“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 4)

[Continued from The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 3)]


In this part I shall take a look at items 2 to 6 and 8 of the “Ten Other Points to Consider” in denierbud’s Stroop Report feature.

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8. “A great piece of trial evidence” (item 2 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Like many a good “Revisionist”, denierbud believes that every criminal trial involving crimes committed by his Nazi heroes was a charade in which mischievous prosecutors and judges acting on behalf of sinister conspiratorial entities crapped upon the law and their legal duties and sentenced innocent men to death or long-term imprisonment on the basis of flimsy or manipulated evidence. Accordingly every incriminating document exhibited at any such trial must be a forgery, especially such “prominent” exhibits as the Stroop Report and its two supposed “parallels”, a “family album bound in tattooed human skin” mentioned at the trial of Ilse Koch and a photo album entitled “Good Times” that was kept by Kurt Franz, the deputy commander of Treblinka extermination camp.

Regarding the first, denierbud’s claim is the following:

Indeed such a book was mentioned (but never produced as evidence) at the trial of Ilse Koch. In her case, we have the lie that she had a family album bound in tattooed human skin.

Denierbud is contradicting himself here insofar as the fact that Ilse Koch’s album was not introduced as evidence against her at the trial belies the notion that it was considered “a great piece of trial evidence” by either the prosecution or the tribunal. According to this page of a site with certain “Revisionist” leanings, which I accordingly would not expect to withhold any claim that might help discredit this particular trial, the album was testified to by a prosecution witness, but also invoked by Ilse Koch herself in her defense:

Apparently this photo album was confiscated by the American liberators, but it was not introduced into evidence in the courtroom. In her plea for mercy from the court, Ilse Koch pointed out that Newsweek magazine had published an article in which it was stated that the US military government in Germany was in possession of her photo album. Frau Koch claimed that the album contained several photos of her home which showed lampshades made from dark leather; Frau Koch said the photos showed that the lampshades were clearly not made from human skin.

According to the above, the introduction of this exhibit as evidence was in the interest of the defense and not the prosecution. The aforementioned testimony, according to which the album had tattooed human skin on its cover, was apparently not considered reliable by the court, for there’s no mention of Ilse Koch having been sentenced on account of this testimony. She was also not sentenced on account of the more well-known testimonies about her having made lamp shades out of human skin:

She was convicted by a panel of 8 military judges on the charge of participating in a "common plan" to violate the Laws and Usages of War, but she was not convicted on the specific charge of ordering human lamp shades to be made from the skin of tattooed prisoners.

So much for this “great piece of trial evidence”.

Regarding Kurt Franz’s photo album, denierbud’s claims are the following:

Evidence in the 1960's Kurt Franz trial where similar to the Stroop Report, an incriminating album of Treblinka pictures was simply found in Franz's apartment (upon arrest 15 years after the war) with an album title that would anger any jury: "Good Times." Franz, who was accused of skimming millions of dollars in addition to sadistically murdering Jews, lived in a modest apartment under his real name for 15 years prior to his arrest, and it evidently never occured to him to throw this incriminating piece of evidence away.

It is correct that Kurt Franz was leading a modest middle-class life when arrested and that he was living under his own name, something he could afford to do due to the initial sluggishness of West German justice in matters of NS-crimes that has been addressed in this article.

It is also correct that he possessed a photo album with the title “Die schönsten Jahre meines Lebens” (“The best years of my life”), which was missing some photographs and their captions but still contained pictures of camp commandant Stangl, of Franz himself, of his dog Barry and of the excavators that had been used at Treblinka, first to dig the mass graves and later to exhume the corpses and move them to huge roasters for incineration (Adalbert Rückerl, NS – Prozesse. Nach 25 Jahren Strafverfolgung: Möglichkeiten, Grenzen, Êrgebnisse, page 46 f.).

What is not correct, however, is that the case against Kurt Franz was made around this photo album at the trial against Franz and other former members of the Treblinka camp staff before the Düsseldorf County Court, or that the album was an important element of incriminating evidence on which the court’s findings of fact in its judgment were based. The evidence underlying the court’s findings of fact about the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews and the execution of that policy at Treblinka extermination camp has been listed in this article. A specific mention of Franz’ photo album is not to be found there. There is also no mention of this photo album in the court’s specific findings of fact regarding the defendant Franz’s individual criminal actions, which are transcribed in my RODOH post # 7191. Franz was found guilty of eagerly commanding and taking part in the mass killings carried out at Treblinka, and of numerous killings on his own initiative beyond the scope of orders received, on the basis of his co-defendants’ depositions and the testimonies of a number of eyewitnesses considered credible by the court, which belied his mendacious claims that he had done no more than orders required him to do and helped the poor Jews wherever he could. Only on one occasion the judgment mentions photographs presumably taken from the photo album in connection with its findings of fact regarding Kurt Franz. These are photos of Kurt Franz’s dog Barry, which were shown to animal psychiatrist and court expert Konrad Lorenz for the purpose of his expert opinion about Barry’s character. For while several witnesses provided detailed and coincident descriptions of how Franz had often sadistically set his big dog upon inmates to kill or maim them, there were also statements that Barry had been a playful and harmless animal when not in the presence of his master Franz. Court expert Lorenz concluded from the photos of Barry shown to him that the dog had been a half-breed, and explained that half-breed dogs have a particularly strong tendency to adapt to their master’s character. This, according to Lorenz, explained why Barry had been a murderous beast when under the influence of Franz but a peaceful animal when Franz was not around. Lorenz’ expert opinion was the only instance I found in the judgment in which photographs presumably taken from Franz’ album were used, not as direct evidence against Franz but as input for a court expert’s opinion meant to solve an apparent contradiction between various elements of evidence.

A look at the Treblinka photos shown here and here, many of which are from Kurt Franz’s album, helps to understand why the album is not specifically mentioned in the judgment, let alone as the key incriminating evidence that denierbud claims it to be: none of these photos, at first sight, points to a mass murder site let alone to murders committed or partaken in by Kurt Franz. Only with extraneous knowledge of these pictures’ location and context, based on other evidence, is it possible to link them to the mass killing at Treblinka, and that only through photo analysis such as described in Alex Bay’s article The Reconstruction of Treblinka. A criminal court, whose task was not an exact physical reconstruction of the Treblinka site but a reconstruction of events at that place insofar as required to ascertain the individual defendants’ criminal deeds, didn’t have much use for these photographs, interrogation and cross-examination of defendants and eyewitnesses being the court’s main source of evidence instead. Denierbud’s claim that Franz was “nailed” on the basis of his photo album is taken out of thin air.

Denierbud also makes no effort to explain why on earth Franz did not deny that Treblinka had been a place of mass murder and that he had himself participated in the killing, even though he tried to play down the extent and nature of his participation. What advantage could he have gained by not challenging the evidence that Treblinka had been an extermination camp, by not claiming that it had been a mere transit camp and the accounts of mass killing were all part of one great big hoax? In the case of Kurt Franz, there’s no room for even the absurd and baseless “Revisionist” fantasies about mendacious plea-bargaining by corrupt criminal justice authorities acting at the behest of some sinister conspiracy, for Kurt Franz was sentenced to life imprisonment, the highest penalty that the German Criminal Code provides for.

Last but not least, denierbud doesn’t know what he’s talking about (or then he is simply making things up) when he claims that Kurt Franz “was accused of skimming millions of dollars”. While the plunder of the Jewish victims at the camps of Aktion Reinhard(t) is mentioned in some detail in the judgment, there is no mention of Kurt Franz having, in violation of orders to hand over all valuables to the administration of Aktion Reinhard(t), kept for himself any of the loot, let alone “millions of dollars”.

Thus his wishful thinking is all that denierbud is left with in support of his claim that Franz’s album was “likely another planted fake document”.

The baseless conclusion that denierbud ends this item with:

In short, the Stroop Report fits in with other faked albums which had the aim of serving as courtroom evidence. Jürgen Stroop was sentenced to death by a Polish court and an American court. Kurt Franz got life in prison.

requires no further comment.

9. “The Stroop Report is too readable” (item 3 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

This is where I’m at loss with what our poet denierbud is trying to tell us. His irrelevant subjective opinion that the Stroop Report reads “like a fiction book” aside, what “specific details or mentioning of technical issues” does he expect it to contain, beyond those it contains, that would interest a superior following the progress of a murderous police action against a despised minority? Denierbud doesn’t tell, and I doubt he would be able to specify what the hell is talking about if required to do so. In the opinion of Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, the Stroop Report contained not too little detail, but far too much for the despicable minor undertaking if referred to:

The dirty arrogant SS swine! Imagine writing a 75-page boastful report on a little murder expedition, when a major campaign fought by soldiers against a well-armed army takes only a few pages.

It is also hard to understand what exactly denierbud expects to be “hard for a layman to understand” in a report about such “little murder expedition”. Stroop was reporting neither about complex technical issues such as might be the topic of conversation between denierbud’s jet-fighter pilots, nor about a military engagement involving knowledge obtained at some military academy. He was reporting about a violent roundup and killing operation that essentially consisted in burning down the Warsaw ghetto block after block and then rooting out the surviving Jews from dugouts and sewers. I don’t see anything there that could be hard to understand for anybody, but perhaps denierbud can enlighten us about what exactly he had in mind.

10. “Another reason why the German death toll is not believable” (item 4 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Harking back to his previous rambling against the “unbelievably” low casualties reported by Stroop (discussed in Part 2 of this article), denierbud surmises that the Jews must have prepared for resistance ever since the presumed dissemination in the Warsaw ghetto of a «Jewish Underground report known as the "November 1942 Report"», describing the Treblinka death camp (he is probably referring to the description of Treblinka appended to a report entitled “The Destruction of Jewish Warsaw”, which on 6 January 1943 was transmitted to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London through its delegate in occupied Poland, and which is mentioned in the excerpt from Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps transcribed in my RODOH post # 8970), and that this makes the low casualty rate reported by Stroop “even harder to believe”.

If, as denierbud assumes, said report was disseminated in the Warsaw ghetto, it probably had no greater effect than an earlier report about Treblinka mentioned in Marek Edelman’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. For as becomes apparent from that account,

• most of the ghetto’s inhabitants were reluctant or refused to accept a reality that was too horrible to contemplate, or selfishly stuck to the irrational hope that they might be spared while others perished;

• the Germans cleverly used a combination of trickery and terror in order to assure compliance with the deportation measures, and

• those Jews who were willing to face the facts and not resign to their fate, essentially the members of the Jewish resistance, took a long time to gain acceptance among the ghetto population and had to obtain their weapons from the Polish underground, which was of little assistance at least in the beginning.

Here’s how Marek Edelman describes the reactions of most ghetto inhabitants to the deportations from the ghetto and to news about fate of those deported (emphases are mine):

On the second day, July 23rd, a meeting of the so-called Workers' Committee took place. All political parties were represented on the Committee. Our group, supported only by the Hechalutz and Hashomer organization, called for active resistance. But public opinion was against us. The majority still thought such action provocative and maintained that if the required contingent of Jews could be delivered, the remainder of the ghetto would be left in peace. The instinct for self-preservation finally drove the people into a state of mind permitting them to disregard the safety of others in order to save their own necks. True, nobody as yet believed that the deportation meant death. But the Germans had already succeeded in dividing the Jewish population into two distinct groups--those already condemned to die and those who still hoped to remain alive. Afterwards, step by step, the Germans will succeed in pitting these two groups against one another and cause some Jews to lead others to certain death in order to save their own skin.
[…]
On the second day of the "deportations" the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide. He knew beyond any doubt that the supposed "deportation to the East" actually meant the death of hundreds and thousands of people in gas chambers, and he refused to assume responsibility for it. Being unable to counteract events he decided to quit altogether. At the time, however, we thought that he had no right to act as he did. We thought that since he was the only person in the ghetto whose voice carried a great deal of authority, it had been his duty to inform the entire population of the real state of affairs, and also to dissolve all public institutions, particularly the Jewish police, which had been established by the Jewish Council and was legally subordinate to it.
[…]
So that we might learn conclusively and in detail about the fate of the human transports leaving the ghetto, Zalmen Frydrych (Zygmunt) was ordered to follow one of the transports to the "Aryan side". His journey "to the East", however, was a short one, for it took only three days. Immediately after leaving the ghetto walls he established contact with an employee of the Warsaw Danzig [Gdanski] Terminal working on the Warsaw--Malkinia line. They travelled together in the transport's wake to Sokolow where, Zygmunt was told by local railroad men, the tracks forked out, one branch leading to Treblinka. It proved that every day a freight train carrying people from Warsaw travelled in that direction and invariably returned empty. No transports of food were ever seen on this line. Civilians were forbidden to approach the Treblinka railroad station.

This in itself was conclusive proof that the people brought to Treblinka were being exterminated somewhere in the vicinity. In addition, Zygmunt met two fugitives from the death camp the following morning. They were two Jews, completely stripped of their clothes, and Zygmunt met them on the Sokolow market place and obtained the full details of the horrible procedure. Thus it was not any longer a question of rumours, but of facts established by eyewitness accounts (one of the fugitives was our comrade Wallach).

After Zygmunt's return we published the second issue of On Guard with a detailed description of Treblinka. But even now the population stubbornly refused to believe the truth. They simply closed their eyes to the unpleasant facts and fought against them with all the means at their disposal.

In the meantime the Germans, not too discriminating in their choice of methods, introduced a new propaganda twist. They promised--and actually gave--three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to everyone who voluntarily registered for "deportation". The offer was more than sufficient. Once the bait was thrown, propaganda and hunger did the rest. The propaganda value of the measure lay in the fact that it was truly an excellent argument against the "stories" about gas chambers ("why would they be giving bread away if they intended to murder them?..."). The hunger, an even stronger persuader, magnified the picture of three brown, crusty loaves of bread until nothing was visible beyond it. Their taste which one could almost feel in one's mouth--it was only a short walk from one's home to the "Umschlagplatz" from which the cars left--blinded people to all the other things at the end of the same road. Their smell, familiar, delicious, befogged one's mind, made it unable to grasp the things which would normally have been so very obvious. There were times when hundreds of people had to wait on line for several days to be "deported". The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.
[…]
After this temporary let-up, the deportations from Warsaw started again with intensified force. Now the blockades were even more dangerous for us, because there were fewer people and the area had become smaller. They were also more difficult for the Germans, however, because people had already learned how to hide. Therefore, a new method was used: every Jewish policeman was made responsible for bringing 7 "heads" daily to the "Umschlag". And this is how the Germans were playing their best game. Never before had anyone been so inflexible in carrying out an action as a Jewish policeman, never before had anyone been so unyielding in holding on to a captured victim as one Jew in relation to another Jew. So that they might furnish the 7 "heads", Jewish policemen would stop a doctor in a white coat (the coat could be sold for a fantastically high price later, in the "Umschlag"...), a mother with her child in her arms, or a lonely, lost child in search of its home.
[…]
The following incident may serve to clarify the conditions in which we had to work at the time. About mid-November (in the period of "quiet") a few hundred Jews from several shops were deported, allegedly to work in the Lublin Concentration Camp. During the trip Comrade W. Rozowski broke open the bars in the car window, threw out six female prisoners, while the train was in motion (among others, Guta Btones, Chajka Betchatowska, Wiernik, M. Kojfman), and then jumped out himself. Similar feats would have been quite impossible to perform at the time of the first deportations, because even if there had been somebody brave enough to attempt an escape, the other victims would never had allowed it for fear of German revenge. By now the Jews finally began to realize that deportation actually meant death; that there was no other alternative but at least to die honourably. But as was quite natural for human beings, they still tried to postpone death and "honour" for as long a time as possible.

And here’s how Edelman describes the efforts of the Jewish resistance to obtain arms from the Polish underground. Emphases are also mine:

Once again we built a large organization, not alone this time, but by common efforts, and once again the major problem of weapons was encountered. There were almost none at all in the ghetto. In must be taken into account that the time was the year 1942. The resistance movement of the Poles was just beginning at the time, and only vague stories were being circulated about partisans in the woods. It must be remembered that the first organized act of armed resistance on the part of the Poles did not take place until March 1943. Therefore, there was nothing unusual in the fact that our efforts to obtain arms and ammunition through the Government Delegate and through other agencies encountered major difficulties and as a general rule, brought no results. We were able to obtain a few pistols from the People's Guard.
[…]
At the end of December 1942 we received our first transport of weapons from the Home Army. It was not much--there were only ten pistols in the whole transport--but it enabled us to prepare for our first major action. We planned it for January 22nd and it was to be a retaliatory measure against the Jewish police.

The “first major action”, however, was not what it had been expected to be, and its outcome was disastrous:

However, on January 18th, 1943, the ghetto was surrounded once again and the "second liquidation" began. This time, however, the Germans were not able to carry out their plans unchallenged. Four barricaded battle groups offered the first armed resistance in the ghetto.

The ZOB was baptized in battle in the first large-scale street fighting at the corner of Mila and Zamenhofa Streets. The best part of the Organization was lost there. Miraculously, because of his heroic attitude, the ZOB Commander, Mordechaj Anielewicz, survived. After that battle we realized that street fighting would be too costly for us, since we were not sufficiently prepared for it and lacked the proper weapons. We, therefore, switched to partisan fighting. Four major encounters were fought in the apartment houses at 40 Zamenhofa Street, 44 Muranowska Street, 34 Mila Street and 22 Franciszkanska Street. In the Schultz shop area the SS men taking part in the deportation were attacked by the partisans. Comrade A. Fajner took an active part in this action and was killed in its course.

One of our battle groups, still unarmed, was caught by the Germans and was taken to the "Umschlag". Shortly before they were to enter the railroad cars, B. Pelc addressed the group with a few words. It was only a short address, but it was so effective, that not a single one of the sixty people moved to enter the car. Van Oeppen (the chief of Treblinka) shot all sixty himself on the spot. This group's behaviour, however, served as an inspiration that always, under all circumstances, one should oppose the Germans.

Of all the prepared 50 battle groups only five took part in the January activities. The remainder, not having been assembled at the time of the Germans' entry into the ghetto, was caught by surprise and was unable to reach the place where their weapons were stored.

Once again, as was the case in the first stage of the ZOB's activities, four-fifths of the Battle Organization's members perished.

Thus weakened by their first engagements, the Jewish resistance had to reorganize its activities. It was only now, at the end of January 1943, that it received broader support from the ghetto population, and also more assistance from the Polish underground:

The latest developments, however, reverberated strongly both within the ghetto and outside of it. Public opinion, Jewish as well as Polish, reacted immediately to the ghetto battles. For now, for the first time, German plans were frustrated. For the first time the halo of omnipotence and invincibility was torn from the Germans' heads. For the first time the Jew in the street realized that it was possible to do something against the Germans' will and power. The number of Germans killed by ZOB bullets was not the only important thing. What was more important was the appearance of a psychological turning point. The mere fact that because of the unexpected resistance, weak as it was, the Germans were forced to interrupt their "deportation" schedule was of great value.

In the meantime legends about "hundreds" of dead Germans and the "tremendous" power of the ZOB started circulating throughout Warsaw. The entire Polish Underground was full of praise for us. At the end of January we received 50 larger pistols and 50 hand grenades from the Home Army Command.

It was this “awakening” to the realization that it was possible to resist the Germans, rather than any reports about the fate of the deportees at Treblinka, that ended the passivity of the majority of the surviving ghetto inhabitants and caused them to help the resistance organize the defense of the ghetto against the final roundup. At the same time, a change in the attitude of the Polish underground, also brought about by the first acts of armed resistance in January 1943, helped the Jewish fighters obtain armament that, while still miserable compared to the hardware of a modern army, was a lot better than the few pistols they had been fighting with at first:

By now every partisan was equipped. on the average, with one pistol (and 10-15 rounds for it), 4-5 hand grenades, 4-5 Molotov cocktails. 2-3 rifles were assigned to each "area". There was just one machine-gun in the entire ghetto.

Thus we can see that the notion that reports about Treblinka death camp galvanized the Warsaw ghetto’s Jews into putting up a big fight is merely theoretical and fails to take into account the ostrich-like attitude of most of the ghetto’s population, the hunger and misery in the ghetto that some people irrationally hoped to escape from by allowing themselves to be deported, the violence employed by the Germans where deceitful coaxing failed, the selfishness of people hoping that while others would perish they might themselves be spared, the difficulties faced by the resistance in obtaining arms, and the widespread notion that nothing could be done about the impending fate. Only the first armed engagements starting 18 January 1943, which despite their disastrous outcome showed the people that it was possible to fight the Germans, brought about a significant change of attitude, away from the wishful thinking, selfishness and fatalism that until then had paralyzed the Warsaw ghetto’s population. Had it not been for the armed battle groups that resisted the roundup on 18 January 1943, Stroop would probably have had a much easier job when he took to wiping out the ghetto three months later.

11. “A different Jewish strategy due to the Germans losing the Battle of Stalingrad?” (item 5 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Never one to mind contradicting himself, denierbud forgets his previous claim, about a description of Treblinka in November 1942 having galvanized the Jews into resistance, when indulging in one of the most idiotic “Revisionist” speculations that I have ever seen: up to the German defeat at Stalingrad, where the remains of the German 6th Army surrendered to Soviet forces on 2 February 1943, the Jews (not only in the Warsaw ghetto, but throughout Europe and also in the US – denierbud apparently believes in some central body directing Jewish activities worldwide) are supposed to have changed their “strategy” from one of “collaborating” with the Nazis (never mind that such “collaboration”, apart from helping the genocidal mass killing that denierbud denies, implied dying like flies of starvation and disease in ghettos and being treated like garbage in concentration or labor camps, among other inconveniences) to one of a) resisting and b) promoting the “holocaust myth”.

This conjecture is so flagrantly at odds with all evidence and reason that it’s hardly worth even commenting on. Suffice to say that even its basic assumptions (absence of Jewish atrocity reports and resistance before Stalingrad, commencement of both only thereafter) are mistaken, as will be shown hereafter.

Reports in Jewish publications about the Aktion Reinhard(t) extermination camps appeared as early as April 1942, see the quotes in my RODOH post # 8036. At about the same time, see the excerpt from Arad’s book in my RODOH post # 8970, the Polish underground, drawing on its own sources and on “Jewish Underground groups in Poland, like the Jewish National Committee and the Bund”, started transmitting news “news of the deportations to the death camps and what was happening there” to the Polish Government in Exile in London. Reports about Belzec that reached London “were handed over by the Polish Government-in-Exile to Dr. Ignacy Schwarzbart, a Jew and a member of the Polish National Council”, who on November 15, 1942, “published in London an open statement with all the known details about the extermination actions going on in Belzec”. Then there was the already mentioned report on "The Destruction of Jewish Warsaw", which was issued on the same day and transmitted to London on January 6, 1943. These are but a few examples prior to the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, which alone are sufficient to show the ignorance (let’s give him the benefit of doubt) that underlies denierbud’s conjecture. Denierbud ices the cake by repeating his favorite rambling about “a February 1943 Reader's Digest article” written by “Irgun member Ben Hecht”, which is the subject of one of his videoclips and of Andrew Mathis’ commentary on that clip.

As concerns resistance, there are examples dating as far back as July 1942 of Jews resisting the elimination of ghettos in the administrative area known as Reichskommissariat Ostland, namely in Kleck on 21 July 1942 (25 of 400 escapees survived) and in Nieswiez on 22 July 1942. The presidents of the Jewish Councils in Marcinkánce in the Bialystok district and in Lachwa (Polesia) defended themselves against the liquidations at the end of 1942. On 23 December 1942 Jewish fighters and Communists attacked a German café in Cracow. In Minsk Mazowiecki the last 400 Jews resisted their liquidatioin on 10 January 1943. They were burned alive by the Germans in the school building from which they threw bricks. These and other acts of resistance are mentioned in the translated excerpt from the “Poland” chapter of Benz et al’s Dimensionen des Völkermords that is transcribed in my RODOH post # 3877. My previous post on the same thread, # 3876, contains a translated excerpt from Christian Gerlach’s Kalkulierte Morde about Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Belorussia.

On the other hand – contrary to what one would expect if there had been a “new Jewish strategy” following the German defeat at Stalingrad – the overwhelming majority of Jews under Nazi rule continued to “cooperate” all the way to gas chambers and execution pits. Perhaps the most striking example of an utter absence of resistance, even when the remaining Jews realized that they would also share the fate of those deported before them, is that of the Lodz ghetto.

Nonsensical though denierbud’s “Stalingrad” theory is, it is worth reading on account of a revealing statement showing what denierbud thinks of those lazy, good-for-nothing Jews, a statement that might be taken straight from an issue of Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer, or from this Nazi newspaper article published in August 1939. Emphases are mine:

The Germans, upon entering Warsaw, had found a lot of Jews who had no visible means of income. No apparent legitimate job. They wanted to have the Jews learn to work in labor camps in order to prepare them to move to a temporary Jewish state in occupied USSR.

Bravo, denierbud!

Every Jew-hating scumbag in the world would probably give you a hearty slap on the back for that.

And any reasonable human being who was still in doubt about what cesspit you come from should be in doubt no longer.

But before that pep-talk, denierbud treats his readers to a revelation that, if it could be substantiated, would probably make him the most famous “Revisionist” ever. He claims to have found out that the Jews deported from Warsaw in 1942 were actually sent to labor camps:

The standard account is that 7 months earlier (in July through September 1942), the Germans deported around 300,000 Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto and there was no resistance: the Jews went willingly because the Germans told them they were being deported to labor camps. It was the truth[my emphasis – RM]: […]

So our friend denierbud claims to know of evidence leading from Treblinka, which all evidence known to historians (such as Ganzenmüller’s letter to Wolff dated 28 July 1942 and Höfle’s radio message to Heim dated 11 January 1943) shows to have been the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Jewish deportees from Warsaw and other Nazi-occupied areas of Poland, to labor camps where he believes the Germans had those lazy Jews “learn to work” (he apparently has no objection to forced labor as long as it’s Jews performing the same).

To think that “Revisionist” big-shots Mattogno & Graf frantically searched archives in Eastern Europe for such evidence without finding anything, when all they would have needed to do is visit their faithful disciple denierbud in northern California …

12. “ The beginning of the report contains a short philosophical summary of the Jews in Europe, which seems out of place for a general writing it for two superior generals:” (item 6 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

This “point” is about as inane as the previously discussed “too readable” baloney. After pointing out that the Stroop Report was “a commemoration book meant as a limited edition printing of 3 copies, 2 of which are given to generals Himmler and Kruger” (the Reichsführer SS would probably have enjoyed being referred to as a “general”), denierbud argues that background information about the history of Jewish ghettos would have been out of place in such a document, because its addressees would not be interested in the history or know it already.

Why, and I thought this was a commemoration book!

The following excerpt from page 26 of Richard Raskin’s A Child at Gunpoint contains a quote of Stroop explaining what purpose his report was meant to serve:

Just as it was Krüger’s idea to collect the daily reports in this way, it was also his suggestion that photographic records be kept of the operation. In a conversation while in prison in 1949, Stroop told of a meeting he had with Krüger on May 2, 1943, in which Krüger

… was particularly anxious that our accomplishments be preserved on film. During our final conference, held in my headquarters, he declared: ‘Photographs of the Grand Operation will serve as invaluable tools for future historians of the Third Reich – for the Führer, for Heinrich Himmler, for our nationalist poets and writers, as SS training material and, above all, as proof of the burdens and sacrifices endured by the Nordic races and Germany in their attempt to rid Europe and the world of the Jews.’

Would some background information about the history of Jewish ghettos in general and the Warsaw ghetto in particular not be a proper introduction for a work that might one day be used as historical and training material and as proof of the Nazis’ heroic struggle against the Jews? I’d say such background information would be spot-on there. And from Stroop’s career point of view, it would show his superiors that he was not just a numb executor of orders, but a man with interest in and background knowledge of the “Jewish problem”, therefore a candidate for a higher leadership post. In other words, Stroop was meeting the expected wishes of his superiors and brown-nosing them.

On the other hand, why would the female Jewish forger of denierbud’s fantasies have included this historical background in the document? In order to highlight the Nazis’ emphasis on Jews being a threat to non-Jews? That would hardly serve any “vilifying” purpose and might even have a slightly apologetic effect.

Once again, denierbud’s conjectures leave much to be desired in terms of logic and reason.

13. “Over-the-top use of the word "bandit" and "subhuman."” (item 8 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Denierbud has a problem with the frequent use of the term “bandits” throughout the Stroop Report. He argues that Stroop “would” have been more specific about what “bandits” exactly he was up against, so that his report could be used for intelligence purposes, and that the derogatory nature of the term points to a forger trying to denigrate poor Stroop and denierbud’s Nazi heroes in general.

In his “intelligence” argument, denierbud ignores the fact that Stroop’s daily teletypes to Krüger were progress reports for a superior who wanted to know how the operation was doing, and not something meant for intelligence services interested in collecting information about underground fighting organizations. Such intelligence services would probably not rely on Stroop’s daily teletypes for information, but obtain protocols of prisoner interrogations or, even better, take part in such interrogations themselves. If their only or main source were a commanding officer's progress reports to his superior, they would be bunglers not worth their salary. Regarding the Stroop Report as a whole, denierbud keeps forgetting that this was a commemorative book, something to celebrate the Nazi struggle against Jews and other sub-human scum and to look at when reminiscing of the good old times by the fireside. Intelligence-relevant information about specific fighting organizations that the “bandits” belonged to would not only be boring in such a context, but create the perhaps unwelcome impression that the “bandits” were political organizations with a cause and not the underworld rabble that the Nazis liked to see themselves as fighting against.

As to the derogatory nature of the term “bandits”, denierbud reveals his ignorance of the fact that “bandits” was a term commonly used by the Nazis for partisans and other members of resistance organizations in the countries they occupied during World War II, with the obvious and understandable intent of portraying members of underground resistance as criminals acting against the established order, rather than patriots fighting to free their country of the Nazi occupiers. The fight against partisans, especially in Poland and the occupied territories of the USSR, was designated by the Nazis as Bandenbekämpfung, i.e. fight against bandit gangs. The Bandenbekämpfung also served as a cover and pretext, in the occupied territories of the USSR, to wipe out Jews and other undesirable elements of the population allegedly linked to the Soviet partisans. Thus, for instance, a report by Himmler dated 29 December 1942, of which a facsimile can be viewed on this site, refers to “Bandenbekämpfungserfolge”, i.e. successes in the fight against bandits, achieved in Southern Russia, Ukraine and Bialystok between 1 September and 1 December 1942. It separately lists “Banditen” (“bandits” - 1,337 killed in battle, 737 prisoners immediately executed, 7,828 executed after longer intensive questioning) and “Bandenhelfer und Bandenverdächtige” (“bandit helpers and bandit suspects” – 16,553 arrested, 14,257 executed, and 363,211 Jews executed). Jews were obviously seen as “bandit helpers and bandit suspects” regardless of whether or not they had any connection to the partisans, on account of being Jews alone.

So it is only natural, within the scope of Nazi terminology, that Stroop should refer to Polish resistance fighters found in the ghetto as “bandits”. Referring to the specific organizations they belonged to might affect their depiction as criminals against the established order and instead give them a certain aura of legitimacy, which was the last thing the Nazis wanted.

In this context, it is of interest to have a look at just how many members of the Polish underground took part in the fighting inside the Warsaw ghetto between 19 April and 16 May 1943. According to this page and this excerpt, an 18-man unit of the Polish Armia Krajowa, under the command of Henryk Iwański, fought inside the Warsaw ghetto, amid the ruins on Muranowski Square and Nalewki Street, alongside one of the Jewish fighting organizations. This seems to have been the unit that Stroop referred to as follows:

The main Jewish battle group, mixed with Polish bandits, had already retired during the first and second day to the so-called Muranowski Square. There, it was reinforced by a considerable number of Polish bandits.

If – as denierbud would probably be prone to argue – the emphasis on “bandits” in the Stroop Report is out of proportion to the size and the achievements of Iwanski’s unit, the reasonable explanation for this would be that Stroop, embarrassed by how long it was taking him to subdue the Jewish resistance, and perhaps also by high casualties that he eventually played down in his report (see Part 2 of this article), reckoned that the Polish underground fighters, the “bandits”, would be seen by his superiors as a more formidable opponent than the despised Jews, and thus make his difficulties in crushing the uprising more excusable in Krüger’s and Himmler’s eyes. For the female Jewish forger of denierbud’s fantasies, on the other hand, there would be no reason to have the non-Jewish underground play a bigger part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising than it actually did.

At the end of this item of his feature, denierbud points to the oddness of the term “subhumans” in Stroop’s teletype message of 16 May 1943:

180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed.

Indeed it makes no sense to interpret the “subhumans” as a category other than “Jews” and “bandits”, so the reasonable interpretation is that “subhumans” is being used as an epithet for either Jews or Polish underground fighters, whereby in the first case the term “bandits” would in this particular message be another epithet for the Jews. Either of both scenarios fits the Nazi view that Jews were “bandits” or “bandits helpers” per se, non-Jews were “bandits” if they fought as partisans against the Nazis, and both the Jews and the Slavic Poles were Untermenschen. In the latter scenario (“bandits” = Polish underground fighters = “subhumans”), it is possible that the text in Stroop’s manuscript was, for instance, “Es wurden 180 Juden, bzw. Banditen und Untermenschen vernichtet” (“180 Jews, or bandits and subhumans were destroyed”), and by mistake this became “Es wurden 180 Juden, Banditen und Untermenschen vernichtet”(“180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed”) when the message was typed. Such banal explanation is more realistic than denierbud’s manipulation fantasies.


Denierbud’s “Ten Other Points to Consider” have thus been dealt with. The next and final part of his article will be dedicated to denierbud’s theory about his female Jewish forger’s identity.

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Continuation:

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 5)