Gerstein Report
The Gerstein Report was written in 1945 by Kurt Gerstein, Obersturmführer of the SS-TV, who served as Head of Technical Disinfection Services of the SS during the Second World War and in that capacity supplied a pesticide, based on hydrogen cyanide, Zyklon B, from Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung) to Rudolf Höss in Auschwitz and conducted the negotiations with the owners.
[1] On 18 August 1942, along with Rolf Günther and Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, Gerstein witnessed the gassing of some 3,000 Jews in the extermination camp of Belzec in occupied Poland.
[2]: 211–212 Gerstein was born on 11 August 1905 in Münster, where he lived until 1910 and then to Saarbrücken; Halberstadt; and Neuruppin, near Berlin, where he finished his secondary school in 1925.
Reportedly outraged by the euthanasia programme, Aktion T4, he decided to join the Waffen SS "to look into the matter of these ovens and chambers in order to learn what happened there".
It was in that capacity that he travelled to the extermination camps of Belzec and Treblinka to offer the supply of hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon B).
In front a very lovely young girl; so all of them go along the alley, all naked, men, women, children, without artificial limbs.
At the corner a strong SS man stands who, with a voice like a pastor, says to the poor people: "There is not the least chance that something will happen to you!
A Jewess of about 40 years of age, with flaming eyes, calls down vengeance on the head of the murderers for the blood which is shed here.
One can hear them crying, sobbing.... Hauptmann Wirth hits the Ukrainian who is helping Unterscharführer Hackenholt 12, 13 times in the face.
He reports on his chance encounter with the secretary of the Swedish legation in Berlin, Baron Göran von Otter, on the Warsaw-Berlin train: "Still under the immediate impression of the terrible events, I told him everything with the entreaty to inform his government and the Allies of all of this immediately because each day's delay must cost the lives of further thousands and tens of thousands".
[5] Gerstein's message was eventually sent to the Vatican not by the nuncio's office but by the auxiliary bishop of Berlin, where the information reached a "dead end".
Typed on paper without an official heading and with the simplified title of Tötungsanstalten, this version circulated within the Dutch government-in-exile via the British government and eventually to the attention of the United States Inter-Allied Information Committee.
[8] Some aspects of Gerstein's report include false statements that were attributed to Odilo Globocnik, as well as inaccurate claims regarding the total number of Jews gassed at Holocaust locations in which he was not an eyewitness, but his claim that gassing of Jews occurred at Belzec was independently corroborated by SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm Pfannenstiel's testimony given at the Belzec trials,[9][10] as well as by the accounts of other witnesses that can be found in Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness, a biography of the Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl.
The Holocaust historian Christopher Browning noted: Many aspects of Gerstein's testimony are unquestionably problematic.
[In making] statements, such as the height of the piles of shoes and clothing at Belzec and Treblinka, Gerstein himself is clearly the source of exaggeration.
Gerstein also added grossly exaggerated claims about matters to which he was not an eyewitness, such as that a total of 25 million Jews and others were gassed.
But in the essential issue, namely that he was in Belzec and witnessed the gassing of a transport of Jews from Lwow, his testimony is fully corroborated....
[8]The historian Robin O'Neil noted that Gerstein's data presented at face value about the enormous capacity of the gas chambers of "four times 750 persons" has no grounds in reality.
[11] The Gerstein Report has also been targeted by Holocaust deniers, who claim that its author approached Göran von Otter on behalf of the Nazis.
