Please forward to Germar Rudolf.

Dear Germar:

I am Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine. I would like to ask you a few questions about your research. In Errol Morris' film "Mr. Death," he shows the fatal mistakes made by Fred Leuchter in his chemical analysis of the concrete and brick from numerous locations at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. I would like to inquire if you made the same errors in your research and if not, how did your research take these problems into account:

And I am David Thomas, an ordinary unordained skeptic. The following responses are my own. Mr. Rudolf has responded numerous times to technically illiterate questions put to him, including portions of these, which seems to affect the posers not a whit.

At the time the sample was taken, I believe that this alleged gas chamber was still being passed off as original. David Irving was charged with a crime in Germany for maintaining that it was a reconstruction, and I believe but have not confirmed that this happened after Leuchter and Rudolf did their work. The odds are very good that had it not been analyzed, there would have been a chorus of true-believers saying "Aha! You purposely avoided taking samples from the main gas chamber in Auschwitz proper, you fraud!"

Because some of them were in the walls of buildings undisturbed since 1945. Is this implying that several (many) of the current buildings at Auschwitz/Birkenau were rebuilt from rubble? If so, which ones, what is your source for the claim, and does your answer include any from which samples were taken? Let me guess that your answers will be "I don't know of any," "There is no such claim, therefore no source," and "Not applicable." Some of the samples were taken from the underground vault in the well preserved ruins of Krema II.

Mr. Rudolf has addressed this issue in some detail. There are pictures published that show the _exterior_ walls of a delousing building with deep blue (prussian blue) stains that have remained impervious to the weathering for more than 50 years. Prussian blue is essentially insoluble, even in the acid rain which Nizkorites claim would dissolve it. Courtesy of R. Widmann, here's a relevant quote from the source of Shermer's skepticism:

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Note this exchange from the Zündel trial with Roth from p. 395 of "The Holocaust on Trial" by Robert Lenski (highly recommended)

"What is Prussian blue?" asked Christie

"It's an iron cyanide," said Roth. "If iron is present with hydrogen cyanide around, then you are going to get a reaction between the hydrogen cyanide and the iron," which is Prussian blue.

Christie: And is Prussian blue the kind of thing you can wash off or what happens?

Roth: In general, no. It's a very stable compound. It stays around for a long time.

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It should be noted that samples from the exterior wall yielded concentrations of several thousand parts per million, and this by several different researchers, including the Krakow Institute in 1990, under the supervision of Dr. Piper.

Finally, not all the samples were exposed to the weather, and this notably includes the interior of the main alleged gas chamber in Krema II, which is quite nicely sheltered from the elements.

All this becomes moot to Shermer, however, if he in fact is of the new and revised opinion that prussian blue is not of interest because it would not have formed in or on the brick. This is the current position being touted by the reborn second Krakow Report, which seeks to invalidate the first Krakow Report by eliminating the only viable cyanide compound, prussian blue, from the test results.

A further quote from Roth on this subject:

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Christie: If you are presented with a porous material like brick and mortar and significant quantities of ferrous irons are found, what will be the result of hydrogen cyanide that comes in contact with that?

In all likelihood, said Roth, the reaction will occur and Prussian blue (iron cyanide) will result.

Christie: And in porous substances, how deep will this go?

Fairly deep, said Roth, unless perhaps the surface formation of the Prussian blue inhibited its further presentation.

4. Leuchter chipped off huge chunks of concrete and brick and ground up the entire chunks into powder when they were analyzed (or, more to the point, the chemist whom he gave the samples to did because Leuchter didn't tell him what they were), thereby diluting the Zyklon-B traces by hundreds of thousands of times. As you must know, Zyklon-B gas only penetrates about 10 microns into concrete (a human hair, by comparison, is 100 microns thick). What was your procedure for controlling for this problem?

I see that Mr. Shermer has elevated Mr. Roth's comments about a dilution factor of "ten thousand" which now becomes "hundreds of thousands." But, let us take this unconscionable exaggeration as accurate and forego the huge grain of salt that should go with it. Perhaps Mr. Roth's figure was off-the-cuff, and Mr. Shermer's is based on calculations utilizing the unreferenced claim that the penetration depth (of prussian blue, or???) is only 10 microns. That last assumes no porosity in the structure of the brick, no cracks, and ignores the obviously high porosity of the mortar which formed part of the samples. No matter, we'll go with "hundreds of thousands" for the dilution factor of cyanide bearing material with non-cyanide bearing dilutant.

At least five independent sources have made the analysis of samples from the same areas in Auschwitz/Birkenau, and all five returned roughly the same figures. Several of these figures were in the thousands of parts per million range. For the sake of simplicity in dealing with the numbers, let us say that the test results were 1,000ppm, which is one-tenth of one percent by weight.

Let us further assume that this figure was derived, as Mr. Shermer posits, from testing a sample whose cyanide bearing portions in a thin surface layer were diluted 100,000 to 1 with non-cyanide bearing bearing material from the huge inner and untainted volume of material. Then work the arithmetic backward and see what an absurdity this claim is.

To determine the original concentration of the contaminated portion, you would multiply the diluted concentration obtained times the dilution factor. That is, 100,000 times 1,000. This gives the ludicrous answer of a cyanide concentration in the contaminated part of the sample of 100 million parts per million, or 100 times stronger than pure. Nothing can be more than 100% of itself. Yet Mr. Roth and Mr. Shermer would set forth as proof of Leuchter's and Rudolf's supposed stupidity a pseudo-scientific explanation that defies reality by a factor of 100. A patently silly explanation that can be debunked by arithmetic so simple that it doesn't even require a pencil. They are able to get away with this for a while for two reasons:

(1) The explanation just given will not be considered by the majority of listeners, some for lack of understanding, more for lack of a desire to devote serious thought to it.

(2) They take advantage of the fact that some samples gave low returns, so low that they are "essentially zero." And so they play false arithmetic games with zero. If zero is your answer, how big can the dilution factor be that you divided into the result to yield and answer of zero? As big as you want it to be. Bandying it about from "ten thousand" to "hundreds of thousands" becomes unchallengable when you the dancing figure is being divided into zero to give zero. What makes this even more intellectually bankrupt is the coexistence of the position that there should not have been any cyanide compounds formed in gas chamber walls because of the low concentrations and shorter exposure times as compared to delousing chambers. If your position is that the concentrations were zero to start with, then how do you talk of diluting zero and maintain any semblance of intellectual integrity.

These questions should have been given some added attention before posing them, but thanks are due for the decent manner in which they are asked. Sincerity is not in doubt, but I kindly suggest that appropriate technical depth is very much so.

David Thomas