Harry Reid compared Syria’s use of chemical weapons to “Nazi gas chambers”

The Times of Israel featured a news report today with the headline:

Reid compares Assad’s attacks to Nazi gas chambers

Senate majority leader tries to drum up support in Congress for American military actions against Syria

This quote is from the news report:  “Millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war were murdered in Nazi death camps, Treblinka and Auschwitz.”

So that’s what happened during World War II?  Prisoners of War were murdered at Treblinka and Auschwitz.

Were any of the Nazis ever charged with killing Prisoners of War at Treblinka or Auschwitz? Not that I know of.

I searched and searched on Wikipedia (the official website for the history of the Holocaust) and found nothing about Prisoners of War being sent to Treblinka and Auschwitz to be murdered.

Reid might have selected the name Treblinka to mention because this camp has been in the news recently.

Symbolic cemetery at Treblinka has 17,000 stones in honor of the towns and villages from which the victims, who were killed at Treblinka, came

The photo above shows the symbolic cemetery, which is located on a knoll, at the top of a gentle slope, on the site of the former Treblinka extermination camp. The symbolic cemetery is a large circular area with 17,000 stones of various sizes and colors set into concrete. When I visited Treblinka in October 1998, my tour guide told me that 130 of the stones have the names of the cities or towns from which the victims were deported to the death camp.

Strangely, there are no stones in honor of the Prisoners of War who were murdered at Treblinka, according to Harry Reid.

My tour guide informed me that the ashes of the 800,000 people who were murdered here were dumped in this area and are now hidden underneath the concrete of the symbolic cemetery and by the grass and tiny flowers which cover the area.

One of the 17,000 symbolic stones represents the city of Kielce in central Poland, where 42 Jews were killed by a mob of Polish citizens in a pogrom on July 4, 1946, long after the Nazi occupation of Poland had ended.

Since my visit to Treblinka in 1998, I have learned that some tour guides now tell visitors that the number of 17,000 stones in the symbolic cemetery represents the highest number of Jews that were gassed in a single day when the camp was in operation. Others say that the number 17,000 represents the number of Jewish communities that were destroyed in the Holocaust.

Stone in honor of Janusz Korczak at Treblinka

The photo above shows a stone, in the symbolic cemetery at Treblinka, which was placed there in honor of Janusz Korczak, the only person to have his name on a stone. There are 17,000 stones in the symbolic cemetery and 700 of them represent the Jewish communities in Poland that were destroyed in the Holocaust. Most of the stones are small and have no writing on them. In the foreground of the photo is the stone for the victims from the town of Staszow in Poland.

Harry Reid should raise money for a stone to be put at Treblinka, in honor of the Prisoners of War who were murdered there.

Kurt Franz the last Commandant at Treblinka

The man shown in the photo above is Kurt Franz, notorious Nazi war criminal, who was the last Commandant of Treblinka.  He was such a nice man that the prisoners nicknamed him Lalka, the Yiddish word for “Doll.”  Is this the guy who killed Prisoners of War at Treblinka?

Kurt Franz, the last Commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp

Kurt Franz the last Commandant of Treblinka

I have been doing some more research on Treblinka II, one of the Nazi “death camps,” and Kurt Franz, the last Commandant of Treblinka II. (Treblinka I was a “labor camp.”) From this website, I have found a description of Kurt Franz, which mentions that he served in the Buchenwald camp in 1941, the same year that the zoo in Buchenwald was built by Karl Otto Koch.  I am now ready to concede that the photo that was found in the private album of Kurt Franz was taken at Buchenwald.  So The Black Rabbit of Inlé , who is a regular reader of my blog, is correct in identifying the photo of bears in a zoo, as a photo taken at Buchenwald, not Treblinka.  The photo of the bears was incorrectly identified by the Yad Vashem museum.

Photo of bears in the Buchenwald zoo

Why is all this important? It is important because there is a wealth of misinformation about the Holocaust and numerous Holocaust and World War II photos that are fake or misidentified.  It has gotten to the point that you can’t trust anything anymore.  A big Thank You to all the revisionists who are working hard on the Holocaust story. I happen to know that “the Black Rabbit” is young and British.  He is doing some fantastic work in setting the Holocaust story straight.  Thank God that there are young people today who are carrying on this important work.

The following quote is from the deathcamps.org website:

FRANZ, Kurt Hubert SS-Untersturmführer SS-Number: 319 906
17/01/1914 – 04/07/1998

BACKGROUND:
Not a member of NSDAP or affiliated organizations. Belonged to the Waffen-SS.

Born in Düsseldorf. Extended elementary school from 1920-1928 in Düsseldorf.
Since 1929 he was trained as a cook, at first in the restaurant “Hirschquelle”, then in “Hotel Wittelsbacher Hof” in Düsseldorf without final examination. Soldier during 1935 – 1937. In October 1937 he joined the Waffen-SS (3. SS-Totenkopfstandarte Thüringen). End of 1939 summoned to the Führer’s Chancellery and detailed for service as cook in the euthanasia institutes at Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein and Brandenburg.
As member of the 6th battalion he served at the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1941 (SS Clothing Department, perhaps cook).
On 30 January 1940 he was promoted SS-Unterscharführer, in 1941 (?) SS-Scharführer. During Spring 1942 ordered to the Generalgouvernement.

Treblinka is very important to the Holocaust story because it is second only to Auschwitz in the number of Jews who were allegedly killed by the Nazis. Between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were allegedly killed at Treblinka, compared to an estimated 1.1 million to 1.5 million who died of all causes at Auschwitz.

The first Commandant of the Treblinka “death camp” was SS-Obersturmführer Irmfried Eberl, who held this position from July 1942 to September 1942. He was succeeded by SS-Obersturmführer Franz Stangl, who served as the Commandant from September 1942 to August 1943. Prior to his service at Treblinka, Stangl had been the commander of the Sobibor death camp and before that, he was on the staff at Schloss Hartheim, where mentally and physically disabled Germans were sent to be killed.

The 3rd and last Commandant of the Treblinka “death camp” was SS-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz who was the commander from August 1943 until October 3, 1943. Franz was a handsome man who was nicknamed “Lalka” by the Jewish prisoners at Treblinka. The word Lalka, or Lalke, is the Yiddish word for doll.

The Treblinka “death camp” was located 62 miles northeast of Warsaw, near the railroad junction at the village of Malkinia Górna, which is located 1.5 miles from the train station in the tiny village of Treblinka.

Raul Hilberg stated in his three-volume book, The Destruction of the European Jews, that there were six Nazi extermination centers, including Treblinka. The other extermination camps were at Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. All six of the “death camps” were located in what is now Poland. The last two camps in the list also functioned as forced labor camps (Zwangsarbeitslager), and were still operational shortly before being liberated by the Soviet Union towards the end of the war in 1944 and early 1945.

The camps at Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno had already been liquidated by the Germans before the Soviet soldiers arrived, and there was no remaining evidence of the extermination of millions of Jews. The combined total of the deaths at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor was 1.5 million, according to Raul Hilberg.

This quote, regarding the service of Kurt Franz at Treblinka, is from the deathcamps.org website:

SERVICE AT BELZEC AND TREBLINKA: [Kurt Franz] Kommandant of Treblinka, from 27 August 1943 – November 1943.In spring 1942 (as SS-Scharführer) to Belzec. On 20 April promoted SS-Oberscharführer. He worked as cook, and trained the Ukrainian guards there. In August/September 1942 he was ordered to Treblinka where he took over the Ukrainian guard squads and rose to be deputy camp commandant. Commandant of Treblinka, from 27 August 1943 until November 1943. Promoted SS-Untersturmführer on 21 June 1943.Franz was the dominant personality in Treblinka when it came to the day-to-day running of the camp, and especially with regard to the prisoners. To the prisoners Franz was the cruellest and most frightening among the SS personnel in the camp. His physical appearance was extremely deceiving: he was nice-looking; he had a round, almost baby- face; and he was younger than most of the other SS men. He was therefore nicknamed “Lalke” (“doll” in Yiddish) by the prisoners. However, he was a murderer and a sadist who made the prisoners’ lives a nightmare.

Not according to the book Treblinka, written by Jean-Francois Steiner. In his book, Steiner devotes a lot of pages to the description of the parties and marriages in the Treblinka II camp.  Kurt Franz brought in women for the Jews who worked in the camp, but he performed marriages before men and women were allowed to live together.  This indicates to me that Kurt Franz was a very moral and considerate man.  He also set up an orchestra for the workers at Treblinka. How could a man like that be a “murderer and a sadist”?  I think that Kurt Franz was a decent man, and because of this, he had to be demonized by the Holocaustians.

This quote is also from the deathcamps.org website:

Mostly, when Franz made the rounds of the Lower Camp and the extermination area, his dog Barry accompanied him (Barry’s first owner was Paul Groth, Sobibor). Depending on his mood, Franz set the dog on inmates who for some reason had attracted his attention. The command to which the dog responded was, “Man, go get that dog!” By “Man” Franz meant Barry; the “dog” was the inmate whom Barry was supposed to attack. Barry would bite his victim wherever he could catch him. The dog was the size of a calf so that, unlike smaller dogs, his shoulders reached to the buttocks and abdomen of a man of average size. For this reason he frequently bit his victims in the buttocks, in the abdomen and often, in the case of male inmates, in the genitals, sometimes partially biting them off. When the inmate was not very strong, the dog could knock him to the ground and maul him beyond recognition. But when the defendant Franz was not around, Barry was a different dog. With Franz not there to influence him, he allowed himself to be petted and even teased, without harming anyone. (Donat, p.313)

The dog named Barry

Note that the dog named Barry was at Sobibor at one time.  This settles another question about Barry, who was apparently at both Sobibor and Treblinka. However, I am not convinced that Kurt Franz actually commanded his dog to attack the prisoners.

If  Treblinka was not a “death camp,” what happened to the 900,000 people who were sent there? Treblinka was one of the Operation Reinhard camps, which the Nazis set up after the Wannsee Conference.  The Nazis claimed that these camps were set up as transit camps for Jewish “Transportation to the East.”

Is there any evidence that the Jews were resettled in the East?

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the head of all the Nazi camps, was responsible resettling many people during World War II.  By March 1943,  he had resettled 629,000 ethnic Germans from the Baltic countries into the Polish territory that had been incorporated into the Greater German Reich in October 1939.

Himmler was also responsible for deporting 365,000 Poles, from the part of Poland that was incorporated into the Greater German Reich, to occupied Poland. He also deported 295,000 citizens from Luxembourg and the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, after these places were incorporated into the Greater German Reich.

All of this had been accomplished by Himmler by March 1943 when Dr. Korherr, who was Himmler’s chief statistician, made his report on what had happened to the Jews who were living in Eastern Poland.

In 2000, a document called the Höfle Telegram was discovered by Holocaust historians in the Public Records Office in Kew, England. This document consists of two intercepted encoded messages, both of which were sent from Lublin on January 11, 1943 by SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle, and marked “state secret.” One message was sent to Adolf Eichmann in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin and the other to SS-Oberststurmbannführer Franz Heim, deputy commander of the Security Police (SIPO) at the headquarters of German-occupied Poland in Krakow.

The encoded messages gave the number of arrivals at the Operation Reinhard camps during the previous two weeks and the following totals for Jews sent to the Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Lublin (Majdanek) camps in 1942:

Treblinka, 71,355; Belzec, 434,500; Sobibor, 101,370; and Majdanek, 24,733.

The number for Treblinka, 71,355, was a typographical error; the correct number should be 713,555, based on the total given. The total “arrivals” for the four camps matches the total of 1,274,166 “evacuated” Jews in the Korherr Report.

So there is proof that 1.275 million Jews were transported to the East, but where is the proof that they were killed?

The Treblinka zoo

Update: July 16, 2013   Read my later posts about the zoo here and here.

Continue reading my original post:

There is a discussion in the comments section of my blog, regarding a photo in the Yad Vashem Museum which shows bears in a zoo.  The following words are included in the museum’s caption of the photo, which is shown below:

The photograph is from the private album of Kurt Franz from the time of his service as Deputy Commandant of Treblinka. The album was presented by the prosecution at Franz’s trial in Dusseldorf during the years 1964-5.

Photo of bears at Treblinka, enhanced in PhotoShop

Kurt Franz was the Commandant of the Treblinka camp when a zoo was built in the camp.  Franz was never stationed at Buchenwald, and as far as I know, he never visited Buchenwald.  If the above photo of bears in a zoo was taken at Buchenwald, why would Kurt Franz have had this photo in his private photo album? (I have since learned that Kurt Franz did serve at Buchenwald during the time that the zoo was built there.)

In my home library, I have a copy of the book entitled Treblinka, The inspiring story of the 600 Jews who revolted against their murderers and burned a Nazi death camp to the ground, written by Jean-Francois Steiner. Today, I read the entire book again, looking for any mention of the zoo at Treblinka.

This quote is from page 338 in Steiner’s book:

Halfway up the main street [in the Treblinka camp] there branched off to the left another, smaller street […] Later, in early Spring, an offshoot of this road was built to the west; it led to a zoo that was being laid out. […] In the center of the park was a hexagonal building covered with little birch logs. On each side of the building were the cages: there was a cage for the birds, a cage for the squirrels, et cetera.

There is no mention, anywhere in this 415 page book, of bears in the Treblinka zoo.  However, in the quote from the book which I wrote above, “little birch logs” are mentioned. On the left side of the photo, there are little birch logs.  There are no little birch logs in photos of the Buchenwald zoo.

On page 398 of Steiner’s book, there is this quote:

At Camp Number One [ the camp for the SS officers] an S.S. officer strolls slowly through the zoological garden.

I would not describe the Buchenwald zoo as a “garden,” whereas the photo, which I think was taken at Treblinka, could be described as a photo of bears in a “zoological garden.”

For all of these reasons, I believe that the photo above was taken at Treblinka.