Essays

Treblinka Transitees

by Germar Rudolf

Holocaust Archaeology

IF WE FOLLOW the orthodox Holocaust narrative, the so-called Aktion Reinhardt Camps — Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka — were pure extermination camps. In the very lethal sense of the word, they are said to have been dead ends for Jewish deportees sent there, who were allegedly murdered in homicidal gas chambers using engine-exhaust gas, and their corpses subsequently buried and later exhumed and cremated on huge outdoor pyres.[1]

During the past 20 years, archeological explorations were conducted by orthodox researchers at all three Aktion Reinhardt Camps in search of remnants of the claimed gas-chamber buildings and of the mass graves and mass-cremation sites claimed to have existed nearby.

The earliest such explorations were conducted between 1997 and 1999 at the site of the former Bełżec Camp.[2] While major amounts of disturbed soil were located, the amount of human remains discovered was minimal, and no trace of any building was found that resembles even remotely what witnesses have described as the homicidal gas chamber.[3]

Next in line was the Sobibór Camp, which was the focus of much larger explorations than those conducted at Bełżec. The investigations started in 2000 and extended well into the year 2014 and probably even beyond that. Unlike Bełżec, the researchers involved did not merely undertake core sample drillings, but they actually excavated several areas suspected to contain remnants of former camp structures: fence poles, buildings, mass graves and cremation pits.[4] In the summer of 2014, a structure was discovered which the researchers involved believe to have been the claimed homicidal gas chamber.[5] Until late 2016, the website dedicated to the Sobibór memorial had a 2014 news item posted announcing the impending publication of the research result.[6] When I approached them via email in late November 2016 asking whether that publication had yet appeared, and if so, where it could be found, instead of receiving an answer, the announcement was quietly removed. A revisionist critique of the findings at Sobibór was published in 2013, which of course does not address the claimed gas-chamber find.[7]

The Treblinka Camp was last in line to become the object of modern archeological research. This included the use of high-technology devices such as LIDAR scans and ground-penetrating radar. Core samples and minor excavations were also conducted, although apparently on a much smaller scale than at Sobibór. No dedicated research report, paper or book seems to have been published as a result of it, but the lead researcher, Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls, did include some of her findings in a general book on the forensics and archeology of mass-murder sites.[8] A written revisionist critique published two years prior to the appearance of that book could analyze only small bits of information that had been published in rather superficial media items, hence is of merely limited value.[9] A revisionist video documentary addressing Sturdy Colls’s research limits itself to what had appeared during a 2013 TV documentary,[10] hence has a narrow focus as well.[11]

Conflicting Claims

In any murder case, the burden of proof is on those claiming that a murder has happened. In any scientific dispute, the burden of proof lies on those making any claim about anything.

In the present case, everybody agrees that at least some 1.3 million people were deported to the Aktion Reinhardt Camps, a claim primarily based on a German radio message intercepted and deciphered by the British on January 11, 1943, which speaks of a total of 1,274,166 deportees.[12] But what happened to the Jews who arrived at those camps?

Orthodox historiography maintains that almost all of these Jews were murdered on the spot, usually within a few hours of their arrival at the latest. Only a few healthy young men were kept alive as slave laborers to run the camp’s genocidal operation, but even those usually did not live long.

Revisionists, on the other hand, claim that these camps were transit camps, and that Jews arriving at these borderline stations merely swapped trains from European standard gauge to the Russian wide gauge, to be deported further East during a grand plan of resettling Europe’s Jews.[13] The revisionist storyline has it that most of the Jews deported to those camps were kept there for only a short while — hours or days — during which they and their belongings may have been subjected to hygienic measures: showers and disinfestation. They also may have been subjected to some kind of selection to extract those individuals suitable for slave-labor deployment, to be sent elsewhere, while the rest boarded another train headed further east to be resettled in some part of the then-German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union.

Proving Mass Murder

Those claiming that a gigantic mass-murder operation unfolded at these places have to deliver the kinds of evidence required in any murder case: primarily traces of the bodies, evidence of murder, and any kind of trace of the murder weapon. The archaeological investigations mentioned earlier were carried out to some degree to do exactly that: locate bodily remains, determine the way they died, and find traces of the gas chambers. Revisionist critics have claimed that the evidence actually found falls extremely short of what has to be expected, yet orthodox counter-critics have argued otherwise.[14]

For this study, I will focus on the Treblinka Camp, which is said to have had the largest death toll of all three Aktion Reinhardt Camps.

First, let’s define what kind of evidence would be required to prove that the claimed mass murder has taken place. Most important, this concerns traces of the victims or of the manner in which their bodies were disposed of. The orthodoxy claims that some 700,000 victims were buried within the camp and later exhumed and cremated on huge pyres. I will leave aside here the question as to how such a task could have been physically possible, for if the remains of 700,000 victims can be located, that feat obviously was possible somehow. Hence, we need to worry about the How only if we do not find the expected traces.

The burial of 700,000 victims within a few months — most are said to have died between July and October 1942 — requires a minimum amount of space in the soil. In addition, large areas where the cremations allegedly took place must have existed, too. Finally, the cremation remains — ashes, body fragments, unburned wood — need to be found somewhere. This all needs quantification.

However, the task is not as simple as it seems, because we are not dealing with a pristine crime scene as it was left behind by the alleged perpetrators. Quite to the contrary: it is a matter of record that two forensic/archaeological investigations were conducted there at war’s end or shortly thereafter, one by Soviet, the other by Polish authorities.[15] In addition, there is evidence suggesting that bombs were dropped onto the area of the former Treblinka Camp toward the end of the war, probably by Soviet aircraft, causing major devastation.[16] Furthermore, completely undocumented random digs by grave robbers have been going on for decades, as the site was left basically unguarded for decades after the war.

Hence, even if one were to succeed in determining exactly how much of the camp’s underlying soil has been disturbed, how is one to tell which of these perturbations originate from the purported perpetrators and which have been added by the above-mentioned activities that unfolded after the camp had been dissolved? While it is perhaps possible to find out where and how much of a volume the Soviet and Polish investigative commissions dug up, and to what degree it included the volume of former mass graves and cremation sites, etc., it is probably rather difficult, if at all possible, to distinguish bomb craters and haphazard digs from original mass graves and cremation sites. But such a distinction is indispensable in order to be sure which soil perturbation is original and which is later. Admittedly, this prerequisite is a very high standard of proof which may be extremely difficult or even impossible to meet. But that failure of securing the evidence while it was fresh is merely the fault of the authorities in charge of the area right after the withdrawal of all German authorities in 1944. Worse still, if the camp’s area was indeed bombarded by the Soviet Air Force, this raises the suspicion that the Soviets themselves were those who initiated the process of destroying the evidence. It is moot to speculate about their motives, but it is safe to say that securing evidence in a mass-murder case was obviously not on their minds. At any rate, not having conducted a thorough forensic investigation for so many decades has led to a considerable deterioration and spoliation of the evidence which we may never be able to overcome.

Still, considering that the cremation of 700,000+ victims must have left innumerable traces in and around the camp, it should be possible to come to some conclusions when scouring the soil of the entire former camp and its vicinity for these remains.[17] This might be a daunting task, but it seems to be the only way of determining with any degree of reliability the magnitude of events that unfolded there.

Notes

[1]Described most authoritatively by Yitzhak Arad in his book Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis 1987.

[2]Andrzej Kola, Bełżec: The Nazi Camp for Jews in the Light of Archeological Sources. Excavations 1997-1999, The Council for the Protection of Memory and Martyrdom/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Warsaw/Washington 2000.

[3]See Carlo Mattogno, Bełżec: Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research and History, reprint, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2016 (1st ed.2004).

[4]Andrzej Kola, “Sprawozdanie z archeologicznych badań na terenie byłego obozu zagłady Żydów w Sobibórze w 2000 r,” Przeszłość i Pamięć, No. 3, 2000; idem, “Badania archeologiczne terenu byłego obózu zagłady Żydów w Sobibórze,” Przeszłość i Pamięć, No. 4, 2001; Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi, Wojciech Mazurek. “Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres,” Present Pasts, Vol. 1, 2009; Marek Bem, Wojciech Mazurek, Sobibór: Archaeological Research Conducted on the Site of the Former German Extermination Centre in Sobibór 2000-2011, The Foundation for Polish-German Reconciliation, Warsaw/Włodawa 2012.

[5]Claus Hecking, “Archäologen im NS-Lager Sobibór: Plötzlich kommen Stimmen von Juden aus den Ruinen’”, Der Spiegel, Sept. 23, 2014; www.spiegel.de/einestages/ns-vernichtungslager-Sobibór-ruinen-der-todesfabrik-entdeckt-multimediaspezial-a-993045.html

[6]http://Sobibór.info.pl/?page_id=1524

[7]Carlo Mattogno, Thomas Kues and Jürgen Graf in their 2-volume work The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2015 (1st ed. The Barnes Review, Washington, D.C., 2013), Chapter 8.2.3f., pp. 886-939.

[8]Caroline Sturdy Colls, Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions, Springer, Berlin 2015.

[9]Carlo Mattogno et al., op. cit. (Note 7), Chapter 8.2.5., pp. 939-952.

[10]Treblinka: Inside Hitler’s Secret Death Camp, BBC/Furneaux & Edgar Productions, 2013; https://vimeo.com/120776242.

[11]Eric Hunt, The Treblinka Archeaology Hoax, DVD, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2014; https://youtu.be/YuAAjrbbBiM

[12]Peter Witte, Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’,” in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3, Winter 2001, pp. 469f.

[13]Most recently and thoroughly explained by Carlo Mattogno et al., op. cit. (Note 7); see esp. Chapter 7, “Where They Went: The Reality of Resettlement,” pp. 561-703.

[14]See in this regard primarily Jonathan Harrison, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Jason Myers, Sergey Romanov, Nicholas Terry, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka: Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard, A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues, http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com, December 2011.

[15]See Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, 2nd ed., Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago, Ill., 2005, pp. 77-90.

[16]Bomb craters of up to 6 meters deep and 25 meters in diameter were reported by the Polish investigative commission in late 1945; see ibid., pp. 85-87.

[17]Although even that evidence might have been corrupted by Jewish visitors scattering the ashes of their deceased relatives on the camp grounds; see Eric Hunt, op. cit.¸ Note 11.

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Source: Read the full article at CODOH

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TeamWakeUp
TeamWakeUp
7 March, 2017 12:32 am

I read about an Australian team that went to Treblinka in 2000, that used ground penetrating radar among other investigative measures. Their findings included the fact that none of the soil strata in and around the camp had ever been disturbed. That means no mass graves at all. Big surprise. When soil strata is disturbed, it takes nearly 100 years for all the layers to realign. Neither have any bones or teeth, which clearly would have survived any open pyre burning, ever been found. It’s just galling that as the Auschwitz story continues to fall apart, the exterminationists shift their atrocity propaganda more and more to the Reindhardt camps, mostly because there is nothing left of them. Therefore, they can make up any story they like and not have to… Read more »

Truthweed
Truthweed
Reply to  TeamWakeUp
8 September, 2019 5:31 pm

The Treblinka victims were allegedly cremated on railway ties/sleepers. This would have required about a million of them. From which railway were these removed? where were they stored. How would these have been shipped to the site of the hundred metre deep fantasy hole. How were trains that were being routinely attacked deliver the thousand thousand-ton loads to Treblinka.

Questions, questions…

Truthweed
Truthweed
Reply to  TeamWakeUp
14 December, 2020 3:04 pm

Greetings TeamWakeup. And now it has become very difficult to use ground penetrating radar at Treblinka because the museum there had covered the entire site with large memorial boulders. Not the action of honest people. Honest people would encourage more intense and independent investigation.

maury ballstein
maury ballstein
21 March, 2017 9:00 pm

please stop it internet

Nora
Nora
16 April, 2020 1:39 am

I was reading about the Mittelbau Dora work camps and Grendenhal massacre. What I don’t understand is why transport prisoners, especially sick ones, in April 1945 when Germany surrendered a few weeks later. I read the barracks were bombed by Allies. It seems to me these Slavic prisoners preferred to go West with the fleeing German army. As far as the massacre, the local townspeople predicted correctly that once free these starving men would most likely go on a robbing spree and they were outmanned.

Truthweed
Truthweed
Reply to  Nora
15 December, 2020 2:47 pm

Greetings Nora. As I recall it, more than a hundred thousand Auschwitz inmates chose to follow the German army and guards back into Germany rather than be liberated by the glorious Soviet Jewnion. The inmates knew that thye Germans had previously done everything possible to provide them with food, clothing shelter, work, education and entertainment, and payment. Perhaps the inmates knew that the Soviet Jewnion would have recruited them as unarmed cannon fodder to consume the Germans’ supply of bullets, as was the Soviet army’s usual practice with unarmed Russian conscripts.