The Holocaust Historiography Project

Gas Chamber Door Fraudulently Portrayed at U.S. Holocaust Museum

Visitors at the recently opened US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, will find on display a casting of a door of a supposed extermination gas chamber. This artifact is presented as graphic evidence of the chemical slaughterhouses supposedly used by the Germans to systematically exterminate masses of Jews during the Second World War.

According to the March 1990 issue of the Museum’s official Newsletter, this is “a casting of the door that sealed one of the gas chambers at the Majdanek killing center in Poland.” This door is also shown in The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a book by Museum official Michael Berenbaum. A photograph of it appears on page 138 (reproduced here) along with a caption describing it as “a casting of the door to the gas chamber at Majdanek … from the outside, SS guards could observe the killing through a small peephole.”

French anti-Revisionist researcher Jean-Claude Pressac reports on this door in his 563-page book, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (published in 1989 by “Nazi hunters” Serge and Beate Klarsfeld). He provides a photograph of the building in the Majdanek camp, including the door from which the Holocaust Museum casting was made.

As Pressac correctly notes, this door did indeed close on a gas chamber at Majdanek. However, as he concedes (on pages 555 and 557 of his book), this was a delousing chamber used to disinfest clothing. The only living things killed in this gas chamber were lice.

The fraud of the US Holocaust Museum in presenting this “gas chamber” door was pointed out by Journal editor Mark Weber in his speech in suburban Washington, DC, on April 21, and by IHR editorial advisor Dr. Robert Faurisson in the July-August Journal (pages 14-17).


Bibliographic information
Author: [Staff]
Title: Gas Chamber Door Fraudulently Portrayed at U.S. Holocaust Museum
Source: The Journal for Historical Review
Date: September/October 1993
Issue: Volume 13 number 5
Location: page 39
ISSN: 0195-6752
Attribution: “Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659, USA.”
Please send a copy of all reprints to the Editor.