Aktion Reinhard and the Holocaust in Poland
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