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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In the context of the Jewish Holocaust, the term “extermination camp” refers to camps established by the German authorities or any of their allies with the claimed exclusive, main or auxiliary purpose of exterminating inmates in masses, either by mass execution (shooting) or by mass gassings in stationary gas chambers or mobile gas vans. In…
Starting on 6 September 1943, Jews from the Theresienstadt Ghetto in what is today Czechia were deported in large numbers to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp and lodged there in the so-called Family Camp. More such transports arrived in December 1943 and May, September and October 1944. On 10 and 11 July 1944, some 7,000 Jews quartered…
Stephen Pinter, the U.S. chief investigator preparing the prosecution against former staff members of the Flossenbürg Camp after the war, came to the conclusion that no homicidal gas chamber ever existed at that camp. Today, all historians agree with that conclusion. That didn’t stop former inmates from making gas-chamber claims, though, as it was fashionable…
The Gross-Rosen Camp, located near a town of that same name in Lower Silesia, was initially a labor subcamp of the Sachsenhausen Camp, but became an independent concentration camp in 1941. Its relevance for the Holocaust is strictly limited to the unique and false claim by former Gross-Rosen inmate Isaac Egon Ochshorn, that this camp…
When the Mauthausen Camp became overcrowded in 1939, subcamps were established to house inmates near to their worksites. Eventually, three such camps near the creek Gusen were established, named Gusen I through III. Of particular interest for Holocaust historiography is the cremation furnace established at the Gusen I Camp, which was almost identical to the…
In mid-October 1941, a camp was set up at Janowska Road in Lviv to house transports of Austrian and Czech Jews deported for resettlement to the east. It was to serve as a transit as well as forced-labor camp, and started operating in November of that year. Its relevance for the Holocaust starts in the…
The Jasenovac Camp in wartime Croatia was established in August 1941 near a village of the same name. It was operated by the Croatian wartime regime. It consisted of five separate camps, two of which were short-lived, but the other three – Ciglana, Kozara and Stara Gradiska – operated until April 1945. The purpose of…
The Klooga Labor Camp was a satellite camp of the Vaivara Camp in northern Estonia. It was set up in the summer of 1943, and at its peak housed up to 3,000 Jewish men and women, mainly from the Vilnius and Kaunas Ghettos. Toward the end of the German rule in this area, most inmates…
The Polish underground “Memorandum on the Situation in the Country for the Period July 16 –August 25, 1942” claimed four death camps in existence in German-occupied Poland: Bełżec, Treblinka II, Sobibór and one at “Kosów Podlaski.” (See Mattogno 2021e, p. 97, for the source.) No such town exists, but there is a town called Sokołów…
An extermination camp equipped with homicidal gas chambers was allegedly located in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv (Lemberg in German). On 18 May 1943, the British received a “Memorandum” from Stockholm containing the statements of two Belgian prisoners of war who had escaped from Germany on 28 April and arrived in Sweden on 5…
Documented History The decision to set up a concentration camp for 25,000 to 50,000 inmates near the Polish city of Lublin was made on 20 July 1941. It was meant to supply a slave-labor force for Himmler’s ambitious Generalplan Ost aiming at the colonization, development and Germanization of territories in Eastern Europe. After the initial…
Maly Trostenets (also spelled Trostinets) was a village in the suburbs of Belorussia’s capital Minsk. Near it is located the so-called Blagovshchina Forest of roughly 2.5 square kilometers in size (one square mile). According to Russian sources of the 2000s, this forest was the execution site of choice for the local branches of the Soviet…
On 9 August 1938, a new concentration camp near the Austrian town of Mauthausen near the city of Linz was established. The camp was mainly populated by political prisoners, later also Soviet PoWs and partisans from south-eastern Europe. The camp served as a reservoir of slave labor for several enterprises, foremost a company for construction…
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