Anyone interested in discussing what is the actual evidence for the allegations regarding Chelmno/Kulmhof and the mass murder there in 'gas wagons'?
Chelmno or Kulmhof is considered to be the first place where mass gassings of people were carried out against people categorised as Jewish.
Mass-gassings are alleged to have started there on the 7th or 8th of December of 1941.
The holocaust narrative states that an estimated 152,000 to 360,000 men, women and children were killed at Chełmno. That is, the estimates vary with room for a 208,000 disparity margin.
Chelmno appears to be another alleged extermination centre that has no conclusive empirical or documentary evidence supporting the allegation that it was a place of mass extermination. The evidence provided to support the allegation is predominantly 'witness' testimony. And in this case the 'survivor witness' testimony is quite limited.“Transports to Chełmno stopped at the Kolo [railway] station, where victims were brought to the synagogue and then by railway to the station at Powiercie.”
In a small Polish village, the "final solution of the Jewish question" commenced with the establishment in December 1941 of the first camp built for the sole purpose of extermination, at Chełmno nad Nerem (Kulmhof an der Nehr [Ger], Chełmno on the Ner River [Eng]). Whole communities of victims were gassed here day after day. Located 60 km (37 miles) northwest of Łódź, and connected by a railway annex to the town of Koło 14 km away (8.5 miles), it was not difficult to transport people without attracting much outside attention.
Chełmno was organised on a small estate or manor, surrounded by about 5 acres of land. Transports of about 1,000 people a day in 20-22 wagons were brought here under the pretence that they would be "resettled." To gain the cooperation of the deportees, the Nazis encouraged them to exchange their Polish money into German marks and sell their belongings or leave them for "safekeeping" at carpenters' shops in the ghetto. Each received warm clothing, bread and sausage for the journey.
http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Holo ... ports.html
This fact alone can be interpreted to confirm the view that everyone else who was deported to Chelmno did not survive the war and therefore were murdered there. Though another explanation is that very few people actually were deported to Chelmno, and of those who had passed through, none wanted to contradict the official story in the 1960's when it became more widespread, and expose themselves to receiving the ostracisation, violence and threats that fellow-Jews like Joseph Burg (Ginsburg) received for contradicting the emerging holocaust narrative.
There were a few people who later testified as 'survivor' witnessess to what occurred at Chelmno.
Mordechai Zurawski and Michał Podchlebnik were two of them.
Another one was Shimon Srebnik, who died in Israel in August 2006 aged 76.
Shimon Srebnik...a total of seven Jews from the burial Sonderkommando escaped from the Waldlager. Determining the identities of the few survivors of Chełmno had presented ambiguity because records use different versions of their names. One survivor may not have been recorded in the early postwar years because he did not testify at trials of camp personnel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chełmno ... #Survivors
Srebnik said he was deported in 1944 aged 13 with his mother to Chelmno from the nearby Lodz Ghetto.
He testified about Chełmno for a trial held in Łódź, Poland in 1945.
He and the two others who had been at Chełmno testified at the 1961 Adolf Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (session 66-68) previously discussed here by Werd.
He testified in the Chełmno Guard Trials, which were conducted in Germany from 1962–1965.
He also appears in the beginning of the film released in 1985 by Claude Lanzmann called Shoah where he says its impossible to describe what happened at Chelmno, that noone can understand it, not even himself.
He describes there flames from the crematorium 'ovens' reaching “up to the sky”.
Yet in a later interview he talks not of ovens but of an open furnace over grids with bodies piled in between layers on wood.
Q1: Was it ovens or a furnace built upon railway grids?
Here is his description, as recorded by Yehudit Inbar, director of the Museums Division at Yad Vashem who took down Srebnik's testimony at a period of time that in 2006 was described as "several years ago":
He said: “When the van reached the furnace, two people entered. The furnace was already lit.When we got to Chelmno the older people said, 'What a beautiful place, we'll be happy here, it's green, birds are singing. A real health resort.' I remained in the 'house kommando.' I was in a barrack with Waler Bonmeister. We sorted people's gold and possessions, things people left behind, suitcases. There was a big tent where Jews sorted things.
How did I know my mother arrived in Chelmno?
There were many handbags, a mountain of handbags. Once, I found a handbag with my mother's pictures and all her documents. I told Bonmeister: 'Look, this is my mother's.'
'Yes, she's in heaven,' he said.
'It's my mother's.' I was naive.
He said, 'Yes, but she's in heaven.'
I didn't know what he meant by 'heaven'.
There were three gas vans. The exhaust gas from the engine entered the van through a gridiron on the floor. Each van held 80 people. There was a bigger van that held 100 people.
The distance from Chelmno to the forest was four kilometers. During the ride, gas entered the van.
When the doors opened, you could see that all the dead were injured.
Everyone wanted to survive, wanted to live, so they scratched each other. It was terrible.
When the van reached the furnace, two people entered. The furnace was already lit.
What a fire! There was a railway gridiron in the furnace. They put a layer of wood on top of it and lit it and then a layer of people, and a layer of wood. This happened every two days.
They pulled out gold teeth along with the flesh. I sat and removed the gold from the flesh. It smelled awful. I collected the victim's teeth. It wasn't only my mother, I handled thousands of mothers. My heart ached for them and for my mother. But there were thousands like her... Did I think about my mother? She was already in heaven. Nothing could be done."
https://web.archive.org/web/20110713122 ... 7913655664
What a fire! There was a railway gridiron in the furnace. They put a layer of wood on top of it and lit it and then a layer of people, and a layer of wood.”
Q2: would it be possible to pile corpses on such a furnace AFTER it was alight?
He describes there vans that could hold 80 to a 100 people.
In testimony he gave to a court judge in June 1945 (while not under oath) he stated that of the three alleged gas vans at Chelmno one could hold as many as 170 people.
Another trial witness — this time one of the accused named Bruno Israel — claimed the following:
Q3: could this van hold 80 to a 100 or 170 people?In Chelmno there were two death vans. At the time of my stay in Chelmno generally only one of them was used. The other one, the smaller one, with the carrying capacity of 80 persons, was kept in Chelmno in reserve. Both vehicles were sent to Berlin, to which city they were driven by Laabs and Runge. The men were not (in Chelmno) for over a week. Apart from this there was one more van, used for disinfecting clothes.
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org ... ister.html
http://www.zchor.org/GASVAN.HTM
Srebnik also implied in his 1945 testimony that people gassed in the vans became unconscious after only four minutes. He says nothing about vividly pink corpses.
Q4: wouldn't his nose show signs of a such a bullet wound as he described receiving, shot from such close proximity?In the evening fellow prisoners from the Waldkommando told us what had happened in the woods. After the trucks arrived, the Jews were ordered to go to one of the barracks in the woods.
The Germans told them to take off their clothes and put them in a separate pile, because they would put them back on after bathing. The underwear also had to be removed. Women could leave their panties on. Signs on the walls of the barracks read, “to the bathhouse,” and “to the doctor.”
The Jews were driven out of the barracks and loaded into a van of a special type. There were three vans: larger one and two smaller ones. The larger van could hold up to 170 people, while the smaller ones, 100-120.
The van doors were locked with a bolt and a padlock. Then the engine was started. The exhaust fumes entered the interior of the van and suffocated those inside. The exhaust pipe went from the engine along the chassis and into the van, through a hole in the car’s floor, which was covered with a perforated sheet of metal. The hole was located more or less in the middle of the chassis. The van’s floor was also covered with a wooden grate, just like the one in the bathhouse. This was to prevent the prisoners from clogging the exhaust pipe.
The vehicles were specially adapted vans. On one of them, under a new coat of paint, one could see a trade name. I cannot remember the name, but it started with the word “Otto.”
I do not know the make of the engine. The chauffeurs were Burstinger, Laabs and Gielov. Shouting and banging on the door lasted about four minutes. The van was not moving at that time.
After the shouting faded, the vehicle started moving in the direction of the crematoriums. When the van reached its destination, it’s door was unlocked to let the fumes out. Then two Jews went inside and threw out the bodies.
The gas coming out had all the characteristics of the exhaust fumes (colour and smell) I cannot be mistaken here. The corpses, having been searched through, were placed in the furnace.
...Finkelstein, whom I have already mentioned in my testimony had to throw his own sister into flames. She regained consciousness and shouted, “You murderer, why are you throwing me into the furnace? I’m still alive.”
...The camp was liquidated and the barracks dismantled. Machines for shredding clothes and underwear were sent back. The furnaces were also dismantled. In the granary there were still 87 Jewish workers. Those were tailors and shoemakers. They lived upstairs. The number of workers decreased and finally there were 47 of them left – 22 tailors and 25 courtyard workers.
When the Soviet army was advancing quickly, one night we were ordered to leave the granary in groups of five. I cannot remember the date. The area was lit with car headlights.
I went outside in the first group of five. Lenz ordered us to lie down on the ground. He shot everybody in the back of the head. I lost consciousness and regained it when there was no one around.
All the SS men were shooting inside the granary. I crawled to the car lighting the spot and broke both headlights. Under the cover of darkness I managed to run away. The wound was not deadly. The bullet went through the neck and mouth and pierced the nose and then went out.
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org ... brnik.html
Further reading
Chelmno Personnel
Critique of Chelmno revisionism
A critical analysis of the gas vans
