Thomas Kues and Isak Grünberg

Isak Grünberg arrived in Maly Trostinets from Vienna on 9th-10th October, 1942. He and his wife were selected for labour, but Grünberg testifies here that his wife was subjected to a later selection and killed. Grünberg also describes selections followed by shootings. Grünberg is therefore clearly a witness to extermination, so any denier would have to be stupid and/or dishonest to use his testimony to support 'resettlement', yet this is precisely what Kues does here. What tricks does Kues perform in this process?

Firstly, although Kues mentions Grünberg's wife, he of course ignores her fate. He also ignores his account of selections. Kues confines his citation of Grünberg to this passage:

According to my estimate there were 1200 to 1300 Jews in the camp. This figure remained unchanged, the fresh supply [of manpower] was taken from camps, from Theresienstadt and Auschwitz and probably also from other ones. […] Transport after transport arrived. Often we never even heard where they came from, since it frequently happened that all [of the deportees] were immediately liquidated.

Kues infers the following conclusion from this quote:

The transports from Theresienstadt which Grünberg states arrived at Trostenic [sic] following his own arrival at the camp on 9 or 10 October must therefore have arrived either via Auschwitz or Treblinka.

Kues has distorted Grünberg's statement into something far more specific than its actual content. Grünberg does not state that the transports arrived from Theresienstadt and Auschwitz after he did: he simply describes how the population level was maintained. He does not specify the timeframe of this process, so he could be referring to a period that included earlier transports. Moreover, Kues does not tell the reader that Grünberg was a mason whose role in the camp was to work as a builder on SS residences. Thus Grünberg was not in a role that involved meeting these transports. It is therefore likely that Grünberg was reporting hearsay, and that his sources were describing the procedure that applied over a longer period than Grünberg's own presence. Kues withholds from the reader the information that would allow that more plausible inference to be drawn.

Furthermore, Kues' claim that trains went from Theresienstadt to Minsk via Treblinka places him at odds with his own colleagues Mattogno and Graf, who wrote an entire chapter on resettlement in their Treblinka screed [here] without ever claiming that Minsk transports came via Treblinka. Instead, they stated that:

It is valid to suggest that the direct transports to Minsk arrived first in Warsaw and ran over the Siedlce-Czeremcha-Wolkowusk line, so that they were traveling past Treblinka at a distance of approximately 80 km (Siedlce railway station) and about 140 km from Sobibór.

It seems odd that Kues would make such a major revision to the revisionist thesis without acknowledging that he was so radically departing from the previous denier orthodoxy on these deportations.

Most importantly of all, Kues has perpetrated these deceptions for no ultimate benefit, because lying about Grünberg does not alter the fact that transports to Maly Trostenets were either killed on arrival or were replacing other Jews who had been killed. Grünberg does not state that the inmate population increased; he actually states that in 1943 the population had shrunken ["zusammengeschrumpft"] as other inmates had been liquidated.

Kues' thesis is therefore not only dishonest, but also incoherent and pointless, unless the point is simply to deceive CODOH readers who are only too willing to be deceived by such obvious tricks.