Three Books on Treblinka

During recent years there have appeared from time to time new books on the Treblinka “death camp”. Compared with the vast number of Auschwitz-related publications, and considering the fact that, according to the exterminationist point of view, Treblinka claimed the second-highest number of victims among the six “death camps” (the victim figure given usually varies between 750,000 and 900,000) this is only a small trickle. One might expect then that the contents of these few books would at least be partially fresh, offering us new insights and new material. Unfortunately, this is not the case: from the publication of Yitzhak Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka in 1987 the exterminationist literature on the Treblinka camp has very much been treading old ground. In the following review I will briefly discuss three books relating to the camp which were published between 2003 and 2012. It will be not so much a comprehensive review as a presentation of what these books have to offer which is not a rehash of Arad, Sereny et al – pitifully little, as we will see.

Torben Jørgensen’s Book on the Aktion Reinhardt Staff

Let us begin with a book by Danish historian Torben Jørgensen, Stiftelsen. Bødlerne fra Aktion Reinhardt (The Foundation. The Executioners of Aktion Reinhardt, Lindhardt og Ringhof, Copenhagen 2003). This concerns the Aktion Reinhardt personnel as a whole, but as can be expected a significant portion of it concerns Treblinka.

The book contains very little information of interest, despite the fact that the author had reportedly surveyed 3,000–4,000 pages of court material. Remarkably, there are almost no quotations in this book that have not already appeared in Arad, Jules Schelvis, Adalbert Rückerl or Ernst Klee et al. There is also virtually nil information provided on the interrogations themselves. We learn some more, however, on the astoundingly lax security reportedly prevailing at Treblinka during the tour of its first commandant, Dr. Irmfried Eberl (p. 75):

“Prostitutes and blackmarketeers from Warsaw erected regular shops in the woods around Treblinka. The personnel, Ukrainians as well as Germans, were in a permanent state of inebriation. In addition to this, a number of unauthorized people visited the camp. Those were, among others, German soldiers who were stationed in Warsaw, among them personnel from a Panzerkorps, that is, the Wehrmacht. Members of these units made excursions to Treblinka, which was not sealed off; here they went about taking photographs and observing the fate of the transports.”

This description should probably be regarded with some caution, since it is based on a court statement made by the second commandant, Franz Stangl, who arrived at Treblinka only after Irmfried Eberl had been sacked for incompetence; the information that Wehrmacht soldiers visited Treblinka is therefore from a second-hand source. Nevertheless it is worth noting: If an indeterminate number of German soldiers went around taking photos at the camp, how come none of these has ever been discovered? Could it be that photographs were indeed taken, but that what they showed did not conform to the “death camp” allegation, so that the person(s) in possession of the photo(s) either hesitated to come forward with it, or simply did not connect it with Treblinka?

We also learn that the protocols from the interrogations with Irmfried Eberl, Franz Hödl, Heinrich Barbl, Ernst Lerch, Hermann Hoefle and others are kept in the Österreichische Widerstandsarchiv in Vienna. No further details are given, however (in the case of Eberl the interrogation may not be relevant to the “death camp” issue, since he was arrested because of his involvement in the euthanasia program and supposedly committed suicide before his role at Treblinka had been discovered).

Unrelated to Treblinka we are informed (in a footnote on page 215) that two (unnamed) Bełżec survivors were found living in Israel several decades after the war. This claim, which is noted to derive from Michael Tregenza, is rather sensational considering that only 7 inmates are alleged to have survived Bełżec, only two – Rudolf Reder alias Roman Robak and Chaim Hirszman[1] – of whom left any testimony on their supposed experiences. Why, we may ask, has Tregenza not furnished any information on these two hitherto unknown Bełżec survivors?

Some new light is also shed on the mysterious death of the former Sobibór SS man Gustav Wagner in Brazil in 1980 (p. 225):

“During a conversation with the author in Lublin in the summer of 2001, Thomas Blatt [a prominent Sobibór eyewitness] told that another survivor from Sobibór who lived in Brazil in 1980 killed Wagner together with some other former prisoners.”

Only two former Sobibór inmates are known to have settled in Brazil after the war: Chaim Korenfeld and Stanislaw Szmajzner. Since Jules Schelvis[2] and others have noted that Szmajzner himself had hinted that he was involved in the murder, and since Blatt was close to Szmajzner, this pretty much settles who was behind Wagner’s death, which (according to most sources) was officially ruled as a suicide.

The Testimony of Hershl Sperling

Mark S. Smith’s Treblinka Survivor. The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (The History Press, Stroud 2010) is an attempt to trace the life and fate of Hershl Sperling, a former inmate of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau (!) who committed suicide by drowning in Glasgow in 1989. The book mostly consists of interviews with Sperling’s son, psychological ruminations and descriptions of Smith’s travels in Sperling’s footsteps to Treblinka and other places in Poland and Germany, interspersed with rehashings from well-known exterminationist publications on the subject and excerpts from Sperling’s only testimony on Treblinka (he left none regarding his time at Auschwitz, to where he was sent in the autumn of 1943), a brief account simply entitled “Treblinka” which was published in 1947 in issue 6 of the obscure Yiddish-language journal Fun letzter Churbn ( Since the Recent Catastrophe ). Fortunately Smith presents a complete English translation of this testimony as an appendix to his book. This is pretty much the only part of the book which is of any real interest, however meager it is. Below I will briefly discuss the most interesting parts of it.

Sperling was deported to Treblinka from Czestochowa “almost at the end of the period of deportations” from that city (pp. 243–244). According to the transport lists presented in Yitzhak Arad’s book on the Reinhardt camps, the last deportation from Czestochowa to Treblinka took place on 5 October 1942. Sperling informs us (p. 244) that the “disinfectant calcium chloride” was “scattered liberally into each wagon” of the convoy. This practice is likely the origin of the early holocaust claim (found in the writings of Jan Karski and others) that the Germans were killing the Jews not in gas chambers but in transport trains, using chloride or unslaked lime. Sperling also reveals that Polish workers which the Jews of the convoy encountered during the drawn-out railway travel spread atrocity stories causing great fear among the deportees (p. 245):

“One of the Polish workers mentions burnings, another, shootings, and a third – gassings. Another tells of inhuman, unbelievable tortures. An unbearable state of tension mounts among us, which in some cases even leads to outbreaks of hysteria.”

At the camp Sperling was selected for work and made a member of the “sorting squad” working in the “reception camp”. He never set foot in the “upper camp” or “death camp proper”, where the alleged gas chambers and the mass graves were located, so his description of that area is based only on second-hand sources. The details of the alleged killing method were relayed to Sperling and his fellow inmates in Camp I by prisoners assigned to carry food between the different parts of the camp (pp. 247-248):

“It was strictly forbidden to cross from one camp to the other. In the early period the food carriers used to come to us from Camp II and bring us all the minute details of the cruel deeds that were being perpetrated there. […]

The food-carriers describe to us how the path to the death camp goes through a garden. Just before you come to the death-shower there is a hut, where everyone is instructed once again to relinquish money and gold. […] At the shower room of death, which is adorned only by a Star of David, the victims are received with bayonets. They are driven into these shower rooms, prodded with these bayonets. […] When all the wretched victims have been forced into the showers, the doors are hermetically sealed. After a few seconds, uncanny, horrifying screams are heard through the walls. […] The screaming becomes weaker and weaker, finally dying away. At last everything is completely silent. Then the doors are opened, and the corpses are thrown into huge mass graves, which hold about 60 to 70 thousand people. When there was no room for any new victims in the mass graves, there came a new command to burn the dead bodies. They would dig out a deep trench, and throw in a few old trunks, boxes, wood and things like that. All is set alight, and a layer of corpses is thrown onto it, then more branches, and more corpses, and so on. Later the order was given to dig out the dead in the mass graves, and burn them too.”

While this is merely a second-hand description of the “death camp proper”, three aspects of it are worthy of note.

First, we have the fact that nowhere in the above description do we find any hint as to what the actual killing agent was. According to the official version of events it was the exhaust fumes from a large engine mounted in a separate room in the “gas chamber” building. Considering the short distance between this building and the fence to Camp I (some 50 meters in the case of the new building) one would expect that the inmates of Camp I soon would connect the purported mass murder of the deportees with the sound from this engine. As I have pointed out in the study on Sobibór which I co-wrote with Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno[3] the earliest testimonies about the alleged death chambers at that camp – which supposedly functioned in the same way as at Treblinka – mention murder methods used in these chambers which strongly imply that these witnesses did not connect the alleged gassings with the sound of an engine. Sperling’s testimony very much fits into this picture.

Second, we have the ridiculous notion that the cremations were carried out using as fuel “a few old trunks, boxes, wood and things like that”. If the vast amount of firewood required for the cremation of some 800,000 corpses – some 139,200 metric tons[4] – had actually been brought into Treblinka, either by train or truck or from the nearby forested areas Sperling would inescapably have observed and taken note of this – that he did not is yet another hint that the amount of firewood used in the cremations at Treblinka was much smaller, corresponding to a number of corpses much smaller than alleged by mainstream historiography.[5]

Third and last, we have the emphasis on the word “shower”. Compare this with the statement of Polish prisoner Jan Sulkowski (quoted in Arad’s book on the Reinhardt camps): “I was told by the SS men that we were building a bathhouse and it was after a considerable time that I realized that we were constructing gas-chambers.” This implies that the Germans either went to extreme lengths to disguise homicidal gas chambers as shower rooms, or that they actually built shower rooms for a delousing facility. In this context it is worth mentioning a letter sent from Treblinka commandant Irmfried Eberl to the commissar for the ghetto in Warsaw, Dr. Heinz Auerswald, on 19 June 1942 (i.e. some 1 month before the opening of the camp), in which he ordered the following “still needed” items for the Treblinka camp:[6]

“10 m copper pipes 1/4 inch
5–10 kg filler wire stacks
2 kg brass wire for brazing
50 m iron pipes of each of the sizes: 1 inch, 3/4 inch, 1/2 inch
20 iron pipe T-fittings of each of the sizes: 1 inch, 3/4 inch, 1/2 inch
30 iron pipe elbow joints of each of the sizes: 1 inch, 3/4 inch, 1/2 inch
20 double nipples (connection pieces) of each of the sizes: 1 inch, 3/4 inch, 1/2 inch
6 waterproof lighting fixtures with sockets, enclosed with cages
10 water-taps 3/4 inch with hose connection
10 water-taps 1/2 inch with hose connection

Electric light bulbs 120 Volt:	30 items 25 Watt
	20 items 60 Watt
	20 items 75 Watt
	20 items 100 Watt

300 m two-conductor G.A. flexible wire
1000 m for overhead lines 2.5 sq. mm diameter”

On 7 July Eberl wrote again to the commissar, notifying him that the camp would be ready for operation on 11 July and ordering additional items for the camp.[7] Most of these were related to lighting but among them were also “3 intake strainers [Saugkörbe] for wells with check valves [Rückschlagventil] 1 1/2 inch”. From testimonial evidence we know that a Polish construction worker named Grzegorz Wozniak worked on coordinating the piping and trenching during the camp’s construction phase.[8]

For what purpose would the small Treblinka camp, supposedly a “pure extermination camp”, need at least 160 meter of piping? From an exterminationist viewpoint the apparent conclusion is that they were used for a fake shower installation that was part of the murder weapon. Yitzhak Arad describes the alleged first gas chambers at Treblinka as follows:[9]

“During the camp‘s first months of operation, there were three gas chambers, each 4 x 4 meters and 2.6 meters high […]. A room attached to the building contained a diesel engine, which introduced the poisonous carbon monoxide gas through pipes into the chambers, and a generator, which supplied electricity to the entire camp. […] Inside the chambers the walls were covered with white tiles up to a certain height, and shower heads and piping crisscrossed the ceiling – all designed to maintain the illusion of a shower room. The piping actually served to carry the poison gas into the chambers. When the doors were closed, there was no lighting in the chambers.”

But is this setup really believable? Given a room height of 2.6 m, the shower heads would have been placed some 2.3–2.4 m above the floor – clearly within reach of the taller of the alleged victims, as well as shorter ones lifted up by or standing on others. According to the verdict from the Treblinka trial, each of the three chambers in the old gas chamber building could hold 200-350 victims, i.e. a capacity 600–1,050 victims per gassing.[10] Considering that during the first month of the camp’s operation some 6–8,000 Jews were sent daily to the camp from the Warsaw ghetto,[11] this would mean that some 6–14 gassings would have to be carried out daily. Considering the design usually employed for the shower installations in the German concentration camps,[12] it seems inevitable that the “fake” piping and shower heads would have been damaged by panicking, desperate victims on a daily basis – if lethal exhaust gas had been indeed been streaming out from these showers, that is. The notion that it would have been feasible to feed the gas into the chambers using a fake shower installation is therefore, at closer glance, absurd. Another hint that the piping, if indeed used for the “bath house” described by Sulkowski et al (something for which we have no conclusive proof but which seems likely in the absence of other known installations at the camp that would have utilized such piping) formed part of an actual shower installation is the fact that Eberl together with the piping ordered “waterproof lighting fixtures with sockets” (emphasis added).

Even more significant are the “3 intake strainers [Saugkörbe] for wells with check valves” ordered on 7 July 1942. A “Saugkorb” is a large strainer, sometimes suspended in a float to hold it near the surface of the water and containing a check valve or setback valve, which is placed at the intake end of a suction hose, which in turn is connected to a pump. Its function is to filter the water and to see to that the suction hose is kept filled with water. [13] Intake strainers are usually employed by fire fighters as a means to obtain the large amounts of water needed for their fire hoses from dirty waters (such as ponds or lakes), but they can also be used in wells as part of a pump device.

According to the most ambitious exterminationist attempt to visually reconstruct Treblinka, the Peter Laponder maps from the early 2000s,[14] there existed a total of five wells in the camp: one well for the German staff in the northernmost part of the camp, one near the kitchen of the Ukrainian guards, one west of the living quarters of the Jewish prisoners and south of the “zoo”, one in the “reception camp” near the railway siding, where the arrivals disembarked their trains, and finally one in the “death camp proper”, in the immediate vicinity of the original “gas chamber building”. The third of these wells is visible in one of Kurt Franz’s photographs of the “zoo”.[15] It is clear that this well was manually operated, and no suction hose or similar device is in sight. So far I have not been able to find any detailed descriptions of the other four wells, but it appears that the first three were all used in connection with the kitchens for the guards and prisoners, so that it is likely that they all resembled the one seen on the Kurt Franz photo. The presence of three intake strainers at the camp however indicates that one needed to draw a considerable amount of water from possibly as many as three wells (although one of the intake strainers may have been for spare use). Such a need may possibly have applied to the well in the reception camp, where water under pressure may have been used for cleaning the emptied rail wagons, but I have found no testimonial evidence stating that this well was equipped with a suction system. This would seem to indicate that one or more of the intake strainers were used in the “death camp proper”. From an exterminationist viewpoint such an installation would be rather pointless, but from a revisionist viewpoint it is perfectly explainable, as a shower installation used by hundreds of deportees at a time would have required the drawing of large amounts of water. If the pump system was powered by an engine (as is often the case) this might help explain the origin of the allegation that engine-exhaust gas was used for homicidal gassings. In this context it is worth pointing out that the ARC website displays a photo, apparently taken at some museum exhibition, of what is purported to be a “Gassing pipe used in the Belzec gas chambers”.[16] This rusty item, however, with its perforated basket-like lower part, resembles nothing so much as a strainer with a dual intake.

Sperling has the following to say on the number of deportees arriving at the camp (p. 249):

“New transports arrived at Treblinka all the time. Sometime there is a break of a few days. But on the average ten thousand people per day are murdered in Treblinka. There was one day in fact when the human transport reached the figure of twenty-four thousand.”

Between 22 July 1942 and the end of the same year – a period of 163 days – a total of 713,555 Jews were brought to Treblinka, which means an average of 4,378 arrivals per day. An average of 10,000 per day would mean 1,630,000 arrivals during the same period, so Sperling is clearly exaggerating rather than just misestimating.

In connection with the discussion of the number of arrivals, Sperling shares with his readers the following bizarre anecdote (p. 249):

“Only once did Jews leave the camp alive. The Front had demanded women. So one hundred and ten of the most beautiful Jewish girls, accompanied by a Jewish doctor, were sent off.”

Besides the preposterous claim that Jewish women would have been sent to the frontlines to be used as prostitutes – something which would be in violation of the National Socialist racial laws (on “Rassenschande”, defilement of the race) we may compare Sperling’s assertion that Jews were able to leave the camp “only once” with witness Israel Cymlich’s statement that groups of Jews from the extermination camp were regularly transferred to the Treblinka I labor camp to replenish its labor force,[17] and the verdict of the Düsseldorf Treblinka trial, according to which “coming from Treblinka, several thousand people are said to have arrived at other camps”.[18]

The Smoke and Mirrors of Ian Baxter

Finally, I will take a brief look at Ian Baxter’s The SS of Treblinka (Spellmount, Stroud 2012). A search at Amazon or any other online book will reveal that Baxter is not a Holocaust historian, but a military historian and author of a number of photography-focused books dealing with the European theatre of WWII, in particular the Eastern front. A common thread in the online reviews of his book is that the layout and photos are high quality, but that the writing is “history light” or even provide examples of poor scholarship. The latter unfortunately applies to his recent book focusing on the German and Austrian staff employed at the Treblinka “extermination camp”.

This book is mainly a rehash of Arad, Sereny, Chrostowski, Steiner and Rückerl (as well as material from the H.E.A.R.T., Holocaust Research Project and ARC websites, from which most of the illustrations are taken), with most of the usual quotes from Wiernik et al. It follows from this that the book is mostly for those seeking exhaustive coverage; if you are buying only one book this summer, save the money for something better…

It should first of all be pointed out that, despite the title, the book contains next to no new material on the lives of the men stationed at Treblinka. One might expect that Baxter would have dug deeper in the interrogation and investigation files and perhaps even tried to interview relatives or acquaintances of them in order to shed more light on their activities before and during the war as well as their post-war fates, but unfortunately no such research seems to have been carried out.

As for poor scholarship, Baxter recycles the claim that John (Ivan) Demjanjuk served as a guard in the “extermination area” (p. 68), despite the fact there exists no solid evidence whatsoever for Demjanjuk being posted to Treblinka. That Demjanjuk has now passed away is, unfortunately, unlikely to stop the frequent repetition of this accusation, we suspect. We further find claims that transports of Dutch Jews were sent to Treblinka in 1943 (p. 91), something which can be ruled out from readily available statistics and transport data. Baxter’s sloppiness in the field of research is also revealed by the fact that he gives the victim figure for Sobibór as “approximately 250,000” (p. 159) – an estimate which was rendered impossible by the discovery of the Höfle document in 2000 – despite listing in his bibliography the 2003 German edition of Jules Schelvis’s Sobibór study, which gives the number of Jewish arrivals at that camp as some 170,000.

As for small but interesting fresh tidbits, Baxter asserts (p. 81) that during the latter phase of operations, killing of sick deportees and inmates were carried out not only by shooting but also by lethal injections; the source for this, however, goes unstated. We also learn a little more about the supposed “deception” of the arriving Jewish deportees. The testimony of SS-Unterscharführer Willi Mentz is quoted as follows (p. 71):

“When the Jews had got off, Stadie or Matzig would have a short word with them. They were told something to the effect that they were a resettlement transport and that they would be given a bath and that they would receive new clothes. They were also instructed to maintain quiet and disciplined. They would continue their journey the following day.”

The by far most interesting part of Baxter’s book consists of three brief diary excerpts. The first one of them, reproduced without a date of writing or name of the author, except for the information that he was a “staff officer attached to [Christian] Wirth’s office”, reads as follows (p. 103):

“I frequently visited TII in the summer of 1943 and regularly reported back to Wirth with a progress report on the dismantling of the camp. Whilst the commandant [Stangl] was on leave I came to Treblinka and was given a guided tour by Deputy Franz and another officer. Here I was shown the cremation areas and the pits where the corpses were being exhumed by prisoners. I had my briefcase with me and I got my assistant to write down notes on the calculation Franz gave me on the total number of bodies exhumed thus far. I was not chiefly interested in the quantity or condition of the prisoners working inside these pits, but more anxious about how the job was going to be completed in the specified time.”

The endnote to this quote gives the source as “Extract from Ernst Reuss to Author. November 2008. Diary Catalogued 43216/A/2 ER”. Ernst Reuss is possibly identical with the German expert witness and author of the study Kriegsgefangen im 2. Weltkrieg (Augsburg 2011). It is not made clear to which archive the document number refers. From the contents of the quote it is clear that it was written in retrospect in 1944 or later, as the unnamed author would hardly have written “in the summer of 1943” in 1943. For the second quote we are presented with at least a modicum of background: “A Staff officer named Kratzer visiting Treblinka with one of Globocnik’s representatives found Floss to be a ‘determined fellow’ who displayed versatility ‘and much relish for the mission’.” Is this Kratzer the same person as the author of the first quoted text written in 1944 or later? The reader has no way of knowing. In any case the second quote reads as follows (p. 104, ellipsis by Baxter):

“I admire the way in which our men are dealing with cremating the corpses. I have been informed by the cremation expert Floss that the burnings will be terminated by the end of August or September. […] There is much activity in the camp and the staff here are working exceptionally hard to bring about a conclusion to this dirty work. TII is certainly being run effectively and my report on its decommissioning will be presented in due course.”

Again, no date is given, although we are told by Baxter that Kratzer’s visit took place “some time at the end of July or early August 1943” (the Treblinka prisoner revolt, we should keep in mind, took place on 2 August 1943) – a vagueness which implies that this passage is either written in retrospect or not part of a regular diary, but rather some form of memoir. The source for the second quote is given as “Extract from Ernst Reuss to Author. November 2008. Diary Catalogued 43217/B/3 ER”. The third quote reads (p. 106):

“After my tour I made specific notes and a sketch of the camp so that my boss had an overall idea of the general layout of the camp This was undertaken in order to make preparations for the installation’s decommissioning.”

The source is given as “Extract from Ernst Reuss to Author. November 2008. Diary Catalogued 43218/C/4 ER”.

We will observe here first of all that none of these quotes supports the allegation that Treblinka served as a “pure extermination camp”, only that an unspecified number of corpses were burnt there. Baxter tells his readers (p. 104) that Kratzer “visited the ‘Upper Camp’ and saw for himself the gas chambers, the installations for the disposal of the corpses and the huge iron grills, and the barracks for the Jewish work-groups.” This description, however, is completely unsourced, and no further quotations are presented which allow us to verify to what degree (if at all) it corresponds to what Kratzer actually wrote, and to what degree it is just Baxter’s conjecture. This in itself is extremely revealing, because Baxter must certainly be aware of the fact that, since virtually no war-time documents on Treblinka have been preserved (or rather: are known to exist) the discovery of an authentic contemporary diary text describing the camp, and moreover one written by a German staff officer (or possibly two different officers) with access to all parts of the camp, is something no less than sensational. One would expect that Baxter, instead of rehashing old material, would present these texts in full with commentaries – or at least any passages confirming the existence of homicidal gas chambers at the camp, thus refuting the “deniers” once and for all.

In the introduction (p. 9), he in fact speaks of “recently discovered material, some of which has never been published before”. The latter can, as far as I am able to tell, only relate to the above discussed diary entries. One would thus expect Baxter to reproduce the entries in full (perhaps even in facsimile) instead of devoting five pages (pp. 151–155) to an irrelevant general list of concentration camps, eight pages to reproducing the transport lists from the appendices to Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, or 16 pages to miniature biographies of camp staff lifted almost verbatim from the ARC website (which, to Baxter’s credit, he at least attributed). But no, Baxter is content with presenting only the three quotes above.

We may safely assume that Baxter (or his colleague Reuss) would have jumped eagerly at the opportunity to  publish a contemporary German document (be it a memorandum or a diary) describing homicidal gas chambers and/or mass graves filled to the brim with hundreds of thousands of Jewish corpses at Treblinka if he had in fact access to such a document, which means with almost 100 % certainty that he (or Reuss) does not have such a document in his hands. This in effect leaves only two possible conclusions:

1. The descriptions of the camp found in these diary entries are so vague that they neither confirm nor refute the official version of events.
2. The descriptions of the camp are incongruent with the official version of events.

Whatever the facts may be on this issue, it is imperative that this potentially extremely important historical document is appropriately presented to the public, be it in another book, an article or online. Since it is unlikely that Baxter will respond to an appeal voiced by revisionists, I await exterminationist Holocaust historians and anti-revisionists to do their best to get Baxter or Reuss to publish the document(s). Surely here they have an excellent opportunity to finally prove with documentary evidence the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Treblinka?

Notes: