In article <0[email protected]>, “Bug
Eyes” <[email protected]> wrote:
> Eugene Holman <[email protected]> wrote in article
> <[email protected]>…
>
> > Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), a nationwide pogrom which
took
> > place in Gemrany on Nov. 9-10, 1938.
>
> Yes, that was a shameful party, Crystal Night. However, way before
that
> German Jews were told that because of the country’s utter chaos,
> destruction, mass starvation, currency devaluation, etc. ALL German
people,
> including the Jews, had to pull together. Many Jews were visibly rich.
In
> some cases rightly, in other cases wrongly, they were seen as
profiteering
> from W.W.I and of not making a sacrifice now to rebuild Germany. It
was
> “are you with us or not”.
The Jewish population of Germany during the interwar periodwas never
more than 1.5%, and it was considerably less than 1% (less than 500,000
in a population of 80,000,000 in 1939), and they were scattered
throughout the social hierarchy, from a few very rich people to many
people in the middle and lower middle class. Demographically they
differed somewhat from other Germans (although they, too, were Germans)
by being better represented in ‘modern’ urban professions such as
teaching, medicine, law, and commerce, with a correspondingly lesser
presence in agriculture and factory work. This somewhat different social
distribution was at least partially the consequence of previous patterns
of discrimination. These had pushed German Jews off the land and into
the cities, where they sought to make their livelihood primarily by
entering fields which required a specialized higher education or
reliable business partners. Thus, Jews during the 1920s and early 1930s
were somewhat overrepresented in fields such as teaching, law, medicine,
as well as wholesale and retail commerce. It’s hard to reconcile German
claims that Jews were not making sacrifices with the fact that Jewish
merchants were generally reagrded to sell at lower overheads and to pass
these savings on to the customers. One of the complaints in the popular
press after Kristallnacht was that the lower-priced Jewish-owned shops
disappeared. Oh yes, of course, this is yet another example of how the
Jews made life difficult for the Germans.
Jews, including many Christian Germans who had Jewish grandparents, soon
found themselves excluded from the civil service, deprived of their
citizenship, and forbidden to use telephones, parks, museums, or public
transport. If they were married to Aryans their marriages were declared
illegal. Crystal Night, which was instigated by the murder of a German
diplomat in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year old Jew who was
neither a German national nor a German resident, resulted in the arrest
of 25,000 – 30,000 Jews, the killing of about a hundred of them, and the
destruction of thousands of Jewish-owned small and medium-sized
businesses and, in the short term, made life considertably more
difficult for the Germans as a whole. In addiiton to that, the German
government imposed a collective fine of RM 1,000,000,000 on the Jewish
community, forced Jews into work details to clean up the mess, and
pocketed the insurance money for the 7,500 businesses and 267 synagogues
destroyed. More than What is important about Kristallnacht, though, is
that the incident which precipitated it had nothing to do with the
German Jewish community. Herschel Grynszpan, was a Paris-resident Polish
national, frustrated and angree because the German government had thrown
his parents out of Germany along with 15,000 other Polish Jews without a
warning.
If ‘many’ German Jews were visibly rich, many more German gentiles were.
The heads of the great German industrial conglomerates such as Krupp,
I.G. Farben, and Telefunken were not Jewish but they were headed by CEOs
that were quite wealthy. The strength and wealth of these industrial
giants was very much a function of they or the combanies from which they
were formed having profited from W.W.I.
>
> Next, Jews were given the chance to pack and leave. Many did.
Yes, like the family of Anne Frank. They went to neighboring Holland and
began a new life. Many of the victims of the Holocauset were German Jews
who sought refuge in countries such as Latvia, Estonia, Denmark,
Luxembourg, France, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Poland, Norway, and
Czechoslovakia – all countries subsequently overrun by Germany. Very few
Grman Jews had the resources to escape to places really far afield, such
as the United States, and there are several cases of countries refusing
to accept and turning back to point oif origin shiploads of German
Jewish refugees.
Another issue is that of the legality of a country suddenly and
arbitrarily declaring a set of its citizens non-persons. Other countries
are not obligated to accept such persons.
>
>Later, Hitler
> even considered assisting their relocation (i.e. deporting them) to
> Madagascar or other far-away locations.
These considerations were not serious. Germany had no control over
Madagascar, and certainly had no right to deport its unwanted former
citizens there. Nor did these plans ever go so far that discussions
would have been started with the French colonial authorities that rules
Madagascar at the time..
> It was much later that hooligans, etc. started assaulting German Jews.
You are wrong here. German Jerws were being assaulted fright from the
beginning of Hitlers accession to power. Read D. Goldhagen *Hitler’s
Willing Executioners*. pps. 90 – 97, and follow up some of the
references to primary sources mentiuoned there.
Just to summarize the main points:
1933
Jan 30, 1933 – Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany a nation
with a Jewish population of 566,000.
April 1, 1933 – Nazis stage boycott of Jewish shops and businesses.
April 11, 1933 – Nazis issue a decree defining a non-Aryan as “anyone
descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents
or grandparents. One parent or grandparent classifies the descendant as
non-Aryan…especially if one parent or grandparent was of
the Jewish faith.”
April 26, 1933 – The Gestapo is born, created by Hermann Göring in the
German state of Prussia.
May 10, 1933 – Burning of Jewish-authored books throughout Germany.
In June – Nazis open Dachau concentration camp near Munich, to be
followed by Buchenwald near Weimar in central Germany,
Sachsenhausen near Berlin in northern Germany, and Ravensbrück for
women.
July 14, 1933 – Nazi Party is declared the only legal party in Germany.
Nazis pass Law to strip Jewish immigrants from
Poland of their German citizenship.
In Sept – Nazis establish Reich Chamber of Culture, then exclude Jews
>from the Arts.
Sept 29, 1933 – Nazis prohibit Jews from owning land.
Oct 4, 1933 – Jews are prohibited from being newspaper editors.
1934
Jan 24, 1934 – Jews are banned from the German Labor Front.
May 17, 1934 – Jews not allowed national health insurance.
July 22, 1934 – Jews are prohibited from getting legal qualifications.
1935
May 21, 1935 – Nazis ban Jews from serving in the military.
Aug 6, 1935 – Nazis force Jewish performers/artists to join Jewish
Cultural Unions.
Sept 15, 1935 – Nuremberg Race Laws against Jews decreed.
1936
June 17, 1936 – Heinrich Himmler is appointed chief of the German
Police.
Aug 1, 1936 – Olympic games begin in Berlin. Hitler and top Nazis seek
to gain legitimacy through favorable public opinion from
foreign visitors and thus temporarily refrain from actions against Jews.
1937
In Jan – Jews are banned from many professional occupations including
teaching Germans, and from being accountants or
dentists. They are also denied tax reductions and child allowances.
Nov 8, 1937 – ‘Eternal Jew’ travelling exhibition opens in Munich.
1938
March 12/13, 1938 – Nazi troops enter Austria, which has a population of
200,000 Jews, mainly living in Vienna and several of them
refugees from Nazi Germany. Hitler announces Anschluss with Austria.
In March – After the Anschluss, the SS is placed in charge of Jewish
affairs in Austria. Adolf Eichmann establishes an Office
for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. Himmler then establishes Mauthausen
concentration camp near Linz.
April 22, 1938 – Nazis prohibit Aryan ‘front-ownership’ of Jewish
businesses.
April 26, 1938 – Nazis order Jews to register wealth and property.
June 14, 1938 – Nazis order Jewish owned businesses to register.
In July – At Evian, France, the U.S. convenes a League of Nations
conference with delegates from 32 countries to consider
helping Jews fleeing Hitler, but results in inaction as no country will
accept them.
July 6, 1938 – Nazis prohibited Jews from trading and providing a
variety of specified commercial services.
July 23, 1938 – Nazis order Jews over age 15 to apply for identity cards
>from the police, to be shown on demand to any police
officer.
July 25, 1938 – Jewish doctors prohibited by law from practicing
medicine.
Aug 11, 1938 – Nazis destroy the synagogue in Nuremberg.
Aug 17, 1938 – Nazis require Jewish women to add Sarah and men to add
Israel to their names on all legal documents, including
passports.
Sept 27, 1938 – Jews are prohibited from all legal practices.
Oct 5, 1938 – Law requires Jewish passports to be stamped with a large
red “J.”
Oct 15, 1938 – Nazi troops occupy the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia.
Oct 28, 1938 – Nazis arrest 17,000 Jews of Polish nationality living in
Germany, then expel them back to Poland which refuses
them entry, leaving them in ‘no-man’s land’ near the Polish border for
several months.
Nov 7, 1938 – Ernst vom Rath, third secretary in the German Embassy in
Paris, is shot and mortally wounded by Herschel
Grynszpan, the 17 year old son of one of the deported Polish Jews. Rath
dies on November 9, precipitating Kristallnacht.
Nov 9/10 – Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass.
Nov 12, 1938 – Nazis fine German Jewish community one billion marks for
damages related to Kristallnacht.
Nov 15, 1938 – Jewish pupils are expelled from all non-Jewish German
schools.
Dec 3, 1938 – Law for compulsory Aryanization of all Jewish businesses.
Dec 14, 1938 – Hermann Göring takes charge of resolving the “Jewish
Question.”
1939
Jan 24, 1939 – SS leader Reinhard Heydrich is ordered by Göring to speed
up emigration of Jews.
Jan 30, 1939 – Hitler threatens Jews during Reichstag speech.
Feb 21, 1939 – Nazis force Jews to hand over all gold and silver items.
March 15/16 – Nazi troops seize Czechoslovakia (Jewish pop. 350,000).
April 19, 1939 – Slovakia passes its own version of the Nuremberg Laws.
April 30, 1939 – Jews lose rights as tenants and are relocated into
Jewish houses.
In May – The St. Louis, a ship crowded with 930 Jewish refugees, is
turned away by Cuba, the United States and other countries
and returns to Europe.
July 4, 1939 – German Jews denied the right to hold government jobs.
July 21, 1939 – Adolf Eichmann is appointed director of the Prague
Office of Jewish Emigration.
Sept 1, 1939 – Nazis invade Poland (Jewish pop. 3.35 million, the
largest in Europe). Beginning of SS activity in Poland.
Sept 1, 1939 – Jews in Germany are forbidden to be outdoors after 8 p.m.
in winter and 9 p.m. in summer.
Sept 21, 1939 – Heydrich issues instructions to SS Einsatzgruppen
(special action squads) in Poland regarding treatment of
Jews, stating they are to be gathered into ghettos near railroads for
the future “final goal.” He also orders a census and the
establishment of Jewish administrative councils within the ghettos to
implement Nazi policies and decrees.
Sept 23, 1939 – German Jews are forbidden to own radios.
German Jews were psychologically assaulted by the Nuremberg Laws of
September 1935 which made them non-citizens nd severely restricted their
rights. Isolated acts of terror against German Jews was a feature of
Germany beginning almost immediately with Hitler’s accession to power
(i.e. the Nazi boycott of Jewish business on April 1, 1933, the
nationwide burning of books by Jewish authors on May 10, 1933, the vast
anti-Semitc rally on August 15, 1935, the appearance of ‘Juden nicht
erwünscht’ signs in business and town gates , etc.) It is well known
that Germany let up on every-day anti-Semitism for the Berlin Olympics
in 1936 to put on a good face for the world.
>Of
> course when the war came, Jews were rounded up and shipped to labour
camps
> along with other unreliable citizens.
If things had been that simple, Holocaust casualties would have been a
mximum half million. In actual fact, though, as Germany systematically
invaded its neighbors, it rounded up their Jews and either used them for
slave labor to keep the war machine going or exterminated them as extra
mouths to feed. In the final analysis, the German Jewish population
fared relatively well during the war – almost three quarters (72.6%) of
them survived. Jews in neighboring Holland (83.3% died), Poland (87.7%
died), Belgium (52.5% died) and Luxembourg (65% died) for example, did
not fare nearly as well.
This is not a matter of an internment action against ‘unreliable
citizens’, but rather a prolonged policy of systemic terrorism and
thenic cleansing against the civilian populations of invaded countries.
>
> Everything has a cause/effect…..let’s not simply isolate an incident
and
> use it to prove something.
>
Kristallnacht is an important threshold. It is the boundary between a
previous policy of systematic but random persecution of German Jews and
a policy which sees the actions of any Jew, no matter where, as part of
a world-wide conspiracy which can only be stopped by total elmination of
all Jews. It has obvious cause and effect links to both the policies
which preceded it , and to those taken subsequently.
> In the final analysis, why is it that throughout the centuries all
these
> different “racists” in different times in different places in
different
> religions have always gotten tired of the Jew? Ancient Greeks, Romans,
> Spaniards, Russians, Germans, etc. all picked on the Jew.
Not just the Jew. The Indian, the Black man, the Chinese, the Armenian,
the Gypsy, the foreigner, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Hutu, the
Tutsi, the Muslim, the Serb, the Croat, the Russian,…
>
> Why? For the same reason it is happening in the USA now. It’s because
many
> Jews cannot just pursue their lives, their religion, their business,
etc.
> without constantly whining and crying the blues.
Nonsense. If there were no Jews in the United States certain people
would be blaming African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic Americans,
Catholics – you name it – for their problems. We don’t usually think
about it too much any more, but the United States had a Holocaust like
event – the Indian Removal Act. Certain individuals in the United States
of the 1810s and 20s convincingly argued their case that Native
Americans could not live together with European Americans. The result of
this was, first the recommendation that Indians abandon their ancestral
lands and emigrate to lands west of the Mississippi, later the passage
of Federal Laws during the 1830s for their forced removal. In 1820
120,000 Indians lived among the approx. 12,000,000 Americans east of the
Mississippi; by 1845 fewer than 30,000 were left there.
>
>The war is over, Germany
> paid billions upon billions of dollars to Israel (not too well
publicized
> here, is it?) as well as to individuals. Germans were/are portrayed as
> war-mongering Huns (???) for decades and now all ARABS are being
reduced to
> the level of dirty, bloodthirsty terrorists.
Germany pays pensions to Holocaust victims in Western Europe, Israel,
and elsewhere. For this it can only be commended for not shirking the
responsibility which it bears for the horror and destruction brought
about by its armya little more than half a century ago. There are,
however, some problems.
– This entire responsibility fell on former West Germany. Former East
Germany refused to assume any responsibility.
– Pensions or compensation have not, as a rule, been paid to individuals
in former Eastern Europe. Nazi actions against Jewish populations were
at their worst in places like Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, and the
still surviving victims of Nazi terror in those countries are often
destitute, having seen their life savings and social security nets
disappear in conjunction with the economic changes of the past ten
years.
– The Nazis seized vast amounts of Jewish property in the countries they
invaded. Recurrent scandals, such as one involving French government
owned apartment houses in Paris a few years ago, and the issue of
dormant Holocaust-era bank aassets in Swiss, Swedish, Spanish,. and
Portuguese banks and safe deposit boxes, show us that the records are
there, but not always the willingness to use the information they
contain to restitute wrongs.
>
> As a group, American Jews are rich, powerful and well-organized. Good
for
> them! Why keep screeching about some inflated story about some Anne
Frank?
> Is she a martyr already? How many other children suffered? How many
are
> suffering today, are being starved, raped and butchered in Rwanda and
> elsewhere?
Anne Frank is a perfect symbol of the Holocausts, perhaps of all
Holocausts. Her family went to extraordinary lengths to avoid being
caught up in the Holocaust: they emigrated, learned a new language and
culture, and then, when that world fell apart, went into hiding. All
through this ordeal Anne was able to maintain her optimism in the
essential goodness of mankind. I hope that generation after generation
of young people will coninue to read her diary, do the necessary work to
understand what she went through, and derive strength from it.
> How many other children suffered? How many are
> suffering today, are being starved, raped and butchered in Rwanda and
> elsewhere?
>The hell with the Jewish “victims” already!!!
>
> People get tired of the crying Jew. Most Americans are sick of the
steady
> diet of the “Holocaust” and of Simon Wisenthal et al.
> The time will come when ordinary people will say enough is enough.
>
> And that is when history may repeat itself. Wisen up, Jew, please.
The Indians have kept relatively quiet about what has been done to them
and what has been the result: a few successful court cases, a few
casinos on restored Indian lands, but very little restitution
considering what was done. Most Americans couldn’t care less about
Indian issues any more, but that doesn’t morally justify what was done
to the Indians or silencing discussion of it. The Holocaust affected
tens of millions of people, and many of them are still alive – indeed,
the youngest direct victims of the Holocaust are in their mid-50s right
now, so we are not likely to hear the end of it any time soon. The only
way to ensure that the dishonest and unprincipled gains made by
Holocaust-like genocide are not forgotten and thus allowed to become
‘honest’ as the manner in which they were acquired disappears into the
clouds of history, as is the case with the Swiss bankers, is to continue
to scream ‘FOUL’.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
From [email protected] Wed Dec 24 13:12:37 EST 1997
Article: 155680 of alt.revisionism
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From: Eugene Holman <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: The Deportation of German Jews
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997 19:47:08 -0500
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Anyone who believes that the Jews were interned in concentration camps
because they were ‘unreliable’, or that Holocaust victims do not have a
strong case against the Swiss banks that dealt in Nazi gold and held
Jewish assets, should consider the following, one of many similar
reports on ‘Jewish evacuation’.
Go to: http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-deport.htm
“At Wuerzburg, Germany, Jewish deportees carrying bundles and suitcases
march through town in columns behind Nazi officials
riding in an open car.
The Jews of Wuerzburg were taken by police officials into the Platzscher
Garten hotel. In one room of the hotel, their luggage was
inspected by Gestapo officials and all valuables were confiscated. The
luggage was then taken to a collecting area, from where it
would supposedly be taken to the deportation train. However, the
deportees never saw their luggage again.
In a second room, the deportees surrendered all their personal papers
showing ownership of securities and property. They were left
only with their identification cards, watches and wedding rings. In the
next room the deportees underwent body searches for
concealed valuables. Even gold fillings were removed from their teeth.
Next, their identification cards were stamped “evakuiert”
[deported].
They were then surrendered to an SS detachment until ready to leave for
the railway station. To facilitate the march through the city
and the boarding of the trains, the deportees were organized into groups
led by Jewish ordners. The transport traveled to
Nuremberg, where it was attached to a larger Judentransport departing
for ghettos and concentration camps in the East. ”
Regards,
Eugene Holman
From [email protected] Mon Dec 22 12:50:19 EST 1997
Article: 155672 of alt.revisionism
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From: Eugene Holman <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: A working definition of ‘the Holocaust’
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997 18:20:40 -0500
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From [email protected] Wed Dec 24 13:12:37 EST 1997
Article: 156172 of alt.revisionism
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From: [email protected] (Eugene Holman)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: A simple question (Phillips)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 1997 10:37:26 -0500
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In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] wrote:
> ====================================================PHillips
>
> Which proves what? Numbers, man, I need numbers. Can you show me
anything that
> goes like this: “We found ashes spread over an area of about 25,000 sq.
meters. We made
> tests of
> the depth at several points and from this data we estimate the bulk of
the remains to be
> around
> 120,000 cubic meters. So, dividing this by the bulk of a t ypical shoebox
we are at …..”
>
> THAT’s what i need, not some dingle-dong who shouts in triiumph: “eureka.
I found a bone.”
>
SOURCE:
http://veritas.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/auschwitz/crematoria/burning-pits
“In 1965, Hydrokop, a chemical mining enterprise based in Krakow, was
commissioned by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to carry out geological
tests at Birkenau aimed at determining the locations of incineration pits
and pyres. Specialists of Hydrokop bored 303 holes up to 3 m deep. Traces
of human ashes, bones, and hair turned up in 42 sites. Documentation of all
the holes and the diagrams of their distribution are preserved in the
Conservation Department of the Museum.” (Franciszek Piper, Anatomy of the
Auschwitz Death Camp, p. 179n).
****************************************************************************
***********
SOURCE: https://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/places/ukraine/serniki-excavations
UNCOVERING GENOCIDE: WAR CRIMES – THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
by Richard Wright
[Richard Wright is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Sydney. The original text of this lecture first appeared
in The Sydney Papers, Vol. 7 (3), Winter 1995, following a lecture
delivered to the Sydney Institute on 23 May 1995. The following text
is taken from an edited reprint appearing in International Network on
Holocaust and Genocide, Volume 11, Issue 3, 1996.]
This lecture will introduce 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. The question is why
was an archaeologist needed at all?
The Special Investigations Unit (SIU) of the Australian
Attorney-General’s Department was determined to forestall two styles
of defense customarily offered in such cases – that the wrong person
has been charged (mistaken identification) and that the events alleged
are imagined or (if not wholly imagined) so polluted in peoples
memories by the lapse of time, and by self-reinforcing narration, as
to be worthlessly distorted evidence. 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.
Thus this discussion will be about how the graves were found, how the
details of killings were worked out, and how the events were dated,
both by old fashioned stratigraphic methods and modern chronometric
techniques. As an archaeologist my analysis concentrates on the
particulars and does not presume to give a summary of the holocaust in
Ukraine.
The first grave was at Serniki, where the excavation party consisted
of, on the forensic side (for assessing sex, age, manner of death of
the victims), Dr Godfrey Oettle, head of the division of forensic
medicine in Glebe, Sydney. Responsible for collecting details in a
form acceptable for a court of law, Detective Sergeant David Hughes of
the New South Wales Police. My wife Sonia Wright, an experienced field
archaeologist, and who is currently writing up her experiences at
Serniki, was my assistant.
There were some preliminary problems. Even with glasnost (well under
way in the summer of 1990) one could not just turn up in Moscow and
announce you were going to do a mass exhumation in the Ukraine. With
this in mind, the trip had been arranged with officials within the
Soviet Government. The Soviet officials had already experienced the
professionalism of the Sydney-based Special Investigations Unit, as
the Australian team had virtually wound up its investigations at the
village of Serniki. Thus the archaeological team inherited much of the
goodwill that the SIU had built up with both the Soviet and Ukrainian
authorities. Responsibility for ensuring the second team’s needs were
fulfilled was given to the procurator for the whole western half of
the Soviet Union, Madam Kalishnikova – at times a hindrance, at times
immensely helpful.
Serniki is on the southern margins of the Pripet marshes, which Hitler
said, in his table talk, would be retained for Wehrmacht manoeuvres
after the war. The work area was, in 1942, well within the German
lines in this area of the Ukraine. The area of the grave is now an
ominous-looking dark pine forest, but feelings of that sort are
illusory. At the time of the killings this was open country. Now in
the late twentieth century, at the site in the forest, the Soviet
authorities had set the team up with a telephone, tents, electricity,
bulldozers, and a contingent of Red Army soldiers. Only the telephone
didn’t work.
The local officials wanted to find the bodies as soon as possible, and
did so at what turned out to be one end of the grave. However, the
archaeological interest was first to find a soil feature that might be
interpreted as a grave and only then look for bodies. In this way
damage to contextual evidence would be minimised.
The team was fortunate to find a marked contrast in colour and texture
between the natural soil and the filling of tne grave. This contrast
came right to the base of the existing humic zone at the surface, so
delimiting one half of the grave was possible before disturbing
anything. 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 first job, having delimited the boundaries of ths grave as some
forty metres long and five metres wide, was to bulldoze down two
metres to within twenty centimetres of the bodies. Then, together with
the soldiers, shovels were used to remove the sand until the tops of
the bodies were exposed. Paint brushes were then used to do the final
exposure. At the end of five weeks of gruesome work, the skull count
indicated about 550 bodies in the grave. There may have been a few
more skulls where bodies lay more than two deep, but the torsos had
too much surviving soft tissue to make feasible the task of any
further exposure.
An awful scene unfolded. As the eyewitnesses had said, they were
mostly women and children. The men were old men. They had been herded
down a ramp into the grave. One lot had gone to the left and been shot
while lying down within the grave; the others had gone to the right.
The majority had entry and exit wounds of bullets in their skulls.
Some of them had been clubbed.
At the end the Soviets were working on, the bodies lay face down,
parallel and in rows. At the Australian end the bodies were much more
disorganized. There seemed to have been panic at our end.
In a generally empty area at the middle of the grave, bodies were
found that had fewer bullets to the head. Some had been clubbed. These
people had surviving bits of clothing, whereas the main mass of people
at each end of the grave had been stripped before being shot. Items of
clothing were found right through the filling of the grave, suggesting
that people had picked through a pile of clothing, throwing in what
was unwanted while the grave was being filled. One boot contained a
pocket watch secreted in the heel.
There was grim satisfaction in revealing that the massive grave was
much too large for the number of people in it. The Nazis had obviously
hoped for many more victims.
One of my duties was to concentrate on dating the event. After
cleaning up some of the corroded machine pistol cartridge cases, and
examining them with a lens, my colleagues found that the killers had
used German ammunition stamped with the place and date of manufacture.
The cases dated from the years 1939, 1940 and 1941. These cases were
like coins found in conventional excavations. Thereby the team had a
date of 1941, later than which the killings must have taken place.
It proved more of a problem to get a date earlier than which the
killings took place. The fir trees grew in parallel rows and were
clearly a plantation. Some fir trees grew in the filling of the grave.
The growth rings of the trees were examined. The greatest number of
rings found was 29, indicating that the killing had taken place before
1961.
Dating narrowed down significantly on return to Sydney, Australia.
Radiocarbon dating of hair showed no trace of the so-called hydrogen
bomb effect in their proportion of carbon isotopes. So the killing
must have taken place before hydrogen bombs were first detonated in
1952.
Turning now to 1991, when work commenced at Ustinovka, a year later
than Serniki. Sergeant Steve Horn replaced David Hughes, and Dr Chris
Griffiths, a specialist in forensic dentistry at Westmead Hospital,
Sydney, joined Godfrey Oettle on the forensic side. He was needed
because of a particularly awful allegation about the killings there.
It was alleged that after a hundred or so adults had been marched two
kilometres to a grave and shot, a fellow had asked where the children
were. ‘We didn’t think you wanted to shoot the children’, the
organisers of the round-up had said. At that, some of the men returned
to the village, commandeered a cart, and drove the children back to
the grave. It is then alleged that they threw the children off the
cart and into the grave, and shot them. 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.
Dr Griffith’s services were required because of the need to work out
the ages of the children, if found, from the stages of eruption of the
milk and permanent teeth.
Ustinovka is 500km east-southeast of Serniki, in the fertile black
soil loess belt. Unlike at Serniki, the locals had only a vague idea
of where the grave might be. There was no sign on the surface.
Standing in a vast paddock of 10 cm tall peas and maize, I felt
helpless. How were we to start looking? Where were we to start
looking?
One idea was to look for evidence of disturbed soil -young crops like
disturbed ground, trenches showing up from the air as greener
features. However, even from the air this proved fruitless, and thus
more mundane methods were initiated.
With a backhoe, a shallow trench was put across a likely area. We
began examining the scraped walls for lateral discontinuities in
colour and texture. In this way the side of a deep cutting was found,
which turned out to be the grave. At Ustinovka, unlike at Serniki,
there was success in defining the whole area of the grave before
disturbing any of its contents. When looking for a buried body your
archaeological objective should be first to find the grave and only
then direct attention to the body. This is a fundamental principle in
conserving evidence that Australian police should pay more attention
to. Archaeologists too rarely get called in to assist the police in
their investigations.
Remembering the story that children had been killed after the adults,
the stratigraphic evidence provided stunning support for this story.
The team came upon the children’s skeletons first, and then what
seemed to be the bottom of the grave. But twenty centimetres below the
children lay the adults. The witnesses did not actually mention that
the grave had been partly filled after the adults were killed, but
obviously the stratigraphic observations provide important material
evidence for their statement that children were killed later.
There were about twenty children. The youngest one was about six
months and virtually destroyed in the soil, except for the teeth. The
oldest one was about twelve or thirteen years old.
Thus evidence was gathered that would have been missed without
attention to scientific methods of excavation. At Ustinovka, maybe
even the grave itself would have been missed. I conclude that
archaeological methodology has a role in the investigations of
killings.
I want to conclude by looking more widely than the events in the
Ukraine. I am obviously not alone in thinking that archaeoogical
methodology has a role in the investigation of killings. The
University of Bradford has a postgraduate diploma that majors in
forensic archaeology. I hope to visit John Hunter there when I go over
to the United Kingdom later this year [see ‘Investigating War Crimes –
An Update’ at the end of this article).
Closer to the topic of what I have been discussing in this lecture is
the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. It was formed in the
mid-1980s, when it became politically possible to investigate the fate
of the so-called ‘Disappeared’ of the 1970s. Horrified at the shambles
the police were making of the exhumations, they formed themselves into
a group of archaeologists and forensic anthropologists. They impressed
on the authorities that their methods would allow better opportunities
for identifying specific individuals, by proving the association
between artefacts and particular skeletons. It was not merely enough
to dig up the skeletons and take them to a morgue for identification.
This dedicated tearn has lent its services to authorites elsewhere in
South America and the world.
The Boston based Physicians for Human Rights has been approached by
the United Nations to assist with prosecutions relating to atrocities
in both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. As their title indicates,
they are primarily a forensic team of volunteers. But they routinely
incorporate the services of archaeologists. I am privileged to have
been invited last year to join their group of experts, though I cannot
say that it is an invitation that I accept with relish.
The primary archaeological interests of my career have been twofold –
environmental changes at the end of the Ice Age and models for
computer aided multivariate analysis of archaeological data. But as
you can see, the invitation to work in the Ukraine dragged me away
>from those worthwhile, but relatively arcane, pursuits to a nasty
awakening in the archaeology of the twentieth century. Nasty it may
have been, but I have not regretted it. 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.
[Editor’s addendum: AUSTRALIAN WAR CRIMES – A BRIEF OVERVIEW. In April
1987 the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) was formed under the
directorship of Robert Greenwood within the Australian Federal
Attorney-General’s Department to investigate all aspects of
Australia’s Nazi past. In its five-year life the SIU examined
allegations against 814 individuals. From substantial research,
proceedings were commenced against three men: Ivan Polyukhovich,
Mikolay Berezovsky and Heinrich Wagner. The archaeological material
excavated by Richard Wright from the Serniki mass grave was submitted
as evidence in the trial of Polyukhovich, who was acquitted. The
Berezovsky case was dismissed by the magistrate. The case against
Wagner was stopped by the Director of Public Prosecutions due to
Wagner’s ill-health. The case against a fourth, Konrads Kalejs, was
handed over by the then Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, to the
Australian Federal Police after the closure of the SIU in 1992. No
other proceedings have taken place in the ensuing years.]
———————-
INVESTIGATING WAR CRIMES – AN UPDATE
The editors of International Network on Holocaust and Genocide kindly
asked me if I would like to append a note to the reprinting of my
lecture to the Sydney Institute.
I did visit John Hunter at the University of Bradford and found he is
doing an excellent job teaching forensic archaeology. Readers
interested in the technicalities should consult his book Studies in
Crime: An Introduction to Forensic Archaeology, Batsford Books (1996).
He has been particularly concerned to build up a good relationship
between the profession and the British police, one that persuades the
police that archaeologists should be called in as a matter of course.
A case study, where they were not called in, is that of the Harry West
murders in Gloucestershire. The investigators publicly claimed to be
using archaeological methods to recover evidence but they did not use
archaeologists. Hunter reproduces a photo of the Gloucestershire work.
It looks like a preparation of the Fields of Flanders.
In April I went to the Middle East to work on skeletal remains from
the University of Sydney’s excavations in the Bronze Age of Arabia.
Sonia and I had a round the world ticket to return to Australia, one
that would have taken us through the United States in mid-May. So I
asked Darren O’Brien (Assistant Director of the Centre for Comparative
Genocide Studies) about institutions in the US that might be
interested in hearing of our Ukrainian work. He circulated my
‘Serniki’ article on the Holocaust internet list. [The list in
question was H-Holocaus issuing out of the University of Chicago
which, at that time, had 677 subscribers – Ed.]. Disappointingly,
there was virtually no interest – certainly no constructive interest.
So we routed our return to Australia via Argentina. Last month, in
Buenos Aires, we met with members of the Argentine Forensic
Anthropology Team. We were both moved by the meeting. They operate
with a threat to personal safety that I have never had to come to
terms with.
During a seemingly carefree lunch in the middle of Buenos Aires, one
of the Argentine investigators told us that her husband would be sorry
not to meet us. He was at that moment in Brazil, investigating the
shooting murders by the police of thirty landless peasants.
Someone asked whether we have children. Yes – our children are grown
up. We then asked (with that automatic reciprocity that characterises
polite restaurant conversation) whether she too had children. ‘No, we
don’t’. Then she added laconically: ‘In South America, if you do our
type of work it’s best not to have children’.
Before breakfast in our Buenos Aires hotel room, and on the very day
we met with the Argentine forensic team, I turned on CNN television to
see what was going on in the world. I was non-plussed by the
coincidences. I had tuned in to the opening speech for the prosecution
in the Bosnian war crimes trial at The Hague. It was Grant Niemann
making his opening speech. A wheel had come full circle. Grant was the
Adelaide based prosecutor of our Ukrainian cases.
So far as I know, Holocaust deniers have shown a total avoidance of
our Ukrainian evidence. Yet (and, again, so far as I know) the deniers
have not been directly confronted with it in any arena of debate. 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.
-Richard Wright-
***************************************************************
Regards,
Eugene Holman
From [email protected] Wed Dec 24 13:12:38 EST 1997
Article: 156174 of alt.revisionism
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From: [email protected] (Eugene Holman)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: On leather from human skin: the evidence
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 1997 11:23:50 -0500
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 74
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]> <349[email protected]> <[email protected]>
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In article <E[email protected]>, [email protected] (Daniel Keren)
wrote:
> [email protected] (Ole Kreiberg) writes:
>
> # This is exactly allegations like this that makes the
> # whole holocaust myth so incredible. The petit bourgeois
> # Nazi-Germans shunned all sorts of pervasion and
> # abnormality, and things like that would never have
> # been tolerated.
>
> Which is perhaps why a letter from the Weimar pathology
> department to the camp asked that such abuse of human
> corpses will be stopped. Problem for nazi-boy Kreiberg
> is that this letter (and another document I am aware of)
> do prove that such abuse of corpses took place in the
> camp; see the gif files in the directory
>
> https://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?camps/buchenwald/images
>
See specifically:
https://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?camps/buchenwald/images/buchenwald-doc01.gif
It is a message from the local SS physician in Weimar (SS – Standortarzt
Weimar), dated May 7, 1942, addressed to the Director of Pathology at the
Buchenwald Concentration camp.
The German text of the message reads:
<BEGIN QUOTE>
Es wird darauf aufmerksam gemacht, dass mit s o f o r t i g e r
Wirkung die Anfertigung sogenannter Geschenkartikel (Schrumpfköpfe u.s.w.)
einzustellen ist. Über den vorliegeneden Auftragbestand für die
SS-ärztl.Akademie Graz ist dem SS-Standortarzt jeweils zum 1. und 15. eines
jeden Monats schriftlich zu berichten.
Die ärztliche Behandlung von Häftlingen liegt ausserhalb des Rahmnens
einer Pathologie und wird mit s o f o r t i g e r Wirkung untersagt.
Dieser Befehl ist auch den in der Pathologie beschäftigten Häftlingen
bekanntzugeben.
<END QUOTE>
TRANSLATION
“It is brought to [your] attention that, effective i m m e d i a t e l
y, the preparation of so-called gift articles (shrunken heads etc.) is to
be stopped. A written report is to be made to the local SS physician for
the SS Medical Academy in Graz on the 1st and 15th of every month
concerning the status of current assignments.
The medical treatment of internees falls outside the framework of
pathology and is prohibited, effective i m m e d i a t e l y. This order
is also to be made known to the internees involved with pathology.”
The message is initialed in an illegible hand, this being followed by the
title, SS-Hauptsturmführer, but no clarification of the name.
***************************************************************
For those interested in seeing what these ‘Geschenkartikel (Schrumpfköpfe
u.s.w.)’ [gift articles (shrunken heads etc.)] were, I suggest a look at:
– https://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/buchenwald/images/buchenwald01.jpg
more ‘raw material’, a wagon loaded with emaciated bodies
– https://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/buchenwald/images/buchenwald03.jpg
the ‘raw material’, a pile of emaciated bodies
– https://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/buchenwald/images/buchenwald02.jpg
a display of ‘gift articles’ fashioned from human bodies
– https://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/buchenwald/images/shrunken.jpg
close-up photograph of a mounted shrunken head
Regards,
Eugene Holman
From [email protected] Wed Dec 24 13:12:38 EST 1997
Article: 156176 of alt.revisionism
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From: [email protected] (Eugene Holman)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: On leather from human skin: the evidence
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 1997 12:01:15 -0500
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 51
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
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In article <[email protected]>,
[email protected] (RWhita8200) wrote:
> >From: [email protected] (Daniel Keren)
>
> > nazi-boy Kreiberg
>
>
> Anybody who disagrees with Poltical Correctness is A Nazi Who Wants To Kill
> Six Million Jews.
> Bob Whitaker
Come on, Bob, you can do better than this. How about the ‘What sewer do you
have to dredge…” one?
Documents and pictures have been posted here which substantiate allegations
that artefacts of human skin were indeed produced at at least one Nazi-run
concentration camp, Buchenwald.
One of those documents noted that when on trial as a consequence of her
possession of such objects, Ilse Koch did not deny their existence or the
fact that she had them in her possession, a strategy she certainly would
have taken were they not of human skin and if she did not own them, but
rather she only argued that she herself did not have anyone killed
specifically for his or her skin. What on earth does hunting for old
documents and piecing them together to make a coherent story have to do
with political correctness?
As to Ole, he has a naive view of the Nazis, even with respect to some of
their activities in occupied Denmark, but that’s not the point here. If the
Nazis, as Ole claims, were so concerned about ‘perversion’ and had a low
tolerance for ‘abnormality’, how is it that their leader, Adolf Hitler, 1)
had no educational or professional qualifications, 2) had spent more than
two years in Vienna as a derelict and homeless drifter, 3) had never had a
normal relationship with a woman (well, he tried once, but she committed
suicide), 4) had a flagrant homosexual, Ernst Roehm, as one of his best
frieds, 5) spoke German with a yokel accent that betrayed his hicktown
background. Neither were the other top Nazi leaders, Paul Göbbels, a
grossly overweight failed chicken farmer, Hermann Göring, a former
narcotics addict and Vaterlandsverräter (he spent several years in Sweden
and had a Swedish wife), and Heinrich Himmler, obsessively neurotic and not
averse to public displays of sadism, paragons of bourgeois normality and
conventional German values. Ilse Koch, wife of Erich Koch, the Buchenwald
commandant, in addition to her decidedly non-petit beougeois collecting
activities, evidently took great please in dressing in tight sweaters and
mini-skirts and then ostentatiously flaunting her sexuality in front of the
male inmates at Buchenwald. She really earned her epithet – the ‘Bitch of
Buchenwald’.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
From [email protected] Wed Dec 24 13:12:38 EST 1997
Article: 156177 of alt.revisionism
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From: [email protected] (Eugene Holman)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: 3420-PS: Buchenwald & Human Skin artifacts
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 1997 12:15:43 -0500
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 50
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References: <67d9fm$99t[email protected]> <[email protected]>
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In article <[email protected]>, [email protected]
(Michael) wrote:
> On 19 Dec 1997 07:58:46 GMT, [email protected] (Kenneth McVay OBC) wrote:
>
> another “liberally” translated piece of garbage from the discredited IMT
Blue Series.
>
>
I present here a German text pertaining to the same issue and my own
translation of it. If it is ‘liberally’ translated, point out and explain
the faults and then do a better job.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
https://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?camps/buchenwald/images/buchenwald-doc01.gif
It is a message from the local SS physician in Weimar (SS – Standortarzt
Weimar), dated May 7, 1942, addressed to the Director of Pathology at the
Buchenwald Concentration camp.
The German text of the message reads:
<BEGIN QUOTE>
Es wird darauf aufmerksam gemacht, dass mit s o f o r t i g e r
Wirkung die Anfertigung sogenannter Geschenkartikel (Schrumpfköpfe u.s.w.)
einzustellen ist. Über den vorliegeneden Auftragbestand für die
SS-ärztl.Akademie Graz ist dem SS-Standortarzt jeweils zum 1. und 15. eines
jeden Monats schriftlich zu berichten.
Die ärztliche Behandlung von Häftlingen liegt ausserhalb des Rahmnens
einer Pathologie und wird mit s o f o r t i g e r Wirkung untersagt.
Dieser Befehl ist auch den in der Pathologie beschäftigten Häftlingen
bekanntzugeben.
<END QUOTE>
TRANSLATION
“It is brought to [your] attention that, effective i m m e d i a t e l
y, the preparation of so-called gift articles (shrunken heads etc.) is to
be stopped. A written report is to be made to the local SS physician for
the SS Medical Academy in Graz on the 1st and 15th of every month
concerning the status of current assignments.
The medical treatment of internees falls outside the framework of
pathology and is prohibited, effective i m m e d i a t e l y. This order
is also to be made known to the internees involved with pathology.”
The message is initialed in an illegible hand, this being followed by the
title, SS-Hauptsturmführer, but no clarification of the name.
