A document that forced Mattogno to claim "forgery"

[Edited on 06.02.2016 to finish an incomplete sentence.]



On 24 October 1942, the following events were recorded in the Kriegstagebuch (War Diary) of the Oberquartiermeister (Head Quarter Master), Mbfh Polen (Military Commander Poland) for the period from 1.5.41 to 31.12.43:

OKW beabsichtigt die Mitnahme von Waren aus dem GG dahin zu regeln, dass der persönliche Reisebedarf und die zur Mitnahme zugelassenen Waren frei von jeglicher Abgabe bleiben.
OK Ostrow meldet, dass die Juden in Treblinka nicht ausreichend beerdigt seien und infolgedessen ein unerträglicher Kadavergeruch die Luft verpestet.

The first paragraph translates as follows:

Army High Command intends to rule the taking along of merchandise from the General Government in such a way that the personal travel accessories and the merchandise allowed to be taken along will be free of any duty.

The recording of this intent, whose implementation would have been welcomed by military personnel on leave from the General Government, is without interest to the subject matter of this blog.
Not so the second paragraph, which was translated as follows in Christopher Browning’s expert report for the defense at the Irving-Lipstadt trial^[1]:

OK Ostrow reports that the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and as a result an unbearable smell of cadavers pollutes the air.

The translation is accurate, except that "nicht ausreichend" is more properly translated as "not sufficiently" or "insufficiently". The translation I propose is thus the following:

OK Ostrow reports that the Jews in Treblinka are not sufficiently buried and as a result an unbearable smell of cadavers pollutes the air.

A copy of the diary’s page containing the above entries is shown below. ^[2]

The crucial sentence conveys the immediate message that at the time of the entry there were more corpses of Jews at Treblinka than could be adequately buried, and that this led to smell pollution serious enough for the OK (Ortskommandant, local commandant) at Ostrów, a town 20 kilometers away from Treblinka, to report this as a problem that he wanted something to be done about. It is also independent corroboration of various eyewitness testimonies describing the stench of corpses that could be noticed far away from Treblinka extermination camp.

These eyewitness testimonies include that of Franz Suchomel, who in his interview by filmmaker Claude Lanzmann recalled the following^[3]:

The smell was infernal because gas was constantly escaping. It stank horribly for miles around. You could smell it everywhere. It depended on the wind. The stink was carried on the wind. Understand?

Another witness who recalled the stench was Treblinka’s second commandant, Franz Stangl. Interviewed by British writer Gitta Sereny, Stangl recalled the following^[4]:

“I drove there, with an SS driver,” he said. “We could smell it kilometres away. The road ran alongside the railway. When we were about fifteen, twenty minutes’ drive from Treblinka, we began to see corpses by the line, first just two or three, then more, and as we drove into Treblinka station, there were what looked like hundreds of them - just lying there - they’d obviously been there for days, in the heat. In the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still alive ... that too, looked as if it had been there for days.”

Sereny also interviewed Franciszek Zabecki, who was traffic controller at Treblinka (town) station from May 1941 until after the camp was demolished. A member of the Home Army (the Polish resistance), his undercover job was reporting German troop movements, but it enabled him to keep a detailed record of all the transports coming through his station on the way into Treblinka camp. Zabecki recalled the following^[5]:

But, you must imagine what it was like living here: every day, as of the early morning, these hours of horror when the trains arrived, and all the time - after the very first days - this odour, this dark foggy cloud that hung over us, that covered the sky in that hot and beautiful summer, even on the most brilliant days - not a rain-cloud promising relief from the heat, but an almost sulphuric darkness bringing with it this pestilential smell.

Hubert Pfoch, a German soldier on his way to the Eastern Front, passed Treblinka station behind a train bound for the camp in August 1942. In his diary he noted the following impressions, among others^[6]:

Eventually our train followed the other train and we continued to see corpses on both sides of the track - children and others. They say Treblinka is a ‘delousing camp’. When we reach Treblinka station the train is next to us again - there is such an awful smell of decomposing corpses in the station, some of us vomit.

None of these witnesses was aware of the aforementioned entry in the War Diary.

Mattogno’s first approach as concerns this inconvenient document was trying to explain it away. In his co-production with Jürgen Graf about Treblinka, Mattogno had argued that the few hundred bodies found by the Soviets and Poles in mass graves in the area of the Treblinka I labor camp were "the bodies of all – or nearly all – who died there", and that the violation of these mass graves "alleged" by judge Łukaszkiewicz was "presumably done in order to be able to exaggerate the number of victims of Treblinka I".^[7] Łukaszkiewicz had estimated that at least 6,500 people had been buried in 41 mass graves found in the area of the Treblinka I labor camp. When it came to explaining the "unbearable smell of cadavers" reported by the OK Ostrów, Mattogno dropped his professed skepticism regarding Łukaszkiewicz’s estimate and argued that "nothing excludes that the document in question referred to the abovementioned 6,800 corpses buried near Treblinka I"^[8].

Actually it can be safely excluded that the OK Ostrów’s complaint about an unbearable stench of corpses emanating from insufficiently buried Jews had anything to do with the cemetery of the Treblinka I labor camp. As I pointed out in an earlier blog^[9], the Treblinka I labor camp existed from November 1941 to late July 1944, i.e. for about 32 months or 960 days. It is assumed to have taken the lives of about 10,000 inmates by historians, 6,800 (or 6,500, see below) by Mattogno, which would mean an average mortality rate of 7 to 10 per day. So Mattogno was asking his readers to believe that a daily average of only 7 to 10 bodies could not have been buried deeply enough, and that their decomposition released such a high amount of foul gasses that the smell thereof disturbed the camp's neighbors miles away.

Having obviously realized that this dog wouldn’t hunt^[10], Mattogno turned to questioning the authenticity of the diary entry in question. Claiming forgery is not something Mattogno will readily do in regard to an exhibit of documentary evidence, presumably because he is aware that doing so implies acknowledging that such exhibit is incriminating and runs counter to the "Revisionist" canon.

Now, what arguments does Mattogno present in support of his forgery contention?

First of all, he claims that the entry contains two unlikely elements, one being the reference to the Jews: "If the purpose of the protest was to have the bodies buried in a more adequate manner, there would have been no need to introduce this "bavure" (slip) to borrow a term from Pressac"^[11] .

This is a rather weak argument. The entry in question is one of two entries for the date 24.10.1942, on a page that contains entries about other matters for a period between 20.10.1942 and 25.10.1942, of an internal document that was kept in its place, not one that was sent around. The entry in question, mingled with entries about innocuous matters in a page of a book containing lots of similarly innocuous entries, is also not exactly an eye-catcher, so one wonders what forger would (by typing an additional entry into what would have been an unusually large blank space below the first entry for 24 October 1942, taking care to use the same typescript) have given himself the trouble of creating so inconspicuous a "smoking gun", only to then leave it buried in some archive until some historian happened to discover it. That alone makes Mattogno’s forgery insinuations rather improbable.

And what’s the deal with the use of the term "Jews"? The person keeping the diary was recording the OK Ostrów’s verbal complaint as it had been made: the Jews in Treblinka were not sufficiently buried, therefore a stench of corpses befouled the air, and that stench was unbearable (so something had to be done about it). There’s nothing incriminating about the mention of Jews per se; Jews might be Jewish inmates of a labor camp. What makes the entry incriminating, and thus uncomfortable for Mattogno to the point of his knowing no better than to claim forgery, is the information that there was a place called Treblinka where there was an enormous number of corpses, so many that they couldn’t be sufficiently buried and their decomposition generated a stench that was perceived as unbearable even at some distance from the place, or else the Ostrów commandant wouldn’t have complained. What kind of place in this particular area, which was far away from the front or any bombed-out city, and not being visited by any monstrous epidemic, could that possibly have been under the circumstances, other than a place where people were being murdered in large numbers? The entry would be just as incriminating if the person in charge of the diary has used the term "Leichen" (corpses) instead of "Juden" (Jews).

Mattogno’s second argument against the entry’s authenticity is just as feeble. Apparently hoping that his readers might mistake it for an argument, he asks a rhetorical question: "Can it seriously be believed that, even with a favorable wind, the smell carried from Treblinka could have been experienced at this distance as "unbearable [unerträglich]"?

"This distance" is the 20 kilometers between Treblinka and Ostrów, and Mattogno makes no effort at demonstrating that it would have been impossible for the wind to carry the smell of hundreds of thousands of decomposing corpses to a town 20 kilometers away. There is no reason to assume such impossibility. Reports and complaints about decomposition stench causing discomfort far away from the place of origin are usually related to the presence of large numbers of decomposing corpses, carcasses or other organic matter at a given place and time. Besides the examples mentioned in my previous blog^[12], there is the example of the Trajouce landfill in Portugal, where 150,000 tons of waste were deposited over a period of ten years. Even after the landfill was closed down, its odors continued to be felt not only in the locations closest to the landfill (Abóboda and Tires in the Cascais area), but also in Porto Salvo^[13] "when the wind is stronger" and especially "in the summer, when temperatures are highest". Other examples:

This is "Fats and Proteins UK" the most revolting stink for miles around. This place takes carcasses and waste animal parts from abbatoirs and the meat industry and renders them down into two saleable products, Fat and Protein. However the way they do it causes a vile stench accross large areas of Lancaster, particularly when the wind is in the East, or when there is a temperature inversion. ^[14]

Dagoretti is the place where the herders bring their cattle to be butchered. You can smell it a couple miles away – the thick stench of rotting carcasses that almost gets stuck in your throat. As you drive into Dagoretti and past the abattoirs, you see skulls and vultures. Wooden pens, perhaps 2 or 3 meters on each side, and stretching up about the same height, stand in front of and beside each abattoir, all along the side of the road. Each one is filled with skulls, in various stages of decomposition. ^[15]

The smell of rotten meat is throughout the air. The odor can be smelled for miles. ^[16]

Southern California awoke Monday morning to a foul odor that wouldn’t go away.
Residents clogged 911 lines with calls, prompting health officials from Ventura County to Palm Springs to send out investigators looking for everything from a toxic spill to a sewer plant leak.
But the prime suspect was 100 miles away from Los Angeles. The leading theory is that the stink was caused by the annual die-off of fish in the Salton Sea. Officials believe Sunday evening’s thunderstorms and strong winds churned up the water and pushed that dead-fish smell to points west overnight. ^[17]

It turned out the stink originated nearly 50 miles south of Columbus, at the Glatfelter paper plant in Chillicothe.
Ohio Environmental Protection Agency spokeswoman Heidi Griesmer said the plant was performing maintenance early today when a venting system failed, offending everyone for miles.
“What people are smelling is sulfur compounds (that are) detectable at a very, very low level,” Griesmer said. ^[18]

While it's not confirmed yet, there's a chance the smell could be traveling from the Western Placer Waste Management Authority.
Some Rocklin residents -- who live about six miles from the facility -- said they noticed the strong scent lingering this weekend.
"It's a very foul, chemical-smelling odor," said Breanna Rybinski, of Rocklin. ^[19]

The above examples don’t prove that the stench of hundreds of thousands of insufficiently buried corpses could be perceived as unbearable as far as 20 kilometers downwind, but they do suggest that this was possible. As Mattogno bears the burden of proving the impossibility of such phenomenon but offers merely a feeble appeal to incredulity, that’s enough to destroy his argument. Besides, the fact the OK Ostrów reported the stench does not necessarily imply that he smelled it at his command post in Ostrów. It is also possible that he took notice of it on a tour of the area as he got closer to Treblinka, or that it was reported to him by subordinates, German officials or civilians in the area of his jurisdiction.

Mattogno asks why the cadaverous stench became unbearable only towards the end of October 1942. Who said so? Certainly not Franz Suchomel, Franz Stangl, Franciszek Zabiecki and Hubert Pfoch, among other witnesses who were bothered by the stench in August 1942 already (including one witness later mentioned by Mattogno himself). The fact that only one documentary record mentioning the stench has been found only means that, bar eventual future finds in archives not yet completely explored, only one recorded complaint about the stench survived the war. There may have been other records that were later destroyed, and there may have been reports or complaints about the stench that went unrecorded. It is even possible that the OK Ostrów, after having called attention to the problem several times to no avail, insisted that his complaint on 24 October 1942 be taken on record, in the hope that this would finally lead to something being done.

That said, it is also a fact that October 1942 was the most killing-intensive month in the history of Treblinka extermination camp^[20]. Over 200,000 additional corpses in that month alone, on top of the hundreds of thousands already buried before, might well have led to graves being overfilled as grave space became scarce, as is suggested by eyewitness testimonies mentioning cremation attempts in November 1942^[21].

Mattogno’s next argument in support of his forgery contention is quite peculiar. He cites the following recollection by Polish engineer Jerzy Królikowski^[22]:

The corpses of the gassed – as already mentioned – were buried in the camp in huge graves, which were filled in with earth. The results were sensed first in the surrounding area closest to Treblinka and, later, in places further away. On 11 August (a date I will not forget) we sensed for the first time the terrible smell from the corpses, which the south wind brought to Treblinka.

Mattogno’s argument is the following:

According to orthodox holocaust historiography, some 150,000 Jews were gassed and buried at Treblinka as of 10 August 1942, so that the fact that Królikowski, at a distance of 3 or 4 km from the Treblinka "extermination camp," sensed this cadaverous stench for the first time on the 11th of this month appears rather problematic, even more so than the notion that the Wehrmacht soldiers stationed in Ostrów Mazowiecki, some 20 km away from the camp, smelled it at the end of October.

Mattogno doesn’t reveal what work of "orthodox holocaust historiography" exactly he took his figure from, but according to the correspondence between the Secretary of State in the Reich Ministry of Transport, Dr. Eng. Ganzenmüller, and the head of Himmler’s personal staff, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff^[23], 5,000 Jews went from Warsaw via Malkinia to Treblinka every day starting 22 July 1942, so that by 10 August 100,000 Jews should have arrived at their final destination from Warsaw alone. There were also transports from other places of origin. A calculation I made based on Sara Berger’s list of transports to Treblinka^[24] suggests that the camp had accrued about 126,000 corpses by 10 August 1942.

For someone outside the camp to smell the decomposition stench of these corpses, two factors had to be present: there had to be many corpses in the upper layers of the mass grave(s) closer to the top, and these corpses had to be in a state of putrefaction (which occurs between days 4 and 10 after death in the open, and during which foul-smelling gases such as hydrogen sulphide, methane, cadaverine and putrescine are produced) ^[25]. Corpses buried early in the period from 22 July to 10 August 1942 would be lying in the lower layers of the grave or graves in which they were buried, and perception of their smell from the outside would additionally be somewhat attenuated by sand and chlorinated lime poured over each layer of corpses. Corpses in the upper layers would be those of people killed (or dead on arrival) closer to the date mentioned by Królikowski, and it would be mainly the decomposition stench of these corpses that the witness would notice when the wind blew it in his direction, which need not have happened every day. So Królikowski’s recollection is entirely plausible, while the same cannot be said of Mattogno’s "transit camp" fantasies^[26].

As to whether the stench carried further than the 3 or 4 kilometers from the camp where Królikowski stood, there is nothing in the witness’s account to belie that notion, and the witness expressly stated that the "results" of the killing – by which he apparently meant the stench – "were sensed first in the surrounding area closest to Treblinka and, later, in places further away". This statement suggests that either Królikowski himself or people he talked to also noticed the stench at distances larger than 3 – 4 kilometers.

Mattogno’s last shot against the uncomfortable War Diary entry comes in one of the chapters dedicated to this humble writer’s contribution to the HC critique^[27], which will be addressed in detail in upcoming blogs. A "Wehrmacht letter (Wehrmacht-Brief) dated "Treblinka, 10 September 1943 [Treblinka, den 10. September 1943]" regarding the delivery of a railway car of chlorinated lime to the "SS-Arbeitslager Lublin"" allows Mattogno to "infer that in Treblinka the chlorinated lime (Chlorkalk) was used in adequate quantities in the mass graves", as the chlorinated line is "evidently the remnant of a previous delivery"^[28].

In Mattogno’s book, the letter in question indicates that the Treblinka "transit camp" had sufficient chlorinated lime at its disposal to keep the stench of the corpses’ decomposition from bothering the neighborhood, so much of the substance that some was left over towards the end of the camp’s operation. However, the fact that Treblinka had leftover chlorinated lime in September 1943 may also have been due to shipments of the substance arriving after cremation had replaced burial as a body disposal method and/or the clearing of the graves and cremation of the corpses had commenced. Such chlorinated lime would thus have no more use at the time the shipment arrived, and be left over for shipment to the SS labor camp at Lublin. This explanation is not only plausible by itself, but has the elementary advantage of being in accordance with all available evidence, whereas Mattogno’s inference is not.

So it can be concluded that Mattogno has neither a plausible alternative explanation for the "unbearable stench of cadavers" recorded as emanating from Treblinka (his attempt to blame that stench on a mere 6,500 corpses buried over a period of about 32 months is quite ridiculous), nor a relevant argument against the authenticity of the War Diary entry of 24 October 1942 whereby the local commandant in Ostrów complained that the Jews in Treblinka were insufficiently buried and therefore an unbearable smell of corpses befouled the air. All he has achieved is to unwittingly acknowledge that said entry is documentary evidence supporting other evidence whereby mass killing on an enormous scale was conducted at Treblinka.

Notes

[1] Christopher R. Browning, Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution, Part IV item C - "Documentary Evidence concerning the Camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka" ([link])

[2] The image was taken from the provisional draught of Stephen Potyondi’s article "Final Destination Treblinka" on "The Phora" forum ([link]). Potyondi took the image from the Nizkor website, where it is featured under http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/ftp.cgi?camps//aktion.reinhard/treblinka/images/ostrow2.jpg but currently not available. According to the related reference (http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/ftp.cgi?camps//aktion.reinhard/treblinka/images/ostrow2.ref), a copy of the document was made available to Danny Keren by the Militärarchiv (Bundesarchiv, Abt. Militärarchiv - [link]) in Freiburg, Germany.

[3] Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust, Pantheon Books, New York, 1985. A transcript of the interview with Suchomel is available on the Nizkor website under [link]. Lanzmann’s interview with Suchomel can also be viewed on Youtube under [link].

[4] Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness. From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, 1974 McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, p. 157.

[5] Sereny, as above, p. 155.

[6] Sereny, as above, p. 159.

[7] Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, 2004 Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago, pp. 88-89.

[8] Carlo Mattogno, "Belzec or the Holocaust Controversy of Roberto Muehlenkamp" ([link]).

[9] "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,4)" ([link])

[10] Mattogno refers to his "nothing excludes that the document in question referred to the abovementioned 6,800 corpses buried near Treblinka I" - argument (pointing out that the correct number is 6,500 instead of 6,800) on page 1099 of Mattogno, Graf and Kues’ lengthy magnum opus with the lengthy title The “Extermination Camps” Of “Aktion Reinhardt”. An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers, 2013 Castle Hill Publishers, UK. However, he doesn’t mention let alone address my refutation of that argument.

[11] Extermination Camps, p. 1100.

[12] See notes 338 and 339 in that article ([link]).

[13] "Ambiente: População continua a queixar-se do mau cheiro da lixeira de Trajouce" ("Environment: Population keeps complaining about the bad smell from the Trajouce landfill") ([link]). The distance between Porto Salvo and Trajouce is 7.7 km by car or 4 km by air ([link]).

[14] "Animal carcass rendering plant (Lancaster)" ([link])

[15] "The Smells of Africa" ([link])

[16] ""Smells like dead animals" and other complaints made about a pet treat factory in Rino" ([link])

[17] "Stench across Southern California highly unusual, officials say" ([link])

[18] "Bad odor this morning came from paper plant 50 miles away" ([link])

[19] "Possible source of Rocklin smell could be miles away" ([link])

[20] Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung. Das T4-Reinhardt Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka, 2013 Hamburger Edition, p. 254. According to the table on that page, 211,600 – 234,600 people were killed at Treblinka in October 1942, more than in any other month.

[21] See the blog "The Clueless Duo and early corpse incineration in Treblinka and Belzec", by Sergey Romanov ([link]). One of the testimonies addressed therein, that of Richard Glazar, quotes rumors whereby the corpses were being burned because "There’s not enough room to bury them". Mattogno’s lengthy rambling in the magnum opus against witnesses mentioning early corpse incineration at Treblinka (especially Rajzman) will be addressed in another blog.

[22] Extermination Camps, p. 1101.

[23] Quoted in the Judgment LG Hagen vom 20.12.1966, 11 Ks 1/64, see translated excerpt under [link]

[24] Experten der Vernichtung, pp. 427 to 431. Where numbers are given for a larger period (e.g. 186,200 to 199,500 deportees from Warsaw between 22.7 and 18.8 and between 25.8 and 27.8.1942) I divided the lower number by the number of days in the period.

[25] Australian Museum, "Stages of Decomposition" - "Stage 3: Putrefaction - 4 to 10 days after death" ([link])

[26] As explained in the blog "Challenge to Supporters of the Revisionist Transit Camp Theory" ([link]), names of "transited" Jews would be all over the place if the "transit camp" theory were more than hollow humbug, but not a single such name has become known in over seven decades since the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps were closed down. The challenge to provide one such name (with proof) is hereby extended to Mr. Mattogno.

[27] Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues. ([link])

[28] Extermination Camps, p. 1250.