In late December 2011, we received a long text entitled Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues. The authors are  Jonathan Harrison, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Jason Myers, Sergey Romanov and Nicholas Terry. The object of their critique are the following three books:

• Mattogno, Carlo, Jürgen Graf, Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertation Press, Chicago 2004.
• Mattogno, Carlo, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research and History, Theses & Dissertation Press, Chicago 2004.
• Graf, Jürgen, Thomas Kues and Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, The Barnes Review, Washington DC 2010.

It stands to reason that we could not afford to ignore such a challenge because this would have been tantamount to surrender. Initially we considered contenting ourselves with a summary reply, pointing out the most glaring fallacies and idiocies in the arguments of our opponents, but we then decided to use the „steam roller method“ instead, discussing and refuting all major arguments our five adversaries adduce in their paper.

This means that our response will be extremely long (several hundreds of pages). The bulk of our rebuttal will be written by Carlo Mattogno. This is inevitable because Mattogno, being the most prolific of us, is the main target of our adversaries’ attacks. Since Mattogno’s part will have to be translated from Italian into English, this alone will inevitably delay the publication of our reply, not to mention the fact that the three of us will have to coordinate our texts in order to reduce the inevitable repetitions to a minimum.

Should Caroline Sturdy Colls publish her paper about her archeological research at Treblinka before we have finished our rebuttal, Thomas Kues will include an analysis of her results in his chapter on the excavations at Belzec and Sobibor.

For the aforementioned reasons, our response will probably not be ready before July or August. Much to our regret, this delays the beginning of our study upon the Einsatzgruppen. On the other hand, after the publication of our reply we will not have the slightest obligation to pay any further attention to anything MM. Harrison, Mühlenkamp, Myers, Romanov and Terry might publish in the future.

12 March 2012                    Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues

By Thomas Kues

In November 2010 I published a blog entry on an online video concerning the research activity of a young British archaeologist from the University of Birmingham, Caroline Sturdy Colls, who had set out to refute “Holocaust Deniers” by locating the mass graves at the Treblinka “extermination camp” using “the most up-to-date scientific techniques”.[1] Recently, a news report was published boldly stating that “mass graves at Nazi death camp Treblinka prove Holocaust deniers wrong”. In this we read that

“A British forensic archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka. Some 800,000 Jews were killed at the site, in north east Poland, during the Second World War but a lack of physical evidence at the site has been exploited by Holocaust deniers. Forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls has now undertaken the first co-ordinated scientific attempt to locate the graves.”[2]

It is worth recalling that the same triumphatory claim that the “Holocaust deniers” finally and once and for all had been “refuted” was heard in connection with Kola’s surveys at Belzec and Sobibór, which in reality turned out to refute the official version of events relating to these two camps.

The above quoted news item was more or less a push for a radio program, “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust”, featuring Sturdy Colls as well as Yitzhak Arad and former Treblinka inmate Kalman Taigman, which was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 23 January 2012, 20:00 GMT.[3] In anticipation of this radio program, on the same date, a podcast interview was uploaded by the University of Birmingham “Ideas Lab”.[4] In this we can listen to the following description of the methods employed by Sturdy Colls and her team, as well as some vague descriptions of their findings:

“Interviewer: What technology have you used to investigate the site?

 Sturdy Colls: I used a number of non-invasive techniques at Treblinka and what this means is, as you quite rightly pointed out, the ground wasn’t disturbed due to Jewish burial law so the methods used didn’t involve any form of ground disturbance or excavation and this allowed us to investigate the historic and scientific potential of Treblinka but obviously it was very important that we recognised its religious and commemorative significance as well. So the techniques that were used, there was a process of archival research which involved looking at documentary records, revisiting historical data if you like, looking at known data and assessing it with an archaeological eye, so looking for information about the landscape. Then there was a process of looking for aerial photographs of the site, any ground based photography, accounts by the witnesses, plans that had been created, etc, to build up a database of information so that when I did do the survey all of that could be corroborated against my results. So in the field this involved field walking, so assessing the landscape, topographic survey which used advanced GPS and total station surveying to demarcate features on a plan of the site allowed us to record micro-topographic change which may be indicative of buried features. And also to assess the visibility of other features such as a number of artefacts that were actually identified in quite a remote part of the site. Then moving on from that to look below the ground I used a number of geophysical techniques, so quite often mentioned is ground penetrating radar and this was one of the methods used but this was also corroborated with other methods that detect other physical properties in the soil. So I also used resistance survey and an extension of that which allows 3D imaging of buried remains as well, to ensure that all of the properties of the buried remains could be characterised accurately.

 Interviewer: And what have you discovered?

 Sturdy Colls: Well the survey results when corroborated with historical information have indicated that there are a number of surviving building foundations at Treblinka just below the surface and also a considerable amount of obviously structural debris which the Nazis would have been simply unable to have removed from the site, and this supports accounts written by post-war investigators which commented upon the visibility of artefactual remains, structural remains, at the camp. We’ve also identified a number of pits at the site. Again, all these pits have been mapped and corroborated with witness plans and this is indicative of a number of probable graves at the site. It is recognised as part of the survey that the history of Treblinka didn’t end with its abandonment by the Nazis. Issues such as post-war looting and the construction of the memorial itself and a number of other forms of landscape change that have taken place at the site, you know, could confuse interpretation so it was essential that all of these were considered when the results from the geophysical survey in particular were being assessed. So then all of this data was married up with historical information so we seem to have a situation here where it’s been commonly believed that all of the victims at Treblinka were cremated, they were destroyed without trace, however, the research has revealed a much more complex picture of the disposal patterns used by the Nazis. Looking at it from an offender profiling perspective, so a slightly more forensic point of view, the Nazis worked on, as do most offenders, this principle of least effort where they would actually have a burial method that very much matched the nature of their victims or their locations within the camp and there are a number of photographs and physical evidence that we observed on the ground at Treblinka that demonstrates that these bodies were not reduced to ash, that some survive as mass graves in the truest sense and that also the ashes of the victims were redeposited into the pits that they were originally exhumed from upon Himmler’s order in 1943. Also with the topographic survey we’ve demonstrated that the camp as it’s marked currently on the ground by the modern memorial was actually much larger, that the boundaries of the camp should have been 50 metres further north and this has a knock-on effect for a number of structures within the camp itself. So we can examine it from a spatial point of view and look at all of these features in relation to each other and hopefully eventually start to build up a more detailed map of the camp as it existed during its operation.

 Interviewer: So you’ve now presented your findings to the authorities responsible for the memorial at Treblinka. Does this conclude investigations at the Treblinka site or is it sort of an ongoing project?

 Sturdy Colls: It’s absolutely an ongoing project. The survey demonstrated that the site has got huge potential in terms of what we can learn from the application of archaeological method and very much was the tip of the iceberg in terms of being the first survey of what I hope will be many more to come. I hope to return to the site later on this year and there will be subsequent seasons of fieldwork in coming years. As I mentioned, at the moment what we’ve got is a map of what survived at the camp as a result of my findings. However, in order to build up a map of the camp as it existed we need to do more work, we need to survey the site. Only a small proportion of the site has actually been surveyed so there’s huge potential to find out more about the history of this camp in the future.”

Somewhat more on the findings of Sturdy-Coll could be gleaned from the BBC 4 radio documentary “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust”. Starting at the mark 23:20 minutes we hear:

“Caroline Sturdy Colls: All the history books states that Treblinka was destroyed by the Nazis, in summary, the survey demonstrated that this simply isn’t the case. I have identified a number of buried [sic] pits using geophysical techniques. These are considerable. One in particular is 26 meters by 17 meters.

 Jonathan Charles: That’s huge.

 Sturdy Colls: It is huge. We are talking about a considerable number of bodies [which] could have been contained within pits of that size.

 Charles: That could have contained hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies, we don’t know deep it is, or do you know how deep it is?

 Sturdy Colls: Unfortunately no. The survey technology does not allow us to go to certain depths. I know that it is over 4 meters, that was the extent of this [inaudible]. It’s a considerable pit.

 Charles: There are quite a few pits that you have discovered?

 Sturdy Colls: Absolutely, there were a number of pits, in particular to the rear of what of what is now the current memorial, five that are actually in a row, again of a considerable size, in an area where witnesses state this was the main body disposal area, this is behind the gas chambers, it was where the majority of victims who were sent there were then subsequently buried, and later where the cremative remains of the victims were also placed.

 Charles: It’s not just pits that you found, there’s also what look like buildings.

 Sturdy Colls: There are, and again, the Nazis claimed they destroyed Treblinka, they certainly levelled the site, but it’s not really possible when buildings have been on a site to actually sterilize the ground, so what I’ve identified is that solid structural remains, we’re talking building foundations, do survive, but in particular two sort of structures that I’ve identified are likely to be the old and new gas chambers at Treblinka.”

While here we learn virtually nothing about the supposed remains of the Treblinka “gas chambers” we are provided with some tantalizing information on the camp’s burial pits. Needless to say, a critical assessment of the findings made by Sturdy Colls can only be made after she has published at least a preliminary report or a detailed article on the same, but we may nonetheless with appropriate caution note down some preliminary observations on what has been revealed so far. The most interesting information, however, is not to be found in the radio interviews, but in a short article wrriten either by Sturdy Colls herself or by BBC editorial staff based on her verbal or written statements, which was published on the website of the BBC on 23 January.[5] In this we read:

“The existence of mass graves was known about from witness testimony, but the failure to provide persuasive physical evidence led some to question whether it could really be true that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed here.

 Although they lasted only a few days, those post-war investigations [in 1945-1946] remained the most complete studies of the camp until I began my work at Treblinka in 2010.

 This revealed the existence of a number of pits across the site.

 Some may be the result of post-war looting, prompted by myths of buried Jewish gold, but several larger pits were recorded in areas suggested by witnesses as the locations of mass graves and cremation sites.

 One is 26m long, 17m wide and at least four metres deep, with a ramp at the west end and a vertical edge to the east.

 Another five pits of varying sizes and also at least this deep are located nearby. Given their size and location, there is a strong case for arguing that they represent burial areas.

 [...].

 As well as the pits, the survey has located features that appear to be structural, and two of these are likely to be the remains of the gas chambers.

According to witnesses, these were the only structures in the death camp made of brick.”

Even more importantly, this article is illustrated with two composite maps on which the outlines of the findings made by Sturdy Colls have been superimposed on a modern-day aerial photograph of the former camp site and a 1944 aerial photograph of the same area respectively. In the figure below I have placed these two composite maps side by side, moved the main legend and the scale and slightly increased the picture size in order to allow for easier comparison of scale. On the map to the left I have also arbitrarily numbered the “probable burial/cremation pits” from 1 to 10 (click on the picture to view it in full size).

The information furnished by the two interviews, the article and the maps allow us to make the following observations:

1) The pit which Sturdy Colls mentions “in particular” and which is stated to have a surface area of “26 meters by 17 meters”, that is a total of 442 square meters, is, judging by the dimensions, most likely identical with the rather irregular pit #3, located some 25 m south of the large cenotaph. This is clearly the largest in surface of the 10 pits identified.

2) As far as the surface area is concerned, 2 of the 33 mass graves identified by Andrzej Kola at Belzec (pits #1 and 27) were larger (with 480 and 540 square meters respectively), whereas 2 more (#7 and 14) were almost of the same size (364.5 and 370 square meters respectively).[6] Of the 6 burial pits identified by Kola at Sobibór 2 (pit #2 and 4) were larger or even significantly larger (with surface areas of 500 and 1,575 square meters respectively), whereas 2 other graves were nearly of the same surface size (pits #1 and 6, with 400 and 375 square meters respectively).[7] Yet whereas at Belzec some 435,000 and at Sobibór some 80,000 corpses are alleged to have been interred,[8] the number of uncremated bodies buried at Treblinka is supposed to have amounted to at least some 700,000. Would it then not make sense for the Germans to use mass graves of a larger size at Treblinka than at the other two Reinhardt camps?

3) The eyewitnesses Eliahu Rosenberg and Chil Rajchman, who to the knowledge of this author are the only witnesses to have provided detailed statements on the dimensions of the mass graves in the “death camp proper”, claim pits of sizes vastly larger than the largest pit mapped by Sturdy Colls. Eliahu Rosenberg claimed in 1947 that the mass graves measured 120 m × 15 m × 6 m, giving a surface area of 1,800 square meters and a total volume 9,900 cubic meters.[9] Chil Rajchman, whose 1944 testimony [10] is prominently featured in the “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust” radio program – including a particularly bizarre passage from it concerning burning blood – states:

“The pits were enormous, about 50 metres long, about 30 wide and several storeys deep. I estimate that the pits could contain about four storeys.”[11] 

The burial pits thus measured 1,500 square meters according to the witness Rajchman and maybe as much as (1,500 x 12 =) 18,000 cubic meters in volume! How come that the largest of the pits discovered by Sturdy Colls corresponds to less than one third of the surface size claimed by Rajchman and to one fourth of the surface area claimed by Rosenberg?

4) It is indeed unfortunate that the top modern equipment used by Study-Colls for some reason or other was not able to detect depths exceeding 4 meters. Perhaps it would have been wise of her to dispense of some of the piety with regards to “Jewish burial laws” and utilize probe drillings to measure the depth of the pits, as was done by Kola at both Belzec and Sobibór. Of the pits identified by Kola in these two camps, the deepest pit (#3 at Sobibór) measured 5.80 m, whereas the depth of the remaining pits averaged some 4 m.

Generously assuming Rosenberg’s estimate of 6 meters (Rajchman’s estimate of some 12 meters can be safely dismissed as an exaggeration), and even more generously assuming (for the sake of argument) 6 meters to be the effective depth, with the pit walls being vertical instead of sloping (an obviously unrealistic assumption, which is moreover contradicted by Sturdy Colls statement that this pit had a “ramp” at the west end and a “vertical edge to the east”, implying that three out of four side walls were oblique – but again, for the sake of argument…) pit #3 would have a volume of (26 x 17 x 6 =) 2,652 cubic meters. Assuming an average capacity of 8 corpses per cubic meters,[12] this means that the pit in question could have contained in total (2,652 x 8 =) 21,216 corpses. Since the so-called Höfle document from an exterminationist viewpoint shows that nearly 713,555 were murdered at Treblinka up until the end of 1942 – in reality this document only proves that this number of Jews was deported to the camp up until that time – and since virtually all sources maintain that non-experimental cremations on a significant scale did not commence at Treblinka until 1943, at least 700,000 corpses would have had to have been interred in the camp, necessitating no less than (700,000 / 21,216 =) 33 pits of the same size as pit #3, with a total surface area of 14,586 square meter, or nearly 1.5 hectares. Needless to say the mass graves would have had to be separated by soil walls of considerable thickness, thereby increasing the surface area required by the graves.

 
Above: Montage of the 10 identified pits placed within a square 100 x 100 meters. Relative dimensions have been kept unchanged from the maps produced by Caroline Sturdy Colls.

5) Pits #1 and 2, which together appear to have a surface area of some 600-700 square meters, are located in the western part of the camp site, near the torn-up railroad sidespur, clearly outside of the “death camp proper”. These may be identical with the mass graves mentioned by the witness Abraham Kszepicki, in which the bodies of Jews who had died en route to the camp were buried during the first months of operation.[13]

 6) The four pits #5-8 are placed in a (not very straight) row. Sturdy Colls states in the radio documentary that there are “five” pits of “considerable size” “in a row” and in the area which witnesses state “was the main body disposal area, (…) behind the gas chambers”. Either Sturdy Colls mistakenly said five when she meant four, or it may be that one of the pits, perhaps #6, with its “neck” in the middle, is counted by her as two separate pits. Regardless of which, it is clear that the pits #5-8 cover a surface area which corresponds to roughly 175-200 % that of #3, that is, somewhere in the range of 750-900 square meters.

 7) Altogether, pits #3-10 as mapped by Sturdy Colls cover a surface hardly exceeding 1,800 square meters. If again, for the sake of argument, we assume the no doubt overly generous average effective depth of 6 meters with vertical pit walls – and once more I want to remind my readers that the pits identified at Belzec and Sobibór averaged some 4 m in depth – this would mean that the “probable burial/cremation pits” in the “death camp proper”/”upper camp”/”camp 2″ [14] had a total volume of some (1,800 x 6 =) 10,800 cubic meters. The pits at Belzec as identified by Kola have a total estimated volume of 21,310 cubic meters,[15] whereas those at Sobibór have a total estimated volume of 14,718.75 cubic meters.[16] The no doubt greatly exaggerated estimate of 10,800 cubic meters could have contained at most some (10,800 x 8 =) 86,400 corpses (assuming instead a more realistic average effective depth of 5 m this figure would change to 72,000 – and this still disregards the likely enlargement of the original grave volumes due to clandestine diggings and other causes). According to Yitzhak Arad some 312,500 Jews were murdered in Treblinka merely “during the first five weeks of the killing operation”.[17] According to the files of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, 251,545 Jews from the ghetto in that city were deported to Treblinka between 22 July 1942 and 12 September 1942.[18] And as already mentioned, the Höfle document states that 713,555 were deported to Treblinka up until the end of 1942. Judging by the information revealed, only a small fraction of this enormous number of people could have been buried in the identified “probable burial/cremation pits”, even taking into account the two pits in the reception camp, which could not have been used for any hypothetical “gas chamber” victims given the reported structure of the camp.

 8 ) Sturdy Colls’s statement that “the failure to provide persuasive physical evidence [of mass graves] led some to question whether it could really be true that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed here” implies that the presence of mass graves itself would be enough to refute the “deniers”. However, it is clear that mass graves of considerable size must have existed at Treblinka, even if it was in fact only a transit camp. Holocaust historian Dieter Pohl estimates that up to 5 % of the deportees to the Reinhardt camps perished en route due to suffocation, dehydration, crushing caused by panicking deportees etc.[19] Considering that the reception of transports at Treblinka during the intense initial months of operation is claimed to have been grossly mismanaged by the first camp commandant, Dr. Irmfried Eberl (who, apparently because of this reason, was fired and replaced by Franz Stangl), leading to the delay of transports at way stations – and this in the summer heat of July and August – there is little reason to doubt that a certain number of Jews must haved died en route from Warsaw to Treblinka, but on the other hand the trip from Warsaw to Treblinka when following schedule lasted “only” 3 hours and 55 minutes, so that for this group of deportees (making up roughly one third of the total number of Treblinka deportees) the en route death ratio is unlikely to have reached that posited by Pohl.[20] The en route death ratio for transports originating from more distant parts of Poland and from other German-controlled countries was likely higher than that for the Warsaw deportees due to the longer travel time required. Since somewhere between 750,000 and 800,000 Jews in total were deported to Treblinka during the camp’s period of operation (July 1942 – August 1943), it seems reasonable to assume that the number of Jews who perished en route to this camp amounted to somewhere in the low tens of thousands. Moreover, there are reasons to assume that a smaller percentage of the deportees were subjected to “euthanasia” due to contageous or mental diseases, or for being too weak for further transport. To this should be added a smaller number of deaths among the camp inmates caused by epidemics etc, as well as those killed by guards in connection with attempts at escape or uprisings.

 9) The vague mention of a “more complex picture of the disposal patterns used by the Nazis” is interesting. Were uncremated corpses also detected by the survey, and if so, how many?

 10) Sturdy Colls label the pits “probable burial/cremation pits”, indicating that one or more of the pits may have been used for cremations and not for interment (at Sobibór Kola identified such a pit with an area of 10 x 3 m and a depth of up to 90 cm). In this context the smaller, more rectangular pits #4 and 5 may be the most likely candidates. The dimensions of an identified cremation pit could give important hints about the actual cremation capacity at Treblinka.

 11) It is noteworthy that none of the pits or structural remains are located under the stone/concrete covered memorial areas (cf. the map to the left, where these areas are visible as a bluish gray). Sturdy Colls’s statements does not mention whether or not she was able to map these area with her geophysics equipment.[21] This issue, like many others, will have to await further clarification. The covered area inside the “death camp proper” appears to correspond to roughly 1 hectare.

 12) It may be worth making a quick comparison of the maps of Study-Colls with the “reconstruction” of Treblinka proposed by exterminationist air-photo analyst Alex Bay.[22] Concerning the mass graves Bay writes:

“Unfortunately, the aerial photography does not contain enough information to delineate the boundaries of the graves. The May [1944] coverage is sufficient only for crudely identifying the places where deep disturbances in general are probable, but the exact boundaries cannot be established.

In Figure 42 aerial photography is presented in which nine 50 by 25 meter [164 x 82 feet] pits have been drawn to scale along the east and west sides. The positioning and size of these pits is purely speculative.”[23]

The dimensions of 50 x 25 m for the pits are taken from Bay’s number one eyewitness, Yankiel Wiernik, and his 1944 publication A Year in Treblinka. Wiernik writes indeed that “The dimensions of each ditch were 50 by 25 by 10 meters”[24] but this almost certainly refer to ditches located not in the “death camp proper”, but in the reception camp. The scene wherein Wiernik provides the abovementioned dimensions takes place on the second day after his arrival in the camp, and the following chapters imply that first visited the “death camp proper” or Camp II, as he calls it, only several days later.

In the figure below I have placed Bay’s Figure 42 side by side with the Sturdy Colls composite map based on the 1944 air photo. The scales of the two maps have been harmonized. To Bay’s map I have also added the letters A and B to indicate the solid black outlines drawn by Bay to mark out the two alleged gas chamber buildings. Even considering Bay’s admittal that the positioning and size of his mass graves “is purely speculative” it is clear that his vision of what the “death camp proper” might have looked like differ considerably from the Sturdy Colls map. As for the locations of the two alleged gas chamber buildings, which Bay goes to painstaking length to identify, based on the aerial photos and witness statements, the 4 structures marked out by Sturdy Colls (in blue) and designated “probable location of gas chambers” are located some 100 m south of the sites pinpointed by Bay. The alignment of these structures is also rather different from that asserted by Bay. Together with the considerable difference in surface size between the mass graves posited by Bay and the pits identified by Sturdy Colls, this says something of the competence of Bay as well as the reliability of his star witness Wiernik.   

 Above: Bay’s “reconstruction” of Treblinka compared with the 1944 air photo version of the Sturdy Colls map (click to enlarge)

13) As for the “probable location of gas chambers” we learn virtually nothing other than that Sturdy Colls has identified two brick structures. On the composite maps, however, four structures are marked out, of which the largest (near the eastern exit of the “Road to heaven”) is likely to be the one identified by Sturdy Colls as the “new gas chamber building”. The three other structures, two of which are relatively large, are located close to each other. One must suppose that one of the two larger structures has been identified by Sturdy Colls as the “old gas chamber building”. According to the most elaborate exterminationist effort to map Treblinka based on aerial photos and eyewitness testimony (and in this case one of the ground photos from the Kurt Franz “Schoene Zeiten” album interpreted by Bay and others as taken inside the “death camp proper”), the 2004 map of Peter Laponder,[25] the only structures located adjacent to the “old gas chamber building” were a water pump shelter, a tiny guardhouse, and a watchtower. Yet on the composite map we have two larger structures next to each other. We will have to wait and see if the geophysical survey has revealed anything about the layout of these structures. If that is not the case, we can only hope that Sturdy Colls soon returns to the camp site to excavate the detected structural remains. 

All in all, the information revealed by these interviews about the findings of the 2011 geophysical survey at Treblinka provides us with more questions than answers. We can only wait and hope that a preliminary report on the research results is not too long in coming. One thing is sure, however, namely that little indicates that the findings of Caroline Sturdy Colls have actually “proven Holocaust deniers wrong” with regard to Treblinka. On the contrary: the information revealed seems to hint that the findings of Caroline Sturdy Colls may well spell the doom of the official historiography on Treblinka.

_____________________________________________________________________

[1] Thomas Kues, “UK Forensic Archeologist Sets Out To Refute Treblinka ‘Deniers’”,  http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/11/uk-forensic-archeologist-sets-out-to-refute-treblinka-deniers/

[2] “Mass graves at Nazi death camp Treblinka prove Holocaust deniers wrong”, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/16/mass-graves-at-nazi-death-camp-treblinka-holocaust_n_1208814.html

[3] This radio program is temporarily available at  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b019rlns/The_Hidden_Graves_of_the_Holocaust/

[4] http://www.ideaslab.bham.ac.uk/MP3s/Caroline_Sturdy_Colls_Treblinka_podcast.mp3 A transcript of this podcast can be found at http://www.ideaslab.bham.ac.uk/MP3s/Transcript_Predictor_Podcast_40.doc

[5] “Treblinka: Revealing the hidden graves of the Holocaust”, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16657363 The article carries a heading which concludes with the words “…writes forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls” giving the clear impression that what follows is a piece written directly by Sturdy Colls herself; on the other hand the article isn’t signed. Nevertheless it is clear that the contents of the article are derived from Sturdy Colls together with the composite maps.

[6] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 73.

[7] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books 2010, p. 120.

[8] Cf. ibid., p. 117.

[9] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 138.

[10] Discussed in detail in my article Chil Rajchman’s Treblinka Memoirs, Inconvenient History, vol. 2, nr. 1, online: http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_1/chil_rajchmans_treblinka_memoirs.php

[11] Chil Rajchman, Treblinka. A Survivor’s Memory 1942–1943, MacLehose Press, London 2011, p. 60.

[12] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec or the Holocaust Controversy of Roberto Muehlenkamp, section 4.1. http://www.codoh.com/gcgv/gcgvhcrm.html

[13] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1987, p. 85.

[14] Judging by some of the early maps of the camp, pit #3 would have been located outside of this part of the camp, whereas some later exterminationist efforts to reconstruct the topography of the camp places it within the “death camp proper”, cf. Mapping Treblinka, http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/maps.html

[15] C. Mattogno, Belzec…, op.cit., p. 73.

[16] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór…, op.cit., p. 120.

[17] Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, op.cit., p. 87.

[18] Ibid., pp. 275-276.

[19] Dieter Pohl, “Massentötungen durch Giftgas im Rahmen der ‘Aktion Reinhardt’: Aufgaben der Forschung” in: Günter Morsch, Betrand Perz (eds.), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, Metropol, Berlin 2011, p. 194.

[20] Cf. Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, op.cit., pp. 87-88; J. Graf, C. Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., p. 107.

[21] According to the English-language Wikipedia article on Ground Penetrating Radar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar) “Good penetration is also achieved in dry sandy soils or massive dry materials such as granite, limestone, and concrete where the depth of penetration could be up to 15 m”, implying that the concrete slabs of the memorial in themselves should pose little problem for a GPR survey. There may of course be other, unrevealed hindering factors. 

[22] The Reconstruction of Treblinka, http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/

[23] http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/deathcampinternet/deathcampp7.shtml

[24] Y. Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka, chapter 3, online: http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm

[25] http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bmap9.jpg

By Thomas Kues

1. Introduction

According to orthodox holocaust historiography, carbon monoxide from engine exhaust was used to kill nearly 2 million Jews in Poland, Serbia and on occupied Soviet territory between late 1941 and the summer of 1944. The majority of these supposed victims were allegedly killed in stationary gas chambers located in three “pure extermination camps” in the Polish General Government – Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka – while the remainder is said to have been killed in mobile “gas vans” that were either stationed at the Chełmno (Kulmhof) camp in the Warthegau area of occupied Poland or employed by Einsatzgruppen or SD units operating in Serbia and on occupied Soviet territory. Below is listed the victim figures for each “killing center” as currently held by the orthodox historians.

Bełżec 434,501[1]

Sobibór 170,000[2]

Treblinka 750,000-900,000[3]

Chełmno (Kulmhof) 152,000-360,000[4]

Other “gas vans” 100,000 approx.

Total: 1,606,501-1,964,501

According to most eyewitness testimony, Diesel engines from captured Soviet tanks were used as killing agents Bełżec and Treblinka, while at Sobibór, the historians claim, a petrol (gasoline) engine of unclear origin was used to produce the lethal carbon monoxide gas. As for the “gas vans” supposedly employed at Chełmno, those are commonly held to have been modified Saurer or Diamond trucks.

The danger of Diesel exhaust has long been debated by revisionist scholars. Since the early 1980s, American revisionist writer and engineer F.P. Berg has published a number of articles dealing with this issue. Their conclusion: Because Diesel engines only generate small amounts of carbon monoxide, and since Diesel exhaust contains much oxygen, the use of diesel engines as killing agents in homicidal gas chambers is preposterous. Witness testimony claiming that Diesel engines were utilized for murderous purposes are thus objectively false. To those witnesses belongs Kurt Gerstein, a certified mining engineer.

This article will not further discuss the Diesel engine issue – it will suffice to say that a number of holocaust historians cling on to the notion that Diesel engines were used for killings,[5] at least at Treblinka, while others have tried to cautiously distance themselves from the Diesel claim.[6] Instead, I will for reason of argument follow the assumption that the (hypothetical) German perpetrators used engines capable of producing lethal amounts of carbon monoxide gas. Given this, I will pose a number of questions related to the physical effects of the poison gas. How would the carbon monoxide (CO) affect the bodies of the victims? What would they look like post mortem? And, most importantly: what does the eyewitnesses to the alleged carbon monoxide gas chambers have to say about the appearance of the corpses?

2. Previous research

The main revisionist study on the issue of skin discoloration caused by carbon monoxide consists of an online article by revisionist and engineer F.P. Berg, entitled “Blue Women on the Beach – and the False Toxicity of CO2 in Diesel Exhaust”. It was written as a rebuttal to an article by Charles D. Provan, “The Blue Color of the Jewish Victims at Belzec Death Camp – and Carbon Monoxide Poisoning”, which had previously appeared in the May 2004 issue of The Revisionist. Below I will provide a summary of the relevant articles written by Berg and Provan between 1983 and 2007.

2.1. Berg’s first articles on the issue of Diesel gas chambers

The first of F.P. Berg’s writings to deal with the issue of the alleged carbon monoxide gas chambers, and especially the claim that Diesel engines were used to generate the lethal gas, was an article originally presented at the 1983 International Revisionist Conference and later, in 1984, published in The Journal for Historical Review, “The Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth Within a Myth”. In it he among other things dissected the witness account of a supposed mass gassing at Bełżec in 1942 that was left by the former SS hygiene technician Kurt Gerstein in French prison in 1945. Referring to the text of one of Kurt Gerstein’s “reports”, Berg writes:

“According to the last sentence of the text quoted, ‘the bodies were tossed out blue, wet with sweat and urine.’ Here we have a flaw as far as the death-from-carbon-monoxide theory is concerned because victims of carbon monoxide poisoning are not blue at all. On the contrary, victims of carbon monoxide poisoning are a distinctive ‘cherry red,’ or ‘pink.’ This is clearly stated in most toxicology handbooks and is probably well known to every doctor and to most, if not all, emergency medical personnel. Carbon monoxide poisoning is actually very common because of the automobile and accounts for more incidents of poison gas injury than all other gases combined.”[7]

As sources Berg gave references to two standard works on toxicology.[8] The above argument was then reiterated in a revised and expanded version of the same article which originally appeared in the revisionist anthology Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (1994) under the same title and later in translation (in Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, Theses & Dissertations Press 2003) as “Diesel Gas Chambers: Ideal for Torture – Absurd for Murder”. In this appearance the above quoted passage was complemented with a further reference to recently published specialist literature.[9]

2.2. The 2004 article by Charles D. Provan

In his article The Blue Color of the Jewish Victims at Belzec Death Camp – and Carbon Monoxide Poisoning[10] Provan asserts that bluish color or bluish tinge attributed to the Bełżec victims by Gerstein and later Pfannenstiel can be explained as cyanosis. “Blue”, Provan writes, “is a regular (and documented) color for carbon monoxide poisoning, especially when the victims are alive, but also when the victims are dead.” In regard to fatal cases of CO poisoning, Provan quotes a number of studies indicating that “in some cases” of fatal poisoning there is “no cherry-red coloring of the skin”, that in some cases the appearance of the victim is instead “cyanotic”, and that the cherry-red discoloration might be “slight” due to low saturation (i.e. low carboxyhemoglobinal level) and in some cases obscured because of “associated cyanosis”. Provan takes the above as evidence that what Gerstein and Pfannenstiel said in regards to the color of the corpses is “possible”, and that Berg in his previous articles had reached the wrong conclusions.

2.3. The rebuttal of F.P. Berg

Berg opens his rebuttal to Provan[11] stating that the assertion of blue corpses “is totally at odds with the claims (…) that the toxic ingredient [in the exhaust gas used as the killing agent] was carbon monoxide.” The texts on cyanosis referenced by Provan, Berg notes, “fail to use the words “blue” or even “bluish” at all”. “The simple fact”, Berg further contends, “is that the blue appearance of “cyanosis” does not correspond at all to the general “blue” appearance of the “blue corpses” that Gerstein or Pfannenstiel allegedly saw (…)”. Corpses may be multi-colored, and thus “blue” cyanosis may appear on one part of the body, while the rest of it displays a cherry-red color. Cyanosis occurring in connection with carbon monoxide poisoning is “associated” with the poisoning and not in itself a product of any reaction between carbon monoxide and the victim’s blood. Reactions of carbon monoxide with blood are more or less bright red, never blue. Provan is wrong in defining cyanosis as a “medical term for blue coloring occurring in a patient or corpse” since “cyanotis” is not simply the medical term for blue coloring, but only applies to some varieties of blue discoloration. One would not be able to conclude a case of CO poisoning from the mere presence of cyanosis; the color of the victim’s blood would also be examined.

While cyanosis may appear in some fatal cases, “the appearance of a generally “blue” corpse is extremely rare if it ever occurs at all” (Berg). Below a carboxyhemoglobin level of 30% a living body or corpse may indeed display cyanosis without accompanying bright red discoloration, but as the lethal level for most individuals lies around 60%, an overwhelming majority of corpses would definitely show some nuance of red. Variations and exceptions to this occur in only around 6% of all cases. Also, the reddish color when occurring “tends to be extremely intense and dramatic whereas cyanosis is an extremely subtle coloring in which most of the skin is merely pale” (Berg). A lay observer would thus have a hard time noticing any cyanotic cases, whereas the red discolored corpses would be immediately noticeable. “There is good reason to believe”, Berg writes, “that a cyanotic description in our context does not really mean blue at all — but merely blue by contrast or in comparison to other parts of the same or other bodies.” In regards to the Pfannenstiel testimony, Berg remarks that Pfannenstiel “noticed nothing special about the corpses” except for a bluish tinge to the face of some of them, and that no mention of any red discoloration is made, two things which combined speaks against the reliability of this witness. Berg also strongly criticizes Provan’s way of mixing fatal and non-fatal cases of poisoning, as well as “immediate” fatal cases with “delayed” ones. Living victims of CO poisoning may be partially cyanotic and partially red (with a “flushed” or pink appearance) or cyanotic with only negligible or unnoticeable red discolorations. Dead CO victims on the other hand are usually red or cherry-red. In the rare cases (around 9% of all cases) when cyanosis appears associated with fatal CO poisoning, it tends to be appear restricted to parts of the body where the skin is more translucent, such as the lips or nasal openings. The alleged observations of Gerstein and Pfannenstiel are thus not reconcilable with known medical facts.

3. The difference between fatal and non-fatal cases of CO poisoning

In discussing the issue of discolorations in the skin of CO gassing victims, it is important to note the difference between fatal and non-fatal (i.e. clinical) cases of CO poisoning. In the writings of anti-revisionists, we often find quotes from medical literature such as:

“The classic findings of cherry-red lips, cyanosis, and retinal hemorrhages occur rarely.”[12]

Or:

“The classic ‘cherry-red’ skin coloration is actually rare, and patients are more likely to appear pale or cyanotic.”[13]

As F.P. Berg points out, statements such those above appears to refer mainly to clinical cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, i.e. cases where the poisoned person was found alive and received treatment before he or she either survived, or died (therefore the word “patients” in the second quote). A statement similar to the ones quoted above can be found in the standard work A guide to general toxicology (1983):

“Carbon monoxide poisoning may result in blisters or bullae over pressure areas but the classic cherry red color of the skin is rare.”[14]

When, however, the text within which this quote appears is read more closely, it becomes evident that the author(s), without stating this explicitly, is referring mainly or even exclusively to clinical cases.[15] In fact, specialist literature on toxicology and emergency medicine by its very nature normally focus on clinical cases, while cases involving untreated fatal cases are normally treated in writings related to forensic medicine.[16] An article from 2007 authored by Nicholas Bateman, a professor in clinical toxicology, indirectly confirms that deep red or “cherry pink” discoloration is rare among surviving victims, but more common in fatal cases (emphasis added):

“Skin blistering may occur if the patient lies unconscious for some hours before being discovered, and the skin is more likely to be cyanosed than to have the cherry-pink colour that is described to be a classical feature of CO poisoning, but rarely seen in living patients.”[17]

The letter by Bruno Simini to The Lancet, often cited by anti-revisionists, in which it is stated that “cherry-red discoloration in CO poisoning is quite rare” and that “most doctors overestimate the frequency of cherry-red discoloration in CO poisoning” is also clearly referring to clinical cases of poisoning, since it only refers to “surveys of patients” i.e. treated victims of CO poisoning.[18]

The case reports and medical papers which I quote and refer to in the next section clearly proves that deep red or cherry red discoloration of the skin is virtually always present among fatal cases of CO poisoning. In the section after that I will contrast the contents of the medical case reports and findings with statements made by professed eyewitnesses to the alleged homicidal gas chambers and “gas vans”.

Illustration 1: Reddish flush in a non-fatal case of CO poisoning.[19]

Illustration 2: Typical red discoloration in victim of fatal CO poisoning.[20]

Illustration 3: A fatal case of CO poisoning displaying distinctive reddish-pink discoloration.[21]

Illustration 4: Bright red lividity in a victim of CO poisoning.[22]

4. Verified cases of discoloration resulting from carbon monoxide poisoning

Below I will provide brief summaries of a number of case reports and medical papers concerned with skin discoloration as an effect of CO poisoning.

Item 1: The man with the red face

The following case from mid-60’s America involved the suicide attempt of a 21-year old white male of Italian descent:[23]

“When seen on the morning following his admission the author was struck by the appearance of the patient’s cherry-red face. Additionally, he was thick-tongued in speech, lethargic and showed impairment of orientation as regards time and place. Confusion as to what had brought about his admission was noted.

The writer’s initial impression was acute brain syndrome but one whose etiology might involve carbon monoxide poisoning. Thus, the patient was questioned closely as regards the circumstances and details of his suicide attempt. Elicited from the patient were additional facts that he had fallen asleep in his car with the engine running and the windows closed. Twelve hours later, he awoke and returned home to tell his parents what he had done. At that time his clothes were covered by vomitus. It became apparent that a most important clinical sign and area of history had been over-looked previously.”

Thus it is apparent that cherry-red skin discoloration can be highly visible even among survivors of carbon monoxide poisoning. Red discoloration of the skin is thus not limited to the lividity of fresh corpses, but appears in the still living victim’s body as the mechanical result of carbon monoxide being absorbed by the bloodstream. This is because, as F.P. Berg writes in his rebuttal to Provan, “when carbon monoxide reacts with human blood, it forms carboxyhemoglobin which above concentrations of 30% is a bright red, becoming brighter and more intense as the concentration increases”, that is, the discoloration begins immediately with the reaction of the blood with the CO, and is then increased by the inflow of CO. Following death the discoloration is then concentrated by the pooling of blood that is livor mortis (post-mortem lividity).

Item 2: A dead girl in Italy

This case involved a 21 year old white female found dead in a country house owned by her family. It was later determined that her death had been unintentionally caused by a gas water heater. We are told by the authors of the case report that “[t]he pale cherry pink colour of the victim immediately suggested a carbon monoxide poisoning.” A spectrophotometric measurement of the blood showed a carboxyhemoglobin level of 60%. The report also mentions that among survivors of CO poisoning, the mean carboxyhemoglobin level is 28.1%, while among fatalities the mean level is 62.3%. At a level of 50%, the probability of survival is more or less 50%.[24]

Item 3: A German report on six “unusual” cases of fatal CO poisoning

This article[25] states that, despite the presence of indicative death scenes and/or characteristic findings of the external (coroners’) examination, about 40% of all unintentional fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning remain unrecognized until the autopsy. To illustrate possible reasons for this, the authors describe six individual cases. In case 1 and 2, involving a middle-aged couple, the bodies were found in a state of extreme putrefaction, so that the cause of death could only be recognized through spectrophotometrically analyzing the carboxyhemoglobin level of the oedema fluid that had gathered in the scalps of the victims. Case 3 involved a young truck driver, found dead in the closed cab of his vehicle and not displaying any clear external signs of CO poisoning, despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 83%. Case 4 involved a 19 year old male found dead in a flat. Despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 65% his body lacked “the bright pink coloration of livor mortis”. Case 5 involved a 27 year old male discovered dead in his flat with a carboxyhemoglobin level of 80%. His body was found in a state of advanced decomposition. Case 6 involved a 42 year old female found dead in the garage beside her car. The body did not show any clear external signs of CO poisoning despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 46%. As stated already by the title of this article (“Unusual carbon monoxide poisoning”) these six cases (in particular cases 3, 4 and 6) are to be viewed as anomalous.

Item 4: An American case of CO poisoning without cherry-red discoloration

According to the authors of this article, carbon monoxide poisoning “typically causes so-called cherry-red livor of the skin and viscera.” They then report of a case of CO poisoning in which this cherry-red livor did not develop. It involved a 75 year old white male found dead in his car during a cold winter. His carboxyhemoglobin level was measured as 86%. The authors inform us that “the curious absence of cherry-red livor” was studied and the decedent’s tissue and blood specimens tested at various temperatures. The tests showed that neither the blood nor the tissue of the victim had a tendency to develop cherry-red color, regardless of temperature.[26]

Item 5: An optical study of discolorations

In this South African study of 10 fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, the skin color of the victims’ bodies was analyzed by the help of reflectance spectrophotometry, with the values converted to visual equivalents. It was found that several circumstances contribute to the difficulty of identifying the cherry-red color in the skin, among them low CO concentration in the blood, skin pigmentation, washing-out of previously high CO concentrations, and deep venous dilatation combined with superficial vasoconstriction (narrowing of the blood vessels), producing the impression of cyanosis. It was further found that the color of the altered blood “depends on the way the red cells are massed together, their depths below the surface, and the brightness of the background against which they are viewed.”[27]

Item 6: A study of 15 CO victims at an Indian hospital

This study, published in 2001, was carried out at a hospital in a provincial Indian city which is located on an altitude of 5000 ft above mean sea level. It involved findings in 40 cases of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, 25 of the clinical, 15 of them post mortem. The autopsy findings revealed “deep red discoloration of skin and serous membranes” in 12 of the 15 corpses.[28] This study is important for the topic of the present article, since it shows that deep red discoloration is displayed by a majority of victims of lethal carbon monoxide poisoning even when the skin of the victims are of a darker pigmentation than the average Caucasian’s.

Item 7: An Austrian study on 182 cases of fatal CO poisoning

This study[29] consists of an analysis of autopsy reports of postmortems performed at the Viennese Institute of Forensic Medicine between 1984 and 1993. The aim of this survey was to determine whether the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis[30] is a reliable finding for the coroner to suspect a carbon monoxide-related death immediately at the death scene. It involved 182 cases of unintentional carbon monoxide-related deaths: 92 females and 90 males. The authors found a strong association between the carboxyhemoglobin level (i.e. the level of CO concentration in the blood’s hemoglobin) and the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis: “in 98.4% of unintentional carbon monoxide-related deaths livor mortis was clearly cherry-pink.”[31] It was determined that fresh corpses with carboxyhemoglobin levels greater than 31% show “a clear cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis.”[32] The survey further indicated that the Viennese coroners’ inability to recognize cases of unintentional carbon monoxide fatalities immediately at the death scene was correlated to the age of the victim: the older the victim, the worse the coroner’s recognition.

In conclusion, the authors of the article suggest that coroners should be recommended to examine naked corpses thoroughly, and especially the color of livor mortis. In this way, they write, a carbon monoxide-related death can be recognized immediately and the source of the gas release identified, thus protecting other people from the risk of poisoning.

Item 8: A survey of 388 car exhaust gas suicides in Denmark 1995-1999

This study[33] from 2005 consists of a survey of 388 cases of suicide by means of engine exhaust gas carried out in Denmark between 1995 and 1998. Of the suicides 343 were males and 45 females. It was found that in 11 cases (2.8%) putrefaction or burns were so extensive that livor mortis could not be found, while “the characteristic pink livor mortis” was found in 353 cases (91% of the total cases, 93.6% of those with livor mortis). Only in 9 cases (2.4% of those with livor mortis) did the victims show a normal-colored livor mortis. In 3 of those 9 cases the victim had survived more than a day after the poisoning, implying a positive correlation between the cherry-red discoloration of livor mortis and the carboxyhemoglobin level. In 15 cases the author of the autopsy report had neglected to write down the color of livor mortis.

Summary of the medical evidence

From the above summarized cases we may conclude that:

• Cherry-red discoloration sometimes appears in non-fatal cases of CO poisoning, i.e. it is visible also in ante-mortem states (Item 1). According to available medical literature, such cases are not the rule, but on the other hand not highly exceptional. Such discoloration would appear more or less directly after the blood cells had started absorbed the carbon monoxide. The visibility of the deep red discoloration is related to the concentrations of CO in the blood (i.e. the carboxyhemoglobin level), as well as other factors such as pigmentation (Item 5). In the case of the alleged gas chamber victims it is reasonable to assume that their carboxyhemoglobin level would be much higher than that of the average CO poisoning survivor (that is 28.1%, whereas in fatal cases the concentration averages 62.3%; cf. Item 2), thus greatly increasing the number of individual cases with cherry-red discoloration appearing already ante-mortem or prior to the onset of livor mortis.

• According to Item 7 fresh corpses with carboxyhemoglobin levels greater than 31% shows clear discoloration. This level is only 2.9% above that of the average survivor of CO poisoning (cf. Item 2).

• In cases of fatal CO poisoning, deep red discoloration of the livor mortis is visible in many cases even when the victim’s pigmentation is much darker than that of the average Caucasian (Item 6).

• In fatal cases of CO poisoning, absence of cherry-red lividity is regarded as “curious” or “unusual”. Individuals whose blood and tissue lacks the tendency to develop the cherry-red color are very much an exception (Item 4). In many of the fatal cases where discoloration could not be detected, this was due to the corpse having entered the stage of advanced decomposition, or from having suffered severe burns (Items 3, 8).

• Deep red/cherry-red discoloration of livor mortis is present in at least 95% of all fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning (Items 7 and 8).

5. Eyewitness descriptions of alleged carbon monoxide victims at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Chełmno

Witness 1: Kurt Gerstein

As a captive of Allied forces in France, former SS hygiene technician Kurt Gerstein wrote a number of reports in which he claimed to have witnessed a mass gassing at Bełżec in August 1942. In the two reports indisputably written by Gerstein in French on April 26, 1945, the bodies of the gassing victims are described in the following way:

“The blue bodies are thrown, damp with sweat and with urine, the legs full of excrement and menstrual blood.”[34]

In the German-language Gerstein reports which Henri Roques designate T III and T VI the word “blue” is not present. It is likewise not present in the French text T Va, dated to May 6, 1945. The German text T IV contains no corresponding passage.

Regarding the blueness of the Bełżec corpses and the issue of cyanosis, see Section 2 above.

Witness 2: Wilhelm Pfannenstiel

The professor of hygiene at the University of Marburg-Lahn Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel allegedly accompanied the aforementioned Kurt Gerstein on his trip to Bełżec in August 1942. After the war Pfannenstiel was arrested but never sentenced to prison. Instead he was on a number of occasions summoned as a witness for the prosecution in trials dealing with the alleged homicidal gas chambers at the Reinhardt camps. In 1950 he testified before a court in the German city of Darmstadt:

“I noticed nothing special about the corpses, except that some of them showed a bluish puffiness about the face. But this is not surprising since they had died of asphyxiation.”[35]

Since Pfannenstiel was without question familiar with the texts of the Gerstein reports, it is fully possible that he also derived his description of the corpses from one of the two French texts. As an alternative, it cannot be excluded that Pfannenstiel, with his thorough background in medicine and hygiene studies, was familiar with asphyxiation symptoms and thus also able to fabricate a vague description with the ring of authority. As for the Pfannenstiel testimony I once again refer to Berg’s article summarized above.

Witness 3: Karl Alfred Schluch

SS-Unterscharführer Karl Alfred Schluch was posted at Bełżec from June 1942 until early summer 1943. His work at the camp up until December 1942 supposedly involved accompanying the naked Jewish victims through the camouflaged “sluice” which led to the gas chambers. Schluch was acquitted at the trial of former Bełżec camp staff held in Munich in 1963. In connection with this trial the witness made the following statement regarding the bodies of the gas chamber victims:

“The corpses were at least partially besmirched with excrement and urine, others in part with saliva. The lips and nose tips of some of the corpses had turned blue. With some the eyes were closed, with others the eyes had rolled.”[36]

Now it is possible that the lips, and possibly also the nose tips, of carbon monoxide victims would look purple-bluish as a result of cyanosis. The problem is that this is the only kind of discoloration that the witness claims to have been aware of. Are we to believe that Schluch noticed a few purple-bluish lips, but completely missed the large red discolorations?

Witness 4: Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann testified during his trial in Jerusalem that he had visited three camps were carbon monoxide was allegedly used to exterminate Jews: Chełmno (Kulmhof), Treblinka, and an unidentified camp in the Lublin area commonly assumed to have been Bełżec. Only in regard to the first camp does Eichmann claim to have witnessed the bodies of the alleged victims. This is how Eichmann described the murder of Jews in “gas vans” at Chełmno:

“I went myself to a small wood and just as I got there the omnibus also arrived, it pulled up beside a pit which had been dug up, the doors were opened and out of them poured corpses, down into the pit. One upon the other. It was a ghastly inferno. No, a super-inferno. To me they looked as if they were still alive. But now each and all of them were dead.”[37]

Thus according to Eichmann the corpses of the victims looked the same way as when they had been alive. The vagueness of the description makes the testimony weak evidence in any case, but it might be safely assumed that Eichmann would have noticed and remembered large red discolorations on the corpses from the gas vans, if he had in fact seen any.

Witness 5: “Szlamek”

This key witness to the alleged gas van mass murders in Chełmno, who has been identified as either a certain Jakov Grojanowski or Szlojme Fajner, claims the following in his testimony, reportedly dating from February 1942:

”How did the corpses appear? They were not burned, not black. The complexion of their faces was unchanged. Almost all the dead were lying in their excrement.

[...].

It seemed that they had only been put to sleep; their cheeks were pale and they kept their natural skin color.”[38]

Thus the corpses displayed no skin discoloration whatsoever.

Witness 6: Rudolf Reder

The witness Rudolf Reder, born in 1881, is supposed to have spent a significant portion of his nearly four month long stay at Bełżec dragging corpses from the camp’s alleged gas chambers to massive burial pits. On December 29, 1945, Reder was interrogated by the Polish Judge Jan Sehn. Regarding the physical appearance of the gas chamber victims, the witness stated:

“I was often on the ramp at the moment the doors were opened, but I never smelled any odor, and on entering a chamber right after the doors were opened I never felt any ill effects on my health. The bodies in the chamber did not show any unnatural discoloration. They looked like live persons, most had their eyes open.”[39]

The Bełżec key witness Reder is thus clearly of the opinion that the gassing victims displayed no cherry-red discoloration.

Witness 7: Eliahu Rosenberg

The Jewish witness Eliahu (Elias) Rosenberg supposedly spent several months working in close proximity of the alleged Treblinka gas chambers,[40] dragging thousands of corpses from the “death chambers” to mass graves. In a 12-page typewritten deposition in German which Rosenberg left in Vienna on December 24, 1947, the appearance of the gas chamber victims is described thus:

“The corpses were very bloated, their skin looked gray-white and easily peeled off, so that it hung from them like shreds. Their eyes protruded and the tongues hung out of their mouths.”[41]

Rosenberg’s description of the hue of the corpses is clearly not consistent with the red discoloration resulting from carbon monoxide poisoning.

In addition to Rosenberg, the Jewish writer Rachel Auerbach states in her essay “In the Fields of Treblinka” from 1946 that “the bodies were naked; some of them were white, others were blue and bloated.”[42] Auerbach had not herself been interned at Treblinka, but visited the remains of the camp in 1945 as part of an official inspection tour. Her essay is reportedly based on written testimony and talks she had with former Treblinka inmates. Another secondary account derives from the writings of a certain Jacob Mittelberg, who spent only a few hours in Treblinka before being transferred to Majdanek. Mittelberg visited the site of the “death camp” after the war in the company of Rachel Auerbach and a number of former Treblinka inmates, who told him that “when the doors of the gas chambers were opened, the people were blue and so pressed together as to be unrecognizable.”[43] Soviet-Jewish propagandist Vasily Grossman wrote in 1945 after his visit to the former camp site that “People who were unloading the chambers told me that the faces of dead were very yellow”.[44]

Witness 8: Theodor Friedrich Leidig

As far as I have been able to determine the only eyewitness to an alleged mass murder with exhaust gas to have spoken of corpses with red or reddish coloring was a certain Dr. Theodor Friedrich Leidig of the Kriminaltechnisches Institut (KTI) of the RSHA. Dr. Leidig claimed to have witnessed the murder of Russian POW’s detained at Sachsenhausen using a “gas van”:[45]

“We then went to another place, where we once again encountered the van. It turned out that we were now at the crematorium. I still remember that one could look through a peephole or a small window [Scheibe] into the interior of the van, which was illuminated.

One could see that the people were dead. Then the van was opened. Some corpses fell out, the rest were unloaded by prisoners. The corpses had, as was determined by us chemists, the pinkish-red [rosa-rote] appearance which is typical for people who have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Regardless whether this testimony is reliable or not – and we have in fact not a single shred of documentary or technical evidence that supports it – the following observation is inevitable: Leidig clearly knew from his studies that humans who have died of CO poisoning ought to look “pinkish-red”, so in case he was forced or felt impelled to make up a false story, he would have little problem making it a plausible-sounding one. A testimony from a layman mentioning the presence of reddish-pink discoloration would clearly be of a higher evidentiary value, as the possibility that the witness had drawn from a priori knowledge to embellish his story would be much smaller.

6. Rebuttals to possible counter-arguments

Below I will discuss four possible counter-arguments which may be raised against the revisionist critique of the eye-witness testimony.

Argument 1: The studies cited by revisionists are irrelevant because they refer to livor mortis

As has been explained above, the cherry-red discoloration appears as a mechanical effect soon as the carbon monoxide has been absorbed by the blood cells and is thus visible on post-mortem bodies (especially pronounced in the livor mortis, as during this phase the blood is concentrated due to gravity-induced pooling) as well as in ante-mortem states (to a variable degree) and even in some cases where decomposition has already set in. The medical studies and case reports quoted in this article and others are therefore relevant, whether referring to livor mortis or ante-mortem appearances of red discoloration.

Argument 2: Most or all of the victims were deeply anemic, something which would have prevented visible discoloration from ocurring

Anemia is medically defined as a qualitative or quantitative deficiency of hemoglobin, the molecule found inside red blood cells which causes the blood to look red. Anemia results either from excessive blood loss (due to hemorrhage or chronic loss of smaller volumes of blood), excessive destruction of blood cells, or a deficient production of new red blood cell. The idea of the counter-argument is that severe anemia would prevent the red discoloration from appearing in the gassing victims.

In the case of the Jewish deportees, anemia might have been caused either by inadequate intake of vitamin B12 and/or folic acid (leading to macrocytic anemia), or by iron deficiency (causing microcytic anemia). While mild anemia caused by iron deficiency among women of childbearing age is not uncommon even in the western world of today, it is very rare among men and children.

How common then was anemia among the populations of the wartime Jewish ghettos of Poland, where malnutrition, starvation and epidemics indeed took a heavy toll on the inhabitants? This question is very difficult to give a definitive answer to, but a number of indications may be gleaned from the book Hunger Disease. Studies by the Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, edited the former Director of the Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition, Dr. Myron Winnick.[46] In this volume, Winick presents a report on nutrition-related diseases prepared by a group of Jewish physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1942. The group, led by Dr. Israel Milejkowski, worked out the details of the study in secret meetings, had medical equipment smuggled into the ghetto, and later smuggled the finished manuscript out of it. The small team of 28 Jewish medical experts included Dr. Mieczyslaw Kocen, a specialist in blood diseases who himself was later allegedly exterminated at Treblinka. The manuscript of the report, which escaped the war tumult relatively unscathed, was published in limited Polish and French editions by the American Joint Distribution Committee. It remained most obscure however, until it surfaced in the United States in the late 1970s and was published in edited form by the abovementioned Winnick.[47]

Regarding the changes of blood characteristics in hunger disease victims the ghetto physicians noted the following:

“Red blood cells examined in 80 cases decreased from 3 million per cubic millimeter to between 1.5 and 1 million and in some cases even below. Hemoglobin decreased to 60 to 70% and in some cases ranged as low as 10%. Color index was usually 1 or less, and rarely reached 1.15. Examining a drop of fresh blood we noticed that the red blood cells do not aggregate normally into rolls but remain single or group into small clusters. Anisocytosis and even more often microcytosis are present, macrocytosis is rare, and there are no nucleated red blood cells. Often the red blood cells are colorless and irregularly shaped. These are symptoms of hypochromic anemia in the recovery phase as indicated by a high percentage of reticulocytes.”[48]

The Warsaw doctors pointed out that “hunger disease” does not result in a decrease of the blood volume of the victim:

“In cachexia and hunger edema there is no anemia in the strict sense because blood volume is not decreased in proportion to body weight. Since there is a low percentage of red blood cells in a drop of blood, this would be classified as normovolemic oligocytemia.”[49]

Rather than a decrease of the total number of red blood cells, “hunger disease” tends to cause a dilution of the blood through the increase of the water content:

“In normal specimens plasma contains 89 to 90% water and red blood cells contain 63 to 67% water. In our patients’ specimens plasma contained 93 to 94% water and red blood cells only 58%.

The changes described in the water content of the blood can produce a pseudoanemia in patients with cachexia or hunger edema. The dryness of the red blood cells explains the presence of microcytosis.”[50]

In a study of child victims of hunger disease it was observed:

“Anemia was usually mild (3 to 3.5 million red blood cells, but sometimes under 2 million, or color index about 1). Even in advanced anemia no young red blood cells were found. In evaluating the degree of anemia, we had to consider “blood dilution,” which was present in every case of severe malnutrition, even the dry form without edema. (…) Dr. Apfelbaum’s research on the volume of blood in adults suffering from hunger disease has demonstrated an increase in blood volume per kilogram of body weight. This factor must also be considered in evaluating the degree of anemia.”[51]

On the subject of child victims of malnutrition, Winnick comments:

“One might assume that since these children, especially the older ones, were reasonably well nourished before the war (unlike most children in developing countries) they had built up significant reserves of vitamin A prior to contracting hunger disease. (…). Finally, vitamin A requirements, like those for other vitamins, might decrease during semistarvation.”[52]

Winnick further notes:

“This results not only in hemodilution which, as we shall see, contributed to the anemia and leukopenia reported in the next chapter, but also in a reduction in the efficiency of the blood as a carrier of nutrients. Thus the vascular system is forced to supply more of the ‘poorly nourished’ blood to the ‘hungry’ tissues and organs. The absolute anemia (…) reduces the amount of oxygen carried by the blood and again increases the total blood requirements of the tissues even though they are consuming less oxygen.”[53]

Another study of the Warsaw physicians showed that some degree of anemia was common among patients of hunger disease but that

“of 32 cases only six had 4 to 5 million red blood cells. Thus anemia was prevalent. The largest group of people had 3 to 4 million blood cells. Therefore we consider this number as average for slightly advanced hunger disease.”[54]

However, according to the table following this paragraph 10 of the cases displayed a level of 3-4 million red blood cells per cubic millimeter, while 9 cases displayed a level of 2 million or less. Thus only a minority of the studied cases suffered from what could be defined as severe anemia. Further among the conclusions we read that

“Anemia is normochromic or hyperchromic and only very rarely hypochromic. There is anisocytosis with a predominance of macrocytes.”[55]

Winnick summarizes the post-mortem case studies performed as follows:

“They [the physicians] report on 492 autopsies performed in the 2 ½ years that preceded the deportations. These were cases of ‘pure’ hunger disease with no other complications. This represented about 15% of the total number of autopsies performed in their departments during the same period. They divided their material into four periods beginning in January 1940 and ending on July 22, 1942, and point out that the number of cases of hunger disease increased with time.”[56]

In a series of tables the Warsaw physicians list the following gross changes in the “hunger disease” victims:[57]

1. Pale cadaver-like skin in 82.5% of the cases. Dark brown-colored skin in 17.5%.

2. Edema in one third of the cases. Effusions were most frequent in the abdominal cavity when they occurred.

3. Edema was rare in cases of “brown skin,” whereas the pale skin group had either the edematous or the dry form of the disease.

4. Severe atrophy occurred in heart, liver, spleen, and kidney.

5. Brain weight remained unchanged (these were adult patients).

6. Marked skeletal muscle atrophy.

7. Edema of the small intestinal wall with swollen reddish discolored mucosa and mucus appeared in 27.2% of the cases.

8. Thin watery bile in 77.7% of the cases.

9. Reduced number of fat bodies in the adrenals in 50% of cases.

10. Jellylike consistency in bone marrow of certain cases.

11. Emphysema in 13.8% of cases.

12. Anemia in only 5.5% of cases.

13. Almost 50% of the cases had intestinal changes that could be classified as pseudodysentery. An equal number of these cases fell into the edematous and nonedematous groups.

The above can be taken as a strong indication that even among fatal cases of malnutrition, anemia was far from always present. Even if no definitive answers may found in regards to this question, it seems far-flung to assert that a majority of the Jewish deportees who arrived at Treblinka were afflicted with anemia severe enough to prevent the appearance of a visible livor mortis or other variants of skin discoloration.

Argument 3: The lighting may not have been adequate for the eye-witnesses to see the colors of the corpses properly

This argument is easily dismissed. Rosenberg and Reder claims to have worked not only with removing the corpses from the gas chambers, but also with transporting them to the mass graves. It is generally asserted by holocaust historians that this activity was mainly carried out during the day,[58] so that in most if not all cases the Arbeitsjuden engaged in the corpse-dragging must have been able to observe their macabre burden in full daylight.

Argument 4: The inmates working with transporting the corpses might not have noticed the color of the livor mortis since it would have appeared on the half of the bodied turned towards the ground

There are two obstacles to this argument. On its way from the gas chamber to its final place in one of the mass graves the corpse would have made at least two stops, first close to the gas chambers, where the “dentists” would check its teeth and pull out any gold present, the second at the edge of the burial pit, where it had to be arranged with the other bodies in some fashion. In order to efficiently arrange the huge number of bodies in the mass graves, a portion of them would most likely have had to be turned around. In any case it seems logical to assume that a great many of the hypothetical gassing victims would have been turned over at least once on their way to the burial pits. That the inmates who worked day after day with these routines would have managed to completely miss the large, brightly discoloured portions of skin is simply out of the question – unless we assume that the clever Nazis selected only colorblind Jews for these work commandos!

7. Conclusion

In a medical article from 2004 we find the following stated regarding the appearance of cherry red skin discoloration in cases of carbon monoxide poisoning:

“The classical cherry red appearance is not seen in all cases of acute poisoning, and may not be apparent even in cases of severe toxicity.”[59]

However, in the case of the alleged mass gassings at the Aktion Reinhardt camps and Chełmno, all of the (alleged) victims can safely be regarded as victims of acute poisoning, and since the witnesses to the alleged gassings supposedly observed – often at very closely distance – not only one or two corpses, but hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of corpses, it natural follows that witnesses such as Reder, “Szlamek” and Rosenberg would have observed a very large number of bodies showing cherry red discoloration. That not a single one of the alleged eye-witnesses to mass gassings at the above listed camps mention the highly eye-catching type of discoloration that most often accompany lethal carbon monoxide poisoning is in itself enough to throw doubt upon the alleged truthfulness of their statements.[60] The apparently isolated case of Theodor Friedrich Leidig , not only because of his background but also due to the fact that he describes something not part of the holocaust per se, namely the (alleged) murder of a group of Russian prisoners of war at an “ordinary” concentration camp. When key witnesses from the “extermination camps”, however, reports the corpses to have been blue, white, grayish, or even without any discoloration whatsoever, then we can be certain that something is not right with their gas chamber testimonies.

At the website of the University of Birmingham we find the following presentation of a young forensic archeologist named Caroline Sturdy Colls [1]:

“Caroline is part of a small specialist team in the UK who work in the area of forensic archaeology. Caroline has a strong stomach and she doesn’t mind getting muddy – which helps when she works with the British Police on ‘no body’ cases – apparently it’s not as glamorous as it appears on CSI or Waking the Dead!

Caroline was recently one of the very few people allowed inside the newly-discovered Egyptian tomb, KV63, in the Valley of the Kings and she’s currently working on a project to identify Holocaust victims buried in mass graves in Poland.“

The holocaust mass graves which Ms. Colls is currently working at identifying are in fact those of the “pure extermination camp” of Treblinka II. This is made clear by a movie which can be downloaded at the same webpage. Below I provide a transcript of Ms. Sturdy Colls’ own narration (emphasis added):

“Forensic archeology is the collection of evidence for use in a legal case. This can be anything from investigating a single murder to genocide or war crimes.

It’s hard to believe that there has been no systematic search for the six million victims who perished in the Holocaust.

800,000 people were murdered here at Treblinka and their bodies were never found. It’s time we started looking.

I’m a scientist and while I obviously feel the same emotions as everyone else when I read about the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, I need to be able to do my job objectively. So I need to shut out these emotions sometimes, and let the evidence speak for itself.

There are some very vocal Holocaust deniers who use spurious archeology to claim that the Holocaust never happened. That’s why it’s so important that we use the most up-to-date scientific techniques. This can be done, and it should be done.“

My comments:

1) For any rational observer it is indeed “hard to believe” that there has been “no systematic search” for the bodies of the alleged 6 million holocaust victims. Since it is a given in murder cases that crime investigators do their best to secure technical and forensic evidence, and most importantly the physical remains of the victim, one would think that such a systematic search for bodies – as well as the weapons of crime, the remains of the alleged homicidal gas chambers – would have been appropriate already in connection with the Nuremberg Trials. How come, Ms. Sturdy Colls, that no such elementary technical-forensic investigation was carried out in this case of (alleged) murder of 6 million people?

2) Ms. Sturdy Colls should also ask herself how it is possible that no-one has managed to locate the remains of 800,000 people allegedly buried within the area of a mere few hectares? [2]

3) If Ms. Sturdy Colls had bothered to actually read the holocaust revisionist literature on the Aktion Reinhardt camps published in the last ten years she would know that its critique of the orthodox holocaust historiography concerning the alleged “extermination centers” of Bełżec [3] and Sobibór [4] is based on the surveys conducted at these sites by the renowned Polish archeology professor Andrzej Kola. While Kola pays lipservice to the holocaust credo, his published results leaves no doubt that the orthodox historiographical picture of these camps is untenable, that the alleged gas chamber buildings never existed, and that the number of people who perished and are buried at these sites is much smaller than claimed by holocaust historians. The results of Kola’s research at Sobibór indeed proved so embarrassing to the defenders of the officially sanctioned historiography that the article in which they were presented (in 2001) has never been officially translated. It was only through the study on Sobibór which I co-authored with Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno that the non-Polish-speaking world finally learned about them in 2010. It is most revealing that the leading mainstream expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis (who currently is appearing as a joint plaintiff (Nebenkläger) at the Demjanjuk Trial in Munich), in all the revised editions of his – otherwise very thorough – Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp to have come out since 2001 [5] does not mention with so much as a word the research of Prof. Kola – this despite the fact that Schelvis, who maintains contact with several Polish holocaust museums and institutes [6], cannot possibly be unaware of it. Surely Ms. Sturdy Colls is not suggesting that Prof. Kola’s research is “spurious archeology”, or that he is somehow in league with evil “Holocaust Deniers”?

4) I really hope that Ms. Sturdy Colls is indeed able to do her job objectively, despite her à priori conclusion that 800,000 people were murdered at Treblinka. In this she should heed the words of the archeologists Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek:

“It is generally agreed that one of the challenges facing the historical archaeologist is the artifact/text dichotomy. […] If contradictions are apparent and real, we are talking about spaces between or within artifact and text, about dissonances, that may reveal additional aspects hitherto unknown […]. However, to establish if in a given case dissonances exist, the nature and quality of the evidence, of both the archaeological and the historical data, should be reexamined carefully.“[7]

Or in plain English: If established historiography is contradicted by hard archeological evidence it needs to be reexamined and then discarded or rewritten. Even if Ms. Sturdy Colls’ future results would happen to support the revisionist transit camp hypothesis rather than the orthodox “death camp” hypothesis it is her scientific duty to present them openly and without falsifications. A word of caution though: Ms. Sturdy Colls should be careful not to publicly announce any “inconvenient” results until she is safely returned to the UK, as Poland punishes “Holocaust Denial” with up to 3 years in prison.[8] Perhaps better then to proceed as Professor Kola: Pay the necessary lipservice and let the results speak for themselves.

In 2007-2008 the abovementioned three archeologists (Gilead, Haimi and Mazurek) attempted to do what Kola had not been able to do: to find the alleged gas chamber building at Sobibór. To their help they had experts in geophysics, high resolution metal detection, a magnetic gradiometer, a terrain conductivity meter, ground penetrating radar, aerial photography, and GPS mapping devices – exactly the “most up-to-date scientific techniques” which Ms. Sturdy Colls is talking about. Despite the fact that the team from the outset “knew roughly where the gas chamber was located“, and that the area they had to investigate amounted to less than 3 hectares, they had to conclude in 2009 that “the location of the gas chambers is a complex issue that has to be solved, an important objective for future archaeological research at Sobibór“! [9] In the August 2010 issue of Reader’s Digest Yoram Haimi put it even more bluntly: “we’re still looking for the gas chambers.” [10] Another word of caution: It is easy to make a fool of oneself if one clings to scientifically indefensible dogmas!

I can only wish Ms. Sturdy Colls good luck in her work, which is precisely the kind of effort that we holocaust revisionists welcome.
In the meantime I advise her to read Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf’s study Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?,[11] especially the chapters on previous forensic examinations and the alleged mass burials and cremations (pp. 77-110, 137-157).

After the publication of “Evidence for the Presence of ‘Gassed’ Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 1”¹ in the summer issue of Inconvenient History I have came across numerous pieces of information prompting additions to the same text, which were incorporated in a recently published online Swedish version of the article.² Since many of these additions need to be considered in the upcoming parts of this study, I have decided to publish all of them separately online in the form of an addendum. The additions are presented in order of the sections to which they belong.

Section 2.3.3. “The Jews of France”

Of the 878 Jews deported from Drancy to Kovno and Reval (Tallinn) on 15 May 1944 (convoy “73m”), at least 26 were later transferred from Estonia to the concentration camp Stutthof near Danzig. A transport list from the autumn of 1944 contains the following names identifiable as persons from this convoy:³

Aserman, Gean b. 25.10.98. (spelt “Jean Aserman” in the 73m transport list)
Biter, Child b. 05.06.99. (“Szydeour Bitter”)
Blaufuchs, Alfred b. 03.06.08
David, Ozias b. 23.12.99. (“Oryas David”)
Frydmann, Abraam b. 25.02.99. (“Abram Frydmann”)
Futeral, Simon b. 02.02.22. (“Sandel Futeral” b. 02.04.22 – likely a mistake; there is one other Futeral in the transport list, but the year of birth does not match)
Gusevicz, Paul b. 07.04.04. (“Paul Guzewicz”)
Grosswald, Moise b. 10.05.93
Gustin, David b. 10.10.02. (David Gustein)
Herclich, Zysia b. 22.06.09. (“Zygia Herclich”)
Jolles, Ferdinand b. 27.02.07.
Kuperman, Jacob b. 27.06.93.
Leviach, Paul b. 12.09.04.
Levy, René b. 07.05.97.
Levy, Roger b. 30.12.97.
Mager, Armand b. 13.10.95.
Mlynarsky, Achille b. 15.03.02.
Mizrahi, Albert b. 19.02.00.
Perachia, Albert b. 15.05.21. (“Albert Perahia”)
Schnek, Leon b. 06.12.02. (“Leon Schneck”)
Skosovsky, Jean b. 03.01.12. (“Jean Skosowsky”)
Tattelbaum, Maurice b. 22.08.97.
Toledano, Henry b. 18.02.26. ( no doubt identical with “Leon Toledano”, who has the same birthday; there is no other Toledano in the transport list)
Valigora, Narchman b. 01.01.97. (“Nachmann Walligora”)
Mayer, Guy b. 07.02.96.

2.4.1. Italy

In the bimonthly Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 7, no. 2 (April 1944), we find the following news item (p. 185):

“A report from Polish underground sources reaching official Polish circles in London on Feb. 13 revealed that 3,000 Italian Jews arrived at the Trawniki labor camp last Nov. 15. Their present whereabouts is unknown, stated the report, since the Trawniki camp has been liquidated.“

This implies that the deported Italian Jews did not reach the Occupied eastern territories, but were transited via Auschwitz to the Lublin District.

Section 2.4.9. “Luxembourg”

Some of the 334 Luxembourg Jews deported to the Łódź Ghetto in October 1941 were reportedly later sent to Chełmno. Also, many of the Luxembourg Jews who had fled to France in autumn 1941 were later deported from there.⁴

Section 3.1.2. “Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz”

In the quote from the issue of 27 November 1942 we read:

“The London-based newspaper ‘France’ carries a notice that 20,000 Jews deported from France have arrived in Bessarabia in a pitiful state. The trains went straight to Kischinev [Chisinau] and Calarisi to deliver the prisoners to the local ghettos there.”

There is a Calarasi in southern Romania, but since the text is speaking of Bessarabia (where Chisinau is located) it is clear that the town meant is Calarasi in Bessarabia, also known as Kalarash.⁵

The report summarized by Shechtman according to which “Jews from Germany and Bulgaria, as well as 700 Polish Jews, were reported among the deportees in Mogilev” derives, according the historian’s notes, from a report published in the 23 July 1943 issue of the JTA Bulletin. Since Schechtman’s article is dealing with Transnistria it is almost certain that the Mogilev mentioned is the city of Mogilev-Podolski (Mohyliv-Podilsky) in the Vinnitsa District of Ukraine, rather than the city of Mogilev in eastern Belarus. Mogilev-Podolski was occupied by German forces on 19 July 1941 but was later annexed by Romania as part of Transnistria. In December 1941 there lived 3700 local Jews in the city’s ghetto together with 15 000 Jews who had been deported there from Bessarabia and Bukovina. In June 1942 there was an outbreak of typhoid in the ghetto which prompted the transferral of Jews to ghettos in other cities.⁶

As explained in Section 2.4.3. no Jewish transports departed from Bulgaria proper. However, from the Bulgarian-annexed regions of Macedonia and Thrace a total of 11 343 Jews were deported during the period March-April 1943. It is likely that the reported “Bulgarian” Jews reached Mogilev-Podolski via either Sobibór or Treblinka at the end of March 1943. It is not impossible that the German (as well as the Polish) Jews reached the city during the same period and the same route. According to an exterminationist website two transports with German Jews were sent to Sobibór during the first half of 1943: one containing “hundreds” departing on 31 March and another with 938 deportees departing from Berlin on 21 April.⁷ However, the leading exterminationist expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis, knows nothing of these transports.⁸ Witnesses state that one or two transports with German Jews reached Treblinka during Franz Stangl’s time as commandant of that camp, most likely in late autumn 1942 or the first half of 1943.⁹

To this section could be added a diary entry penned by the Warsaw Jew Abraham Lewin on 10 May 1942:

“Today this same refugee [unnamed Jew from Aleksandrów Kujawski] told me that the Nieszawa Jews and all other Jews left there were believed to have been deported to Romania. This rumour is most probably close to the truth, as another Jew happened to remark to me that reports had arrived from Bessarabia from Lublin Jews who had been transported there by the Germans.”¹⁰

The Jews of Nieszawa had been deported to the Lublin District in 1939-1940.¹¹ It is likely that they were among the Jews evacuated from Lublin and surrounding towns to Bełżec between 17 March and 14 April 1942.¹²

Section 3.1.4. “New York Times”

Thomas Dalton has kindly provided the author of this article with five further relevant quotes from the New York Times:

Already on 28 October 1941 the daily noted that Jews were “sent to the General Government, chiefly to Litzmannstadt, although some also are being banished to Riga, occupied capital of Latvia, and Minsk, in occupied Russia”. This is of course in perfect accordance with mainstream historiography. During the following months and years, however, the reports came to diverge from it.

In the issue from 26 July 1942 (under the headline “Vichy and Berlin at odds on aliens”) we read: “the Netherlands Indies news agency reported that 60,000 Jews had been moved from Amsterdam since last Thursday in a mass deportation of Netherland ‘non-Aryans’ to Poland and German-occupied Russia.” The 60,000 figure most likely derives from the number of Jews sent to the collection camps within the Netherlands, since only some thousand Dutch Jews had actually been deported east by this point in time.

On 29 August 1942 (“$25,000 sent abroad to care for children”) Joseph Hyman, the executive vice chairman of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, was quoted as stating that “The recent deportation to Eastern Poland and occupied Russia of 12,000 Jews from Paris and other parts of occupied France has aroused terror in the hearts of the entire Jewish population.”

5 September 1942 (“Deportation of Jews near goal in Reich”): “Until recently only Jews under 60 years of age were deported. But now even older people are being sent to Poland or Eastern [sic] Russia. (…) It is practically impossible to get in touch with German Jews sent to different ghettos in Poland or occupied Russia.”

Finally, on 8 November 1943 (“Germans wipe out Jews of Austria”), it was reported that the remaining Austrian Jews were “taken in cattle cars or ancient unheated passenger coaches to the ghettos of eastern Poland, Latvia, or occupied Russia. Reports suggest that many die on the way or after arrival.” By this point in time, there had been no direct transports of German, Austrian and Czech Jews to Latvia for over a year.

Section 3.1.5. “Notre Voix”

The Radio Moscow report from April 1944 concerning the liberation of 8,000 Paris Jews in the Ukraine by the Red Army finds support in two other sources:

On 15 August 1942 the Romanian-Jewish Bucarest physician Emil Dorian entered into his diary:

”There are persistent rumors about trains passing through the northern part of Moldavia, carrying Jews from occupied France sent by the Germans to the east. It is known that 20,000 Jews in occupied France have been recently deported from there, but no one could guess where they were sent. There are details: Sealed cars, dreadful thirst, no food.”¹³

The 20,000 Jews from France which Dorian is speaking about are alleged by the exterminationists to have been murdered in Auschwitz. Trains from the west passing through “the northern part of Moldavia” would most likely have had some city in the Ukraine as their destination.

One and a half months prior to Dorian’s diary entry, on 29 June 1942, the papal ambassador in France, Valerio Valeri,wrote from Vichy to Cardinal Luigi Malone:

“Towards the 20th of this month the occupational administrations, using the French police, have arrested some 12,000 Jews. [...] The majority of them are non-Aryans of foreign origin, primarily Poles, Czechs etc., who are destined to be deported to the Ukraine.”¹⁴

To summarize:

1) On 29 June 1942 a top member of the Catholic church informed a fellow church leader that the Jews recently arrested in Paris were “destined to be deported to the Ukraine.”

2) On 15 August 1942 Emil Dorian wrote of “persistent rumors” according to which 20,000 Jews from occupied France were passing through northern Moldavia.

3) On 29 August 1942 a leader of the Joint Distribution Committee stated that 12,000 French Jews had been deported to “Eastern Poland and occupied Russia” (see addenda to Section 3.1.4. above).

4) In April 1944 Radio Moscow reported that 8,000 Paris Jews (Paris was located in the occupied part of France) had been liberated by advancing Soviet troups in the Ukraine.

Could this really be just coincidence?

By the end April 1944 the Red Army had already crossed the Dnepr River,¹⁵ which means that the liberated Paris Jews had likely been held prisoners somewhere in the western part of the Ukraine. A possible train route from Auschwitz to the Ukraine via “the nothern part of Moldavia” could have been Auschwitz-Cracow-Przemysl-Lvóv-Czernowitz-Shmerinka-Vinnitsa-Kasatin-Fastow-Kiev.¹⁶ Czernowitz, in Romanian Cernăuti, is the capital of the Bukovina region which was part of the historical principality of Moldavia.¹⁷

Edit [25 September 2010]:  While it’s correct that close to 20,000 Jews had been deported from France up to 15 August 1942, as Dorian wrote in his diary, most of the deportees during this period were registered in Auschwitz. Up until the same date, a total of 4,940 Jews deported from France had been “gassed” i.e. transited.

During 1942-1943 a total of 32,631 Jews deported from France were “gassed” at Auschwitz and Sobibór.

(Cf. Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported From France 1942-1944, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1987, p. xxvi; smaller corrections after J. Schelvis, Sobibor. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, Oxford/New York 2007, pp. 217-218).

Section 3.3.3. “Hersh Smolar”

In another book on his involvement in the Minsk ghetto underground, originally published in 1946, Hersh Smolar writes with regards to the first half of 1943:

“News leaked out that large parties of Jews from Warsaw, Paris and Prague were brought to the vicinity of Minsk and Trostenitz where they were annihilated.”¹⁸

Between 18 and 22 January 1943 some 6,000 Warsaw Jews were sent to be “gassed” at Treblinka.¹⁹ Also, between 4 and 25 March 1943, some 3,500 French Jews were sent from the collection camp Drancy outside Paris to the “gas chambers” of Sobibór.²⁰ A further thirteen transports with 13,569 French Jews were sent to Auschwitz during 1943.²¹

Section 3.3.4. “Heinz Rosenberg”

Where did the 23 000 arrivals in February-March 1942 come from, and how did they reach Minsk? Where they German Jews, or of another nationality? As we have seen Rosenberg knew from the labels on the trunks where the deportees came from, but apparently forgets to tell his readers about it.

The preserved documents does not seem to allow for “unknown” transports of German Jews to Belarus during the period in question; at least not of the magnitude spoken of here. Could the unknown deportees mentioned by Rosenberg have reached Minsk via a transit camp? During February-March 1942 three of the “extermination camps” were in operation: Chełmno, Bełżec and Auschwitz. Bełżec was opened on 17 March, so it seems unlikely that more than a smaller portion of the 23 000 Jews could have been transited via this camp to Minsk. In Auschwitz the first regular (as opposed to experimental) mass gassing is supposed to have taken place in January or February, but this is portrayed as a chronologically rather isolated event, and judging by the diary entry of Herman Kruk from 30 January 1942, the Jews from this first “gassing” were transported via Vilna to the Eastern Front (cf. Section 3.3.1.). There remains thus Chełmno as the likely alternative. As we have seen in Section 3.3.1., many of the Jews evacuated from the Łódź Ghetto to the “extermination camp” Chełmno during the first months of 1942 continued on to Lithuania. Considering that a total of (7025 + 24 687 =) 31,712 Jews were sent from Łódź to Chełmno during February and March, it is not at all impossible, however, that 23,000 of these were instead transported to Belarus via the railway line Poznań-Warsaw-Minsk. That Jews from Łódź were deportered to Minsk is also confirmed by an “Address of the citizens of Minsk to Stalin” published in Pravda in August 1944, which is found quoted in a 1951 study by the Jewish scholar Solomon M. Schwarz:

“The German fascist invaders had driven 50,000 people from Minsk and the surrounding districts into the so-called ghetto, in addition, over 40,000 Jews had been brought to the Minsk ghetto from Hamburg, Warsaw and Lodz.”²²

The mention here of Warsaw indicates that Minsk later also served as the destination for transports of Polish Jews via Treblinka, something which in turn is confirmed by the statements of H. Smolar (cf. Section 3.3.3.).

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.

The memorial center project, estimated to cost some 6 million euros ($8 million), is currently in its first planning stages. Decisions about an international competition for planning the building and decisions on budget allocation will be made in a joint meeting next month in Warsaw, in which all participating countries will be present. The center is due to be completed by October 2013, the 70th anniversary of the prisoner’s uprising at the camp.

‘We see this as a sacred joint obligation to remember the past and the victims,’ said Konrat during the meeting.

‘I welcome Polish cooperation and the importance the minister gives to remembering the Holocaust,” the director-general of the Ministry of Information said. “The establishment of a center at the death camp in which some 250,000 Jews were killed is an important part in education… and a part of the struggle against all those who would deny it happened.’”^[1]

The above news notice is a sure sign that the guardians of the “Holocaust” feel a growing desperation confronted with the mass of revisionist criticism of the gas chamber mythos, and that they therefore are resorting to certain strategies in order to prevent further research at the former sites of the “pure extermination camps” of Belzec, Sobibór och Treblinka (together known as the Reinhardt camps), research which could only cause further damage to the orthodox historiography. In the case of Treblinka most of the former camp site was covered with slabs of concrete and large stones already in the 1960s.^[2] In Belzec, where an archeological survey was carried out in the late 1990s (with devastating results for the official historical picture of this “death camp” ^[3]) the whole of the former camp site was covered in the early 2000s with an enormous concrete “monument”.^[4] It would not exactly surprise if Sobibór is now headed for a similar fate.

The YNet item contain two passages of particular note. First, the Israeli minister Ronen Plot is quoted as speaking of 250,000 Sobibór victims. This figure may well be used still in new encyclopedias and the like, but it has in fact been untenable all since the discovery of the so-called Höfle document in 2000. This document shows that 101,370 Jews were deported to Sobibór up until the end of 1942.^[5] The camp was in use until October 1943, but all sources agree that the number of Jews deported to Sobibór during 1943 was much smaller than that of 1942. Thus the leading exterminationist expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis, states the victim figure as 170,000.^[6]

Secondly we read in the article that an “international committee of experts” has carried out a survey at the former camp site in order to “determine the precise location of the gas chambers”. In fact there have been carried not one but two ^[7] archeological surveys with this purpose: the first one in 2000-2001 headed by the Polish archeology professor Andrzej Kola (who also led the abovementioned survey at Belzec) and a second one in 2007-2008 conducted by the Israeli-Polish trio Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek.

Andrzej Kola surveyed the whole of “Lager III” – the fenced-off section of the camp wherein the alleged gas chamber building supposedly was located and which covers less than 4 hectares – with probe drillings and ssubsequently carried out archeological diggings at five identified building remains. Of these “Object E” was identified in the south-western corner of Lager III, exactly where the gas chamber building was located according to maps drawn by the eyewitnesses. The problem with this discovery is that “Object E” in no way corresponds with the descriptions of said building. The six gas chambers in the camp were allegedly arranged three and three alongside a central corridor inside a brick or concrete building measuring approximately 10 x 13-18 meter. “Object E” on the other hand consist of two barracks built completely out of wood, the smaller one measuring 14 x 4 m, the larger one no less than 60-80 x 6 m! Remarkably enough not a single eyewitness has spoken of this enormous wooden barrack, which dimensions as well as construction material makes it impossible to identify with the alleged gas chamber building (the same naturally goes for the smaller barrack). Also in “Object E” was discovered numerous remains of clothing and toilet articles, such as hairclips, perfume bottles, belts etc. The supposed gas chamber victims on the other hand are alleged to have entered the chambers of death already naked. These finds made Kola dismiss in his excavation report the hypothesis that “Object E” could have served as the gas chamber building. Instead he proposed the hypothesis – which has no support in eyewitness testimony – that the larger barrack served as a magazine for the confiscated clothing and belongings of the gas chamber victims.^[8]

None of the four other building remains identified by Kola in the former Lager III were even close to fit the description of the searched-for gas chamber building. Another remarkable find, however, was “Object A”, a small building with a cellar in which were found remains from an oven and a coal storage. Kola somewhat halfheartedly interpret this as the remains of a blacksmith’s workshop, despite the fact that there already existed a blacksmith in another part of the camp, and a small camp such as Sobibór hardly would need two blacksmiths. Besides, what would the use be of a blacksmith’s workshop in a camp section supposedly devoted only to the gassing, burial and cremation of the alleged victims?^[9] In our study of Sobibór I, Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno have interpreted “Object A” as an installation in which clothing and other items were deloused using heated air or steam (produced by the oven), and “Object E” as a delousing barrack in which the Jews deported to the camp were showered and deloused before being sent further east to the German-occupied part of the Soviet Union.^[10]

The archeological survey carried out at Sobibór 2007-2008 by the trio Gilead-Haimi-Mazurek has only been published in extreme brevity in an article published in the American journal Present Pasts in early 2009.^[11] In this article we read that the three archeologists “acting on the assumption” that they “knew roughly where the gas chamber was located (…) decided to dig first in the area bordering the west of Kola’s Building E”. In this area, however, one found no building remains whatsoever.^[12] Later, in summer 2008 the team was reinforced by American geophysicists equipped with among other things ground-penetrating radar. Despite the aid of advanced technology and the fact that Lager III had already been mapped out by Kola, one failed with miserably with detecting any remains of the fabled gas chambers, and in the 2009 article one had to grudgingly admit that “It is obvious that the location of the gas chambers is a complex issue that has to be solved, an important objective for future archaeological research at Sobibór.”^[13]

In other word: the “international committee of experts” spoken about in the YNet news notice has not found any trace of the alleged homicidal gas chambers of Sobibór, despite two surveys and a very limited area to search through. The explanation for this is of course simple: the alleged gas chambers never existed in the first place, and could therefore not leave any remains.

In our study, Mattogno, Graf and myself have presented a wide assortment of evidence which unequivocally shows that Sobibór in fact was a transit camp – which it was also designated as in classified internal communication between the SS leader Heinrich Himmler and the SS camp administrator Oswald Pohl from the summer of 1943 ^[14] – in which deported Jews were deloused and then sent on eastwards, for example to Lithuania.^[15] In the total absence of evidence supporting the Sobibór mass gassing allegations, the guardians of the extermination camp legend such as Avner Shalev and Andrzej Konrat have no other option than to resort to obfuscation of facts and prevention of further research, all disguised as “commemoration”.

^[1] “Sobibor death camp memorial center planned”, online: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3933561,00.html
^[2] http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/gallery/TREBLINK.htm
^[3] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, pp. 71-96; C. Mattogno, “Belzec or the Holocaust Controversy of Roberto Muehlenkamp”, online: http://www.codoh.com/gcgv/gcgvhcrm.html
^[4] http://www.deathcamps.org/belzec/buildingsite.html
^[5] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington DC 2010, p. 22, 46-47.
^[6] Ibid., pp. 49-50.
^[7] A travel journal written by “Holocaust” historian Martin Gilbert reveals that another excavation was carried out in the former Lager III already in 1996, but apparently the results of this excavation have never been published; cf. ibid., p. 109, note 298.
^[8] Ibid., pp. 157-162.
^[9] Ibid., pp. 153-155.
^[10] Ibid., pp. 286-287.
^[11] I. Gilead, Y. Haimi, W. Mazurek, “Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres,” Present Pasts, vol. 1, 2009.
^[12] Ibid., p. 27
^[13] Ibid., p. 33f.
^[14] Nuremberg document NO-482.
^[15] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., cf. especially chapter 9 and 10.

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):

“Just about four weeks before I went on my transport, there was one transport before mine and a friend of mine named Helmut went on that transport. That transport wound up in Treblinka. In a place near Treblinka, there was also a contingent of Germans working, one of whom we had known. Helmut wrote a letter and gave it to this man and said: ‘Send it to my Ernst.’ I got this letter. I never knew who sent it or how they got it out. He told me in this letter that he was near Treblinka and ‘hier ist ein Lager, wo die Menschen chemisch behandelt werden.’ [here is a camp were the people are being treated with chemicals.] It is amazing that even at that time he wouldn’t say that they were gassed. Isn’t that amazing? I was thinking, ‘what the heck does he mean?’ I guess he eventually was gassed. He certainly didn’t survive.”

What is especially striking about the letter’s reported content is the wording “chemisch behandelt” (“chemically treated”). According to official historiography, the alleged mass killings at Treblinka were carried out using engine exhaust gas. Obviously no ordinary person would connect exhaust gas with chemicals. The early war-time and post-war claims about killings with steam and vacuum on the other hand are impossible to connect with the concept of “chemical treatment”. From Levin’s statement it is clear that his friend Helmut did not write that the deportees died from the “chemical treatment” (otherwise Levin would have easily drawn the conclusion that the phrase referred to mass killings using some chemical agent).

Since the reported message from the Breslau Jew Helmut is only fragmentary, it is as good as impossible to draw any conclusions from it. It is possible, though, that “chemisch behandelt” is a reference to a part of a delousing procedure. The Ostarbeiter Galina K., who worked in a transit camp near Hannover during the war, has testified that she and the other worker prisoners “smeared heads, armpits and genitalia [of the Ostarbeiter deportees] with a chemical solution” (Janet Anschutz, Irmtraud Heike, “Medizinische Versorgung von Zwangsarbeitern in Hannover: Forschung und Zeitzeugenberichte zum Gesundheitswesen”, in: Gunter Siedburger, Andreas Frewer, Zwangsarbeit und Gesundheitswesen im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Einsatz und Versorgung in Norddeutschland, Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, Zürich, New York 2006, p. 52).

The statement that Helmut was sent to Treblinka, but then ended up “near Treblinka” can be taken to imply that he was transferred from the “death camp” to either the labor camp Treblinka I or to some labor detail in the Treblinka-Malkinia area. It should not be excluded though, that the letter could have been sent from Treblinka II. The phrase “near Treblinka” could possibly refer to the village of Treblinka, which was located some four kilometers to the north of the “death camp” Treblinka II, or to the railway station, which was located about 1 km to the north of it. The phrasing “hier ist ein Lager” (here is a camp), while not unequivocal, also fit this interpretation. What speaks against such an interpretation is the claim that Helmut gave the letter to a German working “near Treblinka”, a claim which, however, Levin appears to contradict himself (“I never knew who sent it or how they got it out”).

That at least some of the inmates in the Aktion Reinhardt “pure extermination camps” were able to send letters to the outside world has been revealed by Jules Schelvis. In his study Sobibor. A History of a Nazi Death Camp (Berg Publishing, Oxford 2007), Schelvis briefly mentions (p. 139) Walter Poppert, a German Jew who was deported from Westerbork (a collection camp in the Netherlands) together with his wife on May 8, 1943. At Sobibór, Poppert was foreman of the Waldkommando (wood-cutting detail) a fact which he mentioned himself in a postcard dating from August 1943 (p. 112, 141). Orthodox historians often maintain that the Dutch Jews who arrived at Sobibór had to write postcards which were sent to their relatives in the Netherlands as part of the overall “deception”. However, this is supposed to have happened at their arrival, before the vast majority of them supposedly were led to the gas chambers. Poppert’s postcard on the other hand was sent 3 months after his arrival to the camp. In other words: the SS allowed an inmate in a top secret “extermination camp” to communicate with the outside world!

“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.
Until now, the big question about Bormann – “Hitler’s evil spirit – has not been his whereabouts, but whether he survived 1945.
It is accepted that Stangl would know the truth. As former commandant of the notorious Treblinka extermination camp in Poland, he had been third on the list of the most wanted Nazis. At the time of his arrest he was living and working in Sao Paulo, Brazil, an area in which a number of Bormann’s underlings settled after the war.
It now seems that Bormann has been moving about between three South American countries – Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. Stangl said Bormann has a heart disease, and at one time was in a monestary in Asuncion, Paraguay, where Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Doctor of Auschwitz” was called in to treat him.
Stangl, now awaiting trial, is likely to be interrogated for a long time yet. Only his questioners know how co-operative he is being. But there are indications that he is talking about prominent Nazis other than Bormann.”

The problem is, of course, that Bormann’s remains were found in Berlin in 1972 and positively identified as such by genetic tests in 1998. Thus all the claims of Bormann surviving the war and hiding in South America were nothing but tall tales and rumors. Stangl’s statements on Bormann to his West German interrogators clearly shows that he was willing to please the Bundesdeutsche justice with various outrageous claims.

“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.

The Treblinka experience of Israel Cymlich

Israel Cymlich was arrested for black market activity in the small town Falenica (some miles east of Warsaw) and sent to Treblinka on August 20, 1942 (p. 29). Cymlich writes that by “the second half of July” that year, the Jews in Warsaw still “had absolutely no clue as to what was going on, or about the destination of the transports. The Germans proved to be very cunning, by proclaiming that the deportees were leaving to work in the East” (p. 25). On the other hand, certain rumors were already circulating: “foreman Ickiewicz, on a visit to our apartment, told me that all the transports departed for Treblinka, where Jews were let out to some electrical fields and the burned” (p. 26). E. Ringelblum mentioned electricity as a murder method at Treblinka on October 15, 1942, and the same method was mentioned also in the Nuremberg document USSR-93 (Graf & Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, pp. 50-51, 61-62). Killing by electricity was generally attributed to Belzec during the war years.
When Cymlich’s transport reached the Treblinka station, it was divided. One part was sent to Treblinka II, while the other part, carrying our witness, continued on along the railway spur to Treblinka I. On the way, however, Cymlich caught a glimpse of the “extermination camp”:

“And there we were, passing through the Treblinka railroad station, through the woods, until, all of a sudden, we beheld a sight straight out of Dante’s Inferno. At first, I wasn’t sure whether it was real or a mirage: a huge mountain of clothes, naked people running all around it, throwing more clothes higher and higher, black smoke billowing from huge pits. (…) We barely had the time to make out a number of barracks, machine-guns mounted on the roofs, firing frequently. Then we saw only a fence of young pine trees, and smelled the terrible odor of burning human bodies.” (p. 31)

No other eyewitness claims that bodies were burned at Treblinka II as early as August 1942. Abraham Kszepicki, who was deported to Treblinka II on August 25 and managed to escape 18 days later, speaks of mass burials but mention nothing of cremations (cf. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka… p. 85). The witness Glazar claims that the burning of bodies began in November (R. Glazar, Trap with a green fence, p. 29), whereas Chil Rajchman dates the same event to December (C. Rajchman, Ich bin der letzte Jude, p. 113). Historians generally claim that cremations began in March 1943 (cf. Arad, p. 173).
The Treblinka I labor camp is, needless to say, portrayed by Cymlich as a living hell, with SS guards such as Untersturmführer Prefi, “a madman and a thug” who “carried out massacres single-handedly” with his machine-gun, and Unterscharführer Schwarz, who “derived sadistic satisfaction from tormenting, torturing and killing” inmates in the Malkinia subcamp with blunt instruments, with a daily quote of at least a dozen killed (pp. 34-35). On the other hand our witness survived a 3-week bout of typhus in a quarantine barrack together with “many other patients”, even if “every few days, patients would be taken from the barracks to the woods or to the death camp” (pp. 40-42).
At the time of Cymlich’s arrival, 400 Jews and about 200 Poles were held in the camp; by November 1942 there were 1,200 Jewish and some 100 Polish detainees (p. 36). The Poles stayed in the camp two or three months, and most of them had a term of release. Some Poles “could leave the camp grounds” and some were brought parcels from their families. “Meeting with Poles and talking to them were not allowed; to this end, the latrine was the meeting place of choice” (p. 37). According to Cymlich, groups of Jews from the extermination camp were regularly sent to Treblinka I to replenish its labor force (p. 40). Among the detainees in the labor camp was also a group of German and Czech Jews who had participated in the construction of Treblinka II:

“They had worked for a long time at constructing the other camp, without a clue as to what they were building. The contingent that used to go to work there was called the ‘T-Group,’ pronounced Tej. The prisoners explained the meaning of ‘T’ by suggesting it meant Treblinka or technical group. They didn’t know that the name T-Group was for the death camp under construction: the so-called T-Halle, or, to be more exact, Tothalle.” (p. 32).

How Cymlich knew about this bizarre name, which does not appear in any other witness testimony, is never made clear. Jan Sulkowski, a Polish prisoner from the labor camp who had taken part in the construction of the “death camp” testified in 1948:

“I was told by the SS-men that we were building a bath-house and it was after a considerable time that I realized that we were constructing gas-chambers” (Arad, p. 40).

Cymlich came to learn the following about the killing installations from other labor camp inmates:

“All we knew was that corpses were completely burned; nothing specific, however, was known about the methods of mass killing. People said that the newly arrived victims were told to undress under the pretext of [that they were] going to take a bath, which actually was a barracks (sic) with an electrified floor. Some claimed that this barracks was in fact a gas chamber. After the killing, the floor slid out and the corpses were thrown into pits, which doubled as furnaces” (pp. 38-39).

This description has caused Silberklang to insert an explanatory note:
“It is noteworthy that even when he was in the camp and was able to acquire much information about the death camp, Israel Cymlich and others had mistaken notions about the method of murder. Only ‘some’ believed that the Jews were being killed in a gas chamber. And, of course, there was no sliding floor in these chambers” (p. 39, note 17).
But if there were inmates in the labor camp who themselves had participated in the construction of the “gas chambers,” how come that such ridiculous notions, completely contradicting the established “truth”, were spread among them?
Moreover, if the Germans really were constructing installations for mass murder and wanted to keep those a secret, why would they involve Polish labor camp inmates, who according to Cymlich usually were released after two or three months (p. 37), or for that matter Jews from Treblinka I, who possibly could have passed on their knowledge to Polish detainees? One may recall in this context that the alleged first gas chambers at Belzec were constructed by a team of 20 local Poles (cf. Mattogno, Belzec…, p. 43).
It is further noteworthy that the tale of the electrical floor which, once the killing was done, opened to a furnace pit, is strongly reminiscent of propaganda spread about Belzec (Mattogno, Belzec…, pp. 11-22). The collapsible gas chamber floor also appears in the testimonies of several Sobibor witnesses (cf. M. Novitch, Sobibor. Martyrdom and Revolt, p. 147, Ehrenburg & Grossman, The Black Book, p. 439; Yuri Suhl (ed.), They fought back…, p. 20). There is even an indication that the collapsible floor tale was once applied to Auschwitz (C. Edvardson, Bränt barn söker sig till elden, Stockholm 1984, p. 57).
Later during his stay in the labor camp Cymlich also got into contact with inmates from the death camp, who supposedly told him further details about the killings. A young Jew told him “that there was a large barrack, partitioned into several chambers, to which pumps were hooked that sucked the air out. After the victims were locked inside, the pumps started working and the victims suffocated. Whoever survived for several minutes was finished off with a bullet” (p. 45). Again Silberklang adds an explanatory note: “At Treblinka, of course, the gas was pumped in, and [it was] not the air that was pumped out. After the gassing was completed, the gas chamber was ventilated. Apparently Cymlich’s contact misunderstood the purpose of the engines that stood outside the gas chamber. Moreover, the effect of the gas entering the room may have been as though the air had been pumped out” (p. 45, note 18). I will return to the issue of the “vacuum chambers” later in this review.
Israel Cymlich escaped from the labor camp in April 1943, just before he was to be transferred to the “death camp.” He returned to Falenica, where he supposedly finished writing his memoirs on June 10 the same year. Treblinka II was liquidated three months later, yet Cymlich is able to deliver a “correct” prophecy about the end of the alleged death camp:

“Before war’s end, undoubtedly everything would be leveled, plowed over, trees would be planted over the graves of the hundreds of thousands of people incinerated there. Only the resident of the neighboring villages would be able to point out the empty area of the greatest execution site in the history of the world.” (p. 46)

Cymlich, who admits that he has “described Treblinka very briefly and not very accurately” (p. 52), concludes that “the blame belonged to the entire German people, who not only knew about the crime, but willingly helped to carry it out. The pleasure of tormenting the innocent was in the blood of every German” (p. 45). His personal judgment of an entire people is more than a little harsh: “This organized crime, which had been planned down to the last detail, must be avenged in blood. The German people must be taught a ‘lesson’ that would burn out its thuggish nature for centuries to come.” (p. 62)
After the war Cymlich moved to Uruguay, where he was still alive in 2005.

Oskar Strawczynski’s ten months in Treblinka

Oskar Strawczynski was born in Lodz in 1906. On October 5, 1942, he was sent to Treblinka together with his family from the Czestochowa ghetto. On August 2, 1943 he participated in the uprising and mass escape from the alleged death camp together with his brother Zygmunt. After the war he moved to Canada. In 1964 he testified at the Düsseldorf Treblinka trial. Strawczynski died in Montreal in 1966.
Regarding the origin of the published account, members of the Strawczynski family informs us that it was written in Yiddish “during the spring and summer of 1944,” when the witness joined a unit of Jewish partisans from the ZOB (Jewish Combat Organization). The head of the unit, a certain Gabrysz Fryszdorf, “wanted to ensure that an eyewitness account of the events at Treblinka was preserved for history” and provided our witness with paper. The original manuscript was supposedly lost, but a copy made by Fryszdorf’s wife was deposited in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York (pp. 188-189). When exactly this happened is not made clear, but Strawczynski’s sister reportedly translated the YIVO copy into English in 1981. We are further informed that Strawczynski after the end of the war presented either the original manuscript or another copy of it to the Jewish community organization in Lodz, which refused to publish it “because of the frankness with which the Jews collaboration in Treblinka was depicted” (p. 124).
Besides the fact that, similar to Cymlich, the beginning of cremations at the camp is dated much earlier than by the official version (our witness speaks on p. 130 of feeling the “smell of charred flesh” as he arrives in early October), and the claim that the Treblinka victims numbered in the “millions” (p. 131), the most remarkable aspect of his tale is indeed his portrayal of the relation between camp staff and detainees. One should recall here that Treblinka allegedly was a “pure extermination camp” where the few who were selected for work in the camp could be sure that they, too, sooner or later would be killed. The staff in turn consisted of trained killers who allegedly tortured and murdered inmates for the slightest transgression of camp rules, besides carrying out a mass murder of thousands of Jewish deportees on a daily basis. Nonetheless our witness wants us to believe that fraternizing went on between the SS and the detainees, like some “Stockholm syndrome” in extremis, and that inmates even took initiatives to “deceive” arriving Jews that they had come to a transit camp. On pp. 140-141 we are told of a transport of “bold and militant” Jews from Bialystok or Grodno, who at their arrival to the camp in December 1942 asked the Jewish work commando (the “Reds”) at the reception square:

“’’You are Jews like us. Is this Treblinka? Are we going to our death? We are ready. We will free us all.’ Instead of telling them the truth, the ‘Reds’ told them that this was just a transit camp, that tomorrow they would be transported to other camps for labor. With great difficulty, the ‘Reds’ convinced them to undress.”

It is worthy of note that Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad has consciously distorted this passage from Strawczynski’s account. In his summary of it (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka…, p. 254) Arad writes:

“When the people from the transport disembarked, they had no idea where they were. They asked the Jewish prisoners if they were in Treblinka, but their questions were left unanswered.”

Yet according to Strawczynski, the prisoners had told the deportees that they were in a transit camp!

Needless to say, the ‘Reds’ are portrayed as scum from the Warsaw underworld, and their kapo Jurek as someone who raped young girls bound for the gas chambers (p. 140). On a side note, we are informed in this chapter that some Jews from Czestochowa had been issued special papers exempting them from resettlement by the ghetto commandant Degenhart (pp. 142-143).
The female detainees are, with only five exceptions, described as tramps who “went to parties, got drunk, and enjoyed themselves to the utmost”. Supposedly, they slept around with Jewish kapos as well as Ukrainian guards and SS, and never received physical punishments (p. 154).
The members of the Jewish “aristocracy” in Treblinka were so well seen to that, in case of illness, they were not taken to the “Lazarett” to be shot, but instead, if they died, “a funeral was arranged according to Jewish tradition” (p. 162).
The security at the camp is described as being so lax that, up until at least November 1942, “about 30-40 people escaped daily” (pp. 145-146)! In the end, however, the SS grew anxious “that the secret of the ‘resettled’ Jews” would become known to the outside world. (p. 146). We are told that the Germans “been spreading rumors that the ‘resettled’ Jews were being sent to the Ukraine for farm work” and that there even was “a sign in Treblinka to this effect”. The SS even bothered to send “an ‘important personage’ from the central office in Lublin” (perhaps Hermann Höfle?) to Treblinka just to hold a speech to the detainees about the supposedly fake resettlement (pp. 146-147).
In the spring of 1943, at the same time as hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses were allegedly turned into ashes in the death camp proper (also known as Camp 2), the SS set out to “beautify” the camp and introduce entertainment and pastimes for themselves as well as the inmates. Responsible for most of this was SS Kurt “Lalka” Franz, who is generally described by eyewitnesses as the worst sadist in the camp. Franz saw to that a boxing ring was set up:

“A boxing craze spread through Treblinka. In the free evening hours, you could spot groups of people surrounding two fools sporting swollen noses and black eyes” (p. 156)

Also, “a show would be held almost every second Saturday: concerts, boxing, athletic competitions” (p. 156). Responsible for the music was usually the Arthur Gold jazz orchestra, for which “Lalka” had special costumes made (white jackets with blue collars and lapels). The orchestra performed behind elegant, custom-made music stands. “You could not ask for anything better in the finest resort” (pp. 155-156). Israel Cymlich also mentions this orchestra:

“The Jews set out for work in the morning singing, and they sang upon return. Especially in the evenings, after the end of the working day, the Jews marched as if on parade, singing to the sounds of an excellent jazz orchestra, and sometimes to the sounds of a violin or an accordion. One could only imagine what a passing stranger might have thought when hearing the song of a thousand sated, and also usually slightly drunk, workers.” (p. 46)

The Germans liked the Jewish jazz musician so much that they threw a big party to celebrate this 40th birthday:

“The Treblinka bakery supplied pastries; the German warehouse supplied drinks and sweets. Gold arranged a special program for the occasion. The hall was beautifully decorated and the orchestra was in gala attire. Special invitations were issued to all the Germans and the Jewish camp aristocracy. Toasts were drunk to the German victory. Gold reached his peak with his oration in which he praised the Germans for their benevolence, and declared that their handling of the Jews was understandable and in the interests of the German people. I have no idea what the Germans could have thought of that speech” (p. 157).

No wonder that the Jewish organization in Lodz refused to publish this account!
During the period of beautification several new camp “streets” and buildings were constructed:
“New streets and avenues are paved with stone and given various names, e.g., Kurt Seidl Strasse, named after the chief of the ‘street-builders’ brigade; and Siedlerstrasse [Settlers' Street!], leading toward Camp 2″ (p. 165).
Between the two German barracks a small brick building containing a bathhouse for the Germans “with a tower for the waterworks” was set up, together with an armory and the well-known Treblinka “Zoo” (p. 166, 174). Strawczynski further claims that the following odd contraption was installed in the camp’s administrative office:

“Berl Kot also constructed a special iron cupboard. Inside it were some metal shelves like a grating. On a special shelf, there was a little bottle of gasoline and some matches, and underneath was a large glass bottle containing several liters of gasoline. Over it hung a weight tied to a rope, which was fastened outside the cupboard. (…) The secret documents of Treblinka were kept on the remaining shelves. A pipe from the cupboard went through the roof as though from a stove. It served the following purpose: In case of a sudden, unexpected attack, all those inconvenient documents could be burned instantly and completely. In such an event, the contents of the small bottle would be spilled and ignited; the doors of the cupboard hermetically sealed; and the rope loosened, causing the weight to fall and break the large bottle. The gasoline would then catch fire and the documents would be burned.” (pp. 166-167)

This sure sounds like a risky security measure!
According to Strawczynski, the detainees in Camp 1 “were strictly forbidden to enter Camp 2″ (p. 170). Our witness, however, received descriptions of the “Totenlager” from two Jews who had worked there, Herszel Jablkowski, who had been “employed in building the ‘bath’”, and Szymon Goldberg, “who worked in Camp 2 for four months” and who met with Strawczynski in the Polish forests 10 months after the mass escape, at the time the account was reportedly written (p. 171). The description of the gas chambers presented by Strawczynski reads as follows:

“It was a large, concrete building standing on a cement platform. On its roof, visible from a distance, was a wooden Star of David. Running through the middle of the building was a corridor. The entrance was covered with a red curtain. Off the corridor were doors leading to small cubicles into which the arrivals from the transport were introduced. Outside, over the platform were large openings covered by panels hinged at the top and fastened with steel bands. Inside the cubicles, smooth tiles covered the slightly slanted floors and halfway up the walls. On the ceiling were mounted a few shower-heads There was also a small window in the middle of the ceiling [of each cubicle]. The doors are hermetically sealed, and the motors start to work. The air from inside is sucked out, and fumes from burnt gasoline is forced in. The cries from inside can be heard for about 10 minutes and then it becomes silent. The entire process, from the arrival at the camp to the oven, lasts only about half an hour. A German controls the progress of the ‘work’ through the little windows in the ceiling. When he is sure that everyone inside is dead, he opens the side panels, and the corpses fall out onto the cement platform. And elderly Jew from Czestochowa, known as ‘the dentist,’ checks the bodies for gold or metal teeth, which he pulls out. The bodies are then piled onto stretchers and carried to the oven, where they are flung into the fire and burned. The blood that has collected in the cubicles streams out into specially dug ditches. The ‘bath’ contained 10 cubicles, four big ones and six smaller ones” (pp. 169-170)

The notion that the air was sucked out of the hermetically sealed chambers by pumps before the exhaust gas was led in does not make much sense. For one thing, the feasibility of the process is dubious, due to the issue of pressure. Moreover, if the air could really be sucked out of the chambers, why bother introducing the exhaust gas, since deprived of oxygen the victims would have suffocated in no time? Apparently aware of this oddity, Silberklang remarks (p. 170, note 19) that “the effect of pumping the poison exhaust into the gas chambers was to replace the air there”, suggesting that like Cymlich’s Treblinka II contact, Strawczynski’s informant had “misunderstood the purpose of the engines” and mistaken the supposed ventilation following the gassing with the sucking out of the air prior to the introduction of the poisonous fumes. How credible is this explanation? At the end of 1945, Strawczynski’s informant Szymon Goldberg testified:

“The Jews were poisoned in that the air was pumped out – there was a machine for pumping out the air – and gas of a vehicle were introduced. Ether was burned and this vapor introduced inside. Then there was also chlorine” (quoted in Mattogno & Graf, Treblinka…, p. 67).

Thus the informant who had worked for four months at the alleged killing installations not only alleged that the air was sucked out of the chambers, but also spoke of ether and chlorine as other poisons used in the killings – gases which goes completely unmentioned by established Treblinka historiography. Furthermore, vacuum as killing method is mentioned by two other witnesses from Camp 2, Abe Kon (alias Stanislaw Ko(h)n) and the aforementioned Chil Rajchman, alias Henryk Reichmann (ibid.). A most widespread “misunderstanding”!
There are three further oddities to be found in gas chamber description: 1) the notion that the pulling out of gold teeth was carried out by a single “dentist”; 2) the size of the chambers – witnesses and historians generally assert that all the chambers in the new building were of the same size; and 3) the claim that the progress of the gassing was checked through small windows in the ceilings of the chambers. This claim is found in Sobibor testimony (Novitch, p. 56, 147), but as for Treblinka, historiography has it that the observation windows were placed in the entrance doors to the chambers (cf. Arad, p. 120).

By Thomas Kues

“After we were finished with this party, another party came in, and there were about 140, 150 women. They were all already taken care of, and they told us to leave the gas chamber for a few minutes, about five minutes, when they put in the gas and choked them to death. (…) [We waited] outside the gas chamber and on the other side. Well, on this side the women went in and on the other side was a group of working people who took out the dead bodies – some of them were not exactly dead. They took them out, and in two minutes – in one minute – everything was clear. It was clear to take in the other party of women and do the same thing they did to the first one.” (Shoah, p. 106)

Thus within merely 6-7 minutes, the 140-150 people inside the chamber were not only gassed, but also dragged out of it, one and all. It hardly needs to be stated that this is utterly inconceivable. Such a scenario would only be possible, if the “victims” left the “gas chamber” on their own feet, still alive after having been showered or deloused.

While the statements made by Bomba in Shoah are enough to destroy the credibility of this witness, he made many other absurd and interesting claims that were never shown to the movie viewers. Of the long interview made by Lanzmann, only a smaller portion was included in the finished movie. Thanks to a fellow revisionist researcher, I have recently come by, however, a transcript of the full interview. This 73-page transcript is available online at the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In the present article I will scrutinize A. Bomba’s further statements on the “pure extermination camp” Treblinka.

Bomba’s Personal Background

Abraham Bomba was born in Germany in 1919, but at an early age his family moved to the Polish town of Czestochowa, where he worked in a barber shop and married in 1940. One of his brothers was deported to Treblinka together with his family on the first transport from Czestochowa on September 22, 1942. Bomba himself, with his wife, infant son, mother and a 12-year-old brother were sent to Treblinka with the second transport which left “the day before Sukoth” (Interview transcript, p. 18). In 1942 the Sukkot holiday fell on October 6, although Bomba mentions September rather than October (p. 20). The trip to Treblinka reportedly took 24 hours (p. 22). The date of October 5 is indicated by Arad (p. 393) as the last day of deportations from Czestochowa. In Treblinka, all of Bomba’s family except himself were supposedly gassed on arrival. Contrary to most Jewish Treblinka witnesses, he did not participate in the prisoner revolt and mass escape on August 2, 1943 but escaped with two other inmates after having spent three months working in the camp (p. 32).

Bomba’s much older brother was deported with his wife to Auschwitz from France in 1943. His sister survived the war and later lived in Paris. In 1949 Bomba migrated to Israel, but due to his wife’s severe illness he left for the United States in 1950 and stayed there for 28 years. During the Düsseldorf Treblinka trial of 1964-65, Bomba appeared as a witness for the prosecution (p. 71). On September 17, 1978 he and his family migrated to Israel once more. In Tel Aviv he continued working as a barber (one might think that his traumatic Treblinka experience would have made him change his profession, but this was apparently not the case).

“B[omba]. I like Israel and I worked very hard for Israel.

C.L[anzmann]. Yes?

B. Yes. In organisations, in the Histadrouth, and even before the war. I was an active member in the organisations.

C.L. You mean before the war, the Second World War?

B. Yes, before the Second World War. I was active in the Zionist organisations. C.L. And you were a Zionist?

B. Yes.” ( p. 2)

Histadrouth or Histadrut is a Jewish trade union in Israel, which Bomba supposedly joined after migrating there. The fact that Bomba already before the war was a dedicated Zionist provides a reason for his false accusations against the Germans: without the alleged gas chamber mass murder there would likely be no “very, very nice country of Israel” that is “very good especially for Jewish people” (p. 3).

Arrival at Treblinka

At the square in Treblinka where the deportees were received and divided into men and women, Bomba was separated from the other members of his family, who were taken through a “big door” and from there supposedly to the gas chambers to be killed. Abraham was picked out with 20 or 22 other men to tidy up the reception square before the arrival of the next transport:

“After the arrival of every transport it was almost the same thing. There was screaming and hollering from those places where they went in, especially the women, it was impossible to have your mind straight, because all the hollering was in your ears and in your mind. But, like I said, in one second or one minute, everything was quiet. Then they told us to make clean the whole place (…) That had to be done in minutes.” (p. 26)

Bomba describes the scenery of the reception camp as follows:

“There were no trees, there were barracks; one barrack on the left side where the people went in, and on the right side there was another barrack but we didn’t go into it. What we saw was a well, where they used to take water out to drink. So at that time there was a well, and some of the people from the transport had an idea what was going on, because you could also smell it a little bit, something was wrong with the smell, like burning meat or the smell of chalk or other things. It happened that people jumped into that well. It happened also in my transport.” (p. 25)

The Jews selected for work not only jumped into wells, but according to the witness they also committed suicide in droves. Their bodies from the suicides were taken to a large burning pit near the so-called “Lazarett” and burned there (p. 29). This caused the nauseating stench of burning bodies to pervade the air in the camp. Bomba notes that not only corpses, but also clothes and papers were burned at the same site (p. 34).

At first, Bomba was set to work as a member of the Sortierungskommando, which sorted the clothings and other belongings of the victims in a couple of barracks near the reception camp (p. 29). Four weeks after his arrival, however, he was picked out to work as a barber, and in turn selected a number of professional barbers whom he knew from Czestochowa (p. 54). The men, numbering 16 or 17 in total, were led along the pathway reportedly known as the “Road to Heaven” to the part of Treblinka called “Treblinka 2″ by Bomba and the “Upper Camp” or “Totenlager” by other eyewitnesses, where the alleged gas chambers were located:

“That was the first time that somebody working in Treblinka 1 came into Treblinka 2, where the gas chambers were, and walked out from the gas chamber alive and not be (sic) carried out as a dead man.” (p. 61).

According to Arad (p. 109) the hair cuttings in the Aktion Reinhardt camps began in September or October 1942, which is slightly earlier than implied by Bomba’s account.

The Gas Chambers

When Bomba and the other barbers were led to Camp 2 it was the first time they witnessed the gas chambers – or “gas chamber”. Only once during the interview does Bomba mention the plural form of the word, and he never explicitly states the number of chambers. At the time in question – late October or early November 1942 – the alleged first gas chamber building had supposedly been taken out of operation and replaced with a large concrete building containing either 10 or 6 chambers, each measuring 4 x 8 m, arranged five and five (or three or three) alongside a narrow corridor. The new building was inaugurated at the middle of October (Arad, pp. 119-120). At the same time, the old gassing building was converted into a tailor’s shop (!). This means that the dimensions of the gas chamber stated by the witness, 3.6 x 3.6 m, is in contradiction with established Treblinka chronology.

As already mentioned, Bomba claims that the female victims had their hair cut inside “the gas chamber”:

“They took us to the place – we had never been over there, no one from Treblinka where we were, at our place, ever went across that big door going in to what we knew already was the gas chamber. They took us over there and we cut the women’s hair. That was another thing that was horrible. Unbelievable. They took the women in, they undressed themselves and we were supposed to do a job. They didn’t know they were going into the gas chamber. They didn’t know they were in the gas chamber. They knew there was a little place called the barber’s shop where they would have their hair cut, afterwards they would have a shower and everything would be finished and they would be back to work.” (pp. 29-30)

Later in the interview Bomba describes the walk to the gas chamber area in more detail:

“B. (…) Going in they had put some benches, where the women could sit so they would not have the idea that this was their last way, the last time they were going to live or breath or know what was going on.

C.L. Can you describe how the gas chamber looked?

B. It looked like a simple room, closed from 2 sides with an opening on the other sides, like a door from this side and a door on the other side. But on these [other] 2 sides there was no door, nothing. At the ceiling there was like a shower head, to give the idea that the women going into the gas chamber were taking a bath – not that from the shower head poison gas or chankali(?) [read: cyankalium] or other things were going to come in.” (pp. 54-55)

Many of the Aktion Reinhardt eyewitnesses makes it clear that the SS camp staff made extraordinary efforts to trick the deportees into believing that they had arrived in a transit camp: propaganda posters were put up, “deceptive” speeches were held, soaps handed out &c. Bomba here makes an interesting contribution to the “historiographical” picture of the Treblinka transit camp “deception” by informing us that the Germans had provided benches for the female victims – whether they were inside the chamber or outside it, on the “Road to Heaven” is not really clear due to Bomba’s less than perfect English – in order to provide them with a false sense of comfort.

In fact, the whole notion of cutting the hair of the female victims makes little or no sense within the context of assembly line mass killings. As has been pointed out by the pseudonym DenierBud, the cutting of the hair of 1,000 women would result in approximately 100 kg of hair. We should recall here that the valuables (money, jewels, precious metals) confiscated from the Aktion Reinhardt deportees amounted to a total of 178,745,960.59 RM (Arad, p. 161). Does it really sound reasonable that the SS would have instituted a bottleneck – the hair cutting – into the mass killing procedure just in order to gain some 40 tons of hair (assuming 400,000 female deportees), that easily could have been procured from other sources? On top of this, Bomba has it that the SS found it a good idea to cut the hair inside the gas chambers. A bottleneck willfully placed in a bottleneck! On the other hand, hair cutting makes perfect sense as part of a delousing procedure.

Clearly smelling a rat, Lanzmann repeatedly asks his interviewee for how long a period the hair cutting was done inside the gas chamber, but Bomba misunderstands the question, believing that Lanzmann is asking how long it took to cut the hair. Finally Lanzmann asks for how many weeks he worked in the gas chamber, to which Bomba replies “about a week or ten days”. After that, the SS decided to have the hair cut in a separated part of the undressing barrack (p. 68); a claim consistent with established historiography (Arad, p. 109).

What Bomba has to say on the subject of the murder weapon is nothing short of astounding:

“C.L. When they were already inside the gas chamber and the room was closed and the gas was sent [in], did you hear anything?

B. It was not the sort of thing you ask to hear. It was not only that you heard it, but people from outside, the Polish people for kilometres around could hear the screaming and choking that was going on for a number of seconds, even 1 or 2 minutes, until everything was quiet.

C.L. It was so short? No more than 2 minutes?

B. No, that is as short as it was, because when in Treblinka they stopped giving in poion or other kinds of poison things to gas them, they had a pump pumping out the air from the chamber. Naturally, without air the women had to be choked and fall on each other to catch the breath from each other. But it was impossible, and in a very short time, maximum 2 minutes, they were all quiet until the other door opened up; because the Nazi was looking through a little hole to see what was going on, whether they were still alive or dead, to give the order to take them out of the gas chamber.

C.L. But I thought the Jews were killed with carbon monoxide gas from a motor.

B. That happened at the beginning. After that they stopped it because it was expensive. It cost money and it was very hard to get through to them. At the last time they pumped out the air from the chamber.

C.L. You are sure of this?

B. I am pretty sure. And I know about it, I was there and I saw it. I was inside and not many people – maybe 2 or 3 of the people who worked in the second part of Treblinka are still alive. I was one of them, I know, I was there and I saw that.” (pp. 65-67)

Not only are the screams heard kilometers away or the 2 minutes required to kill the victims patently absurd (and the latter statement contradicted by numerous other witnesses), but here Bomba has the audacity to resurrect the bogus atrocity propaganda of the (technically less than feasible) Treblinka “vacuum chambers”, thirty years after this claim was thrown down the memory hole together with the “steam chambers” in favor of engine exhaust gas being used as the killing agent (cf. J. Graf, C. Mattogno, Treblinka…, pp. 47-76). It should not surprise that Lanzmann did not include this portion of the interview in the finished film.

Interestingly, Bomba’s story is blatantly contradicted by the only Treblinka eyewitness to take the stand at IMT Nuremberg, Samuel Rajzman. In his account “Uprising in Treblinka” presented before the American House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1945, Rajzman stated that the killing installation

“consisted of 10 cabins with room for 700 to 800 persons each. In these cabins there were even towels and rules posted. Once the people were inside, the cabins were hermetically sealed, and the air pumped out with machine (poison gas was used later). Thus the victims were suffocated to death. They remained in the cabins for 10 to 20 minutes; the large number of others waiting in line for the “bath” made it impossible for the Germans to leave them there any longer”

Thus according to Bomba each chamber held 140-50 people whereas Rajzman claims as many as 700 to 800 victims per chamber; engine exhaust fumes were initially used as the murder weapon but then replaced with vacuum, if we are to believe Bomba, but Rajzman has it the other way around – vacuum was replaced with “poison gas”; the killings took 1 to 2 minutes according to Bomba, but 10 to 20 minutes according to Rajzman. Two accounts, completely contradictory, equally ridiculous.

Mass Graves and Cremations

The Höfle telegram shows that up to the end of December 1942, a total of 713,555 Jews were deported to Treblinka. Orthodox historians claim, without a shred of evidence, that virtually everyone of them were killed with engine exhaust fumes immediately at arrival. But how did the SS manage to dispose of this vast amount of corpses? Bomba tells us:

“After they were gassed the spectacle had already started, and the people from the other places, the gas chamber, worked already taking out the people clamped one to another, because even after their death they clamped to one another to be close to one another, not to be apart from each other, in life time and also in death. That is how they took them out of the gas chamber and to the places where they put them for a while, they dug a big trench and put them there, but that was not the end. After that they dug them out and put them on top of each other, body by body, and burned them like an autodafé in the time of the inquisition in Spain. They burnt all those bodies on top of another.” (p. 52)

As we have already seen, Bomba arrived at Treblinka in early October 1942 and escaped from the camp three months later. Established historiography has it that the exhumation and cremation of corpses at Treblinka commenced in March 1943 (Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, p. 173). Aside from Bomba, there are only two witnesses who speak of earlier cremations: Samuel Rajzman and Richard Glazar (Graf & Mattogno, Treblinka…, p. 39, 142). The only eyewitness to have provided information on the dimensions of the Treblinka mass graves, Eliahu Rosenberg, spoke of graves each measuring 120 x 15 x 6 m. Given a 0.5 m thick top layer and a maximum density of 8 corpses per cubic meter, each grave could have contained at most 79,200 bodies, so that 9 such graves would have been needed to contain the 713,555 Jews that had been deported to Treblinka (and allegedly killed there) up until the time of Bomba’s escape (cf. Graf & Mattogno, Treblinka…, p. 138). Bomba, however, knows of only one “big trench”. It is further worthy of note that Bomba does not mention with a single word the fuel needed for the incineration pyres. One might think that the procurement of the firewood necessary – more than 100,000 tons in total (ibid., p. 150) – and the work involved with it would have caught his attention!

The Escape

Bomba’s story of his escape from the “death camp” begins reasonably: he and two other inmates hid beneath a pile of clothing in a warehouse, and then snuck out after nightfall. What supposedly happened next is, however, more difficult to lend credence to:

“B. (…) The only place to escape from Treblinka, the safest place, was to the Lazarett, because otherwise you had 4 or 5 different gates to go around, where it was very dangerous. There was barbed wire, and it was almost impossible to get through. Coming out from the barracks we didn’t see anybody, all we saw was a huge place for burning, burning clothes, paper and people. And we had to go through that place to get to the wire fence, where there was only one fence to go through.

C.L. You mean you went…

B. Through that fire too…

C.L. Through the ditch of the Lazarett?

B. Through the ditch. We wore some clothes on top so that we wouldn’t get burned, and we just went through.

C.L. You went into the ditch of the Lazarett?

B. Like a fire. We went through there. One of us in the third one (sic), when we came to the barbed wire fence, we put some clothes on top of it and went through that fence, one on top of the other. It just happened that Saturday night that the Ukrainians were all drunk, and nobody was in the watchtower. There was no-one around.” (pp. 32-33)

It is hard to refrain from pointing out that, with a little reconnaissance, Bomba and his pals could have sneaked out of the camp without having to wade through fire with some rags on the head for dubious protection. Not to mention the absurdity of the camp staff leaving a huge fire unattended! The whole scenario makes for a good Monty Pythonesque sketch, not for a testimony believable to people over the age of 5.

A look at a “map” of Treblinka further suggests that the escapees would just as easily have been able to penetrate the fences to the west of the “Lazarett”, and that they also could have circumpassed the burning pit by climbing the sand banks surrounding it.

After the miraculous escape from the death camp, Bomba and friends did not try to escape from German-occupied territory, but instead went from Zagrodiniki to Warsaw where they took a train to Czestochowa to find relatives still living there.

Bomba’s return to the Czestochowa ghetto

After having themselves smuggled into the Czestochowa ghetto, Bomba and his fellow escapees set out to inform the 5,000 Jews still remaining there of the “truth” about Treblinka. However, the Czestochowa Jews were not very willing to believe their story. Bomba recall their reactions:

“Something is wrong with all of you. Either you are out to get something here, or you want to do something. We don’t believe you. You must be crazy. The way you look, the way you behave, you must be crazy, because that is impossible.” (pp. 40-41)

Some women in the ghetto “could never believe” the stories of Bomba and went to see the ghetto commandant Degenhart:

“ B. (…) They went to him and told him, “We know that there are people from Treblinka who came over here, and they are making a panic and telling everyone that everybody is dead”

C.L. Jews went to Degenhart?

B. Yes, Jews went and told him. And do you know what he said? ‘they have run away from Treblinka, let them stay as long as they can.’” (p. 42)

Bomba then claims that the members of the Jewish Elder’s Council in Czestochowa fully well knew the “truth” about Treblinka, but did nothing to warn the others, as they sought to save themselves and their relatives by ingratiating themselves with the Germans. All were later killed however, either sent to Treblinka or shot a the local Jewish cemetery (p. 43). In spite of this supposedly treacherous behavior our witness maintains that

“The Jewish people – and I want you to know this – is a strong nation. No nationality would have survived if that had happened to them. Take the Polish people, the French people or any other people – they would break down like flies. But the Jewish people have a will, a will to live. I mean to live even in suffering.” (p. 44)

To summarize: the Jewish people possess an immense collective will to survive, but their leadership in Europe during the war consisted of cowards and traitors who assisted in having their fellow Jews deported to death camps and who sought to save their own skins by sucking up to an enemy who planned to exterminate each and every one of them!

Tales from Treblinka

No Holocaust story would be complete without a dose of insane, sadistic violence perpetrated by demonic SS men. Bomba relates:

“Like the guy Lalko [Kurt Franz] – his speciality was in taking out the nicest, healthiest men and without saying anything just going over and taking out his gun and killing them.” (p. 72)

On one occasion Bomba gets very sick and asks his foreman to be sent to the “Lazarett” and killed and thus be spared his pains. “He looked at me as if I was crazy. He asked me “How long have you been working here?”. I said “I’ve been working here for about 5 or 6 weeks already”. “5 or 6 weeks!” he said. “Go to the kitchen and tell the man to give you some whisky. When you’ve got some whisky you will feel better.”"(pp. 69-70)

Generally Treblinka was hell on earth, but sometimes the Nazis stopped their random butchering and baby killing for a moment and suddenly turned humane:

“B. (…) It happened in Treblinka that a woman coming in with a transport from a town near Warsaw – I don’t know how, but she knew what was going to happen. She took out a razor and cut the throat of one of the workers.

C.L. One of the Jewish workers?

B. One of the Jewish workers. One of them tried to rescue him, and she cut his throat with the razor. The other one – as a matter of fact he was the ‘capo’ of the barbers – she cut his throat too. He survived, but the other one, who was what I would call an ‘Over-capo’, died. The Germans took him to the hospital and tried to do everything they could to rescue him but they could not succeed. The only grave of a man dying in Treblinka was his, in which he was buried, a natural grave like any other human being’s all over the world.” (p. 63)

This singular honor was bestowed to the dead man “because he was like a hero for them – a Jewish hero for the Nazis” – “All the Germans went to the funeral, all the people working there in Treblinka had to stand at ‘Appel’ and they had to salute the body going through to be buried.” (p. 64). Naturally we will have to suppose that with the funeral ceremony finished, Kurt Franz and his companions in genocide resumed their diabolical mass murdering.

Conclusion

There is not much need to discuss in depth the reliability of Bomba as a “Holocaust” eyewitness. From the haircutting in a jam-packed gas chamber turned into a vacuum chamber, to the escape route through a burning pit – his story is a sad mess of contradictions and absurdities. One can only draw the conclusion that Bomba is either a slightly mentally deficient liar, or else delusional. Perhaps sensing his own lack of credibility, Bomba resorts to making vague references to other, supposedly overwhelming evidence:

“But not only witnesses, the Germans themselves have filmed all those places, they have photographed all those places which took in the people, where they were gassed and the corpses of the dead people were taken out, which they cannot deny. The Germans themselves know they are guilty of this thing that they did to our people” (p. 62).

If Lanzmann was striving to reach the truth about the Holocaust – which he most certainly wasn’t – he would have asked Bomba about those war-time photos and films of gas chambers, because no other person on Earth has laid eyes on such material! As for the eyewitness evidence provided by Bomba himself, it is all too obviously inadmissible. The fact that Lanzmann promotes Bomba’s tears as prime evidence for the alleged gas chamber mass murders at Treblinka, while cutting from the released documentary a number of statements which clearly reveals this witness as a brazen liar, speaks volumes about the nature of the Shoah propagandists.