Janowska Camp

In mid-October 1941, a camp was set up at Janowska Road in Lviv to house transports of Austrian and Czech Jews deported for resettlement to the east. It was to serve as a transit as well as forced-labor camp, and started operating in November of that year. Its relevance for the Holocaust starts in the summer of 1943. According to witness statements of five Jewish inmates of the camp, they were forced to exhume mass graves of murdered Jews in and near this camp, and burn them on huge pyres.

Most of these witness statements were made to a Soviet investigative commission researching alleged crimes committed by German occupational forces in the Lviv region. In their report of 23 December 1944, they described their findings, claiming that “in the Janov[ska] Camp the fascists shot more than 200,000 peaceful Soviet people.” They also claimed to have found “three pits with the bodies of Soviet citizens,” but did not state how many bodies they contained, and whether any were exhumed and examined. The rest of the report is full of claims evidently not based on accurate forensic findings, but on conjectures extrapolated from a few local impressions, and from the witness accounts gathered.

An analysis of these inmate accounts indicates that they were probably orchestrated. Death-toll numbers range from 100,000 to 300,000, resulting in insurmountable logistical problems for the claimed activities to exhume, burn and erase all traces of these claimed victims in the context of the so-called Aktion 1005. Hence, these claims are probably highly exaggerated, if not invented. See the entries on lumberjacks and for the five witnesses: Abraham Beer, Heinrich Chamaides, Moische Korn, David Manusevich, Leon Weliczker. See also the entry about the bone mill allegedly used in that camp to grind down unburned bones.

A comparison contained in the Soviet report with how the Germans allegedly tried to cover up their crimes is revealing:

“In that manner, the Hitlerite murderers in Lvov Region stuck to the same me­thods of concealing their crimes which they began earlier, by killing the Polish officers in a forest near Katyn. The commission of examiners has established full identity of the burial sites located in Lisenitsy with the same type of masking [=camouflaging, as used for] the graves of the Polish officers killed by the Germans in Katyn.”

However, the mass murder of Polish officers near Katyn, and the subsequent concealment of the graves, had been perpetrated by Soviet forces in 1940, and discovered in early 1943 by the Germans. The Soviets prepared a fake expert report about Katyn after the German retreat, blaming their own crime on the Germans. This shows the mendacity in which all Soviet “expert” reports were steeped at war’s end. It cannot even be ruled out that some of the mass graves and human remains allegedly discovered in fact originated from Soviet murders committed in the two decades before the German invasions. After all, Ukraine has always been a hot spot of anti-Russian and anti-Soviet resistance, and thus also of Russian and Soviet mass atrocities against Ukrainians.

(For more information on the Janowska Camp, see Mattogno 2022c, pp. 485-522.)