1944 Soviet Treblinka Investigations

[pilgrimofdark]

I've created several pages on the Wiki to collect the documents from the 1944 Soviet investigations of Treblinka.

https://wiki.codohforum.com/pages/index ... stigations

There are dozens of reports.

These are polished AI-assisted translations of transcriptions of archival documents from the Russian State Archives (GARF). They could use more polishing, which is why I put them on the Wiki. In a Word doc, it was nearly 200 pages, which is more than I can proofread in a reasonable amount of time.

Some people may want to read the documents, or pull them into an LLM to analyze. There are a lot of interesting snippets of information, once you get past the schlocky atrocity propaganda. Numerous people gave multiple statements to different investigators, which usually reflect that investigation's "theme" as it developed over time.

I've already gone through and standardized many names that were inconsistently translated from Russian to English due to the differences in Cyrillic letters. Especially for Polish names of towns, they'd be translated differently even in the same document.

The titles say "death camp" everywhere and I left it because it reflects the title of the document. Don't shoot the messenger.

Mattogno has a few more fragments of documents that aren't included. More references could be added for named individuals, and the summaries could be fleshed out. There were additional documents that the Soviets had, like a Russian translation of A Year in Treblinka, that aren't included.

I'll try to add to it over time.

[Callafangers]

Fantastic concept! This is one of the best uses for the Wiki I have seen yet. Have you had a chance to "vet" the translations in any way? I notice that LLMs often produce errors with translation work (although its gotten better with more recent/powerful models), so I think its important to "double-check" everything in some way.

Overall, this is set up to become an awesome resource, once confidence in the translations is established.

[pilgrimofdark]

Have you had a chance to "vet" the translations in any way?

Yes, I'll explain the process I went through over the last couple months. These are far from "raw" translations at this point.

I put it on the Wiki because it's such a large collection of documents that it could use more eyes on it.

Process

I fixed the transcriptions, especially where there were corruptions in paragraph flows (word breaks with dashes at the end of lines, etc.).

I standardized a lot of place names, especially of Polish towns with diacritical marks that don't exist in Cyrillic. There were a bunch of corruptions like Vulka-Kraglik for Wólka Okrąglik, for instance, as well as other names.

I standardized the names of the witnesses, cross-referencing books by Mattogno and Webb, as well as Gibbs's dissertation. For example, Samuel Rajzman would get translated inconsistently as Rajzman/Reisman/Raisman, etc.

People are probably more familiar with the German names, so I didn't get around to standardizing those yet, other than the inconsistent Zep/Sep/Zepp/Sepp I kept finding.

I read through each translation as I did them. I basically manually translated one paragraph at a time, looking for problems. Sometimes I translated one word in isolation, or had to look up words in various Russian-English dictionaries. In some cases, I had to use an online Cyrillic keyboard to fix a transcription error in a single word.

For "weird stuff," I compared Google Translate, DeepL, and the mostly-atrocious Firefox browser translator.

In some cases, the AI-translator rearranged words in the sentence to match English grammar, and I put it back in the original order, especially if there was a footnote.

In the non-SMERSH pages, there is a link in the sources to online transcriptions of each document where the text can be double-checked.

With all that said, it would benefit from more polishing. But instead of sitting in a 200-page Word doc on my computer forever, other people might want to read them as-is or help identify/correct issues.

[Stubble]

If they are taken from source, and source is provided, I'm not sure how much 'vetting' there is to do. Just minor quibbles about translation.

Pilgrimofdark, you are a BEAST!

I've been meaning to get up to speed on how to use a wiki. It looks like I may need to devote some time to figuring out how that stuff works.

If anybody has a primer laying around it would be quite welcome.

I could try to lend a hand, assuming none of it is in Russian cursive...

[pilgrimofdark]

If anybody has a primer laying around it would be quite welcome.

I could try to lend a hand, assuming none of it is in Russian cursive...

I didn't know until yesterday, but you can write in LibreOffice and Export directly to a MediaWiki .txt file with all the code.

Headings and footnotes all mostly worked, with some extra stuff I didn't want. Most of what I did was rearrange the references/sources headings.

The MediaWiki documentation helped me iron out a few things like images.

It was a lot easier than I feared.

[Stubble]

Urg...

I don't wanna learn to code...

/groan

Going over the wiki, I find Henryk Brenner mentions the shitter goblin.

[pilgrimofdark]

Brenner also mentions the Milewko farmstead that appears just west of the gravel quarry in maps, and the "forced letter writing."

The September 1944 investigation was partly done by the Polish-Soviet Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes.

A year later, this became the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland that did the 1945 Treblinka investigation.

Another organization that participated, the Polish Committee of National Liberation, was under the State National Council, whose president was an NKVD agent who later became the president of "independent" Poland.

It's the same organizations, doing the same work, at the same place, with the same witnesses, with Soviet control or collaboration.

While also radically changing details, and dumping others.

The December ChGK draft report is also interesting, as some of the footnotes describe the authors' struggle to construct a coherent narrative.

[pilgrimofdark]

The structure of these pages has been significantly cleaned up, shortened, and standardized. The table of contents is much easier to read now.

[Name]. [Nature of Testimony]. [Location]. [Date]

Soviet Treblinka Investigations

Also moved the archival reference to the end of the full name of each report, instead of a messy list at the end.

I think adding info on "alternative names/spelling" and "further testimony" would be helpful. Some of these witnesses became heavy hitters, quoted by Arad, Webb, and other historians who basically ignore everything that came out of these Soviet investigations (maybe rightly so).