Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Ostland Aktionen!
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Bialystok,Chelmno,Einsatzgruppen,Latvia,Lithuania,Ostland

Archive/File: holocaust/poland/reinhard/sobibor ostland.1
Last-modified: 1993/03/07

OSTLAND:

Someone recently added up the deportation figures I had posted from the Arad
book and noted that the total did not include all of those thought to have
died - I believe the total was in the neighborhood of 1.7 million. My
response included the information that the deportation figures taken from
the Arad book noted below were only for Operation Reinhard, and with very
rare exception, did not include Auschwitz or other camps (Chelmno, etc.).

The sections on Bialystok District and Reichskommissariat Ostland shed
additional light on this question by including the activities of the SS
Einsatzgruppen....

"The majority of the Jews in these territories were killed during the
Aktionen of the mobile SS Einsatzgruppen which had operated there in the
first months after the occupation, in the summer of 1941, and later by the
civilian German administrative authorities in Osland. The large-scale
killing operations were carried out in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in
the summer and autumn of 1941 and in Belorussia during 1942. The
extermination actions were carried out by taking Jews out to locations in
the vicinity of places in which they lived and shooting them there.

After these Aktionen Jews remained only in the few ghettos that existed in
the larger cities. The number of Jews who were in these ghettos at the
beginning of the summer of 1943 was 72,000. They were concentrated in six
ghettos, in the cities of Vilna, Kovno, Shavli, Riga, Minsk, and Lida. On
June 21, 1943, Himmler issued an order to liquidate these ghettos. The able
Jews who were needed for work were to be sent to concetration camps that
would be erected in Ostland to service the war economy. According to
Himmler's order, the 'non-essential' inhabitants of the Jewish ghettos were
to evactuated to the East. This term -- 'evacuation to the East' -- meant
that they would be sent for extermination." <1> "Three ghettos -- Vilna,
Minsk, and Lida -- were liquidated, and the other three ghettos were turned
into concentration camps. The 'non-essential' Jews from these ghettos were
sent to Sobibor.

Regarding the deportation of 2,700 Jews from Lida to Sobibor, a German
engineer, Otto Weisbecker, who was a Baufuhrer in the Todt Organization,
testified at the Sobibor trial:

	As a building engineer I came to Lida and worked there on
 	the railways... In the ghetto, which was subordinated to the
	Gebietskommissar [district commissar], were 1,400 Jews. At the
	building site that I headed, 1,300 Jews and their families, who
	were accommodated in a camp, were engaged....Approximately in
	the middle of 1943, the Security Police arrived in Lida... All
	these Jews were then subordinated to the Security Police. One day,
	these Jews from the ghetto -- men, women, and children, were 
	loaded into freight cars and under the direction of
	Haupttruppfuhrer Bache from Organization Todt they were
	transferred to Sobibor. The next day I received an order from
	the head of my department, the architect Hans W., to transfer
	our Jews to Lublin for a working mission. The Jews were loaded
	on the train that day, sixty people to a freight car. I was the
	commander of that transport, and I had at my disposal a police
	sergeant and nineteen Polish policemen....In spite of the 
	security measures, between twenty and twenty-five Jews escaped
	on the way.
	...A sentry in Sobibor told me that the transport would be
	liquidated in the morning. Next morning I came into the camp
	and was brought to the commander, who was in the breakfast
	barrack...On the wall of this barrack was a big plan of the
	camp. I could see on it that the 1,400 Jews that Bache had
	brought the day before could not possibly be accommodated in
	the existing barracks. In reference to my question to the
	camp commander, where can he accommodate the Jews I had
	brought, he told me that of the 1,400 Jews of yesterday's
	transport, nobody remained." <2>
	
<1> Nuremberg Documents, NO-2403
<2> Yad Vashem Archives, Sobibor-Bolender, Band 13, pp. 2575-2576;
    "Sefer Lida" (The Lida Book), Tel Aviv, 1970, pp. 314-315

Excerpted from....----------------------------------------------
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps
Indiana University Press - Yitzhak Arad, 1987. ISBN 0-253-3429-7

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