SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 73
which took them at first to mass graves and later, when time was
short, to cremation ovens instead.”
Ada Lichtman, too, asserts that Bauer “supervised the executions
from a roof window of the gas chambers” 136 Even as late as 5 June
1961, at the 65th hearing of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the witness
Ya’akov Biskovitz declared: 137
“Yes, that is the fire pit in which the victims who were brought
out of the gas chambers were burned. After some time, a buzzing
sound would be heard, the floor opened up, and the victims fell into
the deep hollow below and were conveyed in this little train into the
pit where the eighty men of Camp 3 were working, and they burned
the bodies.”
Bauer’s presence on the roof (“to regulate the amount of death-gas”)
does not make much sense within the framework of Holocaust historiography,
because the claimed engine allegedly producing the gas worked
best only at a certain speed. In this sense, SS-Unterscharführer Erich
Bauer declared on 2 April 1963: 138
“On the suggestion of the chemist I set the engine to run at a certain
number of revolutions, which would make acceleration unnecessary
in the future.”
Perhaps for this reason Szmajzner later changed the “little window”
into “a moveable skylight” for the introduction of Zyklon B, 139 along
the lines of the alleged model of the gas chambers in crematoria II and
III at Birkenau!
The tale of the assassinations by means of an undefined “engine”
was officially adopted only in 1947. During the Polish investigations on
the Sobibór camp the following was “ascertained:” 140
“On the inside, this [gassing] building had brick partitions. It
probably [141] held 5 chambers, which could accommodate a total of
500 persons. Killing was done with the exhaust gas produced by an
engine set up next to the chambers and connected to them by pipes.”
136
Ibid., p. 56.
137
State of Israel, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Record of Proceedings in the District Court
of Jerusalem. Jerusalem 1993, vol. III, p. 1184.
138
J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 70), p. 119.
139
Cf. chapter 4, p. 83.
140
Z. �ukaszkiewicz, “Obóz zag�ady w Sobiborze,” in: Biuletyn G�ównej Komisji Badania
Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce, vol. III, Pozna� 1947, p. 52.
141
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