A Premature News Report on a “Death Camp” for Jews

An alleged revisionist forgery

In 1990, German revisionist Udo Walendy published an issue of his journal Historische Tatsachen (Historical Facts) entitled “Der Fall Treblinka” (“The Treblinka Case”) that focused on the numerous absurd allegations surrounding this supposed “pure extermination camp”. On one of the first pages of this publication Walendy has reproduced in facsimile a newspaper clipping from the Polish-language London newspaper Dziennik Polski (Polish Daily) dated 11 July 1942, together with a German translation of a part of an article appearing in said clipping, together with a brief commentary on it. The part of the facsimile offered in translation appears to have been either rendered clearer and/or slightly enlarged or retyped and inserted on top of the facsimile (cf. Illustration 1).

Walendy’s introduction, translation and commentary read as follows in English translation:[1]

“On 11 July 1942 the Polish Daily, a newspaper of the Polish government in exile in London, reported on a press conference held by the British Minister of Information on 9 July 1942, quoting the exile-Polish Minister of the Interior S. Mikolajczyk word for word under the heading ‘The Slaughter of the Jews’:

‘…All in all 2,500 people were murdered this night, while the remaining 25,000 people were brought to camps in Belzec and Tremblinka. In Izbica Kujawska 8,000 individuals were driven away in an unknown direction. In Belzec and Tremblinka the people are reportedly killed with poison gas.’

One thing is certain, however, namely that it was only on 23 July 1942 – that is 14 days later! – with the arrival of the first transport of Jews from Warsaw that the Treblinka camp was opened!!

As demonstrated by the above-described press conference, the lie about mass gassings with poison gas at this place [Treblinka] had been disseminated to the world before the camp even existed!”

Due both to the way in which Walendy reproduced the newspaper article and the fact that revisionists Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno in their seminal study on Treblinka from 2002 (2004 in German) do not mention the Dziennik Polski article, while summarizing Walendy’s writings on the subject in their review of literature on the camp,[2] certain online anti-revisionists have asserted that Walendy committed a forgery, and that Graf and Mattogno tacitly ignored the article out of opportunistic motivations. “Holocaust scholar” Nick Terry writes in an online forum post from 19 June 2009:[3]

“[…]
 this […] is actually a rather crude denier forgery, more specifically an alteration of the original text. Look at the facsimile and blow-up of the original Polish article in the relevant issue of Historische Tatsachen. The crucial passage is highlighted in such a way that it does not match the rest of the paragraph. […]
One thing that is a bit of a give-away is the fact that none of the other reports on the July ’42 press conference in English-language papers mention Treblinka, nor [does] any of the works which used information from the government-in-exile.”

In another forum posting from the same date, Terry writes further:[4]

“[…] I would only be compelled to accept the reference if someone were to produce the original in a clear modern scan or in a stable digicamera picture. The retyping means that the burden of proof is squarely back on denial’s shoulders, and until such time as someone looks at the original, we can dismiss the reference. Of course, when someone looks at the original and can show that Walendy definitely altered the text, then that’s his credibility shot to pieces. Yet again.

A quick and dirty gauge of whether this is a forgery or not is the fact that Mattogno and Graf did not pounce in it and include it in their Treblinka book. If Dziennik Polski had really mentioned Treblinka as a death camp before it opened, they would have been all over it.”

Terry repeated this stance on 13 May 2011:[5]

“[…] the facsimile in Walendy’s screed is very clearly manipulated and the underlying original text is obscured deliberately by [Walendy]. The Dziennik Polski article reports on a very well-known press conference of the Polish government in exile, which was widely reported elsewhere, with literally no other paper mentioning extermination at Treblinka. Nor do any of the historians who have examined the impact of the Bund report, which was the source that provided the information used in the press conference.

The coup de grace is surely the non-appearance of Walendy’s gambit in Mattogno and Graf’s book. They cite Walendy’s work but don’t cite this particular attempt to insinuate fraud and hoaxing.

[…] Treblinka II began to be constructed from April 1942 and was built evidently using Jewish labour. (Not one single Jewish labourer who helped build Treblinka II, or indeed Belzec or Sobibor, survived the war.) The fact that underground reports began to distinguish the older Treblinka labour camp from a new and more lethal Treblinka camp in May-June 1942 indicates only that the new camp was more lethal, which was evidently true, as the Jewish labour force was evidently being decimated long before the camp opened for ‘business’ proper. The pre-opening reports are clearly exaggerated, but that is nothing unusual. They don’t yet indicate a knowledge of Treblinka as a site of mass extermination, which emerged only later in the summer, after 22 July. None of these sources speak of five figure killings like Walendy’s forgery. […]

In the end […] Walendy’s facsimile is unusable as a source because it is so clearly a forgery that the burden of proof shifts squarely back onto whoever wants to use such a dubious source. This is surely why neither of the leading denier gurus thought it worth their while including it in their supposedly definitive screed.”

But is Walendy’s facsimile really a brazen forgery, reproducing something that was never written in that newspaper and on that date? In order to determine that once and for all, I will in the following section present a full translation of the Dziennik Polski article together with facsimiles.

The text of the Dziennik Polski article of 11 July 1942

The article quoted by Walendy is found on the third page of the 11 July 1942 issue of Dziennik Polski (cf. Ill. 2). This page bears the following triple headline:[6]

“The Tragic Situation of the Polish Nation
A country seeks the awakening of the world conscience
Report of Minister Mikolajczyk at the British Ministry of Information”

Below this headline we find the following editorial note in italics:

“We provide here data [dane] on the state of affairs in Poland, presented the day before yesterday [i.e. 9 July 1942] by Minister Mikołajczyk to British and foreign reporters at a press conference held by the British Ministry of Information. These data constitute a summary of a comprehensive report that Minister Mikołajczyk gave to the National Council of the Republic of Poland.”

Below on the same page are a number of articles containing such “data”, most of them dealing strictly with the sufferings of ethnic Poles, as well as some notices on the world’s reactions to the (alleged) events. Only two items deal with mass murders of Jews: a brief notice on massacres of Jews at Ponar near Vilna[7] (formerly a Polish city) and the text quoted by Walendy, which is entitled “The slaughter of the Jews” (“Rzeź Żydów”, cf. Ill. 3). I will give here this article in full translation:

“The Slaughter of the Jews
The situation of the Jews presents itself even worse. The matter of the Warsaw ghetto is well known. Hunger, death and diseases continually and systematically threaten the Jewish population. In the area of Lublin on the night of 23-24 March [1942] the Jewish population was deported. The sick and disabled were killed on the spot. All children aged 2-3 years from the orphanage, who numbered 108, were sent away from the city along with their nurses and murdered. Altogether 2,500 people were murdered that night, while the remaining 26,000 were sent to camps in Bełżec and Tremblinka [wywieziono do obozów w Bełżcu i Tremblince]. From Izbica Kujawska 8,000 people were deported in an unknown direction. Reportedly in Bełźec and Tremblinka the killing is going on with the help of poisonous gas [za pomoca gazów trujacych]. Mass murders in Rawa Ruska and Bilgoraj where the Jewish communities ceased to exist. On March 22nd the SS shot dead 120 people in the marketplace of Wąwolnica near Kazimierz. An unknown number was moved out of the city and murdered. On March 30th 350 people were deported and killed on their way to Nałęczów. The rest was put inside wagons that were sealed and sent away. In Mielec a total of 1,300 people were killed on March 9. 2,000 Jews were killed in Mir; 2,500 in Nowogródek; 1,800 in Wołożyn; 4,000 in Kojdanów. From Hamburg 30,000 Jews were brought to Minsk; all of them were shot. In Lwów the count is of 30,000, in Vilna of 60,000, in Stanisławów around 15,000, in Tarnopol of 5,000, in Złoczów 2,000, in Brzeżany of 4,000 murdered Jews. Murders of Jews are also from Tarnów, Radom, Zborów, Kołomyja, Sambor, Stryj, Drohobycz, Zbaraż, Brody, Przemyśl, Kolo and Dąbie.
Under the constraint to dig their own graves – shootings with machine guns [kolumłotami] and killings with grenades – even poisoning with gas [zatruwanie gazem] are the daily methods of destroying the Jewish people, while it is understood that even as in Lwów the Jewish communities themselves had to draw up the list of criminals.”

A closer look at the facsimile of the article (Ill. 3) will show that it is difficult from the extant copy to make out all digits of the figure of Jews deported from the Lublin area to the “camps in Bełźec and Tremblinka”. I therefore provide an enlargement of this section of the article in Illustration 4. From this we may determine that it is a five-digit figure, since there is a full stop (as customary in Polish as well as German) following the second digit, three digits following this stop, and no space left for further digits before the word “wywieziono”). The first digit is clearly a “2”; the third and fourth are both a “0”. While the last digit is badly mangled in the copy, it stands to reason that it is also a “0” (or we would have to believe that someone estimated, say, 26,004 Jews to have been deported). The second digit was read as a “5” by Walendy, but comparison with the clear “5” on the middle of the preceding line gives a hint that this is not the case. The only digit fitting the features of the ink outlines is a “6”. The number of Jews reported as deported on 23-24 March 1942 is therefore 26,000.

The significance of the article

It is unanimously claimed by Holocaust historians that the Treblinka II extermination camp began its operation with the arrival of the first of the transports from the Warsaw Ghetto, which departed on 22 July 1942 and reached the camp the same or the following day. This means that Mikołajczyk reported on the alleged extermination actions at Treblinka a whole two weeks before they are supposed to have commenced. Even more remarkable, it is alleged that a machinery of mass murder was in operation at Treblinka three and a half months earlier, on 23-24 March 1942. According to the official version of events the Jews evacuated from the Lublin area at this time (the second half of March) were sent to be murdered in the Bełżec camp, which had opened on 17 March 1942.[8] There can be no confusion with the third Aktion Reinhardt camp, Sobibór, since that camp opened only in early May 1942.

Could it be that the nearby labor camp Treblinka I, notorious among Warsaw citizens as a penal camp, was mistaken for an extermination camp because of transports of Jews there? Jewish Holocaust historian David Silberklang provides the following history of this camp:[9]

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

The Polish Jew Israel Cymlich was sent from the small town of Falenica to the Treblinka labor camp in August 1942. According to Cymlich’s testimony there were 400 Jews and about 200 Poles in the camp at the time of his arrival; by November 1942 there were 1,200 Jewish and some 100 Polish detainees. Most of the Polish inmates stayed in the camp for only two to three months.[10]

According to Yitzhak Arad the Treblinka I camp was established in the summer of 1941.[11] Another source claims that the camp did not open until December 1941.[12] This is supported by a preserved proclamation in German and Polish[13] which indicates that the Treblinka labor camp was established (at least formally) either in November or December 1941. If we are to accept the – unsourced – Treblinka I death toll given by Silberklang, i.e. less than 10,000, it would mean an average of approximately (10,000 ÷ 32 ≈) 312 deaths per month, assuming for the sake of argument that the camp did not open until December 1941. For the period of October 1941–May 1942 this would mean a total of some 2,500 deaths. Here we must recall Silberklang’s statement that the majority of the inmates during the first period were Poles. Yet even if half of the deaths were Jewish, this figure – 1,250 spread out over a longer period of time – seems extremely unlikely to have triggered rumors of a death camp for Jews.

Could it then be, as suggested by Nick Terry, that the “evident” “decimation” of Jews working with the construction of the Treblinka II camp caused the “exaggerated” “pre-opening reports”?

Arad provides the following description of the construction of the “extermination camp”:[14]

“In late April or early May 1942, an SS team arrived in the Treblinka area, toured the region, and determined the site where a death camp would be erected. […] The construction of the death camp began in late May/early June 1942. […] I as SS Obersturmführer Richard Thomalla, who had completed his building mission in Sobibor and had been replaced there by Stangl in April 1942. Technical assistance in the erection of the gas chambers was also made available.”

“The SS and Police Leader of the Warsaw district was responsible for the erection of the camp. Polish and Jewish prisoners from Treblinka penal camp, as well as Jews from neighboring towns, were provided for labor. […] None of the Jewish workers who were employed at the building of the camp survived.”[15]

Arad goes on to quote a Polish Treblinka I detainee, Jan Sulkowski:[16]

“The Germans killed the Jews either by beating them or by shooting them. I witnessed cases where the SS-men […] during the felling of the forests, forced Jews to stand beneath the trees which were about to fall down. In both cases 4 Jews were thus killed. Besides, it often happened that the SS-men raided the huts of the Jewish workers and killed them in cold blood. […] I was told by the SS-men that we were building a bath-house and it was after a considerable time that I realized that we were constructing gas chambers.”

About when did the construction period of the Treblinka camp commence? To begin with, the source offered by Arad for the late April/early May 1942 inspection tour of the future camp area is the memoirs of the Treblinka station master Franziszek Zabecki. Arad also quotes another piece of testimony of importance in this regard, namely that of Erwin Herman Lambert the alleged architect of the Aktion Reinhardt gas chamber buildings:[17]

“The Treblinka camp was still in the process of construction. I was attached to a building team there. Thomalla was there for a limited time only and conducted the construction work of the extermination camp. During that time no extermination actions were carried out. Thomalla was in Treblinka for about four to eight weeks. Then Dr. Eberl arrived as camp commander. Under his direction the extermination Aktionen of the Jews began.”

We know from Irmfried Eberl’s personal correspondence that he was still in Sobibór on 26 April 1942 and that on 29 June 1942 he had already spent several days in Treblinka.[18] A letter from Eberl to Commissar of the Warsaw Ghetto dated 19 June 1942 and requesting a number of items for the “Lager Treblinka” strongly indicates that he was present in the camp by this date at the latest.[19] From this and Lambert’s testimony it follows that Thomalla was present in Treblinka supervising the construction beginning late May to mid-June. Considering that all sources seem to agree on the fact that the construction of Sobibór was concluded by the end of April, and that Thomalla was in charge of the construction of both Sobibór and Treblinka, it seems most likely that the construction of the latter camp did not commence until around the time of the opening of the Sobibór camp, i.e. early May 1942. According to the verdict of the Düsseldorf Treblinka trial (1965) the camp was constructed “in the summer” of 1942.[20]

The diary of the Warsaw Ghetto elder Adam Czerniaków reports that 150 young German Jews were sent from Warsaw to “Treblinka” on 10 April 1942. Another 78 German Jews were sent there in late April 1942, a further group of thirty on 23 May 1942.[21] Cymlich states among the Jewish detainees in Treblinka I there was a group of German and Czech Jews who had participated in the construction of Treblinka II: “They had worked for a long time at constructing the other camp, without a clue as to what they were building”.[22] Indeed, if we are to trust Cymlich, the “knowledge” of the prisoners as regards the alleged mass-murder installation was far removed from today’s established version:[23]

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

No wonder then that it took “considerable time” also for Sulkowski to figure out that he was constructing gas chambers…

Czerniaków’s diary entry from 23 April 1942 states that 1,000 Czech Jews arrived in Warsaw that day.[24] Thus it is possible that both German and Czech Jews were among the 30 people sent to Treblinka on 23 May (Czerniaków does not mention the nationality of these Jews). Were these Jews sent to Treblinka in order to work on the construction of the Treblinka II camp? Regardless of which, it is clear that the Germans in charge of building Treblinka II did not consider these Jews to be carriers of a terrible state secret, for otherwise they would surely not have let them live and sent them to the Treblinka labor camp, where they could easily pass on this “knowledge” at the camp latrine – which fittingly was the gossip exchange of choice[25] – to Polish inmates who, as mentioned, were often released after two to three months. How many inmates died in the Treblinka II camp during its construction phase will likely remain unknown, but there does not exist the slightest evidence that mass murders were taking place at that time, and certainly not mass death on a scale that would be sufficient to trigger rumors about a death camp. Again, if that had been the case, why let Jews from the construction work force be transferred to the labor camp?

Considering the above evidence, one must conclude that construction of Treblinka II likely did not begin until May 1942 – possibly not until the latter half of that month – and that consequently it is very unlikely that work on the first “gas chamber building” ­– which the Poles employed for its construction “mistook” for a bath house – was finished until June. Nonetheless propaganda about a new “death camp” for Jews at Treblinka was in circulation at least as early as the end of May! In a survey of death-camp rumors Jewish Holocaust historian Ruth Sakowska writes as follows:[26]

“At that time, i.e. in late May and early June 1942, the clandestine press published reports on two camps in Treblinka: the labor camp and the death camp. The first reference to the killing center there is to be found in a text by Gutkowski entitled ‘The Scroll of Agony and Destruction,’ which probably constitutes the draft of an Oneg Shabbat press bulletin. In the entry dated May 29, 1942, we read: ‘There are two camps in Treblinka: a labor camp and a death camp. In the death camp people are not murdered by shooting (the criminals are saving ammunition), but by means of a lethal rod [in the Yiddish original: troytshtekn].’ This item, without mention of the ‘lethal rod,’ was printed on June 2, 1942 by the newspaper Yedies. The next issue of that paper, dated June 9, 1942, carried an article entitled ‘The Death Camp in Trenblinka [sic]’ In it we read:

‘A Pole who managed to bribe his way out of the camp relates: ‘I worked with the German personnel of the labor camp. The Poles present there were assigned the task of digging huge pits. The Germans brought a group of about 300 Jews every day. They were ordered to undress and get into the pit. The Poles then had to cover the pits with soil, burying the people there alive. After they finished their work, they were shot.’”

Here we clearly have the notion of a killing center for Jews, even if the idea of gassings (or killing by steam for that matter) had not yet entered the story and the scale of the alleged killings is smaller. It is perhaps significant though that both the 29 May and (less explicitly) the 9 June version rely on the propagandistic theme that the Germans were employing outlandish and cruel methods of murder in order to “save bullets”. Some 40-50 days after these “revelations” the mass murders at Treblinka began according to established historiography. The idea of industrialized mass murder in “death chambers” must have been attached to the new Treblinka camp at some time between mid-June and – at the latest – 8 July (the day before the press conference).

On 1 August 1942, the Communist underground newspaper Trybuna Wolnosci reported that the Jews deported from Warsaw were ostensibly “resettled in the East” but in reality subjected to “mass executions and total extermination.”[27] Considering that this article was written on 31 July 1942 at the latest it had apparently taken the Communist sleuths of this paper less than one week to “expose” Treblinka II as an extermination camp. Still that amazing piece of investigative journalism pales in comparison with the clairvoyance of the abovementioned anonymous propagandists.

The “Discovery” of the Aktion Reinhardt “Death Camps”

From an exterminationist viewpoint there can really only be two possible – and equally unsatisfactory – explanations regarding the existence of the Dziennik Polski article and the May 1942 reports on a new “death camp” at Treblinka: either the German secrecy was so catastrophically lacking that the “terrible secret” of the use of the future Treblinka II camp leaked out virtually as soon construction of the camp began – despite claims to the contrary from the inmates who participated in the construction – or else the Polish and Polish-Jewish journalists and propagandists were super-sleuths privy to top secret Nazi plans for extermination.

While we do not know of any “premature” black propaganda reports about the two other Aktion Reinhardt camps, i.e. Bełżec and Sobibór, there exist some remarkably early reports regarding the former camp. The first known report about Bełżec dates from 8 April 1942 – some three weeks after the opening of the camp – and speaks of mass murders carried out using electric current or gas.[28]

The first known report about Sobibór, which speaks of arriving convoys of Lublin Jews being “murdered with gas, machine-guns and even by being bayoneted” was published on 1 July 1942, i.e. some 50 days after the opening of that camp.[29] The most likely reason for Sobibór being overlooked until then is no doubt the relatively small number of Jews that was sent there.[30]

From a revisionist viewpoint the early (even premature) birth of the Aktion Reinhardt “death camp” narrative is not difficult to explain. That the Germans were pursuing a policy of mass deportation against European Jewry would have been abundantly clear to Allied intelligence and their contacts in the Polish-Jewish underground already by early 1942, both from official or semi-official statements from German leaders and the fact that large numbers of Jews were already being transferred in stages to the east: beginning in autumn 1941 nearly 20,000 Jews from Central and Western Europe were deported to the Łódz (Litzmannstadt) ghetto, some further 4,000 to the Warsaw ghetto in early 1942, and nearly 70,000 Reich, Protectorate and Slovak Jews were sent to ghettos in the Lublin District during the first half of 1942.[31] Even more significantly, more than 20,000 Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate had been deported directly to Latvia, Belarus and Lithuania by the time Bełżec opened in March 1942.[32]

The German conquest of Soviet and formerly Soviet-annexed territory following Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 meant that the German railway administration had to face certain transport problems caused by the fact that Germany and the USSR employed different widths for their railway gauges. While the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact lasted, efforts were in fact made to alleviate this logistical problem, as described in a 1940 New York Times article recently adduced by Eric Hunt:[33]

“Nine pairs of railway stations on the New German-Russian frontier will hum soon with activity through the reloading of Russian raw materials and German industrial goods from wide to standard gauge freight cars and vice versa, if Nazi expectations are fulfilled.

These stations, all in what until last September was Poland, are listed with those on the German side first: Szczepki, Augustow, Prostken-Grajewo, Malkinia-Zaremba, Platerow-Siemiatycze, Terespol-Brest-Litovsk, Chelm-Jagodzin, Belzec-Rawa Ruska, Zurawicz-Przemysl and Nowogrod-Salus. […]

Of the nine projected transfer points along the German-Russian frontier all but one have already been opened to bring minerals, oil and grain to Germany. The ninth – at Chelm-Jagodzin – must wait until a new bridge is built over the Bug River.”

Preserved documents show that the direct transports to Belarus often travelled via Platerow.[34]

It is an already well-known fact that the Aktion Reinhardt camps were located near the Soviet-German demarcation line and therefore near to were the gauge changed. The Treblinka camp was located only some 5 kilometers south of Małkinia and the Bug River (which formed most of the demarcation line). Sobibór is located only some 2.5 km west of the Bug River.[35]

Sobibór was connected to the Chełm-Włodawa railway line.[36] From testimony we also know that trains travelling from Minsk to Sobibór in the autumn of 1943 (at the time of the evacuation of the Minsk ghetto) passed through Chełm; the same no doubt held true for transports in the opposite direction.[37] Sobibór is located some 40 km north from Chełm.[38] From Chełm the railway line continued east into the Ukraine with the city of Kowel as final station.[39]

As seen from the abovementioned New York Times article Bełżec was located right at one of the nine transfer points. That the camp was not on the border of the Generalgouvernement is due to its expansion to incorporate East Galicia (the Lemberg district) on 1 August 1941 (before 22 June 1941 Rawa Ruska had thus belonged to the Ukrainian SSR).

Upon noticing the establishment of a series of small camps – the construction of Bełżec began already in late fall 1941 – with railway connections, all located in the immediate vicinity of the former demarcation line and the Soviet-German railway transfer points, it would not have taken long for the propagandists to figure out that the Germans were constructing transit camps for Jews. The very nature of these camps – temporary stop-overs from where deportees after passing through a delousing process would continue to distant, little-known places in the east under another administration, with no prospects of a return west in the foreseeable future – could easily have suggested the “pure extermination center” story.

Unfortunately for the propagandists, some knowledge about the actual destinations for some of the Jewish transports seeped through to the civilian population. The initial reaction of the propagandists seems to have been to dismiss these transports as exceptions or “decoy transports” used to fool the Jews remaining behind into believing that actual resettlement was taking place. Later, when postcards from deported Jews continued to reach the Warsaw ghetto, one launched the allegation that the Germans were forging the letters or forcing deportees to write postcards with misleading contents after their arrival at the “extermination camps.”[40]

Conclusion

When Udo Walendy reproduced the Dziennik Polski article in 1990 he would have done better to either provide his readers with a proper facsimile or with an annotation clarifying the editing done to the reproduction – simply in order to not provide his opponents with ammunition. However, Walendy did provide the most basic and important element of a scientific argument, namely a source (i.e. the name of the newspaper and the publication date). Therefore, Walendy’s critics could easily have verified the quote. Instead, the opposite happened, as anti-revisionist and “Holocaust historian” Nick Terry a priori declared Walendy a forger without bothering to look up the original newspaper article. In fact, in the above cited posting from 19 June 2009 Terry writes:

“I am looking forward to consulting a copy of Dziennik Polski for the relevant date at some point in the future and showing that this is an unequivocal example of denier forgery.”

As is to be expected, this verification has now been done—by revisionists instead of by Terry and his cohorts. To the sure disappointment of Mr. Terry it turns out that he was wrong on all points. Let us summarize:

• Walendy’s quote from the article (as well as the transcription apparently edited into the facsimile) is correct, with the exception of a single obscured digit (26,000 misread as 25,000) and some minor wording.
• The pre-opening reports do indeed indicate a “knowledge” of Treblinka as a site used for mass killings.
• The very much authentic Dziennik Polski article does speak of a five-figure killing in connection with the camp. To make it even worse for the hapless exterminationists, it claims that Jews were sent to be gassed in Treblinka already in March 1942, i.e. some two months before the camp was even being constructed.
• There exists no reason to believe that the conditions among the inmates in Treblinka II during the construction phase of that camp could have given rise to the contents of the above-mentioned reports.

As for Terry’s claim that Mattogno and Graf skirted the Dziennik Polski article “because it is so clearly a forgery” this is not correct either. The actual reason for its non-inclusion is simply that it was overlooked among the wealth of other material on the camp eventually reproduced and discussed in the study in question.[41] Nick Terry’s eagerness to ascribe forgeries and bad faith to his opponents without evidence to back up his accusations speaks for itself.

Notes: