Post by been_there on Jan 28, 2022 15:35:47 GMT
The link to the thread containing the witness material. Grossman
I will get the ball rolling. This eye witness account is from Vassili Grossman. This Jew was a war correspondent for the Soviets. Wiki states At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was engaged as a war correspondent by the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda; he wrote first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. Grossman's eyewitness reports of a Nazi extermination camp, following the discovery of Treblinka, were among the earliest accounts of a Nazi death camp by a reporter. The following extract is from TREBLINKA: EXTERMINATION CAMP OR TRANSIT CAMP? by Mattogno & Graf link. Grossman interviewed former Sonderkommando inmates who escaped from Treblinka and wrote his manuscript without revealing their identities.
This I think sums up the authenticity and reliability of this account:
โEven if we reduced all the numbers, as given by the witnesses, of all those who were on the trains to Treblinka by about a factor of two, the number of people brought to Treblinka within thirteen months nevertheless amounts to approximately three million.โ
If this were accurate that would mean those โwitnessesโ claim they saw 6 million Joos transported to Treblinka II. ๐
The question any honest and reasonable person needs to ask is, is this obvious โatrocity propagandaโ i.) an exaggeration or ii.) or a complete fabrication?
In Treblinka there were two camps: the labor camp No. 1, in which prisoners of various nationalities, above all Poles, worked, and camp No.2, the Jewish camp. Camp No. 1 โ the work or concentration camp โ was located directly next to the sand pit, at the edge of the forest. It was a camp like those, which were established by the hundreds and thousands in the occupied eastern territories by the Gestapo. It began in 1941. As if reduced to a common denominator, the traits of the German character, grotesquely disfigured by the frightful fun house mirror of the Hitler regime, are combined in it. [p. 27fโฆ]
The No. 1 Camp existed from autumn of 1941 [until] July 23, 1944. It was completely liquidated while the prisoners were already in earshot of the dull boom of the Soviet artillery. Early in the morning of July 23, the guard unit and the SS people proceeded to exterminate the camp after they had fortified themselves with schnapps. By the evening all of the prisoners had been murdered โ murdered and buried. The Warsaw cabinetmaker Max Lewit was able to save himself, because lying wounded underneath the corpses of his comrades, he had waited for the darkness and crept into the forest. He told how he heard the singing of thirty boys in the pit who struck up the tune โSong of the Fatherlandโ before being shot to death; he heard one of the youngsters yell: โStalin will avenge us!โ He heard the camp favorite Leib, who had led the boys, get up again after falling down into the pit after the volley hit him, and ask: โPan[28] Guard, they missed; please, once more Pan Guard, once more!โ [p. 29โฆ]
We know the names of the camp SS men, their characters, idiosyncrasies, we know the camp commander van Eipen, a half-Dutch German, who is an insane murderer, an insatiable libertine, a lover of good horses and fast riding jaunts. [โฆ]
We know the one-eyed German Swiderski from Odessa, the โMaster Hammerer,โ who was regarded as the unsurpassable specialist of โdry murder,โ because within a few minutes he killed with a hammer fifteen children between the ages of eight and thirteen years, who had been designated as unfit for labor. We know the skinny, gypsy-like SS man Preifi, nicknamed โthe Old Man,โ a taciturn grouch. He sought to dispel his melancholy by sitting behind the place where the camp slops were dumped; he stalked the prisoners who sneaked back there to secretly eat potato peels and forced them to open their mouths and then shot into those widely opened mouths. We know the names of the professional murderers Schwarz and Ledecke. They took delight in shooting at the prisoners returning home in the twilight and murdered twenty of them a day. Thirty, forty men. [p.29f.]
Such was life in this camp, similar to a miniature Majdanek, and it might seem that there could be nothing worse in the world. But the inmates of Camp No. 1 knew quite well that there was something worse, something a hundred times more horrible than their own camp. Three kilometers from the labor camp, the Germans began in May 1942 the construction of the Jewish camp โ the human slaughterhouse. [p. 31โฆ]
For thirteen months the trains came to Treblinka, each train consisting of sixty cars, and on each car a number was written with chalk: one hundred fifty โ one hundred eighty โ two hundred. These figures indicated the number of people who were in the car. Train workers and peasants secretly counted the trains. One peasant from the village of Wulka (the community situated closest to the camp), the sixty-two-year-old Kazimierz Skarzinski, told me that there were days when six trains ran past Wulka alone, over the Siedlce railway, and that there wasnโt one day during the course of these thirteen months that at least one of these trains didnโt come through. But the Siedlce line is just one of the four train lines which supplied Treblinka.
Lucian Cukowa, a railway repair worker, who the Germans had mobilised for work on the branch line that goes from Treblinka to Camp No. 2, relates that during his work from June 15, 1942, until August 1943, one to three trains came every day from Treblinka Station to the camp over this secondary line. Every train consisted of sixty cars and in each car were no fewer than one hundred fifty persons. We have collected dozens of such statements. Even if we reduced all the numbers, as given by the witnesses, of all those who were on the trains to Treblinka by about a factor of two, the number of people brought to Treblinka within thirteen months nevertheless amounts to approximately three million. [p. 31f.]
In the report on this last tragic train, all witnesses mention the atrocities of an anthropoid creature, the SS man Zepf. He specialized in the murder of children. This creature, who had at his disposal enormous strength, suddenly grabbed a child from out of the crowd and, after he had swung him through the air like a club, smashed in his skull on the ground or tore him right in two. When I heard of this monster, obviously born of a woman, it seemed to me unthinkable and improbable that the acts that were told of him could be true. But after I had personally heard these reports repeated from direct eyewitnesses, I saw that they spoke of them as of details, which were neither unusual nor inconsistent with the entire structure of the Hell of Treblinka, and I believed in the possibility of such a creature. [p.43โฆ]
The dimensions of the first three chambers were only five by five meters, which means that each had twenty-five square meters. Each chamber was one hundred ninety centimeters high. It had two doors; one admitted the living, the other served for bringing out the gassed corpses. This second door was very wide, approximately two and a half meters. The chambers were mounted upon a common foundation. These three chambers did not correspond to the productive capacity demanded by Berlin in assembly-line murder. [โฆ]
The seven hundred prisoners worked five weeks long on the structure of the new large-scale murder business. When the work had reached its peak, an expert came with his staff from Germany and took care of setting things up. The new chambers, ten in all, were symmetrically arranged on either side of a concrete corridor. [โฆ]
The new chambers were each seven by eight meters, or fifty-six square meters in area. The total surface area of these ten chambers amounted to five hundred sixty square meters, and if one added to this the area of the three old chambers, which were put into service at the arrival of small parties, then Treblinka had at its disposal a total of usable lethal surface area of six hundred thirty-five square meters. Four hundred sixty to five hundred people were squeezed into one chamber at a time. When fully loaded, therefore, the ten chambers during one operation annihilated an average of four thousand five hundred people. At their most typical loading, the chambers of the Hell of Treblinka were filled at least two or three times every day (there were days when this happened five times). If we intentionally reduce the figures, we are able to calculate that, with a usage of only twice per day of just the new chambers, approximately ten thousand people were murdered in Treblinka on a single day, and about three hundred thousand in a month. Treblinka operated for thirteen months, day after day, but if we allow even ninety days to be deducted for repairs, idleness, untypical transports, there are ten full months of operation. If in one month an average of three hundred thousand people arrive, then within ten months Treblinka exterminated three million people. [p. 47fโฆ]
The duty of the writer is to report a terrible truth, and the citizenโs duty as a reader is to learn it. Anyone who turns away, closes his eyes and walks by, desecrates the memory of the murdered. Whoever does not know the whole truth can never grasp against what foe, what monstrosity, the great Red Army took up the deadly struggle. [p. 55โฆ]
Chapter I: The Description of Treblinka in Historiography 23
We entered the camp of Treblinka at the beginning of September [1944], which was thirteen months after the day of the revolt. For thirteen months the Germans had tried to erase the traces of their work. [โฆ]. And the earth, giving way under oneโs feet, is fatty and swollen, as if it had been soaked in a surfeit of linseed oil; the unsolid earth of Treblinka wells up like an eddying sea. This wasteland, surrounded by barbed wire fencing, has consumed more human lives than entire oceans and seas of the globe since the existence of the human race.โ (p. 61f.)
The No. 1 Camp existed from autumn of 1941 [until] July 23, 1944. It was completely liquidated while the prisoners were already in earshot of the dull boom of the Soviet artillery. Early in the morning of July 23, the guard unit and the SS people proceeded to exterminate the camp after they had fortified themselves with schnapps. By the evening all of the prisoners had been murdered โ murdered and buried. The Warsaw cabinetmaker Max Lewit was able to save himself, because lying wounded underneath the corpses of his comrades, he had waited for the darkness and crept into the forest. He told how he heard the singing of thirty boys in the pit who struck up the tune โSong of the Fatherlandโ before being shot to death; he heard one of the youngsters yell: โStalin will avenge us!โ He heard the camp favorite Leib, who had led the boys, get up again after falling down into the pit after the volley hit him, and ask: โPan[28] Guard, they missed; please, once more Pan Guard, once more!โ [p. 29โฆ]
We know the names of the camp SS men, their characters, idiosyncrasies, we know the camp commander van Eipen, a half-Dutch German, who is an insane murderer, an insatiable libertine, a lover of good horses and fast riding jaunts. [โฆ]
We know the one-eyed German Swiderski from Odessa, the โMaster Hammerer,โ who was regarded as the unsurpassable specialist of โdry murder,โ because within a few minutes he killed with a hammer fifteen children between the ages of eight and thirteen years, who had been designated as unfit for labor. We know the skinny, gypsy-like SS man Preifi, nicknamed โthe Old Man,โ a taciturn grouch. He sought to dispel his melancholy by sitting behind the place where the camp slops were dumped; he stalked the prisoners who sneaked back there to secretly eat potato peels and forced them to open their mouths and then shot into those widely opened mouths. We know the names of the professional murderers Schwarz and Ledecke. They took delight in shooting at the prisoners returning home in the twilight and murdered twenty of them a day. Thirty, forty men. [p.29f.]
Such was life in this camp, similar to a miniature Majdanek, and it might seem that there could be nothing worse in the world. But the inmates of Camp No. 1 knew quite well that there was something worse, something a hundred times more horrible than their own camp. Three kilometers from the labor camp, the Germans began in May 1942 the construction of the Jewish camp โ the human slaughterhouse. [p. 31โฆ]
For thirteen months the trains came to Treblinka, each train consisting of sixty cars, and on each car a number was written with chalk: one hundred fifty โ one hundred eighty โ two hundred. These figures indicated the number of people who were in the car. Train workers and peasants secretly counted the trains. One peasant from the village of Wulka (the community situated closest to the camp), the sixty-two-year-old Kazimierz Skarzinski, told me that there were days when six trains ran past Wulka alone, over the Siedlce railway, and that there wasnโt one day during the course of these thirteen months that at least one of these trains didnโt come through. But the Siedlce line is just one of the four train lines which supplied Treblinka.
Lucian Cukowa, a railway repair worker, who the Germans had mobilised for work on the branch line that goes from Treblinka to Camp No. 2, relates that during his work from June 15, 1942, until August 1943, one to three trains came every day from Treblinka Station to the camp over this secondary line. Every train consisted of sixty cars and in each car were no fewer than one hundred fifty persons. We have collected dozens of such statements. Even if we reduced all the numbers, as given by the witnesses, of all those who were on the trains to Treblinka by about a factor of two, the number of people brought to Treblinka within thirteen months nevertheless amounts to approximately three million. [p. 31f.]
In the report on this last tragic train, all witnesses mention the atrocities of an anthropoid creature, the SS man Zepf. He specialized in the murder of children. This creature, who had at his disposal enormous strength, suddenly grabbed a child from out of the crowd and, after he had swung him through the air like a club, smashed in his skull on the ground or tore him right in two. When I heard of this monster, obviously born of a woman, it seemed to me unthinkable and improbable that the acts that were told of him could be true. But after I had personally heard these reports repeated from direct eyewitnesses, I saw that they spoke of them as of details, which were neither unusual nor inconsistent with the entire structure of the Hell of Treblinka, and I believed in the possibility of such a creature. [p.43โฆ]
The dimensions of the first three chambers were only five by five meters, which means that each had twenty-five square meters. Each chamber was one hundred ninety centimeters high. It had two doors; one admitted the living, the other served for bringing out the gassed corpses. This second door was very wide, approximately two and a half meters. The chambers were mounted upon a common foundation. These three chambers did not correspond to the productive capacity demanded by Berlin in assembly-line murder. [โฆ]
The seven hundred prisoners worked five weeks long on the structure of the new large-scale murder business. When the work had reached its peak, an expert came with his staff from Germany and took care of setting things up. The new chambers, ten in all, were symmetrically arranged on either side of a concrete corridor. [โฆ]
The new chambers were each seven by eight meters, or fifty-six square meters in area. The total surface area of these ten chambers amounted to five hundred sixty square meters, and if one added to this the area of the three old chambers, which were put into service at the arrival of small parties, then Treblinka had at its disposal a total of usable lethal surface area of six hundred thirty-five square meters. Four hundred sixty to five hundred people were squeezed into one chamber at a time. When fully loaded, therefore, the ten chambers during one operation annihilated an average of four thousand five hundred people. At their most typical loading, the chambers of the Hell of Treblinka were filled at least two or three times every day (there were days when this happened five times). If we intentionally reduce the figures, we are able to calculate that, with a usage of only twice per day of just the new chambers, approximately ten thousand people were murdered in Treblinka on a single day, and about three hundred thousand in a month. Treblinka operated for thirteen months, day after day, but if we allow even ninety days to be deducted for repairs, idleness, untypical transports, there are ten full months of operation. If in one month an average of three hundred thousand people arrive, then within ten months Treblinka exterminated three million people. [p. 47fโฆ]
The duty of the writer is to report a terrible truth, and the citizenโs duty as a reader is to learn it. Anyone who turns away, closes his eyes and walks by, desecrates the memory of the murdered. Whoever does not know the whole truth can never grasp against what foe, what monstrosity, the great Red Army took up the deadly struggle. [p. 55โฆ]
Chapter I: The Description of Treblinka in Historiography 23
We entered the camp of Treblinka at the beginning of September [1944], which was thirteen months after the day of the revolt. For thirteen months the Germans had tried to erase the traces of their work. [โฆ]. And the earth, giving way under oneโs feet, is fatty and swollen, as if it had been soaked in a surfeit of linseed oil; the unsolid earth of Treblinka wells up like an eddying sea. This wasteland, surrounded by barbed wire fencing, has consumed more human lives than entire oceans and seas of the globe since the existence of the human race.โ (p. 61f.)
This I think sums up the authenticity and reliability of this account:
โEven if we reduced all the numbers, as given by the witnesses, of all those who were on the trains to Treblinka by about a factor of two, the number of people brought to Treblinka within thirteen months nevertheless amounts to approximately three million.โ
If this were accurate that would mean those โwitnessesโ claim they saw 6 million Joos transported to Treblinka II. ๐
The question any honest and reasonable person needs to ask is, is this obvious โatrocity propagandaโ i.) an exaggeration or ii.) or a complete fabrication?
