I was just looking at Simferopol.
R. T. Paget was Manstein's lawyer and he published a book that discusses the exaggerated nature of the Einsatzgruppen tallies. And he specifically discusses Simferopol. Paget's commentary is very revisionist friendly and has been cited to by Weber, Irving, and Hayward, among others. The book itself is long out of print and was hard to find, but just recently it was made available for temporary borrowing on archive.org.
https://archive.org/details/mansteinhis ... 8/mode/2up
Here are some key bits
-Charges against Manstein included involvement in murder of 90,000 Jews in the Crimea.
-Ohlendorf: some 85,000 Jews killed in four and a half months. Numbers “appeared to be corroborated by reports made by the town majors, but on examination it appeared probable that the town majors merely repeated a figure given to them by the S.D.” (169)
-Einsatzgruppe D: about 500 strong, divided in five companies, including 200 clerks. Each company had about ten vehicles.
-Alleged process: Jews were instructed to register, told to assemble, told they were to be resettled. Taken to an anti-tank ditch some 10 kilometers from town and shot and buried.
Paget has some great comments on the logistical implausibility of the number of executions.
It seemed to me that the S.D. claims were quite impossible. Single companies of about 100 with 8 vehicles were reporting the killing of up to 10,000 and 12,000 Jews in two or three days. They could not have got more than about 20 or 30 Jews who, be it remembered, thought they were being resettled and had their traps with them, into a single truck. Loading, travelling at least 10 kilometres, unloading and returning trucks would have taken nearer two hours than one. The Russian winter day is short and there was no travelling by night. Killing 10,000 Jews would have taken at least three weeks.
In one instance we were able to check their figures. The S.D. claimed that they had killed 10,000 in Simferopol during November and in December they reported Simferopol clear of Jews. By a series of cross checks we were able to establish that the execution of Jews in Simferopol had taken place on a single day, 16th November. Only one company of S.D. were in Simferopol. The place of execution was about 15 kilometres from the town. The numbers involved could not have been more than about 300. These 300 were probably not exclusively Jews but a miscellaneous collection of people who were being held on suspicion of resistance activity. (170)
By the time we had finished with the figures and pointed out the repeated self-contradiction in the S.D. reports, it became probable that at least one “0” would have to be knocked off the total claimed by the S.D. … It is impossible to know even the approximate number of murdered Jews, for not only was Ohlendorf lying to his superiors but as we were able to show his company commanders were lying to him. (172)
I do not myself believe that the Jews murdered in the Crimea number more than 2000 to 3000. (172)
Paget, however, seems to accept the overall extermination story, just not the specific story he himself investigated. “The extermination policy worked in the extermination camps where every individual could be given a particular job.” (171) This seems like a classic example of Gell-Mann amnesia.
There is an HDOT rebuttal. They mention Paget throughout but they don't actually address his points. Their arguments are fundamentally circular and inadequate.
https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/e ... y-reports/
There is a mainstream history on this, Kiril Feferman,
The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus. I'll try to post a bit on Feferman when I get the chance to review.
