Some notes on the Bau-Reder map
Your contributions to this forum are invaluable, Mr. Merovingian. This book must have been pretty hard to find. It would be great to have a translation especially of the pages written by Nella Rost (I don't think this has ever been translated)
If the
English translation which appeared in
Polin is to be trusted, Reder claimed that the prisoner work force at Belzec numbered 500 men.
Take a look at the Bau-Reder map of Belzec. Only one of the barracks, the small one (not much larger than one of the gas chambers!) marked
cz. robotnicy, is designated as living quarters for the prisoners (compare that to the three large barracks at the bottom which are the living barracks of the Ukrainian guards). How did they fit all the Arbeitsjuden in there?
?
What an accurate map!
Also note the absence of the "Schlauch" (which should be there since the camp shows the alleged later phase of the camp with the larger "gas chamber" building) and the absence of any division of the camp into different sectors (in Belzec allegedly two, one with the sorting and work barracks and one with the gas chambers and graves). Cf the Arad map of Belzec during its second phase:
On Arad's map, the prisoner barracks has become two, with a total area matching approximately the size of the entire gas chamber building. How did Reder, a few years after the alleged events, miss to tell Bauer that there were two larger living barracks for the prisoners?
Further notes of interest:
- The Ukrainian living barracks are placed in the far north on the map of Arad, and in the far south of the camp in the map of Reder and Bau
- The ramp is entirely missing on Reder's map
- There are mass graves on Reder's map south of the railway spur, visible to arriving victims(!)
- The dimensions of the camp is very much different in the two maps, the camp shown on Reder's map is far from the almost quadratical shape shown on Arad's.
- Arad's map has a huge storeroom (roughly twice the size of the gas chamber building) in the south end of the camp (legend 11). The Reder-Bau map only has a small part of a barrack (less than the size of one of the gas chambers) named "magazine" in the lower left part of the camp.
- The buildings marked 7,8, 21 and 22 on Arad's map are absent from the Reder-Bau map. The absence of buildings 21 and 22 probably reflects that Reder does not make any distinction between workers in the reception camp and workers in the alleged "death camp" (or indeed mention any separation of the camp into different parts separated by fences or similar) - hence no special separate living quarters for the workers in the latter.
And what to say about those illustrations...
