The Operation Reinhard Death Camps Revised And Expanded Edition

Under the code name Operation Reinhard, more than one and a half million Jews were murdered between 1942 and 1943 in the concentration camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Unlike more well-known camps, which were used both for slave labor and extermination, these camps existed purely to murder Jews. Few victims survived to tell their stories, and the camps were largely forgotten after they were dismantled in 1943. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps bears eloquent witness to this horrific tragedy. This newly revised and expanded edition includes new material on the history of the Jews under German occupation in Poland; the execution and timing of Operation Reinhard; information about the ghettos in Lublin, Warsaw, Krakow, Radom, and Galicia; and updated numbers of the victims who were murdered during deportations. In addition to documenting the horror of the camps, Yitzhak Arad recounts the stories of those courageous enough to struggle against the Nazis and their "final solution." Arad's work retrieves the experiences of Operation Reinhard's victims and survivors from obscurity and exposes a terrible chapter in humanity’s history.

Between the years 1942 and 1943, under the code name Operation Reinhard, more than one and a half million Jews were gassed in the concentration camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Jewish survivors of the operation numbered fewer than 200. Yitzhak Arad reveals here the complete story of Operation Reinhard for the first time. Using sources previously overlooked, such as German and Polish official records and testimonies from Nazi war criminal trials, Arad records the history of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka death camps from their construction in 1941 to their destruction in 1943. He describes the camps' physical layouts, the process of extermination used, and the actions of the SS men and Ukrainian guards who operated the camps. Arad tells the tale of the death camps' inmates -- though many of their lives lasted but a few hours following their arrival --he underground organizations, the revolts and escapes, and the details concerning the day-to-day survival of those spared instant death in the gas chambers. Arad's work retrieves the experience of Operation Reinhard's victims and survivors from obscurity and bears eloquent witness to the tragedy which was theirs. Biographical Statement: Yitzhak Arad, Chairman of Yad Vashem, Holocaust Remembrance Authority, is a lecturer in Jewish History at the University of Tel Aviv and author of Ghetto in Flames: Story of the Vilna Ghetto.

After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they quickly began persecuting anyone who was Jewish. Millions were shoved into ghettos and forced to live under the swastika. Death camps were built and something called "Operation Reinhard" was set into motion. Its goal? To murder all the Jews of Poland. The Commandant of Lubizec is a harrowing account of a death camp that never actually existed but easily could have in the Nazi state. It is a sensitive, accurate retelling of a place that went about the business of genocide. Told as a historical account in a documentary style, it explores the atmosphere of a death camp. It describes what it was like to watch the trains roll in, and it probes into the mind of its commandant, Hans-Peter Guth. How could he murder thousands of people each day and then go home to laugh with his children? This is not only an unflinching portrayal of the machinery of the gas chambers, it is also the story of how prisoners burned the camp to the ground and fled into the woods. It is a story of rebellion and survival. It is a story of life amid death. With a strong eye towards the history of the Holocaust, The Commandant of Lubizec compels us to look at these extermination centers anew. It disquiets us with the knowledge that similar events actually took place in camps like Bełzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The history of Lubizec, although a work of fiction, is a chillingly blunt distillation of real life events. It asks that we look again at "Operation Reinhard". It brings voice to the silenced. It demands that we bear witness.

In the 1950s, the policy of the West German law courts was to limit the number of Germans who could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity during the Nazi era, thereby preserving the old state elites who had been accomplices to the Nazi regime, among them the judiciary, 90% of whom had been Nazi party members. The number of Nazi criminals prosecuted in West Germany dropped throughout the 1950s. The Einsatzgruppen trial at Ulm in 1958 showed that many Nazi criminals held positions in the Federal Republic's administration. An investigation of the Nazi death camps was initiated by the Ludwigsburg Office in 1959. Focuses on three trials against former staff members of three camps: the Bełżec trial held in München in 1963-64; the Treblinka trial held in Düsseldorf in 1964-65; and the Sobibór trial in Hagen in 1964-65. Contends that despite their sometimes doubtful past, the trial judges acted in good faith within the bounds of West German law. The prosecutors based their cases on eyewitness testimonies. The Bełżec trial proved to be a debacle (all of the defendants but one were acquitted), primarily because only one survivor was found to testify. In Treblinka and Sobibór, successful uprisings of prisoners in 1943 helped many of them to survive and later to give evidence at the respective trials; at these trials, most of the defendants were convicted.

Chil Rajchman, a Polish Jew, was arrested with his younger sister in 1942 and sent to Treblinka, a death camp where more than 750,000 were murdered before it was abandoned by German soldiers. His sister was sent to the gas chambers, but Rajchman escaped execution, working for ten months under incessant threats and beatings as a barber, a clothes-sorter, a corpse-carrier, a puller of teeth from those same bodies. In August 1943, there was an uprising at the camp, and Rajchman was among the handful of men who managed to escape. In 1945, he set down this account, a plain, unembellished and exact record of the raw horror he endured every day. This unique testimony, which has remained in the sole possession of his family ever since, has never before been published in English. For its description of unspeakably cruelty, Treblinka is a memoir that will not be superseded. In addition to Rajchman's account, this volume will include the complete text of Vasily Grossman's "The Hell of Treblinka," one of the first descriptions of a Nazi extermination camp; a powerful and harrowing piece of journalism written only weeks after the camp was dissolved.

Ever since the authors of the present study started publishing, together or separately, thorough studies about the most prominent German camps of the WWII era which are generally referred to as extermination camps, orthodox historians have made it a point to intentionally ignore these studies which they seem unable to refute. This eerie silence ended only in late 2011 when several members of the exterminationist Holocaust Controversies blog published a 570 page-long online study titled Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. With it they claim to refute three of our authors' monographs on the camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (see vols. 9, 19 and 8 of the Holocaust Handbooks series). This lengthy orthodox critique forced our three authors to go back to the sources. After a year of archival and library research, the rebuttal of their detractors' critique was finally complete, and a few months later Mattogno's major contributions to it were translated into English. After a 6-months-lasting process of thorough fact-checking and archival verification by peer reviewers, the results were released to the public. This work has occupied the most knowledgeable revisionists for a year and more. Today's leading revisionists consider this their ultimate response and final word on the subject. As to the contents of this book, the casual reader may be warned: This work cannot be read like a novel. It is a point-by-point response to the above-mentioned Holocaust Controversies bloggers' PDF file (accessible on their website) and can be understood only in that context. It also requires that the reader be familiar with the authors' three monographs on the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka camps, all of which can be accessed and downloaded on this website. It goes without saying that it is neither easy nor profitable to publish such a huge two-volume opus which will find only a very small audience. In order to make the text a little more readable and to reduce the volume of the printed version slightly, it does include only the English translations of any foreign language sources quoted. The full foreign language text can be found in the extended PDF version. Since this PDF file is accessible to everyone and can thus be searched, we have refrained from creating a cost-prohibitive index. In summarizing the book's conclusions, Jurgen Graf writes in his Epilogue: "Holocaust Controversies had all the time they needed to write their "refutation." They were assisted by a host of Holocaust historians they diligently enumerate in their introduction. It did not help them a bit. [...] Since the exterminationist position with regards to these two topics [gas chambers and eyewitnesses] is hopeless from the beginning, Myers had myriads of opportunities to make a fool of himself, and he missed not a single one of them. [...] However, the most preposterous chapters of the pamphlet are undoubtedly the two last ones, written by [...] Roberto Muehlenkamp, who unsuccessfully tried to prove that during World War II the eternal laws of nature had to pause so that the evil Nazis could carry out their massacre in chemical slaughterhouses and get rid of the bodies without significant use of fuel. [Muehlenkamp] knew exactly that Mattogno, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of all problems related to cremation, would react to his challenge and make mincemeat of his chapters, to use Romanov's poetic formulation for the last time. Is Muehlenkamp perhaps a masochist? Does he relish the role of the circus clown who is pelted with eggs to the roaring laughter of the audience? Now he has egg all over his face. I do not feel a bit sorry for him because he asked for it." This study consists of two parts, each with roughly 700 pages, hence a total of almost 1,400 pages. This is Part 2. It cannot be read without the first part!"

Ever since the authors of the present study started publishing, together or separately, thorough studies about the most prominent German camps of the WWII era which are generally referred to as extermination camps, orthodox historians have made it a point to intentionally ignore these studies which they seem unable to refute. This eerie silence ended only in late 2011 when several members of the exterminationist Holocaust Controversies blog published a 570 page-long online study titled Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. With it they claim to refute three of our authors' monographs on the camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (see vols. 9, 19 and 8 of the Holocaust Handbooks series). This lengthy orthodox critique forced our three authors to go back to the sources. After a year of archival and library research, the rebuttal of their detractors' critique was finally complete, and a few months later Mattogno's major contributions to it were translated into English. After a 6-months-lasting process of thorough fact-checking and archival verification by peer reviewers, the results were released to the public. This work has occupied the most knowledgeable revisionists for a year and more. Today's leading revisionists consider this their ultimate response and final word on the subject. As to the contents of this book, the casual reader may be warned: This work cannot be read like a novel. It is a point-by-point response to the above-mentioned Holocaust Controversies bloggers' PDF file (accessible on their website) and can be understood only in that context. It also requires that the reader be familiar with the authors' three monographs on the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka camps, all of which can be accessed and downloaded on this website. It goes without saying that it is neither easy nor profitable to publish such a huge two-volume opus which will find only a very small audience. In order to make the text a little more readable and to reduce the volume of the printed version slightly, it does include only the English translations of any foreign language sources quoted. The full foreign language text can be found in the extended PDF version. Since this PDF file is accessible to everyone and can thus be searched, we have refrained from creating a cost-prohibitive index. In summarizing the book's conclusions, Jurgen Graf writes in his Epilogue: "Holocaust Controversies had all the time they needed to write their "refutation." They were assisted by a host of Holocaust historians they diligently enumerate in their introduction. It did not help them a bit. [...] Since the exterminationist position with regards to these two topics [gas chambers and eyewitnesses] is hopeless from the beginning, Myers had myriads of opportunities to make a fool of himself, and he missed not a single one of them. [...] However, the most preposterous chapters of the pamphlet are undoubtedly the two last ones, written by [...] Roberto Muehlenkamp, who unsuccessfully tried to prove that during World War II the eternal laws of nature had to pause so that the evil Nazis could carry out their massacre in chemical slaughterhouses and get rid of the bodies without significant use of fuel. [Muehlenkamp] knew exactly that Mattogno, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of all problems related to cremation, would react to his challenge and make mincemeat of his chapters, to use Romanov's poetic formulation for the last time. Is Muehlenkamp perhaps a masochist? Does he relish the role of the circus clown who is pelted with eggs to the roaring laughter of the audience? Now he has egg all over his face. I do not feel a bit sorry for him because he asked for it." This study consists of two parts, each with roughly 700 pages, hence a total of almost 1,400 pages. This is Part 1. It cannot be read without Part 2 (ISBN 1591480884)"

This true story of a revolt at a Nazi death camp, newly updated, is “a memorable and moving saga, full of anger and anguish, a reminder never to forget” (San Francisco Chronicle). On October 14, 1943, six hundred Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it safely into the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the rest of the war. In this edition of Escape from Sobibor, fully updated in 2012, Richard Rashke tells their stories, based on his interviews with eighteen of the survivors. It vividly describes the biggest prisoner escape of World War II. A story of unimaginable cruelty. A story of courage and a fierce desire to live and to tell the world what truly went on behind those barbed wire fences.