Roberto posted a terrifying photo above, “captioned” as showing :
Mass graves of seven thousand murdered in Khmelnitski Proskurov, Ukraine, January 1943. _Museum of the Polish Army, Warsaw, Poland._
Prof Richard Wright led
…archaeological investigations of mass killings in Ukraine, perpetrated in 1942 and excavated 50 years later. The work was done to support three prosecutions made in Adelaide, South Australia, under the War Crimes Legislation.
Prof Wright asks :
The question is why was an archaeologist needed at all?
Even though no Australian has been found guilty by the courts of the atrocities we investigated, we have brought forward new material evidence of three particular episodes in the Holocaust that no persons, even those labouring on behalf of Holocaust deniers, have sought to contradict. Material evidence is harder to contradict than memories.
From Prof Wright’s update, quoted by Roberto:
I want to say that I found it unnerving that even the well-disposed have shown so little interest in our Ukrainian work. I hasten to mention exceptions, and acknowledge the interest of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Macquarie University, and of the Australian Jewish Historical Society in Canberra. But that is it. Perhaps the reason is this. Material evidence may be harder to contradict than memories, but memories are more potent and demanding of attention - and, of course, more fleeting than archaeological evidence. But then again, perhaps what we did in the Ukraine is just too nasty, immediate and confronting. As a Jewish colleague said to me, we have forced ourselves to get familiar with the grainy black and white photos of Belsen. Now you are wanting us to look at the Holocaust in colour.
Yes, we have all to force ourselves to look at the Holocaust through all kinds of “nasty, immediate and confronting” aspects. We are also asked to believe what we see, and that what we see is the Holocaust.
Then we are faced with the question of definition: What is the Holocaust? Is it history, a detail in history, or Real History? Without precedent? Or an Intention in our Western Civilization(the school of Intentionalism)? A black hole in Universal History?
Even the doyen of Holocaust studies, Raul Hilberg, has been cited as saying that he is becoming more and more confused about what the Holocaust really is (and he is no Denier, you know!).
The Jewish colleague that Prof Wright cited above mentioned the “grainy black and white photos of Belsen”, and he probably meant photos of the bulldozers burying the victims of typhus and hunger.
Those photos are differently “captioned” nowadays, since it is agreed that there were no gas chambers at Belsen.
What is the Holocaust?
“Die deutsche Ausrottung der europäischen Juden war der erste vollendete Vernichtungsprozess der Weltgeschichte. Zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte der westlichen Zivilisation hatten die Täter alle eine Tötungsoperation im Wege stehenden administrativen und moralischen Widerstände überwunden”. (Hilberg “Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden”, sid 1115 (Fischer 1999)).
“The German extirpation of the european Jews was the first complete(d?) extermination process in world history. For the first time in the history of western civilization had the murderers removed all administrative and moral resistance to a killing operation”. (my translation)
“The attempt to extirpate them has been made under the most favourable auspices and on the largest scale; the most considerable means that man could command have been pertinaciously applied to this object for the longer period of recorded time.” (Benjamin Disraeli, ”Lord George Bentinck : a Political Biography”(1852). Kap XXIV, ”The Jewish Question”.)
There was a pre-Nazi “Final Solution”, according to Disraeli.
Consequently, the “Phase 2” that George Will is suggesting in the title of his essay…
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will.html
(click on “George Will Archives”, and “’ Final Solution’, Phase 2” (2 May 2002)
…ought to be numbered “3”, perhaps?
Will writes:
<<Did not Hitler, the foremost avatar of anti-Semitism, fail? No, he did not. Yes, his 1,000-year Reich fell 988 years short. But its primary work was mostly done. Hitler's primary objective, as he made clear in words and deeds, was the destruction of European Jewry.>>
Will agrees with Hilberg.
But the Palestians would perhaps disagree? They are likely to see themselves as “destroyed” by “European Jewry”?
What has this to do with the horrible photo and the horrible finds in the Serniki and Ustinovka archaeological excavations?
“Holocaust&Warcrimes” is the forum name. “Why the Jews and the gaschamber?” is Roberto’s name for this conference.
<< Historian Omer Bartov believes that the most frightening thing is “the impossibility of learning anything from the Holocaust …of putting its facts to any use ”. For him the Holocaust renders vain all questions about learning and progress. It is, he fears, “precisely the meaninglessness of the event …the utter uselessness of it all, the total and complete emptiness …that leaves us breathless, bereft of the power of thought and imagination ”>>.(Bartov, O. , Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation, New York, 1996.)(Quoted from ”Tell ye your children”, published by the THE SWEDISH GOVERNMENT OFFICES
LIVING HISTORY PROJECT, written by STÉPHANE BRUCHFELD AND PAUL A. LEVINE).
”…the impossibility of learning anything from the Holocaust…”! Yet : ”Tell ye your children”!!
”…of putting its fact to any use.”! According to Finkelstein, its facts are put to use.
We must – one way or the other – try to understand the photo and the findings of Mr Wright.
Roberto :
While not required to provide proof of facts that have already been proven beyond reasonable doubt, archaeological evidence is likely to shut up ideologically motivated crackpots for good.
Prof Wright has some qualifications, though :
“Archaeology had nothing to do with the first strategy - identification of alleged perpetrators - but much to do with investigating material evidence for the alleged events.”
Does it make a difference who the perpetrators were? Isn’t it a Holocaust just the same? The horror of it all is undiminished?
What is the difference between a crime, a war crime and the Holocaust?
The Holocaust is not just a “sum” of a crime and a war. Hilberg’s definition – and Disraeli’s – is more than that.
That is perhaps why revisionists – “ideologically motivated crackpots”, according to Roberto – never have questioned the mass shootings and murders illustrated by Prof Wright’s excavations.
The history of human warfare is full of such mass murder since homeric and OT times, at least.
Numbers 31
15 "Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. 16 "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the Lord in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the Lord 's people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
The Holocaust is this history, too, but at the same time something “beyond”.
Its historians still incorporates the victims of these actions in the “German” Holocaust, i.e. it was part of the Final Solution according to Nazi plans. The gas chamber phase was introduced because of the “impractibility” and the “demoralizing” consequences of mass shootings (to “spare the nerves” of the german soldier).
Why kill women and children in this way?
In olden times (see OT quote above) it made sense to kill those who might become avengers. The widows might tell their baby boys who their fathers were, and what “honor” demanded.
“Tell ye your children”; the teachers at Muslim free schools of Europe are suspected of indoctrinating their pupils in Jew-Hatred and preparating them for terrorism.
In the slave camps it made “sense” to kill “useless eaters”.
During the Sovjet “campaign” of terrorist-extermination in Afganistan it was alleged that the Russians dropped “mined” toys from the air over Afghan guerilla territories in order to create “useless eaters” by crippling children.
You would think that sparing women and children during the war operations would reduce the resistance capacity of occupied territories by the same logic(?).
But then there are those mass-graves.
Since the Jews were to be exterminated as a race, every individual Jew was a target of the Final Solution – is that the answer to the “why” of these killings of women and children?
Military sense had to stand back for ideological fanaticism?
NARRATOR: The following summer Richard returned to the Ukraine. One of the graves he excavated was near the village of Ustinovka and was pertinent to the case of Heinrich Wagner.The allegations were chilling.
RICHARD WRIGHT: Wagner was Chief of Police in a small town called Izraylovka. He had these instructions to kill the Jews.A hole was dug about a half an hours walk out of town, on a bit of high ground, and he was there while the Jews turned up and were shot and then complained that the children of mixed marriage were not there and personally went back and collected them, about 19 children, took them up to the grave in a cart and the eye witnesses said that the children were thrown into the grave and those that weren't dead were shot.
http://www.abc.net.au/quantum/stories/s124137.htm
Prof Wright describes the mass grave at Ustinovka :
We found about two metres down 19 children, all lying higgledy piggledy. One of them was shot in the head but the youngest was only six months by growth of the teeth. And these bones were in such a poor state you could often not tell whether they had been shot or not, but there they were lying higgledy-piggledy, no adults. But there was something like 20 centimetres of soil underneath the children and then, suddenly, there were the adults ... and I think it was between 100 and 150 was our estimate.
Apparently the SIU investigators had interviewed the mother of three of those children (the father was a Jew, she was not), who had said she returned from the fields for lunch one day, and her children were not in the house. She asked the neighbours whether they had seen the children. The neighbours told her they had been taken away to be shot.
Why were they shot? Because they were jewish. The mother of those three children must have thought they were safe, since she wasn’t jewish.
But her husband was already killed? And all the “unmixed” jewish children, along with their parents?
Did she know this, that day she came home “to lunch”?
Or was the villages or “towns” strictly separated by racial distinction in this part of Ukraine? No communication? Who told the neighbours that the children were to be taken away to be shot? Wagner “personally”(see quote above)?
It reminds me of a story told in Sereny’s “Into that Darkness”(1974). Franciszek Zabecki, the station master at Treblinka, and spy for the exiled Polish Government in London, related the panic that spread in the town of Treblinka when the Germans brought 20 empty train wagons to the railway station. “Now they are coming for us!” people thought, and everybody sent their wives and children away in safety(?). There were only grown men left in the region. “Then you had to send your family away, too?” asked Sereny. And since Zabecki was such an honest man (according to Sereny) he couldn’t lie : “No, I had too much to do. Besides, it would have been too impractical – with cooking, and so on!” (I quote from memory).
The Everyday Holocaust? Or the Banality or Commonplace of Evil? Genocide that is “all in a day’s work”?
Or is somebody lying?
Still, the graves are there. The children have been shot.
Here is a quote from Prof Gros, the author of “Neighbors” :
The issue of Jedwabne is unusual, because it is a little as if, during our conversation, we didn't notice the remains of an infant lying on the table, and here we have been carrying on with our discussion for 50 years, without seeing this. After all, this is an essential event in the history of the occupation! We will see this in the years to come. In light of this event, that history will be different.
http://www.wsp.krakow.pl/konspekt/gross/gross_e.html
Is there a parallell to Jedwabne?
Prof Wright says (above) :
I want to say that I found it unnerving that even the well-disposed have shown so little interest in our Ukrainian work.
Why this difference between Serniki/Ustinovka and Jedwabne?
I cannot find any mention of his findings even at the Ukrainian National site of Ukar.
On the other hand is there a strong reaction to a mis-captioned photo in Time Magazine, concerning an alleged public gang rape of a Jewish(?) woman, allegedly committed by Ukrainians during the war.
http://www.ukar.org/levyts01.shtml
Prof Wright was very careful to make sure that the Germans were pointed out as the perpetrators. Firstly, because :
Archaeology had nothing to do with the first strategy - identification of alleged perpetrators - but much to do with investigating material evidence for the alleged events.
And the Australian team shared responsibility on the excavations with Sovjet collegues.
To do the work, the grave was divided into two halves, with the Australian team at the end located by archaeological methods, and the Soviets at the other.
The part of the grave that was NOT located by archaeological methods, but nevertheless located by the Soviets, was perhaps the part that supplied the German cartridges from 1941, which presumably exculpate the Russians? (I.e, that it could be a grave from the Stalinist purges. Besides, why should Stalin kill women and children?)
In order to make the exculpation stronger, there were radiocarbon datings from the victim’s hair.
(Prof Wright allows some room for the “first strategy” after all – see quote above.)
The excavations at Jedwabne also discovered German ammunition – but pre-WW2, and not in use by Germans at the time of the massacre. But the Einsatztruppen perhaps had more primitive and old armament?
Prof Gros, from the link above:
However, as far as the exhumations are concerned, I also don't think they were conducted properly. But the message of the book is not changed by the numbers-300 or 1600 persons murdered-though obviously, it would be good to know how many people actually died at the time. Since this is an exceptionally difficult story, such certain knowledge would make it easier to come to terms with, as well as facilitate discussions conducted as conversations oriented toward content rather than toward details (by reason of true or supposed ill will). During the exhumations, not everything was dug up. We need to remember that this was not a professionally-conducted exhumation. An international observer having enormous knowledge of this subject, with whom I spoke in Jedwabne and after Jedwabne (I wrote about his accounts in the Gazeta Wyborcza), stated that on the basis of the work conducted there, it is absolutely impossible to determine the total number of persons buried. Professor Kieres attempts to present this in some sensible manner, saying that the exact number of victims is of no great significance, because what we have found out up until now is entirely sufficient for us to treat this crime as one of the most horrible magnitude. After all, remains of children and old people were found, and in general, it is known that what was described in Wasersztajn's account did in fact happen.
(The historian Sara Bender would agree with the last sentence, at least:)
http://www.radzilow.com/haaretz.htm
But why is Prof Gros dissatisfied with the exhumations? They discovered too few victims?
“…the message of the book is not changed by the numbers-300 or 1600 persons murdered-though obviously, it would be good to know how many people actually died at the time. Since this is an exceptionally difficult story, such certain knowledge would make it easier to come to terms with, , as well as facilitate discussions conducted as conversations oriented toward content rather than toward details (by reason of true or supposed ill will).”
Since the exhumations at Serniki/Ustinovka were professionally done, they “provided stunning support” for the witness relations. This would presumably “facilitate discussions…toward content rather than towards details”.
But – as quoted –
“I want to say that I found it unnerving that even the well-disposed have shown so little interest in our Ukrainian work”.
Perhaps Serniki/Ustinovka is waiting for its historian – a Ukrainian Gros?
What will happen then?
Here is what Finkelstein thinks:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/info-poland/cl ... Finkl.html