Yes, There Was a Swimming Pool in Auschwitz

The entrance to Auschwitz.

Holocaust deniers will tell you there was a swimming pool in Auschwitz, hence it could not have been an extermination camp. In fact, there was a pool in the extermination camp. A water reservoir in Auschwitz I (the main camp) was converted to a swimming pool which was used for a time by the camp’s staff. The existence of a pool does not refute all the evidence that Auschwitz was the largest extermination camp operated by Nazi Germany where over 1 million people died.

A typical unheated brick barrack. This had 60 brick partitions with 3 levels creating 180 bunks. Each bunk was to hold 4 prisoners but often held many more.

Holocaust deniers will tell you that Auschwitz inmates were taught trades. Townspeople in the surrounding area saw life at Auschwitz as “luxurious,” what with the inmates’ attractive red-brick sleeping quarters,” complete with “bunk beds with mattresses, flush toilets, porcelain-covered stoves for cozy heating, and double-paned casement windows. The paths were tree-lined, there were flowers planted before every barracks, and the Nazis regularly showed movies to the inmates.

An Auschwitz latrine which weren’t built until 1944.

Not only that, but Auschwitz had an art museum, a library, regular concerts and sporting events, a theater for music and drama, and a brothel for lonely inmates. It also had two fine post offices because the Geneva Convention rules, strictly followed by the Germans, ensured the sending and receiving of mail by all prisoners. The kindly SS guards even provided special pre-printed cards and letter forms. And their health care system was world class — after all, for the Nazis, the health of the labor force was a prime concern.

There is a growing body of work hat disputes the Holocaust. Where does all this nonsense come from? Some of it is spread but stupid gullible people who are incapable of analytical thinking. I believe much of it is produced by antisemites.

Why would they spread such lies? Holocaust denial is one of a number of conspiracy theories directed at Jews. It is a radical form of anti-Semitism that denies Jews the ability to be considered victims and suggests that the Holocaust is part of a worldwide conspiracy. The revisionists claims Jews around the world knowingly fabricated evidence of their own genocide in order to extract reparations from Germany, gain world sympathy and facilitate the alleged theft of Palestinian land for the creation of Israel. 

Holocaust denial began immediately after the end of World War II by Nazi supporters and sympathizers. It evolved in the 1970s to incorporate a new pseudo-scientific element, as right-wing extremists began making methodologically flawed but technically sophisticated arguments to challenge the historical record. With minimal or no Holocaust education in schools, the number of people who are aware of the Holocaust has been shrinking.

A crematorium built by Topf and Sohne that could burn 340 corpses per day.

There is much evidence left behind by the Nazis to support the existence of the Holocaust. I can tell you what happened to members of my father’s family in the summer of 1942. on August 15, 1942, about 2,000 Jewish men women and children who were selected in the Great Deportation from Bedzin and Sosnowiec arrived in Auschwitz. After the selection, only 27 men and 25 women were tattooed and admitted to the camp. The men received the numbers 59018 – 59044 and the women received the numbers 17147 – 17221. The other 1898 people were all immediately murdered in the gas chamber of the Little White House also known as bunker 2. This included my grandparents, my father’s first wife and their two little girls. There were no crematoria constructed so the bodies were burned in open pits and the ashes spread in the fields outside the camp.

A photo smuggled out of Auschwitz showing Jewish prisoners burning corpses in a pit before the crematoria were built.

The Little White House was second gas chamber in Auschwitz. It was constructed near the Birkenau camp that at the time was still under construction. The decision to convert this building, a farmhouse of the expelled Polish owners, into a gas chamber was made in June 1942 as a result of the arrival of numerous transports of Jews designated by the Germans for extermination.

Because the walls were plastered, it was called the “Little White House.” Its interior was divided into four gas chambers with a total floor space of 120 sq. m. The system of interior doors and hatches for Zyklon B was the same as in the Little Red House, which was the first gas chamber constructed in Auschwitz. 

The gas chambers in the Little White House were taken out of operation at the turn of April/May 1943. The building was demolished in the late autumn, when extermination operations in Birkenau were completed. Traces of the foundations of the gas chambers are still visible today at this location.