To forestall a probable objection from Dogzilla when he reappears, I have annotated most of the works mentioned and alluded to in my long reply.
So, after spending time away doing real history I find you penned the above series of rhetorical questions and ignorant assertions in my absence. The other stuff about museums and your soap fetish can be ignored since finally you get back to real issues, sort of.
Starting from the top - most events in 20th Century history are known
primarily through eyewitness testimony. Take a gander at the offerings in most bookstores and you will find that works based on eyewitness accounts generally sell the best. Especially if they relate to wars. Look in university press catalogues and you will also find several genres of history, especially social hisory, which rests on testimony. The chances are that we find out most of what we know about history through eyewitnesses, with very little mediation from documents.
This said, the Holocaust is regarded as historical fact by historians because of the documents. So they 'know' it through the documents as much as through other sources. For about a quarter of a century the field revolved substantially around debating the origins of the Final Solution, a debate that was in the end largely driven by how documents are to be interpreted. By the end of that debate, those placing more faith in the testimonies of witnesses like Eichmann and Hoess than documents such as the Goebbels diary
[FONT="][1][/FONT], Hans Frank's Diensttagebuch
[FONT="][2][/FONT] and the Dienstkalendar Himmler
[FONT="][3][/FONT] found it harder and harder to persuade their colleagues that they were right. And so we are all Gerlachs now.
[FONT="][4][/FONT]
The same quite obviously applies to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, which in the past 25 years has become one of the dominant research fields both because the events there speak to the overall evolution and escalation, and because the scale of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union became much clearer once access to German documents held in East European archives became easy.
This said, at the same time as documents became available, it also became routine to examine postwar trials and to look at 1940s East Bloc investigations. Which is why Christian Gerlach (him again) cites from all of these sources at once
[FONT="][5][/FONT], wherever they are available, which is not always, because although we do have many more documents than 30 years ago, and are still processing big piles of them, it's a stark fact that most Nazi records went up in smoke.
But not completely, which is why the camps have also been studied using both Nazi documents, testimonies and investigations, and that includes all the death camps. There were already quite a few such documents in circulation in the 1940s regarding Auschwitz, gas vans and Chelmno in particular, but the number of such documents has considerably increased since then. For Auschwitz, this is symbolised by Pressac who added a very substantial pile of documents to the already known examples.
[FONT="][6][/FONT] And Pressac wrote more than 20 years ago, so there are actually even more available.
Chelmno and gas vans
[FONT="][7][/FONT], too, have been considerably boosted. Aside from 501-PS there is a well known document, which contrary to your trolling, I have mentioned to you before, commonly known as the '97,000 processed' document, which is on the Holocaust History Project website; it's not difficult to look up. There are more than 20 documents relating to gas vans scattered across various files. 501-PS and "97,000 processed" clearly describe gassings, while others use explicit terms like Gaswagen associated with license plate numbers that match other documents and even underground reports - matches that are impossible to explain either as a product of chance or as a product of manipulation, because the relevant sources were held in entirely different nation-states with no evidence of any connection.
[FONT="][8][/FONT]
Recently, there have been a slew of studies of Chelmno either directly, or in relation to the Lodz ghetto (Peter Klein's Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt) or the Warthegau (Michael Alberti).
[FONT="][9][/FONT] These have all used the evidence of the Sonderkommando Kulmhof's bank account, which rather interestingly documents shipments of quicklime among other curiosities. They also use the very interesting reports of phone conversations intercepted by Goering's bugging service which contain further nastiness.
The euthanasia program, too, has been much studied in the past while and once again studied using documents plus testimonies.
[FONT="][10][/FONT] There are enough documents which explicitly connect gassing to T4 cited in the work of the likes of Michael Burleigh
[FONT="][11][/FONT], Ernst Klee
[FONT="][12][/FONT], Henry Friedlander
[FONT="][13][/FONT] and Dick de Mildt
[FONT="][14][/FONT] (whose works would constitute a minimal entry-level requirement to an informed discussion of the issue) that denier prayer-wheel ululations like 'Nazi gassings never happened' are refuted beyond any shadow of a doubt.
The T4-Aktion Reinhard connection has been known since the 1940s
[FONT="][15][/FONT], as has the fact that the core files for the AR camps were destroyed. That is a documented fact, explicitly mentioned in Globocnik's final report to Himmler, and that is why denier demands for x kind of document relating to the camps has pretty much always been laughed at. Past events do not disappear into a puff of smoke because someone got lucky and destroyed
one kind of source material.
And not very well at that, since research has identified dozens of 'smoking gun' documents relating to Aktion Reinhard - by doing what historians always do when confronted with gaps in the record, and looking sideways at the issue. Indeed, some of the documents I am thinking of have been known since 1945 and very much formed part of the evidentiary basis to reach the initial verdict of the main Nuremberg trial. Hans Frank's Diensttagebuch contains more than half a dozen explicit statements about the destruction of the Jews of the Generalgouvernement
[FONT="][16][/FONT], and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that this is the same area which Treblinka et al "serviced". That's why Frank's diary plus Samuel Rajzman was all that was needed at Nuremberg to establish a basic evidentiary lock.
Since then we have simply added more and more such documents, including letters from Nazi officials repeatedly and inconveniently discussing extermination of the Jews
[FONT="][17][/FONT], and a variety of documents found in other institutions' files relating to the AR camps or AR more directly.
[FONT="][18][/FONT] One would need to read through books like Dieter Pohl's study of the Holocaust in Galicia
[FONT="][19][/FONT], or the tombstone of a reference work by Wolfgang Curilla on the Ordnungspolizei in Poland
[FONT="][20][/FONT], to become familiar with all of these items. They do not leave a very large gap, even if there is no document to match the explicitness of '97,000 processed' for Chelmno, or the Hodys interrogation for Auschwitz
[FONT="][21][/FONT], or the script of the euthanasia training film.
You're also wrong about the lack of physical evidence, as we have discussed before. All the sites were examined in the 1940s
[FONT="][22][/FONT] and virtually all have been re-examined in recent years.
[FONT="][23][/FONT] And this includes sites which don't really interest most deniers, such as the T4 institutes
[FONT="][24][/FONT], the sites of mass shootings which either were or were not visited by Sonderkommando 1005 (btw, SK 1005 is documented and not a product of testimony alone
[FONT="][25][/FONT]), and sites inside Germany where bodies were buried or cremated en masse outside of crematoria.
Physical evidence, however, can only ever tell us so much. A while back deniers got very excited when Van Pelt said that 99% of what we know about the past does not come from physical evidence, they failed to notice he was speaking about what we know of the past
as a whole. And that very much applies to what we know about wars.
Responding to a point I made earlier, you try to contrast WWI veterans with Holocaust survivors assuming that because there are trenches then somehow this corroborates the veterans. Utter bullflop. Most veterans' accounts from wars concern tactical movements, timings, intensities and numbers killed, none of which will leave physical evidence that can be accessed at a glance, if at all. The 'face of battle' is entirely evanescent and can hardly be reconstructed without relying on eyewitness testimonies. You are almost never going to be able to confirm or refute an eyewitness account left by a soldier by walking the battlefield. For all you know there could well have been a huge pile of bayoneted enemy soldiers lying over a now removed barbed wire fence, unfortunately civilisation deems it impolitic to leave them hanging up on the wire to rot.
Mentioning wars brings me onto another point about documents, which is the incredibly narrow definition of documents used by deniers. When deniers say documents they only ever mean German documents. But if one was studying a war then you should aim to look at both sides' documents. That is precisely what historians of the Holocaust have been doing, with varying emphases, since the 1940s.
Military historians have to do it as well because many collections of military records have gone up in smoke. If you want to write a detailed history of WWI from the German perspective you are more or less forced to look at the Bavarian Army because the Prussian records were all destroyed in 1945. Same with the air war - Luftwaffe records all went up in smoke. Most 1944-45 war diaries were burned by Wehrmacht divisions before they surrendered, as was standard policy. So historians use the records of their opponents together with whatever memoirs and surviving documents they can find to cobble together a picture.
With the Holocaust, it is not always appreciated how significant some of the non-German source bases are. There are substantial collections of surviving Judenrat records for Warsaw, Bialystok
[FONT="][26][/FONT], Lublin and Lodz
[FONT="][27][/FONT]. These often include statements written down at the time about events elsewhere or inside the ghettos.
[FONT="][28][/FONT] Those are, like it or not, contemporary documents. They of course include numerous accounts of Treblinka written in 1942 which correctly and explicitly discuss gas chambers.
[FONT="][29][/FONT] To claim that gas chambers are not documented would be wrong speaking about German documents as a whole, it is doubly wrong when one adds in Jewish documents.
And it is trebly wrong when one adds in Polish documents. The Polish underground state had an entire regional hierarchy
[FONT="][30][/FONT] reporting upwards just like the Nazi one, and it did so in parallel. There are individual, weekly, fortnightly, and monthly
[FONT="][31][/FONT] reports for separate districts and entire regions
[FONT="][32][/FONT], not to mention substantial collections of material gathered by resistance networks inside specific camps, such as Auschwitz
[FONT="][33][/FONT]. Indeed, the history of Auschwitz could hardly be written without such sources, since the camp resistance not only smuggled out or preserved actual German documents, it also reported so extensively on goings on inside the camp that one can compare and contrast their reports time and again with the surviving German sources, and with witness statements.
For example, the Polish underground reports record a mutiny among a company of Ukrainian guards who revolted in mid-1943. So did Pery Broad, who described the revolt in his 1945 statement to the British
[FONT="][34][/FONT] - this is independent evidence. There are, however, also SS documents about the mutiny, which have been found in a Russian archive, and which confirm details known from personnel files of the mutineers, as well as witness statements from Ukrainians who served in that company.
[FONT="][35][/FONT]
Another example - the Polish underground reports describe the liquidation of the Sosnowitz and Bedzin ghettos in early August 1943 and specify 30,000 victims. German documents from the Sosnowitz police confirm the number and deportation
[FONT="][36][/FONT]; SS documents confirm there was a Sonderaktion; survivors of the selections confirm the process described in the contemporary underground report. There might not be a German document saying explicitly 'these deportees were gassed' but the sum total of available sources makes that pretty clear.
Contemporary documents make that clear. And there is no other evidence to support any other conclusion.
Other contemporary documents exist which do not conform to the usual government-produced report but which are of a type that is utterly standard for almost all eras of history. Diaries, for one. I have already mentioned the Goebbels diary which has long been regarded as a key source on Nazi Germany, but the number of diaries from Jews and bystanders is substantial. Sakowicz's diary from Ponary is a key independent source confirming the Jaeger report and adding details which a bald official tabulation would not give.
[FONT="][37][/FONT]
Another example is Zygmunt Klukowski's classic diary of the Nazi and Soviet occupation in the Lublin region.
[FONT="][38][/FONT] Klukowski records his knowledge of the mass shooting at Jozefow, which is now fairly famous because it was carried out by Police Battalion 101. There is no German document relating to Jozefow, does the event disappear into a puff of smoke because of this? Not only do we have an exhaustive postwar investigation and interrogation of the shooters, we have Klukowski, and we also have the Polish Main Commission which investigated every killing site and wrote them up. Somewhere out there an exhumation report almost certainly exists. That is more than can be said for most historical massacres (please link to the forensic report on the Setif massacre in 1945 if you disagree with this).
So now we come to how to evaluate witnesses and how historians of the Holocaust evaluate witnesses - and whether this is really any different to other historiasn. There are really some pretty simple rules of thumb which allow us to be certain beyond any reasonable doubt about what happened
1) victims, bystanders and perpetrators give mutually corroborating accounts.
2) they did so in large numbers starting already during the war but especially in the 1940s. There are huge collections of testimonies at for example the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, written down immediately after the events while the witnesses were in the same country as the events.
3) historians use many such testimonies in an increasingly systematic way. Yitzhak Arad used more than 90 testimonies in his book on the Aktion Reinhard camps and that is about 1/3 of the number I could cite from today.
[FONT="][39][/FONT] The Auschwitz museum published a 5 volume work in the late 90s on the camp's history which cited from literally hundreds of eyewitnesses, mostly from the 1940s Polish investigations.
[FONT="][40][/FONT] Again, I could draw on significantly more witnesses today, 10-15 years on. Your jibe, repeated twice, that historians only cite four or five testimonies is obvious nonsense.
[FONT="][41][/FONT]
4) the events and sites were repeatedly investigated
[FONT="][42][/FONT], allowing historians to compare, usually, 1940s with 1960s accounts, and there is a remarkably high level of consistency despite the lapse of time. Some of the best and most detailed descriptions of the Auschwitz gas chambers were given in the early 1970s at the Dejaco trial, often as a result of probing and questioning by defense lawyers.
[FONT="][43][/FONT] Accounts are not repeated verbatim, but nor do they change so drastically en masse that one would dismiss them in toto as seems to be desired. Moreover, the investigations take place in diverse environments so that one can cross-examine them and compare them across different cultures. The Soviets conducted several thorough investigations and trials of Trawniki men serving at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka in the 1960s
[FONT="][44][/FONT] at the same time as the West Germans were conducting their investigations. The two sets of investigations were entirely independent of each other.
5) as time goes on and we get into the 1980s to the present, then the passage of time, cultural biases, increased mediatisation and the effects of old age plus generation combine to reduce the usefulness of recent eyewitness accounts. It's no accident that virtually all "crazy survivors" were young teenagers in 1944-45 and are living in America, where their testimonies have attained a cultural/social significance because they are "living witnesses". Although there has been a considerable effort to record video testimonies, these sources are much less often used by historians for what are obvious, basic reasons - they were produced long after the event. Rankeanism prefers sources as close to the event as possible chronologically. Journalism, and oral history, however, prefer sources as close to the event as can be laid hands on.
6) quantifying eyewitness testimony has been done fairly extensively in psychology. Aside from Elizabeth Loftus's pioneering work
[FONT="][45][/FONT] there are also specialist studies by Willem Wagenaar, who appeared as an expert witness for the Demjanjuk defense in 1987.
[FONT="][46][/FONT] Wagenaar's main study examined the memories of Dutch political prisoners held by the Nazis in a camp in Holland, IIRC, finding a postwar sample of statements and then reinterviewing them in the 1980s, and found unsurprisingly a considerable deterioration of some details along with a fairly high consistency on aspects he identified as 'core'.
[FONT="][47][/FONT] Historians have also quantified testimonies, notably Christopher Browning, who cut his teeth on more than 100 statements from Battalion 101
[FONT="][48][/FONT] and noted the trends in this large sample, and then recently studied an unusually large sample of many hundreds of survivors from Starachowice labour camp.
[FONT="][49][/FONT] Browning found that circa 1980, these survivors started incorporating elements of the 'conventional Holocaust narrative' into their testimonies. The main example concerned their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944 - the transport was not selected, but after 1980, some of the survivors started 'remembering' Mengele conducting a selection.
7) the quantitative dimension is fundamentally why all your blethering is meaningless. There are probably more than 100,000 statements, testimonies or memoirs from Holocaust survivors in the narrow sense. The Central Jewish Historical Commission gathered 7000 in 1945-48 or so
[FONT="][50][/FONT]; DEGOB in Hungary gathered 4000, another 1000 were taken by the Jewish Agency in Romania
[FONT="][51][/FONT]; there are probably more than 1000 statements in the Polish Auschwitz investigation, 1400 witnesses were interrogated for the Frankfurt Auschwitz pre-trial investigation
[FONT="][52][/FONT], so even with overlaps you are looking at more than 10,000 statements in just these collections. There are 1000s of memoirs, and 10s of 1000s of recent testimonies; there were 1000s of investigations in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s into practically every sub-camp of a KZ
[FONT="][53][/FONT] and every district of occupied Poland.
[FONT="][54][/FONT] Since 1980 or so there have been probably 30,000 more testimonies produced.
I'm simply not going to be moved by the odd 'crazy' survivor a la Zisblatt until it is shown that they are a demonstrably and abnormally large percentage of these totals. Pointing to a supposedly particularly crazy survivor doesn't change this. I want proof that a full third or a half of all testimonies are utter bollocks. If revisionism was to be taken seriously, it would at least examine properly constructed samples numbering into the hundreds. I don't think the 'serious' revisionists have even got past 250 witnesses in 65 years of trying,
including SS witnesses. And there is no revisionist book that examines more than about 50 of them in one go. Whereas scholars can produce works examining 100s.
8) unsurprisingly given the status of the Witness in Western society of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, 'fake' survivors do exist for the Holocaust, meaning people who were not actually in Nazi camps or ghettos. The evidence for there being more fake Vietnam vets is clearly laid out in BG Burkett's book
Stolen Valor, which whatever one thinks of the author's obvious political biases, amasses enough examples to show that there flatly are more fake Vietnam vets than there have been fake Holocaust survivors. That's why Congress passed the
Stolen Valor Act to clamp down on impostors claiming to have won the Medal of Honor and other military awards. A company manufactured
more than twice as many Medals of Honor as there are living recipients. You also get guys like
this one who claim to have won 17 medals while serving in the SAS. Or
this one. Or
this one, whose fake SAS service was swallowed by publishers, other military authors and magazines.
In fact, just looking at the
Wiki entry for 'impostor' reveals enough examples of frauds that it's difficult to get worked up over a tiny handful of fake Holocaust survivors. And that some of them slip through the net for a brief while? Tell that to the
New York Times which for a while had
problem after
problem with supposedly respected reporters fabricating stories.
9) How do we weigh different testimonies together? It is fairly obvious and intuitive how we do that. I suggest you look up Twining, Analysis of Evidence, or Wigmore, or Schum, or Douglas Walton's extensive work on testimony if you want something more theoretical. The bottom line is that none of your favourite examples or indeed, deniers' favourite examples, matter a damn when they target witnesses who played absolutely no role in the legal proceedings related to the different camps and who are not cited by historians.
10) the final point is obvious to anyone but, it seems, a denier. That is how documents and witnesses can be combined to write narratives. Deniers usually fixate on an abstracted ideal type of the procedure and ignore how practices change over time. Those subtle changes are precisely what one can get at most easily with testimonies. Belzec started out using a lot of deception to lull the victims, but as the news spread then the SS and Trawnikis started using massive amounts of coercion and violence to achieve their aim. The spread of knowledge is
documented in diaries and contemporary underground reports.
[FONT="][55][/FONT] The witness testimonies - in this case, exclusively from the perpetrators, since only 2 Jews survived Belzec to give proper accounts - confirm this and are in turn confirmed by the external reports and diaries. Auschwitz underwent massive changes in practices and procedures depending on the killing sites used and the phase in question. This not only conforms to how real organisations usually work, it is confirmed by contemporary accounts, witnesses and sensible interpretations of the documents.
Basically, if you're going to try to criticise the evidence, you had better (a) know what it is and (b) not strawman it.
[FONT="][1][/FONT] Fröhlich, Elke (ed),
Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Munich 1987-2001
[FONT="][2][/FONT] Prag, Werner and Jacobmeyer, Wolfgang (eds),
Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen 1939-1945. Stuttgart, 1975
[FONT="][3][/FONT] Witte, Peter et al (eds),
Der Dienstkalendar Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42. Hamburg, 1999
[FONT="][4][/FONT] Gerlach, Christian,
Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord. Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Hamburg, 1998
[FONT="][5][/FONT] Gerlach, Christian,
Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944. Hamburg, 1999
[FONT="][6][/FONT] Pressac, Jean-Claude,
Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. New York, 1989; Pressac, Jean-Claude,
Die Krematorien von Auschwitz. Die Technik des Massenmordes. Munich, 1994
[FONT="][7][/FONT] Beer, Mathias, ‘Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den europäischen Juden’, VfZ 35, 1987, pp.403-417;
Angrick, Andrej, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943. Hamburg, 2003;
[FONT="][8][/FONT] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-convergence-of-evidence-works-gas.html See also
Unsere Ehre heisst Treue. Kriegstagebuch des Kommandostabes Reichsführer SS. Tätigkeitsberichte der 1 und 2. SS-Infanterie-Brigade, der 1. SS-Kavallerie-Brigade und von Sonderkommandos der SS. Vienna, 1984 regarding Maly Trostinets
[FONT="][9][/FONT] Alberti, Michael,
Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Wartheland 1939-1945. Wiesbaden, 2006;
Klein, Peter, Die ‘Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt’ 1940-1944: Eine Dienststelle im Spannungsfeld von Kommunalbürokratie und staatlicher Verfolgungspolitik. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2009
[FONT="][10][/FONT] Eg for Hartheim see Choumoff, Pierre,
Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas auf Oesterreichischem Gebiet 1940-1945. Vienna, 2000
[FONT="][11][/FONT] Burleigh, Michael,
Death and Deliverance. ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany 1900-1945. Cambridge, 1994
[FONT="][12][/FONT] Klee, Ernst,
“Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens”. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1983; Klee, Ernst (ed),
Dokumente zur “Euthanasie”. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1985/1997
[FONT="][13][/FONT] Friedlander, Henry,
The Origins of Nazi Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995
[FONT="][14][/FONT] de Mildt, Dick,
In The Name of the People: Perpetrators of Genocide in the Reflection of their Post-War Prosecution in West Germany. The ‘Euthanasia’ and ‘Aktion Reinhard’ Trial Cases. The Hague, 1996
[FONT="][15][/FONT] See also articles in Götz Aly (ed),
Aktion T4. Die “Euthanasie”-Zentrale in der Tiergartenstrasse 4. Edition Hentrich: Berlin, 1987 and articles in
Bogdan Musial (ed), Aktion Reinhard: Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement 1941–1944. Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2004; the euthanasia-Holocaust connection is also spelled out in Riess, Volker,
Die Anfänge der Vernichtung “lebensunwerten Leben” in den Reichsgauen Danzig-Westpreussen und Wartheland 1939/40. Frankfurt am Main, 1995
[FONT="][16][/FONT] One is used to kick off Herbert, Ulrich,‘Labour and Extermination: Economic Interest and the Primacy of Weltanschauung in National Socialism’, Past & Present, No. 138 (Feb., 1993), pp. 144-195, among ,many other secondary sources discussing this context, including Browning, Christopher R.,
Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000
[FONT="][17][/FONT] Examples in
Roth, Markus, Herrenmenschen: Die deutschen Kreishauptleute im besetzen Polen – Karrierwege, Herrschaftspraxis und Nachgeschichte. Osnabrück: Wallstein, 2009
[FONT="][18][/FONT] Cf works such as Grabher, Michael,
Irmfried Eberl. ‚Euthanasie’-Arzt und Kommandant von Treblinka. Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main, 2006; Schelvis, Jules,
Vernichtungslager Sobibor. Hamburg/Münster, 2003 (Metropol-Verlag, Berlin, 1998); Mlynarczyk, Jacek Andrzek, ‘Treblinka – ein Todeslager der “Aktion Reinhard”,’ in:
„Aktion Reinhardt”. Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement 1941-1944 / hrsg. von Bogdan Musial. – Osnabrück, 2004, pp.257-281; Benz, Wolfgang and Distel, Barbara (eds),
Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Band 8: Riga-Kaiserwald, Warschau, Vaivara, Kauen (Kaunas), Plaszow, Kulmhof/Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. C.H. Beck: Munich, 2008
[FONT="][19][/FONT] Pohl, Dieter,
Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944. Munich, 1996; see also his earlier work on Lublin: Pohl, Dieter,
Von der ‘Judenpolitik’ zum Judenmord. Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouvernements 1939-1944. Frankfurt am Main, 1993
[FONT="][20][/FONT] Curilla, Wolfgang,
Der Judenmord in Polen und die Ordnungspolizei 1939-1945. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011
[FONT="][21][/FONT] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2009/11/war-time-german-document-mentioning.html
[FONT="][22][/FONT] For further contemporary evidence regarding the Treblinka site after 1945, see Rusiniak, Martyna,
Oboz zaglady Treblinka II w pamieci spolecznej (1943-1989). Warsaw, 2008; Gross, Jan Tomasz,
Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation. New York: Random House, 2006
; Engelking, Barbara, Leociak, Jacek, Libionka, Dariusz (eds),
Prowincja Noc. Zycie i zagłada Zydow w dystrykcie warszawskim. Warsaw, 2007; Krajewski, Kazimierz and Tomasz Łabuszewski,
“Łupaszka” “Młot” “Huzar”: Działalnosc
5 i 6 Brygady Wilen
skiej AK (1944–1952) (Warsaw: Volumen, 2002)
[FONT="][23][/FONT] Summed up here:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/01/more-evidence-for-presence-of-gassed.html and here:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/12/mattogno-on-chemno-mass-graves.html
[FONT="][24][/FONT] See the chapters in Morsch, Günter, Perz, Bertrand, Ley, Astrid (eds), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2011 for an overview
[FONT="][25][/FONT] There are several documents not used in the one book written about it:
Hoffmann, Jens, ‘Das kann man nicht erzählen’: ‘Aktion 1005’ – Wie die Nazis die Spuren ihrer Massenmorde in Osteuropa beseitigten. Hamburg: Konkret Verlag, 2008; see also Spector, Shmuel, ‘Aktion 1005 – Effacing the Murder of Millions’,
HGS 5/2, 1990, pp.157-173
[FONT="][26][/FONT] Anders, Freja, Stoll, Katrin, Wilke, Karsten (eds),
Der Judenrat von Bialystok. Dokumente aus dem Archiv des Bialystoker Ghettos 1941-1943. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010
[FONT="][27][/FONT] Eisenbach, Artur (ed),
Dokumenty i materialy do dziejow okupacji niemieckiej w Polsce. Bd 3: Getto lodzkie. Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, 1946;
Dobroszycki, Lucjan (ed) The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984
[FONT="][28][/FONT] [FONT="]Sakowska, Ruta (ed),
Archiwum Ringelbluma, getto warszawskie: lipiec 1942-styczen 1943. Warsaw, 1980; Sakowska, Ruta (ed),
Archiwum Ringelbluma. [/FONT]
Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy. Tom 1: Listy o Zagładzie. Warsaw, 1997; Zbikowski, Andrzej (ed.),
Archiwum Ringelbuma: Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, vol. 3:
Relacje z Kresów (Warsaw: Zydowski Instytut Historyczny IN-B, 2000); Kopciowski, Adam, Dariusz Libionka (eds), ‘Życie i Zagłada w Hrubieszowie w oczach młodej warszawianki’,
Zagłada Zydow, 2007, pp.229-240
[FONT="][29][/FONT] In addition to the volumes in the note above, for an overview see Kassow, Samuel,
Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto. London, 2007
[FONT="][30][/FONT] Good overview in Puławski, Adam,
W obliczu Zagłady. Rząd RP na Uchodźstwie, Delegatura Rządu RP na Kraj, ZWZ-AK wobec deportacji Żydów do obozów zagłady (1941-1942). Lublin: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2009
[FONT="][31][/FONT] Gmitruk, Janusz et al (eds),
Pro Memoria (1941-1944). Raporty Departmentu Informacji Delegatury Rzadu RP na Kraj o zbrodniach na narodzie polskim. Warsaw/Pultusk, 2004/2005
[FONT="][32][/FONT] Marczewska, Krystyna, and Waźniewski,Władysław,
"Obóz koncentracyjny na Majdanku w świetle akt Delegatury Rządu RP na Kraj," in:
ZM, VII, 1973, pp. 164-241; Marczewska, Krystyna, Władysław Waźniewski, "Treblinka w świetle Akt Delegatury Rządu RP na Kraj", in:
Biuletyn Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, XIX, Warsaw 1968, pp. 129-164; Marikowski Zygmunt (ed),
Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej, I, Armia Krajowa w Okregu Lubelskim, London. 1973; Tyszkowa, Maria, "Eksteminacja Żydów w latach 1941-1943. Dokumenty Biura Informacji i Propagandy KG AK w zbiorach oddziału rękopisów buw", in: Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce, no. 4 (1964), Warsaw; Marczewska, Krystyna, Władysław Waźniewski, "Treblinka w świetle Akt Delegatury Rządu RP na Kraj", in:
Biuletyn Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, XIX, Warsaw 1968, pp. 129-164
[FONT="][33][/FONT] Oboz koncentracyjny Oswiecim w swietle akt Delegatury Rzadu RP na Kraj, Zeszyty Oswiecimskie, 1968, special issue 1; see also the sourcing in Czech, Danuta,
Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945. Reinbek, 1989
[FONT="][34][/FONT] available in Kaul, Friedrich Karl and Noack, Joachim (eds),
Angeklagter Nr. 6. Eine Auschwitz-Dokumentation. Berlin, 1966 and other publications
[FONT="][35][/FONT] Recently cited in an article by eter Black in HGS, 2011
[FONT="][36][/FONT] Reprinted in Boda-Krezel, Zofia and Osojca, Jadwiga (eds), ‘Dokumenty o eksterminacji Zydow Zaglebia Dabrowskiego podczas okupacji hitlerowskiej’,
Biuletyn ZIH, Nr 43-44, 1962 and Poliakov, Léon, Josef Wulf,
Das Dritte Reich und die Juden. Dokumente und Aufsätze, Arani Verlag, Berlin-Grunewald 1955 among other places
[FONT="][37][/FONT] Sakowicz, Kazimierz,
Ponary Diary, 1941-1943. A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005
[FONT="][38][/FONT] [FONT="]Klukowski, Zygmunt,
Dziennik z lat okupacji Zamojszczyzny (1939-1945). Lublin, 1959[/FONT]
[FONT="][39][/FONT] Arad, Yitzhak,
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington, 1987
[FONT="][40][/FONT] Dlugoborski, Waclaw and Piper, Franciszek (ed),
Auschwitz 1940-1945. Central Issues in the History of the Camp. Oswiecim, 2000: Volume I:
The Establishment and Organisation of the Camp; Volume II:
The Prisoners – Their Life and Work; Volume III:
Mass Murder ; Volume IV:
The Resistance Movement; Volume V:
Epilogue
[FONT="][41][/FONT] As is obvious from looking at the standard work Kogon, Eugen, Langbein, Hermann, Rückerl, Adalbert (eds),
Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Frankfurt am Main, 1983
[FONT="][42][/FONT] Wirsching, Andreas, Finger, Jürgen, Keller, Sven (eds),
Vom Recht zur Geschichte: Akten aus NS-Prozesse als Quellen der Zeitgeschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2009
[FONT="][43][/FONT] Brought out in part in Allen, Michael Thad, ‘Not Just a ‘Dating Game’: Origins of the Holocaust at Auschwitz in the Light of Witness Testimony’,
German History 25/2, 2007, pp.162-191; Allen, Michael Thad, ‘Realms of Oblivion: The Vienna Auschwitz Trial’,
Central European History 40, 2007, pp.397-428
[FONT="][44][/FONT] Pohl, Dieter, “Die Trawniki-Männer im Vernichtungslager Belzec 1941–1943,” in Alfred Gottwaldt, Norbert Kampe and Peter Klein (eds), NS-Gewaltherrschaft: Beiträge zur historischen Forschung und juristischen Aufarbeitung. Berlin: Edition Heinrich, 2005), pp.278–89; Rich, David A., 'Reinhard's Foot Soldiers: Soviet Trophy Documents and Investigative Records as Sources', in: John K. Roth & Elizabeth Maxwell (eds.),
Remembering for the Future: the Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, vol. 1 (History), Basingstoke 2001, pp.688-701
[FONT="][45][/FONT] Loftus, Elizabeth,
Eyewitness Testimony. Cambridge, MA, 1979
[FONT="][46][/FONT] Wagenaar, Willem A.,
Identifying Ivan. A Case Study in Legal Psychology. Hemel Hempsted, 1988
[FONT="][47][/FONT] Wagenaar, Willem A. and Groeneweg, Jop, ‘The Memory of Concentration Camp Survivors’, Applied Cognitive Psychology 4, 1990, pp.77-87
[FONT="][48][/FONT] Browning, Christopher R.,
Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution. New York, 1992
[FONT="][49][/FONT] Browning, Christopher R., Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. New York: Norton, 2010
[FONT="][50][/FONT] See articles in
Bankier, David and Dan Michman (eds), Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (Jerusalem, 2008).
[FONT="][51][/FONT] See Gerlach, Christian and Aly, Götz,
Das letzte Kapitel. Der Mord an den ungarischen Juden. Stuttgart, 2002
[FONT="][52][/FONT] Wittmann, Rebecca, ‘The Wheels of Justice Turn Slowly: The Pretrial Investigations of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-65’,
Central European History, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2002), pp. 345-378;
[FONT="][53][/FONT] Brought out in the series Ort des Terrors and in the USHMM encyclopedia of camps and ghettos: Benz, Wolfgang and Distel, Barbara (eds),
Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Band 3: Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006; Benz, Wolfgang and Distel, Barbara (eds),
Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Band 5; Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007; Benz, Wolfgang and Distel, Barbara (eds),
Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Band 6: Natzweiler, Gross-Rosen, Stutthof. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007; Benz, Wolfgang and Distel, Barbara (eds),
Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Band 7: Lublin-Majdanek, Dora-Mittelbau. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007
[FONT="][54][/FONT] See Pohl, Curilla, Roth as well as Musial, Bogdan,
Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouvernement. Eine Fallstudie zum Distrikt Lublin 1939-1944. Wiesbaden, 1999;
Mlynarczyk, Jacek Andrzej, Judenmord in Zentralpolen. Der Distrikt Radom im Generalgouvernement 1939-1945. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007; Seidel, Robert,
Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Polen. Der Distrikt Radom 1939-1945. Paderborn, 2006; Mallmann, Klaus-Michel, ‘ ‘Mensch, ich feiere heut’ den tausenden Genickschuss’. Die Sicherheitspolizei und die Shoa in Westgalizien’ in Gerhard Paul (ed),
Die Täter der Shoah, pp.109-136
[FONT="][55][/FONT] See Pohl, Ostgalizien
