Stubble wrote: ↑Sun Aug 31, 2025 3:43 am
Sir, do you mind if I ask you a couple questions before we take a long stroll down this path you just laid out here?
One thing I want to ask you is, were jews indeed 'sheep dipped' into OT during Barbarossa? I remind you of the Yad Vashim article covering this I linked on page 10. Now, given this proven example, do you think it is reasonable to entertain the idea that this program was broader than that, and to look for evidence of such?
One case in 1941. Jews from the Lodz ghetto were taken out in spring 1941 for work outside the ghetto in large numbers, some were sent to Danzig-Westpreussen. From there a contingent was taken by a construction firm to Lithuania. The survivors were encountered by native Jews, so showed up in e.g. the diary of Eliezer Yerushalmi in Siauliai/Schaulen, Abraham Tory in Kovno and Herman Kruk in Vilna.
The most solid observations of this group were from an OT camp of Baugruppe Giesler in Palemonas near Kaunas, since 150 Jews from Kovno ghetto were sent there in September 1942, this is documented in the Kovno ghetto Judenrat records. Witnesses from Kovno who returned from this 'Aussenarbeit' said there were 300 Polish Jews who had been brought east in late summer 1941. Two of these Jews, from Lodz, escaped to the Siauliai/Schaulen ghetto in the summer of 1942 and explained they had first worked near Danzig and then been brought to Lithuania.
Source synthesising these sources: Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen, pp.1091-2. Wolf Gruner in his Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis has more on the spring 1941 assignments of Lodz ghetto Jews, including to the camps of the Reichsautobahnn in the annexed territories of western Poland, also noting some sent to Danzig-Westpreussen
The second case is January 1942. In Upper East Silesia a contingent of Jewish workers were put together by the OT and sent in January 1942 - slowly due to the transport logjam - to Army Group North to work on regauging the railways. They were moved around and evidently suffered losses from the cold and mistreatment, but not a really extreme mistreatment. Then by mid-1942 they were returned to Silesia and the Schmelt camps.
Sources: Summary of German Police Decodes 16.12.41-15.1.42, 14.2.1942, MSGP 32, pp. 10-11, TNA HW 16/6 pt.1; Kruk, The last days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, 187 (30.1.1942) noted the passage of the transport through Vilnius; Gustaw Ickowicz, Lb. 34, 3.1945, YVA O.62/31; departure and return also noted in Hans Wollenberg, …Und der Alptraum wurde zum Alltag. Autobiographischer Bericht eines Jüdischen Arztes über NS-ZAL in Schlesien (1942-1945) (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1992), 66-7. The reconstruction of this action by Bella Guttermann, ‘Jews in the Service of Organisation Todt in the Occupied Soviet Territories October 1941-March 1942’, Yad Vashem Studies XXIX (2001), 65-107, misdates the departure to late 1941, which is contradicted by the sources cited here.
So both cases known hitherto preceded any deportations to Chelmno and Birkenau respectively.
These would have been 'OT-Einsatz II' before the establishment of the OT-Einsatzgruppen. They would have involved German construction staffs and firms.
Polish construction firms from the GG were certainly contracted for the OT further east, but there's no evidence hitherto that they were employing Jewish labour, the construction offices in the GG which did employ Jews evidently contracted to German firms.
Another question I have for you is, do you have a 'hard' estimate for the dead at the Bug River camps? Looking at the studies conducted over the years, it looks like the grave space will accommodate roughly 10% of the claim, at each camp.
I disagree with 10%, you are lowballing the capacity of the graves as a cope.
My last question is with regard to the 'calorie crunch' after the Soviet slash and burn during their withdrawal and in the ensuing couple of years. Now, would this scenario be the same as 'the preplanned genocide of the jews of Europe'? Or would that scenario be seen as a more pragmatic approach to a resource problem? I also want to know if the coming pivot here is to say 'the nazis planned this famine because they hated slavs'. I think that's where this line of attack usually goes.
In my eye, the 'calorie crunch' argument is the one trotted out when the 'it was a preplanned' genocide' argument falls flat. Then the argument gets bullnosed back to 'it was preplanned genocide' but this time through the 'starvation plan'.
The 'hunger strategy' has been known from key documents since IMT Nuremberg. It was obviously emphasised by German historians like Christian Streit when examining the treatment of Soviet POWs in Keine Kameraden (1978). Streit went on to query the Ohlendorf pre-Barbarossa extermination order claim in the early 1980s so was part of the effort shifting the consensus away from this, which is the only 'pre-planned genocide' claim around. So that was basically dismissed forty years ago.
The 1980s and 1990s saw a general incorporation of German planning for Barbarossa into discussions of the Final Solution, both the Generalplan Ost and 'Hunger Plan'. These themes are not quite as prominent in Hilberg 1961, but are quite obvious in Browning/Origins (2004) and Longerich, Holocaust (2010), whose German edition appeared in 1998.
Both the GPO and 'hunger strategy' envisaged population reductions through expulsions to Siberia and deaths of 20-30 million people. Himmler was informed via Backe and talked to the HSSPFs of 20-30 million deaths before Barbarossa. There are many other sources outside the SS about slogans of millions dying, plus Goering talking about the greatest dying off since the Thirty Years War (which halved the population of Germany) to Italian foreign minister Ciano.
Since the agricultural planners proposed reducing the Soviet urban population to the level of 1913 to extract surpluses, the hunger strategy would have affected Jews, a largely urbanised nationality, in the pre-1939 Soviet Union regardless of other considerations. The annexed western borderlands, i.e. the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia-Bukovina, had not seen the same dramatic urbanisation as Soviet Ukraine. They were also agriculturally more productive in many cases. The Jews of the Baltic states were however eliminated while these areas served as the supply base for Army Group North, which was besieging Leningrad with a very underpopulated and unfertile hinterland (lots of forests and swamps).
The countervailing pressure was labour requirements, specifically
skilled labour. Two areas/towns in the western borderlands exemplify this, firstly the Drohobycz-Boryslaw oilfields in Galicia. Jews were found to be a large part of the existing skilled workforce there, so this specific workforce had to be protected, and while most Jews from these towns were deported or killed over 1942-3, this was the sole big concentration of surviving Jewish forced labour in Galicia to the spring of 1944. The other was Siauliai/Schaulen, where there were two of the largest leather factories in Europe. Random arrests and killings in July 1941 were stopped because of the intervention of the military economic staffs. Even though the core Jewish workforces in these factories was small, the intervention meant that a far higher proportion of Jews in Siauliai survived 1941. At the start of 1941, there were 6,400 Jews in a town of 32,000, with refugees also arriving. In November 1941 after the last actions and after some provincial Jews were moved in, there were 4,674 Jews counted. This is a much higher percentage of survivors than in Vilnius or Kovno, where demands for skilled labour prevented the total destruction of those ghettos and meant there were workers into 1944. The Lithuanian provinces had fewer critical industries so provincial Jews were seen as superfluous, useless mouths, security threats, Bolsheviks.
By contrast, the industrial cities of the Dnieper bend in Soviet central Ukraine had lost most of their factories to Soviet evacuations, and while the Germans intended to rebuild some and various other projects, the Jews remaining were superfluous and not needed. The same in Kharkiv where 10,000 Jews were insignificant compared to the number of unemployed Ukrainian workers who could be sent west as Ostarbeiter, while local labour demands rose, and more starved to death in the city than there were Jews. Being at the bottom of the racial hierarchy meant they were slated for death in this specific context. Kyiv faced starvation in 1941-2 as well, but the remaining Jews had all been killed in a nominal reprisal at the very start of the occupation.
About 1 million Jews survived 1941 in eastern Poland; about 200,000 had been killed there in 1941, including 33,000 in formerly Polish Wilno. Survival was partly down to the economic structure, with Jews forming a very high proportion of artisans and other workers, partly due to the division between occupation regions - the Bialystok district was annexed to the Reich - and partly due to the shortage of SS-Police forces across these regions, especially in GK Wolhynien. Even at the end of 1942, there were still large ghettos remaining in the Bialystok district, 161,000 Jews in Galicia, and ghettos in Wilno, Oszmiana, Lida, Glebokie and camp-ghettos in Baranovichi and a few other places. Only GK Wolhynien had been largely cleared of Jews due to this being an agrarian province with heavy quotas imposed. There was one small work-ghetto left, none in the Belarusian northern part.
The way you see the German mind, soul and people is radically different than the way I see them.
Oradour, Malmedy, Ardeatine Caves, Klissura, Serbia, Lidice, T4 - Hartheim, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandeburg, Sonnenstein, several settlements named Borki in Belarus wiped out with their entire populations, the Ochota and Wola massacres in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising... the list goes on.
But so does the list of Germans who were horrified by this, who also tried to save lives and shelter non-Jews and Jews where possible: Major Plagge and Anton Schmid in Vilnius, Berthold Beitz in Drohobycz (future director of Krupp postwar), Oskar Schindler in Krakow, Josef Meyer and his family in Zloczow, Galicia, and many more.
The Holocaust was a coalition act of violence. Croatians, Romanians, Hungarians all killed Jews in varying numbers on their own, Lithuanians killed the majority of Lithuanian Jews under German direction, there were collaborator forces like the Arajs Kommando in Latvia, and Estonian and Latvian Security Police sent to Belarus. Belarusian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian local police became caught up in the actions and manhunts. Ukrainian POWs were recruited to the Trawnikis and formed the bulk of manpower at the Reinhardt camps, and in deportation detachments. The famous Police Battalion 101 delegated the killing of Jewish children to its Trawnikis for a time.
If the T4 personnel could kill 100,000 pscyhiatric patients and KZ inmates in Germany and Austria, then the T4 personnel transferred to the GG together with hundreds of Trawnikis could kill 1.5 million Jews.
If Sonderkommando Lange could 'euthanise' thousands of Polish (and some Polish Jewish) psychiatric patients in the Warthegau, and 1500 from Germany when sent to the Soldau camp, then it could cope with gassing 157,000 Jews and Roma.
It's not difficult to identify other regimes and groups (paramilitaries, militaries, mobs) in the modern era who also resorted to unrelieved slaughter, and perfectly possible to find bad cases in recent American, British, French and Dutch history. I don't think seeing any of this mass violence as unique is helpful or warranted, nor do I think that any nation has an automatic virtue or can avoid descending into such violence under particular circumstances.
The close study of all of these cases might identify widespread factors like racism, in colonial regimes and in the case of the Nazis. But close study also emphasises obedience, camaraderie and other psychological factors. It's beyond reasonable dispute that Nazi Germany was a racist society and structured in that way. Those who helped kill may not have been foaming at the mouth antisemites and did not need to be, they just needed to obey and to cope with a horrible task. Most claimed after the war not to hate Jews - we should take that with pinch of salt due to changed circumstances and potential legal jeopardy. But they had been directed by leaders who ordered the elimination of Polish elites, psychiatric patients and others on a group basis, and who did the same with the Jews. The Nazi leadership were no different to the Bolsheviks, shaped by the First World War and political violence afterwards. Both leaderships could write turgid books and be 'intellectual' and yet also order or demand mass killings. The liberal democracies also didn't shy away from violence in the 'right' circumstances, and all of these powers bombed the shit out of each other if they had the means. Callousness and instrumentalised violence were not unique to the Germans.