Monday, December 26, 2011

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 3: Aktion Reinhard and the Holocaust in Poland (1).

Aktion Reinhard and the Holocaust in Poland

 As the preceding chapter has demonstrated, Mattogno, Graf and Kues have an exceedingly poor grasp of the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy and of the Final Solution as a whole. The following chapter will show that such a verdict does not change in the slightest when we consider the arguments proffered by the trio regarding the evolution of Aktion Reinhard and the Holocaust in the regions of Poland most affected by Aktion Reinhard. Strictly speaking, the trio do not actually offer a coherent account of either of these things in the ‘trilogy’ of booklets about Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. They might well say that their studies were of the camps themselves, and that they were not obligated to examine the history of Jewish policy in the Generalgouvernement. But in the guise of trying to prove ‘resettlement’, these books reimport just such an account a through the back door – an account, moreover, which is so horribly distorted, inaccurate and ignorant as to be all but unrecognisable to anyone who is moderately familiar with the conventional historical literature on the subject.
Just as with Nazi Jewish policy as a whole, the chapters under consideration here are almost entirely the work of Carlo Mattogno.[1] Indeed, some of the arguments Mattogno advances end up repeated in his own oeuvre[2], or in brochures by Graf[3] or parroted in the summaries of other negationist gurus such as Germar Rudolf.[4] Not only are the arguments repeated in other works, but the basic gist of the argument is largely unchanged from Treblinka (whose original version appeared in 2002 in German) to Sobibór (appearing in 2010). Closer examination reveals that the exact same references recur across both volumes, and are sometimes even repeated a third time in Bełżec, where the corresponding chapter is truncated and refers the reader to the more extensive exposition in the earlier Treblinka.
Taken together, the corresponding chapters purporting to deal with the origins of Aktion Reinhard and the deportations to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka amount to about 81,000 words. In practice, a staggering amount of space is given over to digressions about Auschwitz or developments in Jewish policy in western Europe that are of indirect relevance at best to the question of what was Aktion Reinhard and what were Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.[5] Closer inspection reveals that some of these digressions are set-piece spiels which Mattogno uses in his Auschwitz brochures. Indeed, some documents turn out to be cited by Mattogno no fewer than nine times across his entire oeuvre.
These digressions and repetitions only serve to underscore one of the biggest problems with Mattogno’s attempts to account for the evolution of Aktion Reinhard, namely the utter absence of any reference to a range of what might be considered obvious sources anywhere inside the ‘trilogy’. A good example would be the well known Goebbels diary entry of March 27, 1942, already mentioned in the preceding chapter and which will be discussed further below. Not only is this source a standard reference in many studies of the origins of the Final Solution in general[6], it is invariably mentioned in all the relevant regional studies of occupied Poland as well as in the standard histories of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.[7] One would therefore expect that the document would be acknowledged and discussed in a serious work on those camps. Yet nowhere in the trilogy do Mattogno or either of his co-authors bother to mention this obviously critical source. When called on his omission of the diary entry from Bełżec by Roberto Muehlenkamp, Mattogno feebly tried to claim that the document was not relevant because it did not mention Belzec by name.[8] But this does not stop him from citing dozens of documents in Treblinka and Sobibór that not only do not mention Belzec, Sobibor or Treblinka, but which are not even relevant to any of the regions affected by these camps. One has to search far and wide through Mattogno’s oeuvre to find any discussion of the Goebbels diary entry.[9] The fact that he could not bring himself to include such a discussion in any of the three volumes of the ‘trilogy’ suggests that far from being able to explain away this deeply inconvenient reference, the leading negationist is actually embarrassed by it, and knows that if he were to include too many such documents invoking unpleasant terms such as ‘destruction’, ‘extirpation’, ‘liquidation’ or ‘killing’, then he would undermine his own argument and destroy the plausibility of the ‘resettlement thesis’. Unfortunately for Mattogno, as this chapter will demonstrate, the Goebbels diary entry is far from the only example of an omission of a crucial document. Moreover, when such a reference is omitted from not one or two but all three works, there are good grounds to apply a simple principle: ‘three strikes, and you’re out’. Such a flagrant omission is not the behaviour of a Doubting Thomas but of the proverbial three monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil; deny, deny, deny.
Argument by omission – for that is what we are dealing with here – is however not the only failing which Mattogno brings to the table in the Aktion Reinhard chapters. Perusing them, it swiftly becomes apparent to any reader familiar with the conventional historiography of the Holocaust in Poland[10] that Mattogno is deeply, profoundly ignorant of this literature, and is evidently blithely unaware of how rapidly the literature has grown in the past two decades in particular. Nor does he show much of a grasp of the available sources. Virtually all the Poland-specific citations are taken from a few published documentary collections. (And even then, many documents published in these collections are, unsurprisingly, omitted or overlooked.) Other sources are lifted from the Nuremberg trials, Eichmann trial documents or publications of the CDJC in Paris[11], leaving a vanishingly small number of citations to actual archival sources in the relevant chapters.[12] Under no circumstances can Mattogno be considered to have done the work, or to have bothered to listen to those who, unlike him, actually have done the work on this topic.
His use of the limited amount of scholarly literature and primary sources he does know about verges on the parodic. In Treblinka, for example, Chapter 8.7 turns out to be 2,211 words written about the Holocaust in Galicia, a mini-essay buttressed by 27 footnotes and grossly padded with 927 words of italicised block quotes. Mattogno’s most recent secondary source turns out to be Thomas Sandkühler’s dissertation on the Holocaust in Galicia, published in 1996.[13] It is difficult to see how on earth Mattogno can believe that this section is even remotely capable of addressing the total volume of evidence on the Holocaust in Galicia or the relevant literature. Indeed, it is easy to identify nearly as many works specifically on Galicia as there are footnotes in his shoddy little essay, including a second German dissertation from 1996 by Dieter Pohl[14], and numerous works published in recent years.[15] Why does Mattogno think that 2,211 words is a sufficient counter to two whole PhDs plus a substantial quantity of other literature, which collectively discusses a vast wealth of source material relating to the Holocaust in Galicia? There were more trials in West Germany for the Galicia district than he manages footnotes.[16] Why would anyone bother to believe Mattogno’s feeble take when there are extensive, detailed, coherent narratives and explanations of what happened in Galicia to the Jews there from 1941 to 1944? And why would anyone bother with Mattogno when he evidently does not understand the course of the Holocaust in Galicia, much less any of the other districts affected by ‘Aktion Reinhard’?
For as well as resorting to argument by omission and argument from ignorance, Mattogno frequently relies on what might be called argument from incomprehension. As we have already seen in Chapter 2, Mattogno’s grasp of the evolution of Nazi policy before and during the Final Solution consists of little more than a series of strawmen and misrepresentations. By far the most frequent misunderstanding is his refusal to grasp something that has been extensively discussed and debated in the conventional scholarly literature – the interaction of labour and extermination.[17] Instead of demonstrating the slightest awareness of this debate, Mattogno time and again resorts to a strawman of 100% extermination, expresses puzzlement as to why ever smaller minorities of Jews were being spared for slave labour, and declares pompously that selections for forced labour at this or that camp are supposedly incompatible with the ‘official thesis’ of extermination.[18] Unfortunately for this truly imbecilic strategy of argumentation, the world has been quite aware since 1942 that Nazi policy was, broadly, to exterminate the unfit first and spare those fit for labour for at least a temporary reprieve.[19] The survival of an ever decreasing number of Jewish forced labourers cannot in any way be regarded as a meaningful or logical argument against the mass murder of 90% of the Jews of Poland. Yet Mattogno constantly argues as if it does, thereby exposing only his own lack of comprehension of the development of Nazi policy and the factors which went to shape it.
Contrary to the lurking strawman of Nazi Germany as a centralised, totalitarian state, it is a truism of conventional scholarship that Nazi occupation policy in Poland was rent sideways by political conflicts between different factions and institutions, and caught in a series of dilemmas generated by the contradictions between Nazi ideology and economic rationality.[20] Politics and economics, two subjects to which real historians pay great attention and which pseudoscholars rarely grasp, thus decisively shaped the course of the Holocaust in Poland. Moreover, changing political and economic circumstances over the course of 1941 to 1944 caused policy to now accelerate, now seemingly decelerate, and to vary considerably from region to region and phase to phase. These variations do not therefore generate discrepancies or anomalies as Mattogno might like them to, but are very easily explained as the results of conflicts between SS and civil administration, between ideology and economic pragmatism, between centre and periphery, between utopian ambition and logistical limitations, and between long, medium and short term goals. In this respect, Nazi Jewish policy in Poland was no different to any other policy enacted by the National Socialist regime, and just as other Nazi policies shifted rapidly to accommodate changed circumstances, so, too did Nazi Jewish policy change. By trying to eternalise Nazi Jewish policy and ignoring change over time, Mattogno reveals himself as fundamentally tone-deaf to historical context. It is thus small surprise that his chapters and sections purporting to address this context display a degree of chronological discombobulation that is practically pathological, and in some cases almost certainly entirely deliberate. 
This chronological discombobulation is mirrored on the thematic level by the staggering number of topics which are simply left out of Mattogno’s confused account. Indeed, not only are these themes left out of the ‘trilogy’, but one is hard pressed to find any discussion of them anywhere in the entire negationist oeuvre. For example, Mattogno briefly discusses the Warsaw ghetto actions of 1942 and 1943 in Chapter 9 of ‘Treblinka; but this is more or less the only location in his entire body of work where ghettos are discussed at all; and nowhere is the phenomenon of ghettoisation addressed.[21] Why and how the Nazis decided to put Polish Jews into ghettos is simply not mentioned. In this regard, Mattogno is far from alone among negationist gurus, as his co-author Graf doesn’t even manage to mention the word ‘ghetto’ once in The Giant with Feet of Clay, while Butz’s account of the ghettos in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century seems to reimagine them as a paradise of Jewish self-rule.[22] Yes, we know: Revisionists are concerned with extermination and death camps and gas chambers, but even the poorest student of history would surely be aware that what came before might well shape and influence what transpired later. By yanking Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka out of their proper historical context, and trying to fabricate a bright, shiny, new pseudo-context for them with the ‘resettlement thesis’, Mattogno isn’t going to fool anyone.[23]
Similarly, the fixation on the three Aktion Reinhard camps ends up ignoring the circumstances of the deportations in 1942-3 and the sheer amount of violence used to carry them out. Indeed, it ignores the fact that the Nazis had been dealing out death to Jews since 1939. From the very first days of the German invasion of Poland, Jews suffered at the hands of Nazi terror in Poland[24] that saw some 16,000 executions by October 25 and 50,000 by the end of 1939.[25] 7,000 of the killed were Jews, victims of a culture of antisemitic violence and abuse that had gestated within Nazi Germany during the pre-war years[26] as well as a specific contempt for East European Jews (Ostjuden)[27], a reaction which is amply documented in soldiers’ letters and other sources.[28]
The mass murder of the Jews inhabiting the regions of Poland affected by Aktion Reinhard involved both deportations to the death camps as well as extensive mass shootings. Nowhere in Mattogno’s work is there a detailed confrontation with the demographics of the Holocaust in Poland.[29] Yet ghettos and shootings killed more Jews in the Generalgouvernement, Białystok and Zichenau districts than are held to have died at Belzec. The omission of this context unsurprisingly leads Mattogno to present conclusions which those more familiar with the evidence than he is will find either hilariously ignorant or utterly dishonest. With a total of 1,611 Jewish communities identified inside the borders of pre-war Poland, and over 630 localities in the Generalgouvernement, Zichenau and Białystok districts documented with Jewish communities, not to mention the hundreds of ghettos identified by multiple research projects in recent years[30], it is obvious that the Holocaust in Poland cannot be reduced to a matter of three camps and a few handwaving remarks about the Warsaw ghetto.
After the high-level decisions reached in December 1941 (already touched on in Chapter 2) had been made, and the necessary preparations to begin the extermination concluded, the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ began in earnest on March 16, 1942, with near-simultaneous deportations from the ghettos of Lublin as well as Lwow in the Galicia district, and a number of provincial small towns in both districts. From May 1942, the camp at Bełżec was joined by a second killing facility at Sobibór, which claimed the lives of Jews from the Lublin district as well as German, Austrian, Czech and Slovak Jews deported to the region from outside the Government-General. By June 1942, the initial operations had claimed well over 150,000 lives, and permission was forthcoming to extend the campaign to other districts in the Government-General. The Cracow district began to be targeted that same month[31], before a transport stop was ordered until mid-July, in order to allow the free passage of reinforcements and supplies to the Eastern Front in preparation for the German summer campaign in eastern Ukraine and Russia. On July 22, 1942, the campaign, by then named Operation Reinhard in honour of the head of the RSHA, Reinhard Heydrich, who had been assassinated in Prague not long beforehand, was extended to encompass the Warsaw district, with the start of deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to a third extermination camp set up by Globocnik’s staff at Treblinka.[32] In early August, the Radom district was sucked into the process, which henceforth ran at high speed across the whole of the Generalgouvernement.[33] Deportations from the Radom district were directed almost exclusively to Treblinka and secondarily to Belzec; transports from the Cracow and Galicia districts went exclusively to Belzec; trains from the Warsaw district were exclusively sent to Treblinka; while the Jews of the Lublin district were murdered in all three camps. In November 1942, the Zichenau and Bialystok districts, both annexed to East Prussia and thus belonging to the ‘incorporated territories’, were drawn in to Operation Reinhard with transports directed to Treblinka, although trains left from both districts to Auschwitz at this time.[34] In mid-December 1942, a renewed transport stop to enable reinforcements to reach the collapsing Eastern Front and relieve the encircled German forces at Stalingrad brought the second phase of Operation Reinhard to an end. By the end of 1942, 1,274,166 Jews had been deported to the Reinhard camps.[35]
Alongside deportations, units of the SS and Police conducted so-called “local resettlements” in many districts, especially in smaller towns which lay some distance away from the rail lines. Over the course of 1942 and 1943, more than 300,000 Jews were killed on the spot in mass executions that affected every single district caught up in Operation Reinhard. In the Radom district, at least 11,000 were shot during the deportations.[36] A similar number were shot in the liquidation of the provincial ghettos of the Warsaw district[37], while at least 5,000 Jews, in all probability well over 10,000, were shot in the Warsaw ghetto action of the summer of 1942.[38] In the Galicia district, over 70,000 Jews were murdered in 1941 by units of the Einsatzgruppen, Order Police and the static KdS Galizien, decimating the Jewish population of the region.[39] Through to the end of 1942, approximately 250,000 Jews were deported and another 70,000 shot “locally”.[40] Shootings were almost as extensive in the Krakow district, in former western Galicia, where up to 60,000 Jews were shot in repeated actions through to the start of 1943.[41]
In 1943, after the closure of Belzec, shooting was more or less the only method used in eastern Galicia, claiming another 150,000 lives by the end of that year. Whereas the Jewish population of Galicia was counted at 278,000 on September 15, 1942, it had decreased to 161,500 by the end of 1942.[42] A similar depletion is easily demonstrated for other districts. Whereas in early 1942, there were 300-320,000 Jews in the Lublin district, by July/August 1942, this had fallen to 190,000 Jews, and by the end of the year shrunk to a mere remnant of 20,000.[43] Across the whole Generalgouvernement, there were officially only 297,000 Jews left by the end of 1942, virtually all of whom were engaged in forced labour. The census of March 1, 1943 found 203,679 Jews left in the Generalgouvernement, a number that was reduced to around 80,000 by the start of 1944.[44]


[1] The relevant chapters are: M&G, Treblinka, part of Chapter II, part of III, VIII and IX; Mattogno, Bełżec, Chapters I and V; MGK, Sobibór, part of Chapter 3 and most of Chapters 8 and 9
[2] Cf. Mattogno, Hilberg                                     
[3] Graf, Neue Weltordnung.
[4] Cf. Rudolf, Lectures on the Holocaust
[5] We have dealt with some of these digressions in the preceding chapter, and will examine more in Ch. 4.
[6] To cite two older examples, see Martin Broszat,  ‘Hitler und die Genesis der ‘Endlösung’. Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving’, VfZ 25, 1977, pp.739-775, here p.762, as well as Browning, ‘Antwort’, p.99.
[7] In addition to the numerous obvious examples from Western historiography, see also Zygmunt Mankowski, Miedzy Wislaa Bugiem 1939-1944, Lublin: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1978, pp.222-3.
[8] Mattogno, Bełżec e Muehlenkamp, p.60.
[9] To our knowledge, the three instances are in his reply to Roberto Muehlenkamp (as previous note), in Mattogno, Hilberg, pp.38-39 and Carlo Mattogno, ‘Denying Evidence’ in Auschwitz Lies. Legends, Lies, and Prejudices on the Holocaust, Chicago: Theses & Dissertations Press, 2005, pp.259-260.
[10] For an overview up to the early 2000s, see Dieter Pohl, ‘Poland’, in Dan Stone (ed), The Historiography of the Holocaust, London, 2004, pp.88-119
[11] Together 22 out of 140 references in Chapter 8 of M&G, Treblinka. Most do not actually relate to the Holocaust in the Generalgouvernement at all. Mattogno began his career by citing the CDJC documents from the relevant publications, but has taken to omitting his actual source.
[12] Just 12 archival sources can be identified out of 140 references in Chapter 8 of M&G, Treblinka.
[13] Thomas Sandkühler, ‘Endlösung’ in Galizien. Der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz, Bonn, 1996.
[14] See in addition to works cited in Chapter 1 and in this Chapter, Tatiana Berenstein, ‘Prace przymosiwa ludnosci Zydowskiej w tzw. Dystrikcie Galicja (1941-1944)’, BZIH 1969, pp.3-45; Elisabeth Freundlich, Die Ermordung einer Stadt namens Stanislau. Vienna, 1986; David Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, Amherst, 1990; Jakub Chonigsmann, Katastrofa lwowskogo evreitsva, Lviv, 1993; Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944. Munich, 1996; Eliyahu Jones, Żydzi Lwowa w czasie okupacji 1939-1945, Łódź: Wyd. Oficyna Bibliofilów, 1999, translated as Smoke in the Sand. The Jews of Lvov in the War Years 1939-1944, Jerusalem: Gefen House, 2005; Bogdan Musial,  ‘Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschiessen’. Die Brutalisierung des deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges im Sommer 1941, Munich, 2000; Rosa Lehmann, Symbiosis and Ambivalence: Poles and Jews in a Small Galician Town, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001; Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002; Thomas Geldmacher, ‘Wir als Wiener waren ja bei der Bevölkerung beliebt’. Oesterreichische Schutzpolizisten und der Judenvernichtung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944, Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2002
[15] Gabriel N. Finder and Alexander V. Prusin, 'Collaboration in Eastern Galicia: The Ukrainian police and the Holocaust', East European Jewish Affairs, 2004, 34:2, pp.95 -118; Delphine Bechtel, ‘De Jedwabne a` Zolotchiv: Pogromes locaux en Galicie, juin–juillet 1941,’  in Cultures d’Europe Centrale, vol. 5, La destruction de confines, ed. Delphine Bechtel and Xavier Galmiche (Paris, 2005), 69–92; Omer Bartov, ‘Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide’, Journal of Modern History, 80 (2008), pp. 557 – 593; Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present Day Ukraine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007; Wlodzimierz Wazniewski, Stracone nadzieje. Polityka wladz okupacyjnych w Malopolsce Wschodniej 1939-1944, Warsaw, 2009; Christoph Mick, Kriegserfahrungen in einer multiethnischen Stadt: Lemberg 1914-1947. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011.
[16] 28 such trials can be identified across the Justiz und NS-Verbrechen series.
[17] The literature on this issue is vast, so we will confine ourselves at this stage to pointing to what is still one of the best short summaries of the debate, namely the article by Ulrich Herbert, ‘Labour and Extermination: Economic Interest and the Primacy of Weltanschauung in National Socialism’, Past & Present, No. 138 (Feb., 1993), pp. 144-195, originally appearing in German in Wolfgang Schneider (ed), Vernichtungspolitik. Eine Debatte über den Zusammenhang vom Sozialpolitik und Genozid im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland. Hamburg, 1991. Other titles will be cited below.
[18] For example, MGK, Sobibór, p.310
[19] Any misapprehensions on this score can be corrected by re-reading the United Nations Declaration regarding the extermination of the Jews, issued on December 17, 1942
[20] For Polish overviews of Nazi occupation policy in Poland, see For overviews, see Czeslaw Luczak, Polytika ludnosciowa i ekonomiczna hitlerowskich Niemiec w okupowanej Polsce, Poznan, 1979 and Czeslaw Madajczyk, Die Okkupationspolitik Nazi-Deutschlands in Polen 1939-1945. Cologne, 1988. A succinct summary of Nazi economic policy in the Generalgouvernement can be found in Sonja Schwanenberg, ‘Die wirtschaftliche Ausbeutung des Generalgouvernements durch das Deutsche Reich 1939-1945’ in: Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk (ed), Polen unter deutscher und sowjetischer Besatzung 1939-1945, Osnabrück: fibre, 2009, pp.103-129.
[21] Philip Friedman,‘The Jewish Ghettos of the Nazi Era’,  Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1954), pp. 61-88 ; Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat. The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. Lincoln, 1972; Gustavo Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos: Voices from a Beleaguered Society, 1939-1944. London: Bloomsbury, 2002; Tim Cole, ‘Ghettoization’ in Stone (ed), Historiography of the Holocaust, pp.65-87; Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
[22] Graf, Giant; Butz, THOTTC. One might also note that the section of Mattogno, Hilberg, purportedly dedicated to ‘i getti’ actually discusses ghettos in the Ostland, and has literally nothing to say about the ghettos of western Poland. The brief discussion of ghettos in Dalton, Debating the Holocaust, is so imbecilic as to not be worth the effort of refutation.
[23] One possible rejoinder, ‘but Arad/Schelvis don’t discuss ghettos!’ falls at the first fence, because Arad and Schelvis are contributing to a historiography that does discuss ghettos, whereas ‘Revisionism’ does not. Moreover, Schelvis has little problem in giving a succinct summary of the issues involved, cf. Vernichtungslager Sobibor, pp.17-24.
[24] On the September campaign see Szymon Datner, 55 dni Wehrmachtu w Polsce. Warsaw, 1967; Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland. Blitzkrieg, Ideology and Atrocity. Lawrence, Kansas, 2003 ; Jochen Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg. Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939. Frankfurt, 2006
[25] Datner, 55 dni Wermachtu, pp.110-122; Luczak, Polityka, pp.68-76; on the murders in the ‘incorporated territories’, many carried out by ethnic German militias, see Christian Jansen and Arno Weckbecker, Der “Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz” in Polen 1939/40. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992 and most recently, Maria Wardzyńska, Był rok 1939 Operacja niemieckiej policji bezpieczeństwa w Polsce. Intelligenzaktion. Warsaw: IPN, 2009. For a case study of an SS unit which was already carrying out three-figures massacres of Jews during 1939, see Alexander B. Rossino, ‘Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy during the Polish Campaign: The Case of the Einsatzgruppe von Woyrsch’, German Studies Review, Vol. 24, No. 1. (Feb., 2001), pp. 35-53.
[26] On antisemitic violence and rituals of humiliation in German everyday life, see the important recent work of Michael Wildt, ‘Gewalt gegen Juden in Deutschland 1933–1939’, WerkstattGeschichte 18, 1997, pp. 59–80.; and his monograph Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung. Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007, as well as the most recent study of the infamous ‘Night of Broken Glass’, the November pogrom of 1938, by Alan Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009.
[27] See Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland: 1918–1933.Hamburg: Hans Christian, 1986 as well as David Clay Large, ‘ “Out with the Ostjuden”. The Scheunenviertel Riots in Berlin, November 1923’, in: Hoffmann, Christhard, Werner Bergmann, Helmut Walser Smith (eds), Exclusionary Violence. Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History, Michigan: University Press, 2002,  p. 123-40. It is worth recalling that Kristallnacht was triggered ultimately by Nazi Germany’s expulsion of Polish Jews in October 1938:  Jerzy Tomaszewski, Auftakt zur Vernichtung. Die Vertreibung polnischer Juden aus Deutschland im Jahre 1938, Osnabrück, 2002.
[28] See the examples compiled in Walter Manoschek (ed), “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum: Vernichtung”. Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen 1939-1944. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995, pp. Alexander B. Rossino, ‘Destructive Impulses: German Soldiers and the Conquest of Poland’, HGS 11/3, 1997, pp.351-265.
[29] Occasionally, Mattogno has ritualistically invoked the name of Walter Sanning, pretty much the last negationist writer to try and address the question of numbers in any meaningful way. Cf.  Mattogno, ‘Denying Evidence’, p.245 and  M&G, Treblinka, p.293, a chapter ostensibly authored by Mattogno, although the footnote reads like an addition by either Graf or Germar Rudolf.
[30] The first figure was calculated from the listings of Pinkas hakehillot Polin, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976-2005, available online at jewishgen.org and zchor.org; the second from Franz Golczewski, ‘Polen’ in: Wolfgang Benz (ed), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Munich: Oldenbourg 1991, pp. 411–97. Regarding ghettos see also Guy Miron (ed), The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of Ghettos During the Holocaust, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010, 2 volumes. In 2012, USHMM will publish the second volume of their Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1939-1945, dedicated to ghettos, edited by Martin Dean. From samples shown to the present author the work will be of a very high quality. For ghettos in eastern Poland, i.e. Soviet-annexed territory, in this context the Białystok district (at least 80 communities), and Galicia districts (139 communities) see also Ilya Altman, Kholokost na territorii SSSR. Entsiklopedia. Moscow: Rosspen, 2011, which is also an impressive work of collective research. The older Polish encyclopedia, with which Mattogno is familiar, remains a useful summary, although the USHMM encyclopedia will clearly eclipse it. Czeslaw Pilichowski (ed), Obozy hitlerowskie na ziemiach polskich 1939-1945, Warsaw, 1979
[31] Cf. Andrea Löw and Markus Roth, Juden in Krakau unter deutscher Besatzung 1939-1944. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011; Aleksander Bieberstein, Zagłada Zydow w Krakowie. Krakow, 1986.
[32] The literature on the Warsaw ghetto is large. For the most recent summary, see Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
[33] Robert Seidel, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Polen. Der Distrikt Radom 1939-1945. Paderborn: Schönigh, 2006, pp.297-330; Jacek Andrzej Mlynarczyk, Judenmord in Zentralpolen. Der Distrikt Radom im Generalgouvernement 1939-1945. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007.
[34] On the Bialystok district see Szymon Datner, ‘Eksterminacja ludności żydowskiej w Okręgu Białostockim. Strukturą administracyjną okręgu Białostockiego’, BZIH 60, 1966, pp.3-48; on Zichenau see Michal Grynberg, Zydzi w rejencji ciechanowskiej 1939-1942. Warsaw, 1984 as well as Jan Grabowski, ‘Die antijüdische Politik im Regierungsbezirk Zichenau’, in: Jacek Andrzej Mlynarczyk and Jochen Böhler (eds), Der Judenmord in den eingegliederten polnischen Gebieten 1939-1945. Osnabrück: fibre Verlag, 2010, pp.99-116 and Andreas Schulz, ‘Regierungsbezirk Zichenau’, in: Wolf Gruner and Jörg Osterloh (eds), Das ‘Grossdeutsche Reich’ und die Juden. Nationalsozialistische Verfolgung in den ‘angegliederten Gebieten’. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2010, pp. 261-282
[35] SSPF Lublin an BdS Krakau, 11.1.43, GPDD 355a, items 13/15, PRO HW 16/22.
[36] Seidel, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, pp.297-330, esp. p.330. On the Holocaust in the Radom district, see also Jacek Andrzej Mlynarczyk, Judenmord in Zentralpolen. Der Distrikt Radom im Generalgouvernement 1939-1945. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007; there are also two studies of the liquidation of the Kielce ghetto by Jacek Andrzej Mlynarczyk, ‘Bestialstwo z urzedu. Organizacja hitlerowskich akcji deportacyjnych w ramach “Operacji Reinhard” na przykladzie likwidacji kieleckiego getta’, Kwartalnik Historii Zydow 3, 2002, pp.354-379; and Sara Bender, ‘The Extermination of the Kielce Ghetto – New Study and Aspects Based on Survivors’ Testimonies’, Kwartalnik Historii Zydow 2/2006, pp.185-199.
[37] Barbara Engelking, Jacek Leociak, Dariusz Libionka (eds), Prowincja Noc. Zycie i zagłada Zydow w dystrykcie warszawskim. Warsaw, 2007.
[38] Hilberg, Vernichtung, p.530, citing Monatsberichte von Lichtenbaum, 5.9. and 5.10.42, ZStL Polen 365 d, S.654-72
[39] See below.
[40] For reconstructions of the deportations in the Galicia district, see Tatiana Berenstein, ‘Eksterminacja ludnosci zydowskiej w dystrykcie Galicja (1941-1943), BZIH 61, 1967, pp.3-58; Aleksander Kruglow, ‘Deportacja ludnosci zydowskiej z dystryktu Galicja do obozu zaglady w Belzcu’, BZIH 151, 1989, pp.101-118, latter updated in Alexander Kruglov, The Losses Suffered By Ukrainian Jews in 1941-1944, Kharkov: Tarbut Laam, 2005, chapters on Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv and Ternopil oblasti.
[41] E. Podhorizer-Sandel, ‘O zagladzie Zydow w dystrykcie krakowskim’, BZIH 30, 1959; Klaus-Michel Mallmann, ‘ ‘Mensch, ich feiere heute’ den tausenden Genickschuss’. Die Sicherheitspolizei und die Shoa in Westgalizien’ in Gerhard Paul (ed), Die Täter der Shoah, pp.109-136; cf. also Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, pp.55-94, for a discussion of Sicherheitspolizei behaviour in Nowy Sacz; Stawiarska, Malgorzata, ‘Judenmorde in der polnischem Stadt Sanok während des Zweites Weltkrieges’, Kwartalnik Historii Zydow 4/2005, pp.506-540
[42] Włodzimierz Bonusiak, Małopolska Wschodnia pod rządami Trzeciej Rzeszy. Rzeszów: Wydawn. Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogicznej w Rzeszowie, 1990, p.106; Korherr-Bericht, 19.4.1943, NO-5193.
[43] Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung, pp.100-1; Bevölkerung des Distrikts Lublin nach dem Stande vom 1. August 1942, Lublin, den 5. März 1943, AIPN CA 891/8, p.487, cf. Eisenbach, Hitlerowska polityka,  p.426; Korherr-Bericht, 19.4.1943, NO-5193.
[44] Golczewski, ‘Polen’, p.479.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please read our Comments Policy