Tipped into Gaschamber story and survived, where to locate

[Snafu]

I remembered once on the CODOH board, somebody posted a witness story about a young woman being tipped into a subterrenean gaschamber at Birkenau directly from a lorry (!).

If I recall it was a witness statement or something read from an affidavit in relation to a trial. Does anybody know a link to or a source for this one?

Thanks,
Snafu

[Hebden]

I remembered once on the CODOH board, somebody posted a witness story about a young woman being tipped into a subterrenean gaschamber at Birkenau directly from a lorry (!).

If I recall it was a witness statement or something read from an affidavit in relation to a trial. Does anybody know a link to or a source for this one?

Thanks,
Snafu

Somebody sent something which sounds like that to Mr. David Irving:

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/con ... elsen.html

A positive case of subterranean gas chamber blues.

[Snafu]

Well Mr Hebden, I am impressed!

Guess I'll try digging up the book The Belsen Trial then, since I fear the records, unlike the "Blue Series" of the IMT (which are available from the "Avalon Project" of Yale Law School), are not to be found online, am I correct?

Further, may I dare to ask where you acquired the affidavits of principally Sophia Litwinska and secondly, Regina Bialek, before handing them over to David irving?

Would mean a lot!

And once again, thank you!

Regards,
Snafu

[Hebden]

Well Mr Hebden, I am impressed!

Guess I'll try digging up the book The Belsen Trial then, since I fear the records, unlike the "Blue Series" of the IMT (which are available from the "Avalon Project" of Yale Law School), are not to be found online, am I correct?

To our knowledge, yes. We assume the official records of the trial are held in the Public Record Office in London.

Further, may I dare to ask where you acquired the affidavits of principally Sophia Litwinska and secondly, Regina Bialek, before handing them over to David irving?

You may. There's an appendix in the book which gives the text of all the affidavits as used in the trial (you are probably less impressed now). By all means get the book but the pickings from the viewpoint of a revisionist interested primarily in Auschwitz are rather thin.

[Hebden]

The following is an extract from Donald Bloxham's book Genocide on Trial (War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory) (OUP, 2001):

The prosecutor Colonel Backhouse did, however, differentiate between Auschwitz and Belsen, stating that conditions at the former were the result of 'a policy of deliberate extermination', whereas at the latter they were brought about by 'criminal neglect,...deliberate starvation and ill-treatment.' He introduced the idea of millions of death at Auschwitz, promising to bring forward a witness who would testify to 4 million murders at the camp (a number far in excess of current expert estimates of the total of dead at Auschwitz-Birkenau), but the Frankfurter Rundschau was again true to the tone of the proceedings when, amidst its detailing of the scale of the Auschwitz gas chambers, the Jews were notable by their absence. When Backhouse's witness subsequently arrived, she did reveal that the Auschwitz victims were predominantly Jews. Yet some of the reporting of the opening speech distorted Backhouse's message: focusing on Belsen, then describing Auschwitz as a camp with 'very much the same routine as Belsen'. The 4 million figure was faithfully reported in the New York Times and The Times, but again they referred only to 'people' cremated.

Alongside her estimate of the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz, the witness in question, a Polish-Jewish doctor, Ada Bimko, told of the operations of the gas chambers, and the techniques used to get the bodies to the crematoria, including the operations of the Jewish Sonderkommando. Her testimony actually seized the headline in The Times, and constituted one of the clearest assertions of the nature of Auschwitz throughout the course of the reporting of the trial; indeed it was only in the context of her appearance that the Frankfurter Rundschau got to grips with the Jewish aspect of the trial. The two other witnesses to give competent testimonies about the gas chambers at Auschwitz were also Jewish.

In a moving and informative appearance, Sophia Litwinska described a horrific ordeal when she was on the verge of being gassed. Charles Bendel had been deported from Drancy (Paris) to Monowitz in December 1943. From January 1944 his services were required in the 'Gypsy' camp in Birkenau. He was thus in a position to observe the arrival of transports of Jews, the 'selections', and the consequent gassings. He witnessed the delivery of the gas in Red Cross vans, and was one of the first to provide what by now is a staple of death-camp testimony, in his recollections of the 'basalt-like' appearance of the intertwined corpses in the Birkenau gas chambers. Most of this detail was related in The Times, though that newspaper concentrated more on the sensational 'near-death' experience of Litwinska than on the rest of her testimony. The information was all but absent from the Frankfurter Rundschau and the New York Times.