Section 76: The Belzec Camp—Given Little Prominence Because of Unbelievable Allegations
Belzec
had been established in mid-1940 as a work camp to supply labor for defenses
along the border with the Soviet Union.
The
camp was not large, and remained relatively obscure, at least in the eyes of
the Holocaust storytellers, for nearly two years until March 1942, when it was
suddenly transformed into a “killing center.”
According
to the Holocaust storytellers, the camp only operated from March 1942 to June
1943—a total of 15 months.
During
this time, it is claimed that between 430,000 and 500,000 Jews were killed in
the camp, along with an unknown number of Poles and Gypsies.
The
short lifespan of the camp shows its true purpose: a temporary holding center
rather than an “extermination camp” but this obvious point aside, the real
problem occurs when the simple mathematics is done.
If the
camp operated for 15 months (10,800 hours) and killed 500,000 people, this
would have meant that 47 Jews would have been murdered every hour, 24 hours per
day, round the clock for all 15 months.
This is
of course not feasible, as it would have required a staff of thousands, a
massive logistical backup, and, most importantly of all, an incredibly advanced
execution method. Just as importantly, the Belzec camp was never equipped with
crematoria, which would have been critical had it been meant as an
extermination center.
In
fact, none of the Reinhard camps had crematoria, a fact which is ignored by the
Holocaust storytellers.
Section 77: Fantastic Claims from Most Famous “Eyewitness Survivor” Rudolf Reder
One of
the most-quoted “eyewitness survivors” to the Belzec camp was one Rudolf Reder
(1881–1968), who wrote his “memoirs” and published them in a 74-page booklet
with the title Belzec.
This
booklet single-handedly set the pattern for almost all the latter Holocaust
storyteller narratives, including the lurid claims of packed “cattle trains,”
“pits full of burning bodies,” and the “gas chambers” used in the Reinhard
camps.
Below: Reder’s “map of Belzec” supposedly
showing the camp’s layout. Alongside, the original cover of Reder’s “memoirs.”
Reder
claimed to have worked as a “Sonderkommando”
member—one of the group of Jews supposedly selected by camp authorities to work
emptying the gas chambers and helping dispose of the bodies.
Reder
even produced a map layout of the Belzec camp, upon which the Holocaust
storytellers still base most of their claims about the camp. Reder’s book is,
however, full of patently false claims, and was obviously not written by
someone who was actually in a camp, much less Belzec. The more obvious errors
include:
- A
claim that the “Gestapo” ran the camp, overseen by the “SS”—a ludicrous idea
which is obvious to anyone familiar with the role of the Gestapo, who at no
stage ever guarded camps;
- A
claim that the courtyard into which the trains arrived was one square kilometer
in size—when aerial photography from 1944 shows that the entire camp was only a
quarter of that size;
- A
claim that the “gas chambers” were powered by gasoline engines, and that he
personally worked on them when they malfunctioned. Today, the Holocaust
storytellers claim that the gassing was actually done with diesel engines.
- A
claim that “10,000 Jews were gassed everyday” at the camp. At that rate, at
least a million Jews would have been gassed during the three and a half months
when Reder claimed to have been a prisoner at the camp.
For the
15 months when Belzec was actually operational, 10,000 murdered per day would
have resulted in that camp having disposed of over 4 million Jews—all by
itself.
- A
claim that there were six “gas chambers” which held 750 people each. This claim
is, like his “10,000 murdered per day,” physically impossible for the
dimensions claimed for these “gas chambers”—about 25 square meters.
The
figure of 750 people fitting in a single chamber was obviously taken from the
“confession” of Kurt Gerstein (see section 17), as this exact figure is
contained in Gerstein’s statement. Reder clearly incorporated those claims into
his book as “memoirs.”
- A
claim that all these millions of dead bodies were buried in a series of pits
located right next to the “gas chambers.” This is, of course, physically
impossible, give the size of the camp and the space that 2.5 million bodies
would have taken up.
- A
claim that all these millions of bodies were then dug up again in 1943, then
burned, and crushed—and that was why these impossibly huge graves with millions
of bodies could no longer be found.
Of
course, Reder’s assertion that he had worked on a “death commando” is as
improbable as his other claims. Firstly, if his narrative is to be believed, he
would have been 61 years old when “employed” in the “death commando”—supposedly
digging mass graves, pits, carrying dead bodies out of the “gas chambers” day
in and day out etc. The chances of the “Gestapo” picking a man of that age to
do such physically demanding work would be near to impossible, given, as the
Holocaust storytellers claim, that they would have had millions of arrivals to
choose from.
Lastly,
Reder’s claim of how he escaped is simply unbelievable, given the standard
narrative that the Jewish “death commandos” were only used for a few months at
a time, kept under close guard, never let out, and then killed to prevent them
telling what they had seen.
Despite
all of this, Reder said he escaped after being taken by the “Gestapo” on a day
trip to the city of Lemberg (today known as Lviv in the Ukraine) to collect
metal sheets—a shopping expedition(!). There, while his German accompaniment
fell asleep, Reder said he just jumped out the truck, ran away into the German
occupied city, and vanished. Despite Reder’s “memoirs” being patently a fabrication
from start to finish, it is still produced by the Holocaust storytellers as
“evidence” of how Belzec “worked.”
Section 78: Belzec’s Incredible Execution Methods: “Electrocution and Drowning in Excrement”
The
alleged method of killing at Belzec is yet another incredible story. The first
reports to appear about the camp claimed that Jews were electrocuted on steel
plates. Another version claimed that prisoners were submerged in water up to
their necks and then electrocuted.
In
1954, yet another “survivor” claimed that the main form of execution was
drowning in excrement: “Jews were arrested every day, forced to dig a deep and
narrow ditch and were then thrown into it one at a time. Then each prisoner was
forced to go to the toilet on the head of the victim. Anyone refusing received
25 lashes. In this way, they went to the toilet all day long until the victim
finally suffocated in the faeces” (“Kronika life-span niezanego autora,” in Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historicznego,
Warsaw, no. 54, January–June 1954, p. 307).
The
allegations of murder became more incredible and bizarre, but were reported in
the New York Times in 1944 as “fact.”
In
1944, Dr. Abraham Silberschein, a member of the Polish parliament and delegate
of the World Jewish Congress, published, in Geneva, a series of mimeographed
brochures entitled Die Judenausrottung in
Polen (The extermination of Jews in Poland), in which he included even more
incredible stories from “witnesses.”
In one
paper, titled Die Hölle von Belzec (“The
Belzec Hell"), he reported as follows: “Jews deported to Belzec were ordered to
undress, as if they were going to take a bath. They were, indeed, taken to a
bathing establishment able to contain several hundreds of people. However, they
were executed en masse by means of an electric current. A boy who managed to
escape from such an establishment told me what happened after the
electrocution: The fat from the corpses was drained in order to make soap from
it. The remnants of the corpses were then thrown into anti-tank ditches which
had been laid out along the Russian border by the arch-henchman Major Dollf (A.
Silberschein, “Die Hölle von Belzec,” in Die
Judenausrottung in Polen, vol. V, Geneva 1944, pp. 21f).
Needless
to say, the “soap from Jewish fat” story has been thoroughly rejected as a
hoax, even by Israel’s Yad Vashem (Bill Hutman, “Nazis never made human-fat
soap,” The Jerusalem Post –International
Edition, week ending May 5, 1990).
The
“death by electrocution” charge formed an official part of the Nuremberg Trial
proceedings and was entered into the court records by the Soviet Prosecutor
L.N. Smirnov on 19 February 1946 (document USSR-93, IMT, vol. VII, pp. 576f).
Finally, it was claimed that the fiendish Nazis smeared chlorine and lime
inside train transports, so that by the time the unfortunate deportees arrived
at Belzec, they were already dead.
Despite
the electrocution method being officially entered into the records, the
Holocaust storytellers realized that “death by electrocution” or “drowning in
feces” was too far-fetched even for the most gullible believers.
By the
1960s, the method of execution had been changed to a Soviet diesel tank engine
which pumped fumes into several “gas chambers” which could then allegedly be
opened by large side doors for the removal of bodies.
Once
again, it is necessary to point out that it borders on the impossible to murder
large numbers of people with diesel fumes alone, and this claim should by
itself be reason enough to question the Belzec story.
Below: An aerial reconnaissance photograph
taken of the Belzec camp site in May 1944, reveals that the entire camp was
situated on a hillside with moderately sized trees which were cut and removed
from the train tracks to the top of the ridge, affording villagers an unobstructed
view of the hill and the camp. If it had been used as the Holocaust Story
tellers claim--with open pit body burnings and “cranes” to move the stacks of
bodies around, then all of that would have been done in full view of thousands
of witnesses from the nearby village. Of the “gas chambers,” body-burning pits,
and mass graves where half a million or more people are supposed to have been
killed, there is not a sign.
According
to a 1959 statement by a “witness,” W. Pfannenstiel, there were no survivors at
all, and only four (!) SS guards, even though a “survivor,” one Rudolf Reder,
had published a “memoir” in 1946 already.
Equally
fortuitously for the Holocaust storytellers, the commander of the Belzec camp,
Christian Wirth, was killed in action in Croatia in May 1944 (his Belzec
command was as short-lived as the camp). Another fortuitous “fact” for the
Holocaust storytellers is that there are absolutely no official German
documents, plans, papers or even any descriptions of exactly what the camp looked
like—despite the claim that its “gas chamber system” was duplicated at the
other Reinhard camps.
Furthermore,
the alleged designer of the “gas chambers” (which, it will be recalled,
supposedly used highly ineffective diesel fumes), SS-Hauptscharfuhrer Lorenz
Hackenholt, also “vanished” after the war, never to be seen again.
Section 79: The Belzec Trial
An
attempt to bring eight former SS guards at Belzec to trial in January 1963
failed when seven of the accused were acquitted almost immediately for lack of
evidence.
This
occurred despite some of them making statements in which they accepted that
there had been murders at the camp, but that they were not personally involved.
As
discussed earlier, such “confessions” were not unusual at the time, and would in
fact have been a perfectly reasonable defense to raise in order to protect
oneself: not to deny a crime, but to say one had nothing to do with it.
Almost
no other evidence was led at the trial (the only “eyewitness survivor” was
unable to identify any of the accused) and as a result, one defendant was
sentenced to a mild four and a half years in prison because hearsay evidence
implicated him in some extra-judicial executions.
Section 80: Forensic Digs at Belzec Contradict “Official” History and Fail to Find “Gas Chambers”
In
1997, the Polish Council for Safeguarding the Remembrance of Struggle and
Martyrdom, together with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum of
Washington, DC, commissioned a team of archaeologists led by Professor Andrzej
Kola from the Nicolas Copernicus University of Torun to excavate the Belzec
site in an attempt to discover more of the camp layout and structure.
Kola
wrote a paper on the diggings entitled Belzec:
The Nazi Camp for Jews in the light of archaeological sources: Excavations
1997–1999.
The
excavations involved drilling 2,227 holes in the ground some 18 feet (about 5
meters) apart. Kola claimed to have found 33 grave sites in two separate areas,
and published the results of analysis of 137 of the 236 soil samples taken.
These
results showed that there were bodies buried at the site, which would not be
out of the question given that at least 434,000 people passed through the camp
before it was closed. Kola was unable to give a precise determination of the
number of human remains found, but his published results only indicated a few
dozen.
Given
the size of the camp, this is most likely an underestimate caused by the
sampling methods used, but, even if the number were quadrupled to allow for
sampling error, the figure would still be dramatically short of the 600,000
“murders” claimed for Belzec by the Holocaust storytellers. In addition, Kola
claimed to have found the remains of the “second” gas chamber built at the
camp.
He
describes it as follows in his official report: “In the light of the studies no
traces of the gas chamber from the 1st stage of the camp functioning were
found. The traces of a wooden building [G] in the central part of the camp can
be hypothetically regarded as the remains of the 2nd stage gas chamber.”
Of
course, the official account contradicts Kola’s finding, because it is claimed
that the “second” or “new” set of “gas chambers” at Belzec were not made of
wood, but allegedly of solid concrete with deep foundations.
It is
highly significant that Kola failed to find any foundations which matched this
“official account” of a concrete gas chamber.
All
that Kola found were “wooden” foundations, exactly what would have been
expected at a temporary transit camp. It is claimed that the Nazis demolished
the camp when it closed down, but it is unlikely that they would have been able
to remove all traces of the foundations of a solid concrete gas chamber of such
large size.
Once
again, the archaeological evidence firmly contradicts the “official” story.
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