The Koeppen Memo

Historians have recently arrived at a consensus that the policy decisions that resulted in the Final Solution emerged from a gradual process rather than a 'Big Bang' (Browning, p.28). There was not a quantum leap, taken at a specific moment, from no genocide to total genocide. However, this consensus does not get us very far unless we can define the moral and mental parameters within which Hitler was making his decisions in 1941. Below I offer one definition using a document that is not often discussed: the Koeppen memo.

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This memo is described by Longerich here:

Hitler`s motives become apparent from a memo written by the representative for the Eastern Ministry in Hitler`s headquarters, Koeppen, on 20 September. Koeppen wrote that the Envoy von Steengracht (representative of the Foreign Office in the headquarters of the Führer) had told him that Hitler was considering the question of postponing possible "Pressalien" (i.e Repressalien; reprisals) against the German Jews "for a [sic] eventuality of an American entry into the war".

This memo reveals that the killing of German Jews was tied to US entry into the war. This may at first glance appear to support the idea that no decision to kill the Jews was therefore taken before December. However, this idea would pre-suppose that Hitler had no expectation of the US entering the war until they actually did so, when in reality the very fact that Hitler had the 'reprisal' thoughts in his mind shows that his expectation was very real by September at the latest.

This memo can cast further light on Hitler's thinking when used in conjunction with Goebbels' diary entries for August 19-20, 1941, which quote Hitler's thoughts at a point that was a month prior to the Koeppen memo. Browning summarizes the entries here:

"The Führer is convinced that his Reichstag prophecy is coming true; that should the Jews once again succeed in provoking a world war, this would end in their annihilation. It is coming true in these weeks and months with a certainty that appears almost sinister. In the east the Jews are paying the price, in Germany they have already paid in part and they will have to pay still more in the future.” Concerning that fateful future, Goebbels learned when (“Moreover the Führer has promised me that I can deport the Jews from Berlin immediately after the end of the eastern campaign.”), where (“in the east”), and more vaguely the ultimate fate of the deportees (“Then they will be worked over in the harsh climate there.”).

These entries show that Hitler had been harbouring the view for quite some time that Jews would die in large numbers, either during a long war or after a short war (the latter being preferable). However, as of August, their deaths were expected to be attritional, presumably through a combination of shooting, forced labour and starvation in a climate such as that of Siberia. Furthermore, their deaths are clearly linked with those of the Soviet Jews:

In the east the Jews are paying the price, in Germany they have already paid in part and they will have to pay still more in the future.

Hitler's thoughts in August therefore only differed from the final fate of the Jews in the facts of the locations and methods of murder. A genocide in which approximately half of the victims died in gas chambers in death camps was the result of the inability of the Germans to pursue the originally planned attritional method due to the war not developing as successfully as they desired, but it is false to assume that the gas chambers were a genocidal "quantum leap" from the previous attritional plans.

In conclusion, therefore, the effects of the Soviet counter-offensive and US entry on the one hand, or Hitler's "victory euphoria" on the other, upon the Final Solution, did not determine the initial murderous impulses that resulted in the gas chambers. They shaped the direction that the murderous impulses took, in forcing the Nazis to look for solutions primarily within Poland than in Siberia, but they did not turn a resettlement into a mass murder of millions of Jews. The resettlement was always going to be a mass murder of millions of Jews.

In other words, the escalation in killing that took place after the decisions of 1941 was not a 'moral escalation' (or, rather, a further moral descent) by Hitler. He had already arrived, mentally and morally, at the point where the extermination of Jewry, by whatever means available, was not only thinkable but desirable.

Demographics and Killing in Volhynia-Podolia (Part 2: 1942)

Further to Part 1, below I present eight sources of evidence that converge on the conclusion that the Germans exterminated the remaining Jews of Volhynia-Podolia during the period August-October 1942.

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1) There were 326,000 Jews in the Volhynia-Podolia region in May 1942:

NAW RG 238, T- 1 75, roll 235 Report from the occupied eastern territories No. 5, 29 May 1942 gives the figure of 326 000 Jews for Volhynia-Podolia (Dean, p.195)

2) Puetz to Aussenstellen der Sipo/SD, 31/8/42 [Browning, p.136]:

The actions are to be accelerated, so that they are completed within your area within five weeks. At the meeting of the Gebeitskommissaren in Luzk from August 29-31, 1942, it was explained in general that in principle a 100% solution is to be carried out.

3) Meldung 51:

c) Jews executed [Aug-Sep-Oct-Nov-Total] 31246 165282 95735 70948 363211

Kruglov breaks down the 363,211 as follows:

a) The November total is mainly Bezirk Bialystok

b) Of the 292,263 killed before November, approximately 70,000 were in the present-day Belarus part of the RKU, the rest were in present-day Ukraine

The concentration of killings into September matches Puetz's instruction to carry out the actions "within your area within five weeks."

4) Browning

Monthly report of the military armaments commando, Volhynia-Podolia, October 1942, in: Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg, RW 30/15. (Im Oktober 1942 fanden nun in Wolhynien die grossen Judenevakuierungen statt, durch die aus allen Betrieben die Juden restlos entfernt wurden, sodass die Betriebe auf kürzere oder längere Zeit vollkommen zum Erliegen kamen, bezw. die Fertigung bis auf Bruchteile zusammenschrumpfte.)

Translation:

Then, in October 1942, there were large-scale Jewish evacuations in Volhynia as a result of which every Jew was removed from all the factories, and the factories came to a complete standstill for a shorter or longer time, or production dwindled to a mere fraction.

This indicates that the final stages of the killing actions initiated by Puetz were completed in October.

5) German police reports copied in Polish archives (Shmuel Spector, p.173; Dean, p.93)

6) Interrogation of Sturmscharfuehrer Wilhelm Rasp 18 Dec 1961 (ZSL 204 AR-Z 393/59 Vol. II, pp. 173-94) confirming details of police actions (Dean, p.93).

7. The mass graves investigations in Nick's blog Mass Graves in the Polesie

8. Browning shows that the killings were ordered over the heads of the civilian administration, who protested that they still needed Jewish labour:

Informed of the impending "overall resettlement of the Jews" (generelle Umsiedlung der Juden), the SS and Polizeistandortführer in Brest-Litovsk, Friedrich Wilhelm Rohde, pleaded: "Insofar as the Jewish question is solved in Brest, I foresee severe economic damage resulting from the lack of labor." He was supported by the local commissioner (Gebietskommissar) Franz Burat: "Although the total resettlement of the Jews from the Kreisgebiet is desirable from the political standpoint, from the standpoint of labor mobilization, I must plead unconditionally for leaving the most needed artisans and manpower."53

These appeals were in vain. On October 15-16, 1942, the 20,000 Jews of Brest, including 9,000 workers, were shot.54 The war diary and reports of Police Regiment 15 show that the Jews working in camps and on state farms in the region were also executed.

Thus the local autonomy aspect of the Holocaust had clear limits in Volhynia-Podolia, as elsewhere.

Demographics and Killing in Volhynia-Podolia (Part 1: 1941)

Documents listing mass killings in the western USSR, such as the Einsatzgruppen Reports, Meldung 51 and police reports, do not exist in isolation from a demographic context. They must be read in conjunction with demographic reports showing that, for example, there were 326,000 Jews in the Volhynia-Podolia region in May 1942 (Dean, p.195); and there were 18,000 Jews in one of that region's largest cities, Brest, as of 28 Feb 1942 [Bundesarchiv Berlin R 94/6 Ernauhrungsamt Brest-Litowsk, Statistischer Bericht 28/2/42, cited by Browning, p.124]. Similarly, demographics and killing reports in Volhynia-Podolia are supported by evidence of mass graves, as Nick showed in great depth back in 2006. Below I present some further proof of convergence between these sources, taken primarily from Browning's study of Brest (Chapter Five of this collection).

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Browning argued that there was a close correspondence between the reduction in the population of Brest (from 59,600 in Sep 39 to 50,000 in Nov 41) and the total number of killings for Brest listed in the Operational Situation Reports. I have summarized Browning's figures into two tables in my opening post of this RODOH thread.

The main killing action in Brest in 1941 is summarised by Longerich:

2.6.4 The Police Battalion 307 shot several thousand Jewish civilians in Brest-Litovsk around July 12; almost all were men between 16 and 60, it was a supposed "retribution measure" (Vergeltungsmaßnahme). Immediately before the massacre, Daluege, the Chief of the Police Regiment Centre, Montua, Bach-Zelewski and further Higher SS Leaders had assembled in Brest.

Browning argues that the inspiration behind these killings was neither totally top-down nor bottom-up. Instead, Himmler and his subordinates learned from the measures taken in late June by PB 309 in Bialystok and Stapo Tilsit in Lithuania.

The relationship between centre and region could therefore be a dynamic one. However, Browning's narrative also shows that the centre would ultimately hold sway when the final killing decisions were made in mid-1942. That will be the subject of Part 2 of this series.

ADDENDUM: March 24th, 2009.

Since writing the above, I have become more critical of Browning's interpretation of the Brest sources he cites, and his omission of other important sources. My revised interpretation of the evidence for Brest is given in this blog.

Vidal-Naquet, Show Trials and McCarthyism

Anyone tempted to buy into denier rhetoric concerning "show trials" is strongly advised to read Chapter Five of Vidal-Naquet's A Paper Eichmann, which is on-line here. Below I highlight two major points, and add one of my own.

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Firstly, it is simply untrue, even in the Soviet show trials, that a dissenting voice was never heard. Vidal-Naquet cites the denial, made in court, by Krestinsky, which can be viewed here. Krestinsky had clearly been tortured enough for his persecutors to believe that he would confess in court, but on his first court appearance, he retracted whatever confession he had promised to give, and had to be subjected to further (presumably even more vicious) torture before he caved in the following day. Krestinsky thus proved, with great courage, that someone being tortured could still "have his day in court", even if his torturers defeated him subsequently. Furthermore, Vidal-Naquet notes that, when French deniers compared Hoess to Bukharin:

The comparison was unfortunate since Bukharin recognized practically nothing except his political defeat; those who were actually judged publicly, moreover, were only a minority. Certain others among them, such as Krestinsky or Kostov, retracted their confessions.

This leads to the second point, namely how show trial confessions differ from those of Hoess and other SS officers:

Eichmann's lawyer in Jerusalem, Servatius, claimed as much: "Hoess's testimony is characterized by the fact of his total submission,"[58] but I doubt that any other reader of the autobiography would have that impression. Hoess proliferates autobiographical details, insignificant but authentic facts, personal comments, the most varied political commentaries (including a denunciation of the Soviet camps), anti-Semitic and anti-Gypsy accusations. Nothing in it suggests either fabrication or dictation.[59] Upon being arrested by the Allies, Hoess was beaten (and why should we disbelieve him?) several times; he disavows his first signed statement (p. 244); he was also mistreated by his Polish guards at the beginning of his incarceration in Cracow (p. 247). At Nuremberg, on April 15, 1946, he was first called as a witness for the defense by Kaltenbrunner's lawyer, Kauffmann, a fact which Faurisson, normally so garrulous on the subject of Hoess, omits mentioning.[60]

SS perpetrator testimonies are replete with statements that do the prosecutors no favours, and which could indeed harm the prosecution (e.g. revelations of torture; condemnation of Soviet camps). Their political content is often antisemitic and contains statements defending Nazi actions. This is entirely different from the Soviet show trial confessional, in which the Stalinist regime was primarily interested in full self-condemnations that discredited all of Stalin's opponents.

To Vidal-Naquet's arguments, I would add a further comparison: McCarthyism. This anti-Communist crusade, also known as the Second Red Scare, used the investigatory and accusatory powers of the state, was close in time to the Nuremberg trials (which were still on-going when McCarthyism was beginning), and must thus have involved similar institutions and technologies of interrogation as those used by Americans in postwar Germany. McCarthyism was also just as aggressive in its intentions as the Nuremberg trials and de-Nazification. The [Jewish!] Judge in the Rosenberg case stated that:

I consider your crime worse than murder

Yet the prosecution could not elicit a confession from the Rosenbergs, even after coercing Julius by threatening to indict his wife. Moreover, this huge investment of state power did not involve a mass forgery of documentation. The Venona decrypts, which would have made convictions easier, were not used.

McCarthyism was therefore a political witch-hunt without a sophisticated hoax, and thus refutes the denier claim that the one must involve the other.

A Burning Question

Mattogno and Graf are often sunk by their own sources. A key example of this unintentional self-debunking tendency can be found in their discussion of Soviet and Polish investigations of the human remains found at the Treblinka I labour camp and Treblinka II death camp.

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On the one hand, M/G tell us that corpses were found at Treblinka I:

On August 22 and 23, [1944], the investigatory committee, accompanied by local Polish officials, went to Treblinka in order to carry out investigations on the spot. Three mass graves and 13 individual graves were discovered by this.

The key point to note is that these bodies had not been cremated. With regard to Treblinka II, however, the Polish investigation of Łukaszkiewicz found that "nearly all of the bodies of the victims were burned." Mattogno and Graf conclude from Łukaszkiewicz's report that "the human remains as well as the ashes prove only that bodies were buried or cremated in the camp." However, not only do M/G grossly under-represent the volume of victims that Łukaszkiewicz's findings indicate (as Roberto showed here), but they also ignore the obvious question raised by the contrast between the two camps: why burn corpses at one camp but leave them in-tact at the other?

The only plausible conclusions are that the camps had different purposes and the Nazis needed to conceal the purpose of the second camp by burning as many of the victims as possible.

Hargis Plagiarizes Rudolf

Less than two weeks after he rebuked Gerdes for plagiarizing Mattogno and Graf, Hargis has committed an act of intellectual theft against Manfred Köhler [a pseudonym of Germar Rudolf], documented in this Memory Hole Thread.