Mattogno on Riga, Part Four: Polishing a Turd

I’m going to finish this series on Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the murder on 30 November 1941 of thousands of Latvian Jews, plus a thousand Reich Jews who had just arrived in Riga, by making a few general observations.

Before that, however, a couple of confessions. First, I’m not an historian, although I do have an undergraduate history degree (summa cum laude) and 20 graduate credits in history (U.K. system). Also, I’ve never read a whole book by Mattogno. Readers of this blog will know that I am not a coauthor of the white paper published by most of the bloggers here several years ago, despite being one of the blog’s founders. Therefore, the extent to which I can claim any expertise on the topic at hand should be considered with those points in mind.

I spent the last week or so writing around 2,000 words on roughly ten pages of “history” written by Mattogno. While not an expert per se, I can state the following with confidence. Mattogno’s writing of history is terrible – just awful. If I submitted a paper for a grade with the kinds of errors he makes (or lies he tells), I’d get a failing grade. Were I a peer reviewer who received his work to be considered for publication in a scholarly journal (a job I have, in fact, done in a different field of the humanities), not only would I reject it outright, refusing to consider it further upon revision, but I would seriously doubt the field expertise and/or intellectual honesty of the writer.

In the ten pages on Riga alone, in a mere 2,000 words, I’ve managed to point out a number of serious methodological errors and instances of outright lying. This is not an historian – this is either an imbecile or an ideologue bent on falsifying the historical record. That Mattogno is routinely held up as the leading light of “revisionist scholarship” says a boatload about the quality of the scholarship we’re talking about. That he has managed to keep his hands relatively clean regarding overt anti-Semitism (a claim his coauthor Jurgen Graf cannot make) is a worthless distinction given the pitiful state of his “research."

“But look at all the footnotes!” Footnotes are worthless unless they’re deployed honestly. Yes, Mattogno cites a number of sources, but he doesn’t bother to present the material in those sources honestly or thoroughly.

“Thousands of pages can’t be wrong!” Yes, they can. Plus, did you ever notice how many of those pages are taken up by direct quotations? If he were a student, Mattogno would be cited for plagiarism despite acknowledging his sources because the sheer volume of quoted material is so great.

“He’s an expert in textual analysis!” Really? Who says? He doesn’t appear to have a degree in anything except (perhaps) classics and philosophy. I assume he learned some textual analysis as part of that process. That does not, however, make one an expert. Nor are the “readings” that he offers of many texts plausible or defensible.

Carlo Mattogno is a charlatan of the highest order. That he can reasonably present the veneer of respectability is beside the point. You can only polish that turd so much.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Three: Hierarchies Are Hard

Having addressed Mattogno’s butchering of the Keine Liquidierung phone note and ignorance of points like basic meteorology, geography, and arithmetic, we move in this post to discussing how Mattogno addresses the aftermath of the shooting of a thousand Reich Jews in Riga on 30 November 1941. The “orthodox” history has it that, Lange having lodged a complaint about this shooting to RSHA and thus to Himmler, Himmler issued the orders the following day regarding the ongoing disposition of Reich Jews arriving in Riga and Minsk and summoned Jeckeln on 4 December to discuss events.

Mattogno’s first point of contention here regards why Jeckeln’s shooting of Reich Jews on 30 November should warrant the attention of Heydrich and Himmler, but the shooting of Reich Jews in Kaunas on 25 and 29 November by Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando would not; he writes (p. 217), “Therefore, as Himmler did with Jeckeln, the SS should also have summoned Jäger for a reprimand.” Again, on its face, this seems like a reasonable argument. However, there are a few key differences between the cases that Mattogno does not acknowledge.

First, there was no conflict of interest or “turf war” in Kaunas as there was in Riga. After all, Lange did not raise the issue of Reich Jews in Riga being shot because he was particularly concerned with their lives. Rather, he seems to have been motivated by the need to apportion some Jews to work detail and, perhaps as importantly, the fear that his prerogative to manage the arrival and treatment of Reich Jews in Riga, which he had been assigned as a member of the SD, would be taken over by Jeckeln. Also, it’s worth noting that it was Lange who had routed the Reich Jews shot in Kaunas to that city in the first place; therefore, if anyone would have raised an alarm, it would have been he.

Second, there is again the matter of geography – Riga is not Kaunas, and more importantly, the people stationed in each city were different. Jäger’s immediate superior, Stahlecker, was stationed in Riga; in contrast, Jeckeln, as an HSSPF, had Himmler as his immediate superior. Therefore, while Stahlecker, like Lange, could have taken issue with Jäger’s shooting of Reich Jews five days and one day earlier and some reprimand given, that they were in different cities made such a scenario less likely to have yet emerged, particularly while occurring in the context of the Jews of the Kaunas Ghetto being shot at the same time. Complicating matters is that, as I pointed out in my article on the Keine Liquidierung note, it seems fairly clear that Stahlecker wasn’t even in Riga on the dates in question. Otherwise, as Finnberg pointed out in his testimony, Lange would have brought his complaint directly to Stahlecker.

Mattogno pulls something similar in discussing the dispute that arose between Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar for Ostland, and the SS regarding the need to keep Jews alive for labor. Noting that Jeckeln claimed to have been ordered by Himmler to exterminate the Jews in the Riga Ghetto on 10 or 11 November, Mattogno points to a document dated 20 November from the Generalkommissar for Latvia, Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, commenting on labor assignments for ghetto Jews. Clearly, if the Jews of the ghetto were to be exterminated, Drechsler’s document makes no sense. Mattogno writes (p. 225), “Can one seriously believe that the Generalkommisar in Riga, who issued these orders, had never heard of Himmler’s alleged extermination order?”

Well, frankly, yes. Drechsler’s immediate superior was Lohse, who in turn reported directly to Alfred Rosenberg as Minister for the Eastern Territories – the civilian occupation regime. Jeckeln, as noted, reported directly to Himmler. Since the dispute between Lohse and the SS was ongoing, there is no reason to think Drechsler would not have begun planning to deploy the Riga Ghetto Jews for labor, particularly since, when he wrote the document in question, the Jews in the ghetto were still alive.    

A key thing to point out here is that there are two possibilities for what Mattogno has done in these cases. Either Mattogno doesn’t know or understand the differences in hierarchies between the SD, on the one hand, and the SS and Police Leaders, on the other, or between the SS hierarchy in the east and that of the civilian administration, or he’s deliberately obfuscating. The man has written several books on the topic of Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity, so the odds favor the latter, although I suppose the former is possible.

The next and last part of this series will offer some final observations on how Mattogno has treated this topic. Spoiler alert: He has done so badly.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Two: Phone Calls in Riga, Prague, and Berlin

Picking up where I left off in my last post, Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the mass shooting of Latvian Jews, as well as a thousand newly arrived Reich Jews, on 30 November 1941 is riddled with errors and lapses in logic. After briefly remarking on the discrepancy between the actual date of the shooting and the date as reported in Stahlecker’s famous report of the following year (“in early December”), Mattogno writes (p. 216), “The exact date is important because the shooting of the Jewish transport early in the morning depended precisely on the large number of persons who were to be killed during the day. This has its logic, but if 45 minutes (from 8:15 to 9:00 AM) was time enough to kill 1,000 persons (according to the verdict in the Riga Trial), then why did it require more than seven hours to kill 4,000 people? At Riga, in fact, the sun only came up at 8:34 AM on 30 November, and it set at 3:50 PM.”

Mattogno on the Killing of 4,273 Children in Kaunas [Kovno]

The second Jaeger Report stated that, on October 29, 1941, a total of 9,200 Jews were killed in Kaunas [Kovno] consisting of:

2,007 Jews, 2,920 Jewesses, 4,273 Jewish children (mopping up ghetto of superfluous Jews)

Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen Handbook (here p.211) entertains the possibility that these Jews may have been shot in order to make room for five transports due to arrive from the Reich, despite the fact that Jaeger also reports those Jews as having been shot. Mattogno's suggestion would mean that 4,273 Lithuanian Jewish children were shot in order to accommodate transports that (according to Jaeger) only contained 327 children (175 on 25.11 and 152 on 29.11). Mattogno does not acknowledge the significance of the fact that Jaeger sarcastically refers to the Reich Jews as "resettlers" and that he correctly identifies the cities of origin. He is of course refuted by the way in which the selection for the shooting was carried out and the fact that diaries (most notably Tory), witnesses, trials and other sources never identify deported Reich Jews as being in the Kaunas ghetto. However, following Roberto's refutation here (at footnote 129), Mattogno seems to have abandoned his argument in the Italian edition concerning the transfer of Jews from Kaunas to Riga in early February 1942, as it does not appear in the English translation. Rudolf does not acknowledge this deletion in his foreword but instead chooses to imply that no such changes were made in response to criticisms made on this blog.

Moreover, Mattogno's underlying purpose of trying to show that the Nazis allowed Reich Jews to be resettled while shooting Soviet Jews is undermined by his own citation (p.210) of the report from the East of July 3, 1942, stating that Reich Jews deported to Riga the previous winter were "covered by the general anti-Jewish measures in effect in the East." There was thus a "general" policy covering Jews of all national origins, in accordance with Nazi racial constructs that regarded all Jews as a Gegenrasse. All these Jews were eventually meant to die after their usefulness as labour expired, as Lohse made clear on December 2, 1941.

Mattogno on Riga, Part One: Keine Liquidierung Revisited

With my blogmates already having responded to parts of Carlo Mattogno’s magnum opus on the Einsatzgruppen, I decided to have a look at the ten pages Mattogno dedicates to the killings in the fall of 1941 in Riga – a topic I’ve had occasion to look at very closely over the last couple of years. I put together some of the theories about the famous Keine Liquidierung note a few years back; for his part, Mattogno seems to have stuck with some of the less compelling explanations.

Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) - Part 5 (2)

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In this article I continue the presentation of administrative documents relating to mass graves from the extermination of the Jews in Lithuania in 1941, which like in the previous series will be contextualized with the 2nd Jäger Report and other evidence.

The documents presented hereafter are from districts of the GBK’s Panevėžys(Ponewesch), Šiauliai (Schaulen) and Vilnius(Wilna)-Land.

Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) - Part 5 (1)

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In the previous articles of this series I refuted Mattogno’s arguments against the authenticity and reliability of the 2nd Jäger Report in the first volume of his work about the Einsatzgruppen.

This article and the next one will be dedicated to presenting and discussing some documentary evidence associated to the mass killings reported by Jäger, which is mostly ignored by Mattogno and largely shown for the first time, as far as I know, in a publication written in the English language.

Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) – Part 4

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The subject of this article is Mattogno’s argumentation in support of his denial of the killing, mentioned in the 2nd Jäger Report, of German and Austrian Jews deported to Kaunas.^[98]

Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) – Part 3

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This article and the following will address what Mattogno’s calls his "critical examination" of the 2nd Jäger Report.^[47]

Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) – Part 2

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In the previous article of this series I addressed Mattogno’s arguments against the authenticity of the 2nd Jäger Report and concluded that these are rather weak. In this and the following articles I will address Mattogno’s arguments against the reliability of the information contained in the 2nd Jäger Report.

Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) – Part 1

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Introduction

The report dated 1.12.1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando (EK) 3 of Einsatzgruppe (EG) A (the 2nd Jäger Report) ^[1] is the most explicit surviving German document related to Nazi Germany’s largely successful endeavor to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. It details the killing, between 4 July and 25 November 1941, of a total of 137,447 people mainly on the territory of Lithuania, of which 135,391 (98.50%) were Jews and 2,056 (1.50%) were non-Jews (communists, partisans, prisoners of war, mentally disabled people and others). ^[2]

Report on the Deportation of Reich Jews to Riga in December 1941

On December 26, 1941, Paul Salitter submitted a report on a transport from Düsseldorf to Riga that had taken place between the 11th and 17th of that month. A copy of that report, the original of which is in the Wiener Library, London, can be seen here whilst an English translation is here. Below I analyze its most pertinent contents and compare it to other sources, such as Meurin's report of the transport to Minsk of a month earlier.

Mattogno’s Marijampolė Mass Graves Controversy

One of the largest massacres committed in German-occupied Lithuania in 1941 took place near the city of Marijampolė. The victims were the following, as recorded in the report dated 1.12.1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 (the 2nd Jäger Report)^[1], under the date 1 September 1941:

Mariampole

1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses 1,404 Jewish children, 109 mentally ill, 1 fem. German national who was married to a Jew, 1 fem. Russian

How many people were killed at Ponary?

In the community Rudamina, in the small forest Paneriai^[1],near the railway station of Paneriai, a neighborhood of Vilnius, the largest killing site in Lithuania during its occupation by Nazi Germany was located. Known as Ponary to Poles and as Paneriai to Lithuanians^[2],the place was mainly used for killing Jews from the Vilna Ghetto, but Jews from other places, non-Jewish civilians and Soviet prisoners of war were also shot there. In this article the Polish name Ponary will be used.

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 4)

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We now get to what are probably the most interesting images in the Yad Vashem collection of photos captioned as having been taken at Ponary.

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 3)

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Now, let’s look at the Ponary photos that Mattogno "examined", and at what (other) photos that may be relevant to Mattogno’s argument regarding the exhumed corpses mentioned in the 26 August 1944 report (and/or to his other arguments presented in this context) are available in the online archives of The Ghetto Fighters House and Yad Vashem. All photos must, of course, be credited to the respective institution in whose archives they are featured, respectively The Ghetto Fighters’ House and Yad Vashem. Photos that appear in both collections are shown only once, with the references in each of these collections.

Whether or not they were taken at Ponary, some of these photos are very graphic and should not be viewed by sensitive readers.

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 2)

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Back now to Mattogno’s considerations regarding the August 1944 commission’s report as concerns excavations at Ponary and finds of human corpses and cremation remains.

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 1)

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Introduction

This is the first of a series of articles discussing Carlo Mattogno’s claims and arguments regarding mass graves at the Ponary mass killing site near Vilnius, Lithuania. It is based on the 153rd of my posts on the forum of the "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust" that was censored (i.e. "disapproved" or truncated beyond recognition, in both cases on the flimsiest of mendacious pretexts, or deleted after publication) since early July 2017 (the number would be higher if my job had not been such a hustle in the past months, leaving little if any time for pastimes both online and offline). Said censorship is further proof of what is already common knowledge, namely that open debate on the Holocaust is the last thing that said "Committee" is interested in and wishes to provide.

Commendably none other than Friedrich Paul Berg, one of the least commendable exponents of Holocaust denial, expressed his opinion about CODOH censorship with unusual frankness. He gets points for that.

That said, I move on to the first article of this series, which owes much to the gratefully acknowledged, very valuable input of my fellow bloggers Jonathan Harrison, Nick Terry and Sergey Romanov.

The Jäger Report (8)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (7)

The eighth and last blog of this series addresses Karl Jäger's involvement in the killings committed by Einsatzkommando 3 in 1941, his further wartime career and his postwar life until his arrest, interrogation and suicide in 1959. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (8)

The seventh blog of this series addresses the events that led to a temporary suspension of the extermination of Lithuania’s Jews after the massacres organized by Einsatzkommando 3 in 1941, and the fate of this Jewish community’s remainders. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").