Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

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DirkSteele said:
Yeh.. My Mum is 80? (or something..It would be imprudent of me to reveal her true age even tho she goes line dancing a few times a week... !! (happy birthday mother!) She was a child during the war. How many people in a population of 60 million in the UK are over 80? Less than a million.
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Three million actually in 2010 See here .
In 2010 people older than 72 lived through the entire Second World War, so we have to add their number also to this category.
 
DirkSteele said:
Ok I am wrong. How many are there then? Who lived through ww2. My bad.
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About 5 million in total (see my post above here).

I've searched for these numbers. Will you do the same for the 1 millions jews that lived through the holocaust?
 
DirkSteele said:
Yeh.. My Mum is 80? (or something..It would be imprudent of me to reveal her true age even tho she goes line dancing a few times a week... !! (happy birthday mother!) She was a child during the war. How many people in a population of 60 million in the UK are over 80? Less than a million.
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I see part of your problem.

WWII ended in 1945. Anyone alive then, by definition, lived through WWII. Which means that we are counting people ~67 or older.

And according to https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uk.html, unless you have some proof that unless there are 9,341,628 people between the ages of 65 - 67, your figure is way off.

Did you see what I did there? I referred you to an webpage which has some authority.

It could easily have been a book or something, but the point is you don't have to take my word for it.

This is that citation thingy for which I kept asking you. Not that, given your performance so far today I am hopeful you will be able to produce, but perhaps you will surprize me.

BTW, you can munge the URL should you choose to use the web, and someone will post the correct citation for you. So, for example, I could post h t t p s://w w w .cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uk.html if I were unable to directly post links.
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erwinl said:
Three million actually in 2010 See here .
In 2010 people older than 72 lived through the entire Second World War, so we have to add their number also to this category.
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Bloody hell! How wrong I have been!! 3 million out of 60 million.... sorry guys. I take back all that I implied. And more......
 
DirkSteele said:
Bloody hell! How wrong I have been!! 3 million out of 60 million.... sorry guys. I take back all that I implied. And more......
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Actually a bit more than 9 million out of a population at war's end of ~40 million -- or nearly a quarter of that population.

You're still trying apple and oranges.

So, roughly 15 million Jews (just in Europe) when the war began, less those that were killed leaves 9 million or so? What's 25% of that?
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TSR said:
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Actually a bit more than 9 million out of a population at war's end of ~40 million -- or nearly a quarter of that population.

You're still trying apple and oranges.

So, roughly 15 million Jews (just in Europe) when the war began, less those that were killed leaves 9 million or so? What's 25% of that?
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And if his 1 million jews number would be right, out of these 15 million, then it would mean that we are missing a awfull lot of jews.
 
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erwinl said:
And if his 1 million jews number would be right out of these 15 million, then it would mean that we are missing a awfull lot of jews.
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Actually, zie said "millions", but ~2 million still surviving today is not out of line with the figures I gave. Bottom line: more Brits lived through WWII than Jews survived the Holocaust.
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TSR said:
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Actually, zie said "millions", but ~2 million still surviving today is not out of line with the figures I gave. Bottom line: more Brits lived through WWII than Jews survived the Holocaust.
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He said 'over a million' in post 9545, so I took that to mean 1 million as in using only 1 significant number.
Either way, he proved the Holocaust himself. :)
 
erwinl said:
And if his 1 million jews number would be right, out of these 15 million, then it would mean that we are missing a awfull lot of jews.
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Roberto Muehlenkamp, in the link I posted back a page, went through this, quoting the Illinois Holocaust Museum IIRC to the effect that there were fewer than 300,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors, by their expansive definition, alive in 2004.
 
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LemmyCaution said:
Roberto Muehlenkamp, in the link I posted back a page, went through this, quoting the Illinois Holocaust Museum IIRC to the effect that there were fewer than 300,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors, by their expansive definition, alive in 2004.
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Ok guys.. I admit I was stupid and wrong!! Isn't that the point of this forum? You show us lesser mortals the wisdom of your ways? Blimey! Only yesterday I thought Judaism was a religion and not a race! Now I know how these Arabs became Caucasian... I was only talking about my mis-education at school. I did not learn much about the genocides carried out by us Brits on the Indians the Africans and the American populations. I do realise that humans are the scum of the earth (a mouldy slime) and I know that just one innocent death is a travesty. But thanks for the education. Down and out.....
 
DirkSteele said:
You show us lesser mortals the wisdom of your ways? Blimey! Only yesterday I thought Judaism was a religion and not a race!
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No one here has called you a "lesser mortal".

And Judaism *is* a religion. One which the Nazis *treated* as if it were a race.

And strangely enough, also institutionalized the concept of the Untermenschen.
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TSR said:
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No one here has called you a "lesser mortal".

And Judaism *is* a religion. One which the Nazis *treated* as if it were a race.

And strangely enough, also institutionalized the concept of the Untermenschen.
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Oh. Was it only the Nazis that treated Jews as a race? Why were they given Israel? Why were they allowed to just shift those pesky arabs from the place of their birth? I also think it problematic today when I criticise the views of Islam.. in Europe I can be locked up for 'racial hatred' I get confused now about these issues. Please enlighten me... i.e show me the light!!! Light as opposed to the 'darkness' of human beings. Metaphorically speaking of course....
 
But I am convinced now... 6 million jews were slaughtered in WW1. And six million jews were exterminated in WW2 ... god only knows how many Jews have been slaughtered in WW3. By those muslims who want to create their own nuclear bomb... just to be equal to us. I guess you guys will give me the facts when you are ready
 
I don't think our resident deniers are going to be helped by this reinforcement.
:D
 
DirkSteele said:
Oh. Was it only the Nazis that treated Jews as a race? Why were they given Israel?
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Because they had been treated as a race, and slaughtered by the millions, and the world decided to collectively not let that happen any more.
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DirkSteele said:
Why were they allowed to just shift those pesky arabs from the place of their birth?
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Because it was also *their* place of birth in most cases, and most of the rest they had bought and turned from desert to garden.
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TSR said:
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Because they had been treated as a race, and slaughtered by the millions, and the world decided to collectively not let that happen any more.
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Because it was also *their* place of birth in most cases, and most of the rest they had bought and turned from desert to garden.
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'Their place of birth' 'desert to garden'? I suspect a religious viewpoint here. Yes?
 
DirkSteele said:
'Their place of birth' 'desert to garden'? I suspect a religious viewpoint here. Yes?
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No, a truthful one. Do yourself a favour and read a book. Pay especial attention to the parts where Palestinian Arabs were also offered a homeland, and that the partition was made on the basis of population.

Only ~18% of Palestine was owned by Arabs at that time, and yet, they got ~65% of the land. Jews held a clear majority of the citizens on the land which became Israel.

And if you doubt the desert to garden meme, take a look at the Jewish lands as they were in, say, 1900 and then again at partition.

But this is arguably off topic for this thread -- may I suggest you start a thread in, non-USA politics?
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Look... in europe I am facing imprisonment for what I say. Do you think I am taking this debate seriously??? You US guys can say what you like.... I do not have that freedom. FFS!... why is that? Why do you have his freedom? I do not. Why?
 
DirkSteele said:
Look... in europe I am facing imprisonment for what I say. Do you think I am taking this debate seriously??? You US guys can say what you like.... I do not have that freedom. FFS!... why is that? Why do you have his freedom? I do not. Why?
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I'm in Europe and I can say for certain that you can say whatever stupid things you want without facing imprisonment.

Sorry to step on your martyr complex.
 
DirkSteele said:
Look... in europe I am facing imprisonment for what I say. Do you think I am taking this debate seriously??? You US guys can say what you like.... I do not have that freedom. FFS!... why is that? Why do you have his freedom? I do not. Why?
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Huh? Up thread you said you accepted the normative death toll.

Even though you are obviously trivializing the events of the Holocaust, given that there has never been anyone who ran afoul of the EU law in question.
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DirkSteele said:
Look... in europe I am facing imprisonment for what I say. Do you think I am taking this debate seriously??? You US guys can say what you like.... I do not have that freedom. FFS!... why is that? Why do you have his freedom? I do not. Why?
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May I ask a question?

What exactly is the point you are trying to make in this thread?
 
Sorry guys.. I was wrong. Went on the wrong website and had too many whiskies. Had a stupid thought. Now I know I am wrong. Ta.
 
DirkSteele said:
No.. not at all... dunno what happened to my truncated message... I am just saying that this issue will only be settled by science. I am a 54 year old that has always believed in what I was told. I am now starting to believe that the revisionists or whatever.. are correct.I am not anti-semite not a nazi... just please let us stick to science... although maybe science is political? I am not trying to agree or disagree.. but your insult to me is out of order...
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Welcome to the jungle.
 
LemmyCaution said:
Roberto Muehlenkamp, in the link I posted back a page, went through this, quoting the Illinois Holocaust Museum IIRC to the effect that there were fewer than 300,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors, by their expansive definition, alive in 2004.
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The Claims conference claims there were around 600,000 in 2010.
 
TSR said:
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Because they had been treated as a race, and slaughtered by the millions, and the world decided to collectively not let that happen any more.
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Because it was also *their* place of birth in most cases, and most of the rest they had bought and turned from desert to garden.
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Most of the Jews who settled in Israel had been born in Israel? Really? And it was because they had been slaughtered by the millions, the world decided to give Jews a safe haven in the form of Israel? That's what happened? Really?
 
Look guys. I admit that was trying to get my mum into the mental hospital for her 'line dancing' delusions. I admit I tried the 'holocaust' excuse to try confirm her utter madness. I was wrong to do this and now I have suffered badly for my attempts... I am not even mentioned in her will now!!!! So I was so wrong .... give me a break you intelligent beings... I admit my stupidity.
 
Dogzilla said:
Most of the Jews who settled in Israel had been born in Israel?
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Not what I wrote, try again. In an appropriate thread.
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Dogzilla said:
Really?
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If you could read for comprehension, you'd know no, your characterization was not correct.
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Dogzilla said:
And it was because they had been slaughtered by the millions, the world decided to give Jews a safe haven in the form of Israel?
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Once more, try again. May I suggest Non-USA Politics would be the correct forum?
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Dogzilla said:
That's what happened? Really?
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As above.
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Originally Posted by tsr View Post

because it was also *their* place of birth in most cases, and most of the rest they had bought and turned from desert to garden.
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fabrication too.



It's obvious that Jewish people are far to intelligent to be descendents of Semites.
 
Clayton Moore said:
It's obvious that Jewish people are far to intelligent to be descendents of Semites.
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So, how many Jews pre-partition had not been born there?

What evidence do you offer that those pre-partition Jews had *not* bought the 80% of the land they owned, that it wasn't swamp or desert when they bought it, or that they didn't make it farmable?

Your posts show you to know even less about pre-partition Palestine than you do about 9/11, vaccines, the Liberty or the Holocaust. Free hint: try reading a book about it, then get back to us, m'kay?
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Nick Terry said:
Your Katyn analogy isn't a very good one, I'm afraid, because the results of the Nazi and Soviet wartime investigations conflicted. Only some of the issues at stake were agreed upon. Nobody denied that there were mass graves full of Polish officers at Katyn, but the Soviet investigation spun this using forensic technobabble to argue for a 1940 date, despite points highlighted by the Nazis such as the date of documents found on the bodies. The NKVD leant on witnesses in the local area, with a full heavy mob arriving from Moscow. IIRC, some witnesses who had given evidence one way to the Nazis changed their tune when interrogated by the Soviets.

Meanwhile, the NKVD had no control over any other witnesses, including Wehrmacht officers who had been involved in organising the investigation. So it came to a standup fight at Nuremberg, with three witnesses on either side, heard over more than a day. Some reactions to this actually thought the Soviets had the better of the exchange. But the Allied judged prevailed on the Soviet judge to leave Katyn out since there was enough lingering doubt, no doubt fanned by Polish government-in-exile diplomacy and the widely voiced opinion among the Polish diaspora, that Katyn was a Soviet crime.

Then there was a US Congressional committee hearing on Katyn in 1951-2, during the Korean War. Polish exiles and also West Germans had continued to voice the opinion that Katyn was a Soviet crime. The Cold War climate made it opportune for US politicians to determine that this was so. But from then on, through all the bumps and twists of east-west relations, Katyn was seen as a Soviet crime in the West.

One important point you are missing is that so were a host of other sites seen as Soviet crimes - sites that had never been overrun by the Nazis and which had never been investigated using forensics.

This is ultimately why all your pseudolegalistic gambits, or your 'who-saw-what-when' gambits, will fail. The Cold war saw a strong consensus, which solidified ever more strongly, that Stalin had presided over the mass killing and mass death of millions of Soviet citizens. The evidence for this consisted of wishy-washy things like demographics, eyewitness testimonies and journalistic reports. It wasn't based on many documents if any and it wasn't based on forensic investigations. But it's fair to say that by the early 70s, everyone outside of diehard pro-Moscow communist parties in the west accepted Soviet mass murder as a reality.

You're also missing a crucial point, which is that very little of the Soviet investigations of Nazi war crimes were common knowledge by the 70s; it's only after the collapse of communism that we have reconstructed them in detail. Not so with Poland.

Merely pointing to the fact that Poland was a Soviet satellite and assuming that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander would be an epic fail, since Poland didn't even become a one-party state until after the bulk of the investigations were over; and since there were demonstrable differences between the states in the East Bloc for obvious historical and cultural reasons.

One key difference was the degree of transparency and the lengths to which Polish authorities went to publish their source materials. The Poles didn't just stop with putting out German Crimes in Poland in 1946; that was an English translation of a journal of the Polish Main Commission which continues to this very day. The Jewish Historical Commission mutated into a Jewish Historical Institute which began publishing a journal in 1951. The Auschwitz museum started publishing a journal in 1957. The Majdanek museum started publishing a journal in the 1960s. There are documentary collections reproducing materials gathered for the Polish NTN trials and other cases which appeared in 1957, 1960 and on many other dates; in addition to the articles publishing documents in the various aforementioned journals.

Nothing like this degree of openness can be seen with the USSR, which essentially didn't bother to write a proper history of the war under Stalin, and which was extremely slow to commemorate even the frontline aspects of the war until the end of the Khrushchev era, much less acknowledge Nazi atrocities. When they started to do so, Soviet authors published materials cited from Soviet archives, which we can now see check out perfectly. A skilled scholar can parse their footnotes and locate their references very precisely. From the 1960s on you do get accurate information in Soviet accounts; it's just that before the 1960s, there were no accounts at all.

The Polish investigations were thus on display long before the end of the Cold War, and skilled scholars could integrate that material into their work by comparing the materials presented by the Poles with materials uncovered by the west. This especially applies, for what ought to be blindingly obvious reasons, to our knowledge of Auschwitz.
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If my Katyn analogy is "weak" it's because it's not really an analogy. It's not possible to compare Nazi Germany's investigation into Katyn with the Soviet investigation into Katyn because Nazi Germany conducted a proper investigation. They invited representatives of the international community to visit the site to determine what had happened and who was responsible. As you yourself stated, the Soviets conducted their investigation using "forensic technobabble" and the usual NKVD interview techniques to refresh witnesses' memory that the Germans were responsible. The fact that the results of the German and the Soviet investigation differed does not mean there are no lessons to learn from Katyn. Of course the results differed. The German investigation was seeking the truth--that the Soviets were responsible. The Soviets were seeking to cover up their responsibility and blame it on the Germans.

It would be interesting to compare the results the Soviet investigation into Auschwitz with a German investigation into Auschwitz. This comparison is, of course, impossible because the Germans didn't conduct any such investigation. If they had, the results probably would have conflicted with the Soviet investigation as well. Some of the factual issues would probably be agreed upon, e.g., that four million innocent Poles and Russians had been murdered, no matter who did the investigation. But a German investigation would probably try to pretend that some ridiculous ailment nobody has ever heard of, like typhus was fatal so it's not their fault. While the Soviets would say something far more believable like the Germans locked the victims in a room and made them breathe bug spray.

But this digression into Katyn is in response to your lack of awareness and lack of concern as to when western scholars were allowed to visit the the main holocaust sites in Soviet occupied Poland, particularly Auschwitz. Which, btw, you haven't answered. Earlier you had said that the lack of access to the physical plant is irrelevant because scholars in the west had access to documents and witnesses and there was an exchange of information across the iron curtain. You're now saying that a crucial point I've been ignoring is that "very little of the Soviet investigations of Nazi war crimes were common knowledge by the 70s; it's only after the collapse of communism that we have reconstructed them in detail." Besides that, the Soviet Union commited atrocities which they did not investigate either. So I guess you're trying to say that the Soviet Union didn't even investigate Nazi crimes until the 1970, western scholars didn't gain access to any of their investigations until after the fall of communism, and the Soviets were capable of committing their own atrocities and then covering them up so the fact that we didn't have access to the major sites of the holocaust isn't a problem.

It's not a problem because the Poles were the ones who were doing the investigations into the sites of the holocaust anyway. You said: "The Poles didn't just stop with putting out German Crimes in Poland in 1946; that was an English translation of a journal of the Polish Main Commission which continues to this very day. The Jewish Historical Commission mutated into a Jewish Historical Institute which began publishing a journal in 1951. The Auschwitz museum started publishing a journal in 1957. The Majdanek museum started publishing a journal in the 1960s. There are documentary collections reproducing materials gathered for the Polish NTN trials and other cases which appeared in 1957, 1960 and on many other dates; in addition to the articles publishing documents in the various aforementioned journals."

OK, so the Poles were conducting research and their information was making it's way across the iron curtain. Since it was the official Polish government report that established the truth of the steam chambers at Treblinka, I have some doubts about the reliability of their research. Since I've heard countless times that the four million Auschwitz victims that was endorsed by the Poles until 1988 is irrelevant because nobody in the west ever accepted that number, I guess I'm not alone in questioning the veracity of Polish information.

So the question remains, when did the Poles allow western researchers to investigate the death camps on Polish territory? When did they allow westerners to access the archives?
 
Dogzilla said:
If my Katyn analogy is "weak" it's because it's not really an analogy. It's not possible to compare Nazi Germany's investigation into Katyn with the Soviet investigation into Katyn because Nazi Germany conducted a proper investigation. They invited representatives of the international community to visit the site to determine what had happened and who was responsible. As you yourself stated, the Soviets conducted their investigation using "forensic technobabble" and the usual NKVD interview techniques to refresh witnesses' memory that the Germans were responsible. The fact that the results of the German and the Soviet investigation differed does not mean there are no lessons to learn from Katyn. Of course the results differed. The German investigation was seeking the truth--that the Soviets were responsible. The Soviets were seeking to cover up their responsibility and blame it on the Germans.
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There's nothing that says a 'proper investigation' has to involve an international effort. This was done precisely ONCE in the first half of the twentieth century, at Katyn.

And once again, you're missing the point, that one can confirm the reliability of a forensic investigation through conducting an independent investigation using other sources.

The example of the Einsatzgruppen illustrates this perfectly - there was absolutely no contact between the US investigators who discovered the documents, and the Soviet investigators who exhumed mass graves all over the USSR. Yet the sources match.

It would be interesting to compare the results the Soviet investigation into Auschwitz with a German investigation into Auschwitz. This comparison is, of course, impossible because the Germans didn't conduct any such investigation.
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This is nonsense. An investigation does not need to be forensic.

The Soviet investigation into Auschwitz combined site inspections with reading documents and interviewing witnesses. There's hardly a police investigation in history which hasn't interviewed witnesses. Document examination isn't exactly unusual either. This investigation was repeated by the Polish Main Commission, while substantial chunks of the Soviet investigation were removed to Moscow and then not used in the Polish trials of Hoess and the SS Staff. The Poles repeated the same blindingly obvious steps: interview witnesses, read documents, and inspect the sites, adding chemical tests on objects found in the ruins of the crematoria.

Since two separate denier investigations confirmed the presence of cyanide and this was reconfirmed by a non-denier investigation, there is absolutely no reason to doubt that the Poles conducted the tests in 1945, as they reported shortly thereafter and as can be confirmed by reading the original forensic report regarding the tests for cyanides done in 1945.

Separately to the Polish and Soviet investigations, there were multiple investigations in western Europe relying primarily on interviewing witnesses. There are enough details which were conveyed entirely independently of each other on either side of the Iron Curtain that one can regard it as simply impossible that the details were fabricated or scripted.

All subsequent investigations confirmed the original 1940s investigations.

If they had, the results probably would have conflicted with the Soviet investigation as well. Some of the factual issues would probably be agreed upon, e.g., that four million innocent Poles and Russians had been murdered, no matter who did the investigation. But a German investigation would probably try to pretend that some ridiculous ailment nobody has ever heard of, like typhus was fatal so it's not their fault. While the Soviets would say something far more believable like the Germans locked the victims in a room and made them breathe bug spray.
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Stop making crap up.

But this digression into Katyn is in response to your lack of awareness and lack of concern as to when western scholars were allowed to visit the the main holocaust sites in Soviet occupied Poland, particularly Auschwitz. Which, btw, you haven't answered. Earlier you had said that the lack of access to the physical plant is irrelevant because scholars in the west had access to documents and witnesses and there was an exchange of information across the iron curtain.
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I'm still unconcerned about your idiotic attempt to fabricate a gotcha for the reasons already explained. In the 1940s, west European countries plus the Anglo-Saxon powers carried out a wide variety of investigations into Nazi crimes, which accumulated evidence on crimes in Poland and the USSR independently of any investigations conducted in the East Bloc. There were already numerous matches by 1945 which could not possibly have been orchestrated by any single player.

The results of the Polish investigations were transmitted to the west starting really in 1946 - that's when the summaries of the Treblinka and Auschwitz reports were published, and when fuller versions of the investigative materials began to appear in Polish, copies of which found their way to the west.

Western scholars didn't necessarily concern themselves with getting physical access to the sites (a) because they could see very clearly that evidence in the west matched evidence from the east (b) it was a waste of their time since historians don't feel obliged to inspect every fold of ground that might have been trodden by theri subjects (c) they lived in a culture which was far less obsessed with forensics than is the case today and finally (d) a number of authors working on the subject had been in the same frakking camps.

Like, say, Hermann Langbein, who was easily the most prominent author in western Europe writing about Auschwitz in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a survivor of Auschwitz and had seen Krematorium I with his own eyes in 1942, and also witnessed a gassing there. Langbein was the secretary of the Auschwitz survivors' association to about 1960, and visited the camp on many occasions before and after.

The first people who had not been in the camp during the war to visit Auschwitz to inspect the site were probably the officials of the Frankfurt Landgericht in the 1960s. This was in the course of the biggest and longest trial of Nazi crimes conducted in the entire history of West Germany from 1949-1989, and once it was over, the crime of Auschwitz was regarded as a done deal.

I've already stated that I do not know and simply don't care whether the Frankfurt Landgericht noted what should have been obvious from their own source material, that any crematorium in the main camp would have to be a reconstruction since they had the 1946 report saying it had been dismantled and converted to an air raid shelter.

But if you're hellbent on conjuring up your fantasy gotcha, then by all means read the records of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. I'm not going to do it for you and if you persist in shifting burden of proof on this one, will simply tell you to **** off.

You're now saying that a crucial point I've been ignoring is that "very little of the Soviet investigations of Nazi war crimes were common knowledge by the 70s; it's only after the collapse of communism that we have reconstructed them in detail." Besides that, the Soviet Union commited atrocities which they did not investigate either. So I guess you're trying to say that the Soviet Union didn't even investigate Nazi crimes until the 1970, western scholars didn't gain access to any of their investigations until after the fall of communism, and the Soviets were capable of committing their own atrocities and then covering them up so the fact that we didn't have access to the major sites of the holocaust isn't a problem.
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Again, you're missing the points made above, since you're confusing Poland and the USSR and confusing what was published already in the 1940s with what became available later by the 1970s.

The Soviet Union published about 20 reports summarising the results of their Extraordinary Commission investigations during the war. These were submitted at the IMT as USSR-documents. There was a separate volume of unedited EC reports for the easternmost regions liberated already in 1943, eg Smolensk, Krasnodar, Kharkov. It appeared in Russian. A copy sits in the library of the London School of Economics and there are probably other copies in other libraries.

None of the early historians of the Holocaust knew Russian, and they basically ignored the published and translated summaries of the EC reports in their works. Nearly all their references are to documents presented in US trials like the Einsatzgruppen trial. They evidently felt that this was a sufficient amount of evidence to tell their story, and compared to many other authors working in the same era, they had far more evidence because of the bonanza of documents.

So the matches became apparent only when the Soviet Union transmitted copies of other EC reports which had not previously been published. This was done around the same time as historians in the Soviet Union trying to write the history of the war and the Nazi occupation began to use the same sources for their works. Thus, from the 1970s to the 1990s, legal investigators had access to the Soviet reports, and from the mid-1970s so did historians since Yad Vashem acquired copies of the reports from Ludwigsburg. Then in the 1990s, USHMM acquired copies from Moscow. So there are copies floating around all over the place. The citations in Soviet-era historiography or the reproductions in document collections from the 1960s are accurate, except for when the Soviets omitted the word 'Jew' in certain published document collections since they didn't always like acknowledging that one people had been singled out for extermination. Those cases tended to be in Russia, whereas in Belorussia, which was a separate republic within the union, there were no such qualms.

Other than a couple of guys, nobody was still paying much attention since most of the historians of the Holocaust still didn't speak Russian. That changed in the late 80s/early 90s, at which point we enter into the post-Cold War era and can look back and go, 'gee, the Soviets really weren't lying'.

The Soviets had investigated Nazi crimes from 1942-1945 quite extensively, since the EC produced 55,000 separate reports covering the entire length and breadth of the occupation zone, of which precisely one can be considered a fabrication, namely the report on Katyn. There were only further investigations in the USSR when East and West Germany were finishing off their own investigations, thus by the 1970s you have West German prosecutors visiting the USSR to conduct face to face interviews and look at sites, ditto with East German investigators.

By the same time, Soviet historians had finally begun writing about Nazi atrocities at greater length than was the case from 1946 to the 1960s. And the 1940s investigations had been transmitted to the west.

Meanwhile, western historians such as Robert Conquest reconstructed the course of Stalinist mass murder using wishy-washy sources like demographics, eyewitness accounts and didn't even have access to any documents, much less any forensic reports, except for Katyn and Vinnitsa. A guy named Solzhenitsyn came along and made the Gulag really, really famous, to the point where absolutely nobody except diehard Stalinists doubted that Stalin had mass-murdered a very large number of people.

You've still not accounted for this, which leads me to conclude that you have a rather blatant evidentiary double standard.

It's not a problem because the Poles were the ones who were doing the investigations into the sites of the holocaust anyway. You said: "The Poles didn't just stop with putting out German Crimes in Poland in 1946; that was an English translation of a journal of the Polish Main Commission which continues to this very day. The Jewish Historical Commission mutated into a Jewish Historical Institute which began publishing a journal in 1951. The Auschwitz museum started publishing a journal in 1957. The Majdanek museum started publishing a journal in the 1960s. There are documentary collections reproducing materials gathered for the Polish NTN trials and other cases which appeared in 1957, 1960 and on many other dates; in addition to the articles publishing documents in the various aforementioned journals."

OK, so the Poles were conducting research and their information was making it's way across the iron curtain. Since it was the official Polish government report that established the truth of the steam chambers at Treblinka, I have some doubts about the reliability of their research.
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LOL. Nope. That report (3311-PS) derives from reports received by the Polish government-in-exile during the war. The actual postwar Polish government report on Treblinka was submitted by the Soviets. Your doubts are based on a misconception, so you'll have to do a lot better than that.

I also don't think you realise what we're discussing here. The results of Polish investigations were published from 1946 onwards, and those publications often included facsimiles alongside transcriptions of documents. Those results were used in a lot of cases by scholars in the west. Then, from the 1960s, copies of the material were transmitted from the Polish Main Commission to the Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg, and used in the very many West German trials. The sources became familiar to the legal investigators, judges and then soon afterwards to historians. Today we can see these materials in their original files and there is zero room for doubt about them.

The chance that scholars and lawyers in the west were wrong to trust in their senses and note that evidence from the east confirmed and corroborated evidence found in the west, and thus use Polish sources during the Cold War, was already vanishingly small. Today, it's essentially zero.

Since I've heard countless times that the four million Auschwitz victims that was endorsed by the Poles until 1988 is irrelevant because nobody in the west ever accepted that number, I guess I'm not alone in questioning the veracity of Polish information.
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Count up all the details conveyed in the 1946 Auschwitz report and get back to me with a number, then tell me what percentage of the details consists of the 4M figure. Then apologise for this latest example of the fallacy of hasty generalisation from you.

So the question remains, when did the Poles allow western researchers to investigate the death camps on Polish territory? When did they allow westerners to access the archives?
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See above.
 
Nick,

Thanks for taking the effort to summarize all this. It is very helpful as a reminder of and/or primer on the broad contours for the evidentiary base behind the historiography. Much appreciated, great, great post.

LC
 
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In the past weeks, Dogzilla has felt free to cast about vacuous and fanciful claims concerning the Jaeger Report, but, when challenged, he has refused, time and again, to support his claims on the basis of the report itself. His multiples failures on this score cause him not the slightest pause in continuing to lie about the report and its contents when convenient to whatever case he is pleading.

Since neither Dogzilla nor our other JREF revs wish to discuss the substance of this important report, I'll explain further how I see Jaeger's report, by sharing some comments on its context and summarizing its content. This is all about what Dogzilla doesn't want to tell you. The report is, as we shall see, an accounting of a German mass murder campaign in summer and fall 1941 in which over 136,000 Jews were executed with the aim of making the region free of Jews.

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The "Jaeger Report" was written in late fall 1941 by SS-Standartenfuehrer Karl Jaeger. (The rank Standartenfuehrer is equivalent to Colonel.) SS-Standartenfuehrer Jaeger was commander of Einstatzkommando 3 (EK3), which was a Kommando of Einsatzgruppe A. Einsatzgruppe A, which was commanded by SS-Brigadefuehrer Dr. Franz Stahlecker, was attached to Army Group North and operated mainly in the Baltics and Belorussia, with EK3's field of operations being Lithuania. Through late July, EK3 operated in Lithuania alongside EK9 (a Kommando of Einsatzgruppe B and led by SS-Obersturmbannführer Alfred Filbert), which operated in the Vilna area until around 20 July, and Einsatzkommando 2 (part of Einsatzgruppe A, commanded by SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Batz), which operated in the Shavli (Schaulen) area. In addition, Einsatzkommando 1B, another unit of Einsatzgruppe A, operated in Lithuania during these months.

One unit of EK3, Rollkommando Hamann, was particularly active in the Lithuanian countryside. This unit was led by SS-Obersturmfuehrer Joachim Hamann and was described by Jaeger as “a raiding commando under the leadership of SS First Lieutenant Hamann and 8 to 10 reliable men from Einsatzkommando 3” working “in collaboration with Lithuanian partisans”; the partisans under the Rollkommando were led by Bronius Norkus. It was usual for the EK operations to rely on armed Lithuanian partisans subordinated to the German units. In the Vilna area, for example, the Ipatingi Burys, a Lithuanian partisan organization, supported the operations of EK9 during the summer. Jaeger explained his Kommando’s role in the opening of the report: “Take-over of the security police tasks in Lithuania by Einsatzkommando 3 on July 2, 1941 (Einsatzkommando 3 took over the Vilnius area on August 9, 1941 and the Schaulen area on October 2, 1941. Up to this time, Einsatzkommando 9 handled Vilnius and Einsatzkommando 2 handled Schaulen.)” The "security tasks" assumed by Jaeger's Einsatzkommando included those which he described as mass executions of Jews throughout the countryside and in the principle cities of Lithuania.

(As it lists the execution action of early September in Vilna, the Jaeger Report is an important piece of the evidence for that action, which we have discussed at length, reinforcing evidence in journals kept by such Vilna Jews as Kruk and Rudashevski; the diary of Polish journalist Sakowicz; memoirs of other Vilna Jews like Balberyszki, Korczak, Dworzecki; Eichmann trial testimony from Kovner and Dworzecki; and other sources cited in this thread. In the case of Vilna, the Jaeger Report gives us a German document which aligns well with eyewitness accounts, both Jewish and Polish, making the various sources highly credible.)

The Jaeger Report was submitted to Stahlecker and covered the period from 2 July 1941 to 1 December 1941. The report was headed: "Secret Reich Business! 5 copies / Complete list of executions carried out in the EK 3 area up to 1 December 1941." It was, in fact, close to being complete but not fully complete. A single copy of the report survived, the 4th of the 5 copies made. It is dated 1 December and filed from Kovno (Kaunus, Kauen), the EK’s home base. Jaeger explained the contents of the report as follows: “Executions carried out by Lithuanian partisans on my instructions and under my command.” Jaeger lists over 110 individual mass executions in more than 60 locations across Lithuania carried out under his command during the five months covered in the report.

Jaeger entered execution actions in list form, in roughly chronological order, noting the date, location, the number of people killed, and special comments. The entry for each execution action broke the victims into categories, by far the greatest number being Jews, who are almost always listed as Jews, Jewesses, or Jewish children. Other victim categories included Communists, active Communists, females Russian Communists, Communist functionaries, Russian Communists, Lithuanian Communists, Jewish Commnunists, politruks, Poles, mentally ill people, criminals, Lithuanian NKVD agents, Lithuanians, Latvians, Zigeuner (Gypsies), Russian POWs, superfluous Jews, German and Austrian Jews, terrorists, and partisans. Victims also included a convert to Judaism, a Russian guardsman, a mayor, a corpse robber, and an Armenian. Jaeger's report accounts for executions of about 137,000 people in Lithuania – 133,000 directly under Jaeger’s command. The victims were overwhelmingly Jews (~135,000) with a number of victims in the other categories (~2,000). The Jewish victims were mainly adult males before the third week in August. From late August on, more and more Jewish women were killed as well as large numbers of Jewish children – from 22 August to 1 December at least 47,000 women were executed and well over 30,000 children. In a number of entries, Jaeger's addition is off, with his total for the action not matching the totals listed in each category. Some entries represent killings over weeks rather than single execution actions.

Most of the actions – especially those from late August onwards – focused on Jews, with Jaeger’s entries usually made in this format “Nov. 3, 41 – Lazdijai - 485 Jews, 511 Jewesses, 539 J children - [total] 1,535.” An entry of 29 October is a good example, in Jaeger’s words, of how the executions were intended to eliminate Jews: “Oct. 29, 41 -Kauen - F. IX - 2007 Jews, 2920 Jewesses 4273 Jewish children (cleansing of superfluous Jews from the ghetto) - [total] 9,200.” In entry after entry, Jews are listed as the execution victims, always named as a special category. Throughout the campaign, which was in Jaeger's term systematic, the scope escalated - with daily murder totals climbing and the victims expanding from mainly adult male Jews to include all Jews. Jewish women and children were increasingly targeted through August. Another indication of the escalation in the actions against Jews is the fact that only 200 of the 2,000 non-Jewish victims killed during the five months of actions were executed after the third week in August. Not all the Jewish victims were local, as we know: in fact, nearly 5,000 of the victims were transported from cities in Germany and Austria, heading for Riga but diverted to Kovno and executed there on 25 November and 29 November: “Nov. 25, 41 - Kauen - F. IX - 1159 “ 1600 “ 175 “ (evacuees from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt am Main) -2,934” and “Nov. 29, 41 - “ “ 693 “ 1155 “ 152 (evacuees from Vienna and Breslau) - 2,000.”

There are indications that the Jewish victims were not passive but resisted the actions being undertaken against them. At Zagare, on 2 October, Jaeger states that 2,236 Jews were killed, adding that “as these Jews were led away, a mutiny took place, which nonetheless was immediately put down. 7 partisans were wounded” (that is, Lithuanian collaborators with the Germans). Jaeger also wrote that “Attempts to escape, which took place every now and then, were prevented exclusively by my men at the risk of their lives.” Note that these specific cases involve Jewish victims, targeted for execution, reacting with force or trying to escape the Germans to prevent their being killed - and not organized Jewish resistance to the German occupation, which only evolved later than the time period covered by Jaeger's report.

In a few cases, Jaeger provided an additional rationale, beyond eliminating Jews to render Lithuania free of Jews, as a pretext for the mass murder actions. For example, Jaeger described a few of the executions as reprisal actions, in which a large number of Jews was selected for killing in response to a purported shooting or for supporting Soviets. These instances included the murders carried out on 18 August at Fort IV in Kovno – which claimed the lives of “689 Jews, 402 Jewesses, 1 fem. Pole, 711 intell. Jews from the ghetto” and which Jaeger described “as a reprisal for an act of sabotage.” In Jewish sources, however, this action is explained as “the intellectuals action,” in which, according to Avraham Tory’s diary, “The Jewish Council is obliged to provide today 500 Jews, namely, men from the educated classes, to be brought to the authorities at the Ghetto gate.” Also in Kovno, on 4 October, the Germans killed 1,845 Jews – among them 818 children – in a “punishment operation” because “a German policeman was shot at in the ghetto.” Again, Jewish sources, and historians, differ with the pretext stated by Jaeger, explaining this action as the planned liquidation of the city’s small ghetto, with holders of Jordan-scheinen (work cards) saved from the killing, which also included burning of the Jewish hospital with patients inside. As we know from earlier discussion in this thread, in the Great Provocation action of 2 September in Vilna, which claimed over 3,700 Jewish victims, the Germans claimed that a shooting had occurred at the corner of Glezer and Wielka, provoking a reprisal; according to Jaeger, this was a “Special operation because Jews had shot at German soldiers,” although most historians doubt any such shooting occurred. The report also includes an action on 11-12 September in Uzusalis, which Jaeger described as a “Penal operation against inhabitants who fed Russ. partisans and some of whom were in possession of weapons “; 43 non-Jews were shot in this action - no Jews were victims of this "penal operation," almost all of the executions of Jews being for the express purpose of "cleansing" Lithuania of its Jewish population. Jaeger also listed a shooting involving a lone partisan, in which case 3,200 Jews, 5 Lithuanian Communists, 1 Pole, and 1 partisan were murdered in Rokiskis on 15-16 August.

Accordingly, of more than 130,000 Jewish victims, 7,000 or so were said by Jaeger to have been shot in reprisals, that is, innocent people killed on account of purported actions taken by other unidentified persons in alleged anti-German actions, which Jaeger left non-specific. Just three of the 110+ actions are described in any way as relating, however tenuously, to partisans acting to oppose the German occupation and there are no specific details given for such oppositional action, making the rationale flimsy in comparison to the overwhelming majority of the cases. After 22 August, the victims included over twice as many Jewish women and children as Jewish men - a proportion further rendering groundless the latter-day arguments that the killings were organized against partisans. Almost all victims, too, were taken from cities, small towns, or villages to rural killing sites - rather than being found operating in partisan units in the countryside (in Kovno, most victims were killed in two forts on the outskirts of the city). To reiterate, 98% of the victims reported by Jaeger were Jews, mostly described as being killed simply as Jews.

As noted earlier in this thread, Jaeger’s report did not cover all the Jewish victims of the German extermination actions of summer and fall 1941. As EK9, not Jaeger’s EK3, operated in Vilna during July, the totals for Vilna are not complete (many of these unlisted executions are included in the Eriegnismeldungen). Also the Yom Kippur action in Vilna, which EK3 did carry out, is missing from Jaeger’s report. Nor were Jews shot or killed in other ways in the cities, for example, during roundup actions, always listed. And December’s killings, which were not as large as those of the earlier fall, came after the report was submitted and thus do not figure in the totals.

Following his statistical summary of the killings and victims, Jaeger explained the results of his operations and the processes his command used.

To begin with, Jaeger reminded Stahlecker that EK3’s operations supported “the goal of making Lithuania free of Jews” and explained that with the actions he described, “the goal of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been achieved by Einsatzkommando 3.” Jaeger mentioned that, for labor, 4,500 Jews were kept alive in Schaulen (Shavli), 15,000 in Kauen (Kovno), and 15,000 in Wilna (Vilna). Jaeger described these Jews as ones he had also “wanted to kill, including their families” but whose murder “the civil administration (the Reichskommisar) and the army” had forbidden in order to retain them for work: “the Work Jews and their families are not to be shot!” Jaeger describes the resolution of what to do with these “Work Jews” as having been “acrimonious.” The clear conclusion, based on Jaeger’s account, can only be that the agreed and approved means for “making Lithuania free of Jews” was a series of extermination actions in which over 130,000 Jews were killed; Jaeger himself wrote that his report provided a “Complete list of executions carried out in the EK 3 area up to 1 December 1941” and, we have seen, over 98% of the victims of these executions were Jews, in keeping with the stated and approved main goal. Some 34,500 Jews were temporarily spared execution when senior authorities, both regional and military, decided to halt the fall murder actions because of labor needs. The discussion among German authorities, which Jaeger referenced, is covered by many historians, one good summary being found in Yitzhak Arad's Ghetto in Flames, pp 164-171. Arad quotes the statement which Hans Gewecke, Gebeitskommissar with the civil administration in Shavli, gave his superior, Adrian von Renteln, in Septemer: ". . . 4,000 Jews, including members of their families, who are needed as skilled workers, will remain in the Shavli region. . . . It is impossible to carry on work without Jews." The Reichskommissar, Heinrich Lohse, wrote a note in November, summarizing that "Of course, the cleansing of the East of Jews is a necessary task; its implementation, however, must be coordinated with the necessities of war production." At one point, in mid-December, authorities in Berlin admonished those debating whether to spare the lives of some Jews for labor, "Clarification of the Jewish question should be achieved through verbal discussion." The result of the pressure from the armed forces and the civil administration had been a November clarification, in writing, from Trampedech, on behalf of the Political Department of the Reichskommissariat in Riga stating that "I unequivocally demand that liquidation of Jews employed as skilled workers in the armament factories and workshops of the Wehrmacht be stopped, as there is no possibility of replacing them by other local workers at the present time. . . . Arrangements should be made to train local workers as replacements as quickly as possible." This order resulted in the temporary suspension, for an indeterminate amount of time, of the mass executions - which suspension was noted, with protest, in Jaeger's report.

In this context, Jeager added in his own recommendations for his superior’s consideration: “I consider the Jewish operations for Einsatzkommando 3 as essentially completed. The still available Work Jews and female Work Jews are urgently required and I can foresee that post-Winter, this manpower will still be most urgently required. I am of the view that sterilization of the male Work Jews should begin immediately to prevent reproduction. Should a Jewess nonetheless become pregnant, she is to be liquidated.” Jaeger was uncertain how long the “Work Jews” were to be kept alive, but advised curbs so that during their temporary survival they would not reproduce. Sterilizations of Jews were not in fact carried out in Lithuania, but reproduction by Jews was, at least in Kovno, forbidden. (In Kovno ghetto, on 24 July 1942, according to Avraham Tory, “The Gestapo issued an order: pregnancy in the Ghetto is forbidden. Every pregnancy must be terminated. An eighth- or ninth-month pregnancy may be completed. From September on, giving birth is strictly forbidden. Pregnant women will be put to death.” Five days later Tory noted a circular from the Jewish Council informing physicians and midwives of their responsibilities under the Gestapo order. On 7 August, Tory wrote that SS Sergeant “Rauca, accompanied by Garfunkel, toured the institutions of The Ghetto. During the tour he noticed a pregnant woman, in her seventh month. Rauca said: ‘This embryo must perish. If not, it will be taken away from its mother right after birth.’” The Council, on 8 September, “issued an announcement about the ban on pregnancies in the Ghetto. From now on, the Germans declare that any pregnant woman will be killed on the spot.” In early January 1943, Council members were questioned by Keiffler, deputy governor of Kovno city, about ghetto statistics, including ‘how many births? . . . We answered that ever since last September there have been no births in the Ghetto. That was news to him.” Council members explained that "The Gestapo had strictly forbidden women in the Ghetto to give birth, and so they all had to terminate pregnancies." . . . When the word ‘Gestapo’ is uttered the great Keiffler refrains from asking questions. . . . It appears that even a figure like Keiffler does not dare to show any interest in the Gestapo's activities.” In July 1943 Tory cited the death penalty for giving birth as one factor in the ghetto's declining population.)

Jaeger also explained how the executions were organized and implemented. He described “the deployment of a raiding commando with selected men under the leadership of SS First Lieutenant Hamann” who co-opted “Lithuanian partisans” to the Germans’ goals and placed them under his command. To free Lithuania as a whole of Jews, EK3 operated “systematically [to] make every district free of Jews,” adapting its tactics and operations to the unique needs of each individual district and action. The extermination process generally included the following steps leading to mass murders: (1) “The Jews had to be assembled at one or several locations” (notice that, in keeping with the results we have seen, Jaeger specifically describes the victims as Jews, with the implication that the other categories of victims were not the main targets of the operation aimed at “making Lithuania free of Jews”; (2) a site for killing pits was located and appropriate pits were dug; (3) the routes from where the Jews were assembled to the pits was generally 4-5 kilometers, which the victims marched; (4) the Jews (again, Jaeger wrote of the victims as Jews) went to the killing sites in staggered groups usually of about 500 each (motor vehicles were used, but not often, to transport victims); (5) the executions were conducted at the pits.

Jaeger described in depth the complexity of a “nerve-wracking” individual operation, the murder of 3,208 in Roksiskis in mid-August, with 60 Lithuanian partisans (out of 80 available) being used “for transportation and cordoning off duty.” He also explained the orchestration of killings across different locations, requiring the “clever use of time”; the result of good coordination and logistics was the ability of the Germans to carry out “five operations in a week” whilst keeping up with duties in Kovno. In Kovno, Jaeger wrote, the killings, carried out by experienced and skilled Lithuanians, could be “considered parade shootings compared to the often enormous difficulties that had to be dealt with outside” the city and home base of EK3.

Jaeger also explained the participation of his unit’s members: “All the leaders and men of my commando in Kauen have taken part actively in the large-scale operations. Only one official from the police records department was excused from participation due to illness.”

Jaeger’s Einsatzkommando had duties additional to executing Jews and other presumed dangerous persons (Jaeger described the main operations as “the Jewish operations,” again ignoring the other victim categories in favor of the main target, Jews). Jaeger described one of these other duties, as inspecting overcrowded prisons and resolving cases of false imprisonment. He went into some detail about conditions in prisons and cited a case in Jonava where, in a crowded cellar, along with sixteen men, a number of teenaged girls were incarcerated “because they, in order to get work, had applied for admission to the Communist youth.” In this case, the EK had taken “drastic measures” to instill a proper attitude among the local population: “The inhabitants of the prison were assembled in the prison courtyard and checked on the basis of lists and documentation. Those who as a result of harmless offences had been locked up for no reason were assembled in a special group. Those whom we sentenced to 1-3 and 6 months because of their offences were also specially set off, as were those who were to be liquidated, such as criminals, Communist functionaries, politruks and other such riffraff. In addition to the announced punishment, some, according to the offence, especially Communist functionaries, received 10 to 40 lashes with the whip, which were meted out immediately. After completion of the examination, the prisoners were led back to their cells. Those who were to be let free were led in a platoon to the marketplace and there, after a short speech in the presence of many inhabitants, let go. The speech had the following content (it was immediately translated sentence by sentence by an interpreter into Lithuanian and Russian): ‘If we were Bolshevists, we would have shot you, but because we are Germans, we give you your freedom.’ Then followed a severe admonition to abstain from all political activity, to report to the German authorities any hostile activities that came to their attention and to intensively and immediately busy themselves in reconstruction, especially in agriculture. Should one of them again be found guilty of an offence, he would be shot. Then they were released. One cannot imagine the joy, gratitude and enthusiasm that our measures triggered in those who were freed and in the population. We often had to deflate the enthusiasm with sharp words, when women, children and men with tear-filled eyes sought to kiss our hands and feet.” I quote at length from this section because it occupies a significant portion of Jaeger’s report, representing a self-congratulatory moment in which German power and the occupation are celebrated, almost sentimentally, as both an example of educational uplift of the conquered savages of Lithuanian and a kind of German cultural triumph in the expansion of its power in the east. In the two Jonava actions listed in the report, only Jews are given as victims, with over 2,000 Jews killed, among them 244 Jewish children. In the case which Jaeger describes in depth, some of the local non-Jews were led back to their cells, whilst others, deemed less dangerous, were set free, after a stern lecture and serious warning (shooting for not adhering to the guidelines in the lecture. In the main, then, Jaeger was willing to allow moments of mercy for non-Jewish elements, even those duped or potentially dangerous, whilst continuing "systematically" to do away with the region's Jewish population, men, women, and children.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Now, Dogzilla has made clear his rejection of the Jeager Report as a document giving evidence of extermination actions directed against Jews even whilst he has refused to describe the contents of the Jaeger Report. Notwithstanding his refusal, Dogzilla has expounded a bit on his views of the report, characterizing the report as follows:

- The victims were not killed because they were Jews or as part of a policy of exterminating Jews.

- “The Jaeger Report is evidence of anti-partisan actions. Some might say the anti-partisan actions were sometimes excessive but unfortunately excesses have always been a part of war.”

- “[A]ll that documentation clearly shows a policy of ethnic cleansing. Intending to make regions free of Jews does not prove an intent to kill the Jews.” (Dogzilla defines ethnic cleansing the “same way the UN defines it,” as removal of a population group from an area.)

- The operation was a rogue undertaking by lower level troops without authorization.

Our summary of the actual report, however, shows no evidence supporting any one of Dogzilla’s three contradictory claims. In fact, Jaeger himself described the operation as consisting of “executions” principally of Jews with the goal of “making Lithuania free of Jews.” In describing his operations, Jaeger even ignored non-Jewish victims, repeatedly referring to "the Jewish action" and efforts to eliminate Jews from Lithuania.

There is not a single mention of population removal in the report. There are, however, over 100 mentions of mass murders, executions, or shootings with mostly Jewish victims. In fact, in one entry, for 29 October, as we have seen, Jaeger equated the murder of 9,200 Jews at the Ninth Fort in Kovno with “cleansing of superfluous Jews from the ghetto.” That is, for Jaeger the means of population “removal” was mass murder. Removal = execution. In reference after reference, Jaeger described murdering Jews in a matter of fact manner, with the shared assumption of his superiors that freeing the region of Jews required killing them and with pride in his accomplishments. The only point of dispute among the German authorities turned out to be whether to finish the Jews of Lithuania off in fall 1941 – or, preserving some for forced labor temporarily, at a later time. The decision was taken to retain a minority of the Jews for labor and to replace them when possible with local workers, rendering the Jews "superfluous" at that future time.

The report alluded only tangentially to partisans and other opponents of the German occupation – in a few cases describing mass murders of large numbers of Jews in supposed reprisal for small-scale actions that Jaeger does not even bother to describe and for which innocents, numbering in the 100s or 1000s, with no stated connection to the opposition action, were slaughtered. Additionally, in describing his operations in narrative, as we have seen, Jaeger always described the operations as directed against Jews – without even alluding to the other victims, who constituted only about 2% of those killed.

In concert with the shooting actions directed against Jews throughout the eastern occupied territories, we can see an escalation in Lithuania described by Jaeger, beginning in early July with the shooting focused on adult male Jews, not exclusively but mainly, until the third week of August, when the victims became increasingly Jewish women and children. In many cases, these victims were hauled out of urban areas and marched to rural killing sites - and in two cases German and Austrian Jews who had just been shipped into Kovno were slaughtered there.

The operations were commanded by an SS- Standartenfuehrer, subject to close and deliberate review and monitoring by civil administration and Wehrmacht authorities and reported up the chain to an SS-Brigadefuehrer, Jaeger's superior, Stahlecker. The notion that these wide-scope murder actions, aimed at “making Lithuania free of Jews” by means of “executions,” carried out “systematically” in district after district, might be rogue events is either a naïve fantasy or shameless lie. Dogzilla’s vain hope is crushed, too, by the use of some of the data from Jaeger’s report in a subsequent report made by SS-Brigadefuehrer Stahlecker himself. In that report, Stahlecker stated, not mincing words, that “systematically district by district the Lithuanian sector was cleansed of Jews of both sexes.” Stahlecker continued, differentiating the German operations in Lithuania from population removal, noting that “Altogether 136,421 people were liquidated in a great number of single actions. It is worthy of note that many of the Jews used force against the officials and Lithuanian auxiliaries who were carrying this out, and before their execution still expressed their Bolshevik convictions by cheering Stalin and abusing Germany.” Stahlecker did not even take note of the non-Jewish victims, presenting the goal and result of the operations in Lithuania as the cleansing of the region of Jews by means of systematic liquidation. Here, using Jaeger’s data, Stahlecker shamelessly re-invented the course of the actions in Lithuania, heroically pumping up some cases of limited resistance to the murder actions into Bolshevik sentiments and rallying cries. Returning to sobriety, Stahlecker based his conclusion on Jaeger’s account of the so-called Work Jews: “As the complete liquidation of the Jews was not feasible as they were needed for labour, Ghettos were formed which at the moment are occupied as follows:

Kauen approximately 15,000 Jews.
Wilna approximately 15,000 Jews.
Schaulen approximately 4,500 Jews.

These Jews are used primarily for work of military importance. For example up to 5,000 Jews are employed in 3 shifts on the aerodrome near Kauen on earth-works and work of that sort.”

The reason for Dogzilla's reticence becomes obvious: he has no case to make concerning the Jaeger Report. Study of the actual report exposes his false claims and provides a convincing case for the campaigns of EK3 in Lithuania as a genocidal operation aimed at, and successful in, ridding Lithuania of its Jewish population by means of systematic, carefully planned, and well-orchestrated mass execution actions. Along with other evidence, which confirms the contents of the report, it helps show that there is approximately zero percent chance that the actions of EK3 in Lithuania during 1941 were directed against partisans, aimed at population removal, or unapproved rogue incidents.
 
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