SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 357
The local Jews spoke at least one of four closely related Slavic languages
– Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian and Polish – current in the area
and usually in addition to Yiddish.
Three waves of deportations had swept a large part, if not the majority,
of the ethnic Polish Jews into the inner or eastern regions of the
USSR: The refugees coming from the German zone of occupation were
deported to the extent that they did not take on Soviet citizenship. After
the German invasion of 1941, large portions of the Jewish population in
the western regions were evacuated before the Germans arrived. 1063 Finally
we have the mass deportations reported in the American Jewish
Yearbook in 1949. Under these conditions the Polish Jews deported to
the East by the German authorities in 1942 and 1943 could have inconspicuously
blend into Soviet Jewry in general.
The situation of the non-Polish Jews who found themselves in the
occupied eastern territories was entirely different. We shall now present
several instances of unassailable evidence to show that the “Migration
to the East” was far from being a “myth” for these Jews, as R. Hilberg
would have it, but solid reality.
10.4. Western Jews in the Eastern Territories
10.4.1. Steffen Werner’s White Ruthenia Hypothesis
In his book The Second Babylonian Captivity 1064 Steffen Werner
presents a large amount of circumstantial evidence for the deportation
of Jews to White Ruthenia. Among them we have utterances by Hitler
who justified himself in a small circle of close collaborators for having
sent the Jews “into the mud.” Werner takes the “mud” to have been the
Pripyet swamps in White Ruthenia, which the Jews allegedly were to
clear. This hypothesis is supported by other sources. Gerhard Reitlinger
says: 1065
“A letter from Rosenberg’s office, dated October 25 th [1942],
shows that it was intended to select the able-bodied to work behind
the Eastern front. Later, there were some rumours that Jews had
1063 Concerning these deportations cf. primarily Walter Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern
European Jewry, Institute for Historical Review, Torrance (CA), 1983.
1064 Steffen Werner, Die zweite babylonische Gefangenschaft, private edition 1990. A second
edition was published in 1991 by Grabert-Verlag, Tübingen.
1065 Gerald Reitlinger, op. cit. (note 560), 1968, p. 90f.