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].

Another SK 1005 update

As mentioned previously on the blog, we have 22 German wartime documents explicitly mentioning Sonderkommando 1005, of them 7 have been published here. Now it's time for a little update of that posting. First of all, I have added an image of the official German wartime copy of Hegenscheidt's radiogram, the text of which has already been published. Hegenscheidt was arrested in 1944 and this official certified wartime copy is among the other materials in his case.

Further I have added a previously unpublished document from the same file - excerpts from the manuscript that Hegenscheidt wrote as a part of his defense in 1944, as he was sitting under arrest in Berlin.

That makes it for 8 published German wartime documents that mention SK 1005 explicitly (and 22 that we have overall).

Remember how Mattogno and Graf insisted on the very designation "1005" being a Soviet invention? And what did they base that on? Right, the same thing these clowns base all of their fraudulent "research" on: nothing (except wishful thinking).

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].

Contemporary Reports of Killings in the USSR that included Children

The following is merely a sample of reports where the killing of children is included or clearly implied. More will follow in due course. To these must also be added the numerous actions in the Jaeger Report that included children, and Jaeger's update of 9.2.42 which gave a total killed of 34,464 children.We can also consider the high number of references to places being "free of Jews" (e.g. EM 88, EM 133, EM 150) as being inclusive of killing all the children.

Nacht und Nebel update

I have how added a couple of document images to the post exposing the old fool Faurisson.

Podcast Interview on Holocaust Denial

I gave an interview a couple of months ago to Matthew Buckley of Adelaide, Australia, who runs a podcast called Social Justice Warriors. We talked about the phenomenon of denial in general, techniques of denial, whether deniers are liars or just lousy historians, and the current status of Holocaust denial as a movement.'

For readers interested in the "inside baseball" of HC, there's a bit of our backstory at the beginning of the interview. Apologies to Nick for never remembering where he went to school and to Sir Ian Kershaw for failing to remember his name.

German Document on Chelmno Gas Van Driver Filling up Gasoline in Lodz

APL 221/30183, p. 11

A document from the Ghetto Lodz administration shows that on 2 September 1944 "Laabs" from the "SS police" refuelled his truck with the licence number "71449" two times with "45 liters" of gasoline at the tank station of the Ghetto Lodz administration. The driver "Laabs" of the "SS police" can be matched to the well known permanent gas van driver of the SS and police Sonderkommando Kulmhof Gustav Laabs (see testimonies in the appendix below). That this vehicle was indeed a homicidal gas van is supported by the fact that its license number of 71449 is close to those of other known gas vans 71457, 71462 and 71463 (see also How the convergence of evidence works: the gas van of Auschwitz, Mattogno and the Activity & Situation Report of Einsatzgruppe B on its Gas Vans and Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes).

Jews Shot because They Were Jews

In response to the brainless denier meme that Jews were only shot in the USSR because they were partisans, Communists, saboteurs or provocateurs (a meme that is antisemitic on its face, because no other group was automatically shot because it was assumed to inherently possess those characteristics), below are a list of quotes from Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Reports [hereafter EMs] which show that being a Jew alone - and for no other reason - was sufficient to get a person shot, regardless of age, class, gender or political history.

German Instigation of Pogroms

A favourite meme of Holocaust deniers is that pogroms were not the responsibility of the Germans. Germar Rudolf even claims here that Jewish deaths from pogroms were not "real Holocaust victims." This article refutes such lies by demonstrating that references to pogroms in the Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Reports [hereafter EMs] almost always show attempts by Germans to instigate them. The success or failure of these attempts varies with the region in which each Einsatzkommando was operating.

The Denial Fossil Faurisson Sounds Like a Broken Record (Again)

After the news that Angela Merkel will receive USHMM's Elie Wiesel award the French denier of the obvious Robert Faurisson couldn't stay silent and had to express his displeasure in an article with the name as long as Pinocchio's nose would be if he were to read any of Faurisson's articles out loud: "Is Angela Merkel Going to Endorse Elie Wiesel’s lies and, Particularly, his lie of the Extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz by Fire and not by Gas?" in which he, predictably, attacks Wiesel as a "false witness":