A New Revisionist Interpretation of Operation Reinhardt

[PrudentRegret]

Could Prudent Regret produce evidence from inside TII, to support his claim that it was only used to sort property?

Whether Malkinia was a transit camp, operational as such in 1942-3, is not evidence TII was a sorting, rather than death camp.

https://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm

"Amidst untold torture, we finally reached Malkinia, where our train remained for the night. The Ukrainian guards came into our car and demanded our valuables. Everyone who had any surrendered them just to gain a little longer lease on life."

Yes, WIerniks says that valuables were confiscated at Malkinia. Which is said by other sources as well. So Wiernik is also "corroborating" Hirtreiter's testimony that he worked at Malkinia conducting confiscations of property carried by deportees. What would the SS have done with these confiscated valuables and clothing? Sent them to T-II and then ultimately to Operation Reinhardt headquarters. There's no purpose to stopping the train and conducting confiscations in Malkinia according to mainstream theory because everything was going to "T-II". In fact there's no reason to stop there at all as the train could have gone to Treblinka Station directly without stopping.

The vaunted "cash register" which is mentioned by some witness testimony but not others would also have been another Malkinia feature that became grafted onto the "Treblinka Extermination Camp", just like Hirtreiter's testimony and the location of Treblinka on Warsaw-Bialystok line.

But I have suggested that Malkinia was the point of confiscation of property carried by deportees, and then that property was transported to the Sorting Camp. Those transports became "misinterpreted" as wagons full of Jews waiting to be gassed for days on end just like the economic operation at Majdanek was "misinterpreted" as being the remains of millions of people who were murdered inside Bath and DIsinfection I.

[Archie]

I checked Gerwarth's bio of Heydrich to see what he claims. Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

There is one sentence in the main text about the naming of Aktion Reinhardt.

In 'honour' of Heydrich, the extermination programme in the General Government was given the operational name 'Aktion Reinhardt'.

That's it. And then in the footnote, he just says some people (like Koehl) have said it was after Fritz Reinhardt but he dismisses this because he says Heydrich spelled it both ways. He relies on this paper (which is the same thing Sergey relied on). Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, "A New Document on Deportation ..."

https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/zhura ... tation.pdf

The main arguments for it being named after Heydrich seem to be,

1) There are variant spellings of Heydrich's first name. Therefore, the -dt spelling could refer to him and might explain the inconsistent spellings of the codename.
2) The earliest use of the codename was not long after Heydrich's death (~two months, according to Wikipedia).
3) And this is the main one, 'It does seem inherently unlikely that a murderous operation of the complexity of "Aktion Reinhard" would be named after an economist."

These points are not conclusive, or even very persuasive, in my opinion.

[bombsaway]

I checked Gerwarth's bio of Heydrich to see what he claims. Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

There is one sentence in the main text about the naming of Aktion Reinhardt.

In 'honour' of Heydrich, the extermination programme in the General Government was given the operational name 'Aktion Reinhardt'.

That's it. And then in the footnote, he just says some people (like Koehl) have said it was after Fritz Reinhardt but he dismisses this because he says Heydrich spelled it both ways. He relies on this paper (which is the same thing Sergey relied on). Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, "A New Document on Deportation ..."

https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/zhura ... tation.pdf

The main arguments for it being named after Heydrich seem to be,

1) There are variant spellings of Heydrich's first name. Therefore, the -dt spelling could refer to him and might explain the inconsistent spellings of the codename.
2) The earliest use of the codename was not long after Heydrich's death (~two months, according to Wikipedia).
3) And this is the main one, 'It does seem inherently unlikely that a murderous operation of the complexity of "Aktion Reinhard" would be named after an economist."

These points are not conclusive, or even very persuasive, in my opinion.

It could have been named after Fritz as a means of camouflage. On the old codoh forum I posted examples of camouflage language more extravagant than this (such as w t4).

The major point is there are some details we just can't be sure about, due to gaps in the evidence. PRs issue (and a broader one which I consistently have encountered when revisionists start making positive assertions) is that arguing for possibility is not the same as making assertions. To make assertions at a minimum you must have direct evidence (debate me about this point if you disagree), eg hey we saw many thousands of Jews leaving the train at malkinia and going somewhere, or German documents stating existence of a camp there. The mere possibility of a camp in Malkinia being called Treblinka because the SS operated out of Treblinka is not evidence. The lack of photos from 1942 disproving any camp is not evidence. A bunch of Ukranians stealing from Jews at Malkinia is not evidence of a transit camp there. Revs need to learn how uncertainty works

[Nessie]

Could Prudent Regret produce evidence from inside TII, to support his claim that it was only used to sort property?

Whether Malkinia was a transit camp, operational as such in 1942-3, is not evidence TII was a sorting, rather than death camp.

https://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm

"Amidst untold torture, we finally reached Malkinia, where our train remained for the night. The Ukrainian guards came into our car and demanded our valuables. Everyone who had any surrendered them just to gain a little longer lease on life."

Yes, WIerniks says that valuables were confiscated at Malkinia. Which is said by other sources as well. So Wiernik is also "corroborating" Hirtreiter's testimony that he worked at Malkinia conducting confiscations of property carried by deportees.

Interesting that you believe Wiernik, when it suits you. However, you are cherry-picking his testimony. After the quote above he states;

"Unfortunately, I had nothing of value because I had left my home unexpectedly and because I had been unemployed..."

What is being described, is Ukrainian guards stealing property before it gets to TII. In the next few paragraphs Wiernik states;

"At 4 P.M. the train got under way again and, within a few minutes, we came into the Treblinka Camp....They took us into the camp yard, which was flanked by barracks on either side. There were two large posters with big signs bearing instructions to surrender all gold, silver, diamonds, cash and other valuables under penalty of death."

Now, you believed him about the theft of property at Malkinia, what about at TII? That process is also corroborated. Do you switch to disbelieving him? If so, what is your evidence.

What would the SS have done with these confiscated valuables and clothing? Sent them to T-II and then ultimately to Operation Reinhardt headquarters.

Have you got any witnesses, or other evidence, from within TII, of that happening?

There's no purpose to stopping the train and conducting confiscations in Malkinia according to mainstream theory because everything was going to "T-II". In fact there's no reason to stop there at all as the train could have gone to Treblinka Station directly without stopping.

The witness described overnight and into the next day wait at Malkinia, was that transport waiting its turn to be shunted into TII.

The vaunted "cash register" which is mentioned by some witness testimony but not others would also have been another Malkinia feature that became grafted onto the "Treblinka Extermination Camp", just like Hirtreiter's testimony and the location of Treblinka on Warsaw-Bialystok line.

But I have suggested that Malkinia was the point of confiscation of property carried by deportees, and then that property was transported to the Sorting Camp. Those transports became "misinterpreted" as wagons full of Jews waiting to be gassed for days on end just like the economic operation at Majdanek was "misinterpreted" as being the remains of millions of people who were murdered inside Bath and DIsinfection I.

You are again concentrating on Malkinia, when you are trying to produce evidence to prove what happened inside TII. When are you going to produce evidence from inside TII? If a school pupil was asked to describe what happens inside the White House, and instead they describe what happened inside Congress with a few references to the White House, they would get a fail, for concentrating on the wrong place.

[PrudentRegret]

The main arguments for it being named after Heydrich seem to be,

1) There are variant spellings of Heydrich's first name. Therefore, the -dt spelling could refer to him and might explain the inconsistent spellings of the codename.
2) The earliest use of the codename was not long after Heydrich's death (~two months, according to Wikipedia).
3) And this is the main one, 'It does seem inherently unlikely that a murderous operation of the complexity of "Aktion Reinhard" would be named after an economist."

These points are not conclusive, or even very persuasive, in my opinion.

The earliest use of the codename was actually June 6, 1942- only two days after Heydrich's death, and the letter pertained to a request for suitcases from the stores of the SS-Standortverwaltung Lublin.



Guess who else sent transports of confiscated property to SS-Standortverwaltung Lublin? SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka:



These documents tie Reinhardt to an economic use action, and they tie Treblinka to the economic use action with the transport of wagons of furs to the Reinhardt headquarters in Lublin which received the very first letter in which the "Reinhardt" code-name appeared, on June 6 1942- two days after Heydrich's death and not two months per Witte and Tyas.

I had a good laugh at Terry et al. on the Skeptic Forums who were trying to say that whoever wrote this letter asking for suitcases knew to put "Reinhardt" in the document because Heydrich died TWO DAYS earlier . Sooooo stupid, but what else can you expect from such a dishonest group of people who are cornered on upholding an obvious lie.

[PrudentRegret]

More on Chipinstrasse 27, which was the address of the first document in which "Reinhardt" appears:

This typifying approach is also present in the unremarked combination of images from the Majdanek concentration camp and from the “Erfassungslager für beschlagnahmtes Feindvermögen”8 located in Chopinstr. 27 in the city center, miles away from the concentration camp. The “Erfassungslager” was a central collecting point for “Effekten” from the extermination camps in Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the Majdanek concentration camp. Majdanek also had its own Effektenkammer, yet, as reconstructed by Natascha Drubek-Meyer, at least the close-ups in Majdanek were filmed in the store in the city (Drubek-Meyer 2020, 6). However, the footage of vast amounts of belongings being piled up in front of the barracks taken from Majdanek and also used in Death Mills most likely was filmed in yet a third location, the labor camp at the old Lublin airport called “Bekleidungslager Lublin,”9 where less valuable items like shoes were hoarded. Hence, the virtualization of the camps had already started when the Signal Corps units began to film, and the utilization of the Soviet footage in Death Mills and Die Todesmühlen was an appropriation of footage that had already been stripped of its provenance in a prior attempt at virtualizing the camps.

Notice what the author is saying: Soviet investigators combined evidence from multiple different locations at different camps miles away from each-other in its construction of the portrayal of an "Extermination Camp" at Majdanek.

So Soviet investigators were using stores of confiscated property at the Sorting Camp as material evidence for mass extermination at the Majdanek Concentration camp. And their portrayal of the evidence did not make it clear they were filming these things outside the Majdanek concentration camp, in various camps miles away from eachother.

Note that this is what I am claiming with features of the Malkinia station and Malkinia Transit Camp being combined with the Treblinka Sorting Camp in the construct of a "Treblinka Extermination Camp." This is exactly what happened at Majdanek using the exact same tactics.

They combined features of various camps miles away from each-other, with material evidence at the Sorting Camp becoming the most noteworthy physical evidence in lieu of no mass graves and no bodies.

[SanityCheck]

Could Prudent Regret produce evidence from inside TII, to support his claim that it was only used to sort property?

Whether Malkinia was a transit camp, operational as such in 1942-3, is not evidence TII was a sorting, rather than death camp.

https://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm

"Amidst untold torture, we finally reached Malkinia, where our train remained for the night. The Ukrainian guards came into our car and demanded our valuables. Everyone who had any surrendered them just to gain a little longer lease on life."

Yes, WIerniks says that valuables were confiscated at Malkinia. Which is said by other sources as well. So Wiernik is also "corroborating" Hirtreiter's testimony that he worked at Malkinia conducting confiscations of property carried by deportees. What would the SS have done with these confiscated valuables and clothing? Sent them to T-II and then ultimately to Operation Reinhardt headquarters. There's no purpose to stopping the train and conducting confiscations in Malkinia according to mainstream theory because everything was going to "T-II". In fact there's no reason to stop there at all as the train could have gone to Treblinka Station directly without stopping.

The vaunted "cash register" which is mentioned by some witness testimony but not others would also have been another Malkinia feature that became grafted onto the "Treblinka Extermination Camp", just like Hirtreiter's testimony and the location of Treblinka on Warsaw-Bialystok line.

But I have suggested that Malkinia was the point of confiscation of property carried by deportees, and then that property was transported to the Sorting Camp. Those transports became "misinterpreted" as wagons full of Jews waiting to be gassed for days on end just like the economic operation at Majdanek was "misinterpreted" as being the remains of millions of people who were murdered inside Bath and DIsinfection I.

This is a wonderful example of a misread and misunderstood testimony. Wiernik here is describing informal robbery by Ukrainian guards, most probably the train escorts, and not anything official. The spin placed on this is even funnier, as Wiernik nowhere mentions that his transport or even his cattle car was allowed out much less into a camp. So the stretch to use this to support a 'Malkinia confiscation camp' is a real hoot.

As for the 'misinterpretation', Treblinka was the fifth extermination camp to be reported on by the Polish underground and witnessed by Polish bystanders. I'm still at a loss as to why they'd get something wrong five times in a row (and then add a sixth in autumn 1942 with reports of gassings at Majdanek). The Polish underground was quite capable of reporting on troop transports and supply trains flowing east across the borders to behind the Eastern Front, and there were many Poles working in the occupied Soviet territories, either as indentured farriers and carters or with the Organisation Todt. If this is what the Germans had been doing, a reverse move compared to bringing Soviet POWs and Ostarbeiter westwards, then what was in it for very disparate groups of local Poles to report trainloads (or truckloads for Chelmno) of Jews entering camps and not coming out.

[PrudentRegret]

More on Chipinstrasse 27, which was the address of the first document in which "Reinhardt" appears:

This typifying approach is also present in the unremarked combination of images from the Majdanek concentration camp and from the “Erfassungslager für beschlagnahmtes Feindvermögen”8 located in Chopinstr. 27 in the city center, miles away from the concentration camp. The “Erfassungslager” was a central collecting point for “Effekten” from the extermination camps in Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the Majdanek concentration camp. Majdanek also had its own Effektenkammer, yet, as reconstructed by Natascha Drubek-Meyer, at least the close-ups in Majdanek were filmed in the store in the city (Drubek-Meyer 2020, 6). However, the footage of vast amounts of belongings being piled up in front of the barracks taken from Majdanek and also used in Death Mills most likely was filmed in yet a third location, the labor camp at the old Lublin airport called “Bekleidungslager Lublin,”9 where less valuable items like shoes were hoarded. Hence, the virtualization of the camps had already started when the Signal Corps units began to film, and the utilization of the Soviet footage in Death Mills and Die Todesmühlen was an appropriation of footage that had already been stripped of its provenance in a prior attempt at virtualizing the camps.

Notice what the author is saying: Soviet investigators combined evidence from multiple different locations at different camps miles away from each-other in its construction of the portrayal of an "Extermination Camp" at Majdanek.

So Soviet investigators were using stores of confiscated property at the Sorting Camp as material evidence for mass extermination at the Majdanek Concentration camp. And their portrayal of the evidence did not make it clear they were filming these things outside the Majdanek concentration camp, in various camps miles away from eachother.

Note that this is what I am claiming with features of the Malkinia station and Malkinia Transit Camp being combined with the Treblinka Sorting Camp in the construct of a "Treblinka Extermination Camp." This is exactly what happened at Majdanek using the exact same tactics.

They combined features of various camps miles away from each-other, with material evidence at the Sorting Camp becoming the most noteworthy physical evidence in lieu of no mass graves and no bodies.

Reading this made me realize something I should have realized far earlier...

The biggest Hook that got me into Revisionism was the Majdanek camp, where in my mind it was obvious the Revisionists did excellent work in disproving claims made by investigators and historians. So that raised my suspicion on the other claims. This was actually the topic that brought me to SkepticForums. The HolocaustControversies people told me that Majdanek was mistaken as an extermination camp because of the huge number of shoes found there. Here's Nick Terry as late as 2022:

It's precisely because of this other evidence that the Soviet overestimates/exaggerations were rapidly reduced. The only thing supporting a really large death toll at Majdanek was the evidence of hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes found there, which had been brought from the AR camps.

The hundreds of thousands of shoes are derived from images like the one below:



The caption from the USHMM reads:

Victims' shoes at Majdanek

A Soviet soldier walks through a mound of victims' shoes piled outside a warehouse in Majdanek soon after the liberation. Majdanek, Poland, August 1944.

And this all squared with my mental model until this point, although I never bought their original argument that a warehouse of shoes was a reasonable basis for the false claim of an extermination camp. But that was the argument they were going with.

But reading this recent 2024 paper has only now realized that they did EXACTLY what I am claiming happened at Treblinka. They took photographs of the sorting camp miles from Majdanek and used that as the centerpiece for the claim there was an extermination camp at Majdanek. The Authors conclude that the image above was not taken from Majdanek at all, but from the Sorting Camp at the airfield miles away!!

I always thought that picture was from Majdanek itself, and no doubt Nick Terry did as well, in spite of the fact he will insist he is well-aware of the Old Lublin airfield camp. Yes, he knew about that camp but he did not know the much-vaunted warehouses of shoes were not in Majdanek they were in the sorting camp miles away!

Majdanek also had its own Effektenkammer, yet, as reconstructed by Natascha Drubek-Meyer, at least the close-ups in Majdanek were filmed in the store in the city (Drubek-Meyer 2020, 6). However, the footage of vast amounts of belongings being piled up in front of the barracks taken from Majdanek and also used in Death Mills most likely was filmed in yet a third location, the labor camp at the old Lublin airport called “Bekleidungslager Lublin,”9 where less valuable items like shoes were hoarded. Hence, the virtualization of the camps had already started when the Signal Corps units began to film, and the utilization of the Soviet footage in Death Mills and Die Todesmühlen was an appropriation of footage that had already been stripped of its provenance in a prior attempt at virtualizing the camps.

I am amazed at what is turning out to not be a one-off mistake, but a modus operandi: combine features of various facilities and camps in the fictionalization of an "Extermination Camp", with a special emphasis on the material culture found at the closest Sorting Camp; especially given, you know, the fact there are no mass graves and no bodies so you have to use shoes and clothing instead. Strip the original components of their provenance in the deceptive presentation of a fictional "Extermination Camp."

This is exactly what happened at Majdanek, deceiving everyone including Nick Terry himself until I am letting him know right now. And I will say this is exactly what happened at "Treblinka" with various features of Malkinia Station, Malkinia Transit Camp, and the Treblinka Jewish Sorting Camp all being grafted into a "Treblinka Extermination Camp".

[bombsaway]

This is exactly what happened at Majdanek, deceiving everyone including Nick Terry himself until I am letting him know right now. And I will say this is exactly what happened at "Treblinka" with various features of Malkinia Station, Malkinia Transit Camp, and the Treblinka Jewish Sorting Camp all being grafted into a "Treblinka Extermination Camp".

The initial mass gassing story at Majdanek didn't hold up not because of the work of revisionists but because it was insufficiently supported by direct evidence, much like your theories of a convoluted Treblinka/Malkinia grafting.

[PrudentRegret]

This is exactly what happened at Majdanek, deceiving everyone including Nick Terry himself until I am letting him know right now. And I will say this is exactly what happened at "Treblinka" with various features of Malkinia Station, Malkinia Transit Camp, and the Treblinka Jewish Sorting Camp all being grafted into a "Treblinka Extermination Camp".

The initial mass gassing story at Majdanek didn't hold up not because of the work of revisionists but because it was insufficiently supported by direct evidence, much like your theories of a convoluted Treblinka/Malkinia grafting.

They literally did this at Majdanek. The "Majdanek Extermination Camp" was a combination of features that were individually stripped of their provenance and combined in the creation of a fictionalized camp that never actually existed. In Terry's mind until today, the Soviets arrived at Majdanek and found warehouses of hundreds of thousands of shoes. That didn't happen, he was deceived by the approach of combining features of different camps and facilities into the "virtualization" of a non-existent extermination camp.

From DeathCamps.org:

At Christmas 1942, Stangl ordered the construction of a fake railway station: A clock with painted numerals permanently indicating 6 (!) o'clock, ticket windows and various timetables and arrows (including some indicating train connections "To Warsaw", "To Wolkowice" and "To Bialystok"), were painted on the facade of the sorting barracks. The purpose of this was to lull the arriving victims into believing that they had actually arrived at a transit camp.

USHMM:

One building erected on the platform was disguised as a small railway station, complete with a wooden clock and fictive rail terminal signs and railway schedules.

NYT in the 1960s:

Beds of flowers at an ordinary looking Polish railway station were deceptions intended to call the doomed Jews arriving at Treblinka, survivors from that death camp testified today at the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Look, I found it! Complete with the wooden clock and the signs:



Except this is a picture of the Malkinia Station in 1942, a perfect match to the description of the "fake" railway station at T-II. On the ground photographs of the entrance to T-II in 1944, on the other hand, shows no trace of such a thing:



"You really think they would do that? Take the Malkinia train station and just graft it onto the Treblinka Sorting Camp in the creation of some non-existent 'Treblinka Extermination Camp'?"

Yes they would, they literally grafted the Sorting Camp which was miles away from Majdanek onto Majdanek itself in presenting the prime evidence for the claim Majdanek was an extermination camp. This fooled everyone, including Nick Terry, until now.

[bombsaway]

PR, what you're doing now is no better than what the Soviets did. It seems possible that "millions" of Jews could have been killed at Majdanek and then had their property moved a few miles away, just like you think all the Jews in Malkinia camp had their property moved a few miles away. Possibility, and even patterns of behavior, are not good enough if you're doing history right. If that was the case, perhaps it would have been to correct to assume mass gassings at Majdanek despite the lack of direct evidence for it.

It does occur to me that one of your chief pieces of evidence or arguments (or whatever you want to call it), for Malkinia being Treblinka, is Weirnik's map with its labeling of Treblinka being on the Warsaw-Bialystock line. You said that only explanation for something like this is he was describing a completely different camp. Yet one of the witnesses you quote said that fake railway station at the T-2 camp bore this sign. Within the mainstream position, this is very plausible explanation for why he labeled the map that way.

Again, if you were using direct evidence as a basis for your claims, you wouldn't run into problems like this.

[SanityCheck]

I've always thought of Majdanek as part of a Lublin SS complex - this is quite explicit in the investigations of both as well as the paper trail within SSPF Lublin. But then I've long thought of a Konzentrationslager as a hub of a network of sub-camps, in the case of KL Lublin including Budzyn, Warsaw, Radom and other far-flung places. That much ought to be apparent from 'Auschwitz' being at least three big camps (main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz) and many sub-camps.

The interplay between KLs proper under the WVHA and SSPF-run sites is equally obvious from the paper trail and arrangements. If one compares 'Auschwitz' with 'Lublin' then one adds the SSPF infrastructure across the board - labour camps, property sorting depots and KZs - and finds that 'Lublin' was in all respects bigger until summer 1943. 'Auschwitz' had a parallel hinterland in the Organisation Schmelt camps, which were eventually absorbed into KL Auschwitz III and KL Gross-Rosen. So the shifting statuses of camps in close proximity is nothing new to me. I was calling them labour/extermination camp complexes almost 15 years ago in an academic context, while also highlighting the spatial division of property sorting as a parallel function to the extermination aspect of 'Auschwitz' and 'Lublin'.

Point being, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, what were often separate camps or sites elsewhere were combined - the crematoria with the Sonderkommando alongside Kanada I and II (with one of the surviving strength reports for the women's camp in 1944 showing a massive increase in the workers for Kanada II under the rubric of Reinhardt). In Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, these were reflected in the upper/death camp workforce and the outer camp/property sorting workforce, then augmented by the Lublin sorting depot workforces. All of those must be added together to determine how many workers were deployed to address extermination-and-expropriation, rather than being employed on camp construction or in actual industrial roles, as with the Unionwerke at Auschwitz or Heinkel's workforce in Budzyn in the Lublin district.


So PR's 'revelation' is no such thing. There were at least three property processing sites in Stadtkreis Lublin, at Majdanek, in Chopinstrasse 27 and the Alter Flughafen camp. The documentation that survives versus the reports from 1944 after liberation don't really make it easy to divide up what went where, and that has occasionally bugged me. If the whereabouts of the shoes were fudged by the Soviets in 1944, bfd, that doesn't change the fact that the only figure in the Polish-Soviet communique to support the 1.5 million extrapolation/death toll estimate is the claim of 820,000 pairs of footwear. Every other number for shooting or gassing actions is in four, five or three figures. The point that the original overestimate was influenced by Lublin-Majdanek serving as the property sorting hub for the Reinhard camps, and thus *ironically* arriving at a 1.5 million figure which is quite close to the consensus for BST plus Majdanek today, stands.

The Polish-Soviet communique on Majdanek incidentally discusses the Chopin Street depot which was organisationally separate from Majdanek proper, and certainly spatially separate.
https://www.jewishgen.org/forgottencamp ... eport.html

One might add that the communique attributes 20% of the exaggerated victim total to the 'Krembicki woods' (Krzepicki forest) some distance away from the camp.

The idee fixe about property plunder is causing you to forget the other key aspects of Majdanek as photographed, filmed and reported in 1944, which underscore the complexity of the Lublin 'hub'.

Saying that Majdanek was "a combination of features that were individually stripped of their provenance" is true for various comprehensions and portrayals of the camp in 1944 as much as in the 21st Century in countries like Russia. If you read Natascha Drubek-Meyer, Filme über Vernichtung und Befreiung: Die Rhetorik der Filmdokumente aus Majdanek 1944-1945 (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2020), then you'll see how she discusses a crowdsourced captioning of photos in Russia in the 2010s that was misleading. Photos of children's toys found at the Chopinstrasse depot were labelled 'children of prisoners of war' since Russians knew of Majdanek as a *POW* camp, which was *one* of its functions - it received thousands of Soviet POWs. The captioner simply did not register or remember the deportations of Jewish children to the Reinhard camps and came up with a fanciful and inaccurate label.

The complexity of "Majdanek" as a site or site of mass killings extends to the killing and cremation sites existing some distance away from the camp - the Krzepicki forest killing and burial ground - as much as the varied methods used. Mass shootings, with Harvest Festival requiring this since the gas chambers were in no way capable of killing 18,000 prisoners in a short space of time. Bringing in police battalions to carry out 'Harvest Festival' connects Majdanek to the killing fields across the 'east' in general, and not in a 'revisionist'-friendly way at all.

CO gas chambers, with a really, really awkward connection to T4 provided by the 1944 commission identifying bottles with the T4 pseudonyms of Jennerwein and Brenner inscribed on them. There is no possible way they could have known about something recorded in confidential memos by Brack captured in 1945 by the Americans, and there was no inclusion of this micro-detail in the published report (aka communique). If this can't be explained, then I suggest you give up 'revisonism' as the coincidence is devastating confirmation.

Zyklon B gas chambers, the usual 'delousing' cop-out undermined by the parallel existence of CO gas chambers.

Also gas vans, likely operated by the Security Police in Lublin during 1943-44, when the retreat from Soviet territories made them available. A gas van is reported also in the 1005-Borek site in Chelm county, which exhumed bodies of Soviet POWs from the Stalag there. But the Lublin gas van - could easily have shuttled around - was used relatively close to the German withdrawal from Lublin, so there were victims whose corpses were not cremated, The Polish-Soviet commission declared that some displayed the telltale signs of CO poisoning. Such autopsy reports of corpses with such signs of CO poisoning had been made elsewhere further east, thereby destroying one low-level 'revisionist' gotcha. Obviously, this connects the camp to a large raft of evidence on gas vans, including documents which must be forgeries if the entire 'revisionist' enterprise is to be kept afloat, otherwise you might as well pack up and go home.

Visually, the liberation of Majdanek did not just revolve around shoe mountains but the famous photo of a Soviet soldier posing over a rooftop chimney/insertion point, and photos of the crematorium with half-cremated skeletons in front of the muffles on the ground. The latter are 'irrefutable' since crematoria at Majdanek are well documented and have to be conceded, indeed are conceded. But they also refute the 'no bodies' blether that is further rebutted by the now well known photos from the Treblinka gold rush of grave robbers posing in front of skulls and bones. Such photos abound in the investigation files, Polish archives and books on the grave robbing of the key camps. Sometimes I wonder why 'revisionists' insist on throwing out hyperbolic claims of 'no bodies' and 'no mass graves' when such things have been proven over and over - whatever quibbling about the size of such graves you might need to do, one cannot at face value claim there were no mass graves at e.g. Belzec if bore probe methods hit layers of corpses in wax-fat transformation, or the shape of the mass graves at Sobibor is visible in freaking aerial photographs today. And it does not help 'revisionist' credibility to either unnecessarily accuse yet more people of lying or to repeat mantras that are clearly wrong.

The complexity of Majdanek and the range of inmate groups - Polish peasants/partisan suspects, partisan suspects and relatives/families from Belarus especially, Jews, KZ inmates dumped there to relieve camps in the west, wounded Soviet POWs in a genuine hospital sector - plus the range of killing methods provided qualitative support for the initial exaggeration of the death toll as well as the implicit obfuscation of the Reinhard camps of BST, which had all been dismantled and covered up, a highly odd move for Amazon sorting depots or whatever they were according to PrudentRegret.

The range of inmates at Majdanek and in the labour camps in the Lublin city limits are good reminders to PR not to reduce these camps to just Jews - the same goes for Auschwitz-Birkenau, of course. The range of killing methods and contrasting intended fates - the wounded Soviet POWs really were intended to recover at Majdanek, for example - likewise.

[SanityCheck]

As for the 'misinterpretation', Treblinka was the fifth extermination camp to be reported on by the Polish underground and witnessed by Polish bystanders. I'm still at a loss as to why they'd get something wrong five times in a row (and then add a sixth in autumn 1942 with reports of gassings at Majdanek). The Polish underground was quite capable of reporting on troop transports and supply trains flowing east across the borders to behind the Eastern Front, and there were many Poles working in the occupied Soviet territories, either as indentured farriers and carters or with the Organisation Todt. If this is what the Germans had been doing, a reverse move compared to bringing Soviet POWs and Ostarbeiter westwards, then what was in it for very disparate groups of local Poles to report trainloads (or truckloads for Chelmno) of Jews entering camps and not coming out.

I think Treblinka being fifth in a series of 'alleged' extermination camps really does require the previous four to be addressed in turn, like a steeplechase. This also has the advantage of refocusing attention on December 1941 to July 1942, by which point awareness of German-established extermation camps killing Jews was evidently extremely widespread in Poland. One cannot skip ahead to later developments and overlook the origins as they unfolded.

The key question which is being dodged is why the Polish underground and Polish-Jewish underground would either misinterpret all the evidence and reports to make up extermination or invent a story of extermination instead of 'transit'. The answer to this why question must consider both recipients of such reports - this is why Crowell's 'hystory' thesis about Polish Jews freaking out about delousing and hygiene is such obvious bollocks, because it does not account for why disparate groups of Poles near to the key camps would also report them as extermination sites, and do so more or less in realtime within Poland.

[Archie]

As for the 'misinterpretation', Treblinka was the fifth extermination camp to be reported on by the Polish underground and witnessed by Polish bystanders. I'm still at a loss as to why they'd get something wrong five times in a row (and then add a sixth in autumn 1942 with reports of gassings at Majdanek). The Polish underground was quite capable of reporting on troop transports and supply trains flowing east across the borders to behind the Eastern Front, and there were many Poles working in the occupied Soviet territories, either as indentured farriers and carters or with the Organisation Todt. If this is what the Germans had been doing, a reverse move compared to bringing Soviet POWs and Ostarbeiter westwards, then what was in it for very disparate groups of local Poles to report trainloads (or truckloads for Chelmno) of Jews entering camps and not coming out.

I think Treblinka being fifth in a series of 'alleged' extermination camps really does require the previous four to be addressed in turn, like a steeplechase. This also has the advantage of refocusing attention on December 1941 to July 1942, by which point awareness of German-established extermation camps killing Jews was evidently extremely widespread in Poland. One cannot skip ahead to later developments and overlook the origins as they unfolded.

The key question which is being dodged is why the Polish underground and Polish-Jewish underground would either misinterpret all the evidence and reports to make up extermination or invent a story of extermination instead of 'transit'. The answer to this why question must consider both recipients of such reports - this is why Crowell's 'hystory' thesis about Polish Jews freaking out about delousing and hygiene is such obvious bollocks, because it does not account for why disparate groups of Poles near to the key camps would also report them as extermination sites, and do so more or less in realtime within Poland.

It's nowhere near as clean as you are suggesting. For one thing, a lot of wartime sources fail to identify Auschwitz as an extermination camp. Most media reports through 1943 (usually using the name Oscwiecim) describe perhaps a camp with tough conditions but hardly a mass murder factory. Auschwitz as an extermination camp did not really emerge until mid-1944. Yes, I know there are earlier reports claiming gassings, electrocutions, etc at Auschwitz, but these were very obscure and that still doesn't explain the failure of so many sources to notice.

https://archive.codohforum.com/20230609 ... c570d.html

You're also ignoring that there are false positives, camps identified as having been extermination camps of some kind but that aren't claimed as such today. Majdanek is the big one (which of course you would dispute), but that's not the only one.

Again we see this method of counting reports, counting witnesses but not wanting to deal with the problems with what the "reports" actually say. This is because the problems are so obvious that even casual readers would notice. The steam chamber report, that one Chelmno one, David Milgrom, Jan Karski's story. These are all have fatal flaws.

[PrudentRegret]

To tie a bow on what Archie said-

It's highly convenient for SanityCheck to compare the Revisionist task to a Steeplechase and it's the exact posture I've seen HolocaustControversies push that has never been remotely convincing to me.

These events are not independent, they are correlated with each other. They are based on the same body of evidence, often the exact same investigators across different camps, the same governments, the same wartime or postwar fervor within historical contexts like occupations, communism, denazification. It is flat out wrong to compare this to a steeplechase where every obstacle is independent of the others. If you stumble on a single obstacle, you lose! That isn't how this works at all. These claims are all correlated with each other, so picking apart the weaker ones weakens the entire foundation of the narrative.

It would be like saying you have to disprove every single accusation made in the thousands of Witchtrials across Europe. No you don't, you only need a few well-documented examples to show the dynamics of those types of trials, and those dynamics generalize even to cases that may be harder to explain, for example, because there's no longer much documentation about the details of individual cases.

Allegations of homicidal gassings debunked in the Western camps and debunked in Majdanek, which are the earliest examples where those accusations were made and ostensibly proven by investigators. This isn't a steeplechase where you now have to treat the next camp as being independent from those other claims that have been falsified.

If you don't weigh the claims made at Auschwitz in 1945 against the exact same falsified claims made earlier at Majdanek in 1944, and you instead treat them as separate, independent claims, you are being entirely irrational.