Dirlewanger to an SS Investigator on Poisoning of Jews

In 1942, the SS Main Office "investigated" charges launched by the SD and the SS and Police court Cracow against Oskar Dirlewanger, the commander of the infamous SS penal unit Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, which included racial defilement, abuse of his own men, extortion, illegal hunting, illegal confiscations, illegal arrests and illegal killings in the Generalgouverment. 

During his interrogation of 1 September 1942, Dirlewanger explained to the SS court martial officer (Gerichtsoffizier) that the SD could not cope with the killing of the Jews caught violating Nazi regulations and that therefore in November 1941, the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin district Odilo Globocnik ordered they are to be handed over to Dirlewanger for execution. Initially, the Jews were just shot, but later they had to undress in a cellar under the pretense vaccination against typhus and were killed by injection of the poison strychnine. Their gold teeth were broken out to be used for the SS dental station and the clothes were provided to Russian POWs.

It is noteworthy that Dirlewanger tried within his sphere of influence and on a small scale what were to be basic elements of large scale Nazi mass extermination sites: disguise, poison and robbing of dead people.

Debunking the YouTube denial.

This post will be updated from time to time with short debunkings of the more or less popular denier videos from YouTube.

A (not so) short debunking of the "Holocaust Deprogramming Course".

The archived website.

The first sentence (after the title) is a lie:

"Free yourself from a lifetime of Holo-brainwashing about “Six Million” Jews “gassed” in “Gas Chambers Disguised as Shower Rooms”"

The claim is not that 6 million Jews were gassed. Only about a half or so of all Holocaust victims were gassed, the rest were murdered through mass shootings, starvation, death marches and so on.

There. We are done. The author of the site did not even bother to learn the basic claim that he has set out to debunk. He doesn't have the slightest clue. Dismissed.

But just for fun, let's go further.

"Is genocide necessarily evil?"

Someone on Quora asked this question.

My answer is rendered below.

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.