Biological eradication (biologische Ausmerzung)

On page 118 of the Critique, I cited Rosenberg's briefing of November 18, 1941, taken from Christopher Browning's submission to the Irving-Lipstadt trial. Rosenberg spoke of the necessity of "a biological eradication of the entire Jewry of Europe" (eine biologischen Ausmerzung des gesamten Judentums in Europe) by measures that would "expel them over the Urals or eradicate them in some other way." Mattogno replied to this by stating that the "purely figurative meaning of “Ausmerzung des Judentums” (extirpation of Jewry)...designated the eradication of Jewry from the soil of the Reich and from the European soil." However, this can be refuted by two points.

Firstly, a native German-speaking denier, Staeglich, acknowledges that "biological elimination” (“biologische Ausmerzung”)...in ordinary usage has roughly the same import as “killing”." Staeglich therefore contends that the briefing is "In all probability...just another forgery" or that "one might attribute this odd choice of words to the fact that Rosenberg was a Balt, and so may not always have been sure about proper German usage!" Whilst these statements are absurd, they do at least, unlike Mattogno, avoid lying about the meaning of German words.

Secondly, Rosenberg had already equated deportation with killing, as shown here, when he wrote on September 12, 1941, that "Stalin now was also going to expel the remaining 400,000 Volga Germans to Siberia, that is, to murder them" (to avoid any claims of dubious translation, I have used the one preferrred by CODOH's David Merlin here). Rosenberg even repeated the phrase 'murder' three sentences later in the word Massenmord, although Merlin chooses to translate that as "slaughter," which, I believe, would imply that Rosenberg had used the noun Schlachtung.

Connecting the Sept. 12 and Nov. 18 statements can only lead to one plausible inference, namely that Rosenberg saw the deportations both of Volga Germans by Stalin and of Jews by the Germans as acts of mass killing, not resettlement. Rosenberg may or may not have understood the means of killing of Jews to have included gas chambers; Browning notes that Rosenberg met Himmler for four hours on November 15, but it would be a stretch to infer that killing methods were discussed there rather than simply the fact that Jews would be killed. The main fact is that Rosenberg understood clearly by that point that Jews deported to the USSR were slated to die, either immediately (as at Kaunas in late November) or later (as in White Ruthenia during the summer of 1942).