Missing the points, as usual.Archie wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2024 3:12 am I'm well aware of that report. I don't find it even remotely convincing. Nor any of the ones I have read from the Delegatura or the Home Army. This idea that the material "inside Poland" was solid but was unfortunately mangled by incompetent editors in Britain is definitely not true. Even Arad was groaning at a lot of these reports. It is an excuse used to explain away the obviously poor quality of these reports.
The first point is inaccuracies logically increase the further one gets away from an event/location and the more they have passed through multiple interpreters, or been synthesised with other data. This explains why reports out of London contained more errors than the reports closest to the events/locations. It is standard practice to prefer sources closest to the events/locations, which is why plucking a newspaper report in another country out for hyping, as Prudent Regret was doing in the OP, is fairly meaningless.
The second point is one bombsaway was making, to illustrate the problem. PR was touting reports labelling Trawniki as an extermination/death camp in 1942. But there is no root source giving a lengthy description of this, nor from my memory can any passing references to such a thing be found in any of the serials and reports written down in Poland. Accordingly, the errors crept in further down the chain of transmission, and were not elaborated upon. Passing errors are to be expected. When signals are detected within noise and confusion, the earlier distortions but also the subsequent Chinese Whispers distortions fall away, because better sources emerge - ultimately, eyewitness accounts.
What you might overlook is how the relatively few reports hinting at onward transit/resettlement/survival are almost all of this third-fourth hand, written in another country, quality. There are no detailed descriptions of this process or eyewitness accounts or anything of 'transit'. Hardly any of them use eyewitness markers like 'I saw' or even clear provenance markers like 'somebody else told me they saw'. And basically none of them even mention the camps in question. Many involve lists of nationalities of Jews that supposedly turned up somewhere, including various entirely premature reports.
The third point is that sources and reporting closer to the events/locations, i.e. reports within Poland, by 1) Germans unofficially, 2) Ukrainians, 3) the Polish underground, 4) Polish Jews are more extensive than you realise. This does not mean they are error-free. But they include many details that are easily confirmed, and they also paint a broader picture, not just of a few camps whose precise killing mechanisms trolls can fuss over, but of the entire pattern of deportations and killings across whole regions.
The April 1942 Polish underground report is far from 'poor'. The report identified Captain Wirth as the commandant of Belzec, which is corroborated by among other sources Kurt Gerstein, who could not possibly have known about this report, nor was it published/publicised. Wirth being the inspector of Einsatz Reinhardt is documented, his role as commandant of Belzec until August 1942 is not, but was widely attested. The Polish underground could not possibly have known that Captain Wirth had been involved in T4 (a role which is documented in contemporary German records).
Rather than asserting knowledge with certainty, the April 1942 report on Belzec clarifies what could be observed and what could not. The report does not claim that there was firm insight into the inner workings of the camp, and reported the contrasting opinions of the local population as to how the victims were being killed - all within weeks of the camp opening. The local population could however easily observe that trains were entering with people and not leaving with people, that the deportees remained in the camp which was not expanding, and that Jews were observed inside the camp in their underwear. Moreover, the report identified the size and composition of the force at Belzec, a mixture of Germans and Ukrainians, which was entirely correct, as we have personnel files of Trawnikis indicating their assignment to SS-Sonderkommando Belzec at the right time (as we do for all three Reinhard camps).
The core claim is that transports of Jews "began to arrive from the direction of Lvov and Warsaw", meaning the rail lines, and the deportees were not leaving the camp. Local observers could not necessarily know that the transports were coming from the Lublin and Lwow ghettos as well as smaller ones, so the report refrained from filling in these details, which emerge from other sources. For example, the Lublin Jewish council knew within a short while that the deportations from the Lublin ghetto were going to Belzec, without knowing what Belzec was. Other Polish underground reports identified the direction of deportations independently of this report, thus Informacja biezaca 15/40 of 21 April 1942 connects the Lublin deportations to Belzec.
While 'revisionists' will not like the report that transports were entering Belzec with deported Jews and that no deported Jews were leaving, refuting this absolutely requires evidence to the contrary. This very early report also cannot be refuted by referring to grave capacity issues or the uncertainty over killing methods, since this is about the very first phase. Grave capacity could not possibly have been an issue in March/April 1942, while the acknowledged uncertainty over the killing method - gas, electricity or air being pumped out - speaks to honesty, not propagandistic confabulation.
Given previous Polish underground reporting and knowledge of Chelmno as well as the early Auschwitz gassings, plus the Poznan gassing experiment in 1939, for the report to introduce electricity alongside gas as a possible killing method, and attribute this to local speculation, contradicts the line that this was all just propaganda. The 'revisionist' hyping of wayward killing methods does not logically support 'propaganda', such reports were coming from below. A smooth propaganda claim would have stuck with what was known, which because of Chelmno was very much - gas.
Good sources convey something of their own sources of knowledge, discriminating between direct observations and what was learned from someone else, identifying the acount's sources, and admitting uncertainty. The April 1942 report on Belzec does exactly this.
Ultimately, this report illustrates perhaps the chief problem for 'revisionism', which Prudent Regret, Nazgul, Callafangers and others are consciously or unconsciously realising, which is that disputing goings-on inside the camps is far too late. Either 'revisionism' can refute the claims in reports such as the April 1942 Belzec account that transports arrived at specific sites and the deportees did not leave, and provide convincing evidence for what happened instead, or it is a complete waste of time.
As a contrast, the Swedish consul in Stettin Vendel received an accurate hearsay account of the extermination of the Jews in the Government-General in the summer of 1942. The report did not mention any camp names but did spell out gassing, and noted also the Lublin ghetto action. There are some issues with clarity about what was the procedure (and where the gassings happened) but the outline is entirely in accordance with the conventional version. The source was evidently a German Army officer with ties to resistance circles, so independent of Polish or Polish Jewish reporting. If it had been informed by such reporting, one would maybe expect a little more detail as well as some of the inevitable errors, such as naming camps or mentioning rumours of wayward killing methods. But nope: gas.
(HC white paper, p.52, the source given has been online - Jozef Lewandowski, ‘Early Swedish Information about the Nazis’ Mass Murder of the Jews’, Polin, 2000, pp.117-8)The treatment of the Jews, as described by the person to whom I spoke, is of the kind that is impossible to express in writing. That is why I limit myself to a few brief pieces of information. The treatment differs in different locations, depending on the number of Jews. In some cities there are Jewish quarters; in others there are ghettos surrounded by high walls, which Jews can trespass only at the risk of being shot; finally, in some others Jews enjoy some freedom of movement. Nevertheless, the aim is the extinction of them all. The number of Jews murdered in Lublin is estimated at 40,000. The Jews over fifty years of age and children under ten are especially subjected to extermination. The rest are left alive in order to fill the gap in the workforce; they will be exterminated as soon as they are no longer useful. Their property is confiscated; it mostly falls into the hands of SS men. In the cities all Jews are gathered; they are officially informed that it is for the purpose of ‘delousing’. At the entrance they have to leave their clothes, which are immediately sent to a ‘central warehouse of textile materials’. Delousing is in practice gassing, after which all are packed into previously prepared mass graves. The source from whom I received all the information about the conditions in the General Government is such that there can be no shadow of a doubt that his description is true.
This report shows that accurate information does survive transmission through hearsay chains. The further irony is that Gerstein was informing the Swedes around the same time and then informed the Dutch underground before writing his reports in 1945 while in French captivity, the 1945 reports circling back and naming Captain Wirth, along with chapter and verse on Globocnik's organisation and other SS in the Reinhard camps (Hackenholt for sure is on the promotion list from 1943).
