TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter VII: The Role of the Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories 217
tion book, 612 there were at least 345 predominantly Lithuanian Jewish children
and youths between the ages of 12 and 17, whose age distribution was as follows:
YEAR OF BIRTH AGE NUMBER OF CHILDREN
1927 17 years 613
56
1928 16 " 136
1929 15 " 119
1930 14 " 26
1931 13 " 6
1932 12 " 2
Total: 345
Since the transport lists are incomplete, the number of the boys and girls
transferred from Kaunas and Riga must actually have been significantly larger
than the approximately 1,250 documented cases. That these children were still
in Kaunas and Riga in the summer of 1944 categorically refutes the claim that
the Einsatzgruppen had been conducting a total extermination of the Jews or
at least of those Jews unfit for labor.
But there is a still more compelling objection to the claims of mass extermination:
the lack of material traces.
4. Operation 1005
After the discovery of the mass graves of Katyn and Vinnitsa by the Germans,
Soviet propaganda went on the counterattack, principally by using two
ploys: it attempted to place the blame for atrocities committed by the Soviet
secret service, the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), on the Germans, and it
claimed that mass graves of victims of the Germans had been discovered.
As is well known, on April 13, 1943, in the forest of Katyn, not far from
Smolensk, the Germans, following directions from the local populace, found
seven mass graves with a total of 4,143 bodies of Polish officers who had been
shot. Between April and June 1943 these remains were examined by a commission,
which included medical doctors from 12 European nations, and further
by a commission of the Polish Red Cross and by American, British, and
Canadian officers who were prisoners of war. The Germans published an extraordinarily
well-documented official dossier afterwards, which contained all
the forensic results of the investigation, 80 photographs, and the names of the
victims identified. 614
612 AMS, transport list, microfilm 262.
613 The 17-year-olds were 14 years old when the Einsatzgruppen advanced into Lithuania.
614 Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn, Berlin 1943.