1944 Soviet Treblinka Investigations

[pilgrimofdark]

I've created several pages on the Wiki to collect the documents from the 1944 Soviet investigations of Treblinka.

https://wiki.codohforum.com/pages/index ... stigations

There are dozens of reports.

These are polished AI-assisted translations of transcriptions of archival documents from the Russian State Archives (GARF). They could use more polishing, which is why I put them on the Wiki. In a Word doc, it was nearly 200 pages, which is more than I can proofread in a reasonable amount of time.

Some people may want to read the documents, or pull them into an LLM to analyze. There are a lot of interesting snippets of information, once you get past the schlocky atrocity propaganda. Numerous people gave multiple statements to different investigators, which usually reflect that investigation's "theme" as it developed over time.

I've already gone through and standardized many names that were inconsistently translated from Russian to English due to the differences in Cyrillic letters. Especially for Polish names of towns, they'd be translated differently even in the same document.

The titles say "death camp" everywhere and I left it because it reflects the title of the document. Don't shoot the messenger.

Mattogno has a few more fragments of documents that aren't included. More references could be added for named individuals, and the summaries could be fleshed out. There were additional documents that the Soviets had, like a Russian translation of A Year in Treblinka, that aren't included.

I'll try to add to it over time.

[Callafangers]

Fantastic concept! This is one of the best uses for the Wiki I have seen yet. Have you had a chance to "vet" the translations in any way? I notice that LLMs often produce errors with translation work (although its gotten better with more recent/powerful models), so I think its important to "double-check" everything in some way.

Overall, this is set up to become an awesome resource, once confidence in the translations is established.

[pilgrimofdark]

Have you had a chance to "vet" the translations in any way?

Yes, I'll explain the process I went through over the last couple months. These are far from "raw" translations at this point.

I put it on the Wiki because it's such a large collection of documents that it could use more eyes on it.

Process

I fixed the transcriptions, especially where there were corruptions in paragraph flows (word breaks with dashes at the end of lines, etc.).

I standardized a lot of place names, especially of Polish towns with diacritical marks that don't exist in Cyrillic. There were a bunch of corruptions like Vulka-Kraglik for Wólka Okrąglik, for instance, as well as other names.

I standardized the names of the witnesses, cross-referencing books by Mattogno and Webb, as well as Gibbs's dissertation. For example, Samuel Rajzman would get translated inconsistently as Rajzman/Reisman/Raisman, etc.

People are probably more familiar with the German names, so I didn't get around to standardizing those yet, other than the inconsistent Zep/Sep/Zepp/Sepp I kept finding.

I read through each translation as I did them. I basically manually translated one paragraph at a time, looking for problems. Sometimes I translated one word in isolation, or had to look up words in various Russian-English dictionaries. In some cases, I had to use an online Cyrillic keyboard to fix a transcription error in a single word.

For "weird stuff," I compared Google Translate, DeepL, and the mostly-atrocious Firefox browser translator.

In some cases, the AI-translator rearranged words in the sentence to match English grammar, and I put it back in the original order, especially if there was a footnote.

In the non-SMERSH pages, there is a link in the sources to online transcriptions of each document where the text can be double-checked.

With all that said, it would benefit from more polishing. But instead of sitting in a 200-page Word doc on my computer forever, other people might want to read them as-is or help identify/correct issues.

[Stubble]

If they are taken from source, and source is provided, I'm not sure how much 'vetting' there is to do. Just minor quibbles about translation.

Pilgrimofdark, you are a BEAST!

I've been meaning to get up to speed on how to use a wiki. It looks like I may need to devote some time to figuring out how that stuff works.

If anybody has a primer laying around it would be quite welcome.

I could try to lend a hand, assuming none of it is in Russian cursive...

[pilgrimofdark]

If anybody has a primer laying around it would be quite welcome.

I could try to lend a hand, assuming none of it is in Russian cursive...

I didn't know until yesterday, but you can write in LibreOffice and Export directly to a MediaWiki .txt file with all the code.

Headings and footnotes all mostly worked, with some extra stuff I didn't want. Most of what I did was rearrange the references/sources headings.

The MediaWiki documentation helped me iron out a few things like images.

It was a lot easier than I feared.

[Stubble]

Urg...

I don't wanna learn to code...

/groan

Going over the wiki, I find Henryk Brenner mentions the shitter goblin.

[pilgrimofdark]

Brenner also mentions the Milewko farmstead that appears just west of the gravel quarry in maps, and the "forced letter writing."

The September 1944 investigation was partly done by the Polish-Soviet Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes.

A year later, this became the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland that did the 1945 Treblinka investigation.

Another organization that participated, the Polish Committee of National Liberation, was under the State National Council, whose president was an NKVD agent who later became the president of "independent" Poland.

It's the same organizations, doing the same work, at the same place, with the same witnesses, with Soviet control or collaboration.

While also radically changing details, and dumping others.

The December ChGK draft report is also interesting, as some of the footnotes describe the authors' struggle to construct a coherent narrative.

[pilgrimofdark]

The structure of these pages has been significantly cleaned up, shortened, and standardized. The table of contents is much easier to read now.

[Name]. [Nature of Testimony]. [Location]. [Date]

Soviet Treblinka Investigations

Also moved the archival reference to the end of the full name of each report, instead of a messy list at the end.

I think adding info on "alternative names/spelling" and "further testimony" would be helpful. Some of these witnesses became heavy hitters, quoted by Arad, Webb, and other historians who basically ignore everything that came out of these Soviet investigations (maybe rightly so).

[pilgrimofdark]

Why is Rudolf Reder's September 22, 1944 Soviet interrogation (in HH #43) so similar to the Treblinka September 1944 Soviet testimonies?

That Treblinka investigation uses the most material directly from Jankiel Wiernik's book and some of that appears in Reder's interrogation. But also even material echoing Wiernik's unpublished manuscript (which Goldfarb also echoes).

Reder: "After a pit was full, which contained more than 100,000 /one hundred thousand/ corpses..."
Treblinka: "To imagine this enormous mass of murdered and burned people, suffice it to say that the smallest pit contained at least 100,000 corpses."

Reder: "killing of 3 million people."
Wiernik: "approximately 3.5 million corpses."
Soviets: "at least 3.5 million people;" "no less than 3 million people;" "extermination of 3.5 million Jews."

Reder: "They brought people from Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia."
Soviets: "they brought hundreds and thousands of Jewish people from cities in Poland, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and occupied Russian cities."

Reder: "The corpses were dragged into [already] dug pits measuring 100 x 25 x 15 meters."
Wiernik (manuscript): "The mass grave was 100 meters long, 25 meters wide, and 15 meters deep."

In a later 1945 interview, Reder says Himmler visited Belzec in October 1942.
Soviets: "In October 1942, when I was working in the camp's 2nd Department, Himmler arrived by plane."

And then Reder didn't write his own book? (like Wiernik and Krzepicki)

Kues on CODOH:

The booklet Belzec was not written by Reder alone, but in collaboration with a certain Nella Rost (whose surname is misspelled as Post by Rubel), who also wrote a foreword (not included in the Rubel translation). Rubel writes that the account was published "under his name but was probably written by [Rost]."

- Kues, "Rudolf Reder’s 'Belzec' A critical reading," CODOH

Olga Kartashova in a thesis:

Rudolf Reder (1881–1968) [...] He was the only surviving witness of the Bełżec crimes. He escaped Bełżec and remained in hiding in Lwów until 1944. After the war he stayed in Kraków. He testified before Soviet and Polish investigation commissions. In 1946 Reder collaborated with Nella Rost on the booklet about Bełżec, which appeared under his name, but was probably written by her.

- Kartashova, Olga. “Holocaust History Between Liberation and Sovietization: The Publications of the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland 1945-1947,” 48.

I read Nella Rost's introduction to the book, but she doesn't explicitly state she wrote Reder's account. So I'm not sure why historians think she wrote it in his name.

Nella Rost (aka Nella Rost-Hollander) was a literary scholar and worked with the Central Jewish Historical Commission (CZKH) after the war. The CZKH became the Jewish Historical Institute, which has the Ringelblum Archive materials. Rost took witness statements in Krakow.

[Stubble]

Why is Rudolf Reder's September 22, 1944 Soviet interrogation (in HH #43) so similar to the Treblinka September 1944 Soviet testimonies?

Personal opinion, because these are all core elements that the powers that be agreed the witnesses would agree on.

[borjastick]

The key thing to note with Soviet reporting and claims is that at Treblinka, Auschwitz, Majdanek etc they took no pictures or film when they actually entered the camps. All pictures and evidence claimed for these camps was produced weeks later. Why?

I noticed recently on some website pictures of the wall of death at Auschwitz which is where it is claimed many inmates were shot. Yet the wall itself has no bullet holes. When I questioned this odd anomaly I was told by some prune that the Russians renovated it or rebuilt it afterwards. Why would they do that?

[pilgrimofdark]

The Warsaw to Lublin pipeline? The Ringelblum / Soviet convergence? Not sure how to characterize this.

Overlapping aspects of the chlorine occur in several witness accounts, including some from important witnesses. Very non-divergent.

Krzepicki (two-person draft), late 1942(?):

800 to 1000 people were admitted to the bathhouse at a time. None of us workers knew exactly how the deaths occurred. However, it seemed to us that a faint, barely perceptible smell of chlorine hung around the bathhouse.

Wiernik (three-person draft), 1943-1944(?):

On the opposite side, a trapdoor that opens after people have been gassed. This is also where the corpses are removed. On the roof is a safety hatch, used in the event of chlorine poisoning. After the appropriate amount of chlorine has been added, the hatch closes hermetically. [...] Transports arriving in the evening were killed through a safety hatch, where chlorine gas was poured onto the crowded mass of people. The hatch was closed overnight, and death lasted from 10 to 12 hours. It happened quite often that people were pulled out of the chamber alive.

Goldfarb, September 1944:

Then, while the engine was being repaired, another, even more painful, method of extermination was employed. A significant quantity of chlorinated lime was urgently delivered to the building. A certain amount of chlorinated lime was left wet in a chamber, which was hermetically sealed. This process of poisoning the occupants was incomparably longer, and therefore more painful. People were kept in the chambers for 24 hours, and even then, some sometimes remained alive. Since the chambers' capacity fully met the "requirements," this relatively inexpensive method of extermination was used throughout the winter. The engine was put into operation in April 1943.

Rajzman, September 1944:

People were herded into large groups of so-called bathhouses. These cabins were hermetically sealed. At first, killing was done by pumping out the air, then they switched to another method: poisoning with chlorine gas and cyclone gas. The camp had a special warehouse with a large quantity (up to 15 tons) of so-called chlorene. Chlorene looked like white stones. Every day, before my eyes, barrels of this chlorene were carried to the 2nd section.

Sopilo, September 1944:

On my last day in the construction camp, a truck covered with a tarpaulin arrived. No one was allowed near the truck, but it smelled of chlorine. This truck was parked in the camp, and in the morning it was taken to the foundations where the engines were, but in the meantime we were sent to a work camp, where I stayed for about seven days, then fell ill and was released from the camp.

Teperman, September 1944:

I once had the opportunity to examine this engine, and I clearly remember that it had the inscription "Citroen," a French manufacturer. Grooves were made in the floors of the chambers to allow blood to drain. If the engine malfunctioned, suffocation was carried out with chlorinated lime. I myself saw a can of chlorinated lime standing near the "bathhouses," and how buckets of chlorinated lime were hoisted onto the roofs of the "bathhouses." [...] I knew it was chlorinated lime because I used that same barrel to wash my laundry, so it would be white. The men who removed the bodies from the cabins said that after the people were suffocated with chlorinated lime, the smell of chlorine could be detected in the cabins.

Six early reports.

• All six mention homicidal chlorine poisonings
• Three report the distinctive smell of chlorine
• Three report administration by (hermetically-sealed) roof hatch
• Two report chlorine poisonings took far longer
• Two report homicidal chlorine was not reliably homicidal

Wiernik and Goldfarb obviously share the most overlap. Almost like one was of low intelligence so was read aloud the testimony of the other in order to remind him and jog his memory regarding well-known events, following standard methodology for the unintelligent.

AI Overview
Chlorine and engine exhaust have quite different odor profiles, and most people can distinguish them when concentrations are noticeable.
Chlorine: Sharp, pungent, and irritating. Causing immediate irritation of the nose, throat, and eyes. Even relatively low concentrations can produce a distinctive burning or stinging sensation.
Diesel: Acrid but less "chemical" than chlorine. Having a characteristic petroleum or fuel odor.
Gasoline: Sometimes sweet, solvent-like, or hydrocarbon-like.

If you knew how to assess witnesses, you would see that witness reports of steam chlorine and electricity, are hearsay. They come from witnesses who did not see the gassing operations.

Witness assessment based on above methodology: Krzepicki, Wiernik, Goldfarb, Rajzman, Sopilo, and Teperman did not see gassing operations, or were of low intelligence.

[Stubble]

3rd position?

Maybe the word traveled down the jewish grapevine ahead of the Soviet advance and the coaching was carried out prior to Soviet interrogation? To the Soviet it would look like convergence.

I'm not trying to defend the Soviet here, just spitballing an idea to try it on for size.