The Holocaust Historiography Project

Rajzman, Samuel

Samuel Rajzman
Samuel Rajzman

Samuel Rajzman (1904 – 1979) was a Polish accountant who was deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp in late September 1942 – or maybe in August of that year, according to his testimony at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT, Vol. 8, p. 325). He managed to escape from that camp on 2 August 1943 during the inmate uprising, hence he was in the camp for over ten months.

A year later, Rajzman wrote a 16-page report about the camp, and in September 1944 he was questioned by a Soviet, and on 9 October 1945 by a Polish investigator. He testified briefly during the IMT in late February 1946. Also in 1946, he composed another essay, and he furthermore gave a recorded interview in 1950, neither of which contain any particulars about the claimed murder facilities, other than that they were gas chambers. He did not appear during any of the later trials where the Treblinka Camp was the focus of attention.

Here are some of the more peculiar claims made by Rajzman. As he himself asserted at one point, his knowledge is to a large degree based on stories heard from a man who himself was reporting things from hearsay. Evidently, ten months presence in the camp offered him no opportunity to discover anything first-hand. Hence, we are dealing here with a typical Chinese-whisper chain of rumors:

  • Initially, victims were killed by pumping out the air from the chambers. Creating a vacuum in a brick-and-mortar building is technically impossible (the external pressure would crush the walls), hence this most certainly was not done.
  • Later, the victims were killed with chlorine gas and Zyklon B. Engine-exhaust gases, the orthodoxy’s current paradigm, were never mentioned by Rajzman.
  • People were at times burned alive on pyres, so that desperate lamentation sounded from the fire. Cremation had already begun when he arrived (August/September 1942), although the orthodoxy insists on March 1943 as the starting point of open-air incinerations.
  • During his Polish interrogation, he asserted that, during the year he was at the camp, 25,000 Jewish slave-laborers died or were murdered, which is an absurdly high figure, meaning that the entire staff of some 800 slave laborers had to be replaced on average almost every ten days.
  • Rajzman asserted that Heinrich Himmler visited the Treblinka Camp in February 1943 for an inspection. However, there is no evidence suggesting that Himmler ever visited Treblinka.
  • At the Nuremberg Trial, he asserted that on average ten to twelve thousand persons daily were killed at Treblinka, which would amount to 3.65 million within the year of his presence. However, in his 1946 essay (and similar in his Soviet interview) he increased that to 25,000 persons per day — or an astonishing 9.1 million in a year! The protocol of his Soviet interview has a detailed list of victims that he claims the camp resistance recorded. Hence, this should be first-hand material, not hearsay rumor-mongering. However, these numbers result in a total death toll of 2,775,000. Compare all this to today’s orthodox figure of some 800,000 victims.
  • According to his IMT testimony, cutting the women’s hair before gassing lasted only five minutes. That would have worked only if there had been as many barbers with shears as there were women to be processed.
  • During the IMT, he also claimed that the Germans planned to increase the number of gas chambers at Treblinka to 25 in order to exterminate other nationalities.

Rajzman’s various testimonies are characterized by their lack of details, which is prudent considering that he was reporting only from double-hearsay. Wherever he conveys details, he is pitifully wrong, even if we take the orthodox narrative as the yardstick.

(For details, see Mattogno/Graf 2023, pp. 67-69, 96, 141; Mattogno 2021e, pp. 139-141, 151-154.)