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Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives and invite open debate. |
Michael
Mills
of Australia
writes Tuesday, May 29, 2001
Jews built roads in occupied East
YOU may be interested in the following reference to your "Hitler's War" by the respected German historian Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm.
It occurs in his essay "Offene Fragen der Holocaust-Forschung: Das Beispiel des Baltikums", in "Die Schatten der Vergangenheit: Impulse zur Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus", edited by Backes/Jesse/ Zitelmann (1990).
In note 31, on page 424, Wilhelm writes:
"Noch
Mitte Oktober 1941 soll mit dem Bau "riesiger
Arbeitslager" für jüdische Zwangsarbeiter aus
Galizien an der "Rollbahn" von Kiew nach Moskau begonnen
worden sein (so Irving D., Hitlers Krieg: Die Siege
1939-1942, München 1983, S. 387)".
Note 31 refers to the following paragraph in the text on page 414:
"Von einigen Gross-Ghettos abgesehen, wissen wir noch viel zu wenig über den Prozeß der Ghettoisierung in den besetzten sowjetischen Gebieten 1941/42.
Wahrscheinlich könnte niemand in Deutschland mit dem Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit auch nur eine Übersichtskarte der an der Jahreswende 1941/42 existierenden Ghettos zeichnen.
Erst recht ist der jüdische Zwangsarbeitseinsatz beim Fernstrassenbau und ähnlichen "nicht ortsfesten" Einsätzen noch kaum erforscht."
The "Fernstrassenbau" referred to by Wilhelm, based on your book, may well be Durchgangsstrasse IV, a military road designed to reach from Lwow in Galicia to the Donbass in East Ukraine, which was authorised by Hitler in October 1941.
References to Durchgangsstrasse IV and the employment of large numbers of Jewish slave-labourers on it started to crop up in the literature of the late 1990s.
For example, both Browning and Longerich refer to it in their most recent works.
Paradoxically, Browning and Longerich give the impression that our present awareness of the employment of Jewish slave-labour on Durchgangsstrasse IV is entirely due to very recent ground-breaking research by the younger generation of German historians.
Once again you appear to have been ahead of the pack by at least 20 years.
DAVID
IRVING writes:
SO far as I recall, my source was the October 1941 table talk recorded by Werner Koeppen (a document which I was once again the first to exploit).
David Irving