What's There to Hide? Camouflage and Secrecy of Nazi Extermination Sites

Contemporary German documents referring to the fate of Jews considered unfit for forced labour often do so in a conspicuously vague way. Instead of spelling out actual destinations or camps, general phrases like "eastwards" and "Russian East" were employed.

Elsewhere I've pointed out how the killing of Poles and mentally ill people in 1940 in East-Prussia was disguised by the Nazis. For "camouflaging" the "liquidation" of members of the Polish intelligentsia in the camp of Soldau, "the Poles in question had to sign a declaration of the content that they agreed with their deportation to the Generalgouvernement". The "mentally ill prisoners...liquidated by a special commando" were "evacuated" and "placed somewhere else" in SS correspondence.

The concept to camouflage murder with none or vague destinations was later also implemented for disguising the extermination of the Jews. The deception could work as it had a true core. The Jews had to gather in the towns and villages and were brought away. For the population and authorities parts of the operation could have appeared more or less like a real resettlement. Except that they never heard anything of those "resettled" again, as the "resettlers" were executed, buried and incinerated at the next extermination site.

Mattogno's Distortions on the Crimea

Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen Handbook (here) has a section on the Crimea (pp.673-681) that illustrates Mattogno's ignorance of context and documentation. Mattogno assumes that all killings would be documented in detail by the Operational Situation Reports and is apparently unaware that the Wehrmacht issued its own killing reports due to the fact that the fourteen command HQ subordinated to Korueck 553 (11th Army Rear Army Command) did not just hand over Jews to the SD but also killed them using their own military police. He also, as in the rest of the book, ignores the true ideological context, in which Jews were killed as Jews, as shown by the fact that the killings included Krymchaks, despite the fact that they were "passive towards Bolshevism", as I discussed here. Mattogno's poor sourcing is shown by the fact that he totally overlooks the documentation from the Manstein trial, which is online at Yad Vashem. The sources shown here and in the links below demonstrate how much this weakens Mattogno's authority on the region, especially in the following ways:

1) He ignores the racial component of Manstein's order of November 20, 1941.
2) He seems to be unaware that the Wehrmacht had procedures to kill many Jews locally themselves rather than handing them over to the SD
3) He continues to rely on Paget's false assumption that all the killings in Simferopol were done on one day (November 16, 1941) despite the sources showing how most of the killings were delayed until late November and early December.

4) Mattogno ignores the report by Seibert of April 16, 1942 that the Crimea was "freed of Jews" despite its prominence in the NMT judgment against him.
5) He cannot adequately explain three cases where "resettled" was crossed out in a document and substituted by "executed."
6) He ignores the Nuremberg document of 30.6.42 (NOKW-1819) stating that Kersch was "free of Jews."
7) He ignores the evidence concerning Eggebrecht, which is online.
8) He ignores Paget's concessions, which I documented here.

[Post amended on December 12, 2018, to remove duplications from previous posts and replace them with links to the original posts]

A new document mentioning "special cellars" (Sonderkeller) in the crematoria 2 and 3 at Birkenau.

Dr. Pavel Polian has kindly provided us with several documents from a collection residing in the Military-Medical Museum (Voyenno-Meditsinskiy Muzej) in Saint-Petersburg, Russia.

One of the documents is important for confirming the chronology of the decision to install gas chambers in the cellars of the Birkenau crematoria II and III.

We will provide a short historical introduction as well as an analysis of the Holocaust deniers' take on the issue

1. Introduction to the "special cellar" issue.

We know that the first two Birkenau crematoria (II and III) were initially planned as "normal" hygienic installations. Their morgues were began to be intended as gas chambers some time in 1942* and as undressing rooms some time in 1943.

Germar Rudolf’s foreword to Mattogno’s Einzatzgruppen book

The English translation of Mattogno’s Einsatzgruppen opus, which bears the title The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories. Genesis, Missions and Actions and has already been addressed in several HC articles, has finally been published.

Towards the end of October, as mentioned in this article, 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". However, there seems to have been no such feedback, or then it was limited to excuses for not addressing that long list of open issues, or then Rudolf changed his mind.

Either possibility is in line with the final part of Rudolf’s foreword to Mattogno’s book, which will be addressed in this article. Said foreword is on pp. 11-22 of the book, and the part referring to the "remarks made by the HC Blog" is on pp. 21 and 22.

Some Initial Observations on Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen Handbook

Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen study, which we have already addressed in its Italian version, has just been issued as Holocaust Handbook, Volume 39 in an English translation. Several members of the HC team will be posting their observations about this text on this blog shortly. My initial observations constitute seven parts, presented below.

1) Flawed Logic

Mattogno's key argument regarding German actions in the USSR is that Soviet Jews were killed because they were perceived by the Germans to be the "architects and supporters of Bolshevism" rather than because they were Jews (p.126). However, this is a "begging the question" fallacy because it does not acknowledge how this perception was connected to a racist worldview in which, as I showed here and here, the Jews were considered to be a Gegenrasse. Mattogno omits, for example, Hitler's message to the troops of October 2, 1941, in which both Communism and American plutocracy were blamed on "Jews and Jews alone." Given that the evidence clearly shows the perpetrators embracing this worldview, it is inescapable that Jews were killed "as Jews", as a perceived world-historical racial enemy. Mattogno simply feigns blindness to this racist, antisemitic framework of Nazi policy.

Laura Loomer Makes Fool of Self, Defames Muslims, Doesn't Know History

If you’re a seasoned kook-watcher like myself, you probably saw Laura Loomer’s protest at the Twitter headquarters last week, at which she chained herself to only one of the two front doors and wore a yellow star of David (she’s Jewish) to protest her unfair treatment by Twitter. Some Jews (myself included) took offense at this and expressed our opinion about it. But she really added insult to injury when she granted an interview to Stefan Molyneux to hash out her complaints.

Bunker 2 Extermination Site in Auschwitz-Birkenau in Contemporary Photographs

The Auschwitz State Museum has published a 26-page booklet dedicated to Bunker 2 in Auschwitz-Birkenau (Bartosik & Martyniak, "Biały domek". Historia zagłady w bunkrze II, 2017). As already suggested by the front cover, the gassing facility known as Bunker 2 (in some accounts also Bunker 5) has been spotted on a photograph taken by the SS - AFAIK its only appearance in a contemporary ground photograph (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Construction site in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1943 (Yad Vashem Archives, Photo Archives, Album FA157/344, Item 66393)

Germar Rudolf's fraudulent treatment of the Balard shooting range footage.

In the mockumentary "Probing the Holocaust", the transcript of which is available here, Germar Rudolf presents the footage of the Balard shooting range in order to "prove" that the Allies were engaged in an outright Holocaust-related fraud.

The Balard shooting range was built in 1938 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, at the boulevard Victor in the XVth arrondissement of Paris for training police offcers. It was demolished in 1964. During the Nazi occupation it served as a place of torture and executions.

In his mockumentary Rudolf brings up the postwar footage of the shooting range during his segment on the gas chamber of Dachau (which will be dealt with at a later date). He tries to prove that the footage proves that the Allied Psychological Warfare divisions were faking evidence of Nazi atrocities, and thus wants to dismiss the Dachau gas chamber as another such fake.

Let's take a look at his arguments.

Mattogno's Major Problem with a Gas Van Document

Among the contemporary German documents on homicidal gas vans is a letter from Walther Rauff to the Criminal Technical Institute at the Reich Criminal Police Office of 26 March 1942 on "special wagons" and "gas bottles with carbon monoxide". Since the document challenges a core belief of Holocaust denial of no Nazi homicidal gas-chambers, it had to be declared dubious or insinuated forged by leading deniers (debunked in Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Van: Part V: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute with updates 1, 2, 3 and specifically on Mattogno here).

One of the arguments: the head of the Security Police motor pool Friedrich Pradel is referred to as "Major" in the letter, allegedly a false rank. Recap what Santiago Alvarez and Carlo Mattogno - one parroting the other - claimed on the issue:

Alvarez, The Gas Vans (September 2011), p.298:

Mattogno, Inside the Gas Chambers, 1st edition (June 2014), p. 146 and 2nd edition (October 2016), p. 145:

Bunkers, dugouts, Mattogno's honesty.

In "Carlo Mattogno, the failed Dragon-slayer" I wrote in regard to Mattogno's claim that the term "Bunkers" (in relation to the first two extermination installations in Birkenau, Bunker 1 and Bunker 2) was invented by the Poles and forced on Hoess:

The problem for Mattogno is that Hoess did mention the term "Bunker" before he was transferred to Poland. Here's a quote from the joint interrogation of Otto Moll and Rudolf Hoess at Nuremberg on 16 April 1946, by Lieut.-Colonel Smith W. Brookhart, as published in R. Overy, Interrogations. The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945, 2001, p. 394:

Q. How does that figure strike you, Hoess?
A. It is impossible for him to know the exact figures, but they appear to me to be much too small as far as I can remember today. The people buried in the two big mass graves of the so-called dugouts one and two, amounted to 106,000 or 107,000 people.
[...]
Q. Hoess, what do you think would be the correct figures?
A. Moll, in my opinion, cannot possibly have any idea of the number of killings in the dugouts where he was working and responsible. At any rate, they were far, far too low - that is, Moll's figure.

Obviously "dugouts one and two" are Bunkers 1 and 2, and the translator was clueless about what Hoess meant. And why would that be if there was such a grand conspiracy? So much for Mattogno's claim about Hoess.

In his response Mattogno characterized my explanation as follows:

He argues that Rudolf Hoess used the term "Bunker" before his extradition to Poland (contrary to what I said) and cites an interrogation of the former commandant of Auschwitz on April 16, 1946 where, however, the term "Bunker" does not appear but rather "dugouts one and two". Romanov said: "Obviously "dugouts one and two" are Bunkers 1 and 2, and the translator was clueless about what Hoess meant." The explanation is quite feeble. The fact is that the text does not mention the term "Bunker", and here we are speaking precisely about terminology.
During the interrogation of 1 April 1946 Hoess spoke of "two old farms", and on 11 March 1946 of "two old farmbuildings". These terms correspond to the German Bauernhäuse, so that the term "dugouts" is explained more by an inappropriate translation of Bauerhaus than that of "Bunker".

In my response I explained, citing dictionaries:

"Dugout" is one of the direct English translations of the German term "Bunker". Indeed, the very English word "bunker" in the military sense of "dugout" came from German [...] Hence, in context, it is obvious that originally Höss used the term "Bunker" which for a native English speaker made sense as a dugout.

Lo and behold: in his subsequent book Commandant of Auschwitz - Rudolf Höss, His Torture and His Forced Confessions (Nov. 2017, p. 227) Mattogno adopts my "quite feeble" explanation without any further ado!

Most likely, Höss had used the term “bunker” earlier on April 16, 1946, when he spoke about “dugouts” 1 and 2 [...] The term in question, “dugout,” is in fact the English equivalent of the German word “Bunker,” whose primary meaning is “concrete shelter” (“betonierter Schutzraum”; Brockhaus…, p. 86), such as a fortress or an air-raid shelter.

No acknowledgment of his previous conspiracy theory about Poles forcing the term on Hoess (he concocts an entirely new one instead, which is even less convincing) and no acknowledgment that he was wrong about my explanation being "quite feeble" either.

Carlo has shown his true face again.