The CODOH Revisionist Forum

pilgrimofdark wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2026 7:20 pm The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City has a long section on typhus. Since the book is expensive and not online, points of interest are below:

There were two waves of typhus in the Warsaw ghetto:

• first half of 1940 (large influx of refugees from areas annexed to Germany)
• first half of 1941 (influx of refugees from western district of Warsaw)

Three groups of insect pest controllers were set up, each with four pest-eradication columns. A column was made up of twelve Jewish and six Polish sanitary workers and was under the supervision of German pest controllers and Polish doctors. Each column was also accompanied by a Jewish doctor and a Polish and Jewish policeman.

Around August 1941, the Judenrat set up the Health Council, which was led by Professor Ludwik Hirszfeld.

Official numbers counted 15,449 cases of typhus. Counting people hiding their illness, the estimated real number was 110,000 to 150,000 cases.

The soap was low quality "hard soap" or "gray soap," which contained a lower percentage of fatty acids than regular soap. People at the bathhouses were given very small amounts of it to clean themselves.

There were five public bathhouses in the ghetto. At least one bath outside the ghetto was also used by Jews who were escorted there and back.

It's claimed the SS men escorting Jews to bathhouses would sometimes fire randomly into the crowd.

The widespread attitude was that the German methods of combating the epidemic only served to spread the disease further. Hospitals were overcrowded, whole buildings were quarantined, and the sanitary columns and doctors were corrupt. The public baths also took bribes to issue certificates without a person being cleaned. The sulfer was too weak to kill the lice. People in quarantined houses would bribe their way out so they could work or acquire food. Because everyone in a house had to be bathed, they were standing in lines for hours at a time, where the lice could spread to healthy people.

The apartments where people suffering from typhus were discovered were chosen for the sulfur gassing. Belongings from potentially clean apartments were brought into the infected apartment, thereby spreading lice if the sulfur was not strong enough.

Until fall of 1941, treating typhus at home could lead to imposition of the death penalty. An illegal private hospital was set up in the ghetto.

The book cites memoirs diaries by Hirszfeld, Adam Czerniaków (head of the Judenrat), Ringelblum, and others. Also cited is Courage Under Siege: Starvation, Disease, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto, which is online from the usual suspects, but I haven't read yet.

It should also be noted that Samuel Crowell's The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes discusses the issue of immigrant Jewish attitudes and misconceptions about bathing/disinfection in New York as early as the 1890s: believing they were going to be killed, starving themselves in quarantine due to no kosher food, hiding cases of typhus.

Wetzelrad wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2026 4:52 pmIf a bunch of Warsaw Jews were already afraid of being "steamed" to death, and then they were transferred to or gained knowledge of Treblinka, they may have transported that fear there, creating the legend.

I'll get back to the other points, but this one is interesting because of the inversion.

At Treblinka, Warsaw Jews were allegedly calmed down by being told they would be sent to the Ukraine for work after they bathed.

Sequence of events:

1. blockades & merciless beatings on the journey to the train station, cripples and elderly shot
2. calming speech about being resettled for work
3. merciless beating to get onto the trains
4. starvation, suffocation, dehydration on the 3-day train ride; occasionally punctuated by Latvians, Lithuanians, or Ukrainians entering the trains to rob people; SS and guards firing randomly into the trains
5. merciless beating of the 1-20% who survived to get out of the trains
6. calming speech about being bathed and sent to Ukraine for work
7. merciless beating into the barracks
8. undressing, shaving, turning over currency, getting a receipt
9. merciless beating through the "tube"
10. calming speech at the bathhouse
11. merciless beating to shove as many people into the bathhouse as possible

Only at Step 11 did the Jews suspect anything was wrong.

(Yes, this is the process Arad, Chrostowski, and others describe, based on the eyewitnesses cited.)

Stubble wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2026 7:28 pm

pilgrimofdark wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2026 7:20 pm Sequence of events:

1. blockades & merciless beatings on the journey to the train station, cripples and elderly shot
2. calming speech about being resettled for work
3. merciless beating to get onto the trains
4. starvation, suffocation, dehydration on the 3-day train ride; occasionally punctuated by Latvians, Lithuanians, or Ukrainians entering the trains to rob people; SS and guards firing randomly into the trains
5. merciless beating of the 1-20% who survived to get out of the trains, cripples and elderly and orphans shot
6. calming speech about being bathed and sent to Ukraine for work
7. merciless beating into the barracks
8. undressing, shaving, turning over currency, getting a receipt
9. merciless beating through the "tube"
10. calming speech at the bathhouse
11. merciless beating to shove as many people into the bathhouse as possible
12. infants thrown in on top, door(s) hermetically sealed

Only after Step 11 did the Jews suspect anything was wrong.

(Yes, this is the process Arad, Chrostowski, and others describe, based on the eyewitnesses cited.)

Wait, you think at step 11 according to the orthodoxy they knew something was wrong? I thought it was at step 12 when the door closed and chlorine was tossed in through the roof hatch or whatever.

Wetzelrad wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2026 4:50 pm

Eye of Zyclone wrote: ↑Tue Jun 16, 2026 11:58 pm Delousing in America during WW1 :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkD6QfeRil8

This is difficult to watch. It goes to show how much racial grievance and atrocity can be spun up out of the mundane application of disease prevention. "The Jail Holocaust", give me a break.

Stubble wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2026 10:42 pm That's the story i remember, although, it is missing the orchestra.

• the orchestra drowned out
• the screams, which drowned out
• the machinery, which drowned out
• the excavators, which drowned out
• the shootings, which drowned out
• the circus;

• the Christmas tress obscured
• the fences, which obscured
• the Christmas trees, which obscured
• the smoke, which obscured
• the fires, which obscured
• the approximately 3.5 million corpses;

• all of the witnesses remember Wiernik,
• none of the witnesses remember each other,
• Wiernik remembers none of the witnesses;

• three chlorine hatches under the sky,
• seven excavators digging halls of stone,
• nine new boilers for those doomed to die,
• One first-person eyewitness account for Rachel Auerbach on her dark typewriter,
• in the fields of Treblinka where the shadows lie.
• One first-person eyewitness account to rule them all, three scribes to work it out to their satisfaction.
• One Lodz writers group to bring them all, and in the darkness read aloud each other's testimony to remind them and jog their memory of well-known events

pilgrimofdark wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2026 11:38 pm

Stubble wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2026 10:42 pm That's the story i remember, although, it is missing the orchestra.

Encompassing everything,

• the orchestra drowned out
• the screams, which drowned out
• the machinery, which drowned out
• the excavators, which drowned out
• the shootings, which drowned out
• the circus;

and

• the Christmas tress obscured
• the fences, which obscured
• the Christmas trees, which obscured
• the smoke, which obscured
• the fires, which obscured
• the approximately 3.5 million corpses;

and

• all of the witnesses remember Wiernik,
• none of the witnesses remember each other,
• Wiernik remembers none of the witnesses;

and

• three chlorine hatches under the sky,
• seven excavators digging halls of stone,
• nine new boilers for those doomed to die,
• One first-person eyewitness account for Rachel Auerbach on her dark typewriter,
• in the fields of Treblinka where the shadows lie.
• One first-person eyewitness account to rule them all, three scribes to work it out to their satisfaction.
• One Lodz writers group to bring them all, and in the darkness read aloud each other's testimony to remind them and jog their memory of well-known events

in the fields of Treblinka where the shadows lie.

This all probably belongs in a different thread, but I'm not sure which one.

Apologies for how stupid this post was.

Wetzelrad wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2026 4:52 pm

pilgrimofdark wrote: ↑Tue Jun 16, 2026 8:01 pm Almost all of the accounts report the bribery to avoid disinfection/baths, and that the entire process was more likely to spread lice than kill them.

Does that second claim sound true, or does it sound like a self-serving justification for their behavior? I am definitely sympathetic to anyone who wants to resist forced quarantine procedures, but I find it hard to believe that any of the processes described could make the situation worse than it already was. I would even be inclined to believe that something like sulfur was ineffective -- not counterproductive -- but since Bermanis reported it did kill pests, who am I to disagree?

It seems likely that these justifications were largely or purely stories these Jews were telling to insulate themselves from responsibility.

Kroshmalna Street was a center of poverty in the ghetto, a synonym for poverty, a breeding ground for disease. [...] On 7 May 1940, Kroshmalna Street was again closed off. Thirty new cases of typhus had been confirmed. The rubbish had not been removed from there for nine months. Twenty buildings and about 20,000 inhabitants were cut off from the world for twenty-three days. The sanitary activities proved an opportunity for corruption and robbery on a grand scale.

The second wave of anti-epidemic activities in Krochmalna Street took place on 28 and 29 August 1941 during the recurrence of the epidemic and was even more brutal.

On August 28, 1941 at 4 a.m. functionaries of the Jewish Order Service instructed all residents of Krochmalna Street to be prepared for bathing. The whole of Krochmalna Street from Ciepla to Rynkowa Streets was to be disinfected and its inhabitants bathed.

Residents of this street unfamiliar with disinfection regulations initially thought that they were going to be resettled.