Dividing the Dead – or not (Part 1)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

1. Introduction

In an earlier article^[1], I suggested that one of the reasons why the Soviet Union held back until 1963 the report dated 1.12.1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 (the 2nd Jäger Report)^[2], notwithstanding the document’s damning explicitness, was its incompatibility with a Soviet policy against "dividing the dead" when documenting crimes committed by Nazi Germany on the territory of the USSR.

This policy, as characterized in the secondary sources referred to in my earlier article, did not imply concealing the mass murder of Jews on Soviet territory. It did, however, imply presenting it as part and parcel of no-holds-barred, systematic violence directed against the Soviet population in general. Jews were to be seen not as the targets of the Nazis’ most concentrated violence, an extermination program that was a breed apart from the occupiers’ terror in general, but as victims of Nazi mass murder just like all other peoples of the occupied Soviet territories.

This series is about that policy, with a focus on the Soviet prosecution case at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal.

Unz, Roberts, and Irving

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration Treasury official, was dancing tantalizingly close to flat-out Holocaust denial. He's back again, now defending the choice of libertarian activist and one-time California gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz to publish David Irving's Hitler's War on his website, Unz.com, which publishes a variety of libertarian materials, as well as "race realism," anti-Zionist polemics, and other generally far-right materials.

For his own part, Unz is a bit of a cipher. For instance, he is Jewish himself, although we have seen in the cases of Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen, and others that being Jewish isn't always a guarantee against anti-Semitism. For a while now, Unz has drawn suspicion for his willingness to publish blatantly anti-Semitic material, although he has generally been able to defend his editorial judgment on the basis of his libertarian leanings. This orientation has generally led to the comments threads at Unz.com being something of a free for all, as I'd noted in the past. Sergey Romanov has also commented here on Unz's activites in this regard.

Jürgen Graf's lie about the Hungarian Jewish children.

In Jürgen Graf's article "What Happened to the Jews Who Were Deported to Auschwitz But Were Not Registered There?" (in which he incidentally fails to explain what happened to the 320,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and found unfit for work; they disappeared without a trace and since no transit theory can even begin to seriously account for them, it's the death knell  of the Holocaust denial - one of many, actually) we see the following claim:

I am referring in particular to a 217-page report written in early 1945, shortly after the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz. It was written, in German, under the auspices of the Soviets by four former camp inmates, the Jewish physicians Lebovits, Weil, Reich and Bloch. It contains more than a thousand names of Auschwitz prisoners, nearly all of them Jews, with information about each one's age and date of imprisonment. These prisoners had been in the Auschwitz hospital on January 27, 1945, when the Red Army took control of the camp. Among those patients are 97 boys and 83 girls in ages ranging from a few months to 15 years.[note 56] One was a three-year-old Hungarian Jewish boy, J. J. Malek, and another was an eleven-year-old Hungarian Jewish girl, R. M. Salomon.[note 57] The former had arrived at Auschwitz in May 1944, the latter in July of the same year. According to the official "Holocaust" story, these two Jewish children would never have lived to see the year 1945; they would have been gassed immediately upon arrival.
[...]
56. Gossudarstvenny Archiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (Moscow), document 7021-108-23.
57. Gossudarstvenny Archiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (Moscow), document 7021-108-23, pages 181 and 183.

Carlo Mattogno later published the list of names contained in the report.

There we find Jakob Malek (camp number A-7738), a 3 year-old Hungarian Jewish boy who arrived in Auschwitz in May of 1944. An 11 year-old R. M. Salomon who arrived in July of 1944 is nowhere to be found, but a 9 year-old Rozalia Salomon (camp number A-11) who arrived on May 21, 1944, is on the list - we will assume Graf meant her.

What Graf is silent about is that these were so-called Mengele's twins. Indeed, it is obvious already from the report (most of the children listed there were twins): alongside Jakob Malek (A-7738) we see the 3 year-old Elias Malek (A-7737). Alongside Rozalia Salomon (A-11) we see the 9 year-old Sarolta Salomon (A-10). Indeed, Mattogno published another list, specifically of Mengele's twins, and all of these children are on the list.

That is, Graf lied when he wrote that "[a]ccording to the official "Holocaust" story, these two Jewish children would never have lived to see the year 1945; they would have been gassed immediately upon arrival" and did not mention the fact of these children being twins. Being useful for Mengele's "research" pretty much guaranteed them not being gassed on arrival - all in accordance with what Graf calls "the official "Holocaust" story".

Indeed, here is how the selection of Yaakov Malek took place:

In May 1944 the family was sent to Auschwitz. The father Josef disappeared immediately among the masses. The mother and her six children stayed together. Mengele called for twins to leave the line. Shlomo, Yehudit, Eliyahu and Yaakov did not respond but an acquaintance of theirs, who stood nearby, shouted, "They are twins." Mengele approached and the mother pointed out the twins. Two pairs of twins in one family was an exceptional occurrence. The two sets of twins were taken for Mengele's experiments and survived.

Jürgen Graf's reputation as a notorious liar is thus once again confirmed.

Pia Kahn Throws the Gauntlet

Just a quick note to say that, today at the cesspit, CODOH Forum member Pia Kahn wrote:

Occasionally, I try to talk with the people from the holocaustcontroversies blog because they post lots of article trying to refute the revisionists However, they are not capable of arguing rationally. When you have them cornered they start ad hominem attacks, shifting the goal past, twisting words, lying, 4 letter words,... Eventually, they block me from posting on their blog although I do not respond in kind. 

I'm not sure I'm aware of any attempt by Pia Kahn to engage us at this blog. Therefore, I invite her to appear on this thread and have her say.

Mattogno’s Marijampolė Mass Graves Controversy

One of the largest massacres committed in German-occupied Lithuania in 1941 took place near the city of Marijampolė. The victims were the following, as recorded in the report dated 1.12.1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 (the 2nd Jäger Report)^[1], under the date 1 September 1941:

Mariampole

1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses 1,404 Jewish children, 109 mentally ill, 1 fem. German national who was married to a Jew, 1 fem. Russian

Techniques of Neutralization: Acknowledging Shootings but Denying Blame

The term Techniques of Neutralization was devised by Sykes and Matza in 1957 (see here) to analyze how people suppress guilt by rationalizing their actions in ways that deny or transfer blame. This posting applies their five categories to the excuses used by the Nazis and their denier apologists to evade any guilt for the shootings of Jews they carried out in the USSR.

The Final Solution and the German Press: 2. Winter 1941-1942

Continued from Part 1.

On November 16, Goebbels wrote a piece for Das Reich which stated that "The Jews are receiving a penalty that is certainly hard, but more than deserved. World Jewry erred in adding up the forces available to it for this war, and now is gradually experiencing the destruction that it planned for us, and would have carried out without a second thought if it had possessed the ability. It is perishing according its own law: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."[1]

Stefan Molyneux Is Holocaust Denier-Adjacent

You probably missed, but there was a bit of a dust-up a couple of days ago on Twitter. What happened was that, about a month ago, New Atheist Sam Harris hosted Christian Picciolini on his podcast. Picciolini is a former leader of the Hammerskins skinhead group who reformed several years ago and now does the lecture circuit talking about how to prevent/undo the damage done by such groups. During the Q&A section of the podcast, Picciolini stated his belief that Stefan Molyneux, the very popular Irish-Canadian YouTube personality (on who much more here), is a Holocaust denier. Now, weeks later, Harris announced that he had expunged all mention of Molyneux from his podcast, apparently because Molyneux lodged a complaint with him. For his own part, Picciolini took to Twitter to complain and offered some evidence.

So what's the deal here? Is Stefan Molyneux a Holocaust denier?

No, but he is Holocaust denier-adjacent.

The Final Solution and the German Press: 1. September-October 1941

On September 10-12, 1941, several German language newspapers across Nazi-occupied Europe announced that Stalin was going to exterminate the Volga Germans after deporting them to Siberia. This announcement played an important role in making loyal Nazis more willing to contemplate a fatal deportation of Jews, especially when viewed as a justifiable form of vengeance and as a fulfillment of Hitler's Reichstag prophecy of January 30, 1939, that a world war would result in the extermination of Jews. The following article analyzes that process with links to primary sources.

Paul Craig Roberts Crosses the Line

If you've never heard of Paul Craig Roberts, don't feel bad. As a public figure, he seems to have hit his high water mark during the Reagan Adminstration as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, where he stridently defended supply-side economic policy. Since 2001, he has been a rather loud voice among the 9/11 truth movement, which dovetails nicely with his Buchanan-esque paleoconservative views of Israel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his writings over the last decade or so have walked a very fine line between perhaps overly vehement but otherwise justifiable attacks on Israel's role in American foreign policy to overtly anti-Semitic rhetoric. I want to be clear before continuing that I don't know whether Roberts is an anti-Semite and am not saying that he is. But with his latest column, he has crossed over a divide -- whether he knows it or not -- into plain Holocaust denial. And for this, he needs to answer.