[innguest]

I don't mean to be down-voted so I ask honestly, how can we accept Treblinka as an extermination camp in the face of all the Jewish testimonies attesting to it being a transit camp?

Arad denies emphatically that Treblinka could have possibly been a transit camp and says "all that arrived were killed within 15 minutes", but he has not commented on the testimonies from Shoah Foundation's own tapes who describe stopping at Treblinka for a few days on their way East.

This is a complicated field of study made all the more touchy by the fact it is easily politicized so I'd be interested only if you have comments on how to coalesce these two realities (extermination vs transit camp) in the face of the evidence. We can avoid inflammatory discussion.

Video zlFCvQttOv8 on Youtube has the video testimonies. I won't link to it here due to its inflammatory title.

[abritinthebay]

Because there were multiple camps under the Treblinka banner.

Treblinka I was a forced work camp. They had transit stops, and people came in and out of here. That's what most stories about it being a transit camp are.

Treblinka II was probably the largest extermination camp in terms of "output". 700,000--900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers and around 2,000 Romani people.

There were so many corpses they had to exhume their mass graves and burn bodies on pyres. In 2010 there were 3 previously unknown mass graves discovered.

That there was a duality is not unknown, that it was an extermination camp is not controversial. The evidence is clear.

[scott_karana]

> I don't mean to be down-voted so I ask honestly, how can we accept Treblinka as an extermination camp in the face of all the Jewish testimonies attesting to it being a transit camp?

There were two "Treblinkas", and both of them changed over time.

How can we consider it an extermination camp? Due to the 800,000 bodies that were exhumed, and the testimony of the gas-chamber murderers.

That body of evidence should outweigh the survivorship bias of those few who were in-fact transited through it at specific times.