Carlo Mattogno and Jurgen Graf on Treblinka gassings

Mattogno makes his first blunder by proclaiming that the time in which death from CO occurs is directly proportionate to the percentage of CO. He is simply taking Berg’s word for it, and of course, Berg can’t back his claim up. You’d think that “Revisionists” out of all people would be very careful to give evidence for their assertions.

M&G then proceed to tell us that “a diesel engine cannot continually run at full load, since it would soon break down due to the accumulation of solid compounds on the cylinder words.”
But what’s really important here is what “soon” means. We need to know in how much time would the engine really be ruined. I have read Berg’s essay in which he claims that the accumulation of solid compounds could possibly ruin the engine cylinders in “minutes”, but, in true denier fashion, he can’t give any evidence for his assertion. “Soon” isn’t good enough, and it’s likely that M&G sucked this out of their fingers.

M&G then tell their readers that “During a homicidal gassing, the oxygen content of the air must be so low that the victims suffocate from lack of oxygen, i.e., at a level of approximately 9%.” But there is actually no magical number below which death occurs. What is clear however is that the less oxygen there is, the faster death comes. After this, M&G say: “This is attained by producing an air-fuel ratio of 25:1, which is reached at about 3/4 of full load.” This is an incorrect claim because not every engine has the same point of stoichiometry (the fuel-air ratio were there is just enough air to burn all the fuel).

After this, Mattogno refers us to the Pattle et al experiments and what Berg said about them:

"In the animal experiment previously described with a real CO concentration of 0.22%/vol., which was already established before the test animals were even introduced and which, because of the reduced oxygen content of 11.4%/vol., corresponded to an effective CO concentration of (0.22×21÷ 11.4=) 0.4%/vol., it still took more than three hours to kill all of the test animals. It is, therefore, perfectly reasonable and even quite conservative to say that in a similar gassing attempt with humans and with only a gradually increasing CO concentration, the majority of people in the alleged gas chamber would still be alive after one or even two hours. Such a result would have been an utter fiasco."

Of course, this is simply proof that M&G didn’t even bother to read the Patte et al experiments or bothered to research on what people have argued on the subject. Had M&G researched more, they would have realized that the anti-denial thesis is that toxic exhaust can be reached with a combination of air-intake restriction and fuel-supply increase. And Pattle et al didn’t do this. In their most lethal experiments (“d” experiments), the air-intake was restricted but there was no increase of the fuel-supply. From the literature I’ve read and the research I’ve seen, this can be done by rotating the fuel-pump plunger so that it injects more fuel per stroke. This alone is enough to render the Pattle et al experiments (when used to “prove” that a combination of air-intake restriction and fuel-supply increase isn’t enough to make toxic exhaust) irrelevant. But there’s more. Later in their book, M&G mathematically show that 465 occupants in an airtight 4 x 8 room would use up the remaining oxygen in the room in about 25 minutes, if my memory serves me correctly. But, in the Pattle et al experiments, the animals weren’t stuffed in the chamber to such an extent that they could not move. We have already seen what a big difference the number of occupants per chamber makes. No doubt it would take a much longer time for the animals in the Pattle et al experiments to die. Aside from that, the Pattle et al engine was a small bhp engine. Not comparable to the huge engines used to gas people at the Aktion Reinhard camps. Berg and others may try to fool us that engine size doesn’t make much of a difference, but if we turn to the Holtz-Elliot experiments, one of the sources which Berg repeatedly cites from, we find:

Despite such low concentration of carbon monoxide it was observed that the concentration of this gas was affected not only by fuel-air ratio but also by engine design and to a slight extent by factors that varied with engine speed.

The Significance of Diesel-Exhaust Gas Analysis by John C. Holtz and M. A. ElliottTransactions of the ASME, 1941, 63, pp. 97-105

The above renders the Pattle et al experiments irrelevant.

After this, Mattogno tells about the producer-gas generators:

But that would not even have been the 'best' source of CO available during World War II: Due to a lack of gasoline, the German government passed laws that made it compulsory to equip all diesel-driven vehicles with producer gas generators, which generate a gas with up to 35% of CO from wood or coke.

But, unsurprisingly, Mattogno doesn’t tell us all of the story. According to the Merck index, CO has a flammability range between 12 and 75%, indicating that these producer gas generators would produce not only dangerous amounts of CO, but the CO gas coming from these producer gas generators would come in concentrations high enough that it would become flammable. FP Berg even admitted this in an alt.revisionism post in the 1990s: (see http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/b/ftp.py?people/b/berg.friedrich/gas-generators-available)

As an alternative which they were required, by law, to know was extremely deadly, the Germans had producer gas generators--18% to 35% CO--on hundreds of thousands of trucks. Those generators were extremely dangerous--everyone had to know that because gas leaks were not only toxic but also highly explosive! When the engines were shutoff, the generators would keep on generating until the internal fire could be extinguished.

All emphases are mine.
So, we conclude that the reason why producer=gas generators weren’t used is because they leaked highly toxic and flammable CO gas, which would be a great risk for anyone using them to murder anyone on a regular basis.

Then M&G say:

It is thus more than justified when Berg concludes:[315]

"How absurd to believe anyone with even a minimum of technical understanding would even try to use the exhaust from [diesel engines] for murder, when the [producer gas] fuel itself was a thousand times more lethal!"

First of all, it has been shown that the gassing engines used to kill victims at the Aktion Reinhard camps were not diesel engine; they were gasoline engines. This renders the entire diesel issue irrelevant.Second of all, M&G and FPB are indulging in “coulda woulda shoulda”, i.e., History is the way you want it to be. This is an utter negation of Historiography. M&G and FPB simply can’t grasp the concept that the fact that there were better methods of performing something doesn’t contradict the fact that it occurred (according to eyewitness testimony, etc).