Showing posts with label Transit Camps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transit Camps. Show all posts

Saturday, February 01, 2020

Seriously Now, Where Did The Jews "Evacuated to The East" Go?

A straightforward question to corner any Holocaust denier:

Where did the Jews considered unfit for work by the Nazis and "evacuated to the East" go?

Figure 1: Satellite map of Europe (Google Earth image) highlighting selected political-administrative regions of the Third Reich. The map also displays: The number of Jews 'evacuated' between June 1941 and April 1943, Remaining Jewish populations as of 1943, Partisan-populated areas within the German army's rear and operational zones, the boundary of the operational zone and the Eastern front line as of mid-1942.

On December 15, 1942, Adolf Eichmann’s RSHA Jewish Affairs office, IV B4, submitted a "Secret State Affair" report titled Operation and Situation Report on the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question (unfortunately not preserved). Himmler, however, found it lacking "professional accuracy" (left image, microfilm quality) and, unsatisfied, ordered his chief statistician, Richard Korherr, to take over data analysis from Eichmann's office (BArch NS 19/1577).

By March 23, 1943, Korherr had compiled a 16-page document, The Final Solution of the European Jewish Question, covering data up to December 31, 1942, for Himmler. A month later, on April 19, he prepared a condensed summary extending coverage to March 31, 1943, to be incorporated into a larger (not preserved) report on the Final Solution for Adolf Hitler, coordinated by the RSHA (BArch NS 19/1570, scans, text in German/English).

Korherr’s findings? Approximately 2.6 million European Jews had been "evacuated" eastward by Nazi operations. After factoring in double-counting, forced labor selections, and transports not routed to extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Belzec, Kulmhof, Sobibor, and Treblinka, we’re left with roughly 2.3 million Jews "evacuated to the East" between June 1941 and April 1943 - numbers that Holocaust deniers struggle to account for (see the appendix for details).

Even with combined forces, deniers like Carlo Mattogno, Thomas Kues, and Jürgen Graf couldn’t tackle this in their "inverted comma" opus The "Extermination Camps" of "Aktion Reinhardt". They weakly speculate about Jews fit for work being deported or directly transported east but fail to explain the fate of those "unfit" Jews deported to extermination camps. Graf concedes in TECOAR’s epilogue  "that we are unable to produce German wartime documents about the destination and the fate of the deportees" (TECOAR, p. 1503).

The reality is clear: the claim that these Jews were simply resettled further east, instead of killed in extermination camps, is a not true. Contemporary German documents show that the "evacuated" Jews did not reappear in the occupied Soviet territories under civilian administration, and the military-governed zones, already plagued by partisan conflict, were largely devoid of Jewish presence (see Figure 1).

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Düsseldorf to Minsk via Malkinia

On 22 November, 1941, an officer named Meurin submitted a report (translation and transcription here) regarding the deportation of Jews from Düsseldorf, Essen and Wuppertal to Minsk. This revealed an original route that included Lodz, Warsaw, Malkinia (near the site of future Treblinka II death camp) and Bialystok, but then noted a detour (due to fears of partisan attack) via Czeremcha. The train stayed in Malkinia for 1.5 hours but there was no mention of any need to delouse these Jews nor to switch trains due to different rail gauges.

Thursday, December 08, 2011

Another 'Transit Camp': Hinzert

The ITS has an excellent page on Hinzert here. Like Soldau, Hinzert was a 'transit camp' that managed to kill hundreds of people. It also extracted gold from the teeth of its victims, as camp commander Sporrenberg reported in NO-1000 here. A study of Hinzert by Volker Schneider can be accessed here.

Soldau

Otto Rasch gave a statement to the SS in Berlin in June 1943 in which he described the functions of Soldau. The testimony is here and here [original] and states that Soldau's original purpose was to liquidate Polish political prisoners inconspicuously. Rasch also states (p.3) that Soldau was subsequently used to kill mental patients, as was also documented in NO-2908.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Notes from a Transit Camp

Located in Dubrovitsi near Staraja Russa south of Lake Ilmen after 6 September 1941, Durchgangslager (Dulag) 150, a transit camp for Soviet prisoners of war, was subordinated to the 281st Security Division and the commandant of Army Rear Area 584.