Smith's Report #180 | 15Mar2011 | Thomas Kues
http://www.codoh.com/newsite/sr/online/sr_180.pdf

New “Memorial Center” Planned for the Sobibór “Death Camp

Some five months ago, on 17 August 2010, the Zionist news site YNet published the following item:

"Israel will continue to support efforts to set up a memorial center at Sobibor, according to an agreement reached by the director general of the Ministry of Information and Diaspora Affairs Ronen Plot and the Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev, with Dr. Andzrej Konrat, who is in charge of Holocaust remembrance in Poland.

"The agreement is in keeping with the statement of intentions agreed upon in 2008 by Israel, Poland, Slovakia and the Netherlands.

"Almost nothing remained of the Sobibor Nazi death camp in Poland at the end of the war. The creation of a memorial center is the result of cooperative research by Poland’s council for the memory of war victims, headed by Minister Konrat, and Israel’s Ministry of Information and Diaspora Affairs and Foreign Ministry, directed by Yad Vashem researchers and assisted by Slovakia and the Netherlands.

"For this purpose, an inter-national committee of experts was established, and digs were carried out at the site to determine the precise location of the gas chambers.

"The memorial center project, estimated to cost some 6 million euros ($8 million), is currently in its first planning stages. Decisions about an international competition for planning the building and decisions on budget allocation will be made in a joint meeting next month in Warsaw, in which all participating countries will be present. The center is due to be completed by October 2013, the 70th anniversary of the prisoners’ uprising at the camp.

"‘We see this as a sacred joint obligation to remember the past and the victims,’ said Konrat during the meeting.

"‘I welcome Polish cooperation and the importance the minister gives to remembering the Holocaust,’ the director-general of the Ministry of Information said. ‘The establishment of a center at the death camp in which some 250,000 Jews were killed is an important part in education… and a part of the struggle against all those who would deny it happened.’"

The above news notice is a sure sign that the guardians of the orthodox holocaust story feel a growing desperation confronted with the mass of revisionist criticism of the gas-chamber mythos, and that accordingly they are resorting to certain under-handed strategies in order to prevent further research at the former sites of the “pure extermination camps” of Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka (collectively known as the Reinhardt camps), research which could only cause further damage to the orthodox historiography.

In the case of Treblinka, most of the former camp site was covered with slabs of concrete and large stones already in the 1960s. In Belzec, where an archeological survey was carried out in the late 1990s (with devastating results for the official historical picture of this “death camp,” cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, Theses & Dissertations Press 2004, pp. 71-96), the whole of the former campsite was covered in the early 2000s with an enormous concrete “monument”. It would not be exactly surprising if Sobibór is now headed for a similar fate, although thus far there has been no news on the progress of the installation of the new memorial (the website of the Sobibór memorial/museum, http://www.sobibor.edu.pl, also appears to be down).

The YNet item contains two passages of particular note. First, the Israeli minister Ronen Plot is quoted as speaking of 250,000 Sobibór victims. Even though this figure may well still be used by encyclopedias, guidebooks and the like, it has in fact been untenable since the discovery of the so-called Höfle document in 2000. This document shows that 101,370 Jews

Also in "Object E" were discovered numerous remains of clothing and toilet articles, such as hairclips, perfume bottles, belts etc. The suppos-ed gas chamber victims on the other hand are alleged to have entered the chambers of death already naked.

were deported to Sobibór up until the end of 1942. The camp was in use until October 1943, but all sources agree that the number of Jews deported to Sobibór during 1943 was much smaller than that of 1942. Thus the leading extermin-ationist expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis, nowadays states the victim figure as approximately 170,000.

Secondly, we read in the article that an “international committee of experts” has carried out a survey at the former camp site in order to “determine the precise location of the gas chambers.” In fact not one but two archeological surveys have been carried out for this purpose. The first documented survey took place in 2000-2001 and was headed by the Polish archeology professor Andrzej Kola (who also led the abovementioned survey at Belzec); the second one in 2007-2008 was conducted by the Israeli-Polish trio Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek. There is also a mysterious third excavation: holocaust historian Martin Gilbert in a travel journal reveals that archeological digs for the cremation pyres reported by eyewitnesses were carried out in 1996 (Holocaust Journey, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1997, p. 250). Nothing has ever been published on this survey, which no doubt would be completely unknown if it wasn't for Gilbert's itinerary coincidentally taking him to the site at the right time.

Andrzej Kola surveyed the whole of “Lager III” -- the fenced-off section of the camp wherein the alleged gas chamber building supposedly was located and which covers less than 4 hectares -- with probe drillings and subsequently carried out archeological digs at five identified building remains. Of these, "Object E" was identified in the south-west corner of Lager III, exactly where the gas chamber building was located according to maps drawn by the eyewitnesses. The problem with this discovery is that "Object E" in no way corresponds to the witness descriptions of the building. The six gas chambers in the camp were allegedly arranged three and three alongside a central corridor inside a brick or concrete building measuring approximately 10 x 13-18 meters.

"Object E" on the other hand consists of two barracks built completely out of wood, the smaller one measuring 14 x 4 m, the larger one no less than 60-80 x 6 m! Remarkably enough, not a single eyewitness has spoken of this enormous wooden barrack, the dimensions of which as well as construction material makes it impossible to identify with the alleged gas chamber building (the same naturally goes for the smaller barrack). Also in "Object E" were discovered numerous remains of clothing and toilet articles, such as hairclips, perfume bottles, belts etc. The supposed gas chamber victims on the other hand are alleged to have entered the chambers of death already naked.

These finds made Kola dismiss in his excavation report the hypothesis that "Object E" could have served as the gas chamber building. Instead, he proposed the hypothesis -- which has no support in eyewitness testimony -- that the larger barrack served as a magazine for the confiscated clothing and belongings of the gas chamber victims (cf. J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books 2010, pp. 157-162).

None of the four other building remains identified by Kola in the former Lager III were even close to fitting the descriptions of the searched-for gas-chamber building. Another remarkable find, however, was “Object A,” a small building with a cellar in which were found remains from an oven and coal storage. Kola somewhat halfheartedly interprets this as the remains of a blacksmith’s workshop, despite the fact that there already existed a blacksmith in another part of the camp, and a small camp such as Sobibór would hardly need two blacksmiths. Besides, what would the use be of a blacksmith’s workshop in a camp section supposedly devoted only to the gassing, burial and cremation of the alleged victims (cf. ibid., pp. 153- 155)? In our study of Sobibór Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno and I have interpreted “Object A” as an installation in which clothing and other items were deloused using heated air or steam (produced by the oven), and “Object E” as a delousing barrack in which the Jews deported to the camp were showered and deloused before being sent further east to the German-occupied part of the Soviet Union (ibid., pp. 286-287).

In the total absence of evidence supporting the Sobibór mass gassing allega-tions, the guardians of the extermination camp legend such as Avner Shalev and Andrzej Konrat have no other option than to resort to obfuscation of facts and prevention of further research, all disguised as “commemoration.”

The archeological survey carried out at Sobibór 2007-2008 by the trio Gilead-Haimi-Mazurek has been published only with extreme brevity in an article published last year in the American journal Present Pasts ("Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres", Vol. I, 2009). In this article we read that the three archeologists “acting on the assumption” that they “knew roughly where the gas chamber was located (…) decided to dig first in the area bordering the west wall of Kola’s Building E.” In this area, however, one found no building remains whatsoever (ibid., p. 27). Later, in summer 2008, the team was reinforced by American geophysicists equipped with, among other things, ground-penetrating radar. Despite the aid of advanced technology and the fact that Lager III had already been mapped out by Kola, they failed miserably with detecting any remains of the fabled gas chambers, and in the 2009 article one had to grudgingly admit that “[i]t is obvious that the location of the gas chambers is a complex issue that has to be solved, an important objective for future archaeological research at Sobibór” (ibid., p. 33f).

In other words: the “international committee of experts” spoken about in the YNet news notice has not found any trace of the alleged homicidal gas chambers of Sobibór, despite two surveys and a very limited area to search through. The explanation for this is of course simple: the alleged gas chambers never existed in the first place, and could therefore not leave any remains.

In our study, Mattogno, Graf and I have presented a wide assortment of evidence which unequivocally shows that Sobibór in fact was a transit camp -- as it was designated in a classified internal communication between the SS leader Heinrich Himmler and the SS camp administrator Oswald Pohl in the summer of 1943 (Nuremberg document NO-482) -- in which deported Jews were deloused and then sent on eastwards, for example to Lithuania (J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór..., see especially chapters 9 and 10).

In the total absence of evidence supporting the Sobibór mass gassing allegations, the guardians of the extermination camp legend such as Avner Shalev and Andrzej Konrat have no other option than to resort to obfuscation of facts and prevention of further research, all disguised as “commemoration.”

Meanwhile, in Munich, the trial against John Demjanjuk for his alleged assistance in the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibór continues. Fifteen months have now passed since it commenced on 30 November 2009. The progress of the trial has repeatedly been delayed due to the defendant's steadily worsening health. Indeed, it is possible that Demjanjuk, who will turn 91 on 3 April this year, will not live to see the end of it. On 21 February the German Press Agency (DPA) reported that the trial had now entered its final phase and that a verdict is expected on 23 March 2011 this year, but it would not be surprising if this date were postponed.

The people staging this grotesque farce seem determined to go on persecuting this dying nonagenarian, no matter what. Media attention on the case appears to be gradually waning, though, despite it probably being the last major "Nazi war crimes trial." Samuel Kunz, a former Belzec guard who was called to witness in Munich and who then himself became the target of a criminal investigation, died some months ago. Alex Nagorny, another witness, is now under investigation for participation in alleged mass murders at Treblinka, according to a notice from the Associated Press on 19 February 2011. However, considering that Nagorny is 94 years old, it does not seem very likely that he will live to stand trial.

Recently Demjanjuk's defence attorney, Ulrich Busch, stated that he had gained access to new evidence contradicting the late key witness Ignat Danilchenko's statements from 1949 and 1979 to the effect that Demjanjuk had participated in mass killings of Jews at Sobibór. Demjanjuk's son in turn commented on this recent development saying: "This case has been fraught with government coverup, prosecutorial misconduct and fraud over the years and this is but another chapter of the same" (Canadian Press, 8 February 2011).

People who have spent considerable time observing the proceedings in Munich first-hand have informed me that during all of the sessions to date, the issue of the technical evidence for the 27,900 cases of murder that Demjanjuk allegedly assisted through his alleged presence as a guard at the Sobibór camp has not been mentioned.

Despite the misconduct with regard to the investigation of the alleged presence of Demjanjuk at Sobibór, a scandal vastly greater is the fact that the alleged murders in question have never been proven to have taken place with hard evidence. People who have spent considerable time observing the proceedings in Munich first-hand have informed me that during all of the sessions to date, the issue of the technical evidence for the 27,900 cases of murder that Demjanjuk allegedly assisted through his alleged presence as a guard at the Sobibór camp has not been mentioned. This should of course not surprise us, as the situation has been the same in countless previous German war-crime trials. The existence of the gas chambers and the mass murders allegedly carried out using these legendary contraptions has simply been considered an a priori fact and taken judicial notice of.

As for Sobibór, the existence of the alleged gas chambers in that camp was debated neither at the 1966 Sobibór trial in Hagen, nor at the two trials against members of the camp personnel in 1950 (even though at that time the accused, Hubert Gomerski, stated that only some 25-30,000 deaths occured at Sobibór). That the new Demjanjuk trial -- where, nota bene, the foremost expert on the camp, Jules Schelvis, has appeared as a joint plaintiff -- has been conducted so far with complete disregard of the archeological evidence uncovered by Professor Kola as well as other important exonerating evidence (I am thinking here especially of the diary entries of the Vilna Jew, Herman Kruk, which confirm that transports of Dutch Jews were arriving in Lithuania at the same time as the alleged mass gassings of Dutch Jews at Sobibór which Demjanjuk supposedly assisted in) clearly demonstrates that we are here dealing with a show trial, and that the official Sobibór story can only be maintained by the obfuscation and banishment of facts.
"The very existence of [Holocaust denial] statutes could very well add credibility to the claims of the deniers.
Precisely because they cannot be refuted, the deniers will claim, must their ideas be ruled
outside the pale of legitimate discussion." J. Rosenblum, Jerusalem Post Magazine