TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

50 Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf: Treblinka
In August as well as the following months, as the acceleration of the
campaign exceeded the possibilities of the steam chambers, the transports
were loaded into cars, which were sprinkled with a layer of lime and chlorine,
so that after the arrival in Treblinka, only corpses of a violet-blue
color were tossed out of the cars. All had suffocated under torment in the
cars. For these transports (for example from Mi�dzyrzec Podl., Kielce)
Treblinka was but the place of burial. From this information it emerges
that a punctual and precise execution of the determined plan was important
to the Germans. The methods described above were practiced when
the capacity of the machinery of death in Treblinka was faltering. The teeth
of the corpses pulled out of the steam chambers in Treblinka were examined.
Gold teeth and bridges were extracted by means of dental instruments.”
In 1946, Eugen Kogon cited in his well-known book Der SS-Staat the
eyewitness narrative – originating from the previous year – of one Oskar Berger,
who, according to his own statements, had been deported in July 1942
from the ghetto of Kielce to Treblinka and had escaped in September of the
same year. He stated inter alia: 120
“Sometimes there were shipments that held only corpses. I believe these
people must have been gassed in the cars, for I never noticed any wounds.”
He added that in the beginning the Jews who had arrived in the camp were
shot. During his stay in Treblinka, the Germans had built “a small brick building.”
121 From then on, according to the witness, “new arrivals were gassed
rather than shot.”
These killing techniques – engine exhaust fumes from fuel mixed with
toxic fluids, stationary gas chambers, a mobile gas chamber, gas with a delayed
effect, gas with immediate effect, shootings, train cars strewn with unslaked
lime, electric current 122 – were mentioned in the reports about Treblinka
only sporadically and without further details. The murder method that
occupied the foreground, which was described most often as well as in the
most detail, was scalding with steam.
120 Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat. Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager, Karl Alber
Verlag, Munich 1946, p. 170; we quoted from the English translation: E. Kogon, The Theory
and Practice of Hell, Secker & Warburg, London 1950, p. 170.
121 According to other witnesses, this building already existed in July 1942.
122 See following section.