Mattogno’s ‘Resettlement’ Shell Game
Having
ignored virtually every source discussed in the preceding section, and after
deliberately misunderstanding the interplay of labour and extermination, it is
unsurprising that Mattogno feels he can devote most of his energies to
misrepresenting Nazi Jewish policy in Poland by presenting a series of
documents which he misinterprets as ‘proving’ a resettlement program. That Mattogno
deliberately omitted all indicators to the contrary is bad enough, but on
closer examination, his attempt to construct a chain of documents for
‘resettlement’ also falls flat on its face. Firstly, it is immediately striking
how little Mattogno actually has to say about the fate of Polish Jews.
Most of the rumours, false news reports and other uncorroborated evidence that
Mattogno and his younger associate Kues try to parlay into proof of ‘resettlement’
in fact concerns West European Jews; evidence which will be examined in the
next chapter. Secondly, as Mattogno’s hypothesis meanders over the course of
1942-43, it is striking how he is less and less able to find any vague
indicators of transfer out of the Generalgouvernement. By mid to late 1943, he
is in effect reduced to playing a shell game whereby the surviving Polish Jews
are simply transferred from one part of the province to another, simply so that
Mattogno can avoid admitting that the 400,000 Jews left alive in the GG and
Bialystok districts at the start of 1943 were further decimated.
A more fundamental problem,
however, is the constant attempt to pyramid extraordinarily vague references to
‘resettlement’ into hard proof of actual transfer, and the refusal to recognise
a euphemism when one is demonstrably used. The contrast with the documentation
of genuine resettlements in Poland between 1939 and 1941, as well as other Nazi
evacuation measures, should be manifest. Documents describing actual
resettlements contain clear and precise references to transfers between point A
and point B, or between administrative district X and administrative district
Y.[329] The
glaring absence of any such details in the paper trail surrounding the
deportations of the Jews in the course of Aktion Reinhard during 1942-3 is
precisely why historians have ignored ‘resettlement’ as a fiction.
Moreover, it is not difficult to
find examples of documents where ‘resettlement’ was manifestly being used
euphemistically or which referred to the strict secrecy of the task, a secrecy
which is entirely incompatible with a peaceful population transfer. In late
March 1942, the office of the governor of Galicia noted that the ongoing
‘out-settlement’ (Aussiedlung) of “all dispensable Jews out of Galicia”
was a secret state matter (Geheime Reichssache). Jews were to be
concentrated near rail lines so that they could be moved in transports of
1000-1100. At this time, all transports from Galicia headed westwards to
Belzec, not to the ‘Russian East’.[330] In
June 1942, SS-Obergruppenführer Krüger wrote to request that Helmuth Pohl, a
member of SSPF Lublin and part of Höfle’s deportation staff, be promoted to an
officer of the Waffen-SS as he was engaged “with important tasks in the ‘Jewish
Resettlement’ desk” (im Referat “Judenumsiedlung”). Inverted commas were
used in the original.[331] Krüger
referred the SS Personnel Office to a communication written on June 3, 1942
about the task “Jewish Resettlement” of the Reichsführer-SS, the same day that
Globocnik presented a ‘Jew folder’ (Judenmappe) containing his plans for
the second phase of Aktion Reinhard to Himmler.[332] In
September 1943, Krüger wrote to the HSSPF Niederlande, Hanns-Albin Rauter,
trying to place Hermann Höfle in a new job after the completion of Aktion
Reinhard. Stating that Höfle had had to carry out ‘special tasks’ (Sonderaufträge),
Krüger elaborated by explaining that these had above all consisted of the ‘Jew
Final Solution Question’ (Judenendlösungsfrage), a ‘purely confidential
matter’ (reine Vertrauenssache) that was also especially demanding.[333] Lower
down the chain of command, agricultural specialists negotiating with SS
officers over the continued use of Jewish forced labour on kok-sagys farms in
Galicia noted in the spring of 1943 that “hitherto no order from Berlin had
been given to “resettle” the Jews here” (die hiesigen Juden “umzusiedeln”).[334]
To interpret such documents
literally is a sign of nothing other than delusion. It is one thing not to
realise from the context when euphemisms are being used, quite another not to
notice inverted commas clearly demarcating the terms from their conventional
meaning. As in the example from Jagielnica above, the overwhelming majority of
uses of the terms ‘evacuation’, ‘resettlement’ and ‘outsettlement’ in the
German documents are entirely intransitive, not even making a vague gesture to
a fictitious destination. All too often, “evacuation” apparently became an end
in itself, if we are to apply the kind of literalism that Mattogno wants us to
apply in so many other cases.
So desperate is Mattogno to
identify any possible exit from the GG for the deported Jews that he is not
above inventing them, misreading chains of documents to fabricate a fictitious
continuity out of trial balloons and policy dead ends. A good case in point is
the repeated exaltation of the Pripyat marshes in southeastern Belorussia as a
supposed transfer destination. That this was a plan confined entirely to 1941
and never carried out is simply ignored by Mattogno, who decontextualises the
paper trail by omitting crucial sources inconvenient to his fantasy.
In the spring of 1941, Hans Frank
and the civil administration of the Generalgouvernement, although hoping for
the removal of Jews “within a reasonable space of time”, still reckoned on the
presence of Jews in their domain for the foreseeable future, instituting
economic planning for the Warsaw ghetto in the expectation that it would exist
for a further five years.[335] The
invasion of the Soviet Union opened up the prospect that the Jews of the GG
could be expelled eastwards. Indeed, Hans Frank returned from a meeting with
Hitler on June 19, 1941 with a firm promise that the GG would be the first
region to be made judenfrei, and would be transformed into “a kind of transit
camp”. Accordingly, no more ghettos were to be created.[336] The
“imminent clearing” of the Warsaw ghetto was now on the cards.[337] On
July 22, Frank declared that he would give “the order to prepare the evacuation
of the Warsaw ghetto in the next few days”.[338] The
reason for the urgency of these preparations he ascribed to the food situation:
“if we establish a food and development plan, then it is clear that certain
questions with which we have grappled continuously for almost two years will no
longer concern us in the main. I believe that a relief in the conditions in Warsaw
and other large towns will now occur.”[339] Some
of Frank’s hopes for an expulsion of the Jews of the GG rested with a proposal
to expand the Generalgouvernement eastwards. The decision to add the
traditional Habsburg territory of eastern Galicia was made without difficulty
and confirmed on July 19.[340] In
fact, this was not the only territory in which Frank was interested. The civil
administration of the GG had been tasked with temporarily administering the
border town of Brest-Litovsk from an early stage.[341] On
July 20, Frank proposed to Hans Lammers that the Pripyat marshes be annexed to
his domain. By contrast to “overpopulated” eastern Galicia, the Pripyat marshes
would enable Frank to “bring population elements (above all Jewish) into
productive and profitable employment for the Reich”[342]
Hitler rejected the proposal two
days later.[343]
Although the notion of deporting Jews to drain the Pripyat marshes was floated
not long afterwards by the chief of Einsatzgruppe C, Otto Rasch[344], both
expert opinion[345]
as well as Hitler himself feared that the draining of the Pripyat marshes would
lead to the “steppe-ification” of the vital agricultural acreages of Ukraine
and thus the marshes were better utilised as military manoeuvre areas.[346]
Mattogno’s treatment of this
episode is instructive. Aside from misdating Rasch’s suggestion twice[347], he is
utterly silent on the dead-ending of the proposal by Hitler, and instead
discusses the project as if it were a live concern that might well have
extended into 1942, presumably in order to keep open another option for his
fantasy ‘resettlement’ thesis. Later on in Sobibór, his co-author Graf
goes one better and offers a cretinously literalist reading of a statement from
1942 by the deputy director of the Population and Welfare Department of the GG,
Walter Föhl.[348]
The quote is sufficiently instructive that it is worth citing in full, in order
that the reader can gauge the degree of imbecility required to take it
literally:
“Every day now, we have been receiving trains, each with 1,000 Jews from Europe, processing them and housing them in one way or another, and sending them on, right into the swamps of White Ruthenia towards the Arctic Ocean; that is where they will all find themselves when the war is over – if they survive (and the Jews from the Kurfürstendamm or from Vienna or Pressburg surely will not) – not without having built a few motorways. (But we should not talk about that.)”[349]
To read this jumble of destinations
and allusions to superseded fantasies and dead policy proposals as anything
other than a blatantly obvious cipher for mass murder takes some doing. But to
miss the inhumane undertone takes a special kind of stupidity. As Föhl’s
remarks from 1942 indicate, the expectation in the summer of 1941 – as in 1939
with the “Lublin reservation” plan, or in 1940 with Madagascar – was that any
deportation to the Pripyat marshes would decimate the Jews by working them to
death.[350] The
Pripyat proposal thus represented yet another confirmation of the genocidal
tendency in the planning of the civil administration, much less that of
the SS.
In several of his brochures,
Mattogno has tried to link the Pripyat marshes trial balloon to a document
describing the deportation in May 1942 of 16,882 Jews from Pulawy county in the
Lublin district “over the Bug River.”[351] A
glance at the map apparently sufficed to allow Mattogno to take this vague
expression literally, and to declare that the Jews of Pulawy county must have
been resettled in the Generalkommissariat Wolhynien-Podolien, which contained
the Gebietskommissariat Pinsk and thus administered the Pripyat marshes. Quite
apart from the total and glaring lack of confirmation of this from any source
from the Wolhynien-Podolien district, the interpretation can be dismissed for
two reasons. Firstly, at least one Sobibor survivor, Stanislaw Szmajzner, was
selected for the Sonderkommando from these transports, and did not report any
‘onward transports’. There is already thus a contradiction between separate
sources which cannot be overcome by appealing to the supposed superiority of
documents, since the documented reference is so extraordinarily imprecise and
vague, and totally lacking in any kind of corroboration.[352]
Secondly, the phrase “over the Bug”
had already been used several times as a cipher for mass murder in the Lublin
district. On December 1, 1939, 5./SS-Reiterstandarte 1 expelled 1018 Jews from
Chelm county to Sokal across the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line “over the Bug”,
in the course of which no fewer than 440 Jews were “shot trying to escape”. The
next month, on January 13, 1940, the same company murdered 600 Jewish prisoners
of war deported to Chelm who it had been hoped could likewise be expelled
across the border.[353]
Moreover, this cipher recurred in late 1941 during the transition phase to
Aktion Reinhard. At a meeting on October 17, as we have seen above, the civil
and SS leadership of the Lublin district together with Hans Frank decided that
“all Jews, with the exception of indispensable craftsmen and the like, are to
be evacuated from Lublin. Initially, 1,000 Jews will be transferred across the
Bug River. Responsibility for this is placed in the hands of the SSPF. The
Stadthauptmann will select the Jews to be evacuated.”[354]
It is a virtual certainty that
Mattogno would see this document as further proof of his fantasy resettlement
thesis, since the protocolled intention was that Jews would be “transferred
across the Bug River”. Alas, neither in the protocol of the October 17 1941
meeting in Lublin nor in its later usage can Mattogno’s stultifyingly literalist
interpretation be sustained. Firstly, the phrase “over the Bug” first
circulated in 1939 when SS troops were busy trying to expel Jews over the
Nazi-Soviet interest border. This resulted, as we just saw, in several
massacres of Jews who were ostensibly to be expelled but never even reached the
border. Thus the phrase may well have been understood – by the SS, by the civil
administration or by both institutions – as a cipher and euphemism for mass
murder already in 1941. Secondly, there is the simple problem of geography. A
literalist interpretation would direct the Jews of Lublin city who were
supposed to be “transferred across the Bug river” either into the Galicia
district or into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. From the perspective of both
the SS and the civil administration, and in the light of every previous
experience in Nazi Jewish policy in the Generalgouvernement, a transfer to
Galicia would have been a futile exercise in rearranging deckchairs on the
Titanic. Previous efforts to create the ‘Lublin reservation’ or to annex the
Pripyat marshes to the Generalgouvernement as a dumping-ground for unwanted
populations had also failed. There is no hint in any source that the Galicia
district was intended to fulfil such a function, and a great deal of evidence
to argue against this.
That leaves the possibility of
expelling Jews from Lublin to Ukraine or another location in the occupied
Soviet Union. Yet the very location of Belzec, on the border of the Lublin and
Galicia districts, argues against this interpretation. Moreover, with the
construction of Majdanek, there was simply no need to construct a ‘transit
camp’ in a remote location. If the intention was at this time to simply expel
and resettle the Jews of Lublin, then all that would have been needed was a
temporary holding facility, which already existed in the form of the ghetto, or
the camp at Lipowastrasse 7, or Majdanek, which was already being built up to a
capacity large enough to accommodate 1,000 persons passing through temporarily.[355] For
all these reasons, the location of the first camp in what was to become Aktion
Reinhard on the border between the Lublin and Galicia districts, in a primitive
rural environment and from a transport perspective in entirely the wrong
direction for any ‘transit’ to Ukraine, is not compatible with a ‘transit
camp’. And thus, the reference in May 1942 to the deportation of the Jews of
Pulawy county “over the Bug River” cannot be considered evidence of actual
“transit” – quite aside from the utter lack of corroboration at the putative
end destination.
It is telling that Mattogno is
wholly unable to provide any other source than the now debunked ‘over the Bug’
reference which might indicate ‘resettlement’ of the up to 180,000 Jews
deported to Belzec and Sobibor from March to June 1942 in the first phase of
Aktion Reinhard. The sources concerning the other nine-tenths or more of the
deportations are either utterly silent on the actual destinations, or in fact
name destinations which are demonstrable falsehoods, because they were Nazi
deception measures. A case in point is the deportations from the Galician
capital of Lwow which began in March 1942.[356]
Indeed, the Jews of Lwow were misinformed that their relatives had been
deported to Lublin, as the Wehrmacht commander in the Galicia district noted:
Within the Jewish population of Lemberg a noticeable unrest has spread in regard to a deportation action that has begun, through which some 30,000 elderly and other unemployed Jews shall be seized and allegedly transferred to a territory near Lublin. To what extent this evacuation can be equated with a decimation remains to be seen.[357]
None of the Jews of Lwow or any
other town in Galicia ever arrived anywhere in the Lublin district, as was
swiftly realised in the Galician capital:
The Jewish population displays the deepest depression, which is completely understandable because on the one hand in various locations in the district the well-known actions against the Jews occur again and on the other hand in Lemberg the temporarily interrupted resettlement of Jews resumes; in the meantime it is whispered also among the Jews that the evacuees never reach the resettlement territory that is alleged to them as the destination.[358]
Instead of ending up in Lublin –
which was itself the target of a simultaneous deportation operation to Belzec –
the deportees from the Lwow ghetto perished in Belzec, as was swiftly confirmed
by the Polish resistance.[359]
Although confronted with these documents in an earlier exchange with Roberto
Muehlenkamp, Mattogno was unable to explain what had happened to the Jews of
Lwow, much less why they had been deported westwards, contenting himself with
seemingly misunderstanding the remark of the Oberfeldkommandatur in Lwow that
“to what extent this evacuation can be equated with a decimation remains to be
seen” as referring to Belzec, rather than as is apparent to any sentient
reader, referring to the decimation of the Jews of Lwow.[360] It is
howlers like this that make us question sometimes whether Mattogno can actually
read English fluently, since the alternative is that he has absolutely no shame
about lying.
References which can be spun into
substantiating the ‘resettlement’ fantasy are equally thin on the ground for
phase two of Aktion Reinhard, beginning at the start of June 1942 with the
reopening of Belzec and hitting its stride in late July 1942 with the unveiling
of Treblinka. This is not to say that the Nazi hierarchy and SS leadership were
not using ‘resettlement’ in a manifestly euphemistic manner, however. At a speech
to the senior SS leadership immediately after Heydrich’s funeral in early June
1942, Himmler announced that “the migration of the Jews we will have definitely
completed within one year; then none will wander any more. For now a clean
sweep must be made.”[361] The
usual negationist literalism founders badly on an ambiguous statement such as
this, since Himmler’s words can easily be interpreted as meaning none will be
alive to wander, rather than merely that all Jews will have been migrated
within one year to a final destination. If MGK were to opt for the latter, they
would, of course, have to explain which part of the occupied eastern
territories had been selected for the permanent Jewish reservation,
since ‘dann wandert keiner mehr’ cannot be read as referring to the
transplantation of deportees to a temporary holding centre, especially
not when coming from the lips of a man who openly declared the extermination of
the Jews to be a completed fact on several occasions in 1943 and 1944.[362]
That Himmler henceforth intended a
total expulsion of the Jews of Poland is seemingly accepted by Mattogno, who
has cited on several occasions a well known directive from the Reichsführer-SS
to Krüger issued on 19 July 1942.[363] The
document is worth quoting in extenso, not least because Mattogno omits the two
sentences bolded below from his reproduction of this document in Sobibor: [364]
I herewith order that the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the Government-General be carried out and completed by December 31, 1942.
From December 31, 1942, no persons of Jewish origin may remain within the Government-General, unless they are in collection camps in Warsaw, Cracow, Czestochowa, Radom, and Lublin. All other work on which Jewish labor is employed must be finished by that date, or, in the event that this is not possible, it must be transferred to one of the collection camps.
These measures are required with a view to the necessary ethnic division of races and peoples for the New Order in Europe, and also in the interests of the security and cleanliness of the German Reich and its sphere of interest. Every breach of this regulation spells a danger to quiet and order in the entire German sphere of interest, a point of application for the resistance movement and a source of moral and physical pestilence. For all these reasons a total cleansing is necessary and therefore to be carried out.
The omitted sentences contain
sentiments which, as we will see shortly, become a virtual refrain in Himmler’s
orders forcing through the continued deportations from the Generalgouvernement
and Bialystok district in 1943. More important for our immediate purposes,
however, is to note that nowhere in this document is the end destination for
the ‘resettlement’ specified. Nor was the order copied to any other Higher SS
and Police Leader than Krüger; no duplicate sent to one of the three HSSPFs in
the occupied Soviet territories has come to light. The intransitive use of
‘resettlement’ and organisationally myopic omission of any form of coordination
with the reception areas renders this document entirely useless for the purpose
of proving ‘resettlement’. When set against other statements by Himmler made
around this same time, the intended meaning becomes even clearer. On July 28,
1942, Himmler wrote to Gottlob Berger, head of the SS-Hauptamt, declaring that
“The occupied Eastern territories will be freed of Jews (judenfrei). The
Führer has laid upon my shoulders the execution of this very difficult order.
Moreover, no one can relieve me of this responsibility.”[365] As
will be seen again in Chapter 4, a ‘resettlement’ to the very territories which
are to become judenfrei is complete nonsense. Unsurprisingly, MGK ignore
this source, too.
The ensuing Warsaw ghetto action
lasting from July to September 1942 poses Mattogno enough problems that he
dedicates nearly six pages of Treblinka to obfuscating it and displaying his
remarkable lack of reading comprehension.[366] Let us
start by noting that the famous correspondence between Karl Wolff, head of the
Personal Staff of the Reichsführer-SS, and Ganzenmüller, the state secretary
for transport, simply refers to the deportation of a daily train of 5,000 Jews
“from Warsaw via Malkinia to Treblinka”, without mentioning any kind of onward
destination or discussing the necessity of coordinating changing trains.[367] More
hilarious, however, is Mattogno’s insistence that “not a single German report concerning such a
large-scale displacement of population has been preserved”[368],
blithely ignoring an excerpt from a monthly report of the governor of the
district of Warsaw, Ludwig Fischer, published in one of his favourite sources
for quote-mines.[369]
The real belly-laugh comes from Mattogno’s inept attempt to compare the
percentage of Jews deemed fit for work in the Lodz ghetto as of the end of June
1942, with the number selected from the deportees from the Warsaw ghetto and
sent to the ‘Durchgangslager’, the
transit camp for workers.[370]
Evidently it did not occur to Mattogno that firstly, the remaining 35,000
‘legal’ workers who avoided deportation would have to be added to the 263,243
deported to produce a comparable statistic for the Warsaw ghetto, and secondly,
that circumstances were rather different in the Generalgouvernement after
Himmler’s order of 19 July 1942 than they were in the Warthegau.
Finally,
then, we have a genuine ‘transit camp’ to consider. Alas, Mattogno doesn’t seem
to twig that the separation of 11,315 workers from 251,545 other deportees[371] means
that the subsequent bloviation about a transport of 1000 Jews arriving in Minsk
at the end of July 1942 proves absolutely nothing other than his inability to
perform basic arithmetic.[372] For
until evidence is forthcoming that more than 11,315 Warsaw Jews turned up
anywhere other than Treblinka, we are quite safe in concluding that any reports
of transports of Warsaw Jews arriving elsewhere must have been taken from the ‘Durchgangslager’ only. At the end of
July, at most two transports were transferred to Minsk and Bobruisk, the latter
heading thereafter to Smolensk, for labour purposes.[373]
Between August 15 and September 17, three or four transports from Warsaw
arrived at Majdanek with around 3,440 Jews and were registered there.[374] Polish underground reports
recorded two possible additional transports to Brest and Malaszewice near Brest,
but no further trace of them has been uncovered.[375]
Together, these labour transports, real or fictitious, do not yet exhaust the
quota of 11,315 selected for the ‘Durchgangslager’,
even if one ignores possible double-counts and duplications.
Much
trumpeted by Mattogno and Graf in their 2002 work, privately, Jürgen Graf has
apparently admitted that the paper trail surrounding the arrival of the lone
transport from Warsaw to Minsk on July 31, 1942[376] does
not prove that the transport had ‘transited’ through Treblinka. Indeed,
elementary common sense and basic inference flatly contradict such an
interpretation. Here it should be noted that in Treblinka, M&G refrain from
making any firm conclusion about their cut and pasted excerpts, preferring to
save this assertion for more polemical platforms. Thus, when Graf wrote an open
letter to David Irving on the subject of the Reinhard camps, he reasoned that “as the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto had commenced
eight days before, and as everybody agrees that at that time all Warsaw Jews
were deported to Treblinka, the 1000 Jews mentioned by Kube must by necessity
have been deported to Minsk via Treblinka.”[377] But
no, Jürgen, not everyone agrees that all the Warsaw Jews were deported to
Treblinka, since we have a good source, published already in 1951, from Oneg
Shabes indicating that up to 11,000 were not. A source, moreover, which was
still buried in a milk-can at the time of the Nuremberg trial when the
complaint about the transport from Warsaw to Minsk made by Gauleiter Erich
Kube, the Generalkommissar Weissruthenien, to Gauleiter Hinrich Lohse, the
Reichskommissar Ostland, was uncovered.
If
this critique’s discussion of Mattogno’s ‘resettlement’ gambits is beginning to
resemble the tracing of a Jackson Pollock painting, that is because that is
exactly what it is. No better example of how Mattogno throws paint against the
wall in the hope of creating a Rembrandt can be found than the repeated
invocation of a document which judging by the sheer number of times it is
spammed across his many brochures and pamphlets, must be valued very highly by
him. Namely, a report from Oswald Pohl to Heinrich Himmler on September 16,
1942, regarding his recent negotiations with the Armaments Minister Albert
Speer about the possibility of locating arms factories in the concentration
camps. One result of the negotiations was an agreement to deploy 50,000 Jews
for armaments work at Auschwitz. “We will skim off the labour force necessary
for this purpose mainly in Auschwitz from the migration to the east (Ostwanderung)...
the able-bodied Jews destined for migration to the east will therefore have to
interrupt their journey and perform armament work”.[378]
This
document, which is cited at least nine times in Mattogno’s oeuvre, is frequently
recapitulated with a crucial term omitted – able-bodied.[379] The
actual document thus refers only to Jews fit for work “breaking off
their migration to the east” and says absolutely nothing about Jews regarded
as unfit for work. In this regard, it is of a piece not only with the
Wannsee conference protocol[380], but
several other sources which remain utterly silent on the fate of the unfit,
although as we have seen, there are several other documents which close this
ominous gap and specify their intended fate – murder. Pohl’s poetic reference
to the Ostwanderung, moreover, seems to have been lifted almost directly
from the Wannsee protocol, which was written at a time before the actual shape
of the Final Solution was crystallised in its eventual form. Thus, once again,
the informed reader will shrug at Mattogno’s gyrations and say, ‘so what?’ They
prove nothing other than either his sloppy typing or his dishonesty in omitting
two words that change the entire meaning of the quoted statement.
However,
the document does help us introduce a series of sources which are perhaps
unsurprisingly omitted from Mattogno’s portrayal of ‘resettlement’, precisely
because they completely refute this hypothesis. In December 1942, the head of
the Gestapo Heinrich Müller telexed Himmler at his field headquarters
concerning a plan to increase the labour force in the concentration camp
system. 45,000 Jews were to be deported to Auschwitz, of which 10,000 were to
come from the Theresienstadt ghetto, 3,000 from the Netherlands and 2,000 from
the hitherto exempted Jews employed as part of the Berlin armaments workforce,
while 30,000 were to come from the Bialystok district, where deportations had
begun at the start of November 1942.[381] The
total of 45,000 Jews included “the unfit appendages (old Jews and children)” so
that Müller hoped to reap 10 to 15,000 workers from the 45,000 deportees slated
for Auschwitz.[382] What would happen to the “unfit appendages”
was not spelled out, but is crystal clear to anyone familiar with the real
history of Auschwitz, as opposed to the Revisionist fantasy version. As with
the deportations from Lwow to Belzec earlier on, the decision to deport Jews
from the Bialystok district to Auschwitz meant that once again, the
‘resettlers’ were going in the wrong direction – a problem which MGK have yet
to properly acknowledge, much less solve.
A
major concern for Müller was yet another of the periodic Transportsperren that
would prevent deportation trains from running until mid-January 1943, in order
to allow the Reich Ministry of Transport the chance to concentrate the maximum
resources on reinforcing the collapsing German front in the Don bend after the
encirclement of 6th Army at Stalingrad. The Transportsperre,
also reported to Himmler by the HSSPF in the Generalgouvernement, Krüger[383], led Himmler to write to
Ganzenmüller on January 20, 1943 with a remarkable – and for Revisionists
deeply problematic - justification of
the necessity of deporting the Jews:[384]
Now I wish to present another important question: a precondition for bringing peace and quiet to the General District of Białystok and the Russian territories is the deportation of all those aiding the gangs or suspected of belonging to them. This also includes, over and above all else, deportation of the Jews, as well as the Jews from the West, because otherwise we will have to take into account a rise in the number of assaults from these territories as well. Here I need your help and your support. If I wish to finish things up quickly, I must have more trains for transports. I well know what dire straits the railroads are in and what demands are always being made on them. Nevertheless I am forced to appeal to you: help me and supply me the trains.
As in his order to Krüger of 19
July 1942, Himmler emphasised that the Jews were a dangerous threat to German
order and security. Just as in July, he had emphasised that failure to carry
out the total deportation of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement represented “a
danger to quiet and order in the entire German sphere of interest, a point of
application for the resistance movement and a source of moral and physical
pestilence”, in January 1943 Himmler stressed that the “precondition for
bringing peace and quiet” to the “Russian territories” was the “deportation of
the Jews”. From Himmler’s perspective, as sources such as these makes
unmistakeably clear, Jews would be a threat to security and order everywhere.
Nor did Himmler drop this refrain
in later months. After discussing with ethnic resettlement expert
SS-Gruppenführer Greifelt the urgency of ‘removing’ the remaining 300-400,000
Jews of the Generalgouvernement in May 1943[385],
Himmler reiterated this point as a necessity in a file note around the same
time, stressing that “as much as the evacuation of the Jews produces unrest in
the moment of its execution, so it will be the main prerequisite for a
fundamental peace of the region after its completion.”[386] Given
that Himmler had arrogated to himself and to the SS the role of security
commissar for the entire occupied Soviet territories and was closely engaged in
planning the Nazi response to the rising tide of partisan warfare[387], one
must honestly question the sanity of anyone who thinks they can legitimately
interpret these documents as implying any kind of ‘resettlement to the east’ at
a time when substantial parts of the occupied Soviet territories had become a
virtual war zone due to the increased level of Soviet partisan resistance, and
when Himmler had declared a state emergency in the Generalgouvernement to the
west because of the rising level of Polish partisan warfare[388], and
since May 1943 had been sending a steady stream of police regiments as
reinforcements to the region.[389]
Since the autumn of 1942, as we
have already seen above, the only form of accommodation for Jews anywhere in
eastern Europe that was acceptable to Himmler was a concentration camp or
forced labour camp. In the course of 1943, the few remaining sealed ghettos
were almost all converted to full-fledged Konzentrationslager
or Zwangsarbeitslager, with many
forced labour camps slated for absorption into the KZ system. The Lodz ghetto,
seemingly the exception to this rule, was in fact the subject of efforts by
Globocnik to deport its inmates to the Lublin district in order to add them to
his workforce in the camps of SSPF Lublin and in Majdanek. By the end of June
1943, Globocnik had amassed a workforce of 45,000 Jews in ‘his’ labour camps
alongside the expanded inmate population of Majdanek.[390]
As Mattogno is apparently
congenitally incapable of comprehending the interaction between labour and
extermination in the Final Solution, it comes as no surprise that the final
phase of the Lublin labour/extermination camp complex in 1943 is grossly
misinterpreted by him in his quest for the ‘resettlement’ Holy Grail. At no
time, however, does Mattogno appear to notice that he has silently abandoned
almost all of his effort to locate the deported Jews in the occupied Soviet
territories and is seemingly content to shuffle deportees around the
Generalgouvernement a bit, or even to misdirect deportees all the way to the
west to Auschwitz.
A good case in point is his treatment
of the deportation of West European Jews to the Lublin district and Sobibor in
the spring of 1943. More or less ignoring the 5,000 French Jews deported to
Sobibor and Majdanek at this time[391],
Mattogno instead alights on wartime rumours that Belgian Jews had been sighted
in the ghetto of Konskowola in the Lublin district, reports which reached Gisi
Fleischmann of the ‘Working Group’ in Slovakia.[392]
Indeed, the Polish underground also transmitted a report that Belgian Jews had
been interned in Deblin-Irena and Konskowola, the message reaching the outside
world by July 1943.[393]
However, a subsequent message from a Slovakian Jew interned in the labour camps
of Chelm county refutes this rumour; despite reports that Belgian Jews were to
arrive, they did not.[394]
Likewise seized on uncritically by Mattogno were earlier false reports that
Belgian Jews had arrived at the ghetto in Grodno in late 1942.[395] The
report in question had emanated in part from the Lodz ghetto, suggesting that the
reference to Belgian Jews was pure hearsay.[396] Wholly
ignored by Mattogno, needless to say, is the fact that the Grodno ghetto began
to be emptied in November 1942 and was entirely liquidated by February 1943,
with many inmates deported first to Auschwitz and later on also to Treblinka;
none of the survivors reported seeing Belgian Jews in the ghetto after the war.[397]
Having struck out with the
Belgians, Mattogno twice tries to make something of the deportation of Dutch
Jews. The contrasting presentations in Treblinka (2002) and Sobibór (2010)
are highly instructive regarding the degree to which Mattogno will distort
perfectly clear evidence and well understood facts in order to spin a desperate
yarn. In Treblinka, it suffices for Mattogno to note that there were
selections at Sobibor which sent Dutch Jews to forced labour camps in the
surrounding area. Blithely ignoring the fact that these selections had been
discovered by the investigations of the Dutch Red Cross in 1946[398], and
skipping over the fact that both Leon Poliakov and Gerald Reitlinger[399], the
very first two writers to present comprehensive overviews of the Holocaust in
1951 and 1953 respectively, had noted these selections, Mattogno tries to use
the account presented by Jules Schelvis, one of the 18 survivors of the
selections, to discredit “official historiography”.[400] But
since all his sources are “official” by Revisionist standards and the equally
“official” historians acknowledged this over sixty years ago, it is truly a
puzzle to work out just what his point is. So what?
By Sobibór, however,
Mattogno has decided to try a different tack. Noting that the BdS Niederlande,
Wilhelm Harster, had ordered an increased tempo of deportations of Dutch Jews
to satisfy labour requirements at Auschwitz[401],
Mattogno expresses puzzlement that the transports instead rolled to the Lublin
district, and decides all of a sudden to expose himself as a complete ignoramus
of procedures at Auschwitz by declaring that “the able bodied were kept at
Auschwitz, with the remainder of the deportees moving on to Sobibor”, then adding
“the selected
detainees were no doubt moved directly to the Monowitz camp without being
registered at Birkenau.”[402] That
survivors of selections were registered and tattooed inside the Monowitz camp
without passing through either Auschwitz or Birkenau is apparent from numerous
memoirs of survivors of Monowitz[403]; but
this does not mean they were entered into a separate number series, as all such
cases can be matched to the “classic” Auschwitz number sequence recorded in the
so-called Smolen list.[404] As
there are no transports registered on the Smolen list from the Netherlands
arriving in the same time frame as the deportations of Dutch Jews to Sobibor,
Mattogno is simply talking rubbish on this one. How anyone who is supposedly as
knowledgeable on Auschwitz as Mattogno thought he could get away with a
transparent piece of nonsense such as this is completely beyond our
comprehension.
Why
34,000 Dutch Jews were deported to Sobibor and the Lublin district is not nearly
as “mysterious” as Mattogno tries to make out, once one remembers that in the
same time-period, the inmates of the Salonika ghetto were arriving at
Auschwitz-Birkenau to be selected then gassed or registered, at a time when few
of the four new crematoria were completed.[405] The
inference is both obvious and in our view, inescapable. Naturally, since
Mattogno denies that any camp was an extermination camp, it eludes him
entirely. We might sympathise, were it not for the fact that he has decided to
ignore the known, documented and utterly undeniable facts about prisoner
registration at Auschwitz, simply to try and get out of his apparent quandary
about what to do with the 34,000 deported Dutch Jews.[406]
Which
brings us to an old negationist hobby-horse, the correspondence between Pohl
and Himmler in June 1943 regarding the conversion of the ‘transit camp’ Sobibor
into a concentration camp.[407] The
manner in which deniers from Butz onwards have cited this document without so
much as bothering to parse it properly, much less consider the context, would
be almost touching were it not for its sheer tediousness. Firstly, let’s just
note that this is the only document related to any of the three Reinhard camps
where ‘Durchgangslager’ is used.
Secondly, it appears that Mattogno, in common with his comrades, has forgotten
that there are other documents where Sobibor is given a different name. In June
1942, Lieutenant Fischmann of a Vienna police detachment accompanying a
transport of Austrian Jews to Sobibor filed one of the rare surviving reports
of a deportation, describing Sobibor as a ‘work camp’ (Arbeitslager).
Given the Revisionist propensity for allowing gas chambers to mutate into
morgues, air raid shelters or delousing chambers at will according to the needs
of the moment, the transmogrification of Sobibor from a ‘work camp’ to a
destination which had an ‘intake’ of 101,000 in 1942 to a ‘transit camp’ just
over one year later probably doesn’t bother the deniers. Alas, the Vienna
police reported that a selection had been conducted on the ramp at Lublin, with
51 of the deportees taken off to be sent to Majdanek, while the luggage was
robbed before the Viennese Jews arrived at Sobibor.[408] So
even if Fischmann believed whatever he was told at the Sobibor camp gates about
its purpose, the document itself contradicts such a notion by highlighting a
prior selection of the able-bodied from the transport. Moreover, there isn’t
exactly a shortage of documents referring to Sobibor simply as
SS-Sonderkommando.[409]
Ah,
but the Revisionists chirrup, why are Pohl and Himmler using a supposed
‘camouflage term’ in secret correspondence? That, dear Revisionists, is because
the purpose of euphemising death was not primarily camouflage; it was to
distance the perpetrators and senior decision-makers from the consequences of
their actions. Since we are dealing here with a sample of one – no other
documents exist which quote either SS officer affixing any kind of descriptive
term to the Reinhard camps – then the only comparable evidence would be documents
such as the aforementioned ‘Ostwanderung’ letter written by Pohl to Himmler,
which was written in such transparently cynical language that one is entitled
to be sceptical that Ozzy and Uncle Heinrich were playing it straight with ‘Durchgangslager’.
There
are, however, further points to be made about the negationist gift-horse of
‘transit camp Sobibor’. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the
Revisionist gurus that the document simply doesn’t specify where deportees to
Sobibor might transit to. Try as Mattogno, Graf and Kues might, they
cannot actually use this as proof of ‘resettlement’ outside of the
Generalgouvernement. And, once this fact is recognised, the term ‘transit camp’
becomes entirely explicable, for that is precisely what Sobibor had become by
the spring of 1943. In stark contrast to Belzec in 1942, Sobibor was now
situated in a nexus of forced labour camps run by SSPF Lublin, and functioned
virtually as a pendant to the Trawniki camp. Incoming transports were
frequently selected on arrival at Sobibor, with the able-bodied being
transferred to Trawniki, Dorohucza or another SS-Arbeitslager in the region; or they were selected on arrival at
Trawniki, with the unfit being dispatched to Sobibor, a fate which was also
evidently experienced by exhausted and sick Jews from the labour camps who were
being culled after a selection inside these camps.[410] This interpretation is further supported by the fate of incoming
transports deported from the Reichskommissariat Ostland, most especially from the
Minsk ghetto, in September 1943. Several surviving witnesses as well as
contemporary diaries[411]
confirm that the Jews of the Minsk ghetto were selected on arrival at several
destinations in the Lublin district, including Sobibor, with at least several
hundred sent to forced labour camps in the Lublin district.
In Sobibór, Mattogno plays
dumb and insists that these selections and the testimonies reporting them are
“in disagreement with the thesis of nearly total extermination of the deportees
taken to Sobibor and lends credit to the hypothesis that the Polish Jews
selected for work were far more numerous than mainstream historiography
asserts”[412]
As we have seen, this strawman argument can be refuted simply by referring
Mattogno to his ostensible sources as well as to books he claims elsewhere to
have read, all of which belong to the “mainstream historiography” he is
misrepresenting. Leaving aside the apparently incorrigible myopia from which
Mattogno suffers, the fact that there were indeed numerous selections on
arrival at Sobibor, more than at any other Reinhard camp, renders the
designation of ‘transit camp’ much more plausible and comprehensible. Nor, as
we have seen with other examples of violent ‘transit camps’, does the
designation rule out the extermination function at Sobibor so amply testified
to by so many witnesses and confirmed indirectly by so many documents discussed
above. And still the Revisionists’ problem of trying to locate the
deportees remains unsolved...
Mattogno fares little better when in
his 1998 monograph on Majdanek, he tries his hand at etch-a-sketching away the
violent end to Aktion Reinhard, the ‘Erntefest’ massacres at Majdanek, Trawniki
and Poniatowa at the start of November 1943. The selections from the incoming
transports from the Ostland are far from the only indicator that the SS
authorities, both at the WVHA in Berlin as well as in Lublin itself, fully
intended to continue exploiting Jewish forced labour in the Lublin district,
until the contingency of the revolt at Sobibor prompted a dramatic volte-face.
In August 1943, the WVHA had taken over the Trawniki training camp for
administrative purposes, removing it from Globocnik’s direct aegis.[413]
Globocnik’s impending promotion and transfer as HSSPF to Trieste also prompted
negotiations with Oswald Pohl to subordinate the SS-Arbeitslager to Majdanek. [414]
However, the revolt at Sobibor on October 13, 1943, coupled with the general
deterioration of the security situation and the growing threat from partisans,
created fears of similar revolts in other camps.[415]
Accordingly, Himmler ordered the new SSPF Lublin, SS-Major General Jakob
Sporrenberg, to organise the largest mass shooting action in the history of the
Third Reich, Operation ‘Erntefest’ or ‘Harvest Festival’. This action would
target the Jewish inmates of Majdanek while also liquidating the majority of
ZALs in the Lublin district.[416]
The forces assembled for this
series of shooting actions were considerable. Sporrenberg was even supplied
with a contingent of SS from Auschwitz to assist in the action at Majdanek.[417]
Several police battalions were tasked to the operation, including units
deployed from outside the Lublin district. Thus, Reserve Police Battalion 41
was transferred from the Radom district to Lublin, and from there staged out to
Trawniki on November 3, 1943, where it participated in the mass execution of
10-12,000 Jews.[418]
The action at Trawniki was also carried out by forces from Reserve Police
Battalion 67, normally stationed in the Lublin district[419], as
well as Gestapo officials belonging to KdS Lublin.[420] The
mass shooting at Trawniki also swallowed up the Jewish slave labourers
remaining at nearby Dorohucza.[421] At
Poniatowa, Police Cavalry Battalion III and the separate Police Cavalry
Squadron Lublin were deployed alongside another detachment from KdS Lublin,
possibly together with forces from Police Battalion 67, and executed 14,000
Jews.[422]
Companies from Gendarmerie Battalion (mot.) 1 were split between Poniatowa and
Majdanek itself.[423]
At the latter site, Reserve Police Battalion 101 provided the lion’s share of
the force of executioners and guards screening off the killing sites, along
with Majdanek camp staff and the detachment from Auschwitz. The mass execution
at Majdanek claimed 18,000 lives.[424]
Mattogno’s attempt at “debunking” the
massacres in his 1998 brochure on Majdanek is fairly feeble in its grasp of the
available sources; the claim that “all descriptions of the alleged massacre are based on the account of SS-Oberscharführer
Erich Mußfeldt” is nonsense, as the above brief recapitulation of some
of the sources should indicate.[425]
Moreover, his total omission/ignorance of the parallel massacres at Trawniki
and Poniatowa mean that we will simply send him back to the library and
archives to deal with all the evidence rather than cherrypick it.[426] For
our purposes here, the interesting thing is noting the sheer desperation with
which Mattogno tries to confabulate a ‘transfer’ of prisoners from Majdanek to
labour camps in the Krakow district, citing as usual a single vague wartime
report which he hopes will somehow weigh more heavily in the balance than the
mountain of testimonies and other evidence which exists concerning ‘Erntefest’.[427]
The problem with the ‘transfer’
argument should be immediately apparent: if prisoners were transferred to
another camp, then they would sooner or later show up in the records of those
camps, or in testimonies from survivors of those camps, whereas nothing of the
sort can be shown. To the contrary: there were parallel liquidations at camps
in the Galicia district, where the remaining survivors of the SS-Arbeitslager Janowska in Lwow were
murdered in two actions on October 25/26 and
November 12-19, 1943[428], and
in the Krakow district, which saw the camp at Szebnie liquidated and its
inmates transferred to Auschwitz, with 2,889 disappearing into the gas chambers
of Birkenau.[429]
There were also transfers for labour purposes at this time. The camp at
Plaszow transferred a contingent of 2,500 prisoners to the large ammunition
factory at Skarzsyko-Kamienna on November 16; another 1,400 labour camp inmates
were transferred to other forced labour camps in the Radom district two days
later.[430]
But the fact that other prisoners
were transferred at this time helps us illuminate the fundamental problem with
Mattogno’s “transfer” argument: he ignores the fact that a mere “transfer” of
inmates could be accomplished utilising existing guard forces. The movement of
up to 4,000 prisoners from Plaszow and camps in the Krakow district evidently
did not require the deployment of multiple battalions of Order Police as did
the actions at Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki. Since those camps disposed of
several thousand Trawniki men alone, there was absolutely no shortage of
manpower to carry out a mere transfer. The deployment of a full battalion of
police from outside the Lublin district as well as the mobilisation of five
battalions and a separate squadron from inside the district, alongside the
deployment of the full strength of the Security Police command and the
involvement of the camp staffs of Majdanek and Auschwitz meant that the 42,000
victims of ‘Erntefest’ were killed using exclusively German manpower; despite
the presence of several battalion equivalents of Trawnikis in the vicinity of
all three shooting sites.[431] The
deployment of outside forces totally militates against Mattogno’s pathetic
handwave of an explanation, and points directly to the real purpose: the
slaughter of 42,000 Jewish prisoners in order to assuage the security paranoia
of Heinrich Himmler.
The Reichsführer-SS, however, was
unable to force through the mass murder of Jews employed in armaments factories
or in directly war-related production. Osti, the major employer at Majdanek,
Poniatowa and Trawniki, did not manufacture armaments, and accordingly could
not hold on to its workforce when the SS panicked.[432] Nor
could the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke at Janowska justify its continued existence
as its output involved light manufacturing only.[433] By
contrast, the forced labour camps at the oil refineries of Boryslaw and Drohobycz
in the Galicia district[434], as
well as the forced labour camp at Budzyn in the Lublin district which produced
aircraft components for Heinkel[435], were
all left untouched by ‘Erntefest’, as were the forced labour camps for heavy
industry and armaments in the Radom district.[436]
Indeed, the number of Jewish forced labourers employed in what was adjudged
‘direct’ armaments work rose from 22,444 in October 1943 to 27,439 in May 1944[437], as
Jewish slave labourers engaged in non-armaments work were transferred to the
arms factories, including the aforementioned 4,000 prisoners transferred from
the Krakow district to Skarzysko-Kamienna in November 1943, and after 1,500
Jews were transferred from the Lodz ghetto to Skarzysko-Kamienna in March 1944.[438]
That
Mattogno thinks citing this fact can in any way negate the murder of 42,000
prisoners is eloquent testimony to the hopeless, desperate position in which he
finds himself when attempting to play shell games with ‘resettled’ and
‘transferred’ Jews. In 1942, at the height of Aktion Reinhard, he is wholly
unable to prove that the mass deportation of more than 1.2 million Jews was
anything like a ‘resettlement’ to the ‘Russian east’, as we will see further in
Chapter 4. In 1943-44, he also cannot account for the progressive decimation of
the surviving 400,000 Jews of the Generalgouvernement and Bialystok district
down to an insignificant fraction of the former size of the Jewish population
of these regions. If the survivors were more and more productively employed in
direct armaments work, then this only demonstrates how labour and extermination
could be at least partially harmonised, even as Himmler forced through the
progressive destruction of the remnant population to satisfy his ideologically
driven paranoia.[439] In the
summer of 1944, the remaining few tens of thousands of Jewish armaments workers
were evacuated into the concentration camp system, largely via Auschwitz –
whereupon their fate was submerged into another context entirely.[440]
This
chapter has exposed Carlo Mattogno for his ignorance of the sources and
literature concerning Aktion Reinhard and raised serious questions about his
honesty on a number of occasions. Mattogno’s approach to the sources bears all
the signs of pseudoscholarship: bizarrely contorted interpretations of
documents which do not find any support in the texts or which are flatly
contradicted by the texts; the extremely selective use of sources, omitting
anything which might prove inconvenient to his thesis; and a failure to
substantiate his own claims of ‘resettlement’ and connect them to hard,
meaningful evidence. In this regard, our scrutiny of his arguments about the
origins, planning and implementation of Aktion Reinhard has come to much the
same result as the previous chapter’s examination of his portrayal of Nazi
Jewish policy and the origins of the Final Solution in general.
Several
points need to be reiterated at this stage. Firstly, if Mattogno wishes to take
part in debates with the big boys, he needs to demonstrate a far greater
familiarity with the literature and sources than is currently the case. He also
needs to acquaint himself with both the organisational culture of the SS and
the polycratic structure of the National Socialist regime, since time and again
his (quite possibly deliberate) misunderstandings are based on a flawed grasp
of both of these things. In Sobibór, for example, he advances an
absolutely nonsensical understanding of the chain of command involved in Aktion
Reinhard and other extermination camps which is simply laughable to anyone
familiar with Nazi-era German military, police or SS organisational structures.[441] It is
perhaps harder to criticise his lack of grasp of the economic context of Aktion
Reinhard, simply because he doesn’t have any grasp whatsoever of how the food
and labour factors alternately accelerated then marginally slowed the process
of destruction.
Although
we have demonstrated Mattogno’s ignorance and duplicity on a great many points,
this chapter has not touched on many quite important incidents and sources – in
part deliberately. For if Mattogno and his colleagues wish to be taken
seriously, they will have to do considerably better than dig into their bag of
tricks for an ‘undebunked’ point, but must instead show how the totality of the
evidence is to be interpreted. We do not anticipate that this will happen, but
that’s the price of admission, folks.
Much the
same, of course, can be said for MGK’s attempts to spin out their ‘resettlement
thesis’ into the occupied Soviet territories, to which this critique now turns.
[329] This is perfectly apparent from Götz Aly, ‘Endlösung’.
Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an der europäischen Juden. Frankfurt am Main,
1995, as well as more recent studies of Nazi resettlement policy such as Isabel
Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, Deutsche Blut”: Das Rasse &
Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas,
Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003; Philip Rutherford, Prelude to the Final Solution:
The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939-1941. Lawrence: University of
Kansas Press, 2007. The contention is also confirmed by examining the records
of Wehrmacht evacuation measures conducted behind the Eastern Front; cf. in
addition to the many studies of occupation policy in the Soviet Union cited in
Chapter 2, Christian Gerlach, ‘Umsiedlungen und gelenkte Bevölkerungsbewegungen
in Weissrussland 1941-1944’ in Dahlmann, Dittmar and Hirschfeld, Gerhard (eds),
Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung und Deportation. Dimension der
Massenverbrechen in der Sowjetunion und in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945.
Essen, 1999, pp.553-565.
[330] Pohl, Ostgalizien, p.189, citing DALO R-37-1-1, Bl. 72, Runderlass
GDG/I.V., 24.3.42.
[331] HSSPF Ost, Ernennung zu Führern der Waffen-SS, 8.6.1942, gez.
Krüger, BDC SS-OA Helmuth Pohl
[332] SSPF Lubin, 33/42 gRs, Lublin, den 3.6.42, gez. Globocnik, BA
NS19/1755, p.2.
[333] Krüger an Rauter, 24.9.43, BDC SS-OA Hermann Höfle.
[334] Vermerk. Vorsprache des Herrn Sonderführers Storbeck und des Herrn
Lobenberg be idem Adjutanten, SS-Ustuf. Inquart, des SS-Gruppenführers in
Lemberg. am Mittwoch, dem 21.4.1943, wegen Freigabe von 1 500 Juden für die
künftige Staatsdomäne Jagielnica, 29.4.43, BA NS19/3921, pp.7-8.
[335] Diensttagebuch, pp.335-6, 338-9 (25.3.1941, 26.3.1941).
[336] Diensttagebuch, pp.386, (17.7.1941).
[337] Diensttagebuch, p.389 (21.7.1941).
[338] VEJ 4, p.683 (Protokoll der Wirtschaftstagung der Regierung
des GG in Krakau, 22.7.41). The declaration and intention became widely known,
as Heinz Auerswald confessed to Adam Czerniaków, among both the Polish and
Jewish population. Czerniaków, Diary, p.178ff (28.8.41). Rumblings also
reached the Swedish newspaper Tidningens by mid-July, which claimed that “the
Nazis are considering the expulsion of all Jews form Poland into occupied
Soviet territory”, although these reports noted that “Hitler prefers to have
the Jews of Poland also sent to Madagascar instead of forcing them on Russian
soil”. See ‘Nazis Reported Considering Expulsion of All Polish Jews into
Russia’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 15.7.1941.
[339] Aly, Endlösung, p.317, citing from unpublished portions of
the meeting of 22.7.1941.
[340] Aly, Endlösung, p.293.
[341] Brest-Litovsk was eventually handed to Erich Koch’s
Reichskommissariat Ukraine as part of the Generalkommissariat
Wolhynien-Podolien. The Generalgouvernement also assigned a liaison officer,
Ernst Kundt, to Army Group Centre, which had taken Brest. Berück Mitte Ia
Br.B.Nr 135/41 g.Kdos, 23.7.41, NARA T315/1669/80.
[342] Frank an Lammers, BA R6/21, p.136ff.
[343] Diensttagebuch, p.387 (22.7.41).
[344] EM 52, 14.8.1941, NO-4540; cf. Wilhelm, Einsatzgruppe A,
p.628; Aly, Endlösung, p.277.
[345] See Aly/Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung, p.251, discussing a
position paper by Helmut Meinhold from July 1941.
[346] Jochmann, Monologe, p.74 (28.9.1941).
[347] In both Sobibór (p.246) and Treblinka (pp.253-4),
Mattogno misdates this document to 1942 in the main text while correctly dating
the reference in the footnote. Meanwhile, the document is repeated in Treblinka,
p.205, with the correct date in the main text. Misdating the document to 1942
would tend to go in Mattogno’s favour, so there must be a suspicion that this
evident sloppiness is an expression of unconscious bias. If Mattogno wants to
avoid such a suspicion, he really needs to get a better proof-reader, and stop
leaping around chronologically so much.
[348] MGK, Sobibór, p.358, citing from the apologetic memoir of
RKF official Fritz Arlt, published after the research of Götz Aly and Susanne
Heim had overturned the rock under which this Nazi resettlement expert had been
hiding.
[349] First cited in Aly/Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung, p.215ff;
also cited in Aly, Endlösung, p.275; Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung,
pp.268-9.
[350] Cf. Martyn
Housden, Hans Frank: Lebensraum and the Holocaust. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003, pp.147-8.
[351] KHm Pulawy an GDL, 13.5.42, FGM, p.438. For the negationist
presentation, see M&G, Treblinka, p.258; MGK, Sobibor, p.302.
[352] Schelvis, Vernichtungslager Sobibor, p.283.
[353] Cüppers, Wegbereiter der Shoah, pp51-3; on the January 1940
incident also Shmuel Krakowski, ‘The Fate of Jewish Prisoners of War in the
September 1939 Campaign’, YVS XII, 1977, pp.297-333.
[354] Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung, p.196, quoting from an
unpublished portion of the Diensttagebuch.
[355] Contrary to a persistent negationist fantasy, a delousing facility
was hardly a sine qua non, as both before 1941 and afterwards, quite
substantial populations were transferred across Nazi-occupied Europe without
necessarily being deloused at the start of their journeys. Besides
which, there were surely ample delousing facilities available in Lublin or
which could have been rapidly constructed there. From a hygienic perspective,
delousing was more urgently carried out at the end of a journey or upon
arrival at a permanent destination. This, of course, assumes that the Nazis
cared enough to insist on hygiene when they had long ago transitioned to
walling up or fencing off incredibly overcrowded Jewish communities inside
ghettos across Poland and the occupied Soviet Union.
[356] As with so many deportation operations in the course of Aktion
Reinhard, precise documentation is fragmentary. On March 27, the Ukrainian
police rounded up 1,648 Jews without work passes; on March 30, 1,328 and on
April 1, 903 Jews. Cf. Kommandeur der Ukrainischen Polizei in Lemberg an KdSch
Lemberg, Betr. Judenaktion am 27.3.1942, 30.3.1942, 1.4.1942, DALO R12-1-37, pp.45,
52 and R12-1-38, p.14. For the course of the entire action, see Pohl, Ostgalizien,
pp.186-188; Sandkühler, Endlösung in Galizien, pp.208-212.
[357] Oberfeldkommandantur 365, Monatsbericht für 16.2-15.3.42, 19.3.42, NARA
T501/215/97; cf. Pohl, Ostgalizien, p.188; Krannhals, ‘Judenvernichtung’,
p.573.
[358] OFK 365, Monatsbericht für 16.3-15.4.42, 18.4.42, NARA
T501/216/203; cf. Pohl, Ostgalizien, p.192.
[359] Zygmunt Marikowski, Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej, I, Armia Krajowa w
Okregu Lubelskim, London. 1973. Book Two, Documents, pp.34-35.
[360] Mattogno, Belzec e le controversie olocaustiche, p.60.
[361] Himmler Geheimreden, p.159.
[362] See section ‘Extermination and Labour’ above.
[363] Cf. M&G, Majdanek, note 28; Mattogno, ‘Origins of
Birkenau’, note 103; Carlo Mattogno, Hitler e il nemico di razza. Il
nazionalsocialism e la questione ebraica, Edizioni di AR, 2009, p.106 note
3; MGK, Sobibor, p.249.
[364] Himmler an den Höheren SS- und Polizeiführer Ost, 19.7.42, NO-5514.
Available online at: http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/documents/part2/doc124.html
[365] Himmler an Berger, 28.7.42, NO-626, cf. Fleming, Hitler and the
Final Solution, p.112.
[366] M&G, Treblinka, pp.273-279.
[367] Ganzenmüller an SS-Obergruppenführer Wolff, 28.7.42, NO-2207, also
T/251.
[368] M&G, Treblinka, p.275.
[369] FGM, pp.323-4; fuller versions are published in Polish
translation in Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz (ed), Raporty Ludwiga Fischera,
Gubernatora Dystryktu Warszawskiego 1939-1944. Warsaw, 1987.
[370] M&G, Treblinka, p.274.
[371] ‘Likwidacja Getta Warszawskiego’, BZIH Nr 1, 1951, pp. 81-90.
[372] M&G, Treblinka, p.277-279; this reference is repeated in
countless articles by MGK and others, too numerous to list here.
[373] Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p.762. An earlier transport
of 1000 workers left the Warsaw ghetto on May 30, 1942, for the
SS-Nachschubkommandantur Russland-Mitte in Bobruisk, evidently as part of a
private back-channel deal, and also predating any mass deportations, and is
thus as irrelevant to the issue of proving ‘resettlement’ as everything else
offered by MGK.
[374] Schwindt, Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager Majdanek, pp.137-8;
K.A. Tarkowski, ‘Transporty więźniów przybywające
do obozu na Majdanku jesienią 1942 roku. Analiza numeracji więźniów’, Zeszyty
Majdanka, t. XXII (2003), p. 312; Tarkowski, ‘Transport Żydów z getta warszawskiego z 15
sierpnia 1942 r.’, Zeszyty Majdanka, t. XXI (2001), pp. 247–275.
[375] Marczewska/Waźniewski, ‘Treblinka w świetle Akt Delegatury’, p.137.
[376] Kube an Lohse, Partisanenbekämpfung und Judenaktion im
Generalbezirk Weißruthenien, 31.7.1942, 3428-PS, IMT XXXII, pp. 280-2.
[377] Jürgen Graf, ‘David Irving and the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ Camps’, Inconvenient
History, Vol.1, No.2, 2009.
[378] Pohl an Himmler, 16.9.1942, NI-15392 and BA NS19/14, pp.131-3.
[379] It is cited in Carlo Mattogno, Special Treatment in Auschwitz:
Origin and Meaning of a Term, Chicago: Theses & Dissertations Press,
2004, notes 141 and 259, M&G, Treblinka, note 727; Carlo Mattogno, ‘The
Morgues of the Crematoria at Birkenau in the Light of Documents’, The
Revisionist, 2/3 (2004) Part I note 7; Mattogno, ‘Origins of Birkenau’ note
115, Carlo Mattogno, ‘Azione 1005’ i Azione Reinhard, notes 9 and 11;
Mattogno, Hilberg, note 424; Mattogno, Hitler e il nemico di razza,
p.39 note 3 and p.100 note 1; MGK, Sobibór,pp.290-1, omitting ‘able
bodied’; Mattogno, Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity, note 902. It is
additionally repeated in Graf, Neue Weltordnung, note 510 and Rudolf, Lectures
on the Holocaust, note 448.
[380] NG-2586-G.
[381] In March 1942, 161,000 Jews were registered in the Bialystok
district. Der Bezirk Białystok (1.3.42), p.29, BA F 15024. On the deportations
from the Bialystok district, see Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp. ; Sara
Bender, The Jews of Bialystok during World War II and the Holocaust.
London, 2008.
[382] Müller to Himmler, 16.12.42, 1472-PS, IMT XXVII, pp.251-3.
[383] Krüger an Himmler, 5.12.1942, cited in Hilberg, Vernichtung,
Bd.2, p.516.
[384] Himmler an Ganzenmüller, 23.1.43, BA NS19/2774, pp.1-2, also FGM,
p.346.
[385] Vermerk zu einem Vortrag des SS-Gruppenführer Greifelt beim
Reichsführer-SS am 12.5.43, betrifft Ansiedlung im Generalgouvernement, BA
NS19/2648, p.135.
[386] Aktennotiz über Bandenbekämpfung, Berlin, den 10.5.43, gez.
H.Himmler, NARA T175/128/2654173-7. Once again, the proposed evacuation was
discussed intransitively, thus Himmler spoke of “Die Evakuierungen der
restlichen rund 300 000 Juden im Generalgouvernement”, not even talking
about evacuating the Jews out of the Generalgouvernement. (Emphasis
mine).
[387] On SS antipartisan strategy, operations and organisation, see
Philip Blood, Hitler’s Bandit Hunters. The SS and the Nazi Occupation of
Europe. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2006.
[388] Der Reichsführer-SS, Vortrag beim Führer am 19.6.43 auf dem
Obersalzberg ‘Bandenkampf und Sicherheitslage’, NA T175/70/2586505-6.
[389] Aktennotiz über Bandenbekämpfung, Berlin, den 10.5.43, gez.
H.Himmler, NA T175/128/2654173-7; cf. Curilla, Judenmord in Polen.
[390] Globocnik an RFSS Pers.Stab, 21.6.43, BDC SS-OA Odilo Globocnilk,
also published in Grabitz/Scheffler, Letzte Spuren, p.322ff; for the
context of Globocnik’s efforts to liquidate the Lodz ghetto, see also Klein, Gettoverwaltung
Litzmannstadt, pp. 596-599.
[391] The four transports with 5,003 deportees were directed to ‘Chelm’,
cf. FS RSHA IV B 4 a an BdS Frankreich, Betr.: Abbeförderung der Juden aus Frankreich,
20.3.43, T/476. While 40 were selected for Majdanek from the first transport
and a handful more from the second, of whom six survived by being transferred
from Majdanek to Auschwitz and Budzyn, all the deportees on the last two
transports went directly to Sobibor, where 31 workers were taken from the last
of the transports, of whom two survived. See Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to
the Jews Deported from France 1942-1944. New York: Beate Klarsfeld
Foundation, 1983, pp.384-425
[392] M&G, Treblinka, pp.251-2. The claim is mysteriously
dropped from MGK, Sobibor.
[393] ‘Deportation of Jews from Polish Cities Continues: Belgian Jews
Held in Lublin District’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 14.7.1943.
[394] Tatsachenbericht eines aus der Slowakei deportierten und
zurückgekehrten Juden, 17.8.43, VHA Fond 140/59, pp.41-50.
[395] M&G, Treblinka, p.252
Propagandy
KG AK w zbiorach oddzialu rekopisów BUW,’ BZIH Nr 4, 1992, p.49.
[397] It is probably equally needless to note that nowhere does Mattogno
show the slightest awareness of even the existence of the six volume collection
of sources and postwar trial materials
relating to the Grodno ghetto compiled in Serge Klarsfeld (ed), Documents
Concerning the Destruction of the Jews of Grodno, Vols 1-6. Paris,
1985-1987.
[398] Affwikkelingsbureau Concentratiecampen, Sobibor, ‘s
Gravenhage, 1946;Informatiebureau van Het Nederlansche Roode Kruis, Sobibor,
‘s Gravenhage, 1947; A de Haas, L Landsberger, K Selowsky, Sobibor : rapport
omtrent de Joden, uit Nederland gedeporteerd naar het kamp Sobibor, 4de verb. en aangev. uitg., 's Gravenhage: Vereniging het Ned.
Roode Kruis, 1952.
[399] Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, p.197; Reitlinger, The Final
Solution, p.142
[400] M&G, Treblinka,
pp.258-260.
[401] BdS Niederlande IV B 4, Endlösung der Judenfrage in den
Niederlande, 5.5.1943, gez. Harster, T/544.
[402] MGK, Sobibor, p.309.
[403] Cf. among others, Hans Frankenthal, The Unwelcome One: Returning
Home from Auschwitz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002.
[404] NOKW-2824, Case 12, Prosecution Document Book 9H.
[405] Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, passim.
[406] We examine another gambit on these deportations from Graf in
Chapter 6.
[407] NO-482, cited in Butz, Hoax of the Twentieth Century, note
374; Graf, Neue Weltordnung note 506; MGK, Sobibor note 875;
M&G, Treblinka note 756; Mattogno, Hilberg notes 435, 436.
[408] 152. Polizeirevier, Erfahrungsbericht betr.: Transportkommando für
den Judentransport Wien-Aspangbahnhof nach Sobibor am 14.6.1942, 20.6.42, gez.
Fischmann, facsimile in Schelvis, Vernichtungslager Sobibor, Plates
XIV-XV.
[409] E.g., SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor an die Bekleidungswerke Lublin,
25.4.43, AGK NTN 144, p.109.
[411] See the diary of Helene Chilf, reproduced in Grabitz/Scheffler, Letzte
Spuren, p.252, and the postwar testimony of Minsk ghetto survivor Zina
Czapnik, 28.3.1966, reproduced in ibid., p.269ff, both speaking of groups of
200-250 selected deportees transferred from Trawniki to Sobibor. Heinz
Rosenberg, another survivor of the Minsk ghetto, spoke of being deported to
‘Treblinka’ from Minsk in September 1942, and thereafter being selected along
with 250 others and being sent to the Budzyn labour camp. The naming of ‘Treblinka’
might be ascribed to a postwar confusion by the witness, were it not for the
fact that Francizek Zabecki, the Treblinka stationmaster, referred to a
transport arriving on 17 September 1942 from “Minsk Litewski”, the Polish name
for the Belarusian capital (to distinguish it from Minsk Mazowiecki in
Mazovia), which owing to the condition of the camp was sent on to “Chelm”. Cf. Heinz
Rosenberg, Jahre des Schreckens... und ich blieb übrig, daß ich Dir's ansage.
Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 1985, pp. 72-8; Protokol, Francizek Zabecki,
21.12.1945, AIPN NTN 70, p.4R.
[412] MGK, Sobibor, p.311.
[413] SS-WVHA, Betr.: SS-Ausbildungslager Trawniki, 13.8.1943, gez. Pohl,
NARA-BDC SS-OA Georg Wippern.
[414] Aktenvermerk, 7.9.1943, gez. Pohl, NO-599. A formal order to this
effect was issued on October 22, 1943, cf. Globocnik an Himmler, 18.1.1944,
NO-057. On the labour camp at Poniatowa, see Ryszard Gicewicz, ‘Obóz pracy w
Poniatowej (1941–1943)’,Zeszyty Majdanka X, 1980, pp. 88–104; Artur
Podgórski, ‘Arbeitslager in Poniatowa, 1941-1943’, Kwartalnik Historii Zydów,
4/2010, pp.425-488; Evelyn Zegenhagen, ‘Poniatowa’ in: Megargee (ed), USHMM
Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Vol. 1, pp.888-891.
[415] Diensttagebuch, p.741 (19.10.43).
[416] On the course of ‘Erntefest’, see in addition to the sources named
below, Schwindt, Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager Majdanek,
pp.268-286.
[417] Report on the Interrogation of PW SS-Gruppenfuehrer Jakob
Sporrenberg, 25.2.1946, PRO WO208/4673 (also for the most comprehensive account
of the planning of ‘Erntefest’); Statement of Erich Mussfeldt, Freising, 5.7.1945, AIPN NTN 126, p.173; Testimony of Otto Moll, taken at Nürnberg, 16.4.46, NARA
M1270/12/655-9.
[418] Curilla, Judenmord in Polen, pp.621-2; DDR-Justiz und
NS-Verbrechen, Bd I, pp.145-7.
[419] Curilla, Judenmord in Polen, pp.745-7; Justiz und
NS-Verbrechen Bd. XLI, pp.670-1.
[420] See the report of an SD NCO noting the shattering of his rifle butt
in the course of the operation. SS-Hauptscharführer, signature unreadable, with
KdS Lublin Abt III, Betr.: Waffenschaden – Gewehr Nr. 6682, Lublin, den
31.1.44, NARA T175/248/2739778.
[421] Schelvis, Vernichtungslager Sobibor, pp. 140-143.
[422] Curilla, Judenmord in Polen, pp.763-5; Justiz und
NS-Verbrechen Bd. XXXVIII, p.658-662. Units of this battalion had also
participated in the manhunts and clean-up after the Sobibor revolt, cf.
Schelvis, Vernichtungslager Sobibor, pp.204-5; Wojciech Zysko, ‘Eksterminacyjna dzialnosc
Truppenpolizei w dystrykcie lubelskim w latach 1943-1944’, Zezsyty Majdanka t.VI, 1972, pp.186-7.
[423] Curilla, Judenmord in Polen, p.756.
[424] Browning, Ordinary Men, pp.133-142; Curilla, Judenmord in
Polen, p.725-9.
[425] M&G, Majdanek, pp.209-230; citation on p.214.
[426] In addition to the sources enumerated above, one can also add the
480-page Wojciech Lenarczyk and Dariusz Libionka (eds), Erntefest 3-4
listopada 1943 – zapomniany epizod Zaglady. Lublin, 2009.
[427] M&G, Majdanek, p.230.
[428] Pohl, ‘Zwangsarbeitslager’, p.428; Pohl, Ostgalizien, pp.359-60;
Eisenbach, Hitlerowska polityka, p.553.
[429] Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, p.520; cf. protokol doprosa,
Roza Iuzefovna Langsam, 15.2.1945, GARF 7021-108-1, pp.144-R.
[430] Felicja Karaj, Death Comes in Yellow. Skarzysko-Kamienna Slave
Labor Camp. Amsterdam, 1996, p.60; Angelina Awtuszewska-Ettrich, ‘Plaszow’,
in: Benz/Distel (eds), Ort des Terrors Bd. 8, p.276. On Plaszow in
general see also Ryszard Kotarba, Niemiecki oboz w Plaszowie 1942-1945.
Warsaw/Krakow: IPN, 2009.
[431] This was emphasised in almost all postwar investigations in West
Germany. See Jochen Böhler, ‘Totentanz. Die Ermittlungen zur “Aktion
Erntefest”,’ in Klaus-Michel Mallmann and Andrej Angrick (eds), Die Gestapo
nach 1945. Karrieren, Konflikte, Konstruktionen. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009, pp.235-254. There are contradictory
testimonies regarding the presence of Trawnikis in the sentry screens
surrounding the execution sites at Poniatowa and Trawniki. According to one SS
NCO at Poniatowa, none were present. Vernehmungsniederschrift Stephan Baltzer,
14.4.1970, StA Hamburg 147 Js 43/69, Bd.85, p.16115. According to one Trawniki
also stationed at Poniatowa, the shooting was done by Germans while the
Trawniki guards remained at their posts around the camp. Protokol doprosa, Ivan
Vasilevich Lukanyuk, 12.4.1948, ASBU Ivano-Frankivsk 5072-2123, pp.10-22. However, a rare survivor testimony from the
same camp suggests that Trawnikis were involved in rousting Jews from hiding
places in the barracks. Andrzej Żbikowski, ‘Texts Buried in Oblivion.
Testimonies of Two Refugees from the Mass Grave at Poniatowa’, Holocaust.
Studies and Materials, 1/2009, pp.76-102, here p.89. At Dorohucza, the camp
was surrounded by a police unit who demanded that all Germans as well as
Ukrainians surrender their weapons while the inmates were rounded up. The use
of troops who had had no personal contact with the inmates was thus evidently a
deliberate strategy.Cf. Vernehmung Robert Jührs, 13.10.1961,BAL B162/208 AR-Z
252/59, Bd.8, pp.1486-7. Jührs had previously served at Belzec.
[432] On the Osti firm, see see Jan-Erik Schulte, ‘Zwangsarbeit für die
SS. Juden in der Ostindustrie GmbH’ in: Norbert Frei et al (eds), Ausbeutung,
Vernichtung, Oeffentlichkeit. Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen
Lagerpolitik. Munich: KG Saur, 2000, pp.41-74.
[433] Jahresbericht 1943 DAW Lemberg, BA NS3/146, p.34.
[434] On these camps see Rainer Karlsch, ‘Ein vergessenes
Grossunternehmen. Die Geschichte der Karpaten Oel-AG’, Jahrbuch für
Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 2004/1, pp.95-138, as well as the older work by East
German historian Hanns-Heinz Kasper, ‘Die Ausplünderung polnischer und
sowjetischer Erdöllagerstätten im Gebiet der Vorkarpaten durch den deutschen
Imperialismus im zweiten Weltkrieg’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte
1978/II, pp.41-64.
[435] Lutz Budrass, ‘ “Arbeitskräfte können aus der reichlich vorhandenen
jüdischen Bevölkerung gewonnen werden’. Das Heinkel-Werk in Budzyn 1942-1944’, Jahrbuch
für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1, 2004, pp.41-64; Wojciech Lenarczyk, ‘Budzyn’
in Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel
(eds), Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen
Konzentrationslager. Band 7. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007, pp.89-92.
[436] Adam Rutkowski,
‘Hitlerowskie obozy pracy dla zydow w dystrykcie radomskim’, Biuletyn
ZIH 17/18, 1956, pp.106-128; cf. Seidel, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik,
pp. 353-365. There are now several detailed studies of individual camps. On
Skarzysko-Kamienna see Felicja Karaj, Death Comes in Yellow.
Skarzysko-Kamienna Slave Labor Camp. Amsterdam, 1996; on the Kielce camp
see Felicja Karaj, ‘Heaven or Hell? The Two Faces of the HASAG-Kielce Camp’, Yad
Vashem Studies XXXII, 2004, pp.269-321 ; on Starachowice see Christopher R. Browning, Remembering
Survival. Inside A Nazi Slave Labor Camp. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010;
[437] Piotr Matusak, Przemysl na ziemiach polskich w latach II wojny
swiatowej, Tom 1, Warsaw/Siedlce, 2009, p.207; Hilberg, Vernichtung,
p.563.
[438] H.Biebow an Hauessler, Litzmannstadt, 18.3.1944, published in Tatiana
Berenstein, Artur Eisenbach and Adam Rutkowski (eds), Eksterminacja Zydow na
ziemiach polskich w okresie okupacji hitlerowskiej. Zbior dokumentov,
Warsaw, 1957, p.256; Karaj, Death Comes In Yellow, p.66.
[439] When Mattogno claims apropos ‘Erntefest’ that “the alleged mass
executions make no sense economically” (M&G, Majdanek, p.226ff), he
will do little more than provoke a hollow laugh from anyone familiar
with the personality and ideology of Heinrich Himmler. Evidently, Mattogno has
not grasped several basic facts about the Holocaust which are apparent to one
and all, not least of which was its immense irrationality.
[440] On the evacuation of the surviving camps see Golczewski, ‘Polen’,
pp.481-9; on the evacuation of the Radom district labour camps, see Seidel, Deutsche
Besatzungspolitik, pp.367-370. Only the camp at Czestochowa remained
unaffected by the evacuations, and was liberated with 5,200 survivors, of whom
1518 were from Czestochowa itself. The only other location in the whole of
occupied Poland where Jews were liberated from Nazi captivity was Lodz in the
Warthegau, where 877 survivors retained for clean-up work after the liquidation
of the ghetto were freed.
[441] MGK, Sobibor, pp.251-2. The key flaw in his comprehension
lies in not realising the distinction between line commands and technical lines
of communication. Support agencies like the Kriminaltechnische Institut of the
RSHA provided logistical support and advice. They were not in the vertical
chain of command at all, but instead stood horizontally in relation to other
agencies. Much the same can be said for the role played by the T4 organisation
vis-a-vis the Aktion Reinhard camp staff; these men continued to receive pay
via T4, i.e. the euthanasia organisation remained involved administratively.
If this does not compute with either Mattogno or his fans, then we will make
the following analogy: placing agencies such as the KTI into the chain of
command for the extermination camps is as utterly moronic as claiming that the
Heereswaffenamt was in charge of a panzer division on the Eastern Front.
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