Wiki Holocaust

[ginger]

In reading about the Balkans, I discovered that during World War II the Croats set up an extermination center at Jasenovac in Croatia to exterminate the Serbs. The Serbs were Orthodox Christians while the Croats were Catholics.

Since Jasenovac was dubbed an extermination camp, I wondered if the Croats used gas chambers to exterminate the Serbs. I went to Wikipedia for a quick overview. They reported that, yes, there were gas chambers at Jasenovac. Wiki writes:

Gassing and poisoning: . . . They first tried to gas the women and children that arrived from camp Djakovo with gas vans . . . The method was later replaced with stationary gas-chambers.

In its notes on the article, Wikipedia quotes Antun Vrban, - who was apparently being tried for war crimes at Jasenovac:

"Q. And what did you do with the children
A. The weaker ones we poisoned
Q. How?
A. We led them into a yard... and into it we threw gas
Q. What gas?
A. Zyklon B and sulfur dioxide.”

I doubt that children could be killed by tossing Zyklon B pellets at them in an open yard! As for SO2, a person can be harmed by exposure, but can they be killed when exposed in an open yard? I’d be surprised if SO2, or even Zyklon B, is that deadly, but I could be wrong.

I don’t expect much from Wikipedia when it comes to the Holocaust, but this information struck me as ridiculous. I’ve checked other sources but I can find no other mention of stationary gas chambers at Janesovac. It looks like the original camp is gone, along with any stationary gas chambers. As with all gas chamber claims, any direct evidence, such as an intact building, is absent.

Do you think there is any truth to Wiki’s information or to the witness testimony? As I said, it strikes me as ridiculous. I find this often when reading about or hearing about the Holocaust in the most accessible sources, like mainstream news outlets, television, movies, Wikipedia, or the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

[DSV]

Yeah, more than likely Vrban was tortured into giving phony confessions, just like the rest.

[Mkk]

Well, the "yard" thing is ridiculous. Noone has ever claimed it possible to use such gassing methods out in the open.

Can wikipedia provide any documentary proof of the killings, yes or no? No. It has to rely on the laughable testimony of someone, physically impossible at that.

Although I have never read anything on the subject, I have heard some allegations about "Croatian exterminaton camps". Perhaps we should start a thread invstigating this?

[borjastick]

If you look at the serbo croat war of the 1990's it was clear that ethnic cleansing was not far from the top of their list of 'to do' projects. However they chose to do it with guns not a well developed gassing technique, that would have been available to them had they perfected things in the second world war.

Therefore on that basis alone, and there are of course others, I would say this story is total nonsense.

[ginger]

Thanks for the input on this.

Another point to be made from the extermination camp at Jasenovac is that the exterminations were not part of the Final Solution. The victims were Serbs and not Jews.

Still, the language of the Final Solution is all over the Wikipedia entry. Much blame is given to the Nazi for influencing the Croats into commiting atrocities. I believe Wikipedia is heavily influenced by the Holocaust Industry, and this is why the "gas chambers" became part of the Jasenovac story.

[Toshiro]

These stories are about the Stara Gradiška sub-camp of Jasenovac. Of course, there is no evidence, except for "testimonies."

In the Sajmište camp, they supposedly used the very same Saurer "gas van" that arrived from Berlin to Belgrade in March 1942, and after they were "done," they sent the van back to Berlin.

The claim is not that they only killed Serbs. They claim Jews were gassed.

[Toshiro]

I did some more digging regarding this. From here, page 99-100: http://www.rs.boell.org/downloads/Reader_Sajmiste.pdf

Turner’s personal file contains a letter dated 11 April 1942, before the completion of the gassings, addressed to Himmler’s adjutant, Karl Wolff, in which the head of the Serbian civil administration writes:

A few months ago I ordered the shooting of all the Jewish males under my command, and the assembling of all the Jewish women and children in the camp. At that time I obtained, with the help of the SD, a delousing van [Entlausungwagon] which shall clean up the camp in a few weeks time.

Note it says a delousing van, not a gas van.

It goes on:

Significantly, however, Schäfer, the head of the Belgrade Security Police, related
that on the eve of his departure to Belgrade in January 1942, Heydrich personally
briefed him and never mentioned Jews. Furthermore, he claimed at his trial after
the war that he did not ask Berlin to send the gas van, and upon his arrival in
Belgrade, when he heard about the annihilation of the local Jewish men, he was
convinced that it was part of the so-called ‘Final Solution’. He was, therefore, not
surprised when he received a telegram from Berlin [from Heinrich Müller, RSHA Gestapo chief] concerning the dispatch of
the gas van, nor had he any doubts as to its purpose. The wording, (according to
Schäfer) was something like this:

The subject: Jewish action [Judenaktion] in Serbia.
A special detachment [Einsatzkommando] with a Saurer van
is on the way for a special action

I tried to find the telegram, and this is what I found:

Dieses Fernschreiben, welches nicht mehr vorhanden ist [...]

It says the telegram no longer exists. How convenient. So we're left with nothing but a testimony of a "special action" and a letter referring to a delousing van.

Edit: the "delousing van" was typed in quotation marks, so the exterminationalists believe it's an euphemism for murder: http://www.holocaust-history.org/19420411-turner-wolff/

[Mkk]

The "Turner" letter has been demolished elsewhere. See p. 87 onwards here.

http://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/26-tgv.pdf

[Toshiro]

The "Turner" letter has been demolished elsewhere. See p. 87 onwards here.

http://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/26-tgv.pdf

Thanks. Another fraud. Who would have thought?

[ginger]

Thanks Toshiro – I checked your link on Sajmiste and was connected to a Wikipedia entry. Thankfully, Wiki doesn’t assert that there were stationary gas chambers at Sajmiste.

Wiki asserts that there were stationary gas chambers at Jasenovac, which puzzled me because Jasenovac was not a German-run camp, so technically it was not part of the Final Solution. I had thought that the gas chambers were unique to the Nazis and the Final Solution.

As for gas vans, the storytellers can explain the absence of gas vans more easily than the absence of stationary gas chambers.

Mkk's link to the article on the gas vans was very helpful. After reading the Conclusion, I doubt that the Nazis used gas vans.

The most shocking part of the Holocaust narrative is the use of stationary gas chambers to exterminate the Jews. It is such an effective part of the story that the narrators cannot refrain from including it whereever they can – and the ordinary listener, and Wikipedia reader, will believe it.

[ganglere]

Good evening ladies and gentlemen!

I have studied the Jasenovac entry at Wikipedia, and being the version in my native tongue (swedish) I can conclude that it is more ridiculous than usual. There is also a photo of a Ustasha guard that is standing in a pit of what seems to be humans. It is usual holocaust quality i.e. unsharp, with what appears to be blacked-out areas. and, by his left leg, an oversize skull?

To my knowledge, there has never been a thorough examination of the claimed atrocities, and , in Titos Yugoslavia, it was probably treated as "judicial notice" in the same manner as the Nuremberg process did.

On the other side, there were a large number of Croats killed after the war:

" recent construction works [in 2000] of a highway near Maribor (Republic of Slovenia) the roadbed crossed a filled in 1941 anti-tank trench whose length, one reckons, was some 2.5km. On the excavated part of it of some 70m one found and had to remove thousands of bones of some 1,200 skeletons of entirely decomposed male bodies. Considering some 15 skeletons per meter (!) in that excavated trench part only, one derives to say over 30,000 killed males being buried there... [the place of this horrific mass slaughter in Slovenia is still not marked by any visible sign].
• In 1999 the resources from the Republic of Slovenia reported of as many as 110 mass graves of Croats discovered in this state, victims of the "Way of the Cross" in 1945 immediately after the end of WW2. Among them there were not only soldiers, but also a large number of civilians. The Slovenian public was shocked by the size and number of these graves.
• In 2001 Slovenian sources reported of as many as 296 mass graves on their territory, and an estimate of about 190,000 Croats killed immediately after the end of WW2 (May 1945 and later), mostly Croats. Only in the region of Tezno woods Slovenian sources estimate about 60-80,000 killed. Many children bones have been found among the remains victims."

Source: croatianhistory.net

Personally, I trust Wikipedia as far as the recipe for vegetable omelet.

All the Best!

Humbly yours,

Ganglere