Himmler's Posen Speeches

A favourite tactic of deniers is to attempt to neutralize the word "ausrotten" [or "ausrottung"] when it appears in a Nazi document. They usually ignore the analyses of the term written by native German experts, such as those that appear in Klemperer's LTI and Longerich's submission to the Lipstadt trial. On the rare occasions when they do acknowledge these analyses, they deliberately misrepresent them, as I showed here.

Read more!

The stupidity of this tactic is best illustrated by an article by Carlos Porter that was published by CODOH in 1996, which can be viewed at this link. Porter attempts to spin Himmler's first Posen speech of 4th October, 1943 into a more benign form. In place of the Nuremberg translation of 'ausrotten' as 'extermination', Porter insists upon 'extirpation'. This in itself is no big deal because 'extirpation' can still mean extermination if used in a particular context. Indeed, Longerich translates 'ausrotten' as 'extirpation', and states that:

I have not yet found a single example of Hitler or Himmler using the term "ausrotten" during the Second World War with respect to human beings or a group of human beings other than in the sense of "to kill in large numbers or to kill all as far as possible".

However, Porter's schoolboy error was to insist that Himmler was speaking 'figuratively' when he used the term, but to then print long extracts from the speech which showed that Himmler was, indeed, referring literally to mass genocidal killing of women and children. Porter thus debunked his own case. For example, in Porter's own translation, the word 'extirpation' follows the phrase 'elimination of the Jews'. Later in the same paragraph, Himmler describes the typical scene of mass murder:

Most of you know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 lie there, or if 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this, and at the same time, apart from exceptions caused by human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has made us hard.

In the following paragraph, Himmler makes his meaning even clearer by referring directly to a genocide of "this people":

We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill this people which wanted to kill us.

In the next paragraph he admits that "we eradicated a bacillus". Later in the speech, Himmler says:

Whether other races live well or die of hunger is only of interest to me insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise that doesn't interest me. Whether 10,000 Russian women fall down from exhaustion in building a tank ditch is of interest to me only insofar as the tank ditches are finished for Germany.

If this is not enough 'context' to prove the correct meaning of 'ausrotten' in Himmler's first Posen speech, we have further context from a follow-up speech made two days later at the same venue. I am grateful to David Woolfe for drawing my attention to this extract:

Es trat an uns die Frage heran: Wie ist es mit den Frauen und Kindern? Ich habe mich entschlossen, auch hier eine ganz klare Lösung zu finden. Ich hielt mich nämlich nicht für berechtigt, die Männer auszurotten- sprich also, umzubringen oder umbringen zu lassen - und die Rächer in Gestalt der Kinder für unsere Söhne und Enkel groß werden zu lassen. Es mußte der schwere Entschluß gefaßt werden, dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen.

We came to the question: How is it with the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution here as well. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men - that is, to kill them or have them killed - and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth.

Himmler thus helpfully defined his precise meaning when he used 'auszurotten' in the second Posen speech. He then reiterated this meaning in a further speech at Sonthofen on May 24, 1944:

As to the Jewish women and children, I did not believe I had a right to let these children grow up to become avengers who would kill our fathers [sic] and grandchildren. That, I thought, would be cowardly. Thus the problem was solved without half-measures.

Himmler did not approve of 'half-measures'. Only a 'half-wit' would use Himmler's first Posen speech to try to fool us into believing otherwise.

"A minor "revisionist" admits Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jews!"

Or so I could have said, if were fond of pathetic demagoguery, which the Holocaust deniers use all too often.

As usual, David Irving posted some trash on his website, this time it's a letter by Paul Grubach about, what Irving calls, a "minor conformist concession about Himmler's Posen speech of 1943".

Read more!

IN the summer of 2006 Professor Jeffrey Herf published his book, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). It has been said this is one of the most important books on the Holocaust in the past decade.

I would like to bring to your attention an admission by Professor Herf that actually corroborates the revisionist thesis of Dr. Arthur Butz.

In October of 1943, Heinrich Himmler delivered a speech in Posen, in occupied Poland. This speech is considered by many to be absolute proof that the Nazis had a policy to exterminate all the Jews of Europe, primarily through the use of homicidal gas chambers.

Um, no. The speech indeed is a piece of evidence (one of many) that the Nazis had a policy to exterminate Jews. That's all. No specific methods are explicitly mentioned in the speech, and nobody, to my knowledge, claims that the speech directly proves specifically gassings. So Grubach erected a strawman.

Let us assume that Himmler really did make the comments attributed to him.

Note the usual "revisionist" "I can't debunk it, but I will try to cast unreasonable doubt on it anyway" rhetoric.

Here is the key passage in question:

"I [Himmler] am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people. This is something that is easily said: 'The Jewish people will be exterminated,' says every Party member, 'this is very obvious, it is in our program -- elimination of the Jews, extermination will do.'"

Himmler continued: "Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a descent person...has made us tough."

Herf writes that in this speech, "Himmler referred only to the early methods of the Einsatzgruppen murders and said nothing about the death camps, gas chambers, and crematoria [p.233]."

Herf is admitting that Himmler is referring only to the mass shootings of Jews that took place on the Eastern Front, and this speech says nothing at all about the alleged "death camps, gas chambers, and crematoria."

Note how Grubach tries to mislead the readers by using the word "admitted". The word implies that it is usually assumed by historians that Himmler somehow explicitly mentioned gas chambers and crematoria in his speech, and only rare honest researchers actually "admit" that this is not true. What a load of... Nevermind.

As far back as the early 1970s, Arthur Butz made the important revisionist point that the only part of the extermination legend that contains a particle of truth is that the Einsatzgruppen exterminated some Russian Jews by mass shootings (See Hoax of the Twentieth Century, p.241).

Professor Butz wrote:

"At the time of the invasion of Russia in June 1941, there was a Führer order declaring, in anticipation of an identical Soviet policy, that the war with Russia was not to be fought on the basis of the traditional rules of warfare. Necessary measures were to be taken to counter partisan activity, and Himmler was given the power to 'act independently upon his own responsibility.' Everybody knew that meant executions of partisans and persons collaborating with partisans. The dirty task was assigned to four Einsatzgruppen…which had a total of about 3,000 men…We have had occasion to note in several instances that the Jews did, in fact, pose a security menace to the German rear in the war…The task of the Einsatzgruppen was to deal with such dangers [anti-German partisan and guerrilla warfare] by all necessary means, so we need not be told much more to surmise that the Einsatzgruppen must have shot many Jews, although we do not know whether 'many' means 5,000, 25,000 or 100,000. Naturally, many non-Jews were also executed (pp. 241-242)."

Butz, being the dishonest bloke he is, tries to obfuscate things, by pretending that EGs murdered (some) Jews as a security danger, not as, well, Jews. But, as I wrote elsewhere

I think I should only mention that according to message no. 412 of 09.02.1942, out of 138,272 people killed by EG A, 55,556 were women and 34,464 were children.

Only idiots and deniers will argue that this was any sort of anti-partisan action.

In fact, of these 138,272 people only 56 were partisans, and 136,421 - Jews.

Or take Jaeger's report with its clear division of the victims into men, women and children, like

20.9.41 in Nemencing
128 Jews, 176 Jewesses, 99 Jewish children

22.9.41 in Novo-Wilejka
468 Jews, 495 Jewesses, 196 Jewish children

24.9.41 in Riess
512 Jews, 744 Jewesses, 511 Jewish children

25.9.41 in Jahiunai
215 Jews, 229 Jewesses, 131 Jewish children

27.9.41 in Eysisky
989 Jews, 1,636 Jewesses, 821 Jewish children

Yes, one must be a real idiot to deny the obvious extermination plan (at least for the Soviet Jewry).

Herf is now admitting that Himmler is referring to only the mass shootings of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front, something that was never denied by Holocaust revisionists.

Ah, yes, this "admitting" thingie again. That's how "revisionist" sensations are made. Remember all the "Auschwitz Museum Director F. Piper admits this or that" hype? Nothing ever changes.

The secret police chief was not referring to the alleged Hitler "gas chambers" and accompanying crematoria, and the so-called extermination camps. So, this passage cannot be used by orthodox Holocaust historians to "prove" that the Nazis had a policy to exterminate Jews in "gas chambers."

Thank you Dr. Herf for corroborating this key Holocaust revisionist point!

So, the redundant, never-contested point that Himmler did not mention the words "crematoria" and "gas chambers" in his speech is actually a "key Holocaust revisionist point"? Thanks for such an embarassing admission, Mr. Grubach!

Now, Grubach, being the silly denier that he is, ignores THE key phrase in Himmler's speech:

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people.

So, no. Himmler did not refer solely to Einsatzgruppen mass-murderers. He directly, and truthfully, equated deportation with extermination. And indeed, the bulk of the evacuated Jews were exterminated in the death camps, mainly by gas, as we know from numerous testimonies and some documents. So, while Himmler did not explicitly mention murder by gas in his speech (and nobody has ever implied that he did), his speech serves as a confirmation of the established fact that the bulk of the deported Jews were indeed exterminated. And since they were deported to the camps, this speech also indirectly confirms the existence of extermination camps.

So much for "revisionist" analyzing skills.

A quick response to some boring nonsense.

The long-winded and correspondingly boring third-tier denier John Wear (see this blog devoted to debunking him) has published a long-winded and boring piece "comparing" euthanasia to the Holocaust and it has been brought to my attention that he has mentioned our blog.

First, let's take a quick look at the kinds of arguments he proffers.

Correction Corner #8: the alleged Himmler speech about extermination of Poles is most probably a forgery.

1. Introduction.

In the Eastern Bloc literature as well as in the modern Polish studies on the Nazi policies an alleged speech made by Himmler on March 15, 1940 before the camp commandants in the occupied Poland is quoted quite often. Himmler is reported to have said:

All skilled workers of Polish origin are to be utilized in our war industry; then all Poles will disappear from this world.
In fulfilling this very responsible task, you must destroy Polishness* quickly in prescribed stages. I give all the camp commanders my full authorization...
[...]
The hour is drawing closer when every German will have to stand the test. It is therefore necessary that the great German nation sees its main task in exterminating all Poles...

This claim is peculiar, for at that time the official Nazi policy did not even include wholesale slaughter of Jews (the exterminatory "Final Solution" policies appeared in 1941 and escalated throughout 1941 and 1942), and Jews were on a lower rung of the Nazi "racial hierarchy" than Poles.

Graf's Deceit

In Holocaust or Hoax?, Jürgen Graf writes a passage that he knows to be a deception. In his commentary on Himmler's first Posen speech, Graf attempts to deceive the reader into believing that "the meaning of the word "Ausrottung" has changed" since the war.

Read more!

Graf writes as follows:

in the first speech, Himmler identifies the "evacuation" of the Jews with their "extermination", mixing up two concepts which are totally distinct today. The identification of evacuation and extermination loses their contradictory meaning when one considers that the meaning of the word "Ausrottung" has changed. In today's speech, "Ausrottung" doubtlessly means "liquidation, physical extermination". This was not necessarily so earlier; the etymological derivation of "ausrotten" is "to uproot".

This is downright deceitful because, in the earlier version of 'Holocaust or Hoax?', which at that time (1993) was entitled The Holocaust Under the Scanner, Graf cited this text, published in 1944, which includes descriptions of exterminations at Belzec and Majdanek:

Abraham Silberschein (Die Judenausrottung in Polen, Genève, août1944)

Graf therefore knows that a text exists, published in 1944, in which 'ausrottung' could only have referred to killings in extermination camps, yet Graf attempts to con his readers into assuming that the 'physical extermination/liquidation' meaning of 'ausrotting' did not come into usage until a later date. In addition, of course, like his partner in deception, Carlos Porter, Graf simply ignores those portions of the Posen speeches which prove that Himmler could only be referring to mass killing.

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents - The Polish Working Detail

Mass Killing Unit of Warthegau

Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents:

 Euthanasia 1940/41

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents:

Part I: Origin and Foundation

Part II: The Extermination of 100,000 Jews

Part III: Body Disposal (Appendix)

Part IV: Pabianice Sorting Camp

Part V: Funding

Part VI: The Polish Working Detail

Part VII: Motor Pool and Fuel (Appendix)

Part VIII: Drinks and Tobacco (With Excursus on the Extermination of the Sinti and Roma)

Part IX: Farewell (1943)

The Polish working detail of Sonderkommando Kulmhof was situated in the grey zone between prisoners and collaborators. Once imprisoned in Fort VII in Posen, the Poles were forced to empty the gas van and bury the corpses during the Euthanasia killings of Sonderkommando Lange in 1940/1941. At the beginning in December 1941, the same job awaited for them in Kulmhof extermination camp, until a permanent Jewish working detail was established for the forest camp at latest in early January 1942 (see section Mass Graves here). During the erection of the camp, the Polish prisoners constructed the wooden ramp and fence used for loading the gas vans. ^[1] They were regarded as sufficiently trustworthy and reliable by the Sonderkommando leadership for more critical and responsible work, like collecting the Jewelry and money of the Jews in the Kulmhof palace ^[2] (also ref 3 here), searching the orifices of the corpses for valuables (ref 5 here), accompanying the SS and police men outside the camp, ^[3] supervising the undressing of the Jewish victims and forcing them into the gas vans, ^[4] overseeing the Jewish working details, ^[5] driving the vehicles including the gas vans, ^[6] possibly establishing the connection between the exhaust and the gassing box (the claim should be taken carefully as it was made by perpetrators to exculpate themselves), ^[7] maintenance services on the Sonderkommando motor pool. ^[8]

In return for their loyal service, the members of the Polish working detail were awarded a large degree of freedom and preferential treatment. They were accommodated on the upper floor of the Kulmhof palace, but could move around freely in the camp and in the village ^[9] , as illustrated by a series of photographs showing them strolling and posing in Kulmhof village as well as drinking beer with members of the Police Sonderkommando at the Kulmhof palace (for example Figure 1 and 2). ^[10] They could meet Polish women and were in some cases allowed to pick Jewish girls from the transports for the night. ^[11] After the war, one of its members Henryk Mania claimed that "I did not run away, because I was afraid that my family will be killed as they threatened in the beginning" - a motive corroborated by the local residents Jozef Grabowski and Jan Krysinski, but contradicted by another Polish worker, Henryk Maliczak. ^[12]

Figure 1: Members of the Polish working detail on the bridge across the river Ner with the Kulmhof village in the background (1942/early 1943). From left to right: Henryk Mania, Stanislaw Polubinski, Lech Jaskolski, Kajetan Skrzypczynski, Henryk Maliczak; photograph from Montague, Chelmno and the Holocaust, image 28, online available here (see also examination of Henryk Mania of  14 April 1964, Pawlicka-Nowak, Swiadectwa Zaglady, p. 123 ff.).

Figure 2: Members of the Polish working detail and Police Sonderkommando drinking beer in front of the Kulmhof palace (1942/early 1943). Photograph from Montague, Chelmno and the Holocaust, image 27, online available here, see also close-up here.

Between Scylla and Charybdis

Being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology, which means "having to choose between two evils". Several other idioms, such as "on the horns of a dilemma", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place", express the same meaning.

In his Posen speech on 6 October 1943, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler used this idiom in referring to the extreme effects that mass killing of Jewish populations including women and children could and often did have on the psyche of the executors:

I ask you that what I tell you in this circle you will really only hear and never talk about it. The question came up to us: What do to with the women and children? I decided to find a very clear solution also in this respect. This because I didn’t consider myself entitled to exterminate the men, that is, to kill them or to have them killed, and to let the children grow up as avengers against our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth. For the organization that had to carry out the task if was the most difficult we had so far. It has been carried out without, as I consider myself entitled to say, our men and our leaders having taken harm to their spirit and soul. The path between the possibilities existing here, to either become crude and heartless and no longer to respect human life or to become weak and collapse to the point of nervous breakdowns, the path between this Scylla and Charybdis is horrendously narrow.

(Emphasis added)

This blog will present cases from the massacre of the Jews of Nikolayev organized by Einsatzgruppe D, which is mentioned in Operational Situation Report USSR No. 101 and in Peter Bamm’s book Die unsichtbare Flagge, that illustrate the psychological stress addressed in Himmler’s speech.

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 3: Eyewitnesses

Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:

Part 1: Indoor Cremation

Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria

Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)
Part 4: Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings

Part 5: Construction Documents:

A: Introduction
B: Ventilation & Elevators
C: Undressing Rooms
D: Outwards Opening Door & Removal of Corpse Chute

E: Gas Detectors

F: Cremation with Simultaneous Special Treatment

G: Gas Chambers

Mattogno’s poor treatment of testimonial evidence is a common thread throughout his Auschwitz oeuvre. Whether on Henryk Tauber, Rudolf Höß, Charles Sigismund, Miklos Nyiszli, Filip Müller, Pery Broad, Hans Stark etc., Mattogno does not get tired to repeat the same mindless exercise over and over again: he points out what he thinks are contradictions and false statements in the testimonies and…well that’s it. This flimsy source criticism is already sufficient for him to dismiss any testimonial evidence on mass extermination once for all. Needless to say he does not discuss why this crude and superficial approach is supposed to be justified.

In practise, this scheme follows falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one, false in all). This (controversial) legal maxim assumes that it has been established that a witness has wilfully testified falsely. But it's hard to prove a lie, even more so retrospectively by studying written sources. Indeed, Mattogno does not manage to discriminate between dishonest and honest mistakes in his work. He cannot demonstrate a single lie in the most important accounts. Moreover, falsus in uno usually assumes uncorroborated testimonies, but which is not the case for the mass extermination in Auschwitz. In fact, the powerful concept of independent corroboration enables to extract historical truth with high certainty even from partially contradictionary and false sources. And last but not least, falsus in uno is not a scientific or historiographical principle, but a logical fallacy.

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 7)

Further to my continuing series on the disappeared denier, Walter Sanning, an amusing postscript is provided by his paper on Scorched Earth Warfare.

Read more!

Sanning claims that the Soviets were the "beneficiaries of an almost unbelievably generous reconstruction assistance" from the Nazis, and that "the allegation of systematic German brutality in Russia is exposed as plain Soviet propaganda". These claims can be shown to be based on a deliberate refusal to read the primary literature on Nazi food policy. For example, Roberto has partially translated and transcribed two key documents on this RODOH thread showing that a Hunger Plan existed before Barbarossa. Roberto summarizes this evidence here.

Roberto has also unearthed Rosenberg's Letter to Keitel Concerning Maltreatment of USSR Prisoners of War (Nuremberg doc. 081-PS). This contains the key admission that Soviet citizens did attempt to bring food to POW's but were prevented by force from doing so:

Anyhow, with a certain amount of understanding for goals aimed at by German politics, dying and deterioration could have been avoided in the extent described. For instance, according to information on hand, the native population within the Soviet Union are absolutely willing to put food at the disposal of the prisoners of war. Several understanding camp commanders have successfully chosen this course. However in the majority of the cases, the camp commanders have forbidden the civilian population to put food at the disposal of the prisoners, and they have rather let them starve to death. Even on the march to the camps, the civilian population was not allowed to give the prisoners of war food. In many cases, when prisoners of war could no longer keep up on the march because of hunger and exhaustion, they were shot before the eyes of the horrified civilian population, and the corpses were left.

Roberto has also put together a compilation of sources on Leningrad which make clear the Nazis' intention to starve the city.

Finally, in addition to Roberto's excellent sources, we can also point to the passage in Himmler's Posen speech where he leaves no doubt about Nazi policy:

What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur: otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished (Nuremberg doc. 1919-PS)

Sanning's failure to acknowledge these sources is further proof of his dishonesty as a scholar.

Mattogno's Failure to Evolve, 2000-2010

Mattogno was hyperactive in the first decade of the new century, producing a body of work that included his 'trilogy' on the Aktion Reinhard camps. On the subject of policy, I would identify four developments, which are really indicative of Mattogno's failure to adapt in an evolutionary way to how historians were discussing the Final Solution. Firstly, Mattogno began to tackle shootings in the East, but these were framed against a straw man which assumed that the "orthodox historiography" regards the Einsatzgruppen as forces that only shot Jews because they were Jews, and for no other reason. Secondly, Mattogno elaborated a theme, which he had introduced back in the 1980s, that there was continuity between the emigration policies of 1939-1941 and the Final Solution, and the only change was the destinations of the 'emigrants' and the manner of their emigration. Thirdly, Mattogno set out to neutralize the statements of leading Nazis such as Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels, prompted seemingly by the use of those statements in Shermer and Grobman's Denying History and perhaps by Irving's defeat in the Lipstadt court case. Finally, Mattogno in Sobibor reignited his discussion of the Hitler Order by confronting historians whom he had largely ignored to that point, such as Gerlach, Browning and Kershaw. This attack would continue in his riposte to our White Paper in 2013.

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents - Farewell (1943)

Mass Killing Unit of Warthegau

Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents:

 Euthanasia 1940/41

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents:

Part I: Origin and Foundation

Part II: The Extermination of 100,000 Jews

Part III: Body Disposal (Appendix)

Part IV: Pabianice Sorting Camp

Part V: Funding

Part VI: The Polish Working Detail

Part VII: Motor Pool and Fuel (Appendix)

Part VIII: Drinks and Tobacco (With Excursus on the Extermination of the Sinti and Roma)

Part IX: Farewell (1943)

Until 31 December 1942, the Sonderkommando Kulmhof had systematically murdered about 4,400 Sinti and Roma and 145,301 Jews  (Document 234). The Jews of the Warthegau had been wiped out except for the "labour ghetto" in Litzmannstadt and Jews loaned to outside work-sites. Since life as a Sonderkommando member was comparable pleasant and beneficial - with bonus payments, free tabacco and alcohol, no front duty, absence of military discipline, access to cheap goods from the rich warehouses of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto Administration - and facing the prospect of front-line service, the Kulmhof commandant Hans Bothmann seemed to have stretched the dismantling and closing of the camp over the whole Winter 1942/43. ^[1]

Thomas Dalton responds to Roberto Muehlenkamp and Andrew Mathis (3)

I. Introductions
II. Documents and Numbers
IV. Techno-babble and Conclusions

Before I move to the next part of my comments about Mr. "Dalton"'s response to Andrew Mathis and me following our radio conversation with Kevin Barrett on American Freedom Radio, I shall publish what my fellow interviewee Andrew Mathis has to say about item (4) of said response, which was discussed in my previous blog.

"Is genocide necessarily evil?"

Someone on Quora asked this question.

My answer is rendered below.

Seriously Now, Where Did The Jews "Evacuated to The East" Go?

A straightforward question to corner any Holocaust denier:

Where did the Jews considered unfit for work by the Nazis and "evacuated to the East" go?

Figure 1: Satellite map of Europe (Google Earth image) highlighting selected political-administrative regions of the Third Reich. The map also displays: The number of Jews 'evacuated' between June 1941 and April 1943, Remaining Jewish populations as of 1943, Partisan-populated areas within the German army's rear and operational zones, the boundary of the operational zone and the Eastern front line as of mid-1942.

On December 15, 1942, Adolf Eichmann’s RSHA Jewish Affairs office, IV B4, submitted a "Secret State Affair" report titled Operation and Situation Report on the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question (unfortunately not preserved). Himmler, however, found it lacking "professional accuracy" (left image, microfilm quality) and, unsatisfied, ordered his chief statistician, Richard Korherr, to take over data analysis from Eichmann's office (BArch NS 19/1577).

By March 23, 1943, Korherr had compiled a 16-page document, The Final Solution of the European Jewish Question, covering data up to December 31, 1942, for Himmler. A month later, on April 19, he prepared a condensed summary extending coverage to March 31, 1943, to be incorporated into a larger (not preserved) report on the Final Solution for Adolf Hitler, coordinated by the RSHA (BArch NS 19/1570, scans, text in German/English).

Korherr’s findings? Approximately 2.6 million European Jews had been "evacuated" eastward by Nazi operations. After factoring in double-counting, forced labor selections, and transports not routed to extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Belzec, Kulmhof, Sobibor, and Treblinka, we’re left with roughly 2.3 million Jews "evacuated to the East" between June 1941 and April 1943 - numbers that Holocaust deniers struggle to account for (see the appendix for details).

Even with combined forces, deniers like Carlo Mattogno, Thomas Kues, and Jürgen Graf couldn’t tackle this in their "inverted comma" opus The "Extermination Camps" of "Aktion Reinhardt". They weakly speculate about Jews fit for work being deported or directly transported east but fail to explain the fate of those "unfit" Jews deported to extermination camps. Graf concedes in TECOAR’s epilogue  "that we are unable to produce German wartime documents about the destination and the fate of the deportees" (TECOAR, p. 1503).

The reality is clear: the claim that these Jews were simply resettled further east, instead of killed in extermination camps, is a not true. Contemporary German documents show that the "evacuated" Jews did not reappear in the occupied Soviet territories under civilian administration, and the military-governed zones, already plagued by partisan conflict, were largely devoid of Jewish presence (see Figure 1).

Goebbels' Slip of the Tongue: 'Ausrott-Ausschaltung'

Kent Ford has kindly brought to my attention the moment when Goebbels unintentionally revealed that 'elimination' had become 'extermination.'

Read more!

This moment comes from Goebbels' speech at the Sportpalast on 18th February 1943. The slip was captured on tape and can be heard here. Donald M. McKale's Hitler's Shadow War, p 311, refers to Goebbels' mistake as "a telling slip of the tongue," and has a translation that runs as follows:

but means to counter [the Jewish threat] in time and if necessary with the most complete and radical exterm- [correcting himself] elimination [Ausrott-Ausschaltung] of Jewry.

McKale adds:

The large crowd received Goebbels' words with applause, shouts of "out with the Jews," and laughter.

McKale's source is Jeremy Noakes' Nazism, 1919-1945, p. 239.

This slip is significant because, among other things, it destroys a denier gambit regarding Himmler's Posen speeches, whereby Himmler's use of elimination ['ausschaltung'] is deployed to minimize his use of 'ausrotten', such as in Porter's translation of this passage:

I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that's easy to say: "The Jewish people will be extirpated" , says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme: elimination of the Jews, extirpation ; that's what we're doing."

Goebbels' slip makes it clear that Himmler's usage conflates elimination, extirpation, evacuation and extermination because, when they are used in the context of the Final Solution, all of those terms amount to the mass murder of Jews. This is the opposite of the denier claim that Himmler's use of 'extermination' is just a hyperbolic expression of a policy that is really just 'ethnic cleansing' and forced deportation. If the denier claim were correct, there would be no need to use a stronger term than 'ausschaltung' or 'Säuberung' [cleansing] to describe Nazi policy.

The more you scratch Friedrich Jansson …

… the more the fellow loses his bearings and hysterically showers abuse on his opponent.

His latest foot-stomping, with the title Spoonfeeding the Mule, reads like Jansson is foaming at his mouth, at least the title and the introductory abuse, which is so characteristic of this lamentable individual that it will be quoted verbatim:

Roberto Muehlenkamp has again updated some posts in his futile attempt to refute my criticisms, and has again offered little but misinterpretation, incomprehension, and illiteracy. We all know what that means: it’s time for another round of spoonfeeding that dimwitted animal. As usual, I will simply ignore cases when Muehlenkamp has simply repeated himself without even acknowledging my previous refutation, and while pretending that I had not addressed an issue. (He may not be deliberately lying in these cases, as his reading comprehension is so poor that he doesn’t even notice concise rebuttals.)

Friedrich Jansson proudly presents …

... a report by US government official whereby "Ausrottung" does not imply killing. Or so Jansson interprets the official’s statements.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 5: Gas Chambers at the Aktion Reinhard Camps (1). A “Humane” Solution: Poison Gas and the Development of the Gas Chambers.

Gas Chambers at the Aktion Reinhard Camps

 [Investigation Commission]

So the day of deliverance for the patient arrives. Before an investigative committee under the direction of the asylum doctor, the personal and medical details of the patient are examined and assessed.

[Photograph]

For archival purposes, photographs are taken of the patient.

[Gas Chamber (Cuts to turning on of the valve, gasometer, and observation by the doctor)]

In a hermetically sealed room the patient is exposed to the effects of Carbon Monoxide gas.

The incoming gas is completely odourless and initially robs the patient of their powers of judgement, and then their consciousness.

Completely unknown by the patient, without pain and without struggle, the deliverance of death takes effect.

1942 draft for a Nazi documentary on mercy killings on mentally sick persons by German director Herman Schweninger[1]

A “Humane” Solution: Poison Gas and the Development of the Gas Chambers

Poison gas had been a method chosen by Nazi leaders since 1939 for purposes of ‘racial hygiene’, to exterminate those deemed to be ‘unfit’. On December 12-13, 1939, for instance, SS chief Heinrich Himmler visited Posen, probably in the company of RKPA deputy chief Werner, and was shown a model gassing at the experimental euthanasia facility in Fort VII, Posen. His adjutant Joachim Peiper recalled this in two accounts given in 1967 and 1970.[2] In the genocidal climate that reigned during the late summer/autumn of 1941, the idea to extend the use of poison gas on a widespread scale against social and political enemies grew in popularity among Nazi officials.[3] On July 16, 1941, SS-Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner, head of the Security Service (SD) in Poznan, wrote a memo to Adolf Eichmann regarding possible solutions to problems inside the Warthegau. Höppner suggested to Eichmann the following:[4]

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 3: Aktion Reinhard and the Holocaust in Poland (3). Extermination and Labour.

Extermination and Labour

Not content with misunderstanding the origins of Aktion Reinhard, Mattogno also fails to grasp the intentions and motivations of the civil administration and SS in the Generalgouvernement. Literally almost every statement that indicates the emergence of a genocidal mentality in occupied Poland, and every statement that confirms that genocide was in fact resolved upon and carried out, is omitted from the ‘trilogy’. Instead of confronting and properly dealing with this evidence, Mattogno opts to substitute a strawman version of Nazi policy, an all-or-nothing caricature whereby either the Nazis implemented virtually instantaneous 100% extermination, or they did not do this at all. Yet this strawman is flatly contradicted by the extant paper trail, which makes it perfectly clear, as we have seen above, that the Nazis carried out their extermination policy in tandem with a policy of selecting and sparing an ever decreasing minority of Jews for use as forced labourers.[197] Ignorant as he is of recent historiography, Mattogno does not seem to realise that there were three distinct phases to Aktion Reinhard: a first phase from March to June 1942 in which the system was tested in the Lublin and Galicia districts while preparations were undertaken in other districts; a second phase of accelerated deportation and mass murder from late June to December 1942 in which every district was targeted, and a third phase from January 1943 onwards, where the surviving Jews, now reduced down to around 20% of their number at the start of 1942, were decimated piecemeal, as ghettos were reduced in districts which had fallen behind others were eliminated (e.g. in the Galicia and Bialystok districts), and other ghettos were converted to labour and concentration camps. The evolution from phase to phase, moreover, was influenced by two key variables – food and labour. Priorities demonstrably shifted over the course of 1942, decisively shaping the course of Aktion Reinhard.

What's There to Hide? Camouflage and Secrecy of Nazi Extermination Sites

Contemporary German documents referring to the fate of Jews considered unfit for forced labour often do so in a conspicuously vague way. Instead of spelling out actual destinations or camps, general phrases like "eastwards" and "Russian East" were employed.

Elsewhere I've pointed out how the killing of Poles and mentally ill people in 1940 in East-Prussia was disguised by the Nazis. For "camouflaging" the "liquidation" of members of the Polish intelligentsia in the camp of Soldau, "the Poles in question had to sign a declaration of the content that they agreed with their deportation to the Generalgouvernement". The "mentally ill prisoners...liquidated by a special commando" were "evacuated" and "placed somewhere else" in SS correspondence.

The concept to camouflage murder with none or vague destinations was later also implemented for disguising the extermination of the Jews. The deception could work as it had a true core. The Jews had to gather in the towns and villages and were brought away. For the population and authorities parts of the operation could have appeared more or less like a real resettlement. Except that they never heard anything of those "resettled" again, as the "resettlers" were executed, buried and incinerated at the next extermination site.