Apologia for Genocide

[Roberto]

Was this Gasolene or Diesel engine ?

The engine at Sobibor was gasoline but the engines at Belzec and Treblinka were diesel.

This is not correct.

Some time ago I had a look at some of the eyewitness and documentary evidence to find out where what "Revisionist" guru Friedrich Paul Berg calls the "myth within a myth" comes from. The results were the following:

1. Gas vans used by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union

Dr. Widmann: No mention of type of engine (Kogon/Langbein/Rückerl et al, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, pages 81 and following)

Rauff: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 82)

Pradel: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 82)

Wentritt: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 83)

Leidig: Doesn’t mention type of engine. (Kogon et al, as above, pages 83 and following)

Just (letter to Rauff of 5 June 1942): No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 84 and following)

Gniewuch: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 87, 90, 91)

Trühe: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 87)

Mendel Vulfovich: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 88 )

Adolf Rübe: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 89)

Zalman Levinbuck: Gasoline engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 91)

Unter den Lastwagen gibt es riesige mit hermetisch verschließbaren Türen … Diese luftdicht geschlossenen Wagen werden ‘dushegubky’ genannt, was auf russisch ‘Seelentöter’ heißt. Sie bringen bereits tote Menschen heran, die man nicht mehr erschießen muß. Die Menschen werden unterwegs vergiftet durch Gase und Abgasdämpfe, die durch das Verbrennen von Benzin im Motor entstanden sind. Denn diese Abgase werden durch ein spezielles Rohr ins Wageninnere geleitet, anstatt, wie normalerweise, frei an die Luft zu entweichen; und so werden die Menschen durch das Kohlenmonoxyd getötet.

My translation:

Among the trucks there were giant one with doors that closed hermetically.... These hermetically closed vans are called ‘dushegubky’, which in Russian means ‘soul killer’. They already bring along dead people who don’t have to be shot anymore. The people are poisoned during the drive by gases and exhaust fumes that are created by the combustion of gasoline in the motor.[my emphasis] This because the exhaust is led through a special valve into the inside of the van instead of freely vanishing into the air as it normally would, and thus the people are killed by the carbon monoxide.

Chugunov: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 91)

Boris Dobin: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 91 and following)

Lauer: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 93)

Bauer: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 93)

Willi Friedrich: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 94 and following)

Wilhelm Findeisen: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 95)

Robert Mohr: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 96)

Ljudmila Nazarevskaya: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 97)

Kotov: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 101 and following)

Paul Zapp: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 104 and following)

Johannes Schlupper: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 105 and following)

Eugenia Ostrovec: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 106 and following)

2. Gas vans used in Yugoslavia and Eastern Poland

Dr. Harald Turner (letter to Wolff of 11 April 1942): No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 107 and following)

Hedwig Schönfein: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 108)

Benno Goldbrand: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, page 109)

3. Gas vans used at Chelmno

Walter Burmeister: Gasoline engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 115, 123 and following, 125 and following, 129 and following)

[…]Die Wagen waren mittelschwere Renault-Lastwagen mit Ottomotor. Sie ließen sich schlecht fahren, weil sie nicht einen so großen Wendekreis hatten. Der zeitweise hinzugekommene dritte Wagen war wohl ein schwerer. Die Wagen hatten Kastenaufbau mit einer großen Zweiflügeltür an der Rückseite, ähnlich wie Möbelwagen.[…]

My translation:

[...]The vans were medium size Renault trucks with Otto engines.[my emphasis] They were hard to drive because they didn’t have so big a turning circle. The temporarily added third van must have been a heavy one. The vans had a box-like buildup with a big two-wing door at the back side, similar to furniture vans.[...]

Johann H. and Johann P. before the Vienna County: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 116 and following)

Kurt Möbius: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 122 and following)

Wilfried Heukelbach: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 124 and following)

Gustav Laabs: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 126 and following)

Walter Piller: Gasoline engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 138 and following)

[...]Während der Fahrt wurde durch den Kraftfahrer Laabs ein Ventil geöffnet, durch welches Gas einströmte, welches die Insassen in 2-3 Minuten tötete. Hierbei handelte es sich um Gase, die durch den Benzinmotor erzeugt wurden.[...]

.

My translation:

[...]During the drive the driver Laabs opened a valve, through which gas streamed in, which killed those inside within 2-3 minutes. These were gases that had been created by the gasoline motor.[my emphasis][...]

.

4. Gas chambers of Belzec extermination camp

Karl Alfred Schluch: No mention of type of engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 167 and following)

Gerstein: diesel engine (Kogon et al, as above, pages 171 and following)

Pfannenstiel: No mention of type of engine. Speaks of a 100 BHP motor that was run with diesel fuel ("Er wurde mit Dieselkraftstoff betrieben")

Reder: gasoline engine

[…]Gerstein, citing Globocnik, claimed the camps used diesel motors, but witnesses who actually serviced the engines in Belzec and Sobibor (Reder and Fuchs) spoke of gasoline engines.[…]

Source of quote:

http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.com/e ... .asp#5.4.5

5. Gas chambers of Sobibor extermination camp

Fuchs: gasoline engine. See Kogon et al, as above, pages 158 and following and Browning, as above. Translation of Fuchs’ deposition:

Testimony of SS Scharfuhrer Erich Fuchs, in the Sobibor-Bolender trial, Dusseldorf: (Quoted in "BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps", Indiana University Press - Yitzhak Arad, 1987, p. 31-32). .....We unloaded the motor. It was a heavy Russian benzine engine, at least 200 horsepower.[my emphasis] We installed the engine on a concrete foundation and set up the connection between the exhaust and the tube. I then tested the motor. It did not work. I was able to repair the ignition and the valves, and the motor finally started running. The chemist, who I knew from Belzec, entered the gas chamber with measuring instruments to test the concentration of the gas. Following this, as gassing experiment was carried out. If my memory serves me right, about thirty to forty women were gassed in one gas chamber. The Jewish women were forced to undress in an open place close to the gas chamber, and were driven into the gas chamber by the above mentioned SS members and the Ukrainian auxiliaries. when the women were shut up in the gas chamber I and Bolender set the motor in motion. The motor functioned first in neutral. Both of us stood by the motor and switched from "Neutral" (Freiauspuff) to "Cell" (Zelle), so that the gas was conveyed to the chamber. At the suggestion of the chemist, I fixed the motor on a definite speed so that it was unnecessary henceforth to press on the gas. About ten minutes later the thirty to forty women were dead.

Source of quote:

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/ftp ... /fuchs.t01

6. Gas chambers of Treblinka extermination camp

Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, based on the testimonials of Jankiel Wiernik, Henryk Poswolski, Abe Kon, Aron Czechowicz, Oskar Strawczynski, Samuel Reisman, Aleksander Kudlik, Hejnoch Brener, Starisław Kon, Eugeniusz Turowski, Henryk Reichman, Szyja Warszawsski, and Leon Finkelsztejn: No mention of the type of engine.

The aspect of the chambers in which victims were gasssed, according to statements by the witnesses Wiernik, Rajchman and Czechowicz, was as follows: Both buildings had many corridors, within the larger building the entrances to the chambers being on both sides of the corridor, but in the smaller one on one side only. The entrances were small and had tightly closing doors. In the outer wall’s of the chambers were large trap doors which could be raised in order to permit the removal of the corpses. The chambers had tiled floors, sloping towards the outer side. In the ceiling were openings connected by pipes with engines situated in adjoining buildings, which produced the CO gas with which the victims were suffocated.

Source of quote:

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/gcpoltreb1.htm

Ya’akov Wiernik at the Eichmann trial: No mention of type of engine.

[…]Q. Where did the gas enter?

A. That is in the sketch. Here was the gas engine, the engine which forced the gas in. And there were pipes with valves. They would open the valve into the chamber where the people were. There was an engine of a Soviet tank standing there, and in this way the gas was introduced. Here were the doors where people entered from one side, and, on the other, this was the large door which opened along almost the entire wall. And, after forty to forty-five minutes had passed, they would stop, they would open the door, and the dead bodies would fall out. And here was a spare engine next to the three. Numbers 1, 2, 3 and 26 were the engines that generated the electricity, and there, too, there was a motor.

Q. I understand from this that the gas was produced on the spot, or was it brought in ready-made from outside?

A. The gas was produced on the spot.[…]

Source of quote:

http://www.ukar.org/eichma02.shtml

Eliahu Rosenberg at the Eichmann trial: No mention of type of engine. Speaks of "Ropa, which was a kind of oil, a crude oil" as having been the fuel they put into the gassing engine. This does not necessarily mean that the engine itself was a diesel engine, however.

[…]Q. Where did the gas come from?

A. The gas came from an engine.

Q. They did not bring it from outside — it was produced on the spot?

A. It was Ropa — Ropa gas.

Q. Was it manufactured by an engine, from the exhaust of a diesel engine?

A. Yes. It was gas from an engine. They put in Ropa, which was a kind of oil, a crude oil, and the fumes entered the gas chambers. The people who were the last to enter the gas chambers, the very last, received stabs in the bodies from the bayonets, since the last persons already saw what was going on inside and did not want to enter. Four hundred people were put into one small gas chamber. And when they forced them in, they, on their part, pressed inwards and in this way reached the full capacity, so that only with difficulty could the outer door of the chamber be shut.[…]

Source of quote:

http://www.ukar.org/eichma02.shtml

Otto Horn before the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, 26 February 1980: No mention of type of engine. See transcription of interrogation protocol under

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hor ... n-004.html )

Adolf Eichmann: No mention of type of engine.

[…]Höfle told the police captain to explain the installation to me. And then he started in. He had a, well, let's say, a vulgar, uncultivated voice. Maybe he drank. He spoke some dialect from the southwestern corner of Germany, and he told me how he had made everything airtight. It seems they were going to hook up a Russian submarine engine and pipe the exhaust into the houses and the Jews inside would be poisoned.[…]

Source of quote:

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eic ... n-004.html

Rudolf Höß: No mention of type of engine.

[…]The camp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of half a year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient.[…]

Pavel Vladimirovich Leleko before the Fourth Department of the "SMERSH" Directorate of Counterintelligence of the Second Belorussian Front: diesel engine.

[…]The road from the undressing rooms, fenced on both sides by barbed wire intertwined with branches led to the gas chamber building where people were exterminated with gas obtained from running diesel engines.[…]

Source of quote:

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/ftp ... leleko.001

Nikolai Petrovich Malagon, interrogated in Zaporozh'ye, March 18, 1978: diesel engine

[…]Pipes carrying exhaust gas from running diesel motors were installed in the gas chambers and the people inside perished.[…]

Source of quote:

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/ftp ... alagon.001

7. The impression conveyed by the above collection of depositions is the following:

a) Most witnesses to gassings with engine exhaust don’t mention the type of engine at all.

b) Those who do mention it casually, without making a big deal out of it.

c) Regarding the gas vans, the only depositions mentioning the type of engine expressly speak of gasoline engines.

d) Regarding Sobibor, the only deposition that addresses the type of engine expressly mentions a gasoline engine.

e) Regarding Belzec, the only deposition expressly mentioning a diesel engine is that of Gerstein, and outsider who, according to Browning, didn’t see the engine himself. Another outside observer, Pfannenstiel, speaks of an engine running on diesel fuel, which doesn’t necessarily mean that the engine itself was a diesel engine, see below. Of the depositions of camp insiders, one (Schluch) doesn’t mention the type of engine at all and the other (Reder) speaks of a gasoline engine.

f) Of the depositions regarding Treblinka, only two mention the type of engine, and these speak of a diesel engine. Both come from former Ukrainian camp guards not involved in the operation of the gassing engine, and neither is detailed enough to establish whether the witnesses based their descriptions on features they observed themselves or on what they heard from others, making it impossible to assess the accuracy of their statements. The depositions of the witnesses who testified before the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland seem to have left the type of engine unmentioned or to have been inconclusive in this respect, or then the Commission didn’t consider this detail worth mentioning. Eichmann and Höß do not mention the type of engine, and they obviously didn’t see the engine but described it after what they heard from others. The depositions of Wiernik and Rosenberg at the Eichmann trial and the deposition of Horn before the Ohio District Court, on the other hand, are based on what the witnesses saw themselves and constitute the most detailed descriptions of the gassing device among those collected. Neither of these two descriptions clearly points towards one or the other type of engine, however. Rosenberg’s statement that the engine ran with "Ropa", a Polish term for rock oil or diesel oil, makes it possible that what he considered to have been the gassing engine was a diesel engine. It is equally possible, however, that the engine was a gasoline engine run on diesel fuel for gassing purposes, or that Rosenberg confounded the gassing engine, which was a gasoline engine running on gasoline, with one of a number of diesel engines used to generate electricity for the camp.

g) At any rate, there is no such thing as a convergence of eyewitness testimonials on the use of diesel engines, nor did any of the witnesses seem to have given any significance to the detail what type of engine was used. Thus the diesel engine "myth within a myth" that Berg makes such a fuss about seems to be little other than a windmill he built himself in order to have something to furiously race against. One of the many such paper dragons the valiant "Revisionist" dragon slayers like to impress their gullible followers with.

[demonio]

And yet they allowed Höß to write this.

[Pages 191 and following]

[…]

The two smaller crematoria III and IV were capable, according to calculations made by the constructional firm of Topf of Erfurt, of burning about 1,500 bodies within twenty-four hours. Owing to the war-time shortage of materials the builders were compelled to economize during the construction of crematoria III and IV and they were therefore built above ground and the ovens were of a less solid construction. It soon became apparent, however, that the flimsy build of these four-retort ovens did not come up to the requirements. Number III failed completely after a short time and later ceased to be used altogether. Number IV had to be repeatedly shut down, since after its fires had been burning from four to six weeks, the ovens or the chimneys burned out. The gassed bodies were mostly burned in pits behind crematorium IV

.

Thanks for the examples of text Roberto. Just a little thing. I think he might be reffering to Crema IV and V and not III and IV in the above passage.

[Scott Smith]

Was this Gasolene or Diesel engine ?

The engine at Sobibor was gasoline but the engines at Belzec and Treblinka were diesel.

This is not correct. [...]

The probability of any engine being gasoline is greater simply because there were more of them in operation.

However, the only details we get are from Fuchs. This is enough technical detail to establish a gasoline engine but not on many other points, which I discussed with Sailor and others on the linked thread.

Roberto has forgotten to mention the Soviet Krasnodar/Kharkov warcrimes trials held in 1943 which mention both diesel murder-vans and Saurer murder-vans. There is some convergence right there. Also PS-501 from Becker to Rauff talks about Sauer vans. Unless an example of a gasoline powered Saurer can be found this is probably a diesel.

As to the point that nobody cared what type of engine it was, this would be completely irrelevant to a non-engineer, but any sharp attorney, or technically-minded historian or layman would see the problem immediately. And in fact, except in political trials where the outcome is not in question and therefore the technical details don't matter (see Vidal-Naquet/Poliakov quotation above again), the details do matter, and the witnesses are cross-examined extensively on them, and such facts like whether the moon was full are checked in reference sources and compared with other evidence.

Rosenberg’s statement that the engine ran with "Ropa", a Polish term for rock oil or diesel oil, makes it possible that what he considered to have been the gassing engine was a diesel engine. It is equally possible, however, that the engine was a gasoline engine run on diesel fuel for gassing purposes,

No, it is not "equally possible." It is incredibly unlikely. A gasoline engine cannot burn diesel fuel.

There are some kinds of lightplants that use a gasoline (i.e., a spark-ignition engine) with kerosene fuel. These are specially designed.

A more modern lightplant used by the U.S. Air Force actually burns JP7 jetfuel. It does not work on the principles of a diesel (i.e., a compression-ignition) engine.

There are also the modern "multifuel" diesel engines used in the U.S. Army's 2.5 ton truck. These can run on other fuels besides diesel, such as motor-gasoline, but not alcohol or high-octane aviation gasoline, because it is a compression-ignition (diesel) engine--so it wouldn't work for gassing even with gasoline used as the fuel.

It is the type of engine, not the type of fuel that is important.

It is possible that a two-cycle gasoline engine was used for gassing, like what would be found on a chainsaw or an East German Trabant motorcar, which used an old Third Reich-era engine. With a two-cycle engine you have to mix the gasoline with the lubricating oil. These engines are used for extremely-lightweight applications and are not very big. I think the Trabant engine was a two-cylinder.

If oil was being put into the fuel then it was either a diesel or a two-cycle. And there is no further support for the latter notion.

...or that Rosenberg confounded the gassing engine, which was a gasoline engine running on gasoline, with one of a number of diesel engines used to generate electricity for the camp.

Yes, either the engine itself was a diesel or he mistook the gassing engine for a diesel engine like the ones used to generate the camp's power. I have made that point many times before.

Instead of finding out what happened, however, we seem to be more concerned with keeping the eyewitness stories canonical. That is why I would really like to cross-examine these witnesses to find out what they know, how they know it, and what they think they know, and how they know that.

g) At any rate, there is no such thing as a convergence of eyewitness testimonials on the use of diesel engines, nor did any of the witnesses seem to have given any significance to the detail what type of engine was used. Thus the diesel engine "myth within a myth" that Berg makes such a fuss about seems to be little other than a windmill he built himself in order to have something to furiously race against. One of the many such paper dragons the valiant "Revisionist" dragon slayers like to impress their gullible followers with.

No, what he did was take apart the thesis of Poliakov and early-Hilberg, which drew mainly on (former) Saint Gerstein and created the diesel-murder story out of fantasy and the layman's erroneous belief that diesel fumes are more deadly than ordinary car exhaust, which everbody knows is deadly. I don't see how Gerstein (who was a mining engineer) could have misunderstood this but who knows. The Hoaxers, as Berg would call them, found that diesel smoke makes for good storytelling and good Greuelpropaganda--the nastier the better--but this is not good historiography or science. Furthermore, the Soviet courts, the Israeli courts during the Eichmann and Demjanjuk trials, and the West German Belzec and Treblinka trials, said diesel engines, so the convergence-of-evidence on at least some use of diesel engines was good enough for these political trials. And that certainly doesn't raise their credibility.

[ChristopherPerrien]

Hay sus!, The Infernal Gas Vans again! , don't yall got one "exhausting" topic on this already.

[R.M. Schultz]

The probability of any engine being gasoline is … BLAH BLAH BLAH

All of this nit-picking about gas or diesel is sick-making!

What on earth could you be trying to prove? That somehow, because Gas Vans burned the wrong kind of fuel, that millions of Jews, Slavs, Gipsies were not killed because of their race? That hundreds of thousands of Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals were not murdered for their beliefs/way-of-life?

Do you need proof of murder? Are not the piles and piles of corpses enough?

Do you need proof of intent? Are there not enough internal memoranda to prove it?

Do you need proof of malice? Isn't Mein Kampf enough? What about Der Stürmer?

Do you need proof of anything else? Are there not enough memoirs and letters home from the Einsatzgruppen to make you sick?

At long last, have you no decency?

[michael mills]

Demonio wrote:

He made the choice to write the memoirs so his family could get some money in the future. If any information is given under duress it will be during an interogation. Do you really get the feeling he is being interrogated about what he has written as you read it ?

Demonio,

You need to distinguish between Hoess' hand-written autobiography, composed early in 1947, after completion of the pre-trial interrogations and while awaiting his trial, and the series of reports on a number of topics written by Hoess at the request of the chief interrogator, Judge Sehn, around the end of 1946, in the context of the pre-trial interrogation.

The reports written for Judge Sehn are included in the published editions as appendices to the autobiography proper. It is important to realise that those appendices are not part of the autobiography, and were produced under different conditions.

With regard to the hand-written autobiography, the Polish authorities gave Hoess paper and a pencil, and left him free to write away. There is no reason to believe that the Polish authorities "massaged" the autobiography in any way. The late German historian Martin Broszat sighted the hand-written originals of the autobiography, and was able to compare them with other authenticated examples of Hoess' handwriting, thus confirming that the autobiography was genuine.

In the case of the reports written for Judge Sehn, which are published as appendices to the autobiography, the situation was somewhat different. These were not actually written by Hoess, and the originals are in type-script. The topic of each report was chosen by Sehn, as part of an exercise of gathering information for use at the forthcoming trial.

The way the reports are compiled suggests that they consist of a series of answers given by Hoess to questions asked by Sehn. For example, Hoess will often jump from one topic to another without any transition, indicating that he has been asked a new question.

The reports in their present form were probably derived from a record of interview, consisting of a series of questions asked by Sehn and answers given by Hoess, under conditions of interrogation. The questions have ben omitted, and the answers run together to form a continuous narrative.

The upshot is that we do not know exactly what questions Sehn asked, and to what extent, if at all, their phrasing may have conditioned Hoess's responses. Nor do we know how many times Hoess may have been asked a particular question, and whether he may have modified his responses to a particular question. All we can be reasonably sure of is that the reports in their current form, ie the appendices to the autobiography, represent Hoess's final answers to Sehn's questions, the best that Sehn was able to get out of him.

I do not know to what extent the reports written by Hoess for Judge Sehn in November 1946 were presented to the court during his trial. They may have been presented in their entirety, or the prosecution may have presented only selections from them. If the latter, that would have obviated certain elements in the reports that differ from the received wisdom of the Soviet and Polish Communist Governments at the time. eg Hoess's insistence that the number of Jews who arrived at Auschwitz was much lower than the Soviet figure or various other inflated figures given by survivors.

It is noteworthy that both Hoess's autobiography and the reports for Judge Sehn were kept secret until the late 1950s, at which point they were released for examination and publication by the German historian Martin Broszat. It may be that the various conflicts between Hoess's claims and the official Polish Government line mant that they could not be released until the fall of the Stalinist regime in 1956.

[Scott Smith]

Hay sus!, The Infernal Gas Vans again! , don't yall got one "exhausting" topic on this already.

Well, I was going to respond to demonio's post and try to answer his questions, but by popular demand, perhaps I'll give the keyboard a rest.

If it isn't interesting and informative then there's no point in typing.
:roll:

[Scott Smith]

The probability of any engine being gasoline is … BLAH BLAH BLAH

All of this nit-picking about gas or diesel is sick-making!

What on earth could you be trying to prove? That somehow, because Gas Vans burned the wrong kind of fuel, that millions of Jews, Slavs, Gipsies were not killed because of their race? That hundreds of thousands of Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals were not murdered for their beliefs/way-of-life?

Do you need proof of murder? Are not the piles and piles of corpses enough?

Do you need proof of intent? Are there not enough internal memoranda to prove it?

Do you need proof of malice? Isn't Mein Kampf enough? What about Der Stürmer?

Do you need proof of anything else? Are there not enough memoirs and letters home from the Einsatzgruppen to make you sick?

At long last, have you no decency?

Sgt. Schultz, your post is not even worth responding to. It makes no difference to you whether the details involve a murder-weapon or flying-saucer abductions. It is all the same prurient Genocide theology.
:roll:

[ChristopherPerrien]

Holiest of Holies , me and Schultz agree "somehow".Could we get back to the topic or a close fascimile thereof before the world ends or something

[R.M. Schultz]

Sgt. Schultz, your post is not even worth responding to. It makes no difference to you whether the details involve a murder-weapon or flying-saucer abductions. It is all the same prurient Genocide theology.

When I condemn Nazi genocide, you reply with Allied acts of war and proclaim "dead is dead."

When Witness and Roberto call you to account on the Holocaust, you somehow try to prove that the Jews couldn't have been killed with gas vans, or gas chambers, or whatever …

When I point out that "dead is dead" and it doesn't matter how the Nazis killed their victims, it is just "prurient Genocide theology."

What would it take?

What fact, or reasoning, or epiphany would restore your human decency?

[David Thompson]

Please avoid personalizing these discussions.

[demonio]

Demonio wrote:

He made the choice to write the memoirs so his family could get some money in the future. If any information is given under duress it will be during an interogation. Do you really get the feeling he is being interrogated about what he has written as you read it ?

Demonio,

You need to distinguish between Hoess' hand-written autobiography, composed early in 1947, after completion of the pre-trial interrogations and while awaiting his trial, and the series of reports on a number of topics written by Hoess at the request of the chief interrogator, Judge Sehn, around the end of 1946, in the context of the pre-trial interrogation.

The reports written for Judge Sehn are included in the published editions as appendices to the autobiography proper. It is important to realise that those appendices are not part of the autobiography, and were produced under different conditions.

With regard to the hand-written autobiography, the Polish authorities gave Hoess paper and a pencil, and left him free to write away. There is no reason to believe that the Polish authorities "massaged" the autobiography in any way. The late German historian Martin Broszat sighted the hand-written originals of the autobiography, and was able to compare them with other authenticated examples of Hoess' handwriting, thus confirming that the autobiography was genuine.

In the case of the reports written for Judge Sehn, which are published as appendices to the autobiography, the situation was somewhat different. These were not actually written by Hoess, and the originals are in type-script. The topic of each report was chosen by Sehn, as part of an exercise of gathering information for use at the forthcoming trial.

The way the reports are compiled suggests that they consist of a series of answers given by Hoess to questions asked by Sehn. For example, Hoess will often jump from one topic to another without any transition, indicating that he has been asked a new question.

The reports in their present form were probably derived from a record of interview, consisting of a series of questions asked by Sehn and answers given by Hoess, under conditions of interrogation. The questions have ben omitted, and the answers run together to form a continuous narrative.

The upshot is that we do not know exactly what questions Sehn asked, and to what extent, if at all, their phrasing may have conditioned Hoess's responses. Nor do we know how many times Hoess may have been asked a particular question, and whether he may have modified his responses to a particular question. All we can be reasonably sure of is that the reports in their current form, ie the appendices to the autobiography, represent Hoess's final answers to Sehn's questions, the best that Sehn was able to get out of him.

I do not know to what extent the reports written by Hoess for Judge Sehn in November 1946 were presented to the court during his trial. They may have been presented in their entirety, or the prosecution may have presented only selections from them. If the latter, that would have obviated certain elements in the reports that differ from the received wisdom of the Soviet and Polish Communist Governments at the time. eg Hoess's insistence that the number of Jews who arrived at Auschwitz was much lower than the Soviet figure or various other inflated figures given by survivors.

It is noteworthy that both Hoess's autobiography and the reports for Judge Sehn were kept secret until the late 1950s, at which point they were released for examination and publication by the German historian Martin Broszat. It may be that the various conflicts between Hoess's claims and the official Polish Government line mant that they could not be released until the fall of the Stalinist regime in 1956.

The jumping from topic to topic without transition can also be consistent with someone with extensive knowledge on the subject but fears they might forget certain details so he jumps to them before he forgets or has difficulty with the recall section of the brain. He was a "man" with a story to tell. He knew he would hang anyway. Something he had no control over. In interogations it is easy to "talk your head off" ive experienced this fear and state of autism first hand, so i do see the point your making, however the undertone of the memoirs in "Death Dealer" convey to me more the notion of someone trying to empty his brain,(a bit like an extended premature death bed confession), not someone being interrogated although he may have reffered to interrogation notes to get a feel of what readers would most want to read about.

Also his personality. He may just be one of those people that "changes channel" without much warning. I myself can also relate to this.

The authority already got what they wanted from him. Memoirs are personal. He would have told someone if they tried to bastardize his memoirs. He lives on through them in his mind so i think he would have them as authentic as possible

[Scott Smith]

Sgt. Schultz, your post is not even worth responding to. It makes no difference to you whether the details involve a murder-weapon or flying-saucer abductions. It is all the same prurient Genocide theology.

When I condemn Nazi genocide, you reply with Allied acts of war and proclaim "dead is dead."

When Witness and Roberto call you to account on the Holocaust, you somehow try to prove that the Jews couldn't have been killed with gas vans, or gas chambers, or whatever …

When I point out that "dead is dead" and it doesn't matter how the Nazis killed their victims, it is just "prurient Genocide theology."

What would it take?

What fact, or reasoning, or epiphany would restore your human decency?

You are confusing how someone died and if accusations are true, with why somebody died, particularly according to a moral hierarchy rather than a cold, dispassionate analysis of what happened and why it happened.

[michael mills]

I note that some posts on this thread have dealt with the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, and contested whether it qualifies as a "genocide".

The book "Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction", by the German leftist historian Goetz Aly, while its main topic is the economic rationale that drove the German mass-exterminations during the Second World War, also includes a section on the Soviet collectivisation program and the accompanying mass-dying, for comparative purposes. It is worth quoting in extenso:

'Overpopulation' in the Soviet Union

In whatever terms rural overpopulation was described and explained, Oberlaender [Theodor Oberlander: Director of the Institute of East European Eonomic Studies in Koenigsberg, and a proponent of the need to reduce overpopulation] and his colleagues basically worked on the assumption that Poland and south-east Europe neded to catch up with developments that had already taken place not only in western Europe, but also in the Soviet Union. This meant that the 'backward' agricultural industry in these countries had to be rationalised, and that a proportion of the landless rural population should be drafted into manufacturing industry. The Soviet Union had already taken this step at the beginning of the 1930s, and thereby, as Oberlaender wrote, 'caught up with the trend in western Europe to redue the size of the rural population by undrtaking a massive purge of peasant farmers in the name of collectivisation'. Enforcced collectivisation undr Stalin, he wrote, had amalgamated 25 million smallholdings into 250,000 collective farms, and 'within a relatively short space of time the indvidual smallholding' had simply disappeared. At the same time industrialisation had 'alleviated the population fator'. In the elimination of millions of Soviet peasant farmers Oberlaender saw the successful attempt 'to establish a balance between feeding capacity and population numbers'. His barely concaled admiration for Soviet strong-arm methods presumably had something to do with the fact that Stalin's agrarian policy had ealt with the problem of rural overpopulation in the Soviet Union in very short order - virtually within a decade, in fact.

Following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks had initially reintroducd the old Russian system of land distribution, the so-called mir system, in order to strengthen their power base. Abolished a decade earlier by Stolypin's agrarian reforms, this system favoured familis with large numbrs of children, and at the same time put economic checks on migration from the land to the towns and cities. The result was that he land owned by the commune had to be divided up etween more and more people.

In the early 1920s the Soviet government sought to acumulate capital from the agrarian sector for the development of the country's industry. To this end it kept the prices of industrial goods and taxation levels relatively high, while prices for agricultural produce remained low. But - just like calialist Poland - the gap between industrial and agricultural prices encouraged peasant farmers to keep their produce for their own consumption rather than selling it on.

When the grain bought up by the government in 1927-8 fell well below the projeted figures, despite a good harvest, the government reintroduced the compulsory delivery of agriculural produce. It had used similar tactics to incite the peasant population against the new Soviet power during the period of War Communism. In the 1920s Soviet economists shared the view that large tracts of the Soviet Union were overpopulated - although their estimates of how many people constituted 'too many' wre as widely divergent as thir ideas about how to solve the problem. Together with an intensified programme of industrialisation, mass resettlement was sen as an effetive method, not least because it would also opn up hithrto undeveloped regions in the east of the country to economic exploitation. Initially people were ncouraged to resettle in Sibria by offers of government aid. But when this failed to have the desired effect, the authorities resorted once again to forcible methods.

Th year 1929 marked the beginning of the wholesale elimination of the kulaks as a class - the process described by Oberlaender as 'a massive purge of peasant farmers in the name of collectivisation'. Between then and 1932 millions of Soviet peasant families were dispossessed and divided into three groups. The first group was either summarily murdered or imprisoned, the second was deported to Siberia and the third was 'merely' banished from the district. This last group could be absored into a kolkhoz or collective farm after a probationary period of three to five years. The majority of kulaks belonged to the second group. In the Russian Soviet Republic alone an estimated 820,000 families - some four million people - were deported. Many of them - the exact numbr is not known - died in transit. To escape the terror many people fled from the countryside into the towns and cities, where they tried to find work illegally in industry.

The black-earth region of the Ukraine, the 'bread basket of the Soviet Union', was regarded as particularly 'overpopulated'. The Ukraine played an important economi role, most notably as an exporter of grain. After the population had already been severely deimated by the elimination of the kulak class, somthing like a fifth to a quarter of the population fell victim in 1932-3 to the goverment's policy of deliberate starvation. The cause of the famine was not failed harvests or natural disasters, but the abnormally high delivry quotas for grain imposed on the farmers. Until this quota had been met, keeping back even small amounts of grain for one's own use was punishable by severe penalties. The starving populace tried once more to flee the countryside and seek refuge in the cities, but special units of troops were deployed to prevent them. According to new Soviet estimates, a total of nine million pople died as a result of resettlement and famine - the consquenes of a policy designed to rationalise agriculture at any price in order to create the necessary conditions for industrialisation.

Contrary to the official political line, the drive to eliminate the kulak class was directed not only against well-to-do peasant farmers who were accused of exploiting poorer villagers, but also - soon enough - against families on tiny smallholdings who barely had enough to live on themselves. So collectivisation was not the great achievement born of the class struggle that the Soviet Communist Party made out, but an attempt, as ruthless as it was successful, to eradicate rural overpopulation by various means and to accumulate capital in order to impose a modern economic structure on the country in the shortest possible time. Obrlaender was in no doubt 'that the Soviet Union has embarked on the path of industrialisation under the pressure of agrarian overpopulation, and in so doing has taken one of the paths by which agrarian overpopulation may be combated'. Dispossession, famine, resettlement and mass murder were evidently viewed in the Soviet Union, as they later were in German-occupied Poland, as necessary and legitimate methods for 'correcting' the country's demographic make-up. In the Soviet Union this 'correction' was justified in terms of the 'laws of the class struggle', while in the German plans for a new European order it was justified by racist arguments. In their semantic parallelism the German terms 'Entkulakisierung' and 'Entjudung' ['the elimination of the kulak class' and 'the elimination of Jewish elements'] point to a ertain similarity in the two programmes, while at the same time identifying thir differing ideological thrust. When Oberlaender cited the Soviet Union as a model and exemplar in his study of 'Ostmitteleuropa', he put the ideological baggage to one side and reduced both programmes to a common denominator of population policy: the eradication of population groups who were classed as 'extra mouths to feed'.

It is noteworthy that Aly does not get bogged down in the question of what constitutes a "genocide". Regardless of whether the population group to be eliminated is defined in terms of ethnicity, or class, or occupation, Aly is concerned to identify the rational calculations driving the elimination.

It is also of interest that Aly recognises the model that the Soviet elimination of unwanted population groups through mass-killing, among other methods, provided for influential German theoreticians such as Oberlaender.

[michael mills]

Demonio wrote:

The authority already got what they wanted from him. Memoirs are personal. He would have told someone if they tried to bastardize his memoirs. He lives on through them in his mind so i think he would have them as authentic as possible.

Demonio,

Please read again what I wrote.

Yes, I agree that no-one tried to 'bastardise' his memoirs.

But you must distinguish betwen his memoirs, which he could write freely, and the reports written for Judge Sehn, which appear to have been arrived at through a process of question and answer. The reports are included in the published versions as appendices, and are not, I repeat NOT, part of Hoess's memoirs.

All my comments addressed the reports written for Judge Sehn, not the memoirs.

Look in "Death Dealer" again. There should be an appendix titled "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem at KL Auschwitz". There should be another one called "My Meetings with Himmler". Both of them are repaorts written for Judge Sehn in Novemebr 1946, and are not part of Hoess's memoirs.

Please try to understand the distinction.