Historiography as seen by an ignorant charlatan …

... and conveyed to even more ignorant troglodytes.

I think that’s a fitting title for the first clip of our Ugly Voice Bud’s video, which is viewable on YouTube as well as here.

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The essence of this clip – I’ll skip Bud’s introduction to the topic and his preceding chatter about TV, newspapers, the state of Israel, etc. – is a lame attempt to discredit the scholarship of Raul Hilberg and Yitzhak Arad on account of their having used Yankel Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka as one of their sources. For Wiernik’s account, so Bud thinks he can demonstrate, is a "fraud" and should therefore have been dismissed as a source.

Unsurprisingly, Bud’s "demonstration" of the "fraudulence" of Wiernik's account is as full of shit as can be, as I shall demonstrate hereafter.

But before I get to that part, let us briefly assume, just for the sake of argument, that Bud is right about the fallacies he thinks he discovered in Wiernik’s account.

Would such fallacies necessarily render the whole of Wiernik’s account useless, and discredit scholars who have used this account as a source?

Bud seems to think that when historians use a source, it means they took all of its contents at face value and accept them as accurate and as the basis of their findings and conclusions. That may be how "Revisionist research" works with sources that seem to support the "Revisionist" creed, which are usually swallowed whole no matter how unsubstantiated and/or dubious they are. Serious historiography does not work like that, however. Serious historiography consists of looking at a multitude of sources independent of each other and working out the conclusions towards which these sources converge. In doing so, historians sift the wheat from the chaff not only among sources, but also within an individual source, conscious that every individual source may contain both reliable and less reliable information and that sources containing only reliable information are as much an exception to the rule as sources wholly unreliable. This applies especially in what concerns eyewitness testimonies, for human observation and memory are everything other than perfect even under the best of circumstances and must be handled with especial care the more they are influenced by emotions, stress and traumata, as is generally the case when what the witness observed and experienced are events of extreme violence like the murder of hundreds of thousands of people at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps. There is hardly an eyewitness to an extremely violent occurrence that can provide a wholly objective account thereof, for emotions like fear, revulsion or hatred tend to be very strong and may lead to distortions of observation or memory, without such distortions, on the other hand, excluding that accurate information about the occurrence in question is also present in the respective eyewitness account. An eyewitness account of an extremely violent occurrence may contain mistaken, even preposterous claims alongside with information that comparison with other eyewitness accounts independent thereof and/or with evidence other than eyewitnesses shows to be highly accurate. This, in turn, means that dismissing such eyewitness account altogether on grounds of one or the other inaccuracy contained therein is like throwing the baby out with the bathing water, even where occasional inaccuracies take the form of downright fantasy.

The above leads to assuming that, if Raul Hilberg and Yitzhak Arad used Yankel Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka as one of the many sources on which their studies about the Nazi genocide of the Jews in general and the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps in particular were based, they did not thereby accept every single part and detail of Wiernik’s account as accurate. What they accepted, where they referred to Wiernik’s account as a source, was the accuracy of such parts thereof that they had previously cross-checked against other testimonies independent of Wiernik’s and/or against evidence other than testimonies. Wiernik’s account contains many details that are confirmed by evidence independent thereof, namely other witness testmonies, depositions of indicted perpetrators before West German courts and documents regarding the deportations to Treblinka. In the following analysis of Bud’s attempted deconstruction of Wiernik’s account, we will come upon examples of such coincidence.

Let us see what Bud has got to say against Wiernik’s account of his experiences in Treblinka, then.

1. Bud starts out insinuating that Wiernik’s account A Year in Treblinka is very hard to come by. Amazon doesn’t offer it, and only the University of Berkeley, California happens to have a copy of the book. The impression Bud obviously tries to convey is that access to Wiernik’s account is made or kept difficult because the scholars who have used it as a source don’t want critical readers to check behind them. Actually, however, Bud could have saved himself the trouble of perusing university libraries by simply doing something known as googling. Inserting the words "Wiernik A Year in Treblinka" into a Google browser will turn up these results, and if you click the first of the links turned up by Google you reach a site featuring Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka. The text on this site seems to be from another edition than the one that Bud found in the Berkeley library, for the wording or terminology is occasionally different from that in Bud’s Berkeley copy. Insofar as can be checked on hand of the passages Bud shows his viewers, however, these differences in wording or terminology do not change the content and meaning of the account in general and the statements that Bud takes issue with in particular, so the online version can be used for assessing the merits of Bud’s commentary. Where I should consider wording or terminology differences between the two versions worth pointing out, I will do so.

In any case, contrary to what Bud insinuates, there’s nothing obscure or secret about Wiernik’s account, which is readily available and easy to access on the web for whoever would like to read it. As video maker and YouTube member Bud is hardly the old-fashioned kind of fellow who doesn’t know how to use an internet search engine, the fuss he makes about how difficult it was to find Wiernik’s account strongly smacks of Bud’s first attempt to take his viewers for a ride. What is more, in episode 29 of the UVP video, Bud makes a fuss about the book on Treblinka by Alexander Donat, "a book respected by Holocaust historians" which is also available via Amazon – both the 1979 paperback edition and the 1988 hardcover edition. Now, Donat’s book contains a reprint of Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka. So how can Bud seriously insinuate that Wiernik’s account is some hard-to-find mystery that he had to painstakingly seek for?

2. Bud’s second attempt to cheat his viewers is rather obvious. Bud points out the following passages of Wiernik’s account, which can be found in Chapter 9 of A Year in Treblinka:

It turned out that bodies of women burned more easily than those of men. Accordingly, the bodies of women were used for kindling the fires.

and claims (by asking a rhetorical question) that Wiernik tried to make believe that the women burned «on their own, like wood».

This is nonsense, of course. The context provided by other evidence shows that what Wiernik probably meant was that the bodies of women, which would burn better than those of man due to their higher fat content, were placed at the bottom of a pile of corpses to be incinerated so that they might help the incineration of the less fatty male corpses above them. This practice was described by another eyewitness, Yechiel Reichman, who is quoted as follows on page 175 of Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (emphases are mine):

The SS "expert" on body burning ordered us to put women, particularly fat women, on the first layer of the grill, face down. The second layer could consist of whatever was brought – men, women, or children – and so on, layer on top of layer … Then the "expert" ordered us to lay dry branches under the grill and to light them. Within a few minutes the fire would take so it was difficult to approach the crematorium from as far as 50 meters away ...

As we can see, the use of women for "kindling" in the way described by Reichman did not exclude the use of external flammables, expressly mentioned by this witness. This shows that there is no reason to assume that Wiernik intended to exclude the use of wood or other flammables when stating that the bodies of women were used for "kindling the fires"; he might have simply considered the use of wood or other external flammables as a given and therefore not worth mentioning. But actually Wiernik did mention other flammables in his description of the procedure in question. For if we read a little further on in Chapter 9 from the passage pointed out by Bud, we find the following:

Nevertheless, the results were very poor. The corpses were soaked in gasoline. This entailed considerable expense and the results were inadequate; the male corpses simply would not burn.

The text in Bud’s version reads as follows:

The results were very poor. The male corpses would not burn at all, although they were sprinkled with benzine. The expense was considerable and the results inadequate.

Not only did Wiernik clearly state that an external flammable – gasoline – was used to burn the corpses, he also pointed out that this procedure was ineffective and very expensive, because "the male corpses simply would not burn" despite the female bodies placed at the bottom of the piles of bodies to be burned and the gasoline that these piles were doused with.

So how come Bud didn’t tell his viewers about this passage, which completely invalidates his claim that Wiernik tried to make believe that women burned «on their own, like wood»? Did he miss it? Hardly so, as we can expect Bud to have read Wiernik’s account very carefully, looking for passages he could make a fuss about. The conclusion is inescapable that our friend Bud simply lied to his viewers, by deliberately omitting a passage that invalidated his claim.

3. The inefficient initial procedure of simply piling up the bodies, drenching them with gasoline and setting them on fire was eventually replaced by an efficient procedure described by Wiernik, Reichman and other eyewitnesses, that of building huge grids made of railroad tracks, placing the bodies on top of these grids and setting them on fire by lighting wood placed underneath the grids. Wiernik’s description hereof, which reads as follows in the online version:

I am no longer a young man and have seen a great deal in my lifetime, but not even Lucifer could possibly have created a hell worse than this. Can you picture a grate of this length piled high with 3,000 corpses of people who had been alive only a short time before? As you look at their faces it seems as if at any moment these bodies might awaken from their deep sleep. But at a given signal a giant torch is lit and it burns with a huge flame.

is the next target that Bud focuses on, claiming that Wiernik oh-so-absurdly tried to make believe that no external flammables were used in this process and the bodies burned entirely on their own. Again, this is not a necessary conclusion to be drawn from Wiernik’s not having mentioned such flammables, which may have been due to his having considered the use thereof a given not worth mentioning, especially as he was obviously more interested in conveying the horror of the scene than in describing the technical means and mechanisms involved. Again, the context of other eyewitness testimonies also shows that absence of wood or other external flammables can hardly have been what Wiernik meant to describe. Besides the above-quoted testimony of Yechiel Reichman, these include depositions of former members of the Treblinka SS staff like that of Heinrich Matthes, quoted on page 174 of Arad’s book (emphases are mine):

At that time SS Oberscharführer or Hauptscharführer [Herbert] Floss, who, as I assume, was previously in another extermination camp, arrived. He was in charge of the arrangements for cremating the corpses. The cremation took place in such a way that railway lines and concrete blocks were placed together. The corpses were piled on these rails. Brushwood was put under the rails. The wood was doused with petrol. In that way not only the newly accumulated corpses were cremated, but also those taken out from the graves.

Besides contributing to the refutation of Bud’s misinterpretation of Wienik’s account, the above-quoted testimony is of interest in that it identifies as «SS Oberscharführer or Hauptscharführer Floss» the gentleman who Wiernik referred to as follows in his account:

Then, one day, an Oberscharfuhrer wearing an SS badge arrived at the camp and introduced a veritable inferno. He was about 45 years old, of medium height, with a perpetual smile on his face. His favorite word was "tadellos [perfect]" and that is how he got the by-name Tadellos. His face looked kind and did not show the depraved soul behind it. He got pure pleasure watching the corpses burn; the sight of the flames licking at the bodies was precious to him, and he would literally caress the scene with his eyes.

So here we have two eyewitnesses completely independent of each other – Wiernik and Matthes – who both tell us about a high-ranking SS-man who came to Treblinka and introduced an efficient procedure of burning the corpses on grids made of railway tracks. This independent corroboration of Wiernik’s account shows Wiernik to have been a reliable witness in what concerns the implementation of the corpse incineration procedure at Treblinka.

4. In Chapter 12 of his account, Wiernik mentioned an experiment conducted by the SS in connection with the burning of the bodies exhumed from the mass graves, as follows:

Within a few days work was begun to empty the remaining 25 per cent of the graves and the bodies were cremated. As I pointed out before, the weather was extremely hot, and as each grave was opened, it gave off a nauseating stench. Once the Germans threw some burning object into one of the opened graves just to see what would happen. Clouds of black smoke began to pour out at once and the fire thus started glimmered all day long.

Bud comments that «in other words the bodies underground ignited», as if that were preposterous. Indeed it would be preposterous if these had been fresh bodies recently thrown into the mass graves. But they were not. The bodies in the opened mass graves had been lying there for some time, were in an advanced state of decomposition and gave off a nauseating stench. As I showed in section 4.2 of my article Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research, flammable substances like methane, hydrogen sulphide and butyric acid are set free during the various stages of human or animal corpse’s decomposition; it is actually these substances that cause the nauseating stench of decomposing corpses, mentioned by Wiernik. Corpses in the stage of butyric fermentation not only contain stinking and flammable butyric acid, they are also completely dehydrated, which alone encourages their burning, as explained in my above-mentioned article.

This means that Wiernik’s account of a burning object thrown into a mass grave full of decomposed corpses having caused a fire inside that mass grave is by no means preposterous, but on the contrary quite plausible. The account is also corroborated by the depositions of eyewitnesses other than Wiernik that the following statements in Arad’s book are presumably based on:

[page 175]

At first an inflammable liquid was poured onto the bodies to help them burn, but later this was considered unnecessary; the SS men in charge of the cremation became convinced that the corpses burned well enough without extra fuel.

[page 176]

The bodies of victims brought to Treblinka in transports arriving after the body-burning began were taken directly from the gas chambers of the roasters and were not buried in the ditches. These bodies did not burn as well as those removed from the ditches and had to be sprayed with fuel before they would burn.

As I explained here, the dehydration of the decomposed corpses and/or the flammable substances set free during the decomposition process, depending on the stage of decomposition, may well have been the reason for the phenomenon described by Arad, i.e. the burning of decomposed corpses without more external fuel than the petrol-drenched wood placed underneath the grids to light the fires. "Fresh" bodies, on the other hand, additionally required being sprayed with fuel before they would burn. Fuel alone wouldn’t do the job with bodies simply piled on top of each other, even if decomposed, presumably because there was not enough air circulation to fan the flames. But with the grid system introduced by incineration expert Floss, air circulation was sufficient to efficiently burn the bodies, and the amount of external flammables required was minimal where the bodies were dehydrated and/or contained flammable substances of their own due to decomposition.

5. The next supposed absurdity in Wiernik’s account that Bud takes issue with is in the concluding Chapter 14, in which Wiernik writes about the Treblinka inmates’ revolt and his own escape from Treblinka:

Then I heard a shot; in the same instant I felt a sharp pain in my left shoulder. I turned around and saw a guard from the Treblinka Penal Camp. He again aimed his pistol at me. I knew something about firearms and I noticed that the weapon had jammed. I took advantage of this and deliberately slowed down. I pulled the ax from my belt. My pursuer - a Ukrainian guard - ran up to me yelling in Ukrainian: "Stop or I'll shoot!" I came up close to him and struck him with my axe across the left side of his chest. He collapsed at my feet with a vile path ["oath", in Bud’s Berkeley version, which makes sense; "path" in the online version is probably a typo].

I was free and ran into the woods. After penetrating a little deeper into the thicket, I sat down among the bushes. From the distance I heard a lot of shooting. Believe it or not, the bullet had not really hurt me. It had gone through all of my clothing and stopped at my shoulder, leaving a mark. I was alone. At last, I was able to rest.

To be sure, bullets fired from a gun will not usually stop at a human target’s shoulder. But as before and as so often throughout his video, good old Bud only tells his viewers half the story.

First of all, Wiernik’s pursuer did not fire a rifle, but a pistol, and he fired it from some distance away. It doesn’t take much familiarity with firearms to know that pistols are short-range weapons, ineffective at longer distances. For instance, the Walther P38 pistol used by German armed forces in World War II had an effective range of about 50 meters. A weapon’s effective range is the distance at which a weapon may be expected to fire accurately to inflict damage or casualties. So if Wiernik’s pursuer was carrying a Walther P38 and fired it from a distance of more than 50 meters, it is possible that, when it reached its target, the bullet no longer had sufficient force to go through all of Wiernik’s clothing (for understandable reasons, Wiernik may have been rather thickly clad on that day of his escape, and he mentions in the same chapter that «On that day, however, the men wore their clothes under their overalls. Before escaping, they would have to get rid of the overalls, which would have given them away at once.») and wound him seriously. The extent to which the bullet could still penetrate Wiernik’s body would also depend on what part of the shoulder it hit. If it was the shoulder blade – which is probable, as Wiernik had his back turned towards the shooter – the bullet was less likely to go any further beyond its effective range than it if had hit flesh.

Second, there was obviously something wrong with the gun, as it jammed after the shot that reached Wiernik. Whether the gun’s malfunction may have had an effect on the range or the accuracy of the shot fired I cannot tell, but I also see no reason to exclude this possibility.

Third, the bullet may have penetrated Wiernik’s clothing from a lateral angle, grazed his shoulder and then gone again through his clothing and away. The grazing impact would still have been painful, without however doing any damage, and Wiernik may incorrectly have assumed that the bullet had "stopped" at his shoulder. Actually that was not what Wiernik stated in the original text of A Year in Treblinka, which was written in Polish and which Andrew took the trouble of having a look at. The original Polish text of the passage in question is the following:

Kula mnie nie zraniła o, dziwo! Przebiła wszystko na mnie i odbiła się o łopatkę, pozostawiając znak.

This was translated as follows by our Polish reader Roman Werpachowski:

The bullet did not hurt me - very strange! It pierced everything on me and reflected from my shoulder blade, leaving a mark.

A bullet ricocheting from a shoulder blade is something different from a bullet "stopping" at the shoulder, and it has also happened on at least one other occasion, the one referred to here.

In short, there are a number of possibilities that must be excluded before concluding on the physical impossibility of this part of Wiernik’s account. In bluntly proclaiming such impossibility, Bud is making things too easy for himself. And in omitting details that may call his verdict into question, Bud is again displaying his intellectual dishonesty.

6. Following his rambling about supposed technical/physical absurdities – none of which, as we have seen, is necessarily an absurdity at all – Bud tries to portray Wiernik as a vilifying propagandist bent on denigrating them poor Germans, on hand of the following passage from Chapter 9:

The gangsters ["Germans", in Bud’s version] are standing near the ashes, shaking with satanic laughter. Their faces radiate a truly satanic satisfaction. They toasted the scene with brandy and with the choicest liqueurs, ate, caroused and had a great time warming themselves by the fire.

Thus the Jews were of some use to them even after they had died. Though the winter weather was bitter cold, the pyres gave off heat like an oven. This heat came from the burning bodies of Jews. The hangmen ["German fiends", in Bud's version] stood warming themselves by the fire, drinking, eating and singing. Gradually, the fire began to die down, leaving only ashes which went to fertilize the silent soil. Human blood and human ashes - what food for the soil! There will be a rich harvest. If only the soil could talk! It knows a lot but it keeps quiet.

«Seems a little over the top doesn’t it?», Bud rhetorically asks his devoted viewers. His reasons, unsurprisingly, fall somewhat short of supporting his claim, rather revealing Bud’s deplorable ignorance.

For one thing, Bud wonders whether "German soldiers" could drink while on duty.

First of all, why "German soldiers"? The murderers who staffed Treblinka and the other Aktion Reinhard(t) camps were not members of the German armed forces. Most of them had been made available to Aktion Reinhard(t) by the German police or by the authority conducting Aktion T4, the Nazi "euthanasia" program of killing physically and/or mentally disabled patients of German sanatoria, as shown by Sergey in section 1.6 of his article An Ugly Analysis. The reason for this choice of staff probably was that these men had some experience in the institutional killing of helpless human beings on a large scale and/or were expected to be already inured to such killing. Calling these murderers "German soldiers" is an offense that, I am sure, any decent German soldier would have strongly resented.

Second, if Bud had done some reading about the Einsatzgruppen killing squads and the personnel of the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps, he might have found out that, according to evidence completely independent of Wiernik’s account, these people drank like fishes, as a means tolerated by their superiors of coping with the stress of day-by-day mass murder. Thus German non-commissioned officer Wilhelm Cornides, in his diary entry of 30 August 1942, recorded a conversation regarding the mass killings at Belzec as follows:

A Sudeten German building foreman who sat at the same table added:
"Recently a drunken SS man sat in our cafeteria, howling like a child. He said that he was serving in Belzec, and that if things carried on like this for another 14 days he would kill himself, because he could no longer bear it."

And this is from the autobiography of Rudolf Höss, partially transcribed here (my translation, emphasis is mine):

I always had a horror of the shootings when I thought of the masses, of the women and children. I had already had enough from the hostage executions, the group shootings, which were ordered by the RFSS or RSHA. Now I was comforted because all these bloodbaths would be spared to us, and also the victims would be spared until the last moment. It was exactly this that worried me most when I thought of Eichmann’s accounts of the mowing down of Jews with machine guns and machine pistols by the special detachments. Horrible scenes were said to have occurred there: people running away with gunshot wounds, the killing of the wounded, especially the women and children. The frequent suicides in the ranks of the special detachments, of men who could no longer bear the wading in blood. Most members of the special detachments helped themselves with alcohol over their grisly work. According to Höfle’s accounts the men of Globocnik’s extermination sites consumed incredible quantities of alcohol.

"Globocnik’s extermination sites" were the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and Höfle was Hermann Höfle, one of the highest-ranking figures of the Reinhard(t) killing operation. If it was known to a high-ranking SS-officer that the SS-men at the AR camps drank like fishes, it can hardly be argued that this was not tolerated by their superiors, and the consumption of "incredible quantities of alcohol" is hardly incompatible with the AR staff having drunk also while carrying out their murderous tasks, especially as this was a means of coping with the stress of killing and of drowning whatever remainder of conscience they had still left. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, alcohol was actually one of the rewards granted to SS-men for taking part in "special actions" and one of their incentives for volunteering to take part in such actions, as pointed out in the Diary of Johann Paul Kremer. One of the most beastly SS murderers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oswald Kaduk, was known for having been drunk all the time there. When he was later on the stand as a defendant at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, where he was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment, Kaduk mentioned this fact while crying crocodile tears about how the suffering and dying he had witnessed at Auschwitz had touched him. According to Hermann Langbein’s notes about Kaduk’s statements, which are partially transcribed here, Kaduk stated the following (my translation):

Kaduk: I didn’t drink much as a civilian. But at Auschwitz I couldn’t stand seeing the misery. When one got to the ramp there and saw the women and children, one had to pull oneself together so much – that one can only endure by drinking. No matter how tough one is. But unfortunately, it happened. I cannot change it (he cries).

So much for these valiant "German soldiers" not being allowed to drink "on duty". If Bud had read Wiernik’s account in Chapter 9 with more attention, he might actually have noticed that what Wiernik was describing was not exactly "duty" on the part of the SS-men standing around the fire drinking, eating and singing. The "commissioning" of the incineration grates was a special occasion, for thanks to incineration expert Floss’s genius Treblinka had found an efficient way of burning the bodies and thus overcome a major problem of the camp’s operation. It was a reason to celebrate.

What about eating? Would someone have an appetite when surrounded by rotten, burning corpses and the stench that emanated from them? Well, the SS-men at Treblinka had been living with corpses and the stench thereof – which, as I mentioned in section 4.7 of my article about Mattogno’s Belzec ramblings, had been the subject of a complaint by the local Wehrmacht commander at Ostrow – for months by the time the incineration grids were implemented, so if they had not got used to the presence and stench of dead bodies so well that it would no longer keep them from eating, they would probably have starved. And why shouldn’t they have got used to the presence and stench of dead bodies, when combat troops in war can get inured to that as well? One example of such habituation is found in a letter that SS-Brigadeführer Ludolf von Alvensleben sent to his friend Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s personal secretary, regarding his impressions of the battlefield following the German conquest of Sevastopol in July 1942. This letter is quoted on page 530 of Andrej Angrick’s book Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943, from which I translate:

Tens of thousands of dead Russians, countless horse cadavers befoul the air. Five meters away from a Russian soldier already completely decomposed I saw a Landser eating his breakfast in all calm and relaxation (in aller Gemütsruhe)! At the cliff line a great many Russian soldiers and vehicles had fallen down. The corpses could not yet be removed and are continuously thrown against the cliffs.

Maybe little Buddy should step out a little into the real world, which he seems to be so far away from.

What else has our friend got to say against this passage of Wiernik’s account?

Oh yeah, the general tone in which Wiernik refers to the heroic "German soldiers". Bud tells his viewers to ask themselves if the passage looks like "propaganda" or like a "real eyewitness account" (whatever that’s supposed to be in Bud’s ideal fantasy world).

Well, to me it looks like the expectably somewhat emotional account by an eyewitness who was filled with rage at the men who had killed hundreds of thousands of his people and made no effort to hide that in his account. Little Buddy in his ideal fantasy world seems to think that a "real" eyewitness is supposed to be able to give a cold and dry account bereft of any emotions, focusing on technical details and on such details alone, even in regard to observations as incomprehensibly horrible and traumatic as those recalled by Wiernik. I wonder if Bud could, if required to do so, show us a single eyewitness who might be capable of such an extraordinary feat, and I submit that such characters are extremely rare, if they exist at all. Wiernik was none of them; his feelings about what he saw, heard and experienced show prominently throughout his account, and what he obviously wanted to share with his readers were not so much technical details of the killing and body disposal procedure as his own feelings of fathomless horror and despair.

And yet, as Bud unsurprisingly forgot to tell his viewers, Wiernik tried to be as fair as he could in his assessment of both the murderers and their victims. For one thing, he made clear that he didn’t consider the vileness and cruelty he saw and experienced to be a phenomenon limited to the German SS-men, but instead found it also among the Ukrainian guards and among his own people, the victims. In fact, his observations in Chapter 6 suggest that he had lost faith in humanity as a whole. Emphases in the following quote are mine:

The German system is one of the most efficient in the world. It has authorities upon authorities. Departments and sub-departments. And, most important, there is always the right man in the right place. Whenever ruthless determination and a complete destruction of "vicious and subversive elements" are needed, good patriots can always be found who will carry out any command. Men can always be found who are ready to destroy and kill their fellow men. I never saw them show any compassion or regret. They never showed any pity for the innocent victims. They were robots who performed their tasks as soon as some higher-up pressed a button.

Such human hyenas always find a wide field for activity in times of war and revolution. To them the road of evil is easy and more pleasant than any other. But a firm and just order, aided by education, good examples and wise discipline could check these evil tendencies.

Vicious types lurk in disreputable places where they carry on their subversive activities. Today, all ethics have become superfluous. The more vicious and depraved one is, the higher the position he will occupy. Advancement depends on how much one has destroyed, or how many one has killed. People whose hands drip with. The blood of innocent victims receive adulation and there is no need for them to wash their hands. On the contrary, these are held aloft so that the world may pay them honor. The dirtier one's conscience and hands, the higher the glory their owner will achieve.Another amazing character trait of the Germans is their ability to discover, among the populace of other nations, hundreds of depraved types like themselves, and to use them for their own ends. In camps for Jews, there is a need for Jewish executioners, spies and stool pigeons. The Germans managed to find them, to find such gangrenous creatures as Moyshke from near Sochaczew, Itzik Kobyla from Warsaw, Chaskel the thief, and Kuba, a thief and a pimp, both of them born and bred in Warsaw.

Yet despite his warranted pessimism, Wiernik was still able to distinguish and point out those few among the German SS-men and the Ukrainian guards who tried to maintain a minimum of decency in that highly unfavorable environment, as the passages quoted hereafter will show.

Chapter 4

There were fifteen of us in our construction group, to which three Ukrainians were assigned as guards. One of them, an older soldier by the name of Kostenko, did not look too menacing. The second, Andreyev, a typical "guard," was of medium size, stout, with a round red face, a kind, quiet individual. The third one, Nikolay, was short, skinny, mean, with evil eyes, a sadistic type. There were also two other Ukrainians, armed with rifles, which were to stand guard over us.

We were marched to the woods and were ordered to dismantle the barbed wire fences and cut timber. Kostenko and Andreyev were very gentle. Nikolay, however, used the whip freely.

Chapter 7

My quarters were still in Camp No. 2 but, because of a shortage of craftsmen, I was taken each day to Camp No. 1, with Unterscharfuhrer Hermann as my escort. He was about 50 years old, tall and kind. He understood us and was sorry for us. The first time he came to Camp No. 2 and saw the piles of gassed corpses, he turned pale and looked at them with horror and pity. He left with me at once in order to get away from the gruesome scene. He treated us workers very well. Often, he surreptitiously brought us some food from the German kitchen. There was so much kindness in his eyes that one might have been tempted to pour one's heart out to him, but he never talked to the inmates. He was afraid of his colleagues. But his every move and action showed his forthright character.

Chapter 10

About that time I caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia. All the sick were being killed either by shooting or by injections, but it seems that they needed me. Accordingly, they gave me whatever medical attention was available. A Jewish physician attended me, examined me every day, and gave me medicine and comfort. My German superior, Loeffler, brought me food: white bread, butter and cream. Whenever he confiscated any food from smugglers, he shared it with me.

Chapter 13

However, we were drawing closer to the end of our suffering. The day of our deliverance was approaching. Just then, my superior, Loeffler, who had been treating me so well, was transferred to Maidanek. He was bent on taking me with him to work there, and I was in a terrible predicament. I knew that a cruel death awaited each one of us. In Maidanek, I would be unable to find a quick way to freedom in the new surroundings and it would take me a long time to become acquainted with new people and new conditions. However, the decision did not rest with me: what was more, I had to pretend that I was elated over Loeffler's honoring me with such an offer. Luckily for me, the Hauptsturmfuhrer refused to let me go. He still needed me. I, for my part, was very happy about that.

Wiernik, a gibbering hate propagandist bent of vilifying the Germans at any cost? Looks like Buddy has this extraordinary "Revisionist" capacity for switching off his brain while reading whenever he stumbles upon a passage that doesn’t fit his pre-conceived notions. Or then he is simply lying again.

Anything else about this part, Buddy? Ah, Wiernik forgot to mention that, when the corpse pyres on the grates burned down, they left behind not only ashes but also bones. Big fucking deal, considering that, as I pointed out above, Wiernik’s account was rather emotional and he was obviously more interested in conveying to his readers the horror of the whole place than in informing them about technical details. And Yitzhak Arad, who – as I explained at the beginning of this commentary – used Wiernik’s account selectively and critically as historian is supposed to, did not forget the bones but described in detail how the same were processed, obviously based on the testimonies of witnesses who, because they were more interested in technical aspects or for some other reason, paid more attention or gave more importance to this detail. The following quote is from page 176 of Arad’s book:

When the fire went out, there were only skeletons or scattered bones on the roasters, and piles of ash underneath. Another special team, known as the "ash group" (Aschenkolonne), had the task of collecting the ash and removing the remains of the charred bones from the grill and placing them on tin sheets. Round wooden sticks were then used to break the bones into small fragments. These were then run through a tightly woven screen made of metal wire; those bone fragments which did not pass through the screen were then returned for further smashing. Unburned bones which proved too difficult to fragment were returned to the roaster and re-ignited with a new pile of bodies.

It should be pointed out, in this context, that what Arad calls "round wooden sticks" are likely to have been not sticks but wooden logs such as portrayed in this drawing from Auschwitz-Birkenau by David Olère, which is shown on page 390 of Jean-Claude Pressac’s book AUSCHWITZ: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. In Arad’s description of the bone grinding procedure at Treblinka on page 189 of the study Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, the German term describing these objects is "Holzpflöcke", which in this context conveys the image of the wooden logs shown on Olère’s drawing.

7. The last of the absurdities Bud thinks to have detected in Wiernik’s account relates to Wiernik’s description of the "Scheissmeister" of Treblinka in Chapter 12:

Another such poor wretch was the so-called "Scheissmeister" [shitmaster]. He was dressed like a cantor and even had to grow a goatee. He wore a large alarm clock on a string around his neck. No one was permitted to remain in the latrine longer than three minutes, and it was his duty to time everyone who used it. The name of this poor wretch was Julian. He also came from Czestochowa, where he had been the owner of a metal products factory.

Before we look at the hilarious tale Bud makes up about the presumable background of this "vilifying" portrayal of former metal products factory owner Julian, let us answer Bud’s not very bright question whether the "German soldiers" (see above) would "really have done something this ridiculously theatrical". Come on, Bud, what’s the deal? Are the SS folks at Treblinka not supposed to have treated themselves to their own version of USO entertainment? And what is so unusual about people with the power to kill and maim over others amusing themselves by deriding and ridiculing those under their boot? Unfortunately that is a common human trait; the last manifestation thereof that made the world’s headlines were the abuses of prisoners by US soldiers in the Abu Ghurayb (Abu Ghraib) prison near Baghdad, which had a strong element of "theatrical" ridiculing and humiliation of the victims. Yet the relationship between torturers and victims at Abu Ghurayb was not nearly as extreme as at Treblinka, where the SS had absolute power of life and death over any Jewish inmate and any SS man could kill, maim or abuse any Jew at will without having to fear any consequences from the state he was working for. So why on earth should the SS have refrained from amusing themselves at their victims expense, in a way that humiliated the Jews and reinforced their image of despicable wretches who deserved nothing better than being stepped on and crushed by the superior Germans? This was actually the function, or one of the functions, of cruelties such as the "shitmaster" figure. On page 101 of her book Into that Darkness, Gitta Sereny recorded a statement in this sense by former Treblinka commander Franz Stangl:

"Why," I asked Stangl, "if they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?"
"To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies," he said. "To make it possible for them to do what they did." And this, I believe, was true.

The "shitmaster" humiliation (which, incidentally, was not wholly gratuitous cruelty, but also served the practical purpose of keeping the inmates from spending too much time on the latrines) was not mentioned by Wiernik alone. In the Düsseldorf District Court’s judgment at the first Treblinka trial (LG Düsseldorf vom 3.9.1965, 8 I Ks 2/64, a transcription of which is now available here), section VIII.12 of the findings of fact regarding the deeds of defendant Kurt Hubert Franz, mention is made of two latrine capos who were dressed up as rabbis and carried an alarm clock and a whip, and whose function it was to see to it that the inmates spent no longer than a few minutes in the latrines. The existence and functions of these figures were described by 11 witnesses interrogated independently of each other, of which Wiernik was none, in the context of establishing whether or not Kurt Franz had killed one of these capos following a box fight he had staged between the two for the camp staff’s amusement (the court concluded that the existence of these capos and the box fight between them staged by Franz, but not the subsequent killing of one of them, could be established with sufficient certainty on the basis of the testimonies).

Wiernik was one of the witnesses at the Düsseldorf Treblinka trial of Kurt Franz and other former members of the Treblinka staff. The court didn’t it consider him a very useful witness, however, for reasons it explained as follows (my translation):

Although the witness Wie. made the impression on the juror court that he was honestly endeavoring to tell the truth, it had to be considered, on the other hand, that this 75 year old witness, who went through a lot at Treblinka extermination camp, had considerable memory and concentration failures during his interrogation. This went so far that he, due to his severely weakened health, could no longer provide a coherent and comprehensible description of events at the camp some time after the beginning of the interrogation. It is also notable that he no longer managed to recognize any of the defendants. In the case of defendants Franz and Stadie he presumed the right identity, but he wasn’t quite sure here either. After a longer rest break, which was granted to the witness, it was also not possible to adequately question him, so that his deposition had to be ended ahead of time.

So the court’s findings of fact, both in what concerns the general features of and procedures at the camp and the defendants’ individual criminal actions, had to be based on evidence other than depositions by Wiernik, who by the time of this trial was too old and weak to be a useful witness. Yet the numerous independent depositions, of both eyewitnesses and defendants, on which the Düsseldorf court based its reconstruction of events at Treblinka (see my article More Fun With Ugly Voice Productions (Part 1)), essentially confirmed the descriptions of the mass killing and body disposal process that Wiernik had provided in A Year in Treblinka 20 years before. A translated excerpt from the judgment may illustrate this:

>From that stage on both male and female victims received the same treatment. So that these people would not have the time to think or offer resistance, they were driven through the "tube" by guards stationed there, who struck out at them with canes, whips, rifle butts and with their fists to hurry them along. The victims had to run through the "tube" four and five abreast, completely naked and with arms raised; this was the way in which they were herded into the gas chambers. The capacity of each gas chamber was utilized down to the last square centimeter. Under a rain of constant blows and abuse so many people were sqeezed into the chamber that no one was able to move any more. Often, infants and young children would simply be tossed into the rooms above the heads of the adults standing in the chamber. When it was no longer possible to squeeze additional people into the chambers, the doors were sealed and the German squad leader ordered the Ukrainian in the engine room (he might say "Ivan, water!") to switch on the engine, whose exhaust fumes were then conducted into the chamber [In a different place, it is specified that engines of captured Soviet tanks were used]. The killing process itself lasted about 30 to 40 minutes. After that time the engine was shut and someone went to the doors to listen for signs of life in the chambers. If no sign of life could be detected, the command was given to open the trap doors on the outer walls, and the transfer of the corpses began. On occasion some victims showed signs of life even after the gassing had been completed. Such people would be shot on the platform or perhaps on the way to the ditch or the cremation grill. The shooting was done either by the German squad leader or by one of the Ukrainian guards. Others shot at the mass graves included newcomers who could not be pushed into the already overcrowded gas chambers, but who were too few in number to warrant the expense of a separate gassing operation.

Compare with Wiernik’s description of the process in Chapter 5:

Each chamber had a door facing Camp No. 2 (1.80 by 2.50 meters), which could be opened only from the outside by lifting it with iron supports and was closed by iron hooks set into the sash frames, and by wooden bolts. The victims were led into the chambers through the doors leading from the corridor, while the remains of the gassed victims were dragged out through the doors facing Camp No. 2. The power plant operated alongside these chambers, supplying Camps 1 and 2 with electric current. A motor taken from a dismantled Soviet tank stood in the power plant. This motor was used to pump the gas, which was let into the chambers by connecting the motor with the inflow pipes. The speed with which death overcame the helpless victims depended on the quantity of combustion gas admitted into the chamber at one time.
The machinery of the gas chambers was operated by two Ukrainians. One of them, Ivan, was tall, and though his eyes seemed kind and gentle, he was a sadist. He enjoyed torturing his victims. He would often pounce upon us while we were working; he would nail our ears to the walls or make us lie down on the floor and whip us brutally. While he did this, his face showed sadistic satisfaction and he laughed and joked. He finished off the victims according to his mood at the moment. The other Ukrainian was called Nicholas. He had a pale face and the same mentality as Ivan.
The day I first saw men, women and children being led into the house of death I almost went insane. I tore at my hair and shed bitter tears of despair. I suffered most when I looked at the children, accompanied by their mothers or walking alone, entirely ignorant of the fact that within a few minutes their lives would be snuffed out amidst horrible tortures. Their eyes glittered with fear and still more, perhaps, with amazement. It seemed as if the question, "What is this? What's it all about?" was frozen on their lips. But seeing the stony expressions on the faces of their elders, they matched their behavior to the occasion. They either stood motionless or pressed tightly against each other or against their parents, and tensely awaited their horrible end.
Suddenly, the entrance door flew open and out came Ivan, holding a heavy gas pipe, and Nicholas, brandishing a saber. At a given signal, they would begin admitting the victims, beating them savagely as they moved into the chamber. The screams of the women, the weeping of the children, cries of despair and misery, the pleas for mercy, for God's vengeance ring in my ears to this day, making it impossible for me to forget the misery I saw.
Between 450 and 500 persons were crowded into a chamber measuring 25 square meters. Parents carried their children in their arms in the vain hope that this would save their children from death. On the way to their doom, they were pushed and beaten with rifle butts and with Ivan's gas pipe. Dogs were set upon them, barking, biting and tearing at them. To escape the blows and the dogs, the crowd rushed to its death, pushing into the chamber, the stronger ones shoving the weaker ones ahead of them. The bedlam lasted only a short while, for soon the doors were slammed shut. The chamber was filled, the motor turned on and connected with the inflow pipes and, within 25 minutes at the most, all lay stretched out dead or, to be more accurate, were standing up dead. Since there was not an inch of free space, they just leaned against each other.

and in Chapter 7:

Next, all the men, and women, old people and children had to fall into line and proceed from Camp No. 1 to the gas chambers in Camp No. 2. Along the path leading to the chambers there stood a shack in which some official sat and ordered the people to turn in all their valuables. The unfortunate victims, in the delusion that they would remain alive, tried to hide whatever they could. But the German fiends managed to find everything, if not on the living, then later on the dead. Everyone approaching the shack had to lift his arms high and so the entire macabre procession passed in silence, with arms raised high, into the gas chambers.
A Jew had been selected by the Germans to function as a supposed "bath attendant." He stood at the entrance of the building housing the chambers and urged everyone to hurry inside before the water got cold. What irony! Amidst shouts and blows, the people were chased into the chambers.
As I have already indicated, there was not much space in the gas chambers. People were smothered simply by overcrowding. The motor which generated the gas in the new chambers was defective, and so the helpless victims had to suffer for hours on end before they died. Satan himself could not have devised a more fiendish torture. When the chambers were opened again, many of the victims were only half dead and had to be finished off with rifle butts, bullets or powerful kicks.

Details like the occasional defectiveness of the motor are mentioned in other parts of the Düsseldorf judgment, namely in connection with the issue of whether the gassings had been cruel killings in the sense of section 211 of the German Criminal Code. My translation from the judgment:

The mass of the other victims, who were driven to the gas chambers under whip lashes and rifle butt blows, not only suffered immeasurable psychological pain when they were tightly squeezed into the gas chambers, with near death in front of them, but also severe choking pain for several minutes – in case of occasional motor failures even for several hours – before they got unconscious and perished. Those waiting in the tube even had to hear the screams of the victims preceding them in death before it was their turn. In the winter they sometimes had to wait in icy cold, naked and freezing, for being the next to be driven into the gas chambers.

The situation during winter gassings mentioned in the last sentence of the above-quoted excerpt from the Düsseldorf judgment was described by Wiernik as follows, in Chapter 7:

The women and girls were then taken to the "barber shop" to have their hair clipped. By now they felt sure that they would be taken to have a shower. Then they were escorted, through another exit, to Camp No. 2 where, in freezing weather, they had to stand in the nude, waiting their turn to enter the gas chamber, which had not yet been cleared of the last batch of victims.

All through that winter, small children, stark naked and barefooted, had to stand out in the open for hours on end, awaiting their turn in the increasingly busy gas chambers. The soles of their feet froze and stuck to the icy ground. They stood and cried; some of them froze to death. In the meantime, Germans and Ukrainians walked up and down the ranks, beating and kicking the victims.

I don’t think there is room for reasonable doubt that, in his 1944 account A Year in Treblinka, Wiernik provided an essentially accurate first-hand description of how people were killed at that place.

Now to the funny part of Bud’s fussing, the theory he sucks out of his fingers about why Wiernik represented the poor "shitmaster" Julian in such a "vilifying" manner: Julian used to be the owner of a metal products factory in Czestochowa (not in Warsaw, where Wiernik had lived and worked), and Bud thinks that he may have had a dispute with a union for which Wiernik worked and was therefore unfavorably portrayed in Wiernik’s account, published in the US by the American Representation of the General Jewish Workers’ Union in Poland. This would be but another baseless supposition, were it not for the humorous touch added but what makes Bud think that Wiernik may at some time have worked for a labor union: his having been a member of the examining board of the Warsaw Trades Chamber. Apparently our friend doesn’t know the difference between a trade or labor union and a trades chamber or chamber of commerce. One wonders what high school this poor wretch attended.

So, is it clear that «this 46 page book A Year in Treblinka is a fraud», as good old Buddy heavy-handedly concludes after the ramblings assessed above? By no means, but I think it is legitimate to conclude that "fraud" is a legitimate, maybe even a little too gentle term for the flagrantly ignorant and dishonest assessment that Bud has offered.

After this showpiece of "Revisionist" distortion and piss-poor reasoning, Bud indulges in some notoriously inane speculations, with barely veiled anti-Semitic undertones ("Polish Yiddish Culture"), about why Wiernik couldn’t "lie very well". Instead of discussing this compendium of fathomless imbecilities, I suggest that our readers ask themselves a question that seems far more pertinent than Bud’s, considering the shit that the fellow produced in this clip: How come that Bud can’t lie very well?

Last but not least, I would like to point out a possible inconsistency/improbability in Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka, which master analyst Buddy notably failed to spot. I’m not talking about the description in Chapter 8 about how a naked Jewish girl "leaped" above a barbed wire fence three meters high. That is probably just a mistranslation from the original (like the mistranslation of the bullet episode, mentioned above), Wiernik meaning to say that the girl quickly climbed over the fence, which as we know from other parts of his account and other evidence had tree saplings woven into it; I don’t consider it improbable that an athletic young women, especially if driven by despair, could have quickly reached the top of such a fence and just as quickly climbed or jumped down from it on the other side. No, I am referring to this passage of Chapter 10:

In April, 1943, transports began to come in from Warsaw. We were told that 600 men in Warsaw were working in Camp No. 1; this report turned out to be based on fact. At the time a typhus epidemic was raging in Camp No. 1. Those who got sick were killed. Three women and one man from the Warsaw transport came to us. The man was the husband of one of the three women. The Warsaw people were treated with exceptional brutality, the women even more harshly than the men. Women with children were separated from the others, led up to the fires and, after the murderers had had their fill of watching the terror-stricken women and children, they killed them right by the pyre and threw them into the flames. This happened quite frequently. The women fainted from fear and the brutes dragged them to the fire half dead. Panic-stricken, the children clung to their mothers. The women begged for mercy, with eyes closed so as to shut out the grisly scene, but their tormentors only leered at them and kept their victims in agonizing suspense for minutes on end. While one batch of women and children were being killed, others were left standing around, waiting their turn. Time and time again children were snatched from their mothers' arms and tossed into the flames alive, while their tormentors laughed, urging the mothers to be brave and jump into the fire after their children and mocking the women for being cowards.

If the term "pyres" in the above text is to be understood as meaning the fire grids set up by Mr. Floss, on which the bodies taken out of the mass graves and later the bodies of people killed by gassing just before were burned, the above is an inaccurate and improbable description, for according to Wiernik himself and to other eyewitnesses as well (e.g. Yechiel Reichman, quoted above), these grids gave off such heat when bodies were being burned on them that they could not be approached. It is possible, however, that the pyres referred to in this passage were in the pit by the "Lazarett", the place where the old and infirm were shot so that they would not delay the "processing" of the bulk of arriving deportees through the undressing barracks and the "tube" to the gas chambers and subsequent mass graves or incineration grids. The "Lazarett" is described as follows in Chapter 5 of Wiernik’s account:

Camp Treblinka was divided into two sections. In Camp No. 1 there was a railroad siding and a platform for unloading the human cargo, and also a wide open space, where the baggage of the new arrivals was piled up. Jews from foreign countries brought considerable luggage with them. Camp No. 1 also contained what was called the lazaret (infirmary), a long building measuring 30 x 2 meters. Two men were working there. They wore white aprons and had red crosses on their sleeves; they posed as doctors. They selected from the transports the elderly and the ill, and made them sit on a long bench facing an open ditch. Behind the bench, Germans and Ukrainians were lined up and they shot the victims in the neck. The corpses toppled right into the ditch. After a number of corpses had accumulated, they were piled up and set on fire.

Similar descriptions of the "Lazarett" by eyewitnesses other than Wiernik were the basis for the findings of fact regarding this place in the Düsseldorf court's judgment at the first Treblinka trial, where two men who had done the shooting at the "Lazarett", Willi Mentz and August Wilhelm Miete, were sentenced to lifetime imprisonment (none of them denied the nature of his activity at the "Lazarett", though both tried to play down the number of people they had killed). What follows is my translation from the judgment:

Furthermore – at least in the initial period of the mass killings – a member of the German camp personnel often held a speech to the people assembled in the square before the station, in which he repeated the contents of what was written on the boards. Furthermore he urged persons old, sick, infirm or otherwise not able to walk to go, if necessary with the help of members of the Jewish work detachment, to the hospital ("Lazarett"), where they would receive medical assistance. Trusting this statement numerous persons reported for medical treatment after the arrival of each transport. As soon as they had got there, however, they had to take off all their clothes. They were either seated next to each other on an earth wall alongside the pit or lain on the edge of the pit and then shot by the guards doing service at the "Lazarett". The shooting was at first done with carbines or rifles. Later, however, there was only the shot in the neck with a pistol. This had been ordered by Wirth himself. He personally demonstrated it to the defendant Mentz by killing some Jews with a shot in the neck in the "Lazarett". The people sitting next to each other on the earth wall had their faces turned towards the pit, and before they were killed they had to see the corpses of the previous victims burning and fuming there. The shootings at the "Lazarett" were without exception carried out by the German Unterführer. When there was greater traffic, however, it also occurred that Ukrainians were used for support.
This barbaric killing procedure had two functions. On the one hand the pretension of medical treatment was to strengthen the victims’ erroneous belief that this was indeed a resettlement action. On the other hand the separation of the sick and infirm was to guarantee the expedient conduction of the mass killings.

The barbaric killing procedure described above was sometimes accompanied by gratuitous sadistic cruelties, such as those described by the witness Rajzman at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals and later at the first Düsseldorf Treblinka trial (see Andrew’s article More Fun With Ugly Voice Productions (Part 2)). It therefore doesn’t seem improbable that such cruelties were applied to Jews whose resistance had especially infuriated their murderers, the ones transported to Treblinka in the course of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. Transports of Jews to Treblinka extermination camp ("T II") in April and May 1943, when the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt was put down, were mentioned in the Stroop-Report, which thus serves as independent documentary corroboration of Wiernik’s mention and dating of these transports. The "Lazarett" was also the ideal place for the cruel scenes described by Wiernik. What is questionable, however, is whether Wiernik witnessed these events first hand or merely heard about them from other prisoners. As the "Lazarett" was in the section Wiernik referred to as "Camp 1", whereas Wiernik was working in the section he called "Camp 2" at the time, the latter seems rather probable. However, as Wiernik did not claim that he had witnessed these events first hand, this does not diminish the overall credibility of his account A Year in Treblinka.

I thank my fellow contributors Andrew and Sergey for their valuable input. Thanks also to our readers Roman Werpachowski and aldo-umschlagplatz, Roman for the translation from Polish and Aldo for pointing me to the parallel between the abuses at Abu Ghurayb prison and the Treblinka "Scheissmeister" episode.

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