Monday, December 26, 2011

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 3: Aktion Reinhard and the Holocaust in Poland (4). Mattogno’s ‘Resettlement’ Shell Game

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
[396] Maria Tyszkowa, ‘Eksterminacja Zydów w latach 1941-1943. Dokumenty Biura Informacji i
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.
[410] Ref.Zeg/IX, Informacja tygodniowa, 30.6.1943, AAN 202/XV-2, fols. 341-42.
[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. 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please read our Comments Policy