Richard Rashke's "Escape from Sobibor"

[Laurentz Dahl]

Bought this book recently and thought I would post some findings from it.

Escape from Sobibor, upon which the infamous Rutger Hauer TV-movie was based, consists of a 370+ pages long uninterrupted narrative based mainly on a number of survivor interviews (it has a part on the sources in the back) as well as on the well-known but hard-to-get book by Rueckerl on the 1960's NS trials. The most interesting part is the end, where Rashke (a non-Jew) talks to Sobibor "survivors" in Canada, the US, Israel and South America.

For example, Rashke together with Toivi Blatt visits Shlomo (Stanislaw) Szmajzner, a survivor upon whose testimony a large part of the first half of the book is based, in his home in Goias, Brazil.

After a while, their talk turns to the arrest of Gustav Franz Wagner, a former SS guard at Sobibor.

Wiesenthal knew Wagner had been hiding in Brazil since 1950 because Stangl had so testified during his trial in Duesseldorf. Wiesenthal asked the police to find Wagner - he, too, was living under his own name - but the police said they couldn't. Suspecting that Wagner was being protected, Wiesenthal decided to play a waiting game. If Wagner felt that no one was looking for him. maybe he would make a mistake. So over the next decade, the Nazi-hunter spoke constantly about Joseph Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz doctor, but never about Wagner.

(p. 313)

Comment: even if "protected" why live under your own name if you are guilty of the murder of 250 000 people. If, like Stangl, he was even registered at the Austrian consulate in Rio, it makes even less sense.


Above: Wagner had a passport issued to him in his own name in Rio in 1950.

Rashke then recounts how in 1978 pictures had been taken of Wagner and others at a "secret meeting at the Hotel Tyll" where he and others were celebrating the birthday of Adolf Hitler. The photos reached Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal then identified a man in the pictures who was not Wagner and publicized information on him.

The Germans in Brazil eliminated [really? see below] the dark man with the big ears. But Wagner, fearing that Israeli agents were after him, called the police and offered to surrender on a Sao Paolo street corner. Germany, Israel and Poland had each requested Wagner's extradition.
Schlomo was watching the evening news when he saw Wagner's face on the screen. He nearly went crazy with anger, realizing that for almost thirty years he had been breathing the same air as Wagner. He jumped on the first plane for Sao Paolo, because if someone did not positively identify the Nazi as Sobibor's Gustav Wagner within a few days, the police would have to release him, and he could then run off to Paraguay or bury himself in some remote Brazilian village.
Schlomo found Wagner in the holding tank with several other prisoners.
"Hello, Gustl," he said, using Wagner's more intimate name.
"Who's that? Who said that?" Wagner seemed confused.
"It's the little Jewish goldsmith from Sobibor."
"yes, yes, I know you. I saved you," Wagner said. "You and your three little brothers.
The police held Wagner, and Schlomo eventually testified at the extradition trial, where Wagner admitted he was a Nazi and had served in Sobibor.
"I know what happened there," he told the court. "But I never went to see. I only obeyed orders."
The Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that neither Poland nor Israel had jurisdiction over Wagner, and that Germany's extradition documents were flawed. Wagner was a free man once again."

(p.313-314)

The problem　is that in reality, Wagner confessed that he had been in Sobibor, but that he knew the camp only as an exemplary work camp and that he therefore had no regrets about his days spent there. Things are a bit vague about the extradition trial since not much detailed information on it seems to be available in translation, but according to an article by Mark Weber

For a time, the acting commandant of Sobibor was Gustav Franz Wagner. Some years after the war, he was found living in Brazil and was put on trial there. Jewish witnesses testified in court that he was responsible for 150,000 deaths and took special delight in brutally killing women and children. Wagner, however, swore that Sobibor had been a "model" work camp, not an extermination center. The Brazilian court rejected the prosecution's case and decided to neither convict nor extradite him. Wagner was released in 1979, but was found dead a short time later at his farm, knifed in the chest.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v08/v08p173_Weber.html

Rashke continues:

"Then, in October 1980, Wagner's attorney announced that the Nazi had committed suicide on the farm in Atibaia where he worked as a farmhand. Shlomo hinted to me that Wagner's death was no accident. Did the Israelis get him? Did Brazil's Kameradenwerk, the Nazi underground, get him? Did the Jews get him? Schlomo declined to explain his cryptic remark.
Schlomo recalled how Tom [Thomas Blatt] had phoned him from California when he had learned that the Brazilian government would not extradite Wagner.
"Can I buy a gun in Brazil?" Tom had asked Schlomo.
"Don't worry", Schlomo had said. He didn't want Tom to do anything rash. "Wagner'll be taken care of."
Tom told me later that he had thought many times about hunting down and killing the Sobibor Nazis. He said he didn't know whether he would have actually done it, but he could have because to him it wouldn't have been murder."

Note that Blatt as well as Schlomo Szmajzner had experience with weapons and warfare. Szmajzner was a partisan after the escape and Blatt served as a military officer hunting down ex-Nazis in post-war Soviet-occupied Poland.


Above: Wagner found dead at the farm in Atibaia. How likely is it that someone would commit suicide through stabbing oneself in the chest?

If Sobibor really had been a extermination camp, why would any "Brazil Nazi network" eliminate Wagner, especially since he was not extradited? Why wouldn't they have killed off him and Stangl way earlier to begin with? Why would a ghostly network of expatriate Nazi geezers have eliminated "the man with the big ears" who wasn't Wagner?

The only scenario that explains the death of the unknown German and Wagner is that of Jewish (Mossad?) agents or assassins hired by them killing off "extermination camp" guards. Let's recall the bragging of the "nazi hunting" Klarsfelds in this context:

On July 24, 1978, at a news conference in Paris following the indictment in Cologne of Kurt Lischka, Serge Klarsfeld stated: "We are not seeking vengeance. If that were our aim, it would have been easy for us to kill all the Nazi criminals we have tracked down." "And if the court in Cologne refuses to try Lischka?," someone asked. Klarsfeld replied: "That in a way would be signing his death sentence" (Le Monde, July 26, 1978, p. 4). In 1982 the Klarsfelds engaged the services of a hired assassin, a Bolivian socialist of Indian origin named Juan Carlos, to assassinate Klaus Barbie (Life, Feb. 1985, p. 65), but the operation did not succeed.

During a 1986 interview with the Chicago Tribune (June 29, 1986), Beate Klarsfeld told "how she haunted at least three former Nazis until they committed suicide or died; how she organized attempts to kidnap others; how she used headline-making gimmicks to bring to trial or to ruin the careers of many who were convinced the world had forgotten them." She related how she slapped the face of German Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger in public in 1968. "Once, she and several friends tried to kidnap Kurt Lischka" but the operation failed because the car they were using had only two doors. As for Ernst Ehlers, "harassed by Klarsfeld-organized demonstrations outside his home, he first resigned his position [as judge] and then committed suicide."

After picking up the trail of Walter Rauff in Chile, the Klarsfelds organized demonstrations in front of his house and broke his windows. "He died a couple of months later," Beate Klarsfeld told the American daily. "I was glad, because as long as these people are alive, they are an offense to their victims." "My husband and I are not fanatics ... Once my husband held a pistol to the temple of Rauff, just to show that we could kill him, but he didn't pull the trigger."

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n2p-2_Faurisson.html

Blatt's "interview" with Sobibor SS man Karl Frenzel (see http://www.forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=3674 ) also takes on a new shape in the light of Blatt's words to Rashke.

My guess it that a loose cabal of "nazi hunters" like Wiesenthal and the Klarsfelds in league with Mossad people and maybe also survivors like Schlomo (who likely acted as a sayan, a local trusted assistant of Mossad, in the terminology described by ex-Mossad Victor Ostrovsky in his book By way of deception) eliminated those former "death camp" guards who they did not manage to extradite and put before kangaroo courts (where they would "confess" to the gassings). They would have an extra incentive in the case of Wagner, who seems to have denied the established view of Sobibor as a "death camp" in his extradition trial. If not eliminated, he might pose a threat to the gas chamber legend. This hypothesis could also explain the "suicides" while under arrest of some of the ex-guards brought before "trial" in West Germany during the 50's and 60's or earlier, such as Kurt Bolender (according to death-camps.org "During his trial he constantly maintained that there were no sick and cripple people executed in Sobibor - only when he was cross examined he admitted that everything was true."), Friedrich Tauscher and Hermann Felfe.

Next: Richard Rashke's falsification of the Jan Karski Report on Belzec

[Laurentz Dahl]

The survivors who deny Sobibor

I found another tantalizing passage in Rashke's description of his interview with Szmajzner and Blatt in Brazil.

"What do you dream about"
"At least once a week," [Blatt] said, almost relieved that someone was asking about his terror in the night. "The dream makes me feel as if I'm still in Sobibor. You see Richard, I am still a prisoner. I feel I would betray my parents, my brother, my friends, if I pretended that Sobibor never happened, as some survivors have. I feel it would be some kind of insult.""

(p.305)

Who those survivors are is never mentioned. Could it be that those "deniers" are those Jews who survived the escape and the war up to 1945, and never left any testimony or witness account. Could their reason be that they knew that the gassings were a myth, but that they were afraid to say so in public due to pressure from people like Schlomo Szmajzner?

Rashke recounts on several occasions in his epilogue how he had a difficulty in getting the interviews, how suspicious many of the survivors were. On one instance, he tried to arrange an interview with Josel, the Jewish medic in Sobibor, but

When I called him on Monday to give my arrival time, he was edgy and nervous. "I've been going through hell ever since you called," he said. "My stomach has been churning. I haven't been able to sleep, thinking about the interview. I'm sorry, but I can't go through with it."

(p.297)

Blatt describes a recurrent dream of his:

"Lateley, I've been having a variation of the dream. Wagner sends me out of the camp to get some photographic materials for him. It is the first time he's sent me out. I could go free, but I come back."

(p.305)

Could it be that Blatt, Sascha, Schlomo and the other major "survivors" were sharing some kind of group delusion/psychosis, and that the dream recounted above was a part of his consciousness telling him that Sobibor was never an "extermination camp"? Speculation, but...

Alexander Donat reports similarly in his Death Camp Treblinka that most of the "survivors" he contacted would have nothing to do with him. And Donat, in contrast to Rashke, was a Jew and himself a "survivor of nine death camps" (according to his memoir The Holocaust Kingdom).

* * *

On a sidenote we also learn that Szmajzner was the first to publish a full-length account of Sobibor, in Portuguese in 1968, a book titled "Hell in Sobibor". Curiously, Rashke states on p.296 that he does not speak that language, but in the very next sentence he claims to have read Szmajzner's book. Does there exist any translation of this book? Myself I've never even heard of it until I read Rashke's book.

We also learn on page 291 that Listener magazine printed an article on Gustav Wagner somewhere between 1978 and 1981. I have not read this but will try to find a copy sometime in the future. If someone knows about this article. please share info.

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Did Listener magazine publish something before Wagner was in trouble? If so maybe that was the "slip up" Wiesenthal was referring to.

Note the similarity that right before Eichmann was kidnapped, big articles in Life Magazine were coming out.

It could be that those South American Germans could have greatly hurt the holocaust hoax, and thus they had to be eliminated.

And as it happens alot in this business, Eichmann was turned into the opposite of what he could have been to the world in the 1960's. Similar, as Butz points out, to how Wannsee was turned into the opposite of what it really was. The hoax enforcers don't sweep these things under the rug. Rather, they hold them up to the spotlight and proclaim that they're the opposite of what they are.

The average person has no idea about this. They think that if Eichmann, in Argentina, had ever proclaimed the holocaust a hoax, that the papers would tell that. That it would be on CBS news that week. That is not the case. Thus a common question from the masses is "why did none of these Germans ever speak up years later and say it was a hoax?"

I mean look how the 2006 Teheran conference was covered. Nothing in Robert Faurisson's keynote speech was ever mentioned. And Usually Robert Faurisson himself wasn't even mentioned. It shows the media isn't honest and wasn't honest 40 years ago.

[Laurentz Dahl]

Biskubicz collapsible gas chamber floor sighting down the memory hole

Rashke's book was published in 1985 and republished with a new afterword in 1995.

If one looks at the list of sources on p.371-4, one will note the absence of the Eichmann trial protocols. At this trial, three survivors of Sobibor testified before the Israeli court: Moshe Bahir, Dov (Ber) Freiberg and Jacob Biskubicz.

As many of you may know, Biskubicz testified that he had managed to get a glimpse of the gas chamber from the gate of Camp III. According to Biskubicz, he had seen that the chamber was equipped with a collapsible floor - something that goes completely against the established story. Biskubicz was promptly interrupted and ushered away from the witness stand when he tried to tell the court more about this.

I am not ware of when the full English translation of the Eichmann Trial Proceedings transcript was first made available, but anyway Rashke went to Israel where he gathered sources (with the help of Miriam Novitch, publisher of the witness account anthology Sobibor - Martyrdom and Revolt from 1981) and interviewed a number of survivors - among them Biskubicz! ("Jacob spoke like a man still in a dream. Once he started his story, there was no way to stop him, even for a question. He almost shouted into my mike, and Miriam [Novitch] had a difficult time translating between his gulps for air", p.329). Either Rashke is not aware of Biskubicz Eichmann trial testimony, which do not seem very likely to me, or he has chosen to completely ignore it, because it is never mentioned.

[Laurentz Dahl]

Zukerman's note down the memory hole

As I have mentioned in another thread http://www.forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=3713 , it is claimed that the Jewish working prisoners in Sobibor was first made aware of the existence of the gas chambers in a very strange way, as recounted by Arad, who quotes the testimony of one Herzl/Hershl Cukierman/Zukerman:

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.

Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka... p.79.

On page 156 of Rashke's book, a meeting between Sascha Pechersky and the leader of the camp resistance, Leon Feldhendler, is described.

Feldhendler explained in detail how the system worked. "No one in the camp has ever seen the gas chambers," he continued. "We know from notes written by those who worked there.
He went on to tell Pechersky what he had pieced together from notes and rumors. Not all of it was accurate: [we are then told the infamous black liquid and collapsible floor story]

What's curious is that Rashke never, not once, mentions the note that Zukerman allegedly got smuggled out of Camp III, not even in his notes to this or other chapters. A note allegedly given to Shlomo Szmajzner from a friend in Camp II (or Camp III, it gets a bit confused here) is recounted, but nothing is said about the incident which Arad gives half a page to in his book. That Rashke isn't aware of this story is out of the question, since Zukerman's account is republished in Novitch book on Sobibor, a book which Rashke uses heavily as a source.

How curious? Could it be that Rashke understood that the story of the Original Gas Chamber Revelation in Sobibor sounds completely bogus?

[Laurentz Dahl]

Rashke meets Raul Hilberg

Rashke is convinced that all the establishment historians who have not spent pages upon pages praising the Sobibor revolt ignores an all-important "symbol" of Jewish resistance, and that their accounts of Jews going to their death like sheep constitutes "the unpardonable sin of distorting history"...

After a conference, Rashke confronts the biggest one of them all:

I voiced my concern about the distorted "passive Jew" theory to a highly respected Holocaust historian whom I met at an international conference. Why, I asked, did he relegate the escape from Sobibor to a brief footnote in his thousand page book? Because, he said, the escape was an interesting aberration and a footnote was all it deserved. How could he be so certain that resistance was mere aberration, I asked? Because, he said, there are no documents. What about the survivors, I asked? They are too emotional, he said, and their memories are not to be trusted. Documents are frequently inaccurate I countered. They often distort. By way of example, I pointed out three factual errors in his footnote about Sobibor. The historian dismissed me like a student, and in subsequent reprints of his classic, repeated the same three errors in the same skimpy footnote.

Both sides are correct. The eyewitnesses are not exactly too trustworthy, and documents often distort - or rather, the contents of Holocaust documents are frequently distorted by people like Hilberg. And the escape from Sobibor was indeed something of an aberration. Most Jews did not try to escape, since at the time most of them apparently did not believe in the mythical gas chambers.

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Hey Laurentz,

What's really going to send you over the edge is when you read Dov Freiberg's testimony at the Eichmann trial:

He describes guards that for no plain reason shaved off the hair on one side of their face. One eyebrow. Half a mustache. Totally crazy, and no one else noticed. Just Dov. Because he made it up of course.

I'm going from memory. Been awhile since I read it.

[Laurentz Dahl]

Sascha waits until the 80's to tell of his gas chamber "hearing"

On page 343-351, Rashke recounts his visit to Alexander "Sasha" Pechersky in Moscow. He is accompanied by Thomas Toivi Blatt.

On page 344, we are told that the visit took place in July ("Even though it was July, there was no fresh produce or fruit in the stores except for cabbage and some onions"). The year is not given, but it must be somewhere between 1980 and 1984.

This means that this interview did not coincide with the one published on Blatt's site on Sobibor (http://www.sobibor.info/hero.html), since the date of that one is given as January 20 1980.

From Blatt's own interview with Pechersky:

Toivi: Were you aware of what happened in Sobibor?

Sasha: In the evening, the same day, I asked a another prisoner about the smog coming out from behind the fence in the opposite site of the camp. He looked at me and told me a matter of fact, the people you came with?, they are leaving Sobibor in the smoke. From him I learned the truth about the death factory, but working in the forest I was removed from direct witnessing of the murder, until... (and here his voice breaks down and tears rolled down his cheeks, the same thing happened a few years later when we meet in Moscow) working in the forest I heard amidst noises a laud cry of a child "Mama" coming from behind a hilltop. I realized that I was working near the gas chambers. I was thinking about my Elotchka, my daughter I left in a village in the Ukraine.

And from Rashke's account of his interview with Pechersky (p.346):

He had been working close to the gas chambers in the woods, he said. He couldn't see Camp III because of all the pine trees, but he could hear screams, muffled like a chorus from far away. Then he heard a solo, clear and piercing: "Mama! Ma-"

Rashke writes in his notes for chapter 22 on page 386 that his account of Pechersky's first days in the camp (including the incident of him hearing the gas chamber victims) was based both on the personal interview in Moscow and on Pechersky's own account.

Pechersky account was originally published as a 34 page pamphlet. It was translated and included in They Fought Back: The Story of jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe edited by Yuri Suhl and published in 1967 by Schocken Books, New York. It was also republished in Novitch book from 1981.

I have yet to read Pechersky's own account, but I take it as a safe guess that the incident described above was not mentioned by Pechersky until the interviews in the early 80's, since Blatt, who is described as a an avid collector of Sobibor memorabilia and in touch with many other survivors, apparently had not heard about it when he did his interview.

[Laurentz Dahl]

The many faces of Gustav Wagner

Survivor, later partisan fighter, Haim Lejst, has a great greuel story to tell:

Wagner used the miners' train to cart ashes from the crematorium in Camp III to the garden. "For fertilizer," he told Haim, who had to spread the ashes and bits of bone around the strawberries and vegetables. Wagner thought that using Jews to energize his food was funny. One day at roll call, he took a bite out of a large carrot. "There," he told the prisoners. "I just ate twenty Jews."

(p.331)

to that

Btw, wouldn't the "joke" have been lost on the other prisoners?

By survivor Esther Terner-Raab, we are told the following tidbit about conveniently "suicided" super sadist Gustav Franz Wagner:

Esther paused to fish in her memory for a Wagner story. "Once, he gave me two pieces of candy," she recalled. A half-smile crossed her lips. "He probably had it on his conscience for the rest of his life, that he gave a Jew candy."

(p.319)

Sure.

Raab's description of Wagner's intelligence is typical:

"He was the smartest Hitler could find. He even knew what you we're thinking. Shrewd. That man was shrewd."

(p.319)

Again, we may ask: would such a shrewd and intelligent man, while being sought for the murder of 250 000 people, really have lived under his own name, with a passport issued in it, in the open in Brazil?

[Laurentz Dahl]

Through Google I found some Brazilian webpages mentioning Wagner.

Some dates:

- May 30 1978 Wagner hands himself over to Brazilian police in Rio
- June 18 1979 Wagner interviewed by BBC journalist Tom Bower(does there exist a transcript of this somewhere?) who later wrote an article on Wagner for Listener magazine.
- June 22 1979: The Israeli, Polish and Austrian extradition claims dismissed by the Rio Supreme Court.
- 30 October 1980 Wagner found dead, stabbed in the chest on the farm in Atibaia where he worked.

I have access to Le Monde from 1979 so I will try to find the article mentioned by Weber.

Some illuminating Rashke quotes about Schlomo Szmajzner, who went to see Wagner in custody right after the latter had handed himself over to Brazilian police:

He dragged out a shoebox full of black and white snapshots of his jungle ranch, seven hundred miles north of Goiania. Most of the pictures were variations of the same theme - Shlomo with a rifle or a fish or a deer, in his jeep, next to his jeep, with his son Norberto, cattle, a few Indians. His rifle seemed to be everywhere.

p.302

"Did you come out of Sobibor a better or a worse person?"
"I became a pessimist," he said without hesitation. "Every nice feeling about people has disappeared. I'm worse. Being a pessimist isn't so bad. It's only an outlook. But - but killing someone is not a big deal anymore (...)"

p.305

"I was fortunate. I had a chance to release my anger."
Shlomo was referring to his year as a sixteen year old Russian partisan, a proud and satisfying year, when he tried to fight his way back to sanity. He didn't really want to talk to me about what he had done to "release his anger" except to say that he had killed Germans.

p.307

The two [Blatt and Szmajzner] had met in Lublin and decided to visit Bojarski [the farmer who had hidden but later supposedly betrayed Blatt]. Tom thought that the farmer might not have spent all the gold and diamonds that he, Wycen and Kostman had given Bojarski. Tom and Shlomo wanted to get what was left and then execute the farmer.
Shlomo, two Russians, and Tom knocked on Bojarski's door. They were all dressed in Russian uniforms.
"Where's Mr Bojarski?" Tom had asked.
"In town," his wife said. Her daughter stood next to her. They were frightened, because they recognized Toivi.
"We'll wait!"
(...)
Shlomo got impatient and took over.
"Where did your husband hide the money?" he demanded.
"I don't know," Mrs. Bojarski said.
"If you don't tell us, we'll kill her," Shlomo threatened, pointing to the daughter.
(...)
Shlomo grabbed the girl. Mrs. Bojarski quickly told him where the money was buried. Shlomo and Tom dug it up. There were still thousands of dollars worth of gold and diamonds. They split the money, as agreed. Then Shlomo ordered the girl to follow him behind the barn, close to the spot where Toivi had been shot in the jaw. Shlomo cocked his rifle. The girl's mother pleaded.
Tom could not go through with it. He begged Shlomo not to execute her, and, reluctantly, Shlomo lowered his gun.
"I would have done it," Shlomo told me. "Just like that."
Tom wasn't sure why he couldn't agree to killing the girl.

p.307-308.

So they want o have their gold and diamond back, threatens to kill Bojarski's daughter, who Blatt acknowleged was innocent. Bojarski's wife tells them where the gold is, they dig it up, there's a fortune left, but Shlomo still wants to kill the innocent girl. Nice guy.

Schlomo was in his midteens when sent to Sobibor so he would have been in mid- to late 50's when the suspicious Wagner "suicide" took place.

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

I read Blatt's account here:

http://www.onethirdoftheholocaust.com/blatt/

and it says the wife was actually present when the farmer shot them. (A ridiculous story in and of itself) So why shoot the daughter? The daughter is someone who "Toivi" had known in grade school, and from Blatt's account was involved very little.

That they're wearing Russian uniforms. Hmm. Communist-Polish Jewish connection so that it was no problem for them to do that?

Through all the lies you get a glimpse of what the real situation might have been.

[Laurentz Dahl]

I made a simple enlargement of the photo of Wagner's passport posted on Blatt's website. According to Blatt's caption, the passport was issued on December 4 1950.



As can be read on the card, Wagner was born June 18 1911. That would make him 39 years old in December 1950.

However, if the man on the photo is 39 years old then that's the worst case of premature ageing I've ever seen. The guy looks like he's in his mid-50's, at least.

This is what Wagner looked like in the early 1940's



And this is, I believe, a photo of Wagner taken in Brazil, date unknown (I've only found it on Brazilian websites, none of the providing a date):



Blatt is obviously mistaken on the date of issue for the passport (if it's indeed a passport, I don't read Portuguese so I'm not sure).

By the way I found and copied the article from The Listener. It's in the issue for June 21st 1979. I will scan it later when I've more time on my hands.

I believe the photo in the "1950 passport" is actually his mug shot (thus the small card like object at the level of his chest, which would be out of place on a passport photo). The amount of wrinkles and the state of Wagner's hair is much similar to the photo on the front page of The Listener. On the latter photo Wagner looks thinner, but this is probably due to him having spent almost a year incarcerated at mental hospital outside Brasilia awaiting his extradition trial.

[Laurentz Dahl]

Here's Tom Bower's article on Wagner in Listener Magazine June 1979












I will be back with comments.

[StuDewan]

the document on the picture is not a passport but an ID card known as "model 19"... you can read that on the lower right side as MOD_19

it´s an ID card issued to resident foreigners and it was issued on april 12th, not december 4th since dates in portuguese begin with day, not month...

there are his parents name (unreadable), states him as a widow, white skin, blue eyes... also his address, birth date at july 1?, 1911...

the white rectangle on his chest is a date tag, but unreadable...

[Laurentz Dahl]

the document on the picture is not a passport but an ID card known as "model 19"... you can read that on the lower right side as MOD_19

it´s an ID card issued to resident foreigners and it was issued on april 12th, not december 4th since dates in portuguese begin with day, not month...

there are his parents name (unreadable), states him as a widow, white skin, blue eyes... also his address, birth date at july 1?, 1911...

the white rectangle on his chest is a date tag, but unreadable...

Thank you very much for the clarification.

Do you read Portuguese?