Tuesday, April 29, 2008

5 million non-Jewish victims? (Part 2)

[Updated on 15.05.2013 to replace "Allied requisition policies" with "Axis requisition policies" in the section about Greece]

[Updated on 04.04.2012 to replace broken links to the former RODOH forum.]

Part 1

In the following I shall attempt a country-by country tabulation of non-Jews who perished through criminal violence by Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II, i.e. of non-Jews who died at the hands of the Nazi “killing apparatus” as defined in Part 1.

This tabulation, which lays no claim to being scientific and is open to any constructive criticism that may lead to improving its accuracy, is based on data known to me from various sources as well as my own estimates. Where I have no data from other sources at my disposal, I use the very detailed Wikipedia page on World War II casualties and other information provided by Wikipedia.

Mattogno and Graf Screwed By Their Own Source

In their Treblinka screed, Mattogno and Graf use the following episode as 'evidence' that Treblinka was a transit camp to the USSR:
Finally, the arrival of at least one transport from the Warsaw Ghetto at a location east of Treblinka has been documented beyond any question. On 31 July 1942, the Reichskommissar for White Russia, Wilhelm Kube, sent a telegram to the Reichskommissar for the Ostland, Heinrich Lohse, in which he protested the dispatching of a transport of "1,000 Jews from Warsaw to work at Minsk," because this would lead to danger of epidemics and an increase in partisan activity.
This is denier logic in a nutshell: a document in which bureaucrats bitterly protested about the transport of a mere 1,000 Jews for essential labour into their zone is used as evidence that the same bureaucrats would have acceded to the transport of over 700,000 Jews via Treblinka into the same zone. Such are the slender threads to which deniers cling.

Read more!

Furthermore, Mattogno and Graf prove again that their use of sources is dishonest, because the document they cite was sent on the same day as the well-known letter from the same author, Kube, to the same recipient, Lohse, which reveals that:
Following exhaustive discussions with the SS Brigadefuehrer Zenner and the exceedingly capable Leader of the SD, SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Dr. jur. Strauch, we have liquidated about 55,000 Jews in Byelorussia in the past 10 weeks. In the area of Minsk county Jewry has been completely eliminated without any danger to the manpower requirements. In the predominantly Polish area of Lida, 16,000 Jews were liquidated, in Slonim, 8,000, etc.

Owing to encroachment by the Army Rear Zone (Command), which has already been reported, there was interference with the preparations we had made for the liquidation of the Jews in Glebokie. Without contacting me, the Army Rear Zone Command liquidated 10,000 Jews, whose systematic elimination had in any case been planned by us. In the city of Minsk about 10,000 Jews were liquidated on July 28 and 29. Of these 6,500 were Russian Jews – mainly old men, women and children – and the rest Jews incapable of work, who were sent to Minsk in November of last year by order of the Fuehrer, mainly from Vienna, Bruenn, Bremen and Berlin.

The District of Sluzk has also been relieved of several thousand Jews. The same applies to Nowogrodek and Wilejka. Radical measures are planned for Baranowitschi and Hanzewitschi. In Baranowitschi there are still another 10,000 Jews in the city itself, of whom 9,000 will be liquidated next month.
Moreover, Kube's letter concludes with a sentence that reveals that the local SD commander intends to liquidate any such transports:
I am in full agreement with the Commander of the SD in Byelorussia that we should liquidate every transport of Jews not arranged, or announced to us, by our superior officers, to prevent further disturbances in Byelorussia.
Mattogno and Graf thus quoted a document without acknowledging that its author had, on the same day, sent a letter to the same recipient clearly describing genocidal activity by their Nazi heroes, which directly contradicts and refutes M/G's resettlement thesis.

M/G therefore carried out two deceptions in one stroke. The first deception was to draw an inference from their source ('large-scale resettlement in the East') which was perverse given that the source explicitly expresses opposition to resettlement. The second deception was to omit contextual evidence of mass killing contained in a far more famous document, sent by the same author to the same recipient on the same day, which has been cited by several historians and has been in the public domain for over sixty years.

Monday, April 28, 2008

"Hannover" Hargis’ Hysteria ...

... came to the fore once more after Joachim Neander mentioned a recent Polish newspaper article about the Gold Rush in Treblinka.

Read more!


In a recent thread on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" (a.k.a. the Cesspit), headed Anybody know what tin sheets were used for?, Joachim Neander wrote the following (Fri Apr 25, 2008 4:27 pm):

Sorry, Mr. Dahl, I did not study Sobibor. I only researched a little bit the "Treblinka gold rush" from 1944 to 1950. Two Polish (non-Jewish) journalists wrote an article about it that appeared in the Polish newspaper "Gazeta Wyborcza" in the beginning of this year. I translated it into German and Roberto Muehlenkamp into English. It can be found at the shills Web site under "Documents." The article deals with illegal excavations made by local people and members of the nearby Soviet garrison in search of gold and precious stones. BTW, similar "excavations" took place at Auschwitz, but they were quickly suppressed by the local Polish authorities. At Treblinka, the authorities turned a blind eye on the "excavations," most probably after having received their share of the "findings." In every respect, a disgusting story.


Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis, Keeper of the "Revisionist" Faith, thereupon started jumping up and down trying to discredit this unexpected and inconvenient information (Fri Apr 25, 2008 4:57 pm):

How convenient, but absurd, this story is.

What are these 'journalists' sources?

They claim that there were 'illegal' excavations, yet all too conveniently these alleged 'excavations' were not documented by official Polish sources, since they supposedly "turned a blind eye". On the contrary, making the alleged finds known and visible at the time would have been a bonanza to the propaganda ... IF the 900,000 Jews tale was true.

This is hardly credible evidence for a desperate cover story whose intent is to claim that the alleged mass grave for an alleged 900,000 Jews at Treblinka (10 X The Rose Bowl) cannot be found because there were 'illegal' excavations. Only with the 'holocaust' can people get away with this junk.

I should also note that any mass grave, especially one of the size alleged at Treblinka, would still, today, leave a massive, easily detected footprint. 'illegal excavations' or not.

The liars have not and cannot show us the alleged mass grave for the alleged 900,000 Jews at Treblinka.

- Hannover


What follows are my comments to Hargis' utterances.

Hargis:
How convenient, but absurd, this story is.


Actually the most "absurd" things have happened in human history, so "absurdity" is never an argument when there's evidence. And the pilfering of the Treblinka victims' belongings was not so much an "absurdity" as a showpiece of the greed and selfishness that, unfortunately, are among the features of human nature. The "story" is also everything other than convenient, on the contrary: as becomes apparent from the Gazeta Wyborcza article (see my English translation of Dr. Neander's translation from Polish into German), the Treblinka "gold rush" is an uncomfortable, shameful subject that contemporaries and their descendants in Poland are still reluctant to talk about.

Hargis:
What are these 'journalists' sources?


Interviews with elder villagers who took part in the "gold rush", contemporary Polish reports about the scavenging, photographs that the journalists found or that were shown to them by a Polish historian – Piotr Głuchowski and Marcin Kowalski are very specific about their sources. All it takes to answer Hargis’ unnecessary question is reading their article.

Hargis:
They claim that there were 'illegal' excavations, yet all too conveniently these alleged 'excavations' were not documented by official Polish sources, since they supposedly "turned a blind eye".


Actually, and as the Gazeta Wyborcza article shows, the excavations in search of treasures were mentioned in several contemporary Polish documents, including

• Two reports from the Siedlce Section of the NSZ Task Force for Special Actions" [NSZ = Narodowe Siły Zbrojne - National Armed Forces, right-wing nationalist, anti-communist Polish partisan organization] about the raising of contributions from local inhabitants who ravished the graves in Treblinka;

• A vivid description of the site and the pilfering by a member of an investigative delegation from Warsaw, Karol Ogrodowczyk;

• An activity report by militia commandant of Kosów Lacki about (futile) measures taken by his unit against the pilferers;

• A photograph from an action against the pilferers undertaken by a militia unit from Ostrowa Mazowieckie, shown in the Gazeta Wyborcza article and in my review thereof.

Why didn't Hargis read the article, instead of jumping to convenient conclusions based on a statement of Dr. Neander’s? (This statement is not contradicted by the existence of the above-mentioned documents, by the way – a few half-hearted actions against the Treblinka scavengers don’t change the fact that these people's disgraceful activity, which went on for 15 years after the roundup resulting in the above-mentioned photograph, was allowed to proceed unhindered most of the time.)

Well, maybe he did and is lying – though he's obviously as afraid of this article as he is of anything that comes from the RODOH forum, the name of which is automatically changed into "shills" by the forum software on the Cesspit, lest one of Hargis’ fellow "truth-seekers" take a look through the telescope.

Hargis:
On the contrary, making the alleged finds known and visible at the time would have been a bonanza to the propaganda ...


What, making it known and visible that noble Polish citizens were digging up the ashes and bones of murdered Jews in search of whatever valuables the victims may have taken with them to their graves? As often before, Hargis shows that his reasoning, apart from being based on nothing other than hollow preconceived notions, leaves much to be desired in terms of logic.

The aspect of the Treblinka grave site was made known and visible at the time, by the way – not for the purpose of propaganda, but within the scope of a criminal site investigation carried out by Examining Judge Lukaszkiewicz, the results of which were summarized in a protocol presented by the Soviets at the Nuremberg Trial as Document USSR-344 (see my article Polish investigations of the Treblinka killing site were a complete failure …) and included in the report about The Treblinka Extermination Camp by the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, published in 1946. But then, who would have expected Hargis to read even his own "Revisionist" sources (the Polish site investigation report is quoted in my above-mentioned article after Mattogno & Graf’s Treblinka screed) before shooting the bull?

Hargis:
IF the 900,000 Jews tale was true.


900,000 happens to be the figure given by Głuchowski and Kowalski, which I criticized in my review. Is Hargis' mention of the same figure a coincidence, or did Hargis read my translation of the Gazeta Wyborcza article? In the latter case, he’s lying rather stupidly about the article’s contents.

Hargis:
This is hardly credible evidence for a desperate cover story whose intent is to claim that the alleged mass grave for an alleged 900,000 Jews at Treblinka (10 X The Rose Bowl) cannot be found because there were 'illegal' excavations.


First of all, what would Hargis consider "credible evidence", and what rules or standards of criminal investigation and/or historical research - if any - are his requirements based on? This is a question I would love to directly ask the fellow one day, though I expect him to run away from it like other "Revisionists" to whom this question has been asked.

Second, whence did Hargis derive the supposed "intent" of the Gazeta Wyborcza article? The source seems to be none other than his own paranoia, for nowhere in the article is it stated that the "the alleged mass grave for an alleged 900,000 Jews at Treblinka" cannot be found because of the robbery-digging. There is just one mention of the robbery-digging "blurring the traces of the German mass crime" (which it certainly did, independently of the extent to which the original mass graves remained identifiable), and that is contained in one of those official Polish reports that Hargis claims do not exist. From my translation:

In the archives of the IPN there is the activity report of the militia commandant of Kosów Lacki: "The area was guarded by unidentified armed persons, who barred access to non-adepts and stood guard for those who dug out the remaining watches, jewelry or gold (...) This situation led to blurring the traces of the German mass crime, and there was the risk of an epidemic of diseases dangerous for people. (...) We carried out a roundup and expelled the human hyenas, but they doggedly returned to take up again their interrupted search."


Third, who is supposed to have "alleged" that all victims of Treblinka extermination camp were dumped into one single mass grave? The eyewitness testimonies addressing this issue that I know of mention several mass graves in the "death camp" area of Treblinka extermination camp.

The "Rose Bowl" herring seems to have been borrowed from our old friend "denierbud", by the way. It is one of the arguments that the Ugly Voice fellow (who is probably identical with Hargis' acolyte "Carto’s Cutlass Supreme") uses to impress suckers, like in his clip # 13.

Hargis:
Only with the 'holocaust' can people get away with this junk.


It would be far more appropriate to say that only on a forum like the "CODOH Revisionist Forum", which Hargis controls by deleting inconvenient posts and banning inconvenient posters like this writer, one can get away with writing junk such as has once more been produced by Hargis. On an uncensored open discussion forum like RODOH, such junk would be taken apart by evidence-backed arguments and slapped around the poster's ears – which Hargis probably knows very well, as he has never been known to debate on a forum where he cannot control the debate.

Hargis:
I should also note that any mass grave, especially one of the size alleged at Treblinka, would still, today, leave a massive, easily detected footprint. 'illegal excavations' or not.


… says "Hannover" Hargis, the self-appointed expert in detecting mass graves, without informing the readers why mass graves emptied of their contents, then refilled with human ashes, bone fragments and soil, then leveled off and planted with lupines and then excavated over a period of 15 years by robbery-diggers even using explosives to blast holes in the ground, should leave "a massive, easily detected footprint". Though I’m no expert either, my common sense tells me that if anything left "a massive, easily detected footprint" under these conditions it would have been the robbery-digging, and this seems to have been so indeed. From my translation of the Gazeta Wyborcza article:

"When we went around the memorial we found slots in the area," we say when bidding farewell to the director. "Judging by the trees growing inside them they must be several dozen years old. Are these pits from the diggings?" - "No ... those are from artillery shells. In 1944 the front line was here for some weeks."[…] Martyna Rusiniak thinks that a part of the pits are the hyena's heritage. Especially from the time when bombs were used for "extraction". The young historian shows us photos of the largest postwar excavation sites. The pits have a length of ten meters, one of them looks like the construction pit of a several-story building.


Hargis
The liars have not and cannot show us the alleged mass grave for the alleged 900,000 Jews at Treblinka.


Actually the "liars" (Hargis probably means criminal investigators and historians who have documented the mass killings at Treblinka) have shown eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence that allows for only one reasonable conclusion, the conclusion that about 750,000 people were murdered at Treblinka extermination camp. This article explains how documentary evidence to the magnitude of the killing is corroborated by the findings of Examining Judge Lukaszkiewicz on site.

With all available evidence pointing to mass murder and none suggesting anything else, "Revisionists" are not in a position to play the expectant princess and yell "show me". They are the ones who have to show something, namely an evidence-backed alternative scenario about the fate of the hundreds of thousands who were deported to Treblinka. This they are not able to do, hard though they (especially their gurus Mattogno & Graf) have tried and despite the fact that any scenario other than mass murder should be far better documented (for the Nazis would have had no reason to try getting rid of the documentation) than the scenario that becomes apparent from all known evidence.

Without any evidence supporting "Revisionist" claims or insinuations as to what "actually happened" to all these people, folks like Hargis can whine and squeal all they like. They will never have anything like a case.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

5 million non-Jewish victims? (Part 1)

[Updated on 04.04.2012 to replace broken links to the former RODOH forum.]

[Update, 25.11.2018: I corrected the information about the time at which Europe-wide genocide was decided upon according to Christopher Browning. Thanks to Sergey Romanov for bringing this to my attention.]

Part 2

When running a Google search for information about non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder, one of the first pages to show up is this one, which is headed “Five Million Forgotten” and links to a site called “Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust • Five Milion Forgotten”, hosted by Terese Pencak Schwartz. This site is also linked to by The Holocaust History Project (link # 22) and referred to there as being “A site focusing on the 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust”.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Liepaja (Part 1)

The killing of Jews from Liepaja, Latvia, has been documented in numerous sources. SS and Police Chief Emil Dietrich recorded most of them in his diary. Dietrich was hanged by a US military tribunal at Landsberg-am-Lech prison on 22 Oct 1948. Between the 15th and 17th of December, 1941, three German and Latvian squads shot 2749 Jews, mainly women and children, in the dunes of Skede, near Liepaja. The events were recorded in these infamous photographs by Carl-Emil Strott, who was convicted and sentenced at the trial of Grauel and others in Hannover in 1971. More of Strott's photographs can be found in this thread.

Read more!

Furthermore, lest any deniers are stupid enough to shout 'show trial' and 'forgery', the killings in Liepaja have been demonstrated by the demographic research of Anders and Dubrovskis, who examined the Nazi census of 30 Aug 1941 in the Latvian state archives, and compared it to other demographic sources such as the Soviet census of February 1935, the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, the list of deportees to the Soviet interior, the Grauel trial, residential 'house books', the "Metals Collection" List, the Schutzpolizei Reports, records from the camp at Stutthof, and the Soviets' Extraordinary Commission for Investigation of Fascist Crimes.

Their research is another nail in the coffin of the reputation of fraudulent 'demographer' Walter Sanning. As I noted in this blog, Sanning dishonestly pretended that Nazi demographic figures from January 1943 referred to Soviet population data as of June 1941. This enabled him to claim that most Jews had either fled or been deported to the Soviet interior as part of Stalin's 'scorched earth' policy. Anders and Dubrovskis demonstrate that only 209 Liepaja Jews (out of a Jewish population of 7140) were deported and a maximum of 300 fled.

Liepaja therefore gives us a further demonstration of the bankruptcy of Holocaust denial. To deny that the Nazis deliberately killed women and children from Liepaja, deniers have to ignore the existence of a handwritten diary by the SS and Police Chief, photographs taken by a perpetrator who was tried in a West German court, a census that the Nazis carried out two months after they invaded Latvia, and residential data collected by the Nazis in 1942, showing that many of the people in earlier censuses had been killed. Such denial can only be a deliberate blindness to evidence of genocide.

Footnote: Many thanks to KentFord9 for drawing my attention to the demographic data.