Continuing on with another piece of ‘Holocaust Nonsense’ from the notebooks of prominent jewish Soviet propagandist and apologist for Stalin Vasily Grossman we have the claim that the Germans ‘burnt 58,000 jews from Odessa alive’ at Berezovka in the Ukraine.
Grossman claims that:
‘Fifty-eight thousand Odessa Jews were burned alive in Berezovka. Some of them were burned to death in railway carriages. Others were taken to a clear where Germans poured petrol over them and then set them on fire.’ (1)
The problem of course is that this claim doesn’t specify a date or year, but also contains the extremely improbable scenario of the Germans allegedly transporting 58,000 jews from the Ukrainian city of Odessa to Berezovka for ‘extermination’ and ‘exterminating’ them by ‘burning them to death in railway carriages’ – which makes no sense because the German military desperately needed as much Soviet rolling stock as possible due to the Soviet rail gauge being different to the European rail gauge – (2) and also ‘pouring petrol over them’ and then ‘setting them on fire’ is also clearly nonsense, because petrol was a scarce resource for the Germans even in August 1941 when Berezovka was liberated from Soviet control and it was conserved wherever possible.
So, the idea that the German expended huge amounts of petrol in August 1941 by dumping it over – presumably – tens of thousands of jews to sit them on fire in order to kill them is both ridiculous and profoundly stupid.
In truth even the ‘Jewish Virtual Library’ thinks Grossman’s claim is nonsense writing that:
‘Berezovka was taken by the Germans on August 10, 1941. On August 14 they murdered 41 Jews and on August 25 another 100. By September, 211 were dead. Subsequently the town was included in Romanian Transnistria, and Jews from Bessarabia and Odessa were deported to the Berezovka area, with nearly 7,000 perishing.’ (3)
It is unclear on what basis the ‘Jewish Virtual Library’ comes up with the circa ‘7,000 dead’ but it is vastly different from Grossman’s figure of 58,000!
In truth what probably happened at Berezovka is that it was to be used as a transit ghetto for the concentration of the surrounding jewish population – given that when German forces rolled in despite popular myths to the contrary only 211 jews out of 1,424 were shot by the Einsatzgruppen between August and September 1941 which necessarily suggests the German forces were actually just shooting the local jews significantly involved with (or believed to be significantly involved with) the Soviet authorities and/or supportive of Communism – (4) and the jews transported to the Berezovka were sent there not ‘to be executed’ as Grossman explicitly claims and ‘Jewish Virtual Library’ implies, but rather to be guarded with as few resources as possible and to be ready for onward shipment into the concentration camp system as a labour force.
Thus we can see that Grossman’s claim is just another bit of ‘Holocaust’ nonsense.
References
(1) Vasily Grossman, 2007, ‘A Writer at War: A Soviet journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945’, 1st Edition, Vintage: New York, p. 267
(2) See for example: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23616/what-did-germany-do-in-world-war-ii-about-the-different-rail-gauge-in-the-soviet and https://www.o5m6.de/wehrmacht/downloads/Reichsbahn%20on%20the%20Eastern%20Front.pdf
(3) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/berezovka
(4) Ibid.