TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter IX: Transit Camp Treblinka 293
ports, a public health commission brought disinfection equipment and mobile
ovens for heating water for the showers to Treblinka in November 1942. 911
In January 1942, there was already great anxiety concerning sanitation and
hygienic conditions in the district of Galicia. 912 Cases of typhus fever had appeared
in the district of Kolomyya, 913 but other districts were probably also afflicted,
so that the governor instructed all district physicians to answer a
“questionnaire concerning bathing and delousing facilities.” 914 Among the
various delousing facilities was even a “fumigation booth for scabrous
horses.” 915 The situation was becoming critical to the point that placards in
German, Ukrainian, and Polish were posted, warning about typhus fever.
These had been designed by the “District Administrator in Tarnopol. Dept. of
Health” and explained the type and danger of the epidemic and the necessity
of combating its carriers: “Without lice there is no typhus fever. Fight lice infestation!”
Then it warned:
“A large part of the population, but most of all the Jews, is infested with
lice!”
The text of the placard closed with the admonition to see a physician at the
first sign of symptoms of the disease. 916
The resettlement to the east of the Jewish population of the General Gouvernement,
which had been living in the ghettos under difficult hygienic circumstances,
therefore required transit camps with bathing facilities, disinfection,
and delousing.
5. What Was the Fate of the Deportees?
The fate of the Jews deported to the east is one of those questions for
which there is no sure answer, due to the lack of documents. It is closely
bound up with the even more complex problem of Jewish population losses
during World War II, which is not the subject of the present study. 917
911
Wydawnictwo Centralnej �ydowskiej Komisji Historycznej (ed.), Dokumenty i Materia�y,
op. cit. (note 40), p. 176.
912
Letter of January 19, 1942, of the Kreishauptmann of Horodenka on the subject of “Delousing
Facilities”. DAL, R-35-9-313, p. 3.
913
Letter of 5 February 1942 of the District Physician in Kolomyya on the subject of “Typhus
Fever in the District”. DAL, R-35-9-313, p. 1.
914
DAL, R-35-9-320, pp. 1, 5. R-35-9-313, p. 16.
915
DAL, R-35-10-452, page number illegible.
916
Poster “Fleckfieber!” (typhus) DAL, R-35-9-444, p. 2.
917
The most comprehensive studies on this question are: on the side of the orthodox historians,
the anthology Dimension des Völkermords, edited by W. Benz, op. cit. (note 80), and, from
the revisionist side, W. Sanning’s The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, op. cit. (note
79). A comparison of the two works has been understaken by Germar Rudolf: “Holocaust