TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter IV: The Alleged Extermination Facilities in Treblinka 141
supposed to follow from German documents – never published, however –
that on June 29, 1943, an excavator from Treblinka was sent to the Adam
Lamczak firm in Berlin; two more excavators were supposedly shipped to
Lublin or Poniatowa or Trawniki in November 1943 (the exact date and exact
place of destination are not named). 404 It apparently occurred to nobody that in
reality these excavators could have been stationed in Treblinka I, where they
found employment in the mining of gravel in the pit there. The sole ‘proof’ for
the presence of these machines in Treblinka II is two drawings produced by S.
Willenberg in the 1980s, in which one sees a part of the camp with an excavator
in the background! 405
10. Early Cremations
Arad describes the early history of the alleged burning of bodies in Treblinka
as follows: 406
“During Himmler’s visit to the camp at the end of February/beginning
of March 1943, he was surprised to find that in Treblinka the corpses of
over 700,000 Jews who had been killed there had not yet been cremated.
The very fact that the cremation began immediately after his visit makes it
more than possible that Himmler, who was very sensitive about the erasure
of the crimes committed by Nazi Germany, personally ordered the cremating
of the corpses there. A cremation site was erected for this purpose in
the extermination area of the camp.”
Here Arad is simply repeating what �ukaszkiewicz had written in 1945: 407
“In February or March 1943, Himmler visited the camp (witnesses:
Poswolski, Stanis�aw Kon, Wiernik, Kudlik, Reisszmann [sic]. After this
visit the bodies were cremated in mass.”
This claim is untenable just as much from the standpoint of the witness testimony
as it is historically invalid. Rajzman had stated in particular at his first
interrogation on September 26, 1944: 408
“In the first months – as I was told – the bodies were buried and covered
with a layer of earth, at which point the dentists extracted the gold
teeth as soon as the bodies were dragged out of the chambers.
At my arrival in the camp, the bodies were being burned in primitive
furnaces, the pyres blazed day and night. Clouds of smoke covered the sky
over the camp to the point that we entered into a constant zone of darkness.”
404 S. Wojtczak, op. cit. (note 61), pp. 149f.
405 S. Willenberg, Revolt…, op. cit. (note 83), drawings on unnumbered pages.
406 Y. Arad, op. cit. (note 72), pp. 173f.
407 USSR-344. GARF, 7445-2-126, p. 320a (p. 4 of the report).
408 USSR-337. GARF, 7445-2-126, p. 242.