Criticism of The Gerstein Report
The Gerstein Report has been targeted by holocaust deniers and antisemites. Distinguished French historian, Pierre Vidal-Naquet in "Assassins of Memory" discusses such criticism.
While some aspects of Gerstein's report include false or exaggeratedly attributed statements to Odilo Globocnik, and inaccurate claims regarding the total number of Jews gassed at places where he was not an eyewitness, Gerstein's claim that gassing of Jews occurred at Belzec is independently corroborated by SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm Pfannenstiel's testimony given at the Belzec trials, as well as by the accounts of other witnesses that can be found in Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness, a biography of one-time Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl.
The historian, Christopher Browning, has written: "Many aspects of Gerstein's testimony are unquestionably problematic. ... 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 .... It is also corroborated by other categories of witnesses from Belzec."
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