Poswolski, Henryk

Henryk Poswolski was a Polish Jew deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp in January 1943, where he was employed as a bricklayer and stoker. However, he was not working at the camp’s extermination sector, which was physically and optically cordoned off from the rest of the camp. (What he was stoking, then, remains a mystery.) Therefore, he had no access to it, and no first-hand knowledge about it. His hearsay story includes the following claims:

  • The homicidal gas chambers even had washbasins installed to fool the victims. This is a unique claim that makes no sense, unless those basins actually worked.
  • Two of the gas chambers had collapsible floors. “Under the floor passed carts with which the corpses were carried away.” This claim, usually connected with the Sobibór Camp, is unique for Treblinka, technically extremely challenging and thus unlikely, completely unfounded, and rejected by all historians, orthodox or heterodox.
  • A Diesel engine first created a vacuum, then introduced engine-exhaust gases. However, diesel exhaust is unsuited for mass murder, and creating a vacuum in a brick-and-mortar building is technically impossible (the external pressure would crush the walls), hence most certainly was not done.
  • The bodies were burned using not wood, but a “certain white powder” as an evidently magical flame accelerant.
  • Himmler visited the camp in March 1943, ordering that all buried corpses be burned. In fact, there is no trace of Himmler ever visiting the Treblinka Camp.

This is yet another example of why testimonies from hearsay should never be permitted, either in courts of law or in historiography. (For more details, see Mattogno 2021e, pp. 159f.)

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