Critique of the Matt Cockerill vs. Thomas Dalton Debate, Part 6

Matt Cockerill writes on page three:

“[I]t should be emphasized at the outset that substantially all the Jews deported to the aforementioned camps vanished without a trace. The marginal number of survivors of these camps included several thousand Jews selected for forced labor and deported to work in camps in the west, as well as perhaps a few hundred escapees. Well over 99% of the 1.5 million deportees ‘disappeared’ in Kulmhof, Sobibór, Belzec, and Treblinka II.”

Matt Cockerill adds on page 19:

“However, deniers either decline to offer an alternative narrative as to what happened to the Jews—based on the assumption that they carry no burden of proof for their claims—or offer an outright ridiculous one: the idea that the Jews, or at least the 1.4 million who ‘disappeared’ in the Reinhardt camps in 1942 and 1943, were channeled out of the camps and resettled. The problem is that there is zero evidence of resettlements existing. (Common sense requires us to assume that there would be testimonial, infrastructural, economic, and communicative traces of a settlement—a nation, really—of 1.4 million Jews in 1940s Europe.)”

“The failure of deniers to explain how millions of Jews ‘disappeared’ in Nazi custody during the war—that is, their failure to offer a serious counter-narrative to extermination—puts them outside the scope of historical practice. Barring the uncovering of earth-shattering new evidence of settlements of Jews channeled out of the Reinhardt camps, both Holocaust denial and the ‘resettlement’ theory developed by deniers will continue to be stigmatized as pseudo-historical.”

Matt Cockerill adds on page 31:

“I would now ask our readers to give me a moment to illuminate how ridiculous denier resettlement theory is. A resettlement of the 1.4 million Reinhardt-camp deportees would have amounted to a community (a country, really; ‘Jewlantis’) with a larger population than contemporary Estonia. And yet—in contrast to, say, the Daunians, a preliterate, ancient civilization in what is now southern Italy, for whose communities we have considerable archaeological evidence—there is no evidence for Jewlantis, a European nation that supposedly existed within living memory.”

Matt Cockerill adds on pages 31 and 32:

“You attempt, Thomas, to diminish the absurdity of resettlement theory by asserting that there is no reason to assume all 1.4 million were resettled in one ‘new nation’ of Jews. Okay. Let us suppose the 1.4 million were deposited into 24 settlements with an average population of 57,000; that would be equivalent to twenty four Greenlands. But whether we are talking about one Estonia (‘Jewlantis’), twenty four Greenlands, or for that matter thirty five Leichensteins, common sense still requires us to assume there would be physical evidence (infrastructure, homes, human remains, etc.), as well as testimonial, infrastructural, economic, and communicative traces of these nations, not to mention train records of the actual deportations from the Reinhardt camps to the East. But you have literally nothing. There is no evidence for ‘resettlements.’”

Matt Cockerill adds on page 32:

“I have by now indulged your resettlement daydream quite enough. The bottom line is that, by setting up an extermination-resettlement dichotomy, you (like Graf, Mattogno, Kues, and Rudolf) have boxed yourself into a position best described as a joke.”

Matt Cockerill adds on page 39:

“You were also unable to provide any evidence for the existence of Jewish resettlements, despite your endorsement of resettlement as an alternative explanation as to how millions of Jews (or at least the 1.4 million Jews in the Reinhardt camps) disappeared in Nazi custody. Unless you can find evidence of resettlements, your alternative explanation as to what happened to the Jews, and your Holocaust denial more generally, cannot be considered legitimate forms of historical inquiry.”

Matt Cockerill adds on page 45:

“A foundational problem for Holocaust deniers is their lack of an explanation for how millions of Jews disappeared in the German camp systems. The problem of the ‘disappeared’ millions is one that anti-deniers have brought up for decades, and it repeatedly came up in our debate.

To be sure, Mattogno, Graf, Rudolf, and other more sophisticated deniers, who presumably know the basics about how history is written, have recognized their epistemic obligation to offer an explanation for the disappeared Jews. They have hypothesized that the Jews were channeled out of the camps and resettled. You embraced this theory in this debate, contending that a proportion of the disappeared Jews—the 1.4 million Jews sent to the Reinhardt camps—were resettled in the Russian East. But resettlement theory is a joke, Thomas! As I have repeatedly written in this debate, there is no evidence for resettlements of Reinhardt-camp Jews. And this lack of evidence is an absurdity, given that a 1.4 million Jews would have amounted to a country larger than contemporary Estonia.

To quote myself at greater length: Common sense […] requires us to assume there would be physical evidence (infrastructure, homes, etc.), as well as testimonial, infrastructural, economic, and communicative traces of these [resettlements], not to mention train records of the actual deportations from the Reinhardt camps to the East. But you have exactly (precisely) nothing.”

Matt Cockerill concludes on page 45:

“On the second point, or the question of how millions of Jews disappeared in Nazi custody, you embrace the “resettlement theory” of Mattogno, Graf, Rudolf, and Kues. But this narrative is embarrassed by its lack of evidence. As I have noted repeatedly, there is no evidence of resettlements of millions or—if we are limiting the discussion to Jews who disappeared in the Reinhardt camps—1.4 million Jews.”

My Response

This is certainly a big issue to Matt Cockerill and other promoters of the Holocaust. However, the evidence is overwhelming that the Aktion Reinhardt camps were transit camps.

Heinrich Himmler made numerous orders and statements indicating that the Aktion Reinhardt camps were transit camps. For example, on July 5, 1943, Himmler personally gave the following order:[1]

“The transit camp Sobibór is to be converted into a concentration camp. In the concentration camp a plant for the repair of captured munitions is to be established.”

This instruction, directed to German officials who were clear about the actual character of the Sobibór camp, was a Reich secret. For what reason would Himmler have used the expression “Durchgangslager” (transit camp)? Certainly not to pull the wool over the eyes of his underlings who for a long time had known about Sobibór.

On September 18, 1941, in a letter to Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, Himmler wrote that, in accord with the wishes of the Führer, the Jews were supposed to have been transported out of the Altreich and the Protectorate “into the eastern territories newly incorporated into the Reich two years ago,” but merely “as a first stage,” in expectation of a deportation “still farther to the east.”[2]

On November 18, 1943, in a speech given in Kraków before SS leaders and other German officials, Himmler spoke of:[3]

“[…] these 16 million foreign peoples, whose numbers were once made even larger by an enormous number of Jews, who of course now have emigrated or been brought to the east.”

Himmler also made the following declaration in Bad Tölz on November 23, 1942:[4]

“The Jewish question in Europe has completely changed. The Führer once said in a Reichstag speech: If Jewry triggers an international war, for example, to exterminate the Aryan people, then it won’t be the Aryans who will be exterminated, but Jewry. The Jews have been resettled outside Germany, they are living here, in the east, and are working on our roads, railways etc. This is a consistent process, but is conducted without cruelty.”

Some Holocaust historians dismiss these and other statements by Himmler by saying that the Nazis used code words to hide their genocide of European Jewry. This theory does not explain why Himmler used explicit written orders for his other crimes. For example, Himmler authorized in writing many illegal human medical experiments and executions in the German concentration camps. It is absurd to think that Himmler hid the genocide of European Jewry behind code words, while his other crimes were clearly stated in writing.

In the months that followed their transfer east, letters and post cards addressed to the relatives of the deported Jews arrived in the Warsaw Ghetto from Bialystok, Pinsk, Bobruisk, Brzesc, Smolensk, Brest-Litovsk, and Minsk. Some letters and cards were sent by mail, while some arrived through the underground. Many letters mentioned that the senders were working hard, but confirmed that they were being properly fed.[5]

The German policy of resettling Jews in the east is also supported by the demographic studies of Eugene M. Kulischer. Kulischer, who was a member of the International Labor Office in Montreal during World War II, published in 1943 the book The Displacement of Population in Europe.[6] This book used the work of 24 institutions that had at their disposal a huge network of channels of information in the various European nations. Kulischer was thus able to base his demographic studies upon the best existing sources.

Kulischer devoted an entire section of his book to the expulsion and deportation of Jews during World War II. Kulischer wrote:[7]

“For the Polish ghettos are not the last stage in the forced eastward migration of the Jewish people. On 20 November 1941, the Governor General, Hans Frank, broadcast the information that the Polish Jews would ultimately be transferred further east. Since the summer of 1942 the ghettos and labor camps in the German-occupied Eastern Territories have become the destination of deportees both from Poland and from western and central Europe; in particular, a new large-scale transfer from the Warsaw ghetto has been reported. Many of the deportees have been sent to the labor camps on the Russian front; others to work in the marshes of Pinsk, or to the ghettos of the Baltic countries, Bielorussia and Ukraine.”

The minutes of the Wannsee Conference held on January 20, 1942 do not mention anything about an extermination program against Jews. Instead, the objective of the conference was to exclude Jews from a) every sphere of German life and b) from the German nation’s living space. The minutes of this meeting state:[8]

“As the only feasible temporary measure to achieve these goals, Jewish emigration from the Reich territory was being further accelerated and pursued methodically.”

The central passage in Reinhardt Heydrich’s address at this meeting was: “As previously authorized by the Führer, emigration has now been replaced by the evacuation of the Jews to the east as a further solution.”[9] The German policy was to evacuate Jews to the East—not to exterminate them.

Goebbels’s diary entry of March 27, 1942 reinforces the Revisionist claims that Jews were being deported to the East. Goebbels wrote: “Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being deported to the East.”[10]

Jewish mainstream historian Robert Jan van Pelt has pointed out the importance of Auschwitz in the plans of the SS for the colonization of the occupied Eastern territories. In his book, coauthored with Debórah Dwork, van Pelt wrote:[11]

“The creation of the camp at Birkenau, which by the end of 1942 had become a major center for the annihilation of Europe’s Jews, was directly connected to Himmler’s program to transform Auschwitz into a paradigm of German settlement in the East.”

The questions become: “If the Aktion Reinhardt camps were transit camps, where did the Jews go if they were not gassed at these camps? Why isn’t there a massive amount of documentation showing that Jews were shipped to other locations outside of the Aktion Reinhardt camps?

The probable reason why documentation does not exist proving that Jews were transited out of the Aktion Reinhardt camps to the East can be explained by examining the historical context. The following questions and answers are relevant:

1. Who won World War II? Answer: The Allies.
2. Who controlled the documentation after the war? Answer: The Allies.
3. Who claimed that Germany had a policy of genocide against the Jews? Answer: The Allies.
4. Who could have destroyed the documentation relating to the transiting of Jews through the Reinhardt camps? Answer: The Allies.

The Soviet Union took control of Poland and the documentation related to the Aktion Reinhardt camps. We know that the Soviet Union engaged in many lies and deceptions concerning World War II. One of the best examples is the three witnesses at Nuremberg who testified that Germany was responsible for the mass execution of Polish officers at Katyn. Today everybody agrees that the Soviet Union and not Germany was responsible for the Katyn Forest massacres.[12]

Another example of Soviet deception is that the Soviets hid information that would enable an outsider to construct the reality of what was happening militarily in the Soviet Union at the beginning of Germany’s invasion on June 22, 1941. Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet military intelligence operative who defected to the United Kingdom in 1978, gained access to closed Soviet archives while doing a research paper at the Soviet Army Academy. Suvorov discovered that the Soviet version of World War II history is a lie, and that it conceals the Soviet Union’s responsibility for starting the war. The Red Army in June 1941 was, at the time, the largest and best equipped army in the history of the world. The German invasion of the Soviet Union was made to prevent the Soviets from conquering all of Europe.[13]

The Soviets also lied about the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Majdanek in Poland. A Soviet-Polish committee concluded in August 1944 that at least five homicidal gas chambers operated in Majdanek. The documents at Majdanek prove, however, that the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Majdanek were delousing chambers built only for sanitary purposes.[14] The Soviets also claimed at the IMT that 1.5 million people died at Majdanek, while today most historians estimate that only about 78,000 people died in this camp.[15]

The Soviet Union under Josef Stalin also engaged in numerous criminal acts, including the mass murder of many millions of its own citizens. Destroying the documentation related to transports of Jews from the Aktion Reinhardt camps would be extremely easy and totally consistent with the criminal nature of the Soviet government.

The American military also could not be trusted to honestly report and disclose any documents that it discovered after World War II. The United States conducted a program of genocide against the German people after the war. This includes the mass starvation and murder of hundreds of thousands of German POWs, the expulsion of approximately 15 million Germans from their homes in eastern Germany, and the intentional starvation of millions of resident Germans.[16] Any nation that committed such atrocious criminal acts would not hesitate to hide or destroy documents that disprove the official Holocaust story.

Matt Cockerill writes on page 15 of this debate:

“There is very little documentary evidence of any kind—much less regarding the import of wood—concerning the Reinhardt camps; such evidence was systematically destroyed by the Nazis.”

My Response

My question for Matt is: So, if the Nazis could systematically destroy evidence concerning the Reinhardt camps, why couldn’t the Soviets systematically destroy the train records and other evidence of the Jews transited to the East from the Reinhardt camps?” The Soviets certainly had the ability to do so after the war.

The question is often asked: Why haven’t any Jewish survivors of the Aktion Reinhardt camps testified that they survived these camps and were transported to the East? One reason is that Jews who publicly dispute the so-called Holocaust have been subject to physical threats, persecution, and harassment.

For example, American Holocaust revisionist David Cole, whose parents are both Jewish, was very effective in the 1990s in promulgating revisionist viewpoints. He was so effective that the Jewish Defense League threatened him into recanting his views. In January 1998, Cole changed his name to David Stein to protect himself, and he became publicly known as a right-wing Hollywood Republican. In May 2013, David Cole was exposed by a former friend and is now using his original name again.[17] Hopefully, Cole’s First Amendment right to free speech will be respected in the future.

Joseph G. Burg was a Jewish author of several books who testified at the 1988 Ernst Zündel trial in Toronto. Burg testified that he spoke to hundreds of people after the war who had serviced and operated the crematoria, but he could not find anyone who had operated homicidal gas chambers. He said that the crematoria had been established for hygienic purposes as a result of typhus and other diseases. Burg also testified that he attended the Nuremberg trials in 1946 and met Ilya Ehrenburg, who had visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as a Jewish publisher who had been interned in Auschwitz for several years. Both Ehrenburg and the Jewish publisher said they did not see any homicidal gas chambers while they were at Auschwitz-Birkenau.[18]

Burg further testified that the German people, not just the Nazis, had been falsely blamed and defamed. He had frequently discussed the subject of German restitution with Zündel. If the Holocaust had not been invented, in Burg’s opinion the Germans wouldn’t be paying restitution and, he pointed out, “they are paying.” He dealt with the subject of restitution in his book Guilt and Fate, which Zündel read in the 1960s. Burg testified that the reason for the continuation of war crimes trials was to prove to everybody that the Germans, even the ones born in America and Canada, were to be blamed for the murdering and gassing of Jews.[19]

Burg testified that he had suffered personally for publishing books and documentaries expressing his views on the “Holocaust.”[20] He was reportedly beaten by thugs from the Jewish Defense League. After his death, Burg was also denied burial in the Munich Jewish cemetery.[21]

Since Jews have been threatened and persecuted for challenging the official Holocaust narrative, Jewish survivors of the Aktion Reinhardt camps transported to the East would not want to publicly express what happened to them. It has never been safe for them to do so.

Also, many of these Jewish survivors would not know they had been transited through Belzec, Sobibór or Treblinka. This would result in a diminished sense of relevance of their experiences. These Jews would have little motivation to document their travels, even once the names of the Aktion Reinhardt camps gained popular attention decades after the war.

Thomas Dalton on page 51 of this debate summarizes what happened to the Jews transited through the Aktion Reinhardt camps:

“Of the 1.4 million shuttled through the Reinhardt transit camps, as I said, the vast majority were shipped on to the east into captured (former-Soviet) territory, and then either interned in labor camps or released. This would have occurred between roughly mid-1942 and mid-1943. The total captured area was huge; if we combine the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the Reichskommissariat Ostland, and occupied Soviet territory, the area is roughly twice the size of France, amounting to some 400,000 square miles (about 1 million square kilometers). That’s an average of about three Jews per square mile; no surprise that we can’t find them. As the Soviets recaptured all that land over the subsequent two years, they would have swallowed up all 1.4 million Jews, who were then quickly ‘locked up’ behind the Iron Curtain, for decades. There, with new lives, new names, new families, they were ‘lost’ to the West—and thus ‘disappeared.’”

Dalton’s explanation is very reasonable. Unfortunately, not only do the victors of a war get to write the war’s history, but they also get to control the documents related to its history.

Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, a retired major general of the German army, points this out in his book 1939—The War That Had Many Fathers. He writes that the files given back by the Allies to the Germans are riddled with forgeries and omissions. Since the Allies, like other nations, were inclined to present themselves favorably and to justify their own actions, many files had been selected in the victors’ favor and had also been “washed.” Schultze-Rhonhof writes:[22]

“So I found in the memoirs and documents omissions, revisions, forgeries and pro-domo interpretations.”

The archives in the West have also been managed to present a version of history acceptable to the Allies. Documents and photographs damaging to the Allies have conveniently disappeared from the archives. As one American professor states: “In my 30 years as a scholar of American history, I have never known the archives to appear to be so much of a political agency of the executive branch as it is now. One used to think of the Archivist of the United States as a professional scholar. Now he has become someone who fills a political bill.” The cover-up goes on to the present day.[23]

So, it is very reasonable to postulate that the documents showing that Jews were shipped to other locations outside of the Aktion Reinhardt camps were destroyed by the Soviets.

Matt Cockerill writes on page three:

“Regarding material evidence, it should be noted that the Germans razed Kulmhof, Treblinka II, Sobibór, and Belzec—along with the gas chambers—long before the regions where the camps had been built were overrun by the Soviets. Nevertheless, various archaeological investigations have been undertaken which identified numerous, massive mass graves in these camps. For instance, an investigation of Belzec conducted by a team of archaeologists 1997 and 1998 discovered 33 mass graves, whose total surface area denier Carlo Mattogno calculated to be a total surface area of 5,919 square meters and a total volume of 21,310 cubic meters. In light of the very large percentage of Belzec deportees who were children, and the emaciated bodies of most adult victims, these colossal graves could readily accommodate hundreds of thousands of persons.”

Matt Cockerill adds on pages 30 and 31:

“Moreover, the ‘incomplete’ physical evidence for Reinhardt-camp exterminations is still enormous. At Belzec alone, Andrzej Kola’s 1997 and 1999 excavations identified 33 mass graves, loaded with ash. Your own Carlo Mattogno calculated the total surface area of the graves to be 5,919 square meters, and their total volume at 21,310 cubic meters. (And we are only discussing physical evidence; the compelling documentary and testimonial evidence for exterminations at the Reinhardt camps converge with the physical evidence.)”

My Response

Andrzej Kola’s work at Belzec does not indicate that Belzec was an extermination camp. Kola in 1997 and 1999 drilled core samples out of the soil at intervals of five meters covering the whole camp site, which altogether resulted in 2,227 samples. Of these 2,227 samples, 236 revealed a disturbance of the earth layer in 33 different, highly irregular shapes. Out of these, only 137 were relevant enough to have their data published. However, only six of these contained human remains, which was less than 3% of all samples with a disturbed earth layer, or only 0.3% of all samples taken. The largest corpse layer was only 75 cm thick (2.5 ft). What was generally found was a scattering of thinly layered ashes mixed with lots of sand and earth.[24]

Germar Rudolf acknowledges that humans died at Belzec. However, he writes that Kola’s drilling does not clarify how many people died in Belzec, nor what caused their deaths. Upon closer analysis, the drillings determined that only approximately 21,000 cubic meters of soil had been disturbed. According to official Holocaust historiography, 600,000 corpses would have had to fit into this area, because in Belzec the burning of corpses is said to have begun after the murder phase had allegedly ended. However, only occasionally did Kola’s team find ash mixed with soil.[25]

When asked why there are so many pits in Belzec if they were not used, Rudolf responded that the Polish researcher Andrzej Kola wrote:[26]

“Additional disturbances in archaeological structures were made by intensive dig-ups directly after the war while local people were searching for jewelry. The facts make it difficult for the archaeologists to define precisely the ranges of burial pits.”

Kola’s statement about Belzec is confirmed by the public prosecutor of Zamosc, who on April 11, 1946 explained what some witnesses had confirmed:[27]

“At the moment, the camp site has been completely dug up by the local population in their search for valuables. This has brought to the surface ash from the corpses and from wood, charred bones as well as bones that were only partially charred.”

Rudolf continues:[28]

“In other words: the pits found through the sample drillings are not only mass graves, but to a large extent the remnants of wildcat excavations made by treasure hunters after the war. This also explains why the pits found are completely irregular both concerning their sizes, shapes, and orientations as well as their contents and the position, arrangement, and composition of the earth layers in them. If one considers that at least 90% of the material of the sample cores exhibited neither human remnants nor ash, then the maximum number of the corpses that could have been buried in these pits – 126,000 – is at least to be reduced by a factor of 10, because the number 126,000 is based on the premise that the corpses were packed as tightly as possible in all of these pits.”

Rudolf states that the number of people dying in Belzec were “only in the thousands.” These deaths should be called “mass dying” instead of “mass murder,” because the most frequent causes of death at Belzec were from diseases and other natural causes. The results of Kola’s forensic investigations have far-reaching consequences. Due to the Höfle radio message, we know that by the end of 1942, 434,500 Jews had been deported to Belzec. If, however, not more than 126,000 Jews could have been buried at Belzec – but probably much less than that – we know that most of these deported Jews were not buried at Belzec. They obviously were transited outside of Belzec.[29]

Rudolf concludes that this “confirms the revisionist thesis that Belzec was a transit camp. By the way, during the sample drillings, a search for the remains of the gas chambers was also made. However, there were no traces of buildings resembling what witnesses reported. What was found instead were the ruins of a multiple-car garage.” Rudolf also states that no bodies were exhumed at Belzec, since once the mass graves containing hundreds of thousands of victims or their remains were not located, there was little interest in doing anything else.[30]

A monument was built at Belzec in 2004 which buried a large part of the camp under concrete. Unfortunately, this probably means there will be no excavations or more archaeological research at Belzec in the future.[31]

Regarding excavations at Sobibór, Thomas Kues states:[32]

“In an article published in The Scotsman on November 26, 2001, we read that Polish archaeologist A. Kola and his team had discovered seven mass graves at the Sobibór site…Despite seven years having passed since the drilling and diggings were reportedly made, not a single article, paper or scientific report has appeared on them, neither in English, Polish, nor in any other language.”

No articles, papers or scientific reports have been published because A. Kola and his team had nothing to report that would benefit the claim that Sobibór was an extermination camp.

A second team led by Jewish researchers who were apparently not happy with Kola’s results conducted further research at Sobibór between 2004 and 2014. This team of archaeologists in September 2014 issued a press release stating that the foundation walls of the gas chamber had been found at Sobibór. These archaeologists, however, merely found several rows of bricks in the soil delineating the perimeter of a former building. Based on survivor testimonies, these building remains were probably of a shower room rather than of a homicidal gas chamber.[33]

Defenders of the Holocaust story have sometimes used the limited excavation work at Treblinka of forensic archaeologist Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls to prove that Treblinka was an extermination camp. An analysis of her work, however, shows that she fails to prove that Treblinka was an extermination camp.[34]

A detailed forensic examination at the Treblinka Camp using sophisticated electronic ground radar has also found no evidence of mass graves. An Australian team headed by Richard Krege, a qualified electronics engineer, carried out an examination at the site of the Treblinka Camp. Krege’s team used an $80,000 Ground Penetration Radar (GPR) device, which sends out vertical signals that are visible on a computer monitor. GPR devices are routinely used around the world by geologists, archaeologists, and police. GPR detects any major disturbances in the soil to a normal effective depth of four or five meters.

For six days in October 1999, the team carefully examined the entire Treblinka site, especially the alleged “mass graves” portion, and carried out control examinations of the surrounding area. Krege’s team also carried out visual soil inspections, and used an auger to take numerous soil samples. They found no soil disturbance consistent with the burial of hundreds of thousands of bodies, or even evidence that the ground had ever been disturbed. In addition, the team found no evidence of individual graves, bone remains, human ashes, or wood ashes. Krege concludes from his examination of the site that Treblinka was never an extermination camp.[35]

German aerial reconnaissance photographs taken in 1944 of the Treblinka Camp also cast serious doubts on the widely accepted story that Treblinka was a mass extermination center. Discovered in 1989 in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., these photographs corroborate other evidence indicating that Treblinka was a transit camp. The photographs indicate that Treblinka was an extremely small camp. The camp’s burial area appears too small to contain the hundreds of thousands of bodies supposedly buried there. Treblinka was not particularly well guarded or isolated. The aerial photographs show that fields where Polish farmers planted and cultivated crops were directly adjacent to the camp perimeter and were cultivated right up to the edge of the camp.[36]

All three of the Aktion Reinhardt camps were situated near the demarcation line between German- and Soviet-occupied Poland. This geographic fact indicates the likelihood that these camps served as transit camps for Jews to the east. The Soviets used broad-gauge railway tracks in contrast to the rest of Europe. Therefore, transports towards the east had to transfer their people at this demarcation line from trains of the European gauge to those of the Russian gauge. This explains why so many witnesses talked about hygienic measures such as delousing and showering procedures at these camps, which today are often falsely regarded as deceptive measures preceding mass murder.[37]

Endnotes