By Thomas Kues

On 17 August 2010 the Zionist news site YNet published the following item:

“Israel will continue to support efforts to set up a memorial center at Sobibor, according to an agreement reached by the director general of the Ministry of Information and Diaspora Affairs Ronen Plot and the Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev, with Dr. Andzrej Konrat, who is in charge of Holocaust remembrance in Poland.

The agreement is in keeping with the statement of intentions agreed upon in 2008 by Israel, Poland, Slovakia and the Netherlands.

Almost nothing remained of the Sobibor Nazi death camp in Poland at the end of the war. The creation of a memorial center is the result of cooperative research by Poland’s council for the memory of war victims, headed by Minister Konrat, and Israel’s Ministry of Information and Diaspora Affairs and Foreign Ministry, directed by Yad Vashem researchers and assisted by Slovakia and the Netherlands.

For this purpose, and international committee of experts was established, and digs were carried out at the site to determine the precise location of the gas chambers.

(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…)

A small bit of memory-holed history, lifted from The Milwaukee Journal, Thursday July 20, 1967, p. 2:

“Hitler’s Deputy Living in Brazil, Nazi Says

Observer News Service

Vienna, Austria – Nazi war criminal Franz Stangl, now being interrogated in West Germany, has reported that Martin Bormann – Hitler’s deputy – is still alive.
Stangl, extradited from Brazil last month, has also pinpointed the area in which Bormann is to be found – the Brazilian state of Parana, close to the border with Paraguay.
As a result of Stangl’s statements, the West German government has officially asked Brazilian authorities to arrest and extradite Bormann. This is the first time that the German government has officially indicated that it believes that Bormann – officially declared dead in 1954 – is still alive. (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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In the recent Fall issue of the journal Inconvenient History, I have published a longer article on certain statements of Treblinka eyewitness Richard Glazar and what these imply for the allegation that more than 800,000 corpses were incinerated on open air pyres in this “extermination camp”. In its second paragraph I quoted the following passage from the English language translation of Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno’s study on the camp:  (Read more…)

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

(Read more…)