TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

76 Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf: Treblinka
decades in an archive 187 and emerged into the spotlight only during the Demjanjuk
Trial. 188
In 1951, Léon Poliakov used the ‘Gerstein Report’ 189 in order to give substance
to the rumor of the ‘extermination camps’ in Poland. He quoted a long
excerpt from it and concluded as follows: 190
“There is little to add to this description, which holds good for Treblinka
and Sobibor as well as for the Belzec camp. The latter installations
were constructed in almost the very same way, and also used the exhaust
carbon monoxide gases from Diesel motors as the death agent.”
Two years later, Gerald Reitlinger took up Poliakov’s claims in his work
The Final Solution, 191 which rapidly became the classic of official historiography
and thereby ultimately asserted diesel exhaust gases as the extermination
method in the ‘eastern extermination camps.’ 192
Therefore it owes mainly to the ‘Gerstein Report’ that Treblinka, just like
Be��ec and Sobibór, received its diesel engine, and the steam chambers were
banished to the junk yard of history.
By means of this propaganda maneuver, official historiography raised the
carbon monoxide chambers of Treblinka (as well as of the two other ‘eastern
extermination camps’) at last to the status of ‘certain historical fact.’
187 Eliahu Rosenberg appeared as a witness at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (Session 66 of
June 6, 1961), but in his testimony did not touch on his report of December 24, 1947, in any
way. State of Israel. Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Record of Proceedings
in the District Court of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 1993. vol. III, pp. 1212-1215. The report
in question is also not mentioned by A. Donat in his biographical notes to E. Rosenberg (op.
cit. (note 4), p. 289).
188 Elias Rosenberg, Tatsachenbericht. Das Todeslager Treblinka, Vienna, December 24, 1947.
The document was printed on p. 133f. in facsimile by Hans Peter Rullmann in Der Fall
Demjanjuk. Unschuldiger oder Massenmörder?, Verlag für ganzheitliche Forschung und
Kultur, Viöl 1987. The passage cited appears there on p. 136 (p. 4 of the report).
189 The ‘report’ of April 25, 1945. PS-1553.
190 Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, Holocaust Library, New York 1979, p. 196.
191 G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution. Hitler’s Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939-
1945, Vallentine, Mitchell, London 1953, pp. 140-142; p. 148f. in the 1987 edition, note 181.
192 This clearly did not prevent Lord Russell of Liverpool from writing even in 1954 that in
Treblinka there had been committed “massacres by means of two methods, steam and gassing”:
The Scourge of the Swastika, Cassel & Company Ltd., London 1954, p. 242.