TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter VII: The Role of the Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories 225
Bl. 583): ‘…You must give me a guarantee that the bodies of these deceased
Jews will either be burned or buried in every location, and that nowhere
can anything else of any kind happen with these bodies…”
He does not say that this letter bore the heading “IV B 4 43/42 gRs (1005),”
does not assign to it the designation ‘1005,’ and confines himself to the following
comment: 655
“The undertaking received – in accord with a nomenclature procedure
of the RSHA – the designation ‘1005.’”
Thus, the letter in question dates from November 20, 1942, and not from
February 20. This would mean that the designation ‘1005’ for the operation
would have been assigned a full five months after its start! On the other hand,
in the letter the Jews are referred to as “dead,” not ‘shot’ or ‘killed.’ Moreover,
the disposal of the bodies could take place by cremation or burial, which
means that the Himmler letter need have no connection with the excavation
and cremation of corpses of Jews who had been shot, and that what we are
dealing with here is a primitive hoax.
According to official historiography, 652 SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel
took charge of ‘Operation 1005’ and “The operation commenced in June 1942
with attempts to burn the corpses in the CHE�MNO extermination camp.” 652 In
the initial phase, the bodies in the alleged eastern extermination camps are
supposed to have been exhumed and cremated. We have dealt with this issue
in detail in Chapter IV, in the prototypical case of Treblinka.
The second phase is supposed to have lasted from the beginning of June
1943 until the end of July 1944. During its course, the mass graves on Soviet
and Polish territory are supposed to have been emptied and the traces of the
massacres eradicated.
The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust shows a map with the most important
locations, at which these activities are supposed to have transpired. It is a huge
area, which extends from north to south across approximately 1,500 km (from
the North Sea to the Black Sea) and from west to east across about 1,300 km
(from west Poland to the German-Soviet front). 656 Beginning with the camp
Janowska at Lemberg, each region is supposed to have been assigned its own
‘Sonderkommado 1005,’ which consisted of officers of the Sicherheitsdienst
(Security Service) and from the Sicherheitspolizei (SIPO, Security Police), of
men from the Ordnungspolizei (regular police) and of dozens or hundreds of –
mostly Jewish – prisoners, whose task was the hands-on accomplishment of
the work. ‘Sonderkommando 1005-A’ and ‘Sonderkommando 1005-B’ are
supposed to have been active in Kiev. Both, so it is said, were then transferred.
‘Sonderkommando 1005-Mitte’ supposedly began its work in Minsk.
655 A. Streim, “Die Verbrechen der Einsatzgruppen in der Sowjetunion”, in: A. Rückerl (ed.),
NS-Prozesse, op. cit. (note 251), p. 78.
656 Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, op. cit. (note 18), article “Aktion 1005,” vol. I, p. 12.