The Destruction of The European Jews - Alleged Mistakes

Alleged Mistakes

According to Henry Friedlander, Hilberg's 1961 and 1985 editions Destruction mistakenly overlooked what Friedlander called "the most elaborate subterfuge" involving the disabled. This involved the collection of Jewish patients at various hospitals before transported elsewhere and killed during the summer and autumn of 1940.

The destination officially provided for these transports was the Government General of Poland and, although they never reached Poland, fraudulent letters informed the relatives that they had died at the Chelm mental hospital in the Lublin region. This deception was so successful that it was not even uncovered at Nuremberg, was accepted by most postwar historians, and continues even today to mislead researchers. In fact, these Jewish patients, the first Jewish victims of Nazi genocide, were all murdered in the T4 killing centers located inside the borders of the German Reich.

Freidlander discusses this ruse in Chapter 13 of his Origins of Nazi Genocide (1995).

According to Lithuanian-American scholar Saulius Sužiedėlis, Hilberg misinterpreted a document regarding Algirdas Klimaitis, "a small-time journalist and killer shunned by even pro-Nazi Lithuanian elements and unknown to most Lithuanians". This resulted in Klimaitis being inadvertently "transformed into the head of the 'anti-Soviet partisans'".