On Weckert's 'Jewish Emigration from the Third Reich'

Unlike Heddesheimer, Ingrid Weckert is a known quantity. She has a long career on Germany’s far-right; of all the HH authors, she has the clearest connections with the neo-Nazi movement in Europe, with Jürgen Graf a close second. Now in her 90s, she has spent the last 40 years writing exculpations of Nazi figures (including Julius Streicher and Josef Goebbels) and crimes (most notably Kristallnacht). Beyond contributions to Holocaust denial, she was closely affiliated with the neo-Nazi leader Michael Kühnen in the 1980s and participated in attempts to form legitimate far-right political parties --  most recently, Kühnen’s Deutsch Alternative, which was banned in 1992. Trained as a librarian, she also studied theology and history, including allegedly studying Jewish history in Israel.

Weckert’s contribution to the HH collection, Jewish Emigration from the Third Reich, is a translation of her Auswanderung der Juden aus dem Dritten Reich, which Castle Hill published in 2004. A slim volume numbering only 70 pages not including frontmatter, backmatter, and appendices, it attempts to strike a more seemingly conciliatory tone than much of Weckert’s previous work. Nevertheless, it repeats the grotesque errors of that work, with the typical lying by omission, whitewashing, and blame shifting found there. It is important to state at the outset that a thorough checking of Weckert’s use of source material is beyond the scope of this short review. That said, an earlier review by Andrew E. Mathis of Weckert’s article on Kristallnacht in the Journal of Historical Review (summer 1985 issue) found that she was a routine abuser and misrepresenter of her cited sources.[1]

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Just Memo

 Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans

Part I: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant (update 1, 2)
Part II: Producer Gas

 Part III: The Ford Gas Wagon (update)
Part IV: The Becker Letter (update)
Part V: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute (update 1, 2, 3, cf. on Mattogno & here)

Part VI: The Turner Letter

Part VII: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes

Part VIII: The Einsatzgruppe B Activity & Situation Report (cf. on Mattogno)

Part IX: The Just Memo

Part X: The West-German Trials Against Members of Einsatzkommando 8

Part XI: Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol

Part XII: Material Evidence

Part XIII: Misreading the Fine Print 

The Document

On 5 June 1942, the member of the Security Police motor pool Willy Just set up a memo for Walther Rauff, the head of RSHA department II D on Technical Matters, to "decide" on "technical modifications on the special vehicles in operation and under construction". The memo does not explicitly name the purpose of these "special vehicles", but the description is clear enough that it is talking about homicidal gas vans. It explains that about "97,000 have been processed with three vehicles in use" at one place, about "a rapid distribution of carbon monoxide" and that "the load pushes hard against the door" inside the vehicles. The memo also mentions that such vehicle was involved in an "explosion in Chelmno".

Note on Involvement of OSS in Locating Gas Van Documents PS-501

The following information is taken from pages 179-182 of this work by Michael Salter and concerns the four documents constituting Nuremberg exhibit PS-501, discussed in this series by Hans. The first involvement of the OSS was to locate the documents among those held by British intelligence in London. A cable from Donovan to Jackson dated June 1, 1945, detailed the role of Colonel Amen in obtaining "documents (originals) which contain details of gas by "death van" fitted out by that purpose" [Salter p.180, citing cable 18124, 1/6/45, Jackson Papers, Box 101, Reel 7, my emphasis]. These were placed in a dossier prepared by OSS X-2 branch and eventually picked up by Whitney Harris, who discusses here (pp.198-199) how he used them in the interrogation of Ohlendorf while preparing for the case against Kaltenbrunner. The documents were also authenticated by Rauff in Ancona, as Hans shows here. Although the Becker-Rauff document became part of PS-501, it was originally filed by the OSS as Feldpostnummer S2704 / SECRET. Rauff gave a further very detailed confirmation of the document in Chile in 1972, shown here.

On the whining of Weckert and others about the origins of these documents, I refer readers to the quote by Zimmerman in Roberto's post here.

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Becker Letter

 Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans

Part I: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant (update 1, 2)
Part II: Producer Gas

 Part III: The Ford Gas Wagon (update)
Part IV: The Becker Letter (update)
Part V: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute (update 1, 2, 3, cf. on Mattogno & here)

Part VI: The Turner Letter

Part VII: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes

Part VIII: The Einsatzgruppe B Activity & Situation Report (cf. on Mattogno)

Part IX: The Just Memo

Part X: The West-German Trials Against Members of Einsatzkommando 8

Part XI: Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol

Part XII: Material Evidence

Part XIII: Misreading the Fine Print 

August Becker obtained his PhD in 1932 at the University Gießen, where he worked in the field of physical chemistry and photochemistry under Prof. Karl Schaum. In December 1939, he was assigned as gassing specialist to the Euthanasia action in Germany and in December 1941 to take care of the gas vans deployed to the Einsatzgruppen. In the following year, he toured through the occupied territories in the East to inspect the operation of these vehicles.

On 16 May 1942, he wrote a preliminary report on his activities to Walther Rauff, who was responsible for technical matters in the RSHA, including motor vehicles. The letter openly discusses the killing of people in gas wagons ("I ordered that during application of gas all the men were to be kept as far away from the vans as possible...the persons to be executed suffer death from suffocation")

The document cannot be explained away as describing something other than German homicidal gas vans and accordingly it is dismissed as a forgery by Holocaust deniers. However, there is not a single piece of evidence or comprehensible and well-founded reason to support the forgery allegation; to the contrary: it is clearly an authentic contemporary German document radically debunking the central dogma of Holocaust denial that there had been no systematic gassings.

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans

Part I: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant (update 1, 2)
Part II: Producer Gas

 Part III: The Ford Gas Wagon (update)
Part IV: The Becker Letter (update)
Part V: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute (update 1, 2, 3, cf. on Mattogno & here)

Part VI: The Turner Letter

Part VII: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes

Part VIII: The Einsatzgruppe B Activity & Situation Report (cf. on Mattogno)

Part IX: The Just Memo

Part X: The West-German Trials Against Members of Einsatzkommando 8

Part XI: Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol

Part XII: Material Evidence

 

[Major additions to this posting can be found here and here.]

One of the main arguments by the Revisionist Santiago Alvarez against German homicidal gas vans is that most of the vehicles (namely those with Saurer chassis) were supposed to have had Diesel engines combined with the claim that Diesel engine exhaust - as opposed to gasoline engine exhaust - is not suitable for killing.

This posting presents evidence that the homicidal gas vans based on Saurer chassis were fabricated with gasoline engines in German-occupied France. In fact, all brands identified as possible gas vans by the most reliable sources were either most likely or at least possibly using gasoline engines. Furthermore, the available testimonial evidence strongly supports gasoline engines over Diesel. Therefore, the "Diesel issue" is indeed irrelevant as far as the reality of homicidal gas vans is concerned.

Weckert on Chelmno

It is instructive that Ingrid Weckert's Chelmno screed, which can be viewed here, is the only denier text concerning Chelmno, because it illustrates that deniers have no real interest in historical revision, or in critical peer review of other denial works. Weckert's article is full of errors and omissions, which are detailed below, yet no denier has seen fit to publish a 'corrected' revisionist account of the camp. This alone tells us that denial is dogma, not historiography.

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Four points should quickly become apparent to any informed reader who scans Weckert's analysis of the Chelmno historiography. Firstly, Weckert deliberately omits key documents and testimonies, such as the Greiser-Himmler correspondence, the Korherr Report, and many of the perpetrator testimonies collected by West German criminal authorities. Contrast her summary of the testimonies with my recent overview here. Secondly, Weckert focusses on alleged discrepancies between secondary texts without tracing them to the authors' primary sources. Her approach is to abuse the sources via the secondary author, without allowing the reader to see the sources she is 'attacking by proxy.' Thirdly, Weckert conflates different contexts. She pretends that documents discussing one event (or timeframe) are actually discussing another. She perpetuates the deliberate chronological and geographical confusions that are key components of denial's methodology. Finally, Weckert specializes in the false dilemma. She repeatedly insists that we must choose between two alternatives, each of which she distorts.

Weckert definitely knows about the Greiser-Himmler letter because it is printed on p.278 of Faschismus - Getto - Massenmord [the page ref. is cited in Kershaw, p.85, n.88], a work which she cites in her text. She omits the Greiser-Himmler letter because she has already declared another gas van letter, Just to Rauff, to be a forgery. She has also strongly implied that the letter by the SS-Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner to Adolf Eichmann dated July 16, 1941 was a forgery. She has therefore already used up her "forgery" gambit on those documents. Her grounds for dismissing Just's statement that "Since December 1941, ninety-seven thousand have been processed" are that the figure of 97,000:

contradicts the statistic by Rückerl as adopted in the conclusion of Massentötungen (p. 132) of the deportations from Lodz, which are generally equated with the murder victims of Kulmhof/Chelmno. Rückerl says (p. 276) that until the end of May 1942 some 55,000 Jews were deported from Lodz. This number should have been in the Aktenvermerk of June 5, 1942, if it is really about the murder victims of Kulmhof/Chelmno.

This is a distortion because at no point in the Just-Rauff or Greiser-Himmler letters is it stated that all the 97,000 (Just-Rauff) or 100,000 (Greiser-Himmler) victims were from Lodz. Moreover, Weckert's own source for the 55,000 figure, Rückerl, had already been quoted earlier in Weckert's article as stating that the Jews from areas surrounding Lodz, rather than from the ghetto itself, were transported to Chelmno "a few in the month of March and a large quantity in the month of April 1942" (p. 278, note 72). Weckert dismisses this quote on the grounds that Rückerl previously stated that

"After Jews were taken by truck from the closer vicinity to Chelmno from December 5, 1941, to the middle of January 1942, the transports from the ghetto began on January 16, 1942" (p. 276)

Weckert thus simply manufactures a contradiction in the evidence where there is none. The logical meaning of Rückerl's narrative, combined with the gas van documentation, is that, in addition to the 55,000 Jews deported from the ghetto by June 1942, a further 42,000-45,000 Jews were killed in gas vans after being deported from other parts of the Warthegau.

Weckert also tries to undermine Rückerl by quote-mining eyewitness accounts published in New York in November 1942, which described the murders of Jews from the Grodziec, Rzgów and Zagórów ghettos in local forests. Weckert infers, falsely, that because the source publishing these accounts stated that the killing actions were completed before the Lodz deportations began on January 16th, 1942, all deportations to Chelmno from that date could only have been from Lodz. All her subsequent 'discrepancies' flow from that (deliberate) misreading of the sources.

Weckert's misinterpretation betrays her technique of playing off secondary sources against each other. Had she been willing to honestly report how Rückerl used his sources, she would not have accused him falsely of contradiction.

Weckert plays a similar game of falsifying contradictions with regard to the naming of the Sonderkommando and the chronology of gas van deployment. On the SK, Weckert claims:

Massentötungen decided to call it "Sonderkommando (SK) Kulmhof/Chelmno" or also "SK Lange" or "SK Bothmann" after the Kommandoführer at the time (Massentötungen, p. 116).

Here Weckert has simply falsified the chronology by ignoring the fact that Lange and Bothmann were in charge of the unit during different periods, and the fact that the unit was renamed SK Kulmhoff when Bothmann replaced Lange. Weckert would have known this because, according to Kershaw, p.85, n.81, the chronology is given in Rückerl, p.251 and 258.

On the gas vans, Weckert claims that:

In the chapter about the origin of the gas trucks, Massentötungen explained that at this time, December 1941, the delivery of the Saurer-vehicle chassis was still being negotiated and were then, after delivery, to be equipped with a body by the firm Gaubschat. The completed trucks could therefore not have been delivered prior to spring 1942. How was it then possible that three of these vans were already in operation since December 1941?

Again, Weckert has used a secondary source to camouflage the primary ones, such as the testimonies of Walter Burmeister and Walter Piller, which make it plain that Lange's unit initially used the van containing bottled carbon monoxide that had been deployed in the Euthanasia action, and subsequently deployed "medium size Renault trucks with Otto engines". The source of these testimonies is Kogon/Langbein/Rückerl et al, Nationalsozialistische Massenttungen durch Giftgas, page 81ff., the very same source which Weckert claims proves that the vehicles were Saurers!

Finally, I am grateful to David Woolfe for exposing, in this RODOH post, Weckert's fraudulent use of Reitlinger, whom she distorts on three occasions. Firstly, Weckert claims that:

Some of the deportees were "transferred to work camps and to vacated ghettos of the district of Lublin", (Reitlinger, p. 279). Others were deployed "for the reclamation of the Pripjet swamps and to the Jewish agricultural colonies close to Kriwoi Rog in the Ukraine", (Reitlinger, p. 101).

As David has shown, Reitlinger actually says that "A small portion of the 'resettled' Jews of Lodz were transferred to work camps and to vacated ghettos of the district of Lublin." He says nothing about Lodz Jews being sent to the Ukraine. There is no evidence that even these small numbers of Lodz Jews sent to Warsaw and Lublin were part of the Lublin and Warsaw selections sent for forced labour to the Pripyet Marshes project. Weckert has simply connected two separate Reitlinger passages without explaining that they refer to different populations.

Secondly, Weckert uses Reitlinger to suggest that nobody in the Lodz ghetto knew of gassing at Chelmno yet she ignores Reitlinger's very next sentence:

Those who knew did not care to spread despondency. Thus Lieutenant Rosenblatt, the commander of the Jewish Ordnungsdienst, admitted that he selected the old and feeble, knowing perfectly well they would be gassed.

Finally, Weckert attempts to discredit Reitlinger's source, Salomon M. Schwarz, when he discusses the liquidation of the Ukrainian camps in May 1942, whilst ignoring the fact that Schwarz was also Reitlinger's original source for the transfer of Warsaw and Lublin Jews to these camps.

In conclusion, therefore, going back to my opening point in this blog, it is inconceivable that a denier such as Mattogno could trace the footnotes in Weckert's screed and not realise that she had lied blatantly throughout the article. Yet no denier has sought to replace her dishonest and disreputable garbage with a genuine revisionist study of the historiography of Chelmno. They seem happy to allow it to stand as the standard denier work on the camp and must therefore share her culpability for its falsehoods.

Partisans, Reprisals and Other Denier Excuses: the Career of Harald Turner

I have already noted here how the career of Eduard Strauch disproves the denier claim that the Einsatzgruppen killed Jews purely as partisans. I have also debunked the false claim by Germar Rudolf that Nazi reprisal policy was legal. To reinforce these points, I will now take a look at the career of Harald Turner, which Christopher R. Browning described in detail in Chapter Six of his The Path to Genocide. Browning recapitulated his argument in shorter form in this on-line essay here.

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Turner was made chief of military administration in Serbia in April 1941. In mid-August 1941 he requested (via Benzler) that all Jews be deported down the Danube to Rumania or the General Government. This was declined so a month later he persuaded Benzler to make an appeal to Rademacher, requesting deportation of the Jews to Poland or the USSR. Rademacher recorded the reply that he received in a handwritten note that was subsequently presented in evidence at the Eichmann trial:

In the opinion of Sturmbannfuehrer Eichmann, RSHA IVD4, there is no possibility to take them to Russia or to the Generalgouvernement. Even Jews from Germany cannot be accommodated there. Eichmann proposes to kill them by shooting.

In the meantime, the Wehrmacht, under the command of Boehme, began to shoot Jews under the pretext of the need to fill 1:100 reprisal quotas. Such reprisals were not, however, for crimes committed by Jews but were instead inflicted on Jews in lieu of Serb partisans who had not been captured in sufficient numbers to meet the quotas. Turner admitted that this was morally wrong in a private letter dated 17 October 1941 sent to Hildebrandt and reproduced in German here. The extract was translated into English by Walter Manoschek in his 'The Extermination of the Jews in Serbia', published in Ulrich Herbert (ed), National Socialist Extermination Policies, p.177 [thanks to KentFord9 for reminding me of this source]:

In the last 8 days, I have had 2,000 Jews and 200 Gypsies shot dead, following the quota of 1:100 for brutally murdered German soldiers, and a further 2,200, also nearly all Jews, will be shot in the next 8 days. That is not pleasant work! But it must be done, in order to make it clear to people what it means to attack a German soldier, while at the same time, the Jewish question solves itself most quickly in this way. Actually, it is wrong, if taken literally, that for murdered Germans, for whom the ratio of 1:100 should come at the expense of the Serbs, 100 Jews will now be shot, but they are the ones we happened to have in the camp . . .

However, any moral impediments on Turner's behalf seem to have dissipated by 26th October, because Turner was able to issue the following order, which is also cited by Manoschek and which Nick Terry reproduces in this RODOH thread:

Verwaltungschef Turner wies daraufhin die Kreis- und Feldkommandanturen an, die Geiselopfer gezielter auszuwaehlen, wobei er sich des selbstgeschaffenen Problems bewusst war, dass bei der Quote von 1:100 die Opfer 'nicht mehr gestellt werden koennen, wenn einigermassen ein gewisser Schuldbegriff, auch nur auf Grund der allgemeinen Haltung der Festzunehmenden, in Betracht werden soll.' Bei Juden und Zigeuner mussten so diffuse Auswahlskritirien allerdings nicht beruecksichtigt werden: Turner betonte, dass weiterhin 'in jeden Fall alle juedischen Maenner und alle maennlichen Zigeuner als Geiseln der Truppe zur Verfuegung zu stellen' sind.

source quoted: Befehl Turner an saemtliche Kreis- und Feldkommandanturen, 26. 10. 1941, NOKW-Dokument 802

The background to Turner's order, according to Browning, was a meeting on Oct 20th in Belgrade between Turner, Rademacher, Suhr and Fuchs, in which it was decided that male Jews would be held as hostages and gradually killed to meet reprisal quotas against Serb (non-Jew) partisans, whilst evacuation of women & children 'to the East' was agreed for a future unspecified date. However, this evacuation did not take the form of expulsion, but instead took the form of gas vans the following Spring, which Turner falsely claimed credit for in his famous letter to Wolff:

Already some months ago, I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on in this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a "delousing van," that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp, which in any event since the arrival of Meyssner and the turning over of this camp to him, was continued by him. Then the time is come in which the Jewish officers to be found in prisoner of war camps under the Geneva Convention find out against our will about their no longer existing kinfolk and that could easily lead to complications.

Whilst this was a candid admission of killing by gassing [as was noted at the Irving-Lipstadt trail, Turner stupidly gives the game away by putting "entlausungswagen" in inverted commas], Turner omitted the fact that the gas van was ordered direct from Berlin by Emanuel Schaefer, who admitted this in his West German postwar trial testimony at both his trial in Cologne and Pradel's trial in Hannover (Browning, p.137, n.33).

How do deniers respond to this overwhelming evidence of genocide? They either cry 'forgery', as Ingrid Weckert does with other gas van documentation here, or they lie outrageously. Weckert's supposedly comprehensive study of gas vans only mentions the Turner-Wolff document once, in an oblique reference that is designed to deceive:

It is also not impossible that the RSHA's special vehicles were used for disinfection purposes. In any case, an SS-Obergruppenführer confirmed in April 1942 that the RSHA had supplied him with a 'delousing van'.

So much for 'revisionism'.

Work in Progress

I've finished the first draft of rather a lengthy essay on Reichskristallnacht, and since I intend to publish it at the Holocaust History Project Web site rather than in a peer-reviewed publication (where I'd be relinquishing the copyright in most cases), I'm presenting my first draft online for those interested in having a peak. The first two paragraphs are here. If you're interested, read the whole thing.

A standard argument by Holocaust deniers is that, while they do not believe that there was an organized plot by Nazi Germany to exterminate the Jews of Europe, that gas chambers were used to this end (among other methods), or that the number of fatalities was nearly six million (and perhaps more), they "[do] not deny the tragedy that the Jews suffered in World War II" (Kulaszka). However, as time has gone on, this gambit has been dropped, so much so that there are self-styled "revisionists" unwilling to admit that any innocent Jew died at the hands of the Nazis. Falling into this camp of Holocaust deniers are such apologists as Friedrich Paul Berg, Carlos Whitlock Porter, and the godfather of American Holocaust denial, Willis Carto.

This sort of denial had always been embraced by the most extreme elements within the Holocaust-denial movement. However, "mainstream" deniers are engendering it more and more. One such Holocaust denier is Jonnie A. Hargis. Posting on March 5, 2007, to the Web-based discussion forum of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) as "Hannover," Hargis cut and pasted a twenty-year-old essay by Ingrid Weckert on Kristallnacht and commented that this was "a more accurate account of Kritallnacht [sic]."

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