Extraordinary State Commission

File:Members of a Sonderkommando 1005 unit pose next to a bone crushing machine in the Janowska concentration camp.png

Photograph of an alleged "Bone Mill" that was allegedly used by a "Sonderkommando 1005" unit at the Lemberg labor camp in Ukraine. The photograph was frequently used as evidence by the Soviet Union at the IMT trial. The revisionist Klaus Schwensen has argued that research shows that the machine was nothing but a normal ball mill and that the Soviet story was a fabrication.

More recently, the photograph has been cited by the leftist Wikipedia as evidence in several articles. See also Wikipedia's and RationalWiki's Holocaust articles.

The Extraordinary State Commission was a Soviet government agency created on 2 November 1942. This was likely in response to the German discovery of the Katyn Massacre. It was tasked with "investigating" alleged World War II crimes against the Soviet Union and "documenting" alleged material losses, to be used when demanding payments from Germany and allies. The official aim of this agency also included "punishing for the crimes of the German–fascist aggressors."

The agency's full ceremonial name was: Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices. Sometimes the abbreviation ChGK from its Russian name is used also in English. According to its own data, the organization had a staff of 32,000 and there were additional contributions by around 7,000,000 Soviet citizens.

History

Use in trials

Reports by this organization on alleged atrocities, such as the Holocaust, were accepted as important "evidence" at the Nuremberg trials.

"The documentary evidence collected in the framework of the ChGK and the 7 published “Reports” were widely used in diplomatic notes of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and at the various Allied peace conferences of the war years. They were the heart of the documentary evidence used by the Soviet participants in the international tribunals at Nuremberg (1945–46) and Tokyo (1950), and they continued to be used into the 1960s for numerous Soviet domestic trials, both open and closed, of Nazi criminals and their accomplices.”

At the International Military Tribunal, "at Nuremberg the Soviets introduced reams of so-called evidence purporting to demonstrate that it was the Germans, not Stalins's henchmen in the secret police, who murdered over 4,000 Polish prisoners at Katyn [...] the Western Allies said not a public word at Nuremberg to challenge the Soviet "evidence" on Katyn (the judges quietly glossed over the Red charges by omitting them from their verdict). [...] It is the special service of Made in Russia: The Holocaust to remind readers that the same Soviet stamp which converted the fake Katyn reports into admissible evidence at Nuremberg also provided proof of the extermination of millions of Jews at Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, and elsewhere. As Porter emphasizes, physical and forensic evidence for the Holocaust was never introduced, nor is there any reason whatsoever to imagine it ever existed. All we have is a handful of "testimonies," and "confessions," and the reports of a number of Soviet or Soviet-controlled "investigative" commissions. The same Red prosecutors who framed the victims of Stalin's purges at the Moscow show trials, and sent millions of innocents to their deaths in our gallant Soviet ally's Gulag archipelago, are the chief source for the vaunted Nuremberg evidence of the "Holocaust."

Internal propaganda

The ChGK was also used for internal Soviet propaganda. "The “ChGK Reports” that were published in the central Soviet press became the main form through which the commission’s work became known to the public”."

"Trophy Commission" and "trophy brigades"

The Extraordinary State Commission was also tasked with compensating the state for alleged damages suffered by the Soviet Union because of the war. This specific aim of the agency is usually referred to by historians as the work of the "Trophy Commission", which led the "trophy brigades" behind the frontline. The commission became instrumental in the removal of industrial installations, materials, valuables, and artwork from all Soviet-occupied territories, including Hungary, Romania, Finland and Poland (within its prewar borders), and later, from the Soviet Zone of Germany.

Criticisms

File:Voroshilov, Molotov, Stalin, with Nikolai Yezhov.jpg

The first photo shows Joseph Stalin with the "Vanishing Commissar" (Nikolai Yezhov) in 1937, before Soviet retouching. The second photo is after Soviet retouching, with Yezhov entirely removed. Not a falsification by the Extraordinary State Commission, but one example of how the Communist Soviet Union used fabrications and false propaganda in order to rewrite history. Examples of revisionist criticisms of claimed Holocaust photographs, some of them of Soviet origin: External link.

The first photo shows Joseph Stalin with the "Vanishing Commissar" (Nikolai Yezhov) in 1937, before Soviet retouching.

The second photo is after Soviet retouching, with Yezhov entirely removed. Not a falsification by the Extraordinary State Commission, but one example of how the Communist Soviet Union used fabrications and false propaganda in order to rewrite history.

Examples of revisionist criticisms of claimed Holocaust photographs, some of them of Soviet origin: External link.

The organization has been admitted to have fabricated many atrocity claims. Despite this, other atrocity claims by the organization are still cited as support for politically correct history. Examples of now admitted fabricated claims include:

• Falsely blaming Germany for the Katyn Massacre.
• Falsely claiming that 4 million were killed at Auschwitz. See Holocaust demographics: 4 million killed at Auschwitz claim.
• Falsely claiming 840,000 killed Soviet POWs at the Sachsenhausen camp. See also Paul Waldmann.
• Falsely claiming that Finland had put the whole Soviet population of the occupied territories into Concentration camps in East Karelia during the Continuation War, where 40% had died according to the commission’s data.
• "the authors of the 1994 book Cherekskaia tragediia published data about the falsification of information in the Cherek district of Kabardino-Balkariia, where the local authorities and the auxiliary ChGK commission blamed the Nazis for the punitive actions of the NKVD and the material losses the population sustained in supplying the Soviet 37th Army."
• "The well known American researcher Patricia Kennedy Grimsted cites analogous facts in connection with the destruction of cultural treasures in Kiev [...] Aleksandr A. Formozov also confirms that Soviet propaganda placed the blame for the destruction and damage done to cultural monuments in the 1930s on the Nazis, as well as on portions of the Red Army. [...] Russian archivists say that the large losses sustained by the State Archival Fund in the war years, long blamed on Hitler’s forces, were actually the consequence either of bad evacuation planning or conscious destruction (for various reasons) by the archival officials themselves."
• "church historians note that the mass destruction of religious buildings belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church, about which much was written that described it as the barbarism of the invaders, in fact occurred on a large scale even before the war."
• "direct falsification of the facts. The process of preparing the report entitled “On the Destruction of the City of Smolensk and the Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders against Soviet Citizens” is revealing in this regard."
• Regarding corpses allegedly killed by gas vans, an initial draft of a report stated that this could not be confirmed by examining the corpses, and that the evidence consisted of "witnesses" claiming this. A senior editor reviewing the draft deleted the text stating the absence of material evidence, inserted the allegation that the claims were supported by unspecified "other data", and stated that killings in gas vans had been "confirmed".

More generally, criticisms include that the organization:

• "presented "certified" photo copies of documents at the Nuremberg trials, promising to produce the originals later; they never did, and the court accepted this."
• "suggest that in reality the commission, in addition to its publicly stated tasks, must have also had its own hidden goals. In 1994, P. N. Knyshevskii named one of these goals, conjecturing for the first time in Russian historiography that through the ChGK there was “a largely successful attempt to blame Hitler for a portion of the Soviet authorities’ own crimes. Along the same interpretative lines, in 1998 the writer Lev Bezymenskii, who had analyzed the process of preparation for those ChGK “Reports” that were connected with the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet territories, confirmed that some of the information published by the ChGK was the result of conscious and purposeful falsification on the part of Stalinist propagandists."
• "Its role became all the more crucial in 1943, when the “Katyn commission” uncovered a whole series of reports by the German high command about the discovery on the occupied Soviet territories of sites of mass NKVD executions of Soviet citizens. [...] Today, of course, it is obvious that Katyn was far from being the only such case; the “Katyn model” of erasing crimes was widely used by the Stalinists in other situations, covered up by the authority of the ChGK and its auxiliary commissions."
• "“Intentional distortions and/or falsifications” made up those “reports” and no mention on the destruction caused by the Soviets themselves as ordered by Stalin in his radio address of 3 July 1941." (See the article on The World Wars and mass starvation on the Soviet scorched earth policy.
• "The procedure for reviewing the texts thus processed by the ChGK staff included the following stages: first, Vyshinskii and Aleksandrov edited them, then Shvernik sent the documents to Molotov for his approval, and finally the ultimate decision was made by Stalin personally."

See also the "External links" section regarding many other criticisms.

Quotes

These sham “reports” were used to convict Germans, to murder (judicial murders) and imprison them. The falsehoods contained in them are still used to shore up “The Holocaust”, to demonize Germans and extort more and more money. The sad part is that no one is willing to launch an investigation undertaken by experts in the field of crime investigations to ascertain, or dismiss, what is stated in those “reports”. Prof. Maser wrote that historians are reluctant to do so out of concern not to find what is allegedly there. It is not only historians who are afraid, it appears that the establishment of the whole world is paralyzed, afraid to question anything, they are happy to just continue and blame the Germans.
—Wilfried Heink. "A closer look at the Soviet “Extraordinary State Commission” (ESC) which claimed to have investigated “Fascist Crimes”".

See also

• Allied psychological warfare
• Holocaust motivations: Some of the Allies allowing criticism of other Allies and not emphasizing Jewish Holocaust uniqueness

External links

• A closer look at the Soviet “Extraordinary State Commission” (ESC) which claimed to have investigated “Fascist Crimes” Part I
• A closer look at the Soviet “Extraordinary State Commission”(ESC) which claimed to have investigated “Fascist Crimes” Part II
• A closer look at the Soviet “Extraordinary State Commission”(ESC) which claimed to have investigated “Fascist Crimes” Part III
• A closer look at the Soviet “Extraordinary State Commission” (ESC) which claims to have investigated “Fascist Crimes” Part IV
• The Bone Mill of Lemberg
• The Report of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, The Genesis of a Propaganda Project
• The "Report on Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen" (Prisoner's Report) of 12 June 1945
• Made in Russia: The Holocaust, Excerpts from the Nuremberg Trial Transcripts
• The Maly Trostenets "Extermination Camp"