The Ostland
A recent article by Kues
argues that RK Ostland contained four “transit points for at least part of the
large numbers of Jews deported east via the "extermination camps" in
Poland.”[105] These
transit points were the camps Vievis, Vaivara, Salaspils and Maly Trostenets.
However, this contradicts the assertion in Sobibór that the Jews
deported to the Ostland arrived “w/o a stop-over in any camp.”[106] In Treblinka,
M&G had stated that: “It is valid to suggest that the direct transports to
Minsk arrived first in Warsaw and ran over the Siedlce-Czeremcha-Wolkowusk
line, so that they were travelling past Treblinka at a distance of approximately
80 km (Siedlce railway station) and about 140 km from Sobibor.”[107] Kues
and his colleagues are therefore fundamentally split on how the deportees
arrived in the Ostland.
MGK are unaware of the
literature concerning the mass unemployment and starvation in Belorussian
cities. The need for skilled labor was very low because German air attacks and
the Soviets in retreat had destroyed, dismantled and relocated many factories
and the Germans did not replace the capacity. Thus in Mogilev, starvation
forced skilled non-Jews into the countryside, whilst Jews starved in Vitebsk.[108] It is
notable that, in ignoring this literature, MGK also display amnesia towards the
earlier generation of deniers, who had embraced Walter Sanning’s thesis that
the retreating Soviets deployed a “scorched earth” policy. How does “scorched
earth” support resettled Jews?
Overcrowding and food shortages were two of the reasons that
Kube and Lohse fiercely resisted deportation into their area and only relented
when it became clear (as discussed in Chapter 2) that deported Jews would
eventually be killed. Documents written by Kube and Lohse are used selectively
by MGK. They thus omit Lohse’s statement of August 6, 1942 that "Only a
small part of the Jews are still alive; umpteen thousand have gone."[109] On July
31, 1942, Kube protested to Lohse about the arrival of 1,000 Warsaw Jews in
Minsk and insisted that further transports from the General Government would be
liquidated.[110]
This was at a time when many deported Reich Jews were in transit ghettos in the
General Government. M&G perversely interpret Kube’s protest as supporting
resettlement but they do this by citing an alternative document from the same
date in which the threat to liquidate the Jews was apparently omitted.[111]
Kues
contradicts himself with regard to proving that Polish Jews were resettled in
the Ostland. On the one hand, he admits in his initial article that it is
difficult to prove that Polish Jews did not arrive in the Ostland by means
other than deportation:
Hersh Smolar, the Jewish partisan leader operating near Minsk whose memoirs are discussed below (Section 3.3.3.), was one of the Polish Jews who had fled to Belarus in 1939 and remained there at the time of the German invasion. It is thus very difficult to use references to the presence of Polish Jews in the occupied eastern territories as a mean to verify the revisionist hypothesis. For their presence to be of significance, the mentioned Jews would have to be reported as deported from Poland to the east from December 1941 onward, following the opening of the first “extermination camp” Chełmno (Kulmhof) in the Warthegau District.[112]
On the other hand, Kues
totally disregards this logic in his subsequent articles by insisting that
“[Grünberg’s] statement that most of the Jews in the camp at the time of his
arrival were Polish implies one or more undocumented Jewish transports from
Poland.” He also overlooks the fact that his witnesses who claim to have seen
Jews arriving “straight from Poland”[113] may
simply have referred to Wilno, which was in Poland at the start of the war.
Moreover, his reliance on such witnesses is of course hypocritical, because MGK
insist elsewhere that enquirers “must recognize the necessity of comparing
witness accounts with the available material evidence.”[114] There
is, of course, no material evidence of resettlement; otherwise Kues would not
be reliant on these witnesses.
Kues uses his witnesses in a highly dishonest way. For
example, his use of Grünberg[115]
ignores his account of selections (including his wife’s) and the fact that he
heard people being shot.[116] He
disregards witness anomalies (which he would normally view as proof of
unreliability) when it suits his purposes to do so. For example, Moses L. Rage
stated in a written testimony to a Soviet commission that in the spring of 1942
or later "there began to arrive in Riga a series of trains with Jews from
Poland, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Holland and other countries." Because
no Danish Jews were deported to extermination camps, Kues reasons that the
witness "could have mistaken Norwegian Jews for Danish Jews."[117] Kues
never shows such latitude towards testimonies describing extermination, so this
is a clear double standard, as is the fact that he is hereby relying on Soviet
sources that he has dismissed elsewhere.[118]
Kues’ reliance on Vaivara and Vievis ignores the fact
that the Nazis shot such Jews when they retreated. For example, around 2,000
were killed at Klooga, where their remains were photographed and published in
western sources soon after liberation. Foreign journalists were shown the
unburied corpses of partially burned victims on October 2, 1944. The New
York Times journalist W.H. Lawrence wrote that he had personally “seen and
counted recognizable parts of 438 complete and partly burned bodies of men,
women and children.”[119] Kues
himself is forced to rely on a mass grave witness account by M. Morein in which
“while looking for the corpses of his parents in 1946 near the village of Kukas
near Krustpils, [Morein] discovered, in a mass grave, corpses whose clothes
bore French labels.”[120] However,
Kues’ own secondary source reveals that these Jews were actually killed in
1941:
At that time, all the Jews of Viesite, together with those of Jekabpils (Jakobstadt) and Nereta, were murdered by an execution squad of the Perkonkrusts in the village of Kukas.[121]
Kues commits another
distortion when citing a diarist in Lithuania, Herman Kruk, specifically his
sentence, “Today a rumour is circulating that there are about 19,000 Dutch Jews
in Vievis.”[122]
This is an isolated line in Kruk’s diary, supported only by a related entry
about two trainloads of objects, “apparently from the Dutch Jews.”[123] Given
that the real fate of Dutch Jews has been copiously documented, it is bizarre
that Kues should regard Kruk’s obviously equivocal language – “rumour”,
“apparently” – as firm evidence of anything except the existence of that which
Kruk himself defines as “gossip.”[124]
Given his propensity for schoolboy errors such as these,
it is incredible that Kues should then refer to Gerlach as an “armchair historian”[125], when
it is in fact Kues who cannot grasp the basics of the historian’s craft.
The earlier work of Mattogno and Graf shows a high level
of ignorance concerning Nazi ghetto policy in the Ostland. This leads them to
interpret Nazi ghetto statistics and Riga-Stutthof transport data in a
misleading way. M&G’s Einsatzgruppen chapter in Treblinka discusses
a report by Einsatzgruppe A that lists the number of Jews remaining in three
ghettos:
· Kauen approximately 15,000 Jews
· Vilna 15,000 Jews
· Schaulen 4,500 Jews.[126]
They commit two howlers
when interpreting these figures. Firstly, they compare the figures with those
for Lithuania in the 1929 Soviet census, but they forget that Wilno Voivodship
was not in Soviet Lithuania in 1929, but appeared instead in the 1931 Polish
census (108,900 Jews) and was swelled by other Polish Jewish refugees in
1939-40.
Secondly, they compare the figures for Vilna [Wilno] with
a census of the Vilna ghetto from May 1942 that lists 3,693 children in a
population of 14,545. They conclude that the survival of the children disproves
that there was any order to shoot the unfit. However, the Jäger Report cites
the same figures for the three ghettos and explains clearly why these children
survived:
I can state today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been achieved by Einsatzkommando 3. In Lithuania, there are no more Jews, other than the Work Jews, including their families. They are:
In Schaulen around 4,500 In Kauen “ 15,000 In Wilna “ 15,000I also wanted to kill these Work Jews, including their families, which however brought upon me acrimonious challenges from the civil administration (the Reichskommisar) and the army and caused the prohibition: the Work Jews and their families are not to be shot![127]
Jäger simply confirms what was known in the ghetto
itself: in October 1941, the Nazis issued yellow permits (Gelbschein)
that entitled 3,000 essential workers to select three family members who would
be temporarily spared from killing actions.[128] Moreover,
Jäger advocated that the males among these worker Jews should be sterilized,
thereby continuing the sterilization discourse that had begun with Wetzel back
in 1939.
In the same chapter M&G point out that, in Minsk,
"In a list from 1943 (month not given) of 878 Jews from the ghetto of
Minsk, there are...about a dozen elderly persons."[129]
However, this simply confirms that old people were disproportionately targeted
for liquidation, because 12/878 is not a ratio that would exist in a normal
civilian population.
M&G’s subsequent incredulity about the inclusion of
children and the elderly in evacuation transports from Riga to Stutthof can
therefore be dismissed as the result of ignorance. Furthermore, the inclusion
of those children actually argues in favour of a Nazi policy of total
evacuation that refutes MGK’s assumption in Sobibór that the Nazis
failed to almost totally evacuate the Ostland when they retreated. The Nazis
did not leave behind hundreds of thousands of Jews for the Soviets to find.
M&G’s treatment of Riga, Minsk
and Wilno can be contrasted with sources concerning those cities that have
mostly been in the public domain since the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials. In
April 1943, the Foreign Office representative in Riga, Adolf von Windecker,
pointed out to his colleagues in Berlin that, in the Ostland, “the local
population, as is known, has in spontaneous actions in connection with the
arrival of the German troops removed numerous Jews, amounting to an almost
total extermination of Jewry in some places”, and that many thousands of local
and Reich Jews had been shot in the Riga region over time [viele tausend der
hiesigen und reichsdeutschen Juden im Bereich von Riga im Verlauf der Zeit
erschossen worden sind]. He concluded that “it seems very questionable
whether any Jews can be considered for exchange purposes, without the
executions carried out here being thereby used against us.”[130] This
echoed a reply given by Günther the previous November to a request, forwarded
to him from the Italian General Consul Giuriatti in Danzig, that the ‘Jewess’
of Italian citizenship, Jenni Cozzi, be returned from the Riga ghetto to Italy.
Günther asserted that she had to remain in the ghetto “because it must
certainly be feared that the Jewess Cozzi will exploit the conditions in the
Riga ghetto for purposes of atrocity propaganda in Italy.”[131]
In January 1943, a former
colleague, on leave from Wilno, told Karl Dürkefälden about the almost total
extermination of the city's Jewish community: only 10% of the population was
left.[132] German
documentation shows that Jews from the Wilno region were subjected to a
“special treatment” that claimed over 4,000 victims in early April, 1943.[133] On May
15, 1943, Rademacher’s successor von Thadden noted:
Mr. Legation Counsellor Rademacher informed me that on occasion of a visit by Fascist representatives in Minsk Gauleiter Kube had also shown a church that had been used by the Communists for worldly purposes. Asked by the Italians what the little parcels and suitcases piled up there meant, Kube had explained that these were the only leftovers of Jews deported to Minsk. Thereafter Kube had shown the Italians a gas chamber in which the killing of the Jews was allegedly carried out. Supposedly, the Fascists had been most deeply shocked. Mr. Rademacher learned of this incident through Mr. Koeppen, adjutant of Reichsleiter Rosenberg. In his opinion General Consul Windecker in Riga is likely to also be informed about this incident, for as far as he, Rademacher, could remember, the incident had occurred on occasion of the Fascist representatives sent east to take care of Italian workers.[134]
The gas chamber in this
highly reliable official wartime hearsay account, concerning senior German
officials discussing recent events, was contained in the gas van that was
mentioned by the documents and Becker’s testimony discussed in Chapter 2. The
source is too high up the political chain to be construed as rumour, and every
link in this chain had nothing to gain by inventing the method of murder.
By June 1943, most Jews in the Ostland were dead but the
Nazis were still ruthlessly hunting down non-Jewish partisans. Their methods
led to a complaint from Lohse to Rosenberg that compared the methods used
against bandits with those that had been used in the ‘special treatment’ of
Jews:
The fact that Jews receive special treatment requires no further discussion. However, it appears hardly believable that this is done in the way described in the report of the General Commissioner of 1 June 1943. What is Katyn against that? Imagine only that these occurrences would become known to the other side and be exploited by them! Most likely such propaganda would have no effect only because people who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to believe it. Also the fight against the bandits it taking forms that give reason for much concern if pacification and exploitation of the various regions is the goal of our policy. Thus the dead banditry suspects, which according to the report dd. 5.6.43 from Operation "Cottbus" number 5,000, could in my opinion with few exceptions have been used for labour service in the Reich.
It shall not be denied that due to communication difficulties and generally in
such mopping-up operations it is very hard to tell friend from foe. But it
should nevertheless be possible to avoid cruelties and to bury those
liquidated. To lock men, women, and children into barns and to set fire to them
does not appear to be a suitable method of combating bands, even if it is
desired to exterminate the population. This method is not worthy of the German
cause and hurts our reputation severely.[135]
Lohse also passed to
Rosenberg a report by prison warden Günther on the killing of a few remaining Reich
Jews in the Minsk prison and the removal of gold from their teeth after death.[136]
The demographic consequences of Nazi
killing actions are documented in population statistics produced by the German
administration. In January 1942, Stahlecker reported that “The systematic mopping up
of the Eastern Territories embraced, in accordance with the basic orders, the
complete removal if possible, of Jewry” and that “This goal has been
substantially attained-with the exception of White Russia-as a result of the
execution up to the present time of 229,052 Jews”[137] An
Operational Situation Report of the same month revealed that 139,000 Jews
remained alive in GK Weißruthenien:
In White Ruthenia the purge of Jews is in full swing. The number of Jews in the Territory handed over to the civil authorities up to now, amounts to 139,000. 32,210 Jews were shot meanwhile by the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD.[138]
On August 26, 1942, Fenz
estimated that 95,000 Jews had thus far been “shot under martial law” whilst
6,000 had escaped to the partisans.[139]
KdS Strauch reported a working population of 27,660 Jews
remaining in White Ruthenia on November 6, 1942. Kube informed Lohse on October
23, 1942 that "In the course of the first year of civil administration,
Jewry in the general district [White Ruthenia] has been reduced to about 30,000
in the entire general district."[140] In a
meeting of Gebeitskommissars on April 8-10, 1943, Strauch explained the
problems he had encountered in attempting to complete the extermination of the
GK’s Jews, but nonetheless confirmed that 130,000 had been killed:
When the civil administration arrived it already found economic enterprises operated by the Wehrmacht aided by Jews. At a time when the Bielorussians wanted to murder the Jews, the Wehrmacht cultivated them. In that way Jews reached key positions and it is difficult today to remove them completely, for then the enterprises are liable to be destroyed, something we cannot allow ourselves. I am of the opinion that we can confidently say that of the 150,000, 130,000 have already disappeared. 22,000 are still alive in the area of the Gebietskommissariat.[141]
He suggested that the
surviving 22,000 could be reduced by 50%:
I therefore want to request of you that, at least, the Jew disappear from any place where he is superfluous. We cannot agree to Jewish women polishing shoes...We will cut the number down to half without causing economic difficulties.
In the same month, the
Head of the German Security Police and Security Service in Lithuania informed
the RSHA that 44,584 Jews were left in the Lithuanian General District of the
Ostland - including 23,950 in the Vilnius ghetto, 15,875 in the Kaunas/Kovno
ghetto and 4,759 in the Šiauliai ghetto - of which about 30,000 Jews doing jobs
needed by the German army[142]. The
surviving population of Latvia as of January 1943 was given as between 13,584
and 14,784.[143]
Estonia had been declared “free of Jews” on January 14, 1942.[144]
An
Ostministerium conference report of July 13, 1943 stated that the Jewish population
of White Ruthenia was 16,000, consisting of 8,500 for Minsk and 7,500 for Lida.[145] The
total for the whole of the Ostland was 72,000 (Wilno 20,000, Kovno 17,000, Siauliai
5,000, and Riga 15,000). Of this 72,000, the conference stated that 22,000 were
to be ‘resettled’ and 50,000 placed in SS concentration camps, as per Himmler’s
order of June 21, 1943.[146] Kube
requested an exemption for 4,000 Jews employed by the Wehrmacht in Minsk, but
Himmler ordered that these Jews be sent “to Lublin or to another place.”[147] On
July 20, 1943, Strauch wrote a file note on Kube’s protest about the execution
(which he referred to in different paragraphs as Sonderbehandlung and Executionen)
of 70 Jews being used for labour by Kube.[148]
There was clearly no option to
keep these Jews in the Ostland, so it must be concluded that Himmler’s
intention was to totally clear White Ruthenia of Jews by sending them westwards
to the General Government. This documentation therefore converges with the
evidence that, of the 15,500 Jews remaining in Minsk and Lida, the vast
majority were deported to the Lublin region between August and October,
1943. Gerlach cites a testimony by
Isselhorst giving a figure of 12,000-13,000 deported from “Minsk and Baranovichi”.
Kues[149]
overlooks Gerlach’s footnote clarifying that Isselhorst probably meant Lida, not
Baranovichi.[150]
Isselhorst’s testimony therefore converges with the demographic data that Kues
is attempting to deny.
[105] Thomas Kues, ‘The Maly Trostenets "Extermination Camp"-A
Preliminary Historiographical Survey, Part 2,’ Inconvenient History,
3/2, summer 2011.
[107] M&G, Treblinka, p.245.
[108] Gerlach, ‘German Economic Interests’, pp.210-39.
[109] Stenographisches Protokoll ueber Besprechung Görings mit den
Reichskommissaren und den Militaerbefehlshabern der besetzten Gebiete,
6.8.1942, USSR-170, IMT XXXIX, pp.384-412;
Gerlach, 'Bedeutung der deutschen Ernaehrungspolitik', pp.216-17.
[110] Kube an Lohse, 31.7.42, 3428-PS, IMT XXXII, pp.279-82, also
facsimiled in Weinreich, Hitler's Professors, pp.188-190.
[111] M&G, Treblinka, p.278.
[112] Kues, ‘Evidence, Part I,’ 2.2.1.
[113] Kues, ‘Evidence, Part 2,’ 3.3.14.
[114] MGK, Sobibór, p.106.
[115] Kues, ‘Evidence, Part 2,’ 3.3.10.
[116] Christoph Lind, Bericht von Isaak Grünberg über seine Haft in
Maly Trostinec, “... sind wir doch in unserer Heimat als Landmenschen
aufgewachsen...”Der “Landsprengel” der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde St.
Pölten: Jüdische Schicksale zwischen Wienerwald und Erlauf. St. Pölten: Inst.
für Geschichte der Juden in Österreich, 2002.
[117] Kues, ‘Evidence, Part 2,’ 3.3.12.
[118] Kues, ‘The Maly Trostenets "Extermination Camp."’
[119] New York Times, 6.10.44, p.6.
[120] Kues, ‘Evidence, Part 2,’ 3.3.13.
[121] Bernhard Press, The Murder of the Jews in Latvia 1941-1945.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000, p.49.
[123] Herman
Kruk, The last days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Chronicles from the Vilna
Ghetto and the camps 1939-1944. Yale University Press, New Haven/London, 2002,
p.518.
[125] Kues, ‘The Maly Trostenets "Extermination Camp.”’
[126] M&G, Treblinka, p.209, citing Einsatzgruppe A,
Gesamtbericht vom 16 Oktober 1941 bis 31 Januar 1942, RGVA, 500-4-92, pp.57-59.
[127] Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK. 3 bis zum 1. Dez. 1941
durchgeführten Execution. RGVA 500-1-25.
[128] Herman Kruk, Benjamin Harshav (ed.), The
Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and
the Camps 1939-1944. New Haven: Yale University, 2002, p.150. Mattogno also
ignores evidence that Wehrmacht officers used the tactic of ‘salvation through
work in Wilno; see the essays by Kim C. Priemel, ‘Wirtschaftskrieg und
‘Arbeitsjuden’. Möglichkeiten zur Rettung von Juden in Vilnius, 1941-1944’ in
Wolfram Wette (ed), Zivilcourage. Empörte, Helfer und Retter aus Wehrmacht,
Polizei und SS. Frankfurt am Main, 2003, pp.305-322 and ‘Into the grey
zone: Wehrmacht bystanders, German labor market policy and the Holocaust’, Journal
of Genocide Research, 10/3 2008, pp.389-411.
[129] M&G, Treblinka, pp.214-15.
[130] Windecker an Auswärtigen Amt Berlin, 5.4.43, NG-2652; T/311.
[131] Günther an Auswärtigen Amt Berlin, 10.11.42, T/348.
[132] Karl Dürkefälden, Schreiben, wie es wirklich war...:
Aufzeichnungen Karl Dürkefäldens aus den Jahren 1933–1945, edited by
Herbert Obenaus and Sibylle Obenaus, Hannover, 1985, pp.107ff.
[133] Arad, Ghetto in Flames, p.365, citing E. Rozauskas et al
(ed), Documents Accuse, Vilnius, 1970, pp. 271-272.
[134] Auswärtigen Amt Berlin, 15.5.43, T/341.
[137] Stahlecker, Report of Einsatzgruppe A, n.d., 2273-PS.
[138] EM 155, 14.1.42, NO-3279.
[139] Hauptkommissariat Baranowitschi to GK Weißruthenien, Arbeitspolitische
Fragen, 26.8.42, NG-1315; cf. Haberer, ‘The German police, Part II,’ p.271n.;
Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p.706.
[140] Strauch an BdS Ostland, 6.11.1942, LVCA 1026-1-3, p.331;
Angrick/Klein, Riga, p.376.
[141] Protokoll über die Tagung der Gebietskommissare,
Hauptabteilungsleiter und Abteilungsleiter des. Generalkommissars in Minsk vom
8.April bis 10.April 1943, NARB 370-1-1263, pp.126-45; cf. Shalom Cholawsky, The
Jews of Bielorussia during World War II, Amsterdam, 1998, p.64; Haberer, ‘German
Police’, Part I, p.13.
[142] Arũnas Bubnys, ‘The Holocaust in Lithuania: An Outline of the Major
Stages and their Results’, in: Alvydas Nikžentaitis, Stefan Schreiner &
Darius Staliũnas (ed.), The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews, 2004
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, p.216.
[143] Angrick/Klein, Riga, p.369.
[144] EM 155, 14.1.42, NO-3279; cf. Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred.
[145] Sitzungsvermerk v. 20 August 1943 des ORR Hermann über eine Tagung
am 13.7.43 im RmbO zum Thema: Arbeitseinsatzfragen des Reiches unter besonderer
Berücksichtigung der Verhältnisse in den besetzten Ostgebieten, NO-1831, NMT
XIII, pp.1018-19; cf. Safrian, Eichmann’s Men, p.124; Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto
In Flames, Ktav, 1982, p.402.
[146] Der Reichsführer SS an HSSPF Ostland, SS-WVHA, 21.6.1943, NO-2403.
[147] Memorandum by Gottlob Berger, 14.7.43, NO-3370; cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte
Morde, p.737ff.
[148] Strauch,
Aktenvermerk, Minsk, 20.7.43, NO-4317 and
T/1413; also published in Helmut Heiber (ed), ‘Aus den Akten des Gauleiters Kube’, VfZ
4, 1956, pp.65-92
[149] Kues, ‘The Maly Trostenets "Extermination Camp”’.
[150] Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p.742 n.1285.
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