Callafangers wrote: ↑Thu Aug 28, 2025 5:19 pm
Nick, you aren't listening. The records were minimized by a number of factors:
- No OBL units and a general lack of administrative structure further East - few or no documents ever created
- Germany covering their tracks on Jewish dispossession and policy and war's end - even fewer documents
- Soviets and Allies (and their Jews) pillaging and corrupting any remaining records at war's end - those who forge will also shred
This is why it is necessary for you to show official, veritable, contemporary documents or physical/forensic evidence that supports your case,
which is 'conveniently' where you repeatedly and inevitably fail.
Nah, sorry, your ignorance of the besetzten Ostgebieten is truly spectacular. Have you ever read *anything* conventional about them?
I went over some very inconvenient sources for your 'theory' at RODOH a while back, specifically showing that by mid-1943, multiple sources indicated 72,000 Jews remained in the RK Ostland, a mixture of Latvian, Lithuanian and Reich Jews. The four Generalkommissariate ranged in population from 1 million to nearly 3 million, so adding further populations would have been a spectacularly obvious burden on the food supply, something especially critical in the most populous district, Weissruthenien, which was also the region most affected by partisan warfare (with both Soviet and Polish partisans by 1943). Army Group Centre's occupation zone was larger at 6 million (4 million in the army group rear area) but facing a constant threat to its control from Soviet partisans. Army Group North's zone was smaller at 1.2 million, very under-urbanised, agriculturally not very fertile, and also faced down something of a partisan threat.
I pointed to the known size of the OT-Einsatzgruppen with multiple dates in 1942-43. The OT employed Dutch and Flemish workers but also many, many Polish workers, alongside Russians, Belarusians and Balts, looking at Nord and Mitte, which operated into the military zone of operations.
This means that there are quite a range of sources in the records of the civil administration (spread across four national archives in addition to NARA/the Bundesarchiv and further materials in Moscow), the military administration and Economics Staff East which discuss the various construction projects and sources of manpower, and requests by the OT to be supplied with labour. I pointed to some examples earlier in this thread, records concerning Latvia, employment of the remaining Jews there, the labour market as a whole, use of POWs, and providing workers for Baugruppe Giesler, one of the component parts of OT-Einsatzgruppe Russland-Nord, which Giesler commanded once the OT-Einsatzgruppen were set up. A close reading of such sources can identify specific construction firms, just as one can find out the names of construction firms operating in the Government-General.
Mostly, though, it's time for you to consider the administrative structure and general pattern of urbanisation and what the Germans would do with these rear-area towns, i.e. who was based where and how they might use up the available housing, barracks, and what they might require. POW camps could provide labour - even for agriculture in Latvia - while different services had need of labour, such as Luftwaffe commands needing workers to improve, maintain or expand air fields.
Weissruthenien had 10 districts and Minsk as a municipality. In 1941-2 there were five Stalags for Soviet POWs in Minsk (352 until November 1943), Slutsk (362), Glebokie (351 until April 1942), Molodechno (342 until March 1943) and Baranovichi (337 until September 1943). Those were all districts and generally not very large towns, Minsk a small city. The former Stalag sites at Slutsk and Baranovichi became transit camps for Soviet civilian evacuees in 1943.
The initial garrison was one short infantry division, the 707th, with six infantry battalions. This was replaced in spring 1942 with the same number of territorial battalions, with Wehrmacht forces being added over 1942, including Reserve units training new recruits.
Weissruthenien rapidly filled up with SS, Police and Schutzmannschaft units to combat the rising threat from partisans, already by mid-1942. As of July 1, 1942 there were already seven battalions of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Schuma dispersed through the provincial districts, and 3 battalions of Belarusian Schuma doing guard duty around Minsk. By 1943 multiple battalions of Ukrainian Schuma had been added, along with several German police regiments. Sonderkommando Dirlewanger finally moved there in February 1943, it operated in the military zone until then.
(The military zone was equslly densely garrisoned; security divisions in Army Group Centre ended up fairly quickly with three regiments instead of two. The SS-Police force ran to two regiments in the summer of 1942, out on almost constant operations.)
The 10 districts of Weissruthenien had substantial Jewish populations still at the start of 1942, and they were
murdered over the course of the year; 139,000 Jews were reduced to below 30,000, with the latter figure including the survivors of the 7000 Reich Jews deported to Minsk in 1941. Another 17,000 Reich Jews were murdered at Maly Trostenets and one transport at Baranovichi from May to October 1942. Other than selecting a few to work in the Maly Trostenets camp and agricultural estate, these 17,000 Reich Jews showed up nowhere else in either Weissruthenien or Army Group Centre's rear area.
The SS developed a practice of reducing or destroying surviving provincial ghettos during the major antipartisan operations, 'Swamp Fever' (Baranovichi ghetto was hit), 'Hamburg' and 'Nuernberg', 'Hornung' in February 1943 (the Slutsk ghetto was destroyed, 3300 killed, amply and multply documented).
The 10 districts (Gebietskommissariate) controlled 59 Soviet districts or raiony - some were Polish counties in the west or divided from these. The region was very rural, heavily forested and contained some swamps. Already in August 1942, Soviet partisans attacked and captured raion capitals; this was a pattern common also in eastern Belarus under military administration and in the southern Belarusian Polesie region in the north of Generalkommissariat Shitomir in RK Ukraine. They usually could not hold them against determined efforts to recapture them, but the disruption was palpable.
In the sticks, at raion level, there would be even fewer officials, various Gendarmerie posts and local Belarusian Schumas, all taking significant casualties from partisan attacks. The raion capitals or market towns were all basically shtetls, so over 1941-2 the Jews of these towns were murdered or concentrated in the district capital, or skilled workers selected to be so concentrated, until they could be replaced by Belarusians or Poles.
It so happens there is an inspection tour report for OT-Einsatzgruppe Russland-Mitte for 28 July to 4 August 1942, which I would consider to be a decisive refutation of any claims that the Great Deportation from the Warsaw ghetto sent anyone via Treblinka into Weissruthenien or Army Group Centre. The Warsaw-Malkinia-Bialystok-Baranovichi-Minsk main railway would, if the 'transit camp thesis' had any substance to it, have logically pointed in *exactly* this direction.
The report noted the recrutment of 3700 Russians evidently in Army Group Centre's area, before mentioning the Sondereinsatz Werlin repair works in Minsk (which has records from the Mercedes-Benz archive) and problems with managing both Russian peasants and POWs. From mid June to mid July 1942, the OT-Einsatzgruppe Russland-Mitte lost 68 killed and 104 wounded in partisan attacks - the implication being these were Germans. Most would have been in the military part, but from April to July 21 1942, in Weissruthenien 27 OT men were killed and 9 wounded. A 500 man German Schutzkommando was impending but had yet to arrive.
The OT secured agreement to deploy 1-2000 Jews from the Baranovichi ghetto as long as they could be held in barracks (kaserniert), for the Eisenbahneinsatz. No mention of Jews from Warsaw.
A further report for the end of August/start of September 1942 noted that *Italian* workers for the OT in this region had reached the end of their contracts and were returning home; 50 however had extended their contracts. The Arbeitseinsatz section of this report further discusses a promise in July 1942 to supply 5000 POWs and 1000 Ukrainian civilians 'from Army Group South' (they could have moved up via Chernihiv) but the transfer was cancelled. There was a demand of 2-3000 workers for the railway Einsatz and 6-7000 workers for the Durchgangsstrassen. On the other hand, 7000 Russian civilians had been recruited (again presumably mostly in AGC, but Russen could equally be used casually for Belarusians. This report confirms that 2000 Jews had indeed been assigned to the Eisenbahneinsatz, given the previous report from Baranovichi - no hint they had arrived from outside the region. The partisan threat was causing a high rate of flight among 'civilians' (not Jews). From mid-July to mid-August 1942, the OT-Einsatzgruppe lost a further 68 killed and 194 wounded. There was also a discussion of the issues arising from contracting Polish construction firms based in the GG, due to the wage differential. Multiple reports in other records note Polish OT workers in the central sector (Mitte-Weissruthenien).
In this time frame, the era of the Great Deportation from the Warsaw ghetto (July 22-September 21, 1942), two transports of Jewish workers *were* sent from Warsaw to the Mitte-Weissruthenien region. But they were taken from 11,000 able bodied Jews selected for the Dulag and left directly from Warsaw; this contingent also saw transports deported directly to Majdanek (as workers) in September 1942. The bimonthly report of the Warsaw district governor as well as information available to the Judenrat and thus ghetto underground both agree on the destinations of the two transports. They did not come from the 250,000 documented as resettled and from the train schedules and other sources sent to Treblinka to be killed (and a few selected to work in either Treblinka II, like Jankiel Wiernik, or Treblinka I)
One transport was sent to the SS-Nachschubkommandantur Russland-Mitte near Bobruisk, which had already received a labour transport from Warsaw since the SS in Bobruisk had exterminated all the native Belarusian Jews in 1941. The other was slated for Luftgau Moskau headquartered in Minsk.
That transport provoked a freak-out from Gauleiter Kube, the Generalkommissar Weissruthenien, who threatened to have it destroyed. What happened to the transport is unknown. Kube further freaked out in mid-August at a false report of another incoming transport of Jews reaching Baranovichi - to repeat, the paper trail withdrew the accusation and said this was a
false report. Kube and the mayor of Minsk, Janetzke, had complained extensively about being lumbered with a mere 7,000 Reich Jews in 1941. Kube did not object to the 17 transports from the Reich being killed at Maly Trostenets and Baranovichi or small numbers being selected to work on the SS estate at Trostenets, because he didn't have to worry about them, they would not need to be housed, fed or looked after.
In April 1943, the district commissars, Minsk officials and SS held a conference to discuss achievements and new goals, with many of the district commissars as well as the SS (von Gottberg the SSPF and Strauch the KdS) noting the extermination of the Jews of their districts or the killings of Jews and the now much lower number left alive. After the civil administration fled Weissruthenien in June-July 1944, each district commissar filed an experience report with several more noting the problems from the loss of Jewish labour.
I'd like you to outline a scenario for how the 250,000 Jews of Warsaw deported to Treblinka could possibly have ended up along the Mitte-Weissruthenien axis, over and above those two known transports from the 'Dulag'.
Army Group Centre was busily trying to offload Russian civilians evacuated from the Rzhev salient onto Weissruthenien, which it managed to do to the tune of many thousands before one brought typhus along and the transports were suspended. Some of the evacuees from near Rzhev were resettled into housing in Lida freed up by the reduction of the ghetto there in May 1942.
Offloading large numbers of Jews into the zone of operations is not feasible, not without triggering protests and refusals. The SS depot at Bobruisk could bring in explicit workers in small numbers without being especially noticed, but there weren't further SS staffs in the Army Group Centre area capable of absorbing and controlling five or six figures of deported Jews. In 1941, plans to send just a few transports beyond Minsk into the military zone met with the response that they would be turned away with force of arms (Waffengewalt), due to the transport crisis. In 1942, every train was needed to supply the colossal battle in the Rzhev salient, while the rail lines were being harried endlessly by the partisans. Since the SS were committed to antipartisan operations in AGC at this time, there wasn't an infrastructure to handle five or six figures of deported Jews. The OT was not involved in this sector in large-scale use of Jewish forced labour. The statistics for OT-Einsatzgruppe Russland-Mitte in spring 1942, August 1942 and into 1943 don't allow for this.
Moreover, there are multiple reports from Einsatzgruppe B from late August through the whole of September 1942, with some preserved in multiple copies captured by the Americans as well as the Soviets, which do not mention the arrival of any Jews from Poland, or indeed from Maly Trostenets if you remember you have to account for the whereabouts of 16,000 deportees from the Reich killed there and 1000 killed at Baranovichi.
Offloading large numbers of Jews in Weissruthenien was just as problematic. The SS-Police were also committed to antipartisan operations in this region. The Minsk ghetto was being reduced in this time-frame and its size counted in reports of the civil administration, the employment of workers in Minsk noted in other reports. Dispersing 250,000 Jews deported from Warsaw, even allowing for a 20% casualty rate en route, would mean 20,000 Jews being settled in each district. For this to go unremarked in all of the many sources surviving from GK Weissruthenien, whether from the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus or the NARA-Bundesarchiv records, including in several OT reports from this exact time-frame, is not credible. For this also not to be noted by any diarists, letter-writers, partisan units, the Polish underground and Armia Krajowa (who were for sure operating in western Belarus) is even less credible.
But, I'm willing to hear out a scenario dividing up the 250,000 Jews of Warsaw deported to Treblinka by regions and districts in Mitte-Weissruthenien.
This would not be the only cohort to explain away - the more than 300,000 Jews of the Radom district deported to Treblinka, the deportations from provincial ghettos in the Warsaw district and the deportations from parts of the Lublin district to Treblinka all would logically flow from Malkinia-Bialystok-Baranovichi-Minsk. The Bialystok district deportations southwestwards to Treblinka might have better been sent from the transit/collection camps without boomeranging westwards to Treblinka, but the same route would apply. However, maybe you have an idea of how the Radom district Jews were deflected into the Polesie and Pripyat marshes, or how actually it was the Radom district Jews who needed to be sent to Weissruthenien while the Jews of Warsaw really ended up in the Pripyat marshes.
The scenario needs to outline where these contingents were sent - were they sent to the Gebiet capitals or dispersed into the provincial raiony, who guarded them and was there any intention of feeding them? (Because there's also no hint in the agricultural administration records of adding hundreds of thousands of people to the ration lists in either Mitte or Weissruthenien).
'Muh OT' ain't gonna cut it now.
