The Holocaust Historiography Project

Berger, Oskar

According to his own 1945 memoirs, Oskar Berger was deported from the Kielce Ghetto to Treblinka in June 1942, therefore a month before the camp started operating in late July 1942. He managed to escape from the camp in September 1942.

Berger claims that, during the first weeks of his presence in the camp, deportees were machine gunned from the roof of a building. Imagine the panic among the deportees, how they start running chaotically, and how stray bullets are whizzing by everyone — deportees, guards, auxiliaries and SS men. It is an absurd picture. Both the wrong starting date and the machine-gunning claim were made by two more Treblinka survivors, Eugeniusz Turowski and Stanisław Kon, who were both interviewed by Polish judge Łukaszkiewicz on 7 October 1945. This is a clear case of convergence of evidence on a lie.

On one occasion, Berger claims, all deportees in a train were dead on arrival, so he suspected that they had been killed by gas in the railway cars. He asserted that the victims’ skin was discolored bluish. This is a truly unique claim.

Later, he said, a gas-chamber building then under construction was used to kill the deportees. He and others were assigned to bringing the corpses in carts to mass graves for burning, so he must have known this facility’s design and mode of operation. Yet he neither describes this building nor says anything about how it operated. His reference to burning bodies in mass graves is anachronistic, if we take the orthodox narrative as a yardstick, which insists that all victims were merely buried in mass graves until early 1943; burning is said to have started only after that.

(See Mattogno 2021e, pp. 129f.)