A number of notable historians have disputed Litchfield's version of the massacre, among them anti-Semitism researcher Wolfgang Benz and Winfried Garscha of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. Garscha states that the Nazis had already made plans to murder the 200 Jewish prisoners, who were considered too weak and sick to march on ahead of the rapidly-advancing Soviet army, before the Countess's party, and that the killings were in fact carried out by Nazi soldiers under orders from their superiors and not by civilian party guests: "It was indisputably a mass murder but it didn't arise from a party whim. People incapable of marching were murdered everywhere at the time."