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Instruments include man-made crime scenes, such as camps and ghettos, as well as tools to commit the crime (weapons) or destroy its traces (pyres, crematoria).
Orthodox Narrative Sometime in 1942, SS chief Heinrich Himmler is said to have decided that the traces of atrocities committed by German units both in the various so-called extermination camps as well as during mass shootings outside of camps needed to be erased. To this end, mass graves were ordered to be opened, the corpses…
When writing about the Aktion Reinhardt Camps, orthodox historians commonly refer to the camps Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, which according to their narrative were pure extermination camps, but in fact served as mere transit camps for Jews deported to the East either for construction work or for resettlement. From a telegram sent by Hans Höfle,…
Google map of the region around Auschwitz, with black labels added. The Polish town of Oświęcim (German: Auschwitz) lies in a valley at the Sola River near its confluence with the Vistula River. Already during the time of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, a military barracks existed southwest of the town on the left bank of the…
Documented History The first extant document of this camp, dated 30 April 1940, is a cost estimate totaling 2 million reichsmark to convert the former Polish barracks into a camp. It includes fences, walls, watchtowers, but also an inmate kitchen, a laundry, a water-supply system, an inmate bath, a delousing facility, and of course additional…
Documented History The Belzec Camp was initially one of a string of forced-labor camps set up along the eastern border of occupied Poland, meant to house prisoners, among them gypsies, Jews and Christian Poles, who were deployed to build roads and border fortifications. Living conditions in these camps were very bad, and mortality due to…
Documented History The Bergen-Belsen Camp started out in the 1930s as a construction worker’s camp for a nearby military training ground of the German armed forces. After World War Two broke out, the camp was repurposed and expanded as a PoW camp. In April 1943, several sections of this camp were taken over by the…
At the beginning of the Second World War, the northeastern Polish city of Białystok was briefly occupied by German forces, but then handed over to the Soviets. After the outbreak of hostilities between Germany and the Soviet Union, Białystok was occupied by Germany within a few days. In early August 1941, all 50,000 Jews of…
Documented History After the victory over Poland, German officials developed the “Generalplan Ost,” which aimed at Germanizing the territories annexed from Poland. In the summer of 1941, after the initial success in the war with the Soviet Union, Himmler expanded this plan to encompass the large conquered Soviet territories. He drafted ambitious plans for building…
Four witnesses claimed that, at the Janowska Camp near Lviv, a machine was used to grind down bones that were left over from open-air incinerations of corpses, which are said to have been extracted from mass graves of German murder victims. These witnesses are: Heinrich Chamaides, Moische Korn, David Manusevich and Leon Weliczker. Their claim…
No historian has ever claimed or is currently claiming that any kind of systematic extermination of inmates by any technical means occurred at the Buchenwald Camp. Therefore, this camp would not have a place in an encyclopedia on the Holocaust, if it weren’t for some witnesses having made claims to the contrary, and if the…
Terms Similar to the English term bunker, the German term Bunker can refer to three things: A shelter facility protecting from projectiles, bombs, shrapnel or noxious gases in times of armed conflicts. Bulk-item storage facilities, such as potatoes, coal or coke. The German language even has a verb for this: einbunkern, to store in bulk….
In the context of the Jewish Holocaust of World War II, the camps of interest are those for which claims of mass extermination have been made. Although an argument could be made that the Soviet prisoners held in PoW camps in the temporarily German-occupied Soviet Union were subject to conditions that led to millions of…
Carbon monoxide (CO) is a colorless and odorless gas which is highly toxic to vertebrate animals, but not to non-vertebrates such as insects. CO clings more strongly than oxygen to the hemoglobin of vertebra blood, hence preventing oxygen transportation by the blood. Since the combination of CO and hemoglobin is more intensely red than the…
Documented History Only a few documents about the Chełmno Camp itself seem to have survived the war. The most important of them, dated 11 May 1943, refers to the earlier delivery of iron material to the Chełmno Special Unit. This delivery included a “water reservoir,” “iron boiler pipes” with a total weight of 1,600 kg,…
Concentration camps are prison camps for civilians incarcerated without due process. They were first created by the Spanish during the 1897 Cuban War of Independence. They were employed in subsequent years by the British (Boer War) and Americans (war against the Philippines). Concentration camps made their first appearance in Europe with the 1918 Bolshevik revolution…
Imagining one’s body burn is a veritable nightmare for us all. Hence, the cremation of the human body is a prime topic for propaganda stories, because it is easy to make an audience exposed to such stories shudder in horror. For this reason, the cremation of alleged victims of claimed German wartime atrocities is a…
Fire funerals were quite common in ancient times but were banned by the monotheistic religions. Only with increasing population densities, a lack of cemetery space, hygienic concerns, and decreasing influence of religions did cremations make a comeback in the late 1800s. They have been on the rise ever since; see the data prior to World…
Documented History The Dachau Camp enters the Holocaust stage in March 1942, when plans for a proper crematorium building were drawn up. The few documents that the conquering U.S. troops did not destroy show little unusual. However, on 9 August 1942, hence in the early stages of the planning and construction phase, Dachau camp physician…
Diesel-engine exhaust gases are claimed by numerous witnesses – including during the trial against John Demjanjuk in 1987 – to have been used to mass-murder Jews in the camps at Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, and in some of the so-called gas vans. However, diesel-engine exhaust gas is notoriously low in its most toxic component, carbon…
Historical Context In Western and Central Europe, and in particular in Poland and Germany, it was well-known since 1918/1919 that the Bolshevists and their Red Army exhibited a savage bestiality during warfare and even in peacetime that was unparalleled in modern history. In addition, the Soviet Union rescinded any agreement of international law that Czarist…
On the day Germany’s armed forces invaded Poland, Hitler signed an order permitting the “mercy killing” of severely mentally disabled persons in what is called Germany’s Euthanasia Program. In charge of the program was Viktor Brack, a high official in the Reich’s Chancellery. The program was also called Aktion T4, an acronym for the Berlin…
The excavation of mass graves containing victims of mass murder committed by German forces during World War II can be divided into two groups: Excavations presumably carried out by German units during the war in attempts to erase traces of their crimes. This is said to have happened during a large-scale operation nowadays referred to…
Witnesses have claimed all kinds of methods allegedly used in certain facilities to mass murder people at German wartime camps. Nowadays, the orthodoxy only recognizes claims as valid which posit the use of toxic gases, hence homicidal gas chambers (see that entry for details). However, during the war and in the immediate postwar years, when…
Many of the commonly claimed murder methods allegedly used during the Holocaust, are exotic in nature by objective standards, but due to incessant exposure to tales about them, we have become calloused as to their peculiar nature, and have accepted them as “normal.” This includes homicidal gas chambers as well as gas vans, which both…
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