Treblinka

Treblinka was a work and transit camp used temporarily to house prisoners on their way to other camps in the German system. It was located 62 miles northeast of Warsaw. The buildings included barracks, bakery and storage buildings.

Treblinka was made up of two separate camps. Treblinka I was a penal work camp that wasn't at all secret. The 1941 directive announcing the establishment of the "Treblinka Labor Camp" was published in both Polish and German in widely distributed official journals. Poles and Jews worked in a large sand and gravel quarry at the Treblinka labor camp.

Treblinka II, the so-called "extermination" camp, was located about a mile and a half UP from the rail spur from Treblinka I. As wartime aerial reconnaissance photographs clearly show, Treblinka I was at the end of the rail spur on which Treblinka II was also located. This fact strengthens the thesis that the Treblinka II camp was not particularly secret, since penal labor prisoners being taken by train to and from the publicly known Treblinka I camp passed directly by the supposedly top secret Treblinka II "extermination" camp.

So what was Treblinka II? Simply a transit camp for prisoners going to others areas.

Most prisoners of Treblinka came from the Warsaw Ghetto from July to October, 1942. Others came after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in may of 1943.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

To understand what happened in the Warsaw ghetto in April-May 1943, it is important to know why the Germans decided to launch a police operation. In the city’s 'Jewish quarter' or 'ghetto' were 36,000 officially registered residents, as well as, in all probability, more than 20,000 clandestine inhabitants. The ghetto was, in a sense, a city within a city, administered by a 'Jewish Council' (Judenrat), and a Jewish police force, which collaborated with the German occupation authorities, even against Jewish 'terrorists.' Many thousands of Jewish workers toiled in ghetto workshops and factories, supplying products vital to the German war effort.

Following the first Soviet air attack against central Warsaw on August 21, 1942, bomb shelters were built, on German orders, everywhere in the city, including the ghetto, for the protection of the residents. The Germans furnished the Jews with the cement and other necessary materials for these shelters, which legend has transformed into 'blockhouses' and 'bunkers.' So extensive was this 'network of subterranean refuges and hiding places' that, according to one prominent Holocaust historian, 'in the end, every Jew in the ghetto had his own spot in one of the shelters set up in the central part of the ghetto.'

Small armed Jewish groups, numbering no more than 220 persons, were active. The most important of these was the 'Jewish Combat Organization' (JCO), whose members were mostly young men in their twenties. Its 'general directives for combat' specified 'acts of terror' against the Jewish police, the Jewish Council, and the Werkschutz (protection service for the factories and workshops). This JCO directive stated specifically: 'The general staff works out the central plan of action — sabotage and terror — directed against the enemy.'

Accordingly, these 'fighters' or 'terrorists' used 'sabotage and terror' to shake down Jewish ghetto police, Jewish Council officials, and workshop guard. The 'terrorists' also profited from the ghetto’s intensive industrial and commercial life, shaking down merchants and other residents by threat and blackmail, even holding them prisoner in their homes for ransom. They were able to buy weapons from soldiers stationed in Warsaw, who, like troops stationed elsewhere well behind the front lines, often served in patchwork units, ill-trained and poorly motivated. The ghetto 'terrorists' even carried out murderous attacks against German troops and Jewish collaborators.

The ghetto became increasingly insecure. Because of this, the Polish population became more and more hostile to its existence, while the Germans, for their part, feared that it could become a threat to the city’s important role as a rail nexus in the war economy and as a hub for transport of troops to the Eastern front. Himmler therefore decided to relocate the Jewish population, along with the workshops and factories, to the Lublin region, and to raze the ghetto, replacing it with a park. At first the Germans tried to convince the Jews to voluntarily accept relocation. But the 'terrorists' refused to accept this, aware that such a transfer would mean for them losing, simultaneously, their financial base as well as their freedom of movement. They devoted all their efforts to opposing this, until on April 19, 1943, a police operation to forcibly evacuate the remaining Jews was begun on Himmler’s order.

At 6:00 a.m. that morning, troops under the command of SS Colonel Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg entered the ghetto, supported by a single tracked vehicle (captured during the invasion of France) and two armored cars. Initially the 'terrorists' or guerrillas offered stiff resistance, wounding 16 German SS men, six Ukrainians (so-called 'Askaris'), and two Polish policemen. One Polish policeman was killed.

Himmler, eager to minimize casualties, was angered. That same morning, he relieved von Sammern-Frankenegg of command and replaced him with SS General Jürgen Stroop. Stroop, ordered to carry out the operation slowly to minimize casualties, did so in the following manner: each morning, the troops would enter the ghetto, clear buildings of their residents and use smoke candles (not poison gas) to drive out the Jews hiding in the air-raid shelters; the buildings were destroyed as they were evacuated. Each evening the troops sealed the ghetto so that nobody could escape during the night.

Skirmishes lasted from April 19 to May 16, 1943, so that altogether the operation required 28 days. On the third day, many of the Jewish armed fighters tried to escape, most whom where shot or captured. Contrary to some reports, the German command never called for air support to destroy the ghetto, and the operation involved no aerial bombardment.

The number of Jewish dead is unknown. An often-cited figure of 56,065 is, in fact, the number of Jews who were apprehended. The great majority of these were deported, many to the transit camp at Treblinka from where they were taken to Majdanek (Lublin). German deaths in the operation totaled 16. (This included one Polish policeman.)

One should not doubt either the courage of the Jewish resistance in the ghetto or the tragic nature of the whole affair, with the civilian population trapped in the cross-fire between various heterogeneous German units and small groups of Jewish guerrillas scattered throughout the ghetto. Contrary to some grandiose propaganda claims, though, what took place was far from an 'apocalyptic' revolt, as one writer has recently called it, particularly when one is mindful of the tens of thousands of deaths, civilian and military, that occurred during those same 28 days, on battlefields around the globe and in European cities bombarded by British and American air forces.

for the full text of this article see http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n2p2_Faurisson.html

In August 1943, the prisoners in the work details rebelled. They seized small arms, sprayed kerosene on all the buildings and set them ablaze. In the confusion, a number of German soldiers were killed and many of the prisoners. The camp ceased operation soon after. Two months later the revolt at Sobibor occurred.

After the revolt, it was decided to shut down the camp since the fire had badly damaged the structures.

Jewish Version

Treblinka

Treblinka was one of the most important extermination centers during WW II. Between July 1942 to September 1942, three hundred thousand Jews were transported from Warsaw to Treblinka. Later, in May of 1943, the entire population of the Warsaw ghetto was liquidated and most were transported to Treblinka. By July 11,1945, when Soviet troops entered Warsaw, more than 700,000 Jewish men, women, and children had been murdered at Treblinka.

OUR NOTE: From July 1942 to November 1943 it is claimed that over 870,000 Jews were killed at Treblinka. We just can't help ourselves -- that's over 51,000 per month. Just how did the Germans manage to murder that many people in a month? How could they possibly dispose of that many bodies in such a short period of time? You just can't burn bodies that fast! You can't bury people that fast! This accusation is so ridiculous it's laughable, except Germans were executed based on this accusation. Germans are vilified based on this accusation. The lie continues to this day!

Under the command of Franz Stangl, the killing process at Treblinka was very similar to that of Belzek and Sobibor. Upon their arrival by railway freight cars, the victims at Treblinka II were separated by sex and adults from children. They were told that they were being transported to other work camps but first they had to bathe and be disinfected. They were stripped of their clothing and other possessions, marched into buildings containing "bathhouses," and gassed with carbon monoxide poison produced by diesel engines and pumped in through ceiling pipes camouflaged as shower heads. The route from the selection area to the gas chambers passed through a narrow fenced-in passage known as "the tube." Many realized that they were going to their death and, when they resisted, were beaten, clubbed with rifle butts and whips by the camp staff. In September, 1942, several new and larger gas chambers were constructed.

Truth

TREBLINKA

Treblinka was such a non-issue that the 1965 World Book Encyclopedia
Has no entry for it!

Then Jewish propaganda took hold

Treblinka

Wartime Aerial Photos of Treblinka Cast New Doubt on "Death Camp" Claims

by Mark Weber and Andrew Allen

Treblinka is widely regarded as the second most important German wartime extermination center. Only Auschwitz-Birkenau is supposed to have claimed more lives.

Treblinka became the focus of worldwide attention in 1987-1988 during the 14-month trial in Jerusalem of John (Ivan) Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born American factory worker. As Treblinka's "Ivan the Terrible," Demjanjuk supposedly operated the machinery used to gas hundreds of thousands of Jews there. Citing testimony by Jewish survivors, the Israeli court that condemned him to death in April 1988 declared that more than 850,000 Jews were killed at Treblinka between July 1942 and August 1943.

After the death sentence was handed down, Demjanjuk's family was able to discover previously suppressed evidence -- much of it from Soviet Russian archives -- indicating that the real "Ivan the Terrible" was another Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko (or Marczenko). This new evidence discredited the courtroom testimony of five Jewish camp survivors, each of whom had "positively" identified Demjanjuk as the sadistic mass murderer of Treblinka.

As historians know, and as common sense would suggest, such decades-old testimony is far less trustworthy than contemporary records or forensic evidence.

And yet, Treblinka's reputation as a mass extermination center is based almost entirely on precisely such subjective and unprovable testimony by former prisoners -- evidence that has proven to be notoriously unreliable in several major trials of alleged "Nazi war criminals."

There is no documentary evidence that Treblinka was an extermination center. In fact, contemporary records suggest that the camp had a very different function.

Aerial reconnaissance photographs taken in 1944 of the Treblinka "death camp" site -- and forgotten for almost 45 years in the National Archives in Washington, DC -- cast serious doubts on the widely accepted story that it was a mass extermination center.

Discovered in 1989, and published here for the first time in the United States, these German reconnaissance photos corroborate other evidence indicating that Treblinka was actually a transit camp.

Moreover, the camp's burial area quite obviously appears too small to contain the hundreds of thousands of bodies supposedly buried there.

'Steam Chambers'

The generally accepted story today is that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed at Treblinka in gas chambers with poisonous exhaust from engines. But the "original" Treblinka extermination story was that Jews were steamed to death there in "steam chambers."

According to an "eyewitness" account received in November 1942 in London from the Warsaw ghetto underground organization, Jews were exterminated in "death rooms" at Treblinka with "steam coming out of the numerous holes in the pipes." In August 1943, the New York Times reported that two million Jews had already been killed at Treblinka by steaming them to death. People such as Albert Einstein, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and others "sponsored" other Treblinka steam stories in 1943.

According to a 1944 "eyewitness" account compiled by the OSS, the principle US intelligence agency, Jews at Treblinka "were in general killed by steam and not by gas as had been at first suspected."

American prosecutors at the main Nuremberg trial supported the steam story. An American prosecutor quoted from this report during his address to the Tribunal on December 14, 1945.

Although no reputable historian now supports the "steam" story, and little has been heard of it during the last several decades, it was revived in a widely-circulated booklet published in 1979 and 1985 by the influential Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

Diesel Gassing

In recent years, the most widely-circulated story has been that Jews were gassed at Treblinka with carbon monoxide from the exhaust of a diesel engine.

However, as American engineer Friedrich Berg has established, this story is improbable for technical reasons. In spite of the obnoxious odor of diesel exhaust, diesel engines produce much smaller quantities of toxic carbon monoxide than ordinary gasoline motors. It would thus be difficult efficiently to gas large numbers of people using diesel exhaust. A normal gasoline engine would be much more logical.

It is important to keep in mind that the "evidence" now usually cited for diesel gassing at Treblinka is no more credible than the evidence that was once presented for steaming and suffocating. Apparently the steaming and suffocating stories have been dropped for the sake of credible consistency.

Solid evidence for gassings at Treblinka has proven to be very elusive. For example, it turned out that none of the witnesses in the 1951 West German "Treblinka" court case ever actually saw anyone being gassed. "The type of gas used to kill the people there [Treblinka] cannot be determined with certainty because none of the witnesses was able to witness this procedure," the judges declared in their verdict. At least some former Treblinka prisoners testified in postwar West German trials that they not only never saw a gas chamber, but did not even hear about gassings from others.

Treblinka Labor Camp

About one mile (1.5 km) from the "extermination camp," which was known as "Treblinka II," was a penal labor camp for Poles and Jews known as "Treblinka I." It was not at all secret. The 1941 directive announcing the establishment of the "Treblinka Labor Camp" was published in both Polish and German in widely distributed official journals. Poles and Jews worked in a large sand and gravel quarry at the Treblinka labor camp.

As wartime aerial reconnaissance photographs clearly show, the Treblinka T-I labor camp was located at the end of the rail spur on which the Treblinka T-II "extermination" (transit) camp was also located. This fact strengthens the thesis that the T-II camp was not particularly secret, since penal labor prisoners being taken by train to and from the publicly known T-I camp passed directly by the supposedly top secret T-II "extermination" camp.

Documentary Evidence

Documents found after the war confirm that large numbers of Jews were deported to Treblinka in 1942 and 1943. German railway records report the transfer of trainloads of "settlers" ("Umsiedler") and "workers" to Treblinka from various places in Poland and from other countries.

In July 1942, a senior German railway official reported to the chief of Himmler's personal staff that 5,000 Jews were being transported daily to Treblinka. An August 3, 1942, German "Ostbahn" railway directive similarly reported that special trains would be carrying "resettlers" from Warsaw to Treblinka daily, until further notice.

German railway records have been cited as evidence that hundreds of thousands of Jews were exterminated at Treblinka. While there is little doubt that these documents are genuine, and that they confirm transports of Jews to Treblinka, they are not proof of an extermination program.

Transit Camp

If Treblinka was not an extermination center, what was it? As already mentioned, the balance of evidence indicates that Treblinka II -- along with Belzec and Sobibor -- was a transit camp, where Jewish deportees were stripped of their property and valuables before being transferred eastwards into German-occupied Soviet territories.

The generally-accepted story is that Treblinka II was a "pure" extermination center, from which no Jew was permitted to leave alive. However, credible reports of deportations of Jews from Treblinka refute the allegation that all Jews sent there were destined for extermination, and indicate instead that the camp functioned as a transit center.

Letters and postcards that arrived in the Warsaw ghetto from Jews who, by all accounts, had been deported to Treblinka, indicate that the camp was a transit center from where Jews were resettled in the occupied Soviet territories. These messages, which arrived from settlements and camps in Belarus (Byelorussia), Ukraine, and even Russia proper (near Smolensk), were written by Jews who had been deported in 1942. Some letters and cards had been sent by mail and some had arrived through the underground. Many mentioned that the senders were working hard, but confirmed that they (and often their children) were being fed.

Completely contrary to its supposed character as a top secret extermination center, Treblinka was neither secret nor even closely guarded, as both former inmates and officials have confirmed. "Secrecy? Good heavens, there was no secrecy about Treblinka," Jewish prisoner Richard Glazer later testified. "All the Poles between there and Warsaw must have known about it, and lived off the proceeds. All the peasants came to barter, the Warsaw whores did business with the Ukrainians -- it was a circus for all of them." Polish farmers worked the fields that directly adjoined the camp. "And many others," said Jewish survivor Berek Rojzman, "came to the fence to barter, mostly with the Ukrainians, but with us too."

Deaths

In spite of its often inconsistent, contradictory and implausible character, testimony indicating that many Jews lost their lives at Treblinka cannot easily be dismissed. Many Jewish prisoners doubtless perished during their rail journey to the camp site, and were almost certainly buried there. Furthermore, it is plausible and even likely that hundreds and perhaps thousands of Jews who were too weak or ill to continue the eastbound journey from the camp were killed there by officials acting on their own authority.

All the same, there is no hard or compelling evidence that Treblinka was a mass extermination center where hundreds of thousands of Jews were systematically put to death. To the contrary, credible reports of transfers of Jews from Treblinka eastwards to the occupied Soviet territories, the relative lack of secrecy and security in the camp, and the small size of the area where the bodies were supposedly buried, all suggest instead that this was a transit center.

This is a summary of the article. To read it all go to http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p133_Allen.html

After the August of 1943 revolt, the camp was dismantled and the ground used for farm land. The remaining prisoners were transferred to Sobibor, where that camp had an uprising in October. The last prisoner left Treblinka in November of 1943.

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The Individual Camps

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