In chapter 13 of Mattogno, Graf and Kues’ magnum opus^[1], with the self-descriptive title "Asinine, Judeophantic Arrogance", Mattogno dwells at length (pp. 1481 to1484, plus images on pages 1485 and 1486) on the massacre of mostly Jewish inmates of the Klooga forced labor camp in Estonia in September 1944. I’ll address his arguments in this respect because they briefly touch the subjects of fuel requirements and duration of cremation^[2] and my name is mentioned, and also because they further reveal Mattogno’s ill-reasoning and intellectual dishonesty.



Mattogno addresses the Klooga massacre in the context of my co-author Jason Myers’ argument, on p. 520 of the HC critique^[3], that MGK’s "attempt to poison the well by blaming the Soviet investigators for effectively hoaxing mass graves ignores the fact that western journalists were shown human remains at Babi Yar, Klooga and near Majdanek, and a huge store of plundered property in Lublin". Earlier in the critique (p. 256), Jason had referred to the Klooga massacre as follows:

For example, around 2,000 were killed at Klooga, where their remains were photographed and published in western sources soon after liberation. Foreign journalists were shown the unburied corpses of partially burned victims on October 2, 1944. The New York Times journalist W.H. Lawrence wrote that he had personally “seen and counted recognizable parts of 438 complete and partly burned bodies of men, women and children.”

Mattogno quotes Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad’s description of the massacre and claims uncertainty about "who ordered this massacre, why it was ordered and who performed it" - conveniently omitting that one of the Soviet investigation reports he later quotes from^[4] is quite definite about the perpetrators responsible:

III. PERPETRATORS OF THE CRIME
Materials of the preliminary investigation determined that the following military men of the fascist army were organizers and direct executors of the mass execution and burning of Soviet civilians, including babies, women and old men, in the Klooga Concentration Camp on September 19, 1944:
1. Chief of the central administrative board of camps in Estonia Hauptsturmführer BRENNEISEN.
2. Head physician of concentration camps in Estonia Obersturmführer fon BODMAN.
3. Chief of the Klooga Camp Unterscharführer VERLE.
4. Clerk of the Klooga Camp Unterscharführer SCHWARZE.
5. Chief of office of the Klooga Camp Gauptscharführer Max DALMAN.
6. Chief of the medical unit of the Klooga Camp Unterscharführer GENT.
7. Manager of the household of the Klooga Camp Oberscharführer GELBICK.
8. Oberscharführer FRUIVIRT.
Except the names listed above, 50 SD soldiers directly participated in convoying, guarding, and execution of 50 people, their last names are not determined by the investigation.

Following this misinformation, Mattogno feebly suggests that a shot in the neck of the victims already lying on the pyre would not be a "time-saving method" (why not, he doesn’t explain) and that the Germans’ having "lit the stacks and left during the same night without bothering to ensure that the corpses incinerated properly" is "untypical for the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps and also inconsistent with the traceless removal of evidence otherwise claimed".

The last of these comments is particularly silly, not so much because Mattogno doesn’t reveal who is supposed to have claimed that a "traceless removal of evidence" was "otherwise" endeavored or achieved, but because Klooga labor camp in Estonia and the Aktion Reinhard(t) (AR) extermination camps in Poland were entirely different pairs of boots (except for the fact that they were both camps run by Nazi Germany and their inmates were forced laborers), not only as concerns their function and the organization they were subordinated to but also as concerns disposal of their victims’ bodies. At the AR camps enormous numbers of murder victims were cremated until about a year before the Red Army arrived, with plenty of time, on grates made of railway rails, a procedure that was comparatively effective as concerns fuel and time and gradually improved by trial and error. What happened at Klooga, on the other hand, was a hurried, improvised attempt to burn the corpses of murdered inmates on makeshift pyres consisting of wood alone, which wasn’t completed because the killers were more concerned with getting away from the approaching Soviet troops than with finishing their body disposal job.

Mattogno then quotes, from a Soviet investigation report dated 29 September 1944 (which I will hereinafter refer to as "Report 1")^[5], excerpts whereby the investigating commission had found four pyres, each with an area of 6 x 6.5 meters, consisting of "6 logs put on the ground with a number of poles with 75 cm pine and fir-tree logs on it", of which one was "only prepared" while the other three were "already burned down". On two of the pyres two layers of corpses were visible according to the report, while on another pyre there were three layers of corpses. On the remaining parts of the fires, the report continued, it had been possible to "make out 254 burnt corpses, that is 20-25% of the overall number of corpses that were laid on the fires."

Another Soviet report of the same date (hereinafter "Report 2")^[6] is quoted by Mattogno as mentioning that "three firewood fires of 8-10 rows of the corpses" had been lit using 14 "barrels" of gasoline and burned "for two and a half days", whereas "The base of the fourth fire prepared by the Germans remained untouched as they had no time; it forced the Germans to finish executing the remained prisoners in barracks.". According to this second report "The larger group (about 800 people) was destroyed by the Germans in an empty house – a barracks that consisted of eight rooms."

A third report dated 12 October 1944 (hereinafter called "Report 3")^[7], from which Mattogno also quotes, estimated the total number of victims at "up to 1,800 to 2,000".

From the quoted parts of these three reports Mattogno concludes that according to the Soviets "(2,000 – 800 =) about 1,200" corpses were burned on the pyres. Postulating that one layer of corpses on a pyre with an area of 6m x 6.5m = 39 m² could consist of 50 corpses at most ("the surface occupied by each corpse was of (39 ÷ 50 =) about 0.8 m², as I already assumed for the Treblinka pyres"), Mattogno then argues that the 8-10 "rows" of corpses mentioned in the second Soviet report would actually need to be layers of corpses placed on top of each other (with layers of wood in between), resulting in a heap "considerably bigger than what the Soviets claim to have found". He even provides a "photoshop" reconstruction model on p. 1486 (see image below) that is supposed to illustrate what that heap would have looked like.



Mattogno wouldn’t be who he is if he had not withheld from his readers important information that runs contrary to his argument, namely information from Report 1. In the following quote, emphases were added to highlight those parts of the report that Mattogno also reproduced.

Corpses of men and women randomly lay in front of the door in the premises of the ground floor of the building, and also in the first and second aisles between plank beds. The bodies in the aisles lay with their faces down in two-three rows lengthwise the aisle, one on another, like a tile roof; heads of the top corpses lay on the middle of the body that is bellow, with their legs towards the doors.
There are 79 corpses in total, with their outer clothing on. Prison clothes are on corpses of three men and one woman. On clothes of six corpses, numbers are sewn on the left side of the chest. The corpses have bullet wounds in the nape; all bodies are in the stage of decomposition with a strong putrid smell.
There are clothes and bedding everywhere scattered in disorder.
200 meters away from the camp, to the north from the railway, near a ditch, there is a burned down building with a stone base and two pipes remaining. At a corner of the base on a stone the date of 7/21/1944 is engraved. The base is 45 centimeters high. On the site of fire, in ashes, there are plenty of burnt skulls, vertebras, and other bones and remains of corpses. Most of the corpses were completely burned down that is why it is not obviously possible to define the exact amount of corpses. Only 133 of the burnt corpses, which are 13-15% of the total, can be possibly recognized. On the southern side of the house, outside of the base, two female corpses lay. The burnt head of one corpse and burnt feet of the other are directed towards the base.
At the east side, 15 meters away from the burnt-down building, among ridges of cabbage, lies a corpse of a man with a bullet wound in his nape.
On the same side, 30 meters away from the burnt-down house, lies a corpse with scorched clothes and strong burns on his hips and on the bottom part of his stomach. The corpse has an entrance bullet wound on the right side of his back and an exit wound on the right side of the chest. On the western side, 5 meters away from the burnt-down building, lies a corpse of a man with two bullet wounds on the left side of the chest.
Between the burnt-down building and the camp, in a ditch, at the distance of one meter from the road, from the left side, lies a corpse of a man with many bullet wounds on the right hand, on his neck and back.
700 meters to the north from the camp, on a glade that is 27 meters away from the wood road there are four fires situated 4 meters away from each other; one of them was only prepared, the other three were already burnt down. The area of the fires is 6 x 6.5 meters. The fires consist of 6 logs put on the ground with a number of poles with 75 cm pine and fir-tree logs on it. In the middle of the fire four poles are hammered by a quadrangle at the distance of 0,5 m from each other. Thin logs are rarely fixed on a pole, which, most likely, should represent a pipe. On the three burned down fires corners remained at the western side. On the bottom layer of firewood lie corpses with burnt-down bottom parts of the body. Corpses lay with their faces downwards, some of them with overhanging hands. Two corpses are with their faces closed by hands, the palms densely pressed to the face and eyes closed by the fingers. By the remaining parts of the corpses it can be said that there were 17 corpses put on the fire in one row, and there were 5 such rows, heads of corpses of the second and the following rows lie on the feet of the previous row. A layer of firewood is placed on the first layer of corpses and the second layer of corpses lies on it. On the second and on the fourth fire two layers of corpses are visible, and on the third fire - three layers. The middle and eastern parts of the fires have completely burnt down. On the remaining parts of the fires, it is possible to make out 254 burnt corpses that is 20-25% of the overall number of corpses that were laid on the fires.
At the northern and the northeastern side at the distance from 5 up to 200 m, 18 corpses of men with bullet wounds in the area of the nape, back and legs lie on the glade.

According to the above, the investigators counted 79+133+1+1+1+1+254+18 = 488 recognizable corpses. They estimated that the burned-down building where 133 corpses were recognizable contained the remains of at least (133 ÷ 0.15 =) 887 people (thereof 754 burned beyond recognition), and that the three pyres whose middle and eastern parts had completely burned down contained the remains of at least (254 ÷ 0.25 =) 1,016 people (thereof 762 burned beyond recognition). The minimum number of victims they counted or estimated was thus 2,004, thereof 488 recognizable and 1,516 unrecognizable. The estimate regarding the pyres, which would imply that each of the (2+2+3 =) 7 layers of burned bodies visible consisted of about 145 corpses, seems to be in contradiction with the earlier statement that "By the remaining parts of the corpses it can be said that there were 17 corpses put on the fire in one row, and there were 5 such rows, heads of corpses of the second and the following rows lie on the feet of the previous row.", as this would imply only (17x5 =) 85 corpses per layer, (85 x 7 =) 595 corpses in all 7 layers of the three pyres, and a minimum total of 1,583 instead of 2,004 counted or estimated victims. Apparently the investigators assumed that each row had consisted of more corpses than could be established on hand of the remaining parts. 145 corpses in 5 rows (the latter being quite a reasonable figure if a pyre was 6.5 meters wide, the heads of a subsequent row lay on the feet of a previous row and the heads or feet of the outermost row extended beyond the pyre’s outermost logs) would imply 29 corpses in each row. This is also not implausible, as can be established on hand of Mattogno’s illustrations 13.1 to 13.3 on p. 1485, reproduced below.



On the first of these three images, "Illustration 13.1", one sees 8 logs of different sizes at the bottom, with their heads facing the foreground. Above these one sees, from left to right, 5 logs of about equal length and diameter lined up lengthwise, with an empty space between the fourth and the fifth log, and the picture’s extension to the right suggesting that there was a sixth log with the same length and diameter as the other five. These could have been the "6 logs put on the ground" mentioned in the first Soviet report quoted by Mattogno. If each of these logs was one meter long, the length of the pyre as shown from the left to the right of the picture can be assumed to have been 6 meters, i.e. the length stated in Report 1. From the picture’s foreground to the picture’s background one sees several rows of apparently similar logs lined up side by side, with the row on the right side of the picture seemingly wider (about 14-15 logs) than the other rows, which suggests that the pyre was not finished or had already been partially dismantled at the time the picture was taken.

The last of the three images – Mattogno’s "Illustration 13.3"– shows how many persons could be aligned, with their heads on or beyond the log, along the length of each of the aforementioned six logs. There is room enough for four or five heads and upper body parts along the length of each log, i.e. 24-30 heads and upper body parts along the length of six logs lined up lengthwise. This means that, with 5 rows of corpses along the pyre’s width, the 145 corpses per layer mentioned above (which is almost three times the maximum number postulated by Mattogno) are quite feasible. And that Mattogno’s photomontage in "Illustration 13.4" is utter nonsense.

Report 2 differs from Report 1 in that it estimates 800 (instead of at least 887) killed and burnt inside the building and assumes 8-10 rows of corpses (instead of the 5 assumed in Report 1) along the width of the pyres. Whether this higher number of rows is plausible depends on how the bodies were aligned. If
a) the bodies of every two rows were placed in such a way that their lengths overlapped, and
b) the heads or feet of the outermost rows of bodies extended beyond the logs on each side of the pyre’s width,
then it is not implausible that each two rows would cover about 1.60 meters^[8] and that 8 rows could thus fit on a stretch of 6.5 meters. However, such arrangement would contradict the description in Report 1, whereby there was only an overlapping of heads and feet. As Report 2 doesn’t state on what observations the stated higher number of rows was based, I’ll stick with the 5 rows mentioned in Report 1 and the 145 corpses per layer on the pyres. If the number killed inside the burned building was 800 as per Report 2 instead of at least 887 according to Report 1, the total number of victims is reduced from at least 2004 to at least 1,917. Thus the conclusion in Report 3, whereby "up to" (i.e. a maximum of) 1,800 – 2,000 people were killed in the Klooga massacre, is in line with the finds on site recorded in the other two reports, even comparatively conservative.

Mattogno claims that the pictures he shows "even partly contradict the Soviet statements mentioned above", without explaining wherein the contradiction is supposed to consist. Then he triumphantly proclaims that the pictures "further tear to pieces Muehlenkamp’s thermo-technical delirium, because they show an impressive amount of wood for only two layers of corpses". Outside Mattogno’s wishful thinking, all this "impressive amount of wood" means is that more wood in relation to corpse mass was used at Klooga than on the pyres set up at the Dresden Altmarkt after the bombing attacks on 13/14 February 1945 and their closest match, the cremation pyres at the AR extermination camps, which, due to the method applied (especially the placing of the corpses on a metal grate removed from the ground) and the types of fuel used for cremation (with a clear predominance of liquid fuel at Dresden and a likely predominance of such fuel also at the AR camps) managed to burn corpses with a far less "impressive" amount of wood^[9].

Wishful thinking also guides Mattogno’s argument derived from the duration of burning claimed in the second Soviet report (two and a half days), as he contends that if this claim is taken for granted, "and even without taking into consideration the time needed to erect the pyres", the times required to burn the corpses at the AR camps would be "1,012 for Bełżec (against the 105 available), 2,690 for Sobibór (against 365), 1,472 for Treblinka". Apart from the farcicality of Mattogno’s assumptions regarding the available cremation grate area at these camps and (except as concerns Sobibór) the respective cremation period borne out by evidence, a cremation period of two and a half days at Klooga would have to be attributed to the comparatively much less efficient construction of these pyres, consisting of wooden logs placed on the ground and on top of each other alone, the reduced amount of accelerant employed (14 "barrels" of gasoline according to Report 2, for three pyres with a total area of 117 square meters), and the fact that the fires, unlike those at the AR camps, were untended as the killers left the camp after setting the pyres on fire. ^[10]. Cremation was done much more efficiently at the Dresden Altmarkt, where corpses were burned at a rate of 500 per day (including the presumably considerable time required for bringing the corpses to the square, trying to identify them and building each pyre) on a grate area that I estimated at just 14 m², little more than a third of a Klooga pyre’s area. At the AR camps, where the corpses just had to be dragged out of nearby mass graves and their identity was indifferent to the organizers, the number of corpses burned per day and square meter of pyre can hardly have been lower than at Dresden. ^[11].

Mattogno’s fantasizing about AR cremation times is preceded by what is arguably the most despicable part of his musings about the Klooga massacre. Mattogno refers to an article by a certain Jan Kuras, who in an article in a "Revisionist" publication^[12] claimed to have "critically analyzed" a number of Klooga images he had received from the Yad Vashem archives and found that "they strongly suggest that these photos were staged by the Soviets using living people". So what Mattogno is suggesting here is that the Soviets made up the Klooga massacre and that American journalist W.H. Lawrence, who claimed to have "seen and counted recognizable parts of 438 complete and partly burned bodies of men, women and children" at Klooga, was an inveterate liar.

What makes Kuras’ "analysis" rather ridiculous is not so much the fact that he provides no backup for his claims whereby certain features of the bodies shown on the "analyzed" pictures suggest living people as the fact that, besides the photographs he "analyzed", the Soviets also took photos of unburned or partially burned corpses found on or by the Klooga pyres that are among the most shockingly graphic images of Nazi atrocities I have seen. These images can be accessed on the USHMM website^[13], and some of them have been included in one of my photo collections on this blog site^[14]. Furthermore graphic footage of corpses found at Klooga was included in the Soviet documentary film "The Atrocities committed by German Fascists in the USSR", shown at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal on 19 February 1946^[15].

It should be obvious to whoever sees these images that at Klooga the Soviets would have had no need whatsoever to do any staging with "living people", had they been thus inclined.

I can give Mr. Kuras the benefit of doubt and assume that he indulged in his photo-analysis fantasies without having seen the harrowing Klooga images that show said fantasies to be just that. But it’s more difficult to give the same benefit to Carlo Mattogno, who on p. 1201 of the magnum opus quotes my reference to the collection of photographs I mentioned on p. 396 of the critique, which includes some of these Klooga images.

It beggars belief that Mattogno did not follow the link in note 35 on p. 396 of the critique, which leads to this collection^[16] and lists 12 images of the Treblinka site (nos. 1.1.79, 1.1.84, 1.1.85, 1.3.1 to 1.3.7, 2.7.1 and 2.7.2) contained therein, of which only 4 are shown in the critique. Unless, of course, one is to assume that sensitive Mattogno didn’t want to disturb his peace of mind by looking at pictures of atrocities committed by his Nazi clients.

Notes

[1]The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt” An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers, 2013 Castle Hill Publishers, UK, online under [link].
[2]These subjects are discussed at length, regarding the Aktion Reinhard(t) extermination camps Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka and Chełmno extermination camp, in the series "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia", starting under [link].
[3]Jonathan Harrison, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Jason Myers, Sergey Romanov, Nicholas Terry, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues, A Holocaust Controversies White Paper, First Edition, December 2011, online i.a. under [link].
[4]"Concluding remarks of Deputy Public Prosecutor of the Estonian SSR on materials of investigation of mass executions of prisoners and destruction of their bodies in Klooga concentration camp (Harjumaa Uyezd)", October 12, 944, Tallinn, in: Estonia. The Bloody Trace of Nazism 1941-1944. Selection of Archival Documents on Crimes of Estonian Collaborators in the Second World War, pp. 36-44 (p. 43). This document collection, which I will hereinafter refer to as Estonian Collaborators, is available online under [link].
[5]"Report of survey of the Klooga concentration camp held by the Office of Public Prosecutor of the Estonian SSR", September 29, 1944 (Estonian Collaborators, pp. 28-29).
[6]"Report about atrocities of Nazis and their Estonian accomplices against prisoners of the Klooga concentration camp", September 29, 1944 (Estonian Collaborators, pp. 32-35).
[7] As note 4.
[8]This would be the average stature of Jews (male and female) in eastern Poland at the time, see the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 1)" ([link]), namely the reference to my related discussions with Friedrich Jansson about the subject. Klooga held both male and female prisoners, mostly from Lithuania and Latvia. Observed statures of male and female Jews in Lithuania are mentioned in The unedited full-text of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia ([link]).
[9] For details see the blog series mentioned in note 2.
[10] An approximate match in inefficiency can be found in the disastrous pyres at Epynt in Wales during the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic in the UK, which burned for five months although the British Environment Agency’s original feasibility report "only allowed for 2-3 days of burning of 900 cattle using 525 tons of coal in total" (Epynt Action Group, A Report on the damage to the environment caused by water pollution, plus possible air pollution and risks to human health resulting from the disposal of animal carcasses at an unlicensed site at Mynydd Eppynt (Epynt) in mid-Wales during the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK, p. 4. See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 2, Section 3)", which contains a link to this report, downloadable as a Word document in note 168).
[11]For details see Part 3, Section 1 ([link]) and Section 2 ([link]), of the series "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia".
[12]"Sowjetische Bildfälschungen. Eine Analyse gestellter sowjetische Fotos aus dem Lager Klooga in Estland", Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, no. 3, 1999, pp. 278-283, online under [link].
[13]Search results for "Klooga" ([link]).
[14]See the blog "Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes" ([link]), images 1.2.13 to 1.2.21.
[15]See the blog "The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR (2)" ([link]).
[16]That is, to the blog mentioned in note 14 above.

I have seen a truck on the yard and knew it was a so called gas wagon...When Rie. told me that I had to drive with the vehicle, I immediately knew what this was about."

"He [Se.] had the order to drive with a Secret Police secretary in a car behind the gas wagon, but not with a responsible or supervising function for this gassing trip....After the unloading of the Russians killed with exhaust, he and the Secret Police secretary continued their drive to Mogilev."

In chapter 13 of Mattogno, Graf and Kues’ magnum opus^[1], with the self-descriptive title "Asinine, Judeophantic Arrogance", Mattogno (p. 1480) brags about his "devastating article “Patrick Desbois e le ‘fosse comuni’ di Ebrei in Ucraina” (Patrick Desbois and the ‘mass graves’ of Jews in Ukraine”)", suggesting that it was not cited in the HC critique of Mattogno, Graf and Kues^[2] because the critique’s authors (who he refers to as the "plagiarist bloggers") "were probably unable to devise any deception in order to counter my essay and to sustain this shooting aspect of the Holocaust, whose significance rises in proportion to the constant and inescapable decrease of the historiographic weight of its gassing aspect".

In this blog series, I will show that the mentioned article is devastating indeed – for the credibility of its author. Or better, that it would be devastating for Mattogno’s credibility if he had any such left.



Mattogno’s 2009 article about Desbois slumbered in its original Italian version on "Revisionist" websites like the one referred to by Mattogno^[3], until an English translation was published in "Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2015" of "Inconvenient History", a "Revisionist" journal that counts Mattogno and other "Revisionist" celebrities among its "columnists"^[4]. The translator is Carlos Porter, a "respected scholar" whose latest contribution to historical scholarship consisted in calling for the mass extermination of refugees entering Europe^[5].

Mattogno starts out by referring to an article in a French literary journal^[6] that mentions criticisms leveled against Desbois’ book Porteur de memoires^[7] and its author, as well as Desbois’ response to such criticisms, namely the following:
• One of the journal’s authors, Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, publicly distanced herself (in a broadcast in which Desbois refused to participate) from her earlier praise of Desbois’ book, and was thereupon excluded from a seminar sponsored by Sorbonne University with historian Edouard Husson and Father Desbois in the fall of 2008.
• Georges Bensoussan, chief editor of the Revue d'histoire de la Shoah, called Desbois’ expression "Shoah par balles" a form of "expression marketing" and a "stupidity" ("niaiserie"), on grounds that "there was not a Shoah by gas and a Shoah by bullets, but one single Shoah, carried out by countless killing methods, including killing people with blade weapons, throwing them into wells, immuring them alive, etc."^[8].
• The book’s subtitle "A priest reveals the Shoah by bullets" ("Un prêtre révèle la Shoah par balles") presents Desbois as a pioneer who uncovered hitherto unknown facts, and there are no references in the book’s text to previous works about Nazi mobile killing operations in Eastern Europe, such as the large parts of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews dedicated to this subject (referred to by Claude Lanzmann, the maker of the Shoah documentary, in a comment to Desbois book).
• Desbois invoked a misunderstanding and pointed out that he is not a historian, an argument seconded by Anne-Marie Revcolevschi, general director of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, who argued that Desbois’ undertaking is that of a priest and he is entitled to have his own methodology, which differs from that of university professors.
• A photographer by the name of Guillaume Ribot pointed out to Desbois that there were numerous memorials around pits pertaining to Nazi killing sites, which belies the impression created by Desbois that the vast majority of pits had been hitherto ignored. While not calling into question the relevance of Desbois’ research, Ribot deplores what he calls the "small compromises with truth" ("petits arrangements avec la vérité") that, according to him, led Desbois to exaggerate the magnitude of his discoveries.
• Desbois on his part insisted that his research has the merit of showing that the existing memorials were not always erected at the place where the killing actually took place and of pointing out the secondary, hitherto unknown killing sites, demonstrating that the killing was far more dispersed than had been previously assumed.
• Whereas this endeavor was not criticized by anyone, some deplored that Desbois’ discoveries were accompanied by what they consider approximations. Such was the case with the massacre that took place at Busk on May 21st, 1943. On his blog historian Edouard Husson wrote that Father Desbois’ inquiry made it possible to establish that over 1,500 Jews were killed on site, thereby revising the previous notion that all Jews of Busk had been deported to Bełżec extermination camp. However, this on site killing has been known for sixty years, as pointed out by Alexander Kruglov in a book (The Losses Suffered by Ukrainian Jews, 1941-1944) published in 2005.
• Whereas researchers have increasingly become concerned with the precise role that local populations played in the mass killing of Jews, namely their degree of complicity with the Nazis and their auxiliaries, Desbois’ research completely ignored this issue, as pointed out by historians Christian Ingrao and Jean Solchany. It being known that Ukrainians provided the largest contingent of extermination camp guards, Claude Lanzmann considered this omission quite embarrassing. The aforementioned Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine claimed that she was warned against addressing this subject towards "our nice Ukrainian witnesses" ("nos braves témoins ukrainiens"), on grounds that she had no right to do so and might additionally scare them away. Desbois countered that the issue of complicity was not his priority, which lies in reconstructing the crimes scenes in order to find out where the dead are.
• Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine considered it a waste to spend so much many without asking "the essential questions", and doubted the scholarly value of interviews that she deemed to have been conducted in a climate of intimidation due to the presence of an armed bodyguard in a camouflage suit. The insinuation that the witnesses were somehow frightened led Desbois to lose his complacency, claim that he was a victim of calumny and point out that one could not on the one hand complain that he avoided questions which might upset the witnesses and on the other claim that he frightened them.

The article ends with the remark that doubts about the magnitude and interest of the finds made by Desbois’ team might be dissipated when Desbois’ archives would be easily accessible. So far this had not been the case as told to the journal by several researchers who claimed an evasive attitude on the part of Desbois, with meetings cancelled at the last minute and phone calls left unanswered. Desbois had promised to end this state of affairs and that his archives would be opened to researchers as of 15 October 2009.

Some of the aforementioned criticism comes across as over the top, namely Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s claim of witness intimidation, which – as Desbois correctly pointed out – contradicts her complaint that he avoided questions about complicity in the killings that might make the witnesses feel uneasy or anger them. Other criticism, namely that of Desbois’ self-promotion and his failing to duly credit the work of other researchers, is arguably pertinent and also expressed in a review of the German translation of his book^[9].

However, what is not borne out by any of this criticism is the conclusion Mattogno derived, in his "devastating" article, from the parts of the Le Monde des Livres - article that he quoted or rendered because he thought they helped his argument – the conclusion that Desbois "has, for his research, adopted a methodology based, not on scholarly standards, but, rather, on religious faith".

Said conclusion, which carries a distinct element of self-projection (considering that all of Mattogno’s research is aimed at vindicating preconceived notions to which he clings with a quasi-religious fervor, and accordingly far away from living up to scholarly standards) is especially not supported, contrary to the impression Mattogno tries to create, by Anne-Marie Revcolevschi’s remark that Desbois’ undertaking is that of a priest and not that of a historian, and that he is entitled to have his own methodology, which differs from that of university professors. For the context of this remark shows that the difference in methodology Revcolevschi was referring to concerned not the methods used to establish or reconstruct historical events, but the academic practice of referring to previous works about the subject matter of one’s research, which Desbois’ had been accused of not following. Failure to credit previous researchers in the same field does not mean, however, that Desbois has a faith-based approach to the subject matter of his research. As we shall see in this series, Desbois’ approach consists in correlating information from various sources independent of each other so as to reach conclusions that are reasonably warranted by such correlation, which is essentially what historians also do – and what Mattogno does not.

Most of the next section of Mattogno’s article, headed "Aktion 1005 and "Negationism"", is dedicated to Mattogno’s complaining that "negationism" is "a term invented by the defenders of traditional Holocaust lore to discredit revisionism" and that "the only real negationism is that professed by those who, out of intolerance, deny other people's right to freedom of expression, denying, out of pseudo-religious obtuseness and bad faith, the very foundations of historiographical and scholarly methodology itself". The obvious self-projection in the accusation of "pseudo-religious obtuseness and bad faith" aside, Mattogno seems to be maintaining that only "Revisionists" like himself are entitled to freedom of expression, whereas someone’s calling the practice of Mattogno et al "negationism", or otherwise pointing out that it has little if anything to do with revisionism in the proper sense of the term, means denying those poor "Revisionists" that freedom. Apparently it hasn’t dawned on the "Revisionist" movement’s flagship that freedom of expression works both ways, entailing both the right of "Revisionists" to express their offensive falsehoods and the right of others to express what they think of such falsehoods.

As to "historiographical and scholarly methodology itself", the utterances that precede his complaints are further proof of how little Mattogno knows about this methodology, or how little it means to him, as he refers to the "so-called"Aktion 1005, an "alleged" code word for an operation intended to erase the physical traces of Nazi mass murder in occupied Europe. As readers of Sergey Romanov’s related blogs^[10] may remember, Mattogno maintains that there is no documentary evidence to Aktion 1005 having been planned let alone undertaken, and has gone as far as claiming that the designation "1005" was invented by the Soviets. Meanwhile, researchers who take scholarly methodology seriously have, according to the latest of Sergey’s aforementioned blogs, identified 21 German wartime documents explicitly referring to the designation 1005, of which 7 have been published on this blog site. One of these published documents is of particular interest in the context of Mattogno’s "devastating" article, as we shall see below.

Mattogno returns to Aktion 1005 later in that article, producing one of his staple mantras in response to Desbois’ assertion that in this operation the Third Reich entrusted the destruction of the traces of its victims to "highly qualified, trained personnel":

This is a rather strange thing to say about Blobel, who had absolutely no competence in the field of cremation. As I have remarked above, at the time, according to Holocaust historiography, the Topf & Söhne company, the most important German builder of crematory ovens at the time, and its head engineer, Kurt Prüfer, an extremely highly qualified specialist in cremation, rendered their services at Auschwitz, concurrently with the extermination of the Jews. Notwithstanding this fact, the SS, for the huge task of cremating hundreds of thousands of bodies, instead of consulting real cremation specialists — particularly Prüfer himself or his colleague, Fritz Sander, certified engineer and designer, in October 1942, of a "Crematory furnace for bodies, capable of continuous functioning and intended for mass use" (Kontinuierlich arbeitender Leichen- Verbrennungsofen für Massenbetrieb),52 is said to have had recourse to a poor semi-drunken derelict, who, as Desbois himself remarks, had "never even studied architecture," as he later declared at Nuremberg during the Einsatzgruppen trial, but had simply attended a "state technical school at Barmen-Eberfeld, where he began a half-year [course of study], during the winter of 1913-1914, before joining the army."

The above showpiece of Mattognian ill-reasoning has been discussed in a recent blog of the "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia" series^[11], where I pointed out the reasons why Blobel and not Prüfer and/or Sander had been put in charge of Operation 1005. First of all, Blobel was a member of the SS, whereas Prüfer and Sander were civilian engineers. Second, what Prüfer and Sander were specialized in was the building of cremation ovens, and it would hardly have been expedient, let alone cost-effective, to set up cremation ovens engineered by these "real cremation specialists" at the many sites where Aktion 1005 was meant to be carried out. When large numbers of corpses or carcasses have to be disposed of within a short time, makeshift open-air incineration methods (which can be set up on site rather quickly and using easy to procure materials) are to be preferred over specially built cremation ovens (at least when such don’t exist already but have to be ordered, engineered and built first), which is why, for instance, the former and not the latter were used to dispose of mass mortality during the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Epidemic in the UK. There’s no reason to assume that builders of cremation ovens would have come up with better open-air incineration methods than those that were eventually applied with success at a large number of places (including Dresden after the Allied bombing on 13/14 February 1945), and besides those builders had their hands full designing and building cremation ovens for concentration camps.

The Prüfer-Sander mantra is followed by what can be considered Mattogno’s crowning achievement (at least in his "devastating" attack on Father Patrick Desbois) regarding Operation 1005, as he delights his audience by stomping his feet as follows:

Desbois, incredibly, adds:

Aktion 1005 was kept secret, the SS communicated with Berlin in code: the number of clouds indicated that of the re-opened graves, and the quantity of rain indicated the number of bodies that had been burned (p. 201).

Where did Desbois ever get this poppycock? From some senile "eyewitness"? What rubbish!

Mattogno is familiar with the work of a German researcher by the name of Jens Hoffmann, in whose book about Aktion 1005 the use of meteorological code words is mentioned on several occasions^[12]. Even if he were not, a little googling would have been sufficient to overcome his ignorance. A search on www.google.de with the terms "Aktion 1005" and "Wolken" (German for clouds) turns up as first result a link to an article in Germany’s main weekly magazine^[13] discussing trials against several former members of the SS or police who had been involved in Aktion 1005 and been charged with the murder of forced laborers involved in the cremation of the corpses: Max Krahner, Otto Goldapp, Otto Drews, Hans Sohns, Fritz Zietlow, Walter Ernst Helfsgott, Fritz Kirstein. Regarding Sohns, the article contains the following information:

Mit Pickeln und Schaufeln, aber auch mit Baggern ließ Sohns die Massengräber öffnen. ermittelte die Staatsanwaltschaft. Er selber kontrollierte gelegentlich den Fortgang der Arbeit an Ort und Stelle, er selber gab Befehl, die herbeigezwungenen Totengräber durch Genickschuß zu töten. Nur geschossen hat er selber nicht: jemals seine Versetzung oder Abberufung beantragt auch nicht.
Er war immer bei der Sache, meldete jeweils Vollzug unter Stichwort "Wolkenhöhe" aus den Niederungen der Menschenvernichtung.

Sohns had the mass graves opened with pickaxes and shovels, but also with excavators, according to the public prosecutor’s office’s investigations. He himself occasionally controlled the progress of the work on site, and he himself gave the order to kill the forced grave diggers by shots in the neck. He only didn’t shoot himself; he also never requested a transfer or relief from his post.
He always had things under control, and on each occasion reported accomplishment under the keyword "cloud height" from the hollows of human extermination.

(Emphases added.)

The trial against Sohns et al was held before the Stuttgart Court of Assizes (Landgericht Stuttgart) and ended with the court’s verdict on 13.03.1969, which is included as Verfahren Lfd.Nr.701 in the University of Amsterdam’s Justiz und NS-Verbrechen collection^[14] and can be ordered from there. Regarding the use of the code word "Wolkenhöhe" ("cloud height"), the judgment contains the following findings:

Auf der gemeinsamen Grundsatzbesprechung teilte Blobel ferner mit, dass der Abteilung IV des RSHA täglich über die Zahl der beseitigten Leichen berichtet werden müsse. Er fragte die Anwesenden, ob jemand einen vernünftigen Vorschlag zur praktischen Handhabung der Berichtspflicht machen könne. Hierauf schlug Soh. vor, die täglichen Leistungsberichte als "Wettermeldung" zu tarnen. Als "Wolkenhöhe" verschlüsselt konnte die Leichenzahl über Funk oder von einer KdS-Dienststelle aus fernschriftlich unauffällig an den BdS gemeldet werden, der die bei ihm einlaufenden Berichte täglich an das RSHA weiterzuleiten hatte. In der Praxis oblag es später den Teilkommandoführem, also auch dem Angeklagten Zie., die täglichen "Wettermeldungen" abzugeben. Ob Soh. in der Praxis auch in das von ihm inspirierte Berichtswesen eingeschaltet war, ist ungeklärt. […]
Der Angeklagte hat ferner eingeräumt, schon vor Aufnahme der eigentlichen Arbeiten bei der gemeinsamen Grundsatzbesprechung auf entsprechende Frage Blobels vorgeschlagen zu haben, dass - wie das später dann in der Praxis tatsächlich weitgehend durchgeführt wurde - die vom RSHA geforderten täglichen Leistungsberichte als "Wettermeldung" verschlüsselt und die Zahl der verbrannten Leichen mit einer als "Wolkenhöhe" getarnten Zahl durchgegeben werden sollten.

At the joint principle meeting Blobel furthermore informed that Section IV of the RSHA had to be informed about the number of removed corpses on a daily basis. He asked those present if anyone could make a reasonable suggestion about the practical handling of this reporting duty. Thereupon Soh. suggested to mask the daily performance reports as "weather report". Coded as "cloud height", the number of corpses could inconspicuously be reported by radio or by a service of the Commander of Security Police and Security Service (Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD - KdS) per telex to the Head of the Security Police and Security Service (Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD - BdS), who had to transmit the messages received to the RSHA on a daily basis. In practice the commanders of partial detachments, including the defendant Zie., later had the task of issuing the daily "weather reports". Whether Soh. was also involved in the practice of reporting he had inspired has not been clarified. […]
The defendant furthermore admitted that already before the works proper started he had at the joint principle meeting suggested, in response to a corresponding question by Blobel, that – as was later actually done in practice to a large extent – the daily performance reports required by the RSHA should be coded as "weather reports" and the number of burned corpses should be reported by a number masked as "cloud height".

So instead of the account of "some senile "eyewitness"" derisively suggested by Mattogno we have the deposition of a key participant in Operation 1005 at a trial before a West German court, held according to the defendant-friendly procedural rules of a democratic state, in which defendants were assisted by legal counsel and entitled to deny the charges brought against them and challenge the related evidence as they saw fit.

But it gets even better, for one of the documents quoted by Sergey^[15] confirms Sohns’ deposition whereby meteorological code words were used to report the progress of Operation 1005, namely the sixth one^[16]:

Einsatz der SK 1005 A und B, GrS-Auftrag RFSS an SS-Staf. Blobel im Raum BdS-Schwarzes Meer nicht möglich. Erfaßte Niederschlagsgebiete nur noch im Raum KdS-Krim. Einsatz dort bei Front- und Bandenlage zZt. untunlich. Transportraum für Gesamtkommando nicht vorhanden. Gerüchteweise verlautet, daß Räumung Krim bevorsteht. Schlage Auflösung beider Kommandos bzw. Einsatz in anderem Raume vor.
Source: excerpt from a secret 28.03.1944 radiogram from SS-Stubaf. Friedrich Hegenscheidt (KdS Schwarzes Meer) to Chef der Sipo und des SD and Einsatzgruppe C Lemberg, Abw. Stab; Barch, B 162/204 ARZ 419/62, Band 1, Bl. 146 as cited in ibid., S. 127. (Note that "Niederschläge" was a code word for buried bodies of the Nazi victims, cf. B 162/3537, Bl. 115.)

(Emphases added.)

"Niederschlag" translates as "rainfall", "Niederschlagsgebiete" translates as "rainfall areas", and the highlighted part of Sergey’s quote translates as "Recorded rainfall areas left only in the area of Commander of Security Police and Security Service Crimea", which in the context of Operation 1005 meant that only in this area there remained mass graves to removed. The report goes on to state that the operation could not be carried out at the time due to the situation at the front and partisan activity, that there were rumors whereby the Crimea was about to be evacuated, and that the dissolution of both detachments (SK 1005 A and B) or their use elsewhere was thus suggested.

The above-mentioned insider witness and documentary evidence makes Mattogno’s derisive remark about the source of Desbois’ reference to the coding of Operation 1005 reports look like the impertinent blather of a charlatan incapable or unwilling to do even the most basic research in the field of his "scholarly" activity, whereas Desbois comes across as someone who did his homework of consulting the available sources of evidence or at least the judgments and/or scholarly literature wherein such sources are mentioned.

But then, who in his right mind still believes that Mattogno’s "scholarship" amounts to anything other than poppycock?

That term also fits Mattogno’s subsequent question why cremations within the scope of Operation 1005 were concealed whereas the shootings had been done "in the light of day". If Mattogno had paused to think a little, it might have occurred to him that the shootings were mostly carried out in 1941/42, at a time when the Nazis hoped to win the war, whereas the exhumation and burning of the victims in Operation 1005 took place in 1943/44, at a time when German forces were in full retreat on the Eastern Front. Thus there was certain logic – to the extent that mass murder can be considered logical at all – in an endeavor to maintain secrecy regarding Operation 1005. However, as pointed out by Desbois^[17], the idea that secrecy could be achieved was wishful thinking insofar as "Operation 1005 was doubtless the best known German operation in the immediate neighborhood of the cremation sites during the genocide of the Jews".

Mattogno quite pointlessly chides Desbois for having failed to express an opinion on the "fundamental question" of how many mass graves the Nazis had succeeded in eliminating the traces of, as if Desbois had undertaken to provide a scholarly study of Operation 1005 instead of just briefly narrating, in a chapter that occupies no more than seven pages of his book (which is an autobiographical account and not a work of historiography) ^[18], this Nazi operation and his encounter with related evidence.

The evidence presented by Desbois regarding Operation 1005, if one is to believe Mattogno, consists of no more than a photo showing "traces of the chicken coop in which the Soviet POWs employed in Aktion 1005 were burned". Mattogno conveniently omits eyewitness evidence to cremations within the scope of Operation 1005 that is presented in Desbois’ book, including the testimonies of two women from Voskresenskoye near Nikolayev, Olga Bitiouk and a woman identified only by her first name, Maria^[19]. These two testimonies match in certain details and differ in others, as one would expect of testimonies provided independently of each other. Both witnesses mention the involvement of Soviet prisoners of war who were imprisoned in the local kolkhoze chicken farm, but differ in what concerns the work these prisoners were made to perform: whereas Maria only mentions their being tasked with burning the corpses, Olga holds that the prisoners were also forced to do or take part in the shooting of the Jews. As to the manner in which these prisoners were disposed of, Olga states that they were shot, whereas Maria vividly recalls that they were burned alive inside the chicken farm. While it is improbable that the POWs took part in the shooting as claimed by Olga (this would have implied their being part of collaborator formations like the extermination camps’ Trawniki guards, and be incompatible with the prisoners’ being locked up inside the chicken coop), the prisoners’ being shot and burned alive are not necessarily mutually exclusive propositions. It is possible, even likely, that (similarly to what happened during anti-partisan operations in which whole villages were wiped out together with their inhabitants^[20]), the POWs were shot down inside the chicken coop which was then set on fire, and those among them who were merely wounded perished in the flames.

The circumstances surrounding the testimonies provided by Maria (it seems that there was one preceding the transcribed interview on 13 July 2006^[21]) are quite interesting in that they belie several conjectures whereby Mattogno tries to discredit testimonies collected by Father Desbois:

How could I forget Maria’s story? She lived in the village of Voskresenskoye, not far from Nikolayev. I arrived in front of Maria’s house with Svetlana. Maria appeared, here plaited hair under a multi-colored scarf, her face covered with tears. Just mentioning what she lived through during the war was unbearable to her. Her husband, dressed in blue overalls, rushed into the courtyard, shouting "I’m going to call the Soviets. I am going to call the police – my wife won’t talk unless the Soviets agree to it."
I have rarely encountered such violence mixed with such suffering. I explained to him that it was only for history, memory, and the archives. Maria managed to contain her sobs: we set up the camera very quickly and she began talking. ^[22]

So where Mattogno claims that the testimonies were "clearly invalidated by the rumors circulating post war", we have a witness who, decades after the events she narrates, is still emotionally overwhelmed by what she recalls having seen and heard at the time. Where Mattogno claims that witnesses were "heavily influenced by propaganda", we have villagers so isolated from the outside world that in 2006, 15 years after the demise of the Soviet Union, Maria’s husband still believed that "the Soviets" were in charge. It’s unlikely that "propaganda" reached or had much influence on the people in boondocks like Voskresenskoye, whose uniform lives of hard work and poverty were briefly interrupted by the experience of Nazi occupation and atrocities and then resumed their dreary monotony and isolation. The circumstances surrounding Maria’s testimonies also show the absurdity of any insinuations that the witnesses had in any way felt coerced or intimidated. Instead Father Desbois gave Maria and others the opportunity to finally make a clear breast of horrible memories they had carried inside for decades, without anybody to talk to about them because nobody was interested. Where Mattogno, who apparently believes that it is he who sets the standards of evidence whereby historical facts are established, dismissively speaks of "mere" testimonies, what we actually have is historically relevant pieces of a puzzle that can be put together with other pieces independent of them, such as physical traces, documents, perpetrator testimonies and/or testimonies of other witnesses as isolated as Maria, into a consistent narrative of the Nazi genocide of Ukraine’s Jews as it happened in remote places like Voskresenskoye.

Notes

[1]The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt” An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers, 2013 Castle Hill Publishers, UK, online under [link].
[2] Jonathan Harrison, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Jason Myers, Sergey Romanov, Nicholas Terry, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues, A Holocaust Controversies White Paper, First Edition, December 2011, online i.a. under [link].
[3] See under [link].
[4] See under [link].
[5] See the blog "Holocaust Denier Carlos Porter Wants the Mass Extermination of Refugees" ([link]).
Porter’s original comment can be read under [link].
[6] Thomas Wieder, "Querelle autour du Père Desbois", in Le Monde des Livres, 18.06.2009, online under [link].
[7] Translated into English as The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
[8]''Il n'y a pas eu, face à une ''Shoah par gaz'', une Shoah par balles''. Mais une seule Shoah, avec des méthodes de tueries innombrables: on a aussi tué des gens à l'arme blanche, on les a jetés dans des puits, emmurés vivants, etc."
[9] Jan Süselbeck, ''Kontinent der Vernichtung'', literaturkritik.de rezensionsforum, October 2009 ([link], translation under [link]). In fairness, it should be mentioned that while Desbois’ book is indeed missing a bibliography and references to previous or contemporary work on site by others, it contains very favorable mentions of historians Martin Dean, Édouard Husson and Dieter Pohl (Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 103f.). Husson and Pohl are members of the Scientific Committee of Yahad in Unum, see under [link].
[10]''That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part I: Deniers on Sonderkommando 1005'' ([link]); ''Once More, With Feeling: Deniers And Aktion 1005, 10 Years Later''; ([link]); "A short update on Mattogno and Aktion 1005" ([link]); ''Another 1005 mini-update'' ([link]).
[11]"Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 1, Section 2a)" ([link]).
[12] Jens Hoffmann, "Das kann man nicht erzählen."»Aktion 1005« - Wie die Nazis die Spuren ihrer Massenmorde in Osteuropa beseitigten,, 2008 KKV konkret Hamburg, pp. 108, 127 and 157f.
[13]"Wolkenhöhe", in: Der Spiegel, 30.09.1968 ([link]).
[14] A list of all West German judgments in the collection, sorted by Lfd.Nr. (Case Nr.), is available under [link]. English version: [link]
[15] This document is quoted in Hoffmann, as note 12, p. 127. On page 108 Hoffmann refers to Sohns’ suggestion at the meeting with Blobel mentioned in the Stuttgart Court’s judgment. On page 158 he quotes at length from the deposition made on 24.9.1967 by Walter Meyer, who during the war had handled the radio station of Sonderkommando 7b. Meyer recalled having been upset about receiving numerous coded "weather reports" stating a "Wolkenhöhe" (cloud height) followed by a figure, which he had considered completely superfluous until someone informed him that the "weather reports" were actually reports about the digging up of mass graves.
[16]"Once More, With Feeling: Deniers And Aktion 1005, 10 Years Later" ([link]).
[17]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 154.
[18] As pointed out in Süselbeck’s review (note 9).
[19]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 147-151 and 156-159. The testimonies are transcribed in the reference library thread "Father Patrick Desbois, "The Holocaust by Bullets"" ([link]).
[20] See Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp. 914f., 964f., translations in the reference library thread "The Nazi struggle against Soviet partisans" ([link]).
[21]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 156-159.
[22] As above, pp. 155-156. A picture of Maria as she recalls the burning of the POWs inside the chicken coop is included in the book’s photo section.

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)

In the previous blog of this series we have seen that Mattogno’s self-projecting accusation whereby Desbois adopts a "faith-based" methodology in his research is not supported by the source Mattogno cites in support of this accusation, while on the other hand Mattogno’s writing about Operation 1005 shows that he knows or cares little about the "historiographical and scholarly methodology" he invokes.

In this blog, we will have a look at further attacks on Desbois’ methodology in Mattogno’s critique.



In the 3rd section of his "devastating" article, headed "Numerical nonsense", Mattogno takes issue with Desbois’ assertion, during an exhibition of his research finds in Paris on 20-30 June 2007, whereby "testimonies gathered by the Yahad, systematically compared with written documentation, have enabled the discovery of more than five hundred previously forgotten mass graves^[23] and the collection of material evidence relating to the genocide (weapons, cartridge cases, ammunition)". Conveniently ignoring that Desbois is referring to a convergence of various elements of evidence including but not limited to eyewitness testimonies, Mattogno hollers that "the presumed "discovery of more than five hundred mass graves" is a shameless lie", on grounds that "with the exception of 15 graves, with regard to which many objections can nevertheless still be raised, Desbois never located one single grave, but rather, areas in meadows, woods or agricultural lands in which he claims mass graves exist, based on mere testimonies" (which Mattogno will try to discredit as best as he can).

The unscholarly dismissal of an important source of historical evidence as "mere" testimonies aside, the above can be safely called a shameless lie of Mattogno’s, who tries to create the impression that Desbois uncritically assumes that there is a mass grave wherever local villagers tell him there is one. Actually, as mentioned in several parts of Desbois’ book^[24], physical traces found on site and evidence recorded in German and/or Soviet archives are also important elements in identifying a murder site. Physical traces may include human bones brought to the surface by robbery diggers, like in the cases of Khvativ and Bakhiv, but cartridges found on site are considered by Desbois the main indicator of a mass shooting. If such cartridges are from weapons manufactured by only one of the belligerents, namely from German weapons, the conclusion is warranted that the shooting from which these cartridges were left was not combat, but one-sided killing. If eyewitnesses describe the site of this one-sided killing as the site of a mass shooting carried out by German forces, the conclusion that the cartridges are lying where the victims of such mass shooting were shot and buried is logically warranted, especially if there are also human remains visible and/or if evidence recorded by German and/or Soviet investigators points to a massacre carried out by German forces in the respective area. Desbois’ team studies available evidence from German and/or Soviet archives to get an idea of what happened in the area they intend to investigate. Then they approach local inhabitants old enough to have witnessed these events, independently of each other if there are several such locals. Then they endeavor to go with the witnesses to where the same recall the killings to have taken place and reconstruct the crime scene from the witnesses’ vantage point. Finally, they corroborate their finds with what physical remains of the killing, especially cartridges, can be found on the ground.

Where several different elements of evidence point to a mass killing by German forces at a certain place, there is little if any room for reasonable doubt that such mass killing happened at that place. And if, according to the interviewed eyewitnesses and/or the archival evidence consulted, the killing took place according to the method preferred by an officer responsible for many of the shootings, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln (the so-called "sardine-packing" method, in which one row of victims was forced to lay down inside a grave and killed by a shot in the neck, then another row was made to lie on top of the previous one and shot in the same manner, and so on), or if the evidence points to the victims having been otherwise dispatched with a single shot for each^[25], the number of cartridges can even serve as an indicator of the number of people killed, provided that the site was not disturbed after the war. If, on the other hand, the evidence points to a massacre performed by sustained firing from machine guns or machine pistols, the number of cartridges must be assumed to exceed the number of victims, which can only be estimated on hand of the interviewees’ testimonies and/or the archival information obtained. But even in such cases, the presence of cartridges from only one belligerent source hardens the identification of a mass murder site by local eyewitnesses.

Oblivious of the logic behind Desbois’ convergence approach to identifying a Nazi mass killing site, Mattogno attacks every converging element in isolation. His arguments as concerns cartridge finds in section 9 of his article ("“Proofs of genocide”: the cartridge casings!") are notably feeble, consisting of little more than rhetorical catch-phrases ("another aberrant methodological principle, the application of which by the naive priest approaches the level of the ridiculous"; "something much less than real evidence; "irremediable inconsistency", "merely superficial traces") and one notably silly remark, which deserves to be quoted in all its splendor:

But if the "sardine packing" story is to be taken seriously, with the corollary of killing by means of a shot to the back of the neck using Soviet machine pistols, the absence of Soviet cartridge casings would be evidence against the genocide!

Mattogno derived this nonsense from an excerpt of Andrew Ezergailis’ account of the Rumbula massacre in Latvia^[26], which reads as follows:

In planning the massacre, Jeckeln adapted the system he had devised in Ukraine for the specific conditions in Riga. The system involved detailed planning, subdividing the assignment into manageable parts, and then selecting a specialist in each area. As Jeckeln’s aide Paul Degenhart testified, there were nine aspects to the system: 1) SD men inside the ghetto drove the people out of the houses; 2) the Jews were organized in 500-person columns and brought by train to the killing grounds (actually they were driven on foot in 1,000-person columns); 3) the Order Police led the column to Rumbula; 4) the killing was done simultaneously in three pits; 5) the victims were undressed and their valuables collected on the way to the pits; 6) an inner and an outer gauntlet were formed to drive the people to the pits; 7) the victims were driven directly into the pits, saving the labor of moving the bodies; 8) Russian submachine guns were used, because the clip held fifty bullets and the weapon could be set to fire single shots;[12] 9) the victims lay face down in layers, after which the marksman would kill them with a bullet in the back of the head[13]. This method was referred to as Sardinenpackung (sardine packing), and even some of the EG operatives were horrified by its cruelty.[14] [Note 12: Landgericht Hamburg: Jahnke’s Trial Records, depositions of Paul (Herbert, Georg, Wolfgang) Degenhart. Degenhart is the main source for the weapons used. Zingler in his testimony says he had a Finnish weapon, but unless it could use the same ammunition as the Russian ones, I think he is wrong. Deposition of Zingler, p. 6. Also see Arăjs Trial Records, p. 2133 a.] [Note 13: Arăjs Trial Records, Deposition of Degenhart in the Arăjs files, Hambug pp. 11952-61. The Landgericht Hamburg files has extensive testimonies from Degenhardt, because an indictment, although it never came to fruition, was also prepared against him. Also see Landgericht Hamburg: Indictment (1971) of Oberwinder, Jahnke, Tuchel, Hernicker, Neumann and Draeger, p. 22.] [Note 14: Ohlendorf thought that Jeckeln’s was an unacceptable method, for it would brutalize the killers, since this kind of operation did not allow for the slightest deniability (Nürnberg: Einsatzgruppen Case, p. 311).]

The above shows that Degenhart’s testimony about the use of Russian sub-machine guns refers specifically to the Rumbula massacre, and not to Jeckeln’s methodology in general. It doesn’t follow from the use of Russian submachine guns at Rumbula, where a particularly high number of people had to be killed, that such weapons were used wherever mobile killing squads applied Jeckeln’s method (which other commanders of mobile killing units were horrified by and disapproved of) or certain features of that method (namely having the victims lie down on the ground and killing them with a shot in the back of the head). German machine pistols also allowed for firing single shots^[27], and the marksmen of mobile killing squads are known to have also used rifles^[28] or pistols^[29]. So what can be inferred from Degenhart’s testimony is that the finding of only Russian cartridges at a mass shooting site would not necessarily be an indication against the shooting having been done by German forces, whereas Mattogno’s inference that Russian weapons or ammunition were used by Nazi mobile killing squads as a rule (at least when they applied the Jeckeln method) is utter nonsense. Rather than produce such nonsense, Mattogno should try explaining what, other than a mass shooting carried out by German forces, the finding of only German cartridges at a site described by local bystander witnesses as a German killing site could logically mean (especially when a German massacre in the respective area also becomes apparent from documents and/or testimonies kept in German and/or former Soviet archives).

That said about Mattogno’s "ballistic" objections to Desbois’ assessment of evidence, we move back to the "Numerical nonsense" section of Mattogno’s article. Here the "Revisionist" movement’s flagship follows up his "shameless lie" accusation with another demonstration of his "scholarship" and reading capabilities, as he produces the following pearl:

Even the number of alleged victims is absurd. In his numerical tally of Holocaust victims, under the heading of "Open Air Executions," Raul Hilberg supplies the total figure of "more than 1,300,000," which includes: Einsatzgruppen, other heads of the SS and Police, Rumanian and German armies in mobile operations; shootings in Galicia during the deportations; executions of prisoners of war and shootings in Serbia and elsewhere.
It is therefore impossible to understand how one could arrive at the figure of 1.5 million victims in the Ukraine alone.

First of all, it seems that the self-appointed champion of "historiographical and scholarly methodology" hasn’t been following the evolution of historiography since Hilberg’s study, which has led to an upward revision of the number of Jews killed in mobile operations. For instance, German historian Dieter Pohl writes that of the 5.6 – 5.8 million murdered Jews, approximately 2 – 2.2 million died in mass executions, 2.5 million in extermination camps, and approximately one million due to other circumstances, in ghettos, other camps or during death marches.^[30] Second, Desbois had not claimed that 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews had been killed in open-air executions, but written the following (as quoted by Mattogno):

Between 1941 and 1944, approximately one and a half million Ukrainian Jews were murdered during the German invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany. The immense majority were shot by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units deployed in the Eastern theater), the Waffen-SS, the German police and by local collaborators. Only a minority were killed after deportation to the extermination camps[…].

(Emphases added.)

So Desbois was referring not to 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews killed in open-air executions as Mattogno would have it, but to the total death toll among Ukraine’s Jewish population as of the date of Germany’s attack on the USSR, including Jews deported to extermination camps. Desbois’ figure is not far above that of Dieter Pohl, who provides the following numbers^[31]:
• About 1.4 million Jews in all of Ukraine came under German rule.
• Of these the Einsatzgruppen and other units killed about 300,000 in 1941, in the area under military administration until the spring of 1942.
• 20,000 Jews fell victim to pogroms in June/July 1942.
• 530,000 Jews from the Galicia district were killed either on site or in Bełżec extermination camp.
• 185,000 Jews from Transnistria were killed by German and Romanian forces.
• 350,000 Jews were murdered in the Ukrainian parts of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.

Pohl’s figures (which do not include Hungarian Jews in labor battalions, Jews deported to Transnistria from Romanian Bessarabia and North Bukovina and Ukrainian Jews who became prisoners of war) add up to 1,385,000.

Regarding Bełżec Pohl provides no figures, but according to his colleague Thomas Sandkühler about 255,000 Jews from the Galicia district were deported to that camp^[32]. That would be about 18.4 % of the total killed, the balance of 1,130,000 (81.6 %) being killed in mobile murder operations.

Mattogno’s reduced reading capabilities also became apparent in the last paragraph of the "numerical nonsense" section, as he accuses Desbois of having undertaken his research under the "rather facile pretext" of finding "the final resting place of his grandfather, a POW, in a concentration camp at Rawa Ruska, in the Ukraine". Actually Father Desbois’ grandfather, Claudius Desbois, found his final resting place in his native France, and what actually triggered Desbois’ research is described as follows in Desbois’ book: ^[33]

And then, there was one name, a name unlike all the others: Rawa-Ruska. I was told my grandfather Claudius had been taken there during the war. As usual, I tried to understand. I thought that if he didn’t talk to me about it, it was because he must have done something bad. One day I asked him this terrible question: “Grandpa, did you kill any people?” Not even turning round to face me, he simply answered: “No.” I didn’t know how much the misery of deportation could isolate people, how much he must have thought that nobody in Chalon in 1970 could possibly understand what had happened in Rawa-Ruska back in 1942. I didn’t know how sullied a person could feel after living through such horror.[…]
Several times during our Sunday lunches I tried to ask questions when he was absent. As soon as I pronounced the words Rawa-Ruska everybody started crying, especially Marie-Louise, my grandmother. Rawa-Ruska echoed like a painful family mystery. What a strange name! I didn’t even know what country Rawa-Ruska was in. It was nowhere. It was impossible to situate it. Was it in Russia, Poland, or somewhere else? Just once, he uttered these words: “For us, the camp was difficult; there was nothing to eat, we had no water, we ate grass, dandelions. But it was worse for the others!” That sentence was engraved in my consciousness as a child for all time. I realized that he couldn’t say any more about it. But who were the others?
I was 12 years old when I saw images of the Holocaust in the municipal library in Chalon for the first time. There was a large album with photographs on a varnished wood display stand. I opened it and turned the pages. I saw photographs of the concentration camps for Jews at Bergen-Belsen. I remember closing the book quickly and thinking to myself: “Now I understand everything! I understand grandpa’s secret. The others were the Jews!” I ran out of the library. Shocked by my discovery, I didn’t tell anyone about it but since that day, I have always sought to understand what happened, what the tragedy was that my grandfather had been forced to witness.

One wonders what part of Desbois’ above-quoted writing could have been too hard for Mattogno to understand.

This demonstration of Mattogno’s poor reading capabilities (to give him the benefit of doubt) is preceded by a groundbreaking achievement in distortion. As we have seen in the first part of this series, Mattogno creatively misinterpreted a statement by Anne-Marie Revcolevschi, general director of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, whereby Desbois was not a historian but a priest and thus entitled to have a methodology differing from that of university professors, in the sense that Desbois adopted a "faith-based" methodology that ran contrary to the methodology of historical scholarship. He further referred to a remark by photographer Guillaume Ribot claiming that what Ribot called "small compromises with truth" ("petits arrangements avec la vérité") had led Desbois to exaggerate the magnitude of his discoveries. Now Mattogno converts his creative misinterpretation of Revcolevschi’s statement and Ribot’s claim into a self-description of Desbois:

Desbois describes himself as a "man of the cloth," who adopts a "faith-based" methodology to combat revisionism, with recourse, euphemistically speaking, to certain "adjustments of the truth."

This distortion is so flagrant that it’s impossible to give Mattogno the benefit of doubt here. He is clearly arguing against better knowledge.

In the last paragraph of the "Numerical nonsense" section, Mattogno provides a less dishonest but notably feeble criticism. Desbois recalls that in the Polish city of Częstochowa, during a nighttime walk in which he found himself "alone in the dark", he asked companions walking far ahead of him where they were, and someone answered "Not far from the Ukraine"– probably a joking remark, but one that in Desbois evoked memories of what his grandfather had told him about Rawa Ruska in Ukraine^[34]. Mattogno considers it pertinent to point out that Częstochowa is actually closer to Germany than to Ukraine (so what?), and boldly concludes that this shows Desbois’ account to be "merely a literary fiction". The impression left by Mattogno’s pointless wisecracking is that Mattogno is aware of how little he has to put up against Desbois’ research. This impression is hardened by the ill-reasoning and distortions in Mattogno’s attempt to discredit witnesses interviewed by Desbois, which will be examined in the next part of this series.

Notes

[23] That was in 2007. As of the date of this writing, according to the USHMM page "Holocaust by Bullets" ([link]), the researchers of Yahad – In Unum "have crisscrossed the countryside in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Republic of Macedonia and Moldova, Lithuania, and Romania in an effort to locate every mass grave and site at which Jews, Roma, and other victims were killed during the Holocaust" and "have identified 1,744 of an estimated 2,500 such locations".
[24]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 52-59, 105-116, 134-136, 145-147. Excerpts are transcribed in the reference library thread "Father Patrick Desbois, "The Holocaust by Bullets"" ([link]).
[25] For example the executions mentioned in the blogs "Pits at a «Resettlement Site»" ([link]) and ""... otherwise you’ll think that I’m bloodthirsty"" ([link]).
[26] Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941-1944: The Missing Center, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; 1st edition (March 1, 1996), pp. 240-241, 265.
[27] See the Wikipedia page "MP40" ([link]).
[28] For instance at Simferopol, see the blog "That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part VIII: The Simferopol Massacres" ([link]).
[29] For instance police secretary (Polizeisekretär) Walter Mattner, administrative officer with the Local SS and Police Commander at Mogilev, who on 2.10.1941 wrote to his wife: "Tomorrow I shall for the first time have the opportunity of using my pistol. I have taken along 28 rounds. This will probably not be sufficient, but another comrade will lend me his pistol or rifle." See the blog ""... otherwise you’ll think that I’m bloodthirsty"" ([link]).
[30] Dieter Pohl, "Historiography and Nazi Killing Sites", in: International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (editors), Killing Sites Research and Remembrance, 2015 Metropol Verlag + IHRA, Berlin, pp. 31 to 46 (p. 37). Pohl is quoted in the blog "Nazi killing methods" ([link]).
[31] Dieter Pohl, "Schauplatz Ukraine. Der Massenmord an den Judem im Militärverwaltungsgebiet und im Reichskommissariat 1941-1943", in: Christian Hartmann, Johannes Hürter, Peter Lieb, Dieter Pohl, Der deutsche Krieg im Osten 1941-1944. Facetten einer Grenzüberschreitung, R. Oldenbourg Verlag München 2009, pp. 156-196 (pp. 192 f.).
[32] Thomas Sandkühler, Endlösung in Galizien, 1996 Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger GmbH, Bonn, page 461.
[33]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 6 ff.
[34] As above, pp. 14f.

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)

The previous blog of this series dissected Mattogno’s attacks on Desbois’ methodology for establishing mass killing sites, and his accusations of "numerical nonsense".

In this blog, we will have a look at Mattogno’s attempt, in sections 4 and 7 of his critique, to discredit witnesses interviewed by Desbois whose testimonies are rendered in Desbois’ book.



Desbois divided the witnesses he interviewed into three categories^[35]:

There were indirect witnesses, people who did not see the assassinations but who had heard about them or had seen the Jews leaving town. They told us how, for example, they had seen the police taking the Jews from their homes and had watched them disappear from the corner of the street.
Then there were the direct witnesses, who had been present at the assassination. Like Yaroslav Galan, who told us that he had seen several trucks arrive while he was tending a cow. Thirty or so people had gotten out of these trucks. He saw them digging and then being shot. He heard the orders of the Germans and the last words of the Jews. This second group constituted the majority of our witnesses.
And then there were others: civilians, mostly children, who had been requisitioned for a day or a week. A local policeman, an emissary from the mayor, or a German officer would go into people’s houses and order: “You come with me and bring a spade.” They could be requisitioned to dig a pit at 5 in the morning. After they had finished digging, the Germans made them sit down while they brought in the Jews and shot them, and then they had them get up and fill in the pit. Some were assigned the task of gathering up the clothes, passing by with a cart so the Jews should put their clothes into it. When the cart was full, they took it to a house designated by the Germans to store the loot. Others were requisitioned to pull out teeth. Still others to transport the Jews in their carts when the pit was too far from the village and there weren’t enough trucks. Most of them were forced to act at gunpoint. They had no choice.

Mattogno’s first objection concerns the age of the witnesses at the time of the events about which they were interviewed. He exclaims that the direct eyewitnesses ""were only six, seven or eight years old at the time of the events in question"!", based on the following observations by Desbois^[36]:

These are people who saw what happened but who could do nothing. Powerless people who still ask themselves whether they are guilty or innocent, when they were only six, seven, eight, or nine years old at the time these events occurred. These children who ran behind the lines of Jews who were throwing away their last possessions—necklaces, wedding rings, and the few bits of jewelry they had left—so as not to leave them to the Germans. These curious children who ran along behind the Jews, up to the place of execution, hiding in the grass or climbing up into the trees to watch. These children who saw their fathers dig the pits and their classmates stripped naked before being shot.

As a particularly egregious example, Mattogno points out that of Maria Kedrovska, born in 1937 and thus only five years old at the time of the killing she witnessed. What he conveniently omits is that this witness, born to a Russian mother and a Jewish father, was saved by the intervention of a German at the very site of the killing, where all members of her family were killed except for her mother, who as a Russian was spared but went mad. ^[37]

Mattogno claims that the witnesses’ recollections, "more than sixty years later, are now indissolubly confused with what they heard of read later". This "fact" is supposed to be made obvious by their own declarations, of which he quotes the following (the page numbers refer to the Italian translation of Desbois’ book):

Only much later did we learn what had happened (p. 148);
My father, who died in 1980, was the person who told me… (p. 203);
I didn't see it personally, but someone spoke to me about it… (p. 216).
I didn't see it directly, but the villagers told me about it (p. 245).
From rumors going around… (p. 186).

However, the snippets that Mattogno quotes out of context fail to support his claim, for they suggest that, even after 60 years, the witnesses were able and willing to distinguish between their own sensory perceptions related to the killing (seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and what they had learned from others. This impression is hardened in most cases^[38] by a closer look at the witness interviews^[39], which furthermore show that the witnesses distinguished between what they knew for certain and what they did not. I encourage our readers to look up these interviews.

The mentions of "rumors" in the last quoted snippet is a handy pretext for yet another of Mattogno’s convenient sweeping conclusions:

These alleged "eyewitness testimonies" are thus clearly invalidated by the rumors circulating post-war.

A reference to "post-war" rumors is not mentioned in the eyewitness testimonies unless I missed something, and the same goes for the source of such rumors that Mattogno postulates, the investigations carried out by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment of German Crimes. Mattogno indulges in a lecture about the German and Soviet investigations of the Katyn killings, praises the former’s having been conducted by commissions made up of independent experts, and calls the latter a "large-scale propaganda exercise in the falsification of history"– which it was, as the Soviets tried to blame their own crime on the Germans. Yet this doesn’t justify the conclusion that Mattogno gladly jumps to, which is that all investigations conducted by the Soviet Extraordinary Commission are useless as sources of historiography and can be thrown into the rubbish bin ("The value of the above-mentioned Soviet reports can readily be assessed", as Mattogno puts it.)

Desbois, who is quoted in this sense by Mattogno, also stood before the question what value he should attribute to Soviet investigation reports:

I went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., where massive archives concerning the Holocaust since 1944 have been microfilmed. It is a virtually inexhaustible bank of data that represents 46 million pages that are open to public access, in which one can find also the documents of the extraordinary Soviet commissions of 1944. As soon as the Germans left a place, the Soviets, village after village, opened the ditches, interrogated neighbors, the priest, the mayor, and the survivors, and drew up a document in which they established the facts. They sometimes even drew a sketch indicating the site of the mass graves. But how much could one rely on the Soviet which, although used during the Nuremberg trials, had lost much of their credibility since the revelations about the Katyn affair? ^[40]

Yet this question didn’t lead Desbois to dismiss Soviet investigation reports in toto:

Nonetheless, we dissected all the texts of the Soviet commissions. One of them related the order to open all the mass graves at Lisinitchi.
Fifty-seven mass graves were listed. Bodies had been burnt there and the commission indicated that the ashes had been found very deep down in the ground. These statements confirmed the content of the testimonies of Miron and Adolf.

The approach of comparing evidence from Soviet investigation reports with evidence independent of the Soviets (such as post-Soviet local testimonies, testimonies collected by West German investigators or made at trials before West German courts, contemporary German documents) is also taken by historians, who have found that in many cases evidence collected by the Soviets matches evidence on which the Soviets could have had no influence. One of these historians is Dieter Pohl:

The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment of German Crimes, to use the short version of its name, started to locate places of German mass murder from February 1941 on. They collected evidence, witness statements and in many cases exhumed victims of Nazi crimes. Of course, this investigation commission was a Stalinist institution that served the purpose of propaganda and restitution. And there has been much source criticism of the commission’s handling of the Katyn case and its victim statistics. Even in cases of exhumed large mass graves, their estimates were much too high. Nevertheless their source material is of enormous value and has not been fully combed through until today. The Soviet Union "re-discovered" the occupation only during the mid-1960s, and research on the crimes under occupation was not published before the mid 1970s, among it valuable surveys of the destroyed villages in Belorussia. ^[41]

(Emphasis added).

The value of Soviet source material has also been assessed on this blog site, which contains various articles in which Soviet evidence is set against evidence independent of the Soviets^[42]. The result of such comparisons is that, while the Soviets often exaggerated in their estimates of the number of victims, the massacres they claimed are borne out by evidence on which the Soviets could have had no influence. I haven’t yet come upon a single case in which the Soviets simply made up a German mass crime that never took place, and I’m also not aware of any report by the Soviet Extraordinary Commission – except for the notorious Katyn report – in which the Soviets tried to blame a crime of their own on someone else. The experience of my fellow bloggers and co-authors, as far as I know, is the same.

So the reasonable approach to Soviet investigation reports is to use them with the necessary caveats and checking Soviet claims, whenever possible, against evidence the Soviets could not have influenced. That is the approach taken by historians and serious researchers, whereas defense attorneys of Nazi Germany, such as Mattogno, take the a-historical approach of dismissing, on a handy pretext, a large body of evidence that is inconvenient to their clients. On page 1480 of the magnum opus^[43], Mattogno contends that, because the Soviet investigations were not "independent, professional investigations", the Soviet discoveries "in principle have exactly the same value as the findings by father Patrick Desbois: none at all". The only investigations he accepts as "accurate" are "the ones performed by the Germans at Katyn and Vinnitsa".

Mattogno’s private standards of evidence, whereby it takes an investigation such as conducted by the Germans at Katyn and Vinnitsa to provide conclusive proof of a mass crime, have the corollary that the only crimes of Stalin’s regime proven according to such standards are those at Katyn and Vinnitsa, which together claimed 13,575 victims^[44]. No other crimes committed by Stalin’s regime were the subject of "independent, professional investigations"– or, for that matter, of any criminal investigations at all. So by the standards of evidence that Mattogno applies when it comes to Nazi crimes, a Communist regime that murdered millions^[45] would be reduced to something in between the regime of Pinochet in Chile^[46] and the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983^[47]. Maybe this incidental apology of Stalin’s regime is the reason why Mattogno seems to get along well with Russian Katyn "Revisionist" Yuri Mukhin^[48].

Back to Mattogno’s "devastating" critique of Father Desbois, in which the "Revisionist" coryphée claims it’s beyond doubt that the witnesses interviewed by Desbois, "who were mostly mere adolescents at the time" (didn’t he previously point out that they were children?) were heavily influenced by "this" propaganda, meaning the Soviet investigation reports. Other than the fact that such reports existed, Mattogno has nothing to show in support of his claim that the witnesses were influenced thereby, and it is actually unlikely that they were – not only because they were children and the Soviet investigators would preferably interrogate adults, but also because of the isolation in which they lived, before and after the Nazi occupation. Contacts between these inhabitants of remote villages and the Soviet system (whose interest in Nazi atrocities seems to have waned after the war and the immediate postwar period, judging by Pohl’s above-quoted statement) were rather sparse, as pointed out by Desbois:

The witnesses who spoke to us are simple people who had not been swallowed up by the Soviet system, because they were too poor. Peasants who keep a cow tied on a rope, exactly as they did 60 years ago. Beggars or farm workers who bring in the harvest. People whose path, or that of their animals, had happened to cross the path that led to the extermination of the Jews. When we asked them if people had come to the village since the war to talk to them, they told us: “No, you are the first.” When, before ending an interview, I would ask them why they had never spoken, they all responded that they had never been asked.

So it doesn’t look like these witnesses were influenced by Soviet propaganda, outside Mattogno’s wishful thinking.

Such thinking is also at the root of Mattogno’s supposition that information about Nazi atrocities collected by some witnesses who were "researchers after their own fashion" necessarily influenced their testimony. It may have had an influence or not, and there’s no indication in the testimonies that it did.

Mattogno claims that the testimonies are "full of obviously apocryphal horrifying or edifying anecdotes", but actually the transcribed interviews^[49], which I again encourage our readers to look up, contain few if any such "anecdotes" and rather show the horrifying banality of the killings described. Mattogno had to dig hard to come up with examples of "obviously apocryphal horrifying or edifying anecdotes", which upon closer examination do not seem nearly as "apocryphal" as Mattogno claims they are. Let’s have a look at them, one by one

Mattogno:

the story of the … man who had seen a local Volksdeutscher take a childhood friend into the camp and shoot him, after which [the child] was forced to pick a cartful of sunflowers [!] to burn his friend and all the Jews who had been killed over the past week (p. 152).

Either the Italian translation is not very accurate or Mattogno distorted this quote, for in the English translation^[50] Desbois mentions a woman who

… saw her childhood friend taken into the fields and shot by a Volksdeutscher who then brought a cart of sunflowers to burn her friend and all the Jews who had been killed in the preceding weeks.

So it was not the child but the killer who brought the cart, and as to using sunflowers as burning material, Mattogno obviously expects his readers to be impressed by his "[i]", which is presumably meant to express the idea that sunflowers don’t burn well. Actually sunflowers seem to be quite flammable, which is why gardeners are advised to use extreme caution when burning sunflower roots and stalks, and warned against trying to burn away sunflower seedlings ("This is especially unwise in dry conditions or near any flammable materials, such as a wooden fence.")^[51]. Sunflower and Sunflower seed dust are listed as "Combustible Dust"^[52]. Spontaneous combustion is a real danger in drying and storing sunflowers^[53].

Mattogno:

Or that of the Jewess who, indifferent to the mass executions, wandered around calmly begging with her three children near the barracks housing the Gestapo. The "head of the Gestapo" shouted at her:
Jews? The woman nodded, yes. Then he took his pistol and killed them all, right there, right in front of my doorway (p. 125).
Truly a suicide looking for a place to happen.

Again, the account differs somewhat from Mattogno’s rendering:

I also saw in my mind’s eye that poor old lady whose house was requisitioned to be a Gestapo headquarters . . . She sat silently with her daughters on a little bench in front of the house, beside the asphalt road. She seemed to be hiding as best she could, with her big thick blue woolen scarf and large glasses with their light brown plastic frames. One of her daughters, the youngest, took her gently by the shoulder and encouraged her: “Come on, mama, speak!” The old lady nodded her head, not saying a word. “No, no, they’re not going to deport you to Siberia; all that’s finished!” The woman remained firmly locked in her silence. Svetlana calmly sat down opposite her. And then suddenly, in a voice that could barely be heard, she began her story: “The Gestapo was living with us. They had requisitioned the house. One day I was in the garden, just there, behind the entrance gate, and I saw in the distance a Jewish woman coming on foot with her three small children. She was going from house to house to beg for food. I ran as fast as I could to tell them not to stop at our house. The head of the Gestapo saw me from the window; he opened the door and started running after me. When the Jewish woman was in front of us with her children he shouted out to them in a loud voice: ‘Juden?’ The woman nodded yes. Then he got out his pistol and shot them, right there in front of my door.” ^[54]

(Emphasis added.)

Again, either the Italian translation is inaccurate, or Mattogno deliberately omitted the highlighted details.

Mattogno:

Or the story, a truly plaintive one, of the Jewish child, "aware" that his friend Anna was watching his execution together with her friends, concealed in a nearby hayloft, waved goodbye to her before being shot; since they were watching "through cracks in the slats," and could not be seen from the outside, he was able to "make a brief gesture in their direction, as if to wave goodbye, after which he shouted: "Goodbye!" The murderers fired at that moment. (p. 213)
All this is said to have taken place in the face of imminent death by shooting, in which a true "silence of the tomb" must have reigned, enabling them to hear the child's words, from a distance, through the cracks in the hayloft.

This episode is briefly mentioned in Anna Dychkant’s interview on 29 April 2004^[55]:

A boy who was with me at school knew; he shouted "farewell" and signaled to me with his hands.

Yet Anna mentioned this episode on several occasions, including the first encounter in which she took Desbois’ team to the execution site:

All the Ukrainian witnesses of the Holocaust we talked to, when brought back to the sites of the Jews’ assassination, had made their own way, without waiting for us, with rapid steps toward the scene of the crime, as though overtaken by the vision of those men and women who had been there during those wretched days. A vision that has never left them. I heard her murmuring: “Yes, there, there! They were taken there . . . They forced them to run by beating them, even elderly people. Some of them found it hard to walk.” As she moved, she recaptured the memory of the child who saw the massacre of her Jewish neighbors. “They were brought to the door of the cemetery in a car from the ghetto. Some were already dead.” She reached the lower ground, on the bank of the river, and stopped, then suddenly began speaking again, as though in a single breath: “It is here that the Jews had to undress completely and place their clothes on the ground. They threw their jewels in the river so that the Germans couldn’t collect them when they were forced to undress! The Germans were furious. Afterwards they forced them to take off their clothes further away from the river, down there!” She climbed, a little out of breath, onto a long slope covered in grass. “Under my feet, just there, they shot them one by one, with a bullet from behind.” With her right hand she pointed to the nape of her neck, looking at us to be sure that she was understood. It seemed impossible to imagine that this bucolic landscape was the backdrop to such a massacre. She was talking about her experiences for the first time since 1943. Several times she mentioned a memory of her childhood friend, a young Jew from the ghetto. He was taken by the police to this field with all his family. He knew that Anna was watching the execution, hidden with her friends in a hay barn. This barn, very close by, behind the Jewish cemetery, was made of uneven planks through which she could watch. Anna was 14. He was pushed far from the others who were waiting, standing in front of the pit with his family, stripped of all their clothes. Just before the shooting, he had turned toward Anna and made her a little hand gesture as if to say goodbye, and then shouted “Farewell life!” Then the assassins started shooting. ^[56]

It’s not clear what Mattogno expects his readers to consider apocryphal about this detail. Anna’s vantage point seems to have been close enough to the execution site for her to hear her friend’s last words, regardless of whether there was a "silence of the tomb" at the execution site or the victims were crying and wailing. Maybe it was the former, judging by the report of one Oberleutnant Walther about the shooting of Jews and Gypsies in Pancevo, Serbia, on 4 November 1941^[57], which contains the following remark:

Das Erschießen der Juden ist einfacher als das der Zigeuner. Man muß zugeben, daß die Juden sehr gefaßt in den Tod gehen – sie stehen sehr ruhig -, während die Zigeuner heulen, schreien und sich dauernd bewegen, wenn sie schon auf dem Erschießungsplatz stehen. Einige sprangen sogar vor der Salve in die Grube und versuchten, sich tot zu stellen.

The shooting of the Jews is easier than that of the Gypsies. One has to admit that the Jews go to their deaths very composed – they stand very quietly – whereas the Gypsies howl, cry and move all the time when they are at the shooting site. Some even jumped into the pit before the salvo and tried to feign death.

Anyway, the detail of her friend’s farewell seems to have been etched into Anna’s mind, and the context in which it is mentioned offers no indication that she was not recalling something she honestly remembered.

Mattogno:

Obviously, this little fairy tale is then said to have "almost broken" Desbois's heart (p. 213), just like this one, no doubt:
When the neighbors read "kilometer 11," the Germans had already blocked the road. All traffic was prohibited during the executions. The only vehicles authorized to continue along the road were loaded with Jews. They glimpsed little Dora on the other side of the barrier. She was naked. In the freezing cold, she begged the Germans to give her back her cloak: "Give me my cloak, I'll give you my shoes in exchange!" But the Germans never listened to any of the pleading victims. Dora was shot (p. 275).
But if the road was blocked and all traffic was prohibited, how could the "neighbors" have seen and heard such a scene, which occurred, be it noted, in the midst of a crowd of 1,500 persons?

Dora was a Krymchak girl from Simferopol, Crimea^[58]. She was shot when she was four and a half years old. Desbois writes^[59] that the Germans killed first the Ashkenazi Jews and then the Krymchaks, but according to historian Andrej Angrick, who reconstructed the killings based on German criminal investigation files^[60], the sequence in Simferopol was the other way round: the Krymchaks, numbering at least 1,500, were killed on 9 December 1941, whereas the killing of the city’s about 11,000 Jews started two days later. Anyway, when Dora was taken away with two other members of her family, those who had escaped the raid begged two neighbors to go to the execution site at "kilometer 11" to try to negotiate with the Germans for her not to be killed. It’s not clear why the neighbors, who apparently made their way to the site on foot, should have been kept by the blocking of traffic on the road from seeing Dora behind the "barricade", which presumably means the road block. It is not improbable that a girl naked in the freezing cold, begging to be given back her coat, should have been noticeable to the neighbors even among a large number of people. It should be noted, by the way, that Desbois doesn’t mention the number of Simferopol Krymchaks shot anywhere in his book. Mattogno must have got that number from Angrick or another source mentioning the killing of the Krymchaks. His argument that it would have been impossible to make out a little girl "in the midst of a crowd of 1,500 persons" implies his maintaining that there was such a crowd at "kilometer 11", which in turn implies his concession that the massacre of the Simferopol Krymchaks took place.

Mattogno:

Not to mention the little fairy tale of the bodies piled up on top of each other and stamped on like grapes in a vat:
There were thirty of us Ukrainian young people, we had to stamp on the bodies of the Jews with our bare feet and throw a thin layer of dirt over them, so that the other Jews could lie down.
The following is Desbois's comment:
I could never have imagined that the Germans would have forced Ukrainian children to stamp on the bodies of Jews with their bare feet, as if they were Beaujolais grapes at harvest time (p. 102).
Does this require any comment at all?

Yes it does, or rather a question: what are Mattogno’s arguments against the account provided by the witness Petrivna^[61], other than personal incredulity? He tries this argument:

Alternatively, the bodies were "thrown" into the graves (p. 94), in which case it was unnecessary to "stamp" on them, but they had to be arranged in regular layers; or they were "arranged" (p. 185), in which case, it was unnecessary to "stamp" on them.

Different places, different commanders in charge, different methods. The "pressing" or "stamping" is mentioned on only one occasion in Desbois’ book. Argument dismissed.

Another argument, equally feeble:

It is odd that the "method" in question did not enlist the labor of the Jewish victims themselves, and that not even the Jews forced to lie down on top of the layer of bodies to be shot in turn were compelled to "stamp" on the bodies forming the underlying layer.

The killers may have expected – correctly or not – that the victims themselves would be too paralyzed with fear to do any "pressing" or "stamping", or then that they would be defiant and refuse to do so as they no longer had anything to lose anyway. Local village girls, on the other hand, would be vigorous and frightened enough (but not so frightened as to be paralyzed). They may thus have been considered likelier to be compliant and do an effective job. Argument dismissed.

Mattogno’s next comment:

It might be added that if "sardine packing" were really a "method," it should have been in general use throughout the Ukraine; but not a single one of Desbois's witnesses even mentions it; on the contrary, some of the witnesses openly contradict it. For example, Stanislav claims that the victims were killed "on their knees in front of the graves, facing forward, towards the grave" (p. 224). Nikolaj Olkhuski declared that the Germans "all shot at the same time" (p. 94) at the Jewish victims on the edge of the grave, who then fell into the ditch, some of them still alive (pp. 94-95). The same method is confirmed by Ivan Fedossievich Lichnitski, according to whom, in the ditch, a group of Jews "were forced to distribute the Jews lengthwise, covering the entire breadth of the grave" (p. 173), precisely because they had been shot at the edge of the ditch.

further reveals Mattogno’s ill-reasoning and sloppy research. Even if Jeckeln had been the only commander of mobile killing squads in Ukraine throughout the period of occupation, this would only mean that he endeavored to apply his "sardine packing" method whenever practicable, exceptions to the rule being possible. But Jeckeln was only one out of several actors on the scene, and his method, as mentioned by Ezergailis (see the previous blog of this series), horrified even some of the Einsatzgruppen operatives who witnessed it at Rumbula, and was considered unacceptable by Ohlendorf, the head of Einsatzgruppe D, which did much of the killing in Ukraine^[62]. Jeckeln was Höherer SS und Polizeiführer (HSSPF) Russland Süd (Head of SS and Police Southern Russia) from June 1941 until his replacement as of 1 November 1941 by the HSSPF Ostland, Hans-Adolf Prützmann. Jeckeln was transferred to Riga and appointed HSSPF for Northern Russia and the Ostland (which comprised the Baltic States and parts of Belorussia) ^[63]. It stands to reason that mass killings in Ukraine after Jeckeln’s departure were not necessarily carried out according to Jeckeln’s method. Desbois mentions the application of this method only once, in connection with the testimony of Petrivna from Ternivka on 23 July 2007^[64]

Mattogno continues:

Thus, precisely and solely this method justifies the folk legend, referred to by many witnesses, of the mass graves covered by dirt which moved for three days, because the victims were buried alive (p. 81, 109, 175, 274), with the variants of two days (p. 187), or four days (p. 267); or of the use of a "well" instead of a mass grave (p. 263), evidence of extraordinary vitality on the part of the victims, to say the least: buried alive, three days below ground, without air, after being deliberately "stamped" on, like grapes in a wine vat! If to this be added the shot in the back of the neck inflicted upon every single victim, buried alive in mass graves, for three days, only zombies would be capable of such movement.

It is not clear what Mattogno means to say in the first period of the above-quoted paragraph. If by "this method" he means the Jeckeln method, his reasoning is mistaken as a method in which each victim was shot individually was the one least likely to leave some victims merely wounded, unless the marksmen were bad shots or too drunk to aim accurately. Mattogno would then be contradicting his argument in this first period in the last sentence of the paragraph, in which he argues that "the shot in the back of the neck inflicted upon every single victim" would make victims not fatally wounded unlikely.

As to the "folk legend", one might consider the possibility of such a legend if all witness testimonies referred to executions at a single location. It is extremely unlikely, however, that the mention of a phenomenon by witnesses in a number of isolated places far away from each other should be a "folk legend", unless travelling bards carried such legend through the vastness of Ukrainian, from one boondocks village or town to another. As there’s no evidence to the activity of such bards, the mention of agonizing victims moving inside mass graves must be more than just a "folk legend". That said, is the phenomenon recalled by several witnesses at different locations improbable?

In arguing such improbability, Mattogno dishonestly tries to make believe that the procedure of "stamping" on or "pressing" the victims was generally applied, while in fact it is mentioned only in the testimony of Petrivna from Ternivka – which contains no mention of movement inside the grave(s) for some time after the execution. Movement inside graves or wells because people were not yet dead was mentioned by the following among the witnesses whose interviews are transcribed:
• Olena S. ^[65]: in response to the question whether the earth moved because some victims were not dead, this witness replied that she didn’t see it herself but people told her that. She also mentioned a man who had managed to get out of a pit and was saved by a villager, adding that he was the only person not mortally wounded who got out of the pit because "In most cases, they shot them in the head".
• Nikolai Olkhusky^[66] mentioned that at the end of the day on which the execution took place he "went to look" and saw that "the earth was moving". He considered the possibility that some children who were in their parents’ arms fell into the ditch alive and that this was the reason why "the earth was still moving afterwards". Olkhusky also mentioned that after the shooting was finished the requisitioned Russians filled in the ditch but "they didn't put much earth on top. Dogs came to rummage and pull things out. Then you could see the bodies." He didn’t know whether Jews who were only wounded came out of the pit alive because he "wasn’t next to the pit" (presumably meaning that he wasn’t next to the pit at the time the execution took place, as he had earlier mentioned that he had gone there at the end of the day).
• Hanna Senikova^[67], who described a massacre during which the executioners had a banquet prepared by her aunt and drank lots of alcohol, mentioned having been told about a Jewish man who had "jumped into the pit without being wounded" and "waited until the end of the shooting to get out". The man had asked a collaborator named Kothya to "let him come out of the pit", but Kothya had killed him instead. Hanna considered the possibility that "someone was only wounded and it took the whole night for him to die", but added that "we can’t know", further mentioning that, the morning after the execution, "we had to go and get the young boys from other villages to fill in the pit with their spades", because there were no young people in her village.
• Marfa Lichnitski: during the first interview together with her husband Ivan^[68], this witness spoke about her mother having told her that "the earth moved for three days" and that small children "were thrown in alive".
• Ivan Lichnitski: during his second interview together with his wife Marfa^[69], this witness mentioned that "the earth was still moving" when they "filled the pits immediately after every execution". Asked for how long the earth moved after an execution, Ivan replied: "About two days. There were dead people, wounded, and people still alive. Not everyone was killed on the spot. Some were only wounded." He also mentioned a man who "fell into the pit alive", managed to get out during the night and survived to come back after liberation.
• Marfa Lichnitski added that the man mentioned by her husband had helped them as a cook when he came back, and told them that "the pit was very full when he fell inside alive".
• Olga Bitiouk^[70], when asked whether there were people in the pits who were still alive, answered: "They say that when they filled in the pits with spades and a bulldozer, they heard moaning. People must have still been alive."
• Eugenia Nazarenko^[71] recalled that the victims were in "such hysteria" and that some "fell when they weren’t even dead". She remembered "a woman who managed to get out of the pit; she took refuge with another woman from the village. The woman denounced her and the Jewish woman was caught and killed." Eugenia thought that there might also have been other such cases: "If someone fell into the pit alive he perhaps managed to get out of the pit."
• Maria Kedrovska^[72] mentioned that some people fell alive into the well into which members of her family and other Jews were shot, and that shouts "were heard for three days"^[73].

What were the chances of someone who fell into an execution pit or well unwounded (because, being children, they were thrown in alive or fell in together with shot parents holding them, or because they managed to jump inside the pit and feign death without the killers noticing because they were too drunk) or not mortally wounded (because the shooting was done by steady fire from machine guns or pistols, or because the marksmen shooting individual people were bad shots or had drunk too much) to survive inside the pit or well for up to two or three days, or even get out of the pit on occasion? Based on the reading of the above testimonies and on pictures I have seen^[74], I’d say that such temporary survival or even escape were not improbable provided that a number of conditions were met, namely that the victim in question was among those on the upper layers of bodies inside the cavity as opposed to being buried underneath several layers of corpses (like the escapee mentioned by Ivan and Marfa Lichnitski), the pit was covered with soil only after some time (like in the execution witnessed by Hanna Senikova, in which the pit remained open after the execution until boys from another village fetched the next morning covered it up), and/or the soil cover was so thin that air could get through (like in the execution witnessed by Nikolai Olkhusky, in which the soil cover was so thin that dogs "came to rummage and pull things out" and "you could see the bodies". The described presence of such circumstances, together with the long distances between and remoteness of locations in which witnesses recalled such phenomena, allows for the conclusion that what Mattogno dismisses as "folk legends" has a factual basis, even though the time during which bodies moved inside pits or wells may have been shorter than recalled by witnesses.

Besides the mention of moving bodies inside mass graves, Mattogno has another objection regarding the testimony of Ivan Lichnitski, which he expresses as follows in section 7 ("State Secrets and open secrets") of his article:

All the persons forced to participate, according to Ivan Lichnitski, by German order, took empty buckets and beat on them to make a noise, to cover up the blows and screams (p. 183).
This witness also claims to have remained concealed in the usual barn overlooking the execution site, so that he saw what happened. In response to the remark that "it was a miracle that they weren't killed," he said:
And how. They even saw us, shot at us, but thanks to God they didn't capture us (p. 176).
We are thus invited (or expected) to believe that the Germans released direct eyewitnesses, who had witnessed the entire course of the executions, "remaining side by side with the Jews and their murderers, sometimes just a few meters away, seated on the grass," eyewitnesses who were then drafted again for the next round of executions (pp. 177-178), but shot at children who witnessed the shootings only by chance, partially and at some considerable distance!

The trick Mattogno plays here is to conflate information from various parts of Desbois’ book to create a false dilemma. The mention of witnesses "remaining side by side with the Jews and their murderers, sometimes just a few meters away, seated on the grass" is not part of Lichnitski’s testimony, but appears as a remark of Father Desbois elsewhere in the book, in the following context:

The requisitioned were not watching the columns of Jews marching to the pits from their windows. Neither were they watching perched up in an oak tree or hidden behind a bush. They were at the site of the crime, very often before the Jews arrived. They were present, from beginning to end, at the shootings, beside the Jews and their assassins, sometimes sitting in the grass only a few meters away from them. ^[75]

Ivan Lichnitski mentions the following indigenous participants in the killing:

They put the Jews in the cells. They took boys born in 1928, 1924 and 1926, gave them a machinegun and told them to guard the cells. If one of them managed to escape, the boy was shot. They kept them around two days, the time it took to fill the cells. ^[76]

They shot them in groups of five or six. The police and the guards had to bang empty buckets to cover the noise of the shooting. Others led them there, mothers carrying their children in their arms or by hand. They were beasts. ^[77]

My brother was requisitioned. I know that he had to shoot two people. Two armed policemen came in the night and said: “Get up, get dressed and come with us.” ^[78]

If he was part of the guard team, he had to do it [in response to the question whether his brother also had to fill in the pits]. Once, the guards stole jewels from a Jew. The Germans said to this Jew: “If you can recognize the guards who took your valuables, they will be shot.” The Jew pointed them out and they were shot with the Jews.” ^[79]

So the only indigenous people that Lichnitski mentioned, besides himself and other boys who watched the killing from the attic of the local pharmacy (not the "usual barn", as Mattogno would have it) while the other locals were hiding, were the policemen (assuming these were men of local collaborator formations, not German policemen), and the requisitioned "guards", who took part in leading the victims to the killing site and one of whom (Lichnitski’s brother) even shot two Jews. These eyewitnesses were also accomplices to the crime and could accordingly be expected to be discreet about it. Their having been ordered to "bang empty buckets to cover the noise of the shooting" suggests that the commander in charge of this killing had a certain concern with discretion that other commanders of mobile killing units may not have had (every commander was different in this respect, and the degree of efforts to maintain secrecy accordingly varied from one killing site to another). Under these circumstances, it is not implausible at all that the killers should have felt bothered by uninvolved witnesses watching their activities, and tried to shoot them or at least chase them away (the shot or shots fired in the direction of Lichnitski and the other boys may have been meant not to hit but only to frighten them, for all we know). Seen this way, the part of Lichnitski’s account that Mattogno takes issue with:

No. Everyone hid. [In response to the question whether they stopped the traffic on the roads during the executions.] With other boys, I climbed up to the attic of the pharmacy and we watched what was happening. When they saw us, they shot at us but they didn’t hit us, thank God.

is quite plausible.

Mattogno also objects to the credibility of witness Eugenia Nazarenko, on similarly feeble grounds:

To conclude our review of the imaginative anecdotes reported by Desbois, the witness Evgenja Nazarenko, in 1943, at age 9, is said to have been abandoned, alone, by her mother, near an execution site at Busk , in the province of Leopoli, to allow her (the mother) to see whether or not her husband, the child's father, would also be shot, thus risking the life of the little girl (pp. 218, 241, 246).

Actually little Eugenia’s having been "abandoned" is not all that frightfully shocking, if one considers the circumstances that Mattogno conveniently omitted:

The Germans knew her father well because of his music. He was requisitioned by the deisatnik of their street to dig the big pit, and to fill it in after the shootings. Her mother was very worried when she saw the desiatnik taking him away. She took her daughter Eugenia to the other side of the river, next to the wooden church, to check what the Germans were going to do with her husband. But she couldn’t stay with her daughter because the tufts of grass were not high enough to hide an adult. So only the child saw the preparation of the pits, the arrival of the Jews, their assassination, and the filling in of the pits. She explained: “From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see the Jews and the gunmen very clearly; there were so many people all around.” ^[80]

(Emphasis added.)

The highlighted text suggests that the child was well hidden in the grass and thus not at risk, and that Mattogno’s objection is therefore moot.

Mattogno’s convenient omissions and other distortions regarding the witnesses interviewed by Desbois reach their lowest point towards the end of the article’s section 4, as he produces the following straw-man argument:

And what can one say about the stories of Jews walled up alive (pp. 266-267) or suffocated with "Eiderdowns," i.e., feather-bed quilts [sic!]"? Desbois even entitles the paragraphs in question “The Shoah by Suffocation”! (p. 267)

The unwary reader is led to believe that there is a chapter or section in Desbois’ book headed "The Shoah by Suffocation", which includes some preposterous tale about sadistic German killers having suffocated a sizable number of Jews with feather-bed quilts instead of shooting them. Yet nothing could be further away from the actual contents of the respective chapter of Desbois’ book, which is headed "Everyday Evil" in the English translation^[81] and contains three separate episodes that Desbois obviously considers illustrative of the chapter’s title. One takes place in a village called Sataniv, where there were large cellars under the central market that housed small shops. The Germans put the local Jews into these cellars, burned some straw to make smoke and smother them before closing the cellars, and then piled earth on top. According to the related Soviet investigation report, this took place on 15 May 1942, and the victims were asphyxiated by the smoke. Local women questioned by Desbois, on the other hand, recalled that the Jews had tried to get out of the cellars for four days afterwards and that "one could see the ground of the marketplace moving" - in other words, that the Jews had met a far more horrendous death than the death from smoke asphyxiation assumed, contrary to testimonies whereby "the ground moved for four days", by the Soviet investigators^[82]. Desbois tries to find an explanation for this killing method and considers the intention to set an example, lack of time, or the particular sadism of the killing squad commander as possible explanations. What particularly shocks him is the revelation, by one of the locals questioned, that the cellars were only opened in 1954, meaning that the victims had remained in there for 12 years after the killing.

Another episode, namely the "feather-bed quilts" incident that Mattogno mocks himself about, is one of the most sinister in Desbois book, though in terms of criminal law it is just a plain case of serial robbery-murder and doesn’t even involve the German invaders. In a tiny village called Bertniki, the locals refuse to speak about events during the war, which in Desbois arouses the suspicion, apparently based on previous experience, that "something serious had happened". Desbois and his team go from house to house with the locals watching them, ask questions and invariably receive the answer, "with a large smile", that there were no Jews in Bertniki during the war, no executions and no mass graves. At one of the houses that looks much better than the rest and lies by "an immense quarry and a magnificent, dense, green forest", they meet a well-dressed elderly man who implausibly claims that he is only 60 years old (and thus knows nothing about what happened during the war). Desbois is furious about this obvious untruth ("He is the youngest old person I have ever met.") and continues going from house to house asking questions. Finally, as he is about to give up, the couple first questioned approaches him and reveals the village’s dirty secret: the elegant man in the better house had during the war taken in Jewish refugees, then smothered them at night with quilts, robbed and stripped them and thrown them into the quarry near his house. The revolt at this revelation and the macabre environment surrounding it leads Desbois to make the following bitterly ironic remark:

The Holocaust by smothering. This was far removed from the centralization of the Shoah, its industrial, modern character. In Ukraine it took on the quality of carnage. People could be shot in a marketplace, beside a cliff as in Yalto, walled up alive as in Sataniv, or else smothered with cushions at night.

Desbois account of this episode is not only as far removed as can be from the straw-man reference to it that Mattogno expects his gullible readers to swallow, but also shows that Desbois is everything other than the gullible collector of stories as which Mattogno tries to portray him. If he were, he wouldn’t check eyewitness testimonies against archival information as he did regarding Sataniv, and he would have left Bertniki in the belief that nothing bad had happened in this tiny village.

So Mattogno has again amply shown that "the foremost Holocaust revisionist researcher in the world today"^[83] is nothing but a purveyor of sloppy research, illogical nonsense and insidious but easily detectable falsehoods, writing for an audience of uncritical true believers that share his ideological agenda.

Mattogno’s final comment in this section is worth quoting because it not only reveals (albeit unnecessarily) what makes Mattogno tick, but also shows what kind of person he is:

Everything his decrepit ex-child "witnesses" tell him sixty years later is sacrosanct Truth, like the Gospels (or the Talmud).

Let us hope for Mattogno, who turned 65 early this year^[84], that he may spend his remaining years in good health and never become "decrepit" as he would like Father Desbois’ elderly witnesses to be.
Mattogno’s comments about the Busk eyewitnesses in section 5 of his article will be addressed together with his arguments regarding the excavations conducted by Desbois in this Ukrainian town.

Notes

[35] As above, pp. 74f.
[36]As above, p. 74.
[37] As above, pp. pp. 197-201. Maria Kedrovska’s testimony is transcribed in the reference library thread "Father Patrick Desbois, "The Holocaust by Bullets"" ([link]).
[38] Stepan Davidovski’s interview, transcribed on pp. 179-184 of Desbois’ book, is very informative, but it would be even more so if the witness had been asked what he knew from first-hand sensory perceptions and what he had learned from others. Maria Kedrovska, whose interview is transcribed on pp. 197-201, mentioned that "Shouts were heard for three days" from the well into which members of her family were shot. Her previous account of how she was saved from the execution by a German suggests that she didn’t hear these shouts herself but learned about them second-hand.
[39] The interviews are transcribed in the aforementioned reference thread.
[40]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 111.
[41] As note 30, p. 43.
[42] See, among others, the blogs "Neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass graves with even only a few thousand bodies …" ([link]), "Mass Graves in the Polesie" ([link]) and "Drobitski Yar" ([link]), as well as the series "The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR" ([link] to the first of three blogs, which contains links to the other two).
[43] As note 1.
[44] 4,143 corpses were found at Katyn and 9,432 at Vinnitsa, see Mattogno, Bełżec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research and History, p. 77 (online under [link]).
[45] See the blog "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?" ([link]).
[46] 3,095 deaths and forced disappearances according to the Chilean government, see the Wikipedia page "Augusto Pinochet" ([link]).
[47] Between 7,158 and 30,000 people killed or "disappeared", see the Wikipedia page "Dirty War" ([link]).
[48] See the blog "And now for something not completely different..." ([link]).
[49] Same link as note 37.
[50]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 122.
[51]"How to Get Rid of Sunflowers" ([link]).
[52]"Combustible Dust" ([link]).
[53]"Drying and Storing Sunflowers" ([link]).
[54]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 102f.
[55]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 124-128. The interview is included in the transcription under [link].
[56]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 164f.
[57]NS Archiv, "Erschießungen in Pancevo" ([link]).
[58] Regarding the Krymchaks of Crimea and the reason why they were exterminated, see the blog "That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part VIII: The Simferopol Massacres" ([link]).
[59]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 211.
[60] Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitk und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943, pp. 323 ff. Angrick’s narrative is rendered in the blog mentioned in note 58.
[61]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 83-86, included in the transcription under [link].
[62] Norman Goda, "Report on the Otto Ohlendorf IRR File" ([link]).
[63] Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp. 182f.; Jürgen Kilian, Wehrmacht und Besatzungsherrschaft im Russischen Nordwesten 1941 – 1944. Praxis und Alltag im Militärverwaltungsgebiet der Heeresgruppe Nord, pp. 149f. See also the German Wikipedia page "Friedrich Jeckeln" ([link]) and the Usenet article "Friedrich Jeckeln - an unsung Holocaust figure", by Eugene Holman ([link]).
[64]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 83f.
[65] As above, pp. 68-71.
[66] As above, pp. 75-79.
[67] As above, pp. 88-94.
[68] As above, pp. 136-140.
[69] As above, pp. 140-143.
[70] As above, pp. 147-151.
[71] As above, pp. 184-191.
[72] As above, pp. 197-201.
[73] Probably not a first-hand recollection, as mentioned in note 38.
[74] For instance the photos of corpse-filled pits shown in the blog "The Kamenets-Podolsky Massacre" ([link]), and the following photos included in the blog "Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes" ([link]): 1.1.9, 1.1.11, 1.1.20, 2.1.
[75]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 82.
[76] As above, p. 138.
[77] As above, p. 139.
[78] As above, p. 141.
[79] As above, p. 142.
[80] As above, p. 169.
[81] As above, pp. 203-207, transcribed in the reference library thread "Father Patrick Desbois, "The Holocaust by Bullets"" ([link]). The original French chapter title is "La banalité du mal" ("The banality of evil"), so it’s unlikely that the Italian translator should have made that into "The Shoah by Suffocation".
[82] A similar case of civilians locked in cellars and killed by asphyxiation from inhaled smoke occurred in a village that is probably Sofino in Poltavs'ka Oblast', Ukraine. This incident is documented in the Soviet film "The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR", shown at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals (see the blog "The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR (1)" ([link]).
[83] Thus he is touted on the "Inconvenient History" website ([link]).
[84] According to the Wikipedia page "Carlo Mattogno" ([link]).

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)

In the previous blog of this series we had a look at the sloppy research, illogical nonsense and insidious but easily detectable falsehoods whereby Mattogno tries to discredit Ukrainian witnesses to Nazi mobile killing operations interviewed by Father Patrick Desbois.

In this blog, we will examine Mattogno’s handling of evidence regarding mass killings and corpse incinerations that took place in areas around the city of Lviv, Ukraine (Lvov in Russian, Lemberg in German) during the Nazi occupation, including a forest area referred to in Desbois’ book as the Lisinitchi Forest.



The witnesses to the aforementioned mass killings and corpse incinerations include three surviving members of a unit of Jewish forced laborers who, supervised by members of the SS and police, were forced to unearth corpses from mass graves and burn them on pyres, and occasionally also to burn corpses of people right after they had been killed. Their names are Heinrich Chamaides, Moishe Korn and Leon Weliczker Wells. Chamaides testified before the deputy of the Lvov district attorney on 21.9.1944, Korn before the deputy of the Lvov city attorney on 13.9.1944. Chamaides’ and Korn’s testimonies were later made available to West German criminal investigators and are transcribed, in German translation, in a collection of documents dealing with Nazi crimes in Poland and the Soviet Union that was published in the German Federal Republic^[85]. Weliczker Wells, who eventually emigrated to the US and lived there until his death in 2009^[86], was the author of an account including the narration of the aforementioned body disposal unit’s activities, which was partially or fully printed in various languages, including English^[87]. Weliczker Wells also before testified before the Soviet Extraordinary Commission^[88] and at the Eichmann Trial^[89].

Desbois went to New Jersey to interview this witness. The contents of the conversation, which took place in a local restaurant and then in Weliczker Wells’ home, are rendered as follows in Desbois’ book^[90]:

We finished our conversation at his house: “You see the wall on the left, it is dedicated to my wife’s family; they painted. That is why that side of the wall is full of paintings. On the other side the wall is bare because nothing remains of my family.” ^[91]
He told us how he had burnt other Jews with the commando of requisitioned Jews. He told me that the Germans had nicknamed him “Baby.” He was 14 years old at the time. I asked him: “What did you do, Baby?” ^[92] He answered, “I pulled out the gold teeth of the Jews who had been dug up, put them in a bag and gave them to the Germans in the evening. That went on for a long time because there were 90,000 bodies. There was also my friend who was younger than me, who was called the Tzeler, the Counter. He was in charge of counting the bodies every evening, and writing the number in a little book.”
I asked: “He counted the bodies? What happened to him?” His expression fell. “Of course they killed him.” I told him that I knew that they killed the counters. “Yes,” he replied, “that is why there is no record of the numbers.” I asked: “They made you sleep under some sort of canvas so that you wouldn’t see who it was they were killing?” He answered, “Yes, but I was the smallest so I managed to peek under the canvas. I saw all the executions and afterwards we had to go out to undress and burn them. That went on for six months.”

Mattogno takes issue with every aspect of this conversation except the witness’s mention of his extinguished family. His arguments will be examined hereafter, not necessarily in the order in which they are presented as the main issue – the number of dead bodies – deserves a more detailed discussion, which I leave for last.

Mattogno contends that in his book, Weliczker Wells (who I shall hereinafter refer to as "Wells" for the sake of simplification) makes no specific mention of "gold teeth", but rather of "precious metals, such as gold or platinum", which were not "disinterred" but rather found among the crematory ashes and placed, not in a "little bag" but rather in a "special sieve", furthermore that these tasks were performed by the "ashes column" of which Wells formed no part. While it is correct that Wells didn’t mention in his book that he worked in the "ashes column", there is a specific mention of gold teeth and of a bag for collecting the valuables in the book’s English version, which reads as follows^[93] (emphases added):

The work of the ash brigade is to crush the bones that hadn't completely burned with heavy wooden poles to fine dust and pick out all the metallic items, for example, fillings of teeth, gold teeth, jewelry, and so on. These valuables are to be put into a sieve standing near the bench. In the evening the foreman is to bring the sieve up the hill, giving them to the Untersturmführer, who will then empty it into a linen bag which he then carries off with him.

Wells’ mention in his conversation with Desbois of the "Counter", of the Counter’s fate and of the consequence that "there is no record of the numbers", is contrasted by Mattogno with information that reads as follows in the book’s English version^[94]:

On the other side of the fire the tabulator was standing. He held a piece of paper and a pencil in his hands. His task was to keep count of how many bodies were burned each day. This is a top-secret job. It is forbidden to tell even the Schupos how many are burned each day. In the evening the tabulator reports the exact number to the Untersturmführer. Even the tabulator must forget the amount after he reports to the Untersturmführer, my neighbor tells me. When the Untersturmführer asks him the next day, "How many bodies were burned yesterday?" the tabulator must answer, "I don't know."

Mattogno points out that Wells doesn’t mention the killing of the counter in the book, but this doesn’t rule out that the counter was killed, especially as only a few members of the "death brigade" survived. Mattogno further argues that the shooting of counters wouldn’t have sufficed to ensure that no trace of the numbers remained, as the counters could have passed on the numbers to other members of the unit, namely to Wells, who kept a diary of the unit’s activities. This argument is not exactly pertinent considering the perspective of the counter, who may have hoped to survive against all odds and had to fear being caught in the act of passing on information to another inmate or betrayed by his interlocutor or a listener trying to curry favors with the SS and police supervisors. From the perspective of these supervisors, the killing (and replacement) of counters at certain intervals would have been just an additional precaution against eventual information leaks, as no member of the "death brigade" was meant to survive in the end anyway.

During part of the corpse disposal unit’s period of activity its members were accommodated in facilities that Wells refers to as barracks or "bunkers". Later, when the unit moved to a forest called the Krzywicki woods in the book, the inmates were accommodated in tents whose features Wells described in some detail, partially quoted by Mattogno^[95]. Mattogno argues that, contrary to Desbois’ question responded affirmatively by Wells, the purpose of these tents was accommodation, and not to keep the inmates from witnessing mass killings. Desbois’ question may have been due to a misunderstanding of (or a simplified reference to) the practice, narrated in Wells’ book, of confining the inmates to their accommodations during "air raids", i.e. during mass executions carried out near their worksites. One such "air raid" took place on 26 October 1943. Wells’ description thereof suggests that, despite being locked inside his tent, he was able not just to hear (as Mattogno claims) but also to see (probably for the reason that he mentioned in his interview with Desbois, namely his being able to "peek under the canvas") what happened on that occasion^[96]:

There is now no doubt that the entire camp is being liquidated. We have another "air raid," but not like yesterday's. Then we were taken away from the tents; today we are locked in. We hear the oncoming trucks and the yelling of the Germans: "Alles herunter!" (All out!) "Ausziehen!" (Undress!) "Zu fünf antreten." (Step out in fives!) "Unterhacken!" (Link arms!) "Im gleichen Schritte marsch!" (Step together, march!)
Today they are bringing the victims in trucks. Each truck stops in front of our enclosure. It stands there until we are commanded to get into our tents for an "air raid." The tailgate of the truck then opens, and the Schupos shout commands. Over the guttural yells of the Germans one can hear the swishing of the whips hitting the victims.
Of course, everything does not always proceed "normally." Most of the time it, does, of course; that is, the victims undress quickly, wanting to get it over with as fast as possible, and to save themselves from prolonged torture. Mothers undress their children, and the naked mother carries her child in her arms to the fire. However, sometimes a mother will undress herself but will fail to undress the child or the child refuses to let itself be undressed out of panic. When this happens, we can hear the voices of the children. "What for?" or "Mother, mother, I'm scared! No! No!" In these cases, one of the German SD's takes the child by its small feet, swings it, crushing its head against the nearest tree, then carries it over to the fire and tosses it in. This is all done in front of the mother. When the mother reacts to this, which happens a few times, even if only by saying something, she is beaten and afterward hung by her feet from a tree with her head down until she dies.
But I should like to emphasize again that usually the people undress themselves quickly and go to the fire without protest. Some of them even jump into the fire without an order to do so. They have had enough. The tortures have been going on too long. Most of them have already lost all their near ones, and everyone feels that the world is his enemy; even the children in diapers feel this. We are taught that people sharing common tragedy become friends in sorrow. This didn't happen at Janowska. The word tragedy perhaps is not strong enough to convey what had happened to these people.

That said about Mattogno’s minor bickering regarding the conversation between Desbois and Wells, I move on to the numbers issue. Mattogno’s argument in this respect reads as follows:

The figure of 90,000 bodies is not mentioned in the book, and is not the sum of the sums mentioned, a total of approximately 5,100, plus "thousands," an order of magnitude far removed from 90,000. What is more, this figure is in contradiction with the procedures described by Weliczker. In fact, he claims that it took three days to eliminate 700 bodies in June of 1943 (exhumation, cremation, sifting the ashes, filling and levelling the mass graves) and another three days to eliminate 750 bodies in August, so that the average was 250 bodies a day, not counting Sunday, which was a holiday! It follows that the elimination of 90,000 bodies would have required 360 working days, or 420 days including Sundays, that is, 14 months. But Weliczker only spent 5 months in the "death brigade."

While it is true that the figure of 90,000 bodies mentioned by Wells in his conversation with Desbois does not appear in the book^[97], the rest of Mattogno’s argument is yet another collection of falsehoods, or at least another example of Mattogno’s abysmal capacity for reading and understanding texts.

The following information regarding procedures and numbers in Wells’ book provides a picture of the undertaking’s magnitude that is rather different from the one conveyed by Mattogno:
• Under the date "June 15th, 1943", Wells describes a ravine that is "over a thousand feet long" and contains "an open mass grave with thousands of bodies"^[98].
• Under the same date, Wells mentions that his unit is on a road that connects the Janowska concentration camp with a place known as the "sands". He states that the whole of this place is a mass grave^[99]. Later in the book he describes this place in more detail: "In the western section of Lvov is Janowska Street. At the end of this street, as I've said, is a huge sandy area, called the Janowska "sands." These "sands" have high hills, deep ravines, and cover an area of approximately two and a half square miles."^[100].
• On another day, "our brigade is opening a mass grave that contains 1,450 bodies"^[101].
• Thursday, June 24th: "The Untersturmführer, satisfied with yesterday's work (over two thousand corpses were burned), makes a speech during our lunch."^[102]
• "Friday, June 26, 1943": three mass graves containing "over seven hundred bodies" are opened^[103]. Under the date of the next day ("Saturday, June 27th"), it is mentioned that "In the ravine, where all the bodies are already burned, the ground is turned over to see if anything is left."^[104] This suggests that these about 700 bodies were burned in one day and not in three days as Mattogno claims. The following day, Sunday, is a day of rest. Under the date "Tuesday, June 30th", Wells mentions that "The work on the three graves, which was started on Friday, is completely finished today. The fire is dying out, and the people can be seen carrying the remaining ashes in wooden boxes to the Ash Brigade."^[105] This is probably the basis for Mattogno’s claim (ignoring the aforementioned entry for "Saturday, June 27th", as well as the entry for Thursday, June 24th whereby "over two thousand corpses" had been burned on the previous day) that "it took three days to eliminate 700 bodies in June of 1943".
• On the same day, there is a mass execution at the work site of the "death brigade", during which its members are ordered to stay in the "bunker"; however some peer through cracks in the roof and report to the others what is happening. When the execution is finished, the body disposal unit is called out to burn the victims’ bodies: "An hour later all the bodies are aflame. They number 275."^[106]
• On "Wednesday, June 31st", a large group is scheduled to start on a new working site, which is described as follows: "The graves here are about two months old. The ground is moist, and the workers soon find that the corpses have disintegrated. For this reason the work takes much longer. Instead of pulling out an entire body, one pulls out parts of it; usually the heads are severed from the bodies. We count only the heads. Bodies without heads are not tallied-they are too disintegrated for accurate counting. In one of the graves the bodies are completely deteriorated, with only bones strewn about. The work is gruesome. The inmates are up to their knee in puddles of foulness. With bare hands, they toss the remnants into buckets; they carry the buckets over to the fireplace and toss the contents into the fire."^[107]
• On Thursday, July 1st, Wells decides to discontinue his day by day account "because it is to repetitious" and to henceforth "touch only the highlights of life in our brigade". The next chapter begins with the description of a new working place, the fourth area containing mass graves that the brigade has worked in. In this place, "one has to dig very deep before one finds the bodies. The corpses are clothed; they were inmates of the concentration camp six to eight months ago. They lie in layers. Every few feet there is another layer of thirty to fifty bodies. This grave goes down as deep as twenty-five feet and is about seventy-five feet long."^[108] On the same page, Wells starts describing the progress that his unit has made in managing to burn more bodies at a faster pace^[109]:
"At first, we had been capable only of building heaps of five hundred bodies. After a while we managed to pile up heaps of seven hundred and fifty, and now, really experienced, we can stack up heaps of two thousand and more. The carriers ascend to the top of these heaps on ladders with their bodies.
To light the fire, we pour gasoline all over the top and on the sides of the pyramid. Afterward we make a torch and ignite the fire. There is an explosion as the fire catches and the sky darkens from the smoke.
The length of time required to burn the bodies depends on whether the bodies are clothed or naked, fresh or putrid. Clothed bodies burn more slowly, as do those in an advanced state of decay. The difference in time of burning between fresh and putrid bodies is a matter of one day. Children and women burn faster. But success in our work depends on how much experience we have. In the beginning it took us one week, using much oil to burn the same sized pyre that took only two days using one quarter the amount of oil later on. It's a matter of "knowhow."
• "One evening, around July 15th", the brigade is called upon to burn a heap of naked bodies: "Lower down in the heap the bodies are, as usual, distended because of the pressure. All the corpses are heavy because most of them had been men. At 9 :oo A.M. the whole job is finished and all the bodies are stacked up, ready for burning. The pyre is made up of 425 bodies, but its size is as great as that normally built for eight hundred corpses excavated from the pits. That is because the bodies are so bloated."^[110]
• Under the date Sunday, August 22nd, 1943, Wells mentions that the work of digging up new pits is "ceaseless"; in the area where the brigade is now, the pits are "about 165 feet long" and "there are about fifteen of them with a total of nine thousand corpses"^[111]. Note that this number alone is almost twice as high as the number ("approximately 5,100") that Wells’ partial figures add up to according to Mattogno.
• The procedure for burning the corpses in these new pits is described as follows^[112]: "We erect two fireplaces. When one pyre stops burning, we ignite the other one and start on a new heap of the dead. We now have taken to building pyramids of a thousand or more bodies, and have been told to keep using less and less oil. We can manage to do this, for we are now very skillful at body-burning.
Untersturmführer Scherlack tells us that, with these pits, the job will be finished here and we will move to the far end of Lyczakow Street in the Krzywicki woods on the outskirts of Lvov. The deadline for finishing the work here is September, we are informed."
Untersturmführer"Scherlack" was Walter Schallock, commander of the first Kommando 1005 to go into operation in Eastern Europe; this commando was also the only "1005" detachment that did not only unearth and burn corpses, but also carry out large-scale executions of Jews. Schallock’s deputy was Oberscharführer Johannes Rauch. After the war Rauch was recognized on a street in Munich by Wells and two other survivors of the "death brigade", Max Hoening and David Manucewitz. Taken into custody by the Americans, he was handed over to Poland, where in 1949 he was sentenced to death and executed. Schallock, who before the war had been with the criminal investigation department, was the subject of two criminal investigation procedures in the German Federal Republic after the war. Both were eventually cancelled, the first on grounds that Schallock was permanently unable to stand trial for health reasons, the second because of Schallock’s death in 1994. ^[113]
• Before moving out to its new working site in the Krzywicki woods, the brigade has to remove another mass grave^[114]: "Today we start the digging, and the day is over before we reach the bodies.
The next day we go to work at daybreak.[…]By about midday all the bodies are pulled out, the fireplace is built and ignited, and the two pits are refilled with earth. There are 275 bodies. The problem now arises as to what to do with the bones that haven't burned. The Ash Brigade has already finished its work and the grinding machine has been partially dismantled. There is no time to reassemble and start it, because we have a deadline; we must move to our new quarters. We are made to dig a very deep pit and bury the leftover bones."
• On "Tuesday, September 7, 1943" the "death brigade" moves to its new working site in the Krzywicki woods^[115]. Work there starts on Thursday, September 9, 1943 and is described as follows^[116]:
"On Thursday, September 9, 1943, we leave for our first day of work at this new site. There are many graves here, one next to another, starting about one hundred feet from our camp. The corpses in these graves have been in the ground for more than a year. In some of the graves, beside the corpses, there are also packages of clothing. We can tell from these packages that the graves contain the victims of the December, 1941, action at the "Bridge of Death."^[117]
At the order of the Untersturmführer we try to build a fireplace with iron grates instead of wooden logs, but under the heat and weight the iron grates bend, and all the bodies cascade down. Since this new experiment doesn't work, we return to the "old" system, the one we used on the "sands." We build pyres of two thousand or more "figures," the name the Germans gave the bodies. They call us "figures," too. They say, for example: "Zehn Figuren heraustreten!" (Ten figures step out!)
Normally we ignite the pyres on Saturday, and it usually takes until Wednesday for the heap to be completely burned. ^[118] […]
By October 8, 1943, we are all but finished with the work at this new site – Our last pyre of two thousand corpses is ready to be burned."
Wells’ description suggests that they spent Thursday, 09.09.1943 and Friday, 10.09.1943 building the first pyre(s) of 2,000 corpses, which were then lit on Saturday, 11.09.1943. Assuming two days to extract the corpses and build a pyre, about 18,000 corpses would have been burned or ready for burning by Friday, 8.10.1943. Assuming one day to extract the corpses and build a pyre, the number would be 36,000, as shown in the table below:

• Its work in the Krzywicki woods finished, Wells and his fellow inmates move on "to different places, where we unearth the graves, disinter the corpses, and bring them, in the insulated truck, to be burned." They go "to the towns of Jaryczow, Brzuchowice, Dornfeld, and Bobrka."^[119]
• On Monday, 25th October 1943, the brigade is required to burn the bodies of a large number of freshly killed people – about 2,500, judging by the number of pairs of shoes they find upon arriving at the extermination site after having been sent away on the pretext of an "air raid"^[120].
• On Tuesday, 26th October 1943, another "air raid" takes place, this time within hearing distance of the brigade’s members locked inside their tents and with Wells also being able to see certain details of the killing. No information about the number of victims is given. After describing this killing and reflecting on why the victims didn’t commit suicide, Wells mentions that every day "different groups of SDs arrive here" in order to watch and learn from "the German method of execution and our expertise in the burning of corpses". When questioned by such visitors, the brigade’s members are supposed to claim that they have been doing this work for "less than 12 days", as a corpse disposal unit is supposed to be eliminated and replaced by another every 14 days; Wells assumes that the Untersturmführer is keeping him and his fellow inmates alive because of the expertise they have acquired and because he thinks they have no plans to escape^[121].
• On 27th October 1943, the new commandant of Janowska concentration camp^[122] starts making preparations for the final liquidation of the camp, which takes place two weeks later ("All received good coats and suits, and they marched out-to death."). Assuming that they will now also be killed because they are no longer needed, the men of Wells’ brigade start to plan an uprising^[123].

The uprising took place on 19 November 1943. Most of the inmates in the brigade at that time (126 according to Chamaides, 120 according to Korn^[124]) were killed, only 12 managed to survive.

How many bodies were burned during Wells’ time with the "death brigade" will never be known, though the aforementioned information in his book suggests an order of magnitude way above that claimed by Mattogno. Sandkühler estimated that according to Wells’ notes up to 100,000 corpses may have been burned in "the area behind the Jewish cemetery" ("im Gelände hinter dem jüdischen Friedhof") alone, vs. 60-70,000 in the "sands" and 45-50,000 in the Leisinice forest according to Chamaides. Considering these estimates, Sandkühler assumed that about 100-120,000 Jews were shot "in Lemberg"^[125]. The number is higher than the 90,000 mentioned by Wells in his conversation with Desbois, which presumably refers to all areas of the "death brigade"’s activity and not – contrary to what Desbois seems to have assumed, judging by his having called the Lisinitchi forest "the theater for the massacre of more than 90,000 people"^[126]– to the Leisinice/Lisinitchi/ Krzywicki woods alone. Interestingly, the number 90,000 was also mentioned by a Schupo (Schutzpolizist = policeman) interrogated by officials of the Soviet Ministry for State Security, who claimed that this number had been given to him by Schallock^[127]. The number being much lower than the one originally claimed by Wells (310,000), Chamaides estimate (60-70,000 plus 45-50,000) and the Soviet Extraordinary Commission’s own estimate of 200,000, it is rather unlikely that this witness was subject to any coercion. Pohl estimates the total number burned by Schallock’s 1005 detachment in Eastern Galicia at 100,000. A member of Schallock’s unit testified that Schallock had on a weekly basis reported the number of corpses burned to Berlin, coded as water level reports (Wasserstandsmeldungen)^[128] .

Death tolls claimed by witnesses should, if possible, be checked against other evidence. The city of Lemberg/Lvov had a Jewish population of about 160,000 in July-August of 1941, according to the Katzmann Report. The number of survivors is given by various sources as between 200 and 900^[129]. Rounding upwards the highest number for good measure, I’ll assume that 159,000 Jews living in Lvov in July-August 1941 lost their lives during the German occupation. The causes of death other than shooting were a) deportation to and gassing at Bełżec, and b) hunger and disease inside the ghetto.

Regarding a), German historian Sara Berger has established the following deportations^[130]:
• 15 March to 1 April 1942: 15,000
• 10 to 22/25 August 1942: 38,000 to 50,000
• 18 to 20/21 November 1942: 5,000 to 10,000

So a total of 58,000 to 75,000 Jewish inhabitants of Lvov were deported to Bełżec, leaving 84,000 to 101,000 who died locally. Living conditions among the Jewish inhabitants of Lvov were abysmal, with an estimated 600 dying each month of hunger and disease^[131]. If this monthly death toll applied during the about 19 months between the large population movements from 12 November to 8 December 1941 into what was to become the Lvov ghetto^[132] and the liquidation of the ghetto (following its transformation into a "Julag"– short for "Judenlager", i.e. "camp for Jews"– in early 1943^[133]) in June 1943^[134], a total of about 11,000 Jews died of such "natural" causes. This number is probably too high as the ghetto’s population was regularly reduced by deportations and executions, but I will use it nevertheless to establish the minimum number of Lvov Jews killed by shooting. That minimum number is between 159,000 minus 75,000 minus 11,000 = 73,000 and 159,000 minus 58,000 minus 11,000 = 90,000. If one considers the additional mass killings in towns and villages in the Lvov region^[135], whose victims were also exhumed and/or burned by the "death brigade", the figure given by Wells in his conversation with Father Desbois must be considered entirely plausible, even arguably conservative.

While the work of the "death brigade" made it impossible to accurately estimate the numbers of victims on hand of their physical remains, its execution was an open secret in the city of Lvov and its surroundings. Adolf Wislovski, interviewed by Father Desbois in August 2005, recalled having heard the shootings and the cries of the victims and occasionally watched the killings from his house, and that it was "hard to breathe" due to the smoke from the fires in which the corpses were burned. He also recalled the shooting when members of the corpse disposal unit tried to escape, having seen lots of bodies the next morning, and that his father was requisitioned to transport the bodies. ^[136] The driver of Warzok, the last commandant of Janowska concentration camp, recalled in a testimony, given on 10.6.1960, that the stench of the burning corpses lay over the city of Lemberg and mauve and yellow-brown plumes of smoke were in the air^[137]. The smoke and stench were such that the local fire brigade was mobilized, leading to the following documentary record dated 23 July 1943: "Janowskastraße: Die Turmwache meldet, daß ein Brand hinter dem Friedhof sichtbar ist. Dort angelangt erklärte die SS-Polizei, daß kein Brand besteht und mahnte zur Rückkehr." ("Janowska Street: The tower watch reports that a fire is visible behind the Jewish cemetery. Upon arrival there the SS-police declares that there is no fire and warns to turn back.").^[138]

While the corpses burned by Schallock’s Kommando 1005 and its "death brigade" were mostly of Jews, they also included non-Jewish victims of Nazi crimes. The most prominent of these are mentioned in Wells’ book:

We know at once that these are not the bodies of Jews. It is clear that these had been very important people; we could tell by their clothes and their jewelry. Some of them had been buried in tuxedos, others in very fine conservative clothes. When we pull out the first two corpses, two gold watches with heavy chains and a gold Waterman pen fall out. The pen has a gold band round it about half an inch wide, with the owner's name engraved on it.
The grave is only about four feet deep, so that after half an hour all the bodies are out and loaded on the heavily insulated truck that we had come with. I don't know how many corpses there are exactly, but there appear to be about thirty. A few minutes later the place is returned to its former appearance- we leave it spic and span. After we are counted, we climb back onto the truck, and, about 11:30 P.M., we are back in our tents.
The next day, those who worked last night have the day off. The others unload the insulated truck and put the bodies on the pyre. The inmates, inquisitive as to who these bodies were, start to pull out documents from their pockets. The documents show that among these dead are Professor Kazimicrz Bartel, internationally known mathematician and former Prime Minister of Poland; Dr. Ostrowski, Professor Stozek, T. Boy Zelenski, and others. There are thirty-eight bodies – the very cream of Poland's social and intellectual life. ^[139]

Three of the above mentioned are among the 38 Lvov professors, family members and guests murdered in the Wulka hills according to Polish historian Józef Krętosz^[140]: Prof. Dr. Tadeusz Ostrowski, Chief of the Institute of Surgery, Uniwersytet Jana Kazimierza, Prof. Dr. Włodzimierz Stożek, Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Politechnika Lwowska (PL), and Prof. Dr. Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, writer and gynecologist, Chief of the Institute of French Literature. Prof. Dr. Kazimierz Bartel, former Prime Minister of Poland, former Rector of PL and Chairman of the Department of Geometry at PL, was also killed but is not listed among those murdered in the Wulka hills, leaving open the question what document(s) pertaining to him it was that Wells found and why such document or documents were there.

Non-Jewish victims of mass killings in this area may also have included Italian prisoners of war^[141]. The aforementioned Adolf Wislovski recalled having witnessed the shooting of such prisoners, remembering that they "were in uniform with their little plumed hats"^[142] In his "devastating" article, Mattogno quotes the part of Wislovski’s account that includes this detail, then bluntly dismisses it as having no proof value, after referring to the finds of an Italian investigatory commission, quoted in the Italian edition of Desbois’ book, which "cast doubt upon the alleged mass executions", and to an article by Erika Lorenzon which refers to the mentioned commission’s conclusions and to a minority opinion by overruled members of the commission whereby the massacre could not be completely disproven, "although there are still reasonable grounds for doubt which make it impossible to consider the matter proven". Pohl addressed the matter as follows (my translation) ^[143]:

Also subject to much attention after the war was the fate of Italian prisoners of war, which the Wehrmacht had interned since 1943 in Stalags 325 and 328 in Eastern Galicia. Since 1944 there were Soviet claims whereby 2,000 of these prisoners had been shot in the Lemberg citadel, in a Stalag or in the Lesienice forest. In 1987 the Italian government decided to examine these claims and sent a commission to Lemberg and to the archives. This commission concluded that such shootings had not taken place. In the meantime, however, the commission’s report has been strongly criticized, and Soviet authorities have handed over new evidence.

Pohl’s book was published in 1997, which raises the question how the criticism of the commission’s results, mentioned by Pohl, could have failed to reach Mattogno’s attention until 2009 (when the original Italian version of his article appeared), or until 2015 (when the English translation thereof was published.

In connection with his disingenuous attempt to make believe that the Lisinitchi Forest and the Krzywicki woods were two different places^[144], Mattogno remarks that Wells’ book doesn’t mention "any bodies of Italian soldiers"– which is true but quite pointless, as Desbois doesn’t claim that it does^[145]. However, Heinrich Chamaides[^[146]expressly mentioned in his testimony that among the corpses burned in what is called the "Ligakovsk [?]" forest in the German translation of his testimony there had been clad and unclad ones, and that from the clothing of the latter he had recognized that those shot were Russian and Italian prisoners or civilians. This means that, unless Chamaides testimony was published in one of the Polish newspaper articles that Adolf Wislovski collected^[147], there are two testimonies independent of each other suggesting that Italian prisoners were indeed executed by the Germans in the Lisinitchi Forest^[148]. Given that executions of Italian prisoners was not exactly a practice alien to the German armed forces, the accuracy of Chamaides and Wislovski’s accounts in this respect would thus be a distinct possibility. ^[149]

Notes

[85]»Gott mit uns« Der deutsche Vernichtungskrieg im Osten 1939 – 1945.. Edited by Ernst Klee e Willi Dressen, 1989 S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The translations of Korn’s and Chamaides’ testimonies are transcribed on pp. 225-229 of this document collection.
[86] See the Wikipedia page "Leon Weliczker Wells" ([link]).
[87] Leon Weliczker Wells, The Janowska Road, first published in 1963 by The Macmillan Company. A second edition with the title The Death Brigade was published in 1978 by Holocaust Library, New York. Quotes in this article are from the second edition.
[88] See the Wikipedia page "Janowska concentration camp" ([link]).
[89] See Nizkor transcripts of Session 22 part 2 ([link]), part 3 ([link]), Session 23, part 1 ([link]), part 2 ([link]), part 3 ([link]), part 4 ([link]). A part of the testimony can be viewed on Youtube under [link].
[90]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 115.
[91] In his deposition at the Eichmann Trial, Weliczker Wells mentioned that he had had two brothers and four sisters and that he was the only survivor not only of the immediate family "but of the whole family including all cousins, uncles, which counted all of 76 members" (Nizkor transcript of Session 22 part 2, [link]).
[92] In what he may have thought was a touch of humor, Mattogno’s translator Carlos Porter rendered this question as "Whatcha doin', Baby?".
[93]The Death Brigade, p. 162.
[94] As above, p. 146.
[95] As above, pp. 194-95.
[96] As above, pp. 206-07.
[97] Wells did provide total numbers, however, in his depositions before the Soviet Extraordinary Commission and at the Eichmann trial. The former he told that that his unit had burned more than 310,000 bodies, thereof 170,000 in the immediate vicinity of the camp and another 140,000 or more in the Lysynychi area of eastern Lvov (see the Wikipedia page mentioned in note 88). At the Eichmann trial, when asked if he could give the court an approximate number of the bodies burned by his brigade, his answer was "A few hundred thousand". See Nizkor transcription of Session, part 3 ([link]). Both numbers are considerably higher than those given by Chamaides (as note 85), who estimated that his unit had burned about 60-70,000 bodies he called the "valley of death" and 45-50,000 in a wood area referred to as the "Ligakovsk [?]" forest in the German translation of his testimony. The Soviet Extraordinary Commission must have considered Chamaides’ lower estimates more credible. In the Indictment on Count Three at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals (transcribed i.a. under [link]), it is stated that in the "Ganov camp" (meaning the Janowska concentration camp in Lvov, from whose inmates the "death brigade" was formed) "200,000 peaceful citizens were exterminated".
[98]The Death Brigade, p. 140.
[99] As above, p. 143.
[100] As above, p. 158.
[101]As above, p. 157.
[102]As above, p. 165.
[103]As above, p. 167.
[104] As above, p. 168.
[105] As above, p. 173.
[106] As above, pp. 173-74.
[107] As above, p. 175.
[108] As above, p. 179.
[109] As above, pp. 179-180. The claim that "clothed bodies burn more slowly, as do those in an advanced state of decay" is counterintuitive (as clothing contributes flammable material to the burning corpses and bodies in an advance state of decay have lost most of their water and thus burn better) and thus in all probability a mistake in Wells’ account, like the incoherent dates and the claim, on p. 146, that each corpse dragged up from a mass grave "weighed 150 to 200 pounds" (an improbably high weight for small-statured and malnourished Jews from ghettos in eastern Poland). See the blogs ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 1)" ([link]) and "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 2, Section 3)" ([link]).
[110] As above, p. 181.
[111] As above, p. 185.
[112] As above, p. 186.
[113] Regarding Schallock’s "Kommando 1005", see Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944, R. Oldenbourg Verlag München 1997, pp. 379-381; Thomas Sandkühler, Endlösung in Galizien, 1996 Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger GmbH, Bonn, pp. 277-280; Jens Hoffmann, "Das kann man nicht erzählen.»Aktion 1005« - Wie die Nazis die Spuren ihrer Massenmorde in Osteuropa beseitigten, 2008 KKV konkret Hamburg, pp. 91-105. Rauch’s postwar fate is described on pp. 297 – 305 of The Death Brigade and in Hoffmann, as before, note 19 on pp. 92-93. Regarding Schallock’s postwar fate see Hoffmann, as before, and Pohl, as before, p. 420.
[114]The Death Brigade, pp. 190-91.
[115] As above, pp. 193-94.
[116] As above, pp. 195-96.
[117] This action took place while moving into the newly created ghetto the majority of those among Lemberg’s Jews who were still living outside that ghetto. The only accesses to the new ghetto were beneath two railway bridges. Jews who had an especially poor or weak aspect were selected, brought by truck to the forest at Lesienice and shot there. Several thousand Jews, including a large number of women, were killed in this action (Pohl, as above, p. 160). SS-Gruppenführer Fritz Katzmann, Commander of the German SS and Police in the District of Galicia, referred to this operation as follows in the report dated 30 June 1943 that is known as the Katzmann Report (Nuremberg Document 018-L, IMT Volume XXXVII, pp. 391-431, [link]): "Bei dieser Umsiedlung der Juden in ein bestimmtes Stadtviertel wurden mehrere Schleusen errichtet, an denen von vorneherein bei der Durchschleusung das gesamte arbeitsscheue und asoziale jüd. Gesindel erfasst und sonderbehandelt wurde." ("During this resettlement of the Jews to a certain quarter of the city there were erected gates, at which during the transfer all the work-shy and asocial Jewish scum was caught and specially treated.")
[118] Despite their "know how", and presumably because the "iron grates" employed in the mentioned experiment were less stable (and perhaps also less properly arranged, with too long spans between supports) than the railway rails used at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps and the grates employed at Dresden after the Allied air attacks on 13/14 February 1945, the "death brigade" didn’t manage to burn bodies at the pace that was achieved at these places – see the blogs "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 3, Section 1)" ([link]) and "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 3, Section 2)" ([link]). Another time-consuming factor in comparison to the AR camps was the absence of excavators to extract the bodies from the graves. Unlike their "colleagues" at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, the members of the "death brigade" had to extract all bodies from the graves by manual labor.
[119]The Death Brigade, p. 197.
[120] As above, pp. 204-05.
[121] As above, pp. 206-07.
[122] Wells calls him Hauptsturmführer Warzog. The man’s name was Friedrich Warzok (Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, p. 333).
[123] As above, pp. 210-11.
[124] As note 85.
[125]Endlösung in Galizien, p. 280. As Hoffmann points out (Das kann man nicht erzählen …, note 17 on p. 92) there are various designations ("forest of Lesienice", "the Lyczakow forest on the eastern edge of Lemberg", the "Krzywicki woods") for the forest area in which much of the body-burning took place. Wells himself called it the Lysynychi area of eastern Lvov in his testimony before the Soviet Extraordinary Commission (see note 97) and the Krzywicki woods in his book, obviously meaning the same area. This doesn’t keep Mattogno from claiming, in his "devastating" article, that the Krzywicki woods were a place different from what Desbois call the Lisinitchi Forest.
[126]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 111.
[127] Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, note 159 on p. 381.
[128] As above, p. 381 and note 160 on the same page.
[129] See the Wikipedia page "Lwów Ghetto" ([link]). Wells, who estimated the city’s Jewish population as 150,000 on the date of the German attack, testified at the Eichmann trial that two weeks after liberation 212 Jewish men, not all from the city, were registered in Lvov, see Nizkor transcript of Session 23, part 3 ([link]).
[130] Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung. Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka, 2013, Hamburger Edition, pp. 416-422. Berger’s totals for Bełżec are higher than those that become apparent from the Höfle telegram (see under [link] and [link]), so some of her numbers for individual deportations may also be a bit on the high side.
[131] Sandkühler, Endlösung in Galizien, p. 207.
[132] Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, pp. 159-60.
[133] As above, p. 248; Sandkühler, Endlösung in Galizien, p. 225.
[134] Pohl, as above, pp. 258-59; Sandkühler, as above, pp. 227-28.
[135] Pohl, as above, pp. 67-71, 110-116 (mass shootings in 1941), 223-229 (shootings in connection with deportations between July and December 1942) and 246-265 (mass shootings and liquidation of ghettos in 1943). These pages contain accounts of mass shootings throughout the Galicia district, including Lvov and the Lvov region.
[136]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 116-120. The interview is transcribed under [link].
[137] Sandkühler, Endlösung in Galizien, p. 278 and note 429 on p. 522.
[138] As above, pp. 278-79 and not 430 on p. 530.
[139]The Death Brigade, p. 197.
[140] As quoted on the Wikipedia page "Massacre of Lwów professors" ([link]). The source given is: Józef Krętosz (2012), "Likwidacja kadry naukowej Lwowa w lipcu 1941 roku", in: Niezwykła więź Kresów Wschodnich i Zachodnich, ed. by Krystyna Heska-Kwaśniewicz, Alicja Ratuszna & Ewa Żurawska, Uniwersytet Śląski, pp. 13–21.
[141] So-called "military internees", a designation given to about 600,000 members of the Italian armed forces captured by the Germans after Italy switch sides in September 1943. See the page "Italian Military Internees" of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial Site ([link]) and the German Wikipedia page "Militärinternierte" ([link]).
[142]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 113; see also Wislovski’s interview on pp. 116-120 (as note 136). Plumed hats or helmets were worn by the Bersaglieri elite infantry, see the German Wikipedia page "Bersaglieri" ([link]).
[143]Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, pp. 113f.
[144] See note 125.
[145] Mattogno must have wrongly concluded otherwise from the fact that Desbois’ first mention of Wells’ book (Holocaust by Bullets, p. 111) follows his first mention of Adolf Wislovski, who told him that he "kept Polish newspaper articles that talked about the commando charged with the cremation of bodies" and that he and a friend had climbed a tree and from there seen "the execution of Italian soldiers".
[146] As note 85.
[147] See note 145.
[148] The main difference between the testimonies is that according to Wislovski the prisoners undressed before being shot, whereas according to Chamaides they were killed and buried in their uniforms. These differences can be explained by assuming that the former procedure (having the prisoners undress, presumably under the pretext that they were to undergo a delousing procedure as they seemed unaware of their impending fate) was adopted in some executions whereas in others the prisoners were shot in uniform, depending on what was considered expedient by the executioners in each case.
[149] Gerhard Schreiber, "Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen gegenüber Italienern", in: Wolfram Wette/Gerd R. Ueberschär (editors), Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert, pp. 222 to 234, transcribed on the reference thread "German War Crimes against Italians" ([link]). Schreiber mentions that Italians killed by German forces acting under orders included thousands of Italian soldiers shot when or after laying down their weapons as well as many of the about 46,000 military internees who perished in German captivity.

Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (4)
Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)

In the previous blog of this series we had a look at Mattogno’s handling of evidence regarding mass killings and corpse incinerations that took place in areas around the city of Lviv, Ukraine (Lvov in Russian, Lemberg in German) during the Nazi occupation, especially the omissions or misrepresentations in Mattogno’s rendering of Leon Weliczker Wells’ account of the activities of a unit of forced laborers in charge of cremation within the scope of Operation 1005.

This blog will be mainly dedicated to examining Mattogno’s arguments regarding the eyewitness and archaeological evidence mentioned in Chapter XVII of Father Desbois’ book, about his research on the killings in the Ukrainian town of Busk^[150].



Mattogno dedicates section 5 of his "devastating" article to the witnesses interviewed by Desbois at Busk. He refers to Desbois’ claim, in an interview by François Delpla on 4 June 2009^[151], that direct witnesses interviewed by him had never been heard [before] and do not appear in any archive document. This claim is supposed to be contradicted by the following reference Desbois makes in his book to the "propagandistic" Soviet war crimes investigations^[152]:

We found several names of other Ukrainian witnesses from Busk who had given evidence in 1944 to the town district attorney. […] In 1944, the district attorney of Busk had interrogated Ukrainian witnesses who lived in Chevtchenko Street, that long street that bordered the Jewish cemetery. Without realizing it, in 2006 we had knocked at the same doors as the district attorney did 62 years earlier.
The degree to which the testimonies dovetailed with each other was astounding, in terms of both form and content.

Even if the witnesses interviewed by Desbois at Busk had been exactly the same persons who had been interrogated by the district attorney of Busk 62 years earlier, these witnesses would just be an exception to the rule mentioned in the Delpla interview. However, the time elapsed alone (62 years) makes this extremely improbable, as the district attorney would have interrogated adults rather than children, and witnesses who were adults in 1944 were unlikely to still be alive in 2006. This reasoning is borne out by the names of the witnesses interrogated in 1944, which are different from those of Desbois’ witnesses, who were children at the time of the events in question. Either Mattogno failed to a) reason properly and b) read Desbois’ rendering of the Soviet era testimonies, or he failed to notice in his reading that the 1944 witnesses were not the ones interviewed by Desbois, or he is trying to take his readers for another of those rides that uncritical "Revisionists" would be more than willing to take.

The 1944 witnesses mentioned by Desbois are the following^[153]:
• Yvan, the Jewish cemetery’s caretaker before 1944, who recalled the following: "The Ukrainian police and four to five Germans transported, for over a week, Jews in a truck to a pit that had already been dug. The naked Jews had to sit down in front of the pit, facing it, and they were killed with machine guns. They killed a lot of Jews; I don’t know how many. All the Jews are buried in 10 or more pits next to the Jewish cemetery in Busk. I know all these pits."
• A cleaning lady who worked for the Germans and heard them talking about the executions every evening.
• Her neighbor Stanislav, who remembered the name of the German officer who had taken charge of the executions: "During the German occupation, I worked as a desiatnik in Busk, in Chevtchenko Street. In May 1943, I don’t remember the exact date, German gendarmes came to my house on the orders of Lieutenant Ludwig Lehner who was head of the German gendarmerie, and also German commander of the town of Busk. These German gendarmes demanded, under threat of death, that I bring citizens to dig pits near the Jewish cemetery. Under that threat, I followed the orders and when the pits were ready, a German gendarme by the name of Maier and other German gendarmes and Ukrainian police transported the Jews from the ghetto to the pits where they were forced to undress completely. They had to put their things in a pile and, in groups of 10 or more people, they had to kneel before the pits. Then they were killed with machine guns. The executions lasted more than a week. More than a thousand Jews were killed before the eyes of the citizens, but we couldn’t approach the pits. Then the citizens and I, as desiatnik, were forced to bury the bodies in the pits . . . In total, in the Jewish cemetery there are almost 10 pits where the bodies of the Jews were buried. "
Of the witnesses interviewed by himself, Desbois mentions Anna Dychkant^[154], Anton Davidovski^[155], a woman named Polina^[156], Eugenia Nazarenko^[157], Stepan Davidovski^[158] and a woman named Lydia^[159]. Needless to say, Mattogno tries to dismiss all of these witnesses’ testimonies. His objections regarding Anna Dychkant and Eugenia Nazarenko have already been addressed in a previous blog of this series^[160], so here we’ll look at what Mattogno has got to say regarding the other four witnesses.

Anton Davidovski is dismissed with characteristic "Revisionist" hand-waving as a "self-styled ‘little friend’" of Anna Dychkant, on account of his having recalled, when asked for Anna’s whereabouts and told about the object of Desbois’ investigation, that he had been with Anna in the barn on the day of the shooting described by Anna, along with three other children. Why Anton Davidovski is supposed to have lied (as the "self-styled" epithet implies), Mattogno does not explain. Nor does he mention that this witness "tried, with jerky, disordered gestures, to indicate to us that the Jews had fallen head first into the pit, and that the gunmen, the Ukrainian police, were standing with rifles beside German officers"^[161], pointed out the site of the local mass graves, and recalled having seen numerous carts transporting Jews who died in the ghetto pass in front of his door: "They had already killed a lot of Jews in the ghetto of Busk. The Germans had requisitioned peasants with their carts to transport the Jews who had died in the ghetto to the pit. My cousin was one of them. Me, I saw everything!". The scene had visibly moved Anton Davidovski, for throughout his testimony, as Desbois mentions, he "continually repeated, like a moan or a haunted suffering: ‘You don’t treat people like that. One wouldn’t even treat wood like that. Their heads were dragging on the ground.’"^[162]

Anton Davidovski also recalled that one of his neighbors had hidden a Jewish woman in her barn but then betrayed her, whereupon this woman had been killed by a German with a pistol shot to her head. Another detail he recalled was that the Germans "kept 30 or so very pretty Jewish women that they put to work in the offices of the Gestapo but whom they also used as ‘sex objects’ for the police and the Germans." These women, according to the witness, had been shot in a forest 5 kilometers away from Busk after they had become pregnant. ^[163] This detail, Desbois mentions, "was confirmed to us a year later, on August 30, 2006, when we meet Polina, a woman who lived in Chuchmani, a little hamlet six kilometers from Busk, not far from the forest where the Jewish girls were executed." Polina had been told by others that "the Jewish girls who worked for the Kommandantur, bringing food or cooking for them—I don’t know which—were killed in the forest where a pit had been dug." She added that she had known these girls because "at that time I taught at the supply center"^[164]. This detail – Polina’s having known the murdered Jewish girls – is omitted by Mattogno, who tries to dismiss Polina (he mistakenly refers to her as "Anna") as a second hand witness whose confirmation of a "rumor" mentioned by Anton Davidovski he considers insufficient to qualify as independent corroboration. Mattogno might have a point but for the important detail he conveniently omits, and for the fact that there’s no indication of any contact between Anton Davidovski and Polina.

Stefan Davidovski, a witness pointed out by Desbois for his "acute perception" and his ability "to offer such a detailed account of the whole town’s history and geography, and of the ghetto under Nazi occupation"^[165], is bluntly dismissed as an "indirect witness" by Mattogno, without further explanation. While it doesn’t become apparent from Desbois’ interview of Davidovski^[166] what parts of his account are based on first hand observation and what parts are second-hand knowledge, Stefan Davidovski must have had a lot of the former, as he had during the war possessed an authorization to enter and move inside the ghetto.

Regarding Lydia, Mattogno objects that she "did not see the executions". That may be so, but what she saw is nevertheless important, as pointed out by Desbois^[167]:

Every witness saw part of the genocide. None of them can recount the whole thing. That is the limit of visual memory. Lydia saw horse-drawn carts bearing the bodies of Jewish women killed in the ghetto. She believed that these women had been hiding or tried to escape. She remembered having run behind these carts full of bodies as a child, all the way to the door of the cemetery. She supposed that the Germans had killed a lot of people in the ghetto. She also saw trucks full of women and Jewish children, who were crying.

Lydia also pointed out the location of the mass graves, as mentioned by Desbois and conceded by Mattogno. Whence she derived her knowledge becomes apparent from the above-quoted excerpt, which Mattogno fails to mention.

Summing up, one can conclude that none of Mattogno’s objections against the witnesses interviewed by Desbois carries any weight. Mattogno ends this section of his article by making a splendid fool of himself with the following remark, which requires no further comment:

The above-alleged "concordance of testimony" later mentioned by Desbois, means, therefore, that the Soviet prosecutor had interrogated the children "sixty-two years before"!

Besides interrogating witnesses, Desbois organized an archaeological investigation under the supervision of a rabbi, which took place for three weeks in August 2006. The archaeologists identified and opened a number of mass graves near the Jewish cemetery of Busk^[168], containing what Desbois described as follows^[169]:

The bodies appeared one after the other. We were able to establish whether it was a man, a woman, or a child and above all the cause of death. The impact of the bullets and the position of the bodies showed that they had all been shot and buried alive. Many of the women’s bodies were found holding a baby, to protect it from the flow of sand. It was three weeks of macabre discoveries.

The scope of the investigation was limited by the requirement to respect Jewish religious principles as concerns the handling of buried remains^[170]:

The Jewish law, the Halakha, specifies that bodies must not be moved under any circumstance, particularly the victims of the Holocaust. According to Orthodox Jewish tradition, these victims are resting in the fullness of God, and any movement of their bodies would disturb that peace. Hence the archaeologist could only uncover the first layer of bodies, taking care not to move any bones. In addition, the bodies had to be covered up again as soon as the archaeologist finished working.

However, the limitations imposed by this restriction were made up by the other evidence collected, according to Desbois^[171]:

After three weeks, all the graves had been opened. It was impossible to carry out a typical scientific study because we had to respect Jewish and not move any of the bones. We could therefore only observe what appeared on the surface. The missing information, though, appears in the German and Soviet archives of 1944, which explicitly mention the execution of the Jews in the cemetery. These were also confirmed for us by our 10 witnesses, who identified the grave sites with precision.

Desbois puts the number of bodies inside these graves at "around 1,750", stating that these were "the last Jews of Busk" after a large part of the local Jewish community had been deported to Bełżec extermination camp, and adds that most were "women and children who had hidden after the German attacks on the ghetto" and "were found in cellars, imprisoned in the gendarmerie, and then shot". He gives no source for this number, which due to the aforementioned restrictions could not have been established on hand of the archaeological investigation performed. Mattogno, who in chapter 10 of his "devastating" proclaims that said restrictions render the investigation "valueless from the point of view of forensics"^[172], surmises that Desbois sources are "the testimony of the witnesses and the investigation of the 1944-45 Soviet Commission regarding the massacre of the last 1,700 Jews". Such corroborating sources are "discredited in advance" in Mattogno’s book, but it’s not Mattogno who gets to make the rules of evidence whereby researchers establish historical facts, and Soviet investigation results, while requiring critical assessment and checking against non-Soviet evidence whenever possible, are not as worthless as Mattogno would like them to be^[173]. Besides, Desbois mentions not only Soviet but also German archives, and the information about the Busk ghetto’s liquidation that Desbois provides^[174]:

On May 21, 1943, the ghetto of Busk was liquidated by members of the Sipo-Außenstelle of Sokal, the Ukrainian police, and the Volksdeutsche. One thousand two hundred Jews were executed. Three hundred Jews who were fit to work were transferred to the Yanovska camp in Lviv.

is probably based on German sources, considering the identification of the Sipo (Sicherheitspolizei = Security Police) Außenstelle (branch office) at Sokal as one of the units that carried out the killing^[175]. The mentioned number of victims in the Busk ghetto’s liquidation is below that claimed by the cleaning lady interrogated by Soviet investigators^[176], but higher than the number claimed by the witness Stanislav, also interrogated by the Soviets, according to whom more than one thousand Jews were killed over the period of over a week in May 1943. Mattogno swiftly converts the witness’s number into "thousands of Jews", thus again showing his inability to read or his intellectual dishonesty. Then he argues that the duration of the killings recalled by this witness (more than one week) "is in flagrant contradiction with the Holocaust claim that the executions occurred on 21 May 1943". The "Holocaust claim" that Mattogno has in mind is French historian Edouard Husson’s reference in his blog to "the massacre that took place at Busk on May 21st, 1943", according to the article in a French literary journal addressed in the first part of this series^[177]. But whatever it is that Husson wrote in his blog, the only thing known about the date 21 May 1943 in this context is that the liquidation of the Busk ghetto started on this date. The operation may well have lasted about a week (considering that the liquidation of the Sokal ghetto started only on 28 May 1943^[178]), as Jews were dragged from hideouts to the place of execution, or then there were smaller executions over some period following a large-scale massacre as further Jews were discovered in hiding^[179]. The presence of a number of smaller graves instead of one or two bigger ones suggests that the local killing of Busk’s Jews was rather protracted and the graves took in those who had died of privation in the ghetto or been killed during deportations, those killed during the May 1943 operation meant to make the town "free of Jews" (several pits were dug on that occasion by local citizens headed by the witness Stanislav^[180]), and Jews found in hiding later on. Why the Germans chose to dig several pits for the May 1943 operation instead of a single one (as Mattogno claims they should have done) is not known. Possibly the killers considered that the killing of Jews in small groups could be handled more expediently with a number of smaller pits than with a single big pit.

As concerns the killing method described by the witness Stanislav (the victims had to "kneel before the pits" and "were killed with machine guns"), Mattogno produces this peculiar claim:

This method of execution is incompatible with the findings mentioned by Desbois, since it presupposes moving the dead bodies around, and arranging them along the entire surface area of the mass grave; for this reason, the "position of the bodies" in the grave" proves nothing, nor were any skeletons found "in the act of protecting their infants from the shovelfuls of sand."

Mattogno does not reveal whence he deducted that, contrary to Desbois’ description, no skeletons were found in positions suggesting that a woman had tried to protect her infant from shovelfuls of sand. As to the position of the bodies, Mattogno seems to be inferring that Desbois referred to where in a grave a body was placed, as opposed to the posture of that body, which might provide information about the impact of bullets on the body regardless of whether the same was left were it fell or moved around. Assuming that Desbois meant the latter (it does not become clear from his statement whether he does), it is not clear how this would mean a contradiction between Stanislav’s testimony and archaeological finds.

Besides this bickering, Mattogno complains that no "expert report" about the excavations at Busk has been published, contrary to a claim supposedly made by Desbois^[181], and that the same applies to the results of an examination of the Busk finds on 3 October 2007 at Sorbonne university, mentioned by French historian Edouard Husson^[182]. He contrasts this with the ubiquitous publication of reports produced by Nazi Germany about the Soviet massacres at Vinnitsa and Katyn, unaware that by holding up investigations of mass crimes to such standards he is unwittingly denying the overwhelming majority of the Stalinist regime’s crimes, which were never subject to any forensic or archeological investigation at all^[183]. He laments that the covering up of the Busk graves to prevent robbery digging "guarantees that the graves will never again be opened to perform a forensicmedical expert examination intended to ascertain whom the skeletons belonged to, when they died, and the cause of death", and claims that the presence of Jewish victims of Nazi killings has not been proved by the archaeological investigation organized by Father Desbois and, what is more, that Desbois "has provided virtually no support for this particular conclusion".

The last two claims are notoriously dim-witted. German cartridges found inside the mass graves prove that the killing was done using German ammunition, and the skeletons discovered included those of women and children. These finds do not all by themselves identify the victims as Jews and the killers as the German occupiers and their auxiliaries, but considering the body of eyewitness testimony that dovetails with these archaeological finds as concerns their location, the perpetrators and the victims, who other than Jews murdered by the Nazis could be reasonably expected to lie in the Busk mass graves by the Jewish cemetery?

Mattogno feebly tries to suggest that the dead might also be victims of a Soviet crime, in three paragraphs that deserve being quoted in all their splendor:

On p. 188, a witness reports that "the Rada [Ukrainian Parliament] has recognized the genocide of the Ukrainian people during the famine of 1932 and 1933", the so-called Holodomor, "the terrible famine which struck the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. This was the worst catastrophe which ever struck the Ukrainian nation in modern history, since it involved the deaths of several million people (estimates vary widely). According to various historians and the Ukrainian government itself, the famine was intentionally caused by the policies of Soviet Dictator Stalin, in such a way as to enable consideration of the famine a true and proper genocide."
What is certain is that the number of deaths caused by the genocidal famine was enormously greater than that of the “Shoah by bullets” and that women and children also died, both Ukrainians and Jews. On the other hand, the graves at Busk were discovered "in an old Jewish cemetery."
But then, without a forensic investigation, how can one state that the bones in question belonged to Jews shot by the Germans?

The answer to Mattogno’s question is simple: by comparing the archaeological finds with what becomes apparent from Soviet-era testimonies, testimonies made before West German criminal investigators and contemporary German documents about the liquidation of the Busk ghetto, and the post-Soviet testimonies collected by Father Desbois. All these sources of evidence, which are independent of each other, point to the conclusion that the Busk mass graves contain the skeletons of Jewish civilians, including women and children, murdered by Nazi mobile killing units and their auxiliaries. Mattogno apparently expects his readers to believe that the local witnesses were not able to distinguish between victims of the 1932/33 famine and victims of mass shootings that took place ten years later – and that even though his mention of the witness he refers to suggests that witnesses made a clear distinction between the two events. This impression is reinforced by reading the exact words of the witness Mattogno is referring to, Marfa Lichnitski from Novozlatopol, in her second joint testimony with her husband Ivan on December 30, 2006^[184]:

People must know the truth. The Rada recognized the genocide of the Ukrainian people during the famine of 1932–1933. But the Jewish people also suffered a lot. If you read a book about Babi Yar, you can’t sleep for a week. All I saw was the Jews being arrested and taken away but when one knows how they were shot and thrown into the pits alive . . . It seems that when the spring arrived, people couldn’t breathe, the smell was so strong.

It’s also not like local witnesses would have been inclined to mix up shootings by the Soviet NKVD with the shooting of Jews by the Germans and their auxiliaries. Stepan Davidovski expressly mentioned the former^[185]:

When the Germans arrived, the NKVD had already escaped. They had summarily shot 33 people in the prisons: doctors and engineers. Then they left. Their families could bury them when the Germans arrived, directly from Lviv.

Besides being bereft of all logic an reason, Mattogno’s suggestion that the Busk mass graves might as well contain victims of the Holodomor stands out for the conspicuous absence of any "skepticism" on the part of Mattogno when it comes to a historical event regarding which he has no axe to grind. Mattogno not only accepts the Holodomor as a historical fact without any reservations, but also emphasizes that "the number of deaths caused by the genocidal famine was enormously greater than that of the “Shoah by bullets”"^[186]. It would be interesting to interrogate Mattogno on what objective criteria, if any, led him to accept as fact the former while disputing the latter.

With this I end my discussion of Mattogno’s objections regarding Father Desbois’ Busk investigations and turn the last subject of criticism worth addressing^[187], the Bełżec thrashing machine. Desbois is accused of having gullibly fallen for the account of a Bełżec villager whereby his threshing machine had been used to sift the ashes of cremated Jews in search of gold fillings and teeth left therein. The account is supposed to be a tall tale because "according to the official historiography concerning Belzec" (which Mattogno thus tacitly professes to accept), "the gold teeth were extracted from the victims before burial (followed by subsequent disinterment and cremation)", something the "good priest" must have failed to notice.

What Mattogno failed to do here was to think a little (which might have led him to realize that the SS may have, not unreasonably, considered the possibility of some gold teeth having been overlooked during the hasty removal of the bodies from the gas chambers to the mass graves, not to mention valuables hidden in body cavities) and to read what he calls the "official historiography", namely the following text I translated from German:

After cremation the remains of the victims were searched once more for gold and the bones were broken into small pieces. This happened with the help of a flour mill that the Germans had confiscated from a local peasant as well as a somewhat larger mill that presumably came from the work camp at Janovska road in Lemberg. ^[188]

Notes

[150]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 161-191. The chapter is transcribed under [link], except for the testimonies of Stefan Davidovski (pp. 179-184) and Eugenia Nazarenko (pp. 184-191), which are transcribed under [link].
[151] The interview is transcribed under [link].
[152]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 173.
[153] As above, pp. 173 – 175.
[154] As above, pp. 163 – 166 and interview on pp. 124-128. Mattogno apparently didn’t read the interview in which the lady’s full name is given, for he claims that the witness’s last name is not given.
[155] As above, pp. 166-68.
[156] As above, pp. 167-68.
[157] As above, pp. 167-69 and interview on pp. 184-191. Again, Mattogno seems to have missed the interview, for he claims that the witness’s last name is not indicated.
[158] As above, pp. 170-71 and interview on pp. 179-184.
[159] As above, pp. 172-73.
[160]"Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)" ([link]).
[161]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 166.
[162] As above, p. 166-67.
[163] As above, p. 167.
[164] As above, pp. 167-68.
[165] As above, pp. 171.
[166] As above, pp. 179-84.
[167] As above, p. 172.
[168] As above, pp. 176, 178.
[169] As above, p. 177. An aerial view of the Busk mass graves and images of skeletons uncovered and German cartridges found in these graves can be viewed in the documentary "Shoah Par Balles" ([link]), 3:48 to 4:32.
[170] As above, p. 176. Mattogno indulges in some brief mumbling about "this singular ban, halfway between superstition and ceremonial magic", as if religions were supposed to be logical and rational. Never one to mind contradicting himself, Mattogno also claims that in the Busk excavations Desbois had violated the opinions of Jewish religious scholars as concerns the handling of buried corpses, before mentioning that said excavations were carried out under the supervision of a rabbi – not to ensure "that the burials of the victims were conducted according to Jewish law" as Mattogno would have it, but "so that the excavations would not contravene Jewish law" (Holocaust by Bullets, p. 175).
[171] As above, p. 177.
[172] As Mattogno doesn’t reveal what rules of evidence or procedural rules governing any state’s forensic practices would consider the opening of mass graves "valueless" as evidence because it didn’t go beyond the first layer, and as one can reasonably dismiss such narrow-mindedness in the forensic practice of any democratic constitutional state, the conclusion is warranted that the "forensics" here referred to are just Mattogno’s own uninformed idea of "forensics".
[173] See the blog "Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)" ([link]).
[174]Holocaust by Bullets, note 9 on p. 227.
[175] At the end of May 1943 police detachments attacked the districts of Kamionka Strumilova and Zloczov in order to wipe out the few ghettos still existing there. In the Kamionka Strumilova district these were the ghettos in Busk and Sokal, which were attacked on, respectively, 21 May and 28 May 1943 (Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, p. 257 and note 278 on the same page. Pohl mentions that district commander Nehring on 7 June 1943 issued a poster at Katzmann’s order’s whereby the district was now "free of Jews". He refers to a source containing a copy of this poster and to Nehring’s deposition on 24.3.1965. On the "Busk" page of Yahad in Unum’s interactive map of investigated execution sites ([link]), the following testimony recorded in German archives is quoted: "As far as I remember there might have been a big action taken against the Jews on March 20 or 21 in 1943. Busk should have been made "judenfrei" or "judenrein" like we used to call it in those times."
[176] The aforementioned "Busk" page quotes the following testimony recorded in Soviet archives: "2,000 people were shot and buried in the pits situated next to the Jewish cemetery and in the cemetery. I was employed as a cleaning lady for the Ukrainian police and for the German gendarmery. I know who shot the Jews, because after the shooting they bragged and told each other how many Jew they had killed."
[177] See the blog "Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (1)" ([link]).
[178] Pohl, as note 175.
[179] The witness Stepan Davidovski, who unlike Stanislav dated the large massacre to mid-June 1943, and who unlike the other witnesses, who located the killings by the Jewish cemetery, claimed that the victims were taken "to the forest of Rabovi, I don’t know exactly where" and also "to the forest of Chuchmani, others to Sokal, and Rawa Ruska", recalled that the subsequent killing of small groups of Jews found in hiding "went on all summer" (Holocaust by Bullets, p. 182).
[180]Holocaust by Bullets, p. 175.
[181]The site of the exposition "Les Fussilades Massives des Juifs en Ukraine 1941-1944. La Shoah par Balles" ([link]) includes a thumbnail photo or the mass graves viewed from the air, with an explanatory text below including the following statements: "Une expertise commandée par le Mémorial de la Shoah en 2006 a démontré la présence de victimes juives tuées par des balles allemandes entre 1942 et 1943. © Guillaume Ribot A la demande du Mémorial de la Shoah une expertise a été réalisée en août 2006 sous la responsabilité de Yahad-in Unum, par les archéologues ukrainiens de l'Organisation civile Société de recherche des victimes de la guerre « Mémoire » sous la surveillance de l'association Zaka, garante du respect des corps des victimes selon la loi hébraïque." The text refers to an "expertise", i.e. an expert investigation, commissioned by the Mémorial de la Shoah in 2006 and carried out in August 2006 by Ukrainian archaeologists of an organization dedicated to research about war victims. No mention is made of an "expert report" having been drawn up.
[182]"Rapport sur la création et le développement du Centre de ressources pour la recherche et l’enseignement sur la Shoah à l’Est (Paris-Sorbonne/Yahad-In Unum). Remis par le Professeur Edouard Husson au Professeur Georges Molinié, Président de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne" ([link]).
[183] As already pointed out in the blog "Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (3)" ([link]).
[184]Holocaust by Bullets, pp. 140-143. The testimony is transcribed under [link]
[185] As above, pp. 179-80.
[186] In this Mattogno is not completely wrong, by the way. According to my calculations in the blog "Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (2)" ([link]), mobile killing operations accounted for about 1,130,000 out of 1,385,000 victims of the Nazi genocide of Ukraine’s Jews. The Holodomor claimed about 3.3 million victims, according to American historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010 Basic Books, New York, p. 412).
[187] Mattogno’s insinuation in section 13 that Desbois is out for "renewed financing and notoriety", followed by his sneering remark that Desbois should visit the Gaza Strip and "look for Israeli cartridge casings: "one cartridge casing= one dead Palestinian", will not be graced with a comment.
[188] Robert Kuwałek, Das Vernichtungslager Bełżec, 2013 Metropol Verlag Berlin, p. 133 and footnote 13 on the same page. The source for the floor mill is the deposition of Edward Łuczyński on 15.10.1945, which is contained in the Polish investigation file about crimes committed in Bełżec extermination camp.

A film of Patrick Desbois' work in Ukraine was released in France in 2008. A preview of the Desbois film, showing the Busk excavation is here. I originally posted a partial transcript in June 2013 but did not have the full transcript at that time. I have therefore updated the article below with the full transcript, produced for educational purposes only: