TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter II: The Development of the Idea of Treblinka as an Extermination Camp 73
power supply. This was all the more true of those which – like Treblinka –
were not connected to the local electric supply. In Treblinka, the electric
power supply was no emergency device, but rather the camp’s own plant for
supplying it with the electricity necessary for its functioning; consequently it
had to be in operation 24 hours a day. The generator of such a power supply
was usually driven by a diesel engine. In view of the importance of this engine,
a special engine – naturally new – was normally employed. How technologically
complex such an installation was regarded emerges from, for example,
the “Kostenvoranschlag über Notstromanlage” (cost estimate for back-up
power plant) which was prepared for the concentration camp Auschwitz on
November 10, 1940, by the firm of Georg Grabarz, Master Electrician, from
Gleiwitz. 174 We shall return to this later.
Where was the power plant located in Treblinka? As we have seen,
Wiernik claimed that it had been installed by the first “gassing house.” This is
also claimed by Rajzman, who reports:
“The engines in the ‘bath rooms’ ran 24 hours without interruption.”
By the “bath rooms” the supposed homicidal chambers are meant. That
one or more engines are supposed to have been in operation “24 hours without
interruption” cannot be explained on the basis of the requirements for an extermination
program, in which such engines would have run only a few hours
a day, but solely by the necessity of producing electricity for the camp around
the clock.
That the story of the engine exhaust gas chambers lacks any kind of basis
in reality and is nothing else but a propaganda fairy tale is shown beyond
doubt by Wiernik’s description of the corpses of the alleged gassing victims:
175
“All were equal. There was no longer any beauty or ugliness, for they
all were yellow from the gas.”
Relying upon the statements of three eyewitnesses, Rachel Auerbach
writes: 176
“The bodies were naked; some of them were white, others were blue
and bloated.”
As a matter of fact, the victims of carbon monoxide poisoning exhibit a
cherry-red or rosy red coloring. 177 This is caused by carboxy hemoglobin,
which forms as a reaction of carbon monoxide with hemoglobin in the blood.
What happened next is extremely odd:
The Polish government was acquainted with Wiernik’s writing and even
mentioned it in its official report, submitted to the Nuremberg Tribunal, con-
174
RGVA, 502-1-128, pp. 45-49, see Document 21 in the Appendix.
175
A. Donat, op. cit. (note 4), p. 159.
176
Ibid. (note 4), p. 36.
177
Friedrich P. Berg, op. cit. (note 99), p. 439 as well as his footnote 22.