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Paul
Grubach
of Ohio believes that Christopher Browning disproves the basis of one smear by “Skunky” Evans, December 24,
2008
Professor
Richard J (“Skunky”) Evans, Regius Professor of
History at Cambridge University.
Vindicating
David Irving — and Refuting Richard
Evans!
IN HIS 2001 book, Lying About Hitler:
History, Holocaust, and the The David Irving
Trial, Richard
Evans (right) castigated you in two places (pp. 115, 210-211) for claiming that
Einsatzgruppen commanders deliberately inflated the number of Jews executed by mass shooting. Now Evans’s colleague, Christopher
Browning, puts forth a case that actually vindicates what you have claimed.
Browning admits that, in at least one important case, the number of
Jews executed by mass shooting on the Eastern Front was over-estimated by German officials.
We quote Evans verbatim: “In his evidence to the Zündel trial in 1988,
Irving cast doubt, for example, on the reports filed by task force leaders giving numbers of Jews shot by their forces. ‘I [David Irving]
don’t trust the statistics they contain,’ he said.
‘Soldiers who are out in the field doing a job or murderers who are out in the field doing a job, they don’t have time to count.’
Each leader, he
[David Irving] suggested, submitted reports whose aim was to ‘show he’s doing a jolly good job,’ and by inference, therefore, seriously exaggerated or even invented the numbers killed.
‘Statistics like this are meaningless,’ Irving said. ‘I’m suggesting,’ he continued, ‘it is possible that at the time some overzealous SS officer decided to put in a fictitious figure in order to do Heinrich Himmler a favour
[p.115].'”
Evans then castigates you by writing:
“This
of course was pure speculation, unsupported by
any documentary evidence. This was
characteristic of Irving’s methods of disposing
of inconvenient documents. If a document did
appear that Irving was unable to suggest was not
genuine, or in some way unreliable, such as a
memorandum from Himmler to Hitler in which three
hundred thousand Jews were referred to in 1942
as having been exterminated.Irving said he was
‘unhappy about it because it is such an unusual,
isolated document.’ But of course, it was only
‘isolated’ because Irving had dismissed or
ignored other documentary evidence that pointed
in the same direction: there was no genuine
documentary warrant at all for this remark
[p.115].”
Evans is wrong. In his 2004 book, The Origins of the Final Solution, Holocaust historian
Christopher Browning puts forth an example where a German official did over-estimate the number of Jews shot on the Eastern Front by
German forces. The over-estimation is contained in the “Hahn summary report” of December
10, 1941.
Five Einsatzgruppen reports were summarized by Franz Rademacher‘s assistant,
Fritz Gebhard von Hahn. At this point we quote Browning verbatim:
He
[Hahn] extrapolated, however, from the
examples of EK 2 and 3 in the Baltic, and
wrongly, concluded that each individual
Sonderkommado had on average liquidated 70,000
-80,000 Jews. The result was an over- rather
than underestimate of the number of Jews
murdered, but clearly Hahn had not failed to
grasp the significance of the reports concerning
the intended fate of Soviet Jewry
[p.402].
So there you have it, David. Here is an example that supports your theory that at least some of those Einsatzgruppen reports contained exaggerated statistics in regard to the number of
Jews shot.
What is interesting to note is that Browning admits that, in at least one very important case, the number of Jews executed by mass shooting on the
Eastern Front was over-estimated by German officials (p. 402).
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