On Now! Heads up for U.K. Members......

[Adrian]

Yes, it is available on Demand 5 if you missed it.

[StefanM]

I see the usual Holocaust denial trash have started leaving comments on the C5 website!

Historian Jan Gross recently wrote an extremely contentious book "Golden Harvest" that describes the immediate post-war excavation of Treblinka by local Poles and Soviet soldiers in the hunt for hidden gold amongst the remains of murdered Jews buried in the surrounding former camp environs. The Soviets were even using dynamite in their attempts to bring up the human remains in their pursuit of Jewish gold.

I would have thought this wide scale destruction and despoliation of the site would impact/compromise further archeological investigations?

[StefanM]

Images of the immediate post-war exhumations and despoliation of the Treblinka site:

[Tango]

I would watch but being here in the UAE I can't so that's b**gered it...I will find something on You Tube instead.....Cheers Terry.

[harryamb2]

that's disgusting.4thskorpion.

[Adrian Stevenson]

It should be valid for a year on Demand 5 so you can catch it when you are next home in the UK.

Cheers, Ade.

[Danmark]

And down here we ( as usual ) will have to take a rain check while the ABC and SBS networks beg for government funding .......... sigh!

[StefanM]

that's disgusting. 4thskorpion.

It is hard to comprehend.

Rachel Auerbach, who visited Treblinka on November 7, 1945, as part of a delegation of the Polish State Committee for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes on Polish Soil, described what she saw:

Masses of all kinds of pilferers and robbers with spades and shovels in their hands were there digging and searching and raking and straining in the sand. They removed decaying limbs from the dust [and] bones and garbage that were thrown there. Would they not come upon even one hard coin or at least one gold tooth? They even dragged shells and blind bombs there, those hyenas and jackals in the disguise of man. They placed several together, set them off, and giant pits were dug in the desecrated ground saturated by the blood and the ashes of burned Jews ...

Scenes of this kind took also place in the fields of Belzec and Sobibor. The search for treasures continued. The area was dug up again and again, and each section of the land was checked thoroughly by local people and people from afar who tried their luck. These acts ceased only when the Polish government decided to turn the camp areas into national memorial sites.

Source:
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps
By Yitzhak Arad
Page: 379

Not surprisingly Auerbach omits to mention the active participation by the Soviet militias in this destruction and plunder of Treblinka and other death camp sites in the former German occupied territories, such was the lure in the belief of buried Jewish gold.

Sadly even today theses sites are targeted by metal detectorists.

[StefanM]

I watched this programme through a couple of times in the hope I would find something of merit that I must have missed first time. But no, and no amount of my forensic digging in the documentary revealed anything that adds to the knowledge of the camp....ceramic tiles which they concluded had a "Jewish star" symbol stamped on the reverse are offered as evidence of buried gas chambers! Really, its a bit like saying only the Nazis used the Swastika symbol and therefore any object with a swastika must have Nazi associations. Did the forensic archeologists do any investigation of pottery trademarks before coming to their startling discovery, if they did they didn't mention it. If they did then I apologise for casting doubts on the investigating teams conclusions.

[ford369]

thanks for the link Ade,thats tonights viewing sorted

Nigel