SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 187
dants who were ready to cooperate with the court could more often than
not count on a lenient sentence.
The Hagen judges behaved at times as if they were mentally deficient,
swallowing even the most ridiculous lies uttered by the witnesses.
Here is one example: 532
“The witness Moshe B. asserted credibly: while he was waiting
at the tables in the German mess hall in the entry camp, SS-
Scharführer B. had approached him, asking him bluntly whether he
was aware of what was happening in camp III. When he said he did
not know, B. was dissatisfied. He then placed an empty can on
[Moshe’s] head and tried to knock it off by pistol shots, all the time
asking him whether he really did not know anything.”
Hence, the Scharführer himself did not know what was going on in
camp III, but expected a detainee, who (at least according to the traditional
accounts of Sobibór) was strictly forbidden to enter that part of
the camp, to tell him! The person behind the abbreviation ‘Moshe B.’
was actually our old acquaintance Moshe Bahir, whose credibility can
be judged by the fact that, earlier on, he had spoken of a gas chamber
with a collapsible floor and had asserted that in February of 1943 there
had been a celebration at Sobibór on the occasion of the annihilation of
the first million Jews. 533
The fairy tale of SS men shooting tin cans off detainees’ heads also
appears in connection with other camps: at Auschwitz Gottfried
Weise 534 and at Majdanek Anton Thumann 535 are said to have played
the part of ‘Wilhelm Tell’ with fatal consequences for the detainees
concerned.
It goes without saying that even the dustiest of shelf-warmers of
black propaganda, Himmler’s visit in early 1943 where he allegedly
witnessed the gassing of Jewish ladies, was accepted by the Hagen
court at face value: 536
“Actually, at that time, very probably on 12 February 1943,
Himmler was present at Sobibór. The court based its clear conviction
on statements of the defendants who belonged to the camp per-
532
A. Rückerl (ed.), op. cit. (note 36), p. 191.
533
Cf. chapter 2.2.8., p. 32.
534
Claus Jordan, “The German Justice System: A Case Study,” in: G. Rudolf (ed.), op. cit.
(note 34), pp. 145-179, here p. 149.
535
Tadeusz Mencel (ed.), Majdanek 1941-1944, Wydawnictwo Lubielskie, Lublin 1991, p.
167.
536
A. Rückerl (ed.), op. cit. (note 36), p. 193f.