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Notes -
Here are some other gems from Yechiel Reichmann including claims of:
The Germans building a special incinerator in Treblinka to exterminate British Jews after Hitler conquered Great Britain:
And blood that burst into flames like fuel:
Reichmann also falsely identified the American-Ukrainian citizen John Demjanjuk as a Treblinka guard known as "Ivan the Terrible." Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death, but the conviction was overturned because it turned out all the Jewish witnesses which had identified him were "mistaken."
Things to keep it mind when you are trying to gauge the credibility of Rajchman's claim that thousands of people were cremated with "dry branches", or that blood seeped from the earth and burst into flames.
The Nazi leadership were delusional. They believed they could turn the tide until the very end of the war. Hitler's megalomaniacal redevelopment of Berlin was only put on hold in March 1943, after his defeat in Stalingrad. Even in late 1944, they were expending military resources to destroy artefacts and buildings of no military value in Warsaw. The notion is hardly "laughable".
That sounds like methane or other decomposition products from the bodies, cf. landfill fires. It is not nearly as preposterous as you are claiming that a giant pile of corpses that had been decaying for a long time could burst into flames and burn for a day. Presumably those present were not familiar with the nature of anaerobic decomposition, which is why they misidentified the substance as blood, which, of course, it was not.
Therefore, a plausible explanation exists for both of those claims. Of course, it's just speculation, but you were implying that both claims are patently ridiculous and could not possibly be true.
You consider it plausible that the Germans built a large incinerator in Treblinka for British Jews who would be deported there after Hitler captured Great Britain? It's not plausible at all. There's no documentation for such a nonsensical plan. Such a device as described by Reichmann is not described in any documents or other witness testimonies, and you won't find a single mainstream historian who makes this claim today. There are multiple "mini-legends" within the Treblinka narrative that try to gave the British/Americans more stake in the Treblinka narrative, and that was one of them that didn't make its way into mainstream historiography. You have outed yourself as being incapable of assessing the plausibility of claims made by witnesses. Your judgement is obviously too clouded by your biases on the issue.
There's a difference between planning for victory and "you know what, let's just go ahead and build a large incinerator for British Jews for when Hitler gets around to conquering Great Britain, so they can be sent here to Treblinka." I can't begin to describe how asinine the assertion is. Needless to say, it did not happen, and it discredits Reichmann's account along with all of his other assertions.
Decomposing/decomposed bodies are not flammable. The methane gases would escape in the open pit, and blood is not flammable. Bodies cannot sustain a fire for a day, and the decomposition would reduce the body mass that would provide energy. Even during a short cremation, the body mass cannot sustain a cremation and external heat has to be added to maintain temperatures. 250,000 bodies bursting into flames, with flammable blood seeping to the surface and burning for an entire day is a propaganda hoax. It did not happen, and it's unbelievable to me that you would think that this actually happened.
Reichmann says that over a million corpses were buried in Treblinka before being unburied and burned, and that particular mass grave with 250,000 bodies was only on grave of eleven mass graves. Do you think it's possible to bury a million people in 5 football fields?
It's astounding how much nonsense you are willing to believe without any concrete physical evidence or without the claims even being remotely possible. But believing this story requires belief in the impossible, because the official narrative makes impossible claims only supported by witnesses who lack credibility and have an obvious motive to lie.
Absent other evidence, and without further investigation, I would not immediately dismiss allegations of the Nazis building special facilities for British Jews in early 1943. Thankfully, you have now provided evidence that it didn't happen.
But why should this one claim, which is apparently likely false, entirely discredit the account? Eyewitness testimony is known to be quite unreliable, and I can imagine that all sorts of rumours were circulating at the time, see e.g. the soap-from-fat myth. All it shows is that eyewitness accounts should be interpreted critically and shouldn't be taken at face value, which is something we already knew.
The gas can slowly seep from the ground and catch fire when exposed to an ignition source, and then burn for a while. This is exactly what happens in landfill fires.
Of course not. My hypothesis is that some kind of liquid resulting from the decomposition process was misidentified as blood, and that this liquid and/or the associated vapours are what caught fire.
I'm not saying the bodies themselves burned. I'm speculating that they released a flammable gas which could have burned for a day. The remains of the bodies would then have to be cremated separately.
I'm not sure where you got "5 football fields" from, but I will go with it. According to a unit conversion website, 5 football fields is approximately 26,700 m2. The website you linked mentions a depth of four storeys or "between 8 and 12 meters". This website, which I found on the Wikipedia article for the Treblinka camp, says the burial ditches were "10m deep". So, 10 metres seems like a reasonable assumption. This gives us a volume of 267,000 m3. To bury a million corpses therein, one would need to bury around four corpses per cubic metre, which is very much plausible.
The best piece of physical evidence I have is the missing six million Jews. Where did they all go? If Treblinka was merely a transit camp, where did the Jews transit afterwards? Compare the pre-war and post-war census data in Europe, especially Eastern Europe. Even accounting for emigration, millions of Jews disappeared.
In general, I think census data is a reliable source for estimating the number of victims. I'm not familiar with the details of the Holocaust in Europe as a whole, so the best example I can provide is the Jasenovac concentration camp. Shortly after WWII, it was estimated that around 600,000 people were killed there. These estimates were widely accepted, including by the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Later claims went as high as a million or more. In the 1980s, two researchers independently arrived at much lower estimates based on demographic data. Eventually, after the end of communist censorship, a new consensus formed that the number of victims is around 100,000, an order of magnitude lower than previous estimates.
This shows that it is entirely to possible for new research to greatly lower the estimated number of victims. There is no conspiracy to suppress the truth. Indeed, despite the number six million being embedded in popular culture, some credible historians place it at closer to five million. Yad Vashem says "the number of victims was between five and six million".
What is the motive to lie?
You are asking why a witness claiming something that did not happen discredits the account? It increases the probability that the witness is lying. You suggest that the witness maybe just heard a false rumor, but you don't consider the possibility that the witness lied in order to increase the stakes of what he claimed to witness. There were other aspects of this happening, it's a pattern. Revisionists don't have to prove the witness is lying about everying, they just have to show the witness accounts are not sufficient evidence to establish what is being claimed.
That is good for you to acknowledge, but you are not interpreting the eyewitness accounts critically. For example, you take it for granted for granted that the entire 2 hectares of area conceivably had burial pits of 10 meters deep. No pits of 10 meters have been identified nor excavated, but apparently you do not require any physical investigation of these 10 meter pits in order to be sure they existed. The area burial density is unlike any other grave in human history, not even close. It is not plausible absent concrete, physical evidence which does not exist. Of those 2 hectares, 0% has been shown to actually cover mass graves of any depth, much less mass graves 10 meters deep for the entire area.
A million people buried in 2 hectares would be by far the most dense grave of carcasses in human history. It's not a plausible claim unless there is significant physical evidence to support it, and there is not. You rely on witness testimony to assert the plausibility of the claims.
Edit: A Revisionist has also compared burial density of other (real) concentration camp mass graves to the alleged Treblinka mass graves. Again, the real concentration camp graves resemble other known mass graves and the Treblinka mass graves you are alleging resemble nothing in history.
Furthermore, the historical position is not that these claims are plausible, it's that they are certain and there is no doubt the claims are true. Your assertion that "if 100% of 2 hectares was one giant pit that was 10 meters deep then it would be plausible" is a weak position in the face of official historiography, which has a much stronger position than "plausible."
Do you also think it's "plausible" that 5,000-7,000 people were cremated on outdoor pyres every single day? Do you think the truth of that claim is as certain as it is claimed by mainstream historiography? Do you also think it's plausible that these cremations were done without fuel?
The motive to lie is that a political prisoner detained and subject to harsh conditions has a reason to want to exact revenge against the defeated adversary. He might exaggerate the crimes committed by his captors or entirely make up claims that would be used against them in court and subject them to punishment.
In the trial of John Demjanjuk, Reichmann was one of 9 "Treblinka witnesses" who misidentified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" in court. Do you think this was random circumstance, or do you think the misidentification was motivated by other factors? "Other factors" would include fame for participating in the Israeli show-trial and political clout- being celebrated by the global media for being a witness who identified "Ivan the Terrible." There is also a nationalistic motive, as Jewish nationalism is closely tied to Holocaust lore, having a conviction for a Treblinka guard in Israel would be a propaganda win for Jewish nationalism write large.
It even turned out that one of the witnesses who identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible", Eliahu Rosenberg had testified in 1947 that "Ivan the Terrible" was killed in the Treblinka revolt. So that witness, Rosenberg, who made a big scene when he asked to "look into the eyes of Demjanjuk" to identify him, testified decades earlier that Ivan the Terrible was dead only to testify in the trial that it was John Demjanjuk. This cannot be said to be a case of mistaken identity. Why would Rosenberg testify that Ivan the Terrible was killed, and then identify him in a trial decades later?
The motives for false testimony are numerous, and systematically false testimony is not unusual either. It was a common features in witch trials and Soviet show-trials.
I agree on this point, broadly speaking.
You clearly know much more about Treblinka than I do, so I'm not sure if I can provide any good counterarguments. Let's suppose, then, for the sake of the argument, that the archaeological evidence for the "official narrative" is insufficient. That means we don't know what exactly was done with the Jews.
Other evidence exists for the claim that over 700,000 people were killed at Treblinka, such as the Höfle Telegram and the Korherr Report. But looking at them, thanks to the euphemisms used, I suppose they might also be interpreted as supporting the transit camp theory.
However, you did not address the question in my previous post: if Treblinka was merely a transit camp, where did the Jews transit from there? Where were the hundreds of thousands of eyewitnesses after the war who testified that they passed through Treblinka and were peacefully resettled?
And more broadly, demographic data has millions of Jews unaccounted for after the war. Where did they all go? Or do you accept the rest of the "official narrative" and are only sceptical with regard to Treblinka? Auschwitz had proper crematoria, with fuel and everything – do you believe that over a million people were killed there?
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