Foreword to Carlo Mattogno’s book Einsatzgruppen

Order this books from Armreg Ltd

Throughout the 19th Century, tsarist Russia was a predominantly agricultural society where many of its mostly orthodox-Christian subjects lived in serfdom to the few landowners of the nobility until the serfs were emancipated in 1861. This system might be described as a mild form of slavery, only that, instead of one ethnic or national group enslaving another, as has been the rule throughout the history of slavery, in this case the majority of the lower class of a people was enslaved by the upper class of that same people.

The abolition of serfdom by Tsar Alexander II did not change the fact, however, that most land was owned by the nobility, so that the peasantry continued to be at the mercy of the nobility to earn an income.

The Jews in tsarist Russia, although in their majority not engaged in agricultural activities, had their own grievances, most notable among them the fact that they were not allowed to settle wherever they wanted, and that they were subjected to a form of restrictive affirmative action in practicing certain professions.

Since the highly urbanized Jews of Russia were on average far more educated than their Christian fellow countrymen, Jews were overrepresented in many intellectual fields, revolutionary activities included. Although Russia’s Christian peasantry had more reasons to strive for radical change, they were to no small degree kept in line with the tsarist regime first and foremost by their lack of education, but also by the Russian Orthodox Church, which was to no small degree an extension of tsarist power control. It was also a main driver behind anti-Jewish sentiments among Russia’s Christians.

Of course, the history of Jewish-Christian animosities goes all the way back to the years when Christianity was born. During the first years of its existence, with the Jews being a powerful majority in Palestine and the Christians a powerless minority, Jewish persecution of Christians prevailed. The tables were turned when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire. Ever since, humanity has had to deal with a series of anti-Jewish measures by Christian rulers and the mob. While the uneducated masses may have been stirred up against the Jews with pseudo-arguments such as “Jews killed our Lord Jesus Christ” –  which isn’t even true because, strictly speaking, Jesus was killed by the Romans, if we were to take the New Testament’s narrative at face value – the Christian clergy had a more-sophisticated approach to this issue, as is evidenced for instance by the Roman Catholic Church’s century-long ban of the Talmud for its anti-Christian and anti-Gentile contents, or by Martin Luther’s critique of Jewish teachings in this regard in his book Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies). While such anti-Jewish attitudes were socially acceptable in Russia and most of Europe during the 19th Century, they are severely frowned upon today, to say the least, although more-recent studies have to a large degree justified the 2,000-year-old critique of Jewish scripture and its influence on the behavior of some – mostly orthodox and fundamentalist – Jews (see Shahak and Shahak/Mezvinsky).

To what degree this anti-Jewish attitude was socially acceptable back then can be gleaned from the Antisemitismus-Streit, an argument among scholars and prominent personalities that erupted onto the public stage in Germany in 1879, although it had been smoldering in less-popular circles many years prior to this and had a tradition going all the way back to Martin Luther.[1] The Jewish newspaper of record, The New York Times, commented on this argument in an editorial on 27 February 1880 as follows:

“The war, which has for some time raged in Germany between the natives and the Jews, seems rather to increase than diminish in intensity. It is something more than a popular prejudice, it is a national passion and the ablest, most dignified, and most learned men have ranged themselves on either side. To us here it seems very strange that such a contest of races can be going on in a land of so much intelligence and intellectual pretension, and in the year 1880, too. The crime of the Jews appears to be comprehended chiefly in their financial prosperity. No sin is as great as success in the eyes of the non-successful. The charge is made that of the 600,000 Israelites in the empire, hardly any engage in agricultural or mercantile pursuits; but that they control trade, rule the money markets, and are eating up the country with their avarice and usury.”

Societal and financial envy were only a side show of this German debate, however, while at its core was the criticism of Jewish teachings about how to regard and interact with Gentiles, as laid down in Jewish writings such as the Talmud and the Shulchan Aruch, facts which the New York Times carefully hid from its readers.

Fuel into the fire of anti-Jewish sentiments in Germany and in Russia was the publication and analysis – in Russia but also in the German language – of the minutes of the Council of Jews of the Minsk Ghetto (see Brafman), which undergirded the accusations that Jews are inherently hostile toward Gentiles. Since the Russian nobility was heavily influenced by German society and to a large degree related to its nobility, political and ideological discussions circulating in the German public inevitably had an impact in Russian intellectual circles.

Of course, this is also true for anti-tsarist circles, who eagerly picked up the German ideas of socialism and communism. While the German upper classes tried to cut the ground out from under these radical ideas by creating a constitutional monarchy and a parliament with far-reaching powers (after the German unification in 1871), and by implementing social reforms and social welfare, Russia seemed to be too far behind with everything to be able to keep up with the modernization pace expected by the radicals.

As a result, the last two decades of the 19th Century as well as the first two decades of the 20th Century were marked by several attempts of political radicals in Russia to overthrow the tsarist regime, starting with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and ending with the successful revolution in 1917.

Considering the backwards, at times even reactionary nature of the tsarist regime and Russian society in general during those years, one should think that the majority of Christian Russians should have had an interest in radical change just as any other disadvantaged group. In each of these attempts at overthrowing the tsarist regime, however, individuals with a Jewish background were vastly overrepresented among those radicals. While Christians identified with their notionally Christian tsars and their rule – or were led to identify with it by way of the Orthodox Church – Jews and other religious groups, as well as marginalized ethnic groups, did not have that allegiance. Jews, being outsiders both by religion and by race – at least they were treated this way, and many Jews saw themselves this way, too – had the highest probability of supporting the most radical changes most vociferously. And so they did.

While there were also non-Jews among those revolutionaries, the Russian mainstream was eager to focus on the Jews as the main drivers behind these events. The results were pogroms against the Jews, most prominently among them the ones triggered by the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, and by the abortive 1905 revolution. I have described these events in more detail elsewhere, where I also showed that they were the 19th Century’s breeding ground for media buzzwords such as “holocaust” “six million” and “extermination” in connection with the persecution of the Jews in Russia (introduction to Heddesheimer, pp. 7-37).

It is understandable that media outlets such as the New York Times championed a development in Russia that would create something similar there to what existed in the U.S.: a republic with guaranteed civil rights for everyone. The hope that a revolution would do the job can be read between the lines of several New York Times articles of those days.

In 1917, the revolution in Russia led to a civil war lasting several years, and it was not clear at all from the outset that the revolutionaries would win this war. While it was raging, readers of the New York Times learned how the authors and editors of that newspaper trembled at the thought of the revolution failing. They knew that this time, after so much bloodshed, pogroms against Jews would threaten to wipe them out completely. For instance, in an article of 20 July 1921 on page 2 titled “Begs America Save 6,000,000 in Russia”, we read in the subtitle that “Russia’s six million Jews are facing extermination by massacre” as the power of “the counter-revolutionary movement is gaining and the Soviet’s control is waning.”

Of course, at that point everyone not blind to self-evident facts could see that those revolutionary Soviets neither planned to install a republic in the Soviet Union nor to grant civil rights to everyone. In fact, news spread throughout the world about widespread massacres by the Soviets against the former nobility, the Christian clergy, the “bourgeoisie,” the “kulaks” (small independent farmers) and, in fact, anyone standing in their way. But at that point, the New York Times and many other similarly minded media outlets in the U.S. had stopped reporting most of the shocking news that should have been fit to print, and instead concealed with deafening silence the horrors unfolding in Russia. By looking away and supporting the perpetrators – millions of dollars were raised with the help of these newspapers to support whatever was going on in Russia at that time – they had become accomplices in the slaughter of millions, most of them Christians by faith.

The terrifying truth about Soviet Russia’s many massacres unfolding during the civil war and in the two decades afterwards, which was plain to see for everyone next door in Europe, foremost in Germany, was to a large degree hidden from the American public for decades. In fact, only the Cold War breaking out after the conclusion of World War II allowed for a more balanced view of what had happened in Russia since 1917.

Who was responsible for these Soviet massacres?

Robert Wilton, the correspondent for the London Times during WWI and shortly thereafter, reported for his newspaper about events unfolding in Russia during the revolution. In 1920, while the civil war was still raging, he published a book on The Last Days of the Romanovs, in which he laid out the extreme dominance of individuals with Jewish backgrounds in carrying out the revolution, and in manning the leadership of the early Soviet Union. More-recent contributions have since confirmed this observation, although many of them are not available in the English language – one may wonder why.[2]

More convincing for many readers are perhaps statements made by Jews themselves who – confronted with what was going on in Soviet Russia perpetrated to a large degree by individuals with Jewish backgrounds – were not only horrified, but also spoke out in warning as to what that means for Jews in general. The Russian Jewess Sonja Margolina analyzed some of these early voices in her German 1992 book whose title translates to The End of Lies: Russia and the Jews during the 20th Century. This book was never translated into English either. In it, Margolina reviewed in detail a book that had appeared in 1924 in Germany under the title Rußland und die Juden (Russia and the Jews). This 1924 book examined the causes of the Russian Jews’ conspicuously above-average participation in the excesses of the 1917 revolution and the tyranny that followed it. The book also contains an appeal by German Jews “To the Jews in all Nations!” where we read (Margolina, p. 58):

“The Jewish Bolsheviks’ overeager participation in the subjugation and destruction of Russia is a sin that already bears within itself the seeds of its retribution. For what greater misfortune could happen to a people than to have its own sons engage in excesses? Not only will this be counted against us as an element of our guilt, it will also be held up to us as reproach for an expression of our power, for a striving for Jewish hegemony. Soviet power is equated with Jewish power, and the grim hatred of the Bolsheviks will transform into a hatred of the Jews […]. All nations and peoples will be swamped by waves of Judeophobia. Never before have such thunderclouds gathered above the heads of the Jewish people. This is the bottom line of the Russian upheaval for us, for the Jewish people.’”

Margolina quotes further from this 1924 anthology (ibid., p. 60):

“‘The Russians have never before seen a Jew in power, neither as governor nor as policeman, nor as postal official. There were both good and bad times in those days too, but the Russian people lived and worked, and the fruits of their labors were their own. The Russian name was mighty and threatening. Today the Jews are at every corner and in all levels of power. The Russians see them at the head of the Czarist city, Moscow, and at the head of the metropolis on the River Neva and at the head of the Red Army, the ultimate mechanism of self-destruction. […] The Russians are now faced with a Jew as judge as well as executioner; they encounter Jews at every step, not Communists who are just as poor as they themselves but who nevertheless give orders and take care of the interests of the Soviet power […]. It is not surprising that the Russians, in comparing the past to the present, conclude that the present power is Jewish, and so bestial precisely because of that.’”

In the early 1990s, German professor Dr. Ernst Nolte, who specialized in the history of totalitarian ideologies, also pointed out the Jews’ intimate entanglement in Communism (Nolte, pp. 92f.):

“For readily apparent social reasons, was not the percentage of persons of Jewish extraction particularly great among the participants in the Russian Revolution, different from the percentages of other minorities such as the Latvians? Even at the start of this century Jewish philosophers were still pointing with great pride to this extensive participation of the Jews in Socialist movements. After 1917, when the anti-Bolshevist movement – or propaganda – stressed the topic of the Jewish People’s commissars above all others, this pride was no longer expressed, […] But it took Auschwitz to turn this topic into a taboo for several decades.

It is all the more remarkable that in 1988 the publication Commentary, the voice of right-wing Jews in America, published an article by Jerry Z. Muller who recalls these indisputable facts – though of course they are open to interpretation:

‘If Jews were highly visible in the revolution in Russia and Germany, in Hungary they seemed omnipresent. […] Of the government’s 49 commissars, 31 were of Jewish origin […]. Rakosi later joked that Garbai (a gentile) was chosen for his post ‘so that there would be someone who could sign the death sentences on Saturdays.’ […] But the conspicuous role of Jews in the revolution of 1917-19 gave anti-Semitism (which ‘seemed on the wane by 1914’) a whole new impetus. […] Historians who have focused on the utopian ideals espoused by revolutionary Jews have diverted attention from the fact that these Communists of Jewish origin, no less than their non-Jewish counterparts, were led by their ideals to take part in heinous crimes – against Jews and non-Jews alike.’”

Summarizing what was to follow, U.S. journalist Jerry Muller put the two large historical events of the 20th century into this nutshell:

“The Trotskies make the revolutions [i.e., the GULag] and the Bronsteins pay the bills [in the Holocaust].”

Hence, the buzzword “Jewish Bolshevism,” which was later used by the German National Socialists as one reason to persecute Jews, was not a pure figment of the imagination, and we do not have to rely on their sources (such as Kommos 1938) to learn about the veracity of their claims.

The counter-revolutionary forces fighting the Soviets in the years 1917 to 1921 were eventually defeated. The Jews of Russia and their brethren abroad could breathe a sigh of relief – for a while. The more the Soviets stabilized their tyranny in Russia, the more they laid their eyes upon other nations where they planned to carry out similar revolutions on their path to their dream of a “world revolution.” Germany was considered the most-important stepping stone to reach that goal. But Germany, defeated and weak after World War I and in constant civil-war-like turmoil, was putting up a tough fight of resistance against such a bloody revolution. The most radical among the counter-revolutionary forces in Germany were the National Socialists, who tried to cut the ground out from underneath the revolution by making their own top-to-bottom socialist revolution on a national level while at the same time mercilessly combating any Soviet attempt at instigating a foreign-led, Jewish-dominated communist revolution.

On a national level, the National Socialists were sensationally successful in the years of peace, but with this success inevitably came confrontation with other foreign powers, among them first and foremost Stalin’s Soviet Russia, which saw its plans of instigating a revolution in Germany foiled, hence considered war the only option left to conquer Central and Western Europe.

The German-Russian – or rather National-Socialist–Soviet-Communist – Clash of Titans started on 22 June 1941. The present book tries to uncover what subsequently happened to the Jews who lived in, or were deported into, the temporarily German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Unlike almost all mainstream authors writing about the topic, Carlo Mattogno is aware and takes into consideration that the “information” we have about those events is steeped in Soviet atrocity propaganda; that witness testimony and Soviet forensic expert reports are equally riddled with distortions, exaggerations and inventions; that the Soviets did not shy away from outright forgeries, even blaming their own massacres on the Germans, as in the case of Katyn Forest. With the historical record so contaminated with Soviet mendacity, what can we believe?

Hence, the critically minded scholar – and no other type of scholar should be trusted in these matters – may not take anything at face value; source criticism is absolutely crucial.

* * *

As National-Socialist Germany prepared her invasion of the Soviet Union, she did so as a counter-revolutionary power, as an avenger for Soviet terror past and present, with the intention to wipe out Judeo-Bolshevism once and for all. The reader of this book will read repeatedly that, as the German army moved into one Soviet city after another, the German authorities taking over behind the advancing front found confirmation after confirmation that Jews were indeed the mainstay of Soviet power and terror on many if not all levels. But was that really true? Can we take these claims in German contemporary documents at face value?

In 2001, Russian researcher Nikita Petrov published a paper which addressed the question to what degree Jews were involved in the Soviet Union’s most prominent government agency of repression, the NKVD. This was possible because the NKVD itself had kept records on the ethnic affiliation of its employees and associates, and Jews were seen as a separate ethnic group, not as members of a religion. If we look at this data – see the table below – it turns out that up to 1937, Jews filled almost 40% of all the higher positions within the NKVD, while only some 2% to 3% of the Soviet population was Jewish at that time.

The drastic decline in the NKVD’s Jewish composition was mainly due to the massacres committed among all government officials in the course of the purges carried out by Stalin in the years 1937/38. Because Jews were so extremely overrepresented among those officials, they were also among the main victims of these purges.

It is therefore safe to assume that, when the German army moved into Russia in June 1941, the astounding predominance of Jews in the Soviet state bureaucracy was to a considerable degree a matter of the recent past.

But why, then, did German contemporary reports as quoted in the present book state the opposite?

The first question to ask is always: how could they know? It is a fact that most Soviet officials fled when the Germans arrived. What the Germans found out about the ethnic composition of government personnel may have relied more on witness testimony and hearsay than on official records. At least that is the impression I received from reading these German reports, for they never mention the thorough analysis of employment records.

The next question to ask is: can we trust those witnesses? The answer to this is simple and clear-cut: no, we cannot. Anyone making statements in this regard to the Germans was evidently willing to collaborate with the enemy, and with the reputation the Germans had as Jew-hating anti-Semites, many witnesses may have anticipated what the Germans wanted to hear. Hence, this is a clear case of confirmation bias. The Germans were probably mostly hearing their own echo rather than independently collected, reliable data. It is also conceivable that claims about Jewish dominance in positions of power contained in these documents were completely unfounded, hence made up in order to “justify” mass executions of Jews.

Does that mean that the Jews in Russia were not the enemy the Germans perceived them as? Not necessarily. If we put ourselves into the Jews’ shoes for a moment, there are mainly two things to consider.

First, although the Soviet terror apparatus was to an astounding degree “Jewish” in nature until 1937, that does not mean that most Jews were involved in that apparatus. In fact, by the time of the Stalinist purges of 1937/38, it must have become clear to everyone in the Soviet Union that literally everyone was a victim of the Soviet or rather Stalinist terror. Even the perpetrators of that terror regime were caught up in a nightmare of horrors which they could not escape, and many of them were eventually swallowed up by this maelstrom they had helped create and maintain. From that point of view, everyone in the Soviet Union needed to be liberated, Jews and Gentiles, perpetrators and victims, government officials and the general populace. Had the Germans moved in with that attitude – to liberate everyone from the Bolshevik nightmare – they might have won the war. But that is not what they did.

Instead, the Germans moved in with the attitude of an eye for an eye. And as Gandhi correctly observed, that attitude merely makes the whole world blind. Even if many of Russia’s Jews were not necessarily hostile to the Germans before the war, once the Germans had assumed a radical, to one degree or another eliminatory anti-Jewish stance when advancing into the Soviet Union, the Jews had little choice but to align themselves with the only power that could and would protect them from the counter-revolutionary, anti-Jewish wrath the Germans were both bringing with them and unleashing among the local non-Jewish populace.

Stalin was smart enough to recognize that he had to unite the peoples of his realm and beyond to win this war. So he reinvented Russian patriotism, resurrected the Orthodox Church, and rallied the Jews around him – only to revert all this again after the war, but that’s beside the point. Hence, even if Stalin’s Russia in 1938 wasn’t more Jewish than Hitler’s Germany at that time, as the German forces started committing massacres against the Jews on Russian territories, Stalin’s Russia once more became the central focus of Jewish support – from within the Soviet Union itself, but also from the U.S. and elsewhere.

While Stalin turned many of his former enemies temporarily into “friends” and sowed discord among the rest of his enemies, Hitler, with his sweeping anti-Jewish stance and racist attitudes toward the Slavs, sowed discord among his potential friends and united his enemies.

Hence, if some Jews weren’t already hostile toward the Germans when the war started, most if not all of them became enemies as it progressed. This in turn served as a justification for increasingly severe German measures against the Jews. This way, a vicious, ever-escalating cycle was created that turned the entire conflict into a bloodbath. In a way, therefore, the Germans created, maintained and helped grow an enemy that needed not exist in the first place. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

As noble as the intention was to slay the Bolshevik monster, by applying methods similar to those of the Bolsheviks, i.e., by declaring entire sections of the population as enemies (the nobility and bourgeoisie here, the Jews and Soviets there) – rather than by waging a war merely against ideas – and by perpetrating wholesale slaughters on a scale unprecedented in German history, the National Socialists and with them many millions of loyal German followers turned into a mirror image of the monster they were claiming to fight. It’s an oft-repeated tragedy in the history of mankind.

Although these facts can make us understand why things happened as they did, none of it can excuse them.

In this sense, the present book tries to shed light on what exactly happened without trying to justify or excuse. Did the Germans go into Russia with the intention to slaughter all the Jews they got their hands on wholesale? Or was it a reaction to Soviet atrocities and a perception that Jews were primarily responsible for them? What exactly did happen? And how many Jews fell victim to these massacres?

The last question in the above list is probably also the most vexing one. Al­though Carlo Mattogno has given well-documented estimates in the past about the probable, actual death tolls of certain National-Socialist camps, the reader will be disappointed in this regard with the present book. Although Chapter 5 of Part One deals with this question, it merely makes us realize that it is close to impossible to pinpoint even an approximate figure. As a matter of fact, after having digested this voluminous work, the reader will understand that there are a number of seemingly insurmountable obstacles to determining a death toll. First, the numbers given in German documents are anything but reliable because the data contained in them are, to use Mattogno’s words “chaotic and disordered,” and the numbers given “almost never coincide with the declared totals” (see p. 271). Many scholars have suspected that the numbers in those documents may be exaggerated, but after reading Mattogno’s analysis, one can safely say that they are entirely unreliable, and that anything is possible: exaggeration and understatement.

Next, there is reason to suspect that the German documents do not include all the massacres that have occurred. Most of these suspicions are based on mere witness claims of massacres that are not backed up by documents. Although mere claims by witnesses do not prove that a massacre occurred, if a forensic team finds a mass grave based on such witness testimony, and there is no known German document confirming that there has been a massacre, this can mean either that it wasn’t documented, or else that this mass grave contains other victims instead, such as those of a Soviet massacre. Mattogno discusses one such case in Subchapter 1.6. of Part Two. Of course, the other extreme is possible, too, namely that mass-execution events reported in German documents may have been invented from whole cloth. That possibility is discussed by Mattogno as well.

Ultimately, the only thing that could settle the question as to whether death-toll figures in German documents are correct would be to do numerous complete and thorough forensic exhumations of all victims found in a mass grave associated with a documented massacre, determine as best as possible the number and identities of the victims, the probable cause and approximate time of death, and the likely perpetrators. That is standard procedure in any other case of mass murder.

As Mattogno documents thoroughly, however, it is in particular Jewish religious authorities who successfully veto that such examinations occur. It is difficult to say whether this intentionally or unintentionally obstructive stance will ever change, or whether non-Jewish government authorities will ever muster enough backbone to do what should have been done a long time ago, no matter what some Jewish personality wishes. For now, all we can do is wait and hope. Of course, as decade after decade passes, this task will not become any easier, since the evidence needed to come to clear conclusions deteriorates steadily.

Mainstream death-toll claims for massacres committed by the Einsatzgruppen and associated German units usually vary between just under a million (Hilberg 2003, p. 408) and up to three million (Schwarz, p. 220). For now, little can be said about these figures other than that they are more speculative in nature than based upon hard, confirmable data. Their order of magnitude may be in the correct ball park, though. If so, these are indeed shocking numbers. But if we compare these figures with the death toll of Soviet atrocities committed since 1917 until the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, we are dealing with “peanuts.” Estimates of that Soviet death toll up to 1941 range in the tens of millions, hence a factor ten higher than that of Jews (and non-Jews) presumably killed by Germans in the Soviet Union.

Yet when we go into libraries of the western world, we find more than 100,000 books on the Jewish WWII Holocaust, but only very few works dealing with the Soviet massacres in the years 1917-1941 – and beyond. Why is that?

While mainstream scholars claim that the Jewish Holocaust is one of the best- and most-thoroughly investigated genocides in the history of mankind, or even of any major event in our species’s history, the Soviet massacres – a series of many genocides and non-genocidal mass murders of far greater magnitude – are hardly researched in a systematic and thorough manner by anyone in the western world. The former Soviet-occupied countries which suffered greatly under Soviet rule, such as the Ukraine and the Baltic countries, have done their share of investigations since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but they have garnered little attention in the West. Why?

The answer to these questions can be found when we realize who holds cultural hegemony over the western world. This hegemony evidently results in this one-sided and lopsided historical perspective that is hiding cause and effect, and turns history into an unintelligible black-and-white image of supposed absolute evil versus supposed innocent good. The forces that accomplish this are the same forces which, in the U.S. for many years since 1917, have to a large degree hidden from public view what was going on in the Soviet Union.

* * *

The book you are holding in your hands presents the results of the first-ever revisionist effort to comprehensively investigate the activities of the Einsatzgruppen behind the German-Soviet front during World War Two. According to mainstream sources, the murders perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen and other associated German units encompass roughly one third of the Holocaust, quantitatively speaking (give or take a million victims, depending on the source). It is a vast topic in many respects: by the number of claimed events, by the size of the geographic area where these events are said to have occurred, by the amount of source material available, and by the number of – almost exclusively mainstream – studies already published about it. Carlo Mattogno has taken on a huge task.

The original Italian edition of this book was published in 2017. That edition has attracted the attention of a group of hostile commentators who, in August 2018, started to analyze and critique it in a series of blog entries online.[3] At that point in time, the editing efforts of the present English translation of Mattogno’s book were well under way. Right after I was informed about these critical blog entries, I informed Carlo Mattogno about them. Since it was obvious that these blog entries had just started and were to be continued, probably for many months to come, reacting to them would have meant suspending the entire project, waiting for the bloggers to finish their critique, then do more research and finally rewrite the book where necessary, first in Italian, then in English. This would have delayed the English edition for a year, if not more. Add to this the volatile nature of blog entries, which can be changed and deleted at a moment’s notice. In other words, Carlo Mattogno was not willing to go on a wild-goose chase just to refute some bloggers. If their critique were to be published in a conventional print format where the contents are fixed, then he would consider it. Otherwise, he will not give some hostile critics the power to postpone the publication of his own book ad indefinitum.

The reader, on the other hand, is invited to take notice of the arguments of both sides in this debate. When reading about the bloggers’ contentions regarding Mattogno’s comments on the “Jäger Report,” for instance, we notice first of all that the alpha and omega of historiography – source criticism – is something the bloggers evidently don’t like at all. All Mattogno does in this regard in the present book is to raise some questions about this document. He does the same with the Einsatzgruppen’s infamous Incident Reports. Source-critical questions are not illegitimate, as the bloggers suggest, but pivotal. This alone shows the utterly unprofessional, biased approach of these bloggers. The next thing to notice with regard to the “Jäger Report” is that the bloggers accuse Mattogno of claims or mistakes he did, in fact, not make. Just read carefully what Mattogno wrote and what the bloggers claim (provided they haven’t changed it by now), and you will realize their skewed perspective. Whether this is due to their incompetence or mendacity may be left for the reader to decide.

In another blog entry, they accuse Mattogno of not having used all the secondary source material available on some aspects of the present study, and to have taken into consideration only a limited number of witness testimonies. Such accusations are inevitable and unreasonable. They are inevitable, because it is physically impossible to cover all existing sources in a book of a reasonable size written by only one author within a finite time span. In addition, quoting all the secondary sources in existence – of which there are thousands – would be a book-inflating exercise which would only annoy the reader without adding much information. At the end of the day, a study such as the present one must be based primarily on primary sources, not on other scholars’ opinions.

Furthermore, when it comes to witness testimonies, these accusations are unreasonable as well, because the present book proves with ample examples that many if not most witness testimonies are filled with absurd claims that give rise to the conclusion that we simply cannot rely on them. Adding thousands more of these sometimes absurd and even grotesque statements won’t change that conclusion. Such expansion of the data pool can only confirm it.

At the end of the day, it does not matter how many witnesses have claimed that witches ride on broomsticks and have sex with the devil (not necessarily both at once nor in that order). If it can be shown that many of these statements are untrustworthy, we need to seek better, more reliable types of evidence. In our case, as already stated, the type of evidence needed consists of thorough and independent forensic examinations of the mass graves that can be located. Nothing else will do. If such evidence is never developed or presented, the world will have to live for all eternity with critical, skeptical and even denying voices regarding the claimed Einsatzgruppen massacres.

Germar Rudolf, 1 November 2018

Notes

[1]    A rather comprehensive bibliography of anti-Jewish writings predominantly in Germany from the year 1500 all the way up to 1887 can be found in Frey, pp. 209-219.
[2]    See for instance Weber 1994; von Bieberstein 2002; Solschenizyn 2003.

[3]    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/

Sources:

• Brafman, Jacob A., “Das Buch vom Kahal”: Materialien zur Erforschung der jüdischen Sitten, 2 Vols., Vilnius, 1865/St. Petersburg 1875
• Frey, Thomas (= Theodor Fritsch), Antisemiten-Katechismus, Verlag von Th. Fritsch, Leipzig, 1887
• Heddesheimer, Don, The First Holocaust: The Surprising Origin of the Six-Million Figure. 5th ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2018
• Hilberg 2003, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews. Third Edition. Yale University Press/ New Haven and London, 2003
• Kommos, Rudolf, Juden hinter Stalin: Die Vormachtstellung jüdischer Kader in der Sowjetunion auf der Grundlage amtlicher sowjetischer Quellen dargestellt. Nibelungen-Verl., Berlin/Leipzig 1938
• Margolina, Sonja, Das Ende der Lügen: Rußland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert. Siedler, Berlin, 1992
• Nolte, Ernst, “Abschließende Reflexionen über den sogenannten Historikerstreit,” in Uwe Backes, Eckhard Jesse, Rainer Zitelmann (eds.), Die Schatten der Vergangenheit: Impulse zur Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus. Propyläen, Berlin, 1992, pp. 83-109
• Petrov, Nikita. “Die wichtigsten Veränderungstendenzen im Kaderbestand der Organe der sowjetischen Staatssicherheit in der Stalin-Zeit,” Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2001; www1.ku eichstaett.de/ZIMOS/forum/docs/petrow.htm
• Schwarz, Solomon M. The Jews in the Soviet Union, Syracuse Univ. Press., Syracuse 1951
• Shahak, Israel, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. Pluto Press, London 1994
• Shahak, Israel, Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press, London 1999
• Solschenizyn, Alexander, 200 Jahre zusammen, 2 vols., Herbig, Munich 2003
• von Bieberstein, Johannes Rogalla, Jüdischer Bolschewismus: Mythos und Realität, Edition Antaios, Dresden, 2002
• Weber, Mark 1994. “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia’s Early Soviet Regime,” Journal of Historical Review, 14(1) (1994), pp. 4-14
• Wilton, Robert. The Last Days of the Romanovs, George H. Doran, New York 1920