Willing Executioners?--The Holocaust, Germans, and Collective Guilt
The Manichaean syndrome … the good guys vs. the bad guys … the easy generalizations … the business of guilt and blackmail ... it goes on…
Patrick Buchanan is famous as a populist and staunch conservative, but he’s also a gadfly: He raises the important issues others ignore; he smashes the sacred idols; he asks troubling questions and proposes the answers most would rather not hear. He makes us think and for that we should be grateful.
In Where the Right went Wrong, he exposed the lies of the neocons and their disastrously wrong predictions about Iraq. Now in Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, he again challenges and provokes us to rethink what we take for granted. He reminds us of Lord Salisbury and the Boer War, of Churchill and the food blockade of Germany 1918-19, which led to the death by starvation or malnutrition of 750,000 German civilians, of the unwise guarantee to Poland in 1939, of the criminal carpet bombing of civilian targets in Germany 1941-45 and of the revelations of C.P. Snow in his 1960 Godkin Lectures at Harvard University.
My commentary here goes beyond Buchanan, as I will look closer at an issue that has been consciously avoided by generations of historians and political scientist—the degree to which the German people had knowledge of the Holocaust during 1939-45. Hitler’s and Himmler’s guilt is obvious and well documents, but what level of guilt do we attribute to the average German, what guilt do we continue to impose on the children and grand children of those unfortunate Germans who, in a very real sense, were the first victims of Hitler’s terror?
The potential for psychological blackmail remains strong even today. The simple syllogism of the past 60 years has been since “the Germans” committed the Holocaust, they are forever damned. But who were “the Germans”? Do we not mean, perhaps, the Nazis? Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his hate-filled book Hitler’s Willing Executioners wants us to believe that all Germans knew and all Germans were anti-Semites. But the real historical question—the crucial question—is that of knowledge and consent.
Most historians and political scientists ignore the issue by assuming both knowledge and consent. For them, the presumption of innocence is not operative when it comes to the Holocaust. There is, instead, a presumption of guilt. Let us now revisit the situation at the time of the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46, when the prosecutors posed the key questions: who knew what when? The accused gave answers that we cannot simply ignore.
We learn that the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was not the purpose of the war but an aberration that emerged with the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and the criminal activities of the Einsatzgruppen. But who knew about the SD-commandos, who knew about the extermination camps? And those who knew about it, what could or did they do to oppose the horror?
Germans knew that they lived in a virulently anti-Semitic society, but anti-Semitism was not a German monopoly, and pogroms had long been common in Tsarist Russia, in the Ukraine, in Poland, and elsewhere.
From the Nuremberg trials we learn that the Endlösung was classed in the category of geheime Reichssache—that is, the highest level of State secrecy. In other words, the Nazi government tried to keep it away from public scrutiny—the shootings took place far away in the Baltic States, in Poland, in the Soviet Union—and the extermination camps—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Lublin-Majdaneck, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmo—were all outside of the Reich. For good reason. True enough, Dachau was in Bavaria, but this camp was established primarily to hold German Communists, Social Democrats, and homosexuals.
The average German knew that the “Jews” were supposed to be in labor camps in the East–not a good place to be but ostensibly safer than the cities of the Reich, which were exposed to frequent air bombing. Of course, Germans saw that Jews were convened to assemble at the market place or at the train station whence they were transported east. But should every German have thought that transportation to the East meant death? Why? What precedents had they to believe such a thing? In America, some 120,000 Japanese-Americans and some 40,000 German-Americans were also picked up and transported to internment camps. Their neighbors saw it and did nothing to oppose it. But no one in the U.S. would have dreamt that these poor people were going to be exterminated. If we absolve ourselves of responsibility, why do we impose the ultimate guilt upon the Germans?
Of course, some German soldiers did witness massacres. But a shooting event in 6 years of war is but a stone in a larger mosaic. Who could possibly have known the full horror of what was going on? Several times in the Nuremberg transcripts we learn about Führerbefehl Number 1 on secrecy. Here Hitler stipulated:
a) No one is to have any knowledge of secret matters which do not fall within his sphere.
b) No one is to obtain more information than he needs for the fulfillment of the task set him.
c) No one is to receive information earlier than is necessary for the duties assigned to him.
d) No one is to pass on to subordinates more secret orders or at an earlier date than is indispensable for the attainment of the purpose. (IMT, Nuremberg, Vol. VIII, p. 236)
This order was posted in every governmental office, and every soldier was made aware of it. Thus, even if an individual learned something about the Holocaust, it was almost impossible to investigate further. There was one exception: military justice. Thus, for instance, Army judge Wilken von Ramdohr, whom I personally interviewed, was instructed to prosecute a young German soldier on charges of defamation of the SS, because during home leave the soldier had complained that the SS was killing Jews in the East. Judge Ramdohr tried to investigate through the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, which insisted on a conviction. Eventually Ramdohr dismissed the case, because the matter had not been clarified by the authorities in Berlin. Ramdohr was punished by being transferred out of his post, but he survived the war to tell (see Alfred de Zayas, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau).
The most remarkable testimony in Nuremberg was perhaps that of SS-Judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who in the course of a routine investigation into corruption by SS officers in the running of the concentration camps learned about the killings in Lublin-Majdanek. From there he went on to investigate corruption in Auschwitz, learned about the killings there, arrested the Chief Political Officer there, Untersturmbannführer Grabner, and tried to get indictments against Christian Wirth and Adolf Eichmann among others. On 7 August 1946, he stated under oath: “At first Wirth’s description seemed completely fantastic to me, but in Lublin I saw one of his camps. It was a camp which collected the property of his victims. From the piles of things—there were an enormous number of watches—I had to realize that something frightful was going on…” (IMT, Vol. XX, p. 495). On 8 August, he explained that there was a whole system of disinformation and dissimulation: “Certain Jewish prisoners with connections abroad were selected and were made to write letters abroad telling how well-off they were in Auschwitz, so that the public got the impression that these well-known people were alive and could write and that they were doing well.” (ibid., p. 506).
To the question “under normal circumstances, what would you have had to do after you had learned of all these terrible things?” Morgen answered “I was a judge of military penal justice. No court-martial in the world could bring the Supreme Commander, let alone the head of the State, to court… it was not possible for me as Obersturmbannführer to arrest Hitler … but in the meantime the front had advanced, Auschwitz was occupied and the judge who had been sent there had to stop…and in January 1945 complete disorganization set in which made further legal prosecution impossible. ” (ibid., p. 510). To the question “Did you not consider it your duty to inform the public or to clear your conscience somehow by raising the cry ‘murder’?” Morgen responded: “I was bound by Basic Order Number 1, concerning secrecy on State affairs, and could only approach the chiefs of the main offices personally. Any mistake I would have made in contacting other offices would have had serious results for me and would have given my enemies a pretext for protracting the investigation … [besides] I would have needed access to … the press and the radio, which I did not have. If I had blurted that out at every street corner, no one would have believed me, because this system was beyond human imagination. I would have been locked up as insane” (ibid., p. 511).
The Nuremberg documents further show that Himmler had personally taken the oath from the SS-commandos charged with the murder of Jews and declared explicitly that anyone who should say anything about the action would be put to death. (IMT, Bd. XXI, p. 533). Himmler further underlined the importance of secrecy in his infamous speech to senior SS officers privy to the Endlösung, when on 4 October 1943 he spoke in Posen not about the “extermination” of the Jews but about their “evacuation”: “This is an unwritten and never to be written page of glory in Germany’s history.” (Nuremberg Document 1919-PS, IMT, Vol. 29, p. 145). And when some 200 SS-people who had been involved in the murders asked to be transferred to the front, Himmler denied them permission, because it was too risky to send these SS officers to mix with the regular soldiers. (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München, IFZ_Archiv, ZS 1931, Treblinka Prozess. Der Leitende Oberstaatsanwalt bei dem Landgericht Düsseldorf, Gesch. Nr. 8 I Ks 2/64. Niederschrift Francke-Griksch).
The testimony of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and General Alfred Jodl similarly indicate lack of any real knowledge about the Holocaust. Is this believable? Probably. Indeed, if one is taken up 100% in fighting a “total war,” one tends to concentrate on one’s own overwhelmingly consuming military responsibilities. But what about the press people? Hans Fritzche, one of the three persons to be acquitted at the Nuremberg Trials, was the head of Nazi Radio. On 18 June 1946 he testified:
I, as a journalist who worked during that period, am firmly convinced that the German people were unaware of the mass murders of the Jews, and assertions to that effect were considered rumours; officially denied again and again … [W]hen the Russians, after they recaptured Kharkov, started legal proceedings during which killing by gas was mentioned for the first time. I ran to Dr. Goebbels with these reports and asked him about the facts. He stated he would have the matter investigated… The next day he sent me a notice of denial… Dr Goebbels explicitly informed me that the gas vans mentioned in the Russian legal proceeding were pure invention and that there was no actual proof to support it. It was not without reason that the people who operated these vans were put under the ban of strictest secrecy. If the German people had learned of these mass murders, they would certainly no longer have supported Hitler.” (IMT, Vol.XVII, p. 181).
The above testimony at the Nuremberg Trials has enormous implications for the question of guilt. But historians have apparently not done their homework—or they seem to want to ignore these statements, so as to maintain their pre-conceived idea of collective knowledge and collective guilt.
Conclusions
When I lived in Germany in the 1970-80s as a Fulbright Fellow and later as a fellow at the Max Planck Institute, I researched these matters in the archives and interviewed more than 150 former military judges. I also interviewed Admiral Dönitz and Albert Speer. I am persuaded that Führerbefehl Nr. 1 on secrecy was indeed successful in keeping the horror of the Holocaust secret until the last months and weeks of the war. Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD), a Wehrmacht officer with whom I have frequently corresponded, has also repeatedly affirmed that he had never heard about it during the war and only learned of Auschwitz after the capitulation. Are all of these people liars? I don’t think so. After all, some State secrets are kept secret—like, say, the Manhattan project!
It is crucial to understand that Hitler knew that the Germans would not approve of the Holocaust. Rumours were rejected as enemy propaganda. Only a few Germans really knew what was going on, and many of them committed suicide at the end of the war to escape prosecution. Others went into the Resistance against Hitler, specifically because of their knowledge of some aspects of the Endlösung, even if they had no way of establishing the whole picture. Count Helmuth James von Moltke, the head of the conspiratorial “Kreisauer Kreis,” did have access to some information, since he worked in military intelligence. In 1943 he wrote to his former Oxford professor Lionel Curtis the following lines: “in Germany people do not know what is happening.” Moltke himself, did not know the true dimensions of the crime, because he thought that only hundreds of thousands had been killed—not millions! (see Peter Hoffmann, German Resistance to Hitler, p. 132).
The head of German Intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and many others similarly went into the resistance because of what they had managed to learn about the Holocaust. They became involved in several failed assassination attempts, most notably on 20 July l944. This was the case with Graf Claus von Stauffenberg, Peter Count York von Wartenburg, Carl Goerdeler, and others. This, too, is an under-investigated chapter of the Second World War. There was much resistance to Hitler. But those who want to defame the whole German race as being “eliminationist” anti-Semites and congenital aggressors—these people do not even want the information available to all in the Nuremberg transcripts.
A thoroughgoing examination of collective knowledge and guilt has great relevance not only to historiography but policy-making and diplomacy in the 21st century. We should thank Pat Buchanan for being the gadfly who’s provoked us to take a second look.
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas is professor of international law at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations and formerly served with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Secretary of the Human Rights Committee, and the Chief of Petitions. He is the author of several books including A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans and Nemisis at Postdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans. You can visit his website here.
Comments
As far as I know, of the meeting that purportedly decided so-called Final Solution only one copy exsists, and that is clearly a falsification. How come that foreign state secretary von Weizseacker, who took part of the meeting, got away with only a few years prison at Nuremberg? It is not only that most Germans didn’t know about the atrocities, it is also that many which are blamed on them have never happened.
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Mr. de Zayas argument would be self-evident if we did not operate in the West under the assumption that collectively the Germans were guilty, and that therefore all crimes committed against the Germans, were a mere retribution, a form of raw cosmic justice embodied in the persons of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. On these lines Daniel Goldhagen’s indictment of the Germans as ‘willing executioners’ attempted to give a new lease of life to the spurious anthropology put forward by the Frankfurt School in the effort to denazify and reeducate the defeated Germans. This spurious anthropology postulated as the eternal German national character an ‘authoritarian personality’ marred by sado-masochism and compulsive anti-semitism, and whose only solution lies on state-driven ‘Mass Pedagogy’ (Volkspädagogik), and ‘Mass Re-Education’ (Volkserziehung). The Freudian savvy of the Frankfurtians came in handy for the task since the whole process of re-education was –and still is- carried out through carefully crafted conditioning techniques such as mass-media aversion therapy. Denazification developed into a totalitarian practice of its own, and came to the US – with its implicit double standards- already in the 1970s in the form of Political Correctness, the present dominant ideology.
In the war memories of de Gaulle, Churchil and Eisenhower, you will not find a mention of the word Holocaust. And in the online proceedings of the Nuremberg trials (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/imt.htm ), you will find 3 mentions of the word Holocaust: one referring to generic German crimes (not exclusive towards Jews), and to referring to the devastation of Dresden and Germany itself.
If you do a search in the electronic full-text version of the massive, 32 volume World History (Propyläen-Weltgeschichte) published between 1960 and 1965, you will not find a single mention of the term ‘Holocaust’. The series was edited by Golo Mann, Alfred Heuß and August Nitschke all respected Historians in denazified Germany.
The timing of its arrival in the US is important because it coincides with the emergence of the term ‘Holocaust’ as shorthand for the persecution of the European Jews during WWII. Norman Finkelstein argues that the rise of the Holocaust industry coincided with the Israeli success in the 1967 preemptive attack against Syria, Egypt and Jordan. At that moment, the image of a defenseless little David fighting against the Arab Goliath had become untenable and required a redoubling of the Hasbara efforts in the West.
It is important to keep the historical perspective of how the term Holocaust evolved, and to what political ends it is used, so that we can understand why all children born today in the West, three generations after the crimes committed during WWII, are still being denazified. A brave new world indeed, this one of ours.
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Professor deZayas’s investigation of this matter, as far as I can tell, is based on
scrupulous research, and matches the testimony of Helmut Schmidt, a Social Democrat of
Jewish ancestry, and the diaries of a World War Two Jewish professor who survived
the war in Dresden. Such testimonies suggest that most German Christians were far from
virulent anti-Semites and had only a vague knowledge of Hitler’s Endloesung. It is also
ridiculous to think that a population being bombed from pillar to post, and one
fighting a two front war, would have had the energy or time to be interested in what
Nazi fanatics were doing to Jews in concentration camps. Goldhagen’s picture
of German Christians running to assist Hitler in the killing of German Jews borders on
the surreal. It is also a treasured image in today’s Germany, a place in which national
self-hatred has been elevated to a national cult.
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Similarly - not even a single Israeli is aware of the alleged misdeeds of its forces in the West Bank and Gaza. So all who collectively blame all Israelis/Jews for any alleged misdeeds of its forces - hands off!!!
All I can say is - Prof. Zayas - thanks!! What a relief.
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All guilt is personal and to hold all Germans responsible for what happened as a group is wrong. I don’t blame all Jews for the crimes in Russia or the new crimes in Palistine and Iraq. Most of these things are way beyond the ordinary man. Even those ordered to take part, had no real way to escape orders. It took a lot of courage for someone to stand up on the battle field and refuse to obey a superior officer. Some did, but it took a lot of courage.
Look at this country, we stood by and let the Surpreme Court, by decree, declare that the life of a baby in the womb was worthless and that the people in a democracy, with full freedom had no right to regulate, the practice of abortion.
Now they are doing the same thing with homosexual marriage. Hitler had to hide his crimes. Here abortion, torture, Abu Graib, Guantanomo,and preememtive war are allowed and celebrated even with full knowldege of the population with free speech and free press. The Germans were in a police state.
The diaries of Otto Klemperor, who Dr. Gottfried refers to, can be read with great effect to see the attitude the average German had toward the Jews. Klemperor was helped at all turns by old friends and even new ones as he survivied for 6 years in Germany during the war. They are very informative about the life of ordinary Germans in this period.
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And what of the prior “useless-eater” films - they had already murdered a class of people, and it was doctors, not soldiers, the intelligentsia, not the military. Was this too a state secret?
And most pro-life people wonder where are the good americans? We all watched Terri Schiavo starve to death - wasn’t that after Abu Gharib? The “unitary executive” didn’t do an Elian Gonzales in Florida, instead he did a Pontius Pilate paper (wasn’t it around Good Friday?) for the former, and ordered the latter, though at Gitmo, but may have forgot to tell them not to continue things in Iraq.
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Mr. Gottfried
What exactly do you know of Hitler’s Endloesung? You of all people should know the precise historical facts, and I’d love to know.
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De zayas making a compelling case that the Germans were not aware of the Holocaust. This is indeed likely. On the other hand, the German people likely were aware that Jews had their property confiscated, were driven from their homes, were forced to be publicly identified, etc. So although it is clear that the Germans were not collectively (or even to any significant degree) supporters of genocide, it is undeniable that they collectively did not object to the elimination from public life and forced removal of the Jews. It is furthermore undeniable that the Nazis were brought to power through democratic means in free elections. Indeed, the greatest support for the Nazi party was in the eastern regions of Germany whose ethnic cleansing of Germans by Soviet forces was so decried by de Zayas. The picture that emerges is that in the 1930’s the German people’s attitudes, with exceptions of course, towards Jews and Slavs was comparable to that of some of the more extreme Israeli settlers towards Arabs, or white South African suporters of apartheid towards Blacks. While the propogandistic work of those such as Goldhagen portraying Germans as genocidal monsters is wrong, whitewashing guilt for what the Germans have actually been responsible for is also wrong. Sorry, but a generally decent people would not have voted the Nazis into power nor enthusiastically supported a war of invasion of its eastern neighbors.
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max nordau
Your comment is excellent and exemplary. It should be a paradigm for all those who tend to repeat historical facts that lack, on closer scrutinity, all credibility.
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That the specific word “Holocaust” does not appear in the memoirs and histories of that era’s geopolitical actors means nothing. The term did not reference exclusively the Nazi murder of European Jewry until the 1960s; before that, it slowly gained prominence since the 1940s as the dark trademark for this awesome tragedy. For “proof” of the cataclysm we need only seek the people themselves. In the cities and towns of Europe and Russia, in the villages and shtetls - what became of the people? Where are the Jews?
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Yes, it is of vital importance that the word „Holocaust” is a recent construct in historical narratives, as opposed to a descriptor of historical realities. This religious term denoting sacrificial immolation among the ancient Hebrews has acquired its present pop meaning by imputing to the Germans industrial-scale incineration as one of their methods to mass murder Jews during WWII. During the proceedings of International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, the main methods of industrial extermination were listed as burnings, gassings (Zyklon B in Auschwitz, diesel exhaust in Treblinka), and electrocutions. Less conventional methods of extermination such as pedal-operated head-bashing machines, and the killing of 20’000 Jews in Auschwitz with a nuclear bomb were also part of the accusation (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/06-21-46.htm ).
Despite Elie Wiesel’s moving account of large pyres being fed with truck-loads of Jewish babies, ‘incineration’ as the main method of extermination has steadily receded into the background of the Holocaust narrative. The same happened with electrocution and nuclear annihilation. It seems then that that the Holocaust of demotic usage is less a descriptor of the actual method of extermination, than the symbolic representation of the religious sacrifice of the Jews. This interpretation seems in keeping the exhortations made by Wiesel and other Holocaust-experts that these events ‘cannot be apprehended rationally’ that they ‘are unique in the history of mankind’, that they represent ‘purest form of evil ever seen’, and that any inquire about the actual logistics and physics of those events amount to a form of sacrilege.
The orthodoxy and taboos surrounding a word that supposedly describes historical events is troubling. Especially so in Germany, Austria and France, where the full might of the state is used to crush whoever expresses any deviant thoughts on what should be the best documented crime in the History of mankind. Historical truth stands on its own and does not need the state to enforce it.
I fear the Holocaust may have acquired the character of established religion in the post-Christian West. The psychodynamics is in any case is very similar: the son of God/God’s chosen are sacrificed for the sins of mankind and later resurrected, one Heaven-bound, the others settled in Palestine.
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We are all familiar with Hilberg’s remarkable construction explaining how the exterminationist (or should that be destructionist?) Holocaust came to pass:
“But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus—mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy. “
This of course hardly marries with the USHMM definition....
“The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.”
.... it being impossible to square the “not organized centrally” with the “bureaucratic” circle:
But so what? Enlightened souls who have penetrated the obnoxious charade practiced by those well versed in Holocaust charlatanry will no more than nod knowingly at such commonplace contradiction. Please indulge me as I serve up these two interpretations merely to set the scene for my question.
We are also familiar with the tales regarding the lengths to which the Nazis went to keep their Holocaust secret. Quoting the USHMM again…
“The Holocaust was a state secret in Nazi Germany. The Germans wrote down as little as possible. Most of the killing orders were verbal, particularly at the highest levels. Hitler’s order to kill Jews was issued only on a need-to-know basis. The Nazi leaders generally avoided detailed planning of killing operations, preferring to proceed in a systematic but often improvised manner. The Germans destroyed most documentation that did exist before the end of the war. “
So, my question is this: if the Holocaust began in 1941, when we can safely assume the Nazis believed they could still win the war, and the need for secrecy in carrying out their evil plan was clearly recognized - what exactly was their end goal? What was their plan come peace time? What I mean to ask is how did the Nazis plan on explaining away the disappearance of the Jews after the war? Or did they not think anyone would notice? Or did they just not recognize what was an obvious hole in their secret plan?…
-Posted at the RODOH Discussion Group’s “The Morning After” thread by Herbivorous Moose
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If the “industialized slaughter” model of Nazi anti-Semitic crimes is a fabication - and the Holocaust itself a scrap of wartime propaganda that somehow took on a life of its own in the intervening years - explain how… realistically… such a massive fraud could be perpetuated for more than six decades. If we can split hairs and pore over details that seem to disprove the atrocity, then where are the footprints of historical forgers capable of such a supernaturally efficient con job? If it’s all a lie, can we really believe European Holocaust denial laws and political correctness could keep the truth jugged up since 1945?
We can condemn what the much put-upon Norman Finkelstein terms the Holocaust Industry - a postwar, ongoing scheme to elevate the crime to almost religious significance for political and financial rewards - without atrociously denying a catastophic horror.
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Professor de Zayas’ scholarship provides at least two invaluable contributions to the cause of truth in our time:
1) contra David Irving (who has argued that the non-existence of documents ordering the Holocaust proves that the latter is fictional), de Zayas has shown that the Nazi regime was so steeped in secrecy that actual documents ordering murder would be unlikely;
2) despite historic anti-Semitism within the German church (as Eric Voegelin documented in his Munich lectures of 1964), it is unlikely that Christians had knowledge of the Holocaust as it was happening.
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In reply to San Fernando Curt’s “where are the Jews”?
Answer: Try Palestine, the United States, and Russia, for starters.
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Mr. mcbrown, thank you for your personal attack, despite your violating Taki’s guidelines for posting comments. I thank you not out of sarcasm, but rather because I appreciate being challenged in the logic of my arguments, in the truthfulness of my facts, and in the overall import of my thoughts.
Of course you did not challenge me on any of those accounts, but I am ready to give you the benefit of the doubt. Kindly indicate any logical error, factual inaccuracy or mistakes in my previous posts. Simply asking posters to be banned without engaging their ideas is facile, but also unmanly and unsatisfactory.
Totalitarian attitudes like yours are redolent of Cultural Marxism, and are rapidly revealing its anacronism in the internet age. Mercifully, the monopoly of the message has been broken, and the censor -whoever he is- will be punished with irrelevance sooner rather than later.
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Whether the so-called Holocaust is a truth, a half-truth, or a flat-out lie, commentators--whether they are curmudgeons or San Fernandoans or anything else--should be aware that facts have never gotten in the way of the racket that Professor Finkelstein skewered. One of the most-renowned authorities within the racket is Professor Yehuda Bauer, of Hebrew University and Yad Vashem. His published estimate that the number of Jews killed was between 2.5 and 4 million has been a matter of record for, I believe, about two decades. No one within the racket questions his work--he is a formidable researcher--they simply ignore it. When Goldhagen’s book (a rewrite of his doctoral thesis) was published, Bauer and Christopher Browning were members of a forum discussing the book; the forum was broadcast on C-SPAN, now many years ago. Although Bauer and Browning made no secret of their utter contempt for Goldhagen’s thesis, for the folks at Harvard who gave him a Ph.D., and for “little Danny” himself--Bauer (a tough cookie if ever there was one) actually referred to Goldhagen that way--Goldhagen sat patiently, almost beatifically, ignoring everything hurled at him. And why shouldn’t he have done so? He knew he had a winner; he knew that the appetite for another fable of the Virtuous Us being victimized by the Evil Them would make him rich and famous.
Was he wrong? Was he worried that facts would undo him? Hardly. Instead, it was David Irving--who NEVER claimed that there was no grand plan for the Holocaust, by the way, unless noting that no one has ever produced a piece of documentary evidence in support of the grand plan equals denial of its existence--who got sent to the slammer. So much for the free market of information.
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max nordau
Your reply to San Fernando C. is generous, elegant and one more example of your finely tuned mind. But is it really necessary? The SFC’s of this world, so insultingly coarse and ignorant in their own statements, can never comprehend an intelligent argument that doesn’t fit into their miniature frame of mind. So why not ignore them, instead of wasting the proverbial pearls on them?
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Be sure and give my regards to the rest of the Cthulhus in your little corner of the Hollow Earth.
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On August 9, 1911 Dr Max Nordau stated in an address to the Tenth
Zionist Congress in Bssle:
“But the virtuous Governments which
work with such noble zeal for the
spread of eternal peace acquiesce
in the downfall of six million creatures-acquiesce, and no-one,
except the victims,raises a voice
against it, altough this is an in-
comparably greater crime than any
war, for no war has ever yet destroyed six million human lives.”
PRESCIENT ?
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PRESCIENT ? The following are remarks from Max Nordau’s address
of August 9 1911 before the Tenth Zionist Congress in Basle---"But the virtuous Governments which work with noble zeal for the spread of eternal peace acquiesce in the downfall of six-million creatures-acquiesce and no-one, except the victims, raises a voice against it,although this is an incomparably greater crime than any war, for no war has ever yet destroyed six million human lives.”
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Beware of people who use the expressions “War on Terror”, “appeasement”, “World War IV”, “Clash of Civilizations” and “Holocaust” without the inverted comas.
“credo non quod, sed quia absurdum est.” - Tertulian
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Richard J Buck
What for heaven’s sake does this mean? Could it be that the myth is much older? Can anybody enlighten me? Especially since the Max Nordau of 1911 can’t be the same who wrote so eloquently and compelling on this site.
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Dr Max Nordau was an early and prominent collaborator with Theodor Herzl. Nordau’s speeches before the WZO were first published in Germany in 1923 and then in 1941 translated into english by Benjamin Netanyahu, father of the present statesman. The latter work was published by Scopus Publishing and styled Max Nordau to his People - A Summons and a Challenge.
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McBrown doesn’t sound like a very nice person. Is it true as McBrown says that Taki will “bar” anyone not towing the official Jewish Holocaust Line?
My friend Walt’s comments have been deleted. He had a very insightful observation, which you should take to heart. Why is it okay to label Christians who don’t believe in the Holocaust as Holocaust Deniers, but when Jews don’t believe in Christ it’s not okay to labeled them “Christ Deniers”.
If you going to bar H deniers, in fairness you ought to bar Christ deniers too.
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The Holocaust is a staple of American education nowadays. What people don’t consider is, why should non-Jews give a damn?
The Holocaust is a unique Jewish experience; every Jew will tell you this until you are blue in the face. So let them have their Holocaust. But they should not keep throwing it in our face, as though we some how had anything to do with it. Or what’s worse incessantly demand that we care one iota about it.
The Erie American Indian tribe once lived on the shore of the lake by that name in Ohio and Pennsylvania. In the late 18th century they were exterminated by the Iroquois American Indians. Here was a whole people actually exterminated, but not a single monument exists to them; not in America, and certainly not in Israel.
If the Jewish people don’t care one wit about the Erie’s extermination, why should they expect us to work ourselves up about an attempt at Jewish extermination that was, obvious by what has since transpired, a total flop?
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WmBelts
If you are a German, which after 60 years of relentless propaganda is synonymous with Nazi, massmurderer and in general a memeber of the worst tribe that ever walked this earth, you DO care about the Holocaust. Especially if you have come to doubt the whole incredible venture.
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san fernando curt
I just realized that I made a stupid mistake. I didn’t mean you, I meant mr.mcbrown. Please forgive me.
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From Ron Lewenberg (via email):
Mr. de Zavas,
The truth is that the German people knew that untermenschen were being killed. the rate of death of handicaps was not hidden. And Germans who cared to look, knew the fate of Jews. Spouses of half-Jews about to be rounded up successfully protected their families in at least once instance.
http://www.rinr.fsu.edu/fallwinter97/features/hitler.html
Some Germans successfully hid Jews, while other lost their lives doing so. http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/press/museum-created-germans-hid.4161.htm
The Einzstagruppen were none too cautious in the east, and many German soldiers were repulsed by the killings. My father and his family survived because a Wermacht officer warned them of the coming liquidation of the Drohobycz ghetto, and a German-Ukranian policeman helped them escape.
According to testimony at Nuremberg civilians taunted prisoners.
“The German civilians often threatened the inmates that they would be gassed and made into soap. We were told that quite a few times by the inmates and I personally heard the German civilians make those threats many times. Also I heard the Germans joking among themselves about the same thing. I didn’t take it seriously at first but later I wondered whether it might not be true after all. Though I have no personal knowledge, I got the impression that the manufacture of soap from inmates was being done at Auschwitz by rendering the fat from the gassed bodies. [5]”
# NMT, vol. 8, p. 624.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/soap01.html
There is much more on line.
While many Germans did not know about the Holocaust, most simply looked away. Ignoring this fact for current political purposes is crass revisionism.
This does not mean that current Germans, those born after the war, bear any guilt.
And I don’t mean this on a theoretical level. As a young child, my best friend was the grandson of a NDSAP member. Of course, I held (and hold) no grudge and my parents had no problem with the friendship, given the profuse densunciation of Nazism by my friend’s parents.
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