«Evidence for the Presence of "Gassed" Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories» (3, 1)

Comments on the article

Evidence for the Presence of "Gassed" Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 1


By a "Revisionist" who calls himself Thomas Kues (hereinafter "TK")

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 (1)



TK

3. A Survey of the Testimonial Evidence

The testimonial evidence can here be divided into two sub-categories, indirect sources in the form of news reports, statements from exile governments, underground publications etc. where the origin of the information is usually not made explicit, and direct information in the form of eyewitness statements. We will begin our survey with the former category.

It is duly noted that TK, who at the beginning of his article told us that "Revisionist historians, however, dispute this claim [of mass murder], considering it a theory completely lacking of documentary as well as material proof" has no problem with using "news reports, statements from exile governments, underground publications etc. where the origin of the information is usually not made explicit" – what he calls indirect testimonial evidence – as well as "direct information in the form of eyewitness statements" in support of his transit camp theory. Never mind that the former is a source that historians don’t place much reliance on (news reports, statements from exile governments and underground publications, namely such "where the origin of the information is not made explicit", are often based on error-prone sources or include spurious propagandistic claims and should therefore be relied on only after cross-checking with other, more reliable evidence), and that eyewitnesses tend to be high-handedly dismissed by "Revisionists" when their accounts don’t match the "Revisionist" stance. Has no one ever told TK that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and that double standards are the surest way of destroying what credibility he might otherwise have?

What is more, as we look at TK’s testimonial evidence we will probably see that convenience not only dictates what categories of evidence he accepts, but also what part of a testimony he takes at face value and what part he dismisses as "propaganda" or otherwise unreliable.

TK

3.1. Reports in Newspapers and Periodicals

3.1.1. American Jewish Yearbook

The American Jewish Yearbook is one of the most comprehensive contemporary sources on the development of the Jewish communities the world over. In its 1943 edition the Yearbook had the following to tell its readers about the developments in Poland:
“Among the more important of these transfers of population was the expulsion of all but 11,000 of the Jews of Cracow, who were deemed ‘economically useful’ and put into a ghetto; those expelled, over 50,000 in number, were sent to Warsaw, Lublin and other cities. The stay of those sent to Lublin was short, for most of them were sent farther east, those remaining being penned in a ghetto in one of the suburbs of the city. Also sent east were most of the Jews who still remained in the western Polish provinces incorporated into the Reich.”[81]

Three of the “extermination camps” were located within the Lublin district: Majdanek (in Lublin itself), Sobibór and Bełżec. With “western Polish provinces incorporated into the Reich” is meant the Warthegau district, from which Jews were transferred east via Chełmno. In the edition from the following year (1944, with the year in review being 1943) we read:

“There are reports of Jewish deportees from Holland and other Western countries having been sent to the occupied Soviet territories for military work, but their numbers and their fate are still shrouded in darkness.”[82]

3.1.2. Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz

The Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz (Israelite Weekly for Switzerland) published many reports on the progress of the “Final solution” during the war years. In its issue from 16 October 1942 the weekly reported (p. 10f.):

”For some time there has been a trend toward dissolution of the ghettos in Poland. That was the case with Lublin, then it was Warsaw’s turn. It is not known how far the plan has been carried out already. The former residents of the ghetto are going farther to the east into the occupied Russian territory; Jews from Germany were brought into the ghetto to partly take their place. […] Of late, transports of Jews from Belgium and other western European countries were observed in Riga, but they moved on immediately to other destinations.”

In the issue of 27 November 1942 we read:

“On a daily basis trains depart from Berlin for the east, part of them [destined] for the ghettos, part of them for drainage work in the territories of eastern Poland and Russia. Authorities in New York are reported to have learned that a Jewish settlement rayon for all the Jews of Western Europe is to be established in the former Polish-Russian border zone and if necessary used as a political means of pressure. The deportations from Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium and France are to cease by the end of this year. The identification papers of the deported Jews are destroyed and their names stricken out; they are henceforth only designated by numbers. It is therefore hardly possible to keep up a correspondence. [...]. In Paris 4,000 Romanian Jews and Jewesses have been arrested and taken out of the city. They were allowed to bring food for two days. [...] The London-based newspaper ‘France’ carries a notice that 20,000 Jews deported from France have arrived in Bessarabia in a pitiful state. The trains went straight to Kischinev [Chisinau] and Calarisi to deliver the prisoners to the local ghettos there.”

With “the former Polish-Russian border zone” is almost certainly meant the area around the border between Poland and Russia as of 1920-1939 (note that the journal apparently uses “Russia” as synonymous with the USSR). Since, as already mentioned, the eastern part of Poland, including Pinsk and most of the Pripet marshes, fell to the Byelorussian Soviet Republic in 1939, this implies that the “Jewish settlement rayon [district] for all the Jews of Western Europe” consisted of a part of Belarus (Minsk was located only some thirty kilometers from this border).

At the time, Kishinev was located very near the border of the Transnistrian Reservation (between the rivers of Dniestr and Southern Bug), to where Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were deported en masse by the Romanian authorities. As mentioned in Section 2.4.8 above, the Transnistria issue will not be discussed here in depth. However, it ought to be mentioned that, while most of not all mainstream historians today know nothing of deportations of French Jews to Transnistria, an article from 1953 by the Jewish-American scholar Joseph B. Shechtman confirms that there are indications of transports of Jews from France as well as other countries in Western Europe to that area:

“There are indications that in 1943 Transnistria began to serve as a kind of a ‘reservation’ for deportation not only of Rumanian Jews, but of Jews from other Nazi-dominated countries. On February 28, 1943, the London press reported that thousands of Jews who had been transported from their homes in Germany, Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Protectorate to the ‘model concentration camp’ at the fortress of Theresin [i.e. Theresienstadt] in the Protectorate, were being sent to Transnistria.[83] Eight months later, reports from Bucharest stated that freight trains crowded with Jews deported from France, Holland and Belgium ‘continue to reach the city of Jassy en route to Transnistria,’ where they ‘are isolated in camps together with Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina.’[84] Jews from Germany and Bulgaria, as well as 700 Polish Jews, were reported among the deportees in Mogilev.[85]

A confidential report of the International Red Cross, dated January 20, 1944, states that, according to official Rumanian statistics, there were on September 1, 1943, 82,098 Jews in Transnistria. Of this number, 50,741 were deported Rumanian Jews, while the remainder were Russian Jews, native inhabitants of this area. […]. There are reliable indications that considerable numbers of Jews from Transnistria were sent to work on fortifications along the German-held eastern front. The Krakauer Zeitung of August 13, 1942 hinted at this when it stated that the Jews deported to Transnistria ‘were housed in large ghettos until an opportunity arose for their removal further east.’”[86]

The claim of transports from Theresienstadt to Transnistria requires some elucidation. During 1943 a total of 17,068 Jews were deported from Theresienstadt in 10 transports. Four of them took place in January and consisted of in all some 6,000 passengers. In February a single transport departed carrying 1,001 passengers. During the period March-August no transports took place; only in September were transports resumed again.[87] The first three of the January transports were sent to Auschwitz, as was the single February transport. From the information provided by Danuta Czech in her Kalendarium[88] we can reconstruct the fate of these four transports as per the table below:

Transports from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz January-February 1943
Date Code: Deportees Registered "Gassed"
Jan. 20 Cq 2000 418 1582
Jan. 23 Cr 2029 227 1802
Jan. 26 Cs 993 284 709
Feb. 1 Cu 1001 218 783
Total: 6023 1147 4876

It should be added that in the previous autumn, on 26 October 1942, a convoy (with the code “By”) had brought 1,866 Jews from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz; 247 of those were registered in the camp, while the remaining 1,619 were “gassed”, i.e. transferred elsewhere. The preceding five transports from Theresienstadt (departing during the brief period of 5-22 October) had all been sent to Treblinka. The transport “Ct” departing from Theresienstadt on 29 January with 1,001 deportees is listed as bound for Auschwitz by, among other sources, the Terezin Studies website,[89] but does not appear in Czech’s Kalendarium.[90] Disregarding the minor uncertainty about this single transport, the contradiction between the orthodox historical picture and the 28 February 1943 news reports is clear. If the latter were correct, then the Jews in question could only have been sent to Transnistria via Auschwitz. The issue of these possible transports to Transnistria requires further research.

3.1.3. Judisk Krönika

In a study on the Swedish response to the ”Holocaust”, American-Jewish historian Steven Koblik has the following to say on the Swedish-Jewish periodical Judisk Krönika (Jewish Chronicle) issued in Stockholm:

“One center of activity [in Sweden] was with the pro-Zionist groups. They had a journal, Judisk Krönika, founded in 1932, that publicly tried to change the official congregation policy and influence the larger Swedish community. The journal developed close contacts in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, and provided some of the best information on the extent of the Final Solution found in any Western publication. The journal also became a source of information for other non-Jewish publications.”[91]

During the war years, this well-informed journal carried a number of news stories that clash violently with the now established historical picture of the “Holocaust”. In the issue from September 1942 we read:

“Jewish school children of more than 14 years of age are being deported from the Third Reich as well, mainly to Ukraine, where they are deployed in harvest work. The children are informed about their deportation only a few hours earlier and are allowed to take along only the mere necessities.”[92]

No transports of German Jews to the Ukraine are known by mainstream historiography, which inevitably leads to the conclusion, that if the above information is correct, then the children in question reached their destination via one of the “death camps”.
In its issue from the following month Judisk Krönika reported:

“A large number of Jews who had been interned in German concentration camps have been transported to Poland, where they are deployed to drain the swamps of Pinsk. The Dachau camp is now devoid of any Jews. Most Jews from the Rhineland, including those of Cologne, have been transferred to the ghetto of Riga.”[93]

While the city of Pinsk did indeed belong to Poland between 1920 and 1939, it fell to the Byelorussian Soviet Republic after the division of Poland. As we will see, the Pripet marshes and the towns and cities near it, such as Pinsk and Bobruisk, will crop up again and again in our material.

In the same issue (October 1942) we read:

“The transport of this tremendous large amount of people [from Western Europe] to Poland was accompanied by the mass expulsion of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto and from other locations. These people were deported farther east, and since they were more or less unfit for labor due to starvation and diseases, one can imagine what fate awaited them there.”[94]

According to the Holocaust historians, the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto were killed en masse in Treblinka, not “deported farther east”. Since the Polish-Jewish underground press had reported since August 1942 that Treblinka was a “death camp” where all arriving Jews were steamed or poisoned with a delayed-action gas, this news notice can only mean that the “news” of the “truth” about Treblinka had not yet reached the well-informed Swedish-Jewish journal (which seems unlikely) or that its writers did not believe the wild atrocity stories and had more trustworthy information available to them.

Finally, in the issue of May/June 1944 we read:

“Certain sparse information begins to seep through about the fate of those Jews who have been deported from Western Europe to Eastern Europe. According to a communication from Lithuania, thousands of Jews from Holland, Belgium, and northern France have been deported to Kaunas, where many have been shot to death in the city’s fortress. In Vilnius as well a large number of Jews from Western Europe has been executed. Some 20,000 Jews from Western Europe are still in the city’s ghetto. The Germans are executing several hundred of them every day, and the Gestapo compiles lists of the next victims. Many Jews managed to escape from the various ghettos and to join partisan groups, and today there is a large number [of Jews] from Western Europe who are fighting together with the Lithuanian partisans.”[95]

While the Judisk Krönika had reported of mass killings in Majdanek and Auschwitz in November 1943[96] and about the “death chambers” of Treblinka (where “many thousands of Jews have been killed”) in September 1943[97] as well as in its May-June 1944 issue[98], the above quoted passage demonstrates that one still believed a large number of Western Jews, including Dutch, Belgian and French Jews, to be present in the occupied eastern territories. As for the claim that the Germans executed thousands of Western Jews in Vilna in 1944, as well as similar claims elsewhere, the question of the eventual fate of the deportees to the eastern territories will be addressed in the concluding part of this article; here it will suffice to point out that if the Soviets at the end of the war had discovered remains of hundreds of thousands or even millions of deported Western and Polish Jews in mass graves on formerly German-occupied Soviet territory, they could easily have dispensed with the vapid claims about gas chambers and extermination camps and presented concrete forensic evidence at the Nuremberg trial.

Regarding the notion of mass shootings of Jews at Vilna in 1944, it is worth noting what historian Andrew Ezergailis has to say about similar claims concerning Latvia:
“Some memoir writers tell us that just before the move to send Jews back to Germany, there were large massacres in Latvia. This contention, however, must be deemed ‘folklore,’ because to date no archival information has surfaced that would confirm the murders. For example the Soviet Extraordinary Commission records no fresh 1944 grave sites.”[99]

3.1.4. New York Times

On 15 June 1943 the New York Times reported on a communiqué issued by the Belgian government in exile, according to which most of the Belgian Jews had been sent to concentration camps in Germany, Poland, and in the occupied Russian territories.

3.1.5. Notre Voix

In April 1944 the communist French underground newspaper Notre Voix told its readers:

“Thank you! A news item that will delight all Jews of France was broadcast by Radio Moscow. Which of us does not have a brother, a sister, or relatives among those deported from Paris? And who will not feel profound joy when he thinks about the fact that 8,000 Parisian Jews have been rescued from death by the glorious Red Army! One of them told Radio Moscow how he had been saved from death, and likewise 8,000 other Parisian Jews. They were all in the Ukraine when the last Soviet offensive began, and the SS bandits wanted to shoot them before they left the country. But since they knew what fate was in store for them and since they had learned that the Soviet troops were no longer far away, the deported Jews decided to escape. They were immediately welcomed by the Red Army and are presently all in the Soviet Union. The heroic Red Army has thus once again earned a claim on the gratitude of the Jewish community of France.”[100]

While it may be argued that both the French communists and Radio Moscow could be suspected of spreading propaganda, it is difficult to see how the presence of French Jews in the Ukraine could have lent itself to propaganda, especially since the Soviet Union were at the same time disseminating propaganda about German “extermination camps”.

Much ado about nothing. Contemporary newspapers – moreover not necessarily objective ones, especially the one mentioned in 3.1.5 – with limited access to information about what was going on in Nazi-occupied Europe, probably often reduced to relying on reports that could not be confirmed and/or were largely based on mere conjecture, can only be used to establish what certain sources assumed to be happening at the time, the accuracy of such assumptions depending on whether or not they were confirmed by later research with a more complete access to information. To the extent that such later research, which in this case has been going on for decades, does not confirm or contradict the contents of such contemporary press information, the same must be dismissed as inaccurate, period. He who argues otherwise might as well try to make a case about the existence of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction based on newspaper articles prior to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, of which he will probably find a lot.

Particularly bereft of this logic is TK’s invoking the good old Notre Voix article, a classic of "Revisionist" propaganda that was commented as follows in my blog Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (5,2):

This Radio Moscow broadcast is obviously what its tone suggests it to be - a propaganda claim meant to ingratiate the French underground, especially it's Jewish and or Communist components, with the glorious Red Army of the Soviet Union. And it speaks volumes about Mattogno's desperation that he invokes such a dubious source, which he would (rightly, for a change) not hesitate to brush away as propaganda if it did not support his claims.

While I don’t see why that would necessarily hinder a propaganda claim meant to ingratiate the French underground with the glorious Red Army, I also didn’t know that the Soviet Union was "at the same time" (i.e. in April 1944, months before Red Army overran Majdanek concentration camp) disseminating "propaganda" about German extermination camps. Maybe TK can show us some of that "propaganda".

The only source mentioned by TK that is not contemporary press, unless I missed something, is "an article from 1953 by the Jewish-American scholar Joseph B. Shechtman confirms that there are indications of transports of Jews from France as well as other countries in Western Europe to that area". However, the quotes from Shechtman’s article reveal that the author relied exclusively on press reports from the years 1942 and 1943 and a "confidential report of the International Red Cross, dated January 20, 1944" based on "official Rumanian statistics". There’s no reason to assume that the International Red Cross, dependent as it was on what information official entities of the Axis countries were willing to give it, was any better informed at the time than the contemporary press.

Where contemporary press reports contain information that doesn’t fit his theses, TK reveals an amazing capacity for selective reading (or thinking), namely in the following passage (emphasis added):

TK

In the same issue (October 1942) we read:

“The transport of this tremendous large amount of people [from Western Europe] to Poland was accompanied by the mass expulsion of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto and from other locations. These people were deported farther east, and since they were more or less unfit for labor due to starvation and diseases, one can imagine what fate awaited them there.”[94]

According to the Holocaust historians, the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto were killed en masse in Treblinka, not “deported farther east”. Since the Polish-Jewish underground press had reported since August 1942 that Treblinka was a “death camp” where all arriving Jews were steamed or poisoned with a delayed-action gas, this news notice can only mean that the “news” of the “truth” about Treblinka had not yet reached the well-informed Swedish-Jewish journal (which seems unlikely) or that its writers did not believe the wild atrocity stories and had more trustworthy information available to them.

Apart from the fact that Treblinka lies "farther east" than Warsaw indeed, the highlighted passage reveals that the Swedish-Jewish journal in question, while being less well-informed than TK would like it to be (maybe TK can explain why the journal should be expected to have had access to Polish-Jewish underground press), correctly assumed that the deportees "more or less unfit for labor due to starvation and diseases" would be killed. How else is one to understand the remark "one can imagine what fate awaited them there"? The writers were obviously more reasonable and realistic than who, conveniently glossing over the cited remark, would now have them "not believe the wild atrocity stories".

Also amusing, though largely an aside from his current argumentation, is this remark of TK’s:

TK

As for the claim that the Germans executed thousands of Western Jews in Vilna in 1944, as well as similar claims elsewhere, the question of the eventual fate of the deportees to the eastern territories will be addressed in the concluding part of this article; here it will suffice to point out that if the Soviets at the end of the war had discovered remains of hundreds of thousands or even millions of deported Western and Polish Jews in mass graves on formerly German-occupied Soviet territory, they could easily have dispensed with the vapid claims about gas chambers and extermination camps and presented concrete forensic evidence at the Nuremberg trial.

I’m waiting with baited breath on how TK will address the "eventual fate of the deportees to the eastern territories" in the "concluding part of this article". Will he claim that the deportees all ended up in the Soviet Gulag and perished there, that they were abducted by flying saucers, or that the Soviets brainwashed them all into forgetting who they were and were they had come from before releasing them to wherever they returned to or emigrated?

As to the second period, the Soviets didn’t discover remains of hundreds of thousands or even millions of deported Western and Polish Jews in mass graves on formerly German-occupied Soviet territory, for the simple reason that the overwhelming majority of Western and Polish Jews had been bumped off on Polish territory that had never belonged to the Soviet Union. What they found on formerly German-occupied Soviet territory was the mass graves, largely untouched by Aktion 1005, of millions of mostly Soviet citizens – prisoners of war as well as Jewish and non-Jewish civilians – who had been murdered by the Nazis, mostly by shooting or by letting them die of starvation, more rarely by using gas vans. Regarding these atrocities the Soviets presented at Nuremberg the following reports of the Extraordinary State Commission:

* USSR-1 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on atrocities in the Stavropol region
* USSR-2(a) Report of a special commission on crimes in Stalino
* USSR-4 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on causing death by spreading epidemic of typhus
* USSR-5 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on the "Gross-lazarett" in the town of Slavuta
* USSR-6 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on crimes in the Lvov region
* USSR-7 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on atrocities in Lithuania
* USSR-9 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on atrocities in Kiev
* USSR-37 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on crimes in the city of Kupiansk
* USSR-38 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on German crimes in the city of Minsk
* USSR-39 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on atrocities in Estonia
* USSR-41 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on crimes in Latvia
* USSR-42 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on crimes in the town of Krasnodar and vicinity
* USSR-43 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on crimes in Kharkov and vicinity
* USSR-45 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on crimes in the town of Rovno and vicinity
* USSR-46 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on crimes in Orel and vicinity
* USSR-47 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on atrocities in the city of Odessa and vicinity
* USSR-55 Report of special Soviet commission on crimes in the city of Krasnodar and vicinity
* USSR-56 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on atrocities committed in Smolensk and vicinity
* USSR-63 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on crimes in Sevastopol and other cities
* USSR-249 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on German atrocities in Kiev
* USSR-279 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on crimes in the city of Viazma and others in the Smolensk region
* USSR-415 Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on crimes committed against Soviet prisoners of war in the camp of Lamsdorf

together with reports about destruction of property and cultural heritage, the Joint Polish and Soviet report USSR-29 (presumably about Auschwitz or Majdanek) and the infamous report USSR-54, in which they tried to blame their Katyn killings of Polish officers on the Nazis.

Regarding the extermination camps, only at Majdanek did the Soviets come upon a largely intact camp with easy-to-find physical evidence, some of which is shown in photographs included in my collection Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes. Regarding Treblinka the Soviets presented some of the available physical evidence in document USSR-340 (this seems to be the document referred to as "USSR-344" by Mattogno & Graf), as well as the witness Samuel Rajzman. Chelmno was briefly mentioned on 27 February 1946, whereas Belzec and Sobibór were not mentioned at all, as far as I know. Regarding Auschwitz-Birkenau the most important evidence introduced at Nuremberg came not from the Soviets but from defense witness Rudolf Höss. Obviously the Soviets at Nuremberg weren’t all that interested in and/or didn’t know much about the Nazis’ extermination camps, especially those in which the victims had been almost exclusively Jews.

TK

3.2. Other Indirect Sources

3.2.1. E.M. Kulischer

In 1943, the demographics professor and member of the International Labour Office at Montreal, Canada, Eugene M. Kulischer published a survey entitled The displacement of population in Europe. Kulischer was assisted in his survey by no less than 24 institutions, including Jewish ones, which in turn had a dense network of information channels in the various European countries. His chapter on “The Expulsion and Deportation of Jews” contains much information of interest to revisionist researchers; here I will contend myself with merely quoting the passages of interest to our subject:

“This forced transfer [of the Jews] has taken the following forms: [...]. Expulsion from an area which is to be ‘purged of Jews’ and deportation to a special region (e.g. the Lublin reservation), city or town, or part of such region, city or town. Since 1940 this has been the usual practice adopted in removing Jews from various German-controlled territories and deporting them to the General Government, or, latterly, to the occupied area of the Soviet Union.”[101]

The mention of transports to the “occupied area of the Soviet Union” could possibly be a reference to the deportation of German, Austrian and Czech Jews directly to the Baltic States and Belarus in 1941-42, but the following passages are more specific:

“Some of the Jews from Belgium were sent to a neighbouring part of Western Europe for forced labour, but generally speaking the tendency has been to remove the Jews to the east. Many Western European Jews were reported to have been sent to the mines of Silesia. The great majority were sent to the General Government and, in ever growing numbers, to the eastern area, that is, to the territories which had been under Soviet rule since September 1939 and to the other occupied areas of the Soviet Union.”[102]

Here one should recall that the number of German, Austrian and Czech Jews deported directly to the east did not increase during 1942, according to preserved documentation, but was rather a small but steady stream, and that the last known such transport departed from Vienna on 28 November 1942.[103] It therefore does not make much sense for Kulischer to speak of “growing numbers” in 1943, unless he had knowledge of other, de facto increasing, transports of Jews to the occupied eastern territories. Further on Kulischer writes that

“…generally speaking, deportation to the east is for the Jews the equivalent of the recruitment for work in the Reich to which the rest of the population of German-controlled Europe is subject, and their removal further and further eastwards is doubtless connected with the need for supplying the army’s requirements near the front.”[104]

We note here the expression “further and further eastwards”. The destination of the transports “further eastwards” is made more clear in the following paragraph which concerns the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto – which the mainstream historians claim led said Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers of Treblinka:

“Since the summer of 1942 the ghettos and labour camps in the German-occupied Eastern Territories have become the destination of deportees both from Poland and from western and central Europe; in particular, a new large-scale transfer from the Warsaw ghetto has been reported. Many of the deportees have been sent to the labour camps on the Russian front; others to work in the marshes of Pinsk, or to the ghettos of the Baltic countries, Byelorussia and Ukraine. It is hardly possible to distinguish how far the changes in the Jewish population of the General Government are due to deportation and how far they are attributable to ‘ordinary’ mortality and extermination. Moreover, the number of Jews remaining in the General Government is in any case uncertain.”[105]

Kulischer further speaks of “hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews deported eastward from the General Government”.[106]

3.2.2. A. Rei and H. Laretei

August Rei and Heinrich Laretei, who had served as Estonia’s ambassadors to Moscow and Stockholm, respectively, before the Soviet occupation of that country in 1940, reported to the Swedish detective superintendent Otto Danielsson on 8 November 1944 that

“Jews had been deported from Czechoslovakia and Poland [to Estonia] under the pretence that they would work in Estonian factories, but were then shot. Estonian patriots had carried out investigations and discovered evidence.”[107]

While it is documented and acknowledged by the Holocaust historians that a transport from Theresienstadt carrying 1,000 Jews bound for Estonian Raasiku departed on 1 September 1942, mainstream historiography is unaware of any transports of Polish Jews to Estonia.

3.2.3. A. Jablonski

On 26 August 1943, the Swedish Communist organ Ny Dag published an article written by a Latvian Communist, A. Jablonski, entitled “The Germans in Latvia”, in which we read:

“During the winter 1941-1942 the Germans deported to Riga Jews from Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, and other occupied countries and executed them together with Jews from Riga in the pine forest at Čuibe, between the stations of Rumbula and Salaspils.”[108]

What applies to the contemporary press also applies to TK’s contemporary "other indirect sources", whose access to information was also limited and whose claims can accordingly be considered reliable only insofar as confirmed by postwar research. This includes the the ubiquitous 1943 Kulisher study, regarding which I wrote the following in the blog Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (5,2):

It looks bad enough on Mattogno that he ignores not only publications contemporary to Kulisher’s study[440] that pointed to mass murder of the Jews rather than the deportation to the occupied Soviet territories that Kulisher surmised, but also and especially postwar publications which incorporated lots of information that was not available to Kulisher in 1943. It looks at least as bad on Mattogno that one of the few "indications" he supports his absurd wishful thinking with is a study written in 1943 in Canada, by a demographer who, for all his presumable hard work and competence, only had limited if any access to information other than could be openly obtained from official sources (as opposed to secret reports from underground organizations or secret Nazi documents like Wetzel's appraisal of the Generalplan Ost) and therefore couldn’t possibly know all that was going on in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. What Kulisher wrote about the ultimate destination of Jews deported from the General Government comes across as having been not a conclusion "undergirded by a copious documentation"[441], but rather an educated guess based on very limited information [442].

Kulisher obviously didn't know why the Jews were being removed "further and further eastward"; he simply assumed that this was "doubtless connected with the need for supplying the army's requirements near the front". So when he learned of "a new large-scale transfer from the Warsaw ghetto" (his source: "Unser Zeit, quoted by Novy Put, 10 Jan. 1943. On 22 July 1942, the Jewish Council of Warsaw received an order to prepare 6,000 persons to be sent away daily. Deportation started the next day, and several thousand persons are said to have been deported every day." [443]) he assumed that the Jews were being taken to the occupied Soviet territories for the purpose of "supplying the army's requirements near the front", i.e. what he had previously surmised to be the general purpose of deportation "further and further eastward". Whence he concluded on the specific destinations mentioned thereafter ("labour camps on the Russian front; others to work in the marshes of Pinsk, or to the ghettos of the Baltic countries, Bielorussia and the Ukraine"[444]) is not clear; it may have been his own conjectures together with the "official" destinations of the deportation mentioned in the article in Unser Zeit, which he learned from through another source (Novy Put) quoting that article. Actually, as is known from evidence including but not limited to the Stroop Report[445] and Ganzenmüller's letter to Wolff of 28 July 1942[446], the destination of the Jews deported from Warsaw starting 22 July 1942 was not the Soviet-occupied eastern territories, but Treblinka extermination camp.

Kulisher was not unaware, however, that German policies towards the Jews involved physical extermination, for he used the term "extermination" at least twice in a context in which it can only mean physical killing [447].

The reference to extermination in the obvious sense of physical killing on page 111 of Kulisher’s book ("It is hardly possible to distinguish how far the changes in the Jewish population of the General Government are due to deportation and how far they are attributable to "ordinary" mortality1 and extermination.") suggests that Kulisher suspected that the transports from Warsaw mentioned just before were not actually going where he wrote they were going, but refrained from putting to paper this sinister conclusion, because he had no evidence in his hands to support it and/or because it seemed too sinister to contemplate.

The two passages referred to above are not mentioned by Mattogno & Graf in their discussion of Kulisher's book[448], at the end of which the authors triumphantly proclaim the following:

Nowhere does Kulischer speak of ‘extermination camps’ or of a German policy of the physical extermination of the Jews!

Neither do M&G mention the passage on page 110 regarding the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto[449]; M&G may have reckoned that quoting this passage would make it obvious that their cherrypicked source was basing his conclusions on an inadequate and incomplete data base.

Also not mentioned are the caveats about the accuracy of the data presented and conclusions reached, stated by Kulisher in his Introduction[450] and in the preceding Prefatory Note from The International Labour Office (emphasis added):

In spite of the plentiful material which it has been possible to assemble with the help of a number of institutions and individuals, public and private, who have kindly made their information available, it is clear that under present circumstances the results of a survey of this kind must necessarily be regarded in many ways as of a preliminary and provisional nature.

So a study expressly stated by its author and editors as being "of a preliminary and provisional nature" was touted by Mattogno & Graf[451] as "written with scientific exactitude" and "undergirded by a copious documentation", in a puny attempt to place it above contemporary publications pointing to mass murder rather than mere displacement and posterior studies based on a more complete data base, especially including secret Nazi documentation that Kulisher couldn't possibly have access to at the time.

Kulisher himself was more professional and honest than to remain stuck with the limited knowledge he possesed in 1943. In 1948 he wrote another book, for which he obviously took into consideration the copious documentation of systematic extermination that had come to his knowledge in the meantime[452]. Mattogno & Graf, for obvious reasons, did not move beyond the status of Kulisher’s knowledge in 1943. And that's supposed to be scientific.

Maybe TK would like to argue that Kulisher had been brainwashed and/or joined the Jewish World Conspiracy by 1948.

In the next two sections I'll discuss the eyewitness testimonies that TK expects his readers to accept as "strong evidence for the revisionist transit camp hypothesis".


Part 3(2)