3244-PS: Bormann on "ruthless severity" in the Camps

On October 9, 1942, Bormann sent this circular in response to eyewitness accounts of atrocities, which were reaching German public opinion via letters and verbal communications from soldiers in the East. It is notable for the fact that Bormann connects "ruthless severity" to the camps in the East, which in turn are connected to the atrocities witnessed by soldiers. Consequently, although Bormann uses the standard camouflage, "they will either be used for work or else transported still farther to the East", the overall context is one of killing, in which the fate of Jews in "the camps" is clearly connected to the fate of shooting victims witnessed by military personnel.

Wannsee Revisited

It is worth recalling this key line from the Protocol:

In the meantime the Reichsfuehrer-SS and Chief of the German Police had prohibited emigration of Jews due to the dangers of an emigration in wartime and due to the possibilities of the East.

It raises two questions. Firstly, why would it be safer "in wartime" to send Jews to the East, where the military conflict was at its most intense and insecure position, than to let them go to a country such as Morocco or Palestine, to which Germany had no objections to letting them go in 1939-40? Secondly, what are the "possibilities in the East"? Most western Jews were unsuitable for labor over there and would be a rapidly diminished labour force. The unfit Jews would gradually starve if not simply killed on arrival. Costs of maintaining camp security would be prohibitive, and there would be a constant risk of prisoners escaping to the partisans. Heydrich and Eichmann must logically therefore be referring here to the possibilities of killing these Jews, just as Soviet Jews had been killed in large numbers in the preceding months.

Satire on Auschwitz Commemoration

Today, the satirical section SPAM of the German magazine Der Spiegel has posted something on the approaching 70th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz (27 January 1945) and the reported absence of the Russian president Putin.

Meet Otto Bene

Otto Bene occupied the post of "Vertreter des Auswärtige Amt beim Reichkommissar für besetzten niederländischen Gebiete (Representative of the Auswärtige Amt for Occupied Dutch Territory)." He was the Foreign Office's man on the spot, reporting on deportations of Jews from the Netherlands to the death camps. His antisemitic missives back to Berlin reveal much about the Final Solution.

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:

Part 1: Indoor Cremation

Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria

Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)
Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings

The Sonderkommando handwritings are among the most damning individual sources on the mass murder in Auschwitz for Revisionists. Here I look into Revisionist Carlo Mattogno's non- and mistreatment of the manuscripts.

German Extermination Planning for Romanian Jews

On August 13th, 1942, the Krakauer Zeitung published a statement on the status of Romania's policy towards Jews which stated that "185,000 Jews have been evacuated since October of last year (i.e. 1941) into Transnistria, where they were housed in large ghettos until an opportunity arose for their removal further east. Today there still remain 272,409 Jews in the country. . . Both the provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina can now be considered as free of Jews, excepting Czernowitz, where there are still about 16,000. . . It may be assumed that even during the present year a further 80,000 Jews could be removed to the Eastern Territories." This source has been cited by Mattogno and Graf here, who use Kulischer as their source, and by Kues here, who uses an article by Shechtman for the information. However, MGK, Kulischer and Shechtman all seemed unaware of the fact that phrase "removal further east" and "removed to the Eastern Territories" could only be euphemisms for killing.

German Foreign Office knowledge of Extermination (Pt. 1)

The following article is heavily indebted to Christopher Browning's magisterial study of the German Foreign Office, the Auswärtiges Amt (hereafter AA). Browning's study focusses on the knowledge and activities of the officials of Referat D III, headed by Rademacher, which was part of Abteilung Deutschland, headed by Luther. These men were ultimately responsible to Ribbentrop but tended also to act on their own initiative, often in collusion with the SS. This dual nature gave those men unique insight into the extermination of Jews as it unfolded in various stages, first in Transnistria, the USSR, Croatia and Serbia, but then from mid-1942 in the attempts of the Germans to secure deportations of Jews from ambivalent partner states such as Italy, Romania and Hungary. Browning's study remains the most important analysis we have of what these men knew and when they discovered it.

The Contemporary Sonderkommando Handwritings on Mass Extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau

The contemporary Sonderkommando handwritings were authored by members of the so called Jewish Sonderkommando engaged in the body removal and disposal at the extermination sites. The manuscripts were written during the operation of Auschwitz concentration camp, buried in the ground near the crematoria and were only to be found after the liberation of the camp between February 1945 and 1980. They are a worthy and unique historical source since they provide impressions of the Jewish prisoners engaged in the mass murder machinery while it was still running or just dismantled. They were not filtered, directed and influenced by external persons (i.e. investigators, interviewers, historians) and post-liberation and post-war knowledge and circumstances. For these reasons, the Sonderkommando handwritings are also extremely powerful evidence for mass extermination in Auschwitz. Here, I present the manuscripts found and published so far with the most relevant quotes with regards to mass extermination.

The "Disappeared" Defence Witness at the Belsen Trial

While searching on Revisionist sites for any tiny straw to support a possible conspiracy for what they call the "hoax", I came across the blog posting Defence witness disappears from Belsen trial from The Black Rabbit of Inlé (hereafter "Lesser Bunny"; to discriminate him against the crematoria denier Little Grey Rabbit). 

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 3: Eyewitnesses

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:

Part 1: Indoor Cremation

Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria

Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)

Mattogno’s poor treatment of testimonial evidence is a common thread throughout his Auschwitz oeuvre. Weather on Henryk Tauber, Rudolf Höß, Charles Sigismund, Miklos Nyiszli, Filip Müller, Pery Broad, Hans Stark etc., Mattogno does not get tired to repeat the same mindless exercise over and over again: he points out what he thinks are contradictions and false statements in the testimonies and…well that’s it. This flimsy source criticism is already sufficient for him to dismiss any testimonial evidence on mass extermination once for all. Needless to say he does not discuss why this crude and superficial approach is supposed to be justified.

In practise, this scheme follows falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one, false in all). This (controversial) legal maxim assumes that it has been established that a witness has wilfully testified falsely. But it's hard to prove a lie, even more so retrospectively by studying written sources. Indeed, Mattogno does not manage to discriminate between dishonest and honest mistakes in his work. He cannot demonstrate a single lie in the most important accounts. Moreover, falsus in uno usually assumes uncorroborated testimonies, but which is not the case for the mass extermination in Auschwitz. In fact, the powerful concept of independent corroboration enables to extract historical truth with high certainty even from partially contradictionary and false sources. And last but not least, falsus in uno is not a scientific or historiographical principle, but a logical fallacy.

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)

 Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:

Part 1: Indoor Cremation

Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria
Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)

Comments on Selected Individual Testimonies on Homicidal Gassing in Auschwitz

 

Correction Corner #5: Bartosik et al., The Beginnings of the Extermination of Jews in KL Auschwitz...

The document collection from Bartisek et al. (The beginnings of the extermination of Jews in KL Auschwitz in the light of the source materials) contains a number of previously unknown and for Revisionists  inconvinient German contemporary sources (some - but not all - have been highlighted in a previous posting). Other documents in the collection have been known already, in particular from Revisionist Carlo Mattogno's works. And some of the docs have been clearly misinterpreted by Bartisek et al.

Alois Brunner: “All of them deserved to die."

In 1987, Alois Brunner told the Chicago-Sun Times, “All of them deserved to die, because they were the devil’s agents and human garbage. I have no regrets and would do it again.” Brunner, whose death was confirmed yesterday, lived in Syria for several decades and clearly had multiple opportunities to state that Jews were resettled, yet he chose to glory in their deaths, much as his boss Eichmann had done in his Sassen conversations.

Postscript 12/16/14: Brunner had made a similar statement to Bunte in 1985: see here.

Some dolt called Peter Winter claims here that "Honsik actually travelled to Damascus where he interviewed Brunner in person, even taking a picture of the former SS Hauptsturmführer, and reprinting it in his book." However, as my colleague Hans shows here, Honsik appears to have taken the photo from the 1985 article by Bunte, which Winter ignores.

German Documents Confirm Bunker Sites and Body Disposal Activity of Birkenau Sonderkommando

Recently published contemporary German documents (Bartosik, Martyniak, Setkiewicz, The Beginnings of the Extermination of Jews in KL Auschwitz in the Light of the Source Materials, 2014) hammer another nail in the Revisionist coffin as they support the historical reality of the Bunker 1 and 2 sites in Auschwitz-Birkenau and that their Sonderkommando (special detail) was engaged in body disposal (the historical reality of the Sonderkommando of the crematoria was previously confirmed by a German document).

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:

Part 1: Indoor Cremation

Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria
Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)

For conventional delousing practise of housings in Auschwitz, the SS paramedics could enter the room to be deloused, open the Zyklon-B can(s) and leave again through the door. The same procedure was not possible for the killing of people as the victims were locked into rooms behind strong wooden gas tight doors (the first experimental homicidal gassings in Block 11 in the Auschwitz main camp, where the victims were locked behind prisons bars, are an exception to this, but this technique was less efficient/more challenging to camouflage). Instead, the hydrogen cyanide soaked pellets had to be introduced from the outside. The actual method was depending on the structural design of the buildings, which housed the gas chambers. At crematorium 1 in the Auschwitz main camp and at crematoria 2 and 3 in Auschwitz-Birkenau holes were drilled or poured respectively into the flat roofs of the homicidal gas chambers and closed with covers. At Bunker 1 and 2 and crematoria 4 and 5 in Birkenau with their pitched roofs, the gas was introduced via windows in the walls that were closed with gas tight shutters.

The supposed lack of evidence for gas introduction openings in the roofs of homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz has been a major argument for Revisionists in the past: from the veteran Revisionist Robert Faurisson (“no holes, no Holocaust”) to Germar Rudolf (Rudolf Report), Brian Renk (Convergence or Divergence?) and Carlo Mattogno (No holes, no gas chambers, Auschwitz Lies, Auschwitz: Crematorium I , Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity ). I already dealt with the gas introduction openings of crematoria 2 and 3 elsewhere in detail. This will be a condensed and polished treatment of the matter. Two new pieces of evidence (German contemporary documents and the 23 August 1944 RAF aerial photograph) are also included. In the second and third part, the gas introduction at crematoria 4 and 5 and the gas openings of crematorium 1 in the main camp are discussed with a focus on Mattogno’s arguments.

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 1: Indoor Cremation

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:

Part 1: Indoor Cremation

Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria
Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement) 

Revisionist Carlo Mattogno’s book Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity (September 2010, abbreviated as ATCFS) is hailed as the “the most devastating blow ever” to holocaust historiography according to the Holocaust handbooks webpage or in Mattogno’s own words:

"In fact, I am the author “most damaging” to their [Jean-Claude Pressac and Robert Jan Van Pelt] books about Auschwitz, which I exhaustively refuted in the more than 700 pages of my already quoted study Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity."

(Mattogno [with Graf and Kues], The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”, 2013, p. 1496)

Not the first time Mattogno thinks a great deal of his page count (see also Mattogno, Auschwitz: The First Gassing, 2011, p. 7 and Mattogno, Inside the Gas Chambers, 2014, p. 110; Mattogno had been truly hyperactive over the last years, but the other side of the coin is that he missed out to improve the quality of his writings).

The book has some 768 pdf pages, but that’s fortunately not all I had to wade through. It comes along with a large appendix. There are effectively 640 pages of text with about 250,000 words; the figure is not reflecting his original output, since more than 53,000 words are block quotes. Moreover, entire paragraphs and sections have been taken over from at least six previous books and four articles published by Mattogno, a total of about 36,000 words (and I did not even compare the chapter on cremation with his Italian crematoria book; curiously, comments on Aumeier on p. 609 f. are repeated again 30 pages later, something that could have been avoided if the patchwork were subjected to some serious proof reading).

Anyway, the good news is this won’t be a 250,000 words riposte. I won’t go after every single minor issue and follow him on every secondary theatre he pulled on Jean-Claude Pressac and Robert Jan Van Pelt. I will also not synthesize a narrative on Auschwitz – I will leave it to the people who have learnt how to do it (historians) to clear up the timeline and details of the Holocaust in Auschwitz if something is still unclear and contradictory. I will focus on a single issue: Did Mattogno justify reasonable doubts on the mass extermination of Jews in Auschwitz? The book will have to be measured on Mattogno’s own words that “the present work furnishes a coherent and actually converging set of evidentiary elements which show that the holocaust thesis regarding the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz is historically, documentarily and technically unfounded” (ATCFS, p. 24). 

Warsaw '44: Testimony of Matthias Schenk

Taken from this source. Any commentary by me would be superfluous:

(Schenk hides his face in his hands).

“We blew up the doors, I think of a school. Children were standing in the hall and on the stairs. Lots of children. All with their small hands up. We looked at them for a few moments until Dirlewanger ran in. He ordered to kill them all. They shot them and then they were walking over their bodies and breaking their little heads with butt ends. Blood streamed down the stairs. There is a memorial plaque in that place stating that 350 children were killed. I think there were many more, maybe 500."

“Or that Polish woman" (Schenk doesn't remember which action it was). "Every time, when we stormed the cellars and women were inside the Dirlewanger soldiers raped them. Many times a group raped the same woman, quickly, still holding weapons in their hands. Then after one of the fights, I was standing shaking by the wall and couldn't calm my nerves. Dirlewanger soldiers burst in. One of them took a woman. She was pretty. She wasn't screaming. Then he was raping her, pushing her head strongly against the table, holding a bayonet in the other hand. First he cut open her blouse. Then one cut from stomach to throat. Blood gushed. Do you know, how fast blood congeals in August?"

“There is also that small child in Dirlewanger’s hands. He took it from a woman who was standing in the crowd in the street. He lifted the child high and then threw it into the fire. Then he shot the mother."

“Or that little girl who unexpectedly came out of the cellar. She was thin and short, something about 12 years old. Torn clothes, disheveled hair. On one side we, on the other Poles. She was standing by the wall not knowing where to run. She raised her hands, and said Nicht Partizan. I waved with my hand that she shouldn't be afraid and should come closer. She was walking with her little hands up. She was squeezing something in one of her hands. She was very close when I heard a shot. Her head bounced. A piece of bread fell out from her hand. In the evening the platoon leader, he was from Berlin, came up to me and said proudly: ‘It was a master shot. Wasn’t it?’ He smiled proudly."

News Sources: Sobibor Gas Chambers Uncovered

Video

Times of Israel with photo

Washington Post with photos

Reuters

Archaeology News Network

Spiegel 

Dutch TV

Update September 27th, 2014: The second video embedded in this story makes it clear that they still have to do work on the west side which will uncover remaining gas chambers. They also seem to know the engine's positioning and the gap that indicates the entrance:

Eichmann Before Jerusalem (Bettina Stangneth)

In 1957, a circle of Nazis in Argentina taped dozens of hours of conversations with Adolf Eichmann with the expectation that these would lead to a book that refuted the estalished history of the Holocaust. To their horror, however, Eichmann proceeded to make antisemitic statements on tape that clearly indicated he had desired to exterminate all Jews, and that Nazi policy had been geared towards that ultimate objective. Eichmann killed denial stone dead. Bettina Stangneth has provided the most detailed and correctly contextualized analysis of this revisionist act of suicide that is currently available.

Gassing in animal shelters

This is currently a topic that causes controversy in debates concerning animal rights and the suffering of animals during euthanasia. However, I introduce it here to show that death is caused by lack of oxygen not by poisoning. An article from 2005 states:

From start to finish, the process of gassing an animal takes about 25 minutes. One or more animals are placed in an airtight chamber, and a high concentration of bottled carbon monoxide gas is released.

Cats and dogs are rendered unconscious within a minute, then eventually die from lack of oxygen.

I am grateful to posters at this AHF thread for the heads-up.

Hadamar Autopsies

I refer readers to this excellent thesis paper by Madeline Schlesinger, which shows conclusively why the autopsies conducted by Major Bolker at Hadamar proved that the patients did not die of TB, and which also notes the key fact that Hadamar had no facilities for diagnosing and treating TB, such as X-ray machines and relevant drugs (p.19). Deaths were consistent with the poisonings described by defendants (p.44) and the morphine bottles found at the site (p.35). Furthermore, the paper cites (on p.40) the statement by Wahlmann suggesting that 200,000 was the initial death target for the T4 program, implying a calculation of 80,000,000 x 0.004 x 0.625.

Breaking Down Soviet World War II Losses

Our reader Marko Marjanović from Ljubljana has published an updated version of his breakdown of the Soviet Union’s human losses in World War II, which can be read and downloaded under this link.

Descendants of Survivors of Victims of the Nazi Genocide Condemn Israel’s Assault on Gaza

327 Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide have signed a letter written in response to what they consider to be Elie Wiesel’s manipulation of the Nazi Genocide to attempt to justify Israeli attacks on Gaza.

For more information on this letter and the related press release see here and here.

Minsk: A Preliminary Partial List of German Witness Statements

This article is an alphabetical list of witnesses to events that occurred in Minsk between 1941 and 1944. I have only included witnesses whose full surname I was able to ascertain from the sources. There are far more witnesses in trial judgments whose names are censored to just two letters. These are listed at the end of the blog article.

Wilhelm Dadischek - admitted killing Jews but claimed superior orders [source]

Karl Dalheimer - Heuser co-defendant, described mass shooting actions [source]

Sabine Dick - Heuser's secretary, wrote up his orders for Jewish actions [Heuser judgment, 552-129, and Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies, pp.110-113]

Dittrich - gan vans sent from Minsk to Baranovici [source]

Otto Edel - atrocities against Jewish prisoners [source]

Graf's Idiocy Regarding West German Trials (Part 1)

Between 1975 and 1981, Hildegard Lachert was one of sixteen defendants who stood trial in Düsseldorf for crimes committed at Majdanek. Her lawyers included Ludwig Bock, who explicitly denied the gas chambers and stated that there was no proof that more than 100,000 Jews ever died in the Nazi period. Despite this clear denial strategy, however, Lachert received a sentence of only twelve years for accessory to murder, having previously served a term in Poland from 1947 to 1956. The judges in the trial allowed Bock to conduct a cross-examination of witnesses "so severe as to approach intimidation."

Graf's Idiocy Regarding West German Trials (Part 2)

In addition to the general problems I identified in Part 1, which confront MGK concerning West German war crimes trials, Graf and his colleagues are burdened with the patterns that clearly emerge from testimonies and sentencing of defendants who stood trial in West Germany between 1963 and 1966 for crimes at the three Operation Reinhard camps.

Re: Was Rudolf Vrba registered at Auschwitz? (updated)

Right now some CODOH Revisionists are wondering if Rudolf Vrba aka Walter Rosenberg "was really at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the first place". The notion that he was not is patently absurd. 

Black Saturday

Except in the case that is the subject of this blog, which was its closest match to the massacres committed by its Japanese ally in Nanking and Manila, Nazi Germany didn’t carry out wholesale shooting massacres of the general civilian population with five-digit death tolls in occupied territories, even in Poland and the Soviet Union. Bloodbaths on such a scale, like Aktion Erntefest and the earlier mass shootings at Kamenets-Podolsky, Babi Yar near Kiev, Drobitzki Yar near Kharkov and Simferopol, were a «privilege» reserved to the Jewish minority among the occupied peoples, which was targeted for extermination.

A nightmare with no way out

In just 100 days in 1994, some 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists targeting members of the minority Tutsi community as well as their political opponents. According to the Kigali Memorial Centre, the number was even higher, about one million dead. Either number makes the Rwandan genocide one of the swiftest mass killings in history, with an average of at least about 8,000 victims per day, its matches in the 20th Century including the mass murder, mostly by starvation, of Soviet prisoners of war in the custody of the German Wehrmacht between October 1941 and March 1942 (according to German historian Christian Gerlach, the number of Soviet prisoners who died is likely to have been around 300,000 to 500,000 in each of the months October, November and December 1941). The Gendercide Watch site's page Case Study:Genocide in Rwanda, 1994 includes the following comparison:

Together with the mass murder of Soviet prisoners-of-war during World War II, it was the most concentrated act of genocide in human history: "the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust." (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998], p. 3.) (Gérard Prunier provides an even higher estimate: "the daily killing rate was at least five times that of the Nazi death camps." Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide [Columbia University Press, 1995], p. 261.)

June 22, 1944

On this day 70 years ago, three years to the day after the beginning of Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, the Soviet army launched an offensive codenamed Operation "Bagration", which led to the Wehrmacht’s greatest defeat on the Eastern Front.