6 million

[Dan]

The only list broken down the way Roberto asks that I've ever seen was by the South African government, but as it dealt with Communist Jews in senior posisitons in the middle of the last century, I suppose it's on topic. The numbers were half, about 64 out of 130 something. The percentage of Jews to gentiles in South Africa was about 1 in 40.

[Scott Smith]

Roberto,

In the Right Honorable Winston S. Churchill's famous February 8, 1920 article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, he describes Zionism versus Bolshevism as "A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People," and he suggests that they should be Zionists, of course.

Do you think, Roberto, that Winnie was saying that ALL Jews were Communists? Seems that would be reductio ad absurdum now, wouldn't it?

We forget--we want to forget--that Hitler was not the only one who generalized that the Jews were Communists, don't we?

[michael mills]

Mr Muehlenkamp wrote:

What Pumpkin tries to do is to portray communism as a “Jewish” phenomenon:

Quote:
Nope! They [Lenin and Beria] were both of jewish origin. As was Karl Marx and many other communists (and coincidently, Stalins wife). A majority of the ministers of Lenin's government were of jewish origin. And it wasn't hard for the nazis to point out some jewish american capitalists who sponsored the early Soviet. This fact explains why anti-communism became anti-sionism in nazi propaganda. Ignoring this will prevent you from understanding the rise of nazism.


One thing is whether there was a disproportionately large number of Jews in a given organization, which I don’t see having been demonstrated yet. Another is whether this makes such organization a “Jewish” organization rather than just an organization where there happen to be many Jews.

I do not interpret Pumpkin's words as a claim that Communism was in objective reality a Jewish phenomenon. Rather, I think he is saying that in Nazi PROPAGANDA (note his use of that word) Communism was seen as a Jewish phenomenon, and that the perception of Communism as a Jewish organisation contributed to the rise of Nazism. No reason to call Pumpkin a "Nazi-loving Jew-hater".

There was a disproportionately large number of Jews in the various strands of the Communist revolutionary organisation in Russia, particularly in the first decade of Bolshevik rule, particularly in areas where the Jewish population was concentrated (Ukraine and White Russia), and particularly in the security police. In the first years of the Bolshevik regime, a small number of Jews (together with a small number of non-Jews) stood at the very pinnacle of power and exercised ultimate decision-making authority.

Russian Communism was not a Jewish movement in the sense that Zionism is. Its proclaimed purpose was not the open pursuit of an avowedly Jewish aim, such as, in the case of Zionism, the creation of a Jewish state. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik regime in Russia received the support of Jews in that country, regardless of whether they supported Communist ideology, and of most Jews elsewhere, mainly because that regime was seen as more conducive to Jewish interests than any possible alternative.

In the early decades of the 20th century, Tsar' Nicholas II was seen by Jews everywhere as the greatest enemy of the Jewish people that had ever existed, in much the same way as Hitler is seen now (see for example the caricatures of Nicholas in the United States Yiddish-language periodical "Der Groysse Kundes"), and his overthrow and the killing of him and his family was seen by many Jewish leaders, even Orthodox religious Zionists such as Menachem Ussishkin, as a just revenge and a model for what should happen to all enemies of the Jewish people.

[Roberto]

Roberto,

In the Right Honorable Winston S. Churchill's famous February 8, 1920 article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, he describes Zionism versus Bolshevism as "A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People," and he suggests that they should be Zionists, of course.

Do you think, Roberto, that Winnie was saying that ALL Jews were Communists? Seems that would be reductio ad absurdum now, wouldn't it?

Why, does the Reverend all of a sudden consider his bête noire Churchill an authority on the subject?

We forget--we want to forget--that Hitler was not the only one who generalized that the Jews were Communists, don't we?

Generalizations are usually propaganda, wherever they come from. How about providing some figures from an objective source instead of quoting Winnie's rhetoric, Reverend?

[Pumpkin]

Thank you michaels mills, you have seen my point. Why did the nazis target jews? It separates them from the fascism of (the early?) Mussolini. I think that the easy-to-make propaganda connection between communism and jews is an important reason to why hatred of jews could be built up and why KZ came into existance. This isn't exactly highlighted in history writing of today. I don't think it gives nazis any greater legitimacy, but many seem to worry that it would.

Medorjurgen seems to be very sceptical about the connection between jews and communism. That's fine. But lacking that scepticism, and being biased towards generalizations (such as "all palestinians are terrorists"), many others would accept that connection and generalize it to all jews, directing their hate of communism into hate of the jew running a shop next door.

Objective research in the subject? I think it would be very difficult to get such research done within any reputable university, because the subject generally is not allowed to be touched. If anything, this taboo helps the anti-semites in our day. What is being hidden, one can ask, and anti-semites readily provide their version.

There's two seperate pictures here:
One is understanding the anti-semitic propaganda of the nazis. In this propaganda there is a strong connection between Soviet leaders and "all jews".

Another one is understanding how, in fact, communism came about in Soviet Union. "All jews" certainly had nothing to do with it. Ethnicity won't explain it. But social networks would and they might, for natural reasons, partially correlate with ethnicity (georgian or jewish).

Making an analogy, blaming all Germans, or even all of SS, or even all fascists (I'm gonna have that one come back!) for the holocaust is as false (but reasonable not as dangerous) as was the anti-semitic propaganda of the nazis. It's a generalization that fails see the peculiarities of the not so black-and-white reality.

[Roberto]

There was a disproportionately large number of Jews in the various strands of the Communist revolutionary organisation in Russia, particularly in the first decade of Bolshevik rule, particularly in areas where the Jewish population was concentrated (Ukraine and White Russia), and particularly in the security police. In the first years of the Bolshevik regime, a small number of Jews (together with a small number of non-Jews) stood at the very pinnacle of power and exercised ultimate decision-making authority.

Interesting. Where are the figures supporting this contention?

In the early decades of the 20th century, Tsar' Nicholas II was seen by Jews everywhere as the greatest enemy of the Jewish people that had ever existed, in much the same way as Hitler is seen now (see for example the caricatures of Nicholas in the United States Yiddish-language periodical "Der Groysse Kundes"), and his overthrow and the killing of him and his family was seen by many Jewish leaders, even Orthodox religious Zionists such as Menachem Ussishkin, as a just revenge and a model for what should happen to all enemies of the Jewish people.

Really? What exactly did that bastard Ussishkin state in this respect? Who were the other of the “many Jewish leaders”, and in what terms did they praise the murder of Nicky and his family?

[Roberto]

Pumpkin,

Your last post shows you to be far more reasonable than I considered you to be on the basis of previous statements of yours.

So please accept my apology for the "Nazi-loving Jew-hater". I obviously misunderstood your stance and intentions.

[Pumpkin]

Oh, I am a very reasonable man indeed And I apreciate people who can, like you, avoid escalating unnecessary conflict. Also, I did make false claims in the beginning, in this touchy subject, so I did deserve some fire.

[Scott Smith]

Roberto,

In the Right Honorable Winston S. Churchill's famous February 8, 1920 article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, he describes Zionism versus Bolshevism as "A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People," and he suggests that they should be Zionists, of course.

Do you think, Roberto, that Winnie was saying that ALL Jews were Communists? Seems that would be reductio ad absurdum now, wouldn't it?

Why, does the Reverend all of a sudden consider his bête noire Churchill an authority on the subject?

We forget--we want to forget--that Hitler was not the only one who generalized that the Jews were Communists, don't we?

Generalizations are usually propaganda, wherever they come from. How about providing some figures from an objective source instead of quoting Winnie's rhetoric, Reverend?

Roberto,

You are the man who loves the smoking-gun rhetoric, not me. Besides, I have never made the case that Communism was Jewish. I have instead stated that at best this is an oversimplification. I have even questioned whether Hitler truly believed it.

You are right--I have no love whatever for Churchill.

Best Regards,
Scott

[michael mills]

Mr Muehlenkamp may be interested in the following quote from the book by George Leggett, "The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police". It occurs on page 262.

"We have already discussed the remarkable racial mix of the top twenty Chekists, a diversity which also characterised the leadership of the Russian socialist parties, though the pronounced Jewish element evident at the apex of the Bolshevik Party (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krestinskii, Sverdlov, Sokolnikov, etc.) and, even more, of the Menshevik Party (Martov, Liber, Dan, Abramovich, etc.) and the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Gotz, Gershuni, Kamkov, Natanson, Steinberg, etc.), was perhaps not quite so manifest at the Vecheka summit. This ethnic heterogeneity of the Old Chekists was therefore not an isolated phenomenon; furthermore, it applied also to the Vecheka's middle and lower strata, where we constantly find a foreign strain: Poles, Hungarians and Estonians, Armenians and Georgians, Finns, even Chinese, but above all Latvians and Jews in abundance. At a Politburo meeting held on 18 April 1919, Trotsky commented:

'that Latvians and Jews constituted a vast percentage of those employed in Cheka frontal units, executive committees in frontal zones and at the rear, and in Soviet establishments at the centre; that the percentage of them at the front itself was a comparatively small one; that strong chauvinist agitation on this subject was being carried out among Red Army men and finding a certain response there; and that in Comrade trotsky's opinion, a reallocation of party personnel was essential to achieve a more even distribution of all nationalities between the front and the rear.'

A striking imbalance manifested itself particularly in the Ukraine, where in early 1919 the Chekas contained an extraordinarily high proportion of Jews: 75 per cent of the personnel of the Kiev Cheka, and seven out of its ten collegium members, were Jews. For reasons of race and religion the numerous Jews living in the Pale of Settlement in the Ukraine had long been treated as second-class citizens, with bitter experience of pogroms at Ukrainian hands. During the period following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, as a direct result of the official policy of anti-Semitic discrimination, and with the rapid development of the social democratic revolutionary movement, Jews - especially those with education - became revolutionaries in numbers out of all proportion to the relative size of the Jewish population in Russia. Indeed, in 1903 Count Witte observed that 50 per cent of all Russian revolutionaries were Jews, attributing this phenomenon to the unjust treatment they received. Just as, in the Ukraine, native Ukrainians were in the minority in the Chekas, so, after the Red Army's occupation of Menshevik Georgia in February 1921, very few Georgians were admitted to the Georgian Cheka, most of its personnel being Armenians, Jews, etc. Very probably such discriminatory staffing sprang from a deliberate policy of using national minorities or aliens to perform the Chekas' disagreeable tasks, on the calculation that such detached elements could be better trusted not to sympathise with the repressed local population."

Leggett provides a note to the above, note 79 page 413:

"On 1 May 1919, i.e. shortly after Trotsky's Politburo protest, the Kiev Cheka (and doubtless other Chekas) received an order prohibiting (or, more probably, limiting) the appointment of Jews to top Cheka posts, and requiring, for propaganda reasons, the token execution of Jews - previously only one Jew had been executed by the Kiev Cheka".

Leggett's source for the proportion of Jews in the Kiev Cheka is the article "Chekist o Ch. K.", documents edited by Sergei Petrovich Melgunov, published in "Na chuzhoi storone", Vol. IX, 1925, pp. 109-41. Melgunov was a Russian socialist who was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for a period, and later published the book "The Red Terror in Russia", largely based on the reports of the Commission of Inquiry into Bolshevik Crimes established by General Denikin.

According to Leggett, the document "Chekist o Ch. K." was based on the interrogation by Denikin's forces of a member of the Kiev Cheka captured in August 1919. Since the document was prepared by Denikin's Volunteer Army, which was largely responsible for the 1919 pogroms in Ukraine, there is a possibility that it was distorted in an anti-Jewish way, in order to justify the pogroms. Nevertheless, Leggett accepted it without demur, and his book appears quite respectable, being published by Oxford University Press in 1981. Accordingly, I think the statement about the preponderance of Jews in the Ukrainian Cheka can be accepted.

Leggett also comments on the number of Latvians in the Chekas. On page 263 he writes:

"They [the Latvian rifle battalions] also provided the Vecheka with a reservoir of talent to draw on. The guards and gaolers in the Lubianka offices and prisons were mostly Letts: the politician and historian, S. P. Melgunov, who himself spent many months in the Lubianka cells, affirmed that in 1919 three-quarters of the Vecheka's HQ staff of 2,000 were Letts. So were various prominent Chekists, such as Peters and Latsis, A.V. Eiduk and K.I. Lander, and so was the veteran Chekist, A. Ia. Pelshe, who served in the state security organs during 1920-40, and rose to be a member of the Soviet Communist Party's Politburo as from 1966."

It should also be noted that the very first security police organ set up by the Bolshevik Government of Russia after their successful November 1917 coup was titled "Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism". This was set up in Petrograd at the end of the year. Apparently, the new Bolshevik rulers saw all opposition to their seizure of power as manifestations of anti-Semitism, or at least they smeared it as such; the combatting of "anti-Semitism" was used as a justification for suppressing all dissent (a tactic which some members of this forum still seem to employ).

With regard to Menachem Ussishkin, the details of the incident to which I referred can be found in the book "The Siege" by the late Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien, a strong pro-Zionist.

Menachem Ussishkin was a Jewish nationalist leader from Ukraine, and also a leading Zionist belonging to the Orthodox religious wing. He was of course in no way a Bolshevik, or a sympathiser with the Socialist wing of the Zionist movement.

In 1919, Ussishkin headed the Jewish Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. There he caused a lot of headaches by insisting on a special protected status and autonomy for the Jewish minorities in Poland and other east European countries, thereby coming into conflict with the Polish delegation. In formation about Ussishkin's role at the Paris Peace Conference can be found in the book "From shtetl to socialism : studies from Polin", edited by Antony Polonsky, in particular the chapter concerning the role of the British Jewish leader, Lucien Wolf, at the Conference.

(That chapter contains one very illuminating snippet. In his Peace Conference Diary, Wolf related how a member of the British Delegation came to him and asked whether there was any way of getting Ussishkin to tone down his demand for Jewish autonomy. When Wolf replied in the negative, the member of the British Delegation is supposed to have commented in relation to the Jews of Poland: "Well then, they will all be murdered!" A remarkably prescient comment.)

In 1920, Ussishkin was the Acting Head of the Jewish Agency in Palestine. In April of that year, there were Jewish-Arab riots in Jerusalem in which a number of Jewish settlers were killed. Ussishkin went to the British Commissioner in Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, to complain about British inaction. Apparently, as Cruise O'Brien relates it, the discussion grew somewhat heated, and eventually Ussishkin completely lost his cool. He reminded Storrs of the example of Russia; there the Tsar' had also opposed the Jews, but "now Trotsky sat on his throne". What had happened to the Tsar' would happen to all enemies of the Jewish people.

Ussishkin was speaking in a moment of stress, but, as Judge Gray said in relation to Irving, it is in such moments of stress that a man's treu thoughts and feelings are revealed.

It is noteworthy that Ussishkin said that the Tsar' had been replaced by the Jew Trotsky, rather than by the non-Jew Lenin.

If anybody is interested, I will take the trouble to retrieve the book referred to and post the exact reference.

[Roberto]

You are the man who loves the smoking-gun rhetoric, not me.

As I see it, rhetoric and smoking guns are two different things. Himmler's Posen speeches and Goebbels' diary entries belong in the latter category.

[Roberto]

If anybody is interested, I will take the trouble to retrieve the book referred to and post the exact reference.

I would be more interested in the profile of Stalin's NKVD. Was it also as dominated by ethnic minorities, particularly Jews, as Leggett tells us the Cheka was?

[michael mills]

I would be more interested in the profile of Stalin's NKVD. Was it also as dominated by ethnic minorities, particularly Jews, as Leggett tells us the Cheka was?

The first few years of the Bolshevik regime, up to the death of Lenin in 1924, the period when the Cheka exercised its reign of terror, was the most crucial for the formation of the concept of "Jewish Bolshevism" in the minds of German right-wing nationalist ideologues such as Rosenberg. That cocept remained fixed, despite later developments.

When Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf" in 1924, his image of the Soviet Union as a state dominated by Jews was based on the inflience of Rosenberg, which in turn was based on the latter's experiences during the Russian Revolution, coupled with information (and disinformation) about the Cheka brought West by Russian emigres in the early 20s. Hitler still had that image in 1941.

I do not have any reliable information on the number of Jews in Stalin's NKVD of the 30s. The head of the police apparatus until 1936 was Genrikh Iagoda, a Jew; he was purged in that year and replaced by Ezhov, who ran the Great Terror.

I would guess that the membership of the NKVD reflected local ethnic realities, ie the NKVD in Kygyzstan, say, was probably largely Kyrgyz, and I doubt that there were many Jews in it.

Ukrainian nationalist sources claim that at least 50% of the officer corps of the NKVD in Ukraine was of Jewish origin in the 30s. I will try to retrieve the URL of the site on which I found that inforamtion. Of course I cannot vouch for its accuracy.

[Ovidius]

The first few years of the Bolshevik regime, up to the death of Lenin in 1924, the period when the Cheka exercised its reign of terror, was the most crucial for the formation of the concept of "Jewish Bolshevism" in the minds of German right-wing nationalist ideologues such as Rosenberg. That cocept remained fixed, despite later developments.

When Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf" in 1924, his image of the Soviet Union as a state dominated by Jews was based on the inflience of Rosenberg, which in turn was based on the latter's experiences during the Russian Revolution, coupled with information (and disinformation) about the Cheka brought West by Russian emigres in the early 20s. Hitler still had that image in 1941.

Hitler, as a soldier in the German Imperial Army, might have been also influenced by the recalls of his comrades returned from the East(Russia, Ukraine, Poland), and those men had nothing pleasant to tell.

~Ovidius

[Roberto]

The first few years of the Bolshevik regime, up to the death of Lenin in 1924, the period when the Cheka exercised its reign of terror, was the most crucial for the formation of the concept of "Jewish Bolshevism" in the minds of German right-wing nationalist ideologues such as Rosenberg. That cocept remained fixed, despite later developments.

When Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf" in 1924, his image of the Soviet Union as a state dominated by Jews was based on the inflience of Rosenberg, which in turn was based on the latter's experiences during the Russian Revolution, coupled with information (and disinformation) about the Cheka brought West by Russian emigres in the early 20s. Hitler still had that image in 1941.

Hitler, as a soldier in the German Imperial Army, might have been also influenced by the recalls of his comrades returned from the East(Russia, Ukraine, Poland), and those men had nothing pleasant to tell.

~Ovidius

What are they supposed to have told, Ovidius?

I inherited the regimental history of the German 11th Hussar Regiment in World War I, where my maternal grandfather served as a trumpeter, first in France in 1914, then on the Eastern Front until 1917, then on the Western Front in 1918. The only passages that mention Jews speak of the deadly fear these people had of the Russian Cossacks, who would hang a couple of Jews in a given village if they felt like doing so, and of the relief and even joy the Jews showed whenever German troops marched into their place. Go figure ...