The term Techniques of Neutralization was devised by Sykes and Matza in 1957 (see here) to analyze how people suppress guilt by rationalizing their actions in ways that deny or transfer blame. This posting applies their five categories to the excuses used by the Nazis and their denier apologists to evade any guilt for the shootings of Jews they carried out in the USSR.

1) The Denial of Responsibility occurs when the Nazis or their excusers claim that their actions were driven by forces beyond their control. For example, Mattogno and Graf claimed in Treblinka that "According to Mayer, the massacres of the eastern Jews was [sic] not part of a comprehensive plan of extermination, but occurred as the result of the inexorable radicalization of the war in the east and because the eastern Jews were classified by the SS as carriers of Bolshevism." In The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”, Mattogno argues that shootings were a rational and understandable response to the threat posed by partisans (see p.211 and p.226). The Germans are portrayed as being carried along by the tide of history, and the radicalization of their actions is viewed as the natural outcome of any war in this terrain.

It has symbolic value that the Jewess Simone Veil, former inmate in Auschwitz, a so called “Holocaust-survivor”, had abortion legalized during her tenure as France’s “minister of health”, and upon the founding of the European Parliament was elected its “honorary president”. By this choice “Europe” (that is the criminal clique that rules over the old continent) initiated a culture of death which would necessarily lead to its downfall – unless this barbarism is halted in time.

The question of the driving force behind the industrial-scale child murdering is easily answered. From the Jew Lawrence Laden, co-founder of the American “National Abortions Right Action League”, who has “concentrated on supporting the right to abortion with such good results, and whom the feminist author, Betty Friedan called “the father of the movement” to the Jew Dr. Etienne Beaulieu (original family name: Blum), inventor of the abortion pill RU-486 – always we see the same deadly pattern. In the USA, where the percentage of Jews in the population is officially 2 percent and their percentage among doctors is 14 percent, every other abortion doctor is a Jew...

5) The Appeal to Higher Loyalties is the claim that the Nazis had no responsibility to obey international law because their loyalty was to the German race. This technique is least applicable to deniers but it can be found in their musings. For example, Bradley Smith published this passage from Heine:

"The greatest virtue of the Germans is a certain loyalty, a certain, thick-headed, but movingly generous loyalty. The German fights for the worst causes, once he has taken the King‘s shilling, or whenever he has promised his support in a moment of enthusiasm; he fights with a breaking heart, but he fights; no matter how much his better conviction may demur, he cannot simply desert the banner, and he is least likely of all to do so when his party is in danger or perhaps surrounded by superior numbers of enemy…" 

 Nazis relied on higher loyalties to ensure that their underlings co-operated in crimes against Jews. Holocaust denial is itself a form of loyalty to the regime that requires the excusing of any crime that cannot be feasibly denied, in addition to the denial of everything that can possibly be contested.

One of the largest massacres committed in German-occupied Lithuania in 1941 took place near the city of Marijampolė. The victims were the following, as recorded in the report dated 1.12.1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 (the 2nd Jäger Report)^[1], under the date 1 September 1941:

Mariampole

1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses 1,404 Jewish children, 109 mentally ill, 1 fem. German national who was married to a Jew, 1 fem. Russian

In 1996 the city of Marijampolė decided to erect a Holocaust memorial at the place where these 5,090 hapless human beings had been murdered. The search for the mass grave site was initially unsuccessful, as reported in the paper Lietuvos Rytas on 21.08.1996, and several "Revisionists" exulted in what they thought supported their contentions. ^[2] Their joy was premature, as I found out by inquiring with the Mayor of Marijampolė Municipality, who informed me as follows in a letter dated 20.05.2003: ^[3]

Because the exact location of the graves was not known, in 1996 were done archaeological excavations and the place of fusillade was found (about 50 m to the west from registered graves).
Doctor of Archaeology Science of Vilnius University Mr Algimantas Merkevicius did archaeological excavations. All the documents of excavation keep Chief Specialist of Architecture and Urbanity Division of Marijampole Municipality Mr Gedeminas Kuncaitis.

I contacted the mentioned Dr. Merkevicius on 28 May 2003 and asked for lots of information about the mass graves, which I thought had been excavated and investigated in every detail (dimensions of the graves, quantification of the human remains, the methods by which it had been established how and when the victims had been killed, what belongings of the victims and what traces of ammunition and other artifacts belonging to the killers had been found). The response I received from Dr. Merkevicius on 17 June 2003 was not quite what I had expected, but it was interesting enough:

Dear sir Roberto Muehlankamp,
Sorry for late answer, but I was outside of me office.
Yes, I excavated mass grave territory in Marijampole in 1996. The purpose was to finde exact place of the graves. The supposed burrial place was emty and I found the mass graves about 100 m outside of this supposed territory. People were kiled and burried in a big dich. But after finding the exact place, my work was over. I don't know how much people were kiled and how big the mass grave territory.
Best regards, sincerely yours
Algimantas Merkevicius

So the mass graves had not been investigated in detail as I had presumed, but the survey had been limited to establishing their location in order to place the intended monument there. ^[4] I further inquired about the report on the results of this survey, asking Dr. Merkevicius to send it to me (17 June 2003). Dr. Merkevicius responded on 25 June 2003 that he could send me the report upon his return from an excavation, but that I would find "very little information about these graves" in the report. I didn’t receive the report, and I also didn’t insist much further, considering what I had been told about the report’s expectable contents (very little of the information I was looking for), and that the case had been made anyway: "Revisionists" who had crowed about the supposed absence of mass graves had made fools of themselves and shown what poor researchers they are.

This is where our old friend Carlo Mattogno (again) comes in. In the second volume of his book about the Einsatzgruppen he renders my correspondence with Marijampolė Municipality and Dr. Merkevicius in all detail, then spins a conspiracy theory. To his mind, the Lithuanians’ "evasive" response to my inquiries shows that they were making claims against better knowledge^[5]:

In pratica, la presunta scoperta delle fosse comuni era una patetica finzione, ovviamente in riferimento al preteso numero dei cadaveri che dovevano contenere, cioè almeno 5.090. (In practice, the alleged discovery of mass graves was a pathetic fiction, obviously in reference to the alleged number of corpses that had to contain, that is at least 5,090.)

In other words, the respectable public servants of a European city and a renowned archaeologist are supposed to have shamelessly lied through their teeth, putting their reputation at risk by inventing mass grave finds they didn’t make and having a monument erected at a place where they had found nothing. Not exactly the most realistic of propositions, except perhaps for Mattogno, who tries to bolster his conspiracy theory with two fully transcribed/translated 2008 press articles about further developments regarding the "controversial" Marijampolė mass graves.

The narrative of these two articles is very similar.^[6] The mass graves of the September 1941 killings lie on a bend of the Šešupę river that used to house a czarist-era military town. The Soviets later erected military equipment storehouses and an ammunition warehouse and made embankments at the same site. After the demise of the Soviet Union, the buildings became Lithuanian state property and were later bought by a private company, which obtained the municipality’s permission to take down the buildings "without prior coordination with specialists of the Department of Cultural Heritage". Human bones were found when tidying up the area and dismantling the concrete pavement, revealing that the mass graves were partially located below the buildings. Even though construction works were halted at once and bones lying around on the ground were all gathered (at the request of Jewish community leaders), "any larger downpour of rain washed new bones afloat to the surface". The municipality’s official in charge announced that there would be no more demolition works on the burial ground site.

Now, what does Mattogno make of this?

First of all he muses how, if at least a large part of the victims’ bones were below the pavement of buildings, it was possible to find the mass graves in 1996. ^[7]

The likeliest answer to this question is that a part of the mass grave area sufficiently large for detection by probing excavations or other invasive means was not covered by buildings, and as concerns what was below buildings non-invasive survey methods may have been used.^[8]

Mattogno’s next question is why, in his correspondence with me, archaeologist Dr. Merkevicius mentioned no buildings at the site of his survey. Given that (as Mattogno knows) the archaeologist just sent me two very short messages, this is not exactly the most pertinent of questions.

By the way, the two long buildings that used to be by the side of the memorial, still visible on the Google Maps image below, are no longer there.^[9] It might be interesting to know what happened at the site since October 2012, when this image was taken.



Mattogno tries to make the most of those Soviet-era buildings. He submits the hypothesis that the Soviets may have erected military buildings at the site not because it seemed appropriate for the purpose (after all a czarist military town had been located there) and they didn’t care much about buried Jews (at Babi Yar their indifference/contempt had gone to the lengths of dumping pulp into the ravine and planning to put up a housing development or an athletic center there^[10]), but in order to cover up a crime of their own. In support of this possibility (which as far as I know would have no equivalent at any other Soviet crime site), Mattogno refers to a 1999 press article whereby skeletons of people killed by the Soviet NKVD had been found in Marijampolė.^[11]

What Mattogno doesn’t know, or doesn’t care to know, is that Soviet crimes against Lithuanians have been exhaustively investigated since the 1990s, and the state of knowledge allows for determining with great precision who did what, where and when.^[12] Marijampolė Municipality is no exception to this rule: it commemorates the victims of both Nazi and Soviet crimes. The victims of the Soviet regime were buried in the cemetery near Varpas str. in 1944-1953. In the years of Lithuania’s national revival wooden roadside memorials were erected and a Peace Park was established in that place.^[13] A country that suffered Soviet rule for decades and lost far more of its core population (as opposed to minorities like the Jews) to the Soviets than to the Nazis, Lithuania is not the kind of place where one would risk passing off victims of Stalin’s regime as victims of the Nazi occupiers.

Besides, there’s not the slightest evidence that any out-of-hand massacre by Soviet forces was committed at the bend of the Šešupę river where the victims of Einsatzkommando 3 are commemorated. On the other hand there is considerable evidence, besides what has already been mentioned, that corroborates the information in the 2nd Jaeger Report. So far I have come upon the following:

1. Testimony of Jurgis Maksimovas taken on 4.10.1944 by the Soviet Extraordinary Commission. The shootings, according to this witness, took place at 8 pits.^[14]

2. Testimony of Herman Pavlaitis taken by the Soviet SMERSH counterespionage department^[15] (emphasis added):

"In August, 1941, under orders of the German command, the police of Marijampole Uyezd committed a mass raid against the Jewish population of the Marijampole Uyezd. All of the police, including me, were directed to settlements where we took away all the Jewish families, including babies, put them on carts and convoyed them to Marijampole.
For three days of the operation we arrested and convoyed about 7,700 of the Jewish population – women, old people, men and children of all ages.
We had guarded the doomed to death for three days, not giving them any water or food.
On the 3rd day, on Saint Ludwikas’s day, all of them, about 7,000 people, were shot by the police. ^[16]
I, as well as others, was guarding the doomed to execution…”
[…]
"Before the execution the doomed to death were locked in stables.
...After the prisoners were searched, the strongest men were chosen to dig pits. Eight pits were dug, two of them 150 m long, 5 m deep and 4 m wide, and the other six 100 m long, 4 m wide and 5 m deep.
After all the Jews were undressed and were left in underwear, the execution began. First men were shot in groups of 100–200.
As soon as the men were shot, women and children of all ages were executed in the same way.
In the course of the execution many were wounded and then shot by single shots from rifles, and many of them were buried alive, as a result the ground was moving for some hours after the corpses were buried…"

3. Testimony of police officer Vincas Urbanavičius taken on 2.12.1944. At the end of August 1941, according to this witness, the Jews of Marijampolė together with those of Liudvinavas, Kazlų Rūda and Kalavrija were locked into army horse stables.^[17]

4. Diary entry of 12.9.41 by a physician in Kaunas, Elena Kutorgienė:^[18]

In Marijampole (as I was told by a patient who saw it herself) they dug a deep pit and chased women and children inside (they screamed and cried) and shot them with machine pistols. Then they ordered the following ones to lie down on these warm, twitching and perhaps still living bodies; they also murdered them, and so it went on, until the pit was full. […] Moaning, wailing, sobbing. Even the Lithuanian Shaulists fainted, and the medical emergency service had to be called in for them. The women were undressed up to their bras and panties, the men up to their underpants. The remaining clothes were laid on a heap and then distributed to the poor. "Alles sehr praktisch" ["All very practical"– German in the original text.]

5. Contemporary administrative correspondence. Like in numerous other places in Lithuania, the mass graves left behind by the 1941 German-Lithuanian extermination of Marijampolė’s Jews raised public health concerns with the German occupation and Lithuanian collaboration authorities. These concerns were expressed in administrative correspondence, some of which has been recovered, including the following documents regarding the mass graves by the Šešupę river:

a) Report by the Sanitation Department of the Wehrmacht Local Headquarters in Marijampolė, Lithuania, dated 3.4.1942. ^[19]The relevant parts of this document read as follows in my translation (emphases added):

4) Epidemic typhus in 11 cases
Typhoid fever in 3 cases
To avoid such danger is necessary to place another soil cover on the Jew graves by the barracks area, because on the one hand due to the rainwater flowing off, and on the other hand due to the high water (the graves are right on the banks of the Sesupe river and are covered with a soil layer only 50 cm high), the cover is washed off and the corpses are laid bare.
The preventive measures necessary for this purpose shall be carried out by the Local Headquarters’ own work force.

b) Letter sent on 26 October 1942 by the Head of Marijampolė County [Administration] to the Main Health Board.^[20] The relevant parts of this document read as follows in "my" translation^[21] (emphases added):

In response to the Board’s letter No. 20260 I report that the mass graves, which used to be flooded by the incoming Šešupę [river], have been dried by moving them to a higher location. There are currently no untidy mass graves.

The aforementioned evidence fully corroborates the Jäger Report as concerns the large Marijampolė massacre. The cited correspondence shows that the graves were located a) right on the banks of the Šešupę river and b) by a "barracks area", which was obviously the barracks of the czarist military town mentioned in the 2008 press reports. The witness Pavlaitis, quoted above, as well as the witness Urbanavičius, cited by Dieckmann, testified that before the massacre the victims had been herded into stables (Urbanavičius with the precision that the stables had been army horse stables). It stands to reason that these stables pertained to the old czarist military town, made at a time when horses still played a major part in military life. So these witnesses and the authors of the aforementioned correspondence were referring to the same site. All mentioned testimonies point to a very large massacre, with victims in the thousands and not just in the hundreds. A reference to earlier, smaller massacres mentioned in the 2nd Jaeger Report can be ruled out, as these massacres happened at least more than a month before the date of the massacre recalled by the cited witnesses, and moreover took place elsewhere in the Marijampolė area.^[22]

Thus there is no room for reasonable doubt that the mass graves mentioned in my correspondence with Marijampolė Municipality and Dr. Merkevicius pertain to the massacre mentioned in the 2nd Jäger Report under 1 September 1941, that the memorial was set up in the right place, and that the massacre it commemorates actually occurred. The number of victims written on the memorial stone may be too high (the actual number was 5,090 and not 8,000), but the order of magnitude is in line with the facts. It was not a small massacre, but one of enormous proportions.

What is more: if, as suggested by the letter of the Marijampolė Head of County dated 26 October 1942, corpses were removed from the original graves and placed in secondary graves higher above the Šešupę to keep the corpses from being laid bare by floodwater, this might help explain why the 1996 archaeological survey found no corpses at the originally expected place(s). Witnesses to the massacre might have recalled the site(s) of the killing but not the site(s) to which corpses were later moved.^[23]

So much for Mattogno’s Marijampolė Mass Graves Controversy. Further information about the Marijampolė mass killings will be posted as it becomes available.

Update, 30.05.2018

Below are facsimiles of the contemporary administrative correspondence about public health matters mentioned in this article.

Report by the Sanitation Department of the Wehrmacht Local Headquarters in Marijampolė, Lithuania, dated 3.4.1942. Source: LCVA (Lietuvos Centrinis Valstybės Archyvas = Lithuanian Central State Archives), R-678-1-3-42.
Publication of this document requires prior written permission. Any publication of this document must mention the full name of the institution: Lietuvos Centrinis Valstybės Archyvas (Lithuanian Central State Archives), and the archival reference.


Letter sent on 26 October 1942 by the Head of Marijampolė County [Administration] to the Main Health Board. Source: LCVA (Lietuvos Centrinis Valstybės Archyvas = Lithuanian Central State Archives), R 627-1-150-35.
Publication of this document requires prior written permission. Any publication of this document must mention the full name of the institution: Lietuvos Centrinis Valstybės Archyvas (Lithuanian Central State Archives), and the archival reference.


Notes

[1]Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK. 3 bis zum 1. Dez. 1941 durchgeführten Exekutionen (Yad Vashem Archives, Record Group O.53 - Ludwigsburg, USSR Collection, File Number 3, pp. 88-96). The former The Holocaust History Project website featured a transcription and a translation (links to respective first page, from where the following pages can be accessed; a facsimile of the respective original page can be accessed from each page). This was the second report written by Jäger, following an earlier report dated 10.9.1941 (YVA, Record Group O.53 - Ludwigsburg, USSR Collection, File Number 3, pp. 83-86). As of this date, a place search for "Mariampole" in the Yad Vashem Names Database yields 3,521 results. A search for "Marijampole" yields 4,958 results.
[2] Quotes in Sergey Romanov’s article That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part II: Deniers and the graves of Marijampole.
[3]The Mayor’s letter and my subsequent correspondence about this matter are reproduced in the HC Reference Library thread Mass grave(s) at Marijampole.
[4] The monument can be viewed on the Marijampole Municipality’s website, with the following caption: "In the valley of the Sesupe river 5090 Jewish and people of other nationalities were killed in 1941 by Nazi forces." Larger photos of the memorial and its surroundings can be viewed on the pages Gedenkorte Europa 1939-1945 - Marijampolė Stadt and Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance – Mariampol.
[5] Carlo Mattogno, Gli Einsatzgruppen Nei Territori Orientali Occupati. Parte II L"Azione 1005" (2017 Effepi Edizioni, Genova), p. 278. In the subsequent paragraph on the same page, Mattogno claims that in the HC white paper (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues., by Jonathan Harrison; Roberto Muehlenkamp; Jason Myers; Sergey Romanov; Nicholas Terry), I "prudently dropped the matter" ("lasciò cadere prudentemente la faccenda") in my chapter about mass graves, even though there is a reference in note 25 on p. 97 to an article by "Revisionist" star Germar Rudolf and one Sibylle Schröder, in which these authors try to make the Einsatzgruppen look as mere anti-partisan fighters and, among other things, make much of the supposedly absent mass graves at Marijampolė. The respective chapter of the critique was written by one of my co-authors (and not by me, as Mattogno’s readers may be led to believe), and the critique’s chapter 7, which I wrote, was about the mass graves at the extermination camps Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Chełmno alone. Mattogno obviously didn’t read carefully enough, or then his memory is failing him.
[6]"Jewish execution site laid to rest", in The Baltic Times, 15 August 2008; "Construction halted at Lithuania mass grave site", in: Jewish Telegraphic Agency Archive, 15 August 2008. The former article is available online. The direct link to the latter article no longer works, but it is transcribed in the online article Lithuanian desecration of Jewish mass-grave from Holocaust halted. The JTA article contains a wildly exaggerated claim about the number of victims ("tens of thousands of Jews"). The only killings at Marijampolė besides the large massacre on 1 September were comparatively small earlier massacres. The following of these are mentioned in the 2nd Jäger Report: 7.7.41 – 32 male Jews; 8.7.41 – 14 male Jews and 5 communist officials (19 persons); 14.7.41 – 21 male Jews, 1 Russian and 9 Lithuanian communists (31 persons); 18.7.41 – 53 Jews (39 male and 14 female); 25.7.41 – 103 Jews (90 male and 13 female). Another 68 Jews were killed before 11 July 1941 by the Tilsit Gestapo. The Tilsit Gestapo’s massacre is mentioned in Operational Situation Report USSR no. 19 dated 11 July 1941 (translation in Arad, Yitzak, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, editors The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 1989 New York: Holocaust Library, pp. 16-19, online). According to the page Gedenkorte Europa 1939-1945 - Marijampolė Stadt and the Holocaust Atlas of Lithuania, these earlier executions, except for the killing of 68 Jews by the Tilsit Gestapo, took place in the Šunskai and Rudžiai forests, i.e. not at the site of the large massacre on 1 September 1941. There are separate memorials in each of these two forests. At the Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial, two of the defendants were charged with having participated in the killing mentioned in OSR no. 19, but acquitted of that charge for lack of proof. The judgment mentions two witnesses who recalled having heard from others that Jews had been killed "by the Gestapo" in the Šešupę river valley, but couldn’t provide particulars about the "Gestapo" killers. As the witnesses’ sources wouldn’t necessary be able to tell Gestapo from Einsatzgruppen, and as the Šešupę river valley is not limited to the site of the massacre recorded by Jäger under 1 September 1941, it is not clear whether the "Gestapo" killings took place at that same site.
[7] GE2, p. 280.
[8] Ground-penetrating radar can identify objects even below granite, according to a personal communication I received from GPR Expert Lawrence B. Conyers on 13 April 2017.
[9] A Google Maps view of the mass grave site in its current state can be generated at the bottom of the page Gedenkorte Europa 1939-1945 - Marijampolė Stadt.
[10] See Sergey Romanov’s article That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part V: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (3) and my article The Jäger Report (1)
[11]"Killing field found in Marijampole", in: The Baltic Times, 18.11.1999, online.
[12] Dieckmann, as above, pp. 151-155 (regarding the status of research and arrests and deportations during the first Soviet occupation, 1940-41; no out-of-hand massacres are mentioned) and pp. 301-303 (regarding massacres committed by retreating Soviet forces in June 1941). Soviet police, party and Red Army forces murdered over 400 prison inmates and about 700 (other) civilians in all of Lithuania in June 1941. According to Lithuanian historian Brandišauskas, there were 30 locations in which tortures, mutilations and murders by Soviet perpetrators took place, with numbers of victims ranging from a few to several dozen individuals. In Rainiai, a forest near Telšiai, 76 victims were murdered. The most deaths occurred among the political prisoners of the Pravieniškes camp near Kaunas, where about 230 prisoners and 31 public servants with their families were murdered.
[13]From the municipality’s website.
[14] Dieckmann, as above, citing GARF, 7021-94-424, fl. 16. The number of victims stated in the same file, fl. 3-3R, was 7-8,000 Jews and 1,000 non-Jews.
[15]"Special Report of the Head of the ‘SMERSH’ Counterespionage Department of the 3rd Byelorusia Front General-Lieutenant Zelenin about the Activity of the Šaulis Nationalistic Organization" dated 3 September 1944 (The Tragedy of Lithuania: 1941−1944. New documents on crimes of Lithuanian collaborators during the Second World War / Трагедия Литвы: 1941−1944. Сборник архивных документов. − М:Алексей Яковлев, 2008. − 288 с. − Англ. ISBN 978-5-903588-01-5. Document 38, pp. 122-123). The massacre of September 1941 was also mentioned (with the wrong year, 1944) in the "Memorandum Report on the Acts of Atrocious Destruction of the Soviet People Committed by the Germans on the Territory of the Lithuanian USSR in the Vicinity of the City of Alytus" dated 18 October 1944 (Tragedy,Document 36, p. 109). The number shot was "not identified".
[16] Pavlaitis obviously meant to say Saint Liudvikas' day, which is 25 August. The witness may have mixed up the day on which the victims were herded into the stables and the day of the massacre.
[17] Dieckmann, as above.
[18] Dieckmann, as above, citing the Black Book of Soviet Jewry and LCVA R-1390-1-138, fl. 49-53; the quote is my translation from Dieckmann’s translation to German. Mrs. Kutorgienė’s diary entry is also quoted on the page Gedenkorte Europas 1939-1945 - Marijampolė Stadt.
[19] LCVA (Lietuvos Centrinis Valstybės Archyvas, Lithuanian Central State Archives) R-678-1-3-42 (facsimile, transcription, translation).
[20] LCVA R 627-1-150-35 (facsimile, transcription, translation).
[21] The automatic translator (I don’t read or speak Lithuanian) yielded the following text: "Concern: mass graves arrangement. In response to the Board's letter No. 20260 report that the mass graves that have been dried in the bottom of the stream, the incoming Šešupė, raised to a different location. There is currently no untidy mass graves." The literal machine translation makes no sense, but what is being referred to becomes clear when looking at the Report by the Sanitation Department of the Wehrmacht Local Headquarters in Marijampolė dated 3.4.1942. The mass graves by the Šešupė river were being flooded whenever the river‘s water level rose, and to put an end to that the graves were "dried" by "raising" them to a different location, namely a higher place where they would not be reached by floodwater. Of course graves cannot be moved; what they did was to remove the bodies from the original graves and place them in other graves further removed from the river’s water level. My understanding coincides with that of Dieckmann (Besatzungspolitik, p. 918), whose book I’m indebted to for pointing me to these and other documents.
[22] See note 6.
[23] Moving massacre victims from one grave to another is not as unusual as it seems at first sight. It was done at massacre sites in the Bosnian War of 1992-95, including the site of the Srebrenica massacre. See Richard Wright, "Where are the Bodies? In the Ground.", The Public Historian, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 96–107 (February 2010). The difference in regard to the removal of corpses from the Šešupę mass graves was the motive: at Srebrenica and other killing sites in Bosnia corpses were removed from the primary graves in order to hide evidence to the killings, whereas the Šešupę mass graves were "moved" to avert the threat of epidemic diseases resulting from contamination of the drinking water supply, such as typhoid fever.

Just a quick note to say that, today at the cesspit, CODOH Forum member Pia Kahn wrote:

Occasionally, I try to talk with the people from the holocaustcontroversies blog because they post lots of article trying to refute the revisionists However, they are not capable of arguing rationally. When you have them cornered they start ad hominem attacks, shifting the goal past, twisting words, lying, 4 letter words,... Eventually, they block me from posting on their blog although I do not respond in kind. 

I'm not sure I'm aware of any attempt by Pia Kahn to engage us at this blog. Therefore, I invite her to appear on this thread and have her say.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration Treasury official, was dancing tantalizingly close to flat-out Holocaust denial. He's back again, now defending the choice of libertarian activist and one-time California gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz to publish David Irving's Hitler's War on his website, Unz.com, which publishes a variety of libertarian materials, as well as "race realism," anti-Zionist polemics, and other generally far-right materials.

For his own part, Unz is a bit of a cipher. For instance, he is Jewish himself, although we have seen in the cases of Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen, and others that being Jewish isn't always a guarantee against anti-Semitism. For a while now, Unz has drawn suspicion for his willingness to publish blatantly anti-Semitic material, although he has generally been able to defend his editorial judgment on the basis of his libertarian leanings. This orientation has generally led to the comments threads at Unz.com being something of a free for all, as I'd noted in the past. Sergey Romanov has also commented here on Unz's activites in this regard.


The publication of Hitler's War, however, seems to indicate a kind of Rubicon. Along with the book in HTML form, Unz has also published an accompanying essay entitled "The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving." In that essay, Unz muses on his own relative ignorance of WWII historiography before encountering Irving's work and asks, "All his material is massively footnoted, referencing copious documents in numerous official archives, but how could I possibly muster the time or energy to verify them?" He continues, "Rather ironically, an extremely unfortunate turn of events seems to have fully resolved that crucial question."

From here, Unz launches into a short history (as he understands it) of the Lipstadt case as emblematic of, as he calls it, the work of "zealous ethnic-activists" (read: Jews). As he describes the events culminating in the London lawsuit, "This development [i.e., Lipstadt labeling Irving a Holocaust denier] eventually sparked a rancorous lawsuit in 1998, which resulted in a celebrated 2000 libel trial held in British Court." The next paragraph is worth quoting in full:

That legal battle was certainly a David-and-Goliath affair, with wealthy Jewish movie producers and corporate executives providing a huge war-chest of $13 million to Lipstadt’s side, allowing her to fund a veritable army of 40 researchers and legal experts, captained by one of Britain’s most successful Jewish divorce lawyers. By contrast, Irving, being an impecunious historian, was forced to defend himself without benefit of legal counsel.

Well, most importantly here, Irving was not "defending himself"; he had brought the suit himself, against one of the world's largest publishing houses. He had also been stupid enough to do so in the U.K., where the law required him to pay the costs of the defense should he lose. Instead, the way Unz presents it, Big Bad Deborah Lipstadt victimized poor old David Irving, dragging him into a court with her millions of dollars, and bullied him into bankruptcy. Whether Unz knows this is the exactly opposite of what actually happened in Irving v. Lipstadt or is merely ignorant, I can't say, but the necessary conclusions we must draw are, respectively, that Unz is lying for devious purposes or he was so careless as to not familiarize himself with the merest details of the case.

This lying by omission or frankly catastrophic ignorance carries over to his treatment of the findings in the case. Unz writes, "[T]he worst they discovered after reading every page of the many linear meters of Irving’s personal diaries was that he had once composed a short 'racially insensitive' ditty for his infant daughter, a trivial item which they naturally then trumpeted as proof that he was a 'racist.'" He draws this conclusion, it seems, on reading (perhaps) Lipstadt's own version of events in her book History on Trial, rather than the book distilled from the expert testimony of Richard Evans (Lying About Hitler), who was the primary historian-witness at the Lipstadt trial refuting both Irving's version of historical events and his historical methods. Evans's book details how Irving systematically misrepresented primary sources or ignored them altogether as part of an overall project to exculpate Hitler for crimes, misdeeds, and mistakes.

Finally, Unz tells us that, adding insult to injury, Irving was jailed in Austria after being convicted of denying the Holocaust there on a trip in 2005. I commented on this turn of events at the time, and I remain convinced of the opinion I expressed then. That point notwithstanding, it's clear that Unz has published Hitler's War at least in part in admiration for Irving's free speech battles -- as he understands them. The conclusions we must draw are clear: Unz is either actively shilling for Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism now or is a useful idiot contributing to their cause.

What about Roberts? His defense of Unz is both more amusing in its blunders and more consistent with his previous pieces. Here is Roberts's version of events:

Zionists destroyed David Irving’s livelihood with slander and libel, because he made public a letter from the former chancellor of Germany, Hitler’s predecessor, to Winston Churchill, a letter that Irving found in the American publisher’s file of Winston Churchill’s history of the war, and which the publisher prevented Churchill from publishing in his history. The former chancellor of Germany, who escaped the Nazis and lived in England, wrote to Churchill that two of Hitler’s financiers were Jews who managed two of the largest banks in Germany. One was a Zionist leader. The letter exists, and there is no reason to doubt its honesty. However, for making an important historical document public, Irving was labeled by a vicious propaganda campaign an “anti-semite” and “holocaust denier.”

Putting aside the fact that the charge of libel was disproved in court, the story of the former German chancellor (here he refers to Heinrich Brüning, the second-to-last chancellor before Hitler) is one I hadn't heard before. The lack of dates provided by Roberts makes it difficult to discern the particulars of the story of Irving being destroyed for daring to publish this letter, although it is possible, I suppose, that Irving was first to locate this information. I do, however, also note that Irving has published the letter in question at his site, and he makes no mention in doing so that he suffered any consequences regarding the letter. I know enough about David Irving to know that no opportunity to bemoan his own persecution would go unexploited.

Roberts continues

Another Irving honesty, the one that destroyed him, was that after 10 years of research he could not find one document that provided evidence for the claim that Hitler personally conducted the holocaust or that he even knew about it. Irving did find and report documents that he made available in which Hitler issues orders prohibiting extermination of Jews.

I've already written extensively on one of these pieces of evidence. Roberts as least has the sense (or lacks knowledge) to avoid referring explicitly to the Lipstadt case. He also, like Unz, does not state his own particular set of beliefs about these matters. Both men are apparently still too attached to whatever support, monetary or otherwise, that they receive from people who disdain Holocaust denial to plainly state what they seem to be strongly suggesting is their point of view.

Therefore, I invite Messrs. Unz and Roberts to clearly state their own points of view. They live in a country where they cannot be punished for doing so. Rather than coy dancing around the point, let them be the brave defenders of history and truth as they apparently see them. Then, let them defend those points of view in discussion and debate.

1. Introduction

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

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

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



The overwhelming majority of Soviet civilians killed out of hand by the Nazi occupiers were Jews. Between 2.4 and 2.6 million of the about 5.1 million Jews who lived on territory of the USSR on 22 June 1941 perished at the hands of the Germans, their Romanian allies and their local auxiliaries, most of them either killed on site by shooting or gassing or deported to extermination camps. Non-Jewish Soviet civilians were massacred on a smaller scale, mostly in the context of rural anti-partisan operations and reprisals, which are estimated by German historians to have claimed about half a million lives throughout the occupied territories.^[3] The imbalance becomes even more pronounced if one considers that the Jewish dead made up about half of the Soviet Union’s Jewish population as of 22 June 1941 and up to over 96 % of the Jewish population that came under Nazi rule in the occupied territories, whereas the number of non-Jewish civilian deaths from hard criminal violence by Nazi Germany and its allies amounted to less than 2 % of the non-Jewish population under occupation.^[4]

Yet this is not what usually becomes apparent from contemporary Soviet reports about the investigation of Nazi crimes on Soviet territory, Soviet court verdicts at war crimes trials and Soviet official statements about Nazi crimes.

Some of these documents, when referring to massacres whose victims are known from other sources (e.g. German documents and/or testimonies of eyewitnesses outside the Soviet sphere of influence) to have been wholly or mostly Jews, mention the Jewish ethnicity of the victims or most of the victims.^[5] In others the victims of such massacres are referred to as "Soviet citizens", "civilian citizens", "peaceful civilians", "peaceful population" or similar terms arguably meant to obfuscate the victims’ ethnicity and create the impression that all Soviet nationalities suffered equally from German occupation, that both Jews and non-Jews became victims of wholesale massacres, unprovoked and unrelated to any suppression of resistance, aimed at destroying or decimating the civilian population of the occupied territories. Even where Jews are specifically mentioned, it is stated or suggested that the non-Jewish civilian population suffered as least much from the occupiers’ direct violence.^[6]

2. The Nuremberg Indictment and the US Prosecution’s Case

When the Soviet army pushed the German invaders beyond the borders of the USSR, the tendency to such "ecumenical" reporting about civilian victims of Nazi crimes was extended to the Nazi extermination camps discovered by the Red Army. Such is suggested, for instance, by what seems to have been the Soviet contribution to Count Three – War Crimes, section "Murder and Ill-Treatment of Civilian Populations of or in Occupied Territory and on the High Seas", of the Indictment against Hermann Göring et al at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Especially the following statements:^[7]

About 1,500,000 persons were exterminated in Maidanek and about 4,000,000 persons were exterminated in Auschwitz, among whom were citizens of Poland, the U.S.S.R., the United States of America, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, and other countries.
In the Lwow region and in the city of Lwow the Germans exterminated about 700,000 Soviet people, including 70 persons in the field of the arts, science, and technology, and also citizens of the United States of America, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Holland, brought to this region from other concentration camps.
In the Jewish ghetto from 7 September 1941 to 6 July 1943, over 133,000 persons were tortured and shot.
Mass shooting of the population occurred in the suburbs of the city and in the Livenitz forest.
In the Ganov camp 200,000 peaceful citizens were exterminated. […]
In the Estonian S.S.R. they shot tens of thousands of persons and in one day alone, 19 September 1944, in Camp Kloga, the Germans shot 2,000 peaceful citizens. They burned the bodies on bonfires.
In the Lithuanian S.S.R. there were mass killings of Soviet citizens, namely: in Panerai at least 100,000; in Kaunas more than 70,000; in Alitus about 60,000; at Prenai more than 3,000; in Villiampol about 8,000; in Mariampol about 7,000; in Trakai and neighboring towns 37,640.
In the Latvian S.S.R. 577,000 persons were murdered.[…]
(b) Murders and ill-treatments at places in the Eastern Countries and in the Soviet Union, other than in the camps referred to in (a) above, included), on various dates during the occupation by the German Armed Forces:
The destruction in the Smolensk region of over 135,000 Soviet citizens.[…]
In the Leningrad region there were shot and tortured over 172,000 persons, including over 20,000 persons who were killed in the city of Leningrad by the barbarous artillery barrage and the bombings.
In the Stavropol region in an anti-tank trench close to the station of Mineralny Vody, and in other cities, tens of thousands of persons were exterminated.
In Pyatigorsk many were subjected to torture and criminal treatment, including suspension from the ceiling and other methods. Many of the victims of these tortures were then shot.
In Krasnodar some 6,700 civilians were murdered by poison gas in gas vans, or were tortured and shot.
In the Stalingrad region more than 40,000 persons were tortured and killed.[…]
In Orel over 5,000 persons were murdered.
In Novgorod and in the Novgorod region many thousands of Soviet citizens were killed by shooting, starvation, and torture. In Minsk tens of thousands of citizens were similarly killed.
In the Crimea peaceful citizens were gathered on barges, taken out to sea and drowned, over 144,000 persons being exterminated in this manner.
In the Soviet Ukraine there were monstrous criminal acts of the Nazi conspirators. In Babi Yar, near Kiev, they shot over 100,000 men, women, children, and old people. In this city in January 1942, after the explosion in German Headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Street the Germans arrested as hostages 1,250 persons—old men, minors, women with nursing infants. In Kiev they killed over 195,000 persons.
In Dnepropetrovsk, near the Transport Institute, they shot or threw alive into a great ravine 11,000 women, old men, and children.
In Kamenetz-Podolsk Region 31,000 Jews were shot and exterminated, including 13,000 persons brought there from Hungary.
In the Odessa Region at least 200,000 Soviet citizens were killed.
In Kharkov about 195,000 persons were either tortured to death, shot, or gassed in gas vans.
In Gomel the Germans rounded up the population in prison, and tortured and tormented them, and then took them to the center of the city and shot them in public.
In the city of Lyda in the Grodnen region on 8 May 1942, 5,670 persons were completely undressed, driven into pens in groups of 100, and then shot by machine guns.[…]
Along with adults the Nazi conspirators mercilessly destroyed even children. […]
From 6 September to 24 November 1942, in the region of Brest, Pinsk, Kobren, Dyvina, Malority, and Berezy-Kartuzsky about 400 children were shot by German punitive units.
In the Yanov camp in the city of Lwow the Germans killed 8,000 children in two months.
In the resort of Tiberda the Germans annihilated 500 children suffering from tuberculosis of the bone, who were in the sanatorium for the cure.
On the territory of the Latvian S.S.R. the German usurpers killed thousands of children, whom they had brought there with their parents from the Bielorussian S.S.R., and from the Kalinin, Kaluga, and other regions of the R.S.F.S.R.

Although the civilians killed at most of the places mentioned above were mostly or exclusively Jews,^[8] the only mentions of Jews in this catalogue of horrors (whose figures are mostly exaggerated in varying degrees) occur in relation to the Kamenetz-Podolsk Region^[9] and an unnamed Jewish ghetto, probably the Lwów Ghetto as suggested by the preceding paragraph.^[10] The 133,000 persons "tortured and shot" in that ghetto seem to be part of the "about 700,000 Soviet people" claimed to have been exterminated by the Germans in "the Lwow region and in the city of Lwow". The idea that the above-quoted parts of the Nuremberg indictment convey is clear: yes, Jewish civilians were murdered in large numbers, but so were non-Jewish civilians, and in much larger numbers. The comparatively modest references to the mass killing of Jews in "Count Four – Crimes against Humanity" of the indictment do nothing to dispel this impression:

Under paragraph VIII (A), above, millions of the persons there mentioned as having been murdered and ill-treated were Jews.^[11]
Among other mass murders of Jews were the following:
At Kislovdosk all Jews were made to give up their property; 2,000 were shot in an anti-tank ditch at Minerallye Vodi; 4,300 other Jews were shot in the same ditch. ^[12]
60,000 Jews were shot on an island on the Dvina near Riga. ^[13]
20,000 Jews were shot at Lutsk. ^[14]
32,000 Jews were shot at Sarny. ^[15]
60,000 Jews were shot at Kiev and Dniepropetrovsk. ^[16]
Thousands of Jews were gassed weekly by means of gas-wagons which broke down from overwork. ^[17]
As the Germans retreated before the Soviet Army they exterminated Jews rather than allow them to be liberated. Many concentration camps and ghettos were set up in which Jews were incarcerated and tortured, starved, subjected to merciless atrocities, and finally exterminated.

The Treblinka extermination camp is notably absent from the list of killing sites in either part of the indictment, even though it was investigated and reported about by a Soviet commission in August 1944 and a Soviet war correspondent, Vassili Grossman, wrote an impressive article about its horrors. ^[18] This omission may have been due to the fact that, unlike the more "international" concentration camps Auschwitz and Majdanek, Treblinka had been made exclusively for the purpose of killing Jews and thus was thus not compatible with the "ecumenical" Soviet stance.

The US and British prosecutors presenting their cases placed more emphasis on the persecution and extermination of the Jews. On the 19th and 20th day of the trial, 13 and 14 December 1945, Major William Walsh, Assistant Trial Counsel for the United States, made clear that he considered this not only the Nazis’ primordial atrocity, but also the worst human atrocity on record:

The term used does not convey, and indeed I cannot conjure a term that does convey the ultimate aim, the avowed purpose to obliterate the Jewish race.
This presentation is not intended to be a complete recital of all the crimes committed against the Jews. The extent and the scope of the crimes was so great that it permeated the entire German nation, its people and its organizations. ^[19]

I know of no crime in the history of mankind more horrible in its details than the treatment of the Jews.
It is intended to establish that the Nazi Party precepts, later incorporated within the policies of the German State, often expressed by the defendants at bar, were to annihilate the Jewish people. ^[20]

I have not attempted to recount the multitudinous and diabolical crimes committed against the Jewish people by the state which these defendants ruled, because, with sober regard for contemporary and historical truth, la detailed description of some of these crimes would transcend the utmost reaches of the human faculty of expression. The mind already recoils and shrinks from the acceptance of the incredible facts already related. ^[21]

In the next parts of this article I will take a look at how the extermination of the Jews was addressed in the Soviet prosecution’s presentation of evidence.

Notes

[1]The Jäger Report (1)
[2]Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK. 3 bis zum 1. Dez. 1941 durchgeführten Exekutionen (Yad Vashem Archives, Record Group O.53 - Ludwigsburg, USSR Collection, File Number 3, pp. 87-95). The former The Holocaust History Project website featured a facsimile, a transcription and a translation (links to respective first page, from where the following pages can be accessed). This was the second report written by Jäger, following an earlier report dated 10.9.1941 (YVA, Record Group O.53 - Ludwigsburg, USSR Collection, File Number 3, pp. 82-85).
[3] See, among other, my articles Soviet Civilian Losses in World War II and The Kortelisy Massacre, and the sources cited there. See also Marko Marjanović, Breaking Down Soviet WWII Losses. Marjanović estimates 2,550,000 Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union murdered in the Holocaust, 650,000 non-Jewish civilians killed in anti-partisan reprisals in the countryside and 200,000 – 400,000 civilian victims of "all other German killing policies and repression" (pp. 21-22). The overwhelming majority of excess deaths in the occupied territories, estimated at ca. 3.5 – 4 million, were due to privation (p. 15, citing Krivosheev), largely induced by the occupiers’ appropriation of food resources and the "scorched earth" destruction wreaked by retreating German troops. Both are addressed in Christian Hartmann, Unternehmen Barbarossa. Der deutsche Krieg im Osten 1941-1945 (Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, München, 2011), pp. 62-81 (translated here; Hartmann’s booklet is now also available in English translation.
[4] According to Hans-Heinrich Nolte, about 2.7 million out of 5.1 million Jews on Soviet territory as of 22 June 1941 came under German rule, and of these about 2.6 million were killed (96.3% of the total). The parts of the USSR that fell under German occupation, according to Marjanović, were home to 77.5 million people before the war. 16.5 million of these fled or were evacuated by the authorities, leaving just over 60 million in areas under German control. If 2.7 million of these were Jews, that leaves 57.3 million non-Jews. Marjanović’s highest figure for non-Jewish civilian victims of all German killing policies and represssion (ca. 1,050,000) corresponds to 1.83 % of these. The total number of Soviet civilians shot, gassed, hung or burnt to death by German and Romanian occupation forces was given as ca. 6 million by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, thereof about 2.8 million Jews and 3.2 million non-Jews (see my article One might think that …). While the figure for Jews is quite realistic, the figure for non-Jews is exaggerated by a factor of 3, assuming Marjanović’s highest figure for Soviet non-Jewish civilians murdered out of hand.
[5] One such report is the "Act on Atrocities Committed by Fascist Aggressors in the Ponar District, near Vilnius", a translation of which is included as document no. 9 in the collection The Tragedy of Lithuania: 1941−1944. New documents on crimes of Lithuanian collaborators during the Second World War / Трагедия Литвы: 1941−1944. Сборник архивных документов.− М:Алексей Яковлев, 2008. − 288 с. − Англ. ISBN 978-5-903588-01-5. The description of the exhumed corpses includes the information that, according to documents found in their clothes, "the majority of the killed people were of the Jewish nationality, the rest were Poles, Russians and Lithuanians" (p. 40). However, the commission made no effort to determine what approximate proportion of the estimated number of victims of the Ponary killing site were Jews, but simply concluded that "Considering the huge quantity of burnt human bones spread on the surface of all the camp area, the corpses found in the pits that were not yet burnt, and witnesses’ testimonies, the total number of corpses is determined to be no less than one hundred thousand." The "Report of the Medico-Legal Examination of the Mass Grave in the Vicinity of the Town of Žagare" dated 24 September 1944 (Tragedy, document no. 13, pp. 50-51) expressly mentions that the massacre victims were Jews. So does the "Act on Crimes of Fascist Aggressors and their Accomplices in the Vicinity of the City of Žagare" dated October 5, 1944 (document no. 16, pp. 58-60). There are also other Soviet reports in the collection mentioning that the victims were Jews or mostly Jews.
[6] Some examples of such statements can be found in my article Neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass graves with even only a few thousand bodies …. More examples are in Ernst Klee/ Willi Dreßen, »Gott mit uns« Der deutsche Vernichtungskrieg im Osten 1939-1945, pp. 24-29 (the report mentions the mass killing of Jews from the Ukrainian city of Konotop, but claims that twice as many non-Jewish civilians were shot), 31-37 (the report claims that 70,000 inhabitants of Zhitomir, Ukraine, thereof 30,000 Jews, were shot), 97-99 (according to this report, which goes into much detail regarding the exhumation of about 700 murdered mental patients and also mentions a pit containing the corpses of about 1,000 Soviet prisoners of war, the German and Romanian invaders tortured, shot and destroyed 101,139 Soviet citizens in the Vinnitsa region, Ukraine, thereof 41,620 in the city of Vinnitsa, thereof 15,000 in the spring of 1942), 157-164 (this report, about the liquidation of the Klooga labor camp in Estonia, mentions that among the inmates there were Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians and others, but not that the majority of the camp’s inmates were Jews), 186 (the report claims that about 30,000 civilians, including about 10,000 Jews, were killed in and around Mogilev, Belorussia), 191-192 (about 17,000 Soviet citizens were shot or killed in gas vans in anti-tank ditches near the village Novopashkovo and in a forest by the Kasimirovo collective farm, Belorussia). Further examples can be found in the Tragedy collection, including without limitation the following: "Act on Crimes and Atrocities of Fascist Aggressors and their Accomplices in the City of Mežeikiai of the Lithuanian SSR", dated December 7, 1944 (document no. 22, pp. 70-72); "Act on Crimes and Atrocities of Fascist Aggressors and their Accomplices in the Ilokai Borough, the Mežeikiai Uyezd, the Lithuanian SSR", dated October 18-19, 1944 (document no. 52, pp. 155-156: while the introduction mentions "massacre of Soviet citizens, […]communists, Komsomol members, Soviet activists and Jews", there is no mention that the hundreds of victims referred to as having been discovered in mass graves were Jews, and the named perpetrators are accused of "carnage and humiliation of the Soviet citizens in the Ilokiai borough"); "Act on Crimes and Atrocities of Fascist Aggressors in the Vilkaviskis Uyezd of the Lithuanian SSR", dated April 12, 1945 (document no. 58, pp. 165-165); "Act 8. On Mass Executions of the Party-and-Soviet Active Functionaries and Other Civil Population in the Panavežys Uyezd of the Lithuanian SSR" dated January 25, 1945 (document no. 68, pp- 181-182); "Act on Atrocities of Fascist Aggressors against Citizens of the USSR in the Lasdiai Uyezd during the Occupation of the Lithuanian SSR", dated June 8, 1945 (document 76, pp. 195-199); "Act of Investigation of Atrocities of Fascist Aggressors and their Accomplices during the Temporary Occupation on the Territory of the Kedainiai Uyezd of the Lithuanian SSR", undated (document no. 97, p. 242). See also Izabella Tabarovsky, Don’t Learn from Russians about the Holocaust. For a different theory about the origin and purpose of the ecumenical term "peaceful citizens", see Michelle Jean Penn, The Extermination of Peaceful Soviet Citizens: Aaon Trainin and International Law, University of Colorado at Boulder.
[7] The text of the indictment can be read here on the site of Yale Law School’s Nuremberg Trials Collection, which also features the Proceedings Volumes ("Blue Set" or "Blue Series") and some of the volumes of the series "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression" (aka the "Red Set" or "Red Series"), a collection of documentary evidence and guide materials prepared by the American and British Prosecuting Staffs. The Proceedings Volumes can also be read and downloaded on the US Library of Congress’s page, Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, the "Red Series" on the LoC’s page Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression.
[8] Auschwitz, Majdanek, the Lwow/Lvov region (including the Ganov/Yanov camp and the Livenitz forest), the Klooga camp in Estonia, the named locations in the Lithuanian S.S.R. including Panerai (Ponary) and Mariampol (Marijampolė), the Latvian S.S.R., the Smolensk region, Mineralny Vody and other cities in the Stavropol region, Pyatigorsk, Krasnodar, Orel, Minsk, the Crimea (Kerch, Simferopol and other locations), Babi Yar, Dnepropetrovsk, the Kamenetz-Podolsk region (see following note), the Odessa region, Kharkov, Gomel.
The figure for the Latvian S.S.R., 577,000, is so unrealistically high if including civilians alone (as claimed) that it may well include the about 327,000 Soviet prisoners of war who perished on Latvian territory according to Soviet prosecutor Colonel Pokrovsky’s presentation citing Document Number USSR-41 (IMT Vol. VII, p. 380). This figure for prisoners of war may be fairly realistic, considering that, according to German historian Christoph Dieckmann (Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen, 1941–1944, p. 1340), of the ca. 3 million Soviet prisoners of war who died in German captivity ca. 1.2 million perished in the Reichskommissariat Ostland (which included Latvia) and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. This would leave about 250,000 civilian dead on Latvian territory – still much too high (according to Latvian-American historian Andrew Ezergailis the number of civilian victims did not exceed 85,000, including both Jews and non-Jews).
The figure for the Smolensk region, 135,000 seems to mostly consist of Soviet prisoners of war, not civilians (see my article Neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass graves with even only a few thousand bodies …, where a "Communiqué of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission about the Liquidation of Prisoners of War and Civilians in Smolensk and Surroundings from July 1941 to September 1943" is quoted; locations numbered 6, 7, 10, 11, 12 and 14 suggest facilities for keeping PoWs).
The figure for the Leningrad region (172,000) seems widely exaggerated unless it also includes civilian deaths from acts of war and privation outside the Leningrad metropolis (starvation victims of the siege of Leningrad are obviously not included in this figure as it is much too low for that, whereas people killed in the city by bombing and shelling are expressly included).
The figure for people "tortured and killed" in the Stalingrad region also comes across as much too high (40,000 seems to be the number of civilian inhabitants of Stalingrad commemorated here as having been killed during the battle, including but not limited to victims of German reprisals or other atrocities).
The claimed drowning of "peaceful citizens" in the Crimea is not confirmed by any non-Soviet source I know about.
The claims regarding the places not mentioned in this note should also be treated with caution.
[9] In late August 1941, forces subordinated to the Higher SS and Police Leader for Southern Russia massacred a reported total of 23,600 Jews at Kamenets Podolsky in south-western Ukraine, including deportees from Hungary. See my article The Kamenets-Podolsky Massacre.
[10] Lwów or Lvov (Lemberg in German, L’viv in Ukrainian) was the capital of the District of Galicia of the General Government. Of the ca. 530,000 Jews living in the District of Galicia at the end of June 1941, just about 5,000 survived. The rest were shot on site or at the Janowska concentration camp, or deported to Bełżec extermination camp (Thomas Sandkühler, Endlösung in Galizien, 1996 Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger GmbH, Bonn, pp. 459-461). Sandkühler’s book is cited in my article Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (5,2).
[11] Note the term "murdered and ill-treated". This means that the term "millions" does not necessarily refer to people murdered alone.
[12] The total number of Jews murdered at Mineralnyye Vody is estimated as between about 6,500 and about 7,500 according to Yad Vashem. The mass killings at that place are narrated, largely on the basis of testimonies before judicial authorities of the German Federal Republic, in Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943, pp. 617 ff.
[13] The total number of Jews killed in Latvia was about 65,000, according to Ezergailis. Jews killed in Riga and the Riga District are commemorated in various memorials including the Rumbula memorial (ca. 25,000 Jews murdered) and the Bikernieki Forest Memorial (ca. 35,000 persons murdered, including about 20,000 Latvian, German, Austrian, and Czech Jews).
[14] Lutsk (Luts’k ) is a city in northwestern Ukraine, whose Jewish population was herded into the Łuck Ghetto. Almost all of them were killed during that ghetto’s liquidation, which was one of the rare occasions on which Jews made a futile attempt to resist. See the Yad Vashem video Mass-murder of Łuck Jews at Gurka Polonka in August 1942, the Yad Vashem page on Łuck, the entry for Luts’k in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, and Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, p. 265.
[15]Sarny is a small city in western Ukraine. Between 14,000 and 15,000 Jews from Sarny and surrounding townships were massacred on August 27-28, 1942 (Arad, as above).
[16] 33,771 Jews of Kiev were killed on September 29 and 30 in the Babi Yar Massacre. According to the Yad Vashem page about Dnepropetrovsk, at least 10,000 Jews of Dnepropetrovsk were murdered on the southern outskirts of the city on October 13-15, 1941. Operational Situation Report USSR No. 128 dated 2 November 1941 mentions a total of 80,000 Jews killed by the Kommandos of Einsatzgruppe C until that date. According to Operational Situation Report USSR No. 132 from Dniepropetrovsk dated 12 November, Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C alone had so far executed 55,432 people.
[17] It is not clear what place of places this statement refers to. Gas vans in the USSR had technical problems mentioned in the Becker letter of 16 May 1942, but no non-Soviet source I know of suggests that they ever broke down from overwork. Gas vans are likely to have accounted for a relatively small part of the people murdered by mobile killing units on occupied Soviet territory, considering what German historian Christian Gerlach wrote about their (in)efficiency in his book Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944, pages 766 f. (see my translation in the article Thomas Dalton responds to Roberto Muehlenkamp and Andrew Mathis (2) ). Their main use was at Chełmno extermination camp, where according to the Just Memo, dated 5 June 1942, "97,000 have been processed with three vehicles in use".
[18] See my article 19 November 1942.
[19] IMT Vol. III, p. 519. Major Walsh’s presentation closely followed the rendering of prosecution evidence in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression Vol. I, Chapter XII – The Persecution of the Jews (pp. 978 – 1022).
[20] As above, p. 521.
[21] As above, p. 573.

Part 1

Part 2

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

3. The Soviet Prosecution Case

The Soviet prosecutors also mentioned crimes against the Jews in their presentations, but rather as a component of policies of exploitation, enslavement and extermination pursued by Nazi Germany against other peoples (especially the Soviet peoples) than as the Nazi regime’s quintessential evil. The relevant presentations in this context were the following:

• The opening statement by Chief Prosecutor General Rudenko on 8 February 1946.^[22]
• The presentation on "crimes against the peaceful population of the U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia" by Chief Counsellor of Justice Smirnov. ^[23]
• The presentation on Crimes against Humanity by Counsellor Smirnov. ^[24]



3.1 General Rudenko’s opening statement

In Chief Prosecutor General Rudenko’s opening statement, the record of which covers about 50 pages, the following part focused on the extermination of the Jews: ^[25]

The fascist conspirators planned the extermination to the last man of the Jewish population of the world and carried out this extermination throughout the whole of their conspiratorial activity from 1933 onwards.
My American colleague has already quoted Hitler's statement of 24 February 1942, that "the Jews will be annihilated." In a speech by the Defendant Frank, published in the Kraków Gazette on 18 August 1942, it is stated:
"Anyone who passes through Kraków, Lvov, Warsaw, Radom, or Lublin today must in all fairness admit that the efforts of the German administration have been crowned with real success, as one now sees hardly any Jews."
The bestial annihilation of the Jewish population took place in the Ukraine, in Bielorussia, and in the Baltic States. In the town of Riga some 80,000 Jews lived before the German occupation. At the moment of the liberation of Riga by the Red Army there were 140 Jews left there.

The above statements (which are the only of their kind in Rudenko’s introductory speech) suggest that Rudenko lent the same weight to the genocide of the Jews as his American colleagues, but the context of these statements shows otherwise. For Rudenko, as becomes apparent from (among others) the statements quoted below, what the Nazis did to the Jews (mass extermination) was no different from what they did to other segments of the Soviet population and the population of other Slavic nations. Emphases in the quotes below are mine.

This New Order was a regime of terror by which, in the countries seized by the Hitlerites, all democratic institutions were abolished and all civil rights of the population were abrogated, while the countries themselves were plundered and rapaciously exploited. The population of these countries, and of the Slav countries above all others-especially Russians, Ukrainians, Bielorussians, Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Slovenes, Jews-were subjected to merciless persecution and mass extermination.^[26]

On 1 September 1939 the fascist aggressors invaded Polish territory in treacherous violation of existing treaties. The Polish people were subjected to mass extermination, and their cities and villages were mercilessly destroyed. ^[27]

The appendices to Order Number 8, as well as Orders Number 9 and 14 and the appendices thereto, make it evident that the systematic extermination of Soviet people in fascist concentration camps in the territories of U.S.S.R. and other countries occupied by the fascist aggressors was carried out under the form of "filtration,""cleansing measures,""purges,""extraordinary measures,""special treatment,""liquidation,""execution," and soon. ^[28]

Among the means employed by the Hitlerites for the extermination of Soviet citizens were also intentional infection with spotted typhus and murdering by poison gas in gas vans which were called the "murderess" in Russian, et alia.^[29]

The names have already been mentioned here of the camps of Maidanek and Auschwitz with their gas-chambers, in which over 5.500,000 completely innocent people, citizens of Poland, Czechoslovakia, U.S.S.R., U.S.A., Great Britain, France, and other democratic countries were killed. I must name the concentration camps of Smolensk, Stavropol, Kharkov, Kiev, Lvov, Poltava, Novgorod, Owl, Rovno, Dniepropetrovsk, Odessa, Ramenetz-Podolslk, Gomel, Kerch, of the Stalingrad region, of Kaunas, Riga, Mariampol (Lithuanian) of Kloga (Estonian) and many others, in which hundreds of thousands of Soviet nationals belonging to the civilian population, as well as soldiers and officers of the Red Army, were tortured to death by the Hitlerites.^[30]

A special place among the unheard-of crimes of the Hitlerites is occupied by the bloody butchery of the Slavic and Jewish peoples.^[31]

If Your Honors please, you have already heard the testimony of the witness, Eric Von dem Bach-Zelewski, about Himmler's aims, as given by him in his speech at the beginning of 1941.
In answer to a question by a representative of the Soviet Prosecution, the witness declared, "Himmler mentioned in his speech that it was necessary to cut down the number of Slavs by 30 million."^[32]

Even before the attack on the U.S.S.R., directives were prepared regarding the merciless annihilation of Soviet people for political and racial reasons.^[33]

3.2 Counsellor Smirnov on War Crimes against Civilians

In his presentation on "crimes against the peaceful population of the U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia", Chief Counsellor of Justice Smirnov followed along the same lines as Rudenko. In the record of this presentation the term "Jew" appears on relatively few occasions.

The first is a quote from a note dated 6 January 1942 by Soviet foreign minister Molotov (Exhibit Number USSR-51), whereby "Hitler’s thugs", on the day after entering the city of Lvov, "started a massacre under the slogan, 'Kill the Jews and the Poles.'" No distinction between the two victim groups is mentioned. ^[34]

The second mention of Jews occurs in another quote from the same note, which refers to the Babi Yar massacre and provides details of a massacre of a "large number of Jews". However, these Jews were not killed just because they were Jews, according to the note. They were murdered, along with Ukrainians and Russians, because they had in some way "displayed their loyalty to the power of the Soviet."^[35]

The third mention of Jews is the following:

This fascist specialist on legal questions [General Governor Frank] annihilated 3 million Jews in the territory under his jurisdiction which fell only temporarily into the hands of the fascist invaders. On this occasion Frank said-I quote his speech at a business meeting of the NSDAP orators in Kraków on 4 March 1944. The Tribunal will find this excerpt on Page 93 of the document book, second paragraph, second column of the text; I begin the quotation of Dr. Frank:
"If there are any woebegone souls today who bemoan the fate of the Jews and say with tears in their eyes, 'Isn't it awful what is being done to the Jews,' we should ask them if they are still of the same opinion now. If we had there 2 million Jews carrying on their activities and opposed to them the few German men in the country today, we would no longer have control of the situation. .. . Jews are a race which must be eradicated. When we catch one of them, it is the end of him."^[36]

Seen in isolation, the above quote may be used to support an argument against the "ecumenical" Soviet presentation of Nazi crimes. However, in the context in which it was inserted it looks almost like a "by the way" mention of something that was not of primary interest. In the record of the proceedings the quote can be read on the fourth page of commented quotes from Frank’s diary (Document Number 2233-PS, submitted by the Americans), of which all but one (the one quoted above) refer to the treatment of and crimes against Poles. The reference to the extermination of the Jews is preceded by the following quote from Frank’s diary:

"18 March 1944, Speech at the Reichshof. "Dr. Frank: 'If I had gone to the Führer and said, "My Führer, I have to report that I have destroyed a further 150,000 Poles," he would say, "All right, if it was necessary."'"^[37]

Following the brief mention of Jewish extermination victims, Smirnov’s presentation then returned to crimes against Poles, a subject that Smirnov seems to have been more interested in than in what happened to the Jews. Following a recess he took up the subject again as follows:

I am quoting now from Frank's diary at the place which the Tribunal will find on Page 93 of the document file, in the second column of the text, second paragraph below the title, "Meeting of Political Leaders of NSDAP in Krakbw, on 15 January 1944." It begins thus, Dr. Frank, "I did not hesitate to say that for every German killed, up to a hundred Poles would be shot."
In these dark days the Polish people regarded the victims of Frank and of his henchmen as martyrs. That is the reason it seems to me that, on 16 December 1942, at a government meeting in Kraków, Frank stated-I am quoting excerpts from the diary on Page 92 in the document book, third paragraph after the heading, the first column of the text. I begin the quotation:
"We must consider whether, for practical reasons, executions should be carried out as far as possible on the spot where the murder of a German was attempted. It might also be as well to consider whether special places for execution should be set up, as it has been established that the Polish population streams to the places of execution, which are accessible to everyone, for the purpose of filling vessels with the blood- stained earth, and taking them to church."^[38]

Smirnov’s statements reproduced on the next about 8 pages of the record were wholly dedicated to Polish acts of resistance and heroism, reprisal killings and anti-Polish legislation. Jews were just briefly mentioned in a reference to a decree "which virtually outlawed all Poles and Jews in the incorporated Polish territories".^[39] The next subject was the "Judicial Terror of the German Fascists in Czechoslovakia".^[40] Counsellor Smirnov left no doubt as to where he set his accents.

The next mention of Jews occurs more than seventy pages later in the record, in the context of reprisal killings in Kragujevac, Yugoslavia. On 18 October 1941, "all male Jews were arrested, as well as all persons who were considered Communists". On 20 October, 60 of those arrested were killed. On the same day, the reprisal was extended to "the entire male population of Kragujevac", whose massacre is described in some detail, ^[41] followed by other German atrocities in Yugoslavia, then by atrocities in Greece, followed by "evidence of mass exterminations of the peaceful population in the territory of the U.S.S.R. by the Germans". There is no further mention of Jews in either context, until they show up as part of an "ecumenical" community of atrocity victims in the city and region of Rovno, Ukraine: "The witness Karpuk, a worker on a German farm near Belaya Street, testified: "'Several times I saw how the Hitlerites exterminated Soviet citizens, Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews."^[42]

Jews are next mentioned in the record regarding the mass killings at Fort IX in Kaunas, Lithuania. But again, they are counterfactually^[43] mentioned as if they had been victims killed along with members of other nationalities in similar proportions:

"In Fort Number 9 people of different nationalities were shot: Russians, Ukrainians, Bielorussians, Lithuanians, Poles, and Jews."^[44]

The distortion of facts becomes especially egregious as concerns victims from outside the Soviet Union:

Besides Soviet citizens the Hitlerites exterminated French, Austrian, and Czechoslovak citizens in Fort Number 9. ^[45]

French citizens were in fact exterminated in Kaunas. 878 arrived there on a transport from Drancy, France departing on 15 May 1944. All of them were Jews. ^[46]

There were also Austrian, German and possibly Czechoslovak citizens among those killed at Kaunas. These were Jewish deportees mentioned in the 2nd Jäger Report as "resettled" from Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt a.M. (2,934, thereof 1159 men, 1600 women and 175 children, killed on 25.11.1941) and from Vienna and Breslau (2,000 Jews, thereof 693 men, 1,155 women and 152 children, killed on 29.11.1941). ^[47]

The first (and only) reference to Sobibór extermination camp (spelled "Sobibur") in the record reads that this camp was founded during "the first and second liquidation" of an unnamed Jewish ghetto, but "the extermination on a large scale in this camp really started at the beginning of 1943". That the victims of this large-scale extermination were all Jews is not mentioned. Bełżec (spelled "Belsen" in the record) gets just a little more attention as a mistaken description of the killing method (electrical current) is provided, but there’s no hint that the camp’s victims were all Jews. Treblinka is also briefly mentioned without such precision. ^[48] Regarding Majdanek there is a quote from the Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission's report, whereby the camp’s victims were "1.5 million persons: Soviet prisoners of war, prisoners of war of the former Polish Army, and nationals of various countries, Poles, Frenchmen, Italians, Belgians, Dutch, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks, Croats, and a great number of Jews."^[49] The enormous exaggeration of the death toll aside, the text doesn’t suggest that Jews made up the overwhelming majority of the camp’s victims.^[50]

Whereas Jewish victims are mentioned only occasionally in the record of Smirnov’s presentation on war crimes against civilians, the mentions of "Soviet citizens", "peaceful citizens" or "peaceful civilians" are legion. The term "peaceful" (in connection with "citizens", "Soviet citizens", "civilians", "inhabitants", "people", "population" or "populations") occurs about 83 times in the presentation by my count. "Soviet citizens", in connection or not with the terms "peaceful" and "innocent", are mentioned 39 times. Abundantly quoting from Soviet official communiqués and reports of the Extraordinary State Commission, Smirnov passionately recited a long list of horrors (so long that the President of the Tribunal felt compelled to request a shortening of the presentation), from individual killings to enormous massacres, with gritty details about incomprehensible acts of gratuitous, sadistic violence and his own condemnatory, sometimes hyperbolic comments (which the President eventually asked him leave out). The impression that the presentation conveys is that of an extermination program directed against the population at large (as opposed to certain population groups). Even massacres and camps whose victims are known from other evidence to have been exclusively or predominantly Jews are described without a mention of the victims’ Jewish ethnicity, as if the Germans had wantonly murdered the general population outside the context of any reprisals or suppression of resistance. The following quotes may illustrate the gist of Smirnov’s presentation. Emphases are mine.

From the very first months of the war it became clear to the Soviet Government that the innumerable crimes of the German fascist aggressors against the peaceful citizens of my mother country represented, not the excesses of undisciplined military units or the isolated crimes of individual officers and soldiers, but that they represented a system prepared in advance, not merely sanctioned by the criminal Hitler Government, but consciously planned and encouraged by this government.^[51]

Manusevitch was imprisoned by the Germans in Yanov Camp, where he worked in the prisoners' squad for burning corpses of murdered Soviet citizens. After the 40,000 corpses murdered in Yanov Camp were burned, the squad was transferred for similar purposes to the camp in Lissenitzky Wood.^[52]

A document was already submitted to the Tribunal which establishes that the legalization of mass murders and extermination of the peaceful population of the Soviet Union carried out by the Army with a view to terrorizing the population was begun by Hitler and his clique as early as 13 May 1941, that is, over a month before the beginning of the war.^[53]

Having launched their criminal war, the Hitlerites directed it towards a mass extermination of the peaceful citizens of the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe.^[54]

The carnage to which the Hitlerites exposed the peaceful population of the Soviet Union has far overshadowed the most bloodstained pages of the annals of mankind, as well as of the current world war, and fully reveals the bloodthirsty and criminal plans of the fascists, aimed at the extermination of the Russian, Ukrainian, Bielorussian, and other nationals of the Soviet Union.^[55]

"In the same headquarters there was discovered a telegram, Number 37, from the commander of the Cavalry Brigade, an SS-Standartenfuhrer, to a cavalry unit of the above-mentioned 2d Cavalry Regiment, dated 2 August 1941. It mentioned that the Reichsfuhrer of the SS and the Police, Himmler, considers the number of the exterminated peaceful civilians far too insignificant; and it points out that 'it is necessary to take radical measures' and 'the unit commanders conduct the operations too mildly.' He also orders to report every day on the number of people shot."^[56]

I quote one paragraph out of Exhibit Number USSR-9 (Document USSR-9), already presented to the Tribunal. This is a report of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union of the crimes of the German fascist invaders in the city of Kiev. The members of the Tribunal will find this document on Page 238, second column of the text, sixth paragraph:
"On 29 September 1941 Hitler's bandits drove thousands of the peaceful Soviet citizens to the corner of Melnik and Doktorovskaya Streets and from there to Baybe-yar, where they shot them, after taking all their valuables from them.
"Citizens N. F. Petrenko and N. T. Gorbacheva, who lived near Baybe-yar, stated that they had seen how the Germans threw babies at the breast into graves and buried them alive with their dead or wounded parents. One could see the surface of the ground moving over the buried people who were still alive."^[57]

The first mass "action" of the Germans, when tens of thousands of innocent and peaceful people were murdered at a time, was the "Kiev action." In order to realize the extent of these atrocities I refer Your Honors to a communication of the Extraordinary State Commission already submitted to the Tribunal as Document Number USSR-9. I quote from Page 238, on the reverse side of the document book, at the end of the third paragraph from the top.
I quote: "In Kiev, over 195,000 Soviet citizens were tortured to death, shot, and poisoned in the gas vans, as follows: "(1) In Baybe-yar, over 100,000 men, women, children, and old people.
"(2) In Darnitza, over 68,000 Soviet prisoners of war and peaceful citizens.
"(3) In the antitank trench in the vicinity of Syretzk Camp and in the camp proper, over 25,000 peaceful Soviet citizens and prisoners of war.
"(4) In the grouna of the Hospital of St. Cyril, 800 insane patients.
"(5) In the grounds of the Kiev-Pechersk Abbey, about 500 peaceful citizens.
"(6) In the cemetery of Ljukjanousk, about 400 peaceful citizens.^[58]

The murder of insane patients was a case apart, but Jews were murdered just like other "peaceful citizens", in the Extraordinary State Commission’s parlance.

The war crimes presentation ended with the screening of the documentary "The Atrocities committed by German Fascists in the USSR". Although the documentary includes footage of killing sites whose victims were wholly or mainly Jews (Kerch, Barvenkovo, Nalchik, Pyatigorsk, Drobitsky Yar, Makeyevka, Taganrog, Osipenko, Babi Yar, Iziaslav, Kremenets and Vishnevets near Ternopol, Slonim, Klooga, Majdanek, Auschwitz), this is nowhere mentioned in the documentary. ^[59]

Notes

[22] IMT Vol. VII, pp. 146 – 197.
[23] As above, pp. 437 – 602. The cited passage is on p. 197, where Rudenko announced Smirnov’s presentations along with those of State Counsellor Zorya about the aggression against the U.S.S.R. and Colonel Pokrovsky about crimes against (mainly Soviet) prisoners of war.
[24] IMT Vol. VIII, pp. 238 – 344.
[25] IMT Vol. VII, pp. 192-193.
[26] IMT, Vol. VII, p. 153.
[27] As above, p. 156.
[28] As above, p. 170.
[29] As above, p. 171.
[30] As above, p. 173.
[31] As above, p. 191.
[32] As above, p. 192.
[33] As above.
[34] As above, p. 454.
[35] As above, p. 458.
[36] As above, p. 470.
[37] As above.
[38] As above, p. 471.
[39] As above, p. 477.
[40] As above, p. 478.
[41] As above, pp. 552-553.
[42] As above, pp. 564.
[43] According to my adding 23,203 people killed at Kauen are mentioned in the 2nd Jäger Report. Of these 23,175 were Jews and 28 were non-Jews.
[44] As above p. 570.
[45] As above.
[46] This transport is mentioned in the chronology of deportations from France featured in the online presentation of the German Federal Archives’ Gedenkbuch Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933-1945 ("Memorial Book of the Victims of the Persecution of the Jews under the National Socialist Rule of Violence in Germany 1933-1945").
[47] See note 1. The execution of the "resettled" Jews is mentioned on page 5 of the report.
[48] IMT Vol. VII, pp. 576-577.
[49] As above, p. 590.
[50] The camp’s death toll is currently held to be in the order of 78,000, thereof 59,000 Jews.
[51] IMT Vol. VII, p. 440. This statement is followed by quotes from "one of the official notes of V. M. Molotov, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the U.S.S.R., dated as early as 6 January 1942." There is no mention of Jews in these quotes.
[52] As above, p. 446.
[53] As above, p. 483. The document referred to is the Barbarossa Decree, concerning the German military’s conduct in relation to Soviet civilians and Soviet partisans.
[54] As above, p. 487.
[55] As above, p. 498. This a quote from a note by Molotov dated 27 April 1942.
[56] As above, p. 500. This is also from Molotov’s note dated 27 April 1942. What it refers to is Himmler’s order on August 1, 1941: "All Jews must be shot. Drive the female Jews into the swamp." (quoted in Christopher Browning, Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution, Expert Opinion, Chapter IV, online.
[57] As above, pp. 540-541. All of these "peaceful Soviet citizens" were Jews.
[58] As above, pp. 555-556.
[59] See my series about this documentary, starting with The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR (1) (the article links to the two following articles of the series).

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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




3.3 Counsellor Smirnov on Crimes against Humanity

Smirnov’s presentation of the Soviet case on Crimes against Humanity^[60] differed from his presentation on War Crimes against Civilians mainly in that it included a section exclusively dedicated to the "persecution of the Jews",^[61] with evidence in two other sections, "Experiments on Living Persons"^[62] and "secret centers for extermination of people",^[63] mentioning the mass gassing of Jews in extermination camps.

Brief as these sections were, they were also outstanding parts of Smirnov’s presentations of evidence. Not only did German documents and eyewitnesses testifying before the tribunal predominate in these presentations (whereas the War Crimes presentation relied heavily on Soviet official statements and investigation reports) ^[64] but the tone of the presentation was also different – with little if any of the pathos that characterized the war crimes presentation, just an exposition of the relevant facts. One gets the impression that, whereas atrocities against "peaceful citizens" aroused Smirnov’s emotions because they actually or at least officially involved his own people, crimes declaredly committed against Jews only were something he could address in a cooler, less passionate manner.

The evidence mentioning the extermination of Jews presented in the aforementioned three sections of the Smirnov’s presentation on Crimes against Humanity was the following:

1. A report on Einsatzgruppe A from October 1941 to 31 January 1942, Document Number USSR-57; ^[65]

2. A report of the commander of one of the companies of the 12th Regiment of Police, which carried out the mass extermination of the Jews assembled in the ghetto of the town of Pinsk, Document Number USSR-119(a); ^[66]

3. An original poster which had been put up in the town of Kislovodsk by Kommandantur Number 12; ^[67]

4. A report of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Stavropol region, Document Number USSR-1 (p. 298), about the massacre of 2,000 Jews at Mineralniye Vody; ^[68]

5. A Polish government report whereby "about 3 million Jews perished in Poland;"^[69]

6. Data whereby in Czechoslovakia only 6,000 out of 118,000 Jews were left at the end of the war; ^[70]

7. A report from the Yugoslavian government whereby out of about 80,000 Jews on Yugoslavian territory before the German invasion, only about 10,000 survived the occupation;^[71]

8. The testimony of Abram Gerzevitch Suzkever, about the extermination of the Vilna ghetto’s Jews; ^[72]

9. The testimony of Severina Shmaglevskaya, about experiments on children at Auschwitz;^[73]

10. The testimony of Samuel Rajzman about Treblinka extermination camp;^[74]

11. A report by a Polish examining magistrate about Treblinka extermination camp, whereby about 781,000 persons perished at that camp, Document Number USSR-340;^[75]

12. Quotes from the depositions of an examining magistrate before the Chief Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, about the extermination camp "Helmno", whereby about 340,000 persons perished in that camp.^[76]

The exhibit mentioned under item 1 is the later of the two reports issued by SS-Brigadeführer Stahlecker about the activities of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic States. The earlier report, covering the period up to 15 October 1941, had been presented by US prosecutor Major Walsh as Document L-180, Exhibit Number USA-276. ^[77] Smirnov expressly referred to the American prosecutor’s presentation of this earlier document. ^[78] The 1st Stahlecker report mentions the execution of 121,817 persons, thereof 118,430 Jews and 3,387 communists. The largest number of executions occurred in Lithuania (81,171 persons, thereof 80,311 Jews and 860 communists). Communists made up a larger proportion of people executed in Latvia (1,843 out of 31,868) and Estonia (684 out of 1,158, i.e. the majority) than in Lithuania. In "White Ruthenia", the part of Belorussia included in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, all 7,620 people executed by Einsatzgruppe A were Jews. In addition to those executed by his own forces, Stahlecker mentioned 5,500 Jews annihilated by pogroms in Lithuania and Latvia, 2,000 Jews, communists and partisans executed in the "old Russian area", 748 executed "lunatics" and 5,502 communists and Jews killed by the State Police and Security Service, for a total of 135,567.^[79] The 1st Stahlecker report places special emphasis on the willingness of local forces to cooperate with the German authorities also as concerns the killing of Jews and communists (especially in Lithuania, where locals also did much killing on their own initiative), ^[80] on Soviet crimes against the Baltic peoples and their resistance against Soviet rule. ^[81] Major Walsh, in his presentation of the persecution of the Jews, emphasized the participation of Lithuanians and Latvians in the killings, namely in pogroms set into motion by Stahlecker’s unit and/or its local auxiliaries.^[82]

The 2nd Stahlecker Report was written at a time when, despite the generally collaborationist attitude of the occupied populations in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and "White Ruthenia", especially in the former Baltic countries, an increasing dissatisfaction with the German rule had become noticeable. Accordingly the report addresses these phenomena in some detail. ^[83] Resistance had become a major concern, especially in Latvia and the Belorussian territories, and accordingly occupies a long section of the report. ^[84] The extermination of the Jews covers a comparatively short section, ^[85] which mainly addresses the history of Jews in each country (including their claimed culpability in the context of Soviet terror, and the need to keep some of them alive for lack of other skilled craftsmen) and also mentions Jews deported from the Reich (20,000 to Riga, 7,000 to Minsk). As concerns executions, Estonia had been made free of Jews (p. 50), in Latvia 30,000 Jews had been executed by Einsatzgruppe A and assisting Latvian police forces (p. 59), besides another 11,034 killed in Dünaburg (Daugavpils) on 9.11.1941^[86] and, by forces of the Higher SS and Police Commander, 27,800 in Riga in early December 1941^[87] and 2,350 in Libau (Liepāja) in mid-December^[88] (p. 59). In Lithuania 136,421 persons had been killed with the help of Lithuanian auxiliaries (p. 61). ^[89] In "White Ruthenia", due to the dispersal of the Jews, difficult roads and lack of vehicles, gasoline and executors, "only" 41,000 had been killed by Einsatzgruppe A, with an additional 19,000 "partisans and criminals, i.e. mainly Jews"^[90] killed by Wehrmacht forces and an undetermined number killed by earlier Einsatzkommandos (pp. 62-63). All but the last of these figures were mentioned in Smirnov’s presentation on Crimes against Humanity. ^[91] Unlike in Major Walsh’s quotes from the 1st Stahlecker Report, references to local initiatives and auxiliaries were omitted.

In the context of items 2 and 3 above, Smirnov spoke about the "extermination of the peaceful Jewish population".^[92]

Unlike the Extraordinary State Commission reports in Smirnov’s presentation about war crimes against civilians, the report of the Stavropol commission about Mineralniye Vody (item 4) was summarized but not quoted verbatim.^[93]

Regarding item 5 of the aforementioned list, it should be noted that the stated number of Jews who perished in Poland refers to Poland within its borders as of 1 September 1939. It thus includes Jewish inhabitants of Eastern Poland who had become Soviet citizens following the annexation of that region by the USSR. Unlike for Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, no total figure for the USSR in its 1939 borders or including the former Baltic countries^[94] was stated by Smirnov, the only hint that these figures might also be very high being Smirnov’s pointing out that Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe A was just one such unit and Stahlecker’s report referred to just one period of that unit’s activity. ^[95] The absence of a total figure for the USSR might have been be due to the fact that no such figure was available and/or related to the ludicrously low figure for total Soviet military and civilian losses that was official at the time, perhaps also to other "taboos".^[96]

Suzkever’s testimony (item 8), despite exaggerating the number of victims,^[97] was a vivid and realistic account of life and death in Jewish Vilna during the Nazi occupation, including the mention of key figures on the German side, like Martin Weiss and "a certain Herring", both later sentenced in the German Federal Republic.^[98] A notable feature in Suzkever’s testimony is that, despite the prominent role played by Lithuanian auxiliaries in exterminating Vilna’s Jews,^[99] these auxiliaries were never mentioned by the witness, who referred to the perpetrators eith s Germans er a or as "Sonderkommandos". Also notable is Suzkever’s having produced a document "concerning the Jewish clothing from Ponari", later identified as Document USSR-444, that Smirnov was unaware of.

Severina Shmaglevskaya’s testimony (item 9) is the first piece of evidence in the Soviet prosecution case, unless I missed something, that mentioned the selections among Jews arriving at Auschwitz and the gassing of those deemed unable to work. The witness stated that children born to Jewish mothers in the camp were immediately put to death, then mentioned that she had seen "many children among the Jews brought to the concentration camp", then that children arriving with Jewish transports were separated from their parents in front of the crematory and led separately into gas chambers (at peak periods thrown alive into the cremation ovens or pits), then that "the children of Hungarian Jews" had to "work together with the children who were brought after the Warsaw uprising." One of her statements^[100] may or not be understood as suggesting that non-Jewish children were gassed as well.

The witness Rajzman (item 10) was introduced as "a Polish national", without Smirnov stating that he was a Jew or that Treblinka extermination camp was meant for Jews. However, Rajzman’s clearly stated the trains arriving at Treblinka were "filled exclusively with Jews-from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Greece, and Poland". A claim at the end of the testimony, whereby it had been planned to increase the number of gas chambers from 10 to 25 because, according to Rajzman’s German interlocutors, there would be "others" after all Jews had been killed, ^[101] suggests that Treblinka was meant to eventually exterminate non-Jews as well (there is no other evidence I know of that would corroborate this claim). With the mention of gas chambers as the killing method, Rajzman’s testimony was an important corrective to the Polish government report that had been presented by Major Walsh, according to which the victims had been killed with "steam".^[102] Said prior mention of Treblinka by the US prosecution may have been the reason why the Soviets brought Treblinka into their case despite the camp’s having been omitted in their contribution to the indictment, which only mentioned Auschwitz and Majdanek (both not as camps whose victims had been mostly Jews). It is also noteworthy that the Soviets did not present any witness regarding Majdanek.

The Polish report about Treblinka submitted as Document Number USSR-340 and mentioned by Smirnov was prepared by Soviet Judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz. ^[103] The stated estimated figure, about 781,000, was higher than the figure stated in a later Polish publication, ^[104] but a far cry from the 3 million estimated by Soviet war correspondent Vassili Grossman. ^[105] Considering the overblown figures for Auschwitz and Majdanek, the exclusively "Jewish" extermination camp Treblinka may thus have come across as ranking third, after Auschwitz and Majdanek. Łukaszkiewicz’s estimate was remarkably close to more recent estimates, which were made on the basis of documentary evidence that Łukaszkiewicz didn’t have at his disposal. ^[106]

Like regarding Treblinka, Smirnov also didn’t mention Jews when presenting the Polish deposition about "Helmno" (Chełmno), but the quoted text clearly mentioned Jews as the camp’s victims. The Polish figure, about 340,000, has since been reduced by judicial investigation and historical research. ^[107]

Considering the above, could it be that the Soviet prosecution, in its case on Crimes against Humanity, abandoned its "ecumenical" stance whereby Jews were victims of Nazi exterminatory violence just like other "peaceful citizens" or "peaceful civilians"?

Indications to the contrary can be sought in various statements or omissions mentioned above, namely the reference to the Jews as the "peaceful Jewish population" (arguably a sub-category of the "peaceful population" or the "peaceful Soviet population"), the inclusion of Jews murdered in annexed former Polish territories in a number of victims for "Poland", the absence of a figure for Jews killed on the territory of the USSR, and the possible mentions of non-Jewish or potentially non-Jewish victims in the testimonies of Shmaglevskaya and Rajzman. A much weightier argument, however, is the context in which the aforementioned sections of Smirnov’s Crimes against Humanity presentation were embedded.

In the introduction of this presentation, Jews were not mentioned even once – even though Treblinka extermination camp was expressly mentioned, and statements by "Jacob Vernik, a carpenter from Warsaw" were quoted. ^[108]

The title of the presentation’s first section after the introduction was far more dramatic than "Persecution of the Jews":

I pass on to the first part of my statement, which is entitled, "Extermination of Slav Peoples." In this part I shall show how this criminal purpose of the Hitlerites to exterminate the Slav peoples was carried out.^[109]

Emphases in this and the following quotes are mine.

The first example of Nazi extermination policy against the "Slav Peoples" was an equally dramatic quote from a Yugoslav government report:

Apart from the thousands of Yugoslavs who died in battle, the occupants exterminated at least one and a half to two million people, mostly women, children, and aged persons. Of the 15 million prewar Yugoslav population, in the relatively short period of 4 years; almost 14 percent of the entire population was exterminated."^[110]

No less dramatic, and no more realistic (as least as concerns wartime Nazi policies^[111]) was the following claim in Smirnov’s presentation:

In Poland a regime of extermination of the Slav population was put into effect by divers criminal methods, among which driving people to an extreme state of exhaustion by excessive labor and subsequent death from hunger, was most prevalent. The criminals quite consciously embarked upon the extermination of millions of people by hunger, which is attested by a number of documents already quoted by me and my colleagues in part, namely, the diary of Hans Frank. ^[112]

This was followed by evidence to severe undernourishment among the Polish population and related statements of Nazi officials, the most damning of which was the one made by General Governor Hans Frank according to the minutes of a governmental conference held on 24 August 1942:

"With all the difficulties which arise from the illness of workers, or the breaking down of your co-operatives, you must always bear in mind that it is much better if a Pole collapses than if the Germans are defeated. The fact that we shall be condemning 1,200,000 Jews to death by starvation should be mentioned incidentally. Of course, if the Jews do not die from starvation, it is to be hoped that anti-Jewish measures will be expedited in the future."^[113]

In accordance with the message that this part of his presentation was meant to convey, Smirnov’s emphasis was not so much on Frank’s genocidal statement regarding the Jews as on the passage I highlighted, about the underfeeding of the Poles.

The exploitation of the occupied territories of the USSR figured prominently in Smirnov’s presentation on the "extermination of the Slav peoples", as did statements about Germanization and removal of the locals and atrocities against the Slav population. In order to "explain the methods adopted by the German fascists in the execution of their cannibalistic plan for the extermination of the Soviet people", Smirnov called the witness Jacob Grigorievich, a survivor of the eradication of his home village in the district of Pskov near Leningrad on the pretext that partisans had hidden in that village.^[114]

The next count of Crimes against Humanity was the "discrimination against the Soviet people". The main case presented here was that Soviet prisoners of war^[115] were treated much worse than those from other Allied countries. This is an indisputable fact. ^[116] However, and although the different treatment of PoWs from various nations is an important aspect of Nazi racism and criminality, the rationale of this Crimes against Humanity count seems difficult to understand. Would the abysmal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity have been a lesser crime if all prisoners of war in German custody had been treated as badly as the Soviet prisoners? If the Nazis had massacred the Soviet civilian population at large like they massacred the Jews (i.e. according to the impression that the Soviet stance about exterminatory crimes against "peaceful civilians", "the Soviet people"> and the like tried to convey), this would obviously have been a larger and more abominable crime than the ones that were actually committed.

The Soviet case on Crimes against Humanity did not end with the evidence about Treblinka and Chełmno extermination camps. From secret extermination centers Smirnov moved on to "religious persecutions" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which the "fascist criminals" were supposed to have indulged in "by their mockery of the religious feelings and faith of the people, by persecuting and murdering the priesthood of all religious creeds."^[117]

After addressing repression of religion including incarceration of clerics in Czechoslovakia and the incarceration or murder of Polish clerics (the latter at least was real enough^[118]), Smirnov’s presentation moved to actions against the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union, where "the persecution of religion and clergy took the form of sacrilegious desecration of churches, destruction of shrines connected with the patriotic feelings of the Russian people, and the murder of priests".^[119]

The Archdean of the Churches of the City of Leningrad, the Very Reverend Nikolai Ivanovitch Lomakin, was called to the stand as a witness. A survivor of the siege of Leningrad, Lomakin, who had himself been "dying of hunger" during the siege, recalled the horrors of life inside the besieged city, with large numbers of civilians killed by German air raids and dying of hunger, several thousand per day, piles of bodies piling up around a church, weakened relatives falling down and dying as they tried to bring the bodies of their loved ones to the cemetery. ^[120] Yet prosecutor Smirnov was mainly interested in damage done to the Leningrad churches, which the witness described in detail, including occasions on which parishioners and priests were killed or wounded in German air raids.

Lomakin claimed that "the Luftwaffe and German artillery forces timed their raids so that not only would the churches be demolished, but the peaceful worshipers who sought refuge there from the fighting and the artillery fire would be killed as well."^[121] The number of people killed by air raids in or near sites of cult according to Lomakin (5,000 under the ruins of three churches alone)^[122] is in all probability exaggerated, ^[123] and a claim that a girl was killed by a German sniper as she emerged from the crypt of the Leningrad Trinity Church^[124] cannot possibly be accurate as the German besiegers of Leningrad never got within sniping range. ^[125]

The witness went on to describe destruction, plunder and mining of cult sites in the city of Pskov, ^[126] then moved back to Leningrad to recall that artillery fire was directed at the Cathedral of Leningrad and killed parishioners – fifty on one occasion, which seems fairly realistic, but the claim that in the cathedral "I had to bury thousands of peaceful citizens torn to pieces, victims of the predatory raids of the air force and artillery"^[127] is clearly hyperbolic. The same does not necessarily apply to the claim that "most of the intensive artillery fire on Leningrad always took place on feast days; the houses of God, tramway stops, and hospitals were put under fire, and destroyed with all means,"^[128] as the shelling of the city was a means of terror that was most effective on days where and when congregations of people could be expected.^[129]

Following Lomakin’s testimony, Smirnov concluded his presentation on Crimes against Humanity. He finished with a (notwithstanding its flaws) dramatic account provided by a Russian Orthodox cleric, which possibly appealed more to the feelings of religious Russians and perhaps also to those of religious men among the members of the Tribunal, and besides the suffering of struggling people may at the time have been something that people could identify with better than with the slaughter of people who did not defend themselves, besides being more familiar and easier to visualize than the unprecedented, unimaginable extermination camps.^[130] In any case, Lomakin’s testimony helped to obfuscate the notion that the genocide of Europe’s Jews was the quintessential crime of Nazi Germany and not just one atrocity among others.

This obfuscation pervaded Smirnov’s case on war crimes against civilians and was also unmistakably present in his case on Crimes against Humanity. A "criminal German fascist organization", the Einzatzgruppen,^[131] liquidated or executed Jews (thus the wording of the 2nd Stahlecker Report, which Smirnov didn’t qualify on) in large numbers. There were "mass executions of Jews by the German criminals."^[132] The "German fascist invaders" proceeded to "the extermination of the peaceful Jewish population."^[133] The "extent of the criminal extermination of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe"^[134] (but not in the Soviet Union) was pointed out. On the other hand, the "this criminal purpose of the Hitlerites to exterminate the Slav peoples was carried out."^[135] In Poland, the criminals "quite consciously embarked upon the extermination of millions of people by hunger."^[136] The German fascists adopted measures like the eradication of villages and their inhabitants, described by the witness Grigoriev, "in the execution of their cannibalistic plan for the extermination of the Soviet people – peaceful citizens of my motherland, women, children and old people." The extermination of the Jews was nothing extraordinary in this context. It was an indistinct part of the Nazis’ exterminatory barbarity, which hit the "Slav peoples" as well. Throughout their prosecution case, the Soviets remained true to their stance that "peaceful citizens" or "peaceful civilians", Jews and non-Jews alike, had been victims of Nazi Germany’s criminal plans and actions. ^[137]

Notes

[60] IMT Vol. VIII, pp. 238 – 344.
[61] As above, pp. 294-308.
[62] As above, pp. 308-322.
[63] As above, pp. 322-331.
[64] Documentary evidence was also referred to in Smirnov’s War Crimes presentation, for instance Keitel’s order of 16 December 1942 authorizing any measures against civilians in the context of anti-partisan warfare (Vol VII pp. 488-489), communications by the Kiev town commandant dated 22 October, 2 November and 29 November 1941 about reprisal killings (pp. 503-504), a "Summary of a Punitive Expedition to the Village of Borysovka, 22 and 26 of September 1942." (p. 533), reports by German officers Rösler and Schirwindt about a mass execution witnessed by Rösler in Zhitomir in late July 1941 (pp. 534-536), photographs of the Liepāja massacres in December 1941, as well as other atrocity photos taken by Germans (pp. 548-550), and correspondence between Topf and Sons of Erfurt and the Auschwitz construction office about the Auschwitz crematoria (pp. 583-584). But the quantitatively prevailing evidence, which also set the tone of the presentation, was Soviet government communiques and reports by the Extraordinary State Commission, with their "peaceful citizens" stance. This doesn’t mean that the Soviet investigation reports presented are useless. They contain important descriptions of mass grave exhumations, and much of their content can nowadays be checked against and confirmed by evidence independent of the Soviets. For examples of matching Soviet and non-Soviet evidence (German documents, testimonies before judicial authorities of the German Federal Republic) see among others the aforementioned articles about the documentary film "The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR" and the articles Neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass graves with even only a few thousand bodies …, Mass Graves in the Polesie, Drobitski Yar , Mattogno and Father Patrick Desbois (5)Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (first of a series of four articles, with links to the others) and Mattogno’s Marijampolė Mass Graves Controversy.
[65] IMT Vol. VIII, pp. 294-296.
[66] As above, pp. 296-297.
[67] As above, pp. 298.
[68] As above. Regarding this massacre see also note 12.
[69] As above, pp. 298-299.
[70] As above, p. 299.
[71] As above, p. 301.
[72] As above, pp. 302-308.
[73] As above, pp. 317-322.
[74] As above, pp. 324-329.
[75] As above, p. 330.
[76] As above, pp. 330-331. "Helmno" is obviously the Chełmno extermination camp.
[77] IMT Vol. III, pp. 530-531 and p. 559.
[78] IMT Vol. VIII, p. 294. Fairly complete copies of the Stahlecker Reports can be downloaded on the page The Two Full Stahlecker Reports: Holocaust Atrocities in the Baltics. Only a very relatively short part of the 1st Stahlecker Report was translated into English (Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Vol. VII, pp. 978 – 996; the text is also available on the Wikisource page Comprehensive report of Einsatzgruppe A up to 15 October 1941.
[79] Enclosure 8 of the report, reproduced in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression Volume VII, p. 992.
[80] As above, pp. 983-986 and 989.
[81] As above, pp. 983 (Lithuanian uprising against Soviet rule at the beginning of the "Eastern Campaign"), 985 (Men of Lithuanian and Latvian detachments attached to execution squads were chosen whose relatives had been murdered or "removed" by the "Russians") and 988 (especially extensive exhumation of Estonians murdered by the "Russians", 30,000 Estonian men reported missing in Reval alone).
[82] IMT Vol. III, p. 559. The same quotes can be found in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Vol. I, p. 999.
[83] E.g. in the section "Stimmungsbericht", pp. 9-17.
[84]"Widerstandsbewegung", pp. 120-147.
[85]"Juden", pp. 56-64.
[86] The number may be a typo. According to the 1st Stahlecker Report 9,845 Jews had already been killed at Dünaburg by mid-October 1941. Ezergailis, according to this page, mentions 1,134 killed in Daugavpils on 9 November 1941 in The Holocaust in Latvia, p. 279.
[87] This was the Rumbula forest massacre, organized by SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, who had earlier organized the massacre at Kamenets-Podolsky.
[88] This was the Šķēde beach massacre, recorded in photographs taken by an SS officer, Karl Strott.
[89] The figure was provided by Jäger on 9 February 1942. A facsimile of the report can be viewed in my article The Jäger Report (8) .
[90] German text: "Partisanen und Verbrecher, d.h. also in der Mehrzahl Juden".
[91] IMT Vol. VIII, pp. 294-296.
[92] As above, p. 298.
[93] As above.
[94] According to Nick Terry’s estimate published on the Axis History Forum, of about 2.89 million Jewish dead from prewar Poland about 1.6 million died in western Poland (occupied by Germany since 1939), 1.21 million in eastern Poland and 80,000 in the Wilno area (annexed by Lithuania in 1939, then annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 together with the rest of Lithuania). The number of dead Jews from among those living on territory of the USSR would thus be 2.558 million.
[95] IMT Vol. VIII, pp. 294 and 295.
[96] According to Michael Ellman & S. Maksudov, Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War, the official figure in the Stalin period was 7 million, which was about 20 million below the currently accepted figure. As Stalin had claimed 5 million military fatalities at Yalta (so the article "Im Fernsehen: Rußlands Vaterländischer Krieg", Der Spiegel, 14.09.1981), this would leave room for only 2 million civilian dead, far less than the number of Jewish genocide deaths on Soviet territory alone. According to American historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010 Basic Books, p. 342) the number of Jews killed by the Germans in the Soviet Union was a "state secret". A contextual quote of Snyder’s statement is included in my article The Jäger Report (1).
[97] According to Suzkever in the last answer to his Soviet interrogator, 79,400 out of 80,000 Jewish inhabitants of Vilna were exterminated. According to my calculations the total number of Jews from the Vilna Ghetto cannot have exceeded about 37,000.
[98]Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Vol. VI, Case No. 192 (LG Würzburg 500203, LG Würzburg 670921). At the first of these two trials Martin Weiss was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment for the murder of at least 30,000 people by units under his command, mostly at the Ponary killing site near Vilnius, as well as several individual murders he committed by his own hand. Also sentenced was August Hering, (obviously the "certain Herring" mentioned by Suzkever. The 1967 verdict acquitted Weiss from one of the individual murder charges on which he had been convicted in 1950, the murder of a female singer.
[99] Lithuanian executors are frequently mentioned in the "Ponary Diary" of Kazimierz Sakowicz, quoted in my article How many people were killed at Ponary? .
[100]"I should also add that it is impossible to determine the number of these children-like that of the Jews-because they were driven directly to the crematory, were not registered, were not tattooed, and very often were not even counted."– IMT Vol. VIII, p. 320.
[101] As above, p. 329.
[102] Document 3311-PS, Exhibit USA-293. The quote is transcribed in IMT Vol. III, pp. 567-568. In the IMT’s judgment, Auschwitz and Treblinka were mentioned as two of the concentration camps that had been set aside for the main purpose of destroying people in gas chambers.
[103] See the list of estimates on the Wikipedia page about Treblinka and the page about Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz.
[104] 731,600 according to German Crimes in Poland. Volume I. Published by the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. Warsaw, 1946, pp. 95-106, online.
[105] See my article 19 November 1942.
[106] Polish historian Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk ("Treblinka – Ein Todeslager im Rahmen der "Aktion Reinhard"", in: Bogdan Musial (editor), Aktion Reinhardt Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement 1941-1944, pp. 257-281) added 713,555 deportees in 1942 according to the Höfle Telegram and 67,308 deportees in 1943 to arrive at a minimum total of 780,863 people killed at Treblinka (p. 281). This figure also includes ca. 2,000 Sinti and Roma taken to Treblinka in the spring of 1943.
[107] The Bonn Court of Assizes (Landgericht), in its judgment dated 30.3.1963 at the trial against Heinrich B. et al (Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Vol. XXI, Case No. 594, quoted in Adalbert Rückerl, NS Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse, pages 288 ff.), concluded that at least about 152,000 Jews had been killed at Chełmno. Additionally about 5,000 Sinti and Roma were murdered at the camp. See Hans Metzner’s articles Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents - The Extermination of 100,000 Jews and Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents - Drinks and Tobacco (With Excursus on the Extermination of the Sinti and Roma).
[108] IMT Vol. VIII, pp. 238-242; Vernik (aka Yankel Wiernik) is quoted on p. 240.
[109] As above, p. 242.
[110] As above, pp. 242-243. The claim that 1.5-2 million Yugoslav non-combatants (14 percent of the population) were "exterminated" is a considerable exaggeration. Total war-related fatalities in Yugoslavia, according to the late Croatian economist and United Nations specialist Vladimir Žerjavić, were in the order of 1,027,000, thereof 947,000 on Yugoslavian territory and 80,000 abroad. Of the former about 237,000 were resistance fighters, 209,000 were "collaborators and quislings" and 501,000 "victims", thereof 216,000 in camps and 285,000 "in places" (Žerjavić, Yugoslavia – Manipulations with the Number of Second World War Victims, chapter THE AUTHOR'S SURVEY OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC AND HUMAN WAR LOSSES IN YUGOSLAVIA, Table 3 and Table 5. While all occupying forces (Germans, Italians, Hungarians and Bulgarians) committed many atrocities against non-combatants in the course of anti-partisan reprisals, the only ones who perpetrated something that can be called genocide against Slavs (in this case Serbians) were other Slavs, the Croatian fascists known as Ustaše. According to the USHMM page about Jasenovac concentration camp, Croat authorities murdered between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia during the period of Ustaša rule. Žerjavić’s figures are much lower: Serbian civilian losses on the territory of the NDH or "Independent State of Croatia" were in the order of about 197,000, thereof 45,000 killed by German forces, 15,000 killed by Italian forces, 28,000 died in "prisons, pits and other camps", 50,000 killed in the Jasenovac-Gradina camp, 25,000 died of typhoid and 34,000 killed "in battles between Ustashas, Chetniks and Partisans". According to my calculations, about 260,000 non-Jewish Yugoslavian citizens were killed criminal actions by Axis (including Croatian) forces during World War II.
[111] The Generalplan Ost, had it been implemented following a final victory by Nazi Germany, would have been a different matter altogether.
[112] As above, p. 243.
[113] As above.
[114] As above, pp. 257-261. Horrible though the atrocities committed against the non-Jewish peasant population in the context of anti-partisan warfare were (to get a small idea of what it was like, watch Elem Klimov’s Come and See, in my opinion the best war film ever made), and despite the fact that especially in Belorussia large swathes of land were depopulated, these killings were not intended to eradicate the peasant population per se like the Jews inhabitants of the occupied territories had been mostly wiped out. The idea was to deprive the partisans of shelter and sustenance by destroying the villages where they might find foodstuffs and killing or deporting the villagers that might assist them in any way, be it voluntarily or at gunpoint. In his study about German occupation and extermination policies in Belorussia, Christian Gerlach explains this tactic as follows (Kalkulierte Morde, p. 910, my translation): "As in the case of other guerrilla movements the military attacks of the partisans and the own losses were not the most dangerous aspect from the point of view of the German occupation authorities (see chapter 9.1). What concerned them more was the partisans growing political influence upon the local population. The partisans were thus to be isolated from the peasants at any cost. The more the armed resistance drew the peasants to its side, the less agrarian products they delivered to the Germans. The main interest of the occupiers, however, was to have a population as loyal and willing to deliver as possible. Where the population sided with the partisans, it became a threat to German rule through its disobedience, and as it was easier to hit, the occupiers concentrated on wiping out the partisan infested villages (a term often employed) in order to keep the political infection from spreading.".
[115] Crimes against prisoners of war had already been addressed in an earlier presentation by the Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the USSR, Colonel Pokrovsky (IMT Vol. VII, pp. 345 – 436). This presentation was based also on German documents such as Leykauf’s Letter to Thomas dated 2 December 1941 and Rosenberg’s letter to Keitel dated 28 February 1942, but chiefly on Soviet government communiques, Extraordinary State Commission reports, records of witness testimonies before Soviet authorities and a Soviet court verdict. One of the exhibits referred to, as concerns the treatment of Polish prisoners of war, was the infamous Document Number USSR-54, featuring the forensic report whereby the Soviets tried to make believe that it was not them but the Germans who had murdered the Polish officers whose bodies had been found in 1943 in the Katyn forest (pp. 425-427). This was the abysmal part of the Soviet prosecution case.
[116] See the HC reference library threads The Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War and Nazi and Soviet Crimes, as well as my article Scrapbookpages on Subhuman Cannibalism.
[117] As above, p. 332.
[118] According to Polish figures, during the German occupation Poland lost 45 percent of her physicians and dentists, 57 percent of her attorneys, more than 15 percent of her teachers, 40 percent of her professors, 30 percent of her technicians, and more than 18 percent of her clergy. See Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust. Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947, p. 23.
[119] IMT Vol. VIII, p. 333.
[120] As above, pp. 335-336. The horrors of the siege of Leningrad and the intentions of Hitler and the Wehrmacht High Command regarding the city’s population are addressed in the HC reference library thread The Siege of Leningrad, a collection of excerpts from German documents, eyewitness testimonies, photos, film footage and historical literature. Stills from a Soviet documentary about the siege can be viewed in my article Nazi crimes in Soviet footage.
[121] As above.
[122] As above, p. 341.
[123] In his presentation about war crimes against civilians Smirnov quoted from a Soviet report whereby bombing and artillery fire killed 16,747 people in Leningrad and 632,253 people died of hunger (IMT Vol. VII, p. 571). There is no indication, as far as I know, that the former figure is an undercount, and with less than 17,000 air raid and shelling victims throughout the city it is highly improbable that 5,000 died at three church sites alone. The number of starvation deaths, on the other hand, is generally held to be too low. According to Harrison E. Salisbury (The 900 Days. The Siege of Leningrad, 1970 Avon Books, New York, pp. 590 ff.), the civilian death toll of the siege was no lower than 800,000 and may have reached something over 1,000,000 deaths attributable to hunger alone in Leningrad and its vicinity. Anna Reid (Leningrad. Tragedy of a City under Siege, 2012 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, pp. 417-418) estimates that the siege’s civilian death toll was "not less than 650,000 and not much more than 800,000", and that the most probable single figure is about 750,000 (between one in three and one in four of Leningrad’s immediate pre-siege population).
[124] IMT Vol. VIII, pp. 341-342.
[125] If the incident happened the cause of death must have been shrapnel from an exploding bomb or shell. Or then the girl was shot in an embattled city like Pskov (which also has a Trinity Cathedral), and locations got mixed up in Lomakin’s memory. The hypothesis that he simply invented a tale I consider more remote. Witnesses to traumatic events often have confused or even weird recollections. A case in point are certain survivors of the Dresden bombings.
[126] As above, p. 342.
[127] As above, p. 343.
[128] As above.
[129] See Salisbury, as above pp. 636-637; Reid, as above pp. 377 – 380 and 383. Salisbury and Reid mention stations, tram stops and movie houses as the targets; according to Reid artillery fire was especially heavy during morning and evening journeys to work and public holidays. However, neither Salisbury nor Reid mention the targeting of churches.
[130] The siege of Leningrad was addressed in Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia, one of the US wartime propaganda documentaries made by Frank Capra. Footage about the defense and siege of Leningrad, which is presented in a rather euphemistic manner as befits the heroism stance that pervades Capra’s production, starts at 49:30 of the YouTube video. At 53:54 to 53:59 there is a (false) claim that surrender of the city was demanded by the Wehrmacht. The horrors of starvation are briefly shown, as is the shelling of the city (with some inaccuracies, e.g. what is shown as German artillery is sometimes Soviet artillery), supposedly meant to bring about the city’s surrender.
[131] IMT Vol. VIII, p. 294.
[132] As above, p. 296.
[133] As above, p. 298.
[134] As above.
[135] As above, p. 242.
[136] As above, p. 243.
[137] In fairness it should be said that this viewpoint is not wholly without merit, insofar as it is to a certain extent present in studies by historians like Christian Gerlach, Dieter Pohl and Timothy Snyder, who maintain that the genocide of the Jews must be seen and can only be properly understood in the context of crimes committed or intended by the Nazis against other victim groups. In the introduction of his latest book, The Extermination of the European Jews, Gerlach states that his study "places the persecution of Jews in the context of interdependent policies regarding warfare, occupation and policing, social issues, economics, racist thought and popular racism", and "also describes the murder of Jews amidst massive violence against other groups and attempts to make connections among these different sorts of violence", an approach in which it "differs from narratives that examine the persecution and murder of Jews alone with little regard to the fate of other groups, on the basis of a history of ideas with relatively few other forms of contextualization."

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

The fourth and final part is this series is about how the Soviets addressed the Nazi genocide of the Jews after Nuremberg, and about what the Soviet approach to the particular fate of Jews under Nazi rule might (or not) reveal about the reasons why the Soviets held back the 2nd Jäger Report for almost twenty years after its discovery.




4. After Nuremberg

The Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals was the high water mark of Soviet interest in Nazi crimes committed specifically against Jews. Never again, as far as I know, would Soviet authorities address the subject in such detail as in Smirnov’s Crimes against Humanity presentation.

During the Nuremberg Trial the Soviet prosecutors, especially Smirnov, apparently tried to be in line with their western colleagues, as far as their instructions from above permitted, regarding Nazi Germany’s crimes against the Jews.^[138] By the time the IMT issued its judgment, on 1 October 1946, the former allies in the war against Germany had become estranged, and the beginning of the Cold War was on its way. Interest in the documentation and persecution of Nazi crimes waned, with only the US keeping up the effort on a stand-alone basis at subsequent trials lasting until April 1949. ^[139]

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, one of the five anti-fascist committees created by Stalin to encourage western support for the Soviet war effort, was no longer needed and rather considered an alien organization as Stalin’s government became increasingly anti-Semitic. Eventually it was disbanded and its members arrested and put on trial.^[140] A voluminous documentation about atrocities against Jews in the Soviet Union, known as the Black Book, was rejected by Soviet censorship and never published in the USSR. ^[141]

Fond though it was of commemorating the Soviet people’s achievements and sacrifices in the "Great Patriotic War", the Soviet state, also in the post-Stalin era, didn’t erect memorials mentioning the mass killing of Jews. Sites where Jews had been mass murdered were relegated to oblivion, even used for military or industrial purposes. ^[142] Where memorials were erected, their message was something like "Soviet citizens were shot in this place in 1941–1944" or "Here in the Paneriai forest, from July 1941 to July 1944, the Nazis shot more than 100,000 Soviet citizens"^[143]

Despite making up the large majority of Soviet civilians killed out of hand by the wartime occupiers and their local auxiliaries (or precisely because of that), Jews had never figured prominently as victims of the "fascist invaders" in Soviet reports and public statements. After 1946, however, Jews were indistinguishably merged with other "peaceful civilians" or "peaceful Soviet citizens" as victims of Nazi crimes. The Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews had no place in Soviet history. One might consider this a form of Holocaust denial.

5. The Jäger Report

I go back now to the beginning of this series, to the hypothesis that the Soviet Union’s suppression of the 2nd Jäger Report had something to do with the "peaceful Soviet citizens" stance. Considering the Soviet approach to the subject throughout the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals, which was outlined in this series, there are arguments pro and contra this hypothesis.

Jäger’s figures add up to 137,447 people killed, of which 135,391 (98.50%) were Jews and 2,056 (1.50%) were non-Jews. ^[144] Not exactly something that would support the "all Soviet peoples suffered equally" fiction, but then a similar disproportion as concerns Lithuania (80,311 Jews vs. 860 communists) becomes apparent from the parts of the 1st Stahlecker Report, presented by US prosecutor Major Walsh, that were translated in English. Besides, the Soviet prosecution itself submitted as evidence the 2nd Jäger Report, which like its predecessor not only shows a huge disproportion between Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Einsatzgruppe A (even though executions of non-Jews are not mentioned at the same time as executions of Jews in this report), but also contains further information highly inconvenient for the Soviet Union, namely about Soviet oppression of and crimes against the Baltic peoples and the collaboration of Soviet citizens (Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Belarusians) with the Nazi invader, with Lithuanians and Latvians also taking part in Nazi mass crimes.

Then again, the Stahlecker Reports are large documents (the first almost 180 pages long, the second over 250 pages long, in each case with recovered annexes), of which only a small part deals with the mass killing of Jews, the rest being about the organization and marching route of the Einsatzgruppe, history of the occupied territories with a focus on Soviet rule and Jewish influence, the mood and attitudes of the locals, suppression of partisans and other resistance, administrative matters, economy and other issues, including even cultural life. It was therefore possible to pick out the relatively small parts that were of interest to the prosecution cases and ignore the rest, as Smirnov did in his presentation. Moreover no part of the 2nd Stahlecker Report was translated into English; the only parts rendered in the English language were translations from the notes of Smirnov’s presentation in Russian language.

The 2nd Jäger Report, on the other hand, is a very short document, only 9 pages long, and it is almost exclusively about mass killing, with only part of page 8 and page 9 dedicated to the liberation of prison inmates detained by Lithuanian nationalists. Each of pages 1 to 7 and most of page 8 brings home the message, additionally emphasized by the subdivision of the Jewish victim numbers into men, women and children, that Einsatzkommando 3 sought to wholly exterminate the Jewish population of Lithuania (being kept from completing its tasks only by the civilian administration and the Wehrmacht who needed Jewish laborers), whereas the killing of other "peaceful [Soviet] citizens" was a low priority for Jäger’s mass murderers. Picking and choosing in this report would be of no avail as any prosecution-relevant excerpt one might select would convey this message. Moreover, and although this was certainly not Jäger’s intention, the separate count of Jewish men, women and children gave the victims a bit of a human face, whereas the figures in Stahlecker’s report were just cold, impersonal figures.

The much stronger impact of the Jäger Report vs. the Stahlecker reports would also apply as concerns the inconvenient aspect of Lithuanian collaboration. Lithuanian "partisans" killing at Jäger’s command, in coordination with SS-Obersturmführer Hamman’s Rollkommando (mobile command) and Lithuanian civilian authorities or wholly on their own initiative are mentioned on the very first page and again on pages 5, 6 (one which the total number of victims is stated), 7 and 8. There was also no room for picking and choosing in this respect.

Considering the above, and also that the Jäger’s figures are a subtotal of those in the 2nd Stahlecker Report because they only cover Lithuania whereas Stahlecker’s also cover Latvia, Estonia and "White Ruthenia", there would be little if anything to motivate a Soviet presentation of this harrowing document. The disadvantages of doing so would outweigh any additional benefit that the document could have brought for the Soviet prosecution case.

So the Soviet prosecution would have had good reasons not to submit the 2nd Jäger Report as evidence at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals. Assuming, that is, that the Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg were even aware of its existence. Given the uncoordinated, inefficient manner in which Soviet investigators collected and processed German documentary evidence, it is quite possible that a document discovered in Latvia (the 2nd Stahlecker Report) was known to Counsellor Smirnov or who provided him with prosecution evidence whereas a document discovered in Lithuania (the 2nd Jäger Report) was not, simply because Soviet investigators in Latvia worked better than their colleagues in Lithuania.^[145] After Nuremberg any Soviet motivation to make German evidence about the extermination of the Jews public vanished anyway (see the previous section of this article), and even in 1963 the Soviets seem to have been reluctant to make the 2nd Jäger Report available to judicial authorities of the German Federal Republic. ^[146]

Bottom line, there is no reason to suspect any kind of Soviet manipulation behind the suppression of the Jäger Report, other than a selection of evidence according to what was deemed necessary for the Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg to be more or less in line with their western colleagues as concerns crimes against the Jews without watering down the claim that Nazi Germany had endeavored to exterminate the "peaceful [Soviet] population" in general and massacred Soviet civilians with no distinction between nationalities. The "do not divide the dead" approach to Nazi crimes need not but may well have been at play here.

Notes

[138] Indicative of this are Smirnov’s reference to evidence presented by the US prosecution, namely before presenting the 2nd Stahlecker Report (IMT Vol. VIII, p. 294) and the introduction of Treblinka evidence despite that camp’s having been omitted in the indictment, following its mention in Major Walsh’s presentation on the persecution of the Jews (IMT Vol. III, p. 557 and pp. 567-568).
[139] The Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10.
[140]See the YIVO Encyclopedia page Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
[141] See the YIVO Encyclopedia page Black Book.
[142] A case in point is the use for military purposes of the massacre site near Marijampolė, Lithuania. Another is the use of the Babiy Yar ravine for dumping pulp, which led to the 1961 Kurenivka mudslide. Regarding the long struggle for a memorial at the killing site near Kiev see the YIVO Encyclopedia page Babi Yar.
[143]Text of memorials erected at the Ponary killing site near Vilnius, Lithuania, according to Piotr Niwiński, Ponary. The Place of "Human Slaughter" (brochure in Polish, Lithuanian and English), pp. 36-37.
[144] See my article The Jäger Report (1)
[145] An example of how the Soviets handled German documentary evidence is provided on the page How do we know the Einsatzgruppen reports are authentic and not forgeries? of the Holocaust Denial on Trial website, quoting Lucjan Dobroszycki, "Captured Nazi Documents on the Destruction of Jews in the Soviet Union", in: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941-1945 (M.E. Sharpe, 1993), pp. 215-221 (p. 217): "When the Russians occupied Berlin in 1945 they went through the German official archives with more vigor than discrimination, shipped some material to Russia, destroyed some, and left the rest scattered underfoot. They often following a system that is difficult to understand—emptying papers on the floor and shipping the filing cabinets that had contained them."
[146] Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, pp. 28-29, cited in my article The Jäger Report (1)

The third paragraph informs us that a Jew attempted suicide but was unsuccessful and therefore "realized that he could not avoid sharing the fate of the evacuees." This reveals that Salitter knew that the deportees faced a fate worse than suicide.

The breakdown of the 1,007 passengers by occupation shows that the majority were not of working age (521 were "ohne Beruf" - without vocation). The age breakdown was: 41 aged 1-6 years, 62 aged 6-14, 62 aged 14-18, 408 aged 18-50 and 434 aged over 50. Most of these Jews could not therefore be regarded as suitable for labour deployment in the East. Deporting young children and old people to Latvia in December was genocidal on its face; deaths could be anticipated in such a climate and with inadequate nutrition and medical care.

In Minsk itself - exclusive of Reich [Jews] - there are about 1,800 Jews living, whose shooting must be postponed in consideration of their being used as labour.

The Commander in White Russia is instructed to liquidate the Jewish question as soon as possible, despite the difficult situation. However a period of about 2 months is still required - according to the weather. 

Historians debate the intentions of the Nazi leadership at the moment that Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, disputing the extent to which an extermination of Soviet Jews had already been decided and, if so, whether this covered just Jewish men or also women and children. Important sources for deducing those intentions are starvation plans and Heydrich's instructions to the Einsatzgruppen and HSSPF, but a less explored source is Hitler's address to the military of March 30 recorded in the diary of Franz Halder. In this article, I analyze this source against other earlier and later statements made by Hitler.

For the relevant passage in this address, as summarized by Halder, I have relied on Roberto's translation given here:

Question of Russians getting away: not likely because they are tied to the Baltic and Ukraine.

If the Russians should try to get away, they would have to do it at a very early stage, otherwise they will no longer be able to withdraw in an orderly manner. After solving the tasks in the East 50 to 60 divisions (armoured) will suffice. It will be possible to release a part of the land forces to work in the armament industry for the air force and navy, another part will be requiredfor other tasks, for instance Spain.(Marginal note by Halder: Colonial Tasks.)

Two world-views fighting each other. Demolishing verdict about Bolshevism, which is equal to social criminality. Communism is an enormous danger for the future. We must depart from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship. The Communist is no comrade before and no comrade afterwards. This is a fight to annihilation. If we dont see it as this, we will defeat the enemy, but in 30 years we will again be faced with the communist enemy. We don’t make war to conserve the enemy.

Future order of states: Northern Russia belongs to Finland. Protectorates Baltic countries, Ukraine, Belorussia.

Fight against Russia:Annihilation of the Bolshevik commissars and the communist intelligence. The new states must be Socialist states, but without an intelligence of their own. It must be prevented that a new intelligence comes into being. A primitive Socialist intelligence is sufficient. The fight must be conducted against the poison of disintegration. This is not a matter for military tribunals. The leaders of the troops must know what this is about. They must lead in the fight. The troops must defend themselves with the means by which they are attacked. Commissars and GPU-people are criminals and must be treated as such.

For this the troops need not come out of the hands of their leaders. The leader must issue his directives in consonance with the feelings of the troops. This fight is very much differentiated from the fight in the West. In the East harshness means mildness in the future. The leaders must require themselves to do the sacrifice of overcoming their considerations. 

Part 1

Introduction

The report dated 1.12.1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando (EK) 3 of Einsatzgruppe (EG) A (the 2nd Jäger Report) ^[1] is the most explicit surviving German document related to Nazi Germany’s largely successful endeavor to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. It details the killing, between 4 July and 25 November 1941, of a total of 137,447 people mainly on the territory of Lithuania, thereof 135,391 (98.50%) Jews and 2,056 (1.50%) non-Jews (communists, partisans, prisoners of war, mentally disabled people and others). ^[2]



If this flagrant imbalance between Jewish and non-Jewish victims were not enough to show that the Nazis pursued a policy of extermination against the Jews, this would follow from the fact that, around the middle of August 1941, the entries show the wiping out of entire Jewish communities, men, women and children (listed separately). Rarely is there a pretense that the mass killing of Jews was retaliation for acts of resistance, and even on those occasions the reprisal claim is a preposterous pseudo-justification given the enormous disproportion between harm supposedly suffered and harm inflicted. ^[3] The term "partisans", where it appears in the report, refers mostly to Lithuanian insurgents who had taken up arms against the Soviet occupation^[4] and later, as we shall see, played a major role in the mass killing of Jews in which members of EK3 and/or their Lithuanian auxiliaries participated, besides slaughtering Jews on their own initiative. ^[5]

The above features hinder any attempt to explain away the massacres listed by Jäger as having been carried out in an occupational/military context, namely as reprisal actions to suppress resistance. Thus it is no surprise that "Revisionists" turn to claiming that the 2nd Jäger Report is a forgery and/or that it contains widely exaggerated numbers and other inaccuracies (in other words, that Jäger cheated his superiors by inflating his accomplishments and his superiors were so gullible and incompetent as to take Jäger’s claims at face value instead of cross-checking them with other available information). The movement’s "scholarly" champion Carlo Mattogno is no exception to this rule. In fact, he undertakes the lengthiest attempt to discredit the 2nd Jäger Report that I know of. ^[6]

Before addressing that attempt, I’d like to provide a little background information about Lithuania under Nazi rule and the activities of Jäger’s EK3.

Between 1941 and 1944, following a brief period of military rule, the Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, together with a part of Soviet Belorussia, were part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland (abbreviated RKO, translated Reich Commissariat [of the] Eastern Territories), which is shown in the map below. ^[7] The head of the RKO was Reichskommissar (Reich Commissioner) Hinrich Lohse, whose headquarters was in Riga, Latvia. The RKO was an administrative subdivision of the Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories), headed by Alfred Rosenberg.



Lithuania was one of the four Generalbezirke into which the RKO was subdivided, the other three being Latvia, "White Ruthenia" (Weißruthenien) and Estonia. The head of each Generalbezirk was a Generalkommissar. The Generalkommissar for the Generalbezirk Litauen had his head-office in Kaunas. The Generalbezirk Litauen was divided into six Kreisgebiete (District Regions): the Gebietskommissariate (Regional Commissariats) Schaulen (German name of Šiauliai), Ponewesch (German name of Panevėžys), Kauen-Land (Kaunas rural area) and Wilna-Land (Vilnius rural area), and the Stadtkommissariate (City Commissariats) Kauen-Stadt (Kaunas city) and Wilna-Stadt (Vilnius city). ^[8] Each of the rural Kreisgebiete or Gebietskommissariate was subdivided into several Kreise (counties or districts), roughly corresponding to prewar Lithuanian administrative districts. The map below shows the Generalbezirk Litauen as subdivided in 1942. ^[9]



The following four maps are close-ups of the Gebietskommissariate Ponewesch/Panevėžys, Schaulen/Šiauliai, Kauen-Land/Kaunas rural area and Wilna-Land/Vilnius rural area, with the names of the principal killing sites in the extermination of Lithuania’s Jews.^[10]









If the administrative organization of EK3’s area of operations may seem complicated, the organization to which EK3 belonged was even more so.

EK3, commanded by Jäger and with headquarters in Kaunas, was one of the subunits of Einsatzgruppe A, commanded until his death on 23 March 1942 by SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker. In his capacity as Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (abbreviated KdS, meaning Commander of Security Police and Security Service), Jäger was subordinated to the Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (abbreviated BdS, meaning [High] Commanding Officer of Security Police and Security Service). The post of BdS for the Reichskommissariat Ostland, with headquarters in Riga, was held by the same Stahlecker until his death in March 1942. The BdS received his instructions from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office), the central administrative entity for matters of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) and Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), created by the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and headed at the time by Reinhard Heydrich. For special matters within the competence of the Reichsführer SS, such as the fight against partisans and the extermination of the Jews, the Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer (abbreviated HSSPF, meaning Higher SS and Police Leader(s)), who were directly subordinated to Himmler, could use all units of SS and police within their area of competence and accordingly issue orders to the BdS. The HSSPF for Northern Russia (Russland Nord), with headquarters in Riga, was SS-Obergruppenführer Prützmann between June and October 1941, thereafter SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, who held the post from 1.11.1941 until early 1945.

In this series the following abbreviations for administrative entities will be used, as the context requires:
• BdS = a Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD or his agency.
• GBK = a Gebietskommissariat or the respective Gebietskommissar.
• HSSPF = a Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer or his agency.
• KdS = a Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD or his agency.
• RKO = the Reichskommissariat Ostland or the Reichskommissar Ostland.

Jäger’s EK3 with its Lithuanian auxiliaries and collaborators was the main but not the only actor in the extermination of Lithuania’s Jews in 1941. The Vilnius area was taken over from EK9 on 9 August 1941, the Schaulen/Šiauliai area from EK2 on 2 October 1941, according to the 2nd Jäger Report. ^[11] EK2 was also the predominant German killing unit in the parts of the GBK Ponewesch/Panevėžys close to the Latvian territory of the Generalbezirk Lettland.^[12] In the GBK Schaulen/Šiauliai districts Kretinga/Krottingen and Tauragė/Tauroggen near the German border, state police (Gestapo) units from border regions were in charge of the killing. And in a number of places Lithuanian local authorities and "partisans", who throughout the country assisted the Germans as best as they could, also murdered Jews entirely on their own. ^[13] On the other hand, detachments of EK3 also killed Jews and other undesirables in the Dünaburg/Daugavpils area of Latvia and in the Minsk area of Belorussia. Of its 137,447 victims, 124,031 (thereof 123,134 Jews) were killed on territory of the Generalbezirk Litauen, 10,366 (thereof 9,226 Jews) in the Generalbezirk Lettland^[14] and 3,050 (thereof 3,031 Jews) in the Generalbezirk Weißruthenien.

EK3 was subdivided into five detachments according to the 2nd Jäger Report: the Kommando in Kauen (KK), the Rollkommando Hamann (RKH), the Teilkommando in Wilna (TKW), the Teilkommando in Dünaburg (TKD) and the Teilkommando in Minsk (TKM). The KK killed a total of 23,203 people, thereof 23,175 Jews. ^[15] The TKW accounted for 34,757 killed, thereof 34,718 Jews, in the city of Vilnius (at the Paneriai/Ponary killing site^[16]) and in surrounding communities of the RK Wilna-Land: Nemencing (Nemenčinė), Novo-Wilejka (Naujoji Vilnia), Riesa (Riešė), Jahiunai (Jašiūnai), Eysisky (Eišiškės), Trakai, Semiliski (Semeliškės) and Svenciany (Švenčionys). The lion’s share of EK3’s killing was accounted for by the RKH, which will be addressed in more detail further on: 62,071 deaths, thereof 61,241 Jews. RKH did its killing in the GBK Kauen-Land (43 killing sites, 23,040 victims, thereof 22,815 Jews), the GBK Ponewesch/Panevėžys (19 killing sites, 29,730 victims, thereof 29,128 Jews), the GBK Schaulen/Šiauliai (8 killing sites, 6,606 victims, thereof 6,603 Jews), and the GBK Wilna-Land (Kaisiadorys/Kaišiadorys, Rumsiskis/ Rumšiškės and Ziezmariai/Žiežmariai, 2,695 victims, all Jews). ^[17]

Now to Mattogno’s attempts to discredit the Jäger Report.

Forgery Claims

In his biography of Karl Jäger, German historian Wolfram Wette renders the history of how the 2nd Jäger Report became available to western criminal justice authorities and historians. The document wasn’t yet available to the Nuremberg Military Tribunals that judged German war criminals in the years 1945 to 1949. A copy of the report, namely the fourth of a total of five copies, had already during the war, when the Red Army re-conquered Lithuania in 1944, fallen into the hands of the Soviet Union, who at first kept quiet about it. Only in 1963 the Soviet foreign ministry made this unique document available to authorities of the German Federal Republic, namely the Central Bureau of the Federal States’ Judicial Administrations for the Investigation of NS Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen für die Aufklärung von NS-Verbrechen) in Ludwigsburg. There the source was thoroughly examined and declared authentic. ^[18]

Mattogno complains that Wette doesn’t "even" raise the question why the Soviet authorities "behaved in this manner", then adds that "someone" ventured the "bizarre" explanation that the Soviets’ delay and reluctance in handing over the document may have had something to do with a Soviet party line to "not divide the dead", whereby Jews are supposed to have suffered no differently from Nazi occupation and mass murder than members of other Soviet nationalities. That "someone" is obviously this writer, and it’s not like I plucked my explanation out of thin air as Mattogno seems to suggest. ^[19] Several references to the mass killing of Jews in the Soviet prosecution case at the Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal are quoted by Mattogno in support of his argument that no such "ecumenical" Soviet party line existed. ^[20] However, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, the Soviets stuck with that approach to Nazi crimes against Jews (yes, they had been mass-murdered, but so had other "Soviet citizens" or "peaceful civilians") even in Counsellor Smirnov’s presentation of the Soviet case on Crimes against Humanity, which was the high water mark of Soviet interest in what had happened specifically to Jews under Nazi rule. ^[21]

As to why the Soviets made the 2nd Jäger Report available to West German judicial authorities, Mattogno speculates that this might have had something to do with a controversy about Soviet attempts to suppress the memory of the Babi Yar massacre, including a plan to build a new sports stadium at the place. This plan was opposed by Soviet writer Viktor Nekrassov and by Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who in September 1961 published his famous poem Babi Yar (Бабий Яр). ^[22] Yevtushenko was harshly criticized for this by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1963. Mattogno reasons that in the context of Soviet accusations of "cosmopolitanism" against whoever demanded a memorial at Babi Yar making available the Jäger Report to West German judicial authorities would make no sense, and that from a purely theoretical point of view the Soviet attitude may seem suspicious. This is hardly a strong argument as it assumes that Soviet foreign and domestic policies were necessarily aligned and coordinated with each other and the Soviets wanted the document to be pronounced unauthentic in the west in order to weaken demands at memorializing the Nazi genocide of Soviet Jews. As to the West German Central Bureau’s having examined the document and found it authentic as mentioned by Wette, this is supposed to be taken "with a grain of salt" because Wette doesn’t exhibit the expertise on the document’s examination. ^[23]

The latter claim is not wholly accurate as Wette refers to a letter he received from the Central Bureau in 1989, with a 1963 file note of the Central Bureau about a number of original documents made available by the Soviet foreign ministry attached. ^[24] Moreover Mattogno doesn’t explain why, in his short biography of Jäger, Wette should have shown proof of something that historians and judicial authorities never professed any doubt about, namely the report’s authenticity.

That German judicial authorities examined the document’s authenticity not only stands to reason (given that the document might be used as evidence in indictments and challenged by defense attorneys, especially on grounds of its having been provided by the Soviets), but is also borne out by the means available to do such examination, which beside the context of other evidence (including without limitation Jäger’s deposition that will be addressed below) included at least three documents handwritten and hand-signed by Jäger that could be compared with each other and with the 2nd Jäger Report. One is a report that Jäger submitted on 9 February 1942 in response to Order Nr. 1331 from the BdS in Riga, instructing the commanders of EK 1 A in Reval, EK 1 B in Minsk and EK 3 in Kaunas to immediately submit information about executions carried out, broken down into A) Jews, B) communists, C) partisans, D) mental patients and E) others (to be specified), furthermore information about how many of the total were men, women and children. ^[25] The other two documents are farewell letters that Jäger wrote (before his suicide while imprisoned on remand) to the family of his son-in-law and to his interrogator Aedtner, in which he claimed that he had committed no crimes and heaped no guilt on himself, furthermore lamenting the "terrible fate" he had met. ^[26] It would be easy for a handwriting expert to establish that the handwriting and signature on these documents and the signature on the 2nd Jäger Report had been made by one and the same person.

With little to offer by way of arguments against the 2nd Jäger Report’s authenticity, ^[27] Mattogno turns to the "no less important" question of the report’s veracity. Mattogno’s arguments in this sense will be examined in the next articles of this series.

Notes

[1]Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK. 3 bis zum 1. Dez. 1941 durchgeführten Exekutionen (Yad Vashem Archives, Record Group O.53 - Ludwigsburg, USSR Collection, File Number 3, pp. 87-95). The former The Holocaust History Project website featured a transcription and a translation (links to respective first page, from where the following pages can be accessed). This was the second report written by Jäger, following an earlier report dated 10.9.1941 (YVA O.53 - 3, pp. 82-85).
[2] The total number of victims stated on page 6 of the report is 137,346. However, there are several addition mistakes on page 2 ("13.8.41 Alytus"– sum should be 718 instead of 719; "19.8.41 Ukmerge"– sum should be 643 instead of 645) and on page 6 ("12.9.41 Wilna-Stadt" - sum should be 3,434 instead of 3,334; "17.9.41 Wilna Stadt"– 4 executed Lithuanian communists are not included in sum), so the correctly added total is 137,447.
[3] On page 2 it is stated that on 18 August at Kauen - Fort IV, besides 689 Jews, 402 Jewesses and one Polish woman killed for no apparent reason, 711 "intell. Jews from the ghetto" were shot "as a reprisal for an act of sabotage". On 4 October 1941, 315 Jews, 712 Jewesses and 818 Jewish children were shot in a "punishment operation" because "a German policeman was shot at in the ghetto" (page 5). On 2 September 1941 the Wilna detachment of EK3 killed 3,704 Jews (864 men, 2019 women and 817 children) in a "special operation because Jews had shot at German soldiers". In the last recorded killing in Wilna, on 25 November 1941 (page 6), "9 Jews, 46 Jewesses, 8 Jewish children, 1 Pole" were shot, the Pole "for possession of weapons and possession of other war equipment."
[4] See the Wikipedia page June Uprising in Lithuania. The nature and activities of these partisan were described in, among other documents, the 1st Stahlecker Report (Einsatzgruppe A – Gesamtbericht bis zum 15.10.1941), pp. 14-15.
[5] The only references to armed fighters against the German occupation are on page 2 ("2 Lith. NKVD agents, 1 mayor from Jonova who gave the order to set fire to the city of Jonova")¸page 4 ("Penal operation against [non-Jewish] inhabitants who fed Russ. partisans and some of whom were in possession of weapons"), page 5 ("15 terrorists of the Kalinin Group") and page 6 (a Pole shot "for possession of weapons and possession of other war equipment").
[6] Carlo Mattogno, Gli Einsatzgruppen Nei Territori Orientali Occupati. Parte I - Genesi, compiti e attività . 2017 Effepi Edizioni, Genova. Pp. 173-198. This book will in the following be referred to as "GE1".
[7] The map is available on and can be downloaded from this page. It can also be enlarged for close-ups of each region.
[8] Originally (as of 25 June 1941), the Generalbezirk Litauen was subdivided into the following Kreisgebiete (District Regions), aka Gebietskommissariate (Regional Commissariats) of the provincial areas and Stadtkommissariate (City Commissariats) of the metropolitan areas:
• Kauen-Stadt (city of Kovno/Kaunas);
• Kauen-Land, comprising the Lithuanian districts Kovno/Kauen (part), Kėdainiai/Kedahnen, Marijampolė/Mariampol (part) Šakiai/Schaken and Vilkaviškis/Wilkowischken (part);
• Ponewesch-Land, consisting of the city of Panevėžys/Ponewesch and the Lithuanian districts Biržai/Birsen, Panevėžys/Ponewesch, Rokiškės/Rokischken, Utena/Utena (part), Ukmergė/Wilkomir (part) and Zarasai/Ossersee (part);
• Schaulen-Land, consisting of the city of Šiauliai/Schaulen and the Lithuanian districts Kretinga/Krottingen, Mažeikiai/Moscheiken, Raseiniai/Raseinen, Šiauliai/Schaulen, Tauragė/Tauroggen und Telšiai/Telsche.
As of 1.8.1941 the Kreisgebiete Wilna-Stadt and Wilna-Land (consisting of the Lithuanian districts Alytus/Olita, Trakai/Traken und Vilnius/Wilna) were added.
As of the same date the territory of the Lithuanian districts Kovno/Kauen (remainder), Lazdijai/Lasdien, Marijampolė/Mariampol (remainder) and Vilkaviškis/Wilkowischken (remainder) were integrated in the Kreisgebiet Kauen-Land.
As of 1.4.1942 the former rayons Lida- Eišiškės/Eischischken (part) and Švenčionys/Swenzainen of the Generalbezirk Weißruthenien (General District White Ruthenia, the part of occupied Soviet Belorussia under German civilian administration) were integrated in the Kreisgebiet Wilna-Land, and the districts Alytus/Olyta and Trakai/Traken of the Kreisgebiet Wilna-Land and Zarasai/Ossersee of the Kreisgebiet Ponewesch-Land were expanded. In the Kreisgebiet Wilna-Land the new districts Ašmena/Aschmena, Eišiškės/Eischischken und Svyriai /Svyren were formed. Part of the Trakai/Traken District was transferred from the Kreisgebiet Wilna-Land to the Kreisgebiet Kauen-Land. Part of the Utena District was transferred from the Kreisgebiet Ponewesch to the Švenčionys/Swenzainen District of the Kreisgebiet Wilna-Land.
[9] This map is featured in Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941-1944 (2016 Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen), p. 1542. The names of the Gebietskommissariate Schaulen and Ponewesch are rendered in Lithuanian on this map (Šiauliai and Panevėžys). The cities and regions of Kauen and Wilna appear under their respective Lithuanian names, Kaunas and Vilnius.
[10] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, pp. 1545-1547.
[11] Regarding the killings by EK9 at Paneriai/Ponary see my article How many people were killed at Ponary?.
[12] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 810.
[13] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, mentions the following massacres, none of which was recorded by Jäger:
• 8.8.1941, GBK Panevėžys, District Biržai: 2,500 Jewish men, women and children shot by various Lithuanian police and paramilitary forces (p. 813).
• 2nd half of August 1941, GBK Panevėžys, town of Kupiškis: about 3,000 Jews shot by Lithuanians (pp. 817-818).
• 18.7.1941, GBK Šiauliai, District Telšiai: at least 840 Jews, all males. The killers were two Gestapo officers and a platoon of Lithuanian auxiliary police (pp. 847-849).
• 29.8.1941, GBK Šiauliai, District Telšiai: at least 1,580 Jewish women and girls. Lithuanians, arriving in two trucks, did the shooting (pp. 851-852).
• Mid-July 1941, GBK Šiauliai, town of Plungė: About 1,700 Jewish men, women and children. The shooters were Lithuanians, commanded by a few Germans (p. 854).
• 3, 4 and 9 August 1941, GBK Šiauliai, District Mažeikiai: About 2,900 Jews were killed by Lithuanian police and insurgents. Germans were only involved on the first day of the massacre (pp. 855-856).
• Early September 1941, GBK Šiauliai, District Kretinga: all Jewish women and children (the men had been already been killed in the early weeks of the German invasion). German border police and the Saugumas, the Lithuanian Secret Police, committed this massacre (p. 856).
• August and September 1941, GBK Šiauliai, District Tauragė: About 500 Jews including children on 16.9.1941, about 1,800-2,000 Jews in the town of Tauragė, about 7,800 – 8,000 Jews in all of Tauragė District. This was done by units commanded by Criminal Secretary Schwarz and other officials from Gestapo posts in the German-Lithuanian border region (Tilsit, Klaipėda) (pp. 857-861).
[14] The figure includes the 9,585 killed by the TKD in the period 13.7-21.8.1941, plus 21 killed at Dünaburg (Daugavpils, Latvia) on 22.8.41, 544 killed at Aglona (Latvia) on the same day and 216 killed at Dagda und Kraslawa (Dagda and Krāslava, atvia) on 27.8.41. As all these locations are on Latvian territory, I assumed that the execution were carried out by the Teilkommando based in Dünaburg (Daugavpils). It is also possible, however, that the killings on 22.8 and 27.8.41 were the work of the RKH. Their being listed separately from the figure for the 13.7-21.8.1941 period points in that direction, as does Jäger’s mentioning Aglona as one of Hamann’s killing sites in his 1959 interrogation (pp. 24-25 of the interrogation record, which can be read here). With the 781 people killed on Latvian territory on 22.8 and 27.8.41, the tally of the RKH would increase from 62,071 to 62,852, while that of TKD would be reduced to the 9,585 killed in the 13.7-21.8.1941 period.
[15] The killing was done at Kaunas Forts IV (4,163 killed, thereof 4,158 Jews), VII (3,027 killed, thereof 3,020 Jews) and IX (16,013 killed, thereof 15,997 Jews). According to contemporary maps available here and here, Forts IV and IX were not within the Kaunas city boundaries at the relevant time. The respective areas may thus have pertained to the GBK Kaunas-Land.
[16] The number killed at that place between 12 August and 25 November 1941 was 21,273 (thereof 21,234 Jews) according to Jäger. See my article How many people were killed at Ponary?.
[17] All regions are referred to in their borders as of 1.4.1942. Each of these locations (Kaisiadorys/Kaišiadorys, Rumsiskis/ Rumšiškės and Ziezmariai/Žiežmariai) is closer to Kaunas (from where the RKH operated) than from Vilnius (where the TKW was based).
[18] Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, 2011 S. Fischer Verlag Frankfurt am Main, p. 28.
[19] See my article The Jäger Report (1).
[20] GE1, pp. 173-174.
[21] See the series Dividing the Dead – or not (link to Part 1, which links to the following parts).
[22] A translation of this poem and the original Russian text are available on this page. This video features Yevtushenko reciting his poem.
[23] GE1, p. 175.
[24] Wette, Jäger, p. 28 and note 27 on p. 206.
[25] Facsimiles of this order and Jäger’s reply thereto can be viewed in Wette’s book (pp. 146-147) and in my article The Jäger Report (8).
[26] Wette, Jäger, pp. 168 and 170. The latter of the two letters is reproduced by Wette and also in my aforementioned article.
[27] On page 182 of his book, Mattogno makes another insinuation in the "forgery" direction, by pointing out, "without wanting to draw a particular conclusion" from this "anomaly", that the report’s heading "Der Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei u. des SD" should, as said Befehlshaber would be Jäger’s superior SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Stahlecker (the commandant of Einsatzgruppe A), have read "An den Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei u. des SD". While it is true that Jäger as Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (KdS) was subordinated to Stahlecker as Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (BdS), Mattogno overlooks the fact that the supposedly misworded heading is followed by "Einsatzkommando 3", suggesting that the document was meant to be a read as a report by the Einsatzkommando 3"subsidiary", subordinated to the BdS, of the BdS organization. The 1st Jäger Report, dated 10 September 1941, contains the following remark below the date (YVA, O.53-3, p. 82): "Nur zur persönlichen Uebergabe an SS-Brigadefuehrer Dr. Stahlecker" ("Only for personal delivery to SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Stahlecker"). What seems to be the cover letter of the 2nd Jäger Report, dated 10.12.1941 (YVA, O.53-3, p. 87), also bears the letterhead "Der Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei u. des SD Einsatzkommando 3", and is addressed "An die Einsatzgruppe A SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Stahlecker in Riga". So there is no "anomaly" here. "Der Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei u. des SD Einsatzkommando 3" was Jaeger’s letterhead. Between the 1st and the 2nd report, as the YVA collection shows, Jäger also got himself typewriters that had the German Umlaut characters ("ä", "ö", "ü"). He furthermore managed to have "Der Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei u. des SD" printed in Deutsche Schrift on his letterhead.

Part 1

Part 2

In the previous article of this series I addressed Mattogno’s arguments against the authenticity of the 2nd Jäger Report and concluded that these are rather weak. In this and the following articles I will address Mattogno’s arguments against the reliability of the information contained in the 2nd Jäger Report.



Jäger’s interrogation

Following his arrest in the German Federal Republic in 1959, Jäger was interrogated at the Hohenasperg prison by officials from a special commission of the Baden Württemberg Crime Investigation Bureau (Landeskriminalamt), on 15, 16, 18 and 19 June 1959. Mattogno extensively refers to and quotes from Jäger’s statements in this interrogation, which he treats as if they were to be taken at face value, at least where he thinks they support his case by contradicting evidence he’s less fond of or otherwise. ^[28]

Jäger’s deposition indeed contradicts other evidence in several respects, as it is a showpiece of mendacious (and not very clever) self-apology. Or maybe Jäger had in the decades since his Lithuania days managed to make himself believe his own falsehoods. In any case, the deposition contains claims that could be seen as laughably improbable if the matter were not so serious. Jäger’s subordinate Hamann, who Jäger referred to as the head of "his" execution detachment (Leiter meines Exekutionskommandos, page 6 of the interrogation record) never received any orders from Jäger to carry out executions but conducted his killing expeditions entirely on his own initiative (p. 11). Jäger actually never issued an order to kill Jews at all; all he did was sign reports that had been prepared by his office, about executions that were reported to him case by case (same page). Everything else happened just by itself, without his having to do anything (same page). He considered it cruel and terrible that people were killed just because of their race and faith (same page). Once when meeting Stahlecker, he informed him about what he had in the meantime seen and heard about executions ("was ich inzwischen über Erschießungen gesehen und gehört hatte", p. 14), whereupon Stahlecker informed him that Jews had to be killed because they were bearers of communism and organized acts of sabotage (p. 15; to Mattogno’s mind this supposed statement bears out his claim that the motivations behind the killing of Jews were of a "political-military" rather than a racial nature.) He recalled only a few of the sites visited by Hamann’s killing squad and could not remember the numbers killed there or other particulars (p. 24). Only one of these killing sites (a mental asylum at Aglona in Latvia^[29]) he had visited himself, and what he had done there was to save the lives of 20 or 30 patients (p. 25). Jäger’s interrogators were also asked to believe that the Kaunas ghetto had been created after Jäger suggested this to Stahlecker (with the argument that one could not shoot all Jews because some were needed as workers)^[30], in order to put an end to the executions, and that further shootings in the ghetto only happened because Stahlecker insisted that they were necessary for security police reasons (p. 26 of the interrogation record). Although he had been in Kaunas all the time, Jäger didn’t remember any larger executions in the ghetto (and of course he didn’t order them), but also didn’t rule out that such had happened.^[31] And so on.

Far-fetched though many of Jäger’s self-apologetic claims are, his deposition also contains information that is of interest in corroborating Jäger’s reports. One is the vivid description (pp. 18-19) of a mass execution of about 3,000 Jewish males during the first days of his command at Kaunas, which I have translated in an earlier article^[32] and which Jäger attributed to Lithuanian Lieutenant Norkus – omitting that, as expressly stated on the first page of the 2nd Jäger Report, Jäger himself had ordered the execution by Lithuanian "partisans" of 2,930 male and 47 female Jews on 4 and 6 July 1941. Another is the mention (p. 11) of said Lieutenant Norkus as the commander (subordinated to Hamann) of an execution detachment of about 50-100 Lithuanians (the extensive Lithuanian collaboration and participation in the killings, which was essential to the success of the 1941 extermination campaign against the Jews of Lithuania, will be addressed in more detail further on). Another is this statement on page 25 of the interrogation record, which suggests the extent of the killings inside and outside Kaunas and the role of Hamann and his Lithuanian auxiliaries in the latter (my translation):

The shootings of Jews continued almost daily, also in Kovno. SS-Obersturmführer Hamann was constantly away on business outside Kovno with his detachment, and together with Lithuanian lieutenant Norkus and his people continued shooting thousands of Jews at the most varied places, which I can no longer remember.

Hamann’s essential role in the murder campaign is also highlighted in the 2nd Jäger Report, with the difference that in the report Hamann is mentioned not as having acted entirely on his own without any instructions from or interaction with Jäger, but as having entirely adopted Jäger’s goals (page 7 of the report). Hamann is furthermore praised in the report for having understood the importance of ensuring the co-operation of the Lithuanian "partisans" and the competent civilian authorities (which, as we shall see, was indeed essential to his success^[33]). In his interrogation Jäger mentioned that Hamann had been constantly in contact with the local Lithuanian police authorities or requested by these to perform executions (p. 24 of the interrogation record). Another noteworthy statement can be found on page 26 of the interrogation record (my translation):

They had only told me, that is, Stahlecker told me during his first visit in Kovno, that the Jews were to be shot for security police reasons – they were carriers of communism, tended to commit acts of sabotage. The mentioned reasons, however, never justified to simply exterminate the Jews ("die Juden einfach auszurotten").

The Jews were to be exterminated. "Security police reasons", where invoked (a topic that will be addressed in the next article of this series), were pseudo-justifications.

The Jäger’s reports compared with each other and with other documentation about the killing of Jews

Mattogno claims that there are major contradictions between Jäger’s 1st and 2nd report and between the two Jäger Reports and other German documentation about the killing of Jews in Lithuania, namely the Operational Situation Reports USSR of the Einsatzgruppen.^[34]

The total number of people executed until 10.9.1941, according to Jäger’s 1st report, is 76,355. The figures up to 10.9.1941 in the 2nd report, according to Mattogno, add up to 62,986.^[35] How come this discrepancy? Actually there’s hardly any discrepancy at all; Mattogno just didn’t pay attention. He added up the 2nd report’s figures on pp. 1-4 up to 10.9.1941, which unlike the figures up to that date in the 1st report don’t include the following:

• Teilkommando des EK.3 in Dünaburg in der Zeit vom 13.7-21.8.1941– 9,585
• Teilkommando des EK.3 in Wilna: 12.8. bis 1.9.41 Wilna-Stadt– 461
• 2.9.41 Wilna-Stadt– 3,700.

Adding these figures (which in the 2nd report appear on page 5 after the Kauen and RKH figures, logically so as these killings were scored up by different detachments of EK3, namely the TKD and the TKW) to the sum of figures on pp. 1-4 up to 10.9.1941 inclusive (which is not 62,986 but 62,983, as Jäger counted 1 too many for Alytus 13.08.1941 and 2 too many for Ukmerge on 19.08.1941) yields 76,349 executions until 10.9.41 inclusive. The difference in regard to the 1st report’s total is, just wait for it, 6. This tiny difference results from the following minor discrepancies:
• 19.7.41, Kauen - Fort Vll (Kaunas): 28 according to the 1st report, 26 according to the 2nd report (17 Jews, 2 Jewesses, 4 male and 2 female Lithuanian communists, 1 German communist). Either the addition in the first report is incorrect, or the number of Jewesses and/or that of Lithuanian female communists, which are both not readable in the YVA copy, was different in the 1st than in the 2nd report, perhaps because 2 of the ladies had been counted twice (as Jewesses and as Lithuanian female communists).
• 13.8.41, Alytus: 719 according to the 1st report, 718 according to the 2nd report corrected by me (the partial figures, 617 Jews, 100 Jewesses and 1 criminal, add up to 718 instead of 719; the incorrect total is stated in both reports).^[36]
• 16.8.41, Rokiskis (Rokiškis): 3,208 in the 1st report (the partial figures: 3,200 Jews,^[37] 5 Lithuanian communists, 1 partisan, 1 Pole, were incorrectly added) vs. 3,207 in the 2nd report (partial figures were correctly added).
• 19.8.41, Ukmerge (Ukmergė): 645 according to the 1st report, 643 according to the 2nd report corrected by me (incorrect addition of partial figures: 298 Jews, 255 Jewesses, 88 Jewish children, 1 politruk, 1 Russian communist, yields 643 and not 645; the incorrect addition is in both reports).

The number of Jews killed on 6 September 1941 in Georgenburg (Jurbarkas) was changed from 41 in the 1st report to 412 in the 2nd report, according to Mattogno. Actually there was no change at all. It’s just that in the YVA copy of the 1st report the last digit of the figure, obviously a "2" (as this fits the added total) is not clearly visible. Again, Mattogno didn’t pay attention.

That said, I move on to the supposed incompatibilities with the Operational Situation Reports USSR (Ereignismeldungen UdSSR) of the Einsatzgruppen.

In his biography of Jäger, as mentioned by Mattogno,^[38] Wolfram Wette referred to two Ereignismeldungen that mention killings listed in the 2nd Jäger Report. The killing of mental patients at an asylum in Aglona (Latvia) is mentioned OSR no. 88 dated 19 September 1941, where the same number of victims as in Jäger’s report (544) is stated, and particulars of the massacre at Zagare (Žagarė) on 2.10.41 are narrated in OSR no. 155 dd. 1 January 1942 (where the number killed in that massacre, 2,236 according to the 2nd Jäger Report, is not stated). To Mattogno’s mind these two matches, rather than confirm the veracity of the Jäger Report, increase the perplexity (perplessità) about the almost total absence in the OSR of specific data about the executions mentioned in the 2nd Jäger Report. In fact, Mattogno tells his readers, out of 94 executions with over 100 victims listed by Jäger, thereof 42 with more than 1,000 victims, only 10 with a total of 1,841 victims are mentioned in the OSR.^[39]

Mattogno doesn’t reveal (at least not in his discussion of the Jäger Report) what OSR he has in mind, and his "perplexity" is hard to understand for who has realized that the OSR only point out executions or other occurrences considered to be of particular interest and otherwise merely state the number of victims scored up by a given unit within a given period. Let’s look at what mentions of mass killing in Lithuania can be found in the surviving OSR.^[40]

• OSR No. 8 dated June 30, 1941 mentions that during the past 3 days Lithuanian "partisan" groups "have already killed several thousand Jews". The statement apparently refers to Kaunas.

• OSR No. 19 dated July 11, 1941 mentions that after the retreat of the Red Army, "the population of Kaunas killed about 2,500 Jews during a spontaneous uprising," and that, in addition, "a rather large number of Jews was shot by the Auxiliary Police Service." In Kaunas, according to this report, "up to now a total of 7,800 Jews have been liquidated partly through pogroms and partly through shooting by Lithuanian Kommandos." According to the Jäger’s reports a total of 2,977 Jews were killed on 4 and 7 July 1941 at Jäger’s orders. To these must be added the Jews killed by Lithuanians on their own initiative before EK3 took over. According to the Jäger reports the number of these was about 4,000. The difference between the addition of these numbers (ca. 7,000) and the number stated in OSR No. 19 is about 800. In the first report (10.9.1941), the 4,000 killed by "partisans" before EK3 took over were subdivided into two partial figures, 3,200 and 800, the latter referring to a period whose identification is not readable in the YVA copy. It is possible that a) these figures referred to Kaunas only,^[41] b) EK3 communicated both the total killed by "partisans" (4,000) and the second figure stated in the report dated 10.9.41 (800), and c) the recipient of these communications didn’t realize that the 800 were already included in the 4,000, thus counting them twice.

• OSR No. 21 dated 13 July 1941 includes the following information (emphasis added):

In Vilnius by July 8th the local Einsatzkommando liquidated 321 Jews. The Lithuanian Ordnungsdienst which was placed under the Einsatzkommando after the Lithuanian political police had been dissolved was instructed to take part in the liquidation of the Jews. 150 Lithuanian officials were assigned to this task. They arrested the Jews and put them into concentration camps where they were subjected the same day to Special Treatment. This work has now begun, and thus about 500 Jews, saboteurs amongst them, are liquidated daily.

When complaining later in his book that of the Jews in Vilnius killed by EK3 and its predecessor, EK9, only several hundred are mentioned in each of 3 OSR, Mattogno omits the highlighted text, which (considering that, according to the 2nd Jäger Report, EK9 was in charge of Vilnius until 8 August 1941) would imply that, in the month starting 8 July and ending 8 August 1941, EK9 killed over 15,000 Jews. The number was actually much lower (about 5,000 in July and 1,500 in early August 1941) because, contrary to what OSR No. 21 suggests, executions were not carried out every day in this period and the number of victims in each execution was not necessarily as high as 500.^[42]

• OSR No. 24 dated 16 July 1941 mentions, with regard to EK9 in Vilnius, that because of a "short surprise fire fight against the Vilnius Security Police Headquarters" a "special liquidation" of an unmentioned number of persons was carried out "in excess of daily liquidation quotas" (obviously meaning the 500 Jews per day mentioned in OSR No. 21). Mattogno somehow missed this OSR.

• OSR No. 88 dated 19.09.1941 (the one in which the Aglona asylum massacre is mentioned, see above) mentions that Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A had, together with Lithuanian "partisans", killed 46,692 people.^[43]

The total is equal to the figure that results from adding up the following numbers in the 2nd Jäger Report:
(a) Kaunas, RKH and possibly TKD (Dünaburg/Daugavpils and Aglona on 22.8.41, not including the figure for the 13.7-21.8.41 period stated separately on page 5 of the report) up to 29.8.41 inclusive (42,488);
(b) TKW up to 2.9.41 inclusive (4,161);
(c) Uzusalis (Užusaliai) on 11-12.9.41 (43)
EK3’s reporting figures for different dates/periods would not be implausible if one considers that
i) figures (a) and (b) pertain to different detachments of EK3, whose figures may have reached Jäger and/or been forwarded to the command of Einsatzgruppe A at different times, and
ii) figure (c) refers to an execution that may have been reported separately (and more immediately) because it was something out of the ordinary – not a massacre of Jews but a "punitive action" against (non-Jewish) local inhabitants accused of having fed the Russian partisans and partially been in possession of weapons ("Strafaktion gegen Bewohner, die die russ. Partisanen verpflegt haben und teilweise im Besitze von Waffen waren."). Such a reprisal would deserve special attention as it might affect the relations between the German occupiers and the Lithuanian population, which the Germans meant to keep on their side.

So far it looks like, as of 19 September 1941, a significant part of Jäger’s mass execution tally (25 times higher than Mattogno’s 1,841) had been mentioned in Ereignismeldungen. And that Mattogno again didn’t pay attention – which is all the more perplexing as he quotes from OSR No. 88 on two occasions, including the text passage that contains the 46,692 figure.^[44]

But there’s more.

• OSR No. 94 dated 27 September 1941 mentions that by its time the number of persons liquidated within the area of EK3 had increased to approximately 75,000.^[45] The killings by KK, RKH and (possibly) TKD up to 26.9.41 inclusive according to the 2nd Jäger Report (TKD including Dünaburg/Daugavpils and Aglona on 22.8.41, but not including the figure for the 13.7-21.8.41 period stated separately on page 5 of the report) add up to 66,156, the killings by TKW to 8,870 until 17.9.41 inclusive and to 9,273 until 20.9.41 inclusive. The respective additions with the sum for KK, RKH and TKD up to 26.9.41 yield 75,026 and 75,429 people executed – both figures within the "approximately 75,000" range.

So it looks like Mattogno’s claim that Jäger’s execution figures are only marginally reflected in the OSR must be attributed to, at best, a somewhat-less-than-attentive reading of the OSR.^[46]

In the next articles of this series I will examine further examples of Mattogno’s scholarship in what he calls a "critical examination" of the 2nd Jäger Report.

Notes

[28] GE1, pp. 175-177.
[29] The killing of 544 mental patients at Aglona is mentioned in both Jäger reports and in Operational Situation Report USSR no. 88 dated 19.9.1941 (Wette, Jäger, p. 118). Jäger’s reports contain the precision that of those executed 269 were men, 227 were women and 48 were children.
[30] In his 2nd report Jäger stated that he had also wanted to wipe out the surviving Jews of the Kaunas, Vilna and Šiauliai (page 7), but been kept from doing so by the Wehrmacht and German civilian authorities. In his first report dated 15 October 1941 Jäger’s superior Stahlecker lamented that a total extermination of Jews in Latvia and Lithuania was not possible ("zumindest nicht im jetzigen Zeitpunkt" - "at least not at the present moment") because the crafts in these countries were almost entirely in Jewish hands, some professions were entirely performed by Jews and Jews were for the time being indispensable for repairing war damage to infrastructure and cities and carrying out tasks important for the war effort (pp. 31-32 of the 1st Stahlecker Report).
[31] Actually the largest mass executions in Kaunas happened after the creation of the ghetto, whose population was reduced by 12-13,000 in several mass executions between 26 September and 29 October 1941. See Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, pp. 949-958.
[32]The Jäger Report (2).
[33] Regarding the participation of Lithuanian auxiliaries in Hamann’s killings, for example the Rokiskis (Rokiškis) massacre recorded under 16.8.41 (actually it lasted two days), see my article The Jäger Report (3). The subject will also be addressed in the next article of this series.
[34] GE1, pp. 177 and 181-182.
[35] As above, p. 177.
[36] In the 1st report the "criminal" was also referred to as an "idiot" (obviously in a clinical sense). This detail was omitted in the 2nd report.
[37] According to the 1st report all these were women and children. According to the 2nd report they were men, women and children.
[38] GE1 pp. 181-182, citing Wette, Jäger, pp. 111 and 118.
[39] As above, p. 182.
[40] Translated excerpts from OSR numbered 8 to 191, with some missing in between, can be accessed on the page The Einsatzgruppen, where they are quoted after Arad, Yitzak, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, editors. The Einsatzgruppen Reports. New York: Holocaust Library. 1989. The German text of these and other Ereignismeldungen has been published in Klaus-Michael Mallmann / Andrej Angrick / Jürgen Matthäus / Martin Cüppers (Hrsg.): Die „Ereignismeldungen UdSSR“ 1941. Dokumente der Einsatzgruppen in der Sowjetunion, Darmstadt 2011.
[41] According to the 1st Stahlecker Report (pp. 21-22), in Kaunas alone "partisans" killed 1,500 Jews in the night of 25-26 June 1941 and 2,300 in the following nights, for a total of 3,800. There is at least one higher estimate of the number of Jews killed in the Kaunas pogrom. In a letter to his Admiral dated 22.9.1941 (Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv, RM 7/1014, Bl. 39-41), the Navy Liaison Officer at Army Group North recalled having witnessed the shooting of about 6,000 Jews by the "Letten" (he mixed up Latvians, Letten in German, with Lithuanians, which in German are called Litauer) in Kowno/Kaunas. A transcription and translation of this letter, the subject of which was how difficult it would be to wipe out the several million inhabitants of Leningrad, can be found in the HC library thread The Siege of Leningrad.
[42] See my article How many people were killed at Ponary?. According to my calculations/estimates in this article, a total of about 28,000 people, overwhelmingly Jews, were executed at the Paneriai/Ponary killing site near Vilnius in the months July to November 1941, including 21,273 persons (21,234 Jews, 39 non-Jews) killed by EK3 according to the 2nd Jäger Report.
[43] Mallmann et al, as above, p. 494.
[44] GE1, pp. 182 and 185.
[45] Mallmann et al, as above, p. 554.
[46] Mattogno mentions another two OSR, No. 36 dated 28 July 1941 and No. 152 dated 7 January 1942, in order to show how few of Vilnius Jews killed by EK9 and EK3 are mentioned in these OSR (GE1, p. 185). Given that, as demonstrated in this article, a significant part of the Jews killed by the Vilnius Teilkommando of EK3 (TKW) are included in the totals mentioned in OSR No. 88 and OSR No. 94, Mattogno’s argument regarding OSR No. 36 and No. 152 can be dismissed as irrelevant.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

This article and the following will address what Mattogno’s calls his "critical examination" of the 2nd Jäger Report.^[47]



"Justifications" for the mass killing of Jews

After pointing out the supposed formal "anomaly" that was already addressed in the first article of this series,^[48] Mattogno argues that, in a report about a wholesale extermination plan, there would be no need to "justify" specific executions. Why was this nevertheless done on occasion?

Besides the killing of non-Jews on account of some characteristic, action or circumstance that made them undesirable in a specific case (because they were communists, mentally disabled, partisans, NKVD agents, Gypsies, "terrorists", criminals, villagers who had helped partisans, etc.), and the occasional mentions that communists or prison inmates shot were (also) Jews or vice-versa, there are the following cases in which a "justification" for killing Jews was stated:

• 18.8.41 Kauen - Fort IV: 711 "intellectual" Jews from the ghetto killed as "a reprisal for an act of sabotage."
• 26.9.41 Kauen-F.IV: 1,608 Jewish men women and children who were "sick" or "suspected of carrying epidemics."
• 4.10.41 Kauen-F.IX: 1,845 Jewish men, women and children killed in a "punitive action" for a German policemen having been "fired on in the ghetto."
• 29.10.41 Kauen-F.IX: 9,200 Jewish men, women and children killed because they were "superfluous" in the ghetto.
• 29.11.41 Kauen-F.IX: 17 Jews and 1 Jewess killed because they had "violated the ghetto laws."
• 2.9.41 Wilna-Stadt: 3,700 Jewish men, women and children killed in a "special action because a German soldier had been fired on by Jews."

What all these "justified" killings have in common is that they took place in one of the large Jewish ghettos in Kaunas and Vilnius,^[49] whereas no "justification" was invoked for any of the large massacres of the RKH’s murder campaign in the Lithuanian province, starting with the massacre of 3,200 Jews at Rokiskis (Rokiškis) that Jäger recorded under the date 16.8.41.^[50] So the stated "justifications" probably had something to do with the victims being ghetto inhabitants.

The small action on 29.11.1941 took place after the mass killing in Kaunas had stopped, pursuant to the insistence of civilian and military authorities that essential laborers and their families, contrary to the intentions of Jäger and his superior, be kept alive.^[51] The killing of those 18 Jews therefore had to be justified, and there is no indication that the reason given (violation of the ghetto laws) was, from Jäger’s point of view, a mere pretext.

Jäger, Stahlecker et al. may have only wanted to kill as many Jews as possible, but the Wehrmacht and the civilian administration (also) saw the ghettos as a pool of essential labor and accordingly sought to restrict EK3’s murder campaign – with success regarding a large part of the ghetto inhabitants, as Jäger ruefully pointed out in his 2nd report. In this context Jäger may have wanted to convey the message (e.g. for the benefit of what discussions his superior, who expressly mentioned the same "problem", might have with who was interested in preserving Jewish labor) that no valuable workers had been destroyed, but only Jews that were a threat to public health or just "superfluous" had been killed.

Moreover these "justifications" were not just made up for the sake of reporting, but corresponded to the criteria actually applied when deciding which Jews to kill right away and which to let live a little longer. In the 4 October 1941 massacre in Kaunas, in which the "small" ghetto was destroyed, Jews who had work certificates were spared, those who had none killed, and the ghetto’s hospital for infectious diseases was burned down.^[52] The massacre on 29 October was preceded by a selection of able-bodied Jews among the "large" ghetto’s entire population, apparently until a predetermined quota of "useful" or "superfluous" Jews had been reached.^[53]

The 18 August "intelligence action" in Kaunas took place a few days after the constitution of the city’s ghettos had been completed, and its apparent purpose was to eliminate right off those Jews who might become leaders of resistance.^[54] Invoking an alleged act of sabotage, Jäger ordered that on the morning of 18 August 1941 500 intelligent and well-dressed Jewish men present themselves at the Viljampole ghetto gate. The "graduates" were made to believe that they would be employed in the town hall archives and the ministries' archives, but then taken to Fort IV and shot there. ^[55] This means that, just like the "carriers of epidemics" and "superfluous Jews" explanations, the alleged "reprisal" was not just made up for the sake of the report. It had previously been "sold" to the ghetto’s inhabitants. The same applies regarding the Kaunas action on 26 September, which was dressed up towards the ghetto as a reprisal for shots allegedly fired on German policeman Paul Koslowski.^[56] The Vilnius action on 2 September, which was later called the "Great Provocation" by the ghetto’s Jews, commenced with the setting up of posters in the ghetto whereby German soldiers had been fired upon and the whole Jewish population would thus be subject to the severest countermeasures.^[57] The alleged reprisal character of this massacre was also known to outsiders.^[58]

The purpose of these "reprisal" actions was apparently one of eliminating or discouraging potential resistance and paving the way for subsequent actions, by turning those ghetto inhabitants not yet killed in the "reprisals" into leaderless, cowed, depressed and thus completely helpless victims of what followed. Indicative of this is also the timing of the "reprisal" actions. Each of them marked a certain phase in the history of the respective ghetto. The "intelligence" action in Kaunas (18.8.41) followed immediately upon the ghettos’ constitution and deprived the Jews of potential leaders. The Koslowski "reprisal" on 26.9.41 initiated the destruction of the "small" ghetto and the decimation of the "large" ghetto up to an intended quota. The "Great Provocation" in the Vilnius ghetto was the overture of a series of large massacres in which 20,556 ghetto inhabitants (according to Jäger’s figures, including the "Great Provocation" deaths) were killed between 2 September and 6 November 1941. None of the subsequent mass executions in Vilnius was claimed to have been a reprisal in the 2nd Jäger Report, because none had been dressed up as such towards the targeted population. After the shock of the "Great Provocation" massacre, no further pretexts were deemed necessary.

Bottom line, the pseudo-justifications of the mentioned large massacres in the 2nd Jäger Report correspond to the actual background of each of these massacres, which in turn was a (further) step in the gradual extermination of the Kaunas and Vilnius ghettos’ inhabitants. Mattogno might have found that out himself if he had consulted (or properly read) the corresponding literature.

Operations of the Hamann Rollkommando

To Mattogno’s mind the operations of the Rollkommando Hamann (RKH) in the Lithuanian province are the most dubious aspects of the Jäger Report. Before addressing Mattogno’s argument, let’s take a look at how the RKH was made up.

According to the 2nd Jäger Report (p.1) the RKH was led by Hamann and 8-10 experienced men from RK3. The report further mentions that Hamann carried out his executions in cooperation with the Lithuanian "partisans" (same page) and that Hamann managed to assure the cooperation with the Lithuanian "partisans" and the local civilian authorities. In his 1959 interrogation Jäger mentioned an execution detachment of 50-100 men commanded by a Lithuanian, Lieutenant Norkus, subordinated to Hamann (p. 11 of the interrogation record), and that Hamann had been constantly in contact with the local Lithuanian police authorities or requested by these to perform executions (p. 24 of the interrogation record).

The Lithuanians that made up all or most of the RKH’s rank and file were members of the National Labor Service Battalion No. 1(13) (Lithuanian: Tautinio darbo apsaugos batalionas, abbreviated TDA), which had been put together in Kaunas in late June and early July 1941. The battalion consisted mainly of former "partisans" and officers from the former Lithuanian armed forces. As of 4 July 1941, it had 724 officers and soldiers.^[59] The 1st and 3rd companies of this battalion are known to have taken part in mass executions of Jews, the former mainly in Kaunas, whereas the latter was the core of the RKH, and members of this company were accordingly assigned to the RKH’s operations in the Lithuanian province.^[60] There is no information about the strength of the TDA’s 3rd Company, but as a company may have 100 to 250 soldiers, a battalion is made up of two or more companies and the TDA has 724 officers and soldiers, the strength of the 3rd Company is likely to have been in this range, which in turn means that the lower of the figures mentioned by Jäger in his interrogation (50) is too low and higher figure (100) is more realistic.

Whatever the number of men subordinated to Hamann and Norkus was, it was not enough to carry out large-scale executions without assistance. While the number of shooters sent to one or the other killing site may have been sufficient (the shooting proper is obviously the least time- and/or labor-intensive part of a mass execution), all preparatory and auxiliary work (digging the graves, rounding up the victims and taking them to the killing site, cordoning off that site, etc.) had to be (and was) done by someone else, namely by the local Lithuanian authorities and what local "partisans" were available. This local cooperation renders moot one of the dreariest pieces of Mattogno’s writing, as he fills up almost two pages with considerations about what impracticable distances the RKH would have had to cover within short times if the whole unit had travelled from one killing site to the next.^[61] The exercise ends with Mattogno’s reasoning that his distance calculations would not apply if one assumes that Hamann divided his forces, followed by the claims that
1. there is nothing to support such assumption (il che però non è attestato),
2. the distances to be covered would still be considerable,
3. the executions would still have been organized in a chaotic manner, some here and some there, and
4. there were executions so large that even the whole RKH couldn’t have carried them out.

Let’s examine these claims in turn.

The first is another of those abysmal parts of Mattogno’s research. If he had bothered to consult the available literature, especially the works of Arūnas Bubnys and Christoph Dieckmann about the Holocaust in Lithuania, he might have realized that what is hard to find (if existing at all) is a mass execution in which the whole RKH participated.^[62] Bubnys describes the RKH’s usual modus operandi as follows (emphases added):

J. Hamann’s flying squad did not function permanently nor it had its special place of location. Generally speaking it would be formed for carrying out specific operations involving several German Gestapo officers and several dozens soldiers of the TDA. J. Hamann himself very often refrained from going to the executions in the province and limited his duties to charging the soldiers of the 1st Battalion with this task (i.e. Lieutenants A. Dagys, J. Barzda, and B. Norkus). One might guess that the following officers of SS would often represent the German side: Hauptsharführer Porst, Stuetz, Salzmann, Mack and Planert. SS Hauptsharführer H. Rauca was J. Hamann’s deputy.
The so-called flying squad would go on missions only when all the preparatory work was completed, i.e. the Jews condemned to death were gathered in one place, all local police and “partisans” were charged with guarding them, a more remote place is chosen for the execution of the Jews (often in a forest or remote fields), and ditches were dug.^[63]

So the men sent by Hamann to a given killing site only had to do the shooting proper, while everything else was or had been taken care of by local Lithuanian authorities and "partisans". And even the killing itself they didn’t have to do alone, if at all. Here are some examples of local cooperation:

• At Kėdainiai (2,076 killed Jews recorded under 28.8.41 in the 2nd Jäger Report), the killing was done by Lithuanian policemen and railway workers under the direction of men from EK3. The pits were dug by Soviet prisoners of war at the orders of the local Lithuanian authorities.^[64]
• The Marijampolė massacre on 1.9.41 (5,090 killed) was carried out by EK3, Reserve Police Battalion 11, Lithuanian police and insurgents.^[65]
• At Garliava on 2.9.41, no Germans are known to have been present in the killing of 247 Jews recorded by Jäger. It is likely that everything was done by the men from the 3rd Company of the TDA, local policemen and "partisans".^[66]
• At Jieznas (called "Jesuas" in Jäger’s Report), on 2.9.41, not only did local policemen and "riflemen" do all the preparatory work, but some of them also took part in the shooting of 144 Jews.^[67]
• At Jonava (1,556 Jews killed on or ending on 2.9.41 according to Jäger), the local Saugumas (Lithuanian Security Police) was decisively involved. Their commander instructed the command of the local "partisans" to make available men for the executions.^[68]
• The massacre at Ukmerge (Ukmergė) on or ending on 5.9.41 (4,709 Jews killed, thereof 1,123 men, 1849 women and 1,737 children) was carried out by members of the RKH together with Lithuanian police and "partisan" units from Ukmergė and nearby villages. The "direct" participants (probably meaning the shooters) were about 20 Germans and 100 Lithuanians.^[69]
• At the biggest massacre of Alytus Jews on 9 September 1941 (1,279 Jews killed according to Jäger), the victims were gunned down by a squad from Kaunas under the command of B. Norkus and J. Obelenis (ca 20–30 men). The victims were driven to the place of killing and were guarded by local policemen and "white-bands" (aka "partisans").^[70]
• At Butrimonys on the same day, the killing of 740 Jews was carried out by 20 RKH members who arrived from Alytus. Local policemen and "white bands" had on the previous day locked all the victims in the town’s primary school, and on the day of the killing took them to the pits and guarded them as they awaited execution.^[71]
• Local "white bands", besides having done the preparatory work, also took part in the shooting of 854 Jews at Merkinė on 10.9.41.^[72]
• The massacre at Žagarė on or ending on 2.10.41 (2,236 Jews killed according to Jäger) was carried out by the 14th (Lithuanian) Schutzmannschaft Battalion from Šiauliai, commanded by one Lt. Kolokša, plus auxiliary police from Linkuva. Three SS-men, two lieutenants and one NCO, commanded the operation.^[73]
• At Lazdijai, the 1,535 Jews recorded by Jäger under 3.11.41 were killed by RKH members and Lithuanian police.^[74]
• At Varėna (831 Jews shot on 10.9.1941, according to the 2nd Jäger Report), local policemen and "white armbanders" forced the Jews into the small town’s synagogue, where they were held for several days. On September 10, 1941, the Chief of the Security Police of the Alytus region, Pranas Zenkevičius, his deputy Juozas Kvedaravičius, and 30–40 troops arrived in Varėna to shoot the Jews. According to witnesses, several Varėna residents also took part in the shootings. ^[75] Apparently no one from the RKH, German or Lithuanian, was present at this massacre.^[76]

Members of the TDA’s 3rd Company were not involved in the killing in all provincial areas mentioned by Jäger, according to Bubnys. It is possible that the Jews from quite a few places of Lithuania (Varėna, see above, seems to have been one of these) were killed by local police and "partisan" squads, without the RKH taking part.^[77]

Bottom line, the RKH managed to successfully conduct its extermination campaign because its commanders could send some men here and others there, ^[78] and because wherever they went the labor-intensive preparatory work had already been taken care of by local Lithuanians, who sometimes also did some or even most of the shooting. Without the willing cooperation of Lithuanian local authorities and "partisans", the RKH could not have accounted for nearly as many Jews killed as it actually did.

The RKH’s dependence on local cooperation at all killing sites is also the reason why Mattogno’s argument about the supposedly "chaotic" conduct of the executions is moot. For the RKH’s pace and schedule accordingly depended on when their local auxiliaries could have things ready for shooters from the RKH (especially the 3rdCompany of the TDA) to arrive and pull the trigger or command the shooting, and that in turn depended on decision-making processes and availability of resources at local level, which the RKH could not necessarily influence. Nevertheless, allocating the killing sites to the respective Gebietskommissariate shows that the executions followed a certain regional and temporal pattern. Between the middle and the end of August 1941 the main area of the RKH’s activity was clearly the GBK Ponewesh/Panevėžys, where 8 of the 17 mass executions between 15 and 31 August took place (vs. 3 in the GBK Schaulen/Šiauliai, 4 in the GBK Kauen-Land and 2 in the GBK Wilna-Land).^[79] Between 1 September and 15 November 1941, almost all the RKH’s killing took place in the GBK Kaunas-Land, with only one more "visit" to the GBK Ponewesh/Panevėžys^[80] and three more "visits" to the GBK Schaulen/Šiauliai.^[81]

Even with the indispensable local cooperation and the resulting possibility of dividing his forces, Hamann’s task was never an easy one, as Jäger pointed out himself when comparing the "parade shooting" ("Paradeschießen") of Jews at Kaunas itself with "the often enormous difficulties" ("den oft ungeheuerlichen Schwierigkeiten") that had to be overcome outside (page 8 of the 2nd Jäger Report). But was there any reported execution that an RKH squad and its local auxiliaries could not have handled within the reported time?

To claim that this would have been an insurmountable problem, Mattogno refers to Jäger’s statements on p. 7 of the report whereby the execution site was on average 4-5 km from the collection point and the Jews were brought there in groups of 500 each with a distance of at least 2 km between groups. He also quotes a statement by Yitzhak Arad about a new organization method that allowed for killing 100 persons per hour.

The latter is a somewhat-less-than-honest out-of-context quote, for Arad is referring not to German mass executions in general, but to mass executions in a particular setting and situation, namely that of the execution of several hundred male Jews per day by EK9 and its Lithuanian auxiliaries in the pits at Paneriai/Ponary near Vilnius in July 1941, in which the death candidates were collected in one pit and then taken in small groups from that pit to another in which they were shot, with the shooters being instructed to kill by rifle shots at individual victims and not by machine-gun fire so as to eliminate the chance of men being only wounded or remaining unhurt.^[82] It stands to reason that this situation cannot be projected to any given mass killing site.

The number of people that could be shot within a given time at one of the killing sites where the RKH was active would depend on the size of the killing site (namely the mass graves in or into which the victims were shot), the factors mentioned by Jäger and the number and armament of the shooters, whose work would be the least time-consuming part of the job. The preferred walking speed of human beings being about 5 km per hour, each group of 500 would take at most an hour to arrive at the place of shooting, probably much less as the escorting Lithuanian policemen and partisans would make them quicken their pace.^[83] Assuming a 45-minute wait between groups including 15 minutes for the victims to undress themselves where that was done, the shooters would have 500 victims in front of them every (60+45 =) 105 minutes. If there were, say, 50 shooters with automatic weapons at the pit, how long would they take to gun down 500 helpless people, especially if they didn’t necessarily deliver immediately fatal shots? Five minutes (10 victims per shooter, 2 every minute) seems a generous assumption. So every batch of 500 people would be "processed" within two hours at most. 3,000 within 12 hours, 3,500 within 14 hours, 4,500 within 18 hours, 6,000 within 24 hours. Double the number of shooters and have the shooting done on two batches à 500 at two places on the killing site instead of one, and you can double each number. Reduce the intervals between groups, and you can further increase the output.

The largest massacre involving the RKH was the one at Panevėžys, where 7,523 people were killed. One description of the massacre reads as follows:

"The major mass murder of the Jews of Panevėžys took place on August 23, 1941. Two pits about 40 meters long were dug in the forest. Before the massacre, German SS-Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann delivered a speech in which he stressed that, according to the decree of the Führer, all Jews must be destroyed. They were brought to the pits in groups and shot. Jews were brought to the shooting place by troops of the Panevėžys (10th) battalion. The Germans selected some Lithuanians to do the shooting; they carried out the execution. According to one participant in the massacre, about 70 soldiers of the battalion and 30 Germans did the shooting. Colonel P. Genys and commander of the 1st Unit of the battalion lieutenant V. Aižinas were present at the murder site. Before the shooting, each killer was given 200 grams of vodka. The Lithuanians used rifles and the Germans used machine guns. The massacre took all day. A total of 7,523 Jews were shot (1,312 men, 4,602 women, 1,609 children). Jews from different rural districts of Panevėžys district were murdered along [with] the prisoners of the Panevėžys ghetto."^[84]

A day’s work with two killing spots à 50 shooters and 500 victims per batch and spot, assuming that the killing site was 4-5 km from the collection point and there was a 2 km interval between batches. However, there are sources according to which the massacre lasted longer. ^[85] Also on this occasion, according to the above account, local forces (troops of the Panevėžys (10th) battalion) not only conducted the victims to the pits but also took part in the shooting (actually making up the majority of the shooters). The account further illustrates the fact that the shooting proper was not what required the most manpower in the execution. The shooting proper could be done by about 100 killers, whereas the rest of the execution work required a whole battalion.

Jäger’s 2nd report (pp. 7-8) suggests that the RKH ran into trouble when the local authorities failed to provide the necessary manpower for conducting the victims to the execution site and cordoning off the same, in which case some of the local "partisans" meant to participate in the shooting had to be employed in these preparatory tasks. During the execution described on these two pages, the one at Rokiskis (Rokiškis) on 16.8.41, the RKH apparently had counted on 80 local "partisans" to take part in the shooting, but as the local authorities had not provided sufficient other forces for preparatory tasks, 60 "partisans" had to help out there in order to get things done within 24 hours, and only 20 could do the shooting proper together with Hamann’s men. Where local authorities provided sufficient personnel for the preparatory work and the local "partisans" could carry out or help in carrying out the killing itself, things must have gone more smoothly. The Rokiškis massacre was the first on a four-digit scale (3,207 victims, thereof 3,200 Jews) that was conducted or commanded by RKH forces. Experience gained there probably helped to better organize later massacres on a similar or larger scale.

Experience also mattered as concerns the participants in the massacre, including without limitation the shooters themselves. The local "soldiers" that made up most of the killing squad at Panevėžys apparently had none, and their being inebriated (probably in order to steel their nerves) didn’t help. Thus many of the victims fell into the pits while still alive.^[86] At Kaunas, one the other hand, there were sufficient "fairly trained partisans" ("einigermassen ausgebildete Partisanen") according to the 2nd Jäger Report (page 8), which meant that the preparatory work could be done more efficiently and less shooters were required to do the same amount of killing.^[87] During the largest massacre in Kaunas, the killing of 9,200 ghetto inhabitants on 29.10.1941, it was nevertheless necessary to do without the intervals between batches that according to Jäger were practiced by the RKH in the province, ^[88] and to use machine guns for the shooting – dozens of them according to a surviving witness. ^[89]

Bottom line, there were no difficulties in the large-scale massacres mentioned in the 2nd Jäger Report that could not be overcome with the available resources, contrary to Mattogno’s claims. Neither was there any insurmountable difficulty in the RKH’s scheduling of massacres. Mattogno’s "examination" of the RKH’s operations in the Lithuanian province is fraught with the familiar mixture of faulty reasoning, ignorance of some important sources and misreading of others.

Jewish children and other "inconsistencies"

Of the 135,391 Jews killed that Jäger’s figures add up to, 29,391 are stated to have been children. The number of children killed was actually higher, given that regarding a number of places only the total number of Jews but not their subdivision into men, women and children is stated.

The systematic extermination also of Jewish children poses another problem for Mattogno’s argument about EK3’s massacres having been committed in a "political-military" context rather than a racially motivated extermination policy. He tries to tackle that problem by pointing out that, according to a census conducted in Vilnius at the end of May 1942, out of 14,545 counted Jews 3,693 (25.4 % of the total) were children up to the age of 15 – and that the school-age children, go figure, even went to school.^[90] This, so Mattogno argues, is in stark contrast with the policy of wholesale extermination that becomes apparent from the 2nd Jäger Report. It surely is, but then Jäger, as he pointed out himself in his report, was kept by German civilian and military authorities from wiping out certain working Jews and their families, which according to his report (page 7) numbered 34,500 in total (15,000 in each of the Kauen/Kaunas and Wilna/Vilnius ghettos and 4,500 in the Schaulen/Šiauliai ghetto). The intervention of German civilian and military authorities that restrained EK3’s killing still doesn’t explain, so Mattogno, why the "useless eaters", namely the children, were kept alive. However, it doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out in what sense the children were not"useless eaters" at al. They were the working Jews’ essential motivation for performing as well they possibly could and not contemplating resistance or suicide. Working men and women who had lost what was dearest to them would be more likely to perform badly due to depression, to kill themselves as their life had lost all meaning, or to somehow rise up against and try to take revenge on the killers. Parents who knew that any such action would mean not only their end but also that of their children, on the other hand, would be compliant and hard-working in order to save their families by remaining essential to the German war effort.

Already before the mass killings were suspended the German authorities issued so-called Jordanscheine to the inhabitants of the Kaunas ghetto. In each such certificate two adults and two children of a specialized worker’s family could be entered. During the subsequent mass killings, being entered or not in a Jordanschein made the difference between life and death.^[91] The Vilnius ghetto’s equivalent of the Jordanscheine were the so-called gelbe Scheine or Gelbscheine, in each of which a specialized worker’s family (the parents and two children aged 2 to 16) could be entered. The awareness that being or not on a Gelbschein meant the difference between life and death led to a "tragic masquerade" as the ghetto inhabitants attempted by all means to gain possession of such certificate or be entered into one. Mass killings after 24 October, known as the "Gelbe-Schein-Aktionen", targeted Jews whose names were not entered into one such (temporarily) life-saving certificate. ^[92]

Also for the German civilian administration, keeping alive Jewish specialized workers (and their families as an incentive to be compliant and work well) was only meant to be a temporary solution. In a letter sent to the Generalkommissare and the HSSPF of the RKO on 9 December 1941, Lohse’s representative Frundt emphasized the need to prevent the liquidation of Jewish specialized workers who for the time being could not be replaced by non-Jews, but at the same time urged to speed up the training of replacements.^[93]

In order to emphasize that he had solved the "Jewish problem" in Lithuania, Jäger reported numbers of surviving Jews in three ghettos that apparently corresponded to pre-determined quotas. These numbers are too low. The number of surviving Jews in Lithuania after EK3’s extermination campaign is likely to have been about 43,500, thereof 20,000 in Vilnius, 17,500 in Kaunas, 5,500 in Šiauliai and about 500 in Švenčionys. This means that Jäger’s total of 34,500 Jews surviving on the territory of Lithuania as of the date of his report was about 9,000 lower than the actual figure. Further Jews were added to the Generalbezirk Litauen in April 1942 as it took over territory that until then had belonged to the Generalbezirk Weißruthenien. In April 1943 the KdS for Lithuania reported that in the Generalbezirk (including the territories added in 1942) there were 44,584 Jews left; as this was after the liquidation of Švenčionys and other smaller ghettos and the murder of about 4,000 of their inhabitants at Paneriai/Ponary,^[94] the number prior to this massacre must have been in the order of 48,500.^[95] Mattogno somehow arrives at a total of about 51,000 and, oblivious of the aforementioned territorial changes, gleefully remarks that 51,000 – 34,500 = 16,500 Jews were still alive who according to Jäger should have been dead, obviously implying that this casts doubts on the accuracy of Jäger’s killing figures. The territorial fallacy in Mattogno’s arithmetic aside, such innuendo is not exactly pertinent as Jäger’s numbers of dead Jews were obviously arrived at by counting and not by any before-minus-after subtraction, and moreover they can be checked against other sources, including such that I have already mentioned^[96] and others that I will mention further on in this series.

Mattogno concludes his "critical examination" with the remark that the most important test of the Jäger Report’s reliability is whether a commensurate number of corpses have been found at EK3’s killing sites. Actually that’s quite irrelevant; Mattogno might as well claim that the death toll attributed to Stalin’s Gulag camps, purges and other mass executions depends on how many of their victims have been exhumed and investigated, in which case he would be left with little more than the corpses unearthed at Katyn and Vinnytsia and become a Stalin apologist besides one of Hitler’s willing defense attorneys.

The disappearance of Lithuania’s Jews under Nazi rule is unequivocally proven by demographic data, contemporary documents^[97] and other evidence, and there’s no evidence that any significant number of these ended up anywhere else than in the mass graves made by the various German killing agencies and their Lithuanian collaborators and executors. Thus it doesn’t matter how many of these mass graves were actually dug up. Nevertheless, it is known from the available evidence that some of the killing sites were investigated following the Soviet re-conquest of Lithuania, and there are interesting documents about public health concerns of the local administration regarding the mass graves that littered Lithuania in the wake of the German-Lithuanian extermination campaign in 1941. Some of these will be shown in the last two articles of this series. But before I’ll take a look at Mattogno’s arguments regarding another of his "Revisionist" concerns, the massacre of German and Austrian Jews in Kaunas in November 1941.

Notes

[47] GE1, pp. 182-188.
[48] See there note 27.
[49] The Kaunas ghetto was formed between July and August 15, 1941, the Vilnius ghetto in early September 1941.
[50] The dates mentioned in the 2nd Jäger Report are not necessarily the dates on which the respective massacres were committed. They may also be the commencement or end dates of massacres that lasted several days. For instance, the Panevezys (Panevėžys) massacre of 7,523 Jews recorded under 23.8.1941 lasted three days (24 to 26 August) according to some sources (Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 816, note 53).
[51] As mentioned on p. 7 of the 2nd Jäger Report and on pp. 31-32 of the 1st Stahlecker Report. Regarding the temporarily spared working Jews see also my article The Jäger Report (7).
[52] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, pp. 950-951. What is strange is that not this massacre with an apparent "public health" purpose (suggested by the burning of the hospital for infectious diseases), but the earlier massacre on 26 September was "justified" by Jäger as having been directed against the sick and suspected carriers of infectious diseases. This suggests that "justifications" got mixed up in the 2nd Jäger Report, and that the 26 September action was actually the "punitive action" (which also seems to be Dieckmann’s assessment, see Besatzungspolitik, p. 949) whereas the one on 4 October was meant to remove diseased Jews.
[53] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, pp. 951-958. Regarding the actions on 26.9, 4.10 and 29.10 see also my article The Jäger Report (5), with translations of witness testimonies quoted in Wette’s biography of Jäger.
[54] As above, p. 942.
[55] Wette, Jäger, pp. 99-101. Wette’s account of this operation is cited in my article The Jäger Report (2).
[56]Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 949. As mentioned above, the "justifications" for the massacres on 26 September and 4 October apparently got mixed up in the report.
[57] As above, pp. 974-975.
[58] Polish journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz, who kept a diary about the mass killings at Ponary that he observed or otherwise learned about, noted the following under 2 September (the day of the massacre): "These shootings were a punishment for the bogus shooting at German soldiers in Wilno on Sunday, August 31. There, on the outskirts of the city, Hingst announced that Jews would be punished for the shooting on the previous Sunday." (Ponary Diary 1941-1943. A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder. Kazimierz Sakowicz. Edited by Yitzhak Arad. 2005 Yale University Press. P. 29).
[59] Dr. Arūnas Bubnys, "Lithuanian Police Battalions and the Holocaust (1941-1943)", pp. 7-8.
[60] Bubnys, as above, pp. 12-14.
[61] GE1, pp. 183-184.
[62] See the overviews of executions and perpetrators that I published here (based on Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, pp. 792-1008) and here (based on Bubnys, "Holocaust in Lithuanian Province in 1941").
[63] Bubnys, Province, pp. 19-20. See also Bubnys, Police Battalions, pp. 12-13, and Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 872.
[64] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 882.
[65] As above, p. 878.
[66] As above, p. 27.
[67] As above, p. 9.
[68] As above, p. 876. According to Bubnys (Holocaust, p. 22), the Chief of Jonava Security Police, Jr Lieut. J. Jurevičius appointed 16 men from his squad to carry out the execution. The Jews were driven to the place of the massacre in the Giraitė forest in groups. Soldiers of a "self-defence battalion" escorted the Jews to the killing site. After the first group of the condemned had been killed, TDA Battalion Lieutenants B. Norkus and Vladas Malinauskas came to Giraitė forest from Kaunas. They continued commanding in the execution jointly with a Gestapo chief. The shooting was done not only by the members of Jonava squad but also by "partisans" from other areas and several Germans who were all dressed as civilians.
[69] As above, p. 368.
[70] Bubnys, Province, p. 6.
[71] As above, p. 8.
[72] As above, p. 12.
[73] As above, p. 846.
[74] As above, p. 890.
[75] Holocaust Atlas of Lithuania, Mass Murder of the Jews of Varėna. Thanks to Jonathan Harrison for pointing out this link.
[76] The fact that local Lithuanians had done the killing may have been what shocked Varėna priest Jonas Gylys into holding a sermon on 14.9.1941, in which he called the Lithuanian officials butchers. He reportedly said: "Innocent people, among them old folk and pregnant women, were pushed about and kicked by Lithuanians in uniform. The forest of Varena was soaking in the blood of innocent people. The blood had not dried yet, when they rushed at the property of their victims." The Chief of Varėna I Police Station, J. Kvaraciejus, reported this to the Chief of the Alytus District Police, stating that the priest’s sermon had been "directed against the government". Kvaraciejus’ report, with the archival reference LCVA, 1436/1/30, fl. 366, is reproduced in German translation in the collection Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933 – 1945 Band 7 Sowjetunion mit annektierten Gebieten I Besetzte sowjetische Gebiete unter deutscher Militärverwaltung, Baltikum und Transnistrien, compiled by Bert Hoppe and Hildrun Glass, Oldenbourg Verlag München 2011 (Dok. 192, pp. 539-540). An English translation is available in the collection Documents Accuse, compiled and commented by B. Baranauskas and K. Rukšėnas, edited by E. Rozauskas, translated from Lithuanian by L. Valeika and A. Aukštikalnienė, from German by Vl. Grodzenskis, English version edited by Vl. Grodzenskis, Vilnius: Gintaras, 1970 (Document Nr. 95). Thanks to Nick Terry for making both document collections available to me.
[77] As above, p. 20.
[78] The RKH usually operated from Kaunas, whose strategic central location meant that most killing sites could be reached more quickly from there than from previous killing sites (as shown in this overview). In some cases, however, it was more advantageous to operate from another place. Thus the squad sent for the Jews of Butrimonys, for instance, came from nearby Alytus (Bubnys, Province, p. 8).
[79] Rokiskis/Rokiškis (16.8.41), Ukmerge/Ukmergė (19.8.41), Panevezys/Panevėžys (23.8.41), Obeliai (25.8.41), Seduva (Šeduva), Zarasai and Pasvalys (26.8.41), Utena and Moletai/Molėtai (29.8.41).
[80] Ukmerge /Ukmergė, 5 September 1941.
[81] Rasainiai/Raseiniai and Georgenburg/Jurbarkas on 6 September, Zagare/Žagarė on 2 October.
[82] Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames. The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, 1980. Pp. 75-77; the part about the "method" is on p. 76. A description of this Ponary killing method is also provided in my article Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 4).
[83] The German author of the Meurin Report recalled how, in the detraining and marching to Minsk of German Jews that his unit has escorted there, the local Latvian police "behaved so as to speed up the process". And that was not at an execution site.
[84] Holocaust Atlas of Lithuania, second entry for Panevėžys .
[85] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 816, note 53. This account also describes a three-day massacre, starting on 24.8 and ending on 26.8.1941. It claims that the killing was done in batches of 200 each instead of the 500 each mentioned by Jäger, which seems improbable considering the scale of the massacre.
[86] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 816.
[87] According to Bubnys (Police Battalions, p. 11) almost all of the Lithuanian 1st Police Battalion took part in the largest Kaunas massacre on 29.10.1941, and the killing proper was done by several dozens of the 3rd Company’s soldiers and about 20 German officers and "soldiers". Bubnys maintains (p. 17) that there is no reliable evidence that another Lithuanian police unit, the 3rd Battalion, also took part in the killing of Kaunas Jews. However, according to Dieckmann (Besatzungspolitik, p. 957), the files of an investigation conducted against Lithuanian non-commissioned officer Kazys Pagalys of the 3rd Battalion prove that this unit also took part in the massacre.
[88] As above, pp. 956-957. Sometimes a batch of victims would be pushed into a pit while the previous one was still being shot.
[89] See the account of Kuki Kopelman provided to his friend Solly Ganor and recorded in the latter’s memoirs (quote in Wette, Jäger, pp. 122-24, translation in my article The Jäger Report (5)).
[90] GE1, pp. 186-187.
[91] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 946.
[92] As above, p. 996-1004. Mattogno seems to have never heard of either the Jordanscheine or the gelbe Scheine. At least I didn’t find these terms in a keyword search in his book.
[93] As above, p. 1010. The document is also quoted in Verfolgung, Band 7, p. 583 (Dok. 218).
[94] See my article How many people were killed at Ponary?.
[95] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 1009.
[96] See my previously mentioned article and the article Mattogno’s Marijampolė Mass Graves Controversy.
[97] Besides the Jäger reports these include, among others, the minutes of a meeting on 1.9.1943 about labor force availability and losses in the Lithuania, whereby 156,000 potential laborers had been lost due to the "Judenumsiedlung" ("resettlement" of Jews). (Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 1009).

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

The subject of this article is Mattogno’s argumentation in support of his denial of the killing, mentioned in the 2nd Jäger Report, of German and Austrian Jews deported to Kaunas.^[98]



On 25.11.1941, according to the 2nd Jäger Report, at total of 2,934 Jewish deportees from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt am Main (1,159 men, 1,600 women and 175 children) were shot at Fort IX in Kauen (Kaunas). On 29.11.1941, a total of 2,000 Jewish deportees from Vienna and Breslau (693 men, 1,155 women and 152 children) met the same fate.

Mattogno dedicates more space (roughly 10 vs. 6 pages) to these two executions than he does to the murder campaigns addressed in the previous part of this series, even though the latter claimed a much higher number of victims. This suggests that the execution of deportees from Germany and Austria bothers Mattogno more than that of Lithuanian Jews, which is not surprising. However far-fetched Mattogno’s attempts to explain the extermination of Lithuania’s Jews (insofar as he admits to it) in a "political-military" context may be, any such attempt would be just plain ridiculous regarding the mass murder of Jewish deportees from the German and Austrian heartlands. Thus Mattogno’s only way out is downright denial that these massacres took place.

Mattogno’s arguments in support of this claim are as long-winded as they are weak. Basically he expects his readers to accept the notion that, as the decision-making process leading to the execution of these German and Austrian Jews cannot be reconstructed on hand of the available evidence, these mass killings didn’t take place.

Mattogno is breaking no news as concerns the questions about the reasons why Jäger ordered these executions. These questions have long been discussed among historians (I don’t count Mattogno in that category), of whom Mattogno quotes a few.

One theory that has been advanced, e.g. by Jäger’s biographer Wolfram Wette, is that Jäger was taken by surprise by the arrival of these transports, which had originally been meant for Riga but been rerouted to Kaunas on short notice because the Riga ghetto was overfilled. Not knowing what to do with these deportees, for whose accommodation in the surviving ghetto no preparations had been made, Jäger is supposed to have decided on his own initiative to solve the problem by killing these arrivals. ^[99]

Other historians consider this improbable as the intention to send some of the deportation transports from the Reich to Kaunas had already been known three weeks before the first massacre and Jäger had been informed about it.^[100] What is generally considered more probable is that Jäger assumed that killing the arriving German and Austrian Jews was in line with contemporary policy and the desiderata of his superiors.

There as several indications supporting this notion.

One month before, EK3 and its Lithuanian auxiliaries had completed a series of mass killings that in all probability were meant to reduce the Kaunas ghetto population to a predetermined size that was a compromise between labor needs and extermination policies.^[101] Taking in new Jewish arrivals would go against this purpose, especially as the deportees were either unable to work or did not possess the artisan skills on account of which a part of the Kaunas ghetto Jews and their families had been temporarily spared.^[102]

Three days before the first massacre on 25 November, Jäger had a conversation with Dr. Peter Kleist, head of the department in the Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) that handled matters of the RKO. In this conversation Kleist expressed his satisfaction with Jäger’s extermination campaign against the Lithuanian Jews, especially the extent to which Jäger had managed to enlist Lithuanian cooperation in the killing process. ^[103] Whether or not this signaled the Ministry’s agreement with an intended mass killing of deported German Jews, ^[104] Jäger could certainly have understood Kleist’s praise in this sense.

Upon receiving confirmation from the Ministry that, notwithstanding reservations expressed by an official of the Reich Commissariat, transports with Jews from the Reich would arrive, Reich Commissioner Lohse contacted Friedrich Jeckeln, then the HSSPF for Northern Russia and the Eastern Territories and thus one of Jäger’s superiors (the other being Stahlecker). Jeckeln, who on 10 or 11 November had received Himmler’s instruction or approval to wipe out the Latvian Jews of the Riga ghetto,^[105] was making preparations for this operation and, according to a later deposition by a member of his staff, had also inspected the intended execution site at Kaunas Fort IX before the first contingent of German Jews arrived at Kaunas. ^[106] After Jäger’s first massacre of deportees on 25 November, Lohse confirmed on 28 November that transports to Minsk, Riga and Kaunas were OK and matters had been agreed with Jeckeln.^[107] It is unclear whether Lohse was informed about this first massacre at Kaunas, but it is likely considering that, according to a later deposition by his driver, Lohse was present at the Riga massacre together with Jeckeln. So it seems probable that Jeckeln and Lohse had agreed that at least some of the transports arriving at Riga and all of the transports arriving at Kaunas were to be exterminated. This because even their temporary accommodation would have implied considerable effort, as the places of accommodation in Latvia had by no means been finished and in Lithuania preparations had not even begun. Thus Lohse and Jeckeln had decided on the easier solution of mass murder, and Jeckeln as Jäger’s superior had informed or instructed Jäger accordingly.^[108]

Not all German officials involved were of Lohse’s and Stahlecker’s mind regarding what should happen to German Jews. Apparently in response to requests that decorated German Jewish war veterans should be exempted from deportations to the Ostland, Heydrich had in 10 October 1941 declared that no exceptions would be made. On 20 November Eichmann issued a circular with deportation guidelines restricting the categories of Reich Jews to be reported, apparently because the Reich Main Security Office had received complaints, as is also suggested by statements of Heydrich’s towards Goebbels, mentioned in the latter’s diary entry of 18.11.1941. Heydrich thereupon decided to create the Theresienstadt ghetto for Reich Jews who were over 60 years old or might be considered exempt. Nevertheless there were protests because these guidelines were not adhered to. Thus in Berlin in early November two prominent spokesmen pleaded for setting free the Jewish attorney Dr. Karl Loewenstein, who was nevertheless deported to Minsk. Regarding the mass murders of Jews proper anonymous complaints from all parts of the Reich came in all the time, according to Gestapo chief Müller in a letter dated 6 February 1942.^[109]

The most outspoken defender of Reich Jews among high-ranking German officials was probably the Generalkommissar Weißruthenien, Wilhelm Kube, whose head-office was in Minsk and who had amply shown that he had no problems at all with local Jews being bumped off. German Jews were another matter, however:

Among these Jews are front veterans with the Iron Cross first and second class, war wounded, half-Aryans, and even a three-quarter Aryan … In repeated official visits to the [Minsk] ghetto I have discovered that among these Jews, who distinguish themselves from Russian Jews in their personal cleanliness, are also skilled workers, who are perhaps five times as productive as Russian Jews. …
I am certainly tough and ready to help solve the Jewish question, but human beings who come from our cultural sphere are something other than the native bestial hordes. Should one assign the Lithuanians and Latvians, who are even rejected by the population here, with their slaughter? I could not do it. ^[110]

Though Kube’s letter was sent more than half a month after the last execution of Reich Jews in Kaunas and therefore cannot have influenced the decision-making process there, it probably expressed the gist of earlier protests against treating German Jews just like the "native bestial hordes". Such protests apparently led Himmler to conclude, after Jäger’s massacres on 25 and 29 November, that as concerns German Jews his overzealous subordinates were moving too fast for the sensibilities of a significant part of the German administration and people. This, in turn, is likely to have been the reason why he tried to avoid the next execution of German Jews, the one that Jeckeln’s forces carried out at Riga on 30 November. Browing writes:

It is only speculation, but the repercussions of the Kaunas killing may have given Himmler pause. At this sensitive and increasingly uncertain time in the war, he may have decided to postpone the further killing of Reich Jews until it could be done, as Kube urged, in a more discrete and "humane" way.^[111]

In his Dienstkalender (service agenda), also quoted by Mattogno,^[112] Himmler made notes about a phone conversation at 13:30 hours on 30 November with Heydrich in Prague,^[113] including the remark "Judentransport aus Berlin" followed by "Keine Liquidierung". The "Judentransport aus Berlin" was obviously the only Jewish transport from Berlin to reach its destination on that day, namely the transport carrying 1,053 Jews that had left Berlin on 27.11 and arrived at Riga on 30.11.1941,^[114] and the reasonable interpretation of the subsequent remark "Keine Liquidierung" is that it referred to this very transport and meant that the same was not to be liquidated or should not have been liquidated. If Himmler meant to avoid the liquidation of the transport as opposed to expressing his displeasure with that liquidation, his intervention came too late as the Berlin Jews had already been killed in the early morning of 30 November.^[115] Either way, Himmler on the next day (1 December 1941), following another phone conversation with Heydrich about the "executions in Riga",^[116] undertook to assert his direct control over the situation. He sent Jeckeln a radio message (intercepted by British decoders) with the following instructions:

Die in das Gebiet Ostland ausgesiedelten Juden sind nur nach den von mir bezw. vom Reichssicherheitshauptamt in meinem Auftrag gegebenen Richtlinien zu behandeln. Eigenmächtigkeiten und Zuwiderhandlungen würde ich bestrafen. Gez. H. Himmler.^[117]

The Jews resettled to the Eastern Territories region may only be treated according to the directives issued by me or by the Reich Main Security Office on my behalf. Actions on own authority and contraventions I would punish.

Jeckeln was also called upon to meet Himmler at his office on 4 December and receive verbal instructions.^[118] The fact that Jäger and/or Stahlecker were not called as well suggests Himmler’s being aware that, as hypothesized above, Jeckeln had ordered not only the liquidation of the transport from Berlin at Riga on 30 November but also the preceding massacres of deportees from the Reich at Kaunas on 25 and 29 November. In this context the particular wording of the above-quoted instruction should be noted: Himmler announced that he would punish actions on own authority or contraventions to his directives if they should occur, but didn’t state that such actions on own authority or contraventions had already occurred. This suggests that he was giving Jeckeln the benefit of doubt. His actions at Kaunas and Riga could be forgiven as due to an excessively extensive interpretation of existing guidelines, to Jeckeln’s having assumed that he was allowed to do also to German Jews what he was authorized to do (and what he and others had been doing) to the local Jews. But from now on, as concerns deportees from the Reich, he was to do only what he was expressly instructed to do, and not what he thought was in line with his superior’s policies.

Anyway, whatever the reasons behind Jäger’s ordering the killing of deportees to Kaunas from the Reich may have been, there is no room for reasonable doubt that these deportees were killed as recorded in the 2nd Jäger Report. The departure from the Reich of five trains bound for Kaunas and the number of their occupants can be ascertained on hand of the available train records.^[119] The arrival of these trains at Kaunas is also proven by German documents, something that even Mattogno doesn’t call into question.^[120]The names and other personal data of most of the deportees have been established.^[121] None of them was ever again seen or heard of after arriving at Kaunas. There is no evidence suggesting that any of them, let alone any such large number of deportees, were ever accommodated in the Kaunas ghetto (where they would surely have been noticed by the locals). There is also no evidence to suggest any onward transportation. And there is the evidence corroborating the information in Jäger’s report, including without limitation the testimonies mentioned below, which Mattgno ignores.^[122]

- Dr. Elchanan Elkes, the president of the Kaunas Ghetto's Jewish council, described how he saw columns of Jews passing by the ghetto, who were obviously shouting where they were coming from.^[123] Translation:

Two hours ago there passed in front of our eyes, before the windows of our houses, many thousand Jews from southern Germany and Vienna who were taken with their luggage to Fort IX, which was some kilometers away from us. There they were killed with extreme cruelty. We later learned that they had been deceived. They had been told that they would be accommodated in the Kowno ghetto.

- An eyewitness by the name of Kulisch provided an account of the massacre on 25 November 1941. ^[124] Translation:

The Gestapo men and the Lithuanians ordered the people to line up in a row, in groups of 80 persons, and seemingly ordered morning calisthenics in the fort's yard. Then they made the people run in the direction of the pits. At the pits they beat the victims as soon as they tried to run away. Most victims were shot after they had fallen into the pits. The shots were fired from machine guns set up on the wooded hill by the graves. Those who did not run or ran in another direction were shot on site by those Lithuanians and Germans who had earlier grouped them together.

- Based on information received from Kaunas, Breslau Cardinal Adolf Bertram wrote a report that is partially translated below.^[125]

In Kowno there are transports from Berlin. However it is doubted whether one of them is still alive. […] Not a word so far of the deportees from Kowno. Instead reports from an academic born in Kaunas (Kowno), Aryan, Lithuanian, who a few weeks ago returned to Berlin and came from K[owno]: Not only the Jews of the very large Jewish community of Kowno had been shot in their tens of thousands, but also those deported there from Germany. With certainty he confirmed the repeated question whether it was certain that the transport from Berlin to K[owno] had been shot. He received the following information about this shooting from a person who had himself participated in this shooting and approvingly described this execution as follows: The Jews coming from G[ermany] had to completely undress (the temperature was 18 degrees cold), then step into ‘pits’ [Gruben] that had previously been dug by Russian prisoners of war. Thereupon they were shot with machine guns; grenades were additionally thrown in. Without control whether all were dead, the order was given to close the pits. Both the Lithuanian and the German non-Aryans, Christians as well as Jews, died with calm and composure. They prayed together and went to their deaths singing psalms.

- Jewish forced laborers sorted some of the belongings that had been left at the station. They found deportation orders, which revealed that the Jews thought they would be taken to work in the Eastern Territories. The husband of Rosa Simon worked in this detachment and "was so shocked" that he couldn’t talk to his family for several days. They had emptied elegant suitcases "which were filled with wonderful jewelry, precious stones, furs, clothes, among them the most exquisite Viennese knitwear and handicrafts."^[126]

- The perpetrators were men of the KdS (Jäger) together with Lithuanians of the 1st Schutzmannschaft Battalion under Major Šimkus and the Lithuanian prison staff of Fort IX. A former member of the KdS, Kurt M., testified on 1.3.1972 that "the whole detachment" had "in the early morning formed up for the shooting of a whole train with Jews from the Reich."^[127]

- The Kaunas massacres of Reich Jews were also mentioned in the Soviet prosecution’s presentation of evidence at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, albeit without revealing that the victims were Jews:

[…] Besides Soviet citizens the Hitlerites exterminated French, Austrian, and Czechoslovak citizens in Fort Number 9.
"A former supervisor of Fort Number 9, the witness Naudjunas, testified: "'The first group of foreigners, numbering 4,000, arrived at the fort in December 1941. I talked to one of the women, who said that they were being transported to Russia, allegedly for work. On 10 December 1941 the extermination of foreigners began. They were ordered to leave the fort in groups of 100 people, allegedly for inoculations. Those who left for inoculations did not return. All 4,000 foreigners were shot. On 15 December 1941 another group arrived, numbering approximately 3,000 persons, which was also exterminated."'^[128]

To be sure, not all details in the above-mentioned evidence can be taken at face value. For instance, the witness adduced by the Soviet prosecution got the dates wrong and (slightly) exaggerated the number of victims, and Cardinal Bertram’s statement that the victims (who could have included converts to the Christian faith) went to their deaths praying and singing psalms may have just been the attempt of a religious person to find consolation over the horrible events recorded. However, one cannot reasonably argue that the aforementioned evidence fails to confirm the fact that, as recorded in the 2nd Jäger Report, Jewish deportees from the Reich were massacred at Kaunas Fort IX on 25 and 29 November 1941.

Against the corroborating evidence listed above, what has Mattogno got to offer?

Following his considerations about the decision-making process behind the Kaunas massacre of the Reich Jews, Mattogno cites a letter dated 10 February 1942 sent by the Gebietskommissar of Riga (Land) to the RKO (Lohse), about a transport of Jews from Kaunas that had arrived at Riga two days before, on 8 February.^[129] The author of the document complained that instead of 500 male workers only 222 male and 137 female workers had been sent, and asked for an additional 1,000 Jewish workers from Kaunas. Apart from the fact that November 1941 and February 1942 were two different "eras" as concerns German policies regarding Kaunas Jews (the former was before, the latter after it had been decided to spare a certain number of essential Jewish workers and their families as reported by Jäger), it defies understanding what the transfer from Kaunas to Riga of Jewish labor (none of which was stated to be of Reich origin) could have to do with what happened to the Reich Jews deported to Kaunas in November 1941.^[130]

As I said at the beginning of this article, Mattogno’s arguments in support of his denial of the Reich Jews’ massacres at Kaunas are as long-winded as they are feeble.

The same, as shown in the previous articles of this series, can be said about the rest of Mattogno’s attempt to discredit the 2nd Jäger Report.

The refutation of Mattogno’s arguments against the Jäger Report is thus completed. In the next two articles of this series I will show some documents from the Lithuanian Central State Archives regarding killing sites mentioned in the 2nd Jäger Report.

Below are some photos I took at the Fort IX memorial site in Kaunas on 11 August this year. They show the enormous size of the killing ground (which is also conveyed in this video) as well as objects found during excavation and displayed in the museum. The latter include objects that obviously belonged to the deportees from Germany, such as a cigarette case with the inscription "September 1921" and a cannikin of "Tangermünder Orangen-Marmelade".

~


Notes

[98] GE1, pp. 188-198.
[99] Wette, Jäger, p. 126.
[100] See Christian Gerlach, "Die Wannsee-Konferenz, das Schicksal der deutschen Juden und Hitlers politische Grundsatzentscheidung, alle Juden Europas zu ermorden", in: Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord. Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (hereinafter "KEV"), Hamburger Edition 1998, p. 97. Gerlach refers to a communication dated 8.11.1941 by Einsatzgruppe A to the RKO (Bundesarchiv, R 90/146). According to a handwritten note on this document the RKO had sent a copy to the Generalkommissar for Lithuania, who in turn would have informed Jäger.
[101] These were the massacres recorded in the 2nd Jäger Report under the dates 26.9 (1,608 Jews), 4.10 (1,845 Jews) and 29.10.1941 (9,200 Jews). See Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, pp. 949-958. Mattogno suggests (GE1, p. 92) that the removal of 9,200 "superfluous" Jews from the ghetto was meant to make room for expected arrivals from the Reich. However, unlike was the case in Minsk and (at least a posteriori) Riga (see Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, Arrow Books 2004, pp. 393 and 395-96; Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 965), there is no evidence pointing to such "make room" background of the Kaunas massacre. There are especially no indications that any effort was made to arrange parts of the ghetto so as to accommodate the expected deportees from the Reich (Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 965).
[102] See note 30. The Jews that according to Stahlecker (pp. 31-32 of the report dated 15.10.1941) had to be spared on account of their indispensable skills were artisans such as glaziers, shoemakers, stove makers/fitters (Ofensetzer) and plumbers/tinsmiths/metal roofers (Klempner). German Jews tended to exercise more "intellectual" professions (most of the 999 deportees from Munich, for instance, were former traders, public servants and corporate employees in leadership positions with their women and children, according to Wette, Jäger, p. 127) and were thus useless in this context – especially when they were of advanced ages. In his second report, for the period from 16 October 1941 to 31 January 1942, Stahlecker stated that only a small part of the deportees from the Reich were able to work and 70-80% of them were women, children and elderly persons unable to work (p. 65 of the report).
[103] Gerlach, KEV, pp. 97-98, citing Kleist’s personal diary.
[104] Gerlach, as above, assumes that it did.
[105] Browning, Origins, pp. 395-96. The Rumbula forest massacre, whose victims included about 26,000 Riga Jews and 1,000 Jewish deportees from Germany, took place on 30 November and 8-9 December 1941. Regarding this massacre see Jonathan Harrison’s recent article Report on the Deportation of Reich Jews to Riga in December 1941.
[106] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 966, citing the deposition of Tornbaum on 1.2.1962 in the context of an investigation by German judicial authorities against former members of EK3.
[107] Dieckmann, as above, citing a handwritten remark of Lohse’s dated 28.11.1941 on a letter by the BdS Ostland (Stahlecker) to the RKO dated 20.11.1941.
[108] Dieckmann, as above. The administratively correct sequence would have been HSSPF Jeckeln > BdS Stahlecker > KdS Jäger; however Stahlecker apparently was not informed and very angry when he learned about "eine ganz große Sauerei" ("an enormous mess") that had been initiated by HSSPF Jeckeln (Dieckmann, as above, p. 964, citing the deposition of a former member of the BdS office). Gerlach, KEV p. 98, considers Lohse’s presence at the Riga massacre to be confirmed by an entry in the already mentioned diary of Kleist, whereby he had learned about the shooting of 10,000 German and Lithuanian Jews attended by the Reichskommissar (Lohse). According to Gerlach, Kleist’s noting the killing of German Jews without any emphasis is another indication that the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories was in agreement with the killing of German Jews.
[109] Gerlach, KEV, pp. 101-102.
[110] Browning, Origins, p. 394, citing a letter dated 16.12.1941 sent by Kube to Lohse (the original text of the letter can be read in YVA 0.18 - 204, pp. 1-2).
[111] Browning, Origins, p. 397.
[112] GE1, p. 192, citing Peter Witte et al, Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers, p. 278.
[113] Besides being the head of the RSHA, Heydrich was also Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor (Deputy/Acting Reich-Protector) of the Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren (Reich Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia).
[114] See the chronology of deportations from the Reich, which is part of the online presentation of the German Federal Archives’ Gedenkbuch Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933-1945, the memorial book for the German Jews persecuted and murdered by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.
[115] These were the findings of fact of the Hamburg Court of Assizes (Landgericht) in its judgment dated 23.2.1973 at the trial of Otto Tuchel et al (Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Vol. XXXVIII, Case No. 789), which Mattogno quotes (GE1, p. 197) after G. Fleming, Hitler und die Endlösung, Wiesbaden and Munich 1982, p. 92. Much of Mattogno’s argumentation regarding the transports to Kaunas is an attempt to dissociate "Judentransport aus Berlin" and "Keine Liquidierung", i.e. trying to make out that the latter had nothing to do with the former. This interpretation is far-fetched, to put it politely. "Keine Liquidierung" without a stated context would make no sense whatsoever, and however terse Himmler’s agenda notes may have been, they still had to contain sufficient information for their author to recall later on what topic had been discussed, which a loose "Keine Liquidierung" would not do. There was also nothing other than the liquidation of that transport on the same day, especially nothing more important or urgent, that could have merited a telephone conversation between the Reichsführer SS and the head of the RSHA, both men with very busy schedules, on the day on which it occurred. Whether "Keine Liquidierung" meant that the transport was not to be liquidated or that it should not have been liquidated (the latter would also serve a purpose as further transports to Riga and Minsk were on the way) depends on whether Himmler and Heydrich knew at the time of their conversation that the transport had already been liquidated. Mattogno argues that the information about a massacre in the early morning of the day cannot possibly have taken until the early afternoon to reach Heydrich (who would have called Himmler after receiving it), but information relayed to a lower-ranking official at the RSHA might actually take quite a while to reach the head of the organization, especially as he was in Prague in his other capacity as Acting Reich Protector. The informing official’s intention being not to save the deportees but to check if their execution was in line with Himmler’s directives or to report that something against such directives might be, was going to be or had been done, knowledge that the execution had already been carried out would not have dissuaded said official from passing on what information in this respect he had as his disposal.
[116] Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 962.
[117] Quoted in Dieckmann, as above.
[118] As above.
[119] As shown in the chronology of deportations from the Reich, the trains left on the following dates: 17.11.41 from Berlin, 1,000 occupants; 20.11.41 from Munich, 999 occupants; 22.11.41 from Frankfurt am Main, 988 or 992 occupants; 23.11.41 from Vienna, 998 occupants; 25.11.41 from Breslau, 1,005 occupants.
[120] GE1, pp. 188-191. The documents cited include a letter dated 20.11.1941 sent by Einsatzgruppe A to the RKO, mentioning that of the 25 transports originally meant for Riga the first 5 would be sent to Kaunas (YVA, 018-166.1), and Operational Situation Report USSR No. 151, whereby the first 5 transports meant for Riga were sent to Kaunas.
[121] A search for "Todesort" (place of death) and "Kowno" in the names database of the German Federal Archives’ memorial book yields 3,771 entries, and a search for "Deportationsort" (place of deportation) and "Kowno" yields 4,001 entries. A list of the "Todesort" names is transcribed in this thread of the HC reference library.
[122] Regarding Wette’s biography of Jäger, Mattogno’s comment in this context is that Wette contributed nothing new and provides no corroboration of the information contained in the 2nd Jäger Report about the murder of deportees from the Reich (GE1, p. 181). In the second volume of his Einsatzgruppen opus (GE2 pp. 242-253), Mattogno treats his readers to another of his familiar lengthy attempts to make out that the cremation of exhumed corpses as described by surviving prisoners in charge thereof was not practicable. Mattogno’s considerations in this respect may be the subject of a future article. For now I just note that at least one of these accounts, a report dated 26 December 1943 written by escaped prisoners, corroborates the 2nd Jäger Report insofar as it mentions the corpses of about 5,000 Jews from Germany and Austria, who unlike the local Jews had been shot with their clothes on (GE2 pp. 242-243). Said report, (from) which Mattogno quotes (after I. Ehrenburg, V. Grossman, The Complete Black Book of the Russian Jewry, pp. 319-320) is also referred to in Jens Hoffmann, "Das kann man nicht erzählen''. Aktion 1005 - Wie die Nazis die Spuren ihrer Massenmorde in Osteuropa beseitigten (Konkret Literatur Verlag, Hamburg 2008), pp. 347-350.
[123] Wette, Jäger, pp. 127-128, quoting after Wolfgang Scheffler, "Massenmord in Kowno", p. 84, in: Scheffler/Schulle, Buch der Erinnerung.
[124] Wette, Jäger, p. 128, quoting from Dina Porat, "The Legend of the Struggle of Jews from the Third Reich in the Ninth Fort near Kowno, 1941-1942.", p. 382. In: Tel Aviv Yearbook for German History 20 (1991).
[125] Wette, Jäger, page 129, quoting after Scheffler, "Massenmord in Kowno", p. 84; Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, p. 960.
[126] Dieckmann, as above p. 961, citing a letter written by Rosa Simon to the editors of ‘Yediot Chadashoth’ dated 10.12.1958; this letter was part of the evidence collected by German judicial authorities in the aforementioned investigation procedure against former members of EK3.
[127] As above, p. 960 (note 149). The Lithuanian battalion was obviously the TDA Battalion also mentioned by Bubnys. The participation of this unit in the massacre of the Reich Jews was also mentioned in the interrogation protocol of I. Vylius-Velavičius on 24 December 1945 (Bubnys, Police Battalions, p. 11 and note 32 on p. 33).
[128]Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal ("IMT"), Vol. VII, p. 570. Regarding the Soviet prosecution’s presentation on war crimes against civilians see my article Dividing the Dead – or not (Part 2). A testimony regarding mass killings in Kaunas was also provided by the British prosecution (Document GB-599 – 968-D, IMT Vol. XXXVI, pp. 97-99). In an affidavit sworn before British Army Maj. RE. A.G. Wurmser on 10 August 1946, Chaim Kagan, a former member of the Kaunas Jewish Council who had been in charge of statistics and food supply, recalled the "intelligence" action on 15 August 1941 (recorded under 18.8.41 in the 2nd Jäger Report) and the massacre of "superfluous" Jews (10,500 killed on 28.10.1941 according to Kagan, 9,200 victims recorded under 29.10.41 in the 2nd Jäger Report). Both mass killings are mentioned in Part 3 of this series.
[129] GE1, p. 199. The reference "PS-579", suggesting a Nuremberg prosecution document, is unclear as no document with this reference seems to have been published. The document exhibits in IMT Vol. XXVI move from Document 556(55)-PS to Document 580-PS. I also found no such document mentioned in the index (Vol. XXIV).
[130] Moreover the document suggests a lack of Jewish labor in Riga. That lack of labor was obviously due to the events mentioned here.