Sunday, December 25, 2011

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 2: Nazi Policy (7). Conclusion.

Conclusion

The flaws in MGK’s writing on Nazi policy, which we have documented above, can be divided into four categories: self-contradiction, irrelevancy, highly selective sourcing, and distortion.
It is self-contradictory that Mattogno fixes a resettlement decision in September 1941 but then Kues has to admit that requests from a very high level (Ribbentrop) to resettle Serb Jews were being declined by Himmler in October. It is self-refuting for Mattogno to admit that Wetzel was referring to gassing on 25.10.41 but for Kues to claim that Rademacher was referring to mere resettlement of Serb Jews in a document written on the very same day.
Irrelevancy and selective sourcing dog Mattogno’s chapters on ‘emigration’. It amounts to a strategy of distracting the reader: ‘misdirection’. Mattogno’s assumption that Zeitschel’s request in August 1941 is more important than the well-documented deportation negotiations of October 1941 (which were won by Wetzel’s assurances about “Brack’s device”) is clearly spurious. Kues’ claim that Rademacher’s deportation note of October 25, 1941 refutes Turner’s gas van document of April 11, 1942, is an amazing chronological misdirection that ignores piles of intervening documentation, commencing with the Wetzel draft of the same October date, which clearly leads into the gassing timeline that takes the policy to Chelmno, the Ostland, Serbia and the Aktion Reinhard camps through gradual radicalization. Selective sourcing is most egregious, as noted above, in the Ostland paper trail of Kube and Lohse. The distortion of this documentation is so blatant that it amounts to a strategy of deliberately hiding smoking guns.
As readers can see, therefore, there are more than enough examples of distortion in MGK’s work to prove their lack of scruples. This chapter does not address absolutely every last example that could be found in the trilogy, as it would lengthen the chapter several fold. We have, however, covered the most serious cases.
The intended result of Mattogno’s distortions is to bury the real timeline of extermination, which we have rehearsed above. There was a process of cumulative radicalization that began with starvation planning in the spring and culminated in Himmler’s order of July 1942 to kill working Jews as well as non-working Jews. This process had two peaks – the July 1941 Hitler’s decision to kill all Soviet Jews (with some labor exemptions) and the December 1941 decision to kill Jews across Europe within the timeframe of the war – but these peaks were not a culmination because they still left open the matter of how quickly each category of Jews (non-working and working) would be killed. This was not resolved in full until July 1942, when Himmler set a deadline of December 31, 1942, but even then Himmler eventually had to concede some labor exemptions, which were concentrated into SS run camps. The fate of Jews in these camps is discussed in later chapters.
Finally, it is anticipated that MGK may mislead readers by pointing out that some children and old people survived to the end of the war, which they infer as meaning there was no extermination policy. This would be fallacious because it would omit the obstacles faced by the SS in the execution of policy. Some ghettos gave permits to the immediate families of essential workers (as we show below); some had officials who were bribed into giving out work permits to the highest bidder[260], and some had children who were hidden. The SS eventually tracked most of these down, as we saw in the case of Domachevo above, but, given that Germany was fighting a losing war militarily, the SS could not ultimately track down every hidden child and overcome every local Wehrmacht official who wanted to keep productive Jews. Those that survived, however, were a tiny minority of the total Jewish population that came under Nazi rule. MGK’s deceptions cannot negate this fact.

[260] Browning, Remembering Survival, pp.76-78.

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