Sunday, September 05, 2010

The oh-so-unreliable Rudolf Reder

One of the very few survivors of Bełżec extermination camp, Rudolf Reder is considered an unreliable witness by British researcher Michael Tregenza, who wrote that Reder's account is contradictory and contains inaccuracies such as a greatly exaggerated number of victims, wrong measurements of the mass graves and the camp and the participation of Romanians and Norwegians in the extermination (Tregenza, "Bełżec – Das vergessene Lager des Holocaust", in: Jahrbuch Fritz Bauer Institut 2000, p. 242).

Saturday, September 04, 2010

The Road to Vyazma

The following is an excerpt from the article "The Road to Vyazma", written in June 1943 by American journalist Quentin Reynolds and included in Reynolds’ book The Curtain Rises (Random House, 1944). It conveys a non-Soviet observer's first hand impression of the effects of German occupation and scorched-earth policy on a Russian city and its inhabitants, and also suggests that skepticism towards reports of German atrocities was the approach of western reporters until directly confronted with evidence behind such reports.