Tales of Junk Demography: How Sanning Invented 100,000 European Jews in Morocco

In Chapter Seven dealing with post-war Jewish migration, Sanning tries to convince his readers that part of the Oriental Jews who came to Israel during the first two decades after its declaration of independence were, in fact, European Jews. Among them, allegedly 100,000 out of 252,642 Moroccan olims.

To support his assertion, he cited the results of 1936 French Moroccan census, which found 161,000 Jews, then implied a natural increase of 1 percent per a year and stated Moroccan Jewish population was 50,000 in 1970. This would allow the native Moroccan Jewish community to give Israel only 150,000 new souls, by 100,000 less than actually arrived. The self-appointed revisionist demographer concluded the only explanation is the mass resettlement of 100,000 European Jews in Moroccan territory during the war or shortly after (Walter Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, p. 164).

Note: In the case of France, Sanning assumed totally 170,000 North African Jewish newcomers, 110,000 from Algeria and 60,000 from Tunisia (ibid., p. 169).

Sanning's calculation is, of course, wrong.

The results of the 1936 census can't be considered complete, as Robert Attal wrote in 1963:

"We have to note, however, that in Morocco, only the results of 1947 and later years are of use, the data from the censuses of earlier years being incomplete because of the imperfect control exercised over certain regions and because of other technical reasons; the census enumerators could not without risk make individual contact with the population of insubordinate areas, and the administration had to content itself with estimates of Muslim and Jewish populations."

(Robert Attal, 'The Statistics of North African Jewry', in: Morris Ginsberg (ed.), The Jewish Journal of Sociology, 1963, Vol. 5, p. 29)

The 1947 census counted 203,839 Jews of Moroccan nationality (Ibid., p. 34).

Both the 1936 and the 1947 census still didn't cover Spanish Morocco and Tangier, where 28,762 Jews lived in 1945, fewer than 3,000 of them were wartime refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. 

A natural increase of 1 percent per a year in the time period in question is crudely underestimated. With median age of 18 years in 1960, Moroccan Jews were demographically like the general population  (Usiel Oskar Schmelz, Jewish Population Studies, 1961-1968, p. 39; Victor Malka, 'Morocco', in: American Jewish Year Book, 1963, Vol. 64, p. 400). Annual natural increase of Moroccan population ranged between 2.5 and 3 percent in the 1950s and 1960s (Koenraad Matthijs, Population Change in Europe, the Middle-East and North Africa, p. 129).

The Moroccan Jewish population decreased from 230,000 in 1947 to 160,000 according to the 1960 census (the first one conducted in unified Morocco). By 1971, the Moroccan Jewish population shrank from 160,000 to around 35,000 (Leon Shapiro, 'World Jewish Population', in: American Jewish Year Book, 1972, Vol. 73, p. 599). With an annual natural increase of 2.5 percent, a total excess of births over deaths of 63,500 over 1947-1960 seems to be reasonable. After 1960, the continuing outflow of Jews from Morocco surely caused significant drop of birth rate, because a disproportionaly higher percentage of those who stayed behind were people over the age of 40 (Attal, 'The Statistics of North African Jewry', p. 31). Still, even an average annual natural increase of only 1.25 percent in 1961-1971 would lead to a total excess of births over deaths 12,000.

According to Statistical Abstract of Israel 2013 (Table 4.4), a total of 254,715 Moroccan Jews - explicitly Moroccan-born (!) - relocated to Israel in 1948-1971. Several thousands later returned. Between 1948 and 1967 over 6,000 Jews left Israel for Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia (Ori Yehudai, Leaving Zion, p. 19).

A certain number of Moroccan Jews settled in Spain (specifically from former Spanish Morocco), where Jewish population, amounting to 6,000 after the Spanish Civil War, reached 10,000 in 1973, including the enclaves of Ceunta and Melilla (Abraham S. Karlikow, 'Spain', in: American Jewish Year Book, 1973, Vol. 74, p. 425). The United States in 1962-1968 admitted 4,100 North African Jews, mostly from Egypt, but aswell some from Morocco (Jack J. Diamond, 'Jewish Immigration to the United States', in: American Jewish Year Book, 1966, Vol. 67, p. 92; Jack J. Diamond, 'Jewish immigration to the United States', in: American Jewish Year Book, 1969, Vol. 70, p. 289). Between 1960 and 2011 about 8,600 Jews moved from Morocco to Canada.

In summary, taking into account population 230,000 in 1947, remaining Moroccan Jewish population 35,000 in 1971, total excess of births over deaths at least 75,500 and several thousands returnees, not less than 275,000 Moroccan Jews departed from Morocco in 1948-1971 - by 20,000 more than Moroccan Jews who made Aliyah to Israel - without any influx of European Jews claimed by Sanning.

Tales of Junk Demography: An Introduction

 Over 17 years ago Jonathan Harisson finished his series The Crazy World of Walter Sanning criticizing The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, the 1980s "revisionist" attempt of study of Jewish demography.

Sanning is still taken seriously by many Holocaust deniers. Deanna Spingola heavily refered to The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry in The Ruling Elite: Death, Destruction, and Domination published in 2014. Don't forget about Ryan Faulk. Or X Nazi star Karl Radl.

In the first part of the book Sanning tried to explain fate of Soviet Jewry. He argued 5,337,000 Jews lived in the USSR on the eve of Operation Barbarossa and out of them 1,030,000 lost their lives during the war - 700,000 in Siberia, 200,000 serving in the Red Army and 130,000 Jewish civilians in front-line and German-occupied territory (Sanning, Dissolution, p. 106).

For comparison, Mark Kupovetsky concluded non-Holocaust losses of Soviet Jewry were following - 170,000 Soviet-Jewish soldiers and partisans, 60,000 Soviet-Jewish civilians in front-line areas, 50,000 in Soviet hinterland and 15,000 in GULAG - totally less than 300,000. According to Kupovetsky not less than 2.5 million Soviet Jews died in the Holocaust (Mark Kupovetsky, 'Jewish Population Losses during World War II within the Prewar and Postwar Borders of the USSR', in: Alfred Kokh and Pavel Polian (eds.), Denial of the Denial, or the Battle of Auschwitz, pp. 166-167).

Notice Sanning exaggerated Jewish deaths in Soviet interior by 635,000! He claimed 600,000 Polish-Jewish refugees perished in Siberia - calculating this figure by subtracing 157,500 Jews repatriated to Poland after the war from his grotesquely inflated number of Polish Jews deported by Soviet authorities (Sanning, Dissolution, p. 103).

Sanning paid special attention to Polish Jewry. He suggested that after 1933 annually 100,000 Jews left Poland and refered to Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (Ibid., p. 30-31). This contradicts official Polish statistics, which recorded 109,716 Jewish emigrants in 1931-1937 (Pavel Polian, 'The Demography and Statistics of the Holocaust', in: Kokh/Polian (eds.), Denial of the Denial, p. 240).

The study published by Institute for Contemporary History that Sanning relied upon was Hermann Graml's "Die Auswanderung der Juden aus Deutschland zwischen 1933 und 1939". The only Graml's source was Mark Wischnitzer's "Die Juden an der Welt" from 1935, whose very year of publication speaks to its irrelevance. Wischnizer talks about the 1920s, and Graml, perhaps, did not quite understand him. (Ibid., p. 272).

Jewish emigration from Poland during the 1930s decade was really low despite certain Polish groups wanted to make it much larger:

„The Budget Committee of the Polish Sejm discussed the issue of Jewish emigration from Poland. The rapporteur on this matter Walewski stated that between 1926 and 1936 18,000 Jews emigrated from Poland per a year, barely 60 percent of the natural increase of Polish Jewish population. If this issue is to be resolved definitively, then at least 100,000 Jews must emigrate from Poland annually.“ 

(Lidove noviny, 22nd January 1938, p. 4)

Sanning believed most of the alleged 100,000s unrecorded Polish-Jewish emigrants went to the USA. American Jewish population rose from 4,228,000 in 1927 to 5,199,200 in 1943, by 971,200. Sanning insisted such growth can't be explained by 220,000 officially recorded Jewish immigrants and natural increase (Sanning, Dissolution, pp. 156-158).

Total excess of births over deaths 751,200 per 16 years with initial population 4,228,000 and terminal population 5,199,200 means natural increase just under 1 percent per a year. This is actually plausible. In New York in 1932 Jewish annual natural increase averaged 0.9 percent, as Dr. Julius Mahler observed (Arthur Ruppin, The Jewish Fate and Future, p. 79).

American immigration statistics reveal 6,300 Polish Jews entered the USA in 1935-1939 and 8,600 in 1930-1934 (part of them obviously before the 1931 Polish census).

Sanning, too, quoted a statement made in 1943 by Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long that a majority of the 580,000 refuges who entered the United States since 1933 were Jews. The problem is that Long would later correct himself by saying that 580,000 visas had been issued, but less than half were utilized because the victims could not reach the United States.

After the invasion of Poland according to Sanning 850,000 Polish Jews fled German zone to the Soviet zone or Romania and at most 757,000 Polish Jews got under German control (Sanning, Dissolution, p. 42).

Well, only in Warsaw and Lodz ghetto 392,911 and 156,402 Jewish prisoners respectively were counted in 1940, totally 549,313, not including 10,000s transfered there later (Isaiah Trunk, Lodz Ghetto, pp. 96-97; Isaiah Trunk, 'Epidemics and Mortality in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1939-1942', in: Michael R. Marrus (ed.),The Nazi Holocaust. Part 6: The Victims of the Holocaust. Volume 1, p. 8).

Himmler’s statistician Richard Korherr reported that out of estimated 2,790,000 Jews who lived before the war in territories of the General Government and annexed Polish areas 1,496,000 were „evacuated“ by the end of 1942 and 530,000 remained at the beginning of 1943. Korherr still covered neither horrifying mortality rate in ghettoes nor mass killing operations outside extermination camps.

One Holocaust denier named Stephen Challen tried to bring Korherr report into accord with alleged flight of most of Polish Jewry from Nazi rule and came up with absurd hypothesis that Korherr on Himmler’s order exagerrated number of evacuated Polish Jews by 1 million (Stephen Challen, Richard Korherr and His Reports, p. 43).

It should be noted that Challen’s pamphlet was published several years before discovery of the Hoefle telegram.

This introduction already exposed serious errors in Sanning’s work. But we have just started.

Willi Lenz: The “Doctor” of the Kulmhof (Chełmno) Extermination Camp

When Soviet troops reached the area around Chełmno nad Nerem in January 1945, the Nazi extermination camp Kulmhof had already been largely dismantled.¹ Nevertheless, contemporary documents and witness testimony preserve evidence about the men who operated the camp.

One name appears repeatedly in these sources: Willi Lenz, a Polizeimeister of the Schutzpolizei. At Kulmhof, he supervised Jewish forced laborers in the so-called forest camp, personally carried out shootings, and oversaw the disposal of the corpses.

Studies of Kulmhof describe Lenz as an exceptionally brutal person (see endnote 1), but provide little information about his background and career. Using contemporary civil records, police files, NSDAP membership documentation and postwar testimony, this article establishes his identity and reconstructs a life-spanning, though still fragmentary, biography of Willi Lenz. 

Note on terminology

This article uses Kulmhof for the German extermination camp and Chełmno for the Polish village in which it was established. The village, officially known as Chełmno nad Nerem, lies in central Poland, between Poznań and Łódź. German names such as Posen, Litzmannstadt and Breslau (Polish Wrocław) are used where they reflect the administrative language of the sources.

What Vladimir Davydov really said about the height of the Babyn Yar pyres.

It has long been a staple argument of the deniers against one Babyn Yar witness Vladimir Davydov (one, but not the only, contrary to the incompetent nincompoops Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf's claim) that he claimed the height of 10-12 m for the Babyn Yar pyres in 1943.

Mattogno and Graf wrote:

On November 9, 1944, Major Lavrenko, member of the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Kiev, questioned the Jewish witness Vladimir K. Davidov. The latter stated that on August 18, 1943, he, along with 99 other prisoners, for the most part also Jewish, had been selected from the Siretzki concentration camp 5 km from Kiev. The 100 prisoners were taken to Babi Yar and there were forced to dig up the bodies of the Jews shot in 1941. According to him, 70,000 bodies had been in the mass graves of Babi Yar. The prisoners had exhumed these and burned them on 'ovens' afterwards, which consisted of granite blocks - procured from the Jewish cemetery of Kiev - with train rails laid upon them. On these a layer of wood was piled and on top of this the bodies, so that an enormous stack of bodies 10 to 12 m high resulted! In the beginning there was merely a single 'oven,' but then 75 of them (literally seventy-five) were built.

No other witness claimed something like this and Davydov himself stated in 1967 that the height was actually 4 m.

But what of his original claim? Well, now we have the original BY investigation files from 1943 and 1944.

In the original handwritten 09.11.1943 protocol we do indeed see "height":

But interestingly enough in the file a heavily edited typewritten version follows, in which the "10 to 12 m high" claim is struck out:

And just was was to be expected, the "height" in the 09.11.1943 protocol was nothing but a mistake. In the protocol from 20.11.1943 Davydov states:

"... as a result of this the stack was 10-12 m long and 4-5 m wide"

Conclusion: the claim in the 09.11.1943 protocol of the pyre height of 10 to 12 meters was a mere mistake, later corrected.

Otto Moll - Dear Gardener Next Door Or Psychopathological Mass Murderer?

Otto Moll, born in 1915 in Mecklenburg, trained as a gardener before joining the SS-Wachverband V "Brandenburg" in 1935. His early life was marked by personal hardship: a serious car accident in 1937 left him with a skull fracture and blindness in one eye, and in 1940 his first wife and unborn child died from blood poisoning. By April 1938, he was working in the SS garden at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and he soon became part of the expanding concentration camp system.

According to his own statement to US investigators from November 3, 1945, "from 1941 until January 1945, I likewise managed a gardening unit of the Economic and Administrative Main Office in the Auschwitz concentration camp". 

Afterwards, Moll was stationed at the Kaufering II subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp. Moll stated that "no prisoner in my camp died from illness or malnutrition, and none were hanged or shot. There was not a single death in my camp ... no mistreatment of any prisoners by any guards occurred. No prisoner was beaten, kicked, or otherwise abused by the guards".

SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll - the dear gardener from next door?   

 

Otto Moll (source)

At the CODOH Holocaust denial discussion forum, the poster Stubble writes that "Going over what there is, I can't rule out that he indeed just ran the garden (farm) detail and was hated for it, and thus framed up for something different". 

The record tells a very different story. 

Twenty years of HC blog

Happy birthday to us: exactly twenty years ago, the Holocaust Controversies blog was kicked off with the first of over 1,500 posts. It's a strange anniversary given how much time has elapsed and how different the world now is. 

Back then, the HC team met online at the original Real Open Debate on the Holocaust forum, an old-fashioned bulletin board, before any of today's social media platforms existed. While Holocaust 'revisionism' had been dealt a huge blow in 2000 with the defeat of David Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in London, it seemed to be surging online, largely ignored by the mainstream media. Many of the HC team had been arguing with Holocaust deniers online for years. I myself stumbled across it when googling for materials on Auschwitz, and could scarcely avoid what seemed like a barrage of revisionist propaganda materials. Thus the decision to found the blog.

Twenty years on, the landscape is entirely different. Holocaust denial in 2026 presents an even more paradoxical picture: it has surged once again on various social media platforms, but in a largely headless form, part of a wider upsurge in antisemitism online in the past two to three years. And with that surge, HC's views have as well, passing six million since May 2010 in July 2025 and seven million in February 2026. 

Organised revisionism, meanwhile, has come closer than ever to dying a death entirely. In 2009, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, announced that he no longer saw a point in 'revisionist' activities; in those years also David Irving and David Cole, two of the bigger names from the early 1990s heyday, publicly rejected most of the key tenets of 'revisionism'. Nearly all of the promoters, publishers, authors and activists who stuck to hardcore negationism despite these declarations of apostasy then proceeded to drop like flies: Willis Carto, Bradley Smith, Ernst Zündel, Robert Faurisson, Serge Thion, Samuel Crowell, Fredrick Töben, and Jürgen Graf all passed away, alongside lesser figures who had made names for themselves without really publishing anything, such as Richard Williamson and Ursula Haverbeck. Many of the revisionists we've sparred with online at RODOH and elsewhere have likewise passed away: Fabian 'Sailor' Eschen, Wilfried 'neugierig' Heink, Charles Wing Krafft, Friedrich Paul Berg, and likely others - Carlos Porter's website went offline several years ago, being archived elsewhere, for example.

This near-death experience for organised revisionism hasn't silenced them entirely: Germar Rudolf has kept the lights on at CODOH, despite an attempted coup by Michael Santomauro in December 2023. Rudolf even recently organised 'the first revisionist conference in twenty years' at the start of February 2026. The catch being, there are now only a handful of living revisionists associated with the core enterprise who can contribute to the flagship 'Holocaust Handbooks' series. When HC blog started, this ran to twenty brochures; a further 34 have been published since 2006. Of those, three have recycled older books by now-dead or missing authors (Henri Roques, Walter Sanning, John Ball), two were revisions of earlier books also by now-dead authors (Pierre Marais and Jürgen Graf), and a whopping 22 of the new 34 titles were authored by our old friend Carlo Mattogno, now a venerable 75 years of age. With 21 titles from Mattogno just on Auschwitz across 54 volumes in the series, prolixity becomes self-refuting: who has the time to wade through that much verbiage? Why can't he sum up his arguments concisely? 

Chances are, if you've come across HC in the past few years, it's because we've been linked to for our resources, especially Sergey Romanov's Rebutting the Twitter Denial round-up (337K views since May 2017), Roberto Mühlenkamp's Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes (151K views since 2009), and Hans Metzner's index of published evidence on Auschwitz (107K views since 2012). Or downloaded our 2011 white paper on Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (26K views on archive.org many thousands more on academia.edu and on other online libraries). Numerous Substackers, Redditors, tweeters and others have pointed to HC's resources over the years - we thank everyone for making use of the work we've done. 

Other anti-denial websites, especially Gilles Karmasyn's phdn.org, have provided similar resources, archiving the Holocaust History Project website (still a going concern when HC began in 2006) and many others.

The biggest change since 2006, however, has been in the possibilities of digitisation across archives and libraries. Consider this: in 2004, the archives in Washington, DC area, USHMM and the US National Archives at College Park, MD, were relying on microfilm reader-printers; by 2007 these had become reader-scanners. When HC began twenty years ago, digital cameras were only just becoming cheap enough to be used by researchers, so twenty-five years ago, one would take notes in pencil or on laptops. Archives had yet to invest in scanners to digitise their holdings; by the start of the 2010s that had started to change.

While HC blog has regularly posted transcriptions and scans of key sources, our own Hans Metzner has recently set up the Holocaust History Site to post scans, transcriptions *and* translations of key sources in especially German. Both sets of materials see use in classrooms. On HC blog, I have been maintaining a directory of open access sources since 2016, with 59.9K views since then - a resource which has been appreciated by researchers into WWII and the Holocaust with otherwise zero interest in Holocaust denial. Since 2020, with systematic digitisation at the Bundesarchiv, US National Archives and other European archives, from Switzerland to Poland and Ukraine, the volume of historical sources from the 1930s and 1940s has increased exponentially. The oldest and largest Holocaust archives - the Wiener Library, Ghetto Fighters' House, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem - have been either early adopters of digitisation or have embraced it wholeheartedly when they took the plunge. This has supported yet more reference sites such as Yad Vashem's Untold Stories project, documenting over 1,200 localities within the borders of the wartime Soviet Union where Jews were murdered, with translated sources for all of them. 

In 2006, HC blogged about the then brand new agreement to open up the archives of the International Tracing Service at Arolsen, Germany. The following summer in 2007, I watched as a procession of hard drives arrived at USHMM with the digital copies of the archive being shared around the world. By the end of the 2010s, much of the Arolsen Archives were made open access online.

The range of open access literature and published sources has likewise exploded, to the point where it's difficult to keep fully on top of what is and isn't on an open access library, or has been uploaded to a historian's academia.edu page. The first four volumes of USHMM's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos are now fully open access both on JSTOR as well as a convenient subsite at Project Muse. All West and East German trial judgements - 63 volumes worth - have been open access at Justiz und NS-Verbrechen for over three years now. All sixteen volumes of the Persecution and Murder of European Jews series are open access in German, the English translations are following behind with only a short moving wall; the full published edition of the Goebbels diaries is likewise now open access. Hundreds of yizkor books, memorial books to destroyed Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, have been translated to English and can be found on JewishGen. 

So, what to do with all of this material? This anniversary post goes up almost exactly eight months since we last made a new post on HC. While none of the regular HC bloggers have been scythed down in the way that revisionist authors have been in the past twenty years, it's nonetheless true that the core team has largely moved on. Roberto Mühlenkamp and Jonathan Harrison are both inactive; Hans Metzner is concentrating on the aforementioned Holocaust History Site, while Sergey Romanov is focused on his research on the Katyn and Vinnytsia Soviet killing sites and debunking of Russian Katyn deniers; you can read his work at the Katyn Files (and browser translators mean you don't need to know Russian to do so). Andrew Mathis is around, but less active. Our guest bloggers and white paper contributors - Jason Willis Myers, Joachim Neander, Statistical Mechanic - have likewise moved on or retired. I myself devote most of my time to teaching history at university level, on themes far broader than the Holocaust, having devised courses on comparative histories of violence, on the German occupation of Poland and the Soviet Union in WWII - thus concerned 50:50 with the fates of Jews and non-Jews, and now also contributing to a course on the Second World War as a global war. 

Sustaining interest in 'debunking' is a long-term impossibility, and we have never monetised the blog or sought to profit from the work on display here. There just isn't as much 'activity' from Holocaust deniers as there is from pseudoarchaeologists, pseudohistorians and ancient aliens enthusiasts, which has kept a debunker/researcher like Jason Colavito busy for decades.

Passing the twenty year anniversary, at a time when Holocaust denial has surged in some parts of social media, despite the near-death of 'organised revisionism', does however make me resolved to revive HC. That could be posting more often about the new digital resources, or exploring older denial texts that remain inexplicably popular. Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century is about to, or has just had, its fiftieth anniversary. 

As the founder of HC blog, I'd also like to open up the possibility of recruiting new contributors, who might pick up the baton and who can respond to denial as it currently is, in its vague, diffuse form. Voicing denier sentiments might well be simply a form of vice signalling, or just another tool in the antisemitic repertoire and another way of attacking and trying to hurt Jews, 'libtards', and the other enemies of the terminally online contrarians. Perhaps pop over to Skeptics Society Forum, where Hans and I still post, and where other veterans of anti-denier arguments online still post, to introduce yourself if you might be interested in helping out.

In the meantime, a huge thank you once again to all our readers and everyone who's ever made use of the Holocaust Controversies blog. 

German Footage of a Homicidal Gassing with Engine Exhaust. Part 7: Tactical Symbol & Homicidal Gas Van

 German Footage of a Homicidal Gassing with Engine Exhaust

Part 1: Provenance

Part 2: Location

Part 3: Responsibility (I)

Part 4: Responsibility (II)

Part 5: Responsibility (III)

Part 6: Forgery Allegation

Part 7: Tactical Symbol & Homicidal Gas Van 

 

 

If there were still anyone in the world who harbored even the slightest doubt about the authenticity of the film footage showing the Nazi gas killing operation at the psychiatric hospital in Mogilev, those doubts should now be dispelled.

 

Mogilev gassing footage

Recall that the truck, whose exhaust pipe is connected to the building wall, bears a tactical symbol and a numerical designation on the rear side of the flatbed (see Figure 1). Until now, these markings could not be clearly identified  - but that has changed.

 

Figure 1: Still of Mogilev gassing footage with tactical sign on the truck

 

As reported in another blog post, the only known photographic evidence of a Nazi gas van using engine exhaust for killing was recently published. In one of these photos, the gas van used by Sonderkommando 7a of Einsatzgruppe B is seen from behind with its doors closed. On the left rear door of the box body, a tactical symbol and the designation "VIIa" are clearly visible (see Figure 2).

 

 

Figure 2: Photograph of homicidal gas van of SK 7a (from: Cameron Munro, "Engineered for Mass Murder – The Nazi Gas Vans: 1939–1945")

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the crucial point: The exact same tactical symbol appears on the truck shown in the Mogilev gassing footage - just in that case, it is followed by "IX" (see Figure 2). The symbol was apparently used to mark vehicles of Einsatzgruppe B, while the number denoted the specific Einsatzkommando or Sonderkommando.

 

 

 

Figure 3: Comparison between rear of Mogilev gassing truck (left) and SK 7a gas van (right)

  

The truck used in Mogilev therefore belonged - at least temporarily - to Einsatzkommando 9 of Einsatzgruppe B. Since the license plate visible on the vehicle can be linked to Einsatzkommando 8, it may be that the truck originally served with Kommando 9 and was later transferred to Kommando 8.

The tactical symbol on the truck provide further evidence that it belonged to Einsatzgruppe B - and thus confirm that the footage is indeed authentic documentation of a gassing operation carried out by Einsatzgruppe B at the psychiatric institution in Mogilev.

 

First Published Photographs of Nazi Homicidal Gas Van with Engine Exhaust

Cameron A. Munro has recently published "Engineered for Mass Murder – The Nazi Gas Vans: 1939–1945", a book in which he presents 15 photographs depicting a homicidal gas van built on a petrol-powered Diamond T chassis. 

These photographs were taken in April 1942 by SS-Rottenführer August Vielkind of the Waffen-SS reserve, who was part of the advance detachment of Sonderkommando 7a of Einsatzgruppe B, marching from Klintsy via Gomel to Sychyovka. The images were used by prosecutors in Dortmund during investigations into members of Sonderkommando 7a. However, as Munro notes, it seems they "did not forward the photographs to West-German investigators of other units" and "the photographs then lay forgotten in the files of the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen in Münster for many years". 

It’s remarkable that such historically significant material can still be discovered after so many years. And fittingly - characteristic of authentic historical research - the deeper one digs, the more corroborating rather than contradicting evidence tends to emerge. 

I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history and mechanics of the Nazi homicidal gas vans.

 

Saurer Company or Why even Rudolf has shown the Diesel Issue is irrelevant on Gas Vans ("Rebuttal of "Holocaust Encyclopedia")

For decades, Holocaust deniers have claimed that the Saurer gas vans had to have diesel engines, and since diesel exhaust has lower carbon monoxide, they conclude the vans couldn’t have been used for murder. The argument is irrelevant as the RSHA turned chassis with gasoline engines into gas vans. A detailed refutation of the "diesel issue" argument was published ten years ago and has never been answered in substance to my knowledge (see Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant). Denier Alvarez’s new edition (2023) of his book "The Gas Vans" continues to repeat it, without a single source, counter-argument, or whisper of a rebuttal to the refutations that already exist. 

Germar Rudolf’s entry "Saurer Company" in CODOH's Holocaust Encyclopedia tries a fresh variation:

He notes that the RSHA motor pool acquired a number of Saurer 5-ton chassis in 1942  and the company Gaubschat in Berlin built a cargo box on each chassis - "for an unspecified purpose".  The historical consensus (or as Rudolf  like to call it "orthodoxy") holds that these were mobile gas chambers. Rudolf argues that because gasoline-engined trucks were supposedly "much easier" to obtain from other manufacturers, the RSHA’s Saurers “must have had diesel engines".

Here’s where the things get interesting. 

Rudolf concedes for the first time what deniers once swore was impossible and what we have pointed out at this blog: that Saurer did, in fact, produce gasoline-engine trucks during the war - in the French factory in Suresnes near Paris

Why Producer Gas Wasn’t Used (Rebuttal of "Holocaust Encyclopedia")

Holocaust deniers often fixate on fringe technicalities or imagined inconsistencies to avoid confronting the overwhelming documentary, testimonial, and forensic evidence. One of their rhetorical questions goes something like this: "If gas chambers were real, why didn't the Nazis use producer gas?" 

Well, challenge accepted.