Mattogno on Pripjet Marshes reclamation

[offlinejnovitz]

On the March Smith report, Thomas Kues reviews Carlo Mattogno's latest work on Chelmno and states

concludes that Chelmno functioned as a delousing and transit camp, from where the deportees were sent further east via the Poznań-Warsaw-Minsk railway,
possibly to the Pripjet marshes in western Belarus, where land reclamation projects were underway.

Is anything much known about these reclamation projects? How were they affected by such things as the increasing partisan warfare that took place in at least some parts of the Pripjet marsches (however, it was a very big area and this does not preclude safer regions)

There appear to be a number of echos about swamps and the fate of Jews in some german documents.
First would be Adolf Hitler's table talk where he claimed that no one can tell him he cant send the Jews off to the marshier parts of Russia. The other would be Himmler's alleged instruction to the SS Cavalry - drive them into the marsches.

I have already posted an exercept from the Israelische Wochenblatt of 27 Nov 42

Taeglich fahren von Berlin Zuege nach dem Osten teilweise in die Gehttos, zum anderen Teile zur Drainage in den Gebieten Ostpolens und Russland.
Daily trains travel from Berlin to the east, partly to the ghettos, the other part to drainage in the areas of East Poland and Russia

On the 17 April 1942 regarding Slovakia the same newssheet had

Die Slowakei
ist dazu uebergegangen, die Juden aus ihrem Gebiete auszuweisen, nachdem diesen das ganze Vermoegen abgenommen wurde. Die Zuege fahren manchmal nach Lodz und Warschau, dann wieder weiter nach Riga und Lublin, und erst in der letzten Woche sind wider zahlreiche Eisenbahnzuege in der Richtung nach Polen abgefahren. Es heisst, dass zwischen der deutschen und slowakischen Regierung jetzt eine Vereinbarung zustande gekommen sei, wonach an der polnisch-slowakischen Grenze Gehttostaedte errichtet werden. Innenminister Mach erklaerte in einer Konferenz mit der Auslandpresse, dass taeglich einige Eisenbahnzuege mit arbeitsfahigen Juden und Juedinnen die Slowakei verlassen. Es handle sich um den letzten Schritt zur Loesung der Judenfrage in der Slowakei. Jeder Jude koenne 50 kg an Eigentum mit sich nehmen. Die Juden, so sagten Mach, werden nicht in ein geheimnisvolles Sumpfgebiet geschickt, eine solche Gefahr drohe nicht, aber sie werden arbeit muessen. Zuerst meinte er, kommen die getauften Juden an die Reihe; an einem Tage seien 550 Taufen vorgekommen, die ber nichts nuetzen werden, da das Aussiedlungsgesetz auf der grundlage der Rassenzugehoerigkeit aufgebaut sei.

In part: "The Jews, according to Mach [Interiorminister] will not be sent off to a secret swamp area, such a fate did not threaten them, but they would have to work"

On 28th August 1942 regarding Poland it reported

In Polen
geht eine neue Politik dahin, anstelle der kleineren Ghettos eine Anzahl groessere zu errichten, weil dadurch die spaetere Auswanderung erleichtert werde. Im Lager von Belsyce sind 9000 Juden aus Holland, Deutschland, Osterreich und der Slowakei eingetroffen. Aus Warschau wurde eine Anzahl Juden an die Front geschickt, um dort Festungsarbeiten durchzufuehren. Etwa 6000 Juden wurden "weiter ostwaerts" mit unbestimmetem Ziel wegeschickt. Die polnische Polizei im Ghetto wurde durch litauische, die einer anti-juedischen Gruppe angehoeren,

" In Poland a new political course is taking shape, in place of small ghettos, a number will be built in order to ease a latter emigration. In the Belzec camp 9000 Jews from Holand, Germany, Austria and Slovakia have arrived. From Warsaw a number of Jews were sent to the Front, in order to carry out fortificationswork there. Around 6000 Jews were "further eastwards" to an unknown destination sent off. The polish police in the ghetto were replaced by a lithaunian force who belong to an anti_Jewish organisation.

Does Mattogno find much references to land reclamation work in the Pripjet with or without Jews?

[offlinejnovitz]

Leaving aside the bizarre phraseology, academics have to bend over backwards if they allow anything other than pure extermination slip into their narratives, I came across this

Hans Frank even made a specific
proposal to Hitler about the best way to eliminate Jews. In July 1941, shortly after the
launching of Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, he recommended that the
Pripet marshes be attached to his territory, the Government General, and that the three
million or so Jews living under his rule be worked to death draining the land and
undertaking new construction projects there.

http://www.hicsocial.org/social2003proc ... ousden.pdf

Was this the so-called Garden of Eden meeting where Hitler laid out his plans for making European Russia the bread-basket of Europe? Or according to Browning et al. decided on the extermination of the Jews.

Did the Pripet marshes draining go ahead outside the GG?

[offline Hannover]

Why isn't the German original of this alleged Hans Frank document shown? No doubt it doesn't really say what the English text claims. This is so typical.

- Hannover

[offlinejnovitz]

I don't know the author didnt reference it, I expect he was just dealing with a secondary source. I do have quote from his diary about exploiting the Pripet marshes - needless to say there was nothing about working Jews to death to do so.

However, the projects to drain the marshes have been studied and appear, according to historical scholarship, to have been abandoned in late 1941.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/neal-ascherson/imagined-soil

This was not just an argument that engineering works could be aesthetically pleasing. It was the germ of an approach developed, powerfully but ambiguously, by the Nazis after 1933. Blackbourn’s examination of Nazi environmental thinking, murky and contradictory as it was, forms the core of his chapter on ‘Race and Reclamation’, the colossal and fortunately unrealised plan for the transformation of the Pripet region in the old Polish province of Polesie (now in Belarus). It is the most suggestive and fascinating section of his book.

For Nazi ideologues, the traditional contrast between ‘natural’ landscape and sites of development or settlement was old-fashioned. They decided to collapse it. Starting from the idea that the ‘right’ sort of development should be considered ‘cultural’, they went much further. The distinction between natural and non-natural should no longer be defined by the mere fact of human intervention. Instead, the distinction should be what Nazis called ‘political’ – in other words, racial. A landscape shaped by a race destined by inexorable laws of nature to dominate was ‘natural’. The environment in which inferior races lived was in contrast degenerate and backward. Where Germans had shaped the earth, they had done so ‘in harmony with nature’. Konrad Meyer, the leader of the fanatically confident team in charge of the Pripet plan, wrote:

If the new living spaces of the settlers are therefore to become a new home, the planned and close-to-nature design [Gestaltung] of the landscape is an essential precondition. That is one of the foundations for the securing of Germandom. It is not enough to settle our race in those areas and eliminate people of an alien race. Rather, these spaces have to take on a character that corresponds to the nature of our being.

The war turned against the Germans before the plan could be put into effect. The only detail to be carried through was the ‘elimination’ of the Jews. (As early as August 1941, the SS had murdered some fifteen thousand Jews in the Baranowicze-Pinsk area of Polesie alone.) No marshes were drained, and few German settlers arrived. But had the General Plan for the East been realised, only a Nazi eye could have recognised the new landscape as ‘natural’. On the reclaimed marshland, a Frederican chequerboard of squared-off fields and identical villages would have appeared. The Large-Scale Green Plan set aside conservation land in each village, ordained the planting of deciduous trees and proposed to convert poor arable fields into pasture, in order to prevent desiccation after drainage. Nazi development policy was often enlightened in detail. It is startling to learn from Blackbourn that Hitler himself launched a plan to generate energy with windfarms (but this was in 1942 and nothing came of it), and that – apparently – he ordered the cancellation of the Pripet scheme in late 1941 on environmental grounds, fearing that it would create a dustbowl (Versteppung).

Review of Neal Ascherson of:
The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany by David Blackbourn
Cape, 497 pp, £30.00, January 2006, ISBN 0 224 06071 6

This is not to say Mattogno is necessarily wrong, but he certainly needs to do more work if he wishes to demonstrate this was really a destination for European Jews.