Mattogno on Riga, Part Three: Hierarchies Are Hard

Having addressed Mattogno’s butchering of the Keine Liquidierung phone note and ignorance of points like basic meteorology, geography, and arithmetic, we move in this post to discussing how Mattogno addresses the aftermath of the shooting of a thousand Reich Jews in Riga on 30 November 1941. The “orthodox” history has it that, Lange having lodged a complaint about this shooting to RSHA and thus to Himmler, Himmler issued the orders the following day regarding the ongoing disposition of Reich Jews arriving in Riga and Minsk and summoned Jeckeln on 4 December to discuss events.

Mattogno’s first point of contention here regards why Jeckeln’s shooting of Reich Jews on 30 November should warrant the attention of Heydrich and Himmler, but the shooting of Reich Jews in Kaunas on 25 and 29 November by Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando would not; he writes (p. 217), “Therefore, as Himmler did with Jeckeln, the SS should also have summoned Jäger for a reprimand.” Again, on its face, this seems like a reasonable argument. However, there are a few key differences between the cases that Mattogno does not acknowledge.

First, there was no conflict of interest or “turf war” in Kaunas as there was in Riga. After all, Lange did not raise the issue of Reich Jews in Riga being shot because he was particularly concerned with their lives. Rather, he seems to have been motivated by the need to apportion some Jews to work detail and, perhaps as importantly, the fear that his prerogative to manage the arrival and treatment of Reich Jews in Riga, which he had been assigned as a member of the SD, would be taken over by Jeckeln. Also, it’s worth noting that it was Lange who had routed the Reich Jews shot in Kaunas to that city in the first place; therefore, if anyone would have raised an alarm, it would have been he.

Second, there is again the matter of geography – Riga is not Kaunas, and more importantly, the people stationed in each city were different. Jäger’s immediate superior, Stahlecker, was stationed in Riga; in contrast, Jeckeln, as an HSSPF, had Himmler as his immediate superior. Therefore, while Stahlecker, like Lange, could have taken issue with Jäger’s shooting of Reich Jews five days and one day earlier and some reprimand given, that they were in different cities made such a scenario less likely to have yet emerged, particularly while occurring in the context of the Jews of the Kaunas Ghetto being shot at the same time. Complicating matters is that, as I pointed out in my article on the Keine Liquidierung note, it seems fairly clear that Stahlecker wasn’t even in Riga on the dates in question. Otherwise, as Finnberg pointed out in his testimony, Lange would have brought his complaint directly to Stahlecker.

Mattogno pulls something similar in discussing the dispute that arose between Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar for Ostland, and the SS regarding the need to keep Jews alive for labor. Noting that Jeckeln claimed to have been ordered by Himmler to exterminate the Jews in the Riga Ghetto on 10 or 11 November, Mattogno points to a document dated 20 November from the Generalkommissar for Latvia, Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, commenting on labor assignments for ghetto Jews. Clearly, if the Jews of the ghetto were to be exterminated, Drechsler’s document makes no sense. Mattogno writes (p. 225), “Can one seriously believe that the Generalkommisar in Riga, who issued these orders, had never heard of Himmler’s alleged extermination order?”

Well, frankly, yes. Drechsler’s immediate superior was Lohse, who in turn reported directly to Alfred Rosenberg as Minister for the Eastern Territories – the civilian occupation regime. Jeckeln, as noted, reported directly to Himmler. Since the dispute between Lohse and the SS was ongoing, there is no reason to think Drechsler would not have begun planning to deploy the Riga Ghetto Jews for labor, particularly since, when he wrote the document in question, the Jews in the ghetto were still alive.    

A key thing to point out here is that there are two possibilities for what Mattogno has done in these cases. Either Mattogno doesn’t know or understand the differences in hierarchies between the SD, on the one hand, and the SS and Police Leaders, on the other, or between the SS hierarchy in the east and that of the civilian administration, or he’s deliberately obfuscating. The man has written several books on the topic of Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity, so the odds favor the latter, although I suppose the former is possible.

The next and last part of this series will offer some final observations on how Mattogno has treated this topic. Spoiler alert: He has done so badly.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Two: Phone Calls in Riga, Prague, and Berlin

Picking up where I left off in my last post, Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the mass shooting of Latvian Jews, as well as a thousand newly arrived Reich Jews, on 30 November 1941 is riddled with errors and lapses in logic. After briefly remarking on the discrepancy between the actual date of the shooting and the date as reported in Stahlecker’s famous report of the following year (“in early December”), Mattogno writes (p. 216), “The exact date is important because the shooting of the Jewish transport early in the morning depended precisely on the large number of persons who were to be killed during the day. This has its logic, but if 45 minutes (from 8:15 to 9:00 AM) was time enough to kill 1,000 persons (according to the verdict in the Riga Trial), then why did it require more than seven hours to kill 4,000 people? At Riga, in fact, the sun only came up at 8:34 AM on 30 November, and it set at 3:50 PM.”

Mattogno on the Killing of 4,273 Children in Kaunas [Kovno]

The second Jaeger Report stated that, on October 29, 1941, a total of 9,200 Jews were killed in Kaunas [Kovno] consisting of:

2,007 Jews, 2,920 Jewesses, 4,273 Jewish children (mopping up ghetto of superfluous Jews)

Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen Handbook (here p.211) entertains the possibility that these Jews may have been shot in order to make room for five transports due to arrive from the Reich, despite the fact that Jaeger also reports those Jews as having been shot. Mattogno's suggestion would mean that 4,273 Lithuanian Jewish children were shot in order to accommodate transports that (according to Jaeger) only contained 327 children (175 on 25.11 and 152 on 29.11). Mattogno does not acknowledge the significance of the fact that Jaeger sarcastically refers to the Reich Jews as "resettlers" and that he correctly identifies the cities of origin. He is of course refuted by the way in which the selection for the shooting was carried out and the fact that diaries (most notably Tory), witnesses, trials and other sources never identify deported Reich Jews as being in the Kaunas ghetto. However, following Roberto's refutation here (at footnote 129), Mattogno seems to have abandoned his argument in the Italian edition concerning the transfer of Jews from Kaunas to Riga in early February 1942, as it does not appear in the English translation. Rudolf does not acknowledge this deletion in his foreword but instead chooses to imply that no such changes were made in response to criticisms made on this blog.

Moreover, Mattogno's underlying purpose of trying to show that the Nazis allowed Reich Jews to be resettled while shooting Soviet Jews is undermined by his own citation (p.210) of the report from the East of July 3, 1942, stating that Reich Jews deported to Riga the previous winter were "covered by the general anti-Jewish measures in effect in the East." There was thus a "general" policy covering Jews of all national origins, in accordance with Nazi racial constructs that regarded all Jews as a Gegenrasse. All these Jews were eventually meant to die after their usefulness as labour expired, as Lohse made clear on December 2, 1941.

Mattogno on Riga, Part One: Keine Liquidierung Revisited

With my blogmates already having responded to parts of Carlo Mattogno’s magnum opus on the Einsatzgruppen, I decided to have a look at the ten pages Mattogno dedicates to the killings in the fall of 1941 in Riga – a topic I’ve had occasion to look at very closely over the last couple of years. I put together some of the theories about the famous Keine Liquidierung note a few years back; for his part, Mattogno seems to have stuck with some of the less compelling explanations.

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.