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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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