Thursday, January 29, 2015

3244-PS: Bormann on "ruthless severity" in the Camps

On October 9, 1942, Bormann sent this circular in response to eyewitness accounts of atrocities, which were reaching German public opinion via letters and verbal communications from soldiers in the East. It is notable for the fact that Bormann connects "ruthless severity" to the camps in the East, which in turn are connected to the atrocities witnessed by soldiers. Consequently, although Bormann uses the standard camouflage, "they will either be used for work or else transported still farther to the East", the overall context is one of killing, in which the fate of Jews in "the camps" is clearly connected to the fate of shooting victims witnessed by military personnel.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Wannsee Revisited

It is worth recalling this key line from the Protocol:
In the meantime the Reichsfuehrer-SS and Chief of the German Police had prohibited emigration of Jews due to the dangers of an emigration in wartime and due to the possibilities of the East.
It raises two questions. Firstly, why would it be safer "in wartime" to send Jews to the East, where the military conflict was at its most intense and insecure position, than to let them go to a country such as Morocco or Palestine, to which Germany had no objections to letting them go in 1939-40? Secondly, what are the "possibilities in the East"? Most western Jews were unsuitable for labor over there and would be a rapidly diminished labour force. The unfit Jews would gradually starve if not simply killed on arrival. Costs of maintaining camp security would be prohibitive, and there would be a constant risk of prisoners escaping to the partisans. Heydrich and Eichmann must logically therefore be referring here to the possibilities of killing these Jews, just as Soviet Jews had been killed in large numbers in the preceding months.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Satire on Auschwitz Commemoration

Today, the satirical section SPAM of the German magazine Der Spiegel has posted something on the approaching 70th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz (27 January 1945) and the reported absence of the Russian president Putin.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Meet Otto Bene

Otto Bene occupied the post of "Vertreter des Auswärtige Amt beim Reichkommissar für besetzten niederländischen Gebiete (Representative of the Auswärtige Amt for Occupied Dutch Territory)." He was the Foreign Office's man on the spot, reporting on deportations of Jews from the Netherlands to the death camps. His antisemitic missives back to Berlin reveal much about the Final Solution.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

German Extermination Planning for Romanian Jews

On August 13th, 1942, the Krakauer Zeitung published a statement on the status of Romania's policy towards Jews which stated that "185,000 Jews have been evacuated since October of last year (i.e. 1941) into Transnistria, where they were housed in large ghettos until an opportunity arose for their removal further east. Today there still remain 272,409 Jews in the country. . . Both the provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina can now be considered as free of Jews, excepting Czernowitz, where there are still about 16,000. . . It may be assumed that even during the present year a further 80,000 Jews could be removed to the Eastern Territories." This source has been cited by Mattogno and Graf here, who use Kulischer as their source, and by Kues here, who uses an article by Shechtman for the information. However, MGK, Kulischer and Shechtman all seemed unaware of the fact that phrase "removal further east" and "removed to the Eastern Territories" could only be euphemisms for killing.

German Foreign Office knowledge of Extermination (Pt. 1)

The following article is heavily indebted to Christopher Browning's magisterial study of the German Foreign Office, the Auswärtiges Amt (hereafter AA). Browning's study focusses on the knowledge and activities of the officials of Referat D III, headed by Rademacher, which was part of Abteilung Deutschland, headed by Luther. These men were ultimately responsible to Ribbentrop but tended also to act on their own initiative, often in collusion with the SS. This dual nature gave those men unique insight into the extermination of Jews as it unfolded in various stages, first in Transnistria, the USSR, Croatia and Serbia, but then from mid-1942 in the attempts of the Germans to secure deportations of Jews from ambivalent partner states such as Italy, Romania and Hungary. Browning's study remains the most important analysis we have of what these men knew and when they discovered it.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

The Contemporary Sonderkommando Handwritings on Mass Extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau

The contemporary Sonderkommando handwritings were authored by members of the so called Jewish Sonderkommando engaged in the body removal and disposal at the extermination sites. The manuscripts were written during the operation of Auschwitz concentration camp, buried in the ground near the crematoria and were only to be found after the liberation of the camp between February 1945 and 1980. They are a worthy and unique historical source since they provide impressions of the Jewish prisoners engaged in the mass murder machinery while it was still running or just dismantled. They were not filtered, directed and influenced by external persons (i.e. investigators, interviewers, historians) and post-liberation and post-war knowledge and circumstances. For these reasons, the Sonderkommando handwritings are also extremely powerful evidence on mass extermination in Auschwitz. Here, I present the manuscripts found and published so far with the most relevant quotes with regards to mass extermination.