Jewish Resettlement" in Eastern Galicia

It seems the host site is down for that file.

I see in your link that you have included Bergen Belsen. You are well aware of the horrendous conditions there entirely due to the break down of infrastructure at wars end. You are also well aware of the typhus epidemic in that camp.

As you have realized the largest camps is not where the Jews were kept. Die Judenlager run by the SS were relocated to konzentrationlager by some voluntary marches. Most zwangarbeitslager did not fit the appearance of a camp, but workers housed in all kinds of accomodation. Schlomo Pivnik describes working on a farm, living in a barn, finding bottles of red wine under a hay bale and getting drunk on it. There are descriptions of those Jews caught up in the advance of the Soviets after escaping their prior conditions. Some in barns and farm houses were simply blown up by the Russians. Others just died of sickness.

Why people did not return to their homelands is not evidence of much.

Miss X mentioned 150 other girls in her camp. It has been mentioned on occasions that labour camps were often not given names, just the larger ones. A link was given to show the camp. Miss X said:

While Miss X did not know the name of the camp (because it probably did not have one) the location was given. In fact she says:

Her job was to dig fortifications.

Miss X said:

I and a number of other girls made our escape. This was not difficult, as by that time the guards were already demoralised and hardly tried to maintain control

Not happy this his request for the name of a single camp that was not guarded properly Nessie now demands evidence of millions.




If you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one. Thousand of labour camps and demoralized guards and escape is a far simpler explanation than murder by gas chamber.



There is ample evidence that many Jews died horrible deaths as evidenced by Mihai Dimitru, discussing the Jewish colony in Transistria.


Millions of Jews escaped the war.
Peter Gatrell writes:

It is quite clear from that statement by Prof Gattrel that people did not go home. Lantos describes how the Jews were kept prisoners of the Russians. When they escaped they no longer had a home to go to. In Britain alone 2 million homes were destroyed by bombing. 72% of housing in Poland was destroyed.(Urban). An average of 60% of houses were destroyed over Europe. There were no homes to return to. In the case of Jews, it is a fact that their homes were sequestered and not returned post war.

To ask why they did not return home is somewhat asinine. A closer look at Jewish migration is more in order than claiming mass murder.

There is evidence the security of detention was lax. In some work camps there were no guards, no need.


Discuss the topic not what you consider evidence.

Please contribute to the thread without demanding information. It cannot sink in that many camps did not have names.


From this quote, it is clear that the farms did not have guards unless an armed foreman on the larger estates is considered a guard.

Jews working on farms were no different. The Jew Pivnik worked on such a farm, no guard except the harsh farmer. Pivnik and co murdered that farmer making their escape.

That is mere inference. Millions simply walked away at the the end. There are substantial numbers of reports of Jews hiding while the Russians advanced. They had problems not being shot or bombed by the Russians.

You are well aware of this person and his book. He mentions many Jews in similar circumstances.

People like these Jews who had nothing to say, no atrocity stories were largely ignored.

Excellent work and content Callahan. I will reproduce it here.  I think that all the photos and links work.

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General Government Labor Camps



This map vastly understates the true number of these labor camps, first of all because many are "stacked" in the same place (sometimes dozens) with the points plotted, but also because (1) many of the labor camps which are known lack sufficient information to be mapped and (2) there are likely hundreds more (maybe thousands) which remain totally unknown. These do not include those in the East nor further south (e.g. Austria). It also does not include ghettos nor concentration camps/sites.

What it does do is provide an illustration of, generally, where these known labor camps were clustered, how they were patterned throughout German territory and relative to AR camps (also shown), etc.

I have been working with the data used to populate the map (see: forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14794&p=107398#p107398) which, as already mentioned, includes many more camps than those plotted. In total, there are 1,030 known camps within the territories shown above. The breakdown is as follows:

Silesia = 213
Reichsgau Wartheland = 205
District Galicia = 164
District Lublin = 126
District Radom = 93
District Krakow = 84
District Warsaw = 72
Reichsgebiet = 40
District Bialystok = 7
Reichsgau Sudetenland = 17
Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreußen = 8
Reichsgau Oberdonau = 1

What is not known, for the most part, is the size of these camps. There are at least some confirmed to have had inmates numbering in the thousands but others were as low as in the dozens or hundreds.

Of the 1,030 total, here is some of the data which I found most important:

• based on the time of its "last mention" ("letzte Erwähnung")
• 204 were reported (or assumed) closed no earlier than sometime in 1944 (with even mid-to-late 1944 not being uncommon)
• 20 were reported closed in 1945
• About 10-15% have no known closing date at all
• 346 of the 1,030 entries have no map location due to missing/insufficient information (many others have only an approximate location)

These areas and figures do not include those camps for Hungarian Jews in Austria, which are even more shocking:



I have yet to dive into the types of labor throughout all of these camps in-depth. I think mapping these out, understanding the timelines and locations where types of labor were conducted can add a lot in terms of understanding the story of how Jews were treated, where they were transported at various times throughout the war, possibly even where they ended up.

Have a look at this map of the major train lines as of 1939. I wanted to highlight the routes from the major ghettoes (Warsaw, Radom, Lublin, Lvov, Krakow, Czestochowa) to the AR camp to the east of each, showing the route which came into contact with the most labor camps (or gravitating toward the densest clusters thereof) along the way, in pink. I also color-coded the districts which neighbored the General Government to the East (from top-to-bottom: District Litauen [yellow], District Bialystok [rose], District Weissruthenien [blue], District Volhynia [green], District Galicia [orange]). I came up with this:

Eastbound Labor Map



To determine how to draw the above, I used the first map provided for tracing those camps in the General Government, and the map of the eastern (Ostland, RK Ukraine) labor camps for those in the East (current version is here: www.mapcustomizer.com/map/ZwangarbeiterslagerOstlandUkraine7).

Now, let's say hypothetically that each AR camp is officially a "gateway" further east, each corresponding to districts on either side of it (west-east). It might look something like this:

Gateway Map


Three sets of districts to the west, three gateway camps, three to the east. It makes administrative sense to associate each gateway with a particular set of districts on either side, to keep things organized insofar as tracking and managing Jewish eastbound movement.

Since we know that the Hoefle telegram and Korherr report together refer only to Jews who had accessed route designations "B, S, T (and L)" insofar as being "sifted through camps in the General Government" (see here: forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14847&p=107780#p107780), and with insights gained from the "Eastbound Labor Map" above, which shows the [approximate] paths of greatest labor camp density, we should identify to what extent these paths align with the alleged "extermination routes" to AR camps. Some Holocaust establishment resources, here:






One very interesting find I came across in the last couple days is a map drawn in November 1941 from Organization Todt, which details the main, official German transportation routes of resources and materials being sent to the east:


Source and more detailed view: www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~332809~90101167:Der-Generalinspektor-f%2525C3%2525BCr-das-deutsc

Some excerpts from the description:



Surely, Jews were among those materials being sent east along these routes and, sure enough, these routes almost perfectly follow those routes with greater "labor camp density", both in the GG and further east. This could be for obvious logistical reasons (i.e. the need for getting prisoners and camp resources to the routed locations efficiently), and/or because these camps are simply the ones we are most likely to know about, given that information likely traveled the same path as these "thoroughfares and expressways" did.

The description quoted above indicates that "over a million people" were enslaved for Organisation Todt projects, alone, in the occupied territories and in concentration camps. I wonder how far "over a million" this could entail, in fact. I also wonder how many were Jews, and how many other organizations employed forced labor in these areas and to what scale.

As PR has already pointed out above, researchers have already identified the existence of some 42,500 and counting (!) different camps and ghettos. If only one-third of those are in the occupied eastern territories, that's over 14,000 different locations in these territories where Jews may have been held. Did each location have just fifty Jews on average (accounting for 700,000 Jews total)? Did each have two-hundred Jews on average (2.8 million total)? Throughout this time, how many Jews were in the other 28,000 camps (the remaining two-thirds) back west?

The bottom-line is that Jews were sifted through camps in the GG according to geography and labor needs, along an "access route" which led many to cross-over into Ostland and RK Ukraine via the "gateways" of Belzec (B), Sobibor (S), and Treblinka (T). Once crossing into eastern-occupied territories, they were sifted through the camps on this side even further, all the way up to the eastern front.

What does "sifting" mean? It means Jews were brought east from their ghettos, labor needs were identified at each stop and the requested number of capable or appropriate Jews would disembark at that point in time (a time-consuming process which is documented, as shown by Nazgul, via the Fahrlplananordnung documents). Those Jews who find no place at any of the labor camps en route toward the east in the GG would end up at the AR camp corresponding to their route. Any and all confiscated property would be on the same train with them. Those who were truly hopeless would possibly be euthanized via Aktion 14f13 but this was a very small number, in any case. Those anticipated to be able to handle the difficult journey further east would use these "gateway" sites to be deloused, shower, etc. as their property (and that of those who disembarked at earlier stops) is unloaded from the train and sorted by the camp staff (who would often burn large amounts of "junk" property, leading to the odors and smoke reported by some witnesses). Those transiting Jews then board a different train nearby (this one on Soviet wide-gauge rails) for the journey further east. They then continue a similar journey to the one they had just endured. They are "sifted through" the many labor camps in the eastern-occupied territories in much the same fashion as before. These routes went as far as the eastern front.

Given there are some 42,500+ sites where Jews could be held, it is impossible to ever account for every location where the "less fit" or "unfit" Jews were held, either temporarily or until war's end. But between the risks of starvation, typhus and other diseases, the threat of 'antisemitic' locals, or post-war Soviet captivity, the odds of their surviving the war were slim. The odds of these frail persons living long enough post-war to ever be asked to document their paths of travel (in the east or otherwise) were even slimmer. Given that most of Holocaust interest and literature did not appear until decades after the alleged events, the odds that any significant number of these "unfit" persons would ever be accounted for in the historical record reach slim to none, especially given most of the world had already presumed them as dead based on "official" narratives.

The greatest misconception among exterminationists is lack of recognition of just how scattered Jews became throughout the war and thereafter. It is clear that this is the case, from the excerpt already shared by PR but here again as it is extremely relevant:



The degree of dispersion, diffusion, etc. was extraordinarily vast, unlike anything that has ever happened before to any group of people. You add this to the fact that most Jews genuinely believe in the horror stories and had already grown accustomed to having not seen their home and family in years by the end of the war... It becomes obvious why so many Jews appeared "missing", even and especially to Jews themselves.

Of course, this is not to rule out one other extremely-important consideration: Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union. It wasn't hard for Stalin to figure out what the 'Nazis' were doing with Jews in the eastern territories. They were scattered all over, in various condition, when the Soviet army arrived. What, exactly, did the this notorious army do when they found these Jews; dozens, hundreds or thousands at a time? Were they all "liberated", as some report to have been further west? How many were sent to Siberia, like hundreds of thousands of other Jews which had already been sent there by that time? How many were simply killed, reasons be damned, by soldiers with a reputation for needless destruction on a literal warpath? All of this is brought into greater focus when thinking about just how much the Soviet Union got away with by this time and thereafter. Starving to death tens of millions of their own population, NKVD death squads, campaigns of show trials, etc. After insisting that Nuremberg be a show trial as well (allegedly then being overruled by other Allied governments), Stalin supposedly acquiesced and decided a fair trial was okay, only to submit a phony "Katyn report" into evidence (with 100 official Soviet signatories!). This is the government whom Jews were captured by at the end of the war. I say "captured" and not "liberated", for obvious reasons.

The answer to "where did they go?" needs to fall at least as much on the Soviet Union as it does on Germany.

Some of what I described at the beginning of this post will likely never be 100% confirmed, as property confiscation and transport of important resources for the war (including Jewish forced labor) were "secret Reich matters" which were topics likely subject to destruction of important documents near the end of the war. Nonetheless, a case can still be made such as the above.