A New Revisionist Interpretation of Operation Reinhardt

[Nessie]

What about the location of Treblinka (Belzec & Sobibor) in relation to its supposed primary purpose as a sorting facility for confiscated goods? It was located right on the eastern border of Poland, crossing into former Soviet territory with different railway gauge sizes. The location of these camps has been stated as one of the key evidences for their purpose as transit camps. Unless I'm missing something, it makes little sense for Treblinka II to have primarily been a sorting facility when it was located - essentially - out in the middle of nowhere, in the forest close to the Ukrainian border. That makes a whole lot of sense if it was primarily a transit camp, though.

That theory is contradicted by evidence directly pertaining to TII, so it does not make much sense.

In my view, it's possible that TII served a dual function as a sorting facility for goods seized from the Jews being deported eastwards, but this wouldn't have been its primary function. If we assume that TII, Sobibor and Belzec served the same purpose, it has to be pointed out that Sobibor is referred to as a "Durchgangslager" in a document from Himmler. It is the only instance in which one of the AR camps are referred to explicitly as a transit camp. This meaning is easy to carry over to Belzec and TII.

The evidence from workers inside TII is that they bagged property taken from the Jews, which was then sent to Lublin to be sorted. PR's theory, as with your theory of a transit camp, ignores such evidence.

In Thomas Kues' series on the presence of 'gassed' Jews in the OET, there is significant evidence of Sobibor serving as a sorting station for confiscated goods as well. Jews from the Netherlands who were deported to Sobibor and (according to Kues) transited through to the Baltics had the goods seized and sorted as Sobibor.

Kues looked at the primary evidence of Dutch Jews sent to Sobibor and secondary reports of property from Dutch Jews in Lithuania and concluded that is evidence the Dutch originally sent to Sobibor went to Lithuania. He is clearly scratching at straws with that one. No wonder he stopped producing revisionist works after that.

Revisionist standards of evidencing are so poor, that their theories would fail even at a school level of scrutiny.

[curioussoul]

That theory is contradicted by evidence directly pertaining to TII, so it does not make much sense.

Given the evidence for resettling the extermination hypothesis makes even less sense.

The evidence from workers inside TII is that they bagged property taken from the Jews, which was then sent to Lublin to be sorted.

What evidence in particular are you referring to?

Revisionist standards of evidencing are so poor, that their theories would fail even at a school level of scrutiny.

What in particular was wrong about Kues' Sobibor argument?

[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.

Here what Koehl says about it in his book from 1957. The whole book is free on archive.org.
https://archive.org/details/rkfdv-germa ... -1939-1945

[Nessie]

That theory is contradicted by evidence directly pertaining to TII, so it does not make much sense.

Given the evidence for resettling the extermination hypothesis makes even less sense.

There is a lack of evidence of resettlement. For example, Eric Hunt looked for evidence of transports back out of TII and he only found a few transports totalling a few thousand people, who went to labour camps south or east of TII, not the east.

https://studylib.net/doc/7233192/trebli ... ist-edited

The evidence from workers inside TII is that they bagged property taken from the Jews, which was then sent to Lublin to be sorted.

What evidence in particular are you referring to?

From workers such as Krzepicki, who was assigned to the undressing area;

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/holocau ... t1916.html

"I took away the women’s shoes, tied them in pairs and put
them down outside on a pile, to be carried away to the assembly point."

"They were told that in Maidanek near Lublin
and in other camps the Jews had been given paper clothing and that the clothing
with which they had come had been gathered together, sorted out, and forwarded
to Germany to be reconditioned."

Revisionist standards of evidencing are so poor, that their theories would fail even at a school level of scrutiny.

What in particular was wrong about Kues' Sobibor argument?

What argument is that? I would surmise that because you refer to it as an argument, that it lacks evidence. Like your argument in this post about the evidence of resettlement. You suggest there is a lot, when in fact there is very little.