TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter IV: The Alleged Extermination Facilities in Treblinka 131
2. It had therefore been planned at the level of Himmler, through Department
IV B 4 of the RSHA (Eichmann).
3. The implementation of the extermination plan had been entrusted to
Globocnik, who was directly responsible to Himmler for it.
The RSHA allegedly gave Gerstein the job of changing the way the gas
chambers functioned. Therefore, the order had to have been issued by
Himmler. Himmler had supposedly done so because the system employed at
that time – diesel engine exhaust gases – was unsatisfactory. Globocnik had
been in full agreement with this, and only he would have been able to inform
Himmler about the inefficiency of this method of extermination.
According to Michael Tregenza, Globocnik ordered the restructuring of
Treblinka after inspecting it on August 19, 1942, and entrusted this task to
Christian Wirth as “Inspector of the SS-Sonderkommando ‘Operation Reinhard.’”
371
We therefore return to our earlier question:
How can so inefficient a technique for carrying out the Reich’s secret extermination
program have been okayed at the highest governmental level?
Gerstein belonged to the SS Main Operations Office, Office Group D,
Sanitation, of the Waffen-SS, Hygiene Department. Why did the RSHA turn
to this office in order to change the killing system then in operation, yet not
inquire about a more effective one? If the use of engine exhaust gases had
been planned, why hadn’t the RSHA contacted the Reichsgesundheitsamt
(Reich Office of Health) in Berlin and the research laboratories of I.G. Farbenindustrie,
which, as we have seen, had substantial experience in this field
at its disposal?
If the RSHA had decided to use prussic acid in the gas chambers, why did
it commission Gerstein to pick up liquid prussic acid instead of Zyklon B?
And finally, if the diesel exhaust gas chambers proved to be so inefficient,
why had their method of operating not been changed?
Thus, although the killing method allegedly used in Be��ec had been
proven to be inefficient and the RSHA – i.e. Himmler – is supposed to have
decided to modify it at the beginning of June 1942, the construction of the
second gassing installation in Treblinka at the end of August/beginning of
September 1942 is supposed to have begun using exactly the same inefficient
diesel principle! And who – apart from Himmler – could have issued the order
for the construction of this second installation?
Thus, the ‘Gerstein Report’, which Arad describes as “one of the first and
most important documents relating to Operation Reinhard” (sic), 372 is not only
devoid of any sort of evidentiary weight, but on the contrary, it also sheds ad-
371 M. Tregenza, op. cit. (note 299), pp. 9f.
372 Arad, op. cit. (note 72), p. 102.