The Holocaust Historiography Project

Goldfarb, Abraham I.

Abraham Goldfarb was deported from his hometown Międzyrzec Podlaski on 18 or 25 August 1942 to the Treblinka Camp. On 21 September 1944, a Soviet investigative commission interrogated him. The resulting testimony was later submitted by the Soviets during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (Document USSR-380). A second, undated deposition by Goldfarb, published in a 1987 book, was made in the context of the Jerusalem show trial against John Demjanjuk, hence probably dates to the mid-1980s.

There are a few differences between both statements. Most notably, in his later deposition, he claimed that the floors of the railway cars going to Treblinka were sprinkled with chlorine (probably referring to chlorinated lime), while no such reference is in his 1944 account. Here are some notable claims from Goldfarb’s statements:

  • When he arrived, there was only one gassing building with three chambers, each measuring 5 m × 4 m, and 2 m high.
  • A tractor engine located in an annex was used both to generate electricity, and to gas victims with its exhaust gases. This stands in contrast to the current orthodox narrative of a tank engine used for gassing, and a separate motor used to generate electricity. Engine-generator devices were rather complex. Running 24/7, they needed to be reliable and easy to maintain. Hence, devices specifically designed for that purpose were used, not some engine taken from some vehicle, rigged in some awkward way to a dynamo.
  • The victims’ corpses bled from their mouths. Killings with chlorine could have that effect, as it destroys the lungs, but engine exhaust does not lead to bleeding.
  • A new gas-chamber building was built between late August and late November 1942, with 2 × 5 rooms, each measuring 6 m × 6 m, and 2 m high.
  • There were windows in the roof and round spy windows in the corridor walls to observe the gassings. Neither of this is part of the current orthodox narrative. Roof windows were frequently claimed for the Sobibór gas chambers, while spy holes in the wall are Goldfarb’s unique invention.
  • Each gas chamber had gas-escape openings in the roof. These, too, are Goldfarb’s unique contributions to the tale.
  • The engine in a room next to the last chamber was too small; it could only feed exhaust gas into two of the ten chambers. Therefore, between late November 1942 and April 1943, when a larger engine was installed, the victims were killed not with exhaust gases, but instead with moistened chlorinated lime, killing people within 24 hours. This is an echo of Jan Karski’s black-propaganda story of Jews getting killed during transit with chlorinated lime spread out on the floors of the deportation trains. A similar claim was made by Leon Finkelsztein and Szyja Warszawski.
  • Victims crammed together so tightly that they kept standing upright after death (from his 1985 deposition). However, people dying slump down, no matter how tightly they are packed.
  • On average 5,000 victims per day, which would result in 1.8 million during the camp’s operational span of roughly a year, which would be twice the amount claimed by today’s orthodoxy.

In his 1944 account, Goldfarb mentions Jankiel Wiernik and also the latter’s book, which means that he probably read the book, and possibly other accounts as well. This suspicion becomes a certainty when comparing Goldfarb’s 1944 account with Wiernik’s booklet: Goldfarb took essential elements of his story from Wiernik’s account, such as the first 3-chamber and the second 2×5-chamber building with similar measures. He also included one pivotal aspect that Wiernik had dragged through his evolving story. This enables us to identify this plagiarism. In his earliest, handwritten text, Wiernik wrote:

On the roof [of the gas-chamber building] — a safety hatch used in the case of killing people with chlorine. After throwing the appropriate amount of chlorine, the hatch closes hermetically.

In Wiernik’s later typewritten text of what was soon to be published as his booklet, chlorine is no longer mentioned, but rather engine-exhaust gas. Therefore, the roof hatches had lost their function. But they hung around nonetheless. Wiernik included them in his typed text anyway, without giving any explanation of what they were used for:

On the roof, an outlet with an airtight closure.

In the published English translation, this turned into:

The outlet on the roof had a hermetic cap.

Goldfarb fell into that trap when copying Wiernik’s roof outlets to his first gas-chamber building:

Each chamber had an opening in the ceiling, which was covered with a net.

The orthodox story knows nothing about such openings.

When describing the new, larger gassing facility, Goldfarb included openings here as well, assigning a new function to them:

There were special openings in the roof for the gas to flow out of the chamber.

Considering that large amounts of exhaust gas were allegedly pumped into those chambers, these rooms had to have some gas-release opening, or else the gas would have forced its way out during a gassing by bending or breaking something. Hence, Goldfarb’s literary evolution of Wiernik’s chlorine-introduction hatches was actually smart — if that’s what Goldfarb meant by that, rather than a simple ventilation opening used after the gassing.

However, for some inscrutable reason, Goldfarb reverted to the chlorine murder with his unique claim that, due to an insufficient engine, chlorinated lime was used for four months. He also described victims bleeding from their mouths, which could be cause by chlorine, but not by exhaust gases.

Goldfarb added features to his plagiarized story to make it sound like his own story, which are all unheard of, far-fetched and in conflict with the narrative ultimately accepted by the orthodoxy.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2021e, pp. 141-145, 178-181.)