The Industrial Ledger: Observations Over Hearsay
Dutch Survivors
To maintain a rigorous analysis of the Industrial Ledger, we must strip away the postwar rumours and hearsay that survivors often accepted as fact and look strictly at their contemporaneous observations. When we do, the 'mercy' narrative for 14f13 and the 'total extermination' myth both collapse under the weight of logistical data.
It is medically and industrially astounding that hundreds of people arrived at an alleged 'extermination' camp like Sobibor or Majdanek and then simply left on trains to go elsewhere.
The Logistical Exit: Survivors like Wins, Cohen, and the Veterman sisters didn't just 'witness' Sobibor; they were processed through it and sent back out to the Lublin-Flugplatz or the Dorohucza peat camps. If these were 'one-way' death machines, this movement of human variables back into the industrial workforce is a massive logistical anomaly.
The "Tipper" Reality (Observed): Multiple survivors saw the elderly and the 'unfit' being thrown onto tippers and moved via narrow-gauge rail. While rumours suggested gassing, the primary observation remains: the physical dumping of 'broken parts' into a disposal system.
The "Shoe" Harvest (Observed): At the peat camps, the survivors watched as 80 men were stripped of their boots and shoes before being moved. In the ledger, the leather was a recoverable asset; the 'unfit' man was not.
The Empty Barracks (Observed): Jetje Veterman and the Polak sisters arrived at Sobibor and found it hermetically sealed and empty.
We didn’t know what Sobibor actually was. You didn’t see any people, the barracks were completely empty, no beds, nothing.’
They didn't see 'mercy' or 'hospice'; they saw the aftermath of a massive administrative deletion. 6,000 variables had been cleared from the spreadsheet in a single day (Aktion Erntefest) to prepare for the Red Army's advance.
The Variable of Utility: Every survivor listed was spared because of a specific functional output: assembling printing presses, sorting clothes, or planting potatoes. They weren't 'saved' by kindness; they were retained assets. This was the norm for most people of this ethnic or religious group.
When the state decided to stop 'fueling' those specific variables (the kJ/kcal deficit), the deletion was often crude, kinetic, and immediate—not the 'industrial' myth often used to sanitize the process.
The primary observations of these survivors show a system that recycled clothes and shoes while shooting the sick in the street to save on transport costs. That is the definition of Industrial Insolvency.
The trains didn't just go in; they came back out. The ledger shows a machine focused on utility, not extermination myths or mercy labels.