Counting the years properly we are now facing a new decade. What will it bring for holocaust revisionism?
In one of my first articles for Smith’s Report, “What Remains to be Researched?” (issue 150) I outlined a number of areas still in need of research as well as mentioned a number of studies in need of translation of the English. In the two and a half years that have passed since then much of this research has in fact been carried out.

In 2010, coinciding with the new trial against John Demjanjuk in Munich, was published the first revisionist study on the Aktion Reinhardt “extermination camp” of Sobibór, co-authored by myself, Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno and titled Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality (TBR Books). The most important part of this book is undoubtedly the analysis of the results from an archeological survey carried out at the former Sobibór camp site by the Polish professor Andrzej Kola in the years 2000-2001. Kola had published an article on his research result in a rather obscure Polish journal already in 2001, but this was never translated into any Western language, or for that matter referenced by any of the orthodox experts on the Aktion Reinhardt camps (including the foremost mainstream expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis, who has published two revised editions of his study Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp after 2001). The reason for this is easy to see: While Kola pays the necessary lip service to the mass extermination dogma, the published results from his probings and diggings clearly show that the official claim that Sobibór served as a “pure extermination center” – a claim based exclusively on “eyewitness” testimony – do not hold water. Instead of the concrete gas chamber building described by the “eyewitnesses”, Kola discovered, at the site where this murder factory should have been located, the remains of a huge wooden barrack, with dimensions completely incompatible with those of the alleged gas chamber building, containing numerous fragments from toilet articles and clothing. Not far from this barrack he also discovered the remains of a smaller building containing an oven. These finds suggest a large delousing barrack and a smaller hot air delousing chamber, something which greatly strenghtens the revisionist hypothesis. Neither Kola nor a later Israeli-Polish team of archeologists active in 2007-8008 managed to find the slightest trace of the alleged gas chambers, despite finecombing the 3 hectare area of the “death camp proper” with probes and advanced equipment. In other words: the homicidal gas chambers at Sobibór never existed. Thanks to the research of Kola we may now conclude, based on solid proof, that Sobibór was in fact what Himmler had called it in a directive from 5 July 1943, namely a transit camp. In Chapter 10 of our study we discuss the deportation of Jews to the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union via the “extermination camps” – which were in fact all transit camps. A key piece of evidence presented here is the wartime diary of Herman Kruk, who served as head librarian in the Vilna ghetto. Kruk’s diary entries from April 1943 confirm that a large number of Dutch Jews, that according to mainstream historiography were “gassed” in Auschwitz and Sobibór, were in fact deported to Lithuania. The discovery of these diary entries in turn prompted me to write a survey of the available evidence for the eastward transit of supposedly murdered Jews, which is currently being published in installments in the Inconvenient History web journal under the title “Evidence for the presence of ‘gassed’ Jews in the Occupied eastern territories“.

In 2009 Carlo Mattogno published in Italian Il Campo di Chelmno tra Storia e Propaganda, the first full-length revisionist study on the first constructed of the “extermination camps”, Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof) in the Warthegau district of occupied Poland. This volume, which presents an abundance of evidence against the official Chelmno historiography, which has it that some 150 000 Jews were murdered at this camp in “gas vans”, is scheduled to be published in English by TBR Books in mid-2011 with the title Chelmno: Myth and Reality. Among other things, Mattogno demonstrates, based on the published results of four archeological surveys, that the only means of cremation which existed in the camp, a single open field oven of a known type, could only have incinerated at most 45 corpses within 24 hours, so that the cremation of the alleged 150 000 victims would have lasted until 1951, and that the amount of human remains present in the mass graves at the former camp site is absolutely incompatible with the supposed victim figure. Furthermore a diary entry of Herman Kruk’s from 4 July 1942 as well two diary entries penned on 14 and 30 July 1942 by Avraham Tory, the secretary of the Jewish Council in the Kovno ghetto, confirm independently of each other that many of the Jews deported to Chelmno ended up in Lithuania, where they were employed in road construction. With the publication of this volume, all six “extermination camps” (as well as the “auxiliary extermination camp” of Stutthof) have been devoted book-length revisionist studies. It thus marks an milestone in the history of holocaust revisionism.

Naturally Mattogno spends many pages of this book discussing the evidence for the alleged murder weapon employed at Chelmno, the so-called “gas vans”, concluding that the scanty “proofs” dished up by the holocaust historians for the existence and use of these vehicles is devoid of any real evidentiary value. The issue of the “gas vans”, which were allegedly used not only at Chelmno, but also in Serbia and the occupied Soviet territories, is also dealt with in detail in French revisionist Pierre Marais’ study Les camions de gaz en question from 1994, which will be published in a fully revamped English edition as The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation in late 2011.

The indefatigable Carlo Mattogno is most of all known as an expert on the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex, and in December 2010 his most exhaustive study on this subject, Auschwitz: The Case For Sanity, was published in English. This 756-page volume critically examines Jean-Claude Pressac’s and Robert Jan van Pelt’s desperate, deeply flawed and sometimes plain absurd attempts at proving the existence of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Birkenau, as well as traces how the Auschwitz gas chamber legend came into being. It is the most definite revisionist statement on the Auschwitz gas chambers to date. In late 2011 it will be followed by what might justly be called Mattogno’s long-awaited magnum opus, The Crematory Ovens of Auschwitz, a likewise monumental study on the five crematories at Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose incineration capacities play a crucial role in determining the veracity of the mass extermination claims. The publication of these two volumes however does not mark the end of Mattogno’s research efforts. In Healthcare in Auschwitz, scheduled for publication in late 2011, the vast measures undertaken by the Auschwitz camp administration for the sake of the inmates’ health are for the first time revealed in their full scope, including detailed regulations for the proper nourishment of the inmates and the construction of a large hospital complex wherein surgeries were carried out on thousands of Jewish inmates allegedly marked for death. Auschwitz: assistenza sanitaria, “selezione” e “Sonderbehandlung” dei detenuti immatricolati (Auschwitz: sanitary service, “selections” and “special treatment” of registered inmates, Effepi 2010) serves as a sort of companion volume to Healthcare in Auschwitz, as well as a follow-up to Mattogno’s previous study Special Treatment in Auschwitz (2004), and discusses the “special treatment” of registered Auschwitz inmates and the allegation of mainstream historians that this term meant the selection of sick detainees for killing in homicidal gas chambers. This volume will hopefully be published in English during 2012.

As was mentioned some months agp during a broadcast of Carolyn Yeager’s radio show Heretic’s Hour, Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno and myself are embarking on one of the largest revisionist research undertakings to date. The subject of this research project will be the last major aspect of the holocaust that has yet to be dealt with in detail by revisionists, namely the alleged mass extermination of 1 to 2 million Jews carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union. This part of the holocaust is especially complex, as we are not dealing here with isolated phantasms within very limited areas (I am talking here of the “gas chambers” in the “extermination camps”), but with mass shootings of the most varying scopes carried out at hundreds of locations during a three-year period. The orthodox allegations are based on a number of activity and situation reports supposedly based on messages dispatched by the Einsatzgruppen themselves. While there is no questions that mass shootings were carried out in the East, there are several questions in need of critical inquiry, chief of them a) Were the Einsatzgruppen ordered to exterminate Jews based solely on their ethnicity? b) Are the reports presented as evidence for the mass extermination genuine and reliable? and c) How many Jews were actually killed by the Einsatzgruppen? In order to answer these questions we must survey the entire available contemporary documentation on the Einsatzgruppen, which means going through tens of thousands of document pages. In fact, one of the initial obstacles we are now facing even before the start of our research is the pressing need to transfer this vast documentation from microfilm to digital media, something which unfortunately costs a rather large sum of money. We would be most grateful for any helping donations, however small (we can be reached via CODOH).

Where is Holocaust revisionism heading in this new decade? As seen above, we will soon have covered virtually all aspects of the holocaust complex in our research. What remains now, first and foremost, is to reconstruct, piece by piece, what actually happened to the Jews in German-controlled Europe during World War II, to map the real history of the camps, the ghettos, the deportations and the victim figures. Carlo Mattogno has dubbed this new constructive side of revisionism “affirmationism”. The best examples of this affirmationist trend in revisionist research can be found in Mattogno’s own latest studies on Auschwitz. While running the risk of sounding self-promoting, I see my own research concerning the actual fate of the “gassed” Jews as another example of affirmationism, as this seeks to provide an answer to the anti-revisionists’ favorite rhetorical question: If they were not gassed, then what happened to them?

During the coming decade revisionism will have many challenges to meet, but also many opportunities to take advantage of. I will begin with listing the challenges.
First and foremost there is a lack of revisionist researchers. The number of revisionists carrying out original research can easily be counted on both hands’ fingers. This does not mean that we necessarily need x number of full-time researchers. It would be just as well to have a sizable number of spare-time researchers, preferably from varied disciplinary backgrounds, who contribute high-quality articles from time to time, or only once or twice. As a saying in my native Sweden goes, “many small streams will form a large river”. Our opponents consists of an armada of certified court historians and skilled propagandists with virtually unlimited funds and resources as well as mass media and the legal and political systems on their side – yet despite this the field of “Holocaust studies” appears increasingly moribund, not to say braindead. We on the other hand, while lacking manpower as well as fundings, have dedication and the endurance that comes from knowing that historical truth is on our side and that this truth ultimately will prevail.

It would be most welcome if new revisionist researchers would appear in eastern Europe – I am thinking specifically of Romania, Moldavia, the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia – as natives of this region would have many advantages in dealing with the two great remaining problems of revisionist research, the Einsatzgruppen killings and the fate of the “gassed” Jews deported to the occupied Soviet territories. Especially welcome would be research from scholars with access to historical archives. Such researchers should realize that it is possible for them to publish findings of revisionist nature without running any risk of being charged with “Holocaust denial”, provided that they proceed cautiously. For example, if a historian, based on testimonal or documentary evidence, demonstrated the presence of French, Dutch or Belgian Jews in a camp or ghetto in Belarus during the period 1942-1944 – a fact not allowed for by mainstream historiography – but refrained from discussing how exactly these Jews had reached occupied Soviet territory and paid the necessary lip service to the orthodox version of the holocaust, he could go scot free, provided that he knew how to play his cards well. Even discoveries of documents concerning transports of supposedly “gassed” Jews to the East could possibly go unpunished with enough reference to the find constituting an “exception” (though publication outside peer-reviewed channels might prove necessary). This would amount to a sort of “salami tactics” undercover revisionism which might to some seem cowardly, but in some cases, and particularly under an increasingly totalitarian system, this might be the most effective way to proceed. This would serve to undermine the orthodox dogmas from within, by piling anomaly upon anomaly until critical mass is reached and the stability of the building of lies can no longer be maintained. I recommend such prospective researchers to read through my above-mentioned article series on the presence of “gassed” Jews in the East, which should be regarded as a stepping stone for further research into this issue.

The second challenge is the legal persecution of Holocaust revisionists taking place in many European nations. There is no sign that this persecution will decrease, rather we must be prepared that it will increase as revisionism gains new victories. The more the facts presented by us threatens the system, the more we in turn will be threatened by the system. Alarmingly a trend has recently been seen among the governments of the Western world, in connection with the Wikileaks “Cablegate”, to seek to control and censor the Internet. We should expect open or covert attacks on revisionist websites under the guise of campaigns against “online terrorism” and similar, and we should therefore do our best to counter the encroachment of Internet freedom and civil liberties. As long as the Internet remains free, revisionism cannot be stopped.

The third (thankfully minor) challenge is posed by what I prefer to call “pseudorevisionists”. Carlo Mattogno warned about this phenomenon already back in his book My Banned Holocaust Interview, originally published in 1995: “Unfortunately, for some years now, several groups of “Naziskins” have appropriated some revisionist positions for their own particular ideological-propagandistic purposes. These are revisionism’s most dangerous enemies: first, because they spread a version of revisionism which has been simplified to the point of banality, giving the impression that revisionist arguments are all nonsense; and secondly, because they provide a justification for those who claim that revisionism is a Nazi phenomenon (…)”. Today this challenge is not necessarily posed by only people mishandling revisionist arguments for political ends; there are also individuals spreading fallacious arguments in the name of holocaust revisionism. Their usual operating procedure is to claim that virtually every document relating to the fate of the Jews has been forged, without backing up their vast accusations with any form of evidence. Two concrete examples of this are so-called “Krema denial”, the assertion that all or most of the crematorium building at Auschwitz-Birkenau never existed, or that those structures were in fact bakeries or some such, and what might be called “Aktion Reinhardt denial”: the claim that the camps Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka not merely did not function as extermination centers, but actually did not exist at all, with no Jewish deportees ever reaching them. Both of these positions lack any kind of evidential support and are contradicted by archeological evidence as well as hundreds, even thousands of pages of doubtlessly authentic documents – evidence which is fully congruent with the revisionist position and which do not in any way provide proof of homicidal gas chambers. Whether this pseudorevisionism stems from ignorance, politically motivated subjectivism (“everything that furthers my agenda is permissible”) or covert activism by anti-revisionists and Zionist trolls (or “Hasbara activists” as they prefer to call themselves), it lends ammunition to our opponents, who can use these individuals as strawmen and say things like: “See, the revisionists are denying that the camps existed. They are either crackpots or liars”. I should remind my readers that the need to counter this challenge has nothing do with defending any revisionist “dogmas”. Authentic revisionism is, by the very definition of the term, alien to the concept of dogmatic thinking. It is not the abovementioned notions in themselves that are problematic, but the fact that they completely lack any evidential basis. To stubbornly maintain an assertion without present a serious argument for it is to cling to a dogma, hence why I call these positions “pseudorevisionist”. What must be defended is sound scientific methodology. I see no real need for revisionist researchers to spend their valuable time discussing these vapid claims in detail (a rebuttal to Krema denial has already been offered by Mattogno in his article “Zu den ‘nicht existierenden’ Krematorien von Birkenau”, Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, vol. 3, no. 3), but I recommend online revisionist debaters to not let such claims go unanswered – and to educate themselves.
Then we have the upcoming opportunities and good news.

To begin with it looks like the efforts of the powers that be to introduce anti-revisionist legislation into all member states of the European Union will be thwarted – at least temporarily – by constitutional friction in those states yet lacking such heresy laws. A recent statement from Sweden’s constitution committee implies that such legislation most likely cannot be passed before 2014. The “Anti-Racist” legal framework constructed for the implementation of an EU-wide anti-revisionist law has also been watered down by those member states still paying a modicum of respect to the freedom of speech.

The second piece of good news may not be very new, but will have implications for the coming decade. Some four years ago it was revealed that while postwar historians estimated that the Germans had operated between 5,000 and 7,000 detention sites, recent research shows that there in fact existed “somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 000 camps and ghettos of various categories”, the majority of them on located on occupied Soviet territory (“Largest archive of Holocaust records to open”, USA Today (online edition), 19 November 2006). Presently a 7-volume encyclopedia of these camps and ghettos is being compiled by Geoffrey Megargee of the USHMM. This piece of news is of great interest to revisionists, as it ties in with the question of the destination of the deported “gassed” Jews.
Other opportunities for further research will no doubt arise from the “European Holocaust Research Infrastructure” (EHRI), a 7 million euro project in which “seventeen research centres from Europe and Israel” will “transform the dispersed data available for Holocaust research in Europe, Israel and the United States into a cohesive corpus of resources” which will then be made available online for “maximum open access of these data” (cf. http://www.cegesoma.be/cms/index_en.php?article=1575). Experience has shown that openings of archives and releases of unpublished material strengthens the revisionist position while correspondingly weakening the orthodox.
Finally there is a very interesting development on the archeological frontier. As reported by me on the Inconvenient History blog, a young British forensic archeologist, Caroline Sturdy Colls of the University of Birmingham, is currently working on a project which involves identifying the mass graves at the site of the former Treblinka “extermination camp” using “the most up-to-date scientific techniques”. This project will form the basis of her doctoral dissertation, which will be presented at the earliest by the end of this year. Considering the fatal damage which Kola et. al.’s research activities at Belzec and Sobibór have caused orthodox holocaust historiography, the news of this high-tech survey is most welcome. One should never underestimate the Shoah defenders’ propensity for shooting themselves in their collective foot of clay.
All in all, I believe that this will prove one of the most important decades in the history of holocaust revisionism. Let us face every challenge with renewed energy, and may our opponents live in interesting times, as the old Chinese saying goes…

In the recently published study Sobibór. Holocaust and Propaganda co-authored by Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno and myself a subchapter (pp. 361-363) of our discussion on the fate of the allegedly gassed Jews is devoted to a number of quotes from war-year issues of the Swedish-Jewish periodical Judisk Krönika (Jewish Chronicle) which contradicts the established historiography on this most important issue. Jewish-American historian Steven Koblik, who has specialized on Sweden’s war-time relationship with Germany and the ”Holocaust” has the following to say about the journal in question:

“One center of activity was within the pro-Zionist groups. They had a journal, Judisk Krönika, founded in 1932, that publicly tried to change the official congregation policy and influence the larger Swedish community. The journal developed close contacts in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, and provided some of the best information on the extent of the Final Solution found in any Western publication. The journal also became a source of information for other non-Jewish publications.”

In my survey of the war-year issues of this journal – which is still the most important Jewish periodical in Sweden – I came across also a number of news notices relating to the activities of the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories, as well as Soviet evacuations of Jews to the Russian interior and Central Asia. I present them here in chronological order accompanied by a few brief comments.

• Vol. 10 Nr 9 (November 1941), p. 141: “50,000 Lithuanian Jews, who initially had been brought to the interior of Russia, have now been allocated to Mongolian farms. About 100,000 Jews from Ukraine have found a haven of escape in Birobidzhan.” The number of evacuated Lithuanian Jews given here is vastly higher than those presented by mainstream sources, who generally state that approximately 10,000 of these Jews escaped or were evacuated to the Soviet Union before the German invasion (cf. Jim G. Tobias, ”Die Massenexekutionsstätte Ponary bei Vilna 1941-1944” in: R. Margolis, J. G. Tobias (eds.) Die geheime Notizen des K. Sakowicz, Antogo, Nuremberg 2003, p. 14, note 12).
• Vol. 10 Nr 10 (December 1941) p. 156: “News of the most terrifying sort have reached us from the Ukraine. There are reports of thousands of killed Jews, among them 15,000 Galician Jews, who had been expulsed from Hungary. Also in Odessa thousands of Jews are said to have been executed as punishment for a time-bomb which exploded in the city hall and buried in its ruins 200 Romanian soldiers with their staff. Similar reports also come from Kiev and other Russian cities.” (The journal consequently used “Russian” to denote “Soviet”, thus the reason why Kiev in the Ukraine is called a “Russian city”).
• Vol. 11 Nr 1 (January-February 1942) p. 12: “In occupied Ukraine, the violent German anti-Jewish persecution has not been able to destroy the Ukrainian population’s good relationship with the Jews. As far as it is possible, the local government takes care that also the Jews are given normal rations of food. The destitution, however, is enormous, and a large part of the population does not have a roof over their heads, since the houses have been destroyed during the fighting. [...]. According to Deutsche Zeitung im Ostland [an official German newspaper published in Riga] the Russians evacuated 30,000 Jews from Lithuania, 24,000 Jews from Latvia and 1,000 Jews from Estonia at the beginning of the German-Russian war.” The figure of 30,000 evacuated Lithuanian Jews is three times that held by mainstream historiography (see above). It should be noted in passing that the number of Jews evacuated from Latvia by the Soviets is consistent with that found in the general report of the Einsatzgruppe A from 16 October 1941 to 31 January 1942 (23,479).
• Vol. 11 Nr 2 (March 1942) p. 27: “In Minsk, Berditschev, Schitomir and Mohilev there are no longer any Jews. Their houses have been confiscated to be used as winter quarters for German soldiers. All the Jews of Kharkov [Kharkiv] were brought to a concentration camp soon after the German conquered the city. The Jews in the occupied territories are being strongly decimated by epidemics and hunger.” In the Minsk ghetto there lived in fact tens of thousands of Jews at the time. It seems unlikely that the well-informed journal would be so grossly mistaken on this point. It is possible that what was meant was that there were no longer any Jews outside of the ghettos – the second sentence hints in this direction. As for the Jews of Kharkov, mainstream historiography claims that 15,000 of them were shot in the nearby ravine Drobitsky Yar on 15 December 1941.
• Vol. 11, Nr. 6 (July-August 1942), p. 91: “From Uzbekistan it is reported, that the Soviet government has prepared for the creation of permanent housing for the one million Jews which have been evacuated there. (…) After several months on the march, the evacuated Jewish colonists from Crimea have reached their destination, the Siberian territory of Krasnojarsk. [...]. Part of the Jewish farmers from the Ukraine have travelled to Saratov in the Volga district, where they have been given new soil. [...] In Taschkent, where thousands of Jews from Poland find themselves, there have been opened three offices for the registration of the refugees.”
• Vol. 11 Nr. 7 (September 1942), pp. 101-102: “The latest reports to the Polish government in London are concerned with this ['the horrible blood bath'] and according to them, 400,000 Poles, half of them Jews, have been massacred. A report which reached London even states the number of Jews exterminated in Poland alone to 700,000. This figure is so enormously high, that one find it hard to believe in. [...]. Berlin radio has explained, that the message about the killings of 700,000 Jews is not true. Only executions due to actions of sabotage have taken place.” While this quote does not concern the USSR, it is nevertheless worth mentioning here, as it shows that German authorities addressed and explicitly denied the mass killing allegations, while acknowledging executions of (Jewish) partisans (and possibly also reprisal shootings). On page 102 we find a list of a “horrible series of mass executions”: 9,000 Slonim Jews are claimed to have been killed at the beginning of November 1941; 50,000 Vilna Jews from November 1941 onward; another 60,000 Vilna Jews in May 1942; undated mass killings are listed for Lodz (35 000 victims), Lwow (30,000), Stanislawow (15,000), Pinsk (8,000) and Brzesc (6,000). Massacres are also claimed for Czyzew, Szlachecki, Hancewicze and Tarnopol, but neither dates nor victim figures are given. It is further stated that 25,000 Latvian Jews fell victims of pogroms (supposedly carried out by the local population, in contrast to mass shootings carried out by the Germans). As for the alleged Vilna massacre of May 1942, it was reported on by the New York Times on 16 June 1942 (p. 6):
  

  “Stockholm, Sweden, June 15 – Sixty thousand Jews of Vilna were put to death between May 7 and May 20 by the German-controlled Lithuanian police, according to reports brought here by a Pole, who said he was in Vilna until May 24. He arrived in Stockholm a few days ago with an account of escaping from the Nazis by way of Warsaw and Gdynia, where he hid himself aboard a ship bound for Sweden. The Polish refugee’s story of the Vilna massacre, of which he said he was an eye-witness, is impossible to confirm now.
  He said members of the special Lithuanian police, recruited from Germans in Lithuania and Lithuanian Quislingists, started persecuting Jews and Poles immediately after Berlin’s announcement of the so-called autonomous status of the Baltic States at the end of April.
  Until then 80,000 Vilna Jews were concentrated in two ghettoes, the old ghetto near the German quarter and a new one in the Bakshta quarter of the city. After the announcement of the new status all the Jews were sent to the Bakshta ghetto, the Pole stated.
  On May 7 the executions started, he said. The Jews, men, women and children, were taken from sundown to dawn in trucks to the suburb of Ponary, where they were mowed down by machine-gun fire. The executions continued every night until May 20, the Pole related, and during the day members of the Lithuanian police collected and sold the clothing of their victims.
  The Polish refugee said that about 20,000 Jews of ‘useful professions’ such as physicians and scientists and specialized workers, escaped execution and that the number of the victims was estimated in Vilna to be up to 60,000. No German military or Gestapo men were seen taking part in the executions, but neither did they interfere, he said.”

  This alleged massacre of 60,000 Vilna Jews is clearly invented. No other known source claim a mass killing of even remotely this size during 1942, and moreover the figure of 60,000 victims is numerically impossible: In January 1942 there lived some 15,000 Jews in the Vilna ghetto, while according to a census carried out at the end of May the same year, the inhabitants of the Vilna ghetto numbered 14,545 (cf. J. Graf, C. Mattogno, Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 209, 212). The census moreover shows that among these 14,545 ghetto inhabitants, no fewer than 3,693 were children of 15 years of age or less, whereas there were 59 registered Jews aged 65 or older (ibid., p. 212). This clearly contradicts the claim that only ”Jews of ‘useful professions’” were spared. Moreover, one of the major testimonial sources for the alleged mass extermination of Jews at Ponary, the diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, states that not a single Jew was shot at Ponary during May 1942, or for that matter in April or June (R. Margolis, J. G. Tobias (eds.) Die geheime Notizen des K. Sakowicz, op.cit., p. 69).
  The most bewildering aspect of the anonymous Polish witness testimony is the implication that there had been no (large-scale) massacres of Vilna Jews until May 1942, and that until April the same year there had existed two ghettos in the city, housing a total of 80,000 Jews. According to mainstream historiography, there existed two ghettos in Vilna, together housing some 60,000 Jews, until the end of October 1941, when the smaller of the two ghettos (“Ghetto No. 2″) was liquidated. By this time there reportedly remained only some 27,000 – 28,000 Jews in Vilna, which the Germans sought to reduce to 12,000. The Jews now had to get new work certificates and were moved to the now empty Ghetto No. 2. Those Jews who did not managed to receive new work certificates were sent to Ponary and allegedly killed there in three ‘actions’ in late October, early November and December 1941 (ibid., pp. 30-32). The anonymous Polish witness thus places the liquidation of the smaller ghetto in April 1942, when in fact it happened in October the year before! But how could anyone confuse something which happened more than half a year ago with something transpiring a mere few weeks ago?
  By listing the alleged mass murder of 50,000 Vilna Jews together with the alleged mass murder of 60,000 Jews from the same city in May 1942 – despite the two allegations being mutually contradictory – Judisk Krönika somehow wanted its readers to believe that there had lived at least 110,000 – possibly as many as 130,000 – Jews in the Vilna ghetto! Nonetheless, in its issue from May/June 1944 (vol. 13, No. 5, p. 68) the same journal reported that there still lived 20,000 Jews in the Vilna ghetto, but these were said to have been ”foreign Jews” – something which flies straight in the face of mainstream historiography, according to which not a single foreign Jew was ever deported to Vilna (cf. J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington D.C. 2010, pp. 362-363).
  Here should also be noted that mainstream historiography holds it that there remained only some 40,000 Jews in Lithuania by the end of 1941 (ibid., p. 45). Several thousands of Lithuanian Jews were allegedly shot in early 1943, including 4,000 Jews from smaller ghettos in the vicinity of Vilna. In the autumn of 1943 most of the remaining Jews in the country were either sent to Poland to be killed in the “extermination camps” there or deported to labor camps in Latvia and Estonia (ibid., pp. 33-34). However, according to the memoirs of the Hungarian Jewess Reska Weiss, who was deported from Auschwitz to Riga in June 1944 and from there on to Lithuania via Daugavpils (Dünaburg), some 30,000 inmates, mainly Baltic Jews, were detained in a camp in the northern Lithuanian town of Panevezys (Ponevezh). After spending some time there, Weiss was transferred to the ghetto of Siauliai (Schaulen, in western Lithuania), where she was informed by a nurse working in the ghetto hospital that the ghetto’s population amounted to some 30,000 Jews (R. Weiss, Journey through hell, Valentine Mitchell, London 1961, p. 81, 95).

• Vol. 11 Nr 8 (October 1942). On p. 122 we are informed that 76,000 Jews were evacuated from Vitebsk at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, while 24,000 stayed in the city. We are also told that 200 Jews were shot in Kujbysjev as a result of partisan activity, 600 Jews were machine-gunned in the same town the following week. The remaining 15,000 Jews of Kujbysjev were then supposedly massacred during the next following weeks. The Jews in Jelsk were supposedly put on a barge in the Pripjet river which was then made to capsize (!). 5,000 Jews are stated to have been shot in Kersh. A witness, a fisherman named Josef Weingarten, crawled out of the mass grave and escaped. On pp. 122-123 we learn that “The result of the Nazis inhuman actions against the Jews is that they – men and women alike – have joined the guerillas, since they prefer to die in combat rather than be butchered like animals.” That this would in turn result in more Jewish men – and women – being shot as partisans, as well as more Jews being targeted in reprisal shootings ordered due to the activity of the same – increasingly Jewish – partisan groups – goes without saying.
• Vol 11 Nr 9 (November 1942). On pp. 142-143 we find reported massacres on Jews in Belarus (Delchitzi: 1,000 victims; Velizh in the Vitebsk district: 1,400 victims; Vaulino near Pskov: 1,000 victims) and in Lithuania (Ponevezh district: 11,000 victims; Kovno (Kaunas) in 1941: 800 victims). It should be noted here that if we are to believe the so-called Jäger Report, a total of 23,175 Jews had been shot in Kovno up until 1 December 1941. None of the individual Kovno shootings allegedly listed by Jäger are in the vicinity of the figure 800. The nearest ones are 463 and 534. There is mentioned, however, for 18 August, among a total of 1,811 Jewish victims, a shooting of ”711 Intelligentia Jews from the ghetto as reprisal for an act of sabotage”. But if the journal was in fact referring to this particular group of killed Jews, how come that it was unaware of all the other shootings in Kovno?
• Vol. 12 Nr 1 (January-February 1943), p. 6: “It is estimated that at the beginning of 1942 approximately 250,000 Jews were serving [as Red army soldiers] in the Russian battle zone. With the later instituted mobilization of reserve forces the number is likely to reach up to 400,000 in the end.” That the latter estimate was reached, or even surmounted, is indicated by the fact approximately 200,000 Jews are stated to have fallen as soldiers in the Red Army (cf. W.N. Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, IHR, Costa Mesa 1990, p. 108). War-time Soviet reports state that 600,000 Jews served in the Red Army (ibid., p. 111f).
• Vol. 12 Nr 4 (May 1943), p. 63: “Since October 1942 more than 10,000 Jews have been killed by German special troup units only in the Brest-Litovsk district. Thousands have been poisoned with gas in hermetically sealed barns and others have been shot in groups of 60 in the forests in the vicinity.” The claim that barns were turned into improvised gas chambers is, to my knowledge, not found elsewhere.
• Vol. 13 Nr 4 (April 1944), p. 53: “It is yet impossible to say, how many of the Jews living in western Russia and the Ukraine managed to escape when the Germans occupied those territories in 1941 and 1942, and how many of these refugees really managed to find a safe haven after surviving the horrors of war, the starvation and the epidemics. It has been calculated, that between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 Jews were able to reach the Russian interior during this period of time. It is thus likely that, despite the German invasion troups’ massacres on the Jewish population there are about 4,000,000 Jews in Russia. [...]. In fact, more than half of Russian Jewry are at the present living in Ural and beyond this area.” It should be noted here that it is unclear whether evacuated Belarus and Baltic Jews are included in this figure. The 4 million figure is consistent with statements made later that year by a Soviet source, according to which the number of Jews in the world after the end of the war would amount to ”little over 12,000,000”, whereof one third would be ”citizens of the USSR” (see my article ”Soviet Mouthpiece Journal in Late 1944: Only Some 3 Million Jews Exterminated”, Smith’s Report, No. 173, pp. 10-11).
• Vol. 16 Nr 5 (May 1947), p. 94: “In the Ukraine there live once more one million Jews. They have returned from the eastern parts of Russia to their old homes. Kiev and Odessa once more have 125,000 Jews [each?]. In Moscow there live 250,000.” According to the Soviet census of 1959, there lived 154,000 Jews in Kiev, 102,200 in Odessa, and 239,246 in Moscow. The 1970 edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica estimated the Jewish populations of the same three cities to, respectively, 200,000, 180,000 and 500,000 (W.N. Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, op.cit., p. 119).

“[T]he Commission’s extraordinary efforts resulted in an impressive list of “hundreds of Germans, from generals to humble privates”, and a “specific and detailed enumeration of the crimes of which they stood accused”. These records proved indispensable at the IMT.”
http://www.amnestyusa.org/events/western/pdf/AmnestyConference_BazylerMichaelCLE.pdf

This then tells us that without those contributions it would not have been possible to conduct those trials. The war in the east was not just a very intense battle fought with conventional weapons but also a war of ideologies: Communism (Bolshevism) vs. Fascism (National Socialism). The former won, thus the reports of this “Extraordinary State Commission…” should be very carefully scrutinized to eliminate findings tainted by ideology, i.e., insure that what is presented is fact based. Was this done? No international body of forensic experts has ever been appointed to investigate, as was done by the Germans at Katyn and Vinnitsa, to verify the findings of this “Extraordinary State Commission…”. The charges levelled against the Germans at the IMT were based on documents presented by said Commission and even though of dubious origin were taken at face value (Dr. F. Seidler, “Das Recht in Siegerhand”, pp.272/73). “Perpetrator” confessions and eyewitness testimonies? Here is how they were obtained:

“Since the Soviet legal system did not differentiate between police investigation and judicial investigation, evidence obtained during the pre-trial interrogation constituted a prime basis for indictment. Therefore, the bulk of the interrogation records contained defendants’ responses to two instructions, which were posed interchangeably: “Inform the investigation what you know about the destruction of Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality [within a given area],” and “Inform the investigation about your participation in the destruction of the Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality.” The attributive mode of these statements was a reflection of a well-tested interrogation technique “perfected” during the 1930s show trials[…]Confession and eyewitness testimonies were considered of crucial importance. Often they were taken at face value and provided the sole basis for indictment and conviction. Although officially illegal, brutal methods for extracting confession were also a normative component of the Soviet police system before, during, and after the Stalin era. The interrogation practices of the 1930s political trials included threats to the defendant’s family, appeals to his “party conscience,” sleep deprivation, beatings, and torture. With the exception of appeals to party conscience, all were also used widely against alleged collaborators during and after World War II (Alexander Victor Prusin, “Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!”, p.17).

Now to one of the sites investigated by this “Extraordinary State Commission…”, Katyn. In summer 1942, traces of the crime were found by the Germans, but a full investigation did not take place till spring 1943. From the April 13th 1943 Berlin radio broadcast:

“[T]he German authorities inspected the place called Kosogory[…]situated 16 km west of Smolensk, and made the most horrific discovery. A great pit was found, 28 meters long and 16 meters wide, filled with twelve layers of bodies of Polish officers, numbering about 3 000. They were clad in full military uniform, and while some of them had their hands tied, all of them had wound in the back of their skull caused by pistol shot[…]” (Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, Wojciech Materski, Katyn: a crime without punishment, p.305)

The Germans conducted a thorough investigation, inviting: “…twelve forensic experts and their staffs from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, and Hungary. After the war, all of the experts, save for a Bulgarian and a Czech, reaffirmed their 1943 finding of Soviet guilt[…]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

No doubt the above mentioned “Extraordinary State Commission…” was formed as a result of Katyn, to use the common description, because the first traces were discovered in summer 1942 and word probably got out. Following the Berlin broadcast of April 13th 1943, on April 19th 1943 the Supreme Soviet passed a law. From “Fascist Criminals to the Gallows”, by Alexander Victor Prusin:

“The turning point in Soviet retribution policies came on April 19, 1943. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet signed a decree stipulating public execution or heavy prison sentences for Axis personnel and their accomplices found guilty of crimes against civilians and POWs. The decree provided no legal definition of war crimes—it used the all-encompassing terms “atrocities” or “evil deeds” (zverstva or zlodeianiia)—but it stated that while the Axis powers and their accomplices had committed horrible crimes against Soviet citizens, “to date the punishment meted out to these criminals and their local hirelings is clearly inadequate to the crimes they have committed.”[…] While some scholars have suggested that the decree was a direct Soviet response to the German discovery of the mass graves of Polish POWs in the Katyn Forest in April 1943, the fact that the Soviets never published the decree confirms that it was intended for internal purposes. In addition, the issuance of the decree corresponded with an extensive restructuring of the Soviet security organs as part of a massive effort to seek out and punish real and potential collaborators[…]”

Mr. Pursin’s efforts to downplay the connection are appreciated, but publishing decisions was not a customary Politburo practice, for instance, document No. P 13/144, of March 5,1940 concerning Katyn was also not published (Michael S. Voslensky “Das Geheimnis wird Offenbar”, p.29). The restructuring canard is just that, a canard and will not work.

In all, some 25 000 Polish officers, intellectual and officials were murdered by the NKVD, the afore mentioned document speaks of 25 700, with 21 875 executed and the fate of the remaining 3 943 unknown (Ibid, p.30 [the numbers provided by Voslensky add up to 25 800]). The order to kill the Poles was signed by Woroshilov, Mikojan, Kalinin, Kagarowitsh and Stalin (Ibid). The German investigation revealed evidence, among it letters and newspaper clippings found in the clothing of the victims, all dated 1940, i.e., the time before Barbarossa. When the Red Army liberated the Katyn territory, an “Extraordinary State Commission” was formed, consisting of:

“Academicians Burdenko, Alexis Tolstoy, and the Metropolitan Nicolas- this commission was composed of the President of the Pan-Slavonia Committee, Lieutenant General Gundorov; the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Union of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, Kolesnikov; of the People’s Commissar for Education in the R.S.S.F.R., Academician Potemkin; the Supreme Chief of the Medical Department of the Red Army, General Smirnov; and the Chairman of the District Executive Committee of Smolensk, Melnikov. The commission also included several of the best known medico-legal experts[…]”
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-14-46.asp (p.426)

Here is part of what was presented at the IMT:

“GENERAL R. A. RUDENKO (Chief Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.): Members of the Tribunal, the Soviet Prosecution have several times expressed their view respecting the application of Defense Counsel to call witnesses with regard to the mass shooting of Polish officers by the Fascist criminals in Katyn Forest. Our position is that this episode of criminal activity on the part of the Hitlerites has been fully established by the evidence presented by the Soviet Prosecution, which was a communication of the special Extraordinary State Commission investigating the circumstances of the mass shooting of Polish officer prisoners of war by the German Fascist aggressors in Katyn Forest. This document was presented by the Soviet Prosecution under the Document Number USSR-54 on 14 February 1946, and was admitted by the Tribunal; and, as provided by Article 21 of the Charter, it is not subject to argument.

“Now the Defense once again are putting in an application for the calling of three supplementary witnesses-a psychiatrist, Stockert; a former adjutant of the Engineer Corps, Bohmert; and a special expert of the staff of the Army Group Center, Eichborn.

“We object to the calling of these three witnesses for the following reasons: The calling of the psychiatrist Stockert as a witness must be considered completely pointless as the Tribunal cannot be interested in the question of how the commission drew its conclusion-a conclusion which was published in a Hitlerite White Book. No matter how this conclusion was drawn, the fact of the mass shooting of Poles by Germans in Katyn Forest has been unequivocally established by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission.”
(http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/06-03-46.asp, 3 June 1946, pp.289/90)

“Unequivocally established”, when in fact it was a lie. Voslensky, who was an insider, remembers how uneasy everyone felt when the Burdenko report was presented in the Moscow Academy of Science. Especially the part about “shooting in the back of the neck”, presented as a German method, was met with silence because all of them knew that “8gr. of lead in the neck” was an NKVD method (Ibid, p.31).

Khrushchev did not dare reveal what really happened at Katyn when the Stalin area came to a close, fearing that if it is admitted to that his predecessors committed crimes of that enormity, people might feel that the present regime is also capable of committing them (Ibid, p.32). Thus, on March 3,1959, Alexander Schelepin (the names are copied from a book written in German), head of the KGB at that time, wrote a letter to comrade Khrushchev. The letter was marked “Top Secret” and handwritten by the mighty boss of the KGB to avoid it being read by anyone other than Khrushchev. Voslensky provides a copy of the letter, in German, and if need be I’ll produce it. We read, and I am paraphrasing, that the (Katyn) action was undertaken by an order issued on March 5,1940 by a special Troika (a group of three), and 21 857 people were shot as a consequence. No information about this action had been released, the documents stored in a sealed room. Those documents are of no historical value for Soviet authorities and could not be of any interest to our Polish friends. On the contrary, the discovery of the documents could have some unpleasant consequences, because the special Burdenko commission concluded that the crime had been committed by the German fascist aggressors, and that those findings are firmly lodged on the memory of the population (Voslensky writes that at this time nobody believed that version). It is therefore suggested that all documents be destroyed, save for those that recorded NKVD interrogations of some of the victims and they could be shown if needed (Ibid, p.31/2, [“Izvestia”, 19.11.1992]).

Western reports forced the Soviets to re-address the issue, a number of meetings of the Politburo were convened in 1971 to 1973 resulting in an official condemnation of the “lying” and “Anti-Soviet propaganda” by the western press, using the same language as in the times of Stalin. On April 5,1976 it was decided to take some countermeasures concerning western reports re. the Katyn question and play the role of the offended. In 1985 Gorbachev came to power, but it took him four years to finally getting around to address that issue. On March 31,1989 the Katyn issue was placed on the agenda of the Politburo and the CPSU (Communist Party) asked for suggestions as to how to solve this issue. The result: it was decided to blame the NKVD for the crime (Ibid, pp.32/33).

This plan is outlined in a letter to Gorbachev of February 2,1990, by Valentin Falin (head of the international department of the central committee of the communist party). Voslensky provides the wording of this letter, in German, and I can reproduce it. For now, I’ll just paraphrase again: A number of Soviet historians have discovered documents concerning the treatment of POW’s for the years 1939-1940. Those documents are in regards to Katyn and the fate of 14 000 former Polish citizens. In April/May 1940 the prisoners were handed, in batches, from three camps to the NKVD. Lists were compiled, containing on the average 100 names, they arrived regularly at the central authority, four to five per day. The camp commanders were advised not to send registration cards to the central authority. Before the operation began, a strict postal control was enforced, all in- and outgoing letter confiscated. Historians are about to publish this material. This would create a new situation: Our argument that no material on Katyn is stored in the archives will no longer be believed. When considering what the historians have discovered, even though it is only part of the secret, in combination with the facts the Poles base their assessments on, it would make it impossible to maintain the official version. With the 50th anniversary of Katyn approaching, we need to make clear what our position is, one way or the other, and it seems to me that the following variation entails the fewest disadvantages:
We are to inform W. Jaruzelski (Polish head of state) that we have not found any orders and the like to determine exactly what happened at Katyn and who is to blame for that tragedy. We have, however, discovered some material that puts the findings of the Burdenko commission into question. Based on those findings we can conclude that the NKVD officers Beria and Merkulov are personally responsible for the death of the Polish officers (Ibid, pp.33/34 [Komsomol’skaja Pravda, 15.10.1992]).

Thus, Beria and Merkulov were declared to be the guilty, responsible for the death of over 25 000 Polish officers, officials and citizens (the order, signed by Stalin et al surfaced later). Those two had been shot long ago, but the Soviet government claimed to have been unaware of their crimes, and that was the position taken by Gorbachev when he talked to Jaruzelski in 1990. Did Gorbachev know the truth about Katyn? In an interview with Komsomolskaja Pravda he stated that he only opened the files hours before he resigned, i.e., on December 25,1991. When Jelzin arrived, Gorbachev took the files out of the safe and noticed that only Andropov and Tschernenko (sp.?) had opened them before him, begging the question why neither Khrushchev nor Brezhnev had looked at them. Gorbachev explained that this was because 1 500 top secret files of the central committee were stored in Stalin’s former living quarters and only the general secretary of the central committee had access to them. The files contained a note saying that on April 15,1981 the contends were read to comrade J. W. Andropov and that he made himself familiar with the contend. Problem is, in 1981 Andropov was not the general secretary. Also, if it was read to him, others, at least the reader, would have known what the files contained (Ibid, p.35).

Voslensky concludes that the leadership of the CPSU knew the facts about Katyn, but kept lying about it.

Summary.

What is of interest here is the fact that an “Extraordinary Commission” under Burdenko had allegedly undertaken an investigation and came to the conclusion that the “German Fascist Aggressors” were to blame for the Katyn crime. A few more samples of bogus findings by said “Extraordinary Commissions”:

“I refer further to the report of the State Extraordinary Commission relative to the crimes in the city of Kiev[…]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.”[…]”
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp (p.582)
“[I]n 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.” […]
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp (p.589)

The 5 ½ million refers to Auschwitz and Majdanek. We are now told, however, that some 1 million were killed at Auschwitz (Pressac has it at just over 600 000) and about 80 000 ‘died’ at Majdanek. Thus, this “Extraordinary Commission…” missed the mark by over 4.4 million. And last, but not least:

“In this same report, in the last paragraph on Page 136 of the document book, we may read that Camp Belsen was founded in 1940; but it was in 1942 that the special electrical appliances were built in for mass extermination of people. Under the pretext that the people were being led to the bath-house, the doomed were undressed and then driven to the building where the floor was electrified in a special way; there they were killed.[…]”
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp (576/77)

This electric floor nonsense was peddled for a while, then quietly dropped, along with all the other inconvenient “evidence”. This just to demonstrate how thoroughly the Soviets ‘investigated’ and more samples could be provided. Then there is the issue of Stalin’s “scorched earth” order, issued on July 3,1941 during a radio broadcast. Here is how this order was implemented:

“When Nazi forces are reported to be nearing a Soviet district three things happen. if it is a collective-farm the entire population works to gather together anything that might be of use to the invaders. Grain, oil, machinery, food—all are loaded info lorries or peasant carts and evacuated to the rear or handed over to near-by Red Army units. A number of people leave the villages to carry these goods to the rear.
Cattle, livestock and poultry are then driven off into the forests and hidden. In innumerable cases the villagers then set fire to their own homes, applying the scorched earth policy in all its heartrending ruthlessness, and also take to the forests. In other cases a certain proportion of the people remain in the villages to act as bases for the guerilla detachments[…](“We Are Guerillas”, An Account of the Work of Soviet Partisans behind the Nazi Lines, Published by authority of “Soviet War News”, p.5)

How many of those villages were destroyed by the Russians themselves and the crime blamed on the Germans we don’t know. It is also more than reasonable to assume that unwilling villagers were shot by the partisans, the Germans blamed for it. Most of the charges laid at Nürnberg et al were based on the findings of those Commissions, and historians, as well as courts relied/rely on them to write history and sentence the accuse. “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”?( false in one thing, false in everything). Those of us who are questioning the official version are accused of applying this adage and if we were just talking about “uno”, that is one un-truth, the charge would stick. But when looking at the material presented by the Soviets it becomes hard to tell what to believe and what not. In fact, when the cold war started, the Soviets were declared to be compulsive liars by the west, but just from then on, not before 1945.

Only a thorough investigation by independent experts can determine what crimes were committed by the Germans. As is, many a crime blamed on the Germans was in fact committed by the Soviets, as Katyn showed. The Soviets presented graves and bodies which were of their own doing and “experts” determined that the “German fascists” were the criminals. Unless and until all of it is investigated, the charges levelled at the Germans are not fact based but the result of an ideologically driven agenda.

Armes Deutschland.

Wilfried Heink

Of course, where no real evidence can be found, one can always blame the perfectionist evidence destroyers of Sonderkommando 1005 who, with the Red Army and surviving partisans in their back, managed to obliterate the traces of German mass murder at hundreds, or even thousands, more or less obscure sites all over western Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, thus inadvertently providing Fr. Desbois and his likes with the strongest, most impenetrable sort of proof: the tell-tale lack of evidence.      

In a similar fashion, Desbois relies on the so-called Ereignismeldungen (operational reports), taking it for granted that the Einsatzgruppen dutifully reported the number of killed Jews to Berlin, while in cases where no “documentary evidence” can be mustered, he resorts to the rather pagan method of tea-leaf reading. In a typical example of exterminationist double-think, we are to believe that in some cases the Einsatzgruppen leaders reported the exact number of executed Jews (sometimes even with nifty little illustrations of coffins – on formal reports!), while in other cases they took pains to encode reports on mass shootings as “innocent daily meteorological forecasts”, wherein “the number of clouds stood for the number of graves and the amount of rain indicated the number of victims”! Did it occur to Desbois to check if the contents of those “encoded” messages corresponds to the actual weather at that time and place? Or, if there is such a correspondence, are we perhaps to take it that the number of shot depended on the weather? Were Jews saved by sunny days?  

If Fr. Desbois has demonstrated anything, it’s the exterminationist camp’s awkward tendency to shoot itself in the foot. Holocaust by Bullets is a juicy bone thrown to the revisionists. Now we are only waiting for Steven Spielberg to finish his ever-delayed documentary on Babi Yar.