More Mattogno Dishonesty

In their Treblinka screed, Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf attempt to rescue their pathetic resettlement thesis by citing two transports that were mentioned by Christian Gerlach in his Kalkulierte Morde. The dishonesty of their citation is breathtaking.

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The two transports to which Mattogno and Graf refer are summarized by them as follows:

On May 30, 1943, a transport was sent to Bobruisk with 960 Jews, who had been arrested in the Warsaw Ghetto. On July 28 of the same year, another transport of Jews from Warsaw arrived in Bobruisk; a portion of the deportees were sent on to Smolensk.

It is clear from Gerlach's original passage, however, that these transports were not 'resettlements'. Here is Roberto's translation of the key paragraphs:

The head of logistics of Waffen SS and Police Central Russia, SS-Standartenfhrer Georg Martin, had the idea of building a concentration camp and to bring Jews from Warsaw. Thus on 30 May 1942 960 Jewish men, who on the previous day had partially followed an appeal, partially been detained in roundups in the Ghetto, were transported to Bobruisk. On 28 July another train with Warsaw Jews reached Bobruisk; a part of the Jews were sent to Smolensk. In Bobruisk the Jews also had to do work for the Wehrmacht. The return to Lublin in September 1943 only 91 men out of the 1,500 deportees lived to see, while all others had fallen victim to the constant selections, the work, the hunger and the terrible treatment. Furthermore there were possibly one or several transports whose inmates were shot immediately upon arrival. Among these there was possibly at least one transport with German Jews. In this context some depositions, according to which in 1942/43 there were large shootings of Jews at or near Bobruisk up to a number of 12,000 to 15,000 victims, are of interest, but cannot be verified here. This shows how much these events are still unknown to us.

Polish Jews were also taken by train to Minsk. On 31.7.1942 1,000 Warsaw Jews got there, who were to be used as labour for the air force in the Minsk area. Kube threatened to immediately destroy them and all further unannounced transports. It is unclear, however, whether this happened.

As a matter of fact many Polish Jews were imprisoned at Trostinez, who apparently were under the Organization Todt and of whom about 250 were handed to the SS construction management in Smolensk. Also in the Minsk ghetto there are said to have been Polish Jews. What is unclear is how many trains with Polish Jews got to Minsk.

All of this happened because Jews were seen by the German authorities and units as a labour force that was available in every respect and could be shifted around at will, in a sense deprived of all humanity. We recall again the resettlement of Jewish forced labourers within western Belorussia, mainly for the Organization Todt (see chapter 7.3a) On 26 May 1942 Jews from Slonim were sent to Mogilev, of whom later only two or four came back. In a similar manner in 1942 Jews from Lida and Nowogrodek came to Smolensk, and 900 Jews from Brest were sent to the East in June 1942, only twelve of them coming back.

There are three features of this passage which, as Mattogno and Graf must have known when they read it, flatly contradict the deniers' resettlement thesis.

Firstly, the Jews who survived this labour assignment ("91 out of 1,500 deportees") would "return to Lublin in September 1943". There was no intention of resettling them in the USSR. Secondly, the death rate of approximately 94% clearly corresponds to a program of labour genocide (working Jews to death) not resettlement. Thirdly, if only those fit to work were sent to these areas, what happened to the rest? A labour assignment is clearly not a total population resettlement.