Ernst Jünger's March 1942 Diary Entry on Shootings in Lithuania

On March 30, 1942, a German war hero, Ernst Jünger, wrote in his diary that he had heard about shootings in Lithuania in which the victims had to dig their own graves and lie down in them in layers before being shot. 

Claus Valentiner kehrte aus Berlin zurück. Er erzählte von einem schauerlichen Burschen, früherem Zeichenlehrer, der sich gerühmt hatte, in Litauen und anderen Randgebieten ein Mordkommando geführt zu haben, das zahllose Menschen schlachtete. Man läßt die Opfer, nachdem sie zusammengetrieben sind, zuerst die Massengräber ausheben, dann sich hineinlegen und schießt sie von oben in Schichten tot. Zuvor beraubt man sie des Letzten, der Lumpen, die sie am Leibe tragen, bis auf das Hemd.

Claus Valentiner returned from Berlin. He reported about a horrible fellow, a former art master, who bragged about having commanded a murder detachment in Lithuania and other peripheral areas, which slaughtered countless people. After rounding up the victims they first have them dig mass graves, then lie down inside them, and then they shoot them dead in layers from above. Before they rob them of the last they have, the rags they wear, up to the last shirt.

Germans in Jünger's position were therefore hearing, not just about executions, but also their method.

Nazi Policy as Revealed in Axis Propaganda Sources

This list is not meant to be exhaustive; it complements my other lists, taken from other types of sources, here and here. However, even if these open sources were the only information we had on Nazi policy, they would be overwhelming proof to any objective observer that a genocide was taking place.

29.6.41: "many Jews in Belgrade were shot yesterday for sabotage" [JTA citing Belgrade radio].

2.10.41: "the Jewish problem should be solved without any sentimentality [Voelkischer Beobachter, cited in JTA]."

16.11.41: Goebbels: "every Jew is our enemy, irrespective of the fact whether he is rotting in a ghetto in Poland, or continues his parasitic existence in Germany, or conducts war propaganda in New York and Washington [Das Reich, cited in JTA]." Full text here.

Public Announcements in France in 1942

On 27.9.42, Vichy leader Pierre Laval told Paris radio that Jews who entered France before 1936 and "who wish to emigrate to places other than Germany" would be denied exit visas, even though they may already hold visas to countries such as the USA. His reasons were "because they might take up arms against Germany, which would be contrary to the Armistice agreement," and "there is a suspicion that they would work against the interests of the French Government as soon as they reached another country" (JTA, 28.9.42, and Jewish News, 14, 27.10.42, p.1). The second reason echoed that given by Lecca here for the change in Nazi policy regarding Jewish emigration.

On 22.10.42, the Nazi agency Transocean stated that Jewish children were to be held as hostages: "Vichy may not allow these children to leave unless inimical propaganda against France and Germany ceases in America (JTA, 23.10.42)." However, it was already known that Jewish children were being deported separately from their parents (JTA, 28.9.42).

Knowledge of the Final Solution in Nazi Satellite States: 1) Hungary

This series of articles updates information that was presented in the Critique here regarding attempts by the Nazis, from the Wannsee Conference onwards, to extend the Final Solution across all territory in which the Nazis had administrations or allies. This first piece, on Hungary, begins before Wannsee due to the fact that Jews deported from Hungary were murdered at Kamenets Podolsk in August 1941. These early murders colored much of what followed, because there could be no doubt that the Nazis harbored genocidal designs on at least some categories of Jews. The events that unfolded in 1942-44 were therefore guided by the willingness of otherwise of Hungary's leaders to collude in extermination, and this in turn depended on whether the Hungarians felt it was in their economic and strategic interests to block the deportations to death camps.

Knowledge of the Final Solution in Nazi Satellite States: 2) Italy and Croatia

Further to the Critique, on Italian knowledge of the Final Solution (see here), the following quotations are taken from Galeazzo Ciano's diaries and papers. The first two relate to a meeting Ciano held with Goering on November 24-27, 1941. In the first, Ciano noted this statement by Goering:

'On the other hand', he added, 'we cannot worry unduly about the hunger of the Greeks. It is a misfortune which will strike many other people besides them. In the camps for Russian prisoners of war, after having eaten everything possible, including the soles of their boots, they have begun to eat each other, and what is more serious, they have also eaten a German sentry. This year between 20 and 30 million persons will die in Russia of hunger. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nations must be decimated. But even if it were not, nothing can be done about it. It is obvious that if humanity is condemned to die of hunger, the last to die will be our two peoples.[1]

Grafeneck: Nuremberg Documents

Documents submitted at Nuremberg clearly show the degree of local knowledge and political controversy that existed in the second half of 1940 concerning the killing of mental patients at Grafeneck. Harvard's Nuremberg site has scans of these documents, from which the information in this article is taken. I have also relied upon the account given by Henry Friedlander, especially pages 107-111 of this edition.

American Knowledge of Grafeneck in 1940

Back in 2009, I posted this New York Times article from 1999, which had explained how Vice Consul Paul H. Dutko in Leipzig had cabled the the American Embassy in Berlin and the State Department in Washington about killings in Grafeneck. The NYT article also cited a "Feb. 23, 1940, memorandum to Secretary of State Cordell Hull from Assistant Secretary Adolf A. Berle Jr." noting "reports from the embassy in Berlin that Jews were being sent to ''unnamed concentration camps'' in Poland." Below I post a highly relevant document, casting light on these matters, which I have scanned from the NARA collection, Records of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, 1938-1947, which is available to me here via the Gale Digital Collections resource, Archives Unbound.

German Wartime Knowledge of Extermination in the East

Sönke Neitzel's 2004 paper, Deutsche Generäle in britischer Gefangenschaft 1942-1945, can be found here. It includes two taped conversations between captured German military officers that reveal knowledge of extermination in the East. A partial English translation appears in Michael Burleigh's new book, Moral Combat, p.439, and is extracted below.

Mass Graves and Majdanek

In their Majdanek screed, Mattogno and Graf acknowledge that bodies were unearthed at Krepiecki, 12km from Majdanek:

the Polish-Soviet Commission, in its search of the camp grounds and Krepiecki Forest, discovered 467 bodies and 266 skulls, which were subjected to forensic analysis. The Commission also discovered 4.5m3 of ashes and bones

French Military Witness in Kaunas (Kovno)

Fifteen days after the Soviets liberated Kaunas in August 1944, the city was visited by Colonel Pierre Pouyade of the Normandie-Niemen regiment of the the Free French Air Force. Five months later, Pouyade was interviewed in Egypt and gave an account describing "heaps of corpses of men, women, and children in the streets and in ruined cellars." Reports of his account can be seen here and here