The Jews Went to Work? Organization Todt

[SanityCheck]

Let's take just one, then:

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.

Yes, fortunately, I was able to dig up this 'inconvenient source(s)' you reference, it's here: https://rodoh.info/post/16436

Multiple sources for 1943 indicate the number of Jews remaining in the Ostland, following multiple sources for late 1942, since in November 1942 the number remaining and employed by all agencies including the SS was surveyed.

Weissruthenien counted first 30,000, then 27,000 Jews remaining in November 1942; this included 9500 in the Minsk ghetto. In February 1943, the Slutsk ghetto was liquidated with 3300 Jews killed, and other ghettos and camps were similarly destroyed. This included 2850 Jews working under the auspices of the OT in Krasne/Krasnoje in the Wilejka district. The conference in July 1943 referenced 16,000 Jews in Weissruthenien, a separate report from the same month counted 11,776 Jewish labourers in Weissruthenien.

Data and details are quite clear in Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, a book which is ultimately essential to read and digest, even if it takes you a decade, for covering the relevant themes from all possible angles (agriculture/food, labour, industry/towns and infrastructure, organisation, antipartisan warfare, POWs and the murder of Jews in Belarus)

Lithuania had 44,000 Jews at the start of April 1943 according to the KdS, this number included Jews from the Belarusian border strip annexed in April 1943, 4000 of whom were executed at Ponary that same month as noted in the same report.

Latvia documented 11,000 Jewish workers in January 1943 in sources I cited and linked to earlier in the thread. 15,000 total fits with these and other sources.

Estonia had no Jews other than a hundred or two taken from two 1942 transport to Raasiku from the Reich who were otherwise murdered. All native Estonian Jews had been murdered by mid-1942 and there weren't many to begin with; 1000 is the rounded number for Holocaust deaths for Estonian Jews. As noted earlier, Estonia's total population under occupation was just 1 million. More Jews arrived only in September 1942 with the setting up of KL Vaivara and the transfer of thousands of Jews from Vilnius when the Vilna ghetto was dissolved.

Back to showing there really weren't large numbers of hidden Jews in the Ostland:

In mid-1943, the GK Weissruthenien noted that there were a total of 505,000 Versorgungsberechtigte (those entitled to supply/rations) in the Generalkommissariat, of whom 281,000 were nonworkers i.e. dependents, 164,000 normal workers and 60,000 heavy, extra-heavy and barracksed (kasernierte) workers.
This compares with a population of 2.4-2.9 million through the occupation.
C.f. WiIn Ost La, 12.7.43; RMO III E, 3.7.43; GK Weissruthenien III E, 20.7.43, NARA T77/1196/378-85.

workers would include officials of the Belarusian collaborator administration; the definition of worker in this context is someone who is not a 'self-supplier' i.e. a peasant farmer growing their own food. As food was rationed, such counts are telling.

Minsk had a population of 100,000 in 1942-2. The 10 district capitals were small towns adding several hundred thousand more in total: Baranovichi had a population of 25,000 in mid-1942, Slonim 12,000 after the liquidation of the ghetto there. Smaller market towns also would have workers on the ration lists, the heavy workers would be more likely to be deployed in dispersed camps for the railways, OT, etc in the countryside.

Rationing policy for Jews tended to equate them with lower categories, sometimes Jewish workers were given the same rations as non-Jewish dependents or children, or heavy worker supplements withheld and the Jewish workers treated as 'normal' workers. However organised, the documents just cited did not distinguish between Jews and non-Jews, the remaining total of 16,000 Jews would have been a small fraction of the 505,000 on the ration lists.

You're welcome to try claiming that there were hundreds of thousands of foreign Jews in Weissruthenien hidden away... somewhere, but that figure of 505,000 on rations, and 224,000 in the non-agricultural workforce for mid-1943 should surely give you pause. This was a very under-urbanised region and considered part of Poland B in the interwar period, the eastern underdeveloped part.

In case you're tempted to try displacing large numbers further east to Army Group Centre's rear area, the ration lists were deliberately cut in this region from 1.4 million out of 6 million inhabitants, to 800,000 by August 1943, with the withdrawals playing only some of the role here; the military economics staffs deliberately threw Russian and Belarusian civilians off the ration lists, with a target of cutting 243,000 dependents from the lists among other goals. They aimed to increase the number of heavy workers in the process.

There's no trace of large numbers of foreign Jewish dependents i.e. those unfit for work anywhere in the planning materials for agricultural quotas or rationing for these regions. Please explain.

[Nazgul]

There's no trace of large numbers of foreign Jewish dependents i.e. those unfit for work anywhere in the planning materials for agricultural quotas or rationing for these regions. Please explain.

14f13

[Callafangers]

Multiple sources for 1943 indicate the number of Jews remaining in the Ostland, following multiple sources for late 1942, since in November 1942 the number remaining and employed by all agencies including the SS was surveyed.

Weissruthenien counted first 30,000, then 27,000 Jews remaining in November 1942; this included 9500 in the Minsk ghetto. In February 1943, the Slutsk ghetto was liquidated with 3300 Jews killed, and other ghettos and camps were similarly destroyed. This included 2850 Jews working under the auspices of the OT in Krasne/Krasnoje in the Wilejka district. The conference in July 1943 referenced 16,000 Jews in Weissruthenien, a separate report from the same month counted 11,776 Jewish labourers in Weissruthenien.

Yes, I have seen your presentation of numbers thus far, Nick, and what I have found is that you sometimes go as far as to interpret vague statements about specific contingents of Jews or actions as a generalized census tally. Or you have sources that do the same, or sources of sources who do. Hence why I advocate the need to "fact-check" everything you claim, since you're much more interested in spamming great quantities of claims and [vague] references rather than actually breaking down the quality (or lack thereof) of anything you present.

This is why I mentioned in my last post the imbalance of power which you seem to enjoy and benefit from immensely, and which you take full advantage of. Revisionists have done enough of the footwork to show clearly by this point that there is an obvious and outstanding pattern of misrepresentation, falsehood, exaggeration, embellishment, and outright fabrications in your camp, driven by some very apparent (indisputable) motives, means, and opportunity in the postwar dynamic. We know with certainty this pattern exists, and its been reinforced anytime a light has been shone in a particular subcategory of the 'Holocaust'. But it's taken occasional and uncommon events like the curiosity of a determined German chemist, a semi-wealthy Italian historian, and some brave others dedicating their lives and taking flak to gradually chip away at this dogmatic fairytale, rather than the usual intellectual process of widely-sanctioned and free open debate and exposure to harsh criticism and reason. You gloss over these conditions, all the while still arguing in a way as to take full advantage of them (spamming references to a web of self-referential works, focusing in-depth on no particular area, bombarding with spurious data and anecdotes).

Go ahead, tell me again how many books I need to read in order to finally grasp just how 'trustworthy' Soviet investigations and Jewish-communist claims of "there's thousands buried there... trust me!" really are.

[Stubble]

Even if we take the liquidation claims at face value thus far, and assume things like 'people were taken to the train station and shot' (Rumbula IIRC), where does that put us accounting for missing persons?

I appreciate your earlier response Nick, and, it is certainly representative of the orthodox view. Something that seems to be getting missed is that some projects required much more labor than others and thus, conscripted labor was employed. This goes for OT and for TN.

Another thing getting missed is that there is no easy way to discount the premise that jews were sometimes 'sheep dipped' (military term) into labor orgs. I can cite one famous example with OT, but, it would be hard to say it existed in isolation.

You also never did address what 'Unit 51' was. If you don't know, that's fine. It would certainly make me feel less foolish for having been unable to suss out what it was thus far.

For some reason, with specific regard to the labor orgs, the employment of jews was treated as a 'state secret'. I still don't understand why, had I been there I would have used it as propaganda 'jews assist German Forces in destroying the Soviets across the eastern front, help to provide fuel for the war effort, and learn the value of labor through working for pay' or something to that effect.

Rather than do that, this was treated as a bastard child program, kept wrapped up in secrecy, and downplayed wherever possible.

To be very clear, I understand the orthodox position, I'm not only making an effort to identify the missing persons, I'm making an effort to modify our understanding of operation in that theater.

I read your bio, and this should be 'your bag'. It is strange to me how under explored this particular facet of the conscripted labor program is. You appear to be fighting this tooth and nail Sir.

Now, if my hypothesis is wrong, you are going to have to show me where the missing persons are to knock me off of my position. With the failure in accounting for missing persons, the assumptions of mass murder even when the documentation says otherwise (expulsion/resettlement) and the various other misrepresentations over the past 80 years, I find it hard to assume 'good faith' as an explanation for the absolute lack of interest in an accounting.

We are left with the records, such as they are. From that, I've already begun to glean an entirely different picture of the situation than the one you are eager to paint Sir.

I'm sure that some of this comes from an engrained assumption regarding 'homicidal gas chambers' and 'mass murder' being conducted by the German Authorities. Personally, when I look at the data, I don't see it.

I am told I'm 'uncritically taking the party line', or 'it was euphemism' or 'well if they weren't murdered, where'd they go'. All I'm actually doing is reviewing what remains as neutrally as I can (with my admitted bias), and trying to figure out the reality of what transpired in those chaotic and devastating years.

I'm doing this in a time where simply pointing out the lie of the 6,000,000 can send someone to jail for many years in some countries. Fangers is absolutely 100% correct, this argument is very lopsided, and you benefit greatly from that whether you choose to acknowledge that or not.

I'm going to outline this again, for clarity and continuity, only 10% of the missing (or there about) can be in the dirt at the Bug River camps according to the orthodox narrative. The vast majority of the dead, we are told, were buried first. The grave space is extant. It has been, in places, roughly quantified. It is woefully insufficient. Personally, I think the grave space is filled with people 'euthanized' under 14f13 and people executed as partisans mostly. I want to know where the other 90% of this supposed death toll ended up.

I will find them. I will quantify them. I will name them.

This will not be some nebulous statistical cohort, it will be a known quantity, and their disposition, best as can be determined, will be known.

With you being one of the most knowledgable persons on earth in this field, I'd very much like to tap that knowledge and to understand things better. I understand that our perspectives are wildly disparate. That doesn't mean that your knowledge isn't useful for me to further develop and refine my understanding.

I am going to remark again that I appreciate your posts and I thank you for your help in locating documents, your efforts to make the archives accessible through no less than 2 separate websites, and for your recommended reading (even if a lot of it is at times so vitriolic I find it unbearable).

In the end, the jews must be accounted for. They were not murdered at the Bug River camps, and that whole historical narrative is unsustainable propagandistic garbage.

[SanityCheck]

You also never did address what 'Unit 51' was. If you don't know, that's fine. It would certainly make me feel less foolish for having been unable to suss out what it was thus far.

If OT, Einheit 51 would have been a unit originally part of Einsatz Jakob. Sorry I didn't make that clearer earlier when discussing Einsatz Jakob.

I can't tell you quickly where it operated because the main source for OT organisation is structured by region so it means flicking through 300 pages for the Eastern Front.

The OT-Einsatz Nawratil with 1st Panzer Army as an example had OT-Einheiten 61 and 67. You can find two whole files on the Bundesarchiv about the OT with 1st Panzer Army (searching for Todt digitised and looking under Militaer then finding Panzerarmeeoberkommando 1), and more in the other Armeepionierfuehrer files, comparing with Klaus Boehm's organisational directory.

The orders of battle at the bottom of this page for 17th Army indicate other OT units alongside Army bridging, engineering and construction battalions: https://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Gl ... 7Armee.htm

[Stubble]

If OT, Einheit 51 would have been a unit originally part of Einsatz Jakob. Sorry I didn't make that clearer earlier when discussing Einsatz Jakob.

I can't tell you quickly where it operated because the main source for OT organisation is structured by region so it means flicking through 300 pages for the Eastern Front.

The OT-Einsatz Nawratil with 1st Panzer Army as an example had OT-Einheiten 61 and 67. You can find two whole files on the Bundesarchiv about the OT with 1st Panzer Army (searching for Todt digitised and looking under Militaer then finding Panzerarmeeoberkommando 1), and more in the other Armeepionierfuehrer files, comparing with Klaus Boehm's organisational directory.

The orders of battle at the bottom of this page for 17th Army indicate other OT units alongside Army bridging, engineering and construction battalions: https://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Gl ... 7Armee.htm

If I understand the situation with 'Unit 51' correctly, they were 'On Loan' per Speer for the Bridge Project in Kertsch (late '43).

There was a kerfuffle where they were 'requisitioned' for some other activity that is not well described.

It's a bit of an aside however, I was just hopeful you might recall of the top of your head (a big ask, honestly, given how granular this particular bit of minutiae is).

I appreciate you taking the time to refine further.

A clarification, after checking the memo, it was 'Unit 53', not 'Unit 51'. My apologies. Again, I was just asking on the off hand chance you might know. It's not a paramount concern or anything, just a niggling little detail I was having trouble sorting out.

[SanityCheck]

Yes, I have seen your presentation of numbers thus far, Nick, and what I have found is that you sometimes go as far as to interpret vague statements about specific contingents of Jews or actions as a generalized census tally. Or you have sources that do the same, or sources of sources who do. Hence why I advocate the need to "fact-check" everything you claim, since you're much more interested in spamming great quantities of claims and [vague] references rather than actually breaking down the quality (or lack thereof) of anything you present.

Go back and think about who was reporting - the April 1943 figure of 44,000 Jews in Lithuania comes from KdS Litauen, the Security Police, responsible to the RSHA. The figure fits with colossal quantities of documentation about the Kovno, Vilnius and Siauliai ghettos (Kauen, Wilno, Schaulen in German sources) and with the autumn 1942 registration by local authorities of the 15 ghettos added in April 1942 from Weissruthenien, in the Oszmiana area. References to that registration are in the corresponding entries of USHMM Encyclopedia vol II; there are name lists for these 'extra' ghettos. The KdS report was internal and not some smokescreen to fob off other authorities.

Also think about the interaction of rationing and population. GK Weissruthenien counted 505,000 on the ration lists in July 1943, breaking this down into workers and dependents. Nearly all were Belarusians, Russians and Poles. The 16,000 Jews noted in Weissruthenien at this time, the 11,000 in work (with Lida not properly accounted, I would add after re-reading the report, whose source I gave and the document is digitised) were necessarily included.

For July 1943, OT-Einsatzgruppe Russland-Mitte had 89,586 workers, spread across the whole of Army Group Centre as well as Weissruthenien. Any civilians were fed through the quotas for civilian rations. As of August 1943, there were 800,000 civilians entitled to rations in AGC, including dependents.

The recruitment and impressment of Russians and Belarusians to OT-Einsatzgruppe Russland-Mitte is quite clear from the sources, the military quartermaster and economics staff records are all digitised at NARA, the economics staff records also digitised at the Bundesarchiv. You can go off and explore them if you are so mistrusting.

It's clear from this figure that the OT cannot have employed significant numbers of 'missing' Jews 'transited' to the central axis of Mitte-Weissruthenien. There is currently no evidence of any such employment by the OT at any point in 1942 or 1943.

As with any such 'there is no evidence' statement, it is defeasible - find evidence and things change. There isn't, however, an underdog exception allowing you to make shit up in the absence of any evidence. That's dog ate my homework.

I invited you earlier to outline a scenario for how large numbers of Jews *might* hypothetically have been moved to the specific geography of Weissruthenien, meaning identifying the districts and whether there might have been shelter in district capitals, raion capitals or camps outside either urban space. This presumes you're not going to resort to the nonsensical idea that the Germans simply dumped Polish Jews in the countryside to be agricultural labourers and run free. In German eyes in this era, Jews were a clear security threat, and their supposed ties with partisans the excuse to carry out massive actions against them. So they have to be confined. They have to be guarded. They have to be fed - or they will starve to death.

A working hypothesis is a research tool - it might help you figure out where to look, because eventually you need evidence. Rather than remaining stuck on the OT hobby-horse, see if you can sketch out the logical way to disperse or concentrate Jews from Poland in this region.

Or accept that maybe Weissruthenien with its ever growing amount of partisan activity in 1942 perhaps wasn't the logical place to direct the Jews of Warsaw, the Radom district or anyone else, and suggest another region. Then we can consider if that one will 'work'.

You seem not to have absorbed the fact that concentrating even 20,000 Jews in many of these Gebietskommissariate would add as many inhabitants as lived in the district capital, and by extension the raion towns were even smaller. 20,000 people is a substantial POW camp - there weren't even 20,000 POWs in Weissruthenien for most of this time-frame, and they were based out of several Stalags. 20,000 people is Sachsenhausen in the middle of the war.

The same goes for the Government-General or Bezirk Bialystok. I don't particularly care which regions you choose to divide the Korherr figures into, I do however expect you to be able to outline a hypothesis with numbers and a hypothesis for the dispersal/concentration of those numbers. You think the deported Jews (whose prior presence in Poland under German occupation is not in reasonable dispute, sorry) were divided across the 400 ZALfJ you see as loose ends? That's 3000 people added to existing ZALfJ just for the Reinhardt camps, many of which have to head west, and they haven't even left Poland! How is that a Final Solution by resettlement?

Numbers, please. Hypothetical - but numbers are needed.

[SanityCheck]

duplicate post deleted

[SanityCheck]

If OT, Einheit 51 would have been a unit originally part of Einsatz Jakob. Sorry I didn't make that clearer earlier when discussing Einsatz Jakob.

I can't tell you quickly where it operated because the main source for OT organisation is structured by region so it means flicking through 300 pages for the Eastern Front.

The OT-Einsatz Nawratil with 1st Panzer Army as an example had OT-Einheiten 61 and 67. You can find two whole files on the Bundesarchiv about the OT with 1st Panzer Army (searching for Todt digitised and looking under Militaer then finding Panzerarmeeoberkommando 1), and more in the other Armeepionierfuehrer files, comparing with Klaus Boehm's organisational directory.

The orders of battle at the bottom of this page for 17th Army indicate other OT units alongside Army bridging, engineering and construction battalions: https://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Gl ... 7Armee.htm

If I understand the situation with 'Unit 51' correctly, they were 'On Loan' per Speer for the Bridge Project in Kertsch (late '43).

There was a kerfuffle where they were 'requisitioned' for some other activity that is not well described.

It's a bit of an aside however, I was just hopeful you might recall of the top of your head (a big ask, honestly, given how granular this particular bit of minutiae is).

I appreciate you taking the time to refine further.

A clarification, after checking the memo, it was 'Unit 53', not 'Unit 51'. My apologies. Again, I was just asking on the off hand chance you might know. It's not a paramount concern or anything, just a niggling little detail I was having trouble sorting out.

Thanks, that makes more sense, Einheit 53 was part of OT-Einsatz Herbert along with Einheit 59.

Boehm outlines a changing roster for Sondereinsatz Kertsch

26.2.43
Einsatz Herbert (Einheiten 53, 59)
Einsatz Graf > identical with the later Einsatz Taman
BBL (Brueckenbauleitung?) Ertl

on 3.3.43 BBL Ertl oversaw
Einsatz Nawratil - as previously noted, under 1st Panzer Army in 1941-2
Einsatz Quast
Einsatz Bilger
BBL Ertl
BBL Bauer

On 20.7.43
BBL Ertl with 32. NSKK-Kp.
Einsatz Herbert is back
BBL Gertis
BBL Zmoelnig
Hb-Einsatz (Hochbau)
Einsatz Taman with 31. and 32. NSKK-Kp

On 7.8.43
Einsatz Herbert
BBL Ertl
OBL Taman

disbanded 14.9.43

The best bets for more details would be the records of 17th Army which held the Kuban bridgehead and Taman peninsula, the XLII Corps which was the Befehlshaber Krim, the Armeewirtschaftsfueherer AOK 17 and Wirtschaftskommando Krim. Only the last is digitised at the Bundesarchiv, the others would be NARA T312, T314, T77. In military records, the Armeepionierfuehrer and quartermaster records are the ones to check alongside economics records.

BBL Ertl and the others have more details in Boehm, who doesn't give references (why do 'reference works' lack references so often?). BBL Ertl was the specialist bridge building directorate that had done bridges at Kyiv, Dnepropetrovsk, Rostov, Zaporozhe, Kremenchug and others. The Rostov bridge was built between July and November 1942.

There was a Verbindungsfuehrer A which was briefly known as OT-Einsatzgruppe Kaukasus, corresponding to Army Group A. However, there aren't any relevant records of Army Group A. Maybe something in the Economics Inspectorate Caucasus or whatever it became.

[curioussoul]

I invited you earlier to outline a scenario for how large numbers of Jews *might* hypothetically have been moved to the specific geography of Weissruthenien, meaning identifying the districts and whether there might have been shelter in district capitals, raion capitals or camps outside either urban space. This presumes you're not going to resort to the nonsensical idea that the Germans simply dumped Polish Jews in the countryside to be agricultural labourers and run free. In German eyes in this era, Jews were a clear security threat, and their supposed ties with partisans the excuse to carry out massive actions against them. So they have to be confined. They have to be guarded. They have to be fed - or they will starve to death.

More strawmen and misrepresentations. We're tired of it, Nick. The 'working hypothesis' is not that the Germans let all the Jews loose in the countryside, nor that they were all specifically employed by OT and traceable to labour camps run by them. What's being posited is that Jews deported by the Germans were utilized or not utilized in a variety of different ways, including being housed in provisional open-air 'camps' with scarcely any resources, or alongside Soviet POW's in massive fenced-in areas of RK Ukraine and elsewhere. There's literally witness testimony to this effect, one from a French POW in Ukraine (yeah, the guy who said Jews went backwards from Ukraine to Belzec). Hundreds of thousands of Jews would have been arriving because of "orders from Berlin" and the "final solution" organized by "the RSHA", but local military commanders and SS police chiefs had virtually no way of housing or feeding them, nor any reasonable heads-up for incoming transports, as the speed with which ghettos were being emptied in Poland was not manageable on the ground at the destinations in the OET. Just look at Kube's frustration when confronted with the massive influx of Jews to his region, you're more than familiar with his letters. He was basically given the cold shoulder by Berlin and told to get shit done. This was charecteristic of the German command and leadership hierarchy at the time - orders would come in from higher up, and local leaders were forced to deal with the problem. Needless to say, the Jews flooding in to these districts were barely dealt with at all. It's my position many of them died of deprivation or escaped/disappeared before even the Soviets showed up - to the extent they were not filtered off at labour camps before and after reaching the Reinhard camps.

But you already know all this, because you attempted to debate Thomas Kues on that very topic more than a decade ago and got your ass handed to you. You never came back with a response because you knew you'd met your match. Your position is utterly untenable. When Kues was able to prove numerous Holocaust trains that "disappeared" at Sobibor actually ended up in Weissruthenia, it was all over for you. You've been flailing ever since. The verbose garbage you post on here tells a clear story.

[Stubble]

But you already know all this, because you attempted to debate Thomas Kues on that very topic more than a decade ago and got your ass handed to you. You never came back with a response because you knew you'd met your match. Your position is utterly untenable. When Kues was able to prove numerous Holocaust trains that "disappeared" at Sobibor actually ended up in Weissruthenia, it was all over for you. You've been flailing ever since. The verbose garbage you post on here tells a clear story.

There a link to this debate kicking around? Anybody know where I can find it?

[Callafangers]

Lithuania had 44,000 Jews at the start of April 1943 according to the KdS, this number included Jews from the Belarusian border strip annexed in April 1943, 4000 of whom were executed at Ponary that same month as noted in the same report.

I decided to pick just one location to focus on. You have mentioned Lithuania several times now, so let's check out a few documents. Aside from multiple documents describing how partisans had continued to organize thus bringing chaos to the region (explaining German retaliation), here are some items I found of further interest, in chronological order:

• 1942.10.27 - Report from Armia Krajowa-linked Informacja Bieżąca claiming atrocities at various locations including Vilna (Wilnius, Lithuania). Report asserts Treblinka as a "labor camp"; also says people who were gassed got up and walked to the cremation pits after being gassed ('delayed action death', so to speak).
  [VEJ 8, DOK 206]
• 1943.21.6 - Himmler issues a secret order for dissolution of ghettos in RK Ostland, shifting Jews into local labor camps and others to be evacuated further East
  [VEJ 11, DOK 45]
• 1943.07.17 - Intercepted letter from Frumka Plotnicka (resistance figure) claims Jews shot in Ponary (Lithuanian Jews), leaving just 20,000 in Vilna/Kaunas/Siauliai. In the same letter, claims 'steam chambers' at Treblinka, also describes labor ghettos and high mortality there due to disease and hunger.
  [VEJ 10, DOK 218]
• 1943.08.20 (July 1943 conference) - Chief of War Administration Matthiesen references Himmler's order for "the concentration of Jews in concentration camps which, however, must not result in losses of production," showing this is about consolidating remaining groups of Jews to bring them out of 'open' areas.
  [NMT, Volume 13, p. 1021]
• 1944 July-November - 50-year-old Jewess Paja Pavlovskaja describes her deportation from Schaulen, Lithuania in July 1944 to Stutthof as the Soviet army advanced. Says she was "in various camps near Schaulen, Lithuania" up until this time. She indicates she was told that the weak and sick were "taken to light labor", but that "we understood what light labor meant." She adds that her "work consisted of gathering and burning the vast stocks of clothing and shoes. For weeks, we burned expensive clothing, shoes, and food. We piled everything into high stacks in the yard, poured gasoline over it, and set it on fire."
  [VEJ 10, DOK 259]

Most of the references are available for download, here: https://pmj-documents.org/free-download/

Notice that documentation for Lithuania seems limited overall however it seems to tell a clear story including:

• Some key reports/documents of the 'Holocaust' narrative in Lithuania are interwoven with infamous atrocity lies ('gassed' Jews walking into cremation pits, steam chambers)
• Official reports explicitly describing evacuation and labor and security based initiatives, focused on removing Jews from all open areas (likely also reflecting that any counts/tallies of total Jews in any area should be regarded through this lens -- i.e., "only X amount of Jews left in Y area" frequently meaning "X amount of Jews left in the open in Y area").
• There were many camps still operating into 1944 in Lithuania, in places like Schaulen and its surrounding areas, per Pavlovskaja.
• Jews from these camps were evacuated West as the war advanced
• It is reported explicitly that Jews who were weak and infirm were taken to conduct lighter labor

Also, of interest to Treblinka and Aktion Reinhardt camps is this further confirmation from Pavlovskaja that Jews were assigned to burn massive piles of clothing and Jewish property, reinforcing revisionist narratives and interpretations about the function of Reinhardt (and other) camps as property sorting sites, with burning/ash reports better reflecting treatment and destruction of property than endless cremations of of Jews.

Nick, I am only one guy on the internet. Just imagine if I (and others here) could do this kind of work full-time. You can be sure we would spend many hours daily in our cushy faculty positions at our local universities, just like you do, but approaching this topic from a contrarian position, something you have never had to face before.

Do you really think your position could survive that kind of challenge? If so, why not put your money where your mouth is and become an activist for Holocaust revisionism's legitimate presence at your university campus (and as faculty/staff)?

[Callafangers]

I don't particularly care which regions you choose to divide the Korherr figures into, I do however expect you to be able to outline a hypothesis with numbers and a hypothesis for the dispersal/concentration of those numbers. You think the deported Jews (whose prior presence in Poland under German occupation is not in reasonable dispute, sorry) were divided across the 400 ZALfJ you see as loose ends? That's 3000 people added to existing ZALfJ just for the Reinhardt camps, many of which have to head west, and they haven't even left Poland! How is that a Final Solution by resettlement?

Numbers, please. Hypothetical - but numbers are needed.

A working hypothesis with some quantification could be a reasonable ask (although not entirely, given the broader political circumstances) but, to be clear, nothing I or others have suggested here is a strawman about inventing fantasy camps or "dumping" Jews in the wilderness. Rather, we are leaning on:

• Official German policy (evacuation East for labor/security, per Final Solution docs, e.g. Wannsee and Himmler's orders)
• Known infrastructure (e.g., 1,030+ ZALfJ in GG alone, many unclosed into 1944-45 per the database), discussed in-depth on this thread and others
• Historical realities (labor shortages, partisan chaos, poor Eastern admin/records per OT Handbook, westward retreats in 1944).

All three of these items are facts which you have to contend with.

Your request for precision also ignores certain "elephant(s) in the room", i.e.:

• Eastern records were minimized/fragmented (no OBL units, per OP; Soviet pillaging/postwar tampering; German secrecy on Jewish labor, confirmed in Goebbels' [Correction: Bormann's] 1943 circular, per Stubble).
• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence -- especially when we know records were destroyed/lost (e.g., Soviet capture of Minsk, other archives).
• Revisionism doesn't claim omniscience; it infers from what's available, while your side fills gaps with claims from Germany's countless enemies.
• Given your camp aggressively ties the hands of revisionists, it's quite a 'big ask' for you to request more data

That said, the image/table below is a hypothetical breakdown of Korherr's figures, accounting for ~1.27M "sifted through GG camps" (core of evacuations), plus contributions to the ~4M decline (pre-1943), dispersed Eastward per policy. Numbers are estimated based on:

• Known camp counts (e.g., 1,030 GG ZALfJ; 400+ in Ostland/Ukraine per ZALfJ data/maps; although worth nothing this is likely an extreme underestimation of eastern ZALfJ)
• OT/Wehrmacht labor needs (e.g., OP's OT Handbook: 1-2M workers by 1943, many Jews/Russians; Himmler's 1943 orders prioritizing labor without production loss).
• Attrition: ~20-30% from disease/partisans/14f13 (e.g., per VEJ docs on Lithuanian camps).
• Dispersal: Initial Eastward sift (1942-43) via Reinhardt transit points; later Westward (1944) due to Soviet advance (e.g. per Pavlovskaja's 1944 evacuation from Lithuanian camps to Stutthof, VEJ 10/259).
• Feasibility: Averages ~500-2,000/camp (no 3k dumps); aligns with policy (e.g., 1943 Himmler order: consolidate to camps, evacuate East; westward shifts per Nazgul's maps).

This will be a work in progress -- show better data and we can adjust it... For now, it fits the facts without invoking outrageous claims of millions 'Holocausted':

Hypo2.jpg (361.12 KiB) Viewed 1746 times

[Callafangers]

I should add, my latest breakdown is likely far too generous with the overall survival rate of transports, etc., which for Soviet transports was sometimes as low as 50% (as in, for traveling long distances, up to half of those traveling didn't survive; per some reports on Soviet deporations to gulags). Situations could have been nearly as bad for some Jewish transports by Germany if conditions became extreme enough (e.g. in freezing winters). But not enough is known either way.

[Stubble]

• Eastern records were minimized/fragmented (no OBL units, per OP; Soviet pillaging/postwar tampering; German secrecy on Jewish labor, confirmed in Goebbels' 1943 circular, per Stubble).

It's not Goebbels. Its Bormann.

To be clear, that circular says 'don't discuss the final solution'. To the best of my understanding, this was because Hitler wanted to win the war before further discussing carving out a new homeland for the jewish people. Nick disputes my interpretation, and I need to go source the documentation again (one day I will remember to write these things down).

When he talks about the jews and labor, he says that is the interim solution (basically). Again, Nick contends this is simply a cover story. No amount of documentation of policy illustrating resettlement was the goal, work was the policy and that dilution was the answer to the security threat is likely to dissuade him.

This is because he 'knows' that these millions of people were murdered and that all of the documents are a clever ploy to smoke and mask what was really going on, except for, of course, the einsatzgruppen reports, those are obviously golden you see, because they explicitly state that which apparently was only ever said in quiet code with a wink and a nod through a quiet meeting of minds through a far flung bureaucracy that just 'knew'.

Grave too small where the event is said to have occurred? No problem, just ignore it.

Anyhow, before I go off on a bit of a rant here, I'm going to drop something in the thread that shows the secret nature of this employment and the 'sheep dipping' from a kosher source, otherwise, no one would believe it. Of course, they will balk and say it is a one off and it never happened again etc etc etc, but, presented to you here, is some proof, from a kosher source no less, that the I'm not just making some wild assertion here;

https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/acad ... ories.html

This mysterious affair, perhaps a marginal event in the overall historical picture, has yet to be studied. The conscription of young Jews from eastern Upper Silesia—prisoners in forced-labor camps for Jews under the auspices of Organisation Schmelt,1 disguised as employees of Organisation Todt (OT)2 —for the task of rehabilitating the Soviet railroad system is extremely puzzling. Schmelt’s long arm reached not only across Germany and the Polish areas annexed to the Reich but also, by means of this group of Jewish prisoners, to the snowy vastness of the Soviet Union.

It was a bold experiment on the part of the Reichsautobahn3 administration and the OT directors, who urgently sought manpower that could be transferred to the East, in conjunction with the directors of Organisation Schmelt, who sought additional sources of income. The labor campaign, at a location near the German front, in the autumn of 1941, became a tragic event in the lives of the 350 young people from Zagłębie4 who participated in it. These Jews were interned in Reichsautobahn forced-labor camps for non-German Jews; the Schmelt organization provided the Reichsautobahn with the Jewish forced laborers.5

The Jewishness of the 350 young men was concealed from everyone around them. They underwent hasty, semi-military training, were issued uniforms, and were attached to a transport of laborers and engineers. Their story has been buried in the testimonies of the few who survived the frozen inferno and the labor and concentration camps to which they were sent after they returned from the front. This article probes the background to this transport—why Jews from eastern Upper Silesia were sent out in the guise of German employees of OT, and how they were associated with Operation Barbarossa. The transport of these Jews attests, above all, to the basic contradictions that riddled the Nazi administration’s decision-making process, especially with respect to Jews.

Now, the uniforms were Black with Green Armbands. I'm still compiling stuff. From where I'm standing, this wasn't a one off with 350 people. I am not done with my prove up. So far as hypothetical though, this is bordering on being theoretical and my research is fleshing out.

Now, que the 'you aren't a historian' and 'that's not how history works' and 'this never happened because you aren't done looking'.

Also keep in mind the massive labor requirements in the peat bogs with TN. The tree felling, the leveling, the running of rail lines, electrical cables, communications etc...

Nick, he's going to say, 'it was all done by 22,000 Soviet pow's'. I'm going to have to show him logistics for how jews got there through the Bug River camps and their meal tickets.

It will also be demanded I answer the question of why ghetto jews would be passed west to the Bug River camps (I know this because it already has by Bombsaway) that I can answer, it was to winnow out partisans and execute them. I'll even grant a full 88,000 partisans killed and buried in the 4 pits at Treblinka II. It's just spitballing though, and honestly, some kind of actual forensic investigation should have been done for the trials, a real one.

Ultimately, the missing jews, they aren't where I was told they would be, and the orthodoxy is left with a question that they invert, 'where'd they go'...

I don't think any exterminationist is interested in actually answering that question, it seems more to just be a cudgel with which to try to beat me into submission. As a guy that is still finding Hungarian jews I was told were murdered in homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms at Auschwitz Birkenau, I don't think having the same people invert the question of 'where'd they go' is going to have me 'step back in line' or whatever. For me, spell is broken.