This redacted clip from the Radical Agenda show of 2 December 2019 contains foul language and adult references.
At Stanford University on 7 November 2019 Ben Shapiro quoted a document from the Communist legal system of post-war Poland, a deposition attributed to a former concentration-camp inmate named Henryk Tauber, to the effect that 2500 corpses per day were cremated by a crew working in Birkenau’s Krema II. According to information from the manufacturer of the crematory ovens used at Birkenau, Topf und Söhne, this is simply impossible.
There were 15 crematory retorts in Krema II and each could cremate (on average) one body per hour. In 24 hours of continuous operation, then, 360 bodies could be cremated. All the 38 retorts in Birkenau operating continuously for 24 hours could cremate 912 bodies.
It’s really worse than that, because the ovens had to be out of service for 3 or 4 hours each day to be cleaned. In that case the maximum possible numbers are 315 for Krema II and 798 for Birkenau as a whole.
The idea that cremations could be accomplished faster by piling in bodies seems to be based on the assumption that a crematorium functions like an open fire, where the energy released as heat is mostly wasted. In fact a crematorium, especially the kind used at Auschwitz-Birkenau, functions more like an oven for baking food, where the temperature is controlled and waste of energy is minimized. It is a well known fact that in a household oven the time required for cooking a piece of meat is roughly proportional to the mass. This rule also applies to crematory ovens.
Apart from false testimonies like Tauber’s, there is no reason to believe that Birkenau’s crematoria were operated to the maximum extent possible. A document discovered by Carlo Mattogno refers to a “twelve-hour workday” in relation to fuel-consumption. Also, some of Birkenau’s crematoria spent considerable time out of service needing repairs, which surely would not have been allowed if the full capacity for cremation had been needed at all times.
The impossibly high rate of cremation claimed in Tauber’s deposition seems to have been calculated to support the old Soviet line, that 4 to 5 million died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Museum’s current claim (still a gross exaggeration) is that only about 1.1 million died there.
Indisputably, that document from the Communist legal system of post-war Poland makes absurdly inflated claims about how fast corpses could be cremated in Birkenau concentration camp, and Ben Shapiro was a fool to trust it.
Shapiro felt the need to try to demonstrate the factuality of the Holocaust because of Nick Fuentes’ mockery of it in a video-clip from last January, which had been dredged up and publicized as a way of attacking Fuentes after his followers humiliated the representatives of a phony conservative organization called Turning Point USA. A discussion of the conflict around Nick Fuentes can be read here: America First vs. Holocaustian Mind-Control.