Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

In mid-May 1943, the German Foreign office was troubled by a story that the Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien, Wilhelm Kube, showed an Italian delegation of fascists "a gas chamber in which the killing of the Jews was allegedly carried out" in Minsk (see 1943-05-15 Opera and Gas-Chamber: Italian Fascist Delegation’s Visit to Nazi-Occupied Minsk). This was a mobile "gas chamber", since only gas vans are known to have operated in Minsk (see also here).

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

Before I roll out the heavy artillery, here's a quick appetiser to illustrate Mattogno's cheating or ignorance (your choice again) on German documents on the gas vans. Even after having read 250 documents on the Einsatzgruppen and some 200 individual pieces of correspondence from or to the Einsatzgruppen, he argues like a beginner on the subject and even considers his lack of understanding as something especially clever no one else has noticed:

Mattogno on Photographic Documentation

This article contains very graphic images that may disturb sensitive readers.

On page 402 of his recent Einsatzgruppen "masterpiece",^[1] Carlo Mattogno writes the following:

If these extraordinary Soviet discoveries, of which I have used those relating to the Ukraine as an example, were authentic, they should be confirmed by hundreds of photographs of mass graves and of exhumations taken by the various warcrimes commissions, and showing hundreds of thousands of bodies. However, photographs of this type are incredibly scarce. This is also true for the most prestigious among Holocaust archives, such as those at Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Ghetto Fighter House.

Over this and the following 7 pages (402 to 410), Mattogno then treats his readers to a litany of juxtapositions between the number of corpses (if any) that can be seen on published photographs of a number of killing sites and the number of people killed at these sites according to various sources – German documents (namely the Jäger Report^[2]), Soviet investigation reports or historical writing.

In this article I will test the aforementioned arguments for substance.

Smoke Over Birkenau in 1943

A reader of this blog called to our attention a ground photograph from the album of the construction offices in Auschwitz showing plums of smoke rising above Birkenau and wondered if it could be "smoke from bunker 1 and 2".

Yad Vashem Archives, Photo Archive, album FA157/74, item 46043

Location

The photograph was taken from about 500 m South-East of Auschwitz Birkenau with view on its South-East corner on the left and the main entrance gate on the right.

Date

Crematorium 3 seems to be visible on the far left of the picture, which was completed in 1943.  According to a document in Bartosik et al., The Beginnings of the Extermination of Jews in KL Auschwitz in the Light of the Source Materials, p.175, the vegetable storage houses in the foreground was still under construction in July 1943. Hence, the photograph was probably taken in summer 1943.

Origin of the Smoke

While the direction of the smoke could roughly correspond to the locations of Bunker 1 and Bunker 2 extermination sites, it is presumed that those sites were not in operation anymore in summer 1943 as the crematoria took over the extermination. Open air cremation might have taken place in August 1943 especially at crematorium 5 (see Open-Air Cremations in Auschwitz, August 1943). The exact origin of the smoke on the photograph seems unclear. Other than from cremation, it could be smoke from the chimneys of kitchens, delousing facilities or a narrow gauge railway transporting material to construction sites.