From the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld

[RACPISA]

After I saw "The Pianist", I decided to read the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman. At the end, there was an epilouge with exerpts from the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer who helped Szpilman at the end of the war. In one entry, Hosenfeld described a method of killing Jews that I had never heard of before:

The rumours say that thirty thousand Jews are to be taken from the ghetto this week and sent east somewhere. In spite of all the secrecy, people say they know what happens then: somewhere near Lublin, bulidings have been constructed with rooms that can be electrically heated by heavy current, like the electricity in a crematorium. Unfortunate people are driven into these heated rooms and burnt alive, and thousands can be killed like that in a day, saving all the trouble of shooting them, digging mass graves and then filling them in. The guillotine of the French Revolution can't compete, and even in the cellars of the Russian secret police they haven't devised such virtuoso methods of mass slaughter.

pg. 198

Was this really a rumor or was this method actually used?

[David Thompson]

I've never seen or heard of any claims of an electrical method of killing being used, despite the claimant's statement that it "saved trouble" for the executioners. It should be taken as a rumor until proven otherwise.

[White Rose]

After I saw "The Pianist", I decided to read the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman. At the end, there was an epilouge with exerpts from the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer who helped Szpilman at the end of the war. In one entry, Hosenfeld described a method of killing Jews that I had never heard of before:

The rumours say that thirty thousand Jews are to be taken from the ghetto this week and sent east somewhere. In spite of all the secrecy, people say they know what happens then: somewhere near Lublin, bulidings have been constructed with rooms that can be electrically heated by heavy current, like the electricity in a crematorium.

Was this really a rumor or was this method actually used?

I doubt this method was actually used; it sounds more like a rumour spread by the SS or the Gestapo to instill fear in the civilian populace.

I was in an area affected by the big blackout in August of 2003, and you realize what a lack of real information can do. With the restriction on information, rumour ran rampant; we were under terrorist attack, the impact of the outage was much farther and wider then it actually was, etc etc. While there wasn't a mass panic, any of those things were plausible and considered as they could be true.

We are able to distinguish fables from truth through a critical news media, where two or more sources are reporting on the facts. During the war, there were no critical sources to dispute the veracity of rumours. Some "super weapon" that could be used to execute a whole town would be excellent propoganda against resistance of the average citizen.

[michael mills]

It was a rumour that became very widespread, and also quite detailed.

The first reports that filtered through about mass-killings at Belzec described electrocution as the killing method.

Such reports, including quite detailed but historically untrue descriptions of the electrocution methodology (one such being an electric current fed through a large metal plate forming the floor of a water-filled pit on which hundreds were killed at a time), can be found in publications that appeared during the war.

It is unknown how the stories of mass-killing by electrocution arose. It is unlikely that they were manufactured out of thin air.

It seems to me most likely that the accounts arose from confusion between description of trainloads of Jews being taken to camouflaged camps where they disappeared, and description of German installations with heavy-duty electrical connections.

What we can be certain of is that mass-killing by electrocution has never been documented as a methodology used by German authorities.

[White Rose]

It was a rumour that became very widespread, and also quite detailed.

I would think that the "security forces" would have encouraged and reinforced such rumours, the more grisly the more productive, from their point of view.

The first reports that filtered through about mass-killings at Belzec described electrocution as the killing method.

Such reports, including quite detailed but historically untrue descriptions of the electrocution methodology (one such being an electric current fed through a large metal plate forming the floor of a water-filled pit on which hundreds were killed at a time), can be found in publications that appeared during the war.

It is unknown how the stories of mass-killing by electrocution arose. It is unlikely that they were manufactured out of thin air.

It seems to me most likely that the accounts arose from confusion between description of trainloads of Jews being taken to camouflaged camps where they disappeared, and description of German installations with heavy-duty electrical connections.

What we can be certain of is that mass-killing by electrocution has never been documented as a methodology used by German authorities.

Since there weren't any survivors yet to deliver first hand accounts, I think it's quite reasonable for the people that were left behind to speculate as to what happened to those who were deported. We have to rationalize things, and electrocution is as good a guess as any.

Some "revisionists" make a big deal out of the rumours of "steam" being used to kill at various camps. However, diesel exhaust creates visible fumes, and I believe that Zyklon-B can form a blue cloud, and in any event, the warmth emiting on a cold day could all cause "steam like" clouds to eminate from the killing facilities when the doors were opened. A casual observer seeing this process from a distance, and not wanting to ask about what they probably shouldn't be seeing, could definately have started a rumour like this that is credible.

I can't really figure out the electrocution thing, although it might be related to the fact the camps were surrounded by electrified wire, but I've got nothing but my own feeling for that.