Totenlager as "clean side" of delousing operation

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Samuel Crowell's school of thought on how the holocaust legend came about, can be seen as very "Jew friendly." Rather than liars trying to villify the Germans, Crowell believes that the holocaust was a legend that came about, as innocently and naively as the people fooled by the HG Wells War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938.

Consider Sobibor from a Crowell perspective: As a delousing camp, where nudity was involved there might have been some tree branch fences for privacy. (That makes sense for privacy but not much sense as death camp security.) Jewish workers who worked there, couldn't have interacted with the "clean side" because lice could pass with that interaction. A tree branch fence could have been enough to separate the clean and dirty side. One could see how easy it would be for a rumour to spread. Here's how: Because you can't interact with the "clean" people, it would be easy to believe they were being killed. Thus the death camp (totenlager) is just the clean side after delousing.

Two major things that support this:

1: The Sobibor maps and models have a ridiculously small "death camp" (Totenlager.) It's not much bigger than a suburban back yard in the USA. Here 80,000 bodies were apparently buried, then later disinterred, bones crushed, and reburied. That would take some space. And how many workers? The workers supposedly lived in this area also. But this small space makes perfect sense for a delousing operation. The Jews get their deloused clothes back, put them on, and leave at the train station which is a 2 minute walk away.

2: The Sobibor revolt. No one from the "death part of the camp" escaped. That's odd considering all the shooting and tumult going on. Also, the death camp was so separate from the rest of the camp that no one like Pechersky, Blatt or others even had contact with a single Jewish inmate in the "death part" of the camp. But again this situation makes perfect sense for a delousing operation: There never was anyone there in the first place. That's why none of them escaped and why no one knew who they were.

The dirty side might have been run by Jews were were more immune to typhus. It's said that Warsaw Jews were more immune. One can see how believable a holocaust story might be if these Jews were told that the people entering the tube were being killed.

The Crowell perspective, if I can call it that, is an interesting angle with which to view Sobibor, but it must be mentioned that the featured Sobibor survivors such as Blatt, Pechersky, Biskowitz, and Dov Frieberg were later shown to be obvious liars. At the Eichmann trial for the latter two. Nevertheless, looking at Sobibor from a Crowell perspective shines light on what must be a big part of how the story came about.

[Laurentz Dahl]

The Sobibor revolt. No one from the "death part of the camp" escaped. That's odd considering all the shooting and tumult going on. Also, the death camp was so separate from the rest of the camp that no one like Pechersky, Blatt or others even had contact with a single Jewish inmate in the "death part" of the camp. But again this situation makes perfect sense for a delousing operation: There never was anyone there in the first place. That's why none of them escaped and why no one knew who they were.

Arad writes on page 79 of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka...:

The 200-300 Jewish prisoners who were kept in Camp III [the alleged "extermination area" of Sobibor], who removed the bodies from the gas chambers and buried them, had no contact with those in the other parts of the camp. The food for them was cooked in Camp I and taken by Jewish prisoners to the gate of Camp III. No physical contact was permitted between the Jewish prisoners from the different parts of the camp. But the Jewish prisoners in Camp I wanted desperately to find out what was going on in Camp III. Hershl Zukerman [a name that is spelled Herzl Cukierman elsewhere], who was a cook and prepared the food for prisoners in Camp III, testified:

I came up with an idea. Everyday, I used to send twenty or twenty-five buckets with food for the workers in Camp III. The Germans were not interested in what I cooked, so once I prepared a thick crumb pie and inside I put the following letter: "Friends, write what is going on in your camp." When I received the bucket back, I found in one of them a piece of paper with the answer: Here the last human march takes place, from this place nobody returns. Here the people turn cold..." I informed some other people about the substance of this letter.(13)[Yad Vashem Archives 016/1187, the testimony of Hershl Zukerman p.7-8]

The truth of what was going on in Camp III became known to the Jewish prisoners in Sobibor at the beginning of June 1942.

Comment: if the German guards were so extremely careful not to let the prisoners in Camp III come into contact with the prisoners in Camp I or II, how come they neglected this possible way of passing on messages? Why not take the simple measure of checking the empty food buckets before they were returned?

Is the theatrical wording of the return letter believable? Why would the Camp III prisoners not mention any specifics regarding the mass murder process?

Notice that Zukerman testified that he informed some other prisoners about the substance of this letter, something that hints that he did not show them the letter, probably since it never existed.

Arad writes on page 300-301 that the Camp I cook "Hersz Cukierman" and the Ukranian in charge of the kitchen, Koszewadski, were the originators of an uprising/escape plan in the summer of 1943. Koszewadski supposedly had contact with partisans and Cukierman paid him "hundreds of dollars" to uphold these contacts. Their plan was to poison the German and Ukrainian guards with morphine or some other substance. Cukierman also testified that he and other members of the underground in Sobibor had made contact with Ukrainian communist partisans, but that this other escape plan was abandoned because of mistrust.

Arad indexes both the names Hersz Cukierman and Hershl Zukerman without pointing out that they are the same person. That Zukerman and Cukierman are the same person is supported by the fact that Arad refers to the testimony of Hersz Cukierman as YVA 016-1187, which is the same reference as the above "Zukerman testimony" referred to in note 13 to chapter 10, page 79. Mix-up by Arad or some kind of deliberate deception?

Blatt writes on page 143 of From the Ashes of Sobibor:

Also, to the organizers' dismay, there was no possibility of contacting Lager III, where about 30 Jews were now working.

Why not have Cukerman/Zukerman/Cukierman bake another thick crust pie?

This Zukerman seems a likely suspect for the originator of the gas chamber rumours spread among Sobibor prisoner workers.

PS. It is often claimed that most of the working prisoners in the Reinhardt camps either were often killed and replaced by others (shootings and hangings were allegedly commonplace as punishments for even tiny disgressions against the rules) or died of diseases and hardships. Zukerman was a pretty lucky fellow, since he seems to have arrived at Sobibor soon after the alleged exterminations started in April 1942 and was one of the prisoners who survived the escape (together with his son Josef) in October 14 1943.

[Laurentz Dahl]

I believe Ya'akov Biskowitz (also spelled Jacob Biskubicz) is the only Sobibor "survivor" who testified that he had seen with his own eyes the Sobibor gas chambers (in contrast to the "spirally black substance" claims of Pechersky who supposedly heard these details from another prisoner), and he was not part of the alleged Lager III work force. Zelda Metz also claimed that the gas chamber floor(s) in Sobibor was collapsible. Was this detail in Metz testimony hearsay or something she claimed to have seen with her own eyes? I have only read this Metz quote from Mattogno:

Thereupon they went into the barracks where they cut the women's hair, then into the bathroom, that is to say, the gas chamber. They were asphyxiated by chlorine. After 15 minutes they were all asphyxiated. Through a skylight it was verified that all were dead. Then the floor opened automatically. The cadavers fell into a railroad car that ran through the gas chamber and carried the cadavers to the ovens.

http://www.vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/8/3/Mattogno261-302.html#ftn23

The source Mattogno gives is the Polish book Dokumenty i Materialy which often turns up as a source in books like Arad's.

Dokumenty i materialy, opracowal Mgr Blumental, Lodz, 1946, vol. I, p. 211.

This or another testimony by Metz is apparently available in French (a language I unfortuneatly am not very aquainted with):
http://resources.ushmm.org/Holocaust-Na ... at&id=7005

The part of the Biskowitz testimony regarding the Sobibor gas chambers:

A: After some time, a buzzing sound would be heard, the floor opened up, and the victims fell into the deep hollow below and were conveyed in this little train into the pit where the eighty men of Camp 3 were working, and they burned the bodies. The fire that was ablaze in Sobibór could be seen, without exaggeration, from a distance of twenty kilometers.
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Ya'akov Biskowitz describing Sobibor, in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, The Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial, Jerusalem, 1992, Session No. 65, 05Jun61, p. 1184.

Presiding Judge You described the inside of the gas chamber. For example, you told us how the floor opened up and the bodies fell into the railway waggons.

Witness Biskowitz Into the hollow below.

Q. Did you see this with your own eyes, or are you talking of things that you heard from others?

A. I will describe a shocking scene here.

Q. But first of all ? did you, in general, have an opportunity of seeing these things from the inside?

A. Not everybody had the opportunity, but I, by chance, did. By chance I was taken to bring a cart with a barrel of chloride. When I was passing by the two larger stores in Camp 2, I detached the cart and pushed it towards Camp 3. I was supposed to leave it near the gate, but I could not hold the vehicle back. The gate opened and it pushed me inside. Since I knew I would not get out alive from there, I began to run back at top speed and managed to reach my place of work without anyone noticing. I kept this a secret ? I am stressing this ? even from the inmates of the camp who worked with me. From a distance, I saw the pit and the hollow and the small train that carried the dead bodies. I did not see the gas chamber from the inside; I only saw, from the outside, that there was a very prominent roof, and that the floor opened and the bodies fell below.

Q. You came to this conclusion from the nature of the structure?

A. Not from the nature of the structure ? I saw it from afar even while I was running away quickly, although I cannot describe it exactly, after nineteen years.

Q. Please understand me. You are somewhat familiar with these matters. Did you see the floor when it had opened up?

A. I did not see that ? I merely saw that underneath the gas chamber, there was a hollow which already contained bodies.
Presiding Judge Thank you, Mr. Biskowitz, you have concluded your testimony. I know you have not told us everything. But there was no alternative.

Witness Biskowitz There was another shocking case which I witnessed, and I should like to describe just this one further incident.

Presiding Judge I am very sorry. I have already explained it to you. It is not only those who appear here who want to relate their story, and it is simply not possible. Thank you very much ? and Shalom.
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Ya'akov Biskowitz describing Sobibor, in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, The Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial, Jerusalem, 1992, Session No. 65, 05Jun61, p. 1188.

http://web.archive.org/web/200503310901 ... enb02.html

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Hi Laurentz Dahl,

That's amazing that you caught that Cukierman, Zukerman thing. If you hadn't caught it, I doubt anyone ever would have. Arad didn't catch it. That's an interesting assertion that he was the one who started the death rumour.

Yes, as Dahl mentions: 200-300 prisoners in camp 3.(Arad pg. 79) Considering that, it's just incredible when you look on Arad's map on page 35, or on the Blatt model, or on the the German Sobibor trial map: There's about enough room for 6 people to live there. But not only did 300 people live there, but they killed and buried 80,000 bodies.

Zukerman used to send 25 buckets of food to the 300 workers there. That's 12 people per bucket.

Dahl writes

Is the theatrical wording of the return letter believable?

Answer: No.

[Pauvre France]

This or another testimony by Metz is apparently available in French (a language I unfortuneatly am not very aquainted with):
http://resources.ushmm.org/Holocaust-Na ... at&id=7005

I would gladly help if you can get the document.

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Delousing has two characteristics that made the Germans very vulnerable to a rumour:

1) nudity and thus privacy barriers like a tree branch fence. So a section of people can't see what's going on.

2) A clean side where people don't mix with a dirty side.


In a small camp this wouldn't be so bad: you'd see the people again after everyone showered and got deloused. But in a transit camp, the permanent workers wouldn't see all the people again. The people would get back on the train and leave.

And there probably was real screaming due to the rumours spread in Warsaw and spread by the BBC that these were deathcamps. Even the movie Schindler's List of all things, shows Jews terrified of being killed only to find they were herded into a real mass shower facility.

[Laurentz Dahl]

In the testimony of Biskubicz published in Miriam Novitch' Sobibor anthology the description of the gas chamber has completely vanished. What we read is:

I couldn't believe in the reality of camp No.3. One day I pushed a wheelbarrow loaded with chloride, and, eager to know what was going on in the camp, I went over the limit. I was nearly killed. I was obsessed with the thought of escape, but I could not leave my father.

p.120

Not only is nothing told of how Biskubicz managed to get into the "death camp", or of what he saw there, the non-descript sojourn to Lager III is depicted as something willed by the witness because of his eagerness to know what was going in - contrary to Eichmann trial statement that it all happened by accident; and the wagon with chloride - heavy enough to push the gate open with Biskubicz hanging behind it - has turned into a wheelbarrow!

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Nice job Laurentz!

When Biskubicz lies, it's just so easy to change the story to make it sound more plausible, but then he doesn't realize the contradictions he's making. Wheelbarrows can't roll on their own.

[Laurentz Dahl]

Novitch' book also contains a long witness account written by Moshe Bahir. It has Bahir seeing Bauer on the roof of the "gas chambers" watching the victims through a small window in it! And although Bauer by the details of his account should not be able to see the insides of the building, he describes it in the same manner as Biskubicz, with a collapsible floor! On top of this, Bahir writes about a joke told to him by said Bauer, with the point of the joke relating to Bauer standing on the top of the gaschamber roof. All this stuff Bahir completely left out of his account at the Eichmann trial.

Eda Lichtman's witness account also has a collapsible-floor-gaschamber in it, even though she never clarifies how she knew about it.

I don't have the book with me right now but I will be back with quotes probably next week.

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Wasn't Bahir the man at the Eichmann trial who described recognizing Eichmann in a book, and then when Servatius asked to know which book and requested him to produce the book, he had to come back the next day and admit that no such picture existed in the book.

What a mess.

[Laurentz Dahl]

Wasn't Bahir the man at the Eichmann trial who described recognizing Eichmann in a book, and then when Servatius asked to know which book and requested him to produce the book, he had to come back the next day and admit that no such picture existed in the book.

What a mess.

Yes, Moshe Bahir is the one. Bahir, Freiberg and Biskubicz were the 3 Sobibor inmates who testified in Jerusalem in 1960. Eda Lichtman was scheduled to testify but did not go further than identifying herself before the court.

Here follows the most relevant parts of Bahirs written testimony which according to Miriam Novitch (Sobibor. Martyrdom and Revolt, Holocaust Library 1980) "were written about 1950, were issued by "The Museum of Fighters and Partisans" in Tel Aviv in 1970". Bolds mine.

Lager 3 was closed on all sides to the prisoners of Sobibor. It was impossible for us to see what was going on in that Lager because of the grove of pine trees which surrounded it. We saw only the roof of the "bathhouse" which protruded through the trees. Thus we saw the murderous face of Oberscharführer Bauer, who used to stand on the roof of that building and peep through the little window, into the death-chambers.
We all knew what was done inside the building. We knew that Bauer looked through the window in order to regulate the amount of death-gas which streamed through the ducts, which were in the form of an ordinary shower. He was the one who saw the victims suffocating from the gas that was showered upon them and he was the one who ordered that the flow of gas be increased or stopped. And he was the one who used to see the victims in their final agony and in their death. At his order the machinery which opened the floor of the "bathhouse" was activated, and the corpses fell into small carts which took them at first to massgraves and, later when time was short, to the cremation ovens instead.
Two hundred Jews worked in the gas chambers Lager. When their weeks of work ended, they, too, were sent to the "bathhouse" and the same number of men from the recently arrived transport was brought in to take their place. This substitution of men continued until the end of 1942. Then the Germans decided to employ permanent workers, instead, in order to spare themselves the work of training and to ensure the swift and efficient performance of the necessary tasks.
The meager food portions to the workers in Lager 3 were supplied by our kitchen in Lager 1. Ten men from our work group used to bring the pails of watery soup to the gate of Lager No.3, leave them there and bring the empty pails back to Lager 1. All of this was done twice a day at a hasty run, accompanied by lashes from the guards. Since there were occasions on which the workers of the two Lagers would meet face to face and, as a result of these unfortunate meetings our men would be taken straight to the gas chambers in Lager 3, this nightmarish work could mean destruction for our men, who never knew if they would succeed in returning to their "home" from this cursed gate of Hell. I remember one incident that happened to a group of our comrades: one day several of them were ordered to roll barrels of chlorine towards the death camp. They went out hastily, spurred on by blows from their guards,, and when they arrived with the barrels at the border of Lager 3 the gate opened and the Jews who worked at the crematoria came to meet them to get the chlorine. The men of our camp were ready to return, but, suddenly, Oberscharführer Bolander appeared and ordered those who had brought the barrels to join those who had met them at Lager 3. We saw them no more.
In spite of the strict supervision, from time to time we managed to make contact with the Jews in camp 3. Sometimes we would find notes stuck to the sides of the empty buckets that were brought back from the gate. In these notes the men who worked at burning the bodies described what went on in Lager No.3. One note told of a bloodstain which could not, by any means, be cleaned or scraped from the floor of the gas chamber. Finally, experts came and determined that the stain had been absorbed into the chamber's floorboards after a group of pregnant women had been poisoned and one of them had given birth while the gas was streaming into the chamber. The poison gas had mingled with the mother's blood and had created the indelible stain. Another note said that, one day, the workers were ordered to replace a few floorboards because several fragments of ears, cheeks and hands had become embedded in them.
Thus we learned that the Jews who worked in the crematoria had a few times tried to rebel and had even made desperate attempts to escape from the camp. These attempts failed, and all the workers were immediately sent to the gas chambers after enduring hellish torture. One unsuccesful escape attempt, daring and well-planned, occured about three months before the great revolt at Sobibor. Over many weeks, the crematoria workers had dug a tunnel from the shed where they lived towards the barbed wire fences of the camp. They did their work with spoons and their finger nails, lacking digging tools. They scattered the earth in the crematoria, mixed with the ashes of the victims. When the work was almost finished and they had only one meter left to dig, the Germans discovered it. In their murderous rage, they subjected those who participated in the plan to indescribable tortures and sent the whole group of workers to the ovens.

p.147-9.

I have already described the duties of Oberscharführer Bauer in camp No.3, in the gas chambers and their operation. It is difficult to describe his base character. Perhaps it will become clear from the wile joke that I heard from him after I had been at Sobibor for some time, while I was working in the Germans' casino. One day he told a story about the "stupid Jews": A transport of naked women was brought into the "bathhouse." One woman saw Bauer as he stood on the roof, waiting for the doors to be hermetically sealed so that he could order that the gas-taps be opened. The woman stopped the armed soldier who stood by the entrance door and asked him, "What's the officer in uniform doing on the roof? Is something wrong? How can we wash ourselves here inside while they're fixing the roof?" The guard pacified her, saying that in just a moment the roof would be fixed and, as for her, she need not hurry to push herself inside; there would be room enough for her, too...
This was Bauer's story about the naive Jewess. At the end of his story Bauer dissolved in laughter; he even succeeded in infecting the camp commander and the officers around the casino with his laughter.
In 1945, Bauer was sentenced to life imprisonment and is still in jail.

p.151-2.

Some comments:

- Bahir claims that the food for the prisoners in Lager 3 were brought to the gate of that camp by 10 prisoners from Lager 1. But according to Herszl Cukierman, the chef in Lager 1, the food was brought there by Ukrainian guards. Also, Cukierman claims that he could cook more or less whatever he pleased for the Lager 3 workers, while Bahir has it that they were always served thin soup.

- I have found no other witness account alleging that the "gas chambers" had a roof which could be seen from Lager 1 or 2.

- If only the roof could be seen protruding from the trees, how could Bahir know about the collapsing floor &c?

- Not to mention that the whole collapsing floor gas chamber and the window in the roof with Bauer standing on it is clearly in disaccord with the "established" Sobibor story, which has the victims pulled out through large doors and no window in the roof, which I believe is usually claimed to have been slanted.

- Then we have Bauer telling a joke referring to himself as standing on the roof of the gas chambers!

- One may note that Bahir uses wording as "to the ovens", "in the crematoria", "worked at the crematoria", as if real crematoria were referred to rather than the open air "roasts" allegedly employed to incinerate the corpses.

- I have found no other account referring to the continuous secret contacts between Lager 1 and 3 which Bahir is talking about. By the way, how could they smuggle out so many, and so detailed, messages, without the guards ever noticing?

- How could there be accounts of revolt and escape attempts if all the workers had been sent to the gas chambers?

- The bloodstain yarn? Something out of some martyr legend it seems.

- Bits of hands, cheeks and ears embedded in floor boards?? Ridiculous!

Maybe the clever chef Cukierman and his pal Leon Feldhendler, the leader of the resistance in the camp up to the arrival of Sasha Pechersky, "found" some extra "death camp letters" in the buckets in order to convince the gullible prisoners of Sobibor about the existance of gas chambers and the necessity to revolt?

[Laurentz Dahl]

In the testimony of Biskubicz published in Miriam Novitch' Sobibor anthology the description of the gas chamber has completely vanished. What we read is:

I was quoting on top off my memory. Here is an exact quote:

I couldn't believe in the reality of camp No.3. One day, I was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with chlorine, and eager to know what was happening in the camp, I went beyond the limit. I was nearly killed. I was obsessed with the idea of escaping, but could not leave my father.

(p.121.)

[Laurentz Dahl]

Here's the sentence in Eda Lichtman's account that I mentioned above:

SS Scharführer Erich Bauer, master of camp No.3, supervised the executions from a roof window of the gas chambers.

(p.56)

But there are no explanations as to how Lichtman "knew" this.

So there were three Sobibor witnesses at the Eichmann trial who (presumably) believed in the same gas-chambers-with-collapsible-floors-and-window-in-the-roof yarn.

[IlluSionS667]

It seems obvious to me that the Crowell's hypothesis is true for most anonymous of lesser known "survivors" of the "holocaust". They heard the wildest story and allowed these to interfere with their own memory, hence creating an elaborate hoax with just "too many witnesses" to deny the truthfulness of the hoax.

Obvious lies by the most oportunistic inmates increades the reliability of the hoax, combined with the show trials by the allied occupation governments since 1945 and the endeavors of the holocaust industry that would start in the '60s.

I must say that I'm insufficiently familiar with the Sobibor-issue to know which of the Sobibor-witnesses fall in which category.

[Laurentz Dahl]

Seems I cannot post in this thread other than oneliners like this. I have tried numerous times to post a message with nothing more unusual than a list function in it. Even if I remove this (and there's nothing strange in it) I cannot post it.