Evidence for the Presence of “Gassed” Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 1
Thomas Kues
1. The Importance of the Search for the “Gassed” JewsAccording to mainstream historiography, during a period from December 1941 to the fall of 1944, millions of European Jews were murdered in homicidal gas chambers in six camps in Poland – the “combined concentration and extermination camps” of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek (Lublin) and the “pure extermination camps” of Chełmno (Kulmhof), Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. Revisionist historians, however, dispute this claim, considering it a theory completely lacking of documentary as well as material proof. In a number of studies, they have shown, based on documentary as well as archeological-forensic and technical evidence, that the alleged homicidal gas chambers in these camps never existed, that the alleged numbers of victims did not perish at these sites, and that there never existed a National-Socialist plan for a systematic physical extermination of the European Jews to begin with. The revisionists further propose that the Jews sent to the “extermination camps” and allegedly gassed there were in fact deloused and then sent away, the vast majority of them to the occupied eastern territories[1] [1], so that said camps actually functioned as transit camps. This transit camp hypothesis is in perfect harmony with documented National Socialist Jewish policy as expressed in official and internal reports, documents on the Jewish transports, and even in classified communications between leading SS members.[2] [2] The exterminationists on the other hand are forced to explain away terms such as Durchgangslager (transit camp), Ostwanderung (“wandering to the east”), Umsiedlung (resettlement) and Aussiedlung (emigration) as verbal camouflage.
While the refutation presented by the revisionists alone is enough to make the orthodox “Holocaust“ story collapse like a house of cards, the proponents and defenders of the officially sanctioned exterminationist hypothesis, while doing their best to counter the revisionist onslaught with censorship and various damage control tactics, keep repeating over and over the same question: If the Jews were not gassed, where did they go?
One might argue that the revisionists have no obligation to answer this question. From a moral standpoint this argument is fully valid. As in a court of law, the exterminationists must prove that the crime they allege really took place – the burden of proof is on the accuser. Moreover, since the revisionists have proven that the crime – i.e. the mass gassings – did not take place, they have no moral obligation to search for the missing, alleged victim of the fictional crime. On the other hand, from a scientific viewpoint the question posed by the exterminationists is also fully valid, even if it usually uttered as a merely rhetorical question and part of anti-revisionist propaganda.
Needless to say, the forced deportation of millions of people would leave a significant paper trail. Even if one assumes – and there is good reason for it – that the archives in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere which are not under lock and key have been purged of such “inconvenient” documents, common sense dictates that there should exist at least a number of minor direct or indirect documentary traces surviving in more or less obscure and unlikely places where the unnamed custodians of official history have neglected to look. In addition, there should exist scores of witness testimonies mentioning the presence of allegedly gassed Jews in the occupied eastern territories, and possibly even physical traces of them. Searching for the “gassed” Jews constitutes part of a new, constructive aspect to the revisionist critique, as the orthodox historiography is not only shown to be flawed, but an alternative reconstruction of events in accordance with known facts is offered (however spotty at this early point in time) – a development of revisionism which Carlo Mattogno has termed “affirmationism”.
The present article consists of a comprehensive survey of the hitherto discovered evidence for the presence of “gassed” Jews in the east, and should be regarded as a stepping stone to further future research. Some of the evidence has already been presented in Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno’s study on the Treblinka camp[3] [3], as well as in a recent study on the Sobibór camp[4] [4] which I co-authored together with Graf and Mattogno. It should be mentioned here that many pieces of evidence were located by the Spanish revisionist Enrique Aynat and the late Belgian revisionist Jean-Marie Boisdefeu. The majority of the finds presented below, however, are published here for the first time.
2. The Deportation of Jews from Western-, Central-, Northern and Southern Europe According to Mainstream Historiography
In order to fully understand the significance of the evidence surveyed in the present article, it is necessary to acquaint oneself with the documented historical background, namely the deportations of Jews from the German-controlled European territories. How many Jews were deported from the different countries, and when? The sections below will clarify this context.
2.1. The Deportation of Jews from Altreich, Ostmark and the Protectorate
It is a fact fully recognized by mainstream historians that, between early November 1941 and late November 1942, more than 80 transports brought a relatively large number from Altreich (“The Old Empire”, a term referring to Germany within its 1938 borders), Ostmark (Austria) and the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia directly into the occupied eastern territories. The destinations were, in order of frequency, Riga, Minsk, Maly Trostinec (Belarus), Kaunas (in German Kovno), Baranoviči (Belarus) and Raasiku (Estonia).[5] [5] None of the documented transports were sent to the Ukraine or to the occupied parts of Russia proper. Preserved railway documents in combination with a German report from July 1942, enables us to draw the conclusion that, all in all, 66,210 Jewish deportees were sent directly into the occupied eastern territories.[6] [6]
A somewhat greater number were sent to the ghettos in the General Government and from there later on to the “extermination camps”. A total of 65,892 Jews were deported to Auschwitz from Germany, Austria and Theresienstadt during 1942-1943; 35,561 of these were “gassed without registration”, i.e. transited east. A total of 10,933 Jews who had been sent from the Altreich, Ostmark and the Protectorate to the Łodz Ghetto were deported to Chełmno in the first half of 1942 (cf. Section 3.3.1.) and “gassed” there, i.e. transferred east. According to Jules Schelvis, 23,500 German and Austrian Jews were sent to the “pure extermination camp” Sobibór.[7] [7] In Treblinka, 18,004 Jews from Theresienstadt were “gassed”.[8] [8] Yitzhak Arad further speaks of “tens of thousands” of German and Austrian Jews being sent to Treblinka as well as Bełżec.[9] [9] This means that some 100,000 Jews from the abovementioned territories were deported to the east via transit camps.
2.2. The Jews of Central Europe
2.2.1. The Jews of Poland
The vast majority of the Jews allegedly gassed in the “extermination camps” were Polish Jews. Thus one would expect a search for the “gassed” Jews to focus mainly on this group. There are, however, good reasons for not doing so. First there is the great similarity between Polish, Baltic, Byelorussian, Russian and Ukrainian Jewry. All of these groups had until the early 20th century been subjects of the Russian Czar, and besides speaking closely related Slavic tongues (except for most of the Baltic Jews), nearly all of them spoke Yiddish. A Polish Jew would therefore have been able to go more or less unnoticed among for example Russian Jews. More importantly, it is a commonly recognized fact that a large number of Polish Jews either managed to escape or were evacuated east, first at the outbreak of the war in 1939, and later also in connection with the launch of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. Not all of those Jews found their way to the interior of Russia or Central Asia in; a relatively large number also remained in Belarus while smaller numbers lingered also in the Ukraine and the Baltic States. Hersh Smolar, the Jewish partisan leader operating near Minsk whose memoirs are discussed below (Section 3.3.3.), was one of the Polish Jews who had fled to Belarus in 1939 and remained there at the time of the German invasion. It is thus very difficult to use references to the presence of Polish Jews in the occupied eastern territories as a mean to verify the revisionist hypothesis. For their presence to be of significance, the mentioned Jews would have to be reported as deported from Poland to the east from December 1941 onward, following the opening of the first “extermination camp” Chełmno (Kulmhof) in the Warthegau District.
2.2.2. The Jews of Slovakia
The total number of Jews in Slovakia as per the census of 15 December 1940 amounted to 88,951.[10] [10] A deportation agreement reached between Germany and Slovakia in 1941 stipulated that the Slovakian government would pay Germany 500 Reichsmark per deportee for “shelter, food, clothing, and retraining” (Unterbringung, Verpflegung, Bekleidung und Umschulung), a cost which Raul Hilberg naturally dismisses as “fictional expenses”.[11] [11] Deportations from Slovakia began on 26 March 1942. Up until October the same year a total of 57,752 Jews were deported; 18,746 were sent to Auschwitz while 39,006 were taken to a ghetto in Nałęczów near Lublin. From this ghetto some 9,000 of them proceeded to Majdanek, while 24,378 were sent to be gassed at Sobibór.[12] [12] Jules Schelvis on the other hand concludes that, all in all, “around 26,000” Slovakian Jews were “gassed” at Sobibór.[13] [13] During 1942 some 7,000 Slovak Jews managed to escape to Hungary.[14] [14] Of the Jews that remained in Slovakia some 13,000 – 14,000 were eventually arrested. In October 1944, 7,936 of them were deported to Auschwitz, while 4,370 were sent to Sachsenhausen and Theresienstadt.
2.2.3. The Jews of Hungary
The deportation of Jews from Hungary did not begin until May 1944. Since the German-controlled areas in the east were shrinking at a rapid rate during that year, it is extremely unlikely that any of the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau ever reached the occupied eastern territories[15] [15], with two exceptions: 1) a transport of some thousand Hungarian women which was sent to Latvia, and of which approximately 700 were later transferred by ship from Kaunas to Stutthof on 4 August 1944;[16] [16] 2) a transport of 500 Hungarian women, possibly from the Transylvanian town of Bistritz (Bistriţa) that arrived in the Estonian camp Vaivara in June 1944.[17] [17] It is not impossible that the latter group consisted of a subset of the first group, as one source states the Jewesses from Bistritz arrived via Riga.[18] [18] Two further special cases of Hungarian or nominally Hungarian Jews reaching the east already in 1941 will be discussed below in Section 3.3.3.
2.3. The Jews of the Netherlands, Belgium and France
2.3.1. The Jews of the Netherlands
According to a registration carried out by the German occupational authorities on 10 January 1941, there lived 140,000 full Jews liable to deportation on the territory of the Netherlands, whereof 80,000 in the city of Amsterdam.[19] [19] From July 1941 the Dutch Jews had to have their identification papers stamped with the letter “J” for “Jood” (Jew), and from 29 April 1942 they were forced to wear a yellow Star of David with the inscription “Jood” on their outer clothing.[20] [20] On July 17, 1942 transports of Dutch Jews bound for Auschwitz began departing from the collection camp of Westerbork. Raul Hilberg states that 105,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands and presents the following breakdown according to the points of arrival[21] [21]:
| Mauthausen (1941 and 1942) | 1,750 |
| Various Concentration Camps | 350 |
| Auschwitz Complex | 60,000 |
| Sobibór | 34,300 |
| Theresienstadt | 4,900 |
| Bergen-Belsen | 3,750 |
| Allegedly perished deportees | approx. 99,900 |
| Returning deportees | 5,100 |
| Deaths in the Netherlands | approx. 2,000 |
| Mortality surplus | approx. 2,000 |
| Migration and escapes | up to 5,000 |
| Remaining Jews in Sept. '44 | 20,000-22,000 |
| Total: | 134,000 - 136,000 |
2.3.2. The Jews of Belgium
Hilberg writes that the Jewish population of Belgium on the eve of the German invasion “most probably” amounted to more than 65,000 people, the majority of whom did not possess Belgian citizenship but were immigrants from Eastern Europe as well as refugees from the Third Reich. At the time of the German invasion “thousands” of the Jews fled south, whereas another 8,000 were shoved by the German occupants into France. A subsequent registration of the Jews encompassed 55,670 Jews on Belgian territory and another 516 Jews in two French départements attached to the Brussels military administration.[32] [32] Starting in August 1942, a total of 25,000 Jews were deported from Belgium to Auschwitz, and of those fewer than 1,500 returned after the war. According to Hilberg, “several hundred” Belgian Jews died in their country during arrest or committed suicide.[33] [33] Approximately 25,000 Belgian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and of these some 15,700 are alleged to have been gassed; a smaller number was also sent to Majdanek.
2.3.3. The Jews of France
At the end of 1939, some 280,000 Jews lived in France; in Paris alone there were more than 200,000.[34] [34] The first French transport bound for Auschwitz left on 27 March 1942.[35] [35] By March 1943, the number of Jews deported from France had reached 49,906.[36] [36] A total of 75,000 Jews were deported from France; whereof at least two-thirds were foreign-born people who did not possess French citizenship.[37] [37] Hilberg lists the destinations of the deportees as follows[38] [38]:
| Auschwitz | 69,000 |
| Maidanek | 2,000 |
| Sobibór | 2,000 |
| Kaunas | 1,000 |
2.3.4. The Importance of the Transports from the Abovementioned Countries
The Jews deported from the Netherlands, Belgium and France are of key importance to the issue at hand. Not only are good statistics on the Jewish populations available; the transports from these three countries were carefully recorded, and there further exist detailed transport lists with personal data on the deportees. The documented facts leave very little or no room for “unknown” direct transports of Jews from those countries to the east similar to the 1941-42 Altreich transports to the Baltic States and Belarus. The only such recorded deportation, the 15 May 1944 convoy from Drancy to Kaunas and Tallinn, is easily distinguishable due to the late date (the German withdrawal from the Baltic States began only some months later). In other words: any reliable report of Dutch, Belgian or French being present in the occupied eastern territories from the spring and summer of 1942 onward (and up until May 1944 in the case of the French Jews) is to be regarded as strong evidence for the revisionist transit camp hypothesis.
2.4. Jews of Other Nationalities
2.4.1. Italy
In Italy, the deportation of Jews did not begin until after the overthrow of Mussolini by Badoglio and the German take-over of the northern half of the country. The first transport of 1,007 Italian Jews departed for Auschwitz on 18 October 1943. In November and early December of the same year two transports carrying a total of some 1,000 Jews departed from northern Italy. The deportations continued in small numbers until early August 1944. In total, more than 7,500 Jews were deported from Italy.[41] [41] For the reason discussed in Section 2.2.3., it is highly unlikely that any of the Italian Jews except for the approximately 2,000 deported between October and December 1943 ever reached the occupied eastern territories.
2.4.2. Greece
In 1941 Greece was divided into three parts: one (the north, including most of Thrace) which was incorporated into Bulgaria, one (the largest, including Athens) under Italian jurisdiction and finally one (including Salonika and the East-Aegian area) under German jurisdiction. While the latter two parts were jointly administered by a puppet government in Athens, the Italians and the Germans were split in their treatment of the Jews. In the German jurisdiction the Jews were collected in the Salonika Ghetto during 1942. In February 1943, the first transports left the ghetto for Auschwitz. A total of 45,989 Jews are reported to have been deported from Salonika up until the cease of transports in August 1943.[42] [42] According to Hilberg, 45,000 of them were sent to Auschwitz, whereas the rest – “privileged and foreign Jews” – were shipped to Bergen-Belsen. Yitzhak Arad, resting his argument on a railroad document as well as two eye-witnesses, suggests that at least one of the transports from Salonika in March 1943, carrying 2,800 Jews, was sent to Treblinka.[43] [43]
In early 1943 there lived 13,000 Jews in the Italian jurisdiction. Following the downfall of Mussolini on 8 September 1943, this part of Greece was taken by German forces together with the former Italian-occupied territories of Albania, Montenegro and the Dodecanese islands. All in all approximately 16,000 Jews lived in these areas. Up until July 1944 more than 14,000 of these Jews had been deported, primarily to Auschwitz. In all of the mentioned areas some 12,000 remained at the end of the occupation.[44] [44]
2.4.3. Bulgaria
Approximately 50,000 Jews lived in Bulgaria proper before the war (a census in 1934 gave their number as 48,565). Since Bulgaria was a weak ally of Germany rather than a mere puppet state, it was able to procrastinate on a promised deportation of its Jews, and in the end, the Jews in Bulgaria proper were never deported.[45] [45] However, in the northern parts of Greece (Thrace) annexed by Bulgaria in 1941 together with Macedonia, there lived some 14,000 Jews, according to an agreement signed by the SS and representatives of the Bulgarian government on 2 February 1943. Of these some 5,500 Jews lived in the former Greek areas, and in March that same year 4,215 of them were sent by ship from Vienna and from there by train to Treblinka.[46] [46] A further transport with 2,382 Jews was sent from Skopje (Macedonia) to Sobibór in March 1943.[47] [47] All in all 11,343 of the Jews in the annexed territories (7,122 from Macedonia and 4,221 from Thrace) had been deported by 5 April 1943 according to a German document.[48] [48]
2.4.4. Croatia
Similar to Greece, the administrative territory of Croatia was split into a German and an Italian zone, with ensuing negotiation troubles concerning the deportation of the Jews. During the war Slovenia was slit up between Italy, Germany, Hungary and Croatia, while Bosnia and Herzegovina in its entirety was ceded to Croatia. In the whole of the new Croatia there lived some 35,000 Jews.[49] [49] 19,800 are reported to have died in Croatian camps, primarily Jasenovac, during the following years.[50] [50] During the summer of 1942, 4,972 Jews were sent to Auschwitz via Maribor. A further 2,000 Croatian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in May 1943.[51] [51] Yet other Croatian Jews escaped to neighboring countries and were eventually deported from there, which makes the orthodox victim estimate somewhat floating. It is generally estimated that some 8,000 Croatian Jews[52] [52] were “gassed” at Auschwitz.
2.4.5. Serbia
According to Raul Hilberg, barely 16,000 Jews lived in Serbia at the outbreak of the war.[53] [53] Due to the significant involvement of Jews in the very active Serbian partisan movement, a large number of Serbian Jews were killed as hostages. On 8 September 1941 the German plenipotentiary in Belgrade, Felix Benzler, sent a telegram to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which he requested the deportation of the male Serbian Jews (in all some 8,000) to an island in the Danube Delta (in Romania).[54] [54] On 11 September Martin Luther replied that the Jews in question should instead be interned in labor camps.[55] [55] Already on the following day Benzler sent a new request for the deportation of the male Serbian Jews, arguing that for security reasons such internment was unfeasible, and that if the Jews could not be sent to Romania as per his request, they would be expelled to the General Government or to Russia.[56] [56] The Ministry of Foreign Affairs now turned to Adolf Eichmann, who declared a deportation of the male Jews to the General Government or Russia “impossible” and advised that the Jews in question be shot.[57] [57] Nevertheless Ribbentrop on 2 October contacted Himmler to ascertain if the male Jews could be deported somewhere.[58] [58] In the end, however, the decision was made to shoot the male Jews of Serbia. Thus it is a fact that a large number of Serbian Jews were shot, not primarily because of their ethnicity, but because of reasons of military security, and this as a last resort. As for the remaining Serbian Jews – the women, children, and elderly – it is alleged by mainstream historians, chiefly on basis of the so-called Turner document, that these were murdered in “gas vans” near Belgrade (in fact near the Sava River) in March-May 1942.[59] [59] However, in his summary of the negotiations on the Serbian Jews from 25 October 1941, Franz Rademacher, chief of the “Judenreferat” at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, noted that these Jews “would be evacuated by ship to the collection camps in the east” (auf dem Wasserwege in die Auffanglager im Osten abgeschoben).[60] [60] This would suggest that the remaining Serbian Jews were in fact deported east, possibly via the Sava River and the Danube to Romania.[61] [61]
2.4.6. Norway
1,800 Jews lived in Norway as of 1939.[62] [62] 767 of them were deported starting on 19 November 1942. Of these deportees, 532 were sent to Auschwitz, were 346 were “gassed without registration”.
2.4.7. Denmark
When the German occupation of Denmark began in April 1940, there lived approximately 6,500 in the country. In early autumn 1943, 447 Danish Jews were deported to Theresienstadt, but none of them were ever sent on to Auschwitz. In a massive underground operation in October 1943, 5,919 Danish Jews were taken in boats to neutral Sweden. Thus not a single Danish Jew reached the “extermination camps”.[63] [63]
2.4.8. Romania
During the war years Romania under the Antonescu regime pursued a more or less independent Jewish policy of its own, which mainly consisted in deporting Romanian Jews to Transnistria, an annexed region east of the Dniestr River.[64] [64] Since the Romanian deportations are only indirectly related to National Socialist Jewish Policy, and since much is unclear about the deportations to – and from – Transnistria, Romanian Jewry will fall outside the scope of the present article. For an excursus related to Transnistria, see below Section 3.1.2.
2.4.9. Luxembourg
In 1935 there lived 3,144 Jews in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. During the first years of the war most of them fled the country, and by July 1941 there were only some 800 left. On 16 October 1941 a train with 334 Luxembourg Jews departed for the Łódź Ghetto. A few dozen of these Jews were later sent on to Auschwitz or the Lublin District. During 1942 the remaining Jews in Luxembourg were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto.[65] [65]
2.5. The Number of Jews Deported to the Occupied Eastern Territories
According to the revisionist hypothesis, the Jews sent to the occupied eastern territories can be divided into two main groups: 1) the Jews from the transports sent directly to the Baltic States and Belarus from Altreich, Ostmark and the Protectorate in 1941-42 (recognized by mainstream historiography); 2) the Jews who were allegedly “gassed without prior registration” in the six “extermination camps” between December 1941 and late 1943. For the first group we have rather reliable numbers (see above, Section 2.1.). For the second group we have reliable figures of arrivals to the Reinhardt camps (Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, here also including Majdanek/Lublin) for 1942, and the Korherr Report further provides a figure for Chełmno (where no “gassings” took place in 1943). For the year of 1943 we must to a certain extent rely on estimates presented by mainstream historians. In the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we have to rely on a number of sources, which are more or less exact. In order to not make this article longer than necessary, I will here refer the reader to a revisionist study wherein these calculations are presented in detail.[66] [66] In the table below the number of Jews deported to the east is broken down according to routes and nationality (Polish and non-Polish Jews). One should recall here that not all of the non-Polish Jews are Western Jews (even if they form the majority).
| Deported via the Aktion Reinhardt camps: | ~1,429,000 |
| Deported via Chelmno: | ~145,300 |
| Deported via Auschwitz: | ~354,000 |
| Deported directly w/o any stop-over in a camp | ~ 66,200 |
| Total: | ~1,994,500 |
| - of which Polish Jews: | ~1,571,500 |
| - of which non-Polish Jews: | ~423,000 |
Addendum: A List of the Operational Periods of the Transit Camps
- Chełmno (Kulmhof): 8 December 1941 – latter half of 1942; summer of 1944;[70] [70]
- Auschwitz-Birkenau: January or February 1942[71] [71] – 1 November 1944;[72] [72]
- Bełżec: 17 March 1942[73] [73] – early December 1942;[74] [74]
- Sobibór: 3 May 1942[75] [75] – 14 October 1943;[76] [76]
- Treblinka: 23 July 1942[77] [77] – 19 August 1943;[78] [78]
- Majdanek (Lublin): September-October 1942[79] [79] – 1943(?).[80] [80]
3. A Survey of the Testimonial Evidence
The testimonial evidence can here be divided into two sub-categories, indirect sources in the form of news reports, statements from exile governments, underground publications etc. where the origin of the information is usually not made explicit, and direct information in the form of eyewitness statements. We will begin our survey with the former category.
3.1. Reports in Newspapers and Periodicals
3.1.1. American Jewish Yearbook
The American Jewish Yearbook is one of the most comprehensive contemporary sources on the development of the Jewish communities the world over. In its 1943 edition the Yearbook had the following to tell its readers about the developments in Poland:
“Among the more important of these transfers of population was the expulsion of all but 11,000 of the Jews of Cracow, who were deemed ‘economically useful’ and put into a ghetto; those expelled, over 50,000 in number, were sent to Warsaw, Lublin and other cities. The stay of those sent to Lublin was short, for most of them were sent farther east, those remaining being penned in a ghetto in one of the suburbs of the city. Also sent east were most of the Jews who still remained in the western Polish provinces incorporated into the Reich.”[81] [81]Three of the “extermination camps” were located within the Lublin district: Majdanek (in Lublin itself), Sobibór and Bełżec. With “western Polish provinces incorporated into the Reich” is meant the Warthegau district, from which Jews were transferred east via Chełmno. In the edition from the following year (1944, with the year in review being 1943) we read:
“There are reports of Jewish deportees from Holland and other Western countries having been sent to the occupied Soviet territories for military work, but their numbers and their fate are still shrouded in darkness.”[82] [82]3.1.2. Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz
The Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz (Israelite Weekly for Switzerland) published many reports on the progress of the “Final solution” during the war years. In its issue from 16 October 1942 the weekly reported (p. 10f.):
”For some time there has been a trend toward dissolution of the ghettos in Poland. That was the case with Lublin, then it was Warsaw’s turn. It is not known how far the plan has been carried out already. The former residents of the ghetto are going farther to the east into the occupied Russian territory; Jews from Germany were brought into the ghetto to partly take their place. […] Of late, transports of Jews from Belgium and other western European countries were observed in Riga, but they moved on immediately to other destinations.”In the issue of 27 November 1942 we read:
“On a daily basis trains depart from Berlin for the east, part of them [destined] for the ghettos, part of them for drainage work in the territories of eastern Poland and Russia. Authorities in New York are reported to have learned that a Jewish settlement rayon for all the Jews of Western Europe is to be established in the former Polish-Russian border zone and if necessary used as a political means of pressure. The deportations from Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium and France are to cease by the end of this year. The identification papers of the deported Jews are destroyed and their names stricken out; they are henceforth only designated by numbers. It is therefore hardly possible to keep up a correspondence. [...]. In Paris 4,000 Romanian Jews and Jewesses have been arrested and taken out of the city. They were allowed to bring food for two days. [...] The London-based newspaper ‘France’ carries a notice that 20,000 Jews deported from France have arrived in Bessarabia in a pitiful state. The trains went straight to Kischinev [Chisinau] and Calarisi to deliver the prisoners to the local ghettos there.”With “the former Polish-Russian border zone” is almost certainly meant the area around the border between Poland and Russia as of 1920-1939 (note that the journal apparently uses “Russia” as synonymous with the USSR). Since, as already mentioned, the eastern part of Poland, including Pinsk and most of the Pripet marshes, fell to the Byelorussian Soviet Republic in 1939, this implies that the “Jewish settlement rayon [district] for all the Jews of Western Europe” consisted of a part of Belarus (Minsk was located only some thirty kilometers from this border).
At the time, Kishinev was located very near the border of the Transnistrian Reservation (between the rivers of Dniestr and Southern Bug), to where Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were deported en masse by the Romanian authorities. As mentioned in Section 2.4.8 above, the Transnistria issue will not be discussed here in depth. However, it ought to be mentioned that, while most of not all mainstream historians today know nothing of deportations of French Jews to Transnistria, an article from 1953 by the Jewish-American scholar Joseph B. Shechtman confirms that there are indications of transports of Jews from France as well as other countries in Western Europe to that area:
“There are indications that in 1943 Transnistria began to serve as a kind of a ‘reservation’ for deportation not only of Rumanian Jews, but of Jews from other Nazi-dominated countries. On February 28, 1943, the London press reported that thousands of Jews who had been transported from their homes in Germany, Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Protectorate to the ‘model concentration camp’ at the fortress of Theresin [i.e. Theresienstadt] in the Protectorate, were being sent to Transnistria.[83] [83] Eight months later, reports from Bucharest stated that freight trains crowded with Jews deported from France, Holland and Belgium ‘continue to reach the city of Jassy en route to Transnistria,’ where they ‘are isolated in camps together with Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina.’[84] [84] Jews from Germany and Bulgaria, as well as 700 Polish Jews, were reported among the deportees in Mogilev.[85] [85]
A confidential report of the International Red Cross, dated January 20, 1944, states that, according to official Rumanian statistics, there were on September 1, 1943, 82,098 Jews in Transnistria. Of this number, 50,741 were deported Rumanian Jews, while the remainder were Russian Jews, native inhabitants of this area. […]. There are reliable indications that considerable numbers of Jews from Transnistria were sent to work on fortifications along the German-held eastern front. The Krakauer Zeitung of August 13, 1942 hinted at this when it stated that the Jews deported to Transnistria ‘were housed in large ghettos until an opportunity arose for their removal further east.’”[86] [86]The claim of transports from Theresienstadt to Transnistria requires some elucidation. During 1943 a total of 17,068 Jews were deported from Theresienstadt in 10 transports. Four of them took place in January and consisted of in all some 6,000 passengers. In February a single transport departed carrying 1,001 passengers. During the period March-August no transports took place; only in September were transports resumed again.[87] [87] The first three of the January transports were sent to Auschwitz, as was the single February transport. From the information provided by Danuta Czech in her Kalendarium[88] [88] we can reconstruct the fate of these four transports as per the table below:
Transports from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz January-February 1943
| Date | Code: | Deportees | Registered | "Gassed" |
| Jan. 20 | Cq | 2000 | 418 | 1582 |
| Jan. 23 | Cr | 2029 | 227 | 1802 |
| Jan. 26 | Cs | 993 | 284 | 709 |
| Feb. 1 | Cu | 1001 | 218 | 783 |
| Total: | 6023 | 1147 | 4876 |
3.1.3. Judisk Krönika
In a study on the Swedish response to the ”Holocaust”, American-Jewish historian Steven Koblik has the following to say on the Swedish-Jewish periodical Judisk Krönika (Jewish Chronicle) issued in Stockholm:
“One center of activity [in Sweden] was with the pro-Zionist groups. They had a journal, Judisk Krönika, founded in 1932, that publicly tried to change the official congregation policy and influence the larger Swedish community. The journal developed close contacts in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, and provided some of the best information on the extent of the Final Solution found in any Western publication. The journal also became a source of information for other non-Jewish publications.”[91] [91]During the war years, this well-informed journal carried a number of news stories that clash violently with the now established historical picture of the “Holocaust”. In the issue from September 1942 we read:
“Jewish school children of more than 14 years of age are being deported from the Third Reich as well, mainly to Ukraine, where they are deployed in harvest work. The children are informed about their deportation only a few hours earlier and are allowed to take along only the mere necessities.”[92] [92]No transports of German Jews to the Ukraine are known by mainstream historiography, which inevitably leads to the conclusion, that if the above information is correct, then the children in question reached their destination via one of the “death camps”.
In its issue from the following month Judisk Krönika reported:
“A large number of Jews who had been interned in German concentration camps have been transported to Poland, where they are deployed to drain the swamps of Pinsk. The Dachau camp is now devoid of any Jews. Most Jews from the Rhineland, including those of Cologne, have been transferred to the ghetto of Riga.”[93] [93]While the city of Pinsk did indeed belong to Poland between 1920 and 1939, it fell to the Byelorussian Soviet Republic after the division of Poland. As we will see, the Pripet marshes and the towns and cities near it, such as Pinsk and Bobruisk, will crop up again and again in our material.
In the same issue (October 1942) we read:
“The transport of this tremendous large amount of people [from Western Europe] to Poland was accompanied by the mass expulsion of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto and from other locations. These people were deported farther east, and since they were more or less unfit for labor due to starvation and diseases, one can imagine what fate awaited them there.”[94] [94]According to the Holocaust historians, the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto were killed en masse in Treblinka, not “deported farther east”. Since the Polish-Jewish underground press had reported since August 1942 that Treblinka was a “death camp” where all arriving Jews were steamed or poisoned with a delayed-action gas, this news notice can only mean that the “news” of the “truth” about Treblinka had not yet reached the well-informed Swedish-Jewish journal (which seems unlikely) or that its writers did not believe the wild atrocity stories and had more trustworthy information available to them.
Finally, in the issue of May/June 1944 we read:
“Certain sparse information begins to seep through about the fate of those Jews who have been deported from Western Europe to Eastern Europe. According to a communication from Lithuania, thousands of Jews from Holland, Belgium, and northern France have been deported to Kaunas, where many have been shot to death in the city’s fortress. In Vilnius as well a large number of Jews from Western Europe has been executed. Some 20,000 Jews from Western Europe are still in the city’s ghetto. The Germans are executing several hundred of them every day, and the Gestapo compiles lists of the next victims. Many Jews managed to escape from the various ghettos and to join partisan groups, and today there is a large number [of Jews] from Western Europe who are fighting together with the Lithuanian partisans.”[95] [95]While the Judisk Krönika had reported of mass killings in Majdanek and Auschwitz in November 1943[96] [96] and about the “death chambers” of Treblinka (where “many thousands of Jews have been killed”) in September 1943[97] [97] as well as in its May-June 1944 issue[98] [98], the above quoted passage demonstrates that one still believed a large number of Western Jews, including Dutch, Belgian and French Jews, to be present in the occupied eastern territories. As for the claim that the Germans executed thousands of Western Jews in Vilna in 1944, as well as similar claims elsewhere, the question of the eventual fate of the deportees to the eastern territories will be addressed in the concluding part of this article; here it will suffice to point out that if the Soviets at the end of the war had discovered remains of hundreds of thousands or even millions of deported Western and Polish Jews in mass graves on formerly German-occupied Soviet territory, they could easily have dispensed with the vapid claims about gas chambers and extermination camps and presented concrete forensic evidence at the Nuremberg trial.
Regarding the notion of mass shootings of Jews at Vilna in 1944, it is worth noting what historian Andrew Ezergailis has to say about similar claims concerning Latvia:
“Some memoir writers tell us that just before the move to send Jews back to Germany, there were large massacres in Latvia. This contention, however, must be deemed ‘folklore,’ because to date no archival information has surfaced that would confirm the murders. For example the Soviet Extraordinary Commission records no fresh 1944 grave sites.”[99] [99]3.1.4. New York Times
On 15 June 1943 the New York Times reported on a communiqué issued by the Belgian government in exile, according to which most of the Belgian Jews had been sent to concentration camps in Germany, Poland, and in the occupied Russian territories.
3.1.5. Notre Voix
In April 1944 the communist French underground newspaper Notre Voix told its readers:
“Thank you! A news item that will delight all Jews of France was broadcast by Radio Moscow. Which of us does not have a brother, a sister, or relatives among those deported from Paris? And who will not feel profound joy when he thinks about the fact that 8,000 Parisian Jews have been rescued from death by the glorious Red Army! One of them told Radio Moscow how he had been saved from death, and likewise 8,000 other Parisian Jews. They were all in the Ukraine when the last Soviet offensive began, and the SS bandits wanted to shoot them before they left the country. But since they knew what fate was in store for them and since they had learned that the Soviet troops were no longer far away, the deported Jews decided to escape. They were immediately welcomed by the Red Army and are presently all in the Soviet Union. The heroic Red Army has thus once again earned a claim on the gratitude of the Jewish community of France.”[100] [100]While it may be argued that both the French communists and Radio Moscow could be suspected of spreading propaganda, it is difficult to see how the presence of French Jews in the Ukraine could have lent itself to propaganda, especially since the Soviet Union were at the same time disseminating propaganda about German “extermination camps”.
3.2. Other Indirect Sources
3.2.1. E.M. Kulischer
In 1943, the demographics professor and member of the International Labour Office at Montreal, Canada, Eugene M. Kulischer published a survey entitled The displacement of population in Europe. Kulischer was assisted in his survey by no less than 24 institutions, including Jewish ones, which in turn had a dense network of information channels in the various European countries. His chapter on “The Expulsion and Deportation of Jews” contains much information of interest to revisionist researchers; here I will contend myself with merely quoting the passages of interest to our subject:
“This forced transfer [of the Jews] has taken the following forms: [...]. Expulsion from an area which is to be ‘purged of Jews’ and deportation to a special region (e.g. the Lublin reservation), city or town, or part of such region, city or town. Since 1940 this has been the usual practice adopted in removing Jews from various German-controlled territories and deporting them to the General Government, or, latterly, to the occupied area of the Soviet Union.”[101] [101]The mention of transports to the “occupied area of the Soviet Union” could possibly be a reference to the deportation of German, Austrian and Czech Jews directly to the Baltic States and Belarus in 1941-42, but the following passages are more specific:
“Some of the Jews from Belgium were sent to a neighbouring part of Western Europe for forced labour, but generally speaking the tendency has been to remove the Jews to the east. Many Western European Jews were reported to have been sent to the mines of Silesia. The great majority were sent to the General Government and, in ever growing numbers, to the eastern area, that is, to the territories which had been under Soviet rule since September 1939 and to the other occupied areas of the Soviet Union.”[102] [102]Here one should recall that the number of German, Austrian and Czech Jews deported directly to the east did not increase during 1942, according to preserved documentation, but was rather a small but steady stream, and that the last known such transport departed from Vienna on 28 November 1942.[103] [103] It therefore does not make much sense for Kulischer to speak of “growing numbers” in 1943, unless he had knowledge of other, de facto increasing, transports of Jews to the occupied eastern territories. Further on Kulischer writes that
“…generally speaking, deportation to the east is for the Jews the equivalent of the recruitment for work in the Reich to which the rest of the population of German-controlled Europe is subject, and their removal further and further eastwards is doubtless connected with the need for supplying the army’s requirements near the front.”[104] [104]We note here the expression “further and further eastwards”. The destination of the transports “further eastwards” is made more clear in the following paragraph which concerns the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto – which the mainstream historians claim led said Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers of Treblinka:
“Since the summer of 1942 the ghettos and labour camps in the German-occupied Eastern Territories have become the destination of deportees both from Poland and from western and central Europe; in particular, a new large-scale transfer from the Warsaw ghetto has been reported. Many of the deportees have been sent to the labour camps on the Russian front; others to work in the marshes of Pinsk, or to the ghettos of the Baltic countries, Byelorussia and Ukraine. It is hardly possible to distinguish how far the changes in the Jewish population of the General Government are due to deportation and how far they are attributable to ‘ordinary’ mortality and extermination. Moreover, the number of Jews remaining in the General Government is in any case uncertain.”[105] [105]Kulischer further speaks of “hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews deported eastward from the General Government”.[106] [106]
3.2.2. A. Rei and H. Laretei
August Rei and Heinrich Laretei, who had served as Estonia’s ambassadors to Moscow and Stockholm, respectively, before the Soviet occupation of that country in 1940, reported to the Swedish detective superintendent Otto Danielsson on 8 November 1944 that
“Jews had been deported from Czechoslovakia and Poland [to Estonia] under the pretence that they would work in Estonian factories, but were then shot. Estonian patriots had carried out investigations and discovered evidence.”[107] [107]While it is documented and acknowledged by the Holocaust historians that a transport from Theresienstadt carrying 1,000 Jews bound for Estonian Raasiku departed on 1 September 1942, mainstream historiography is unaware of any transports of Polish Jews to Estonia.
3.2.3. A. Jablonski
On 26 August 1943, the Swedish Communist organ Ny Dag published an article written by a Latvian Communist, A. Jablonski, entitled “The Germans in Latvia”, in which we read:
“During the winter 1941-1942 the Germans deported to Riga Jews from Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, and other occupied countries and executed them together with Jews from Riga in the pine forest at Čuibe, between the stations of Rumbula and Salaspils.”[108] [108]3.3. The Witnesses
3.3.1. Herman Kruk
Herman Kruk was born in the Polish town of Plock in 1897. In 1920 he joined the Jewish Labor Bund. Following the German attack on Warsaw in 1939 he fled to Vilna, where he remained in 1941 when the Germans overtook Lithuania. In the Vilna Ghetto, Kruk became the head librarian and a prominent member of the ghetto community. From 1941 to 1944, he kept a voluminous diary which he regarded as a chronicle of the destruction of the Vilna Jews. In September 1943, Kruk was transferred from Vilna to the labor camp Lagedi in Estonia, where he was reportedly shot on 18 September 1944. His diary was preserved by a friend who after the war found his way to Israel. In 1961 the diary was published in the original Yiddish by the Jewish organization YIVO under the title Hurbn Vilne (The Destruction of Vilna, other editions of the same book go under the title Togbuch fun Vilner Geto, Diary from the Vilna Ghetto). The diary finally appeared in English translation in 2002. It contains numerous entries which are of utmost interest, as they blatantly contradict the orthodox historiography on the “extermination camps” and offer strong support to the revisionist hypothesis.
In Kruk’s diary entry from 30 January 1942 we read:
“A train with Jews passed by here today. The Jews said that they are being taken to work from Sosnowiec and the surrounding area. The train left in the direction of the Eastern Front.”[109] [109]Sosnowiec is a city in Upper Silesia, not far from Katowice, which is in turn located not far from Oświęcim, that is, Auschwitz. According to orthodox historiography, the very first transport of Jews sent to Auschwitz to be gassed reportedly originated from Upper Silesia. The Holocaust historians are not unanimous when it comes to the date of this transport. Danuta Czech in her Kalendarium states that the convoy arrived from the Upper Silesian town of Beuthen on 15 February.[110] [110] The sources she gives are not contemporary documents but statements from the SS men Rudolf Höss and Pery Broad that not in any way support the alleged date or origin of the transport.[111] [111] Jean-Claude Pressac on the other hand dates the beginning of large-scale gassings at Auschwitz (in Krematorium I) to January 1942[112] [112], as does Ber Mark, who identifies the first alleged victims as coming from an unspecified location in Upper Silesia.[113] [113] Given the date and reported origin of the transport witnessed by Kruk it nevertheless seems plausible that we are here dealing with an observation of the first Polish Jews sent to be “gassed” at Auschwitz. Holocaust historiography knows of no transports from Sosnowiec to Auschwitz (or any other “extermination camp”) taking place earlier than May 1942,[114] [114] but we should recall here that when it comes to many if not most deportations of Jews from Poland, contemporary documents are lacking and dates and numbers often derive from testimonies.
In a brief chronicle of the Kovno Ghetto written as a diary entry on 16 February 1942 and detailing events transpired in that ghetto from late June 1941 to February 1942, Kruk writes:
“The only disturbing thing was that masses of Jews were driven into Kovno from the Czech area, from Łódź, Upper Silesia, Belgium, and Germany. The Slobodka [Vilijampole] Judenrat [in Kovno] calculated that they would settle those Jews in the ghetto, but it turned out that the Jews were brought to Kovno for destruction.”[115] [115]Only two transports from the west to Kovno (Kaunas) are known by mainstream historiography for the period in question: one carrying an unknown number of German Jews from Berlin on 17 November 1941, and one with 995 Jews from Vienna departing on 23 November 1941. The mention of Jews from Łódź and Upper Silesia are of particular interest. As already mentioned, the first Jews sent to be “gassed” at Auschwitz are reported to have been Jews from Upper Silesia, and as seen above, Kruk on 30 January 1942 witnessed a convoy of Jews from that part of Poland passing through Vilna on their way to the eastern front. From January 1941 onward, Jews from Łódź are alleged to have been gassed at the Chełmno camp.
Kruk’s mention of Belgian Jews is difficult to explain, since the first deportations from that country reportedly took place in August 1942. Some 8,000 Belgian Jews were expelled to France, but deportations from there did not start until March 1942 (cf. Sections 2.3.2. and 2.3.3.). Kulischer on the other hand states that “some Jews, mainly of Polish origin, were transferred from Antwerp to Lodz for work in textile factories” during the winter of 1941-42.[116] [116] Provided that this information is correct, then some of these Jews may hypothetically have reached Kovno via Chełmno. Perhaps more likely Kruk’s unnamed informant(s) was in error here. Another spurious piece of second-hand information (considering the date) was noted down by Kruk on 12 March 1942: the Judenälteste of the Kovno Ghetto had sent him “a yellow patch from a Western European Jew” together with a letter claiming that it derived from one of “a large group of Jews from Belgium and Holland” which had recently been brought to Kovno to be shot, but of which “many managed to hide.”[117] [117]
On 12 March 1942, Kruk penned the following entry in his diary:
“A rumor has suddenly spread through the ghetto that 2,000 German Jews were brought to Subocz Street [in Vilna].”[118] [118]Two days later, on 14 March 1942, he returned to this subject:
“We have already noted that 2,000 German Jews are in the Municipal Houses on Subocz. Now I know that the group of Jews is from Austria, most from Vienna. So far, we have not been able to make contact with them.”[119] [119]Mainstream historians know of no such transport of Austrian Jews to Vilna. These deportees may have been sent there directly from Vienna, but it is also possible that they reached Vilna via the Łódź ghetto. From 16 October 1941 to 4 November of the same year, a total of 5,002 Jews were deported from Ostmark (Austria) to the Łódź Ghetto. According to a Gestapo report dating from 9 June 1942, 10,993 of the 19,848 Jews deported to Łódź from Altreich, Ostmark and the Protectorate had been evacuated (i.e. sent east via Chełmno) up until that date.[120] [120]
When dealing with the possibility of transports to the east via the “pure extermination camp” of Chełmno, Kruk’s diary entry from 4 July 1942 under the heading “A Message from Łódź” is of utmost interest:
“Just received a message from Łódź. For us, Łódź is one of those cities from which you can obtain almost no information. Of course, the rumors from there are crazy and wild, and according to them, it is already certain that there are no Jews in Łódź.
Now I learn from two young people who were taken out of the Łódź Ghetto in March that Łódź has a ghetto. There is no shooting, and mass executions are unknown. The only thing is, people are taken off to work. They figure that about 10,000 Jews have recently been sent out of Łódź. Now the young people know what it is to be sent out to work. They are dragged around from place to place; they don’t know where they are or what they are doing. From time to time, groups are pulled out and disappear, and they assume that they are shot…
Both of the young men escaped from such a group, and after a week of wandering, they were arrested in Vilna [and taken to] Łukiszki [a prison in Vilna] and were released from there only two days ago. Here in the ghetto they were clothed, and soon they will be sent to forest work.”[121] [121]Orthodox historiography has it that, from January 1942 onward, numerous Jews from the Łódź (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto were sent, not to work, but to be killed in the Chełmno “extermination camp”. According to the “Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto”, 10,003 Łódź Jews were sent to their deaths in January and 7,025 in February.[122] [122] In contemporary German documents the Jews evacuated from the ghetto are referred to as “resettled” (ausgesiedelt), and the diary entry of Kruk clearly shows that this resettlement was real and not a camouflage for mass killings. This diary entry thus constitutes a strong confirmation of the transit camp hypothesis. It is possible that the two Łódź Jews which Kruk received the information from only had knowledge of the number of Jews deported in January, considering the striking match between the figures (“about 10,000” and 10,003). The fact that the two young men had wandered for only a week from their work place to reach Vilna indicates that at least part of the Łódź Jews were sent to Lithuania or possibly to neighboring Belarus.[123] [123]
The notion expressed by Kruk in his entry from 16 February 1942 that Jews from Łódź among other places were brought to Kovno merely to be shot there seems somewhat spurious in light of what the prominent Kovno Jew Avraham Tory entered into in his diary on 14 July 1942. Here we read that “four Jews from Łódź” had been brought to the Kovno Ghetto Hospital for surgery after having “spent a long time in a labor camp”.[124] [124] We will also note here briefly that a number of witnesses report the presence of Polish Jews in the Baltic States. Most of them, unfortunately, do not specify where in Poland these Jews came from or when they had arrived to the occupied eastern territories. Jeanette Wolf, a German Jewess deported to Riga, writes in her memoirs of Polish Jews being interned in the Strasdenhof camp near Riga.[125] [125] The German Jew Josef Katz repeatedly mentions the presence of Polish Jews in the Riga Ghetto and the Kaiserwald Concentration Camp (in the same city), including “Shmuel, a Jew from Łódź”.[126] [126] In one of the undated notations made by Kruk after his deportation to Estonia, and which seems to refer to December 1943, we read that the camp elder in a camp in Narva (possibly the Vaivara subcamp Narva-Ost) was “the Galician Jew Zieler.”[127] [127] Preserved file cards from the Estonian camp Klooga shows that at least 14 of the inmates there were Jews from Warsaw.[128] [128] It is further reported that a smaller group of Polish Jews worked with cremating the bodies of executed political prisoners near the Estonian Tartu camp in November 1943.[129] [129]
Kruk’s entry from 16 April 1943 is of extreme interest:
“I learn that for the past two weeks, two trains have been halted in Vilna, each with 25 cars of objects, apparently from the Dutch Jews. [...]. Today a rumor is circulating that there are about 19,000 Dutch Jews in Vievis.”[130] [130]Vievis (Polish spelling Jewie) is a small town located between Kovno and Vilna with direct access to the railroad running between those two cities (cf. Ill. 1). In a Lithuanian doctoral dissertation which is partially available in English translation online, historian Neringa Latvyte-Gustaitiene gives a description of the camps located in Vievis that is based almost exclusively on post-war testimonies:
“As early as 1942, there were two labour camps at Vievis, one for Soviet prisoners of war and the other for Jews. Both were supervised by a German military unit, under the command of an officer named Deling.223 The majority of the Jews were mostly engaged in building the highway. [...]. In May 1942, there were 700 Jews in the camp. The flow of people was intense: large groups were often removed to be murdered, and others arrived to replace them. Prisoners from the Vilnius and Kaunas ghettos worked there. [...]. The regime at the Vievis work camp was very severe. Leaving the camp was strictly forbidden. The campsite was fenced off with barbed wire and guarded by armed personnel. The working day started at 5:30; the roll-call was at 6:00 a.m. The food was bad. [...]. In mid-1943 the Vievis labour camp came under the supervision of the Vilnius City Commissar, who was noted for his cruelty. [...]. The inmates continued to build the highway. Nutrition did not improve, ‘Quite often you could see Jews returning from work, holding one another so as not to fall.’ The living quarters were unhealthy and even a threat to life. People slept on four-story berths made of boards joined together. They put some straw on the boards, if they could get any. Selections at the camp continued, and groups of Jews were brought to replace others. Those who were ill were most often transferred to the Vilnius or Kaunas ghettos. From these ghettos, the camp received some aid - clothing, boots and other things. Although the internal regime had not changed substantially, confrontations between the Jews and the camp guard became more frequent. [...]. In September, a big group of Jews arrived at the Vievis camp. Selections of those fit to work began immediately. Dzena selected able-bodied Jews, and those who had gold, to remain in the camp. The greater majority, including the elderly people and children, were transported to Paneriai [i.e. the alleged mass shooting site Ponary]. [...]. A 45 kilometre narrow-gauge railway line from Vievis to Paneriai had been built, which transported Jews to the site of their death. [...]. The Vievis labour camp was liquidated in December 1943. All its workers were murdered in Paneriai.”[131] [131]What seems certain of the above information is that there existed a Jewish camp in Vievis from early 1942 to December 1943. That ill inmates from the Vievis camp were brought to the Vilna or Kovno ghettos – a detail which does not square well with the assertion that Jews from the same camp were shot in large numbers at Ponary – is confirmed by the Kovno Ghetto diary of Avraham Tory. In his entry from 2 July 1943 Tory writes:
“Yellin, the representative of Vievis camp, arrived here today. He comes to the Ghetto [in Kovno] once every two or three weeks to collect wooden shoes, underwear, and other supplies from our welfare department. The conditions in the Vievis labor camp are harsher than in the Ghetto. The housing conditions there endanger the health and lives of the inmates, the regime is strict, and the labor is back-breaking. The Vievis labor camp is under the supervision of the city governor of Vilna, who is a very cruel man. About four weeks ago, the camp workers feared that all the inmates would be exterminated after two Jewish youths had refused to obey the orders of the camp guards. Once in a while, patients from Vievis camp are admitted to out Ghetto hospital. The camp inmates also come here quite often to ask for help over some problem or other. We, for our part, extend them whatever assistance we can.”[132] [132]In a collection of “Holocaust survivor” testimonies from 2007 we read the following account concerning “Marie”, a Jewess from the Vilna Ghetto:
“When they saw that the last days of the [Vilna] ghetto were approaching [the ghetto was liquidated on 23 September 1943] Adam [Marie’s brother] succeeded to be transferred to the camp Zezmarai, working for the German engineering organization TODT. He was working there as a camp physician, while Marie remained in the [Vilna] ghetto. Just before the great action her brother arrived with friendly members of the TODT organization and saved her. She was right now in camp Vievis. After about a month, she was transferred to Milejgany and from there to the Zezmarai camp.”[133] [133]This account suggests that Vievis functioned not only as a labor camp but also as a transit camp from where Jewish prisoners were relayed to other camps.
[134]Transport lists shows that between 2 March and 6 April 1943, six transports with altogether 7,699 Dutch Jews left Westerbork for the “extermination camp” of Sobibór.[134] [135] Was the person behind the Vievis rumor perhaps misinformed about the number of Dutch deportees? This may be, but it is also possible that Vievis at this time held Dutch Jews deported to the East not only via Sobibór but also via Auschwitz. Between 17 July 1942 and 25 February 1943 a total of 42,533 Dutch Jews were sent to Auschwitz; 30,413 were “gassed upon arrival”, i.e. transited elsewhere.[135] [136] If part of these were sent to Vievis, it is possible that there indeed were 19,000 Dutch Jews present in this town on 16 April 1943.
Later on the same day that he reported on the rumor of Dutch Jews in Vievis (16 April 1943) Kruk wrote under the heading “Once more about the Dutch Jews”:
“Just now I succeeded in getting a Jewish sign from a Dutch Jew and a copy of the order of the Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands about Jewish property (attached).”[136] [137]The editor of the diary informs us that “The order is missing.” This entry shows us that Kruk had good reason to believe the Vievis rumor, since he himself had in his possession items belonging to one or more Dutch Jews transported to the East. With “Jewish sign” is undoubtedly meant the yellow cloth Star of David forcibly worn by the Western Jews. In the Netherlands these emblems bore the inscription Jood (Dutch for Jew).
On 19 April 1943 Kruk wrote:
“Europe will be purged of Jews. The Jews of Warsaw are being taken to be killed in Malkinia, near Lwów or near Zamość. The Jews from Western Europe are being taken east, their wandering go on.”[137] [138]In his previous entries Kruk repeatedly recounts claims that the Warsaw Jews were killed near the Polish town of Malkinia. On 5 September 1942 Kruk wrote that “The Jews are taken toward Malkinia, and there, there… they are poisoned with gas”.[138] [139] On 30 September 1942 he noted that the mass killings “are supposed to have taken place somewhere near Malkinia. People are forced to leave their clothes in the trains. From there, they are driven to underground trenches, and they don’t come back. How it is done is still a secret.”[139] [140] By 27 October the rumors had become more specific: “The Jews from there [Warsaw] were taken, as has been mentioned, to Bełz (near Lwów) and to a forest around Malkinia. There the Jews are put into special underground entrances, poisoned, and burned.”[140] [141] On 30 October Kruk again wrote of the rumors, this time giving a source, issue no. 6 of the Polish underground newspaper Niepodległość. Kruk summarizes: “Some were taken on trains to Treblinka near Malkinia, many were conveyed as far as Bełz (in the Lwów district), where they were poisoned en masse with gas or killed with electrical current in the former soap factory there.”[141] [142] By 6 May 1943, finally, the rumors had grown wild indeed:
“Treblinka. This is the name of that place near Malkinia where Jews from Warsaw, Białystok, and Grodno are killed. Here, as I said, the trains come and everyone has to undress to go into the woods, where there is supposedly a disinfection facility. Anyone who realizes what is going on, and doesn’t want to undress, is handed over to a group of Jewish police, who throw the resisters into a fire; then you have to undress and be driven in, no matter where. […] The victims are driven into the disinfection facility. From the inside, the air is sucked out by a machine until the people die. The bodies then burst from the pressure of the air and are automatically thrown into a so-called crematorium, which burns the bodies to coal. The narrators [unnamed] say that ashes are scattered on the fields of the whole area. Clearly, the ashes from the burned people.”[142] [143]It is of interest to note that, while Kruk readily reported rumors spread by Polish underground publications that the Jews from Warsaw, Białystok and Grodno were killed en masse at Treblinka and Bełżec (which is here confused with another place, the town of Bełz) – the latter camp being located not far from Lwów and Zamość – he never mentions the alleged mass killing of the Łódź Jews at Chełmno (Sobibór and Auschwitz are also unknown to him). The reason for this is obvious: ever since his encounter with the two young Łódź Jews on 4 July 1942, he understood that the rumors according to which “there are no Jews in Łódź” were “crazy and wild” because he knew from first-hand sources that “mass executions are unknown” and that the tens of thousands of Jews evacuated from the Łódź were merely “taken off to work”. This shows that Kruk, while susceptible to black propaganda about the fate of the Warsaw Jews – something understandable in the light of the fact that most of his relatives lived there – did not lend credence to mere rumor in cases when he had access to reliable first-hand sources contradicting those rumors.
Kruk’s note from 19 April 1943 that “The Jews from Western Europe are being taken east, their wandering go on” shows that he did not believe said Jews were being gassed en masse in the “extermination camps” in Poland. The reason for this is also simple: why would he believe so when he knew that the Dutch Jews were being taken to the occupied eastern territories?
On 26 April 1943 Kruk wrote more about the Western Jews under the heading “Where are the millions of Jews of Europe?”, insinuating that at least part of them had been shot in Lithuania and Belarus:
“We know, for example, that Poland alone contained more than 3 million Jews, and now – can you find even half a million in former Poland? However much we try, we cannot reach such a number. And the hundreds of thousands of Jews from Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the thousands of Jews from France, Belgium, Holland, and Czechoslovakia, who have gone through Lithuania in the thousands, who were shot near Minsk, at the Seventh Fort of Kovno, etc.?”[143] [144]On 30 April 1943 Kruk returned to the subject of the deported Dutch Jews:
“We have already written about the packing up of 130,000 Jews from Holland and their transport to the East.[144] [145] We have also mentioned that carloads filled with goods from the Dutch Jews are in the Vilna railroad station. Now an issue that clears it all up - beautiful old furniture has been brought here, to our joiners' workshop, to be repaired. In the drawers people find Dutch documents, including documents from December 1942, which means that ostensibly, the Dutch were not taken to the East before January or February. Thus the Jews [there] did not know they were going to be exterminated. The rich Dutch Jews even brought bridge tables with them, in case, God forbid, such things wouldn't be found among the backward Ostjuden [Eastern European Jews]. Now it is clear that they were slaughtered, just like the Oszmiana[145] [146] and Swieciany Jews. In our area, dozens of railroad cars are scattered, filled with Jewish junk, remnants of the former Dutch Jewry.”[146] [147]This passage removes the last doubt about the origin of the transports, because the mainly Yiddish-speaking Jews in the Vilna Ghetto would certainly have been able to tell Dutch from German. The dates written on the documents discovered in the drawers also confirm that the Dutch Jews had been brought to Lithuania either in January or February 1943 via Auschwitz or in March or April via Sobibór.
One might argue here that the trains may have brought only the belongings of Dutch Jews murdered at Sobibór, and not the Jews themselves in still living condition. Such a counterargument, however, clashes with the mainstream historiography on Sobibór. Miriam Novitch writes that “Gold and jewelry were sent directly to the Führer’s Chancellery in Berlin. Prisoners’ clothing, from which the yellow star badges, and all signs indicating their origin, were removed, went to several German institutions.”[147] [148] Yitzhak Arad quotes the testimony of Jan Piwonski, a railway worker at Sobibór station:
“I saw how the goods which were of no value to the Germans were burned. The other goods were loaded on freight cars and sent to Germany. Such transports with objects and clothing departed twice a month. Valuables, gold, and money were packed in an iron box and sent to Berlin twice a week.”[148] [149]One would think that Piwonski would have recalled if part of the spoils for some odd reason had been sent not to Germany, but to the Baltic States! Moreover, if the railway cars really were filled with the stolen belongings of Dutch Jews murdered in Sobibór, how come there were not only possibly incriminating documents among the objects, but also Star of David patches? It should further be pointed out that this passage indicates that the transited Jews did not have all their belongings confiscated at Sobibór. Finally we note that nowhere in this or the following entries does Kruk give an explanation to how he knew that the Dutch Jews sent to Lithuania had been “slaughtered”.
A further passage of interest was penned by Kruk on 23 June 1943:
“In the Minsk Ghetto, 3,000 - 4,000 Jews now live. Next to the ghetto is another ghetto. In the first ghetto are Russian Jews from Minsk, Slutsk, Baranovitsh, etc. In the second, there are altogether 1,500 German and Czech Jews.”[149] [150]Kruk knew this information from two individuals who had recently been to Minsk. The assertion that 1,500 German and Czech Jews at the time lived in the second ghetto appears to contradict the statement of Minsk witness Hersh Smolar (see Section 3.3.3.) that the last remaining German Jews in the “Hamburg Ghetto” were murdered in “gas-vans” in early 1943.[150] [151] On the other hand, Smolar reports that no less than 12,000 Jews (whereof about 3,200 in hiding) were still living in the Minsk ghetto as of late February 1943.[151] [152]
3.3.2. Hilde Sherman-Zander
Hilde Sherman-Zander, a German Jewess born in 1923, was deported from Cologne to Riga on 10 December 1941. In her memoirs she recalls an incident taking place at a not further specified date in the summer of 1942:
“One morning on the way to work, as we crossed the railroad tracks, we found there standing a long train made up of cattle wagons. On the tracks lay small pieces of paper and cardboard, on which were written, ‘Help, we are thirsting to death’ and cries of ‘Water! Water!’From the air apertures, which were barred with barbed wire, we saw hands and lower arms reaching out. Suddenly the unfortunates threw out rings, watches and money in the hope of receiving a mouthful of water in return. We were hastily marched on our way.
In the evening in the ghetto we learned that the clothing from this transport had already arrived in the Ghetto. Only the clothing. Also a couple of prams with baby bottles filled with milk. There was no trace of the people. They were Dutch Jews, deported from Westerboork [correct: Westerbork].
So it continued during the whole of the summer: Every second day large amounts of clothing arrived in the ghetto: bed sheets, shoes, toilet articles. Everything was unloaded in the enormous hall and then sorted. [...] Not once did a single human soul from all the thousands and yet thousands from these transports reach our ghetto. By now we knew where they went: to the Hochwald [i.e. the Bikernieki Forest]. All of them. Without exception. All were shot and buried in mass graves.”[152] [153]
Similar to Herman Kruk, Sherman-Zander claims that the Dutch deportees were all shot to death in forests in the vicinity of Riga, but this assertion is not based on observations of her own. As mentioned above, the deportation of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz began on 17 July 1942, a fact which fits well with Sherman-Zander’s testimony.
3.3.3. Hersh Smolar[153] [154]
Hersh Smolar was a Polish Jew born in 1905. In 1939 he fled from his native city of Bialystok to Minsk in Belarus, where after the German invasion in 1941 and the erection of the Minsk Ghetto he became a prominent figure in the local Jewish underground. From 1942 onwards, Smolar led a group of Jewish partisan fighters based in the forests and swamps near Minsk. In his memoirs, originally published in 1948, Smolar recalls the arrival of Western Jews to Minsk:
“Ever since transports of Jews from various European countries had begun arriving at the Minsk railroad station - from Germany and France, from Poland and Czechoslovakia, from Hungary and Greece - we were receiving from our people employed at the station fragmentary reports about the Jews in those countries. We heard about the various methods the Nazis were using not only to terrorize the Jews but to undermine their vigilance by deception. We knew, for example, that this was done by spreading rumors that the transports were going to work-places in the east.”[154] [155]Unfortunately, while the passage quoted here is found in a chapter describing events taking place during the summer of 1942, Smolar does not make it clear when these transports began arriving or until what date they continued. We recall here that the first deportation of Jews from Greece took place in February 1943, whereas in France the deportations began already in March 1942.
The mention of Hungarian Jews might be taken to indicate that the information relayed by Smolar is unreliable, due to the reasons presented above in Section 2.2.3. There is, however, an entirely possible explanation for the presence of nominally Hungarian Jews in Belarus in 1942: In August 1941, 17,000 – 22,000 of the Jews living in the former Czechoslovak province of Carpatho-Russia, which had been incorporated into Hungary, were declared as stateless and deported by the Hungarian authorities across the Dnjestr River to the Ukrainian region of Kamenetz-Podolsk.[155] [156] Historian Christian Gerlach further mentions that the 2nd Hungarian Army brought some thousand of Hungarian “Work Jews” with them to Belarus in the summer of 1942, who were then also employed by Organisation Todt.[156] [157] In his short memoirs from 1961, the Berlin Jew Karl Loewenstein, who was deported to Minsk on 14 November 1941 and transferred to Theresienstadt on 13 May 1942 (due to distinguished service in World War I), mentions having been in contact with a Hungarian Jew in Minsk.[157] [158]
3.3.4. Heinz Rosenberg
The German Jew Heinz Rosenberg, born in 1921, was deported from Hamburg to Minsk on 8 November 1941 (the first direct transport to that city).[158] [159] His memoirs were published in 1985. A few days after Rosenberg’s arrival to Minsk, another transport with “about 1000 Jews from Düsseldorf” arrived.[159] [160] This is perfect accordance with facts, since a transport bound for Minsk departed from Düsseldorf on 10 November. At the time, Rosenberg was told by SS members that “another 30 to 40 transports would follow”.[160] [161] This reported statement fits well with the fact that another 32 direct transports reached Minsk: 4 more in November 1941 and another 28 in the period May – November 1942 (most of them from Vienna). Rosenberg writes that in the next few weeks following the Düsseldorf transport, more trains arrived, each carrying about 1000 people, so that in all 7,500 Jews arrived in the ghetto (which seems to imply a total of 7 transports). The documents show that the transports to Minsk in November numbered 6, and that they carried a total of 5,453 people. Thus Rosenberg somewhat overestimates the number of deportees, but within a reasonable margin of error. The origins of the transports following the first two from Hamburg and Düsseldorf are given by Rosenberg as “Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Bremen/Hamburg”.[161] [162] The documents show (in chronological order): Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Brünn and Hamburg. Here Rosenberg is in error, but it is not as grave an error as it might appear. Brünn (present Brno) was a city in the Protectorate and it is not out of the question that Rosenberg in his recollections mistook it to have arrived from Prague. The mention of Vienna and the lacking mention of Frankfurt are perhaps more serious, and points to a somewhat faulty memory. Rosenberg is correct, however, that the last of the November transports arrived from Hamburg. It is worth noting here that Karl Loewenstein, who arrived with the fourth transport (from Berlin), recalled in 1961 that the three following transports arrived, in chronological order, from “Brünn, Bremen and Vienna”.[162] [163] Later in his recollection Loewenstein explicitly mentions the presence of Vienna Jews in Minsk in the winter of 1941-42 (and that part of the German ghetto had been named after these Jews)[163] [164], while the documents show that the first direct transport from Vienna to Minsk departed on 6 May 1942. A hypothetical explanation for this would be that the transport from Vienna to Kaunas departing on 23 November 1941 was for some reason rerouted to Minsk, or that some Jews from the Kaunas transport were sent on to Minsk.[164] [165] However, as far as the author of this article is aware, there exists no documentary evidence supporting this hypothesis.
The part of Rosenberg’s memoirs that interests us here describes how the witness worked in February-March 1942 with sorting the belongings from arriving transports in the former Minsk Opera:
“A large contingent of ghetto inmates worked every day in this building with sorting the stolen goods of the ‘enemies of the Reich’. We were dealing with hundreds and thousands of trunks, rucksacks and handbags from the belongings of some 23,000 Jews, who had arrived to Minsk in 23 transports, but never were admitted into the ghetto. Instead they were shot or gassed immediately at arrival. Only from the labels on the trunks could our people know where the transports had come from.”[165] [166]Apparently Rosenberg “knew” about the fate of these Jewish transports only from hearsay, as he himself during this period of time neither was present at the railway station nor outside of the city near the alleged killing sites. It may be worth noting in this context K. Loewenstein’s comment that the Minsk railway station and the ghetto of the German Jews were located in opposite ends of the city.[166] [167]
According to the documents, not a single direct transport from the west arrived in Minsk during the whole period from December 1941 to May 1942. The possible counterargument that the luggage Rosenberg sorted might have come from Jews sent from Theresienstadt to nearby Maly Trostinec does not hold water, since the first of these transports (five in all) departed on 14 July 1942. Neither does there exist, as far as the author of this article is aware, any reports of Jewish transports arriving by train to Minsk from other parts of Ostland or the Ukraine during the period in question. This implies that if Rosenberg is correct, then the 23 unknown transports arrived to Minsk indirectly from the west via Chełmno or Auschwitz. Alas, Rosenberg does not tell his readers what he and his fellow workers read on the trunk labels!
When we compare Rosenberg’s statement with what contemporary documents has to tell us about Minsk during the period in question (early 1942) something rather curious crops up. On 5 January 1942, the Stadtkommissar of Minsk, Gauamtsleiter Wilhelm Janetzke sent a letter to the Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, in which he related that he had just been informed by the SS and Police that central authorities had the intention
“of bringing approximately 50,000 more Jews from Germany to Minsk in the next weeks and months.”Janetzke strongly protested the planned deportations, arguing that the city, which had been severely devastated by the war but still had 100,000 civilian inhabitants, could not receive more transports, and that there were in the city’s ghettos already “about 7,000 Jews from Germany” and “roughly from 15,000 to 18,000 Russian Jews”. [167] [168]
On 16 January, the expert on Jewish questions in Rosenberg’s ministry, Amtsgerichtsrat Wetzel, replied in a letter addressed to Reichskommissar Lohse (i.e. Janetzke’s superior):
“According to a communication of the Reich Security Headquarters imparted to me, it was planned to send 25,000 Jews from the Reich to Minsk, who were supposed to be accommodated in the ghetto there. Of these, 7-8,000 Jews have reached Minsk. The rest who remained behind cannot be transferred to Minsk at this time due to transportation difficulties. As soon as these difficulties are removed, however, the arrival of these Jews in Minsk must be reckoned with.”[168] [169]On 6 February 1942 Generalkommissar Kube wrote a letter to Lohse in which he supported Janetzke’s protest and pointed out the impossibility of accommodating yet an additional 25,000 Jews.[169] [170]
As has already been mentioned, no Jewish transports are recorded as having departed for Mink during the long period from 19 November 1941 to 6 May 1942, when the first known transport from Vienna departed. Did it really take this long to remove the referred-to transport difficulties? Or was the problem in fact solved not long after Wetzel’s reply and the deportation of Jews to Minsk renewed, as Rosenberg’s account hints at?
If we add together the recorded number of Jews deported directly from the Reich to Minsk in the period 6 May – 28 November 1942 (the date of the last recorded such transport) we reach the figure of 25,657 people. For one of the recorded transports during this period, however, the number of deported Jews is not known. The transport in question departed from Cologne on 22 July 1942 and had the code Da-219. Since virtually all of the other direct transports from the Reich to Ostland carried approximately 1,000 persons each, we are justified in assuming this average number also for Da-219. Thus some 26,657 Reich Jews were sent to Minsk during the abovementioned period in 28 transports. If we then add to these the 23,000 arrivals in February-March claimed by Rosenberg, we get the figure 49,657, that is, almost exactly the number of Jewish deportees (50,000) that the SS and Police authorities in early January 1942 had told Janetzke would arrive to Minsk “in the next weeks and months”. Was the deportation schedule resumed again in February but then stretched out over the whole of 1942 in order to make it easier for the local administration to find accommodation for the arrivals?
3.3.5. Friedrich Jeckeln
In an interrogation held in Soviet custody on 14 December 1945, the former Higher Leader of the SS and Police of Ostland, Friedrich Jeckeln, made the following statement concerning the Latvian “death camp” of Salaspils:
“Q: What countries were the Jews in Salaspils brought from?
A: Jews were brought from Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and from other occupied countries to the Salaspils camp. To give a precise count of Jews in the Salaspils camp would be difficult. [...]. The first Jewish convoys arrived in Salaspils in November 1941. Then, in the first half of 1942, convoys arrived at regular intervals. I believe that in November 1941, no more than three convoys arrived in all, but during the next seven months, from December 1941 to June 1942, eight to twelve convoys arrived each month. Overall, in eight months, no less than fifty-five and no more than eighty-seven Jewish convoys arrived at the camp. Given that each convoy carried a thousand men, that makes a total of 55,000 to 87,000 Jews exterminated in the Salaspils camp.”[170] [171]It should be noted here that while Russia as late as 2004 claimed that 101,000 “Soviet citizens” had been killed at Salaspils, and whereas a Soviet encyclopedia in 1970 gave the victim number as at least 53,700,[171] [172] current historiography estimate a death toll of only some thousands.[172] [173] We will return to the issue of Salaspils further on in this article.
3.3.6. William W. Mishell
Mishell, born as Mishelski in 1918, was a Lithuanian Jew who during the war lived in the Kovno Ghetto. In his memoirs from 1988 he writes of one or more transports of French Jews to Kovno in the summer of 1942:
“Barely had the bodies of the Jews from Vienna a chance to cool when, one morning, a new transport of Jews was brought to Kovno for extermination. [...]. Nobody was quite sure, but it seemed that this group was from France. [...]. Several more transports came in short succession and then they stopped, for how long we did not know.”[173] [174]Mainstream historiography knows of only one transports of Viennese (or other Austrian) Jews to Kaunas, which took place on November 23, 1941. The ambiguity concerning the nationality of the “French” deportees as well as the late date of Mishell’s memoirs prompts us to regard this piece of witness evidence as of minor value.
3.3.7. Lebke Distel
In his book on Abba Kovner’s Lithuanian-Jewish resistance group, The Avengers, Rich Cohen recounts the story of a companion of Kovner’s named Lebke Distel who on 1 September 1943 was deported from Vilna to Estonia[174] [175] and various camps near the Narva-Leningrad theatre of the eastern front, only to be reunited with Kovner and his group in 1945:
“From Wilna, Lebke had been sent from prison camp to prison camp, a death march, always one step ahead of the Red Army. In Kortla Java, he worked on the roads in the swampy country. At night he could hear shelling and rifle shots. He was then sent down the river Narva River to Suski, where he built the German railroad. The temperature dropped to twenty five degrees below zero; prisoners carried the dead to be counted and burned. The snow was to his waist in Koromej, where he was locked up with Jews from Holland and Kovno. He then marched west to a half-remembered foundry of red flames and smoke chimneys. He worked in the metal shop. One day a door opened and in walked his brother, which Lebke had last seen in Vilna. Their mother had been sent to Auschwitz or Ponar, her good hiding place given away by a Jewish policeman. Lebke’s feet were bloody in Tallinn, the snow-covered capital of Estonia, houses serene beyond the boxcar door. A boat took him to Stutthof, outside Gdansk, the blue-black port. It was summer. Lebke was shaved, put in uniform and marched to Stuttgart.”[175] [176]An indirect retelling of someone’s experiences like the one above naturally has less evidential value than would an account coming directly from Distel himself. We know from the “acknowledgments” page of the book that Cohen met and interviewed Distel in Yaqim in Israel,[176] [177] and we may thus assume that the passage above is based on statements from Distel. As will be seen below, the sequence of events described fits with documented facts about the places mentioned.
The name “Koromej” is not to be found on any map of Eastern Europe. Distel was however referring to a real place. The location of “Koromej” can be identified with certainty thanks partially to Distel’s mention of other places, partially thanks to the testimony of a certain Miriam Reich, a Jewess from Kovno who on 26 October 1943 was deported to “Camp Kurame” in Estonia. She describes her brief stay in the camp as follows:
“Our bunks were very primitive. No running water. No toilet facilities. An outhouse and a well were all we had. We did what we could to keep ourselves clean, but most of the time it was too cold to even want to undress and bathe. Looking for lice in the seams of our clothes was the most common evening recreational activity. Needless to say, the smell in the bunks, particularly at night, was odious. We slept on tiers of boards, one above the other, bundled up in our day clothes for warmth. Blankets were scarce. There was a wood stove in the center of the bunk that would burn dimly at night. [...]. We built roads in the middle of nowhere. Ostensibly, these roads were going to provide the Germans with greater access to the Russian front. Trees had to be cleared, road beds dug, and gravel spread, all manually. The supervisors were mainly local Estonians recruited by the Germans. Some were quite decent; others were worse than the Germans. Lunch consisted of some nondescript cabbage soup with a few potatoes thrown in, and upon our return to our bunks, more of the same with a slice or two of bread.”[177] [178]A close look at a map of Estonia (cf. Ill. 2) will reveal the presence of a village named Kuremäe located some 20 km south-west of the city of Narva. Some 15 km to the north-north-east of Kuremäe we find Vaivara, a concentration camp from which a large number of Jews as well as Soviet POW:s were distributed to a network of labor camps in the north-eastern part of Estonia, including Klooga, Narva-Ost, Aseri, Kiviõli, Viivikonna, Lagedi, and, indeed, Kuremäe.[178] [179] The presence of Reich and other Kovno Jews in “Camp Kurame” fits well with the mention in Lebke Distel’s story of Kovno Jews being present at “Koromej”. Unfortunately, Reich does not mention the origin of the other inmates of the camp.
[180]“The subcamp [Außenlager] in Kuremäe, a village in the north-east of Estonia (...) was established in October 1943. The first 150 prisoners were initially housed in a former communal building. They lacked everything: food, water, latrines, shoes and clothing. [...]. Some inmates were deported directly from Kaunas [Kovno] to Kuremäe, others were brought in from different camps.
The forced labor consisted in the construction of a narrow gauge railway. In November 1943 the number of inmates rose to 462. Bodmann [an SS camp physician] mentioned the high percentage of inmates ‘completely unable to work’ who were, however, to be reduced.[180] [182] The 33 registered deaths in November were likely not due to natural causes. In December 1943 and January 1944 the number of inmates was slightly reduced, and Bodmann registered 10 and 14 deaths respectively. 437 prisoners from Soski were brought to Kuremäe in February 1944[181] [183], something which raised the total number to 850.[182] [184] On 8 and 6 February prisoners on the work sites were killed by Soviet artillery fire.
The head of the camp was Alfred Engst[183] [185], and a certain Knott was medical orderly [Sanitätsdienstgrad]. Erich Scharfetter was present in the camp from February to March 1943 as medical orderly and disinfector. He was infamous because of numerous atrocities. [...] Scharfetter was sentenced to life imprisonment in Stade for several cases of murder.[184] [186] [...]. In March 1944 Kuremäe was closed. After an evacuation march under terrible conditions the inmates were distributed to various camps. Several witnesses mention Goldfields as the next station.”Since “Suski” is undoubtedly the same camp as Soski (in Viru County), Lebke Distel most likely arrived to Kuremäe in February 1944. Miriam Reich on the other hand stayed in Kuremäe only “halfway through the winter”, when she and other inmates, including her mother, were marched to the camp in Goldfields.[185] [187] As for Soski, we are informed by the same encyclopedia that it was yet another subcamp of Vaivara, located in the vicinity of Lake Peipus and the Narva River. The inmates there worked on constructing a narrow gauge railroad – another detail which confirms the veracity of Distel’s story – as well as with shale-oil production.[186] [188]
Lebke Distel’s route is moreover confirmed by an eyewitness account from a certain Wein Moyshe about “The Entrapment of the FPO Group [Abba Kovner’s resistance group] at Szpitalna Street 6” which was included among the undated notes taken by Herman Kruk in Estonia.[187] [189] The only main difference is that the deportation from Vilna here takes place on 2 August 1943, not 1 September.[188] [190] Moyshe mentions among the deported FPO members a Jew named “Letsid” whom the editor of the Kruk diary identifies as “Letsid Distel”. According to Moyshe’s account the train reached Vaivara via Daugavpils, Riga and Tartu. From Vaivara part of the transport continued to Kohtla (no doubt identical with the “Kortla Java” mentioned in the Distel account)[189] [191] and from there on to the Vaivara subcamp Ereda. “About September 1” the FPO members were sent to Narva and then to Soski, where they met 250 Jews “from the ghetto” (likely it is the Vilna Ghetto that is implied). At the “beginning of February 1944” the Jews from the Soski camp “marched 20 kilometers to Kuremae, where it was integrated into another Jewish camp.” In March the Jews in this camp “marched 60 kilometers toward Goldfilz [Goldfields]”. Some of them were later sent on to the Klooga camp.
The Distel account is important since it indicates that the Dutch Jews deported the Baltic States were not sent there to be killed en masse, as at least some of them were still alive in early 1944.
3.3.8. Paula Frankel-Zaltzman
In a witness testimony from the Latvian Jewess and Daugavpils Ghetto inmate Paula Frankel-Zaltzman, originally published in Yiddish in 1949 and now available online in English translation, we find the following sentence buried in a description of the liquidation of the Daugavpils Ghetto on 25 October 1943:
“Just then they started to take us to Pogulanka where the earth is soaked with the blood of tens of thousands of Jewish victims from Latvia, Holland and other countries.”[190] [192]The transport carrying the witness did not stop at Pogulanka but went on to Riga. Needless to say, this brief statement has little evidential value, since Frankel-Zaltzman does not state that she herself observed any Dutch Jews. Nevertheless this throw-away reference indicates that she regarded transports from the Netherlands to Latvia as something of a common fact.
Pogulanka (or Pagulanska) is the name of a forest just north-west of Daugavpils (Dvinsk, in German Dünaburg) in south-eastern Latvia, which allegedly served as the site for mass shootings of Jews.[191] [193]
3.3.9. Jack Ratz
Jack Ratz was born in Riga in 1927. In May 1943 he was sent to Lenta, a labor camp some 40 km north-east of Riga, where some 500 Jews worked[192] [194]:
“After two months, four hundred Jews were left in Lenta, all Latvians. After a few months, a new transport arrived, but the newcomers were not Latvian. They were German, Czechoslovakian, Austrian, and Polish Jews. Some of the foreign Jews were from the Riga ghetto; the Polish Jews had come straight from Poland. Lenta now had a mixed Jewish population.”[193] [195]One should note here that the Polish Jews are explicitly stated to have “come straight from Poland”, in other words they were not Polish Jews from Belarus.
To be continued...
Notes:
[1] [196] Strictly speaking, the occupied
eastern territories were the two Reichskommissariat Ostland and
Ukraine. Reichskommissariat Ostland consisted of the four
Generalbezirk Estland (Estonia), Lettland (Latvia),
Litauen
(Lithuania) and Weißruthenien (White Ruthenia), i.e. the
occupied western part of Belarus SSR. Two further
Reichskommissariat were planned that would encompass Muscovite
Russia and the Caucasian region respectively, but those
administrative entities were never realized due to the retreat
of the German armies. The great areas in west and south-west
Russia taken by the German early in the war were not occupied in
the same sense that the territories of the two
Reichskommissariat were, and were administered by the military
command and the SS generals. It seems highly likely, however,
that Jews were transported to Russia proper to carry out labor
near the front; cf. H. Kruk’s diary entry about Polish Jews from
Sosnowiec passing through Vilna in a train heading “in the
direction of the eastern front” (Section 3.3.1.).
[2] [197] To give just one example: In a letter sent to eight high-ranking members of the SS administration, among them the head of SS-WVHA, Oswald Pohl, on 5 July 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered “The Sobibor transit camp [Durchgangslager], located in the Lublin district, (...) to be converted into a concentration camp” (a transformation which eventually did not take place); Nuremberg Document NO-482.
[3] [198] Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004.
[4] [199] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibor: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books 2010.
[5] [200] For a list of the documented transports, see Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., pp. 199-201.
[6] [201] The available railway documents shows that, between 8 November 1941 and 28 November 1942, 66 transports with a total of 56,221 Jewish deportees were sent from Altreich, Vienna and the Protectorate to the East (cf. note 5). In an enclosure to “Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten” no. 10 from 3 July 1942 (RGVA, 500-1-775, p. 233) it is stated that 25 transports carrying 25,103 Jews had been sent to Riga between 17 November 1941 and 6 February 1942. Only 15,114 of these deportees are found in the available railway documentation. Thus the number of directly deported Jews amounted to [56.221 + (25.103–15.114)=] 66,210.
[7] [202] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, Oxford / New York 2007, p. 224.
[8] [203] Miroslav Kárný, Konečné řešení. Genocida českých židů v nĕmecké protektorátní politice, Academia, Prague 1991, pp. 115f.
[9] [204] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington / Indianapolis 1987, pp. 139-140.
[10] [205] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edition, Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2003, vol. II, p. 769.
[11] [206] Ibid., pp. 776-777. It seems somewhat that odd that Germany would bother to scam this money from Slovakia, since the latter nation, as Hilberg puts it, was a “puppet state” (ibid., p. 792) and thus could have been plundered by the Germans in a much less roundabout manner.
[12] [207] Ibid., p. 785.
[13] [208] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 215.
[14] [209] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., vol. II, p. 781; on p. 785 though Hilberg gives their number as merely 6,000.
[15] [210] This of course also applies to the Jews from Slovakia and elsewhere deported to Auschwitz during 1944.
[16] [211] Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Stutthof and its Function in National Socialist Jewish Policy, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2003, p. 24.
[17] [212] In June 1944 the possibility of using Hungarian Jews as workers in the Estonian camps was under consideration. A total of 2,310 men and 240 women were scheduled for deportation, but in the end it appears that only the 500 women arrived in Estonia. They were employed at the Arbeitseinsatzställe Baltöl in north-eastern Estonia. Cf. Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity, Tallinn 2006, p. 724.
[18] [213] Ibid., p. 719.
[19] [214] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., pp. 600-601, 610.
[20] [215] Ibid., p. 615.
[21] [216] Ibid., pp. 628-629.
[22] [217] Ibid., p. 614.
[23] [218] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 198.
[24] [219] Ibid., p. 199.
[25] [220] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., p. 629.
[26] [221] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 199.
[27] [222] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., p. 629.
[28] [223] Ibid., note 139.
[29] [224] PS-1726, IMT Vol. XXVII, p. 506.
[30] [225] Schelvis writes that according to his own ”rough estimates”, about 1,000 Dutch Jews were transferred upon their arrival at Sobibór to labor camps in the Lublin district; J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 14.
[31] [226] Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989, passim.
[32] [227] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., p. 636.
[33] [228] Ibid., p. 645.
[34] [229] Ibid., p. 650.
[35] [230] Ibid., p. 672.
[36] [231] Ibid., p. 695.
[37] [232] Ibid., p. 699.
[38] [233] Ibid., p. 700.
[39] [234] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 198, 216-218.
[40] [235] Serge Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Paris 1978. This book lacks page numbers. See also Alex Faitelson, Heroism & Bravery in Lithuania 1941-1945, Gefen, Jerusalem 1996, pp. 373-375. A number of inscriptions preserved on the walls of Cell No. 5 in the Kovno Ninth Fort were left by those French Jews. The inscriptions transcribed by Faitelson includes an “S. Kool, jr., Amsterdam”, something which indicates that this transport may have contained a miniscule number of Dutch Jews, most likely individuals that had been arrested in France. Faitelson also writes of Belgian Jews being in the Drancy transport, but provides no evidence for this claim.
[41] [236] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., p. 716, 718, 722-723.
[42] [237] Ibid., pp. 738-739, 742-743, 745.
[43] [238] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, op.cit., p. 146.
[44] [239] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., pp. 748-750, 755.
[45] [240] Ibid., p. 794ff.
[46] [241] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, op.cit., p. 143.
[47] [242] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg Publishers, Oxford / New York 2007, p. 226, note 5.
[48] [243] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. II, op.cit., p. 805.
[49] [244] Ibid., p. 757.
[50] [245] Ibid., p. 761.
[51] [246] Ibid., pp. 764-765.
[52] [247] This group is sometimes confusingly designated as “Yugoslavian”.
[53] [248] Ibid., p. 725.
[54] [249] R. M. Kempner, Eichmann und Komplizen, Europa Verlag, Zürich/Stuttgart/Vienna 1961, p. 289, 290.
[55] [250] Ibid., p. 290.
[56] [251] Ibid., p. 291, facsimile of the document.
[57] [252] Ibid., p. 292. Nuremberg document NG-3354.
[58] [253] Ibid.
[59] [254] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. II, op.cit., pp. 736-737.
[60] [255] Ibid., p. 293.
[61] [256] Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Danubemap.jpg
[62] [257] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. II, op.cit., p. 584ff.
[63] [258] Ibid., pp. 589-596.
[64] [259] Cf. ibid, pp. 808-853.
[65] [260] Ibid., pp. 632-634.
[66] [261] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Die Akte Sobibor, pp. 105-109, online: http://juergen-graf.vho.org/pdf/graf-kues-mattogno-die-akte-sobibor.pdf [262]
[67] [263] As mentioned above, Jules Schelvis states that approximately 1,000 Dutch Jews were transferred from Sobibór to various labor camps. Witnesses quoted by Schelvis further speak of at least 40 French Jews transferred to Lublin and of 830-880 Belarus Jews transferred to Trawniki; J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 14, 217, 219f.
[68] [264] Cf. the testimony of Treblinka I inmate Israel Cymlich, according to which “transports of workers were brought in frequently from the death camp”; Israel Cymlich & Oskar Strawczynski, Escaping Hell in Treblinka, Yad Vashem, New York/Jerusalem 2007, p. 36.
[69] [265] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 198, 218-220.
[70] [266] These are the most commonly given dates; for a list of alleged dates relating to the camp cf. Ingrid Weckert, “What Was Kulmhof/Chelmno? Questions about a controversial extermination camp”, The Revisionist 1(4) (2003), pp. 400-412. Any Jews deported to the camp in the summer of 1944 would almost certainly not have reached the eastern territories. It is in fact highly dubious that any Jews were deported to Chełmno during 1944, cf. Carlo Mattogno, Il campo di Chełmno tra storia e propaganda, Effepi, Genua 2009.
[71] [267] Cf. Section 3.3.1.
[72] [268] The last “gassing” in Auschwitz “probably” took place on 1 November 1944, according to Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, op.cit., p. 921.
[73] [269] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, op.cit., p. 68.
[74] [270] Ibid., p. 172. The Höfle document shows that 0 Jews were deported to the camp during the last two weeks of December 1942, implying that transports ceased during the first half of December or already in November.
[75] [271] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 36.
[76] [272] 14 October 1943 is the date of the well-known Sobibór uprising and mass escape, following which the camp was promptly liquidated. It should be pointed out that the last 6 or 8 transports (the number is not known due to lack of documentation) arrived to Sobibór from Ostland in September 1943 and consisted of Russian Jews who were most likely either employed within Sobibór or transferred to Trawniki and other labor camps in the Lublin district. The last transport to Sobibór transited east was almost certainly a convoy from the Netherlands which departed on 20 July 1943 (cf. ibid., p. 198).
[77] [273] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, op.cit., p. 81.
[78] [274] Ibid., p. 372.
[79] [275] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. III, op.cit., p. 938.
[80] [276] Based on the Höfle document we know that a total of 24,733 Jews were transited via Camp Lublin (Majdanek) during 1942, whereof 12,761 during the latter half of December. In the latest official estimate of the Majdanek death toll (from 2005), historian Tomasz Kranz does not claim any “gassings” for the year 1943. If any Jews were transited via Majdanek in 1943, their numbers are likely to have been very small. For more on the Majdanek victim figure, cf. Jürgen Graf, “Zur Revision der Opferzahl von Majdanek”, online: http://aaargh.codoh.com/fran/livres7/JGrevismajda.pdf [277]
[81] [278] American Jewish Yearbook, no. 44 (1942-1943), p. 244f.
[82] [279] American Jewish Yearbook, no. 45 (1943-1944), p. 304.
[83] [280] JTA Bulletin, March 1, 1943. (Note in original).
[84] [281] Ibid., November 1, 1943. (Note in original).
[85] [282] Ibid., July 23, 1943. (Note in original).
[86] [283] Joseph B. Shechtman, “The Transnistria Reservation”, in: Koppel S. Pinson (ed.), Studies on the Epoch of the Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, Vol. VIII), Yiddish Scientific Institute - YIVO, New York 1953, pp. 190-191.
[87] [284] Cf. Elena Makarova et al., Theresienstadt: kultur och barbari / Theresienstadt: Culture and Barbarism, Carlssons Bokförlag, Lund / Stockholm 1995, p. 11. http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Holocaust/0025_BialystokChildren5Oct1943.htm
[88] [285] Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, op.cit. Entries for January and February 1943, passim.
[89] [286] http://www.terezinstudies.cz/deu/ITI/database/tr_out_to (Accessed on 1 May 2010).
[90] [287] The webpage http://www.gedenkbuch.halle.de/gbdatensatz.php?num=294 states that a Martha Bratel was brought on Transport Ct to Auschwitz on 29 January 1943, giving as its source a transport list reproduced in Theresienstädter Gedenkbuch – Die Opfer der Judentransporte aus Deutschland nach Theresienstadt 1942-1945 (Prague 2000), p. 709. The author of this article has not been able to verify this source.
[91] [288] Steven Koblik, The Stones Cry Out: Sweden’s Response to the Persecution of the Jews, Holocaust Library, New York 1988, p. 56.
[92] [289] Judisk Krönika, vol. 11, no. 7, September 1942, p. 91.
[93] [290] Judisk Krönika, vol. 11, no. 8, October 1942, p. 123.
[94] [291] Ibid.
[95] [292] Judisk Krönika, vol. 13, no. 5, May/June 1944, p. 68.
[96] [293] Judisk Krönika, vol. 12, no. 9, November 1943, p. 150.
[97] [294] Judisk Krönika, vol. 12, no. 7, September 1943, p. 105.
[98] [295] Judisk Krönika, vol. 13, no. 5, May/June 1944, p. 67.
[99] [296] Andrew Ezergailis, Harold Otto, Gvido Augusts, Nazi/Soviet Disinformation About the Holocaust in Nazi-Occupied Latvia, Latvijas 50 Gadu Okupacijas Muzeja Fonds, Riga 2005, p. 115.
[100] [297] Reproduced in: La presse antiraciste sous l’occupation hitlérienne. Foreword by A. Raisky, Paris 1950, p. 179.
[101] [298] E.M. Kulischer, The displacement of population in Europe, International Labour Office, Montreal 1943, pp. 96-97.
[102] [299] Ibid., p. 107.
[103] [300] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., pp. 199-201.
[104] [301] E.M. Kulischer, The displacement of population in Europe, op.cit., p. 110.
[105] [302] Ibid., p. 111.
[106] [303] Ibid., p. 113.
[107] [304] Memoranda written by Otto Danielsson on 9 November 1944, attached to a letter from Thulin to SUK on 27 November 1944, Kontrollbyråns korrespondens E4:1, SUK, RA; quoted in Mats Deland, Purgatorium. Sverige och andra världskrigets krigsförbrytare, Atlas, Stockholm 2010, p. 323, 521 (note 1106).
[108] [305] Quoted in Andrew Ezergailis (ed.), Stockholm Documents. The German Occupation of Latvia 1941-1945. What Did America Know?, Historical Institute of Latvia, Riga 2002, p. 472.
[109] [306] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944, Yale University Press, New Haven/London 2002, p. 187.
[110] [307] Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939–1945, op.cit., pp. 174f.
[111] [308] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: Crematorium I and the Alleged Homicidal Gassings, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2005, pp. 67-68.
[112] [309] J.-C. Pressac, Les crématoires d’Auschwitz. La machinerie du meurtre de masse, CNRS Editions, Paris 1993, p. 38.
[113] [310] Ber Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, Am Oved Publishers, Tel Aviv 1985, p. 4.
[114] [311] Shmuel Spector, Geoffrey Wigoder, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust, Vol. 3, New York University Press, New York 2001, p. 1221.
[115] [312] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 210.
[116] [313] E.M. Kulischer, The displacement of population in Europe, op.cit., p. 104.
[117] [314] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 231.
[118] [315] Ibid., p. 230.
[119] [316] Ibid., p. 236.
[120] [317] Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau (ed.), Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord. Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges, Röderberg-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 285-286.
[121] [318] Ibid., p. 319.
[122] [319] Danuta Dąbrowska, Lucjan Dobroszycki (eds.), Kronika Getta Łódzkiego, Wydawnictwo Łódzkie 1965, vol. I, p. 401, 426.
[123] [320] Vilna is located some 150-160 km from the Polish and (former) German (East Prussian) borders but merely some 30 km from the border to Belarus. One must further keep in mind that Jewish escapees traveling by foot, who had to look out for German soldiers, would not likely have covered a very long distance daily.
[124] [321] Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust. The Kovno Ghetto Diary, Harvard University Press, Cambridge / London 1990, p. 111. In his entry from 17 November 1942 (p. 154) Tory further writes that “The Jewish police [in the Kovno Ghetto] have found two young men, both originally from Poland, who have agreed to carry out the hanging”.
[125] [322] Jeanette Wolf, Mit Bibel und Bebel, Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn 1980, p. 33. Wolf writes (ibid.) that the camp had about 1,500 inmates.
[126] [323] Josef Katz, One who came back: The diary of a Jewish survivor, Dryad Press, Takoma Park (ML), 2006, p. 65, 108, 129, 156. Katz’ memoirs (not an actual diary, but memoirs in strict chronological order) were written between the early summer of 1945 and the fall of 1946.
[127] [324] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 664.
[128] [325] Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., pp. 724-725.
[129] [326] Ibid., p. 703.
[130] [327] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 518.
[131] [328] Neringa Latvyte-Gustaitiene, “The Genocide of the Jews in the Trakai Region of Lithuania”, online: http://www.jewishgen.org/LITVAK/HTML/OnlineJournals/genocide_of_the_jews.htm
[132] [329] Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust. The Kovno Ghetto Diary, op.cit., p. 407.
[133] [330] Joseph Rebhun, Why Me? Memoirs of Holocaust Survivors, Wildside Press, Rockville (MD) 2007, p. 173.
[134] [331] J. Schelvis, Sobibor. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 204, Table 12.9. A seventh transport departed on 13 April, but is improbable that it could have reached Lithuania by 16 April.
[135] [332] Forty-three transports with Dutch Jews departed for Sobibór between 15 July and 12 December. After a lull in the departures, another nine convoys Dutch Jews were sent to Auschwitz between 11 January and 1 March 1943. Cf. Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau, op.cit. Schelvis on the other hand gives the total number of Dutch Auschwitz deportees July 1942 – March 1943 as 46,555; J. Schelvis, Sobibor. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 198.
[136] [333] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 519.
[137] [334] Ibid.
[138] [335] Ibid., p. 350.
[139] [336] Ibid., p. 370.
[140] [337] Ibid., p. 386.
[141] [338] Ibid., p. 396.
[142] [339] Ibid., p. 530.
[143] [340] Ibid., p. 521.
[144] [341] In his entry from 12 April 1943 Kruk writes under the heading “30,000 fresh victims”: “From the German press, I learn that the Jews must leave 8 of the 11 Dutch provinces. This means about 130,000 fresh victims. No one knows if the Jew will be sent to Eastern Europe to work or to be killed. Now it’s the turn of the Dutch Jews.“ Ibid., p. 515. Since the figure of 130,000 is mentioned again in the entry from 30 April, one may conclude that the figure in the heading is an error.
[145] [342] In his entry from 10 August 1942, Kruk writes under the heading “What happened in Oszmiana?”; “About 40 km from Vilna is the small town of Oszmiana, which was annexed to Lithuania only this spring. Until recently it was quite there. Yesterday a train passed through Vilna with Jews who tossed out about 20 letters to those working in the Vilna railroad station. From the letters, it became clear that the Jews come from Oszmiana and are being taken to work in Vievis, a small town 50 km from Vilna. They write that they don’t know where they are being taken. They were sure this was the end. Some ran away. Altogether, some 400 persons were taken. Some are in… the hospital; some were not taken because they are wounded… That means there was an Aktion, that Oszmiana has already been staked out.”Ibid., p. 344. In the entry from 28 October the same year Kruk reports that 410 sick and old among the remaining 2,300 Jews in the Oszmiana Ghetto were taken away and shot; ibid., pp. 387-388. The following day Kruk noted down contradictory reports that 800 Jews had been shot; ibid., p. 394.
[146] [343] Ibid., p. 525.
[147] [344] Miriam Novitch, Sobibor. Martyrdom and Revolt, Holocaust Library, New York 1980, p. 29. Cf. Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, op.cit., pp. 109-110.
[148] [345] Ibid., p. 157.
[149] [346] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 570.
[150] [347] Hersh Smolar, The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans Against The Nazis, Holocaust Library, New York 1989, pp. 102-103.
[151] [348] Ibid., p. 108.
[152] [349] Hilde Sherman-Zander, Zwischen Tag und Dunkel. Mädchenjahre im Ghetto, Ullstein, Frankfurt a. M. /Berlin 1984, pp. 60-61.
[153] [350] Other sources, such as Reuben Ainsztain, spells the name of this witness as Hersh Smolyar.
[154] [351] Hersh Smolar, The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans Against The Nazis, op.cit., p. 98.
[155] [352] Gerald Reitlinger, Die Endlösung. Hitlers Versuch der Ausrottung der Juden Europas 1939-1945, Colloquium Verlag, Berlin 1992, pp. 467-468.
[156] [353] Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland, Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, pp. 761-762.
[157] [354] Karl Loewenstein, Minsk. Im Lager der deutschen Juden, Bundeszentrale für Heimatsdienst, Bonn 1961. pp. 23-24.
[158] [355] Rosenberg gives the date as 9 November, and describes the train as being boarded 5 o’clock in the morning and departing on 10 o´clock. It does not seem out of the question that the scheduled departure time was pushed forward for whatever reason and that Rosenberg is actually correct about the date; Heinz Rosenberg, Jahre des Schreckens... und ich blieb übrig, daß ich Dir’s ansage, Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 1985, pp. 17-18.
[159] [356] Ibid., p. 27.
[160] [357] Ibid.
[161] [358] Ibid.
[162] [359] Karl Loewenstein, Minsk. Im Lager der deutschen Juden, op.cit., p. 17
[163] [360] Ibid., p. 20.
[164] [361] It is interesting to note in the light of this hypothesis that, according to orthodox historiography, the Jews from this Vienna transport were shot by an Einsatzkommando at the outskirts of Kaunas; cf. R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., Vol. I, p. 366.
[165] [362] Heinz Rosenberg, Jahre des Schreckens, op.cit., pp. 37-38.
[166] [363] Karl Loewenstein, Minsk. Im Lager der deutschen Juden, op.cit., p. 16.
[167] [364] GARF, 7445-2-145, pp. 65f.; quoted in: Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., p. 198. Raul Hilberg, who merely summarizes the contents (The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., Vol. I, p. 367), gives as an alternative archival source Occ E 3-37.
[168] [365] GARF, 7445-2-145, p. 68; quoted in: Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., p. 198.
[169] [366] GARF, 7445-2-145, pp. 72f; summarized in: Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., pp. 198-199.
[170] [367] Minutes from Jeckeln’s interrogation on 14 December 1945 (Major Zwetajew, interrogator; Sergeant Suur, interpreter), Historical State Archives, Riga; quoted in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1984, pp. 96-97.
[171] [368] Jukka Rislakki, The case for Latvia: disinformation campaigns against a small nation, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam / New York 2008, p. 124.
[172] [369] Ibid., p. 123.
[173] [370] William W. Mishell, Kaddish for Kovno. Life and Death in a Lithuanian Ghetto 1941-1945, Chicago Review Press, Chicago 1988, pp. 127-128.
[174] [371] Rich Cohen, The Avengers: A Jewish War Story, Vintage Books, New York 2001, pp. 87-88.
[175] [372] Ibid., p. 196.
[176] [373] Ibid., p. 255.
[177] [374] Memoir: The Holocaust Recalled, http://migs.concordia.ca/memoirs/Reich/Rei_mem.html
[178] [375] Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., p. 722.
[179] [376] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Vol. 8, Verlag C.H. Beck, Munich 2008, pp. 167-168.
[180] [377] Monatsbericht SS-Lagerarzt, 25.11.1943, in: EAM (Eesti Ajaloomuuseum, Estonian History Museum), D 152/2/40. (Source in original). The reports of the Vaivara SS-Lagerarzt were discovered only in 2002 by Estonian historian Meelis Maripuu; cf. ibid., p. 144, note 4.
[181] [378] The exact date was 3-4 February. 23 sick inmates were evacuated on horseback and 414 on foot. The transport took place under Red Army fire and as a result of the exerting march some inmates died after arriving at the Kuremäe camp. Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., p. 729.
[182] [379] A witness named Markus Gordon on the other hand testified that the number of inmates at the Kuremäe camp prior to the transfer from Soski amounted to some 800, not 444 as recorded by Bodman. The author of this article has unfortunately not had the opportunity to directly access Gordon’s account, which is referenced in Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., p. 726.
[183] [380] Other sources state that the Lagerführer was a certain Eugen Einget Wurth; cf. Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., p. 722.
[184] [381] Urteil gegen Scharfetter, 1.2.1980, in: Landgericht Stade, 9 Ks /78-23/78. (Note in original). The Estonian name of the Goldfields camp was Kohtla, not to be confused with the nearby Kohtla-Järve camp.
[185] [382] Memoir: The Holocaust Recalled, op.cit.
[186] [383] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Der Ort des Terrors, op.cit., pp. 175-176.
[187] [384] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 667ff.
[188] [385] Another source states that 1,000 Jews from Vilnius arrived at the Kohtla railway station on 4 September 1943, whereof one half were taken to the Ereda camp and the other half to Vaivara – this would support the dating found in the Distel account; Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., p. 731.
[189] [386] Other sources gives the name of this place as “Kohtla-Järve”; cf. Lukáš Přibyl, “Die Geschichte des Theresienstädter Transports ‘Be’ nach Estland”, in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 2001, Institut Theresienstädter Initiative, Prague 2001, p. 164.
[190] [387] http://migs.concordia.ca/memoirs/frankel_zaltzman_paula/frankel_zaltzman_paula_04.htm [388]
[191] [389] The Holocaust in Kraslava, http://www.seligman.org.il/kraslava_holocaust.html
[192] [390] Jack Ratz, Endless Miracles, Shengold Publishers, New York 1998, p. 43.
[193] [391] Ibid., p. 45.
[2] [197] To give just one example: In a letter sent to eight high-ranking members of the SS administration, among them the head of SS-WVHA, Oswald Pohl, on 5 July 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered “The Sobibor transit camp [Durchgangslager], located in the Lublin district, (...) to be converted into a concentration camp” (a transformation which eventually did not take place); Nuremberg Document NO-482.
[3] [198] Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004.
[4] [199] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibor: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books 2010.
[5] [200] For a list of the documented transports, see Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., pp. 199-201.
[6] [201] The available railway documents shows that, between 8 November 1941 and 28 November 1942, 66 transports with a total of 56,221 Jewish deportees were sent from Altreich, Vienna and the Protectorate to the East (cf. note 5). In an enclosure to “Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten” no. 10 from 3 July 1942 (RGVA, 500-1-775, p. 233) it is stated that 25 transports carrying 25,103 Jews had been sent to Riga between 17 November 1941 and 6 February 1942. Only 15,114 of these deportees are found in the available railway documentation. Thus the number of directly deported Jews amounted to [56.221 + (25.103–15.114)=] 66,210.
[7] [202] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, Oxford / New York 2007, p. 224.
[8] [203] Miroslav Kárný, Konečné řešení. Genocida českých židů v nĕmecké protektorátní politice, Academia, Prague 1991, pp. 115f.
[9] [204] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington / Indianapolis 1987, pp. 139-140.
[10] [205] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edition, Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2003, vol. II, p. 769.
[11] [206] Ibid., pp. 776-777. It seems somewhat that odd that Germany would bother to scam this money from Slovakia, since the latter nation, as Hilberg puts it, was a “puppet state” (ibid., p. 792) and thus could have been plundered by the Germans in a much less roundabout manner.
[12] [207] Ibid., p. 785.
[13] [208] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 215.
[14] [209] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., vol. II, p. 781; on p. 785 though Hilberg gives their number as merely 6,000.
[15] [210] This of course also applies to the Jews from Slovakia and elsewhere deported to Auschwitz during 1944.
[16] [211] Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Stutthof and its Function in National Socialist Jewish Policy, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2003, p. 24.
[17] [212] In June 1944 the possibility of using Hungarian Jews as workers in the Estonian camps was under consideration. A total of 2,310 men and 240 women were scheduled for deportation, but in the end it appears that only the 500 women arrived in Estonia. They were employed at the Arbeitseinsatzställe Baltöl in north-eastern Estonia. Cf. Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity, Tallinn 2006, p. 724.
[18] [213] Ibid., p. 719.
[19] [214] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., pp. 600-601, 610.
[20] [215] Ibid., p. 615.
[21] [216] Ibid., pp. 628-629.
[22] [217] Ibid., p. 614.
[23] [218] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 198.
[24] [219] Ibid., p. 199.
[25] [220] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., p. 629.
[26] [221] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 199.
[27] [222] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., p. 629.
[28] [223] Ibid., note 139.
[29] [224] PS-1726, IMT Vol. XXVII, p. 506.
[30] [225] Schelvis writes that according to his own ”rough estimates”, about 1,000 Dutch Jews were transferred upon their arrival at Sobibór to labor camps in the Lublin district; J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 14.
[31] [226] Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989, passim.
[32] [227] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., p. 636.
[33] [228] Ibid., p. 645.
[34] [229] Ibid., p. 650.
[35] [230] Ibid., p. 672.
[36] [231] Ibid., p. 695.
[37] [232] Ibid., p. 699.
[38] [233] Ibid., p. 700.
[39] [234] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 198, 216-218.
[40] [235] Serge Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Paris 1978. This book lacks page numbers. See also Alex Faitelson, Heroism & Bravery in Lithuania 1941-1945, Gefen, Jerusalem 1996, pp. 373-375. A number of inscriptions preserved on the walls of Cell No. 5 in the Kovno Ninth Fort were left by those French Jews. The inscriptions transcribed by Faitelson includes an “S. Kool, jr., Amsterdam”, something which indicates that this transport may have contained a miniscule number of Dutch Jews, most likely individuals that had been arrested in France. Faitelson also writes of Belgian Jews being in the Drancy transport, but provides no evidence for this claim.
[41] [236] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., p. 716, 718, 722-723.
[42] [237] Ibid., pp. 738-739, 742-743, 745.
[43] [238] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, op.cit., p. 146.
[44] [239] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., pp. 748-750, 755.
[45] [240] Ibid., p. 794ff.
[46] [241] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, op.cit., p. 143.
[47] [242] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg Publishers, Oxford / New York 2007, p. 226, note 5.
[48] [243] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. II, op.cit., p. 805.
[49] [244] Ibid., p. 757.
[50] [245] Ibid., p. 761.
[51] [246] Ibid., pp. 764-765.
[52] [247] This group is sometimes confusingly designated as “Yugoslavian”.
[53] [248] Ibid., p. 725.
[54] [249] R. M. Kempner, Eichmann und Komplizen, Europa Verlag, Zürich/Stuttgart/Vienna 1961, p. 289, 290.
[55] [250] Ibid., p. 290.
[56] [251] Ibid., p. 291, facsimile of the document.
[57] [252] Ibid., p. 292. Nuremberg document NG-3354.
[58] [253] Ibid.
[59] [254] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. II, op.cit., pp. 736-737.
[60] [255] Ibid., p. 293.
[61] [256] Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Danubemap.jpg
[62] [257] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. II, op.cit., p. 584ff.
[63] [258] Ibid., pp. 589-596.
[64] [259] Cf. ibid, pp. 808-853.
[65] [260] Ibid., pp. 632-634.
[66] [261] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Die Akte Sobibor, pp. 105-109, online: http://juergen-graf.vho.org/pdf/graf-kues-mattogno-die-akte-sobibor.pdf [262]
[67] [263] As mentioned above, Jules Schelvis states that approximately 1,000 Dutch Jews were transferred from Sobibór to various labor camps. Witnesses quoted by Schelvis further speak of at least 40 French Jews transferred to Lublin and of 830-880 Belarus Jews transferred to Trawniki; J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 14, 217, 219f.
[68] [264] Cf. the testimony of Treblinka I inmate Israel Cymlich, according to which “transports of workers were brought in frequently from the death camp”; Israel Cymlich & Oskar Strawczynski, Escaping Hell in Treblinka, Yad Vashem, New York/Jerusalem 2007, p. 36.
[69] [265] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 198, 218-220.
[70] [266] These are the most commonly given dates; for a list of alleged dates relating to the camp cf. Ingrid Weckert, “What Was Kulmhof/Chelmno? Questions about a controversial extermination camp”, The Revisionist 1(4) (2003), pp. 400-412. Any Jews deported to the camp in the summer of 1944 would almost certainly not have reached the eastern territories. It is in fact highly dubious that any Jews were deported to Chełmno during 1944, cf. Carlo Mattogno, Il campo di Chełmno tra storia e propaganda, Effepi, Genua 2009.
[71] [267] Cf. Section 3.3.1.
[72] [268] The last “gassing” in Auschwitz “probably” took place on 1 November 1944, according to Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, op.cit., p. 921.
[73] [269] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, op.cit., p. 68.
[74] [270] Ibid., p. 172. The Höfle document shows that 0 Jews were deported to the camp during the last two weeks of December 1942, implying that transports ceased during the first half of December or already in November.
[75] [271] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 36.
[76] [272] 14 October 1943 is the date of the well-known Sobibór uprising and mass escape, following which the camp was promptly liquidated. It should be pointed out that the last 6 or 8 transports (the number is not known due to lack of documentation) arrived to Sobibór from Ostland in September 1943 and consisted of Russian Jews who were most likely either employed within Sobibór or transferred to Trawniki and other labor camps in the Lublin district. The last transport to Sobibór transited east was almost certainly a convoy from the Netherlands which departed on 20 July 1943 (cf. ibid., p. 198).
[77] [273] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, op.cit., p. 81.
[78] [274] Ibid., p. 372.
[79] [275] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. III, op.cit., p. 938.
[80] [276] Based on the Höfle document we know that a total of 24,733 Jews were transited via Camp Lublin (Majdanek) during 1942, whereof 12,761 during the latter half of December. In the latest official estimate of the Majdanek death toll (from 2005), historian Tomasz Kranz does not claim any “gassings” for the year 1943. If any Jews were transited via Majdanek in 1943, their numbers are likely to have been very small. For more on the Majdanek victim figure, cf. Jürgen Graf, “Zur Revision der Opferzahl von Majdanek”, online: http://aaargh.codoh.com/fran/livres7/JGrevismajda.pdf [277]
[81] [278] American Jewish Yearbook, no. 44 (1942-1943), p. 244f.
[82] [279] American Jewish Yearbook, no. 45 (1943-1944), p. 304.
[83] [280] JTA Bulletin, March 1, 1943. (Note in original).
[84] [281] Ibid., November 1, 1943. (Note in original).
[85] [282] Ibid., July 23, 1943. (Note in original).
[86] [283] Joseph B. Shechtman, “The Transnistria Reservation”, in: Koppel S. Pinson (ed.), Studies on the Epoch of the Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, Vol. VIII), Yiddish Scientific Institute - YIVO, New York 1953, pp. 190-191.
[87] [284] Cf. Elena Makarova et al., Theresienstadt: kultur och barbari / Theresienstadt: Culture and Barbarism, Carlssons Bokförlag, Lund / Stockholm 1995, p. 11. http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Holocaust/0025_BialystokChildren5Oct1943.htm
[88] [285] Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, op.cit. Entries for January and February 1943, passim.
[89] [286] http://www.terezinstudies.cz/deu/ITI/database/tr_out_to (Accessed on 1 May 2010).
[90] [287] The webpage http://www.gedenkbuch.halle.de/gbdatensatz.php?num=294 states that a Martha Bratel was brought on Transport Ct to Auschwitz on 29 January 1943, giving as its source a transport list reproduced in Theresienstädter Gedenkbuch – Die Opfer der Judentransporte aus Deutschland nach Theresienstadt 1942-1945 (Prague 2000), p. 709. The author of this article has not been able to verify this source.
[91] [288] Steven Koblik, The Stones Cry Out: Sweden’s Response to the Persecution of the Jews, Holocaust Library, New York 1988, p. 56.
[92] [289] Judisk Krönika, vol. 11, no. 7, September 1942, p. 91.
[93] [290] Judisk Krönika, vol. 11, no. 8, October 1942, p. 123.
[94] [291] Ibid.
[95] [292] Judisk Krönika, vol. 13, no. 5, May/June 1944, p. 68.
[96] [293] Judisk Krönika, vol. 12, no. 9, November 1943, p. 150.
[97] [294] Judisk Krönika, vol. 12, no. 7, September 1943, p. 105.
[98] [295] Judisk Krönika, vol. 13, no. 5, May/June 1944, p. 67.
[99] [296] Andrew Ezergailis, Harold Otto, Gvido Augusts, Nazi/Soviet Disinformation About the Holocaust in Nazi-Occupied Latvia, Latvijas 50 Gadu Okupacijas Muzeja Fonds, Riga 2005, p. 115.
[100] [297] Reproduced in: La presse antiraciste sous l’occupation hitlérienne. Foreword by A. Raisky, Paris 1950, p. 179.
[101] [298] E.M. Kulischer, The displacement of population in Europe, International Labour Office, Montreal 1943, pp. 96-97.
[102] [299] Ibid., p. 107.
[103] [300] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., pp. 199-201.
[104] [301] E.M. Kulischer, The displacement of population in Europe, op.cit., p. 110.
[105] [302] Ibid., p. 111.
[106] [303] Ibid., p. 113.
[107] [304] Memoranda written by Otto Danielsson on 9 November 1944, attached to a letter from Thulin to SUK on 27 November 1944, Kontrollbyråns korrespondens E4:1, SUK, RA; quoted in Mats Deland, Purgatorium. Sverige och andra världskrigets krigsförbrytare, Atlas, Stockholm 2010, p. 323, 521 (note 1106).
[108] [305] Quoted in Andrew Ezergailis (ed.), Stockholm Documents. The German Occupation of Latvia 1941-1945. What Did America Know?, Historical Institute of Latvia, Riga 2002, p. 472.
[109] [306] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944, Yale University Press, New Haven/London 2002, p. 187.
[110] [307] Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939–1945, op.cit., pp. 174f.
[111] [308] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: Crematorium I and the Alleged Homicidal Gassings, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2005, pp. 67-68.
[112] [309] J.-C. Pressac, Les crématoires d’Auschwitz. La machinerie du meurtre de masse, CNRS Editions, Paris 1993, p. 38.
[113] [310] Ber Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, Am Oved Publishers, Tel Aviv 1985, p. 4.
[114] [311] Shmuel Spector, Geoffrey Wigoder, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust, Vol. 3, New York University Press, New York 2001, p. 1221.
[115] [312] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 210.
[116] [313] E.M. Kulischer, The displacement of population in Europe, op.cit., p. 104.
[117] [314] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 231.
[118] [315] Ibid., p. 230.
[119] [316] Ibid., p. 236.
[120] [317] Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau (ed.), Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord. Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges, Röderberg-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 285-286.
[121] [318] Ibid., p. 319.
[122] [319] Danuta Dąbrowska, Lucjan Dobroszycki (eds.), Kronika Getta Łódzkiego, Wydawnictwo Łódzkie 1965, vol. I, p. 401, 426.
[123] [320] Vilna is located some 150-160 km from the Polish and (former) German (East Prussian) borders but merely some 30 km from the border to Belarus. One must further keep in mind that Jewish escapees traveling by foot, who had to look out for German soldiers, would not likely have covered a very long distance daily.
[124] [321] Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust. The Kovno Ghetto Diary, Harvard University Press, Cambridge / London 1990, p. 111. In his entry from 17 November 1942 (p. 154) Tory further writes that “The Jewish police [in the Kovno Ghetto] have found two young men, both originally from Poland, who have agreed to carry out the hanging”.
[125] [322] Jeanette Wolf, Mit Bibel und Bebel, Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn 1980, p. 33. Wolf writes (ibid.) that the camp had about 1,500 inmates.
[126] [323] Josef Katz, One who came back: The diary of a Jewish survivor, Dryad Press, Takoma Park (ML), 2006, p. 65, 108, 129, 156. Katz’ memoirs (not an actual diary, but memoirs in strict chronological order) were written between the early summer of 1945 and the fall of 1946.
[127] [324] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 664.
[128] [325] Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., pp. 724-725.
[129] [326] Ibid., p. 703.
[130] [327] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 518.
[131] [328] Neringa Latvyte-Gustaitiene, “The Genocide of the Jews in the Trakai Region of Lithuania”, online: http://www.jewishgen.org/LITVAK/HTML/OnlineJournals/genocide_of_the_jews.htm
[132] [329] Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust. The Kovno Ghetto Diary, op.cit., p. 407.
[133] [330] Joseph Rebhun, Why Me? Memoirs of Holocaust Survivors, Wildside Press, Rockville (MD) 2007, p. 173.
[134] [331] J. Schelvis, Sobibor. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 204, Table 12.9. A seventh transport departed on 13 April, but is improbable that it could have reached Lithuania by 16 April.
[135] [332] Forty-three transports with Dutch Jews departed for Sobibór between 15 July and 12 December. After a lull in the departures, another nine convoys Dutch Jews were sent to Auschwitz between 11 January and 1 March 1943. Cf. Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau, op.cit. Schelvis on the other hand gives the total number of Dutch Auschwitz deportees July 1942 – March 1943 as 46,555; J. Schelvis, Sobibor. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 198.
[136] [333] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 519.
[137] [334] Ibid.
[138] [335] Ibid., p. 350.
[139] [336] Ibid., p. 370.
[140] [337] Ibid., p. 386.
[141] [338] Ibid., p. 396.
[142] [339] Ibid., p. 530.
[143] [340] Ibid., p. 521.
[144] [341] In his entry from 12 April 1943 Kruk writes under the heading “30,000 fresh victims”: “From the German press, I learn that the Jews must leave 8 of the 11 Dutch provinces. This means about 130,000 fresh victims. No one knows if the Jew will be sent to Eastern Europe to work or to be killed. Now it’s the turn of the Dutch Jews.“ Ibid., p. 515. Since the figure of 130,000 is mentioned again in the entry from 30 April, one may conclude that the figure in the heading is an error.
[145] [342] In his entry from 10 August 1942, Kruk writes under the heading “What happened in Oszmiana?”; “About 40 km from Vilna is the small town of Oszmiana, which was annexed to Lithuania only this spring. Until recently it was quite there. Yesterday a train passed through Vilna with Jews who tossed out about 20 letters to those working in the Vilna railroad station. From the letters, it became clear that the Jews come from Oszmiana and are being taken to work in Vievis, a small town 50 km from Vilna. They write that they don’t know where they are being taken. They were sure this was the end. Some ran away. Altogether, some 400 persons were taken. Some are in… the hospital; some were not taken because they are wounded… That means there was an Aktion, that Oszmiana has already been staked out.”Ibid., p. 344. In the entry from 28 October the same year Kruk reports that 410 sick and old among the remaining 2,300 Jews in the Oszmiana Ghetto were taken away and shot; ibid., pp. 387-388. The following day Kruk noted down contradictory reports that 800 Jews had been shot; ibid., p. 394.
[146] [343] Ibid., p. 525.
[147] [344] Miriam Novitch, Sobibor. Martyrdom and Revolt, Holocaust Library, New York 1980, p. 29. Cf. Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, op.cit., pp. 109-110.
[148] [345] Ibid., p. 157.
[149] [346] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 570.
[150] [347] Hersh Smolar, The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans Against The Nazis, Holocaust Library, New York 1989, pp. 102-103.
[151] [348] Ibid., p. 108.
[152] [349] Hilde Sherman-Zander, Zwischen Tag und Dunkel. Mädchenjahre im Ghetto, Ullstein, Frankfurt a. M. /Berlin 1984, pp. 60-61.
[153] [350] Other sources, such as Reuben Ainsztain, spells the name of this witness as Hersh Smolyar.
[154] [351] Hersh Smolar, The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans Against The Nazis, op.cit., p. 98.
[155] [352] Gerald Reitlinger, Die Endlösung. Hitlers Versuch der Ausrottung der Juden Europas 1939-1945, Colloquium Verlag, Berlin 1992, pp. 467-468.
[156] [353] Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland, Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, pp. 761-762.
[157] [354] Karl Loewenstein, Minsk. Im Lager der deutschen Juden, Bundeszentrale für Heimatsdienst, Bonn 1961. pp. 23-24.
[158] [355] Rosenberg gives the date as 9 November, and describes the train as being boarded 5 o’clock in the morning and departing on 10 o´clock. It does not seem out of the question that the scheduled departure time was pushed forward for whatever reason and that Rosenberg is actually correct about the date; Heinz Rosenberg, Jahre des Schreckens... und ich blieb übrig, daß ich Dir’s ansage, Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 1985, pp. 17-18.
[159] [356] Ibid., p. 27.
[160] [357] Ibid.
[161] [358] Ibid.
[162] [359] Karl Loewenstein, Minsk. Im Lager der deutschen Juden, op.cit., p. 17
[163] [360] Ibid., p. 20.
[164] [361] It is interesting to note in the light of this hypothesis that, according to orthodox historiography, the Jews from this Vienna transport were shot by an Einsatzkommando at the outskirts of Kaunas; cf. R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., Vol. I, p. 366.
[165] [362] Heinz Rosenberg, Jahre des Schreckens, op.cit., pp. 37-38.
[166] [363] Karl Loewenstein, Minsk. Im Lager der deutschen Juden, op.cit., p. 16.
[167] [364] GARF, 7445-2-145, pp. 65f.; quoted in: Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., p. 198. Raul Hilberg, who merely summarizes the contents (The Destruction of the European Jews, op.cit., Vol. I, p. 367), gives as an alternative archival source Occ E 3-37.
[168] [365] GARF, 7445-2-145, p. 68; quoted in: Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., p. 198.
[169] [366] GARF, 7445-2-145, pp. 72f; summarized in: Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., pp. 198-199.
[170] [367] Minutes from Jeckeln’s interrogation on 14 December 1945 (Major Zwetajew, interrogator; Sergeant Suur, interpreter), Historical State Archives, Riga; quoted in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1984, pp. 96-97.
[171] [368] Jukka Rislakki, The case for Latvia: disinformation campaigns against a small nation, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam / New York 2008, p. 124.
[172] [369] Ibid., p. 123.
[173] [370] William W. Mishell, Kaddish for Kovno. Life and Death in a Lithuanian Ghetto 1941-1945, Chicago Review Press, Chicago 1988, pp. 127-128.
[174] [371] Rich Cohen, The Avengers: A Jewish War Story, Vintage Books, New York 2001, pp. 87-88.
[175] [372] Ibid., p. 196.
[176] [373] Ibid., p. 255.
[177] [374] Memoir: The Holocaust Recalled, http://migs.concordia.ca/memoirs/Reich/Rei_mem.html
[178] [375] Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., p. 722.
[179] [376] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Vol. 8, Verlag C.H. Beck, Munich 2008, pp. 167-168.
[180] [377] Monatsbericht SS-Lagerarzt, 25.11.1943, in: EAM (Eesti Ajaloomuuseum, Estonian History Museum), D 152/2/40. (Source in original). The reports of the Vaivara SS-Lagerarzt were discovered only in 2002 by Estonian historian Meelis Maripuu; cf. ibid., p. 144, note 4.
[181] [378] The exact date was 3-4 February. 23 sick inmates were evacuated on horseback and 414 on foot. The transport took place under Red Army fire and as a result of the exerting march some inmates died after arriving at the Kuremäe camp. Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., p. 729.
[182] [379] A witness named Markus Gordon on the other hand testified that the number of inmates at the Kuremäe camp prior to the transfer from Soski amounted to some 800, not 444 as recorded by Bodman. The author of this article has unfortunately not had the opportunity to directly access Gordon’s account, which is referenced in Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., p. 726.
[183] [380] Other sources state that the Lagerführer was a certain Eugen Einget Wurth; cf. Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., p. 722.
[184] [381] Urteil gegen Scharfetter, 1.2.1980, in: Landgericht Stade, 9 Ks /78-23/78. (Note in original). The Estonian name of the Goldfields camp was Kohtla, not to be confused with the nearby Kohtla-Järve camp.
[185] [382] Memoir: The Holocaust Recalled, op.cit.
[186] [383] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Der Ort des Terrors, op.cit., pp. 175-176.
[187] [384] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., p. 667ff.
[188] [385] Another source states that 1,000 Jews from Vilnius arrived at the Kohtla railway station on 4 September 1943, whereof one half were taken to the Ereda camp and the other half to Vaivara – this would support the dating found in the Distel account; Toomas Hiio et al. (eds.), Estonia 1940-1945, op.cit., p. 731.
[189] [386] Other sources gives the name of this place as “Kohtla-Järve”; cf. Lukáš Přibyl, “Die Geschichte des Theresienstädter Transports ‘Be’ nach Estland”, in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 2001, Institut Theresienstädter Initiative, Prague 2001, p. 164.
[190] [387] http://migs.concordia.ca/memoirs/frankel_zaltzman_paula/frankel_zaltzman_paula_04.htm [388]
[191] [389] The Holocaust in Kraslava, http://www.seligman.org.il/kraslava_holocaust.html
[192] [390] Jack Ratz, Endless Miracles, Shengold Publishers, New York 1998, p. 43.
[193] [391] Ibid., p. 45.
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[370] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref173
[371] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref174
[372] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref175
[373] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref176
[374] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref177
[375] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref178
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[379] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref182
[380] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref183
[381] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref184
[382] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref185
[383] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref186
[384] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref187
[385] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref188
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[387] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref190
[388] http://migs.concordia.ca/memoirs/frankel_zaltzman_paula/frankel_zaltzman_paula_04.htm
[389] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref191
[390] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref192
[391] http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_2/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews.php#_ednref193
--------------------------
Evidence for the Presence of "Gassed" Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 2
Thomas Kues
The following article is a continuation of Thomas Kues's Evidence for the Presence of “Gassed” Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 1 [1]. Thomas Kues's analysis takes up the revisionist proposal that Jews sent to the “extermination camps” and allegedly gassed there were in fact deloused and then sent away, the vast majority of them to the occupied eastern territories. The camps therefore actually functioned as transit camps. The transit camp hypothesis is in perfect harmony with documented National Socialist Jewish policy as expressed in official and internal reports, documents on the Jewish transports, and even in classified communications between leading SS members.3. A Survey of the Testimonial Evidence
3.3.10. Lev Saevich Lansky and Isak Grünberg
Lev Saevich Lansky, who had been an inmate of the Maly Trostinec camp from 17 January 1942 onward, was interrogated by a Soviet investigative commission on 9 August 1944. Concerning the Jews deported from Altreich, Austria and the Protectorate to Maly Trostinec1 [2] (which is located 12 km southeast of Minsk),2 [2] Lansky made the following statement:
"We all got soap and clothing from German Jews who had been slaughtered. There were ninety-nine transports of a thousand people each that came from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia."3 [2]When asked about the fate of these deportees, Lansky answered that they were "all shot".4 [2]
It is generally agreed that five transports from Theresienstadt (Da220, Da222, Da224, Da226, Da228) reached Maly Trostinec between July and September 1942, and that each of them carried 1,000 deportees.5 [2]
Holocaust Historian Gertrude Schneider asserts that, except for a first transport departing on 28 November 1941, all transports from Vienna to the General District of Weißruthenien (White Ruthenia) "ended up at the killing grounds of Maly Trostinec",6 [2] despite the fact that said transports are listed in documents as bound for nearby Minsk. On the other hand Schneider also states that the transport departing Vienna on 6 May 1942 "arrived May 11 at the Minsk railroad station", whereupon 81 Austrian Jewish deportees were "selected for work on the farm at Maly Trostinec".7 [2] Schneider also mentions a survivor from the transport departing Vienna on 27 May 1942 (Da-204), Marie Mack, who was later deported from the Minsk Ghetto to Lublin in September 1943;8 [2] as well as the arrival of the 7 October 1942 transport (Da-230) at the Minsk railway station.9 [2] Thus of the 25 transports departing Vienna for Minsk in 1942, only 22 or 23 could have been diverted to Maly Trostinec. If Lansky's statement about the number of transports from the west to Maly Trostinec is correct (or more or less correct as to order of magnitude), where did the other 71 or 72 transports come from? Did further, indirect transports reach Maly Trostinec via the "extermination camps"?
German exterminationist historian Christian Gerlach writes that 18 Jewish transports from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Minsk and the rest of Generalbezirk Weißruthenien were originally planned for the period 10 November – 16 December 1941, and a further 7 transports between 10 and 20 January 1942. In the end, however, due to the protests of Generalkommissar Kube, only a total of 7 transports were sent to Minsk in November and December, while all the January transports were cancelled. To compensate for the decreased number of transports, more convoys to Riga were added.10 [2] The deportations were then commenced anew following the visits of Eichmann, Himmler and Heydrich to Belarus in March and April 1942.
Gerlach provides a list of 18 transports to Weißruthenien that are "certain to have arrived" and 5 "uncertain" ones.11 [2] In the more comprehensive list provided by Graf and Mattogno there are a total 34 transports for the period in question (May-November 1942). Three of the "uncertain" transports in Gerlach's list are not included in the latter: one from Theresienstadt departing on 13 June 1942 with some 1,000 deportees, one transport from Dachau which arrived sometime in June 1942 (attested to by a surviving deportee, Ernst S.), and one from an unknown origin arriving in the first half of August 1942 (attested to by an activity report of the "Gruppe Arlt" from 25 September 1942). The "uncertain" transport listed by Gerlach as departing from Theresienstadt on 20 August 1942 with some 1,000 deportees is concluded by Graf and Mattogno to have been sent to Riga; Gerlach himself notes that "this transport, billed for Minsk, was possibly redirected."12 [2] A further "uncertain" Theresienstadt transport ("Be") departing on 1 September 1942 with some 1,000 deportees was in fact sent to Raasiku in Estonia, as confirmed by numerous eyewitnesses.13 [2]
As for the Theresienstadt transport departing on 13 June 1942, the Terezin Studies website14 [2] lists a transport designated "AAi" as departing for an "unknown" destination on this date. The Dachau transport in June 1942 is yet more mysterious. We may recall here that the Swedish-Jewish periodical Judisk Krönika in its issue from October 1942 reported that Jews from Dachau and other German concentration camps had been deported to Pinsk for drainage work (cf. §3.1.3. above). Mainstream historiography knows of no transports of Jews from Dachau to the occupied eastern territories. It is documented that there were transports from Dachau to two of the "extermination camps", namely Auschwitz and Majdanek. The number of these deportees amounted to 4,767 and 2,933 respectively. However, Danuta Czech lists no transports as arriving to Auschwitz from Dachau during June 1942, and the only known transports from Dachau to Majdanek took place in January and February 1944.15 [2] The purported Dachau transport to Belarus remains an enigma.
It is when we take a look at transports departing from the Theresienstadt (Terezin) ghetto in October 1942 that things get really interesting. In 1993 the German historian Hans Safrian wrote:
"In the summer of 1942 Minsk and Maly Trostinec became the end station for deportation transports from Central Europe, mainly from Terezin and Vienna. […]. The destination of five further deportation transports from Terezin in October 1942 has not yet been clarified. […]. In the circulation plan for October the station of Izbica [in the General Government] was designated as destination for the transports from Terezin, which suggests that these people were murdered in one of the 'Aktion Reinhard' death camps. Nonetheless there is evidence indicating that in October 1942 five trains from Theresienstadt were conducted to Minsk / Maly Trostinec."16 [2]The "evidence" indicating that the five Theresienstadt transports Bt, Bu, Bv, Bw and Bx arrived in Maly Trostinec consists of a reference to H.G. Adler's study Der verwaltete Mensch from 1974. In a previous study on the Theresienstadt Ghetto from 1955 Adler had concluded that the same transports were sent to Treblinka,17 [2] but by 1974 he had changed his mind on the issue:
"On 8 August 1942 a certain Dr. Engineer Jacobi of the General Management Office East [Generalbetriebsleitung Ost] of the German Reich Railway [Deutsche Reichsbahn] wrote to inform the Main Railway Offices in Minsk and Riga, the Reich Railway Head Office, the General Office of the Eastern Railways [Ostbahn] in Cracow and also the General Management Offices in Essen and Munich about the 'Special trains [Sonderzüge] for resettlers, harvest workers and Jews in the period from 8 August to 30 October 1942'. To the cover letter was attached, among other things, a 'circulation plan' [Umlaufplan], which was later partially revised. The following trains, which were supposed to carry each 1,000 people, were assigned for the deportation of Jews (the declared destination Wolkowysk indicates Minsk): [...]In this contemporary schedule [...] there are some aspects worthy of note. First of all Auschwitz was at this time still not intended as a destination for transports from the Reich proper. [...] Following the series of transports to Wolkowysk the destination of the transports departing Theresienstadt is given as Izbica from the beginning of October onward. In reality none of the deportees reached the ghettos in Izbica or in its vicinity, if not only as transit camps from where they were sent to the nearby extermination sites Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek. The destination Izbica thus refer to these sites. However, all of the transports from Theresienstadt during October 1942, with the exception of the last one on the 26th (from the 29th no more departed) with which began the series of convoys to Auschwitz, were in fact directed to the vicinity of Minsk and the extermination camp Trostinetz which is here implied with the station Wolkowysk."18 [2]
21.9.[42] from Theresienstadt to Wolkowysk
23.9. from Nuremberg to Theresienstadt
24.9. from Vienna to Theresienstadt
26.9. from Berlin to Riga
27.9. from Darmstadt to Theresienstadt
28.9. from Vienna to Wolkowysk
1.10. from Vienna to Izbica
3.10. from Berlin to Riga
from Berlin to Theresienstadt
5.10. from Vienna to Wolkowysk
from Theresienstadt to Izbica
6.10. from Darmstadt to Theresienstadt
8.10. from Theresienstadt to Izbica
9.10. from Vienna to Theresienstadt
12.10. from Theresienstadt to Izbica
15.10. from Theresienstadt to Izbica
19.10. from Theresienstadt to Izbica
22.10. from Theresienstadt to Izbica
26.10. from Theresienstadt to Izbica
29.10. from Theresienstadt to Izbica
Czech Holocaust historian Miroslav Karny has made the following comment on Adler's later hypothesis:
"In his newer work he [Adler] asserts that the October transports departing from Theresienstadt did instead arrive via Izbica at the extermination camp in Trostinez, 'which is here implied with the station Wolkowysk.' In no document relating to any of the October transports from Theresienstadt is Wolkowysk mentioned as a station where the 'travellers' would have to reembark on a freight train and continue their journey to Minsk or Koloditschi."19 [2]It is indeed true that Adler does not provide reference to a document stating that the October transports were routed to Wolkowysk (which is an important railway junction in western Belarus). What then prompted Adler to change his mind? As we will see below it was likely the testimony of a certain former Trostinec detainee.
Karny, like other mainstream historians, asserts that the Jews on the five transports Bt-Bx departing from Theresienstadt in October 1942 were killed in Treblinka. It is in fact clear that at least one of the five trains—the second transport departing on 8 October (Bu)—reached Treblinka, as one of the Jews on board, Richard Glazar, was picked out to work in the camp and later survived the Treblinka prisoner revolt to became a Holocaust witness.20 [2] Reportedly only a few dozen of the in total 8,000 Theresienstadt deportees were selected for work in Treblinka as Glazar was, while the rest were "gassed".21 [2]
Ironically, while criticizing Adler for not backing up his assertion, Holocaust historians like Karny are completely unable to provide any documentary proof of the alleged homicidal gas chambers in which these deportees were supposedly killed. The only one of their conclusions which is acceptable is thus that these five trains were sent to Treblinka—but from this does not follow that the Jews in the convoys were killed there.
What kind of transports arrived at the station of Maly Trostinec? In an account based mainly on West German court material, Paul Kohl has the following to say about this alleged extermination site:
"In the summer of 1942 a railway station was built by a one-way track near the collection point in the part of the camp closest to the [Minsk-Mogilev] road (the railway line had previously ended at Michanowice). The trains with Jews from the Reich, which had previously stopped at the Minsk freight yard, were now immediately redirected from there to Trostenez. Twice a week trains arrived from the Reich, from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, France. They arrived on Tuesdays and Fridays and - in order to avoid commotion - always in the early morning between four and five o'clock. Also from the Dachau Concentration Camp a train arrived in June 1942."22 [2]In 1974 H.G. Adler described the Trostinec camp thus:
"In a small village, which before the occupation had constituted a kolkhoz, the camp [Trostinec] was located; to this belonged an estate of 250 hectares. Here the prisoners were also housed, first in pig sties, later in barracks which each housed 150 to 160 people. During 1942 a total of 39,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia-Moravia, Luxembourg, Holland and also from the Soviet Union were brought to Trostinetz, but in the camp itself there were never more than 640 Jews at one time, most of them Jews from Vienna; among the inmates there were also some hundreds of Russian prisoners of war."23 [2]Needless to say the dogma of mainstream historiography does not allow for transports of Jews from Poland, Holland, France or Luxembourg to Belarus.
If one or more trains arrived at the station "twice a week", as Kohl writes, this would mean that at least 50 convoys arrived at Trostinec during the second half of 1942. According to Gerlach, from 10 August 1942 on, all the Jewish deportation trains were redirected from Minsk to Trostinec via the Kolodischtschi station (15 km east of Minsk).24 [2] Yet if we look at the listed transports from 11 August to 28 November we find that it contrasts with Kohl's description of the arrivals at Minsk/Maly Trostinec:
| Date of Departure | Origin | Deportees | Interval (days) |
| 11 Aug (Tue) | Vienna | 1,000 | |
| 17 Aug (Mon) | Vienna | 1,003 | 6 |
| 18 Aug (Tue) | Vienna | 1,000 | 1 |
| 25 Aug (Tue) | Vienna | 1,000 | 7 |
| 25 Aug (Tue) | Theresienstadt | 1,000 | 0 |
| 31 Aug (Mon) | Vienna | 967 | 6 |
| 1 Sept (Tue) | Vienna | 1,000 | 1 |
| 8 Sept (Tue) | Theresienstadt | 1,000 | 7 |
| 14 Sept (Mon) | Vienna | 992 | 6 |
| 22 Sept (Tue) | Theresienstadt | 1,000 | 8 |
| 30 Sept (Wed) | Vienna | 1,000 | 8 |
| 7 Oct (Wed) | Vienna | 1,000 | 7 |
| 18 Nov (Sun) | Hamburg | 908 | 11 |
| 28 Nov (Wed) | Vienna | 999 | 10 |
Grünberg was deported from Vienna on 5 October 1942 (according to him; preserved railway documents give the departure date as 7 October) and on 9 or 10 October 1942 reached Maly Trostinec, where Grünberg himself, his wife and their three children were selected for work in the camp. At their arrival, there were "already a lot of Jews" in the camp, "mainly from Poland".26 [2] By this point in time there were, according to mainstream historiography, to follow only two more transports from the west to Belarus—one convoy departing from Hamburg on 18 November 1942 and another one departing Vienna on 28 November 1942—but according to Grünberg several transports from the west reached Trostinec in the months following his arrival:
"According to my estimate there were 1200 to 1300 Jews in the camp. This figure remained unchanged, the fresh supply [of manpower] was taken from camps, from Theresienstadt and Auschwitz and probably also from other ones. […] Transport after transport arrived. Often we never even heard where they came from, since it frequently happened that all [of the deportees] were immediately liquidated."27 [2]Further on in his testimony Grünberg estimates the number of Jews allegedly liquidated near Trostinec to "certainly 45,000 people at the least".28 [2] It is not made clear in the testimony whether this estimate refers to merely Grünberg's own period of stay at Trostinec or the whole operational period of the camp.
The mention of Auschwitz is crucial: here we have a witness who explicitly states, based on his own experience, that transports arrived in the occupied eastern territories from one of the "extermination camps". The mention of Theresienstadt is likewise of utmost importance: The last documented transport from Theresienstadt to Belarus departed on 22 September 1942, i.e. more than two weeks before Grünberg arrived in Trostinec. In October 1942, as has already been mentioned, five transports were sent from Theresienstadt to Treblinka:
| Deportation date | Designation | Number of Deportees |
| 5 October | Bt | 1,000 |
| 8 October | Bu | 1,000 |
| 15 October | Bv | 1,998 |
| 19 October | Bw | 1,984 |
| 22 October | Bx | 2,018 |
The transports from Theresienstadt which Grünberg states arrived at Trostenic following his own arrival at the camp on 9 or 10 October must therefore have arrived either via Auschwitz or Treblinka. Since Grünberg explicitly mentions Auschwitz together with Theresienstadt as origins of the transports it seems most likely that they reached Belarus via Treblinka. Possibly these deportees simply did not recall the name of this transit camp in the middle of nowhere, where they might have stayed only a few hours.
Unfortunately Grünberg does not state the nationality of the arrivals, although it is presumable that the Theresienstadt Jews were (for the most part) Czech. His statement that most of the Jews in the camp at the time of his arrival were Polish implies one or more undocumented Jewish transports from Poland. That transports of Polish Jews reached Trostinec is also maintained by Belarussian Holocaust historian Marat Botvinnik.30 [2] From where Kohl and Adler derive their assertions that also Jews from Luxembourg, Holland, France were sent to Trostinec is unclear. In Kohl's case it is possibly unpublished court material, in Adler's it is more likely other testimonial sources. Grünberg in his testimony mentions two Trostinec survivors who had returned to Austria: Julie Sebek and Siegmund Prinz.31 [2]
3.3.11. Yudi Farber, K. Sakowicz and Aba Gefen
Yudi Farber, a Russian-Jewish engineer, left an account in the early post-war years of how he was sent on 29 January 1944 to Ponary (also spelt Ponar, in Lithuanian Paneriai), an alleged extermination site north of Vilna, from where he managed to escape on 15 April 1944. In this we find the following passage describing his arrival at Ponary:
"We went under a canopy; there was a wooden structure that they referred to as a bunker, with a small kitchen. The women said that Jews from Vilnius and surrounding areas were living here. They were hiding in the ghetto but were found, sent to prison, and brought here. Kantorovich, whom I have already mentioned (he was from Vilnius), exchanged a few words with the women. They opened up and said that this was Ponary, where not only the Jews of Vilnius had been shot but also Jews from Czechoslovakia and France. Our job would be to burn the bodies."32 [2]Mainstream historiography knows of neither French nor Czechoslovakian Jews killed at Ponary. As mentioned in §2.3.3., the only French Jews claimed by the orthodox historians to have reached the occupied eastern territories departed Drancy for Kovno and Tallinn on 15 May 1944. Any French Jews present in Lithuania prior to that date must accordingly have reached that destination via one of the "extermination camps" of Auschwitz-Birkenau or Sobibór.
Interestingly we find in the "Ponary diary" of Kazimierz Sakowicz the following entry dated 4 May 1943 in which this Polish journalist reports on a conversation with Lithuanian militia members stationed at Ponary:
"The Lithuanians say that they will have still more work to do, as Jews are to be brought here from abroad. Reportedly Jews from France, Belgium and so on are already being shot in the Fourth Fort in Kaunas [Kovno], where they were brought under the pretense that they would be transported to Sweden."33 [2]That Belgian Jews were transported to Lithuania is confirmed by a news notice appearing in Aufbau on 28 August 1942:
"Several hundreds of Belgian Jews, who had been deported to Wilna, were massacred by the Gestapo."34 [2]According to Jewish historian Reuben Ainsztein
"entire train-loads of Czech, Dutch and French Jews were brought to what they believed to be the town of Ponary and exterminated there by German and Lithuanian killers."35 [2]Ainsztein does not provide a source, but since neither Sakowicz nor Farber mentions transports of Dutch Jews to Ponary it seems likely that there exists further testimony concerning transports of foreign Jews to this place. In this context it should also be noted that Ponary is located only some 5 km north-east of the town of Vievis, where, according to rumors reported in the diary of Herman Kruk (cf. §3.3.1.), 19,000 Dutch Jews had arrived by 16 April 1943. As for the alleged mass shootings of foreign Jews at the forts around Kovno, we read in the Black Book that
"Not only Kaunas Jews met their death in the mass graves near the forts; here the Nazis carried out the wholesale execution of thousands of Jews who had been driven there from the Lithuanian provinces, from Berlin, Vienna, France and Holland."36 [2]The French Jews can be explained by the fact of Convoy 73 reaching Kovno in May 1944, but the mention of Dutch Jews is anomalous to exterminationist historiography.
A further witness stating that foreign Jews were brought to the Vilna area is the Lithuanian Jew and partisan Aba Gefen. On 16 May 1943 Gefen wrote in his diary:
"In the evening I visited Yonas Kazlovsky at Zhuk's [a farmer]. He said that recently in Vilna 40,000 Jews—not from Lithuania, but from other countries—have been killed."37 [2]Again the date fits well with the Herman Kruk's diary entry from 16 April 1943 and his subsequent entry from 30 April stating that 19,000 Dutch Jews deported to Lithuania had been "slaughtered" there (§3.3.1.).
3.3.12. Moses L. Rage
On 10 September 1944 a Latvian-Jewish engineer from Riga named Moses L. Rage (b. 1903) left a written testimony to a Soviet commission in Dvinsk (Daugavpilsk), in which we find the following passage:
"Subsequently [in the spring of 1942 or later] there began to arrive in Riga a series of trains with Jews from Poland, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Holland and other countries, which were taken off the trains and sent away on trucks to be shot. Their belongings were sent to the Gestapo. I estimate that the total number of foreign Jews killed in Riga and other parts of Latvia exceeds 200,000."38 [2]As mentioned in the first part of this article (§2.4.7.) no Danish Jews were ever "gassed", and accordingly Rage could not have witnessed the arrival of Jews from that country in Riga, something which diminishes the value of this testimony. It seems possible though that the witness could have mistaken Norwegian Jews for Danish Jews. 346 Jews from Norway were allegedly "gassed" in Auschwitz in October 1942.
3.3.13. M. Morein
In his book on the Holocaust in Latvia, Bernhard Press provides the following brief summary of a testimony left by a certain M. Morein which is stored in the archive of the Jewish Information Center in Riga:
"(…) while looking for the corpses of his parents in 1946 near the village of Kukas near Krustpils, he discovered in a mass grave corpses whose clothes bore French labels."39 [2]It is not made clear whether with "French labels" is meant French Star of David patches or similar. The author of this article has not yet been able to access the testimony in question.
3.3.14. Szema G.
A Latvian Jewess identified in the court material only as "Szema G" testified in 1948 that groups of Belgian, Dutch, French and Hungarian Jews40 [2] were sent to the Lenta camp near Riga.41 [2] The value of this testimony is diminished by the fact that the witness incorrectly claimed that a crematory oven was installed in Lenta.
That foreign Jews were brought to the Lenta camp is supported, however, by other eyewitnesses. I have already discussed Jack Ratz's mention of Polish Jews being sent to Lenta "straight from Poland" in the summer of 1943 (§3.3.9.). Another Lenta inmate, Abrahm Bloch, has stated:
"To us came a small group of Jews from Vilna. For Lenta this was not a surprise. They brought to us Jews from the most different places."42 [2]This indicates that foreign (i.e. non-Latvian) Jews were commonplace in Lenta. In this context one should note the following passage from a monthly report drawn up by the labor administration department of the Gebietskommissariat Riga for April 1943:
"Lately there have been no new arrivals of Jews. […] Following the deployment of all Jewish auxiliary workers [Hilfsarbeiter] outside of Riga, and since the removal of Jewish skilled labor from the armaments industry—the production and supply of arms being of extraordinarily great importance—can no longer be justified, the influx of Jews from territories outside of Latvia is to be thoroughly welcomed."43 [2]This acute need for Jewish labor would explain why Jews from Poland and possibly also from various Western European nations were sent to the Lenta camp in the summer of 1943. The last documented transport from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate to Latvia departed from Theresienstadt on 20 August 1942, although there are indications that a transport departing from Berlin on 26 October 1942 reached Salaspils near Riga (cf. §3.4.). Considering this, it seems decidedly odd that a lull in transports lasting a whole 5-7 months should be described using the word "lately" ("in der letzten Zeit"). Were there more transports of Jews to Latvia during the last months of 1942, or even at the beginning of 1943?
One might argue that any foreign Jews sent to Latvia in 1943 might have been Lithuanian. Herman Kruk, however, does not mention any Jewish transports from Lithuania to Latvia during that year, and as of 6 April 1943, the Kovno Judenrat secretary Avraham Tory had recorded only two transports of Lithuanian Jews to Latvia (both from Kovno to Riga): the first, consisting of 500 workers, on 6 February 1942; the second, consisting of more than 300 people, on 23 October 1942.44 [2] In his diary entry from 12 February 1943 Tory mentions a German demand that 1,000 Kovno Jews be sent to Riga,45 [2] but this demand was apparently rescinded, because Tory, who due to his position necessarily would be aware of any major transports from the Kovno ghetto, does not record any transports from the Kovno Ghetto (or any other place in Lithuania) to Latvia during 1943. Bloch's statement hints at a transport of Vilna Jews to Riga, but this must have been small to escape Kruk's attention. Possibly some Vilna Jews reached Riga after the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto on 23 September 1943, i.e. five months after the above quoted labor administration report. There further exist no indications that Jews were sent from other parts of Reichskommissariat Ostland, or for that matter the Ukraine, to Latvia for work.
It should be mentioned here that Dutch Jews deported to the Baltic states in 1942-1943 apparently were alive not only in Kuremäe, Estonia (cf. 3.3.7.), but also in western Latvia in 1944, for in the Aufbau issue from 25 August 1944 we read:
"Six hundred Jews, used by the Germans for forced labor on fortifications in occupied Latvia, were to be transferred to Liepaja. On the way there they were liberated by partisans. Most of them were deportees from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Holland. Immediately after being liberated all of them joined the Latvian partisan units. This report comes from the Stockholm newspaper Baltiska Nyheter."46 [2]3.3.15. Kalmen Linkimer
Another minor testimony concerning transports to Latvia is the diary of Kalmen Linkimer, a Jewish schoolteacher from Liepaja (Libau) who spent most of the second half of the war hiding in a cellar together with ten other Jews. In his diary entry from 10 June 1944, we read:
"[The Latvians] so distinguished themselves through their blood thirst and brutality that Jews were sent from countries all over Europe to Latvia, Riga […]"47 [2]The use of the expression "all over Europe" certainly implies transports to Latvia of Jews from countries other than just Germany, Austria and the Protectorate. Unfortunately, Linkimer does not bring up the subject elsewhere in his diary.
3.3.16. Yehuda Lerner
Yehuda (Leon) Lerner is primarily known as a Sobibór eyewitness. He was deported to this "pure extermination camp" from Minsk in the second half of September 194348 [2] under the "pretense" that the Jews in this convoy would be sent to work in Łódź.49 [2]
What is remarkable about Lerner is the fact that he had previously been sent from Warsaw to the occupied eastern territories. Lerner was born in Warsaw in 1926, and it was from there that he was sent to Belarus in the summer of 1942. In a brief, undated testimony (written sometime between 1951 and 1978)50 [2] presented by M. Novitch we read:
"I was born in Warsaw in a family of six; my father was a baker. When war was declared, our life in the ghetto was similar to that of most Jews: unemployment, hunger and anguish. On July 22, 1943, tragedy began in the ghetto. The president of the Jewish council committed suicide and, on the same day, my father, my mother, one of my brothers and I were taken away to the Umschlagsplatz, the ghetto station, and were left in a building. My whole family was deported and never came back.The president of the Jewish Council of the Warsaw Ghetto, Adam Czerniaków, committed suicide on 23 July 1942. On the day before, the first train with Jewish deportees left Warsaw for the Treblinka "extermination camp".
I was sent to a camp near Smolensk, in occupied Russia, where I remained for ten months. Our job consisted of building an airfield. For our work, we got a piece of bread and a bowl of soup. Hunger weakened us and prisoners who had no strength to work were taken to a wood and executed. Haim, a friend from the Warsaw ghetto, was with me. There also were German Jews, in transit through Warsaw. I told my friend, 'Let us escape, we are doomed here.'
Four months later, on a dark night, we crossed the barbed wire, but we were caught and sent to another camp where we again found hard work, hunger and beating. We tried to escape a second time, managed to be free for several days, but once more were arrested and taken to the Minsk ghetto."51 [2]
In 1979 Lerner was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann (in French, using an interpreter). A film of this interview was later released together with a published transcript,52 [2] but this does not contain the entire interview; especially the beginning has been cut short. Fortunately, a complete transcript is available online. In this Lerner dates his deportation to July 22:
"(…) all starts on July 22, 1942, at the moment when they make us leave the Warsaw ghetto; they gather us at the Umschlagsplatz and they tell us that they are going to send some of us off, they do not know where yet; at this moment, I am still with my parents, with my family, but very quickly we are separated, they send me to one side, my parents and my family to the other, and from that moment I am alone. They tell us that in some days they would send us into a work camp, and effectively, after these few days still spent in Warsaw, we leave for Russia."53 [2]This indicates that the transport in question departed from Warsaw sometime during the last week of July. Later in the interview the period between the arrest and the departure is stated to have been "several days". Lerner further tells Lanzmann that the convoy consisted of "some thousands of young people", all able to work.54 [2] The journey is described as follows:
"Lerner: And so, it is there that everything started; for nearly a week, we traveled in these freight cars; each day we were given a little water through the door. After we were placed in the freight cars, they distributed to us a loaf of bread each, and soon we arrived in Belorussia and we were unloaded for work, the place where we arrived was located near an old airport.
Lanzmann: What was it called?
Lerner: The name of the place, I do not remember exactly, in any case it was an airfield and we were working in construction, we were constructing buildings; the conditions were very hard, very little to eat, the Germans on the spot fired on the Jews, without reason, and in particular the pilots when they returned in the evening, got drunk and amused themselves by shooting, firing on the Jews, in the head in general.
Lanzmann: This was a military airport?
Lerner: Yes, military.
Lanzmann: And this, this is the first place where he [i.e. Lerner] had been, after having left Warsaw?
Lerner: Yes, yes, the first place."55 [2]
Historian Christian Gerlach states that the transport carrying Lerner arrived in Bobruisk on 28 July and that a part of this convoy continued on to Smolensk.56 [2] The only source that Gerlach gives here, however, is the Lerner account found in the Novitch anthology, which does not mention any stop-over in Bobruisk. Moreover Gerlach writes that the 28 July Bobruisk transport together with a previous transport of 961 Jews from Warsaw to Bobruisk on 30 May 1942 consisted of in all some 1,500 people,57 [2] so that the latter convoy would have contained approximately 540 Jews—in contrast with Lerner's statement to Lanzmann that the deportees of his transport numbered "some thousands". Apparently the only thing certain about this transport is that it took place, since there is no doubt that Lerner later was sent to Sobibór from Belarus. Thus we have only Lerner's personal assurance that the train did not stop anywhere on the way from Warsaw to Smolensk—for example in Treblinka.
On 17 August 1942 the clandestine Polish newspaper Informacja Bieżąca mentioned that 2,000 "skilled workers" had been sent from the Warsaw Ghetto to Smolensk on 1 August 1942. Some weeks later, on 7 September, the same newspaper reported that two transports carrying a total of some 4,000 Jews had been sent from Warsaw to work on military installations in Brzesc and Malachowicze.58 [2]
This raises the question: were there perhaps not one, but two transports from Warsaw to Smolensk during the first week of the great evacuation—one with some 540 Jews that reached Bobruisk on 28 July and another with 2,000 Jews, that departed from Warsaw on 1 August, travelling directly to Smolensk?
Lerner's statement that there "were German Jews" in the camp in Smolensk who had arrived there from Warsaw is intriguing. From the diary of the aforementioned Warsaw Judenälteste Adam Czerniaków we know that during the spring of 1942, some 4,000 Jews from the territory of the Reich and the Protectorate were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto. On 1 April there arrived "1,000 expellees from Hannover, Gelsenkirchen etc." who were "put in the quarantine at 109 Leszno Street". This convoy consisted of "older people [but no-one older than 68], many women, small children".59 [2] On 5 April there arrived "1,025 expellees from Berlin", "mainly older people, partly intelligentsia". These were also put in the quarantine at Leszno Street, which now contained in all "2,019 persons" (implying that the first convoy consisted of 994 deportees).60 [2] On 8 April Czerniaków visited the Jews "from Berlin, Frankfurt, Hannover, Gelsenkirchen etc." in the quarantine, distributed candy to the children and "addressed the youth" among them.61 [2] Two days later "150 young German Jews" were sent to "Treblinka",62 [2] by which is no doubt meant the labor camp Treblinka I, as the "extermination camp" Treblinka II would not open until three and a half months later. Considering the descriptions of the two first German convoys, these 150 deportees must have made up most if not all of the youths among the quarantined German Jews. On 16 April a third transport of "about 1,000" German Jews arrived in the ghetto.63 [2] On 18 April Czerniakow was called to see the ghetto commandant Auerswald about the German Jews:
"He gave me a list containing 78 names from the last transport; these people are to be sent to Treblinka. Besides he gave me two letters from the workers who are already there. One is asking for phonograph records, the other for tools."64 [2]On 23 April a "transport of 1,000 people arrived from Bohemia".65 [2] Almost a month later, on 23 May, Czerniaków noted that "thirty Jews" had been sent to Treblinka, but he neglected to mention whether these were Polish or German Jews.66 [2] Then finally on 16 July 1942, six days prior to the start of the great evacuation, the Judenälteste mentioned in his diary that 1,700 German Jews had been released from the quarantine.67 [2]
Very little documentation on the great Warsaw evacuation has survived. We do not know when the German Jews in the ghetto were sent to Treblinka. It may be that the German Jews from Warsaw whom Lerner met in Smolensk were identical with those 150 or so young Jews who had been sent to Treblinka I in April, and that those for some reason had been transferred east, but it is also possible that they had reached Russia via the Treblinka "extermination camp" during the first days of the deportations.68 [2] A member of the Warsaw ghetto police noted in his diary that
"The tenants of two hostels [that housed Jewish refugees from Germany and Czechoslovakia] received a day's notice that they must leave on the morrow. They had already undergone so many moves from city to city and country to country that they showed no signs of despair or fear. Warsaw or Vilna, Smolensk or Kiev—it was all the same to them."69 [2]Is it just coincidence that Smolensk is mentioned here as a possible destination?
It should be mentioned here in passing that there is testimonial evidence for the presence of German Jews also in Bobruisk. In 1971 a German witness testified that he had met and spoken with a German Jew from Mönchengladbach in the SS-Arbeitslager Bobruisk.70 [2] The Jews from Mönchengladbach were sent to Auschwitz, Łódź, Riga, and Theresienstadt.71 [2] Those sent to Riga went there via Düsseldorf, and included the witness Hilde Sherman-Zander (§3.3.2.).72 [2]
3.3.17. Inge Stolten
Inge Stolten (born 1924) was a German stage actress and playwright. During the war she performed for German troops in Germany as well as at theatres in the occupied territories. In late July 1943 she was sent to Minsk,73 [2] where at the Minsk Theatre she got into contact with some German Jews from the Minsk ghetto who worked backstage. In the description of the Minsk ghetto found in her memoirs, Stolten mentions also Dutch Jews:
"I heard of Dutch Jews who still believed that their furniture would be forwarded to them as promised, who discussed how they would be able to fit their great armchairs into the all-too-small rooms. Thus almost all of them hung on to some kind of illusion, nourished hopes and felt secure once they had escaped something."74 [2]For more on the presence of Dutch Jews in Minsk, see §3.5 below.
3.3.18. Tsetsilia Mikhaylovna Shapiro
The testimony of Dr. Tsetsilia Mikhaylovna Shapiro, a former inmate of the Minsk Ghetto, was recorded on 20 September 1944 by A.V. Veysbrod. This witness, who escaped from Minsk in early November 1942, stated that French Jews had been present in this city.75 [2]
3.3.19. Avraham Tory (Golub)
Avraham Tory (aka Avraham Golub, b. 1909) served as secretary of the Jewish Council in the Kovno Ghetto. During the period 1941-1944 Tory kept a diary in which he also reproduced several orders and reports from the Council as well as the German ghetto administration.
In Tory's diary entry from 14 July 1942 we read:
"Four Jews from Lodz have been brought to the [Kovno] Ghetto hospital for surgery. They had spent a long time in a labor camp."76 [2]On 30 July 1942 Tory again wrote of Łódź Jews in Lithuania:
"The Lodz Jews who had been employed at the construction of the Kovno-Vilna highway and were transferred to Riga will be replaced by 500 workers from the Ghetto."77 [2]In the same entry Tory writes that
"Five Jews who risked their lives by escaping from a labor camp, where they had been employed at highway construction, arrived in the Ghetto, having traveled by various routes. The inmates of this labor camp had been transferred by road to Riga, and fifty Jews escaped during the transfer. As they jumped off the trucks, they were shot at. Two of the escapees waded into the [unnamed] river and remained hiding there, submerged in the water up to their necks. After the first danger passed, they entered the forest and hid there. Then they traveled by roundabout paths until they reached Kovno."78 [2]We further learn about the unnamed labor camp that
"The camp commandant pretended to be the friend of workers. In reality, he disposed of everyone who, for different reasons, fell behind in his work. One day twenty people were killed by injections of poison, having been told beforehand that they were exhausted and sick and needed some rest. Those who asked to be taken to a physician were taken to the forest and shot. Only four inmates were brought to the Ghetto hospital for surgery; there they remain as of now.The above diary passages indicate that several hundreds of Jews from Łódź were confined in a labor camp somewhere between Kovno and Vilna, not far from a river, and that this group was transferred to Riga sometime in late July 1942. Likely Tory refrained from naming the camp here due to concerns of security, as mentioned in the diary entry itself.
The Council extended assistance to the inmates of this labor camp. This assistance was of some help. But the inmates were desperate and availed themselves of every opportunity to flee, despite the risk to their lives.
Fifteen of those people are now in the Ghetto. First, they were cleaned of lice at the lice disinfection center. They have also received clothes, which enable them to conceal their condition and status in the Ghetto. They must also be protected from the evil eye. At the same time, however, they present the [Jewish] Council with a problem: should the Gestapo find out about their presence in the Ghetto, their fate will be one and the same—death."79 [2]
In this context one may recall Herman Kruk's diary entry (cf. §3.3.1.) from 4 July 1942 reporting on the presence in Vilna of two young Jews who had been deported from Łódź in March the same year, and who had escaped from an unnamed labor camp around the 25th of June. Needless to say the escapees mentioned by Tory and the escapees with which Kruk came into contact might have come from two different labor camps.
Which camp then is Tory referring to? Later in the diary he mentions that the camps Miligan (Milejgany), Vievis and Zezmer (Ziezmariai) employed "thousands of Jews" working on the construction of the Kovno-Vilna highway; in charge of these labor camps was "the Kovno branch of the Todt organization".80 [2] Much points to Vievis being the camp in question, because at the end of the 30 July 1942 entry we find the following isolated sentence:
"Five Jews from the labor camp near Vievis arrived in the Ghetto. They were given clothes and underwear."81 [2]It seems highly unlikely that two groups of each five Jews with ragged clothes had arrived from two different labor camps to the Kovno Ghetto on the same day. Tory – who was a lawyer by profession—may have thought it safe to mention the name of the camp in an isolated sentence where the circumstances of the arrival of the five Jews were not made explicit. That the Jewish Council of Kovno did in fact "extend assistance to the inmates" of Vievis is clear from the diary entry of 2 July 1943, in which we read that "Yellin, the representative of Vievis camp" visited the Kovno Ghetto "once every two or three weeks to collect wooden shoes, underwear, and other supplies from our welfare department" and that "Once in a while, patients from Vievis camp are admitted to our Ghetto hospital".82 [2]
A look at a map of the Vievis area (Illustration 1) shows a wooded area to the east of the town, which may be the "forest" where sick inmates reportedly were taken to be shot. The "river" in which escapees hid themselves might have been the Streva, a tributary of the Nemunas River. The Streva runs along the road from Vilna to Kovno at a shorter distance for a stretch between Vievis and Rumsiskas (cf. Illustration 2).
"A young girl by the name of Zisling has come to the Ghetto from the labor camp in Vievis."84 [2]Without at least a given name and an approximate date of birth it is nigh unto impossible to identify this individual. Nonetheless we may note that a search of the online Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names,85 [2] which reportedly contains records of close to 3 million individuals—with the caveat that "some people appear in more than one record")86 [2]— produces a mere 29 results for the surname "Zisling" with variants (Cizling, Zysling, Tzizling), whereof almost half are duplicates. We are thus dealing with a very rare Jewish surname. Of these search results, the following pertain to young girls:
—Lea Cizling, born to Beniamin and Khana Cizling, nee Pinta. She reportedly died in Skuodas, Lithuania, in 1941, aged 11.
—Zelda Zysling, born in April 1926 in Klodawa,87 [2] Poland, to Baruch and Sara Zysling nee Skowronski. Reportedly killed in Chełmno aged 14.88 [2]
—Zalma Zysling, the sister of Zelda Zysling, born 19 December 1930, also supposedly gassed at Chełmno.89 [2]
—Deborah Zisling, sister of Zelda and Zalma Zysling, supposedly gassed at Chełmno in 1942 at the age of 19.
—Pese Zysling, born in Klodawa in 1924, supposedly gassed at Chełmno in 1942.
This inconclusive yet notable information compels the question: Were Jews who had been transited via Chełmno still present in Vievis in late 1942? Did the transfer to Riga in July 1942 perhaps encompass only the able-bodied or skilled workers? Research into local archives might possibly provide more information on transports to and from the Vievis camp.
The diaries of Avraham Tory and Herman Kruk indicate that the Vievis camp served as a major destination and/or transit point for Jews deported to the East: First in 1942 Jews from the Warthegau district were sent there via Chełmno, and then in early 1943 Dutch Jews reached the camp via Auschwitz and Sobibór. Many of these Jews were apparently employed in the construction of a highway between Vilna and Kovno. This brings to mind the following passage from Himmler's speech in Bad Tölz on 23 November 1942:
"The Jew has been removed from Germany; he now lives in the East and works on our roads, railways etc."90 [2]A Partial List of Camps with Jewish detainees in Lithuania
Abbreviated Main Sources
T: A. Tory, Surviving the Holocaust (Harvard University Press 1990).
K: H. Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania (Yale University Press 2002)
NL: Martin Weinmann (ed.), Das nationalsozialistische Lagersystem.91 [2]
Aleksotas – labor camp in western Kovno suburb at the site of an airfield (NL p. 665, T p. 455).
Babtai – camp where some 1,500 Jews were employed at an "Heeresbaudienststelle" (Army construction bureau).92 [2]
Batcum – camp belonging to the Siauliai (Schaulen) Ghetto with 500-1,000 inmates, established 1942, closed 1944 (NL, p. 665).
Bezdany – peat-digging camp 25 km from Vilna (K, p. 120, 486).
Biała Waka – peat-digging camp 14 km from Vilna (K, p. 120, 407).93 [2]
Darbenai – camp in the Kretinga district.94 [2]
Demitrau (Dimitravas) – camp in the Kretinga district.95 [2]
Ezereliai (Ezerilis) – subcamp to KL Kauen (Kovno) with accommodations for 1,200 Jews.96 [2]
Jonava – labor camp with some hundred inmates.97 [2]
Kacergin – Jewish tree-felling unit located in suburb of Kovno (T, p. 114).
Kailis – "Jewish labor camp" inside Vilna (K, pp. 134-135).
KL Kauen (Kovno) – concentration camp replacing the liquidated Kovno Ghetto in June 1943, closed on 25 July 1944 (NL, p. 299).
Kazlu-Ruda (Raudondvaris) – subcamp to KL Kauen with 300 Jewish inmates some 20 km south of Kovno, established in early 1944.98 [2]
Keidan – labor camp connected with the construction of an airfield (T, pp. 448-453). May be the same as Kedanen/Kidarniai (NL).
Kiena – peat-digging camp, likely near Vilna, apparently run by Organization Todt (K, p. 120, 366, 630). Likely identical with the Keni labor camp mentioned by Tory, who asserts that all of the camp inmates, "300 in all", were burned alive in July 1943 (T, p. 430).
Koschedaren (Kaisiadorys) – Tory gives the name as Koshedar (T, p. 482), but also as Kaisiadorys: "the peat-digging camp at Kaisiadorys, where 350 Ghetto residents do forced labor" (T, p. 454).
Kybartai – small town on German border with Jewish camp or labor unit (T, p. 113).
Linkaiciai (Linkeitz) – labor camp halfway between Kovno and Siauliai where Jews worked in army factories and warehouses, a sugar refinery and with peat digging (T p. 126, 460).
Marijampolé – Army camp in the vicinity of this city to which 400 Kovno Jews were transferred in late September 1943 (T, p. 482).
Miligan (Milejgany) – labor camp for road construction (T, pp. 389-390, 492).
Nowa Wiljeka – Jewish labor camp in the town of the same name (K, p. 485).
Oszmianka – labor camp run by Organization Todt, located near the town of Oszmiana (K, p. 621).
Palemonas – peat-digging camp 10 km from Kovno; a brick factory was also located here (T, p. 58, 60, 92, 482).
Panemune – labor (possibly peat digging) camp.99 [2]
Panevezys (Ponevezh) – City in northern Lithuania where a ghetto and later a Jewish camp was located; according to the witness Reska Weiss there lived as many as 30,000 Jews in the camp in the summer of 1944, mainly Baltic Jews.100 [2]
Petrasunai (Petrasun) – Kovno suburb where Jews worked in a paper factory and at an electric power plant, accommodations for 5,000 Jews were reportedly under construction here in August 1943 (T, p. 116, 188, 455).
Podbrodzie – labor camp or site to where 400 Vilna Jews were sent in early May 1942 (K, pp. 286-287).
Porubanek – groups of Jews worked here in early 1942 with unpacking and sorting weapons and ammunition (K, p. 173).
Provienishok (Pravieniskis) – labor camp 20 km south-east of Kovno (T, p. 115). This is likely the same camp as Prawienischken or Proveniskaiai, which according to NL (p. 666) housed 5,000 – 6,000 inmates "working in the woods"; it was established in 1941 and closed sometime in 1944 .
Radvilishok (Radviliskis) – ghetto and peat-digging labor camp in central Lithuania, railway junction (T, p. 113).
Rudziszki – labor camp (K, p. 629).
Rzesza – peat-digging camp 15 km from Vilna with a few hundred Jewish detainees (K, p. 118, 366).
Sanciai (Schantz) – labor camp in a suburb of Kovno (T, p. 318, 455, 482, 501).
Siauliai (Schaulen) – the ghetto in this city in north-western Lithuania was the third largest in the country; after its liquidation it was replaced on 17 September 1943 with Concentration Camp Schaulen. Inmates evaucated to Stutthof on 21 July 1944. According to the aforementioned Reska Weiss it held as many as 30,000 Jews in the summer of 1944.101 [2]
Sorok Tatary – forestry labor camp 15 km from Vilna (K, p. 400).
Swieciany – Jewish labor camp about 80 km from Vilna (K, p. 485, 513).
Veivirzenai – camp located between Taurage and Kretinga employing Jewish women in agricultural labor (K, p. 483).
Vievis – Jewish labor camp near the town of Vievis (cf. §3.3.1.).
Volary – camp for Jews (NL, p. 299).
Vyzuonos – an agricultural camp or labor unit called the "Red Plantation" was located near the town of Vyzuonos in 1943.102 [2]
Zasliai – Jewish labor camp run by Organization Todt (K, p. 485, 533).
Zatrocze – agricultural/peat digging camp not far from Trakai (Troki), which is located some 20 km west of Vilna (K, p. 346, 447).
Zezmer (Ziezmariai) – labor camp for road construction with at least 400 Jewish detainees in early May 1943. Located 50 km north-west of Kovno. The camp was technically affiliated with the Vilna Ghetto but received aid from the Kovno Ghetto Council (T, p. 162-163, 329). In early May 1943 the camp housed 1,200 Jews, "including 180 children and a number of old people", brought there from Oszmiana and other towns in the Vilna district; some of these were later transferred to Dno near Pskov, 680 others to the Kovno Ghetto (T, p. 328, 376). According to H. Kruk the camp housed 1,200 – 1,500 Jews (K, p. 554). It appears to have been at least formally run by Organization Todt (K, p. 533).
Aside from the three major Lithuanian ghettos of Vilna (Vilnius), Kovno (Kaunas) and Schaulen (Siauliai) there existed a number of minor ghettos, many of them in the small part of northwestern Belarus which had been incorporated into Generalbezirk Litauen: Soly (T pp. 273-274, 486), Oszmiana (K p. 387), Michaliszki (K, p. 486), Smorgonie (reportedly there existed two ghettos in this town; K, p. 629, NL p. 666), Krewo (NL ibid), Ziezmariai (ibid.) and Nieswiez (ibid).
Reading orthodox literature on the Holocaust in Lithuania one generally gains the impression that there existed only a handful camps in this country during the German occupation. However, as seen above, a minor survey of some easily available sources clearly indicates that there existed at least some 43 camps with Jewish detainees on Lithuanian soil. Of the camps listed some 90% were located in south-eastern Lithuania, near Vilna or Kovno. How many camps existed in other parts of the country that the authors of these sources were either not aware of or had no reason to mention?
A possible explanation for the seeming ignorance of the mainstream historians on this issue could be that the large number of camps does not square very well with the firmly established belief that some 75% of the Lithuanian Jews had been killed already by early 1942, and that the vast majority of the survivors were housed in the three major ghettos.103 [2] This is not to say that all the Lithuanian Jews allegedly murdered by the Einsatzgruppen were in fact transferred to these labor camps. While some of them probably were indeed shot—as communists, resistance members, hostages, carriers of epidemic diseases, or for other reaons—many may also have been deported out of Lithuania. Herman Kruk, in a diary entry dated 11 July 1942, mentions a Vilna Jew living undercover with "Aryan" papers in Belarus, according to whom "a lot of Jews from Vilna and Kovno are working in Minsk".104 [2] In the April 1942 issue of Contemporary Jewish Record we read concerning the "over 30,000" Jews removed from the Vilna ghetto (up until February 1942) that "it is believed that half are now in labor camps on the Soviet front, and the remainder have either been interned or executed".105 [2] According to mainstream historiography these Jews were slaughtered en masse at Ponary.
As for the populations of the respective camps, there is a near-total lack of reliable figures. The few available figures are frequently based not on documentary sources but witness testimony. One should note that even if such estimates are taken to be more or less correct, they typically reflect the inmate population at only one given time; needless to say, the populations as well as holding capacities of the camps could have fluctuated. Future archival research may perhaps bring more clarity on this issue. It is also possible that aerial photographs, which we know were taken over Lithuania in 1944,106 [2] could help out with locating camps and estimating their holding capacities.
To conclude: It is certainly not out of the question that a large number of Polish and Western Jews said to have been "gassed"— perhaps even some hundreds of thousands—were interned in Lithuanian camps and ghettos during the years 1942-1944.
3.4. Historians and Witnesses on the Presence of Foreign Jews in Salaspils and Other Latvian Camps
Historian Franziska Jahn has summarized the currently held historiographical picture of the Salaspils camp, located near the Latvian capital Riga, as follows:
"Salaspils was the second camp [the first being Jungfernhof] outside of the [Riga] ghetto, to which foremost male 'Reich Jews' between the age of 16 and 50 were deported. According to the estimates of survivors there were 1,500 inmates in Salaspils. They constructed the camp and worked at the nearby railway station with sorting the luggage from arriving Jewish transports. From the summer of 1942 Salaspils served as a Polizeihaeftlager [police custody camp] for Latvians and Russians."107 [2]In their study The 'Final Solution' in Riga, originally published in German in 2006, historians Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein devote two chapters to the Salaspils camp. Here we learn that the camp, assigned to the Regional Commander of the Security Police (KdS) Latvia, was constructed starting September 1941 and meant to house Latvian political prisoners as well as Latvian Jews and Jews brought from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Originally the camp was planned to hold about 25,000 inmates. A POW camp, Stalag 350, which held some 40,000 prisoners, was already located nearby.108 [2] By mid-January 1942 at least 1,000 Jews were working in the camp.109 [2] On 2 February 1942 a status report from the office of the Territorial Commander of the Security Police and Security Service (BdS) Ostland advised that construction was underway at Salaspils on
"a large camp for about 15,000 inmates, which will be completed around the end of April and is designated at the moment to take in the Jews coming from the Reich. Whereas a part of the camp is to serve immediately as an enlarged police prison, the camp would be completely available as an expanded police prison and correctional camp after the deportation of the Jews, which is expected toward the end of summer."110 [2]The work on this camp, however, did not progress as planned. On 2 May 1942, 300 Jews were transferred from the Riga ghetto to Salaspils for cutting peat. By the end of June there were only 675 inmates in the camp, whereof some 400 were German and Austrian Jews. The KdS Latvia now had to admit to Berlin that after nine months barracks for only 1,000 inmates had been built, and that barracks for only 500-1,000 more inmates could be added in the near future.111 [2]
In the autumn of 1942 the German and Austrian Jews were gradually withdrawn from Salaspils. By December there were 1,800 inmates in the camp, most of them Latvians brought in from the Riga Central Prison and elsewhere.112 [2]
As we have already seen above in §3.3.5., the former Higher Leader of the SS and Police of Reichskommissariat Ostland, Friedrich Jeckeln, stated during his interrogation on 14 December 1945 that between 55,000 and 87,000 Jews "from Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and from other occupied countries" had been brought to Salaspils and "exterminated" there in the period from November 1941 to June 1942.
Contemporary Latvian experts, however, estimate the number of Salaspils victims at only some 2,000.113 [2] This of course does not exclude the deportation of tens of thousands of Western Jews to the camp, providing that a) the Jews were not murdered there, and b) that most of the arriving Jews were transferred on to other camps or ghettos. Salaspils would in that case serve as a transit station for Jewish transports, similar to for example the Vaivara camp in Estonia.
Latvian-American historian Andrew Ezergailis unsurprisingly dismisses the notion that other groups of foreign Jews may have been deported to Latvia:
"It is a Soviet invention that 240,000 Jews were sent to Latvia and murdered there. To begin with, there was not enough housing in wartime Latvia to accommodate, even on a temporary basis, numbers of that scale. The two larger concentration camps, Salaspils and Mezaparks (Kaiserwald), even after being completed, could accommodate only about 6,000 each. And the Riga Ghetto, after the killing of Latvia's Jews, was never again filled up to its original population of 29,000. A makeshift camp was created in Jumpravmuiza [Jungfernhof], but that housed at its peak no more than 4,000."114 [2]What Ezergailis fails to consider is the fact that there existed a number of other, smaller camps in Latvia (for example Strasdenhof, Dundaga I and II, Lenta, Spilve, Eleja-Meitene), as well as minor ghettos such as those in Liepaja and Krustpils. According to a brief report which appeared in the February 1945 issue of the Swedish-Jewish Judisk Krönika there existed in the summer of 1944 no less than 21 camps in the Riga district alone, housing at least 15,000 Jews "from Western Europe" as well as 3,000 Hungarian Jewesses.115 [2]
Ezergailis likewise completely ignores the possibility that such deportees may have been accommodated only for a while in Latvia and later sent elsewhere, for example to workplaces near the Leningrad front. Something like this is in fact hinted at by a brief report which appeared in the February 1943 issue of Contemporary Jewish Record:
"Systematic deportation of all Jews who remained in Latvia, including those brought from Germany, Holland and Belgium was reported Nov. 19 [1942]. The first step in the policy of extermination was taken Nov. 28, 1941, according to the Manchester Guardian (Oct. 30), when the Nazis established an 'inner ghetto' in Riga, and began to use the main ghetto as a transit camp for Jews from Central Europe."116 [2]We note here the (from an exterminationist viewpoint) anomalous presence of Dutch and Belgian Jews in Latvia, as well as the claim that Riga served as a transit station for foreign Jews. If the mentioned transfer did indeed take place it cannot have been complete, at least not in the case of the German (and Austrian) Jews, since it is well documented that there were still thousands of them left in Latvia in summer 1944 (see also §3.3.14. for a report on the presence of Dutch Jews in Latvia in 1944).117 [2] This report, together with that appearing in the 16 October 1942 issue of Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz (according to which "Jews from Belgium and other western European countries" who arrived in Riga "moved on immediately to other destinations"; §3.1.2.) indicates that the Dutch Jews sent to Riga were not shot in the nearby Bikernieki Forest upon their arrival, as claimed by Hilde Sherman-Zander (3.3.2.), but transferred to other ghettos or to labor camps.
Considering the abovementioned possibilities, it is definitely not out of the question that a total of some hundreds of thousands of foreign Jews were indeed transported to Latvia in the period of 1941-1944. Ezergailis's report that there exist no known mass graves containing hundreds of thousands of foreign Jews, or court testimonies or documentation on this hypothetical mass murder,118 [2] needless to say, merely points to the fact that such deportees were not killed en masse.
The fact is, that the historiographical knowledge of the Salaspils camp is exremely scant. Even Angrick and Klein have to admit that "the history of the Salaspils camp and its different groups of inmates is almost unknown."119 [2] Their three Latvian colleagues Karlis Kangeris, Uldis Neiburgs and Rudite Viksne state in an article from 2009 that the administrative records of the Salaspils camp have not been preserved (presumably the documents were destroyed by the Germans at the time of the retreat in autumn 1944), and that the scattered preserved documents (deriving from various German occupation authorities) are not sufficient to reconstruct the history of the camp.120 [2]
There are indeed some Jewish historians who maintain or at least accept as possible the notion that Western Jews from countries other than the German Reich and the Protectorate were deported to Latvia. Bernhard Press, who himself grew up as a Jew in Riga during the war, writes in his study on the Holocaust in Latvia:
"As for the number and origin of other foreign Jews [i.e. other than Jews from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate] who were murdered in Latvia, no official data of any sort exist, and rumors about them are still awaiting confirmation. As has already been indicated, in recent years numerous large and small mass graves have been discovered at various locations in Latvia, but these have yielded no new information because as a rule it was impossible to identify the victims. It must be pointed out here that a leitmotif in the relevant literature is the statement that Jews from France, Belgium, Holland, and even Norway died in Latvia besides those from Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe. Such statements can be found not only in the books of M. Kaufmann and M. Birze and the aforementioned KGB brochures, but even in the personal minutes of the interrogation of F. Jeckeln on December 14 and 16, 1945. […] It is known that there were also Lithuanian and Polish Jews in the Riga ghetto and the billets [= work camps/commandos in the Riga area]. [...]. Jews from Romania and Yugoslavia were also reportedly exterminated in Latvia. [...] As has been mentioned, F. Jeckeln (…) claimed not to know how many foreign Jews had been brought to Riga. Thus the question of the number and origins of the Jews who were deported to Latvia and murdered there remains largely unanswered. Nor do we have a precise answer to the question of how many of the Latvian Jews in the territory occupied by the Germans survived the war."121 [2]That Yugoslavian Jews were brought to Latvia is reportedly confirmed by eyewitness testimony. On 1 January 1943 the weekly exile-German newspaper Die Zeitung reported:
"Now a man who escaped from the Riga Ghetto to neutral foreign soil [likely Sweden] reports that transports of Yugoslavian Jews have arrived in Riga."122 [2]In the same news article we read that
"a report appearing in Gardista, the newspaper of Sano Mach, the Slovakian Minister of the Interior, informs that also Croatian Jews are detained in two towns in eastern Poland."This would imply that the Jews sent to Riga were Serbian Jews. Since the surviving Serbian Jews were most likely deported to Transnistria or the Ukraine (cf. 2.4.5.), it seems more plausible that they were in fact Jews from "Greater Croatia" (considering that a Yugoslavian state of which Croatia was part had existed for more than twenty years prior to the war, confusion on this issue would be understandable). If so, they were part of the 4,972 Croatian Jews deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942 (cf. 2.4.4.).
It should be noted that "eastern Poland" could well refer to the western part of Generalbezirk Weissruthenien, which used to belong to Poland. We may also note in passing that, according to Reuben Ainsztein, Yugoslavian Jews were detained in the Janów camp near Lwów (Lviv) in the south-east part of the General Government (now in the Ukraine).123 [2]
The presence of Polish Jews in the Riga Kaiserwald camp and its subcamps is confirmed by one of the leading Latvian Holocaust historians, Margers Vestermanis, who writes:
"The number of prisoners was reduced considerably through Selections, especially in the summer of 1944, as the front drew closer to Riga. Concerning the many Selections only a single, peculiar document has been preserved: an inscription in Russian on the inside of a locker in the subcamp Strasdenhof (Strazdumuiza): 'I, Abraham Grafman from Warsaw, am now on August 3 among a group of 900 Jews, who are being taken away to be shot.'"124 [2]Here we may recall that the witness Jeanette Wolf states in her memoirs that Polish Jews were kept in the Strasdenhof camp, that another witness, Josef Katz, repeatedly mentions the presence of Polish Jews in the Riga Ghetto and the Kaiserwald camp (cf. §3.3.1.) and that Jack Ratz speaks of the arrival of Polish Jews (who had come "straight from Poland") at the Lenta camp outside Riga in the summer of 1943. We may also note that the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names125 [2] lists an Abraham Grafman from Warsaw (b. 1904), who supposedly perished in 1943—the entry states that he died in Warsaw, but the relative who filled in the form apparently did not know Grafman very well, since the form has the year of birth altered from 1900 to 1904. Could Abraham Grafman have been deported to Latvia via Treblinka?
Vestermanis further writes:
"Regarding Eleja-Meitene [a subcamp of KL Kaiserwald in the Mitau/Jelgava district] the following additional information may be found in the Historical Archives in Riga: The camp, consisting of 16 dilapidated barracks, was located near a 'Machine and Tractor Station' in Eleja. The approximately 3,000 Jewish prisoners from Lithuania and Poland were chiefly employed in laying rail tracks and with repairment of tracks. The camp was in use between October 1943 and June 1944. Nothing is known about the subsequent fate of the prisoners."126 [2]How these Polish Jews had reached Latvia, Vestermanis leaves unexplained. According to information furnished by the International Tracing Service in Arolsen the inmates in the Eleja-Meitene camp (said to be located 40-50 km from Mitau) were employed by the firms Rippel, and Berger & Ottlieb.127 [2]
German historians Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm mention—without providing a source or any further explanation—that Jews were brought from Holland to the Baltic states.128 [2]
Historian and former German-Jewish Riga-ghetto inmate Gertrude Schneider has the following to say about Salaspils camp and the child inmates who reportedly became victims of medical experiments conducted there:
"By late summer of 1942, Salaspils had become primarily a camp for Latvian political prisoners and Russian prisoners of war. It also served as a transit center for subsequent Jewish transports on their journey to death in the forest. [...] Postwar examinations of exhumed bodies revealed that various poisons had been tested on the small victims. Tags worn by the children were found in the forest nearby and at Salaspils. They were made out of aluminum and were marked, in many cases, ohne Eltern (without parents), thus identifying the children as orphans. While many of the names on these tags were Jewish, there were quite a number that had to be of Slavic origin, due to the fact that some of the transports had come from Belorussia and from the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Most of the transports came from the Reich, but some had come from as far away as France."129 [2]I will note here in passing that only one transport from Theresienstadt to Riga in the summer of 1942 is documented: it was given the transport code Bb and departed on 20 August 1942.
Elsewhere Schneider writes:
"While transports of Jews from all over Europe were going to be coming to Riga until late fall of 1942, they would be liquidated immediately, except for small children, who were then housed in one big barrack in Salaspils and used for medical experiments."130 [2]Lotte Strauss recounts a conversation with Schneider in 1999 during which the Holocaust survivor-cum-historian told her that
"during the fall of 1942, 40,000 Jews, mostly from Germany and France, were sent to the woods around Riga. Among them was the '22nd Osttransport,' with 791 Jews from Berlin. They had been packed into regular passenger trains—not into cattle cars as was usual for Jewish transports. It must have given the prisoners a false sense of security and hidden from them that the Nazi authorities intended an especially gruesome end for them: mass execution. Before arriving in the Riga ghetto, the train was diverted to a village named Salaspils. There, at the ramp, the transport was divided: fifty young men were sent to work in a sugar factory in Mitau, and a few more were detailed to help build the concentration camp Kaiserwald. (One, at most two, members of the work details survived.) All the others—more than 700 people—were taken into the woods to the killing grounds, where mass graves had been dug by Russian POWs."131 [2]The last known direct transport from the west to Riga was the abovementioned transport from Theresienstadt on 20 August 1942. The 22nd Osttransport is stated to have departed from Berlin on 26 October 1942 (the number of deportees is alternatively given as 801 or 808).132 [2] In preserved German documents no destination is listed for this transport.133 [2] The next Osttransport from Berlin, with 1,021 deportees, departed for Auschwitz on 24 November 1942. If we take a look at the succeeding Berlin transports things get even more curious. Raul Hilberg notes that
"the transport of November 29, 1942, with 1,001 Jews, is listed as destined either for Auschwitz or Riga, and the transport of December 14, 1942, with 811 deportees is allocated to Riga. The prosecutor could not find survivors of either transport, and proof of their arrival in Riga is lacking. It is likely that both were directed to Auschwitz (...)"134 [2]The court document which Hilberg refers to135 [2]—which the author has not had the opportunity to access—apparently refers to other transport lists than those kept at NARA, because the latter lists three Osttransporte from Berlin departing in November and December 1942: One transport on 20 November with 1,021 deportees, a second on 14 December with 813 deportees and a third on 15 December with 1,061 deportees. For none of these transports is a destination listed. Danuta Czech in her Kalendarium lists no transports from Berlin as having arrived in Auschwitz during December or the last days of November; the next listed arrival from Berlin, with 1,000 deportees (no documentary source is stated for this entry), is on 13 January 1943136 [2]—this is most likely identical with the Osttransport listed in the NARA transport lists as departing Berlin on January 12 (here the number of deportees is given as 1,190).
Here we may ask in passing whether being sent to Salaspils more or less meant certain death for Jewish prisoners, as implied by many exterminationist historians. Jack Ratz, who was briefly sent to Salaspils after the liquidation of the labor camp Lenta in 1944, states that the camp commandant of Lenta, the SS man Fritz Scherwitz—who in secrecy was a Jew who had been adopted by a German soldier during World War I and for that reason took care to treat the Jewish inmates well—"had been ordered to send all the Jews to Germany" at the time of the liquidation but instead sent the Jews in the Lenta camp to Salaspils: "He felt that we had a chance to survive at Salaspils, although it was a notorious death camp".137 [2] The contradiction is dumbfounding. Obviously Scherwitz knew that Salaspils was not a very dangerous place, and definitely not a "death camp"
As for Friedrich Jeckeln's claim that French and Dutch Jews had arrived in Salaspils we find a glimpse of a possible confirmation of it in an article which the Soviet journalist B. Brodovsky wrote after having visited a childrens' home in the Riga suburb of Bolduri (or Bulduri) some time in late 1944:
"Living at the home at the present time are boys and girls who were rescued from Salaspils, a German death factory near Riga. Although there are more than 400 children in the home, a death-like silence reigns in the rooms, for the children are still under the terrifying impression of their recent ordeals. […]The journalist then goes on to describe how he was shown "the findings of medical investigations of children in the Bolduri childrens' home and also quotes briefly from the files on five of the children, all of them apparently evacuees from Belarus: Natasha Panfilova (12 yrs), Pavel Levchenko (12 yrs), Grigori Senkevich (7 yrs), Dmitri Sakson (8 yrs) and Anya Karamish (1 yrs 7 months).139 [2] It is unfortunate that Brodovsky does not mention the name of any of the Dutch or French children, but his account indicates that their names and other personal data were recorded by Soviet investigators, and that they thus may still be retrievable from archived documents.
In Salaspils there were special barracks for children with cots in four tiers. However, there were so many children that some of them had to sleep on the floor. The toilets were in the courtyard, but the children were expected to observe the same regulations regarding their use as the adults. Living in the same barracks were Alexei, Lenya, Valya and Kilya Kondratenko. Kilya, the youngest, was only a year and eight months. […]
The Germans had a reason for organizing children's barracks in Salaspils. They needed a factory for the extraction of blood and the children were good raw material. The camp administration had an agreement with the German Red Cross to supply them with blood, and they did, by the bucketful, which was sent in ampules to the hospitals every day. This was an establishment of which the fascist vampires might well be proud; two hundred liters of children's blood a day.
We talked to young victims from Leningrad, Vitebsk, Poltava and Amsterdam. We even saw two little girls from Paris. From these children we learned of the inhuman practices of this factory."138 [2]
No documentary evidence confirming the allegation that child prisoners served as involuntary blood donors has ever been found, and the claims presented in the Soviet press that 7,000 children perished at Salaspils are viewed as absurd by contemporary Latvian historians.140 [2] This of course does not preclude that child inmates liberated from the camp were placed in Bolduri and examined by Soviet physicians.
In 1963 a book on Salaspils entitled Salaspils naves nometne (Death Camp Salaspils) was published in Riga; the following year a Russian translation appeared.141 [2] This book contain a number of eyewitness accounts, most of which relate either to a nearby POW camp ("Stalag 350") rather than the Salaspils work reeducation camp (AEL, Arbeitserziehungslager), or to the final stage of the camp's existence, when it was used to detain Latvian political prisoners, "work-shies" and evacuees from Belarus. There are, however, two witness statements found in it that confirm the presence of Western and Polish Jews in Salaspils. Stanislav Rozanov, a Russian POW who worked in a sawmill near the camp, states that Jewish convoys "from Germany, Poland, Austria, France, Belgium, Romania, Holland and other countries" were sent there.142 [2] Karlis Sausnitis, a Latvian journalist and political prisoner who arrived in Salaspils on 7 May 1942, repeatedly states that among the camp inmates there were Jews from "Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and other occupied countries".143 [2] As already mentioned, mainstream historians maintain that the Jewish inmates of Salaspils consisted of only Latvian, German, Austrian and some Czech Jews. As seen we have information confirming that an unknown number of Polish Jews were present in five Latvian camps: Kaiserwald (Mezaparks), Lenta, Strasdenhof (Strazdumuiza), Eleja-Meitene and Salaspils.
3.5. Further Witnesses Provided by Christian Gerlach
In his 1999 book Kalkulierte Morde (Calculated Murder) German Holocaust historian Christian Gerlach references several witnesses attesting to deportations of French and Dutch Jews to Belarus:
"That Jews were brought to Belarus not only from the Great German Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, but also from other countries has until now [1999] been almost overlooked. Only some of the transports in question can be traced in detail, and often we know of them only from isolated witness statements, which means that they cannot be confirmed with certainty. Thus after the war, witnesses of a certain authority, for example the former Gebietskommissar of Borissow, [Karl] Bauer; Karl Buchner, a member of KdS Minsk Abteilung IVb specially responsible for gas vans; a surviving German Jew [identified only as "W.M."], and a member of the Arbeitsamt Minsk ["H.H."], stated that French Jews had arrived in Minsk. […] The situation is similar when it comes to possible deportations of Dutch Jews, who are said to have worked in, among other places, the weapons workshop in Minsk."144 [2]As for the Dutch Jews, we learn in a footnote that their presence in Minsk was witnessed not only by the already discussed witness Inge Stolten (§3.3.17.), but also by "H.M.", who worked as a supervisor in the workshop in question; "A.M.", a member of the KdS (Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD) Minsk and the aforementioned "H.H." of the Arbeitsamt Minsk.145 [2] In another footnote we read that Anna Krasnoperko, a former inmate of the Minsk Ghetto, told Gerlach in October 1993 that there had arrived French as well as Dutch Jews at Minsk.146 [2]
The reason why the transports of French and Dutch Jews to Belarus have hitherto been "overlooked" by the Holocaust historians is of course that they do not fit with the official historiography on the deportations of these groups of Jews. Christian Gerlach, however, is unaware—or pretends to be unaware—of the implications of the testimonies he refers to, and he completely refrains from discussing them in a broader context.
Gerlach further writes that it is a commonly held notion in Belarus that Jews from France and other Western European countries were sent to Minsk.147 [2] Indeed, his Belarussian colleague Marat Botvinnik writes, unfortunately without providing a source, that:
"Since the first transport [to Minsk from abroad] arrived from Hamburg, all the prisoners of the Sonderghetto [also called the "Hamburg Ghetto"] were usually called 'Hamburg Jews', even though they came from different cities of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, as well as Belgium and Holland. Each transport consisted of up to 1,000 people. The Sonderghetto held up to 24,000 Jews."148 [2]We note here that the number of Jews held in the Minsk Sonderghetto according to Botvinnik does not fit the notion, embraced by Western Holocaust historians, that the only Western Jews to actually reach the ghetto were the 7-8,000 Reich Jews from the initial transports in November 1941 (cf. §3.3.10).
3.6. Testimonies Concerning Postcards and Letters from Deported Jews
Next–to-last in this survey of testimonial evidence I will discuss the letters and postcards sent to the Warsaw Ghetto in the latter half of 1942 from Jews who had been deported to the east. Since, to the knowledge of the author, none of those have been preserved (perhaps due to the recipients being themselves deported east later on), I will address this issue here and not below in the survey of documentary evidence.
In an article titled "The Jews of Warsaw Are Murdered in Treblinka", published in the 20 September 1942 issue of the clandestine Bund organ Oyf der rakh (On Guard), we find the following passage:
"During the first weeks of the 'Evacuation Aktion,' [ i.e. in late July and early August 1942] Warsaw was swamped by postcards written by Jews deported from the city. Greetings supposedly arrived from Bialystok, Brześć [Brest-Litowsk], Kosów, Malkinia, Pińsk, Smolensk. It was all a lie! All the trains with Jews from Warsaw went to Treblinka, where the Jews were exterminated in a horrifying way. The letters and the postcards come from people who managed to escape from the [train] cars or the camp itself. It is also possible that a few Jews included in the first deportations [...] were intentionally sent to Brześć or to Pińsk so that their postcards would deceive, mislead, and create false illusions in the Warsaw Jewish community."149 [2]It is worth noting here that Warsaw Jewess Mary Berg in her diary entry from 22 July 1942, the very first day of the great evacuation, wrote that "The transports are being sent in the direction of Brzesc"150 [2]—a possible indication that some Jews in the ghetto, perhaps members of the Jewish Council, had more detailed information on the final destination of the transports. According to the witness Rachel Gurmanova, who rehashes the "decoy transport" story, five or six postcards arrived from Brest-Litovsk carrying the message "we are working."151 [2]
A report written by the underground later in the autumn of 1942 came up with an alternative explanation for the letters:
"Mysterious letters written by the deportees and dispatched from the vicinity of Bialystok, Pińsk, Brześć on the Bug River cropped up [in the ghetto]. They were supposedly brought to the ghetto by policemen and railroad workers. As later became clear, these were either poor forgeries or letters that were indeed written by the 'evacuees' as dictated by the Germans at the site of [their] death in Treblinka."152 [2]How exactly it "became clear" that the letters were "poor forgeries" or dictated at Treblinka was never revealed by any of the underground spokesmen.
Further, in an appeal from January 1943 issued by the Jewish resistance organization in Warsaw we read:
"In the course of the last weeks, people of certain circles were spreading news about letters, which supposedly came from Jews who were evacuated from Warsaw and who are now supposed to be in labor camps at Pinsk or Bobruisk."153 [2]According to the Jewish resistance member Yitzhak Zuckerman, letters which were part of "a German ruse", arrived in Warsaw "from the towns of Bessarabia, Smolensk and Minsk saying that the migrants had arrived safely and were satisfied."154 [2]
Needless to say these letters, if genuine, would pose an embarassing problem to the Holocaust historians, who therefore have to dismiss them by making various unsubstantiated claims. Israeli historian Yisrael Gutman writes:
"We have no evidence to the effect that the transports were deliberately sent to a place that would abet the deception of Warsaw's Jews. It is likewise doubtful that the Germans had to bother with any such special circuitous action, since it was much simpler to compel the deportees to copy down dictated letters immediately upon their arrival at Treblinka. This system was used at a number of camps. In fact, it was a customary tactic of deception employed throughout the course of the 'Final Solution.' But it is also true that many escaped from the trains on the way to Treblinka. Youth movement members, for example, repeatedly escaped from the freight cars and returned to the ghetto. Thus it is highly probable that there were escapees who did not return to the ghetto and that they too wrote letters but deliberately failed to state that they had escaped from the train on the way to Treblinka and were living someplace illegally. It is logical that such letters would be deliberately vague, just as there were good reasons why they might be misunderstood or the true location of the sender might easily be misinterpreted. Yet in many cases the tales of greetings and letters were no more than hearsay, and the more one tried to track down the person who had actually seen the letter with his own eyes, or had received the letter himself, the clearer it became that the so-called source had only heard about such a letter from someone else, who had in turn heard about it. The true source of the rumors was evidently the Germans and their Jewish agents, though we can also presume that in a community starved for hope and trying to block out the horrible truth, rumors of this kind come into being even without an instigator at work."155 [2]In order to support the claim that the existing letters were forgeries, Gutman then goes on to quote a dismissing note written by Warsaw Jew and "underground archivist" Emanuel Ringelblum (1900-1944):
"A legend began to grow up about letters from the deportees, particularly from certain places—Brześć, Kowel [in north-western Ukraine], Pińsk, etc. Hard as you might try, you could never get anyone who had actually read a letter with his own eyes. It was always a third person who had heard from someone else that so-and-so had read the letter. These letters were always phrased in exactly the same way and appeared in the same form: a few words scrawled on a chit torn from a paper bag saying that we arrived safely to wherever. A letter like this never contained details about the living conditions of the deportees or how they occupied their time. But they always requested money and belongings and always mentioned that other deportees had asked to pass on their regards—and these others always happened to be wealthy people.Gutman's assertions are rather contrived, and some of Ringelblum's statements are demonstrably false. To begin with, the hypothesis that some of the cards came from evacuees who had escaped from the train on their way to Treblinka could perhaps explain the letters reportedly arriving from Małkinia (which is located approximately 10 km north of Treblinka) and Kosow, but hardly those sent from Belarus and the Ukraine.
Such letters were always delivered by Polish Christians who 'managed to reach [the proper address] after overcoming various difficulties.' The amicable Poles were willing to take money and clothing back for the deportees. They were also prepared to aid in the search for others who had been deported—naturally, in return for the payment of hundreds or thousands of zlotys."156 [2]
Ringelblum's claim that the letters actually received were always delivered by Polish swindlers is incorrect, as shown by a diary entry from 4 August 1942 written by a certain Abraham Lewin:
"A letter from Baranowicze [in western Belarus]. The writer is working as a farm-laborer. She asks for underwear. Living is cheap, 7 zloty for white bread, 1.80 for potatoes. It would be good if she could be sent underwear. The letter came by post."157 [2]Since the letter was delivered by mail, it must necessarily have been stamped by the local post office which first handled it, thus confirming its point of origin. We may also compare with the autumn 1942 underground report's statement that the letters were "dispatched" from locations in the east. This is obviously the reason why the Oyf der rakh writer had to come up with far-fetched idea that the Germans were sending some of the transports to the east just as part of a deception.
The reported contents of this letter further contradict Ringelblum's assertion that the messages "never contained details about the living conditions of the deportees or how they occupied their time". Also, if the letter had been a part of a swindle, how come the writer only asked for underwear, and moreover stressed that prices at the new place of residence were cheap—something which hardly would encourage the sending of large sums of money?
That Polish Jews were deported to Baranovichi is confirmed by a news notice which appeared in the Aufbau issue of 26 June 1942:
"There have been mass roundups of Jews in all of Poland in order to 'recruit' forced labor. In the district of Baranowicze Jews are working on draining the Pinsk swamps. New labor camps are constantly established."158 [2]The hypothesis that the letters were written under duress by deportees who had just arrived in the "death camp" lacks, as far as this author has been able to determine, any basis in the testimonies left by former inmates and camp personnel from Treblinka.
Ringelblum's claim that the existence of the letters was, if not wholly, then for the most part, a "legend" is contradicted by the Oyf der rakh writer's statement that Warsaw was "swamped" by such postcards. That the letters delivered were indeed rather numerous is hinted by the already mentioned statement of Rachel Gurmanova, as well as the testimony of a certain Tokar-Warszawski according to which "three postcards that arrived from people who had been deported were passed around in the Többens' [workshop in Warsaw]".159 [2]
A further diary note of Lewin's from diary dated 30 July 1942 implies that some of the Jews deported from Warsaw were sent on from Treblinka to the Białystok district (similar to how some of the Jews sent to Sobibór were transferred on arrival to labor camps in the Lublin district; cf. §2.5.):
"A letter from Bialystok that a Polish policeman brought, from a woman to her husband. She and her son are together with several other families and have to work in the fields, but they are receiving food."160 [2]3.7. Entries of Interest from the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims
The already mentioned Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims, the majority of whose records are based on forms submitted by relatives of the reportedly deceased, contains a relatively large number of entries that are clearly anomalous from an exterminationist point of view, but which fit well with the revisionist transit-camp hypothesis. Needless to say these entries do not have the evidential value of documents and, generally speaking, not even that of ordinary testimonial evidence. Nonetheless I will present them here as they may provide valuable hints as to the destinations of the transports departing from the "extermination camps".
3.7.1. Polish Jews
The 62 entries summarized in the table below concern Jews who were apparently deported from Poland to the German-occupied Baltic states. For obvious reasons I have obmitted entries concerning Jews originating from the provinces of pre-WWII Poland that were incorporated into Lithuania and Belarus during the war.
The Jews listed in the table above resided in towns and cities all over Poland. If the information in the entries is correct, this would imply that transports went to the Baltic states from more than one of the "extermination camps". The many entries relating to Warthegau Jews (Łódź, Slupca, Lututow, Ozorków, Leczyca (Lentschütz) point to transports from Chełmno. As seen above (3.3.1. and 3.3.19.) the witnesses Kruk and Tory confirm that Jews were deported from Łódź to Lithuania (and transferred from there to Latvia). Sosnoviec, Tarnowskie Gory, Zambrow161 [2] and Będzin point to Auschwitz, whereas Warsaw, Rembertow, Siedliszcze indicate transports from Treblinka. Lwów, Kolomea, Myslenice and Przemysl162 [2] clearly point to Bełżec.
The entry for Berl Zoler, which is based on information submitted by his own daughter, is especially noteworthy. The vast majority of the Jews of Kolomea (Kolomyia) were deported to Bełżec on 3-4 April, 7 September and 11 October 1942.163 [2] From an exterminationist viewpoint it is simply unthinkable that this 72-year-old Jew for some reason would have been spared from certain death and transported to Latvia. Another remarkable entry is that of the Łódź Jew Hugo Friedman, born 1875, who is reported to have perished in Riga.
Another group of Jews deported to Bełżec appears to have ended up near the frontline in eastern Ukraine and Russia. In the June 1942 issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record we read:
"Meanwhile, all skilled and unskilled Jews in Ciechanow were reported April 15 [1942] to have been sent to labor camps, while thousands of former Lublin and Krakow Jews were said to have spent Passover digging trenches on the Taganrog-Kharkov sector of the Soviet front."164 [2]According to Yitzhak Arad, a total of 30,000 Lublin Jews were deported to Bełżec between 17 March and 14 April 1942, while a first group of 5,000 Krakow Jews were sent there in early June the same year.165 [2] Passover (Pesach) fell on 2 April in 1942.166 [2] How then could Krakow Jews have reached the Ukraine (no "gassings" of Kraków Jews had yet taken place in any other "extermination camp")? One possibility is that Arad is mistaken and that smaller transports of Krakow Jews to Bełżec actually took place during the period in question. A more likely explanation, though, is that Krakow Jews were among the Lublin Jews deported to the camp. More than 5,000 Krakow Jews were resettled to the Lublin district during the autumn of 1940.167 [2]
All of the Baltic camps and towns mentioned in the entries are identifiable. To begin with the Latvian locations, Livani, where the elderly Berl Zoler reportedly died, is on the bank of the Daugava River some 30 km south-east of Jekabpils and 80 km north-north-west of Daugavpils (Dvinsk). Sabila, which is stated as the place of death in three entries concerning unrelated individuals from different towns, is most likely identical with Sabile, a town or village located about 35 km north-west of Tukums. Serene or Jaunjelgava is a town on the Daugava River in the Zemgale district, located about halfway between Riga and Jekabpils. Subate is a town or village located some 40 km north-west of Daugavpils, directly on the Latvian-Lithuanian border. Malta is the name of a village (and a nearby river) located approximately 25 km north-west of Rezekne, a town in eastern Latvia. Valka (Walk) is a town located directly on the Latvian-Estonian border, some 110 km inland. Korsovka is the Russian name for Karsava, a town located northeast of Rezekne, near the Russian border. Balwa (Balvi), finally, is a town in the north-eastern corner of Latvia, some 30 km from the Russian border. As for the Lithuanian locations, Merts is another name for Merkine in Alytus county in southern Lithuania. Svedasai is located halfway along the road between Utena and Kupiškis. Kelmai or Kelme is located on the road between Siauliai and Taurage (Tauroggen). Warna is another name for Varena in Alytaus county. Krakes, finally, is a small town in the Kedainiai district in central Lithuania.
The fact that the individuals who submitted the forms in question knew the names of these rather obscure locations in Latvia suggest that they themselves or their relatives had received communications of some kind or other mentioning the whereabouts of the deported person.
About the Łódź Jew Mojsze Goldberg, his cousin informs us that he was "Sent to Riga for slave labor. When standing in line for breakfast rations the Nazis made a 'selection' of 100 men. Mojsze, number 67, was forced to dig his own grave."
3.7.2. French Jews
Next I present a table of 8 similar entries relating to Jews deported from France:
| Surname | Given Name | Year of birth | Wartime residence | Place of death | Year of death |
| Bloch | Edmund | 5/9/1900 | Saverne | Jassy (lasi) | 5/7/1944 |
| Cealac | Yakob | 5/12/1911 | France | Riga | ? |
| Cohen | Israel | 1890 | France | Belarus | ? |
| Falesski | Haim | 1890 | Paris | Transnistria | 1942 |
| Mai | Ludwig | 21/1/1881 | Paris | Riga | 23/11/1944 |
| Perelman | Mina | 1893 | Paris | Riga | ? |
| Rozenberg | Maksimillian | 1912 | Brumath | Bershad (Transn.) | ? |
| Schauman | Khaim | ? | Nice | Transnistria | Aged 18 or 19 |
"Haim Falesski" is identifiable as Haim Faletsky, born in Calarasi, Romania, on 11 September 1890. He was on Convoy 20, which departed from Drancy with destination Auschwitz on 17 August 1942. It consisted of 1,000 deportees, whereof 878 were "gassed on arrival", i.e. transited.168 [2]
There is only one "Israel Cohen" in the transport lists (in Convoy 33), but he is stated to be born in Philipopoli, Bulgaria, in 1902, not in Berguent, Morocco in 1890 as the Israel Cohen found in the Yad Vashem database. There are two Cohens in the transit lists with the name "Isidore", which is given as Israel Cohen's second name: one born 18 October 1887 in Constantinople, the other born 5 July 1894 in Paris. The former was on Convoy 66, which departed from Drancy bound for Auschwitz on 20 January 1944, the latter was on Convoy 23, which departed from Drancy with the same destination on 24 August 1942. If one of these two individuals is identical with "Israel Cohen", it is more likely the "Isidore Cohen" born in Paris in 1894, since it seems improbable that Jews would have been transported to Belarus as late as January or February 1944.
The persons in the six other records are not to be found in the extant transport lists. This, however, does not necessarily mean that these individuals were not deported from France. It is possible that they went under other names at the time of their deportations, that their surnames were misspelled in the transport lists, or that they were last-minute additions to convoys and therefore do not appear in the extant copies of the transport lists. Such additions can be inferred from the fact that the numbers of deportees in the convoy lists in some cases differ slightly from the corresponding figures given in the telegrams sent to Auschwitz by the Jewish section of the French Gestapo. As Serge Klarsfeld explains,
"it was always possible for them [the Gestapo] to add on a few more people at the last minute putting the correct number in the telex without transferring these names to the two lists entrusted to the head of the convoy."169 [2]The four entries stating Transnistria as the place of death are especially noteworthy in context of the news report from November 1942 according to which thousands of Jews deported from France had arrived in Bessarabia and the ghettos of Calarasi (Kalarash) and Kishinev (Cf. §3.1.2.). Moreover the bi-monthly news review Contemporary Jewish Record wrote in its issue of December 1942 that
"In occupied France, deportations proceeded swiftly and ruthlessly. Within three months after the initial arrests, about 35,000 Jewish families were broken up. In Paris, 4,000 Rumanian Jews were arrested on Sept. 24 and taken to the Drancy internment camp, the Rumanian Government having enacted a special law under which they could be apprehended. One of the Paris deportees, who managed to survive a nightmarish journey to Bessarabia, told a horrible story (Oct. 15) of his arrest and of his trip in a sealed car marked 'War materials, explosives - transit to Russia.' Those who met the transport at its destination saw a ghastly sight. More than half of the occupants in some cars were dead, and their bodies, already in a state of decomposition, fell out as the doors were opened."170 [2]This remarkable report implies that the Jews of Romanian nationality deported from France were sent to the Romanian-annexed Bessarabia, from which in turn all or some of them may have been transferred across the Bug to the "Transnistrian Reservation". Indeed, some pages on in the same issue we read:
"Sealed cattle cars, containing Jews deported from France, arrived in Rumania, it was reported in Lisbon, Oct. 15, and those not dead from starvation or exhaustion were immediately shipped to Transnistria."171 [2]Needless to say the Western Jews deported to Transnistria may not have stayed there permanently; it would not take much effort to transport them across the Bug River and into Reichskommissariat Ukraine. In this context we may note that the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported the following on 23 July 1943:
"At present, the Jewish population of Mohilev [in Transnistria] is about 15,000, of whom 3,000 are natives of the city and the others deportees from Rumania, Germany and Bulgaria. These figures vary from day to day, one report points out, since new groups of deportees are constantly arriving and others are sent farther eastward to construct fortifications on the Russian front under the supervision of Nazi officers."172 [2]Also, on 2 January 1944 the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that an estimated 55,000 Jews in Romanian camps had been sent to work on the Russian front; of these about 50% had perished due to lack of food, clothing and medical care.173 [2]
As mentioned in §2.4.3., Jews from the Bulgaria-annexed regions of Macedonia and Thrace were deported to Treblinka and Sobibór in March and April 1943. According to mainstream historiography the only Jews ever deported to Transnistria were from Bessarabia, Bukovina and "Old Romania". Was Transnistria from that time on used as a sort of transit area for Western and Balkan Jews within the framework of the Generalplan Ost, similar to the Lublin "reservation"?
Bershad, where "Maksimilian Rozenberg" is reported to have perished, was the location of a Jewish ghetto which was part of the "Transnistrian Reservation".174 [2] About this "reservation" we read in the 6 November 1942 issue of the weekly Aufbau:
"The province of Transnistria will soon become a single large collection reservoir [Sammelbecken] for Jews. Freight trains from France, Holland and Belgium constantly arrive, bringing half-starved and sick deportees who are then left there to their fate."175 [2]On 24 September 1942, a total of 1,594 Romanian Jews were arrested in the Paris region and detained at the Drancy collection camp. On the following day 729 of them were deported to Auschwitz on Convoy 37, which consisted of in all 1,004 deportees. At Kosel, some 100 km west of Auschwitz, 175 men from the convoy were selected for work. The transport is reported to have arrived at Auschwitz on 27 September. Upon arrival, another 40 men were selected for work, whereas the rest of the deportees were immediately "gassed". On 28 September 1942 Convoy 38 departed with 856 Jews on board; 594 of them were of Romanian nationality. Of the Jews from this transport some 685 were "gassed" on arrival at Auschwitz on 29 September.176 [2]
The abovementioned Haim Faletsky was the only Romanian Jew on Convoy 20, which as already mentioned departed on 17 August, and was, as far as the author of this article has been able to determine from the transport lists, the very first Romanian Jew to be deported from France. The reason for this is mentioned in the above quoted news article and explained more fully by Serge Klarsfeld:
"Romania was allied with Germany, but under the pressure of Gustav Richter, Eichmann's representative in Bucharest, the Romanian Jews living in France lost the protection of their government. On September 17, the German embassy had told the Gestapo that Romania and Bulgaria were no longer interested in their Jews. They thus became deportable [...]. The next day, the Gestapo informed the RSHA in Berlin that the deportation of Romanian Jews would not exceed 3,000 persons."177 [2]In the end a total of 2,958 Romanian Jews were deported from France.178 [2] That Faletsky was deported already in August could be explained either as a mistake or (perhaps more likely) that for some reason he was not recognized as a citizen by the Romanian embassy. Of the three other Jews listed as having died in Transnistria all were reportedly born in France. I will return to the deportation of French Jews to Transnistria later in this study.
3.7.3. Dutch Jews
| Surname | Given name | Year of birth | Wartime residence | Place of death | Year of death |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bromet | Helena | 1912 | Amsterdam | Riga | ? |
| Cohen | Ester | 1871 | Veendam | Riga | 1942 |
| Goldschmidt | Max | 1870 | The Netherlands | Lithuania | ? |
| Linderman | Nico | 1910 | Amsterdam | Utyany (Lith.) | 1944 |
| Magnus | Regina | 1892 | Amsterdam | Lithuania | 1943 |
An online database179 [2] based on the Dutch transport lists a Helena Bromet-Root, born 3 October 1912 in Amsterdam, as murdered in Auschwitz on 23 July 1942. There is also an Esther Cohen-Zion, born 26 June 1871 in Eibergen, listed as murdered in Auschwitz on 17 September 1942. We may recall here Hilde Sherman-Zander's testimony (3.3.2.) according to which one or more convoys of Dutch Jews arrived in Riga in the summer of 1942.
A Max Goldschmidt, born 6 December 1873 in Singhofen, is listed as murdered in Sobibór on 23 July 1943. A Regina Magnus-Kirsch, born 24 August 1892 in Berlin is listed as murdered in Sobibór on 26 March 1943, yet two entries in the Yad Vashem Database, submitted by her brother (James Isaac Kirsch) state (while adding a question mark) that she was deported to Lithuania.
There is no Nico or Nicolaus Henny Lindeman, stated to be born in Hengelo, the Netherlands, to be found in the database, but if one searches for victims from this town one finds a David Herman Lindeman (b. 27 March 1903) and a Dina Lindeman (b. 8 December 1867), both from Hengelo and allegedly gassed in Sobibór, David on 11 June 1943 and Dina on 13 March 1943. Was "Nico" a relative of theirs? The Yad Vashem entry is based on information submitted by his brother, Mordekhai. Utyany, the place where "Nico Lindeman" reportedly perished, is undoubtedly the same as Utena180 [2], a city in north-eastern Lithuania. Avraham Tory wrote that German bombardment during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa had "destroyed the road between Vilkomir and Utena".181 [2] Were Dutch Jews sent to carry out road work at this location? One may recall here Herman Kruk's April 1943 diary entries (3.3.1.) according to which a large number of Dutch Jews were deported to Lithuania, most of them apparently via Sobibór.
It may well be that the first transports of Dutch Jews to Lithuania took place already in the summer of 1942, around the same time that one or more convoys arrived in Riga. In the October 1942 issue of Contemporary Jewish Record we read:
"Mass deportation to Eastern Europe of the 60,000 Jews now in Amsterdam ghettos began at the rate of 600 per day, it was learned July 23. [...]. On Aug. 19 [1942], the BBC stated that several hundred [Dutch-Jewish] deportees had been slain in Wilno by Nazis."182 [2]Something curious appears if we map out the above Latvian and Lithuanian locations (Illustration 3). We immediately note that Balwa, Karsava, Malta, Livani, Subate, Svedasai, Utena, Varena and Merkine as well as Vievis are all located more or less along an imagined line running in NNE-SSW direction from Pskov to the south of Lithuania, not far from the Russian border. All of these locations also had direct or indirect access to the main railroad line Warsaw-Vilna-Daugavpils-Pskov-Leningrad. This suggests the construction of fortifications along the Baltic-Russian border, similar to the "Otto Line" in eastern Poland, or a network of armament factories placed along a supply route. Interestingly the German Jewess Jeanette Wolf, who was deported to Riga in early 1942, writes in her memoirs that Jews from the camps in and near the Latvian capital were sometimes transferred to "so-called Stützpunktkommandos" (reinforcement point commandos) near "the front" (likely meant is the Leningrad front) from which they usually did not return.183 [2] Tory mentions in his diary entry from 20 August 1942 a (later rescinded) German demand that 700 Kovno Jews be sent to, among other locations, "Lake Ilmen near Leningrad" (south of Novgorod).184 [2]
Next I have summarized below 17 entries relating to German and Austrian Jews apparently deported to the Ukraine. As mentioned above (§2.1.) it is an established fact that a large number of German, Austrian and Czech Jews were deported to Reichskommissariat Ostland in the period 1941-1942. Mainstream historians however do not acknowledge any transports of such Jews to Reichskommissariat Ukrain.
| Surname | Given name | Year of birth | Wartime residence | Place of death | Year of death |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Allina | Rosa | 1880 | Vienna | Kiev | 1942 |
| Bergsmann | Mor | 1897 | Loretto (Austr.) | Voroshilovgrad | 1944 |
| Dreschler | ? (female) | 1895 | Vienna | Kiev | ? |
| Gutman | Lia | 1884 | Vienna | Kiev | 1942 |
| Haas | Walter | ? | Frankfurt a M | Kiev | ? |
| Hacker | Lea | ? | Vienna | Kiev | Aged 49 |
| Horowitz | Yehoshua | 1877 | Vienna | Ukraine | 1942 |
| Lantner | Czarna | 1892 | Rohatyn | Ukraine | ? |
| Levy | Beti | 1881 | Altona | Kupel | ? |
| Lewkowicz | Julius | 1876 | Berlin | Krasnoameysk | 1943 |
| Lichtensztejn | Elza | 1910 | Graz | Ukraine | 1942 |
| Tobias | Irene | ? | Hamburg | Ukraine | 1943 |
| Tobias | Kathe | ? | Hamburg | Ukraine | 1943 |
| Federlein | Augusta | 1883 | Frankfurt | Ukraine | 1942 |
| Perle | Chaim | 1907 | Breslau | Krasnoameysk | ? |
| Stern | Hedwig | 1897 | Frankfurt | Kiev | 1943 |
| Stern | Sally | 1889 | Frankfurt a M | Kiev | 1943 |
| Toprower | Bernhard | ? | Vienna | Ukraine | 1943 |
It is noteworthy that several of the individuals listed above were between 60 and 70 years old at the time of their reported death.
Voroshilovgrad is a city in south-eastern Ukraine now called Luhansk. Krasnoarmeysk (more commonly spelt Krasnoarmiysk) is located in eastern Ukraine, about halfway between Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk, while Kupel is located directly on the Ukrainian-Belarussian border, north-north-west of Zhitomir.
3.7.5. Jews from Belgium and Luxembourg
Finally I give 3 entries relating to Jews deported from Belgium and Luxembourg:
| Surname | Given name | Year of birth | Wartime residence | Place of death | Year of death |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Goldberg | Hellen | Sept. 1927 | Antwerpen | Russia | 1942 |
| Kohn | Pesach | 1902 | Brussels | Ukraine | 1942 |
| Levi | Esther | 29/12/1889 | Luxembourg | Minsk | ? |
"Jews from Malines were sent to Calais and other French coastal points to work on fortifications (Oct. 14), while those from the province of Limburg and other cities were shipped (Oct. 5) to the Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Several hundred others, including women from sixteen to fifty years of age, were exiled (Oct. 29) to the coal mines of Silesia. A report on Oct. 21 stated that 5,500 Antwerp Jews had been deported to the east."185 [2]In the June 1943 issue of the same periodical we read:
"Over 14,000 Jews from Belgium and Holland arrived in Nazi-occupied Ochakov, in Kherson, to do slave labor, Geneva sources reported on April 29."186 [2]These Jews had most likely been transited via Auschwitz (in the case of the Belgian Jews) and Sobibór. Ochakov in the Mykolaiv Oblast is a Ukrainian town by the Black Sea, located about halfway between Kherson and Odessa. During the war the district of Ochakov (Oceacov) was part of the Transnistrian reservation.
German railway historians Andreas Knipping and Reinhard Schulz contend that Belgian as well as Austrian Jews were deported to the Ukraine; unfortunately they do not provide a source for this assertion.187 [2] The Belgian exile newspaper Onafhankelijk België reported on 15 October 1942:
"Many cases of the deportation of Jews have been reported in occupied Belgium. In Liège, in particular, one family has suffered much. The father was sent to a workcamp in France. The daughter and two of her brothers were ordered to go to a meeting-place from where Jews are sent to the Ukraine."188 [2]To be continued.
Notes:
- Maly means "small", and therefore this camp is sometimes referred to in German literature as "Klein Trostinetz".
- Paul Kohl, Der Krieg der deutschen Wehrmacht und der Polizei 1941-1944. Sowietische Überlebende berichten, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1995, p. 105.
- Protocols for Inquest Witness Lev Saevich Lansky, Special State Commission Document 124, lines 149-53, quoted in: Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman (eds.), The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick London 2002, p. 195.
- Ibid.
- Cf. Jürgen Graf & Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 201.
- Gertrude Schneider, Exile and destruction: the fate of Austrian Jews, 1938-1945, Greenwood Publishing, Westport 1995, p. 95.
- Ibid., p. 100.
- Ibid., p. 101.
- Ibid., p. 102.
- Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland, Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, pp. 751-752.
- Ibid., pp. 758-759.
- Ibid., p. 759, note 1397.
- Cf. Lukáš Přibyl, "Die Geschichte des Theresienstädter Transports 'Be' nach Estland", in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 2001, Institut Theresienstädter Initiative, Prague 2001.
- Liste aller Transporte aus Theresienstadt, http://www.terezinstudies.cz/deu/ITI/database/tr_out_to [3]
- Cf. Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Majdanek. A Historical and Technical Study, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2003, p. 91.
- Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer, Europaverlag, Vienna/Zürich 1993, p. 186.
- H.G. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941-1945, Tübingen 1955, p. 638.
- H.G. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch. Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland, J.L.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen 1974, p. 443.
- M. Karny, "Das Schicksal der Theresienstaedter Osttransporte im Sommer und Herbst 1942", Judaica Bohemiae vol. XXIV, no. 2, Prague 1988, p. 96, note 36.
- Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness. An Examination of Conscience, Vintage Books, New York 1983, pp. 175-176.
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis 1987, p. 143.
- Paul Kohl, Der Krieg der deutschen Wehrmacht und der Polizei 1941-1944, op.cit., p. 109.
- H.G. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch., op.cit., p. 198.
- Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, op.cit., p. 756.
- Karl Loewenstein, Minsk. Im Lager der deutschen Juden, Bundeszentrale für Heimatsdienst, Bonn 1961, p. 15.
- Testimony of Isak Grünberg to Rudolf Baumann, department chief in the Vienna Jewish Community, Vienna, 4 January 1962, DÖW 2563, reproduced in: Henry Friedlander, Sybil Milton (eds.), Archives of the Holocaust, Volume 19: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna, Garland Publishing, New York/London 1991, p. 357.
- Ibid, pp. 358-359.
- Ibid., p. 360.
- Liste aller Transporte aus Theresienstadt, op.cit.
- Marat Botvinnik, Pamjatniki genocida evreev Belarusi, Belaruskaja Navuka, Minsk 2000, p. 21, 27.
- Testimony of Isak Grünberg, op.cit., p. 360.
- Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman (eds.), The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick London 2002, p. 443.
- Rachel Margolis, Jim G. Tobias (eds.), Die geheimen Notizen des K. Sakowicz. Dokumente zur Judenvernichtungen in Ponary, Antogo Verlag, Nuremberg 2003, pp. 97-98.
- "Die JTA meldet", Aufbau, 24 August 1942, p. 10.
- Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, Paul Elek, London 1974, p. 704.
- The Black Book. The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York 1946, p. 324.
- Aba Gefen, Ein funke Hoffnung. Ein Holocaust-Tagebuch, Bleicher Verlag, Gerlingen 1987, p. 215.
- Latvija pod igom natsizma. Sbornik arkhivnykh dokumentov, Evropa, Moscow 2006, pp. 50-51.
- Bernhard Press, The Murder of the Jews in Latvia 1941-1945, Northwestern University Press, Evanston (IL) 2000, p. 159.
- For Hungarian Jews in Latvia cf. §2.2.3.
- Anita Kugler, Scherwitz. Der jüdische SS-Offizier, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2004, p. 617.
- Ibid., p. 371.
- Monatsbericht der Arbeitsverwaltung des Gebietskommissariats für April 1943 an den Generalkommissariat Lettland, LVA 69/2/74, sheet 49; quoted in Anita Kugler, Scherwitz. Der jüdische SS-Offizier, op.cit., p. 326.
- Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust. The Kovno Ghetto Diary, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA)/London 1990, p. 69, 148, 275-278.
- Ibid., p. 209.
- "Lettische Partisanen befreien 600 Juden", Aufbau, 25 August 1944, p. 3.
- Kalman Linkimer, Nineteen months in a cellar: How 11 Jews eluded Hitler's henchmen, Jewish Community of Riga/Latvian Jewish Museum, Riga 2008, p. 68.
- Lerner states in his interview with Lanzmann that the leader of the Sobibór uprising, Alexander Pechersky, was already in the camp when he arrived. The transport with Pechersky in turn departed from Minsk on 18 September 1943.
- Miriam Novitch, Sobibor. Martyrdom and Revolt, Holocaust Library, New York 1980, p. 112.
- At the end of the text Lerner states that "today I am an officer in the Israeli police" (ibid., p. 113). Lerner began working for the Israeli police in 1951; cf. Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg Publishers, Oxford/New York 2007, p. 236. Novitch's book was originally published in French in 1978.
- Miriam Novitch, Sobibor. Martyrdom and Revolt, op.cit., p. 111
- Claude Lanzmann, Sobibor. 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures, Cahiers du Cinéma/récit, Paris 2001.
- Transcript of the Shoah Interview with Yehuda Lerner, p.
1. Online:
http://resources.ushmm.org/intermedia/film_video/spielberg_archive/transcript/
RG60_5030/91645B27-8317-421E-A32C-50450DC5BDC4.pdf - Ibid., p. 2.
- Ibid., p. 3.
- Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, op.cit., p. 762, note 1421.
- Ibid., pp. 762-763.
- Krystyna Marczewska, Władysław Wazniewski, "Treblinka w swietle akt Delegatury Rządu RP na Kraji", in: Biuletyn Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, Vol. XIX, Warsaw 1968, p. 137.
- Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, Josef Kermisz (eds.), The Diary of Adam Czerniakow, Stein & Day, New York 1979, pp. 339-340.
- Ibid., p. 340.
- Ibid., p. 341.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 343.
- Ibid., p. 344.
- Ibid., p. 347.
- Ibid., p. 358.
- Ibid., p. 381.
- Needless to say the young Jews deported to Treblinka I may also have been sent to the east after first having passed through delousing at Treblinka II.
- Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943: ghetto, underground, revolt, Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis 1989, p. 214, 448 note 34.
- Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, op.cit., p. 763, note 1424.
- Jüdisches Leben in Mönchengladbach, http://www.cjz-moenchengladbach.de/body_in_m_gladbach.html
- Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein, The 'Final Solution' in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford 2009, p. 203.
- Inge Stolten, Das alltägliche Exil. Leben zwischen Hakenkreuz und Währungsreform, J.H.W. Dietz, Berlin/Bonn 1982, p. 73
- Ibid., p. 83.
- Joshua Rubenstein, Ilya Altman, The Unknown Black Book: the Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories, Indiana University Press/USHMM, Bloomington & Indianapolis 2008, p. 257.
- A. Tory, Surviving the Holocaust, op.cit., p. 111.
- Ibid., p. 116.
- Ibid., p. 117.
- Ibid., pp. 117-118.
- Entry for 14 June 1943; Ibid., p. 389.
- Ibid., p. 119.
- Ibid., p. 407.
- Online: http://www.mapywig.org/m/German_maps/German_WIG/Gb_324_Koschedoren_1944.jpg [4]
- Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust, op.cit., p. 159.
- http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/IY_HON_Welcome
- http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_S5?New_WCM_
Context=http://namescm.yadvashem.org/wps/wcm/connect/Yad+Vashem/
Hall+Of+Names/Left+Links/en/3HON_FAQs - The Jews of Klodawa were reportedly deported to Chełmno in early January 1942; cf. http://www.iajgsjewishcemeteryproject.org/poland/klodawa.html
- The form filled in by Zelda's sister, Paula Syzling Kempinski, a resident of Freehold, New Jersey, states that Zelda was gassed in Chełmno in December 1940. This "death camp", however, did not open until December 1941. Zelda Zysling's supposed death date should thus rather be December 1941, aged 15.
- Also on this form Paula Syzling Kempinski gives the erroneous date December 1940.
- Bradley F. Smith, Agnes F. Peterson (eds.), Heinrich Himmler. Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen, Propyläen Verlag, Frankfurt/Main 1974, p. 200.
- Martin Weinmann (ed.), Das nationalsozialistische Lagersystem (CCP), Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 1990.
- Christoph Dieckmann, "Das Ghetto und das Konzentrationslager in Kaunas 1941-1944", in: Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, Christoph Dieckmann (eds.), Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Entwicklung und Struktur, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 1998, p. 467, note 69.
- According to the editor of the Kruk diary, a report on Biała Waka dating from 18 August 1942 is found in the YIVO Archive, Sutzkever Collection, no. 250.
- The Tragedy of Lithuania 1941-1944, Alex Yakovlev, Yaroslav 2008, pp. 215-216.
- Ibid., pp. 104-106, 159.
- Christoph Dieckmann, "Das Ghetto und das Konzentrationslager in Kaunas 1941-1944", op.cit., pp. 469-470, note 103.
- Ibid., p. 467, note 69.
- Ibid., p. 470, note 109. Harry Gordon, The Shadow of Death. The Holocaust in Lithuania, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 1992, p. 135.
- Ibid., p. 136.
- Reska Weiss, Journey through Hell, Valentine Mitchell, London 1961, p. 81.
- Ibid., p. 95.
- H. Gordon, The Shadow of Death, op.cit., p. 119.
- Cf. Christoph Dieckmann, "Der Krieg und die Ermordung der litauischen Juden", in: Ulrich Herbert (ed), Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939-1945. Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 293.
- H. Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op.cit., pp. 327-328.
- Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 5, no. 2 (April 1942), p. 190.
- Cf. http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/rumsiskes/
- Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 8, C.H. Beck, Munich 2008, p. 58, note 74.
- A. Angrick, P. Klein, The 'Final Solution' in Riga, op.cit., p. 200.
- Ibid., p. 235.
- Ibid., pp. 235-236.
- Ibid., pp. 238-239.
- Ibid., p. 239.
- Gunita Nagle, "Sapiga patiesiba", online: http://vip.latnet.lv/LPRA/salaspils.htm [5]
- Andrew Ezergailis, Harold Otto, Gvido Augusts, Nazi/Soviet Disinformation About the Holocaust in Nazi-Occupied Latvia, Latvijas 50 Gadu Okupacijas Muzeja Fonds, Riga 2005, p. 95.
- Judisk Krönika, vol. 14, no. 2 (February 1945), p. 27.
- Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 6, no. 1 (February 1943), p. 67.
- The Einlieferungsbuch of the Stutthof camp has entries for 13 Austrian and 1,125 Reich German Jews (the vast majority female) who had arrived from Riga or Kovno in the summer and autumn of 1944. Unpublished survey compiled by Carlo Mattogno.
- Ibid., p. 115.
- A. Angrick, P. Klein, The 'Final Solution' in Riga, op.cit., p. 243.
- Karlis Kangeris, Uldis Neiburgs, Rudite Viksne, "Salaspils nometne: vestures avoti un historiografiskais materials" (The Salaspils Camp: Historical Sources and Historiographic Material), in: Okupacijas Rezimi Baltijas Valstis 1940-1991, Latvijas Vesturnieku Komisijas Raksti, 25 sejums, Latvijas vestures instituta apgads, Riga 2009, p. 201, 204.
- Bernhard Press, The Murder of the Jews in Latvia 1941-1945, op.cit., pp. 159-160.
- "Das Ende der Balkan-Juden", Die Zeitung (London), 1 January 1943, p. 2.
- R. Ainsztain, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, op.cit., p. 708.
- Margers Vestermanis, "Haftstatten und Todeslager im okkupierten Lettland", in: U. Herbert, K. Orth, C. Dieckmann (eds.), Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, op.cit., p. 487.
- http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_2KE?last_name=
Grafman&first_name=Abraham&location=Warsaw&next_form=results - Margers Vestermanis, "Haftstatten und Todeslager im okkupierten Lettland", op.cit., p. 488. Vestermanis gives as his source LVA, P-132/26/13, Bl. 197.
- M. Weinmann, Das nationalsozialistische Lagersystem, op.cit., p. 661.
- H. Krausnick, H-H. Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Munich 1981, p. 612.
- Gertrude Schneider, Journey into terror. Story of the Riga Ghetto, 2nd revised and expanded edition, Praeger, Westport (Connecticut) / London 2001, p. 38.
- Gertrude Schneider (Ed.), Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember, Philosophical Library, New York 1987, p. 142.
- Lotte Strauss, Over the Green Hill: A German-Jewish Memoir 1913-1943, Fordham University Press, New York 1999, pp. 111-112.
- Elisabeth Kraus, Die Familie Mosse. Deutsch-jüdisches Bürgertum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, C.H. Beck, Munich 1999, p. 581.
- NARA A3355, Reel 1, as summarized online: http://www.jewishgen.org/infofiles/capturedGermanRecords.html
- Raul Hilberg, "Auschwitz and the Final Solution" in: Y. Gutman, M. Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1994, p. 91, note 29.
- Compilation in the indictment of Berlin Gestapo officials, February 22, 1969, 1 Js 9/65, Leo Baeck Institute microfilm 239.
- Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989, p. 382.
- Jack Ratz, Endless Miracles, Shengold Publishers, New York 1998, pp. 50-51.
- B. Brodovsky, "Children's Blood Factory", Soviet Russia Today, April 1945, p. 23.
- Ibid., p. 23, 32.
- K. Kangeris, U. Neiburgs, R. Viksne, "Salaspils nometne: vestures avoti un historiografiskais materials", op.cit., pp. 206-208.
- Karlis Sausnitis (ed.), V Salaspilsskom lagere smerti, Perevod, Riga 1964.
- Ibid., p. 114.
- Ibid., p. 126, 128, 152.
- Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, op.cit., p. 761.
- Ibid., note 1414.
- Ibid., note 1413.
- Ibid.
- M. Botvinnik, Pamjatniki genocida evreev Belarusi, op.cit., p. 13.
- Quoted in Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, op.cit., p. 219.
- Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto. A Diary, L.B. Fischer, New York 1945, p. 175.
- David P. Boder Interviews Rachel Gurmanova; August 17, 1946; Paris, France. Online: http://voices.iit.edu/interview?doc=gurmanovaR&display=gurmanovaR_en
- Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, op.cit., p. 219.
- Faschismus – Getto – Massenmord. Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkriegs, Röderberg Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1960, p. 496.
- Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears. A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1988, pp. 271-272, note 168.
- Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, op.cit., p. 220.
- Ibid., pp. 220-221.
- Ibid., p. 147.
- "Die JTA meldet", Aufbau, 26 June 1942, p. 3.
- Quoted in ibid., p. 219.
- Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears, op.cit., p. 143. Previously, on 26 July 1942, Lewin made the lapidary note "'Good news' from Brześć", likely referring to another letter; ibid., p. 138.
- Cf. Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, op.cit., p. 133.
- Ibid., p. 51.
- Ibid., p. 386.
- Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 5, no. 3 (June 1942), p. 310.
- Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, op.cit., p. 383, 387.
- The Holocaust 1942, http://www.neveragain.org/1942.htm
- Krakow Ghetto, http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/krakow%20ghetto.html
- Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported From France 1942-1944, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1987, p. xxvi, 176.
- Ibid., p. xx.
- Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 5, no. 6 (December 1942), p. 634.
- Ibid., p. 642.
- JTA Daily News Bulletin, vol. 10, no. 170 (23 July 1943), pp. 1-2.
- "Rumänska judar hem från fronten", Dagens Nyheter, 2 January 1944, p. 1.
- http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0003_0_02804.html [6]
- Aufbau, 6 November 1942, p. 16.
- S. Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported From France 1942-1944, op.cit., pp. xxvi-xxvii, 312, 319.
- Ibid., p. 312.
- Ibid., p. xxxvi.
- http://www.dutchjewry.org/inmemoriam/InMemoriamN_search.asp
- Cf. http://www.yivo.org/uploads/files/Lithuania.htm
- A. Tory, Surviving the Holocaust, op.cit., p. 6.
- Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 5, no. 5 (October 1942), p. 530.
- Jeanette Wolf, Mit Bibel und Bebel (Gedenkbuch), Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn 1980, p. 40.
- A. Tory, Surviving the Holocaust, op.cit., p. 126.
- Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 5, no. 6 (December 1942), pp. 630-631.
- Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 6, no. 3 (June 1943), p. 300.
- Andreas Knipping, Reinhard Schulz, Reichsbahn hinter der Ostfront 1941-1944, Transpress Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, p. 220.
- Onafhankelijk België, no. 42 (15 October 1942), p. 5.
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