Chapter VII:
The Role of the Einsatzgruppen
in the Occupied Eastern Territories

Since, according to orthodox historians, the Germans in the occupied Soviet territories are supposed to have pursued a policy of systematic extermination of Jews, we must deal with the objection that at the end of the day it does not matter whether the Jews were gassed in Poland in extermination camps or, after their deportation to the east, were shot there. For this reason we will now turn to the question of whether this systematic extermination of Jews in the eastern territories actually occurred. In clarifying this question, the examination of the Einsatzgruppen and their missions will play a central role.

Soon after the German invasion into the USSR, four Einsatzgruppen altogether numbering 3,000 men - including non-combat troops such as vehicle drivers, interpreters, and radiomen[576] - became operational in the conquered regions. One of their missions indisputably consisted of securing the rear, i.e., fighting against partisans. According to the official historiography, however, other, more sinister tasks were assigned to the Einsatzgruppen beyond this. By referring to a post-war affidavit by Otto Ohlendorf,[577] leader of Einsatzgruppe D, Raul Hilberg summarizes as follows:[578]

According to Hilberg, the Einsatzgruppen killed over 900,000 Soviet Jews, which corresponded to approximately "two-thirds" of the Jewish victims in the territories conquered by the Germans; the rest were killed by Wehrmacht, SS, police units, as well as Rumanians allied with the Germans, or died in camps and ghettos.[579]

As proof for the several hundred thousand murders committed by the Einsatzgruppen, first and foremost are cited the so-called "Ereignismeldungen" (Event Reports), which fall in the period from June 1941 to May 1942 and mention numerous massacres with victims occasionally numbering in five digit figures. The documents are supposed to have been found by the Allies in the offices of the Berlin Reichssicherheitshauptamt. That the Germans let this sort of incriminating material fall into the hands of their enemies, although they could have easily burned the few stacks of papers in time, is strikingly odd. In fact, some revisionist researchers have expressed doubt in the authenticity of the incident reports and are of the opinion that at least in a portion of them we are dealing with manipulated documents. The main argument for this thesis lies in the absence of evidence for mass killings of the scope claimed; we shall return to this question. Further grounds are advanced by Arthur Butz:[580]

Udo Walendy adds:[581]

A still more weighty argument is that a policy of mass extermination in the occupied Soviet territories would have stood in glaring contrast not only to the National-Socialist policy of resettlement of the Jews to the east (cf. Chapters VI and VIII), but also to several reports of the Einsatzgruppen themselves. We have already determined that the "reports from the occupied eastern territories" no. 9 from June 26, 1942, following a description of the ghettoization measures taken by the Security Police and the steps toward exploitation of the work force of the Ruthenian Jews, conclude as follows:[582]

Event Report no. 52 from August 14, 1941, proposed employing the great mass of the Jews in the following project:[583]

In the following, we restrain ourselves from taking any position regarding the authenticity of the Event Reports and merely examine the question of whether the content of the documents, independent of their authenticity, reflects historical facts.

It can hardly be seriously contested that the Einsatzgruppen committed numerous mass shootings. For our subject, however, there are only two issues of decisive significance:

Did the Einsatzgruppen receive the task of systematically exterminating the Soviet Jews?

Were the western Jews, which had been deported into the eastern territories, treated like the Soviet Jews?

With regard to the first of the two questions we have raised, it can be validly affirmed that the policy of the shooting of Jews was not directed against all eastern Jews and also was not generally directed against Jews as such. In a memorandum written on April 29, 1941, Alfred Rosenberg had laid out:[584]

On May 7, 1941, Rosenberg established in his "Instructions for a Reichskommissar in the Ukraine":[585]

The 'Brown Portfolio,' in the paragraph "Class of Population," distinguished two categories of eastern Jews:[586]

The "Soviet Jews" were shot, while the great majority of the remaining resident Jewish population was ghettoized. But also many other eastern Jews were killed: on account of sabotage, anti-German activities, as carriers of diseases, and above all as retaliatory measures for partisan attacks.

This emerges clearly already from the first reports of the Einsatzgruppen. Here is an excerpt from one of these reports:[587]

As we shall see in the following section, there are good reasons to doubt the preceding figures. But the text does prove that the Einsatzgruppen were not given the mission of the complete extermination of the Jews, since otherwise the distinction between the Jews executed for specific reasons and the rest of the Jews would of course have been totally superfluous.

The most logical argument for the mass shootings actually carried out by the Einsatzgruppen might therefore be that, which the Jewish historian Arno Mayer summarizes as follows:[588]

According to Mayer, the massacres of the eastern Jews was not part of a comprehensive plan of extermination, but occurred as the result of the inexorable radicalization of the war in the east and because the eastern Jews were classified by the SS as carriers of Bolshevism.

The shootings carried out by the SS in no way possessed the scope ascribed to them by the orthodox historians, for the numbers mentioned in the relevant reports can not be confirmed objectively and in many cases are demonstrably wrong. We now cite some examples:

In a long general report concerning the activity of Einsatzgruppe A the following data were given:[589]

Let us summarize:

But if we add together the numbers of those shot (30,000 + 41,184 =) 71,184 and those still living in the ghettos (3,750), we get 74,934 Jews, a number which is higher than the number allegedly present at the entry of the Germans into Latvia. In a table that summarizes the report and bears the title "Number of executions carried out by Einsatzgruppe A up to February 1, 1942," the number of those shot is stated as 35,238, to which are added 5,500 Jews killed "by pogroms," but "from December 1, 1941;"[590] we therefore have 40,738 Jewish victims. Although this figure includes an additional 5,500 Jews killed in pogroms not mentioned in the report, the total number of those shot is far lower: 40,738 as opposed to 71,184.

No less strange are the corresponding figures for Lithuania:[591]

In adding the numbers of those shot (136,421) and those still living in the ghettos (34,500), we arrive at a figure in this case as well, which is higher than the initial number (153,743). If, however, one assumes that, as in the case of Latvia, approximately 25% of the Jewish population had fled with the Bolshevists, then the number of Jews still present in Lithuania at the entry of the Germans would have been far lower: approximately 115,000.

General Field Marshall Erich von Manstein was Commander of the Eleventh Army and was fighting on the Black Sea and in the Crimea. In 1949, he came before a British military court in Hamburg on charges of complicity in the massacres committed by Einsatzgruppe D. His defense counsel was the Englishman Reginald T. Paget, who wrote a book - translated into German the year after - about the trial in 1951.[593] In it, he reports the following concerning the activities of Einsatzgruppe D in the Crimea:[594]

In the "Activity and Situation Report no. 6 of the Einsatzgruppen of the Securty Police and the SD in the USSR," we read this concerning the time period from October 1 to 31, 1941:[595]

This deals with the (in)famous 'Massacre of Babi Yar.' However, as Udo Walendy and Herbert Tiedemann have proved, this did not happen, at least not remotely in the scope claimed.[596] Presumable near Kiev, as in Simferopol, several hundred people were shot. We will come back to the case of Babi Yar.

The reports of the Einsatzgruppen are not only questionable with respect to the number of Jews shot, but also with respect to their category.

In the "General Report from October 16 to January 31, 1942," the presence of (allegedly) 34,500 Jews in the ghettos of Kaunen, Vilna, and Schaulen is explained as follows:[597]

Furthermore, among the Jews registered by the census there were also 59 persons 65 years of age or older. The eldest was the 90-year-old Chana Stamleriene, born in 1852.

The children lived with their families in the ghetto. For example, the Michalowski family, which lived in Dysnos house 5-10, consisted of Nachman, born 1905, Fruma, born 1907, Pesia, born 1928, Niusia, born 1932, Sonia, born 1935, Mane, born 1904, Sonia, born 1903, Motel, born 1930 and Chana, born 1933.[599] The Kacew family, residence at Ligonines house 11-8, included the following members: Chaim, born 1909, Chava, born 1921, and Sloma, born 1941.[600] The Schimelevitsch family, living at Rudninku house 7-12, consisted of Abram, born 1896, Chawa, born 1909, Sora, born 1938, and Riva, born 1941.[601] Finally, the Cukerman family, residence at Stasuno house 12, had the following members: Kosel, born 1916, Sima, born 1912, Kusia, born 1932, Malka, born 1934, Abram, born 1904, Syfra, born 1909, and Bluma, born 1930.[602]

Since the 3,693 children were living with their families, it is clear that the number of those unfit for work and those not able to be employed (mothers who had to care for their children) was even higher.

If the Einsatzgruppen had to liquidate all Jews or at least all Jews unfit for labor, then how is it that these 3,693 children were not murdered at the (alleged) dissolution of the Ghetto no. 2 in October 1942?

How little the threat of death was hovering over these children can be gathered from the following description of the school system in the ghetto of Vilna, furnished by Abraham Foxman:[603]

On May 12, 1944, 'Russian bandits' attacked several institutions in Lithuania and looted them, among them:[605]

There are also other cases of ghettos, in which exclusively Jews fit to work ought to have been permitted to live, but where quite a high percentage of old people and children resided as well. In the ghetto of Brest, among the somewhat more than 9,000 Jews whose ages are known, there were 932 old people more than 65 years of age who belonged to the following age groups:

Furthermore, there were in the ghetto 380 children 15 years of age (birth year 1927), 128 of 14 years (1928), 4 of 13 years (1929), one of 12 years (1930), one of 10 years (1932), and two of nine years (1933).[606]

In a list from 1943 (month not given) of 878 Jews from the ghetto of Minsk, there are no fewer than 227 children of the following age groups:

The list also contains about a dozen elderly persons, of whom the oldest was born in 1857 and thus was 86 years of age.[607]

In the summer of 1944, numerous transports of Jews went from the former ghetto of Kaunas (Lithuania)- transformed into a concentrations camp in fall 1943 - and from the ghetto of Riga (Latvia) to Stutthof. From July 12 to October 14, ten transports with a total of 10,458 Jews from Kaunas and six transports with a total of 14,585 Jews from Riga[608] arrived in that camp located east of Danzig (today called Gdansk). As has already been established earlier, in these transports, whose lists of names are fragmentarily preserved, there were quite a number of Baltic Jews (but others as well) of 15 years of age and under, who were designated on the lists as boys or girls. In the transport of July 12, 1944, which included 3,098 deportees (510 of them are known by name), there were 80 children of this category. On the list of July 19, there are 88 children among 1,097 deportees (all but two known by name). The following table gives information about the number of children and their respective age groups.

On July 26, 1944, 1,983 prisoners were transferred to Auschwitz from Stutthof, for the most part Lithuanian Jews. Among them were 546 girls and 546 boys as well as 801 "women who were the mothers of the children."[609] A considerable portion of the list of names of this transport is preserved. Of 1,488 prisoners whose age is known, 850 were children of the following age groups:[610]

On this list, 24 of the 80 children mentioned in the transport of July 13 are recorded and 84 of the 88 children mentioned in the transport of July 19.

On the transport, which departed Stutthof for Auschwitz on September 10, whose list of names can be partially reconstructed on the basis of the registration book,[611] there were at least 345 predominantly Lithuanian Jewish children and youths between the ages of 12 and 17, whose age distribution was as follows:

Since the transport lists are incomplete, the number of the boys and girls transferred from Kaunas and Riga must actually have been significantly larger than the approximately 1,250 documented cases. That these children stayed in Kaunas and Riga in the summer of 1944 categorically refutes the claim, according to which the Einsatzgruppen had been conducting a total extermination of the Jews or at least of those unfit for labor.

But there is a still more compelling objection to the claims of mass extermination: the lack of material traces.

After the discovery of the mass graves of Katyn and Vinnitsa by the Germans, Soviet propaganda switched over to a counter-attack by mainly using two ploys: it attempted to place the blame for atrocities committed by the Soviet secret service, the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), on the Germans, and it claimed it had discovered mass graves of victims of the Germans.

As is well known, on April 13, 1943, in the forest of Katyn not far from Smolensk, the Germans, following directions from the local populace, found seven mass graves with a total of 4,143 bodies of Polish officers who had been shot. Between April and June, these were examined by a commission, which included medical doctors from 12 European nations, and further by a commission of the Polish Red Cross and by American, British, and Canadian officers who were prisoners of war. The Germans published an extraordinarily well-documented official dossier afterwards, which contained all the forensic results of the investigation, 80 photographs, and the names of the victims identified.[613]

The massacre of Vinnitsa (Ukraine) was uncovered by the Germans at the beginning of June 1943. At three different discovery sites, a total of 97 mass graves, they found the mortal remains of 9,432 Ukrainians who had been murdered by the Soviets. No fewer than 14 commissions, 6 foreign ones among them, examined the graves in the period from June 24 to August 25. In this case, too, the Germans publicized the results of the examinations in a substantial documentation of 282 pages with 151 images, forensic expert opinions as well as names of the victims.[614]

After the Soviets had retaken the area around Smolensk, they exhumed the bodies of Katyn a second time and summoned an investigatory commission consisting exclusively of Soviet citizens (the Burdenko Commission), which then charged the Germans with the massacre. On January 15, 1944, this commission also invited a group of western journalists.

This attempt, heavily freighted with propaganda, at falsification of history is also evidenced by means of the 38 dossiers with documents dealing with the Katyn case, which can be found today in the archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow.[615] At the Nuremberg Trial, where the Soviets brazenly blamed the Germans for the crime, the subject of Katyn came up at several sessions,[616] while the mass murder of Vinnitsa was mentioned only a single time, and then only tangentially by the Bulgarian court doctor Marko A. Markov, a member of the investigatory commission on Katyn called by the Germans three years before.[617]

In order to make the crimes of Katyn and Vinnitsa forgotten or at least to suppress them, the Soviets carried out a thorough investigation of all actual or invented crimes, which the Germans had committed in the territory reconquered by the Red Army. For this purpose, an investigatory commission was established at literally every small town. Since the Soviets had learned from Katyn the enormous propaganda effect of pictures, these commissions photographed all mass graves and bodies found. If, however, the bodies were too small in number, then they resorted to the trick of photographing them several times from different angles in order to create the impression that their number was greater.

The case of Osarichi illustrates this manipulatory technique especially tellingly.

On March 12, 1944, the Commander of the 35th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht, Lieutenant General Richter, ordered the White Russian populace of that area to be interned in two camps not far from the village of Osarichi. There was no infrastructure in these camps and those confined there had to hold out under the open sky until March 18, the day of their liberation. The German historian Hans-Heinrich Nolte reports:[618]

Military correspondents, who took numerous photographs after the liberation of the two camps,[619] belonged to this investigatory group. The number of victims being bruited about by diverse Soviet commissions diverge wildly and range from 8,000,[620] past 9,000[621] and up to 20,800,[622] 30,000,[623] 37,526,[624] even 49,000.[625]

600 bodies were supposedly discovered lying on the ground;[626] moreover, a mass grave 100 m long and 1.5 to 2 m wide, in which "a large number of bodies" was lying, is supposed to have been discovered in Camp 1,[627] but in another report it says that the prisoners were forced by the Germans[628]

The committee for the planning of a memorial monument of Osarichi maintained that the bodies had either been left lying on the ground or had been heaped up in open pits:[629]

Thus, the bodies were neither removed nor concealed, but could be seen by anyone. When the Army photographers arrived at the scene, they sure found a horrible tableau, yet not quite horrible enough. The heart-rending sight was that of a group of seven bodies - four children and three adults - who were lying a short distance from one another on the ground. This sad find was excellently suited for purposes of propaganda, but the number of bodies was too small. For this reason the photographers resorted to a trick: they photographed the bodies from nine different angles and the photos then gave the impression that one was looking at several dozen dead bodies.[630] A single body, which was lying somewhat off to the side of the rest, was photographed four times.[631] In four other photos, an additional seven bodies not far distant from the rest can be recognized.[632] In all, the first 15 photographs, which surely constitute the most terrible scenes to be found in the camp, show 15 bodies. Another horrible view was that of a ditch, of which one can see only the end in the photo; it is basically empty in the rear, and in the foreground are 7 or 8 bodies. The picture is a good fit for the 6 m × 3 m × 2 m pit previously described and contains 15 bodies.[633] Further 14 photos show a total of 16 bodies.[634]

Doubtless this photographic documentation was somewhat too meager in order to confirm the death of between 8,000 and 49,000 human beings or - which flatly contradicts this number - the presence of even 600 bodies on the camp property!

A no less typical case is Babi Yar. As we have already emphasized, a report of the Einsatzgruppen speaks of 33,771 Jews shot there. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, the bodies were exhumed and burned by a 327-man 'Sonderkommando' between August 18 and September 19, 1943.[635]

On November 9, 1944, Major Lavrenko, member of the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Kiev, questioned the Jewish witness Vladimir K. Davidov. The latter stated that on August 18, 1943, he, along with 99 other prisoners, for the most part also Jewish, had been selected from the Siretzki concentration camp 5 km from Kiev. The 100 prisoners were taken to Babi Yar and there were forced to dig up the bodies of the Jews shot in 1941. According to him, 70,000 bodies had been in the mass graves of Babi Yar. The prisoners had exhumed these and burned them on 'ovens' afterwards, which consisted of granite blocks - procured from the Jewish cemetery of Kiev - with train rails laid upon them. On these a layer of wood was piled and on top of this the bodies, so that an enormous stack of bodies 10 to 12 m high resulted! In the beginning there was merely a single 'oven,' but then 75 of them (literally seventy-five) were built.

The bones did not completely burn; they were ground up and tossed into the trenches, from which the bodies had been taken. The witness reports:

In order to escape their own murder, Davidov and a number of his comrades (35 to 40) escaped during the night of September 29, in which attempt at least ten of them were killed.[637]

The Black Book of Ilja Ehrenburg and Vassily Grossman summarizes this witness testimony, but alters a few numbers.[638] The statements made in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust quite obviously have their origin in this source.

This Vladirmir K. Davidov is apparently the only witness who claims to have participated in the cremation of bodies of Babi Yar. His tale is wholly unbelievable. The number of bodies - 70,000 - is more than double the number shot according to the Event Report, which in itself is already hugely excessive. The tale of the 10 to 12 m tall mountain of bodies is technically absurd, as we pointed out in the fourth chapter. The claim, according to which 75 'ovens' of the kind first described by the witness are supposed to have been built, stands in contradiction to the number of victims given by him, since there then would have been (75 × 3,000 =) 225,000 bodies to be burned!

Insofar as the date is concerned, the witness maintains that the cremation of the bodies was finished on September 25 or 26. On this day, the prisoners had built the last 'oven' for themselves. On September 26, the Luftwaffe took an aerial photograph of the area, in which Babi Yar was located. John Ball has published it with the following commentary:[639]

Regarding an enlarged section of the same photograph, Ball says:[641]

Ball deduces from this:[641]

These findings have all the more value since, according to the sole witness, the cremation of the bodies in Babi Yar is supposed to have been completed on September 25 or 26, corresponding to the same day or the day before the air photos were taken. The Black Book mentions an even later date:[642]

With the data specified in the fourth chapter, the cremation of 33,771 bodies would have required approximately 4,500 tons of firewood and approximately 430 tons of wood ashes and about 190 tons of human ashes would have been generated by the process. Moreover, several dozen tons of granite (gravestones and monuments) would have had to have been transported from the Jewish cemetery to Babi Yar and back again in order to construct the supports for the 75 'ovens.' If the claims put forward about Babi Yar were true, all of this would have had to leave behind unmistakable traces on the air photo of September 26, 1943.

After the Soviets had reconquered Kiev, an investigatory commission made its way to Babi Yar and took some photographs, which were immortalized in an album. Three of the photos supposedly show a first and a second "zone where the bodies were burned."[643] In another, the "remnants of the ovens and the grotto, into which the prisoners who had cremated the bodies had escaped" are allegedly shown.[644] The captions to these pictures are absurd; the only actual, clearly recognizable objects are a few rotted shoes and some rags, which were painstakingly photographed by the Soviets and were described as follows:[643]

Thus, the most important material evidence for the shooting of 33,771 (or 70,000) Jews and the later excavation and cremation of their bodies, which was discovered at the scene of the crime by the Soviets, consisted of a few shoes and some rags! If, however, the Soviets took such great pains to document things, which had no connection with the charges, what a propaganda circus would they have put on if they had really discovered mass graves with a total of far more than a million murdered Jews (as well as countless non-Jews)? Yet such a propaganda circus failed to occur, since the Soviets found nothing, which would have been comparable to the discoveries made by the Germans in Katyn and Vinnitsa! The objection that they had not been in the position to locate the murder sites would be wholly untenable. Lastly, the Germans, with the assistance of the civilian populace, had discovered 97 mass graves of murdered Ukrainians. As we saw in the third chapter, the Soviets pinpointed three mass graves and 13 individual graves in the area around Treblinka I, and the Poles found 41 mass graves of victims of an epidemic.

If, therefore - to take the number given by Raul Hilberg - the bodies of the barely one-and-a-half million Soviet Jews - killed chiefly by the Einsatzgruppen, but also by Wehrmacht, SS, police units, and Rumanians - as well as the countless non-Jewish victims were not able to be found, they must have been eliminated, i.e. cremated. For that reason, the legal system and historiography needed the 'Aktion 1005' (Operation 1005) or 'Sonderaktion 1005' (Special Operation 1005), about which we have already briefly written in the fourth chapter. This is implicitly conceded even by the official historiography:[645]

In other words: material evidence for the mass murder of an enormous number of people, the 'corpus delicti,' was not found, but this is a mere 'detail'!

The most recent investigations have also led to negative results in this respect. Here is an example. According to a report of December 1, 1941, of the Commander of the Security Police and the SD Einsatzkommando 3, the following persons were shot in Mariampole (Lithuanian: Mariyampol) on September 1, 1941:[646]

Referring to a notice, which appeared in the Lithuanian newspaper Lietuvos Rytas, Germar Rudolf reports:[647]

Every time the Soviets had discovered bodies of victims of the Germans, they photographed them, even in little-known places like the camp Siretzki in the Ukraine.[648] In Auschwitz-Birkenau they found 536 bodies, which were all autopsied.[649] The dead were solemnly interred in the presence of numerous people. Photos were taken of this and many scenes were filmed.[650]

Let us now turn to the question of what the official historiography tells us about the alleged 'Operation 1005' and upon what sources this is based. In the article from the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust it says:[651]

The decision to allow this operation to start up is supposed to have been made in Berlin at the beginning of 1942. A letter of February 20, 1942, from the Chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, to Martin Luther of the Foreign Office,[652] in which the subject of the unsatisfactory burial of corpses is raised and which is supposed to have been written after Müller "had received an anonymous letter complaining about the corpses flooding the Warthegau area," is cited as proof.[651] This letter bears the file designation "IV B 4 43/42 gRs (1005),"[653] and the alleged 'Operation 1005' is supposed to have gotten its name from this document!

But Alfred Streim, who cites the relevant letter based on first-hand knowledge, writes:

He does not say that this letter bore the heading "IV B 4 43/42 gRs (1005)," does not assign to it the designation '1005,' and confines himself to the following comment:[654]

Thus, the letter concerned dates from November 20, 1942, and not from February 20. This would mean that the designation '1005' for the operation would have been assigned a full five months after its start! On the other hand, in the letter the Jews are referred to as "dead," not 'shot' or 'killed.' Moreover, the disposal of the bodies could take place by cremation or burial, which means that the Himmler letter need have no connection with the excavation and cremation of corpses of Jews who had been shot, and what we are dealing with here is a primitive hoax.

The second phase is supposed to have lasted from the beginning of June 1943 until the end of July 1944. During its course, the mass graves on Soviet and Polish territory are supposed to have been emptied and the traces of the massacres eradicated.

Now, if one considers that according to the most comprehensive studies on this subject that exist, the Einsatzgruppen alone are supposed to have shot 2,200,000 people (Jews and non-Jews),[657] that Wehrmacht, SS, and police units are also accused of hundreds of thousands of murders, and that - as already emphasized - neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass- graves with even only a few thousand bodies, the 'Sonderkommandos 1005' must have exhumed and burned between one-and-a-half and three million bodies. This means that within a period of 13 months they had to have emptied thousands of graves at hundreds of locations, which were scattered over an enormous area - all of this without leaving behind any material or documentary traces!

Without having thousands of maps, on which the graves were marked, it would quite obviously have been impossible to locate those thousands of mass graves in a territory of more than 1.2 million square kilometers, but neither are such maps mentioned in even a single Einsatzgruppe report or any other document, nor have such maps ever been found among the German documents captured by the victors of World War II. And if - as the witnesses report - thousands of pyres were burning during the night despite blackout regulations, no Soviet reconnaissance plane discovered and photographed them - for otherwise the photographs would have been exploited at once for propaganda purposes.

Thomas Sandkühler plays this down:[658]

In other words, there are none! Sandkühler 's statement reflects the total embarrassment, which orthodox historians feel in the face of this outrage, while simultaneously serving up the customary stale explanation: the documents do not exist "due to the strict secrecy"! This hypothesis stands in glaring contrast to a fact, which Gerald Reitlinger describes:[659]

The Event Reports USSR comprise a total of "over 2,900 typewritten pages,"[660] and each of them was distributed with a minimum circulation of 30 copies. The Germans are therefore supposed to have distributed tens of thousands of pages of documents concerning the mass shootings committed by the Einsatzgruppen, then quite suddenly have grasped the necessity of exhuming and burning the bodies, but have forgotten to destroy the incriminating documents!

The designation 'Sonderkommando 1005' was invented by the Soviets. At the proceedings of February 9, 1946, at the Nuremberg Trial, the Senior Counsel Smirnov read out excerpts from the protocol "of the interrogation of Gerhard Adametz (Exhibit USSR-80, Document Number USSR-80), taken by an American army lieutenant, Patrick McMahon," in which there was talk of the activities of the "Sonderkommando 1005-A" and "1005-B."[664]

Or, to put it another way, they have none!

The SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel was, however, unknown to this witness. He was connected to the 'Operation 1005' by an Erwin Schulz, who had been the leader of Einsatzkommando V of the Einsatzgruppe C of the Sicherheitspolizei from the beginning of the Russian Campaign until September 1941 and served under SS-Brigadeführer Rasch. But Schulz did not know the name of the alleged huge operation for the excavation and cremation of the bodies, since this was first settled upon in 1947. On December 20, 1945, he stated:[666]

Now all that remained was to put the individual parts together.

In November 1946, Rudolf Höß wrote in the Krakow prison:[667]

Finally, at the preliminary examinations of the trial against the Einsatzgruppen, which took place in Nuremberg from September 29, 1947, to February 12, 1948, Paul Blobel judged it expedient to 'confess' what had already become 'facts determined by virtue of official authority' for the prosecutors. In a 'statutory declaration' made at Nuremberg on June 6, 1947, he stated for the record:[668]

The American inquisitors gave every appearance of being unsatisfied with this 'confession' and forced Blobel to give a further 'statutory declaration.' This time he expressed himself in more detail:[669]

This version, with the new date ("in June 1942" instead of "in the fall of 1942") was elevated to being the pivotal point of official historiography. That Blobel in neither of his two declarations spoke of an 'Operation 1005' or a 'Sonderkommando 1005' played no role, for these little gaps were naturally closed by the historians!

It should be well understood that we do not wish to claim by what we have said here that there was no opening of mass graves and cremation of bodies, any more than we are claiming that there were no shootings of Jews. But we are very much questioning the enormous scale, which the official historiography attributes to these occurrences.

The western Jews deported into the occupied eastern territories did not share, at least in the beginning, the fate of the 'Soviet Jews.' Christopher R. Browning concedes:[670]

In the "General Report of October 16, 1941, to January 21, 1942," already mentioned, there is a section on the topic "Jews from the Reich," in which it says:[672]

In a letter of July 21, 1942, from Reichskommissar Lohse to the Standartenführer Siegert of the RSHA, it says regarding a "work training camp" in Latvia:[673]

These western Jews were therefore by no means systematically killed, although the majority of them were unfit for labor. This stands in striking contrast to the alleged mass liquidations described in the same report of indigenous Jews of Latvia already mentioned by us.

In addition, at least 102 survivors are known from the Jewish deportations from Theresienstadt to Riga of January 9, 1942, and 15 survivors of the deportation of January 15 of the same year, besides 40 from the deportation of September 1, 1942, to Estonian Raasiku. These Jews were liberated at the following locations:

Bergen-Belsen, Bratislava, Bromberg, Buchenwald, Burggraben, Bydhost, Dachau, Danzig, Gottendorf, Gottenhof, Hamburg, Jagala, Kaiserswald, Kattowitz, Kaufering, Kieblasse, Kiel, Langenstein, Lauenburg, Libau, Magdeburg, Neuengamme, Neustadt, Raasiku, Raguhn, Riga, Sachsenhausen, Salaspis, Sophienwalde, Straßenhof, Stutthof, Terezin (Theresienstadt), Torun (Thorn). In addition, 7 survivors of the transport from Theresienstadt of November 16, 1941, to Minsk were liberated in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Flossenbürg, and Theresienstadt.[675] The transports had included not isolated individuals but entire groups who must have exhibited a certain strength, since for example in Magdeburg Jews from the transport of January 15, 1942, and 5 from that of January 9 were liberated, in Buchenwald 3 Jews from the transport of January 15 and 7 from that of January 9.

These people had also survived the catastrophic hygienic and sanitary conditions, which prevailed in the German camps in 1945. Thus, the number of those surviving in 1944 must have been even significantly higher.

Notes

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