Dividing the Dead – or not (Part 4)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

The fourth and final part is this series is about how the Soviets addressed the Nazi genocide of the Jews after Nuremberg, and about what the Soviet approach to the particular fate of Jews under Nazi rule might (or not) reveal about the reasons why the Soviets held back the 2nd Jäger Report for almost twenty years after its discovery.

Dividing the Dead – or not (Part 3)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

This article is about the Soviet prosecution’s case at Nuremberg regarding Crimes against Humanity, with a focus on how the Soviet prosecutors addressed the genocide of Europe’s Jews by Nazi Germany.

Dividing the Dead – or not (Part 2)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

In this article, the Soviet prosecution’s case at Nuremberg regarding War Crimes will be addressed, with a focus on how the Soviet prosecutors addressed the genocide of Europe’s Jews by Nazi Germany.

Düsseldorf to Minsk via Malkinia

On 22 November, 1941, an officer named Meurin submitted a report (translation and transcription here) regarding the deportation of Jews from Düsseldorf, Essen and Wuppertal to Minsk. This revealed an original route that included Lodz, Warsaw, Malkinia (near the site of future Treblinka II death camp) and Bialystok, but then noted a detour (due to fears of partisan attack) via Czeremcha. The train stayed in Malkinia for 1.5 hours but there was no mention of any need to delouse these Jews nor to switch trains due to different rail gauges.

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.