Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
I have just two more things from “Herbert Williams’s” effort comment.
First this statement:
“Hitler would never be cowardly and refuse to do harsh but necessary things while hundreds thousand of good German men, women and children were being brutally killed.“
This is true. Hitler had to make difficult decisions. Like deciding to feed his people first knowing the suffering it would cause to the civilians of the Soviet Union.
Finally, Herbert asserts:
“Especially when he was already letting hundreds of thousands of POWs intentionally starve to death, something no one contests“
This is not true. Perhaps no one in mainstream academia contests this point because they don’t want to become a professional pariah. For one contention to the claim that Hitler intentionally let thousands of POW’s starve to death, I once again turn to the book Extermination Camps of Aktion Reinhardt, by Carlo Mattogno.
On page 178 Mattogno repeats a statement from historian Reinhard Otto:
“Orders were issued in each camp administration: nonworking and weakened soldiers, meaning those who still had to recover, received the smallest rations. And the camp administrations followed that order. After a tour of inspection, a district POW commander in Belorussia wrote about the army’s Michailowski POW collecting point on December 1, 1941, reporting that it held more than 10,000 Red Army soldiers at that
time. The previous night 144 of them had died. Nutrition was completely insufficient. Working POWs officially got 200 grams of bread, one kilogram of potatoes, and 200 grams of cabbage, nonworking prisoners about half of that quantity, but in fact it was less.16 Quartermaster General Wagner described it with one short sentence: ‘Nonworking POWs in the camps must starve.‘”
Mattogno points out that Otto’s account is referring to a single camp with 10,000 inmates. This camp is obviously facing a food shortage, but there is no indication that this is an intentional starvation caused by German authorities.
The source Otto uses to make his assertion is Nuremberg document NOKW-1535—a document that even Mattogno couldn’t get a hold of. Not only is the average person barred from looking at this source, but so is a Holocaust scholar who has spent decades accessing and studying original documents from the era. When a document can only be accessed by team Holocaust Affirmation, I’m going to have to call BS on their interpretation. The Holocaust is a topic that is too controversial to just take their word for it.
Despite not having access to the entire NOKW-1535 document, Mattogno was able to call out these Holocaust-affirming historians by piecing together the citations they uses from the document like the following:
“The question of feeding the civilian population is catastrophic. In order to arrive at any result at all, a classification had to be made. It is clear that within this classification the armed forces and their needs have to be at the very top. Only an existential minimum can be granted to the population. In this way, the countryside will fare somewhat bearably. The question of feeding the big cities, however, is unsolvable. There can be no doubt that Leningrad in particular has to starve, for it is impossible to feed this city. The leadership’s only task can be to keep the armed forces away from this and from manifestations linked to this. […]”
Here we have the Germans acknowledging that the food situation is catastrophic. The fact that there was even a question of feeding the big cities shows that the Germans at least took them into consideration. I wonder, did the Allies take into consideration the catastrophe they would cause civilians when they implemented their food blockades of Germany?
What about documents that actively refute the notion of intentional starvation?
The following quote is from the opening of a Nazi bulletin called “Merkblatt für die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener,” which translates into “Leaflet for the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war” (source):
“The treatment of enemy prisoners of war broadly affects our ability to conduct war, whether from the military, political or economic point of view. Correct treatment is just treatment. Justice, which does not exclude hard-ness where it is required, is not only military law, but also a principle of prudence.”
The document concludes:
“Therefore: adequate nourishment and a good treatment of all prisoners of war from the moment of their capture.”
Did the Holocaust-affirming scholars take this document into consideration when making their claim that the Nazi Regime deliberately starved Soviet POWs? Of course not. Cherry picking is the only way the Holocaust narrative can exist.
Mattogno has several other documental examples that refute the notion that Soviet POWs were being deliberately starved. You can see them on pages 179-182. Examples that Holocaust affirmers have deliberately ignored when forming their narrative.
One thing that is actually not in dispute is the Soviets’ scorched-earth policy. Although it is not disputed, it is not something that Holocaust affirmers like to discuss in detail. The following is a scene the Germans encountered when entering a village that the Soviets scorched:
The Soviet scorched-earth policy needs to be discussed in detail in order to have a balanced understanding of what was going on in the East during WW2. To do that, I will present a paragraph from the article Soviet Scorched-Earth Warfare: Facts And Consequences by Walter N. Sanning:
“The measures taken by the Soviet Union between 1940 and 1942 aimed not only at furthering the Soviet war effort, but also at harming the German enemy even at the cost of huge losses of life among Soviet civilians. The Soviet scorched-earth strategy included the deportation of millions of men, women and children; the resettlement and reestablishment of thousands of factories; the withdrawal of almost the entire railway rolling stock; the-annihilation of raw material depots; the removal of most of the agricultural machinery, cattle and grain stocks; the systematic destruction, burning and blowing up of the immovable infrastructure, inventories of all kinds, factory buildings, mines, residential areas, public buildings, public records, and even cultural monuments; and the intentional starvation of the civilian population which remained behind to face German occupation. It was basically a policy which unscrupulously used the civilian population as a strategic pawn. The extent and timing of this policy action is confirmed by so many sources that no real difference of opinion exists in this regard. What is strange is how scantily it has been covered so far in the scholarly literature. Until now, this policy has not been analyzed to the extent it deserves with an eye to identifying the party responsible for the conflict, nor to appreciating the German difficulties in prosecuting a war along established civilized lines, nor to assessing the claims of German brutality in Russia, nor to sizing up the numerical potential of the alleged German genocide of Soviet Jews, or indeed, of the Soviet Slavs.”
The Soviets engaged in a strategy that “used the civilian population as a strategic pawn”‘ and the Holocaust affirmers don’t blink an eye. That’s just run-of-the-mill war stuff. Yet those same people use the fact that Germany opted to feed their people first as evidence of Nazi genocidal intents. Levels of hypocrisy that are off the charts.
When Holocaust affirmers charge the Nazis with deliberately starving the Soviets and don’t the surrounding circumstances they are being criminally one-sided. This is why it is important to know both sides of the story. You can do that by continuing to read my blog, and by checking out the revisionists sources I reference.
So there we have it. I thank History Speaks (I mean, Herbert Williams) for providing me with content and many teachable moments for my readers.