That feel when I’ve been running this website for almost a year and haven’t written an article about Chelmno yet.

In fact, before I read the fabulist Holocaust Encyclopedia (HE) entry on Chelmno, I had no idea the official story was so dumb. If you are a Holocaust believer, I want you to take off your emotionally manipulated-since-childhood hat and put on your thinking cap. If something sounds convoluted and stupid, it is because it is convoluted and stupid. Don’t second guess yourself. There is absolutely no reason to take the claims of the Holocaust fabulists at face value.
This is the story of the killing operations in Chelmno according to HE:
Guarded by members of the Special Detachment, the victims disembarked one truck at a time in the courtyard of the manor house. SS officials, often wearing white coats to create the impression that they were physicians, explained to the deportees that they would go to Germany as laborers, but first had to bathe and have their clothes disinfected. The Jews then entered the manor house. Once inside they were led to a back room where they undressed and handed over their valuables against receipts to a Polish civilian, who was employed by the special detachment. SS and police personnel led the naked prisoners to the cellar, where they had to walk down a ramp sloping into the back of a large paneled truck that could hold 50–70 persons. When the back of the van was full, the doors were closed and sealed. The mechanic on duty attached a tube to the van’s exhaust pipe and then started the engine, pumping carbon monoxide gas into the space where the prisoners were crowded, killing them by asphyxiation. After the victims were dead, the tube was detached from the exhaust pipe, and the van, now full of corpses, was driven to the forest camp, where the bodies were transferred into previously excavated mass graves. Any victims found to be still alive as the corpses were being unloaded were shot by SS and police officials on duty at the forest camp.
If this sound like a story out of a spooky movie rather than something that happened in real life, don’t dismiss your own judgement. Holocaust fabulists want you to believe that a layperson cannot think for themselves when it comes to the Holocaust. This is simply not the case; you have every right to question the claims that Holocaust historians and officials claim.
The claims about Chelmno would be easy to verify as you could just find the mass graves in the woods and investigate them. However, there are no mass graves in the woods. As usual, Holocaust fabulists have a just-so story for the lack of mass graves. About this HE states:
Beginning in September 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners, presumably brought from outside the Wartheland District, was forced to exhume and cremate any remaining corpses from the mass graves at Chelmno as part of Operation 1005 and to obliterate any other evidence of mass murder operations. The SS and police shot about half of the 80-man detachment after this work was done in November 1944. The Germans abandoned the Chelmno killing center on January 17, 1945, as the Soviet army approached. The SS killed at least 172,000 people at Chelmno between December 1941 and March 1943 and in June/July 1944.
We’re supposed to believe that at least 172,000 (or 320,000 if you ask Wikidpedia) people in Chelmno were killed in batches of 50-70 in gas vans, taken to the woods and buried, and then later exhumed and cremated. Germans digging up bodies at a later time and burning them to hide evidence is a common theme in Holocaust lore. It is absurd that the Germans wouldn’t have thought about, or bothered to, hide evidence of their alleged mass murders until several months into the process.
To break down the fabulist story of Chelmno, we need to start with the gas vans. There is no physical evidence of the gas vans having ever existed as none of these alleged gas vans survived the war. Not even a part of one or a wreck of one was found. Nor were there any instructions or manuals on how to retrofit the vans to make them murder machines. (source pages 18-19). Nor are there any pictures (source pages 34-35). This means that, as usual, the Holocaust fabulists must rely on testimony.
In June of 1945 Polish investigative judge Władysław Bednarz interrogated several individuals about Chelmno. In their entry on Chelmno, the revisionist Holocaust Encyclopedia has conveniently made a list of the problems with this testimony regarding Chelmno and gas vans:
- Walter Burmeister claimed that he drove and operated a Renault gas van with a fanciful, nonsensical piping system, none of which existed even according to the orthodox narrative. (See the entry dedicated to him.)
- Bronisław Falborski asserted to have repaired the exhaust system of a gas van, yet his description of the system is absurdly nonsensical, and he falsely identified a harmless Magirus truck at the Ostrowski factory grounds as the gas van he repaired. (See the entry dedicated to him.)
- Michał Podchlebnik also falsely identified a harmless Magirus truck at the Ostrowski factory grounds as one of the gas vans he saw in operation, and made up a string of other absurd claims, such as that the inmates, before climbing in the gas van, were handed towels and soap—a reflection of gas chamber rumors going rampant in post-war Poland. (See the entry dedicated to him.)
- Szymon Srebrnik also misidentified a harmless Magirus truck at the Ostrowski factory grounds as one of the gas vans he saw in operation, and he filled his tale to the brim with absurd stories. (See the entry dedicated to him.)
- Mieczysław Żurawski gave the fewest details of all witnesses, but where he made specific claims, they are clearly wrong. He insisted that the Magirus truck at the Ostrowski factory grounds was merely a disinfestation van, but later, during the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, he tried “correcting” this “mistake.” (See the entry dedicated to him.)
For more troublesome testimony, I suggest reading the revisionist Holocaust Encyclopedia on Chelmno here.
Finally, we have the issue that the gas vans couldn’t have worked in the way that Holocaust fabulists claim. I have previously written on this topic here. The takeaway is that Holocaust fabulists say that the exhaust was pumped into an airtight compartment. This is a problem, because one of two things would have happened before anyone would have died from inhalation of the exhaust. One, the container would have burst from the excess pressure of exhaust being pumped in. Or, two, the engine would have failed. See Santiago Alvarez’s book, The Gas Vans—A Critical Investigation, if you would like in-depth information about the alleged gas vans.
To close out part one I’d like to share this image of a “gas trailer” I found on DeathCamps.org. It made me chuckle.
Continue to part two where I discuss forensic investigations of Chelmno.
Obviously after months or in some cases years underground, there would be nothing left of human corpses to burn (except bones, and even modern high temperature gas cremation does not turn human bones to ash) — you might as well try to incinerate a wheelbarrow full of moist dirt.
>… a just-so story for the lack of mass graves.
Their existence could still be detected via ground penetrating radar, which would reveal the disturbance underground.
>The SS and police shot about half of the 80-man detachment …
Rather careless of the Germans, who per the ‘fabulists’ had no regard for human life, to leave so many witnesses — do the ‘fabulists’ offer a rationale for that?