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.

Georg Leibbrandt and the Killing of Jews in the USSR: A Case Study of Mattogno's Methods

Georg Leibbrandt was one of two members of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO) who attended the Wannsee conference. Mattogno has discussed him on numerous occasions, most recently in the Italian edition of volume 1 of his forthcoming Einsatzgruppen Handbook where Mattogno cites him seven times, six of which are duplicated from his response of 2013 to our White Paper. The one new reference in the Italian edition is the false claim, as shown below, that Leibbrandt regarded Soviet Jews as only a political and partisan enemy rather than a race that had to be eliminated on biological grounds. The six recycled references entail a misrepresentation of Leibbrandt's correspondence with Hinrich Lohse of the Reichskommissariat Ostland in the Autumn of 1941 as supporting resettlement of Jews eastwards. An analysis of Leibbrandt's involvement in anti-Jewish policy can therefore form a useful case study of how Mattogno manipulates sources on German perpetrators.

Extermination of Children in Daugavpils, Latvia

According to this site, researched by Jacob Gorfinkel, "According to June 1942 Food Card distribution, there remained 487 Jews (245 men, 242 women, 22 children) in Daugavpils." The low number of children is strong proof of an extermination policy in Latvia. It converges with the photographic evidence from Liepaja, Latvia, and the other evidence about Latvia published previously on this blog. It also reinforces the evidence for the Rumbula massacre in Riga, such as the note of Operational Situation Report 155, dated 11.1.42: "The number of Jews left in Riga, 29,500, was reduced to 2,600 by an action carried out by the Higher SS and Police Leader of Ostland. In Daugavpils, there are still 962 Jews left who are urgently needed for the labor pool." This was in the wider context of reducing the Latvian Jewish population from an estimated 70,000 to fewer than 4,000 [Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories, No. 7, 12.6.42].

Remains Found in Pskov, Russia

A new article was published last week concerning the completion of a grave and memorial for 14 Jews, consisting of "two newborns, two teenagers, one old man and 9 women" found near Pskov, a Russian city just east of the Estonian border. The remains were found by Poisk (Search), an organization that searches for the remains of soldiers in known areas of heavy WWII fighting. Poisk could ascertain that these were civilians because, as stated by the Poisk spokesperson, Rachim Dzhunusov, "The remains were of children, women and old men, some [skulls] were shattered by rifle-butt blows [and] we had to collect them piece by piece” and the dead "were stripped naked, there wasn’t a single buckle, a button, nothing,” The article infers from a witness statement that the Jews had been captured after fleeing Latvia, but there are also sources stating that Sandberger's Einsatzkommando had relocated 400 women and children from Estonia to Pskov, where they were executed on Jeckeln's order in January 1942. Yad Vashem has online resources concerning five murder sites around Pskov.

Contemporary Diary of Swiss Doctor Robert Hegglin on Mass Shootings of Jews in Latvia

The following is taken from the contemporary diary of the Swiss internist and cardiologist Robert Hegglin, who took part in a humanitarian mission of the Swiss Red Cross in Riga, Daugavpils and ­Pskov in June - September 1942 and learnt from "German soldiers, officers and Latvians...that 100,000 Jews have been shot in the Riga area since the German occupation".

Films and photos of Nazi crimes on Youtube

Last week I came upon this trailer of a History Channel documentary called "The Unseen Holocaust", which announces "newly discovered footage" showing Nazi mass killings "on the Eastern Front", i.e. in the areas of the former Soviet Union occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Audrini Massacre

In early January 1942, a town containing orthodox Christians was burned to the ground in Audrini, Latvia, and its occupants were shot, including women and children. The responsible Nazi collaborator, Boleslavs Maikovskis, lost an appeal against denaturalisation in the US in 1985, in a case recorded here. He eventually fled to Germany and died in 1996 without serving time for his crimes. However, as the NYT summarizes, Maikovskis acknowledged that the killings took place:

More «Evidence for the Presence of "Gassed" Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories» (2)

Part 1

Lithuania

TK postulates that any French Jews in Lithuania prior to the transport from Drancy to Kovno and Talinn on 15 May 1944 must have reached that destination via Auschwitz-Birkenau or Sobibór, the documented destinations of most deportees from France. As pointed out in part 1, deportations of Auschwitz concentration camp inmates as laborers would be a plausible explanation if one is to assume that witnesses were not simply misled by rumors or otherwise mistaken or saying something that Soviet interrogators (according to historian Andrew Ezergailis, quoted by TK, the Soviets falsely claimed that 240,000 Jews had been sent to Latvia and murdered there) wanted to hear.

Thomas Kues: Mass Grave in Latvia

Revisionist fans of Thomas Kues will be distressed to learn that he has acknowledged the existence of a Jewish mass grave in Latvia. In this article he cites the following from Bernhard Press, The Holocaust in Latvia, p.159, describing a mass grave found by M. Morein in 1946:

(…) while looking for the corpses of his parents in 1946 near the village of Kukas near Krustpils, [Morein] discovered in a mass grave corpses whose clothes bore French labels

Liepaja (Part 2)

Further to my Part 1, Yad Vashem has footage of Liepaja shootings on this site. This was filmed by Reinhard Wiener, whose 1981 interview can be found on the same webpage. Wiener's role and the provenance of the film are discussed here and here. The film was entered into evidence at the Rosenstock trial, which is discussed here.

Liepaja (Part 1)

The killing of Jews from Liepaja, Latvia, has been documented in numerous sources. SS and Police Chief Emil Dietrich recorded most of them in his diary. Dietrich was hanged by a US military tribunal at Landsberg-am-Lech prison on 22 Oct 1948. Between the 15th and 17th of December, 1941, three German and Latvian squads shot 2749 Jews, mainly women and children, in the dunes of Skede, near Liepaja. The events were recorded in these infamous photographs by Carl-Emil Strott, who was convicted and sentenced at the trial of Grauel and others in Hannover in 1971. More of Strott's photographs can be found in this thread.

Read more!

Furthermore, lest any deniers are stupid enough to shout 'show trial' and 'forgery', the killings in Liepaja have been demonstrated by the demographic research of Anders and Dubrovskis, who examined the Nazi census of 30 Aug 1941 in the Latvian state archives, and compared it to other demographic sources such as the Soviet census of February 1935, the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, the list of deportees to the Soviet interior, the Grauel trial, residential 'house books', the "Metals Collection" List, the Schutzpolizei Reports, records from the camp at Stutthof, and the Soviets' Extraordinary Commission for Investigation of Fascist Crimes.

Their research is another nail in the coffin of the reputation of fraudulent 'demographer' Walter Sanning. As I noted in this blog, Sanning dishonestly pretended that Nazi demographic figures from January 1943 referred to Soviet population data as of June 1941. This enabled him to claim that most Jews had either fled or been deported to the Soviet interior as part of Stalin's 'scorched earth' policy. Anders and Dubrovskis demonstrate that only 209 Liepaja Jews (out of a Jewish population of 7140) were deported and a maximum of 300 fled.

Liepaja therefore gives us a further demonstration of the bankruptcy of Holocaust denial. To deny that the Nazis deliberately killed women and children from Liepaja, deniers have to ignore the existence of a handwritten diary by the SS and Police Chief, photographs taken by a perpetrator who was tried in a West German court, a census that the Nazis carried out two months after they invaded Latvia, and residential data collected by the Nazis in 1942, showing that many of the people in earlier censuses had been killed. Such denial can only be a deliberate blindness to evidence of genocide.

Footnote: Many thanks to KentFord9 for drawing my attention to the demographic data.