SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 53
value at all to statements made during the Hagen trial, which took place
in 1965-1966, i.e. over twenty years after the events? After all, the verdicts
against the indicted SS-men, who had been accused of specific
crimes, were based exclusively on eyewitness testimony. Everybody
knows that human memory tends to become less and less reliable as the
years go by.
There is yet another, very revealing aspect hidden in Schelvis’ thesis
that the declarations by the early witnesses are valuable because “they
were given fresh from memory rather than being influenced by later
writings or statements by others.” If that is true, one may conclude that
the witnesses who appeared at the trials of the 1950s and 1960s were
indeed “influenced by later writings or statements by others.” That this
was actually the case is borne out by the fact that not one of the witnesses
who testified in the immediate post war period spoke of a building
in Sobibór which was subdivided into several chambers and was
used to kill Jews by means of engine exhaust gases.
In line with other orthodox historians, Schelvis states that the
corpses of the Sobibór victims were unearthed and burned in the open
from the fall of 1942 onwards. He obviously does not realize the
enormous technical problems the open-air incineration of 170,000
corpses would have posed. 79 It is interesting to note that Schelvis, even
in the 2008 Dutch edition of his book, does not refer in any way to the
archeological soundings and digs carried out in the former camp by professor
Andrzej Kola seven years earlier. 80 It is simply inconceivable that
Schelvis, a recognized expert on Sobibór, would have been unaware of
such a fundamental study.
Jules Schelvis’ book is undoubtedly the best which the defenders of
the orthodox view about Sobibór have been able to muster, but then, at
times, the best is not good enough. Just like his predecessors, Schelvis
is unable to proffer even the shadow of a proof that the Jews deported to
Sobibór were killed in gas chambers in that camp – this is simply
beyond the possibilities of any researcher, be he an honorary doctor of
Amsterdam University or what have you.
Obviously, the revisionists must confront the question of what happened
to the up to 170,000 Jews who were taken to Sobibór. The key to
this mystery is supplied by Schelvis himself, as we can see from the following
extract taken from his chapter “Arrival and selection”:
79 Cf. chapter 5.3.
80 Cf. chapter 5.1.3., 5.2.3.