Showing posts sorted by date for query liepaja. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query liepaja. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Monday, September 25, 2017

Debunking the Partisan Meme: 1. The Killers' Racial Mission

When deniers lamely seek to excuse German shooting policies in the USSR, one of their most common tactics is find references to partisans in the shooting reports and to take at face value the claim that Jews were shot because of their support for these partisans. For example, in 2013, Mattogno acknowledged Kube's report of July 1942 that 55,000 Jews had been shot in White Ruthenia in the last 10 weeks but claimed that the shootings were "motivated by the anti-partisan war and not by an extermination order of Jews for being Jews."[1]. This blog article debunks that claim in two parts. The first demonstrates that the Nazi leadership, Wehrmacht commanders and individual shooters often understood their mission to be a racial one: a war of extermination against Jews as a race. The second shows how the content of shooting reports betrays a racial motive and is inconsistent in its treatment of Jews as partisans.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Extermination of Children in Daugavpils, Latvia

According to this site, researched by Jacob Gorfinkel, "According to June 1942 Food Card distribution, there remained 487 Jews (245 men, 242 women, 22 children) in Daugavpils." The low number of children is strong proof of an extermination policy in Latvia. It converges with the photographic evidence from Liepaja, Latvia, and the other evidence about Latvia published previously on this blog. It also reinforces the evidence for the Rumbula massacre in Riga, such as the note of Operational Situation Report 155, dated 11.1.42: "The number of Jews left in Riga, 29,500, was reduced to 2,600 by an action carried out by the Higher SS and Police Leader of Ostland. In Daugavpils, there are still 962 Jews left who are urgently needed for the labor pool." This was in the wider context of reducing the Latvian Jewish population from an estimated 70,000 to fewer than 4,000 [Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories, No. 7, 12.6.42].

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories, May 1942 to January 1943

Extracts from the Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten appear in this collection edited by Arad et al. Below I copy across several relevant extracts, each referenced by the page number in the collection.

No. 4, 22.5.42: "Of the Krimchaks (about 6,000) who were usually counted as part of the Jewish population, well over half lived in Simferopol (2,500) and in Karasubatsar [Karasubazar]. Their extermination, together with that of the Jews and the Gypsies in the Crimea, was accomplished for the most part by the beginning of December, 1941 [p.344, quoted here]."

No. 5, 29.5.42: 251 people shot and 28 hanged in Minsk on 5.5.42 [p.346].

Sunday, October 28, 2012

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (8)

The seventh blog of this series addresses the events that led to a temporary suspension of the extermination of Lithuania’s Jews after the massacres organized by Einsatzkommando 3 in 1941, and the fate of this Jewish community’s remainders. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").


Thursday, October 04, 2012

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (8)

The present blog contains accounts of massacres organized by Einsatzkommando 3 in the Kaunas (Kowno) ghetto and the killing of mentally handicapped people by this unit. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").


Sunday, December 25, 2011

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 2: Nazi Policy (2). Extermination of Soviet Jews, June 1941-March 1942.

Extermination of Soviet Jews, June 1941-March 1942

During the planning stages for Operation Barbarossa, Nazi food policy was linked to plans for large-scale political killing. On May 2, 1941, a conference of state secretaries, chaired by Thomas, had concluded that "umpteen million people will doubtless starve to death, if we extract everything necessary for us from the country."[10] The selection of these starvation victims would follow a political economy of racial value, but would also be shaped by a political-ideological-racial belief that the enemy was the ‘Jewish-Marxist.’ Rosenberg recognised this linkage when he wrote, on May 8, 1941, that the war would be:
[a] fight for the food supply and raw materials for the German Reich as well as for Europe as a whole, a fight ideological in nature in which the last Jewish-Marxist enemy has to be defeated.[11]

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

June 22, 1941

On this day 70 years ago, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and began the most devastating conflict in recorded history, which accounted for the overwhelming majority of World War II deaths in Europe. About 26.6 million of these deaths, according to demographic calculations, occurred among the population of the Soviet Union. A significant part of Soviet deaths was due to the Nazi invaders’ criminal actions.

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

More «Evidence for the Presence of "Gassed" Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories» (2)

Part 1

Lithuania

TK postulates that any French Jews in Lithuania prior to the transport from Drancy to Kovno and Talinn on 15 May 1944 must have reached that destination via Auschwitz-Birkenau or Sobibór, the documented destinations of most deportees from France. As pointed out in part 1, deportations of Auschwitz concentration camp inmates as laborers would be a plausible explanation if one is to assume that witnesses were not simply misled by rumors or otherwise mistaken or saying something that Soviet interrogators (according to historian Andrew Ezergailis, quoted by TK, the Soviets falsely claimed that 240,000 Jews had been sent to Latvia and murdered there) wanted to hear.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Mass Graves and Dead Bodies

[Last updated on 07.03.2014 to add a photo credit note.]

The online archives of the Ghetto Fighters’ House have been reconfigured, breaking the links in my former photo collection on the RODOH forum.

Therefore I reproduce that collection below, to the extent permitted by my records. The photo captions are those I copied from the GFH Archives when putting together this collection. Where I'm aware of inaccuracies in a caption, this is pointed out.

The images can be enlarged by clicking on them. Needless to say, many of the photos are graphic and sensitive persons are advised against watching them.



Photos should be credited to: 
The Ghetto Fighters' House Museum/Israel/ The Photo Archive 


Monday, June 15, 2009

Liepaja (Part 2)

Further to my Part 1, Yad Vashem has footage of Liepaja shootings on this site. This was filmed by Reinhard Wiener, whose 1981 interview can be found on the same webpage. Wiener's role and the provenance of the film are discussed here and here. The film was entered into evidence at the Rosenstock trial, which is discussed here.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes

[Last updated on 04.02.2011 due to broken links in section 1.]

[Last updated on 07.03.2014 to add a photo credit note.] 

The photographs shown hereafter, some of which are not recommended for more sensitive people, show victims of the genocide of the Jews, and of other nazi crimes addressed in various articles on this blog. I tried to collect photos that are less well known, regarding nazi crimes in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.

The captions embedded in the link to each photo are the captions provided by the source featuring the respective photo. Where these captions are not written in English, I provided a translation of the caption, with supplementary information if considered necessary. Photos shown directly in the blog can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Photographic Evidence of Mass Shootings: 3. Liepaja

Liepaja is an excellent example of how photographs can form part of a convergence of evidence alongside such phenomena as diaries, testimonies and demographic studies. This is discussed here and here. Note again that non-German units took part, in this case Latvian.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

How Many Perpetrators in the USSR? - Part Eight: Baltic States

The two main killing actions in Latvia were the Rumbula Action and the Liepaja action. The Rumbula action has been studied in detail by Ezergailis, whose findings can be viewed in a Word file by clicking the 'Chapter 8' hyperlink shown on this page, whilst Liepaja has been discussed in this blog. The main action in Lithuania was the murder of Vilna Jews at Ponary, described here and depicted in these photographs. Additional comments on each of these massacres are given below.

Read more!

Ezergailis gives an overview of the Order Police in Latvia as follows:
Before the Aråjs commando was trained, it was the 9th Battalion of the Ordnungspolizei that performed most of the killings for Stahlecker. The 9th Battalion units that were in Latvia during July and August had moved on, following Stahlecker to the environs of Leningrad. At the end of November there were at least two kinds of Ordnungspolizei units in Rîga under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Flick: the Schutzpolizei, headed by Major Heise, and the Gendarmerie, under Captain Rehberg. At least several hundred were posted to assure order (“obtain and maintain a German character”) in Rîga, as in Latvia at large. In addition to overseeing the Latvian precinct police, the Ordnungspolizei was also in charge of the ghettoization of Jews, and after October 25 the guarding of the ghetto. During the initial phase of the ghetto the SD were not involved. The Ordnungspolizei's involvement with the ghetto also predetermined their assignments in the liquidation of the ghetto.

The 2nd company of the 22nd Reserve Battalion from Rîga supplied about seventy men, and the 3rd company of the 22nd Reserve Battalion from Jelgava supplied another seventy men. The 2nd company was employed in overseeing the clearing of the Jewish apartments, organizing the Jews into marching columns, and accompanying the columns to Rumbula. The 3rd company was used to guard of the periphery at Rumbula. The chief Ordnungspolizei activist was Major Heise, and it appears that he was also the liaison person with the Latvian Schutzmannschaften.

In addition to the 22nd Battalion from Rîga and Jelgava and the men of the Gendarmerie, Jeckeln had at his disposal another five regiments of Ordnungspolizei, but we do not know which, if any, of them he used. In general, Jeckeln was against involving the Wehrmacht.
A West German trial of Order Police defendants included a description of Jeckeln's organization of the Rumbula action, provided by the defendant Friedrich Jahnke. Ezergailis also discusses the strong Latvian presence at Rumbula, including the planning meeting:
Various German witnesses mention the presence of Latvian officers in the preparatory meeting. Although the only name mentioned is that of Osis, the head of the Latvian Schutzmannschaften, the names of the other Latvians present at these meetings can easily be identified, for the choice is a very narrow one. The only ones who could have been there in addition to Osis, were Aråjs, Ítiglics, and the head of the Latvian ghetto guard, Danskops.
At Liepaja, there an initial killing action in July 1941. A notable feature of this action is that it was ordered by a naval commander, Kawelmacher, as Ezergailis again describes:
The pace of shootings was not fast enough for commandant Kawelmacher (a.k.a. Gontard). On July 22 he telexed the commanding admiral of the Baltic fleet in Kiel, requesting 100 SS- and 50 Schutzpolizei troops “for rapid execution [of the] Jewish problem. With present SS-personnel, this would take one year, which is untenable for [the] pacification of Liepāja.” His request was promptly granted; the notorious Latvian SD Commando under Viktors Arājs arrived from Riga, shot about 1,100 Jewish men on July 24 and 25, and left. Meanwhile the 2nd Company of Police Battalion 13 under SSHauptsturmführer Georg Rosenstock had arrived, primarily for patrol duty and to a lesser extent for executions. From then on, the Navy played a less active role, leaving the persecution of Jews in the hands of Kügler and his superior, SS-und Polizeistandortführer Dr. Fritz Dietrich, who arrived in mid-September.
As was noted in this blog, Dietrich's arrival was crucial because he kept a diary of subsequent events. The main December massacre was ordered by HSSPF Jeckeln, carried through by Dietrich, and photographed by Strott and Sobeck, as Ezergailis describes:
No ghetto had yet been established in Liepāja, but Dietrich ordered a 2-day curfew for Jews. Thus confined to their apartments, they were methodically rounded up by Latvian police and taken to the Women’s Prison. From there they were marched to the Šķēde execution site, ordered to undress, and were shot in groups of 10 by three firing squads, two Latvian and one German. All together, 2,749 Jews were shot on December 15–17. They were mainly women and children, who had been largely spared until now. Kügler’s deputy SS-Scharführer Carl Emil Strott, as well as SSOberscharführer Sobeck, photographed the executions. An audacious Jew working at the Security Police, David Zivcon, got hold of a 12-exposure film by Sobeck long enough to make copies, which have been widely reproduced and exhibited after the war.
Several of Strott's photographs, linked by Roberto here, and also discussed here, clearly show Latvian police taking women and children to the killing area. Strott's trial, at which he did not deny the photos, is here.

For Ponary, an excellent gallery of photographs can be found here. Three larger-sized examples from that gallery are shown here and here and here. Details in the photos match eyewitness testimony given to West German prosecutors that is reproduced here. See for example the book-keeper's statement that "The other nine walked one behind the other, stooping and holding on to the man in front with their hands because they could not see." Finally, note again that this massacre was not carried out by a unit of Einsatzgruppen acting alone. Lithuanian collaborators played an essential role in this murder.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Liepaja (Part 1)

The killing of Jews from Liepaja, Latvia, has been documented in numerous sources. SS and Police Chief Emil Dietrich recorded most of them in his diary. Dietrich was hanged by a US military tribunal at Landsberg-am-Lech prison on 22 Oct 1948. Between the 15th and 17th of December, 1941, three German and Latvian squads shot 2749 Jews, mainly women and children, in the dunes of Skede, near Liepaja. The events were recorded in these infamous photographs by Carl-Emil Strott, who was convicted and sentenced at the trial of Grauel and others in Hannover in 1971. More of Strott's photographs can be found in this thread.

Read more!

Furthermore, lest any deniers are stupid enough to shout 'show trial' and 'forgery', the killings in Liepaja have been demonstrated by the demographic research of Anders and Dubrovskis, who examined the Nazi census of 30 Aug 1941 in the Latvian state archives, and compared it to other demographic sources such as the Soviet census of February 1935, the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, the list of deportees to the Soviet interior, the Grauel trial, residential 'house books', the "Metals Collection" List, the Schutzpolizei Reports, records from the camp at Stutthof, and the Soviets' Extraordinary Commission for Investigation of Fascist Crimes.

Their research is another nail in the coffin of the reputation of fraudulent 'demographer' Walter Sanning. As I noted in this blog, Sanning dishonestly pretended that Nazi demographic figures from January 1943 referred to Soviet population data as of June 1941. This enabled him to claim that most Jews had either fled or been deported to the Soviet interior as part of Stalin's 'scorched earth' policy. Anders and Dubrovskis demonstrate that only 209 Liepaja Jews (out of a Jewish population of 7140) were deported and a maximum of 300 fled.

Liepaja therefore gives us a further demonstration of the bankruptcy of Holocaust denial. To deny that the Nazis deliberately killed women and children from Liepaja, deniers have to ignore the existence of a handwritten diary by the SS and Police Chief, photographs taken by a perpetrator who was tried in a West German court, a census that the Nazis carried out two months after they invaded Latvia, and residential data collected by the Nazis in 1942, showing that many of the people in earlier censuses had been killed. Such denial can only be a deliberate blindness to evidence of genocide.

Footnote: Many thanks to KentFord9 for drawing my attention to the demographic data.

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Quick links

Intention and Explanation - our first posting (23/03/2006)


Auschwitz
  • Open-Air Cremations in Auschwitz, August 1943 by Nick Terry (13/07/2006)
  • War-time German document mentioning Auschwitz gassings: testimony of Eleonore Hodys by Sergey Romanov(08/11/2009)
  • Exaggerating the role of "new" Auschwitz blueprints by Sergey Romanov(26/01/2010)
  • Hans responds to Mattogno by Roberto Muehlenkamp(01/11/2010)
  • Re: Was Rudolf Vrba registered at Auschwitz? (updated) by Hans(05/08/2014)
  • Revisionist Article on Hydrogen Cyanide Chemistry Rejected by Peer Reviewed Journals by Hans(07/09/2013)
  • Satire on Auschwitz Commemoration by Hans(21/01/2015)
  • Sehn's Mistake, Bellinger's Gaffe by Jonathan Harrison(09/05/2015)

  • Block 11 and Krema I

    The Bunkers of Birkenau

    Testimonies of Auschwitz SS Men

    Prisoner Testimonies

    Death Books and Documentation

    Kremas II-V

    1944 in Auschwitz: Ungarnaktion, Gypsies, Lodz

    The Air and Ground Photos of Auschwitz in 1944

    The Auschwitz Sonderkommando

    What the Soviets knew about Auschwitz - and when. [permalink]

    Pure Idiocies from Deniers on Auschwitz


    Aktion Reinhard(t)

    Belzec

    Sobibor

    Treblinka

    Mass Graves and Cremation

    Debunking denierbud videos and writings at http://holocaustdenialvideos.com [permalink]

    Chelmno

    Gas Vans

    Euthanasia, T4, 14 f 13 and other Gassings

    The Holocaust in the Soviet Union


    Sonderkommando 1005, Mass Graves and Cremation

    Latvia

    Lithuania

    Belorussia

    Maly Trostenets

    Ukraine

    Transnistria, Black Sea Coast, Crimea, Caucasus

    Series:That's why it is denial, not revisionism. [permalink]

    The Holocaust in Yugoslavia

    Nazi Policy

    Ausrottung, Vernichtung and the Rhetoric of Extermination

    'Transit Camp' Fantasies

    Holocaust Demographics

    War Crimes Trials

    Nazism and Stalinism

    Other Atrocities and Genocides


    Miscellaneous
    How to interpret witness testimony. [permalink]
    Demjanyuk and Holocaust deniers [permalink]
    • Part I by Sergey Romanov (02/05/2006)
    H.E.A.R.T. (holocaustresearchproject.org) exposed [permalink]
    Correction Corner. [permalink]

    Holocaust Deniers


    Other postings of interest:Andrew E. Mathis
    Nick Terry
    Sergey Romanov:
    To be continued...