How early in the war was the reality of the Holocaust known

[witness]

Very informative.Thank you David.

[GFM2000]

Isn't it interesting that the Western Allies essentially knew that the Jews, including women and children, were being extermination as soon as it occurred? Take this in context that the extermination is supposed to be "discussed amongst us, yet nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public".

The Allies must either have excellent spies throughout the continent.... that, or as Hoess said, the Germans just cannot stop gossiping.

[Roberto]

July 23, 1944
Advancing Red Army troops liberated Lublin, in the Generalgouvernement of Poland, and discovered the nearby death camp at Maidanek. Their findings were immediately publicized in the world press. (Holo Atlas 200; Hilberg 630)

Which seems to have remained skeptical until the discovery of the concentration camps in Germany and Austria with their emaciated human wrecks and piles of bodies who had succumbed to starvation, diseases related to undernourishment or brutal treatment by the camp guards.

British war correspondent Alexander Werth wrote the following about his own impressions of Majdanek, early reports thereon and the reaction to such reports in the West:

Since the end of the war, there have been numerous accounts of various German Extermination Camps - Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Belsen and others - but the story of Maidanek has not perhaps been fully told to Western readers; moreover, Maidanek holds a very special place in the Soviet-German war.

As they advanced, the Russians had been learning more and more of German atrocities and the enormous number of killings. But, somehow, all this killing was spread over relatively wide areas, and though it added up to far, far more than Maidanek, it did not have the vast monumental, “industrial” quality of that unbelievable Death Factory two miles from Lublin.

“Unbelievable” it was: when I sent the BBC a detailed report on Maidanek in August 1944, they refused to use it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt, and it was not till the discovery in the west of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were convinced that Maidanek and Auschwitz were also genuine ...

The Russians discovered Maidanek on July 23, the very day they entered Lublin. About a week later Simonov described it all in Pravda; but most of the Western press ignored his account. But in Russia the effect was devastating. Everybody had heard of Babyi Yar and thousands of other German atrocities; but this was something even more staggering. It brought into sharper focus than anything else done the real nature, scope and consequence of the Nazi régime in action. For here was a vast industrial undertaking in which thousands of “ordinary” Germans had made it a full-time job to murder millions of other people in a sort of mass orgy of professional sadism or, worse still, with the business-like conviction that this was a job like any other. The effect of Maidanek was to be enormous, not least in the Red Army. Thousands of Russian soldiers were made to visit it.

My first reaction to Maidanek was a feeling of surprise. I had imagined something horrible and sinister beyond words. It was nothing like that. It looked singularly harmless from outside. “Is that it?” was my first reaction when we stopped at what looked like a large workers’ settlement. Behind us was the many towered skyline of Lublin. There was much dust on the road, and the grass was a dull, greenish-gray color. The camp was separated from the road by a couple of barbed-wire fences, but these did not look particularly sinister, and might have been put up outside any military or semi-military establishment. The place was large; like a whole town of barracks painted a pleasant soft green. There were many people around - soldiers and civilians. A Polish sentry opened the barbed-wire gate to let our cars enter the central avenue, with the large green barracks on either side. And then we stopped outside a large barrack marked Bad und Desinfektion II. “This,” somebody said, “is where the large numbers of those arriving at the camp were brought in.”
The inside of this barrack was made of concrete, and water taps came out of the wall, and around the room there were benches where the clothes were put down and afterwards collected. So this was the place into which they were driven. Or perhaps they were politely invited to “Step this way, please?” Did any of them suspect, while washing themselves after a long journey, what would happen a few minutes later? Anyway, after the washing was over, they were asked into the next room; at this point even the most unsuspecting must have begun to wonder. For the “next room” was a series of large square concrete structures, each about one-quarter of the size of the bath house, and, unlike it, had no windows. The naked people (men one time, women another time, children the next) were driven or forced from the bath-house into these dark concrete boxes - about five yards square - and then, with 200 or 250 people packed into each box - and it was completely dark in there, except for a small skylight in the ceiling and the spyhole in the door - the process of gassing began. First some hot air was pumped in from the ceiling and then the pretty pale-blue crystals of Cyclon were showered down on the people, and in the hot wet air they rapidly evaporated. In anything from two to ten minutes everybody was dead ... There were six concrete boxes - gas chambers - side by side. “Nearly two thousand people could be disposed of here simultaneously,” one of the guides said.

But what thoughts passed through these people’s minds during the first few minutes while the crystals were falling; could anyone still believe that this humiliating process of being packed into a box and standing there naked, rubbing backs with other naked people, had anything to do with disinfection?

At first it was all very hard to take in, without an effort of the imagination. There were a number of very dull-looking concrete structures which, if their doors had been wider, might anywhere else have been mistaken for a row of nice little garages. But the doors - the doors! They were heavy steel doors, and each had a heavy steel bolt. And in the middle of the door was a spyhole, a circle, three inches in diameter composed of about a hundred small holes. Could the people in their death agony see the SS-man’s eye as he watched them? Anyway, the SS-man had nothing to fear: his eye was well-protected by the steel netting over the spyhole. And like the proud maker of reliable safes, the maker of the door had put his name round the spyhole: “Auert, Berlin”. Then the touch of blue on the floor caught my eye. It was very faint, but still legible. In blue chalk someone had scribbled the word “vergast” and had drawn crudely above it a skull and crossbones. I had never seen this word before, but it obviously meant “gassed” - and not merely “gassed” but, with that eloquent little prefix ver, “gassed out”. That this job finished, and now for the next lot. The blue chalk came into motion when there was nothing but a heap of naked corpses inside. But what cries, what curses, what prayers perhaps had been uttered inside that gas chamber only a few minutes before? Yet the concrete walls were thick, and Herr Auert had done a wonderful job, so probably no one could hear anything from outside. And even if they did, the people in the camp knew what it was all about.
It was here, outside Bad und Desinfektion II, in the side-lane leading into the central avenue, that the corpses were loaded into lorries, covered with tarpaulins, and carted to the crematorium at the other end of the camp, about half a mile away. Between the two there were dozens of barracks, painted the same soft green. Some had notice-boards outside, others had not. Thus, there was an Effekten Kammer and a Frauen-Bekleidungskammer; here the victims’ luggage and the women’s clothes were sorted out, before they were sent to the central Lublin warehouse, and then on to Germany.

At the other end of the camp, there were enormous mounds of white ashes; but as you looked closer, you found that they were not perfect ashes: for they had among them masses of small human bones: collar bones, finger bones, and bits of skull, and even a small femur, which can only have been that of a child. And, beyond these mounds there was a sloping plain, on which there grew acres an acres of cabbages. They were large luxuriant cabbages, covered with a layer of white dust. As I heard somebody explaining: “Layer of manure, then layer of ashes, that’s the way it was done ... These cabbages are all grown on human ashes ... The SS-men used to cart most of the ashes to their model farm, some distances away. A well-run farm; the SS-men liked to eat these overgrown cabbages, and the prisoners ate these cabbages, too, although they knew that they would almost certainly be turned into cabbages themselves before long...”
Next we came to the crematorium. It was a great big structure of six enormous furnaces and above them rose a large factory chimney. The wooden structure that used to cover the crematorium, as well as the adjoining wooden house, where Obersturmbannführer Mussfeld, the “Director of the Crematorium” used to live, had been burned down. Mussfeld had lived there among the stench of burned and burning bodies, and took a personal interest in the proceedings. But the furnaces stood there, large, enormous. There were still piles of coke on the one side; on the other side were the furnace doors where the corpses went in ... The place stank, not violently, but it stank of decomposition. I looked down. My shoes were white, with human dust, and the concrete floor around the ovens was strewn with parts of charred human skeletons. Here was a whole chest with its ribs, here a piece of skull, here a lower jaw with a molar on either side, and nothing but sockets in between. Where had the false teeth gone? To the side of the furnaces was a large high concrete slab, shaped like an operating table. Here a specialist - a medical man perhaps? - examined every corpse before it went into the oven, and extracted any gold fillings, which were then sent to Dr. Walter Funk at the Reichsbank ...
Somebody was explaining the details of the whole mechanism: the furnaces were made of fireproof brick, and the temperature had always to be maintained at 1,700º centigrade; and there was an engineer called Tellener who was an expert in charge of maintaining the right temperature. But the corroded condition of some of the doors showed that the temperature had been increased above normal to make the corpses burn more quickly. The normal capacity of the installation was 2,000 corpses a day, but sometimes there were more corpses than that to deal with, and there were some special days, like the great Jew-extermination day of November 3, 1943, when 20,000 people - men, women and children - were killed; it was impossible to gas them all that day; so most of them had been shot and buried in a wood some distance away. On other occasions many corpses were burned outside the crematorium funeral pyres soaked in petrol; these pyres would smolder for weeks and fill the air with a stench...
Standing in front of the great crematorium, with human remains scattered on the ground, one began to listen to all these details with a kind of dull indifference. The “industrial report” was becoming unreal in its enormity ...
Beside the charred remains of Mussfeld’s house, there lay piles of large black cans, like enormous cocktail shakers, marked “Buchenwald”. They were urns and had been brought from that other concentration camp. People from Lublin who had lost a relative at Maidanek, somebody said, would pay substantial sums to the SS men for the victim’s remains. It was another loathsome SS racket. Needless to say, the ashes with which the cocktail shakers were filled were nobody’s ashes in particular.

Some distance away from the crematorium, a trench twenty or thirty yards long had been re-opened and, looking down through the fearful stench, I could see hundreds of naked corpses, many with bullet holes at the back of their skulls. Most of them were men with shaved heads; it was said that these had been Russian war prisoners.
I had seen enough, and hastened to join Colonel Grosz, who was waiting beside the car on the road. The stench was still pursuing me; it now seemed to permeate everything - the dusty grass beside the barbed-wire fence, and the red poppies that were naively growing in the midst of all this.
Grosz and I waited for the rest of the party to join us. A Polish youngster with tattered clothes and a torn cap, and barefooted, came up and talked to us. He was about eleven, but talked of the camp with a curious nonchalance, with that nil admirari that had become his outlook on life after living for two or three years in the immediate proximity of the Death Camp ... This boy had seen everything, at the ages of nine, and ten and eleven.
“A lot of people in Lublin,” he said, “lost somebody here. In our village people were very worried, because we knew what was going on in the camp, and the Germans threatened to destroy the village and kill everybody in case we talked too much. Don’t know why they should have bothered,” the boy said with a shrug, “everybody in Lublin knew anyway.” And he recounted a few things he had seen; he had seen ten prisoners being beaten to death; he had seen files of prisoners carrying stones, and had seen those who collapsed being killed with pickaxes by the SS men. He had heard an old man screaming while he was being chewed up by police dogs. ... And, looking across the fields of cabbages growing on human ashes, he said, almost with a touch of admiration: “Everything is growing well here - cabbages, and turnips and cauliflowers ... It’s all land belonging to our village, and now that the SS are gone, we’ll get the land back.
There was much coming and going on the road - hundreds of men and women were going into and out of the camp; Russian soldiers were being taken in large parties to be shown the pits and the gas chambers and the crematoria; and Polish soldiers of the 4th Division and new Polish recruits. It was policy to make them see it all, and to impress upon them - in case they were not yet sufficiently impressed - what kind of enemy they were fighting. A few days before a crowd of German prisoners had been taken through the camp. Around stood crowds of Polish women and children, and they screamed at the Germans, and there was a half-insane old Jew who bellowed fanatically in a husky voice: “Kindermörder, Kindermörder!” (Child murderers) and the Germans went through the camp, at first at an ordinary pace, and then faster and faster, till they ran in a frantic panicky stampede, and they were green with terror, and their hands shook and their teeth chattered ...
I shall describe only briefly some of the other aspects of that vast industrial enterprise that the Murder Camp represented. There were those trenches in Krempecki Forest, a few miles away, where they murdered 10,000 Jews on that 3rd of November. Here speed was even more important than business. They shot them, without taking off their clothes, even without taking the women’s handbags and the children’s toys away. Amongst the stinking corpses, I saw a small child with a teddy-bear... But this was unusual; the great principle of the Murder Camp was that nothing should be wasted. There was, for instance, that enormous barn-like structure which had contained 850,000 pairs of boots and shoes - among them tiny baby shoes; now, by the end of August, half the shoes had gone; hundreds of people from Lublin had come and taken whole bagfuls and shoes.
“How disgusting,” somebody remarked.
Colonel Grosz shrugged his shoulders. “What do you expect? After having had the Germans here for years, people stopped being squeamish. They had lived for years buying and selling and speculating; they are short of shoes, so they say to themselves: ‘These are perfectly good shoes; someone will get them eventually; why not grab them while the going’s good?’”
And then - perhaps the most horrifying thing of all - there was the enormous building called the “Chopin Lager”, the Chopin Warehouse, because, by a curious irony, it happened to be in a street called after the composer. Outside, there was still a notice, with the swastika on top, announcing a German public meeting:

Kundgebung.
Donnerstag, 20. Juli 1944
Reichsredner P.G. Geyer.
Im Hause der National-Sozialisten, Lublin.

(Meeting, Thursday, July 20, 1944. Speaker from the Reich, Party Comrade Geyer, in the House of National Socialism, Lublin)

One wondered what kind of cheerful news the Partei-Genosse Geyer had to tell the Maidanek murderers a couple of days before the Russians entered Lublin, and while most of the Germans must have been busy packing up. It was also the day of the bomb that had failed to kill Hitler ...
The Chopin Warehouse was like a vast, five-story department store, part of the grandiose Maidanek Murder Factory. Here the possessions of hundreds of thousands of murdered people were sorted and classified and packed for export to Germany. In one big room there were thousands of trunks and suitcases, some still with carefully written-out labels; there was a room marked Herrenschuhe and another marked Damenschuhe; here were thousands of pairs of shows, all of much better quality than those seen in the big dump near the camp. Then there was a long corridor with thousands of women’s dresses, and another with thousands of overcoats. Another room had large wooden shelves all along it, through the center and along the walls; it was like being in a Woolworth store: here were piled up hundreds of safety razors, and shaving brushes, and thousands of pen-knives and pencils. In the next room were piled up children’s toys: teddy-bears, and celluloid dolls and tin automobiles by the hundred, and simple jigsaw puzzles, and an American-made Mickey Mouse ... And so on, and so on. In a junk heap I even found the manuscript of a Violin Sonata, Op. 15 by somebody called Ernst J. Weil of Prague. What hideous story was behind this?
On the ground floor there had been the Accounts Department. Letters were strewn all over the place; mostly letters from various SS and Nazi organizations to the “Chopin Lager, Lublin”, asking to be sent this and that. Many of the letters were orders from the Lublin SS and Police Chief: on November 3, 1942 a carefully-typed letter instructed the Chopin Lager to supply the Hitler Youth Camp, Company 934, with a long list of articles including blankets, table linen, crockery, bed linen, towels, kitchen utensils, etc. The letter specified that all this was wanted for 4,000 children evacuated from the Reich. There was another list of articles for 2,000 German children who required “sports shirts, training suits, coats, aprons, gym shoes, skiing boots, plus-fours, warm underwear, warm gloves, woolen scarves”. The department store was euphemistically called “Altsachenverwertungsstelle, Lublin” (Lublin Disposal Centre for Second-hand Goods). There was also a letter from a German woman living in Lublin asking for a pram and a complete layette for her newborn child. Another document showed that in the first few months of 1944 alone eighteen railway of goods from the Lublin warehouse had been sent to Germany.

The joint Russo-Polish Tribunal investigating the Maidanek crimes sat in the building of the Court of Appeal at Lublin. It included many leading Polish personalities - the president of the District Court, Czepanski; Professor Bielkowski (whom I had already met); a round, stout prelate, Father Kruszinski, Dr. Emil Sommerstein, the leading Jewish member of the Lublin Committee, and a former Sejm deputy, and Mr. Witos, the Commissioner for Agriculture. That these people were not Russian stooges could be seen from the eagerness with which one of the members insisted in telling the foreign press that the Russians had arrested 2,000 AK men in the Lublin District. In an introductory speech, the Polish president of the tribunal gave the history of Maidanek camp, a lurid catalogue of all the various ways in which people were tortured and killed. There were SS men who specialized in the “stomach-kick” or the “testicle-kick” as a form of murder; other prisoners were drowned in pools, or tied to posts and allowed to die of exhaustion; there had been eighteen cases of cannibalism in the camp even before it had officially become, on November 3, 1943, an extermination camp. He spoke of the chief of Maidanek, Obersturmbannführer Weiss, and his assistant, a notorious sadist, Anton Thumann, and Mussfeld, the chief of the crematorium, and many others.
Himmler himself had twice visited Maidanek and had been pleased with it. It was estimated that 1,500,000 people had been put to death there. The big fry had, of course, fled, but six of the small fry - two Poles and four Germans - had been caught and, after a trial, they were all hanged a few weeks later.
The four Germans - three of them SS men - were professional killers; but it seemed a little hard on the two young Poles, both of whom had originally been arrested by the Germans and had then “sold themselves” to them, in the hope of surviving. (The interrogation of these men is described in my article “First Contact with Poland”, published in the Russian Review, No. 1, Penguin Books, 1945).
The press and radio in the West were still skeptical. Typical was the BBC’s refusal to use my story, as was also this comment of the New York Herald Tribune at the time:

“Maybe we should wait for further corroboration of the horror story that comes from Lublin. Even of top of all we have been taught of the maniacal Nazi ruthlessness, this example sounds inconceivable ...
The picture presented by American correspondents requires no comment except that, if authentic, the regime capable of such crimes deserves annihilation.”

Source of quote: Russia at War 1941-1945, by Alexander Werth, 1964

[witness]

They ate those overgrown cabbages..
I can expect some of the posters to dismiss this report out of hand as the "two minites of hate''..
Where does "the evidence lead'' us ?
Oh yeah there were no always holes in the skulls found .I forgot..
But of course nobody says that there were no some Jews "brutalized" :roll:

[Roberto]

They ate those overgrown cabbages..
I can expect some of the posters to dismiss this report out of hand as the "two minites of hate''..
Where does "the evidence lead'' us ?
Oh yeah there were no always holes in the skulls found .I forgot..
But of course nobody says that there were no some Jews "brutalized" :roll:

Well, the number of victims estimated by the Polish court mentioned by Werth is exaggerated by a factor of six, and only a part of the victims were Jews, the rest being mainly Polish civilians and partisans and Soviet prisoners of war.

According to the findings of a West German court at the Majdanek trial in Düsseldorf between 1975 and 1981, about 500,000 people from 28 countries and belonging to 54 nationalities passed through Majdanek concentration camp, and at least 250,000 of them died there, 60 % thereof from starvation, exhaustion, disease and mistreatment and 40 % executed in gas chambers or by other means.

I found an interesting article about this trial in a German history magazine, which I will translate when I have the time.

[witness]

Meaning that the Werth report was really mostly ''two minutes of hate''.
The sad fact is that even if the numbers are so grossly exaggeratted the number of victims were still tremendous.
I wonder if this kind of reports actually do more damage to the goal of exhibiting the Nazi crimes ?
The kind of exaggerations which gives so much food to all kind of the Nazi apologists to gloat.

[Peter]

David
that answers my every question, thank you, SUPERB piece of work.

It the Holocaust Encyclopaedia a published book ? I havent found it on Amazon.

cheers
Peter

[David Thompson]

For Iltis -- "Holo Ency" is just my shorthand for (ed.) Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, MacMillan Publishing, New York:1990 (4 vols.)

For GFM2000 -- The British got a lot of information out of decoded radio traffic between police ground units and senior commanders. Of course, if there was too much publicity about the messages, the Germans would have changed their codes and the British would have gotten nothing.

For Roberto -- Thanks for another excellent and helpful excerpt, with commentary!

[Peter]

Thanks David
excellent
Pete

[Roberto]

Meaning that the Werth report was really mostly ''two minutes of hate''.
The sad fact is that even if the numbers are so grossly exaggeratted the number of victims were still tremendous.
I wonder if this kind of reports actually do more damage to the goal of exhibiting the Nazi crimes ?
The kind of exaggerations which gives so much food to all kind of the Nazi apologists to gloat.

I wouldn't be so hard on Werth, who as a contemporary observer merely recalled what he saw and heard.

If he wrote that the Polish court estimated the number of victims at 1.5 million, this doesn't necessarily mean that he endorsed their estimate.

Nor does the fact that the death toll was much lower than this estimate diminish the horror of the place, aptly conveyed in Werth's description.

The report remains interesting as an account of the impression that a Nazi concentration/extermination camp made on who was first confronted with its reality, and of the initial refusal of the Western press to accept this reality.

[Charles Bunch]

Iltis wrote:

I'd never really thought seriously before but does anybody know how early in the war the Western Allies were aware of the Holocaust. It is pretty obvious that they knew to some degree by January 1943. Do you know if they knew earlier than this ?? Was it mentioned in any documents ?

On January 6, 1942, Yakov Grojanowski of Izbica Kujawska, Poland, was one of
29 Jews rounded up for a work detail and sent to Chelmno. For 14 days
Grojanowski worked as a grave-digger, burying Jews and Gypsies who had been
killed in the mobile gas vans. On the 19th of January, Grojanowski managed to
escape from a transport bus, and eventually made his way to the Warsaw Ghetto.
There, working with the Oneg Shabbat, a report of his experience was developed,
and using the Polish underground, this report eventually made its way to London
sometime around June, 1942. Significantly, this represents a record of Germans
systematically gassing Jews a full two years before the Soviet liberation of
death camps gave that fact a far broader audience.


Here is Grojanowski's account of one day at Chelmno.

(quote)

Thursday, 8 January 1942 - Day 3


On Thursday, 8 January, early in the morning, the gendarme knocked and asked
maliciously: 'Ah, you Jews; did you sleep well?' We replied that we had
been unable to sleep because of the cold.

At 7:30 the cook brought us hot but bitter coffee with dry bread. We got
the coffee in a large cauldron, which we had to scoop out with our cups.
Some of us drank it but most didn't want that breakfast. They said they
were close to death anyway.

At 8 o'clock we heard the arrival of many people. They were high-ranking SS
men. The gendarmes reported to one of them that the Jews had remained quiet
throughout the night. The SS man ordered him to open our cellar door. (The
door had three locks and a chain.)

The officer screamed, 'All Jews clear out!' and remained alone in the
corridor. (We had assumed the SS would be afraid of a desperate reaction on
our part.)

As we left the cellar, our numbers were checked. In the courtyard we had to
line up in double file. The second SS man checked the number of
grave-diggers once again. Then we had to board the lorry. (Two vehicles
always conveyed us to our place of work and back, a tarpaulin-covered lorry
and a low passenger car with panes at the side, in other words a limousine.
There was, naturally, a further car with SS men.) We stood in the lorry,
behind us were six gendarmes with machine guns, ready to shoot. The
courtyard, into which we came out of the cellar, was strictly guarded by
gendarmes with machine guns for as long as I remained in Chelmno.

When we drove to work we were followed by a carload of SS men. On arrival
we got exactly the same treatment as the day before. After getting off the
lorry we were counted. Eight of us who weren't strong enough for digging
were selected. These eight stepped out of the ranks quite calmly, their
heads lowered. Naturally we had to undress; then all of us had to go to the
same place of work as on the day before. The only things we were allowed to
keep on were shoes, shirt, trousers and underwear. (One man who wore two
shirts was viciously beaten.) We placed our belongings on one spot. Half
an hour later came the next transport, with the remaining grave-diggers, who
had been in the other cellar room. They had to go through the identical
procedure.

The place where we found ourselves was surrounded by armed gendarmes ready
to shoot. The entire forest was patrolled by gendarmes. The tiniest false
move on our part gave the gendarmes cause for the most dreadful and cruel
behaviour. The 'eight' were working twenty paces from us. One of them,
Mechel Wiltschinski from Izbica, nineteen years old, called over to me,
'Stay healthy. I hope you remain alive. We are leaving this world. I hope
you'll get out of this hell.' The remainder of the 'eight' didn't utter a
sound, they only sobbed dejectedly.

Two hours later the first lorry arrived full of Gypsies. I can state with
one hundred per cent certainty that the executions had taken place in the
forest. In the normal course of events the gas vans used to stop about one
hundred metres from the mass graves. In two instances the gas vans, which
were filled with Jews, stopped twenty metres from the ditch. This happened
once on this Thursday, the other time on Wednesday the 14th.

Our comrades from among the 'eight' told us there was an apparatus with
buttons in the driver's cab. From this apparatus two tubes led into the
van. The driver (there were two execution gas vans, and two drivers -always
the same) pressed a button and got out of the van. At the same moment
frightful screaming, shouting and banging against the sides of the van could
be heard. That lasted for about fifteen minutes. Then the driver reboarded
the van and shone an electric torch into the back to see if the people were
already dead. Then he drove the van to a distance of five metres from the
ditch.

After five minutes 'Big Whip', the SS leader, ordered four of the work
detail to open the doors. A strong smell of gas prevailed. Five minutes
later he shouted, 'Hey, Jews, go and lay Tefillim (i.e. throw out the
corpses)!' The dead bodies were heaped up higgledy-piggledy. They were
still warm and looked asleep. Their checks weren't pale; they still had
natural skin colour. The men who had to do this work told us they didn't
feel cold, because they dealt with warm bodies.

After the 'eight' had finished their work with the dead and in the van they
put on Gypsy clothes because of the cold and sat down on top of the corpses.
It was a tragic-comic sight. The 'eight' were in any case forbidden to mix
with the others. At lunchtime they used to be left in the ditch. They were
given cold bitter coffee to drink and a piece of bread. It was done like
this: one of the gendarmes poured coffee into a cup with a long ladle.
After the first man had drained the cup it was refilled for the next one,
and so on. The 'eight' were treated like lepers.

After half an hour the second van with Gypsies arrived. It did not halt at
a distance of twenty metres from us, but a hundred metres further away this
time, so we shouldn't hear anything. (The muffled screams had unsettled
us.)

Until lunch we had 'processed' five vans, and another four in the afternoon.
(We counted the vans.) Our lunch consisted of cold, bitter coffee and
frozen dry bread. The working day ended at 5 p.m. Before we left the ditch
the 'eight' were made to lie on top of the dead Gypsies, face downwards, and
a gendarme shot them through the head with a machine gun. Immediately
afterwards we returned to the Schloss, which was 100 metres from the
highway, so that curious villagers shouldn't notice anything.

With us rode seven gendarmes in front, and three at the back. The seven who
sat in front alight first (in the courtyard of the Schloss). They
surrounded the lorry with machine guns. Then the other three gendarmes
alighted. Finally we had to get down and line up in twos. We were counted
and led into the same dark cellar. It was cold and dim in the cellar. We
told each other, 'This is a veritable paradise (in comparison to the
dreadful graveyard).' At first we sat in the dark on the straw, shivering
with emotion at our terrible fate.

Fifteen-year-old Monik Halter from Izbica clung to me the whole time. He
embraced me, kissed me and said to me, 'We're all lost,' and repeated his
wish that his sacrifice should enable his mother and sister to remain alive.

Others said, 'Once again eight innocent souls have left this world.' The
time passed amid sobs, wails and groans.

At about seven in the evening the chef brought a cauldron of kohlrabi soup
and filled our bowls. A few of us, who were hungry, had some soup, but the
majority didn't touch it. Bitter tears flowed into the soup plate.

Together with the food a night-light was placed in our room. Nearly all of
us said we were prepared t spend our lives in this terrible place, if we
could thereby save our dear ones and survive to see punishment meted out to
the murderers.

Meanwhile the gendarme ordered us to sing. At first we disobeyed. However
when he threatened to shoot and opened the door, my two neighbors Meir
Pitrowski from Izbica, and Jehuda Jakubowicz from Wloclawek, who had lately
been resident in Izbica, begged me to stand up and sing.

I myself don't know from where I drew the strength to get up because I was
very tired. I addressed my comrades in a feeble voice: 'Friends and
honourable people, get up and sing after me; first we shall cover our
heads.'

They stood up.

We covered the slop pail with a white shirt. Angrily the impatient
gendarme, who stood in the open door, ordered us to sing at last. I
therefore began to sing 'Hear! O Israel, the eternal one is our God, the
eternal one is unique'. Those assembled repeated each verse in depressed
tones.

Then I continued: 'Praised be his name and the splendour of his realm for
ever and ever', which the others repeated after me three times. We felt as
if we were at the end of our lives. Sadness and fear gripped us. All were
as sombre as if before the Last Judgement. We were very much mistaken in
thinking we had now sung enough. The gendarme insisted that we go on.

I said, 'Friends and honourable people, we shall now sing the "Hatikvah".'
And we sang the anthem with our heads covered. It sounded like a prayer.
After this the gendarme left and bolted the door with three locks.

We couldn't stop crying and said that the world had never ever known such
barbarism. To liquidate Jews and Gypsies in such murderous fashion, and to
force us to sing on top of it. We hoped they would end up like 'Haman'.
The Almighty should put an end to this terrible fate.

Mosche Asch, a worthy man from Izbica, said, 'We are a sacrifice, indicating
that the time of the Messiah is at hand.'

The guard opened the door again and the German cook, a civilian, fetched a
pail of black bitter coffee, which he poured into the bowl. (We had poured
the remains of the kohlrabi soup into the slop bucket.)

Each of us took a piece of bread and some coffee.

After fifteen minutes the gendarme asked us to sing again. We tried to get
out of it by pleading tiredness but to no avail. He ordered us to repeat
after him: 'We thank Adolf Hitler or everything!' We did so. Then we had
to repeat: 'We thank Adolf Hitler for our food.' Then he demanded that we
sing again. We sang the 'Hatikvah', and afterwards the twenty-sixth Psalm.
(That was our response to the torment in our souls.) Then he bolted the
door again. We slept late into the night.

I woke in the middle of the night probably from cold or nightmares. I began
thinking everything over again. I wanted to scream: 'Where is God in
heaven? How can he see our torment and permit the slaughter of the
innocent. Why doesn't be perform a miracle?

Then it occurred to me that I had to escape from this prison. I carried a
tiny flame to the walled-up window and tried loosening a brick with a knife.
But my efforts were in vain. The frost which also penetrated the interior
had frozen the bricks fast. After two hours of trying I lay down again
disappointed.

By five in the morning everybody was awake because of the cold. We had a
conversation. Getzel Chrzastowski, a member of the Bund, and Eisenstab,
both from Klodawa (Eisenstab owned a furriers in Klodawa), had lost their
belief in God because he didn't concern himself with injustice and
suffering. In contrast others, myself included, remained firm in our belief
and said, like Mosche Asch, that the time of the Messiah was at hand.

Firday the 9th in the morning we were again given bitter coffee. Asked if
we had enough bread we said yes-we had some left over from before. At 8
a.m. the SS men appeared and were told that the Jews had spent an uneventful
night. After the door was opened we had to go out and be counted.

The courtyard was already ringed round with gendarmes carrying machine guns.
(It was the first time that the barrels of the guns were trained on us. We
caught a terrible fright, thinking we were about to be shot.)

In the courtyard we saw two large carts full of gypsies with their wives,
children and all their possessions. We were quickly loaded into a lorry in
order to deny us the opportunity for communicating with the Gypsies. This,
incidentally, was the only occasion on which we saw a transport with live
victims.

We stood towards the front of the lorry, seven gendarmes with machine guns
behind us. A car with eight SS men followed.

At our place of work, we were surrounded by gendarmes. We undressed as
before. We were counted, after which eight people were selected from out of
our ranks.

We picked up the axes and shovels and started work. The bottom of the ditch
was about 1.5 metres wide, the top five metres and its depth was five
metres. The mass grave extended a long way. If a tree stood in the way it
was felled.

(end quote)

Grojanowski's complete 14 day account can be found:

The Holocaust
Martin Gilbert
Owl Books, 1987
pgs. 252-279

[Erik]

The IHR says:
A report on the visit of an IRC delegate to Auschwitz in September, 1944 pointed out that internees were permitted to receive packages and that rumors of gas chambers could not be verified.
Nizkor replies:
Rumors of gas chambers could not be verified because the delegates were expressly forbidden from visiting the Auschwitz Krema, where the gas chambers and cremation facilities were. They were taken only to those parts of the huge complex which housed prisoners who were not to be exterminated. Some Allied POWs were held in Auschwitz, in reasonable conditions, but they knew about the gassings and mentioned them to the IRC delegate.

For example, former SS-Untersturmfuehrer Dr. Hans Münch confirmed this in his testimony at the International Nuremberg Trial (Trial of the Major War Criminals, 1948, Vol. VIII, p. 313-321). He said:
I repeatedly witnessed guided tours of civilians and also of commissions of the Red Cross and other parties within the camp, and I was able to ascertain that the camp leadership arranged it masterfully to conduct these guided tours in such a way that the people being guided around did not see anything about inhuman treatment. The main camp was shown only and in this main camp there were so-called show blocks, particularly block 13, that were especially prepared for such guided tours and that were equipped like a normal soldier's barracks with beds that had sheets on them, and well-functioning washrooms.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/qar/qar51.html


There were “guided tours of civilians and also of commissions of the Red Cross and other parties within the camp” of Auschwitz. They were not allowed to”see anything about inhuman treatment”.

But

Some Allied POWs were held in Auschwitz, in reasonable conditions, but they knew about the gassings and mentioned them to the IRC delegate.

Still, all the “camp leadership” had to do was to look the delegates sternly in the eyes and tell them to forget it!

Rumors of gas chambers could not be verified because the delegates were expressly forbidden from visiting the Auschwitz Krema, where the gas chambers and cremation facilities were.

Since the Nazis forbade the IRC to verify them…. the rumors “could not be verified”!!!

How different/similar (your choise!) to Maidanek!!

Werth wrote, in Roberto’s quote:

“Unbelievable” it was: when I sent the BBC a detailed report on Maidanek in August 1944, they refused to use it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt, and it was not till the discovery in the west of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were convinced that Maidanek and Auschwitz were also genuine ...

Roberto wrote:

The report remains interesting as an account of the impression that a Nazi concentration/extermination camp made on who was first confronted with its reality, and of the initial refusal of the Western press to accept this reality.

Mr Thompson has supplied evidence that the Western leadership were well informed of the “Mongol connection” (Churchill) of the warfare of the Nation of Goethe and Schiller in Poland.

But the leadership didn’t impress the press, evidently.

Not until they “discovered” in the west the realities of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen were they “convinced that Maidanek and Auschwitz were also genuine…”.

What was the “reality” of the camps in the west in relation to the “reality” of Maidanek and Auschwitz? Are there some sort of “dialectics” going on?

Why was the reality of Maidanek suspected to be a “Russian propaganda stunt”? Didn’t the Western press believe their own “stunts”?

“Too horrible to be true”, until thy found out what typhus and terror bombings did to the German camps?

Were Western journalists brought to Maidanek to “verify rumors”, like the IRC to Auschwitz? (See Nizkor reply above.)

Or to stop them? I.e., rumours that the Holocaust was a “Russian propaganda stunt”?

Were they “gullible” to a comparable extent?

[Roberto]

Were they “gullible” to a comparable extent?

Yeah, I suppose Werth was gullible as hell, so gullible that he saw

[...]enormous mounds of white ashes; but as you looked closer, you found that they were not perfect ashes: for they had among them masses of small human bones: collar bones, finger bones, and bits of skull, and even a small femur, which can only have been that of a child[...]

among other features of the camp.

Just as gullible as Himmler's statistician Korherr before him, who in his report on "The Final Solution of the European Jewish Question" mentioned that 14,217 male and 131 female Jewish internees of the Lublin-Majdanek camp had perished there until 31.12.1942, not including those "accommodated" there "within the scope of the evacuation action" - those were included in the 1,274,166 Jews from the General Government who had been transported "to the Russian East" and "sifted through the camps in the Generalgovernment". Korherr got this figure from the following report whose author, Sturmbannführer Höfle, must also have been extremely gullible:

13/15. OLQ de OMQ 1005 83 234 250
Geheime Reichssache! An den Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspol., zu Händen SS Obersturmbannführer HEIM, KRAKAU. Betr. 14-tägige Meldung Einsatz REINHART. Bezug: dort. Fs. Zugang bis 31.12.42, L 12761,B 0, S 515, T 10335 zusammen 23611. Stand ... 31.12.42, L 24733, B 434508, S 101370, T 71355, zusammen 1274166.
SS und Pol.führer LUBLIN, HOEFLE, Sturmbannführer.

Source of quote:

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/dec ... html#Hofle

Translation by the obviously no less gullible British decoding service at Bletchley Park, which intercepted the message:

13/15. OLQ de OMQ 1005 83 234 250

State Secret!

To the Senior Commander of the Security Police [and the Security Service], for the attention of SS Obersturmbannfuhrer HEIM, CRACOW.

Subject: fortnightly report Einsatz REINHART.
Reference: radio telegram therefrom.


recorded arrivals until December 31, 42,

L [Lublin] 12,761,
B [Belzec] 0,
S [Sobibor] 515,
T [Treblinka] 10 335 [,]

together 23 611

sum total…[as per] December 31, 42,

L 24 733,
B 434 508,
S 101 370,
T 71 355, read: 713 555]

together 1 274 166

SS and Police Leader Lublin, HOFLE, Sturmbannfuhrer

Equally gullible, I suppose, were the prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges who, at the trial before the Düsseldorf County Court between 1975 and 1981, were fooled by the self-incriminating depositions of the eight defendants sentenced to lifetime or temporary imprisonment, the dozens of corroborating independent eyewitness testimonials and the documentary evidence on the basis of which they established the number of people who had passed through Majdanek and the number of people who had died there.

I'd say the only one gullible here is our poor philosopher, who in all earnest cites the rubbish produced by his IHR gurus that he piously believes in, obviously without even asking himself why it is so at odds with the evidence mentioned above and other evidence, assessed by historians and by the independent criminal justice authorities of a democratic state.

Or could it be that the philosopher is not all that naïve?

Could it be that he instead is a true believer who adopts a see-no-evil attitude in relation of whatever doesn't fit into his dreamworld of anti-Semitism and/or admiration of National Socialism?

Or an inveterate liar who, despite all indications that this forum is not populated by like-minded individuals, still thinks he can sell "Revisionist" rubbish to anyone?

Or a frustrated loser who, feeling trapped behind the bars of "orthodoxy" he blames for the miseries of his existence, desperately tries to cry out loud, but doesn't know how?

[witness]

Roberto
Probably I should not have been so hard on Mr Werth indeed.After all he was only a reporter and the exaggerations of the facts originated in the Polish court.I am perplexed - what was the purpose of the this numbers overblowing as if the horrors of reality were not quite enough..
Lie remains to be lie even if uttered for the noble purposes..
Semi-lie is even worse cause as every lie it is inevitably bound to be exposed and then becomes one of the most conspicuos memory of the real event.
Does it deserve to linger in our minds..? But it will..

[Erik]

Roberto wrote:

I'd say the only one gullible here is our poor philosopher, who in all earnest cites the rubbish produced by his IHR gurus that he piously believes in, obviously without even asking himself why it is so at odds with the evidence mentioned above and other evidence, assessed by historians and by the independent criminal justice authorities of a democratic state.

Or could it be that the philosopher is not all that naïve?

The Grand Inquisitor isn’t sure. So he states the alternative “could be’s”.

And finally places the poor philosopher behind those bars where an Inquisitor eventually will straigthen out all his question marks, after some proper treatment of the suspect. (see Roberto’s favourite cartoon!)

Dr Hans Münch stated in the Nizkor quote on IRC visiting Auschwitz:

The main camp was shown only and in this main camp there were so-called show blocks, particularly block 13, that were especially prepared for such guided tours and that were equipped like a normal soldier's barracks with beds that had sheets on them, and well-functioning washrooms.

This SS Untersturmfuehrer knew how to hide the secrets of the Holocaust to the enemy, except when he lost the war. Then he “followed the facts”.

But why were they hidden before that? Why all the bother with the secrecy? He knew what he was doing there in Auschwitz, didn’t he? And why?

And his enemies knew too, didn’t they?

August 8, 1942
In Geneva, Gerhart Riegner cabled Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in New York and Sidney Silverman in London about Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The United States Department of State held up delivery of the message to Wise, who finally received it from Silverman on August 28.


Cable sent on August 8, 1942, by Dr. Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Geneva, to Stephen S. Wise in the United States and Sidney Silverman, member of Parliament, in Britain. The cable read as follows:


"Received alarming report that in Fuhrer's headquarters plan discussed and under consideration according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled Germany numbering 34 million should after deportation and concentration in east be exterminated at one blow to resolve once and for all the Jewish question in Europe. Action reported planned for autumn; methods under discussion including prussic acid. We transmit information with all necessary reservation as exactitude cannot be confirmed. Informant stated to have close connections with highest German authorities and his reports generally speaking reliable."

http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x28/xm2856.html
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/Riegner.html
(My emphasis).

Riegner knew the planned murder weapon before Globocnik was informed by Gerstein on the advantages of Zyklon B.

"In Lublin, SS Gruppenfuehrer Globocnik was waiting for us. He said: This is one of the most highly secret matter there are, perhaps the most secret. Anybody who speaks about it is shot dead immediately. Two talkative people died yesterday. Then he explained to us that, at the present moment - August 17, 1942 - there were the following installations:
1. Belzec, on the Lublin-Lvov road, in the sector of the Soviet Demarcation Line. Maximum per day: 15,000 persons (I saw it!).
2. Sobibor, I am not familiar with the exact situation, I did not visit it. 20,000 persons per day.
3. Treblinka, 120 km. NNE of Warsaw, 25,000 per day, saw it!
4. Majdanek, near Lublin, which I saw when it was being built.

http://www.auschwitz.dk/Gerstein.htm
(My emphasis).

Why bother about those “talkative people”, when the whole world already knew what they were up to in the East, and the “news” of it was broadcasted? (See Thompson documentation.)

The IRC knew the “rumors”, but was discouraged by the camp leadership to find out.

Rumors of gas chambers could not be verified because the delegates were expressly forbidden from visiting the Auschwitz Krema, where the gas chambers and cremation facilities were.

After razing Treblinka and Belzec to the ground and cremating the 1,5 million corpses in order not to criminate the Germans with the Holocaust, the Nazis later left Maidanek in a state that allowed the Soviets to criminate them with the very fact of it.

It brought into sharper focus than anything else done the real nature, scope and consequence of the Nazi régime in action. For here was a vast industrial undertaking in which thousands of “ordinary” Germans had made it a full-time job to murder millions of other people in a sort of mass orgy of professional sadism or, worse still, with the business-like conviction that this was a job like any other. The effect of Maidanek was to be enormous, not least in the Red Army. Thousands of Russian soldiers were made to visit it.

This “mass orgy of professional sadism or, worse still, with the business-like conviction that this was a job like any other” was left there for the world to bring it in focus.

To repeat:

I'd say the only one gullible here is our poor philosopher, who in all earnest cites the rubbish produced by his IHR gurus that he piously believes in, obviously without even asking himself why it is so at odds with the evidence mentioned above and other evidence, assessed by historians and by the independent criminal justice authorities of a democratic state.

“Gullible”, or something worse, unless I “in all earnest cites”… the “above and other evidence, assessed by historians and by the independent criminal justice authorities of a democratic state”.

Still,

“Unbelievable” it was: when I sent the BBC a detailed report on Maidanek in August 1944, they refused to use it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt, and it was not till the discovery in the west of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were convinced that Maidanek and Auschwitz were also genuine ...

The “genuineness” of the evidence of this “mass orgy of professional sadism or, worse still, with the business-like conviction that this was a job like any other” was discovered in the German camps of the west in Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen.

And when the “genuineness” of that evidence – in Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen – was discovered, it had to be moved back to where it came from – and needing an Iron Curtain to hide it.