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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5 (1)

Part 5 (2)

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

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

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5 (1)

Part 5 (2)

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

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

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5 (1)

Part 5 (2)

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

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

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

Mattogno’s Marijampolė Mass Graves Controversy

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

Mariampole

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

How many people were killed at Ponary?

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

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 4)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 3)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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

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

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 2)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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

The Jäger Report (8)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (7)

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

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (8)

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

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (8)

The present blog is about the massacre by Einsatzkommando 3 of Jews deported to Kaunas (Kowno) in November 1941. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (8)

The first blog of this series addressed the provenance of the Jäger Report and the question why the document was made available to West German criminal investigators by Soviet authorities only in 1963, almost twenty years after the Soviets had discovered it.

The present blog and the following blogs of this series will provide a closer look at some of the massacres mentioned in the Jäger Report.

The information presented in these blogs is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (8)

The report dated 1 December 1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, head of Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A, is probably the most detailed and explicit document about Nazi mobile killing operations. It contains a tabulation, by date and place, of executions carried out by Einsatzkommando 3 on Lithuanian territory between 4 July and 25 November 1941. For each execution the number of victims is stated, broken down into Jews and (where existing) non-Jews, the number of Jews often further broken down into Jewish men, women and children.

That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part II: Deniers and the graves of Marijampole

[Updated on 03.10.2012 by Roberto Muehlenkamp to replace broken link to an extinct forum site.]

On September 1, 1941 Einsatzkommando 3 murdered more than 5,000 human beings in the Lithuanian town of Marijampole. Later that year the commander of the Security Police and the SD dryly summarized the body count as follows:

Mariampole

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

Fast forward to the summer of 1996: the town of Marijampole decided to erect a Holocaust memorial at the place of the massacre. According to the Lithuanian newspaper Lietuvos Rytas (21.08.1996), presumed site of the massacre was excavated. There were no bodies.

Soon Holocaust deniers began to actively use the Lietuvos Rytas' account. Here are some quotes from the "revisionist" literature:

• Germar Rudolf in the introduction to Dissecting the Holocaust:

  In the summer of 1996 the town of Marijampol, in Lithuania, decided to erect a Holocaust Memorial to the tens of thousands of Jews allegedly slaughtered and buried there by German Einsatzgruppen. In order to build the Memorial at the correct location, they tried to find where the mass graves are. They excavated the site described by the witnesses, but did not find a trace. Further digging throughout an entire year, all around the alleged killing site, has revealed nothing but undisturbed soil. So, did the Germans do a perfect job by destroying all traces and even restoring the original sequence of soil layers? Did they perform miracles? Or are the witnesses wrong?

• Almost identical quotation in G. Rudolf's and S. Schroeder's "Partisan War and Reprisal Killings".
• Juergen Graf, "Raul Hilberg's Incurable Autism":

  Finally, material evidence of a mass murder of Jews in the alleged numbers is totally nonexistent. In the Lithuanian city of Marijampol in 1996, it was decided to erect a monument to tens of thousands of Jews who had allegedly been shot by the Germans. They began excavations at the site designated by eyewitnesses in order to locate the mass grave, but lo and behold, there was nothing there. Even if the Germans had posthumously exhumed and cremated those tens of thousands of corpses, as Hilberg and his consorts allege, any mass grave would still be easily identifiable because of altered configurations of the soil.

• Carlo Mattogno and Juergen Graf simply quote Rudolf in their book about Treblinka.
• And a lesser denier Jonnie Hargis ("Hannover") made the same claim, mistaking the Lithuanian newspaper for a Latvian one.

Deniers' conclusion is simple - the report, mentioning this massacre, is unreliable, and, by induction, all other Einsatzgruppen reports are suspect.

As usual, a little bit more of research would help deniers not to look like idiots.

One of the leading online anti-deniers, Roberto Muehlenkamp, decided to investigate the matter, and wrote to Mayor of Marijampole municipality, Mr. Vidmantas Brazys. He received the following reply on 20.05.2003:

Dear Roberto Muehlenkamp,

I would like to inform you, that in the Internet page of Marijampole Municipality, on line presentation of “Places to visit” under item 10 contains the following passage: “In the valley of the Sesupe river 5090 Jewish and people of other nationalities were killed in 1941 by Nazi forces.” This fact is confirmed by the documents.

In 1970 the cemetery were included into the list of Culture Monuments. The area, where is thought were graves, is planted with olive trees and placed the monument.

Because the exact location of the graves was not known, in 1996 were done archaeological excavations and the place of fusillade was found (about 50 m to the west from registered graves).

Doctor of Archaeology Science of Vilnius University Mr Algimantas Merkevicius did archaeological excavations. All the documents of excavation keep Chief Specialist of Architecture and Urbanity Division of Marijampole Municipality Mr Gedeminas Kuncaitis.

Facts in the article of Germar Rudolf are primary and not final results of archaeological excavations.

Sincerely,

Mayor Vidmantas Brazys

Then Roberto wrote to Mr. Algimantas Merkevicius, and the latter replied on 17.06.2003 as follows:

Dear sir Roberto Muehlankamp,
Sorry for late answer, but I was outside of me office.Yes, I excavated mass grave territory in Marijampole in 1996. The purpose was to finde exact place of the graves. The supposed burrial place was emty and I found the mass graves about 100 m outside of this supposed territory. People were kiled and burried in a big dich. But after finding the exact place, my work was over. I don't know how much people were kiled and how big the mass grave territory.
Best regards,sincerely yours
Algimantas Merkevicius

A simple e-mail request was all that was needed. But why try and spoil the useful argument, right?

---

The usual deniers' response to the above would be:

1) the graves were in the wrong location;
2) the number of bodies has not been established;
3) identity of the bodies has not been established.

This misses the point badly. 100 meters outside of the presumed area is not at all bad, if the area was presumed to be the site of the massacre on the basis of testimonies. Testimonies are bound to get such thing wrong to some extent. Especially if they were late testimonies, taken after half a century. Whether identities of the corpses were established is not clear from the report, but until it is established that they were not Jewish, and that there are not enough bodies, deniers simply don't have a case: the whole argument was based on the premise that there were no bodies whatsoever. The bodies are there. If deniers wish to claim that those are wrong bodies, it's up to them to prove it.

So, once again deniers are shown to be sloppy "researchers".

Oh, and the memorial to 5090 Jews and people of other nationalities who were murdered on September 1, 1941 has been erected, after all:



More to follow, so stay tuned.

Previous << Part I: Deniers on Sonderkommando 1005

Next >> Part III: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (1)