Samuel Rajzman
[back] Holocaust revisionism  [back] Treblinka

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