How many people were killed at Ponary?

In the community Rudamina, in the small forest Paneriai^[1],near the railway station of Paneriai, a neighborhood of Vilnius, the largest killing site in Lithuania during its occupation by Nazi Germany was located. Known as Ponary to Poles and as Paneriai to Lithuanians^[2],the place was mainly used for killing Jews from the Vilna Ghetto, but Jews from other places, non-Jewish civilians and Soviet prisoners of war were also shot there. In this article the Polish name Ponary will be used.

Wehrmacht Involvement in Extermination Actions in the Crimea

The Wehrmacht's role in the extermination of Jews in Crimea can be summarized in three forms of evidence. Firstly, Manstein gave an order on November 20, 1941, that was clearly incendiary, filled with biological racism and indicating a willingness to condone mass killing on racial grounds. Secondly, the fourteen command HQ[1]subordinated to Korueck 553 (11th Army Rear Army Command) issued killing reports that showed a willingness not just to hand over Jews to the SD but also to kill them using their own military police. Thirdly, documents and testimonies describe the involvement of the command HQ and their soldiers in providing transport and manpower to the Einsatzkommandos.

What Did Reginald Paget Deny and Accept?

Manstein's defence attorney Reginald Paget has been used by deniers, such as Mattogno and Graf here, to support their claim that there was no extermination policy in the Crimea. Below I will show that Paget's opening speech to the Manstein trial regarding extermination policy was far less convenient to modern deniers than they assume. On the one hand, Manstein supported denial to the extent of claiming that killing numbers in Operational Situation Reports were massively exaggerated and that the SD did not have the manpower or time to carry out that volume of killing. He also denied that the Wehrmacht shot Jews because they were Jews rather than because of partisan warfare. On the other hand, however, Paget accepted that the SD had received "an assignment to exterminate the Jews" and that "resettlement" was a camouflage term for execution.

Rubin and Schwanitz can't tell Ukraine from East Prussia.

While researching the topic of the Mufti's collaboration with the Nazis I stumbled upon a really embarrassing series of mistakes in Barry Rubin's and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz's Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Yale University Press, 2014).

The authors zealously struggle to pin as many crimes on the Mufti (surely an execrable Nazi collaborator) as they can get away with. One example would be the visit of an Arab delegation to Sachsenhausen in the summer of 1942, which consisted of 3 of al-Kailani's attendants and 1 attendant of the Mufti (for the details of the visit see the authors' archival references or the Nuremberg document NG-5446).

The authors even name their first chapter "From Station Z to Jerusalem", to imply that this delegation also visited the crematorium called "Station Z", which contained the shooting equipment. They also claim that at this time the gas chambers (note plural) "had just  been installed" (p. 2; so they are not talking about gas vans) in the Station Z. Their source is Morsch's and Ley's book, but on p. 4 of that same book they could have read that the small gas chamber (one; not "gas chambers") was actually installed in the crematorium only in 1943, long after the visit. So much for the authors' use of source and general historical knowledge.

Worse, there's zero evidence that the delegation was anywhere near the Station Z or even knew about it. The authors themselves list the places in the camp visited by the group: "barracks, eating halls, washrooms, kitchens, and dispensary" (p. 9). What's missing from the list? Right. The crematorium. Which, due to the extremely sensitive nature of the whole affair, would have been mentioned by the RSHA man who told the Mufti's German handler Grobba about the visit. So not only there is no evidence that the group visited the Station Z, there's strong evidence against such a visit. Rubin and Schwanitz ignore this, of course, claiming all the way that Station Z was the reason for the visit.

They further write: "whether or not he personally visited the death camp on that occasion, the grand mufti..." - as if there was any suggestion at all that he visited the camp, as if the question existed in the first place and was somehow open. It isn't. The Mufti did not visit Sachsenhausen, his attendant did.

Finally, the writers correctly mention the whole affair caused a scandal in the German Foreign Office and that the "SS" (actually RSHA) promised not to make any tours for Arabs in the future. Despite this strong evidence that any such further visits were thus extremely improbable, Rubin and Schwanitz try to show the plausibility of the Mufti having visited not mere concentration camps, but some outright extermination camps including Auschwitz (even though there is no credible evidence of such a visit). And so they write on p. 164:

Did Wisliceny claim that the Mufti visited Auschwitz and was one of the initiators of the Final Solution?

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was without a doubt a vicious Nazi collaborator. On 28.11.1941 he met with Hitler who personally promised the following to him:

Germany’s goal would then be solely the extermination of the Jewry living in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. In that hour the Mufti would be the most competent spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operation secretly prepared by him.

Das deutsche Ziel würde dann lediglich die Vernichtung des im arabischen Raum unter der Protektion der britischen Macht lebenden Judentums sein. In dieser Stunde würde dann auch der Mufti der berufenste Sprecher der arabischen Welt sein. Es würde ihm obliegen, die von ihm insgeheim vorbereitete arabische Aktion auszulösen.

In 1943 he was trying to block the transfer of 4000 Jewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine, suggesting to Ribbentrop they should be sent to Poland instead. In 1944 he was calling onto Arabs to "kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This serves your honor, God is with you".

According to his own memoir (published in Damascus) he was privy to the information about the extermination of Jews. He tells about a meeting with Himmler in the summer of 1943 during which he was told by the latter:

up to now we have exterminated around three million of them.

In the memoir the Mufti feigns surprise at this revelation. He admits though:

Their losses in the course of the Second World War represented more than thirty percent of the total number of their people...

So at least he was not a Holocaust denier. Now, all this aside, let's look at some widespread claims about the Mufti.

Evidence of Extermination in Pyatigorsk, North Caucacus

Back in 2011, Roberto included this image of a child called Svetlana in his excellent article The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR (1). By comparing the image with this Yad Vashem page, I was able to establish that her full name was Svetlana Rudinskaya, she was killed on December 31, 1942 (or the following day), at the Mashuk Mountain overlooking Pyatigorsk in Stavropol Krai of the North Caucacus, and her body was exhumed on January 13, 1943.

The killing of the Jews of Pyatigorsk began on September 6-8, 1941, at the glass factory of Mineralnye Vody, according to the testimony of Pfeifer at his Soviet trial in 1968, after Jews from Essentuki and Zheleznovosk had been killed on September 2-5 and before Kislovodosk Jews were killed on September 9 (source: The Complete Black Book of Soviet Jewry). This was followed in October by murders in gas vans, according to testimonies here. The final action of the New Year was just prior to the German retreat and seems to have targeted professionals.

How the Fate of the Krymchaks Refutes Mattogno

Mattogno claims repeatedly that Soviet Jews were shot for security reasons rather than on racial grounds. In Treblinka, for example, he and Graf paraphrased Mayer's formulation to claim that "the massacres of the eastern Jews was not part of a comprehensive plan of extermination, but occurred as the result of the inexorable radicalization of the war in the east and because the eastern Jews were classified by the SS as carriers of Bolshevism." However, Kiril Feferman's work has shown how German killing policies for Krymchaks directly reflected changes in racial policy. To demonstrate this, I will discuss two documents in my possession. Feferman originally cited these documents from different archives than those from which my copies are sourced, so the references below are mine, not his.

Killing of Jews and Krymchaks in Karasubazar, Crimea

A report by Ortskommandantur II/937 on February 14, 1942, included a survey showing that, of 8,789 people counted in Karasubazar (today Bilohirsk), only one was a Jew and one a Krymchak (NOKW-1688, BArch B 162/657, p.76). Other documents show how the killing of the rest had occurred in stages.

On December 14, 1941, Ortskommandantur Karasubasar Stab Wachbatl. (B) 49 had reported that 76 Jewish men, women (referred to as "Weiber") and children had been taken to a field four days previously and not seen again (BArch B 162/657, p.163); a Soviet Commission report from 1944 shown here collected testimonies about the shooting of the adult Jews and poisoning of the children; killings at this location were also noted in the West German indictment against Johannes Schlupper, 1971. A Soviet testimony from 1973 is shown here. On January 2, 1942, EM 150 recorded Karasubazar as one of the locations in western Crimea that was "free of Jews" due to 17,645 having been liquidated in the region between November 16 and December 15, 1941.

The Krymchaks (numbering 468) were killed in two gas vans on January 17-18, 1942, according to the testimonies given here and here.

Georg Leibbrandt and the Killing of Jews in the USSR: A Case Study of Mattogno's Methods

Georg Leibbrandt was one of two members of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO) who attended the Wannsee conference. Mattogno has discussed him on numerous occasions, most recently in the Italian edition of volume 1 of his forthcoming Einsatzgruppen Handbook where Mattogno cites him seven times, six of which are duplicated from his response of 2013 to our White Paper. The one new reference in the Italian edition is the false claim, as shown below, that Leibbrandt regarded Soviet Jews as only a political and partisan enemy rather than a race that had to be eliminated on biological grounds. The six recycled references entail a misrepresentation of Leibbrandt's correspondence with Hinrich Lohse of the Reichskommissariat Ostland in the Autumn of 1941 as supporting resettlement of Jews eastwards. An analysis of Leibbrandt's involvement in anti-Jewish policy can therefore form a useful case study of how Mattogno manipulates sources on German perpetrators.

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents - Farewell (1943)

Mass Killing Unit of Warthegau

Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents:

 Euthanasia 1940/41

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents:

Part I: Origin and Foundation

Part II: The Extermination of 100,000 Jews

Part III: Body Disposal (Appendix)

Part IV: Pabianice Sorting Camp

Part V: Funding

Part VI: The Polish Working Detail

Part VII: Motor Pool and Fuel (Appendix)

Part VIII: Drinks and Tobacco (With Excursus on the Extermination of the Sinti and Roma)

Part IX: Farewell (1943)

Until 31 December 1942, the Sonderkommando Kulmhof had systematically murdered about 4,400 Sinti and Roma and 145,301 Jews  (Document 234). The Jews of the Warthegau had been wiped out except for the "labour ghetto" in Litzmannstadt and Jews loaned to outside work-sites. Since life as a Sonderkommando member was comparable pleasant and beneficial - with bonus payments, free tabacco and alcohol, no front duty, absence of military discipline, access to cheap goods from the rich warehouses of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto Administration - and facing the prospect of front-line service, the Kulmhof commandant Hans Bothmann seemed to have stretched the dismantling and closing of the camp over the whole Winter 1942/43. ^[1]