Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)

In the previous blog of this series we had a look at Mattogno’s handling of evidence regarding mass killings and corpse incinerations that took place in areas around the city of Lviv, Ukraine (Lvov in Russian, Lemberg in German) during the Nazi occupation, especially the omissions or misrepresentations in Mattogno’s rendering of Leon Weliczker Wells’ account of the activities of a unit of forced laborers in charge of cremation within the scope of Operation 1005.

This blog will be mainly dedicated to examining Mattogno’s arguments regarding the eyewitness and archaeological evidence mentioned in Chapter XVII of Father Desbois’ book, about his research on the killings in the Ukrainian town of Busk^[150].

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)

In the previous blog of this series we had a look at the sloppy research, illogical nonsense and insidious but easily detectable falsehoods whereby Mattogno tries to discredit Ukrainian witnesses to Nazi mobile killing operations interviewed by Father Patrick Desbois.

In this blog, we will examine Mattogno’s handling of evidence regarding mass killings and corpse incinerations that took place in areas around the city of Lviv, Ukraine (Lvov in Russian, Lemberg in German) during the Nazi occupation, including a forest area referred to in Desbois’ book as the Lisinitchi Forest.

Kalymon Case

The deportation proceedings against John Kalymon, a Ukrainian police guard in L'viv, which have been in progress for several years, produced a legal judgement that can be read here. The crucial finding is that there are documents in which Kalymon accounted for his use of ammunition by stating that he shot Jews. I quote these below to indicate the brutality of the police's regular activities, from which readers can deduce their own conclusions:

 A report dated August 14, 1942, indicated that “Iv Kalymun recorded that he fired four shots while on duty,” wounding one Jew and killing another. Further, the chief of the commissariat filed a summary report on the same date indicating that policemen “delivered 2,128 Jews to a central assembly point.” The report stated that twelve Jews were “killed while escaping,” seven Jews were wounded, and that “Ivan Kalymun” expended four rounds of ammunition. Additionally, on August 20, 1942, “Kalymun” fired two rounds of ammunition used during operations where 525 Jews were delivered to an assembly point; fourteen Jews were shot and killed and six were wounded. The following day, “Ivan Kalymun” shot two rounds of ammunition in an operation where policemen rounded up and delivered an additional 805 Jews. In June 1943, Kalymon’s commissariat participated “in the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto” where Jews were shot or sent to forced labor camps. From November 19 through 23, 1943, all UAP members in L’viv, including those in Kalymon’s commissariat, participated in massive search operations to locate and to turn over any remaining Jews in the ghetto to German authorities.

Yahad-in-Unum Kiev Exhibit

The Yahad blog has posted this video guide by Father Patrick Desbois of Yahad's Kiev exhibit, which opened last month. Yahad also did a tour of Ukraine in March, which it blogged here and here and here.

Thomas Dalton responds to Roberto Muehlenkamp and Andrew Mathis (2)

I. Introductions
III. Policy
IV. Techno-babble and Conclusions

II. Documents and Numbers

In his response to Andrew Mathis and me following our radio conversation with Kevin Barrett on American Freedom Radio, "Revisionist" author "Thomas Dalton" writes:

(3) On the Korherr report, it is true that I do not address it in my book Debating the Holocaust. This is because it is, in my estimation, an insignificant and inconclusive matter in the overall debate. The report was not secret, and nothing in it points to mass killing of Jews. It does, however, talk about mass evacuations, which were indeed occurring at that time (early 1943). And there are internal contradictions, in that the conclusions do not follow from the statistics, which suggests either significant error or ulterior motives of some kind. Finally, Korherr himself stated in 1977 that the “special treatment” cited in the report referred to “Jews who were to be resettled,” not killed.

More West German Trials That Do Not Fit the Denier Script

Bartov provides this excellent account of the trials of Köllner and Thomanek, who committed atrocities in ghettos and labour camps in the area of Polizei Sipo Czortków, located in the Galician district of Tarnopol. Two points should be noted. Firstly, although Köllner andThomanek were given life sentences, Sipo commander Peckmann was acquitted. Secondly, the treatment of witness testimony was rigorous and strict. The judgment against Köllner stated:

The judgment was based only on witness testimonies in which errors caused by flawed observation or flawed memory as well as untrue statements could be ruled out with certainty.

These features cannot be reconciled by the paranoid ramblings of denier legalism.

Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (5,2)

(1) - Introduction and 1. Nature and Purpose of Kola’s Archaeological Investigation

(2) 2. Location and Form of the Mass Graves

(3) 3. Corpses Found

(4,1) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.1 The Capacity of the Graves

(4,2) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.2 Wood Requirements
4.3 Duration of the Cremations

(4,3) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.4 The Soil removed from the Graves
4.5 The Ash

(4,4) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.6 The "Actual" Surface Area of the Graves
4.7 Density of Corpses in the Graves

(5,1) 5. Alternative Explanations


5. Alternative Explanations (continuation)[374]

In section 5 of my original article [375] I asked the pertinent question why, in order to bury "some tens of thousands" (Mattogno) of corpses at most, the SS would have created 21,310 cubic meters of grave space, sufficient, even according to Mattogno’s "maximum" capacity of 8 bodies per cubic meter, to bury about 170,000 corpses.

Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)

(1) - Introduction and 1. Nature and Purpose of Kola’s Archaeological Investigation

(2) 2. Location and Form of the Mass Graves

(3) 3. Corpses Found


4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes

4.1 The Capacity of the Graves[74]

In section 4.1 of the original blog[75], I demonstrated that, contrary to what Mattogno had claimed in his book[76], there are weighty reasons speaking against the assumption that the volume of the mass graves existing at Belzec was not sufficient to take in the corpses of the ca. 434,000 Jewish deportees mentioned in the report sent by SS-Sturmbannführer Höfle in Lublin on 11 January 1943 to Obersturmbannführer Heim in Krakow[77] (hereinafter the "Höfle report") as having been delivered at Belzec until the end of 1942.

What it was like

In the "Zloczow" chapter of the Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities, Poland (Volume II) - Eastern Galicia, the liquidation of the Zloczow ghetto in early April 1943 is described as follows:

How Many Perpetrators in the USSR? - Part Four: Ukraine 1941

I have already discussed Wehrmacht complicity in Ukraine in this blog. Below, I deal with the actions of forces under the ultimate control of HSSPF Jeckeln, including the 1st SS Infantry Brigade and Police Battalions 45, 303, 304, 314, 315 and 320. I also examine the role of non-German auxiliaries. My main sources are this collection of essays and Peter Longerich's report to the Irving-Lipstadt trial

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In August 1941, Jeckeln's forces shot "altogether 44,125 people, mostly Jews." By far the largest killing was at Kamianets-Podilsky by "Jeckeln's staff company, the Police Battalion 320 as well as by Ukrainian and Hungarian militia" (Longerich).

Longerich summarizes the killings committed by Battalions 45 and 314 during this period:

3.2.14- The Police Battalion 45, which belonged to the Police Regiment South, proceeded to murder Jews regardless of their age or sex at the end of July-beginning of August. The first victims were the entire Jewish population of the town of Schepetowka, where the Battalion had been based between 26 July and 1 August, 1941; according to the declaration of the Battalion Commander, Besser, made after the war, this involved 40 to 50 men and women, probably however even more. Besser declared on this point that he had been following an order of the Commander of the Police Regiment South, who in turn referred to a general order for liquidation issued by Himmler.

3.2.15 In the following weeks, the Battalion repeated this pattern in other Ukrainian villages: among others, it killed Jewish men and women in Slawuta (according to the declaration of the HSSPF Russia South this included 522 persons), in Sudylkow (471 dead) as well as in Berditschew (1000 victims). When Besser's successor, Rosenbauer, was being briefed on his tasks as Battalion Commander by the Higher SS and Police Leader of Russia South, Jeckeln, he was given very clear instructions, according to his own statements: "Jeckeln said that the order of Reichsführer SS Himmler was the basis for the solution of the Judenfrage: The Ukrainians should become a Helot (slave) people who work only for us. We had no interest, however, in having the Jews multiply: therefore the Jewish population had to be exterminated."

3.2.16 Also the Police Battalion 314, which belonged to the Police Regiment South as well, shot women and children as early as July. This can be documented for the first time in the case of a company of the Battalion on 22 July in a place in the area of Kovel: in the private diary of a member of the Battalion it is stated that on this day 217 people, among them entire families, had been shot.

In September, there were even higher numbers of killings, including four major massacres involving Battalions in Berdichev, Vinnytsia, Kirovohrad and Babiy Yar. The contributions of Pohl and Berkhoff to this collection of essays enable us to identify the assisting forces more precisely.

For Berdichev, Pohl (p.35) notes that Police Regiment South (Battalions 45, 303 and 314) reported the shooting of 4144 Jews on September 4th. Eleven days later, Jeckeln's forces and Battalion 45 murdered a further 12,000 at the airport. On September 19th-20th, Battalions 45 and 314 assisted Ek 6 in the murder of 15000 Jews in Vinnytsia. Ten days later, Battalion 304 - "presumably with Sk 4b" - shot 4,200 Jews in Kirovohrad (Pohl, p.37).

Babiy Yar has already been discussed extensively by Sergey in this series, during which he presented nine German war-time documents concerning the massacre. In addition, Roberto has cited Wette's study of the massacre:

According to German historian Wolfram Wette ("Babij Yar 1941", in: Wolfram Wette / Gerd R. Ueberschär (editors), Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert, pages 152-164), Sonderkommando 4a was made up of members of the Sicherheitsdienst and the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police), one company of a Waffen-SS battalion and one platoon of a police battalion, and reinforced by another two police battalions and units of Ukrainian auxiliary police; the task of supervising and guarding the march of Kiev’s Jews to the ravine in which they were killed was carried out by Wehrmacht troops under the orders of city commandant Eberhard.

Berkhoff's essay notes that the two German Battalions that took part in the round-ups and cordoning off the site were Battalions 45 and 303. Berkhoff identifies the non-German forces as follows (p.303):

It is appropriate to note here that new and newly found Ukrainian sources also name paramilitary and auxiliary police formations that were in Kiev at the time of the massacre: a squad of what was then simply called the "Ukrainian police" and the Bukovinian Battalion. Both were created or commanded by activists of the Melnick faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-M)

More information on the Bukovian Battalion can be found here and here and here.

The Ukrainian militia is mentioned twice in Operational Situation Report No. 106. For Babiy Yar, it notes that:

This order was publicized by posters all over the town by members of the newly organized Ukrainian militia.

For Zhytomyr it states:

The Militia headquarters, according to a suggestion of Sonderkommando 4a, arranged a temporary, local concentration of Jews in Zhitmmir [sic]...On September 19, 1941, from 4 o'clock [a.m.], the Jewish quarter was emptied after having been surrounded and closed the previous evening by 60 members of the Ukrainian militia.

Finally, Longerich notes the involvement of Jeckeln's forces in an October massacre:

Jeckeln also played a central role in the massacre of the Jews of Dnjepreprotowsk on 13 October, where according to the event reports, out of some 30.000 Jews in the city, "approximately 10.000 were shot by a commando of the Higher SS and Police Leaders on 13 October, 1941".

Longerich concludes:

In this series of massacres under Jeckeln's personal management up to October, 1941, more than 100.000 people were murdered.

Shortly after this point, Jeckeln was promoted and relocated to the Ostland region, where he oversaw murders primarily in the Baltic states. Moreover, regional anti-Jewish policy in Ukraine began to be influenced by the civilian administration, under the command of Koch, . The police became stationary and carried out killings under the remit of Sipo, Schupo and Gendarmerie, and (as in Galicia) actions were often organized by the KdS, which were formed from parts of Einsatzgruppe C. The next blog in this series examines that latter post-Jeckeln phase of the Holocaust in Ukraine.

How Many Perpetrators in the USSR? - Part Three: Galicia

Inter-agency collusion in Galicia has already been discussed in this blog, which examined how the regional KdS in Stanislawow, Hans Krueger, was able to use Order Police, and even railway security police, in the "Bloody Sunday" massacre. Below I present evidence of further collusion in the neighbouring area of Kolomyja [German: Kolomea], which was part of the south-eastern Galician region, Stanislawow-Kolomyja-Horodenka.

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The formation of the killing forces in this region provides an interesting case study of how an Einsatzgruppe, upon leaving a region, left behind officers who were required to form the nuclei of local stationary Sipo units, which would then expand their available manpower, and liaise with Order Police (Schupo and Battalions) and native auxiliary police (Ukrainian Hilfpolizei).

In Kolomyja, the KdS was Peter Leideritz, who, like Hans Krueger, had been part of KdS units in the General Government until recruited by Schoengarth for the new detachment for special purposes (Einsatzkommando Z.B.V.- zu Besonderer Verwendung). As Pohl notes, this had:

arrived in Lvov on July 2, on the immediate heels of Einsatzgruppe C; its instructions were to continue the killing squad's work, especially mass executions.

When Schoengarth's squad moved on, Leideritz and Krueger became heads of two of the branch offices of the KdS Lwow, which was commanded by Tanzmann. The region also had an SSPF, Katzmann, who later authored this famous report to his superior, HSSPF Friedrich Krueger.

The role of the Order Police in assisting the KdS in rounding-up and killing Jews in Kolomyja can be pieced together from several sources. Kolomyja was the subject of West German JuNSV legal cases 657 and 743. Although these were Sipo trials (case 743 resulted in the conviction of Leideritz's deputy, Ernst Erwin Gay), they also gathered testimony concerning the roles of Schupo (city police) officers. The research of Robin O'Neil has determined that the Schupo were recruited from the Vienna Schutzpolizei, and were also the subjects of a Viennese investigation after the war:

Vienna doc: Schutzpolizei: Lt. Hertl [Haertl] (commander), Witmann (deputy), Wittich, Doppler, Gross and Kleinbauer. Sergeants: Layer, Pernek, Kneissl, Hofstetter, Steiner. Corporals: Gallhart, Straka. Constables, Gall, Harko, Kroegner, Layer, Mauritz, Reisenthaler, Ruprechtsofer, Stanka[,] Schipany, Uitz. Reinforcements of 7./police 24 detachment who had been engaged in Jewish resettlement in Skole, Stryj and Chodorow during the period 3 – 5 September, 1942, arrived in Kolomyja in time for the action of the 7.9.42.

O'Neil identifies 17 actions in Kolomyja district. Members of the Schutzpolizei were arrested after the war in relation to these actions and gradually issued confessions (ibid.):

Those arrested acted very much like the norm, i.e., when they knew their precarious situation, they implicated others to lessen their own actions, and so to speak, spread the blame as a barrier to a more severe justice. There was no honour among this selection of thieves and murderers, as they crumpled under interrogation and 'spilled the beans' to save their own necks.

Ex Schupo officers Stanka and Straka were the first to break under interrogation and detail the systematic weekly killing of Jews in Kolomyja – in the Scheparowce forest, the cemetery, ghetto and abattoir. Ex Schupo Uitz stated that his police detachment shot over 15000 Jews in Kolomyja.(18) Pernek tried to hang himself in the prison cell, but later he was so overcome with remorse, he requested pen and paper to record what had happened in Kolomyja and confirmed the forest liquidation's and the use of dogs to tear at Jewish throats.(19) An interesting fact emerged that has been discussed elsewhere, was that Lt. Gross refused to participate in killing actions and there had been a row with his commander (SD) Hertl. Gross was not included in further actions, and no disciplinary action was taken against him. (20) All admitted shooting of Jews and complicity in Belzec transports in the districts of Kuty, Kosow, Jablonow, Pistyn, Peczenizyn, Horodenka, Czernilicia, Gwozdiec, Sniatyn, Zablotow, and Zabie.

Police Battalions also played key roles in these actions. When Gay was ordered by Leideritz to carry out an action in Kossow starting on 16th October, 1941, he borrowed personnel from Reserve Battalion 133 in Stanislawow, which had already participated in Bloody Sunday just four days earlier. On the same date, 3rd company of the same battalion assisted border police (BPP) in a killing action in Tatarow under Krueger's subordinate, Ernst Varchim (for both these actions, see Browning and Matthaeus, p.350).

When the time came to deport many of the remaining Kolomyja Jews to Belzec, the KdS was able to recruit Company 6 and Company 7 of Reserve Battalion 24. The commander of Company 7, Lt. Westermann, wrote two reports on the deportation, one of which is reproduced here. Reports were also written by the commander of Company 6, Brenner, and by Schutzpolizei Zugwachtmeister Jacklein of Company 7. Jacklein's report is shown on the same link as Westermann's above. Archival references for all four reports are given by Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edition, p.518, footnote 63.

Ukrainian auxiliaries were a huge factor enabling these actions. Browning and Matthaeus, p.349, estimate that the Schupo in Kolomyja had 100 Ukrainians, a ratio of four Ukrainians to every Schupo German.

Finally, it should be noted that the civilian administration in Kolomyja, led by Kreishauptmann (Chief of District) Klaus Volkmann, was fully involved in ghettoization, seizure of Jewish property, and the liquidation of Jews. Significantly, Volkmann set up his own units of Sonderdienst (ethnic German auxiliary police).

How Many Perpetrators in the USSR? - Part Two: Belorussia

To demonstrate the wide range of perpetrators outlined in Part One of this series, this blog presents a case study of inter-agency co-operation in killing operations in Belorussia. Information is taken from German criminal trials and from three main secondary sources: Christian Gerlach's chapter in this collection, Peter Longerich's report to the Irving-Lipstadt trial, and the passages concerning Belorussia in Browning and Matthaeus (hereafter B/M).

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Gerlach's chapter identifies three mass killings in which Wehrmacht commanders were involved at some stage in the round-ups or in ordering the actual killing. Firstly, in the first few weeks of occupation in the Summer of 1941, it seems that Generalfeldmarschall Guenther von Kluge of the 4th Panzer Army acquiesced in the selections of men in a prison camp in Minsk, some of whom were then shot by Nebe's Einsatzgruppe B. Kluge had at least one meeting with Nebe on the issue (Gerlach, p.217).

Secondly, on 7th July 1941, FK 184 acquiesced in the round-up of 4,000 Jews and 400 non-Jews in Brest. These were shot the following day by units of Police Battalion 307, the Security Police, and SD from Lublin (ibid.).

Whether the involvement of these commanders was 'acquiescence' (passive consent) or active engagement in the killing process, there can be no doubt that the killings occurred under their watch, and with their knowledge.

The third example is a killing for which Wehrmacht orders definitely existed. In the autumn of 1941, the commander of 707th Infantry Division, Bechtolsheim, issued orders to Reserve Battalion 11 (led by Lechtaler) and a detachment of EK 3, both of which had been sent (along with large numbers of native auxiliaries) from Lithuania to Belorussia at the request of the Wehrmacht. These orders resulted in the killings of 14,400 men, women and children in massacres that spanned Slutzk, Kleck, Kliniki, Smilovichi, Kojdanov and the Minsk civilian prisoner camp (B/M, pp.289-90). Lechtaler received a prison sentence for these killings at this trial.

Other Wehrmacht commanders who shared culpability for mass murder included von Schenckendorff, the commander of Rear Army Area Center. He had been at Bialystok on 8th July when Himmler arrived in the city and addressed a group that included HSSPF Bach-Zelewski and the commander of Police Regiment Center, Max Montua, whose battalions included 316 and 322. Shortly after Himmler's visit, these two battalions participated in the shootings of 1,000 Jews in Bialystok (B/M, p.257).

In late-September, von Schenckendorff organised an anti-partisan training course attended by Bach-Zelewski, Nebe and Fegelein, to promote inter-agency co-operation. Nebe was the leader of Einsatzgruppe B and Fegelein commanded the the SS Cavalry Brigade, which was the force given to the HSSPF Bach-Zelewski in July by Himmler. Von Schenckendorff was also instrumental in securing the transfer of Reserve Battalion 11 for the killings described above.

Fegelein's SS Cavalry Brigade was a major killer in Belorussia. It conducted two sweeps of the Pripet Marshes on Himmler's orders. This sweeps are summarized in Longerich's report here.

In the area behind the central section of the Front, the character of the mass executions began to enter a new stage as a result of the use of the SS Cavalry Brigade. This Brigade carried out a first "cleansing operation" in the Pripet marshes between 29 July and 12 August under the leadership of the Higher SS and Police Leader, by which 13,788 "looters" (i.e. mostly Jews) were shot and 714 were held prisoner. On the side of the Brigade 2 were killed and 15 wounded. Between 17 August and 23 August the Cavalry Brigade initiated a second "action" by which, according to their own report, altogether 699 Red Army men, 1001 partisans and 14,178 Jews were shot. Shortly before these two "actions", Himmler had visited Baranovice where he ordered the brigade to kill all Jewish men and the women as well - although in a different way. From a radio-telegraph text dated August 1 from the Second Cavalry Regiment we can read: "Explicit order of the RFSS. All Jews must be shot. Jewish women to be driven into the swamp."

Another subordinate of the HSSPF implicated in killing was SSPF White Ruthenia, Carl Zenner. In this trial, Zenner received a sentence of 15 years for his role in killing 6,000 Jews in the Minsk ghetto to make space for Reich Jews.

The involvement of Police Battalions in the murder campaigns is summarized by Longerich. The major killing Battalions in Belorussia were 307, 309, 316 and 322. Longerich summarizes their early actions:

In Bialystok, the Police Battalion 309 committed a massacre as early as 27 June in which at least 2000 Jews, among them women and children were victims. In the course of this action, members of the Battalion forced at least 500 into the Synagogue and murdered them by setting fire to the building.

2.6.2 In Bialystok, Police Battalion 316 and 322 staged a massacre in the middle of July whereby altogether 3000 Jewish men were killed. A few days before this massacre, on the afternoon of 8 July, Himmler appeared in Bialystok together with the Chief of the Order Police, Daluege. In a meeting with SS and Police Officers Himmler stated, according to Bach-Zelewski's testimony, that "basically every Jew was to be regarded as a partisan". On the next day, Daluege announced in a speech to members of the Police Regiment Centre that "Bolshevism must now be definitively exterminated". Two days later, on 11 July, the Commander of the Police Regiment Centre issued the order to shoot all Jewish men between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as looters. The police made it very easy to "convict" Jews as "looters"; three days previously, members of the Battalion 322 had searched the Jewish quarter and confiscated the goods therein as "loot". Jews were thus per se "looters."

2.6.3 The Police Battalion 316 perpetrated in Baranowicze a further massacre in the second half of July with probably several hundred dead; it was later involved in two mass executions in Mogilev, whereby on September 19, 3700 Jews (also women and children) were killed.

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.

Battalions 316 and 322 were also key agencies in the escalation of killing in October 1941, which began in Mogilev:

On 2 October, a Company of the Police Battalion 322 in Mogilev (where Bach-Zelewski's Headquarters were located) lead a "special action upon the orders of the High SS Police Leader", in which "2208 Jews of both sexes " were involved. (This formulation reveals that children were included.) These people were shot without exception, together with Ukrainian militia men. On 19 October, four days before Himmler appeared for an inspection in Bach's new headquarters in Mogilev, "an important action" against the Jews (Judenaktion grösseren Ausmasses), as it was called in the event report, "was carried out there, by which 3726 Jews of both sexes and all ages were liquidated". This was a clear signal that once again children had also been victims.132 In this "action" the EK 8 and the Police Battalion 316 were implicated. With these two massacres in Mogilev, Bach-Zelewski began a whole series of further, similar "major actions" (Grossaktionen) in eastern Belorus.

The final agency to join this killing process was the civilian administration. Relations between these bureaucrats and the SS did not always runs smoothly, as we know from the complaint by Slutzk District Commissioner Carl, which was Nuremberg document 1104-PS, and Kube's strained relations with KdS Strauch. Mostly, however, administrators were complicit in the killings of Jews. This was the subject of two major German trials - for Slonim and Lida respectively. More on the Lida trial can be found here.

The pattern noted here for Belorussia was typical of the Nazis' organisation of genocide across the USSR. The next two blogs will illustrate this fact further with case studies of Galicia and Ukraine

How Many Perpetrators in the USSR? - Part One: Overview

There is a common misapprehension among some non-scholars that the Einsatzgruppen were solely responsible for shootings of Jews in the USSR. This creates the potential for a false paradox because the Einsatzgruppen had less than 4,000 members. The misunderstanding is innocent if perpetrated by a small Holocaust museum but can become mendacious when exploited by a Holocaust denier whose purpose is to set up a Straw Man which can then be used to attack the proper historiography of the Holocaust. It is therefore necessary to correct this misapprehension at every opportunity by demonstrating that the Einsatzgruppen formed a small percentage of the total manpower involved in Jewish actions on former Soviet territory.

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There are five main types of perpetrator that are often overlooked in 'Einsatzgruppen-focussed' accounts of the East. The first is the Wehrmacht, which was often in overall charge of territories where killings were taking place. I have already discussed the nature of Wehrmacht collusion in Ukraine in this blog.

The second type is the Order Police, under the overall command of Karl Daluege, which was split into mobile and standing units. The mobile units consisted, during the Summer of 1941, of 21 Police Battalions (Browning and Matthaeus, p.231) that were assigned partially to the Wehrmacht and partially to the Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF). For example, in Ukraine, battalions 318, 311 and 82 were assigned respectively to the 213rd, 444th and 454th Wehrmacht security divisions, whilst battalions 45, 303 and 314 were assigned to Police Regiment South under HSSPF Russia South, Jeckeln, who also commanded reserve battalions 304, 315 and 320 (source: Dieter Pohl, p.26 of this collection). I will show in a future blog in this series how the battalions were used by Jeckeln in major killing actions such as Kamenets-Podolsk and Babij Jar. This will demonstrate that, as Pohl notes:

Altogether the six battalions subordinated to HSSPF Russia South killed considerably more Ukrainian Jews than Einsatzgruppe C and Einsatzgruppe D combined (same source, p.40).

The main stationary Order Police were the municipal police (Schupo) and the rural police (Gendarmerie). Many of these units were the subjects of war crimes trials held in Germany between the 1950's and 1990's, which can be accessed here. These units will be discussed in another blog in this series. Eric Haberer, pp.17-18, cites their manpower numbers:

According to Daluege's annual report for 1942, the strength of Order Police stationary personnel deployed at year's end in the two Reichkommissariats [Ostland and Ukraine] amounted to 5,860 Schutzpolizei and 9,093 Gendarmerie, or a near total of 15,000. Other sources indicate that in October-November 1942, these forces had a combined strength of nearly 14,000, of which 9,463 were stationed in the RKU and 4,428 in the RKO. Of the latter, 1,394 were at the disposal of the KdO Minsk, consisting of a Schupo complement of about 300 men for policing Minsk and Baranovichi and over 1,000 Gendarmerie for the extensive rural areas of the Gebietskommissariats Lida, Novogrudok, Slonim, Gantsevichi, Baranovichi, Vileika, Glubokoe, Slutsk, Borisov (Pleshchenitsy), and Minsk-Land.

Gendarmerie placement and organization in these regions is well documented in the case of Baranovichi.21 As of November 1942, this Gebiet of 5,695 square kilometers with a population of 341,522 was policed by 73 Gendarmes in the rural areas and 27 Schutzpolizei in Baranovichi city itself.22 Located in the city as well was a 37-strong motorized Gendarmerie platoon (Zug 7) and the administrative personnel of the Gendarmerie-Gebietsfu¨hrer, the Gendarmerie-Hauptmannschaft, and the SS and Police Garrison Commander (Standortfu¨hrer). Overall, this amounted to a force of 145 Order Police, roughly half of whom were thus Gendarmerie deployed outside of the city of Baranovichi.

The third type of non-Einsatzgruppen unit was the units of the Kommandostab Reichsfuehrer SS, which were under Himmler's personal command. In mid-July 1941, two of these units - the First SS Brigade and the SS Cavalry Brigade - were assigned respectively to the areas of HSSPF Jeckeln (Russia South) and HSSPF Bach-Zelewski (Russia Center). The total manpower of these units was between 10,000 and 11,000 men (Browning and Matthaeus, p.233 and pp.279-281).

However, by far the largest numerical collections of killers were the non-German auxiliaries, known as Schutzmannschaft (Protective Detachments). Eric Haberer, p.17-18, again provides the essential background and numbers:

Although Nazi politics and racism militated against a sound policy of indigenous self-administration and policing, sheer necessity forced from early on the recruitment of local manpower to strengthen the operational capabilities of stationary and mobile Order Police formations. Thus already one month into the war with the Soviet Union, Himmler was forced to acknowledge that “the Police is unable to carry out its tasks in the occupied eastern territories with available Police and SS personnel alone. It is therefore necessary to establish as fast as possible additional protective formations [Schutzformationen] consisting of native, pro-German elements in the conquered areas.” This key-directive of 25 July 1941 set the stage for the creation of indigenous Order Police auxiliaries, ofŽ cially termed Schutzmannschaft of the Einzeldienst (stationary units) and Geschlossene Einheiten (mobile units or battalions). Subsequent orders regulating recruitment, provisioning, SS and Police jurisdiction (Gerichtsbarkeit) and many other necessities of Schuma organization (uniforms, awards, ranks, wages, and so on) were quickly forthcoming via Daluege’s Order Police Main Office and led to the rapid build-up of formidable auxiliary police forces which, as of 1 July 1942, totaled 165,128 men or Schutzmaenner.

This massive injection of non-German manpower continued for the remainder
of 1942 and leveled off at around 300,000 in early 1943.

In the Baltic states, as MacQueen notes in pp.37-38 of this article:

By late 1941, fifteen of them, ranging in strength from 200 to almost 500 men, had been formed, with another five battalions added by August 1942. While some of these were deployed primarily for the security of rail lines and other installations within Lithuania and on the occupied territories of Russia and Ukraine, others have been tied to the mass killing of Jews and reprisals against non-Jewish civilian populations in Lithuania and Belarus.

The units are mentioned in Stahlecker's consolidated report of early 1942. In other regions, Schutzmannschaft assisted the Einsatzgruppen, Jeckeln's First SS Brigade and the Order Police in the role of auxiliaries. For example, as I will show in a future blog, there was a Bukovina Battalion of auxiliaries at Babij Jar.

The final category of perpetrators was the civilian administrations. These bureaucrats sometimes gave the killing orders. For example, in the case of Lithuania, Christoph Dieckmann (in page 261 of this collection) claims that Hans Gewecke, the Regional Kommissar of Siauliai, ordered that Jewish women and children were to be shot by "Lithuanian police, overseen by Germans."

When these categories are added together, the total number of perpetrators becomes large indeed. To give one regional example, Thomas Sandkuehler (in page 127n. of this collection) has shown that, as of September 1942 there were 14,366 Reich Germans in eastern Galicia. Of these, 2,000 participated in the Jewish extermination. In addition there were eventually 4,000 Ukrainian perpetrators in the eastern Galicia region in total.

In conclusion, therefore, we an see how an excessive focus on the Einsatzgruppen distorts the true picture and only gives a small fraction of the true number of people responsible for the Holocaust in the East. The rest of this series will correct this distortion.

Galicia

Our understanding of the Holocaust in Galicia is indebted to the work of Dieter Pohl, especially his Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944 (Munich, 1996). In 1998, Pohl published a study for Yad Vashem entitled Hans Krueger and the Murder of the Jews in the Stanislawow Region (Galicia), which is now available on-line in English here. Pohl's research, combined with the well-known report from Katzmann to Krueger (Nuremberg doc L-18), enables us to identify conclusive sources that demonstrate the co-ordinated genocide carried out by the Nazis in the region.

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The first genocidal action that the Nazis carried out in Galicia was the murder of the Lvov professors in the first week of July 1941. This is described by Polish historian Zygmunt Albert here. The murders were initiated by SS Brigadenführer Dr. Eberhard Schöngarth, who brought his EK unit to Lwow from Krakow. SS Captain Hans Krueger was part of that unit. According to Pohl, later in July:

Schöngarth instructed his subordinate Krueger to set up a branch office of the KdS(Kommandateur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD)— the Regional Command of the Sipo and SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence branch of the SS) in Stanislawow. The Sipo consisted of the Gestapo and Criminal Police (KriminalPolizei, Kripo).

Stanislawow was in south-east Galicia and had been occupied by the Hungarians before the Nazis' arrival. The first killing action in the city was overseen by Krueger on August 2nd, and resulted in the murder of approximately 500 male Jews and 99 Poles in the forest near Pawelce. This was documented at Krueger's trial, a summary of which can be found here.

However, these killings still came within the scope of the so-called 'Intelligenz-Aktion', killing the intelligentsia. An escalation of killing to include normal civilian men, women and children occurred in September, and was prompted by the decision of the new Lvov chief, Tanzmann, to set up a ghetto in Stanslawow that was too small to hold all the Jews. Krueger gave a candid account of this process in his pre-trial interrogation of June 26, 1962:

When the heads of the various branch offices were installed by the new commander in Lvov, Sturmbannfuehrer Tanzmann, specific areas were assigned, and then the guidelines for work were set down...Jews not suitable for deployment as laborers were to be shot. Since they realized that such shootings could not be organized overnight, the plan was that the residential area set aside for the Jews should be progressively reduced. The result was that a certain number of Jews had to be shot on a regular basis, because space was no longer available

The result of this shooting policy was a number of massacres, the largest of which was "Bloody Sunday" on October 12th, 1941, during which at least 10,000 Jews were murdered. A crucial feature of these killings was the diverse number of police units that Krueger was able to co-opt from surrounding areas, including the railway police (Bahnpolizei). As Pohl notes:

Subsequent to the September discussions in Lvov, Krueger began to
make preparations for the large-scale massacre of Jews in Stanislawow. In order to condition his security police for the task awaiting them, he first organized a mass murder on October 6, 1941, in the nearby town of Nadworna as a kind of "dress rehearsal." He also brought in reinforcements to Nadworna from the Border Police station in Tatarow. All Jews were ordered to assemble in the town marketplace. Members of the town's Judenrat and their families were separated from the rest. The police herded off all the others to a nearby wooded area and shot them there. This massacre in Nadworna, which claimed the lives of 2,000 men, women, and children, marked the actual beginning of the "Final Solution" in the Generalgouvernement.

Immediately thereafter, Krueger began preparations for "Bloody Sunday" in Stanislawow. By an order from the Orpo commander in Lvov the Schupo special duty contingent and Reserve Police Battalion 133 were ordered to provide "cooperative assistance" to the Sipo. On October 11, Krueger's deputy Brandt conferred with the RPB 133 commander Gustav Englisch, who initially placed one detachment of his men at their disposal. That same day Krueger himself contacted the municipal commissioner Emil Beau, who then issued directives on the revised and reduced dimensions of the ghetto perimeter. Not until the next morning, October 12, were all the various
authorities involved, including the new Schupo chief Walter Streege, summoned to a meeting. Krueger had also managed to obtain a detachment of the railroad police (Bahnpolizei) to join in the blood-letting.

This has clear implications for our understanding of the willingness of 'ordinary Germans' to carry out these killings. Krueger could bring in, not just specialist execution squads, but also humble railway police and order them to kill Jews as if it were part of their regular duties.

Equally, however, it is clear that there was a consensus between the SS and the different departments of the local administration about the mission to kill Jews. This is documented in the statements of SS men such as Krueger and Katzmann but also in the eager compliance of civilian officials. Pohl gives two examples:

Kreishauptmann Heinz Albrecht, an official of the internal-affairs administration who had previously held a similar post in Konskie...was a committed National Socialist and dedicated antisemite, as reflected in his inaugural speech delivered in the town of Rohatyn on September 28, 1941, and reconfirmed in testimony given in 1962: "As a National Socialist, I believed then that the Jews were the cause of all our misfortune."

Emil Beau, the municipal commissioner responsible for the Stanislawow urban area, was cut from the same cloth as Albrecht in character and conviction.

Nick Terry has kindly posted another statement made by Albrecht, cited by Pohl in Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944:

Jewry in Europa has been largely destroyed this year, in the course of defending the life of the Aryan peoples. The last remains will also disappear in a near future (DAIFO R-36-1-17, pp.24-32, Rede Albrechts an die Arbeitseinsatzstaebe im Kreis Stanislau, 2.11.42).

In addition to Pohl's narrative, we have the account given by the senior SS officer in the region, SS and Police Leader, Katzmann. This makes clear that even the forced labour program had strong genocidal components:

Owing to the peculiarity that almost 90 percent of the artisans in Galicia consisted of Jews, the problem to be solved could only be carried out gradually, as an immediate removal of the Jews would not have been in the interest of the war economy. Not that one could observe that those Jews who were working made any special contribution by their work. Their place of work was often only a means to an end for them: firstly, to escape the sharper measures taken against the Jews; and, secondly, to be able to carry out their black-market dealings without interruption. Only continuous police intervention could prevent these activities. Draconic measures had to be introduced by us after it was noted in increasing numbers of cases that the Jews had succeeded in making themselves indispensable to their employers by provided goods in short supply, etc. It is very sad to have to note that the wildest black-market deals with the Jews were made by Germans who were brought here, and in particular those in the so-called "operating firms" (Einsatszfirmen) or the "ill-reputed trustees" (beruchtigte Treuhander), both of which operated Jewish firms taken from their owners. Cases were known where Jews seeking to obtain some kind of working certificate not only did not ask for pay from their employers but paid regularly themselves. In addition, Jewish "organizing"2* on behalf of their "employers" reached such catastrophic dimensions that energetic action had to be taken in the interest of the reputation of the German people.

As the Administration was not in the position to overcome this chaos, and proved weak, the whole issue of Jewish labor simply taken over by the SS and Police Leader. The existing Jewish Labor Offices, which were staffed by hundreds of Jews, were dissolved. All work certificates issued by firms and official employers were declared invalid, and the cards given to Jews by the Labor Offices revalidated by the Police.

In the course of this Aktion thousands of Jews were again caught in possession of forged certificates or labor certificates obtained fraudulently by means of all kinds of excuses. These Jews were also sent for special treatment (Sonderbehandlungii). The Wehrmacht authorities in particular aided the Jewish parasites by issuing special certificates without proper control... There were cases where Jews were caught with from 10 to 20 such certificates. When Jews were arrested in the course of further checks, most of the employers felt obliged to attempt to intervene in favor of the Jews. This was often done in a manner that can only be described as deeply shameful....

Despite all these measures for the regulation of Jewish labor, a start was made in April 1942 on the evacuation of Jews3* from the District of Galicia, and this was carried out steadily.

When the Higher SS and Police Leader again intervened in the Jewish question in general on November 10, 1942, and a Police Order was issued for the formation of Jewish quarters, 254,989 Jews had already been evacuated or resettled. Since the Higher SS and Police Leader gave further instructions to accelerate the total evacuation of the Jews, further considerable work was necessary in order to catch those Jews who were, for the time being, to be left in the armaments factories. These remaining Jews were declared labor prisoners of the Higher SS and Police Leader and held either in the factories themselves or in camps erected for this purpose. For Lvov itself a large camp4* was erected on the outskirts, which holds 8,000 Jewish labor prisoners at the present time. The agreement made with the Wehrmacht concerning employment and treatment of the labor prisoners was set down in writing...

In the meantime further evacuation was carried out vigorously, with the result that by June 23, 1943, all Jewish quarters could be dissolved. Apart from the Jews in camps under the control of the SS and Police Leader, the District of Galicia is thus free of Jews (judenfrei).

Individual Jews occasionally picked uby the Order Police or the Gendarmerie were sent for special treatment. Altogether, 434,329 Jews had been evacuated up to June 27, 1943.... [This is followed by a list of 21 camps in which there were still 21,156 Jews.]

Katzmann's report is a vital piece of evidence on several levels. It uses the terms 'special treatment' and 'resettlement' in a context where it is undeniable that the terms meant killing. It lists the belongings of dead Jews and connects their fate specifically with Aktion Reinhard. It demonstrates beyond question that forced labourers were not intended to remain alive after their labour had been completed (nor were the SS reluctant to shoot even those who were desperately needed for such labour). It also confirms that the SS were willing to over-ride civilian authorities and employers in their ideological determination to make Galicia 'judenfrei'.

Katzmann also indicates that the SS saw its mission in Galicia as entailing the eventual extermination of Jewry, and that ghettoization and forced labour were interim measures until that extermination could be achieved. Unlike Warsaw and Lodz, there was never a battle between 'productionists' and 'attritionists'. The latter were in control from the beginning. Nor was there ever any evidence that these SS men were aware of a plan to resettle Galician Jews further east.

Mattogno and Graf: Reverse Logic

Mattogno and Graf have a problem. They have decided that, instead of simply ignoring vast quantities of transport data (see Sanning), they will distort them. However, anyone who studies these data eventually finds trains running into the Reinhard camps from the East (e.g. Bialystok, Minsk, Lida, Vilnius and Lwow). To any logical person, this fact alone disproves the 'resettlement thesis'. How do Mattogno and Graf lie their way around this evident fact?

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Mattogno/Graf's (M/G's) first approach to this issue is the blatant non-sequitur. 'Evidence A' is cited in support of totally unrelated 'Hypothesis B'. This is the equivalent of someone pointing to a barrel of apples as proof that there must be orange trees in the area. This is most apparent in Section 6 of Chapter VIII of their Treblinka screed, which begins with the claim:

The deportations of Jews to the east therefore took place in two stages: the Jews were first temporarily settled or lodged in transit camps and then deported farther east. In view of the paucity of existing documentation, we cannot determine with certainty what the final destination of this deportation was, but there exist various pieces of evidence, which make it possible for us to draw plausible conclusions.

In the absence of a 'final destination', M/G infer one by discussing a tiny sample of Dutch Jews who were selected for labour on the ramp at Sobibor. However, by definition, these labour selections were not 'resettlements'. The Jews quoted by M/G never set foot inside the USSR. Moreover, the labour camps cited in their testimony were to the west of Sobibor, so trains were going in the wrong direction to constitute 'deportations to the east'. M/G's own source, Danneker's statement of June 1942, clearly indicates that the 'east' was understood by the Nazis to mean the USSR:

For military reasons, an expulsion of Jews from Germany into the eastern deportation area can no longer take place during the summer.

We thus have a case of 'reverse logic' by M/G in which west and east are deliberately switched: a geographical and logical fallacy. Furthermore, the number of labour selections per transport in the cases cited by M/G was less than 5%. For example, Cato Polak was one of 42 people selected from a transport of 1105 Jews.

M/G's second distortion is to misrepresent a historical authority by cherrypicking a genuine historian's deportation data without giving its context. For example, in the case of Slovakian Jews, M/G claim that:

In an article published in 1992, Polish historian Janina Kielbon drew a close-to-complete picture of the deportation of Jews into the district of Lublin between 1939 and 1942.[703] We reproduce the data for 1942 in table form

M/G give the destinations as Trawniki, Izbica, 'Lublin' [Majdanek?], Lubartów, etc. What they fail to mention is that Kielbon's data indicated that these were merely temporary locations in which Jews underwent labour selection and those unfit for work were held in ghettoes for varying periods awaiting transport to the death camps, as shown here. See also the individual cases from the Majdanek State Museum shown here. M/G's technique here is therefore a snapshot fallacy. It takes a specific moment in a deportation, or one link from a transport chain, and uses this to obfuscate the full history of that deportation from its origin to its final location.

Thirdly, the most serious lie of all committed by M/G is to distort the ultimate fate of the people who were selected for labour:

It is characteristic that nearly all the Dutch Jews, who had been transferred from Sobibór to another camp, returned home by way of Auschwitz-Birkenau; instead of being liquidated as bearers of top-secret knowledge, they survived even this 'extermination camp.'

This can be shown to be false by examining one of M/G's own sources: Jules Schelvis's "Sobibor" study. Mattogno writes:

At Dorohucza, 5 km from Trawniki, was a labor camp where peat was cut. According to Schelvis, at least 700 Dutch Jews were transferred there directly after their arrival in Sobibór, but according to him only two of them are supposed to have survived the war.[765] There is certain knowledge of 171 of these persons - 147 men and 24 women - since they sent postcards home from Dorohucza.

M/G's hypocrisy towards Schelvis is telling. They accept his estimate of the number of Jews in the camp, which comes from the Judenrat in Amsterdam, but reject his findings on the number of survivors. Such hypocrisy is typical of M/G's quote-mining methodology.

Schelvis's estimate of 700 Dutch Jews at Dorohucza is confirmed here:

From Dorohucza a total of 171 written messages (postcards) were received at the Judenrat in Amsterdam. The senders of 160 of these cards could be identified, together with the dates of their deportation. They were on 8 different transports. With these 8 transports, plus the first deportation of 10 - 13 March 1943, from which there were no survivors, the number of Dutch Jews put to work at Dorohucza, can be calculated as at least (9 x 80 + 1 =) 721.

The fate of these Jews is made clear by the same link:

Out of over 34,000 Dutch Jews deported from Westerbork to Sobibor, an estimated 1,000 were sent to the forced labour camps in the Lublin and Trawniki areas. One of those camps was the peat digging camp of Dorohucza. Sixteen of these Dutch Jews survived the war, 13 women and 3 men.

[...]

During the night of 3 November 1943 almost all Jews in the labour camps in the Lublin district (40 - 50,000) were shot. This massacre was conducted under the code name of Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival). In this operation the Jewish slave labourers in Dorohucza and Trawniki were murdered. It also meant the end of the work camps. In the digital ‘In Memoriam-Lezecher’ book are the names of 144 Dutch Jews who were murdered during Aktion Erntefest in Dorohucza, for administrative reasons with 30 November 1943 given as their date of death for administrative reasons. See the testimony of Robert Jührs.

This evidence alone is sufficient to confirm Schelvis's findings about the number of survivors. I am grateful to my friend Earldor for supplying this extract (Schelvis, "Sobibor", p.191):

Of the approximately 700 Dutch men who, upon arrival, were immediately transferred to labour camp Dorohucza to dig peat, only two survived the war. In the rest of the Lublin district, only thirteen women and one man were liberated - though not at Dorohucza or Lublin - after spending time at numerous other camps, relentlessly torn between misery, death and hope.

Finally, M/G set up a false dilemma, and a fallacious argument from incredulity, concerning the Jews in Galicia:

If, as official historiography has it, the establishment of these Jewish residential districts was aiming at concentrating the Jews in order to be able to liquidate them more easily, then why did the Belzec camp, allegedly founded for the purpose of just this liquidation, terminate its 'extermination activity' in December of 1942, although 161,514 Jews were still living in the district of Galicia on December 31, 1942?

The obvious answer to this argument from incredulity is that the Jews died by other means, such as being gassed at Sobibor:

After Belzec closed in December 1942, it is estimated that over 25,000 Jew from Lwow (Janowska Camp) and Stryj ghetto were sent to Sobibór and murdered.

In conclusion, therefore, although Mattogno and Graf present far more documentation than their fellow deniers, their approach to that documentation is no less fallacious and dishonest.

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 2)

[Continued from The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 1)]


Denierbud’s forgery claim strongly relies on the stance that certain contents of the Stroop Report are not in line with what “one” would expect them to be. What apparently bugs him most is that the report describes no members of Stroop’s forces being killed by explosives used by their opponents, and that the casualties of Stroop’s forces are too low to be “believable”. So in the following I will have a look at these arguments.

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3. “No Deadly Explosions” (item B of the section “A Fraudulent Commemoration Book”)

Apparently influenced by the present-day experience of US troops fighting insurgents in Iraq, denierbud considers the comparative inefficiency of Jewish resistance to Stroop’s forces that becomes apparent from the Stroop Report (no mention of Germans killed by Jewish bombs and grenades, only one ambush on April 19 with no Germans reported killed, no mention of booby traps) to be an indication against the document’s authenticity:

The author who impersonates General Jürgen Stroop forgets to have the Jews effectively use bombs or grenades in the nearly month-long battle. The author has the Germans capturing bombs and grenades but forgets to have the Jews using them. Similarly, in the daily reports, there is only one instance of an ambush on the Germans. That occured on the first day, April 19. But if you look at the dead and wounded list (at the beginning of the report) you'll see that no Germans died in that ambush. Also telltale is there is no instance of the Jews ever booby trapping a road, a door, a sewer entrance, or a dugout. The author either forgot to have the Jews do that, or she didn't want to elicit sympathy for the Germans by including any instances of it. We're supposed to believe that Jewish commander Mordecai Anielewicz never tried such strategies.

First of all, denierbud’s allegations reveal him to be a dishonest propagandist when he points out that no Germans are reported to have been killed in the “ambush” on 19 April 1943, described by Stroop in his teletype report of 20 April 1943. That much is true, but it is also true that Stroop mentions to have sustained losses of “12 men (6 SS-men, 6 Trawniki-men)” in that “ambush”, and that the list of wounded at the start of the report shows 19 April 1943 to have been the day with the highest number of wounded in the entire month-long operation (24 out of a total of 85 wounded between 19 April and 16 May 1943 or ca. 28 % of the total reported for a period of 28 days, by my count). So there is not as much a discrepancy as denierbud tries to make believe between the described intensity of combat on 19 April 1943 and the casualties that were reported for that day.

Denierbud’s pointing out that no Germans killed by Jewish bombs or grenades are mentioned throughout the Stroop Report shows the bizarreness of denierbud’s reasoning rather than anything else. While it is true that neither the summary report nor the daily teletypes contain anything like “Unterscharführer So-and-so was killed by a hand grenade” or “Unterscharführer So-and-so was blown up by a mine” (though a wounding through hand grenades is mentioned on at least one occasion), does this imply that none of Stroop’s men is stated to have been killed by explosives? What are the fatalities mentioned in the casualty list supposed to have died from, if not either projectiles from fire-weapons or explosions of hand grenades or other explosive devices?

As to no booby-traps being mentioned by Stroop (though there is one mention of pressure mines laid by “bandits”), this need not mean that none were ever set up, although the Jewish fighters might have been reluctant to employ certain tactics out of concern about how the SS might react thereto against the unarmed civilians that made up the overwhelming majority of the ghetto’s population, or in the hope that, if not alerted and provoked by high casualties, the SS might eventually consider its task accomplished and call off the dreary search for Jews in bunkers and gutters before all ghetto inhabitants had been rooted out. An indication of such concerns or expectations, obviously based on vain hopes and wishful thinking, is provided by the Jews’ reluctance to kill Stroop himself despite having opportunities to do so, which Stroop refers to in the daily report of 14.05.1943:

Several bandits stated that they had long been in a position to kill off the leader of the action, the "General," as they call him, but that they would not do so, since they had orders to that effect to avoid the risk of a further intensification of the anti-Jewish measures.

Further factors to be considered in this context, besides the tactics employed by Stroop that will be addressed in the next section of this part, are the reduced number of Jewish fighters and the little armament they possessed, as opposed to the hardware of a well-equipped modern army. Just how many Jewish fighters were there in the ghetto, and what did they have to fight with?

According to this article, the strength of the Jewish forces before the uprising was the following:

The ZOB now had 22 fighting squads, of 15 fighters each, the Military Union had about half the number of fighters, but it operated in a similar manner.

22 fighting squads of 15 fighters each means a total of 330 fighters, half that many is 165, so the total Jewish fighting force amounted to 465 fighters.

According to the USHMM,

Seven hundred and fifty fighters fought the heavily armed and well-trained Germans.

Even by this higher count, the Jewish fighting force was numerically not very strong. And the nature and quantities of its armament further reduced its chances of putting up a successful resistance:

When, on January 18, the SS squads, composed largely of Balts and Ukrainians, attempted to sweep the ghetto, the inhabitants responded with sniper fire and hit-and-run tactics. Since the Jews had but some 140 small arms, most of them pistols and revolvers worthless except for close combat, the toll on the defenders was terrible – one thousand were killed and fifty-five hundred captured.
[…]
Some additional arms – a few hundred at the most – were obtained at exorbitant cost from the Poles. But the stock of ammunition did not exceed ten rounds per weapon, scarcely enough for a single action. It was Masada, 1943, but without a vestige of hope.

(Robert Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, page 269)

The same bleak picture of Jewish armament becomes apparent from Marek Edelman’s account of the Warsaw ghetto’s struggle. A glorifying account of that struggle by one of the leading figures of one of the Jewish fighting organizations, extolling the prowess of that organization in preparing and carrying out the fight, this is how it describes the hardware that the fighters of that organization had at their disposal (emphases are mine):

Michal Klepfisz in cooperation with the PS and WRN groups made the necessary arrangements for a large-scale purchase of explosives and incendiaries (e.g. 2,000 litres of gasoline) and later, after transporting the shipment to the ghetto, set up a factory for the production of Molotov cocktails and hand grenades. The production process was primitive and simple, but the large output of the shop greatly increased the firing-power of our detachments. By now every partisan was equipped, on the average, with one pistol (and 10-15 rounds for it), 4-5 hand grenades, 4-5 Molotov cocktails. 2-3 rifles were assigned to each "area". There was just one machine-gun in the entire ghetto

Just one machine-gun, few rifles, pistols, hand grenades and flame bottles the mainstay of the Jewish arsenal, and so little ammunition that every bullet had to be counted – the Jews didn’t stand a chance, and perhaps nothing is more illustrative of the desperateness of their situation than the following tactics Stroop refers to on several occasions in his report, for instance on page 8 of the summary account:

During this armed resistance the women belonging to the battle groups were equipped the same as the men; some were members of the Chaluzim movement. Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands. It happened time and again that these women had pistols or hand grenades (Polish "pineapple" hand grenades) concealed in their bloomers up to the last moment to use against the men of the Waffen SS, Police, or Wehrmacht.

This and other references of Stroop’s to the Jews’ armament show just how miserable that armament was, notwithstanding Stroop’s understandable attempt to make the most of it in the eyes of his superiors. The Jews mostly fought with pistols or revolvers (worthless except for close combat, as Conot points out) and hand grenades or flame bottles (Molotov cocktails), which are the weapons most frequently mentioned by Stroop as having been employed by his opponents and captured by his own forces. Rifles are mentioned less frequently, and mentions of machine-gun fire are even rarer. Typical mentions of the Jews’ armament read like the following examples:


Daily Report of 25.04.1943, 1st page:

Also today repeated armed resistance took place and in one bunker 3 pistols and explosive charges were captured.

Daily Report 05.05.1943, 1st page:

Today, we again captured arms and ammunition, including one pistol.

Daily Report 06.05.1943, 1st page

In this skirmish the Jews fired from 08 pistols and other calibers and threw Polish "pineapple" hand grenades.

Daily Report 13.05.1943, 1st page:

During the securing of one bunker, a pitched fire fight took place during which the Jews not only shot with 08 pistols and Polish Vis-pistols, but also threw Polish hand grenades at the Waffen-SS men.

Less frequent are passages like this one from the daily report of 23.04.1943, in which Stroop expresses his astonishment at the fact that his opponents, go figure, even had some rifles:

The Jews and bandits held their fire up to the last moment and then concerted their fire against the units. They even used carbines.

Or like the following in the daily report of 14.05.1943:

The night patrols clashed with armed bandits several times. These bandits fired a machine gun and small arms.

So small was the booty of arms that Stroop was able to present at the end of the operation against the Warsaw Ghetto that he had to do some explaining to his superior, stating that a) seizure of weapons had been made difficult by a number of circumstances and b) explosives and flame bottles seized from the insurgents had immediately been used against them (as if the German and collaborator forces had not had sufficient weapons of their own). In the
explanatory report of 24.05.1943, Stroop wrote the following (emphases are mine):

On figure 3 (bounty)[read: "booty" - RM]

7 Polish weapons, 1 USSR weapon, 1 German weapon, 59 pistols of different calibers, several hundred grenades, both Polish and self-made, a few hundred Molotov cocktails, self-made bombs, infernal machines with detonators.

Large amounts of dynamite, ammunition for weapons of all calibers, including ammunition for automatic weapons.

In respect of the seizure of weapons, t should be remembered that in most cases, the weapons could not be seized, because, before their capture, the bandits and Jews threw them into hiding places and holes that could not be determined or found. Seizure was also made impossible because of the smoke screens set in the bunkers by our men. Since the blowing up of the bunkers had to be undertaken immediately, there was no question of a subsequent capture.

The hand grenades, explosive ammunition and Molotov cocktails seized by us were immediately employed in fighting the bandits.

I leave it open whether Stroop’s main justification for his reduced weapons booty stands up to scrutiny, or whether he was just using a staple excuse invoked by counterinsurgency units when they have few captured weapons to show because most “partisans” or “bandits” they killed were actually unarmed noncombatants (see, for instance, the discussion of German anti-partisan fighting in Belorussia in Christian Gerlach’s book Kalkulierte Morde, especially the excerpt translated in my RODOH post # 3890). For the main reason why so little armament was captured, as shown by all three sources I have referred to, was that Stroop’s opponents didn’t have much armament to start with. The Jewish fighters of the Warsaw ghetto were not only few in number, but also very limited in what they had to inflict damage on their enemy with. The weapons they mainly used, pistols, hand grenades and Molotov cocktails, were close-combat weapons, meaning that the Jews had to get very close to their enemy in order to inflict casualties. This exposed them to high casualties at the hands of an opponent who could hit them with long-range weapons before they became dangerous to him, and was further made difficult by the tactics employed by Stroop’s forces, which will be discussed in the following section. Any fighting success under such circumstances called for extraordinarily reckless and able fighters, and unless the members of the Jewish fighting organizations had these qualities, the inefficiency of their struggle that denierbud rules out as impossible is not exactly implausible.

4. “Not enough Germans Killed” (item C of the section “A Fraudulent Commemoration Book”)

Denierbud tells his readers that there is an unbelievably wide disproportion between the number of Jews killed or captured that Stroop reported and the casualties of his own forces (16 killed, 85 wounded, by my count) that he stated in his report, and that this shows that the supposed female forger “wanted sympathy for the Jews, so she had Jews overwhelmingly killed in many awful ways, but she either forgot to have Germans killed, or omitted that since it didn't work with her Jewish sympathy goal”.

Before discussing whether denierbud’s conclusions make any sense, let’s have a look at the assumptions they are based on.

Denierbud points out the following ratios:

7000 divided by 16 equals 437. Which is 1 German killed for every 437 ghetto fighters. That's just not believable.

But another ratio is even harder to believe: could German forces walk into a mix of combatants and civilians, many armed in bunkers, who believed they were being deported to death camps, and lose 1 soldier for every 3504 people killed or captured?

56,065 divided by 16 equals 3504.

The first of these comparisons suffers from a mistake that I shall gently attribute to denierbud’s having failed to inform himself about how many combatants there actually were in the Warsaw ghetto and assumed that everyone the SS killed out of hand was a “fighter”. Actually, as we have seen in the previous section, the number of armed combatants in the Jewish fighting organizations was below 500 according to one source and 750 according to another. Assuming the higher figure, and that every last combatant was killed by Stroop’s forces (Marek Edelman obviously survived to tell the story, and Stroop himself mentions armed Jews and “bandits” who managed to make their way out of the ghetto), the ratio would be 47 Jewish fighters killed for every combat fatality on the German side (750 vs. 16) and about 7 Jewish fighters killed for every man in Stroop’s force that was either killed or wounded (750 vs. 101, by my count). Considering the wide gap in armament, namely that the Jews mostly fought with short-range weapons requiring them to get close to the enemy and thus expose themselves to high casualties from rifle and automatic weapons fire, and that the SS used artillery, armor, flamethrowers, demolition charges and smoke candles, are these ratios really as implausible as denierbud claims? Wide disproportions in casualties due to considerable differences in training, leadership, armament and tactics have been reported on other occasions, not only in operations by regular military forces against inferiorly trained and armed irregulars, but also in clashes with regular military forces on both sides. For example, at the 1939/40 battle of Suomussalmi, the Soviet forces are reported to have suffered 27,500 killed and missing, whereas the Finnish forces suffered only 350 killed, 600 wounded and 70 missing (ratio of Soviet vs. Finnish killed or missing: 65). When invading Yugoslavia in 1941, German forces killed thousands and captured several hundred thousand enemy troops while losing only 151 killed, 392 wounded and 15 missing. Between June and December 1941, according to Richard Overy (Russia’s War, page 164), German forces attacking the Soviet Union lost about 164,000 dead, against 2,663,000 killed and 3,350,000 taken prisoner on the Soviet side – a ratio of 16 Soviet soldiers killed for every German. In the battle of Kwajalein in January/February 1944, the invading US forces lost 372 killed and 1592 wounded, whereas of the Japanese defenders 7,870 were killed – a ratio of 21 Japanese fatalities for every American combat fatality. The list could be further expanded.

An important factor to be considered when comparing the reported casualties of Stroop’s forces with the number of Jews he claimed to have killed is that a considerable if not the greater part of the latter were not killed in the course of combat actions but executed thereafter. This is not merely an inference from the reduced number of combatants among the Jews that Stroop reported killed, but also becomes apparent from Stroop’s daily reports. While on some occasions it is claimed that the Jews were killed “in battle” or not specified how they were killed, on others it is clear that the Jews reported killed were shot after capture. Some examples of the latter will be quoted hereafter.

Daily Report 25.04.1943, 1st page:

Immediate liquidation was not carried out due to the onset of darkness. I will attempt to obtain a train for T II for tomorrow, otherwise the liquidations will be carried out tomorrow.

Daily Report 26.04.1943, 2nd page:

30 Jews displaced, 1,330 Jews pulled out of the bunkers and immediately destroyed, 362 Jews shot in battle.

Daily Report 27.04.1943, 1st page:

A total of 2,560 Jews were caught today within the former Ghetto, of whom 547 were shot.

Daily Report 02.05.1943, 1st page:

In these operations the raiding parties pulled out 944 Jews from dugouts; 235 more Jews were shot on this occasion.

Daily Report 04.05.1943, 1st page:

Today we caught a total of 2,283 Jews, of whom 204 were shot and innumerable Jews were destroyed in dug-outs and in the flames.

Daily Report 07.05.1943:

Altogether 1,019 Jews were caught alive today, 255 shot.

It stands to reason that the shooting of unarmed noncombatants is not a casualty-prone operation for the force carrying it out, even if denierbud seems to think otherwise.

But what about the Jews expressly reported as killed or shot “in battle”, as in the daily report 26.04.1943? Were they killed in firefights in which the troops opposing them were themselves at risk of being killed or wounded? In most cases this was probably not so, given the tactics employed by Stroop and described throughout his report. Contrary to what denierbud claims, the SS, police and Wehrmacht forces under Stroop’s command did not simply “walk into a mix of combatants and civilians”, thereby exposing themselves to being attacked and suffering casualties. They burned each block of the ghetto down before advancing into it, thereby causing a great many Jews to be burned alive, to be shot while trying to escape or to give themselves up, and they used explosives and smoke candles to destroy bunkers or make their inhabitants emerge from them. The following are some examples of how Stroop described his tactics:

Page 9 of the summary account:

On 23 April 1943 the Reichs Fuehrer SS issued through the higher SS and Police Fuehrer East at Cracow his order to complete the combing out of the Warsaw Ghetto with the greatest severity and relentless tenacity. I therefore decided to destroy the entire Jewish residential area by setting every block on fire, including the blocks of residential buildings near the armament works. One concern after the other was systematically evacuated and subsequently destroyed by fire. The Jews then emerged from their hiding places and dug-outs in almost every case.
[…]
It was always necessary to use smoke candles to drive out the Jews. Thus one day we opened 183 sewer entrance holes and at a fixed time lowered smoke candles into them, with the result that the bandits fled from what they believed to be gas to the center of the former Ghetto, where they could then be pulled out of the sewer holes there. A great number of Jews, who could not be counted, were exterminated by blowing up sewers and dug-outs.

Daily Report 21.04.1943, 1st page:

I resolved therefore to blow up these passages which we had discovered and subsequently to set the entire block on fire. Not until the building was well aflame did screaming Jews make their appearance, and they were evacuated at once. We had no losses in this operation. Precautionary measures were taken in order to ensure that the conflagration remained localized.

22.04.1943, supplement to par. 1 of message of 21 April 1943:

Our setting the block on fire achieved the result in the course of the night that those Jews whom we had not been able to find despite all our search operations left their hideouts under the roofs, in the cellars, and elsewhere, and appeared at the outside of the buildings, trying to escape the flames. Masses of them - entire families - were already aflame and jumped from the windows or endeavored to let themselves down by means of sheets tied together or the like. Steps had been taken so that these Jews as well as the remaining ones were liquidated at once.

Daily Report 22.04.1943, up to 12:00 hours:

One raiding party was dispatched to invade once more the block of buildings which for the greater part had burned out or was still aflame, in order to catch those Jews who were still inside. When shooting again started from one block against the men of the Waffen-SS, this block also was set on fire, with the result that a considerable number of bandits were scared from their hideouts and shot while trying to escape.

Daily Report 24.04.1943, 1st page:

Since some of these Jews resisted, I ordered the building to be set on fire. Not until all the buildings along the street and the back premises on either side were well aflame did the Jews, some of them on fire, emerge from these blocks, some of them endeavored to save their life by jumping into the street from windows and balconies, after having thrown down beds, blankets, and the like. Over and over again we observed that Jews and bandits, despite the danger of being burned alive, preferred to return into the flames rather than risk being caught by us.

Daily Report 25.04.1943, 1st page:

Mission: "Repeated thorough combing of all buildings, identification of bunkers and their blowing up, as well as capture of Jews. Where they meet any resistance or bunkers cannot be reached, the buildings are to be burnt to the ground."
[…]
Today's mission ended for almost all of the shock troops with the breaking out of giant fires which caused the Jews to leave their hiding places and refuges.
[…]
If last night the former ghetto was covered with the glare of fire, then today a giant sea of fire can be seen.

Daily Report 29.04.1943, 1st page:

A larger raiding party was detailed to clean a certain block of buildings (formerly the Hallmann concern) and to burn this block down. 36 more dug-outs used for habitation were discovered altogether, and from them and other hideouts and from the burning buildings, 2,359 Jews were caught, of whom 106 were killed in battle.

Daily Report 07.05.1943

Today we blew up a concrete building which we had not been able to destroy by fire. In this operation we learned that the blowing up of a building is a very lengthy process and takes an enormous amount of explosives. The best and only method for destroying the Jews therefore still remains the setting of fires.

Daily Report 08.05.1943, 1st page

There were about 200 Jews in this dug-out, of whom 60 were caught and 140 were destroyed, partly owing to the strong effect of smoke-candles, and partly owing to heavy explosive charges which were laid in several places. The Jews whom we caught had already reported that innumerable Jews had been killed by the effect of the smoke-candles.

Daily Report 14.05.1943, 2nd page

In order to force the bandits in the sewers to come to the surface, 183 sewer entrances were opened at 1500 hours, and smokecandles were lowered into them at an ordered x-time, thereupon the bandits, seeking escape from what they supposed to be poison gas, crowded together in the center of the former Ghetto, and we were able to pull them out of the sewer entrances there.

And so on. As we can see, Stroop employed tactics that, while time-consuming and reckless, allowed his forces to kill a great number of Jews while mostly remaining out of their opponents’ reach. The devastating effect of these tactics from the Jewish point of view is described by Marek Edelman, as follows:

The partisans' stand was so determined that the Germans were finally forced to abandon all ordinary fighting methods and to try new, apparently infallible tactics. Their new idea was to set fire to the entire brush-makers' block from the outside, on all sides simultaneously. In an instant fires were raging over the entire block, black smoke choked one's throat, burned one's eyes. The partisans, naturally, did not intend to be burnt alive in the flames. We decided to gamble for our lives and to attempt to reach the central ghetto area regardless of consequences.

The flames cling to our clothes which now start smouldering. The pavement melts under our feet into a black, gooey substance. Broken glass, littering every inch of the streets, is transformed into a sticky liquid in which our feet are caught. Our soles begin to burn from the heat of the stone pavement. One after another we stagger through the conflagration. From house to house, from courtyard to courtyard, with no air to breathe, with a hundred hammers clanging in our heads, with burning rafters continuously falling over us, we finally reach the end of the area on fire. We feel lucky just to stand here, to be out of the inferno.[…]
The omnipotent flames were now able to accomplish what the Germans could not do. Thousands of people perished in the conflagration. The stench of burning bodies was everywhere. Charred corpses lay around on balconies, in window recesses, on unburned steps. The flames chased the people out from their shelters, made them leave the previously prepared safe hide-outs in attics and cellars. Thousands staggered about in the courtyards where they were easy prey for the Germans who imprisoned them or killed them outright. Tired beyond all endurance, they would fall asleep in driveways, entrances, standing, sitting, lying and were caught asleep by a passing German's bullet. Nobody would even notice that an old man sleeping in a corner would never again wake up, that a mother feeding her baby had been cold and dead for three days, that a baby's crying and sucking was futile since its mothers arms were cold and her breast dead. Hundreds committed suicide jumping from the fourth or fifth storeys of apartment houses. Mothers would thus save their children from terrible death in flames.

If denierbud speaks of Stroop’s forces having done “things” that made them “very vulnerable to attack”, like discovering and opening dugouts, he forgets to tell his readers that, before doing such “things”, fire had either killed the inhabitants of such dugouts, or caused them to flee the same, or made them into half-crazed, half-suffocated beings more likely than not to give themselves up if only to breathe some fresh air. Stroop was well aware of these people’s situation through interrogations of prisoners, as he mentioned in the daily report of 26.04.1943:

According to statements of the captured Jews, a large number of inhabitants in the bunkers have become insane due to the heat, the thick smoke and the successful explosions.

I don’t think many people are likely to keep in hiding under such circumstances, with horrible death inside their dugout the expected outcome, even if they expect to be killed by their captors.

This leads us to an issue addressed by denierbud when he claims that the Jews “supposedly” knew they were earmarked for annihilation and would thus “resist being taken alive”. Unfortunately such expectation is incompatible with the tendency of many human beings to refuse accepting facts that are too horrible to be contemplated. Marek Edelman describes how most Warsaw ghetto Jews, even in the face of unmistakable indications that the Germans intended to wipe them out, “simply closed their eyes to the unpleasant facts and fought against them with all the means at their disposal”. Even a “detailed description of Treblinka” did not put an end to the ostrich-like attitude of people irrationally hoping that they would be spared. So it is not surprising that this attitude should still have been present among many of the ghetto’s remaining inhabitants even during the uprising. And for people looking forward to dying from heat or suffocation inside their bunkers, the choice was just between one form of death and another anyway.

Having thus shown that Stroop’s list of casualties suffered by his forces need not be as unrealistic as denierbud claims it to be, I shall now turn to the question why on earth the forger of denierbud’s fantasies would have played down the losses that the Jewish ghetto fighters managed to inflict on the SS, rather than doing the exact opposite. Had denierbud done a little research on what significance is attributed to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in historiography and in Jewish tradition, he might have realized that it is widely seen as an outstanding and heartening example of courageous resistance against a murderous oppressor, as opposed to the passivity and resignation that mostly characterized Jewish reactions to the Nazi extermination program. On this site, for instance, the uprising is extolled as follows:

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became one of the most celebrated events of the Holocaust. It gave encouragement to Jews elsewhere as news of the brave stand taken by the Warsaw fighters spread. In Vilna Hirsh Glick wrote the song, Zog nit keyn mol, which became the partisan fighters anthem. The worldwide day of remembrance of the Holocaust, Yom Hashoah, was chosen to be as close as religious custom allowed to actual date of the beginning of the uprising. The uprising took place on April 19, 1943 which corresponds to the 15 th day of the month Nissan in the Hebrew calendar, which is the first day of Passover; Yom Hashoah occurs every year on the 27 th day of Nissan.

The Anti-Defamation League sees the uprising in a similarly glorious light:

The Warsaw ghetto uprising was nothing less than a revolution in Jewish history. Jews had resisted the Nazis with armed force. The significance and symbolic resonance of the uprising went far beyond the numbers of those who fought and died. Mordecai Anielwicz wrote to his colleague Itzhak Zuckerman:"…what really matters is that the dream of my life has become true. Jewish self defense in the Warsaw ghetto has become a fact. Jewish armed resistance and retaliation have become a reality. I have been witness to the magnificent heroic struggle of the Jewish fighters."

So do even more sober and objective sources, such as Gerald Reitlinger, who on page 293 of the 1961 2nd edition of The Final Solution wrote the following:

The events of the next five weeks may be seen from three totally different angles. The first, which is the symbolic angle, must determine the verdict of history. From this angle, the ghetto rebellion was the first national military struggle of the Jews since the rebellion of Bar Kochba in the reign of Hadrian. It was the precursor of the defence of Jerusalem’s ‘Old City’ and the three invasions of Sinai. Goebbels himself took notice of the bulletins of the ‘Jewish High Command.’ Accordingly, the ghetto rebellion has become a Jewish epic in its own right, and it must forever remain so.

On pages 974 and following of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1960), the following is stated:

More than one eyewitness has commented on the spirit of resignation with which so many Jews met their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers or in the great execution pits of the Einsatz squads. Not all Jews submitted to extermination so gently. In the spring days of 1943 some 60,000 Jews walled up in the Warsaw ghetto – all that remained of 400,000 who had been herded into this place like cattle in 1940 – turned on their Nazi tormentors and fought.

Less glamorous is the assessment of Raul Hilberg, who saw the uprising, like other acts of resistance, as but another manifestation of the Jews’ failure to stand up to the Nazi onslaught, and who based this harsh criticism on how little damage the Jews were able to inflict on their enemies. On pages 293/294 of the 1985 student edition of The Destruction of the European Jews (Holmes & Meier, New York and London), which starts with the sentence:

The German destruction of the European Jews was a tour de force; the Jewish collapse under the German assault was a manifestation of failure.

Hilberg wrote the following:

The Jews were not oriented toward resistance. Even those who contemplated a resort to arms were given pause by the thought that for a limited success of a handful, the multitude would suffer the consequences. Outbreaks of resistance were consequently infrequent, and almost always they were local occurrences that transpired at the last moment. Measured in German casualties, Jewish armed opposition shrinks into insignificance. The most important engagement was fought in the Warsaw ghetto (sixteen dead and eighty-five wounded on the German side, including collaborators). Following the breakout from the Sobibór camp, there was a count of nine SS men killed, one missing, one wounded, and two collaborators killed. In Galicia sporadic resistance resulted in losses also to SS and Police Leader Katzmann (eight dead, twelve wounded). In addition there were clashes between Jewish partisans and German forces in other parts of the east, and occasional acts of resistance by small groups and individuals in the ghettos and killing centers. It is doubtful that the Germans and their collaborators lost more than a few hundred men, dead and wounded, in the course of the destruction process. The number of men who dropped out because of disease, nervous breakdowns, or other court martial proceedings was probably greater. The Jewish resistance effort could not seriously impede or retard the progress of destructive operations. The Germans brushed that resistance aside as a minor obstacle, and in the totality of the destruction process it was of no consequence.

Would denierbud’s fantastic female forger, intent on garnering sympathy for the Jews, play down the efficiency of Jewish resistance to the Nazi killers and the casualties it inflicted on them, and thus make that great Jewish epic (Reitlinger), that “magnificent heroic struggle of the Jewish fighters” (Mordecai Anielwicz, as quoted by the Anti-Defamation League) referred to in the bulletins of ‘Jewish High Command’ that Goebbels himself took notice of (Reitlinger), look like what Hilberg considered a manifestation of Jewish failure? Or would “she” do her best to point out that the heroic Jewish fighters not only stood up against their tormentors, but also gave them hell?

The latter is by far the more realistic scenario, assuming that forgery is a realistic possibility at all. Considering the attitudes towards the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that have been mentioned above, claiming that low German casualties are an indication against the Stroop Report’s authenticity makes less sense than claiming that someone fabricated Marek Edelman’s account. For that account not only points to the number of Germans killed by Jewish fighters having been much higher than is stated in the Stroop Report, but also refers to Jewish heroics and tactics of the kind that, according to denierbud, should have been mentioned by Stroop:

The Germans attempted a retreat, but their path was cut. German dead soon littered the street. The remainder tried to find cover in the neighbouring stores and house entrances, but this shelter proved insufficient. The "glorious" SS, therefore, called tanks into action under the cover of which the remaining men of two companies were to commence a "victorious" retreat. But even the tanks seemed to be affected by the Germans' bad luck. The first was burned out by one of our incendiary bottles, the rest did not approach our positions. The fate of the Germans caught in the Mita Street-Zamenhofa Street trap was settled. Not a single German left this area alive.[…]
The Germans found some mattresses and used them as cover, but the partisans' well-aimed fire forced them to several successive withdrawals. German blood flooded the street. German ambulances continuously transported their wounded to the small square near the Community buildings. Here the wounded lay in rows on the sidewalk awaiting their turn to be admitted to the hospital. At the corner of Gesia Street a German air liaison observation post signalled the partisans' positions and the required bombing targets to the planes. But from the air as well as on the ground the partisans appeared to be invincible. The Gesia Street-Nalewki Street battle ended in the complete withdrawal of the Germans.[…]
At precisely the same moment the plug was placed in the socket and a mine, waiting for the Germans for a long time, exploded under the SS-men's feet. Over one hundred SS-men were killed in the explosion.[…]
Of the thirty Germans who succeeded in entering the area, only a few were able to leave it. Once again the Germans withdrew from the ghetto. Once again the partisans' victory was complete. It was their second victory.[…]
Szlamek reaches for an incendiary bottle and throws it at the German so accurately that the latter, hit squarely over his helmet, instantly catches fire and is burned to death.[…]
On one occasion Rozowski and Sziomo, during the course of an area inspection, noticed an approaching German truck. They thought for an instant and then swiftly climbed to a balcony. From here they threw a four-pound powder charge straight down into the truck killing all but five of the sixty SS-men in it.[…]
At 56 Leszno Street Jurek is cornered at an outpost. A group of SS-men surrounds him and one throws a grenade. Jurek adroitly catches the grenade in mid-air and tosses it back at the SS-men before it has time to explode. Four of them are killed on the spot.[…]

Are the above passages of Edelman’s account just the bragging of someone trying to glorify himself and his comrades-in-arms? Or was the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto far more successful and damaging than Stroop was prepared to admit in either his daily report or his summary account? The latter has been assumed by several sources. On page 978 of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer wrote the following:

German losses, according to Stroop, were sixteen killed and ninety wounded. Probably the true figures were much higher, given the nature of the savage house-to-house fighting which the general himself described in such lurid detail.

Reitlinger (as above, page 296) also entertained the possibility that Stoop’s casualties “may have been understated to please Himmler”.

And on this site, casualties on both sides are given as follows:

Approximately 300 Germans and 7,000 Jews were killed in the uprising, and another 7,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka.

If Stroop actually reported casualties much lower than his forces actually suffered, he did nothing that has not been done throughout history by military commanders (though Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, who contemptuously referred to the amount of paper Stroop had dedicated to his “little murder expedition”, might have resented calling Stroop a military commander, Stroop himself apparently saw himself as one) trying to present themselves to their superiors as more successful than they had actually been. In the case of Stroop, it might have been especially embarrassing if, on top of having taken much longer to clear out the ghetto than had been planned (according to Shirer, as above page 975, the operation was originally meant to last three days), his troops suffered high casualties at the hands of a motley force of badly armed insurgents belonging to what was seen as an inferior and despicable people.

So, whatever the actual casualties of Stroop’s forces in putting down the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were, one thing is sure: if someone had a reason to play down these casualties, it was certainly not the female Jewish forger of denierbud’s fantasies. It was only Stroop himself.

Two more of denierbud’s arguments against the authenticity of the Stroop Report having thus been dealt with, I move on to his “Ten Other Points to Consider”, insofar as not already dealt with in Part 1 of this article.

---

Continuation:

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 3)