Wetzelrad wrote: ↑Mon May 25, 2026 7:50 pm
It's bizarre that you would even ask this. The strength of the case for shootings is one of the best revisionist arguments against the case for gassings. Why did the Nazis extensively document shooting executions but not gassings?
How is that question, part of your best case? A best case, is an evidenced one, not a doubt expressed as a question. That you bring only doubts expressed as questions, rather than evidence, to the debate, is evidence your best case is a very weak one indeed.
Dozens of examples of Einsatzgruppen documents proving shootings are reproduced in Mattogno's The Einsatzgruppen. He repeatedly makes the point that, if mass gassings also occurred, they should be likewise documented.
In 1941, the EG felt secure shooting Eastern European Jews. They had total control of the territory and a lot of local cooperation and support. The Nazis were already euthanising the disabled by gassing, but by 1942, they had to officially stop due to objections. They also knew that many in the West would object to killing Western Jews, so gassing operations needed a higher level of security. It is ironic that you then link to evidence of gassing operations;
The importance of the matter in question is made obvious by the fact that enormous numbers of victims are attributed to the Einsatzgruppen’s “gas vans.” Thus, referring to the related article in the Enzyklopädie des Holocaust,[255] Achim Trunk declared that “half of the estimated 500,000 gas-van victims – that is, 250,000” perished “in these mobile murder chambers in the Soviet Union” (Trunk, fn 4, p. 24). If assuming an average of 75 victims per gassing batch,[256] this means that some 3,333 gassings are proposed to have been carried out using these vehicles. If this is so, the allegation should have found abundant confirmation in the extremely rich surviving documentation relating to the activities of the Einsatzgruppen. (p.293)
It should be noted that the Einsatzgruppen have left an enormous quantity of documents on their activities. The “Ereignismeldungen UdSSR” amount to “more than 2,900 typewritten pages” (Krausnick/Wilhelm, p. 333). To these should be added the other hundreds of pages of the “Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories” and the “Activity and Situation Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD in the USSR.” In addition to these three series, there are extremely numerous individual documents. Notwithstanding all this, in this documentation, the “gas vans” are never even mentioned (with the sole exception mentioned earlier), and not one single victim ever appears to have been killed with a “gas van.” (p.324)
The enormous mass of British intercepts of German messages contains not a single mention of “gas vans,” [...] Since the British intercepts contain multiple references to shootings of Jews in the East, it is impossible to believe that the absence of any mention of “gas vans” is attributable to secrecy. (p.374)
The higher level of secrecy over gassing operations, and that the British were concentrating on U-boat intercepts, not what was happening in obscure camps in Poland, in 1942-3, is the reason why they decoded so little. It was not until 1944 that technological advances at Bletchley, meant that the British were decoding the majority of transmissions and then they concentrated on D-Day.
Nevertheless, no document relating to “Aktion 1005” was found in the archives of the Gestapo. We must therefore believe that the SS considered this operation so secret that all the related documentation had to be destroyed, but at the same time they left all the Einsatzgruppen reports (except for one); hence we may deduce that for the SS the exhumation and cremation of Jewish cadavers was much more secret than shooting the Jews in the first place! (p.466)
There was a variation in how well documents were destroyed. The EG OSRs and Auschwitz Construction Office documents were times when they missed large numbers. In others, they have been very officiant. You would think that a conspiracy by the West would mean they would have "found" lots of documents specifically referring to gassings.
Sanity Check - "Thus, currently revisionists can console themselves by affirming their incredulity..."