infinite_one wrote:I do not believe that the world "knew for a fact" as stated, rumors would circulate but thats about it. Saying otherwise is implying the ole anti-semetic rhetoric that they all went to death like cattle. I just dont believe this to be so. There are account of locals knowning, which is obvious, going to as far as to taunt or help (give food or water) to the victims in the trains. It will be unknown how much was actually known.
With all due respect you are completely mistaken about this. A great deal was known, almost as soon as the camps became operational, and it was disseminated throughout the Polish Underground to the government in exile in London and beyond. Sobibor was less known than Belzec and Treblinka (its name was mentioned in reports as an extermination camp, but its details were not known) -- but Belzec and Treblinka were well-known, and there is simply no way to deny that there was widespread knowledge of Operation Reinhard as it was happening -- regardless of what you think the implications are. The only "fact" that seems to have been unknown to the Underground at the time was the exact mechanism of killing, which honestly is trivial as compared with the overarching fact of mass extermination.
From Yitzhak Arad's book "Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps"
Information about the Operation Reinhard death camps reached the Polish Underground as soon as the mass-murder actions were begun there. The intelligence branch of the Polish Underground had spread its network throughout the entire area of occupied Poland, even to the most remote places. The information collected by the Underground was published from time to time in the Biuletyn Informacyjny ("Information Bulletin") of the Command of the Armia Krajowa and was distributed clandestinely in occupied Poland. These news items were also relayed to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London by the Armia Krajowa or the Delegatura.
The following report was received in London from the Delegatura in April 1942, just one month after Belzec became operational. (This was quoted in Arad):
The camp was fully completed a few days before March 17, 1942. From that day transports with Jews began to arrive from the direction of Lvov and Warsaw... On the first day five transports arrived, afterward, one transport arrived daily from each direction. The transport enters the railway spur of Belzec camp after disembarkation, lasting half an hour, the train returns empty... The observations of the local population (the camp is within sight and hearing distance of the inhabitants near the railway station) led all of them to one conclusion: that there is a mass murder of the Jews inside the camp. The following facts testify to this:
1. Between March 17 and April 13, about fifty-two transports (each of eighteen to thirty-five freight-cars with an average of 1,500 people) arrived in the camp.
2. No Jews left the camp, neither during the day nor the night.
3. No food was supplied to the camp (whereas bread and other food articles had been dispatched to the Jews who had worked earlier on the construction of the camp).
4. Lime was brought to the camp.
5. The transports arrived at a fixed time. Before the arrival of a transport, no Jews were seen in the camp.
6. After each transport, about two freight cars with clothing are removed from the camp to the railway stores. (The guards steal clothes).
7. Jews in underwear were seen in the area of the camp.
8. In the area of the camp there are three barracks; they cannot accomodate even one-tenth of the Jews.
9. In the area of the camp, a strong odor can be smelled on warmer days.
10. The guards pay for vodka, which they drink in large quantities, with any requested sum, and frequently with watches and valuables.
11. Jews arrived in Belzec [the township] looking for a witness who would testify that Jews are being killed there. They were ready to pay 120,000 zloty... They did not find a volunteer... It is unknown by which means the Jews are killed in the camp. There are three assumptions: (1) electricity; (2) gas; (3) by pumping out the air.
With regard to (1): there is no visible source of electricity; with regard to (2): no supply of gas and no residue of the remaining gas after the ventilation of the gas chamber were observed; with regard to (3): there are no factors that deny this [possibility]. It was even verified that during the building of one of the barracks, the walls and floor were covered with metal sheets (for some purpose).
In the area of the camp huge pits were dug in the autumn. At that time it was assumed that there would be underground stores. Now the purpose of this work is clear. From the particular barrack where the Jews are taken for so-called disinfection, a narrow railway leads to these pits. It was observed that the "disinfected" Jews were transported to a common grave by this trolley.
In Belzec the term Totenlager ["death camp"] was heard in connection with the Jewish camp. The leadership of the camp is in the hands of twelve SS men (the commander is Hauptmann Wirth) who have forty guards for help.
Another report from the Delegatura to the Government-in-Exile in London (dated July 10, 1942, published by the Polish Ministry of the Interior in London at the beginning of 1943, quoted in Arad):
According to information from a German employed in the extermination site, this place is located in Belzec, close to the railway station, and is fenced off by barbed wire. Inside and outside the fences Ukrainian sentries are posted. The extermination is carried out in the following manner: the train with the Jews, after its arrival at Belzec station, follows the spur until the fences that surround the place of extermination. There the railway workers are changed. From this place until the disembarkation point at the end of the spur, the train is driven by a German locomotive driver. After unloading, the men are taken to the barrack on the right, the women to the barrack on the left, where they have to remove their clothes, as if they were going to baths. After removing their clothes, both groups proceed to the third barrack, with an electrical floor, where the extermination is carried out. Afterward, the corpses are transferred by trolley to a trench behind the fence, which is 3 meters deep. This trench was dug by Jews, and all of them were subsequently liquidated.
According to Arad, "news about Treblinka and the mass murder that was being perpetrated there reached the Armia Krajowa from the first weeks that the camp existed. The interest exhibited by the Underground in what was going on in the desolate area of Treblinka dated from early summer of 1941, when, in anticipation of the Soviet attack, German units were concentrated there and the labor and penal camp of Treblinka I was activated."
Regarding early reports from Treblinka:
- General Bor-Komorowski (second command in the Armia Krajowa)
Not later than July 29 [1942] we learned from reports of the railway workers that transports were being taken to the concentration camp of Treblinka and that the Jews were disappearing there without trace. There can no longer be any doubt that the deportations are the beginning of extermination.
In the Information Bulletin of the Armia Krajowa of August 17, 1942:
... The progress in the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. The decrease in the number of inhabitants in the ghetto at the present stage totals 200,000 persons, that is, 50 percent of the situation that existed before July 22.... In the period between July 23 and August 7, the following transports left for Treblinka... a total of 113,100 people. Besides these transports from Warsaw, every day additional trains from other cities reach Treblinka. For example at the beginning of August a transport arrived from Radom, so that all together every day three transports arrive, each with sixty cars, of them fifty-eight with Jews. In each car there are 100 people. After the engine leaves the station, they force the Jews to undress in order to go, supposedly, to the showers. Actually they are taken to the gas chambers, exterminated there, and then buried in prepared pits, sometimes when they are still alive.
If this isn't enough for you, read the chapter of the book -- the list of quoted reports goes on and on after these, I've just given you just a taste. I mean there is unambiguous and overwhelming evidence that the actions in Belzec and Treblinka were widely known at the time and that this information reached the west. There was detailed information about the uprising in Treblinka as it happened, there was even a report about the uprising in Sobibor even though secrecy around this camp was much better maintained.
The missions of Jan Karski are further evidence. He knew enough about Belzec that he attempted (albeit unsuccessfully) to infiltrate the camp in 1942. He reported specifically on it, on the Warsaw Ghetto, and on the extermination campaign more generally to FDR and to Justice Frankfurter of the US Supreme Court in mid-1943 during his visit to the United States. Based on Karski's and other reports from the Underground, the Polish Foreign Minister in Exile distributed a memorandum to the governments of the United Nations on December 10, 1942, entitled "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German-Occupied Poland". That report can be found here:
http://www.projectinposterum.org/docs/m ... nation.htm
Seriously, the notion that this was some big secret hidden from the world is a rationalization that the western world maintains in order to hide from its own shame (regardless of how much shame is merited). This is exacerbated by our images of Allied troops liberating concentration camps, which create the misleading impression that it was only through these discoveries that the west became aware of the Holocaust. But you don't have to dig very deep to see that the Germans were unable to maintain secrecy, and the degree to which they really tried is open to debate. We're just talking about Aktion Reinhard in this thread, but the Einsatzgruppen killings were widely known, Auschwitz-Birkenau was widely known, and even Chelmno was locally well known -- locals interviewed for Shoah all knew what was happening, and Jews in Lodz knew about it by various means.
Your contention that there is some relationship between outside knowledge and the "sheep to the slaughter" caricature doesn't make sense. The "sheep to the slaughter" idea comes mainly from Nazis like Franz Stangl, who tried to mitigate
their own shame by finding a way to blame the "impassivity" of starving naked Jews being whipped and bludgeoned down the "himmelstrasse" for their own deaths. Many if not most of the Jews, certainly those from Poland, were convinced they were going to die once they got in the trains. Some of this came from rumor, some from reports and foreknowledge, and some from sheer logic based on everything else the Nazis had done. Foreknowledge doesn't mean that you can do anything about it.
There is no doubt that we would benefit from more research and exposition on the death camps, everything from opening archives and translating diaries to LIDAR and excavations. But this is to fill in gaps, not to uncover secrets.
