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

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

Mattogno on Photographic Documentation

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

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

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

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

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

Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) - Part 5 (2)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5 (1)

Part 5 (2)

In this article I continue the presentation of administrative documents relating to mass graves from the extermination of the Jews in Lithuania in 1941, which like in the previous series will be contextualized with the 2nd Jäger Report and other evidence.

The documents presented hereafter are from districts of the GBK’s Panevėžys(Ponewesch), Šiauliai (Schaulen) and Vilnius(Wilna)-Land.

Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) - Part 5 (1)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5 (1)

Part 5 (2)

In the previous articles of this series I refuted Mattogno’s arguments against the authenticity and reliability of the 2nd Jäger Report in the first volume of his work about the Einsatzgruppen.

This article and the next one will be dedicated to presenting and discussing some documentary evidence associated to the mass killings reported by Jäger, which is mostly ignored by Mattogno and largely shown for the first time, as far as I know, in a publication written in the English language.

Mattogno’s Marijampolė Mass Graves Controversy

One of the largest massacres committed in German-occupied Lithuania in 1941 took place near the city of Marijampolė. The victims were the following, as recorded in the report dated 1.12.1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 (the 2nd Jäger Report)^[1], under the date 1 September 1941:

Mariampole

1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses 1,404 Jewish children, 109 mentally ill, 1 fem. German national who was married to a Jew, 1 fem. Russian

Evidence of Extermination in Pyatigorsk, North Caucacus

Back in 2011, Roberto included this image of a child called Svetlana in his excellent article The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR (1). By comparing the image with this Yad Vashem page, I was able to establish that her full name was Svetlana Rudinskaya, she was killed on December 31, 1942 (or the following day), at the Mashuk Mountain overlooking Pyatigorsk in Stavropol Krai of the North Caucacus, and her body was exhumed on January 13, 1943.

The killing of the Jews of Pyatigorsk began on September 6-8, 1941, at the glass factory of Mineralnye Vody, according to the testimony of Pfeifer at his Soviet trial in 1968, after Jews from Essentuki and Zheleznovosk had been killed on September 2-5 and before Kislovodosk Jews were killed on September 9 (source: The Complete Black Book of Soviet Jewry). This was followed in October by murders in gas vans, according to testimonies here. The final action of the New Year was just prior to the German retreat and seems to have targeted professionals.

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 4)

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Part 4

We now get to what are probably the most interesting images in the Yad Vashem collection of photos captioned as having been taken at Ponary.

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 3)

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Part 2

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Part 4

Now, let’s look at the Ponary photos that Mattogno "examined", and at what (other) photos that may be relevant to Mattogno’s argument regarding the exhumed corpses mentioned in the 26 August 1944 report (and/or to his other arguments presented in this context) are available in the online archives of The Ghetto Fighters House and Yad Vashem. All photos must, of course, be credited to the respective institution in whose archives they are featured, respectively The Ghetto Fighters’ House and Yad Vashem. Photos that appear in both collections are shown only once, with the references in each of these collections.

Whether or not they were taken at Ponary, some of these photos are very graphic and should not be viewed by sensitive readers.

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 2)

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Part 2

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Part 4

Back now to Mattogno’s considerations regarding the August 1944 commission’s report as concerns excavations at Ponary and finds of human corpses and cremation remains.

Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 1)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Introduction

This is the first of a series of articles discussing Carlo Mattogno’s claims and arguments regarding mass graves at the Ponary mass killing site near Vilnius, Lithuania. It is based on the 153rd of my posts on the forum of the "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust" that was censored (i.e. "disapproved" or truncated beyond recognition, in both cases on the flimsiest of mendacious pretexts, or deleted after publication) since early July 2017 (the number would be higher if my job had not been such a hustle in the past months, leaving little if any time for pastimes both online and offline). Said censorship is further proof of what is already common knowledge, namely that open debate on the Holocaust is the last thing that said "Committee" is interested in and wishes to provide.

Commendably none other than Friedrich Paul Berg, one of the least commendable exponents of Holocaust denial, expressed his opinion about CODOH censorship with unusual frankness. He gets points for that.

That said, I move on to the first article of this series, which owes much to the gratefully acknowledged, very valuable input of my fellow bloggers Jonathan Harrison, Nick Terry and Sergey Romanov.

Remains Found in Pskov, Russia

A new article was published last week concerning the completion of a grave and memorial for 14 Jews, consisting of "two newborns, two teenagers, one old man and 9 women" found near Pskov, a Russian city just east of the Estonian border. The remains were found by Poisk (Search), an organization that searches for the remains of soldiers in known areas of heavy WWII fighting. Poisk could ascertain that these were civilians because, as stated by the Poisk spokesperson, Rachim Dzhunusov, "The remains were of children, women and old men, some [skulls] were shattered by rifle-butt blows [and] we had to collect them piece by piece” and the dead "were stripped naked, there wasn’t a single buckle, a button, nothing,” The article infers from a witness statement that the Jews had been captured after fleeing Latvia, but there are also sources stating that Sandberger's Einsatzkommando had relocated 400 women and children from Estonia to Pskov, where they were executed on Jeckeln's order in January 1942. Yad Vashem has online resources concerning five murder sites around Pskov.

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:

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans

Part I: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant (update 1, 2)
Part II: Producer Gas

 Part III: The Ford Gas Wagon (update)
Part IV: The Becker Letter (update)
Part V: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute (update 1, 2, 3, cf. on Mattogno & here)

Part VI: The Turner Letter

Part VII: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes

Part VIII: The Einsatzgruppe B Activity & Situation Report (cf. on Mattogno)

Part IX: The Just Memo

Part X: The West-German Trials Against Members of Einsatzkommando 8

Part XI: Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol

Among the documents the US Army seized in an outpost of the SS Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) was not only the Becker letter with its explicit discussion of gas vans, but also three telexes exchanged between the RSHA motor pool in Berlin and the Security Polices in Belgrade and Minsk. The telexes evidence the existence and operation of homicidal gas vans by the German paramilitary forces in Belgrade and Minsk, which is further extensively corroborated by other sources. The flimsy forgery allegation of the "Revisionist" gas van author Santiago Alvarez is rebutted in this posting.

More Photographic Evidence of Exhumed Corpses in the USSR (Warning: Contains Links to Graphic Content)

Further to this previous post by Roberto, I add the following from the Yad Vashem site:

Bogdanovka

Krasnodar

Kramatorsk

Utena

Chernovtsy

Romanian Sources on Mass Murder in Transnistria

In 2003, Jean Ancel published the definitive study of Romanian misrule in Transnistria, including summaries and facsimiles of 1109 documents. I have posted some extracts here, along with a tabulation of sources here on shootings in Transnistria by German Selbstschutz units. I would draw three conclusions from these documents. Firstly, Antonescu's intention is clear that the deported Jews should die by starvation and disease if they cannot be driven across the Bug to be shot by the Germans (documents 31 and 279). Secondly, there is no doubt that conditions at Bogdanovka and other camps on the Bug were not designed to allow life to be sustainable [document 165: there are already 11,000 [in Bogdanovka] in sties not even large enough for 7,000 pigs]. Thirdly, the Germans over the Bug refused to handle these Jews, apart from a few thousand recruited for Organization Todt. Their actions indicate that they shared Richter's knowledge, namely that the "Purpose of the action is the liquidation of these Jews" (3319-PS).

Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 1, Section 2b)

Introduction and Part 1, Section 1
Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1
Part 2, Section 2
Part 2, Section 3
Part 2, Section 4
Part 2, Section 5
Part 3, Section 1
Part 3, Section 2
Part 4


Cremation Devices, Methods and Times

Chełmno – Archaeological Research

Mattogno’s lamentable performance regarding eyewitness and documentary evidence to mass cremation at Chełmno is followed by an illustrated description of the Feist apparatus, an oven for the combustion of carcasses from animals dead from contagious diseases which was conceived by the veterinary Georg Feist in the second half of the 19th century, and which according to Mattogno resembles the cremation ovens used in the 2nd phase (1944/45) of the camp’s operation. Mattogno also repeats his claims regarding the performance of that oven, which will be addressed later on when discussing the capacity of Chełmno’s second phase ovens.

Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Introduction and Part 1, Section 1)

Introduction and Part 1, Section 1
Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1
Part 2, Section 2
Part 2, Section 3
Part 2, Section 4
Part 2, Section 5
Part 3, Section 1
Part 3, Section 2
Part 4


Introduction

Chapter 8 of the HC critique of Mattogno, Graf and Kues^[1], about the burning of the corpses at the Aktion Reinhard(t) extermination camps Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka and at Chełmno extermination camp, is 76 pages long (pp. 440 – 516) and has about 24,000 words including footnotes. Mattogno’s response to this chapter stretches over a full 177 pages (1296 – 1473) of MGK’s magnum opus^[2] and has a word count of well over 71,000, i.e. it is almost three times as long as the chapter it refers to.

Mattogno on early cremation at Treblinka

Following his failed attempt to challenge the authenticity of an inconvenient war diary entry^[1], Mattogno tries to tackle the evidence to early cremation at Treblinka extermination camp^[2], on pp. 1101 – 1107 of Mattogno, Kues and Graf’s magnum opus^[3]

"Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 5, Section 2)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4, Section 1
Part 4, Section 2
Part 5, Section 1
Part 5, Section 2


The "Actual" Surface of the Graves

Following some of the notoriously dishonest and instructively self-projecting accusations that his rhetoric is spiked with ("Muehlenkamp, with his usual dishonesty,[…]", "Muehlenkamp misrepresents or hides my arguments and avoids providing the answers he owes,[…]") Mattogno (pp. 1270f.) quotes the arguments presented in his Bełżec book^[218] in support of his claim that "the layout" Prof. Kola gives for the graves "is completely random, as is their surface area, their volume, and even their number".

"Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 5, Section 1)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4, Section 1
Part 4, Section 2
Part 5, Section 1
Part 5, Section 2


Groundwater Pollution

Mattogno’s arguments in this section start with an instructive self-portrayal of Mattogno.