SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 37
number of Ukrainians from the camp commandos settled there. No
traces whatsoever were to remain as evidence of the atrocities committed
in Be��ec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, to which, by a conservative
estimate, about 1,500,000 human beings had fallen victim.” (p. 137)
It is obvious that it would never have been possible to obliterate the
traces of the burial, the excavation, and the open-air incineration of one
and a half million corpses by the primitive plowing methods described
above. The editors and the authors of this collective volume never even
thought of requesting a forensic investigation of the crime site. They
were happy with the accounts supplied by the witnesses, which they
“corrected” if necessary, as we have seen in connection with the capacity
of the gas chambers: In spite of the fact that the only witness quoted
in this respect, Kurt Bolender, stated that the capacity was “40 to 50
persons” per chamber, the Sobibór chapters of the book twice give significantly
higher capacities, which are not substantiated by witness
statements.
Only the very naïve will accept the assertion in the introduction to
the book, namely that the authors have “set down, in a precise and indisputable
manner, the historical truth about the massacres perpetrated
by means of poison gas.”
2.3.11. Yitzhak Arad (1987)
In 1987, the Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad published a book entitled
Be��ec, Sobibór, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, 49
which is still regarded as a standard in this field. As has been shown in
a previous study, 50 Arad brazenly falsified a source in connection with
his treatment of the Treblinka camp: He quoted a report from the underground
resistance movement in the Warsaw ghetto dating from November
of 1942, which described the extermination of the Polish Jews
in “steam chambers” but replaced the embarrassing word “steam chambers”
quite unabashedly by the term “gas chambers” (p. 354f). In the
case of Sobibór Arad does not use the device of outright falsification.
He limits himself to handling witness statements selectively, carefully
excluding all passages which disagree with the official version of Sobibór,
such as those which describe the killing medium as having been
chlorine or a black fluid, or those assigning a collapsible floor to the gas
49 Yitzhak Arad, Be��ec. Sobibór, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis 1987.
50 C. Mattogno, J. Graf, op. cit. (note 10, Engl. ed.), p. 62f.