TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter II: The Development of the Idea of Treblinka as an Extermination Camp 49
afterward. His report belongs to the series of reports, which was sent to the
Polish government-in-exile in London on March 31, 1943: 117
“Outside of the barracks the women undressed completely, and together
with the naked children they were led to the huge barracks of ‘Treblinka
II’ through a side exit on a path, which was surrounded on both sides
by a wire net. One supposedly takes a bath in these barracks, but in reality
a sudden death by gas occurs. I do not know what kind of gas is used, but I
know from a colleague who worked three weeks in ‘Treblinka II’ that the
corpses have a bluish color. […] I do not know how many people have
been killed in Treblinka; the piles of clothes and shoes are enormous and
attain a height of two stories; they take up a huge surface. […] At the head
of the group of Jewish workers are a Jew, the commandant of the camp,
and his deputy. [sic!]”
In the same series of reports, one reached London that likewise spoke of an
extermination of Jews in “gas chambers.” Information about what sort of gas
was in use was not provided, but there are supposed to have been “about a
hundred gas chambers” (!): 118
“In this gigantic wooden house, where there were approximately
10,000 people in standing positions, an SS officer greeted them very politely
and said the following, word for word: ‘You have worked too little up
to now for the German State, and because of this the German Reich has
decided to resettle you in the Ukraine, so that you work more. You are in a
transit camp here. You will proceed directly to the bath.’ […] They finally
reach their destination – apparently baths, but in reality gas chambers.
They walk, a few of them at a time, into one chamber, and there are certainly
about a hundred of these chambers. […] The bodies are piled up in
even layers, a hundred at a time, and chlorine is sprinkled on them.”
Among the reports delivered to London on March 31, 1943, was one entitled
“Charakterystyka metód Treblinki” (Characteristic of the Methods of
Treblinka), in which three further murder methods were listed: shooting, trains
with unslaked lime, and water vapor: 119
“At the beginning of the so-called resettlement operation, when the
technical preparations of the machinery of death were still not perfected,
the Germans killed their victims in Treblinka in an extremely simple manner:
a machine gun opened fire upon a crowd of men, women, and children
who were brought forward, and they were shot down, each and every one
of them. A crew of gravediggers threw all – the bodies of those killed, the
critically wounded, as well as those lightly wounded – into the pits prepared
up to that time and strew them over with earth.
117 Ibid., p. 148.
118 Ibid., p. 151.
119 Ibid., pp. 153f.