By Wilfried Heink

The second subchapter in the essay by Marina Sorokina is titled:

“A Broad and Authoritative Public Committee, Not Bearing Any Official Character”

“The idea of creating a special public organ for the investigation of Nazi war crimes was raised in the USSR at the very beginning of World War II, although for a long time the Soviet leadership did nothing about it.” writes Sorokina.[1] Then on 6 August 1941, Iakov Semenovich Khavinson 28:

“…who in prewar days had already put forward numerous ideas for the modernization of Soviet propaganda, sent a note to the secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party (and director of Sovinformbiuro), Aleksandr Sergeevich Shcherbakov, in which he proposed the creation of ‘a broad and authoritative public committee, not bearing any official character’, as a ‘systematic source of information about Nazi crimes on the occupied territories of the USSR.’ Such an organ was necessary, Khavinson argued, because ‘the accessibility and effectiveness of such information abroad depends quite heavily on the character of the source that is disseminating it’…”

(28 Iakov Semenovich Khavinson (1901–92) was the principal director of TASS, a member of Sovinformbiuro, and from 1942 on, the head of Sovinformbiuro’s Department of Counterpropaganda. In 1943–46 he was a member of the editorial board and head of the foreign department of Pravda, and he later served as Pravda’s permanent correspondent for international affairs (under the pseudonym M. Marinin). [2]

The idea then was to create a committee “not bearing any official character”, because “who” wrote what was more important than “what” was written, as the last sentence above makes clear. In other words, the propaganda value was the determining factor. It continues:

“According to Khavinson’s plan, the committee was not only to pass on information it received but was also to engage directly in collecting materials about Nazi atrocities, in organizing the investigative proceedings in certain cases through interrogation of the victims, and in publishing materials it collected. Khavinson said that the main consumer for the future “product” would be foreign public opinion, and his proposal was buttressed by reference to the experience of World War I in Europe, when a number of countries created similar committees that consisted of eminent public figures and representatives from the spheres of culture, academics, and law. The Soviet committee, said Khavinson, must similarly include world-famous Soviet scholars, legal experts, doctors, writers, Red Cross activists, and so forth, whose authority and reputation would guarantee in the eyes of the international public that the future committee would be independent in its evaluations, judgments, and conclusions” [3]

According to this, the committee was to actively participate in the investigations, even though none of its members were qualified to do so. The reference to WWI is also of note, horror stories regarding German atrocities were spread throughout that war, and later exposed as lies. And then we have of course the propaganda value, and since the “consumer for” this “future product” was to be “foreign public opinion”, it was important that well known persons made up this commission. Nothing came of the Khavinson proposals at that time, one of the reasons, according to Sorokina, “…a period of extremely serious difficulties at the front”.[4] And:

“A seemingly more important reason for the refusal, however, was that the bureaucrats of Aleksandrov’s Agitprop—created after the purges of the late 1930s and lacking the cultural and educational veneer possessed by certain of their predecessors—quite simply did not grasp the opportunity they had to attempt to influence Western public opinion with psychological propaganda that was free from primitive ideological rhetoric…Despite the “psychological mobilization” of Soviet society for a “Great War” in the late 1930s[5], the Soviet system of information, propaganda, and counterpropaganda was not ready for struggle with an actual enemy on the eve of the war, when it came to propaganda not only were the population and the army completely disoriented in their understanding of who was “friend” and who was “foe,” but even the “propagandists” themselves did not truly understand the forces they faced.”[6]

Sorokina tells us that in Russia, next to nothing was known about Germany. This is why the “propagandists” were ineffective; the reference to propaganda should be noted. But this changed:

“On 6 December 1941, immediately after the beginning of the Soviet counterattack outside Moscow, Lozovskii, the deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs, sent the State Committee on Defense (GKO) a letter addressed to Stalin and People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Molotov with a proposal to create two secret preparatory commissions: a financial-economic one to tally the damage inflicted by the Nazis and set reparations, and a political one to resolve the problem of postwar borders and the political structure of Europe.”41

(41 See “Zaniat´sia podgotovkoi,” 114–15. The latter initiative was quickly approved and on 28 January 1942, by a decision of the Politburo, the “Commission on Postwar Plans for the State Organization of the Countries of Europe, Asia, and Other Parts of the World” was created, headed by People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Molotov. Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Vyshinskii was made co-chairman of one of the commission’s working groups, for preparing proposals for Western and Northern Europe and the British empire).[7]

A little about Solomon Abramovich Lozovskii. Sorokina writes that: “Only in September 1942 was it decided that foreign correspondents of TASS would unofficially work for Sovinformbiuro, and only toward the end of the war (the summer of 1944) was a special Propaganda Bureau for enemy and occupied countries organized within TASS itself, headed by Solomon Abramovich Lozovskii”.[8] According to this, Lozovskii, a Jew, was in charge of producing anti-German propaganda. Interestingly, Iakov Semenovich Khavinson, another Jew, had already before proposed the creation of a committee “as a ‘systematic source of information about Nazi crimes on the occupied territories of the USSR’ “ (see above). Back to Lozovskii:

“The idea of a political body that would speak for the Jewish people of Eastern Europe was not of Soviet origin… The Communist contention that theirs had been the initiative, and that the JAC was begotten at a “public gathering of representatives of the Jewish people” in Moscow, on August 24, 1941, is without foundation.

A detailed plan for constituting a Jewish war committee was drawn up somewhat later by the leaders of the Jewish Socialist Bund of Poland, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, both of whom had been released from prison in Moscow early in September 1941. How the plan was conceived, and what happened after it had been submitted to the Soviet government, we know from a number of documents drafted in October 1941 or shortly thereafter and published in this country in 1943: letters by Erlich and Alter to Lavrentii P. Beriya, People’s Commissar for the Interior (chief of the NKVD), and to Stalin himself, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars; an outline of the activities to be performed by the committee; and the draft of an appeal to the Jewish masses in Poland. The documents reveal that Erlich and Alter were received by Beriya after their release, and that in the course of a lengthy conversation an agree­ment was reached to seek the establishment of a Jewish committee to foster the fight against Nazism…Then, on April 6, 1942, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s correspondent in Moscow learned that an anti-Nazi “Committee of Soviet Jewish Intellectuals” had been formed, and on April 7 the newly founded organization, announced as the “Jewish Antifascist Committee,” issued an appeal to the Jews of the world. On April 23 the existence of the JAC was officially acknowl­edged at a press conference for foreign correspondents in Kuibyshev by Solomon A. Lozovskii, deputy chief of the Soviet Information Bureau.²³ … It was made clear that the JAC was to devote itself chiefly to in­fluencing Jewish opinion outside the Soviet Union, but not so much in order to safeguard Jewish interests or help the Allies as a whole to win the war, as to enlist support for the Soviet Union in particular. It was not intended to organize relief for Jews on Soviet soil, or even for the Jewish citizens of the USSR: the Committee’s chief purpose was to obtain moral and material help for the Red Army. In the appeal of May 24, the Soviet Union was called the first force in the war against Hitlerism, and Soviet Jews were praised for the example they set the Jewish people: “We Jews of the Soviet Union have set you an example. … If all freedom-loving peoples were to do what the Soviet people are doing, fascism would soon be smashed to bits,” said the appeal at a moment when Hitler’s second Russian offensive was sweeping everything before it. “The Red Army is the hope of all mankind,” proclaimed the appeal— “Jews throughout the world! Let us collect money, buy a thousand tanks and five hundred airplanes, and ship them to the Red Army!” The first issue of the Committee’s newspaper, Eynikayt, led off with an article by the chairman, Solomon Mikhoels, the renowned actor, entitled “1,000 Tanks and 500 Bombers.”

(23 Questioned about antifascist committees operating in the USSR, Lozovskii mentioned five: The All-Slav Committee, commitees of Soviet women, of the Soviet youth, and of Soviet science, and the JAC. Of the latter Lozovskii said: “Jews have formed an antifascist committee in order to help the Soviet Union, England, and United States of America put an end to the bloodthirsty rage of Hitler and the other fascist apes who fancy themselves a master race.” Izvestiya, April 24, 1942.)[9]

The appeal issued following the meeting of 24 August 1941 was published in November 1941 by the “Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee”, Buckingham House 6-7, Buckingham Street, Adelphi, London, W.W.[10] This publication no doubt prompted Hitler, at the meeting of 12 December 1941, to order the expulsion of the Jews as a fifth column. The above is also evidence that Jews agitated against Germany wherever they were present, forcing the Germans to react. We do well to keep this in mind when reading/hearing about “innocent” Jews being shot.

Sorokina writes that the “creation of the “financial-economic” commission (in Lozovskii’s terminology), the prototype of the ChGK, took place in the winter and spring of 1942 in the inner sanctum of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR”, but Molotov immediately changed the name to call it “All-Union Committee of the Soviet Council of People’s Deputies for the Investigation of the Villainous Crimes of the Nazis and Their Accomplices and for the Determination of the Degree of Damage Caused by the War”, and Sorokina provides the reason for the name-change:

“Undoubtedly, one of the most important motivations for Molotov’s change was an attempt to connect innovative Soviet antifascist initiatives with initiatives taken all across Europe by émigré governments and representatives of the countries occupied by the Nazis, who were constantly appealing to the Allies with demands to call the aggressors to account. many of these countries were supposed to become beachheads for the territorial, ideological, political, and economic expansion of the Soviet Union after the war; and during the winter and spring of 1942 , the Soviet leadership repeatedly made declarations in its diplomatic notes about how it was necessary to call the German government and high command to account for their war crimes. So it was that by the summer of 1942, at a time when the Western allies were only just beginning to discuss the basics of creating an international commission for the investigation of Nazi war crimes (the future United Nations War Crimes Commission), the Soviet leadership already had concrete plans for this”.[11]

Those “appeals” by émigré governments were of course based on rumors. No investigation by a competent, unbiased body dealing with crimes allegedly committed by Germans ever took place. That people were shot by German soldiers is a fact: what is missing is that many, if not all of the shootings, were reprisal actions. Dr. Aschenauer provides details about the actions of “franctireur” (partisan) units in Poland, the first report by Einsatzgruppe III (rapid response unit) dated 6 September 1939, when German troops entered Poland on 1 September. [12] German troops were fighting partisans even back then, and the reprisal actions were interpreted as war crimes committed by the Germans.

The site of the Katyn massacre, committed by the NKVD, was discovered by the Germans in the summer 1942. However, the investigation did not take place until spring 1943, because a war had to be fought [13]. The creation of this extraordinary committee was likely a result of this discovery. On 20 July, Georgii Aleksandrov, director of Agitprop (Department for Agitation and Propaganda) took up the cause and:

“…sent a packet of documents to Central Committee Secretaries A. A. Andreev, G. M. Malenkov, and A. S. Shcherbakov, as well as to Molotov. The packet contained a note and the Central Committee’s draft decree on the creation of an ‘Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of the Atrocities, Violence, and Other Crimes Committed by the German Army on the Territory of the Temporarily Occupied Soviet Territories, and for a Tallying of the Damage Caused by the German Fascist Troops to the Population of the USSR and to the Soviet State.’”[14]

Thus instead of creating a public committee as suggested by Khavinson, “…Aleksandrov, who was known for his homegrown patriotism,47 proposed the creation of a typical nomenklatura body in the Stalinist mode”.[15] Members were to be high ranking party officials. For instance: “…the secretaries of the Central Committees of the Ukrainian and Belorussian Communist Parties, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR, the public prosecutor of the USSR, the deputy people’s commissars for internal and foreign Affairs,…”[16], making it impossible for the committee to function, the members could never meet since they were scattered all throughout the SU and “…especially considering that this was the ‘bitter summer’ of 1942 , which saw a terrible retreat on the Southern Front and prompted Stalin’s ‘Not one step back!’[17]

(47 This was evident in the fact that unlike Khavinson, Aleksandrov referred to the Russian experience of creating analogous institutions: the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Violations of the Rules and Customs of War (1915) and the Commission for the Calculation of the Consequences of the Intervention and the Civil War. I would note that the results of the work of both commissions were pitiful, for in both pre- and post- revolutionary Russia there was no system for the tallying of war victims; all calculations were based on probability. See A. I. Stepanov, “Obshchie demograficheskie poteri naseleniia Rossii v period pervoi mirovoi voiny,”( The general demographic loss of Russian population during the First World War) in Pervaia mirovaia voina: Prolog XX veka, ed. V. L. Mal´kov (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 482) (my emphasis)

The practice of “calculating based on probability” (footnote 47 above) continued throughout the “investigations” done by the ESC, the 4 million Auschwitz victims an example; but this is just an aside. The project, as proposed by Aleksandrov, “did not move forward in this form”, because the sponsor:

“…clearly did not understand (or was not informed of) the main reason why the party leadership was so invested in the enterprise in the first place—namely, to give international legal legitimacy to documentary materials that had been both collected and created by the institutions of Soviet power about Nazi war crimes, in order to use them as one of their long-term tools in the ideological and political struggle for the future of postwar Europe and the USSR”[18] (my emphasis)

One needs to digest this, for here the real purpose for creating this “Extraordinary State Commission” is revealed. The intent was “to give international legal legitimacy” to what was “collected and created” by the commission. Nothing wrong with that, although the part about “creating” evidence is disturbing. Question is, to gain international legitimacy, why not have authorities trained in criminal investigations and forensic experts undertake the investigations? If that had been done, and the results published and experts from other countries invited after the war, to verify what has been determined, the legitimacy of the ESC would never have been in doubt.

And then we have the part about the “ideological and political struggle for the future of postwar Europe and the USSR”. Ideology did play a part, but when Jodl outlined Hitler’s intent, on 3 March 1941:

“Dieser kommende Feldzug ist mehr als nur ein Kampf der Waffen; er führt auch zur Auseinandersetzung zweier Weltanschauungen“ (This coming war is not just an armed struggle, it is the confrontation between two ideologies)”[19]

it is condemned as Hitler’s attempt to impose National Socialism on others, when in fact the two ideologies, Communism and National Socialism, were opposing each other. Also, from this it appears that the “future of postwar Europe” was decided upon before the war was over (see also footnote 41 above).

We then learn that:

“In the early stages of the war, many organizations were involved in collecting information that exposed the crimes of fascism—from local soviets, the People’s Commissariat of Health, and the Union of Architects to academic bodies such as the Commission on the History of the Fatherland War and the Institute of the History of material Culture, among others.”[20]

Not one body of experts in criminal investigations was among them. And, changes were made again: In February 1942 it was decided to centralize the information. Two decrees were issued, both on 25 February 1942, one by the NKVD: “On Sending materials about the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders to the NKVD’s Bureau of State Records (UGA)” and one by UGA: “On the Process of Collecting, Tallying, and Preserving Documentary materials about Atrocities, Destruction, Robbery, and Violence Committed by the German Authorities on the Soviet Territories Occupied by Them”. These documents:

“…established that all documents recording crimes, regardless of their origin or the department to which they belonged, were to be handed over immediately to the NKVD’s Bureau of State Records or its local branches, and then to the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR SSSR), where a special “Great Fatherland War” division was created. As a direct consequence of this centralization, supported by the main military Prosecutor and the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the USSR, a system developed according to which the NKVD-KGB had total control over all information relating to the issue of war crimes. The only thing lacking in this secretive system was legitimacy for the information it produced. If virtually any kind of product used by the NKVD would suffice for the purposes of concocting domestic trials, very different ingredients were needed for the international arena, ingredients that were better suited to Western tastes and less discredited in the public eye”.[21]

The NKVD, responsible for numerous crimes [22], was put in charge of collecting material regarding alleged German war crimes. Prof. Maser writes that the numbers of people killed by the Germans were overstated by the Soviets to distract from their own killings and avoid being unmasked as war criminals.[23] Also, the material collected was for internal use only. It lacked legitimacy; it was not meant for foreign consumption. Another part that needs to be savoured: what assurance do we have that the material produced later was legitimate, since no historian has ever bothered to verify any of it to this day?

And because legitimacy was an issue and “very different ingredients were needed for the international arena”:

“…an expert on Western public opinion was called in—former ambassador to the United States (1939–41) and current member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID), Konstantin Aleksandrovich Umanskii, who spent the period of August–October 1943 adapting the draft to fit the goals of Soviet foreign policy.”[24]

Schwarz writes: “It is well known that after 1918 a large number of the Soviet diplomats had been Jews (Yoffe, Litvinov, Khinchuk, Umanskii, etc);…”[25], thus we have yet another Jew involved in “collecting and creating”(see above) material concerning alleged German war crimes.

After a few delays, on 28 October 1942, “a third proposal for the creation of the ChGK”, was sent to Molotov, signed by Aleksandrov, Umanskii and Aleksei Fedorovich Gorkin:

“[T]he Formation of the Extraordinary State Committee for the Calculation of the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices and of the Damage Caused by Them to Citizens, Public and State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR…gave the party and Soviet nomenklatura even greater representation on the commission (35 persons) but also included a number of public figures”.[26]

The emphasis was on damage caused by the “German Fascist Invaders” and most members nominated were politicians, academics, trade unionists, etc. But, while the Soviets were working out proposals as to the nature of the commission:

“U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Lord Chancellor John Simon issued a joint statement on 7 October 1942, declaring their readiness to cooperate in the creation of a United Nations commission for the investigation of war crimes. This declaration forced the Soviet side to shift abruptly into reverse. Late on the evening of 4 October in Kuibyshev, Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Lozovskii delivered to the Czechoslovak ambassador, Zdeněk Fierlinger, and the Soviet representative of the Comité français de la libération nationale (CFLN), Roger Garreau, the Soviet government’s reply to the collective note it had been given on 3 July by the governments of nine countries occupied by the Nazis. In this declaration, “On the Responsibility of the Nazi Invaders and Their Accomplices for the Atrocities Committed by Them in the Occupied Countries of Europe,” the Soviet side first officially used the phrase ‘special international tribunal’.”[27]

Therefore, on 17 October, Lozovskii sent a letter to Molotov, proposing:

“…that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issue a special decree creating a “Commission for the Investigation and Collection of materials on the Atrocities Committed by the Nazis in the Occupied Territories of the USSR,”57 headed by a prominent government or public figure and with a staff of 10–12 persons. He also proposed giving an order through the Central Committee and the State Committee on Defense instructing all institutions to deliver to this commission all materials in their possession having to do with the atrocities committed by German troops in the occupied Soviet territories.”[28]

And with this we are finally at the creation of the ESC with its “ten active members” as referred to by Sorokina on p. 801 (see part I). But, footnote 57 is of utmost importance, here it is in its entirety:

(57 Ibid., d. 69, file 7 (“On the Formation of the ChGK”), ll. 3 –3 . An important annotation to the letter states that it was printed in three copies, including copies for Stalin and Molotov. What Lozovskii wrote is worth quoting in full: “materials on German atrocities are located in dozens of sites around the country. They can be found in such places as the Central Committees of Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Moldavian Autonomous Republic; in regional and city committees; among the political workers of regiments, divisions, and fronts; and in the RKKA (main Political Administration of the Red Army), Razvedupr (Central Intelligence Service of the Red Army), the NKVD, and the People’s Commissariat of Health.

The originals of a number of documents have already been lost, with only copies remaining. There has still been no full accounting of those who carried out these atrocities on the spot or the bosses who organized them (name, rank, place of activity, and so forth). I do not know the location of the original reports or the protocols of the commissions that have carried out investigations and inquiries into the atrocities. Probably they are scattered around various institutions. We have very important testimony on German atrocities from prisoners of war, but this testimony is to be found in part in the RKKA and in part with the NKVD and elsewhere. It is time to gather all these materials in one place, sort them, and start up files on each of the generals, colonels, majors, lieutenants, and privates both within and outside the SS. It is necessary to gather testimony from eyewitnesses while the trail is still hot and get their official signatures. All this will be necessary for us when we prepare our final results.”[29] (my emphasis)

No comment really necessary, other than to say that the practice of admitting “copies” of documents by the Soviets as evidence was continued at the IMT.[30]

This latest proposal arrived at Molotov’s desk at the end of October, and Molotov made some corrections:

“…the “committee” became a “commission,” and “calculation” became “establishment and investigation”; collective farms were added to the commission’s purview; and the phrase “and their accomplices” was added to the term “occupiers.” An expression that Aleksandrov had used throughout the text—“the Russian people and other peoples of the Soviet Union”—underwent a fundamental change in Molotov’s version when the first part of the phrase was dropped.”[31]

Lozovskii tried to have Jews added to the commission, “…the chairman of the Antifascist Jewish Committee, Soviet People’s Artist Mikhoels. In addition, it would also be good to include Academician Kapitsa; the editor of our English-language newspaper The Moscow News, M. Borodin; and the editor of our Jewish newspaper Eni Kait [as transliterated], Epshtein.”[32], but it appears that nothing came of that.

Sorokina writes that the final decision naturally rested with Stalin. From 30 – 31 October, Molotov met with Stalin and:

“…on 2 November 1942, the decree was signed by the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, and shortly thereafter it was published. In accordance with the decree, the ChGK was given the status of a public commission. Almost all Soviet and party functionaries were removed from its staff, leaving it a mere third of its former size, reduced to just ten people.”[33]

And finally:

“Practically speaking, the ChGK had been given back its image as a public body, just as Khavinson had suggested back in 1941. The prospect of an international tribunal forced the Soviet leadership to take into account the traditions of Western political and legal culture, even if only superficially imitating their attributes and conforming to “Western standards” of public opinion. On the one hand, the documentary materials that had been (and were being) collected on Nazi crimes in the USSR were supposed to have international legitimacy; on the other, they were supposed to be presented by representatives of Soviet society whose reputation in the West would be beyond question. The personnel roster of the ChGK was meant to reflect its special character as an “export.”[34] (my emphasis)

Thus, the ESC (ChGK) was finally established, the materials collected by it meant for export and the veracity “guaranteed” by “representatives of Soviet society whose reputation in the West would be beyond question”. Why was that so important? Why not have experts investigate, present their findings and invite anyone to verify those findings? If all of this had been legitimate, then this is exactly what would have been done. However, no investigations by experts in the field of criminal investigation ever took place. All of it was just a show, and the makeup of the committee, subject of the next part, confirms this.

To be continued…

Sources:

1. Marina Sorokina, People and Procedures. Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR, p.806
2. Ibid, pp.806/07
3. Ibid, p.807
4. Ibid, p.808
5. For details on the preparations for war, see “Die konspirativen Kriegsvorbereitungen Stalins” (Stalin’s conspiratorial war preparations) by Dr. Irina Pawlowa in “Überfall auf Europa”(Attack on Europe), Pour le Mérite – Verlag für Militärgeschichte, Selent, Austria 2009, pp.109-143
6. Sorokina, People and Procedures, pp.808/09
7. Ibid, pp.809/10
8. Ibid, p.809
9. Solomon M. Schwarz, The Jews in the Soviet Union, Syracuse University Press 1951, pp.201-203
10. Heinrich Härtle, Freispruch für Deutschland, Verlag K.W. Schütz, Göttingen 1965, p.255
11. Sorokina, People and Procedures, pp.810/11
12. Rudolf Aschenauer, Krieg ohne Grenzen. Der Partisanenkampf gegen Deutschland 1939-1945.(War without borders. The fight of the partisans against Germany 1939-19450. Druffel-Verlag Leoni am Starnberger See, 1982, p.170ff
13. http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/09/katyn
14. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.811
15. Ibid, p.812
16. Ibid
17. Ibid
18. Ibid, pp.812/13
19. Walter Post, Die verleumdete Armee, Pour le Mérite – Verlag für Militärgeschichte, Selent 1999, p.43
20. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.813
21. Ibid.
22. Alexander Solschenitsyn, Zeihundert Jahre zusammen. Die Juden in der Sowjetunion; The Black Book of Communism; Michael S. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis wird offenbar;, etc.
23. Werner Maser, Fälschung, Dichtung und Wahrheit über Hitler und Stalin, Olzog Verlag GmbH, München 2004, p.339; Maser refers to Louis Begley (Ludwik Begleiter) in Der Spiegel of 5 June 1995, p.180ff.
24. Sorokina, People and Procedures, pp.813/14
25. Schwarz, The Jews in the Soviet Union, p.363
26. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.814
27. Ibid, pp.814/15
28. Ibid
29. Ibid
30. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-08-46.asp; Franz W. Seidler, Das Recht in Siegerhand, Pour le Mérite, Verlag für Militärgeschichte, Selent 2007, p.80
31. Sorokina, People and Procedures, pp.815/16
32. Ibid, p.816, footnote 59
33. Ibid, p.816
34. Ibid, pp.816/17

By Thomas Kues

1. Introduction

According to orthodox holocaust historiography, carbon monoxide from engine exhaust was used to kill nearly 2 million Jews in Poland, Serbia and on occupied Soviet territory between late 1941 and the summer of 1944. The majority of these supposed victims were allegedly killed in stationary gas chambers located in three “pure extermination camps” in the Polish General Government – Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka – while the remainder is said to have been killed in mobile “gas vans” that were either stationed at the Chełmno (Kulmhof) camp in the Warthegau area of occupied Poland or employed by Einsatzgruppen or SD units operating in Serbia and on occupied Soviet territory. Below is listed the victim figures for each “killing center” as currently held by the orthodox historians.

Bełżec 434,501[1]

Sobibór 170,000[2]

Treblinka 750,000-900,000[3]

Chełmno (Kulmhof) 152,000-360,000[4]

Other “gas vans” 100,000 approx.

Total: 1,606,501-1,964,501

According to most eyewitness testimony, Diesel engines from captured Soviet tanks were used as killing agents Bełżec and Treblinka, while at Sobibór, the historians claim, a petrol (gasoline) engine of unclear origin was used to produce the lethal carbon monoxide gas. As for the “gas vans” supposedly employed at Chełmno, those are commonly held to have been modified Saurer or Diamond trucks.

The danger of Diesel exhaust has long been debated by revisionist scholars. Since the early 1980s, American revisionist writer and engineer F.P. Berg has published a number of articles dealing with this issue. Their conclusion: Because Diesel engines only generate small amounts of carbon monoxide, and since Diesel exhaust contains much oxygen, the use of diesel engines as killing agents in homicidal gas chambers is preposterous. Witness testimony claiming that Diesel engines were utilized for murderous purposes are thus objectively false. To those witnesses belongs Kurt Gerstein, a certified mining engineer.

This article will not further discuss the Diesel engine issue – it will suffice to say that a number of holocaust historians cling on to the notion that Diesel engines were used for killings,[5] at least at Treblinka, while others have tried to cautiously distance themselves from the Diesel claim.[6] Instead, I will for reason of argument follow the assumption that the (hypothetical) German perpetrators used engines capable of producing lethal amounts of carbon monoxide gas. Given this, I will pose a number of questions related to the physical effects of the poison gas. How would the carbon monoxide (CO) affect the bodies of the victims? What would they look like post mortem? And, most importantly: what does the eyewitnesses to the alleged carbon monoxide gas chambers have to say about the appearance of the corpses?

2. Previous research

The main revisionist study on the issue of skin discoloration caused by carbon monoxide consists of an online article by revisionist and engineer F.P. Berg, entitled “Blue Women on the Beach – and the False Toxicity of CO2 in Diesel Exhaust”. It was written as a rebuttal to an article by Charles D. Provan, “The Blue Color of the Jewish Victims at Belzec Death Camp – and Carbon Monoxide Poisoning”, which had previously appeared in the May 2004 issue of The Revisionist. Below I will provide a summary of the relevant articles written by Berg and Provan between 1983 and 2007.

2.1. Berg’s first articles on the issue of Diesel gas chambers

The first of F.P. Berg’s writings to deal with the issue of the alleged carbon monoxide gas chambers, and especially the claim that Diesel engines were used to generate the lethal gas, was an article originally presented at the 1983 International Revisionist Conference and later, in 1984, published in The Journal for Historical Review, “The Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth Within a Myth”. In it he among other things dissected the witness account of a supposed mass gassing at Bełżec in 1942 that was left by the former SS hygiene technician Kurt Gerstein in French prison in 1945. Referring to the text of one of Kurt Gerstein’s “reports”, Berg writes:

“According to the last sentence of the text quoted, ‘the bodies were tossed out blue, wet with sweat and urine.’ Here we have a flaw as far as the death-from-carbon-monoxide theory is concerned because victims of carbon monoxide poisoning are not blue at all. On the contrary, victims of carbon monoxide poisoning are a distinctive ‘cherry red,’ or ‘pink.’ This is clearly stated in most toxicology handbooks and is probably well known to every doctor and to most, if not all, emergency medical personnel. Carbon monoxide poisoning is actually very common because of the automobile and accounts for more incidents of poison gas injury than all other gases combined.”[7]

As sources Berg gave references to two standard works on toxicology.[8] The above argument was then reiterated in a revised and expanded version of the same article which originally appeared in the revisionist anthology Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (1994) under the same title and later in translation (in Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, Theses & Dissertations Press 2003) as “Diesel Gas Chambers: Ideal for Torture – Absurd for Murder”. In this appearance the above quoted passage was complemented with a further reference to recently published specialist literature.[9]

2.2. The 2004 article by Charles D. Provan

In his article The Blue Color of the Jewish Victims at Belzec Death Camp – and Carbon Monoxide Poisoning[10] Provan asserts that bluish color or bluish tinge attributed to the Bełżec victims by Gerstein and later Pfannenstiel can be explained as cyanosis. “Blue”, Provan writes, “is a regular (and documented) color for carbon monoxide poisoning, especially when the victims are alive, but also when the victims are dead.” In regard to fatal cases of CO poisoning, Provan quotes a number of studies indicating that “in some cases” of fatal poisoning there is “no cherry-red coloring of the skin”, that in some cases the appearance of the victim is instead “cyanotic”, and that the cherry-red discoloration might be “slight” due to low saturation (i.e. low carboxyhemoglobinal level) and in some cases obscured because of “associated cyanosis”. Provan takes the above as evidence that what Gerstein and Pfannenstiel said in regards to the color of the corpses is “possible”, and that Berg in his previous articles had reached the wrong conclusions.

2.3. The rebuttal of F.P. Berg

Berg opens his rebuttal to Provan[11] stating that the assertion of blue corpses “is totally at odds with the claims (…) that the toxic ingredient [in the exhaust gas used as the killing agent] was carbon monoxide.” The texts on cyanosis referenced by Provan, Berg notes, “fail to use the words “blue” or even “bluish” at all”. “The simple fact”, Berg further contends, “is that the blue appearance of “cyanosis” does not correspond at all to the general “blue” appearance of the “blue corpses” that Gerstein or Pfannenstiel allegedly saw (…)”. Corpses may be multi-colored, and thus “blue” cyanosis may appear on one part of the body, while the rest of it displays a cherry-red color. Cyanosis occurring in connection with carbon monoxide poisoning is “associated” with the poisoning and not in itself a product of any reaction between carbon monoxide and the victim’s blood. Reactions of carbon monoxide with blood are more or less bright red, never blue. Provan is wrong in defining cyanosis as a “medical term for blue coloring occurring in a patient or corpse” since “cyanotis” is not simply the medical term for blue coloring, but only applies to some varieties of blue discoloration. One would not be able to conclude a case of CO poisoning from the mere presence of cyanosis; the color of the victim’s blood would also be examined.

While cyanosis may appear in some fatal cases, “the appearance of a generally “blue” corpse is extremely rare if it ever occurs at all” (Berg). Below a carboxyhemoglobin level of 30% a living body or corpse may indeed display cyanosis without accompanying bright red discoloration, but as the lethal level for most individuals lies around 60%, an overwhelming majority of corpses would definitely show some nuance of red. Variations and exceptions to this occur in only around 6% of all cases. Also, the reddish color when occurring “tends to be extremely intense and dramatic whereas cyanosis is an extremely subtle coloring in which most of the skin is merely pale” (Berg). A lay observer would thus have a hard time noticing any cyanotic cases, whereas the red discolored corpses would be immediately noticeable. “There is good reason to believe”, Berg writes, “that a cyanotic description in our context does not really mean blue at all — but merely blue by contrast or in comparison to other parts of the same or other bodies.” In regards to the Pfannenstiel testimony, Berg remarks that Pfannenstiel “noticed nothing special about the corpses” except for a bluish tinge to the face of some of them, and that no mention of any red discoloration is made, two things which combined speaks against the reliability of this witness. Berg also strongly criticizes Provan’s way of mixing fatal and non-fatal cases of poisoning, as well as “immediate” fatal cases with “delayed” ones. Living victims of CO poisoning may be partially cyanotic and partially red (with a “flushed” or pink appearance) or cyanotic with only negligible or unnoticeable red discolorations. Dead CO victims on the other hand are usually red or cherry-red. In the rare cases (around 9% of all cases) when cyanosis appears associated with fatal CO poisoning, it tends to be appear restricted to parts of the body where the skin is more translucent, such as the lips or nasal openings. The alleged observations of Gerstein and Pfannenstiel are thus not reconcilable with known medical facts.

3. The difference between fatal and non-fatal cases of CO poisoning

In discussing the issue of discolorations in the skin of CO gassing victims, it is important to note the difference between fatal and non-fatal (i.e. clinical) cases of CO poisoning. In the writings of anti-revisionists, we often find quotes from medical literature such as:

“The classic findings of cherry-red lips, cyanosis, and retinal hemorrhages occur rarely.”[12]

Or:

“The classic ‘cherry-red’ skin coloration is actually rare, and patients are more likely to appear pale or cyanotic.”[13]

As F.P. Berg points out, statements such those above appears to refer mainly to clinical cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, i.e. cases where the poisoned person was found alive and received treatment before he or she either survived, or died (therefore the word “patients” in the second quote). A statement similar to the ones quoted above can be found in the standard work A guide to general toxicology (1983):

“Carbon monoxide poisoning may result in blisters or bullae over pressure areas but the classic cherry red color of the skin is rare.”[14]

When, however, the text within which this quote appears is read more closely, it becomes evident that the author(s), without stating this explicitly, is referring mainly or even exclusively to clinical cases.[15] In fact, specialist literature on toxicology and emergency medicine by its very nature normally focus on clinical cases, while cases involving untreated fatal cases are normally treated in writings related to forensic medicine.[16] An article from 2007 authored by Nicholas Bateman, a professor in clinical toxicology, indirectly confirms that deep red or “cherry pink” discoloration is rare among surviving victims, but more common in fatal cases (emphasis added):

“Skin blistering may occur if the patient lies unconscious for some hours before being discovered, and the skin is more likely to be cyanosed than to have the cherry-pink colour that is described to be a classical feature of CO poisoning, but rarely seen in living patients.”[17]

The letter by Bruno Simini to The Lancet, often cited by anti-revisionists, in which it is stated that “cherry-red discoloration in CO poisoning is quite rare” and that “most doctors overestimate the frequency of cherry-red discoloration in CO poisoning” is also clearly referring to clinical cases of poisoning, since it only refers to “surveys of patients” i.e. treated victims of CO poisoning.[18]

The case reports and medical papers which I quote and refer to in the next section clearly proves that deep red or cherry red discoloration of the skin is virtually always present among fatal cases of CO poisoning. In the section after that I will contrast the contents of the medical case reports and findings with statements made by professed eyewitnesses to the alleged homicidal gas chambers and “gas vans”.

Illustration 1: Reddish flush in a non-fatal case of CO poisoning.[19]

Illustration 2: Typical red discoloration in victim of fatal CO poisoning.[20]

Illustration 3: A fatal case of CO poisoning displaying distinctive reddish-pink discoloration.[21]

Illustration 4: Bright red lividity in a victim of CO poisoning.[22]

4. Verified cases of discoloration resulting from carbon monoxide poisoning

Below I will provide brief summaries of a number of case reports and medical papers concerned with skin discoloration as an effect of CO poisoning.

Item 1: The man with the red face

The following case from mid-60’s America involved the suicide attempt of a 21-year old white male of Italian descent:[23]

“When seen on the morning following his admission the author was struck by the appearance of the patient’s cherry-red face. Additionally, he was thick-tongued in speech, lethargic and showed impairment of orientation as regards time and place. Confusion as to what had brought about his admission was noted.

The writer’s initial impression was acute brain syndrome but one whose etiology might involve carbon monoxide poisoning. Thus, the patient was questioned closely as regards the circumstances and details of his suicide attempt. Elicited from the patient were additional facts that he had fallen asleep in his car with the engine running and the windows closed. Twelve hours later, he awoke and returned home to tell his parents what he had done. At that time his clothes were covered by vomitus. It became apparent that a most important clinical sign and area of history had been over-looked previously.”

Thus it is apparent that cherry-red skin discoloration can be highly visible even among survivors of carbon monoxide poisoning. Red discoloration of the skin is thus not limited to the lividity of fresh corpses, but appears in the still living victim’s body as the mechanical result of carbon monoxide being absorbed by the bloodstream. This is because, as F.P. Berg writes in his rebuttal to Provan, “when carbon monoxide reacts with human blood, it forms carboxyhemoglobin which above concentrations of 30% is a bright red, becoming brighter and more intense as the concentration increases”, that is, the discoloration begins immediately with the reaction of the blood with the CO, and is then increased by the inflow of CO. Following death the discoloration is then concentrated by the pooling of blood that is livor mortis (post-mortem lividity).

Item 2: A dead girl in Italy

This case involved a 21 year old white female found dead in a country house owned by her family. It was later determined that her death had been unintentionally caused by a gas water heater. We are told by the authors of the case report that “[t]he pale cherry pink colour of the victim immediately suggested a carbon monoxide poisoning.” A spectrophotometric measurement of the blood showed a carboxyhemoglobin level of 60%. The report also mentions that among survivors of CO poisoning, the mean carboxyhemoglobin level is 28.1%, while among fatalities the mean level is 62.3%. At a level of 50%, the probability of survival is more or less 50%.[24]

Item 3: A German report on six “unusual” cases of fatal CO poisoning

This article[25] states that, despite the presence of indicative death scenes and/or characteristic findings of the external (coroners’) examination, about 40% of all unintentional fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning remain unrecognized until the autopsy. To illustrate possible reasons for this, the authors describe six individual cases. In case 1 and 2, involving a middle-aged couple, the bodies were found in a state of extreme putrefaction, so that the cause of death could only be recognized through spectrophotometrically analyzing the carboxyhemoglobin level of the oedema fluid that had gathered in the scalps of the victims. Case 3 involved a young truck driver, found dead in the closed cab of his vehicle and not displaying any clear external signs of CO poisoning, despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 83%. Case 4 involved a 19 year old male found dead in a flat. Despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 65% his body lacked “the bright pink coloration of livor mortis”. Case 5 involved a 27 year old male discovered dead in his flat with a carboxyhemoglobin level of 80%. His body was found in a state of advanced decomposition. Case 6 involved a 42 year old female found dead in the garage beside her car. The body did not show any clear external signs of CO poisoning despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 46%. As stated already by the title of this article (“Unusual carbon monoxide poisoning”) these six cases (in particular cases 3, 4 and 6) are to be viewed as anomalous.

Item 4: An American case of CO poisoning without cherry-red discoloration

According to the authors of this article, carbon monoxide poisoning “typically causes so-called cherry-red livor of the skin and viscera.” They then report of a case of CO poisoning in which this cherry-red livor did not develop. It involved a 75 year old white male found dead in his car during a cold winter. His carboxyhemoglobin level was measured as 86%. The authors inform us that “the curious absence of cherry-red livor” was studied and the decedent’s tissue and blood specimens tested at various temperatures. The tests showed that neither the blood nor the tissue of the victim had a tendency to develop cherry-red color, regardless of temperature.[26]

Item 5: An optical study of discolorations

In this South African study of 10 fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, the skin color of the victims’ bodies was analyzed by the help of reflectance spectrophotometry, with the values converted to visual equivalents. It was found that several circumstances contribute to the difficulty of identifying the cherry-red color in the skin, among them low CO concentration in the blood, skin pigmentation, washing-out of previously high CO concentrations, and deep venous dilatation combined with superficial vasoconstriction (narrowing of the blood vessels), producing the impression of cyanosis. It was further found that the color of the altered blood “depends on the way the red cells are massed together, their depths below the surface, and the brightness of the background against which they are viewed.”[27]

Item 6: A study of 15 CO victims at an Indian hospital

This study, published in 2001, was carried out at a hospital in a provincial Indian city which is located on an altitude of 5000 ft above mean sea level. It involved findings in 40 cases of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, 25 of the clinical, 15 of them post mortem. The autopsy findings revealed “deep red discoloration of skin and serous membranes” in 12 of the 15 corpses.[28] This study is important for the topic of the present article, since it shows that deep red discoloration is displayed by a majority of victims of lethal carbon monoxide poisoning even when the skin of the victims are of a darker pigmentation than the average Caucasian’s.

Item 7: An Austrian study on 182 cases of fatal CO poisoning

This study[29] consists of an analysis of autopsy reports of postmortems performed at the Viennese Institute of Forensic Medicine between 1984 and 1993. The aim of this survey was to determine whether the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis[30] is a reliable finding for the coroner to suspect a carbon monoxide-related death immediately at the death scene. It involved 182 cases of unintentional carbon monoxide-related deaths: 92 females and 90 males. The authors found a strong association between the carboxyhemoglobin level (i.e. the level of CO concentration in the blood’s hemoglobin) and the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis: “in 98.4% of unintentional carbon monoxide-related deaths livor mortis was clearly cherry-pink.”[31] It was determined that fresh corpses with carboxyhemoglobin levels greater than 31% show “a clear cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis.”[32] The survey further indicated that the Viennese coroners’ inability to recognize cases of unintentional carbon monoxide fatalities immediately at the death scene was correlated to the age of the victim: the older the victim, the worse the coroner’s recognition.

In conclusion, the authors of the article suggest that coroners should be recommended to examine naked corpses thoroughly, and especially the color of livor mortis. In this way, they write, a carbon monoxide-related death can be recognized immediately and the source of the gas release identified, thus protecting other people from the risk of poisoning.

Item 8: A survey of 388 car exhaust gas suicides in Denmark 1995-1999

This study[33] from 2005 consists of a survey of 388 cases of suicide by means of engine exhaust gas carried out in Denmark between 1995 and 1998. Of the suicides 343 were males and 45 females. It was found that in 11 cases (2.8%) putrefaction or burns were so extensive that livor mortis could not be found, while “the characteristic pink livor mortis” was found in 353 cases (91% of the total cases, 93.6% of those with livor mortis). Only in 9 cases (2.4% of those with livor mortis) did the victims show a normal-colored livor mortis. In 3 of those 9 cases the victim had survived more than a day after the poisoning, implying a positive correlation between the cherry-red discoloration of livor mortis and the carboxyhemoglobin level. In 15 cases the author of the autopsy report had neglected to write down the color of livor mortis.

Summary of the medical evidence

From the above summarized cases we may conclude that:

• Cherry-red discoloration sometimes appears in non-fatal cases of CO poisoning, i.e. it is visible also in ante-mortem states (Item 1). According to available medical literature, such cases are not the rule, but on the other hand not highly exceptional. Such discoloration would appear more or less directly after the blood cells had started absorbed the carbon monoxide. The visibility of the deep red discoloration is related to the concentrations of CO in the blood (i.e. the carboxyhemoglobin level), as well as other factors such as pigmentation (Item 5). In the case of the alleged gas chamber victims it is reasonable to assume that their carboxyhemoglobin level would be much higher than that of the average CO poisoning survivor (that is 28.1%, whereas in fatal cases the concentration averages 62.3%; cf. Item 2), thus greatly increasing the number of individual cases with cherry-red discoloration appearing already ante-mortem or prior to the onset of livor mortis.

• According to Item 7 fresh corpses with carboxyhemoglobin levels greater than 31% shows clear discoloration. This level is only 2.9% above that of the average survivor of CO poisoning (cf. Item 2).

• In cases of fatal CO poisoning, deep red discoloration of the livor mortis is visible in many cases even when the victim’s pigmentation is much darker than that of the average Caucasian (Item 6).

• In fatal cases of CO poisoning, absence of cherry-red lividity is regarded as “curious” or “unusual”. Individuals whose blood and tissue lacks the tendency to develop the cherry-red color are very much an exception (Item 4). In many of the fatal cases where discoloration could not be detected, this was due to the corpse having entered the stage of advanced decomposition, or from having suffered severe burns (Items 3, 8).

• Deep red/cherry-red discoloration of livor mortis is present in at least 95% of all fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning (Items 7 and 8).

5. Eyewitness descriptions of alleged carbon monoxide victims at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Chełmno

Witness 1: Kurt Gerstein

As a captive of Allied forces in France, former SS hygiene technician Kurt Gerstein wrote a number of reports in which he claimed to have witnessed a mass gassing at Bełżec in August 1942. In the two reports indisputably written by Gerstein in French on April 26, 1945, the bodies of the gassing victims are described in the following way:

“The blue bodies are thrown, damp with sweat and with urine, the legs full of excrement and menstrual blood.”[34]

In the German-language Gerstein reports which Henri Roques designate T III and T VI the word “blue” is not present. It is likewise not present in the French text T Va, dated to May 6, 1945. The German text T IV contains no corresponding passage.

Regarding the blueness of the Bełżec corpses and the issue of cyanosis, see Section 2 above.

Witness 2: Wilhelm Pfannenstiel

The professor of hygiene at the University of Marburg-Lahn Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel allegedly accompanied the aforementioned Kurt Gerstein on his trip to Bełżec in August 1942. After the war Pfannenstiel was arrested but never sentenced to prison. Instead he was on a number of occasions summoned as a witness for the prosecution in trials dealing with the alleged homicidal gas chambers at the Reinhardt camps. In 1950 he testified before a court in the German city of Darmstadt:

“I noticed nothing special about the corpses, except that some of them showed a bluish puffiness about the face. But this is not surprising since they had died of asphyxiation.”[35]

Since Pfannenstiel was without question familiar with the texts of the Gerstein reports, it is fully possible that he also derived his description of the corpses from one of the two French texts. As an alternative, it cannot be excluded that Pfannenstiel, with his thorough background in medicine and hygiene studies, was familiar with asphyxiation symptoms and thus also able to fabricate a vague description with the ring of authority. As for the Pfannenstiel testimony I once again refer to Berg’s article summarized above.

Witness 3: Karl Alfred Schluch

SS-Unterscharführer Karl Alfred Schluch was posted at Bełżec from June 1942 until early summer 1943. His work at the camp up until December 1942 supposedly involved accompanying the naked Jewish victims through the camouflaged “sluice” which led to the gas chambers. Schluch was acquitted at the trial of former Bełżec camp staff held in Munich in 1963. In connection with this trial the witness made the following statement regarding the bodies of the gas chamber victims:

“The corpses were at least partially besmirched with excrement and urine, others in part with saliva. The lips and nose tips of some of the corpses had turned blue. With some the eyes were closed, with others the eyes had rolled.”[36]

Now it is possible that the lips, and possibly also the nose tips, of carbon monoxide victims would look purple-bluish as a result of cyanosis. The problem is that this is the only kind of discoloration that the witness claims to have been aware of. Are we to believe that Schluch noticed a few purple-bluish lips, but completely missed the large red discolorations?

Witness 4: Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann testified during his trial in Jerusalem that he had visited three camps were carbon monoxide was allegedly used to exterminate Jews: Chełmno (Kulmhof), Treblinka, and an unidentified camp in the Lublin area commonly assumed to have been Bełżec. Only in regard to the first camp does Eichmann claim to have witnessed the bodies of the alleged victims. This is how Eichmann described the murder of Jews in “gas vans” at Chełmno:

“I went myself to a small wood and just as I got there the omnibus also arrived, it pulled up beside a pit which had been dug up, the doors were opened and out of them poured corpses, down into the pit. One upon the other. It was a ghastly inferno. No, a super-inferno. To me they looked as if they were still alive. But now each and all of them were dead.”[37]

Thus according to Eichmann the corpses of the victims looked the same way as when they had been alive. The vagueness of the description makes the testimony weak evidence in any case, but it might be safely assumed that Eichmann would have noticed and remembered large red discolorations on the corpses from the gas vans, if he had in fact seen any.

Witness 5: “Szlamek”

This key witness to the alleged gas van mass murders in Chełmno, who has been identified as either a certain Jakov Grojanowski or Szlojme Fajner, claims the following in his testimony, reportedly dating from February 1942:

”How did the corpses appear? They were not burned, not black. The complexion of their faces was unchanged. Almost all the dead were lying in their excrement.

[...].

It seemed that they had only been put to sleep; their cheeks were pale and they kept their natural skin color.”[38]

Thus the corpses displayed no skin discoloration whatsoever.

Witness 6: Rudolf Reder

The witness Rudolf Reder, born in 1881, is supposed to have spent a significant portion of his nearly four month long stay at Bełżec dragging corpses from the camp’s alleged gas chambers to massive burial pits. On December 29, 1945, Reder was interrogated by the Polish Judge Jan Sehn. Regarding the physical appearance of the gas chamber victims, the witness stated:

“I was often on the ramp at the moment the doors were opened, but I never smelled any odor, and on entering a chamber right after the doors were opened I never felt any ill effects on my health. The bodies in the chamber did not show any unnatural discoloration. They looked like live persons, most had their eyes open.”[39]

The Bełżec key witness Reder is thus clearly of the opinion that the gassing victims displayed no cherry-red discoloration.

Witness 7: Eliahu Rosenberg

The Jewish witness Eliahu (Elias) Rosenberg supposedly spent several months working in close proximity of the alleged Treblinka gas chambers,[40] dragging thousands of corpses from the “death chambers” to mass graves. In a 12-page typewritten deposition in German which Rosenberg left in Vienna on December 24, 1947, the appearance of the gas chamber victims is described thus:

“The corpses were very bloated, their skin looked gray-white and easily peeled off, so that it hung from them like shreds. Their eyes protruded and the tongues hung out of their mouths.”[41]

Rosenberg’s description of the hue of the corpses is clearly not consistent with the red discoloration resulting from carbon monoxide poisoning.

In addition to Rosenberg, the Jewish writer Rachel Auerbach states in her essay “In the Fields of Treblinka” from 1946 that “the bodies were naked; some of them were white, others were blue and bloated.”[42] Auerbach had not herself been interned at Treblinka, but visited the remains of the camp in 1945 as part of an official inspection tour. Her essay is reportedly based on written testimony and talks she had with former Treblinka inmates. Another secondary account derives from the writings of a certain Jacob Mittelberg, who spent only a few hours in Treblinka before being transferred to Majdanek. Mittelberg visited the site of the “death camp” after the war in the company of Rachel Auerbach and a number of former Treblinka inmates, who told him that “when the doors of the gas chambers were opened, the people were blue and so pressed together as to be unrecognizable.”[43] Soviet-Jewish propagandist Vasily Grossman wrote in 1945 after his visit to the former camp site that “People who were unloading the chambers told me that the faces of dead were very yellow”.[44]

Witness 8: Theodor Friedrich Leidig

As far as I have been able to determine the only eyewitness to an alleged mass murder with exhaust gas to have spoken of corpses with red or reddish coloring was a certain Dr. Theodor Friedrich Leidig of the Kriminaltechnisches Institut (KTI) of the RSHA. Dr. Leidig claimed to have witnessed the murder of Russian POW’s detained at Sachsenhausen using a “gas van”:[45]

“We then went to another place, where we once again encountered the van. It turned out that we were now at the crematorium. I still remember that one could look through a peephole or a small window [Scheibe] into the interior of the van, which was illuminated.

One could see that the people were dead. Then the van was opened. Some corpses fell out, the rest were unloaded by prisoners. The corpses had, as was determined by us chemists, the pinkish-red [rosa-rote] appearance which is typical for people who have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Regardless whether this testimony is reliable or not – and we have in fact not a single shred of documentary or technical evidence that supports it – the following observation is inevitable: Leidig clearly knew from his studies that humans who have died of CO poisoning ought to look “pinkish-red”, so in case he was forced or felt impelled to make up a false story, he would have little problem making it a plausible-sounding one. A testimony from a layman mentioning the presence of reddish-pink discoloration would clearly be of a higher evidentiary value, as the possibility that the witness had drawn from a priori knowledge to embellish his story would be much smaller.

6. Rebuttals to possible counter-arguments

Below I will discuss four possible counter-arguments which may be raised against the revisionist critique of the eye-witness testimony.

Argument 1: The studies cited by revisionists are irrelevant because they refer to livor mortis

As has been explained above, the cherry-red discoloration appears as a mechanical effect soon as the carbon monoxide has been absorbed by the blood cells and is thus visible on post-mortem bodies (especially pronounced in the livor mortis, as during this phase the blood is concentrated due to gravity-induced pooling) as well as in ante-mortem states (to a variable degree) and even in some cases where decomposition has already set in. The medical studies and case reports quoted in this article and others are therefore relevant, whether referring to livor mortis or ante-mortem appearances of red discoloration.

Argument 2: Most or all of the victims were deeply anemic, something which would have prevented visible discoloration from ocurring

Anemia is medically defined as a qualitative or quantitative deficiency of hemoglobin, the molecule found inside red blood cells which causes the blood to look red. Anemia results either from excessive blood loss (due to hemorrhage or chronic loss of smaller volumes of blood), excessive destruction of blood cells, or a deficient production of new red blood cell. The idea of the counter-argument is that severe anemia would prevent the red discoloration from appearing in the gassing victims.

In the case of the Jewish deportees, anemia might have been caused either by inadequate intake of vitamin B12 and/or folic acid (leading to macrocytic anemia), or by iron deficiency (causing microcytic anemia). While mild anemia caused by iron deficiency among women of childbearing age is not uncommon even in the western world of today, it is very rare among men and children.

How common then was anemia among the populations of the wartime Jewish ghettos of Poland, where malnutrition, starvation and epidemics indeed took a heavy toll on the inhabitants? This question is very difficult to give a definitive answer to, but a number of indications may be gleaned from the book Hunger Disease. Studies by the Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, edited the former Director of the Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition, Dr. Myron Winnick.[46] In this volume, Winick presents a report on nutrition-related diseases prepared by a group of Jewish physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1942. The group, led by Dr. Israel Milejkowski, worked out the details of the study in secret meetings, had medical equipment smuggled into the ghetto, and later smuggled the finished manuscript out of it. The small team of 28 Jewish medical experts included Dr. Mieczyslaw Kocen, a specialist in blood diseases who himself was later allegedly exterminated at Treblinka. The manuscript of the report, which escaped the war tumult relatively unscathed, was published in limited Polish and French editions by the American Joint Distribution Committee. It remained most obscure however, until it surfaced in the United States in the late 1970s and was published in edited form by the abovementioned Winnick.[47]

Regarding the changes of blood characteristics in hunger disease victims the ghetto physicians noted the following:

“Red blood cells examined in 80 cases decreased from 3 million per cubic millimeter to between 1.5 and 1 million and in some cases even below. Hemoglobin decreased to 60 to 70% and in some cases ranged as low as 10%. Color index was usually 1 or less, and rarely reached 1.15. Examining a drop of fresh blood we noticed that the red blood cells do not aggregate normally into rolls but remain single or group into small clusters. Anisocytosis and even more often microcytosis are present, macrocytosis is rare, and there are no nucleated red blood cells. Often the red blood cells are colorless and irregularly shaped. These are symptoms of hypochromic anemia in the recovery phase as indicated by a high percentage of reticulocytes.”[48]

The Warsaw doctors pointed out that “hunger disease” does not result in a decrease of the blood volume of the victim:

“In cachexia and hunger edema there is no anemia in the strict sense because blood volume is not decreased in proportion to body weight. Since there is a low percentage of red blood cells in a drop of blood, this would be classified as normovolemic oligocytemia.”[49]

Rather than a decrease of the total number of red blood cells, “hunger disease” tends to cause a dilution of the blood through the increase of the water content:

“In normal specimens plasma contains 89 to 90% water and red blood cells contain 63 to 67% water. In our patients’ specimens plasma contained 93 to 94% water and red blood cells only 58%.

The changes described in the water content of the blood can produce a pseudoanemia in patients with cachexia or hunger edema. The dryness of the red blood cells explains the presence of microcytosis.”[50]

In a study of child victims of hunger disease it was observed:

“Anemia was usually mild (3 to 3.5 million red blood cells, but sometimes under 2 million, or color index about 1). Even in advanced anemia no young red blood cells were found. In evaluating the degree of anemia, we had to consider “blood dilution,” which was present in every case of severe malnutrition, even the dry form without edema. (…) Dr. Apfelbaum’s research on the volume of blood in adults suffering from hunger disease has demonstrated an increase in blood volume per kilogram of body weight. This factor must also be considered in evaluating the degree of anemia.”[51]

On the subject of child victims of malnutrition, Winnick comments:

“One might assume that since these children, especially the older ones, were reasonably well nourished before the war (unlike most children in developing countries) they had built up significant reserves of vitamin A prior to contracting hunger disease. (…). Finally, vitamin A requirements, like those for other vitamins, might decrease during semistarvation.”[52]

Winnick further notes:

“This results not only in hemodilution which, as we shall see, contributed to the anemia and leukopenia reported in the next chapter, but also in a reduction in the efficiency of the blood as a carrier of nutrients. Thus the vascular system is forced to supply more of the ‘poorly nourished’ blood to the ‘hungry’ tissues and organs. The absolute anemia (…) reduces the amount of oxygen carried by the blood and again increases the total blood requirements of the tissues even though they are consuming less oxygen.”[53]

Another study of the Warsaw physicians showed that some degree of anemia was common among patients of hunger disease but that

“of 32 cases only six had 4 to 5 million red blood cells. Thus anemia was prevalent. The largest group of people had 3 to 4 million blood cells. Therefore we consider this number as average for slightly advanced hunger disease.”[54]

However, according to the table following this paragraph 10 of the cases displayed a level of 3-4 million red blood cells per cubic millimeter, while 9 cases displayed a level of 2 million or less. Thus only a minority of the studied cases suffered from what could be defined as severe anemia. Further among the conclusions we read that

“Anemia is normochromic or hyperchromic and only very rarely hypochromic. There is anisocytosis with a predominance of macrocytes.”[55]

Winnick summarizes the post-mortem case studies performed as follows:

“They [the physicians] report on 492 autopsies performed in the 2 ½ years that preceded the deportations. These were cases of ‘pure’ hunger disease with no other complications. This represented about 15% of the total number of autopsies performed in their departments during the same period. They divided their material into four periods beginning in January 1940 and ending on July 22, 1942, and point out that the number of cases of hunger disease increased with time.”[56]

In a series of tables the Warsaw physicians list the following gross changes in the “hunger disease” victims:[57]

1. Pale cadaver-like skin in 82.5% of the cases. Dark brown-colored skin in 17.5%.

2. Edema in one third of the cases. Effusions were most frequent in the abdominal cavity when they occurred.

3. Edema was rare in cases of “brown skin,” whereas the pale skin group had either the edematous or the dry form of the disease.

4. Severe atrophy occurred in heart, liver, spleen, and kidney.

5. Brain weight remained unchanged (these were adult patients).

6. Marked skeletal muscle atrophy.

7. Edema of the small intestinal wall with swollen reddish discolored mucosa and mucus appeared in 27.2% of the cases.

8. Thin watery bile in 77.7% of the cases.

9. Reduced number of fat bodies in the adrenals in 50% of cases.

10. Jellylike consistency in bone marrow of certain cases.

11. Emphysema in 13.8% of cases.

12. Anemia in only 5.5% of cases.

13. Almost 50% of the cases had intestinal changes that could be classified as pseudodysentery. An equal number of these cases fell into the edematous and nonedematous groups.

The above can be taken as a strong indication that even among fatal cases of malnutrition, anemia was far from always present. Even if no definitive answers may found in regards to this question, it seems far-flung to assert that a majority of the Jewish deportees who arrived at Treblinka were afflicted with anemia severe enough to prevent the appearance of a visible livor mortis or other variants of skin discoloration.

Argument 3: The lighting may not have been adequate for the eye-witnesses to see the colors of the corpses properly

This argument is easily dismissed. Rosenberg and Reder claims to have worked not only with removing the corpses from the gas chambers, but also with transporting them to the mass graves. It is generally asserted by holocaust historians that this activity was mainly carried out during the day,[58] so that in most if not all cases the Arbeitsjuden engaged in the corpse-dragging must have been able to observe their macabre burden in full daylight.

Argument 4: The inmates working with transporting the corpses might not have noticed the color of the livor mortis since it would have appeared on the half of the bodied turned towards the ground

There are two obstacles to this argument. On its way from the gas chamber to its final place in one of the mass graves the corpse would have made at least two stops, first close to the gas chambers, where the “dentists” would check its teeth and pull out any gold present, the second at the edge of the burial pit, where it had to be arranged with the other bodies in some fashion. In order to efficiently arrange the huge number of bodies in the mass graves, a portion of them would most likely have had to be turned around. In any case it seems logical to assume that a great many of the hypothetical gassing victims would have been turned over at least once on their way to the burial pits. That the inmates who worked day after day with these routines would have managed to completely miss the large, brightly discoloured portions of skin is simply out of the question – unless we assume that the clever Nazis selected only colorblind Jews for these work commandos!

7. Conclusion

In a medical article from 2004 we find the following stated regarding the appearance of cherry red skin discoloration in cases of carbon monoxide poisoning:

“The classical cherry red appearance is not seen in all cases of acute poisoning, and may not be apparent even in cases of severe toxicity.”[59]

However, in the case of the alleged mass gassings at the Aktion Reinhardt camps and Chełmno, all of the (alleged) victims can safely be regarded as victims of acute poisoning, and since the witnesses to the alleged gassings supposedly observed – often at very closely distance – not only one or two corpses, but hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of corpses, it natural follows that witnesses such as Reder, “Szlamek” and Rosenberg would have observed a very large number of bodies showing cherry red discoloration. That not a single one of the alleged eye-witnesses to mass gassings at the above listed camps mention the highly eye-catching type of discoloration that most often accompany lethal carbon monoxide poisoning is in itself enough to throw doubt upon the alleged truthfulness of their statements.[60] The apparently isolated case of Theodor Friedrich Leidig , not only because of his background but also due to the fact that he describes something not part of the holocaust per se, namely the (alleged) murder of a group of Russian prisoners of war at an “ordinary” concentration camp. When key witnesses from the “extermination camps”, however, reports the corpses to have been blue, white, grayish, or even without any discoloration whatsoever, then we can be certain that something is not right with their gas chamber testimonies.

By Wilfried Heink

“Slavica Publishers” in their Fall 2005 Journal “Kritika” published an article by Marina A. Sorokina titled:

“People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR”.

A little about Slavica publishers first:

“Founded in 1966, Slavica Publishers, a division of Indiana University since 1997, is the leading U.S. speciality press devoted to scholarly monographs, collections of research articles, textbooks, reference works, and journals serving the field of Slavic languages and literatures, as well as Slavic and East European studies in general.”[1]

Unfortunately only institutions are allowed electronic access to the article [2], I thus ordered the journal from Slavic Publishers [3], received it but am unable to link to it. Throughout my essay I will quote from it, with page number, etc., provided, and that will have to do under the circumstances.

A little background first: The ESC was founded in November 1942 (details later), almost certainly as a direct result of the discovery, by the Germans, of the Katyn mass murder of Polish officials by the NKVD. This is being disputed however, not convincingly, and to dismiss this as a coincidence is just not plausible.[4] The ESC reports that were made public played a large role at the IMT, Michael J. Bazyler writes:

“Much of the Soviet evidence came from the work of their “Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices”. Created in November 1942, its task was to

“…keep complete records of the vile crimes perpetrated by the Germans and their accomplices and the damage inflicted by them on Soviet citizens and the socialist state; establish wherever possible the identity of the German-Fascist criminals guilty of the organization or execution of the crimes in occupied Soviet territories, so that they might be handed over to the courts for severe punishment; [and] unify and coordinate the work already performed by Soviet state organs in this area.”23 (23 Haim Goury, Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann [Michael Swirsky, transl.] [Detroit: Wayne State U. Press, 2004], 6-7.19 Ginsburgs, supra, p. 111.20 Id., pp.37-38)… These records proved indispensable at the IMT.”[5]

However, it appears that:

“Some of the reports prepared by the commission are now considered falsifications. Particularly, the first report of the commission was published on 24 August 1944 with the title “Finland demasked“. This report claimed that Finland had put the whole Soviet population of the occupied territories into Concentration camps in East Karelia during the Continuation War, where 40% had died according to the commission’s data.”[6]

The above is about Finland, but the Sorokina article puts doubt on the whole of the reports. A little more background before delving into that article: From 18 October to 11 November 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin met at Moscow and in their October 1943 declaration [7], signed by President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin, stated:

“What is new is that many of the territories are now being redeemed by the advancing armies of the liberating powers, and that in their desperation the recoiling Hitlerites and Huns are redoubling their ruthless cruelties. This is now evidenced with particular clearness by monstrous crimes on the territory of the Soviet Union which is being liberated from Hitlerites, and on French and Italian territory.”

This is a clear reference to the Soviet “investigations” undertaken by the ESC, for D-Day did not happen till 1944. A guilty verdict was also issued at that declaration:

“…those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the above atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of these liberated countries”.Evidence that without the ESC reports it would have been near impossible to convict German officers, and “The Holocaust” also rests in large part on those reports.[4] But, it appears no one has taken a closer look at those reports, no effort was ever made to verify what is claimed in those reports – locate the graves for instance – nothing; all of it was accepted at face value by the IMT. Just a few examples from the Nürnberg Trials:

“We find, in the Indictment, that one of the most important criminal acts for which the major war criminals are responsible was the mass execution of Polish prisoners of war, shot in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk by the German fascist invaders.

I submit to the Tribunal, as a proof of this crime, official documents of the special commission for the establishment and the investigation of the circumstances which attended the executions. The commission acted in accordance with a directive of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union.”[8]

We now know that the Russians were the killers at Katyn.[9] Then this:

“An SS member, Paul Waldmann, testifies to their existence. He was one of the participants in the crime perpetrated by the German fascists when 840,000 Russian prisoners of war in Sachsenhausen were annihilated at one time. The Exhibit Number USSR-52 (Document Number USSR-52) on Auschwitz has already been presented to the Court. I quote that particular extract from the testimony of an SS member, Waldmann, which mentions the mass execution in Sachsenhausen:

“The war prisoners murdered in this way were cremated in four movable crematoria, which were transported on car trailers.”[10]

There is now talk of 12,000 Soviet POWs allegedly killed in gas vans in 1941, among them many Jews, but no mention of “movable crematoria”.[11] A little more about numbers:

“In only two camps of death the criminals exterminated 5 1/2 million people. In proof of this I quote the conclusions of the Extraordinary State Commission for Auschwitz. I will quote only a short excerpt. It is preceded by a detailed calculation. The Tribunal will find this reference on page 356 of the document book, second column of the text, fourth paragraph. I begin the quotation:

“However, employing rectified coefficients for the part-time use of the crematorium ovens and for the periods when they stood empty, the technical expert commission has ascertained that during the period of time that the Auschwitz Camp existed the German butchers exterminated in this camp not less than 4 million citizens of the U.S.S.R., Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium, and other countries.”[12]

5.5 million in two camps? The estimate, and I would like to stress the word “estimate”, for Auschwitz now is 1.1 million killed. Allow me to add a little humor:

“I refer further to the report of the State Extraordinary Commission relative to the crimes in the city of Kiev. This report describes murders in the camps which will be also shown in the films today. I quote only one quotation from this report, which shows the methods of extermination of people in the Syretzk Camp. I quote page 289 paragraph 3, of the Russian text:

“Radomsky and Rieder used all kinds of devices for the extermination of Soviet citizens. For instance, they invented the following method of murder: Several Soviet prisoners would be forced to climb a tree and others had to saw it down. The prisoners would fall together with the tree and be killed.”[13]

And finally, something about graves:

“As a proof of these same circumstances, that is to say, of the scale of the criminal activity of the Hitlerites in concealing the traces of their crimes, I refer now to the report of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union for the town of Minsk. The members of the Tribunal will find this quotation on the back of page 215, second column of the text, paragraph 4. I quote a short excerpt:

“In the Blagovtschchina Woods 34 ditch graves were discovered, camouflaged with evergreen branches. Some of the graves reached a length of 50 meters. During a partial excavation of five of these graves, corpses and a layer of ashes 50 centimeters or 1 meter thick was discovered at a depth of 3 meters. Near the graves the commission discovered a great number of small human bones, hair, false teeth, and numerous small personal articles. The investigation has ascertained that the fascists exterminated here up to 150,000 persons.”[14]

To my knowledge no attempt has ever been made to verify this – to find the graves. This is one reason, and Sorokina cites more, to view the reports submitted by the ESC with scepticism. Prof. Maser writes that German historians, and no doubt not just them, are up to this day reluctant to investigate, out of concern to uncover details not compatible with what they have written over the years.[15] Put it in other words, out of concern for not confirming what is allegedly there.

Marina Sorokina starts out by writing in regards to the ChGK (Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia), the “Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR”, ESC for short, that “…six of its ten titular members were academicians of the Soviet Academy of Sciences”. She continues (quotation marks are in the original except for those at the beginning and on the end of a quote):

“The fact that the Stalinist “Extraordinary State Commission” could be viewed in the West as academic is quite telling, and demonstrates just how effective, propaganda-wise, the Soviet leadership was in its choice of who would play the role of “public prosecutor” of fascism. How and why did the Soviet authorities specifically select representatives of the scholarly elite to present testimony about Nazi atrocities to Western public opinion? What was the role of these representatives, and what was the level of their genuine participation in the process of preparing the future international war crimes tribunal on Nazism? Finally, what significance did the participation of a sizable group of scholars in the work of the ChGK, from academicians to research assistants, have for the postwar development of Soviet scholarship and the scientific community? These questions were initially the reason I began examining the investigation of war crimes, which might at first glance seem far removed from the field of the social history of science.”3[16]
These are questions that should be asked by any historian addressing this topic, but that seems to not be the case. Under footnote 3 she writes, in part: “I might add that the problem of “scholarship and war” has been examined in Russian historiography from only one angle: the role that scholars played in the victory over the Nazis.” Sorokina provides ample sources, too many to list here for one; and two, most are works by Russian authors, written in Russian (I used an on-line translator to translate some).

Sorokina:

“It became impossible, however, to study these historical and scholarly processes without a firm understanding of the declared and undeclared tasks of the ChGK, its visible and invisible participants, the authors and editors of its final “Reports,” and the ways the commission created, collected, and drew general conclusions from the documents it generated. At the same time, it proved rather difficult to find treatment of the subject of Nazi war crimes investigations in the USSR in Western, Soviet, and Russian historiography alike.4 After the publication in the late 1940s and early 1950s of the monographs of B. S. Utevskii, m. Iu. Raginskii, and S. Ia. Rozenblit, which were products of the spirit and constraints of that time, subsequent published historical works on the subject tended to be primarily journalistic or legal in nature. Even after the ideological break of the 1990s, the subject has been treated mostly in the context of studying the fate of foreign prisoners of war.” (4. The book Bibliografiia rabot o Niurnbergskom protsesse nad glavnymi voennymi prestupnikami (Bibliography of works about the Nuremberg trial of major war criminals), Moscow: Institut gosudarstva i prava AN SSSR, 1986) is the best confirmation of this.)[17]

This is astonishing to say the least. The Soviets presented certified photo copies of documents at the IMT, promising to produce the originals later; they never did, and the court accepted this.[18] All of this is no secret, yet historians are reluctant to separate the chaff from the wheat, propaganda from fact. Sorokina made that effort, a positive sign and one can only hope that other historians will follow suit. She writes that her work “about a virtually unknown topic” garnered reactions “that ran the gamut from enthusiastic approval to complete rejection”. Sorokina needs to be congratulated for her effort.[19]

The first sub-chapter is titled “The War Myth: Sources and Historiography”.

“National-level public investigations was…undistinguished in both the Russian empire and the USSR” she writes—in contrast to Europe and the US. At the beginning of the 18^th century, Peter the Great ordered investigations into “various urgent and complicated cases”, those investigations “entrusted to special ‘political appointees’”, thus guaranteeing “that independent evaluations could not take place”.[20]

And:

“Despite their radically different political tone and organizational arrangements, all these commissions had a common fate: the huge collection of documentary materials they amassed never became a subject of broad public discussion in Russia, and the publications they prepared based on these materials were never released to the public. More accurately, the public itself never demanded an accounting of the results of the investigations, either from the authorities or from the commissions, thus silently assenting to the politically motivated raison d’être for these institutions.”(my emphasis)[21]

The practice of not making the findings of commissions public has a long established history in Russia. Sorokina then gets into WWII:

“The history of World War II—or, as it was called in the Soviet Union, the “Great Fatherland War,” sometimes rendered as “Great Patriotic War”— proved no exception in this list of losses that were forgotten and discarded by the country. Among the many and varied Stalinist political myths that have been gradually destroyed in Russia in recent decades, the “myth of the war” has proved to be one of the most resilient. The myth has not only kept its official position in Russian public awareness and in academic historiography but in recent times has even consolidated its position.9

(9 See, for instance, N. A. Zolotarev, ed., Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina, 1941–1945: Voenno-istoricheskie ocherki, 4 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1998–99); and on the restriction of access to military archives, Georgii R. Ramazishvili, “Tsentral´nyi arkhiv Ministerstva oborony Rossiiskoi Federatsii: Problemy dostupa k dokumentam,” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no.2 [2004]: 70(Central.. Archive of the Ministry of Defence Rossiiskoi Federation: Problems of access to documents) The recent pompous Russian celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Great Victory offers substantial support for this conclusion.)(my emphasis)

Here we have the first indication of archives still inaccessible (footnote 9 above). Sorokina also labels the cult surrounding WWII “myth of the war,” and writes that by this “simple and bewitching logic, everything “ours” consisted of heroes and victims, and everything “alien” was associated with enemies and criminals.” She continues by writing that by “separating the myth’s dramatic personae from the lives of real people and concrete events guaranteed that for decades a “national amnesia” (obshchenatsional´noe zabvenie) would serve as an important element in the political stability of the Soviet regime.”[22]

Sorokina now gets to the subject matter and writes:

“One of the immediate participants in the creation of the Stalinist war myth was the ChGK, which was created on November 1942, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The commission had broad powers: it had the right to conduct investigations of Hitler’s war crimes and to determine the material damage suffered by the USSR, to coordinate the activities of all Soviet organizations in this field, to reveal the names of war criminals, and to publish official reports on their findings. The wide scope of activity given to the commission testifies to the importance the work of the ChGK had for Soviet party and state authorities.”[23]

She then tells us that “In addition to the ten “active members” of the ChGK, plus its staff, more than 100 auxiliary commissions operated during the war years in the union republics,” and:

“According to the calculations of the ChGK, around 3,000 public representatives took part in determining the facts about Nazi war crimes, and more than 7 million Soviet citizens directly collected and prepared documents for the ChGK, which in turn read through more than 54,000 statements and more than 50,000 protocols of witness interrogations and declarations of Nazi crimes, as well as approximately 4 million documents on the damage caused by the Nazis. The documentary evidence collected in the framework of the ChGK and the 7 published “Reports” were widely used in diplomatic notes of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and at the various Allied peace conferences of the war years. They were the heart of the documentary evidence used by the Soviet participants in the international tribunals at Nuremberg (1945–46) and Tokyo (1950), and they continued to be used into the 1960s for numerous Soviet domestic trials, both open and closed, of Nazi criminals and their accomplices.”(my emphasis)[24]

This would suggest that the investigations were thorough, and the findings widely publicized to make the public aware of those investigations and their outcome. One would also assume that professionals, i.e., experts in the field of crime investigations, forensic specialists and the like were employed to investigate. But, there is no mention if it, instead we have “3,000 public representatives” and “7 million Soviet citizens”. Something just doesn’t seem quite right, but a little about Nürnberg first. Sorokina continues:

“It is important to note that in accordance with Article of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, ChGK materials, like official government documents and United Nations reports, had the status of incontrovertible evidence and were accepted by the tribunal without additional confirmation from these other sources.”

Yes, those of us who have taken a closer look at the Nürnberg proceedings are aware that whatever the Soviets produced was taken at face value, rarely were questions asked. And now to the reports themselves:

“Despite the significant public and political repercussions both in the USSR and abroad of the ChGK’s investigations of Nazi war crimes, until recently the commission’s activity could not be studied as a subject of independent historical research. From the moment of its creation, the work of the ChGK and the materials it collected—the archival fond for the ChGK contains more than 43,000 dela and is housed at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF)—were surrounded by the strictest secrecy. For instance, in 1945 researchers at Sovinformbiuro were not allowed access to them,12 and representatives of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC), who were preparing their “Black Book” on the Holocaust in the USSR and Poland, were given only a small number of materials that had been carefully selected by ChGK officials.13 Throughout the nearly half-century of the Cold War, the ChGK fond was closed to researchers, although various materials from it were published in collections of documents on the history of the Great Fatherland War, supporting the official Soviet version of events”.

(12 The chairman of the Sovinformbiuro Commission, which was supposed to provide for the publication abroad of new data on Nazi crimes, left an exquisite description of the atmosphere of secrecy: “We were only allowed to sit near the folders containing the dela and twiddle our thumbs, since without the permission of the director it was forbidden to open the folders and actually read them. We sat there, waited for awhile, and then left without having done anything” (GARF f. R–7021, op.116, d.326, l. 31). See also GARF f. R–7021, op.116, d. 404 (on permission to work in the ChGK archive).

13 As the writer Vasilii Grossman testified in a speech at a session of the JAC on 25 April 1946, the ChGK materials were “a little disappointing.” In his words, he was not able to find the materials he needed, having been given only a few protocols from the interrogations of German witnesses and German antifascists. See Il´ia Al´tman, “‘Chernaia kniga’: Zhizn´ i sud´ba,” Gorizont, no.10 (1989): 34. Along the same lines, the JAC secretary Itsik (Isaac) Fefer wrote that without the permission of the ChGK not a single document could be published (GARF f. R–7021, op.116, d. 404, l. 14).(my emphasis)[25]

Why the secrecy when all had been meticulously investigated as is claimed? As for witnesses, Prusin tells us how their testimony was obtained.[26] And why not allow Jews access to the archives to try and substantiate “The Holocaust”, something not done to this day? Then this:

“Despite its enormous size, the ChGK archive itself contains relatively few important documents from the “creative laboratory” of the commission, which is not surprising, since even in the first postwar years it was carefully “systematized” by ChGK officials under the control of the Soviet state security organs.”[27]

What, pray tell, is a “creative laboratory”? Was it Laboratory #12 of which Michael S. Voslensky spoke?[28] Voslensky wrote about a meat grinder in the “Knochenmühle” (bone grinder) in which bodies were ground up, the remnants flushed down the sewer. And, Vodka sat around in cases. No doubt this is where the stories about German bone grinders and drunken guards originated. But back to Sorokina and aside from the laboratory, what does “systematized” mean? Webster’s (1974) defines it as: “to arrange in accord with a definite plan or scheme : order systematically”. Why the need to arrange the findings according to a plan, why not publish them as is, since they had been scrutinized already, as will be shown later? Sorokina continues:

“At the same time, a series of politically important documents of the commission that expose its inner workings remained for many years under the faithful oversight of the main Communist Party archive.15 Here, in the personal fond of Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov,16 are the drafts of several “ChGK Reports” showing the corrections of Andrei Ianuar´evich Vyshinskii, as well as a set of documents about the writer Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi—Stalin’s “golden pen”—that relate to his work for the ChGK.17 Many ChGK documents are concentrated in the fondy for the secretariats of Molotov and Vyshinskii in the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation. Without question, however, the most complete set of documentary materials revealing the true history of the creation and activities of the ChGK can be found neither in GARF nor in the ministry of Foreign Affairs, but rather in the still-restricted Presidential Archive.”

(15 Now the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii, hereafter RGASPI), formerly the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU (TsPA IML).

16 RGASPI f. 8 (V. M. Molotov), op. , d. 5 .

17 Meanwhile, even in 1947 the main Archival Administration (GAU) of the Soviet ministry of Internal Affairs issued an order to hand over all materials on A. N. Tolstoi to the A. M. Gor´kii Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. See Elena Iu. Litvin, “Arkhiv A. N. Tolstogo v IMLI,” in A. N. Tolstoi: Novye materialy i issledovaniia, ed. V. V. Petelin (Moscow: Nasledie, 1995), 192)(my emphasis) [29]

What would Tolstoi, Stalin’s “golden pen” and member of the ChGK (ESC) know about crime investigations? As for “corrections”, Sorokina goes into more detail on those later on, and this then will also be the time to take a closer look at Andrei Ianuar´evich Vyshinskii, Molotov’s bureau chief. But the last sentence is what really counts, for still today access to certain Russian archives is restricted, contrary to what is claimed by some historians.

Sorokina then tells us that Natal’ia Lebedeva, as well as A.E. Epifanov,[30] did some research on the preparations for the Nürnberg Trials, but that “a series of crucial questions remain unanswered even after their publication – questions that had to do with the history of the commission and its significance for the formation and implication of Soviet Cold War ideology”. She then continues:

“For instance, why did the Soviet government even need to create the ChGK? It already had Sovinformbiuro and TASS for purposes of propaganda and counterpropaganda. Within the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) it already had the Central Administration of National Economic Accounting as an economic organ for the calculation of Nazi damages. In the security organs (NKVD-KGB), the People’s Commissariat/Ministry of Defense (SMERSH), and the public prosecutor’s office, it already had an intricate network of efficient intelligence and investigative organs. Did not the ChGK, to all intents and purposes, merely duplicate the functions of the state structures mentioned above? Did the ChGK really carry out independent investigations, or did it just use documents prepared especially for it? Why, despite the enormous mass of materials it collected, did the ChGK eventually publish only 7 small official “Reports” in 1943–45? By whom and according to what criteria were facts and crime locations selected for these reports? Why, despite the full political engagement of the ChGK, did its summary document—the “Report on the Conclusions of the Investigation into the Bloody Crimes of the German Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices,” a draft of which was prepared in the autumn of 1945—not receive Stalin’s permission to be published, and thus languished in the ChGK archives? Finally, why did the Soviet leadership—which might have made wide and public use of this documentary evidence exposing Nazism for what it was—instead seal up the ChGK archival materials for decades, even to its own people? These questions all suggest that in reality the commission, in addition to its publicly stated tasks, must have also had its own hidden goals.

In 1994, P. N. Knyshevskii named one of these goals, conjecturing for the first time in Russian historiography that through the ChGK there was “a largely successful attempt to blame Hitler for a portion of the Soviet authorities’ own crimes.22 Along the same interpretative lines, in 1998 the writer Lev Bezymenskii, who had analyzed the process of preparation for those ChGK “Reports” that were connected with the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet territories, confirmed that some of the information published by the ChGK was the result of conscious and purposeful falsification on the part of Stalinist propagandists.23

(22 Pavel N. Knyshevskii, Dobycha: Tainy germanskikh reparatsii (Hunted: Mysteries of the German reparations)(Moscow: Soratnik, 1994), 5.

23 Lev A. Bezymenskii, “Informatsiia po-sovetski,”(Information in the Soviet) Znamia, no. 5 (1998): 191–99; and Bezymenskii, “Vospriiatie Kholokosta v Sovetskom Soiuze,”(Perceptions of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union) Rossiia i sovremennyi mir, no. 4 ( 1999): 153–68)(my emphasis)[31]

No comment necessary, Sorokina says it all, but she is not done:

“The first concrete case of such “transferred blame” had been established by 1990: the Katyn affair. In fabricating this case in 1943–44, a special commission of the ChGK chaired by Academician Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko was given the dual role of official mouthpiece of the Soviet counterpropagandists, on the one hand, and independent expert and participant in the investigation, on the other. Its role became all the more crucial in 1943, when the “Katyn commission” uncovered a whole series of reports by the German high command about the discovery on the occupied Soviet territories of sites of mass NKVD executions of Soviet citizens. It goes without saying what serious consequences the “political ricochet” of such revelations could have had for the Stalinist leadership, both at home and abroad. Fearing such consequences, Stalin and his circle did all they could to silence and distort Nuremberg Trial evidence dangerous to them. Today, of course, it is obvious that Katyn was far from being the only such case; the “Katyn model” of erasing crimes was widely used by the Stalinists in other situations, covered up by the authority of the ChGK and its auxiliary commissions. 25

(25 Thus the authors of the 1994 book Cherekskaia tragediia published data about the falsification of information in the Cherek district of Kabardino-Balkariia, where the local authorities and the auxiliary ChGK commission blamed the Nazis for the punitive actions of the NKVD and the material losses the population sustained in supplying the Soviet 37th Army. See K. G. Azamatov et al., Cherekskaia tragediia (Nal´chik: El´brus, 1994). The well known American researcher Patricia Kennedy Grimsted cites analogous facts in connection with the destruction of cultural treasures in Kiev (Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2001], 184–88). For a different point of view, see Nikolai V. Petrovskii, Sokrytye stranitsy istorii (Moscow: KRUK-Prestizh, 2002 ), 68–78; and Margarita S. Zinich, Pokhishchennye sokrovishcha: Vyvoz natsistami rossiiskikh kul´turnykh tsennostei (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2003). Aleksandr A. Formozov also confirms that Soviet propaganda placed the blame for the destruction and damage done to cultural monuments in the 1930s on the Nazis, as well as on portions of the Red Army. See Formozov, Russkie arkheologi v period totalitarizma (Moscow: Znak, 2004), 290. Russian archivists say that the large losses sustained by the State Archival Fund in the war years, long blamed on Hitler’s forces, were actually the consequence either of bad evacuation planning or conscious destruction (for various reasons) by the archival officials themselves. See Ol´ga N. Kopylova, “K probleme sokhrannosti GAF SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Sovetskie arkhivy, no. 5 (1990): 37–45; and Tat´iana V. Khorkhordina, Istoriia Otechestva i arkhivy: 1917–1980-e gg. (Moscow: RGGU, 1994), 264–7 . Finally, church historians note that the mass destruction of religious buildings belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church, about which much was written that described it as the barbarism of the invaders, in fact occurred on a large scale even before the war. See Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov´ pri Staline i Khrushcheve (Gosudarstvenno-tserkovnye otnosheniia v SSSR v 1939–1964 gg.) (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Krutitskogo Patriarshego podvor´ia, 2000), 92, 98, 117–18, 146. For information on western Ukraine, see Oleh Romaniv and Inna Fedushchak, Zakhidnoukrains´ka trahediia 1941 (L´viv: Naukove tovarystvo imeni T. Shevchenka, 2000.)(my emphasis0 [32]

The Soviets distort evidence, and blame Germans for their own crimes? Of course they did, read footnote 25 carefully and one must ask why western “historians” are not interested in this. Sorokina continues:

“The questions of how widely this practice was applied, and who was behind it, are exceedingly sensitive for the Russian public; but the questions deserve in equal measure both a direct answer and solid corroboration.” 26

(26 On the use of the facts of Stalinist and Nazi war crimes in the nascent culture of post-Soviet memory, see Irina Paperno, “Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror,” Representations 75 (Summer 2001): 89–118, which cites the relevant literature on the subject. I am grateful to Jan Plamper for bringing this work to my attention) [33]

She then writes that this is not an attempt by her: “to portray the Nazi war criminals as victims,” and that:

“At present, the abundant archival materials of the ChGK are being actively sought out by Russian and foreign researchers, above all as part of the process of reappraising the material, human, and cultural losses of the World War II years and related problems of restitution.

Using the ChGK materials without a clear understanding of the true reasons for the commission’s creation can end up being a sort of Pandora’s box for historians, with the “Stalinist school of falsification” continuing to determine the agenda of work just as before, invisibly but persistently. 27 [34]

(27 For examples of the uncritical use of ChGK documents, see Aleksei A. Sheviakov, “Gitlerovskii genotsid na territoriiakh SSSR,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no.12 (1991): 3–11; and Sheviakov, “Zhertvy sredi mirnogo naseleniia v gody Otechestvennoi voiny,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no.11 (1992): 3–17. Even the latest solid monograph on the subject—Pavel M. Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur: Zhizn´, trud, unizhenie i smert´ sovetskikh voennoplennykh i ostarbaiterov na chuzhbine i na rodine (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), which begins with the publication of ChGK tables entitled “General Data on the Number of Victims of the Atrocities of the Germans and Their Accomplices in the Territories of the USSR as of March 1946” (10–11) does not consider how these totals were calculated and does not subject the ChGK data to critical analysis.)(my emphasis)

Thus even though efforts seem to be underway to shed some light on those “reports”, with all the distortions in the documentation it will be near impossible to find out who did what.

To be continued…

Sources:

1. http://slavica.com/
2. http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/kritika/v006/6.4sorokina.html
3. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kritika/toc/kri6.4.html
4. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v017/17.1prusin.html
5. http://www.amnestyusa.org/events/western/pdf/AmnestyConference_BazylerMichaelCLE.pdf
6. http://www.enotes.com/topic/Extraordinary_State_Commission
7. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1943/431000a.html
8. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-14-46.asp, p.425
9. http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/09/katyn/#more-408
10. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp, p.586
11. http://www.stiftung-bg.de/gums/en/index.htm
12. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp, p.589
13. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp, p.582
14. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp, p.591
15. Werner Maser, Fälschung, Dichtung und Wahrheit über Hitler und Stalin, Olzog Verlag GmbH, München 2004, p.332
16. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, 4 (Fall 2005): 797-831, Article: People and Procedures, Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR, by Marina Sorokina, pp.797/98
17. Ibid, pp.798/99
18. Franz W, Seidler, Das Recht in Siegerhand, Die 13 Nürnberger Prozesse 1945-1949, Pour le Mérite – Verlag für Militärgeschichte, Selent 2007, p.80; http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-08-46.asp p.202ff
19. Sorokina, People…, p.799
20. Ibid
21. Ibid, p.800
22. Ibid, pp.800/01
23. Ibid, p.801
24. Ibid, pp.802/02
25. Ibid, p.802
26. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v017/17.1prusin.html, pp.15ff
27. Sorokina, People…, pp.802/03
28. Michael S. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis wird offenbar. Moskauer Archive erzählen 1917-1991, 1995 by Langen Müller in der F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München, pp.54-62
29. Sorokina, People…, p.803
30. Ibid, p.803, footnote 18: Lebedeva, Podgotovka Niurnbergskogo protsessa (Preparations for the Nürnberg Trials); footnote 19: A.E. Epifanov, Otvetstvennost´ gitlerovskikh voennykh prestupnikov i ikh posobnikov v SSSR (Volgograd: n.p., 1997), published under the imprimatur of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. I might also note that in 1986, at the Moscow State Historical-Archival Institute, Tat´iana V. Borisova defended a senior thesis (diplomnaia rabota) on the ChGK under the direction of Tat´iana P. Korzhikhina.
31. Ibid, p.804
32. Ibid, pp.804/05
33. Ibid, pp.806/07
34. Ibid, p.806

After my comment on the terms Sonderlager and SS-Sonderkommando in relation to the Sobibór camp,[1] Roberto Muehlenkamp has focused his untiring yet self-defeating powers of “argumentation” on the following passage in the March 1944 Benda report on the Sobibór prisoner uprising:

“Mit Rücksicht auf die Art die Sonderlagers und dessen Häftlinge, wurde veranlasst, dass die Wehrmacht sofort die Verfolgung der Flüchtigen und die Schutzpolizei die Sicherung des Lagers ausserhalb der Lagerumzäunung aufnahm.”[2]

In English translation:

“In view of the nature of the special camp [Sonderlagers] and its prisoners, the Wehrmacht was ordered to organize an immediate posse after the fugitives, and the Police to secure the safety of the camp outside its fences.”

Muehlenkamp has offered the following interpretation:

“The best explanation (i.e. the one that takes all known evidence into account and requires the fewest additional assumptions) is that it was considered most urgent that all fugitives be recovered lest they reveal that Sobibór had been an extermination camp, and that the Wehrmacht was charged with the task because it had more personnel available for this purpose than the SD and the Security Police, including units that were trained and experienced in hunting partisans and therefore most suited for the task.”[3]

In other words: The most reasonable explanation for why “the nature of the special camp and its prisoners” required the escaped inmates to be pursued with particular fervor was that they were able to inform the world about Sobibór the Extermination Camp. The problem with this explanation, similar to most arguments advanced by Muehlenkamp and his ilk, is that it ultimately falls back on the a priori assumption that Sobibór indeed functioned as a “pure extermination camp” – for which there is not a shred of hard evidence.

The assertion that the escaped inmates were carriers of the secret of the “extermination camp” Sobibór in fact makes little sense even from an exterminationist viewpoint. Not a single inmate from the “death camp proper”, Lager III, participated in the mass escape on 14 October 1943. In Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality I spent several passages discussing what the Jewish eyewitness have to say regarding their and other inmates’ knowledge of Lager III, which was separated from the rest of the camp by fences and a densely wooded area. The Jewish work commando(s) employed in Lager III were likewise kept separated from the rest of the prisoner population and never entered the other Lagers. Thomas Blatt, who was sent to Sobibór in April 1943, writes in his memoirs that

“The most conclusive evidence that something murderous was taking place in Lager III was the fact that no-one ever came out alive, but such evidence was purely circumstantial. The Nazis made it difficult to collect any direct evidence of what was widely known throughout the camp.”[4]

However, as I showed in the abovementioned study, based on maps an air photos, the inmates in the other parts of the camp could not have been certain that “no-one ever came out alive” .[5]
According to another witness, Eda (Ada) Lichtman, “They [the Germans] always thought that we [= the Jewish inmates] did not know what was going on there [in Lager III].”[6]

If these witness statements are correct, then how could the escaped prisoner have been viewed as carriers of the secret (Geheimnisträgern) of  Sobibór the Extermination Camp? If it was indeed true that no Jew “ever came out alive” from Lager III and that this fact constituted “the most conclusive evidence” the camp inmates had that this part of Sobibór served as a facility for mass murder, would not then all the Polish civilians in the vicinity of the camp, who were in a much better position to ascertain whether “no-one ever came out alive”, likewise have been considered Geheimnisträgern and dealt with accordingly?

The Oneg Szabat group in Warsaw identified Sobibór as an extermination camp already in early July 1942, two months after it began operating, and already on 1 July 1942 the Polish Fortnightly Review published an article according to which Jews were sent to Sobibór and murdered there en masse with gas, machine-guns and bayonets. In a report from the the Polish Government in Exile dated 23 December 1942 Sobibór is identified together with Treblinka and Belzec as an extermination center. The Polish underground press mentioned the Sobibór “death camp” repeatedly in 1942 and 1943.[7] There can be no doubt that the Germans were aware of the contents of at least some of these propaganda writings, and the way they depicted the camp ­- but why would they then worry as late as in mid-October 1943 that the escaped prisoners would “reveal” Sobibór as an “extermination camp”? This gets even more curious when one considers that the atrocity stories produced by the early Sobibór eyewitnesses are ridiculous yarns about gassings with chlorine, mysterious black substances, magical bloodstains, electric machines releasing “deadly gas”, collapsible gas chamber floors, mass killings carried out with water hoses, etc. etc.[8] – i.e. certainly not any “detailed knowledge” regarding the supposed going-ons in Lager III.

Roberto Muehlenkamp has completely ignored the following simple explanation why there was a special urgency to the pursuit of the escaped Sobibór inmates: As already shown by me the dismantling plant for captured Soviet munitions mentioned in Himmler’s directive from 5 July 1943 (NO-482) was indeed installed in the “Lager IV” or “Nordlager” section of Sobibór and came to employ at least 110 inmates, many of them Soviet-Jewish POW:s, who, led by Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, made up the core of the 14 October uprising. Documentary evidence further show that a significant amount of captured Soviet munitions was stored there and later, following the prisoner revolt, sent away from the camp.[9] It goes without saying that the detailed knowledge of the munition dismantling plant held by the escaped inmates would have been of potentially great value to partisan units operating in that part of eastern Poland as well as in the neighboring parts of Belarus and the Ukraine, especially considering that many of said partisans were using Soviet weapons. The knowledge of the escaped prisoners could thus have triggered a partisan attack on the camp with the purpose of stealing the munitions depot, or prompted the destruction of the railway tracks, as a means of shutting down the dismantling operation.[10] The fact that the addition of several trained and experienced Red Army soldiers to the local partisan groups hardly would have benefited the Germans also fits this picture.

The above alternative explanation is certainly better than Muehlenkamp’s “best explanation”, as it does not require belief in the factually unsupported claim that Sobibór functioned as a “pure extermination camp.”

[1] http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/05/on-the-terms-sonderlager-and-ss-sonderkommando/
[2] http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/images/Sobibor%20%281%29.jpg
[3] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/05/thomas-kues-takes-on-sonderlager-paper.html
[4] Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1997, p. 232.
[5] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington DC 2010, pp. 97-98.
[6] Ibid., p. 79.
[7] Ibid, pp. 63-67.
[8] Ibid, pp. 69-75, 82, 179.
[9] http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/05/lies-and-obfuscations-about-himmlers-sobibor-directive/

[10] For some curious reason it never occurred to the partisans that they could (at least temporarily) stop the deportation trains to Sobibór and the other “extermination centres” by dynamiting the railroad tracks leading there. No doubt some exterminationist historians would put this up to the Poles being inveterate anti-Semites…