How [many] Jews were killed for real?

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Gorque
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#346

Post by Gorque » 29 Jan 2016, 20:38

I located the original Eichmann document (document 87) http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=m ... up;seq=227

and a letter from Wisliceny, dated October 13, '42 regarding his discussion with Fay-Halasz on October 8th (Document 151) here: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=m ... up;seq=291
Last edited by Gorque on 29 Jan 2016, 20:43, edited 1 time in total.

uberjude
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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#347

Post by uberjude » 29 Jan 2016, 21:35

Michael, thank you for your efforts, but you have fallen short of supporting your assertions. Here they were again (I have italicized and underlined the relevant portions for which you have provided no evidence)
In point of fact, in 1942 he was asked by senior Hungarian military commanders to begin deporting Jews from the areas annexed by Hungary between 1938 and 1941, but he refused, because at that stage he had been given orders to organise the deportation of Jews only from Germany, Slovakia and Western Europe.

You offered a citation that made nor reference whatsoever to the motivations behind Eichmann's refusal. By contrast, I offered Eichmann's own words that his rationale was because he wanted a total solution to Hungary's "Jewish question," not a partial solution that involved simply sending a minority of Jews to Ukraine.

this is not merely pedantry on my part, because it goes directly to the next assertion you've still failed to support (again, I underlined and italicized the important point):




In fact, Germany only asked for 100,000 Jewish labourers, but the Hungarian Government made releasing those labourers contingent on Germany's taking all the Jews, except the assimilated Jews of Budapest. Then Horthy had most of the younger men conscripted into the Labour Service, to make them unavailable to the Germans.
Nowhere in your citation was there any evidence that Germany had to be coerced into deporting Jews by Hungary; in fact, just the opposite--let's look at the causation it presents (again, I underlined and italicized)
Baky, Endre and Ferencsy taking their orders from the Eichmann commando, confined the Jews in such appalling quarters that they became an impossible burden to the civil administration – the classic methods invented by Heydrich, and expertly copied by Eichmann.
Okay, so we have the Eichmann commando creating the conditions in which caring for the Jews became "an impossible burden." What happened next?

According to Wisliceny, Ferencsy visited Eichmann’s office as early as the 20 April imploring Eichmann to take the Jews off the hands of the Ministry of the Interior. Wisliceny declared that Eichmann had the railway officials waiting in the next office and that Rolf Gunther at once telegraphed Gruppenfuhrer Glucks, Inspector of Concentration Camps, to get ready at Auschwitz.

So according to Wisliceny, Eichmann was hardly being coerced, but was ready for this eventuality, which, of course, he had set in motion.

Now that may all be opinion, but here comes the money shot:
Wislency proposed moving the Jews to the centre of Hungary, but Endre protested that there was nowhere to put them. He was persuaded by Eichmann that they had all better go to Germany.
So rather than the Hungarians, as you put it making deportations "contingent on Germany's' taking all the Jews," it was Eichmann who "persuaded" them. And that, of course, goes hand in hand with the fact that going back to September 25, 1942, Eichmann is looking for a total solution to the Jewish question in Hungary.

So we have Eichmann who wants a total solution to the Jewish question in 1942; we have a Third Reich which was upset with Horthy's foot draggin on the Jewish question in 1943. And we have the implementation of the Final Solution in 1944, after the Third Reich essentially imposes its will on Hungary. And what evidence do you have? A discussion of how Eichmann manipulated the Hungarians into seeking German help for solving the Jewish Question.

And keep in mind, unless I missed something, nowhere in your text does it say anything about the Hungarians "demanding" the Germans take all the Jews (it explicitly says that Eichmann "persuaded" Endre to allow Germany to deport the Jews), and certainly there is nothing about the Hungarians making the deportation of laborers "contingent" on Germany taking the rest of the Jews. Assume I am as obtuse as you doubtlessly think I am--please point out to me where the Hungarians made the deportation of the laborers part of a quid pro quo, as you claimed. Thanks.


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Gorque
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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#348

Post by Gorque » 29 Jan 2016, 23:48

Hi Uberjude:

It wasn't Eichmann that made the decision refusing to deport the non-Hungarian Jews in '42, it was Himmler. Himmler states that it was his decision quite clearly in this letter to Ribbentrop on November 30, 1942. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=m ... up;seq=230

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#349

Post by Boby » 30 Jan 2016, 00:32

See also Longerich, Holocaust, p. 367, 371 for Himmler.

Pd: Gorque, thanks very much for this link! Excellent material.

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#350

Post by michael mills » 30 Jan 2016, 02:18

My thanks to Gorque for providing the link to the digitised copy of Braham's collection of documents "The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry".

On reading through the documents, I found that as early as February 1943 Speer was asking for Jews from Hungary to be made available as a labour force, in that case for deployment in copper mines in occupied Serbia. The 10,000 Jews asked for in 1943 were to come from the Labour Service under the control of the Hungarian Army (Honved); that is why the documents show negotiations with the Honved.

So it would seem that Speer's demand for the forced labour of Hungarian Jews went back a considerable way, and was not just something cooked up in March 1944 as a pretext for deporting all Hungarian Jews to the death camps.

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#351

Post by michael mills » 30 Jan 2016, 06:21

On page 372 of the Braham text linked here

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=m ... up;seq=516

there is a copy of document NG-2059, a telegram of 8 May 1944 from Veesenmayer, the German plenipotentiary in Hungary, to the German Foreign Office, stating that the 210 companies of the Jewish Labour Service are to be increased to 575 in order that important military work projects will nob harmed by the planned removal of Jews from Hungary. That means that around 150,000 working Jews will be excluded from the evacuation measures.

The Security Police has no objection to those work Jews remaining in Hungary, provided that they are held in concentration camps and guarded by the Gendarmerie. The 100,000 Hungarian workers required by the Organisation-Todt for labour deployment in the Reich will have to be applied for from the WVHA (SS- Gruppenfuehrer Gluecks) which has control over the Jews to be transported from Hungary.

The upshot of the above is that instead of the 100,000 Jewish labourers requested by Speer being transported directly from Hungary to Germany, they had to be found from among the Jews transported to Auschwitz. The selection of the labourers to be made available to Speer was made by the WVHA, which is no doubt the reason why the Jaegerstab was disappointed by the quality of the workers sent to them from Auschwitz, consisting largely of Jews who in earlier times would not have been selected for labour but sent straight to the gas-chambers.

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#352

Post by uberjude » 31 Jan 2016, 02:52

Thank you, Gorque, you are correct; I will point out that the original claim regarding Eichmann was Michael's, who noted that it was Eichmann who
refused, because at that stage he had been given orders to organise the deportation of Jews only from Germany, Slovakia and Western Europe.
I'm fine either way; may main issue is not with the role Eichmann played, but the justification provided.

Michael, you still haven't provided citations to support your points as to the reason why Eichmann (or Himmler, perhaps to be more precise) refused Hezlenyi's offer in 1942.

You also haven't provided citations to support your claim that "the Hungarian Government made releasing those labourers contingent on Germany's taking all the Jews," Nowhere is there any suggestion that the Germans had to be pressured into taking those Jews, or that the Hungarians weren't willing to deport laborers until Germany took all the other Jews. Indeed, the one source you provided made almost the opposite claim--that Endre "was persuaded by Eichmann that they had all better go to Germany."


I am happy to end this particular line of questioning, but I would just like either such citations, or a straight recognition that you don't have such citations. I will note that is actually the standard of the Axis History Forum (from the rules):
Consequently, it is required that proof be posted along with a claim.
and further:
This requirement applies to each specific claim. In the past, some posters have attempted to evade the proof requirement by resort to the following tactics, none of which are acceptable here:

A general reference to a website, or a book without page references; citations or links to racist websites; generalized citations to book reviews; and citations to unsourced, secondary articles or opinions.
So insofar as you have made several specific claims for which I've asked for citations, I would appreciate if you would provide them or concede that you don't have them (and I would say, for example, that a request for laborers by Speer in 1943 offers no evidence to support your claims). Thank you.

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#353

Post by michael mills » 31 Jan 2016, 04:37

Indeed, the one source you provided made almost the opposite claim--that Endre "was persuaded by Eichmann that they had all better go to Germany."
The source of that claim was a post-war statement by Wisliceny, at a time when he was trying to save his own life by blaming everything on Eichmann. It is noteworthy that Wisliceny also claimed that he himself had wanted the Jews held in detention centres in northern Hungary to be transferred to the central part of the country, ie not deported, but that Eichmann had overruled him.

We simply have no way of knowing whether or not Endre needed to be "persuaded" by Eichmann to take the Jews to Germany, since Wisliceny is an extremely untrustworthy source, having been shown to have made a number of dubious claims about Eichmann. For all we know it might have been Endre himself who suggested to Eichmann that the Jews be taken to Germany.

If it was Endre who took the initiative in asking that the detained Jews be taken to Germany, that would be entirely consistent with the approaches made by senior Hungarian officials in 1942, in particular that of Fay, who suggested that the Jews of Hungary could be deported in stages, with those of Budapest being left until last. In fact, that is exactly how the deportation in 1944 was carried out, indicating that it was following a Hungarian plan rather than one imposed by Germany.

It may that I was incorrect in my interpretation that the Hungarian Government specifically made the supply of 100,000 Jewish labourers contingent on taking all the Jews of the country, as actually was the case in Slovakia in 1942. However, what is true this course of events:

1. The German Government only requested the supply of 100,000 Jewish labourers, to consist of Jewish men conscripted into the Labour Service.
2. The Hungarian Government refused to make units of the Labour Service available, arguing that it needed them for defence projects within Hungary, and indeed announced that it was going to increase the size of the Labour Service by conscripting even more Jewish men fit for labour.
3. The Hungarian Gendarmerie began rounding up the Jews outside Budapest, ie not those in the Labour Service, and holding them in detention camps under very bad conditions.
4. Hungarian officials then either asked the Germans to relieve the situation by taking the Jews away, or at the very least stated that they would have no objection to the Germans' doing so.

Thus, the claim that it was the German Government that coerced the Hungarian authorities into deporting all the Jews of Hungary is not supported by the course of events. Rather, it was more the case that the Hungarian authorities manipulated the Germans into accepting the Jews that they, the Hungarians, wanted to get rid of by first denying the Germans access to the men in the Labour Service who the Germans wanted to have as labourers, and then rounding up most of the Jewish population and then either asking the Germans to take them, or advising that they would be willing to let them be taken.

The record shows that ever since 1942, senior elements in the Hungarian Government had been asking the German Government to take a large number of the Jews living in Hungary, especially those in the annexed areas, and the German Government had refused. Furthermore, in August 1944 the Hungarian Government asked Himmler to resume the deportations that had been halted in early July, but Himmler refused, saying that he wanted the Jews who had not been deported to remain in Hungary. That is because he wanted to use them as bargaining chips in negotiations that he wanted to initiate with the Western Allies for a cessation of hostilities in the West so that Germany could concentrate on defending itself against the advancing Red Army.

As I wrote previously, by 1944 Himmler had two objectives in regard to the remaining Jews, to use them as expendable labour, and to use them as bargaining chips in negotiations.

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#354

Post by uberjude » 31 Jan 2016, 05:44

So to be clear, you are agreeing that you have no source to support the following claims:

1. That in 1942, Eichmann refused to deport 100,000 Jews
because at that stage he had been given orders to organise the deportation of Jews only from Germany, Slovakia and Western Europe.
2. That the the German decision to deport hundreds of thousands of Jews to extermination in Auschwitz was because "the Hungarian Government made releasing those labourers contingent on Germany's taking all the Jews,"


As to the rest, I am happy to discuss them, but as you put it regards Braham, they are your opinion, which may or may not reflect historical reality.

So we are in agreement, then, that you have no citations to support those specific claims, correct?

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#355

Post by Paul Lantos » 04 Feb 2016, 17:44

michael mills wrote:Furthermore, in August 1944 the Hungarian Government asked Himmler to resume the deportations that had been halted in early July, but Himmler refused, saying that he wanted the Jews who had not been deported to remain in Hungary. That is because he wanted to use them as bargaining chips in negotiations that he wanted to initiate with the Western Allies for a cessation of hostilities in the West so that Germany could concentrate on defending itself against the advancing Red Army.

As I wrote previously, by 1944 Himmler had two objectives in regard to the remaining Jews, to use them as expendable labour, and to use them as bargaining chips in negotiations.
Agreed that in LATE 1944 this was Himmler's intention; but large scale exterminations continued through the end of August 1944 with the liquidation of Lodz, so it's hard to argue that he had interest in preserving those 50 or 60,000 Jews. Of course it makes sense that after Operation Bagration and after Normandy, both in the summer of 1944, that the attitude would change.

I am quite attracted by Longerich's interesting argument that the Nazis involved foreign allies in the extermination program as much as possible in order to preserve alliances. The argument is essentially that allied governments who participated in the deportations of Jews saw that with the turning of the war's tide they would be treated as criminals, and therefore would be much more resistant to leaving the Nazi alliance and capitulating to the Allies. He supports this argument by showing that the regimes that were most complicit in the Holocaust fought alongside the Nazis later into the war.

So a compelling argument for why they exterminated so many Hungarian Jews in 1944 was to irreversibly bind the Hungarians to their cause -- it wasn't just the ideology at work but a brutal kind of Machiavellianism.

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#356

Post by michael mills » 05 Feb 2016, 02:25

I am quite attracted by Longerich's interesting argument that the Nazis involved foreign allies in the extermination program as much as possible in order to preserve alliances. The argument is essentially that allied governments who participated in the deportations of Jews saw that with the turning of the war's tide they would be treated as criminals, and therefore would be much more resistant to leaving the Nazi alliance and capitulating to the Allies. He supports this argument by showing that the regimes that were most complicit in the Holocaust fought alongside the Nazis later into the war.
If that was the German Government's plan, it did not work in the case of Romania, which started killing its own Jews in large numbers in 1941, entirely on its own initiative, but nevertheless was able to change sides without too much trouble in August 1944. Because Romania changed sides before Hungary, and joined the Red Army in the invasion of the latter country, Stalin allowed it to take back all the territory it had lost to Hungary in 1940 (but not of course the territory it had lost to the Soviet Union).
....large scale exterminations continued through the end of August 1944 with the liquidation of Lodz,....
Could that have been due to the Allied rejection of his "Jews for trucks" proposal made through Joel Brand in May? Or perhaps the rapid advance of the Red Army into Poland after the destruction of Army Group Centre in June?

Whatever the case was, he preserved the 30,00 or so Hungarian Jews who had been sent to Strasshof in June, presumably to be used as bargaining chips.

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#357

Post by Paul Lantos » 06 Feb 2016, 01:01

michael mills wrote:If that was the German Government's plan, it did not work in the case of Romania, which started killing its own Jews in large numbers in 1941, entirely on its own initiative, but nevertheless was able to change sides without too much trouble in August 1944.
Longerich specifically discusses the case of Romania, which was complicit in the genocide very early with "stateless" / refugee Jews, but then effectively resisted further efforts later in the war to deport the Jews of Bucharest and Jewish Romanian citizens, saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
Could that have been due to the Allied rejection of his "Jews for trucks" proposal made through Joel Brand in May? Or perhaps the rapid advance of the Red Army into Poland after the destruction of Army Group Centre in June?
You can't blame the Allies' policy decisions for the Nazis' choice to adopt murder as their policy. That presupposes that it was the Nazis' only choice.

Nor was Himmler primarily concerned with slave labor, at least for the Lodz Jews, in August, 1944 -- the Lodz Jews had already been a 100% slave labor operation prior to the liquidation of the ghetto. He COULD have just evacuated all of them westward to labor camps in the Reich, but he did not -- he had about 90% of them gassed first.
Whatever the case was, he preserved the 30,00 or so Hungarian Jews who had been sent to Strasshof in June, presumably to be used as bargaining chips.
Indeed. And about 10 times that number were killed. A 10:1 gas chamber to "bargaining chip" ratio should tell us what we need to know of his priorities.

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#358

Post by michael mills » 06 Feb 2016, 01:34

In April 1944, Himmler was calling for 200,000 Jews to be brought to concentration camps in the Reich for labour. It was mainly the Jews from Hungary that he was thinking of, but it is possible that in that number he included the remaining Jews held in the Lodz Ghetto who were already being used for labour.

As I wrote, it may that the rapid advance of the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw after the destruction of the German forces in Belarus caused him to change his mind and have the inhabitants of the Lodz Ghetto sent to Auschwitz rather than evacuating them to the west.

By contrast, the survivors of the German Jews deported to Latvia between December 1941 and January 1942 were evacuated by sea in the summer of 1944, along with the large-scale evacuation of German military and civilian personnel from Riga.

I do not know why the German authorities chose to evacuate the Jews held at Riga to concentration camps in Germany but not those held in the Lodz Ghetto. It may be that German Jews were favoured over Polish ones, or it may simply be that it was logistically easier to evacuate Jews from Riga by sea than by land from Lodz.

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#359

Post by michael mills » 06 Feb 2016, 02:00

Here is some information on the end of the Lodz Ghetto:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81%C3 ... the_ghetto
In early 1944, the ultimate fate of the Łódź Ghetto was debated among the highest-ranking Nazis. The initial wave of deportations to Chełmno ended in the autumn of 1942 with over 72,000 people defined as "dispensable" already sent to their deaths.[29] Heinrich Himmler called for the final liquidation of the ghetto. Between 23 June and 14 July 1944, the first 10 transports of about 7,000 Jews were sent by Arthur Greiser from the Radegast train station to Chełmno.[29] Although the killing centre was partly razed in April 1943,[30] it had resumed gassing operations specifically for this purpose.[31] Meanwhile, Armaments Minister Albert Speer proposed the ghetto be continued as a source of cheap labour for the front.[29]

On 15 July 1944 the transports paused for two weeks. On 1 August 1944 the Warsaw Uprising erupted, and the fate of the remaining inhabitants of the Łódź Ghetto was sealed. During the last phase of its existence, some 25,000 inmates were murdered at Chełmno; their bodies burned immediately after death.[30][31] As the front approached, German officials decided to deport the remaining Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau aboard Holocaust trains, including Rumkowski. On 28 August 1944, Rumkowski and his family were gassed along with thousands of others. A handful of people were left alive in the ghetto to clean it up.[29] Others remained in hiding with the Polish rescuers.[32] When the Soviet army entered Łódź on 19 January 1945, only 877 Jews were still alive, 12 of whom were children.[1] Of the 223,000 Jews in Łódź before the invasion, only 10,000 survived the Holocaust in other places.[7]
So it appears that it was the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising that brought about the decision to send the remaining Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto to Auschwitz, rather than evacuating them to the west.

The statement that Himmler wanted the Lodz Ghetto to be liquidated is ambiguous; it could mean that he wanted the ghetto inhabitants killed, or it could mean that he wanted the ghetto to be dissolved and its inhabitants distributed to labour camps under his control. It needs to be borne in mind that throughout the existence of the Lodz Ghetto, it was not under the control of the SS but under that of German civilian authorities, who were the ones who benefitted from the labour of the Jews held in it, a situation that Himmler did not approve of and wanted to bring an end to.

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Re: How [many] Jews were killed for real?

#360

Post by Paul Lantos » 06 Feb 2016, 02:30

Honestly the proximate reasons for the destruction of Lodz aren't pertinent to this conversation. Lodz had been a politically and administratively complicated entity for years, but that analysis is beyond the scope of this thread. I simply brought Lodz up because you said that in 1944 Himmler was primarily concerned with slave labor and bargaining chips. I've got no dispute that he had those concerns. But I think it's an indefensible argument that these concerns supervened the extermination program before the autumn of 1944. The Hungarian extermination is a unique case study in many respects, but it was not the final mass coordinated extermination of the war. More than half a million Jews were exterminated in 1944, and at least half of these were at Birkenau, not just part of the cost of doing business in concentration camps. Some of the Birkenau sonderkommando testimonies say that there were gassings up until the crematoria were destroyed in late1944.

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