TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Epilogue 307
3. Testimonies of SS Witnesses and of Prof. Pfannenstiel
Meyer criticizes the authors for dismissing the testimonies of SS personnel
and of Prof. Pfannenstiel as mere tactical lies. It seems that it is Meyer who
needs to be straightened out here: If a forensic blood analysis shows that a defendant
was drunk at the time of a car crash, one million witness statements
and one million confessions of the defendant, all claiming that the defendant
was, in fact, not drunk, cannot change the fact that he was drunk. Thus, if one
hundred witnesses and one hundred confessions state that the moon is made of
green cheese or that 870,000 corpses can be burned within a few months
without fuel and without leaving traces, both assertions being of a similar intellectual
quality, then we have to conclude – in light of all the forensic evidence
– that the witnesses and the defendants are wrong. Like it or not! Thus,
unless Meyer proves that the factual claims of the witnesses were physically
possible, we do not have to discuss whether such witness statements are correct,
only why they are incorrect. To the solution of this question Meyer contributes
nothing.
In this context, I may add one point that is often forgotten today: When the
German Army invaded the Soviet Union with the Christian crosses of the
Wehrmacht as their emblem, the population greeted them enthusiastically –
and naively – as God’s own soldiers come to liberate them from the devilish
Soviet mass murderers. Even the NKVD admitted, in secret reports, that vast
parts of the local population of many regions viewed the Germans as liberators
from Stalinist oppression, that the Germans treated the local populace
well and turned many of the younger people into dedicated National Socialists
eager for close collaboration with the Germans. 943 It can thus come as no surprise
that the largest volunteer army that ever fought for a foreign nation was
that which, consisting of over one million young people mainly from Eastern
Europe, fought alongside the Wehrmacht, because these young people saw the
German war against the Soviet Union as a cause worth sacrificing their lives
for. However, when the Germans started to retreat in 1943, many among the
local population, knowing what awaited them, tried to move west with the
Germans, and were prevented from doing so only by drastic German measures.
After the Red Army reconquered those temporarily liberated territories,
the Soviets conducted draconian purges against the local population, conducting
show trials of uncounted individuals for actual or alleged collaboration
with the Germans. In some regions, where collaboration was very intensive, in
particular in the Baltic states, the Caucasus region, and the Ukraine, considerable
portions of the population were deported to Siberia as a collective pun-
943 Cf. Alexander E. Epifanow, Hein Mayer, Die Tragödie der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in
Stalingrad von 1942 bis 1956 nach russischen Archivunterlagen, Biblio, Osnabrück 1996.