Sturmbannfuehrer Gricksch for SS-Col. von Herff and Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler:

The Auschwitz camp plays a special role in the resolution of the Jewish question. The most advance methods permit the execution of the Fuehrer-order in the shortest possible time and without arousing much attention. The so-called “resettlement action” runs the following course:

The Jews arrive in special trains (freight cars) toward evening and are driven on special tracks to areas of the camp specifically set aside for this purpose.

There the Jews are unloaded and examined for their fitness to work by a team of doctors, in the presence of the camp commandant and several SS officers. At this point anyone who can somehow be incorporated into the work program is put in a special camp.

The curably ill are sent straight to a medical camp and are restored to health through a special diet. The basic principle behind everything is: conserve all manpower for work. The previous type of “resettlement action” has been thoroughly rejected, since it is too costly to destroy precious work energy on a continual basis.

The unfit go to cellars in a large house which are entered from outside. They go down five or six steps into a fairly long, well-constructed and well-ventilated cellar area, which is lined with benches to the left and right. It is brightly lit, and the benches are numbered.

The prisoners are told that they are to be cleansed and disinfected for their new assignments. They must therefore completely undress to be bathed. To avoid panic and to prevent disturbances of any kind, they are instructed to arrange their clothing neatly under their respective numbers, so that they will be able to find their things again after their bath.

Everything proceeds in a perfectly orderly fashion. Then they pass through a small corridor and enter a large cellar room which resembles a shower bath. In this room are three large pillars, into which certain materials can be lowered from outside the cellar room. When three- to four-hundred people have been herded into this room, the doors are shut, and containers filled with the substances are dropped down into the pillars.

As soon as the containers touch the base of the pillars, they release particular substances that put the people to sleep in one minute. A few minutes later, the door opens on the other side, where the elevator is located. The hair of the corpses is cut off, and their teeth are extracted (gold-filled teeth) by specialists (Jews). It has been discovered that Jews were hiding pieces of jewelry, gold, platinum etc., in hollow teeth.

Then the corpses are loaded into elevators and brought up to the first floor, where ten large crematoria are located. (Because fresh corpses burn particularly well, only 50-100 lbs. of coke are needed for the whole process.) The job itself is performed by Jewish prisoners, who never step outside this camp again.

The results of this “resettlement action” to date: 500,000 Jews. Current capacity of the “resettlement action” ovens: 10,000 in 24 hours.

Leon Trotsky: Trotsky's Last Article (1940): Bonepartism, Fascism, and War | Bonapartism and Fascism (1934) | Leon Trotsky: The German Catastrophe (1933) | The Tragedy of the German Proletariat (1933) |

• James Galbraith on Michael Kinsley: "Kinsley writes that all the ways of looking at the national debt 'lead to varying degrees of panic'. But obviously there is no panic where it matters, among those who lend money to Uncle Sam…. Nor is the present public debt close to being a record. In relation to our annual output it was much higher in 1946…. Did calamity follow? No. For a third of a century after the war, the debt-to-output ratio just gradually declined…. It's true that we have got big economic problems right now. But the budget deficit and the public debt aren't among them…. As for [Kinsley's] notion that a "typical" American surviving spouse leaves a cool half-million behind, only someone too lazy to distinguish a mean from a median could believe that. In 2004 according to the Federal Reserve mean family net worth for households with a head aged 65-74 was $690,900--I couldn't find where Kinsley got his $1 million--and the median value was only $190,100. This includes housing wealth, and those values would be lower today. Numbers are numbing, as Kinsley said. Is intellectual laziness a Boomer vice? I think not. It's a pundit vice, induced by easy access to choice venues for the publication of one's thoughts. The pity of Kinsley's essay is that we Boomers will, in fact, leave problems: for starters we burned the oil and we've warmed the planet. Those are grave matters and Kinsley might have written about them. But no: he chose to waste our time on a topic he hasn't troubled to learn the first thing about. Unemployment, on the other hand, is a real problem…"

• Scott Lemieux: Great Moments in Self-Refutation: "Rarely does a (at least once-) respectable pundit face-plant as badly as Michael Kinsley re-proving Krugman’s points about austerity mongers while attempting to refute them. While it’s impossible to summarize an argument this incoherent, the key point seems to be that if you can’t tell the difference between Barack Obama and David Cameron (a problem that, admittedly, does afflict a handful of people on the American left) it’s hard to know what opponents of short-term austerity want…. Kinsley is one of those people who’s been haunted by the specter of inflation for years, and the fact that he’s been consistently wrong doesn’t seem to have taught him anything. And why should it — as he essentially concedes himself, the case for austerity is about overclass morality, not about economics."