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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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