An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

[Sergey Romanov]

Have they though? They don't seem to have been keen on spreading this particular story...

The Alpenszlak version bears some strong resemblance to the Dec 42 report by Karski, I'll compare the two a bit later.

[Gorque]

Hi Michael:

In your quote from The Black Book of Polish Jewry page 329 states "Concentration Camp for Jews 12 miles outside of Belzec near Lublin" while the quote on "In a death camp 12 kilometres outside of Belzec". Is this a transcription error or did the eyewitness visit two different camps?

[Sergey Romanov]

The Apenszlak version of the Karski story has the episode with Himmler - just as the Dec.'42 report by Karski. Himmler relays Hitler's order and calls Jews either "the scum of the earth" or "gnoj ludzkosci" (scum of humanity).

http://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/42/0/-/7 ... -LHVKWOE_w

It is followed in both versions by descriptions of lethal privations - hunger, corpses on the streets - in the Warsaw ghetto. In both versions relatives carry the dead outside in order to avoid burial costs.

In both versions the Jews are under "open sky" in the camp which is not Belzec. They are permitted 15 kg of baggage. 120-130 or 120-140 persons pushed into railroad cars intended for 40 persons.

After 100 or 90-100 were pushed in, the rest had to clamber over heads of other Jews.

Quicklime-chloride / unslaked lime. Natural physical needs.
The number 6000 Warsaw Jews appears in both stories.

The phrase about Dante is in both stories.


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The reports very clearly come from the same source.

[wm]

It's "human manure".
So he can write at the end, after he mentions that the ashes are reportedly used as fertilizer, the Fuhrer words are realized.

[Sergey Romanov]

Yep, the fertilizer bit is another coincidence.

[wm]

The report contains a glaring error, namely that the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto ended up at a camp in the vicinity of Belzec. That error is unlikely to have been made by someone who had been in Warsaw and seen the deportations from there; such a person would have known that the deported Jews were taken to Treblinka. However, such a mistake could easily have been made by someone sitting in London, who had become familiar with the name of Belzec from reports reaching him much earlier in 192 (Belzec began operations in March of that year, about five months before Treblinka.

Both Jews and the "Aryans" outside didn't know such things, they didn't know much about what was going on outside their own neighborhoods. And nobody observed deportations, except those deported, Jewish policemen, and the SS-men.
The name "Bełżec" was known in the Warsaw Ghetto from the end of May 1942 as an extermination place, where people were gassed. In the smaller ghettos earlier, so probably it was more known than the others. But nobody really cared about names, and they were probably easily confused.

[michael mills]

The material generally attributed to Karski is also quoted in another part of the "The Black Book of Polish Jewry", in Chapter Eight, "Extermination".

In the section "Start of Extermination in General Government", it is stated (page 119):

Living conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto on the eve of the mass extermination, which started in July 1942, were dramatically described by an eye-witness, a secret courier of the Polish Underground organisation, who reached London at the beginning of December 1942 after succeeding in getting out of Poland. His report was published in the Voice of The Unconquered, a monthly newsletter of the Jewish Labor Committee, New York, in March 1943. Immediately upon the arrival of the courier in London, the Polish Government summoned the two Jewish members of the Polish national Council, the late Szmul Zygielbojm and Dr I Schwarzbart, and turned over to them the documents which the courier had brought.

The courier stated that long before the orgy of mass-murder which commenced at the end of July 1942, conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were desperate. We read in his report: "The hunger was so great that the people became crazed. The aged and children by the hundreds would drop dead in the streets. Dead corpses lying about in the streets no longer made any impression upon the inhabitants of the Ghetto. Every morning in front of practically every gate there would lie naked corpses. They were stripped of their clothes and cast into the street to avoid funeral expenses. All the dead gathered during the day would be buried in common graves".

The description of the courier is consistent with it being Karski. The book is correct in placing Karski's description of conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto in the period well before the beginning of the deportations, since those conditions improved after most of the population had been deported, due to the the reduction of overcrowding.

That means that if Karski did visit the Ghetto himself and was not just repeating material that had been given to him, it must have been in the period before late July 1942, ie when it was still possible for sightseers, both German and Polish, to go into the Ghetto and move around.

That in turn means that the account given in "Secret State", where Karski states that he was smuggled into the ghetto in August 1942, after meeting the two Jewish Underground leaders, has been fictionalised, no doubt for dramatic effect.

Beginning on page 123 and extending to page 131, there is section with the tile "Polish Government Courier's Report on Warsaw Extermination". It begins with these words:

The report submitted by the previously mentioned secret courier of the Polish underground organisations states:

There follows an extremely detailed, almost day-to-day account of the procedure of the deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto up until approximately the end of August, including long quotes from German orders to the Jewish Council. So detailed is the account that it seems unlikely to be the work of a single observer, but rather a compendium of information from a number of sources. Furthermore, the report does not claim to be an eyewitness account.

My guess is that this report was not related verbally by Karski, but rather was a written report produced by the Polish Underground and given to Karski to carry to London.

One noteworthy feature of this report submitted by the courier, presumably Karski, is that it consistently reports the destination of the deportees from Warsaw as Treblinka.

Page 123:

The so-called 'expulsion action' is equivalent to the military action of mopping up a terrain, with one difference: in a military operation, the beaten enemy surrenders, and after being disarmed is placed in war prisoner camps, while the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto meant only a terrible death in Treblinka.

Page 128:

An average of 100 persons were loaded into a car. When filled the cars were locked from the outside. The direction of the transport was invariably the same - the slaughter house of Treblinka.

Page 129:

Gradually, the remaining Jews began to realise that the Germans sent all the 'deportees' to Treblinka where they died under atrocious tortures, especially since news from Treblinka began to come in, whispered secretly at first, and more openly later. Scores of persons who succeeded in escaping from the vast slaughter-house recounted their tragic experience.

Page 130:

A special institution, the SS Werterfassung (Board of Property Seizure), which has been working without interruption until this very day (middle of November 1942) took over the abandoned Jewish property. In addition to this, houses were blockaded and their inhabitants sent to Treblinka.

[The above excerpt is important as it gives the date on which this report was compiled, the middle of November.]

Page 131:

It is significant that the Germans did not consider the needs of the factories; very often they took away vital workers, the best experts who could not be replaced. The interventions of the German managers were successful in very few cases. As a rule, the workers went directly to the trains leading to death in Treblinka.

In addition to the report described above, this chapter includes another report claimed to be by the same courier, with the title "The Hunt in the Ghetto".

Page 135:

A description of the way in which the Jews were hunted down in the course of the liquidation of the Ghetto was given by the courier who reached London in December 1942, and who has been previously quoted:

The following section differs from the first report attributed to this courier, in that whereas the first report was fairly sober in tone, this one one is highly emotional and full of lurid embellishment. It also contains some clearly fictional elements such as the following:

"The Nazi authorities distributed arms to the Hitler youth of 15 and 16, who go in hordes through the streets of the Ghetto and kill all whom they meet in their path. They do not choose; children or grown-ups. And when the streets are finally deserted they go into the yards and homes or shoot through the windows. German soldiers and agents of the Gestapo are running the Hitler Youth a close second in this orgy of murder".

The claim that members of the Hitler Youth were used in the rounding up of the Jews and actually outdid the Gestapo is quite unhistorical; members of the Hitler Youth were only used in this paramilitary way, ie with arms, in the later stages of the war when Germany was running short of manpower.

In deed, the emotional intensity of this report, and the close identification with the Jewish victims, leads to suspect that the person who wrote it may have been a Jew rather than a Polish courier.

The report continues:

"I want to return to the question of 'deportations' ", the report continues. "I saw in Warsaw the first part of this act and later on the outskirts of Belzec the second and last part..........From Warsaw the Jews are driven to the tracks on the outskirts of the city where a long train of cattle cars is already waiting for them. Before they reach the tracks, however, many are shot for one reason or another, particularly those who lag behind. The whole route is literally strewn with corpses. When they finally reach their destination they are robbed of all their possessions (officially the deportees are urged to take along their most valuable possessions). They are then loaded in cars, a hundred people in a car, and the first lap of the journey which lasts from two to eight days begins. Not once during the journey are the doors of the cars opened with the result that many die before they reach the 'sorting point' (Oboz Rozdzielczy) which is located about fifty kilometres from the city of Belzec. Nevertheless the first stage of this journey is mild, almost human, in comparison with what awaits them at the second stage.

In the uniform of a Polish policeman I visited the sorting camp near Belzec. It is a huge barracks only about half of which is covered with a roof. When I was there about 5,000 men and women were brought to the camp. However, every few hours new transports of Jews, men and women, young and old, would arrive for the last journey towards death".

There follows a description of the sufferings of the Jews in the camp (including the naked old man) which essentially mirrors the description given in the report which I quoted in my previous post. The description of how the Jews are killed is slightly different.

Page 137:

"A long train packed with several thousand men, women, and children is switched to a side line where it remains from two to eight days. The doors are never opened. Those inside suffer inhuman agony. They have to perform their natural functions over the heads of the others. Many cars are painted with lime which begins to burn from the dampness of the urine and increases the tortures of the barefooted and nude.

"Because there are not enough cars to kill the Jews in this relatively inexpensive manner many of them are taken to nearby Belzec where they are murdered by poison gases or by the application of electric currents. The corpses are burned near Belzec. Thus within an area of fifty kilometres huge stakes are burning Jewish corpses day and night".

Thus two reports are attributed to the courier who arrived in London in December 1942. One is a fairly sober factual account full of hard details such as the text of German orders, and containing the historically statement that the Jews deported from Warsaw were invariably sent to Treblinka; it does not claim to be an eyewitness account, but nevertheless is entirely consistent with what is known about the process of deportation from Warsaw from a number of different sources.

The second report is quite different. It claims to be an eyewitness account, is very emotional, full of lurid embellishment, and historically incorrect in that it claims that the Jews deported from Warsaw were taken to a sorting camp in the vicinity of Belzec, and either died in trains or were taken to Belzec and killed there.

Furthermore, it contains a number of formulaic elements that are sometimes repeated. For example, the journey from Warsaw to the sorting camp from two to eight days, the doors are never opened, and many die before reaching the camp. Then the journey away from the camp also lasts from two to eight days, the doors are never opened, and many die.

My guess is that the two reports have different sources. The first report was put together from material obtained from various sources and merely given to the courier to take to London. The second is ostensibly composed by the courier himself, and describes events he claims to have witnessed personally, although the details are historically incorrect.

[michael mills]

In your quote from The Black Book of Polish Jewry page 329 states "Concentration Camp for Jews 12 miles outside of Belzec near Lublin" while the quote on "In a death camp 12 kilometres outside of Belzec". Is this a transcription error or did the eyewitness visit two different camps?

Most probably a transcription error on the part of whoever copied the material from the courier's report for publishing in the "Black Book of Polish Jewry".

[wm]

The book is correct in placing Karski's description of conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto in the period well before the beginning of the deportations, since those conditions improved after most of the population had been deported, due to the the reduction of overcrowding.

To tell the truth it don't.
At best it's a description of the few worst streets, where the Jews relocated from smaller ghettos were dumped and left without any help - not of the Ghetto.
In the last months one person died per about 3,500 every day, mostly in those worst neighborhoods. And mortality was declining. So the deaths were rather invisible. They were talking about new plays staged in the Ghetto, new form of public transport (holzgas-powered omnibuses), newly created playgrounds for children, expansion of their ambulance service.
A visitor strolling through main streets of the Ghetto would rather see this than mayhem and horror:

The claim that members of the Hitler Youth were used in the rounding up of the Jews and actually outdid the Gestapo is quite unhistorical; members of the Hitler Youth were only used in this paramilitary way, ie with arms, in the later stages of the war when Germany was running short of manpower.

At least in one case Hitler Youth were used, in a provincial ghetto, but nothing is known about Warsaw. Although if it happened once during the deportations, it could have been easily forgotten later.
Speculatively, Hitler Youth could have been a weasel word for the Jewish police. Frequently there were described as worse than the Gestapo, with their brutal savage-like behavior.

[Gorque]

Hi WM:

Those are interesting photos that you have shared. Thanks.

I'm looking at the clothing in photos 2,3, & 5 and notice that the majority are wearing winter coats, suggesting the late winter, early spring months of '42 while picture 4, based on the state of the leaves on the tree in the background suggest late April to early May. Is there any further detail regarding the timeline for these photos?

[wm]

4 was made in summer 1941. The rest, is usually said, were made sometime in 1941. Mortality was highest in 1941 (and in the second half of 1940).
1942 was very "short" so not that many photos were made, people rarely made them in winter (it was hard using their primitive, manual cameras), and then the deportations started quickly.
Almost all the known photos were made in 1941, including of the dying children.
But some can be found (at least are labeled as such, from http://fotopolska.eu):

[Gorque]

Hi wm:

Thanks for the additional photos and the link to them.