The Jews Went to Work? Organization Todt

[Nessie]

... here are some items I found of further interest, in chronological order:

An attempt at genuine historical investigation!

• 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]

Early rumour of a death camp where people were gassed.

[*] 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]

The closure of ghettos, consistent with a huge drop in the need for secure accommodation for Jews, due to mass murders. That closure process would continue until autumn 1944, by which time, there was no need for any ghetto.

[*] 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]

More intelligence about mass murder of Jews and rumours about the means of killing at a death camp.

[*] 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]

That is consistent with the policies of closing the ghettos down, but still needing secure accommodation for Jews, who were worked as slave labourers.

[*] 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][/list]

Jews trusted to work were kept alive and moved from camp to camp, and by 1944, they were being moved west, away from the Soviets. That helps to explain why the Soviets liberated few Jews. The type of work, is consistent with the evidence of the mass theft of property from murdered Jews and then the cover-up to destroy evidence of the mass murders.

There is nothing to support so-called revisionist claims that the Nazis were keeping millions of Jews alive in 1944.

[Nessie]

You forgot about chronology again. Please add dates for the populations.

You need evidence of a massive rise in the number of and/or population of camps and ghettos, 1939-45, as the Nazis and their allies and occupied countries arrested Jews. By 1945, if it is correct and 5-6 million had not been murdered, then the Nazis would have a massive task on their hands.

So far, you are not getting round your problem of, the Nazis and the countries they were aligned to, or occupied, were ALL reporting huge drops in the populations of Jews. That makes no sense, as somewhere would have been reporting huge rises in the population.

[Callafangers]

It's not Goebbels. Its Bormann.

Thanks, made the correction.

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.

Yes, it's pretty clear that all signs suggest labor was needed, repeatedly stated as the intent, reflected in the vastness of the labor camp network, and that the only historiographical objection to this comes from 'missing' records and creative 'testimony' which conveniently can't be tested by anyone (and even if it could, laws and social pressure make it functionally near-impossible to do so).

What a world we are living in.

[Callafangers]

You forgot about chronology again. Please add dates for the populations.

You need evidence of a massive rise in the number of and/or population of camps and ghettos, 1939-45, as the Nazis and their allies and occupied countries arrested Jews. By 1945, if it is correct and 5-6 million had not been murdered, then the Nazis would have a massive task on their hands.

So far, you are not getting round your problem of, the Nazis and the countries they were aligned to, or occupied, were ALL reporting huge drops in the populations of Jews. That makes no sense, as somewhere would have been reporting huge rises in the population.

I get it, Nessie. Your angle is:

"Get even more granular -- no, even more than that! No, even more granular..."

...until I no longer can (due to a lack of data for reasons I just explained to SC/Nick), then you can finally say:

"Gotcha! See? Revisionists believe things without evidence."

I should not need to explain to you why your approach in arguing here is not a valid one.

[Callafangers]

• 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]

Early rumour of a death camp where people were gassed.

Cope.

[*] 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]

The closure of ghettos, consistent with a huge drop in the need for secure accommodation for Jews, due to mass murders. That closure process would continue until autumn 1944, by which time, there was no need for any ghetto.

No -- obviously due to changes in the war, labor needs, and security reasons due to partisan activity.

[*] 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]

More intelligence about mass murder of Jews and rumours about the means of killing at a death camp.

No -- you have not ruled out it simply being a a propagandist doing propaganda.

[*] 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]

That is consistent with the policies of closing the ghettos down, but still needing secure accommodation for Jews, who were worked as slave labourers.

Yes, they were worked as slave laborers. We agree, then?

[*] 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][/list]

Jews trusted to work were kept alive and moved from camp to camp, and by 1944, they were being moved west, away from the Soviets. That helps to explain why the Soviets liberated few Jews. The type of work, is consistent with the evidence of the mass theft of property from murdered Jews and then the cover-up to destroy evidence of the mass murders.

How many moved west, Nessie? Got exact figures for each of the Zwangsarbeitslagers, or even a rough estimate?

And how many did the Soviets liberate? Should we take their claims at face value?

And if you're "liberated" by the Soviet-fucking-Union, just how "free" (liberated) are you?

[SanityCheck]

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.

I've seen 'revisionists' resort to the Germans-let-the-Jews-run-wild-in-the-countryside argument just as I've repeatedly seen 'revisionists' claim Stalin killed all surviving Jews who'd been transited. It's not a strawman when someone has actually made the claim. My presumption is that Callafangers is not so desperate as to make this claim.

Note that Thomas Kues - before he vanished - actually made the desperate claim that Jews might have been 'resettled' to SS agricultural estates in Weissruthenien, since Maly Trostenets was also such an SS Gut. This would not be much help since few agricultural estates in this era and region employed more than a few hundred workers, so basically a village, and there's also no evidence of this, while state farms and SS estates were potential targets for partisan attacks as deliberate Soviet policy. Dispersing potential allies of the partisans (according to SS and Nazi ideological dogma) that deep into the countryside would have been extremely risky. Doesn't pass the smell test.

Kues did not prove that transports to Sobibor ended up in Weissruthenien, or indeed anywhere else.

If you're not able to provide numbers - as Callafangers now has tentatively done - then any commentary you have is vague and verbose. Specifics and numbers please, or things don't progress, because Kues wasn't able to present any, and nobody has been working on this from the 'revisionist' side since 2013, just as nobody from the 'revisionist' side has done anything on overall demographics since the Tehran conference,and in published form nothing more complex than Sanning's 42 year old book.

[Nessie]

You forgot about chronology again. Please add dates for the populations.

You need evidence of a massive rise in the number of and/or population of camps and ghettos, 1939-45, as the Nazis and their allies and occupied countries arrested Jews. By 1945, if it is correct and 5-6 million had not been murdered, then the Nazis would have a massive task on their hands.

So far, you are not getting round your problem of, the Nazis and the countries they were aligned to, or occupied, were ALL reporting huge drops in the populations of Jews. That makes no sense, as somewhere would have been reporting huge rises in the population.

I get it, Nessie. Your angle is:

"Get even more granular -- no, even more than that! No, even more granular..."

...until I no longer can (due to a lack of data for reasons I just explained to SC/Nick), then you can finally say:

"Gotcha! See? Revisionists believe things without evidence."

I should not need to explain to you why your approach in arguing here is not a valid one.

Your lack of evidence, which in this thread you are trying to explain away with a suggested, but not evidenced, massive destruction of documentation in relation to OT, is a valid reason to not believe you.

Whether it is on a micro scale, such as evidence of camp populations, or a macro scale, such as evidence from a senior Nazi about accommodating millions of Jews, you have nothing. Then you have a lack of eyewitnesses and circumstantial evidence that would prove millions still alive, such as the need for tons of clothing, rather than the destruction of it.

Historians repeatedly "gotcha" so-called revisionists for their failure to revise history.

[Callafangers]

Specifics and numbers please, or things don't progress

Absolutely, and a healthy helping of intensive source criticism. Please ensure you describe your process for this, including chain-of-custody, for each numerical figure you cite or reference.

[Nessie]

• 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]

Early rumour of a death camp where people were gassed.

Cope.

No, that is exactly what the report states. It evidences Nazi killing in the east, exactly where so-called revisionists suggest Jews were being transported to, some claiming they went via TII. Lithuania was being cleared of Jews, with mass shootings by the EG and Lithuanians, of whom many were happy to rid their country of Jews. If the Nazis then tried to fill Lithuania with foreign Jews, they would likely face resistance, rather than cooperation, from the Lithuanians. That report is evidence of the opposite of what you are claiming happened.

[*] 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]

The closure of ghettos, consistent with a huge drop in the need for secure accommodation for Jews, due to mass murders. That closure process would continue until autumn 1944, by which time, there was no need for any ghetto.

No -- obviously due to changes in the war, labor needs, and security reasons due to partisan activity.

Plenty of labour took place in the ghettos, but their gradual closure and movement of those who could and were needed to work to camps, was accompanied by a huge drop in the overall population of Jews. Ghettos tended to be larger than the camps and when the Warsaw ghetto uprising took place, it was a warning to the Nazis that they needed to speed up the killings. The closure of all of the ghettos by the end of 1944 and the decline in camp populations, is consistent with mass murder, not resettlement.

[*] 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]

More intelligence about mass murder of Jews and rumours about the means of killing at a death camp.

No -- you have not ruled out it simply being a a propagandist doing propaganda.

I have ruled out that it was mere propaganda, with the evidence of mass gassings at TII. The only thing the report got wrong, was the type of gas used.

[*] 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]

That is consistent with the policies of closing the ghettos down, but still needing secure accommodation for Jews, who were worked as slave labourers.

Yes, they were worked as slave laborers. We agree, then?

Yes we agree on that. But you miss out my point about the decline in the number of labourers. A-B's population was lower in 1944 than in 1943 and an expansion of Birkenau did not take place.

[*] 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][/list]

Jews trusted to work were kept alive and moved from camp to camp, and by 1944, they were being moved west, away from the Soviets. That helps to explain why the Soviets liberated few Jews. The type of work, is consistent with the evidence of the mass theft of property from murdered Jews and then the cover-up to destroy evidence of the mass murders.

How many moved west, Nessie? Got exact figures for each of the Zwangsarbeitslagers, or even a rough estimate?

And how many did the Soviets liberate? Should we take their claims at face value?

And if you're "liberated" by the Soviet-fucking-Union, just how "free" (liberated) are you?

You have dodged my point that the destruction of clothing is the opposite of what would be expected, if millions of Jews were still alive in 1944-5.

I do not have exact figures for you. Soviet claims, just like any claim, need to be checked and evidenced. A Western Jew liberated by the Soviets was certainly not a free person. What we can be sure of, due to the Soviet need for supplies, is that they could not have coped with liberating millions of Jews and having to accommodate, feed and clothe them. Imagine a million German, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, French, Belgian and Greek Jews now being guarded by Soviet soldiers.

[SanityCheck]

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.

Five sources in a list doesn't really cut it when the longest study of occupied Lithuania, including the Holocaust, is 1,400 pages long (Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen, 2011), and there are specific studies of Jewish forced labour in the Lithuanian ghettos (Joachim Tauber, Arbeit als Hoffnung, 2015) and the entire labour market of the Baltic states of the Ostland (Tillmann Plath, Zwischen Schonung und Menschenjagd, 2012).

These historians all use the German contemporary documentation, which is complemented by extensive Lithuanian collaborator contemporary documentation.

The contemporary Polish and Polish-Jewish documentation is also very extensive, since the Wilno region was more Polish than Lithuanian, and there were contacts between Warsaw and Lithuania via couriers; Frumka Plotnicka was one such Jewish underground courier. Ponary's main chronicler was a Polish journalist, Kazimierz Sakowicz, who lived very close to the killing site and left an extensive diary for 1941-43 (he was killed towards the end of the occupation). There are numerous direct matches between all these sources, as well as the diaries and ghetto records of the big Lithuanian work-ghettos of Vilna, Kovno and Siauliai.

Nick, I am only one guy on the internet.

Actually, no, you're one out of 134 members on a forum which is associated with an organisation that has published more than 70 books and hundreds if not thousands of articles in quarterly journals. There is crowd sourcing with this, even if not every forum member or author for CODOH or ARMREG addresses a particular issue.

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)?

Since I've been paying attention to 'revisionism' for approaching 20 years - next spring will be the twentieth anniversary of my encounter with RODOH, CODOH, vho.org, the 'Holocaust Handbooks' and reading the then available revisionist literature - I've been "facing" contrarian positions for that long. They obviously haven't convinced me despite my giving them every chance and trying some of them out in 'revisionist mode' to see if they make sense given what else is known - they dont.

[SanityCheck]

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

Thank you for at least guesstimating a scenario. Quick comments

150,000 'further east' beyond the German-Soviet frontline: this is irrelevant to the deportation numbers in Korherr and for 1943-44. There is no evidence of any expulsions over the frontline of Jews, and the Germans when they tried this with Belarusian civilians in 1944 provoked a hefty response from Soviet propaganda. You should probably move this guesstimate to the 200,000 to the military zone
200,000 to the military zones: you attempt to extrapolate from known cases not involving 'transit' through the AR etc camps, which were under tight SS control and in small numbers of labouring prisoners. The obvious problem is the involvement of the SS in these known cases, versus the lack of SS infrastructure outside of these known cases. There is no evidence other organisations could take control, would want to take control or were allowed to take control. The documented statistics for employment of non-Germans for the OT, Reichsbahn and other agencies don't allow for this number, nor do the civilian ration strengths and quota planning of agriculture for the military zones.
300,000 to RK Ukraine: citing Hungarian Labour Service as evidence of 'transit' is a non-sequitur. Contrary to Mattogno, plenty of mass graves were located in Ukraine; the territory was liberated comparatively rapidly in 1943-44 so Aktion 1005 was unable to operate in many places. OT employment for the whole of Russland-Sued thus straddling the military and civilian zones don't fit with such large numbers even theoretically, when there is extensive evidence of the use of local non-Jewish Ukrainians and also of the use of native Ukrainian Jews, including 5000 transferred from Romanian-occupied Transnistria, obviously nowhere near the AR or any other camps.
400,000 to RK Ostland: the figures in your third column are for native Jews or Jews deported from the Reich to Riga and Minsk. Extrapolating from these to project more has no supporting evidence for it and is contradicted by the extensive paper trail.
500,000 in GG labour camps: your "evidence" misreads Korherr both as he originally wrote the report and as he was asked to euphemise it. Transportierung von Juden aus den Ostprovinzen nach dem russischen Osten was insisted on instead of Sonderbehandlung. The numbers of 1.274 million for the GG and 145,000 for the Warthegau were therefore all in the russischen Osten if we take the cover-up seriously - of course conventionally we don't since Sonderbehandlung originally appeared in this place, and this fits with other sources pointing to killing (many for the Warthegau-Chelmno, including explicitly about gassing in vans, more for the AR camps including in both cases more use of Sonderbehandlung).
Citing a source from Skarzysko-Kamienna in 1944 doesn't help since essentially all Jews sent to Skarzysko were held back from deportations to the AR camps. 300 Jews from Warsaw were selected at Treblinka to be sent on to Majdanek in May 1943, the rest taken in to Treblinka and gassed, so one can find a few from this small cohort who would be exceptions, but the bulk came from ghettos or camps such as Plaszow.
The basic objection here is that Korherr gives 297,000 for the number of Jews remaining in the GG, while also giving figures for the Warthegau and Silesia, which make it highly unlikely that there were *significantly* more Jews in the GG not captured by the snapshot; 500,000 is far too high, when one might make a case for SS-Arbeitslager but these had yet to be formed in most places.

The total of 1.55 million covers 1942 only. Bearing in mind that the whereabouts of Jews deported to Auschwitz and registered for work there is known, it's not an unreasonable total. One could subtract a percentage for losses in transit, but just as with Nazgul advancing 14 f 13 as an explanation for what happened to the unfit Jews, this can easily revert back to conventional understanding. 14 f 13 would make sense for the AR camps since there were T4 veterans there; it would involve shootings and gas vans further east, and there's plenty of evidence for such killings of native Jews and the small number of Reich Jews who had become unfit for work. Deaths in transports to Belzec are documented and witnessed, to Treblinka witnessed and much remarked upon (several recalling a transport from Miedzyrzec Podlaski in the Lublin district which was almost wholly DOA).

However, it leaves out 1943-44.

Nessie's point about chronology is a perfectly reasonable one. The period from December 1941-June 1942 involved Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and the very start of Birkenau. For Chelmno 97,000 by the start of June 1942, all told several hundred thousand. Treblinka only opened in the second half of 1942, and this was also when Jews from western Europe began to be deported to Auschwitz and selected on arrival.

The systems you hypothesise would need to be in place and under German control in 1943 and indeed through to May 1944; the Hungarian action marks the start of the final phase.

I would suggest that half year markers are quite valid; i.e. what is the evidence pointing to any of your claims for the first half of 1942, the second half of 1942 and the end of 1942, mid-1943, end of 1943, first part of 1944, and the end of 1944. Nessie asking about 1944-45 skips over these steps too much, while you seem keen to gloss over the chronology and numbers. You need to slow down to the half yearly phases and think about departure regions *and* arrival regions. This is basic history - geography and chronology are unavoidable.

Conventional portrayals would focus on runs of transports from specific municipalities, counties (Kreise) and countries, in specific phases and to specific camps. This tends to produce contingents of 10-20,000 with some exceptions in either direction.

1.42 Lodz ghetto to Chelmno (10,003)
2-4.42 Lodz ghetto to Chelmno (34,073)
3-4.42 Lublin ghetto to Belzec (26,000)
3-4.42 Lwow ghetto to Belzec (15,000)
5.42 first deportations from Silesia to Auschwitz, thousands, no registrations
5.42 Lodz ghetto - 10,000 mostly Reich Jews to Chelmno
5 to 10.42 Reich to Maly Trostenets and Baranovichi, Weissruthenien (17,000, a very few survivors)
5.42 Kreis Pulawy, Distrikt Lublin to Sobibor (16,882, one known survivor selected at Sobibor)
5.42 Kreis Krasnystaw, Distrikt Lublin to Sobibor (8-11,000, survivors include Dov Freiberg from Turobin)
6.42 Krakow ghetto to Belzec (5000, no survivors known)
6.42 Slovakia and Reich to Sobibor (17,000)
7.42 Kreis Rzeszow, Distrikt Krakau to Belzec (22,000)
7.42 Kreis Debica, Distrikt Krakau to Belzec (12,000)
7-9.42 Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka (250,000, at least 5000 shot in Warsaw)
8.42 Radom ghetto to Treblinka (25,000)
8.42 Lwow ghetto to Belzec (40,000 noted by Wehrmacht as deported, about 2000 shot on spot)
9.42 Lodz ghetto to Chelmno ('Gehsperre' action, 15,681)
9-10.42 Czestochowa ghetto to Treblinka (40,000)
2.43 Bialystok ghetto to Treblinka (10,000, some selections, 1000 shot on spot)
3.43 Thrace and Macedonia (Bulgarian annexed territories) to Treblinka (11,343, no survivors)
3 to 5.43 Salonika ghetto to Auschwitz (42,000, about 4,000 selected and registered)
3 to 7.43 Netherlands (Westerbork) to Sobibor (34,000, selections for camps in Lublin district, 18 survivors)
8.43 Sosnowiec-Bedzin ghettos to Auschwitz (30,000, thousands selected and registered)
6-7.44 Lodz ghetto to Chelmno (7,196)

and so on. not a complete roster.

to which we surely need to add the shooting actions, again by municipality and district, since some revisionists have been tempted to 'resettle' these victims as well
11-12.41 Riga at least 25,000 shot at Rumbula (29,400 Latvian Jews registered in ghetto beforehand, 4000 after)
1.42 Kharkiv ghetto liquidated, up to 10,000 shot at Drobitskii Yar (no 1005 action here, sample exhumation and survey)
3.42 Minsk ghetto 3400 shot, had been 18000 native Jews in ghetto as of January
5.42 Lida district, 16,000 shot (as noted in Kube's letter to Lohse of 31.7.42 and other sources)
6.42 Glebokie district, Weissruthenien: 10,000 shot by Trupp Lepel of EK 9 from over the border
7.42 Minsk ghetto 10,000 shot and gassed, 3500 from Reich and 6500 natives, 9500 native and 2500 Reich Jews left in ghetto in autumn 1942
10.42 Brest ghetto 16,000 taken to Bronnaia Gora and shot, fully registered before this
11.42 Pinsk ghetto 16,200 shot out of town, 1000 left alive to 12.42, also a local register
1.43 Lwow ghetto - 10,000 of officially 24,000 Jews taken to the 'Piaski' site and shot, 15344 officially in Julag in 3.43
2.43 Slutsk ghetto 3300 shot and burned alive in ghetto liquidation
4.43 Oszmiana and surrounding ghettos in border strip of Lithuania: 4000 shot at Ponary outside Vilnius
11.43 Poniatowa, Trawniki, Majdanek and Lublin city camps 43,000 shot in Operation 'Harvest Festival'

and so on. not a complete roster.

This level of detail is the one used in conventional histories, and each of the above has varying levels of direct evidence, documents in many cases, plus contemporary reports and witnesses.

The Jews native to the 22.6.41 expanded Soviet Union, in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, complicate the picture considerably, but cannot be ignored. Aside from direct reports of killings, there are quite a range of population registers and numbers for 1941 *prior* to shootings. Riga and Kharkiv are only two examples, already totalling 39,000 Jews. There were similar counts by local authorities in Bobruisk and Zhytomyr prior to documented executions, and quite a lot more for other parts of Ukraine and Crimea. There are of course more for Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria in the Romanian zone. There are lots for Lithuania, not just for the surviving big city ghettos, but for provincial towns as well.

Thus, of the plus/minus 900,000 Jews killed in 1941 in the USSR by the Germans, Romanians and collaborators, there is prior evidence of their presence for a significant proportion. The example of Riga is noteworthy as both Kues and Mattogno tried unconvincingly to shift the victims away from Rumbula, generally northwards into the rear of Army Group North, whose rear area population was less than 700,000 and whose total population was only 1.2 million. The well documented sweep in Lithuania with its extensive prior counts would start to add ever larger numbers already in 1941, clogging up space for future 'resettlers' in 1942 if one wishes to transfer them instead of accepting the killings on the spot.

The situation at the turn of 1942 before the 'second sweep' is even more problematic. Aside from 139,000 counted in Weissruthenien, 326,000 were counted in GK Wolhynien, with both having many documents and reports counting individual ghettos: Minsk 18,000 native Jews, Brest 16,000, Pinsk 17,000, Lutsk 17,000, and so on. There were 22,000 counted in Army Group Centre at the start of February 1942, 4000 of whom were further counted in southeastern Belarus by one Feldkommandantur by town. The military commandants in Army Group South also registered and counted thousands more Jews whose ghettos were destroyed in the first half of 1942, while there is also similar data for other ghettos in the RK Ukraine outside Wolhynien, although most had been killed in 1941 in those districts.

By contrast, the surviving work ghettos in Latvia and Lithuania were very well documented as put to work in 1942, with no further major actions, and instead well documented but *small* labour transfers from Kovno to Riga twice in the year.

The presence of ghettos in Weissruthenien and especially Wolhynien quite some time into 1942 makes them unlikely places for 'resettlement', just as the presence of 160,000 Jews counted in Bezirk Bialystok makes this region an unlikely place for mass transfer, when the Bialystok district ghettos were concentrated from 2 November 1942 and deported westwards in 1942 and early 1943.

There's of course the further marker point of the start of 1943; the majority of the 161,000 Jews counted in the Galicia district were killed on the spot with hardly any transports to the AR camps as Belzec had closed for the clean-up. Outside of Lwow and some efforts at Stanislawow, the mass graves were found intact and examined, with known cases of reburials in some towns. The documentation from Galicia at Kreis level or about the Kreise is quite extensive, with several enumerations by Kreis including in March 1943, and various lower level registrations and counts. So this would add a considerable number to those needing rehoming in the revisionist hypothetical scenario.


If county (Kreis) and municipality (Stadtkreis) is too difficult straight away, then region (Distrikt, Generalkommissariat, Army Group area) should not be. Aggregating sources for extermination by region versus the sources which might juuuuust be reinterpreted otherwise (by squinting very hard) is I think quite in order. To be sure, a task for several people from your side.

[Stubble]

Nick, your claimed death tolls don't fit in the grave space at the Bug River camps as a liquid.

This isn't a 'holocaust of bullets' thread, and as such, diving into the 'Jeckeln system' is not warranted here. Needless to say, the entire premise is ridiculous however, and the choosing of a train station for the supposed event? Well, it should be far easier to show tens of thousands of dead in the dirt there than to try to use incomplete records to show you where they went. After 80 years, what is easier to find Nick, a corpse in a hole in the ground, or a foot print.

I stress again, no serious effort has been made by the 'mainstream' at any point in the last 80 years to solve the grave space problem. In the last 30 odd years this should have become visible to you personally, and should give you pause, but, it doesn't. You continue to tow the line here.

I've been told by other users here that I'm not a historian. Believe it or not, I'm aware of this. I'm a guy on the internet. You however, you are a historian, with a particular focus on exactly the area of concern, and yet, rather than address this glaring issue, you ignore it, completely.

Even when you act like you are entertaining a thought experiment to solve the issue, you straight up don't. You point at the ground and say, they went there. It is demonstrable that's not where they are, at the very least for the Bug River camps, and yet here we are, with you telling me, 'they are in the ground at the Bug River camps'.

So me, a mechanic with a background in the HVAC-R, agricultural and oilfield industries (and manufacturing experience) , I'm one of the ones expected to solve 'where'd they go', because you staunchly refuse to do this, and have refused, for decades.

You can downplay and poke fun and mock all you like, but, none of that will solve 'where'd they go' Nick, and it is a very real problem for your thesis here. When it does finally crumble and when the questions about the homicidal gassings inevitably emerge, you will have another Majdanek on your hands and it will be very unbecoming that the problem was left unaddressed for so long, especially given the glaring visibility of the issue.

This collection of a few guys on the internet, the criticism is valid, we are not historians. Unfortunately, you, as a historian, have failed to refine the history. You didn't just fail though, you refuse. You have your narrative, and you continue to sell it, even as the people stop buying it.

When the wheels finally do fall off, the mainstream is going to be left in quite the pickle here.

This,



Is in no way representative of the reality of Treblinka II.

For the orthodox thesis of twice the population of Liverpool being buried there, this is exactly what reality would have to be. The numbers you claim, they can not exist in the dirt there, it is not reality, it is a fable, a myth, a tale, and you, uncritically take it at face value while you criticize me for not ascribing homicidal intent to documents that plainly say 'resettlement', not 'extermination'.

[Nessie]

...

When the wheels finally do fall off, the mainstream is going to be left in quite the pickle here.

That will never happen, unless so-called revisionist can evidence millions of Jews till alive in 1944 and liberated in 1945. This thread is yet another fail at doing that. Without an evidenced history, so-called revisionism will not get any significant academic support and most people will see it as a fail.

[SanityCheck]

Nick, your claimed death tolls don't fit in the grave space at the Bug River camps as a liquid.

And yet, you cannot say this at all about the individual 'actions'. The Lublin ghetto and first Lwow ghetto actions in March/April 1942? 41,000, not 434,000. The Great Deportation from Warsaw to Treblinka? 250,000, not 713,555.

In all three cases, the prior populations of these ghettos in municipalities are copiously documented in German and Judenrat records. The deportations to Belzec and Treblinka show up also in German, Judenrat, Polish underground and Polish Jewish underground records. Other reports referencing these towns in connection with extermination camps and gassing leaked beyond these circles, e.g. to Sweden regarding Lublin.

The burial of Jews deported to Chelmno and Treblinka in mass graves at those sites shows up in German documents - the cremation of the Jews buried near Chelmno also. The Polish underground registered the open-air cremations in multiple reports, on liberation the evidence for this was found.

Then there are the 'actions' arriving at these camps when open air cremation had begun, like the 11,000 documented deportees from Thrace and Macedonia to Treblinka in 1943, or the 34,000 deported from Westerbork to Sobibor (with some selections).

Yes, you guys now ask 'where's the wood?', but keeping even a fraction of these people alive would have required more wood over a prolonged period just for cooking fuel and minimal heating (unless you're happy for them to have frozen to death in the winter of 1942/3, somewhere). Not to mention consuming many times their body weight in food over a single year (unless you're happy for the Germans to have starved them to death, somewhere).

It wasn't that long ago that 'revisionists' embraced the BS claims of Richard Krege saying there were no ground disturbances at Treblinka, which was quite obviously contradicted by the contemporary sources and what was observed and photographed in 1944-45, never mind by later archaeology.

This isn't a 'holocaust of bullets' thread, and as such, diving into the 'Jeckeln system' is not warranted here.

It's completely warranted, since the issue being avoided is the prior documentation of Jews in ghettos subjected to 'actions'. Whether by deportation to the Reinhardt camps or a foot march to a killing site outside of town is quite, quite irrelevant. Both types must be explained - and the shooting actions left graves which don't have the slightest space issues. Nor, to be blunt, are there any realistic space issues for Chelmno, Sobibor or Birkenau.

This is also why the chronology and phases matter; there were no cremation attempts before summer 1942 starting in Chelmno then Birkenau, but by June 1942, not only had four camps begun operation, the shootings in the USSR had continued. Yet there were still very large numbers documented in ghettos, some in precisely the areas to which Callafangers and other revisionists think they needed to be 'resettled'.

Chelmno, the shootings and the use of gas vans away from Chelmno - at Maly Trostenets, for example - fell substantially in this period of the second half of 1941 and the first half of 1942. Unfortunately, Mattogno's book on Chelmno is one of his worst and also least comprehensive. The amount of evidence for the camp which was known when he wrote it, or which has come to light since, is such that revisionism falls at the very first fence, with the very first extermination camp. Mattogno's book on the Einsatzgruppen is also terrible, horribly organised, verging on unreadable, and doesn't even begin to address all of the evidence whether for the shootings or the intact mass graves or the mass graves exhumed by Aktion 1005.

The 'mass graves problem' dissolves for Kharkiv and countless towns across the USSR into Poland because they were located and found intact after liberation/capture, alongside mass graves near Soviet POW camps. One can ask how much contemporary evidence of shootings (and in the case of the POW camps, starvation and deaths from exposure) to go with these, and the answer is quite a lot.

The 'cremation problem' logically encompasses not just the biggest Reinhardt camps, but all of the camps as well as the key sites targeted by Aktion 1005. Those tended to be outside the bigger cities and towns, and they tended to be well documented for the shooting part in the contemporary German records. They also tended to be observed by undergrounds and bystanders (German soldiers etc) considerably more than what happened in a very provincial shtetl, so the contemporary sources on them are quite extensive, also for the cremations. There are thus even more sources on 1005 than were included in Andrej Angrick's Aktion 1005 (2018, 1400 pages). Indeed, I stumbled across a new one last week, along with a new source on gas vans.

The 'resettlement problem' concerns how to explain what happened to Jews documented as present in regions, counties, towns and ghettos before a German 'action' was reported. Claiming that all Jews in the borders of the USSR on 22 June 1941 escaped still requires evidence, but hardly works for Lithuania when the Germans overran it within a single week, or Brest-Litovsk, when the Germans took control of the town on the very first day of 'Barbarossa', or Lwow, occupied eight days after the invasion on June 30. It works even less well when such towns and regions left copious records of the presence of Jews.

Even when you act like you are entertaining a thought experiment to solve the issue, you straight up don't.

I straight up do entertain all kinds of thought experiments about these issues.

The whole of the east and what happened to non-Jews as well as Jews is what interests me most, but that still requires knowing about Polish and Soviet foreign workers in the Reich, in the same groups in KZs, Soviet evacuations east and mobilisations there plus during the advance westwards, because the Eastern Front was my original core interest. The occupations and annexations from Silesia to the Caucasus are the entangled context for the persecution and murder of Jews in these regions, as well as the survival of a minority as forced labourers, increasingly in KZs, but also in hiding and the forests, which have received a lot of attention in the past 20 years in microhistories of individual counties in Poland, but also further east. I might have started out with Belarus and central Russia, but have taken a broader interest for almost 20 years, and have been in doggy heaven in the past six years as digitisation exploded and I could just download the records of other regions I would never have had the time to copy as print outs 25 years ago.

The countryside doesn't intimidate me, because understanding it is necessary to understand the multiple partisan wars, not just the Soviet but the Ukrainian nationalist (UPA) and Polish (AK, NSZ). I once spent two weeks transforming a list of over 5000 villages burned down in Belarus by the Germans into a sortable table so I could see the patterns by districts and regions. The result was to notice many were obviously burned down on the retreat and not just in antipartisan operations.

My original focus was on precisely the issue of evacuation of populations, so this is what caught my eye when I encountered 'revisionism' almost twenty years ago. Specifically, the lunatic claim of Steffen Werner in The Second Babylonian Captivity that Jews were sent to the southeastern Belarusian town of Marina Gorka, which was under military occupation. Werner compared two rail maps in 1942-3, found that the later one showed the town with a bigger symbol, and concluded solely from this "evidence" that it had grown. It hadn't - I had copied the reports of the Feldkommandantur there in 1942-3 in my previous research, as well as other regional records, and there was no such growth, nor any reference to incoming Jewish 'resettlers'. Moreover, there wasn't even an SS detachment in this area, the nearest was the section of Einsatzkommando 8 in Bobruisk, and the Nachschubkommandantur of the Waffen-SS outside Bobruisk. And I already knew from the OT-Einsatzgruppe Russland-Mitte strengths in 1942-3 that this couldn't be an explanation for this area, either.

Unlike most military historians I have a strong interest in logistics, because my late father had a career in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) in the British Army. I didn't want to join the Army and was not inclined to engineering, but logistics stuck with me. So over the years I have been very interested in how the German Army and Luftwaffe used local labour, POWs, Hiwis and also Jewish forced labour in their logistical effort. The third line maintenance units were called Heereskraftfahrparke - and HKP 562 in Vilnius is now quite famous as a safe haven for Jews because of the efforts of Major Plagge, who kept his workers in Vilnius after September 1943 when everyone else had been deported either to Estonia for work or to Sobibor for death. There are two whole books on Plagge and many journal articles. HKP 547 in Lemberg-Lwow was also an employer, but lost its Jewish workers; there were other places with similar employment patterns, initial use of Jewish forced labourers in skilled work, then their removal.

What I acquired in my research was a realisation that I needed to understand the exploitation of agriculture, requisitioning and the organisation of the food supply for civilians, POWs and German forces in the 'east'. That was crucial not only to understand the fate of Soviet POWs in 1941-2, but Soviet civilian evacuees in 1942-44: why they had to be evacuated, what they suffered if left in food-depleted areas near the front, what happened to them when resettled westwards.

To be blunt, this angle is what makes me completely skeptical of 'resettlement' claims. To repeat a quote I've pointed to many times before, on August 24, 1942, when discussing the new raised requisitioning quotas imposed on the GG, Hans Frank noted that the supply of 1.2 million Jews would 'fall away', leaving only 300,000 Jewish workers employed for German interests. Since quotas were raised on the occupied eastern territories as well at the same time, while the Germans were forced to admit they probably weren't going to meet their targets for central Russia and Belarus due to Soviet partisan disruption, the notion of mass resettlement to the east is utter madness.

The Germans intended to extract agricultural surpluses for the Wehrmacht (to 'live off the land', according to the principle of 'war must feed war') and the Reich from invading the Soviet Union and reducing the Soviet urban population back to the level of 1913, before Soviet industrialisation and urbanisation. They got this, more or less, because of Soviet evacuations, because of the mass starvation of 2 million Soviet POWs, because of starving and murdering a million Soviet Jews by spring 1942, and at the cost of outright famines in several Ukrainian cities.

Agricultural productivity in the Soviet Union wasn't as great as in Germany or Poland - and necessarily fell due to the loss of tractors, fuel, horses and labour. Ukraine was not the 'land where milk and honey flows', contrary to Nazi fantasies. The food deficit Northern Consumer Region of Russian and Soviet agricultural geography was cut off from the Southern Producer Region, unless you were a German soldier, in which case your army's butcher companies might be sent to Volhynia in western Ukraine from the Roslavl-Smolensk front in Russia to prepare meat for shipment to reverse the meat ration cut your army's commander imposed on you in spring 1942.

It naturally didn't help that the Germans also imposed high quotas for the 'recruitment' of Ostarbeiter onto agrarian regions in Ukraine - much higher than in the more urbanised/industrialised regions, and higher than in the Ostland or central regions. The need for labour on the home front to allow German workers to be called up to replace casualties was immense. Thus the westward flow of 1.4 million Ostarbeiter and 'freed up' POWs by the end of August 1942. Meanwhile, the surviving POWs were directly replacing German losses by being recruited as Hiwis, replacing supply troops, and to the Ostlegionen and Osttruppen, adding to security forces.

Labour shortages everywhere could not be reconciled with agricultural production. Meagre rations for Poles and Soviet civilians lowered labour productivity since factory workers had sky-high absenteeism rates so they could search for food on the black market. The armaments inspectorate in the GG sent through a report on apathetic, weakened Polish factory workers in Warsaw in autumn 1941 with photos of emaciated men - ribs showing. One reason the GG administration welcomed the deportation of Jews was to remove them from the black market, and potentially to lower prices and make more food available 'illegally' for Polish workers.

The Germans got their increased quotas from the Government-General in 1942. They then contemplated removing 2 million Poles - dependents in the main - from the ration lists at the end of 1942/3, i.e. after the harvest and quotas had been mainly brought in, since there were still shortages despite removing 1.27 million Jews in deportations. This was too much even for the SS who rejected the idea for fear of provoking unrest. Which ensued anyway in 1943 because the Germans were now losing.

Meanwhile, Army Group Centre *did* go all out to reduce its civilian ration lists from 1.4 million in January 1943 to 800,000 in August 1943, while increasing the number on heavy worker rations, in part by cutting people from the lists outright, more or less forcing them to leave for the countryside, or doing the same with forced evacuees from frontline areas.

So one thought experiment I have conducted many times over the past almost twenty years is to ask what would have happened if the Germans had 'only' expelled Polish Jews to the 'east', given the prevailing agricultural situation in the GG, Ostland, Ukraine and military zone of operations, the manic urgency of raising requisitioning quotas for the 1942 harvest yearr, and given the lack of any discussion of how to feed 1.419 million people (GG and Warthegau figures in the Korherr report). The answer is a repeat of the mass starvation of Soviet POWs in 1941/2, and potentially fifty Belsens. If this is what happened - and it would necessarily have happened since there just wasn't the food to keep all of those 1.419 million deportees alive further 'east' - then both the Polish underground and Soviet partisans, underground and state would have drawn attention to the Armenian genocide-style death trains and starvation-based death camps at the arrival end. Neither was shy about highlighting German rapaciousness and the starvation of Soviet POWs, after all.

[bombsaway]

Nick, your claimed death tolls don't fit in the grave space at the Bug River camps as a liquid.

Revisionist assertions of mass resettlement are based on a 'process of elimination' approach. The claimed numbers at Belzec are impossible, therefore mass resettlement occurred, therefore conspiracy with the dozens of witnesses occurred, despite all lack of evidence.

There are numerous failure points inherent in the therefore. The liquid thing is clearly incorrect, at an average body weight of 35 kg per corpses, 571,428 could be accommodated in the 20,000 cubic meters of grave space. Now you turn that around and say the number is over 600k, but it's obvious that the number could be less than that, that initial estimate could have been too high (this is currently the position of most historians, who use Hoefle's 430k figure). It's possible that less than 400k were buried there, we don't know if Hoefle is accurate either, or there was overcounting, or just how many Jews were sent back to labor camps in Poland. Furthermore even if the grave space was inadequate for an instantaneous burial of 400k + Jews, that isn't how it occurred in practice. Bodies buried over months, which would mean decomposition lowered volume, sometimes burned in the graves according to witnesses.

The failure points are an issue because a) people, no matter how smart they are, can always make mistakes, b) information is incomplete. You are asserting vast conspiracies based on assumptions that may be incorrect. This is the problem when you don't have positive evidence and why such things are the basis of historical assertion (and why Holocaust revisionism is a pseudo history)