The Great Mortality in Königsberg

The title of this article is derived from The Great Mortality, by John Kelly, a bestselling book about the Black Death. However, the article is not about a natural but about a relatively unknown man-made disaster.

Crimes and Mercies, by James Bacque

This article is not about Holocaust denial. Or maybe a different sort of denial, which consists in blowing up (or simply inventing) crimes committed by Nazi Germany’s opponents in order to play down those of Nazi Germany.

Dividing the Dead – or not (Part 3)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

This article is about the Soviet prosecution’s case at Nuremberg regarding Crimes against Humanity, with a focus on how the Soviet prosecutors addressed the genocide of Europe’s Jews by Nazi Germany.

Dividing the Dead – or not (Part 2)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

In this article, the Soviet prosecution’s case at Nuremberg regarding War Crimes will be addressed, with a focus on how the Soviet prosecutors addressed the genocide of Europe’s Jews by Nazi Germany.

Dividing the Dead – or not (Part 1)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

1. Introduction

In an earlier article^[1], I suggested that one of the reasons why the Soviet Union held back until 1963 the report dated 1.12.1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 (the 2nd Jäger Report)^[2], notwithstanding the document’s damning explicitness, was its incompatibility with a Soviet policy against "dividing the dead" when documenting crimes committed by Nazi Germany on the territory of the USSR.

This policy, as characterized in the secondary sources referred to in my earlier article, did not imply concealing the mass murder of Jews on Soviet territory. It did, however, imply presenting it as part and parcel of no-holds-barred, systematic violence directed against the Soviet population in general. Jews were to be seen not as the targets of the Nazis’ most concentrated violence, an extermination program that was a breed apart from the occupiers’ terror in general, but as victims of Nazi mass murder just like all other peoples of the occupied Soviet territories.

This series is about that policy, with a focus on the Soviet prosecution case at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal.

Nazi killing methods

How many of Nazi Germany’s murder victims were killed by gassing, how many by shooting, how many by other methods?

Jansson thought of quitting our discussions …

… before his obsessive grudge against Muehlenkamp got the better of him.

In what he announced might be his last "performance" in our debates, Friedrich Jansson commendably cut a bit on the rhetoric in the introduction, merely referring to "some more messes" of mine (read: some more arguments uncomfortable to his articles of faith), regarding which he would undertake one more "clean up job" (read: one more attempt to restore his peace of mind by restating what he is eager to believe and/or eagerly expects his readers to believe). Someone among his fellow "Revisionists" must have told him that he was putting on the rhetorical bullshit way too thick.

However, Jansson wouldn’t be Jansson if he had managed to stick with this line instead of again disgracing himself with at least one further "lie" accusation and his customary abusive bluster, as he tried to address those of my arguments he thought he could address (ignoring the rest, as usual). His attempts will be commented in this blog.

Germs vs. guns, or death from mass violence in perspective

On 30 July 1932, Albert Einstein sent an open letter to Sigmund Freud, addressing the causes of wars and the possible means of putting an end to armed conflict. A translation of the letter is available on this page, together with a translation of Freud’s reply dated September 1932, which included the following considerations:

Ich möchte aber noch eine Frage behandeln, die Sie in Ihrem Schreiben nicht aufwerfen und die mich besonders interessiert. Warum empören wir uns so sehr gegen den Krieg, Sie und ich und so viele andere, warum nehmen wir ihn nicht hin wie eine andere der vielen peinlichen Notlagen des Lebens? Er scheint doch naturgemäß, biologisch wohlbegründet, praktisch kaum vermeidbar.

This was translated as follows:

However, I would like to deal with a question which, though it is not mooted in your letter, interests me greatly. Why do we, you and I and many another, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of life's odious importunities? For it seems a natural thing enough, biologically sound and practically unavoidable.

An interesting question: what is it that makes war less acceptable than other calamities that befall and have befallen mankind? Why does it get more attention, at least by those who speak up against it, than other causes of human suffering? Is it a more voracious or crueler killer and tormentor than those other causes?

Peter Bamm on male hysteria

The hysterics of my mostly male "Revisionist" interlocutors over the years have often reminded me of the following remark:

Während die weibliche Hysterie eine verhältnismäßig harmlose Bereicherung des Daseins ist, wird die männliche Hysterie oft zum blutigen Motiv der Geschichte. Daß die meisten Menschen nicht wissen, daß es Hysterie bei Männern gibt, macht die Störung nur um so gefährlicher. (Whereas female hysteria is a comparatively harmless enrichment of existence, male hysteria often becomes the bloody motive of history. The fact that most people don’t know that there is hysteria in men only makes the disturbance all the more dangerous.)

Jansson on 1942 births in Leningrad

In a further response to the blog Friedrich Jansson tries to help Mattogno …, Jansson provides a source that, so he claims, "decisively" refutes my assumption that 3rd percentile female weights given in CDC Growth Charts, namely the charts Data Table of Infant Weight-for-age Charts and Data Table of Weight-for-age Charts (I only addressed the latter so far) are too high to represent the weights of a starved population.

Jansson is at it again …

… after he had, in one of his previous posts (commented in the updates mentioned here), announced with his customary big mouth that he would not waste his time in "point by point" responses to my responses to his posts, claiming (rather mendaciously in my opinion, but I’ll let our readers decide) that my responses were "disorganized meanderings", which "fail to engage with the full argument being made, are characteristically thoughtless, being written in a very short timeframe and without even the slightest effort at coherence".

Apparently Jansson doesn’t believe his own abusive rhetoric. Or then some of my arguments are giving him nightmares and/or sleepless nights. Or then it’s both, a distinct possibility considering that a number of my arguments remain unaddressed and a few questions I asked him directly (one of them at least twice) remain unanswered.

Anyway, here we have the latest of Jansson’s "Muehlenkamp this, Muehlenkamp that" productions, with the inevitable baseless accusations of dishonesty ("imposture", "misleading rhetoric", "fundamental lack of regard for the truth") that I attribute to Jansson’s self-projection and/or to the intellectual dishonesty he has been displaying himself throughout our discussions, most prominently in the writings commented in my update of the blog Friedrich Jansson proudly presents …. So let’s see what he’s got this time.

Breaking Down Soviet World War II Losses

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

June 22, 1944

On this day 70 years ago, three years to the day after the beginning of Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, the Soviet army launched an offensive codenamed Operation "Bagration", which led to the Wehrmacht’s greatest defeat on the Eastern Front.

42,500 Camps and Ghettos

While the huge research effort led by USHMM researchers Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean deserves much respect, the same does not apply to the way their finds are being announced, especially in some of the English language press.
  

HC Reference Library

No hay mal que por bien no venga, says a Spanish proverb. There is nothing bad that doesn’t also bring some good.

Soviet Civilian Losses in World War II

In a discussion following my blog 5 million non-Jewish victims? (Part 2), our reader "HLAPOT" remarked that, as concerns the Soviet Union’s human losses during the Second World War, there is at this point in time a demographic estimate (the one presented by Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov in their 1994 article Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note) that "lacks a satisfactory explanation", i.e. is not or insufficiently substantiated by evidence-based death counts.

This apparently remains true more than 1 ½ decades after Ellman and Maksudov’s article. A solid scientific breakdown of the enormous figure of almost 27 million excess deaths in the Soviet Union during the "Great Patriotic War", especially as concerns the civilian component, has to my knowledge not been provided by historiography so far.

June 22, 1941

On this day 70 years ago, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and began the most devastating conflict in recorded history, which accounted for the overwhelming majority of World War II deaths in Europe. About 26.6 million of these deaths, according to demographic calculations, occurred among the population of the Soviet Union. A significant part of Soviet deaths was due to the Nazi invaders’ criminal actions.

Scrapbookpages on Subhuman Cannibalism

In an online article headed Malmedy Massacre Trial, the Scrapbookpages webmaster shows a soft spot for the brave German SS-men accused of involvement in the Malmedy massacre of American prisoners of war.

The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR (1)

[Updated on 03.12.2011 due to removal of YouTube video.]

[Updated on 13.03.2012 to replace broken links to the RODOH forum.]

The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR (2)

The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR (3)

"The Atrocities committed by German Fascists in the USSR" is the title of a Soviet documentary film shown at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal on 19 February 1946, parts of which used to be viewable on Youtube.

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".