Sobibor - Holocaust Propaganda And Reality - Unity of Nobility ...

30 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
According to Abrão, Szmajzner’s confidant, the Diesel engine was
later abandoned and replaced by Zyklon B (p. 190f). As far as we know
and apart from Szmajzner, the use of this pesticide for mass killings at
Sobibór has only been claimed by a certain Joseph Tennenbaum. 35
Among the nonsense which Szmajzner asks his readers to believe we
have the following stories:
Franz was an eighteen-year-old Jew who used to live in the Oppeln
ghetto and had been a “good boy,” but “once the Nazis made him
commander of the Jews in camp III, his personality changed radically.”
He eventually went so far as to believe that he was “a real German,
even a staunch defender of Nazism. He believed that the Jewish
race had to be eradicated and his visible paranoia was such that
he executed his tasks with a degree of sadism not even attained by
the Germans.” (p.192)
On certain days up to 8,000 Jews were killed at Sobibór; the total
number of victims reached nearly two million (p. 270).
In the fall of 1942 a “Walt-Kommando” (Szmajzner’s spelling) was
created; its task was to fell trees and chop wood because with “the
oven burning the whole time, it required gigantic amounts of fuel”
(p. 207). The members of this “Walt-Kommando” had to perform
back-breaking work, but their daily food ration consisted only of a
piece of bread, “for the Germans felt that they were strong enough to
carry out this momentous work without proper food” (p. 231f).
The German Jews who had been deported to Sobibór, while having
“suffered terribly under Nazism, still believed in the Führer and his
gang” (p. 230). Therefore, “they attempted most diligently to work
together with the monsters” (p. 231).
Such absurdities notwithstanding, Szmajzner’s book contains a few
credible passages, such as the following:
“I had become, by the way, a hardened consumer of vodka. […] I
had no trouble getting my bottle, and be it through the dangerous
barbed-wire fence. I must admit to the reader that, at Sobibór, I
drank enough for the rest of my life.” (p. 222)
If there is one passage in Szmajzner’s book of which we believe
every word, it is this one!
35
Joseph Tennenbaum, In Search of a Lost People. The Old and the New Poland, The
Beechhurst Press, 1948, p. 285, quoted after Paul Grubach (cf. section 2.4).