This article concludes a long meditation on the topic of a camp that was destroyed partly and liberated by the Soviet Union, known later for its own use of human bodies from uranium mines in sodium-fast reactors for plutonium production.

The Birkenau case is blatant. The uranium was obviously milled by tiny hands of women on the barracks on the side of the camp (from the raw uranium ore, with gravity). All of this was obviously entirely mysterious for the victims, due to the novelty of the technology.

The victims, so, were brought in the chambers and showered with the resulting uranium ore, there also was possibly a pressurization system, already, and also possibly some uranium enrichment in a plant standing next to the camp. The crematory ovens were the crucial area for the nuclear reaction, in a subcritical design. In the death chambers there obviously is already a limited degree of fission but the most significant part happens in the crematory ovens where the heat, while consuming the bodies, allows for significant neutron acceleration (together with the dehydratation), permitting good U238 to U239 conversion rates followed by rest of the ashes in which U239 decays to Pu239. Subcritical, the actinides fall down while the bodies of the victims burn, the fumes are not really contaminating strongly the surroundings.

Canisters of Pu239 ashes used for the antitank weapons of the late stages of the war by the Nazi regime were obviously seen and confused with Zyklon B.

These weapons were obviously crammed with ashes of bones, of other atoms that do not have the same moderating capabilities than hydrogen, making the antitank weapons of low efficiency. There was a big pit in which babies were regularly thrown to burn by nazi officers (read Filip Muller’s testimony), to collect better quality fats for the antitank weapons. Nevertheless the failures of a criminal process could not give birth to very efficient armor piercing shells.

There also is an effect on memory of exposure to uranium (see my Porto Biomed Journal letter at the beginning of my peer reviewed articles) together with the relative invisibility of the industry. The many small ovens (with small chimneys… many half-collapsed) to the left of the way right of which sits the main collapsed death chamber in Birkenau obviously were such plutonium pits. They could all be built with bricks only because of the subcritical nature of the reaction. It is the permanent piling of new bodies together with heating that governs the nuclear fission in these chambers. It is not critical, no explosion risk so bricks are enough.

This was obviously known by former Nazis. The information circulated. To the relative credit of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the mocking “durafour crématoire” joke makes the link, taunting a French minister while France was developing depleted uranium weapons (in the 1980s). The question on the Auschwitz side also remains. A tiny room actually shows showers where a gas is more likely to be used than uranium powder for the openings are very thin (I visited it in early August 2017). The main hypothesis involves the progressive evolution of a giant work/concentration camp planned to become a monument to the regime (there was a plan for a kind of super-city in Auschwitz-Birkenau), with, simply, one execution room using actually Zyklon B and other methods such as public hanging, to a plutonium 239 plant because of the closure of the access to Madagascar after the Battle of Tobruk (leading to the infamous Wansee decision).