Mattogno's Distortion of Orders in his Italian Einsatzgruppen Book

An English translation of Carlo Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen study, which had previously appeared in Italian in two parts (1 and 2) has just been translated and is undergoing "author proofing" before being made available as Holocaust Handbook No. 39. However, towards the end of October 2018, Germar Rudolf wrote that "We have submitted a long list of open issues -- including remarks made by the HC Blog -- to the author for his review, and are awaiting his feedback" [see screenshot at the foot of this article]. What are these issues? Many of them are likely to pertain to Roberto's detailed refutation of the Jaeger Report chapter. Some may also relate to Hans' demolition of Mattogno on gas vans. This posting focuses on the Italian text's distortions of German orders, which Mattogno misrepresents because he wishes to convince his readers that the orders were intended to shoot Jews not "as Jews" but because they were assumed by the Germans to be aiding Bolshevism and the partisans (pp.10-11). Given that I have posted previously on Mattogno and Graf's old habits on this theme, it is possible that Rudolf wants Mattogno to address it. The distortions regarding orders can be shown by presenting them in chronological sequence.

SK Lange and Mattogno's Italian Book on the Einsatzgruppen

A few days ago, Germar Rudolf indiscreetly revealed on the Holocaust Handbooks site that he has "submitted a long list of open issues -- including remarks made by the HC blog" to Carlo Mattogno for review for an already translated and edited, but not yet published English edition of his Einsatzgruppen book. I don't want to miss the opportunity to add to this list his (mis)treatment of Sonderkommando Lange, if it's not yet on it. I have already blogged extensively on SK Lange, but I will again roll out some of it in this posting specifically to address Mattogno's Italian edition of his Einsatzgruppen book.

Scrolling through the footnotes (Mattogno, Gli Einsatzgruppen nei territori orientali occupati, parte I, p. 279 - 286), it strikes one right away that his knowledge of literature is marginal, his use of documents selective and his study of testimonial evidence virtually non-existent.

His main source is the more than 30 years old article by Beer, Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden (1987). He does not use in this context or know of the more recent works specifically on the killing of mentally ill people and SK Lange, like 

• Rieß, Die Anfänge der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens in Danzig und Wartheland 1939/40 (1995)

• Alberti, Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Warthegau 1939-1945 (2006)

• Topp et al., Die Provinz Ostpreußen und die nationalsozialistische "Euthanasie" SS-"Aktion Lange" und "Aktion T4", Medizinhistorisches Journal, 43 (2008) 

• Montague, Chelmno and the Holocaust (2012)  [only cited later on]

• Leidinger, Das Schicksal der polnischen Psychiatrie unter deutscher Besatzung im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Psychatrische Praxis, 41 (2014)

• Schwanke, Die Landesheil- und Pflegeanstalt Tiegenhof (2015)

Mattogno pours in some snippets from Gerlach's Kalkulierte Morde and Longerich's Holocaust - not exactly specialist literature on the subject - and some British intercepts of radio signals. But this does not change the overall picture that he is mainly stuck in the 80s, both in terms of literature knowledge and his method, that does not seem to have advanced since then.

His limited knowledge of sources combined with his usual double standards, systematic misinterpretation, destructive approach of dismissing evidence for no real reason without offering any own narrative seems to provide him with the false certainty that he has somehow neutralised the momentum of SK Lange on gas vans and the Holocaust. 

Auschwitz-Birkenau Aerial Photographs

The following is a compilation of published aerial photographs (with close-ups) of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. I have also listed visible features relevant to mass extermination and figures on Jewish mass transports (derived from the so called Glaser list) to those days with aerial photographs of sufficient quality and before the halt of the extermination in October 1944.

In the context of Holocaust denial, it is noteworthy that the known aerial photographs show only few seconds of Birkenau from high altitude on few days in 1944, thereof only two days with excessive mass killings taken place (31 May and 8 July 1944 - as opposed to four other days in June and August with "mild" activity and "only" one or two Jewish transports arriving). At such frequency, the photographs cannot directly depict the actual magnitude of mass killing on a certain day or even over a period. And yet, more or less static features constantly present or only slowly changing over time such as open air incineration area, thick security and camouflage screens and discolouration at the gas introduction openings on the gas chambers' roofs, as well as repeated heavy smoke from an incineration trench located close to the crematorium 5 gas chambers (also belching smoke on Sonderkommando ground photos) provide more than just a glimpse on the extermination machinery.

A useful resource of information on the various photos compiled by the late Harry Mazal can be found here (just some of the scale figures need to be corrected).

Other blog postings related to the Auschwitz-Birkenau air-photos:

The Auschwitz Open Air Incineration Photographs as Evidence for Mass Extermination

Personal Movement in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Compound on 25 August 1944 Aerial Photographs

The Gardens at the Crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau

John Ball's Air Photo Evidence on Auschwitz

Agreements Made Before Operation Barbarossa to Target "Communists and Jews" in the Balkans and Occupied Eastern Poland

A key argument of deniers, such as by Mattogno and Graf here, is that the Germans followed a policy in occupied eastern Poland that only pro-Communist "Soviet Jews were shot" systematically, while many other eastern Jews were killed only "on account of sabotage, anti-German activities, as carriers of diseases, and above all as retaliatory measures for partisan attacks." However, such deniers ignore the fact that agreements secured and transmitted by Heydrich before June 22, 1941 had paved the way for the Wehrmacht to give his forces the freedom to target "Communists and Jews" in the Balkan region and the areas of eastern Poland that the Germans would occupy before reaching the pre-1939 borders of the USSR. The evidence below therefore refutes Mattogno and Graf by showing that the Balkans and occupied eastern Poland, as well as the occupied pre-1939 USSR, were designated as grounds for "racial war" against an "anti-race", not just military or political war.

Germar Rudolf doubles down on John Ball's Babiy Yar lie.

John Ball's blatant lie about Babiy Yar was exposed by me here back in 2006.

Long story short, Ball lied about the place where the shootings took place in the ravine and "analyzed" the wrong area of the aerial photo. Here, once again, is the photo with Ball's picture overlaid. No witness has claimed shootings took place there. Ball deceptively omitted most of the ravine, including the places where the shootings did take place.

Ball's lie was republished under Germar Rudolf's editorship numerous times.

Ball's book is the volume 27 of the "Holocaust Handbooks" series and is already in its 5th "corrected and updated edition".

There's a note:

The first three editions of this book bore John C. Ball as the author of this work. On Jan. 29, 2015, John requested not to use his name for new editions, but allowed us the use all of the photographic and texual material as we see fit.
The first edition appeared in 1992 under the title Air Photo Evidence: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen, Belzec, Babi Yar, Katyn Forest— World War II photos of alleged mass murder camps! Does evidence confirm or dismiss eye witness stories? Were gas chamber marks put on by CIA workers?, self-published by the author, Ball Resource Services Ltd., Delta, BC, Canada. The second edition of January 2015 has the same title as the current one and is a marginally corrected reprint of the first edition with a preface similar to the present one plus a number of footnotes added. The third and fourth editions (January 2015, March 2017) resembled the current one closely, except for some updates, corrections and material added.

Naturally, the lie is still in the book:

Wrong! This location is not alleged to have been used for shootings or cremations.

Fake news! Entirely wrong location.

A blatant lie! "8" is not the location "where between 33,771 and 100,000 bodies were said to have been exhumed and cremated".

Rudolf is well aware of our blog, so he has no excuse whatsoever.

Needless to say, this lie fully discredits not only the hoaxer John Ball (about whose other exploits you can read here, here and here) but also the fraud Germar Rudolf, known for his use of numerous fake PhDs in absence of a real one.

The Gardens at the Crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau

In his contemporary manuscript, Marcel Nadjari, a prisoner of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau, provided the following description of crematorium 2/3 (he was usually employed at the latter):

"It is a big building with a wide chimney and 15 ovens. Below a garden there are two big endless rooms in the basement. The one serves for undressing and the other is the death chamber, where the people enter naked and after filled with about 3000 people, it is closed and they gas them, where they gave up the ghost after 6 to 7 minutes of martyrdom."

(Contemporary Handwritten Letter of Auschwitz Sonderkommando Prisoner Marcel Nadjari Deciphered, my emphasis)

Prussian blue penetration depth.

Many years ago a few article drafts appeared on the late Harry Mazal's website mazal.org. One of them was entitled "Techincal requirements for a gas chamber and some observations on Prussian blue".

It turned out to be a draft of the article quoted by Dr. Richard Green in his devastating rebuttal of the fraudulent Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf. Apparently it was initially to be a part of the collective report responding to Rudolf, though later it was decided that only Dr. Green and Prof. Jan van Pelt would officially respond.

The drafts disappeared from the site some time later, and Mr. Mazal died in 2011. The paper was left unpublished, and it is highly unlikely that it will ever be published. Therefore I decided to post an excerpt from this article that concerns one point about the formation of Prussian blue with several valuable photos.

The excerpt follows. There has been some minimal editing of the references (like picture numbers).

Bila Tserkva, 'Gegenrasse' and the Ideological Roots of the Nazi Murder of Jewish Children

In August 1941, 90 Jewish children in Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, were shot by forces under the ultimate authority of General Field Marshall Walther von Reichenau. When Generalstabsoffizier Helmuth Groscurth attended a meeting to discuss the necessity of killing the children, the Field Commander, Reidl, gave him a justification based purely on ideological [weltanschauliche] grounds [facsimile here, translation here]. The subsequent shooting was described by August Haefner in testimony for the Callsen trial. Reichenau's reply to Groscurth confirmed his permission for these murders, whilst his order of a few weeks later echoed Reidl's emphasis on ideology by stating that "The soldier in the eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon German and racially related nations." Reichenau thus reflected a worldview (Weltanschauung) that the "pitiless extermination of foreign treachery" via a "severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry" was necessary in order to "to liberate the German people once forever from the Asiatic-Jewish danger." An important task for historians is to address the roots of those beliefs and how they differed from the racism directed at most other Nazi victims of mass murder, such as Slavs.

Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) - Part 5 (2)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5 (1)

Part 5 (2)

In this article I continue the presentation of administrative documents relating to mass graves from the extermination of the Jews in Lithuania in 1941, which like in the previous series will be contextualized with the 2nd Jäger Report and other evidence.

The documents presented hereafter are from districts of the GBK’s Panevėžys(Ponewesch), Šiauliai (Schaulen) and Vilnius(Wilna)-Land.

Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) - Part 5 (1)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5 (1)

Part 5 (2)

In the previous articles of this series I refuted Mattogno’s arguments against the authenticity and reliability of the 2nd Jäger Report in the first volume of his work about the Einsatzgruppen.

This article and the next one will be dedicated to presenting and discussing some documentary evidence associated to the mass killings reported by Jäger, which is mostly ignored by Mattogno and largely shown for the first time, as far as I know, in a publication written in the English language.