Chapter IX:
Transit Camp Treblinka

The facts and circumstantial evidence assembled so far lead to the conclusion that Treblinka was mainly a transit camp established for the Jewish population of the Warsaw district, which fits within the framework of National Socialist policy of the resettlement of Jews to the east. The verifiable deportations to Treblinka can be explained in this sense. Let us begin with those from the Warsaw Ghetto.

According to the files of the Jewish Council of Warsaw, the following Jews were evacuated from the ghetto in the summer of 1942:[816]

Thus, 251,545 Jews are supposed to have been deported to Treblinka and murdered there, another 11,315 Jews, however, are supposed to have been deported to the transit camp of the ghetto and put to work there. Are these figures reliable?

First, we emphasize the enormous discrepancy between the number of those fit and those unfit for labor: the former were supposed to have comprised 4.5%, the latter 95.5% of the deportees! Compared to this, on June 30, 1942, in the ghetto of Lodz, 68,896 Jews were employed, i.e. fit for work,[818] of a total population of 102,546 Jews,[819] therefore 67.2%!

Railway documents dealing with the deportation of Jews from Warsaw are unfortunately extremely rare. For the period of interest to us only a single schedule exists relating to this. It was issued on August 3, 1942, by the General Management of the Eastern Railway in Krakow and reads:

Moreover, Albert Ganzenmüller, Secretary of State in the Reichsverkehrsministerium (Ministry of Transport) and Deputy General Director of the German Reichsbahn (Imperial railway), made the following report to SS-Gruppenführer Wolff on July 28, 1942:[821]

On August 13, Wolff responded:[822]

On April 11, 1962, Wolff was confronted with this letter during questioning as a witness at the preliminary investigations for the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Wolff made the following statement in reply to this:[823]

Incredibly, not a single German report concerning such a large-scale displacement of population has been preserved. The only numerical information available to us comes from a terse excerpt from the Stroop Report:[247]

This figure is definitely reliable and on the whole it corresponds to the table cited above, so that this may be taken to reflect actual numbers. It is also quite probable that most of the transports went to Treblinka. It also is clear from the few preserved train schedules that the trains were emptied at Treblinka and returned to their departure point without passengers. Of course, none of this proves that the deportees were murdered in Treblinka. The "Disclosures and Conditions for the Jewish Council" of July 22, 1943, prescribed:[824]

Exempted from the resettlement were, among others:

The following regulation pertains to the baggage:

The announcement of the Jewish Council - likewise dated July 22, 1942 - contained the same instructions but began as follows:[825]

The instructions in regard to baggage contained the following warning:[826]

In an announcement of July 24, 1942, the Jewish Council proclaimed:[827]

On July 29, 1942, the Director of the Jewish Ordnungsdienst (law & order services) issued the following summons:[828]

The German authorities were providing 180,000 kg of bread and 36,000 kg of jam for the volunteers.[829]

Let us summarize: The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were supposed "to be resettled to the east"; sick persons in the hospitals who were "unable to be discharged" were exempt from the evacuation; every person ready for resettlement received 3 kg of bread and 1 kg of jam - all of this does not conform to a policy of extermination.

It is worthwhile to quote what Eugene Kulischer wrote in this regard:[830]

Kulischer even knew all about the fact that

The authors of the appeal were alleging that such news was being spread by people "who are working for the Gestapo." The official historiography later gave up this simple-minded assertion and has supported the thesis that the letters and post cards had been "written under duress at Treblinka,"[835] but not a single one of the self-described survivors of Treblinka has made claims of this kind. In fact, this information confirms - however fragmentarily - the picture drawn by E. Kulischer.

On May 30, 1943, a transport was sent to Bobruisk with 960 Jews, who had been arrested in the Warsaw Ghetto. On July 28 of the same year, another transport of Jews from Warsaw arrived in Bobruisk; a portion of the deportees were sent on to Smolensk.[836]

Finally, the arrival of at least one transport from the Warsaw Ghetto at a location east of Treblinka has been documented beyond any question. On 31 July 1942, the Reichskommissar for White Russia, Wilhelm Kube, sent a telegram to the Reichskommissar for the Ostland, Heinrich Lohse, in which he protested the dispatching of a transport of "1,000 Jews from Warsaw to work at Minsk," because this would lead to danger of epidemics and an increase in partisan activity.[839]

On August 5, 1942, Lohse responded in a letter with the subject "Import of 1,000 Jews from Warsaw," in which he indicated that

The responsibility "for the orderly realization of the measures," was also that of the police, so that protests were not permissible.[840]

Kube took up the problem anew in a letter written on August 17, 1942, to Lohse (again on the subject "Import of 1,000 Jews from Warsaw") and requested further instructions, since he wished to make "fundamental decisions concerning the taking in of further Jews into White Russia as a police matter."[841]

Deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to ghettos of the Baltic countries Latvia and Lithuania find additional confirmation in the deportation lists of Jewish transports already mentioned from Kaunas and Riga to Stutthof in the summer of 1944. These lists, although only fragmentarily preserved, include the names of approximately 1,200 Polish Jews, among them 112 boys and girls of up to 15 years of age.

Therefore, while the Einsatzgruppen were allegedly shooting Jews in the broad light of day and with no attempt at secrecy, other SS people were taking pains to forge postcards in order to cover up their alleged mass murders in 'extermination camps'!

In his well-known report of May 16, 1943, about the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop emphasized:[844]

According to Y. Arad, 6,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka between the 18th and the 22nd of January 1943.[845] In fact, Himmler had ordered SS-Obergruppenführer Krüger on January 9, 1943, to transfer 8,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto into the camps in the area around Lublin and to deport another 15,000 up to the 15th of February.[846] On February 2, 1943, SS-Oberführer Ferdinand von Sammern, SS and Police Chief in the Warsaw district, sent a secret letter to Himmler, which he wrote in reference to the firms in the Warsaw Ghetto:[847]

According to the Stroop Report, the number of deported Jews amounted to 6,500.[844]

On March 31, 1943, Dr. Max Horn, together with Odilo Globocnik, the Director of the firm Ostindustrie GmbH (Osti), informed the Director of the Central Construction Office of Lublin-Majdanek:[848]

The Jews resisted a voluntary evacuation, and on April 19, Stroop advanced into the ghetto with his troops, after which the armed struggle began.

The Stroop Report is cited by official historiography as proof that Treblinka was an extermination camp. For example, G. Reitlinger claims that "7,000 Jews had officially been killed in the ghetto and 7,000 'taken to T 2.'"[849] R. Hilberg picks up this number:[850]

Neither Reitlinger nor Hilberg give the sources for these figures. This turns out to be a teletype of May 24, 1943, in which Stroop reported:[851]

This teletype is not contained in the Stroop Report, which bears the title "There is no longer a Jewish residential district in Warsaw!" and was presented as document PS-1061 during the Nuremberg Trial.[852] The Stroop Report actually ends with a teletype of May 16, 1943. L. Poliakov and J. Wulf say in a footnote:[853]

The passage involved was cited at the Nuremberg Trial at the proceedings of December 14, 1945.[854]

Stroop supplied three different versions about the fate of the 56,065 registered Jews. We have already become familiar with the one contained in the teletype of May 24 and taken up by R. Hilberg. In the teletype of May 16 he reported:[855]

Yet it is obviously false that 56,065 Jews were "proven killed"!

In a statement of February 24, 1946, made under oath, Stroop finally gave the following testimony:[856]

According to this, the 56,065 registered Jews were deported to Lublin.

The Stroop Report raises still other problems. Its author presents statistics, in which two categories of Jews are named: those killed and those 'registered,' but those killed also belong to the latter. From the 23rd of April, Stroop gives the total number of the Jews who were "already evacuated or registered for relocation": 19,450.[857]

In the following table we reproduce the figures of the Stroop Report, in which we separate the number of those killed from that of those 'registered' when they are given together,[858] so that the respective column lists only the Jews held alive. One arrives at the total number by adding to the total of the previous day the figures of the day after, for example (for the 24th and 25th of April) 25,500 + 1,964 + 27,464. The single exception is the numbers for the 23rd and 24th of April, since 19,450 + 1,990 = 21,440 and not 25,500, so that (25,500 - 21,440 =) 4,060 persons are missing. In the report of April 24, Stroop mentions also 1,814 Jews who were "pulled out of bunkers" and who had to be added to the "1,660 Jews [who] were seized for relocation," so that the total number missing is (4,060 - 1,814 =) 2,246. These Jews presumable belong to the 3,500 'registered' on the previous day, as in the report for May 6, in which the 2,850 Jews "registered for the relocation" were included in the total number of the day before,[859] although Stroop reports a figure of 1,070 as the total number for the day.

The total number of Jews killed is 7,564. Insofar as Treblinka is concerned, this camp is abbreviated to "T II" four times in the Stroop Report. The first time it is mentioned is in the teletype of April 25. The relevant text, which we reproduce below, is often cited in the official literature as proof that Treblinka is supposed to have been an extermination camp:[864]

One day after this, Stroop noted in his teletype:[865]

The next mention of Treblinka occurs in the teletype of May 12:[866]

Finally, the teletype of May 13 read:[867]

The Stroop Report gives rise to three questions in this connection:

1. How many Jews were deported to 'T II'?

2. Were the Jews deported to Treblinka gassed?

3. Where did the majority of the Jews from the ghetto go?

We will now address the first of these questions. On April 25, 1943, a total of 1,990 Jews were taken prisoner, of whom 274 were shot. The shooting operation was interrupted by the onset of twilight. The transport to Treblinka thus was able to include merely the remaining (1,990 - 274 =) 1,660 persons. But this is the largest number of those deported to Treblinka in a single day. This is confirmed by the fact that on the next day, 1,722 Jews were taken prisoner, of whom 1,692 were killed, and the total number for the 26th of April corresponds to that of April 25 plus those 1,722 Jews: 27,460 + 1,722 = 29,186.

In the report of May 12, it says the Jewish transports leaving from Warsaw were conducted to "T II for the first time" on that day. It is not clear how this fits with the transport of April 25, which went to Treblinka as the first. However that may be, it is clear from the teletype of May 13 that only the Jews captured daily were sent to Treblinka.

According to the table above, on May 12, 1,709 Jews were taken prisoner.

The maximum number of Jews deported to Treblinka during this period therefore amounts to (1,660 + 1,709 =) 3,369. It is thus not clear how Stroop arrived at a figure of 6,929 in his teletype of May 24. But more important is another problem: if these Jews were destroyed in 'T II,' then does this mean that Treblinka was a camp established for the purpose of killing people? In our view, the 'liquidation' there of a few thousand Jews, whom the SS classified as "bandits and lowest elements of the ghetto" proves neither that they were gassed, nor that Treblinka was operated as an 'extermination camp.' If one keeps in mind that the camp was only 80 km from Warsaw, then it would not be surprising if the SS had shot a few thousand people there whom they were unable or unwilling to execute in the city. But another problem arises. In the introduction to his report Stroop writes:[868]

There is thus reason to doubt that the (according to Stroop) 6,929 Jews deported to Treblinka were all 'annihilated.' One of these Jews, a Samuel Zylbersztajn, was in fact deported to Majdanek on April 30, 1943, from the alleged extermination camp Treblinka as a member of a transport of 308 Jews.[869] The translated title of the report of his experiences is "The Memoirs of an Inmate of Ten Camps." After the 'extermination camp' Treblinka, Zylbersztajn also survived the 'extermination camp' Majdanek and eight 'ordinary' concentration camps; he is thus living proof of the fact that the Germans did not systematically exterminate their Jewish prisoners.

Another 356 Jews were transferred from Treblinka to Majdanek on May 13, 1943.[870] The Jewish historians Tatiana Berenstein and Adam Rutkowski write in reference to this:[871]

This fact is confirmed by some witnesses who were interrogated within the framework of the extradition proceedings against John Demjanjuk in the USA. In the official compilations of the interrogations,[872] which we have in our possession, the names of the witnesses have been rendered unreadable, so that we refer to the respective date, on which the interrogation occurred.

Interrogation of December 12, 1979: The witness was deported in April 1943 from Warsaw to Treblinka. On the next day he was transferred to Majdanek, where he spent 6-7 days; afterward he went to Budzyn for approximately a year. From Budzyn he was sent to Wieliczka (in the vicinity of Krakow), from there to Flossenbürg in mid-1944, and finally to Leitmeritz.

Interrogation of January 3, 1980: the witness was taken prisoner in May 1943 in Warsaw and sent directly to Majdanek, from where he was later transferred to Budzyn.

Interrogation of March 7, 1980: The witness was deported in April 1943 from Warsaw to Treblinka, where he remained for only one day; afterwards he was transferred along with 180 other prisoners to Majdanek. After two days the trip continued to Budzyn, where he spent two years. He was liberated by the Soviets from an unnamed German concentration camp.

Interrogation of March 11, 1980: the witness was sent to Treblinka in April 1943, where he remained for only a day. Transfer to Majdanek, thence to Budzyn, where he was interned for about a year. Liberated on May 5, 1945, from Mauthausen.

Interrogation of July 18, 1980: the witness was deported on April 18, 1943, from Warsaw to Majdanek. After 5 weeks he went to Auschwitz and then - toward the end of 1944 - to Gusen (a subcamp of Mauthausen) where he was liberated.

The verdict of the Jury Court of Düsseldorf determined, plainly and clearly, on September 3, 1965, that

The author of this article,[878] however, does not cite the important arguments already brought to bear by G. Reitlinger. The latter writes:[879]

In all: 8 trains and 303 cars.

In the first German edition of her Kalendarium, D. Czech had written that the two transports arrived from the ghetto of Ciechanów.[892]

If one assumes that Treblinka was a transit camp, then one can also interpret the description of the alleged extermination facilities by the witnesses. In his 1995 article mentioned in the first chapter, J.-C. Pressac has put forth a very interesting hypothesis with regard to the supposed extermination camps. He wrote:[894]

A whole array of arguments points to the fact that Pressac has hit the nail on the head. In the second chapter we saw that according to the testimony of the witnesses the alleged extermination installations of Treblinka were camouflaged as a 'bath.' This point merits a closer analysis.

Rachel Auerbach mentions "a whole list of instructions about bathing and disinfection, about what to do with money, jewels and documents." In some cases the new arrivals were actually handed receipts after they had deposited their valuables at the check-in counter.[896] She writes that the women were often asked to take towels with them into the bathhouse,[897] and explains:[898]

Later she says:[899]

The report of November 15, 1942, adds one further important piece of circumstantial evidence: the boiler room for the production of steam, which makes total sense in a disinfection and delousing facility, but which in an installation for extermination has no function whatsoever. Steam was in fact one of the methods at that time for disinfecting and delousing.[900] The Silberschein Report completes the picture of the evidence: directly after their arrival, the deportees were informed they would be continuing their journey "to work in the east." In the verdict of the Düsseldorf Jury Court of 1965, it says that the Warsaw Jews were greeted with the following address:[901]

According to the mentioned report, the deportees were subdivided according to their professions after this address. In fact, the SS had established a bureau at the camp train station,

Then, continues the report of November 15, 1942,

It then says in the report that the Jews were sent "into the gas- and oven-chambers" and were killed there - but why, for Heaven's sake, were they ordered to bathe beforehand? The alleged extermination facility, as it is represented in the sketch, is also otherwise revealing: the building consisted of a dressing room, a bathing room, a "room for testing asphyxiation gases," as well as a furnace or oven room, from whence a railway track led to the cemetery. What purpose, then, did the ovens serve?

Such disinfection furnaces were produced by several firms, among them the Topf firm in Erfurt, which installed two of them (with four hot-air chambers) in the central sauna in Birkenau,[905] as well as the firm of H. Kori in Berlin, which produced less well-built ovens.[906] One other firm, which produced hot air, steam, and steam/formalin delousing chambers, as well as other similar installations, was the Ing. C. Klobukowski & Co., located in Warsaw.[907]

The description and enclosed drawing contained in the Silberschein Report are reminiscent of the plan of the provisional delousing facility of the K.G.L. Lublin. This facility had rooms for dressing and undressing, a boiler house (boiler room), a room with showers (bath), and a room for delousing ("room for testing asphyxiation gases").

Since these children were processed through the transit camp Treblinka - the same was true for the other Jews, adults, and children who were transferred to Lublin/Majdanek and other camps - this bathhouse was obviously a genuine bathhouse!

The structure of the two alleged gassing installations, however, which has been accepted by official historiography, seems to have been more suited to serve as hydrocyanic delousing chambers. In both, the chambers have two doors on the two opposing sides of the room, so that there is a 'clean' and 'unclean' side. In this connection, the mission of Kurt Gerstein acquires an obvious meaning. Gerstein was no expert in mass killings, but he was one in the field of disinfection, and indeed so well-qualified in such matters that in the foreword to his book on disinfection published by the Waffen-SS Hygiene Institute, the SS-Hauptsturmführer d. Res. Walter Dötzer expressed his gratitude to him:[909]

In the district of Galicia in January of 1942, there was already great anxiety concerning sanitation and hygienic conditions.[911] In the district of Kolomea cases of typhus fever had appeared,[912] but other districts were probably also afflicted by it, so that the Governor issued the instruction to all district physicians to answer a "questionnaire concerning bathing and delousing facilities."[913] Among the various delousing facilities was even a "fumigation booth for scabrous horses."[914] The situation was becoming critical to the point that placards in German, Ukrainian, and Polish were posted, warning about typhus fever. These had been designed by the "District Administrator in Tarnopol. Dept. of Health" and explained the type and danger of the epidemic and the necessity of combating its carriers: "Without lice there is no typhus fever. Fight lice infestation!" Then it warned:

The text of the placard closed with the admonition to see a physician at the first sign of symptoms of the disease.[915]

The resettlement to the east of the Jewish population of the General Gouvernement, which had been living in the ghettos under difficult hygienic circumstances, therefore required transit camps with bathing facilities, disinfection, and delousing.

The fate of the Jews deported to the east is one of those questions, for which there is hardly a sure answer due to the lack of documents. It is closely bound to the even more complex problem of Jewish population losses during World War II, which is not the subject of the present study.[916]

As we have seen in Chapter VII, the figures of the Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen according to the 'Event Reports' - or other sources - are hugely exaggerated, so that the number of Jews who either were evacuated by the Soviets or who survived in the German occupation zone, must have been far larger than those 700,000, of which G. Reitlinger speaks.[917] A Soviet source emphasizes the following regarding this question:[918]

E. Kulischer reckons the number of the Jews who fled from the eastern Polish provinces into Soviet territories, which never came under German control, at 500,000; to this are be added 30,000 Jews from the Baltic states and 1,100,000 Jews from the Soviet territories, which left before the Germans conquered these areas.[919]

In an Italian study entitled "The Jews in the USSR," one reads:[920]

The Jewish journalist Louis Rapoport draws a decidedly more pessimistic picture; he writes:[921]

For the period from March to September 1946, "when the homeward trek from the deep interior had only begun," G. Reitlinger supplies Jewish population figures for five Soviet cities, which are not too far below the pre-war numbers. G. Reitlinger took these figures from an article in the Soviet Yiddish language newspaper Ainikeit, whose date of appearance he does not give:

There is no doubt that a large percentage of the Jews in the Soviet territories, which fell under German control during the war, met their deaths, and indeed not only as a result of massacres, but also due to war actions, sickness, exhaustion, and privations. There is, even more tragically, no doubt about this when one considers that most of these Jews were unable to work: old people, children, and the infirm.

Germar Rudolf subdivides the Jewish losses into the following categories:

• - Death from Soviet deportation and internment;[924]

• - Death from non-German pogroms, without German complicity or tolerance;

• - Death from acts of war (labor service, bomb victims);

• - Death as a soldier (i.e., in military service);

• - Death as a partisan (in combat or by execution);

• - Natural mortality surplus;[925]

• - Religious conversions;

• - Unregistered emigration during and after the war;

• - Jews presently not recorded or statistically documented;

• - Unresolved cases;

• - Death (for the most part natural) in ghettos[926] and camps (several hundred thousand);

• - Registered emigration during and after the war.[927]

Of course, the Jews shot by the Einsatzgruppen, the Wehrmacht, etc. are to be added to this. It is an impossibility to assign exact numbers to each of these categories, but the few examples cited here do provide a notion of how high the Jewish losses were, which were not the result of German killing measures.

The official population statistics of the post-war period do not help us any further. First of all because they come from the Jewish and Stalinist side and thus were inevitably influenced by the demands of ideology and propaganda, and secondly because they do not allow for substantial factors such as emigration to other countries, assimilation, or the plain and simple desire of many Jews not to be registered as such.

In 1984, an Italian Communist newspaper explained the reduction of the Jewish population in the Soviet Union, which had been reflected in the censuses of 1926, 1970, and 1976, as follows:[928]

Insofar as the first post-war census is concerned, that of 1959, citizens could declare their nationality without having to produce their ID, in which their nationality was officially registered. For this reason, numerous citizens preferred, for various reasons, to assume another nationality.[929] Together with the rest of the factors already given, this contributed to producing a distorted picture of the numerical strength of the Jews in the USSR.

Notes