The “Final Solution”: Conflicting Stories

Abstract

We have already seen Morgen’s 1964 testimony about how he found his way to Auschwitz. Customs inspectors discovered clumps of gold that had been shipped from Auschwitz to a private address, and they suspected criminal activity.¹ It was no secret that concentration camps harvested gold from the teeth of corpses and sent it to the Reichsbank, but so far as Morgen knew, the corpses were those of inmates who had died of natural causes or legal executions. Seeing the size of the confiscated nuggets, however, Morgen inferred that they must come from 50,000 to 100,000 corpses, which could only be the product of mass murder. So he traveled to Auschwitz—“this little-known Auschwitz, whose location I had to look up with some difficulty”—where he saw the gas chambers and crematoria.