Instruments, of Extermination

The tools which the orthodoxy claims National-Socialist Germany used to accomplish the extermination of Jews (and also other victim groups) fall into two groups:

1. Organizational Instruments

a. Ghettos. Orthodox historians claim that the Third Reich forced Jews to live in ghettos not just to separate them from the non-Jewish population and to keep them under tight control, but also to subject them deliberately to conditions whereby many of them would inevitably die. See the entry on ghettos for more details.

b. Camps. Concentration camps and labor or PoW camps are not a unique feature of the Holocaust. Therefore, they are not included in this work, unless it is claimed that measures or facilities were put in place to accomplish a planned mass extermination. Such claims were made by many witnesses for numerous camps. Most of them were accepted by orthodox historians as true, while a few were rejected as erroneous or fraudulent. For a list of these camps, see the entry on extermination camps.

c. Einsatzgruppen. These German military units operated in eastern occupied territories with numerous tasks. The orthodoxy insists that their main task was to round up and murder Jews. The main methods to accomplish this were mostly mass executions by shootings, with gas vans used as a secondary murder weapon. When German armed forces started retreating from the Soviet Union, special units within the framework of the so-called Aktion 1005 are said to have roamed the temporarily German-occupied territories in order to empty mass graves containing Einsatzgruppen victims, and to burn all bodies.

2. Physical Instruments, Tools

These are the material tools used during and after the murder. They are divided into the actual murder weapon on the one hand, and tools to destroy the victims’ bodies on the other hand:

a. Murder Weapons. This includes a wide array of claimed murder methods, such as bullets, various toxic gases in stationary and mobile gas chambers, electricity, vacuum, steam, war gases etc., but also some exotic methods, such as tree felling, death bridges, explosives, pneumatic hammers, etc. For a closer discussion, see the entry on tools of mass murder.

b. Tools to erase the traces of the murder. These include crematoria, open-air incinerations as well as alleged attempts to remove corpses with explosives (see the respective entries for details).

For more details on this, see the entry on tools of mass murder.