Still Waiting: Where Did The Jews "Evacuated to The East" Go?

It's been a while since I published Seriously Now, Where Did The Jews "Evacuated to The East" Go?  - and honestly, I consider it the clinical precise knockout for any so-called "transit camp hypothesis". So here is the question to those who believe the Nazis did not seize the opportunity of a brutal war to make their wet dreams come true. If I were you, I’d be asking a very serious question about those 2.3 million Jews who were "evacuated to the East" according to the Korherr report. Where did they go? 

Option A) They were shipped off to the swamps and forests of the Reichskommissariats Ostland and Ukraine. Just imagine - over 2 million "state enemies" casually relocated into hostile, partisan-infested territory, where German forces were chronically understaffed and barely holding control. What could possibly go wrong?

Or maybe...

Option B) Over 2 Million "dangerous elements" were cozily settled in the German army’s rear - right between unstable frontline, partisan warfare, hungry locals and overstretched supply lines. Doesn’t that just scream military brilliance?

By the way, the correct answer in the sample solution is "neither option is true." For further details, refer to the original post.

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).

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.

Report to Hitler: "Jews executed: 363,211"

      

1st and last page of the report (B&W scan)

On 29 December 1942, the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler reported to Adolf Hitler that "Jews executed: 363,211" between August to November 1942 in the area of the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) Russia-South, Ukraine, and North-East. The report is one of the most explicit known individual high-level documents on the extent and intensity of the extermination of the European Jews (see also Nazi Document on Mass Extermination of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Franke-Gricksch Report).

We publish here for the first time colored photographs of the original, a copy for the files and the report of the HSSPF providing the data to Himmer's staff (see below).

Bila Tserkva, 'Gegenrasse' and the Ideological Roots of the Nazi Murder of Jewish Children

In August 1941, 90 Jewish children in Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, were shot by forces under the ultimate authority of General Field Marshall Walther von Reichenau. When Generalstabsoffizier Helmuth Groscurth attended a meeting to discuss the necessity of killing the children, the Field Commander, Reidl, gave him a justification based purely on ideological [weltanschauliche] grounds [facsimile here, translation here]. The subsequent shooting was described by August Haefner in testimony for the Callsen trial. Reichenau's reply to Groscurth confirmed his permission for these murders, whilst his order of a few weeks later echoed Reidl's emphasis on ideology by stating that "The soldier in the eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon German and racially related nations." Reichenau thus reflected a worldview (Weltanschauung) that the "pitiless extermination of foreign treachery" via a "severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry" was necessary in order to "to liberate the German people once forever from the Asiatic-Jewish danger." An important task for historians is to address the roots of those beliefs and how they differed from the racism directed at most other Nazi victims of mass murder, such as Slavs.

How the Fate of the Krymchaks Refutes Mattogno

Mattogno claims repeatedly that Soviet Jews were shot for security reasons rather than on racial grounds. In Treblinka, for example, he and Graf paraphrased Mayer's formulation to claim that "the massacres of the eastern Jews was not part of a comprehensive plan of extermination, but occurred as the result of the inexorable radicalization of the war in the east and because the eastern Jews were classified by the SS as carriers of Bolshevism." However, Kiril Feferman's work has shown how German killing policies for Krymchaks directly reflected changes in racial policy. To demonstrate this, I will discuss two documents in my possession. Feferman originally cited these documents from different archives than those from which my copies are sourced, so the references below are mine, not his.

Photographic Documentation of the Shooting of a Woman and Child in Miropol

This photograph was taken by the Slovak soldier, Skrovina Lubomir, in Miropol, Ukraine in October 1941. It is one of two known photographs documenting the shooting of women and children at close range in a public park by Ukrainian policemen attached to Order Police Battalion 303. Lubomir testified in Prague in 1958 that he was in a unit guarding bridges when he and two others were assigned to attend the execution, at which 94 Jews (including 49 children) were murdered. The two shooters on the photo are Ukrainian, the 3 Order Police commanders are German.

Source of the photo is USHMM, originally from Security Services Archive, Prague, H-770-3.0020. Source of the context and archival reference is Wendy Lower, 'Axis Collaboration, Operation Barbarossa, and the Holocaust in Ukraine', in A. Kay, J. Rutherford, & D. Stahel (eds.), Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, Boydell & Brewer, 2012, p.200.

Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories, May 1942 to January 1943

Extracts from the Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten appear in this collection edited by Arad et al. Below I copy across several relevant extracts, each referenced by the page number in the collection.

No. 4, 22.5.42: "Of the Krimchaks (about 6,000) who were usually counted as part of the Jewish population, well over half lived in Simferopol (2,500) and in Karasubatsar [Karasubazar]. Their extermination, together with that of the Jews and the Gypsies in the Crimea, was accomplished for the most part by the beginning of December, 1941 [p.344, quoted here]."

No. 5, 29.5.42: 251 people shot and 28 hanged in Minsk on 5.5.42 [p.346].

Contemporary Reports of Killings in the USSR that included Children

The following is merely a sample of reports where the killing of children is included or clearly implied. More will follow in due course. To these must also be added the numerous actions in the Jaeger Report that included children, and Jaeger's update of 9.2.42 which gave a total killed of 34,464 children.We can also consider the high number of references to places being "free of Jews" (e.g. EM 88, EM 133, EM 150) as being inclusive of killing all the children.

Update: The Extermination of Entire Communities in Ukraine in 1941

It is often assumed that no Axis orders were issued before the invasion to kill women and children in any part of the USSR, but this assumption is false. The General Inspector of the Romanian Gendarmerie, Constantin Vasiliu, issued an order on June 17 or 18, 1941, mandating "the extermination on the spot of all Jews in rural areas, enclosing them in ghettos in urban areas, and the arrest of all those suspected of being Communist party members or of having held important functions under Soviet rule [cited by Ancel, here, note 21, and by Deletant, p.143]." However, it is correct that in the area under the authority of HSSPF Jeckeln, the killing of women and children only became systematic in late August. Prior to the Kamenets-Podolsky massacre of 27.8.41, 40,000 Jews had been killed, but from 27.8.41 to 30.9.41, 100,000 were murdered [Dieter Pohl, here, p.32]. This article examines how the German policy escalated from one of primarily shooting male Jews (as a "security measure" or in reprisal) to one of exterminating whole Jewish population centres.

Shoah By Bullets: Desbois Film Transcript

A film of Patrick Desbois' work in Ukraine was released in France in 2008. A preview of the Desbois film, showing the Busk excavation is here. I originally posted a partial transcript in June 2013 but did not have the full transcript at that time. I have therefore updated the article below with the full transcript, produced for educational purposes only:

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)

In the previous blog of this series we had a look at Mattogno’s handling of evidence regarding mass killings and corpse incinerations that took place in areas around the city of Lviv, Ukraine (Lvov in Russian, Lemberg in German) during the Nazi occupation, especially the omissions or misrepresentations in Mattogno’s rendering of Leon Weliczker Wells’ account of the activities of a unit of forced laborers in charge of cremation within the scope of Operation 1005.

This blog will be mainly dedicated to examining Mattogno’s arguments regarding the eyewitness and archaeological evidence mentioned in Chapter XVII of Father Desbois’ book, about his research on the killings in the Ukrainian town of Busk^[150].

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)

In the previous blog of this series we had a look at the sloppy research, illogical nonsense and insidious but easily detectable falsehoods whereby Mattogno tries to discredit Ukrainian witnesses to Nazi mobile killing operations interviewed by Father Patrick Desbois.

In this blog, we will examine Mattogno’s handling of evidence regarding mass killings and corpse incinerations that took place in areas around the city of Lviv, Ukraine (Lvov in Russian, Lemberg in German) during the Nazi occupation, including a forest area referred to in Desbois’ book as the Lisinitchi Forest.

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)

The previous blog of this series dissected Mattogno’s attacks on Desbois’ methodology for establishing mass killing sites, and his accusations of "numerical nonsense".

In this blog, we will have a look at Mattogno’s attempt, in sections 4 and 7 of his critique, to discredit witnesses interviewed by Desbois whose testimonies are rendered in Desbois’ book.

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)

In the previous blog of this series we have seen that Mattogno’s self-projecting accusation whereby Desbois adopts a "faith-based" methodology in his research is not supported by the source Mattogno cites in support of this accusation, while on the other hand Mattogno’s writing about Operation 1005 shows that he knows or cares little about the "historiographical and scholarly methodology" he invokes.

In this blog, we will have a look at further attacks on Desbois’ methodology in Mattogno’s critique.

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)

In chapter 13 of Mattogno, Graf and Kues’ magnum opus^[1], with the self-descriptive title "Asinine, Judeophantic Arrogance", Mattogno (p. 1480) brags about his "devastating article “Patrick Desbois e le ‘fosse comuni’ di Ebrei in Ucraina” (Patrick Desbois and the ‘mass graves’ of Jews in Ukraine”)", suggesting that it was not cited in the HC critique of Mattogno, Graf and Kues^[2] because the critique’s authors (who he refers to as the "plagiarist bloggers") "were probably unable to devise any deception in order to counter my essay and to sustain this shooting aspect of the Holocaust, whose significance rises in proportion to the constant and inescapable decrease of the historiographic weight of its gassing aspect".

In this blog series, I will show that the mentioned article is devastating indeed – for the credibility of its author. Or better, that it would be devastating for Mattogno’s credibility if he had any such left.

Goebbels: "Mauer reports massive shootings of Jews in the Ukraine"

I am grateful to Jason for spotting this quote, translated from this German text of 19.10.41, also noted in Herf.

Mauer reports massive shootings of Jews in the Ukraine.

He urgently requests explanatory material for the Ukrainian population because they don't understand the need for such severe measures against the Jews.

Bolshevism has weakened the anti-Semitic instinct in the people of the Soviet Union; in many ways we'll have to start from the beginning here.

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.

Breaking Down Soviet World War II Losses

Our reader Marko Marjanović from Ljubljana has published an updated version of his breakdown of the Soviet Union’s human losses in World War II, which can be read and downloaded under this link.

The Kortelisy Massacre

On 23 September 1942, Reserve Police Company Nürnberg destroyed the Ukrainian small town of Kortelisy and killed almost all its inhabitants. The present article about this massacre, where not stated otherwise, is based on the well-sourced brochure »Ihr Gewissen war rein; sie haben es nie benutzt«. Die Verbrechen der Polizeikompanie Nürnberg, by Jim G. Tobias and Nicola Schlichting, 2005 ANTOGO Verlag, Nuremberg. Tobias also made a short documentary that includes interviews with survivors of the massacre ("Der Schwarze Mittwoch" Polizeikompanie Nürnberg vernichtet Kortelisy). Accounts quoted in the following are my translations from German text.