Statements like this one are infuriating, couching the murders of millions of innocent civilians in this bland reasonable tone, as though the Einsatzgruppen were behaving in an entirely understandable fashion. They were only trying “to suppress local resistance,” so goodness me, how could anyone possible object? An invading army simply must destroy that pesky resistance, mustn’t it? At least, that is how I read the subtext.
But even beyond that question of tone, the idea that the Einsaztzgruppen and local collaborators murdered only members of partisan groups is flatly contradicted by the historical record. They may have initially been created to kill political opponents but within a very short period of time they began killing Jews simply because they were Jewish.
Here is a story that may put a human face on things. I don’t expect to change Chen019’s mind, as his/her views seem firmly entrenched. And the OP has disappeared. But I’d like to add this story to the thread anyway. When the Nazis invaded the USSR, some of my husband’s relatives lived in Ukraine. They were concerned that their eldest daughter, then a teenager, would be in danger because she belonged to the Komsomol (the Communist youth organization), so they sent her far away to stay with friends. They were completely naive about the Nazis’ actual intentions. The Nazis didn’t care that no one else in the family belonged to the Communist Party or affiliated organizations. They were Jewish and that was all that mattered. They were all slaughtered. The only member of the family to survive was the eldest daughter.
So no. The Einsatzgruppen were not primarily concerned with eliminating “local resistance.” They slaughtered men and women, infants and children and the elderly. They probably would have murdered even more people if the Nazis hadn’t decided that mass shootings were an inefficient method of destroying the Jewish population and the extermination camps became the main focus for this lethal goal.
Chen019 is still ignoring specific pieces of evidence like this report in which Commander SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger documented over 100,000 Jews and others murdered in Lithuania by Einsatzkommando III with date, location, and number of men, women and children killed, writing “I can state today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania has been reached by Einsatzkommando 3. There are no more Jews in Lithuania, apart from working Jews and their families.”
In fact, if the invading forces had behaved decently toward the conquered people of Ukraine, they might have been able to stir up anti-Communist and anti-Russian sentiments. Instead, they stiffened the resistance, as the people saw the Nazis for the murderous thugs they actually were.
There was nothing rational about the murder squads. They were a virulent symptom of the hellish disease of Nazism.
Uhm… They did get loads of Ukrainian volunteers. A large part of the Ukrainian population was highly anti-semitic. Today they are still proud to have fought on the German side, against the Russians. Witness the sporting of flagrant Nazi symbols in today’s Ukraine.
Numerous Ukrainians did collaborate with the Nazis, partly due to hatred of Soviets for engineering famine in their land and because of rampant ethnic hatreds (not just against Jews, but also Roma, Poles etc.). On the other hand, there were armed Ukrainian resistance groups (including Jewish partisans) who battled the Nazis.
There were some 83 SchuMa battalions raised from Ukrainians, more than 80.000 joined the 14th SS division, 50.000 in the Ostlegionen and several Ostbattalione.
Only in the same manner as he is acknowledging that the Holocaust occurred by saying some Jews died of typhus. As I said, the IHR playbook on explaining away the Einsatzgruppen is to say they were engaged in anti-partisan activities; in Chen’s word’s here “suppress local resistance”. Dragging out 2 million pre-selected ‘undesirable’ men, women, and children (1.3 million Jewish) from their homes and murdering them in open air shootings isn’t suppressing local resistance. That’s what the Einsatzgruppen did in the first year after Barbarossa. It was only in the following years that they were engaged in anything that could remotely be described as anti-partisan operations or ‘suppressing local resistance’ rather than blatant genocide or ethnic cleansing.
You’re not going to answer me are you?
I called you out on purposely and falsely manipulating facts by removing the parts you dont want to show because they make you a liar.
For a fuller outline of my views & why I consider the gas chamber claims to be war propaganda see my earlier posts. You say there is mountains of evidence, when clearly much of what has been claimed has been shown to be war propaganda with no basis in fact.
You state above that Allied Commanders could not imagine what was going on even when presented with evidence. Do you mean when they were shown images of corpses or emaciated prisoners in camps like Dachau, Buchenwald, Berge-Belsen? The claims of extermination centres in German camps, eg:
Or:
Of course, the Allied skepticism clearly proved to be warranted. **The extermination claims above, presented as fact at Nuremberg, turned out to be false. **
So we turn to the camps in Poland. Are the gas-chamber claims, that proved to be war-propaganda in relation to German camps, any more reliable in relation to camps in Poland?
I mentioned above what the British Codebreakers found. British wartime intelligence was eavesdropping on the radio traffic as Auschwitz (and other camps) sent regular reports to the relevant government department in Berlin. These messages were either in plain text or a low-level encrypt and consisted consisted of daily reports on population [Bestand], arrivals [Zugänge], and departures [Abgänge] from the concentration camps.
And, as noted above, the main cause of death at Auschwitz was typhus, with some references to shootings and hangings. On 28 January 1943, Bletchley Park even reported that the Oranienburg office issued an order to compile detailed statistics and to report the exact numbers of deceased inmates and new arrivals (Bletchley Park Summary Reports ZIP/OS6 of 28 January 1942).
So yes, if there was a mass gassing programme, you might expect there to be some reference to it in these transmissions.
Again, I’ve noted above that inmate records which contradict the suggestion that people who couldn’t work were immediately taken away and killed:
I noted, for example, a report on the medical treatment of 3,138 Hungarian Jewish internees was drawn up on June 28, 1944, - when the ‘gas chambers’ were allegedly being operated at full capacity - establishes precisely the illnesses for which the persons concerned are to be treated:
In Auschwitz, every SS man had to sign a declaration reading word for word as follows:
Kazimierz Smoleń, former Director of the Auschwitz-Museum, wrote an article on the punishment system at Auschwitz based on German documents, in which the various punishments provided for by the regulation are listed in order of severity:
Warning with threat of punishment
Additional work
Temporary transfer to a punishment company
Arrest
Severe arrest with withdrawal of food
Arrest in solitary confinement
Beating (25 blows).
SS men guilty of committing crimes against inmates, such as Karl Koch of Buchenwald and Hermann Florstedt of Majdanek - were executed.
Gas chamber & atrocity propaganda:
It’s interesting to see where this originated. The Resistance movement claimed in 1941 there were “electrical baths”, combat gases and a “pneumatic hammer” used to kill prisoners (Enrique Aynat, Estudios sobre el ‘Holocausto’, Graficas Hurtado, Valencia 1994.) Zyklon-B was not mentioned until sometime later. After the liberation of Auschwitz Soviet-Jewish war correspondent Boris Polevoi ublished a report on an “electric conveyor belt” upon which inmates were killed with “electrical current.” (Pravda, February 2, 1945.)
Bruno Baum, was transferred to Auschwitz from Brandenburg prison in 1943. In his memoirs he wrote:
Of course, this doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen but combined with the technical implausibility (see earlier posts) it seems the logical conclusion is that the claims from electric conveyor belts, electric baths, to gas chambers (other than the small delousing facilities to disenfect clothing and bedding), in Germany and Poland were atrocity propaganda.
Once again, every single one of Chen019’s arguments are either trivial irrelevancies that, at best, show that some tiny number of witness reports might be mistaken and not every single Nazi was personally engaged in Jew extermination at all times (which no one ever claimed anyway) or outright false assertions, like his incredibly ignorant crap about the German language. He ignores the reports in which the Einsatzgruppen specifically and explicitly counts the number of Jewish men, women, and children they killed, and the words of Heinrich Himmler explicitly referring to the need to exterminate Jewish men, women, and children. He ignores the vast majority of the evidence in favor of nitpicking about a very small amount.
Nothing new here, and the same old crap that’s been bouncing around the slums of the Internet for decades.
Then you obviously missed his ridiculous sidestepping (and hilariously false assertions about the German language) regarding to the recordings of Himmler’s speeches, among many of the other things he’s ignored or sidestepped.
As it was shown already you are just swallowing the Holocaust denier propaganda, the short item here is that you are still hung up on clear mistakes and indeed propaganda that was anyhow acknowledged for decades already.
The entry from the Holocaust museum in the USA clearly shows that no one seriously thinks that all concentration camps were the same, that BTW does not deny that even in the camps with no gas chambers people were murdered by the SS and other Nazis.
Besides being gunned down, victims also were subjected to lethal injections. Point being that even if no gas chambers were in several camps the idea was still to make elimination easier.
Your attempts at using errors as a tool to discredit what has been established elsewhere to take place, the genocide of the Jews and mass murder of Nazi enemies, has not been debunked at all.