The Jews Went to Work? Organization Todt

[Stubble]

[...]

I hear you, surely you can see my perspective. To me, the pages are noxious, dripping with vitriol, bias and not history, but judgement.

Further discussion on this particular is likely to drift the thread. Perhaps in the future I will pen a post to further elucidate my perspective in the event that I may have been unclear here.

[bombsaway]

Where do you get that from this statement

In the public handling of the Jewish Question, any discussion of a future final solution must be avoided.

However, it may be said that the Jews are being brought in collectively for appropriate labor deployment.

He is talking about "discussion" not policy.

Well, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, now does it. The way I read it as 'the Final Solution is paused' and 'jews are being put to labor in the east' is by, reading the NSDAP circular as it is written. Is it a policy paper? No, it is a circular.

By this logic I could just as well read it as, the final solution entailed mass killing and they didn't want to talk about it so they could draw attention away from it. I think this is a reasonable interpretation of the document but I would never hold it up as evidence for that position. You see where you're going wrong here?

Quote from me in the other document where they say "housing is being put in place" or some such.

If you're holding these documents up as evidence, I think you're hallucinating these sorts of details. It's just not there.

[SanityCheck]

Where do you get that from this statement

In the public handling of the Jewish Question, any discussion of a future final solution must be avoided.

However, it may be said that the Jews are being brought in collectively for appropriate labor deployment.

He is talking about "discussion" not policy.

Well, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, now does it. The way I read it as 'the Final Solution is paused' and 'jews are being put to labor in the east' is by, reading the NSDAP circular as it is written. Is it a policy paper? No, it is a circular.

Stubble, the July 1943 Parteikanzlei circular came after a prolonged public campaign of antisemitic propaganda, which accelerated after the Katyn revelation in April 1943. Not only Goebbels but other leading propagandists like von Leers were often too blunt in their articles. Other NSDAP figures were evidently talking about the 'Jewish question' more, and the public was taking note, which is reflected in SD reports (mostly local level rather than the Meldungen aus dem Reich). Germans were gossiping about how cities being bombed by the Allies suffered because they'd burned down synagogues on Kristallnacht, and others were being spared because they hadn't (which ceased when those towns were also bombed).

This is well covered in Peter Longerich's Davon haben wir nichts gewusst, Jeffrey Herf's The Jewish Enemy, and feeds into other works; Saul Friedlander discusses this phase using some of the same sources in The Years of Extermination.

The limited-hangout cover story of Jews being used for labour was already made in an earlier circular of October 1942, which was purely internal, and did not trigger any publicity wave for Jewish forced labour. Nor did the July 1943 circular trigger any publicity for Jewish forced labour. The July 1943 circular was aimed at Party officials and propagandists, telling them to shut up. The October 1942 reacted to word of mouth stories and rumours spreading among the German public and informed the Party of what to say if it came up.

Both circulars were quite literally the 'Party Line', so it's amusing to watch when someone uncritically takes such an explicit 'Party Line' at face value rather than recognising them for cover stories and limited hang outs. Yes, some Jews were being put to work - but most had disappeared and were nowhere to be found in any Arbeitseinsatz reports or camps.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the Reichs- and Gauleiter were reminded at least twice in 1943 of the destruction/annihilation of the Jews, in February 1943 by Hitler (Goebbels' diary, but also a note by agriculture minister Herbert Backe), in October 1943 by Himmler (Goebbels' diary again, and Himmler's second Posen speech).

[Wahrheitssucher]

…Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the Reichs- and Gauleiter were reminded at least twice in 1943 of the destruction/annihilation of the Jews:
1.) in February 1943 by Hitler (Goebbels' diary, but also a note by agriculture minister Herbert Backe),
2.) in October 1943 by Himmler (Goebbels' diary again, and Himmler's second Posen speech).

Please can you provide a reference or a link to the texts you are referring to supporting 1.) ‘in February 1943 by Hitler”.

[SanityCheck]

I was reminded yesterday when looking something up in Christian Gerlach's Kalkulierte Morde of a briefing paper for Goering dated 13 October 1942, notes for a meeting on the economy of the occupied eastern territories which never took place. It turned out I have the document copied from USHMM, the original is in the Four Year Plan record group of the Moscow 'special archive', so RGVA 700-1-49, p.89.

Gerlach cites this at the start of section 6.3 a) Der regionale Arbeitskraeftebedarf

Labour deployment, so started the paragraph, was making 'growing difficulties' in the east, with the Sauckel action conflicting with local labour demands, while on the other hand there were further problems
Firstly, the Soviets had taken with them (evacuated) labourers especially specialists to a very large degree
Secondly, that the Jews were largely 'resettled'

the quote marks are in the original: dass die Juden zum grössten Teil ‚umgesiedelt‘ sind

The VJP official clearly knew the proper way to euphemise but also to signal that this was a euphemism by using quotation marks.

In addition, the local urban population was increasingly leaving for the countryside to seek more food, which is well attested in regional sources and complaints. And there were other issues, but the absence of Jews was #2 on the list.

Neither native Jews from the USSR and Baltic states nor foreign Jews deported from the rest of Europe or Poland were mentioned thereafter as a potential solution to a growing shortage of labour in the east.

Goering's Four Year Plan had pressured very hard through to August 1942 to raise agricultural quotas for the new harvest year, which resulted in the 'food factor' overriding labour regarding Jews in Wolhynien-Podolien and in the Government-General. Hans Frank noted at a meeting of 24 August 1942 that the feeding of 1.2 million Jews would 'fall away' from the autumn while 300,000 would be retained as workers, which is strikingly close to the actual number left alive at the end of 1942 under German control in the GG (297,000 according to the Korherr report).

Since the occupied eastern territories all had their quotas raised as well, there wasn't going to be a surplus in the Reichskommissariate Ostland or Ukraine, or in the army group areas behind the front, to feed the deportees from Aktion Reinhardt, which peaked precisely from July 1942 onwards.

So the dynamic was similar to the one in 1941, when food imperatives led to the lowering of rations for Soviet POWs resulting in mass starvation in the POW camps (the key decisions being in September 1941), before the labour of Soviet POWs was suddenly embraced as a solution to problems on the labour market, from November 1941. By the time the Germans had 'resolved' the explicit contradiction in the spring of 1942, more than 2 million Soviet POWs had died, and the Germans were left with fewer than 2 million POWs for labour, recruitment as collaborators, etc. Regionally, the cutting of rations in half for Soviet POWs in the camps of the Government-General in September 1941 led to the deaths of a quarter of a million prisoners of war by April 1942. Two thirds of the 21,000 Soviet POWs at Stalag XI C (311) in Bergen-Belsen were dead by spring 1942 as well: https://bergen-belsen.stiftung-ng.de/en ... 1940-1945/ One can go on but the point should be clear.

[SanityCheck]

…Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the Reichs- and Gauleiter were reminded at least twice in 1943 of the destruction/annihilation of the Jews:
1.) in February 1943 by Hitler (Goebbels' diary, but also a note by agriculture minister Herbert Backe),
2.) in October 1943 by Himmler (Goebbels' diary again, and Himmler's second Posen speech).

Please can you provide a reference or a link to the texts you are referring to supporting 1.) ‘in February 1943 by Hitler”.

Friedlander, Years of Extermination for the Goebbels diary quotes, Gerlach/Aly, Das letzte Kapitel for the Backe note which comes from his Nachlass. Not wasting time with more precise references when both will do for now.

[Stubble]

[...]

This seems thread worthy and merits a new thread. I will build a rebuttal and cite sources when I find some time. I'm neck deep in 't' series stuff today.

Currently, I'm diligently pursuing making jewish labor in the east demonstrable and quantified. It's, not easy. The records are spotty and any inference that I make will need to be solidly supported by surrounding documentation, lest it be stillborn and picked apart without being taken seriously.

Again, regardless of our difference in interpretation, I'm sure you can see my perspective.

With the insufficient grave space at the Bug River camps and with the lack of a demonstrable murder weapon at Auschwitz Birkenau, in addition to continuing to find Hungarian jews, I find the proposition of simply accepting the genocide narrative untenable.

I have been repeatedly told I 'must solve the where'd they go' problem, otherwise the events occurred as described. I'm making that effort, to name the missing jews and to figure out their disposition.

One thing I'm not doing is 'taking the party line uncritically'. I'm taking it literally, because so far, that's where the evidence has led me.

/shrug

Mr Terry PhD, a question, do you, here and now, deny that jews were employed by various bodies in the east to work on armament and infrastructure projects for the 3R up to the Soviet counter offensive, in places like Kertsch in the Reichskommisariate Ukraine and various posts through the Reichskommisariate Ukraine and Reichskommisariate Ostland more broadly? Is that seriously your position? I'm extremely doubtful that you will deny this matter of record.

From Yad Vashim;

Title;
Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during World War II

https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/gene ... orers.html

The main documentary basis for this monograph is personal accounts – testimonies and memoirs, and a few diaries and letters, of those who endured. These personal accounts were supplemented by a unique set of documents from the war itself that is held by Yad Vashem.

[Nessie]

...

With the insufficient grave space at the Bug River camps and with the lack of a demonstrable murder weapon at Auschwitz Birkenau, in addition to continuing to find Hungarian jews, I find the proposition of simply accepting the genocide narrative untenable.

....

You are only kidding yourself about the supposed lack of grave space and "murder weapon" at Auschwitz, as you deflect from the total lack of evidence of mass resettlement and millions of Jews in camps and ghettos, OT, otherwise, in 1944.

I have been repeatedly told I 'must solve the where'd they go' problem, otherwise the events occurred as described.

That's history for you. A chronology of events. If you cannot complete that most basic of tasks, you have not done history.

I'm making that effort, to name the missing jews and to figure out their disposition

We are now 80 years since the end of WWII, when, if you were correct, millions of Jews would have been liberated. At what point will you accept that after decades of searching, there is no evidence of mass resettlement?

[SanityCheck]

[...]

This seems thread worthy and merits a new thread. I will build a rebuttal and cite sources when I find some time. I'm neck deep in 't' series stuff today.

Currently, I'm diligently pursuing making jewish labor in the east demonstrable and quantified. It's, not easy. The records are spotty and any inference that I make will need to be solidly supported by surrounding documentation, lest it be stillborn and picked apart without being taken seriously.

Again, regardless of our difference in interpretation, I'm sure you can see my perspective.

With the insufficient grave space at the Bug River camps and with the lack of a demonstrable murder weapon at Auschwitz Birkenau, in addition to continuing to find Hungarian jews, I find the proposition of simply accepting the genocide narrative untenable.

I have been repeatedly told I 'must solve the where'd they go' problem, otherwise the events occurred as described. I'm making that effort, to name the missing jews and to figure out their disposition.

One thing I'm not doing is 'taking the party line uncritically'. I'm taking it literally, because so far, that's where the evidence has led me.

/shrug

Some reading for you at NARA, in T459 Reichskommissariat Ostland, which is actually mostly the Generalkommissar Riga-Lettland papers.
https://catalog.archives.gov/search-wit ... naId%3Aasc

If you've done a Todt keyword search at the Bundesarchiv you may have seen in the catalogue an as yet undigitised file from R 92, GK Riga, regarding Baugruppe Giesler of the OT. In BArch it's R 92/421, the concordance is NARA T459/18 from frame (PDF page) 784

This was very interesting as it showed the supply of Latvian skilled workers, Soviet POWs, Roma (Zigeuner) and only later on some native Latvian Jews for Giesler's construction program. Especially striking was a May or June 1942 proposal to use really large numbers of Soviet POWs at various worksites (i.e. quasi-camps, they would have to have at least some guards) for Giesler.

It has to be read alongside a file of monthly and bimonthly reports from the labour deployment and social administration section of GK Lettland, which can be found on NARA T459/19 from frames 177-373, which contains futher details, editorialising and complaints, as well as context - the use of POW labour and the use of Jewish labour from the remaining Latvian Jews and the newly arrived Jews from the Reich in the Riga ghetto.

Giesler's worksites had poor working conditons, poor shelter and problems with food, causing regular civilian workers to break contracts and wander off, with one report noting that the OT tended to simply request more workers rather than trying to solve the problems. These details offer a lot of insights into how labour deployment worked, and the OT as well.

You may notice when looking at the monthly reports little tidbits like a construction firm (Baufirma) contracted to the Luftwaffe bringing with it 150 Polish skilled workers. There is a running complaint about the reluctance of Latvian women to work due to lack of childcare and various other complaints, including not wanting to be 'German slaves'. I was also especially struck by one report noting on PDF page/frame 295 how Panjewagen drivers were released from service by the Wehrmacht at the Leningrad front, and they arrived in Latvia in poor condition, many being Lithuanians, who then returned to Lithuania. There are other such references which conform to well documented recruitments of Baltic civilians as auxiliaries and as police/troops.

This reel may be a great place to start as from PDF page 374, there is a file on 'Einheimische Juden' which turns out to discuss the deployment of Reich Jews as well as preserving documents about actual and proposed transfers of Lithuanian Jews mainly from the Kovno ghetto. The correspondence and wrangling over different work sites tends to boil down to contigents of 100 or 300 Jews, compared to 15,000 Jews from Latvia and the Reich in the GK Lettland through this period of 1942-3.

The monthly reports show a steady increase of Jews registered in Arbeitseinsatz which equates to a more thorough exploitation of the Reich Jews in the 'German ghetto'.

In early 1943 the districts in Latvia reported the following employment of Jews - all documents are on the Arolsen Archives
5.1.43 GebK Mitau employing 289 Jews
10.1.43 GebK Dünaburg employing 454 Jews
10.1.43 GebK Kurland (Libau) employing 841 Jews
10.1.43 GebK Riga, Arbeitseinsatz; Hier: Judeneinsatz: 10,405 Jews [total, 11,999 Jewish workers]
https://collections.arolsen-archives.or ... d=82173800
https://collections.arolsen-archives.or ... d=82173599
https://collections.arolsen-archives.or ... d=82173644
https://collections.arolsen-archives.or ... d=82173892

One thing to watch for is whether the statistics include Jews employed directly by the SS, which may well explain various apparent discrepancies. The labour administration and civil administration had a lot of insight and oversight, but the SS could

That's a problem for 'resettlement' since the SS commands are well established and there wasn't a Konzentrationslager Kommandanturstab equivalent a year before KL Kaiserwald was set up which could have employed huge numbers of otherwise missing Jews 'extraterritorially'.

Background can be read in a 500-page PhD in German on labour in the Ostland, the author Tilman Plath has very kindly put the whole book on his academia.edu page. Plath considers Jewish forced labour in the dissertation, but alongside other aspects of labour deployment, as one should.

Tilman Plath, Zwischen Schonung und Menschenjagden: die Arbeitseinsatzpolitik in den baltischen Generalbezirken des Reichskommissariats Ostland 1941-1944 (Essen: Klartext, 2012)
https://www.academia.edu/43307619/Zwisc ... 41_1944_45

The raw files on T459/19 will likely help you see the labour market and note the sectors plus see mentions of employers, like the OT's Baugruppe Giesler. The file on Jewish labour is especially striking for how different employers requested Jews and were turned down, or had to fuss for weeks to get approval to move 300 Jews from Lithuania to Riga (to work on the Riga-Spilwe airfield).

Two files cannot tell the whole story, of course, much less of the entire east. But they are a start.

I would recommend exploring the armaments inspectorate/commando and economics inspectorate/commando records in RW 30 and 31 at the Bundesarchiv, since these include many snapshot overviews of labour in particular regions, so for example reports from Kauen (Kovno-Kaunas) were covering the labour situation in Lithuania in 1943. A lot of these war diaries are tedious minutiae, but one can probably zero in on candidates by looking through Plath's footnotes. Or this book which is open access:

Joachim Tauber, Arbeit als Hoffnung: jüdische Ghettos in Litauen 1941-1944 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015)
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document ... 15551/html

The populations of the relevant regions are worth burning into your brain. These are all figures for 1942-3 which do not include native Jews killed in 1941-2 and which do not include hidden foreign/Polish Jews to the best of anyone's knowledge
Army Group North: maximum 1.2 million entirely in Russia
Estonia 1 million (down from 1.1 million prewar)
Latvia 1.8 million
Lithuania 2.8 million

The Baltic states had very good registration and statistical apparatuses, Army Group North also generated extensive statistics.

Weissruthenien 2.5 to 3 million - an initial registration at the end of 1941 had 2.969 million, before the second sweep annihilated over 100,000 Belarusian Jews and before antipartisan operations started depopulating whole swathes of this region

Army Group Centre - 6 million in October 1942, 1.8 million in the forward army areas, 4.375 million in the army group rear area
Reichskommissariat Ukraine - 16 million counted in January 1943, about the same population as the Government-General
Army Group South/B - fluctuated with the 1942 advance and 1943 retreat back to the spring 1942 start lines; 5 million in March 1943

Crimea - an interesting case being a peninsula. 1939 census counted 1.126 million inhabitants, evacuations, call-ups and war reduced this to 728-731,000 as of September 1942 (Norbert Kunz, Die Krim unter Deutscher Herrschaft 1941-1944, pp.103, 316, citing BArch 23/101 (Befh Krim Abt VII, 23.10.42) and RH 24-42/226 which is digitised at NARA). The Germans initially estimated 40,000 of 65,000 Jews in the Crimea remained behind, in reality this was slightly too high but up to 35,000 were killed in 1941-2 with none of the population censuses showing any by late summer 1942. Meanwhile 41,000 Ostarbeiter were recruited or impressed from the Crimea up to October 1943, when it was effectively cut off from mainland Ukraine.

Hitler actually had a major brainfart in July 1942 and ordered in Trumpian fashion the immediate total evacuation of the entire Crimea so it could be Germanised. All the high commands etc had to dodge this which would have meant dumping over 700,000 Russians, Tatars and minorities onto southern Ukraine. Eventually Hitler was distracted back to the war and the mass evacuation was never carried out.

Mr Terry PhD,

Nick is fine

a question, do you, here and now, deny that jews were employed by various bodies in the east to work on armament and infrastructure projects for the 3R up to the Soviet counter offensive, in places like Kertsch in the Reichskommisariate Ukraine and various posts through the Reichskommisariate Ukraine and Reichskommisariate Ostland more broadly? Is that seriously your position? I'm extremely doubtful that you will deny this matter of record.

Kertsch (Kerch) is in the Crimea, which was never a formal part of RK Ukraine. Polish workers for the Organisation Todt were sent there in 1943 to help build a bridge ordered by Hitler to the Kuban peninsula/bridgehead in the North Caucasus. The Arolsen Archives has some copies from files out of BArch R 50 I about this construction effort. The literature on the OT including Franz Seidler's book talks of these workers as Poles, not Polish Jews. But if you think a source says otherwise please highlight it. That would be quite a new discovery.

There certainly were remnant native Jewish workforces in Lithuania and Latvia kept alive to become supervised by the new Baltic KZs in 1943, along with Jews from the Reich deported to Riga. The surviving Jews of Wilno mostly ended up in KL Vaivara in Estonia working for the Organisation Todt project in the oil shale fields there. Some were evacuated in 1944 and some killed at Klooga because they couldn't be evacuated in time, unlike the workforces in KL Kaiserwald and KL Kauen. A single transport from France (convoi 73) was sent directly from Drancy to Lithuania in 1944, while Hungarian Jews were sent from the 'Depot' in Birkenau after selection on arrival to KL Kaiserwald, for essentially a couple of months before they were shipped back via Stutthof.

Jews from the Reich deported to Minsk could survive in small numbers to be sent westwards in autumn 1943 to camps in the Lublin district. This also happened with the survivors from two transports from Warsaw sent as labourers to the Waffen-SS depot (Nachschubkommandantur Russland-Mitte) in Bobruisk in 1942. One transport before the Great Deportation, one transport from the 'Dulag' at the start of the Great Deportation. There was also a small workforce sent to an SS camp in Smolensk (after the liquidation of the Smolensk ghetto). There were various transports westwards to Majdanek and Auschwitz in 1943-44 of non-Jewish partisan 'suspects' and 'relatives', some of which may have included other Jews. The SS camp at Mogilev held 400 Jews in September 1943, many of whom were sent east from the western Belarusian town of Slonim in 1942, so from Weissruthenien to Army Group Centre.

After the closure of the Minsk ghetto and Bobruisk camp, there were still small Jewish workforces in Weissruthenien, in the Maly Trostenets SS camp/estate and in Koldychevo. These could be compared well with Treblinka I (SS-Arbeitslager Treblinka). There were massacres in the 1944 retreat as the hundreds of workers in these camps could not be evacuated.

In Ukraine, the SS ran camps along Durchgangsstrasse IV through the Reichskommissariat, with DG IV continuing past the Dnipro river into Army Group South, with less SS oversight it seems. Ukrainian Jews were used on DG IV and there were many thousands impressed/enticed from Romanian-controlled Transnistria in southwestern Ukraine in August 1942. These camps lost their Jewish workforces to exhaustion and local shootings through 1942-43. A single work-ghetto in Wolhynien was liquidated in late 1943, all other ghettos in the region were destroyed in 1942, as well as the Jewish workers in various OT camps along DG VII.

Heavy industry and 'armaments' plants were limited in the 'east', the Ostgesellschaften formed to oversee mining/steel mills and textiles generally did not employ Jews. However the Glebokie ghetto was a textiles centre for the Ostfaser GmbH until it was destroyed in August 1943. This parallels the textile firms setting up 'shops' in ghettos in Upper East Silesia until the same month (the workers were deported to Auschwitz, and enabled the expansion of more sub-camps of what became KL Auschwitz III), and the textiles production in Bialystok. The loss of Jewish workers in Bialystok when the ghetto was liquidated in August 1943 and the workers transferred to the Lublin district (some to die in Trawniki, Poniatowa and Majdanek, some to survive in the Heinkel plant in Budzyn) caused no disruption according to the armaments inspectorate there, whereas other ghetto liquidations caused hiccups to production. German officials started preparing for the eventual loss of the Glebokie ghetto workforce eight months earlier; this meant setting up training programs to up-skill Belarusians.

Bear in mind the Dnieper bend industrial zone was largely swept clear of Jews in 1941 when industry was at a standstill, before it began to be reactivated, and very few Jews remained behind in the industrial-mining centres of the Donets region by the time they were captured later in 1941.

So one can find Jewish workers in very limited numbers (thousands) in Ukraine until the end of 1943 (in Galicia to spring 1944), in Belarus and central Russia thousands until September/October 1943, in the Baltic states however tens of thousands until July-September 1944.

Given existing patterns and preferences by the SS and other agencies, it would not surprise me to learn of a few more camps along the lines of the Bobruisk camp in the besetzten Ostgebieten (RKO, RKU, military zone) as a whole. The most probable route would be a SS decision to import or keep alive a Jewish workforce for its own purposes in one of its depots or training camps, because this is the typical pattern - in Poland such centres often had quasi-custodial Jewish workforces (like the Heidelager training ground), in Germany pretty much every SS barracks and facility acquired a small Aussenkommando of KZ inmates. However, such camps would probably have been detected in 1960s investigations and known earlier to others, if there had been any survivors, which is what we find with the Bobruisk camp.

[HansHill]

Can i just say from reading a thread like this, the quality of output between certain Orthodox posters is striking. While Dr Sanitycheck and I have crossed swords in previous threads, i) its posts within threads like this that can be appreciated as value-add, and to repeat CF's point in earlier in the thread that posts like these are welcome, and ii) at times where we have crossed swords i thoroughly enjoyed those exchanges. I don't walk away from Dr SC posts laughing my ass off.

[Callafangers]

Can i just say from reading a thread like this, the quality of output between certain Orthodox posters is striking. While Dr Sanitycheck and I have crossed swords in previous threads, i) its posts within threads like this that can be appreciated as value-add, and to repeat CF's point in earlier in the thread that posts like these are welcome, and ii) at times where we have crossed swords i thoroughly enjoyed those exchanges. I don't walk away from Dr SC posts laughing my ass off.

I would certainly hope so... SC/Nick is arguably in the top 5 Holocaust historians in the world (if not #1) who has any hope of competing with revisionists, as shown time and time again by those who are easily demolished when caught off-guard debating revisionists, e.g. here:



I give Nick and the tiny handful of other Holo-historians who are familiar with revisionist arguments some credit, as they have found a way to utilize the massive pile of "hay" (e.g. ChGK reports, Jewish atrocity claims, 'converging' rumor, etc.) in a way that appears consistent (even sometimes authoritative) at face-value, forcing revisionists to keep working to understand and respond to important elements that might have thus far gone unaddressed.

It exposes gaps in revisionism but I think this is the one place we find common ground (between sincere exterminationists and revisionists): we share an interest in exposing the truth, even if that challenges our respective positions.

As you allude to, there are some others in the exterminationist camp who do not provide as much value and likely do not intend to. One such member is currently enjoying a two-week ban for his disruptive behavior.

[EDIT: I have not yet read through SC/Nick's recent posts on this thread, will get to it when I have time to respond.]

[SanityCheck]

From Yad Vashim;

Title;
Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during World War II

https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/gene ... orers.html

The main documentary basis for this monograph is personal accounts – testimonies and memoirs, and a few diaries and letters, of those who endured. These personal accounts were supplemented by a unique set of documents from the war itself that is held by Yad Vashem.

This was added after I replied to your post, but is worth commenting on.

The Hungarian Labour Service showed what the Germans *could* have done if they hadn't been quite so paranoid and extreme about Jews. While Jews were barred from military service in both Germany and Hungary, creating a labour corps was not a dumb idea. Indeed, German/Austrian Jewish refugees when released from British internment were directed to the Pioneer Corps before they were allowed to join regular British Army units (including the Commandos).

However, the HLS model wasn't really possible in Germany/Austria, since younger men had emigrated to a greater extent, ageing the population of Reich Jews, and the remaining working age German Jews were generally directed to armaments work especially in Berlin, much to Goebbels' frustration, and to labour camps of the Reichsautobahn. These were all exempted from deportation in autumn 1941; Hitler and Speer eventually decided to replace them with foreign workers in September 1942, and in February 1943 the 'factory action' removed them from the factories in Berlin (and elsewhere) to be deported to Auschwitz, with the usual selections.

Something like the HLS could possibly have been implemented for Polish Jews, along the lines of the Polish Baudienst, if the Germans had bothered earlier on, but this would have required more organisation and a certain investment of guards, overseers and German personnel, if these able bodied male Jews were to operate like the Hungarian labour battalions. And that would have involved separations from families.

If Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich hadn't decided on a 'Final Solution', then they could well have organised 100,000 or more Polish male Jews of working age into such labour battalions, but that would have required leaving the rest of Polish Jewry where it was.

The initial deportations in the first half of 1942 (and end of 1941 for Chelmno) are incompatible with an Arbeitseinsatz since the unfit and unemployed were so consistently first to go, while in this phase existing workforces were held back. Polish Jews were underemployed and not being used efficiently, deporting and killing the unfit meant the remaining workers were being used more extensively, and also for armaments purposes. In 1941, Jews in the GG were basically banned from armaments work.

[Stubble]

For clarity, I don't do any word search on any of the documents I review, I scan them, form a mental summary, and determine if it is worth putting in the 'read' pile. After I scan a series, I'll read the 'read' pile. If something rings a bell, I will put it in the 'cross' pile and check the other document that 'rang the bell'. If they are congruent, I place them together in a separate file under what seems a relevant title.

I 'scan', then 'read', then 'cross', then collate.

When my brain turns to tapioca, as happens from time to time, I take a break. The break may be an hour, it may be a day, depends on how bad the headache is.

I appreciate you pointing at some particulars, i just don't want to leave ANYTHING unchecked. I'm going to turn over every single stone.

Besides, OT is but a sliver anyhow.

[Nazgul]

In 1941, Jews in the GG were basically banned from armaments work.

This is false information. I do not think the word basically is appropriate considering hundreds of thousand Jews were making munitions including bombs. Here are two examples applicable to the GG.
Jewish Labour Camps for munitions at SkarzyskoKamienna. This is one of the camps mentioned on Fplo 587 documents en transt to Treblinka arbeitslagers. The camp belonged to the German
Hasag concern. It was established in August 1942 and was liquidated on
August 1, 1944. Altogether, 25,000--30,000 Jews were brought to Skarzysko-Kamienna. link
According to the German researchers there were 7 Forced Labour Camps for Jews in Czestochowa all working for HASAG making munitions. One closed in 1944 while the other 6 closed in 1945.

[Nessie]

...It was established in August 1942 and was liquidated on
August 1, 1944. Altogether, 25,000--30,000 Jews were brought to Skarzysko-Kamienna. link
According to the German researchers there were 7 Forced Labour Camps for Jews in Czestochowa all working for HASAG making munitions. One closed in 1944 while the other 6 closed in 1945.

Which leaves you with a chronological gap and is circumstantial evidence of the mass killings, causing a huge reduction in the Jewish population.