The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: camps/aktion.reinhard/treblinka/treblinka.gas2


Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Treblinka's passage to death..
Reply-To: kmcvay@nizkor.alamanc.bc.ca
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Demaniuk,Eberl,Hingst,Nikolai,Treblinka,tunnel

Archive/File: camps/aktion.reinhard/treblinka treblinka.gas2
Last-Modified: 1994/02/11

As a standard "feature" of the death camps, a camoflaged barbed wire
"tunnel" was used to funnel new victims into the gas chambers. At
Treblinka, the German and Ukrainian troops would beat the victims with
pipes and sticks to keep them moving.... One Treblinka survivor, who
wrote of his experiences in 1944 (See the reference at the bottom of
this article), described the process:

"To avoid the blows, the victims ran as fast as they could to the gas
chambers, the stronger pushing aside the weak. At the entrance to the
gas chambers stood ... Ivan Demaniuk and Nikolai, one armed with an
iron bar and the other with a sword, and they, too, urged the people
on with blows to push their way in -- 200-250 in a chamber of 16
square meters. When the gas chambers were full, the Unkrainians closed
the doors and started the engine. Twenty to twenty-five minutes later,
an SS man or one of the Ukrainians would peep into the chambers
through a window in the door. When they thought everyone had
suffocated, they orderd the Jewish prisoners to open the rear doors
and remove the bodies. When the doors were opened, all the corpses
were standing; because of the crowding and the way the victims grasped
one another, they were like a single clock of flesh." <1>

"To drown out the victims' screams on their way to the gas chambers --
so that they would not be heard throughout the camp -- the SS arranged
an orchestra."

"During the first five weeks of the killing operation in Treblinka, between
July 23 and August 28, about 245,000 Jews were deported there from the
Warsaw ghetto and Warsaw district; from Radom district, 51,000; from Lublin
district, 16,500, bringing the total in this period to about 312,500." <2>
[Editor's note: Treblinka deportation figures are available upon request -
contact kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca]

"SS Unterscharfuhrer August Hingst, who served at that time in Treblinka,
testified that 'Dr. Eberl's ambition was to reach the highest possible
numbers and exceed all the other camps. So many transports arrived that the
disembarkation and gassing of the people could no longer be handled (nicht
mehr bewaltigt werden konnte). <3> From the technical and organizational
standpoint, the camp was simply unable to absorb such a large number of
victims.

The three gas chambers, with their frequent technical breakdowns, were the
main bottleneck, and the surplus from each transport had to be shot in the
reception area. Many prisoners and more pits were required for burying the
thousands of people who were shot, in addition to those thousands who died
inside the densely packed freight cars on their way to the camp. The
problem of digging more burial pits was partially solved by a scoop-shovel
that was brought ... But since new transports arrived several times daily,
still more and more corpses were left unburied.

Dr. Eberl ... was incapable of maintaining control over the situation. With
transports coming in all the time and both corpses and clothing piling up
... transports would have to be delayed at way stations. The result was a
higher death toll in the freight cars themselves -- with all its
ramifications once the transport reached the camp.." <3>

<1> Jacob Wiernik, "A Yor in Treblinke" (A Year in Treblinka), New
    York, 1944, pp.20-21
<2> Tatiana Berenstein, B.Z.I.H., Warsaw, 1957, No. 21
    B.Z.I.H., 1952, No. 1(3); B.Z.I.H., 1955, No. 15-16.

<3>-------------------------------------------------------------
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps
Indiana University Press - Yitzhak Arad, 1987. ISBN 0-253-3429-7


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