By Thomas Kues

It is often stated that Rudolf Reder (who later took the name Roman Robak) was the only Jew to have survived the “pure extermination camp” at Belzec. This, however, is incorrect even from an exterminationist viewpoint, since according to orthodox historiography there were in all seven survivors: Reder, Chaim Hirszman, Sara Beer, Hirsz Birder, Mordechai Bracht, Samuel Velser and “Szpilke”. The last person appears only within Reader’s account. Although Reder claims to have met “Szpilke” in Lemberg after the war, and states that he later lived in Hungary, yet this mysterious witness to the last days of the camp has left no historical trace whatsoever. (Read more…)

By Thomas Kues

In 2005, historians Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband published a volume entitled What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (John Murray, London). The book contains a number of recent interviews with Germans as well as Jews of German nationality deported to ghettos and “death camps”. One of the latter is Ernst Levin, born in Breslau (Wroclaw) in 1925. In January 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he worked in the Buna-Werke in Monowitz (Auschwitz III). The most interesting part of the Levin interview, however, does not concern Mr. Levin himself, but a friend of his in Breslau (pp. 74-75): (Read more…)

In this volume of the series “The Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project”, historian David Silberklang presents the memoirs of the two Polish Jews Israel Cymlich and Oskar Strawczynski, dated respectively to June 1943 and the summer of 1944. Both memoirs are reproduced together with full facsimiles of the extant manuscripts (in Polish and Yiddish respectively). While Strawczynski escaped from the “extermination camp” Treblinka II on August 2, 1943, Cymlich is one of the few former detainees of the Treblinka I labor camp to have published his memoirs (at least three other exists: a brief account written by Saul Kuperhand, published in Miriam & Saul Kuperhand, Shadows of Treblinka, University of Illinois Press 1998; Ryszard Czarkowski, Cieniom Treblinki, Warsaw 1989; and an unpublished account by a certain Jan Sulkowski).
Regarding Treblinka I, editor Silberklang has the following to say:

“The penal labor camp of Treblinka I was established in the fall of 1941. It was located two kilometers away from the extermination camp, Treblinka II, which was opened on July 22, 1942. Initially, most of the prisoners in the labor camp were Poles from the Warsaw area. Later, Jews from the same area joined them. The average number of the prisoners ranged from as few as 100 to as many as 2,000. Approximately 20,000 people passed through the Treblinka I penal labor camp; it is believed that nearly half of them were murdered during the camp’s three-year existence. The camp was dismantled in July 1944, as the Red Army approached the area.” (pp. 31-32, note 8).

No source is given for this information. We should note here initially that, accepting the presented figures, half of the detainees were released either during the operation of the camp or at its liquidation.

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Most of my readers are likely already familiar with the Treblinka eyewitness Abraham Bomba. In an article for The Revisionist, “Abraham Bomba, Barber of Treblinka” (Vol. 1, Issue 2, May 2003, pp. 170-176) Bradley Smith exposed Bomba’s rather infantile mendacity as displayed in an interview made in Tel Aviv in 1979 for Claude Lanzmann’s well-known 9 hour documentary film Shoah (1985). In this, Bomba asserted that he and fifteen or sixteen other “barbers” had cut the hair of between sixty and seventy women at the same time inside one of the gas chambers, which was moreover equipped with several benches. According to Holocaust historian Yitzhak Arad, who bases his statements on West German trial verdicts summarized by A. Rückerl, the chambers of the first gassing building measured 4 x 4 m, whereas those of the second one measured 4 x 8 m (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka…, p. 42, 119). Bomba himself describes the room as measuring only “around twelve feet by twelve feet”, (3.6 x 3.6 m) which is slightly smaller than the size of the alleged first gas chambers (Shoah. The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film, Da Capo Press 1995, p. 103). It is obvious that neither a 4 x 4 m or a 4 x 8 m chamber would have offered a feasible working condition for Bomba and his colleagues. Furthermore, Bomba reveals in the film that after he and the other members of the haircutting commando had left the chamber, the women and children still inside were gassed with an astonishing quickness:

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Dr. Irmfried Eberl (b. 1910), former medical director of the euthanasia institutes in Brandenburg and Bernburg, was the first commandant of the Treblinka II “death camp” from the beginning of the camp’s operation in July 1942 to the end of August the same year, when reportedly he was fired due to incompetence and replaced by the former commandant of Sobibór, Franz Paul Stangl.

In his short book from 2006, Michael Grabher traces Eberl’s life from his upbringing and early medical career to his suicide in Austrian custody on February 16, 1948. Except for medical records and some post-war trial material, the author quotes from Eberl’s correspondence – including personal letters sent to his first wife, Ruth (who died during the war) – which has been preserved, at least in part, in the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden (HHStaW) under the file designation “631a 1631″. The bulk of the brief volume is devoted to Eberl’s activity at the euthanasia institutes (mostly administrative) with only a short chapter concerning the months spent as commandant of Treblinka. Perhaps not suprisingly, a large part of this chapter is taken up by a general description of the supposed genesis and purpose of Treblinka and the other Reinhardt camps, much of it derived from Yitzhak Arad’s standard work Belzec, Sobibor Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, which in turn is more or less exclusively based on post-war eyewitness testimony. (Read more…)

The following quote is taken from Alan Gunn, Essential Forensic Biology, 2nd edition, Wiley-Blackwell, New York 2009, pp. 20-22 (italics mine):

«Sometimes the cause of death may result in striking changes to normal skin coloration. For example, deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning often result in a cherry red / pink coloration to the skin, lips and internal body organs (…) although if the body is not discovered until several hours after death the coloration may not be immediately apparent owing to the settling of the blood to the dependent regions [livor mortis].

Carbon monoxide gas forms during the combustion of many substances and poisoning is a common feature of accidental deaths in which people are exposed to fumes from a faulty gas boiler or during fires and suicides in which the victim breaths in vehicle exhaust fumes. (…) Carbon monoxide has much greater affinity than oxygen for the haeme molecule of haemoglobin and therefore, even at very low atmospheric concentrations it will rapidly replace it and thereby reduce the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. When carbon monoxide binds with haemoglobin in the blood or myoglobin in the muscles it forms carboxyhaemoglobin and carboxymyoglobin respectively and they are responsible for the pink coloration

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The deportation of the Polish Jews of the General Government – to “death camps” according to the exterminationists, to yet unknown settlements on occupied Soviet territory according to the revisionist hypothesis – did not only involve practicalities and organizatorial issues, but also a certain amount of legal paperwork. Most of this material is of interest chiefly to students of judicial history, but there are also some documents of historiographical significance.  (Read more…)

In my previous posting on the recent excavations at the alleged extermination camp Sobibór I pointed out the incongruence between A. Kola’s reported interpretations of findings made at the site and later claims made by among others the museal authorities in charge of the Sobibór memorial. I further examined various eyewitness statements regarding the “gas chambers” and also discussed the apparent reluctance of the archeologists Gilead, Haimi and Mazurek to identify the archeological remains designated “Building E” by Kola with the alleged gas chamber building. This “Building E”, we may recall, “is about 60 m long”, to quote the article of Gilead et al (“Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres”, Present Pasts, Vol. 1, 2009 pp. 10-39) and judging from Gilead et al’s redrawn map of Kola’s excavations (p. 28) it appears to have a width of merely 5-7 meters.

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In an article of mine published last year (2008) I made the following remark on the apparent lack of documentation on Polish archeologist Andrzej Kola’s excavations at the former site of the alleged “pure extermination camp” Sobibór (http://www.codoh.com/newrevoices/nrtksgwl):

«The most troublesome aspect of the 2001 excavation is the complete lack of publicly available documentation. Despite seven years having passed since the drills and diggings were reportedly made, not a single article, paper or scientific report has appeared on them, neither in English, Polish, or any other language. The only available source of information consists of the brief and even contradictory press reports published in November 2001».

As it turns out, however, I was wrong on this point. Kola did indeed write an article on his Sobibór excavation, if rather brief, already in 2001, though this escaped my database searches and other inquires. The article, entitled “Badania archeologiczne terenu byłego obozu zagłady Żydów w Sobiborze” was published in the journal Przeszłość i Pamięć. Biuletyn Rady Ochroni Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa, Issue 4, 2001, pp. 115-122. I do not have access to a copy of this text, and neither is my knowledge of Polish – which is very much at a beginner’s level, I am sorry to say – sufficient to tackle a scholarly article in that language.

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Between 1997 and 1999, Polish archeologist Professor Andrzej Kola carried out select excavations and probe drills at the former site of the Bełżec camp in eastern Poland, where allegedly 434,501 Jews (434,508 Jews were deported to the camp according to the so-called Höfle telegram, whereof 7 reportedly survived) were gassed to death, buried, disinterred and cremated on open pyres between 1942 and 1943. The total areal of this camp, which was completely dismantled in September 1943, amounted to no more than 6.2 hectares, with the “Totenlager” part containing the gas chambers and mass graves taking up roughly half of this space.     

In 2000, Kola published the book Belzec: The Nazi Camp for Jews in the Light of Archeological Sources. Excavations 1997-1999 (The Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom/USHMM) wherein he reported that he and his team through drillings had discovered 32 grave pits with a total surface area of 5,919 square meters and a total volume of 21,310 cubic meters. The news of Kola’s research was widely touted as the definite proof that Bełżec had served as an extermination camp where hundreds of thousands of European Jews had met their death. (Read more…)