Ep. 18- Treblinka with Chad Gibbs

The Treblinka extermination center was responsible for the murder of approximately 925,000 Jews during the Holocaust.  It was the deadliest killing site after Auschwitz.  Yet few people know that it was also the scene of a successful uprising and mass escape by the prisoners there.

In this conversation with Chad Gibbs, we talked about the history of the camp as well as the work he has done in recreating the vital social networks among prisoners that enabled the prisoner revolt.

Chad Gibbs is an Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies and the Director of Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston.  His forthcoming book deals with the history of the prisoner uprising at Treblinka.

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman (00:00.461)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Bourne. And today I am very pleased to have with me Chad Gibbs, who is an historian of the Holocaust with a focus on Treblinka. And a lot of us know about some of the places where there were uprisings, revolts, most notably Sobibor. But there also was an uprising that was successful as well at Treblinka. And...

Chad is an expert on this. He's going to be talking with us. And I'm also really, really proud to point out that Chad at one point and one moment in time was one of my students who has now become the master as he is now a professor in his own right. So the circle is now complete. Chad, welcome to the podcast.

Chad's Computer (00:51.376)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Waitman (00:52.941)
Can you tell us a little about, yeah, man, tell us a little about, you know, give us your introduction, where you come from, how you got into this particular topic as well.

Chad's Computer (01:01.168)
Sure. Well, it seems like forever ago, but I'm from Wyoming and Northern Illinois. I usually just tell people Wyoming to keep things simple, but I was in the Army like yourself for a good piece of time. And after the service, kind of looked around for a minute thinking about what comes next, went to college. And long story short, I found out I was actually not terrible at it, even though I thought...

This is probably not going to work out well. And many moons later, I've ended up three years into my position here at the College of Charleston, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Zucker Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies here at the College of Charleston. And really just loving it. It's been going great here.

Waitman (01:48.557)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:53.037)
Yeah, I was going to say like, we are, we are sort of the, they're not a lot of us, the sort of like army to, army to academia pipeline is not, is not typical.

Chad's Computer (02:05.168)
No, it's not a four lane highway, that one. It's more of a dirt trail.

Waitman (02:10.157)
I'm imagining that, you know, that meme of like the car like swerving off the highway onto the exit ramp. That's kind of like, that's kind of us. Though I will say, I'll be curious what you think about this, but the longer I'm in academia, the more I feel like academia is basically the army without the weapons. Like the bureaucracy is still the same and like the politics are still the same. It's just, you know, different context.

Chad's Computer (02:28.24)
entirely that entirely.

Chad's Computer (02:35.952)
100%, 100%. Nothing different about it. You move from one campus to another, it's just like learning a new post. It's the same everywhere you go. It is entirely the army with different silly hats.

Waitman (02:51.021)
It's right. Yeah. The army with, with more brightly colored costumes. Cool. So tell us about this project. Cause I know that you have a book coming out, not out yet, but well and truly on its way about Tripolinka. So how did you get in? How did you get into, into is the wrong word, but how'd you get into Tripolinka?

Chad's Computer (02:52.592)
No.

Chad's Computer (02:57.232)
Yes.

Chad's Computer (03:14.448)
Well, I get to talk about our origin story here a little bit because this goes back all the way to, well, really I'll say kind of my undergrad years. I went to Treblinka in 2011 for the first time. I was on a study abroad as an undergrad. I went to the University of Wyoming and I was studying with David Messenger. He's just an amazing scholar. He's now at University of South Alabama. But I went.

Treblinka on my birthday of all days in 2011. Yeah. And it, of course, never left me from that moment. I bought a couple of few books in this little kiosk trailer thing they had operating in the parking lot at the time, one of which was Ordinary Men. So I got my first copy of Ordinary Men on that trip and bought a couple of memoirs of people who had survived Treblinka and started reading this story and going, my.

Waitman (03:46.125)
Hooray!

Waitman (03:58.125)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (04:12.816)
I need to, I want to know more about this. And I don't actually recall why I didn't pitch this to you as my first master's thesis idea. It was my third. I can remember what the first two were. The first one was unsanctioned memorialization in Germany. Like when did people put up Holocaust memorials that the government didn't support at first, you know, when they come from the people.

Waitman (04:38.125)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (04:42.288)
the very simple reason why that one didn't end up being my path was at that time, my German wasn't good enough. And I was a little terrified of that. second one was I pitched some sort of idea about the history of Holocaust education in the United States. and I think that you wanted me to go older than that, deeper into the, into the history itself at the time. And then I threw, what about.

resistance at Treblinka. I don't know if this was a moonshot, if this was a, okay, this is the last idea I have. But I threw this idea out there and your response was, I don't know if you can do that, there's not a lot of sources. And I swear I have written an entire chapter that is about, look, I found sources. So.

Waitman (05:30.445)
So there you go. There's, there's proof positive that Wayman doesn't always know what he's talking about. There we go. I'm not, I'm not too proud to admit it. There we go.

Chad's Computer (05:34.64)
No. So that's kind of the origin of the project. It was always, how did they pull off this revolt? Some people, of course, covered it before, but I started to think that in what I had managed to read and find by that point, that it was like Treblinka was covered in books that were about wider topics.

And the coverage was a chapter on the day of the revolt itself or something. And then we're, you know, we're done. We're off to the races. That's all you can know. And I, I don't know, I kind of naively thought, well, we can do more than that, can't we? And kept digging away at it. And here we are many, many, too many years later.

Waitman (06:25.133)
Well, but I mean, that's a good example of how a lot of the scholarship, I think good scholarship happens. You know, somebody asks the question, how come we really don't have a book on this? Or how come we really don't have like, how come someone hasn't looked at this particular phenomenon? You know, and there are lots of reasons, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, about why, why not. But I think naive is the wrong word because, you know, sometimes it's good to sort of...

be the fresh pair of eyes that says, Hey, wait a second. Like, how come nobody's actually written about this thing? You know, it's kind of like pointing out a historical blind spot. You know, like it could be me. Why not me?

Chad's Computer (07:03.504)
For real, and I think, I think naivete is in it, but it's like, sometimes that keeps you from having the problems of the orthodoxy of the field. Like if you're steeped in, well, this is all we can know about Treblinka because of XYZ, then you're not kind of foolish enough or new enough to ask that out of the box question. And this is project number one for me, so I definitely didn't know.

all of the reasons why doing research on Treblinka would be difficult and charged ahead because of not knowing those things. So here we are then.

Waitman (07:36.881)
Thank you.

Waitman (07:42.381)
But I mean, that's good. Like I said, sometimes the guardrails aren't actually helpful. Sometimes it's good to sort of plow ahead and just see what happens and see where you end up in the end. So for our listeners who may not be as sort of familiar, before we skip ahead to the revolt.

Chad's Computer (08:03.984)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (08:09.133)
What is Treblinka? What is the story of Treblinka? Where does it come from? What is its significance in the Holocaust?

Chad's Computer (08:18.936)
So Treblika is one of three of the Operation Reinhardt or Actioan Reinhardt camps. So it's one of six extermination camps, but one of three of those that are underneath that wider umbrella that are Actioan Reinhardt. We are including Majdanek as an extermination camp, but not as an Actioan Reinhardt camp, yeah, which I know is a stance all its own.

Waitman (08:36.813)
No wait, are we including my Donik in this?

Waitman (08:45.069)
Okay.

Chad's Computer (08:48.816)
it's involved. No, no, I hear you. so where do these come about? I think there's plenty of disagreement on why did they come about? And I think that that is a good conversation that will keep being had. Here's my attempt at a shorthand that doesn't really throw out any of those opinions. the mass shooting phase of the Holocaust takes place. Father Patrick Dubois Holocaust by bullets.

Waitman (08:49.325)
Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

Chad's Computer (09:17.456)
And there are issues with that in the eyes of the Nazis themselves. My personal opinion would be that I think they saw that a great deal of possible plunder was leaving their own pockets by pursuing the mass shootings instead of a centralized system of murder and camps and elected to make changes to their system. So those changes are already kind of baked in.

There's a decision that's going to happen that has been made. And then they have the Vonse Conference. I think I'm staying with the kind of state of the field by saying, Vonse is not sit down, let's have a discussion about what can come after mass shooting. It's sit down, let's have a discussion about whose responsibility is what. We've already made the decision. The next phase will be murder at set piece extermination camps.

So, Vance Conference takes place January 20th, 1942. It has been slightly delayed by the entry of the United States into the war after Pearl Harbor. And what that meeting is, it's called Oxyon -Reinhardt because heading it is Reinhard Heidrich. And not long after he is killed by Czech resistance. So they name it after him. These are going to be three camps located in the general government of Oxyon.

by Poland that will be responsible for murdering the majority of Polish Jewry. So these are Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and that's kind of in the date order that they open as well. Belzec opens first in March of 1942, and Sobibor follows in May, and Treblinka follows in July 22, 1943.

None of these camps is open for very long. Treblinka's open for 11 months itself, but as the third one of the camps to open, it actually kind of, it's horrific to try to find words to say these things, but it represents like the refined Reinhardt camp in technological terms. Where are the fences? How does it control people? How does it try to streamline?

Chad's Computer (11:44.304)
this business of mass murder. So there are some hiccups with how Treblinka works. They fire an early commandant, they expand the gas chamber to a second, much larger building. But it ends up being open a little bit past the revolt. We could talk about that. I have probably opinions that vary from a bunch of folks on what goes on post -revolt. But it's open until...

November of 1943 in one way or another. Mostly it's a cleanup phase after the August 2nd 1943 revolt.

Waitman (12:17.837)
Well, it's worth pointing out, right, that there's also a Treblinka one to the technically, you know, when we talk about Treblinka in the sort of mythology of the Holocaust or the sort of popular conception of the Holocaust, we're talking about actually Treblinka two, which is the extermination camp, which, but there is a Treblinka one, right?

Chad's Computer (12:33.136)
Yes.

Yes. And we can get even more confusing because it should be thought of as Treblinka -Roman numeral one and Treblinka -Roman numeral two. Because common parlance inside of Treblinka to the extermination camp is to refer to two parts of that camp as camp one and camp two. So, you know, it can get super, super confusing. But almost every single time you hear anyone refer to Treblinka, they're talking about Treblinka two.

Waitman (12:44.781)
Right.

Waitman (12:53.517)
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Waitman (13:04.557)
And is Tripolinka I, because it's a labor camp, but is it also involved in the building of Tripolinka II, the extermination center?

Chad's Computer (13:07.984)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (13:13.584)
Peripherally, yes. So it being so close, they are going to capitalize on some personnel and prisoners to build the early camp. But mostly the builders of the early camp are Jews from the surrounding shtetls that were near Treblinka itself. So they're shipping in, oftentimes by truck, not even yet by rail, shipping in the first victims of Treblinka from those surrounding communities to force them to build it.

Some of those people sleep on the ground outdoors as they're putting up buildings. They're not even anything at the camp yet. At least one of them named Wolf Schneiderman actually survives all the way from the like pre -opening days of Treblinka through the revolt, survives the revolt. It was pretty amazing to find his story kind of just hanging there to be talked about. But he almost certainly has the longest...

Waitman (14:01.197)
Bye.

Chad's Computer (14:12.08)
tenure inside the Camp Avenger or Survivor.

Waitman (14:15.373)
That that in and of itself is amazing. You know, from what like, when does construction begin on Tripolinka?

Chad's Computer (14:19.12)
Yeah.

Chad's Computer (14:23.952)
Let's say about April, May, really May 1942.

Waitman (14:26.637)
42. Okay. Wow. Yeah. And so the first commandant right was Eberl, right? Who is it? The guy that gets fired.

Chad's Computer (14:36.592)
Yeah, a medical doctor. Yeah, he's a medical doctor from the T4 program. And 94 guards who end up in the Aktion -Reinhardt system are drawn from the T4 program. They had been in the euthanasia program. So Nazi Germany is kind of like looking at tools on a shelf. These guys with Reinhardt...

being about to be stood up and the issues with protests about...

the euthanasia program going on, they've got some people sitting there who know how to operate gas chambers and don't have gainful employment and they just send them east and turn them into the guards in Tuvalinka. And that doesn't mean that in any way, shape or form they were trained for or ready for that sort of duty. So Eberle fails at it. In the eyes of the Nazis, of course, he fails because he's not efficient enough at mass market.

And he's replaced by someone who kind of more comes from a sort of police background, Franz Stangl, who had also like been, been steeped in other camps. He had a much longer training process moving up through. Right. Correct. Yeah. So it wasn't, it wasn't his first, command of a camp either. he was much more ready for this sort of challenge. And I think probably even a little bit.

Waitman (15:56.781)
Cause he'd been at Sobibor before, right? Yeah.

Chad's Computer (16:12.496)
more ready psychologically to do these sort of things.

Waitman (16:19.469)
Yeah, I mean, like I should point out for just for the listeners, there's a fantastic book and I want to hear what you think about it. Now that you're sort of an expert on this, on this, you know, there's a fantastic book by an Israeli journalist named Gita Serenny called Into That Darkness, which is based in part on interviews with Franz Stangl when he was in prison, as well as his wife and his coworkers, but also

I think importantly of survivors of the revolt and of the camp itself. But there's an interesting way in which he's portrayed, I think by Serenny in a, I think sympathetic is too strong, but he comes across, I think sort of as a man overcome by events.

and sort of a guy who ends up sort of in the, I'm not saying this is true. That's why I wanted, I'm curious what you think, how you, where you put Stronghold on sort of the perpetrator perspective spectrum.

Chad's Computer (17:24.912)
Yeah. I think that, way I would put that would be Serenity portrays him in her book, the way he tried to portray himself to her sitting in that jail. and I don't really even, I don't think she's buying it. She's pushing at him the entire time. Like we should tell the listener too, like the point of her book. And she also interviewed Schverer, Albert Schverer, and she wrote an amazing book on Albert Schverer.

Waitman (17:36.589)
Right.

Chad's Computer (17:54.736)
The point of her book is to force in this man a moral reckoning with the fact that we haven't mentioned the death toll yet. Treblinka most likely murdered 925 ,000 Jews. So she's trying to force in him a real reckoning with the fact that the lion's share of those murdered took place under him, that he is responsible for this. And he's trying to be, he's trying to use the whole...

Waitman (18:15.981)
Right.

Chad's Computer (18:23.664)
you know, I'm just a cognitive, he's a commandant of a camp, but trying to use the whole cognitive machine. I'm not responsible, blah, blah, blah sort of thing. And then the, and you can, you can hardly believe this hasn't been made a movie yet, but, she forces in him this reckoning. He finally does sort of in their last interview discuss his own, moral universe and responsibility.

Waitman (18:45.133)
you

Chad's Computer (18:51.376)
And he goes back to his prison cell and he dies of a heart attack. Yeah. And it's like, what, like if you wrote, if you threw that out in the writer's room, they'd laugh you out. They'd be like, no, come on, that's too perfect. You can't, you can't make a movie out of that. Come on. But that's what actually took place. I love her, love her book. Absolutely love her book. It's seriously part of what launched this whole thing for me was finding that and.

Waitman (18:54.349)
Yep.

Waitman (19:05.997)
Yep.

Chad's Computer (19:18.416)
Because I was working with you and you had studied under Browning and there was all this sort of kind of between us, like these conversations about perpetrators, perpetrator mindset. And I was not yet, I had not yet made the full turn toward, now I would consider myself more interested in resistance. If somebody asked me, what are you, what do you do about in Holocaust studies? I'd say I'm a scholar of Jewish resistance. But at that point I was like,

wanting to know more about what perpetrators did. And that book was the Treblinka answer to those questions. And he's not even the only guard in there. There's a lot of telling exchanges with Franz Sukumil, a much lower ranking guard who also gave a lot of interviews to Claude Lansmann for the amazing documentary, Joa.

Waitman (19:53.293)
Yeah.

Waitman (20:09.709)
Yeah, that was the hidden camera ones, right? That was him. Yeah.

Chad's Computer (20:14.064)
Exactly. He's the one who sings the Treblinka anthem twice to the hidden camera. Just amazing stuff. But I forget where we started at. I don't know if I've answered your question.

Waitman (20:28.781)
No, I mean, it's this question. I think it's right. I think you're right. It's because Serenity in writing the book, she pushes back against his sort of kind of forest gump of the Holocaust, you know, being sort of showing up in all these places, but kind of just being the victim of events, you know, kind of thing. I mean, one of the things that I remember.

most striking from from Serenity's book and everybody should go out and read this book is when she talks to his wife and she says like, you know, do you think that if you would ask him to stop doing this? That he would have done it. And she said, yes, you know, and and Serenity's kind of like, so, you know, why wouldn't you know, why didn't you? And then but then she asks Stangle the same thing. She says, you know, basically like if.

Chad's Computer (21:18.928)
Why didn't you?

Waitman (21:24.781)
If your wife had said, it's either me or you're working in the extermination in, in, in Treblinka or so before, like, would you, would you have quit? And he says he would have quit, you know? So it's this really, I think it's, it's, it was really ahead of its time because it sort of is, is prefiguring Wendy Lauer, right. And, and the role that women play in sort of, you know, both being perpetrators, but also sort of enablers of the sort of thing, which I think is, you know, always.

Chad's Computer (21:51.536)
Yeah.

Waitman (21:55.629)
always super striking. And the second thing, which gets us a little more into the history maybe is it's kind of almost a footnote, but, you know, one of my sort of heroes, I suppose, of the Holocaust is Janusz Korsak, right? Who, you know, for the listeners who don't know, I think I've mentioned him before, but it's important I mention every time I think about it. You know, he's a, before the war, he's a...

Chad's Computer (22:11.792)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (22:22.413)
a child psychologist in Warsaw, Jewish child psychologist. He's sort of groundbreaking in, you know, he says that, which basically means there's no such thing as children, there's only people. And the idea basically, he's a child rights guy. Long before we had this idea of, you know, children being sort of independent people that have their own rights and feelings. Anyway, long story short, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that, you know, I can do whatever I want to you because I'm the parent kind of thing.

Chad's Computer (22:44.816)
Yeah, we're deep in the scene not heard era here, you know.

Waitman (22:52.717)
Anyway, Longstwich already ends up in the Warsaw ghetto. One of the things he did in addition to his scholarly work both before and during the war was run orphanages. And so one of the things he does is he runs an orphanage, several orphanages. And because he's so famous and lots of non -Jewish Poles know him as well, they give him an opportunity to escape.

When it, when it becomes clear that the ghetto is being sent to Treblinka, which is the connection here and, and core shock basically says, no, I'm going to, I'm going to take the kids. you know, because I don't, I want them to, I want to sort of protect them as long as I can from, from sort of the, the terrible things that are happening. and so there's this incredible moment where, core shock and.

Chad's Computer (23:22.032)
Yes. Yeah.

Waitman (23:47.117)
to be fair, his, his employees and his coworkers who don't get the same level of recognition, but we're also there. Many of them are women who are also there helping, but they marched through the ghetto and you can almost track this in testimonies. I've seen maps of this where people have actually mapped the route based on survivor testimony, what, where they saw, because it's core shock and all these kids and the kids are all dressed up, you know, in.

their Sunday best or whatnot. And they're singing songs because basically Korshak and his coworkers are trying to deceive them as to what they're doing. So that, you know, they think it's an outing to the countryside, et cetera. Anyway, they go to the Omshlug plots, the deportation square in the Warsaw ghetto. They end up on a train, end up in Treblinka. And the reason it gets back to the, and I'll be quiet, but the reason we get back to the Serenny piece is Serenny asks him.

whether he was there, whether he remembered Korshak and the children arriving in Treblinka. Do you remember this part in the book? It's like a tiny, tiny little moment. And he says, he doesn't, he didn't think he was there. He didn't remember, even though he was frequently on the ramp meeting people. And then I forget exactly, I forget exactly the context, but.

Chad's Computer (24:56.88)
I can't say right now that I do. No.

Waitman (25:13.261)
She said something like she left him a children's book written by Korshak in his cell or something. And it like. And that the next day when she interviewed him, he was very sort of distraught and upset. And so the the the suggestion, I suppose, is that. Is that he had been. Present when Korshak and the children arrived anyway, which gets to the point of like.

Treblinka serving as an extermination center for predominantly Warsaw, right?

Chad's Computer (25:45.52)
Yeah, that's its largest single victim group is Warsaw Jews. Just to square that circle though, when I started at the College of Charleston, I was taking over for a gentleman named Dr. Ted Rosengarten, who was headed off into retirement. And I got to take over his wonderful office here. And there was one thing that he left hanging on the tack board on the like...

Waitman (25:51.757)
Yeah, yeah.

Chad's Computer (26:14.16)
student entrance to the office and it was a picture of Janusz Korczak. And like I'm a Treblinka scholar coming here to begin a job and here is hanging on the court board, no words around it, nothing else, it's just a photo of Janusz Korczak. And I knew exactly who it was, it's not marked at all, and I of course have kept it exactly where it was, it will never go anywhere.

That's going to be where it stays for good. That's sitting there. And then I have to give my, not a job talk, I already had the job, it's the, hi, I'm new here. Let me meet the community talk. And there's a retired professor in the crowd who had written a book on one individual's experience at Treblinka. And I saw the names of the people signing into the talk when I was starting here. And I see Richard Chardkoff and I go, wait.

Waitman (26:54.381)
All right.

Chad's Computer (27:11.056)
not the author of Saul's story. And I sent a student running up to my office to grab my copy of Saul's story and bring it down and go, sir, did you write this book? And he's like, my, nobody knows my book. I'm like, well, it's now about to be in my talk that I'm about to give here, introducing myself to the Charleston community. So that was my really strange, you made the right place, sort of entrance to this job.

Waitman (27:23.021)
Yeah.

Chad's Computer (27:40.624)
relevant to Treblinka history. But so I'll go back to like, what is Treblinka? How does it work? How does it operate if you want me to? So it opens, I'm hoping that I didn't say 43 earlier, but opens its first, it's the Commandant of Treblinka sends a letter dated July 22nd, 1942, that Treblinka will be ready to receive deportees from the Neomshuk pots in.

Waitman (27:48.045)
Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Chad's Computer (28:09.392)
Warsaw, as you discussed. And the first train arrives at Treblinka the next day, July 23rd, 1943. And it is, it's the, it's kind of, I've written once, it's the cold rail geography of Poland that kind of determines who ends up murdered in which of these camps. There's other parts to that, but that pretty much gets us to the lion's share of why. So Treblinka.

is where most Warsaw Jews or Warsaw ghetto internees are sent. And it begins operating under air barrel with three carbon monoxide gas chambers. It's an old Russian tank engine that just operates at full tilt to produce carbon monoxide to operate these gas chambers. It's not like Auschwitz with the Zyklon B, all of the

Octi and Reinhard camps are carbon monoxide gas chambers. This doesn't work as fast or as efficient as the terrible word to use with it as the Nazis want. So, Abrol is replaced for various organizational flaws. And that's glossing over quite a bit, but Stangl replaces him. We go into the new year of 1943.

with a 10 room gas chamber building that's so much larger than the first that Treblinka can end up achieving that twice as many murdered as the next highest Reinhardt camp. So this is really like, I want listeners that are maybe new to this history to understand the big difference between this place and it's the other Reinhardt camps and a concentration camp.

that they might, you know, they're kind of apocryphal. You have this idea of what a concentration camp is like that is mostly formed off of Auschwitz. So what's different at Oction Reinhardt Camps is the lack of anything that would resemble a movie -esque selection. A train pulls into Treblinka, it's 20 cars at a time. They'll split up a 60 rail car train into three sections and bring in 20 at a time.

Chad's Computer (30:32.208)
People are rushed off of that train and through one ruse and another over time, constantly kind of kept from having the ability to resist. Even those who know what Treblinka is, and Jews do understand where they're being shipped later on. The Nazis try to compensate for that in a lot of different ways, but as the months wear on, people know what Treblinka is, largely because of escapees from the place itself.

But everyone is brought in, forced to undress, and sent up a fenced path, variously called by the Nazis, either the Schlauch or the Tube, or the Himmelsstraße, the Road to Heaven. And that fenced, like, 10 -foot -wide path leads straight to the door of the gas chamber. People are forced into it. Stangl says to Serenny that the whole process, and this is close to a verbatim quote, the whole process...

meaning the murder of 6 ,000 people in one day could be done by the time he sat down for lunch. So it's incredibly efficient by the time they get the 10 -room gas chamber going. And so much so that there are very few testimonies that ever speak of them. It seems like they may not have even needed to use five of those chambers. That it was just they killed all those people in one day.

just using the five on one side of the building. So they have definitely achieved their goal. They have created a place that is entirely enclosed. I'm going away from the idea that they were ever really concerned about witnessing. I think maybe you're hearing me say that. I think that they were more worried about who was capturing the valuables of these individuals that they're murdering. If you...

Waitman (32:18.893)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (32:27.984)
murder them within the confines of a camp, it's the Reich that will benefit. Because you tell them, bring all of your best worldly goods, you're never coming back to your home, you're being resettled to the east or whatever lie you're being told. That tends to get all the valuables out of the walls or under the floors or whatever and get them sewn into clothes. And then instead of having some local Ukrainian or Pole,

benefit from taking all those belongings after you shot everyone in left town. If you do that inside of a camp, you can then employ prisoners who are forced to search for all those belongings and enrich the right here in the process. So that's where I'm headed toward on what the real purpose of this was because of some of my more recent reading. I've just been really not this idea that there was ever any kind of secrecy about.

much of the Holocaust. It's kind of just not sitting well with me anymore. I'd love to talk to you about that, but that's kind of where I'm at on why.

Waitman (33:28.173)
Well, I mean, I think, I think it's interesting. It's an interesting question because I think that secrecy is important in the sense that as long as possible, I think the Nazis wanted to deceive the Jews as what was happening because of precisely what we're going to talk about later, which is once they realize really what, you know, that's when you see most of these revolts starting to happen, not just in to link it, but elsewhere. Right. But yeah, I also think on the other hand,

I mean, we can certainly make the argument right with the Holocaust by bullets. The Nazis are not trying to hide this. They just fundamentally don't care if Eastern Europeans see this because in the grand scheme of things, they're going away as well. So it's only by exception that you see the deception, which is in Western Europe. Why they're not shooting people in Western Europe. They're not.

They're not rounding up the Jews of France and murdering them in the same way for reasons, right? For reasons of deception. But I think the point is valid that ultimately, and certainly I think the other element that I think often sometimes gets overplayed is the impact this is having on the SS, right?

Chad's Computer (34:32.048)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (34:44.144)
Yes.

Waitman (34:44.941)
You know, I've heard this one and the more I think about it and the more it gets used by bad actors in the present day, it's, it's, it's, I mean, yes, it's absolutely true that the SS leadership recognizes that this is not good for people to have to shoot, you know, women and children, et cetera, et cetera. This, this is, it is what we would call today in different contexts, a moral injury of some kind, I think. but.

By and large, the Nazis solved this already with the Holocaust by bullets by having the auxiliaries do the shooting anyway. I think it's much more a logistical, it's a solution to a logistical problem. Which is we have, the Nazis have consolidated large numbers of Jews already together in a place. So why not consolidate the killing in a place as well rather than.

Chad's Computer (35:18.032)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (35:38.349)
Antart's group is okay when you're trying to sort of hit every little village from here to there. But it's much less necessary when you have Warsaw and Ljubljana and all these sort of large populations, right?

Chad's Computer (35:52.88)
Yeah, I think I got to bring in Edward Westerman's book, Drunk on Genocide there, because I think I went into excellent.

Waitman (35:59.277)
Who also, by the way, has been on the podcast. So if you're, if you're a podcast listener, he was on, he's one of our episodes too.

Chad's Computer (36:05.348)
You're going to be ready with the, and the episode number will be in the show notes or something. But he, I came away from his recent book, Drunk on Genocide, a pretty darn changed about what the Nazi concerns about alcoholism really were, what, to what level they were. Cause we kind of had that narrative, I think it was the first way that I started to understand the Holocaust is that, you know,

Waitman (36:09.613)
That's right. I almost said the episode number, but I don't remember what it was.

Chad's Computer (36:32.784)
Himmler himself had even worried about quote unquote creating a generation of drunkards and that participating in mass shootings was destroying the SS and we need to find an easier way. Westerman's book really pulls back quite a veil on that. He's not saying they drank to console themselves. He's saying they drank to celebrate. Himmler might have been concerned about the level to which they were celebrating.

Waitman (36:37.229)
Mm -hmm. Yep.

Chad's Computer (37:02.544)
but they certainly weren't getting any less willing and ready to kill through the process. So Reinhardt doesn't come around as an operation because killers don't want to kill anymore. They're just searching for a level of efficiency that they're not finding in the first method.

Waitman (37:07.469)
Yep.

Waitman (37:24.973)
Yeah. Absolutely. So tell us about then the prisoners in the camp. Because now let's move towards sort of talking about the revolt, right? Enough of the SS, enough of the perpetrators. Let's talk about the prisoners who sort of went through this and led the revolt.

Chad's Computer (37:44.976)
Yeah. So you never have a large prisoner population at Treblinka. Probably peaks around a thousand and probably isn't at 1000 very often and is not at 1000 on the day of the revolt. But you have those people inside the camp because they're sort of, as I've put it, forced to operate the machinery of death. It's like the Nazis aren't going to do any of the terrible jobs inside of Treblinka. They're going to force others to do it. So who's going to empty a gas chamber is going to be Jews.

Who's gonna turn on a gas chamber is gonna be some truff niki card These they're gonna step back from this process as much as possible and it's worth saying as a last note on German guards There's only ever about 30 of them Most of the guards are so -called Ukrainians or truff niki fallen again so -called volunteer guards from Red Army POWs So these prisoners

They come from almost entirely inside of Poland. There's a considerably important small Czech Jewish group. There is no ability to divide and rule as might have operated inside of a normal concentration camp. There's not some cadre of German so -called career criminals in here that you can make into kapos. There's not some major difference in between people that you can exploit in one way or another and that sort of.

traditional vein. And to finish that story of selection, there just isn't normally selection at Treblinka. A train of 6 ,000 people could pull in and have all 6 ,000 of them murdered. There isn't to the left for work, to the right to stay alive. It's do we need two people because the guards murdered two prisoners yesterday? Then we get two people. And we don't need large amounts of people. They're not creating...

some part of the German war effort here. The only thing they're doing is murdering people and trying to profit from the process. So it's a small population. And that's where the beginning of sort of this social networks way that I've looked at resistance inside of Treblinka begins. Because I started to notice that among many, many ways that the Nazis tried to pull themselves back from actually operating the camp was they didn't really do this election. They didn't care.

Chad's Computer (40:10.96)
They expected everyone inside the camp to die. So they're very hands off about what goes on inside it. They didn't care who got picked. The Lager Altista, a man named Alfred Galevsky, or camp elder, is the highest ranking Jewish prisoner, could walk up to the guards and go, you need my friend here. You need this man who just stepped off the train. You said you wanted the translator so that you could understand the prisoners better. He'll be your translator. Well,

The guy that Alfred Glewski actually picked to be the translator only spoke Polish. He was the world's first translator ever. He couldn't translate anything. It's just the perfect story of how they just, they didn't care. They just waved them on. yeah, take him. Samuel Willenberg shows up and he's saved by someone. He had once stopped a bunch of Polish antisemites from beating up a German Jewish boy who'd been forced into Poland before the war. Probably a Polanoktyon victim.

You've been forced into Poland. He's on the streets of Sheslikhovo and Samuel Willenberg stops these street kids from beating him up. And when he steps off the train at Treblinka, he sees that same boy he had saved those years before and asks him, how do I survive? He says, tell them you're a builder. And Willenberg had the good luck of showing up in his father's painter's smock. So they thought that looked buildery and they...

They went ahead and took that word for it. And what, what it comes down to, long story short, is that there's very few people coming into this camp at all. And everyone who is coming into the camp has a preexisting relationship with somebody who's already there. They're being picked by those, by those people who are forced to work on the arrival ramp. They're being picked by the Jews themselves. And what's really important about that is imagine trying to build.

some way of trusting individuals to put together a resistance conspiracy when you don't know them and they could sell you out for bread. So what's really, really important is these pre -Triblinga relationships. Individuals who knew one another from life before the camp and already could trust each other and say,

Chad's Computer (42:36.816)
Well, you know, we'll bring you in because I know that I can, I know I can put my faith in you. I don't have to build a relationship with you under the, under the threat of this terrible place. It's few more terrible places ever existed on planet earth. So.

Waitman (42:48.429)
Or at least at least they would have a very beginning of like you saved my life. The beginning of the relationship is one of like you you saved me. So like, you know, it's harder to sell somebody at anyway.

Chad's Computer (42:53.648)
Yeah.

Chad's Computer (42:58.64)
They weren't always happy about that. Interestingly, like one of the quotes I open a chapter with is they're not always happy about the fact that their life has been saved. Alfred Galevsky saves a man named Samuel Reisman from arriving during arrival at the camp. And Reisman's wife and children are murdered. And toward the end of the day, he comes up to Galevsky, he's like, how dare you? Why have you forced me to live in this place?

And it's just like the most chilling, amazing quote. Galevsky tells him, I didn't save you to save your life. I saved you to save your two. And this is, this is the quote to sell your life at a higher price. that you're, you're going to be in the resistance now. I need you. I didn't just pull you in to keep you alive for another couple of months inside of this place. and he was, he was put, he was put into the resistance as a trusted person. so like at the very arrival ramp, that's like your.

Waitman (43:38.413)
Hmm.

Chad's Computer (43:57.36)
your nexus of social networks. You build those relationships right there by picking who's going to be in those networks right off the ramp. And then Gulevsky has this ability to put prisoners where he thinks they'd be most efficient. He always markets everything to the Germans on account of efficiency. And I just get the impression we don't talk enough about Nazis being terrible at things.

Waitman (44:25.709)
Yeah.

Chad's Computer (44:27.024)
But they were terrible guards at Treblinka. They were not motivated. They were often drunk. They were not supposed to. Most of these people were former hospital orderlies, nurses, lower rungs of the medical field who had been sent here because they had been killing the disabled before they came to Treblinka. They didn't know how to run a camp and didn't want to.

getting rich was their biggest concern. So, Galevski could suggest to them, we should do this. It would make your life easier. And they'd be like, yeah, sure, fine. Do it. I don't care.

Waitman (45:10.957)
Yeah, it is interesting. It's worth, that's a good point because one of the, I think, stereotypes that's often unhelpful of the Nazis is as this sort of like ruthlessly efficient trains run on time, you know, like fine watch tuning kind of system when, you know, it's clearly not. And even, you know, even in the Novsky book I just finished, they have a camp photographer who is a prisoner.

Chad's Computer (45:25.232)
Yes.

Waitman (45:38.253)
and they let him walk around the camp and take pictures of whatever he wants. He also takes pictures of, you know, pose portraits for the SS and stuff, but like he's a Jewish prisoner. Amazing guy named Herman Lewinter. He's walking around the camp taking pictures. And of course he escapes. And of course he takes the negatives with him, but just like that's not a very smart thing to do. You know, like just to give a prisoner a camera and let them walk around, right?

Chad's Computer (45:54.384)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (46:03.312)
No.

Yeah.

Waitman (46:07.021)
When does the revolt or when does the.

the camp resistance start? Is it something that Galefsky himself originates or is it something that sort of has a moment where it's built up because of the camp's going to close? What's the chronology like?

Chad's Computer (46:26.032)
So I don't like the idea that it comes about because the camp closes or is about to close or something. I think that's a That's been a way that a little bit of thunder has been taken away from resistance at this place. So I push back on that quite a bit, but I Think resistance is an idea is almost immediate But it doesn't make a lot of sense the ideas that they have for the first early months. It's actually stongles

Waitman (46:39.757)
Okay, yeah, push away.

Chad's Computer (46:54.704)
reorganization of the camp is its own worst enemy. So Stangel fixes what Eibarle is doing wrong. He makes the camp more efficient. It is killing more people. Less people are escaping, but escape to warn the outside world had been the resistance planning prisoners were participating in up until Stangel's reorganization. Stangel sets the camp on a firm footing. Let's say about January 1943, things are

under the Stangl system. And escape is no longer really an option. It's not very easy anymore. They finally have some level of accountability on prisoners. Like they didn't even know how many prisoners they had most of the time at Treblinka. So like, they run everything so perfectly. I was going to make a comment from what you were saying there that somebody needs to write the book about the propaganda we still believe, but you know, don't threaten me with that.

Waitman (47:52.117)
Yeah, that's a great idea actually.

Chad's Computer (47:53.392)
someone's going to do it at some point. But so they're into resistance planning the whole time, but by January of 43, it starts to think about revolt because now they're all in the same barracks building, Camp One, or the majority of the prisoners that are in the so -called Camp One side of Treblinka Two. This is where we get back to that confusing wording. So.

They've all been moved into the same building, which the Nazis think, good, we only have to guard one building. But it's an actuality, it's the stupidest thing you could possibly do with a body of prisoners is put them all into a building that you just lock the gates on and don't even guard at night because they just spend all night plotting your demise, which is exactly what they did. So they can communicate in there perfectly. It's ridiculous guarding procedures and

Waitman (48:40.045)
Yep.

Chad's Computer (48:50.096)
They have got a plan for revolt pretty well hashed out by April of 43, and then circumstances get in the way. There's a typhus epidemic in the camp. One of the main leaders of this early drives toward revolt is killed. They go then underneath the leadership of a kapo who's

Kapos in general at Treblinka are in on the resistance. They don't have that ability to divide and rule inside of a pretty much monolithically Jewish population. But this Kapo didn't know everybody. He didn't have access to these social networks like Galevsky did. So he was planning sort of like a large scale escape. He wasn't keen to the whole idea of trying to revolt. He ends up being found with valuables. He's also killed.

Galevsky recovers by then from what may have been a typhus infection and ends up Lager Altista again. So once he's back in charge, which we could put into the summer of 1943, we are definitely in the fourth iteration of a real revolt plan and it's gonna be the one that actually works. And the idea there is, like, I sometimes look at the Sobibor revolt and think, wow.

guys just planned something that was far more attainable like that. Sobibor's revolt could be compared to Treblinka's by saying that Sobibor Jewish prisoners planned little ruses to get German guards off to the side one at a time and hit them one at a time, one at a time, one at a time until it was realized that that's what's going on. And then the whole revolt took place. At Treblinka, it was like they planned for an actual battle.

with the SS. And it was an incredibly intricate and fragile plan. And if, you know, we could fall back to our past and say Murphy's laws of combat, the first casualty of the battle is the battle plan itself. And that's exactly what happened to Blink about the plan was.

Chad's Computer (51:05.232)
take hold of different parts of the camp through convincing the Germans we need to send this work detail here, this work detail there, and in those details are all these people that Gulewski and other leaders that are in on resistance have helped put trusted individuals into. So they send all those folks out into these different places. They have gotten a hold of a key to the armory, and they've also sourced weapons from another area that we definitely have to come back to.

but it deserves its own moment. So they've gotten a hold of the key to the armory, again through another really brilliant movie -esque way of kind of capturing space and moving through guards that aren't paying enough attention. And on the day of the revolt, they're going to pull a cart up to in front of the armory itself, use their key to open it, put all the arms that they can steal into that cart.

distribute them throughout the camp under the guise of construction. The operation of construction is helping them conceal things, a la, shout out to Paul Jaskot there. But the whole thing falls apart on Day of the Revolt because they make the decision that no one else is going to die today.

if anyone looks like they're in danger, we'll start the revolt early. Very emotional sort of decision. And one of the worst guards, somebody who actually may have had a pre -war prison guard sort of background, so he was more like an actual guard than the rest of these former hospital orderlies, catches a couple of prisoners with valuables. The Reich is supposed to be profiting from...

stealing from the dead. So ever being caught with valuables is a death sentence. And he starts marching these two prisoners toward an execution area. And somebody takes a shot at him and the revolt touches off. Nobody's wearing wristwatches because those are thought of as valuables. So nobody agrees on the times that all these things take place. But we're in the early afternoon somewhere at three, four or five o 'clock. And

Chad's Computer (53:26.128)
We definitely kick off about an hour and a half, hour, hour and a half too early. Not everyone is in their attack position yet. Not everybody is armed yet. But it's absolute chaos. It was supposed to be a battle plan and it turns into just absolute chaos. But absolute chaos was enough. And about 300 Jewish prisoners got out that day. It looks like about 70 of them survived the rest of the war because the

really sad thing for a Treblinka survivor who makes it into the forest is it's August 2nd, 1943. You got 21 more months of war and Holocaust to go. So whether you make it out on that day or not, you got a long road ahead of you. And a lot of them didn't make it through the rest of the week even, because the Nazis did indeed call down a great deal of reinforcements to try to catch everyone who had gotten out of the camp. But then again, there's just a lot of people, there's one...

Terribly sad story about an individual who starved to death inside of a bunker because he was too terrified to ever leave it. And just trying to make it through the rest of the war. So we've got at least 70 revolt survivors in that way. Let's say there were 600 prisoners in the camp on the day of the revolt. We're never going to really know what that number was. 300 make it out. 300 are killed. And...

We'll put it at 705 because the only strangely exact number we have is again going back to Serenity's book. I think it was that Stongel said 105, and I hope I'm saying the right number now that I'm dealing in exactness, says that like 105 prisoners were left inside the camp alive at the end of the day. So that's your August 2nd. That early decision kicks things off too early.

They'd spent so much time trying to figure out how to get arms to all the right parts of the camp and most of the problem was that they weren't there yet when the signal went off. So...

Waitman (55:31.981)
300 get out which is pretty amazing.

Chad's Computer (55:35.632)
pretty darn amazing. And let's think about their level of success. If success is our metric, and I really don't think it should be, but people do think about resistance in terms of success a lot. Those 70 spent, many of them at least, spent the rest of their lives testifying everywhere you could call them to. It was like, trial will travel.

And Treblinka guards are convicted at a higher rate than I think, and someone will prove me wrong on this, but I have not seen a camp where the guards were convicted at a higher percentage. When they're put on trial, they are convicted. The prison sentences are by no means satisfying or fulfilling in any way. Sometimes they're getting four years or whatever, or they're getting 20 and then let out after four, like it's the story just about everywhere.

But they do end up being incarcerated quite a bit. And so...

Waitman (56:39.309)
I mean, that's an amazing observation. I hadn't thought about that, but you know, the sort of activity of survivors or not the activity of survivors as witnesses, but the fact that, you know, there's a higher percentage, you know, of guards from one place that are sort of convicted. And I'm guessing this is over multiple trials or is this one trial? Yeah.

Chad's Computer (57:02.896)
Multiple, indeed. Multiple, yeah. Two main Treblinka trials. So we have the 63 -64 Düsseldorf trial of Kurt Franz et al. It's called as 10 guards, basically with the highest ranking one they had at the time taking the case name. Kurt Franz was deputy commandant under Stangl. And then in the end phase, while it was mostly cleanup, Stangl's relieved of command after the revolt, no surprise.

And Franz is the closure commandant. He and about 10 guards are put on trial. All but one is convicted. The only one who's not convicted, some prisoners actually spoke in his defense. A man named Otto Horn, who I guess falls into that movie -esque good German category. And then there's the 70 -71 Standel trial after he's captured trying to live.

Waitman (57:53.293)
Mm.

Chad's Computer (58:02.832)
under a false identity, very Eichmann -like in South America, brought back to Germany and put on trial, convicted, goes to prison. Serrani has their interviews with him and he dies of a heart attack in prison. Treblinka trials, though, go on well into the 1980s. One takes place in the United States that leads to a pretty darn amazing story. Fedor Fedorenko is...

Basically, it's not a real trial. It's an immigration proceeding during which he ends up stripped of his American citizenship and deported to Soviet Ukraine under the Reagan administration. So like imagine Reagan peak Cold War years were putting the dude on a boat to Ukraine under Soviet authority and they promptly, I don't know how much we could call it a trial, but long story short, he ends up executed.

which caused a good deal of conversation in the United States about, do we send people to the Soviet Union to be executed even if they are former Nazi collaborators? We should have a conversation about that. So that's one of the interesting stories that comes out of it. There's a very convoluted path from the Demjanjuk trials that everyone may have watched, Netflix's Devil Next Door and all that.

Waitman (59:26.445)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (59:30.448)
There's a very convoluted, but I would argue straight line path between Treblinka survivors and the moral authority of their weight in a courtroom. And a change to German law that allows the cases that are going on to this very day. So I'll try to do that really, really quick because I think it would be interesting for listeners. But so.

Waitman (59:47.821)
Yeah, sure.

Chad's Computer (59:55.504)
There's a statute of limitations in German law, and maybe you can help me out on this because I'm not perfect at this, I don't think. A statute of limitations on most possible Nazi crimes has come in in German law by the late 1960s. You can't try murder or accessory to murder.

Waitman (01:00:11.373)
It's yeah, they well that this this causes a whole it causes a whole thing, right? Because they try to they try to institute a statute of limitations and essentially it's for crimes that have a certain length of sentence punishment. It's 15 years from the date of the of the crime.

Chad's Computer (01:00:18.11)
yeah.

Waitman (01:00:31.469)
And the people fighting back against the Germans, the German politicians fighting against it basically save, for lack of a better word, murder, first degree murder and accessory to murder. But everything else gets statute limitation. It's like aiding and abetting all this kind of thing. So yeah, but you're right. There's a moment there, which is why Ludwigsburg, the place that investigates these crimes is so important because...

just by opening a case, they could stop the clock on the, on the, the station. But anyway, sorry, go ahead.

Chad's Computer (01:01:03.312)
Yes.

Chad's Computer (01:01:07.696)
No, no, that's all that was really necessary. So I maybe had been under the, and I really want to know more about this, but it's somewhere that I'll do more research in the future. But I thought that accessory also ran out. But, and let me tell you what I understood of it. I could be wrong, but Damian goes to Israel, he's put on trial, convicted, he appeals.

And he brings forward new evidence and he's acquitted. So Damianyuk is definitely a Travniki guard. He was definitely at Oksyon -Reynhard camps. Can't be proven that he was ever at Treblinka by the time he dies. But.

Waitman (01:01:50.637)
Yeah, it's the, it's, he was, he was accused of being Ivan the terrible of Treblinka. It turns out that he was sort of Damianyuk the also terrible of Sobibor. Cause there's like a photograph of him at Sobibor, so like we know.

Chad's Computer (01:02:01.04)
Right, exactly.

Right. And we don't even, we don't even have that photograph and the facial recognition until after he's dead. But so he's in Israel. He's been stripped of his American citizenship. The Germans don't want him because they're like, he's never a German. The Ukrainians and the Russians are both like, definitely not our problem. So he's sort of stateless and sitting in Jerusalem and something has to be done. Like that can't be allowed. Like this Nazi perpetrator for.

Waitman (01:02:06.733)
Until like, yeah. Yeah.

Chad's Computer (01:02:33.424)
however you want to put it, can't be allowed to live out his days in Jerusalem. That's just nuts. So international pressure is applied. The Germans go, fine, we'll change a bit of a law. And they bring him to Germany to try him for accessory to murder. And they change, this is what I understood, I could be wrong here, but they change or a measure is pushed through that gets accessory back on the possible charges.

Waitman (01:03:01.961)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (01:03:03.448)
And Demjanjuk is the first person to be put on trial for that, dies before anything really comes of it. Because Germany couldn't, you know, the international pressure would not allow Germany to just go, he's not our problem. So that law had to be changed. And then after those Demjanjuk trials, which I'm arguing are, you know, the responsibility of these Treblinka voices that show up in the courtroom and push these things along.

We have all of these other, all of the cases since him have been accessory to murder. You know, like if you look at Groening, Oskar Groening, the accountant of Auschwitz, a man who had given really, really open interviews, never about his own moral culpability. He always walked right up to that and then walked back away from it again. But he would say where he was and everything. He was in the six part BBC documentary series about Auschwitz. And...

Waitman (01:03:38.797)
Yep.

Waitman (01:03:48.749)
Yep.

Chad's Computer (01:03:59.408)
He's put on trial for, I think it was 330 ,000 counts of accessory to murder.

Waitman (01:04:04.525)
Well, that's the thing is that, you know, the, as I understand, you're right. The way the law changes essentially is up until it changed, just being an SS guard at a concentration camp was not, was not sufficient to say essentially that you were part of a criminal conspiracy to.

to mistreat and kill these people. Like you had to prove sort of actual acts. So like, you know, up until the point you could conceivably in under German law, be it just a guy at Auschwitz. And then as the, as the law changed, also because the, the potential people that you could try at this point are no longer important people in the, in the sort of, you know, hierarchy of things. So then they changed it. So essentially that.

Now, by dint of just being in that organization at that place, you could be tried as being sort of complicit with the overall activity of the camp, which was a change in sort of the German jurisprudence towards it.

Chad's Computer (01:05:10.096)
Yeah. And what I want to like wrap that up by saying is that I need to brush up on exactly that change in jurisprudence. But the case that I really want to make, keep using those legal terms, is that it was Treblinka survivor voices that sort of began this cascade of pushing us back toward a latter day wave of attempts at justice for camp cards. That it was...

part of their work during part of the Damien Yon -Yuk debacle that sort of brought us down this road through hook and crook.

Waitman (01:05:44.429)
Well, in the Demjano case, I mean, like I want to move on to have another question about about sort of your sources and how you go about reconstructing this this history. But just as a brief aside, the Demjano case is actually a really, really interesting one in the sense that, you know,

He is put on trial in Israel, right? And it's, it's, it's, it's imagined that it's going to be kind of like another Eichmann where, you know, this is a guy who's the Ivan, the terrible of to bring up this terrible human being, you know, the worst of the worst. And, you know, a credible case is made that it's not him. And, and, and, and despite all of the sort of emotion and desire, obviously to convict him.

He's found innocent. He's found not guilty of being Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka and the Israeli Supreme Court upholds the finding, which is a pretty amazing sort of moment in that sense. And then of course it turns out that he's Ivan the also terrible of Sibyvor. Different Ivan, but also terrible. But...

Chad's Computer (01:06:51.408)
I've been calling him Ivan the also terrible myself.

Waitman (01:06:59.149)
One of the things that I remember even from way back when you were working on this, one of the things I remember spatially, right, is you were looking at maps and you were like, you know, is this map accurate, the levels of accuracy? But I think it speaks to this larger question, which is how do you as an historian tell this story in, I'm imagining, you know, almost the complete absence of any sort of...

Chad's Computer (01:07:07.056)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (01:07:28.429)
Official documentation, obviously, because this is all survivor testimony, which is documentation, but it's not sort of Nazi documentation. And it suffers all of the challenges of memory and individual perspective. So how did you do this? How does it work?

Chad's Computer (01:07:28.848)
Yeah.

Chad's Computer (01:07:37.296)
Yeah.

Chad's Computer (01:07:47.152)
Sure. Last shout out on that topic and move right into your answer afterwards, but Clara Aubin's work on Nazi immigration to the United States and people like Fedorenko and Demianyuk, I'm sure is going to be absolutely fantastic. And I can't wait to read more about it when she finishes her book. But so doing work on Treblinka, long story short, made me an oral historian. And it's...

Like that was, I came to being an oral historian kind of the old honest way was that I needed to listen to a lot of oral histories to do research on my topic. And then I started to fall in love with that method and process. So oral histories, historians have a tendency to judge really heavily. And that's a hill I'll die on. I'm very defensive of oral histories, but.

Waitman (01:08:22.029)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (01:08:43.12)
Yeah, you do need to test them. Memories aren't perfect, but they are usually not mendacious. They are somebody doing their absolute best to remember under whatever circumstance. And if you detect a little bit of deflection, you might be detecting, as I hope I've done, an untold part of the story. So I kind of have a couple of methods here is to tie together all of these methods. It's...

If it's social networks was one part of the book, well then who knew who and how can you put together a, an idea of whether or not somebody is, is kind of giving what you might call hearsay evidence or speaking from their own personal observation. And if that's one way of going about it, which is the harder way, because so few people survive, you usually can't put back together the whole social network. the easier way is to test.

their recollections against their lived geography. So you go, this individual says they saw X, Y, Z. Well, they slept here and they worked here and by camp rules, that's the only places they could be. Could they even see that? If the answer is no, they're relaying somebody else's story. So do you, if that person's testimony differs from someone else's, could that someone else's actually have laid eyes on what went on?

And then maybe that's the one you need to believe. The other person has been asked about Tablinka and they do their absolute best, however many years later, to fill in the whole story. I think there's a really good comparison here. I'll call us out both out as Iraq war veterans. Like, if somebody asks me about Iraq, they don't tend to ask me, what did Sergeant Gibbs know about his corner of Mosul?

Waitman (01:10:36.653)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (01:10:37.584)
They asked me grand strategy questions that would be better off in the hands of David Petraeus. And I'm usually left going, I have no idea, man. That one corner was all the terror I needed. so we had the tendency to ask Holocaust survivors the exact same sort of questions. We don't ask them about the corner of Warsaw they lived in. We're like, tell us about the Holocaust. And they do their absolute best to tell you about the whole thing.

Waitman (01:10:39.725)
Yep.

Yep.

Waitman (01:10:48.621)
Yep.

Waitman (01:11:00.077)
Mm.

Chad's Computer (01:11:08.08)
And you have to, you know, they, everyone in both sides of this conversation thinks they're doing the absolute right thing for posterity, but they've actually pushed a little bit beyond their lived experience a lot of the time. So testing against the geography tends to, to really help with that. And the other thing I wanted to bring up was when they're not, when you can see a little bit of obfuscation and avoidance. So.

Treblinka prisoners, Treblinka survivors, of the revolt at least, there's 70 of them. Two of them are women, the rest are men. And the men tend to deny that women were in Treblinka.

Waitman (01:11:56.941)
Hmm.

Chad's Computer (01:11:58.416)
they will tell you all day long about women being, arriving at Treblinka, being forced to undress, maybe being sexually assaulted by guards, and then being sent to the gas chambers. That is telling you about a woman that they are not required to, talk about in a personal sense. They never knew that person. It's sort of one of the thousands of faces who went by them.

but I can show you testimonies where individuals who we can test against their spatial knowledge would have walked by the women's barracks for building, or barracks area, I should say, it's not a separate building. Every single day, they would have gone to the camp kitchen and been served food by a woman. Every single day, they would have used a camp laundry staffed by women all the time, then tell their oral history interviewer there were no women at Treblinka.

Waitman (01:12:53.709)
That's fascinating.

Chad's Computer (01:12:54.128)
Yeah, and I think gender and these sort of questions is one of the things I've, you know, very much added to what is now the book manuscript after we work together. And the case that I'm making is that these are defensive obfuscations that men don't want to recall for their often female interviewer what...

Waitman (01:13:21.229)
Hmm.

Chad's Computer (01:13:23.952)
they saw happen to women. So knowingly or unknowingly, they're just like, there wasn't women there. Let's move on.

And we've not told the story of the small but significant story, small but significant amount of women prisoners at Treblinka because of this sort of obfuscation, this sort of avoidance of a very admittedly incredibly difficult topic because sex and sexual violence were replete. They were all across the history of Treblinka. It was...

It was a place where sex crime was almost as prevalent as murder. It was, it's that bad. So if we avoid, no.

Waitman (01:14:10.637)
Which again is another, sorry, which is another one of those nails in the coffin of the like, you know, sterile industrialized killing sort of mythology, you know, where, where it was this sort of, it was this, it was almost like an industrial slaughter, like in a, in a, in an Abattoir slaughterhouse where, you know, but no, it's actually, you know, women being dragged off and assaulted and things like this, you know, anyway, sorry, go ahead.

Chad's Computer (01:14:23.664)
Yeah.

Chad's Computer (01:14:32.496)
Yeah.

Chad's Computer (01:14:37.328)
And it's a good thing to bring up because that book that we kind of joked about earlier, the propaganda, we still believe, part of it is that Nazis don't rape Jewish women, which they absolutely did all the time. And I'm nowhere near the first person to say it, but we need to really, the public understanding of the Holocaust is still that, that's rossenshonda, that's race shame, they would never do that.

They definitely did that. And especially at a place like Treblinka, where they did not expect their victim to survive and tell stories. So those things went on. I've got an article revised and resubmitted and hopefully on the way to press soon that will point to the existence for, I'm pretty certain for the first time, point to the existence of a brothel inside of Treblinka.

And we'll also show how the women forced to endure that place took part in arming the revolt by stealing rifles from the guards who were in the brothel. So, when we avoid those stories, which, yeah, oral history has often avoided those stories, we, we ended up avoiding, telling these really hard, but very, very important truths about women's roles in this revolt and how,

masculinity and gender roles have kind of concealed them all the way to this day.

Waitman (01:16:11.885)
Yeah, that's really, I mean, that's, I think that's really thought provoking, particularly the, you know, there's this, I think, which I think you're hinting at, there's this kind of gendered.

I don't want to say misogynistic, but it is patriarchal, this idea that men should be protecting women and that, you know, if they're not, then that is sort of a check against your masculinity, your masculine power, right? Which it sounds like what you're saying, it's sort of like that they don't want to sort of think about the fact that there are women prisoners there. And maybe part of it is that because there are so few ultimate survivors of the revolt.

Chad's Computer (01:16:30.448)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (01:16:55.757)
who were women, you know, that they didn't, you know, they were sort of every person for themselves when they got out and then.

Chad's Computer (01:16:57.712)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chad's Computer (01:17:03.536)
Well, the historian Mary Louise Roberts calls this gender damage. So for the man who has survived the revolt and might have to recall sexual violence against women he could not protect in his gender role, that's gender damage for him if he has to sit through that. And then he's also supposed to perhaps think of himself, he's a traditional elder male when he's giving an oral history interview in the 90s or whatever.

I've got one of these that's a man named Jonas Kornhendler giving an interview about his short period inside of Treblinka. And he gets right to the point of beginning to discuss sexual violence at one point in his Holocaust experience. And he says, I don't want to discuss that. It's too drastic in front of these girls. And then his head stops a few different times around the room because he's looking.

Waitman (01:17:55.149)
Hmm.

Chad's Computer (01:18:00.848)
at, I don't know if there are young women who are members of his family or who's in that room. Me as an interviewer, I'm screaming to myself, there's not supposed to be anybody else in this room. But he stops and looks at these, however many women are in that room. And he's thinking about protecting them today from that story. So that can outlive 1945 by quite a bit.

Waitman (01:18:08.721)
Yes.

Waitman (01:18:18.893)
Yep.

Waitman (01:18:26.637)
Yeah, it is.

It is amazing. You know, and I think that we are both big fans of the Shoah Foundation, you know, and, and the visual history archive and all the testimonies. but like any kind of oral history, particularly, you know, the, the Shoah Foundation, I think faced this challenge of we want to get as many of these people's stories on tape as possible, which meant, you know, when you're compiling 55 ,000,

Chad's Computer (01:18:36.72)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (01:18:55.437)
survivor testimonies, you know, they can't all be, the interviews can't all be conducted by oral historians who are trained in the art of, of doing this. Right. And it, and it very much is something that, you know, and you, you said that oral historians are defensive, but I think rightly so, because I think some people say, oral history is just as, you know, you're just talking to people. but having done only a little bit of oral history in my own work, that's, it's hard, it's hard work.

And it requires, it requires a lot of thought and a lot of preparation and a lot of rapport with the person that you're talking to. and you know, one of the things that the Shroud Foundation, you know, it's not its goal, but it shows the value of good interviewers and also shows what happens when you have interviewers that are either inexperienced or just not so good at what they're doing. You know, and we were kind of talking about this before we started recording, but you know, you'll have examples. I've seen examples where.

Chad's Computer (01:19:22.576)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (01:19:52.045)
The interviewer will ask a question that is so basic and so sort of uninformed that the survivor is like, what am I doing here? Like why I'm not even here. And you could almost see them sort of turn off because they're like, okay, like you don't, because I think many survivors already feel like I've gone through something that no one can understand. And if the interviewer sort of suggests that they really have no idea.

Chad's Computer (01:20:06.032)
Yes.

Waitman (01:20:16.141)
You know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the interviewee is kind of like, and then they, and then what they do is they sort of, they sort of go into their, their autopilot, you know, because many of, many survived, not all, but many of the, the people in the Shoah Foundation survivors, you know, do talks in their communities or at schools. And, you know, they have, they have sort of their, their standardized talk that they give, you know, and, and a good oral historian.

is able to, and you've given examples of this already, but a good oil historian is able to sort of bump them a little bit out of the rut. And so they go into new terrain and tell you something new that isn't sort of the story that where they're like, first this happens, then I talk about this, then I talk about this, then I ask the students if there's any questions, and then I go home. I think you're highlighting this in the way that you're sort of describing what your own work.

Chad's Computer (01:20:46.864)
pushes them off.

Chad's Computer (01:21:07.568)
Yes.

Chad's Computer (01:21:14.192)
I do a class here at College of Charleston where I teach students how to be oral history interviewers. And one of the things that we do is actually discuss, and I was smiling when you were describing that, because we discuss how do we push this person off script? How do we get into this interview and immediately get them out of the mindset that they're just going to read their speech to us and ask them questions they don't see coming?

so that we can pull that script apart and get into these lived experiences that they maybe don't think are important, but we do. So that stuff is always so, so very important. You made me think of one other thing that I can't resist talking about though. We talked in the audience of this pod, I'm sure we'll understand from all the things we've said here, how very different Treblinka is from a quote unquote concentration camp. You know, the apocryphal one that everybody comes out of high school understanding.

I've listened to a bunch of oral history interviews with Treblinka survivors where the interviewer keeps interrupting the survivor because they're like, that's not how a camp works. And you're like, shut up. Treblinka is not like that. Stop telling them how the Holocaust worked. You weren't there. So I, you know, I'm the first to admit they can be iffy, but.

Waitman (01:22:21.481)
Hmm.

Waitman (01:22:27.213)
Yep.

Chad's Computer (01:22:37.808)
Sitting here and thinking that relying upon Nazi documentation to be the gold standard of research when it was written by newsflash Nazis is not exactly the right way to go either. You just have to test all of your sources in one way or another.

Waitman (01:22:49.261)
Right.

Waitman (01:22:54.925)
Well, and this is the, you know, this is, I think this is something that we're all striving to. I'm certainly striving to in my book. And I think you are in this one as well, which is Saul Friedlander's concept of an integrated history, which is like, how do we write the history of the Holocaust in a way that, you know, incorporates the perpetrators, perspectives, viewpoints, actions, but also incorporates.

Chad's Computer (01:23:08.72)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (01:23:22.349)
the survivors and the victims perspectives, viewpoints, actions, and not in a sort of in this chapters on this and chapters on that, but in a very sort of integrated way, which I think getting all the way back to the beginning of this discussion is kind of what Serenny is in some ways doing in Into That Darkness. She's trying to tell the story. I mean, admittedly, it's kind of a story of Sranstangle, but the survivors...

Chad's Computer (01:23:38.864)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (01:23:51.085)
are referenced throughout, you know, and their voices come in throughout, right? In a way that is, you know, a lot of early sort of perpetrator history, and it's not bad history by any stretch, but it's very sort of perpetrator refocused. And sometimes that's because the survivor contribution is limited anyway, because, you know, this is like, you know, when I kind of...

Chad's Computer (01:24:07.792)
Yeah. And there.

Waitman (01:24:18.797)
I did this in United States and I kind of do it here as well. I kind of forbid students from writing their Holocaust sort of research papers on medical experiments. You know, because I just think it's like, it's ultimately not a particularly helpful kind of topic. And also because I often require when I have students here in the UK,

We have the Strowell Foundation, a testimony at Northumber University. And so I'll say, because you have to use primary sources. So a good primary source for someone who doesn't speak German is the Strowell Foundation, because it gets you to a lot of different topics. But a topic it can't get you to with regards to medical experiments is the one they always want to write about, which is why did the Nazis do this? And the survivor can't tell you that, even if they survived the medical experiments themselves, because...

Chad's Computer (01:25:06.704)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Waitman (01:25:12.045)
The doctor didn't sit down with them and have a discussion about, about why they're doing it. Right. So, so, you know, there, there are reasons, there are good reasons to use sources for all kinds of different topics. and you know, you don't always have to have a pro -treater perspective. You don't always have to have a survivor perspective, but when you're talking about situations like the ones that we've written about, where there's sort of a history of a camp, I do think that the sort of more recent scholarship is a, is incorporating.

those experiences together in a way that like earlier histories of camps were very much like, and then they opened the women's camp on this date and then the Nazis did this and then they did this and it did this. And the survivor perspective was kind of only sort of sprinkled, sprinkled about for seasonings. You know, like, let's have a let's have a survivor tell us what how bad this Nazi guard was. But it's not taking their experiences from an analytical perspective of like.

How does this contribute to us telling the history of the place? Does that make sense? I mean, that.

Chad's Computer (01:26:13.776)
Right. I mean, yeah, you're hinting at like the purest worst form of the documentary only historian was. Well, you can't ask survivors. They were too traumatized to know anything. And that's sort of apocryphal. I don't really know who was ever that bad, but it's bandied about when we talk about when did we start listening to oral histories and survivor voices more than just looking for the paper record of Nazi crimes.

Waitman (01:26:43.565)
Yeah. And I suspect, I mean, I suspect there actually isn't a lot of like extant documentation, Nazi documentation from Treblinka. Right. I mean, like, yeah. Right. I mean, so like, again, here's a place where you, even if you want, even if you're focused on perpetrators, you cannot tell the story without the survivor testimony. Cause then you're only limited to.

Chad's Computer (01:26:43.664)
Chad's Computer (01:26:55.28)
three pieces of paper to my knowledge.

Chad's Computer (01:27:09.2)
No, no.

Waitman (01:27:12.973)
what they've said in the context of post -war trials, which is already a problematic source base in and of itself. Right. Yeah. I mean, but, I mean, but that, but that, you know, Yanovska is the same thing. I mean, like there's very little paperwork from Yanovska. In fact, I can't think of a document that I've found, a paper document that I've found that was like generated in the camp, you know, like,

Chad's Computer (01:27:20.592)
Well, you've done a lot with it yourself.

Waitman (01:27:40.397)
something that says we're going to send these workers out on this day. I don't think any of that stuff survived. So literally all that we have is, and it's not like, you know, it's not like a little bit, but we have, we have the perpetrator testimony in the context of trials, but we have mountains and mountains of survivor testimony. And, and from that, from that, you can reconstruct an awful lot, but only if you take, but you have to take the survivor testimony.

as a credible source and recognize it. Yeah.

Chad's Computer (01:28:12.152)
You just have to, you know, you just have to approach it like you would anything else. You wouldn't go to the archive and pick up one piece of perpetrator documentation and go, that's the whole story. And I think that's sort of like the false comparison people are making about, if you use oral history, it's, you know, it has holes in it. And that, you know, we assume you're only going to use one of them. Well, no, we're going to use all of them and we're going to test them against each other and we're going to weave together a holistic narrative.

Waitman (01:28:36.109)
Right.

Chad's Computer (01:28:42.096)
and see where things work and where things don't. And that's the exact same thing that you would do going to Ludvigsberg and picking up whole files off the shelf. You would look at everything. So.

Waitman (01:28:51.629)
Absolutely. Yeah. And you have to see, as you've done, I think a great example in the specific context is sort of the, what can we expect you reasonably to be intelligent about? And it's well, if you were in the laundry, if you worked in the laundry and you're telling us about a guard that was in the laundry, you probably are a pretty good expert on that. If you worked in the laundry and you're telling us what you think of Stongel was like,

Chad's Computer (01:29:02.992)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (01:29:14.752)
Thank you.

Waitman (01:29:18.893)
you know, maybe, maybe not, right? But I mean, that's the kind, again, that's the same kind of thing that that Goodest Orange do with anything is like, and documents are the same thing. It's just they, they have the sort of fetish of, of truthiness, because it's a document that I can hold, you know, and aha, it's got a heading on it and everything else. But like, you know, I mean, like, the only, I'm gonna, I'm gonna close because we're already at like an hour and a half, but.

Chad's Computer (01:29:21.232)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:29:46.221)
Literally one of the only pieces of documentation that came out of Janowska that I have is this bizarre correspondence between the commandant, Wilhous. And literally he tried to get letters to Heinrich Himmler himself requesting a transfer to the front, which is bizarre. And, and, you know, basically it gets intercepted by, I think, Brandt who is like,

his secretary or he's like the chief of staff and he's like it was perfect. It was this military. You'll appreciate this immediately. He basically writes back and he's like maybe it was Wolf. He writes back.

Waitman (01:30:34.733)
Hello?

Waitman (01:30:39.085)
Waitman (01:30:42.605)
Hello? Can you hear me now?

Chad's Computer (01:30:42.615)
I don't know if you can hear me.

Yeah, my headphone died.

Waitman (01:30:47.693)
okay. I'll go back and check to, to make, to check the, the times, but anyway, long story short, basically Wolf, Wolf says for your own good, I'm not going to give this to Himmler. It's like, you know, and like, and, and cause base and then, and then Phil has says, you know, well, I'm sorry. I did. You're right. I did kind of embellish my accomplishments in the camp, but we don't have that documentation. We don't know what, what he sent.

what he said, what his report was, you know, but it's him writing directly to Himmler, which is kind of crazy because he was like a captain. But anyway.

Chad's Computer (01:31:25.399)
Indeed. Yeah, to wrap up on my side, I'll say two things. For Treblinka, I believe it literally is three pieces of paper. There's like a, we will be ready to open tomorrow and two orders for like camp supplies to build the camp. Incredibly boring stuff that's really not going to tell you much at all. And just to give one last word to Gita Sireni, who I'm really glad has populated this conversation so much.

Waitman (01:31:28.461)
Yeah.

Chad's Computer (01:31:55.639)
You'd know better than me, but I know how much it's not always the first book author's ability to name their own book, but if I am actually able to name it, I will call it Against That Darkness as an homage to her Into That Darkness.

Waitman (01:32:10.253)
Nice.

Waitman (01:32:14.573)
Well, yeah. And, you know, my first book was marching into darkness. Maybe there's a whole, there's a whole subconscious thing there. great. Chad, thanks so much, man. This was fantastic. before we, before I let you go, let me ask you the question that I normally ask, all of our, our guests, which is if you could recommend one book, on the Holocaust at this moment in time, May, 2024, what would you recommend?

Chad's Computer (01:32:20.979)
But yeah.

Chad's Computer (01:32:27.415)
it was.

Chad's Computer (01:32:43.543)
I would recommend Wolf Gruner's latest book, Resisters, How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany. Because I mentioned earlier that I would, if somebody asked me, I would say I'm a scholar of resistance to the Holocaust. And I'm, one of the things I'm really, really interested in is what is resistance? How do you define it? Where do you find it? Under what circumstances does it occur?

Waitman (01:32:59.661)
Mm -hmm.

Chad's Computer (01:33:13.111)
And I have passionate answers to all of those questions, but Wolf has a new definition of resistance in this book and excavates its existence from the earliest days of the regime in ways that Jews and others do not get enough credit for. We've also danced around this idea of that book about the propaganda that you still believe, and one of those would be that people did not resist Nazi Germany.

They absolutely did. And I think Wolf does once again, a pretty darn amazing job excavating some of those things for us to look at and saying, Jews were always resisting. You just haven't paid enough attention to what it is and where it was.

Waitman (01:33:56.333)
That's fantastic. That's a great recommendation. And for our listeners, as always, I will put links to recommendations and in the show notes. Once again, if you are enjoying is always the wrong word, but if you are finding this podcast to be engaging, interesting, thought provoking, please leave us a comment. Leave us a rating. These things help. And Chad, man, great catching up with you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Chad's Computer (01:34:23.639)
You too. Thanks a lot.