Euphemisms and Camouflage (Part 2)

I noted in Part 1 how Korherr and Hoefle got their euphemisms in a twist. The same contradiction can be found when we trace the original instructions for transports from the ghettos to Treblinka.

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On the one hand, official documentation listed the Jews transported from Warsaw to Treblinka as "resettlers". However, transports from Grodno/Bialystok to Treblinka were listed as labour transports, according to this trial judgement:

However, Altenloh and Errelis deny they knew that the final destination was Treblinka, and that the intent of the order was the extermination of the Jews. They claim they believed the purported official motivation: relocation of Jews for conscripted labor.

Deniers who insist that Treblinka was a transit camp must therefore explain why the Grodno transports had this 'labour' euphemism.

It seems to me that the most likely reason why the euphemism 'transit camps' was not used for the Bialystok/Grodno transports was that such camouflage would obviously have seemed ridiculous to anyone reading the order, because they would have known that the transports were going from east to west. If the SS and RSHA had worked out this obvious fact in 1942, why are deniers still struggling with the concept in 2007?

Euphemisms and Camouflage (Part 1)

Michael Mills makes an interesting point in this letter to Irving, but probably not the point he wanted to make!

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In a nutshell, the Hoefle Telegram and Korherr Report contain identical figures for Jews transported to the Reinhardt camps. However, Hoefle used 'zugang', which means 'influx' or 'inflow', whereas Korherr (on instruction from Himmler) changed his wording from sonderbehandlung (special treatment) to 'durchgeschleust', which means 'guided through'.

We therefore have two contradictory forms of camouflage. Hoefle camouflaged death camps as labour camps, whilst Korherr camouflaged them as transit camps.

The contradiction reveals why it is absurd of dim-witted deniers to claim that documents should be read literally. The only explanation that makes sense is that camouflage terms are being used, as the same populations of Jews could not have been simultaneously admitted as labourers and sent to the USSR because they were unfit for labour.

Berg's Big Lie

If anyone needs proof that Fritz Berg is a charlatan, look no further than this thread which he started on the RODOH forum. In his introductory post, Berg cited a study by Risser and Bjonsch which he claimed "completely supports my view that the vast majority of Reinhardt Camp victims would have appeared RED if they had been killed with carbon monoxide from either diesel exhaust or from gasoline engine exhaust".

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Anyone who reads Risser and Bjonsch's abstract, cited in that first post, can see quite clearly that this is a lie. The first sentence of the abstract states that:

The aim of this retrospective survey of unintentional carbon monoxide-related deaths in Vienna was to determine whether the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis is a reliable finding for the coroner to suspect a carbon monoxide-related death immediately at the death scene.

Risser and Bjonsch were therefore studying the ability of coroners to detect the cherry-pink colour associated with livor mortis. A simple internet search reveals that livor mortis is a condition that takes hours to produce the full cherry-pink coloration. For example, as this medical expert explains:

...the color of death, or liver mortis, starts coming on in about two hours and gets more and more intense for about eight to ten hours and then just remains there

It is therefore dishonest to apply this study's finding to a critique of the Reinhardt eyewitness testimony, because the latter is describing corpses immediately after death.

Defenders of Berg may claim that this is an honest error. He's an old man and maybe his failing eyesight did not pick out the words 'livor mortis' in the text, despite it being in the first sentence of the abstract. If this were the case, however, one would expect Berg to stop using the source as soon as the error was pointed out to him. However, a quick visit to the CODOH forum, hosted by the dim-witted faker Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis, reveals that the 'error' was exposed before Berg started his RODOH thread. On Tuesday September 18th, 2007, 'jnovitz' posted this information:

A distinction should be drawn between liver mortis, which is blood leaking out of the vessels and infusing the tissue - a process that happens several hours after death and the distinctive cherry pink of carbon monoxide poisoning, shown in the top photo.

Berg read this post because he responded in part to it, so he must have known that a study of livor mortis could not be applied to Reinhardt eyewitness testimony, in which the corpses were being described immediately after being gassed. Despite this knowledge, however, Berg started his RODOH thread on Saturday October 13th, 2007, 25 days after his central claim had been debunked on CODOH.

Is it a tribute to the rank stupidity of Hargis that he allowed this clear evidence of Berg's dishonesty to remain on the CODOH forum for us all to discover? Or was he hanging Berg out to dry, bearing in mind that Hargis and Bradley Smith were very critical of Berg here?

Fratricide

In recent months, the denier movement has engaged in numerous episodes of family squabbling and backstabbing. Fritz Berg has attacked Weber; Berg in turn has been rebuked by Bradley Smith; and Grubach has conducted a nasty campaign of open letters against Irving. What are the causes of these squabbles, and what do they tell us about the current state of the movement?

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I would argue that there are two key trends at work. Firstly, deniers tend to conduct turf wars during periods when denial is enjoying brief public exposure. Secondly, denial is simply exhibiting the same factionalism and essentialism that can be found in any other cult or extremist political movement. The difference is that 'revisionism' claims to be an intellectual movement based on 'evidence', rather than the faith position that it clearly occupies in reality.

With regard to turf wars, it is no coincidence that two of the bitterest periods of denier backstabbing coincided with the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial and the Tehran denial conference. The former led to accusations that Irving had not deployed the full range of denier arguments. The latter led to Mark Weber making a TV appearance that caused Berg to fulminate against his failure to deny the Holocaust unequivocally. These episodes require deeper exploration.

The Irving trial was exploited by Rudolf to position himself as, effectively, the denial guru of the moment. In so doing, Rudolf neglected to mention that Irving had been obliged to ditch Rudolf's fatuous 'report' from his appeal due to Rudolf's fraudulent use of sources in the report. However, Rudolf's new guru status did not protect him from denier feuds for long. In 2004, Fritz Berg launched a scathing public attack on Rudolf for publishing a paper by Charles Provan that debunked Berg's crackpot theories on gassing:

Dear Germar,

What was your purpose for publishing that essay by Provan? Do you think there is any merit to what he has written? You dummy! You obviously still think there might be some merit to Provan’s horseshit. Go adjust your head. You should have seen through Provan’s drivel the moment you read it.

This brings us to the current fratricide post-Tehran. Berg has predictably been at the forefront of attacks on Weber's evasions and backsliding. However, Berg's own conduct brought a public rebuke from Bradley Smith:

Fritz, that includes you. One of the reasons you are unable [to] help create such an organization is demonstrated by how you have addressed the issue of Weber and IHR in this thread. I am not saying that you are saying anything that is false. I am saying that the way you address these issues is so divisive that I do not believe you will ever be able to participate, much less spark, the organization that we all have a sense that we need. You do brilliant, unique, independent work, you have done it for years, for decades, you are one of the major contributors, internationally, to revisionist studies, but you have no idea how to deal publicly with organizational or personal issues that you want to address.

So where does this leave us? I would draw an analogy with the fate of fascist groups in western politics. These groups enjoy occasional bursts of publicity that are invariably followed by internal squabbles, essentialist discussions of ideology, and the rooting out of heretics. The witch trials of Weber and Irving are simply the latest manifestations, albeit highly entertaining, of this factionalism in the faith-based cult of Holocaust denial.

Hargis and Grubach: The Laurel and Hardy of Holocaust Denial

You may be wondering why Holocaust Denial has less credibility these days than Lord Haw Haw, Tokyo Rose or Comical Ali. Part of the answer is that its intellectual cupboard, which was already thinly populated, has been all-but-deserted, and is now being guarded by two charlatans whose embarassing antics have even caused that paragon of honesty, David Irving, to complain about their behaviour.

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A survey of their recent exchanges with Irving suggests that entrusting the defence of revisionism to these clowns was the equivalent of asking a man with two broken arms to catch someone jumping from a burning building.

The first of these jokers, Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis, is described by Irving as "not the most cerebral of my supporters". The dim-witted Hargis once sent Irving a doctored photo that offended even this veteran denier:

The photo had two identical columns of smoke, obviously created in Photoshop; I recall that that gentleman, also called Hannover, admitted later, when I exposed the fakery to him, that yes, he was responsible, hoping to prove how easily photos could be faked.

Hargis 'moderates' the CODOH forum with a lack of subtlety that would have made the editor of Pravda blush. Andrew Mathis and Nick Terry have both had posts on CODOH censored. Moreover, Hargis carries out this censorship in the name of 'free speech'. This is Orwellian doublethink at its finest: an advocate of open debate who refuses to tolerate open debate.

Just in case the he hypocrisy meter has not already shot through the roof, Paul Grubach has come along to reinforce the point that revisionism is being defended by arguments that are as sturdy as a chocolate kettle. Grubach has made a public nuisance of himself over the last few years by sending open letters to notable writers challenging them to debate. Having exhausted the list of notable writers, Grubach has recently turned his attention towards a notorious one: the aforementioned D. Irving. However, when RODOH forum member Steve Mock challenged Grubach to a debate on the RODOH site, Grubach suddenly adopted the evasions and excuses that he normally accuses the reluctant recipients of his illiterate ramblings of deploying.

In conclusion, therefore, if history really does repeat itself first as tragedy then as farce, Hargis and Grubach are actors in the latter.

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 6)

In the previous five parts of this series, we exposed Sanning's fraudulent use of sources. This sixth part examines the convergence of evidence from Soviet and Polish archives that allows us to state, beyond reasonable doubt, that the number of Polish Jews deported to the Soviet interior in 1940-41 was less than 100,000.

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The first source of archival data is Aleksander Gurjanov, who obtained access to Soviet deportation records at GARF and published his findings in Cztery deportacje 1940–1941 (Four deportations 1940-1941), KARTA, 12, 1994, pp. 114–136; available on-line here. Gurjanov concluded that approximately 315,000 people were deported, in four sets of deportations, on transports which we have listed in English here. Gurjanov's data allow us to estimate the maximum number of deportees who were refugees from western Poland. The deportation that targeted Jewish refugees took place in June-July 1940; the transports in that action totaled 75,267 deportees, not all of whom were Jews.

Gurjanov’s data refute Sanning, not just for the overall total of deportees, but also for individual cities. Sanning (p.41-42) claims that 50,000 Jewish refugees were deported from Lvov, and 50,000-60,000 from Bialystok, but Gurjanov’s data show only 26,798 deportees in total from Lvov and 9,551 in total from Bialystok.

Gurjanov’s data closely converge with the second source: NKVD archive data concerning camps in the USSR. Sergey Romanov found an excellent discussion of such archives in Mordechai Altshuler's Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust (1998: p. 325-326). This cited an NKVD report, dated 1 April 1941, which showed that the number of deported western Polish refugees (bezhentsy) being held in camps under NKVD control on that date was 76,068, of which 64,533 were Jews. Altschuler concludes that these data, when adjusted for births and deaths, correspond to the June-July 1940 transports.

Other declassified, previously ‘top secret’, Soviet documents also corroborate the number of deportees. This source states that, on 13 January, 1943, 215,081 former Polish citizens remained in the Soviet interior, among them 102,153 Jews (Source: Katyn. Mart 1940 - sentyabr' 2000. Rasstrel. Sud'by zhivykh. Ekho Katyn, compiled by N.S.Lebedeva, Moscow, "Ves' mir", 2001, document 184). Moreover, the same document states that 389,041 former Polish citizens had been freed in the amnesty of August 1941, of which 90,662 were Jews. It also reveals that, in 1939-1941, 218,606 former Polish citizens from Western Ukraine and Belorussia volunteered for work in the Soviet interior, of which 8,830 were Jews. A note from the NKGB head, V. Merkulov, dated May 1st, 1944, tells us that 257,660 of the amnestied 389,041 former Polish citizens were passportised in the USSR in January 1943 (221,150 civilians, 36,510 Berling army) and that among these former Polish citizens, the number of registered Jews plus their children amounted to 81,217 (source: GARF 9401-2-64, pp. 381-384; image and transcription here, translated by Nick Terry here).

In our view, it is reasonable to infer that the 81,217 amnestied Polish Jews alive in the Soviet interior in January 1943 in the 1944 document, after adjustment for births and deaths, was a subset of the 90,662 amnestied Jews alive in August 1941 in the 1943 Beria-Stalin document. The 81,217 figure was also a subset of the total number of 102,153 Polish Jews alive in January 1943 that were counted by Beria (both figures refer to the same month: January 1943). The difference between the 90,662 and 81,217 figures may be partially accounted for by the 4,226 Polish Jews who went to Iran with the Anders Army during 1942, and by deaths between August 1941 and January 1943. The difference between the 102,153 and 81,217 figures consists of 20,936 Polish Jews who were not in the amnestied figure because they were never arrested. It may be explained by the number of labour volunteers, such as the 8,830 in Beria’s document, and by the number other refugees who may have fled to the Soviet interior on their own initiative instead of being deported.

Furthermore, it also seems reasonable to infer that the 64,553 deported refugees as of 1 April 1941 in the NKVD document cited by Altschuler formed a subset (adjusted for births and deaths) of the 90,662 Jews amnestied in August 1941 in the Beria-Stalin document. The other 26,009 amnestied Jews may have been on the other transports in Gurjanov's data (in deportations that did not target refugees), or may have been arrested inside the Soviet interior, or may have been survivors from the group of POW's taken prisoner by the USSR in 1939.

When we have posted some of these facts on the RODOH forum on this thread, 'revisionists' have raised four objections, which we will rebut below. Firstly, they state that death rates among deportees were as high as 50% so deaths must be added to the NKVD data. Secondly, they insist that Soviet data was deceitful and should not be trusted. Thirdly, they claim that our figures are lower than those in Polish Government In Exile sources. Fourthly, they note that the number of Polish Jews repatriated from the USSR after the war was higher than our number of deportees.

The claim concerning deaths overlooks the fact that refugees were deported in the Summer of 1940, so deaths from cold weather would be far lower than those among Poles deported in February. Furthermore, data for Gulag deaths, which Roberto Muehlencamp has posted here, show that overall death rates were far lower than revisionists assume. Total deaths for all Gulag inmates were 46,665 in 1940, out of a total Gulag population of 1,344,408, making a death rate of 3.47% (source: Richard Overy, The Dictators, 2004, Tables 14.2 & 14.3). Moreover, as we have shown above, the number of amnestied Polish Jews passportised in early 1943 (81,217) was only 5.76% lower than the number of Jews amnestied in August 1941 minus the Polish Jews who went to Iran with the Anders Army (i.e. 90,662 minus 4,226).

The claim that NKVD sources are suspect ignores the fact that Beria and other NKVD officers were writing for their superiors, not a public audience, and that the punishment for lying to one's superiors in Stalin's terror state would have been certain death.

The third revisionist objection cites Sanning's claim (p.42) that "The Polish Government In Exile, too, declared the Soviets deported 600,000 Jewish refugees from western Poland in the spring of 1940." However, Sanning provides no footnote for this sentence so does not allow us to check his source. More importantly, Sanning's claim is contradicted by Polish Government In Exile statistics whose sources can be traced precisely. In his contribution to the collection of essays edited by Polonsky and Davies, Jews in Eastern Poland and the U.S.S.R., 1939-46, published in 1991, David Engel (p.177) cites a communication from the Polish Government In Exile Foreign Minister, Raczynski, to Bund representative Zygielbojm, dated 17 March 1943, stating that there were 260,000 Polish citizens in the USSR, "half of whom are Jews". The figure of 260,000 Poles is very similar to that cited above in the note from the NKGB head, V. Merkulov, dated May 1st, 1944, which stated that 257,660 of the amnestied 389,041 Poles were still in the USSR in January 1943. Raczynski is therefore clearly a far more valid source than Sanning's unidentified one.

As to why Raczynski gave a higher figure for Jews than does the NKVB data, the most likely explanation is provided by the context, namely that Raczynski was warning the Bund that aid to Jewish refugees may be jeapordised if the Bund were to criticise Stalin's actions. Raczynski therefore probably exaggerated the proportion of Jews in the refugee population in order to make his point more persuasive.

This hypothesis can be supported by reference to a second Polish Government In Exile source. In another contribution to the Polonsky and Davies collection, Keith Sword (p.155) discussed a document that he found in the archives of the Polish Institute and General Sikorski Museum (PIGSM), located in London. The document was compiled by Raczynski's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is entitled 'Relief accorded to Polish citizens by the Polish Embassy in the USSR (with special reference to Polish Citizens of Jewish Nationality)' (PIGSM File A/11.49 (Sow).31). The report revealed that the Embassy was co-ordinating relief for 260,399 Polish citizens, of whom the proportion of Jews was either 36.15% or 39.4% (the report gave two different breakdowns). The report therefore corroborates Raczynski's total figure for Poles but reveals that his figure for Jews was indeed higher than that reported within his own Ministry.

Furthermore, this reveals yet another omission on Sanning's part: a document in a London archive, written in English, from a wartime Polish Embassy source in the USSR, would have disabused Sanning of his misconception that refugee agencies were providing aid to 600,000 Polish Jews in central Asia.

With regard to repatriation, 157,420 Jewish "repatriates" were registered by the Central Committee of Polish Jewry as having returned to Poland by the end of June 1946. This figure was cited by Sanning and confirmed by Yosef Litvak in his contribution (Chapter 13; pp. 227-239) to the collection of essays edited by Polonsky and Davies, cited above. Litvak (p.235) also claimed that more than 70,000 further Polish Jewish repatriates returned by the end of the decade (bringing the total to 230,700), and a further 30,000 returned under the repatriation agreement of 1957. However, Sanning (p.45) falsely assumes that all of the repatriated Jews were refugees from western Poland who had fled across the Polish-Soviet demarcation line in 1939:

Of the many hundreds of thousands who fled to the Soviet Union in 1939 only 157,420 took advantage of this option and returned to Poland. In other words, the primary source which released these figures - the Central Committee for Jews in Poland, a Communist organization - wants to make us believe that only 83,059 Jews of western Poland (240,489 minus 157,420) survived the Second World War under German administration.

Sanning's claim is another example of his poor quality of research because it overlooks the fact that the Polish-Soviet repatriation agreement, signed on 6 July 1945, allowed any person who had been a Polish citizen on 17 September 1939 to return. Repatriates therefore could include not only western Polish refugees but anyone in eastern Poland who took Soviet citizenship in 1939-41.

Repatriates thus included Jews who were not deportees. Anyone who crossed the Polish-Soviet demarcation line in 1939-1941 but was not deported could be a repatriate; and anyone who fled eastwards when the Nazis crossed the demarcation line in June 1941 could be a repatriate, provided they had been Polish citizens on 17 September 1939.

Moreover, the total of 157,420 that had returned by June 1946 did not only consist of repatriates from the agreement of 6 July 1945, but also included many of the returnees who were repatriated under the agreements of September 1944 between Poland and the districts of the western USSR, which resulted (between 7 September 1944 and 1 January 1947) in 784,000 Polish repatriates from the Ukraine, 272,000 from Belorussia and 170,800 from Lithuania (Source: Piotrowski (2000), Genocide and Rescue in Wolyn, p. 248). The research of Czerniakiewicz (Repatriacja ludnosci polskiej z ZSRR, 1944-1948, Warsaw, 1987, p.154) found that 54,594 of these were Jews. Consequently, not all of the repatriates had been in the Soviet interior in September 1944. This is further evidence that repatriates included not only deportees, but also migrants who had fled from the Nazis on their own initiative, and Polish Jews in annexed territories of former eastern Poland who had been unable to flee from the Nazis in 1941 but survived Nazi occupation.

The repatriation figures are further complicated by three other factors. Firstly, Litvak (p.231) reveals that Poles who married Soviet citizens during the war were allowed to take their spouses, and the spouses' children from previous marriages, back to Poland. He claims that many Soviet war widows had married Poles. Secondly, Litvak (p.235) advises us that the Central Committee of Polish Jewry reported that the number of registered repatriates was 10-15 per cent higher than that of actual repatriates, because some people registered more than once. Thirdly, Litvak's breakdown of repatriates by sex (p.235) also shows that the proportion of males to females was higher than in the 1931 census, suggesting that a significant number of repatriates were labour volunteers rather than refugees.

Repatriation data does not therefore, when properly analysed, refute the evidence we have presented from Soviet and Polish sources, which in our view proves, beyond reasonable doubt, that fewer than 100,000 Polish Jews were deported to the Soviet interior in 1940-41.

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 5)

Andrzej Gawryszewski has very kindly sent me the list shown below of Aleksander Gurjanov's transport data for deportations to the Soviet interior from annexed areas of former eastern Poland between February 1940 and June 1941. This helps to debunk the claim, made by Walter Sanning, that two million Poles were deported, of which 750,000 were Jews. Gurjanov estimates a total of 315,000 deportees, with a margin of error of between 10,000 and 15,000. The deportation that targeted Jewish refugees took place in June-July 1940; the transports in that action totaled 75,267 deportees, not all of whom were Jews. In the next blog, we will show how these records can be synthesized with other Soviet and Polish documentation to refute Sanning.

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The full spreadsheet can be viewed on-line here.

Departure details are given below.

Source: Aleksander Gurjanov, Cztery deportacje 1940-1941 [Four deportations 1940-1941]. Karta, 12, 1994, Warszawa, p. 130-136.

(Format: Date, Departure Station, Number Of Deportees)

2/5/1940 Lida 1680
2/5/1940 Wysokie Litew. 1350
2/5/1940 Brzesc n.Bugiem 902
2/5/1940 Molodeczno 551
2/5/1940 Sienkiewicze 1506
2/5/1940 Pinsk 1492
2/5/1940 Drohiczyn 1743
2/5/1940 Dziatkowicze 1509
2/5/1940 Iwacewicze 1791
2/5/1940 Kosów 1206
2/5/1940 Orańczyce 1166
2/5/1940 Domanowo 1506
2/5/1940 Nowojelnia 1194
2/5/1940 Mickiewicze 1200
2/5/1940 Horodziej 1493
2/5/1940 Jeziornica 1484
2/5/1940 Niemen 1533
2/5/1940 Augustów 1859
2/5/1940 Postawy 2127
2/5/1940 Ziabki 1604
2/5/1940 Woropajewo 1863
2/1/1940 Molodeczno 1981
2/1/1940 Mosty 1669
2/1/1940 Bialowieza 1488
2/1/1940 Bialystok 1582
2/1/1940 Swislocz 1716
2/1/1940 Wolkowysk 1818
2/1/1940 Pogorzelce 1597
2/1/1940 Baranowicze 1290
2/1/1940 Rozanka 2090
2/1/1940 Molodeczno 1155
2/1/1940 Molodeczno 1793
2/1/1940 Lomza 1745
2/1/1940 Horodenka 1280
2/1/1940 Buczacz 1367
2/1/1940 Iwanie Puste 1400
2/1/1940 Dereniowka 1287
2/1/1940 Husiatyn 1514
2/1/1940 Worwolince 1371
2/1/1940 Biala Czortkow. 941
2/1/1940 Rudniki 1400
2/1/1940 Borszczow 1530
2/1/1940 Monasterzyska 1419
2/1/1940 Tlumacz 1113
2/1/1940 Wlodzimierz 1462
2/1/1940 Antonowka 1446
2/1/1940 Kostopol 1110
2/1/1940 Wojnica 1491
2/1/1940 Kamien Koszyr 1672
2/1/1940 Rumosz 1770
2/5/1940 Chodorow 1102
2/5/1940 Zapytow 1145
2/5/1940 Kalusz 1661
2/5/1940 Korszow 1521
2/5/1940 Kolomyja 1423
2/5/1940 Berezowica-Ostr.1312
2/5/1940 Hluboczek Wielki1108
2/5/1940 Zborow 1396
2/5/1940 Podhajce 1158
2/5/1940 Karnaczowka 1567
2/5/1940 Tarnopol 1920
2/5/1940 Grzymalow 1456
2/5/1940 Denysow-Kupcz. 1522
2/5/1940 Skalat 1568
2/5/1940 Brody 1288
2/5/1940 Cholojow 1353
2/5/1940 Stojanow 789
2/5/1940 Zablotce 1081
2/5/1940 Radziechow 1420
2/5/1940 Werba 1249
2/5/1940 Perespa 1260
2/5/1940 Jeziorany 1280
2/5/1940 Krzemieniec 1432
2/5/1940 Zwiniacze 929
2/5/1940 Nieswicz 1425
2/5/1940 Zdolbunow 1319
2/5/1940 Ostrog 1133
2/5/1940 Lanowce 1349
2/5/1940 Woronowka 1113
2/5/1940 Stanislawow 1253
2/5/1940 Rohatyn 1337
2/5/1940 Parchacz 1241
2/5/1940 Lubycza 1767
2/5/1940 Nowe Miasto 1393
2/5/1940 Rawa Ruska 1320
2/5/1940 Przemysl 1361
2/5/1940 Medyka 1110
2/5/1940 Chlebowice Wiel. 1472
2/5/1940 Chyrow 1321
2/5/1940 Krasne 1232
2/5/1940 Jaworow 1233
2/5/1940 Żólkiew? (Żołczów?) 1475
2/5/1940 Zydaczow 1194
2/5/1940 Stryj 1249
2/5/1940 Zloczow 1642
2/5/1940 Chodaczkow 1241
2/5/1940 Saranczuki 1650
2/5/1940 Wolkow 1590
4/14/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 450
4/14/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 1011
4/14/1940 Mikaszewicze 1282
4/15/1940 Mikaszewicze 1349
4/15/1940 Oranczyce 876
4/14/1940 Baranowicze 1049
4/14/1940 Baranowicze 713
4/14/1940 Stolpce 873
4/15/1940 Krolewszczyzna 1003
4/16/1940 Baranowicze 1378
4/18/1940 Lida 1146
4/19/1940 Grodno 1111
4/20/1940 Ziabki 1233
4/20/1940 Krolewszczyzna
4/15/1940 Druja 1189
4/15/1940 Gawja 1068
4/14/1940 Mosty 1040
4/15/1940 Mikaszewicze 1228
4/15/1940 Mikaszewicze 1137
4/16/1940 Wolkowysk 1443
4/20/1940 Baranowicze 994
4/13/1940 Stolpce 1048
4/19/1940 Bialystok 1190
4/19/1940 Bialystok 893
4/19/1940 Molodeczno 1508
4/20/1940 Oszmiana 1067
4/13/1940 Tarnopol 1209
4/13/1940 Tarnopol 1283
4/13/1940 Tarnopol 1187
4/13/1940 Kopyczynce 1423
4/13/1940 Husiatyn 973
4/13/1940 Stanislawow 1778
4/13/1940 Kolomyja 1545
4/13/1940 Biala Cerkiew 1218
4/13/1940 Lwow 1150
4/13/1940 Lwow 1354
4/14/1940 Ozydow 1604
4/14/1940 Sarny 1278
4/15/1940 Luck 1434
4/16/1940 Szepietowka 1392
4/16/1940 Sarny 1324
4/17/1940 Zdolbunow 1061
4/13/1940 Lwow
4/13/1940 Lwow 1111
4/13/1940 Lwow 1165
4/13/1940 Potutory 1379
4/13/1940 Stryj 1552
4/17/1940 Lwow 1139
4/20/1940 Rawa Ruska 1333
5/21/1940 Zdolbunow 452
5/23/1940 Sambor 120
6/30/1940 Bialystok 1303
7/1/1940 Bialystok 1589
7/1/1940 Grodno 1158
6/29/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 1244
6/29/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 1244
6/30/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 1427
6/30/1940 Siemiatycze 1085
7/4/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 431
6/29/1940 Stolpce 1732
6/30/1940 Luniniec 964
6/30/1940 Baranowicze 785
6/29/1940 Minsk 1679
6/29/1940 Minsk 1504
6/29/1940 Minsk 1372
6/29/1940 Minsk 1021
6/29/1940 Minsk 1461
6/30/1940 Bialystok 1533
7/1/1940 Molodeczno 771
7/1/1940 Bialystok 804
4/7/1940 Bialystok 657
6/28/1940 Szepietowka 160
6/28/1940 Szepietowka 1029
6/30/1940 Kowel 1300
6/30/1940 Kowel 2003
6/30/1940 Wlodzimierz 1877
6/30/1940 Wlodzimierz 1483
6/30/1940 Zdolbunow 1266
7/1/1940 Zdolbunow 1777
7/1/1940 Zdolbunow 1675
7/1/1940 Zdolbunow 1371
7/29/1940 Lwow 1789
6/30/1940 Lwow 1412
6/30/1940 Lwow 1470
6/30/1940 Lwow 1305
6/30/1940 Lwow 1604
6/30/1940 Lwow 1394
6/30/1940 Lwow 1527
6/30/1940 Lwow 1466
6/30/1940 Lwow 1300
6/30/1940 Lubaczow 1504
6/30/1940 Brzuchowice 1356
6/30/1940 Przemysl 1398
6/30/1940 Potutory 1040
6/30/1940 Tarnopol 995
7/1/1940 Husiatyn 930
7/1/1940 Stryj 1211
7/1/1940 Lwow 1547
7/1/1940 Lwow 1538
7/1/1940 Lwow 1544
7/1/1940 Rawa Ruska 1700
7/1/1940 Sambor 1316
7/1/1940 Ustrzyki 1142
7/12/1940 Lwow 1444
6/30/1940 Lwow 1208
6/30/1940 Sambor 1165
7/1/1940 Lwow 848
7/1/1940 Stryj 1776
7/5/1940 Lwow 633


6/13/1941 Glubokaja 1444
? ? 1656
? Jelgawa 1736
6/14/1941 Dwinsk 1655
6/16/1941 Dwinsk 1172
7/5/1941 Babynino 1162
6/16/1941 Jelgawa, Ryga 1475
6/16/1941 Jelgawa 1272
6/18/1941 Dwinsk 1242
6/18/1941 Dwinsk 1104
76
? Lomza 1175
6/19/1941 Hajnowka 1090
? Horodziej 821
Ryga, Litwa 311
6/21/1941 Lida 863
6/21/1941 Nowa Wilejka 871
6/17/1941 Nowa Wilejka 1102
6/17/1941 Nowa Wilejka 1296
6/19/1941 Nowa Wilejka 1066
6/19/1941 Nowa Wilejka 1311
6/20/1941 Nowa Wilejka 1139

'Transit Camps' and Occam's Razor

Deniers such as Mattogno and Graf tell us that most of the Jews transported to the Reinhardt camps were resettled within the USSR. The principle of Occam's Razor advises that, for this thesis to be plausible, it must require as few assumptions as possible. We have identified six assumptions that are either implicitly or explicitly stated in denial claims concerning 'transit camps', none of which has any evidential basis.

Read more!

1. The Soviets destroyed the Nazi records of transports from the Reinhardt camps to the USSR. No evidence is offered that the Soviets would have been able to capture all these records. The assumption overlooks the fact that many Nazi documents were captured by the British and Americans.

2. Witnesses to the transports were frightened into remaining silent by the Soviets. This fails to explain how witnesses to other Soviet actions such as the Katyn massacre did manage to get their testimonies to the west. It also fails to explain why no surviving witnesses who subsequently emigrated to the west or survived the downfall of the Soviet regime have ever come forward.

3. Eichmann never mentioned the transports in his defence because he was tortured. In reality, Eichmann had 15 years in which to reveal details of these transports before he was arrested. He was interviewed by a Dutch journalist, Willem Sassen, in Argentina in 1957 but never mentioned these transports.

4. The Soviets murdered the Jews. Deniers who make this argument never identify the mass grave sites where these dead Jews can be found, yet they hypocritically attack the mass graves evidence of normative historians.

5. The Jews moved to Palestine or the USA. Deniers are unable to cite any demographic data for the USA or Israel that would support this claim. They also ignore the fact that the Soviet Union had strict emigration controls so an emigration of at least 1.2 million Jews would have needed to be authorized and documented.

6. The Soviets forced them to renounce their religion and to take Soviet citizenship, so they didn't appear in the 1959 census. This fails to explain why the Soviets allowed up to 260,000 Polish Jews to repatriate between 1944 and 1960, despite the fact that they had taken Soviet citizenship during the war. None of these repatriated Jews has ever stated that he or she was transported to the USSR from the Reinhardt camps, and deniers have never found any evidence that any of the repatriates was ever in a Reinhardt camp.

More Holocaust Denial Fallacies

Andrew recently wrote an excellent article for The Holocaust History Project, published here, in which he used the principles of general semantics to expose the fallacies of Holocaust deniers. Below I explore five more fallacies that I have encountered in 'revisionist' literature and in on-line debates with deniers on RODOH.

Read more!

1. 'The fact that there is no evidence that the Reinhardt Camps were transit camps is not evidence that they were not transit camps'. This argument is a perverse application of Carl Sagan's dictum that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. The dictum was infamously deployed by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 to claim that absence of WMD being found in Iraq is not evidence that WMD were never present. It has also been deployed in medical discussions, such as here, to claim that the failure of a product to produce a demonstrable effect is not evidence that such effects are always absent. Such claims have been debunked brilliantly by Dr. Marvin J. Schissel here. Schissel points out that:

While absence of evidence is not absolute evidence of absence, it is generally evidence of a high probability of absence.

With reference to the Reinhardt camps, we do, of course, have a convergence of evidence from transport records, contemporary documents, the Korherr Report, the Hoefle Telegram, eyewitnesses, perpetrators and site investigations which shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that over a million Jews were murdered at the camps. Revisionists have had over sixty years in which to find records of transports taking Jews from the camps to the USSR, or records of resettlement, or even eyewitnesses of such resettlement, but have been unable to uncover any such evidence. They have been unable to explain why no defendants at postwar trials, including those such as Eichmann who had direct responsibility for 'evacuation' transports, ever used the 'transit camp' gambit in their defence, despite the fact that this would surely have been the most obvious defence available, had it been true. Moreover, they ignore the fact that the Soviets signed repatriation agreements with Poland in September 1944 and July 1945 but the total number of Polish Jews who returned under those agreements was only 230,700 (source: Yosef's Litvak's essay in Polonsky and Davies, Jews in Eastern Poland and the U.S.S.R., 1939-46, p.235).

Consequently, the 'absence of evidence' gambit is a fallacy because there are powerful reasons why evidence of resettlement should be present.

2. 'Evidence of gassing at camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz does not meet an absolute standard of scientific proof'. This is the burden of proof fallacy. It is fallacious to demand that historians meet a higher burden of proof than would be required in a court of law. It is also fallacious to ignore the fact that the Nazis systematically destroyed evidence of their crimes so historians must reconstruct the Holocaust from fragmentary documentation. In view of the incomplete documentary record, the high degree of convergence in the remaining evidence is conclusive proof of genocide, beyond reasonable doubt. Moreover, even scientific experiments carried out in a laboratory are subject to an uncertainty principle, so the deniers' burden of proof is not even accepted by physical scientists.

3. 'The story keeps changing'. As with the burden of proof fallacy, this claim appeals to an audience that is ignorant of historical method, legal procedure and the sociology of knowledge. There is no historical event which is currently interpreted in exactly the same way that it was in 1945. Demanding that the Holocaust 'story' remains static is thus bone-headed.

4. 'The Soviets lied about Katyn and the Ukrainian famine so they could have fabricated the Holocaust and lied about that too.' This fallacy ignores two obvious facts. Firstly, evidence of Katyn and the famine did reach the west, both at the time and since, and the Russians did eventually admit to Katyn in the post-Glasnost era, so this denier fallacy simply begs the question as to why no evidence of Soviets fabricating the Holocaust has ever come to light. Secondly, the Soviets did not have a monopoly of access to Nazi documents or eyewitnesses. For example, the gas van documents submitted to the IMT (as bundle 501-PS) were discovered by the US 12th Army in Germany, not by the Soviets (see John C. Zimmermann, Holocaust Denial, pages 357-358).

5. 'The allies fabricated propaganda of German atrocities in World War I so obviously did so in World War II as well.' There is no evidence cited to support this claim, and it ignores the fact that many Nazi atrocities were documented by the Nazis themselves. Deniers are falsely equating atrocity stories from WWI that never had supporting evidence with a historical record from WWII that contains an overwhelming convergence of evidence.

"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.

Just in case someone is wondering …

… why Jonathan Harrison wrote that Germar Rudolf is lying when he claims that "there are still no traces of any German mass graves or burning sites" in the former Nazi-occupied Soviet territories, here are some links to information on this blog and elsewhere about Soviet postwar crime site investigations, corroboration of these investigations’ results by evidence independent of the Soviets, and current endeavors to find and identify mass graves left behind by Nazi mobile killing operations:

Mass Graves in the Polesie

Neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass graves with even only a few thousand bodies …

Yahad in Unum

The info about recent investigations of massacre sites also shows how nonsensical it is to claim, as Rudolf does, that "any public speculation whether modern methods might not help to locate some [mass graves] is studiously avoided" on grounds that "after all, any such sites have vanished without a trace, thanks to the wondrous methods only the Germans knew about".

This collection includes a number of photographs of mass graves and dead bodies produced by Nazi mobile killing operations in the occupied territories of the USSR, some of which are from Soviet crime site investigations.

Regarding Rudolf’s claim that the massacre at Babi Yar has been "irrefutably proven" to be "an atrocity lie of no substance", see the following articles of the "That's why it is denial, not revisionism" series:

That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part III: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (1)

That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part IV: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (2)

That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part V: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (3)

That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part VI: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (4)