By the term “Action Reinhard(t),” official historiography refers to the (alleged) mass murder of Jews in three German camps: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Some, ahem, historians include Chelmno, but I am using an article by Dieter Pohl, “Massentötung durch Giftgas im Rahmen der ‘Aktion Reinhardt’. Aufgaben der Forschung” (Mass murder by poisonous gas during “Action Reihardt.” Assignment for researchers) as a guideline, and he mentions only three camps. His article appeared on pp. 185-195 in “Neue Studien zu Nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas”, published by Günter Morsch and Bertrand Perz, Metropol Verlag Berlin, 2011—the most recent ‘industry publication’. This book is the result of a conference of May 2008 in Berlin, which was attended by 200 scientists from many countries. The intent was to present new material to help combat revisionists, who, to this day, deny the mass murder by poisonous gasses of millions of Jews in gas chambers. The book is a declaration of “Holocaust” bankruptcy.

But, as my title suggests, the spelling of the name of the action differs: In some publications we read “Reinhard,” in others “Reinhardt.” Why is that? Pohl claims in his article that 1.35 million people (he writes Menschen) were killed during this action: according to him, about one quarter of all Jews killed (here he writes Jews), about half by poisonous gasses. “Action Reinhard(t)” thus refers to an enormous crime, and one would expect exactitude in research, beginning with the spelling of the name.

It might be possible to dismiss the “Reinhardt” vs. “Reinhard” issue as a simple spelling error – albeit an unlikely scenario, for surely “historians” are not that sloppy – if it were not for the reference to Fritz Reinhardt of the finance ministry by Messrs Morsch and Perz in “Neue Studien…”, p. XVII, footnote 11. They write:

“…Die von der unterschiedlichen Schreibweise des Namens „Reinhard“ und „Reinhardt“ in den Quellen ausgelöste Kontroverse über die Frage, ob sich die Bezeichnung „Aktion Reinhard(t)“ auf Reinhard Heydrich oder möglicherweise auf Staatssekretär Fritz Reinhardt im Reichsfinanzministerium bezog, ist mittlerweile entschieden. Die Bezeichnung geht tatsächlich auf Heydrichs Vornamen zurück, der allerdings in den Zeitgenössischen Quellen selbst teilweise fälschlich mit Reinhart geschrieben wurde…“

(Roughly: The controversy concerning writing “Reinhard” or “Reinhardt”, referring to either Heydrich’s first name or that of Fritz Reinhardt of the finance ministry, has been settled. The description goes indeed back to Heydrich’s first name, spelled erroneously at times as Reinhardt.)

Messrs. Morsch and Perz are unclear as to who settled the issue, although they cite sources. But if this was just a spelling matter, and if “Aktion Reinhard(t)” was conceived by Reinhard Heydrich as a ‘Jew killing action’, why even mention Fritz Reinhardt? I am sure Morsch et al. know more about this, but what they know will just not fit into the narrative. Economics did play a role, and after looking at the issue closely, it is apparent that this action was initiated by the finance ministry, by Fritz Reinhardt, and that Reinhard Heydrich had nothing to do with it. His role was appended to the story later on by shysters, who refer to themselves as “historians”.

But before addressing this issue, a little about what Herr Pohl wrote. By stating up front that 1.35 million people were killed during this action, he follows what Julius Wellhausen dismisses as shysterism, to put it bluntly, when he writes:

“Für die Deutung werden die Thatsachen vorsausgesetzt und aus der Deutung werden sie bewiesen“(Die Pharisäer und Sadducäer, 1. Auflage Verlag Bamberg, Greifswald 1874. My copy Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1967, p.66). What he writes is – and Wellhausen is referring to biblical scholars here – that for the interpretation of an event, in this case “The Holocaust”, the event is established as fact up front, and substantiated through the interpretation. In other words, that which should be investigated, “The Holocaust”, is established as fact and substantiated by the interpretations of what is accepted as ‘evidence’. That research into this “action” is lacking, to put it mildly, Pohl confirms:

“Die Hintergründe dieses Massenmordes sind bis heute nicht völlig durchleuchtet.“ (p. 185)

(Trans: The background as to why this mass murder took place has not clearly been established to this day.)

Pohl wrote this after he softened his readers up with tales of gruesome mass murder, including the murder of children, but then admits later that we still don’t know why it happened. Clear indications of the Wellhausen syndrome: one must believe in mass murder, dismissing essentials. As an aside, on December 19 of this year (2011), an article appeared in Die Welt, a German daily, titled: “Hitler gab nicht “den” Befehl zum Holocaust” (Hitler did not issue the Holocaust order). The author, Felix Kellerhoff, writes that between 5.26 and 6.1 million Jews were killed and then continues:

“Obwohl diese Tatsachen unverrückbar feststehen, gibt es eines nicht: den einen schriftlichen Befehl Adolf Hitlers, mit dem das Jahrhundertverbrechen angeordnet worden ist. In keiner Akte ist dieses Dokument aufgetaucht, es gibt kein Zitat daraus und nicht einmal halbwegs verlässliche Zeugenaussagen, wann diese Weisung ergangen sein soll.”

(Even though [mass murder] is a fact, one thing we don’t have: a written order by Hitler to commit the crime of the century. In no file has this document been found: we have no citation of it and no reliable witness testimony as to when this instruction was issued.)

Quite an admission! He tries to explain why nothing resembling an order or plan has ever been found, while still asserting that “The Holocaust” happened:

“…dass der Holocaust nicht auf eine zentrale Weisung Hitlers zurückging, sondern sich zwischen Sommer 1941 und Frühjahr 1942 schrittweise entwickelte”.

(…the Holocaust was not based on a centralized instruction by Hitler, but instead developed step by step between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1942.)

(http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article13759672/Hitler-gab-nicht-den-Befehl-zum-Holocaust.html)

To claim that this “crime of the century,” the alleged plan to murder between 5.26 and 6.1 million Jews, developed on its own is nonsense, pure desperation. But this article is a topic on its own; thus, back to Pohl. He continues on about the deportation of Jews, the establishment of ghettos, that many died/were killed, and that mass murder was already happening on Soviet territory after the war against the S.U. commenced. Then the National Socialist leadership decided, perhaps in September 1941, to conduct mass murder outside Soviet territory as well. On p. 186 we read:

“Aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach am 13. Oktober 1941 beauftragte SS-Chef Heinrich Himmler deshalb den SS- und Polizeiführer im Distrikt Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, eine solche Mordaktion im GG zu organisieren. Vermutlich wurde dieser regionale SS-Führer beauftragt, weil er besonders gute Kontakte zu Himmler pflegte, selbst mit Siedlungsplanungen auftrat und weil er als besonders rücksichtslos galt und schon zahlreiche Verbrechen begangen hatte”.

 (It is most likely that on October 13, 1941, SS-Chief Heinrich Himmler instructed the head of the Lublin district SS and police, Odilo Globocnik, to organize a murder action in the general government. This SS leader was most likely picked because of his good [close] contacts to Himmler, involvement in settlement planning—known for his ruthlessness.)

One needs to read this slowly: It is possible that Globocnik was picked on October 13, 1941, allegedly because of his “good” contacts to Himmler. We don’t know exactly when Globocnik was chosen, but he was possibly picked because Himmler liked him: renowned German efficiency in its finest form.

We then learn that between the end of the 1970s and the mid-1990s advances were made in research into the so-called (sogenannten) Action Reinhardt (he continues to write it with “dt”) extermination camps, referring to “Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen…”, a 1983 publication by Kogon/Langbein/Rückerl and a book he authored with Musial. The Kogon et al. book does nothing to establish mass murder allegations as fact, as no investigation reports by experts in the field of crime investigations are mentioned, i.e. none exist: everything is based on innuendo and circumstance. Pohl admits it when he writes (p. 187):

“Die Forschungen stoßen vor allem durch den Mangel an aussagekräftigen Quellen an Grenzen. Im Gegensatz zu den Konzentrationslagern sind für die Lager der „Aktion Reinhardt” fast keine zeitgenössischen Akten überliefert. Letztere wurden schon im Herbst 1943 fast vollständig vernichtet, die Lagerinstallationen komplett abgebaut [6]…Deshalb stützt sich die Geschichtswissenschaft fast durchweg auf Befragungen der Täter, der wenigen Überlebenden und polnischer Augenzeugen…“

(Research is limited by the almost total absence of meaningful sources. In contrast to the concentration camps hardly any documents have been found about the “Action Reinhardt” camps. Those were almost completely destroyed in the fall of 1943, when the camps were dismantled [6]…This is why historiography is based for the most part on perpetrator statements and remaining Polish eyewitnesses.)

Under [6] we read that Globocnik wrote about the destruction of documents in a letter of January 5, 1944 to Himmler. As a source, Pohl refers to the Nuremberg trials (Der Prozeß gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, Nürnberg 1949, Bd. 34, S. 71). I have not been able to confirm this since I have no access to German documents and there is nothing in Avalon I could find. But even if documents were destroyed, we have no idea what was lost or what anything refers to. To assume that it had to do with mass murder is like saying: “The information we need is contained in the documents we don’t have.” The whole case for mass murder as the intent for “Action Reinhard(t)” rests on hearsay. But, some Globocnik documents survived; more on that later.

Pohl then goes into some detail on Soviet trials, but concedes:

“Was ist diesen sowjetischen Akten nun zu entnehmen? Zunächst muss berücksichtigt werden, dass es sich nicht um rechtsstaatliche Verfahren handelte. In den Vernehmungen wurden die Beschuldigten oft bedroht, gelegentlich, besonders bei den Prozessen Ende der 1940er-, Anfang der 1950er-Jahre wohl auch misshandelt. Deshalb sind individuelle Beschuldigungen und Selbstbezichtigungen eher mit Vorsicht zu betrachten. Die Aussagen zur allgemeinen Lagergeschichte lassen sich jedoch teilweise verifizieren und erscheinen meist glaubwürdig. Deshalb ist es wichtig, die Materialien mit westlichen Untersuchungsergebnissen zu konfrontieren und daraus auf die Glaubwürdigkeit zu schließen.“

(What can be learned from the Soviet documents? First, we must take into account that these were not legal trials (rechtsstaatlich translates into constitutional). During the interrogations the accused were often threatened and sometimes, especially during trials toward the end of the 1940s, abused. As such, accusations and self incriminations must be treated with care. Statements about conditions in the camps can be partially verified and appear to be believable. It is therefore imperative that the material is compared to western investigation results.)

A mouthful, to be sure. Pohl admits that what was beaten out of the accused by the Soviets is for the most part useless; still, he wastes pages on it. As for reports on conditions in the camps, they “seem” to be believable. The last sentence is, however, what takes the cake. He writes that western investigation reports need to be consulted. What investigations? No investigation by a competent body of experts has ever been undertaken. He later mentions Andrzej Kola, who took some soil samples at Belzec. The problem with that is that whatever he claims to have found cannot be verified, since the camp has since been sanitized and the ground covered over. What was offered is bunk. Carlo Mattogno demonstrated this (http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/b/). Pohl later admits that what is claimed cannot be substantiated. He writes:

“Das größte Desiderat bleibt jedoch weiterhin die Rekonstruktion des Schicksals der Opfer. Mit der Entdeckung des Höfle-Telegramms und dessen Veröffentlichung im Jahr 2001 erscheint es möglich, wenigstens die Zahl der Opfer in den drei Lagern zu bestimmen.“

(The biggest ‘desideratum‘ remaining is to ascertain what happened to the victims. With the assistance of the Höfle telegram and its publication in 2001, it appears to be possible to at least determine the number of victims in the three camps.)

Heaven help! First he uses the term Desiderat, a word not commonly used in German. Webster’s defines this as “of desiderare; to desire; to entertain or express a wish to have or attain.” Golly gosh, why use this word when he could have used wünschenswert (“desirable”), or some such? Was it done to befuddle the issue? No doubt in my mind; what he writes is astonishing, to say the least. He admits that we don’t know what happened to the Jews, yet he turns them into “victims.” Then he follows this up by writing that finally in 2001 we became aware of some numbers, thus it is now apparently possible to know the number of “victims.” What was used before, and how is a telegram with some numbers on it evidence of mass murder?

But he is not done with his declaration of bankruptcy, he tells us:

“Lange Zeit spielten die Zeugenaussagen der sogenannten Bystander, also zumeist der Anwohner der Vernichtungslager, keine herausragende Rolle bei der Rekonstruktion der Vorgänge. Zwar haben polnische Justizbehörden vor allem unmittelbar nach dem Krieg und dann in den 1960er-Jahren auch Personen aus diesem Kreis befragt, darüber hinaus ist dies jedoch nicht systematisch betrieben worden. Das ist insofern bedauerlich, als gerade die Anwohner oft einen genauen Einblick in das Lagerleben hatten, manche polnischen Handwerker gingen gar in Vernichtungslagern ein und aus; einige der Trawniki-Männer hatten Beziehungen zu Einwohnern aus dem Dorf. Auch das Eisenbahnpersonal in den Dörfern bestand in der Mehrheit aus Einheimischen. Inzwischen kommt die Zeit für solche Befragungen an ihr Ende.“

(For a long time witness testimonies of the so-called bystanders, neighbors of the camps, were not considered when trying to reconstruct what happened. Although Polish judicial authorities did interrogate some of them after the war, and in the 1960s, but it was not done systematically. This is distressing, for those neighbors were able to observe life in the camps: some Polish tradesmen came and went; some of the foreign guards had relationships with people in the villages. The train personnel also consisted mostly of locals. But by now the time to consult them is coming to an end.)

Unbelievable, but exactly what we have been saying all along. These camps, Treblinka especially, were not hidden: the alleged killing site of Treblinka was on higher ground. And yes, locals came to sell their goods, workers entered and left the camps. At Treblinka, we are told that 880,000 Jews were killed and buried at first in huge mass graves, said graves to measure 50m x 25m by 10m deep (roughly 150′ x 75′ by 30′ deep). Digging those holes could not have been concealed, yet we have no reports, no pictures, nothing; to top it off, those huge pits have never been located. Then it was decided to exhume the bodies and burn them on pyres, with fires raging night and day. And again, not one report by the locals—no pictures, nothing. So yes, Pohl is right; there is no evidence of mass murder.

As for the alleged “murder weapon,” he writes that the exhaust of internal combustion engines was the killer. Again, no details, and here he is careful: diesel engines are mentioned, which are internal combustion engines, but they are unsuitable for mass murder.

What Pohl writes confirms the case made by revisionists. There is no evidence of mass murder in the “Aktion Reinhard(t)” camps. In fact, it was impossible to murder hundreds of thousands without anyone noticing, taking pictures, writing reports, etc. Thus we need to look for an alternative intent to understand what was meant by “Aktion Reinhard(t)”. The “t” spelling gives us our clue. Morsch et al. mention Fritz Reinhardt from the finance ministry, dismissing him of course—but why refer to him at all? When “The Holocaust” story emerged, the real Reinhardt did not fit in and was therefore dropped into a deep, black hole.

But we do have some indications that this “Aktion Reinhardt”, and I am convinced that this is the correct spelling, was an economic undertaking, originating with the finance ministry. Early publications are extremely helpful in determining how the story developed: what was written then and how it compares to what we are told now. One of those early publications provides details, the title Die Todesfabrik (The Death Factory) by the Czech Holocaust survivors Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka (Kongress-Verlag Berlin, 1958). The two arrived in Auschwitz on November 4, 1942 and were transferred to Birkenau two days later (p. 10). They were successful in organizing resistance groups, were well informed as to happenings inside the camp, and so informed the world. Again, the subject of another discussion, but in a sub-chapter of their book, titled “Aktion Reinhard” (pp. 123-126) they provide details of this action. There’s too much to discuss here, so I just copied (from pp. 124-25) portions of the testimony by Rudolf Höß during his 1947 Cracow trial:

“Welche Dimensionen diese Aktion hatte und was für ungeheure Vorteile nicht nur das Reich, sondern auch die nazistische Herrschaftsclique daraus zog, bewies am besten die Aussage des Kommandanten der Auschwitzer Lager, Rudolf Höß, während seines Prozesses:

„Unvorstellbare und nicht abzuschätzende Werte von Hunderten von Millionen sind erfaßt worden. Ungeheure Werte sind gestohlen worden von SS-Angehörigen und Polizisten, von Häftlingen, Zivilangestellten und Arbeitern, vom Bahnpersonal.Beim Entladen der angekommenen Judentransporte blieb das gesamte Gepäck auf der Rampe liegen, bis alle Juden nach den Vernichtungsstellen beziehungsweise ins Lager gebracht waren. Danach wurde durch ein besonderes Transportkommando das gesamte Gepäck in der ersten Zeit nach der Sortierstelle – Kanada I – gebracht, um dort sortiert beziehungsweise desinfiziert zu werden. Auch die Kleidung der in den Bunkern I und II bzw. Krematorien I bis IV Vergasten wurde nach der Vergasung nach der Sortierstelle gebracht.Schon 1942 war Kanada I nicht mehr in der Lage, die Sortierung laufend zu erledigen. Trotz immer wieder neu aufgestellter zusätzlicher Schuppen und Baracken, Tag- und Nachtarbeit der sortierenden Häftlinge und andauernder Verstärkung dieser Kommandos, türmte sich das noch unsortierte Gepäck, obwohl täglich mehrere Waggons, oft bis zu zwanzig, mit sortiertem Material verladen wurden. Berge von unsortiertem Gepäck türmten sich zwischen den Baracken. Die Arbeitskommandos konnten noch so verstärkt werden, während des Ablaufens der einzelnen Aktionen – die immer zirka vier bis sechs Wochen dauerten – war an ein Nachkommen nicht zu denken. Erst in längeren Pausen wurde annähernd aufgeräumt.Nach der Sortierung nach Abschluß größerer Aktionen wurden die Wertsachen und das Geld in Koffer gepackt und mit Lastwagen nach Berlin zum Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt gebracht, von da zur Reichsbank. Eine besondere Abteilung der Reichsbank befaßte sich nur mit diesen Sachen aus den Judenaktionen …Das Zahngold wurde im SS-Revier von den Zahnärzten zu Barren eingeschmolzen und monatlich dem Sanitätshauptamt zugeführt…”So sah die „Aktion Reinhard” aus, (beschrieben von einer besonders maßgebenden Person, dem Kommandanten der Auschwitzer Lager.”

Just roughly: “What dimensions this action had – and the tremendous benefits arrived from it – is best described by Commandant Rudolf Höß during his trial:
“Values in the hundreds of millions were obtained, enormous amounts have been stolen.

During the unloading of the trains, the luggage was left lying on the ramp, all Jews were taken to be executed or admitted to the camp. Thereafter, the entire luggage was sorted out and disinfected in Kanada I. The clothing of those gassed in Bunker I and II, as well as in crematoria I to IV was also taken there.
By 1942 Kanada was no longer able to do the sorting. Despite the addition of new sheds and barracks, the still unsorted luggage was piled high, although several rail cars each day – often up to twenty – were loaded and left with sorted material. Mountains of unsorted luggage piled up between the huts. The work details could be enlarged, however during the individual actions – which lasted approximately four to six weeks – this was impossible.

After sorting, following the completion of a major action, the valuables and money were packed into suitcases and brought to Berlin to the Economic and Administrative Main Office, and from there to the Reichsbank. A special department of the Reichsbank now looked after these things from the Jewish actions …
The dental gold was melted down in the SS infirmary and transported monthly to the main medical office … ”

Such was the “Operation Reinhard”, as described by a particularly influential person, the commander of the Auschwitz camp…”.

The authors (K/K) then go into details, as to how many pair of shoes, dresses, etc., etc., but not one word about the “extermination” camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, the supposed “Aktion Reinhardt” camps. As for clothing etc., K/K tell us that as soon as the arrivals disappeared into the “bath,” quotation marks in the original, all their belongings were taken to be sorted. Nothing sinister here: inmates were issued prisoner’s clothing; though, whatever valuables were found were confiscated, including clothing. It also appears that some inmates carried large amounts of luggage along. We read this in A Year in Treblinka, by Yankel Wiernick:

“Jews from foreign countries brought considerable luggage with them.”

(http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm#chapter5)

This is confirmed in the verdict of the Treblinka trial of September 3, 1965 (this used to be available at the IDGR [Informations-Dienst Gegen Rechtsextremismus] site, unfortunately it disappeared, all I have is the copy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informationsdienst_gegen_Rechtsextremismus]):

“Da alle diese Personen auch noch über zum Teil recht umfangreiches Gepäck verfügten, blieb der Raum für die einzelne Person auf wenige Quadratzentimeter beschränkt.“(Since all of those persons carried considerable amounts of luggage, room for each person [in the rail cars] was at a premium). Based on this, a case for theft can perhaps be made, but not for mass murder.)

Now to what was uncovered at the IMT. The following is from “One Hundred and Ninety-Sixth Day Tuesday; 6 August 1946, Morning Session”:

“REINECKE: It is obvious from the document that Globocznik was acting in his capacity as SS and Police Leader, charged with a secret special task, the so-called “Aktion Reinhard.” He is acting solely as police executive. Any connection between this activity and the organization of the General SS or any of its members does not exist in any way…

HERR PELCKMANN: Would you look to the top of Page 3? I think that indicates quite clearly who was dealing with those matters, and on whose authority Globocznik was acting.

REINECKE: Page 3 of this document shows that the Aktion Reinhard was divided into four parts: (a) resettlement, (b) use of labor, (c) use of materials, (d) seizure of hidden values and real estate. It also shows that Globocznik was communicating with Oswald Pohl personally, as well as with Himmler, on this matter. Pohl was chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office,…

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-06-46.asp

Okay, we read “Reinhard” with no “t”, but this could be a translation issue. But here we have what “Aktion Reinhardt” was all about: economic issues. First resettlement of those unable to work; then use of labor and material; last the seizure of valuables. Why would the Germans kill valuable laborers, desperately needed for the war effort? And no, not just women, children and old people were allegedly killed in the three camps. Yankel Wiernik writes in A Year in Treblinka: “The day I first saw men, women and children being led into the house of death I went nearly insane.”

(http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm#chapter5)

Now to Globocnik, mentioned by Pohl above. This again is from the verdict of the German Treblinka trial referred to before. Under II. Die Endlösung im Generalgouvernement (The final solution in the general government), regarding actions in the three Reinhardt camps we read:

“Sie wurde in diesem Bereich – wahrscheinlich in Anlehnung an den Vornamen des damaligen Chefs des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes Reinhard Heydrich – unter der Tarnbezeichnung “Aktion Reinhard” oder auch “Einsatz Reinhard” durchgeführt.“

(The covert actions undertaken under the term “Action Reinhard” or “Effort Reinhard” were possibly named after the chief of the security office of that time, Reinhard Heydrich.)

Possibly? And then again not. True, the spelling used by the ‘judges’ was that of Reinhard, but as Messrs. Morsch and Perz point out, we have two different spellings. And as can be shown, economics were the issue: the ministry of finance initiated this action, hence “Reinhardt”.

Back to the verdict: first a letter from Viktor Brack from the chancellery (and we are to believe that Hitler was not involved) to Himmler, of June 23, 1942. In this letter, and I have the wording but too long to copy here, Brack informs Himmler that he has made some of his men available to Globocnik for the implementation of this special task (für die Durchführung seiner Sonderaufgabe). He then tells Himmler that he has now added personnel so as to not get stuck should transportation issues arise. Thus, transportation was a concern, understandably so since trains were needed for the war effort. And secrecy had to be maintained, for those deportations were not popular in Germany; quite the contrary.

We then have a second letter, dated October 19, 1943 – and we need to remember that Pohl claims all documents have been destroyed – in which Globocnik informs Himmler that all camps have been dismantled. In another letter of January 1, 1944 Globocnik informs Himmler:

“Die gesamte Aktion Reinhard zerfällt in 4 Gebiete:

A) die Aussiedlung selbst

B) die Verwertung der Arbeitskraft

C) die Sachverwertung

D) die Einbringung verborgener Werte und Immobilien“

(The whole of Action Reinhard consists of four subsections: A) resettlement, B) use of labor, C) use of materials, D) seizure of hidden values and real estate.)

All of these are economic issues, but of course we must read “mass murder” into this. From the Treblinka verdict again:

“Die bei der Aktion Reinhard angefallenen und in den drei Vernichtungslagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka sichergestellten Sachwerte, die dem SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt in Berlin zur Verfügung gestellt wurden, machen nach einem von Globocnik unterzeichneten, für dieses Amt in Berlin bestimmten Bericht über die verwaltungsmässige Abwicklung der Aktion Reinhard den Betrag von RM 178.745.960,59 aus, der sich wie folgt aufgliedert:…“

(The valuables recovered in the three Action Reinhard extermination [sic] camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and made available to the administration in Berlin, are summarized in a letter signed by Globocnik and amount to RM 178.745.960,59.)

178 million plus, not bad. But we must remember that the National Socialists considered them to be ill gotten gains, illegally amassed during the existence of the Weimar Republic. No doubt innocents were affected, but, following the renewed declaration of war by World Jewry, this time from Moscow and published in November 1941 by the “Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee”, Hitler had no choice but to consider all of them a potential threat to national security. (H. Härtle, Freispruch für Deutschland, Verlag K.W. Schütz, Göttingen, 1956, pp. 249-255)

Conclusion

Where are they then if not murdered? This is asked repeatedly; the answer: make a solid case for mass murder and the question becomes redundant. There have been some half-hearted “investigations” conducted in Belzec and Sobibor, but what has been determined is far from convincing and impossible to confirm; the Belzec grounds have been covered. As for Treblinka, where 880,000 Jews were “murdered” according to Yad Vashem, no investigation worth the term has ever been undertaken. The Soviets during their ‘investigation’ determined that the murder weapon was a motor used to pump the air out of the building, thus the Jews mass suffocated (Mattogno, Graf, Treblinka, Extermination Camp or Transit Camp? http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/t/4.html). According to Aradt, at first 700,000 Jews were murdered and buried in huge mass graves (http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/t/5.html, chapter 10) measuring 50m x 25m by 10m deep (roughly 150′ x 75′ by 30′ deep; http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm#chapter3) before being exhumed and burned. Those huge mass graves have yet to be located. An English archeologist, Carolyn Sturdy Colls, offered to investigate. She writes:

“Forensic archeology is the collection of evidence for use in a legal case. This can be anything from investigating a single murder to genocide or war crimes.

It’s hard to believe that there has been no systematic search for the six million victims who perished in the Holocaust.

800,000 people were murdered here at Treblinka and their bodies were never found. It’s time we started looking.

 I’m a scientist and while I obviously feel the same emotions as everyone else when I read about the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, I need to be able to do my job objectively. So I need to shut out these emotions sometimes, and let the evidence speak for itself.

There are some very vocal Holocaust deniers who use spurious archeology to claim that the Holocaust never happened. That’s why it’s so important that we use the most up-to-date scientific techniques. This can be done, and it should be done.”

(http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/11/uk-forensic-archeologist-sets-out-to-refute-treblinka-deniers/)

It now appears that Sturdy Colls is taking a closer look

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2087735/British-archaeologist-discovers-fresh-evidence-mass-graves-World-War-Two-death-camp-Treblinka.html#ixzz1jrlcIibB

But, and this is from the article linked to above:

“As Jewish religious law forbids disturbing burial sites, she and her team from the University of Birmingham have used ‘ground-penetrating radar’…”

So, again no investigation which would include experts in crime investigation and diggings, but just a sort of probing to then cover it all up again. And Jewish laws only selectively forbid digging, that is, it is allowed when they are reasonably sure to find something:

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/news/germany-to-excavate-suspected-holocaust-era-jewish-mass-grave-1.274439

Nothing was found here either, but that is not the issue, digging is. Why then no proper investigation, what are the promoters of the story afraid of? Why not invite experts to come and investigate if all is “obvious”? We also mustn’t forget that this is almost 70 years later, why no investigation earlier? And from what I have seen so far of what is happening at Treblinka now can not be called an investigation, more an effort to satisfy the gullible and also to keep “The Holocaust” front and center.

Therefore, unless and until a proper investigation is undertaken, by experts in the field of criminal investigations – forensic experts – using all the tools at their disposal, including digging, “Aktion Reinhardt” must be considered to have been an economic undertaking.

This morning I found several emails asking and discussing whether a recently posted YouTube video of Ronald Reagan was real. Following the links, I found a short 9 second video of Reagan supposedly questioning the six million Holocaust story.  In the short excerpt Reagan says, “I challenge your history again. There is absolutely no record that six million people were put in concentration camps. They only have 16 million to begin with.”  But something is clearly wrong with this video.

First, the excerpt is taken out of context.  What was Reagan really speaking about?  The excerpt appears like those vintage World War II photos with incorrect captions asserting that something is there in the photo when it is not. A quick examination reveals that the footage is indeed real and was taken in 1967.  But wouldn’t such footage have been used against Reagan in his various political campaigns including two for the presidency?  And, even if buried at the time, surely such footage would have come out during his controversial visit to the Waffen SS cemetery at Bitburg.  But, I have no recollection of such comments.

Today, however thanks to the power of the Internet, one is able to answer such questions in minutes.  The short clip was indeed Reagan and it was taken in 1967.  However, the topic was not the Holocaust.  In fact, during a CBS Television and Radio broadcast on May 15th hosted by Charles Collingwood, then Governor Ronald Reagan was debating aspects of the Vietnam war with then Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Jeff Jordan asked Reagan whether he approved that the Diem regime put six million in forced prison camps and that American advisors did nothing “but help them in this.”  To which Reagan responded,

“I challenge your history again. There is absolutely no record that six million people were put in concentration camps. They only have 16 million to begin with. Now, I’d also like to challenge something else about the supposed evils of the Diem regime. I do approve of Diem’s land reform in which he took from the great mandarin holdings, and began to make land available to the peasants and to the people of Vietnam, who had never owned land before. But also, I would like to call to your attention that a team from the U.N. was sent to Saigon, Vietnam, to investigate the charges against Diem’s regime They did investigate those, but as they returned to this country, Diem was assassinated, which I think was one of the great tragedies of this whole conflict; and the United Nations report, which they declined to make official because they thought why bring anything up now that he’s been killed, has on the other hand, been published, there has been public access to it, and the United Nations report completely cleared the Diem regime of any of the charges that had been brought against him.”

And thus in minutes our 9 second clip is exposed as a complete hoax.  I certainly hope that this hoax disappears quickly from the internet and is not passed around by those who think they have found an ally in Ronald Reagan. This video post, with it’s false caption, asserting a Holocaust connection does a disservice to all interested in historical truth.  It, along with its originator, should be denounced from all quarters.

The subject of what was known about the event now referred to as The Holocaust – and when it was known – has interested me for a while. During the occurrence of this alleged event – and it is referred to as an “event” more often than a “crime” — we have no solid information as to its actual occurrence. There were some reports, but they can be dismissed as rumors. But:

“It can be shown that the intelligence services of the Western Allies had a fairly accurate picture of what was going on in Germany. This was the case even before Mr. Allan Welsh Dulles, as head of the continental branch of the OSS, went to Switzerland (November 1942) and established permanent contacts with the Underground[...]” (Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler, Henry Regnery Company, Hinsdale, Illinois 1948, p. 20)

True, Rothfels writes about the German opposition, but that the western intelligence services were well informed as to happenings in Germany is a fact, and that includes detailed information about concentration camps. For instance, Erwin von Lahousen, a high ranking Abwehr (intelligence service) official testified at the IMT:

“We were currently informed of all happenings by our officials at the front or in the camps. Offices of the Abwehr Division III were active in these camps, and in this way, that is, through the normal service channels, we were informed by reports and oral presentation of all these measures and of their effects.” (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/11-30-45.asp, p. 458)

And still, even though spies and traitors were everywhere, nothing of substance was known about this alleged mass murder of Jews. In fact Rothfels writes in the abovementioned book, on p. 18:

“Of course, all this changed in the spring of 1945. The unbelievable horrors which were then discovered in the liberated camps…shook the western world[...]”

Nothing during the war? The alleged horrors were only discovered after it ended? That this is impossible has been realized and is of concern, thus efforts are made to rectify it, sort of. In a news article of January 16, 2009 in Spiegel Online, re. the upcoming (2010) publishing of “Das Amt und die Vergangenheit” we read that 200,000 Germans and Austrians were directly involved in the mass killings, with another 200,000 assisting. If this was so, details about it would have been known without the assistance of the secret services, but that was not true. Most of the ‘details’ disappeared after the Nuremberg trials. Perhaps this is why we are now back to square one. In the latest publishing “Neue Studien zu Nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas” (2011) we read in the introduction that: “Even when it became known following the war what had happened in the camps…”, echoing what Rothfels wrote back in 1948.

There’s no consensus here either, as is the case with all things “Holocaust.” But this is a serious issue, for if it happened it would have been known, and since nothing was known…

But assuming it did occur. But, if the “Nazis” did murder millions of Jews in gas chambers of various designs, then Germans would have known about it and the subject of guilt would certainly arise. We are aware of Goldhagen’s assertion that ordinary Germans killed Jews willingly and happily. Basically if “The Holocaust” happened, then his is the only plausible theory.

But this theory can not be substantiated and to try and find an answer I look to older books, to find out how this issue was addressed in earlier publications. One of those books, Jewish Frontier, Anthology 1934-1944 (Jewish Frontier Association, Inc. New York, 1945), contains an essay by Hannah Arendt, titled “German Guilt”. It appeared in January 1945. And it is this essay I will take a closer look at, because of Arendt’s desperate attempt at an explanation.

Arendt starts out with:

“The greater the military defeats of the Wehrmacht in the field, the greater becomes that victory of Nazi political warfare which is so often incorrectly described as mere propaganda. It is the central thesis of this Nazi political strategy that there is no difference between Nazis and Germans, that the people stand united behind the government, that all Allied hopes of finding part of the people uninfected ideologically and all appeals to a democratic Germany of the future are pure illusion…”

The fact that the majority of Germans supported Hitler and the “Nazis” (I don’t like the term, it is used in a derogatory fashion) troubles Arendt, and as an explanation she claims that “Nazi political warfare” is to blame: Germans fell for it, which is of course nonsense. Winfried Knörzer writes that following the war the “virus theory” was advanced, the virus spreading from Hitler to infect the otherwise healthy populace (W. Knörzer, Stufen der Dämonisierung in der deutschen Vergangenheitsbewältigung [stages in Germany’s attempt to deal with the past]). And, efforts are still made to come to terms with this. In August of this year The End, Hitler’s Germany, 1944-45, by Ian Kershaw, was published. And although Kershaw only deals with the last two years of National Socialism, in an article in The Observer we read:

 “…Because no one, he maintains, has tried to answer the most important question – why did the Germans keep fighting to the bitter end, long after it was clear to any rational person that the war was lost and that to prolong it would only add further destruction to Germanys cities and misery to its population? Why were Hitler’s suicidal orders still obeyed? Kershaw argues that the answers are to be found by examining the structures of rule and states of mind inside Germany at this time.”(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/21/the-end-ian-kershaw-review)

Kershaw completely ignores the traitors in the thesis he advances. His thesis is useless. But that is not the issue here, for he clearly also tries to find an answer as to why Germans supported Hitler to the bitter end. His endeavors of explanation fall flat, but these strenuous attempts to find the answer as to why a highly advanced, civilized people could become complicit in mass murder are an indication that all is not well with the official narrative. All of them ignore the elephant in the room, i.e., what is alleged could not have happened or Germans would have found out and turned against Hitler. They stopped the euthanasia program. Also, Germans did very well in that time period and therefore knew that the war was forced on them, thus the support.

Now back to Arendt. She continues:

“The implication of this thesis is, of course, that there is no distinction as to responsibility, that German anti-Fascists will suffer from defeat equally with German Fascists, and that the Allies had made such distinctions at the beginning of the war only for propaganda purposes. A further implication is that Allied provisions for punishment of war criminals will turn out to be empty threats because they will find no one to whom the title of war criminal could not be applied.”

Guilt by association. All Germans were guilty: an early Goldhagen theory. And Arendt means what she wrote, as she continues, and this is still from the first page of her essay, p.470 in the book:

“That such claims are not mere propaganda but are supported by very real and fearful facts, we have all learned in the past seven years. The terror-organizations which were at first strictly separated from the mass of the people, admitting only persons who could show a criminal past or prove their preparedness to become criminals, have since been continually expanded…Whereas those crimes which have always been a part of the daily routine of concentration camps since the beginning of the Nazi regime were at first a jealousy guarded monopoly of the SS and Gestapo, today members of the Wehrmacht are assigned at will to duties of mass murder.”

There’s no credible evidence that crimes were committed in the camps. Nor was there any direct mention of mass murder. All of that was put together following the war and never substantiated. She ignores the brutal partisan warfare, which sometimes elicited stern countermeasures by the Wehrmacht (armed forces). In her world Germans were willing mass murderers. But it doesn’t stop there:

“These crimes were at first kept secret by every possible means and any publication of such reports was made punishable as atrocity propaganda. Later, however, such reports were spread by Nazi-organized whispering campaigns and today these crimes are openly proclaimed under the title of “measures of liquidation” in order to force “Volksgenossen” whom difficulties of organization made it impossible to induct into the “Volksgemeinschaft” of crime at least to bear the onus of complicity and awareness of what was going on.” (pp. 470/71)

And there goes the ‘Top Secret’ theory, everyone in Germany – if not complicit – knew about it. The “Nazis” made sure of it. It is hard for me to understand how a seemingly intelligent woman can spout such nonsense. The only explanation: this was a desperate attempt on her part to try and find an answer as to why the majority of Germans supported Hitler to the end. Arendt was born in Germany; she knew Germans and sensed that what later was to become known as “The Holocaust” would be a hard sell. I lived in Germany at that time. My father, who hated “Nazis,” listened to the BBC, but even he never mentioned anything about mass murder of Jews. And here we are being told that all of Germany knew about “these crimes”. Though Arendt is vague as to specifics. German officials visited Switzerland, for instance, but seem to have ‘forgotten’ to go into details about “these (alleged) crimes” when talking to foreigners. Hans Gisevius, a one time secret service official with good connections, was one of them, but never told Dulles, whom he met in Switzerland, about any mass murder of Jews, even though people like Gisevius tried to topple Hitler (Allan Welsh Dulles, Germany’s Underground, Da Capo Press, 2000, pp.125ff). In fact, Dulles never mentions anything about “The Holocaust” in his book, much to the dismay of Neal H. Petersen (Ibid, p. xxiv). Also, at the IMT at Nuremberg, not one of the high-ranking officials who should have known about what was alleged knew anything at all. Thus it was established that only 200-300 were ‘in the know’. Arendt then tells the truth, but tries hard to explain it away. From p. 471:

“In order to appreciate the decisive change of political conditions in Germany since the lost battle of Britain, one must note that until the war and even until the first military defeats only relatively small groups of active Nazis, among whom not even the Nazi sympathizers were included, and equally small numbers of active anti-Fascists really knew what was going on. All others, whether German or non-German, had the natural inclination to believe the statements of an official, universally recognized government rather than the charges of refugees, which, coming from Jews or Socialists, were suspect in any case. Even of those refugees, only a relatively small proportion knew the full truth and even a smaller fraction was prepared to bear the odium of unpopularity involved in telling the truth.’

With the “change of political conditions” she is referring to what she wrote above, Germans were turned into accomplices and willingly allowed this to happen. The important part here is that rumors were spread about “these crimes”, but since nothing could be substantiated, a given, they were dismissed. Arendt however claims that the stories were not believed because they were told by “Jews or Socialists” and that people refrained from talking about “these crimes” for fear of becoming unpopular. Nonsense is not a strong enough term, pure desperation describes it better. But she is not done. On the same page:

“As long as the Nazis expected victory, their terror organizations were strictly isolated from the people and, in time of war, from the army…It was only their defeats which forced the Nazis to abandon (p. 472) this concept and pretend to return to old nationalist slogans. The active identification of the whole German people with the Nazis was part of this trend. National Socialism’s chances of organizing an underground movement in the future depend on no-one’s being able to know any longer who is a Nazi and who is not, on there being no visible signs of distinction any longer, and above all on the victorious powers’ being convinced that there really are no differences between Germans. To bring this about, an intensified terror in Germany, which proposed to leave no person alive whose past or reputation proclaimed him an anti-Fascist, was necessary.”

One needs to read this slowly to let it sink in. We are told here again that at first “these crimes” were kept a secret. Fact is, however, that this secret was kept till the very end. But Arendt understands that if what is alleged did happen it could not have been kept secret, thus she transforms the whole of the German population, minus the anti-fascists, into accomplices. To realize this she claims terror was unleashed; this of course never happened, although because of the many foreign workers in Germany, and thus acts of sabotage, police presence had to be increased. She has to admit, however, that:

“In the first years of the war the regime was remarkably “magnanimous” to its opponents, provided they remained peaceful.”

But:

“Of late, however, countless persons have been executed even though, by reason of years without freedom of movement, they could not constitute any immediate danger to the regime.”

How would Arendt have known about this change of policy? She fled to Paris in 1933 and moved to the US in 1941. As for communists and others being a danger to the regime, they were. The National Socialists were far too lenient when they came to power. But Arendt is not done, she continues, still on p. 472:

“On the other hand, prudently foreseeing that in spite of all precautionary measures the Allies might still find a few hundred persons in each city with an irreproachable anti-Fascist record—testified to by former war prisoners or foreign laborers, and supported by records of imprisonment or concentration camp internment—the Nazis have already provided their own trusted cohorts with similar documentation and testimony, making these criteria worthless. Thus in the case of inmates of concentration camps (whose number nobody knows precisely, but which is estimated at several million), the Nazis can safely either liquidate them or let them escape: in the improbable event of their survival (a massacre of the type which already occurred in Buchenwald is not even punishable under the war crimes provisions)—it will not be possible to identify them unmistakably.”

One has to marvel at those clever “Nazis”, providing their followers with documentation to show that nothing happened. She has it right of course, the documentation discovered does not prove that “The Holocaust” happened, but these are original documents, not forgeries to influence public opinion. As for murdering all the inmates, that also did not happen, the world was full of “survivors” after the war, in fact still is and I have no idea what the reference to Buchenwald is all about.

As for good and bad Germans, Arendt has this to say on p. 473:

“The most extreme slogan which this war has evoked among the Allies, that the only “good German” is a “dead German,” has this much basis in fact: the only way in which we can identify an anti-Nazi is when the Nazis have hanged him. There is no other reliable token.”

Incredible, but she is only warming up:

“These are the real political conditions which underlie the charge of the collective guilt of the German people. They are the consequences of a policy which, in the deepest sense, is a- and anti-national; which is entirely determined that there shall be a German people only if it is in the power of its present rulers; and which will rejoice as at its greatest victory if the defeat of the Nazis involves with it the physical destruction of the German people. The totalitarian policy, which has completely destroyed the neutral zone in which the daily life of human beings is ordinarily lived, has achieved the result of making the existence of each individual in Germany depend either upon committing crimes or on complicity in crimes.”

Words fail me. According to this person, obviously filled with hate, existence in Germany depended on complicity in crimes, and Germans either become “Nazis” and murderers or they deserved to die. As for propaganda:

“The success of Nazi propaganda in Allied countries, as expressed in the attitude commonly called Vansittartism, is a secondary matter in comparison. It is a product of general war propaganda, and something quite apart from the specific modern political phenomenon described above.”

Allied propaganda, i.e., Vansittartism which was dripping with hatred, was ineffective when compared to “Nazi” propaganda, but it gets worse. On pp. 473/74 we read:

“But even the best-intended discussions between the defenders of the “good Germans” and the accusers of the “bad” not only miss the essence of the question—they plainly fail to apprehend the magnitude of the catastrophe. Either they are betrayed into trivial general comments on good and bad people, and into a fantastic over-estimation of the power of education, or they simply adopt an inverted version of Nazi racial theory. There is a certain danger in all this only because, since Churchill’s famous statement on the subject, the Allies have refrained from fighting an ideological war and have thus unconsciously given an advantage to the Nazis”.

Aha, no ideological warfare by the Allies. They fought “the good war.” To stay with German guilt:

“The true problem however is not to prove what is self-evident, namely that Germans have not been potential Nazis ever since Tacitus’ times, nor what is impossible, that all Germans harbor Nazi views. It is rather to consider how to conduct ourselves and how to bear the trial of confronting a people among whom the boundaries dividing criminals from normal persons, the guilty from the innocent, have been so completely effaced that nobody will be able to tell in Germany whether in any case he is dealing with a secret hero or with a former mass murderer.”

No comment, but she seems to waver a bit later on. From pp. 474/75:

“Among the responsible in a broader sense must be included all those who continued sympathetic to Hitler as long as it was possible, who aided his rise to power, and who applauded him in Germany and in other European countries…Yet these people, who were co-responsible for Hitler’s crimes in a broader sense, did not incur any guilt in a stricter sense. They, who were the Nazis’ first accomplices and their best aides, truly did not know what they were doing nor with whom they were dealing.”

Innocent accomplices? This is exactly what she is implying, claiming that although Germans were made aware of the crimes, they somehow did not consider them to be crimes. This yarn is spun ’till today. In “Death Dealer. The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz”, concerning the alleged confession written by commandant Höß, the translators/authors write:

“It is only at the end of his autobiography, written almost two years after the war had ended, that the moral implications of what Hoess did occurred to him and began to affect him consciously”.

Hard to believe anyone can write this, or in the case of Arendt suggest it. But, she has more to say on this subject, after she told us that starving “of seventy to eighty million Germans” would “simply mean that the ideology of the Nazis had won” she continues on pp. 475/76:

“Just as there is no political solution within human capacity for the crime of administrative mass murder, so the human need for justice can find no satisfactory reply to the total mobilization of a people for that purpose. Where all are guilty, nobody in the last analysis can be judged.*

* That German refugees, who had the good fortune either to be Jews or to have been persecuted by the Gestapo early enough, have been saved from this guilt is of course not their merit. Because they know this and because their horror at which might have been still haunts them, they often introduce into discussions of this kind that insufferable tone of self-righteousness which frequently and particularly among Jews, can turn into the vulgar obverse of Nazi doctrines; and in fact already has.”

She spares no one and goes into detail:

“For that guilt is not accompanied by even the mere appearance, the mere pretense of responsibility. So long as punishment is the right of the criminal—and this paradigm has for more than two thousand years been the basis of the sense of justice and right of Occidental man—guilt implies the consciousness of guilt, and punishment evidence that the criminal is a responsible person. How it is in this matter has been well described by an American correspondent, in a story whose dialogue material is worthy of the imagination and creative power of a great poet.

Q. Did you kill people in the camp? A. Yes.

Q. Did you poison them with gas? A. Yes.

Q. Did you bury them alive? A. It sometimes happened.

Q. Were the victims picked from all over Europe? A. I suppose so.

Q. Did you personally help kill people? A. Absolutely not. I was only paymaster in the camp.

Q. What did you think of what was going on? A. It was bad at first but we got used to it.

Q. Do you know the Russians will hang you? A. (Bursting into tears) Why should they? What have I done? (Italics mine. PM, Sunday, Nov. 12, 1944.)”

No mention of Jews, just people, the Jewish “Holocaust” was invented later. Arendt continues along the same lines and for her, Himmler was the arch villain. We learn that:

“Heinrich Himmler is not one of those intellectuals stemming from the dim No-Man’s Land between the Bohemian and the Pimp, whose significance in the composition of the Nazi elite has been repeatedly stressed of late. He is neither a Bohemian like Goebbels, nor a sex criminal like Streicher, nor a perverted fanatic like Hitler, nor an adventurer like Goering. He is a “bourgeois” with all the outer aspect of respectability, all the habits of a good paterfamilias who does not betray his wife and anxiously seeks to secure a decent future for his children; and he has consciously built up his newest terror organization, covering the whole country, on the assumption that most people are not Bohemians nor fanatics, nor adventurers, nor sex maniacs, nor sadists, but, first and foremost job-holders, and good family-men”.

The “Banality of Evil” as she would term it later, ordinary people turning into mass murderers, (allegedly) committing crimes of an immensity that boggles the mind, but without realizing that they were doing wrong. Some might say: Oh well, this was written in 1945, we now know much more. To them I reply: A crime of that enormity, had it happened, could not have been kept secret. But, nothing of substance was known about it during or shortly after its alleged occurrence; no investigation by experts in crime investigations was ever undertaken. Why not? Because what is alleged never happened, and the mental contortions of Arendt are evidence of that. If facts about this alleged crime had been available, then there would have been no need for these daring mental gymnastics performed by Hannah Arendt.

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“History is a race between EDUCATION and CATASTOPHE” –H.G. Wells.

On 11 October 2008 an article appeared in junge Welt, a German daily, titled “Er galt als Amispizel und mußte aus dem Weg geräumt werden“ (He was considered to be an American agent/spy and had to be eliminated), featuring a picture of Adolf Eichmann (I was unable to access the original junge Welt article at this time, available here but for a fee

https://www.jungewelt.de/loginFailed.php?ref=/2008/10-11/001.php ,

the following a link to a copy http://www.kominform.at/article.php/2008101023471245/print ).

The headline continues to say that the article is an interview with Gaby Weber about the mass murderer Adolf Eichmann and that he knew too much about the tripartite dealings (Dreiecksgeschäft) concerning the Israeli atomic bomb. Weber has written a book about what she had uncovered titled chatting with Socrates and followed this up in a radio show on Deutschlandfunk on 4 March of this year (2011). This suggests that here, too, the official version differs from actual events.

Before addressing the Weber research results, let’s review some background on what was known about Adolf Eichmann, and when. He came into prominence at the IMT when, on 14 December 1945, an affidavit by Dr. Wilhelm Höttl was introduced as evidence (Document 2738-PS; Exhibit USA-269), in which Eichmann was mentioned. Here is part of the presentation by Major Walsh at the IMT:

“I do wish, however, to offer one document, a statement, to establish the deaths of 4 million Jews in camps and deaths of 2 million Jews by the State Police in the East, making a total of 6 million- Document 2738-PS, Exhibit USA-296. This is a statement of Adolf Eichmann, Chief of the Jewish Section of the Gestapo, and the source of the figures quoted — made by Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, Deputy Group Leader of the foreign section of the Security Police Amt IV of the RSHA.

Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, in affidavit form, made the following statement; and I quote from page 2:

“Approximately 4 million Jews had been killed in the various concentration camps, while an additional 2 million met death in other ways, the major part of which were shot by operational squads of the Security Police during the campaign against Russia.” (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/12-14-45.asp, p. 569)

This was sort of confirmed by Captain Dieter Wisliceny who, on 3 January 1946, testified at the IMT:

“WISLICENY: Eichmann personally always talked about at least 4 million Jews. Sometimes he even mentioned 5 million. According to my own estimate I should say that at least 4 million must have been destined for the so-called final solution. How many of those actually survived, I am not in a position to say.” (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/01-03-46.asp, p. 371)

Incidentally, this does not establish as fact the deaths of 6 million Jews. But we are not concerned here with fallacious IMT figures; instead, we are concerned with what was known both by and of Eichmann and when. While he was mentioned a few more times at the IMT, an arrest warrant was not issued until 1956. Moreover, Höttl never appeared in court nor was he ever cross-examined. Rudolf Höß, first Auschwitz camp commandant, also mentioned Eichmann in his memoirs, allegedly written while incarcerated in Poland. The following is from Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, edited by Steven Paskuly and translated by Andrew Pollinger, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992, pp. 27-29:

“In the summer of 1941, I am unable to recall the exact date, I was suddenly ordered by Himmler’s adjutant to report directly to the Reichsführer SS 1. in Berlin…Himmler greeted me with the following: ‘The Führer has ordered the Final Solution of the Jewish question. We the SS have to carry out this order…You will learn the further details through Major [Adolf] Eichmann of the RSHA [Reich Security Headquarters], who will soon visit you’…A short time after that Eichmann came to see me at Auschwitz…Eichmann wanted to find a gas that was easy to produce and one that would require no special installations; he then would report back to me. We drove around the Auschwitz area to locate a suitable place. We thought the farmhouse at the northwest corner of Birkenau near planned Section III would be suitable. 6. The house had been abandoned, and it was hidden from view by the surrounding trees and bushes and not too far from the railroad. The bodies could be buried in long, deep pits in the nearby meadows. We didn’t think about burning them at this time…”

This sounds like it was copied from a comic strip, but that’s also not the issue here. According to this, Eichmann was involved in the “final solution,” the alleged mass murder of Jews, his name and role known, yet no effort was made to find him! He lived in Germany until 1950, “unbehelligt” (undisturbed) according to Weber, and only left for Argentina that year. He entered Argentina under a false name, but his children registered in school under their real name and were also registered under their correct name at the German embassy. One has to wonder how this was possible: the “architect” of the “final solution” never bothered or pursued. At his trial he came across as an official doing his job, prompting Hannah Arendt to write about “the banality of evil”. It is true that Eichmann organized the transportation of Jews to various camps, but he also helped them emigrate.

Höttl, in his book Secret Service (Enigma books New York 2003 [I was unable to obtain an original 1953 edition]), had this to say about Eichmann:

“When Eichmann left for Berlin, where I was also transferred, I stayed in touch with him, since I repeatedly needed favors from him.

How is it possible that someone, who until that point could only be accused of expelling tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, out of Germany, even though applying methods that were not always decent, would “turn around” from one day to another and hand over the Jews (who stayed behind to their death) with the same fanaticism and unfortunately also with the same talent for organization? True, before that Eichmann zealously defended his plans to settle the European Jews on Madagascar — even Napoleon had a similar plan — or in Poland, in an empty space near Nisko on the San River…” (emphasis added; p. 308)

Before that, Höttl goes into detail about Eichmann saving “trustworthy Jews”, but then he allegedly made a “turn around” and delivered them to their death. Quite the story! Very little has been written about Eichmann before his capture, not even the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, normally a good source, seems to have concerned itself with Eichmann (publishing of their quarterlies, Viertlejahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte [VfZ] started in 1953). In 1965, an article titled “Hannah Arendt, Eichmann und die Kritiker (H. Arendt, Eichmann and the critics) appeared. The author, Hans E. Holthusen,  performed a tightrope act so as not to ‘offend’ Arendt (VfZ 1965, Heft 2, pp. 179-190). Only in 1981 was Eichmann mentioned again, in Eichmann und die Nisko-Aktion im Oktober 1939, by Seev Goshen. (Jahrgang 29, 1981, Heft 1, pp. 74-96).

S. Wiesenthal writes:

“Seit dem Frühjahr 1959 waren in verschiedenen israelischen Zeitungen gelegentlich Berichte über die wichtige Rolle, die Eichmann bei der Judenvernichtung gespielt hatte, erschienen, in denen auch die Wichtigkeit der Suche nach ihm unterstrichen wurde…“(Simon Wiesenthal, Ich jagte Eichmann, Im Bertelsmann Lesering 1961, p. 302)

(Since spring 1959, articles appeared in various Israeli newspapers about the important role Eichmann played in the destruction of the Jews, and that finding him is of utmost importance.)

It is now alleged that Wiesenthal was a Mossad agent (http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/famous-nazi-hunter-was-a-mossad-agent-new-book-reveals-1.311612) and should have known where Eichmann was. He claimed he didn’t and never found him. Why not? (More on this later.) What is also of note is that, according to Wiesenthal, the Israelis “discovered” Eichmann only in the spring of 1959 – astonishing! — confirming that Eichmann was of little concern re. his alleged role in the “final solution” before his capture and trial.

This seems to have given at least one historian reason to revisit Eichmann. In a Die Welt article of 4 April 2011, titled “Eichmann zog in Jerusalem eine perfide Show ab” (“Eichmann gave a perfidious performance at Jerusalem”) http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article13063495/Eichmann-zog-in-Jerusalem-eine-perfide-Show-ab.html we learn that Bettina Stangeth, a German philosopher and historian has written a book, Eichmann vor Jerusalem. Das unbehelligte Leben eines Massenmörders (“Eichmann before Jerusalem. The undisturbed life of a mass murderer”). In the ensuing interview, Stangeth tells us that Eichmann knew perfectly well what he was doing, participating willingly and enthusiastically in the murder of Jews, contradicting what Arendt wrote. But Stangeth was careful to downplay the contradiction. Why this book now? Could it be that Gaby Weber opened a can of worms? Stangeth also tried to gain access to the Eichmann files, but unsuccessfully.

Stangeth continues by informing the interviewer that Eichmann was not a “desk murderer” (Schreibtischmörder), but that he knew from day one what was happening and that at the IMT his name was well known; thus, one has to wonder how he managed to convince people of the opposite just fifteen years later. She then talks about the “Argentina papers”, the notes made during talks by Germans in Argentina, recorded by Wilhelm Sassen. The interviewer then states that when those talks took place, the German Secret Service (BND) knew where he was…, Stangeth interrupts to say that the CIA knew as well, she had been able to examine the “alleged” (angebliche) BND Eichmann file. When asked why alleged, she replies that she knows that there is more to it, for much is missing and that is obvious. The CIA file contains copies of BND files, but the originals are not to be found in the BND files. In fact, the file about Eichmann before Jerusalem contains only 20 pages. However, according to Stangeth, Bild, a German daily, published a file copy in January proving that the BND already knew in 1952 where Eichmann was. And, Stangeth continues, she discovered hints from the activities of the Gehlen organization and the BND that could lead to risky speculations, but that she is not in the speculation business. Still, since the chancellery has made an effort to extend the period of closure for the Eichmann files — the reason given that releasing them would damage Germany’s image — she reckons that her suspicions are well founded.

Stangeth is suggesting here that the BND acted independently, which is nonsense. If any one of the former National Socialist (NS) officials in the Adenauer government would not have been acceptable to the allies, he would have been removed. Maser wrote that Gehlen, Chief of German Foreign Armies East during WWII, was made head of the BND (1956-1968) at the insistence of the American occupying forces (W. Maser, Fälschung, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Olzog 2004, p. 281). Valentin Falin, a former Soviet insider, writes that the Americans were able to obtain enormous amounts of NS files, some from the last Hitler HQ “Olga” stored in secret depots, containing information on how “Nazis” were channeled into foreign countries. The microfilms supplied by General Gehlen were only a small part of the information they were able to obtain (V. Falin, Zweite Front, Droemer/Knaur 1995, p. 12). Thus the Americans, who were in charge in Germany, knew most of what there was to know; it was impossible for Germans to act independently. Also, Kilzer hints at the possibility that Gehlen might have made contact with the Western Allies during the war. (Louis Kilzer, Hitler’s Traitor, Presidio Press Inc. 2000, pp. 266-69) Was his appointment in return for services rendered during the war? Germany is still not an independent state; it has no peace treaty. In a Spiegel Online interview of 20 February 2011, Jutta Ditfurth, cofounder of the Green Party, mentioned that while addressing an audience at Georgetown University in Washington in 1987, one of the attendees, a former Berlin commandant, told her during the ensuing debate that if the US would not have wanted a Green Party, there would be no Green Party (http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,745943,00.html).

This shows that Americans are still in control of what is happening in Germany.

Back to Eichmann. In a declassified document, a “Foreign Service Dispatch of February 7. 1961, Subject: The Eichmann Trial and the Allegations Against State Secretary Dr. Globke. A conversation with Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer” we read:

“The following main points emerged in private conversations January 30 with Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer (SPD),…and who has recently visited Israel on several occasions in connection with the forthcoming trial of EICHMANN, in whose apprehension by Israeli Agents in Argentina last year he played a definite, though still obscure role, and with whom he talked in Israel in early January:

2) That the Israeli government was going slowly with the Eichmann trial in general, and would go particularly slowly with damaging allegations against prominent West Germans during the trial, for political and diplomatic reasons which Bauer himself accepts as fully valid;…During the conversation, Bauer clammed up completely on questions regarding the method of Eichmann’s apprehension and his part in it (beyond admitting the latter), which he called “irrelevant historical questions…”.

The report is signed by Consul Wayland B. Wuters. “Apprehended by Israeli Agents”, not Mossad and the promise that the Israeli government would go slowly for “political and diplomatic reasons”? Also, Bauer would not debouch any details about the capture of Eichmann. The Dr. Globke issue is not the topic here, but as mentioned above, he would not have been in the Adenauer government if the Americans, and perhaps the Israelis too, had not wanted him there.

This then brings us to Gaby Weber, a German journalist reporting from Buenos Aires — Berlin.

The following is from the Deutschlandfunk radio-show of 4 March 2011, Weber has updated her material since the junge Welt interview of 11 October 2008. Here is the link to the radio show transcript: www.gabyweber.com, click on AKTUELLES on top and an English download on Eichmann is available.

The title of the radio show is Die Entführungs-Legende, oder wie kam Eichmann nach Jerusalem, by Gaby Weber (“The legend of the kidnapping, or how did Eichmann get to Jerusalem?”). The transcript begins (the English translation leaves a little to be desired, but is accurate in essence):

“Author: April 1961. In Jerusalem, the trial of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, the Organizer of the deportations to Nazi death camps, began. This dominated the headlines of the world’s public for months.

Almost a year before, on 11 May 1960, the Israeli Foreign Intelligence Service had kidnapped Eichmann from his hideout in Buenos Aires. Three of these Mossad agents, among them their chief, Isser Harel, wrote books on their “heroic deeds”. Today, the world’s press repeats their version. But it has long been known that Eichmann’s hideout had already been leaked at the beginning of the 50s. What lies behind the legends about this abduction and trial? Do they really only have to do with the crimes of National Socialism? Was not perhaps Hans Globke, Chancellor Adenauer’s right-hand man and commentator of the Nuremberg Race Laws, involved? What were the relationships at the time of the Eichmann trial between Chancellor Adenauer and Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion? What role did the most important intelligence services of the Cold War, the CIA and the KGB, play in this? Why many documents are in this case still kept secret? And might there perhaps even be a military link?

For years I have been driven to seek answers to these questions in both interviews and archives. Finally, after taking the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND)—the German Intelligence Agency, to court, they finally had to grant me some insight, albeit partial, into all of this [...].”

There are quite a few issues raised, most addressed in the show, but, going into detail here would drag this out too much, and is not really the issue: is what we are told true or just another lie? Weber also mentions her trials and tribulations with the BND; she was finally given some files, many blackened or whited-out and nothing really of consequence. Stangeth confirms this. As for the kidnapping, we read on p. 18 from a CIA file (my translation from the German original):

“The security branch Shin Bet (Internal Secret) took Eichmann into custody in mid-May. The Israeli Attorney General Rosen was not informed until Eichmann was on route to Israel on an airplane between Buenos Aires and Dakar. He was told that Eichmann was to be taken directly to Israel from Dakar. Vladimir Belchenko, a Russian diplomat in Israel, mentioned a “deal” between Eichmann and the Israeli government, the latter hoping for a boost to its image. And furthermore, the security services is expecting a budget increase for their “capture” of Eichmann. (back to the original translation)

Speaker:

“The CIA puts the word “capture” in quotation marks …

Author:

But what interest had the U.S. government in Eichmann’s capture? Where did he get in their way? Quote from the BND:

“Eichmann had contacts with Soviet intelligence and was to be transferred at the same moment as Khrushchev was proposing that the SBZ (Soviet Occupation Zone = GDR) should abandon all co-operation with former National Socialist members. Eichmann has prepared a comprehensive roster of former Nazis currently in the service of Pankow, including 220 members of the East Zone KP (Communist Party), most importantly Trade Minister Merkel, Minister of Agriculture Reichelt, President of the Supreme Court of the GDR Schumann, and General Müller”

Speaker:

The note is dated 4 June 1960, shortly after Eichmann’s arrest. The source is given as Intelligent Agent 5473, who refers this to “French Circles.”

Author:

“…to be transferred at the same moment “The words ‘same moment’ refer to the Paris Summit in May 1960. But what the Soviets had meant by the word “transfer,” (Überfuhrung) and what exactly their plans for Eichmann were, are not known to this day [...]”

Again, there are many issues here, but it appears that Mossad was not directly involved as is claimed. And what about the deal between Eichmann and the Israelis, as referred to by Belchenko? Eichmann was in touch with the Russians as well? Then we have General Müller, is this “Gestapo Müller”? And finally, “Trade Minister Merkel”: any relation(s) to Chancellor Merkel?

Here’s a little about Globke, who wrote a legal commentary on the new Reich Citizenship Law (“Nuremberg Laws”) and who keeps popping up, as he was apparently involved in forging the deal. As mentioned above, anyone suspected of trying to further a “Nazi” initiative would not have been allowed in office. The Americans saw to that. Also, Rolf Vogel, a Mischling who had a Jewish mother, and was referred to by Weber as the go-between for the Germans and Israelis, suggests that Globke should be honored as a “righteous gentile” for trying to help Jews. Globke dealt with every Jewish case brought to him personally, thus helping to save Jews. And, Robert Kempner, the “unrelenting” (unnachsichtige) prosecutor never bothered Globke. (Ein Stempel hat gefehlt, Droemer Knaur 1977, pp. 12-15). Vogel also mentions a meeting he had with Adenauer in a Jerusalem hotel in 1966, with Adenauer inviting him to his room (pp. 100-101). This raises another question: Who was Adenauer and why was he picked as first chancellor of postwar Germany? Richard M. Watt wrote re. the efforts made by the French at Versailles to establish the Rhenish Province (the German territory on the left side of the Rhine river) under French protection:

“(*) There seems to be no doubt that Konrad Adenauer, then the burgomaster of Cologne and a prominent political figure in the Rhineland, took a leading (although cautious) role in the encouragement of Rhenish separatism. He was in frequent contact with Dorten and certainly did nothing to discourage Dorten’s efforts (see King, Jere Clemens, Foch versus Clemenceau, pp. 32—37). Clemenceau in his “Grandeur and Misery of Victory”, published in 1930, States flatly (p. 209) that “the Burgomaster of Cologne, Herr Adenauer, had become the leader of the movement.” Subsequently, in 1956 Adenauer denied any connection whatever with the Separatist movement (see King, p. 33). (The Kings Depart, Simon and Schuster, New York 1968, p. 433, footnote *)

Was Herr Adenauer also rewarded for services (almost) rendered? Now, back to Weber and just a little about the deal re. the Israeli atomic bomb (details provided in the transcript, the link provided above).

“Speaker:

The main goal on the political agenda of the Israeli government at that time was: an atomic bomb. The U.S. did not wish to help since their Laws prohibited the manufacture of nuclear weapons for other states.

Ben Gurion thus first asked the French for help. And they offered a commitment for the construction of the Dimona reactor in the Negev desert. But U.S. President Eisenhower exerted pressure on Paris, and Charles De Gaulle had to back down. Instead, he brought the West Germans into play.

Author:

Would Bonn, after all that Germany had done to the European Jews, be able to reject the wishes of Jerusalem?

Speaker:

In December 1959, a high-level delegation of German Nuclear scientists, including Otto Hahn, President of the Max Planck Society in Göttingen, and nuclear physicist Wolfgang Gentner, travelled to the Israeli Weizmann Institute. Both had worked on the “wonder weapon” (Wunderwaffe) in Hitler’s “Uranium Group” (Uranverein). And four months later, the Cabinet granted three million marks from the budget of the Atomic Energy Ministry, for nuclear cooperation with Israel. The raw material – uranium – was sourced in Argentina, who gave a total of 116 tons of so-called “yellow cake” to Israel. Now only the money needed to build the nuclear reactor itself had to be found.

On 14 March 1960, two months before the kidnapping of Eichmann from Buenos Aires, Adenauer and Ben Gurion met in New York. It was a harmonious meeting, wrote the press—a breakthrough to almost “normal” diplomatic relations. The mass murder of the Jews was fifteen years ago, in 1952 the “Reconciliation Agreement” had been completed—destitute Jewish refugees in Israel would be helped to the tune of 3.5 billion DM.

Author:

Adenauer and Ben Gurion agreed in New York to: “Operation Business Friend” (Aktion Geschäftsfreund).

Speaker:

Excerpt from a memo from Karl Carstens, Secretary of State at the Foreign Office.

Citation:

“During the meeting of the Chancellor with Mr. Ben Gurion in New York, was discussed the matter of German development aid to Israel. The Chancellor agreed to Development Assistance, on a commercial basis, in the form of a loan of DM 200 million per year pledged over ten years. Other meetings between the Chancellor, Minister Erhard, and State Secretary Globke were conducted, and these concluded with an understanding whereby the first portion of this year’s allocation, namely 85 million DM, would be released in June and July.”

Author:

The payment was for a “development project in the Negev desert.” There, the Dimona Nuclear Plant was under construction, including its hidden underground facilities…Ben Gurion received from Bonn 630 million D-Mark for the nuclear reactor…”

Conclusion

It seems that German tax money was used to build Dimona and that German scientists helped the Israelis obtain the atomic bomb. Did Eichmann play a role in this? Argentinean whereabouts of Eichmann were known to the BND and the CIA at the beginning of the 50s, with Mossad no doubt also informed. Bauer, during his conversation with the American Consul Wuters, claims to have been involved in the capture of Eichmann. Wuters writes about Bauer: “The reporting officer suspects, though he can in no way document his supposition, that Bauer may well be connected in some high-ranking capacity with the Israeli Intelligence Service in West Germany.” Yet Wiesenthal, who was hunting Eichmann, could not find him, and it seems that Wiesenthal was also close to Mossad. The whole of the Eichmann files at the BND are still inaccessible, which both Gaby Weber and Bettina Stangneth confirm. Why? If Eichmann had been the mass murderer, as claimed, why was he not apprehended earlier? If he was a mass murderer and had no other role to play in Argentina, he would have been “found” like all the other so-called “mass murderers” of Jews.

When reading what Eichmann allegedly wrote while incarcerated in Jerusalem, I write allegedly because we have no way of confirming that he indeed wrote this, he comes across as someone genuinely interested in helping the Jews. Höttl also alludes to this albeit in a roundabout way. Also, the Nisko undertaking could be used to confirm it (VfZ 1981, Heft 1, Eichmann und die Nisko-Aktion im Oktober 1939), even though the author presents it in a negative perspective. As for the trial, here is what Bauer told Wuters during their conversation:

“In fact however, there was little reason for anyone in Bonn to lay awake nights, worrying about the Eichmann trial, as the press was speculating. No one in the Israeli government, least of all BEN GURION himself, Bauer went on, wanted to complicate or in any way exacerbate German-Israeli relations. These were, on the whole, viewed as developing favorably by the Israelis…Bauer did not think that Israel would be in any sort of a hurry with the Eichmann trial, on the contrary; nor did he think the trial would be particularly sensational. He seems to feel all parties involved would “behave wisely” and that Ben Gurion’s main aim would be to secure “historical light” for internal educational purposes within Israel (“Ben Gurion thinks the new generation in Israel is as unbelieving of Jewish passivity in the face of mass murder as the new generation in Germany is unbelieving of mass German guilt”, Bauer said”) [...]”.

Why would anyone “behave wisely” during a murder trial? This whole Eichmann saga raises more questions than can be answered. Would the Israelis have used Eichmann if he was the mass murderer of Jews as is alleged? No. We know that Walter Rauff was used by the Israeli secret service, raising serious doubts as to his alleged involvement in the gas van story. (http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/in-the-service-of-the-jewish-state-1.216923)

Would the Germans have been able to act on their own initiative in helping the Israelis to get the atomic bomb? No. Eichmann was hanged, his body cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, leaving no way to confirm anything. Incidentally, the remains of bin Laden’s body were also recently (allegedly) scattered at sea. What is clear is that there is more to the Eichmann story than meets the eye, and one has to congratulate Gaby Weber for digging this up. Will we ever know what really happened? I doubt it.

By Wilfried Heink

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

Viacheslav Molotov: “It Is Time for the ChGK to Get to Work”.

Sorokina writes that it “took more than four month” to organize the ChGK (ESC) and that on 23 February 1943 a draft “Decree on the ChGK” was send to Stalin. Molotov, in the meanwhile, worked on the “structure of the commission”. The decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party “On the Work of the ChGK” was approved on 5 March by the Politburo. “On 19 march, Pavel I. Bogoiavlenskii was confirmed as chief secretary of the commission by a decree of the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars; and on 3 April, so were its staff (116 people) and budget.”[1]

Thus, the ChGK (ESC) was finally established:

“But only as the “Katyn affair” began to unfold in mid-April 1943 did the activity of the ChGK really start to gather momentum. The Soviet leadership was forced to energize the work of the ChGK by concern over the political implications of Katyn and the urgent need for a tough response, combined with the need to restore economic, political, and ideological control over the territories that had either already been or were in the process of being freed.87 The “ChGK Reports” that were published in the central Soviet press became the main form through which the commission’s work became known to the public”. (my emphasis)

(87 The restoration of control over the liberated territories is a separate topic of research. German propaganda in many of the occupied regions of the USSR had borne substantial fruit: here a sizable police force had been created out of the local population; Soviet citizens, especially young people, had formed armed bands; and various industrial, agricultural, scholarly, and cultural institutions were in operation. Moreover, from the beginning of the war, information began to trickle into Moscow about various sorts of Nazi “dramatizations” of “Bolshevik” atrocities. These had a strong emotional and psychological impact on the local population, which remembered all too well the horrors of famine, socialist collectivization, and incessant repression. I might add that the creation of SmERSH and the issuing of the famous decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 19 April 1943 (“On measures of Punishment for German-Fascist Criminals Who Are Guilty of the murder and Torture of Soviet Citizens and Red Army Prisoners of War and for Soviet Citizens Who Are Spies and Traitors to the motherland and for Their Accomplices”) along with the activation of ChGK investigations, were all undoubtedly links in one chain that were intended in part—and perhaps even principally—to help instill “order” in the liberated Soviet territories.) [2] (my emphasis)

Here Sorokina confirms that it was the “Katyn affair”, the uncovering of the NKVD crime by the Germans (and later blamed on the Germans), that was the driving force behind the establishment and workings of the ChGK (ESC), but what we read in footnote 87 is of utmost importance. Sorokina, who seems to not be sure as to which way to lean, writes that “German propaganda” “had borne substantial fruit”, suggesting that it was only propaganda. She later admits however that “the local population” remembers “the horrors of famine, socialist collectivization, and increased repression”. She continues by allowing that “the famous decree”, issued on 19 April 1943, helped to instill “order” (her quotation marks), by “order” she no doubt meant fear. A little about that decree, first a little about how this decree came to be:

“On the day of the German invasion in June 1941, the Soviet government introduced martial law to several regions of the country. Simultaneously, it extended the jurisdiction of military tribunals and courts martial, which were empowered to prosecute all crimes against the state as well as against public order. Martial law, described as “the avenging sword of Soviet justice,” took precedence over civil laws. Defendants in military tribunals were to be tried twenty-four hours after having been indicted. The presence of prosecution and defense attorneys was not necessary, and verdicts passed by military tribunals were final and not subject to appeal. In accordance with Article 4 of the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) Criminal Code and the corresponding articles of the other republics’ criminal codes, military tribunals were also [End Page 2] empowered to try foreigners according to the laws of the union republics and regions where they had committed crimes. The tribunals claimed additional latitude by applying Articles 318-320 of the RSFSR Criminal Process Code, which stipulated that sentences “be based on the evidence presented in a trial and, more important, on the judges’ inner conviction.”[3]

The wording reminds of the “Partisan Warfare and Barbarossa Jurisdiction Order”, issued by Keitel on 13 May 1941 “…upon direct instructions by Adolf Hitler”(the words “Partisan Warfare” are missing from later publications. Wilf).[4] Based on intelligence reports Hitler was no doubt aware of the fact that Russian partisans were being trained as early as spring 1941[5], and was forced to prepare the troops for the encounter with them. That he was right was confirmed later on when Stalin, in a radio broadcast of 3 July 1941, (scorched earth order) less than two weeks after German troops had entered the SU, activated the partisan units.[6] And because partisans were able to spring into action immediately [7] is proof that they had been formed beforehand and that Hitler was right in issuing this order. But, Hitler’s order is deemed to be illegal, the Soviet decree is ignored.

Prusin then provides some details about the decree of 19 April 1943:

“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 [End Page 3] 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.’ The decree delegated the prosecution of foreign and domestic war criminals to courts martial, and stipulated two measures of punishment: death by hanging and forced-labor terms of fifteen to twenty years. Executions were to be carried out publicly and immediately after the sentence was pronounced. The corpses were ‘to be left on the gallows for several days so that everyone will be aware that [harsh] punishment will befall anyone who inflicts torture and carnage on the civilian population and betrays his Motherland.’

The decree became a binding tool with which to handle all accused war criminals, and its very language signifies its designation as an instrument of deterrence against collaboration with the Germans. By the time the decree was issued, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens had served in various capacities in the Axis armed forces and administration. Consequently, the Soviet government maintained that the tribunals had not pursued with adequate zeal the alleged collaborators.”[8]

This decree was not just “…an instrument of deterrence against collaboration with the Germans”, it no doubt also served to ensure that the correct testimony was forthcoming. As for collaborators, in the “Tätigkeits und Lageberichte” (action and situation reports), issued by the Einsatzgruppen (response forces), no mention is made of collaboration. The reports detail the destruction left behind as a result of Stalin’s “scorched earth” order, but also mentions that farmers and workers assumed their duties, this perhaps was interpreted as collaboration. One report states that farmers in Ukraine are storing the harvested grain in small bins to prevent them from being destroyed by saboteurs (some of those were indeed destroyed by saboteurs). [9] This again was no doubt interpreted as ‘collaboration’, since Stalin had ordered that not one kernel of grain was to be left behind for the Germans. Fact is, this decree instilled fear into the population encouraging them to not ask questions and one can safely assume that as a consequence, crimes that had been committed by the NKVD were blamed on the Germans, no investigation of the alleged crimes has ever been undertaken by impartial experts.

Now back to Sorokina:

“The “Reports” were compiled in Moscow on the basis of documents (testimonies, statements, etc.) sent to headquarters by the various local auxiliary ChGK commissions, and of materials collected by ChGK members while traveling around the country. The idea was for the reports to appear two or three times a week, but this degree of regularity was never reached: the materials received were so weak from a legal standpoint that their “processors” in the ChGK needed a good deal of time to edit them.88 (my emphasis)

This about says it all. Why was the “material received…weak from a legal standpoint”? Because the reports were not based on investigations undertaken by experts, they were a compilation of stories told by people ordered to do so. If those reports would have been the result of proper investigation by experts in the field of crime investigations, their legality would not have been in question and editing not necessary, in fact illegal.

Footnote 88 provides a few details:

“88: See, for instance, the description, quite expressive in its bitter veracity, of the process of compiling the testimonies of German atrocities that was given by the writer Nikolai Atarov not long after he had visited some of the newly liberated areas:

In those days, in the midst of everyday activities—digging through the ashes of huge conflagrations, searching for a place to spend the night or a passing car—everywhere people were seized with the spontaneous need to write, to testify. Stacks upon stacks of testimonies piled up in the political sections of regiments and divisions. They were written on scraps of Gestapo forms, on the backs of idiotic Goebbels posters, and more frequently in school notebooks. There is no statute of limitations for what was written in them.

These statements were composed the hour after the taking of a city or village. The commission was selected sometimes while still under enemy artillery fire. Its members were chosen thoughtfully: soldiers with military awards and medals; teachers and elderly priests; party and Soviet workers who had just returned from the army; nurses and honest old women.

Appointment to the commission was itself an honor, like the trust of widows, orphans, and those who have lost their homes to fire. I knew many of the commission members. It was all the same: the expert in forensic medicine or the old collective farmer, they were all stark indicators of the people’s calamity, sullenly anxious about how the unrest in their spirits might misrepresent not so much the fact as the form of their accounts, as these had been recorded for such documents.

But “the undersigned” are real live people! Despair drew them out of their powerlessness to describe what they had seen and experienced. Figures seemed incomplete and dry, facts seemed bloodless and dead. They stood on top of the excavated mass graves. It began to seem to them that if they named only facts and figures, they would be hiding something. […] They would be hiding both the terrible and the simple, which cannot creep into any document.”(Nikolai Sergeevich Atarov, “Panshin voinu ob˝iasniaet,” in Voennaia publitsistika i frontovye ocherki, ed. Aleksandr Krivitskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), 445–46.) [10]

And even though “the experts in forensic medicine” is mentioned, if the reports would have been compiled by experts they would have stood on their own, legally, no editing necessary. Also, the Kharkov/Krasnodar trials are evidence of the work done by those “experts”, diesel exhaust had been determined as the killer, and that just one example. Fact is, the stories told by “…soldiers with military awards and medals; teachers and elderly priests; party and Soviet workers who had just returned from the army; nurses and honest old women” were the basis of those reports and thus needed to be edited, they had no legal standing.

“The party secretaries gave the troika of Vyshinskii, Shvernik, and Aleksandrov responsibility for putting out the “Reports.” The procedure for reviewing the texts thus processed by the ChGK staff included the following stages: first, Vyshinskii and Aleksandrov edited them, then Shvernik sent the documents to Molotov for his approval, and finally the ultimate decision was made by Stalin personally. The key figure in this process of preparing the reports was Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Andrei Vyshinskii (1883–1954), without whose verdict Molotov did not approve a single ChGK document. Vyshinskii—who had in recent years served as public prosecutor of the USSR and as an experienced manager of the internal political courts of law in the 930s, and who would go on to head up the Soviet section at the Nuremburg Trials—quickly became the éminence grise of the ChGK and the unofficial chief editor and censor of its reports. Shvernik and Aleksandrov understood their secretly delegated roles as extras and in an almost purely pro forma capacity approved the drafts of the “reports” on which Vyshinskii himself had “creatively” worked.”(my emphasisi)[11]

Sorokina continues to apply quotation marks to “Reports”, for good reason, they were nothing but propaganda, a compilation of tales edited to suit and signed by prominent communist apparatchiks to impress westerners.

A closer look at this “troika” starting with Andrei Ianuar’evich Vyshinskii. Sorokina tells us very little about him, other than that he “…was named by the Politburo as chairman of the Commission for Leading the Work of the Soviet Representatives at the International Tribunal in Nuremberg”[12], thus he was in charge of submitting the “evidence” he helped to create. But, Vyshinskii was also first deputy of foreign minister Molotov. And, he was trustworthy, he earned his credentials when he, as state prosecutor, conducted the first Moscow show-trials of 1936-1938, the evidence based on false testimony. But he also knew that those in power could break him, his misdeed: In July 1917, at the time of the provisional government Vyshinskii, a young prosecuting attorney then, had signed Lenin’s arrest warrant, forcing Lenin to flee to Finland. Stalin, who was able to take advantage of Lenin’s absence by furthering his career, was favourably disposed towards Vyshinskii (because of the arrest warrant?), but this potential danger was ever present for Vyshinskii.[13] Thus, we have a person in charge of editing the “reports” who had the sword of Damocles dangling over his head and was no doubt willing to write whatever was asked of him to prevent the sword from dropping.

Now to Georgii Fedorovich Aleksandrov, Sorokina writes:

“Georgii Fedorovich Aleksandrov (1908–61) was head of the Soviet Communist Party’s Bureau of Agitation and Propaganda in 1940–47; academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1943); director of the Institute of Philosophy, Soviet Academy of Sciences (1947–54); and Soviet minister of culture (March 1954–March 1955). After a scandal involving his personal life in 1955, he was forced to leave the Communist Party. From 1956 to the end of his life, he was an official of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences”.[14]

So we have a prosecutor who could end up in front of a firing squad at the slightest miscalculation on his part – along with a propagandist/agitator editing the “reports”, quite the team.

Comrade Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik appears to have been the typical communist apparatchik. He is mentioned by Voslensky, Solzhenitsyn, in the Black Book of Communism, always following orders – never asking questions. He was in any case only the errant-boy, used to deliver to Molotov what had been concocted by Vyshinskii and Aleksandrov. In fact, all of the three were just stage hands, for: “…the ultimate decision was made by Stalin personally”. And what Stalin ultimately decided to make public might have had nothing to do with what had been “created” by Vyshinskii et al., or the material delivered to the troika.

Sorokina continues:

“The resolutions and corrections of Vyshinskii to the draft “ChGK Reports” illustrate well the sorts of demands he made for the compilation of texts. I will give just one example. On 5 August 943, after studying a draft report on Kursk oblast (district), Vyshinskii explained with some irritation to Academician Trainin a few matters that would have been elementary for any legal expert: “You have to say how all these atrocities were established (by a member of the Extraordinary Commission?), whether statements were taken, by whom, when and where they were taken, and so forth. Otherwise this document loses its significance both as document and as legal testimony. Add this and show it to me again.” The missing information was never added, and so this ChGK report on Kursk oblast remained in the archives.” [15]

Why was the missing information never added and the “report” published? Was it because it was all a story told on demand and not fact based? Sorokina continues: “Vyshinskii demanded from the ChGK staff precision and accuracy in those details of the “Reports” that could be easily checked”. Why then not check the readily available details and add them?

Sorokina tells us that: “Vyshinskii constantly kept in focus the possible social implications of the “reports,” as well as their accessibility for the general reader”. Why “focus (on) the possible social implications” of the “reports”? These were reports of crimes allegedly committed by the “Fascist invaders”, based on investigations undertaken by experts, or so one would assume. Where are those reports? Nothing wrong with publishing material intended for public consumption, with “possible social implications” in mind. But it is those altered “reports”, totally lacking in detail, that were submitted as evidence at the IMT. Question is, where are the original reports compiled by experts? They appear to have been lost and all we are left with are the propaganda versions, why? The only possible answer is that these propaganda versions are the “originals”, but they are – because of lack of detail as to when, where exactly, etc. etc. – useless as evidence, and also, what is alleged is impossible to confirm by an unbiased body, no attempt to do so has ever been made. Why?

“At the same time the former Stalinist public prosecutor did not hesitate to engage in direct falsification of the facts. The process of preparing the re- port entitled “On the Destruction of the City of Smolensk and the Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders against Soviet Citizens” is revealing in this regard. It served as the immediate precursor to the Katyn affair and in a certain sense served as a dress rehearsal for the way information was stage-managed there. On 4 November 1943, Shvernik sent Molotov the Smolensk text with the request to permit its publication. After Molotov approved it, he wrote: “It is necessary to publish this on 6 November. Ask Vyshinskii whether he has any comments.” The message was immediately given to Vyshinskii and the very next day he returned it to Molotov’s secretariat with a number of edits. (my emphasis)

The biggest changes made by Vyshinskii were to the “Testimony of the Group of Experts in Forensic medicine,” which had been signed by a commission composed of permanent ChGK experts Burdenko, V. I. Prozorovskii, V. M. Smol´ianinov, P. S. Semenovskii, and M. D. Shvaikova.”.[16]

One has to be forgiven if a little suspicious of those permanent ChGK (ESC) medical experts, why not ask local officials to participate? The above, save for M.D. Shvaikova, had also been the medical experts in the Kharkov/Krasnodar trials of 1943 and their “expertise” leaves a lot to be desired, since they had determined that diesel exhaust was the killer and never blinked when stating that victims were killed by shots to ”the back of the neck”, a well known NKVD method. As permanent members they were under the influence of those who owned their standing, if not their very existence, to Stalin, thus useless as independent experts. And still, Vyshinskii felt the need to alter what they came up with. Sorokina continues:

“The original testimony had said that “in the graves in the territory of the villages of Magalenshchin and Viazoven´ko, and on the fruit and vegetable farms in the village of Readovka, bodies were found with bullet wounds and with injuries caused by blunt, hard, and heavy objects, and bodies without any sign of physical trauma. With regard to this last [type of] body, taking into account the testimony of a number of witnesses, it can be said with a high degree of probability and plausibility that the cause of death was poisoning by exhaust fumes in special vehicles.” Vyshinskii’s corrections were terse and decisive: instead of the indefinite phrase “with a high degree of probability and plausibility,” his pencil wrote “it can be confirmed”; to the phrase “the testimony of a number of witnesses,” he added “and other data”; and he changed “exhaust fumes” to the more scientific-sounding “carbon monoxide.” Finally, he made a point of deleting from the testimony the doctors’ admissions of doubt, such as: “It is impossible to get objective proof that the poisoning was caused by carbon monoxide, the main toxic substance in exhaust fumes, by conducting forensic, chemical, and spectroscopic tests; such tests clearly cannot be carried out given the advanced decay of the bodies, which were buried more than one year ago”; and “With regard to a certain number of the bodies exhumed from the graves in the above locations, it was impossible to determine the cause of death in view of the advanced degree of rot and tissue decay in them.” Thus in Vyshinskii’s understanding the “document” came to look like a finished legal product.” [17]

This proves hat the “reports” were not just politicized, but that substantial changes were made to the reports. And it also shows what type of information was used as evidence, we read that: “…bodies were found with bullet wounds and with injuries caused by blunt, hard, and heavy objects, and bodies without any sign of physical trauma…taking into account the testimony of a number of witnesses,”. People with bullet wounds? Really? In a war zone? Injuries by blunt object? And then we have witnesses testifying? Who investigated and what did they investigate? The above clearly shows that those were indeed sham investigations. And all the alterations made by comrade Vyshinskii will not change the fact that what was reported was not fact based, no reports compiled by experts as a result of a proper investigation.

But, no need to speculate, Sorokina confirms the obvious:

“Vyshinskii’s tactic of giving the texts of the “Reports” the necessary propaganda spin was shared by all the members of the ChGK, who understood perfectly well what the authorities expected of them.” [18]

Not just propaganda spin, to be sure, they delivered “what…was expected of them”. We then learn that Tolstoi, Stalin’s “golden pen” and anything but an expert on crime investigations had from June to August 1943 in Stavropol krai (administrative region): “personally […] established the facts of monstrous atrocities and the mass murder of peaceful Soviet citizens”, and:

“With his name and reputation he thus “confirmed” the witness declarations, affidavits, and testimonies that the NKVD had for the most part compiled before his arrival in Stavropol, and which served as the documentary basis for the report. In the writer’s personal fond there is a whole set of copies of the original documents, which on closer examination reveal one of the most widespread tricks for garbling the facts, namely the “technology of substitution.”[19]

The NKVD had compiled the material, as mentioned before, but it is never good form to have a criminal investigate his own crime. And Tolstoi lend credence to them with his “name and reputation”: more evidence that those “reports” needed help, even after they were altered.

We then have a little about the alleged “…destruction by Nazis of the Jewish population of the krai” and that the wording was changed to read “Soviet children” and “Soviet citizens”, Prusin writes about it, see footnote 3. Sorokina:

“The goal of unconditionally fulfilling Stalin’s political orders was shared quite consciously by all members of the ChGK. On the eve of a meeting of the “Big Three” foreign ministers in Moscow, the ChGK held sessions on 8 September and 14 October 1943, during which the members discussed the need to “speed up and change some of the working procedures” of the commission. Tolstoi proposed placing the matter on the agenda in just such a formulation, demanding a simplification in the way that damage caused by the Nazis was calculated and insisting that the members stop quibbling over trivial details in the testimony. Academician Vedeneev supported him in this, considering it necessary to make a few compromises in the legal value of the documents, and Academician Tarle put the matter even more transparently and vividly: “We do not need to worry about anyone arguing or legally debating with us […]. If we say there were three chickens instead of two, nobody will be able to tell the difference…“Our commission can leave the documents for the future,” he said, “but right now we need our leader to have at the conference detailed material that lends itself to more general conclusions” [20] (my emphasis)

Yes indeed, why quibble over unimportant details like facts, just estimate and who cares whether two chickens were killed or three, nobody ever questioned what was submitted by that committee. And some of that material, the estimates et al, was later used to concoct what became to be known as “The Holocaust”. But Sorokina is not done:

“Of course, at the root of the practice of intentional distortion or falsification of information about the scale and content of the Nazi crimes lay the political will of Stalin himself, which was taken as a direct guide to action. Already in his first war speech of 3 July 1941 , addressed to the army and the population, he declared that all valuable property that could not be carted off must without exception be destroyed. But even such an open position, bolstered later by a series of secret orders and directives, was carefully disguised on the level of ideological propaganda. 107 Simultaneously the party and state leadership of the Soviet Union carefully hid the true material and human losses in the war, either knowingly publishing incorrect data or classifying “inconvenient” information. However, if the basic outlines of Stalinist “double-entry bookkeeping” are obvious – one ledger for “external” and an-other for “internal” use—then the question of when, by whom, how exactly, and why this or that specific information about destruction and losses was distorted, either by being inflated or deflated, must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. How parts of Soviet society itself—at various levels and often for different motives—may have supported and popularized the initiatives of its leaders is an important and intriguing topic for future investigation.” (my emphasis)

(107 Thus, the editor-in-chief of Krasnaia zvezda, David Iosifovich Ortenberg, recalls the strong displeasure on the part of the head of Sovinformbiuro and secretary of the Central Committee, Shcherbakov, with the newspaper’s publication in the autumn of 94 of an article by Aleksei Tolstoi entitled “The Blood of the People,” in which he devoted much space to the sacrifices made by the people. “Why now make so much noise about the fact that we ourselves blew up hydroelectric stations?!” shouted Shcherbakov…” [21] (my emphasis)

“Intentional distortions and/or falsifications” made up those “reports” and no mention on the destruction caused by the Soviets themselves as ordered by Stalin in his radio address of 3 July 1941. Sorokina then tells us that the GhCK (ESC) was abolished on 9 June 1951 by order of the Soviet Council of Ministers, the files handed over to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Some of the material was used to try and “out” Nazis in the Adenauer cabinet, Oberländer is mentioned, Sorokina concludes:

“Nearly a half-century later, it must be recognized that the Stalinist plan to create the phantom of a “public prosecutor” of fascism was a success. The ChGK fulfilled its representational function during the war years, and in the postwar years faithfully kept the topic of “war crimes” sealed off from Soviet society. The documentary materials it created and collected, however, have turned out to be the latest Russian mass grave. In the process of excavating it, historians will for a long time to come be faced with the sometimes fruitless task of distinguishing “ours” from “others,” and executioners from victims.” [22] (my emphasis)

A resounding success, without those “reports” it would not have been possible to convict Germans at the IMT and later murder them. And, no attempt has been made to date to sort “ours”, crimes committed by the NKVD et al from “others”, the paper historians satisfied with the story. Some graves containing NKVD victims have been found. [23] We read in this article that:

“Most of the approximately 20 skulls we have found here in the last month have similar holes in the same part of the head,” he said, adding that the bullets had been fired into the nape of the neck — the typical execution method in the Soviet Union.”

Yes, and Soviet “medical experts” had determined that shooting in the neck was a German method. And we also have this from the article:

“Muzhdaba said the remains could not belong to Nazi victims because the German army did not reach this area in World War II.”

which would suggest that at some time this crime might also have been blamed on the Germans.

These sham “reports” were used to convict Germans, to murder (judicial murders) and imprison them. The falsehoods contained in them are still used to shore up “The Holocaust”, to demonize Germans and extort more and more money. The sad part is that no one is willing to launch an investigation undertaken by experts in the field of crime investigations to ascertain, or dismiss, what is stated in those “reports”. Prof. Maser wrote that historians are reluctant to do so out of concern not to find what is allegedly there. It is not only historians who are afraid, it appears that the establishment of the whole world is paralyzed, afraid to question anything, they are happy to just continue and blame the Germans.

Armes Deutschland.

Sources:

1.      Marina Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.824

2.      Ibid, pp.824/25

3.      Alexander Victor Prusin, “Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!”: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945-February 1946, pp.2/3 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v017/17.1prusin.html

4.      August von Knieriem, The Nuremberg Trials, Henry Regnery Company, Chicago Illinois 1959, p.362

5.      Rudolf Aschenauer, Krieg ohne Grenzen. Der Partisanenkampf gegen Deutschland 1939-1945, Druffel-Verlag, Leoni am Starnberger See 1982, p.116

6.      Ibid, p.130

7.      Ibid, p.136, 141ff

8.      Prusin, Fascist Criminals…”, pp.3/4

9.      Peter Klein, ed. Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42: Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Haus der Wannseekonferenz, 1997), Tätigkeits und Lagebericht Nr.3, 15.8.-31.8.1941, pp. 168/69

10.  Sorokina, People and Procedures, pp.825/26

11.  Ibid, p.826

12.  Ibid, footnote 91

13.  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.24/25; Stéphane Courtois et al, The Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, London England 1999, pp. 180, 247, 300, 749/50

14.  Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.807, footnote 32

15.  Ibid, p.826

16.  Ibid, p.827

17.  Ibid, p.828

18.  Ibid, p.829

19.  Ibid

20.  Ibid

21.  Ibid, p.830

22.  Ibid, p.831

23.   http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/grave-may-hold-30000-of-stalins-victims/243436.html

by Wilfried Heink

The third sub-chapter in the essay by Marina Sorokina is entitled, “The Curve of Your Life is Sloping Upward in Interesting Ways”. (A letter to I. P. Trainin is the source of the quotation used as the heading for this section, ARAN f. 586 [I. P. Trainin], op. 4, d. 3, l.)[1]

Sorokina starts out with:

“For the task of translating the materials into the language of propaganda, Stalin selected a colorful assortment of professionals to serve on the Soviet commission to investigate Nazi war crimes: a trade union leader, the top-ranking politician of a famous and historic city, a female pilot, an Orthodox priest, a writer, a power-engineering specialist, a doctor, an agronomist, a historian specializing in international relations, and a lawyer. moreover, the last six of these also held the prestigious rank of academician.”[2]

Why the need to “translate the materials into the language of propaganda”? Why not just evaluate the reports, the “material”, and publish it? To evaluate anything, experts are needed and this commission was a collection of people of different expertises, not one of them trained in investigating crimes. How then could this commission appraise what was placed in front of it, i.e., the reports of crimes allegedly committed by the “fascist invaders”? And as has been shown, material was collected: “…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.”(see part I)[3] Nothing here about investigations by experts in the field of crime investigation, forensic experts and the like. How did this commission of academicians, union leaders, pilots, etc., ascertain whether what was put in front of them was a report of a crime and not just a tall tale? They couldn’t, as this was not their duty; they were selected to add “legitimacy” to whatever was concocted by others. It appears that an attempt was not even made to involve experts—all of it was only for propaganda purposes.

Here then the composition of the ChGK:

“Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik (1888–1970), the head of the Soviet trade unions; Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896–1948), the first secretary of the Leningrad city and regional party committees, and a member of the Politburo; metropolitan Nikolai of Kiev and Galicia (whose secular name was Boris Dorofeevich Iarushevich, 1892 –1961); Valentina Stepanovna Grizodubova (1910–93), pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union; and six full members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences: the historian Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle(1875–1955), the engineer Boris Evgen´evich Vedeneev (1884–1946), the physician Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko (1876–1946), the agrobiologist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976), the writer Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1882 –1945), and the legal scholar Il´ia Pavlovich Trainin (1886–1949)[4]

Sorokina continues:

“Despite their differences in age,65 social origin, and education, almost all the members of the ChGK were in their own way upwardly mobile “careerists” who owed their rise on the professional ladder to the changes that had taken place in their respective institutions after the October Revolution of 1917, and in this sense they personified the concrete opportunities Soviet power had created for specific people…The ChGK members had doubtless been chosen according to their absolute personal devotion to the country’s supreme leader, as well as for the equally important fact that their devotion was proven. Even leaving aside high Soviet officials like Shvernik and Zhdanov, Stalin had met more than once with almost all the ChGK members before the war, and had directly helped advance their careers” (my emphasis)

(65 The age range of the commission members spanned 35 years: the oldest, Tarle, was born in 1875 and the youngest, Grizodubova, in 1910) [5]

A collection of party hacks, apparatchiks and opportunists beholden to Stalin: not even a hint of impartiality and not one expert in crime investigations among them. Sorokina then goes into detail about each one of them, and some of it is of interest:

“Nikolai Burdenko, the highest-ranking Soviet doctor of the time, was part of the special elite of “Kremlin medicine” in the late 930s, having personally treated Stalin, members of the Politburo and the government, and Comintern officials… It might also be noted that as a consequence of old wounds Burdenko lost his hearing as early as 1937, and in the autumn of 1941 he suffered a stroke that deprived him of movement and speech. An energetic but seriously ill man, Burdenko would serve as the principal medical expert on the ChGK and the chair of its special commission on Katyn.”[6]

His participation in the Katyn cover-up of 1944 reveals Burdenko as a liar. His commission determined that the bodies of Polish officials were buried in the fall of 1941, when in fact they had been murdered and buried by the NKVD in 1940. A little about the Katyn commission from the IMT, 14 February 1946:

“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 crone, 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. In addition to members of the Extraordinary State Commission-namely 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 medicolegal experts.”[7]

Not only can Burdenko be dismissed as untrustworthy, but the same goes for Tolstoi and Nikolai, although his name is spelled “Nicolas” above. Later on Soviet officials still did not dare reveal what really happened at Katyn when the Stalin era came to a close. They feared that if they admitted that their predecessors committed crimes of that enormity, people might feel that the present regime was capable of committing them[8], but also because people might ask what other crimes the Germans were blamed for that were actually committed by the NKVD. Sorokina:

“Valentina Grizodubova was the captain of the female crew that in 1938 completed a famous nonstop flight from Moscow to the Far East, and had numerous unofficial meetings with Stalin while preparing for the flight…In the war years, Grizodubova’s agency was responsible for fulfilling a special government order on flights to foreign countries, and she herself, in addition to directing the long-distance aviation group that took care of special orders for supplying partisan divisions, also headed up the Antifascist Committee of Soviet Women”[9]

Aside from having no clue about crime investigations, Grizodubova can be dismissed as biased, and extremely so.

Now to Il´ia Trainin, who as “…a Jewish youth with not so much as a middle-school education, was made head of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Law”.[10] “…in the prerevolutionary years (Trainin) was involved primarily in the “expropriation of the expropriators,” was repeatedly arrested, exiled to Siberia, and deported abroad; in 1920, he came to work for Stalin in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities. He wrote for the journal Zhizn´ natsional´nostei on both theoretical and practical questions that had to do with the nationalities issue. Having demonstrated an ability both to undergird and to implement the general policy personified by his boss, Trainin soon found himself in charge of the censorship of literature and theater (as chairman of the main Committee for the Control of Repertoire, or Glavrepertkom), then introduced order into the administration of the Sovkino film agency (1926–30) and the Communist Academy’s Institute of Soviet Construction and Law(from 1931 on). It was specifically to him that in 1942 Vyshinskii handed over his position as director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Law—making him the country’s highest-ranking academic jurist…”[11]

Not much needs to be said: Trainin was willing “…to implement the general policy personified by his boss”, i.e., Stalin. Sorokina writes, on footnote 72, p. 820: “It is hardly possible to agree with the opinion that Trainin was an “authoritative scholar… On the contrary, it is more likely that he owed his surprising career entirely to a keen understanding of how to conduct himself around Stalin”. Trainin was also responsible for Article 21 of the IMT Statute [12], which states:

“The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof. It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United Nations, including the acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and of records and findings of military and other Tribunals of any of the United Nations”[13]

Thus it was possible to introduce “copies” of documents and forgeries as evidence at the IMT, as well as some of the findings by this ChGK, ESC, all of it accepted by the Tribunal without question. (footnote 12)[14]

“The scholarly authority Tarle (Evgenii Viktorovich), a renowned specialist on French history, international relations, and Russian foreign policy,  had such an unquestionably high stature that even despite his lack of party affiliation he was recruited to join various experts’ committees in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, where he examined significant foreign policy questions for the Stalinist regime. At the same time, however, an event occurred in Tarle’s life that in large measure determined his subsequent public behavior: in January 1930, the academician was arrested in Leningrad in connection with the notorious “Academy of Sciences affair” (also known as the “Platonov–Tarle affair”) and was exiled for five years to Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan). After a while, Tarle was returned on Stalin’s personal orders and restored to the Academy of Sciences. A man of European culture and enormous talent, Tarle was so shaken by these experiences that had unexpectedly befallen him that in the mid-1930s he practically became the historical mouthpiece for the “great leader of peoples,” providing professional support for the latter’s geopolitical ambitions.”[15]

Another member of the ChGK (ESC) who owed his existence to Stalin.

“’Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo!’ These words, spoken by Stalin in February 1935 at the Second All-Union Congress of Collective-Farm Shock Workers, decisively paved the way for the long and dizzying career of Trofim Lysenko, academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1939), president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1938–56, 1961–62), director of the Genetics Institute of the Academy of Sciences (1940–65), and deputy chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1938–56). Much has been written about how the Lysenko phenomenon was the result of Stalin’s direct patronage.”74

(74 See Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. I. Michael Lerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); and Valerii Soifer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).[16]

“Stalin’s direct patronage”: no comment is even necessary. Voslensky writes that in the 1950s, Lysenko, a careerist and conniver, developed a theory that was supposed to increase agricultural production. As a consequence, the other scientists were chased from the academy. The most famous of them, Nikolai Vavilov, died in jail.[17]

“The famous writer, Aleksei Tolstoi, originally had a decidedly negative attitude toward the Bolsheviks and even cooperated with the propaganda bureau of General Denikin’s Volunteer Army during the Civil War years(1918–19). Later settling in Paris and Berlin, he actively wrote for the émigré press. This did not prevent him from returning home, however: having “changed landmarks”, Tolstoi arrived in the USSR in August 1923, and from this moment on he gave himself to the new regime to such a degree that without a trace of irony he may be called the main “court author” of the prewar regime. Like many Soviet authors, Tolstoi quite consciously made singing the praises of Stalin the springboard for his success, in return for which he received all the privileges available to Soviet writers.”[18]

Tolstoi, Stalin’s “golden pen,” was mentioned above in connection with the Soviet Katyn investigation of 1944. He obviously gave his blessings to anything put before him. Tolstoi was also involved in the sham Krasnodar trial pertaining to the Stavropol region: “Investigation of the crimes committed by the German fascists in the Stavropol region was directed by a prominent Soviet writer and member of the Extraordinary State Commission, Academician Alexey Nikolaevitch Tolstoy, who now is deceased.”.[19] Not only was he involved but the investigations were “directed” by Tolstoi, and in that trial experts determined that the gas vans were diesel powered: all of the accused voluntarily admitted to the alleged killings, a trademark of Soviet sham trials.[20]

“In the 1920s, while still the bishop of Peterhof, Nikolai was repeatedly arrested by the political police (OGPU). He somehow survived and from 1927 to 1940 served as head of the eparchies of Leningrad, Novgorod, and Pskov; in 1940, he became exarch of western Ukraine and Belorussia. At the beginning of the war (July 1941), Nikolai was raised to the rank of metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia, and from the summer of 1941 on, he ran, to all intents and purposes, the eparchy of Moscow. He attended the most important meetings of Orthodox hierarchs with Stalin during the war years 1943, 1945); and when the patriarchate was restored, he was considered as a serious candidate for the position of patriarch of all Rus”.[21]

To “somehow survive” as a bishop in the Russia under Stalin was no small feat. We have this for example:

“During these years [The Great Terror 1936-1938] the authorities sought the “complete liquidation” (to use their own expression) of the last remaining members of the clergy. The census of January 1937 revealed that approximately 70 percent of the popula­tion, despite the pressures placed on them, still replied in the affirmative when asked “Are you a believer?” Hence Soviet leaders embarked on a third and decisive offensive against the church. In April 1937 Malenkov sent a note to Stalin suggesting that legislation concerning religious organizations was out­dated, and he proposed the abrogation of the decree of 8 April 1929. “This decree,” he noted, “gave a legal basis for the most active sections of the churches and cults to create a whole organized network of individuals hostile to the Soviet regime.” He concluded: “The time has come to finish once and for all with all clerical organizations and ecclesiastical hierarchies.” Thousands of priests and nearly all the bishops were sent to camps, and this time the vast majority were executed. Of the 20,000 churches and mosques that were still active in 1936, fewer than 1,000 were still open for services at the beginning of 1941. In early 1941 the number of officially registered clerics of all religions had fallen to 5,665 (more than half of whom came from the Baltic territories, Poland, Moldavia and western Ukraine, all of which had been incorporated in 1939-1941), from over 24,000 in 1936.”[22]

We don’t know why Nikolai was spared, but we may assume that he had Stalin to thank for it. Sorokina sums it up:

“As one can see from this brief survey of the lives of the members of the  ChGK, their absolute loyalty to the Stalinist regime was guaranteed by a tried-and-true method—the carrot and the stick. In each of these people’s lives some event had occurred that in the context of totalitarianism made them completely dependent on the state, making it possible for the state, in one way or another, to monitor or even direct their behavior.”[23]

Yes indeed, and because of that “absolute loyalty to the Stalinist regime”, and in some cases to Stalin himself, anything produced by the ChGK (ESC) can safely be dismissed as payment for services rendered. Sorokina continues by telling us that the person named as chair of the ChGK, Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik, was also of interest. He was chosen because he was: “…a person who, first, was not publicly connected with the internal purges and trials of the 1930s and, second, had been in charge of the Council (later “Commission”) on Evacuation under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and thus had experienced from the inside the many hidden vicissitudes of this process. Stalin accurately saw in the faceless Shvernik a faithful guardian of the most hidden state secrets. Not coincidentally, after the 20th Party Congress, and for the entire period of the “Thaw” (1956–66), Shvernik headed the Soviet Communist Party Control Committee (from 1962 on called the Party Commission), a special organ for party security that, together with the KGB and the ministry of Internal Affairs, guarded all information about the illegal activities of the Stalinist regime for many years.”[24]

Solzhenitsyn tells us a little about the Council, Commission, on Evacuation. On 24 June 1941, two days after German troops entered Russia, this commission was established. Its chair was Shvernik, with Kossygin and Pervuchin as co-chairs. The task: evacuate to safety all party offices and their officials, all industrial installations as well as raw materials, all workers of those industrial plants and their families—up until November 1941 some 12 million people were evacuated. That figure included about 1.1 million eastern Jews and 200,000 western Jews.[25] How many of the party officials and workers were Jews is unknown.

Sorokina then lists the responsibilities of each of the commission members. Trainin, a Jew, was in charge of “…the calculation of atrocities committed by the German occupiers and their accomplices against Soviet citizens”. Lysenko estimated the damage done to farms; Vedeneev to industry; Grizobudova to co-ops and trade unions; Tolstoi, Burdenko and Nikolai calculated the damage done “…to cultural, scholarly, and medical institutions, buildings, and religious paraphernalia”.[26] The job descriptions of the latter three is of interest: no doubt any church destroyed by the Soviets, see above, was counted as a crime committed by the “fascist Invaders and their Accomplices”. Regarding the destruction of property by the Soviets, Solzhenitsyn writes that it was especially appalling to see Jewish communists take part in the destruction of Russian churches.[27]

Sorokina:

“In reality, however, the commission members’ oversight was limited by the fact that the commission’s final documents had to be signed. As protocols of the ChGK show, in practice the commission hardly met, and agreement on its protocols was by “survey”: out of 7 sessions in 1943–44, only 4 involved an actual gathering of the commission members, and these 4 had rather insignificant agendas. The real levers of control over the activity of the ChGK were in the hands of its powerful bosses, who formulated the “political orders,” which the commission apparatus merely implemented.”[28]

And here we have it again, the ChGK (ESC) was only a front, controlled by powerful politicians in the background: “The personnel roster…meant to reflect its special character as an ‘export’”[29] During the war: “…the staff ChGK (department chiefs and inspectors) numbered approximately 50 people… Although the ChGK department “chiefs” (nachal´niki) were the key figures on the staff, none of them had acquired any professional experience before the war in the area for which their particular department was responsible, much less in questions of international criminal law.”80  (my emphasis)

(80 For more detail, see my “Svideteli Niurnberga: Ot ankety k biografii,” in Pravo na imia: Biografiia kak paradigma istoricheskogo protsessa. Vtorye chteniia pamiati V. Iofe. Sbornik dokladov (St. Petersburg: NITC memorial, 2005), 50–63)[30]

Sorokina writes that ChGK officials:

“…were typical mid-level Soviet careerists: a lowly social origin; Red Army service in the Civil War; then, as a rule, a flourishing party or Komsomol career in the provinces; and finally, after receiving a higher education at a communist university or party school, a party or economic career in the capital…The central ChGK was only the tip of a multi-layered iceberg, the bulk of which was made up of a complex system of local commissions assisting in the work of the ChGK, from the republic, krai, and oblast levels (these numbered 19 by the beginning of 1944) down to the village level. Also forming an integral part of this structure were the numerous departmental commissions that accumulated data on the damage caused to institutions and organizations of various people’s commissariats. The makeup of the regional commissions was fundamentally different from that of the central ChGK: they were headed by teams of three, consisting of the first secretary of the regional party committee, plus the heads of the corresponding local Council of People’s Commissars and the NKVD-KGB, which recruited “public representatives” for work on the commissions.82 No document, however, mandated the participation of representatives of the public prosecutor’s office in the investigations.”(my emphasis)

(82  The local commissions were created according to a decree of the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars, no. 299 (“On the Work of the ChGK”), dated 16 March 1943, and personally signed by Stalin. Attached to this document was the “Decree” on the ChGK. Other decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR that regulated the activity of the ChGK were signed by Molotov)

Party hacks and the like “investigated”, but no experts were allowed. As for the participation of the NKVD-KGB, Sorokina tells us that because local party and state officials were busy: “…the decision to staff the local commissions in this manner meant that the whole process of gathering firsthand information on the crimes of the Nazis and the damage they caused was directed and controlled by the local branches of the NKVD-KGB and SmERSH.”( SmERSH was short for Smert´ shpionam! Death to Spies!)[31]

Thus we have the NKVD, responsible for murdering millions of their own peoples, gathering information on crimes allegedly committed by the Germans. Who is to say that they did not just reveal evidence of their own crimes, as happened at Katyn, since few if any Soviet citizens would have dared to protest?

Katyn is not the only example. There are many more and Hoffmann provides details of some. The NKVD committed numerous crimes in the Kharkov region; thousands upon thousands of people were liquidated between 1937 and 1941. When Soviet troops reclaimed Kharkov in the spring of 1943 for a short period of time, NKVD border patrols killed 4,000 people, charging them with collaboration. Among them were young woman who allegedly had sexual encounters with Germans.[32] At Katyn the ChGK (ESC) under Burdenko had “unequivocally established” that the crime was committed by Germans:

“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”[33]

At the Kharkov Trial the expert commission stated:

“Investigation and medico-legal examinations have established that in addition to poisoning with carbon monoxide, the Germans applied on a large scale, in Kharkov and its environs, mass shooting from automatic firearms, firing as a rule into the back of the head, the back of the neck and the spine. (my emphasis)[34]

Hoffmann rightly concludes that since the NKVD were the killers at Katyn, and since their well-known method of killing was a shot in the neck (Voslensky), we may reasonably conclude that those victims found at Kharkov et al, also killed by shots in the neck, were victims of the NKVD. And these same NKVD killers compiled the “evidence” of German crimes, which no “historian” has yet questioned. Not one of the alleged crime sites has been investigated by impartial bodies, or by experts in crime investigations. Not only were no experts involved in compiling the few ChGK reports, but what was submitted was “edited” before release. More on that will be included in the last part.

To be continued…

Sources:

1. Marina Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.817, footnote 64
2. Ibid
3. Ibid, p.813
4. Ibid, p.817
5. Ibid, 817/18
6. Ibid, p.818
7. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-14-46.asp, pp.425/26; also http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/09/katyn/
8. Michael S. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis wird offenbar. Moskauer Archive erzählen 1917-1991, 1995 by Langen Müller in der F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung München, p.32
9. Sorokina, People and Procedures, pp.819/20
10. Ibid, p.818
11. Ibid, p.820
12. Joachim Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945, Verlag für Wissenschaften, München 1996, p.180
13. http://www.icls.de/dokumente/imt_statute.pdf
14. Franz W. Seidler, das Recht in Siegerhand. Die 13 Nürnberger Prozesse 1945-1949, Pout le Mérite – Verlag für Militärgeschichte, Selent 2007, p.80; http://avalon.law.edu/imt/02-08-46.asp, pp.202ff
15. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.829/21
16. Ibid
17. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis wird offenbar, p.254
18. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.821
19. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp, p.572
20. Regarding the methods used by the Soviets to obtain confessions, see http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v017/17.1prusin.html
21. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.822
22. Stéphane Courtois, et al, The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England 1999, pp.200/01
23. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.822
24. Ibid
25. Alexander Solschenizyn, Zweihundert Jahre zusammen. Die Juden in der Sowjetunion, F.A. Herbig-Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München 2003, pp.362/63
26. Sorokina, People and Procedures, pp.822/23
27. Solschenizyn, Zweihundert Jahre zusammen, pp.286/87
28. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.823
29. Ibid, p.817
30. Ibid, p.823
31. Ibid, 823/24
32. Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg, pp. 181ff
33. Michael S. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis wird offenbar. Moskauer Archive erzählen 1917-1991, 1995 by Langen Müller in der F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung München, p.31; http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/09/katyn/;  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/06-03-46.asp, pp.289/90
34. The people’s verdict; a full report of the proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German atrocity trials, Hutchinson & Co (Publishers)Ltd., London, New York, Melbourne 1944, p.111

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 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

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