Holocaust Denial and Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part III)

Now that Carlo Mattogno is out of the game (see Part I & Part II), let's hear the rest of the denier's band on Himmler's report to Hitler.

Holocaust Denial & Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part II)

Holocaust Denial & Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part I, II, III)

The previous part of this series examined Mattogno's bizarre arithmetic and his nearly illiterate understanding of secondary literature in his Einsatzgruppen book on Himmler's report to Hitler on 363,211 executed Jews.

Now, if Mattogno had taken his own credo seriously that only Nazi documents have a historical value (as opposed to non-German documents and testimonies), his confused 9-pages on Himmler's report to Hitler could have been boiled down to a concise two-pager. Several contemporary German sources answer the key points:

How many Jews had been in the Generalbezirk Wolhynien before summer 1942?

Ironically, Mattogno did quote, but not use the most relevant and clear German source on the Jewish population in the Generalbezirk Wolhynien before their systematic extermination was carried out:

"Today, the total population of the General District of Volhynia and Podolia is about 4,630,000, of which approx. 465,000 are Poles and 326,000 are Jews. In the cities, Jews and Poles make up the majority. For example, the cities of Rovno, Dubno, Vladimir-Volhynsk, Lutsk, Kovel, Kostopol, Stolbunov, Brest-Litovsk, Pinsk and Kobrin have a total of 2,438,000 inhabitants, of which 71,300 (around 35%) are Poles and 103,200 are Jews."

(Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten (MbO) no. 5 dated 29 May 1942, Angrick et al. Deutsche Berichte aus dem Osten 1942-1943, p. 351 f.)

Here you've got it black on white: by May 1942, the Nazis estimated that there had been 326,000 Jews in the Generalbezirk Wolhynien.

Holocaust Denial & Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part I)

Holocaust Denial & Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part I, II, III)

The Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's report to Adolf Hitler of 29 December 1942 that 363,211 Jews had been executed within three months in the area of Bialystok, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and the Army Rear and Operation Area in the South is yet another show stopper for Holocaust denial. This series will review deniers' lame attempts to explain away this contemporary Nazi document.

Let's begin with the "Revisionist" who has published most, but who is arguably read the least.

Blobel, Eichmann's Office and a Denier's Ignorance

We have already observed the pattern that whenever the denier Carlo Mattogno claims on the Holocaust that something or someone is not known, had nothing to do with something else or did not exist, then there is a good chance that the exact opposite is true.

Examples:

• Josef "quite unknown" Spacil (SS-Standartenführer, BdS Niederlande, SS economist at the HSSPF Süd-Russland, head of RSHA II)


• Johann "completely unknown" Ernst (SS-Untersturmführer and Technischer Obersekretär, head of SiPo repair garages)


• Guido "completely unknown" Huhn (SS-Obersturmführer, SS-Sondereinheit at concentration camp Auschwitz)


• Friedrich "not a Major in any way" Pradel (SS-Sturmbannführer and Major der Schutzpolizei, RSHA II D 3 a)


• on Sonderkommando 1005 German documents that "there are none" and that the designation "was invented by the Soviets".


• on the Minsk gas-chamber dossier that the "signature of the note in question is by a different hand and is a rather clumsy attempted imitation" and that "there is no trace of any record of the presumed visit to Minsk itself by any Italian fascist delegation".


• on homicidal gas vans that "the word 'Gaswagen,' in the sense of 'mobile homicidal gas chamber' was coined only after the Second World War by the victorious powers".


• on homicidal gas vans that "the term 'Gaskammer' can only refer to a stationary 'gas chamber'".


• on Saurer gasoline driven gas vans that "all Saurer trucks had diesel engines"


• on intercepted decodes on the mass killing unit Sonderkommando Lange that "there is no mention of Sonderkommando Lange, or gas vans, or Novgorod, or mental patients to be killed!".


• on a gas van document that "[c]ontrary to normal practise, the typed name of the author of the letter is missing, as are his name [sic!] and rank and  that steel bottles with carbon oxide "does not appear in any document".


• on the testimony of von dem Bach-Zelewski that "the Jewish editors of Aufbau falsified the original document, shamelessly interpolating and adding entire paragraphs".


• on the Auschwitz Jewish Sonderkommando that "not a single one had anything whatsoever to do with the crematoria" 

Mattogno never gets tired to deliver explosive ammunition that would have destroyed his reputation as a researcher - if he ever had one. In this posting, we take a look at another case in point from his recent "Holocaust Handbooks": Mattogno argues that the Aktion 1005 leader Paul Blobel "had nothing to do" with Eichmann's office - which is straight away refuted by numerous contemporary German documents.

Brest Ghetto Mass Grave: More Than One Thousand Murder Victims Exhumed

Earlier this month, the BBC reported here the exhumation of over 1,000 Jews from a mass grave in the site of the Brest ghetto during the previous two months. The unearthed skeletons included women and children and proof that victims were shot in the back of the head. The embedded video in the report included (from two minutes in) an illustrated discussion of the ghetto population register. As I showed in our Critique, this was the 'Accounting and Control Book of Population Movement' that recorded 16,934 Jews on October 15, 1942, but crossed out that figure the following day. Mattogno of course insists that all these 16,934 Jews were 'evacuated' as that is the term used by Police Battalion 310 in its report of the ghetto action (Mattogno, pp.702-704), but these remains are proof that not all 'evacuated' Jews ever left the ghetto and that at least a thousand of them had infact been shot in the ghetto itself. Moreover, given that this also proves that 'evacuated' was a euphemism that included substantial killing, and there is no evidence these Jews ever left that administrative region of the occupied territories, it is logical to infer that any Jews who were transported elsewhere were also shot. Another desperate Mattogno gambit therefore fails.

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

In his Einsatzgruppen book, Mattogno explains away the Einsatzgruppe B report of 1 March 1942 on "Gaswagen" (gas van) as referring to producer gas vehicles. The term "Gaswagen" can describe a producer gas vehicle, but it can also describe a vehicle for transporting gas, a vehicle driven by liquefied petroleum gas, a delousing van - or as demonstrable in this context a homicidal gas van.

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part VII: Semantics

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

If we search through the books published before the Second World War, the word Gaswagen has been used with three meanings: a) short for Holzgaswagen (producer gas vehicle), short for Gastransportwagen (vehicle for transporting gas), c) any vehicle with an internal combustion engine (for sources see Mattogno and the Activity & Situation Report of Einsatzgruppe B on its Gas Vans). 

Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis deployed homicidal gas vans with engine exhaust. The vehicles consisted of a closed cargo box mounted on a light to medium truck chassis and can be described as Kastenwagen (box wagon/van). Vergasungen (gassings) were carried out inside the closed box, so the vehicle would be something like a Vergasungskastenwagen. The bulky term can be shortened to Gaswagen (as in Gaskammer/gas-chamber, the prefix Vergasung- can be simplified to Gas-). It is semantically plausible that the Nazis would have called their homicidal gas vans as Gaswagen.

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

The number and distribution of the RSHA gas vans is yet another topic that exposes Mattogno's deficiency in his Einsatzgruppen book. He does not properly read/understand the literature he wants to attack, he omits relevant German documents on the subject, his knowledge on the Nazis' Security Police and Security Service in the East - precisely the topic of the whole book - is beneath contempt, and his representation is ridden by confusion.

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

In mid-May 1943, the German Foreign office was troubled by a story that the Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien, Wilhelm Kube, showed an Italian delegation of fascists "a gas chamber in which the killing of the Jews was allegedly carried out" in Minsk (see 1943-05-15 Opera and Gas-Chamber: Italian Fascist Delegation’s Visit to Nazi-Occupied Minsk). This was a mobile "gas chamber", since only gas vans are known to have operated in Minsk (see also here).

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

Before I roll out the heavy artillery, here's a quick appetiser to illustrate Mattogno's cheating or ignorance (your choice again) on German documents on the gas vans. Even after having read 250 documents on the Einsatzgruppen and some 200 individual pieces of correspondence from or to the Einsatzgruppen, he argues like a beginner on the subject and even considers his lack of understanding as something especially clever no one else has noticed:

Mattogno on Photographic Documentation

This article contains very graphic images that may disturb sensitive readers.

On page 402 of his recent Einsatzgruppen "masterpiece",^[1] Carlo Mattogno writes the following:

If these extraordinary Soviet discoveries, of which I have used those relating to the Ukraine as an example, were authentic, they should be confirmed by hundreds of photographs of mass graves and of exhumations taken by the various warcrimes commissions, and showing hundreds of thousands of bodies. However, photographs of this type are incredibly scarce. This is also true for the most prestigious among Holocaust archives, such as those at Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Ghetto Fighter House.

Over this and the following 7 pages (402 to 410), Mattogno then treats his readers to a litany of juxtapositions between the number of corpses (if any) that can be seen on published photographs of a number of killing sites and the number of people killed at these sites according to various sources – German documents (namely the Jäger Report^[2]), Soviet investigation reports or historical writing.

In this article I will test the aforementioned arguments for substance.

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

The genesis of the Einsatzgruppen gas vans can be traced back to Fort VII in Posen. Here, the Nazis conducted mass gassing experiments for the Euthanasia action in Winter 1939/40. One branch developed to stationary gas chambers in the Altreich, the other developed to a gas van in the Warthegau, both types operating with carbon monoxide (CO) from gas cylinders. A killing commando of the Gestapo Posen, Sonderkommando (SK) Lange, employed the CO gas van. The war against the Soviet Union with its extermination policy pushed the development of a new mass killing technique since the mass shooting of people not fit for military service posed a considerable strain on the German paramilitary forces. The method had to fit the use in the wide Russian territory. The carbon monoxide gas cylinders already in use were considered not suitable for logistic reasons. In September 1941, gassing with engine exhaust was tried on a large scale in mental asylums in Minsk and Mogilev, followed by the testing of a prototype gas van with engine exhaust.

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part II: Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

In this post, I report on the case that Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen book (English edition) omits in the gas van chapter crucial evidence on the authenticity of a source - evidence which he had cited two years earlier in the Italian edition of the very same book. The incident is a sign that there is something seriously wrong with him. It's to hope for him that he is still mentally fit. But if he is, the following will inevitably raise doubts about his credibility as a book author. 

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part I: A Dilettante at Work

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

Some Holocaust deniers might have had high expectations that Carlo Mattogno would address his critics in the English translation of his Einsatzgruppen book, after Germar Rudolf's earlier comment that "we have submitted a long list of open issues -- including remarks made by the HC Blog -- to the author for his review". But deniers who had crossed their fingers that Mattogno would show a fierce reaction would have to be deeply disappointed. Rudolf's foreword tried to excuse Mattogno's decision not to consider internet critiques, lest it should force him to postpone publishing the book; a rather questionable strategy for Holocaust deniers to willfully ignoring the HC blog, given that anyone searching in the internet on the book would likely end up here and learn more about his dilettante treatment of the subject.

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 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 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.

Mattogno's Distortions on the Crimea

Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen Handbook (here) has a section on the Crimea (pp.673-681) that illustrates Mattogno's ignorance of context and documentation. Mattogno assumes that all killings would be documented in detail by the Operational Situation Reports and is apparently unaware that the Wehrmacht issued its own killing reports due to the fact that the fourteen command HQ subordinated to Korueck 553 (11th Army Rear Army Command) did not just hand over Jews to the SD but also killed them using their own military police. He also, as in the rest of the book, ignores the true ideological context, in which Jews were killed as Jews, as shown by the fact that the killings included Krymchaks, despite the fact that they were "passive towards Bolshevism", as I discussed here. Mattogno's poor sourcing is shown by the fact that he totally overlooks the documentation from the Manstein trial, which is online at Yad Vashem. The sources shown here and in the links below demonstrate how much this weakens Mattogno's authority on the region, especially in the following ways:

1) He ignores the racial component of Manstein's order of November 20, 1941.
2) He seems to be unaware that the Wehrmacht had procedures to kill many Jews locally themselves rather than handing them over to the SD
3) He continues to rely on Paget's false assumption that all the killings in Simferopol were done on one day (November 16, 1941) despite the sources showing how most of the killings were delayed until late November and early December.

4) Mattogno ignores the report by Seibert of April 16, 1942 that the Crimea was "freed of Jews" despite its prominence in the NMT judgment against him.
5) He cannot adequately explain three cases where "resettled" was crossed out in a document and substituted by "executed."
6) He ignores the Nuremberg document of 30.6.42 (NOKW-1819) stating that Kersch was "free of Jews."
7) He ignores the evidence concerning Eggebrecht, which is online.
8) He ignores Paget's concessions, which I documented here.

[Post amended on December 12, 2018, to remove duplications from previous posts and replace them with links to the original posts]