The Treblinka Holocaust

1. The Demjanjuk Trial and Treblinka[1]

1.1. Background of the Demjanjuk Trial

In the days of the Soviet Union, the American immigrants from Ukraine were split into two factions, one of which was favorably disposed towards Moscow. At that time, this group published a weekly paper titled News from Ukraine. Michael Hanusiak, one of the participants in this publishing venture, made no bones about his close ties to Soviet authorities in Moscow. H. P. Rullmann believes that one of the foremost tasks of this group was the defamation of the anti-Communist, nationalist Ukrainians in exile, whom they charged with collaboration with the 'German Fascists' during the Second World War.[3] This approach had already been practiced in other cases, which not only resulted in the creation of internal strife amongst these Ukrainians-in-exile but also detracted from their collective public reputation.[4] This Soviet method of combating opponents by means of disinformation and falsified or completely fabricated evidence is well-known. In the mid-1980s even the Federal Department of the Interior issued a warning regarding this practice.[5] It is all the more astonishing that the American authorities were taken in by the Communist Ukrainians-in-exile in the case of Demjanjuk in the mid-1970s.

In 1975, after allegedly in-depth research in Soviet archives, Michael Hanusiak submitted to the US Department of Immigration and Naturalization in New York, a list with 70 names of presumed National Socialist collaborators of Ukrainian origin; this list also included the name of John Demjanjuk, who until 1981 was an American citizen living in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked as auto mechanic. In the case of Demjanjuk, Hanusiak came up with an incriminating statement by one H. Daniltschenko, according to whom Demjanjuk had served in the concentration camps Sobibor and Flossenbürg.[6] This, along with a picture of an ID card allegedly documenting Demjanjuk's employment in these two camps, prompted the American Immigration and Naturalization Office to take up the case of John Demjanjuk.[7] The role which pro-Communist Hanusiak played in building Demjanjuk up to be Ivan the Terrible can hardly be misinterpreted. The true instigators of what was in effect a new Eichmann Trial are not difficult to discern behind the scenes. After the News from Ukraine urged the American authorities in 1976 to take steps against Demjanjuk, the American Department of Justice requested that Demjanjuk be stripped of his citizenship due to false claims made in his immigration papers. Meanwhile, witnesses were found in Israel who identified John Demjanjuk on photographs as being Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. Investigations regarding Sobibor as well as Treblinka followed. In 1979 the case was officially taken up by the OSI (Office of Special Investigations), the American 'Nazi-hunting' office set up under President Carter.

However, the Trawniki ID card No. 1393, issued to the name Demjanjuk, which had been reprinted in the News from Ukraine and later became the only piece of documentary evidence used in the trial, exists in two variations: the second card numbered 1393 and bearing the name Demjanjuk belongs to the papers of the concentration camp Flossenbürg, which are held in the Federal Archives in Koblenz. Similar names are very common in the Ukraine. But timewise the number does not correspond to Demjanjuk's stay in Trawniki. – Furthermore, ID numbers were only used once.

The 'original ID card' was not available for the pre-trial investigations in Jerusalem. This central piece of evidence was clearly not officially available from the Soviet Union, for which reason Armand Hammer, the American billionaire of Jewish extraction, was called in. Hammer had already enjoyed an extremely good business relationship with Soviet circles in Lenin's time.[8] In any case the Trawniki ID card did not get to Jerusalem through official channels, but personally via Armand Hammer. If the ID card were officially released, appropriate papers would have been present both in Moscow and in Israel.

Dieter Lehner, the expert from the Demjanjuk defense team, has exposed the ID card as a total fabrication,[9] a discovery matching those of the German Federal Criminal Police Office. Even though the Israeli authorities were already apprised of this fact by the Federal Criminal Police as early as 1987, the Court suppressed this information. Chief Prosecutor Michael Shadek commented merely:

“As far as I am concerned Demjanjuk did commit murders – whether in Treblinka, in Sobibor or elsewhere, that's secondary.”

And in response to the objection that the Federal Criminal Police Office had proven the SS ID card to be fake:

“We are relying on our own expert reports and consider them no less convincing than before.”[10]

But German authorities also played a strange game where the forged Trawniki ID card was concerned. For example, the Münchner Merkur reported that the Federal Chancellery itself saw to it that the Demjanjuk defense team did not learn of the German expert reports by Lehner and the German Federal Criminal Police Office [Bundeskriminalamt, BKA], and that the latter was ordered from higher-up to keep silent about its findings. And what is more: the expert witness from the BKA who did ultimately take the stand in the Jerusalem Court after all, had been instructed by the German authorities to draw up a partial report for this trial, dealing exclusively with certain similarities between the retouched ID card photo and John Demjanjuk's real-life features. In this way the impression was evoked in the Jerusalem Trial that the ID card was genuine. The partial report was submitted by BKA expert Dr. Altmann. In a memo he drew up at that time, BKA Department Chief Dr. Werner described these actions of the German authorities thus:

“Clearly, factual doubts had to be subordinate to the political considerations.”[11]

It has turned out that the photograph on the ID card is an old photo of Demjanjuk from 1947 which was taken from his American immigration file(!) and retouched for the ID card.

When the first doubts were raised about the authenticity of the heretofore unknown ID card, the Jerusalem Court suddenly had several other specimens of identical make on hand; the origin of these cards, which were also fabrications, has not been determined.[9]

The supposition that the KGB might have officially fabricated the ID card is largely refuted by the poor quality of the fabrication and by the ignorance, shown by the card, of the administrative structure of that branch of the police that was responsible for issuing this kind of ID card, as expert Lehner was able to demonstrate convincingly.[9] This does not, however, rule out that a certain circle within the KGB contributed to the fabrication of the card, a circle which must also have had connections to the American immigration authorities, where the photo originated. These circles are in all probability identical to those who worked from the start to set Demjanjuk up as Ivan the Terrible in order to revitalize the Holocaust Religion.

The proceedings to expatriate Demjanjuk began in 1981 before the Cleveland District Court. Naturally, five survivors of Treblinka recognized Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, and the Court's copies of the Trawniki ID card No. 1393 became the chief piece of evidence on whose basis judge Battisti stripped Demjanjuk of his American citizenship.[12]

On the request of Israel, deportation proceedings began in 1984, and the deportation itself followed in February 1986, in violation of all traditions of international law, as the alleged site of the crime (Treblinka) was located in Poland, and at a time when the state of Israel did not yet even exist. How very important this Trawniki ID card was to the OSI in this trial is demonstrated by the fact that the OSI, together with Israeli authorities, attempted to persuade a number of witnesses to confirm the authenticity of this fabricated card against their better knowledge.[13]

1.2. The Demjanjuk Trial in Jerusalem

With the start of the Demjanjuk Trial in Jerusalem on February 16, 1987, the Treblinka Holocaust was restored to the active memory of the world public. According to the testimony of Jewish witnesses, Treblinka had been a World War Two extermination camp where vast numbers of Jews were killed – between 700,000 and 3 million, depending on the source consulted.[14] The Jerusalem Court decided arbitrarily to set the number of victims at 875,000.[15]

The intended linchpin in this revival of the Treblinka Holocaust was the Ukrainian John Demjanjuk. This man was declared to be “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka where he was said to have committed every means of killing, cruelties and perversions imaginable. Not enough that he allegedly drove the Jews into the gas chambers personally, armed with iron canes and a sword, and cut off women's breasts with the bayonet – no, he also operated the Diesel engines whose exhaust gas was piped into the gas chambers, there to kill the Jews. The fact that these claims contradicted the sole alleged documentary proof, which indicated that Demjanjuk had been employed in the camps Sobibor and Flossenbürg (and only in those camps) – this fact was generously overlooked.

The chief witness for the prosecution in the Jerusalem Trial, Eliahu Rosenberg, had stated in Vienna on December 24, 1947, in a “fact report” whose twelve pages he had each initialed personally, that the Ukrainian Ivan had been clubbed to death in his sleep.[16] When Demjanjuk's defense attorney Dov Eitan pointed out to Rosenberg during the Jerusalem Trial that John Demjanjuk, present there in the courtroom, could not be Ivan the Terrible, since according to his – Rosenberg's – own testimony Ivan was already dead since 1943, Rosenberg said that this had been a misunderstanding on the part of the secretary recording his report at the time, and that he had had only third-hand knowledge of the death of Ivan the Terrible. The secretary in question, T. Friedman, refused to testify on this issue, since Jewish sources had threatened him with death in the event that he were to confirm that Rosenberg had really reported the death of Ivan the Terrible as his own personal experience at the time in question.[17] Clearly, therefore, Rosenberg had really affirmed Ivan's death under oath.

So had Ivan the Terrible been resurrected?

It is characteristic of the psyche and the mental state of this kind of witness to substantiate alleged mistakes with the wish for a specific reality; the truth is subordinated to intentions and wishes. Regarding the motives prompting the state of Israel to hold this trial, Jewish publisher A. Melzer wrote that in the mid-1980s the collective Israeli awareness of the Holocaust was on the wane. It had become little more than one chapter among many. Further, the view taken of the Jews by the world public at that time was becoming increasingly shaped by the actions of the Israelis towards the Palestinians, which began to be likened to those of Himmler's SS. This was probably the reason why the proceedings in the Jerusalem District Court dealt less with the case of John Demjanjuk than, essentially, with the total destruction of the Jews in Europe. The 'Auschwitz Cudgel' was in need of exercising.[18]

Ever since the mid-1970s, Ivan the Terrible, personified by John Demjanjuk, was systematically built up to be a symbol of the Treblinka Holocaust. The circumstance that the Monster of Treblinka had to be a Ukrainian probably has historical roots in the time when the Cossacks liberated the western part of the Ukraine from Jewish oppressors and tax-collectors.[19] Oaths of vengeance and instinctive hatred à la the Old Testament survive for centuries.

Two revealing circumstances may aid in the further assessment of the events and connections relating to the Trawniki ID card.

One rather strange event took place in Jerusalem on November 29, 1988. On November 20, 1988, Demjanjuk's attorney, Dov Eitan, had received a comprehensive report from the subject expert for the defense, a report which proved conclusively that the chief piece of evidence against Demjanjuk, the Trawniki ID card, was a fabrication. For the December 4, 1988, appeal date Eitan had announced a surprise for the Jerusalem Court, but mysteriously fell out of a 15th story window of the Eilon Hotel on November 29, 1988.[20] Dov Eitan's (un?)timely death was never solved. At his funeral, the second defense attorney was attacked by someone who threw acid in his face.[21]

Incidentally, the ID card no longer played a significant part in the verdict that was handed down against Demjanjuk in April 1988, whereas it had been a vital element in his extradition to Israel. The Jerusalem Court pointed out that it had been the witnesses, first and foremost, who had proven Demjanjuk's guilt beyond a doubt. But the testimony of those witnesses was of far more questionable evidential value, as Dr. Elisabeth Loftus, Jewish-American expert on eyewitness testimony, noted; Loftus had previously all but proven the unbelievable nature of witness testimony in hundreds of trials.[22] Many of the witnesses against Demjanjuk contradicted not only themselves or at least their earlier statements, but also usually recounted utterly incredible, even downright grotesquely unrealistic scenarios. The decisive factor for Dr. Loftus was that some of the witnesses, due to their advanced age, could barely recall the names of their own children, or how they had only just arrived in the courtroom, while professing to be perfectly capable of identifying John Demjanjuk and to remember all the details of the events in the Treblinka camp or elsewhere. Even though Dr. Loftus realized that the media hullabaloo about John Demjanjuk, about the Treblinka camp and about the eyewitness testimony given in the past few decades rendered impartial, uninfluenced, probative testimony impossible, she refused to make her services as expert witness available to the defense, since she wanted to be on Israel's and the Jews' side in this trial even though she was aware that in doing so she was deliberately opposing justice and truth. Her acknowledgement of the error she thus committed is devastating and well worth reading.

Aside from the manipulation of witnesses already mentioned, H. P. Rullmann tells of the many and varied insults, suspicions and threats hurled at witnesses for the defense, going as far as the arrests of those witnesses;[23] of orders issued by the Court to 'go easy' on the witnesses for the prosecution, in other words, not to analyze or cross-examine their testimony;[24] of unchecked applause etc. by court spectators when witnesses for the prosecution made incredible and grotesque, incriminating statements;[24] of the live television broadcasting of the trial in Israeli schools as well as the worldwide broadcasting of trial highlights;[25] of the interpretation of Demjanjuk's profession of innocence as stubborn denial motivated by a lack of remorse.[26] The ultimate high point of the trial was the verdict, which had been based exclusively on eyewitness testimony: it sentenced Demjanjuk to death by hanging and prompted an almost Purim-fest-like joyful dancing in the courtroom. Of course Demjanjuk's defense appealed this sentence.

The public statements of Elisabeth Loftus, one of the best-known experts on eyewitness testimony anywhere, already sufficed to discomfit the Jerusalem court responsible for Demjanjuk's appeal, since it had to expect that appeal proceedings would not only expose the SS ID card as fake, but also that the witnesses would be shown up to be perjured liars, and by a Jewish expert, no less! But by the early 1990s the case had taken on even far more interesting and, for Israel, more unpleasant aspects. In view of the fact that Demjanjuk's expatriation and extradition had been obtained by fraud, by means of a faked ID card, an increasingly powerful lobby group in the United States began to speak out for the reversal of the Jerusalem verdict as well as for Demjanjuk's return and repatriation to the States, since Israel was obviously not willing or able to conduct a lawful trial against a former American citizen.

The American Member of Congress, James V. Traficant, and Patrick Buchanan, one of the best-known American journalists, and assistant to President Reagan, numbered among the most active of these lobbyists. As early as 1986 Buchanan had called the trial of Demjanjuk a new Dreyfus Affair.[27] But in early 1990 Buchanan went a considerable step farther when, regarding Demjanjuk's alleged mass murders in Treblinka, he wrote in The Washington Times and The New York Post:[28]

“The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody. The Environmental Protection Agency never requires emission inspections of Diesel cars or trucks. In 1988, ninety-seven youths, trapped 400 feet underground in a D.C. tunnel, while two locomotives spewed Diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after forty-five minutes. Demjanjuk's weapon of mass murder cannot kill.”

In 1991 Pat Buchanan was George Bush sen.'s strongest Republican rival in the primaries for the American presidency. He did not deviate from his conviction even during these election campaigns. On television he even supplemented his previous statements by saying that Treblinka had no doubt been a terrible place where hundreds of thousands of Jews had been taken and where thousands had died – in other words, not hundreds of thousands, as was alleged![29] So Israel saw itself faced with a powerful current in American politics and journalism which was not only close to providing the next President of the United States but which also disputed that Treblinka had been an extermination camp.

At the same time as these developments, several eastern European émigrés groups drew up reports in defense of John Demjanjuk, and concluded on the basis of substantial evidence that no mass murder could have taken place in Treblinka and that even for this reason alone, John Demjanjuk must be innocent, as must any other accused.[30]

Only someone who was unaware of these events could have been surprised when the Jerusalem Appeal Court announced Demjanjuk's acquittal in the summer of 1993.[31] Demjanjuk was acquitted for lack of precisely that so-called evidence that had resulted in his death sentence before. Strangely enough, most of the American and all of the European media then proceeded to laud Israel as a state truly under the rule of law – even though the administration of justice in the Demjanjuk Trial had not measured up even remotely to any such standard. The gulf between a death sentence and an acquittal is too great. But if perchance the Court had realized that it was the false statements of the witnesses that had resulted in a miscarriage of justice, then the witnesses ought now to have been charged. But this was not done. For a time it was even debated in Israel whether one should not perhaps charge Demjanjuk for crimes he may have committed in the camps Sobibor and Flossenbürg, but eventually this option was rejected.[32] The iron had grown too hot for Israel, since any further trial could have resulted in other aspects of the Holocaust being drawn into undesirably controversial discussion. It is also possible that the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to factors – such as easier access to archives and to the supposed sites of the crimes – which made it more advisable to send Demjanjuk back to the United States in September 1993, acquitted, but nevertheless unlawfully handcuffed during his trip home.[33] In 1998, John Demjanjuk received his U.S. citizenship back,[34] only to have it revoked again in early 2002 after the OSI claimed that Demjanjuk allegedly was a guard in the camps of Sobibor, Majdanek, and Flossenbürg.[35]

Will the trial of John Demjanjuk become, in a sense, the writing on the wall? Will it bring a turning point in the Treblinka Holocaust, in the 'immolation of the Jews' as a whole? As the Prophet Daniel put it in Daniel 5: “mene, tekel, u-pharsin” – or, in English, 'weighed in the balances, and found wanting'.

2. The Camps in the Treblinka Area

In an analysis of the eyewitness testimony and accounts existing with regard to the Treblinka group of camps, the first thing one notices is that they are completely contradictory of each other. The witness claims diverge so widely – not only where the numbers of victims are concerned, but also with respect to the alleged methods of killing, about the way the bodies and evidence were eliminated, and about the location, size, form and equipment of the alleged extermination camp – that it is impossible to cull a plausible overall account from this material.[36] Udo Walendy has drawn up a detailed study of these contradictions and inconsistencies, to which readers interested in specifics are referred.[37] We shall touch on only the grossest discrepancies here and will then focus on the scenario on which the Holocaust-dogmatists have agreed after a 50-year process of evolution and selection from among the 'usable eyewitness testimony', even though such a practice by the establishment historians is devoid of any scientific value due to the selectivity with which the sources are treated.

2.1. The Malkinia Camp

Among the confused and mostly contradictory descriptions of the camp Treblinka II (i.e., B) and the corresponding sketches of this camp,[38] which were also used in the Treblinka Trials of 1950-51, 1964-65 and 1969-70,[39] there is not one which clearly establishes that aside from the camp Treblinka I (A) and II (B), there was another camp, Malkinia, 3.7 miles north of Treblinka. This was a transit and delousing camp approximately 740' × 820' (607,000 sq.ft.) in size, probably for Jews being deported to destinations in Byelarus and Ukraine.

In prison, more than 15 years after the fact, Kurt Franz – the main defendant in the Treblinka Trial of 1965 – drew a sketch, from memory, of the camp where he had been employed as of November 1942.[40] This sketch could perforce not be correct in every detail, considering the many years of constant influencing that had gone by, but it differed entirely and not only in its external form from Treblinka II (B) as it is shown on an official Polish layout.[41] As we know today, the camp as described by the witnesses is a mixture of conditions and elements from the camps Treblinka II and Malkinia. A stunning confirmation of Franz's camp sketch was found on an aerial photograph of May 13, 1944, which is held in the National Archives.[42] This camp is also the source of the terms 'lower' and 'upper' camp, as Franz had already marked on his sketch. The smaller 'upper camp' was separated from the 'lower camp' by a road. Franz was able to label the buildings in the camp and to mark his sketch with a large number of the surnames of the personnel in Malkinia, including his own surname, Franz, in relation to certain areas of the camp. The fact that many eyewitnesses describe this camp casts a rather dubious light on these witness statements, as the transit camp Malkinia has never been suspected of harboring an extermination center.

2.2. The Treblinka II (B) Camp

Treblinka II has gone down in Holocaust history as an extermination camp, whereas the camp Treblinka I, closely associated with a gravel pit, has hardly figured in subject literature at all. Since it is beyond the scope of this study to analyze all the accounts that have been advanced with respect to Treblinka II, and since it is only our intent to consider the necessary prerequisites and consequences of the mass extermination alleged by the witnesses, we shall confine the following to the most striking points.

In a brochure from 1943 the World Jewish Congress reported that construction of a “slaughter house” for Jews from Poland and other European nations had begun in March 1942 in an area 12,350 acres in size.[43] It is hard to imagine that even people largely lacking in gray matter could seriously propose a camp almost 20 square miles in size, yet this figure nevertheless found its way into a prosecution document with the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.[44] This fact alone suffices to reveal the producer-directors of the extermination scenario of Treblinka II in a suspicious light.

This author has in his possession a copy of an official-looking plan of the camp Treblinka II (cf. illustration 1, next page), showing an archive number, two rubber stamps and a legend, but apparently no date. The scale of 1:2,000 is wrong, as this would result in only half the camp dimensions given. A camp sketch in a brochure of the Treblinka Museum shows the same shape as that on the official-looking plan, but gives a scale of 1:4,000. All camp sketches known to date exhibit more or less considerable deviations in detail. In terms of the points of the compass, the various maps agree with each other but not with the air photos of expert John C. Ball.[45]

T. Skowron has also shed some light on the state of these camp sketches, which were drawn up on the basis of eyewitness accounts; to date he has located more than 40 different sketches.[46]

2.3. The Origin of the Current Version of Treblinka

Treblinka II was situated in an area by no means particularly remote and it concealed few secrets. The train line leading from the village of Treblinka to Siedlce ran at a distance of all of 300 meters from the camp, parallel to the nearby road; scarcely two kilometers separated the camp from the hamlets of Wólka Okraglik in the east and Grady and Poniatowo in the west.[47] If one credits the testimony of eyewitnesses, lively contacts even existed between the camp inmates and the local populace, with which a flourishing barter trade flourished.[48] In fact, soon after the opening of the camp (July 23, 1942), information from it was reaching the outer world. This was essentially coming from Jews who had run away from Treblinka, from the populace which resided in the area surrounding the camp, as well as from the Polish railway workers who operated the trains with the deportees. In these reports, the following methods of killing were mentioned:

1. Exhaust gases of a motor in whose fuel “toxic substances” had been mixed (Report of the Polish underground newspaper Informacja bieżąca, October 5, 1942[49]).
2. A gas with a delayed effect, which enabled the victims to leave the gas chamber and walk to the mass graves; there they lost consciousness and fell into the graves (Informaca Bieżąca, September 8, 1942.[50]
3. A mobile gas chamber, which moved along the mass graves and unloaded the bodies into them (Informacja bieżąca, August 17, 1942).[51]
4. Shooting with machine guns (Report of the Resistance to the Polish government-in-exile in London, March 31, 1943).[52]
5. Quick lime in the trains; the deportees arrived in Treblinka as corpses and were buried there (further report of the Resistance to the Polish government-in-exile, March 31, 1943).[52]
6. Electric current (“Ghetto Chronicle” of Emmanuel Ringelblum, entry for October 15, 1942).[53]
7. Hot steam. This murder method was described in several reports and dominated propaganda concerning Treblinka up into 1944. Of capital importance in connection with this is an unusually detailed report dating from 15 November 1942, from the resistance movement of the Warsaw Ghetto with the title Likwidacja żydowskiej Warszawy (Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw), in which mass killing by means of steam is described as follows:[54]

   “It [the death house] is a walled building. […] It consists only of three small chambers in addition to a boiler room. Along the North wall of this house runs a corridor from which one can enter the doors into the chambers. The exterior wall of the chambers possesses a flap-door (until a short while ago there was a door, which for practical reasons was replaced by a flap-door). In addition, a ramp in the shape of a baking trough runs up to the level of the flap-door. A boiler room is directly annexed to the building. Within the boiler room there is a large boiler for the production of water vapor and super-heated water vapor forces its way into the chambers by means of pipes which run through the death chambers and have the corresponding number of openings. […] The floor in the chambers is slippery, people slide and fall over, but cannot stand up again, since new crowds of victims who have been violently driven inside roll on top of them, The commander [of the camp guards] flings small children onto the heads of the women in the chambers. In this way the execution chambers are filled to the bursting point, and then the doors are hermetically closed, and there begins slow suffocation of the people by the water vapor, which enters through the numerous openings in the pipes. In the beginning, choked-off screams break forth from inside, then gradually become weaker, and after 15 minutes the execution is finished.

   Now it's the turn of the grave-diggers. With screaming and curses the German overseers drive the grave-diggers to work, which consists of pulling the corpses out of the execution chambers. The grave-diggers stand by the ramp, facing the flap-door. The flaps open but no corpses fall out. Under the influence of the steam, all of the bodies have formed a monolithic mass which is cemented together by the sweat of the murdered victims. In their death struggles, many hands, legs and trunks have become entwined in a macabre fashion. To make it possible for the grave-diggers to pull out individual bodies, pails of cold water are poured over this mass from out of the closest well. Now one body is separated from another and they can be easily removed. In general, the external aspect of the bodies has not changed; only the head and buttocks have darkened to violet. The grave-diggers, beaten and harried without respite by the Germans, put the bodies on the ramp until the chambers have been emptied.”

According to this report, two million Jews had already been murdered in Treblinka by this method (thus, about 17,000 per day!); it said that after the Germans had begun to also kill non-Jewish Poles with steam, the entire population of Poland had “the spectre of death in the steam chambers” before its mind's eye.

This report enjoyed wide circulation. A complete English translation appeared by the year 1943 in the omnibus volume The Black Book of Polish Jewry, and on August 8, 1943, the New York Times, in an article headlined “2,000,000 Murders by Nazis Charged. Polish Paper in London says Jews are Exterminated in Treblinka Death House,” reported that according to information from Poland, two million Jews had been murdered in Treblinka by steam.

In 1944, the Rabbi Abraham Silberschein published an eight-page report in Geneva concerning Treblinka, which largely adopted the claims of the resistance movement of the Warsaw Ghetto, but which was nevertheless ambiguous with regard to the technique used to do the killing: on the one hand, Silberschein spoke of “gas chambers” and of “gas which flows out of the pipes,” but on the other hand, of how the corpses stuck to one another “under the influence of the steam.”.[55]

For the orthodox 'Holocaust' historians, all of this is naturally most embarrassing, and many of them resort to shameless falsification of the historical sources. This is particularly true of the Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad, whose book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps[56] is regarded as the standard work about these three camps. Arad mentions in it the report of November 15, 1942, but brazenly substitutes “gas chambers” for the embarrassing steam chambers![57]

The suppression of the steam chambers in favor of gas chambers received its impetus from a report of the Jewish-Polish cabinetmaker Jankiel Wiernik, which first appeared in May 1944 in the Polish language but was then translated into English that same year.[58] Wiernik, who according to his statements had been interned in Treblinka for a year and had escaped from there, plagiarized in this text the report of the resistance movement of November 15, 1942, but replaced the steam chambers with gas chambers in every instance and mentioned a motor as the instrument, without, however, specifying that it had been a diesel motor. Evidently he believed – with good reason – that steam as a murder method was all too unbelievable.

Why the motor? In Treblinka there was certainly an electrical plant, since the camp was not connected to the local power supply. The generator of such a plant was customarily driven by a diesel motor. Since the exhaust fumes of such machinery have an atrocious odor, Wiernik, a layman with respect to the technical facts, obviously believed they made a suitable instrument for murder. After the Red Army had gained control over the area around Treblinka in August 1944, a Soviet investigatory commission quickly got to work and 'determined' that in Treblinka three million people had been killed. However, neither steam nor gas were now named as the method of murder, but instead suffocation by means of chambers which were vacuum-pumped:[59]

“The 'bath' was a building which consisted of 12 compartments each of which were 6 meters x 6 meters in dimension. About 400 to 500 persons were driven into one compartment at the same time. They had two doors which could be hermetically sealed. In the corner, between ceiling and wall, were two openings connected with hoses. Behind the 'bath' stood a machine. It pumped the air out of the room. People suffocated in 6 to 10 minutes.”

The Soviet-Jewish propagandist Vassily Grossmann entered the area of the former Treblinka camp in September 1944 and spoke with numerous witnesses who had already been questioned in advance by the Soviet investigatory commission. In his book Die Hölle von Treblinka (The Hell of Treblinka), which appeared in 1945, he wrote:[60]

“The most diverse means were employed for the killing: the exhaust fumes of a heavy Panzer[armored tank] motor, which served the power station of Treblinka, were squeezed inside. […] The second procedure, which was used most often in Treblinka, was the pumping out of air from the chambers by means of special suction devices. […] And finally, the third method, rarer but likewise employed, the murdering by steam, which also was based upon depriving the organism of oxygen.”

In addition to these three techniques, others were also described by witnesses. One of the best known of the Treblinka chief witnesses, Samuel Rayzman, on the occasion of being questioned by a Soviet military examining judge on 26 September 1944, stated that the killings in Treblinka were performed in the beginning “by means of evacuation of the air from the compartments,” but then – according to Rayzman, –[61]

“they resorted to another method – poisoning by chlorine gas and Zyklon gas.”

The quotations cited make clear the incredible chaos which prevailed among the witnesses at that time with respect to the technology of murder in Treblinka. In December 1945, the Polish government, in a report presented to the Nuremberg Tribunal, was still speaking of how in Treblinka several hundred thousand Jews had been exterminated by steam,[62] yet at approximately the same time, the Polish judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz, head of a committee charged with the investigation of the events in Treblinka, opted for the motor-gas chambers, apparently because this seemed to him to be the most believable of the diverse murder instruments described by the witnesses.[63]

It is worth remarking that the technique for killing which was also claimed for the “extermination camp” Belzec during the war and during the immediate post-war period, does not agree with the version later sanctioned by the official historiography.

Various sources describe the methods for the alleged extermination camp Belzec, where, it is claimed, the victims were killed with electric current, on an enormous platform that could be submerged in water; the victims were then immediately incinerated, using electricity.[64] This account shows a complete lack of technical and scientific understanding; the excessive powers of imagination it attests to render an ordinary person speechless. We shall therefore dispense with a serious evaluation of it here, even though this tale was even accorded a hearing before the IMT.[65]

The version of the diesel exhaust chambers made its final successful breakthrough in 1951. That was when a book entitled Bréviaire de la Haine (Breviary of Hatred) appeared from the pen of the French-Jewish historian Léon Poliakov, which quickly became a classic of orthodox historiography. Poliakov cited a long excerpt there from the Gerstein report, and commented on it as follows:[66]

“We do not need to add much to this description; it applies to Treblinka and Sobibor just as it does to the Belzec camp. The facilities were designed there quite similarly, and carbon monoxide produced by a diesel motor was the chosen method for administering death.”

In such a way were the steam and the suctioned-air chambers, as well as the various other murder methods hawked by the witnesses, finally consigned to the junkyard of history, and the diesel gas chambers of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor became transmogrified into 'established historical facts.'

3. The Extermination Camp Treblinka

According to the current (2003) teachings of the official 'Holocaust' thesis, a large part of the Polish Jews were deported to the extermination camp Treblinka as of the summer of 1942. Without first being registered in the camp, they were gassed in Diesel gas chambers, and buried in mass graves until winter. As of spring 1943, it is said, the gassing victims were immediately incinerated without leaving a trace, as were the exhumed bodies.[67] Allegedly this was done in pits several meters deep and very long (formerly these pits were 'mass graves'), on a grating of steel girders supported by concrete pillars. In autumn 1943 the camp was razed to the ground and all evidence was eliminated. According to reports some 870,000 to 1.2 million Jews fell victim to this scenario.[68] But before examining details of this account, we shall first present a general overview of the matter.

3.1. Generalities on the Site of the Crime and the Murder Weapons

Under normal circumstances, solving a crime involves criminological investigations in order to obtain irrefutable evidence with which to convict the criminal. Since eyewitness statements are frequently very imprecise, it is the task of the courts to establish the true state of the matter on the basis of incontrovertible facts and evidence. Murder ranks among the most heinous of crimes, which is why it is particularly necessary in such cases to precisely establish the relevant facts. In such a crime, the scene of the crime, the murder weapon, the course of events, the cause of death, and the motive are generally investigated in order to ascertain the identity of the murderer/s. The whereabouts of the victims is also of central importance.

If the victim of an alleged crime cannot be located, it is difficult if not downright impossible to prove that the crime took place. In murders with only one or at most a very few victims, the elimination of evidence may be possible, provided that the site of the crime and the method of eliminating the victims remain unknown. If, however, the number of victims is great, and if the site of their elimination is precisely documented cartographically and even recorded on aerial photographs, then given the standards of modern technology the crime can be established with absolute certainty. One need only recall, for example, that in the course of archaeological digs the discovery of ashes suffices to establish the presence of human settlements beyond any doubt even hundreds of thousands of years after the fact. To date forensic investigations of the Holocaust have been based almost exclusively on eyewitness testimony.[69] In only one single case is there a report of an excavation, which the Court of Siedlce had commissioned. This excavation was carried out in Treblinka II on November 9-13, 1945.[70] We shall touch on the results of this investigation a little later.

Official Polish Map of the camp Treblinka II (“extermination camp”). (Click to enlarge.)

According to the expositions of the supporters of the Holocaust dogma, the deportation, internment and killing of the Jews during the Second World War was a systematic and methodical program for purposes of exterminating the European Jews. The supposedly methodical and systematic nature of this campaign requires that there was a plan providing for it. To date, however, the sources available to researchers have yielded no evidence for a plan or its systematic implementation – unless allorders and decrees that are supposed to have been issued with respect to the solution of the Jewish Question were in the form of a secret code. But even for this no evidence has been uncovered, for no source has yet been found which contained a definition of the codes comprising such a secret language; however, such a 'Rosetta Stone' would have been indispensable to ensure a proper understanding between the issuers and the receivers of the orders. It was and remains a characteristic habit of the Germans to organize and document every measure taken right down to the smallest detail, and this practice was particularly evident among the authorities of the Third Reich. The Holocaust dogmatists' theory that the mass murder was guided by improvisation, coincidences and spontaneity, and even by a decision-making process based on mind-reading,[71] is utterly implausible and downright ludicrous, not only for Germany but on the whole.

3.2. Site of the Crime: the Upper Death Camp

As already mentioned, the dubious witness statements and the lack of any definite identification of the murder site by courts or commissions, as well as the commensurate efforts at securing evidence, preclude any exact and reliable reconstruction of the so-called site of the crime. The very fact that there are sketches of the site which show a rectangular camp area and others that show oblique-angled outlines with variant measurements compels one to view the matter with some doubt. Therefore it would seem best to regard as the alleged site of the crime, that camp 'Treblinka II' which is shown on an official looking ground plan and which appears on German aerial photographs from the year 1944.[42] According to the plan from the Treblinka Archives, the camp had an area of 1,447,200 sq.ft., as stated, and the so-called Extermination Area measured 193,700 sq.ft. Working from the air photos, the Extermination Area measured about 230 ft. × 295 ft., corresponding to an area of 67,800 sq.ft. According to the accounts at hand, the Extermination Area included the two buildings housing a total of 13 hermetically sealed gas chambers, as follows:[72] the first Death House, with three gas chambers of approximately 16 ft. × 16 ft. each (other claims allege 13 ft. × 13 ft.) and 8.5 ft. in height, was a concrete construction built in late summer and early autumn 1942. The second Death House, built a little later, had ten gas chambers and an area of 26 ft. × 13 ft. (other claims are 23 ft. × 23 ft.) per gas chamber, and was a stone building with a concrete foundation. Five gas chambers each flanked a 5 ft. wide corridor. The outer walls had gas-tight trap doors that could be pulled up to speed the emptying of the gas chambers. Adjoining the gable wall was the engine room, whence the Diesel exhaust gas was piped into the chambers.

Whereas the Black Book of 1946 speaks of 4,000 to 6,000 people being squeezed into the chambers at one time, most sources are content with fewer than 2,000. The mass graves for accommodation of the bodies are also part of the immediate site of the crime. According to Eliahu Rosenberg,[73] these mass graves, located near the gas chambers, measured 394 ft. × 49 ft. × 20 ft.,[74] but these dimensions vary from 164 ft. in length × 33 ft. in width × 16.4 ft. in depth to 492 ft. in length × 82 ft. in width × 33 ft. in depth, depending on the source. Later the site of the crime was functionally enhanced by the addition of gratings, or grilles, for burning the bodies.

Drawing on the accounts provided by witnesses and the subject literature, we shall examine a few aspects of this, with an eye to the technical prerequisites and their feasibility. These are elements that ought to have been realized long ago, and taken into consideration in the relevant trials. To illustrate the absence of a critical mindset and the frightening incapacity for technical conceptualization on the part of judges and public prosecutors, the following example is taken from the book Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas:

“The building was low, long and broad […] it was of gray concrete, had a flat roof of roofing felt [!!! A.N. …] Three steps without banisters led into the building […] The chambers were 5 ft. above ground level […]“[75]

This means that for each step the riser was an astonishing 1.6 ft. high, which would have been quite an obstacle in filling the gas chambers with the people to be gassed.

3.3. The Murder Weapon

In recent times no one has given any serious consideration to the alleged facilities for the production of high-temperature steam, of sub-atmospheric pressure, or of chlorine gas for mass killing; these claims have clearly been rejected for their absurdity. But it is inexplicable why witnesses, historians and the courts have agreed on Diesel exhaust gas as the 'murder weapon' for Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. It is quite incomprehensible why those planning the extermination of incredibly great numbers of Jews should have resorted to the exhaust from Diesel engines, since we know today from many environmental reports that the exhaust from gasoline-powered engines is a hundred times more poisonous than that from a Diesel engine. A comparison of the various witness statements does not clarify just exactly how the gas affected those locked into the gas chambers. Any grave toxic effects of the exhaust from a Diesel engine can be ruled out due to the low carbon monoxide content of said gas.[76] Piping Diesel exhaust gas into the gas chambers would amount to a reduced but still adequate supply of oxygen to the rooms in question.

It is more than strange that the Black Book of 1943[64] cites a CO content of 2 to 3% for Diesel exhaust. It is not likely that this was printed in error, since the allegedly lethal nature of Diesel exhaust is still a vital brick in the foundation of the Holocaust. The value of 2 to 3% CO given for Diesel exhaust cannot be traced back to any witness statements. One may assume that the World Jewish Congress had subject experts at its disposal in this issue as well; the accompanying expositions of the biochemical effects of CO on hemoglobin would suggest this.

After escaping from the combustion chamber, the exhaust gases of internal combustion engines are channeled into exhaust pipes, whence they pass into the open air. If the gas escaping out the end of the exhaust pipe is stopped up, the pressure will increase until the engine stalls. The degree to which the pressure can rise varies with the type and construction of the engine.[77]

According to the witnesses, the engines used to supply the gas chambers with gas were heavy Diesel engines taken from Soviet tanks, whose power ranged up to 550 hp. Since Diesel engines have a high compression ratio (1:15), it may be assumed that they are still able to function even if the pressure of the exhaust increases by 0.5 atm. after exiting the cylinder.

Now if these exhaust gases are channeled into a hermetically sealed room, the pressure there can also increase by 0.5 atm. (corresponding to a weight of 500g/cm², or 1,024 pounds per sq.ft.); this means that there would have been a force equivalent to the weight of 5 metric tons pushing outward against each square meter of surface area. This would have been the situation in any gassing as described by the witnesses for these allegedly hermetically sealed gas chambers. To illustrate the total force acting on the walls of the gas chamber, let us look at the dimensions of the chambers of Death House 2. Given the assumed height of 6.6 ft. and a room length of 26.25 ft., the wall surface area comes to about 173 sq.ft.; the force pushing outwards against the wall amounts to the equivalent of 80 metric tons. Imagine, if you will, three tractor-trailers of more than 25 tons each, simultaneously pushing against the wall!

The ceiling of this facility has a total surface area of 603 sq.ft. The force acting on it from below would be equivalent to the weight of 280 metric tons. The dead weight of such a ceiling is approximately 10 metric tons. If the ceiling did not actually lift off, it would at least snap in half upwards, since the steel reinforcement of reinforced ceilings is located in the lower third of the ceiling as seen in cross-section. Since according to Rückerl et al. the floor of this gas chamber was 5 ft. above ground level, there must have been an empty space beneath it. Therefore the floor must have had a load-carrying capacity of more than 5 t/m². Ceilings and floors of 6 t/m² weight-bearing capacity would not have simply vanished into thin air after the war.

Similar considerations apply to the doors of the gas chambers. The aforementioned trap doors measured 8.2 ft. width × 6.6 ft. assumed height, i.e., 54 sq.ft. The pressure brought to bear on them would thus have amounted to 25 tons pushing outward – and yet these doors still managed to remain airtight. No doubt such a highly engineered door would be a prized museum exhibit.

Regarding the weight put on walls, ceilings and doors, we shall quote the Black Book of 1946,[14] which states:

“The second method, the one that was most widely used, was pumping air out of the chambers with suction pumps until the victims were dead.”

Rachel Auerbach cites a modified version, according to which the air was pumped out before the Diesel exhaust was piped in.[78] That even just the first half of this would have sufficed to kill the victims if the gas chamber had survived the process from a construction point of view is something which clearly does not occur to Ms. Auerbach. For these methods of killing, the forces acting on the building would have been reversed in comparison to the previous, i.e., acting inwardly from without, and of even greater intensity up to twice the previously demonstrated values, since the difference in pressure between a normal room and one pumped to vacuum conditions is approximately 1 atm. It must be stressed that even considerably smaller pressure differences between the gas chamber and the atmosphere would have demolished the building.

Let us briefly consider how long it would have taken to attain an excess pressure of 0.5 atm. in the gas chamber of 603 sq.ft. area × 6.6 ft. height, i.e., 3,980 cu.ft. Of the aforementioned Soviet Diesel engines, the W2 with 38 liter cubic capacity would be a possibility.[76] In a gassing situation the air volume in the gas chamber (volume of chamber minus volume of victims locked into it) would have been approximately 2,684 cu.ft. Assuming that the engine ran at 500 rpm, the volume of exhaust gas output would have been 335 cu.ft. per minute. The introduction of a total of 1,342 cu.ft. of exhaust gas would have increased the pressure in the gas chamber to 1.5 atm. within 4 minutes. Even running at full load and under the most unfavorable conditions, a Diesel engine does not put out enough toxins in this short time to suffice to kill anyone – but the volume of exhaust certainly would suffice to blow up hermetically sealed brick-walled rooms.

How would a homicidal gassing process even be possible if, for example, the ten gas chambers of Death House 2 were simultaneously filled with 6,000 people, as the Black Book reports? The hallway leading to the gas chambers was allegedly 5 ft. wide. This is just wide enough to allow two people to enter it side by side. So if the victims-to-be are lined up outside the Death House, two abreast and each 2 ft. behind the person before them, we end up with a line-up almost 11/4 mile long. Entering the Death House, filing into the gas chambers and crowding them closely with victims will allow a marching speed of the line-up of, perhaps, 11/4 mile per hour if the victims behave with great discipline and cooperation. The absurdity of the conditions required for this best-case scenario shows that one hour certainly would not have sufficed to crowd the 6,000 people forcibly into the chambers. This means that the victims in the chamber that was filled first would have already been locked up in their air-tight room for an hour or more before the gassing even began; for to assume that the gassing began as soon as the first chamber was filled contradicts eyewitness testimony, for example the claim that Ivan the Terrible not only drove the victims into the chambers but also operated the Diesel unit. He could not have done both at once. This further indicates that the victims locked up in the chamber that was filled first had less than 16 m³ oxygen available to them.

According to technical specifications for engineers, the oxygen requirement for people performing even non-strenuous work is ²/₃ liters per minute. Under the conditions given – being crowded together in a small room – this is the least amount required. This means that 600 persons under the specified conditions use up some 400 liters of oxygen per minute, so that as long as consumption remained steady, the available oxygen would already have been completely used up within 40 minutes; dead bodies would have been all that was left in the chamber, long before the start of any gassing. In fact, oxygen consumption decreases with the onset of death, so that it would have taken the victims about one hour to suffocate. Even the witnesses ought to have noticed that. These, however, report that death by suffocation took 24 or even 48 hours when the Diesel engines failed to work; this account, therefore, must be rejected as being a sheer flight of fancy.[79]

If, however, the chambers were not hermetically sealed and were only enriched, so to speak, with Diesel exhaust gas, then the 15-17% oxygen content of the exhaust would not have been fatal.[80]

Incidentally, it does not make sense that individual chambers should have been used for gassings, since one single large room would have been much more practical in terms of filling and emptying as described for the alleged scenario.

The divergent eyewitness testimony regarding the function of the Diesel engines in the camps necessitates further observations. From time to time it is claimed that the engines used for gassing also supplied electrical power to the camps.[81] According to the claims for Treblinka II, the lower camp already existed before the upper one was constructed. If the Diesel engine mentioned for the upper camp had been meant to supply the entire Treblinka II camp, then the lower camp would have had to obtain its electricity from elsewhere until the upper camp was built. But if the engine had been intended to supply only the upper camp, this would have been technical nonsense, since due to the nature of the facilities all that would have been required was at most 100 light bulbs @ 75 Watt – a total of 7.5 kW – for lighting purposes. The Soviet tank engines had a capacity of up to 550 hp (≈400 KW), which is why no one would have used them to generate 7.5 kW of electricity. At such a low level, one may assume that the composition of the Diesel exhaust would have approximated that of an engine running at idle. One must also bear in mind that it is highly unlikely that engines from captured Soviet vehicles would have been used to generate electrical power, since in the case of a break-down it would have been difficult during wartime to obtain replacement parts for these engines. Eyewitnesses even tell of such defects and break-downs, and claim that they caused repeated delays in the gassings.

The water supply (the camp had its own well) was also dependent on electrical power. Since witnesses have reported time and again that the gassing engines were turned on for the gassings, and were turned off again after the gassings were finished (after 5 to 45 minutes[82]), but the electrical and water supplies would have had to be present without interruption, one may consider it certain that the gassing engine in the upper camp cannot have served to generate electrical power for the lower camp. Treblinka II will thus have been connected to the power supply of the nearby town, and probably also had a separate emergency power back-up in the event of power failures.

Accounts of interruptions of the described gassings due to Diesel engine failures are not restricted to Treblinka. For Belzec SS-Führer Gerstein reported such a failure of a Diesel engine[76] which was used solely for gassings, and would thus almost certainly have been run at idle – if Gerstein's report were correct, but this can almost definitely be ruled out.[83] Since according to Gerstein the people in the gas chambers remained alive for hours while the engine was out of service, a closed chamber must have been very well ventilated indeed.

Any serious plan to commit mass murder by means of exhaust gas would thus not only have provided for a different (non-Diesel) kind of engine, it would also have had to provide for back-up facilities.

All the considerations and calculations presented here are quite simple on the whole, and it is therefore utterly incomprehensible that such technical analyses have not been commissioned and carried out long ago. Another point which the courts really ought to have noted is that so far not one single case is known of someone committing suicide with the exhaust gas from a Diesel engine, whereas suicide by means of exhaust from a gasoline-powered engine is unfortunately not at all a rare occurrence. Thus the toxic effects of Diesel exhaust falsely alleged by the Holocaust dogmatists have not found practical application outside a gas chamber.

The technical considerations set out in the foregoing show that the gas chambers as they are described would not have been physically able to serve as murder weapon as they are commonly believed to have done. The following investigation shall shed some light on the alleged removal of the bodies, which allegedly left no traces whatsoever.

4. Treblinka: Elimination of Corpses Without a Trace

4.1. Burial Pits

According to Eliahu Rosenberg,[16] after the trap doors of the gas chambers were pulled up, the corpses (some 850,000 altogether) were taken to pits measuring 394 ft. in length, 49 ft. in breadth and 20 ft. in depth. Based on Rosenberg's testimony, and assuming a likely gradient of 65° in the sandy and gravelly terrain of the Treblinka area and a 1.6 ft. soil layer to cover the mass grave, such a burial pit would have had a fillable volume of some 282,500 cu.ft.

Some witnesses have stated that the bodies were layered into the pit and that each layer was covered with a layer of soil; others claim that the bodies were haphazardly thrown into the pit. Both situations would allow for approximately 8 bodies per cubic meter (10 per 44 cubic ft.), meaning that the pits described would have accommodated about 64,000 bodies each. Interestingly enough, none of the witnesses mention the considerable amount of excavated soil, which came to about 339,000 cubic ft. per pit, given a 20% loosening-up of the soil. The gradient of a pit dug in natural ground conditions is known to be much steeper than that of the pile of dug-up contents. If the surface area of the burial pit measured 19,300 sq.ft., as alleged, then given a gradient of approximately 30°for the excavated gravel or sand – and after subtracting approximately 35,300 cu.ft. for the material with which the corpses were covered – the area taken up by the dug-up material piled 20 ft. high along the pit would have been approximately 28,000 sq.ft.

According to the Slovenian historian Tone Ference,[84] the upper extermination area, which is said to have been within the camp area of Treblinka II, covered an area of about 172,000 sq.ft.; however, to forestall any objections on this score, we shall base our further considerations on the size of the extermination area indicated by the archival plan, namely about 193,700 sq.ft. This area held not only burial pits and the material dug up in the course of their excavation, but gas chambers and other buildings as well. If one accepts the 875,000 dead mentioned in the Jerusalem Trial of John Demjanjuk, then 14 burial pits à la Rosenberg and a total of some 4.6 million cu.ft. of excavated earth would have been involved in the accommodation of all these bodies. Since these 14 pits would have taken up an area of 271,150 sq.ft, they could not have fit into the extermination area measuring only 193,700 sq.ft. Further, the heaps of excavated material resulting from the 14 burial pits would have required an additional area of more than 392,000 sq.ft.

If, on the other hand, one proceeds on the assumption that the claims of 3 million victims are correct, then 47 burial pits covering some 910,000 sq.ft. would have been needed; these would have taken up almost two-thirds of the area of Treblinka II – not even including the excavated soil going with them.

Finally, some comments on the allegedly 20-ft.-deep burial pits. First of all, it seems unlikely that the pits would have been dug that deep, as doing so would have required either complicated heavy machinery or increased expenses related to the construction of ramps. The excavators allegedly used in Treblinka would hardly have been adequate to this task.[85] At depths of 20 ft., it is also probable that ground water seepage occurs, which would have impeded or downright prevented the construction and use of pits of such depth. However, since the camp Treblinka I, with a large gravel pit, is said to have been located near Treblinka II, a ground water level lower than 20 ft. is certainly conceivable. If one proceeds on the assumption of a more realistic pit depth of approximately 10 ft., then a pit of the aforementioned surface area would have held some 35,000 bodies, and 25 pits would have been needed, covering a total of 484,200 sq.ft. excluding the area taken up by the excavated soil. The excavated material itself would have required an area of 570,300 sq.ft., making for a total of almost 1.1 million sq.ft. For the alleged 3 million victims, 86 pits covering 1.67 million sq.ft. would have been needed, plus the corresponding area for the excavated soil.

In the case of Auschwitz, quantitative considerations based on events 'attested to' by witnesses, and on the technical and material consequences resulting from the alleged events, have brought about a constant and ongoing reduction in the number of victims.[86] Scientific facts have always been the enemy of religious dogma.

4.2. Elimination of the Corpses – Not Quite Without a Trace

The elimination of victims without a trace is a vital link in the chain of evidence for the Holocaust in general. Elimination without a trace is the prerequisite for an arbitrary number of victims. This is how the numbers of victims alleged for Treblinka come to vary from 700,000 to 3 million – a phenomenon that also appears in other cases.[87] The casual treatment of such high numbers of victims seems questionable from the start, and ought to prompt those concerned with the topic to gather scientifically irrefutable facts so as to prevent the Holocaust from becoming a matter of faith. But smoke and mirrors and eyewitness testimony have been deemed good enough. The technically unrealistic claims regarding the mass murder of human beings are compounded by the utterly unbelievable accounts of the removal of bodies without any trace. Millions of dead cannot simply vanish into thin air. In this context the reader is referred to the case of Katyn, where the 4,500 Polish officers murdered by the Soviets in 1940 were discovered in 1943.[88]

According to eyewitness testimony, Himmler ordered the incineration of bodies in the extermination camp Treblinka to eliminate any evidence of the killings; this order was allegedly given in March 1943.[89] This is said to have involved the exhumation and burning of the bodies that had already been buried. Various eyewitness accounts exist of this procedure in Treblinka, which allegedly went on from about March to August 1943.

Regarding the burning of the corpses, Eliahu Rosenberg has stated:

“After Himmler inspected the camp he ordered the burning of all the bodies lying in the pit […] For this purpose, two iron rails were placed on the ground parallel to each other, and the bodies that were dug out of the pit with excavators were stacked on top of each other like fire logs. It frequently happened that the corpses, especially those just freshly killed, didn't burn well, and so we had to pour gasoline over them […] At that time we had only one burning site, and of course that wasn't enough, since we couldn't burn more than a hundred bodies a day. An SS-Oberscharführer, Herbert Floss by name, was brought in from the neighboring camp […] He set up five or six burning sites and also introduced a new way to layer the bodies […]“[90]

In his testimony in Jerusalem, at the Demjanjuk trial, he also persisted in his convictions:

“In Treblinka we learned that little children burn better than grown men. All it takes is a match to light them. That's why the Germans, damn them, ordered us to put the children in the pit first.”[91]

The witness Szyja Warszawski, who came to Treblinka in July 1942, told of gassings with chlorine and of at least 10,000 victims a day, and stated with respect to cremation:

“[…] Usually the bodies were put into pits 33 ft. deep and wide and many times as long. In January 1943 […] five to six gratings were set up on the ground. The grates, which consisted of iron rails, were supported by cement posts about two feet above the ground. A grate like that was 33 ft. long and 13 ft. wide. A fire was started underneath. Bodies were layered on the burning grate with an excavator machine. Once the bodies caught fire they would continue burning by themselves. Mass cremation began in late February 1943. The ashes that remained after the burning were thrown back into the pits where the bodies had been dug out earlier. Sweet-peas were sown over top and trees brought over from the forest were planted to camouflage the site […] For some pits only the top layer of bodies was dug out. The rest of the bodies were covered over with soil, and the site was camouflaged as well […].”[92]

Without going into detail about the strange and contradictory claims in these statements, we shall add some excerpts from Wassily Grossmann's book Die Hölle von Treblinka, where the cremations are described as follows:

“At first the cremation of the bodies just wouldn't work – the bodies did not catch fire properly [sic!]; it was observed however, that female bodies burned easier. Vast quantities of expensive gasoline and oil were wasted on kindling [sic!] the bodies, but the results were pathetic […] An expert […] came from Germany, from the SS. What multitalented experts the Hitler regime gave rise to! […] A specialist for digging up and burning millions of human corpses was also found.

Under his direction the construction of furnaces began. It was a very special kind, a cross between a pyre and a furnace […] The excavator dug a boiler trench 820 to 980 ft. long, 65 to about 80 ft. wide and 16 ft. deep. Reinforced concrete pillars sticking about 40 to 50 inches out of the ground were evenly spaced in three rows on the bottom, along the entire length of the trench. These pillars supported steel joists running the entire length of the trench. Across these joists rails were placed 2 to 3 inches apart. In this way the grating of an enormous oven was formed […] Soon a second and then a third oven of the same size was constructed. Each grating was loaded with 3,500 to 4,000 bodies at a time.

[…] People who participated in the cremation of the bodies recount that the ovens resembled gigantic volcanoes. […] Dense, black, fat columns of smoke rose heavenward […] Even twenty to twenty-five miles away, the people saw […] these flames at night, rising up beyond the treetops of the spruce forests surrounding the camp. The entire area was polluted with the stench of burning human flesh […] The traces are indelible.”[93]

Jankiel Wiernik, who is the only one of the witnesses to claim that he participated directly in the cremation for a longer period of time, writes:

“It turned out that bodies of women burned more easily than those of men. Accordingly, the bodies of women were used for kindling the fires.”[94]

Richard Glazar comments succinctly:

“The human body does not burn particularly well, quite the opposite.”[95]

Rachel Auerbach has compiled various witness statements and summarized them thus:

“Polish people still talk about the way soap was manufactured from the bodies of Jews…. The discovery of Professor Spanner's soap factory in Langfuhr proved that their suspicions had been well founded. Witnesses tell us that when the corpses were burned on pyres, pans would be placed beneath the racks to catch the fat as it ran off, but this has not been confirmed. But even if the Germans in Treblinka or at any of the other death factories failed to do this, and allowed so many tons of precious fat to go to waste, it could only have been an oversight on their part.[96]

In Treblinka, as in other such places, significant advances were made in the science of annihilation, such as the highly original discovery that the bodies of women burned better than those of men.

'Men won't burn without women.' [… T]he bodies of women were used to kindle, or, more accurately put, to build the fires among the piles of corpses […] Blood, too, was found to be first-class combustion material. […] Young corpses burn up quicker than old ones. […] [W]ith the help of gasoline and the bodies of the fatter females, the pile of corpses finally burst into flames.”[97]

Yitzhak Arad, trying to sound scientific, reports:

“[T]he corpses […were] arranged […] in layers on the roaster to a height of 2 meters. […] When all was ready, dry wood and branches, which had been laid under the roaster, were ignited. The entire construction, with the bodies, was quickly engulfed in fire […] and the flames would reach a height of up to 10 meters. [… T]he SS men in charge of the cremation became convinced that the corpses burned well enough without extra fuel. Yechiel Reichman, a member of the 'burning group', writes: 'The SS 'expert' on bodyburning ordered us to put women, particularly fat women, on the first layer of the grill, face down. The second layer could consist of whatever was brought – men, women, or children – and so on, layer on top of layer [….]'[98]

These [fresh] bodies did not burn as well as those removed from the ditches [i.e., the graves] and had to be sprayed with fuel before they would burn.”[99]

But something does seem to have struck one of our Holocausters as odd. Jean-François Steiner vividly describes the problem resulting from the actual, enormous wood (fuel) requirements involved in cremation:

“The prime costs proved to be prohibitive: aside from the vast quantities of gasoline, just as many logs were needed as there were bodies. It was not a viable undertaking, for even if all the forests of Poland might still have been felled as a last resort, the gasoline supply would nevertheless run short. Stalingrad had fallen, and with that, the rich petroleum fields of the Caucasus had shimmered away into nothingness like a mirage.”[100]

But J.-F. Steiner, who also compiled many eyewitness statements, manages to find a way out of this predicament; he too came across the bodies that burn of their own accord:

“There were fire-resistant [bodies] as well as such that caught fire easily. The trick was to use the good ones to burn the bad. According to his [Herbert Floss's] research – which evidently had been far advanced – old bodies burned better than new ones, fat ones better than skinny ones, women better than men, and children not as well as women but better than men. From this it followed that old corpses of fat women were the ideal kind.”[101]

Some witness statements do in fact indicate that there were units in the camp whose task it was to supply firewood. While Abraham Krzepicki and Samuel Willenberg can only tell of a unit that tore branches off trees in order to decorate the fence surrounding the extermination camp with them, for camouflage purposes,[102] Y. Arad reports that a “wood commando” which initially had to provide only the wood required for construction and firewood later also had to procure the wood needed for cremation.[103] However, there is a consensus among the witnesses and Holocaust believers that the wood was only lit as a sort of camp fire underneath the mountains of corpses, until these had caught fire and burned on their own. R. Glazar is the only one to be able to provide details of this “wood commando“: it consisted of 25 men, whose efforts yielded so few twigs and branches that a “camouflage commando” of 25 men had to climb unfelled trees in order to break off additional branches, which were woven into the camp fences to keep outsiders from looking in.[104] Apparently, the “wood commando” did not fell many trees.

Incidentally, Steven Spielberg has shown himself quick to learn from the aforementioned 'witnesses': in one scene of his movie Schindler's List he shows a gigantic conveyor belt continually heaping bodies onto an enormous pile of corpses magically burning on by themselves.[105]

4.3. Cremation of Bodies, or Fire Victims?

Even though they are contradictory, the many eyewitness accounts do offer numerous details of the extermination activities in Treblinka II; on the other hand, the issue of the fuel necessary for the elimination of the bodies – that is, for their incineration – is ignored, glossed over, or dismissed with unacceptable claims. This consistent approach suggests that the issue, not being resolvable, is repressed either consciously or unconsciously. Szyja Warszawski came up with what is no doubt the easiest solution to the fuel problem when he declared:

“[…] Once the bodies caught fire they would continue burning by themselves”,

and Grossmann also took a turn in this direction when he stated:

“[…] the bodies did not catch fire properly”,

and

“[…] kindling the bodies”.

The witnesses appear to agree on the opinion that female corpses burn by themselves particularly well, and can thus serve to ignite and burn other corpses. These claims imply that mere kindling suffices to set corpses on fire.

However, this easy way out does not suffice to truly solve the problem of the cremation of corpses, for the worldwide presence and use of oil-, natural gas- or coal-fired crematoria refutes it conclusively, as do all the laws of nature. Some 65% of the human body is unburnable water.

When a major earthquake struck India in September 1993, claiming some 20,000 lives, it was feared that epidemics would break out if the fuel (wood) needed for the cremation of the bodies could not be procured in time. In India, where the cremation of bodies has been the rule rather than the exception for a long time, self-burning corpses have yet to be discovered, even though the country suffers from fuel shortage in this context.

Psychologists ought to investigate the patently false witness claims, since there is no scientific or literary precedent for any similar event, which might have found its way into the witnesses' subconscious mind in the form of a literary experience. An event somewhat similar to the claims of the witnesses may be found in the German well-known children's picture-book Der Struwwelpeter, where the dreadful fate of Paulinchen, a girl playing with matches, is described in order to deter children from doing the same. All that remains of Paulinchen is a pile of ashes and the girl's shoes.

If the story of Paulinchen, who burned up all by herself, and of the remaining little pile of ashes were the psychological key to the claims of Warszawski and the others, then Paulinchen's shoes, which failed to burn, might also be the key to Gerstein's story about Belzec, where a 5-year-old child allegedly had to take the shoes of the Jews who were to be gassed to a 40-ft.-high(!) pile of shoes.[83] Possibly these oddly similar statements even lead back to another as yet unknown common source reflecting a key childhood experience. The author of the storybook is Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann; however, the Stars of David located in the original edition near the passage in question do not allow for any further conclusions.

Illustration 2:
The sad tale of the matches, from Der Struwwelpeter by Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann. (Click to enlarge.)

If the eyewitness testimony quoted previously with regard to the cremation grating are already utterly unbelievable, the claims made by W. Grossmann in his book also reveal a very sick imagination. His term “boiler trench“, which is neither known from other contexts nor makes any intrinsic sense, should suffice to bring psychologists into play. The purpose of such a neologism is probably to convince the amateur audience of the speaker's authority, to impose and to reinforce ignorance, to create a guilty conscience, and thus to render the lie believable.

Moving on, Grossmann describes the oven grating and states that three supports of reinforced concrete posts (!!!) and steel joists some 40 inches high were set up along the length of the trench, across which rails were placed 2 to 3 inches apart.[106] In this way there are about 5 rails per running meter, which – assuming a rail length of only 40 ft., although the trench is said to have been as much as 82 ft. in width – results in a total rail length of just over 11 miles. To allow for the burning of the alleged millions of bodies, Grossmann reports two further boiler trenches, making for a total rail length of 33.5 miles. Where on earth did all these rails come from? According to Grossmann the grates were loaded with 3,500 to 4,000 corpses at a time. How were the bodies counted, and who distributed them on the grating, and how?

From the dimensions given, the surface area of one grating may be calculated as 38,700 sq.ft.; this means that for the three boiler trenches the total surface area was 116,100 sq.ft., in other words, roughly the same area as the entire death camp. The total volume of soil excavated – 2.86 million cu.ft. – was even greater than that for the mass graves. Whereas Warszawski's much smaller grating held veritable mountains of dead bodies, Grossmann is content with about one body per square yard of grating surface. Assuming that, in the case of Grossmann, cremation could be finished in 5 hours (without the ashing of the bones), it is difficult to understand why cremation was carried on 'round the clock'; in any case, it would have been necessary to extinguish the fires every now and then in order to remove the ashes and to add more fuel. But who knows, perhaps the corpses available to Grossmann were not only self-burning, but also burned without leaving any residue – he doesn't say. At any rate he makes no mention of the fuel.

The sick imagination on which such an account is based is not as astonishing as the fact that millions of people believe it. What became of the enormous number of rails and of the reinforced concrete pillars, and who carried out the transports?

Occasionally, witnesses have mentioned that bodies were burned with liquid fuel in pits in Treblinka II; methyl alcohol and gasoline were allegedly used.[107] In such a case, as in all open-air incinerations, only a small percentage of the energy released by the fuel in fact acts on the object to be burned, in contrast to suitable furnaces where insulated walls concentrate the heat in a small space.

Intensive incineration, with high temperatures and corresponding energy density, requires a plentiful oxygen supply and a large fuel surface. This simple fact has found practical application in, for example, spirit stoves and blowtorches, where fuel and air nozzles are important. This effect is also commonly used in internal combustion vehicles, in the form of fuel injection and air turbulencing. Due to the insufficient oxygen supply in pits several yards deep, the cremation of corpses as described by the witnesses is not physically possible. The reader is referred to a type of fireplace used by the ancient Romans; even in those early days the Romans already knew to supply these fireplaces with air via underground pipes.

If one wanted to incinerate bodies in the open air and with liquid fuels, it would be necessary to prevent the fuel from seeping into the ground by placing metal pans underneath the burning grates. Because of the disadvantageous conditions, the quantity of energy required for cremation could not be less than that generated by solid fuels such as wood or coal. Regarding the cremation grates described, there would have been the additional problem of body parts falling into the gasoline-filled pans, thus being extinguished. Pouring liquid fuel over human bodies can result in their charring but not in their incineration.[108]

While the complete incineration of a body in the retort of a crematorium requires at least 66 lbs. of coke fuel,[109] then the equivalent incineration in the open air will require at least 16 gallons of gasoline, given a suitable set-up. Under the technical conditions described for Treblinka, the incineration of the 875,000 victims alleged in Jerusalem would have taken some 13.2 million gallons of gasoline. Given this daily requirement of fully 10 tank cars of gasoline – an overall total of no less than 2,000 – the train of tank cars would have been all of 9.3 miles long. And this at a time when every gallon of gasoline was badly needed for fighter planes and vehicles of all kinds!

According to a November 27, 1986, report of the New Delhi Schenectady Gazette, cremations and the consumption of wood involved therein (due to the lack of corpses that will burn by themselves) are a serious concern for the inhabitants of India, since entire forests have been cut down over time for just this purpose. According to this report, the daily incineration of 21,000 bodies requires 6,433 metric tons of wood, i.e., 675 lbs. per body. In applying these conditions to Treblinka, we shall simplify the matter somewhat by ignoring the problems involved in the prior exhumation of the bodies; let it suffice to consider only one unreality, namely the incineration of the bodies.

To forestall objections of any kind, we shall reduce the consumption of wood for mass cremations from 675 lbs. to 440 lbs. per body.[110] From various eyewitness accounts it follows that the cremation process lasted until early August, a total of about 185 days. This means that a minimum of 4,700 bodies had to be cremated every day, requiring 950 metric tons of dry wood daily. The engineering handbook Hütte indicates a volume of 74.15 cu.ft. per metric ton for spruce wood,[111] and of 109.5 cu.ft. per metric ton for spruce wood fire logs.[112] This means that the volume of the wood needed in Treblinka daily for incinerating the corpses would have been about 104,000 cu.ft. This volume is perhaps easier to grasp when visualized as a stack 3 ft. high, 3 ft. wide and about 1.75 miles long. Every day!

The cremation gratings, described by Warszawski as measuring 13 ft. × 33 ft. and with 1.5 ft. elevation above the ground, had a spatial volume of approximately 650 cu.ft. underneath the grating. To ensure that the firewood would receive enough draft (oxygen), a maximum of 530 cu.ft. could have been placed underneath. This quantity corresponds to a net weight of 10,600 lbs. and would have sufficed for cremating 24 (twenty-four!) bodies. If one assumes that, in this case, the complete incineration of the bodies took only 2 hours (which, however, is far too short to be realistic), then even cremating 'round-the-clock' would have disposed of 288 bodies at most. The high piling-up of bodies on the grating, as it is described by witnesses, would have brought nothing but disadvantages, if only due to the inhibited access granted the flames. But if 4,700 bodies had to be burned every day, this would have required more than 16 gratings as described above, with a total surface area of 6,890 sq.ft.

Stoking the cremation sites with wood, and removing the ashes and skeletons, are elements which have been ignored to date. Given the heat of the fire under the gratings and the stench of the burning bodies, it would have been impossible to perform these necessary tasks while the fire was burning. It is thus safe to say that continuous cremation in the manner described, and using the burning sites described by the witnesses, would not have been possible. Burning the 4,700 bodies would have required at least twice the number of gratings.

With reference to the number of bodies to be incinerated, we still need to examine the source, processing and transportation of the needed quantities of firewood. The total cremation process in Treblinka would have required 430 million pounds, or 195,000 metric tons, of air-dried (seasoned) wood. Due to the short notice and brief time that Himmler allegedly allotted for this process, such a large quantity of air-dried wood would certainly have been impossible to get, which is why only fresh (“green“) wood of lower calorific value would have been available. The calorific value of seasoned wood is 3,600 kcal/kg, whereas that of green wood is only 2,000 kcal/kg.[113] Therefore the total required quantity of wood would have increased to 351,000 metric tons, and the daily requirement of green wood was thus approximately 1,900 metric tons. Assuming medium-sized trees of 1 cord volume and 1,500 lbs., the total number of trees needed comes to roughly 515,000.

There were two options for obtaining the required quantity of wood: either there was a large forested area near the camp where the demand for firewood could be met, and whence the wood would then be transported to the camp with suitable vehicles, or the wood had to be brought in from other areas by rail.

Let us suppose for the moment that the wood supply was nearby. Assuming that a 15-ton truck can make 3 runs daily, allowing for loading and unloading of the truck, then 126 trips would need to be made daily, using some 42 trucks. None of the eyewitness statements indicate the presence of such a fleet of trucks. The same goes for the labor force required for the daily felling, limbing, sawing and splitting as well as loading and unloading of 2,800 trees. If, given the primitive conditions that prevailed, we assume that two man could have processed – that is, felled, limbed, sawed and split – one tree per day (an utter illusion), then the lumberjacks would clearly have had to number at least 5,600.

To give an idea of how large a forest would need to be in order to supply such vast quantities of wood, let us assume a yield of 325 cord per acre, which for 515,000 trees would require a forest of 1,590 acres, or just short of 2.5 square miles. To put it more graphically, such a forest would have been 2.5 miles long and 1 mile wide. Is it really conceivable that the witnesses and the local residents could have failed to notice such a large deforested area? The site would still be apparent today.

If one proceeds instead on the assumption that the quantity of wood needed would not have been available locally, then it would have had to be brought in from elsewhere, for example in the form of large fire logs, in rail wagons. If one performs the corresponding calculations for this scenario, then a freight train of 63 cars of 30 metric tons each would have had to be unloaded in the camp every day – a total of 185 freight trains. In the end the total length of the trains would have reached 116 km, or 72 miles. This begs the question: where are the pertinent Reichsbahn (German Railway) documents about these enormous wood transports? The authorities and offices in question would hardly have dispensed with payment and not submitted their accounts.

Regarding the claim that the 875,000 corpses were eliminated completely with out any trace, we must consider the quantities of ashes that remain. The quantities of wood ashes are considerable, and vary with the type of wood. We shall postulate the low value of 6.6 lbs. per ton of dry wood.[112] The wood ashes remaining would then have weighed approximately 1,000 metric tons; the equivalent of the payload of 100 10-ton trucks.

The ash content of a human body makes up about 5.6% of the body's weight;[114] given a 132 lb. body, this comes to 7.3 lbs. The ashes from the 875,000 burned bodies would thus have weighed 6,387,500 lbs. The total quantity of ashes – wood ashes plus human ashes – would therefore have weighed almost 4,000 metric tons, or 8.6 million pounds, all of which (according to the witnesses) were then mixed with the soil and thrown back into the pits.[115] Even if this quantity of ash had been mixed with the roughly 3.53 million cubic feet of soil excavated from the burial pits, it would be easy to find evidence for human remains of the quantity alleged by the witnesses. It must also be noted that in the incineration of corpses under the conditions specified by the witnesses, the bones would not have turned to ash, but would have remained as bones.

The witnesses have described how the skeletal remains of the corpses were broken up, and screened and sifted over and over again to ensure that no evidence would remain. Given the primitive equipment described by the witnesses – wooden rollers and thin sheets of metal for crushing the bones – it might have been possible for a man to break up and sift two skeletons per hour in the manner specified. Thus, if one Jewish laborer had pulverized 20 skeletons per day, 240 Jewish laborers would have been needed for this task alone. Adding up the required personnel – 5,600 Jewish laborers for obtaining the wood, 240 for pulverizing the bones, and 150 to stoke the fire sites – fully 6,000 Jewish workers were needed to complete all the required tasks in a solid seven-day work week. Additionally, further hundreds of Jewish workers would have been needed to carry out various other tasks reported by witnesses: excavating and filling trenches, camouflage activities, sorting the valuables of the murdered Jews, cutting the hair and extracting the gold teeth of the victims, rendering services to the SS, administration, rations and supplies for the camp, etc. There would also have to have been reserve labor standing by at all times. Thus the camp would have had to have a permanent workforce of at least 8,000. This number stands in glaring contrast to the mere 700 Jewish laborers attested to for Treblinka.[116]

And finally, we must note that the teeth of the supposed victims could not have been destroyed by the primitive methods attested to.[117] Even if each of the alleged victims had only 20 of the usual 32 teeth left at the time he or she died, there would have been at least 17.5 million teeth to be disposed of at Treblinka. This means that we should still be able to find some 5 teeth per cubic foot of the 3.53 million cu.ft. of material excavated at the alleged site of the crime.

All these calculations are based on the number of victims (875,000) specified by the Jerusalem court. If, on the other hand, one were to postulate the 3 million Treblinka victims alleged by Grossmann and others, then the data ascertained in the previous must be multiplied by a factor of 3.5, meaning: 6,650 metric tons of wood daily to cremate the corpses; a total of approximately 1,200,000 tons of firewood, i.e., almost two million trees, for whose transport trains totaling about 252 miles would have been required. The area of the forest thus required amounts to 9 square miles. There would have been roughly 13,700 tons of ashes to hide, containing at least 60 million teeth. And where on earth were the 20,000 Jewish laborers needed to do all the work involved?

4.4. The Polish Forensic Investigations of November 1945

As already mentioned, from November 9 to 13, 1945, a group of experts assembled by the Polish state attorney's office conducted an inspection tour of Treblinka. What they found there was described in a report composed after the trip by a member of the group, Judge Z. Lukaszkiewicz, as follows:[118]

“Protocol of the work which has been performed on the grounds of the death camp Treblinka, which forms the object of the judicial examination.

From 9 to 13 November 1945 the examining magistrate ofSiedlce, Z. Łukaszkiewicz, together with the State Attorney for the District Court ofSiedlce, J. Maciejewski, performed the following tasks on the camp grounds:

9 November 1945

Excavations were begun on the grounds using the services of 20 workers who had been mustered by the community administration for duty as road laborers. The excavations began at the location described by the witness Rayzman, on 6 November, where the so-called 'camp hospital' had stood and where, according to the witness, a mass grave is supposed to exist. Since at the said location a 4 to 5-meter deep bomb crater is present – two bombs still lie at a slight distance from this crater – the digging was begun in this crater. In the course of this work numerous Polish, besides Russian, German, Austrian and Czech coins, as well as broken pieces of various kinds of containers were discovered. At the end of the work, at approximately 3 P.M., at a depth of 6 meters, we encountered a stratum which had not been previously uncovered. There were no human remains found.

10 November 1945

The work was continued, with 36 workers assigned who had been commandeered for road labor. At a depth of 6 meters a stratum begins which has never before been uncovered by anyone. It consists partly of all sorts of kitchen utensils and different kinds of household objects; there are pieces of clothing besides. At a depth of 7 meters, we reached the floor of the pit – a stratum of yellow sand which is not mixed with gravel. By means of expansion of the excavation we succeeded in determining the shape of the pit. It has sloping walls, and the bottom measures about 1.5 meters[sic!] Presumably, the pit has been excavated with a dredge. During the course of the excavations, numerous more or less badly damaged Polish documents were discovered, and further a badly damaged personal identity card of a German Jew, as well as several more coins: Polish, German, Russian, Belgian and even American. After we had made certain that this pit, filled with broken pieces of the containers mentioned, ran in a north-south direction on the grounds of the camp property – 2 meters more [in a northerly direction] had been excavated – the workers started work at this location.

11 November 1945

A series of test excavations were performed at the place where the [gas] chambers had to have been, in order to find their foundation walls if possible. Pits 10 – 15 meters in length and 1.5 meters deep were dug. Undisturbed strata of earth were revealed by this.

The crater produced by the explosions (numerous fragments attest to the fact that these explosions were set off by bombs), is, at maximum, 6 meters deep and has a diameter of about 25 meters – its walls give recognizable evidence of the presence of a large quantity of ashes as well as human remains – and was excavated farther in order to discover the depth of the pit in this part of the camp. Numerous human remains were found by these excavations, partially still in a state of decomposition. […] The soil consists of ashes interspersed with sand, is of a dark gray color and granulous in form. During the excavations, the soil gave off an intense odor of burning and decay. At a depth of 7.5 meters the bottom was reached, which consisted of strata of unmixed sand. At this point the digging was stopped here.

13 November 1945

With the assistance of 30 workers employed for road work, the opening of a pit was begun – a site where refuse was deposited in the northeastern section of the camp. In this location, as the workers from the nearby hamlet had stated, a very large number of documents was found up till now. Work was begun at this location where the people [of that area] had dug a three-meter-deep pit in a search for gold. During the course of the digging, broken pieces of all sorts of kitchen containers as well as a large number of rags were continually found. Aside from the coins discovered so far, there were yet found Greek, Slovakian and French [coins], as well as documents in Hebrew and Polish, and remnants of a Soviet passport. At a depth of 5 meters, the work was stopped due to the steadily worsening weather conditions.

The Examining Magistrate The State Attorney

Łukaszkiewicz Maciejewski

Decision:

The Examining Magistrate of Siedlce, on 13 November 1945, in regard to the facts of the case, as is to be concluded from the witness testimony examined up till now and the results of the work carried out at the site and place, that with great probability, no mass graves are any longer to be found today on the grounds of the former camp, and with consideration of the oncoming autumn, the present rainfall and the necessity of a rapid conclusion to the judicial preliminary investigations, makes the decision, in view of all these facts, to stop the work on the territory of the former death camp Treblinka.

The Examining Magistrate

Łukaszkiewicz”

The efforts of the commission to find evidence for the claimed enormous mass-murder in Treblinka had therefore proven themselves to be a complete failure. The experts had a spot excavated where, according to the witness Rayzman,, a mass grave had been located, but discovered no trace of such a thing. At a place where, according to witnesses, the two 'gas chambers' had stood, they found merely layers of undisturbed earth. All of the objects they found, as well as human remains, merely showed that there had been a camp in Treblinka and that bodies had been buried or cremated there, but nothing furnished even a trace of proof for any mass murder, to say nothing of one amounting to many hundreds of thousands of people!

In October 1999, an expert team scanned the soil of the alleged extermination camp Treblinka with a ground penetrating radar. This device detects any disturbances of the soil layers, caused either by objects or by former digging activities, up to a depth of 65 feet. The data gathered showed no evidence of disturbance in the soil whatsoever.[119]

In 2002, Italian historian Carlo Mattogno and Swiss scholar Jürgen Graf published the first comprehensive monograph on Treblinka, further substantiating the thesis presented here, and providing plenty of circumstantial evidence that Treblinka was indeed a transit camp mainly for deported Polish Jews on their way to other camps, both east and south of Treblinka.[1]

5. Summary

To summarize the most important points of the previous:

1. Eyewitness testimony regarding the location, dimensions and internal structure of the supposed extermination camp Treblinka are utterly inconsistent and contradictory, and virtually impossible to reconcile with actual facts.
2. The alleged killing methods reveal an outlandish imagination. For this reason all the alleged killing methods other than the Diesel technique have generally been consigned to the Memory Hole.
3. However, Diesel exhaust gas is not suited to mass murder of human beings.
4. The introduction of exhaust gas from heavy Diesel engines into a hermetically sealed, brick-walled room results in the destruction of the facility in question. The same goes for the removal of the air from such rooms.
5. Given the size of the rooms and the great numbers of victims hermetically locked up in them, as described by the witnesses, death by asphyxiation would have occurred within a relatively short time.
6. The burial pits and cremation sites described would have covered an area far greater than the entire so-called death camp.
7. Empirical knowledge as well as the laws of physics prove that corpses cannot burn by themselves.
8. The quantity of wood required for cremation of the victims would have been so great that there would most definitely be Reichsbahn papers documenting the transports, but no such papers have been found to date. There is also no evidence for the deforestation of large forested areas in the vicinity of Treblinka.
9. The witnesses make no mention of large quantities of fuel or of their transportation to the camp and the cremation sites.
10. Pulverizing more than 6.6 million pounds of bones with wooden rollers, sheets of metal, and sieves is not a method suitable for the elimination of evidence for human body parts.
11. The umpteen million teeth cannot be destroyed at all in this manner.
12. A minimum of 3,200 Jewish laborers would have been needed to manage all the work involved in the alleged elimination-without-a-trace of the bodies of the Treblinka gassing victims.
13. The existence of these great quantities of ashes and bones and the millions of teeth could still be conclusively proven even today.
14. An investigation that was ordered by a Polish court and included excavations in Treblinka yielded no proof for the claims of the witnesses. No large mass graves, no human ashes, and no signs of large-scale disturbances of the soil as entailed in the creation of mass graves or burning pits were found.
15. Analysis of German air photos as well as recent data gathered with ground penetrating radar has shown that no major disturbances of the natural ground structure occurred within Treblinka II or in its vicinity.
16. It is also proven that after the camp was dismantled the Germans had engaged in no camouflage activities – such as planting lupine or trees, as witnesses have claimed.
17. According to the December 2, 1941, edition of the official Amtlicher Anzeiger of the German occupation forces, Treblinka was to become a labor camp.[120] One might be surprised that the German occupation powers would officially announce the setting-up of the camp, but there simply was not anything secret about labor camps. The Malkinia camp was probably a transit camp for further transport to eastern settlements in Belarus and Ukraine.

In conclusion, it should be stressed once again that disputing ('denying') the Holocaust is still a criminal offense in the Federal Republic of Germany. The 'self-evident nature' of the Treblinka Holocaust as proclaimed by the courts is based solely on

eyewitness testimony.

In light of the circumstances described here, it is not surprising that by now even the staff of the Holocaust Memorial Site at Jerusalem admit[121] that the heart of the problem with the Treblinka camps is the

eyewitness testimony.

Notes

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