We must not forget Holocaust and I certainly think that it would be very good if many non-Jews could find some time to take a close look at the Jewish death toll during the Second World War. It can be eye-opening, and when the reality is not any more a surprise, such observations can be useful to other people who have not looked at the problem.
I have so far omitted any closer investigation of the Chełmno extermination camp because whatever happened there does not change my total death toll figures in any important way. Indeed, increasing the death toll in Chełmno decreases the upper bound for Jewish deaths in Auschwitz: the deaths are in one or the other camp and the number of deaths is limited by the difference of Jews before the war, the number of survivors and Jewish deaths elsewhere. But now I decided to look at this camp.
There is no doubt that 50 km north from Łódź, Poland, there was a Nazi concentration camp called Kulmhof or Chełmno nad Nerem. The camp operated from December 1941 to January 1945. Nazis joined the Western areas of Poland to the Reich and the official policy was to remove Jews from that area. Jews did remain quite long in the Łódź ghetto, so Nazis did not strictly implement this policy: Jews could be used for work in ghettos and work camps, but the area of the Warta river was emptied of Jews and their synagogues were destroyed.
Some 150,000-340,000 (the Kulmhof museum says 200,000) Jews were sent to the Chełmno camp. These Jews were not later seen in Poland of Germany, thus we can deduce that either they were murdered in the Chełmno extermination camp or they were transported out of Poland and Germany. This means, there should be two alternative theories: the murder theory and the escape theory. After formulating these two theories we can evaluate which one seems more likely.
The murder theory is just the official explanation. There remain ruins of a crematorium, unexplored large mass graves, remains of a narrow gauge train, and a memorial sign. The prisoners are thought to have been gassed in gas vans. So, this is the official theory of what happened to these Jews: they were gassed and cremated in the camp crematory. The ashes are in the mass graves in this area. These mass graves have not been investigated as Jewish mass graves cannot be opened for religious reasons.
Now, let’s make an alternative hypothesis for the possibility that the Jews sent to the camp were transported out of Poland and Germany. Could this have been possible?
I found a site that includes a map of the area, several photos of transports to the camp and a description of how Jews from the local area (Warthegau, the area of the Warta river) were transported to the camp. Local Jews from Warthegau arrived by train to the Koło railway station. There they were moved to a narrow gauge train. The narrow gauge train track went straight through the concentration camp and ended to the Chełmno station.
http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/pic/bigkolochelmnogoogle.jpg
According to the information in
http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/kolo.html
Jews stepped into the narrow gauge train in Koło and got out in a village Powiercie and walked to a village Zawadki, which is on the river Warta. They stayed the last night in a mill in Zawadki.
This seems very strange assuming that the Jews were sent to extermination in the Chełmno camp. The distance between Koło and the Chełmno is 13.3 km and the concentration camp is about 9 km from Koło. Assuming that the narrow gauge train has at least the speed 9 km/h, this trip should take at most one hour. Jews stepped out in Powiercie, about 3 km before the camp, and walked some 400 m to Zawadki and were the night there. In the morning they must have walked either 3 km to the concentration camp or 400 m to the Powiercie station and taken the narrow gauge train for the 3 km trip to the camp.
What is the sense in this?
It would be more logical that Jews walked to the river Warta for some specific purpose, such as in order to embark in motor boats early in the morning in Zawadki. A group that could spend the night in a mill in Zawadki could not be very large. A few motor boats could take this group to the city of Konin. From Konin Warta is navigable all the way to Oder and along Oder to the Baltic Sea close to Szczecin. From Sczcecin a ship would take the Jews to Palestine. Haganah was smuggling Jews from Europe to Palestine breaking British quotas and for some time Nazis were supporting it.
Warta is 808 km long and Konin is in half way, so there is about 400 km navigable river route. The track from Zawadki to Konin is not navigable for big boats, but for small ones it is. Along the road the distance is about 40 km and along Warta a bit longer, say 50 km. For a motor boat full of people this trip may take 5-10 hours, so it is good that the people are spending the night in the Zawadki mill. The camp was operational about 3 years, some 9000 work days. If 150,000 people were transported in this way, it would imply 17 people a day. That is about four motor boats. Twice as many boats could transport 300,000 people.
An equally good alternative is to have three provider gas cars transporting Jews from Zawadki to Konin. There is no compelling reason to use the water way. Provider gas vans would explain the witness statements of gas vans.
How to decide which of these two alternatives is more likely?
There is of course this aspect that my estimate for the Jewish death toll in Auschwitz is much smaller than the official one, and I consider mine as the correct one. My upper bound for the Jewish deaths in Auschwitz is about 300,000. Of this number 60,000 are registered deaths and 240,000 are the missing Hungarian Jews, but in later calculations I noticed that these Hungarian Jews were not killed in Auschwitz. They ended up in the Soviet Union, indeed Eichmann told that Nazis left 200,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in an open camp to wait for Soviet troops. Considering this case of Auschwitz, I would slightly favor the alternative where the Jews sent to Chełmno were not all murdered. That is, why to murder them in Chełmno if they were not murdered in Auschwitz.
I think the following argument may also be good. In the year 1942 72,000 Jews were sent to Chełmno from the Łódź ghetto, some 20,000 of them were children. These transports were decided by the Jewish leader of the ghetto, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who gave the famous speech Give me your children. And so it was, Jewish mothers gave their children. In the ghetto Rumkowski was known for his cruelty, but still, which mother would send her children to an extermination camp knowing that the children will surely die? I guess very few. Therefore Zionist Rumkowski had to tell them that the children were sent to some safer place, not to a mass grave. He had been the head of a Jewish orphanage before the war. I would guess he told the mothers that the children were sent to some orphanage. Were they? It depends on how long Nazi-Zionist co-operation, as shown e.g. by the Haavara agreement, in reality lasted, even if in secrecy. A Zionist, like Rumkowski, thinks “is good for Israel”. Was the best deal that Rumkowski could break with Nazis to exterminate 20,000 Jewish children? Zionist Rumkowski was appointed by Nazis as an elder and Nazis and Zionists had made other deals (Haavara) just a bit earlier.
Of course,holocaust revisionists have shown that the evidence supporting the official version of what happened to Jews sent to this camp is very weak. Most probably there were deaths in this camp: there was a crematorium and people died in all camps. Furthermore, I suspect that there was an eugenic center in the camp. Action 14f13 was in force in Nazi concentration camps and according to it some prisoners were to be terminated for eugenic reasons. This action resulted to ten thousand or so deaths. Probably in a similar way some fraction (maybe up to 1/10) could have been killed in Chełmno. This could be investigated. As for the rest, they have not necessarily disappeared: I show in another post that before 1948 the Jewish population of Palestine grew by some 100,000-200,000 by reasons that are not accounted for by natural population growth or known legal and illegal immigration.
So, I cannot solve this problem yet, but taking a narrow gauge train from Koło to the Chełmno camp, yet stepping out in Powiercie, walking to Zawadki and sleeping there in a mill instead of staying in the train and arriving in the camp in maximum one hour. This story does not make any sense. But that is typical in the Holocaust.