For posterity. And to show where the atrocity tales really come from.
My personal favourite absurd atrocity stories are the murder and reduction to ash by metal floors loaded with electrical currents in Belzec; also the trap doors in the gas chambers where the bodies drop, also in Belzec. Carlo Mattogno cites one absurd report after another in the second chapter of his book.
Belzec. Page 11.
The first reports of Belzec appeared on April 8, 1942, a few weeks after the opening of the camp:16
“Among the Jews terrible desperation. We now know that every day there is a train arriving at Belzec from Lublin and one from Lvov, each with twenty cars. The Jews must get off, are taken behind a barbed-wire fence and murdered by an electric current[17] or poisoned with gas[18] and then the corpses are burnt[19]
16 Z. Klukowski, Dziennik z lat okupacji, Lublin 1959, p. 254.
17 “pradem elektrycznym”
18 “gazami”
19 “zwloki pala”
Belzec. Page 12.
On July 10, 1942, the Polish government in exile in London received the following report:22
“According to information from a German who is employed there, the place of execution is at Belzec, near the station, and is surrounded by barbed wire. Inside as well as around the fence, Ukrainians are on guard duty. The execution is done in the following way: A train full of Jews, after arriving at Belzec station, moves on a siding toward the fence which surrounds the place of execution. There is a change of crew. Beyond the fence, the train is handled by German personnel up to the point of unloadingwhere the rails end. Once discharged, the men go into a barrack on the right, the women into one on the left, to undress, supposedly for taking a bath. Then the groups go together into a third barrack with an electric plate[23] where the execution occurs. The bodies are then taken by means of a railway to a pit, about 30 meters deep, situated outside the fence. The pit was dug by Jews who have all been killed. The Ukrainian guards who are
assigned to the camp are to be murdered once the action is over. The Ukrainians on guard duty have lots of stolen money and jewelry: They pay 400 zloty for a liter of vodka, or 2,000 to have sex with a woman, and give her jewels.”
22 .Meldunek nadzwyczajny z miejsca tracenia w Belzcu z 10.VII.42r, SPP, Jcha 15, poz. 81.
The report was later included as “Annex 3” in the long account (Sprawozdanie No. 6/42)
drawn up in London on December 23, 1942, by the Interior Minister, St. Mikolajczyk, of the
Polish government in exile. HILA, Stanford University, Box 3, pp. 63f.
23. “z plyta elektryczna”
Belzec. Page 13.
The report dated July 10, 1942, reappears on December 1 in an Englishlanguage Polish review:25
“Extraordinary Report from the Jew-extermination Camp at Belzec. July 10th, 1942. According to information from a German employed at the extermination camp, it is situated in Belzec, by the station, and is barred off by barriers of barbed wire. Inside the wire, and all round the outside, Ukrainians are on guard. The executions are carried out in the following fashion: When a trainload of Jews arrives at the station in Belzec, it is shunted by a side track up to the wire surrounding the place of execution, at which point there is a change in the engine crew and train guards. From the wire onward the train is serviced by German drivers who take it to the unloading point, where the track ends. After unloading, the men go to a barracks on the right, the women to a barracks situated on the left, where they strip, ostensibly in readiness for a bath. After they have undressed both groups go to a third barracks where there is an electrified plate, where the executions are carried out. Then the bodies are taken by train to a trench situated outside
the wire, and some thirty metres deep. This trench was dug by Jews, who were all executed afterwards. The Ukrainians on guard are also to be executed when the job is finished. The Ukrainians acting as guards are loaded with money and stolen valuables; they pay 400 zlotys for a litre of vodka, 2,000 zlotys and jewellery for relations with a woman.”
The declaration made by Dr. Schwarzbart was recapitulated ten days later by the bulletin of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an article entitled “250,000 Warsaw Jews Led to Mass Execution: Electrocuting Introduced As New Method of Mass Killing of Jews.”26
25 Polish Fortnightly Review, December 1, 1942, p. 4.
26 “250,000 Warsaw Jews Led to Mass Execution: Electrocuting Introduced As New Method of
Mass Killing of Jews,” Daily News Bulletin, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, vol. XXIII, no.
273, November 25, 1942, p. 2.
Belzec. Page 13-14
In 1944, the story of the electrocution installation at Belzec was embellished with new and fantastic details. On February 12, the New York Times revisited the camp, publishing a more detailed report headlined “Nazi Execution Mill Reported in Poland: Fugitive Tells of Mass Killings in Electrically Charged Vats”:28
“Stockholm, Sweden. Feb. 11 (AP). A young Polish Jew who escaped from a mass execution in Poland with the aid of false identification papers repeated today a story that the Germans operated an ‘execution factory’ in old Russian fortifications in eastern Poland.
The Jews were forced naked onto a metal platform operated as a hydraulic elevator which lowered them into a huge vat filled with water up the victims’ necks, he said. They were electrocuted by current through the water. The elevator then lifted the bodies to a crematorium above, the youth said.
The youth said he personally had seen trainloads of Jews leave Rawna Luska [Rawa Ruska] in eastern Poland in the morning for the crematorium at near-by Beljec [Belzec] and return empty in the evening. He was told the rest of the story, he said, by individuals who escaped after actually being taken inside the factory. The fortifications, he added, were built by the Russians after they had occupied eastern Poland.”
Belzec. Pages 15, 16.
The second report published by A. Silberschein was called “Hinrichtungsund Vernichtungslager Belzec” (Execution and Extermination Camp Belzec) and spoke of an undefined “electric oven” as the means of assassination: 30
30 A. Silberschein, “Hinrichtungs- und Vernichtungslager Belzec,” in Die Judenausrottung in
Polen, Geneva 1944, vol. III, pp. 41f.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Murder Procedure.
Not a single one of all the hundreds of thousands brought to Belzec ever managed to escape. We are, therefore, unable to know the details of what was going on inside the camp. According to a German employed there, the camp is protected by a barbed-wire fence and is situated in the immediate vicinity of the station. Within the barbed-wire, Ukrainians are on guard duty. The executions take place as follows: On arrival, the train with the Jews is taken to a siding right next to the wire fence. Then the crew is changed. After unloading, the men are directed to the right, the women into the barrack on the left. They were ordered to undress and to prepare for an end. They then must enter a third barrack, which contains an electric oven. The executions take place in this barrack. After that, the corpses are taken by train to a ditch beyond the barbed-wire fence. The ditch has a depth of some 30 meters. It was dug by Jews.
Belzec. Pages 17,18,19
In a book published in Stockholm in 1944 and translated into English and German a year later, Stefan Szende gives the following account of Belzec camp:32
32 Stefan Szende, Der letzte Jude aus Poland, Europa Verlag, Zürich 1945, pp. 290-292; Engl.
Stefan Szende, Adolf Folkmann, The Promise Hitler Kept, V. Gollancz, London 1945/Roy,
New York 1945, pp. 159-161.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
When trainloads of naked Jews arrived they were herded into a great
hall capable of holding several thousand people. This hall had no windows
and its flooring was of metal. Once the Jews were all inside, the floor of
this hall sank like a lift into a great tank of water which lay below it until
the Jews were up to their waists in water. Then a powerful electric current
was sent into the metal flooring and within a few seconds all the Jews,
thousands at a time, were dead.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The metal flooring then rose again and the water drained away. The corpses of the slaughtered Jews were now heaped all over the floor. A different current was then switched on and the metal flooring rapidly became red hot, so that the corpses were incinerated as in a crematorium and only ash was left.
The floor was then tipped up and the ashes slid out into prepared receptacles. The smoke of the process was carried away by great factory chimneys. That was the whole procedure. As soon as it was completed, it could start up again. New batches of Jews were constantly being driven into the tunnels. The individual trains brought between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews at a time, and there were days on which the Belzec line saw between twenty and thirty such trains arrive.
Modern industrial and engineering technique in Nazi hands triumphed over all difficulties. The problem of how to slaughter millions of people rapidly and effectively was solved.
Belzec. Page 19.
A variant of the underground extermination was published in the infamous Black Book of the well-known Soviet propaganda writers I. Ehrenburg and V. Grossman, compiled in 1945 and 1946. A certain corporal (Obergefreiter) Erik Heubaum, a German prisoner of war, is said to have declared in a statement, about which no particulars are given, not even a date:33
“I have even seen how peaceful citizens were exterminated by means of gas. I drove some communications people to a minor station some 12 kilometers from Rawa Ruskaya. Near that station, in the middle of a forest, an underground encampment had been set up. One day, when I was there, a convoy of Jews was brought in. From closed cars, people were stretching their arms out the windows begging for water, but nobody was allowed near them. In the evening, these people were led into the forest. Anyone not involved was moved to the station building. The forest was surrounded by SD units. Then all of these people, without any distinction of age or of sex, had their clothes taken from them and were pushed into the underground encampment. Three quarters of an hour later, men from a different section were sent in to take out the corpses before another group was brought in. In this way, each night, up to three hundred people were killed.
I observed that scene over a period of eight days. An SS man from Saxony, Karl Horst, told me that those people were being asphyxiated by means of gas. He took part in this. The executions were directed by Sturmbannführer [major] Herbst, who came from Breslau.”
33 I. Ehrenburg, V. Grossman, Le livre noir, Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 1058f.
Well, well there's Grossman again, who not only makes up absurd claims about Treblinka as shown in Eric Hunt's new movie, but also about Belzec. Those Jewish Communists in Soviet Russia sure were busy constructing propaganda weren't they?
Belzec. Page 20.
But even the story of the descending or collapsible floor took on further variations. The files of the Soviet commission of inquiry for the Sokal territory, dated October 7, 1944, contain is the statement of a certain Rozalja Schelewna Schier:34
“My husband, who was working at the Belzec station at the time, told me the following:
At Belzec station two transports consisting of fifty to sixty cars arrive every day. Each car holds 100-120 persons. The train is taken to a siding in the forest, about one kilometer away. There a movable shed has been placed on the rails. It is marked ‘Baths for Jews.’ The people who have arrived are ordered to undress and enter the baths; they are promised work afterwards. When the bath house is completely full with 100-120 people, gas and high-voltage electric current are fed into it. Within 5 minutes, all the people in the bath house were dead. Inside the shed, the floor folds automatically, and the corpses fall into a previously dug trench where the victims are doused with a flammable liquid and burnt.”
A year later, the extraordinary collapsible floor at Belzec has changed again. On October 16, 1945, the witness Jan G. declared to the investigative judge of Zamosc:35
“By what means the Jews in the gas chamber were killed is difficult to say. At the time the Jews were driven into the gas chamber, a strong engine (250 HP) was running within the camp. It is said that the Jews were killed by means of the exhaust gas. It is untrue that the Jews were killed by means of an electric current; the voltage was much too low for masses of people to be killed that way. While the extermination camp was in operation, the ‘blacks’[36] in my railroad workshop fashioned 48 pairs of special hinges, and a large number of narrow-gauge rails were shaped by bending. From
this I conclude that the hinges were used for the floor of the gas chamber, which opened up after the Jews had been killed, thereby letting the corpses drop into carts, which took them to a common grave.”
34 GARF, 7021-67-82, p. 3.
35 ZStL, 252/59, vol. I, p. 1157 (translation from the Polish).
Belzec. Page 21.
In 1945, Stefan Tadeusz Norwind wrote:38
“Major corpse factories existed at Belzec, at Sobibor, at Majdanek, and also, it is said, at Palmyry in the region of Warsaw.[…] The factories had two types of installations. Some of them were electrical, i.e. naked people were pushed onto a steel plate and then killed by a high-voltage current (this took place e.g. at Belzec). Others consisted of hermetically sealed gas chambers where, again, naked people were killed by means of steam or gas
(this took place at Tremblinka [sic]).”
The story of extermination by means of electricity also appears, with other fanciful details, in the above-mentioned Black Book:39
“Belzec is a terrifying place where the Jews were exterminated. And this place is surrounded by the utmost secrecy on the German side. But the railway men who operate the convoys of the condemned tell their family and friends the truth about the extermination of the Jews at Belzec. The Jews were made to go into a gigantic hall, which could take in up to a thousand people. Along the walls, the Germans had strung uninsulated electric wires. The same wires were in the floor. When the hall was full of naked people, the Germans switched on the current. It was a gigantic electric chair, which we never thought could have been invented even by the most warped mind.”
38 S. T. Norwind, Martyrium eines Volkes, 1945, pp. 102f.
39 I. Ehrenburg, V. Grossman, op. cit. (note 33), pp. 213f.
Says it all doesn't it?
