Doctors' plot: Encyclopedia II - Doctors' plot - The Second Holocaust controversy

Doctors' plot - The Second Holocaust controversy

Some people think that the scenario of the "Doctors' plot" was reminiscent of the previous Stalin purges of the late 1930s, and the plan to deport the whole population based on its ethnicity resembled previous similar deportations. Accordingly, some argue that Stalin was preparing a USSR-wide pogrom, the "Second Holocaust", to finish what Hitler had begun, but this time, the scheme was not completed because of Stalin's death on March 5, 1953.

Proponents of this version cite mainly the memoirs (sometimes only alleged) and late testimonies of contemporaries, including those by Andrei Sakharov, Anastas Mikoyan, Nikolay Bulganin, Yevgeny Tarle, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Veniamin Kaverin.

There are many problems with this evidence, since we don't really have the memoirs of Bulganin. We only have Yakov Etinger's claims (son of one of the doctors, also Yakov Etinger) that he spoke with Bulganin, who told him about the deportation plans. Etinger's credibility was put into question when he claimed to have published a previously unpublished letter to Pravda, signed by many Jewish celebrities and calling for Jewish deportation. The original two versions of the letter have been published in Istochnik and other publications.[3],[4] Not only did they lack any hint of a plan to deport Jews to Siberia, they in fact called for the creation of a Jewish newspaper! The real text of the famous letter actually serves as an argument against the existence of the deportation plans.

Etinger was asked to publish the notes taken during his alleged meetings with Bulganin, but they are still unpublished.

Similarly, the late account of Veniamin Kaverin cannot be trusted, because he claimed that he had been asked to sign the non-existent letter about the deportation. It is possible that he had really seen the letter and misremembered its contents many years later under the influence of widespread rumors about the deportation.

Ilya Ehrenburg's memoirs contain only a hint about his letter to Stalin, which was published along with the "Jewish Letter," and also doesn't contain any hint about the deportation.

Sakharov, Yakovlev and Tarle do not specify the sources of their claims and don't claim to be eyewitnesses. Anastas Mikoyan's edited and published version of the memoir contains one sentence about the planned deportation of the Jews from Moscow, but it is not known whether the original text contains this sentence.

Sometimes it is claimed that one million copies of a pamphlet titled "Why Jews Must Be Resettled from the Industrial Regions of the Country" were published; no copy has been found.

All these and many other facts forced the researcher of Stalin's anti-Semitism, Gennady Kostyrchenko, to conclude in his article "Deportation - mystification" in the Russian-Jewish magazine Lechaim [5], that there is no credible evidence for the alleged deportation plans, and there is much evidence against their existence. Some other researchers think that there is not enough credible evidence for the deportation plans, but the question is still open.[6][7]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Second Holocaust controversy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki