Declassified WWII Documents Describe Killing Of 500 British, US Nationals In Death Camps

Newly declassified World War II documents from Soviet correspondences during the liberation of Poland reveal that at least 500 US and British nationals perished in Nazi concentration camps

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th January, 2020) Newly declassified World War II documents from Soviet correspondences during the liberation of Poland reveal that at least 500 US and British nationals perished in Nazi concentration camps.

One letter, among a slew of documents declassified by the Russian Defense Ministry ahead of the 75th anniversary of the allied victory of Nazi Germany, details an investigation by Soviet journalist David Novoplyanskyy at the notorious Treblinka concentration camp which uncovered an extermination of scores of US and British civilians in Poland in 1942.

"From conversations, it became clear that among Jews, gypsies, Poles, and others, no less than 500 Britons and Americans living in Poland, mainly in Warsaw, were put to death in Nazi gas chambers of the Treblinka extermination camp," reads a telegram from Novopolyanskyy to one Mayor Maslovskyy, political officer of the 70th Army of the Belorussian front dated 15 September 1944.

In the letter, Novopolyanskyy describes being sent on assignment by Red Army newspaper "Za Rodinu" to the Treblinka extermination camp and surrounding areas where he spoke to witnesses, survivors and locals.

According to Novopolyanskyy, Nazi forces ordered US and British expatriates who were trapped in Poland to gather in a square in Warsaw in order to be exchanged with German prisoners of war.

Instead of being swapped, they were then put on a train and transported to Treblinka, much to the bewilderment of local witnesses who say they were under the impression that Treblinka was merely a labor camp exclusively for Jews.

Another witness, a Jewish survivor of the extermination camp, said the foreigners were immediately taken to "bathhouses" where they were killed. The witness, one Wolf-Sheinberg, describes seeing a mound of suitcases and possessions purportedly belonging to the victims.

The Treblinka extermination camp was built by Nazi forces about 50 miles northeast of capital Warsaw upon their decisive seizure of Poland in 1939. Along with Auschwitz, it is one of the most notorious death camps of the Second World War where nearly one million people were killed, mostly Jews and other persecuted minority groups.

The camp was shut down in 1943 in retreat from an advancing Soviet Red Army.