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

On 30 June 2011 the following news item was published by PRNewswire:[1]

Sixty-six years after the notorious Nazi death camp at Auschwitz was liberated and the horrific crimes of Dr. Josef Mengele were first revealed, Alexander Historic Auctions of Stamford, Connecticut (an affiliate of Alexander Autographs, Inc., www.alexautographs.com) has obtained for auction all of the war criminal’s writings, including his autobiography describing his escape from Germany and life in South America, diaries, philosophical tracts, racial and political commentary, poetry, short stories, and travelogues. The archive is composed of over 3,300 pages of handwritten text, some illustrated, largely in bound journals, written while Mengele was in hiding in Paraguay and Brazil between 1960 and 1975.

The archive will be offered in Alexander’s July 21, 2011 auction of historic militaria and autographs.

[...].

The autobiographical material in this archive, about 25% of its content, is of such historical importance, it was quoted and paraphrased in the mid-1980′s by Bundt Magazine and by authors Gerald Posner and John Ware in their biography of Mengele. Bundt and Posner/Ware quoted excerpts very sparingly, leaving the vast majority of this material unpublished and but for Bundt and Posner/Ware, unviewed.

Writing in the third person, or using the pseudonym ‘Andreas,’ Mengele describes his capture by American forces, hiding on a farm while furtively meeting his wife, escape over the Brenner Pass to Italy, arrest, passage to Argentina, and life in Paraguay and Brazil. (…). He also offers his opinions on a myriad of subjects, including race-mixing, the Nuremburg war crimes trials, justification of the concentration camp system, and denial of the conditions at the camps.

[...].

Bill Panagopulos, president of Alexander Historic Auctions, has a strong opinion on the sale of the archive: ‘Scholarly institutions or historic collections should obtain these writings not as a ‘remembrance’ of a horrific period of world history, but more as a learning tool for future generations to recognize the psychopathic mentality that incited the Holocaust so that similar genocides are never repeated.’

What’s most intriguing in this newsreport is the statement that the Auschwitz doctor’s writings include “denial of the conditions at the camps”. What could this mean, exactly?

The very brief excerpts published by Gerald Posner and John Ware in their Mengele biography Mengele: The Complete Story[2] provide us with some clues in this respect.[3] Mengele did not deny that mass death occured at Auschwitz due to epidemics, malnutrition and other “natural causes” (Posner/Ware, p. 73):

“It is natural and understandable that the camps were suffering very bad hunger after all the problems and therefore I saw what was to be expected.”

According to a Munich pharmacist and his wife who met with him soon after the war, Mengele wanted to turn himself in, but was finally persuaded against it. To this couple Mengele declared his innocence (p. 67):

“I don’t have anything to hide. Terrible things happened at Auschwitz, and I did my best to help. One could not do everything. There were terrible disasters there. I could only save so many. I never killed anyone or hurt anyone. I can prove I am innocent of what they could say against me. I am building the facts for my defense. I want to turn myself in and be cleared at a trial.”

If this quote from memory is correct, then it seems unlikely that Mengele was referring to the use of homicidal gas chambers, because the systematic killing of innocent people in chemical slaughterhouses would not be a “disaster”, but pre-meditated mass murder. Epidemic outbreaks, however, could justly be termed “disasters”.

The defense that Mengele was reportedly building may well be included among the papers now to be auctioned off.

Elsewhere (p. 154) Mengele noted that)

“The political lie triumphs and time and history have been warped and bowed.”

This clearly indicates that Mengele believed that victors of WWII had rewritten the history of what transpired during the war in their own favor.

Then there is the title of one of the autobiographical texts, Fiat Lux, “Let there be light”. A suggested by Robert Faurisson, this title clearly implies that Mengele wished to shed light on what had actually transpired at Auschwitz.

If it is true that Mengele’s writings contain “denial of the conditions at the camps” then it seems most likely that “conditions” refer to either claims of gross mistreatment of prisoners in the form of torture, unlawful punishments etc, or to the allegation that Auschwitz functioned as an extermination camp.

One can only hope that the Mengele documents are purchased by an institution that does not place them behind lock and key, but prefer to reveal their contents to the world. After all, we should never underestimate the Holocaust industry’s tendency to shoot itself in the foot.

[1] “Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele’s Unknown Writings to be Auctioned”,

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/auschwitz-angel-of-death-josef-mengeles-unknown-writings-to-be-auctioned-124801054.html

[2] Gerald Posner, John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, McGraw-Hill, New York 1986.

[3] For more on this biography see my online review at: http://www.codoh.com/review/revmengele.html

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.

After my comment on the terms Sonderlager and SS-Sonderkommando in relation to the Sobibór camp,[1] Roberto Muehlenkamp has focused his untiring yet self-defeating powers of “argumentation” on the following passage in the March 1944 Benda report on the Sobibór prisoner uprising:

“Mit Rücksicht auf die Art die Sonderlagers und dessen Häftlinge, wurde veranlasst, dass die Wehrmacht sofort die Verfolgung der Flüchtigen und die Schutzpolizei die Sicherung des Lagers ausserhalb der Lagerumzäunung aufnahm.”[2]

In English translation:

“In view of the nature of the special camp [Sonderlagers] and its prisoners, the Wehrmacht was ordered to organize an immediate posse after the fugitives, and the Police to secure the safety of the camp outside its fences.”

Muehlenkamp has offered the following interpretation:

“The best explanation (i.e. the one that takes all known evidence into account and requires the fewest additional assumptions) is that it was considered most urgent that all fugitives be recovered lest they reveal that Sobibór had been an extermination camp, and that the Wehrmacht was charged with the task because it had more personnel available for this purpose than the SD and the Security Police, including units that were trained and experienced in hunting partisans and therefore most suited for the task.”[3]

In other words: The most reasonable explanation for why “the nature of the special camp and its prisoners” required the escaped inmates to be pursued with particular fervor was that they were able to inform the world about Sobibór the Extermination Camp. The problem with this explanation, similar to most arguments advanced by Muehlenkamp and his ilk, is that it ultimately falls back on the a priori assumption that Sobibór indeed functioned as a “pure extermination camp” – for which there is not a shred of hard evidence.

The assertion that the escaped inmates were carriers of the secret of the “extermination camp” Sobibór in fact makes little sense even from an exterminationist viewpoint. Not a single inmate from the “death camp proper”, Lager III, participated in the mass escape on 14 October 1943. In Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality I spent several passages discussing what the Jewish eyewitness have to say regarding their and other inmates’ knowledge of Lager III, which was separated from the rest of the camp by fences and a densely wooded area. The Jewish work commando(s) employed in Lager III were likewise kept separated from the rest of the prisoner population and never entered the other Lagers. Thomas Blatt, who was sent to Sobibór in April 1943, writes in his memoirs that

“The most conclusive evidence that something murderous was taking place in Lager III was the fact that no-one ever came out alive, but such evidence was purely circumstantial. The Nazis made it difficult to collect any direct evidence of what was widely known throughout the camp.”[4]

However, as I showed in the abovementioned study, based on maps an air photos, the inmates in the other parts of the camp could not have been certain that “no-one ever came out alive” .[5]
According to another witness, Eda (Ada) Lichtman, “They [the Germans] always thought that we [= the Jewish inmates] did not know what was going on there [in Lager III].”[6]

If these witness statements are correct, then how could the escaped prisoner have been viewed as carriers of the secret (Geheimnisträgern) of  Sobibór the Extermination Camp? If it was indeed true that no Jew “ever came out alive” from Lager III and that this fact constituted “the most conclusive evidence” the camp inmates had that this part of Sobibór served as a facility for mass murder, would not then all the Polish civilians in the vicinity of the camp, who were in a much better position to ascertain whether “no-one ever came out alive”, likewise have been considered Geheimnisträgern and dealt with accordingly?

The Oneg Szabat group in Warsaw identified Sobibór as an extermination camp already in early July 1942, two months after it began operating, and already on 1 July 1942 the Polish Fortnightly Review published an article according to which Jews were sent to Sobibór and murdered there en masse with gas, machine-guns and bayonets. In a report from the the Polish Government in Exile dated 23 December 1942 Sobibór is identified together with Treblinka and Belzec as an extermination center. The Polish underground press mentioned the Sobibór “death camp” repeatedly in 1942 and 1943.[7] There can be no doubt that the Germans were aware of the contents of at least some of these propaganda writings, and the way they depicted the camp ­- but why would they then worry as late as in mid-October 1943 that the escaped prisoners would “reveal” Sobibór as an “extermination camp”? This gets even more curious when one considers that the atrocity stories produced by the early Sobibór eyewitnesses are ridiculous yarns about gassings with chlorine, mysterious black substances, magical bloodstains, electric machines releasing “deadly gas”, collapsible gas chamber floors, mass killings carried out with water hoses, etc. etc.[8] – i.e. certainly not any “detailed knowledge” regarding the supposed going-ons in Lager III.

Roberto Muehlenkamp has completely ignored the following simple explanation why there was a special urgency to the pursuit of the escaped Sobibór inmates: As already shown by me the dismantling plant for captured Soviet munitions mentioned in Himmler’s directive from 5 July 1943 (NO-482) was indeed installed in the “Lager IV” or “Nordlager” section of Sobibór and came to employ at least 110 inmates, many of them Soviet-Jewish POW:s, who, led by Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, made up the core of the 14 October uprising. Documentary evidence further show that a significant amount of captured Soviet munitions was stored there and later, following the prisoner revolt, sent away from the camp.[9] It goes without saying that the detailed knowledge of the munition dismantling plant held by the escaped inmates would have been of potentially great value to partisan units operating in that part of eastern Poland as well as in the neighboring parts of Belarus and the Ukraine, especially considering that many of said partisans were using Soviet weapons. The knowledge of the escaped prisoners could thus have triggered a partisan attack on the camp with the purpose of stealing the munitions depot, or prompted the destruction of the railway tracks, as a means of shutting down the dismantling operation.[10] The fact that the addition of several trained and experienced Red Army soldiers to the local partisan groups hardly would have benefited the Germans also fits this picture.

The above alternative explanation is certainly better than Muehlenkamp’s “best explanation”, as it does not require belief in the factually unsupported claim that Sobibór functioned as a “pure extermination camp.”

[1] http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/05/on-the-terms-sonderlager-and-ss-sonderkommando/
[2] http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/images/Sobibor%20%281%29.jpg
[3] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/05/thomas-kues-takes-on-sonderlager-paper.html
[4] Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1997, p. 232.
[5] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington DC 2010, pp. 97-98.
[6] Ibid., p. 79.
[7] Ibid, pp. 63-67.
[8] Ibid, pp. 69-75, 82, 179.
[9] http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/05/lies-and-obfuscations-about-himmlers-sobibor-directive/

[10] For some curious reason it never occurred to the partisans that they could (at least temporarily) stop the deportation trains to Sobibór and the other “extermination centres” by dynamiting the railroad tracks leading there. No doubt some exterminationist historians would put this up to the Poles being inveterate anti-Semites…

In a reply [1] to my recent article [2] on the holocaust historians’ lies and obfuscations about the contents of Nuremberg document NO-482, wherein Sobibór is designated as a transit camp (Durchgangslager), anti-revisionist blogger Roberto Muehlenkamp focuses on the fact that in the 17 March 1944 report of SS-Untersturmführer Benda concerning the Sobibór prisoner uprising and mass escape the Sobibór camp is called a “Sonderlager” (special- or exception camp). According to the Tarnsprache exegesis, adopted by Muehlenkamp and his likes when it suits them, this means that Sobibór was a death camp, since the prefix Sonder- (special- or exception(al)-), it seems, always denoted killings in Nazi jargon! Muehlenkamp further accuses me and my co-authors of the study Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality,[3] Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno, of having hidden Benda’s use of the word Sonderlager from our readers. He writes:

“M[attogno], G[raf and ]K[ues] merely mention that «Five months after these events, on 17 March 1944, SS-Untersturmführer Benda wrote an account of the Sobibór uprising – which he wrongly dated 15 October 1943 – and of the ensuing search for the fugitives, stating that the rebels had “shot an SS officer as well as 10 SS NCOs.”» (MGK, Sobibór, p. 22). “

The quote presented by Muehlenkamp is correct. The non-mention of Benda’s wording, however, is in effect an editorial error, which unfortunately was carried over to the German edition of our book.[4] If Muehlenkamp had bothered to read the condensed (and somewhat “popularized”) German version of our book, Die Akte Sobibor, which is readily available online,[5] he would have found the following remark in the corresponding section:

“In diesem Bericht wurde Sobibor also als ‘Sonderlager’ bezeichnet. Was dieses Wort bedeutete, lässt sich dem Dokument selbst nicht entnehmen.”

In English translation:

“In this report Sobibor was thus designated as a ‘Sonderlager’ [Special camp]. The meaning of this term cannot be determined from the document itself.”

Which is indeed true. There exists not a single contemporary German document stating that Sobibór (or any other German camp for that matter) functioned as a center of extermination.

As for the term Sonderlager Muehlenkamp neglects to mention that it is used elsewhere without denoting anything homicidal/genocidal. For example, German historian Ulrich Herbert writes as follows concerning the setting up of “labor education camps” (Arbeitserziehungslager) in connection to industrial plants:

“The RSHA had suggested setting up such firm-internal penal camps a far back as late 1942:
‘In larger plants with a large foreign work force, with no labor education camp nearby, it appears to be possible under certain circumstances, and on an experimental basis, to set up educational departments. As in the labor education camps, foreign workers will be put to work under guard as punishment for non-serious loafing… The plant should provide for segregated housing and allocation of work after agreement with the State Police (Head) Office.’
On the basis of this decree, such camps were set up over the following months in many large plants. The camps had different designations, such as penal camp (Straflager), special camp (Sonderlager) or labor education camp (Arbeitserziehungslager).”[6]

Herbert refer his readers to:

“‘Lagerordnung der Gestapo für Ostarbeiter-Sonderlager’ (Gestapo Camp Regulations for Special Camps for Eastern Workers), December 13, 1943, Doc. NIK 15510; ‘Lagerordnung für das Sonderlager Dechenschule (Camp Regulations, Dechenschule Special Camp) December 16, 1943, Doc. NIK 15506″[7]

The term “Ostarbeiter-Sonderlager” of course implies that there existed Sonderlager housing inmates of other sort than “Eastern Workers”.

In Rheinland-Pfalz there existed between October 1939 and March 1945 the SS-Sonderlager Hinzert. From 7 February 1942 this camp was administrated by the SS-WVHA. The inmate population consisted mostly of political prisoners from France and Luxembourg, forced laborers from Poland and prisoners of war. During its period of operation some 13-14,000 men were kept prisoners in Sonderlager Hinzert; 321 deaths are documented for this camp.[8]

In Metz in Lothringen/Lorraine was located between October 1943 and August 1944 the “Sonderlager Feste Goeben” (also called “Sonderlager der Sicherheitspolizei in Metz” and “SS-Sonderlager Fort Queuleu”), a forced labor camp housing mostly French POW:s and political prisoners.[9]

In eastern Austria there existed in the period 1944-1945 a large number of Sonderlager for Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers. These were temporary labor camps where the prisoners mainly worked on constructing fortifications.[10] There was also an “SS-Sonderlager Innsbruck” for prominent prisoners.[11]

Between October 1941 and January 1942 Stutthof was counted as a Sonderlager belonging to the Danzig Gestapo.[12] It must be stressed that this was long before gassings of Jewish prisoners was allegedly carried out in this camp (August to December 1944).[13]

In Upper Silesia was located the “SD-Sonderlager Sandberge”, apparently a forced labor camp employing mainly “Eastern Workers” and Soviet POW:s.[14]

The labor and training camp Trawniki in the Lublin district either contained or was designated a “Sonderlager”.[15]

“Sonderlager Watenstedt” near Braunschweig served as a forced labor and penal camp for “work-shies”.[16]

There were also a number of more or less temporary internment camps for Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) that were sometimes referred to as Sonderlager. In this context historian Sybil H. Milton defines the term “SS-Sonderlager” as “special internment camps combining elements of protective custody concentration camps and embryonic ghettos”.[17]

Sonderlager was sometimes also used as a term denoting simply any subcamp or part of a camp housing a special category of prisoners (often prisoners carrying “special papers”), or separated from the normal camp infrastructure. Thus there existed a “Sonderlager für Juden aus Polen” (Special camp for Polish Jews) in the Bergen-Belsen Stammlager.[18] In Buchenwald Jews of foreign nationality were kept in a Sonderlager from late 1939 onward.[19] An isolated barracks at Buchenwald in which members of the Romanian Iron Guard movement were held was designated “Sonderlager Fichtenhain”.[20] “SS-Sonderlager Ammerwald” on the other hand was used for “honored prisoners” (Ehrenhäftlinge).[21]

In Moringen near Göttingen there existed from 1940 onward an “SS-Sonderlager” for “asocial” male adolescents.[22] “SS-Sonderlager Uckermark” imprisoned “asocials” and hardened criminals; it was later attached to KL Ravensbrück.[23]

None of the camps listed above are alleged to have served as extermination centers (with the exception of Stutthof, but as already noted its alleged use as an “auxiliary extermination camp” did not coincide with the period during which the camp was known as a Sonderlager).

Now is there evidence except for the Benda report that Sobibór was designated a Sonderlager? The only sort of indication that I have found so far is a statement, presumably based on eyewitness testimony, in an article by Dutch historian Louis De Jong, that the Vorlager (front camp) section of Sobibór was adorned with large sign reading “SS-Sonderlager Sobibor“.[24] The witness Thomas Blatt writes in his memoirs of “the Gothic letters on the top of the gate leading inside: ‘SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor.’”[25] The witness Dov Freiberg, however, testified at the Eichmann trial that he had observed on repeated occasions, when working outside of the camp, “a sign at the entrance of the camp” bearing the text “SS Sonderkommando Umsiedlungslager” (SS Special Commando Resettlement Camp); the former camp commandant Franz Stangl also testified to the use of this term.[26] The foremost exterminationist expert on the camp, Jules Schelvis, believes that Umsiedlungslager was the word used on the camp sign.[27] It does not seem impossible that “SS Sonderkommando Umsiedlungslager” was the full name written on the sign and that some witnesses remembered merely part of it. We know from documents that the camp staff members of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka (possibly excluding the Trawniki-trained guards) were collectively known as SS-Sonderkommando “Einsatz Reinhard(t)”.[28] The correspondence of Dr. Irmfried Eberl, the first commandant of Treblinka, bore the return address “SS-Untersturmführer Dr. Eberl, Treblinka b/ Malkinia, SS-Sonderkommando“.[29] Thus quite likely the Sobibór camp staff was known as “SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor”. The camp staff at Chełmno was designated “SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof”.[30]

Anti-revisionists may argue, in accordance with exterminationist exegesis, that the use of the term Sonderkommando, “Special commando”, must denote a commando specialized in the mass killing of Jews. Once again the argument falls flat, however, since we know of numerous “SS-Sonderkommandos” not connected in any way with alleged extermination actions. To list but a few:

- “SS-Sonderkommando Zossen” and “SS-Sonderkommando Jüterbog”, which came to form the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.[31]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Grüppe-Künsberg”, affiliated with the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, which appropriated libraries and archives in the occupied territories.[32]

- “The Sonderkommando ‘Dr. Dirlewanger’” (redesignated “SS-Sonderbatallion ‘Dirlewanger’” and “SS-Sonderregiment ‘Dirlewanger’”), which, although notorious for the criminal background of its members and the numerous atrocities it perpetrated (against Poles and Russians), was not employed in actions against Jews, but served mainly as an anti-partisan unit.[33]

- The “SS-Sonderkommando K”, a unit conducting racial “research” on Soviet prisoners of war, stationed in Mittersill near Salzburg.[34]

- The “SS-Sonderkommando Schloss Itter”, employed in an interment camp for “honored prisoners”.[35]

- “SS-Sonderkommando ‘Sachsen’” was employed in the concentration camp Sachsenburg.[36]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Künsberg”, a unit used for the appropriation of archives and cultural goods in Yugoslavia.[37]

- “SS-Sonderkommando ‘Jankuhn’” carried out the appropriation of cultural goods in occupied southern Russia.[38]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Sosnowitz”, which was in charge of an internment and transit camp for Jews in Sosnowiec, Upper Silesia.[39]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Trautenau”, in charge of seven women’s camps in the Sudetenland.[40]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Zeppelin”, stationed in Breslau (Wroclaw), in charge, inter alia, of training pro-German Soviet POW:s as spies to be deployed beyond the Russian frontlines.[41]

The equation of the term “SS-Sonderkommando” with mass killings of Jews is therefore likewise fallacious.

What could then have caused Sobibór to be designated a Sonderlager – at least by Untersturmführer Benda? There are, as far as I can see, three main possibilities:

1) Sobibór was redesignated as a Sonderlager following the installation of the munition dismantling unit in August-September 1943, in which a large portion of the camp’s inmates were employed.[42] On the other hand, if the summary provided by the ARC website is correct, a decoded message from 27 October 1943 mentions the “SS Durchgangslager Sobibor” (SS Transit Camp Sobibor),[43] something which would seem to contradict this hypothesis.

2) Sobibór was alternately designated a Durchgangslager and a Sonderlager, the latter because the Reinhardt camp staff was referred to as an SS-Sonderkommando. There are in turn at least two possible explanations why this commando was considered “special”. One is that the staff were not regular SS but had their background in the T4 euthanasia program, and that, most likely, they continued to perform “euthanasia” on mentally ill and disease-carrying Jewish deportees while posted to the Reinhardt camps.  The other possibility is that at least a part of the SS units involved in the evacuation, transiting and therewith connected systematic robbery of Jewish deportees were for some (perhaps purely military-administrative) reason consider irregular or “special”. What may point in this direction is the fact that Adolf Eichmann’s small personal staff, in charge of the administration of the deportation of Jews from, among other countries, Greece in 1943 and from Hungary in 1944, was named “SS-Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann”[44] or simply “SS-Sonderkommando Eichmann”.[45] As seen above there was also the “SS-Sonderkommando Sosnowitz” in charge of an internment and transit camp in Upper Silesia. One may also note in this context that SS-Sonderlager Hinzert in the autumn of 1941 served as a transit camp in the deportation of Luxembourgian, Belgian and French Jews to the Łódz ghetto.[46]

3) Finally it cannot be excluded that Benda, writing his report nearly half a year after the uprising, simply made an error, especially considering that he mistakenly dated the uprising to 15 October 1943 (instead of 14 October).

What may be safely excluded is the possibility that Sobibór was called a Sonderlager because it functioned as an extermination center where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in homicidal gas chambers. There exists not the slightest documentary or technical evidence supporting this notion, and in addition to the letters of NO-482 calling Sobibór a transit camp, the available hard evidence, as unearthed by archeologists, contradict the exterminationist version of events.[47]

To conclude: The appearance of the terms Sonderlager or SS-Sonderkommando in documents relating to Sobibór (or any of the other alleged death camps) cannot be used as evidence in support of the notion that said camp functioned as an extermination center for Jews.[48]

[1] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/05/thomas-kues-on-lies-and-obfuscations.html
[2] http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/05/lies-and-obfuscations-about-himmlers-sobibor-directive/
[3] TBR Books, Washington DC 2010.
[4] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust-Propaganda und Wirklichkeit, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2010.
[5] http://juergen-graf.vho.org/pdf/graf-kues-mattogno-die-akte-sobibor.pdf
[6] Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s foreign workers: enforced foreign labor in Germany under the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 338
[7] Ibid., p. 468, note 116.
[8] Hedwig Brüchert, Michael Matheus, Zwangsarbeit in Rheinland-Pfalz während des Zweiten Weltkriegs, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2004, pp. 21-22.
[9] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 9, C.H. Beck, Munich 2009, pp. 534-537.
[10] Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, “Sonderlager für ungarisch-jüdische Zwangsarbeiter”, in: ibid., pp. 218ff.
[11] Hans-Günter Richardi, Caroline M. Heiss, Hans Heiss, SS-Geiseln in der Alpenfestung, Raetia 2005, p. 153, 158.
[12] Ibid., p. 613.
[13] For the alleged homicidal gas chamber of KL Stutthof cf. Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Stutthof and its Function in National Socialist Jewish Policy, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2003.
[14] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 3, C.H. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 175.
[15] Timm C. Richter (ed.), Krieg und Verbrechen. Situation und Intention: Fallbeispiele, Martin Meidenbauer, Munich 2006, p. 248 note 15.
[16] Gabriele Lotfi, KZ der Gestapo, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2000, pp. 75-77, 340
[17] Sybil H. Milton, “‘Gypsies’ as Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany”, in: Robert Gellately, Nathan Stoltzfus (eds.), Social outsiders in Nazi Germany, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2001, p. 219.
[18] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Angelika Königseder (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 7, C.H. Beck, Munich 2008, pp. 192-193.
[19] Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, Konzentrationslager Buchenwald 1937-1945, Wallstein Verlag 2007, pp. 115-118.
[20] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 3, C.H. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 304.
[21]  Volker Koop, In Hitlers Hand: die Sonder- und Ehrenhäftlinge der SS, Böhlau Verlag, Cologne/Weimar 2010, p. 78.
[22] Titus Simon, Raufhändel und Randale, Juventa, Winheim/Munich 1996, p. 284.
[23] Angelika Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, F. Greno, 1987, p. 212.
[24] Louis De Jong, “Sobibor”, Encounter, December 1978, p. 22.
[25] Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, Sobibór. The Forgotten Revolt, HEP, Issaquah 1998, p. 38.
[26] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., p. 285.
[27] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, Oxford/New York 2007, p. 36.
[28] Cf. Archives of the Holocaust, vol. 11, part 2, Document 430 on pp. 335-357.
[29] Michael Grabher, Irmfried Eberl. ‘Euthanasie’-Arzt und Kommandant von Treblinka, Peter Lang/Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main 2006, p. 70. For more on this correspondence see http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/07/review-michael-grabher-irmfried-eberl-euthanasie-arzt-und-kommandant-von-treblinka-peter-lang-europaischer-verlag-der-wissenschaft-frankfurt-am-main-2006/
[30] Sascha Feuchert, Erwin Leibfried, Jörg Riecke (eds.), Die Chronik des Gettos Lodz/Litzmannstadt: 1942, Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, p. 7.
[31] Christopher Ailsby, Hell on the Eastern Front. the Waffen-SS War in Russia 1941-1945, MBI Publishing, Osceola (WI) 1998, p. 12.
[32] Michael Burleigh, Germany turns eastwards. A study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988, p. 227ff.
[33] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS
[34] Peter Mierau, Nationalsozialistische Expeditionspolitik: deutsche Asien-Expeditionen 1933-1945, Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2006, p. 500.
[35] Volker Koop, In Hitlers Hand, op.cit., p. 33.
[36] Carsten Schreiber, Elite im Verborgenen: Ideologie und regionale Herrschaftspraxis des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS und seines Netzwerks am Beispiel Sachsens, Institut für Zeitgechichte/Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, p. 274.
[37] Patrick Lehn, Deutschlandbilder: historische Schulatlanten zwischen 1871 und 1990, Böhlau, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 2008, p. 407; Bettina Thorn, Internationaler Kulturgüterschutz nach der UNIDROIT-Konvention, De Gruyter Rechtswissenschaften Verlags, Berlin 2005, p. 32.
[38] Ludwig Jäger, Seitenwechsel: der Fall Schneider/Schwerte und die Diskretion der Germanistik, W. Fink 1998, p. 244.
[39] Wacław Długoborski, Franciszek Piper (eds.), Auschwitz, 1940-1945: Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz, Volume 1, Verlag des Staatlichen Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oswiecim 1999, p. 62; Belah Gutterman, A narrow bridge to life: Jewish forced labor and survival in the Gross-Rosen Camp System, 1940-1945, Berghahn Books/Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2008, p. 43.
[40] Dachauer Hefte, vol. 8-9, Verlag Dachauer Hefte, Munich 1999, p. 7.
[41] C. F. Rüter, Dirk Welmoed de Mildt, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen 1945-1999. Register zu den Bänden I-XXII, APA/Holland University Press, Amsterdam 1998, p. 494.
[42] See my previous article “Lies and obfuscations about Himmler’s Sobibor directive”.
[43] PRO: HW 16/39 (ZIP/GPD 2041 DD-FF, message DD 14, as summarized online: http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/prodecodes.html
[44] Peter Krause, Der Eichmann-Prozeß in der deutschen Presse, Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 29. Also http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann-Kommando
[45] Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles 1984, p. 160.
[46]  Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Eine politische Organisationsgeschichte, Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, p. 94.
[47] Cf. J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 107-167.
[48] A final remark: In a report on a Jewish convoy from Vienna to Sobibór dated 20 June 1942 (reproduced online at http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/sobibor/docs/transport%20wien%20-%20sobibor.jpg ) it is stated that the Jews upon arrival were handed over to the commandant of “the labor camp located adjacent to the railway station” (“das neben dem Bahnhof gelegene Arbeitslager“). This is the only documentary source in which Sobibór is called a “labor camp”. Most likely this designation was simply a mistake on behalf of a Viennese police officer who had not been briefed in detail on the resettlement of the Jews. From an exterminationist viewpoint it hardly makes any sense that the SS would have employed three different camouflage designations – Durchgangslager, Sonderlager and Arbeitslager – for the same death camp!

Peter Black is a Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1981. He is also the former chief historian for the “Nazi hunting” Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice.

In a long article entitled “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard”, published in the prestigious exterminationist journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Black has the following to tell us about the Sobibór “extermination camp”[1]:

“Himmler had intended to convert it [Sobibór] into a concentration camp servicing a plant that recycled captured ammunition; Pohl and Globocnik convinced him instead to make Sobibor into a ‘transit camp’ (Durchgangslager)”

As a source Black offers [2]:

“On plans for an ammunition recycling plant, see circular order of the Reichsführer-SS [initialed R. Brandt], July 5, 1943; Chief of WVHA [signed Pohl] to Reichsführer-SS, July 10, 1943; and Reichsführer-SS/Personal Staff [initialed Brandt] to Pohl, July 24, 1943, NARA, RG 238, NO-482.”

However, if we look at the Nuremberg document NO-482 referred to by the venerable Senior Historian of the USHMM we find that the crucial part of Himmler’s 5 July 1943 directive reads as follows:

“Das Durchgangslager Sobibor im Distrikt Lublin ist in ein Konzentrationslager umzuwandeln. In dem Konzentrationslager ist eine Entlaborierungsanstalt für Beutemunition einzurichten.”

In English translation:

“The Sobibór transit camp, located in the Lublin district, is to be converted into a concentration camp. A dismantling unit for captured enemy munitions is to be set up in the concentration camp.”

And in Pohl’s reply from 15 July 1943 (not 10 July as stated by Black) we read:

“Gemäß Ihrer obigen Anordnung soll das Durchgangslager Sobibór im Distrikt Lublin in ein Konzentrationslager umgewandelt zu werden.
Ich habe mich mit SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik darüber unterhalten. Wir beide schlagen Ihnen vor, die Umwandlung in ein Konzentrationslager aufzugeben, weil der von Ihnen erstrebte Zweck, nämlich: in Sobibór eine Entlaborierungsanstalt für Beutemunition einzurichten, auch ohne diese Umwandlung erreicht wird.”

In English translation:

“According to your above instructions, the Sobibór transit camp in the Lublin district is to be converted into a concentration camp. I have discussed this with SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik. Both of us propose to abandon this conversion, as the purpose intended, viz. to set up at Sobibór an installation for the defusing of enemy munitions, can be realized without such a conversion.”

Then on 24 July 1943 Himmler’s personal assistant, Rudolf Brandt, replied back [3]:

“Der Reichsführer-SS ist mit dem Vorschlag, den Sie und SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik hinsichtlich der Belassung des Durchgangslager Sobibór im Distrikt Lublin in dem augenblicklichen Zustand gemacht haben, einverstanden, nachdem der vom ihm gewünschte Zweck auf diese Weise erreicht wird.”

In English translation:

“The Reichsführer SS agrees to the proposal [made] by you and SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik concerning the maintenance of the Sobibor transit camp in the Lublin district in its present state, as the desired objective can be attained in this manner.”

To summarize: On 5 July 1943 Himmler ordered that the “Sobibór transit camp” was to be converted into a concentration camp equipped with a dismantling unit for captured enemy munitions. On 15 July Pohl on behalf of himself and Globocnik wrote to Himmler, recommending that said conversion be abandoned, as the installation of the dismantling unit could be achieved without it. Finally on 24 July Brandt wrote and confirmed that Himmler agreed with the proposal.

It is clear as day from even a cursory glance at these letters that Pohl and Globocnik did not “convince” Himmler “to make Sobibor into a ‘transit camp’”. In fact it was the other way around: the camp was designated a transit camp (Durchgangslager) at the time Himmler wrote his directive. This leaves only two possibilities: either Black has not read the source he cites, which seems utterly unlikely considering that it’s one of only a handful surviving documents pertaining to a field which he is well-acquainted with, i.e. Aktion Reinhardt, or he is consciously distorting the actual contents of the document. In that he would not be alone, as several exterminationist historians have published false or misleading statements about NO-482. To give just two examples: In his article on Sobibór for the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust Yitzhak Arad writes that “On 5 July 1943, Himmler ordered Sobibór to be closed as an extermination camp and transformed into a concentration camp”.[4]

Raul Hilberg writes in his standard work The Destruction of the European Jews that [5]:

“Sobibór was appropriately called a Durchgangslager (transit camp). Since it was located near the Bug, on the border of the occupied eastern territories, the designation fitted the myth of the ‘eastern migration.’ When Himmler proposed one day that the camp be designated a Konzentrationslager, Pohl opposed the change.”

But, as already shown, Himmler did not propose “to designate this camp a concentration camp” but ordered the camp to be “converted into a concentration camp” – the difference is certainly not irrelevant!

Anti-revisionist blogger Roberto Muehlenkamp has resorted to the following contrived argument in order to prove Himmler’s, Pohl’s and Brandt’s designation of Sobibór as a transit camp to be what exterminationists call Tarnsprache (camouflage langauge)[6]:

“Contrary to what Kues would like to believe and insists in maintaining, said directive and the related correspondence are everything other than evidence that Sobibór was the ‘transit camp’ that Himmler claimed it to be (…). Following the suggestions of Globocnik and Pohl, Himmler eventually became convinced that the ‘transit camp’ didn’t have to be converted into a concentration camp to install there a station for processing booty ammunition, obviously because it already had a large labor force being managed and controlled in a manner akin to what was practiced in concentration camps. As a mere transit camp would not have required such a large labor force, Himmler’s correspondence with his subordinates shows that Sobibór was not what it was claimed to be, i.e. not a transit camp.”

Elsewhere Muehlenkamp presents his argument in its full glory [7]:

“Actually the document that T[homas] K[ues] offers in support of his ‘perfect harmony’ claim in his footnote 2 (‘In a letter sent to eight high-ranking members of the SS administration, among them the head of SS-WVHA, Oswald Pohl, on 5 July 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered “The Sobibor transit camp [Durchgangslager], located in the Lublin district, (…) to be converted into a concentration camp” (a transformation which eventually did not take place); Nuremberg Document NO-482′) belies rather than supports his claim, if one looks at it more closely. [Next follows an English translation of the relevant letters of NO-482].

Why, one wonders, did Himmler propose that the Sobibor camp be converted into a concentration camp in order to install there a station for processing booty ammunition? Obviously because he reasoned that such station required a fairly large labor force and collecting and controlling such fairly large labor force required the kind of organization that characterized the concentration camps run by the SS-Economics and Administration Main Office.

Why, on the other hand, did Globocnik and Pohl not consider it necessary to implement such organization? Obviously because Sobibor already had a fairly large labor force, which could be put to the task of processing booty ammunition, and this labor force was being managed and controlled in a manner akin to what was practiced in concentration camps.

In fact the camp held about 700 inmates at the time of the revolt on 14 October 1943. There’s no reason why a mere transit camp, a place where people were deloused and bathed and then put back on the train to their final destinations, should have required such a large labor force, which was not much smaller than that of Treblinka Labour Camp. What were all these people, directed in a concentration-camp-like manner by a dozen-or-so SS-men and a hundred-or-so Ukrainian guards, doing in a mere transit camp?

To cut a long story short, the fact that Globocnik, Pohl and eventually also Himmler considered Sobibor suitable for installing an ammunition-processing station without any transformation, obviously due to the size of its inmate population, shows that Sobibor was not what it was being called in the above-quoted documents, i.e. not a transit camp.”

To summarize: Because the Sobibór camp held some 700 inmates at the time of the prisoner uprising on 14 October 1943, it could not reasonably have been “a mere transit camp”, because such a camp would not possibly have required a labor force that large. Ergo Sobibór could not have been a transit camp. This supposed argument does not hold water, for several reasons.

To begin with, Muehlenkamp has ignored that the dismantling unit requested by Himmler was indeed installed in Sobibór, with a consequent demand for labor involved in both construction and sorting/dismantling of captured ammunition. Jewish Sobibór witness Dov Freiberg writes in his memoirs about events taking place in August-September 1943 [8]:

“There was another wave of construction at Sobibor camp and again, trains full of construction supplies arrived. Unlike the last frenzy of construction, however, which was intended to increase the capacity of the death machine, now weapons and ammunition warehouses were being built, most of them underground. At this stage Lager 4 was set up, which the Germans called Nordlager – northern camp – in the north-east corner of the existing camp, in the open area between the railway platform and the forest, and it continued into the forest, close to the Lazarett. High-ranking officers landed in light planes and ran around the area with maps and plans, while our SS officers were dragged along behind them. The establishment of ammunition warehouses in a death camp didn’t seem logical – was it possible that a foreign party would set up in a camp run secretly by the SS? It seemed likely that the Germans were going to destroy the death camp and turn it into a munitions base. The work was performed at a swift pace. Before the first bunkers were completed, transports of ammunition had already arrived and were temporarily stored outside, next to the bunkers.”

Freiberg further informs us that around the same time “about a hundred strong young men were selected from the Minsk transport [in mid-September 1943]“.[9] Jules Schelvis on the other estimates the number of workers selected from this transport at 80.[10] These men worked chiefly with carpentry and construction projects connected with the new “Lager IV”. [11]

Another Jewish Sobibór witness, Thomas Blatt, mentions “the girls who sorted the captured Soviet ammunition in Lager IV”.[12] According to Jules Schelvis the sorting of the ammunition was carried out by “a new commando consisting of fifty women and sixty men”.[13]

Intercepted radio messages confirm that unused ammunition from occupied Russia was delivered for recycling to the “SS Durchgangslager Sobibor” at the end of October 1943 (i.e. after the prisoner revolt).[14]

Thus we know that more than a hundred inmates were employed in “Lager IV” with construction work and the sorting and dismantling of captured enemy munition. That Soviet-Jewish POW:s were sent to Sobibór in September 1943 makes perfect sense in this context, as they would naturally have been familiar with the types of munition used by the Red Army.

As for the total number of Sobibór inmates we have only three documents providing indications:

1) A telex from the commmander of the security police in the Lublin district to the duty officer at Krakow on 15 October 1943, in which we read: “On 14.10.1943, around 17:00 hours, uprising of the Jews in the Sobibór SS-camp, 40 km north of Cholm. [...]. Some 300 Jews have escaped, the remainder were either shot or are now in the camp.”[15]

2) On the same day SS-Gruppenführer and HSSPF Lublin Jakob Sporrenberg notified his fellow HSSPF in Luzk (Belarus) that “about 700 Jews” had escaped from “Lager Sobibor” and were thought to be headed across the Bug river.[16]

3) In a report from SS-Untersturmführer Benda of the Security Police and SD in Cholm dated 17 March 1944 the number of escaped inmates is given as 300.[17]

Since all testimonies describing the revolt agree that the number of escapees was nowhere near 700 the logical conclusion is that 300 is the most reliable estimate of how many inmates escaped on 14 October 1943. It then seems reasonable to assume that the figure of 700 mentioned in Sporrenberg’s message might have corresponded to the total number of Jews in the camp, but nonetheless this is mere speculation. However, since most testimonies further agree that about half of the inmate population did not participate in the escape, I will consider it fully possible that Sobibór indeed had some 6-700 inmates at the time of the uprising. The Jewish witness Leon Felhendler stated that the inmate population initially amounted to about 100 and gradually increased to “around 600″.[18] The higher figure mentioned by Felhendler might then possibly have increased to some 700 in September 1943 in connection with the construction of Lager IV.

What then did these inmates work with?

As seen above, at least 110 (possibly up to 190) prisoners worked in the munition dismantling unit in Lager IV.

According to Yitzhak Arad each of the Reinhardt camps had the following inmate work commandos in the parts of the camp outside the “death camp proper” (called “Lager III” in Sobibór) [19]:

- Platform workers (Bahnhofkommando); 40-50 prisoners working at the train platform with the disembarkation and unloading of train transports.
- Transport Square Workers (Transportkommando); about 40 prisoners engaged in activities carried out on the fenced-in square where the Jewish arrivals undressed.
- “Gold Jews” (Goldjuden); nearly 20 people whose task it was to receive and sort the money, gold, valuables, foreign currency, and bonds taken from the arriving Jews.
- Hair Cutter (Friseurs); 10-20 men who cut the hair of the female arrivals before these entered the “death camp proper”.
- Sorting Team for Clothing and Belongings (Lumpenkommando); 80-120 who worked with the collection, examination, sorting, bundling, storing, preparation for shipment and loading of clothing and belongings confiscated from the arrivals.
- Forest Team (Waldkommando), a few dozen prisoners working with the cutting of wood for heating and cooking in the camp. This team was enlarged once cremations began and the demand for firewood increased.

Except for the above work commandos, Arad writes,

“part of the prisoners were employed at other activities. Groups of prisoners were engaged in construction of barracks, in stringing barbed-wire fences, and in paving roads inside the camps. In the autumn and winter a special ‘potato team’ was established. Potatoes were the camp’s principal food, and as winter approached, large quantities were brought to the camp. [...]. Some prisoners worked in the vegetable garden, pigsy, chicken coop, and cowshed, and in the SS personnel’s baths. A few prisoners were employed in cleaning and disinfecting the huts and toilets.
There were also prisoners who supplied direct personal services to the SS and Ukrainians. They included doctors, a dentist, and several barbers. A small group of boys was employed to polish and clean the shoes and uniforms of SS personnel. These boys worked in and around the SS barracks. In addition, there were groups of skilled workers, like tailors, shoemakers, smiths, mechanics, carpenters, and others, known as the ‘court Jews,’ who continued to extend services to the German and Ukrainian staff, as they had since the first stages of the camps’ activity.”[20]

In Sobibór there also existed a group of 15 young female prisoners who worked with knitting socks and sweaters using wool taken from the baggage of arrivals.[21] There were also at least one Sanitäter (medic) tending sick inmates (Kurt Thomas aka Kurt Ticho) [22] and two Jews working in the inmate kitchen (Hershel and Josef Cuckierman).[23] Jewish historian Reuben Ainsztain states that two groups of Sobibór inmates also worked at a nearby quarry.[24]

No-one disputes that the Germans confiscated belongings and valuables from the Jews who arrived in the Reinhardt camps, and it is most likely that arrivals had their hair cut off, as part of the delousing process. Moreover a large number of Jews were no doubt cremated at Sobibór; deportees who had died en route to the camp or who were subjected to “euthanasia” because of mental or physical illness, as well as inmates who fell victims to disease or were executed – and thus there was need for a Waldkommando. It is also far from unbelievable that the SS personnel and guards employed a number of Jewish artisans for their own convenience. All of the above described work commandos are therefore fully compatible with Sobibór the transit camp.

Remains then the inmates housed in the separate “death camp proper”, Lager III.

The sources diverge widely on the number of this group of inmates. In his Eichmann trial testimony Ya’acov Biskovitz gave their number as 80. Thomas Blatt estimates their number to a mere 30 man. Another witness, Chaim Engel, states that “about fifty, sixty Jews” worked in camp III. Arad on the other hand estimates their number at 200-300.[25] Schelvis, referring to a 1985 court verdict, states that the total number of inmates in Lager III as of mid-April 1943 (when a large number of convoys from the Netherlands were arriving at Sobibór) numbered around 150 prisoners.[26] As at this time all inmates in Lager III were reportedly executed because of a failed attempt at a mass escape, and since there are no known survivors from the Lager III inmates, the estimate presumably derives from testimony left by camp personnel.

Following the transit camp hypothesis the Jewish inmates of Lager III could have been employed with a number of tasks: handing out towels and soaps, helping out with the delousing process, cleaning and repairing showers and delousing facilities, guiding deportees from one station in the delousing area to another, assisting in the embarkment on departing trains etc. etc. The archeological evidence shows that the deportees, contrary to the established picture, entered Lager III at least partially dressed, since a large number of remains of clothing and toilet articles were found inside the discovered building remains in that part of the camp,[27] not least in the enormous barracks designated “Object E” by Andrzej Kola, which likely housed the main delousing facility. Further archeological findings from Belzec and Chelmno together with statements from Sobibór eyewitnesses strongly suggest that number tags were used to register the Aktion Reinhardt (and Chelmno) deportees and/or their clothes/belongings that were to go through delousing.[28] Accordingly, the Jewish inmates in Lager III could have also worked with handing out or attaching such tags, as well as with the handling of toilet articles and other items carried by the deportees. According to Reuben Ainsztain a kitchen was installed at a later stage in Lager III.[29] This may have been done in order to better to provide the deportees awaiting further transport with nourishment. Inmates could have worked with preparing and distributing food and water to the deportees.

Then there is the indisputable fact that a large number of Jews died at Sobibór. These Jews perished en route due to various causes, died from illness in the camp, were executed as reprisal for escape attempts, or were subjected to “euthanasia” (likely utilizing lethal injections, possibly also through shooting) as mentally ill or carriers of epidemic diseases (categories of Jews that the German authorities certainly did not want to have resettled in the east). The total number of deaths at Sobibór might have amounted to some 10,000.[30] The part of Lager III where these victims were buried and later cremated was most likely separated by some means from the “clean side” with the delousing facilities. No doubt a number of inmates were involved in the gruesome business of handling and disposing corpses.

To conclude: The presence of 600-700 Jewish inmates in Sobibór fits perfectly well with the transit camp hypothesis, as there was certainly enough work for them all of them to carry out. Roberto Muehlenkamp’s “argument” regarding the letters of NO-482 is therefore devoid of any value: the number of inmates at Sobibór throws no doubt on Himmler’s, Pohl’s and Brandt’s designation of Sobibór as a “transit camp” (Durchgangslager). Their use of that designation is fully congruent with the state of evidence, which allows for only one conclusion: that Sobibór indeed was a transit camp. There is a good reason why Black, Arad, Hilberg and Muehlenkamp have felt compelled to meet the contents of NO-482 with lies and obfuscations.

Before he bothered to write this helplessly flawed criticism Mr. Muehlenkamp should moreover have recalled a truism well-known to all those knowledgable about the socio-economics and technologies of Ancient Rome and Egypt: When slave labor is available in (virtually) unlimited amounts, efficient utilization of said manpower is not a pressing issue.

[1] Peter Black, “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 2011), p. 41.
[2] Ibid., p. 96, note 305.
[3] Quoted from Jules Schelvis, Vernichtungslager Sobibór, Metropol Verlag, Berlin 1998, p. 174.
[4] Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 3-4, MacMillan, New York 1990, pp. 1376.
[5] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., Yale University Press, New Haven/London 2003, p. 1028.
[6] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-12052011-demjanjuk-was-sentenced-to.html
[7] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/06/evidence-for-presence-of-gassed-jews-in.html
[8] Dov Freiberg, To Survive Sobibor, Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem 2007, p. 283.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, Oxford/New York 2007, p. 238.
[11] Ibid., p. 241.
[12] Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor. A Story of Survival, Northwestern University Press, Evanston (IL) 1997, p. 141.
[13] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 147.
[14] PRO: HW 16/39 (ZIP/GPD 2041 DD-FF, message DD 14, transmitted 27 October 1943. I here quote the summary of the message found online at http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/prodecodes.html According to J. Schelvis (Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 188, 196 n. 44), however, the message relates the sending away of munitions from the camp, something which indeed sounds more logical.
[15] Contained in NO-482, also reproduced in several books, for example Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, Sobibór. The Forgotten Revolt, HEP, Issaquah 1998 (unnumbered page in attachment).
[16] PRO: HW 16/38 (ZIP/GPD 1956 CC-HH, message DD 12, transmitted 15 October 1943 at 1115h. Reproduced online: http://www.deathcamps.org/sobibor/pic/prodoc1.jpg
[17] NO-482 Reproduced in the appendices to Miriam Novitch, Sobibor. Martyrdom and Revolt. Documents and Testimonies, Holocaust Library, New York 1980. Also online: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/images/Sobibor%20%281%29.jpg
[18] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 69.
[19] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis 1987, pp. 108-110.
[20] Ibid., p. 110.
[21] Ibid., p. 114.
[22] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., pp. 86-87.
[23] Ibid., pp. 232-233
[24] Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, Paul Elek, London 1974, p. 746.
[25] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington DC 2010, p. 81, note 179.
[26] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 142.
[27] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 154-159.
[28] Ibid, pp. 100-101, 331-333.
[29] R. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, op.cit., p. 746.
[30] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 168-170.

Today, on 12 May 2011, John Demjanjuk was sentenced by a Munich court to 5 years in prison [1]  for assisting in the alleged murder of 28,060 Dutch Jews in the Sobibór “extermination” camp in eastern Poland in 1943 (the number of victims in the indictment was previously given as 27,900).

This sentence is a travesty for several reasons, besides the obvious grotesquery of trying a 91-year-old man for a crime allegedly committed 68 years previously.
I will refrain from giving a detailed overview of the case, as this has already been done elsewhere.[2]

To begin with, the only piece of documentary evidence supporting the presence of Demjanjuk at Sobibór is an identification card (from the SS training camp at Trawniki) which authenticity has been questioned by several experts. A month ago a formerly classified 1985 FBI report surfaced which stated that the Trawniki card was “quite likely fabricated” by the Soviet Union.[3] This revelation, however, did not help Demjanjuk in the end. The only existing testimonial evidence consists of a few vague statements of dubious value from former Ukrainian auxiliaries made behind the iron curtain. Not one of the surviving Sobibór inmates has placed Demjanjuk at Sobibór.

The prosecution has been unable tie Demjanjuk personally to any specific crime of violence. Instead, his alleged crime consists of having been present as a low-ranked guard at camp which sole purpose, it is alleged, was the extermination of Jews. Any guard who found this activity objectionable, the prosecution’s argument goes, could have deserted his post. However, the mere presence as a guard at Sobibór, or any of the other “pure extermination camps”, has until now not been considered punishable. In fact, at the Sobibór trial in Hagen in 1966, five out of the eleven accused former German camp personnel were acquitted, despite their admitted presence in the camp. Four of the convicted were given sentences of between 3 and 4 years imprisonment. Needless to say all of these men were of higher rank than Demjanjuk.

There is further the fact that Demjanjuk spent several years in Israeli prison, including time on death row, innocently accused of having been the camp guard “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. Demjanjuk has in fact been hunted, harassed, imprisoned and prosecuted continuously since 1975, when a pro-Soviet calumniator named Emil Hanusiak leveled the first accusations against him.

All of the above objections are dwarfed, however, by the following harsh facts:

1) There exists no documentary or material evidence whatsoever supporting the official claim that Sobibór served as a “pure extermination camp” where hundreds of thousands of Jews were gassed, buried and later burned on open-air pyres. The only documentary evidence mustered by prosecutors and holocaust historians consists of reports and transport lists confirming that large numbers of Jews were sent to the camp. Said documents have nothing to say about the fate of the Jewish deportees subsequent to their arrival in Sobibór. On the other hand a directive issued by Himmler on 5 July 1943, as well as a reply from Oswald Pohl on 15 July 1943 (Nuremberg document NO 482) speaks of “the Sobibor transit camp located in the Lublin district”. The camp was in fact located very near the former German-Soviet demarcation line, a most logical location for camp serving the transfer of Jews to the Occupied eastern territories.

2) In 2001 and 2008 two teams of archeologists, the first headed by the Polish professor Andrzej Kola, the second by the Israelis Isaac Gilead and Yoram Haimi and the Pole Wojciech Mazurek, went over the whole of Lager III, the “death camp proper of Sobibór – corresponding to an area of less than 4 hectares – using probe drillings as well as numerous excavations without finding any trace whatsoever of the camp’s alleged homicidal gas chambers. As it is radically impossible, given the limited area and time available, that these well-equipped teams of specialists would fail to locate any remain or trace, however slight, of the large concrete or brick building described by the self-styled eyewitnesses, only one conclusion is possible: the alleged homicidal gas chambers, never existed. On the other hand, Andrzej Kola discovered in Lager III a huge wooden barrack filled with remains of clothing and toilet articles, as well as a smaller building with a coke storage and remains of an oven – possibly one used for delousing with hot air or steam. According to the official version neither of these structures should have existed.[4] Together with the non-existence of the Sobibór gas chamber building their discovery greatly strengthens the revisionist case, namely that Sobibór (as well as Belzec and Treblinka) served as a transit camp where arriving Jewish deportees were showered and deloused before being sent on further east.

3) According to orthodox historiography not a single Dutch Jew was ever deported further east than Poland. However, on 16 April 1943 – at the very time when Demjanjuk supposedly aided in the extermination of Jews at Sobibór – the Vilna Jew Herman Kruk noted in his diary that “a rumor is circulating that there are about 19,000 Dutch Jews in Vievis”. Vievis is a small town between Vilna and Kovno, which during the years of German occupation was the location of a Jewish labor camp. On the same day Kruk wrote under the heading “More about the Dutch Jews” that he had “succeeded in getting a Jewish sign [evidently a cloth Star of David] and a copy of the order of the Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands about Jewish property.” Two weeks later, on 30 April 1943, Kruk wrote in his diary that “carloads filled with goods from the Dutch Jews are in the Vilna railroad station”. Furniture taken from these trains had been brought to workshops in the Vilna ghetto, where documents written in Dutch were found by the workers.[5] Since there is no reason on earth to believe that Kruk, a prominent member of the Vilna ghetto community, made up this story, it must be taken as an important piece of evidence in support of the revisionist transit camp hypothesis. Large transports of “foreign” Jews to the Vilna area in the spring of 1943 is also mentioned in the diary of the Jewish partisan fighter Aba Gefen (entry for 16 May 1943),[6] as well as by a news notice published in the Polish underground newspaper Biuletyn Informacyjny on 6 May 1943.[7] There are also several testimonies confirming the presence of Dutch Jews in Minsk in 1942-43.[8]

None of the above facts have been considered, or even mentioned in passing, during the trial in Munich. This should of course not surprise, as the blatant disregard of technical evidence has been common to all “extermination camp” trials.

To summarize:

- The murder weapon in the crime which Demjanjuk has now been sentenced for never existed
- There exists no documentary or material evidence supporting the claim that Sobibór functioned as a “pure extermination camp”; preserved documents in fact describe the camp as a “transit camp” (Duchgangslager)
- There is ample reason to believe that the 28,060 alleged victims were in fact sent on to the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union and the Baltic states.

Needless to say such facts does not matter one bit to the enlightened judges and prosecutors of the “freest state in German history”. The defense, undoubtedly aware that any mention of said facts would run afoul of Germany’s laws against “Holocaust denial”, settled on the usual strategy: accepting the officially sanctioned version of events while insisting on the personal innocence of the defendant. In the end, this did not help, and it probable, even likely, that the outcome of trial was more or less settled from the start. At the time of Demjanjuk’s extradition to Germany in May 2009 German holocaust historian Norbert Frei stated: “The Germans owe it to the victims and the survivors, but also to themselves, to prosecute Demjanjuk.”[9] Demjanjuk had to be sentenced, because the Germans “owed this” to themselves. Or to put it more clearly: The trial was necessary to keep “alive” in the minds of the German people (and the western world in general) the phantom of the “Holocaust”.

Demjanjuk’s defense attorney, Ulrich Busch, has stated that an appeal will be filed against the verdict. As for now Demjanjuk has been released from prison, as the sentence is not yet legally binding (rechtskräftig). If after the appeal it is determined that he should serve time in jail (5 years minus the nearly 2 years already spent in custody) it will further be decided whether the 91-year-old is physically fit for imprisonment.[10]

[1] “Fünf Jahre Haft für John Demjanjuk”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12 May 2011; online: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/urteil-am-landgericht-muenchen-fuenf-jahre-haft-fuer-john-demjanjuk-1.1096378
[2] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington D.C. 2010, pp. 9-12, 375-390.
[3] “FBI thought Demjanjuk evidence faked”; Associated Press, 12 April 2011, online: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gzn9sjjViXpoagiQbtyuSx3oZdEg?docId=2ed960173598473c94630a9a5ebe2cbe
[4] Cf. J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 149-167.
[5] Ibid, p. 366ff.
[6] Cf. Thomas Kues, “Evidence for the Presence of ‘Gassed’ Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 2″, section 3.3.11; online: http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_4/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews_2.php
[7] Klaus-Peter Friedrich, Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord in polnischen Augen: Einstellungen in der polnischen Presse 1942-1946/47, dissertation presented to the University of Cologne in 2002, p. 126. Online: http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/volltexte/2003/952/
[8] T. Kues, “Evidence for the Presence of ‘Gassed’ Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 2″, sections 3.3.17 and 3.5.
[9] Georg Bönisch, Jan Friedmann, Cordula Meyer, “Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Handlanger,” Der Spiegel, No. 26/2009, 22 June 2009 (www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-65794351.html).
[10] “John Demjanjuk kommt frei”, http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/ns-kriegsverbrecherprozess-john-demjanjuk-kommt-frei_aid_626638.html

Counting the years properly we are now facing a new decade. What will it bring for holocaust revisionism?
In one of my first articles for Smith’s Report, “What Remains to be Researched?” (issue 150) I outlined a number of areas still in need of research as well as mentioned a number of studies in need of translation of the English. In the two and a half years that have passed since then much of this research has in fact been carried out.

In 2010, coinciding with the new trial against John Demjanjuk in Munich, was published the first revisionist study on the Aktion Reinhardt “extermination camp” of Sobibór, co-authored by myself, Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno and titled Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality (TBR Books). The most important part of this book is undoubtedly the analysis of the results from an archeological survey carried out at the former Sobibór camp site by the Polish professor Andrzej Kola in the years 2000-2001. Kola had published an article on his research result in a rather obscure Polish journal already in 2001, but this was never translated into any Western language, or for that matter referenced by any of the orthodox experts on the Aktion Reinhardt camps (including the foremost mainstream expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis, who has published two revised editions of his study Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp after 2001). The reason for this is easy to see: While Kola pays the necessary lip service to the mass extermination dogma, the published results from his probings and diggings clearly show that the official claim that Sobibór served as a “pure extermination center” – a claim based exclusively on “eyewitness” testimony – do not hold water. Instead of the concrete gas chamber building described by the “eyewitnesses”, Kola discovered, at the site where this murder factory should have been located, the remains of a huge wooden barrack, with dimensions completely incompatible with those of the alleged gas chamber building, containing numerous fragments from toilet articles and clothing. Not far from this barrack he also discovered the remains of a smaller building containing an oven. These finds suggest a large delousing barrack and a smaller hot air delousing chamber, something which greatly strenghtens the revisionist hypothesis. Neither Kola nor a later Israeli-Polish team of archeologists active in 2007-8008 managed to find the slightest trace of the alleged gas chambers, despite finecombing the 3 hectare area of the “death camp proper” with probes and advanced equipment. In other words: the homicidal gas chambers at Sobibór never existed. Thanks to the research of Kola we may now conclude, based on solid proof, that Sobibór was in fact what Himmler had called it in a directive from 5 July 1943, namely a transit camp. In Chapter 10 of our study we discuss the deportation of Jews to the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union via the “extermination camps” – which were in fact all transit camps. A key piece of evidence presented here is the wartime diary of Herman Kruk, who served as head librarian in the Vilna ghetto. Kruk’s diary entries from April 1943 confirm that a large number of Dutch Jews, that according to mainstream historiography were “gassed” in Auschwitz and Sobibór, were in fact deported to Lithuania. The discovery of these diary entries in turn prompted me to write a survey of the available evidence for the eastward transit of supposedly murdered Jews, which is currently being published in installments in the Inconvenient History web journal under the title “Evidence for the presence of ‘gassed’ Jews in the Occupied eastern territories“.

In 2009 Carlo Mattogno published in Italian Il Campo di Chelmno tra Storia e Propaganda, the first full-length revisionist study on the first constructed of the “extermination camps”, Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof) in the Warthegau district of occupied Poland. This volume, which presents an abundance of evidence against the official Chelmno historiography, which has it that some 150 000 Jews were murdered at this camp in “gas vans”, is scheduled to be published in English by TBR Books in mid-2011 with the title Chelmno: Myth and Reality. Among other things, Mattogno demonstrates, based on the published results of four archeological surveys, that the only means of cremation which existed in the camp, a single open field oven of a known type, could only have incinerated at most 45 corpses within 24 hours, so that the cremation of the alleged 150 000 victims would have lasted until 1951, and that the amount of human remains present in the mass graves at the former camp site is absolutely incompatible with the supposed victim figure. Furthermore a diary entry of Herman Kruk’s from 4 July 1942 as well two diary entries penned on 14 and 30 July 1942 by Avraham Tory, the secretary of the Jewish Council in the Kovno ghetto, confirm independently of each other that many of the Jews deported to Chelmno ended up in Lithuania, where they were employed in road construction. With the publication of this volume, all six “extermination camps” (as well as the “auxiliary extermination camp” of Stutthof) have been devoted book-length revisionist studies. It thus marks an milestone in the history of holocaust revisionism.

Naturally Mattogno spends many pages of this book discussing the evidence for the alleged murder weapon employed at Chelmno, the so-called “gas vans”, concluding that the scanty “proofs” dished up by the holocaust historians for the existence and use of these vehicles is devoid of any real evidentiary value. The issue of the “gas vans”, which were allegedly used not only at Chelmno, but also in Serbia and the occupied Soviet territories, is also dealt with in detail in French revisionist Pierre Marais’ study Les camions de gaz en question from 1994, which will be published in a fully revamped English edition as The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation in late 2011.

The indefatigable Carlo Mattogno is most of all known as an expert on the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex, and in December 2010 his most exhaustive study on this subject, Auschwitz: The Case For Sanity, was published in English. This 756-page volume critically examines Jean-Claude Pressac’s and Robert Jan van Pelt’s desperate, deeply flawed and sometimes plain absurd attempts at proving the existence of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Birkenau, as well as traces how the Auschwitz gas chamber legend came into being. It is the most definite revisionist statement on the Auschwitz gas chambers to date. In late 2011 it will be followed by what might justly be called Mattogno’s long-awaited magnum opus, The Crematory Ovens of Auschwitz, a likewise monumental study on the five crematories at Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose incineration capacities play a crucial role in determining the veracity of the mass extermination claims. The publication of these two volumes however does not mark the end of Mattogno’s research efforts. In Healthcare in Auschwitz, scheduled for publication in late 2011, the vast measures undertaken by the Auschwitz camp administration for the sake of the inmates’ health are for the first time revealed in their full scope, including detailed regulations for the proper nourishment of the inmates and the construction of a large hospital complex wherein surgeries were carried out on thousands of Jewish inmates allegedly marked for death. Auschwitz: assistenza sanitaria, “selezione” e “Sonderbehandlung” dei detenuti immatricolati (Auschwitz: sanitary service, “selections” and “special treatment” of registered inmates, Effepi 2010) serves as a sort of companion volume to Healthcare in Auschwitz, as well as a follow-up to Mattogno’s previous study Special Treatment in Auschwitz (2004), and discusses the “special treatment” of registered Auschwitz inmates and the allegation of mainstream historians that this term meant the selection of sick detainees for killing in homicidal gas chambers. This volume will hopefully be published in English during 2012.

As was mentioned some months agp during a broadcast of Carolyn Yeager’s radio show Heretic’s Hour, Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno and myself are embarking on one of the largest revisionist research undertakings to date. The subject of this research project will be the last major aspect of the holocaust that has yet to be dealt with in detail by revisionists, namely the alleged mass extermination of 1 to 2 million Jews carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union. This part of the holocaust is especially complex, as we are not dealing here with isolated phantasms within very limited areas (I am talking here of the “gas chambers” in the “extermination camps”), but with mass shootings of the most varying scopes carried out at hundreds of locations during a three-year period. The orthodox allegations are based on a number of activity and situation reports supposedly based on messages dispatched by the Einsatzgruppen themselves. While there is no questions that mass shootings were carried out in the East, there are several questions in need of critical inquiry, chief of them a) Were the Einsatzgruppen ordered to exterminate Jews based solely on their ethnicity? b) Are the reports presented as evidence for the mass extermination genuine and reliable? and c) How many Jews were actually killed by the Einsatzgruppen? In order to answer these questions we must survey the entire available contemporary documentation on the Einsatzgruppen, which means going through tens of thousands of document pages. In fact, one of the initial obstacles we are now facing even before the start of our research is the pressing need to transfer this vast documentation from microfilm to digital media, something which unfortunately costs a rather large sum of money. We would be most grateful for any helping donations, however small (we can be reached via CODOH).

Where is Holocaust revisionism heading in this new decade? As seen above, we will soon have covered virtually all aspects of the holocaust complex in our research. What remains now, first and foremost, is to reconstruct, piece by piece, what actually happened to the Jews in German-controlled Europe during World War II, to map the real history of the camps, the ghettos, the deportations and the victim figures. Carlo Mattogno has dubbed this new constructive side of revisionism “affirmationism”. The best examples of this affirmationist trend in revisionist research can be found in Mattogno’s own latest studies on Auschwitz. While running the risk of sounding self-promoting, I see my own research concerning the actual fate of the “gassed” Jews as another example of affirmationism, as this seeks to provide an answer to the anti-revisionists’ favorite rhetorical question: If they were not gassed, then what happened to them?

During the coming decade revisionism will have many challenges to meet, but also many opportunities to take advantage of. I will begin with listing the challenges.
First and foremost there is a lack of revisionist researchers. The number of revisionists carrying out original research can easily be counted on both hands’ fingers. This does not mean that we necessarily need x number of full-time researchers. It would be just as well to have a sizable number of spare-time researchers, preferably from varied disciplinary backgrounds, who contribute high-quality articles from time to time, or only once or twice. As a saying in my native Sweden goes, “many small streams will form a large river”. Our opponents consists of an armada of certified court historians and skilled propagandists with virtually unlimited funds and resources as well as mass media and the legal and political systems on their side – yet despite this the field of “Holocaust studies” appears increasingly moribund, not to say braindead. We on the other hand, while lacking manpower as well as fundings, have dedication and the endurance that comes from knowing that historical truth is on our side and that this truth ultimately will prevail.

It would be most welcome if new revisionist researchers would appear in eastern Europe – I am thinking specifically of Romania, Moldavia, the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia – as natives of this region would have many advantages in dealing with the two great remaining problems of revisionist research, the Einsatzgruppen killings and the fate of the “gassed” Jews deported to the occupied Soviet territories. Especially welcome would be research from scholars with access to historical archives. Such researchers should realize that it is possible for them to publish findings of revisionist nature without running any risk of being charged with “Holocaust denial”, provided that they proceed cautiously. For example, if a historian, based on testimonal or documentary evidence, demonstrated the presence of French, Dutch or Belgian Jews in a camp or ghetto in Belarus during the period 1942-1944 – a fact not allowed for by mainstream historiography – but refrained from discussing how exactly these Jews had reached occupied Soviet territory and paid the necessary lip service to the orthodox version of the holocaust, he could go scot free, provided that he knew how to play his cards well. Even discoveries of documents concerning transports of supposedly “gassed” Jews to the East could possibly go unpunished with enough reference to the find constituting an “exception” (though publication outside peer-reviewed channels might prove necessary). This would amount to a sort of “salami tactics” undercover revisionism which might to some seem cowardly, but in some cases, and particularly under an increasingly totalitarian system, this might be the most effective way to proceed. This would serve to undermine the orthodox dogmas from within, by piling anomaly upon anomaly until critical mass is reached and the stability of the building of lies can no longer be maintained. I recommend such prospective researchers to read through my above-mentioned article series on the presence of “gassed” Jews in the East, which should be regarded as a stepping stone for further research into this issue.

The second challenge is the legal persecution of Holocaust revisionists taking place in many European nations. There is no sign that this persecution will decrease, rather we must be prepared that it will increase as revisionism gains new victories. The more the facts presented by us threatens the system, the more we in turn will be threatened by the system. Alarmingly a trend has recently been seen among the governments of the Western world, in connection with the Wikileaks “Cablegate”, to seek to control and censor the Internet. We should expect open or covert attacks on revisionist websites under the guise of campaigns against “online terrorism” and similar, and we should therefore do our best to counter the encroachment of Internet freedom and civil liberties. As long as the Internet remains free, revisionism cannot be stopped.

The third (thankfully minor) challenge is posed by what I prefer to call “pseudorevisionists”. Carlo Mattogno warned about this phenomenon already back in his book My Banned Holocaust Interview, originally published in 1995: “Unfortunately, for some years now, several groups of “Naziskins” have appropriated some revisionist positions for their own particular ideological-propagandistic purposes. These are revisionism’s most dangerous enemies: first, because they spread a version of revisionism which has been simplified to the point of banality, giving the impression that revisionist arguments are all nonsense; and secondly, because they provide a justification for those who claim that revisionism is a Nazi phenomenon (…)”. Today this challenge is not necessarily posed by only people mishandling revisionist arguments for political ends; there are also individuals spreading fallacious arguments in the name of holocaust revisionism. Their usual operating procedure is to claim that virtually every document relating to the fate of the Jews has been forged, without backing up their vast accusations with any form of evidence. Two concrete examples of this are so-called “Krema denial”, the assertion that all or most of the crematorium building at Auschwitz-Birkenau never existed, or that those structures were in fact bakeries or some such, and what might be called “Aktion Reinhardt denial”: the claim that the camps Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka not merely did not function as extermination centers, but actually did not exist at all, with no Jewish deportees ever reaching them. Both of these positions lack any kind of evidential support and are contradicted by archeological evidence as well as hundreds, even thousands of pages of doubtlessly authentic documents – evidence which is fully congruent with the revisionist position and which do not in any way provide proof of homicidal gas chambers. Whether this pseudorevisionism stems from ignorance, politically motivated subjectivism (“everything that furthers my agenda is permissible”) or covert activism by anti-revisionists and Zionist trolls (or “Hasbara activists” as they prefer to call themselves), it lends ammunition to our opponents, who can use these individuals as strawmen and say things like: “See, the revisionists are denying that the camps existed. They are either crackpots or liars”. I should remind my readers that the need to counter this challenge has nothing do with defending any revisionist “dogmas”. Authentic revisionism is, by the very definition of the term, alien to the concept of dogmatic thinking. It is not the abovementioned notions in themselves that are problematic, but the fact that they completely lack any evidential basis. To stubbornly maintain an assertion without present a serious argument for it is to cling to a dogma, hence why I call these positions “pseudorevisionist”. What must be defended is sound scientific methodology. I see no real need for revisionist researchers to spend their valuable time discussing these vapid claims in detail (a rebuttal to Krema denial has already been offered by Mattogno in his article “Zu den ‘nicht existierenden’ Krematorien von Birkenau”, Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, vol. 3, no. 3), but I recommend online revisionist debaters to not let such claims go unanswered – and to educate themselves.
Then we have the upcoming opportunities and good news.

To begin with it looks like the efforts of the powers that be to introduce anti-revisionist legislation into all member states of the European Union will be thwarted – at least temporarily – by constitutional friction in those states yet lacking such heresy laws. A recent statement from Sweden’s constitution committee implies that such legislation most likely cannot be passed before 2014. The “Anti-Racist” legal framework constructed for the implementation of an EU-wide anti-revisionist law has also been watered down by those member states still paying a modicum of respect to the freedom of speech.

The second piece of good news may not be very new, but will have implications for the coming decade. Some four years ago it was revealed that while postwar historians estimated that the Germans had operated between 5,000 and 7,000 detention sites, recent research shows that there in fact existed “somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 000 camps and ghettos of various categories”, the majority of them on located on occupied Soviet territory (“Largest archive of Holocaust records to open”, USA Today (online edition), 19 November 2006). Presently a 7-volume encyclopedia of these camps and ghettos is being compiled by Geoffrey Megargee of the USHMM. This piece of news is of great interest to revisionists, as it ties in with the question of the destination of the deported “gassed” Jews.
Other opportunities for further research will no doubt arise from the “European Holocaust Research Infrastructure” (EHRI), a 7 million euro project in which “seventeen research centres from Europe and Israel” will “transform the dispersed data available for Holocaust research in Europe, Israel and the United States into a cohesive corpus of resources” which will then be made available online for “maximum open access of these data” (cf. http://www.cegesoma.be/cms/index_en.php?article=1575). Experience has shown that openings of archives and releases of unpublished material strengthens the revisionist position while correspondingly weakening the orthodox.
Finally there is a very interesting development on the archeological frontier. As reported by me on the Inconvenient History blog, a young British forensic archeologist, Caroline Sturdy Colls of the University of Birmingham, is currently working on a project which involves identifying the mass graves at the site of the former Treblinka “extermination camp” using “the most up-to-date scientific techniques”. This project will form the basis of her doctoral dissertation, which will be presented at the earliest by the end of this year. Considering the fatal damage which Kola et. al.’s research activities at Belzec and Sobibór have caused orthodox holocaust historiography, the news of this high-tech survey is most welcome. One should never underestimate the Shoah defenders’ propensity for shooting themselves in their collective foot of clay.
All in all, I believe that this will prove one of the most important decades in the history of holocaust revisionism. Let us face every challenge with renewed energy, and may our opponents live in interesting times, as the old Chinese saying goes…

Below I present a number of additions to the survey material presented in the recently published “Evidence for the Presence of ‘Gassed’ Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 2”¹ which did not make it to the deadline. The additions are presented in order of the sections to which they belong.

Section 3.3.18. “Tsetsilia Mikhaylovna Shapiro”

The relevant passage from Shapiro’s testimony reads as follows:

“In addition to the local Jewish population, Jews from other countries – France, Germany, and elsewhere – were transported to the Minsk ghetto. The Jews of each country were settled in the ghetto separately. Barbed wire separated these different ‘associations of compatriots’ one from the other. They were forbidden to have contact with each other or with the local Jews.”²

Section 3.3.19. “Avraham Tory (Golub)”

The Unknown Black Book provides us with the names of four additional camps in Lithuania with Jewish inmates:

Gerulyay – Jewish camp with women and children (p. 303, 306).

Kocheniski (Kotsynishki) – agricultural labor camp with Jewish prisoners located not far from Kovno (pp. 313-315).

Renyay – Jewish camp (p. 303).

Vishvyany – Jewish camp (p. 303).

This brings the total number of camps to 47.

Additional witnesses

3.3.20. Nikolayev Prilezhaev

Nikolayev Prilezhaev was a 75-year-old professor and member of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences who escaped (at an unclear date) from occupied Minsk with the help of partisans. Soon after his escape his account of the suffering of the Jews of Minsk was recorded by M. Grubian, a correspondent of the Yiddish-language newspaper Eynikait. In this we read:

“Professor Prilezhaev says that not a trace remained of Minsk’s native Jews, and that a certain number of Jews from Lodz and Hamburg are still languishing in the ghetto, dying from hunger and disease.”³

Any convoys of Łódź Jews to reach Minsk must have done so via the “pure extermination camp” of Chełmno.

3.3.21. Golda Vasserman

In an account of the Tulchin Ghetto in Transnistria, written in 1944 by the Romanian Jewess Golda Vasserman, we find the following passage:

“In the autumn of 1942, there were more than three thousand Jewish families from Ukraine, Bukovina and Bessarabia in the Tulchin ghetto. [...]. Every day, new shipments of Jews would arrive in the ghetto. They were in part people who had been hiding in the forests for a long time, had made their way to the partisans and had then fallen into the hands of the fascist cutthroats, and in part Jews from various countries in Europe that had been occupied by Hitler’s forces.”⁴

According to mainstream historiography only Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Romania proper were deported to Transnistria.

3.3.22. Regina Leshchinskaya

Regina Leshchinskaya (b. 1930) was interned in the Pechora camp in northern Transnistria. She states that “in 1942, many Jews from Romania, Poland and Bessarabia” were brought to this camp.⁵ Mainstream historiography is unaware of any transports of Polish Jews to Transnistria.

3.3.23. Nisim Anolik

Nisim Anolik and his brother Benjamin were deported to Estonia from Lithuania on 3 September 1943.⁶ After first arriving in the Vaivara camp they were transferred to one labor camp after another, until in early February 1944 they found thenselves in the Ereda camp:

“Most of the people in the camp came from Kaunas and Vilno. There were also people from Prague, Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Riga, Brussels, and Paris. They lived separately from us, but we found out about them, since we would receive clothes with their names on them after they had been exterminated. All the prisoners wore numbers on the left side of their chests and on their right leg near the knee.”⁷

At a noth further stated date in May 1944 the Anolik brothers were transferred again, this time to the Klooga camp.⁸ The first and only convoy of French Jews to reach Estonia – according to orthodox historiography – departed Paris on 15 May 1944 with Kovno and Tallinn as its destinations (cf. 2.3.3.). According to Estonian historian Meelis Maripuu the French Jews who did not disembark in Kovno on 20 May arrived in Tallinn on the following day, i.e. 21 May 1944, and that on the same day “about 60 of the weaker prisoners were sent to ‘work’ from which they never returned”; 60 more French Jews were sent “to work in the forest” on 14 July, while another group of “about 100 sick prisoners” were sent away on 14 August. All the remaining French Jews were kept in the Tallinn Central Prison; later three Jews who were suspected of attempting to escape were shot.⁹ Although Maripuu assumes that the Jews sent away from the prison on 21 May were shot, it is not out of the question that they were in fact transferred to a labor camp, and that the Paris Jews observed by Anolik in Ereda came from this transport. As for the Jews from Prague, Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna they may have arrived with the documented transports from Theresienstadt and Berlin to Raasiku in the summer of 1942 or indirectly via the Riga Ghetto. The presence in Estonia of Jews from Brussels, i.e. from Belgium, however, is anomalous from an orthodox viewpoint.