Saturday, August 30, 2008

Who thought that Gerdian imbecility can’t get any worse ...

... should read the Cesspit thread Gerdes pledges to pay Kola's Sobibor bill, in which Gerdes treats his CODOH buddies to his latest publicity stunt:

Read more!


According to the dullest of the dull (Roberto Muehlenkamp), Andrzej Kola is allegedly refusing to publish his report on his alleged "archeological excavations" at Sobibor because he has not been paid for his work.

RM (via the VNN forum post #1012):

Quote:
As I learned from Yoram Haimi of the Sobibor Archaeological Project, the reason why Prof. Kola has not yet published a detailed and illustrated report about his 2001 findings is that he wasn’t paid by the Polish government entity that commissioned his work in 2001. So Prof. Kola is sitting on his findings, so to say, until this problem is solved – which I hope will happen in a near future.


RM (via VNN forum post #1036)

Quote:
What I'm waiting for? ... a detailed report by Prof. Kola


Well, I for one am sick and tired of waiting. I am using this forum to announce that - I will be starting a pledge drive to raise the funds needed to pay the so-called "archeologist" Andrzej Kola for his alleged "excavations" of the alleged "huge mass graves" of Sobibor.

What I need from the boys over at holocaust controversies (I'm sure they will be more than willing to help me get this project started and completed) to get started on this very important project are:

1 - The name of the Polish government entity that commissioned his alleged work.

2 - Proof that this alleged entity commissioned his work.

3 - Proof that this entity owes Kola any money

4 - The amount of money this entity allegedly owes to kola.

5 - A contact person who speaks English in this alleged Polish government entity. (Or someone who can translate for me.)

6 - Contact information for Kola.

And I will need the following from Kola:

7 - The amount that he claims he is allegedly owed.

8 - Proof of said claim.

9 - A pledge that he will release this phantom report that he is allegedly "sitting on" immediately after he gets his money.

I would also like to take this opportunity to publicly challenge Michael Shermer to be the first person to pledge a contribution to this fund and to pledge that he will release the results of his alleged Sobibor investigation at the same time that Kola does his.

Now I am presently leaving for the holiday weekend, and would like the above tasks to be completed and the information posted on the holocaust controversies blog by no later than next Tues. afternoon.

Time to get cracking boys. After all, you do want to help me pay Kola the money he's owed and help stop holocaust denial - don't you?


What I wrote in my VNN post # 1036 was the following

What I'm waiting for, the self-projecting hysteric asks?

Let’s see …

I’m waiting for time and means to go to Sobibor, obtain permission to disturb the ash heap (which I doubt will be granted) and enlist the services of an expert to analyze the human remains and certify that they are in fact human remains (which I also doubt anyone will do for just little me).

So waiting for what comes of an assessment of the mass graves’ contents by the SAP and/or for a detailed report by Prof. Kola seems a more promising approach.


Contrary to what quote-mining Gerdes apparently tries to make believe, I'm in no hurry to see the results of archaeological work at Sobibor, be it Prof. Kola's 2001 investigation, the investigation currently under way by the Sobibor Archaeology Project, or both. A good thing takes time, as a German saying goes. And the longer loonies like Gerdes suffer in anticipation of what is coming at them (hence presumably Gerdes' professed impatience), the better.

If Gerdes is "sick and tired of waiting", that's his problem, and it's up to him how he solves it.

If he feels like doing so by contributing to a worthy cause – the publication of a report by Prof. Kola about the investigations he conducted at Sobibor in 2001 – that’s fine.

But why, then, does he demand that the contributors of this blog get him Prof. Kola's contact, proof of this-and-that, etc.?

As concerns the entity that commissioned Prof. Kola’s work in 2001, Gerdes seems to have a short memory. He apparently forgot what I wrote in my VNN post # 916:

C.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gerdes
7 - Tell us what Polish government entity that commissioned Kola's "work."
Question irrelevant for the purpose of proving mass murder at Sobibor (which has already been proven anyway, see my post # 777 under http://www.vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=811075&postcount=777 ) and also without relevance in the context of the NAFCASH challenge.

Nice guy’s answer to irrelevant question:

On the site http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/historia/index.htm , which is quoted in my post # 807 on this thread (Gerdes should read my posts before hacking away), the following is stated:

Quote:
In 2000-2001 the proper archeological research was initiated by professor Andrzej Kola's team from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, commissioned by the Council for Protection of Memory of the Battle and Martyrdom in Warsaw (Kola 2000, 2001).


As to the rest of his demands, the person best positioned to help Gerdes obtain the information, contacts etc. that he requires is Mr. Yoram Haimi, director of the Sobibor Archaeology Project, who has been in contact with Prof. Kola and accordingly informed me of what Prof. Kola’s problems are. Gerdes has already e-mailed Yoram Haimi, or so he claims in his VNN post # 1044, regarding the mound of human ashes at Sobibor.

So what is Gerdes waiting for to contact Yoram Haimi regarding his offer to solve Prof. Kola’s funding problems, if that offer is more than just a transparent bluff?

The contributors of this blog are not Gerdes' errand boys.

What’s particularly amusing, by the way, is the deadline set by Gerdes for his demands to be met:

Now I am presently leaving for the holiday weekend, and would like the above tasks to be completed and the information posted on the holocaust controversies blog by no later than next Tues. afternoon.


The poor fellow is seriously in need of good professional help.

I wouldn’t be surprised if even the CODOH clowns were beginning to feel uneasy at having him around. The same suspicion has already been expressed by tloB2 in his post # 309 on the RODOH forum:

That Gerdes fella is seriously retarded. It seem like they are uncomfortable with him there too. No "valued contributor" for him...


I must have become an obsession for poor little Gerdes, …

... judging by how he keeps running over to his CODOH buddies - i.e. to a forum he well knows I have been banned from – to mouth off about me.

Read more!


The fellow’s latest hysterical rampage can be witnessed in the CODOH thread NAFCASH throws Dullenkamp a bone, where Gerdes made a fuss about a recent change to his "challenge", already announced in his post # 1034 on the VNN thread Archeological Investigations of Treblinka.

My reply to this "bone" can be read in my VNN post # 1036, from which the following quote is taken:

What I'm waiting for, the self-projecting hysteric asks?

Let’s see …

I’m waiting for time and means to go to Sobibor, obtain permission to disturb the ash heap (which I doubt will be granted) and enlist the services of an expert to analyze the human remains and certify that they are in fact human remains (which I also doubt anyone will do for just little me).

So waiting for what comes of an assessment of the mass graves’ contents by the SAP and/or for a detailed report by Prof. Kola seems a more promising approach.


Even Gerdes’ fellow idiot "Mr. Nobody", who seems to have read this reply, must have realized that official permission to disturb the mound of human ashes at Sobibor (especially to the extent required in order to confirm by expert examination that and how many human ashes it contains) is an issue, judging by his reference to "Permits" in the mouthful of imbecile bluster he produced in his post of Thu Aug 28, 2008 2:47 pm.

And of course it’s not like I set my schedules by Gerdes' retarded howling, or have the time and means available tomorrow to travel to Sobibor, apply for a permit that is unlikely to be granted, and enlist the assistance of an expert who can analyze the ash mound’s contents for me, assuming I find someone willing and able to do that.

The next post on this CODOH thread contains some babbling about "integrity" from someone who should never even use the word – Jonni "Hannover" Hargis, the miserable coward who lacks even the minimum amount of integrity required to allow open, uncensored debate on his own forum (not to mention ever stepping out of his warm and cozy Führerbunker into the cold world of open debate).

Then, in his post of Thu Aug 28, 2008 10:02 pm, Gerdes indulged in one of his favorite games – misrepresenting my statements. The exchange that Gerdes "quoted":

"BTW Roberta, why do you keep running from the queations about the soil core samples of Sobibor? What do the frauds at the Sobibor Archaeology Project say those core samples are comprised of?"

The dull one:

"I don’t know what the members of the Sobibor Archaeology Project say about the composition of these samples. In my last phone conversation with Yoram Haimi, I forgot to ask this question. I shall ask it next time we speak."


never took place in the manner presented. Here’s what the conversation actually was like, see my VNN post # 954:

To Gerdes’ self-projecting question:

13 - BTW Roberta, why do you keep running from the queations about the soil core samples of Sobibor?


I answered as follows:

This was my answer to an identically worded previous question:

Quote:
Question irrelevant for the purpose of proving mass murder at Sobibor (which has already been proven anyway, see my post # 777 under http://www.vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=811075&postcount=777 ) and also without relevance in the context of the NAFCASH challenge.

Nice guy’s answer to irrelevant question:

As lying Gerdes well knows, the only one who has been running away from questions regarding these core drill samples:

http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/galerie/badania/F5.html


http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/galerie/badania/F6.html


http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/galerie/badania/F7.html


is Gerdes himself. I have asked him several times what, other than ashes of human bone and tissue, wood ashes, bone ash or lime the substances distinguishable from the light-brown soil in these samples could possibly be. He has neither provided an alternative explanation and nor had the courage to at least openly admit that he has no alternative explanation.


(I’m still waiting for Gerdes to answer my questions regarding these three core samples, by the way.)

Gerdes’ next question:

14 - What do the frauds at the Sobibor Archaeology Project say those core samples are comprised of?


I replied to as follows:

This was my answer to a set of previous questions including the above:

Quote:
Question irrelevant for the purpose of proving mass murder at Sobibor (which has already been proven anyway, see my post # 777 under http://www.vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=811075&postcount=777 ) and also without relevance in the context of the NAFCASH challenge.

Nice guy’s answer to irrelevant question:

1. Unlike Mr. Gerdes and others of his ilk, the members of the Sobibor Archaeology Project are not frauds. They are serious and competent archaeologists.

2. What I have learned from them about these samples is that they pertain to Prof. Kola’s archaeological investigation in 2001, see above answer B.2.

3. This means that if – as is probably the case – these core samples were analyzed to confirm that they contain what their aspect suggests, this was done in 2001 by or on behalf of Prof. Kola’s team, and not by or on behalf of the Sobibor Archaeology Project.

I might add that I don’t know what the members of the Sobibor Archaeology Project say about the composition of these samples. In my last phone conversation with Yoram Haimi, I forgot to ask this question. I shall ask it next time we speak.


So what Gerdes did in his CODOH post of Thu Aug 28, 2008 10:02 pm was to

a) Omit my inconvenient reply to his question numbered 13,

b) Omit most of my reply to his question numbered 14,

c) Present his questions numbered 13 and 14 as a single block of questions, and

d) Present the last part of my answer to his question numbered 14 (which was an additional statement after the quote of an answer to a set of previous questions including the one numbered 14) as my only answer to that supposed block of questions.

Four smaller misrepresentations adding up to a bigger one – is that four lies, or is it just one? I'll let our readers decide.

Gerdes continued as follows:

Of course the liar has yet to actually answer the question. Seems he's tucked tail agian. What a coward.


I couldn’t agree more, as I'm still waiting for an answer to my questions about the Sobibor core samples, which Gerdes has been running away from ever since I first asked them.

Needless to say, I won't call up Yoram Haimi just to ask him a question that would allow me to answer Gerdes' question what the archaeologist's opinion about these core samples is. That has time until I talk to Mr. Haimi about further developments of the Sobibor Archaeology Project's work. It's not stinking Gerdes who gets to set my schedules.

Not content with the lies in his post of Thu Aug 28, 2008 10:02 pm, Gerdes spent most of his following posts on this thread (when he did not vent his frustration into rambling against the Sobibor Archaeological Project) trying to make believe I had claimed that Prof. Kola had taken samples from the Sobibor ash mound during his archaeological investigations in 2001, in which he discovered seven mass graves in the Sobibor killing area.

All that Gerdes achieved by these puny attacks, as so often before, was to show that he's too dumb to understand what I wrote, or then a very clumsy and transparent liar.

I guess one needs to have as many loose screws inside one's head as Gerdes has to understand my statement quoted in Gerdes’ post of Fri Aug 29, 2008 5:11 pm as containing a claim that Prof. Kola took core samples from the ash mound.

As to the loudest howling (with the inevitable "lying coward" self-projection) in Gerdes' post of Fri Aug 29, 2008 12:05 pm:

RM quote:

"The aspect of the substance that the mound consists of, which has a light gray coloration different from the light-brown color of the soil at Sobibor (see photos mentioned in answer B.3 above) suggests the accuracy of captions describing this mound as a mound consisting of or containing human ashes."

And my response:

"Notice how he's trying to imply that there have been core samples taken from the mound. Let's see the photos of these alleged core samples and let’s see the results of the analysis of the alleged samples."

Of course the lying coward refuses to produce the evidence.


a look at my VNN post # 916 is sufficient to expose another example of nonsense that can at best be attributed to the poor fellow’s meager intellect.

To Gerdes’ demand:

9 - Show us proof that the "huge ash mountain" of Sobibor is actually comprised of human ash.


I replied as follows, in post # 916:

Question irrelevant for the purpose of proving mass murder at Sobibor (which has already been proven anyway, see my post # 777 under http://www.vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=811075&postcount=777 ), but of relevance for the "bonus reward" of the NAFCASH challenge.
Nice guy’s answer to question of limited relevance:

All captioned photos showing this mound of ash, while not necessarily if at all describing it as "huge" or as a "mountain", refer to it as being made up of or containing human ash. Photos of this mound include, without limitation, the photos shown under item IV.2.3 in my post # 777 under http://www.vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=811075&postcount=777 and those shown under the following links:

http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/galerie/sobibor_dzisiaj/slides/sobibor039.html

http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/galerie/sobibor_dzisiaj/slides/sobibor040.html

http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/galerie/sobibor_dzisiaj/slides/sobibor043.html

http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/galerie/sobibor_dzisiaj/slides/sobibor082.html

The aspect of the substance that the mound consists of, which has a light gray coloration different from the light-brown color of the soil at Sobibor (see photos mentioned in answer B.3 above) suggests the accuracy of captions describing this mound as a mound consisting of or containing human ashes.

So does the associated documentary and eyewitness evidence proving that Sobibor was an extermination camp and that the bodies of the victims were disposed of by burning them, which is mentioned in my post # 777 under http://www.vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=811075&postcount=777.

The conclusion that the mound in question is comprised of human ash is thus the conclusion that is borne out by all known evidence and belied by none. It is also the conclusion towards which various sources of evidence independent of each other converge. This convergence of various sources of evidence independent of each other, alone or together with the absence of any evidence to the contrary, is proof that the mound in question is comprised of human ash.


Did I say here that these core samples:

http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/galerie/badania/F5.html


http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/galerie/badania/F6.html


http://www.sobibor.edu.pl/angielska/galerie/badania/F7.html


were taken from the ash heap, or that any samples were taken from the ash heap at all?

Of course not.

What I said was that

a) all known evidence about what happened at Sobibor supports the conclusion that the heap is actually made up of human ashes, and

b) so does the aspect of the heap, which has a light-gray coloration whereas the soil of Sobibor – as can be seen on the above-mentioned core sample photographs – has a light brown coloration.

In other words, my argument was that the substance that the mound consists of cannot be the soil of Sobibor, because the soil of Sobibor – as can be seen on core sample photographs taken elsewhere in the camp – has a different color than the substance of which the mound is made.

Whereas this "misunderstanding" still allows – with a huge amount of generosity – for giving Gerdes the benefit of doubt that it was due to his stupidity alone (notwithstanding the – unnecessary – clarification I provided in my VNN post # 1014 and repeated in my post # 1039) the same cannot be said of this quote-mining exercise:

"The human ashes that the mound at Sobibor is comprised of may have been dug out of one of more of the pits discovered by Prof. Kola in 2001."

Notice that he's too stupid to understand that the "ash mountain" has been there for years.


What the fellow obviously tried to make believe here is that I claimed the mound of human ashes at Sobibor to have resulted from Prof. Kola's excavations in 2001.

In VNN post # 916, I replied to Gerdes' question:

10 - Show us were the huge pit is that this "mountain of human ash" was dug out of.


as follows:

Question irrelevant for the purpose of proving mass murder at Sobibor (which has already been proven anyway, see my post # 777 under http://www.vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=811075&postcount=777 ), and also without relevance for the "bonus reward" or the main reward of the NAFCASH challenge, as currently worded under http://www.nafcash.com/ .

Nice guy’s answer to irrelevant question:

The human ashes that the mound at Sobibor is comprised of may have been dug out of one of more of the pits discovered by Prof. Kola in 2001. They were probably brought to the surface by postwar robbery digging, which would mean it is impossible to determine which of the grave pits contained these specific ashes.


I highlighted the sentence that stinking liar Gerdes’ conveniently omitted in his CODOH post of Fri Aug 29, 2008 12:05 pm. He omitted it because it clearly shows what my assumption regarding the origin of the ashes that make up the Sobibor ash mound was: human ashes brought to the surface by postwar robbery digging were collected by the people in charge of the Sobibor memorial site and put together into this ash mound. In other words, what I’m supposedly "too stupid to understand" (that the ash mound has been at Sobibor long before Prof. Kola’s 2001 investigation) is exactly what follows from my highlighted statement.

So much for my having claimed that the ash mound at Sobibor has anything to do with Prof. Kola's 2001 investigation.

And so much for the truthfulness of quote-mining Gerdes.

Following yet another of Gerdes’ self-defeating rampages, we have some Greek clown who calls himself "KostasL" and, in his post of Fri Aug 29, 2008 7:46 pm, echoed the conspiracy theories previously uttered by "Hannover" Hargis and the fellow who aptly calls himself "Mr. Nobody", as follows:

I ask you this :

What if they finally come with falsified evidence that "proves" their claims ?

It is very easy to provide false lab analysis from the cores and virtually anything else that helps their cause.

Is there any independent individual amongst them, who is incorruptible and only seeks the truth ?
Or are they all, determined "Holocaustians" who would accomplish their mission by any means ?


Poor jerk. His presumably self-projecting paranoia suggests that Jonathan Harrison was right in the prediction he made in his post # 2157 on the RODOH forum:

Significantly, Gerdes and Hargis are already moving the goalposts. Whereas previously their gambit was "there are no photos", their new gambit is "how do we know that this black ash came from the excavation area and was not brought in from elsewhere?" That's the game they'll play throughout this process. The threshold of proof will be lifted higher and higher and increasingly absurd conspiracy theories will be offered as to how the evidence was produced - "the bone fragments were brought in from another site" or "Sobibor had a mass typhus outbreak and the allies destroyed the documents that describe the epidemic" or "the remains are really German troops that were killed by partisans".


Friday, August 29, 2008

Archaelogical Research at Chelmno

Further to the latest update of the "nafcash challenge" series, I would like to point out the website of the Museum of the former Extermination Camp in Chełmno-on-Ner, which includes an article about archaeological research by Łucja Pawlicka Nowak - a "must read" for anyone interested in archaeological investigations at former Nazi extermination camps.

Read more!


Some excerpts from that article:

The first grave.
[...]The grave has an irregular shape; the width of the northern part can be established at 8 m and narrows by 3 meters towards the south. Its length equals 62 m. More or less in the middle, it is cut by a concrete road of the period between 1962 and 1964. Its irregular shape and relatively insignificant length in comparison with the other graves indicate that the grave was dug by hand.[...]While uncovering the grave we noticed that the earth must have contained some active substances: protective rubber gloves became destroyed.
Collected earth samples were examined by the Karol Marcinkowski University of Medical Sciences in Poznań, Department of Forensic Medicine. Caustic substances in the grave may provide evidence for experiments connected with liquidation of corpses. The special unit (Sonderkommando) under the command of SS Hauptsturmführer Herbert Lange, which in autumn 1941 in the Kazimierz Forest near Konin killed an undetermined group of victims by boiling them alive in pits filled with quicklime, was later transferred to the center in Chełmno at that time being established. It seems very likely that the attempts to liquidate the corpses with the use of lime were shifted to Chełmno. This method apparently did not prove successful with a significant number of bodies. In the cemetery thus far we have not come across another such place where the earth would contain active chemical substances.[...]

The second grave, so-called "włocławska"
[...]Situated about 20 m east of the old forest track, the grave runs parallel to it. Its current length is marked with a stone wall and equals 185 m. In order to establish its actual run, transverse probes were put up, while in inaccessible places drills were made.
On the basis of the drills made, it was possible to state that the clearing where the grave is situated was originally longer: it stretched over 45 m further south. The grave had an irregular width, ranging from about 7 m in the southeastern part, through about 10 m in the middle part, to only 4 m in the northeastern edge. While the new layout was being uncovered, the existence of burned-out objects and ashes as well as crushed human bones both burned and unburned was stated.[...]

The third grave.
Located parallel to the forest wall. On the basis of probing surveys and drills, it was stated that it reaches the forest from the south (SE), insignificantly entering its area. It passes under the forest track, which during the war most likely in this part of the clearing ran along the then forest wall, situated further on than the present one. A stone wall (about 135 meters long), which was to determine the stretch of the grave, is narrower by 2 m than the actual width of the grave. Its total length equals 174 m, width about 8 m. The contents of the grave includes sandy soil with gravel, burn waste, ash, and crushed human bones.

The fourth grave.
It is represented by a 140-metre-long wall. Located between the third and the fifth graves; its presumed location does not correspond with the actual location. The fundamental fourth grave is located between the wall of the fourth non-existent grave and covers the whole fifth grave. Its actual width equals 10 m, while its length is 182 m. It is filled with gray sandy soil mixed with inclusions of burn waste, ash and crushed bones.

The fifth grave
The last grave, or rather a line of pits filled with ashes, was not commemorated with any walls; in the 1960s it was already not discernible on the surface. On the basis of the description by Judge W. Bednarz it appears that in 1945 the pits were examined by him.
The total length of these pits equals 161 m. The stretch is made up of 11 pits, each located about 2-3 m from another. The dimensions of the pits vary from 9x7.5 m to 15.50x8.50 m. They are filled with gray soil with a significant mixture of burn waste and crushed human bones. In the southern (SE) part of the grave the bones found in the pits used to be ground; those in further parts - crushed. According to W. Bednarz, the depth of the pits was about 4 m, and the width 8-10 m. Even now the flora on the pits is more luxuriant, making this stretch more visible on the surface.


Wednesday, August 27, 2008

"Muehlenkamp accepts nafcash's challenge" - 7th Update

Original article and 1st update

2nd update, 24.07.2008, 23:55 hours GMT

3rd update, 26.07.2008, 15:08 hours GMT

4th update 29.07.2008, 15:00 hours GMT

5th update, 30.07.2008, 23:59 GMT

6th update, 03.08.2008, 0:48 GMT

Update, 27.08.2008, 23:34 GMT

The question I asked in my previous update – whether Gerdes would make anything of the tasks I gave him in my VNN post # 955 during my holiday absence – is answered in my VNN post # 1011, in which I reminded Gerdes of what he should have done, while I was on vacation, in order to look a little bit less like the cowardly and obnoxious liar he has shown himself to be throughout our discussions.

Of course I didn’t expect him to do anything, and he lived up to my expectations.

Read more!


On the Cesspit thread Muehlenkamp accepts nafcash's challenge, no links to this series or to the VNN thread were posted, and neither did Gerdes forward my invitation to Jonni "Hannover" Hargis to step out of his warm and cozy Führerbunker into open debate.

Instead Gerdes and some fellow retards mouthed off on page 3 about websites related to archaeological work at Sobibor, their deplorable "arguments" saying much about themselves but little else, as usual.

The highlight of this exercise in "Revisionist" intellectual brilliance was Gerdes’ post of Tue Aug 19, 2008 11:55 am, in which he argued that there's a contradiction between a website's referring "ash fields" at Sobibor and Prof. Kola’s description of the contents of the mass graves he found at Sobibor in 2001 as "charred human remains". I already addressed the poor reasoning underlying such argument in the 3rd update , where I pointed out that

Even if some of the bodies were not reduced to mere ashes and bone fragments, the incineration of the bodies on grids at Sobibor must have produced lots of such smaller remains, and it stands to reason that these were not left lying around and neither necessarily taken somewhere to be scattered, but returned to the mass graves together with the incompletely burned remains that are suggested by the term "charred human remains" – assuming this is a correct translation of what Prof. Kola told the Polish news agency in Polish language.
.

In his post of Mon Aug 25, 2008 2:43 pm, the obnoxious hysteric (whose imitating my references to his tiny brain suggests that I hit a raw nerve there) let fly as follows:

Hello everyone, I just had to share this latest bit of priceless keyboard claptrap that just spewed out of Muehlenkamp's tiny brain:

RM (via the VNN forum):

"As I learned from Yoram Haimi of the Sobibor Archaeological Project, the reason why Prof. Kola has not yet published a detailed and illustrated report about his 2001 findings is that he wasn’t paid by the Polish government entity that commissioned his work in 2001. So Prof. Kola is sitting on his findings, so to say, until this problem is solved."

I honestly can't stop laughing at that one.

It's been 7 years and the holocaust industry can't come up with the spare change to pay Kola?

LOL!!!

Priceless.


The obvious conclusion from Prof. Kola’s funding problems – that a "holocaust industry", in the sense of a powerful monolithic organization promoting the memory of the Holocaust for ulterior purposes, only exists in "Revisionist" conspiracy fantasies – was obviously beyond a fanatical adherent to such fantasies.

Yet his "spare change" remark shows that even a cretin like Gerdes can to a certain extent be useful other than as a demonstration object of "Revisionist" imbecility (in which respect he is priceless), for he points to an issue that I consider worth addressing: funding problems facing endeavors to use archaeology as a means of expanding and conveying historical knowledge about the Nazi extermination camps.

Prof. Kola’s work at Sobibor is not the only case of such problems:

The Government Agency that supervises wartime cemeteries and monuments in Poland also finances the excavations at Chelmno, which cost about $ 17,500 a year. The country faces a large budget deficit, however, and additional funds that would allow Nowak to realize her plans of opening a museum, visitors’ center, and learning center on the palace grounds are in short supply. For now, some of the objects found at Chelmno are on display in an austere, one-room makeshift museum on the site.


The above quote is from the article "Remembering Chelmno", by Juliet Golden, which appeared in the January/February 2003 edition of Archaeology magazine. This article describes the work that has been done on the site of Chelmno extermination camp since the late 1980s by Lucja Nowak, director of the Konin Regional Museum. Mrs. Nowak’s findings, as the article points out, "have led to a more complete version of the camp’s history than the existing handful of eyewitness accounts provide".

Although it fails to take into account the documentary evidence that has also been helpful in reconstructing the mass murder at Chelmno, this statement expresses the importance of archaeological work on the site of the Nazi extermination camps.

To be sure, such work is not necessary to prove that mass murder on an enormous scale happened at these places – that has long been proven beyond a reasonable doubt on hand of documentary and eyewitness evidence (the latter including depositions from some of those who did the killing), assessed by historians and at various murder trials before West German courts. At the trial against Heinrich B. et al, for instance, the District Court of Bonn, Germany, managed to reconstruct, on hand of documentary evidence, the deportation to Chelmno of about 152,000 people, and established this as being the minimum number of that camp's victims. A translation of excerpts from the court's judgment can be found on the RODOH thread Number of Victims of Chelmno Extermination Camp.

However, archaeological finds can, apart from providing detail information that documentary and eyewitness evidence alone do not provide, make more "palpable" what becomes apparent from such evidence. The above-mentioned article from Archaeology magazine illustrates this by describing what archaeologists have achieved at Chelmno, even with the modest means at their disposal:

Vast amounts of property plundered by the Nazis have been uncovered. "It’s a little strange, but with every movement of the shovel you unearth dozens of objects," says Przymyslaw Gaj, a 26-year-old archaeology student. "You find as many things here in one day as you would normally find in an entire season in the usual dig." The meticulous segregation of goods adds to the surreal nature of the excavation. In one place archaeologists uncovered a thick layer of medicine bottles, followed by a layer of eating utensils. Another pit was filled with combs. Archaeologists have also dug up thousands of dental bridges and false teeth picked over to recover precious metal used in dental work.
There is obviously an emotional dimension to the work at Chelmno that is seldom encountered in archaeology. Small fragments of bone catch the sunlight at the forest site where the crematories once stood. "It’s one thing to hear about the crematory, it’s another to stand inside an enormous pit that is filled with human bones," says Krzysztof Gorczyca, an archaeologist who directed last summer’s excavation. "Only then did it occur to me just how many people were murdered here."
Many of the recovered objects speak volumes about how victims lived in the weeks and months before they arrived at Chelmno. In a pit of goods looted from victims brought in from the Lodz ghetto, two brooches, crudely fashioned from wire, bear the names of Bela and Irka. Other relics give names of victims or their hometowns and reveal their hobbies or passions. Hundreds of medicine bottles found in a single pit originated in Germany, Luxembourg and Czechoslovakia. A charm bearing the image of a tombstone gives a family name and the burial location in a Jewish cemetery in what was once the German city of Breslau, now Wroclaw. Josef Jakubowski carried a cigarette case he won in a 1936 edition of the "Gordon-Bennet" motorcycle race.


The article further points out that

Jewish leaders have praised Nowak’s scrupulous approach to her work. "The research at Chelmno is carried out with the absolute agreement and cooperation of the Jewish community," says Simcha Keller, head of the Jewish community in Lodz. "Dr. Nowak is a guarantor that the work is done with complete respect." Human remains found during the excavations are interred in a Jewish cemetery established in the forest. The burial ceremonies are attended by Jews from around the world.


Yet Dr. Nowak and other archaeologists, like the members of the Sobibor Archaeology Project, need more than praise and symbolic encouragement. They shouldn't have to struggle for the funds they need in order to do their difficult and valuable work of documenting the physical evidence lying in the ground of places like Chelmno and Sobibor. For what they are doing is far more important and useful than, for instance, the setting up of symbolic monuments, on which a lot of money is spent. The Stelenfeld monument in Berlin, for instance, cost the enormous amount of 27.6 million Euros of German taxpayer’s money – spent on 2,711 concrete blocks, the "message" of which somehow escapes me.

The Polish government may be broke, but couldn't, say, the German government invest a fraction of what it spent on the Stelenfeld in projects that matter? Just an idea ...


8th update, 09.09.2008, 12:19 GMT


Sunday, August 24, 2008

Wehrmacht Complicity in the Holocaust in Ukraine

Wendy Lower has estimated that "As many as 300,000 Jews were killed under Wehrmacht administration in Ukraine" (p.245 of this collection). The higher ranks of the Wehrmacht in Ukraine cannot therefore be viewed as bystanders or silent partners in the genocide. Senior military figures often took part in meetings that decided the fate of Jews; they sometimes supplied the manpower that rounded them up; and they were often informed about the killings, even if their troops did not pull the triggers.

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The Wehrmacht is thus an important source of material both for understanding the co-ordination of the Holocaust in Ukraine and for combating Holocaust denial, because many of the most explicit accounts of killing policy were written by Wehrmacht administrators.

Furthermore, as Dieter Pohl writes on p.39 of his essay in this collection, when Wehrmacht reprisal actions in Ukraine are contrasted with such actions in Serbia:
...Wehrmacht units operating in remote areas of Ukraine shot not only Jewish men but also Jewish women and children.
These points are illustrated below with five examples of massacres drawn from the essays of Lower and Pohl referenced above. These took place in 1941 in Bila Tserkva, Zhytomyr, Lutsk, Kamienets-Podilsky and Babi Jar. (Note that each of these place names may have different spellings in other sources).

Bila Tserkva is doubly significant because the killing was requested by Field Commander Oberst, Josef Riedl, and authorised by his superior, Sixth Army general Walter von Reichenau. Ninety Jewish children had been left over in an abandoned school-type building at the edge of town after the adults had been killed. Despite objections from the local chaplains, Riedl insisted that "this brood must be stamped out" (Lower, p.243). Perpetrator testimony of the killing was provided by August Häfner and can be viewed here. Reichenau's authorisation for their killing, which occurred on August 22, 1941, was inevitable given that he harboured a deep antisemitism that was expressed, only seven weeks later, in his infamous 'Reichenau order' which stated, in part, that:
Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry. The Army has to aim at another purpose, i. e., the annihilation of revolts in hinterland which, as experience proves, have always been caused by Jews.
Reichenau may also have assumed that he was expressing the wish of the chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, William Keitel, who on September 12th called for "ruthless and energetic action, and first of all against the Jews as well, as the main bearers of Bolshevism." After the children had been killed, the 454th Division's Security Section wrote (Pohl, p.34):
There can hardly be any more talk of a Jewish question. In several places, the provisioning of Jewish children and infants left without parents sometimes created difficulties; also in this regard, however, remedial action has since been taken by the SD.
In Zhytomyr, the problem of killing children was resolved differently. As Lower (p.244) notes:
Sk4a commando leader Heinrich Huhn...recounted that at the subsequent ghetto liquidation at Zhytomyr on 19 September: "The women were allowed to hold their children in their arms" (Heinrich Huhn statement of 13 October 1965, Callsen Trial, ZSt 207 AR-Z 419/62, BAL.).
The Zhytomyr liquidation was authorised at a meeting between Blobel and FK 197 [Wehrmacht field administration commandant 197] on September 10 and is described in Operational Situation Report USSR No. 106, which shows that the Wehrmacht supplied some of the trucks:
On September 19, 1941, from 4 o'clock [a.m.], the Jewish quarter was emptied after having been surrounded and closed the previous evening by 60 members of the Ukrainian militia. The transport [deportation] was accomplished in 12 trucks, part of which had been supplied by military headquarters and part by the city administration of Zhitomir. After the transport had been carried out and the necessary preparations made with the help of 150 prisoners, 3,145 Jews were registered and shot.

After 25-30 tons of linen, clothing, shoes, dishes, etc. that had been confiscated in the course of the action were handed over to the officials of the NSV in Zhitomir for distribution. Valuables and money were conveyed to the Sonderkommando 4a.
The third example, Lutsk, was a reprisal shooting described in Operational Situation Report USSR No. 24:
On July 2 the corpses of 10 German Wehrmacht soldiers were found. In retaliation, 1160 Jews were shot by the Ukrainians with the help of one platoon of the police and one platoon of the infantry.
The fourth example, the massacre at Kamienets-Podilsky [or Kamenets-Podolsk], involved the killing of 23,600 Jews, many of whom had been expelled from Hungary. As Angrick notes:
Their fate was sealed in a meeting headed by the Quartermaster-General Wagner and the Chief of Military Administration Schmidt von Altenstadt; otherwise, the main topic discussed at the session was the transfer of the territory under military rule to the civil administration of the Reich Commissariat Ukraine. The Higher Police and SS Leader Friedrich Jeckeln (responsible for the rear lines of communication in Army Area South and the Reich Commissariat Ukraine), who did not attend the meeting, had hastily offered to solve the “problem” for all concerned by promising to “liquidate” the Jews by September 1. None of the participants objected.
The notes of this meeting, with a full list of participants, are preserved as Nuremberg document PS-197 and can be viewed here.

The final example, Babi Jar, has already been discussed in detail by Sergey in this blog. I will add four points. Firstly, the massacre was arranged in a meeting between "Jeckeln, Blobel and the city commandant, Kurt Eberhard of FK 195" (Pohl, p.35). Secondly, as Sergey's extract showed, Wehrmacht approval was noted in Operational Situation Report USSR No. 106. Thirdly, the massacre may have been pre-determined by food supply and housing shortage considerations (Gerlach, Kalkulierte Mord, p.595). Fourthly, the the ultimate Jewish death toll for Babi Jar shootings may have been higher than 33,000. Pohl (p.65n.) cites Wila Orbach (1976), "The Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR", pp.39f., as citing a figure up to 50,000. Kruglov, on page 278 of the same book as the Pohl essay, gives a figure of 64,000 for Jews killed in the Kiev oblast in 1941.

In addition to these five major examples, some other killings with Wehrmacht involvement, noted by Pohl, can be summarized. On June 30th, a pogrom took place in Lviv after, as noted here:
The 17th Army Command...suggested the use first of all of the anti-Jewish and anti-Communist Poles living in the newly-occupied areas for self-cleansing activities.
On 3rd November in Myrohod, 168 Jews were shot by 62nd Infantry (Pohl, p.39). In Kharkov, in December, a census initiated by AOK 6 found 10,271 Jews. These were mostly killed in Drobytsky Yar ravine while a few hundred died in a gas van.

In conclusion, therefore, Wehrmacht documentation poses another problem for Holocaust deniers. There is simply so much of this material, found across a range of archives, which converges on one conclusion, that the number of people that a 'conspiracy' would have required becomes even more absurd to contemplate. The Wehrmacht is a massive source of contemporary perpetrator information that leaves no doubt that a genocide was being committed in the USSR.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 8)

In this latest installment of my Sanning series, I investigate his claim concerning the Jewish population of Bessarabia, in which he again displays a deliberate refusal to consult primary sources that refute his thesis.

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In The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, pp.91-92, Sanning states that "The Rumanian count [census] of August 16th, 1941 [showed that] Of the approximately 200,000 Bessarabian Jews the Soviets had removed all but 6,882." As Table 4 of this link demonstrates, that figure only refers to evacuated cities and excludes 65,742 Bessarabian Jews held in camps and ghettoes pending deportation to Transnistria. Sanning has simply ignored the fact that the census was taken after the Rumanian regime had driven most of the Jews from the cities and put them in camps.

Furthermore, the joint census figure for Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina (126,434) was cited by Reitlinger (page 399 fn), so must have been seen by Sanning (as he quotes Reitlinger extensively). Reitlinger's source is an essay by Leon Shapiro and Joshua Starr, in Jewish Social Studies, VIII, 1946, so the correct census figures were in the public domain in the immediate post-war period (I am grateful to David Woolfe for the Reitlinger information).

The fate of these Bessarabian Jews was revealed in numerous sources that were published as long ago as 1946-48 in three volumes by Matatias Carp, whose findings are summarized here and in Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edition, pp.808-852. These show that the Rumanian occupiers had been killing Jews, and driving them over the border into German-occupied Ukraine, since early July. Carp's sources converge with Nazi ones. For example, Operational Situation Report 67 reported that:
The Rumanians had driven thousands of selected persons unfit for labor, such as invalids and children, from Bessarabia and Bucovina into the German sphere. In the vicinity of Svanzia-Mogilev-Podoiski-Yampol, a total of approximately 27,500 Jews were driven back to Rumanian territory, and 1,265, partly younger ones, were shot.
This report is corroborated by other German documents discussed by Angrick here.

Sanning should, of course, have checked these sources, and was again dishonest in not doing so. Furthermore, he should have been aware that far more than 6,882 Jews were deported from Bessarabia to Transnistria after August 1941. The true figure was again documented by Carp (see p.18 of this link), who cited Vasilui's admission in late-1943 that:
Based on data now in our possession, the number of evacuees in 1941 was the following:
From Bessarabia: 55,867
From Bucovina: 43,798
From Dorohoi Co. and town: 10,368
Total: 110,033
The vast majority of these Jews died in Transnistria before it was liberated in 1944. The responsibility of Antonescu's regime for these deaths is beyond doubt, as has been demonstrated here. Sanning would clearly like to convince his readers that those deaths did not take place.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Graf's Deceit

In Holocaust or Hoax?, Jürgen Graf writes a passage that he knows to be a deception. In his commentary on Himmler's first Posen speech, Graf attempts to deceive the reader into believing that "the meaning of the word "Ausrottung" has changed" since the war.

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Graf writes as follows:
in the first speech, Himmler identifies the "evacuation" of the Jews with their "extermination", mixing up two concepts which are totally distinct today. The identification of evacuation and extermination loses their contradictory meaning when one considers that the meaning of the word "Ausrottung" has changed. In today's speech, "Ausrottung" doubtlessly means "liquidation, physical extermination". This was not necessarily so earlier; the etymological derivation of "ausrotten" is "to uproot".
This is downright deceitful because, in the earlier version of 'Holocaust or Hoax?', which at that time (1993) was entitled The Holocaust Under the Scanner, Graf cited this text, published in 1944, which includes descriptions of exterminations at Belzec and Majdanek:
Abraham Silberschein (Die Judenausrottung in Polen, Genève, août1944)
Graf therefore knows that a text exists, published in 1944, in which 'ausrottung' could only have referred to killings in extermination camps, yet Graf attempts to con his readers into assuming that the 'physical extermination/liquidation' meaning of 'ausrotting' did not come into usage until a later date. In addition, of course, like his partner in deception, Carlos Porter, Graf simply ignores those portions of the Posen speeches which prove that Himmler could only be referring to mass killing.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Goebbels' Slip of the Tongue: 'Ausrott-Ausschaltung'

Kent Ford has kindly brought to my attention the moment when Goebbels unintentionally revealed that 'elimination' had become 'extermination.'

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This moment comes from Goebbels' speech at the Sportpalast on 18th February 1943. The slip was captured on tape and can be heard here. Donald M. McKale's Hitler's Shadow War, p 311, refers to Goebbels' mistake as "a telling slip of the tongue," and has a translation that runs as follows:

but means to counter [the Jewish threat] in time and if necessary with the most complete and radical exterm- [correcting himself] elimination [Ausrott-Ausschaltung] of Jewry.
McKale adds:
The large crowd received Goebbels' words with applause, shouts of "out with the Jews," and laughter.
McKale's source is Jeremy Noakes' Nazism, 1919-1945, p. 239.

This slip is significant because, among other things, it destroys a denier gambit regarding Himmler's Posen speeches, whereby Himmler's use of elimination ['ausschaltung'] is deployed to minimize his use of 'ausrotten', such as in Porter's translation of this passage:
I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that's easy to say: "The Jewish people will be extirpated" , says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme: elimination of the Jews, extirpation ; that's what we're doing."
Goebbels' slip makes it clear that Himmler's usage conflates elimination, extirpation, evacuation and extermination because, when they are used in the context of the Final Solution, all of those terms amount to the mass murder of Jews. This is the opposite of the denier claim that Himmler's use of 'extermination' is just a hyperbolic expression of a policy that is really just 'ethnic cleansing' and forced deportation. If the denier claim were correct, there would be no need to use a stronger term than 'ausschaltung' or 'Säuberung' [cleansing] to describe Nazi policy.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Himmler's Posen Speeches

A favourite tactic of deniers is to attempt to neutralize the word "ausrotten" [or "ausrottung"] when it appears in a Nazi document. They usually ignore the analyses of the term written by native German experts, such as those that appear in Klemperer's LTI and Longerich's submission to the Lipstadt trial. On the rare occasions when they do acknowledge these analyses, they deliberately misrepresent them, as I showed here.

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The stupidity of this tactic is best illustrated by an article by Carlos Porter that was published by CODOH in 1996, which can be viewed at this link. Porter attempts to spin Himmler's first Posen speech of 4th October, 1943 into a more benign form. In place of the Nuremberg translation of 'ausrotten' as 'extermination', Porter insists upon 'extirpation'. This in itself is no big deal because 'extirpation' can still mean extermination if used in a particular context. Indeed, Longerich translates 'ausrotten' as 'extirpation', and states that:
I have not yet found a single example of Hitler or Himmler using the term "ausrotten" during the Second World War with respect to human beings or a group of human beings other than in the sense of "to kill in large numbers or to kill all as far as possible".
However, Porter's schoolboy error was to insist that Himmler was speaking 'figuratively' when he used the term, but to then print long extracts from the speech which showed that Himmler was, indeed, referring literally to mass genocidal killing of women and children. Porter thus debunked his own case. For example, in Porter's own translation, the word 'extirpation' follows the phrase 'elimination of the Jews'. Later in the same paragraph, Himmler describes the typical scene of mass murder:
Most of you know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 lie there, or if 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this, and at the same time, apart from exceptions caused by human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has made us hard.
In the following paragraph, Himmler makes his meaning even clearer by referring directly to a genocide of "this people":
We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill this people which wanted to kill us.
In the next paragraph he admits that "we eradicated a bacillus". Later in the speech, Himmler says:
Whether other races live well or die of hunger is only of interest to me insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise that doesn't interest me. Whether 10,000 Russian women fall down from exhaustion in building a tank ditch is of interest to me only insofar as the tank ditches are finished for Germany.
If this is not enough 'context' to prove the correct meaning of 'ausrotten' in Himmler's first Posen speech, we have further context from a follow-up speech made two days later at the same venue. I am grateful to David Woolfe for drawing my attention to this extract:
Es trat an uns die Frage heran: Wie ist es mit den Frauen und Kindern? Ich habe mich entschlossen, auch hier eine ganz klare Lösung zu finden. Ich hielt mich nämlich nicht für berechtigt, die Männer auszurotten- sprich also, umzubringen oder umbringen zu lassen - und die Rächer in Gestalt der Kinder für unsere Söhne und Enkel groß werden zu lassen. Es mußte der schwere Entschluß gefaßt werden, dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen.

We came to the question: How is it with the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution here as well. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men - that is, to kill them or have them killed - and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth.
Himmler thus helpfully defined his precise meaning when he used 'auszurotten' in the second Posen speech. He then reiterated this meaning in a further speech at Sonthofen on May 24, 1944:
As to the Jewish women and children, I did not believe I had a right to let these children grow up to become avengers who would kill our fathers [sic] and grandchildren. That, I thought, would be cowardly. Thus the problem was solved without half-measures.
Himmler did not approve of 'half-measures'. Only a 'half-wit' would use Himmler's first Posen speech to try to fool us into believing otherwise.

Rassinier's Numbers Game (Part 2)

Another distortion by Rassinier concerns the work of Leon Poliakov. Rassinier claimed, falsely, that Poliakov supported the figure of four million for the number of Jews who died at Auschwitz:

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For example: about 4,000,000 Jews met their fate at Auschwitz, the rest in other extermination camps, or in the open at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen, we are told by Leon Poliakov, Olga Wormser, and Henri Michel, among others.
The real figure given by Poliakov was "in the neighborhood of two million", as cited in this link:
In his affidavits, Hoess spoke of two and a half million, 'a figure set officially,' he wrote, under the signature of [Eichmann], in a report to Himmler. This figure has been accepted by several authors, and it appears in the verdict at the trial of the major war criminals. However, there is no reason for accepting without question the statistics attributed to Eichmann, which may err on either side. Adding the number of victims to those deported from different countries gives a lower figure, although we have little data, for example, on the number of Polish Jews sent to Auschwitz. An approximate figure in the neighborhood of two million seems closer to the truth.
Furthermore, as Van Pelt has shown, Poliakov's estimate was not the lowest preferred by serious historians at the time that Rassinier was writing (early-mid-1960's). Hoess's memoirs were available, citing a figure of not more than 1.2 million, Reitlinger had estimated 840,800 (but was uncertain about Poland and the Baltic states) and Hilberg had published a figure of one million Jews. Rassinier had thus constructed Straw Men around the four million specified by the Soviet-controlled Extraordinary Commission, whilst omitting the fact that the Commission had referred to "no less than four million citizens of the USSR., Poland, France, Jugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, and other countries," but had not specified a figure for Jews. He had then misrepresented the figures given by his Straw Men historians. Rassinier's example would later be emulated by other deniers such as Sanning.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Rassinier's Numbers Game (Part 1)

In Chapter Fourteen of Debunking the Genocide Myth, Rassinier presented misleading Holocaust statistics; a blatant exercise in deception. Here is an example.

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Rassinier was trying to set up a disparity between the figures quoted by Hilberg and those in other sources. Thus for Poland he claimed that:
The clearest example of these differences, it seems to me, is Poland, where Mr. Salo Baron, holder of the chair of Jewish History at Columbia University, found that on the arrival of Russian troops in the country 700,000 Jews were still there (according to his statement of April 24, 1961, at the Eichmann Trial); the World Center of Jewish Documentation at Paris gave the figure of 500,000 (communique to the Figaro litteraire of June 4, 1960), the Institute of Jewish Affairs claimed some 400,000 (Eichmann's Confederates and the Third Reich Hierarchy, p. 59), and Mr. Raul Hilberg found only 50,000 (The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 670).[emphasis mine]
Here is Baron's actual testimony concerning Poland:
According to the figures in our possession, and according to the census conducted by the Central Jewish Committee in Poland on 15 August 1945, only 73,955 Jews remained, of whom 13,000 were Polish soldiers and 5,446 were registered in ten displaced persons' camps in Germany and Austria. In other words, out of 3,000,000, possibly within a slightly larger territory, there remained a very small remnant of those who had survived.[emphasis mine]

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Dissenting Voices in the Nazi Occupation of the USSR

Nazi occupation policies in the USSR generated a considerable amount of internal criticism, reflecting the failure of the hierarchy to anticipate the contradiction between its desire to kill Jews and its need for wartime labour. These dissensions from the party line are crucial because they acknowledge that the killing of Jews had gone beyond the point which even some Nazis considered to be rational. They also reveal how widespread was the knowledge of genocide among the occupiers; the true picture was not confined to higher echelons of the SS, but was known within the civilian administration and the Wehrmacht. Below I highlight three such dissenting voices: Otto Rasch, Kurt Klemm, and OKV Rat Prof. Seraphim.

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Rasch was the leader of Einsatzgruppe C. In his Ereignismeldung of 17 September, 1941, Rasch insisted that the mass killing of Jews was an inefficient way of fighting partisans and that it would be better to kill the Jews more economically through forced labour. Wendy Lower has translated the relevant passages as follows and has added the archival location of the document to her translation:
Even if it were possible to carry out the immediate, 100 percent elimination of the Jews, with that we would still not have done away with the hearth of political danger. The work of Bolshevism is supported by Jews, Russians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Ukrainians; the Bolshevik apparatus is in no way identical with the Jewish population. In this state of affairs, the aim of political and police security would be missed, if the main task of the destruction of the communist apparatus were relegated to second or third place in favor of the practically easier task of eliminating the Jews. . . . If the Jewish labor force is entirely done away with, then an economic reconstruction of Ukrainian industry as well as the development of the urban administrative centers will be almost impossible. There is only one possibility, which the German administration in the General Government has neglected for a long time: Solution of the Jewish Question through the extensive labor utilization of the Jews.

This will result in a gradual liquidation of Jewry-a development that corresponds to the economic conditions of the country. (Einsatzgruppe C Ereignismeldung, 17 September 1941, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives (hereafter USHMMA) Acc. 1999.A.1096 (also available at NARA RG 242, T-175, R233, frame 2722384; bold text underlined in Rasch's original).
Wendy Lower also discusses the second source of criticism, the regional commissar of Zhytomyr, Regierungsrat Kurt Klemm, who:
expressed concern about the loss of labor that resulted from the mass murder of the Jews and challenged his counterpart in the SS-Police who insisted that all Jewish laborers must be killed. Consequently, Klemm was summoned to Himmler’s headquarters near Zhytomyr, reprimanded, and then forced to resign in shame. [Klemm statement of 22 August 1962, Ludwigsburg, 204 AR-Z 129/67 band 3, p.830; Statement of Franz Razesberger, 19 January 1957, Ludwigsburg, 204 AR-Z 8/80, band 3, p. 207; band 3, p. 830; Klemm memo about uniform to Rosenberg, 12 July 1943, NARA RG 242, T-454/R 91/000873.]
Ironically, the problems created by this non-rational killing of an economic resource subsequently impinged on Hitler and Himmler themselves in at least two ways. Firstly, as Lower discusses in Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, the Nazis experienced acute shortages of labour for work projects that became the responsibility of Himmler's SS, such as the DG IV road project in the Ukraine. Lower shows how they ran out of skilled local labour to build Hitler's Werwolf bunker [Project "Eichenhain"] and Himmler's Hegewald HQ, so had to obtain the labour of Hungarian and Rumanian Jews. She has also made a crucial document discovery (p.151) that reveals Himmler's thinking at the time of these projects, which coincided with the time period of the Wannsee Conference:
In a memorandum to Rosenberg on the handling of the Jewish question, dated 10 January 1942, Himmler had specified that "measures to eliminate Jews should be taken without regard for economic consequences," but (as is evident in the Wannsee Protocol) he also accepted the policy of using Jewish laborers for street building and, more discreetly, in the construction of his own headquarters, and then killing them after the work was complete. [NA, RG 242, T-454/R 154/MR334]
The effects of this policy were felt in the regions of Lower's study - Vinnytsia [Vinnitsia] and Zhytomyr [Zhitomir/Shitomir] - between 1941 and 1943. Of the 160,000 Jews (of which 45,000 had been brought in from Bukovina and Bessarabia) who died in the Vinnytsia oblast, an estimated 10,000 died through forced labour or through their liquidation following forced labour (Kruglov, Unichtozhenie evreiskogo naseleniia Ukrainy v 1941–1944 gg.:Khronika sobytii, p.14). For Zhitomir oblast, Kruglov estimates 55,000 deaths due to Nazi policies, as per Nick Terry's summary here.

Secondly, by 1943, Hitler had to acknowledge that "The Jews are all gone" and that this was forcing him to "train the Ukrainians how to mend boots." An extract from stenographic notes from Hitler's conversation with Keitel and Zeitzler of 8 June 1943 at the Berghof was collected at Nuremberg as document 1384-PS and appears in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression ("Red Series"), vol III, p. 959, viewable at this link:
[Page 12] He said: Here, I lose 500,000 Jews. I must take them away, because the Jews are the element of revolt. But in my area, actually, the Jews were the only tradesmen. Now they want to set up high schools and grammar schools, thereby building here, a national Ukrainian state, that should in the future, fight against Russia. I am not even in a position to have the worker, who must work here, have his boots repaired. I can't do that because the tradesmen are no longer here. The Jews are all gone. What is more important, that I train the Ukrainians how to mend boots, or that I send them high schools so that they can build up the Ukrainian state?
Finally, the complaints of OKV Rat Prof. Seraphim were addressed to the Chief of the Industrial Armament Department at the Wehrmacht Supreme Command (General Thomas) in a letter sent by the Armament Inspector Ukraine, Generalleutnant Hans Leykauf. Roberto Muehlenkamp has posted the German text with an English translation here. Five points should be noted. Firstly, the letter debunks (yet again) the Sanning thesis that the Soviets had depopulated the Jewish areas:
Regulation of the Jewish question in the Ukraine was a difficult problem because the Jews constituted a large part of the urban population. We therefore have to deal -just as in the General Government- with a mass problem of policy concerning the population. Many cities had a percentage of Jews exceeding fifty percent. Only the rich Jews had fled from the German troops. The majority of Jews remained under German administration.[my emphasis] The latter found the problem more complicated through the fact that these Jews represented almost the entire trade and even a part of the manpower in small and medium industries besides the business which had in part become superfluous as a direct or indirect result of the war.
Secondly, the letter states that the policy of killing Jews was motivated by Nazi ideology, not rational, pragmatic thinking:
Summarizing, it can be said that the kind of solution of the Jewish problem applied in the Ukraine, which obviously was based on the ideological theories as a matter of principle, had the following results
Thirdly, it confirms the policy, reiterated by Himmler, that "no consideration was given to the interests of economy" during killing sweeps. Fourthly, the text confirms that there was a killing policy towards "superfluous eaters". Fifthly, it confirms that the policy lacked economic rationality:
If we shoot the Jews, let the prisoners of war perish, condemn considerable parts of the urban population to death by starvation and also lose a part of the rural population by hunger during the next year, the question remains unanswered: Who, then, is supposed to produce economic values here?
In conclusion, therefore, it can be seen that even Nazis who were embedded within the regime's culture and 'habitus' could see that there was a non-rational genocide taking place which would ultimately damage their own interests.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

"Muehlenkamp accepts nafcash's challenge" - 6th Update

Original article and 1st update

2nd update, 24.07.2008, 23:55 hours GMT

3rd update, 26.07.2008, 15:08 hours GMT

4th update 29.07.2008, 15:00 hours GMT

5th update, 30.07.2008, 23:59 GMT

Update, 03.08.2008, 0:48 GMT

The latest conversations between cowardly cretins Gerdes and Hargis on the CODOH Cesspit have been commented in my VNN post # 953.

See also my VNN posts # 954 and # 955.

The last of these posts contains a list of things for Gerdes to do – if he is interested in making good for the cowardly and obnoxious behavior he has displayed throughout our discussions, I’m just giving him a chance to do so –
during my holiday absence.

Let’s see how much of this, if anything, is done when I come back in three weeks.


7th update, 27.08.2008, 23:34 GMT