Because of conversations that I had with German officers that served in Poland and in Russia, I heard the most fantastic horror stories. When after that the sudden death notice of my mentally ill sister in law was received, I decided not to rest before I had discovered what was true of all the horror stories and of the killing of the insane. All my effort was now to get in touch with prominent SS-men in Poland and to completely gain their trust. After months I thus succeeded to visit two so-called Tötungsanstalten. The first one that I visited was in Belsjek on the road Lemberg-Lublin; the second one in Treblinka about 80 km north of Warsaw. There are two more in Poland, but I did not succeed in obtaining access there.
The two Anstalten named above are situated in sparsely populated forests and heaths. From the outside, these do not look different from the normal concentration camps. A wooden gate with some inscription ending on "-heim" gives passers-by no reason to suspect a murder lair.
From all occupied territories of Europe arrive trains with victims. The trains consist of cattle wagons, the openings covered with barbed wire. Every wagon contains 120 persons. In normal weather conditions approximately 90 % arrive alive, although it had happened once last summer that 50 % had died because of lack of water. If the wagons arrived in the camp, the people are beaten out with a whip and then driven into surrounding barracks and then locked up. The next day or a few days later, depending on what the supply has been, 700-800 people are rounded up on a court-yard. They are then ordered to undress completely, clothes are to be put in neat piles, while shoes are to be put in rows beside each other. Entirely nakes, the man, women and children are now driven in a long corridor fenced in with barbed wire. Ukrainian criminals now start to cut and shave the hair of the the women and children, the hair is carefully collected and serves lates as "Dichtungen" (gaskets) for submarines. For many hours these miserable people are forced to stand in this way in the bitter cold or the burning sun. When some collaps exhausted by the singing heat or the cold, the brutes lash with their whips the naked bodies of these poor people. The suffering and misery in these corridors beggars all description. Mothers try to warm their naked infants with their naked bodies. Almost nobody talks, only their eyes speak a nameless pain and dull resignation.
The corridor ends at an iron door of a brick building. The door is opened and 700-800 death-doomed are beaten in with the whip till they like sardines in a tin cannot move anymore. A little boy of three years old that tried to run out was met with whips and driven back. After that, the doors were closed hermetically. Outside the building now a big tractor is started, the exhaust of which enters the building.
Through a small glass window I now was allowed to observe from outside the effect on the inside. Packed the poor people awaited their last moments. There was no panic, no screaming, just a weak mumbling was heard outside, as if a common prayer rose to heaven. Within an hour, everybody was dead. Sashes were raised from the outside, so that the carbon monoxide could escape. After half an hour, a number of Jews arrived - they thank their lives to the lugubrious work that starts now. They open a back door, and have to take out the bodies of the gassed. Before taking them to the prepared lime pits, they have to take the rings from the fingers, open the mouths and take out the gold teeth if their are any.
In every Anstalt statistics are kept of the number of Tötungen. Per day i.e. per 24 hours three of four Tötungen are executed. For the four Anstalten together, this amounts to 8-9000 per day. In total, already 6½ million people have been killed this way, of which 4 million Jews and 2½ million insane and so-called Deutschfeindlichen. The program encompasses 16½ million people, these are all Jews in the occupied territories and all Polish and Czech intellectuals. From higher up their is pressure to hurry up and the possibility is considered of finding a more efficient way of killing. Cyanide gas has been proposed, but does not seem to have been used thus far, so that killing still takes place in the cynical way described here.
The originals in Dutch (from L. de Jong, Een sterfgeval te Auswitz):
