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

[Callafangers]

Just to check-in, I want to acknowledge that I now see/understand Mattogno's error on this matter. I will concede that he has misunderstood the borders of the Volyn/Volhynia regions which definitely throws off his own analysis.

All of that said, I have been doing a "deep dive" into this topic the last few days. I am still working out some details and trying to determine how best to present the findings. Will give an update soon but, for now, I will say that I believe Mattogno had entirely the wrong approach, in this regard. The Soviets and whichever other fabricators were not at any point going to have trouble inflating their numbers to reach a "target" figure. Thus, the revisionist case will be firmly in the question of quality, rather than quantity.

Of course, to review the quality of tens of thousands of individual claims, references, statements, etc., is not generally feasible for any individual scholar taking on a "new frontier" in such a vast topic as the "Holocaust' in the Eastern territories. Thus, I think Mattogno went with the quantitative approach which, unfortunately, required him to try to beat the establishment "at their own game" on these measurements. But all they would have to ensure to guarantee he fails is that they have enough references (no matter the quality) to point to. It should be no surprise, therefore, that at least in some areas (such as Volyn/Volhynia), the orthodox view can identify 'sources' for its myriad claims of individual "actions", adding up to a total near or even beyond the claimed figures.

I have taken a different, arguably more comprehensive approach to what Mattogno did. I am making an effort toward meaningfully reviewing the quality of evidence for a particular area of relevance to the discussion above. It's challenging so far but, to my absolute shock (/sarcasm), the quality has a pattern similar to what revisionists have noted in atrocity and 'gas chamber' claims - inconsistencies, absurdities, unevidenced assertions and improbabilities galore.

I will hold off on any more 'spoilers' for now. I just wanted to acknowledge openly what I regard to be the revisionist shortcoming on this particular area so far. There is definitely some work to be done.

[SanityCheck]

Just to check-in, I want to acknowledge that I now see/understand Mattogno's error on this matter. I will concede that he has misunderstood the borders of the Volyn/Volhynia regions which definitely throws off his own analysis.

All of that said, I have been doing a "deep dive" into this topic the last few days. I am still working out some details and trying to determine how best to present the findings. Will give an update soon but, for now, I will say that I believe Mattogno had entirely the wrong approach, in this regard. The Soviets and whichever other fabricators were not at any point going to have trouble inflating their numbers to reach a "target" figure. Thus, the revisionist case will be firmly in the question of quality, rather than quantity.

Of course, to review the quality of tens of thousands of individual claims, references, statements, etc., is not generally feasible for any individual scholar taking on a "new frontier" in such a vast topic as the "Holocaust' in the Eastern territories. Thus, I think Mattogno went with the quantitative approach which, unfortunately, required him to try to beat the establishment "at their own game" on these measurements. But all they would have to ensure to guarantee he fails is that they have enough references (no matter the quality) to point to. It should be no surprise, therefore, that at least in some areas (such as Volyn/Volhynia), the orthodox view can identify 'sources' for its myriad claims of individual "actions", adding up to a total near or even beyond the claimed figures.

I have taken a different, arguably more comprehensive approach to what Mattogno did. I am making an effort toward meaningfully reviewing the quality of evidence for a particular area of relevance to the discussion above. It's challenging so far but, to my absolute shock (/sarcasm), the quality has a pattern similar to what revisionists have noted in atrocity and 'gas chamber' claims - inconsistencies, absurdities, unevidenced assertions and improbabilities galore.

I will hold off on any more 'spoilers' for now. I just wanted to acknowledge openly what I regard to be the revisionist shortcoming on this particular area so far. There is definitely some work to be done.

Good of you to concede that on this issue - Volhynia vs GK Wolhynien-Podolien - Mattogno was wrong.

For reference, GK Wolhynien-Podolien was a composite of many Soviet (pre-1939 or 1939-41) oblasti (provinces), specifically
-Gebietskommissariat Bar - Vinnytsia oblast, pre-1939 Soviet territory
-Gebietskommissariat Kremenez - Tarnopol, pre-1939 Poland, 1939-41 Soviet
-districts that belonged to Khmelnitsky oblast, aka Proskuriv oblast and Kamenets-Podolsk oblast, Soviet Podolia - pre-1939 Soviet
-Polish Volhynia, split between Volyn and Rivne oblasti in 1939-41
-Belarusian Polesie, with part of Brest oblast and part of Pinsk oblast (1939-1941), pre-1939 in Poland

There were 26 Gebietskommissariate in the region and about 120 Soviet counties (rayons, raiony) - c.f. USHMM Encyclopedia vol II/B, p.1316, which also sums up the territorial mishmash: "Pre- 1941: parts of Vinnitsa, Rovno, Volyn’, Kamenets- Podolskii, Ternopol’, Brest, and Pinsk oblasts, Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs"

A proper examination of this phase in the occupied Soviet territories - the 'second sweep' - means going down to individual towns, the 135 ghettos in GK Wolhynien-Podolien noted several times, and accepting an unevenness of evidence as is to be expected. Then at districts - the 26 Gebietskommissariate - since a pattern was to force shtetl and village Jews into district centres.

Sourcing is unsurprisingly uneven, with some towns/ghettos very well documented, some German documents referencing a district (Gebietskommissariat), and a range of contemporary Jewish, Polish and Soviet reports plus local diaries, and then German unofficial letters and diaries. Then numerous post-1944 sources from the Soviet Extraordinary Commission, Central Jewish Historical Commission of Poland, other postwar historical commissions as well as the Jewish Antifascist Committee (which functioned in this regard as another historical commission). The memorial books (yizkor books) started appearing quite early and synthesised some of these sources - they might have reprinted a CZKH Polish Jewish historical commission statement, or by the 1960s woven in German documents, as with the Pinsk memorial book.

The sourcing for the UPA ethnic cleansing of Poles in 1943 is also uneven, with few Ukrainian nationalist sources surviving, but many Polish, Soviet and German contemporary sources. Unlike the second sweep exterminating the Jews of Wolhynien-Podolien in small towns, "Volhynia 1943" is about villages, albeit often very large ones - and one can find sources of reasonable quality for most of the villages hit. But the certainty about how many died on each side is less than the certainty for the 1942 second sweep, since there was not as much post-liberation surveying by Soviet authorities. Contemporary sources can also be contradictory about the perpetrators of specific massacres such as at Malin in July 1943:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malin_massacre

Not only should one go down to town and district level, one must also go up to compare with other occupation regions if one is 'calibrating' different source types. The Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien neighboured Wolhynien-Podolien to the north. It was not included in Meldung 51 as the SS-Police there were subordinated to the HSSPF Ostland, Friedrich Jeckeln.

As mentioned, a SD report counted 139,000 Jews in GK Weissruthenien in early 1942, following the mass killing of 60,000 Jews in the district in the last four months of 1941. These were reduced to below 30,000 by the end of 1942, as noted in several 'after' reports counting them. The circa 110,000 victims of German killings in GK Weissruthenien in 1942 are much more densely documented with German reports than the fate of the Jews of Wolhynien-Podolien. The well-known report of Gauleiter Kube to Hinrich Lohse of 31 July 1942 gave a figure of 55,000 Jews killed in a few months, breaking down this number by district. There are further district-level headcounts for this phase. There are also documents from before Kube's reference to a phase, from March 1942, for more actions in Minsk, Baranovichi and elsewhere. Then there are even more reports counting further mass killings after 31 July 1942, for example the reduction of the Baranovichi ghetto at the tail-end of Operation 'Swamp Fever', when Jeckeln sought to improve his bodycounts with an easy win of targeting Jews already penned up in a ghetto. Then further reductions along the same lines in Operations 'Hamburg' and 'Nuernberg', and assorted other lower level police reports.

(All of this excludes the fate of 18,000 Jews from the Reich deported from May-October 1942 to Maly Trostenets with one transport diverted to Baranovichi. Mattogno fusses over these but screwed up by adding a dozen transports including ones from Vienna documented as going to Auschwitz and Sobibor.)

Neither 'German documents only' nor 'perpetrator documents only' will ever fly with historians, since these killing sweeps took place alongside or before other convulsions of violence, in the partisan and antipartisan war, and in the ethnic cleansing segueing into Polish-Ukrainian conflict. The Germans were fairly well informed about the Polish-Ukrainian conflict, and also noted cases of Soviet partisans killing collaborators or targeting villages, and in 1943-44 also knew about the conflict between the Polish Home Army and Soviet partisans in western Belarus (Nowogrodek region of the Armia Krajowa), and the Polish-Lithuanian conflict which emerged by 1944.

The second sweep in GK Weissruthenien also left traces in Polish and Soviet underground reports, as well as Jewish diaries, and as with GK Wolhynien there are also some unofficial German sources - letters, mainly. Like Wolhynien-Podolien, the killings were investigated by the Soviet Extraordinary Commission, with most districts untouched by Aktion 1005. Primarily it was Minsk and some nearby small towns visited by 1005, and a trip to Slonim. That was just one of the ten districts plus the municipality of Minsk.

Weissruthenien was mostly pre-war Poland, with only the Minsk, Slutsk and Borisov districts pre-1939 Soviet territory.

It is also more densely documented than the Wolhynien-Podolien region, although German documents and contemporary sources for Wolhynien are not absent.

The start of 1942 figures for the two districts together with the contemporary sources make it impossible to entirely handwave away the post-liberation investigations and testimonies, much as revisionists might like to. So does the geography: both regions were overrun relatively quickly, thus no time to evacuate en masse, nor much chance for refugees to flee, since civilian movements in the battlezone would be restricted, able-bodied adults conscripted for trench digging, and outside the very big pre-1939 Soviet cities there were few factories with workforces worth dismantling and evacuating. The industrialised Dnipro bend cities were a different matter, thus more civilians including Jews were evacuated (and more military age male Jews called up and conscripted).

If you think you can make an argument as to why a particular shtetl in Polish Volhynia was already denuded of population due to refugee flight in 1941 and the 'testimony only' sourcing for the 1942 destruction of a particular shtetl can be dismissed, please, make your case. But I doubt it will be convincing.

One should note that there were further German surveys of Jewish populations in various towns in 1941, including the key towns of the future Gebietskommissariat Bar, but also for key towns in Polish Volhynia, e.g. an economics staff noting the population of Kowel as 30,000 of which 13,000 were Jews, in 1941; the same staff counting 22,000 inhabitants of Zdolbuniv (Sdolbunow in German) of whom 30% were Jews. All of which confirms the picture from other sources: very large numbers of Jews in the western regions of the Soviet Union fell under German occupation, being unable to outrun the Blitzkrieg. They were then murdered systematically in the escalation of 1941 and in the second sweep of 1942.

They were not 'transferred', resettled or shunted around the other occupation regions in some weird kind of shell game. For that there is zero evidence. There is massively more evidence of all kinds for extermination by shooting, and that evidence consists of significantly more than Meldung 51.

[Hans]

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.

The document lists categories and provides monthly breakdowns alongside totals. Rather than being "fishy" this format reflects an established reporting method. Detailed records served to demonstrate the effectiveness and thoroughness of operations. Just have a look at the earlier report no. 30 dated 22 October 1942 - mentions among other things 4 pistols and 500 zentner potatoes captured on two days.

[Archie]

Here's Dalton's "death matrix" for years 1941 and 1942. The few months in question here are major outliers for the shooting deaths.

[SanityCheck]

Here's Dalton's "death matrix" for years 1941 and 1942. The few months in question here are major outliers for the shooting deaths.

Dalton's 'death matrices' are entirely untrustworthy, since he adjusted the numbers for various camps to fit certain strawmen, e.g. ignoring what historians like Montague presented for Chelmno based on sources and simply scaling up to fit a median death toll (250,000) between the documented numbers and earlier overestimates/extrapolations (the Polish 340,000). He did the same thing with Belzec, relying on Arad from 1987 and ignoring the Hoefle telegram or any regional studies on the affected regions. So he uses 550,000 for Belzec instead of 434,000 as nigh on everyone has done for the past 20 years. Then there are things like delaying cremation at Treblinka until April 1943 when it started months earlier, to create more false bottlenecks.

His figures for ghettos and shootings suffer from the opposite problem of simply ignoring most of the relevant research, which might have led him to query the distinction between ghetto deaths and shootings, since ghetto actions were also accompanied by shootings even when they involved deportations, in numerous cases. Are those the same as deaths from privation in the Warsaw ghetto months earlier? Arguably not.

He provides no real sources for the matrices, which makes them basically worthless.

There are better 'matrices' for Ukraine in Alexander Kruglov's work, the chapter in The Shoah in Ukraine provides one month by month and region by region for 1941, his 2005 book does so for the entire period (while also indicating sourcing for the individual actions, so one can cross-reference - this would be the actual target for any discussion, not the summary chapter), and the more recent Russian language volumes have more such detail.

[curioussoul]

Here's Dalton's "death matrix" for years 1941 and 1942. The few months in question here are major outliers for the shooting deaths.

Dalton's 'death matrices' are entirely untrustworthy, since he adjusted the numbers for various camps to fit certain strawmen, e.g. ignoring what historians like Montague presented for Chelmno based on sources and simply scaling up to fit a median death toll (250,000) between the documented numbers and earlier overestimates/extrapolations (the Polish 340,000). He did the same thing with Belzec, relying on Arad from 1987 and ignoring the Hoefle telegram or any regional studies on the affected regions. So he uses 550,000 for Belzec instead of 434,000 as nigh on everyone has done for the past 20 years. Then there are things like delaying cremation at Treblinka until April 1943 when it started months earlier, to create more false bottlenecks.

So going with the most famous mainstream historians rather than your specific favorite historian which most fits your variation of the extermination narrative on this particular occasion, makes Dalton "entirely untrustworthy"? Furthermore, what are the concrete, arithmetical consequences of these alleged artificial bottlenecks? Belzec goes from 550,000 to 434,000, following the numbers you prefer. Treblinka starts cremating before April 1943. What else?

Given your... shady... track-record when it comes to attempting to debunk revisionist arguments, it'd be naive not to demand specifics here. Simply implying that things look a little bit better if you use different numbers that other historians have thrown about is not going to topple Dalton's overall argument. Is it?

[Archie]

SanityCheck, you seem to be deliberately ignoring all of Dalton's very clear caveats about the death matrix. Dalton doesn't claim those numbers are set in stone. The idea is to break down the 6 million number over time and by camp/killing method. This is to help us visualize exactly what it is that's being claimed.

Also, if you reduce something one place, you have to increase somewhere else or the numbers won't add up. If you insist on lower numbers for the camps with not offset elsewhere, then you are going to end up well shy of six million. (I know you are a 5 million guy, but that's not the standard figure.)

None of this is very relevant to my point because no matter what assumptions you want to make, if you take this 363K number seriously that would necessarily cause of bump in shooting deaths relative to the other months.

[SanityCheck]

SanityCheck, you seem to be deliberately ignoring all of Dalton's very clear caveats about the death matrix. Dalton doesn't claim those numbers are set in stone. The idea is to break down the 6 million number over time and by camp/killing method. This is to help us visualize exactly what it is that's being claimed.

Also, if you reduce something one place, you have to increase somewhere else or the numbers won't add up. If you insist on lower numbers for the camps with not offset elsewhere, then you are going to end up well shy of six million. (I know you are a 5 million guy, but that's not the standard figure.)

None of this is very relevant to my point because no matter what assumptions you want to make, if you take this 363K number seriously that would necessarily cause of bump in shooting deaths relative to the other months.

The big problem with Dalton's shootings figures is underestimating 1941. Kruglov calculated for Ukraine and Crimea *alone* that year
June - 1500
July - 38.650
August - 61.810
September - 136,220
October - 118,510
November - 65,370
December - 87,130
total - 509,190

Add the Baltic states and Belarus to this and you are getting on for 900,000.

His 1942 figures for shootings are more reasonable since the summer/autumn months do extrapolate from Meldung 51, but his assumption going in is too low with shootings (1.6 million, he suggests) and too high with ghettos (1 million) and too rounded up with the six 'main' death camps (3 million instead of 2.5-2.6 million).

Dalton's first edition at least used Hilberg's numbers as a minimum/starting point; it was not very impressive when the 2nd edition onwards shifted to a 'canonical' six million.

But also not very impressive that Dalton and Rudolf refuse to acknowledge country-by-country breakdowns.