The doors to the alleged gas chambers opened inwards

Deniers maintain that since the gas chamber doors opened inwards, assuming that the entire chamber floor was covered with piles of corpses after the mass murder, opening the doors from the outside would have been impossible.

Facts:

This is simply untrue. Every surviving plan of the rooms used as gas chambers at KL Auschwitz shows that the doors opened outwards from the actual chamber. This is clearly seen in the 1943 plan of the underground part of Crematorium II, where the only entrance into the so-called ‘L[eichen]keller I’ (i.e. gas chamber, marked red) had double doors opening outwards into the entrance corridor.

Source: A-BSMA.

Moreover, opening the doors in any other way was impossible, not only because of the need to remove bodies. It should be noted that in chambers where toxic substances were used (HCN—hydrogen cyanide), it was essential to maintain an airtight seal, and this also applied to disinfection chambers. To obtain sufficient insulation of the doors, special external screw clamps were used. This solution can still be seen on surviving disinfection chambers (for example, the door of a block 1 disinfection chamber in the Auschwitz I main camp).

Source: PMA-B.

In the case of crematoria IV and V, each gas chamber had two doors. On the plan below, the yellow arrows show how the victims entered the gas chambers from the corridor. The gas chamber entrance doors are in the blue squares, and the doors on the other side of the chambers, used chiefly for ventilation purposes and perhaps also for the removal of bodies, are shown in the green squares. In both cases, the doors open outwards.

Source: APMA-B.

Similar solutions were also used to install gas-tight doors in the makeshift gas chambers known as the ‘little white house’ and the ‘little red house’. This is confirmed in a drawing attached to the 1945 eyewitness testimony of former Sonderkommando prisoner Szlomo Dragon.

Source: APMA-B.