Grossman, Vasily

After Ilya Ehrenburg, the Jewish journalist Vasily Grossman (12 Dec. 1905 – 14 Sept. 1964) was probably the second most-impactful Soviet atrocity propagandist of the Stalinist era. His two most-important works of propaganda are his booklet on the Treblinka Camp, titled The Hell of Treblinka, and the collection of Soviet atrocity stories on claimed German wartime crimes, authored together with Ehrenburg and titled The Black Book. This book was announced in the U.S. media already in November of 1944 as a tome that would document the German massacre of approximately six million European Jews (Shapiro 1944), clearly showing that the six-million death toll was not a figure established after the war, but predetermined beforehand. However, Stalin must have changed his mind, for the project was put on ice, and the book was published only posthumously in 1980 (Ehrenburg/Grossman 1980). The book is filled with the most outrageous atrocity lies ever spread about the Germans, all based on witness accounts, many of which are summarized in the present work.

In his brochure on Treblinka, Grossman did not quote witness statements but decided to streamline — meaning manipulate — them into a coherent narrative. Grossman claimed, among other things, that the death toll of this camp was 10,000 victims a day, for a total of three million victims (more than triple the amount claimed by today’s orthodoxy). These victims were allegedly murdered by gassing, scalding with hot steam, and suffocation by means of vacuum pumps. The latter two versions are admitted by today’s orthodox historians as having been freely invented. As to the gassing, Grossman specified that this was allegedly done using exhaust gases of a heavy armored tank engine, which served the power station of Treblinka — hence probably a Diesel-powered electric generator, which would have been useless for mass murder, as diesel exhaust is relatively harmless. (See Mattogno/Graf 2023, pp. 19-23, and throughout the book.)