Nov 1942 Treblinka Report, Ringelblum (the "Steam Chamber" report)

[PrudentRegret]

On the subject of cooperation SanityCheck reported:

Proximity meant they could cooperate on occasion, thus guards from SS-Arbeitslager Treblinka are reported to have escorted trains from Warsaw to SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka in the summer of 1942, while the labour camp was stocked up with small selections from some transports otherwise perishing in SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka.

"Proximity meant they could cooperate on occasion" makes no sense given the sensitivity and security of the operation. If TI was this entirely separate administrative entity from the "extermination camp" why would guards from "SS-Arbeitslager Treblinka" be employed for that task? Proximity doesn't explain this in a world where these were entirely different camps with one of them supposed to have been an extermination operation.

[Stubble]

I don't see it as a derail, but more a development of various themes.

The Ringelblum Archive is being published in English, but it doesn't seem to be available in any English-speaking countries. A bold marketing strategy. Some of it is online at least.

But at least one source confirmed that the "Treblinka" report was produced by three important members of the Ringelblum Archive. And Karski was responsible for smuggling out numerous reports to the London Polish government in exile.

Carlo Mattogno was the first one AFAIK to call out the "SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka" involvement in the administration of the gravel operation with this document:

I think this (and Mattogno's Document 17) confirm that this is the relevant set of archival documents that both Berger and Mattogno reference:

Bauleitung der Waffen SS und Polizei Trawniki - Schriftwechsel
"Construction management of the Waffen SS and police in Trawniki - correspondence"

The whole file is around 300 pages. Is the whole file worth requesting scans of? It wouldn't exactly be cheap.

Source 2 claims to have 'at least 18 [pages]' from this set. When they come this way, I will pass them your way.

[pilgrimofdark]

Some more material on what else was going on around Małkinia. If van Eupen was really moved up there, he wouldn't have been moved just to oversee the Treblinka camps.

The USHMM encyclopedia mentions a labor camp in Małkinia Gorna, but not in its own entry.

Foreign legionnaires who came from the territories of the Soviet Union and from Eastern Europe were mostly transferred to “special camps” (labor camps), which existed, for example, in Ostrov (Ostrovskii raion, Pskovskaia oblast’, Russia) and in Małkinia Górna in Poland.

WEHRMACHT DISCIPLINARY FACILITIES INTRODUCTION

From the same volume, Stalag 333 had a subcamp in Małkinia between November 1941 and September 1943. After that, the legion soldiers were transferred to Stalag 366 in Siedlce or Stalag 307. So around the time the T-II camp was winding down and before the T4 personnel were relocated to Italy.

In Siedlce, the prisoners were doing the usual: gravel quarry work, wood cutting, road construction, unloading railcars, building fortifications.

Disregarding ChGK's sanctimonious veneration of horror schlock about villages of Jews being murdered in "electric furnaces," there seems to be more to explore about the camp(s) around Małkinia.

• Labor Camp
• POW Camp
• Transit Camp

Then administratively, how do these tie in with Treblinka or other camps in the region?

I'm not sure where all this is going yet, but I'm putting it in here since the debate Małkinia thread is more than half about Auschwitz

[pilgrimofdark]

I didn't catch this before. I really need to go through these 1944 Soviet Treblinka reports again. They need a lot of proofreading, but have some interesting material.

The Extraordinary State Commission did an "investigation" of US and British citizens sent to Treblinka and killed. They wrote up a Draft Report, which was totally swept under the rug.

They state van Eupen was commandant of the Treblinka death camp.

In June 1942, 3 kilometers southeast of the Treblinka railway station, 2 kilometers southwest of the village of Wólka Okrąglik in the Warsaw Voivodeship, the Germans built concentration camp No. 2, in which they killed civilians, mainly Jews, citizens of the United States of America, England and various occupied European countries – France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and others.

...

This brutal extermination was carried out primarily by gassing in a specially equipped room.

Who do they say was in charge of this?

All atrocities at the Treblinka camp were carried out by the Germans under the direction and with the personal participation of the camp commandant, Baron van Eupen. (underlined with a red pencil in the original)

...

On the basis of the investigation carried out, the Extraordinary State Commission established that this monstrous crime – the extermination of US and British citizens – was committed by the commandant of the Treblinka camp, Baron van Eupen, the head of the camp, Oberscharführer Franz, his assistant, Oberscharführer Fles, Unterscharführers Fuchs, Mitzik, Stumpe, Schwartz, Zenf, Lanz, Hagen, on the orders of the Hitlerite government.

So the ChGK never mentions Stangl in any of their interviews or the draft report. Van Eupen gets quite a few more mentions throughout the various 1944 Soviet investigations than Stangl. Franz also gets numerous mentions.

If anyone is "confused" about the distinction between the Treblinka camps, they're in good company: the initial investigators and supposed eyewitnesses are the source of this confusion, both chronologically and geographically.

And to tie it back to the Ringelblum Archive, it's like the 1942 report got modified to become the Wiernik book, which was then clumsily stapled onto the Soviet Treblinka investigations.

[PrudentRegret]

IIRC Franz Stangl denied being the commandant of "Treblinka extermination camp" in 1967 before "confessing" to that journalist immediately before his untimely death in the 70s. I couldn't find that interview, but I wonder what he says on that point in '67.

[PrudentRegret]

This is the only mainstream historical account I could find on that matter:

https://zdjp.si/wp-content/uploads/2015 ... farrer.pdf

The first attempt to connect Stangl to the function of chief of camp failed, because it turned out that the representative delegated to directly manage the working Jews was his deputy; consequently Stangl's presence was not conspicuous enough for the people to remember him...

...

The commanders of Treblinka, Stangl and Franz, always denied their involvement in the direct action of murder. Franz insisted that his only obligations concerned the squad on guard, while Stangl maintained that his responsibility was only to assure the delivery of the Jewish assets – which he evasively referred to as "material" – to Globocnik.

Well, well, well so Stangl himself in that interview apparently affirmed the "Operation Reinhardt" interpretation of T-II and his role in that camp. Stangl having that role would not contradict van Eupen as the overall commander of "Arbeitslager Treblinka", encompassing what we call "T-II".

[pilgrimofdark]

This Treblinka map was apparently drawn by Kurt Franz while awaiting trial, and lists various personnel.

The only copy I could find online is very low resolution and almost unreadable, so this has a super zoom filter applied to it.

I'm not sure of the original archival source.

Spoiler

[Stubble]

Gee, he drew Wernick's map (basically) and it doesn't reflect reality, what a surprise.

Did he 'draw it' with somebody else's hands a gunpoint?

[pilgrimofdark]

By the 1960s when his trial occurred, Trapezoidal Treblinka was canonical. The 1942 Ringelblum/Wiernik map was supposedly due to "hearsay, memory disorders, PTSD."

So that's the conundrum.

Why would Kurt Franz draw a "hearsay, memory disorders, PTSD" map of a camp that's inaccurate? He was repeating hearsay he got from the Warsaw ghetto

Or did he draw a roughly accurate map of the camp he was at? If so, then what is Trapezoidal Treblinka?

I wonder if gathering maps of Treblinka and separating them by rectangle/trapezoid would help clarify anything.

[Stubble]

Nazgul and Fangers have a thread some place with conjecture about where 'the rectangle camp of death' may have been. I will see if I can find it. If I recall correctly you had piped in on it with that ww2 field map showing the defensive installations nearby, the road work going on etc.

Regardless, that this is what he drew speaks volumes. He drew exactly what he was told to draw.

[Wetzelrad]

The only copy I could find online is very low resolution and almost unreadable, so this has a super zoom filter applied to it.

The deathcamps website has a better version of it, with interpretation in red:
http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/03b.jpg

From this page:
http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/perpetrators.html