According to the Muzeum Treblinka website, the first transport to TII was 23 July 1942. The camp was being constructed from April 1942. A report from early July, about transports to Belzec, which had opened in March 1942 and TII, which opened 4 months later, that thinks TII had also started to take transports in early July, is not odd, or suspicious. It made a mistake. It is not circumstantial evidence of anything. You just think it is significant, because it gives you reason to doubt evidence that does not fit your desired narrative of property, rather people being sent to the camp.PrudentRegret wrote: ↑Sat Oct 05, 2024 7:29 pm .....
Another piece of circumstantial evidence are the premature reports of an extermination camp at Treblinka, well before "Treblinka II" ever opened and allegedly received its first transport.
The newspaper report is from 11 July 1942, by all accounts before "T-II" even opened and received its first transport:
The situation of the Jews presents itself even worse. The matter of the Warsaw ghetto is well known. Hunger, death and diseases continually and systematically threaten the Jewish population. In the area of Lublin on the night of 23-24 March [1942] the Jewish population was deported. The sick and disabled were killed on the spot. All children aged 2-3 years from the orphanage, who numbered 108, were sent away from the city along with their nurses and murdered. Altogether 2,500 people were murdered that night, while the remaining 26,000 were sent to camps in Bełżec and Tremblinka [wywieziono do obozów w Bełżcu i Tremblince]. From Izbica Kujawska 8,000 people were deported in an unknown direction. Reportedly in Bełźec and Tremblinka the killing is going on with the help of poisonous gas [za pomoca gazów trujacych].
No, that article made a mistake and believed that in the second week of July, both Belzec and TII were taking transports, whereas TII did not open for transports for another 2 weeks. However, from the evidence you post next, we know that whilst TII was not yet open for transports, Jews were being killed there and buried in mass graves.Although "T-II" was not open according to historical accounts, we know by the accounts I have just learned about that the "Malkinia Transit Camp" was certainly operational and this time, and would have received transports of Jews and become the origin point of extermination rumors before T-II was even open. Thus, both Weirnik's map and the Dziennik Polski article suggest this Malkinia transit camp was known as "Treblinka."
The report is that people, imprisoned in the TI labour camp, were being used to dig mass graves at TII and the Jewish labourers were then being killed and buried in those graves. Construction of TII started in April 1942, so reports from May and June, already had evidence to reasonably suspect TII was to be a death camp. Your suspicions are contradicted by the evidence you are presenting, which you are misinterpreting.This is not the only report of a "Treblinka death camp" before T-II was even opened, it goes back to May 1942!
So the June 9, 1942 article on the "Death Camp in Trenblinka [sic]" could not be referring to the as-of-yet not opened "T-II." It is most likely referring to the Malkinia Transit camp which was also called "Trebinka". Likewise, claims that Jews were "sent to be gassed in Treblinka" already in March 1942 would pertain to rumors surrounding the transport of Jews to the already-existing Malkinia Transit camp that the Germans set up for Jews along Nurska street and, according to Wiernik, south of the main Warsaw-Bialystok line.“At that time, i.e. in late May and early June 1942, the clandestine press published reports on two camps in Treblinka: the labor camp and the death camp. The first reference to the killing center there is to be found in a text by Gutkowski entitled ‘The Scroll of Agony and Destruction,’ which probably constitutes the draft of an Oneg Shabbat press bulletin. In the entry dated May 29, 1942, we read: ‘There are two camps in Treblinka: a labor camp and a death camp. In the death camp people are not murdered by shooting (the criminals are saving ammunition), but by means of a lethal rod [in the Yiddish original: troytshtekn].’ This item, without mention of the ‘lethal rod,’ was printed on June 2, 1942 by the newspaper Yedies. The next issue of that paper, dated June 9, 1942, carried an article entitled ‘The Death Camp in Trenblinka [sic]’ In it we read:
‘A Pole who managed to bribe his way out of the camp relates: ‘I worked with the German personnel of the labor camp. The Poles present there were assigned the task of digging huge pits. The Germans brought a group of about 300 Jews every day. They were ordered to undress and get into the pit. The Poles then had to cover the pits with soil, burying the people there alive. After they finished their work, they were shot.’”
No, you have quoted a report which is the source of the information TII was to be death camp, before it opened. It came from a Pole who got out of TI, who saw that mass graves were being dug during the construction of TII, and that Jews used to dig the graves were being kiled and buried in them. That is evidence from which it was reasonable for the report to conclude TII's death camp status.There's one another note from Nessies' source regarding the operation at Tluszcz:
Yes, the Malkinia Transit Camp (AKA Treblinka) would have been the point of confiscation of the property carried by settlers. What would that camp have done with the property? According to that protocol, they would have needed to turn that property over to the Reinhardt personnel which constructed a secret Jewish sorting camp for this purpose- at the camp we all call "T-II". Note that this was also the exact pattern of the Pabianice Sorting Camp:On arrival they were disinfected in quarantine at 109 Leszno Street. A note preserved in the files of the JSS in Krakow, recording a message sent by a representative of the JSS for Kreis Warschau-Land, reports that of more than 800 Jews resettled from Tluszcz on 27 May 1942, only 582 people reached the quarantine section of the Warsaw ghetto, without any money or personal property.
This image shows the location of the "salvage sorting camp" Pabianice relative to the transit camp:Pabianice is first mentioned for the purpose of the central sorting site of the plundered Jewish property in a memo of the Ghetto Administration of 31 March 1942 on a forthcoming visit of the Kulmhof commandant. On 3 April 1942, Lange - and possibly already Bothmann [5b] - met in Litzmannstadt to discuss the transport of effects from Kulmhof with the Ghetto Administration. In the absence of the head of the office Hans Biebow, his deputy Friedrich Ribbe was to state the position of the Ghetto Administration that the Sonderkommando is responsible for the transport and has to use its own trucks to bring the effects of their victims to Pabianice or sent them by train (Document 89).
Lange maintained that "he has no vehicles at his disposal to drive luggage to Pabianice", which Ribbe - knowing that the Sonderkommando trucks travelled long distances to the Ghettos when deportations by train were not feasible - countered "to order the trucks on their way to the counties over Pabianice". The first such "load" to Pabianice was to go off on 9 April 1942 despite that it was "still not quite clear how the processing of the luggage shall proceed in Pabianice...since the storage rooms over there have to be first freed from machines" (Document 90). The earliest indication of a load with Jewish effects to Pabianice dates to 29 April 1942, when such truck had to refuel in the Ghetto Litzmannstadt. [6]
The "salvage sorting camp" (also called "special camp Pabianice", "work site Pabianice-Kulmhof", "Jewish working camp Pabianice-Dombrowa" and "camp Dobrowa") [7] was erected as "secret state affair" on the property of a former textile factory in the Litzmannstädter/Warschauer-Straße 127 in Pabianice
Note the distance between where the property was confiscated- the transit camp, and the "secret state affair" Jewish camp which was a salvage camp. This would suggest the same pattern at Treblinka, with the Malkinia Transit Camp (AKA Treblinka) receiving the transports, having their property confiscated, and then delivered on the industrial-use rail to the secret Treblinka Jewish Work camp we all currently call "T-II."
Thus, the Malkinia Transit Camp was the original source of the rumor of a "Treblinka Extermination Camp." A secret Jewish work camp for salvaging personal property was opened at the location we all recognize as "T-II" in order to conduct Operation Reinhardt in the Warsaw District.
The chronology, using the evidence you provide is;
April 1942, construction begins on TII.
May and June 1942, reports emerge that mass graves are being dug at TII and Jews are being killed there, hence the evidence to believe it is a death camp.
Early July 1942, a report about Belzec and TII, mistakenly thinks TII is already taking transports, which do not start until the last week of July. There are already reports of Jews being killed at TII, and that gas is being used.
Regarding the report of the closure of the ghetto in Tlusczc, your interpretation does not fit the evidence. The report is that Jews were sent to the Warsaw ghetto, and they arrived with no property. That just means the Nazis at Tlusczc stole everything, except the clothes the people were wearing. What happened to the rest of their personal possessions, is not known.The property would have been confiscated at the Malkinia Camp, then transported to the Treblinka Work Camp (AKA T-II) on the rail I posted above, where it would have been sorted, deloused, clothing removed of the Jewish star, searched for hidden valuables, and the sorted and clean property was transported to Operation Reinhardt headquarters in Lublin. From there, the confiscated valuables and currency were transported by Globocnik to WVHA headquarters in Berlin, delivered to the Reichsbank by SS Capt. Bruno Melmer (who according to testimony claimed the entire operation was named after Fritz Reinhardt), and deposited into accounts owned by the Reich Ministry of Finance- the ministry of State Secretary Reinhardt.
You speculate where it was sent to, as you suggest "settlers" went to Malkinia, where it was seized. How you conclude that from the report about Tlusczc, is beyond reason. You have no evidence from any witness or document that property was seized at Malkinia and it was then taken to TII for sorting. Your speculation does not even fit the evidence that you provide.