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.

More Nazi Mass Murder Statements (Part 1)

Further to my previous list, this article adds numerous quotes that clearly spell out mass murder intentions or that report mass murder actions. Preference is given to sources with online links:

1) Palfinger, 8.11.40: "a rapid dying out of the Jews is for us a matter of total indifference, if not to say desirable [YVA O.53/78, p.8; German text also here; translation in Browning, p.66]."

2) Stahlecker, 6.8.41: "an almost one hundred percent immediate cleansing of the entire Ostland of Jews [VEJ 7, pp. 511-514 (Dok. 181), here p.514]."

The Revisionist Fabrication of the Myth of an Original Treblinka "Steam Narrative" (Part C)

The Case of Friedrich Jansson and His Ball of Confusion 

Part A. Jacob Rabinowicz

Part B. Abraham Krzepicki

Part C. Rabinowitz, Krzepicki . . . and the burden of the early reports on Treblinka

In this short series examining Jansson's case for a "Treblinka steam narrative," we've looked so far in depth at two of Jansson's key witnesses, Jacob Rabinowicz and Abraham Krzepicki. In this concluding section we will broaden our view to the range of early testimonies and reports about Treblinka and draw some conclusions about these early reports on mass murder at Treblinka and the viability of the revisionist claim that they show early witnesses and observers settling on murder by means of steam.

The Revisionist Fabrication of the Myth of an Original Treblinka "Steam Narrative" (Part B)

The Case of Friedrich Jansson and His Ball of Confusion 

Part A. Jacob Rabinowicz

Part B. Abraham Krzepicki

Part C. Rabinowitz, Krzepicki . . . and the burden of the early reports on Treblinka

In Part A of this comment on Jansson's "Treblinka steam narrative," we saw that, by straightening out chronology and multiple testimonies given by Jacob Rabinowicz, Rabinowicz's important early testimonies on Treblinka were not conclusive on how the young escapee believed Jews were being murdered at Treblinka. Examining the more extensive early testimonies of another escapee, Abraham Krzepicki, in Part B, we will see another case in which Jansson has read into inconclusive reports his "steam narrative."

The Revisionist Fabrication of the Myth of an Original Treblinka "Steam Narrative" (Part A)

The Case of Friedrich Jansson and His Ball of Confusion 

Part A. Jacob Rabinowicz

Part B. Abraham Krzepicki

Part C. Rabinowitz, Krzepicki . . . and the burden of the early reports on Treblinka

Friedrich Jansson has recently made some assertions about the Warsaw ghetto and Treblinka death camp that warrant comment. His assertions rely heavily on his misinterpretation of the reports given by two early escapees from Treblinka death camp – Jacob Rabinowicz and Abraham Krzepicki. The context for Jansson’s assertions was the publication of Belzec, Sobibor,Treblinka: Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard: A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues (Holocaust Controversies 2011). Jansson’s particular target is the argument made in the Holocaust Controversies critique against the revisionist “Treblinka steam chamber” claim. The Holocaust Controversies argument is that revisionists misunderstand the relative evidentiary value of different sources and use this misunderstanding to create a false problem. As we shall see, the argument made by the Holocaust Controversies writers is sound.

Just when I thought I had seen all of Jansson’s fits …

… the poor fellow gets even more hysterical than before, in his latest production with the self-characterizing title Pearls before swine: explaining the obvious to an idiot, which largely consists of attempts to explain away his blunders and distortions, adding more as he goes along.

This blog will address Jansson's response to the blog Friedrich Jansson tries to help Mattogno ….

Friedrich Jansson tries to help Mattogno …

… who, as I pointed out in the blog Friedrich Jansson responded …,, produced no arguments of significance against my substantiated assumptions regarding the height and weight of Polish Jews murdered at the AR camps. In his latest piece, with the amusingly (and characteristically) blusterous and accusatory title Muehlenkamp’s body-mass delusion: a case of BMI abuse, Jansson starts out bragging as follows:

Foundational to Roberto Muehlenkamp’s misrepresentations of the realities concerning burial space at the Reinhardt camps is his claim that Polish Jews weighed an average of 34 kilograms (75 pounds). This claim is based on the assumptions that (1) one third of the Jews were children (meaning under the age of 15), that (2) the adults weighed an average of 43 kg, and that (3) the children weighed an average of 16 kg.

This post will show how worthless are Muehlenkamp’s claims, and how mendacious his analysis. The passage under discussion is from Muehlenkamp’s contribution to the holocaust controversies manifesto, pp. 416-418, especially pp. 417-418; the results of this vital passage exert themselves throughout the rest of Muehlenkamp’s discussion of both burial space and cremation.

Miasto Ruin (City of Ruins) - Warsaw 1945 video

Digital reconstruction of Warsaw. Video recreates the destruction of Warsaw during World War II. A simulation of five minutes helps to educate the new generation about the destruction of Warsaw, Poland, which occurred during World War II (1939-1945).

The video was produced by 40 experts, who took two years to finalize it. Using resources of the cinema in three dimensions (3D), it documents the shocking wreckage to wich Warsaw was reduced by Nazi Germany during the attempted extermination of Jews.

Producers have used historical images to create a simulation of a flight over the city in early 1945, which shows the collapse of bridges, houses burned without roofs, and the Warsaw Ghetto. Jan Oldakowski, the director of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, says that the video, subtitled in Polish, is intended primarily for young people, who doesn't realize the degree of destruction of the largest city in Poland between 1939 and 1945.



Trailer: link
Official site: http://miastoruin.pl/
Extras: technical details of the Warsaw's digital reconstruction

An interview with «"Mike Smith" -- aka "Denier," aka "Bud"»

Yesterday, when I was looking up the list of columnists writing for the "Inconvenient History" journal, the name Michael K. Smith caught my attention.

Nazi Propaganda Film from the Warsaw Ghetto (Revised and Updated Article)

A Nazi film crew, led by Willy Wist, shot over an hour of footage for a propaganda film in the Warsaw ghetto in May 1942. A summary of the scenes they filmed can be found here, along with Jonas Turkow's eyewitness account (from 1948) of why the film was shot. Out-takes from that film were found by Adrian Wood in 1998 and have been collated, along with the formal footage, into a documentary entitled A Film Unfinished. The documentary intersperses the footage with diary entries, such as those of Czerniakow and Lewin, which describe the staging and shooting of the film. It also re-enacts Wist's testimony from war crimes proceedings.

Himmler in Distrikt Lublin, February 1943

On February 16th, 1943, Himmler ordered the razing of the Warsaw ghetto on the grounds that "we must achieve the disappearance from sight of the living-space for 500,000 sub-humans (Untermenschen) that has existed up to now". This order was probably issued whilst Himmler was in Lublin, according to documents cited by Gerlach in Kalkulierte Morde, p.572 note 430, reproduced in part by Dr Nick Terry here

A Critique of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands

Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands is all about murder – the murder of about 14 million people by the regimes of Hitler and Stalin in an area comprising "in today’s terms, St. Petersburg, and the western rim of the Russian Federation, most of Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine" (page 384), which the author calls the "bloodlands".

'The Hell of Polish Jewry'

An interesting article about the Warsaw Ghetto’s Ringelblum archive is available on the English website of Spiegel magazine:

'The Hell of Polish Jewry'. Chronicling the Holocaust from Inside the Ghetto. By Jan Friedmann.

Photos showing conditions inside the Warsaw Ghetto are included in the following collections:

Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes

Mass Graves and Dead Bodies

Mass Graves and Dead Bodies

[Last updated on 07.03.2014 to add a photo credit note.]

The online archives of the Ghetto Fighters’ House have been reconfigured, breaking the links in my former photo collection on the RODOH forum.

Therefore I reproduce that collection below, to the extent permitted by my records. The photo captions are those I copied from the GFH Archives when putting together this collection. Where I'm aware of inaccuracies in a caption, this is pointed out.

The images can be enlarged by clicking on them. Needless to say, many of the photos are graphic and sensitive persons are advised against watching them.

Photos should be credited to: 

The Ghetto Fighters' House Museum/Israel/ The Photo Archive 

«Evidence for the Presence of "Gassed" Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories» (3, 1)

Comments on the article

Evidence for the Presence of "Gassed" Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 1


By a "Revisionist" who calls himself Thomas Kues (hereinafter "TK")

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 (1)

Adina Blady Szwajger in the Warsaw Ghetto

Adina Blady Szwajger was a pediatrician in the Warsaw ghetto. When the great deportation action of July 1942 reached her hospital, she fed her young patients fatal doses of morphine. In her memoir, published in 1988, she revealed that:

I poured this last medicine into those tiny mouths. . . . And downstairs, there was screaming because the . . . Germans were already there, taking the sick from the wards to the cattle trucks.

Deniers may wish to reflect upon why she confessed to this act, given that she could simply have stated that the Germans killed the children. They may also wish to consider the context in which she acted in 1942. Why was she certain that these children were going to suffer horrible deaths during the deportation? The answer is in those events which she had already witnessed: a hospital containing many corpses, attesting to the fact that Jews had already been shot and starved. It is also in the certainty that her patients would be unlikely to survive a long journey in a cattle truck, and that 'resettlement' of such patients in such a context could only mean killing.

The Julius Meinl Connection

Our today's Guest Blogger is Kent Ford

In Walker Percy's novel, The Last Gentleman, a young man, Williston Bibb Barrett, haunted by the historical drama of the American Civil War, lapses into spells which launch him wandering across the great battlefields of that conflict. Less sensitive souls today join organized outings to visit and memorialize great events, making tourist destinations of battlegrounds, homes, camps, and notorious buildings. Families pack into minivans to drive to Concord Bridge, or they make their way to Verdun. In contrast, I am certainly no longer young, nor am I given to tourist groups seeking the markers and relics of great historical dramas. Just the same, the artifacts of one of these events the genocide of Europe's Jews known as the Holocaust, are so prolific that they frequently manage to track me down - and sometimes in the most unexpected ways and places. Yes, some cataclysms, their reverberations so widespread, in time and space, are impossible to escape; these things seem to follow certain people like wraiths, never quite absent from their lives, surprising them like death showing up in Samarra.

So it is that my wife and I often meet our son halfway between the university where he studies and the neighborhood in which my wife and I reside, in a German neighborhood, actually nearby to his apartment, for tea and conversation, at a coffee house called Julius Meinl, advertised innocuously as "Vienna's leading coffee roaster for 145 years." The corporate positioning is more or less as a high-end, continental Starbucks. We don't actually like the place much, always commenting that seating is not comfortable, the pastries don't taste as good as they look, and the wait for a table is often too long. Still, not quite able to put our finger on why, we meet there.

But the case of Meinl is not entirely free of entanglements, so to speak.

 And so yesterday I was reading Adam Czerniakow's journal. Czerniakow, you will recall, was chairman of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, an administrative body made up of the city's prominent Jews and appointed by the German occupiers to administer affairs, starting September 1939 in the city's Jewish neighborhoods and finally in November 1940 in the ghetto. Czerniakow, whose leadership had its adherents and detractors, was a conscientious man who worked long days, without break, yet still managed to make personal daily notes on the Council, great events, and daily life amongst Warsaw's Jews during 1939 to 1942. These notes were made in nine little notebooks of which eight survived the war; the journal was discovered in the 1960s and, subsequently, an English edition was prepared by Raul Hilberg for publication in 1979. The journals break off on 23 July 1942, at the outset of the Great Deportation of Warsaw's Jews mostly to Treblinka, the day on which when Czerniakow took his own life rather than continue as chairman of the Jewish Council.

Studying the entries of the journal for 1941, then, I stumbled upon this: During fall, as so often occurred in Warsaw, "parcels [were being] requisitioned at the post office" [entry for 8 October]. In short, food and goodies mailed to Warsaw ghetto residents were stolen from them at their point of entry into the ghetto, the police confiscating in September, for example, 15,000 parcels valued at several millions of zlotys. Parcels with > 6 pounds of goods were stolen by the authorities for leather goods, flour, fats and < 4 pounds in cases of several packages to one addressee were taken as well. Fair enough: as a denier would say, there was a war on. On October 8 Bischof of the Transferstelle scolded Czerniakow that in the matter of these thefts "like all Jews I am not accurate." Czerniakow finally, concluding his entry for the 8th, noted that "They say that the parcels go to Meinl's chain store," a comment footnoted by Hilberg as follows: "The firm Julius Meinl, a grocery chain acted as middle-man in distribution of confiscated food to canteens and other favored German users. A few months later, the food went directly to Order Police Battalion 61."

But the Meinls have world-famous anti-Nazi credentials and the patina that comes with opposition to the Führer and his band of grim idiots. A branch of the Meinl family were indeed anti-Nazi, Meinl III married to a Jewish woman and having fled Austria in 1938-1939 for the UK, where his son (Meinl IV) became a pilot in the RAF during the war. (Today, the family have both retail and banking interests, and Meinl V was famously arrested this year in a Madoff-like scheme.)

According to the Meinl corporate history, "By the 1930s, the Meinl retail empire had grown to more than 600 company-owned stores, and some 400 franchised stores, making the leading retailer in all of Europe and a mainstay of daily life throughout most of Central Europe. The company also had built a strong string of food processing plants, enabling it to produce foods and other items under the Meinl brand. . . . The outbreak of World War II, however, brought an end to the Meinl family's expansion. The company's bank was shut down in 1943; meanwhile, the country's Central European holdings were ravaged by the war. With the end of hostilities, most of Meinl's former retail empire had fallen within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union."

What the corporate PR machine doesn't mention, however, is that whilst Meinl III hunkered down in London to wait out the war, Meinl II stayed home and ran the commercial empire, as noted by Czerniakow, only to see his bet lose and the firm nearly collapse as the Third Reich came undone. Meinl III returned after the war and rebuilt the Meinl empire from the "good guy" lineage, the empire headed subsequently by more Meinls with roman numerals after their surname. In 1998 the family sold all but one landmark store (in Vienna) and extensive property holdings throughout Europe. Julius V focused on banking only to become during the world economic meltdown, it would seem, a Madoff wannabe.

I have no idea whether the Meinl brews are as good as claimed, since I notoriously don't do coffee. The tea is decent, but it rankles that a simple cup of tea can nest in such a complex moral and structural nexus.

Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (5,2)

(1) - Introduction and 1. Nature and Purpose of Kola’s Archaeological Investigation

(2) 2. Location and Form of the Mass Graves

(3) 3. Corpses Found

(4,1) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.1 The Capacity of the Graves

(4,2) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.2 Wood Requirements
4.3 Duration of the Cremations

(4,3) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.4 The Soil removed from the Graves
4.5 The Ash

(4,4) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.6 The "Actual" Surface Area of the Graves
4.7 Density of Corpses in the Graves

(5,1) 5. Alternative Explanations


5. Alternative Explanations (continuation)[374]

In section 5 of my original article [375] I asked the pertinent question why, in order to bury "some tens of thousands" (Mattogno) of corpses at most, the SS would have created 21,310 cubic meters of grave space, sufficient, even according to Mattogno’s "maximum" capacity of 8 bodies per cubic meter, to bury about 170,000 corpses.

"The Stroop Report is a Forgery" (Part 5)

[Continued from The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 4)]

14. “Who wrote the Stroop Report?”

Following his “Ten Other Points to Consider”, denierbud turns to musing about who, other than its apparent author (who, as we have seen in Part 1, not only did not contest his authorship but also provided details about how the document came into being), may have written the Stroop Report. He “suspects” that “the author was a woman who was a feminist and a zionist, and who was connected to a propaganda group headed by Adolf Berman and Emmanuel Ringelblum”, and announces that “The one person who fits that mold is Rachel Auerbach.”

Read more!


Why he suspects a “feminist and a zionist” behind the forgery of his fantasies denierbud sort of tries explaining in this section of his feature. Yet he leaves his readers in the dark about what his suspicion that the author was related to “a propaganda group headed by Adolf Berman and Emmanuel Ringelblum” is based on. As this commentary is not just about debunking denierbud’s nonsense but also meant to provide further information about issues he refers to, I shall therefore start by having a look at this “propaganda group”.

Adolf Berman was the secretary of a Polish organization called the Council of Assistance of the Jews ("Rada Pomocy Zydom"—ZEGOTA), which was founded on 4 December 1942 and provided assistance to Jews living in hiding outside the ghettos.

Emanuel Ringelblum was a Polish-Jewish historian, politician and social worker who chronicled Jewish life in Poland and particularly the Warsaw ghetto and whose work, insofar as it has been recovered, is kept in the State Archives in Poland as Ringelblum’s archives.

The “propaganda group headed by Adolf Berman and Emanuel Ringelblum” seems to have been headed by Emanuel Ringelblum alone. It was a group known as Oneg Shabbat, which was dedicated to documenting life in the Warsaw ghetto. Adolf Berman and his wife helped smuggle Ringelblum and members of his family out of the Warsaw ghetto, and during his subsequent hiding in the “Aryan” part of Warsaw, which culminated with his being discovered on 7 March 1944 and subsequently executed, Ringelblum regularly corresponded with the Bermans.

Rachel Auerbach, according to a short biography found on this site, was a writer for Oneg Shabbat. She was also “a Zionist and a literary modernist”, and furthermore “one of the very few Jewish women before World War II to cross the gender barrier to be acknowledged and respected for her artistic expression”. The latter may be the reason why denierbud calls her a “feminist”.

Now to the first of what denierbud believes to be an indication of Rachel Auerbach’s authorship:

A passage in the Stroop Report that perhaps reveals the true voice of the author is the following passage from section II of the introduction:

"During this armed resistance the women belonging to the battle groups were equipped the same as the men; some were members of the Chaluzim movement. Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands. It happened time and again that these [women had pistols or hand grenades (Polish "pineapple" hand grenades) concealed in their bloomers up to the last moment to use against the men of the Waffen SS, Police, or Wehrmacht."

Some thoughts on the above passage:

First of all, General Stroop never mentions the real names of the Jewish combat organizations in his report. The forger makes the mistake of portraying him as too ignorant. As if, with all the possible interrogation opportunities from the thousands of captured Jews, Stroop would never mention the organizations behind the fighting: the ZOB and ZZW. The author poorly gauged how knowledgable she should make Stroop. But here's the kicker: we're supposed to believe he can just throw out the word "Chaluzim." A term that means "Young Pioneers"-- A Jewish group centered around learning skills to take with them in their future immigration to Israel. Does that seem like Stroop's voice or a momentary revealing of the voice of the true author?

First of all, denierbud should have read the Stroop Report with more attention before claiming that Stroop “never mentions the real names of the Jewish combat organizations in his report”. If he had, he might have noticed the following:


Daily Report 04.05.1943, 1st page:

As is learned from depositions made by the Jews, today we caught part of the governing body of the so-called "Party." One member of the committee which leads the gang will be used tomorrow for mopping up some more fortified dug-outs with armed Jews inside.

Daily Report 06.05.1943, 1st page:

It could not be reliably ascertained so far whether the so-called "Party Directorate" of the Jews ("PPR") have been caught or destroyed. We are on their traces. It is to be hoped that tomorrow we shall succeed in tracing down this so-called Party Directorate.

Daily Report 08.05.1943, 1st page

We continued today the operation against the dug-out of the so-called select "Party Directorate" which we had discovered yesterday, as reported in my teletype message yesterday. We succeeded in forcing open the dug-out of the Party Directorate and in catching about 60 heavily armed bandits. We succeeded in catching and liquidating Deputy Leader of the Jewish Military Organization "ZWZ" and his so-called Chief of Staff.

The term “ZWZ” looks like a garbled reference to one of the Jewish fighting organizations in the ghetto, the Jewish Military Association (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, initials ZZW), which is mentioned, for instance, in the translated excerpt from Benz et al’s Dimensionen des Völkermords transcribed in my RODOH post # 3877:

In the ghettos there were numerous smaller and larger resistance groups. They partially were split up in accordance with the Jewish pre-war parties, while in other cases they joined forces, e.g. to the left-wing super-party fighting organization of the Anti Fascist Block (Bojowa Organizacja Bloku Antyfaszystowkiego) in April 1942 in Warsaw or the ZOB (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa – Jewish Fighting Organization) under Zionist leadership, but also with the participation of Bundists, which had definitely taken shape at the end of 1942. In Warsaw there was also the rather right-wing Jewish Military Association (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy). Only during the ghetto revolt itself a coordination of the resistance efforts was achieved.

What Stroop refers to as the “Party Directorate” seems to have been the “Coordinating Committee (KK)” mentioned by Marek Edelman, “whose members were representatives of all existing political parties”. The initials “PPR” probably stand for “Polska Partia Robotnicza”, the Polish Workers’ Party that was one of the parties represented in the “Coordinating Committee”. The battle groups of the ZOB were made up in accordance with party membership, and Marek Edelman mentions one battle group that obviously consisted of members of the PPR:

The following battle groups took part in the fighting here: Gruzalc's (Bund); Merdek's (Hashomer); Hochberg's (Bund); Berek's (Dror); Pawel's (PPR).

Stroop did not have a fully accurate idea of how the Jewish resistance was organized. He got the initials of the Jewish Military Association ZZW wrong, and he seems to have believed, or wanted to believe (after all Jews and Communism were considered by the Nazis to be closely linked together), that the “Coordinating Committee” was a “Party Directorate” of the Communist PPR, when actually all political parties active in the Warsaw ghetto were represented therein. But he was not nearly as ignorant as sloppy reader denierbud would like the forger of his fantasies to have presented him.

As concerns the Chalutzim, i.e. members of the Jewish youth movement known as HeChaluz, denierbud should have done some reading about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising before indulging in his farcical conspiracy theories. He might have realized that the HeChaluz played a important part in the ghetto’s Jewish resistance. It is mentioned accordingly in Marek Edelman’s account, and also on page 295 of Reitlinger’s The Final Solution:

The Resistance Committee, which had come into being far too late in the day, never possessed the facilities for overall leadership. It had originated during the resettlement actions of 1942 in a union of the Zionist Hechalutz Party and the Socialist Bund, parties which barely commanded the support of the majority among the young and active, who had some chance of surviving the actions.21 The general accession of all political groups of any serious consequence was not brought about till October, 1942. The inner history is dim-lit and confused. Various reconstructions of the events have been made on the basis of the testimony of survivors, but they leave a bewildering impression of endless small groups and individual names.* A very young man, called Mordechai Anielewicz, a member of the Hechalutz, is said to have been the elected combat leader. Needless to say, survivors writing in the Moscow Jewish press name a Communist.22 The Germans, at any rate, gave all the credit to the Hechalutz. Stroop described the grenades hidden in the skirts of the women Chalutzim, and Krüger praised their endurance. Even Eichmann distinguished them as ‘important biological material .’23

As on many other occasions, ignorance and sloppiness have again been the hallmarks of denierbud’s conjectures.

Denierbud’s “thoughts on the above passage” continue as follows:

Secondly the passage promotes women as fighters which might point to a woman writing it. But it's an absurd notion that an SS general would admire the enemy for doing something as ridiculously "wild west" as firing pistols with both hands. Stroop supposedly writes, " Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands." Wouldn't it be better just to have one pistol and hold it with two hands to steady the aim? Considering the Resistance hardly ever killed a German, aiming is probably more of an issue than doubling your rate of fire with two guns. Would Stroop admire their brazen courage or wonder why they are so poorly trained by the ZOB and ZZW? The forger wants to make the women in the Resistance look courageous and attempts to convey this through Stroop's admiring voice.

The first thing I wonder about is where, in the quoted excerpt from the Stroop Report, Stroop is supposed to have expressed anything like admiration for the Chalutzim women. The text reads to me like a plain description of facts, and what Stroop seems to be highlighting in regard to the Chalutzim women is their fanaticism and the “treacherous” fighting methods they employed, namely the use of hand grenades hidden in their bloomers. Such tactics seem to have given Stroop some concern, judging by this statement in his teletype message of 3 May 1943:

Since we discovered several times today, that Jewesses had pistols concealed in their bloomers, every Jew and bandit will be ordered from today on, to strip completely for the search.

.

While denierbud would like to see Stroop’s emphasis on women fighters as indicative of a female author, the probable explanations are this concern and the wish to hypocritically express condemnation for the Jews’ fighting methods and/or call attention to the risks that he and his men had run. It should also be taken into account, in this context, that the Nazis seem to have considered women combatants in the ranks of those they saw as “sub-humans” to be something particularly perverse and indicative of a lack of moral values. Thus female partisans and female soldiers of the Red Army were referred to as Flintenweiber, which can be translated as “rifle broads” or “gun broads”, and fighting women stood a good chance of being killed after capture even if belonging to the regular armed forces. The following is a part of the translated excerpt from Christian Gerlach’s book Kalkulierte Morde transcribed in my RODOH post # 3973:

The women of the Red Army drew especial hatred. There was even an army order to kill them all – at least one. On 29 June 1941 there was an instruction signed by General Field Marshal v. Kluge, in which it read: “Women in uniform are to be shot.” At the same time that v. Kluge intervened against mass shootings in one respect, he was ordering others. This order was passed on the same day by VII Army Corps and reinforced for instance by the 286th Security Division on 1 and 2 July. On 3 July a counter-order of the Army High Command reached the 286th Security Division, according to which uniformed women, armed or not, were to be recognized as prisoners of war. But even thereafter the hatred of German front line soldiers against the so-called gun broads didn’t remain behind the initial orders from above, and they were fought with enormous brutality or massacred after battle. New orders to kill all female Red Army soldiers were issued, so in July 1941 at Infantry Regiment 167 in the central section and in October 1941 at the 75th Infantry Division in Ukraine. As late as 6 March 1944 the Wehrmacht High Command ordered that captured female Soviet army soldiers were as a rule to be handed over to security police and SD as so-called unreliable elements. In Belorussia there were special prisoners of war camps for women, like at Bobruisk and Baranovichi.

It is possible that anti-partisan fighter Stroop - unlike Krüger and Eichmann, see the above quote from Reitlinger's book - shared this murderous aversion to female combatants and thus highlighted the female Chalutzim not only as a threat and an enemy not fighting “fair”, but as a general expression of the perceived perversion of the Jewish insurgents.

As concerns these women’s firing pistols with both hands instead of holding one pistol with two hands to steady the aim, I don’t know what deniedbud’s problem is. Pistols, as pointed out in Part 2 of this article, are weapons useful only in combat at close quarters, and in such combat aiming would not be a big deal due to the proximity of the target, while doubling one’s firepower in order to kill or wound more enemy soldiers might be considered desirable, especially for fighters trying to cover the retreat of their comrades and/or making a last stand in a hopeless situation.

In the last paragraph of his “thoughts”, denierbud harks back to his argument regarding German casualties, which was already discussed in Part 2. He especially takes issue with the following passage from page 5 of the summary account:

SS Untersturmfuehrer Dehmke fell in this skirmish with the bandits; he was holding in his hand a hand-grenade which was hit by the enemy and exploded, injuring him fatally.

Independently of the probability of this happening, what is beyond my understanding is how the description of SS Untersturmfuehrer Dehmke’s death can be taken as indicative of denierbud’s female Jewish forger. For the officer, who (as stated immediately before this passage) was part of a special raiding party that captured the Jewish and Polish standards hoisted by the insurgents, is clearly being portrayed in a heroic light, a man killed in the thick of the fight by the hand grenade with he apparently was about to throw at the enemy. Would denierbud’s female forger provide such a portrayal of an SS officer? Hardly so. On the other hand, it is not unlikely that Stroop may have wanted to embellish the circumstances in which Dehmke had been killed, if these had actually been less heroic than described.

Denierbud further believes that he detected Rachel Auerbach’s “sardonic style” in the following passages from Page 10 of the summary account:

The longer the resistance lasted, the tougher the men of the Waffen SS, Police, and Wehrmacht became; they fulfilled their duty indefatigably in faithful comradeship and stood together as models and examples of soldiers. Their duty hours often lasted from early morning until late at night. At night, search patrols with rags wound round their feet remained at the heels of the Jews and gave them no respite. Not infrequently they caught and killed Jews who used the night hours for supplementing their stores from abandoned dug-outs and for contacting neighboring groups or exchanging news with them.

Considering that the greater part of the men of the Waffen-SS had only been trained for three to four weeks before being assigned to this action, high credit should be given for the pluck, courage, and devotion to duty which they showed. It must be stated that the Wehrmacht Engineers, too, executed the blowing up of dug-outs, sewers, and concrete buildings with indefatigability and great devotion to duty. Officers and men of the Police, a large part of whom had already been at the front, again excelled by their dashing spirit.

Denierbud claims that, in the above text, the forger of his fantasies was

...juxtaposing a chummy camaraderie of cheerful troops with the deplorable killing of meek Jews who venture out at night with the humble goal of making contact with a neighbor or finding some food. It's the irony of doing a despicable deed with gusto

Try as I might, I can find nothing sardonic in the above-quoted excerpt from the Stroop Report. Especially the reference to “search patrols with rags wound round their feet” who “remained at the heels of the Jews and gave them no respite” can hardly be understood, even objectively, as referring to “the deplorable killing of meek Jews who venture out at night with the humble goal of making contact with a neighbor or finding some food”. For even if Stroop’s casualty figures are realistic and were not “cooked” by a commander embarrassed to report high casualties to his superiors (see the discussion in Part 2 of this article), going on night patrols after the ghetto’s Jews, some of whom were armed and all of whom were desperate, was a risky undertaking requiring a certain amount of courage, and it is obviously this courage that Stroop intended to bring to the fore. When I first read this passage, I was actually astonished at the ability of inexperienced troops to engage in night patrols in an urban area, which not only involved some risk but also suggests a certain combat skill, and wondered if Stroop might not be exaggerating in order to extol his troops' performance. Yet these night patrols are also mentioned by Marek Edelman, whose account describes them as a far more dangerous undertaking than Stroop’s reported casualty figures suggest:

Battles and armed encounters were now fought mostly at night, while in the daytime the ghetto was completely lifeless. The Germans and the ZOB patrols met only when the streets were completely dark, and whoever had time to fire first, won. Our patrols were spread over the entire ghetto area. A great many died on both sides every night. The Germans and Ukrainians made it a practice to patrol the streets in larger groups, and lay in ambush for the partisans only.

It is rather unlikely that a forger intent on sardonically denigrating the Germans might portray them as going on night patrols that, even in the face of an opponent inferior in numbers and especially in armament, might in the reader's eye have the flair of dangerous combat missions requiring courage and fighting skill. At least as unlikely as these other references to the troops' courage and abilities (emphases are mine):

Page 9 of the summary account:

Frequently from the street, we could hear loud voices coming through the sewer shafts. Then the men of the Waffen SS, the Police or the Wehrmacht Engineers courageously climbed down the shafts to bring out the Jews and not infrequently they then stumbled over Jews already dead, or were shot at.

Daily Report 24.04.1943, 1st page:

This success is furthermore due to the fact that the noncommissioned officers and men have meanwhile become accustomed to the cunning fighting, methods and tricks used by the Jews and bandits and that they have acquired great skill in tracking down the dug-outs which are found in such great number.

Daily Report 27.04.1943, 2nd page:

The leader of the raiding party had a difficult task because the bandits were disguised in German uniform, but despite this fact, he did his duty with great efficiency.

Daily Report 13.05.1943, 1st page:

After a portion of the bunker inhabitants had been brought out and were being searched, a woman reached as quick as lightning under her dress and pulled a hand grenade from her panties, from which she pulled the pin and threw into the men doing the search, while at the same time she jumped for cover as quick as a flash. Only the presence of mind of the men prevented casualties.

Rachel Auerbach’s sardonic style here? Bullshit.


15. “Hate for Nazis and compassion for Jews in the Stroop Report”

Denierbud claims that

The person who wrote it wanted to make General Jürgen Stroop look cruel and evil, while at the same time engendering sympathy for the Jews.

and quotes a few passages from the Stroop Report that are supposed to support this claim.

What he doesn’t quote are passages that are likely to engender some sympathy for Stroop’s troops, like those quoted in item 14 above, or present the Jews in a way that might interfere with the supposed goal of eliciting the reader's sympathy towards them.

It can hardly have been in the interest of a forger pursuing the goals that Stroop attributes to her to state that prior to Stroop’s operation the Jews had “control of everything” in the ghetto and manipulated the German managers of the ghetto’s enterprises through bribery and sex, as Stroop claimed in the following passages on pages 5 and 6 of the summary account (emphases are mine):

The conditions discovered there are indescribable. I cannot imagine a greater chaos than in the Ghetto of Warsaw. The Jews had control of everything, from the chemical substances used in manufacturing explosives to clothing and equipment for the Armed Forces. The managers knew so little of their own shops that the Jews were in a position to produce inside these shops arms of every kind, especially hand grenades, Molotov cocktails, and the like.[…] Over and over again we discovered that these labyrinths of edifices belonging to the armament concerns as residential blocks, contained rich Jews who had succeeded in finding accommodations for themselves and their families under the name of "armament workers" and were leading marvelous lives there.[…] According to the statements of arrested Jews, women also seem to have played a prominent part. The Jews are said to have endeavored to keep up good relations with officers and men of the armed forces. Carousing is said to have been frequent, during the course of which business deals are said to have been concluded between Jews and Germans.

It also wouldn’t elicit much sympathy for the Jews to mention that they still had lots of money, like in the daily report of 25.04.1943:

Further today, significant supplies of paper money, currency, gold coins and items of jewelry were secured. The Jews still control possessions of significant value.

The same goes for the upholding of class differences even in so dire a situation, with ”differently equipped dug-outs for rich and for poor Jews”.

Such statements suggest a Nazi’s stereotypic idea of Jews and/or his eagerness to point out their defects, rather than a Jewish forger’s endeavor to make Jews look good in the reader’s eyes.

This can also be said of referring to Jews as “cowards by nature”.

And would a forger bent on engendering sympathy for the Jews highlight the fact that there were Jewish traitors helping the SS to find dugouts?

Page 7 of the summary account:

To discover the individual dug-outs was difficult for the units, as they had been efficiently camouflaged. In many cases, it was possible only through betrayal on the part of the Jews.

Daily Report 30.04.1943, 1st page:

In many cases we are not able to discover those dug-outs unless some Jew, whom we have already caught, gives us a hint as to their whereabouts.

Daily Report 02.05.1943, 1st page:

To find more dug-outs, the raiding parties took along with them some Jews caught on the previous day to act as guides.

Daily Report 04.05.1943, 1st page:

Discovering the dug-outs becomes more and more difficult. Often they can only be discovered by betrayal through other Jews.

Would the forger, on top of so prominently mentioning Jewish betrayal, even stage a photograph in which a smart-looking German officer is seen interrogating two ugly-looking ”Jewish traitors”?

Denierbud must have failed to read the above-quoted passages when going through the Stroop Report. Or then he read them and, for obvious reasons, chose to keep silent about them. The former could be called bungling, the latter – lying.

16. “Read it Yourself”

At the end of his masterpiece, denierbud harks back to his rambling about the low casualty figures reported by Stroop, which has been discussed in Part 2 of this article. He recommends reading the teletype report of 27.04.1943, regarding which he points out that:

Around 600 Jews were killed that day, but notice how many Germans were killed: Zero. And only 3 wounded.

before repeating his brilliant conclusion:

Another not-believable day in the Stroop Report. The Stroop Report is a fake.

It is possible, as pointed out in Part 2, that Stroop manipulated his casualty figures downward in order to avoid embarrassment before his superiors. But what stands out in the above quotes is not so much denierbud’s idiotic notion that a low reported casualty count is indicative of forgery rather than plain and simple underreporting. It is that he apparently tries to create the impression that the “around 600 Jews” killed on 27 May 1943 were killed in battle, when actually most of them were executed after having been captured:

A total of 2,560 Jews were caught today within the former Ghetto, of whom 547 were shot.

Mendacity to the end. The Stroop Report is a fake like denierbud is an honest and reasonable researcher. Or then, the latter notion is even more nonsensical than the former.

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 4)

[Continued from The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 3)]


In this part I shall take a look at items 2 to 6 and 8 of the “Ten Other Points to Consider” in denierbud’s Stroop Report feature.

Read more!


8. “A great piece of trial evidence” (item 2 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Like many a good “Revisionist”, denierbud believes that every criminal trial involving crimes committed by his Nazi heroes was a charade in which mischievous prosecutors and judges acting on behalf of sinister conspiratorial entities crapped upon the law and their legal duties and sentenced innocent men to death or long-term imprisonment on the basis of flimsy or manipulated evidence. Accordingly every incriminating document exhibited at any such trial must be a forgery, especially such “prominent” exhibits as the Stroop Report and its two supposed “parallels”, a “family album bound in tattooed human skin” mentioned at the trial of Ilse Koch and a photo album entitled “Good Times” that was kept by Kurt Franz, the deputy commander of Treblinka extermination camp.

Regarding the first, denierbud’s claim is the following:

Indeed such a book was mentioned (but never produced as evidence) at the trial of Ilse Koch. In her case, we have the lie that she had a family album bound in tattooed human skin.

Denierbud is contradicting himself here insofar as the fact that Ilse Koch’s album was not introduced as evidence against her at the trial belies the notion that it was considered “a great piece of trial evidence” by either the prosecution or the tribunal. According to this page of a site with certain “Revisionist” leanings, which I accordingly would not expect to withhold any claim that might help discredit this particular trial, the album was testified to by a prosecution witness, but also invoked by Ilse Koch herself in her defense:

Apparently this photo album was confiscated by the American liberators, but it was not introduced into evidence in the courtroom. In her plea for mercy from the court, Ilse Koch pointed out that Newsweek magazine had published an article in which it was stated that the US military government in Germany was in possession of her photo album. Frau Koch claimed that the album contained several photos of her home which showed lampshades made from dark leather; Frau Koch said the photos showed that the lampshades were clearly not made from human skin.

According to the above, the introduction of this exhibit as evidence was in the interest of the defense and not the prosecution. The aforementioned testimony, according to which the album had tattooed human skin on its cover, was apparently not considered reliable by the court, for there’s no mention of Ilse Koch having been sentenced on account of this testimony. She was also not sentenced on account of the more well-known testimonies about her having made lamp shades out of human skin:

She was convicted by a panel of 8 military judges on the charge of participating in a "common plan" to violate the Laws and Usages of War, but she was not convicted on the specific charge of ordering human lamp shades to be made from the skin of tattooed prisoners.

So much for this “great piece of trial evidence”.

Regarding Kurt Franz’s photo album, denierbud’s claims are the following:

Evidence in the 1960's Kurt Franz trial where similar to the Stroop Report, an incriminating album of Treblinka pictures was simply found in Franz's apartment (upon arrest 15 years after the war) with an album title that would anger any jury: "Good Times." Franz, who was accused of skimming millions of dollars in addition to sadistically murdering Jews, lived in a modest apartment under his real name for 15 years prior to his arrest, and it evidently never occured to him to throw this incriminating piece of evidence away.

It is correct that Kurt Franz was leading a modest middle-class life when arrested and that he was living under his own name, something he could afford to do due to the initial sluggishness of West German justice in matters of NS-crimes that has been addressed in this article.

It is also correct that he possessed a photo album with the title “Die schönsten Jahre meines Lebens” (“The best years of my life”), which was missing some photographs and their captions but still contained pictures of camp commandant Stangl, of Franz himself, of his dog Barry and of the excavators that had been used at Treblinka, first to dig the mass graves and later to exhume the corpses and move them to huge roasters for incineration (Adalbert Rückerl, NS – Prozesse. Nach 25 Jahren Strafverfolgung: Möglichkeiten, Grenzen, Êrgebnisse, page 46 f.).

What is not correct, however, is that the case against Kurt Franz was made around this photo album at the trial against Franz and other former members of the Treblinka camp staff before the Düsseldorf County Court, or that the album was an important element of incriminating evidence on which the court’s findings of fact in its judgment were based. The evidence underlying the court’s findings of fact about the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews and the execution of that policy at Treblinka extermination camp has been listed in this article. A specific mention of Franz’ photo album is not to be found there. There is also no mention of this photo album in the court’s specific findings of fact regarding the defendant Franz’s individual criminal actions, which are transcribed in my RODOH post # 7191. Franz was found guilty of eagerly commanding and taking part in the mass killings carried out at Treblinka, and of numerous killings on his own initiative beyond the scope of orders received, on the basis of his co-defendants’ depositions and the testimonies of a number of eyewitnesses considered credible by the court, which belied his mendacious claims that he had done no more than orders required him to do and helped the poor Jews wherever he could. Only on one occasion the judgment mentions photographs presumably taken from the photo album in connection with its findings of fact regarding Kurt Franz. These are photos of Kurt Franz’s dog Barry, which were shown to animal psychiatrist and court expert Konrad Lorenz for the purpose of his expert opinion about Barry’s character. For while several witnesses provided detailed and coincident descriptions of how Franz had often sadistically set his big dog upon inmates to kill or maim them, there were also statements that Barry had been a playful and harmless animal when not in the presence of his master Franz. Court expert Lorenz concluded from the photos of Barry shown to him that the dog had been a half-breed, and explained that half-breed dogs have a particularly strong tendency to adapt to their master’s character. This, according to Lorenz, explained why Barry had been a murderous beast when under the influence of Franz but a peaceful animal when Franz was not around. Lorenz’ expert opinion was the only instance I found in the judgment in which photographs presumably taken from Franz’ album were used, not as direct evidence against Franz but as input for a court expert’s opinion meant to solve an apparent contradiction between various elements of evidence.

A look at the Treblinka photos shown here and here, many of which are from Kurt Franz’s album, helps to understand why the album is not specifically mentioned in the judgment, let alone as the key incriminating evidence that denierbud claims it to be: none of these photos, at first sight, points to a mass murder site let alone to murders committed or partaken in by Kurt Franz. Only with extraneous knowledge of these pictures’ location and context, based on other evidence, is it possible to link them to the mass killing at Treblinka, and that only through photo analysis such as described in Alex Bay’s article The Reconstruction of Treblinka. A criminal court, whose task was not an exact physical reconstruction of the Treblinka site but a reconstruction of events at that place insofar as required to ascertain the individual defendants’ criminal deeds, didn’t have much use for these photographs, interrogation and cross-examination of defendants and eyewitnesses being the court’s main source of evidence instead. Denierbud’s claim that Franz was “nailed” on the basis of his photo album is taken out of thin air.

Denierbud also makes no effort to explain why on earth Franz did not deny that Treblinka had been a place of mass murder and that he had himself participated in the killing, even though he tried to play down the extent and nature of his participation. What advantage could he have gained by not challenging the evidence that Treblinka had been an extermination camp, by not claiming that it had been a mere transit camp and the accounts of mass killing were all part of one great big hoax? In the case of Kurt Franz, there’s no room for even the absurd and baseless “Revisionist” fantasies about mendacious plea-bargaining by corrupt criminal justice authorities acting at the behest of some sinister conspiracy, for Kurt Franz was sentenced to life imprisonment, the highest penalty that the German Criminal Code provides for.

Last but not least, denierbud doesn’t know what he’s talking about (or then he is simply making things up) when he claims that Kurt Franz “was accused of skimming millions of dollars”. While the plunder of the Jewish victims at the camps of Aktion Reinhard(t) is mentioned in some detail in the judgment, there is no mention of Kurt Franz having, in violation of orders to hand over all valuables to the administration of Aktion Reinhard(t), kept for himself any of the loot, let alone “millions of dollars”.

Thus his wishful thinking is all that denierbud is left with in support of his claim that Franz’s album was “likely another planted fake document”.

The baseless conclusion that denierbud ends this item with:

In short, the Stroop Report fits in with other faked albums which had the aim of serving as courtroom evidence. Jürgen Stroop was sentenced to death by a Polish court and an American court. Kurt Franz got life in prison.

requires no further comment.

9. “The Stroop Report is too readable” (item 3 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

This is where I’m at loss with what our poet denierbud is trying to tell us. His irrelevant subjective opinion that the Stroop Report reads “like a fiction book” aside, what “specific details or mentioning of technical issues” does he expect it to contain, beyond those it contains, that would interest a superior following the progress of a murderous police action against a despised minority? Denierbud doesn’t tell, and I doubt he would be able to specify what the hell is talking about if required to do so. In the opinion of Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, the Stroop Report contained not too little detail, but far too much for the despicable minor undertaking if referred to:

The dirty arrogant SS swine! Imagine writing a 75-page boastful report on a little murder expedition, when a major campaign fought by soldiers against a well-armed army takes only a few pages.

It is also hard to understand what exactly denierbud expects to be “hard for a layman to understand” in a report about such “little murder expedition”. Stroop was reporting neither about complex technical issues such as might be the topic of conversation between denierbud’s jet-fighter pilots, nor about a military engagement involving knowledge obtained at some military academy. He was reporting about a violent roundup and killing operation that essentially consisted in burning down the Warsaw ghetto block after block and then rooting out the surviving Jews from dugouts and sewers. I don’t see anything there that could be hard to understand for anybody, but perhaps denierbud can enlighten us about what exactly he had in mind.

10. “Another reason why the German death toll is not believable” (item 4 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Harking back to his previous rambling against the “unbelievably” low casualties reported by Stroop (discussed in Part 2 of this article), denierbud surmises that the Jews must have prepared for resistance ever since the presumed dissemination in the Warsaw ghetto of a «Jewish Underground report known as the "November 1942 Report"», describing the Treblinka death camp (he is probably referring to the description of Treblinka appended to a report entitled “The Destruction of Jewish Warsaw”, which on 6 January 1943 was transmitted to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London through its delegate in occupied Poland, and which is mentioned in the excerpt from Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps transcribed in my RODOH post # 8970), and that this makes the low casualty rate reported by Stroop “even harder to believe”.

If, as denierbud assumes, said report was disseminated in the Warsaw ghetto, it probably had no greater effect than an earlier report about Treblinka mentioned in Marek Edelman’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. For as becomes apparent from that account,

• most of the ghetto’s inhabitants were reluctant or refused to accept a reality that was too horrible to contemplate, or selfishly stuck to the irrational hope that they might be spared while others perished;

• the Germans cleverly used a combination of trickery and terror in order to assure compliance with the deportation measures, and

• those Jews who were willing to face the facts and not resign to their fate, essentially the members of the Jewish resistance, took a long time to gain acceptance among the ghetto population and had to obtain their weapons from the Polish underground, which was of little assistance at least in the beginning.

Here’s how Marek Edelman describes the reactions of most ghetto inhabitants to the deportations from the ghetto and to news about fate of those deported (emphases are mine):

On the second day, July 23rd, a meeting of the so-called Workers' Committee took place. All political parties were represented on the Committee. Our group, supported only by the Hechalutz and Hashomer organization, called for active resistance. But public opinion was against us. The majority still thought such action provocative and maintained that if the required contingent of Jews could be delivered, the remainder of the ghetto would be left in peace. The instinct for self-preservation finally drove the people into a state of mind permitting them to disregard the safety of others in order to save their own necks. True, nobody as yet believed that the deportation meant death. But the Germans had already succeeded in dividing the Jewish population into two distinct groups--those already condemned to die and those who still hoped to remain alive. Afterwards, step by step, the Germans will succeed in pitting these two groups against one another and cause some Jews to lead others to certain death in order to save their own skin.
[…]
On the second day of the "deportations" the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide. He knew beyond any doubt that the supposed "deportation to the East" actually meant the death of hundreds and thousands of people in gas chambers, and he refused to assume responsibility for it. Being unable to counteract events he decided to quit altogether. At the time, however, we thought that he had no right to act as he did. We thought that since he was the only person in the ghetto whose voice carried a great deal of authority, it had been his duty to inform the entire population of the real state of affairs, and also to dissolve all public institutions, particularly the Jewish police, which had been established by the Jewish Council and was legally subordinate to it.
[…]
So that we might learn conclusively and in detail about the fate of the human transports leaving the ghetto, Zalmen Frydrych (Zygmunt) was ordered to follow one of the transports to the "Aryan side". His journey "to the East", however, was a short one, for it took only three days. Immediately after leaving the ghetto walls he established contact with an employee of the Warsaw Danzig [Gdanski] Terminal working on the Warsaw--Malkinia line. They travelled together in the transport's wake to Sokolow where, Zygmunt was told by local railroad men, the tracks forked out, one branch leading to Treblinka. It proved that every day a freight train carrying people from Warsaw travelled in that direction and invariably returned empty. No transports of food were ever seen on this line. Civilians were forbidden to approach the Treblinka railroad station.

This in itself was conclusive proof that the people brought to Treblinka were being exterminated somewhere in the vicinity. In addition, Zygmunt met two fugitives from the death camp the following morning. They were two Jews, completely stripped of their clothes, and Zygmunt met them on the Sokolow market place and obtained the full details of the horrible procedure. Thus it was not any longer a question of rumours, but of facts established by eyewitness accounts (one of the fugitives was our comrade Wallach).

After Zygmunt's return we published the second issue of On Guard with a detailed description of Treblinka. But even now the population stubbornly refused to believe the truth. They simply closed their eyes to the unpleasant facts and fought against them with all the means at their disposal.

In the meantime the Germans, not too discriminating in their choice of methods, introduced a new propaganda twist. They promised--and actually gave--three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to everyone who voluntarily registered for "deportation". The offer was more than sufficient. Once the bait was thrown, propaganda and hunger did the rest. The propaganda value of the measure lay in the fact that it was truly an excellent argument against the "stories" about gas chambers ("why would they be giving bread away if they intended to murder them?..."). The hunger, an even stronger persuader, magnified the picture of three brown, crusty loaves of bread until nothing was visible beyond it. Their taste which one could almost feel in one's mouth--it was only a short walk from one's home to the "Umschlagplatz" from which the cars left--blinded people to all the other things at the end of the same road. Their smell, familiar, delicious, befogged one's mind, made it unable to grasp the things which would normally have been so very obvious. There were times when hundreds of people had to wait on line for several days to be "deported". The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.
[…]
After this temporary let-up, the deportations from Warsaw started again with intensified force. Now the blockades were even more dangerous for us, because there were fewer people and the area had become smaller. They were also more difficult for the Germans, however, because people had already learned how to hide. Therefore, a new method was used: every Jewish policeman was made responsible for bringing 7 "heads" daily to the "Umschlag". And this is how the Germans were playing their best game. Never before had anyone been so inflexible in carrying out an action as a Jewish policeman, never before had anyone been so unyielding in holding on to a captured victim as one Jew in relation to another Jew. So that they might furnish the 7 "heads", Jewish policemen would stop a doctor in a white coat (the coat could be sold for a fantastically high price later, in the "Umschlag"...), a mother with her child in her arms, or a lonely, lost child in search of its home.
[…]
The following incident may serve to clarify the conditions in which we had to work at the time. About mid-November (in the period of "quiet") a few hundred Jews from several shops were deported, allegedly to work in the Lublin Concentration Camp. During the trip Comrade W. Rozowski broke open the bars in the car window, threw out six female prisoners, while the train was in motion (among others, Guta Btones, Chajka Betchatowska, Wiernik, M. Kojfman), and then jumped out himself. Similar feats would have been quite impossible to perform at the time of the first deportations, because even if there had been somebody brave enough to attempt an escape, the other victims would never had allowed it for fear of German revenge. By now the Jews finally began to realize that deportation actually meant death; that there was no other alternative but at least to die honourably. But as was quite natural for human beings, they still tried to postpone death and "honour" for as long a time as possible.

And here’s how Edelman describes the efforts of the Jewish resistance to obtain arms from the Polish underground. Emphases are also mine:

Once again we built a large organization, not alone this time, but by common efforts, and once again the major problem of weapons was encountered. There were almost none at all in the ghetto. In must be taken into account that the time was the year 1942. The resistance movement of the Poles was just beginning at the time, and only vague stories were being circulated about partisans in the woods. It must be remembered that the first organized act of armed resistance on the part of the Poles did not take place until March 1943. Therefore, there was nothing unusual in the fact that our efforts to obtain arms and ammunition through the Government Delegate and through other agencies encountered major difficulties and as a general rule, brought no results. We were able to obtain a few pistols from the People's Guard.
[…]
At the end of December 1942 we received our first transport of weapons from the Home Army. It was not much--there were only ten pistols in the whole transport--but it enabled us to prepare for our first major action. We planned it for January 22nd and it was to be a retaliatory measure against the Jewish police.

The “first major action”, however, was not what it had been expected to be, and its outcome was disastrous:

However, on January 18th, 1943, the ghetto was surrounded once again and the "second liquidation" began. This time, however, the Germans were not able to carry out their plans unchallenged. Four barricaded battle groups offered the first armed resistance in the ghetto.

The ZOB was baptized in battle in the first large-scale street fighting at the corner of Mila and Zamenhofa Streets. The best part of the Organization was lost there. Miraculously, because of his heroic attitude, the ZOB Commander, Mordechaj Anielewicz, survived. After that battle we realized that street fighting would be too costly for us, since we were not sufficiently prepared for it and lacked the proper weapons. We, therefore, switched to partisan fighting. Four major encounters were fought in the apartment houses at 40 Zamenhofa Street, 44 Muranowska Street, 34 Mila Street and 22 Franciszkanska Street. In the Schultz shop area the SS men taking part in the deportation were attacked by the partisans. Comrade A. Fajner took an active part in this action and was killed in its course.

One of our battle groups, still unarmed, was caught by the Germans and was taken to the "Umschlag". Shortly before they were to enter the railroad cars, B. Pelc addressed the group with a few words. It was only a short address, but it was so effective, that not a single one of the sixty people moved to enter the car. Van Oeppen (the chief of Treblinka) shot all sixty himself on the spot. This group's behaviour, however, served as an inspiration that always, under all circumstances, one should oppose the Germans.

Of all the prepared 50 battle groups only five took part in the January activities. The remainder, not having been assembled at the time of the Germans' entry into the ghetto, was caught by surprise and was unable to reach the place where their weapons were stored.

Once again, as was the case in the first stage of the ZOB's activities, four-fifths of the Battle Organization's members perished.

Thus weakened by their first engagements, the Jewish resistance had to reorganize its activities. It was only now, at the end of January 1943, that it received broader support from the ghetto population, and also more assistance from the Polish underground:

The latest developments, however, reverberated strongly both within the ghetto and outside of it. Public opinion, Jewish as well as Polish, reacted immediately to the ghetto battles. For now, for the first time, German plans were frustrated. For the first time the halo of omnipotence and invincibility was torn from the Germans' heads. For the first time the Jew in the street realized that it was possible to do something against the Germans' will and power. The number of Germans killed by ZOB bullets was not the only important thing. What was more important was the appearance of a psychological turning point. The mere fact that because of the unexpected resistance, weak as it was, the Germans were forced to interrupt their "deportation" schedule was of great value.

In the meantime legends about "hundreds" of dead Germans and the "tremendous" power of the ZOB started circulating throughout Warsaw. The entire Polish Underground was full of praise for us. At the end of January we received 50 larger pistols and 50 hand grenades from the Home Army Command.

It was this “awakening” to the realization that it was possible to resist the Germans, rather than any reports about the fate of the deportees at Treblinka, that ended the passivity of the majority of the surviving ghetto inhabitants and caused them to help the resistance organize the defense of the ghetto against the final roundup. At the same time, a change in the attitude of the Polish underground, also brought about by the first acts of armed resistance in January 1943, helped the Jewish fighters obtain armament that, while still miserable compared to the hardware of a modern army, was a lot better than the few pistols they had been fighting with at first:

By now every partisan was equipped. on the average, with one pistol (and 10-15 rounds for it), 4-5 hand grenades, 4-5 Molotov cocktails. 2-3 rifles were assigned to each "area". There was just one machine-gun in the entire ghetto.

Thus we can see that the notion that reports about Treblinka death camp galvanized the Warsaw ghetto’s Jews into putting up a big fight is merely theoretical and fails to take into account the ostrich-like attitude of most of the ghetto’s population, the hunger and misery in the ghetto that some people irrationally hoped to escape from by allowing themselves to be deported, the violence employed by the Germans where deceitful coaxing failed, the selfishness of people hoping that while others would perish they might themselves be spared, the difficulties faced by the resistance in obtaining arms, and the widespread notion that nothing could be done about the impending fate. Only the first armed engagements starting 18 January 1943, which despite their disastrous outcome showed the people that it was possible to fight the Germans, brought about a significant change of attitude, away from the wishful thinking, selfishness and fatalism that until then had paralyzed the Warsaw ghetto’s population. Had it not been for the armed battle groups that resisted the roundup on 18 January 1943, Stroop would probably have had a much easier job when he took to wiping out the ghetto three months later.

11. “A different Jewish strategy due to the Germans losing the Battle of Stalingrad?” (item 5 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Never one to mind contradicting himself, denierbud forgets his previous claim, about a description of Treblinka in November 1942 having galvanized the Jews into resistance, when indulging in one of the most idiotic “Revisionist” speculations that I have ever seen: up to the German defeat at Stalingrad, where the remains of the German 6th Army surrendered to Soviet forces on 2 February 1943, the Jews (not only in the Warsaw ghetto, but throughout Europe and also in the US – denierbud apparently believes in some central body directing Jewish activities worldwide) are supposed to have changed their “strategy” from one of “collaborating” with the Nazis (never mind that such “collaboration”, apart from helping the genocidal mass killing that denierbud denies, implied dying like flies of starvation and disease in ghettos and being treated like garbage in concentration or labor camps, among other inconveniences) to one of a) resisting and b) promoting the “holocaust myth”.

This conjecture is so flagrantly at odds with all evidence and reason that it’s hardly worth even commenting on. Suffice to say that even its basic assumptions (absence of Jewish atrocity reports and resistance before Stalingrad, commencement of both only thereafter) are mistaken, as will be shown hereafter.

Reports in Jewish publications about the Aktion Reinhard(t) extermination camps appeared as early as April 1942, see the quotes in my RODOH post # 8036. At about the same time, see the excerpt from Arad’s book in my RODOH post # 8970, the Polish underground, drawing on its own sources and on “Jewish Underground groups in Poland, like the Jewish National Committee and the Bund”, started transmitting news “news of the deportations to the death camps and what was happening there” to the Polish Government in Exile in London. Reports about Belzec that reached London “were handed over by the Polish Government-in-Exile to Dr. Ignacy Schwarzbart, a Jew and a member of the Polish National Council”, who on November 15, 1942, “published in London an open statement with all the known details about the extermination actions going on in Belzec”. Then there was the already mentioned report on "The Destruction of Jewish Warsaw", which was issued on the same day and transmitted to London on January 6, 1943. These are but a few examples prior to the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, which alone are sufficient to show the ignorance (let’s give him the benefit of doubt) that underlies denierbud’s conjecture. Denierbud ices the cake by repeating his favorite rambling about “a February 1943 Reader's Digest article” written by “Irgun member Ben Hecht”, which is the subject of one of his videoclips and of Andrew Mathis’ commentary on that clip.

As concerns resistance, there are examples dating as far back as July 1942 of Jews resisting the elimination of ghettos in the administrative area known as Reichskommissariat Ostland, namely in Kleck on 21 July 1942 (25 of 400 escapees survived) and in Nieswiez on 22 July 1942. The presidents of the Jewish Councils in Marcinkánce in the Bialystok district and in Lachwa (Polesia) defended themselves against the liquidations at the end of 1942. On 23 December 1942 Jewish fighters and Communists attacked a German café in Cracow. In Minsk Mazowiecki the last 400 Jews resisted their liquidatioin on 10 January 1943. They were burned alive by the Germans in the school building from which they threw bricks. These and other acts of resistance are mentioned in the translated excerpt from the “Poland” chapter of Benz et al’s Dimensionen des Völkermords that is transcribed in my RODOH post # 3877. My previous post on the same thread, # 3876, contains a translated excerpt from Christian Gerlach’s Kalkulierte Morde about Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Belorussia.

On the other hand – contrary to what one would expect if there had been a “new Jewish strategy” following the German defeat at Stalingrad – the overwhelming majority of Jews under Nazi rule continued to “cooperate” all the way to gas chambers and execution pits. Perhaps the most striking example of an utter absence of resistance, even when the remaining Jews realized that they would also share the fate of those deported before them, is that of the Lodz ghetto.

Nonsensical though denierbud’s “Stalingrad” theory is, it is worth reading on account of a revealing statement showing what denierbud thinks of those lazy, good-for-nothing Jews, a statement that might be taken straight from an issue of Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer, or from this Nazi newspaper article published in August 1939. Emphases are mine:

The Germans, upon entering Warsaw, had found a lot of Jews who had no visible means of income. No apparent legitimate job. They wanted to have the Jews learn to work in labor camps in order to prepare them to move to a temporary Jewish state in occupied USSR.

Bravo, denierbud!

Every Jew-hating scumbag in the world would probably give you a hearty slap on the back for that.

And any reasonable human being who was still in doubt about what cesspit you come from should be in doubt no longer.

But before that pep-talk, denierbud treats his readers to a revelation that, if it could be substantiated, would probably make him the most famous “Revisionist” ever. He claims to have found out that the Jews deported from Warsaw in 1942 were actually sent to labor camps:

The standard account is that 7 months earlier (in July through September 1942), the Germans deported around 300,000 Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto and there was no resistance: the Jews went willingly because the Germans told them they were being deported to labor camps. It was the truth[my emphasis – RM]: […]

So our friend denierbud claims to know of evidence leading from Treblinka, which all evidence known to historians (such as Ganzenmüller’s letter to Wolff dated 28 July 1942 and Höfle’s radio message to Heim dated 11 January 1943) shows to have been the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Jewish deportees from Warsaw and other Nazi-occupied areas of Poland, to labor camps where he believes the Germans had those lazy Jews “learn to work” (he apparently has no objection to forced labor as long as it’s Jews performing the same).

To think that “Revisionist” big-shots Mattogno & Graf frantically searched archives in Eastern Europe for such evidence without finding anything, when all they would have needed to do is visit their faithful disciple denierbud in northern California …

12. “ The beginning of the report contains a short philosophical summary of the Jews in Europe, which seems out of place for a general writing it for two superior generals:” (item 6 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

This “point” is about as inane as the previously discussed “too readable” baloney. After pointing out that the Stroop Report was “a commemoration book meant as a limited edition printing of 3 copies, 2 of which are given to generals Himmler and Kruger” (the Reichsführer SS would probably have enjoyed being referred to as a “general”), denierbud argues that background information about the history of Jewish ghettos would have been out of place in such a document, because its addressees would not be interested in the history or know it already.

Why, and I thought this was a commemoration book!

The following excerpt from page 26 of Richard Raskin’s A Child at Gunpoint contains a quote of Stroop explaining what purpose his report was meant to serve:

Just as it was Krüger’s idea to collect the daily reports in this way, it was also his suggestion that photographic records be kept of the operation. In a conversation while in prison in 1949, Stroop told of a meeting he had with Krüger on May 2, 1943, in which Krüger

… was particularly anxious that our accomplishments be preserved on film. During our final conference, held in my headquarters, he declared: ‘Photographs of the Grand Operation will serve as invaluable tools for future historians of the Third Reich – for the Führer, for Heinrich Himmler, for our nationalist poets and writers, as SS training material and, above all, as proof of the burdens and sacrifices endured by the Nordic races and Germany in their attempt to rid Europe and the world of the Jews.’

Would some background information about the history of Jewish ghettos in general and the Warsaw ghetto in particular not be a proper introduction for a work that might one day be used as historical and training material and as proof of the Nazis’ heroic struggle against the Jews? I’d say such background information would be spot-on there. And from Stroop’s career point of view, it would show his superiors that he was not just a numb executor of orders, but a man with interest in and background knowledge of the “Jewish problem”, therefore a candidate for a higher leadership post. In other words, Stroop was meeting the expected wishes of his superiors and brown-nosing them.

On the other hand, why would the female Jewish forger of denierbud’s fantasies have included this historical background in the document? In order to highlight the Nazis’ emphasis on Jews being a threat to non-Jews? That would hardly serve any “vilifying” purpose and might even have a slightly apologetic effect.

Once again, denierbud’s conjectures leave much to be desired in terms of logic and reason.

13. “Over-the-top use of the word "bandit" and "subhuman."” (item 8 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Denierbud has a problem with the frequent use of the term “bandits” throughout the Stroop Report. He argues that Stroop “would” have been more specific about what “bandits” exactly he was up against, so that his report could be used for intelligence purposes, and that the derogatory nature of the term points to a forger trying to denigrate poor Stroop and denierbud’s Nazi heroes in general.

In his “intelligence” argument, denierbud ignores the fact that Stroop’s daily teletypes to Krüger were progress reports for a superior who wanted to know how the operation was doing, and not something meant for intelligence services interested in collecting information about underground fighting organizations. Such intelligence services would probably not rely on Stroop’s daily teletypes for information, but obtain protocols of prisoner interrogations or, even better, take part in such interrogations themselves. If their only or main source were a commanding officer's progress reports to his superior, they would be bunglers not worth their salary. Regarding the Stroop Report as a whole, denierbud keeps forgetting that this was a commemorative book, something to celebrate the Nazi struggle against Jews and other sub-human scum and to look at when reminiscing of the good old times by the fireside. Intelligence-relevant information about specific fighting organizations that the “bandits” belonged to would not only be boring in such a context, but create the perhaps unwelcome impression that the “bandits” were political organizations with a cause and not the underworld rabble that the Nazis liked to see themselves as fighting against.

As to the derogatory nature of the term “bandits”, denierbud reveals his ignorance of the fact that “bandits” was a term commonly used by the Nazis for partisans and other members of resistance organizations in the countries they occupied during World War II, with the obvious and understandable intent of portraying members of underground resistance as criminals acting against the established order, rather than patriots fighting to free their country of the Nazi occupiers. The fight against partisans, especially in Poland and the occupied territories of the USSR, was designated by the Nazis as Bandenbekämpfung, i.e. fight against bandit gangs. The Bandenbekämpfung also served as a cover and pretext, in the occupied territories of the USSR, to wipe out Jews and other undesirable elements of the population allegedly linked to the Soviet partisans. Thus, for instance, a report by Himmler dated 29 December 1942, of which a facsimile can be viewed on this site, refers to “Bandenbekämpfungserfolge”, i.e. successes in the fight against bandits, achieved in Southern Russia, Ukraine and Bialystok between 1 September and 1 December 1942. It separately lists “Banditen” (“bandits” - 1,337 killed in battle, 737 prisoners immediately executed, 7,828 executed after longer intensive questioning) and “Bandenhelfer und Bandenverdächtige” (“bandit helpers and bandit suspects” – 16,553 arrested, 14,257 executed, and 363,211 Jews executed). Jews were obviously seen as “bandit helpers and bandit suspects” regardless of whether or not they had any connection to the partisans, on account of being Jews alone.

So it is only natural, within the scope of Nazi terminology, that Stroop should refer to Polish resistance fighters found in the ghetto as “bandits”. Referring to the specific organizations they belonged to might affect their depiction as criminals against the established order and instead give them a certain aura of legitimacy, which was the last thing the Nazis wanted.

In this context, it is of interest to have a look at just how many members of the Polish underground took part in the fighting inside the Warsaw ghetto between 19 April and 16 May 1943. According to this page and this excerpt, an 18-man unit of the Polish Armia Krajowa, under the command of Henryk Iwański, fought inside the Warsaw ghetto, amid the ruins on Muranowski Square and Nalewki Street, alongside one of the Jewish fighting organizations. This seems to have been the unit that Stroop referred to as follows:

The main Jewish battle group, mixed with Polish bandits, had already retired during the first and second day to the so-called Muranowski Square. There, it was reinforced by a considerable number of Polish bandits.

If – as denierbud would probably be prone to argue – the emphasis on “bandits” in the Stroop Report is out of proportion to the size and the achievements of Iwanski’s unit, the reasonable explanation for this would be that Stroop, embarrassed by how long it was taking him to subdue the Jewish resistance, and perhaps also by high casualties that he eventually played down in his report (see Part 2 of this article), reckoned that the Polish underground fighters, the “bandits”, would be seen by his superiors as a more formidable opponent than the despised Jews, and thus make his difficulties in crushing the uprising more excusable in Krüger’s and Himmler’s eyes. For the female Jewish forger of denierbud’s fantasies, on the other hand, there would be no reason to have the non-Jewish underground play a bigger part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising than it actually did.

At the end of this item of his feature, denierbud points to the oddness of the term “subhumans” in Stroop’s teletype message of 16 May 1943:

180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed.

Indeed it makes no sense to interpret the “subhumans” as a category other than “Jews” and “bandits”, so the reasonable interpretation is that “subhumans” is being used as an epithet for either Jews or Polish underground fighters, whereby in the first case the term “bandits” would in this particular message be another epithet for the Jews. Either of both scenarios fits the Nazi view that Jews were “bandits” or “bandits helpers” per se, non-Jews were “bandits” if they fought as partisans against the Nazis, and both the Jews and the Slavic Poles were Untermenschen. In the latter scenario (“bandits” = Polish underground fighters = “subhumans”), it is possible that the text in Stroop’s manuscript was, for instance, “Es wurden 180 Juden, bzw. Banditen und Untermenschen vernichtet” (“180 Jews, or bandits and subhumans were destroyed”), and by mistake this became “Es wurden 180 Juden, Banditen und Untermenschen vernichtet”(“180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed”) when the message was typed. Such banal explanation is more realistic than denierbud’s manipulation fantasies.


Denierbud’s “Ten Other Points to Consider” have thus been dealt with. The next and final part of his article will be dedicated to denierbud’s theory about his female Jewish forger’s identity.

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Continuation:

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 5)