TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter III: Investigations, Camp Plans, Statistics 107
people murdered – therefore of people supposed to have been killed by means
of exactly described techniques – the shocking method of their calculations is
coupled with an astonishing lack of critical intellect, often verging on stupidity,
which is strikingly apparent in comparison with the two isolated representatives
of official historiography who have brought at least a modicum of critical
thinking to this field.
In 1953, Gerald Reitlinger was already writing: 268
“It would in any case have been impossible to gas the greater part of
the 310,000 Jews who were deported from Warsaw, together with an unknown
proportion from other ghettos, in three gas chambers, each measuring
fifteen feet square, in no more than seventy-five working days.”
Faced with salvaging what could be salvaged in light of this impossibility,
he deduced: 268
“Therefore a large proportion must have died in the trains.”
This is likewise an untenable claim: according to train schedule no. 548 of
August 3, 1942, the trip from Warsaw to Treblinka lasted only 3 hours and 55
minutes, 269 and even if the conditions in the overcrowded trains were execrable,
under no circumstances could they have resulted in mass deaths among
the occupants.
In an interview granted by Jean-Claude Pressac in 1995, published for the
first time in 2000 with changes made according his wishes, Jean-Claude Pressac
proposed his own original statistics for the alleged victims of the eastern
camps, in which he started from the basis of these camps’ attested capacity for
extermination: 270
“I have attempted to determine the number of victims of the camps designated
as extermination camps on the basis of material facts: the surface
area of the gas chambers and number of the persons which they could
hold; time for a gassing; number of gassings daily; number of transports
arriving daily with consideration of the actual capacity of the chambers,
etc. In comparison with the numbers of Hilberg, which are based upon
Polish sources, I arrive at the following figures:
Che�mno: 80,000 to 85,000 instead of 150,000;
Belzec: 100,000 to 150,000 instead of 550,000;
Sobibor: 30,000 to 35,000 instead of 200,000;
Treblinka: 200,000 to 250,000 instead of 750,000;
Majdanek: fewer than 100,000 instead of 360,000.” 271
268
G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution, op. cit. (note 181), p. 149.
269
Reproduction of the document in: Raul Hilberg, Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz, Dumjahn, Munich
1981, p. 178.
270
“Entretien avec Jean-Claude Pressac réalisé par Valérie Igounet, à la Ville-du-bois, le jeudi
15 juin 1995,” in: V. Igounet, op. cit. (note 91), pp. 640f.
271
The number of 360,000 Majdanek victims is not postulated by Hilberg, but was accepted in
Poland at the beginning of the 1990s as obligatory; meanwhile, the figure has been reduced