Liepaja (Part 1)

The killing of Jews from Liepaja, Latvia, has been documented in numerous sources. SS and Police Chief Emil Dietrich recorded most of them in his diary. Dietrich was hanged by a US military tribunal at Landsberg-am-Lech prison on 22 Oct 1948. Between the 15th and 17th of December, 1941, three German and Latvian squads shot 2749 Jews, mainly women and children, in the dunes of Skede, near Liepaja. The events were recorded in these infamous photographs by Carl-Emil Strott, who was convicted and sentenced at the trial of Grauel and others in Hannover in 1971. More of Strott's photographs can be found in this thread.

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Furthermore, lest any deniers are stupid enough to shout 'show trial' and 'forgery', the killings in Liepaja have been demonstrated by the demographic research of Anders and Dubrovskis, who examined the Nazi census of 30 Aug 1941 in the Latvian state archives, and compared it to other demographic sources such as the Soviet census of February 1935, the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, the list of deportees to the Soviet interior, the Grauel trial, residential 'house books', the "Metals Collection" List, the Schutzpolizei Reports, records from the camp at Stutthof, and the Soviets' Extraordinary Commission for Investigation of Fascist Crimes.

Their research is another nail in the coffin of the reputation of fraudulent 'demographer' Walter Sanning. As I noted in this blog, Sanning dishonestly pretended that Nazi demographic figures from January 1943 referred to Soviet population data as of June 1941. This enabled him to claim that most Jews had either fled or been deported to the Soviet interior as part of Stalin's 'scorched earth' policy. Anders and Dubrovskis demonstrate that only 209 Liepaja Jews (out of a Jewish population of 7140) were deported and a maximum of 300 fled.

Liepaja therefore gives us a further demonstration of the bankruptcy of Holocaust denial. To deny that the Nazis deliberately killed women and children from Liepaja, deniers have to ignore the existence of a handwritten diary by the SS and Police Chief, photographs taken by a perpetrator who was tried in a West German court, a census that the Nazis carried out two months after they invaded Latvia, and residential data collected by the Nazis in 1942, showing that many of the people in earlier censuses had been killed. Such denial can only be a deliberate blindness to evidence of genocide.

Footnote: Many thanks to KentFord9 for drawing my attention to the demographic data.