In Memory of victims, who had their lives cruelly taken at Treblinka Death Camp in Poland

The second time I went to Krakow, we hired the cab driver for a day that picked us up at the airport when we arrived which meant we could look round at our leisure..I would definately recommend this, I learnt a lot more, but I still found it clinical.


Yes and looking at now is quite upsetting, first visit was in the baking heat of summer the second was in a freezing February...I remember going to the top of the tower pictured and looking round and seeing how many huts there had been..It made me feel quite sick to think of how many people died there.


I think thats what I said when I said to "remember" :D


A bit like the thread where Poles think that the HMG owes them? Even though 1,000s settled here, integrated and have made very good lives for themselves...Funny how that generation dont seem to have an issue with Britain and only the younger generation who weren't hardly affected by communism seem to think the world owes them something!

Anyway, thanks Miss B, brilliant thread and fantastic photos..

Well, it's not completely true that there is a total lack of administration. They remain Germans and Germans like to do anything Gründlich (thoroughly). There are books in the Bundesarchiv of Germany that spell out names and dates (of transport and so on), but they somehow don't connect to the books kept in the camps respectively. This makes it fairly hard to make precised statements as to where certain ppl arrived and of those that were gassed no record was kept at all on the day itself. Unlike the prisoners that stayed in one of the barracks. They were kept in administration fairly thoroughly. Based on these facts one can make fairly accurate statements as to whether a person was gassed upon arrival or if he/she was kept in detainment for a while. Problem with this is that the dates are not always coherent, so that part will always remain guessing and deducting.

As I stated above, most of my findings are relatively accurate. As for the family members that went to Auschwitz I can tell they weren't gassed immediately as there is an arrival record of them (don't know if I mentioned that above). Comparing this record to the occupation records of that September month, has led me to the conclusion that they must've been gassed somewhere around two weeks after arrival.

You are correct when you say that David Irving is a decent researcher, however there are some serious flaws in his findings, as I am sure you will know.

>^..^<

M-G (tiens)

We are all led to conclusions based on available and selected data, M-G. I dare say that you are highly accurate in the case of those that you have traced but we are dealing with telephone book figures when it comes to others. Why would Nazis want to maintain accurate records of their 'prizes', M-G?

History has taught us the legal maxim of 'res noviter veniens ad notitiam'. Stories emerge, to varying degrees of credibility, but I really believe that films have, in their propensity towards exaggeration and hyperbole, distorted accounts to a material extent. Documented accounts vary significantly as to number and nature too.

All in all, we are led back to the humanitarian position that it was an abominable operation that was callous and inhumane in the extreme. Laymen need know no more!

David Irving has made it his life's work so who am I to refute him to any degree of cogency? I wasn't lousy in historical studies but I wasn't any great shakes either.

Seanus (humble in his ineptitude here)

Isnt it about time we all moved on and remember that when we keep saying "Germans" these are the Germans of yesteryears and not the ones we share a union with now..We can debate the numbers till the cows come home, but we will never truely know the exact and true figures of those that perished in those camps..The Roma and vagrants the pregnant women whose unborn babies died the various nationalities that were exported and there are those that escaped and were lucky but were just listed as missing...This is a shameful part of our history in Europe, but we are now living in times where hopefully this will never happen in our countries again...

Can we just respects Miss B's post and just commemorate those who died, rather than debating the numbers.

And can people stop doing this stupid bracketed thing, its phucking irritating! MG did it first and I can deal with that..but copying is just really childish and just show no imagination whatsoever!

I did, but it should matter to all of us as these were ppl and if we start denying it en masse, we start to be co-guilty. Like the Germans who watched and did nothing. Saw "Road To Treblinka", which is on YouTube as well, it's a pretty decent documentary. It's in five parts. Just do a search for Road To Treblinka. It should pop up. It's in English :)

>^..^<

M-G (tiens)

Thank you for removing the negative posts from the thread.

A sincere thanks also goes out to everyone who stayed on topic.

My deepest respect and prayer for all the victims.


You are brave woman, I didn't dare to visit those places where people were murdered by the dozen every day.

hi guys,..
thanks to all for sharing this nice information and old historical pic's,..

yeah, me too. it's a feeling that is hard to shake. :(


why indeed.. they did keep quite the records though and numbered every "prisoner".. why?


well, some of those nazis are still around, you know?


you are forgetting Serbs of the 1990s.. but they didn't waste their time building camps.. :(


definitely, it was a real mess a few days back.. good job Wroclaw.

Well the Nazis considered that what they were doing was the right thing , and each camp had to keep good records to show they were doing their job well and keeping up with the good work for the good of the Reich...

They only began to destroy records when it was obvious they were going to lose the war and that these camps were going to be discovered by people who would not see it the same way the Nazis did....

They did keep books, but as I found out, they somehow didn't add up to eachother - they weren't linked. For example: if a record from Bergen Belsen stated that, say on the 1st of May 1943 a shipment with so and so many ppl with these and these numbers, names and so on left for Treblinka, you can calculate how long that train at the longest will take to reach Treblinka. But since the Nazis didn't keep records of those who went into the gaschamber upon arrival, only numbers, anything coming into Treblinka from Bergen Belsen is to be based on data coming from Bergen Belsen and compare them with the numbers that were gassed in Treblinka on the projected arrival day of the train to come up with an educated guess. That's the hard part of it all and that makes you feel like a bookkeeper when you're doing this.

This may not be such a good example as in Treblinka hardly anybody who arrived there lived longer than 2 or 3 hours, but even in Auschwitz, the books don't connect to the others. Just read my previous posts on how I got to educated guesses on times of arrival and death.

>^..^<

M-G (tiens)

i think its wonderful, and we should never forget what happened at these places. thank you for sharing them.

chaza

Apparently we will never forget, but that doesn't mean that we care about genocide. The last 15 years have seen some of the worst genocides in history take place...and the world sat by and watched TV.

On a side note, visited Auschwitz again this Sunday. Between 10-15 you have to go with a tour guide. It's a shame because the tour seems to be set up for 8 year olds, and comes across as a rush job. It feels like they organized it using amusement parks as a model. I went alone a few years back before you had to take a guide, and it had a huge impact. This time, it just seemed incredibly disrespectful with tourists posing for pictures, not taking off their hats, smoking on the grounds of the museum, chatting away on cell phones... It seems to have become a popular stop with the "European Package Tour" crowd.

:(

I read a lot about death camps thankfully i hadnt to live through that time my mother did she lost 4 brothers to nazi bullets taken from home and shot in woods there crime they were polish solders we must never forget and remember there is always another dictator out there just waiting i have seen aushwitz i found it very painful that man can and still does act like an animal

Waiting? It's happening right now. The reason it is repeated is because of inaction from people like you and I.

The truth is, we really can't be bothered unless it's happening in front of our faces.

Treblinka and Belzec were the worst of all the camps. Treblinka 70 km NW of Warsaw, dealt in the larger numbers and its said 700 000 Jews died there. Detainees thinking it was a rest or refreshment stop got off the deportation train but with a few exceptions [those wanted for camp labour details] were all dead within 3 - 4 hours. The prisoner staff did all the work. Discipline was kept by individual guards who had taken a dislike to a POW, PUNCHED him in the eye, the next morning all those prisoners lined up for 'morning roll-call' with BLACK EYES were shot with no exceptions.

The gas chambers were primitive indeed - nothing more than crude pig-pen-shaped-brick-boxes, ten of them, in which carbon-monoxide was fed. Being led into the gassing building [it looked like a barn with a central corridor] most prisoners had started to realise something was not right so they hesitated to go inside. to stop this the 2 notorious Ukrainian Guards prodded them with the crude SPEARS they carried made out of sharpened gas-pipe, they stabbed you in the back or lower backside to force you to go forward into the death house. They also had knives and revolvers. The actual killing took 20-25 minutes, it was a full 10-15 minutes before you collapsed and lost conciousness. Suffice to say many were still barely alive when dragged outside and burnt. Each gas chamber had 2 doors, an IN and an Out door. Belzec, 45 km N/east of Lublin, was a smaller, cruder sister camp in which 300 000 died in similar circumstances. I recall the Commandant Koch was executed by the SS for theft from prisoners and grand larceny-fraud, which today seems laughable as most of the German High Ups were thieves, rogues and con-men. Briefly: In the Treblinka camp 'Ivan The Terrible' was the most notorious guard with the spear, he disappeared at the end of the war never to be seen again. A dog called Barry roamed the camp which had been trained to attack POW. After the war it was adopted and became a quiet, loveable, family pet. The Treblinka Camp Commandant laughed at so called Allied Justice, he got 12 years and died inside prison. He should have been hung. Another monster was a German called Lalke [The Doll] he was hung. The Ukrainian Guards often dragged pretty Jewish girls out of the line, took them into a shed, raped them, then threw them outside to be taken away to be gassed. The JEWS were innocent victims, hard working, honest, quiet, book readers, chess players and thinkers. They were MURDERED, by the German State on the whim of a MADMAN.

This post was clearly written by a madman.

And the German people as a majority (with precious few resisters, malingerers and practically NO deserters!!) allowed a Hitler to come to power because the already weak underpinnings of a joke Weimar Government became unhinged at the slightest provocation! It's been oberserved countless times, by both German historians such as Meinecke and esteemed English ones like Trevor-Roper, that the Germans were unseasoned in the practice of democracy, compared with their English, French and American counterparts. They had never had a revolution. The so-called 'Vormaerz' of 1848 was another joke. It was said that this revolt failed, "because the police wouldn't permit it":-)) Furthermore, as the historian Dr. Helmut Plessner of Goettingen once observed in his pathbreaking work "Nationhood Deferred: On the political Gullibilty of the Bourgoise Intellect", Christianity never developed at a grass-roots level in German speaking lands as it had in, say, the Anglo-Saxon countries. The wedding of Christianity with Enlightenment as had taken place successfully in France, for instance, never occurred in Germany, hence, the concepts of liberty, equality, fraternity were allowed to wither on the vine of indifference.

But again, this is only one historian's perspective.

I'll play a devil's advocate: what about the concept of the guillotine that accompanied the previous three?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#The_guillotine_as_a_symbol

Perhaps WWII Germany was just following and "perfecting" that tradition of disregard for human life?

????? Logic, please? What has guillotining have to do with Treblinka???

Actually, guillotining is an antithesis of "liberty, equality, fraternity". Your analysis of the reasons for the Holocaust genocide involved lamenting the different fate of the "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" principles in, respectively, France and Germany. I just pointed out that the fate wasn't so much different...

The two topics you mention are wholly unrelated. Hard to comment when in fact the guillotining of noblemen by those who felt them to be oppressors is so completely disconnected from the killing of Jews and other "enemies of the state" by a totalitarian regime. Where the Jews, Sinti-Roma the "oppressors"???? What are you trying to say? Perhaps there's a language interference problem someplace:-)

Well, as for Jews, wasn't this the Nazis' rationale for genocide?

calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/sturmer.htm

Some quotes:

If you or anyone else on PF believes such bilge, then you're dyed-in the-wool Jew haters!!! While the Catholic Church did marginalize Jews from participating fully in European society from the Middle Ages down on, forcing them to become money changers because Christians were expressly forbidden from such pratice, to then BLAME the Jews for having to survive is out and out racism as well as unadulterated fiction!!! Does any group purposely go about becoming the intentional/intended object of another's hatred?? The answer's NO.

You've only just realised, Lyzko?

How can you consider yourself a historian if you are emotionally unable to use appropriate sources? If you want to research the minds of WWII-era Germans and their rationale for wholesale murder, then you MUST refer to sources like Der Stürmer! If you plainly REFUSE, then you are a quack, not a scientist. But you do more than refuse - you dare to attribute materials someone else wants to study personally to the researcher, and this is precisely as rational, as refusing to shake hands with an HIV researcher, because you may get infected. Got it?

Naturally, the world is full of imbeciles. The professor who studies propaganda (with the focus on WWII German and GDR political propaganda) and who posted these reference materials, sometimes receives equally idiotic comments.

calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/faq.htm


Normally, I am quite tolerant to people from the left side of the bell curve, but you, my friend, claim to be a historian and this raises the bar a little.


No, he just waited for an excuse to proclaim this again. The evolution of this thread is a PERFECT reference material for the study of virulent Jewish anti-Polonism - a relevant to the discussion, legitimate reference, clearly (and even redundantly) marked as a quote, serving as a lame excuse to start and anti-Polish rant in #56...

Here we go again, special pleading in the face of all evidence that most of the hostility was in the other direction.

Not really, it's far better to check out what the men themselves had to say.


You're thinking of Sobibor, and it's more ENE than NE from Lublin. Belzec was the first camp, where the techniques were trialed and perfected.


He was the Commandant of Majdanek.

Pardon me, but are you advocating purposefully excluding available relevant, historical materials from the research? Then this is not research aimed at discovering the truth, but rather at confirming presumptions.

I understand that Der Stürmer is a particularly vile propaganda that may offend some sensitivities, but this is the very propaganda that had created the receptive environment for the Holocaust. This is the factor responsible for the fact that most Germans preferred to look the other way. If you ignore these sources, you will be condemned, like Lyzko, to creating unsupported sociological constructs, based on what your biased mind considers correct, rather than on what really happened in the 1930s Germany.

It is of course far more complicated than that - especially given the well-documented hostility to the Nazis and their ideology.