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.

Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard

From the earliest days of their movement, Holocaust deniers have largely centred their arguments on the Auschwitz death camp. Surveying the literature which makes up so-called Holocaust Revisionism,  the obsession with Auschwitz is undoubtedly one of its defining features. Since the early 1990s, with the advent of the modern world-wide web, Holocaust deniers have taken to the internet to try and argue their case. Until recently, the ensuing online debates between advocates of Holocaust denial and their critics have likewise focused on Auschwitz.


Our friends at the Holocaust Controversies Blog have written an article that focuses on the Operation Reinhard camps, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, and the attempts to deny the reality of the murder at those camps by Holocaust deniers, Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, and Thomas Kues. They dedicated this work to the memory of Harry W. Mazal OBE.


The work is entitled, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard: A Critique of the Falsehoods of, Mattogno, Graf, and Kues. 

Final Destination Treblinka

As part of the greater Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe, the Treblinka concentration camp was second only the the more famous Auschwitz-Birkenau in terms of deadliness. With thousands of cattle cars stocked to the gills with Polish Jews converging on it day after day for months on end, its facilities orchestrated the annihilation of at least 800,000 of them, and quite likely more. All this we know from what remains of eyewitness testimony and physical evidence despite Nazi efforts to destroy both, and most especially train schedules whose 'final destination' declarations take on a macabre connotation with the understanding of what really occurred at the end of the line.


Massive and systematic executions at the Treblinka camp fell under the aegis of Aktion Reinhard (alternatively Einsatz Reinhard and Aktion Reinhardt), a facet of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage) devoted to physically exterminating the Jews of the Generalgouvernement of former Poland.


A article by Stephen Potyondi at the Holocaust History project demonstrates the evil purpose of the Treblinka death camp.


http://www.holocaust-history.org/operation-reinhard/final-destination-treblinka

The 'Disappearance’ of SS-Hauptscharführer Lorenz Hackenholt

August 23, 2010. Added The 'Disappearance’ of SS-Hauptscharführer Lorenz Hackenholt. A Report on the 1959-63 West German Police Search for Lorenz Hackenholt, the Gas Chamber Expert of the Aktion Reinhard Extermination Camps by Michael Tregenza

June 2006

June 10, 2006. Added a secrecy oath sworn by participants in the Operation Reinhard extermination camps.

July 2005

July 31, 2005. Added a Short Essay on Odilo Globocnik, the head of the Operation Reinhard death camps.
July 23, 2005. Added the complete text of Dr. Robert Jay Lifton's brilliant and horrifying book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, courtesy of Dr. Lifton and Sara Salzman.