Glazar, Richard

Richard Glazar (29 Nov. 1920 – 20 Dec. 1997) was a Czech Jew who waited 49 years before having his alleged memories of his stay at the Treblinka Camp published in a book titled Trap with a Green Fence (the German edition, Die Falle mit dem grünen Zaun, appeared in 1992). Although the orthodox narrative claims that slave-labor inmates at this camp were killed after several weeks or a few months, Glazar insists that he spent ten months in that camp, from October 1942 until August 1943. The account of his “memories” is a hodgepodge of claims that can be found in the tales of other Treblinka survivors. One main source is the tall tale by Samuel Willenberg, which appeared in English three years before Glazar’s tall tale:

Glazar’s major blunder is his claim that his unit, a group of 25 men called the “camouflage unit,” was the only unit in the camp that was doing real work: they had to climb up trees in the surrounding woods to break off branches, carry those back to the camp, and weave the branches into the fences to hide from outsiders what was going on inside the camp. This claim has three insurmountable problems:

1. This feeble attempt at camouflaging what was going on in the camp would have been futile, because anyone could have climbed up a tree to look over the fence, and the huge pyres sending tall flames into the sky would have been multiple times the height of any fence.
2. The gigantic fires allegedly burning and certainly spreading flying embers in close proximity to those fences would have quickly dried out and set ablaze the branches, making the camouflage unit’s work pointless.
3. It is claimed that some 700,000 to 900,000 corpses were cremated on huge pyres in Treblinka between April and July of 1943 (some 120 days). Assuming the need of some 250 kg of fresh firewood to burn one corpse during open-air incinerations, this would have required at least some 175,000 metric tons of wood. That would have been about a thousand trees per day. They all came with branches that had to be cut off – tens of thousands of branches every day. Hence, why was there a need to climb on trees and cut off additional branches? And if Glazar’s tree-climbing gang was the only unit doing real work around the camp, then who felled, debranched, cut up and transported the 1,000 trees needed every day? And this is not to mention that freshly cut trees make very poor firewood.

This all shows that Glazar was telling outrageous lies. If we follow him, however, all that was required to burn up to a million corpses within four months was to put “a lot of kindling in among the corpses, and then douse the whole thing in something very flammable.” Once lit, the corpses apparently burned by themselves. However, self-immolating bodies simply do not exist. (See Mattogno/​Graf, pp. 38-40; Kues 2009)