Talk:Poniatowa

Quotation from Morgen
The quotation from Konrad Morgen is not, as indicated in the footnote, from an affidavit submitted by Morgen to the IMT. It is a quotation from a report that he submitted at the time of the Poniatowa massacre; in the volume cited, the report is being quoted by the interrogator of Ernst Kaltenbrunner in a pre-trial deposition; and it does not contain the words "6,000 Jews and 9,500 Jewesses". I hesitate to make these corrections without knowing whether the author of this item has an alternative source of the quotation. User talk:Jdvelleman 14:24, 26 May 2011 (CET)

I'm not sure Jdvellman has this quite right. Back when, I asked Raul Hilberg about the provenance of Morgen's "testimony". He told me it was the result of a series of questions (about Poniatowa) PUT TO Morgen by Allied interrogators at Nuremburg; Hilberg supplied me with a copy of the interrogation transcript, and there Morgen gave the inmate population numbers...which accord quite closely with those given by other authorities, e.g.,Artur Podgorski, "Arbeitslager in Poniatowa 1941-43", JEWISH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY QUARTERLY, 2010/#4, pp. 443-44. The Prosecution at the Trial then attempted to use this account against Kaltenbrunner, but that angle failed because Harvest Festival was entirely an SS/Order Police operation...no SD (Kaltenbrunner's men) were involved and he knew nothing about it. It did not, in short "implicate Kaltenbrunner" at all, and this I suspect is the reason why Morgen's otherwise significant account was shunted off into one of the Supplement volumes. I can see why (someone) cut most of Morgen's account of the mass shooting from this article, which is, after all, about the long-term history of the city of Poniatowa, not the Jewish labor camp per se. But, in this connection, am also wondering why the strict chronology of the article was also changed around to put the wartime labor camp part last, instead of adhering to the prior, straight chronology of pre-war deep history, then WW II, then postwar. I think the original sequence should be restored. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Seadragonconquerer (talk • contribs) 07:24, 22 November 2012 (UTC)