Steam death
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Holocaust
revisionism[back]
Treblinka
See: Zyklon B Gassing Diesel gassing
At the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, two conflicting stories were given:
steaming and gassing. Former Treblinka prisoner Samuel Rajzman testified that
Jews were killed there in gas chambers. (note 10) (To confuse matters still
more, a few months earlier Rajzman claimed that during the time he was in
Treblinka, Jews were "suffocated to death" there with a machine that pumped air
out of death chambers.)
American prosecutors at the main Nuremberg trial supported
the steam story. As proof, a Polish government report dated December 5, 1945,
was submitted as prosecution exhibit USA-293. It charged that Jews were killed
at the camp "by suffocating them in steam-filled chambers." This report, which
says nothing about poison gas killings, was published in the official Nuremberg
trial record as document PS-3311. An American prosecutor quoted from this report
during his address to the Tribunal on December 14, 1945.
Although no reputable historian now supports the "steam"
story, and little has been heard of it during the last several decades, it was
revived in a widely-circulated booklet published in 1979 and 1985 by the
influential Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
There may have been a factual basis for the "steam chamber"
stories. It is quite possible that there was indeed some kind of steaming
operation at Treblinka -- but one designed to kill disease-carrying lice, not
people. Such disinfection steaming was commonly used in German camps for Allied
prisoners of war. [1992] Treblinka by Mark Weber
and Andrew Allen
I mentioned several claims about Treblinka that were once widely believed but which no serious historian now accepts. I cited the charge by the U.S. prosecution at the main Nuremberg trial that masses of Jews were killed at Treblinka not by gassing, as is now generally claimed, but by steam in so-called Steam chambers." (Nuremberg document PS-3311). And at the Nuremberg trial against Oswald Pohl, U.S. judge Musmanno said that Jews were killed at Treblinka by gas, steam and electric current. (NMT "green series," Vol. 5, pp. 1133-1134.) My Role in the [Ernst] Zündel Trial
Weber took several minutes to deal with claims presented in one of the most widely distributed pieces of Holocaust propaganda. He held up a copy of The Record: The Holocaust in History, a publication of the Zionist Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith that purports to be a reliable account of how Europe's Jews were treated between 1933 and 1945. According to The Record, said Weber, no less two million Jews were killed at Treblinka alone. But it does not claim that the victims were shot or gassed, which is the generally accepted story these days, but maintains instead that they were steamed to death -- a story no reputable historian now accepts. [1996] Debating the Undebatable: The Weber-Shermer Clash