Soviet deportation of some of the Jews allegedly killed during the Holocaust theory

The Soviet deportation of some of the Jews allegedly killed during the Holocaust theory refers to a theory regarding the fate of some of the Jews who Holocaust revisionist argue were deported by National Socialist Germany to the occupied Soviet Union and who non-revisionists argue were killed at locations such as the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka camps.

Holocaust demographics

See the article on Holocaust demographics on background and general demographic aspects.

Soviet Holocaust propaganda

See Allied psychological warfare: Soviet Union on background on the very important role the Soviet Union and Communist organizations are argued by revisionists to have had in Holocaust and anti-German propaganda, including by large scale fabrications of "evidence". The theory stated in this article would be another aspect of this, by removing witnesses who could contradict the Soviet propaganda claims.

Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, and Thomas Kues

The Holocaust revisionists Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, and Thomas Kues have in recent articles and books (see the "External links" section) described various sources supporting the deportation of Jews to the occupied Soviet Union. This contradicts the politically correct version of the Holocaust, according to which these Jews were killed or remained in camps in Poland. As one example of many, the authors list eleven witnesses (both Jews and non-Jews) who have stated the presence of Dutch and French Jews in Minsk, which contradicts the politically correct version. The authors in addition stated that "For the most part, the existence of the above-mentioned witness statements have been revealed to the world via sparse footnotes in isolated exterminationist publications. How many more such testimonies are gathering dust in archives, ignored by orthodox holocaust historians?"

However, this also raises the question of what happened to these Jews after the war. "It must be pointed out that of the less than 2 million Jews – some 423,000 of them non-Polish – who were deported to the Occupied Eastern Territories, a considerable percentage no doubt perished during the period 1942–1945 due to starvation, epidemics and various other causes. We remind our readers here of the staggering mortality ratios among the POWs in the east (on both the German and the Soviet side). [...] War-related hardships moreover did not end in 1945, as many people died in the immediate post-war era, especially in underdeveloped Eastern Europe, from epidemics, hunger and cold that was the result of collapsed infrastructure, destroyed agriculture and inadequate housing."

Regarding the fate of those who survived this: "While a number of the surviving deported Polish Jews may have been assimilated into the local Russian, Belorussian or Ukrainian Jewish communities, with which they shared much in common, or even managed to return to Poland and from there on to other countries in the west or to Israel, a large portion of them, together with the surviving deported Western Jews, were kept as prisoners behind the Iron Curtain and most likely deported to and hidden away in northern Russia or Siberia, so that Stalin could consolidate the myth of the extermination of Jews in "gas chambers."" These Jews are argued to likely have been taken to camps they were never intended to leave (and likely to camps outside the normal Gulag camp system from which some people returned and therefore not included in the ordinary Gulag documentation). The authors also stated evidence in support for and replied to various objections to this theory such as:

• Various quotes from sources stating such deportations. Some examples from Jewish sources are stated below:
  • On 22 December 1944 the German-Jewish exile weekly Aufbau stated that "The Soviet embassy in Washington is denying reports disseminated by the Palestinian press, according to which the Russian authorities have transferred part of the population of liberated Bessarabia, Bukovina and the eastern parts of Poland to Siberia and already brought hundreds of Jews from Czernowitz [the capital of Bukovina] to the Ural region. According to the statement of denial ‘these claims are completely unfounded and have nothing to do with reality.’ This reply was directed at the Federation of Bessarabian Societies of America, which had contacted the embassy in order to verify the reports which had reached them by cable from Jerusalem."
  • In Septemeber 1949: "The Athens News Agency, quoting reports from 17,000 Greeks who had returned from the Caucasus, said that Jews in an unnamed large Ukrainian town who had relatives in Britain and United States had been deported to Siberia. It added that there had been recent large-scale deportations to Siberia of Armenians from the Ukraine."
  • In 1949 the Swedish-Jewish journal Judisk Krönika stated that "The Russian newspapers have sharply denied the statements seen in Western press about a deportation of Jews from Ukraine to Siberia. What underlies these rumors, they say, is the fact that during the war a Jewish mass escape took place away from the Nazi armies. This mass escape led to 250,000 Jews ending up in Siberia. There they founded 57 collective farms." Mattogno, Graf, and Kues commented that "This brings up two questions: Why did the Soviet bother to issue a denial in the first place? And how come that their explanation of the rumors was not only spurious but plainly absurd? How could anyone in their right mind believe that the mass evacuations of 1941 – an event that was public knowledge, by the way – could have led to rumors of mass deportations in 1949?"
  • The 1950 American Jewish Year Book: "reports about the mass deportation of Jews from the Western border region of the Soviet Union, especially from White Russia, the Ukraine, Eastern Galicia, Bukovina, and Bessarabia. According to one report, the deportation affected mainly the Jewish citizens who had relatives in America or Western Europe; other sources maintain that the whole Jewish population of some territories was deported. [...[ The American Jewish League against Communism sent a protest to the Secretary General of the U.N. in which it estimated the number of Jews affected by the deportations as 400,000'.'"
  • The 1951 American Jewish Year Book: "The reports of deportations of Jews from some border territories of the Soviet Union (see AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK, 1950, Volume 51, p. 340) were repeated during 1949-50. There was a report that the entire Jewish population of Lwow in Western Ukraine (formerly Eastern Poland) where 30,000 Soviet Jews had settled after World War II, had been completely evacuated. Similar reports came from Bessarabia and North Bukovina (The Yiddish [Morning] Journal, August 15, 1949; JTA, August 19, 1949, [from Tel Aviv]); in this case, they were denied and labelled as ‘fantastic’ by the Soviet Embassy in Washington on August 18, 1949. According to these accounts, the Soviet authorities in Kishinev and Czernowitz had announced on July 1, 1949, that Jews wishing to emigrate to Israel should register with the local authorities; the majority of the local Jewish population registered and was sent to concentration camps near Murmansk. According to another report all Jews with relatives in the United States or England had been deported. It remained impossible to confirm these accounts. The United States State Department received reports confirming simultaneous mass deportations of Greeks from the Black Sea area; but as to Ukrainian Jews, it could only say that reports of their deportation had reached the American Embassy in Moscow, but could not be verified, due to travel restrictions imposed on the Embassy personnel."
  • The 1953 American Jewish Year Book: "Reports of deportations of Jews from [Soviet] border territories […] were confirmed by new information printed in the Christian Science Monitor in March 1952. According to this and other reports, the transports of deportees from the Ukraine and White Russia were continuing, and all Jews had reportedly been removed from some districts, such as Rovno and Zdolbunov. At the beginning of the deportation, the Jews were assured by the police that this was not a penal action and that they were being removed ‘for their own security’ because the German occupation had left dangerous seeds of anti-Semitism; the deportees were given twenty-four to forty-eight hours’ notice of the transports. Later the tactics were changed, and the victims were rounded up in surprise midnight raids and removed at once. According to the Israelitisches Wochenblatt of Zurich, July 31-August 8, 1952, a similar evacuation was carried out in Kharkov, where 4,000 Jews were removed from the city. […] Some of the deportees may have been sent to Birobidjan, where several districts were put under the administration of the secret police and transformed into slave labor regions. Some persons who passed through Birobidjan during and after World War II recalled having seen forced labor trains arriving there as early as 1944. The existence of such camps would explain the complete silence about Birobidjan for the past several years, and the complete severance of any contacts between its inhabitants and the other Jews in the Soviet Union."
• "One might argue that the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews would not have gone unnoticed. However, among the more than one million Chechens, Kalmyks, Crimean Tartars, Greeks, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and other nationalities deported by the Stalin regime between 1944 and 1949, and among the even greater number of people (among them many Jews) returning during the same period to their homes in the western parts of the Soviet Union from the Russian interior and Siberia or Central Asia, to where they had escaped or been evacuated by the Red Army at the beginning of the war, the fly-by-night deportation of foreign Jews would have been only one incident of forced or voluntary population transfer among many." (Many of Stalin's ethnic deportations were associated with mass deaths of those deported, such as the deportation/mass deaths of the Volga Germans starting in 1941, the deportation/mass deaths of the Crimean Tatars starting in 1943, the deportation/mass deaths of the Chechens starting in 1944, and the deportation/mass deaths of the Ingush starting in 1944.)
• "There is also another, even more crucial reason to how this operation could have gone unnoticed: while the targets of the other forced Soviet population transfers were Soviet citizens, were registered in public records and their absence obvious to all in the local societies of which they had been part, the foreign German-deported Jews were not merely foreign transients and “displaced persons,” the vast majority of whom no doubt could not communicate in Russian, but in fact, to borrow a term from Orwell, they were “unpersons,” which in “Oldspeak (or standard English)” meant “non-existent persons.” [...] they were unpersons because the world considered them to be dead and because Stalin decided to consolidate this fraudulent report for his own ends. The Jews sent to Siberia or elsewhere were “living ghosts,” unpersons whose disappearance was likely to go unnoticed by any significant number of people."
• "Moreover it must be pointed out that the historiographical knowledge of the Soviet camp system is not complete. Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk writes: “Contrary to expectations, Soviet archives do not contain systematic, complete, ready-to-use information on the number of those convicted and imprisoned. Now that the archives are partially open, historians can review many important documents, but elements of the new historical picture being created on the basis of these documents are still lacking. Some documents were lost (the prewar Gulag archives), while access to others is still restricted (the FSB archives). Many events were never registered and remain known only to their participants.” Thus it would seem that access to some files relating to the camps and forced resettlement areas in distant parts of the USSR is still denied by Russian authorities, while others have supposedly been lost."
• "To suggest that Stalin’s successors, such as Nikita Khrushchev, would have exposed and denounced the secret deportation of the Jews, if real, together with other Stalinist crimes during the so-called de-Stalinization period in the latter half of the 1950s is exceedingly naive. Such an exposure would not only constitute an admission that the Soviet Union had helped fabricate a false genocide to blame on their enemies and subsequently committed an act very close to genocide of its own (the deportation of the surviving resettled Jews), but would seriously undermine the central myth of the Great Patriotic War fought first as a war of defense against the German-Fascist invaders and then as a war of “liberation” of the peoples of Europe from the ultimate evil of “Hitlerism” – a myth upheld to this day by the Russian government.'"
• Regarding the personal involved in such argued deportation and imprisonment of Jews (both Germans and Soviets), if they were not themselves among the many different groups killed by Stalin, those involved would have been silent regarding this due to risk of judicial punishment for involvement in crimes and extra-judicial punishments for accusing the Communists and Stalin of crimes. "That none of the people involved in carrying out the operation have ever spoken of it – at least to our knowledge – following the fall of the Soviet Union could be explained by actual ignorance caused by the use of a need-to-know policy (possibly amounting to the misinformation of involved personnel) and the language barrier between the deportees and their guards, but also by 1) the possibility that some of these individuals were themselves purged as carriers of state secrets; 2) the likelihood that any involved who were still alive in the 1990s and considered speaking of their experiences would keep silent either because they lacked an outlet which would take them seriously or due to the possibility of facing official or unofficial repercussions."
• "The above quoted news articles show that some people did in fact notice the deportations. Why, then, is it that the stream of reports appears to have ceased by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953? The most likely explanation would seem to be that by then detailed news began to reach the West again from the Soviet-Jewish communities. The fact that the local Soviet Jews would have had nothing to tell of deportations affecting their communities – of which the deportees had (most likely) never been a part – would needless to say reinforce the skeptic opinion that the reports had been based upon mere rumors triggered by the measures taken against leading Zionist Jews during the last years of Stalin’s regime. By the early 1950s the orthodox holocaust story had been firmly cemented by the IMT and NMT trials, and it was unlikely that anyone besides isolated individuals would even have considered the possibility that the deportations had in fact taken place, but targeted another category of Jews, a group of displaced Jewish unpersons."

Stalin's relationship with Jews and possible reasons for deportations of Jews

Other authors have stated increasing anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews in general during Stalin's later years (or even before this, citing anti-Jewish actions during the Great Purge and other actions). Stalin is thus argued to have become increasingly suspicious of Jewish loyalties after the creation of Israel. He stated that "Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA." Some examples of persecutions include arresting the leading members of Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the "Night of the Murdered Poets" during which thirteen of the most prominent Yiddish writers were killed, a campaign to quietly remove Jews from positions of authority within the state security services and the Red Army, and suppression of Jewish culture. There were also allegations of conspiracies involving Jews and Capitalist countries, such as the Doctors' Plot, generally seen as a prelude to intended intensified persecutions.

Stalin is stated to before his death to have planned to massively deport and purge Soviet Jews in general. Thus, in 1953 "the Kremlin ordered the construction of four giant prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north, apparently in preparation for a second great terror -- this time directed at the millions of Soviet citizens of Jewish descent." This and the many other ethnic deportations/mass deaths during Stalin's regime may support that Stalin earlier would not have ruled out much more limited deportations/mass deaths of Western Jews, if this was seen as beneficial for his regime.

Regarding why the Soviet Union (and the Allies more generally) supported the politically correct view on the Holocaust, according to revisionists, see Holocaust motivations: Argued exploitation.

Assuming that Stalin did deport in particular Western Jews as argued by revisionists, Stalin may have had other motivations in addition to supporting the politically correct view on the Holocaust.

• One is that Stalin apparently viewed anything less than fighting to the death against National Socialist Germany as "collaboration", which deserved severe punishment, even if such "collaboration" was forced and involuntary. Thus, Soviet soldiers who capitulated, rather than fighting to the death as expected, were after the war often killed immediately or sent to the Gulag system. Even their families were punished by depriving them of food, which has been stated to have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. According to such "reasoning", Stalin may have viewed the deported Jews as deserving punishment, for having been an important part of the German war effort against the Soviet Union as forced laborers.

• Another is that the Soviet Union desperately needed forced laborers. Large numbers of German POWs and German civilian were therefore used as forced laborer in the postwar period and with many of these dying due to this.

• Furthermore, a large group of Western Jews in the Soviet Union would likely by the increasingly paranoid and anti-Semitic Stalin have been viewed as very problematic, with group member possibly having a high risk of becoming dissidents or spies for the West. Stalin had already deported (with associated mass deaths) various non-Jewish ethnicities and other groups he suspected might be potentially disloyal to his regime.

Statements by deported Jews

Stalin's suspicions and deportations of those having associations with the West (including Jews having such associations) is acknowledged in non-revisionist sources. "Jews who found themselves behind the Iron Curtain, especially in Russia, now found themselves under a completely different type of oppression – an oppression in many ways as dark as German oppression. To Stalin anyone who had contact with the virus called “the West” was sent to Siberia. [...] I knew a Rabbi Greenwald form Toronto, an enormous Torah scholar, who at one point ended up in Siberia after the war. A Hungarian Jew, he had been forcibly conscripted into a work battalion of the Romanian army, which was allied with the Nazis. He survived a year-and-a-half in that battalion until the Russians captured them, and sent them all to Siberia. Between the malnutrition and the winter cold, people were falling like flies. [...] He was one of the lucky few that got out."

Another example is three German Jews who during the war were in a labor camp in Lower Silesia. "In 1945, the three women were sent by the Soviets to a labor camp in Siberia; they were considered suspect because of their religion and their German provenance. ‘We couldn’t speak one word of Russian,’ Ruth Usherenko recalled. ‘They didn’t feed us. When people died, they didn’t bury them – they put them in the forest and the wolves were eating them.’ So complete was their isolation that they did not know when the war ended." Mattogno, Graf, and Kues have stated that "While the Usherenko sisters were never deported to the Occupied Eastern Territories, their story nonetheless shows that Western Jews were deported to Siberia by the Soviets just for being non-Soviet Jews, and also helps explain why so many Jews after the war came to believe that most or even all of their relatives had died at the hands of the Germans."

Nikita Khrushchev and de-Stalinization

Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev implemented a limited "de-Stalinization", which included mentioning some of the atrocities that occurred during Stalin regime. Motivations for this has been argued to be to put the blame for the increasingly well-known Communist atrocities on Stalin personally, rather than on the Communist system itself, and as part of an internal Communist power struggle, with these limited revelations intended to discredit political opponents of Khrushchev, since they had been part of Stalin's inner circle. However, Khrushchev's support for political reform was limited, as demonstrated by the continued repression of political opponents in Communist countries and the bloody crushing of the Hungarian Revolutions of 1956.

As noted earlier, Holocaust revisionsits have argued that "To suggest that Stalin’s successors, such as Nikita Khrushchev, would have exposed and denounced the secret deportation of the Jews, if real, together with other Stalinist crimes during the so-called de-Stalinization period in the latter half of the 1950s is exceedingly naive. Such an exposure would not only constitute an admission that the Soviet Union had helped fabricate a false genocide to blame on their enemies and subsequently committed an act very close to genocide of its own (the deportation of the surviving resettled Jews), but would seriously undermine the central myth of the Great Patriotic War fought first as a war of defense against the German-Fascist invaders and then as a war of “liberation” of the peoples of Europe from the ultimate evil of “Hitlerism” – a myth upheld to this day by the Russian government."

Furthermore, Khrushchev may have had personal reasons for not being interested in a complete disclosure of what happened during Stalin's regime and in particular in contradicting the official Soviet view on the Holocaust.

• Khrushchev had personally been an active participant in several of Stalin's atrocities. Notably, he was for a long time one of the highest Communist officials in Ukraine, and thus likely to some degree involved in the brutal post-WWII killings and deportations of many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians.
• Khrushchev had been an active participant in producing the official Soviet view on the Holocaust and headed the Soviet commission which accused Germany of killing 100,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Ukraine. (It also alleged other atrocities, such as that Germans in Kiev "resorted to all sort of methods in exterminating Soviet people. They, for instance, invented the following murder ‘technique’: some Soviet people were forced to climb a tree, others were ordered to cut that tree. People fell down along with the tree, thus finding their deaths.")
• Khrushchev, while in Ukraine in the postwar period, would likely personally have been involved in the argued deportations/killings of Jews argued to have been deported to Ukraine by Germany, and Khrushchev would thus have had a personal interest in these argued deportations/killings not being exposed.

External links

Articles

• Evidence for the Presence of “Gassed” Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories
  • Three Aspects of the German Deportation of European Jews into the Occupied Eastern Territories, 1941-1944

Downloadable books

• Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality - sections such as 9.4. Evacuations to the East: Höfle Telegram and Korherr Report
  • The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”—An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers - answers to criticisms