Latvijas Vēsturnieku komisijas raksti - 23.sējums

Andrievs Ezergailis. Štālekera ziņojumi: holokausta vēstures pirmavots un atslēga
Stahlecker’s Reports: the Basic Source and the Key
of the History of Holocaust
Andrievs Ezergailis
Summary
Stahlecker’s Consolidated Reports, especially that of 15 October 1941 (Nuremberg
document L-180), are not only a major source for understanding the structure and the
process of the Holocaust in Latvia, it is also the earliest narrative account of the event. Its
value derives from its secrecy, its limited distribution, and that it came from the very center
of Nazism – its author was only three removes from Hitler and was in charge of killing
Jews in the Baltic region. In the context of Holocaust studies his account challenges both
the version of the events that the Nazi public relations bureaus put out and also the one
of “revisionists” or “deniers” of later origins. In general the report does not support those
historians who desire to present the Holocaust as Germanless.
Only due to serendipity one copy of Stahlecker’s report survived the shredding of
documents at the RASHA headquarters in winter of 1944 and already in 1945 it came to
the attention of the prosecutors at Nuremberg and significantly weighed in the conviction
of the Nazi perpetrators of crimes in Eastern Europe. Thereafter, the report has functioned
in many Nazi crime trials, except for the USSR, the world over. The major value of the
report is that it irrevokably shows that Holocaust was an organized event from top, not a
spontaneous explosion of people’s ire from bellow. Specifically, the report shows that it
were the members of the Einsatzgruppe A with Stahlecker at its helm, who engaged in
organization and fomentation of killing operations in Latvia and elsewhere in the Baltic.
For reasons that are difficult for outsiders to understand, the report is almost ignored by a
great number of German historians. They consider it as a self-serving and dismiss it as an
unreliable source. The original and preferred plan of killing the Jews, Stahlecker writes, was
to eliminate them by pogroms, by which he meant that the natives on their own, or egged
on by Einsatzkommando leaders, will rise up and bludgeon the Jews to death. Since the
pogrom method failed, Stahlecker admitted, we resorted to organized method “clearing”
the territories. For that purpose, we used native teams which we had organized. The report
consists of two parts: about 100 pages of text and 200 pages of documents.
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