New Document DLC dropped? [Meldung 51/NO-1128]

[WW2History]

Himmler alone directly transmitted to Hitler talking about how he killed 300k jews in Volhynia from 1941. Never seen this one before, any info?

[TlsMS93]

It may not be authentic and where it says “exekutiert” it may be “evakuiert”. See how a few letters changed can change everything.

It could also be Himmler filtering partisans and their aides targeted as Jews. That would be a total of a year and a half on the Eastern Front.

[Archie]

This is a famous document. I have edited the title to be more specific.

Recently, I quoted from Gerald Reitlinger's book where he says the 363,211 number is "a quite manifest exaggeration." Reitlinger was an early H historian and was a bit more honest than typical, i.e., he would occasionally apply some measure of common sense. To his credit, he recognizes that this number of executions over a short period is not realistic.

viewtopic.php?p=1888#p1888

[Callafangers]

This document is addressed specifically on pages 250-259 in Mattogno, "The Einsatzgruppen":

https://holocausthandbooks.com/wp-conte ... /39-te.pdf

Mattogno goes over historical records and demographic data from the region which show considerable discrepancies to what this report suggests. He points out that Kruglov's and Spector's accounting of Jewish victims in 1942 suggests a total of around 171,900 for Volhynia and Podolia, far short of the 363,211 figure. Reports from 1942, such as EM No. 193 and subsequent German documents, indicate a significant number of Jews were still present in the region (contradicting a near-total annihilation). Of course, there is also the general lack of detailed and verifiable evidence (neither documentary nor physical) for many of the claimed executions, coupled with a generally-acknowledged practice of exaggerations in these official reports. Altogether, the number of Jewish victims in this region was likely significantly lower, perhaps by several-fold, than the figure reported in Meldung Nr. 51.

This, of course, does not negate that many Jews were targeted and tragically killed. But some additional context should be considered, including that, within the same period that this large/dubious number of 363,211 Jews is claimed:

- 40,712 other 'bandits' and 'guerilla accomplices' are said to have been executed
- 447 distinct fighting engagements had occurred
- 262 German railroads had been bombed/sabotaged
- 54 bridges had been bombed/sabotaged
- 54 communication stations had been bombed/sabotaged
- 40 other significant acts of sabotage had occurred

[See p. 269-272: https://maint.loc.gov/law/mlr/pdf/NT_wa ... l-XIII.pdf]

All of this highlights the extreme terror of the Eastern territories, in these areas which Germany occupied during the war. An important question is, were Jews a legitimate threat? How much more partisan violence was Germany to encounter in an area with, say, a 15-20% Jewish population, versus areas with a 0% Jewish population? Was there truly some Jewish seed in the partisan activity and violent 'resistance' which Germany encountered repeatedly upon their advance? Or did Germany invent this allegation wholecloth as a false and defamatory 'excuse' for their innate desire to wipe all Jews off the earth?

While mass executions of a large contingent of [Jewish] people in a given area (including men, women, children) is a horrific notion, equally as horrific is having your own nation's men, women, children fire-bombed repeatedly in your own hometown, killing millions over not one but two world wars within your lifetime (wars both originating with a Jewish hand). Knowing that the "seed of resistance" internationally (and that of Bolshevism) was heavily Jewish could be sufficient from a strategic (and arguably moral) standpoint to justify some targeting of Jews, specifically. This is the epitome of the question of "us versus them", in the most brutal and desperate context imaginable. Fewer Jews arguably translated to fewer dead Germans (perhaps millions fewer), less subversion in any area, less troublesome administration, fewer instances of sabotage, and a greater chance to win the war and save the future of Germany and the world.

Obviously, the question of valid motives and morality on these topics is much different than that of what actually occurred, what was possible, what was practical, etc. But I think that the extreme black-and-white view that "any killing of Jewish civilians was wrong" (although true in almost every context) disregards the fact that any killing of German civilians was also wrong, and that the latter started much earlier than the former, and in greater numbers. Thus, the question is whether or not Jews being in German territories actually posed a serious, material threat, and perhaps whether fewer Jewish lives (which included Jewish children, in some cases, for reasons explained by Himmler at Sonthofen) could correctly be seen to translate to the saving of just as many German lives (including children).

These are very challenging topics which are difficult to consider in proper context, given that having your own neighborhood threatened with bombing, rape, and mass slaughter - and having to make the most desperate decisions to prevent this - is not something most of us can appreciate. But this was the reality for every German. This war was hell for all involved.

[Hektor]

It may not be authentic and where it says “exekutiert” it may be “evakuiert”. See how a few letters changed can change everything.

It could also be Himmler filtering partisans and their aides targeted as Jews. That would be a total of a year and a half on the Eastern Front.

The way it's written is for sure fishy. It poses as a summary and then nit-picking details are mentioned. And as for the figures: Where is the corresponding mass graves?

[TlsMS93]

It may not be authentic and where it says “exekutiert” it may be “evakuiert”. See how a few letters changed can change everything.

It could also be Himmler filtering partisans and their aides targeted as Jews. That would be a total of a year and a half on the Eastern Front.

The way it's written is for sure fishy. It poses as a summary and then nit-picking details are mentioned. And as for the figures: Where is the corresponding mass graves?

Blobel came and cleaned everything up. Every now and then, TV reports appear announcing the discovery of a small mass grave believed to be of Jews because it is close to what used to be a Jewish community, but unfortunately for them, the bones are not able to tell what race they belonged to or what religion they practiced.

[SanityCheck]

I'd suggest reading Hans Metzner's series on Meldung 51, especially part 2 which points out where Mattogno's 'analysis' went horribly wrong
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... rt-to.html
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... to_16.html
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... to_28.html

The chief issue is understanding the Generalkommissariat Wolhynien-Podolien, which combined three regions
- Belarusian Polesie (Brest, Pinsk and adjacent provincial areas)
- Polish Volhynia (pre-1939 Poland, chief town Rivne)
- Soviet Podolia (pre-1939 USSR, e.g. Kamenets-Podolsk)

Other regions of Ukraine and the Bialystok district are also counted in Meldung 51, but this is the main one.

Getting confused over this, or misrepresenting Wolhynien-Podolien as just Polish Volhynia, was where Mattogno went wrong in his Einsatzgruppen book.

There were 326,000 Jews in the GK Wolhynien-Podolien in early 1942, around 80,000 in the Polesie. All three regions were targeted for near-total extermination in the summer and autumn of 1942.

This left further German documents at lower levels, especially for Brest and Pinsk, but also district-level reports from Soviet Podolia and some parts of Polish Volhynia. The overlap between prewar Poland and the wartime Soviet Union meant there were both Polish and Soviet underground reports as well. Further contemporary sources exist in the form of letters from Germans in the occupation administration, diaries of Ukrainian nationalists e.g. from Mizocz, and Jewish ghetto diaries.

In early 1943, Polish Volhynia descended into chaos when the Ukrainian nationalist UPA cadres deserted from German police service and mobilised Ukrainian peasants to carry out ethnic cleansing of Poles, which then provoked Polish self-defense, and spread south into Eastern Galicia by late 1943, then into the Lublin region (where Polish Home Army partisans carried out retaliatory massacres against Ukrainian villages). Soviet partisan units were also more present in 1943, as was the case in neighbouring Zhytomyr (Generalkommissariat Shitomir), in the Volhynia and Podolia regions. The Polesie was contested ground earlier, and the marshland either side of the Pripyat river served as a good 'rat run' for partisans moving west from the Bryansk forests (northeast of Ukraine) above Kyiv into Volhynia. There were several raids which then crossed south into Eastern Galicia, in mid-1943 (Kovpak's first raid this far) and 1944 (multiple units).

The Soviet advance in 1943 and 1944 was rapid enough to make it impossible to organise a systematic cover-up in most of Ukraine, so the GK Wolhynien-Podolien regions were liberated/overrun with almost all mass graves intact. Thus, the Soviet Extraordinary Commission found them, and reported on them for big communiques (on Rivne-Rovno and Kamenets-Podolsk). The same happened in provincial Eastern Galicia, since 1005 only operated in Distrikt Galizien in Lviv (at Janowska) and with an incomplete effort at Stanislawow (today Ivano-Frankivsk).

Aktion 1005 only operated in the Belarusian Polesie, and then using the staff of Sonderkommando 1005-Mitte, in 1944. By this time the Belarusian districts of GK Wolhynien-Podolien had been transferred to the Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien and were in the rear areas of Army Group Centre, thus the deployment of staffs originally based out of Minsk. The victims from Brest and Pinsk were exhumed and cremated, but these are the two best documented towns in the region, with name lists of ghetto inhabitants and multiple reports on the actions (plus a direct order from Himmler to eliminate the Pinsk ghetto, prompted by wrangling from the Wehrmacht which wanted to preserve a factory workforce there using Jews).

Meldung 51 also encompassed the Bialystok district since Pruetzmann was also the HSSPF for East Prussia as well as Ukraine; Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, also oversaw the Bialystok district so had a land bridge from his original fiefdom to his new one. The figures for November 1942 in the report include the Pinsk ghetto, some smaller actions, local shootings during the Bialystok district round-ups at the start of November 1942, and also deportations to Treblinka and Auschwitz, as several historians have concluded, including Alexander Kruglov, the main expert on the Holocaust in Ukraine who has also researched adjacent areas extensively.

The accuracy of Meldung 51 is ultimately secondary to the evidence that the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, especially the Generalkommissariat Wolhynien-Podolien, was swept clear of Jews in 1942 leaving a variety of German documents on the shooting actions both before and during the Meldung 51 period. Only a handful of forced labour camps remained, and not very many of them.

In saying the accuracy is secondary, I am observing how historians such as Alexander Kruglov calculate local and provincial (oblast) data and how other historians focus on occupation regions, from the bottom up, referring to Meldung 51 but not relying on it to work out numbers for the Polesie, Volhynia, Podolia, Bialystok etc. Christian Gerlach in Kalkulierte Morde is the source for the 80,000 estimate for Jews in Polesie murdered in 1942, a figure that is very compatible with the start of 1942 headcount and breakdowns for various towns across the region, and which is well documented for Brest and Pinsk; the shtetls in the Polesie left intact mass graves which were evidently exhumed and often counted rather precisely. I wrote about this and some of the other evidence 18 years ago, while also discussing the 1941 sweep, and citing from Extraordinary Commission reports and various German documents.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... lesie.html

Thus, Meldung 51 fits with the local-regional surveys of all forms of evidence, but the precise accounting (which killings were included, did all subordinate regional commands report in) is less critical. From experience, the Germans tended to omit some figures from reports such as these, because of incomplete reporting from subordinate commands.

From November 1942, the GK Wolhynien-Podolien was reporting 'no news' regarding Jewish affairs in its monthly reports, and this was repeated in spring 1943 by the region as well as in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine's own reports. The lack of reporting means the civil administration no longer had to worry about Jews or ghettos; anything left was exclusively SS responsibility and would involve forced labour camps. But the SS was not especially strong in the RK Ukraine nor are a large number of SS projects known. The main one, Durchgangsstrasse IV, saw the labour camps liquidated in 1943 and the guard unit merged into a police regiment; by the end of 1943/44 retreating SS-Police forces were being thrown into the frontline (in 1944, under Kampfgruppe Pruetzmann).

There are some further sources from 1943 showing knowledge of the 'loss' of Jews from Ukraine. One is from Hitler himself in one of the few extant situation conference protocols of June 8 1943. This would support Hitler seeing Meldung 51 and hearing other reports on Ukraine from Himmler, Koch, and perhaps Rosenberg.

Koch said, “My dear Rosenberg, you live in the Ministry of the East, in the nice world of territory organization. But I live in the hard world of satisfying thousands of requests that come to me. My only ambition is to satisfy these requests. I have been put into this position to do that. And I don’t have any other option. How else could I do it?” He said, “I will lose 500,000 Jews here. I have to take them away because the Jews are the element of unrest.” But in his area the Jews have in fact been all the craftsmen. You want to establish universities and secondary schools now, so that we can build up the Ukrainian national state that will fight Russia someday. I’m not even in the position to cobble the boots of the worker who has to work here. I can’t do it because no craftsmen are here any longer. All the Jews have gone. Which is more important: that I train the Ukrainian to cobble boots, or that I send him to the university so that you can build up the Ukrainian state?

Translation from the David Glantz-introduced English edition of the Lagebesprechungen. The German is also in 1384-PS and was published as a journal article.

The half million Jews Hitler recalled as 'gone' had certainly not been moved north, east or west to Belarus, the rear area of Army Group South or into the Generalgouvernement; there are many more sources on killings in RK Ukraine in 1942.

The other striking example also dates from June 1943 and is a brief paragraph in a 20 page report by Dr Hans-Joachim Kausch, a Berlin based journalist, who toured the Reichskommissariat Ukraine as part of an official junket, following closely behind Rosenberg who was on a similar inspection tour; Kausch interviewed Erich Koch about other issues, but made the following off-hand remark:

On the Jewish question we hear quite unequivocal and clearcut statements. There were 1.1 million Jews among the 16 million inhabitants of the territory of the Ukrainian civil administration. They have been liquidated without remainder. As a matter of fact, during our entire trip, we saw only four Jews; they worked as tailors in a penal camp of the SD. As the last group the Jewish artisans were liquidated. During some executions Hungarian or Slovak officers took photographs which afterwards found their way to America. This was considered particularly unpleasant. The Ukrainians watched the execution of the Jews with relative indifference. Some villages resisted the last executions last winter. A senior official from the Reich Commissariat summed up the execution with the words: “Jews were exterminated like bugs.”

YIVO Occ E4-11, which is now online and digitised within RG 215 Berlin Collection. The key remark was cited by Max Weinreich in Hitler's Professors in 1946 and by Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961; Alexander Dallin also cited from the Kausch report in German Rule in Russia in 1957.

The 1.1 million figure appears to refer to the prewar population (Kyiv alone nearly 200,000) for the region, since Kruglov has calculated that just over 1.5 million Jews were murdered in the whole of Ukraine, i.e. including Eastern Galicia, Romanian ruled Transnistria with Odesa, and military administered eastern Ukraine with Kharkiv. A higher total being subtly boasted about is also plausible; nobody would cite this source as proof of the exact number, just of the general tendency and pattern and the apparent absence of any Jews in RK Ukraine by mid-1943, confirming other sources failing to report on any.

Kausch as a reporter is passing on several sources - 'we saw' only four Jews, he was told about the total, and about the artisans beinq liquidated last plus Hungarian and Slovak reactions and Ukrainian indifference, and then a direct quote from a RKU official.

Kausch's report also records what I mentioned above, the uprising of Ukrainian nationalist partisans as well as the Soviet partisan raids in northern Ukraine, on which there are many more sources.

Meldung 51's figures for "actual" antipartisan warfare include several reprisal operations against entire villages, notably the annihilation of the villages and small towns of Borki, Borysovka and Kortelisy. The latter saw up to 2,875 non-Jewish civilians killed, the combined operation over 4,000 just for one cluster of villages in one district in one month.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... sacre.html

Several villages named Borki were destroyed with their inhabitants in Belarus, the Polesian Borki lost 705 inhabitants whose fate was precisely recorded in a report by Police Battalion 310 . Another Borki in between Mogilev and Bobruisk was annihilated in the summer of 1942, with 2,027 inhabitants killed by the Dirlewanger commando with the assistance of a subunit of Einsatzkommando 8. (Precise counts - 633 attributed to the 'SD' - from SS Sonderkommando [Dirlewanger] an HSSPF Russland Mitte, 16.6.42, NARA T175/198/2738453-4)

There were even larger reprisal massacres against entire small towns; the biggest being Koriukivka in northeastern Ukraine in early 1943. Up to 7000 perished there. The SS in the region included Sonderkommando 4a which had drawn heavy criticism for arresting all former communist party members and executing them in the region, even if they had abjured the party and were now working in the local administration for the Germans. The purge cost at least 500 lives (Armeeoberkommando 2 Ia/OQu/Qu.2/VII (Mil.Verw), Lagebericht April, 4.5.43, NARA T312/1239/862, 871). The scale of Koriukivka remains unclear but the fact of an entire town being massacred was reported in the Economics Staff East war diary, naming the town.

It apparently bears repeating that counterinsurgency violence on this scale is rarely effective and often tends to stimulate more resistance, as was clearly the case in the occupied Soviet Union, in Poland and in Yugoslavia under German rule; one can add Greece, Italy, France to the list as well. Repression in the Protectorate in 1941-2 drove resistance underground until 1945 - one of the few cases where it 'worked', but at the cost of Heydrich's life since his repression in late 1941 caused the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to resolve to assassinate him. Repression in western and central Poland kept resistance from being truly active until 1943, but further escalation of repression in late 1943 (public street executions in the cities and towns of the Government-General) prompted further assassinations, with the killing of SS general Kutschera arguably slowing the pace of public violence as the region descended into open warfare in 1944.

The logic of genocide is really counterinsurgency violence writ large, enacted 'preventitively' against a supposedly dangerous minority, which the Germans thought the Jews were or would be; but the patterns of partisan resistance in Eastern Europe show that wiping Jews out prophylactically to target the supposed core of resistance was wholly ineffective, as non-Jewish partisans rose up anyway, and could inflict more damage and disruption on the occupation and its war economy. Jewish resistance whether in the form of revolts or escaping to the forests, partisans and family camps was almost entirely reactive, especially in Poland, where weapons were harder to come by at first and traditions suggested compliance rather than resistance to authority. The Jewish 'threat' was thus often less direct: complaints about spreading disease (despite the self-fulfilling prophecy of herding them into overcrowded ghettos) or black marketeering (despite the equally self-fulfilling prophecy of discriminating against Jews for rations and undersupplying ghettos). Or simply ideological and entirely fantasised, as when Major Trapp encouraged the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 to think of their families back home in Hamburg being bombed by the RAF, whose command centre was certainly not Jozefow in the Lublin district in mid-1942.

The German belief that if Jews had been permitted to remain in the Reich, in Poland or anywhere in the occupied Soviet territories, indeed anywhere in Europe, then more unrest and resistance would have followed, was repeated often enough by Himmler as well as Hitler (see the above protocol where Hitler quotes Koch without criticising the sentiment: "I have to take them away because the Jews are the element of unrest") and others, that one wonders how some revisionists can argue out of both sides of their mouths, claiming Jews were sources of subversion, sabotage and resistance and yet that the Germans were somehow incapable of targeting them for reprisals and killing them. If control was all that was needed, then there was no need to wipe out the sealed-off, prison-like Pinsk ghetto. Yet that is exactly what the Germans did in autumn 1942.

[fireofice]

On Koch and Dr Hans-Joachim Kausch's statements, we already have proof that the Nazi leadership engaged in lots of hyperbole from Himmler's Posen speech. Some revisionists interpret his speech to be more in line with revisionist interpretations. For now that is all irrelevant.

The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews who managed to find hiding places will be left over.

That's from Himmler in October 1943. Yet there were still lots of Jews left over in Hungary, the Lodz ghetto, France, ect. well into 1944. So regardless of whether he means killed or deported, he is engaging in hyperbole. This should inform other statements made about Jews being "gone" or "Judenfrei" from an area.

https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/event ... eches/563/

Also the reference to Jews being "gone" isn't to be taken literally since he makes reference to them just earlier about needing to remove them. They can't be "gone" and still there in need of removing at the same time.

[Callafangers]

SanityCheck's response attempts to validate the official narrative by claiming that Mattogno misunderstood the Wolhynien-Podolien regions and their administrative boundaries. However, expanding the area to include a broader scope only highlights the implausibility of the reported 363,211 figure of Meldung 51. Even when considering the larger and more diverse area, demographic data and scholarly estimates remain significantly lower.

Here are the numbers provided by various sources:
- According to Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten (MbO) No. 5 dated 29 May 1942, there were approximately 326,000 Jews in the Generalbezirk Wolhynien-Podolien at the time.
- Alexander Kruglov estimates 101,000 Jews were killed in Volhynia and another 20,000 in Podolia throughout all of 1942, totaling 121,000 victims, far short of the 363,211 claimed in Meldung 51. [Note: Hans Metzner suggests that the 20,000 figure for Podolia might potentially be an underestimation by Arad, but no direct evidence is provided to support this claim.]
- Shmuel Spector's detailed analysis of selected settlements in Volhynia suggests a maximum of 151,900 Jews in ghettos in 1942. Even when adding up to 20,000 Jews from Podolia, the total reaches only 171,900.
- Einsatzgruppe C's report (EM No. 193) from April 1942 mentions approximately 40,000 Jews had already been "resettled" in Volhynia-Podolia by that time, further reducing the number of Jews available for inclusion in the later 363,211 figure.
- [EDIT: Adding in Christian Gerlach's estimate that 86,000 Jews were killed in Polesie in 1942 -- if we assume this area is indeed included -- still brings all estimates to well-short of the claimed 363,211]

Moreover, the sources used for these calculations, despite some attempts at a bottom-up approach by the respective authors/historians, cannot have eliminated all forms of exaggeration and embellishment. This issue is particularly notable given the frequent deception from local sources such as Jewish or Polish 'eyewitnesses' and their representative organizations. This pattern of exaggeration exists not only in concentration camp narratives but also throughout the ghettos in various territories, where many extreme, improbable, or outright impossible atrocity claims remain widespread.

SanityCheck's further reliance on Soviet Extraordinary Commission reports, notorious for exaggeration (or outright fabrication), does not bolster his case. Claims that "almost all mass graves remained intact" crumble under scrutiny; forensic evidence doesn't back such large numbers. And "remained intact" for who, exactly? The same Soviet "Extraordinary" Commission, to use for their propaganda purposes.

"Trust us, bro. We're communists."

Some NS use of hyperbole is also clear, and the logistics of executing over 91,000 people per month, while incurring minimal German casualties, stretches credulity.

As I have posited elsewhere (admittedly somewhat speculative), literal evacuation and resettlement of Jews could have involved isolated regions like the Pripyat Marshes or rural areas in Stavropol and Krasnodar Krai, masking them as military or economic zones. Such measures would have aligned with Germany's documented postwar resettlement plans. Alternatively, if Germany aimed to 'get rid of' Jews, moving them to contested regions like Krasnodar and Rostov or nearer to the front for Soviet capture would have been a feasible and strategic approach.

In summary, SanityCheck's defense crumbles under scrutiny. The numbers do not add up, the evidence is lacking, and the key sources are notoriously unreliable. Moreover, possible strategies for resettlement or even Soviet capture (aligning with documented German policy) provide a coherent explanation without resorting to unsubstantiated genocide claims.

[fireofice]

I think the data Mattogno relied on and which Hans took issue with him on for the Jewish population "from memorial books of communities and various testimonies" is not a completely solid foundation. The limits of these things should be acknowledged.

[Callafangers]

I think the data Mattogno relied on and which Hans took issue with him on for the Jewish population "from memorial books of communities and various testimonies" is not a completely solid foundation. The limits of these things should be acknowledged.

While it’s true that Mattogno also used sources like "memorial books of communities and various testimonies," these are no less problematic for the exterminationist narrative. Both sides should rely on more robust and verifiable evidence. The official narrative, however, often cites Soviet reports and eyewitness testimonies, which are equally, if not more, susceptible to exaggeration and bias. Therefore, the burden of proof for mass extermination remains unmet without such reliable evidence.

[Callafangers]

Here is an updated calculation (to include Gerlach's figure, as edited-in to my previous post, above)...

Combining Kruglov’s figures, Spector’s data, and Gerlach’s estimate with the 40,000 Jews already “resettled” by April 1942, a revised estimate could be:

• Volhynia and Podolia (as per Kruglov and Spector adjusted for resettlement): 171,900 (including 20,000 from Podolia) - 40,000 = 131,900 potential victims
• Polesie (as per Gerlach): 86,000 potential victims
• Total Estimated Potential Victims: 131,900 + 86,000 = 217,900

This amount (217,900) is less than 60% of the claimed 363,211 figure. And even this, of course, indicates a reasonable maximum only if we assume impartial research from the respective scholars and that reports are generally accurate across-the-board, which includes 'eyewitness testimony' and Soviet reports, primarily. Experience has shown that accepting these at face value is highly-problematic. Thus, we must require substantive corroborating evidence which is extremely lacking.

Overall, the revisionist position remains the one most grounded in evidence and sound reasoning.

[SanityCheck]

SanityCheck's response attempts to validate the official narrative by claiming that Mattogno misunderstood the Wolhynien-Podolien regions and their administrative boundaries. However, expanding the area to include a broader scope only highlights the implausibility of the reported 363,211 figure of Meldung 51. Even when considering the larger and more diverse area, demographic data and scholarly estimates remain significantly lower.

Here are the numbers provided by various sources:
- According to Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten (MbO) No. 5 dated 29 May 1942, there were approximately 326,000 Jews in the Generalbezirk Wolhynien-Podolien at the time.
- Alexander Kruglov estimates 101,000 Jews were killed in Volhynia and another 20,000 in Podolia throughout all of 1942, totaling 121,000 victims, far short of the 363,211 claimed in Meldung 51. [Note: Hans Metzner suggests that the 20,000 figure for Podolia might potentially be an underestimation by Arad, but no direct evidence is provided to support this claim.]
- Shmuel Spector's detailed analysis of selected settlements in Volhynia suggests a maximum of 151,900 Jews in ghettos in 1942. Even when adding up to 20,000 Jews from Podolia, the total reaches only 171,900.
- Einsatzgruppe C's report (EM No. 193) from April 1942 mentions approximately 40,000 Jews had already been "resettled" in Volhynia-Podolia by that time, further reducing the number of Jews available for inclusion in the later 363,211 figure.
- [EDIT: Adding in Christian Gerlach's estimate that 86,000 Jews were killed in Polesie in 1942 -- if we assume this area is indeed included -- still brings all estimates to well-short of the claimed 363,211]

Moreover, the sources used for these calculations, despite some attempts at a bottom-up approach by the respective authors/historians, cannot have eliminated all forms of exaggeration and embellishment. This issue is particularly notable given the frequent deception from local sources such as Jewish or Polish 'eyewitnesses' and their representative organizations. This pattern of exaggeration exists not only in concentration camp narratives but also throughout the ghettos in various territories, where many extreme, improbable, or outright impossible atrocity claims remain widespread.

SanityCheck's further reliance on Soviet Extraordinary Commission reports, notorious for exaggeration (or outright fabrication), does not bolster his case. Claims that "almost all mass graves remained intact" crumble under scrutiny; forensic evidence doesn't back such large numbers. And "remained intact" for who, exactly? The same Soviet "Extraordinary" Commission, to use for their propaganda purposes.

"Trust us, bro. We're communists."

Some NS use of hyperbole is also clear, and the logistics of executing over 91,000 people per month, while incurring minimal German casualties, stretches credulity.

As I have posited elsewhere (admittedly somewhat speculative), literal evacuation and resettlement of Jews could have involved isolated regions like the Pripyat Marshes or rural areas in Stavropol and Krasnodar Krai, masking them as military or economic zones. Such measures would have aligned with Germany's documented postwar resettlement plans. Alternatively, if Germany aimed to 'get rid of' Jews, moving them to contested regions like Krasnodar and Rostov or nearer to the front for Soviet capture would have been a feasible and strategic approach.

In summary, SanityCheck's defense crumbles under scrutiny. The numbers do not add up, the evidence is lacking, and the key sources are notoriously unreliable. Moreover, possible strategies for resettlement or even Soviet capture (aligning with documented German policy) provide a coherent explanation without resorting to unsubstantiated genocide claims.

Repeating Mattogno's dubious claims doesn't make them any better.

Firstly, Mattogno messed up the Ereignismeldung - it is EM 191 of 10 April 1942, not EM 193 of 17 April 1942 that references 40,000 'resettled' in Wolhynien-Podolien hitherto. This number relates to 1941; there were few to no actions in the first four months of 1942 in GK Wolhynien-Podolien.

Secondly, there are two estimates in German sources for the Jewish population of GK Wolhynien-Podolien for spring/early summer 1942. The first is from March 1942 and estimated 330,000 Jews in the region; the second is from May 1942 and have a figure of 326,000. Thus the 326,000 figure postdates EM 191 by a considerable lag, so Mattogno bringing this up, and you parroting him, is extremely dishonest.

Thirdly, within the region, there are population registration figures for some individual ghettos from early 1942. These together with the headline estimate support estimates from other sources (diaries, underground reports and multiple perspectives of eyewitnesses) for the 135 ghettos known in GK Wolhynien-Podolien, of which 25 were in the Belarusian Polesie (including Brest and Pinsk), 70 in Polish Volhynia and 40 in Soviet Podiolia (including Kamenets-Podolsk, one of the last to be eliminated in November 1942).

Fourthly, Kruglov's 101,000 victims applies only to Volyn oblast, as Hans Metzner pointed out in part 2 of his blog series. The Polish region of Volhynia also included Rovno-Rivne oblast, with a further 70,000 victims, thus 171,000 for the entire region. Kruglov's research in the 2000s (The Losses Suffered By Ukrainian Jews in 1941-1944, 2005) was more thorough than Spector's in 1990, and Kruglov went on to write most of the entries for the region for the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos vol II, which appeared in 2011, thus twenty one years after Spector's book on Polish Volhynia was published. Hyping older studies and ignoring more recent ones (while also being apparently totally ignorant of Kruglov's 2005 book) is typical crank Mattogno behaviour.

Mattogno should have spotted the 75,000 victims from Proskuriv oblast for 1942 - it is in the same table as the 101,000 figure he cherrypicked for Volyn oblast then conflated with the whole of Polish Volhynia (ignoring Rivne oblast also in the same table). This equals Soviet Podolia - it is also known as Khmelnytskiy oblast.


I'd suggest you download USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos vol II and study it properly; it is open access at JSTOR but you can also get it in two PDFs from USHMM directly with nothing more than an email address (and opting out of mailing list - so a throwaway email ensures total anonymity).

The sources reconstructing the histories of the ghettos in Wolhynien-Podolien are the same as for other occupation regions: some German documents, some from collaborator local administrations or fed upwards to the Gebietskommissare coming from regional archives, yizkor (memorial) books, statements to the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland (AZIH 301 and 302), Soviet Extraordinary Commission reports, West German war crimes investigations.

You can see some of these at Yad Vashem's Untold Stories site, a work in progress which has entries for 1,282 towns in the Soviet Union, incomplete for some regions/countries and being added to both to add new towns but also to update existing entries with new sources in translation (as excerpts, typically). Thus this should be read alongside the USHMM Encyclopedia vol II (which is getting a refresh and update prior to also being put online as a website/directory) and always with the catch that there will be further sources now known to historians, published, or digitised online, that can be added.

Mattogno rather unintelligently picks on various historians writing summary chapters who cannot possibly cite every source, then managed to cite some sources which undermine his argument. E.g. he notes a claim in one of the Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten (Nr 12, 17 July 1943) of a planned partisan uprising to break out Soviet officers from a POW camp in the Wladimir Wolynsk (Włodzimierz Wołynski) district, which was supposedly to be carried out in conjunction with the ghetto there. Curiously the reprisal measures noted in the report do not indicate any reprisal against the ghetto at this time, which suggests the claim was fantasised. But the report estimated 15,000 Jews in the ghetto, whereas Judenrat survivors estimated 18,000 - both very clearly in the same ballpark and the 15,000 figure being further substantiation of the 326,000 figure for the entire region. Bear in mind it was quite standard to drive Jews from provincial towns and villages in a Gebietskommissariat into a central ghetto prior to the liquidation of the ghetto. Thus the need to pay attention not just to the bigger ghettos but the districts and regions.


There were ongoing actions elsewhere in Reichskommissariat Ukraine as well as Russland-Sued (i.e. the military administration zone which was reaching the Don and Volga rivers in this time-frame). GK Shitomir saw quite large actions in Vinnytsia oblast and still more in Zhytomyr oblast. Further sources of 'bodycounts' would include Soviet Jewish POWs handed over to the Security Police/Einsatzgruppe C (the suspension of the Commissar Order merely meant that the Wehrmacht was no longer expected to carry out executions), as well as killings of fugitive Jews or those rousted from hiding or in forests. Quite large numbers escaped to the forests in Polish Volhynia as well as the Belarusian Polesie, as Shmuel Spector's book showed way back in 1990, but the majority of fugitives were hunted down and killed in subsequent days, weeks and months, according to the few survivors. Discoveries of Jews in hiding in the cities across Ukraine also contributed an unknown number.

The stretch into eastern Ukraine and southern Russia shouldn't be underestimated, and in some cases provides more inconvenient German documents counting Jews who had fallen under German occupation. A German military administration report counted 1038 Jews in Voroshilovgrad (today Lugansk) as of September 1942, this oblast was the last to be overrun in July 1942 and the count contrasts with 7132 Jews in the city in the 1939 census. Soviet reports date the massacre of the Jews of Voroshilovgrad to November 1, 1942. About 2000 Jews out of 11,561 in the 1939 census were reported as killed in the entire oblast. The very fact that German administrators recorded some as present under occupation strongly supports this (the same report counted 100 in the separate town of Voroshilovsk); these were likely elderly or those unwilling to move, less than 20% of the prewar population. The same pattern evidently held in Voronezh and Stalingrad oblasts of southern Russia: smaller numbers of left-behinds.

In summary: Mattogno's attempt to portray Meldung 51 as a gross overestimate relies on completely bodging the oblasts and confusing them with prewar regions - Polish Volhynia became two Soviet oblasts just for starters, and there were *also* some districts which belonged to Tarnopol oblast - Gebietskommissariat Kremenz (Krzemieniec) had around 18,000 Jews (counted in that 326,000 figure) after the initial pogroms/killings of summer 1941, these were concentrated in 7 ghettos and were targeted from August 1942, with a German report counting 13,802 'specially treated' in the first half of the month, the balance were killed as fugitives or in final roustings of hiding places in the former ghettos.

The figures per month in Meldung 51 could well be from mid-July to mid-November (several historians have argued for this), given German reporting practices; whether this is the case or they apply exclusively to August-November is immaterial. There are grey zones as noted with other categories of Jews from the entire region who could well have been included.

But the core overlap with GK Wolhynien-Podolien is such that one cannot claim the 363,000 was some gross exaggeration, which is what Mattogno was attempting by misreading Kruglov and fucking up the geography so badly.

There's also no evidence whatsoever of the 'evacuation' or 'resettlement' of any of the documented, counted, registered Jews in these regions - not from Voroshilovgrad, nor Wladimir Wolynsk, nor Rovno, nor Brest nor Pinsk just to name a few of the towns for which we have German documents referencing broken-down numbers. Or indeed from the Bialystok district with its 160,000 counted Jews in early 1942, other than to be 'resettled' westwards to Treblinka and Auschwitz, if they weren't shot down trying to escape the round-ups in November 1942.

So that is why I've reminded Callafangers on a few previous occasions that his resettlement fantasies don't just involve the Jews of the Government-General deported to the Reinhard camps, but also the Jews of Wolhynien (326,000), Weissruthenien (139,000), Bialystok (160,000) and Army Group Centre's army group rear area (22,000) plus more counted in eastern Ukraine and in other regions, in early 1942, who weren't there anymore or were counted at much reduced numbers (30,000 in Weissruthenien at the end of 1942) after many documented mass executions and even more recorded in other sources, or which left mass graves.

Pinsk and Brest btw are in the Pripyat marshes. A German geographer in 1942 (C. Regel, ‘Weissruthenien und seine Bedeutung für Europa’, Geographische Zeitschrift, 48. Jahrg., 4./5. H. (1942), pp. 121-157) projected 80,000 square kilometres to the Pripyat marshes and an existing population density of 10-20 per square kilometre. The Belarusian districts of GK Wolhynien-Podolien had a combined population - inside and outside the marsh area - of less than half a million; the towns of the region were disproportionately Jewish and thus depopulated by the end of 1942 with the massacres. The Jews of Pinsk and Brest were certainly not 'resettled' into provincial areas, while the same police units that targeted the big urban ghettos were also exterminating Jews sent out to Organisation Todt work camps along another of the Durchgangsstrassen. The Pripyat marshes were not cut out to absorb the hundreds of thousands of murder victims Mattogno so badly wants them to have absorbed. Plus, why would the SS have driven so many Jews into the region when this was already supporting growing numbers of Soviet partisans?

[SanityCheck]

Here is an updated calculation (to include Gerlach's figure, as edited-in to my previous post, above)...

Combining Kruglov’s figures, Spector’s data, and Gerlach’s estimate with the 40,000 Jews already “resettled” by April 1942, a revised estimate could be:

• Volhynia and Podolia (as per Kruglov and Spector adjusted for resettlement): 171,900 (including 20,000 from Podolia) - 40,000 = 131,900 potential victims
• Polesie (as per Gerlach): 86,000 potential victims
• Total Estimated Potential Victims: 131,900 + 86,000 = 217,900

This amount (217,900) is less than 60% of the claimed 363,211 figure. And even this, of course, indicates a reasonable maximum only if we assume impartial research from the respective scholars and that reports are generally accurate across-the-board, which includes 'eyewitness testimony' and Soviet reports, primarily. Experience has shown that accepting these at face value is highly-problematic. Thus, we must require substantive corroborating evidence which is extremely lacking.

Overall, the revisionist position remains the one most grounded in evidence and sound reasoning.

still wrong.

GebK Kremenez, counties belonging to Tarnopol oblast - 18,000
Belarusian Polesie - 86,000
Volyn oblast victims in 1942 - 101,000
Rivne oblast victims in 1942 - 70,000
Proskuriv oblast victims in 1942 - 75,000
total, 350,000 - with likely further small deviations to other occupation regions to be factored in. But certainly breaking down the 330,000 reported for March 1942 to the five key regions.

The 40,000 is not subtracted from any of the 1942 figures, and certainly not from the 326,000 counted in GK Wolhynien-Podolien in May 1942, since the 40,000 figure comes from a report in early April 1942 and refers to 1941 actions, starting with the Sosenki forest massacre of at least 15,000 Jews in Rivne-Rovno in November 1941. To extend the 40,000 into 1942, there needs to be some sources about actions of one kind or another. And neither you nor nor idol managed to point to any.

There were only 5200 Jews left in Rivne in early 1942 - your idol managed to cite documents (such as VEJ 8/100) about this, while also citing another document counting 15,000 in Wladimir Wolynsk, and while ignoring the Brest and Pinsk documents (also more for provincial ghettos in Gebietskommissariat Brest).

Mattogno's attempted exegesis of the Wolhynien regions is truly comic. It is also meaningless without considering the districts (Gebietskommissariate) and individual ghettos - all 135 of them.

The granular detail of looking at the localities is the standard - in Kruglov's work, in the USHMM Encyclopedia and on Yad Vashem Untold Stories. Individual roundings-up might aggregate to slight overestimates which are then deflated when one has documents, like the reported count of 326,000 - but one cannot assume every single district or county reported in for that figure, it's a minimum and a snapshot.

The focus on shtetls and towns has also been standard since the 1940s: memorial books were produced for towns and often the surrounding villages, survivors left accounts for their shtetls, all this influenced why USHMM identified 135 separate ghettos in one German occupation region.

The other focus is on the units involved, which you can learn about in USHMM Encyclopedia section and in other places. Logistically Wolhynien-Podolien was not difficult, and also involved at least five regional killing sites where Jews from various towns were concentrated, one at Sarny in Polish Volhynia, another near Brest at Bronnaia Gora, also at Starokonstantinov, Manivtsy and Iarmolintsy. Many of the other districts also underwent the centripetal movement to central ghettos in a district, concentrating victims prior to their murder.

The actions were carried out by the Security Police who were broken down into Aussenstellen (in Pinsk, Brest, Lutsk, and other towns), Gendarmerie and local Ukrainian auxiliary police of the 26 districts, with several German police battalions operating to target larger ghettos in the Polesie, as well as Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft battalions in other areas, with local assistance also provided by autumn 1942 by some German Army training units. There were over 7000 Ukrainian auxiliary police not in battalions or even in the urban police forces of Brest and Rovno in mid-1942, and by November 1942 there were 1,407 German police (Schupo and Gendarmerie) plus 11,870 auxiliary police, not counting several hundred Security Police. This was more than enough to control Jews in ghettos together with local Ukrainian and German civil administrators, providing oversight, then to concentrate Jews in fewer places, and finally to kill them, while accepting 10% might flee and need to be hunted down later, and while seeing some ghettos revolt or burn themselves down rather than comply.

[Hektor]

On Koch and Dr Hans-Joachim Kausch's statements, we already have proof that the Nazi leadership engaged in lots of hyperbole from Himmler's Posen speech. Some revisionists interpret his speech to be more in line with revisionist interpretations. For now that is all irrelevant.

The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews who managed to find hiding places will be left over.

That's from Himmler in October 1943. Yet there were still lots of Jews left over in Hungary, the Lodz ghetto, France, ect. well into 1944. So regardless of whether he means killed or deported, he is engaging in hyperbole. This should inform other statements made about Jews being "gone" or "Judenfrei" from an area.

https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/event ... eches/563/

Also the reference to Jews being "gone" isn't to be taken literally since he makes reference to them just earlier about needing to remove them. They can't be "gone" and still there in need of removing at the same time.

'Solving the Jewish quesion' was about having control over Jews then.... Or remove them from a territory. Exterminationist eisegesis tries to make something else from this....