SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 359
Byelorussia which had been part of Poland until September of 1939, but
this reasoning does not hold for the members of the other nations mentioned.
We cannot explain the presence of Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Yugoslavs,
or Greeks among the Byelorussian partisans except by assuming
that they were Jews who had been deported to the East from their
respective countries, although this assumption would not apply to the
Spanish fighters. 1069
Still, in spite of many valuable indications and ideas which can be
found in Werner’s book, we must not disregard its glaring shortcomings.
Werner writes at the very beginning of the book: 1070
“I assert: 1) The final solution of the Jewish question consisted in
the Jews being assigned to the eastern parts of White Ruthenia. To
this day [i.e. 1990] they have been kept there by the Soviet Union in
a kind of captivity.”
First of all, it is impossible for the (i.e. all) deported Jews to have
been settled in the eastern part of White Ruthenia, as this was only one
of several destinations for these deportees. Furthermore, it is equally
impossible that the decrepit Soviet state, which by 1990 had long since
discovered glasnost, would have been able or even willing to keep hundreds
of thousands of people not only “in captivity,” but to keep them
from establishing any kind of contact with the outside world.
Finally, we cannot accept Werner’s hypothesis that the Germans
would have let the Jews settle freely in the eastern part of White Ruthenia.
Werner tries to prove this assumption by means of maps allegedly
showing an inexplicably large increase in the number of localities in
this area, but one must assume that the occupying German army would
have wanted to exercise strict control over the deportees, something
which would only have been possible by means of camps and ghettos.
If the Jews deported to White Ruthenia had really been able to move
around freely, they would have rushed to join the partisans – something
the Germans had every reason to prevent. Therefore, we must assume
that the foreign Jews mentioned above who did join the partisans had
1069 S. Werner believes that these Spaniards were antifascists who had fled to France after
Franco’s victory and were then extradited to the Germans by the Vichy government and
later transferred to Auschwitz. (S. Werner, op. cit. (note 1064), p. 89). As there were only
relatively few Jews living in Spain, this would mean that non-Jewish detainees as well
were moved from Auschwitz into the astern areas. So far we have not found any evidence
for this. We therefore think that these Spaniards were most probably antifascists
who had fled to the Soviet Union after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War.
1070 S. Werner, op. cit. (note 1064), p. 5.