A New Revisionist Interpretation of Operation Reinhardt

[Nessie]

...
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.

Sorry, you are mistaken. You think that the shoes are being used to prove exterminations. Instead, they are one small part of the circumstantial evidence, that goes along with evidence from all sorts of sources and types, to prove exterminations. Huge piles of shoes on their own is merely evidence the Nazis seized and stored a lot of shoes. That does not prove anything. It only becomes part of the proof, once the evidence of how the Nazis stole the shoes has been established.

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!!

You constantly cherry-pick evidence and by doing so, you reach a false, distorted conclusion. To prove what happened at TII, you need evidence from TII, not Majdanek, or Malkinia.

... the fact there are no mass graves and no bodies...

This is part of your cherry-picking of evidence, whereby you cherry-pick out evidence that does not suit you, by denying it. You assert, with no evidence, that there are no mass graves and corpses at TII. Fact is, you do not want to figuratively go anywhere near TII to provide evidence of what happened there, because all the that direct, contemporaneous and relevant evidence contradicts your beliefs.

[Nazgul]

you need evidence from TII, not Majdanek, or Malkinia.

There is serious doubt about the location of "Treblinka". Very briefly Wiernik put the camp adjacent to the Warsaw-Bialystok railway line in his first map, while the runner up to the CIA puts it at Kosow Podlaski. General Stefan Rowecki, places the location at Czerwony bor, planning an attack. It has been made clear that there were two Judenlagers attached to T1, which is the probable purpose of the current location of the alleged TII.

[SanityCheck]

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.

You're - collectively - still not providing an explanation for how and especially WHY the reports unfolded as they did. Skipping ahead to later in the war doesn't help with the origins of 'the story' in 1941-2.

The Polish and Polish Jewish contemporary reporting is quite a large corpus of material. The Ringelblum Archive is one big chunk, much of which has now been translated and put online. Nine volumes are now in English, including vol 3 compiling the news bulletins in 1942 and the big reports from the first half of 1942 as well as the Wasser report. Skipping ahead to the Wasser report's annexe on Treblinka and ignoring everything else is the mistake 'revisionists' keep on making. Treblinka, to repeat, was the fifth extermination camp to begin operations, and about the twelth site or region of mass killing and gassing in chronological order.

Polish underground sources aren't as widely translated, but are also increasingly online - one can find some translations of summary reports in Yad Vashem's document archive online, in Ignacy Schwarzbart's papers, while the underground press is more or less entirely online.

The fact that there were two recipients of reports, who also originated them as fugitives and local eyewitnesses, Poles and Polish Jews, is the key problem for explaining the origins of the 'story' for 'revisionists'. One cannot blame the Soviets since Polish and Polish Jewish sources report things first, nor the British, nor American Zionists, nor whoever else might be the bete noire du jour of a particular 'revisionist'.

One also can't separate out the Polish from Polish Jewish reporting very easily to claim that one or the other was the true originator. The Polish underground was observing and reporting on Chelmno and event in the Warthegau independently of the Ringelblum archive recording accounts by fugitives from Chelmno. 'Szlamek' then moved to Zamosc and sent a postcard identifying Belzec as just like Chelmno with little further detail, while local Poles were the ones observing trains entering the camp and nobody leaving. There was usually a short lag between everyone knowing about deportations from Lublin, Warsaw etc and identifying Belzec, Treblinka etc. There are more reports of deportation and shooting actions and those must be explained, however much you guys pretend you don't need to.

I keep coming back to the WHY question - it truly escapes me why both the Polish and Polish Jewish underground would invent a story like this, when the alternative of 'mere' expulsion further to the east would have fitted in with prior expectations.

One also needs not to isolate the camps from the context of ongoing mass shooting actions but also the shoot-to-kill order in the GG, and the repeated threats to Jews to comply alongside the warnings to Poles not to help or shelter Jews, on pain of death. This aspect is copiously documented in numerous placards and many German sources plus of course Polish and Polish Jewish diaries, reports and more. Claming that such threats were not made or carried out against Poles and Polish Jews exponentially increases the amount of material to be denied, over and above the sources, German and non-German, on the liquidation or reduction of the 687 ghettos across the whole of Poland. Conventional research spends a lot of time on the ghetto actions and the 'Jew hunts', and all of that is basically ignored in 'revisionism', as supposedly unimportant - when clearly it's very important to historiography, media and film, the exaltation of Righteous among the Nations and key rescuers, and so on.

This background ought to be remembered if 'revisionists' are to come up with a halfway sane sounding explanation. In western and central Poland, the 'Jew hunts' and executions of Polish rescuers surely made the [insert explanation of rumours/hoaxing here] more plausible to both Poles and Polish Jews. The Germans really did kill Polish Jews in hiding and execute Poles for helping them.

Another way of putting this is both the Polish and Polish Jewish populations evidently sincerely believed that the Germans were exterminating the Jews. One cannot claim two entire ethnic groups were all liars, even if claiming all Jews are liars is an antisemitic standard belief. Some or the majority of contemporaries must have been sincerely mistaken if we're to buy 'revisionist' claims. One must account for how this belief arose, and how it spread geographically. Survivor accounts typically report hearing rumblings or news from nearby, as 1942 wore on - news spread relatively locally in this regard. But reports flowed to Warsaw to both the Polish and Polish Jewish underground documenting this for across the whole of Poland.

Another catch is that the mass shooting actions in especially eastern Poland make it hard to explain WHY the Germans might have wiped out all Jews in areas right next to the Lublin district et al, but 'only' deported Jews from the Government-General (unless they were being executed for leaving ghettos or going into hiding). Some contemporaries initially believed the Soviet occupation and communist 'infection' of Jews in eastern Poland might explain the differences, but they were people who thought the Germans would never deport the Warsaw ghetto. Except the Germans very clearly did. So the contrasting fates of 'resettlement' versus being shot on the spot is still left unexplained.

As noted many times before, expulsions and deportations would very likely have resulted in mass extinction through starvation and harsh conditions at the arrival destinations. Both Polish Jewish and Polish reporters were already making much of the mass starvation of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto - 43,000 in 1941, 80,000 to July 1942 - so it would make much more sense to report accurately on deportations to the east than pretend nobody went further than Chelmno or Belzec. That also would have avoided the risk of German refutation by pointing to actual resettlers in Potemkin villages or genuine large-scale reservations/camps further east. Both Polish and Polish Jewish reporters knew the Germans were slaughtering Jews in extermination actions by shootings further east, so deportation to the east meant nothing good regardless.

The five then six extermination camps claiming Polish Jews as victims of gassing in the conventional understanding cannot all have been 'misinterpreted', especially as onward transport is implied in all claims hitherto of hoaxing or misinterpretation. This also goes for the methods claimed in 1942-3 for the camps. Indeed, a comparison between the key camps indicates gas was the dominant killing method identified since this was the more or less exclusive one for mass actions at Chelmno and Birkenau, used alongside shooting at Majdanek, and rapidly predominated for Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Gas is also indicated in German documents for Chelmno and Birkenau (therefore they must be forgeries! But why again invent this story?) and inferrable for the Reinhard camps because of the T4 connection, before one considers the sum total of Polish, Polish Jewish and other sources for BST, including Gerstein writing during the war, among other examples, which clearly skew towards gas, with other methods almost invariably being hearsay vs gas from direct eyewitnesses.

Bottom line, some answer to the WHY question for both Poles and Polish Jews in the first half of 1942, as in why did both simultaneously invent a story about mass gassing, is needed from 'revisionists'. At the very least answering this question would generate hypotheses that can be tested and sorted out - some will clearly be wrong after discussion, some *might* survive light scrutiny and help you guys. There can be a strong tendency towards concocting just-so stories for this issue, things that might sound plausible in the moment but which will look very silly if someone forgets the Poles also reported on these camps and only thinks about the Jews. We can already rule out any of Moscow, London, New York or Jerusalem/Tel Aviv inventing the 'story' from afar.

[Nessie]

you need evidence from TII, not Majdanek, or Malkinia.

There is serious doubt about the location of "Treblinka". Very briefly Wiernik put the camp adjacent to the Warsaw-Bialystok railway line in his first map, while the runner up to the CIA puts it at Kosow Podlaski. General Stefan Rowecki, places the location at Czerwony bor, planning an attack. It has been made clear that there were two Judenlagers attached to T1, which is the probable purpose of the current location of the alleged TII.

If you cherry-pick evidence, such as this map by Wiernik, from an online version of his book, it does not match the layout or location of the camp on the railway spur to the TI labour camp;

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

It is similar to, but not the same as this plan, also attributed to Wiernik;

http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/maps.html

http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bmap23.jpg

If this map by Wiernik is cherry-picked, then it does match the layout and location;

http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bmap22.jpg

The first two do not look like they have been drawn by the same person, as the third, as they are very different in style. The evidence from multiple maps of the AR camp at Treblinka, commonly referred to as TII, is that it was the one on the spur line, as shown in the third Wiernik map. You are doing what PR is doing, and blatantly cherry-picking evidence.

[SanityCheck]

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.

The reason this history is a steeplechase is because it unfolded chronologically in a very short space of time, with clear progressions. That is entirely different to the history of witch trials, which were small discrete events.

The persecution and murder of European Jews also unfolded alongside other policies of persecution and murder. These were in fact very entangled, since methods and personnel were transferred from one policy to the other, T4-AR being a salient example, the end of the Third Reich saw Jews and non-Jews thrown together in the KZs in Germany and Austria, whereas this hadn't been the case in 1943.

There was a clear progression from stage to stage with the persecution and murder of European Jews, a well-established narrative which like other periodisations has been argued over and prompted debates, but whatever disagreements exist tend to be a matter of months not years by now. The outbreak of war added ever more Jews to the Nazi sphere of influence and direct occupied territories, and it also saw a significant escalation in violence, to Jews and non-Jews. The radicalisation and escalation of policies are fairly manifest.

As a result, one can easily map death tolls chronologically and geographically, observe cumulative totals, and compare the evidence for these various 'components'. Together they aggregate to more than 5 million Jews killed or dying at Nazi and Axis hands (in camps, ghettos, mass shootings, etc). The overall death toll IS a 'revisionist' concern, but other than warbling endlessly about 6M, you guys seem rather allergic to breaking this down by country, method and time-frame.

Analytically, this means conventional understanding of Treblinka will put this at the centre of many Venn diagrams of overlap, demonstrating progression, convergence, transfer and entanglement.

This includes: T4 and Aktion 14 f 13 euthanasia by gassing; ghettoisation and mass starvation in the Warsaw ghetto; a wave of shooting and killing actions in the Bialystok district in summer 1941 by police battalions and other German forces; pogroms after the start of 'Barbarossa' by the local Polish population with the connivance or toleration of the new German occupiers; all part of an escalation to mass extermination by shooting of German and Romanian policies in the occupied Soviet Union which claimed up to 1 million lives in the second half of 1941; the shoot-to-kill order in the GG of October 1941 and worsening conditions in all districts there; the mass starvation of over 2 million Soviet POWs in 1941-2, of whom a quarter of a million died in the Stalags of the GG, causing a number of mostly Soviet Ukrainian POWs to volunteer for the Trawnikis; the establishment of Treblinka I as a labour re-education camp in November 1941 and the dispatch of various Jewish prisoners to it in the first half of 1942 and thereafter; central decision-making about the Final Solution and its communication to Hans Frank of the GG by December 1941 at the latest, interpreted by Frank as an order for liqudation/annihilation (Vernichtung); the subsequent dispatch of Frank's deputy Buehler to the Wannsee Conferene of January 1942; awareness in the Warsaw ghetto of the onset of deportation-and-extermination in the Warthegau at Chelmno; awareness in the Warsaw ghetto of the mass shootings of >200,000 Jews in eastern Poland in 1941; awareness of the deportations to Belzec and Sobibor in the Lublin, Krakau and Galizien districts from March to June 1942; the parallel deportations in the second half of 1942 to Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Birkenau across different regions of Poland; the mass executions of 360,000 victims by shooting in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine in the late summer and autumn of 1942; the unfolding of deportations to Treblinka from July to December 1942 in the Warsaw ghetto, provincial Warsaw district, Radom district, Bialystok district and parts of the Lublin district, including shootings at the departure end running into several 10s of 1000s, and some transports being reported as suffocating to death in the high summer of 1942 (eg from Miedzyrzec Podlaski); train-jumping and breakout attempts during the deportations as compared between Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor; the parallel transfers to some especially lethal forced labour camps like Skarzysko-Kamienna and Majdanek (before gas chambers were used there); the 'acceleration' of extermination in mid-1942 on Himmler's orders for the whole of the GG, influenced by food requisitioning quotas being raised across occupied Europe including the GG and further east, causing Hans Frank to announce that the feeding of 1.2 million non-working Jews would 'fall away' in late summer 1942; arguments between German agencies over Jewish forced labour ending with Goering and Himmler saying that even in such camps Jews would eventually disappear; Hitler announcing that critics of his prophecy about the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe were no longer laughing at a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast of 30 September 1942; Himmler's adjutant Karl Wolff expressing pleasure to transport ministry state secretary Ganzenmueller at the transport of 5000 Jews a day from Warsaw to Treblinka; transports from Theresienstadt to Treblinka which fell in between transports going to another killing site at Maly Trostinets and being sent to Birkenau; the 'second ghettoisation' deception measure; 'Jew hunts' and threats of execution for Poles caught helping or sheltering Jews; the growth of resistance in 1943 and the Warsaw ghetto uprising plus abortive Bialystok ghetto uprising; deportations from Macedonia and Thrace of Greek and Yugoslav Jews in spring 1943; the eventual revolt in Treblinka paralleling revolts in Sobibor and later in Birkenau among similar work crews; and of course the widespread practice of exhuming mass graves of SS and Nazi victims, carried out by local detachments under the rubric of 'Aktion 1005' and which began with the same camps of Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, Birkenau in autumn 1942, extending to Majdanek and associated sites across the GG in 1943-44, from Chelm to Zamosc to Siedlce to the terrain of the former Warsaw ghetto; the dispatch of Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz to staff KL Warschau to carry out the levelling of the former ghetto area in 1943-44; their liberation during the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944; ongoing executions in Warsaw claiming 32,000 Polish and Jewish lives up to the 1944 Uprising; the violent German response to the Uprising including the Wola and Ochota massacres; Verbrennungskommando Warschau cleaning up after these massacres and other killings during the Uprising; the killing of surviving Jewish inmates in Treblinka I before the Treblinka-Malkinia area was overrun by Soviet forces in summer 1944; the transfer of SS and Trawniki personnel from Treblinka to other camps and posts in the GG and to Trieste in late 1943; the establishment of property sorting camps in Lublin at Chopinstrasse 27 and the Alter Flughafen camp; dispatch of property from Treblinka II to these depots; the transfer of Jewish workers in the Toebbens and Schulz factories to Poniatowa and Trawniki in spring 1943 during the Warsaw ghetto uprising; the transfer of other Warsaw Jews to Majdanek and Lublin for dispatch to a variety of camps (Radom, Budzyn, Auschwitz, Skarzysko) including after some had been selected at Treblinka II; the decision after the aforementioned Sobibor revolt to liquidate the unproductive work camps of the Lublin district, aka 'Harvest Festival', but not to eliminate the productive workforce in the Heinkel factory at Budzyn; Himmler pressing Ganzenmueller in early 1943 for more trains to speed up deportations including from the Bialystok district, as Jews were a security threat everywhere; Himmler referring repeatedly to the Warsaw ghetto and the worker/resistance question in secret speeches from the second Posen speech in October 1943 to the Sonthofen speeches up to June 1944; the liberation of the Treblinka area and ensuing grave-robbing or 'gold rush' as with the other Reinhard camps, producing numerous photos of skulls and bones paralleling the piles of skulls photographed/filmed at Majdanek; and the curious presence of Trawnikis helping the clean-up after Dresden in February 1945 with its cremation of 7000 corpses there.


Evaluating the sources and practices for Treblinka in any case requires considering the whole of the GG + Bialystok District due to German documents (Hoefle telegram, Korherr, Diensttagebuch); the Polish and Polish Jewish underground reportage and documentation widens that to the whole of Poland, as does the postwar Central Jewish Historical Commission, Polish Main Commission and Soviet Extraordinary Commission investigations for regions seeing deportations to Treblinka and the other Reinhard camps; the same with the West and East German plus Austrian trials; Soviet cases against Trawnikis, and more.

Vasily Grossman's Hell of Treblinka has to be evaluated alongside the entire Jewish Antifascist Committee documentation and reporting effort including the 'Black Book' project, his visit to the Treblinka area warrants comparison with Ilya Ehrenburg visiting Belarus and Minsk around the same time, including thus Maly Trostinets, as well as the Soviet and western reporters and film-makers reporting on Majdanek, plus the other reports on Sobibor and Belzec from this time. All of which has to pay attention to the context of the Warsaw Uprising and the subtle distortions of Soviet discourses supressing the Jewishness of victims at Majdanek (while also cutting 1005 survivor Reznik from the films produced that shifted attention to Majdanek from the other camp sites liberated in summer 1944).


The overlaps and entanglements indicated above are frequently mentioned in conventional histories and studies whether 'in general' or specific to the sub-aspect, or indeed the Reinhard camps or Treblinka 'directly', as well as biographies of hands-on protagonists.

It's of course possible that the many hundreds of conventional historians and authors who've crowd-sourced the details and sources of all of the overlaps, entanglements and key themes, as well as the various geographers, archaeologists and others who've added further details on the direct sites, all missed something that only you, the pseudonymous PrudentRegret, have spotted, but this seems unlikely, especially if you fail to engage with all of the sources from 1941 to the 21st Century that mention Treblinka directly.

Only a few were alluded to above, but they're all pretty central - Hoefle, Korherr, Wolff-Ganzenmueller, the Stroop report - and the kinds of things which bombsaway and others will always remember whenever you try spinning up your latest hot take.

On balance, it's surely less of a waste of everybody's time, including your own, to put the damn camp into context since there's literally nothing you can do to stop others from doing exactly that, or reading books that do so, and remembering the overlaps, entanglements and comparisons you often so studiously avoid.

But hey, I'm happy to ignore you if you'll accept that your failure to integrate T4 into your analysis means your entire argument is stillborn from the outset. THAT is a hurdle that MUST be cleared, since the German SS personnel at Treblinka are so very clearly part of the core story.

Josef Hirtreiter had served at Hadamar and later served at Sobibor and in Trieste. His pretense about 'Malkinia' did not survive his 1951 trial or stand up in court, indeed the statement to the Americans from him pretending he was at Malkinia is available in a 'Cases Not Tried' file about *Treblinka*, so the Americans saw through his bullshit in the 1940s.

[SanityCheck]

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.

Another reason why the isolate-one-camp routine fails is as I pointed out to you elsewhere, questions of scale and feasibility have been raised by 'revisionists'. This means that for both gassing as well as cremation, it makes most sense to consider the entire set of such claims, with cremations thus overlapping out beyond gassing, and requiring some acknowledgement also of the unexhumed mass graves of mass shooting victims, as well as of Soviet POWs, since some mass graves of Soviet POWs were also exhumed and cremated.

If one tries only to revise from the top down, then this fails to refute the claims of the smaller site and supposedly less crucial camps, and concedes them by default or through omission.

Comparison is also crucial: Majdanek and Auschwitz are indeed compared for the piles of evidence and assumptions made by investigators,, as are the KZs as a whole, also vis-a-vis the Reinhard camps, Chelmno and T4.

Where you are deluding yourself is thinking that anything has been 'debunked'. The normal processes of investigation and research eliminated errors and conflations en route, failed to confirm some initial claims and clarified death tolls by factoring in countries and regions rather than solely looking at individual camps, a crucial conventional cross-examination process. The much vaunted case of the Dachau gas chamber does not work out so well for 'revisionists' on closer examination, for example: while there is insufficient confirmation of use beyond 1-2 witnesses, there are in fact documents which are quite clear about the intended purpose and construction of the chamber, also connecting Rascher's intention to his awareness of T4 euthanasia gas chambers.

The overlaps and entanglements must be considered from all possible angles: if only one route in, such as starting in 1944-45 with distorted fairy-tales about the earliest camp liberations, is necessary for you to sustain your argument, you've failed. You ought to be able to demonstrate your argument in conventional chronological-narrative form, i.e. starting with T4 through the spread of gassing, mass killings by shootings, cremations and the varied forensic landscapes of unexhumed and exhumed mass graves, over 1939-45. Reading history backwards can be quite effective, but not if done with blinkers on, and one must then be able to show how to read it forwards.

On similar lines, the conventional rules of research dictate that past studies which have advanced understanding and solved 'puzzles' must also be taken into consideration. Criticising past studies is expected, fringe resets and totally ignoring past research discredit the would-be iconoclast.

So I'll definitely further recommend Natascha Drubek-Meyer, Filme über Vernichtung und Befreiung: Die Rhetorik der Filmdokumente aus Majdanek 1944-1945 (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2020) as a much more interesting study of the liberation of Majdanek than anything I've read from 'revisionists', with a wider remit including comparisons with Grossman and also an exploration of Paul Celan's Todesfuge that further reminds one of connections/comparisons between Lemberg-Janowska and Majdanek (ball/bone mills - the presence of a ball mill in Lublin is documented, incidentally, in the Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt records). The book even cites a document published by HC which I sourced from NARA for Sergey Romanov some years ago!

[Nazgul]

But hey, I'm happy to ignore you if you'll accept that your failure to integrate T4 into your analysis means your entire argument is stillborn from the outset. THAT is a hurdle that MUST be cleared, since the German SS personnel at Treblinka are so very clearly part of the core story.

14F13 or Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) 14f13. This is the selection process often described and certainly happened at Sobibor.

[borjastick]

This discussion is exactly what I mean when I say obfuscation and distraction. Endless talk about irrelevant issues. My oh my the believers will soon be claiming the 'death camp Treblinka' was somewhere else entirely...

[Nessie]

Prudent Regret thinks AR was a property seizure and sorting programme. Nazgul claims it was an extension of the T4 euthanasia programme, Action 14f13. I am sure he has also claimed the AR camps were customs/border posts. Scott has claimed the camps were hygiene stations to stop the spreading of disease. Mattogno and others have posited they are simply transit camps. The revisionist attempts to evidence the use of the camps are all over the place. Historians are in agreement, they were death camps. AR was to clear ghettos, kill Jews, steal the past of their personal property and use some for forced labour.

I know that one group being in agreement, whilst another cannot agree, is not necessarily a sign that the group in agreement are correct. If we look at the method the groups have used to reach their conclusions, we find that the group in agreement, the historians, have used the method that is evidence based and is taught in schools and at universities. The method that, at some point, most likely at school, all the revisionists were also taught. They have subsequently abandoned that method, to pursue their own flawed method. The biggest flaw in this thread, exhibited by PR in pretty much every single one of his posts, is cherry-picking. He is highly selective over the evidence he choses to believe, down to believing part of what a witness states, whilst ignoring the majority of their testimony. Cherry-picking is the reason why revisionists have come up with so many alternative theories as to what AR was.

[Nazgul]

Nazgul claims it was an extension of the T4 euthanasia programme, Action 14f13. I am sure he has also claimed the AR camps were customs/border posts. Scott has claimed the camps were hygiene stations to stop the spreading of disease. Mattogno and others have posited they are simply transit camps.

I have never claimed the camps were extensions for 14f13, but were judenlagers where the decrepit were euthanized. SS T4 officers did not wear SS runes; this is certainly the case at Sobibor, obvious from the photographic evidence. The only other SS that did not wear runes were Gestapo. There is evidence in the Sobibor photos of an Zollgrenzschutz officer alongside SS.

All the AR camps were on the GG border, even Belzec was once border until integration with Ukraine. All camps had stringent methods of hygiene to prevent typhus and other nasties. All camps were in effect transit camps. The Sobibor Jews mention they went to up to 18 different locations.

[bombsaway]

This discussion is exactly what I mean when I say obfuscation and distraction. Endless talk about irrelevant issues. My oh my the believers will soon be claiming the 'death camp Treblinka' was somewhere else entirely...

So we should just accept there was a transit camp servicing tens of thousands of Jews a week in Malkinia called Treblinka?

If you have an issue with PR's theories you should just tell him.

[Nazgul]

So we should just accept there was a transit camp servicing tens of thousands of Jews a week in Malkinia called Treblinka?

If you have an issue with PR's theories you should just tell him.

No one should accept anything. There was a camp at Malkinia; there is a photo of this place as well as witness reports.

.
Hirtreiter claimed he worked there. It is known that there was a labour camp south of the Treblinka township, with two judenlagers attached, for males and females nearby. The town elders of Wolka Ograklik have sworn there was an extermination camp in the Kosow Laski region a short distance south of the T1 labour camp. This was called Kosow Podlaski by US intelligence.

As mentioned, Wiernik put his map of Treblinka next to the Warsaw-Bialistok railway line. Wiernik has "North" in the correct geographical orientation if the camp was next to the W-B railway line.


The location of the current TII was on the Malkinia-Siedlce line. There are many other major errors of location according to professional surveyors who place the alleged current TII in the wrong geographical orientation.


If the map above represents the current TII location then North is pointing in a distinct easterly direction. The newer maps were altered to correct this apparent anomaly, so the facts fit the narrative.

In the image above, North is in the correct alignment to current TII.

[Wheels]

But hey, I'm happy to ignore you if you'll accept that your failure to integrate T4 into your analysis means your entire argument is stillborn from the outset. THAT is a hurdle that MUST be cleared, since the German SS personnel at Treblinka are so very clearly part of the core story.

Hardly the case... The hurdle in general is cleared by VEJ Bd. 3 Dok. 101 (S. 275-276) / PMJ Vol. 3 pp. 286-288. It's a Foreign Office policy memo from August 1940 namedropping Brack and Boehler's office as regards the "organization of transport". It shows that the Madagascar Plan, which also included registration of Jewish assets, envisaged the can-do crew's involvement. It shows that such a "well-attuned organization with a wealth of experience" could have easily been part of a comprehensive resettlement operation. What we're left with is previous documented leading candidates for a Jewish resettlement operation - back when no putative extermination plan was in place.

[bombsaway]

So we should just accept there was a transit camp servicing tens of thousands of Jews a week in Malkinia called Treblinka?

If you have an issue with PR's theories you should just tell him.

No one should accept anything. There was a camp at Malkinia; there is a photo of this place as well as witness reports.

There are no "reliable" witness reports in the time period in question. There were also no photos of the camp at this time, as PR has stated. In 1944 photos there is no evidence of a transit camp there.

Hirtreiter claimed he worked there.

Hirtreiter claimed to have worked at an extermination facility, not a transit camp. His interrogation contradicts your position to an extreme degree, therefore in your world he is a liar, therefore in your world you are relying on a testimony that is heavily compromised as your only evidence of something. It's not convincing to me for this reason.

As mentioned, Wiernik put his map of Treblinka next to the Warsaw-Bialistok railway line. Wiernik has "North" in the correct geographical orientation if the camp was next to the W-B railway line.

PR quoted witnesses saying the camp bore signs indicating it was between W & B. Wiernik's map is totally consistent with this. Within the mainstream frame, where this is true, it's easy for him to imagine him making a mistake like this and imagining it was between the two cities, therefore oriented north. Your hypothetical only works if there's no other possible explanation for Wiernik's "error", there clearly is.

Bottom line. All you have is speculation about the existence of such a camp, no hard evidence. Maybe you want it to be true, and maybe it is true, but possibility of something isn't enough when you're doing history.

[Nazgul]

There are no "reliable" witness reports in the time period in question. There were also no photos of the camp at this time, as PR has stated. In 1944 photos there is no evidence of a transit camp there.

Nonsense there is evidence of people stating they transited to Birkenau from the Malkinia transit camp.

Hirtreiter claimed to have worked at an extermination facility, not a transit camp. His interrogation contradicts your position to an extreme degree, therefore in your world he is a liar, therefore in your world you are relying on a testimony that is heavily compromised as your only evidence of something. It's not convincing to me for this reason.[/quote) I care little if you are convinced of anything, people with closed minds are not open to new evidence. I am not saying there was no extermination camp, you are positing that position on me. I did mention that the US intelligence put an extermination facility at Kosow Lascki; this coincides with what the elders of the nearby town correlated, not the current TII location.

Wiernik's map is totally consistent with this. Within the mainstream frame, where this is true, it's easy for him to imagine him making a mistake like this and imagining it was between the two cities, therefore oriented north. Your hypothetical only works if there's no other possible explanation for Wiernik's "error", there clearly is.

Saying he is in error and not a liar, perhaps means you wish the evidence to fit in with your thoughts. This is not how history should work, but biased people often do this, so that precious theories are not thrown to the scrap heap.

Bottom line. All you have is speculation about the existence of such a camp, no hard evidence. Maybe you want it to be true, and maybe it is true, but possibility of something isn't enough when you're doing history.

The photo above is evidence of a camp at Malkinia.