Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Partisans, Reprisals and Other Denier Excuses: the Career of Harald Turner

I have already noted here how the career of Eduard Strauch disproves the denier claim that the Einsatzgruppen killed Jews purely as partisans. I have also debunked the false claim by Germar Rudolf that Nazi reprisal policy was legal. To reinforce these points, I will now take a look at the career of Harald Turner, which Christopher R. Browning described in detail in Chapter Six of his The Path to Genocide. Browning recapitulated his argument in shorter form in this on-line essay here.

Read more!

Turner was made chief of military administration in Serbia in April 1941. In mid-August 1941 he requested (via Benzler) that all Jews be deported down the Danube to Rumania or the General Government. This was declined so a month later he persuaded Benzler to make an appeal to Rademacher, requesting deportation of the Jews to Poland or the USSR. Rademacher recorded the reply that he received in a handwritten note that was subsequently presented in evidence at the Eichmann trial:
In the opinion of Sturmbannfuehrer Eichmann, RSHA IVD4, there is no possibility to take them to Russia or to the Generalgouvernement. Even Jews from Germany cannot be accommodated there. Eichmann proposes to kill them by shooting.
In the meantime, the Wehrmacht, under the command of Boehme, began to shoot Jews under the pretext of the need to fill 1:100 reprisal quotas. Such reprisals were not, however, for crimes committed by Jews but were instead inflicted on Jews in lieu of Serb partisans who had not been captured in sufficient numbers to meet the quotas. Turner admitted that this was morally wrong in a private letter dated 17 October 1941 sent to Hildebrandt and reproduced in German here. The extract was translated into English by Walter Manoschek in his 'The Extermination of the Jews in Serbia', published in Ulrich Herbert (ed), National Socialist Extermination Policies, p.177 [thanks to KentFord9 for reminding me of this source]:
In the last 8 days, I have had 2,000 Jews and 200 Gypsies shot dead, following the quota of 1:100 for brutally murdered German soldiers, and a further 2,200, also nearly all Jews, will be shot in the next 8 days. That is not pleasant work! But it must be done, in order to make it clear to people what it means to attack a German soldier, while at the same time, the Jewish question solves itself most quickly in this way. Actually, it is wrong, if taken literally, that for murdered Germans, for whom the ratio of 1:100 should come at the expense of the Serbs, 100 Jews will now be shot, but they are the ones we happened to have in the camp . . .
However, any moral impediments on Turner's behalf seem to have dissipated by 26th October, because Turner was able to issue the following order, which is also cited by Manoschek and which Nick Terry reproduces in this RODOH thread:
Verwaltungschef Turner wies daraufhin die Kreis- und Feldkommandanturen an, die Geiselopfer gezielter auszuwaehlen, wobei er sich des selbstgeschaffenen Problems bewusst war, dass bei der Quote von 1:100 die Opfer 'nicht mehr gestellt werden koennen, wenn einigermassen ein gewisser Schuldbegriff, auch nur auf Grund der allgemeinen Haltung der Festzunehmenden, in Betracht werden soll.' Bei Juden und Zigeuner mussten so diffuse Auswahlskritirien allerdings nicht beruecksichtigt werden: Turner betonte, dass weiterhin 'in jeden Fall alle juedischen Maenner und alle maennlichen Zigeuner als Geiseln der Truppe zur Verfuegung zu stellen' sind.

source quoted: Befehl Turner an saemtliche Kreis- und Feldkommandanturen, 26. 10. 1941, NOKW-Dokument 802
The background to Turner's order, according to Browning, was a meeting on Oct 20th in Belgrade between Turner, Rademacher, Suhr and Fuchs, in which it was decided that male Jews would be held as hostages and gradually killed to meet reprisal quotas against Serb (non-Jew) partisans, whilst evacuation of women & children 'to the East' was agreed for a future unspecified date. However, this evacuation did not take the form of expulsion, but instead took the form of gas vans the following Spring, which Turner falsely claimed credit for in his famous letter to Wolff:
Already some months ago, I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on in this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a "delousing van," that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp, which in any event since the arrival of Meyssner and the turning over of this camp to him, was continued by him. Then the time is come in which the Jewish officers to be found in prisoner of war camps under the Geneva Convention find out against our will about their no longer existing kinfolk and that could easily lead to complications.
Whilst this was a candid admission of killing by gassing [as was noted at the Irving-Lipstadt trail, Turner stupidly gives the game away by putting "entlausungswagen" in inverted commas], Turner omitted the fact that the gas van was ordered direct from Berlin by Emanuel Schaefer, who admitted this in his West German postwar trial testimony at both his trial in Cologne and Pradel's trial in Hannover (Browning, p.137, n.33).

How do deniers respond to this overwhelming evidence of genocide? They either cry 'forgery', as Ingrid Weckert does with other gas van documentation here, or they lie outrageously. Weckert's supposedly comprehensive study of gas vans only mentions the Turner-Wolff document once, in an oblique reference that is designed to deceive:
It is also not impossible that the RSHA's special vehicles were used for disinfection purposes. In any case, an SS-Obergruppenführer confirmed in April 1942 that the RSHA had supplied him with a 'delousing van'.
So much for 'revisionism'.

Update on Gerdes & NAFCASH

Greg Gerdes has responded to my invitation and reported for debate on RODOH, in a manner that confirms my interpretation of NAFCASH as meaning "National Association of Fish-wives, Cretins and Screaming Hysterics".

The current RODOH thread involving Mr. Gerdes is this one:

What is a forensic criminologist?

Gerdes is now also howling around here.

Update, 17.06.2008

Gerdes is furthermore rambling away (in the company of his "White" buddies) on the thread Archeological Investigations of Treblinka of the "Vanguard News Network" forum (an "open arena" into which all opposition is welcome, according to one of the posters – and so far I have not been censored there indeed).

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

How Low Can Deniers Go?

How about: justifying the execution of children, which Hargis attempts to do here by lying about international law, the real status of which was spelled out here?

In this regard, Hargis joins his guru Rudolf, who lied here about the principle of proportionality, the reality of which was clearly spelled out here and here. Just how deeply can these Hitler-kissers descend into the moral mire?

CODOH Lies and Ignorance: Sanning (Part 2)

A quick follow-up to Part 1. Anyone still curious about the number of East European Jews who were being admitted to the USA can check out the 1929 quotas here, the revised 1938 quotas here, and the numbers of Jews who actually gained admittance to the US in 1939-40 here and here. It should also be noted that Jews could not leave the General Government after November 1940, due to this ban.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Faurisson and the Swimming Pool at Auschwitz I

In 2001, Faurisson published this article about the swimming pool at Auschwitz I. He claimed that "The pool was a pool. It was meant for the detainees." However, the solitary direct eyewitness that Faurisson quoted in the original article stated that, "It should be noted that only the very fit and well-fed, exempt from the harsh jobs, could indulge in these games..."

This is therefore a direct distortion by Faurisson, contradicted by his own witness. The pool was only meant for a small minority of detainees: the administrative workers in Auschwitz I. We do not know from the extract that any of these were Jews. The workers at Buna (Auschwitz III) and those selected for Birkenau never went near it; nor did those on starvation rations, nor those doing heavy labour. Yet, as was surely Faurisson's intention, deniers have swallowed this evidence as if it related to the whole of Auschwitz. Both astro3 [Kollerstrom] and 'Hannover' [Hargis] do precisely that here. Readers can decide for themselves whether this misreading was done through mendacity or sheer stupidity. With Hargis and Kollerstrom, either answer would be plausible.

Furthermore, in an addendum on the same link, Faurisson quoted a later witness account, written in 1997, stating that "a newsreel director had some deportees filmed swimming there." An honest scholar might conclude that this indicated the true propaganda purpose of the pool, but Faurisson is a dishonest scholar and chooses to call the witness a liar, except in the small part where his testimony supports Faurisson's claim.

CODOH's Greatest Hits: A Guide for New Readers

The idiocies of the CODOH forum have been documented in detail both here on the HC site and in the Memory Hole section of the RODOH forum. Highlights include CODOH mentor Bradley Smith censoring his own blog to delete complaints made about biased moderation by Jonnie Hargis; the banning of Sergey Romanov for exposing CODOH's hypocrisy concerning standards of evidence; and my own treatment after I exposed Hargis's double standards concerning Neander and Krege.

Readers can also wonder at the fact that this thread was allowed by the 'Moderator' to make unsubstantiated allegations that "Jewish Death Squads killed Germans"; Hargis himself was allowed to allege, without evidence, "mass murders by Allied field troops, heinous mass mutilations by the largely judeo-supremacist Bolsheviks/communists, the dismemberment of Germany, the seizure of her assets and patents, the mass rapes, [and] slave labor made of Germans"; and why Claudia Rothenbach was allowed to wax lyrical, without being warned, about how the "USA killed 20 M natives and robbed their land; had 15 M slaves while some tens of million were murdered before they reached the ramp in Neuf Orleans" and "USSR, killed about 66 M own people, 10 M Ukrainians 1930/31". All such allegations would have been deleted immediately if made about the Nazis.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Mattogno's Abuse of History

During the last two years, we have posted a multitude of blogs demonstrating how 'sonderbehandlung' was used as a euphemism for killing in numerous Nazi documents. One of these blogs is Sergey's excellent shredding of Mattogno's shameless Auschwitz screed. This stands alongside other demolitions of Mattogno's dishonest pseudo-scholarship that we have conducted at HC since 2006, including Roberto's superb analysis of Mattogno's distortions concerning Kola's work at Belzec.

Read more!

Mattogno is different from other deniers in that he does attempt to use a range of primary source materials. However, his stock technique is to present these materials in a way that distorts, and even reverses, their contextual, geographical and chronological framework. Here is another example of this technique in action.

One of the documents that Mattogno seeks to whitewash is this report from Schwarz dated 8 March 1943, which describes the processing of arrivals at Auschwitz as follows:

Transport aus Berlin, Eingang 7. März 43, Gesamtstärke 690 einschließlich 25 Schutzhäftlingen. Zum Arbeitseinsatz gelangten 153 Männer und 25 Schutzhäftlinge (Buna) und 65 Frauen. Sonderbehandelt wurden 30 Männer und 417 Frauen und Kinder.
Translation:
Transport from Berlin, arrival March 7, 1943 total strength 690 including 25 prisoners in protective custody. 153 men and 25 prisoners in protective custody were assigned for work (Buna), and 65 women, 30 men and 417 women and children received special treatment.
How does Mattogno deal with this obvious reference to gassing? I am grateful to Hans at RODOH forum for supplying this extract from Mattogno's attempted whitewash of the documentation:
How was this 'special treatment' managed in practice? In the third paragraph of a letter dated June 4, 1943, already cited on p. 41, Bischoff wrote of the central sauna, then under construction:145

"The large dressing and undressing rooms are absolutely necessary,
since the influx of an entire transport (approx. 2000), most of which arrive
at night, must be confined within a single area until the next morning. Having
the arrivals wait in the fully occupied camp is excluded due to the danger
of transmission of lice."
This citation is both amateurish and fraudulent. It is amateurish because, as Hans notes, Kremer's diary shows that "transports arriving at night were usually not locked somewhere until the next morning but immediately selected." It is fraudulent because, as Nick Terry observes on the same thread:
Mattosha shows his usual incredible grasp of chronology by citing a document from three months after the document he is trying to 'neutralise'.
Mattogno claims that the Jews undergoing sonderbehandlung in the March 8th document were being treated in a Central Sauna that was still 'under construction' on June 4th. He also claims that these Jews were then sent on to the USSR, at a time when the Germans were, to put it mildly, suffering 'major reversals' at the hands of the Red Army and Soviet partisans. As I have noted elsewhere, this is blatantly dishonest because Mattogno has cited in his Treblinka screed that:
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.
Mattogno is seriously asking us to believe that officers in the USSR who bitterly protested the arrival of 1,000 Jews in July 1942 would have given the nod to far greater deportations in 1943 and even 1944, when the phrase 'S.B.' was still appearing in the so-called prisoners' strength reports (Staerkemeldungen) of the women's camp at Birkenau, at a time when the military situation for the Germans fighting the Red Army and partisans had become dire. Moreover, at least one of the Staerkemeldungen mentioning 'S.B.' was dated November 29th, 1944, whereas the Red Army recaptured Minsk on 3 July 1944 and Riga by 13th October, 1944. It is therefore no surprise that Mattosha ignores these documents, as even he would not insult his gullible denier readership by pretending that Auschwitz Jews were being resettled in Soviet territory that was no longer in Nazi hands.

Finally, another part of the extract cited by Hans shows the desperation of Mattogno's sourcing:
According to Radio Moscow, several thousand Jews were resettled in the Ukraine. In its issue number 71 of April 1944, the Jewish underground newspaper Notre Voix was able to report...
Needless to say, Mattogno would excoriate any orthodox historian who resorted to such piss-poor use of a state propaganda outlet and secondary source. That such a source should be Mattosha's primary weapon against authentic Nazi documentation is simply an admission on his behalf that he is fighting an ideological battle by dishonest means, not engaging in honest historical scholarship.

Greg Gerdes

In his post of Tue May 13, 2008 2:45 pm on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum", a bigmouth who calls himself Greg Gerdes blustered away as follows:

Now let's look at what that incredible dullard - Roberto Muehlenkamp, has to say about the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor: (from: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-of-same-trash_18.html )

Quote:
"As before in regard to Treblinka and Belzec, Mr. Ugly Voice tries to take his readers for a ride by "estimating" the burial space available at Sobibor... it seems there are viewers blind and/or stupid enough to let themselves be taken in by such a kindergarten-level hoax. Which is not surprising, by the way, to who has spent some time looking at the world of "Revisionist" lunacy, which is full of fanatics eager to switch off their tiny brains in order to believe what they would like to believe.

...If, on the other hand, you use the plausible densities mentioned in the same article, you get the following:

• At 8 bodies per cubic meter (Mattogno’s "maximum capacity"): 99,592 bodies

• At 10.7 bodies per cubic meter (Alex Bay’s calculation): 133,204 bodies

• At 14.8 bodies per cubic meter (pursuant to Charles Provan’s experiment: 184.245 bodies.

So we can see that, even by the lowest calculation that can be considered reasonable, the American Football spectator crowd of about 80,000 people that Mr. Ugly Voice tries to impress his gullible viewers with could very well fit into the burial space available at Sobibor, as established according to Prof. Kola’s above-mentioned findings. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Ugly Voice has it all wrong once again."

So the dullest of all the holocaust controversies dullards claims that the estimate of 80,000 buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor is a hoax and also sneers at the figure of 100,000. He goes on to estimate 133,000 to 184,000 bodies are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor.

Of course, this begs the question - Even if the maximum figure of 184,000 are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor, then why do so many hoaxers claim that the figure is 250,000?

But of course, the real question is, a question that even a kindergartener would ask: IF the official Sobibor holocasut story is true - Then where EXACTLY are these alleged "huge mass graves?"

And a question:

When is Kola going to publish the results of this investigation?


Read more!


Never having met this Gerdes fellow before, I wondered why he was mad at me, as his mouthing suggests he his.

Was it only because I had referred to "Revisionist" nonsense in general and denierbud’s video clips in particular in rather unflattering and equally appropriate terms? Or was there more behind Gerdes' anger?

The latter is suggested by the fact that, as I found out by running "Greg Gerdes" on the Google search engine, our friend is the "president" of the so-called "National Association of Forensic Criminologists, Archeologists, Skeptics and Historians" (NAFCASH), whose mendacious "challenge" was appropriately commented by Sergey Romanov in this article. My own article Polish investigations of the Treblinka killing site were a complete failure … incidentally punched further holes in what these NAFCASH people (whose multi-colored and multi-sized collection of long-debunked "Revisionist" manure, such as the irrelevant "diesel gas chambers" baloney, is so shrill as to make it look like their initials actually stand for "National Association of Fish-Wives, Cretins and Screaming Hysterics") tell their readers about there being "no trace of mass graves" at Treblinka, by showing – on hand of a site investigation report quoted by "Revisionist" gurus Mattogno & Graf, who however failed to understand its significance – that the size of the presumable mass graves area of Treblinka extermination camp (an area of ca. 20,000 square meters covered by human ashes, bones and skulls, according to said report), as well as the likely depth of the mass graves established during the investigation (7.5 meters, go figure!), are compatible with the order of magnitude of mass murder at Treblinka that becomes apparent from documentary evidence. Another nail in NAFCASH's coffin was my recent article Gold Rush in Treblinka, with its mention of documentary evidence about the postwar digging-up of the Treblinka killing site by treasure hunters and the opinion of an expert in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology, both of which are further confirmation that NAFCASH’s poster-boy Richard Krege is, if not an inveterate liar, then at least an incompetent bungler who doesn't know much about GPR soil examination.

If Mr. Gerdes has read the above-mentioned articles – which I hope he has – that would explain his diatribes against Holocaust Controversies in general and "that incredible dullard" in particular even better than his anger at my having called a spade a spade in my article More of the same trash ….

Now, let’s look at Mr. Gerdes’ comments about the excerpt from that article quoted in his above-mentioned post, item by item.

Gerdes:
So the dullest of all the holocaust controversies dullards claims that the estimate of 80,000 buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor is a hoax and also sneers at the figure of 100,000. He goes on to estimate 133,000 to 184,000 bodies are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor.


I refrain from calling Gerdes the dullest of "Revisionist" dullards because he has some stiff competition among his coreligionists, to say the least, but the fact is that the fellow is obviously too dumb to even read my article correctly.

I’m not arguing that the estimate of ca. 80,000 dead bodies buried in the Sobibor mass graves is wrong let alone a "hoax", and I am also not estimating that "133,000 to 184,000" dead bodies were buried in those mass graves. My argument is that, according to the measurements of the mass graves found in 2001 by Polish archaeologists, the Sobibor mass graves were large enough to hold more or much more than the number of dead bodies reportedly buried in them before the camp staff switched to incinerating the bodies instead of burying them. This in turn means that there is nothing implausible about these mass graves having contained about 80,000 dead bodies.

Maybe such elementary reasoning – if the mass graves could have held more corpses than they are reported to have held, then there’s nothing implausible about the reported figure – is too complex for a "Revisionist" simpleton like Gerdes to grasp.

Gerdes:
Of course, this begs the question - Even if the maximum figure of 184,000 are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor, then why do so many hoaxers claim that the figure is 250,000?


Besides misreading my article, Gerdes apparently didn’t understand the video clip that this article refers to, which starts with the following quote from page 177 of Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps:

Only one-third of the 250,000 victims in this camp had been killed and buried before the cremating began. Those who were gassed there afterward, in the period between October 1942 and October 1943, were taken directly from the gas chambers to the cremating sites.


Even denierbud, though not the sharpest tool in the shed, realized that this meant ca. 83,000 bodies buried before cremation became the body disposal method at Sobibor, whereas the remaining 167,000 were incinerated right after they had been killed, without ever being dumped into a mass grave. For Gerdes, on the other hand, even this simple reasoning seems to have been too much. Or then he didn’t even bother to watch denierbud’s video clip (not that he would have missed anything of value).

The number given by Arad is the highest estimate of the number of victims of Sobibor that I know of. A more cautious estimate was made at the trial against former members of the Sobibor staff before the District Court in Hagen, Germany, which concluded that at least 150,000 Jewish civilians had been killed at Sobibor. As I mentioned in this article, an expert report provided during this trial managed to reconstruct (with remarkable accuracy, as a comparison with documentary evidence discovered decades after this trial shows) the dates and places of origin of the transports included in the minimum number of victims assumed by the court. So despite the Nazis’ documented attempts to get rid of as much evidence as possible, enough documents and other evidence survived to allow for a court expert’s detailed reconstruction of transports to Sobibor, adding up to about 150,000 people, at a trial held more than 20 years after the end of the war.

This leads us to a question far more pertinent that Gerdes’ high-handed (and already answered) question:

But of course, the real question is, a question that even a kindergartener would ask: IF the official Sobibor holocasut story is true - Then where EXACTLY are these alleged "huge mass graves?


The more pertinent question is this: if, as claimed by "Revisionist" fantasists like Gerdes, Sobibor was not an extermination camp but a transit camp from which Jews were distributed to ghettos or labor camps further east, then which were these alleged ghettos or labor camps, what evidence is there that shows large numbers of Jews from Sobibor being transported to these places and accommodated there, and what evidence is there regarding what eventually became of all those Jews?

Common sense alone (which is something alien to "Revisionist" thinking) already tells us that, if Sobibor had been a transit camp and large numbers of Jews had been transported somewhere further east from there, Mattogno & Graf (the only "Revisionists" who, to my knowledge, have tried to come up with something like an answer to this question) would be able to reconstruct these transports at least as precisely as German court expert Wolfgang Scheffler managed to reconstruct transports to Sobibor at the above-mentioned trial, all the more so as the Germans would have had no reason to keep resettlement transports from a Sobibor transit camp a secret or to destroy the related documentary evidence, as they are known to have done with most of the documents pertaining to the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Had a massive resettlement operation via these three "transit camps" actually taken place, Mattogno & Graf wouldn’t be reduced to citing a handful of eyewitnesses about a few small transports from Sobibor to other places, as they do in the excerpt proudly quoted by Gerdes in his opening post of Tue May 13, 2008 1:38 pm (regarding the mendacity of Mattogno & Graf’s claims based on these selectively quoted testimonies, see Jonathan Harrison’s article Mattogno and Graf: Reverse Logic). Nor would these "Revisionist" gurus have to vaguely babble about Polish Jews deported to Ukraine or White Russia, only to be screwed by their own source (apart from shamelessly misrepresenting the writings of German historian Christian Gerlach, as I may demonstrate in a future article). If Mattogno & Graf’s lame endeavors quoted in Gerdes’ OP are the best that "Revisionists" have got by way of an answer to the essential question what, if not mass murder, is supposed to have happened to the Jews deported to Sobibor and the other Aktion Reinhard(t)camps, then one can only feel sorry for these faithful folks and the lunatic creed they embrace.

Gerdes ends his rambling with the following question:

When is Kola going to publish the results of this investigation?


Well, I suggest that Gerdes contact Prof. Kola and ask him this question, which I don’t think anyone else can answer.

Is the absence of a publication similar to Kola’s report about Belzec supposed to mean anything, like there being something wrong with Kola’s announcement of the discovery of mass graves at Sobibor and the measurements thereof? Only in the conspiraloon cloud-cuckoo-land of "Revisionism" could this be seriously claimed, also considering that Prof. Kola is a renowned archaeologist and that his findings are matched by all other evidence to what happened at Sobibor. Gerdes would also be shooting himself in the foot by arguing thusly, insofar as Richard Krege has not yet published the results of the touted "detailed forensic examination" he is supposed to have conducted in 1999. One might say that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, except that there's a significant difference between the findings of a renowned professor of archaeology at Sobibor and those of a "Revisionist" nobody at Treblinka: the former are in line with all known evidence about Sobibor that has been investigated and researched by criminal justice authorities and historians over the past six decades, whereas the latter are at odds with all known eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence about the mass murder at Treblinka.

Gerdes seems to be fond of challenging others, namely Michael Schermer, to debate him.

So here’s a challenge to you, Mr. Gerdes:

Come out and debate the "incredible dullard" about any subject of your choosing related to your "specialty", the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps.

I would reply to you on CODOH if I could post there, but webmaster Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis banned me from that lovely place some years ago, obviously because neither he nor any of his acolytes could handle my arguments. But there’s a forum, owned by a "Revisionist", that offers open and uncensored debate. This forum, which Hargis is so afraid of that he made his software automatically change its name into "shills", is called RODOH, which stands for "Real Open Debate on the Holocaust" (the pun on the falsely so-called "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust" is intended).

I’m waiting for you on RODOH, Mr. Gerdes.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Eduard Strauch

The documented words and deeds of SS-Obersturmbannführer Eduard Strauch, the commander of the Security Police and SD (KdS) in White Ruthenia, pose three unsurmountable problems for deniers. Firstly, Strauch "admitted that, to his own knowledge, a Jew had to be killed just because he was a Jew". This admission was made, not only at his 1948 trial, but also in documents that he wrote for his superiors, which are discussed below. Secondly, Strauch used euphemisms such as "special treatment" and "resettled" in contexts that were so blatant that they could not camouflage their true meaning. Thirdly, Strauch's actions can be traced through testimony showing that they were systematic and ordered from the centre. Deniers cannot therefore claim that Strauch's forces were killing Jews because they were partisans, nor that their actions were ad-hoc and reactive.

Read more!

On July 25th, 1943, Strauch sent a long report to his superior, von dem Bach (Nuremberg file NO-2662), in which he complained bitterly about the behaviour of the Generalkommissar of White Ruthenia, Wilhelm Kube. The report is reproduced in full at the Axis History Forum here. The report includes the following revealing paragraphs:

On numerous occasions Kube has said to me personally that Jews evacuated from the Reich could be spared without any problem since they do not understand the local language and would therefore not pose a danger in so far as their becoming involved in guerrilla activities was concerned.

I am convinced from the evidence that deep down Kube is opposed to our actions against the Jews. If he does not admit to this outwardly the only reason is his fear of the consequences. He is in agreement with actions against Russian Jews because he is able to appease his conscience by the fact that the majority of Russian Jews collaborate with the guerrillas.
Every false denier claim, from Butz downwards, that the Einsatzkommandos were 'just' killing partisans can be safely trashed using this one extract. It confirms what was already obvious to anyone who has read the Operational Situation Reports, such as those in this link, namely that Jews were killed purely on the basis of their assumed 'racial origin'.

Strauch's use of euphemisms has already been the subject of an excellent blog by Nick Terry, revealing how the term 'resettlement' was used euphemistically when Strauch gave the order to kill the Jews of Sluzk. Nick's translation:
On 8 and 9 February 1943 there will be a resettlement in the town Sluzk by the local command the resettlement of the Jews there.
The evacuation of the Jews to the resettlement place happens by means of 6 trucks, each to be accompanied by 4 Latvians.
At the resettlement area are 2 pits. At each pit a group of 10 leaders and men will work, to be relieved every 2 hours. Times 8-10 o'clock, 10-12 o'clock, 12-14 o'clock, 14-16 o'clock.
Strauch's report to von dem Bach, cited above, provides further proof that deniers are pissing in the wind when they try to read 'resettlement' literally in any document produced during the occupation period:
On 1 March 1942 an action was to take place against the Russian ghetto in Minsk. The Generalkommissar received prior notification. In order to disguise the action the Council of Elders was to be informed that 5,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto were to be resettled. These Jews were to be notified by the Council of Elders and told to get ready. Each Jew would be permitted to take along 5 kg of luggage.

As can be proved, the actual intentions of the Security Police were betrayed by the Generalkommissariat. Those Jews employed in the Generalkommissariat were not allowed into the ghetto for several days but were made to stay in the Generalkommissariat, as a result of which it became clear to the ghetto Jews that the version put out by the Security Police was not correct. In addition, further indiscretions were committed, as emerges from liaison reports. At the time it was not possible to prove these incidents. It is clear, however, that the Gauleiter used his knowledge to save his Jews.
Furthermore, the documents of Strauch, Kube and Lohse give several examples of how Sonderbehandlung was used as a euphemism for genocidal killing. Lohse, when forwarding a report from Kube to Rosenberg on 18 June 1943, wrote that:
The fact that Jews receive special treatment requires no further discussion. However, it appears hardly believable that this is done in the way described in the report of the General Commissioner of 1 June 1943. What is Katyn against that? Imagine only that these occurrences would become known to the other side and exploited by them! Most likely such propaganda would have no effect only because people who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to believe it.

To lock men, women, and children into barns and to set fire to them does not appear to be a suitable method of combating bands, even if it is desired to exterminate the population. This method is not worthy of the German cause and hurts our reputation severely.
Strauch's report to von dem Bach gives an example of such 'special treatment':
During a major ghetto action it was made known by informants that the German Jewish Ordnungsdienst made up predominantly of former World War I servicemen, was intending to put up armed resistance. In order to avoid bloodshed on the German side the Ordnungsdienst was made to assemble and was told that a fire had broken out in the town and they should be at the ready for fire duty. The Jews were then loaded on to trucks and sonderbehandelt.
The Nuremberg judgement against Strauch, cited above also noted that:
On 20 July 1943 Strauch wrote a letter narrating how he had subjected 70 Jews to special treatment and expressing his resentment because complaint had arisen from the fact that he had had the gold fillings removed from the mouths of these Jews before they were killed.
Finally, deniers will be distressed to read that Strauch was acting from higher orders. Heydrich met Strauch in Minsk in April 1942, and his presence enabled this sequence of events, described by Strauch at his trial:
In response to a question regarding the Jewish problem in White Ruthenia, Strauch replied that the Fuehrer Order was valid in White Ruthenia, as everywhere else. He testified that he had a conference with Kube and that Kube told him Jews were needed and he could not do without these Jews, since they should be used in bringing in the harvest, working in an armament factory, and doing other jobs. The defendant thereupon talked to Heydrich and was directed to postpone the execution of the Fuehrer Order until the harvest was brought in.
The harvest of evidence relating to Strauch will thus leave an unpleasant taste in mouths of Hitler-kissing deniers.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Conspiraloons on Child Survivors of Auschwitz

Deniers are often so eager to create a Straw Man that they inadvertently expose their idiocy in the process. Here's a classic example. Deniers would like us to believe that, at Auschwitz, "According to the storyline, children, the sick, and the elderly were immediately 'gassed'". However, in the same article, they then reprint Soviet propaganda photographs showing Jewish children who were liberated at Auschwitz.

These Conspiraloon deniers therefore fabricate hoaxers who were both so impossibly clever that they could conceal their forgeries and machinations for over 60 years, and so improbably stupid that they would publish photographs of child survivors when they were in the process of creating a narrative in which the Nazis killed every child on arrival. In their desperation to create Straw Man history in which a genocide can only occur when there are no survivors, deniers thus prove that no such narrative was being constructed by the allies in 1945. The true narratives of the period were created by history itself, which is always complex and which rarely allows the schemes of tyrants to succeed without exceptions and ambiguities, necessitating that some survivors will indeed be left behind. In the case of Auschwitz, testimony shows that these exceptions came from the arbitrary power exercised by Mengele and other selectors, combined with the camp personnel's need for errand boys, sexual playthings, experimental subjects, and Kapo companions. Once again, in its ignorance of this history, we witness the unbearable stupidity of the Cesspit.

Note: Thanks again to KentFord9 of RODOH for help with source material.