The Hagen Letter: "...to deal with 1/3 of the Poles - old people and children under the age of 10 - as with the Jews, that is to kill them."

On 17 February 1943, the Higher SS and Police Leader East Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger forwarded to the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler correspondence of German officials in the General Gouvernement (BArch NS 19/1210).

The cause was a letter written by Wilhelm Hagen, the medical officer of Warsaw, to Adolf Hitler. In his letter of 7 December 1942, Hagen explained that Lothar Weirauch, head of the Department of Population and Welfare,  had revealed that "it is intended or considered, in the course of the resettlement of 200,000 Poles in the east of the General Government...to deal with a third of the Poles - with 70,000 old people and children under the age of 10, as with the Jews, that is, to kill them" (see document below). He did ask Hitler for his intervention and decision on the issue.

Correction Corner #8: the alleged Himmler speech about extermination of Poles is most probably a forgery.

1. Introduction.

In the Eastern Bloc literature as well as in the modern Polish studies on the Nazi policies an alleged speech made by Himmler on March 15, 1940 before the camp commandants in the occupied Poland is quoted quite often. Himmler is reported to have said:

All skilled workers of Polish origin are to be utilized in our war industry; then all Poles will disappear from this world.
In fulfilling this very responsible task, you must destroy Polishness* quickly in prescribed stages. I give all the camp commanders my full authorization...
[...]
The hour is drawing closer when every German will have to stand the test. It is therefore necessary that the great German nation sees its main task in exterminating all Poles...

This claim is peculiar, for at that time the official Nazi policy did not even include wholesale slaughter of Jews (the exterminatory "Final Solution" policies appeared in 1941 and escalated throughout 1941 and 1942), and Jews were on a lower rung of the Nazi "racial hierarchy" than Poles.

Mattogno's Distortion of Orders in his Italian Einsatzgruppen Book

An English translation of Carlo Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen study, which had previously appeared in Italian in two parts (1 and 2) has just been translated and is undergoing "author proofing" before being made available as Holocaust Handbook No. 39. However, towards the end of October 2018, Germar Rudolf wrote that "We have submitted a long list of open issues -- including remarks made by the HC Blog -- to the author for his review, and are awaiting his feedback" [see screenshot at the foot of this article]. What are these issues? Many of them are likely to pertain to Roberto's detailed refutation of the Jaeger Report chapter. Some may also relate to Hans' demolition of Mattogno on gas vans. This posting focuses on the Italian text's distortions of German orders, which Mattogno misrepresents because he wishes to convince his readers that the orders were intended to shoot Jews not "as Jews" but because they were assumed by the Germans to be aiding Bolshevism and the partisans (pp.10-11). Given that I have posted previously on Mattogno and Graf's old habits on this theme, it is possible that Rudolf wants Mattogno to address it. The distortions regarding orders can be shown by presenting them in chronological sequence.

A quick response to some boring nonsense.

The long-winded and correspondingly boring third-tier denier John Wear (see this blog devoted to debunking him) has published a long-winded and boring piece "comparing" euthanasia to the Holocaust and it has been brought to my attention that he has mentioned our blog.

First, let's take a quick look at the kinds of arguments he proffers.

"Is genocide necessarily evil?"

Someone on Quora asked this question.

My answer is rendered below.

Rubin and Schwanitz can't tell Ukraine from East Prussia.

While researching the topic of the Mufti's collaboration with the Nazis I stumbled upon a really embarrassing series of mistakes in Barry Rubin's and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz's Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Yale University Press, 2014).

The authors zealously struggle to pin as many crimes on the Mufti (surely an execrable Nazi collaborator) as they can get away with, specifically they try to show the plausibility of him having visited some extermination camps including Auschwitz (even though there is no credible evidence of such a visit). And so they write on p. 164:

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents - Farewell (1943)

Mass Killing Unit of Warthegau

Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents:

 Euthanasia 1940/41

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents:

Part I: Origin and Foundation

Part II: The Extermination of 100,000 Jews

Part III: Body Disposal (Appendix)

Part IV: Pabianice Sorting Camp

Part V: Funding

Part VI: The Polish Working Detail

Part VII: Motor Pool and Fuel (Appendix)

Part VIII: Drinks and Tobacco (With Excursus on the Extermination of the Sinti and Roma)

Part IX: Farewell (1943)

Until 31 December 1942, the Sonderkommando Kulmhof had systematically murdered about 4,400 Sinti and Roma and 145,301 Jews  (Document 234). The Jews of the Warthegau had been wiped out except for the "labour ghetto" in Litzmannstadt and Jews loaned to outside work-sites. Since life as a Sonderkommando member was comparable pleasant and beneficial - with bonus payments, free tabacco and alcohol, no front duty, absence of military discipline, access to cheap goods from the rich warehouses of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto Administration - and facing the prospect of front-line service, the Kulmhof commandant Hans Bothmann seemed to have stretched the dismantling and closing of the camp over the whole Winter 1942/43. ^[1]

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents - The Extermination of 100,000 Jews

Mass Killing Unit of Warthegau

Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents:

 Euthanasia 1940/41

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents:

Part I: Origin and Foundation

Part II: The Extermination of 100,000 Jews

Part III: Body Disposal (Appendix)

Part IV: Pabianice Sorting Camp

Part V: Funding

Part VI: The Polish Working Detail

Part VII: Motor Pool and Fuel (Appendix)

Part VIII: Drinks and Tobacco (With Excursus on the Extermination of the Sinti and Roma)

Part IX: Farewell (1943)

Figure 1: Google Earth view on the final train stations (Kolo/Warthbrücken & Powierce), the ruins of Kulmhof Extermination Camp and its Body Disposal Site in Rzuchow Forest

Order from the BdS Generalgouvernement That Prisoners and Jews "Are to Be Liquidated" When Evacuation Is Not Possible

The following reproduces an order from the Senior Commander of the Security Police and Security Service (BdS) Generalgouvernement Walther Bierkamp of 20 July 1944 - as it was circulated by the Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service Radom the day later - that "it is to be avoided under all circumstances that prisoners or Jews should be liberated by the enemy...or should fall into their hands alive". In case that the evacuation of the inmates of SD prisons turns out as not possible, these "are to be liquidated, and the bodies of those shot are to be disposed as far as possible (burning, dynamiting of the building, etc.)" and "Jews still employed in the armaments industry or on other work are to be dealt with in the same way".

According to Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches, p. 57ff., the order should be seen in the context of Heinrich Himmler's directive "Security of Concentration Camps in Case A" of 17 June 1944, which handed over the responsibility for the security of the camps from the WVHA to the Higher SS and Police Leaders in case of an emergency situation. The document was cited on this blog in Mattogno's Ineptitude on the Fate of Jewish Workers in the General Government.

Update: Mattogno's Ineptitude on the Fate of Jewish Workers in the General Government

Carlo Mattogno denies the established fact that Jewish workers were massacred in the General Government in early November 1943 and claims instead that there was "a mass transfer of Jewish inmates to the west [Majdanek, p.230]." As we noted in the Critique (pp.233-238), Mattogno's knowledge of this event is woefully inadequate, and he has clearly failed to read the literature on the shootings or the real labour transfers that took place in 1943. His only source for "a mass transfer of Jewish inmates" is "the November 20, 1943, issue of the Polish newspaper-in-exile Dziennik Polski, printed in England."  He quotes numbers from Hilberg showing that "22,444 Jews worked in the armaments industries of the General Government in October 1943" but "it had increased to 26,296" by January 1944, but fails to address the true sources of that increase, which we showed on page 237 of the Critique (note 430). Below I examine a further source of documents ignored by Mattogno: Nuremberg exhibits whose authors documented the fate of the plants that were closed down in the "special action" on November 3, 1943, and bemoaned the fact that the "withdrawal" of Jewish workers caused irreparable losses to the economy.

Grafeneck: Nuremberg Documents

Documents submitted at Nuremberg clearly show the degree of local knowledge and political controversy that existed in the second half of 1940 concerning the killing of mental patients at Grafeneck. Harvard's Nuremberg site has scans of these documents, from which the information in this article is taken. I have also relied upon the account given by Henry Friedlander, especially pages 107-111 of this edition.

On Mattogno's Hallucination That von dem Bach-Zelewski's Extended Testimony on the Minsk Shooting Is a Jewish Forgery

In a handwritten post-war manuscript, the former Higher SS and Police Leader for Central Russia Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski briefly mentioned the show mass shooting carried out by Einsatzgruppe B on 15 August 1941 for the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in Minsk (NARA Record Group 238, M1270/1/111, p. 41, see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Page five from a declaration of von dem Bach-Zelewski on the "persecution of Jews".

The mass execution was also reported by numerous other witnesses. From a historiographic point of view, what is most significant in von dem Bach-Zelewski's account is that he described how after the shooting and visiting of a mental asylum in Minsk (which are both confirmed by Himmler's appointment diary) Himmler ordered the Einsatzgruppen B leader Arthur Nebe "to make use of a more human method of killing" on the mentally ill people, which links the incident to the subsequent mass killing trials with explosives and poison gas in asylums in Minsk and Mogilev. The connection between the events is supported by von dem Bach-Zelewski's own documented activity on the next day to get a demonstration of the mobile carbon monoxide gas chamber of Sonderkommando Lange (for obvious reasons, he kept quiet about this in his post-war testimony).

A more vivid and detailed description of the Minsk shooting by von dem Bach-Zelewski was published on 23 August 1946 in the German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau (Figure 2). The account is somewhat more general with respect to the scope of Himmler's order following the mass execution and asylum visit. He considered that "shooting is not the most human method", ordered Nebe "to think about it and submit a report based on the experiences made" and agreed to try explosives on mentally ill people in Minsk.

Figure 2: Aufbau, volume 12, issue 34, p. 2.

But if it were according to the Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno, von dem Bach-Zelewski's account in Aufbau is a forgery based on his more brief statement from the NARA Record Group 238:

"This anecdote appeared on 23 August 1946 in the New York Jewish newspaper Der [sic!] Aufbau as part of a statement attributed to von dem Bach-Zelewski, but its contents had been massively manipulated by the editorial staff of the newspaper, as is apparent from a comparison with the original statement of this SS officer."

(Mattogno, Inside the Gas Chambers, 2nd edition, p. 58)

Unfortunately for Mattogno, this is rubbish. Upon systematically searching the Yad Vashem Archives digital collection of Yitzhak Stone, who "was a senior aid to the American prosecutor in the Nazi War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg" for interesting material for the blog (and there sure is, so stay tuned), I stumbled across the English translation of an undated, 60 pages long "declaration von dem Bach" (YVA, O.18/90, p. 20ff.). The declaration contains amongst other things also the passages reproduced in German in Aufbau (Figure 3).

The discovery of Himmler's appointments diaries and Himmler's visit to Sobibor in 1943

British tabloids like The Sun, Daily Star, Daily Express and Daily Mail are currently agog at the news that Himmler's diaries have been discovered in Russia, having learned that their German equivalent Bild is serialising excerpts (behind a paywall) of a remarkable discovery by German and Russian historians in the Russian archives.

Himmler Advocates Slaughter of Russian Soldiers, Oct 24, 1943

According to Porter's translation here:

And we'll have to defeat them, smash them, and slaughter them [abschlacten]. When a people like the Russians already have their whole army full of everything from 16 year-olds to 50 or 55 year-olds, then reason tells us that this whole mass of people is coming to an end, like everything on this earth.

This slaughter was clearly framed in the context of ethnic cleansing:

When you know that, the evolutionary and racial development of the Slavic peoples, then you know that we have a task to do if we wish to purify these areas – and we must do that, if we want to live.

Himmler advocated the creation of "an area in which there will be no one but Germans and Teutons, approximately 1,000 kilometres from the old German Reich border." There would clearly be catastrophic consequences for non-Germans in that zone, and people who had the most "Mongolian" blood by Himmler's reckoning would have the lowest value to justify being kept alive.

The slaughter of Russian soldiers was to be part of a process in which Russians would eventually disappear - "this whole mass of people is coming to an end." Himmler also bemoans the fact that "a Russian military generation consists of two and a half to three times as many men as a German military generation." The killing of soldiers therefore has a genocidal rationale that makes it far more criminal than an act of war. The extinction of the Russian people in Europe, by one means or another, is clearly a long-term goal.

War Crimes in Belorussia, mid-1943

Nuremberg exhibit NO-3028 is a series of reports raising concerns about atrocities committed in anti-partisan operations in White Ruthenia. These were posted here by David Thompson in 2004. The most pertinent is perhaps that of 'party member' Lange:

I am submitting the following private communication for your information. Dr. Walkewitsch, the acting head of WSW came to me.

He was informed by Mr. Sakowitsch, the former territory head [Gebietsvorsitzender] of the WSW Minsk--County that on 27 May 1943 at 1400 hours the SS and/or Ukrainians had driven the inhabitants of Krjvsk together into two houses and afterward set fire to the houses so that those inside burned to death.

The same thing happened to the village of Krashyn on 24 May 1943. Both villages are located in the district of Woloshin of the Vilijka territory.

Typically, Himmler's office dismissed such concerns. In the last document in the exhibit, Brandt states that "[Himmler] requests that the Reich Minister of the East be informed that the campaign against the partisans is going quite according to schedule and Volhynia and Podolia will be the next on the list." The subtext was advising Rosenberg to tell his subordinates to quit their complaining. See Leo Alexander's excellent analysis of this exchange, published here in 1948.

Goebbels, Total War and Extermination, December 1942 to October 1943

Goebbels' rants about Jews in 1941 and 1942 are well-known, and can be found in my previous article here. In the article below, I focus on the less-explored period from late 1942 when Goebbels made numerous written and verbal remarks about the totality of the anti-Jewish struggle, whereby all bridges were being burned and there were no possibilities of half-measures. Although extermination decisions were made earlier than this period, the frenzy to include as much of Europe as possible in such measures reached a new momentum, and the language that Goebbels used to justify those actions took on a global scale that had not been present to the same degree previously.

Jansson Misreads Rosenberg's Diary

Jansson asks:

Rosenberg mentions a proposal that would have put Ukrainians on the same level as Jews and Gypsies.[74] According to the interpretations of holocaust controversies, this means that there was a German proposal to exterminate the Ukrainians. Does Harrison believe that such a proposal existed, and if not how does he explain this diary entry?  [9.10.42].

The proposal was that made by Himmler to Thierack that Ukrainians facing trial should have the same status as Gypsies and Jews. It was not concerned with exterminating racial or national groups, although it could be used as cover by the SS for mass killing. Rosenberg was firmly opposed to the policy [Vorschlag Himmler wird von mir abgelehnt], as he reiterated to Thierack on 27.10.42 [Über die Frage d. Rechtsstellung d. Ukrainer i. D. gebe ich ihm meine Meinung bekannt: dass man sie nicht m. Zigeunern auf eine Stufe stellen könne], presumably because he knew that giving the SS such powers would lead to some mass killing of Ukrainians (as later did occur), albeit not the total extermination that was inflicted on Ukrainian Jews (note that Jews in Ukraine at this point were largely dead so their inclusion on 9.10.42 is moot). 

Due to shortage of time and difficulty of accessing the blog at this time, I have asked Roberto to deal with my other notes, but I will finish for now by noting the diary entries "Stalin hätte doch die
führende Schicht ausgerottet" [29.9.39] and "Von den 2 ½ Millionen Volksdeutschen sind 1 Million sicher ausgerottet, von den 1 ½ Millionen Wolgadeutschen waren 400000 nach geblieben." [12.9.41]

Jansson and the Luther Bible

Update, 16.06.2015

In his latest "Memo" blog, Jansson claims that

In the Luther Bible translation of Genesis 17.14, it is commanded that the uncircumcised be ausgerottet, with the meaning that they be removed from the people, or exiled.

Between Scylla and Charybdis

Being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology, which means "having to choose between two evils". Several other idioms, such as "on the horns of a dilemma", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place", express the same meaning.

In his Posen speech on 6 October 1943, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler used this idiom in referring to the extreme effects that mass killing of Jewish populations including women and children could and often did have on the psyche of the executors:

I ask you that what I tell you in this circle you will really only hear and never talk about it. The question came up to us: What do to with the women and children? I decided to find a very clear solution also in this respect. This because I didn’t consider myself entitled to exterminate the men, that is, to kill them or to have them killed, and to let the children grow up as avengers against our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth. For the organization that had to carry out the task if was the most difficult we had so far. It has been carried out without, as I consider myself entitled to say, our men and our leaders having taken harm to their spirit and soul. The path between the possibilities existing here, to either become crude and heartless and no longer to respect human life or to become weak and collapse to the point of nervous breakdowns, the path between this Scylla and Charybdis is horrendously narrow.

(Emphasis added)

This blog will present cases from the massacre of the Jews of Nikolayev organized by Einsatzgruppe D, which is mentioned in Operational Situation Report USSR No. 101 and in Peter Bamm’s book Die unsichtbare Flagge, that illustrate the psychological stress addressed in Himmler’s speech.

Friedrich Jansson proudly presents …

... a report by US government official whereby "Ausrottung" does not imply killing. Or so Jansson interprets the official’s statements.