Monday, April 29, 2019

Brest Ghetto Mass Grave: More Than One Thousand Murder Victims Exhumed

Earlier this month, the BBC reported here the exhumation of over 1,000 Jews from a mass grave in the site of the Brest ghetto during the previous two months. The unearthed skeletons included women and children and proof that victims were shot in the back of the head. The embedded video in the report included (from two minutes in) an illustrated discussion of the ghetto population register. As I showed in our Critique, this was the 'Accounting and Control Book of Population Movement' that recorded 16,934 Jews on October 15, 1942, but crossed out that figure the following day. Mattogno of course insists that all these 16,934 Jews were 'evacuated' as that is the term used by Police Battalion 310 in its report of the ghetto action (Mattogno, pp.702-704), but these remains are proof that not all 'evacuated' Jews ever left the ghetto and that at least a thousand of them had infact been shot in the ghetto itself. Moreover, given that this also proves that 'evacuated' was a euphemism that included substantial killing, and there is no evidence these Jews ever left that administrative region of the occupied territories, it is logical to infer that any Jews who were transported elsewhere were also shot. Another desperate Mattogno gambit therefore fails.

10 comments:

  1. Do we know for sure these were Jewish victims of the Nazis, rather than USSR/NKVD? How do we know they were not killed prior to WWII? Was there any analysis of the bullets, as we could tell whether these were German or Soviet.

    17,000 Jews allegedly resettled, and a mass grave of 1,000. That is fewer than 10 percent, would there be other graves somewhere else, or perhaps these were partisans?

    Seems to me workers found skulls at a construction site, called the authorities, and they sent soldiers to go dig them up and remove them so that the construction could continue.

    Hmmm. Will there be an official report?

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  2. «Do we know for sure these were Jewish victims of the Nazis, rather than USSR/NKVD? How do we know they were not killed prior to WWII?»

    Because there are no records or testimonies of killing before WWII at Brest by the USSR/NKVD, whereas there are Nazi records referring to the Jewish community and its extermination, as well as testimonies of survivors.

    «Was there any analysis of the bullets, as we could tell whether these were German or Soviet.»

    To the extent that bullets were found, there probably were or will be such analysis. The team of Father Desbois, which has identified hundreds of Nazi mass graves throughout the former Soviet Union, includes a ballistics expert who can tell German from Soviet bullet cases. Watch this clip from the documentary "Shoah par Balles". Scenes from excavations at Busk in western Ukraine start at 3:18, German bullets are shown starting at 3:54.

    »17,000 Jews allegedly resettled, and a mass grave of 1,000. That is fewer than 10 percent, would there be other graves somewhere else, or perhaps these were partisans?»

    Most of the ghetto's Jews were transported to a killing site outside town, and I don't know that the Nazis held "partisans", including women and children, in a Jewish ghetto. See this article for further details about the Brest Jews. The NKVD seldom shot women, by the way, and I don't know that they shot children.

    «Seems to me workers found skulls at a construction site, called the authorities, and they sent soldiers to go dig them up and remove them so that the construction could continue.»

    Maybe so. Relevance?

    «Hmmm. Will there be an official report?»

    Maybe so, but even without it there is no room for reasonable doubt who these people were (for the reasons explained above). You don't read like you would "Hmmm" if the bones had been reported to be victims of the Soviet NKVD (like those at Katyn and Vinnitsya), by the way. How come?

    Anyway, let's see your case for an NKVD background of the skeletons.

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  3. The grave was found in the site of the ghetto. Hence they would be the bodies of Jewish workers and their families, whose names were recorded in the passport archive.

    https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Belarus/brest.htm

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  4. Deniers have a really inferior intelligence.

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  5. "Deniers have a really inferior intelligence."

    I would like to ask you why?

    Also - there is a difference between being stupid and being wrong!

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  6. Thank you for this blog. Keep up the good work.

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  7. "there is a difference between being stupid and being wrong"

    This difference becomes irrelevant when the deniers in question are BOTH stupid and wrong.

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  8. I just find it hard to believe that people still deny the holocaust of Jews gypsies disabled etc.the proof is there for all to see.

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  9. I thought Jews opposed the excavation of their graves?

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  10. The local Jewish community (which is tiny) likely had no choice; the grave was found when digging the foundations for a new apartment block which the BBC said was 'elite'. That means land ownership and money is involved, inside a city, rather than a rural site in a forest.

    Rabbinical rulings have in any case permitted reburials of skeletons to recognised cemeteries. As the article explains, the old Jewish cemetery of Brest was built over during the Soviet era, so the remains found here are going to another city cemetery, where presumably there are also graves of Brest Jews from after 1945.

    The excavations and reburials can be conducted with appropriate respect in this case; that is not true for mass grave sites where archaeological excavations would disturb ashes and fragments of corpses, which is why the extermination camps have been explored with non-invasive means.

    Mass grave sites outside towns where it's known that intact corpses were found are generally marked with memorials - many already in Soviet or Polish communist times - just like other mass graves of Poles, Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians killed by the Nazis. They are thus regarded as cemeteries. The respective nation-states are no more inclined to dig up the non-Jewish victims of Nazi occupation than the local and international Jewish communities are to dig up Jewish victims, unless there are pressing reasons, such as construction.

    Nor is there much inclination to dig up Stalinist mass graves; that has happened at Bykivnia outside Kiev and in the Butovo shooting gallery in Moscow (which is now a memorial, especially to Russian Orthodox priests murdered in the Terror), but there were no prior investigations until after the collapse of communism, which is not the case for Nazi victims. Once such excavations are done, there is little inclination to redo them, the memorials go up and they become cemeteries. In Belarus, the Stalinist mass grave site at Kurapaty outside Minsk was sealed off and practically built over, against the wishes of relatives.

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