Simferopol massacre and the Einsatzgruppen

[borjastick]

As per usual I was receiving nonsense holocaust posts on Facebook which I tend to speed read and dismiss. Then this week one popped up about the Simferopol massacre. I read the post and then checked a little on the interweb thingy and found this summary on Wikipedia;

The Simferopol Massacre was a massacre perpetrated by the Nazi unit of the Einsatzgruppen from December 9 to 13, 1941, against Ashkenazi, Krymchak, and Gypsy Jews in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, then in the Soviet Union. The killing spree left 12,300 dead[1].

I am not one to buy a lot of what I believe to be huge exaggerations about the Einsatzgruppen and their fabled mass executions of innocent jews etc behind the lines of the Barbarossa front. I have yet to figure out how so few killed so many and yet (as per usual) left little or no trace afterwards...

However back to Simferopol rather than this spreading into a whole post on the superhuman killing abilities of the very short of manpower Einsatzgruppen.

Some years ago I bought Rhodes 'Masters of Death' pile of poo. Having read it and discarded it into my book collection never to waste my time again on it, I picked it up and searched for Simferopol. I will admit I haven't churned through every page for mentions and references but have had a good look in the index and relevant sections of the book and found nothing, zero, de nada. Why would that be?

Werner Braune was the officer in charge who was subsequently tried and hanged for his involvement. He too is not mentioned on Rhodes' book.

Is this episode in holocaust invented history now doubted or is there another plausible reason for Rhodes not covering this event in his most wonderful tome?

[Archie]

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.

[Hans]

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/

Perhaps nobody heard about it yet, but rebuttals of Holocaust denial can also be found at HC blog. Paget and Simferopol? Been there:

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... s.html?m=1

[Hektor]

As per usual I was receiving nonsense holocaust posts on Facebook which I tend to speed read and dismiss. Then this week one popped up about the Simferopol massacre. I read the post and then checked a little on the interweb thingy and found this summary on Wikipedia;

The Simferopol Massacre was a massacre perpetrated by the Nazi unit of the Einsatzgruppen from December 9 to 13, 1941, against Ashkenazi, Krymchak, and Gypsy Jews in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, then in the Soviet Union. The killing spree left 12,300 dead[1].

I am not one to buy a lot of what I believe to be huge exaggerations about the Einsatzgruppen and their fabled mass executions of innocent jews etc behind the lines of the Barbarossa front. I have yet to figure out how so few killed so many and yet (as per usual) left little or no trace afterwards...
.....

You'd think more people would ask exactly that type of question. The feasibility and lack of evidence that should leave should indeed raise the eyebrows of any intelligent observer, but it seems they are rather stunned by over-powering emotion the message is designed to induce.

[Archie]

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/

Perhaps nobody heard about it yet, but rebuttals of Holocaust denial can also be found at HC blog. Paget and Simferopol? Been there:

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... s.html?m=1

You are glossing over the point that has been raised. Paget is arguing that the numbers in the OSRs are false and you are citing these same OSRs as the primary rebuttal.

Paget's main point is a logistical one. How, practically speaking, do you round up and shoot 10,000+ people in 1-3 days?

Muehlenkamp claims that the thousands of victims might have been marched the 15 km or so to the execution site and/or the Wehrmacht supplied the necessary trucks.

Under Paget's assumptions, you have 10,000 victims and a truck has a capacity of 20-30. This would mean 333-500 truckloads. Paget says one day. Other sources say three days. For three days, we are still looking at over 100 truckloads per day. If you disagree with Paget's assumptions, tell us what your assumptions are and work out the numbers.

With marching on foot, the problem is that gunfire is generally audible within a few kilometers. If you are executing one batch, you need to make sure the next batch is not within earshot or you have a panic on your hands. They'd have to wait a few kilometers away and then you have to wait for them to walk to the execution site which would mean a long lag time in between batches.

[borjastick]

Thanks for the above gentlemen. Perhaps this is why Rhodes did not include Simferopol in his book. It simply stretched the expectation and claims too far for credibility. So then I would ask if he avoided other claimed massacres. Certainly when reading his book I was left with the feeling that many (perhaps most) of these claimed einsatzgruppen actions were not credible.

[fireofice]

Under Paget's assumptions, you have 10,000 victims and a truck has a capacity of 20-30. This would mean 333-500 truckloads. Paget says one day. Other sources say three days. For three days, we are still looking at over 100 truckloads per day. If you disagree with Paget's assumptions, tell us what your assumptions are and work out the numbers.

I'm skeptical of the extent of the Simferopol massacre due to my skepticism of the numbers in these reports in general, but I don't quite get this argument. How would the Wehrmacht sparing 100-500 trucks for this be infeasible? According to Wikipedia, they had 347,490 trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ar ... rld_War_II

[Archie]

Under Paget's assumptions, you have 10,000 victims and a truck has a capacity of 20-30. This would mean 333-500 truckloads. Paget says one day. Other sources say three days. For three days, we are still looking at over 100 truckloads per day. If you disagree with Paget's assumptions, tell us what your assumptions are and work out the numbers.

I'm skeptical of the extent of the Simferopol massacre due to my skepticism of the numbers in these reports in general, but I don't quite get this argument. How would the Wehrmacht sparing 100-500 trucks for this be infeasible? According to Wikipedia, they had 347,490 trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ar ... rld_War_II

To my knowledge, all the claims of Wehrmacht assistance are very vague. I have see nothing claims any specific number of trucks, much less many dozens. Certainly if it had wished to give this priority, the Germans could have sent however many trucks were desired, but the question is whether this actually happened on the scale alleged. And for me the stronger point is more the logistics and implied speed of the killing. For say 400 truckloads over three days, perhaps a ten hour workday, you're dropping off one truckload every 4.5 minutes. That pace is not quite as fanciful as for Babi Yar, but I don't think it's even remotely realistic. I would say it's impossible unless the victims cooperate. And that is essentially what is claimed in much of the Holocaust literature.

Reitlinger:

The state of mind of the victims, who meekly stripped, shovelled a layer of sand over the twitching bodies of their kinsfolk, and then lay patiently, naked in a temperature below zero, to await a shot in the neck, was nothing but the normal resignation of the condemned.

...it must have taken some ingenuity to keep 33,771 people crouching in the road for two days on end, particularly as the small-arms salvos must have been almost within earshot.

[Hektor]

The state of mind of the victims, who meekly stripped, shoveled a layer of sand over the twitching bodies of their kinsfolk, and then lay patiently, naked in a temperature below zero, to await a shot in the neck, was nothing but the normal resignation of the condemned.

Honestly, regardless how one stands to this narrative, it's impossible to know those tiny details of such events. And this is a clear indication that Reitlinger was busy with narrative creation, not with serious historiography. The story is told in a way to capture the audience emotionally.