SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

260 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
A: When I returned to Berlin after a trip which took about two
weeks, I did not talk to anyone about the outcome of my mission.
Nobody asked me anything. […]
Q: As you said so yourself, you were given an important task by
Berlin in your technical function; this mission was so secret which
you had to execute as a state secret; you went to three camps, you
were received there by a general who, in view of your mission, believed
that he should tell you what two top Nazi leaders had said. [773]
How can you expect us to believe:
1) that you did not accomplish your mission,
2) that you did not report about it to anyone,
3) that no one has questioned you about it in any way.”
Schelvis devotes more than five pages to Gerstein; 774 he tries to
avoid one of the grossest absurdities of his witness – the presence of
“700-800 [Jews] on an area of 25m 2 and in a volume of 45m 3 ,” and
writes: 775
“Gerstein was mistaken. The 700 to 800 he mentions must have
been the total number of victims in the six chambers combined.”
Gerstein, however, did mean 700-800 persons in a single gas chamber
and underlined it explicitly: 776
“up to that moment all the people in the four rooms, already
filled, they are alive; four times 750 people in a space of four times
45 cubic metres, still alive!”
The development of the alleged extermination camps of Aktion
Reinhardt inevitably collides with the unanswered questions raised by
Hilberg.
Wolfgang Scheffler asserts that “Sobibór, on the other hand, was
considerably less convenient as far as rail transport is concerned. It was
constructed when it became apparent that Be��ec could not cope with
the assassination program,” 777 and the same reasoning should obviously
be applied to the construction of Treblinka as well.
As we have seen above, the Enzyklopädie des Holocaust wants to
make us believe that the SS had to envisage “the killing of the
773
Hitler and Himmler are said by Gerstein to have visited the eastern camps on 16 August
1942. This is historically false.
774
J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 71), p. 106-110.
775
Ibid., p. 115, note 45.
776
Ibid., p. 108.
777
Wolfgang Scheffler, “Che�mno, Sobibór, Be��ec und Majdanek,” in: E. Jäckel, J. Rohwer
(eds.), op. cit. (note 655), p. 149.