Iris wrote:Prudentregret, regardless of whether someone claims or assumes a figure of 10,000 or 1,000,000 "Jews who set foot in TII specifically" - "Is there any evidence that jews who were transited to Treblinka and actually set foot inside the TII camp were not killed and were transited elsewhere?"
What people are trying to tell you is that your question does not make any sense. It matters if ~1,00,000 vs 10,000 Jews step foot in T-II specifically. The Exterminationists say it was 750,000 - 1 million. If that is wrong then we can say that
they do not know where the Jews went directly from the transports. You are asking us for evidence for where they went after they arrived at unknown location(s).
But to get to the heart of the matter, the major question that this thread brings up, which Butterfangers already pointed out, is related to Graf's assertion in
Treblinka:
Since Treblinka was much too small to be able to accommodate the large number of Jews deported there at the same time, the transit camp thesis is, in fact, the single plausible alternative to the conventional picture of the extermination camp. Tertium non datur – no third possibility is given.
But there is a third possibility.
The third possibility is that the camp we all know as T-II was a sorting camp used for the collection, sorting, disinfestation, temporary storage, and transport of property confiscated from Jews throughout the course of resettlement and the liquidated ghettoes. This initiative was referred to as "Aktion Reinhardt". In this capacity, it was a
Jewish labor camp providing a workforce for the SS Clothing Works (SS-Bekleidungswerk) in the Warsaw district of General Government.
In Lublin, there was a major camp of the SS Clothing Works called
Alter Flugplatz which came under the command of Christian Wirth:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org ... field.htmlWirth's interest in T-II, under this interpretation, would follow from his appointment in the activity of the
SS-Bekleidungswerk, which fell under Department IVa of the SSPF Lublin Site Administration (making it ultimately accountable to the WVHA). Indeed Oswald Pohl intervened to replace Wirth's responsibilities for the delivery of confiscated property with Wippern, indicating that this activity ultimately fell under the auspices of the WVHA.
What was Department IVa in SSPF Lublin? It was code-named
Einsatz Reinhardt, which further ties the "Reinhardt" codename to the economic policy and initiative of the WVHA. At the WVHA trial it was understood that the "Reinhardt" code-name referred to these economic objectives and
not extermination (even the prosecution explicitly acknowledged this).
It is of course possible that this sorting camp could have doubled as a transit camp, especially to a limited degree. But we have strong evidence that "T-II" was
not the destination of hundreds of thousands of deportees. Consider:
The earliest references to a "Treblinka" or "Treblinka extermination camp" could not have referred to T-II.- The earliest reports of a "Treblinka extermination camp" preceded the operation of T-II. There were reports of an "extermination camp" in Treblinka receiving transports before T-II even opened. See A Premature News Report on a "Death Camp" for Jews: https://codoh.com/library/document/a-pr ... r-jews/en/ This news reports of a Treblinka camp receiving transports of Jews could not have referred to T-II and must have referred to some other location known as "Treblinka" which received these Jews and became the origin of extermination rumors before T-II was open.
- Wiernik's early map places the "extermination camp Treblinka" on the main Warsaw-Białystok line and not off the spur from the Malkinia-Siedlce branch line. The map itself also bears no resemblance whatsoever to the consensus "T-II" map:
This early map could not have referred to T-II.
- As discussed in this thread, the train schedules which have long been used as evidence for mass arrivals at T-II do not indicate that T-II was the destination for those transports. The transit timetables rule out that the "Treblinka" noted as the destination could have referred to T-II itself.
The final destination of these transports is documented as some other location which could not have been T-II but was known as "Treblinka". - Witnesses show confusion over different camps, with all the variations of maps which suggest witnesses had different ideas for what "Treblinka" was. Some witnesses confessed to being stationed at Malkinia and were convicted of being stationed at T-II.
So Iris, your demand to answer how many Jews were transited from T-II East is not related to what we are discussing. If mainstream historiography cannot even prove where Jews went from their transports, why are you asking Revisionists to prove Jews transited east from T-II? The theory being discussed is that T-II itself did not receive mass arrivals of the large majority of deported Jews, so your question is moot in context with the possibilities we are discussing.