In a reply [1] to my recent article [2] on the holocaust historians’ lies and obfuscations about the contents of Nuremberg document NO-482, wherein Sobibór is designated as a transit camp (Durchgangslager), anti-revisionist blogger Roberto Muehlenkamp focuses on the fact that in the 17 March 1944 report of SS-Untersturmführer Benda concerning the Sobibór prisoner uprising and mass escape the Sobibór camp is called a “Sonderlager” (special- or exception camp). According to the Tarnsprache exegesis, adopted by Muehlenkamp and his likes when it suits them, this means that Sobibór was a death camp, since the prefix Sonder- (special- or exception(al)-), it seems, always denoted killings in Nazi jargon! Muehlenkamp further accuses me and my co-authors of the study Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality,[3] Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno, of having hidden Benda’s use of the word Sonderlager from our readers. He writes:

“M[attogno], G[raf and ]K[ues] merely mention that «Five months after these events, on 17 March 1944, SS-Untersturmführer Benda wrote an account of the Sobibór uprising – which he wrongly dated 15 October 1943 – and of the ensuing search for the fugitives, stating that the rebels had “shot an SS officer as well as 10 SS NCOs.”» (MGK, Sobibór, p. 22). “

The quote presented by Muehlenkamp is correct. The non-mention of Benda’s wording, however, is in effect an editorial error, which unfortunately was carried over to the German edition of our book.[4] If Muehlenkamp had bothered to read the condensed (and somewhat “popularized”) German version of our book, Die Akte Sobibor, which is readily available online,[5] he would have found the following remark in the corresponding section:

“In diesem Bericht wurde Sobibor also als ‘Sonderlager’ bezeichnet. Was dieses Wort bedeutete, lässt sich dem Dokument selbst nicht entnehmen.”

In English translation:

“In this report Sobibor was thus designated as a ‘Sonderlager’ [Special camp]. The meaning of this term cannot be determined from the document itself.”

Which is indeed true. There exists not a single contemporary German document stating that Sobibór (or any other German camp for that matter) functioned as a center of extermination.

As for the term Sonderlager Muehlenkamp neglects to mention that it is used elsewhere without denoting anything homicidal/genocidal. For example, German historian Ulrich Herbert writes as follows concerning the setting up of “labor education camps” (Arbeitserziehungslager) in connection to industrial plants:

“The RSHA had suggested setting up such firm-internal penal camps a far back as late 1942:
‘In larger plants with a large foreign work force, with no labor education camp nearby, it appears to be possible under certain circumstances, and on an experimental basis, to set up educational departments. As in the labor education camps, foreign workers will be put to work under guard as punishment for non-serious loafing… The plant should provide for segregated housing and allocation of work after agreement with the State Police (Head) Office.’
On the basis of this decree, such camps were set up over the following months in many large plants. The camps had different designations, such as penal camp (Straflager), special camp (Sonderlager) or labor education camp (Arbeitserziehungslager).”[6]

Herbert refer his readers to:

“‘Lagerordnung der Gestapo für Ostarbeiter-Sonderlager’ (Gestapo Camp Regulations for Special Camps for Eastern Workers), December 13, 1943, Doc. NIK 15510; ‘Lagerordnung für das Sonderlager Dechenschule (Camp Regulations, Dechenschule Special Camp) December 16, 1943, Doc. NIK 15506″[7]

The term “Ostarbeiter-Sonderlager” of course implies that there existed Sonderlager housing inmates of other sort than “Eastern Workers”.

In Rheinland-Pfalz there existed between October 1939 and March 1945 the SS-Sonderlager Hinzert. From 7 February 1942 this camp was administrated by the SS-WVHA. The inmate population consisted mostly of political prisoners from France and Luxembourg, forced laborers from Poland and prisoners of war. During its period of operation some 13-14,000 men were kept prisoners in Sonderlager Hinzert; 321 deaths are documented for this camp.[8]

In Metz in Lothringen/Lorraine was located between October 1943 and August 1944 the “Sonderlager Feste Goeben” (also called “Sonderlager der Sicherheitspolizei in Metz” and “SS-Sonderlager Fort Queuleu”), a forced labor camp housing mostly French POW:s and political prisoners.[9]

In eastern Austria there existed in the period 1944-1945 a large number of Sonderlager for Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers. These were temporary labor camps where the prisoners mainly worked on constructing fortifications.[10] There was also an “SS-Sonderlager Innsbruck” for prominent prisoners.[11]

Between October 1941 and January 1942 Stutthof was counted as a Sonderlager belonging to the Danzig Gestapo.[12] It must be stressed that this was long before gassings of Jewish prisoners was allegedly carried out in this camp (August to December 1944).[13]

In Upper Silesia was located the “SD-Sonderlager Sandberge”, apparently a forced labor camp employing mainly “Eastern Workers” and Soviet POW:s.[14]

The labor and training camp Trawniki in the Lublin district either contained or was designated a “Sonderlager”.[15]

“Sonderlager Watenstedt” near Braunschweig served as a forced labor and penal camp for “work-shies”.[16]

There were also a number of more or less temporary internment camps for Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) that were sometimes referred to as Sonderlager. In this context historian Sybil H. Milton defines the term “SS-Sonderlager” as “special internment camps combining elements of protective custody concentration camps and embryonic ghettos”.[17]

Sonderlager was sometimes also used as a term denoting simply any subcamp or part of a camp housing a special category of prisoners (often prisoners carrying “special papers”), or separated from the normal camp infrastructure. Thus there existed a “Sonderlager für Juden aus Polen” (Special camp for Polish Jews) in the Bergen-Belsen Stammlager.[18] In Buchenwald Jews of foreign nationality were kept in a Sonderlager from late 1939 onward.[19] An isolated barracks at Buchenwald in which members of the Romanian Iron Guard movement were held was designated “Sonderlager Fichtenhain”.[20] “SS-Sonderlager Ammerwald” on the other hand was used for “honored prisoners” (Ehrenhäftlinge).[21]

In Moringen near Göttingen there existed from 1940 onward an “SS-Sonderlager” for “asocial” male adolescents.[22] “SS-Sonderlager Uckermark” imprisoned “asocials” and hardened criminals; it was later attached to KL Ravensbrück.[23]

None of the camps listed above are alleged to have served as extermination centers (with the exception of Stutthof, but as already noted its alleged use as an “auxiliary extermination camp” did not coincide with the period during which the camp was known as a Sonderlager).

Now is there evidence except for the Benda report that Sobibór was designated a Sonderlager? The only sort of indication that I have found so far is a statement, presumably based on eyewitness testimony, in an article by Dutch historian Louis De Jong, that the Vorlager (front camp) section of Sobibór was adorned with large sign reading “SS-Sonderlager Sobibor“.[24] The witness Thomas Blatt writes in his memoirs of “the Gothic letters on the top of the gate leading inside: ‘SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor.’”[25] The witness Dov Freiberg, however, testified at the Eichmann trial that he had observed on repeated occasions, when working outside of the camp, “a sign at the entrance of the camp” bearing the text “SS Sonderkommando Umsiedlungslager” (SS Special Commando Resettlement Camp); the former camp commandant Franz Stangl also testified to the use of this term.[26] The foremost exterminationist expert on the camp, Jules Schelvis, believes that Umsiedlungslager was the word used on the camp sign.[27] It does not seem impossible that “SS Sonderkommando Umsiedlungslager” was the full name written on the sign and that some witnesses remembered merely part of it. We know from documents that the camp staff members of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka (possibly excluding the Trawniki-trained guards) were collectively known as SS-Sonderkommando “Einsatz Reinhard(t)”.[28] The correspondence of Dr. Irmfried Eberl, the first commandant of Treblinka, bore the return address “SS-Untersturmführer Dr. Eberl, Treblinka b/ Malkinia, SS-Sonderkommando“.[29] Thus quite likely the Sobibór camp staff was known as “SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor”. The camp staff at Chełmno was designated “SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof”.[30]

Anti-revisionists may argue, in accordance with exterminationist exegesis, that the use of the term Sonderkommando, “Special commando”, must denote a commando specialized in the mass killing of Jews. Once again the argument falls flat, however, since we know of numerous “SS-Sonderkommandos” not connected in any way with alleged extermination actions. To list but a few:

- “SS-Sonderkommando Zossen” and “SS-Sonderkommando Jüterbog”, which came to form the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.[31]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Grüppe-Künsberg”, affiliated with the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, which appropriated libraries and archives in the occupied territories.[32]

- “The Sonderkommando ‘Dr. Dirlewanger’” (redesignated “SS-Sonderbatallion ‘Dirlewanger’” and “SS-Sonderregiment ‘Dirlewanger’”), which, although notorious for the criminal background of its members and the numerous atrocities it perpetrated (against Poles and Russians), was not employed in actions against Jews, but served mainly as an anti-partisan unit.[33]

- The “SS-Sonderkommando K”, a unit conducting racial “research” on Soviet prisoners of war, stationed in Mittersill near Salzburg.[34]

- The “SS-Sonderkommando Schloss Itter”, employed in an interment camp for “honored prisoners”.[35]

- “SS-Sonderkommando ‘Sachsen’” was employed in the concentration camp Sachsenburg.[36]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Künsberg”, a unit used for the appropriation of archives and cultural goods in Yugoslavia.[37]

- “SS-Sonderkommando ‘Jankuhn’” carried out the appropriation of cultural goods in occupied southern Russia.[38]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Sosnowitz”, which was in charge of an internment and transit camp for Jews in Sosnowiec, Upper Silesia.[39]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Trautenau”, in charge of seven women’s camps in the Sudetenland.[40]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Zeppelin”, stationed in Breslau (Wroclaw), in charge, inter alia, of training pro-German Soviet POW:s as spies to be deployed beyond the Russian frontlines.[41]

The equation of the term “SS-Sonderkommando” with mass killings of Jews is therefore likewise fallacious.

What could then have caused Sobibór to be designated a Sonderlager – at least by Untersturmführer Benda? There are, as far as I can see, three main possibilities:

1) Sobibór was redesignated as a Sonderlager following the installation of the munition dismantling unit in August-September 1943, in which a large portion of the camp’s inmates were employed.[42] On the other hand, if the summary provided by the ARC website is correct, a decoded message from 27 October 1943 mentions the “SS Durchgangslager Sobibor” (SS Transit Camp Sobibor),[43] something which would seem to contradict this hypothesis.

2) Sobibór was alternately designated a Durchgangslager and a Sonderlager, the latter because the Reinhardt camp staff was referred to as an SS-Sonderkommando. There are in turn at least two possible explanations why this commando was considered “special”. One is that the staff were not regular SS but had their background in the T4 euthanasia program, and that, most likely, they continued to perform “euthanasia” on mentally ill and disease-carrying Jewish deportees while posted to the Reinhardt camps.  The other possibility is that at least a part of the SS units involved in the evacuation, transiting and therewith connected systematic robbery of Jewish deportees were for some (perhaps purely military-administrative) reason consider irregular or “special”. What may point in this direction is the fact that Adolf Eichmann’s small personal staff, in charge of the administration of the deportation of Jews from, among other countries, Greece in 1943 and from Hungary in 1944, was named “SS-Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann”[44] or simply “SS-Sonderkommando Eichmann”.[45] As seen above there was also the “SS-Sonderkommando Sosnowitz” in charge of an internment and transit camp in Upper Silesia. One may also note in this context that SS-Sonderlager Hinzert in the autumn of 1941 served as a transit camp in the deportation of Luxembourgian, Belgian and French Jews to the Łódz ghetto.[46]

3) Finally it cannot be excluded that Benda, writing his report nearly half a year after the uprising, simply made an error, especially considering that he mistakenly dated the uprising to 15 October 1943 (instead of 14 October).

What may be safely excluded is the possibility that Sobibór was called a Sonderlager because it functioned as an extermination center where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in homicidal gas chambers. There exists not the slightest documentary or technical evidence supporting this notion, and in addition to the letters of NO-482 calling Sobibór a transit camp, the available hard evidence, as unearthed by archeologists, contradict the exterminationist version of events.[47]

To conclude: The appearance of the terms Sonderlager or SS-Sonderkommando in documents relating to Sobibór (or any of the other alleged death camps) cannot be used as evidence in support of the notion that said camp functioned as an extermination center for Jews.[48]

[1] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/05/thomas-kues-on-lies-and-obfuscations.html
[2] http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/05/lies-and-obfuscations-about-himmlers-sobibor-directive/
[3] TBR Books, Washington DC 2010.
[4] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust-Propaganda und Wirklichkeit, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2010.
[5] http://juergen-graf.vho.org/pdf/graf-kues-mattogno-die-akte-sobibor.pdf
[6] Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s foreign workers: enforced foreign labor in Germany under the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 338
[7] Ibid., p. 468, note 116.
[8] Hedwig Brüchert, Michael Matheus, Zwangsarbeit in Rheinland-Pfalz während des Zweiten Weltkriegs, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2004, pp. 21-22.
[9] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 9, C.H. Beck, Munich 2009, pp. 534-537.
[10] Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, “Sonderlager für ungarisch-jüdische Zwangsarbeiter”, in: ibid., pp. 218ff.
[11] Hans-Günter Richardi, Caroline M. Heiss, Hans Heiss, SS-Geiseln in der Alpenfestung, Raetia 2005, p. 153, 158.
[12] Ibid., p. 613.
[13] For the alleged homicidal gas chamber of KL Stutthof cf. Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Stutthof and its Function in National Socialist Jewish Policy, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2003.
[14] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 3, C.H. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 175.
[15] Timm C. Richter (ed.), Krieg und Verbrechen. Situation und Intention: Fallbeispiele, Martin Meidenbauer, Munich 2006, p. 248 note 15.
[16] Gabriele Lotfi, KZ der Gestapo, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2000, pp. 75-77, 340
[17] Sybil H. Milton, “‘Gypsies’ as Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany”, in: Robert Gellately, Nathan Stoltzfus (eds.), Social outsiders in Nazi Germany, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2001, p. 219.
[18] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Angelika Königseder (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 7, C.H. Beck, Munich 2008, pp. 192-193.
[19] Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, Konzentrationslager Buchenwald 1937-1945, Wallstein Verlag 2007, pp. 115-118.
[20] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 3, C.H. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 304.
[21]  Volker Koop, In Hitlers Hand: die Sonder- und Ehrenhäftlinge der SS, Böhlau Verlag, Cologne/Weimar 2010, p. 78.
[22] Titus Simon, Raufhändel und Randale, Juventa, Winheim/Munich 1996, p. 284.
[23] Angelika Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, F. Greno, 1987, p. 212.
[24] Louis De Jong, “Sobibor”, Encounter, December 1978, p. 22.
[25] Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, Sobibór. The Forgotten Revolt, HEP, Issaquah 1998, p. 38.
[26] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., p. 285.
[27] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, Oxford/New York 2007, p. 36.
[28] Cf. Archives of the Holocaust, vol. 11, part 2, Document 430 on pp. 335-357.
[29] Michael Grabher, Irmfried Eberl. ‘Euthanasie’-Arzt und Kommandant von Treblinka, Peter Lang/Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main 2006, p. 70. For more on this correspondence see http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/07/review-michael-grabher-irmfried-eberl-euthanasie-arzt-und-kommandant-von-treblinka-peter-lang-europaischer-verlag-der-wissenschaft-frankfurt-am-main-2006/
[30] Sascha Feuchert, Erwin Leibfried, Jörg Riecke (eds.), Die Chronik des Gettos Lodz/Litzmannstadt: 1942, Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, p. 7.
[31] Christopher Ailsby, Hell on the Eastern Front. the Waffen-SS War in Russia 1941-1945, MBI Publishing, Osceola (WI) 1998, p. 12.
[32] Michael Burleigh, Germany turns eastwards. A study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988, p. 227ff.
[33] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS
[34] Peter Mierau, Nationalsozialistische Expeditionspolitik: deutsche Asien-Expeditionen 1933-1945, Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2006, p. 500.
[35] Volker Koop, In Hitlers Hand, op.cit., p. 33.
[36] Carsten Schreiber, Elite im Verborgenen: Ideologie und regionale Herrschaftspraxis des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS und seines Netzwerks am Beispiel Sachsens, Institut für Zeitgechichte/Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, p. 274.
[37] Patrick Lehn, Deutschlandbilder: historische Schulatlanten zwischen 1871 und 1990, Böhlau, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 2008, p. 407; Bettina Thorn, Internationaler Kulturgüterschutz nach der UNIDROIT-Konvention, De Gruyter Rechtswissenschaften Verlags, Berlin 2005, p. 32.
[38] Ludwig Jäger, Seitenwechsel: der Fall Schneider/Schwerte und die Diskretion der Germanistik, W. Fink 1998, p. 244.
[39] Wacław Długoborski, Franciszek Piper (eds.), Auschwitz, 1940-1945: Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz, Volume 1, Verlag des Staatlichen Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oswiecim 1999, p. 62; Belah Gutterman, A narrow bridge to life: Jewish forced labor and survival in the Gross-Rosen Camp System, 1940-1945, Berghahn Books/Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2008, p. 43.
[40] Dachauer Hefte, vol. 8-9, Verlag Dachauer Hefte, Munich 1999, p. 7.
[41] C. F. Rüter, Dirk Welmoed de Mildt, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen 1945-1999. Register zu den Bänden I-XXII, APA/Holland University Press, Amsterdam 1998, p. 494.
[42] See my previous article “Lies and obfuscations about Himmler’s Sobibor directive”.
[43] PRO: HW 16/39 (ZIP/GPD 2041 DD-FF, message DD 14, as summarized online: http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/prodecodes.html
[44] Peter Krause, Der Eichmann-Prozeß in der deutschen Presse, Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 29. Also http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann-Kommando
[45] Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles 1984, p. 160.
[46]  Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Eine politische Organisationsgeschichte, Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, p. 94.
[47] Cf. J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 107-167.
[48] A final remark: In a report on a Jewish convoy from Vienna to Sobibór dated 20 June 1942 (reproduced online at http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/sobibor/docs/transport%20wien%20-%20sobibor.jpg ) it is stated that the Jews upon arrival were handed over to the commandant of “the labor camp located adjacent to the railway station” (“das neben dem Bahnhof gelegene Arbeitslager“). This is the only documentary source in which Sobibór is called a “labor camp”. Most likely this designation was simply a mistake on behalf of a Viennese police officer who had not been briefed in detail on the resettlement of the Jews. From an exterminationist viewpoint it hardly makes any sense that the SS would have employed three different camouflage designations – Durchgangslager, Sonderlager and Arbeitslager – for the same death camp!

by Dr. Claus G. Wagner Bartach

Introduction

In the early 1960s, a determined, powerful group of Zionists and Israelis decided to broadcast to the world one of the horrific atrocities of the twentieth century, relating to their special concerns. Out of the more than 100 million deaths of civilians, ethnic minorities and political opponents committed in the 1940s by gruesome draconian totalitarian regimes during and after World War 2, the terrible fate of an alleged six million Jews was determined as a uniquely horrific picture of especially German atrocities and guilt towards Jews in Europe. As inconvenient as the truth may be, the reason for this special emphasis was apparently twofold: to establish a perpetual symbol for the alleged eternal suffering of Jews and to materially and politically benefit from a worldwide emotion of guilt resulting in sympathy towards Jews and Israelis, exempting them from inconvenient scrutiny and criticism of their own crass misbehavior. The term Holocaust was carefully chosen (or “invented”) and broadcast, having a vague abstract background in the Bible. An eager media was blindly following suit.

The Jewish author Norman G. Finkelstein differentiates between the “Nazi holocaust” – in which Jews and other victims were exterminated – and “The Holocaust” – the well-known public “persona” of the event, the image that he alleges is nothing but the product of propaganda of the Jewish establishment. Continuing the financial coercion of the past, “The Jewish establishment,” he tells an interviewer, “was now in a rush to shake down mainly the Swiss on the banks issue, and used pressure exerted by agencies of the American government – [saying] that if they didn’t pay up, they would be boycotted in the U.S. There is an extortion racket at work here, and for this alone the extortionists should have been thrown out of public life.”

The Holocaust

In Germany, true and imagined memories of the holocaust are continuously on television, in movies, on stage, in countless monuments, museums and in schools. It is remembered every year on Nov. 9, the anniversary of the night of the broken glass, Kristallnacht, the 1938 assault on German Jewish businesses and synagogues. Germany’s current small but agile, demanding and outspoken Jewish community is a living emblem of what happened in that country. About 300,000 strong before the war, it is less now, but growing, comprised of old German Jewish families (my own family had several friends and neighbors in Austria and Germany who were of Jewish extraction and were never in any special physical danger during these times), who were not persecuted, re-immigrants from Israel and thousands of Russian Jews, all of whom benefit from the over-generosity of the numbed-down German government.

Most of Germany’s Jews nowadays live peacefully and comfortably and see that country as one of the safest places in the world to raise their children. But one of the leaders of that community is anything but quiet. Michel Friedman, a self-anointed and very controversial television showman, a Jew who gets increasingly on the nerves of a lot of Germans, never letting them forget that they must be careful about what they think and say.¹ Friedman flatly states: “I am not responsible that Germany invented the Holocaust. They are responsible, and that’s a part of their life.” He has also stated that “the Holocaust is a special case among the many genocides which took place prior to and after it, and which are still taking place“.² In other words: The Holocaust is a “special case” since it involves the genocide of Jews. All other genocides just kill ordinary, normal human beings.

Most brainwashed Germans do not dare to argue this point. Especially young Germans, born decades after the war, have to bear the burden out of state-supported ignorance. One could ask: Is there an intrinsic risk in raising generation after generation with an imposed shame as the central characteristic of their society? While other countries may grapple with their dark histories from time to time, they have a cleansing mechanism (“Right or Wrong, my Country”), in Germany, certain dark parts of national history, and especially distorted recent history, is a fact of daily life. German have been reeducated, educated and brainwashed for many decades to believe that it is healthy for the central characteristic of their society to be that of feeling guilt. Guilt will give them a feeling, an idea, of themselves. What they have done and what they are responsible for. The above constitutes an absurd aberration of a sick and misinterpreted psychoanalysis, which ends in spiritual and intellectual self-flagellation. The allegorical Walk to Canossa (as done around 1077 by Emperor Henry IV in his dispute with Pope Gregory VII) has been done by the German nation a hundred times over, but no absolution or redemption has ever been in sight.

Another abuse is the way that other countries help to keep alive the image of Germany as an eternally recovering Nazi. The whole nation has been treated as a criminal on probation, and aggressive anti-German Zionist groups work diligently to keep alive the perception that Germans are not yet accepted, and that a German is not yet a normal man or Germany a normal nation. These groups are the ruthless activists and beneficiaries of the Holocaust industry.

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering is a book published in 2000 by Norman G. Finkelstein which argues that the American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain, as well as to further the interests of Israel. According to Finkelstein, this “Holocaust industry” has corrupted Jewish culture and the authentic memory of the Holocaust. Finkelstein’s parents were both Holocaust survivors who had been inmates of concentration camps.

Prof. Moshe Zimmerman of the Hebrew University’s German history department, who has himself been the target of some criticism for his style, argues that one of Finkelstein’s problems is not the content of his claims, but the style in which they are written: “What is irritating about him is his caustic style and choice of words. The claims themselves, both those that attack the centrality of the Holocaust in Jewish-American identity and the compensation affair, contain at least a kernel of truth.”³

Finkelstein analyzes and sharply criticizes the exploitation of the Holocaust for financial profit. He singles out the author and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel as having reaped great personal benefit. But Finkelstein also assails the general Jewish campaigns to restore property and/or to arrange compensation for assets allegedly stolen during the Third Reich period. He views the campaigns and their methods as “those of extortionist gangsters.”⁴

Increasingly, Germans feel they have done everything to face up to their past – having paid and still paying billions and billions of dollars for reparations, apologizing, seeking forgiveness. Mind you, nobody of the Victors apologized for the horrific atrocities committed on Germans and German ethnics during and after the War. Based on this background, it is for German historians a challenging task to write about the time during the totalitarian regime of the National Socialist Party.

Besides the new generation of historians having been exposed to the abovementioned manipulative background, objective research is extremely hampered in certain areas by severe restrictions and even federal laws which do not allow to critical scrutiny of state-determined historiography, i.e. distorted historiography established by lawyers and not by historians.

A peculiar way to become known or recognized in a special field of historic interest in Germany these days is to “cooperate” with Jewish and foreign “experts” – experts, who will always redirect any factual research about German history to their only concern and interest: The Holocaust. This has happened recently with the publication of a survey of the activities and functions of the German diplomatic service during the Third Reich and thereafter.

Das Amt und die Vergangenheit (The Office and the Past) chronicles how the German foreign diplomatic service was allegedly aware of the persecution of Jews and was “actively involved,” thus debunking the myth that most German diplomats of that time had managed to keep their hands clean.

Another Book of late Revenge?

A “Historical Commission”, composed of historians Eckart Conze (Germany), Norbert Frei (Germany), Peter Hayes (United States) and Moshe Zimmermann (Israel), was established in 2005 by then German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (member of the Green Party), to investigate the role of the German Foreign Ministry during the period of Hitler’s rule, and how it was subsequently reestablished in the post-war period. At the end of October 2010, the commission published their abovementioned report Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, which immediately caused extraordinary criticism from different quarters .⁵

The Office – Das Amt

We must start by noting that the Commission has not produced any new or important true information; rather it has re-arranged, re-assessed and re-edited existing and available material and added significant personal and extremely biased ideological comments, which make the result more of a journalistic review than a factual work of historiography.

The book is quite cavalier in its approach, one example being its arbitrary definitions. For example, the Commission says that the claim that the Foreign Office under Hitler’s regime was a non-political body, a place of opposition, or even a hotbed of resistance, is a “myth.” Such a historical assessment was cultivated for decades by the post-war Foreign Office of the German Federal Republic.

The fact that the traditional diplomatic elite was slowly displaced by members of the party is also refuted by the commission. “With few exceptions, German diplomats continued their activities, also in the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich,” it says in the introduction. “From 30 January 1933, the Foreign Ministry became the Foreign Office of the Third Reich, and also functioned as such until 1945. (…) The Foreign Office represented, thought and acted on behalf of the regime”.⁶

The Commission’s report states that the Foreign Office supported the aggressive policies of the Nazi regime. The motives for this were supposedly manifold: “They ranged from a patriotic mentality of duty—‘one does not desert one’s country because it has a bad government’—to hopes for a re-emergence of Germany as a political power on the basis of authoritarianism, to agreement with the premises of Nazi policy; from hostility to democracy to anti-Semitism”.⁷

The diplomats supported Hitler not because they were all convinced party members, but because they shared some of Hitler’s most important political goals: “In part, there was a far-reaching identity with the [Nazis’] objectives, which helps explain the continued functioning of the top diplomacy”.⁸

The Historical Commission shows in cumbersome detail how the process of “self-consolidation” (“Selbstgleichschaltung”) took place in the case of the Foreign Office. It is quite appalling how they “discretely” smear Ernst von Weizsäcker, and his patriotic family.

The Weizsäcker family symbolizes the “continuity of the elites”, which extends from the Kaiser’s Empire to the Weimar Republic, into the Third Reich and from there into the post-war Federal Republic. Karl Hugo von Weizsäcker served the King of Württemberg from 1906 to 1918 as prime minister. He was a loyal supporter of the monarchy. His son, Ernst von Weizsäcker, made a career as an officer in the Imperial Navy and then in 1920, shortly after the founding of the Weimar Republic, joined the Foreign Office. From 1938 to 1943, he served as secretary of state, the number two behind Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. As a young lawyer, Karl Hugo von Weizsäcker’s grandson Richard von Weizsäcker defended after the war his father Ernst at the so-called Nuremberg Wilhelmstrasse trial (named after the location of the Foreign Office), then made a political career in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and from 1984 to 1994 was President of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The Historical Commission can obviously not depict Ernst von Weizsäcker and other senior diplomats as fanatical Nazis. They served Hitler as Germans first and not because they were zealous members of the party. Weizsäcker noted already in 1933, after Hitler took power: “People like us must support the new era. For what would come afterwards if they failed!”⁹

In 1938 von Weizsäcker, like Chamberlain and Daladier, apparently held the honest illusion that Hitler could be appeased by the ethnic restructuring of the artificially created Czechoslovakia. At Nuremberg, he defended himself with the argument that he wanted to stop a potential war in 1938. The reason for this was not the opposition to Hitler’s foreign policy, but von Weizsäcker’s realistic pessimism about the German chances of victory in a war.

In 1949 in Nuremberg, Ernst von Weizsäcker was sentenced to five years in prison for “crimes against humanity” (a newly established term in war trials – created by parties themselves heavily involved in horrific atrocities), however, he was finally released a year later because of an amnesty. The US military court had found him guilty of “participating” in crimes by the German regime, and in particular in the alleged murder of European Jews. Many German historians and politicians, including his son Richard, deny the historical and moral justification of this absurd ruling.

That it came to a conviction of von Weizsäcker at all was mainly due to the deputy chief prosecutor Robert Kempner, a German Jew who had fled unharmed to the US in the 1930’s. Against him, von Weizsäcker’s defence did emphasize in vain his extremely one-sided, biased and revengeful polemics.¹⁰

The Historical Commission also tried to oppose the position that the Foreign Office did not participate in alleged crimes of the Second World War, which, as the Commission allegedly establishes, was from the beginning “a war of conquest and extermination determined by a racist ideology”. This quite distorted comment alone disqualifies any objectivity of the Historical Commission. “The Foreign Office did not stand apart from the rapid erosion of civilized standards and the development towards a murderous war of conquest and destruction”, the Commission concludes. “Regarding the mass deaths of over three million Soviet prisoners of war, regarding the methods of warfare and the criminal character of German occupation policy especially in the East, Wilhelmstrasse [headquarters of the Foreign Service in Berlin] was (…) extremely well informed. German diplomats were (…) assisting the occupation, confidantes, and—time and again—accomplices”.¹¹

This results in a a totally distorted picture, reflecting ignorance and confusion of facts and acts by the members of the Commission.

The same applied to the deportation of European Jews. At the beginning of Nazi rule, while the Foreign Office had “developed terminology that sought to limit Germany’s loss of reputation as result of its Jewish policies”, it later became involved “more and more in the planning, preparation and implementation of measures against the Jewish population of Europe”. “The more territories fell into the sphere of the Third Reich, the more radical Jewish policy became, the more the Foreign Office became involved with the planning and policy of the ‘Final Solution’.”¹² These concoctions bear no relevance to the objective truth and contradict the fact that there was never any documentation for central planning for genocide found after the War.

Hans Mommsen speaks out

Das Amt und die Vergangenheit found first – as usual in Germany for books of this type – a largely positive response in some political circles and the media when the book was presented to the public in late October 2010. Then on November 16, the senior historian Hans Mommsen spoke out in the Frankfurter Rundschau with a first critical review.¹³ (Mommsen is a leading expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He is a functionalist in regard to the origins of the Holocaust, seeing the Final Solution as a result of some “cumulative radicalization” of the German state as opposed to a long-term plan on the part of Adolf Hitler).¹⁴

In this first article, Mommsen described the book, compliant with the German official party line, as a kind of “masterpiece” and acknowledged that the authors were “quite outstanding compilers of some history” with “adequate staff.” Two weeks later, however, and after other critical voices had begun to be raised, he sounded more serious and irritated. In an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio, Mommsen characterized the authors in a rather negative manner.¹⁵ He described them as “gentlemen publishers, who moreover did not necessarily do the work themselves”, accusing them of “massive failures” and recommending that they take an introductory history seminar, that is, a beginners’ course. He criticized the fact that the assignment had been delegated to the Commission by a ministry, claiming this was the “government-directed science of history”, placing the Commission’s independence in question. One must remember here that Germany has a law forbidding research of the holocaust that would contradict the legally accepted version!

Mommsen had already formulated the core of his substantive criticisms in his first article in the Frankfurter Rundschau. In this, he complained about “the tendency of the authors, which surfaces everywhere, to identify the plans for the deportation of Jewish citizens, or the creation of ‘Jewish reservations’ with the later practice of mass destruction”. That was certainly true in the end result, he said, “but before the Wannsee Conference, it was not the specific orientation of the actions of the Nazis”. A strong apostate statement for a German historian.

Mommsen’s argument amounts to the claim that the genocidal dimension of the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not predictable because it had only assumed some vague and undocumented form at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Thus he does not want to consider the support provided by the Foreign Office to justify the Nuremberg racial laws, to prepare the plans for deportations to Madagascar and Poland and to implement other anti-Semitic measures as sharing responsibility for the subsequent mass deportations and extermination.

He accuses the Historical Commission of not understanding the practical implementation of the Holocaust as the “result of a gradual process.” Therefore, it lost “sight of a self-evolution of the ‘ultimate goal’ in the shadows of official secrecy”. “Time and again”, it was “assumed that the ‘Final Aim’ and its attainment existed a priori in people’s minds”.

Here, Mommsen accuses the Historical Commission of adopting implicitly a position that they do not explicitly take themselves. Nowhere does the Commission say that the “ultimate goal”— mass shootings, gas chambers, Auschwitz—“existed a priori in people’s minds”. Such a presentation would be unhistorical, indeed.

The consequences of Hitler’s coming to power could be seen long in advance. Nazism was an expression of reactionary tendencies of German imperialism. Already in the spring of 1932, Leon Trotsky, a political communist observer and an equally radical fanatic of his time, published an article entitled “Hitler’s victory means war against the USSR”.¹⁶

The Nazis’ anti-Semitism was never a secret, at the latest it became clear since the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9. 1938. In 1938, Ernst von Weizsäcker allegedly told the Swiss ambassador in Paris that the Jews had to leave Germany, “or they would meet their destruction in the short or long term.” And on January 30, 1939 in the Reichstag (parliament), Hitler threatened openly that if “international finance Jewry” once again plunged the peoples into a world war, the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. Both are quoted by the Historical Commission.¹⁷

Mommsen counter-poses the “plans for the deportation of Jewish citizens” and “the later practice of mass destruction”. The deportation plans, in which the Foreign Office was active, were the immediate precursor of mass resettlements. They were part of a general scheme for massive resettlement and depopulation, an “ethnic land clearance project”, as Hitler called it. It was not an extermination plan. No-one had forced Weizsäcker and the other officials at the Foreign Office to endorse, approve and accept this “ethnic land clearance project”. They could have come out of what Mommsen calls the “shadows of official secrecy”, however, they did not openly do this.

Mommsen repeatedly comes back to the same point. In his interview with Deutschlandfunk he expressed “dismay” and concern that the Historical Commission had not been more “nuanced” in its treatment of the “totalitarian conditions” under which the Foreign Office was involved in the enforcement of the Holocaust.

In a further contribution to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he said that the commission had exposed the role of the Foreign Office, “in the form of a ‘strategy of exposure’ without regard to the particular chronological context”. He refers to the hysteria that is meted out to those who call for a “more nuanced assessment of the role of the Foreign Office”.¹⁸

Mommsen is particularly irritated that Commissioner Eckart Conze describes the Foreign Office as a “criminal organization”—as if a body serving an alleged criminal regime could somehow be otherwise.

Mommsen further objected to the attempted rewriting of history by the Commission, claiming on Deutschlandfunk that: “The overall impression is created that the Foreign Office was the decisive or major driving force in the enforcement of the Holocaust.” This was “just not right.” The key movers were to be found in the apparatus of Himmler (SS) and Heydrich (SD), he claims.

Gregor Schöllgen and Daniel Koerfer comments

Following Mommsen, other historians have contributed with additional critical comments. Gregor Schöllgen, an acknowledged specialist in German foreign policy, published an indignant article in the cultural section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He accuses the commission of not adequately addressing the extensive, publicly available edition of the Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik 1918-1945 (“Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945”, ADAP) and the Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (“Documents on the foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany” (AAPD), edited by himself. The Commission report creates the false impression that the “Foreign Office had consistently denied its history for decades, or worse still, had consciously misled the public”, he claims.¹⁹

The historian Daniel Koerfer attacked also the objectivity and truth of the report of the Commission. A long conversation which he held with Frank Schirrmacher, an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, culminated in the accusation that it is a fanatic “book of revenge”.²⁰

Koerfer is an honorary professor at the Free University in Berlin, teaching contemporary history. His grandfather, Gerhart Feine, worked under von Weizsäcker at the Foreign Office. In his posting in Budapest, he opposed the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Koerfer’s godfather, Helmut Becker, defended Ernst von Weizsäcker at Nuremberg. At that time, as Koerfer stated it himself, “he mobilized the entire network of the two families in Germany to defend von Weizsäcker” against wrongful accusations.

Political Background

The fierce controversy that has erupted 65 years after the fall of the Third Reich around Das Amt und die Vergangenheit has not only historical but also current foundations. Ever since the German reunification 20 years ago, German foreign policy has again become increasingly self-assured and sovereign. Since the 1990s several major German companies and banks, which in the 1980s still fiercely resisted opening up their archives, commissioned historical research on the roles of their companies during the time of the Third Reich. They have now been joined by the Foreign Ministry and, more recently, the Federal Ministry of Finance. These late initiatives have been motivated by aggressive threats by ruthless Zionist groups who are specialized in blackmailing industry and banks with worldwide dire consequences if these vulnerable but lucrative targets would not kick back funds to them. An important defense against these tactics has been to utilize an open debate on such historical matters to guard against those seeking legal redress or sanctions.

The effective goal of the Historical Commission was also seen in this way by the German Foreign Ministry, as made clear by Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD), Foreign Minister from 2005 to 2009, when presenting the report in Berlin. “Hardly anyone knows better than those in the Foreign Ministry that some shadows of the past are catching up with us all over the world,” he said. “But also, no one knows better what we can win if we face up to this past, without taboos, without myths, confident, courageous, humbly and without pride.”

Steinmeier and Fischer seem to believe that German foreign policy can gain more clout if there is a more open approach to dealing with the past, which, however, as usual is based on self-flagellation. In doing so, they encounter complaints from the “old boys’ network” that their “honor” is being impugned. The extent of the criticism that has been leveled against the report of the Historical Commission shows, however, that there are a growing number of Germans who do not believe in the efficacy of such an approach, especially if and when the objectivity and facts are in question.

Conclusion

For anyone who is interested in the factual history of those tumultuous times, the “review” of the Commission has collected and rehashed a lot of normally widely distributed information. It is thus a practical collection, but there is nothing new or specially revealing contained in it. The problem an objective observer would have with this book is the many comments or commentaries or innuendos by the diverse “commentators” or historians (who may have a special personal agenda), reflecting biased and one-sided thinking, invidious assessments, and even the distortion of facts.

However, overall, it is a good example of a government’s tentacles slowly penetrating traditional or orthodox channels. Ideology is always at the forefront of any diplomatic service of any country, yet practical implementation is normally restricted to “home-based” departments and authorities. This was so with the German Foreign Office, too. This fact cannot be rewritten into the history of the “Office”, as much as some people would like to do.

In Mommsen’s view, the only determinant of German foreign policy was the need to maintain prestige with the German public. In an argument consistent with the school of “Primat der Innenpolitik” (“primacy of domestic politics”) Mommsen wrote that the foreign policy of the Third Reich “was in its form domestic policy projected outwards, which was able to conceal the increasing loss of reality only by maintaining political dynamism through incessant action. As such it became ever more distant from the chance of political stabilization”.²¹

When will the national self-flagellation in Germany as evidenced by the reviewed report, based as it is on biased or distorted opinions, finally come to an end?

Prof. Dr. Claus G. Wagner Bartach is a multilingual polymath and research historian of culture and politics relating to the German people. He lives in the USA.

Peter Black is a Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1981. He is also the former chief historian for the “Nazi hunting” Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice.

In a long article entitled “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard”, published in the prestigious exterminationist journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Black has the following to tell us about the Sobibór “extermination camp”[1]:

“Himmler had intended to convert it [Sobibór] into a concentration camp servicing a plant that recycled captured ammunition; Pohl and Globocnik convinced him instead to make Sobibor into a ‘transit camp’ (Durchgangslager)”

As a source Black offers [2]:

“On plans for an ammunition recycling plant, see circular order of the Reichsführer-SS [initialed R. Brandt], July 5, 1943; Chief of WVHA [signed Pohl] to Reichsführer-SS, July 10, 1943; and Reichsführer-SS/Personal Staff [initialed Brandt] to Pohl, July 24, 1943, NARA, RG 238, NO-482.”

However, if we look at the Nuremberg document NO-482 referred to by the venerable Senior Historian of the USHMM we find that the crucial part of Himmler’s 5 July 1943 directive reads as follows:

“Das Durchgangslager Sobibor im Distrikt Lublin ist in ein Konzentrationslager umzuwandeln. In dem Konzentrationslager ist eine Entlaborierungsanstalt für Beutemunition einzurichten.”

In English translation:

“The Sobibór transit camp, located in the Lublin district, is to be converted into a concentration camp. A dismantling unit for captured enemy munitions is to be set up in the concentration camp.”

And in Pohl’s reply from 15 July 1943 (not 10 July as stated by Black) we read:

“Gemäß Ihrer obigen Anordnung soll das Durchgangslager Sobibór im Distrikt Lublin in ein Konzentrationslager umgewandelt zu werden.
Ich habe mich mit SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik darüber unterhalten. Wir beide schlagen Ihnen vor, die Umwandlung in ein Konzentrationslager aufzugeben, weil der von Ihnen erstrebte Zweck, nämlich: in Sobibór eine Entlaborierungsanstalt für Beutemunition einzurichten, auch ohne diese Umwandlung erreicht wird.”

In English translation:

“According to your above instructions, the Sobibór transit camp in the Lublin district is to be converted into a concentration camp. I have discussed this with SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik. Both of us propose to abandon this conversion, as the purpose intended, viz. to set up at Sobibór an installation for the defusing of enemy munitions, can be realized without such a conversion.”

Then on 24 July 1943 Himmler’s personal assistant, Rudolf Brandt, replied back [3]:

“Der Reichsführer-SS ist mit dem Vorschlag, den Sie und SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik hinsichtlich der Belassung des Durchgangslager Sobibór im Distrikt Lublin in dem augenblicklichen Zustand gemacht haben, einverstanden, nachdem der vom ihm gewünschte Zweck auf diese Weise erreicht wird.”

In English translation:

“The Reichsführer SS agrees to the proposal [made] by you and SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik concerning the maintenance of the Sobibor transit camp in the Lublin district in its present state, as the desired objective can be attained in this manner.”

To summarize: On 5 July 1943 Himmler ordered that the “Sobibór transit camp” was to be converted into a concentration camp equipped with a dismantling unit for captured enemy munitions. On 15 July Pohl on behalf of himself and Globocnik wrote to Himmler, recommending that said conversion be abandoned, as the installation of the dismantling unit could be achieved without it. Finally on 24 July Brandt wrote and confirmed that Himmler agreed with the proposal.

It is clear as day from even a cursory glance at these letters that Pohl and Globocnik did not “convince” Himmler “to make Sobibor into a ‘transit camp’”. In fact it was the other way around: the camp was designated a transit camp (Durchgangslager) at the time Himmler wrote his directive. This leaves only two possibilities: either Black has not read the source he cites, which seems utterly unlikely considering that it’s one of only a handful surviving documents pertaining to a field which he is well-acquainted with, i.e. Aktion Reinhardt, or he is consciously distorting the actual contents of the document. In that he would not be alone, as several exterminationist historians have published false or misleading statements about NO-482. To give just two examples: In his article on Sobibór for the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust Yitzhak Arad writes that “On 5 July 1943, Himmler ordered Sobibór to be closed as an extermination camp and transformed into a concentration camp”.[4]

Raul Hilberg writes in his standard work The Destruction of the European Jews that [5]:

“Sobibór was appropriately called a Durchgangslager (transit camp). Since it was located near the Bug, on the border of the occupied eastern territories, the designation fitted the myth of the ‘eastern migration.’ When Himmler proposed one day that the camp be designated a Konzentrationslager, Pohl opposed the change.”

But, as already shown, Himmler did not propose “to designate this camp a concentration camp” but ordered the camp to be “converted into a concentration camp” – the difference is certainly not irrelevant!

Anti-revisionist blogger Roberto Muehlenkamp has resorted to the following contrived argument in order to prove Himmler’s, Pohl’s and Brandt’s designation of Sobibór as a transit camp to be what exterminationists call Tarnsprache (camouflage langauge)[6]:

“Contrary to what Kues would like to believe and insists in maintaining, said directive and the related correspondence are everything other than evidence that Sobibór was the ‘transit camp’ that Himmler claimed it to be (…). Following the suggestions of Globocnik and Pohl, Himmler eventually became convinced that the ‘transit camp’ didn’t have to be converted into a concentration camp to install there a station for processing booty ammunition, obviously because it already had a large labor force being managed and controlled in a manner akin to what was practiced in concentration camps. As a mere transit camp would not have required such a large labor force, Himmler’s correspondence with his subordinates shows that Sobibór was not what it was claimed to be, i.e. not a transit camp.”

Elsewhere Muehlenkamp presents his argument in its full glory [7]:

“Actually the document that T[homas] K[ues] offers in support of his ‘perfect harmony’ claim in his footnote 2 (‘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′) belies rather than supports his claim, if one looks at it more closely. [Next follows an English translation of the relevant letters of NO-482].

Why, one wonders, did Himmler propose that the Sobibor camp be converted into a concentration camp in order to install there a station for processing booty ammunition? Obviously because he reasoned that such station required a fairly large labor force and collecting and controlling such fairly large labor force required the kind of organization that characterized the concentration camps run by the SS-Economics and Administration Main Office.

Why, on the other hand, did Globocnik and Pohl not consider it necessary to implement such organization? Obviously because Sobibor already had a fairly large labor force, which could be put to the task of processing booty ammunition, and this labor force was being managed and controlled in a manner akin to what was practiced in concentration camps.

In fact the camp held about 700 inmates at the time of the revolt on 14 October 1943. There’s no reason why a mere transit camp, a place where people were deloused and bathed and then put back on the train to their final destinations, should have required such a large labor force, which was not much smaller than that of Treblinka Labour Camp. What were all these people, directed in a concentration-camp-like manner by a dozen-or-so SS-men and a hundred-or-so Ukrainian guards, doing in a mere transit camp?

To cut a long story short, the fact that Globocnik, Pohl and eventually also Himmler considered Sobibor suitable for installing an ammunition-processing station without any transformation, obviously due to the size of its inmate population, shows that Sobibor was not what it was being called in the above-quoted documents, i.e. not a transit camp.”

To summarize: Because the Sobibór camp held some 700 inmates at the time of the prisoner uprising on 14 October 1943, it could not reasonably have been “a mere transit camp”, because such a camp would not possibly have required a labor force that large. Ergo Sobibór could not have been a transit camp. This supposed argument does not hold water, for several reasons.

To begin with, Muehlenkamp has ignored that the dismantling unit requested by Himmler was indeed installed in Sobibór, with a consequent demand for labor involved in both construction and sorting/dismantling of captured ammunition. Jewish Sobibór witness Dov Freiberg writes in his memoirs about events taking place in August-September 1943 [8]:

“There was another wave of construction at Sobibor camp and again, trains full of construction supplies arrived. Unlike the last frenzy of construction, however, which was intended to increase the capacity of the death machine, now weapons and ammunition warehouses were being built, most of them underground. At this stage Lager 4 was set up, which the Germans called Nordlager – northern camp – in the north-east corner of the existing camp, in the open area between the railway platform and the forest, and it continued into the forest, close to the Lazarett. High-ranking officers landed in light planes and ran around the area with maps and plans, while our SS officers were dragged along behind them. The establishment of ammunition warehouses in a death camp didn’t seem logical – was it possible that a foreign party would set up in a camp run secretly by the SS? It seemed likely that the Germans were going to destroy the death camp and turn it into a munitions base. The work was performed at a swift pace. Before the first bunkers were completed, transports of ammunition had already arrived and were temporarily stored outside, next to the bunkers.”

Freiberg further informs us that around the same time “about a hundred strong young men were selected from the Minsk transport [in mid-September 1943]“.[9] Jules Schelvis on the other estimates the number of workers selected from this transport at 80.[10] These men worked chiefly with carpentry and construction projects connected with the new “Lager IV”. [11]

Another Jewish Sobibór witness, Thomas Blatt, mentions “the girls who sorted the captured Soviet ammunition in Lager IV”.[12] According to Jules Schelvis the sorting of the ammunition was carried out by “a new commando consisting of fifty women and sixty men”.[13]

Intercepted radio messages confirm that unused ammunition from occupied Russia was delivered for recycling to the “SS Durchgangslager Sobibor” at the end of October 1943 (i.e. after the prisoner revolt).[14]

Thus we know that more than a hundred inmates were employed in “Lager IV” with construction work and the sorting and dismantling of captured enemy munition. That Soviet-Jewish POW:s were sent to Sobibór in September 1943 makes perfect sense in this context, as they would naturally have been familiar with the types of munition used by the Red Army.

As for the total number of Sobibór inmates we have only three documents providing indications:

1) A telex from the commmander of the security police in the Lublin district to the duty officer at Krakow on 15 October 1943, in which we read: “On 14.10.1943, around 17:00 hours, uprising of the Jews in the Sobibór SS-camp, 40 km north of Cholm. [...]. Some 300 Jews have escaped, the remainder were either shot or are now in the camp.”[15]

2) On the same day SS-Gruppenführer and HSSPF Lublin Jakob Sporrenberg notified his fellow HSSPF in Luzk (Belarus) that “about 700 Jews” had escaped from “Lager Sobibor” and were thought to be headed across the Bug river.[16]

3) In a report from SS-Untersturmführer Benda of the Security Police and SD in Cholm dated 17 March 1944 the number of escaped inmates is given as 300.[17]

Since all testimonies describing the revolt agree that the number of escapees was nowhere near 700 the logical conclusion is that 300 is the most reliable estimate of how many inmates escaped on 14 October 1943. It then seems reasonable to assume that the figure of 700 mentioned in Sporrenberg’s message might have corresponded to the total number of Jews in the camp, but nonetheless this is mere speculation. However, since most testimonies further agree that about half of the inmate population did not participate in the escape, I will consider it fully possible that Sobibór indeed had some 6-700 inmates at the time of the uprising. The Jewish witness Leon Felhendler stated that the inmate population initially amounted to about 100 and gradually increased to “around 600″.[18] The higher figure mentioned by Felhendler might then possibly have increased to some 700 in September 1943 in connection with the construction of Lager IV.

What then did these inmates work with?

As seen above, at least 110 (possibly up to 190) prisoners worked in the munition dismantling unit in Lager IV.

According to Yitzhak Arad each of the Reinhardt camps had the following inmate work commandos in the parts of the camp outside the “death camp proper” (called “Lager III” in Sobibór) [19]:

- Platform workers (Bahnhofkommando); 40-50 prisoners working at the train platform with the disembarkation and unloading of train transports.
- Transport Square Workers (Transportkommando); about 40 prisoners engaged in activities carried out on the fenced-in square where the Jewish arrivals undressed.
- “Gold Jews” (Goldjuden); nearly 20 people whose task it was to receive and sort the money, gold, valuables, foreign currency, and bonds taken from the arriving Jews.
- Hair Cutter (Friseurs); 10-20 men who cut the hair of the female arrivals before these entered the “death camp proper”.
- Sorting Team for Clothing and Belongings (Lumpenkommando); 80-120 who worked with the collection, examination, sorting, bundling, storing, preparation for shipment and loading of clothing and belongings confiscated from the arrivals.
- Forest Team (Waldkommando), a few dozen prisoners working with the cutting of wood for heating and cooking in the camp. This team was enlarged once cremations began and the demand for firewood increased.

Except for the above work commandos, Arad writes,

“part of the prisoners were employed at other activities. Groups of prisoners were engaged in construction of barracks, in stringing barbed-wire fences, and in paving roads inside the camps. In the autumn and winter a special ‘potato team’ was established. Potatoes were the camp’s principal food, and as winter approached, large quantities were brought to the camp. [...]. Some prisoners worked in the vegetable garden, pigsy, chicken coop, and cowshed, and in the SS personnel’s baths. A few prisoners were employed in cleaning and disinfecting the huts and toilets.
There were also prisoners who supplied direct personal services to the SS and Ukrainians. They included doctors, a dentist, and several barbers. A small group of boys was employed to polish and clean the shoes and uniforms of SS personnel. These boys worked in and around the SS barracks. In addition, there were groups of skilled workers, like tailors, shoemakers, smiths, mechanics, carpenters, and others, known as the ‘court Jews,’ who continued to extend services to the German and Ukrainian staff, as they had since the first stages of the camps’ activity.”[20]

In Sobibór there also existed a group of 15 young female prisoners who worked with knitting socks and sweaters using wool taken from the baggage of arrivals.[21] There were also at least one Sanitäter (medic) tending sick inmates (Kurt Thomas aka Kurt Ticho) [22] and two Jews working in the inmate kitchen (Hershel and Josef Cuckierman).[23] Jewish historian Reuben Ainsztain states that two groups of Sobibór inmates also worked at a nearby quarry.[24]

No-one disputes that the Germans confiscated belongings and valuables from the Jews who arrived in the Reinhardt camps, and it is most likely that arrivals had their hair cut off, as part of the delousing process. Moreover a large number of Jews were no doubt cremated at Sobibór; deportees who had died en route to the camp or who were subjected to “euthanasia” because of mental or physical illness, as well as inmates who fell victims to disease or were executed – and thus there was need for a Waldkommando. It is also far from unbelievable that the SS personnel and guards employed a number of Jewish artisans for their own convenience. All of the above described work commandos are therefore fully compatible with Sobibór the transit camp.

Remains then the inmates housed in the separate “death camp proper”, Lager III.

The sources diverge widely on the number of this group of inmates. In his Eichmann trial testimony Ya’acov Biskovitz gave their number as 80. Thomas Blatt estimates their number to a mere 30 man. Another witness, Chaim Engel, states that “about fifty, sixty Jews” worked in camp III. Arad on the other hand estimates their number at 200-300.[25] Schelvis, referring to a 1985 court verdict, states that the total number of inmates in Lager III as of mid-April 1943 (when a large number of convoys from the Netherlands were arriving at Sobibór) numbered around 150 prisoners.[26] As at this time all inmates in Lager III were reportedly executed because of a failed attempt at a mass escape, and since there are no known survivors from the Lager III inmates, the estimate presumably derives from testimony left by camp personnel.

Following the transit camp hypothesis the Jewish inmates of Lager III could have been employed with a number of tasks: handing out towels and soaps, helping out with the delousing process, cleaning and repairing showers and delousing facilities, guiding deportees from one station in the delousing area to another, assisting in the embarkment on departing trains etc. etc. The archeological evidence shows that the deportees, contrary to the established picture, entered Lager III at least partially dressed, since a large number of remains of clothing and toilet articles were found inside the discovered building remains in that part of the camp,[27] not least in the enormous barracks designated “Object E” by Andrzej Kola, which likely housed the main delousing facility. Further archeological findings from Belzec and Chelmno together with statements from Sobibór eyewitnesses strongly suggest that number tags were used to register the Aktion Reinhardt (and Chelmno) deportees and/or their clothes/belongings that were to go through delousing.[28] Accordingly, the Jewish inmates in Lager III could have also worked with handing out or attaching such tags, as well as with the handling of toilet articles and other items carried by the deportees. According to Reuben Ainsztain a kitchen was installed at a later stage in Lager III.[29] This may have been done in order to better to provide the deportees awaiting further transport with nourishment. Inmates could have worked with preparing and distributing food and water to the deportees.

Then there is the indisputable fact that a large number of Jews died at Sobibór. These Jews perished en route due to various causes, died from illness in the camp, were executed as reprisal for escape attempts, or were subjected to “euthanasia” (likely utilizing lethal injections, possibly also through shooting) as mentally ill or carriers of epidemic diseases (categories of Jews that the German authorities certainly did not want to have resettled in the east). The total number of deaths at Sobibór might have amounted to some 10,000.[30] The part of Lager III where these victims were buried and later cremated was most likely separated by some means from the “clean side” with the delousing facilities. No doubt a number of inmates were involved in the gruesome business of handling and disposing corpses.

To conclude: The presence of 600-700 Jewish inmates in Sobibór fits perfectly well with the transit camp hypothesis, as there was certainly enough work for them all of them to carry out. Roberto Muehlenkamp’s “argument” regarding the letters of NO-482 is therefore devoid of any value: the number of inmates at Sobibór throws no doubt on Himmler’s, Pohl’s and Brandt’s designation of Sobibór as a “transit camp” (Durchgangslager). Their use of that designation is fully congruent with the state of evidence, which allows for only one conclusion: that Sobibór indeed was a transit camp. There is a good reason why Black, Arad, Hilberg and Muehlenkamp have felt compelled to meet the contents of NO-482 with lies and obfuscations.

Before he bothered to write this helplessly flawed criticism Mr. Muehlenkamp should moreover have recalled a truism well-known to all those knowledgable about the socio-economics and technologies of Ancient Rome and Egypt: When slave labor is available in (virtually) unlimited amounts, efficient utilization of said manpower is not a pressing issue.

[1] Peter Black, “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 2011), p. 41.
[2] Ibid., p. 96, note 305.
[3] Quoted from Jules Schelvis, Vernichtungslager Sobibór, Metropol Verlag, Berlin 1998, p. 174.
[4] Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 3-4, MacMillan, New York 1990, pp. 1376.
[5] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., Yale University Press, New Haven/London 2003, p. 1028.
[6] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-12052011-demjanjuk-was-sentenced-to.html
[7] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/06/evidence-for-presence-of-gassed-jews-in.html
[8] Dov Freiberg, To Survive Sobibor, Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem 2007, p. 283.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, Oxford/New York 2007, p. 238.
[11] Ibid., p. 241.
[12] Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor. A Story of Survival, Northwestern University Press, Evanston (IL) 1997, p. 141.
[13] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 147.
[14] PRO: HW 16/39 (ZIP/GPD 2041 DD-FF, message DD 14, transmitted 27 October 1943. I here quote the summary of the message found online at http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/prodecodes.html According to J. Schelvis (Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 188, 196 n. 44), however, the message relates the sending away of munitions from the camp, something which indeed sounds more logical.
[15] Contained in NO-482, also reproduced in several books, for example Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, Sobibór. The Forgotten Revolt, HEP, Issaquah 1998 (unnumbered page in attachment).
[16] PRO: HW 16/38 (ZIP/GPD 1956 CC-HH, message DD 12, transmitted 15 October 1943 at 1115h. Reproduced online: http://www.deathcamps.org/sobibor/pic/prodoc1.jpg
[17] NO-482 Reproduced in the appendices to Miriam Novitch, Sobibor. Martyrdom and Revolt. Documents and Testimonies, Holocaust Library, New York 1980. Also online: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/images/Sobibor%20%281%29.jpg
[18] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 69.
[19] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis 1987, pp. 108-110.
[20] Ibid., p. 110.
[21] Ibid., p. 114.
[22] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., pp. 86-87.
[23] Ibid., pp. 232-233
[24] Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, Paul Elek, London 1974, p. 746.
[25] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington DC 2010, p. 81, note 179.
[26] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 142.
[27] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 154-159.
[28] Ibid, pp. 100-101, 331-333.
[29] R. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, op.cit., p. 746.
[30] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 168-170.

Today, on 12 May 2011, John Demjanjuk was sentenced by a Munich court to 5 years in prison [1]  for assisting in the alleged murder of 28,060 Dutch Jews in the Sobibór “extermination” camp in eastern Poland in 1943 (the number of victims in the indictment was previously given as 27,900).

This sentence is a travesty for several reasons, besides the obvious grotesquery of trying a 91-year-old man for a crime allegedly committed 68 years previously.
I will refrain from giving a detailed overview of the case, as this has already been done elsewhere.[2]

To begin with, the only piece of documentary evidence supporting the presence of Demjanjuk at Sobibór is an identification card (from the SS training camp at Trawniki) which authenticity has been questioned by several experts. A month ago a formerly classified 1985 FBI report surfaced which stated that the Trawniki card was “quite likely fabricated” by the Soviet Union.[3] This revelation, however, did not help Demjanjuk in the end. The only existing testimonial evidence consists of a few vague statements of dubious value from former Ukrainian auxiliaries made behind the iron curtain. Not one of the surviving Sobibór inmates has placed Demjanjuk at Sobibór.

The prosecution has been unable tie Demjanjuk personally to any specific crime of violence. Instead, his alleged crime consists of having been present as a low-ranked guard at camp which sole purpose, it is alleged, was the extermination of Jews. Any guard who found this activity objectionable, the prosecution’s argument goes, could have deserted his post. However, the mere presence as a guard at Sobibór, or any of the other “pure extermination camps”, has until now not been considered punishable. In fact, at the Sobibór trial in Hagen in 1966, five out of the eleven accused former German camp personnel were acquitted, despite their admitted presence in the camp. Four of the convicted were given sentences of between 3 and 4 years imprisonment. Needless to say all of these men were of higher rank than Demjanjuk.

There is further the fact that Demjanjuk spent several years in Israeli prison, including time on death row, innocently accused of having been the camp guard “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. Demjanjuk has in fact been hunted, harassed, imprisoned and prosecuted continuously since 1975, when a pro-Soviet calumniator named Emil Hanusiak leveled the first accusations against him.

All of the above objections are dwarfed, however, by the following harsh facts:

1) There exists no documentary or material evidence whatsoever supporting the official claim that Sobibór served as a “pure extermination camp” where hundreds of thousands of Jews were gassed, buried and later burned on open-air pyres. The only documentary evidence mustered by prosecutors and holocaust historians consists of reports and transport lists confirming that large numbers of Jews were sent to the camp. Said documents have nothing to say about the fate of the Jewish deportees subsequent to their arrival in Sobibór. On the other hand a directive issued by Himmler on 5 July 1943, as well as a reply from Oswald Pohl on 15 July 1943 (Nuremberg document NO 482) speaks of “the Sobibor transit camp located in the Lublin district”. The camp was in fact located very near the former German-Soviet demarcation line, a most logical location for camp serving the transfer of Jews to the Occupied eastern territories.

2) In 2001 and 2008 two teams of archeologists, the first headed by the Polish professor Andrzej Kola, the second by the Israelis Isaac Gilead and Yoram Haimi and the Pole Wojciech Mazurek, went over the whole of Lager III, the “death camp proper of Sobibór – corresponding to an area of less than 4 hectares – using probe drillings as well as numerous excavations without finding any trace whatsoever of the camp’s alleged homicidal gas chambers. As it is radically impossible, given the limited area and time available, that these well-equipped teams of specialists would fail to locate any remain or trace, however slight, of the large concrete or brick building described by the self-styled eyewitnesses, only one conclusion is possible: the alleged homicidal gas chambers, never existed. On the other hand, Andrzej Kola discovered in Lager III a huge wooden barrack filled with remains of clothing and toilet articles, as well as a smaller building with a coke storage and remains of an oven – possibly one used for delousing with hot air or steam. According to the official version neither of these structures should have existed.[4] Together with the non-existence of the Sobibór gas chamber building their discovery greatly strengthens the revisionist case, namely that Sobibór (as well as Belzec and Treblinka) served as a transit camp where arriving Jewish deportees were showered and deloused before being sent on further east.

3) According to orthodox historiography not a single Dutch Jew was ever deported further east than Poland. However, on 16 April 1943 – at the very time when Demjanjuk supposedly aided in the extermination of Jews at Sobibór – the Vilna Jew Herman Kruk noted in his diary that “a rumor is circulating that there are about 19,000 Dutch Jews in Vievis”. Vievis is a small town between Vilna and Kovno, which during the years of German occupation was the location of a Jewish labor camp. On the same day Kruk wrote under the heading “More about the Dutch Jews” that he had “succeeded in getting a Jewish sign [evidently a cloth Star of David] and a copy of the order of the Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands about Jewish property.” Two weeks later, on 30 April 1943, Kruk wrote in his diary that “carloads filled with goods from the Dutch Jews are in the Vilna railroad station”. Furniture taken from these trains had been brought to workshops in the Vilna ghetto, where documents written in Dutch were found by the workers.[5] Since there is no reason on earth to believe that Kruk, a prominent member of the Vilna ghetto community, made up this story, it must be taken as an important piece of evidence in support of the revisionist transit camp hypothesis. Large transports of “foreign” Jews to the Vilna area in the spring of 1943 is also mentioned in the diary of the Jewish partisan fighter Aba Gefen (entry for 16 May 1943),[6] as well as by a news notice published in the Polish underground newspaper Biuletyn Informacyjny on 6 May 1943.[7] There are also several testimonies confirming the presence of Dutch Jews in Minsk in 1942-43.[8]

None of the above facts have been considered, or even mentioned in passing, during the trial in Munich. This should of course not surprise, as the blatant disregard of technical evidence has been common to all “extermination camp” trials.

To summarize:

- The murder weapon in the crime which Demjanjuk has now been sentenced for never existed
- There exists no documentary or material evidence supporting the claim that Sobibór functioned as a “pure extermination camp”; preserved documents in fact describe the camp as a “transit camp” (Duchgangslager)
- There is ample reason to believe that the 28,060 alleged victims were in fact sent on to the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union and the Baltic states.

Needless to say such facts does not matter one bit to the enlightened judges and prosecutors of the “freest state in German history”. The defense, undoubtedly aware that any mention of said facts would run afoul of Germany’s laws against “Holocaust denial”, settled on the usual strategy: accepting the officially sanctioned version of events while insisting on the personal innocence of the defendant. In the end, this did not help, and it probable, even likely, that the outcome of trial was more or less settled from the start. At the time of Demjanjuk’s extradition to Germany in May 2009 German holocaust historian Norbert Frei stated: “The Germans owe it to the victims and the survivors, but also to themselves, to prosecute Demjanjuk.”[9] Demjanjuk had to be sentenced, because the Germans “owed this” to themselves. Or to put it more clearly: The trial was necessary to keep “alive” in the minds of the German people (and the western world in general) the phantom of the “Holocaust”.

Demjanjuk’s defense attorney, Ulrich Busch, has stated that an appeal will be filed against the verdict. As for now Demjanjuk has been released from prison, as the sentence is not yet legally binding (rechtskräftig). If after the appeal it is determined that he should serve time in jail (5 years minus the nearly 2 years already spent in custody) it will further be decided whether the 91-year-old is physically fit for imprisonment.[10]

[1] “Fünf Jahre Haft für John Demjanjuk”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12 May 2011; online: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/urteil-am-landgericht-muenchen-fuenf-jahre-haft-fuer-john-demjanjuk-1.1096378
[2] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington D.C. 2010, pp. 9-12, 375-390.
[3] “FBI thought Demjanjuk evidence faked”; Associated Press, 12 April 2011, online: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gzn9sjjViXpoagiQbtyuSx3oZdEg?docId=2ed960173598473c94630a9a5ebe2cbe
[4] Cf. J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 149-167.
[5] Ibid, p. 366ff.
[6] Cf. Thomas Kues, “Evidence for the Presence of ‘Gassed’ Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 2″, section 3.3.11; online: http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_4/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews_2.php
[7] Klaus-Peter Friedrich, Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord in polnischen Augen: Einstellungen in der polnischen Presse 1942-1946/47, dissertation presented to the University of Cologne in 2002, p. 126. Online: http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/volltexte/2003/952/
[8] T. Kues, “Evidence for the Presence of ‘Gassed’ Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 2″, sections 3.3.17 and 3.5.
[9] Georg Bönisch, Jan Friedmann, Cordula Meyer, “Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Handlanger,” Der Spiegel, No. 26/2009, 22 June 2009 (www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-65794351.html).
[10] “John Demjanjuk kommt frei”, http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/ns-kriegsverbrecherprozess-john-demjanjuk-kommt-frei_aid_626638.html