Himmler in Minsk the defining moment for the Holocaust

[MrNobody]

He served the prosecution by suggesting that Himmler at Wewelsburg demanded (rather than merely prophesied) the deaths of millions of Slavs and Jews

He can suggest all he likes, in fact he could have declared that Himmler ordered the Jews to be sent to the Core of the Sun by the Himmelsfahrt Sonder-Raumschiff Dienst blasting off round the clock, but without corroborating evidence it's just not evidence.

According to Browning, Zelewski gave the Bundesarchiv two of his diary books. The second was in the original version. The first volume was not, but was retyped, and according to Browning the Bundesarchiv “said we cannot certify this as a copy of the original because they didn't get the original so they alert the reader to the fact that it is not the original diary book of the man, so you can indeed be alerted to the fact that it...possibly had been changed."

Which brings me to another point, the chain of evidence, which seems to be almost universally lacking & ignored for those supporting the Holocaust Narrative.
Brownings Statements, Opinions, Observations & Speculations can not be considered as evidence for anything, Brownings Statement about a "retyped" Diary could have should have been backed up by either the testimony of a representative a letter or an Affidavit from the Bundesarchiv, all of which would have been easy to obtain, yet we have nothing except his word

However if all true, we can also speculate that the Diary was retyped by Bach-Zelewski because that section of the Diary contained Personal entries which he simply did not want anyone else to see, such as a liaison with a mistress or similar, it did not/does not have to pertain to the Holocaust, after all, it is a Diary, not an official Army Document, it was personal & in fact he didn't even need to lodge a copy with the Bundesarchiv but he did so anyway of his own free will which is obvious otherwise the original Diary would have been forcibly lodge by the authorities.
And as you yourself have noted :

Even without having seen it I am confident that B-Z’s diary, whether copy or original, contains nothing to support claims of a genocidal massacre at Minsk or elsewhere; otherwise it would been entered as an exhibit

Back to the chain of evidence & why it is so important.

Nathan, as you noted :

in the written answers submitted (from abroad) to the Eichmann trial in May 1961

But what isn't made clear to the layperson reading this material is the fact that when/whilst Bach-Zelewski was submitting this testimony, there would have been not less than 5 other people present (that's a conservative estimate)
1. A Justice of the Peace, Justice, Judge or similar empowered Judicial Officer
2. Bach-Zelewski's own Legal Representative, to ensure he wasn't implicating himself & that he was immune from future prosecution.
3. A Representative from the Defendant (Eichmann)
4. A Representative for the Prosecution
5. An Impartial Witness

Understand also that at this very point, the Prosecution through their Representative have the right to view any evidence/material & may examine, cross examine or dispute the Witness or Material being presented & may even submit for the Witness & Evidence to be found inadmissible through the Presiding Judicial Officer, Further to that, if the Witness & sighted Evidence is accepted, the Prosecution can still have the Witness & Evidence struck at the Eichmann trial if the Presiding Judge for that Trial deems that an appropriate course of action.

If Bach-Zelewski is a Liar using a Sanitized & White Washed Diary you have to ask yourself why it was still submitted as evidence & who benefited?

It really is a mute point anyway, the Eichmann Trial like all the other Holocaust Trials was a foregone conclusion, they got the only outcome that was ever going to be possible from these show trials no matter what the Eyewitness & Evidence stated.

Again as you have said :

the question remains: when did a firing squad of partisans become a massacre of innocents? It cannot be honestly sourced to BZ. One villain of the piece may be Professor Richard Evans, who footnotes this claim to Himmler’s desk diary of 15 August. I suspect it will lead back merely to one of Himmler’s commentators.

It seems simple enough to me, Himmler's Diary as I understand it more or less shows an Itinerary, so we can surmise Himmler's entry for August 15 was :
August 15, bound for Minsk for inspection of ongoing Anti-Partisan Operations.

He arrives, has a tour, Confers with Wolff etc, inspects the Einsatzgruppe, rests, whatever, by the 17th he witnesses a Legal Field Courts Martial & witnesses the execution of up to 30 Partisans.

then some Post War scholar (Evans) comes along & the entire story changes, the rest is history as made by the Holohoax industry.

[Sailor]

Btw are there any protocols from the Wolff trial or was it conducted like all the others, without one being taken (remember the Auschwitz trial proceedings has been preserved only because someone decided to audiotape it)?

There were about 2000 Nazi crime trials held in Germany.

Are you saying that there were no protocols taken during those trials?

Why do you come to this conclusion?

fge

[Sailor]

First it needs to be said the the 'partisans' (called 'terrorists' today), were subject to legal execution under international law.

Partisans and terrorists are not the same.

A partisan is a member of an irregular military force formed to oppose control of an area by a foreign power or by an army of occupation behind the front line.

A terrorist is someone who commits violence or other other harmful acts against civilians for political or other ideological goals.

Insurgency is defined as an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict.

You got the right person there? Bach-Zelewski

Problem is, his Diary does not support the allegations made against Himmler
The killings on August 17 simply do not tally with the official story.

Where can I read Bach-Zelewski's diary?

fge

[Hannover]

First it needs to be said the the 'partisans' (called 'terrorists' today), were subject to legal execution under international law.

Partisans and terrorists are not the same.

A partisan is a member of an irregular military force formed to oppose control of an area by a foreign power or by an army of occupation behind the front line.

A terrorist is someone who commits violence or other other harmful acts against civilians for political or other ideological goals.

Insurgency is defined as an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict.

fge

Incorrect, one man's 'partisan' is another man's 'terrorist'. The title 'terrorist' is applied to any attacker of US troops. The US Navy even claims attacks upon their ships to be 'terrorist' acts. Any acts of resistance to US or Israeli agression are 'terrorists' acts.

Call them what you will, but non-uniformed combatants were illegal in WWII, that = 'partisans'. These 'partisans' engaged in many civilian deaths and deserve to be called terrorists. They cannot claim innocence under the law.

- Hannover

[Mannstein]

Bad things happen during war and military occupations. In Berlin after the war a young Hitler Youth launched an anti tank grenade against Russian troops. The Soviets rounded up 300 civilians and shot them. Most were women and old men.

The Americans were also not above committing such outrages. In the fall of 1944 US troops burned down the village of Wallenberg because they encountered resistance. This according to "After the Reich" by Giles Macdonogh, page 235.

In all German cities and towns the Allies posted warnings that reprisals would be taken against the civilian population if an Allied serviceman were harmed a German.

[nathan]

Perhaps I should have said that my second quotation from Browning came from the Canadian Zundel trial, where Browning was under oath and subject to hostile cross-examination. It is most unlikely that he would be so foolish to as to err on a simple matter of fact so easily verifiable. I am confident that the two volumes in the Bundesarchiv are as he describes, though I do not know which, if either, contains the passage in question.

[MrNobody]

Perhaps I should have said that my second quotation from Browning came from the Canadian Zundel trial, where Browning was under oath and subject to hostile cross-examination. It is most unlikely that he would be so foolish to as to err on a simple matter of fact so easily verifiable. I am confident that the two volumes in the Bundesarchiv are as he describes, though I do not know which, if either, contains the passage in question.

Do I detect some doubt?
Never mind, I have a better idea, come! let us all engage in the Germano-Vulcan Mind Meld & use our unique powers to peer into the Vaults of the Bundesarchiv, ready!
1....2....3!

Nope I got nothing, anybody else?

alas, perhaps one has to be an Aryan pure blood, damn my father's father for being a Celtic-Romano-Anglo-Saxon-Norman!

[nathan]

Someone last year was searching for a transcript of the WOLFF trial. Did he have any luck?

MrNobody’s main point, recall, was that some website stories exceeded the wartime diary entry that Bach-Zelewsky submitted from afar to the Eichmann trial of 1961. That by itself could prove nothing more than an anti-partisan execution following a court-martial. Against MrN, I argued that a silent diary is hardly “compelling” evidence that nothing worse happened. Laurence Dahl pointed us to the 1964 Wolff trial as likely occasion for claims that something worse did happen. Its indictment moves us along from thirty partisans including Jews to “a hundred partisans and Jews”. To complete the circle I added Professor Evans’ piece on the findings of the same trial. That took us to 120 Jews and “partisans” - apparently Professor Evan’s quotation marks. So B-Z’s anti-partisan operation including Jews has become an anti-Jewish operation using “partisans” as a pretext.

Here once more is the Evans link:

http://www.hdot.org/trial/defense/evans/530cxivB

(If no longer available, google e.g Minsk Shooting and take the cached version.)

It would be of interest in a minor way to know whether or not David Irving was mistaken – perhaps confusing B-Z with Wolff himself? - when he confidently asserted (in his libel case Reply) that “Bach-Zewlenski testified on July 24, 1964 during the Wolff Trial that in his view 'Hitler knew nothing of the mass destruction of the Jews,' and that 'The entire thing began with Himmler.'”

Professor Evans insinuates that Irving must be wrong in this because “in fact” B-Z was brought to court to help convict Wolff (true) and because B-Z may have had heard Himmler share blame with Hitler and therefore must have believed him. From these non-sequiturs it is clear that Evans has not been able to examine a transcript B-Z’s courtroom testimony to check Irving’s claim.

Readers without German may imagine that Evans in his para 3 is quoting verbatim BZ’s very own account of a Himmler’s words at Minsk, as independently corroborated by seven others. But Evans footnote 274 shows that he has artfully divided what is in fact the German Court’s very own account of a Himmler’s words at Minsk, based on the concurring testimony of 8 witnesses who do include Bach-Zelewski.

Wolff already knew in June 1941 the fate that awaited the Jews, according to Evans, because he had heard Himmler at Wewelsburg predicting a decimation of up to thirty million “Slavs and Jews.” It seems that our source for the incriminating phrase is Bach-Z’s memory. But in his affidavit 3712-PS, B-Z spoke of “a reduction of the Slavic peoples by some thirty million souls’. On the IMT stand on January 7 1946 he stuck to “Slavs”, despite a leading question from Colonol Pokrovsky that tried to conflate two distinct issues.

That Professor Richard Evans accepts something as true does not invariably mean that it is false. Perhaps B-Z was willing to remember in 1964 what he twice forgot to say in 1946. Still, I would like to see a transcript.

[nathan]

Someone has asked me why I fancied that Irving might be mistaken.
Irving’s source was a German contemporary newspaper account. It surprised me that so a skilled a witness as Bach-Z should say anything that the court would not want to hear. It would not want to hear that Hitler did not “know”, especially if Wolff himself had made that very claim. The unpublished transcripts of the Wolff trial are probably buried somewhere in the Fritz Bauer Institute. We know them only as refracted through the Justiz und NS Verbrechen volumes, a collection of court judgements which themselves come refracted through the opaque editorship of Fritz Bauer himself


It would be a yet bigger surprise if B-Z said in court anything that would incriminate himself. He would have been nailing himself as an accessory if he backtracked on his earlier claim that the Minsk executions were purely an anti-partisan operation carried out with some formality. As to the phrase “Jews and Slavs”, which I myself have repeated uncritically, I have seen no proof that it was ever uttered. The Wewelesburg speech and one Minsk speech make up half the evidence which earned Wolf f fifteen years as an accessory to murder under the German penal code. He was brought to trial to prove that he knew things he publicly said he did not know. His having heard the Wewelsburg speech in 1941 made part of the case that he knew that certain death awaited the deported Warsaw Jews in 1942. The case that the 100 or so Minsk killings were purely racial murders, and known as such to Wolff, depends upon connecting them and Wolff to the summarised Himmler speech that Evans says took place “after the shooting” which is his free translation for the Munich court’s “im Anschluss an der Erschiessung” .

In 1949 Wolff had twice been charged in a German court with the Nuremberg offence of belonging to a criminal organisation while knowing of its crimes. He did indeed confess to knowing of the persecution and ill-treatment of Jews, which were crimes enough, but not to any wartime knowledge of an extermination programme. (The British put in a good word for him and he got off lightly)

[Hannover]

nathan said:

The unpublished transcripts of the Wolff trial are probably buried somewhere in the Fritz Bauer Institute. We know them only as refracted through the Justiz und NS Verbrechen volumes, a collection of court judgements which themselves come refracted through the opaque editorship of Fritz Bauer himself

see the 'Fritz Bauer Institute' shot down here:
'How the Auschwitz Trial failed'
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=2239

Richard Baer

He was the last camp commander of Auschwitz and was accused for murder in 1960 (Auschwitz process Frankfurt). He disclaimed the existence of "gas chambers" for two years. One week before the start of the trial he died although he was healthy. The prosecutor, Fritz Bauer (jew btw), let them cremate the dead body immediately before autopsy

from:
- WANTED: Real witnesses to gas chambers
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=1097

- Hannover

[nathan]

Idly googling for Wolff, I stumbled upon a reference to this very discussion.

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot. ... visit.html

and found a charming reference to someone close to my heart, about whom Jonathan Harrison writes:

==== ==== ==== ==== ====
Fifthly, this moronic babble was then joined by 'nathan', who deliberately misquoted the evidence given by Christopher Browning to the Irving-Lipstadt trial:

‘[Bach-Zelewski's diary] was mentioned during the Irving trial by Professor Browning, who deemed it “doctored and sanitized” because it contains no evidence of genocide.’

This was simply a lie. Browning never said "it contains no evidence of genocide". Browning simply claimed that Bach-Zelewski doctored the diary to remove evidence of his own guilt:

"He did [Browning speaking] send apparently his doctored and sanitized diary to the Bundesarchiv all nicely typed up and all references to things that you [Irving] have referred to, that he probably has many hundreds of thousands on his conscious (sic) nicely deleted.
=== === === ===

“Moronic babble”... “ deliberate misquotation”... “simply a lie”... “ monkeys”. That’s the style!.


A paraphrase is not a misquotation. As one can see, Browning gave no reason to believe things had been “nicely deleted” from the submitted diaries, beyond the fact that they were not there. My paraphrase is inaccurate only if Browning would not have characterised as genocidal all those “probable” but missing massacres of hundreds of thousands. But I think he would.

I was actually siding with Browning to the following extent: any absence of record in the submitted diaries could never have counted as proof positive for an absence of fact. No invading army can subdue an insurgent population without major atrocities performed as calculated acts of policy. Would anyone expect an IDF record of the recent slaughter in Gaza to be anything but heavily laundered? Can anyone believe that the nemesis of the Warsaw uprising was not accountable for war crimes? That was the Nuremberg view of him, to be sure, but this was he sustained the Nuremberg view of others, namely that anti-partisan warfare was for them merely a pretext for the planned extermination of whole populations.

I see no sign that Browning has actually been able to study the Bundesarchiv volumes, but he certainly would know as much as we have all been allowed to know about the Bletchley Park decodes. Bach-Zelewski was in charge of the central sector police . On at least seven occasions between 18 July and 30 August 1941, according to FH Hinsley, the police decrypts for that sector gave details of mass shootings including victims described variously as “Jews”, “Jewish plunderers”, “Jewish Bolsheviks” or “Russian soldiers” in numbers varying from a hundred to several thousand. On 7 August B-Z himself reported that 30,000 executions had been carried out since the police arrived in Russia. Browning regards all this as genocidal decimation leading eventually to the gas chambers. Hinsley, who had studied all the unplublished decrypts, interpreted these atrocities as something evoked by, and corresponding to, the increasing scale of the partisan resistance.

However, a general certainty that B-Z bore responsibility for thousands of unrecorded killings of innocent suspects and hostages does not amount to proof positive that any particular execution was a racial massacre - let alone one that was ceremonially attended by top SS brass.

Mr Harrison writes:

“Firstly, Mr Nobody claimed, falsely, that Holocaust websites derive all their information about Himmler's visit to Minsk from Bach-Zelewski's testimony to the Eichmann trial.”

No, no, no. MrN’s central point was precisely that those websited could not have derived their “information” from B-Z’s Eichmann testimony. His complaint was that the ARC and H.E.A.R.T sites tell a taller tale than B-Z while giving as their references nothing beyond vague bibliographies of secondary works. Harrison is scornful of Laurentz Dahl for nothing worse, as far as I can see, than supplying a useful primary source about the Wolff trial. But he fanfares his own independent discovery of a secondary source about the Wolff trial which proves - wouldja believe - to be one considered by us monkeys a month before his attack on us. I have conceded, in my gracious way, that not everything coming via Professor Evans is necessarily false. Himmler’s Dienstkalender entry for August 15 may well for all I know contain a handwritten scrawl by Himmler, eg. “attended execution of a hundred and twenty Jews shot as ‘partisans’ ” Seeing will be believing. But if such an entry does exist I am surprised that it has not become famous for pre-dating by four months the much discussed entry for December 18 (“Jewish question- execute as partisans.” )

Apparently the hundreds of pages of typewritten and handwritten appointments schedules of the “Himmler’s diary” were maintained by Himmler's staff, with scrawls, notes and observations lodged by the SS leader himself. The British ‘Guardian’ wrote in 1999 “The Hamburg team [of editors, led by Peter Witte] have combined them with other relevant archive material in Germany, the United States and elsewhere to produce a comprehensive chronology of Himmler's activities in the two-year period”

No doubt a visit to Minsk is scheduled for 15 August. I remain in doubt how far the entry goes beyond that. I remain in doubt because I have no faith in any part of Professor Evans “expert” reporting, which was an act of considerable prostitution. I road-tested his presentation of the Wolff trial on two careful readers. Both thought they were reading Bach-Zelewski’s very own account of words uttered by Himmler “after the shooting” or even “during the shooting” , as confirmed by seven other witnesses. Mr

Harrison, who is not a careful reader, has been likewise misled.

http://www.hdot.org/trial/defense/evans/530cxivB

What is not fully clear to me is whether the words in Evans footnote 274 come from the Judgment of the 1964 Schwurgericht, being their summary of the “unanimous” testimony of eight witnesses (including B-Z) made in connection with the shootings; or whether they come, at yet a further remove, from a summary of this judgement made by the editors of the Justiz und NS-Verbrechen vol XX. It is likely (pace Irving) that B-Z would readily confirm testimony that put the blame on Hitler. And he would have nothing to lose by confirming that Himmler at some time in Minsk called for the destruction of the Jews. But it seems to me vastly improbable that he would have agreed to incriminate himself by allowing the 15 August executions to be mapped into an extermination program.

[nathan]

Around 1970, six years after his last trial, Karl Wolff admitted that the people shot at Minsk were Jewish prisoners. Having in 1941 five million extra Jews suddenly on their hands, too many “to emigrate”, the Nazis could find no other solution than to kill them all.

Actually that is not true. But it is the impression left with my two careful readers after I showed them a Youtube clip from the old British TV series The World at War. It is a natural misperception.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6pRo2pqzd8
If that does not work try googling: wolff minsk interview

At his third trial in 1964 Wolff maintained the Minsk execution was an anti-partisan operation. He believed the transports to Treblinka were part of the mass expulsion programme which had replaced the policy of formal emigration (which was still going on in August 1941.)

Intercut with footage from executions, Himmler’s inspection tours and the Laurence Olivier commentary, we hear Wolff’s own translated words. But these words contain nothing he had not said through his three trials, minus any talk of partisans. Apart from its self-serving elements, his account seems credible enough. Himmler witnesses his first execution; he is sickened; he bears up. His execution squad commanders must bear up also; so he gives them a pep talk with the kind of rhetoric that never passes the lips of real fighting soldiers.

Perhaps Wolff had by 1970 changed his story to get out of jail, but there is no evidence of his doing so in this clip. Himmler may well have made this the occasion for a Jew-means-Bolshevik tirade, but Wolff himself does not say that. Bach-Zelewski, if he had his head screwed on, would not have said so either.
=======

I see that In my haste I have given an inexcusably bad translation of the famous 18 Dec entry of Himmler’s Dienstkalandar: ("Judenfrage? Als Partisanen auszurotten") Ausrotten is usually translated as exterminate or eradicate. Hang your head, nathan; there are no innocent mistranslations. This very morning , googling Dienstkalendar/Dienstkalender I came upon Judge Gray’s Judgment section 6.82

6.82 From about that date, according to the Defendants, Hitler made repeated references to the extermination of the Jews and to doing away with them. On 16 November 1941 Rosenberg met Hitler and Himmler, who the next day (according to his DIENSTKALENDAR) told Heydrich by telephone that he had discussed the Beseitigung (doing away with) of the Jews….
6.83 The Defendants attach significance to Hitler's speech to the Gauleiter on 12 December 1941 (already referred to in section V) when, according to Goebbels's diary, he said:
"... Concerning the Jewish question the Fuhrer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied that, if they were once again to cause a world war, the result would be their own destruction. That was no figure of speech. The world war is here, the destruction (Vernichtung) of the Jews must be the inevitable consequence… ‘

The primary meaning of Beseitigung is removal; the primary meaning of doing away with is murder. The German original of the last Goebbels sentence reads:

Der Weltkrieg ist da, die Vernichtung des Judentums muß die notwendige Folge sein.

[Hannover]

Had all this been true as the propaganda states we would be finding the mass graves for such sites. Not one 'holocaust' mass grave as alleged can be shown. Not one.

- Hannover