Vanguard News Network
VNN Media
VNN Digital Library
VNN Reader Mail
VNN Broadcasts

Old March 27th, 2020 #1
alex revision
Senior Member
 
alex revision's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Posts: 27,577
Default Bełżec: Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research and History

Bełżec: Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research and History

By Carlo Mattogno

For official historiography it is now indisputable dogma that, from March 1942 onwards, three extermination camps were set up on Polish soil – at Bełżec, at Treblinka, and at Sobibór – where mass murder of jews deported there took place in homicidal gas chambers using the exhaust gases from diesel engines. However, this is neither the first nor the only version that circulated during the Second World War; it was the eventual result of a slow narrative evolution, the main phases of which can be followed in the propaganda, in the original historical version, and in the judicial proceedings of that time. Until 1946, there circulated several totally different versions of the extermination methods allegedly used in those camps, which nonetheless received the blessings of the Polish authorities. With respect to the number of victims in these camps, various absolutely ludicrous figures were reported: 3 million for Treblinka, now reduced to 870,000; some 2 million for Sobibór, now standing at 250,000; and 3 million for Bełżec, 3 against 600,000 at present.

How and why did the present ‘authorized’ version of official historiography come about? And what is its historical value? In the book Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp? Jürgen Graf and I have exhaustively answered those questions for the alleged extermination camp at Treblinka. The present study undertakes the same task with respect to the alleged extermination camp at Bełżec. In the discussion which follows, I shall obviously make use of the results arrived at in my Treblinka book, without repeating the corresponding evidence each time, although some quotations become necessary.

I did not, on the other hand, think it necessary to reiterate the technical objections valid with respect to the use of diesel exhaust gases for homicidal gassings; they apply for the Treblinka camp just as much as for Bełżec. Aside from this, I have been able to make use of a precious tool – archeological research at the ‘scene of the crime’ – which unfortunately was not available at Treblinka and which, as we shall see, will furnish us with conclusive criteria for testing the official theses.

Bełżec originated in the summer of 1940 as a work camp, but from November 1941 on – according to the official historiography – it took on a new function as a camp for total extermination, in line with the camps at Sobibór and Treblinka created later. This means that the jews deported there were totally exterminated on arrival, except for an insignificant handful of people who were allowed to live a little while longer in order to carry out labor tasks. The alleged extermination activity at Bełżec began on March 17, 1942, and ended in November or December of that year. The camp was allegedly equipped, successively, with two extermination installations. The first, made of wood, was allegedly built some time in November and December 1941; it measured 12 by 8 meters and housed three gas chambers 4 by 8 meters each. The second structure was claimed to have been set up in June of 1942 after the first had been torn down. It was a brick structure that contained six gas chambers arranged on either side of a central corridor, each measuring 4 by 5 meters.

For Bełżec, and the other two camps as well, the study of the origins and development of the sources of information during the war and in the postwar period is of vital importance for an understanding of how the currently dominant historical version of Bełżec came about and what level of credibility can be ascribed to it.

In the stream of information on the Bełżec camp which emerged during the Second World War, the alleged system of murder later to be embraced by the official historians – gas chambers using the exhaust gas from a diesel engine – does not appear at all. Instead, we find all manner of methods, not only diverse in nature, but in part quite fantastic.

The first reports of Bełżec appeared on April 8, 1942, a few weeks after the opening of the camp:

Among the jews terrible desperation. We now know that every day there is a train arriving at Bełżec 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 or poisoned with gas and then the corpses are burnt.”

On July 10, 1942, the Polish government in exile in London received the following report:

According to information from a German who is employed there, the place of execution is at Bełżec, 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 Bełżec 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 unloading where 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 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.”

On November 15, 1942, Dr. Ignacy Schwarzbart, a member of the Polish National Council, made a declaration, in which he paraphrased the above report:

The methods applied in this mass extermination are, apart from executions, firing squads, electrocution and lethal gas-chambers. An electrocution station is installed at Belzec camp. Transports of settlers arrive at a siding, on the spot where the execution is to take place. The camp is policed by Ukrainians. The victims are ordered to strip naked ostensibly to have a bath and are then led to a barracks with a metal plate for floor. The door is then locked, electric current passes through the victims and their death is instantaneous. The bodies are loaded on the wagons and taken to a mass grave some distance from the camp.”

In 1944, the story of the electrocution installation at Bełżec 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”:

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.”

In 1946, Simon Wiesenthal wrote an article with the title “Seifenfabrik Belsetz” (soap factory Bełżec), his second of two dedicated to this fanciful topic. In this article he outlined out an imaginary history of the Bełżec camp, crammed with historical falsifications. In January 1942, Wiesenthal says, the Bełżec area was inspected by a commission of top SS officials, among them Adolf Eichmann, whom Wiesenthal promotes to the rank of “SS General” for the occasion! The commission decides to make “the available installations the starting point for the erection of a place of extermination.” For this purpose, “a site of 3 square kilometers” (300 hectares, or about 750 acres) was fenced in. The area of the camp proper came to about 6 hectares, or about 15 acres. Then comes his description of the alleged extermination procedure:

The people, squeezed together by the SS, hounded by the Latvians and Ukrainians, ran into the ‘bath’ through the open gate. It could hold 500 persons at a time. The floor of the ‘bathhouse’ was made of metal, and showers hung down from the ceiling. When the space was full the SS delivered a 5,000-volt current to the metal plate. At the same time, the showers spewed out water. A brief scream and the execution was over. An SS surgeon-major by the name of Dr. Schmidt ascertained the death of the victims by looking through a peephole, the second door was opened, the ‘corpse commando’ arrived and quickly removed the dead. – There was now room for the next load of five hundred.”

Even before the Second World War had ended, the legend of a factory established at Bełżec for the manufacture of soap from the corpses of the allegedly exterminated jews was being circulated. A report sent on August 30, 1942, by the Geneva Office of the jewish Agency for Palestine to the US government and forwarded by the latter to the Holy See on September 26, 1942, contains the first germs of this legend:

Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto is taking place. Without any distinction all jews, irrespective of age or sex, are being removed from the Ghetto in groups and shot. Their corpses are utilized for making fats and their bones for the manufacture of fertilizer. Corpses are even being exhumed for these purposes. These mass executions take place, not in Warsaw, but in especially prepared camps for the purpose, one of which is stated to be in Belzek [sic].

As we saw in section 1, by 1944 the legend of a factory for human soap at Bełżec had already started to take shape, and was disseminated in its initial form by A. Silberschein. In fact, the reports on Bełżec mentioned above state that in this camp “the fat from the corpses was drained in order to – make soap from it” and that the Germans had set up “special factories for the production of soap and shoe polish from jewish fat.”

This juicy story then appeared in the Black Book in the following form:

In another place, still in the Belzec camp, there was a soap factory. The Germans selected the fattest people and killed them to make their soap. Arthur [Israelevitch] Rosenstrauch, a bank clerk from Lvov to whom we owe this report, even held a bar of this ‘jewish soap’ in his hands. The Gestapo bandits did not deny the existence of such a ‘factory’. When they wanted to scare a jew, they said to him ‘we will make soap from you.’”

Simon Wiesenthal recounts profusely the fantastic story of the alleged manufacture of human fat:

Toward the end of 1942, the terrible words ‘transport for soap’ were uttered for the first time! It was in the Government General, and the factory was in Galicia, at Belsetz[sic]. In this plant, between April of 1942 and May of 1943, 900,000 jews had been used as raw material […]; certain solids [of the corpses] were separated and sent to northern Germany, and there, a special oil for U-boat engines was produced. The human bones went into the Lemberg bone mill, and there they were turned into fertilizer. […] What was left, the residual fat, was needed for soap production. In parallel with the human transports, other substances such as soda, kolophonium, and sand were transported as secondary raw materials. The Belsetz plant had a daughter company at Danzig; a portion of the intermediates were sent there. Belsetz was a model plant. Therefore, transports to this location had priority with the Ostbahn [Eastern Railroad]. The plant needed raw materials … and wheels turned for victory!

We see that before he embarked on his lucrative career as a ‘Nazi hunter,’ Simon Wiesenthal pursued the slightly less noble activity of a catcher of lies!

For several years now revisionist historical criticism has been demonstrating that the two fundamental witnesses to the assumed extermination of jews at Bełżec – Kurt Gerstein and Rudolf Reder – are totally untrustworthy. Since the middle of the 1980s, the so-called ‘Gerstein report’ has been analyzed either by myself or by Henri Roques; I also studied Rudolf Reder during that period. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the two testimonies contain glaring contradictions, in particular on the essential point of the technique used for the gassings. This, together with other contradictions, absurdities, and incongruities, has led Michael Tregenza to a total and unconditional acceptance of revisionist positions:

At the end of 1945, only seven surviving jews were known to have survived Bełżec, one of whom was murdered a year later at Lublin by Polish anti-Semites. Of these seven survivors, two – Rudolf Reder and Chaim Hirszman – testified to the mass murder in court after the war. Only Rudolf Reder, the most famous survivor, published a brief account of his experience in Krakow in 1946.”

The official thesis of the extermination of 600,000 (or hundreds of thousands) of persons at Bełżec is therefore in contradiction on every count with the material data we have examined. Still, according to Kola’s statements, 33 mass graves were dug within the camp. How many corpses did they actually contain? In section 4.2. we have calculated that they would have had a capacity of some 170,500 corpses.

But since this purely theoretical figure is already destroying the Holocaust pretense of a mass extermination allegedly perpetrated at Bełżec, it cannot, at the same time, be accepted as a working hypothesis to determine the full scope of the facts. Either an extermination of at least 434,500 jews (the figure resulting from the report of SS-Sturmbannführer Höfle of April 28, 1943) did indeed take place at Bełżec, or there was no mass extermination at all, for if we accept a lower number – for example the hypothetical 170,500 victims mentioned above – the result would be that the remaining 264,000 deportees were taken elsewhere – alive and kicking – away from the Bełżec camp.

The capacity figure of 170,500 corpses for the actual mass graves, is, however, based on two unrealistic assumptions: a maximized surface/volume of the graves and a maximized density of corpses in them. The Germans closed Bełżec in September 1943. The Soviets arrived in October 1944.

In the preceding chapters I have shown that not only is the massacre of the jews transported to Bełżec not confirmed by any material or documentary proof, but also that the results of Polish archeological research refute it; therefore, we are left with only one possibility: Bełżec was a transit camp – of the same type as Sobibór and Treblinka.

This is not the place to reiterate the evidence I have gathered in another, much more exhaustive study. Thus I shall limit myself to stating that, having excluded the hypothesis of a massacre, we can regard as true everything that the witnesses described as ‘camouflage’ to fool the victims. I refer in particular to the speeches by the SS regarding the destination of the deportees: They were in a transit camp, from which they would be moved to other labor camps in the east, but first they had to take a shower and be disinfested.

And, as Jean-Claude Pressac has made clear, the first alleged gassing building can be interpreted only as a building for disinfestation by means of steam.

Significantly, no witness has ever mentioned the existence at Bełżec, or anywhere near the camp, of a disinfestation unit, which, however, would have been indispensable – even if mass exterminations had taken place – for the treatment of the enormous quantity of the victims’ garments, before those could have been loaded on trains and shipped to Lublin.

In this study, I have described, first of all, the literary formation of the thesis, presently upheld by official historiography, of mass exterminations at Bełżec by means of diesel engine exhaust gas; I have shown that it represents the culmination of the propaganda legends spread during the Second World War by professionals in atrocity propaganda like Jan Karski. I have exhaustively demonstrated how this version came to prevail over the other two versions – just as untrue – of extermination by means of electrocution and by means of “trains of death.” I have further shown that the two principal testimonies on which the extermination thesis has been tendentiously constructed – those of Rudolf Reder and of Kurt Gerstein – are not only in irreconcilable disagreement with each other over the type of engine used for the alleged murder of the victims (diesel for one, gasoline for the other), but even with respect to its very use as an instrument of murder: Whereas Gerstein attributed the death of the victims in the alleged gas chambers to the exhaust gases from his diesel engine, Reder asserted that the exhaust gases of his gasoline engine were released into the open air instead of into the gas chambers! The official thesis, based on the so-called ‘Gerstein report,’ has therefore been openly denied ever since the immediate postwar period.

Once the murder method had been selected – exhaust gases from a diesel engine – the judiciary quickly entered the fray on the side of historiography, to give it its official blessing and to disseminate it worldwide through the farcical trial testimonies as a worthy epilogue to the black propaganda of the war years.

The thesis of mass extermination at Bełżec not only collapses under the weight of its own principal main witnesses, it also runs up against insurmountable material impossibilities, especially those concerning the cremation of the alleged victims. Polish archeological research has dealt the final death blow to the official thesis: Its findings categorically disprove the possibility of burying 600,000 (or several hundred thousand), corpses, and the quantity of bodies, bones, and ashes that was discovered are absolutely incompatible with such an enormous massacre. Moreover, the total absence of archeological evidence of the alleged extermination installations completely refutes the conflicting testimonies that are the basis for the extermination claims, testimonies Tregenza has already qualified “as not reliable” (rendering them thus doubly unreliable). The excavations at Bełżec have therefore contributed greatly to revealing the truth – but not the official truth!

Now that the hypothesis of mass extermination has been ruled out, there remains only one alternative: Bełżec was a transit camp for the transfer of jews to the east.

http://www.renegadetribune.com/belze...h-and-history/

https://archive.org/details/BelzecIn...ge/n3/mode/2up
 
Reply

Share


Thread
Display Modes


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 09:15 AM.
Page generated in 2.59744 seconds.