The Reconstruction of Treblinka

The studies which have resulted in this report were begun several years ago. Having worked extensively as a professional in the use of aerial reconnaissance imagery, Alex Bay had long been interested in the questions concerning the Holocaust. Beginning in 1998, he began researching the available facts about the death camps. During this period, he came across the CIA study of Auschwitz by Brugioni, and upon reading this he decided that a thorough and modern analysis of all the death camps was called for. This was to include Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. He soon came to realize that, despite the limited aerial photographic coverage, the task entailed much more time than he had anticipated. In part this was due to the difficulty of reconstructing events and physical plant, now 60 years in the past, using just a very few frames of aerial photography, secondary published sources, verbal testaments by victims and perpetrators, and a few scattered snapshots taken within the camp grounds. He  spent many hours trying to verify just a single fact. Much effort was spent on obtaining high quality copies of the photographs. To do this, he used the latest professional digital camera. Due to the increasing complexity of the project and personal time pressures, he  had to concentrate my efforts. Treblinka became the sole object of my research. Treblinka was chosen because it was the first camp he began to study, and the most familiar when he had to restrict the study to one camp at a time.

The Reconstruction of Belzec

Of the tragedies that played out at the three Action Reinhard camps, Belzec is the most mute. There are only two known survivors of Belzec to describe what they saw and experienced. One of the men, R. Reder, wrote a book published in Crakow in 1946. the second, named Chaim Herszman, was a witness before a Polish commission set up to investigate German war crimes. Herszmen had escaped from a train transporting him and last Jewish workers to Sobibor for execution Thet were being carried from from Belzec after the demolition of that camp. Hirszman lived to see the end of Nazism and had completed part of his deposition beore the Polish commission when it adjourned. He was to return the next day to complete his testimony. He never made it; he was murdered by Polish anti-Semites. Other first hand testimony exists from Polish and German Sources. The former were very restricted in the time and place they had to observe. The latter suffer from the obvious interest they had had in limiting their culpability.

An Introduction to the Einsatzgruppen

Like every historical event, the Holocaust evokes certain specific images. When the Holocaust is mentioned most people immediately think of the concentration camps. They immediately envision emaciated victims in dirty striped uniforms staring incomprehensibly at their liberators or piles of corpses, too numerous to bury individually, being bulldozed into mass graves.

Those are accurate images. Those horrific scenes are real. They happened. But they are not all of the Holocaust. They are merely the end product of the systematization of the genocide committed by the Third Reich. The reality of that genocide began not in the camps or in the gas chambers but with four small groups of murderers known as the Einsatzgruppen formed by Himmler and Heydrich immediately before the invasion of the Soviet Union. They operated in the territories captured by the German armies during the invasion of the Soviet Union and, with the cooperation of German army units and local militias, murdered over a million men, women, and children. It was a story that did not end until 1952 when Otto Ohlendorf, the last surviving commander of an Einsatzgruppe (Einsatzgruppe D), climbed the steps of the gallows to pay for the more than 90,000 murders his command committed.

An article at the Holocaust History Project by Yale F. Edeiken introduces the Einsatzgruppen.

The Dachau Gas Chambers

Although it is well known that the Nazis used homicidal gas chambers in such camps as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, it is not as well known that the Nazis actually constructed gas chambers, homicidal and otherwise in Dachau.

It may come as a surprise to many readers that Baracke X incorporates five gas chambers all of which were included in the original design. These were built and exist to this date. Most visitors to the Dachau Camp, drawn by horror to the main entrance of the crematorium and to the large room designated as a disguised homicidal gas chamber, rarely venture beyond these areas. The chamber (room # 8) is located next to a mortuary room, which in turn connects to the large area housing the four huge furnaces. 

In an essay at The Holocaust History Project website, Harry W. Mazal, OBE, discusses the evidence that theses chambers existed as well as their possible use.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/