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Yes, it is. It is universally agreed that gassing operations began with the transports from Warsaw on July 22. Can you cite one historian who places the beginning of gassing operations before that? There's also the July 7th letter from the first Commandant of that Treblinka camp, Irmfried Eberl, which states that the "Work Camp [Arbeitslager] Treblinkla" will be ready on July 11th. But by July 9th there were already reports, published by the London-based Dziennik Polski:
Of course, that CODOH article shows even more rumors of an extermination camp in Treblinka going back to May 1942, where the original method of mass murder was described as "lethal rods." That was only the first of many variations of alleged method of mass murder. By November 1942, less than four months after the camp was open, the Warsaw ghetto resistance published claims of 2 million deaths by steam chamber in Treblinka (German disinfestation chambers during the war were often operated with steam):
Eberl's letter is also interesting because he refers to Treblinka as a work camp, not an extermination camp. It's not the only instance where an AR camp is explicitly identified as having a non-homicidal function. Himmler's 5 July 1943 directive for example reads:
And Osawld Pohl (head of SS-WVHA and camp system) replies:
There's a third document where Himmler's assistant referred to Sobibór as a transit camp. How do historians explain these documents? They say that the SS were using camouflage in their communications in order to maintain the utmost secrecy in their extermination operation. That's especially ironic given a London newspaper blew the lid on the Treblinka extermination camp before it was even operational. Historians don't even acknowledge these contradictions, they just act as if they don't exist because Revisionists are the only ones willing to point them out and show that the historiography does not explain the known evidence.
By the way, Oswald Pohl himself worked closely in Operation Reinhardt with both Himmler and Globocnik. He and the rest his SS-WVHA denied any knowledge of an extermination operation. He would have known if Operation Reinhardt was an extermination plan, and he denied any knowledge of that.
Heoss' statements are critical precisely because they were clearly cobbled together from previous accounts. The significance of Hoess is that having the story come from a camp commandant gives it a lot more credibility than a story said to be written by anonymous escapees.
The credibility of Wiernik for example has always been enigmatic. Imagine if Wiernik really did witness everything he claimed, and planned the great revolt and escaped after heroically killing a Ukrainian guard with an axe. Why wouldn't he be an international superstar and why would his account be virtually unknown? You cannot even buy A Year in Treblinka on Amazon despite the importance of his remarkable, first-hand account of the single most unusual event in WWII.
Goering, Hans Frank, Oswald Pohl; that is a notable list of top leadership that would have known about this extermination operation in General Government, but they maintained their denial through the end. Heoss gave credibility to these tall tales by recycling them under duress, but he was never in Treblinka; and historians can't even "choose their own adventure", as they so often do, and a pick a date of his visit that's consistent with the rest of the timeline.
The case is so straightforward that you are reduced to contradicting the conclusion of the report you are citing. "Łukaszkiewicz found mass graves!" According to Łukaszkiewicz, he did not. The murder, cremation, and burial of upwards of a million people would leave metric tonnes of evidence. Why are you reduced to these sorts of appeals for something that ought to have an enormous amount of physical evidence that should have easily been found at any point since 1945? Because the claim is extraordinary and the evidence is very weak.
It's a matter of the quantity and quality of the evidence not measuring up to the extraordinary nature of the claims. You are claiming that upwards of a million people were murdered, cremated, and buried in this small camp, and that all these cremations happened in about 120 days (with zero contemporaneous reports of such an enormous, non-stop cremation operation). The lack of evidence is the problem, and the reasons for the lack of evidence could be multiple. But ultimately, "it didn't happen" is the only plausible explanation for why such an allegedly enormous operation like this would have left behind so little evidence. And what little was left behind was in the custody of the Soviet Union, which denied access to outside investigators and even modified structures in existing camps to advance the gas chamber claim.
You've already dodged a defense of the official narrative regarding "Operation Reinhard". To answer your question, you first have to understand what Operation Reinhardt denoted, which was not what historians claim it denoted. Why are you so interested in the "Reinhard staff" if you aren't even interested in what Operation Reinhardt actually was? The reason is that the Revisionist interpretation of Operation Reinhardt fits the evidence far better than the mainstream story of a secret extermination plan named in honor of the Hangman Heydrich.
Stangl died under suspicious circumstances before his appeal was heard. We cannot say how it would have unfolded if he had not died in custody like Himmler, Globocnik, Eberl, etc.
Actually "considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention" is vague. You are starting with your own preferred conclusion and filling in the blank. But Revisionists claim that this was referring to the liquidation of the ghettos where Jews were indeed rounded up, robbed of their possessions, and deported. The Revisionist interpretation of these events explains both the March 27th entry and the March 7th entry which discusses a continuation of the Madagascar plan after the war. Your interpretation may explain the later but it does not explain the earlier entry. The Revisionist interpretation explains both entries.
This is the exact same logic used to hoodwink an entire country into believing atrocities that never happened, like the so-called mass graves at the Kamloops Indian Reservation schools. "The Catholic Church kidnapped those children in order to genocide their culture. You are a genocide denier if you think these GPR results aren't good enough to conclude that this is a mass grave of victims of the Catholic Church!"
In any serious investigation, witness testimony would be followed by excavations to try to identify remains, determine cause of death, and conclude if that evidence coincides with the various accounts. This has not happened in Kamloops and it has not happened in Treblinka.
It did happen in the German investigation of the Kayn Forest massacre. When the Germans discovered the mass graves of the Katyn Forest, they invited international observers and even released American POWs to monitor and report on the investigation to Western authorities. They (NSFW) excavated the remains in the mass graves, conducted autopsies, identified the remains they could, tried to determine cause and time of death, and documented everything. And the Germans were still accused of this crime by the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg, and the truth was denied until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Not a single iota of similar investigation has happened for the alleged murder of around 2 million people in the so-called AR camps. Contradictory witness accounts and confessions extracted in tribunals are not a substitute for a minimum level of investigation that any reasonable person should expect in order to believe these extraordinary claims.
In The Treblinka Death Camp by Chris Webb it is stated,
(I don't have a proper page number because I have the book as an epub).
But you've said you don't put much stock in mainstream historians anyways, so what does it matter? I'm claiming it is perfectly possible the gas chambers were tested prior to the first transport from the Warsaw Ghetto considering that A) there are multiple eyewitness accounts from inmates of the Treblinka labor camp that there were indeed earlier transports and B) this was reportedly done at the other two Reinhard camps before they were fully "operational."
Even if I granted that this paper reported gassings in Treblinka "ahead of time" as it were, I'm not sure how this helps the revisionist case. We agree Jews were sent to Treblinka, just strongly disagree on what happened to them afterwards. Granting that Dziennik Polski is reporting Jews sent to Treblinka before Jews were sent to Treblinka (whether they were gassed or not), does that imply no Jews were sent to Treblinka?
The May report (I've tried to find a copy of the cited source online, I can't) doesn't even mention gas. I have no doubt prisoners were killed at Treblinka long before the gas chambers were installed. It is interesting that "lethal rods" are described as the murder weapon, because a number of inmates of Treblinka work camp described the guards beating prisoners to death with clubs.
The Warsaw underground did not inspect Treblinka for itself.
"The Nazis tried their best keep their mass murder secret, but considering the massive size of the operation, it inevitably leaked out." There is no contradiction there.
Most people didn't care about the Nazi war on the Jews. It was considered a sidebar to the eastern front. Allied propaganda before and after the war focused intently on Nazi oppression of the nations of Europe, but the Jews were rarely if ever singled out despite their place at the center of the Nazi worldview, and if they were mentioned at all it was as one in another list of peoples tormented by the Nazis.
I am actually not sure why Łukaszkiewicz would write that he'd found a pit full of a "large quantity of ashes as well as human remains" and that "numerous human remains were found by these excavations, still partially in a state of decomposition. The soil consists of ashes interspersed with sand, and is of a dark gray color, granulous in form. During the excavations, the soil gave off an intense odor of burning and decay," and then say that he found no mass graves. Perhaps he meant mass graves of intact corpses? I can't read Polish, so I'm relying on the translation in Mattogno's Treblinka book. Perhaps something is lost in translation.
But this sounds like exactly what you're asking for. The supposed sites of the mass graves were excavated and "large quantities of human bone and ash" were discovered, which is precisely what was expected based on the accounts of the eyewitnesses.
So if Reinhardt was an operation to plunder the Jews and ship them east, the question as to why so many of the men assigned to these camps came from the former euthanasia program remains.
Armed men driving people out of their homes and onto waiting trains is not something that is "considerably circumspect" and "doesn't attract too much attention." If that's not attention grabbing nothing is. And it would make this the only time in his entire diaries that Goebbels uses the word "liquidation" to mean anything other than "killing." The revisionist interpretation of this passage is tortured at best.
I don't think the Nazis had necessarily decided to kill every Jew in the world immediately. The Holocaust was much more haphazard and piecemeal than most people think, that much is true. AR was about getting rid of Polish Jewry in particular who were seen as an especial threat due to their proximity to the eastern front and concentration in large cities.
On that note, there is also Himmler's speech to an assembly of Wehrmacht generals at Sonthofen in 1944. It's about the solution to the Jewish question, and how it was necessary for the security of the Reich's eastern borders. He says,
He is talking about Reinhard, which is clear from what he says a few sentences later,
No one doubts the Jews from those cities were sent to the AR camps. And if there was any doubt about what Himmler meant by "exterminate" (since he uses the infamous 'ausrottung') he makes it clear later, when he says:
No ambiguity there. The word is is "umbringen," kill. The Jewish Question was solved in Poland, and it was solved by killing the Jews of Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin, and Lvov, inclusive of women and children.
The fact is, it's ambiguous how many Jews were sent to the camp known as "Treblinka II." The only existing train schedules identify the destination as Treblinka, with a stop right before at the Malkinia junction. Treblinka was the name of a train station some distance from the Jewish camp called TII. Malkinia was a significant hub right next to the Treblinka station. The disinfestation facilities at Treblinka II were likely used as a transit camp in some capacity, but I believe TII was primarily a Jewish labor camp, as stated in Erbel's letter- used for the sorting, storage, and disinfestation of confiscated Jewish property during Operation Reinhardt. But the train schedules do not identify TII as the destination of those transports. It's not known how many Jews set foot in TII.
Because it's another example of historians and their apologists playing "choose their own adventure." All historians since Arad said that gassing operations began in Treblinka on July 22nd or July 23rd. But you cite a 2014 book by Chris Webb, who no doubt included this speculative line in his book in response to these Revisionist findings published a few years before. It's not based on evidence, it's just a helpless attempt to patch another hole in the official narrative made by Revisionist findings.
It identifies a death camp in Treblinka. There were thousands of German camps, and only 5 are claimed to have been death camps. What are the chances that the May report correctly predicted a death camp in Treblinka before it was even constructed? Astronomical. The more likely explanation is that the rumors which preceded the existence of the camps formed the basis for later accounts.
There's a very big gap between "no Jews were sent to Treblinka II" and "a million Jews were sent to Treblinka II." The fact that Dziennik Polski is reporting something before it happened according to official historiography lends credence to Revisionist claims that the nature and extent of this activity was misrepresented by politically-motivated rumor and propaganda, and polluted later accounts and tortured confessions. At any point in the past 75+ years, investigators could have done due diligence and followed basic standards of scientific investigation to determine approximately how many people were killed at Treblinka, but they have specifically forbidden investigators from doing so. The accusers do not want investigators examining the most important evidentiary fact of the matter. That is evidence in itself for Revisionist conclusions.
The euthanasia program ended, so the special staff was available for this special task in the General Government. Much of this former staff were truck drivers employed in the transportation of valuables in General Government. This was the entire point of Operation Reinhardt. The deportation operations were decentralized and handled by the local districts. Operation Reinhardt specifically denoted the sorting, disinfestation, transportation, and utilization of confiscated Jewish property. This was centrally coordinated by SSPF in the district Lublin. It was not a codename for the extermination of the Jews as claimed by official historiography. It was an economic initiative named after Reinhardt- State Secretary of the Ministry of Finance.
No it was not, it was about the utilization of property confiscated from the Jews throughout the course of resettlement and liquidations of the ghettos.
The context of those passages, which you omitted, was the execution of partisans as the result of uprisings. Revisionists do not deny that reprisals of partisans was a very real part of the history of this time and resulted in large deaths tolls. It's the gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, the alleged plans of a "Final Solution" as extermination, and the hyper-inflated death tolls that they challenge.
The Sonthofen speech also provides support for Revisionist arguments, right in a passage you just referenced:
You know full well that the Revisionists do not deny the liquidation of the ghettos; they merely deny that nearly all the evacuated Jews received a 1-way ticket to gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The ghetto liquidations were motivated by hygienic concerns of epidemic typhus, economic concerns for the confiscation of wealth and industry, and security concerns as stated here by Himmler. Not some top-secret plan to exterminate world Jewry with engine exhaust in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
The coup de grâce is the Revisionist critique of the alleged cremation operation at Treblinka, which is not credible in the size, scope, and methods attested to.
Even using extremely conservative estimates of the fuel that would have been required for the operation of cremations at Treblinka, the daily fuel required is roughly similar to the amount of wood combusted in a moderately-sized forest fire. This was a small camp with a small workforce. There is no logical explanation, or documentary evidence, or witness testimony, that explains how this alleged operation was logistically possible. For that matter, it was supposedly carried out without a single contemporaneous report from local villagers or the Polish Underground operating in the area of these raging infernos that were allegedly burning every single day during the cremation operations.
A London newspaper reported on gassing at Treblinka before it even opened, but nobody reported on the raging infernos from the open-air cremation pyres for months straight. That is not logical.
A significant proportion of people would become Revisionists if they learned the specific details of what historians claim happened at Treblinka. The devil is in the details, and the details are not believable. Even allowing that many, perhaps tens of thousands of Jews, died at the camp called TII, the 750,000+ estimated death tolls are equally as ridiculous as the original 4.5 million claim at Auschwitz, or 1.5 million claim at Majdanek. Circling back to the Caroline Colls investigation, her GPR results are not consistent with the shape, size, and scale of graves that would have been required to bury 700,000+ people. The alleged death toll is not credible and the ban on scientific investigation of the alleged mass graves is evidence that authorities are not confident in what they would find if they conducted those excavations.
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