Today we will examine the claim that 1,150,000 million Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. Here is the Holocaust Denial on Trial, or HDoT, entry on the subject.
The official description of the Einsatzgruppen is as follows:
The team allegedly tasked with the systematic murder of Jews consisted of 3000 men in total.
In the Einsatzkommando there were 4 units, A, B, C and D. Karl Jäger was a member of group A. A report made by Karl Jäger is used to help substantiate the claim of over a million deaths. The legitimacy of this document is in question and in this article I discredit its use as evidence of a genocide.
For fun let’s look at the personnel of group A:
This chart comes from The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories—Genesis, Missions and Actions, by Carlo Mattogno. It is over 800 pages long. There’s much that one could talk about. In the interest of keeping my posts short I will focus on the 194 Einsatzgruppen reports that this death toll relies on. For information about physical evidence, or the lack thereof, see this series on Einsatzgruppen mass graves.
HDoT is banking on the fact that most people won’t bother looking into these reports. There is no reference or link on where to find them. You are just supposed to take HDoT’s word for it. Fortunately people like Mattogno have studied these reports. Pages 50-67 of his aforementioned book list various issues with the reliability of these documents. Let’s look at a few of his discoveries.
First we have the fact that multiple copies of this report were made:
To which Mattogno makes the following point:
Next we have this to consider:
The reports contain various errors and duplicities. Here is an example:
In short the reports have problems that need to be addressed. Something that HDoT, or any orthodox Holocaust historian, will never do.
One may complain that Mattogno is nit-picking and disproves nothing. To that I say let’s consider an argument made by Joseph Bishop in his article, The Einsatzgruppen and the Holocaust:
Because the claims made by the orthodox Holocaust historians are extraordinary the scrutiny must also be extraordinary. We are talking about an accusations of major crimes. Crimes that Germans have been imprisoned and executed for. Crimes that lay a shadow over the German people to this day. To deny the public of open and honest discourse about the events of WW2 is in itself criminal. We must be allowed to examine the Holocaust without fear of persecution or prosecution.