tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post3708788815332057823..comments2024-03-29T13:40:51.077+00:00Comments on Holocaust Controversies: Mattogno on Photographic Documentation Nicholas Terryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14852758011968360596noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-13816652220655758472019-01-23T21:23:54.887+00:002019-01-23T21:23:54.887+00:00Another thing, what would those "intimidators...Another thing, what would those "intimidators" have expected the "intimidated" to "keep quiet" about?Roberto Muehlenkamphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03608133715777146924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-87354563060486297932019-01-23T20:57:04.585+00:002019-01-23T20:57:04.585+00:00Or these guys.
The director of the asylum Warta ...Or <a href="http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2015/05/auschwitz-ss-men-confessing-on-tape.html" rel="nofollow">these guys</a>. <br /><br />The director of the asylum Warta <a href="http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2017/05/sonderkommando-lange-in-german.html" rel="nofollow">was told about atrocities by one of the killers</a>: <br /><br />"I learnt from a member of the commando that the patients had been gassed. He had approached me as doctor, because he became crazy. He told me that he is hearing the sound of the gas all the time. It was the person who closed and opened the gas valve."Hans Metznerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07746792258730274681noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-30579633942449881722019-01-23T20:02:38.661+00:002019-01-23T20:02:38.661+00:00PS:
Here you can start listening to a very "...PS: <br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NpF3jGmKOM" rel="nofollow">Here</a> you can start listening to a very "intimidated" fellow.Roberto Muehlenkamphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03608133715777146924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-5458857508411662242019-01-23T19:56:43.022+00:002019-01-23T19:56:43.022+00:00Intimidated by whom exactly, and what's the ev...Intimidated by whom exactly, and what's the evidence that they were? <br /><br />Besides, you apparently didn't look before writing. The pictures I showed at the beginning of this article were obviously taken by direct observers of the "alleged" atrocities. And there are others of the sort. <br /><br />As to "confessions", there were many. <a href="http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/06/otherwise-youll-think-that-im.html" rel="nofollow">This guy</a>, for instance, wrote to his wife about his sporting activities. <a href="http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-is-katyn-against-that.html" rel="nofollow">This one</a> expressed concern about certain procedures. <a href="http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/07/german-wartime-knowledge-of.html" rel="nofollow">These guys</a> and <a href="http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2016/01/german-pows-on-homicidal-gassing-in.html" rel="nofollow">these here</a> talked freely among themselves about certain nice things. And so on. <br /><br />I guess you'll have to yell "forgery".Roberto Muehlenkamphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03608133715777146924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-20885837378175274382019-01-23T01:26:47.341+00:002019-01-23T01:26:47.341+00:00I always thought it odd that no Nazi was outraged ...I always thought it odd that no Nazi was outraged by the alleged atrocities that he didn’t take pictures with a tiny Minox spy camera or confess to a priest or psychiatrist. After the war they were intimidated to keep quiet.666isMONEYhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04278844324811261409noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-71023390608131982072019-01-19T11:33:40.279+00:002019-01-19T11:33:40.279+00:00BRoI, you're confusing depth for breadth. Robe...BRoI, you're confusing depth for breadth. Roberto's blog post is about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, which means dealing with republics and regions, not concentration camps; it means dealing with not just the major cities (Minsk, Wilno, Riga, Kiev, Odessa etc), but also provincial counties and small towns.<br /><br />GK Weissruthenien, for example, had 95 ghettos, as identified in the USHMM Encyclopedia vol. II. But there were only 13 trials relating to units and offices stationed in GK Weissruthenien. Even though some of the trials concerned central units like KdS Weissruthenien and discussed actions in provincial towns, it's clear that not every ghetto liquidation in GK Weissruthenien was discussed in a West German court. <br /><br />The ZStL did survey the entire region as best as it could, but did not advance to indictments for every last locality. Thus one finds that Gebietskommissariat Glebokie was investigated as AR-Z 37/60 from 1959 to 1972, leaving five case files of 1,950 pages and two other files, but this generated no trial. A trial *was* completed regarding the final liquidation of the Glebokie ghetto, in 1976 (so no trial transcript), affecting members of Pol.Rgt. 26, but the main sweep in this region was actually carried out by Trupp Lepel of Einsatzkommando 9 in the summer of 1942, and this was never prosecuted. <br /><br />We have several documents for the summer '42 action in GebK Glebokie - a report from the GebK giving a breakdown, an application for a Bandenkampfabzeichen for an EK 9 member that mentions the sweep, and Kube's report to Lohse (3428-PS) which discusses the cross-border foray by the Army Group Rear Area (i.e.: EK 9/Einsatzgruppe B, subordinated to this Army Group Rear Area) and which confirms that the victims were killed. So it's not like historians have to rely on a trial transcript to reconstruct events in this district. But they can certainly combine the documents, ChGK statements and West German investigations if wished. There were 15 ghettos in GebK Glebokie.<br /><br />A trial or trial transcript is no more magical than any other source type (contemporary German official document, photograph, whatever). Sometimes they are available and sometimes they are not. <br /><br />Historians are not lawyers and don't exclude evidence - they use whatever sources are to hand for a particular locality or event, and the confidence of their judgements are naturally elastic, because of the obviously varying quantities and qualities of evidence available for different eras and locations.Nicholas Terryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14852758011968360596noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-38440154440517442972019-01-19T08:17:57.189+00:002019-01-19T08:17:57.189+00:00> "better coverage"! That's clear...> "better coverage"! That's clearly not true.<br /><br />Funny how you make the claim but don't bother to substantiate it (neither the fact that questions are mostly not written down, nor the Kauer incident, nor whatever the rules were for admitting things to a court have anything to do with historiography).Sergey Romanovhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04063444062099331337noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-65912839012745623492019-01-19T02:45:24.030+00:002019-01-19T02:45:24.030+00:00"But only a fraction of the investigative cas...<i>"But only a fraction of the investigative cases opened in the BRD ever went to trial, so the statements and interrogations gathered in pretrial investigations are always going to provide better coverage and be more widely available for more localities than a statement in a trial transcript. So the 1974 change in trial procedure is not exactly crucial."</i><br /><br />"better coverage"! That's clearly not true.<br /><br />Mailaender went on to say: "Many interview transcripts record only responses to questions asked by the prosecutors or investigative judges, but not the questions themselves." [p.15]<br /><br />In People in Auschwitz, Langbein wrote that former inmate Rudolf Kauer "provided highly incriminating and concrete evidence" at "the preliminary hearing", "but at the trial retracted his testimony". We know from the <a href="http://www.auschwitz-prozess.de/index.php?show=Kauer-Rudolf" rel="nofollow">transcript</a> [<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aoiW2VCmkVE/XEKNDITObiI/AAAAAAAATjM/SjLnzF3xa8MITVUgGVp9lRZif5_FOlRswCLcBGAs/s1600/Miami%2BHerald%2B07.07.64.png" rel="nofollow">newspaper report in English</a> ], that's an enormous understatement. During his 06.07.64 trial testimony, Kauer repeatedly stated that he had lied during his police interrogation 04.01.61 and judicial interrogation 10.10.62, and that those statements were "worthless". <br /><br />It was ruled at the NMT IG Farben trial that witness statements could not be submitted as evidence unless the witness testified in person [exceptions were made for statements from Hoess, as he was dead but had testified at the IMT and his own trial].The Black Rabbit of Inléhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12083144769375557650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-56155368700531223342019-01-18T04:00:58.509+00:002019-01-18T04:00:58.509+00:00Reconstructing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union r...Reconstructing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union relies in any case on multiple source types of multiple national provenances (in terms of who collected and preserved the sources). The ballpark number can be extrapolated from demographic calculations as has been done several times. <br /><br />German and Romanian official documents confirm well over 1.5 million, probably around 1.7-1.8 million out of the 2.4-2.6 million indicated by demographic calculations (excluding deaths of Soviet Jews in the Red Army, etc, which are factored out). Big chunks of this documented total are region-wide or unit-wide statistics, e.g. the figures in Meldung 51, with other documents giving a partial breakdown.<br /><br />Unofficial German contemporary sources like diaries and letters, plus contemporary non-German sources including Polish underground reports, Lithuanian and Latvian nationalist reports, Swiss and other diplomatic/intelligence reports, Jewish contemporary reports, diaries, manuscripts and letters, are also numerous, especially for the annexed territories of the Baltic states, eastern Poland and Bessarabia/Bukovina, which account for 1.4-1.6 million. There are a fair number of such sources for the pre-1939 USSR (0.9-1 million), but the coverage is less extensive. <br /><br />Postwar investigations from 1945 onwards outside the USSR or East Bloc corroborate pretty much all the really big actions and major localities, but they don't necessarily drill down into every last rayon of a particular oblast - for a certain proportion of localities, the only real sources we have are Soviet Extraordinary Commission reports and interrogations, with some corroborated also by Soviet war crimes trials, especially of collaborators, so these are inconsistently available - Ukraine and Lithuania has been open with these trials, the Russian Federation hasn't been so open.<br /><br />The issue for historians is not whether one source base requires corroboration from another, but rather simply using all the relevant sources we have available. In most cases one can corroborate, in other cases one cannot, and to say anything about the obscure backwater village or town in Belarus or wherever, there's no choice but to use a Soviet source. Since there is such a heavy overlap of corroboration, we can rely on the Soviet sources after we cross-reference with the overall demographic calculations. This doesn't preclude individual localities from potentially being wrong or exaggerated for some reason, but the issue is aggregating the most probable numbers by republic (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, RSFSR) and oblast. <br /><br />Since getting absolutely precise and 100% corroborated statistics for most instances of region-wide or country-wide mass violence and genocide in modern history is extremely hard, and since we also have extreme difficulties coming up with absolutely certain numbers for individual massacres (e.g. Setif, Nanjing, Murambi in Rwanda) with sources giving conflicting estimates, then one should accept that death toll numbers for outbreaks of truly mass violence, as well as death tolls of civilians in major wars, are not going to be reconstructed on an even basis.<br /><br />What is also certain is that only a fraction of the deaths in mass violence and genocide were ever investigated via exhumations or forensics, and only a fraction of the deaths, as Roberto has shown in the blog post, were ever documented visually with photographs.Nicholas Terryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14852758011968360596noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-48351503013562293982019-01-18T03:33:20.005+00:002019-01-18T03:33:20.005+00:00I count 131 BRD trials, 11 DDR trials and 10 Austr...I count 131 BRD trials, 11 DDR trials and 10 Austrian trials relevant to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, and most of the BRD trials for the USSR took place before the 1974 change in trial procedure, so there are actually more trial transcripts for these than might be thought; the DDR and Austrian trials generally have trial transcripts. There are relatively similar numbers for Poland, bearing in mind that 38 of the 152 trials in German-speaking countries concerned Distrikt Galizien.<br /><br />But only a fraction of the investigative cases opened in the BRD ever went to trial, so the statements and interrogations gathered in pretrial investigations are always going to provide better coverage and be more widely available for more localities than a statement in a trial transcript. So the 1974 change in trial procedure is not exactly crucial.<br />Nicholas Terryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14852758011968360596noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24597325.post-28455116501707776812019-01-18T00:53:49.313+00:002019-01-18T00:53:49.313+00:00"... Soviet investigation reports should not ...<i>"... Soviet investigation reports should not be accepted at face value but checked whenever possible against evidence uninfluenced by the Soviets, such as German documents and testimonies before criminal justice authorities of the German Federal Republic"</i><br /><br />That would've been easier if the FRG hadn't banned keeping record of testimonies given at criminal trials: <br /><br /><i>"The Majdanek trial was an extraordinarily complex proceeding; unfortunately, space constraints preclude me from offering a detailed examination of the trial. It is important to note, however, that the source materials obtained from the trial are also problematic, not least because verbatim transcripts of witness testimony had been abolished for Regional Courts and Higher Regional Courts (Landgerichte and Oberlandesgerichte) by a reform of criminal procedure passed on December 9, 1974.[88] Initially, the Majdanek courtroom proceedings were recorded, but this practice was abandoned after some of the defense lawyers objected. While the investigation launched by the Cologne public prosecutor in 1960 is amply documented, there are no official, verbatim transcripts for the main hearings, held over a period of nearly six years. Instead, we must rely on the written notes kept by public prosecutors, investigative judges, and police authorities.<br />88. Transcriptions of the content of witness statements were abolished in cases before regional courts and superior state courts by the First Act to Reform Criminal Proceedings Law (1. StVRG § 273 Abs. 2 StPO) of 9 December 1974 (BGBl. I, S. 3393). I thank Dr. Holger Schlüter for this information."</i><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Female-Guards-Workaday-Violence-Concentration/dp/1611861705" rel="nofollow">- pp. 13-14 & 290.</a>The Black Rabbit of Inléhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12083144769375557650noreply@blogger.com