Holocaust Dental Gold Underestimated? (PDF Downloads)
This page has been added in order to provide PDF downloads of the "Holocaust Dental Gold" series of articles written by Keith P Walsh.
001 - Holocaust_Dental_Gold_Underestimated?
002 - Holocaust Dental Gold: Eyewitness_Testimony
003 - Holocaust Dental Gold: 20 Pounds Per Krema Per Day
004 - Holocaust Dental Gold: The Fast Track to the Gas Chamber
005 - Holocaust Pyres: Hiding Evidence or Smelting Gold?
006 - Hitler's Gold Fillings Stolen from the Mouths of Holocaust Victims
007 - Alfred Stock and Mercury Dental Fillings
008 - Priority Selection For Death According to Quantity of Gold Teeth (Primo Levi)
Item 008 above refers to the book, "If This Is A Man", which was written by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi recounting in some detail his experiences as an inmate at Auschwitz. In chapter 13 of this book, Levi describes the "great selection of October 1944", when each of the twelve thousand male inmates of the camp was put through a selection procedure in order to determine which of them were to be killed in the gas chambers and which were not.
This procedure is described as requiring the inmates to run naked (except for shoes) one-by-one through an open doorway, and then for each to pass the card that he was carrying with his own unique prisoner number printed on it to an SS officer. At each instant the officer then added each new card to either of two piles of cards designated "selected" and "not selected" respectively.
Levi states that this entire procedure - processing twelve thousand men in total - was completed in a single afternoon.
Twelve thousand seconds equates to three hours and twenty minutes. It may be imagined that any inmate taking as many as two would have got a kick up the backside - or possibly worse.
Levi's account reveals that a degree of confusion existed amongst the prisoners afterwards as to what criteria had been used to determine the outcome of the "selection" for each individual inmate, and this confusion appears to have been linked with their general presumption that those who would be the most useful as "workers", i.e. the strongest, would be the most likely to be "saved".
But, as Levi protests, " .. the examination is too quick and summary ... ", indicating that accurate and consistent judgements based on any criteria such as this could not have been made at the rate of progress that was achieved.
It has been suggested that the real explanation behind the "great selection of October 1944” is that the Nazis had actually set up a rudimentary metal detector using the frame of the doorway through which the inmates were forced to move in rapid succession, and that this metal detector was specifically designed to give an indication of the amount of gold that each inmate was carrying in the form of metal dental restorations in his teeth. The whole procedure had in fact been set up to maximise the efficiency of the process of looting gold from the teeth of holocaust victims.
If this is correct then it instantly places the role of the SS officer in a much less confusing light. He wouldn’t have been making any kind of objective judgement for each inmate, but simply reacting to a signal from the metal detector, possibly a visual signal which the inmates wouldn’t have been able to see, and then placing each identity card in rapid succession on the appropriate pile, indicating either “significant amount of gold fillings” or “insignificant amount of gold fillings”; rather than “suitable for work” or “not suitable for work”.
The absence of any direct documentary evidence that this is in fact what happened does not of course prove that it didn’t happen. And if anyone knows of any such evidence I would be grateful if they could contact me via keith.p.walsh@btinternet.com
I believe it would be reasonable to expect that anyone offering any kind of comment or judgement on what is written above should first have read “If This Is A Man”, by Primo Levi.
Failing that, they should at least have read Chapter 13 of this book, which I have uploaded in its entirety here at "October 1944".
Other factors which might be taken into account are:
- It appears that the true amount of dental gold looted from Holocaust victims by the Nazis may have been underestimated by today’s Holocaust historians (see Item 001 above)
- In October 1944 allied troops were advancing towards Germany from the West, and Soviet troops from the East.
- Although Primo Levi wrote that in October 1944 new arrivals of inmates were expected at Auschwitz, he doesn’t mention ever being involved in any further “selection” procedures himself. (Could it be that under the urgency of the circumstances, and having been “done” once, Levi and many of the others had been designated not only “insignificant gold fillings”, but also “not worth killing” by the same token?)
- There is direct documentary evidence to indicate that holocaust victims were selected for murder and cremation on a priority basis according to the amount of gold dental fillings in their mouths. (See Item 008 above).
- Although walk-through metal detectors are more commonly associated with security procedures in the post-war age of mass air travel, the science on which their technology is based was first discovered by Michael Faraday more than 100 years before the Nazi Holocaust.
It might also be suggested that the "metal detector" theory is the most, if not the only, rational explanation for what Primo Levi described.
Keith P Walsh - 19 July 2014
P.S., It appears that the walk-through metal detector was invented in the 1920s by two German scientists working out of Leipzig; H. Geffchen and H. Richter - "Radio News for April, 1926.".
- And it also looks like they may have had the patent on it - "Sale of Vested Property Report - August 29, 1945.".
Keith P Walsh - 23 July 2014