Kon, Abe

Abe Kon, a former Treblinka inmate who claimed to have arrived there on 2 October 1942, made the following claims on 17 August 1944 during an interview conducted by Soviet investigators (see Mattogno/Graf 2023, esp. pp. 64f.; Mattogno 2021e, pp. 136f., 154f.):

• There were 12 gas chambers in one building, each measuring 6 m × 6 m, which accommodated 400 inmates at a time – which amounts to an unlikely 11 people per square meter. The orthodoxy insists that only a building with three gas chambers existed when Kon arrived there, and that a second building with 10 more chambers was added later.
• The victims were killed by a machine that pumped the air out of the chambers, suffocating the people within 6 to 15 minutes. However, creating a vacuum in a brick-and-mortar building is technically impossible (the external pressure would crush the walls), hence most certainly was not done.
• In a deposition five days later, he replaced the vacuum murder method with gas: “The gas was turned on.”
• Three batches of people were gassed every day, which resulted not in (12 × 600 × 3 =) 21,600 victims, but according to Kon, in 15,000 to 18,000 victims daily.
• This went on for two months, with (60 × 15,000 to 18,000 =) 900,000 to 1,080,000 victims, plus probably more before his arrival and then afterwards. This death toll for just two months is already more than the camp’s total death toll usually claimed by the orthodoxy of some 800,000.
• A “specially manufactured furnace” could burn up to 6,000 bodies at once, using gasoline or petroleum as fuel – which might be good for lighting a fire, but would only singe the bodies superficially.
• The cremation lasted up to an hour – when in fact open-air incinerations of that type easily burn an entire day or two.
• Those unable to walk were led to the edge of a blazing pit, shot in the neck and made to fall into the fire – while the proximity to this conflagration would have fatally burned the executioner as well.

In an interview with Polish investigating judge Łukaszkiewicz on 9 October 1945, Kon reverted again to the vacuum murder method, which he claimed he learned from a bricklayer who had been involved in building the facility.

Kon furthermore asserted that the largest inmate labor group was the one sorting the deportees’ clothes and valuables, while there was also a group that “went into the woods to collect branches in order to make fences.” However, the largest group should have been the lumberjacks felling trees, debranching, sawing and transporting them to the camp for the cremation activities. That would have made the collection of branches unnecessary. Kon also claimed in this otherwise terse statement that SS generals inspected the camp often, which is an oft-repeated but unsubstantiated myth. (See his complete Polish statement at https://zapisyterroru.pl/.)