The second Jaeger Report stated that, on October 29, 1941, a total of 9,200 Jews were killed in Kaunas [Kovno] consisting of:

2,007 Jews, 2,920 Jewesses, 4,273 Jewish children (mopping up ghetto of superfluous Jews)

Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen Handbook (here p.211) entertains the possibility that these Jews may have been shot in order to make room for five transports due to arrive from the Reich, despite the fact that Jaeger also reports those Jews as having been shot. Mattogno's suggestion would mean that 4,273 Lithuanian Jewish children were shot in order to accommodate transports that (according to Jaeger) only contained 327 children (175 on 25.11 and 152 on 29.11). Mattogno does not acknowledge the significance of the fact that Jaeger sarcastically refers to the Reich Jews as "resettlers" and that he correctly identifies the cities of origin. He is of course refuted by the way in which the selection for the shooting was carried out and the fact that diaries (most notably Tory), witnesses, trials and other sources never identify deported Reich Jews as being in the Kaunas ghetto. However, following Roberto's refutation here (at footnote 129), Mattogno seems to have abandoned his argument in the Italian edition concerning the transfer of Jews from Kaunas to Riga in early February 1942, as it does not appear in the English translation. Rudolf does not acknowledge this deletion in his foreword but instead chooses to imply that no such changes were made in response to criticisms made on this blog.

Moreover, Mattogno's underlying purpose of trying to show that the Nazis allowed Reich Jews to be resettled while shooting Soviet Jews is undermined by his own citation (p.210) of the report from the East of July 3, 1942, stating that Reich Jews deported to Riga the previous winter were "covered by the general anti-Jewish measures in effect in the East." There was thus a "general" policy covering Jews of all national origins, in accordance with Nazi racial constructs that regarded all Jews as a Gegenrasse. All these Jews were eventually meant to die after their usefulness as labour expired, as Lohse made clear on December 2, 1941.

Figure 4

Figure 1: Mattogno's omission of evidence on CO gas cylinders and Euthanasia cited in Kogon's Nazi Mass Murder, he knew earlier (top and right). He also seems to wonder why not doing any research results in not knowing something (left side).

Diagram 2: SK Lange (Killing Commando)


Sources: Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents: Euthanasia 1940/41


Sources: Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents: Euthanasia 1940/41

This article contains very graphic images that may disturb sensitive readers.

On page 402 of his recent Einsatzgruppen "masterpiece",^[1] Carlo Mattogno writes the following:

If these extraordinary Soviet discoveries, of which I have used those relating to the Ukraine as an example, were authentic, they should be confirmed by hundreds of photographs of mass graves and of exhumations taken by the various warcrimes commissions, and showing hundreds of thousands of bodies. However, photographs of this type are incredibly scarce. This is also true for the most prestigious among Holocaust archives, such as those at Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Ghetto Fighter House.

Over this and the following 7 pages (402 to 410), Mattogno then treats his readers to a litany of juxtapositions between the number of corpses (if any) that can be seen on published photographs of a number of killing sites and the number of people killed at these sites according to various sources – German documents (namely the Jäger Report^[2]), Soviet investigation reports or historical writing.

In this article I will test the aforementioned arguments for substance.



The photos that Mattogno refers to he looked up in online photo archives (mostly The Ghetto Fighters’ House^[3] and Yad Vashem^[4], on one occasion the USHMM^[5]), which raises the question whence Mattogno drew the assumption that all or most photos of Nazi mobile killing operations are available on the internet. Even in our digital age that is hardly a given, and I have been shown numerous photos of killing sites in the former Soviet Union that are not on the web. ^[6] But that’s a secondary issue. The main issue with Mattogno’s above-quoted statement and the ensuing list of discrepancies between reported victim numbers and "shown" corpses is Mattogno’s argument that, if the mentioned figures were realistic, they would be "confirmed by hundreds of photographs of mass graves and of exhumations taken by the various warcrimes commissions, and showing hundreds of thousands of bodies."

Hundreds of photographs of mass graves, showing "hundreds of thousands of bodies"– is this a reasonable expectation, or is it just another case of Mattogno’s not knowing what he’s talking about or expecting his readers to be ignorant and gullible enough to fall for what he tells them?

Let’s look at a few photographs that show a number of bodies about as huge as permitted by the photographers’ vantage point and the eye of their cameras.

The first photo is from the Yad Vashem archives. ^[7] It was in all probability taken in a camp for Soviet prisoners of war and is captioned "Latvia, A pile of about 4000 victims' dead bodies."



Does anybody count 4,000 bodies on this photograph?

I don’t. A rough count of the viewable corpses (as opposed to those that may be hidden from view by corpses lying above them) yields about 250 corpses. Let’s make that 300 for good measure, even though I consider this number too high.

The number of Soviet prisoners of war who perished in German captivity is about 3 million, an order of magnitude that is well supported by documentary evidence. ^[8] Assuming the largest number of corpses on the photograph considered above, it would take 10,000 such photographs, with no two photographs showing the same corpses, to photographically document all Soviet PoWs who died in German captivity. The number of published photographs showing dead Soviet PoWs is but a small fraction of that. No such photo that I have seen shows as many corpses as the one above. ^[9] Is that supposed to mean that one should call into question the well-documented order of magnitude of the Soviet PoW’s mortality?

The next three photos, also of dead Soviet PoWs, are shown in Mattogno’s book: ^[10]





Regarding the first photo Mattogno comments that it is "compatible with the disastrous situation of the POW camp complex at Bobruisk in 1941, with a very high mortality rate due to starvation, hardship and killings", then argues (apparently based on nothing other than what is or not visible on the photo) that "the general order of magnitude could be at most in the hundreds, certainly not thousands".^[11] Similar remarks regarding the other two Bobruisk photographs suggests that Mattogno is referring to the particular mass grave or other spot in the camp where the pictures were taken and not to the whole camp during the period of its existence. If we give Mattogno the benefit of interpreting his remarks in this sense, he is being fairly reasonable here, not trying to infer the death toll of the Dulag^[12] 131 at Bobruisk from what can or not be seen on photographs. According to the available documentation, about 158,000 PoWs passed through Dulag 131 until mid-November 1941, and 14,777 of these died there. ^[13]

The next four photos are closer to our subject of mobile killing operations, as they show mass graves containing naked execution victims.^[14]









The upper photo obviously shows only a part of the grave by which it was taken, and the number of corpses in view (which occupy nearly all of the photo) is in the order of 100 by my estimate. There are obviously further corpses lying below these, which however are not visible to the viewer.

Regarding the lower three photos, Mattogno did us the favor of counting the corpses already. He counted about 160. ^[15]

So a total of about 260 corpses can be seen on what are arguably the four photographs showing the largest number of people murdered in mobile killing operations – 65 per photo. The total number of Jews killed in mass executions by the Nazis is currently estimated by historians at about 2 – 2.2 million. ^[16] Photographically showing about 100,000 corpses (nearest lower round number is 99,970) would require no less than 1,538 such photographs, provided that no two photographs show the same corpses. Photographically showing about 2 million corpses (nearest lower round number is 1,999,400) would require no less than 30,760 photographs, the same condition (no two photographs showing the same corpses) provided.

So expecting to see hundreds of thousands of bodies on "hundreds of photographs of mass graves and of exhumations" is obviously far off the mark of reasonability.

Now, how reasonable is it to expect photographs adding up to, say, 100,000 corpses, regarding any given mass crime? It would be possible to take the required number of photographs after all corpses have been lined up side by side (an enormous task, to say the least), but where and by whom has anything like that ever been undertaken? Who has ever undertaken to show all corpses of a massacre site investigation, especially one involving tens or hundreds or thousands of corpses, on publicly available photographs or film footage?

Let’s look at the 1943 investigation of the Soviet mass killings at Katyn by Nazi Germany, which is upheld by "Revisionists" as a model of mass crime investigation and documentation.

A public report about this investigation^[17] has 331 pages and includes 73 photographs. Those among these photographs that show corpses or parts of corpses are reproduced below (needless to say, the images are very graphic).





How many corpses does one see on these pictures?

The first 11 pictures are various views of the skull of a single dissected corpse, corpse no. 0833, a Polish first lieutenant who had not yet been identified. On the other 27 pictures (out of 57 in the picture essay at the report’s end), assuming that no two pictures show the same corpses (which is hardly certain), one can make out, by my rough and possibly generous count, about 430 corpses, slightly more than 10 % of the corpses exhumed. The pictures show that the report’s emphasis was not on documenting the quantity but rather the quality of the killing – the manner in which the victims had been shot and the trajectories the bullets had taken, the victims’ bound hands, the aspect of the most prominent among the officers killed. Pages with pictures showing corpses make up little more than 10 % of the report.

The investigation of the Katyn killings by Nazi Germany stands head and shoulders about any Soviet investigation of German crimes that I know of (which is one of the reasons why Soviet investigation reports should not be accepted at face value but checked whenever possible against evidence uninfluenced by the Soviets, such as German documents and testimonies before criminal justice authorities of the German Federal Republic). ^[18] Yet the Nazi investigators obviously did not consider it their task to document the scale of the killing by photographic evidence. They used photos as illustrations of what becomes apparent from other evidence, meant to help convey the quality rather than the quantity of the crime.

There is also a short documentary film made by the Nazis, in which it is claimed that 12,000 Poles had been killed at Katyn. ^[19] While the footage also shows several hundred corpses (again, assuming that no two sequences show the same corpses), the makers obviously considered other images more telling – close-ups of individual corpses, personal photographs found on the bodies showing their loved ones (the commentator remarks that one can only look with commotion at these pictures full of life found on the dead).

It would take about 240 reports like Nazi Germany’s Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn, and over 2,300 picture essays like that contained in this report, to forensically/photographically document the over 1 million people executed by Stalin’s regime,^[20] 30 or more times as many for the "tens of millions" of Soviet murder victims (moreover up to 1941) that Mattogno’s editor Germar Rudolf believes or professes to believe in. ^[21] But there are just a few. Another Nazi investigation of a Soviet mass killing, which got much less publicity than the Katyn investigation, was conducted regarding the Vinnytsia massacre, which was part of the Great Purge. Unlike at Katyn, most of the 9,432 victims exhumed could not be identified. The investigation report^[22] is just a little shorter than the Katyn report, and the photographic documentation shows a much smaller proportion of the victims. Some of that documentation is reproduced below. In order to avoid saturating the reader with grisly pictures, I have in this case omitted most of those photos that are meant to illustrate the forensic examination of individual corpses, which make up the majority of images in the Vinnitsya report. A collection showing all pictures of corpses or parts of corpses is available here. As in the case Katyn, the photographs show the investigators’ focus on photographically documenting the qualitative features of the crime (e.g. that the killing was done with small-caliber weapons, bullets fired at the head sometimes didn’t penetrate the skull and victims were finished off with blows from rifle butts, or that victims had had their hands and/or legs tied), and not the magnitude thereof.



Further photographic documentation or film footage showing people murdered by agencies of the Stalinist regime can be found online regarding the 1941 NKVD prison massacres,^[23] and regarding Soviet atrocities during the first occupation of Latvia in 1940/41. ^[24] Together with the aforementioned investigation reports and documentary, these publications show a total number of corpses in the order of 1,000 (again, assuming that no two photographs or film sequences show the same corpses). If we double that for good measure to take account of photos showing people found in (other) mass graves from Soviet mass executions, we have 0.2 % of the over 1 million victims of executions under Stalin’s regime whose remains are visible on published photos. ^[25]

Then there are photos of war crimes, gory images of German soldiers murdered after being captured by Soviet troops or partisans, like the ones reproduced below. ^[26] Again, these images show but a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of German PoWs who died in Soviet captivity (overwhelmingly from privation but also, in many cases, from hard violence).^[27]



There are also photos of German civilians murdered by Soviet troops in 1944/45. ^[28] These images show but a few of the up to 120,000 German civilians estimated to have been murdered by Soviet troops in the territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers. ^[29]

Images showing dead bodies become are even much rarer as concerns the largest crimes of the Stalinist regime, the policies that led to the 1932-33 Soviet famine (about 5 million deaths in excess of normal mortality, thereof about 3.3 million in Ukraine) and the about 3 million "foreseeable deaths" on the way to or in labor camps or exile colonies.^[30] The pictures taken by Austrian photographer Alexander Wienerberger are "some of about 100 images verified to be authentic portrayals of those harrowing events"^[31] known as the Holodomor. They show some covered mass graves and, by my count, a total of 11 dead bodies. ^[32] And I still haven’t seen a single photograph unequivocally showing the corpse of someone who died in or on the way to one of Stalin’s exile colonies or in the Gulag. ^[33]

What does all this mean? What does the scarcity of photos showing dead victims of Soviet crimes tell us about the magnitude of these crimes? What does it matter to the historical record of these crimes how many dead bodies one can see on such photographs?

It matters nothing at all. Just like the comparative abundance of dead bodies visible on published photographs of Nazi crimes^[34] tells us nothing at all about the magnitude of Nazi crimes inside and outside of camps. Photographs or film footage show but a minuscule fraction of the about 9 million non-combatants killed by agencies of Stalin’s regime through executions, wanton atrocities, famine and hardship in labor camps and exile colonies. ^[35] Photographs of film footage show but a minuscule fraction of the about 6 million victims of hard criminal violence by Nazi Germany or the about equal number of non-combatants that the Nazis killed by exposing them to extreme privation. ^[36] So what? The evidence that all these people died is conclusive regardless of how many or how few of them were photographed or filmed after death. Whoever invokes scarcity of photographs to call Nazi mass killings into question might at least as well argue against the factuality of crimes committed in and by Stalin’s Soviet Union.

One might object to the above that published photos of Nazi crimes are more numerous than such of Soviet crimes, and should furthermore be more numerous than they are, because Nazi crimes have been investigated and researched far more extensively by judicial authorities and others who had unhindered access to the crime sites, while the same does not apply to most Soviet crime sites. Would this be an argument worth considering?

To answer this question, let’s have a look at the two largest mass killings that took place after World War II. These happened at a time when visual means of information were more developed and widely used than they had been in the 1940s, and the killing sites have been exhaustively examined. I’m referring to the Cambodian genocide of 1975-79 and the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

After the Vietnamese had in 1979 ousted the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, a committee of the newly created People’s Republic of Kampuchea (the "Research Committee on Pol Pot's Genocidal Regime") investigated the crimes of the former rulers. The investigation had some methodological faults, but it is likely to have been conducted to the best of the investigators’ ability, without falsifications meant to (quite unnecessarily) denigrate the Khmer Rouge beyond what became apparent from the abundant evidence to their crimes. ^[37] The PRK investigation reportedly established 568,663 deaths based on exhumations and about 2,746,105 based on a nationwide house-to-house survey, ^[38] for a total of about 3.3 million. This total number is nowadays considered too high due to multiple-counts resulting from the household survey’s flawed methodology; the currently accepted order of magnitude is about 2 million excess deaths. However, the partial figure of 568,663 based on exhumations seems not only realistic, but rather too low based on subsequent research by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam). Besides collecting and analyzing documents from the PRK investigation, the DC-Cam conducted a mass graves survey starting in 1995. Based on interviews with local witnesses and GPS technology, and cross-checking the information provided by local witnesses against the skull-count of adjacent memorials whenever possible, ^[39] the DC-Cam has since mapped 19,733 mass graves,^[40] containing an estimated 1,386,734 victims. ^[41]

So how many of these victims can be seen on publicly available photographs?

The DC-Cam’s website includes a photo archive. On the entry page it is mentioned that DC-Cam has about 6,000 photographs in its possession. Most of these seem to be photographs of prisoners from Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison in Phnom Penh (presumably "mug shots" taken of prisoners upon entering that prison) and other photographs showing living individuals. There are also very graphic images of torture victims at Tuol Sleng, and there are 274 photos pertaining to the aforementioned PRK investigation. On 119 of these 274 photographs one can make out or possibly make out human remains, almost always skulls and/or bones. Counting dead bodies on hand of bones is difficult unless one is an anatomist (which I am not), but every skull pertains to a human being, so by counting the skulls one can get an idea of how many dead people are shown in each picture. Assuming that no two photos show the same remains (counterfactually, as mounds of skeletons on sequential photographs often look very much alike, and some photos are obviously repeated), the remains visible on these photographs add up to roughly 2,800 dead people, generously (over)counted. Then there are other photos on the internet, mostly taken at the Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek memorial sites. On 20 of these photographs I counted roughly 3,800 skulls (again, assuming that no two photos show the same skulls), ^[42] so that together with the PRK photos we would have about 6,600 skulls of Khmer Rouge victims that can be seen on publicly available photographs. Let’s make that 7,000 for good measure. If the photos showed whole bodies instead of skulls and bones the number of dead portrayed would obviously be much lower (one can capture far more skulls than whole bodies on a photo), but even 7,000 is just about 1.23% of the 568,663 dead counted or estimated by the PRK investigators based on exhumations, 0.50% of the 1,386,734 dead in mass graves estimated by the DC-Cam and 0.35 % of the about 2 million victims of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975-79 (i.e. it would take 28,571 such photographs to photographically document the whole genocide). If my skull count were corrected for repetitions and multiple counts, the proportions would be even lower. Obviously nobody had the intention of documenting, as opposed to illustrating, the scale of the Cambodian genocide to the public on hand of photographs.

Now for the Rwandan genocide of 1994, which I have already written about before. ^[43] Death toll estimates range from about 500,000 to over 1 million. The former figure was mentioned by the head of the ICRC delegation in Rwanda, Philippe Gaillard, before he couldn’t "count anymore".^[44] Up to 800,000 are estimated in a demographic study; ^[45] this is also the most widely stated figure. ^[46] About 250,000 victims, brought in from various places, have since 2001 been buried in burial grounds by the Kigali Memorial Center, which pertains to the Genocide Archive of Rwanda, the Rwandan equivalent of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. The archive’s collections include several series showing photos of exhumed human remains. Two of these series, available here and here, contain a total of 77 photographs excluding repetitions, showing human remains corresponding to about 1,170 human corpses in total (assuming that no two photos show the same remains). Another collection seems to be empty, and to another, which may also contain at least some images of human remains, I could for some reason gain no access despite having registered twice under different user names. Many other photographs are available on the internet, mainly in the (careful, very graphic!) gettyimages collection of about 4,500 photos on themes pertaining to the Rwanda genocide and the subsequent refugee crisis. ^[47] 428 of these photos, some repeated, show human remains or possible human remains, including both skulls and bones on racks in memorials and images taken while the genocide was going on. ^[48] A rough count of the number of dead people (freshly killed, decomposing or as skeletons), yields a generously counted/estimated total of about 7,880 (again, assuming that no two photos show the same corpses, which is hardly a realistic assumption as concerns the memorial skeleton collections copiously photographed by visitors, and besides there are other photos that obviously show the same "whole" corpses).

Added to the aforementioned about 1,170 from the Genocide Archive of Rwanda gallery there would thus be about 9,050 corpses "whole" or as skeletons shown on publicly available photographs of the Rwanda genocide and its aftermath. The number would be much lower if corrected for double counts (I counted 58 cases in which all or some of the human remains shown on a photograph are surely or probably also shown on at least one other photograph, and I’m not claiming that my count is complete), the number of corpses that can be made out on publicly available photographs of the Rwanda genocide and its immediate aftermath amounts to just about 1.06 % of the about 850,000 victims of that period. It would take 9,392 such photographs to photographically document the whole body count. As in the Cambodian genocide and the mass killings by Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR, only a tiny fraction of those killed can be seen on publicly available photographs.

What about judicial procedures, such as have taken place regarding the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides and mass killings during the 1992-95 Bosnian War? Is the number of victims documented more completely there?

I put together a YouTube slide show with 289 photos from the Yad Vashem archives, which lasts 24:05 minutes A slide show of 9,392 images (Rwanda) would thus take about 13 hours, and one of 28,751 images (Cambodia) would take about 40 hours. So, were participants at any of the Rwanda or Cambodia trials treated, for hours, to grisly images like the ones reproduced below?^[49]



As concerns the trials of key figures of the former Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the published summaries of the judgments against Kaing Guek Eav^[50] and against Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan^[51] don’t suggest that this was the case.

As concerns Rwanda, the procedures before the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) that I consider the most important were Akayesu, Jean Paul (ICTR-96-4) ^[52] , due to its detailed examination of the genocidal nature of the killings, Bagosora et al. (Military I) (ICTR-98-41), ^[53] due to the prominent role played by the defendants in the genocide, and Nyiramasuhuko et al. (Butare) (ICTR-98-42), which among others addresses the unspeakable atrocities committed by a woman, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko. ^[54] The published indictments and judgments from these procedures do not suggest that photographs or film footage showing human remains were of much significance as a basis of findings of fact by the court (which essentially relied on other than photographic documents and the testimonies of eyewitness and expert witnesses), or that photos or footage, where introduced as evidence, were used for purposes other than illustrating the nature and particulars of the killings (who the victims where, how they had been killed), or to establish certain features of the killing sites for the purpose of checking eyewitness recollections thereof. ^[55] The same applies to the other cases judged by the ICTR. ^[56]

Regarding trials before the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, an expert witness, forensic archaeologist Richard Wright, explains the relevance of photos as evidence in court proceedings:

Because bodies are such powerful historical and legal evidence, the defenders of alleged perpetrators have added interrogation of investigators’ research and recovery processes to their cross-examination. That attempt at distraction should not surprise. For example, David Bright of the University of New South Wales,9 and news media have pointed out the effects of evidence such as gruesome photos on courts.10
In the case of atrocity investigations, forensic archaeologists present to the courts detailed logs and maps of what is found, with interpretations. Official reports, which include photos, are disclosed to the defense. In accord with Bright’s findings, usually the defense does not want the judges to see the gruesome pictures. So the reports are unchallenged by defense counsel. The defense prefers to argue the line of “you prove that our client was seen pulling the trigger.” That has happened in most cases that I have worked on.
Yet the Srebrenica defense teams also devised a strategy to question whether, because of our supposed preconceptions, our archaeological investigation missed identifying military clothing, and whether the number of bodies in the ground was less than we estimated.11 I have vivid memories of a grueling cross-examination in The Hague in February 2007. On and on went the questions about the possibility of my being mistaken in my observations and conclusions. I insisted that I had not seen an item of military clothing on the 2000–3000 bodies my team had exhumed. I insisted that I was not mistaken in seeing high numbers of blindfolds and arms tied behind the back. Words, words, words from both myself and the defense team of barristers. In his right of reply the prosecuting barrister said nothing; he simply put up two photos on the court’s screen.
They were the photos from my official report of a man in civilian clothes, who had broken the ligature fixing his hands behind his back, slipped his blindfold down, and grasped a shrub at the moment of death. The prosecuting barrister asked me a single question. Were these photos the sort of evidence that led me to my conclusions. I said yes. The prosecuting barrister said he had no more questions for me. I think that the photos of a body cut through the verbiage of the courtroom, effectively arresting the defense efforts to reinterpret the evidence. Verdicts are awaited as I am writing this.^[57]

Obviously Richard Wright did not produce photos showing all 2000–3000 bodies his team had exhumed at Srebrenica, nor was he asked to do so. The evidence was his expert witness testimony about the exhumation and examination work he had conducted and the conclusion he had reached as concerns the crime under investigation. Two photographs, showing a single victim of the massacre, were produced to corroborate Wright’s statements as concerns the quality (not the quantity) of the killings.

So we can see that the purpose for which photographs of murdered people are shown at criminal trials regarding mass crimes does not differ much from the purpose for which they are shown to the public: in order to document the nature and quality of the crimes, and not in order to document the numbers of their victims.

Considering all the above, Mattogno’s expectation to see "hundreds of thousands" of corpses on "hundreds" of exhumation photos reveals that he is ignorant not only of the obvious limitations of the camera eye, but also of what photographs are suited and used for in the context of documenting mass crimes.

At the end of the chapter here discussed, Mattogno concludes that "the existing photographic material does not confirm the order of magnitude of the killings mentioned in the Einsatzgruppen reports – not even remotely."^[58] That may be so, but it is also irrelevant. No existing photographic material regarding the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide or Stalin’s Great Purge and other mass killings by the Soviet NKVD, not to mention the Holodomor and the Gulag, confirms the order of magnitude thereof – not even remotely. No one has claimed that it does, no one with a notion of the evidentiary purpose and value of photographs or film footage would expect it to, and no one with a notion of judicial investigation or historical research would claim that this means anything regarding the factuality of these crimes and the sufficiency of the corresponding evidence.

This, in turn, means that all "oh but only so-and-so-many corpses can be seen on photographs" arguments in Mattogno’s Einsatzgruppen book are non-arguments and can be safely ignored.

Notes

[1]The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories: Genesis, Missions and Actions (hereinafter "TEG").
[2] Mattogno’s attempt to "defuse" this highly explicit and incriminating document is addressed in my series "Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well he tries)", which commences here.
[3]Ghetto Fighters House Archives, check "Photo Archive".
[4]Yad Vashem Photo Collections
[5]Lithuanians and a Soviet officer stand among the remains of twenty Jewish atrocity victims, who were exhumed from a mass grave in the woods near Utena - Photograph Number: 26951 (graphic image!)
[6] See my articles Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 1) and Mattogno on the Mass Graves at Ponary (Part 3).
[7]Item ID 80349, Archival Signature 115DO1.
[8] See, among others, the sources quoted in the reference library threads The Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War and Nazi and Soviet Crimes and in my article Scrapbookpages on Subhuman Cannibalism. Documentation includes, without limitation, the following:
• Rosenberg’s letter to Keitel dated 28 February 1942. Rosenberg states that, of about 3.6 million Soviet prisoners taken until then, "only several hundred thousand are still able to work fully", and describes the mass mortality among the prisoners in some detail.
• The document Nachweis des Verbleibs der sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen Stand 1.5.1944 (Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv, RH 2/2623, Bl. 21-23); a transcription can be found here. The document mentions 1,981,364 deaths of POWs (845,128 deaths in the OKW area plus 1,136,236 in the OKH area), plus 963,463 "other losses" (490,441 in the OKW area plus 473,022 in the OKW area). As the "other losses" include prisoners turned over to the SD or the SS, a large proportion of these prisoners must have been killed or otherwise perished. Based on this document German public prosecutor Alfred Streim estimated a number of "at least 2 530 000" Soviet PoWs who died in Soviet captivity. German historian Christian Streit (Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941 – 1945, Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., Bonn, pp. 10 ff. and footnote on p. 304) insists that his estimate, whereby about 3.3 million out of 5.7 Soviet PoWs died, is supported by a listing of the Abteiling Fremde Heere Ost, which mentions 5,754,528 Soviet PoWs taken until February 1945, an order of magnitude also borne out by the Chief of Prisoner of War Matter, who estimated a total of 5.6 million Soviet PoW until December 1944. Prisoners of war included not only Red Army servicemen taken on strength but also members of special formations of civilian authorities, people’s defense, workers’ battalions, militia etc. as well as are those mobilized who were taken prisoner before they were integrated into the troops (Streit, as above p. 20).
• On 19 February 1942 the head of the Working Group Labor in the Four-Year Plan, Ministerial Director Mansfeld, held a lecture before the Reich Economy Chamber about "general questions of labor usage". In regard to the steadily worsening lack of workers, Mansfeld declared that out of about 3.9 million Soviet PoWs taken only 1.1 million were left. According to a listing by the Army High Command/ General Quarter Master cleansed of erroneous reports, until 20.12.1941 3,350,639 prisoners had fallen into German hands. Of these 280,108 had been released and 1,020,531 were still in German captivity on 1.2.1942, which means that over 2 million Soviet PoWs had died until that date already (Streit, as above p. 128).
[9] Some of these photographs are shown in my article Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes.
[10] TEG pp. 785-786 (Documents II.8.18, II.8.19 and II.8.20).
[11] TEG, p. 698.
[12] The abbreviation "Dulag" stands for "Durchgangslager", meaning a transit camp through which PoWs were moved to a Stammlager, a camp where they were meant to stay.
[13] Streit, Keine Kameraden, pp. 156 f., quoting a detailed by one Colonel Marschall dated 22 November 1941, about the situation at various Dulags. The total number of the camp’s victims throughout the existence of Dulag 131 was estimated by Belorussian authorities at about 40,000 (Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944, p. 856; translated excerpt here).
[14] The upper photograph is shown in Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair. Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule, 2004 The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusets and London, England. It is captioned "Open mass grave with thousands of Jews. Podolian town of Proskuriv (today Khmelnytsky), 1941 or 1942 (Muzeum Wojska Polskiego, courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Photo Archives, 17781)". According to this Yad Vashem page, at least 3,000 Proskurov Jews were murdered on 4 November 1941.
Regarding the context and provenance of the lower three photograph see my article The Kamenets-Podolsky Massacre. If correctly attributed, they show some of the about 23,600 Jews who, according to documentary evidence, were killed at Kamenets-Podolsky in late August 1941. The photos are shown on TEG pp. 763 and 764 (Documents II.5.1, II.5.2 and II.5.3).
[15] TEG p. 549. Although each of these photos obviously shows only a (presumably quite small) part of the mass grave by which it was taken, Mattogno argues as if the pictures showed the whole of at least one grave.
[16] See my article Nazi killing methods, quoting German historian Dieter Pohl.
[17]Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn. Im Auftrage des Auswärtigen Amtes aufgrund urkundlichen Beweismaterials zusammengestellt, bearbeitet und herausgegeben von der Deutschen Informationsstelle. Berlin 1943, Zentralverlag der NSDAP Franz Eher Nachf. GmbH. The report can be read and downloaded under this link.
[18] Exhumations of all or most corpses buried at a Nazi mass killing site, which occurred for instance at Žagarė in Lithuania (see my article Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries) - Part 5 (2) and at Smoliarka, Luninets, Lakhva and Koshangrodek in Belorussia (see Nick Terry’s article Mass Graves in the Polesie) were the exception in Soviet investigations. Most of the investigators preferred to open a grave, measure its dimensions, check the identity of the corpses (i.e., whether in military uniform and therefore Soviet prisoners of war, or in civilian clothing), by exhuming some of them, and estimate their number based on a volume calculation. In my aforementioned article I show a drawing (of a mass grave at Gnivan in Ukraine) that illustrates the reason, or one of the reasons, why such estimates could be widely off the mark.
[19]In Wald von Katyn. A mentioned in an earlier article, this documentary is noteworthy as one of the sources showing that "liquidation" in the Nazis’ vocabulary meant physical killing.
[20] This order of magnitude, based on research in the archives of the former Soviet Union (which has laid to rest widely exaggerated estimates from the Cold War area), is mentioned in American historian Timothy Snyder’s article Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?. See also Richard Overy, The Dictators, 2004 Penguin Books, London, pp. 193 ff. (excerpt available here). According to Michael Elman (Soviet Repression Statistics: Some comments, in: EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, Vol. 54, No. 7, 2002, 1151–1172), the most convincing estimate of the Great Purge’s death toll is in the order of about 950,000 to 1.2 million. This number includes both execution deaths and deaths in detention (some of which were also deliberate).
[21] See my article Germar Rudolf’s foreword to Mattogno’s Einzatzgruppen book.
[22]Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Winniza. Im Auftrage des Reichsministers für die besetzten Ostgebiete aufgrund urkundlichen Beweismaterials zusammengestellt, bearbeitet und herausgegeben Berlin 1944, Zentralverlage der NSDAP Franz Eher Nachf. GmbH. The report can be downloaded under this link.
[23] See the German documentary Lemberg 1941.
[24] Namely the well-known, anti-Semitic pamphlet "Latvia: Year of Horror" (available for download under this link.
[25] Applying the standards of evidence that "Revisionists" demand when it comes to Nazi mass killings (e.g. Germar Rudolf, quoted here) one might call all of the Stalinist regime’s killing record into question, for not even the Katyn and Vinnitsya forensic investigations, conducted by Nazi Germany, can be considered wholly independent.
[26] These are shown especially in Franz Seidler’s books Verbrechen an der Wehrmacht, Kriegsgreuel der Roten Armee: Verbrechen an der Wehrmacht, Band II: 1942/43 and Die Wehrmacht im Partisanenkrieg: Militärische und völkerrechtliche Darlegungen zur Kriegführung im Osten. While the images and related reports are certainly authentic, Seidler’s books are otherwise Nazi-apologetic to the point of counting cannibalism among starving Soviet prisoners of war as a Soviet war crime (see my article Scrapbookpages on Subhuman Cannibalism). Seidler also didn’t bother to check the provenance of what turned out to be a forgery of Stalin’s "Torch-men Order" of 27.11.1941 (see my article Blame it on the Germans and Christian Hartmann/Jürgen Zarusky, "Stalins ‘Fackelmänner’ – Befehl vom November 1941. Ein verfälschtes Dokument." in: Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Heft 4, October 2000, pp. 667-674). Seidler is also the author of a book with the title Deutsche Opfer: Kriegs- und Nachkriegsverbrechen alliierter Täter 1945.
[27] Figures range from 357,687 out of 2,388,443 (14.9 %), as per files of the Soviet NKVD to about 1,094,000 out of 3,155,000 according to a commission of West German scientists in the 1960s. The most probable order of magnitude, according to German historian Christian Streit, is around 700,000. See Streit, "Deutsche und sowjetische Kriegsgefangene", in Wolfram Wette/Gerd R. Ueberschär, Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert, 2001 Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt, pages 178 to 192. A translation of Streit’s article is available here. Most prisoners taken by the Soviets in 1941 seem to have been killed on the spot. Out of 60-70,000 Wehrmacht soldiers captured by the Soviets until the end of 1941 only 9,147 reached the camps in the rear (Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg. Front und militärisches Hinterland 1941/42, p. 566). A similar number of Soviet PoWs is likely to have been murdered by German troops right after capture, and the number of Soviet prisoners who perished during evacuation to the rear could well amount to a six-digit figure (Hartmann).
[28] Most of these images, e.g. the ones reproduced here, are attributed to the Nemmerdorf massacre on 21 October 1944. While there is no doubt that Soviet troops murdered many civilians in Germany’s former eastern territories, it has not yet been clarified what exactly happened at Nemmersdorf and to what extent evidence was manipulated by NS authorities for propaganda purposes.
[29] Manfred Zeidler, "Die Tötungs- und Vergewaltigungsverbrechen der Roten Armee auf deutschem Boden 1944/45", in: Wette/Ueberschär, as above, pp. 418 to 432. A translation is available here.
[30] Quote and figures are from Snyder, as above.
[31]Ukraine's Holodomor Through An Austrian's Eyes. This photo, which is sometimes allocated to the Holodomor, actually shows victims of the Russian famine of 1921–22.
[32] Which is still more than the number of victims of the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961 photographed after death. Unless I missed something, there is not a single published photo showing some of the at least 15 million victims of that famine.
[33]This IHR article features a photo showing a pile of bodies claimed to be from the Gulag. The dubious nature of the publication aside, the corpses look more like Nazi concentration camp victims to me, and one reader of the article stated that the corpses are from Auschwitz, so I’m not sure …
[34] A search for corpses in Yad Vashem’s online photo archive, for instance, yields 4,787 photographs, mostly showing victims of camps and other mass violence by Nazi Germany.
[35] The figure is from Snyder, as above.
[36] See my article Nazi killing methods.
[37] See Bruce Sharp, Counting Hell; Craig Etcheson, "The Number"– Quantifying Crimes Against Humanity in Cambodia
[38] Sharp, as above, based on a personal communication from Etcheson.
[39] Etcheson, as above.
[40] DC-Cam, Mapping of Cambodia’s Killing Fields (1975-1979).
[41] Sharp, as above.
[42] The number is so high because I included in the count a panoramic photo (the only of its kind that I have seen) of lined-up skulls featured on this page (about 1,500 skulls by my estimate) and the S 21 skull map of about 500 skulls, which has been removed because it was considered tasteless or offensive to piety.
[43]A nightmare with no way out.
[44]PBS Frontline documentary Rwandan Genocide - The slaughter of 800,000 people The statement is quoted at 1:25:47.
[45] Marijke VerpoortenThe Death Toll of the Rwandan Genocide: A Detailed Analysis for Gikongoro Province.
[46] A more recent assessment by Marijke Verpoorten, in response to much lower figures submitted by two academics, concludes that "512,000-662,000 is a much more plausible range for the Tutsi death toll than a range that includes 200,000".
[47] According to the article The Great Lakes Refugee Crisis, about 50,000 people died in the refugee camps in 1994, mostly from cholera and diarrhea. Assuming about 800,000 genocide victims, the death toll of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and its immediate aftermath would thus be in the order of 850,000.
[48] Unlike the Cambodian genocide, the remains of which only started being photographed after it was over, the Rwandan genocide was photographed and filmed in progress by reporters, and the images they captured were immediately available to the international media.
[49] These stills are from footage of the excavation conducted by Father Patrick Desbois in 2006 at the Ukrainian city of Busk, which is narrated in Desbois’ book The Holocaust by Bullets (excerpts here). The footage can be viewed on YouTube in the documentary La Shoah par balles en UKRAINE (19:50-21:06).
[50]Case 001: "During the 72 days of hearing of evidence, 9 expert witnesses, 17 fact witnesses, 7 character witnesses and 22 Civil Parties were heard before the Trial Chamber. Over the course of the trial, the Chamber examines seven thematic areas of relevance to the proceedings: issues relating to M-13; establishment of S-21 and the Takmao prison; implementation of CPK policy at S-21; armed conflict; functioning of S-21, including Choeung Ek; establishment and functioning of S-24; and issues relating to the character of the Accused. Approximately 1,000 documents were put before the Chamber and subjected to examination."
[51]Summary of Judgement Case 002/02, p. 3: "Over the course of 24 months of evidentiary hearings, the Chamber heard the testimony of 185 individuals, including 114 fact witnesses, 63 Civil Parties and 8 experts. Close to 5,000 evidentiary documents were subjected to examination and admitted, totalling over 82,000 pages over the three official languages in Case 002/02 alone. In light of Cases 002/01 and 002/02 sharing a Case File, this brought the grand total of evidentiary documents to more than 10,000, totalling over 304,000 pages." The large majority of the documents were obviously written documents, leaving comparatively little room for photographic documentation.
[52]Indictments and Judgments.
[53]Indictments and Judgments.
[54]Indictments and Judgments. Regarding Pauline Nyiramasuhuko see also Peter Landesman, A Woman’s Work, The New York Times Magazine, 15 September 2002.
[55] At the trial of Akayesu, Judgement of 2 September 1998, paragraph 24). Findings of fact referred essentially to the testimonies of witnesses and expert witnesses. Such witnesses included a British cameraman who had taken pictures of various massacres in churches throughout the country, and who importantly testified to having seen identity cards which marked their bearers as "Tutsi" strewn on the ground at such sites (paragraph 116). A testimony by an expert witness whereby Tutsi bodies were often systematically thrown into a tributary of the Nile was corroborated by "several images" shown to the court (paragraph 120). Film footage taken by the aforementioned British cameraman, who testified to, among other things, having seen corpses floating down a river "at the rate of several corpses per minute", was viewed by the court (paragraph 161). Similar scenes were also mentioned, without accompanying images being mentioned, by another witness (paragraph 159). Graphic footage from the Rwandan genocide, such as may have been screened at the Akayesu trial, can be viewed in the already mentioned PBS Frontline documentary Rwandan Genocide - The slaughter of 800,000 people (e.g. 53:06 to 53:45, 1:08:50 to 1:09:43, 1:28:41 to 1:29:10, 1:29:22 to 1:29:27, 1:29:34 to 1:29:42, 1:39:38 to 1:40:30, 1:40:41 to 1:40:45, 1:41:27 to 1:41:44, 1:42:25 to 1:42:45.)
During the 408 days of the trial of Bagosora et al, 242 witnesses were heard, 82 for the Prosecution and 160 for the Defense. Nearly 1,600 exhibits were tendered (Judgment of 18 December 2008, note 1 on page 1, paragraph 78 on page 15). The crimes that the defendants were charged with were reconstructed mainly on the basis of testimonies from eyewitnesses and expert witnesses. Video footage and stills showing corpses, a photograph of the local memorial, and the testimony of a witness who "identified the footage and recognised some of the victims" are mentioned as evidence that more than 1,000 mostly Tutsi refugees were killed at Nyanza hill on 11 April 1994 (paragraph 1340 and note 1480 on p. 338). Unless I missed something, this is the only reference in the judgment to visual material showing human remains.
At the trial of Nyiramasuhuko et al, photographs and video footage, taken long after the events at the crime sites, were used to check the reliability of eyewitness recollections of those sites (landscape, vegetation, buildings, etc.) One a single occasion, in the judgment of 24 June 2011, visual evidence is mentioned in connection with mass graves: "Exhibit 34B showed a view of an alleged mass grave located in Kabakobwa; the mass grave was the flat, green grass surrounded by trees. Exhibits 34C, 34D and 34E were views of the alleged mass grave from different angles, and Exhibit 34F represented a view of the road from the valley towards where the mass grave was located on the left side of the photo. Exhibit 34G was a view of the alleged mass grave from a cluster of the trees surrounding it.4308 Exhibit 35 was the related video footage of the photos regarding Kabakobwa.4309."
[56] In the case Gacumbitsi Sylvestre (ICTR-01-64), the following is mentioned in the Trial Chamber’s judgment of 17 June 2004 (paragraph 144 on p. 38, (emphases added): "Prosecution Witness Patrick Fergal Keane, a journalist, who, in May 1994, produced a documentary for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)152 on Rwanda, focussing on the events in Rusumo commune, testified that at the end of May 1994, with the assistance of RPF which was in control of that area, he was in Rusumo and filmed the Nyarubuye Parish building, which was littered with corpses.153 Having heard the stories of the survivors of the events at the parish, he started looking for Bourgmestre Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, and had a conversation with him at the Benaco refugee camp in Tanzania.154 In the documentary, some clips of which were shown and tendered as exhibits,155 many decomposing and intermingled corpses are visible. The corpses are numerous, piled on top of each other, in front of a building located behind Nyarubuye Church, under the arches. The corpses are those of persons of both sexes, and bodies of children, including some in school uniforms, can be seen." Quantitative information is noted but not established (i.e. the court didn’t undertake to count the "numerous" corpses), and the qualitative element (i.e. that the corpses were of persons of both sexes including children) was obviously more important. In the Appeals Chamber’s judgment, one finds the following statement (paragraph 95 on p. 36, emphasis added: "With respect to both Fergal Keane and Alison Des Forges,the Appellant argues that their estimates of the number of people killed at Nyarubuye Parish were inflated because the RPF had brought more corpses to Nyarubuye Parish before the documentary was filmed.236 But even if this were true (which the Appeals Chamber need not decide), this would not cast doubt on the occurrence of the attacks to which both Prosecution and Defence witnesses testified. Nor does the Appellant demonstrate that the difference in the estimates would have affected the Judgement in any other way." In other words, the Appeals Chambe deemed the number of corpses to have been irrelevant to the Trial Chamber’s decision.
In the case Karera, François (ICTR-01-74), the Trial Chamber judgment of 7.12.2007 contains references (e.g. paragraph 292, note 354 on p. 75) to a forensic report regarding the massacre at Ntarama Church, not challenged by the defense, whereby the corpses of 385 victims were found at the crime site. The forensic report, illustrated with photographs and containing the forensic scientists’ find on how the victims examined had been killed, acknowledges that the number of bodies examined is "appreciably lower than the number of people killed" (Appeals Chamber Judgment of 2 February 2009, paragraph 243, p. 70).
In the case Kayishena et al. (ICTR-95-1), reference is made in the Trial Chamber Judgment of 21.5.1999 to a forensic examination by two expert witnesses in which 493 victims were examined (paragraphs 325, 326 on p. 126).
The judgment of 3 December 2003 in the trial Nahimana et al. (Media case) (ICTR-99-52) refers to the testimony of a witness who "filmed dead bodies in the river at Kanyaru, counting the bodies as they flowed by and estimated on that basis that there were 3,000 to 5,000 dead bodies per day coming down the river." However, there is no mention that footage of bodies floating by was shown to the court.
[57] Richard Wright, "Where are the Bodies? In the Ground", The Public Historian, Vol. 32 No. 1, Winter 2010. Like in the Katyn and Vinnitsyia investigations by Nazi Germany, an emphasis on quality (aspect of individual bodies, injuries, ligatures and blindfolds, clothing, etc.), rather than on quantity, also becomes apparent from the images in forensic investigation reports by Wright and others that can be accessed and downloaded on the site SREBRENICA Genocide in eight acts (The Exhumations > Selection of Exhibits). According to this site the Srebrenica investigation, which started in July 1995 and continued through 2014, is arguably the most comprehensive investigation of its kind in the 20th century.
[58] TEG, p. 410.

Mattogno's claim that the Gaswagen in the report of Einsatzgruppe B of 1 March 1942 were producer gas vehicles can be ruled out on several grounds:

Earlier this month, the BBC reported here the exhumation of over 1,000 Jews from a mass grave in the site of the Brest ghetto during the previous two months. The unearthed skeletons included women and children and proof that victims were shot in the back of the head. The embedded video in the report included (from two minutes in) an illustrated discussion of the ghetto population register. As I showed in our Critique, this was the 'Accounting and Control Book of Population Movement' that recorded 16,934 Jews on October 15, 1942, but crossed out that figure the following day. Mattogno of course insists that all these 16,934 Jews were 'evacuated' as that is the term used by Police Battalion 310 in its report of the ghetto action (Mattogno, pp.702-704), but these remains are proof that not all 'evacuated' Jews ever left the ghetto and that at least a thousand of them had infact been shot in the ghetto itself. Moreover, given that this also proves that 'evacuated' was a euphemism that included substantial killing, and there is no evidence these Jews ever left that administrative region of the occupied territories, it is logical to infer that any Jews who were transported elsewhere were also shot. Another desperate Mattogno gambit therefore fails.

This article has nothing to do with the usual subjects of this site (well, a little). It’s about a 2017 lecture by British historian Antony Beevor at Hillsdale College, the subject of which was the Soviet Union’s contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.



Sir Antony Beevor is one of my favorite writers of non-fiction literature, and he tops the list as concerns World War II military history. I have read most of his books about WWII subjects – Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, Berlin: The Downfall, 1945, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble. In his books Beevor comes across as an objective, neutral historian who has no axes to grind.

When listening to his aforementioned lecture, however, I got quite a different impression. The tone of the lecture reminded me of the verbal face slaps that Obama used to send Putin’s way while he was in office. I can understand that Beevor bears a grudge against Putin’s Russia, considering how he and his books have been treated there, and he’s certainly entitled to express that grudge. But I think he should not do that in his capacity as a historian, lest he damage his well-earned reputation as a dispassionate researcher and narrator.

After acknowledging that about three-quarters of all German military fatalities occurred on the Eastern Front or in Soviet captivity (though by reference to the German Military History Research Office, whose figures are from the somewhat dubiousstatistical study by Rüdiger Overmans), Beevor dedicated his lecture to downplaying the Soviet Union’s part in the destruction of Nazi Germany, focusing on futile Soviet bloodlettings like Operation Mars and on assistance granted to the Soviet Union by the Western Allies, e.g. by helping to feed the population in unoccupied Soviet territories (who according to Beevor would have starved but for American food shipments), supplying trucks that greatly improved the Soviet army’s mobility and bombing German cities (which led to the diversion of precious airpower and 88mm anti-aircraft/anti-tank guns from the Eastern Front).

Much of what Beevor said in the lecture is interesting and pertinent, and he is certainly right in pointing out the obvious, namely that Putin’s regime promotes a glorified and distorted image of the Soviet struggle against Nazi Germany. However, Beevor himself distorted facts in this lecture, namely with the following comparison (28:11-28:37 of the lecture’s video recording):

Although statistics are hard to compare between the Western and the Eastern Fronts, the average casualty rates per division per division per month appear to have been higher in Normandy, quite a lot higher in Normandy, than in the East. German losses on the Eastern Front averaged just under 1,000 per division per month. In Normandy the average figure was around 2,300 per division per month.

The quoted statement sort of hurt my family pride, which doesn’t like being (however subtly) told that my uncle Obergefreiter Ernst August Schmidt, who like the large majority of Germany’s military war dead fought and died on the Eastern Front, was up against less (living conditions and the elements aside) than his compatriots facing the Normandy invasion. That, of course, is my problem. However, Beevor’s statement also has some objective fallacies.

I’ll start with the one I consider the least serious. Beevor’s figures are not borne out by army casualty records of the German army high command (Oberkommando des Heeres - OKH) and the armed forces high command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht - OKW), namely the 10-Day Casualty Reports per Theater of War from the OKH/Heeresarzt (Army Medical Officer) and the Monthly Casualty Reports from the OKW. Incomplete though these records are, there is no indication I know about that the proportion of unrecorded casualties was higher regarding one front than the other, so I think these records can be used to test Beevor’s above-quoted claim for substance.

Based on an accounting of German divisions by month and theater from September 1939 to May 1945, I calculated that the average number of German divisions per month on the Eastern and Western fronts in periods relevant for comparison purposes (i.e. following the Normandy landings, in which there was major combat on both fronts) was 144 divisions in the East vs. 70 in the West between June 1944 and April 1945 (the latter being the last month for which there are OKH figures). In the period between June 1944 and January 1945 (the last being the month in which the OKW records end), the average number of divisions per month was 135 in the East vs. 70 in the West. In the months June, July and August 1944 (the period covered in Beevor’s book about the battle for Normandy), the monthly average was 135 divisions in the East, 69 in the West. Allowing for a one-month backlog in casualty reporting I also considered the months July to September 1944, in which the monthly average was 133 divisions in the East vs. 68 in the West.

Taking these figures and the average number of monthly casualties in each period based on the mentioned OKH and OKW records, I arrived at the casualty figures per division per month shown in the table below.



One can see that in the periods considered the number of German casualties per division and month was either just about equal in East and West or somewhat higher in the East than in the West.

Casualties include servicemen killed, wounded or missing, with the missing including those who were killed but whose death could not be ascertained at the time and those who were taken prisoner by the enemy. The next table, in which the numbers of men either dead or wounded per division and month in the relevant periods are compared, shows a clear predominance of East vs. West, with the number of dead and wounded per division and month in the periods June-August 1944 and June-September 1944 being almost 3 times higher in the East than in the West.



This suggests that the proportion of men killed as opposed to taken prisoner among the missing was also somewhat higher in the East than in the West, and it is well known that, as the Allied advance progressed and the situation became increasingly hopeless for the German armed forces, German troops tended to surrender in large numbers to the Western Allies whereas in the East they would rather be killed than captured for fear of Soviet captivity. In April and May 1945, as is mentioned here, there was hardly any fighting in the West as German troops surrendered in masses without putting up much if any resistance, whereas in the East the fighting (as is also pointed by German historian Christian Hartmann on pp. 104-105 of his book Unternehmen Barbarossa: der deutsche Krieg im Osten 1941-1945), the war lost none of its intensity until the end.

(The calculations behind the above two tables are too long to be reproduced here, but I’ll be glad to send them to anyone who asks for them, either in a comment to this blog or in an e-mail to cortagravatas@yahoo.com.)

So much for the consistency of Beevor’s figures, now for what is most problematic about his comparison.

Beevor seems to have compared average German casualty rates in the largest and arguably most intensive battle on the Western Front, the battle for Normandy from June to August 1944, with average German casualty rates along the whole Eastern Front throughout the 4-year conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Such comparison might be appropriate if the Germans and the Soviets had waged major battles along the entire front in every month of that 4-year period, throwing everything they had at each other like the Germans and the Western Allies during the 1944 fighting in Normandy. But that was not so. On the Eastern Front periods of high-intensity combat, which rarely encompassed the entire front, alternated with comparatively quiet periods, in which not much was going on in certain sectors of the front or along the entire front, and in which the main enemies of combatants on either side were dulling boredom and the miserable conditions under which they lived. My uncle mentioned such periods in several of his letters home. "Here it is quiet like in peacetime, hopefully it will stay that way", he wrote from Poland on 11 December 1944. And on 28 December: "It is still quiet and boring. We are sleeping our youth and our reason away." Then in January 1945, after the Soviet Vistula-Oder Offensive had begun, it was as if the skies were falling down on him, as he wrote in his letter of 10.2.1945:

The whole misery started for us on 12.1. Ivan's first attack came at night, two more followed during the day, and of course we beat them off. In the evening we disengaged. From this day on we marched day and night until 21.1. On 21.1. we were suddenly loaded onto trucks, but the ride was not to last long. After 20 km we had to get out, prepare weapons, receive ammunition and get ready to attack. Thus our fate was sealed. The fight for the village of Plaza I don't want to describe to you. Only this much: My best comrade fell there, and we held the village for 3 days. On 25.1 Ivan attacked with 10 tanks and a regiment of infantry in our company area and broke through. I thought it couldn't get any worse, but it still got worse. In the evening Ivan caught us and we wandered into captivity until 27.1. First the pigs took away the distinctions, which in my case had multiplied: Iron Cross 2nd Class, Infantry Assault Badge, Close Quarters Combat Badge, Wounded Badge in Silver, War Merit Cross and a Croatian medal. Now I have no more documents about these, and if I'm unlucky I won't get any more either. I have been recommended for the Iron Cross 1st Class. Then they beat us, and then we had to work. In the evening we broke through again. On 27.1 was the climax: ground attack planes, artillery barrages, attacks by tanks and infantry. The evening brought deliverance for me and death for my second friend.

If Beevor had got his figures right (which according to my calculations is not the case), his comparison between Normandy and the Eastern Front might be true, but it would not be a true and fair comparison. (The difference between "true" and "true and fair" was explained as follows by a tax law professor when I was in law school: A sea captain enters in his logbook that "Sailor X was not drunk today". This may be a true statement, but it is not fair as it implies that the sailor´s soberness on that day was an exception to the rule.) What Beevor did here was to misleadingly compare apples with oranges. It’s the kind of false comparison that I would expect from the likes of Carlo Mattogno and Germar Rudolf, but not from Sir Antony Beevor. One might attribute this fallacy to negligence if it had come from a lesser talent, but a historian of Beevor’s caliber must have known very well what he was doing.

In this context one might also ask whether the number of casualties per division per month is even a meaningful comparison criterion. It presupposes that division strengths were about equal on both sides of the comparison, which was not necessarily (or hardly ever) the case in the German army throughout the fighting on either front. The (purely hypothetical) calculation in the table below shows why Beevor’s comparison criterion is meaningless. The number of divisions in this fictive scenario is twice as high in the lower than in the upper line, but as each division in the lower line is only half as strong as a division in the upper line, the number of troops in both cases is equal. The same number of monthly losses (10,000) incurred by both forces means 2,000 losses per division in the upper and 1,000 per division in the lower case, but the casualty ratio for both forces is exactly the same: 13.33 %.



A true and fair comparison of combat intensity in East and West would have been one between Operation Overlord and a battle of similar scale and intensity on the Eastern Front, the most appropriate comparator being Operation Bagration, which took place at about the same time and was also mentioned by Beevor in his lecture. The table below, a compilation of German strength and casualty figures for Overlord and Bagration according to various estimates (including Beevor’s own for Overlord) shows that according to most estimates (including those of military historians Zetterling for Overlord, Glantz & House and Frieser for Bagration) the average daily casualty ratio was about the same in both battles.



This, incidentally, is in line with Beevor’s assessment on page 522 of his book about the Normandy battle (2012 paperback edition by Penguin Books), where he wrote that "despite the sneers of Soviet propagandists, the battle for Normandy was certainly comparable to that on the Eastern Front".

Following the unfortunate comparison of figures in his lecture, Beevor remarked that German soldiers who had experienced both fronts were shaken by the fighting in north-west France. (28:38-23:45 of the video recording). That may be so, but what does it mean? Being at the receiving end of, say, the unprecedented carpet bombing that started Operation Cobra, or of Allied artillery and airpower decimating the German troops caught in the Falaise Pocket, was easily the worst war experience for German soldiers going through such hell. But then, the same applies to German soldiers encircled at Stalingrad, or to those who were later caught up in, say, the Cherkassy Pocket, the Minsk encirclement, the Budapest breakout attempt, the Heiligenbeil Pocket or the Halbe encirclement (the last of these is impressively narrated by Beevor in Berlin: The Downfall, 1945). So here we have another misleading comparison in Beevor’s lecture.

Toward the end of his lecture (starting at 35:20 of the recording), Beevor approvingly quoted an observation by Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, who stated that "although Stalin killed more people, Hitler had to be defeated first". Beevor added that "a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union in 1941 would have been so terrible that there is no other answer", and that "the mass starvation and enslavement which the Nazis planned for the population of the occupied territories up until the Archangelsk – Astrakhan line could have dwarfed even the horrors of the Holocaust".

While the claim that Stalin had more people killed than Hitler is disputable in light of post-Soviet archival research, I can agree with Beevor’s statement about the possible consequences of a Nazi victory over the USSR (though the "dwarfed" comparison would probably not be well received, and rightly so, by survivors and historians of the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews, one of whom made the point that "No gradation of human suffering is possible.").

However, Beevor’s statement brings up questions that I think Beevor failed to address in his lecture, though they are as pertinent as any to the subject matter thereof: Which was the essential force that prevented the horror of Nazi Germany’s victory when such victory was within reach, in 1941 and then again in 1942? I think the answer is obvious: the army and the people of the USSR. And if that force had failed, could any other have stopped (let alone defeated) Hitler? Could an invasion of Normandy have succeeded, or even taken place at all? Most probably not.

I hope that Sir Antony Beevor will not deliver more lectures like the one discussed above. I also hope that he will continue writing books as good as those I have read.

• Josef "quite unknown" Spacil (SS-Standartenführer, BdS Niederlande, SS economist at the HSSPF Süd-Russland, head of RSHA II)


• Johann "completely unknown" Ernst (SS-Untersturmführer and Technischer Obersekretär, head of SiPo repair garages)


• Guido "completely unknown" Huhn (SS-Obersturmführer, SS-Sondereinheit at concentration camp Auschwitz)


• Friedrich "not a Major in any way" Pradel (SS-Sturmbannführer and Major der Schutzpolizei, RSHA II D 3 a)


• on Sonderkommando 1005 German documents that "there are none" and that the designation "was invented by the Soviets".


• on the Minsk gas-chamber dossier that the "signature of the note in question is by a different hand and is a rather clumsy attempted imitation" and that "there is no trace of any record of the presumed visit to Minsk itself by any Italian fascist delegation".


• on homicidal gas vans that "the word 'Gaswagen,' in the sense of 'mobile homicidal gas chamber' was coined only after the Second World War by the victorious powers".


• on homicidal gas vans that "the term 'Gaskammer' can only refer to a stationary 'gas chamber'".


• on Saurer gasoline driven gas vans that "all Saurer trucks had diesel engines"


• on intercepted decodes on the mass killing unit Sonderkommando Lange that "there is no mention of Sonderkommando Lange, or gas vans, or Novgorod, or mental patients to be killed!".


• on a gas van document that "[c]ontrary to normal practise, the typed name of the author of the letter is missing, as are his name [sic!] and rank and  that steel bottles with carbon oxide "does not appear in any document".


• on the testimony of von dem Bach-Zelewski that "the Jewish editors of Aufbau falsified the original document, shamelessly interpolating and adding entire paragraphs".


• on the Auschwitz Jewish Sonderkommando that "not a single one had anything whatsoever to do with the crematoria" 

from      until       agency                  position
1.6.34   12.1.42   section leader
13.1.42  today     section leader         Standartenführer
9.10.42                RSHA, Amt IV

(BArch R 9361-II/84115)


Document 2.) Order by the RSHA office II D 3 a of 16 April 1943:

Offices which receive as attachments the Führer orders of 16.1 and 29.6.42 and 15.11.42 -O-kdo I O (2) 3 Nr. 98/42 I, II and III and of 10.3.43 -O-Kdo. I K (5) 3 Nr. 166/43:

IV B 4 - Copy for SS-Standartenführer Blobel
[...]

(BArch R 58/257)


Document 3.) Notebook on machine guns and ammunition provided by the RSHA office II D:

Date          No.         Name       Rank       Office
[...]
17.5.43      94          Blobel                      IV B 4[...]

(BArch R 58/858)


Document 4.) Index card on weapons and equipment provided by the RSHA office II D:

Name: Blobel   Official title: SS-Standartenführer   Office: 1V B 4

Abschrift. 

Warschau, den 7. Dezember 1942.

Brieffach 54. 

bis 27. XII. Anschrift:

Augsburg, Zeugplatz 7.

Dr. Wilhelm Hagen

Stadtmedizinalrat

Amtsarzt der Stadt Warschau

Bezirksleiter des Reichstuberkulose-Ausschusses im GG

An den Führer des Großdeutschen Reiches Adolf Hitler

Mein Führer!

Nach Beratung mit einem langjahrigen Freunde Friedrich Weber, "Oberlandweber" - einem Manne, dessen Ergebenheit zu Ihnen, meinem Führer, ausser allem Zweifel steht, bitte ich Sie, mich in folgender Sache zu hören, da Weber selbst durch Krankheit verhindert ist, die Vermittlung zu übernehmen:

Bei einer Regierungsbesprechung über die Tuberkulosebekämpfung wurde uns von dem Leiter der Abteilung Bevölkerungswesen und Fürsorge, Oberverwaltungsrat Weirauch als geheime Reichssache mitgeteilt, es sei beabsichtigt oder werde erwogen, bei der Umsiedlung von 200.000 Polen im Osten des Generalgouvernements zwecks Ansiedlung deutscher Wehrbauern, mit einem Drittel der Polen - 70 000 alten Leuten und Kindern unter 10 Jahren so zu verfahren, wie mit den Juden, das heisst, sie zu töten.

[...] 

Copy.

Warsaw, December 7, 1942.

Letter box 54.

until 27.XII. Address:Augsburg, Zeugplatz 7.

Dr. Wilhelm Hagen

Stadtmedizinalrat

Medical officer of the city of Warsaw

District leader of the Reich Tuberculosis Committee in the Generalgouvernement

To the leader of the Greater German Reich Adolf Hitler

My Führer!

After consulting with a longtime friend Friedrich Weber, "Oberlandweber" - a man whose devotion to you, my Führer, is out of all doubt, I ask you to hear me in the following matter, since Weber himself is prevented by illness to take over the mediation:

At a government meeting on the fight against tuberculosis, we were informed by the head of the Department of Population and Welfare, Oberverwaltungsrat Weirauch as a secret Reich Affair, it is intended or considered, in the course of the resettlement of 200,000 Poles in the east of the General Government to settle German Wehrbauern, to deal with a third of the Poles - with 70,000 old people and children under the age of 10, as with the Jews, that is, to kill them.

[...]

(BArch NS 19/1210; for reasons of time, the reproductions were made only from the microfilm of the file)