bombsaway wrote:I'll wait for your full response but want to point out that a clear difference between Romanian and German policy in occupied USSR was that according to everything we know the Romanians were much more "hands off", which would lessen the need for paperwork/administration.
The Germans had clear motive to be completely "hands-off" insofar as documenting Jewish resettlement in the East. They did not want these Jews back, which means they didn't want or need a paper trail. And whatever the "need for paperwork/administration", it is agreed by all sides that the Germans did whatever they could to destroy documentation related to policies of particular importance near the end of the war. I can go on listing the reasons why such documentation should not be anticipated but this has already been done ad nauseum.
Jews [in the East] were immediately sequestered and confined. Then in every case on record, the non-employable population was decimated through shootings.
When you say "on record", you are either referring to official records of Jews killed most often in relation to suspicion of partisan activity; or, you are referring to scattered documentation of wartime rumor; or, post-war statements and reports, mainly from Jews, such as in their "Yizkor" books. None of this tells us what
actually happened to Jews sent East via AR camps. Very little reliable documentary record survived the war on either side. Hence, we have to examine the bigger picture and make sense out of what happened using more than what is now widely-promoted within official historiography.
Not a single case like this exists in Transnistria.
I refuse to keep running these circles. The two (Transnistria vs. German-occupied East) are not comparable, you have failed to demonstrate how they might remotely be considered as such. They are not even close.
We can look at an example like YESSENTUKI, which was the furthest out (most remote) of any Jewish settlement I could find, as representative of German policy in USSR. Even this relatively tiny and completely unknown settlement (to the average historian/reader) is evidenced in the witness and documentary record, in contrast to Butterfanger's settlements, which perhaps he can point to on a map, but are utterly indefinable when it comes to direct evidence.
The "witness and documentary record" is not actually any official documentary record at all, for the most part. It's statements that were thrown together, where Jews had free license to throw out the largest numbers and figures they could possibly come up with so that [Jewish?] "historians" could later justify or "corroborate" these figures with other similar statements (e.g. Soviet reports) to see what "sticks". If three Jews say a very big number of Jews were killed in X region, historians today claim the "witness and documentary record" now supports "extermination" having occurred there (a true "convergence of evidence"!). It doesn't matter if their figures vary wildly, we'll just average them out or pick one of the lower figures to give a veil of conservatism to our approach. No crime scene needed, and the fact of propaganda warfare is disregarded almost entirely. It's ludicrous.
Most of what happened in terms of Jewish settlements in the East, even those settlements (ghettos, labor camps, etc.) which are accepted by historians, are poorly-evidenced and poorly-understood. I'll circle back to this.
Back to your earlier post, I do not have much else to add but I'll go at it again for good measure:
You're assuming resettlement happened this way which doesn't really make sense. The Jews were considered security threats (see the Kube document which speaks of the systematic killing of non-employable Jews, children, and elderly for this reason, and non Russian/Yiddish speaking German Jews). The Kube document also speaks of Polish Jews as being even more of a threat. Is your assumption they just let these people off the trains and they scattered to the wind, without the police paying them any mind?
The Kube document was written in late July of 1942, which was months before the turn of the war became abundantly clear. The war against partisans was top priority and Jews were largely inseparable from partisan activity. To eliminate Jews in targeted areas with consultation from local security forces (which no one denies sometimes included those "unfit for work", often including children who, frankly, would become a major risk factor over time if left alive [note the brutality of warfare]) is a much different undertaking than eliminating Jews from all
incoming transports intended for labor and/or resettlement. The latter undertaking was not authorized, as indicated by Lohse's response to Kube, delivered in August. Jews from Poland were resettled in Minsk (see p. 579-581) and other areas, and the determination to eliminate risks of partisan activity became less relevant, furthermore, as the war became more obvious as a lost cause. The policy of resettlement, on the other hand, as a rule, remained constant.
In some cases, these Jews deported to the East may have gotten wrapped up into some of the mass killings that took place there. I account for that in my breakdown shown previously. Here it is again, slightly revised to incorporate offboarding at Zwangsarbeitslagers in the GG and en route to destinations further East:
Offboarded at Zwangsarbeitslagers before reaching Eastern territories: 5%
Subjected to German forced labor in Eastern territories until death: 13%
Unauthorized killings of deported Jews by Germans in Eastern territories: 1%
Killed in the crossfire as the Soviet army advanced: 7%
Killed by the Soviet army deliberately during the advance: 1%
Killed through the course of Stalin/Soviet purges: 5%
Died after deportation to gulag: 15%
Subjected to Soviet forced labor leading to death (other than gulag): 5%
Death due to war and immediate postwar conditions (scarcity, disease, local violence, etc.): 20%
Joined partisan resistance movements and died in combat: 4%
Joined partisan resistance movements and died as POWs: 1%
Included in reprisal killings (e.g. by Einsatzgruppen): 3%
Children "reeducated" and losing Jewish identity: 3%
Survived for years, decades in hiding or integration with local populations or Soviet system: 14%
Escaped to other nations and survived for years, decades: 3%
Remember, all of the above will need to be accounted for. If you think even more Jews sent East might have been killed in Aktions such as those referred to by Kube, you will need to lower the percentages in other categories shown above, which makes those categories even easier to account for per the Revisionist thesis.
If they were set up in tiny resettlement camps dispersed across the Russian hinterland, how do they get there? How are they fed or supplied? Documents and bureaucracy are still going to be necessary, unless the plan was for them to just die in these places.
And yet, we agree there is very little surviving documentation even for known ghettos and labor camps, despite it being known that people ate food and survived in these places.
Also see my first point about the Volga Germans, who were dispersed through much more massive and sparse regions and whose travels and fates are well documented.
So to answer this question I have no idea, and I don't think you do either. Like with your other question, the situation is complicated, and to consider it a clear cut case of yeah this would make a massive difference smacks of motivated reasoning.
There is no more clear-cut case of motivated reasoning than to attempt to justify a position which refuses a proper criminal investigation and has implemented the largest censorship operation of all-time against its opponents.
I can see I have been attempting to "reinvent the wheel" somewhat so decided to go "back to basics" in responding to some of the comments from bombsaway, who has an ongoing pattern of "convenient forgetfulness", not only toward information shared within our discussions with him here on CODOH, but toward information he's presumably come across in Revisionist literature elsewhere (assuming he has, in fact, read through much of it, as he claims to have done).
Case and point, bombsaway has leaned quite heavily into the suggestion that there just isn't a documentary record of Jews having been resettled in the East. Nevermind the glaring and obvious reasons why we should not expect much of a record at all, shown here:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15007 , bombsaway still insists (1) that there should be such a record, and (2) that such a record is entirely non-existent.
As for (2), bombsaway is, of course, wrong again.
I'd like to share a relevant excerpt from Mattogno, from a book we should all be at least somewhat familiar with by now. In it, he responds to the HC bloggers' claim that the many news reports Revisionists point to as evidence of resettlement are insufficient. I'll note that the fact that such a debate of "how many" news reports are sufficient is even taking place already largely invalidates bombsaway's suggestion that no trace of resettlement has been documented (TECOAR, p. 562):
The “handful of wartime news sources” presented so far include
about a dozen newspapers, journals and news agency bulletins, and the
number of individual news items number more than 60. As for the claim
that the “actual destinations” of the deportees are specified only “very
rarely,” the some 35 items from JTA Daily News Bulletin describing
deportations or the presence of deported Jews in the Occupied Eastern
Territories mention the following destinations: Pinsk and the Rokitno
district (20/10/41, 23/10/41, 7/1/43), the Taganrog-Kharkov front
(26/3/42), Kishinev (16/10/42), Smolensk district (22/10/42), Jassy
(Iași) en route to Transnistria (1/11/42), (plans to deport Norwegian
Jews to) Lithuania (6/11/42), Riga (20/11/42, 28/12/44), Rovno district
in western Ukraine (22/12/42), Minsk district (21/11/43, 23/11/43),
Dvinsk (Daugavpils) (9/7/44), Kaunas (Kovno) (16/8/44, 20/8/44),
Kretinga (22/8/44)/ In other news reports we also find mentioned Vilni-
us (Vilna) (Judisk Krönika, issue of May/June 1944, p. 68) and Ocha-
kov/Oceacov in Transnistria (Contemporary Jewish Record, June 1943,
p. 300). Apparently the journalists in question (many of them working
for Jewish newspapers and journals) were letting their imaginations run
wild...
Note that many of those destination names are quite familiar if you have gone through the map of labor camps provided in my last post. Labor was much needed in the Eastern territories and, thus, Jews were allocated to labor camps wherever possible (p. 570):
By spring 1942, when the Jewish deportations to the
east commenced on a large scale, the number of Soviet POWs available
for labor in the Occupied Eastern Territories was dwindling at an alarm-
ing rate and would have been depleted within less than a year had the
mass dying in the POW camps continued at the same rate. While many
hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs were still found in the Occupied
Eastern Territories during 1942–1943 due to the intake of new prison-
ers, up to half of them or more were incapable of work due to illness or
malnourishment. Of those fit for work, many were sent further west to
perform labor in Poland, the Reich and elsewhere. The claim that the
presence of the Soviet POWs would have made Jewish labor superflu-
ous is therefore false. On the contrary, one may assume that the influx
of Jews provided a source for the replacement of the diminishing POW
labor pool.
There were many sites that included lighter forms of labor (tailor, shoemaking, assembling, warehousing, etc.), so even the less-fit Jews could be employed in most cases. Those who couldn't were frail enough to be not much of a partisan threat and could be largely ignored, settled into surrounding areas without any formal or consistent methodology.
Remember, our understanding of the quantity of labor sites and, hence, the diffusion/dispersion of Jews through labor sites in the East has consistently been
underestimated and poorly understood. Historians in 2013 were markedly shocked to find out the total number of Jewish camps and sites in Europe is at least 42,500 (and possibly far higher) -- far more than realized before that time. And with regard to Eastern labor camps, specifically, we have only barely scratched the surface regarding the quantity
and qualities thereof. There could be 2x, 5x, or even 10x or more of these camps compared to the number which has thus far been recorded (and mapped) in the official history.
bombsaway should ask why we know so little of these camps. Neither German nor Soviet documentation has much of a record of them at all. And whichever argument(s) bombsaway will use to explain away the lack of such a record can surely be applied to the lack of records of Jewish resettlement in general.
