Mattogno on Riga, Part Four: Polishing a Turd

I’m going to finish this series on Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the murder on 30 November 1941 of thousands of Latvian Jews, plus a thousand Reich Jews who had just arrived in Riga, by making a few general observations.

Before that, however, a couple of confessions. First, I’m not an historian, although I do have an undergraduate history degree (summa cum laude) and 20 graduate credits in history (U.K. system). Also, I’ve never read a whole book by Mattogno. Readers of this blog will know that I am not a coauthor of the white paper published by most of the bloggers here several years ago, despite being one of the blog’s founders. Therefore, the extent to which I can claim any expertise on the topic at hand should be considered with those points in mind.

I spent the last week or so writing around 2,000 words on roughly ten pages of “history” written by Mattogno. While not an expert per se, I can state the following with confidence. Mattogno’s writing of history is terrible – just awful. If I submitted a paper for a grade with the kinds of errors he makes (or lies he tells), I’d get a failing grade. Were I a peer reviewer who received his work to be considered for publication in a scholarly journal (a job I have, in fact, done in a different field of the humanities), not only would I reject it outright, refusing to consider it further upon revision, but I would seriously doubt the field expertise and/or intellectual honesty of the writer.

In the ten pages on Riga alone, in a mere 2,000 words, I’ve managed to point out a number of serious methodological errors and instances of outright lying. This is not an historian – this is either an imbecile or an ideologue bent on falsifying the historical record. That Mattogno is routinely held up as the leading light of “revisionist scholarship” says a boatload about the quality of the scholarship we’re talking about. That he has managed to keep his hands relatively clean regarding overt anti-Semitism (a claim his coauthor Jurgen Graf cannot make) is a worthless distinction given the pitiful state of his “research."

“But look at all the footnotes!” Footnotes are worthless unless they’re deployed honestly. Yes, Mattogno cites a number of sources, but he doesn’t bother to present the material in those sources honestly or thoroughly.

“Thousands of pages can’t be wrong!” Yes, they can. Plus, did you ever notice how many of those pages are taken up by direct quotations? If he were a student, Mattogno would be cited for plagiarism despite acknowledging his sources because the sheer volume of quoted material is so great.

“He’s an expert in textual analysis!” Really? Who says? He doesn’t appear to have a degree in anything except (perhaps) classics and philosophy. I assume he learned some textual analysis as part of that process. That does not, however, make one an expert. Nor are the “readings” that he offers of many texts plausible or defensible.

Carlo Mattogno is a charlatan of the highest order. That he can reasonably present the veneer of respectability is beside the point. You can only polish that turd so much.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Three: Hierarchies Are Hard

Having addressed Mattogno’s butchering of the Keine Liquidierung phone note and ignorance of points like basic meteorology, geography, and arithmetic, we move in this post to discussing how Mattogno addresses the aftermath of the shooting of a thousand Reich Jews in Riga on 30 November 1941. The “orthodox” history has it that, Lange having lodged a complaint about this shooting to RSHA and thus to Himmler, Himmler issued the orders the following day regarding the ongoing disposition of Reich Jews arriving in Riga and Minsk and summoned Jeckeln on 4 December to discuss events.

Mattogno’s first point of contention here regards why Jeckeln’s shooting of Reich Jews on 30 November should warrant the attention of Heydrich and Himmler, but the shooting of Reich Jews in Kaunas on 25 and 29 November by Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando would not; he writes (p. 217), “Therefore, as Himmler did with Jeckeln, the SS should also have summoned Jäger for a reprimand.” Again, on its face, this seems like a reasonable argument. However, there are a few key differences between the cases that Mattogno does not acknowledge.

First, there was no conflict of interest or “turf war” in Kaunas as there was in Riga. After all, Lange did not raise the issue of Reich Jews in Riga being shot because he was particularly concerned with their lives. Rather, he seems to have been motivated by the need to apportion some Jews to work detail and, perhaps as importantly, the fear that his prerogative to manage the arrival and treatment of Reich Jews in Riga, which he had been assigned as a member of the SD, would be taken over by Jeckeln. Also, it’s worth noting that it was Lange who had routed the Reich Jews shot in Kaunas to that city in the first place; therefore, if anyone would have raised an alarm, it would have been he.

Second, there is again the matter of geography – Riga is not Kaunas, and more importantly, the people stationed in each city were different. Jäger’s immediate superior, Stahlecker, was stationed in Riga; in contrast, Jeckeln, as an HSSPF, had Himmler as his immediate superior. Therefore, while Stahlecker, like Lange, could have taken issue with Jäger’s shooting of Reich Jews five days and one day earlier and some reprimand given, that they were in different cities made such a scenario less likely to have yet emerged, particularly while occurring in the context of the Jews of the Kaunas Ghetto being shot at the same time. Complicating matters is that, as I pointed out in my article on the Keine Liquidierung note, it seems fairly clear that Stahlecker wasn’t even in Riga on the dates in question. Otherwise, as Finnberg pointed out in his testimony, Lange would have brought his complaint directly to Stahlecker.

Mattogno pulls something similar in discussing the dispute that arose between Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar for Ostland, and the SS regarding the need to keep Jews alive for labor. Noting that Jeckeln claimed to have been ordered by Himmler to exterminate the Jews in the Riga Ghetto on 10 or 11 November, Mattogno points to a document dated 20 November from the Generalkommissar for Latvia, Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, commenting on labor assignments for ghetto Jews. Clearly, if the Jews of the ghetto were to be exterminated, Drechsler’s document makes no sense. Mattogno writes (p. 225), “Can one seriously believe that the Generalkommisar in Riga, who issued these orders, had never heard of Himmler’s alleged extermination order?”

Well, frankly, yes. Drechsler’s immediate superior was Lohse, who in turn reported directly to Alfred Rosenberg as Minister for the Eastern Territories – the civilian occupation regime. Jeckeln, as noted, reported directly to Himmler. Since the dispute between Lohse and the SS was ongoing, there is no reason to think Drechsler would not have begun planning to deploy the Riga Ghetto Jews for labor, particularly since, when he wrote the document in question, the Jews in the ghetto were still alive.    

A key thing to point out here is that there are two possibilities for what Mattogno has done in these cases. Either Mattogno doesn’t know or understand the differences in hierarchies between the SD, on the one hand, and the SS and Police Leaders, on the other, or between the SS hierarchy in the east and that of the civilian administration, or he’s deliberately obfuscating. The man has written several books on the topic of Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity, so the odds favor the latter, although I suppose the former is possible.

The next and last part of this series will offer some final observations on how Mattogno has treated this topic. Spoiler alert: He has done so badly.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Two: Phone Calls in Riga, Prague, and Berlin

Picking up where I left off in my last post, Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the mass shooting of Latvian Jews, as well as a thousand newly arrived Reich Jews, on 30 November 1941 is riddled with errors and lapses in logic. After briefly remarking on the discrepancy between the actual date of the shooting and the date as reported in Stahlecker’s famous report of the following year (“in early December”), Mattogno writes (p. 216), “The exact date is important because the shooting of the Jewish transport early in the morning depended precisely on the large number of persons who were to be killed during the day. This has its logic, but if 45 minutes (from 8:15 to 9:00 AM) was time enough to kill 1,000 persons (according to the verdict in the Riga Trial), then why did it require more than seven hours to kill 4,000 people? At Riga, in fact, the sun only came up at 8:34 AM on 30 November, and it set at 3:50 PM.”

Mattogno on Riga, Part One: Keine Liquidierung Revisited

With my blogmates already having responded to parts of Carlo Mattogno’s magnum opus on the Einsatzgruppen, I decided to have a look at the ten pages Mattogno dedicates to the killings in the fall of 1941 in Riga – a topic I’ve had occasion to look at very closely over the last couple of years. I put together some of the theories about the famous Keine Liquidierung note a few years back; for his part, Mattogno seems to have stuck with some of the less compelling explanations.

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.

Photographic Evidence of Mass Shootings: 3. Liepaja

Liepaja is an excellent example of how photographs can form part of a convergence of evidence alongside such phenomena as diaries, testimonies and demographic studies. This is discussed here and here. Note again that non-German units took part, in this case Latvian.

How Many Perpetrators in the USSR? - Part Eight: Baltic States

The two main killing actions in Latvia were the Rumbula Action and the Liepaja action. The Rumbula action has been studied in detail by Ezergailis, whose findings can be viewed in a Word file by clicking the 'Chapter 8' hyperlink shown on this page, whilst Liepaja has been discussed in this blog. The main action in Lithuania was the murder of Vilna Jews at Ponary, described here and depicted in these photographs. Additional comments on each of these massacres are given below.

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Ezergailis gives an overview of the Order Police in Latvia as follows:

Before the Aråjs commando was trained, it was the 9th Battalion of the Ordnungspolizei that performed most of the killings for Stahlecker. The 9th Battalion units that were in Latvia during July and August had moved on, following Stahlecker to the environs of Leningrad. At the end of November there were at least two kinds of Ordnungspolizei units in Rîga under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Flick: the Schutzpolizei, headed by Major Heise, and the Gendarmerie, under Captain Rehberg. At least several hundred were posted to assure order (“obtain and maintain a German character”) in Rîga, as in Latvia at large. In addition to overseeing the Latvian precinct police, the Ordnungspolizei was also in charge of the ghettoization of Jews, and after October 25 the guarding of the ghetto. During the initial phase of the ghetto the SD were not involved. The Ordnungspolizei's involvement with the ghetto also predetermined their assignments in the liquidation of the ghetto.

The 2nd company of the 22nd Reserve Battalion from Rîga supplied about seventy men, and the 3rd company of the 22nd Reserve Battalion from Jelgava supplied another seventy men. The 2nd company was employed in overseeing the clearing of the Jewish apartments, organizing the Jews into marching columns, and accompanying the columns to Rumbula. The 3rd company was used to guard of the periphery at Rumbula. The chief Ordnungspolizei activist was Major Heise, and it appears that he was also the liaison person with the Latvian Schutzmannschaften.

In addition to the 22nd Battalion from Rîga and Jelgava and the men of the Gendarmerie, Jeckeln had at his disposal another five regiments of Ordnungspolizei, but we do not know which, if any, of them he used. In general, Jeckeln was against involving the Wehrmacht.

A West German trial of Order Police defendants included a description of Jeckeln's organization of the Rumbula action, provided by the defendant Friedrich Jahnke. Ezergailis also discusses the strong Latvian presence at Rumbula, including the planning meeting:

Various German witnesses mention the presence of Latvian officers in the preparatory meeting. Although the only name mentioned is that of Osis, the head of the Latvian Schutzmannschaften, the names of the other Latvians present at these meetings can easily be identified, for the choice is a very narrow one. The only ones who could have been there in addition to Osis, were Aråjs, Ítiglics, and the head of the Latvian ghetto guard, Danskops.

At Liepaja, there an initial killing action in July 1941. A notable feature of this action is that it was ordered by a naval commander, Kawelmacher, as Ezergailis again describes:

The pace of shootings was not fast enough for commandant Kawelmacher (a.k.a. Gontard). On July 22 he telexed the commanding admiral of the Baltic fleet in Kiel, requesting 100 SS- and 50 Schutzpolizei troops “for rapid execution [of the] Jewish problem. With present SS-personnel, this would take one year, which is untenable for [the] pacification of Liepāja.” His request was promptly granted; the notorious Latvian SD Commando under Viktors Arājs arrived from Riga, shot about 1,100 Jewish men on July 24 and 25, and left. Meanwhile the 2nd Company of Police Battalion 13 under SSHauptsturmführer Georg Rosenstock had arrived, primarily for patrol duty and to a lesser extent for executions. From then on, the Navy played a less active role, leaving the persecution of Jews in the hands of Kügler and his superior, SS-und Polizeistandortführer Dr. Fritz Dietrich, who arrived in mid-September.

As was noted in this blog, Dietrich's arrival was crucial because he kept a diary of subsequent events. The main December massacre was ordered by HSSPF Jeckeln, carried through by Dietrich, and photographed by Strott and Sobeck, as Ezergailis describes:

No ghetto had yet been established in Liepāja, but Dietrich ordered a 2-day curfew for Jews. Thus confined to their apartments, they were methodically rounded up by Latvian police and taken to the Women’s Prison. From there they were marched to the Šķēde execution site, ordered to undress, and were shot in groups of 10 by three firing squads, two Latvian and one German. All together, 2,749 Jews were shot on December 15–17. They were mainly women and children, who had been largely spared until now. Kügler’s deputy SS-Scharführer Carl Emil Strott, as well as SSOberscharführer Sobeck, photographed the executions. An audacious Jew working at the Security Police, David Zivcon, got hold of a 12-exposure film by Sobeck long enough to make copies, which have been widely reproduced and exhibited after the war.

Several of Strott's photographs, linked by Roberto here, and also discussed here, clearly show Latvian police taking women and children to the killing area. Strott's trial, at which he did not deny the photos, is here.

For Ponary, an excellent gallery of photographs can be found here. Three larger-sized examples from that gallery are shown here and here and here. Details in the photos match eyewitness testimony given to West German prosecutors that is reproduced here. See for example the book-keeper's statement that "The other nine walked one behind the other, stooping and holding on to the man in front with their hands because they could not see." Finally, note again that this massacre was not carried out by a unit of Einsatzgruppen acting alone. Lithuanian collaborators played an essential role in this murder.

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.