Oh, that discussion. I thought you had lost interest in it
If you were hoping to enter the Million Dollar Challenge and prove telepathy, you failed miserably.
and I didn't think your responses added anything to the conversation.
On the contrary, they evidently shut you up for at least a day, since you had to strain to think about how to come back in the ongoing discussion.
I mean, anybody who says a Soviet POW who could choose between being treated the way the Nazis treated Soviet POWs or being treated the way the Nazis treated their own guards actually had a choice is not familiar enough with the conditions under which Nazi Germany held Soviet POWs to participate in a discussion such as this.
You are simply misrepresenting the point made and misunderstanding it, as usual. I stated that "The Trawnikis all had a choice at some point about whether they wanted to serve or not". The choice wasn't necessarily in the POW camps. Some of the recruits were simply plucked out for what they thought was a labour detachment, others were asked to volunteer. Then they got to Trawniki, and they had to sign oaths and declarations of loyalty. They were given a chance to say 'no'. That chance was not given to the Sonderkommandos. The Trawnikis had opportunities to avoid the situation which were unavailable to the Sonderkommandos.
Rest assured, Demjanjuk's defense lawyers tried on the coercion argument in court, and it didn't persuade the judges.
Just because the Germans treated Soviet POWs better than your hero Stalin treated Soviet POWs when they returned home after the war doesn't mean life was easy for captured Soviet soldiers.
Utterly false. 100s of 1000s of liberated Soviet POWs were simply reincorporated into the Red Army before the end of the war. The Soviets screened all of their citizens who had spent time abroad, including POWs, at the end of the war, in filitration camps. They did not send everyone to the GULag. They concentrated on those Soviet POWs who had collaborated in uniform with the Nazis, as is surely unsurprising since such people were traitors.
The Nazis, by contrast, organised their POW camp system in 1941-2 in such a way that 2 million starved to death that winter, and 2.7 million died overall. If you can show evidence that Stalin allowed more than 2.7 million returning Soviet POWs died,
then you can say he treated them worse than the Nazis.
Anybody who thinks a Jew in a ghetto was only capable of doing what the Germans told him to do while somebody in PRISON retains some free will doesn't understand the concept of life in prison, life in a ghetto, or free will.
Where did I say that Jews in ghettos were only capable of doing what the Germans told him to do? I did mention escapes from work camps and escapes from marches by Jews, which would suggest that the Jews in confinement did not simply do what the Germans told them to.
We can of course offer a comparison which is rather instructive. Up to May 1944, 2,836,639 million Soviet POWs arrived in the so-called OKW zone. Of these 2.8 million POWs, 66,694 escaped. They were under guard, of course, but moved around a lot and not always confined in camps with barbed wire, although that was common. So we have an escape rate of 2.35%. The Soviet POWs were under considerable threat to life and limb because of Nazi policies. Indeed, 40% died in the camps of the OKW zone, 1,136,236. (The rest of the deaths occurred in the OKH zone behind the Eastern Front.) All this is from NOKW-2125, an overview of statistics for Soviet POWs to May 1944.
Jews likewise escaped from ghettos and fled to the forests in Poland. But whereas the 3.3 million Jews of Poland included the elderly, women and children, the Soviet POWs were all military-age men. So they started with a huge disadvantage. Still, escape rates were often better from the ghettos than for Soviet POWs, despite the fact that many (not all) ghettos were walled in or surrounded by barbed wire and guarded, like POW camps, and despite a shoot-to-kill order for fugitive Jews.
We even have Great Escape-like cases where Jews dug underground tunnels to break out of enclosed ghettos, as at Kurenets in eastern Poland - 400 took flight this way. And were then hunted down and killed, just like in the movie. The Nazis shot 50 Allied POWs in the Great Escape in a special reprisal, but they shot about 50,000 Polish Jews on the run, as a matter of routine policy.
Jews in ghettos also resisted the Nazis in Warsaw, Bialystok, Lwow, Vilnius, Minsk Mazowiecki, and many other locations.
Once in labour camps, Jews continued to escape, breaking out of Poniatowa by distracting Trawniki guards in one case in the spring of 1943, and organising a successful linkup with partisans in another Lublin region labour camp in August 1943. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum survived the Warsaw deportations in 1942, was rounded up in 1943 and sent to the Trawniki labour camp (next to the training facility). He escaped and returned to Warsaw to go into hiding there, but was arrested and shot as a fugitive Jew in 1944.
Your description of life for the sondercommando sounds like your knowledge of this subtopic was gleaned from watching a bad made-for-TV docudrama like "Holocaust" or "Escape from Sobibor."
Not even a nice try, but no.
Your attempts at hand-waving away all questions just shows you don't understand basic human behavior. Fear of instant death for failing to perform an extremely unpleasant task for which you have had no training and no experience with the knowledge that your own lifespan is a few weeks at the most isn't going to be conducive to creating the most efficient factory of death the world has ever seen.
Wow, what a lot of strawmen. Firstly we were discussing the Sonderkommandos in all the camps, so the question of which was most efficient is irrelevant, especially since you are arguing purely from incredulity to dispute all of the camps. Unless you've decided the Holocaust did happen after all, because it seems you want to have your cake and eat it by also making an implied antisemitic jibe about Jewish behaviour.
Secondly, the camps did not have to be perfectly 'efficient', they simply had to function. And there is plenty of evidence that there were inefficiencies, eg the fact that three of the bigger death camps saw revolts from the workers, as well as escapes, refusals, resistance, suicides, and a very high turnover of workers because the SS killed so many.
Thirdly, your claim of 'knowing they would be killed in a few weeks' is a misrepresentation, and you don't provide a source for it. Nor have I at any point stated that this was the case. It is true that such sentiments widely circulate based on hearsay, but they have no historical basis.
At Treblinka under Eberl, life expectancy was down to mere days for most but not all of the Sonderkommandos there. The workers were replaced continuously because so many were arriving. This was massively inefficient, since it meant there was a huge turnover and thus, many escapes, and the camp broke down entirely when too many transports arrived.
The new commandant Stangl changed the system and 'stabilised' the Sonderkommandos. This meant, feeding them better rather than working them to exhaustion then shooting them; and it meant an end to mass replacement every few days. The prisoners who ended up in the Sonderkommando thus had the prospect of surviving longer than a few days or few weeks, as long as they worked. If they stopped working, or became ill, then they would die. They could not reasonably expect to be allowed to live in the long term. They lived instead for the short term, but the knowledge that not everyone would be replaced in a matter of weeks gave the Sonderkommandos the opportunity to plan escapes and plan revolts. Stangl came from Sobibor, where he had used the same system.
So it's no surprise that there were eventually revolts in both Sobibor and Treblinka. It's also no surprise that surveillance by the guards and other measures prevented revolts from occurring earlier, and also resulted in a high turnover of workers in these camps, caused in part by decimations of the prisoner workforce in reprisal for escapes, or the suicide of resistance ring leaders mentioned by LemmyCaution.
Birkenau was similar; the SS created a Sonderkommando in the spring of 1942 which was subjected to harsh conditions and had evidently a fairly high turnover. But we know little more about it because nobody really survived from it. A separate burial commando was created which was not as restricted, suffered a high mortality rate but has some survivors from it. Most of the information about the gas chambers in 1942 comes from the SS and from skilled prisoner workers who helped construct the killing sites (they were not told more than they needed to know to carry out their micro-task, but could work out what was involved).
In December 1942, the Birkenau Sonderkommando was liquidated entirely, and replaced with a new Sonderkommando that started out with several hundred men from the Zichenau district ghettos. This force was created with about 400 prisoners, and underwent a massive turnover through to October 1944. But there were no liquidations every few weeks. The prisoners actually mutinied early on saying to the SS, you can kill us if you want but stop beating us up. So the SS backed down, and allowed the Sonderkommando privileges such as wearing normal clothes, growing their hair longer than the usual shave-cut, and turning a quasi-blind eye to the Sonderkommandos pilfering food from the luggage of the victims. In February 1944, the 400 Sonderkommandos were cut in half by a selection. By this time, i.e. 14 months in, the turnover was at least 100% anyhow.
Then the Birkenau Sonderkommando was restocked to 400 by the start of May 1944, and more than doubled in size to 900 by September 1944. In this period, a contingent of Greek Jews selected involuntarily for the Sonderkommando refused to join it, and was liquidated en masse. Other members continued to die from being maltreated or shot, or because they committed suicide, but the influx of food with the Hungarian Action meant there were fewer cases of deaths from exhaustion.
That Sonderkommando, of course, revolted on October 7, 1944, and was reduced down to 200 men again. By January 1945 there were only 100 left. Most succeeded in escaping or blending in to the ordinary prisoner population during the evacuation, but a few were identified and shot as bearers of secrets.
Your explanations of how the system would work are nothing but hand waving to mask your lack of understanding. Witness this exchange from Post #1070:
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How did they know this? [How did the Jews know they would be killed if they failed to work?]
Being told, directly witnessing killings of anyone who stepped out of line.
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How high was the turnover rate?
Several hundred percent turnover rate as a minimum.
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What percentage of the sondercommando had only been on the job for a day or two at any given time?
At Treblinka under Eberl, 25-33% a day it would seem. Under Stangl, a much lower turnover rate.
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How many sondercommando killed themselves?
Quite a few according to the surviving members.
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Why didn't others refuse to work? They all knew they were going to be killed after a few weeks anyway.
Human behaviour varies. The desire to live is extremely powerful and will make people do almost anything to stay alive. But not everyone would react like that. Which is why the reactions varied.
Once over the initial shock, routinisation and desensitisation will keep people doing even the most unpleasant things. I presume you accept that desensitisation is a fairly well proven psychological phenomenon.
OK, so one third of the crew has no experience doing what they are suppose to do and didn't even know what they were going to do until they showed up on the job site. The entire sondercommando staff is liquidated every few weeks so whatever job they are performing can be done by the new kid with no experience as easily as the grizzled old veteran who has been doing the job for a few weeks.
Strawman, as explained.
So whatever task the Jews are assigned must be extremely simple because experience doing it confers no benefit. Also, making a mistake results in being shot and killed instantly. Sometimes the Jews are not killed instantly but severely beaten instead. But he'll be expected to continue performing the task following the beating. So the task assigned to the Jew must be simple enough to be done without any training and must be able to completed even when in severe pain. An individual Jew won't improvise because doing so and succeeding will give him no reward while doing so and failing will result in instant death. He knows improvising and failing or merely making a mistake will result in instant death because the Germans told him that would happen and because he is seeing his coreligionists being shot and killed willy nilly for the tiniest infraction. Given these parameters, draw me a work flowchart for completing the task of helping Jews off the train.
And more strawmen.
After you complete that assignment, you may try again to explain how documents proving that there were 200 workers in the Krema in Feb 1944 and 900 workers at the Krema in the summer of 1944 has any relevance. This is basically the Team holocaust strategy of masking lack of evidence for the holocaust by giving us evidence that isn't of the holocaust and saying that it is. Documents "referring to this unit as the Sondercommando quite explicitly" prove there were sondercommando. We know sondercommando existed. So what?
So quite a lot, actually. The documents corroborate the surviving witnesses for starters, which is generally regarded as rather important in evidentiary terms. A piece of evidence like the strength report for the men's camp in Birkenau in February 1944 showing that the work commando in the crematorium had been reduced by 200 men from 400 confirms eyewitnesses who say the same thing.
It also poses a huge problem for deniers, since by 1944 survival chances at Birkenau were generally fairly good. In any cohort of 200 people we should really have a survivor. Yet we don't have a single survivor saying 'yes I was in the Sonderkommando until February 1944 and then they transferred me'. Moreover, the survivors we do have from the 200 men who were not selected in February 1944, all describe conditions in the crematoria, and describe the gas chambers etc.
It would be exceedingly unlikely that all of the surviving Sonderkommandos who came forward to testify were all liars and none had actually worked in the crematoria, whereas the real Sonderkommandos had all remained silent.
If you think that the real Sonderkommandos were all killed by the Nazis in order to get out of this logical conundrum, then you face the problem of showing some evidence for this, and the further problem of having conceded a point which is testified to by the same Sonderkommando survivors you want to discredit.
The fact that there are documents labelling the prisoner detachment at the crematoria the 'Sonderkommando' links this detachment to the previous workforce at the Bunkers where there were no crematoria. It also refutes a claim by denier guru Mattogno who declared no such documents existed - he was wrong.
It also begs the question what was the Sonderkommando, which requires more of an answer than 'so what?'. And of course it corroborates all the witnesses inside and outside the Sonderkommando who referred to the work detachment as the Sonderkommando. Knowledge of the existence of the Sonderkommando was widespread through the ordinary inmate population of Birkenau.
So there are lots of ways in which the documents tell us all sorts of things. If archaeologists can reconstruct ancient civilisations from potsherds, then historians of the 20th Century can also reconstruct decivilising processes from diverse sources.
The most important point, however, is the corroboration offered to eyewitness testimonies by the documents. This is hardly the only example of corroboration by documents, as one can clearly see from the fact that Soviet and Polish investigators were told about gas chambers
first by witnesses
then found documents referring to gastight doors and a 'gassing cellar' which were clearly the same spaces discussed by the witnesses. The denier effort to ignore the witnesses and reinterpret the documents in splendid isolation is thus howlingly wrong and screamingly dishonest.
Your attempt to absolve Jews for all blame for the conditions in the camps might have worked pre-Demjanjuk 2012 but it won't anymore. Jews could've escaped from the camps because Jews did escape from the camps. Saying they had no choice except to participate in the killing operations and are therefore innocent while the Trawniki are guilty as accessories to murder because they could've deserted their post at anytime is another reason you can't be taken seriously.
The guilt of the Trawnikis doesn't depend solely on the opportunities they had to escape. The Trawnikis were as already stated, offered a choice to serve with the Nazis or not. They were paid, clothed, fed and armed. They were granted leave from the camp. They could desert if they wanted to. Those that did desert were not prosecuted like the ones who didn't. None of the Trawnikis who made it to the west are known to have deserted the camps. Demjanjuk certainly didn't, he continued to serve as a guard after being transferred from Treblinka.
The judgement that Trawnikis were accessories to murder also rests on the fact that Trawnikis were rotated through shooting gallery duty at the 'Lazarett' and used a large amount of deadly force inside the camps, in addition to guarding a death camp and supervising the slave labourers.
Most of all, the Trawnikis were armed and the Sonderkommandos were not.
The Jews were directly and exclusively in charge of pulling bodies out of the gas chambers and hoisting them up to the Krema to be burned. If they didn't do that, there wouldn't be any gassings until all the bodies decayed.
So? This isn't an act which would make anyone an accessory to murder.
The ghetto police were responsible for helping round up the Jews.
Firstly, the ghetto police didn't exist in the majority of ghettos because they were too small to have such an organisation. So the roundups were conducted in those cases exclusively by Nazis and collaborators. Secondly, even where there was a ghetto police there were many cases where they did not participate, either because the Nazis didn't trust them, or because they refused (and were shot for their pains). Thirdly, in other cases the ghetto police were then shot shortly after the actions, negating the implied quid pro quo of 'help us and we spare you'. Fourth, in some big actions, like Warsaw, the ghetto police were threatened if they did not round up fellow Jews and were under coercion. Fifth, in other cases, ghetto police aided in escape or resistance attempts.
But most of all, the ghetto police are commonly regarded as collaborators, and often labelled traitors by other survivors, and there is very little sympathy for them. Despite this, few survived the war. Some ghetto policemen became kapos when ghettos were transformed into labour camps or concentration camps, or retained such positions after the transfer of a ghetto to a KZ, and were prosecuted after the war.
The Sondercommando were responsible for maintaining calm prior to the gassings.
And this is the nub of the moral problem faced by the Sonderkommandos. But it's not as dramatic as might be thought posed in the abstract rather than when one looks at the details.
There were cases where Sonderkommandos informed arriving prisoners what was to happen, prompting resistance. But since the majority of victims, especially at Auschwitz, were incapable of resistance, causing unrest would draw attention to the Sonderkommandos and bring down reprisals on them. So we're back to the threat of imminent death very rapidly.
In the Reinhard camps, the layout of the camps meant that there were large numbers of SS and Trawniki guards who could potentially witness any collusion between the Sonderkommandos and newly arriving deportees. These were
not propitious circumstances for starting a general revolt, especially since the newly arrived victims were unarmed, often exhausted, in some cases being pulled from the trains DOA, and composed disproportionately of people incapable of putting up a serious fight against guards armed with rifles and machine-guns.
Moreover, the Sonderkommandos were kept fairly divided in such situations. Half of the labour force was walled off behind barbed wire in the Totenlager and would never encounter a live victim. The property sorting commandos were confined to barracks when new trains arrived. (See e.g. Dov Freiberg's memoir for Sobibor).
So only a few small squads were present to greet arrivals. Oskar Strawczynski paints a deeply unflattering picture of the kapo of the 'Reds', the squad who greeted arrivals, saying that Kapo Jurek "had been a Warsaw rickshaw driver so corrupt and debauched, no deed was too foul for him. This brute would not hesitate to take aside a girl, already naked, on her march to the 'bath'. Promising to save her, he would do the worst, and then push her back into the line.... Most of the 'Reds' were recruited from the Warsaw underworld and did not fall far short of their Kapo". (Strawczynski/Cymlich, Escaping Hell in Treblinka, p.132) Kapo Jurek did not survive the war.
Thus, we see that
some of the Sonderkommandos were simply criminals, and behaved identically to prison trusties and kapos in other concentration camps. There is not much problem condemning such collaborators, however they invariably died. One should not have a great problem accepting the fact that a certain proportion of any population of a quarter of a million (the number deported from Warsaw in the summer of 1942, and thus the recruitment pool for Kapo Jurek and his gang) are a-holes who can with some blandishments be corrupted into doing anything.
Other Sonderkommandos, meanwhile, were not necessarily forced into the same situation, and thus cannot be condemned for those actions, especially not when the SS resorted to divide-and-rule tactics such as appointing Kapos.
In Auschwitz, deportees were greeted by a detachment of prisoners, again in an open space watched by armed guards, and the prisoners doing this work were a mixture of Jews and non-Jews. These prisoners knew (unlike at Treblinka) that there was a good chance of survival for a higher proportion of the prisoners, and routinely informed new arrivals of how to comport themselves when faced by the selections, thus saving lives. Since the transports were almost invariably a mix of the elderly, women, children and men, the chances of starting a mass revolt by unarmed people were essentially nil, and would lead to the deaths of the Jew or non-Jew who tried to instigate such a revolt - never mind the fact that it would require virtually instantaneous telepathy to transmit the intention to revolt up and down the line, since deportees were unloaded from lengthy multi-waggon trains and assembled into lines for selection. They were also ordered almost instantly to divide between the sexes.
It so happens that in the first phase of Birkenau, at the Bunkers, there is virtually no evidence that any Sonderkommandos assisted in the undressing or helped the victims at any stage before they were shoved into the gas chambers. The Sonderkommandos generally arrived on the scene after the killing was done, to sort property and move bodies.
This changed with the new crematoria, but as with the Reinhard camps the Sonderkommando was divided. It was divided between crematoria so that there weren't very many prisoner labourers per crematorium (maximum, 200/crematorium, more usually 100 or so). Secondly, the stokers and 'dentists' were locked in a room in the upper floor during the gassings. Thirdly, the property sorting commando was also partially locked away. Very few Sonderkommandos were around to assist in the undressing, and there were armed SS in the same rooms.
The victims by this stage were almost entirely incapable of resistance, because the able-bodied had been removed from the group, leaving only the elderly, mothers and children, and had been marched under armed guard into a barbed wire enclosure and thence into a building, in the cases of Kremas II and III into a cellar. Informing the victims that they were about to die would do absolutely nothing other than cause further torment to the victims and might result in the betrayal of the Sonderkommando and thus, his death. Some Sonderkommandos apparently still did so, but this couldn't do any good whatsoever.
There were nonetheless a few revolts in this situation, in one case leading to the death of an SS NCO. This mutiny happened because unlike the usual mix of victims, an entire transport containing many younger men and women was sent en bloc to be killed, and this transport consisted of Jews from Warsaw who had survived the 1942 and 1943 actions and who knew about the death camps, even if they did not know about Birkenau's finer details.
The Jews sorted the belonging of the dead Jews (and pocketed quite a bit of the loot for themselves).
This doesn't make them accessories to murder. That task was also carried out by non-Jews in the Kanadakommandos at Auschwitz and Birkenau. The spiriting out of valuables and food saved lives, ultimately. It was also punishable by death if the prisoner was caught.
Jews pulled the gold teeth out of dead Jews.
Actually, the extraction of gold teeth was a universal practice across the entire KZ system. Since most of the KZs were judenfrei in 1942-3, there were non-Jewish prisoners who were forced to perform the same role in Buchenwald etc.
I'm really at a loss as to how extracting gold teeth from corpses makes anyone an accessory to murder.
The Trawniki (and all camp guards for that matter) performed routine tasks that are necessary at any prison or prison-like institution--they stood guard. Armed guards weren't unique to the death camps. Many prisons even today are surrounded by barbed wire and employ armed guards to keep the prisoners in and outsiders out.
Now
this is a good example of a handwave. The Trawnikis did considerably more than just stand guard.
Jews, on the other hand, performed tasks that were critical to the functioning of the holocaust.
And if they hadn't done those tasks, someone else would have been made to.
I already pointed out that Soviet POWs were forced to exhume and burn bodies under Sonderkommando 1005. Tens of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians were ordered to dig graves and bury bodies or clean up ghettos and sort property. Jewish
and non-Jewish prisoners sorted property at Auschwitz. Non-Jewish KZ prisoners operated crematoria burning bodies including the bodies of those who had been executed with firearms. There were also gas chambers in other camps like Mauthausen which produced victims that had to be dealt with. And in the T4 centres, German men carried out the cremation of psychiatric patients who had just been gassed - to the tune of more than 70,000 bodies. Those same men were then mostly transferred to the Reinhard camps.
Clearly, there was no monopoly on virtue in 1940s Europe under Nazi occupation. It would be nice to think that human beings are sufficiently noble to go to their deaths rather than be forced to carry out vile tasks, but historical evidence suggests otherwise.
If failure to desert your post or failure to refuse to do what your CO ordered you to do makes you guilty as an accessory to murder, refusal to escape makes a Jew guilty as accessory to murder as well. But that's a nice double standard you got going on there.
It would be if it were not for the fact that the Trawnikis had a choice about whether to serve in the force
full stop. The fact that they could also desert means only that some Trawnikis were not prosecuted after the war because they could point to evidence that they refused to serve in such a situation.
Trawnikis were prosecuted from the get-go in the USSR as collaborators who committed proven excesses. In recent years more have been prosecuted for lying when immigrating to North American countries. Demjanjuk is an exception to the pattern, and the status of the judgement is open to challenge in the courts because he died before an appeal was completed. Other cases will be heard now involving other death camp guards, I am informed, and it remains to be seen whether the accessory to murder charge sticks with them. Clearly, it wasn't used in that way in the 1960s.
The Sonderkommandos were not prosecuted, because there was a general understanding from the get-go that they had been forced into that situation, and because they performed tasks which hardly qualified them as accessories to murder. No Sonderkommando who has been condemned by other Sonderkomandos as a collaborator seems to have survived the war.
Just so you're clear, this discussion will continue, although it would be greatly appreciated if you stopped misrepresenting what I am saying, putting words into my mouth or conjuring up strawmen. It would likewise be appreciated if you paid attention to the evidence and the details of the situations, rather than discussing a fantasy abstract death camp which never existed.
Since this argument originally started with Clayton Moore babbling as usual about Auschwitz, we will continue to discuss all the camps, because that gives us obvious points of comparison, and more data to work with.
You also need to choose between accepting the historical record of the Holocaust so you can attack Sonderkommandos as accomplices, or denying it so you can make a coherent argument against the probability of human beings being coerced to perform unpleasant tasks in Sonderkommando-like situations. You can't have both I'm afraid. Certainly you can't have both if you continue to fisk as poorly as usual and end up contradicting yourself implicitly over the length of a post.
Oh, and you can also consider the discussion about the use of Jewish forced labour as an ongoing one. Taxes are not due for another year now, so please don't dodge.
