I agree that it's entirely
possible that the "no liquidation" ("keine liquidierung") line refers to something else and is not related to the mention of the transport of Jews from Berlin. The notes are too short and contextless to really say with any certainly what is being referred to.
However, pictorex's conclusion about what it does refer to (the "liquidation" of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) is completely unsupported speculation. As far as I can tell from the CODOH thread, the only reason the deniers have latched onto that is because they think "liquidate" only refers to the dissolution of a company or organization, and does not mean "killing" or "execution" at all. One poster even cites from
this German dictionary of foreign words to show that the German word "Liquidation" is never used outside a business context or to refer to anything other than closing down an enterprise of some sort. And that in itself is true...the German word "Liquidation" is indeed only used in a business context.
The problem, of course, is that the document doesn't use the word "Liquidation". It uses the word
Liquidierung. And "liquidierung"
absolutely was used by the Nazis to refer to killing and executions, especially of Jews. For example, Goebbels himself used it that way
in his diary:
Es wird hier ein ziemlich barbarisches und nicht näher zu beschreibendes Verfahren angewandt, und von den Juden selbst bleibt nicht mehr viel übrig. Im großen kann man wohl feststellen, daß 60 % davon liquidiert werden müssen, während nur noch 40 % in die Arbeit eingesetzt werden können.
("A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work.")
The deniers at CODOH, in other words, are proceeding from the predetermined conclusion that there was no extermination program, and grasping at any straw they can to support that predetermined conclusion by claiming that there's no way the Himmler note could refer to
any kind of killing and
must refer to the dissolution of an organization, and therefore can
only be talking about the situation regarding Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (or at least is
most likely to be talking about that).
And that's simply not true - there's nothing at all in the document to rule out Himmler talking about "liquidierung" in the "targetted killing" sense, the same way Goebbels used the word. Sure, it's
possible that Himmler could be talking about dissolving some organization, but it's also possible he was talking about the mass murder of human beings (and far more likely, since the Nazis kind of have a history of using that word when explicitly talking about the mass murder of human beings). That very meaning of the word "liquidierung" and its common use in the context of describing mass murder is, in fact, the entire reason why even deniers like Irving connected the third and fourth lines in that document in the
first place, and never bothered with this "it really refers to the elimination of a Reichsprotektorat and its incorporation into the Gau system!" interpretation.
Supporting the interpretation that the third and fourth lines in Himmler's notes are connected is the fact that the
very next day after these lines were written, Himmler and Heydrich spoke again specifically about the executions of Jews in Riga transported there from Berlin (and hence the most likely "Jewish transport from Berlin" referred to in the third line), and that evening Himmler issued an order to Friedrich Jeckeln in Riga, the SS man in charge of the
Einsatzgruppen and who was responsible for the massacre of Berlin Jews in Riga, ordering Jeckeln not to do things like massacre Jewish transports on his own initiative, but only per Himmler's specific orders and guidelines. Historian Richard Evans has noted this was because executing people sent right from the capital of Germany was far too public and visible (and therefore shouldn't be done without express permission), while the execution of locals was far less likely to cause to any kind of public notice, and therefore could continue to be carried out by Jeckeln's
Einsatzgruppen without the same sort of supervision being required from Berlin.
Pictorex is indeed apparently a cut above your average CODOH denier, but he's not investigating any new neutral historical interpretation of the Himmler document. He's merely come up with a novel way for deniers to still pretend that the Nazis weren't slaughtering people (and, more,
documenting it) after Irving's attempt to spin it away failed so miserably.
