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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…
In April 1944, the two Auschwitz inmates Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from the camp. They managed to flee to Slovakia, where they wrote down in May 1944 what they claimed was unfolding at Auschwitz. This report was sent in various versions and languages to several Jewish personalities. At the same time, the German authorities…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
At the military training ground near the German town of Ohrdruf, a forced-labor camp was established in November 1944. Due to Germany’s rapid collapse at that time, the camp never had a chance of developing any proper infrastructure. Therefore, living conditions were atrocious, death rates catastrophic. As U.S. troops approached, the camp was evacuated to…
Oranienburg is a town north-northwest of Berlin. It was the location of a small prison facility functioning as a concentration camp between March 1933 and summer 1934, when it was dissolved. A new camp on the town’s outskirts, called Sachsenhausen, was established in 1936. Since 1938, Oranienburg was also the seat of the SS’s Concentration…
Rajsko is a village some 5 miles southwest of the city of Auschwitz. Most of its population was deported/resettled in 1941/42. The Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS established its “Sanitary and Bacteriological Testing Station Southeast” there in 1943 (“Hygienisch-bakteriologische Untersuchungsstelle Südost der Waffen-SS”). It served primarily to conduct experiments on a number of vaccines…
In May of 1939, a concentration camp for women was established near the town of Ravensbrück, some 90 km north of Berlin. It entered the stage of Holocaust historiography only after the war, when former inmates claimed during several show trials staged by the British that homicidal gas chambers had been built in that camp…
Sachsenhausen is the name of a district of the city of Oranienburg, some 12 miles north of Berlin. The SS had their headquarters in Oranienburg. In July 1936, a concentration camp was erected right next to the headquarters and named after that city district. Orthodox sources state that some 600 inmates died in the camp…
According to the orthodox narrative, some 7,000 Serbian Jews are said to have been killed by German occupational forces in early 1942 in the Semlin Camp in Serbia, which is called Sajmište Camp by the Serbs. These murders are said to have been committed using a gas van that was specifically transported to that camp…
Documented History Wartime documents concerning Sobibór are very rare, but the few that do exist do not corroborate the orthodox narrative. Chronologically the first of these few documents is a telegram sent by Hans Höfle to the SS headquarters in Berlin on 11 January 1943, which was intercepted and deciphered by the British (see the…
Just one day after the outbreak of open hostilities between Germany and Poland, the German authorities established a detention camp near the town of Stutthof in the region of the “Free City of Danzig” meant to contain anti-German Polish political activists. This region had been separated from Germany after the First World War and was…
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