Table of Contents - The Barnes Review

Treblinka was opened on July 23, 1942. On this day occurred
the start of the mass deportation of Jews from Warsaw to that camp.
On November 15, 1942, the resistance movement of the Warsaw ghetto
published a long report in which it was pointed out that so far, a
million Jews had been murdered in Treblinka (this comes to 20,000
per day). Fixed gas chambers were not named at all as a murder
weapon; rather, steam chambers, whose functions were described in
detail, were reported, and altogether the eyewitnesses mentioned for
Treblinka no less than 11 different killing methods, which I shall enumerate
here.
1. Exhaust fumes from “poison fuel.”
2. A mobile gas chamber, which was moving along the mass
graves, dumping the bodies, directly.
3. A delayed-action gas, which made it possible for the victims
to walk to their graves. Then they would faint and fall into graves.
4. Slaked lime.
5. Electricity (electric current).
6. Shooting with machine guns.
7. Chlorine gas.
8. Steam.
9. Suffocation by pumping air from chambers.
10. Zyklon B.
11. Diesel exhaust gases.
The last version became generally
accepted in 1946; and yet in December of
1945, the Polish government submitted a
paper deeming the Nuremberg Trials, according
to which hundreds of thousands of
people were suffocated with steam at Treblinka
(Nuremberg Document 3311-PS).
According to witness testimonies, the
bodies were buried first in gigantic
mass graves, but later when the
impending German defeat became
obvious, they were burned out in the open,
almost without any fuel. The whole Treblinka
legend stands and falls, thus, with the existence of these graves. In
August 2000, I spent several days in Treblinka and Belzec with the
young Australian engineer Richard Krege. Belzec was another socalled
extermination camp where 60,000 Jews supposedly were murdered
(according to the wartime version, with electricity, and according
to the after-war version, with Diesel exhaust). Krege worked in the
area of these camps with a ground radar instrument, which is used to
find mass graves, but also mineral resources. This instrument shows
disturbances in the soil structure. Neither in Treblinka, nor in Belzec,
was there a zone where giant graves could have been located, nor disturbances
in the ground structure, except at a place in Belzec where
a grave of some 100 people could have existed. Richard Krege is publishing
his study which means the final end to these myths.
What was Treblinka if it was not an extermination camp? The
answer is clear: it was a transit camp. The fact that many Jews
passed through Treblinka to Majdanek and other work camps in the
Lublin area is now admitted by the Jewish historians Adam Rutkowski
and Tatjana Berenstein. In 1968, The Bulletin of the Jewish
Historical Committee in Warsaw published the eyewitness report of a
Jew named Samuel Zylbersztain, who came to Majdanek after a
short stay in Treblinka, another alleged “extermination camp.”
Besides the “extermination camp” Treblinka and “extermination
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The Jews of the ghetto of Lodz,
of their own free will, and
without any resistance, boarded
the trains to Auschwitz. They
would have known if gas
chambers were waiting for
them. If they had been, they
would not have boarded
those trains.
camp” Majdanek, Zylbersztain survived eight other, ordinary camps,
because the title of his testimony is: Memories of an Inmate of Ten
Camps.” He is a living example that the Germans did not exterminate
the Jews.
Less simple is the proof that Treblinka also served as a transit
camp for the occupied Soviet territories, but, in one case,
at least, there is definite proof of this. On July 31, 1942, eight
days before the opening of Treblinka, the Reichskommissar
of White Russia, Wilhelm Kube, protested in a telegram against the
deportation of 1,000 Polish Jews from Warsaw to Minsk. At this time,
all deported Jews from Warsaw came to Treblinka, so that the mentioned
Jews must have been sent via Treblinka. This one transport is
already sufficient to make the thesis of Treblinka as a pure extermination
camp tumble like a house of cards.
In official historiography, the number of Jews killed in the east
is given as up to 1.5 million. The greatest part of the victims were
supposed to have been killed by special deployment troops. So far,
Revisionists have dealt with this topic relatively little, although
Walendy had already, in the early 1980s, objected to the official count
of victims. A comprehensive investigation about the question of special
forces and executions on the eastern front is presently being prepared,
but it will probably take years until its publication.
The central argument against the
inflated number of killings in the east lies in
the absence of proof. After the Soviets had
murdered 4,000 Polish officers in Katyn, the
Germans found the mass graves of the victims,
and they were individually identified.
In the same way, almost all the more than
8,000 Ukrainians who were murdered by the
communists near Vinnitza could be identified
in 1943. It is to be noted that the Soviets
never showed a single mass grave with victims
of the Germans that could be compared
with those of Katyn or Vinnitza.
The most notorious of all alleged
German massacres of Jews in the east was
that at Babi Yar. On September 29, 1941, no
less than 33,000 Jews were supposed to have been shot there. In the
following months, it is said that 10,000 were added to this. In order
to erase the traces of the crime, the Germans supposedly excavated,
two years later, all the corpses and burnt them; this project was
completed in September 1943. But the area around Babi Yar was
photographed on September 26, 1943 by the Air Force. The referenced
photograph does not show any trace of mass burnings,
indeed, not any recognizable human activity. The vegetation and
topography are untouched (John Ball, “Air Photo Evidence” in
Germar Rudolf, Dissecting the Holocaust). Thus it is clearly proven
that the Babi Yar story deals with horror propaganda. Since no
other alleged German massacre on the Eastern Front had been so
propagandistically utilized as that of Babi Yar, the logical conclusion
must be that the other alleged mass murder reports were also
either invented or at the least, highly exaggerated.
In the year 1980, the British Jewish historian Walter Laquer
published a popular book entitled The Terrible Secret (Wiedenfeld
and Nicolson, London). He proved that Auschwitz was anything else
but an isolated camp and that nothing which occurred in Auschwitz
could have remained a secret for long. The Allies, who had an outstanding
communication network, had to find out everything within
weeks; but they never reacted to the horror stories about the exter-