Why the Jews and the gas chambers?

[Roberto]

Roberto posted a terrifying photo above, “captioned” as showing :

Quote:
Mass graves of seven thousand murdered in Khmelnitski Proskurov, Ukraine, January 1943. _Museum of the Polish Army, Warsaw, Poland._

Why the quote marks?

Prof Richard Wright led

Quote:
…archaeological investigations of mass killings in Ukraine, perpetrated in 1942 and excavated 50 years later. The work was done to support three prosecutions made in Adelaide, South Australia, under the War Crimes Legislation.

Prof Wright asks :

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The question is why was an archaeologist needed at all?


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Even though no Australian has been found guilty by the courts of the atrocities we investigated, we have brought forward new material evidence of three particular episodes in the Holocaust that no persons, even those labouring on behalf of Holocaust deniers, have sought to contradict. Material evidence is harder to contradict than memories.


From Prof Wright’s update, quoted by Roberto:

Quote:
I want to say that I found it unnerving that even the well-disposed have shown so little interest in our Ukrainian work. I hasten to mention exceptions, and acknowledge the interest of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Macquarie University, and of the Australian Jewish Historical Society in Canberra. But that is it. Perhaps the reason is this. Material evidence may be harder to contradict than memories, but memories are more potent and demanding of attention - and, of course, more fleeting than archaeological evidence. But then again, perhaps what we did in the Ukraine is just too nasty, immediate and confronting. As a Jewish colleague said to me, we have forced ourselves to get familiar with the grainy black and white photos of Belsen. Now you are wanting us to look at the Holocaust in colour.


Yes, we have all to force ourselves to look at the Holocaust through all kinds of “nasty, immediate and confronting” aspects. We are also asked to believe what we see, and that what we see is the Holocaust.

I sure love these hollow “Revisionist” phrases like “we are asked to believe”. Nonsense. We are supposed to do nothing other than follow the evidence and our own common sense, which some people stubbornly refuse to do because it does not fit into their ideological bubble.

Then we are faced with the question of definition: What is the Holocaust? Is it history, a detail in history, or Real History? Without precedent? Or an Intention in our Western Civilization(the school of Intentionalism)? A black hole in Universal History?

Blah, blah, blah. How about “the genocidal killing of five to six million Jews by the Nazi regime”? That’s what corresponds to the proven facts.

Even the doyen of Holocaust studies, Raul Hilberg, has been cited as saying that he is becoming more and more confused about what the Holocaust really is (and he is no Denier, you know!).

What exactly did Hilberg write, philosopher? Quote please.

The Jewish colleague that Prof Wright cited above mentioned the “grainy black and white photos of Belsen”, and he probably meant photos of the bulldozers burying the victims of typhus and hunger.

Those photos are differently “captioned” nowadays, since it is agreed that there were no gas chambers at Belsen.

Could the philosopher please show when and in what sources the photographs of Bergen-Belsen were captioned as showing victims of gassing at extermination camps? I would like him to show us as well what criminal justice authority or historian ever assumed that there had been gas chambers at Belsen. An admission that his “nowadays” was just a feeble attempt to hoax around will also do.

What is the Holocaust?

“Die deutsche Ausrottung der europäischen Juden war der erste vollendete Vernichtungsprozess der Weltgeschichte. Zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte der westlichen Zivilisation hatten die Täter alle eine Tötungsoperation im Wege stehenden administrativen und moralischen Widerstände überwunden”. (Hilberg “Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden”, sid 1115 (Fischer 1999)).

“The German extirpation of the european Jews was the first complete(d?) extermination process in world history. For the first time in the history of western civilization had the murderers removed all administrative and moral resistance to a killing operation”. (my translation)

“The attempt to extirpate them has been made under the most favourable auspices and on the largest scale; the most considerable means that man could command have been pertinaciously applied to this object for the longer period of recorded time.” (Benjamin Disraeli, ”Lord George Bentinck : a Political Biography”(1852). Kap XXIV, ”The Jewish Question”.)

There was a pre-Nazi “Final Solution”, according to Disraeli.

The former, whatever it was, did not involve homicidal killing on an enormous scale. Why “extirpation” instead of “extermination” for “Ausrottung” in the translation of Hilberg’s statement, by the way? To create some fuzzy and unintelligible parallel to Disraeli’s statement, perhaps?

Consequently, the “Phase 2” that George Will is suggesting in the title of his essay…

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will.html

(click on “George Will Archives”, and “’ Final Solution’, Phase 2” (2 May 2002)

…ought to be numbered “3”, perhaps?

Will writes:

<<Did not Hitler, the foremost avatar of anti-Semitism, fail? No, he did not. Yes, his 1,000-year Reich fell 988 years short. But its primary work was mostly done. Hitler's primary objective, as he made clear in words and deeds, was the destruction of European Jewry.>>

Will agrees with Hilberg.

Whatever the terminology, the issue at hand is mass murder on a rarely equaled scale, which claimed the lives of five to six million people. Get used to the idea, philosopher.

But the Palestians would perhaps disagree? They are likely to see themselves as “destroyed” by “European Jewry”?

Yeah, unfortunately the Nazis didn’t manage to kill all of Europe’s Jews for several reasons (slave labor needs, moderate policies of allied countries and, most important, the fact that they lost the war). Enough survived for European Jews to make up slightly more than 30 % of the population of Israel these days, according to the CIA World Factbook. As to the poor Palestinians, I wonder if the philosopher would even mention them if their oppressors didn’t happen to be Jews.

What has this to do with the horrible photo and the horrible finds in the Serniki and Ustinovka archaeological excavations?

Let me guess: the photo shows, and the graves of Serniki and Ustinovka contain, some of the victims of the genocide. Am I right?

“Holocaust&Warcrimes” is the forum name. “Why the Jews and the gaschamber?” is Roberto’s name for this conference.

I wonder if the philosopher read my introductory post on this thread. The message of it seems to have by-passed him completely, at any rate.

<< Historian Omer Bartov believes that the most frightening thing is “the impossibility of learning anything from the Holocaust …of putting its facts to any use ”. For him the Holocaust renders vain all questions about learning and progress. It is, he fears, “precisely the meaninglessness of the event …the utter uselessness of it all, the total and complete emptiness …that leaves us breathless, bereft of the power of thought and imagination ”>>.(Bartov, O. , Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation, New York, 1996.)(Quoted from ”Tell ye your children”, published by the THE SWEDISH GOVERNMENT OFFICES
LIVING HISTORY PROJECT, written by STÉPHANE BRUCHFELD AND PAUL A. LEVINE).

”…the impossibility of learning anything from the Holocaust…”! Yet : ”Tell ye your children”!!

Bartov is obviously referring to mankind’s woeful inability to derive any practical lessons from the Holocaust in the sense of avoiding the repetition of similar events. Which does not mean we shouldn’t keep trying, a precondition for which is not forgetting what people are capable of doing to other people.

”…of putting its fact to any use.”! According to Finkelstein, its facts are put to use.

A rather sick remark that makes me want to have the philosopher at hand in order to slap it into his face. The abuse of the memory of the Holocaust that Finkelstein accuses Jewish organizations of is obviously not the use to which Bartov would like to see the facts put.

We must – one way or the other – try to understand the photo and the findings of Mr Wright.

The philosopher doesn’t exactly look as though he’s trying.

Roberto :

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While not required to provide proof of facts that have already been proven beyond reasonable doubt, archaeological evidence is likely to shut up ideologically motivated crackpots for good.


Prof Wright has some qualifications, though :

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“Archaeology had nothing to do with the first strategy - identification of alleged perpetrators - but much to do with investigating material evidence for the alleged events.”


Does it make a difference who the perpetrators were? Isn’t it a Holocaust just the same? The horror of it all is undiminished?

What is the difference between a crime, a war crime and the Holocaust?

The Holocaust is not just a “sum” of a crime and a war. Hilberg’s definition – and Disraeli’s – is more than that.

That is perhaps why revisionists – “ideologically motivated crackpots”, according to Roberto – never have questioned the mass shootings and murders illustrated by Prof Wright’s excavations.

The reasons why the crackpots have not focused on the mass shootings in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union are the ones pointed out in my first post on this thread: First of all, the killers left lots of physical evidence behind, though the assessment of it by Soviet investigation commissions is only now becoming accessible with Russia’s opening of its archives. Second and most important, the killers produced a vast amount of very explicit documentary evidence, especially the Operational Situation Reports of the Einsatzgruppen. Third, there are no “technical questions” to mislead suckers about. Even the dumbest idiot knows or can imagine what the bullets of infantry carbines, machine pistols or machine guns fired at close range will do to a human being.

The history of human warfare is full of such mass murder since homeric and OT times, at least.

Quote:
Numbers 31
15 "Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. 16 "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the Lord in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the Lord 's people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.


The Holocaust is this history, too, but at the same time something “beyond”.

In a sense it is, because it constitutes the first attempt by a government to track down and kill the members of a certain ethnic minority in every country that came under the domain.

Its historians still incorporates the victims of these actions in the “German” Holocaust, i.e. it was part of the Final Solution according to Nazi plans. The gas chamber phase was introduced because of the “impractibility” and the “demoralizing” consequences of mass shootings (to “spare the nerves” of the german soldier).

Why kill women and children in this way?

In olden times (see OT quote above) it made sense to kill those who might become avengers. The widows might tell their baby boys who their fathers were, and what “honor” demanded.

That also seems to have been Himmler’s reasoning. As he told the Reichs- and Gauleiter at his speech in Posen on 6 October 1943:

Ich bitte Sie, das, was ich Ihnen in diesem Kreise sage, wirklich nur zu hören und nie darüber zu sprechen. Es trat an uns die Frage heran: Wie ist es mit den Frauen und Kindern? – Ich habe mich entschlossen, auch hier eine ganz klare Lösung zu finden. Ich hielt mich nämlich nicht für berechtigt, die Männer auszurotten – sprich also, umzubringen oder umbringen zu lassen – und die Rächer in Gestalt der Kinder für unsere Söhne und Enkel groß werden zu lassen. Es mußte der schwere Entschluß gefaßt werden, dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen. Für die Organisation, die den Auftrag durchführen mußte, war es der schwerste, den wir bisher hatten. Er ist durchgeführt worden, ohne daß – wie ich glaube sagen zu können – unsere Männer und unsere Führer einen Schaden an Geist und Seele erlitten hätten. Der Weg zwischen den hier bestehenden Möglichkeiten, entweder roh zu werden, herzlos zu werden und menschliches Leben nicht mehr zu achten oder weich zu werden und durchzudrehen bis zu Nervenzusammenbrüchen – der Weg zwischen dieser Scylla und Charybdis ist entsetzlich schmal.

My translation:

I ask you that what I tell you in this circle you will really only hear and never talk about it. The question came up to us: What do to with the women and children? – I decided to find a very clear solution also in this respect. This because I didn’t consider myself entitled to exterminate the men – that is, to kill them or to have them killed – and to let the children grow up as avengers against our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth. For the organization that had to carry out the task if was the most difficult we had so far. It has been carried out without – as I consider myself entitled to say – our men and our leaders having taken harm to their spirit and soul. The path between the possibilities existing here, to either become crude and heartless and no longer to respect human life or to become weak and collapse to the point of nervous breakdowns the path between this Scylla and Charybdis is horrendously narrow.

Philosopher:

“Tell ye your children”; the teachers at Muslim free schools of Europe are suspected of indoctrinating their pupils in Jew-Hatred and preparating them for terrorism.

Not exactly a parallel to the situation that Himmler was referring to, is it?

In the slave camps it made “sense” to kill “useless eaters”.

That policy was actually applied not only in the slave camps. Aktion Reinhard(t) was meant to do exactly that throughout the entire Polish General Government.

During the Sovjet “campaign” of terrorist-extermination in Afganistan it was alleged that the Russians dropped “mined” toys from the air over Afghan guerilla territories in order to create “useless eaters” by crippling children.

You would think that sparing women and children during the war operations would reduce the resistance capacity of occupied territories by the same logic(?).

But then there are those mass-graves.

Since the Jews were to be exterminated as a race, every individual Jew was a target of the Final Solution – is that the answer to the “why” of these killings of women and children?

Military sense had to stand back for ideological fanaticism?

To a certain extent, yes. But the genocide of the Jews and other Nazi killing programs were not merely the product of ideological fanaticism, as demonstrated by German historian Christian Gerlach, who in his book Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord explains the relation between Nazi occupation and food supply policies and their mass killings.

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NARRATOR: The following summer Richard returned to the Ukraine. One of the graves he excavated was near the village of Ustinovka and was pertinent to the case of Heinrich Wagner.The allegations were chilling.

RICHARD WRIGHT: Wagner was Chief of Police in a small town called Izraylovka. He had these instructions to kill the Jews.A hole was dug about a half an hours walk out of town, on a bit of high ground, and he was there while the Jews turned up and were shot and then complained that the children of mixed marriage were not there and personally went back and collected them, about 19 children, took them up to the grave in a cart and the eye witnesses said that the children were thrown into the grave and those that weren't dead were shot.


http://www.abc.net.au/quantum/stories/s124137.htm

Prof Wright describes the mass grave at Ustinovka :

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We found about two metres down 19 children, all lying higgledy piggledy. One of them was shot in the head but the youngest was only six months by growth of the teeth. And these bones were in such a poor state you could often not tell whether they had been shot or not, but there they were lying higgledy-piggledy, no adults. But there was something like 20 centimetres of soil underneath the children and then, suddenly, there were the adults ... and I think it was between 100 and 150 was our estimate.


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Apparently the SIU investigators had interviewed the mother of three of those children (the father was a Jew, she was not), who had said she returned from the fields for lunch one day, and her children were not in the house. She asked the neighbours whether they had seen the children. The neighbours told her they had been taken away to be shot.


Why were they shot? Because they were jewish. The mother of those three children must have thought they were safe, since she wasn’t jewish.

But her husband was already killed? And all the “unmixed” jewish children, along with their parents?

Did she know this, that day she came home “to lunch”?

Or was the villages or “towns” strictly separated by racial distinction in this part of Ukraine? No communication? Who told the neighbours that the children were to be taken away to be shot? Wagner “personally”(see quote above)?

I wonder what the philosopher is hinting at. I suppose he’s trying to challenge the credibility of an eyewitness account on the basis of farcical considerations. As if that would speak against the fact of the mass murders investigated by Richard Wright and the SIU. Poor philosopher.

It reminds me of a story told in Sereny’s “Into that Darkness”(1974). Franciszek Zabecki, the station master at Treblinka, and spy for the exiled Polish Government in London, related the panic that spread in the town of Treblinka when the Germans brought 20 empty train wagons to the railway station. “Now they are coming for us!” people thought, and everybody sent their wives and children away in safety(?). There were only grown men left in the region. “Then you had to send your family away, too?” asked Sereny. And since Zabecki was such an honest man (according to Sereny) he couldn’t lie : “No, I had too much to do. Besides, it would have been too impractical – with cooking, and so on!” (I quote from memory).

The Everyday Holocaust? Or the Banality or Commonplace of Evil? Genocide that is “all in a day’s work”?

Or is somebody lying?

Considering the supporting documentary evidence, the lie that the philosopher would badly like to believe in is rather improbable.

Still, the graves are there. The children have been shot.

Exactly, philosopher. The graves are there. As is the physical evidence of the 33 mass graves at Belzec found in 1997/98 by an archaeological team and the Treblinka burial site more than 20,000 square meters long and wide where the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland found huge amounts of ashes and other partial human remains buried to a depth of 7.5 meters after the war. As are the train schedules and transportation documents that make it possible to reconstruct how many people were taken to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka from given places at given times. As are the Höfle memorandum, the Korherr Report and other documents corroborating the depositions of defendants and witnesses on the mass murder which occurred at those places. Which means that the philosopher’s haggling about alleged inaccuracies in eyewitness testimonials is a pointless academic exercise.

Here is a quote from Prof Gros, the author of “Neighbors” :

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The issue of Jedwabne is unusual, because it is a little as if, during our conversation, we didn't notice the remains of an infant lying on the table, and here we have been carrying on with our discussion for 50 years, without seeing this. After all, this is an essential event in the history of the occupation! We will see this in the years to come. In light of this event, that history will be different.


http://www.wsp.krakow.pl/konspekt/gross/gross_e.html

Is there a parallell to Jedwabne?

Prof Wright says (above) :

Quote:
I want to say that I found it unnerving that even the well-disposed have shown so little interest in our Ukrainian work.


Why this difference between Serniki/Ustinovka and Jedwabne?

I cannot find any mention of his findings even at the Ukrainian National site of Ukar.

Now I get it. The philosopher is hinting that the dead found at Serniki/Ustinovka may have fallen victim to their Ukrainian neighbors rather than to German forces. If so, they would be part of the comparatively low number of Jews (ca. 24,000) who at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union fell victim to pogroms in the Western Ukraine that were instigated by the Einsatzgruppen. A trifle compared to the ca. 500,000 people the Einsatzgruppen killed themselves within the first half year of their activity, according to their own reports. But the philosopher has little but hollow suspicions to show for the thesis he hints at, as I see it.

On the other hand is there a strong reaction to a mis-captioned photo in Time Magazine, concerning an alleged public gang rape of a Jewish(?) woman, allegedly committed by Ukrainians during the war.
http://www.ukar.org/levyts01.shtml

Prof Wright was very careful to make sure that the Germans were pointed out as the perpetrators. Firstly, because :

Quote:
Archaeology had nothing to do with the first strategy – identification of alleged perpetrators - but much to do with investigating material evidence for the alleged events.

And the Australian team shared responsibility on the excavations with Sovjet collegues.

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To do the work, the grave was divided into two halves, with the Australian team at the end located by archaeological methods, and the Soviets at the other.


The part of the grave that was NOT located by archaeological methods, but nevertheless located by the Soviets, was perhaps the part that supplied the German cartridges from 1941, which presumably exculpate the Russians? (I.e, that it could be a grave from the Stalinist purges. Besides, why should Stalin kill women and children?)

In order to make the exculpation stronger, there were radiocarbon datings from the victim’s hair.
(Prof Wright allows some room for the “first strategy” after all – see quote above.)

The excavations at Jedwabne also discovered German ammunition – but pre-WW2, and not in use by Germans at the time of the massacre. But the Einsatztruppen perhaps had more primitive and old armament?

Prof Gros, from the link above:
Quote:
However, as far as the exhumations are concerned, I also don't think they were conducted properly. But the message of the book is not changed by the numbers-300 or 1600 persons murdered-though obviously, it would be good to know how many people actually died at the time. Since this is an exceptionally difficult story, such certain knowledge would make it easier to come to terms with, as well as facilitate discussions conducted as conversations oriented toward content rather than toward details (by reason of true or supposed ill will). During the exhumations, not everything was dug up. We need to remember that this was not a professionally-conducted exhumation. An international observer having enormous knowledge of this subject, with whom I spoke in Jedwabne and after Jedwabne (I wrote about his accounts in the Gazeta Wyborcza), stated that on the basis of the work conducted there, it is absolutely impossible to determine the total number of persons buried. Professor Kieres attempts to present this in some sensible manner, saying that the exact number of victims is of no great significance, because what we have found out up until now is entirely sufficient for us to treat this crime as one of the most horrible magnitude. After all, remains of children and old people were found, and in general, it is known that what was described in Wasersztajn's account did in fact happen.


(The historian Sara Bender would agree with the last sentence, at least:)

http://www.radzilow.com/haaretz.htm

But why is Prof Gros dissatisfied with the exhumations? They discovered too few victims?

Quote:
“…the message of the book is not changed by the numbers-300 or 1600 persons murdered-though obviously, it would be good to know how many people actually died at the time. Since this is an exceptionally difficult story, such certain knowledge would make it easier to come to terms with, , as well as facilitate discussions conducted as conversations oriented toward content rather than toward details (by reason of true or supposed ill will).”


Since the exhumations at Serniki/Ustinovka were professionally done, they “provided stunning support” for the witness relations. This would presumably “facilitate discussions…toward content rather than towards details”.

But – as quoted –
Quote:
“I want to say that I found it unnerving that even the well-disposed have shown so little interest in our Ukrainian work”.


Perhaps Serniki/Ustinovka is waiting for its historian – a Ukrainian Gros?

What will happen then?

Yeah, perhaps some day someone will come along and demonstrate that the Jews of Serniki/Ustinovka were killed by their Ukrainian neighbors and not by Germans. For all the philosopher's considerations bereft with nonsense and wishful thinking, however, this is as unlikely as the fulfillment of the philosopher's pious wish that the dead be related to executions during Stalin's purges (which for all I know rarely if ever victimized women let alone children, the overwhelming majority of those executed being males). Anyway, even if what the philosopher yearns for should happen one day, it will not help him much. As I mentioned, Ukrainians killed about 24,000 Jews in Nazi-incited pogroms at the beginning of the German invasion, whereas the Einsatzgruppen killed 20 times as many in the first half year of their activity, according to their own reporting. In other words, philosopher, much a do about nothing, once again.

Here is what Finkelstein thinks:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/info-poland/cl ... Finkl.html

He’s not telling us that a significant part of the ca. 2,700,000 Polish Jews who perished during the Nazi occupation succumbed to their Polish neighbors, is he?

[Peter Müller]

Why did the Americans fly three arial raids on Ausschwitz? And how many died than?

[Tarpon27]

Peter Muller wrote:

Why did the Americans fly three arial raids on Ausschwitz? And how many died than?

Two natural resource prodcuts the Germans lacked for war were petroleum products and rubber. With a blockade, they were unable to import supplies, so they created plants to produce synthetic products.

I. G. Farben built a plant for making synthetic rubber in the sprawling Auschwitz complex, which consisted of several camps, including Buna, Monowitz, Auschwitz 1, Auschwitz 2 (Birkenau).

There are some materials relating to inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau hoping for Allied bombing of the camp.

I don't know if any were killed at Birkenau by the bombings, or if there were specific missions designed to bomb the camp (some bombs meant for the Buna works may have hit other targets).

Mark

[Roberto]

Why did the Americans fly three arial raids on Ausschwitz?

They bombed the synthetic rubber factories at Monowitz, which was attached to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, if I well remember.

And how many died than?

Some of those who were working at Monowitz at the time of the bombings, no doubt. How many I don't know, but I don't expect the death toll to have been significant.

[Erik]

<<Then we are faced with the question of definition: What is the Holocaust? Is it history, a detail in history, or Real History? Without precedent? Or an Intention in our Western Civilization(the school of Intentionalism)? A black hole in Universal History?

Even the doyen of Holocaust studies, Raul Hilberg, has been cited as saying that he is becoming more and more confused about what the Holocaust really is (and he is no Denier, you know!).>>


He's said no such thing. It's bad enough that you go on and on without really saying much of anything at all, but when you do say something definite it is frequently erroneous.

You may be right! I can’t find the quote!

Perhaps I could hide behind the formulation : “..has been cited as saying…” which probably is not the same as saying that he HAS been saying it. But that won’t help much since I cannot locate even the alleged quote.

Your prompt reaction seems to imply that you have read the allegation before? Or do you simply know that Mr Hilberg CANNOT have said “such thing”?

What I wanted to imply was that you can be confused about what the Holocaust really is without being a Denier. The sheer senselessness of such a project without any kind of possibility of “success” , not even from a Götterdämmerung perspective, can stretch the faculties of anybody’s understanding : what WAS the Holocaust?

The quote from “Tell ye your children”(above) – from the historian O. Bartov – suggests that even many years of “following the facts” (Roberto) doesn’t give the Holocaust an aura of self-evidence.

Bruchfeld and Levine add to the quote from Bartov :

This is a strong argument. The Holocaust is a black hole in the history of Europe and the modern world. Yet it must be understood, at a minimum, that the Holocaust took place because people like you and I chose to make it happen. They chose to plan mass murder and carry it out over a period of many years. They could have chosen otherwise. They should have chosen otherwise.

Perhaps we have to settle for this ”minimum” understanding eventually. The Holocaust is a black hole in ourselves that we once chose to ”plan” and ”carry out”.

But may we not try to find out first what ”das Ding an sich” really is? Ask the knowables who are without ”ideological bubbles”?

Like:

<<What is the Holocaust?


“Die deutsche Ausrottung der europäischen Juden war der erste vollendete Vernichtungsprozess der Weltgeschichte. Zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte der westlichen Zivilisation hatten die Täter alle eine Tötungsoperation im Wege stehenden administrativen und moralischen Widerstände überwunden”. (Hilberg “Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden”, sid 1115 (Fischer 1999)).

“The German extirpation of the european Jews was the first complete(d?) extermination process in world history. For the first time in the history of western civilization had the murderers removed all administrative and moral resistance to a killing operation”. (my translation)

“The attempt to extirpate them has been made under the most favourable auspices and on the largest scale; the most considerable means that man could command have been pertinaciously applied to this object for the longer period of recorded time.” (Benjamin Disraeli, ”Lord George Bentinck : a Political Biography”(1852). Kap XXIV, ”The Jewish Question”.)>>


This is not a definition of the Holocaust. It is Hilberg discussing what he considers some salient points about the events.

And later :

<<The Holocaust is not just a “sum” of a crime and a war. Hilberg’s definition – and Disraeli’s – is more than that.>>

Hilberg's words were not a definition of the Holocaust, and you've offered nothing by Disraeli in that regard either. Perhaps you are confused by what a definition is?

Yes, perhaps!

I was using the word in a colloquial sense, rather than a scientific : you know, “if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck…” and so on!

A “definition” is defined in the Shorter Oxford Dict. as “stating precise nature of thing, or meaning of word”.

A “description” is defined as a “more or less complete definition”.

A “discussion” on the other hand is defined as an “examination by argument”.

Irving Copi (Introd.to Logic) says that “a precising definition is different from a stipulative one because its definiendum is not a new term but one with a established, although vague, usage”.

Hilberg has a historical view of the Holocaust :

Der Vernichtungsprozess der Nazis kam nicht aus heiterem Himmel; es war der Höhepunkt einer zyklischen Entwicklung. Wir können diese Entwicklung in den drei aufeinanderfolgenden Zielsetzungen antijüdischer Amtswalter nachvollziehen. Die Missionare des Christentums erklärten einst : Ihr habt kein Recht, als Juden unter uns zu leben. Die nachfolgenden weltlichen Herrscher verkündeten : Ihr habt kein Recht, unter uns zu leben. Die deutschen Nazis schliesslich verfügten : Ihr habt kein Recht, zu leben. ( “Die Vernichtung..” op cit sid 15).

"The extermination process of the Naziz came not out of the blue sky ; it was the zenith of a cyclical development. We can see this development fullfilled in the three subsequent goals of anti-jewish officials. The christian missionaires once declared : you have no right to live among us as Jews. The following worldly rulers proclaimed : you have no right to live among us. The German Nazis finally, ordained : you have no right to live." (my transl.)

The quote from Disraeli can illustrate the “established” jewish historical consciousness of this extermination process.

I thought Hilberg formulated a “precising” of this consciousness : The Holocaust meant that “..you have no right to live”; the Nazi “radicalization” of Disraeli’s “extirpation”, perhaps? The administrative and moral resistances were removed, as Hilberg stated. The Holocaust was “complete(d?)”.

Or “fullfilled”? (vollendet = “vollbracht”?) What does the American original say?

But it was a “discussion”, rather, according to you.

What do you think? Is a “definition” possible?

<<Does it make a difference who the perpetrators were? Isn’t it a Holocaust just the same? The horror of it all is undiminished?>>


Obviously it makes a difference. That's why we seek out murderers.


<<What is the difference between a crime, a war crime and the Holocaust? >>


Many things, but a sentient being might begin by noting the first two do not necessarily involve murder.

Sentiently, murder is a crime. It also makes a difference who murders.

Hilberg writes about the German bureaucrats :

“they could destroy a whole people without leaving their desks. Except during inspection tours, they never had to see ‘ 100 corpses lying there, or 500, or 1000’. But these men were not naive; they knew the connection between their paperwork and the mountains of corpses in Eastern Europe”. (op cit, side 1093, my transl.)

The “Neighbors” of Gros’ book tried to blame the Germans when they took revenge on the jews. The soldiers were obeying orders. The Sonderkommandos were trying to survive.

Who is a murderer? When is it a crime to kill?

<<That is perhaps why revisionists – “ideologically motivated crackpots”, according to Roberto – never have questioned the mass shootings and murders illustrated by Prof Wright’s excavations.>>

That's deniers who are thus defined. And some of the more mindless have questioned the Einsatzgruppen murders. The rest wisely choose to husband that small amount of credibility accorded to all before they open their mouths, preferring instead to deny gas chambers.

They don’t deny the crime, they deny the Holocaust? If the Holocaust was taking place, it surely was a crime. If it didn’t take place, the other crimes still took place.

But it is not the Holocaust?

I would comment on Wright's archeological confirmation of the Nazi murders at Serniki and Ustinovka as well if I could figure out what your point is. That's one of the potential dangers of making vague speculations rather than stating a clear point and then arguing it.

Prof Gros :

The issue of Jedwabne is unusual, because it is a little as if, during our conversation, we didn't notice the remains of an infant lying on the table, and here we have been carrying on with our discussion for 50 years, without seeing this. After all, this is an essential event in the history of the occupation! We will see this in the years to come. In light of this event, that history will be different.

How will history be different, if the Poles are blamed for these remains of an infant? Will the Holocaust be something else than the definition….sorry, “discussion”, of Hilberg(above)?

The excavations of Prof Wright, on the other hand, confirm the Holocaust, unless the picture is “mis-captioned”?

[Charles Bunch]

<<Then we are faced with the question of definition: What is the Holocaust? Is it history, a detail in history, or Real History? Without precedent? Or an Intention in our Western Civilization(the school of Intentionalism)? A black hole in Universal History?

Even the doyen of Holocaust studies, Raul Hilberg, has been cited as saying that he is becoming more and more confused about what the Holocaust really is (and he is no Denier, you know!).>>


He's said no such thing. It's bad enough that you go on and on without really saying much of anything at all, but when you do say something definite it is frequently erroneous.

You may be right! I can’t find the quote!

Perhaps I could hide behind the formulation : “..has been cited as saying…” which probably is not the same as saying that he HAS been saying it. But that won’t help much since I cannot locate even the alleged quote.

Your prompt reaction seems to imply that you have read the allegation before? Or do you simply know that Mr Hilberg CANNOT have said “such thing”?

My prompt reply reflects a familiarity with his work which you apparently don't share.

What I wanted to imply was that you can be confused about what the Holocaust really is without being a Denier. The sheer senselessness of such a project without any kind of possibility of “success” , not even from a Götterdämmerung perspective, can stretch the faculties of anybody’s understanding : what WAS the Holocaust?

There is nothing particularly difficult about the Holocaust to be confused about. Of course, one could simply be ignorant about it, which might cause confusion, but that is not the same as the event itself being confusing.

<<What is the Holocaust?


“Die deutsche Ausrottung der europäischen Juden war der erste vollendete Vernichtungsprozess der Weltgeschichte. Zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte der westlichen Zivilisation hatten die Täter alle eine Tötungsoperation im Wege stehenden administrativen und moralischen Widerstände überwunden”. (Hilberg “Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden”, sid 1115 (Fischer 1999)).

“The German extirpation of the european Jews was the first complete(d?) extermination process in world history. For the first time in the history of western civilization had the murderers removed all administrative and moral resistance to a killing operation”. (my translation)

“The attempt to extirpate them has been made under the most favourable auspices and on the largest scale; the most considerable means that man could command have been pertinaciously applied to this object for the longer period of recorded time.” (Benjamin Disraeli, ”Lord George Bentinck : a Political Biography”(1852). Kap XXIV, ”The Jewish Question”.)>>


This is not a definition of the Holocaust. It is Hilberg discussing what he considers some salient points about the events.

And later :

<<The Holocaust is not just a “sum” of a crime and a war. Hilberg’s definition – and Disraeli’s – is more than that.>>

Hilberg's words were not a definition of the Holocaust, and you've offered nothing by Disraeli in that regard either. Perhaps you are confused by what a definition is?

Yes, perhaps!

I was using the word in a colloquial sense, rather than a scientific : you know, “if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck…” and so on!

A “definition” is defined in the Shorter Oxford Dict. as “stating precise nature of thing, or meaning of word”.

A “description” is defined as a “more or less complete definition”.

A “discussion” on the other hand is defined as an “examination by argument”.

Precisely, Hilberg was discussing the Holocaust, not defining it.

Now did you have a point?

What do you think? Is a “definition” possible?

What would make you think otherwise?

<<Does it make a difference who the perpetrators were? Isn’t it a Holocaust just the same? The horror of it all is undiminished?>>


Obviously it makes a difference. That's why we seek out murderers.


<<What is the difference between a crime, a war crime and the Holocaust? >>


Many things, but a sentient being might begin by noting the first two do not necessarily involve murder.

Sentiently, murder is a crime.

But crime is not murder, sentiently. I guess you are not a philosopher.

Hilberg writes about the German bureaucrats :

“they could destroy a whole people without leaving their desks. Except during inspection tours, they never had to see ‘ 100 corpses lying there, or 500, or 1000’. But these men were not naive; they knew the connection between their paperwork and the mountains of corpses in Eastern Europe”. (op cit, side 1093, my transl.)

The “Neighbors” of Gros’ book tried to blame the Germans when they took revenge on the jews. The soldiers were obeying orders. The Sonderkommandos were trying to survive.

Who is a murderer?

He or she who murders.

When is it a crime to kill?

We're not discussing killing, we're discussing murder.

<<That is perhaps why revisionists – “ideologically motivated crackpots”, according to Roberto – never have questioned the mass shootings and murders illustrated by Prof Wright’s excavations.>>

That's deniers who are thus defined. And some of the more mindless have questioned the Einsatzgruppen murders. The rest wisely choose to husband that small amount of credibility accorded to all before they open their mouths, preferring instead to deny gas chambers.

They don’t deny the crime, they deny the Holocaust? If the Holocaust was taking place, it surely was a crime. If it didn’t take place, the other crimes still took place.

Deniers of the Holocaust deny the crimes of the Holocaust.

I would comment on Wright's archeological confirmation of the Nazi murders at Serniki and Ustinovka as well if I could figure out what your point is. That's one of the potential dangers of making vague speculations rather than stating a clear point and then arguing it.

Prof Gros :

The issue of Jedwabne is unusual, because it is a little as if, during our conversation, we didn't notice the remains of an infant lying on the table, and here we have been carrying on with our discussion for 50 years, without seeing this. After all, this is an essential event in the history of the occupation! We will see this in the years to come. In light of this event, that history will be different.

How will history be different, if the Poles are blamed for these remains of an infant?

It will be more accurate, and thereby allow those who write about history to make more informed statements about what happened, and why. That is the purpose of history.

Will the Holocaust be something else than the definition….sorry, “discussion”, of Hilberg(above)?

No, did you think it would? Is that what you are struggling to say?

The excavations of Prof Wright, on the other hand, confirm the Holocaust, unless the picture is “mis-captioned”?

The excavations of Prof. Wright confirm the Einsatzgruppen actions in Serniki and Ustinovka.

[Roberto]

The quote from “Tell ye your children”(above) – from the historian O. Bartov – suggests that even many years of “following the facts” (Roberto) doesn’t give the Holocaust an aura of self-evidence.

That’s how the philosopher would like it to be, no doubt. However, the issue of what the term “Holocaust” is supposed to mean has even been discussed in court at the Irving-Lipstadt trial:

8.3 Evans argued that the term is generally understood to denote "the attempt by Nazi Germany, led by Hitler, to exterminate the Jewish population in Europe, which attempt succeeded to the extent of murdering between 5 and 6 million Jews in a variety of ways, including mass gassings in camps built for the purpose". It follows that a "Holocaust denier" is someone who, for one reason or another or for a combination of reasons, repudiates the notion that the above definition of the Holocaust is apt to describe what was sought to be done to the European Jews by the Nazis during World War 2. Evans testified that a characteristic of Holocaust denial is that it involves a politically motivated falsification of history.

8.4 In the opinion of Evans, the views expressed by Holocaust deniers include the following:

(i) that Jews were not killed in gas chambers or at least not on any significant scale;

(ii) that the Nazis had no policy and made no systematic attempt to exterminate European Jewry and that such deaths as did occur were the consequence of individual excesses unauthorised at senior level;

(iii) that the number of Jews murdered did not run into millions and that the true death toll was far lower;

(iv) that the Holocaust is largely or entirely a myth invented during the war by Allied propagandists and sustained after the war by Jews in order to obtain financial support for the newly-created state of Israel.

Source of quote:

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/i/ ... ment-08.01

Emphasis is mine.

Which of the views above described do you adhere to, philosopher?

The excavations of Prof Wright, on the other hand, confirm the Holocaust, unless the picture is “mis-captioned”?

The excavations of Prof. Wright at Serniki and Ustinovka have nothing to do with the picture, which was taken at Khmelnitski Proskurov. Together with other elements, they are evidence to the specific massacres at the specific times and places in question, which are but a fraction of the mass killing that, as becomes apparent from a vast array of eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence, was carried out by the Nazi regime on a rarely equaled scale.

[Erik]

Quote:
Roberto posted a terrifying photo above, “captioned” as showing :

Quote:
Mass graves of seven thousand murdered in Khmelnitski Proskurov, Ukraine, January 1943. _Museum of the Polish Army, Warsaw, Poland._


Why the quote marks?

It was not meant as a sneer quote! The photo IS captioned as you stated, obviously.

I use quote marks a bit too often, I know, but it is more as a wink at the reader about my limited vocabulary and command of the English idiom. A wink is not a sneer, I hope?

(I used quote marks on “captioned” later in the posting, too, by the way.)

I perhaps should have use quote marks around the word “photo” instead. It certainly looks like a painting. It is “too beautiful” to be “true”!!! [Here I use quote marks consciously to mark the horrible amphiboly (if that’s the right term?) of the expression.] Naked bodies are “exposed” like this in painting schools. A mass shooting of 7 000 women and children cannot possibly look like a Raphael painting.

Yes, we have all to force ourselves to look at the Holocaust through all kinds of “nasty, immediate and confronting” aspects. We are also asked to believe what we see, and that what we see is the Holocaust.


<<I sure love these hollow “Revisionist” phrases like “we are asked to believe”. Nonsense. We are supposed to do nothing other than follow the evidence and our own common sense, which some people stubbornly refuse to do because it does not fit into their ideological bubble.>>

Your professional training has perhaps made you able to “look at Horror bare”. To”…follow the evidence and our own common sense,…”??

What is the evidence?

What is the sense?

Is there any chance that the evidence is misleading? That the sense is even more common than we are lead to believe?

Why is refusal to “follow” considered criminal?

Quote:
Then we are faced with the question of definition: What is the Holocaust? Is it history, a detail in history, or Real History? Without precedent? Or an Intention in our Western Civilization(the school of Intentionalism)? A black hole in Universal History?


Blah, blah, blah. How about “the genocidal killing of five to six million Jews by the Nazi regime”? That’s what corresponds to the proven facts.

Even if “that’s what correspond to the proven facts”, the question “what it is”, is still pertinent.

If you ask the question what the Crucification means, and the Orthodoxy “blah blah”:s you, and say : How about “the nailing of our Saviour to a wooden cross by the Jews”, since “that’s what corresponds to the proven facts”, you would still be entitled to ask “what it is”.

Revisionism would certainly be called upon. Was it the Jews or the Romans? Some say that the choice between Barrabas and Christ was invented by the evangelists to exculpate Pilatus (and the Romans)and make “Mission possible” in the Roman Empire.

What if the Holocaust was invented to exculpate the Western powers from an expected WW3 ; against the Soviets,with atomic weapons? “Why stop Hitler? If he was right after all?”

The perpetrators of something as horrible as the Holocaust obviously HAD to be stopped.

Quote:
Even the doyen of Holocaust studies, Raul Hilberg, has been cited as saying that he is becoming more and more confused about what the Holocaust really is (and he is no Denier, you know!).


What exactly did Hilberg write, philosopher? Quote please.

I must refer to my answer to Mr Bunch above, and repeat :

Here are some additions to the quote from Hilberg’s “Die Vernichtung…” given there :

And the "final solution," you see, is really final, because people who are converted can yet be Jews in secret, people who are expelled can yet return. But people who are dead will not reappear.
In such a respect - the last stage - they were really pioneers and inventors?
This was something unprecedented, and this was something new.
How can one give some idea about this complete newness, because it was new for them too?
Yes, it was new, and I think for this reason one cannot find a specific document, a specific planned outline or blueprint which stated: "Now the Jews will be killed." Everything is left to inference from general words. General words - the very wording "final solution" or "total solution" or "territorial solution" leaves something to the bureaucrat that he must infer. He cannot read that document. One cannot even read Göring's famous letter to Heydrich at the end of July 1941 charging him in two paragraphs to proceed with the "final solution," and examining that document, consider that everything is clarified. Far from it. It was an authorization to invent. It was an authorization to begin something that was not as yet capable of being put into words. I think of it that way.
It was a case for every agency as a matter of fact?
Absolutely for every agency. In every aspect of this operation, invention was necessary. Certainly at this point, because every problem was unprecedented. Not just how to kill the Jews, but what to do with their property thereafter. And not only that, but how to deal with the problem of not letting the world know what had happened. All this multitude of problems was new.

http://home.online.no/~bbruland/sider/h ... hoah2.html

"As the Nazi regime developed over the years, the whole structure of decision-making was changed. At first there were laws. Then there were decrees implementing laws. Then a law was made saying, 'There shall be no laws.' Then there were orders and directives that were written down, but still published in ministerial gazettes. Then there was government by announcement; orders appeared in newspapers. Then there were the quiet orders, the orders that were not published, that were within the bureaucracy, that were oral. And finally, there were no orders at all. Everybody knew what he had to do."

http://www.facing.org/facing/fhao2.nsf/ ... endocument

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.
Quoted in: George De Wan, "The Holocaust in Perspective," Newsday (Long Island, New York), Feb. 23, 1983, p. II/3. Also quoted in the Summer 1985 Journal, pp. 170-171.

The above was a selection from a Google search.

Here is a quote from Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer (Fischer 1999).

<<Jeder der Täter spielte für die Formulierungen und Durchführung der antijüdischen Massnahmen eine spezifische Rolle. Meist verstanden die Beteiligten ihre Aufgabe von selbst, schrieben sie ihrer jeweiligen Stellung und ihre Pflichten zu. Ihr Tun war unpersönlich. Sie waren “ermächtigt” oder “angewiesen”, ihre Mission auszuführen. Zudem war kein Einzelner, keine Behörde allein für die Vernichtung der Juden verantwortlich. Es gab keinen Sonderhaushalt für das Projekt. Die Arbeit verteilte sich auf eine weitverzweigte Bürokratie, und jeder konnte sich einreden, nur ein Rädchen im immensen Getriebe zu sein. Daher bezeichneten sich Beamte, Schreiber oder uniformierte Wachmänner im nachhinein nie als Täter. Allerdings wussten sie, dass die Teilnahme an der Vernichtung freiwillig war und dass jeder, der in den Mahlstom eintrat, unauslöschliche Taten beging – in diesem Sinne also immer bleiben würde, was er einmal war, sogar wenn er eisern über sein Tun schwieg.
Der Täter per excellence war Adolf Hitler selber.>>(Vorwort s.9)
…………..
<<Die Vernichtung der Juden war nicht zentralisiert. Weder hatte man eine Behörde für Judenangelegenheiten gegründet noch ein Budget für den Vernichtungsprozess bereitgestellt.>>(s.33)

"Every perpetrator had a special role in the formulation and execution of the anti-jewish measures. The participators understood their task on their own accord, ascribed it to their present position and duty. Their action was impersonal. They were “authorized” or “assigned”, to fulfill their mission. Moreover, no individual, no agency was alone responsible for the extermination of the Jews. There was no special budget for the project. The work was shared by a bureaucracy with many ramifications, and every branch could persuade itself that it was only a cog in the machinery. Therefore did the civil servant, clerk or guard never afterwards designate himself as a perpetrator. All the same they all knew, that the participation in the extermination was voluntary, and that everybody who entered the maelstrom committed indelible actions – thus in this sense always would be what he once was, even if he kept a resolute silence about his actions.

The perpetrator per excellence was Adolf Hitler himself.
…………
The extermination of the Jews was not centralized. Neither had they established an agency for Jewish Affairs, nor prepared a budget for the extermination process."(Foreword side 9)(my transl.)

If I involuntarily misquoted Hilberg above, I hope I am doing him justice here.

Hilberg has called himself an “empiricist”. Like Roberto,”.. he follows the evidence where it leads because he is genuinely interested in the historical facts…”(?).

Still, he must have given some thought to this Final Solution that was “…not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus -- mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy”.

>Everything is left to inference from general words. General words - the very wording "final solution" or "total solution" or "territorial solution" leaves something to the bureaucrat that he must infer. He cannot read that document.<(from above)

>In every aspect of this operation, invention was necessary. Certainly at this point, because every problem was unprecedented. Not just how to kill the Jews, but what to do with their property thereafter. And not only that, but how to deal with the problem of not letting the world know what had happened. All this multitude of problems was new.<(from above)

Hilberg uses the word “incredible” to describe this “meeting of minds”, this “consensus – mind reading”.

He obviously doesn’t mean “doubtful” nor “improbable”, but rather “unbelievable”.

Gitta Sereny has described her reaction at the sight of Treblinka : “We know that more than a million human beings were killed and lie buried in these few acres, but it cannot be believed!!”
(“Into that Darkness” 1974, side145)

“Just follow the facts!”says Roberto. “Leave the Faith to the True Believers!”

On other links he has cited the German historian Gerlach :

This shows that with his possibly strongest intervention in the extermination process Hitler by no means decided or had to decide all, and that his intervention had clear-cut but in a certain sense limited consequences. The findings of research on the crucial responsibility of other instances, especially the authorities in the very areas of occupation, is hereby confirmed.

But the Gerlach quote ought to be read in its entirety.

http://quantum.phpwebhosting.com/~marcu ... php?t=2980

The Final Solution must have been there, lurking in the Chaos, waiting for the Word : “let It be”.
And It was. The will to kill was there, like the Chaos before the creation.

Dawidowicz (The War against the Jews, 1975, s208) says :

<<The Final Solution grew out of a matrix formed by traditional anti-Semitism, the paranoid delusions that seized Germany after the First World War, and the emergence of Hitler and the National Socialist Movement. Without Hitler, the charismatic political leader who believed he had a mission to annihilate the Jews, the Final Solution would not have occurred. Without the assertive and enduring tradition of anti-Semitism by which the Germans sought self definition, Hitler would not have had the fecund soil in which to grow his organisation and spread its propaganda. Without the paranoid delusion of the Dolschstoss that masses of Germans shared in the wake of Germany’s military defeat, political upheavals, economic distress and humiliations of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler could not have transformed the German brand of conventional anti-Semitism into a radical doctrine of mass murder.>>

Later:

<<In medieval days entire communities were seized with witchcraft hysteria, and in modern Germany the mass psychosis of anti-Semitism deranged a whole people.According to their system of belief, elimination of the Jews resembled medieval exorcism of the Devil. The accomplishment of both, it was variously held, would restore grace to the world>>.(op cit s 210)

This was written by Dawidowicz 27 years ago. (Warning! The reader is supposed to beware of the misrepresentation of the historian’s views by selective use of quotes!! I (Erik) may have a secret agenda and an ideological bubble!)

The first quote (note warning above!) probably represents the political correct analysis of the roots of the Holocaust at that time (1975). The omission of the October Revolution is conspicious to a modern reader, reading after the fall of the Sovjet Empire.

The connection between anti-Communism and anti-Semitism was not comme il faut at that time in the West. The pointing out of such a connection was suspected to emanate from a political agenda (crypto-Communism, at least.)

The Communist view was that the Holocaust was just a detail in the history of anti-Communism.

The second quote from Dawidowicz makes it a mystery why there were no gas chambers used in the German camps. The explanation currently offered is that the reaction of the churches of Germany to the euthanasia projekt made the Nazis suspect that the “administrative and moral resistance to a killing operation” (see Hilberg’s discussion below) on German ground could not be overcome.

The “soil” wasn’t “fecund” enough, even in war time.(see Dawidowicz above).

Hilberg explains this by setting apart a bureaucracy with an “incredible meeting of minds” that only needed an “authorization to invent”.

<<In every aspect of this operation, invention was necessary. Certainly at this point, because every problem was unprecedented. Not just how to kill the Jews, but what to do with their property thereafter. And not only that, but how to deal with the problem of not letting the world know what had happened. All this multitude of problems was new.>>

<<Everything is left to inference from general words. General words - the very wording "final solution" or "total solution" or "territorial solution" leaves something to the bureaucrat that he must infer.>>

This is certainly something different from the “fecund soil” and “mass psychosis” that Dawidowicz describes above, which would make “invention” and “mindreading” of the sort that Hilberg describes unnecessary – not to mention “ the problem of not letting the world know what had happened”!

This change of perspective and interpretation on the Holocaust during the last quarter of a century probably reflects the political climate after the collapse of Communism.

The world and its history doesn’t look the same anymore when the “Curtain” is up – so why should the Holocaust escape “revision” when “new light” suddenly appears?

Quote:
The Jewish colleague that Prof Wright cited above mentioned the “grainy black and white photos of Belsen”, and he probably meant photos of the bulldozers burying the victims of typhus and hunger.

Those photos are differently “captioned” nowadays, since it is agreed that there were no gas chambers at Belsen.


Could the philosopher please show when and in what sources the photographs of Bergen-Belsen were captioned as showing victims of gassing at extermination camps? I would like him to show us as well what criminal justice authority or historian ever assumed that there had been gas chambers at Belsen. An admission that his “nowadays” was just a feeble attempt to hoax around will also do.

Ok for “feeble” – but it was not an “attempt to hoax around”.

Perhaps I’m mistaken? Perhaps those photos are still captioned as they always have been, although it is agreed that there were no gas chambers at Belsen?

I recently heard a Swedish film maker on the radio, relating his memories of a film he saw at the cinema, when he was a youngster at 10 years of age. It showed what the Americans saw when they liberated Auschwitz (sic), and disclosed the mountains of corpses and skeletons and gold teeth(sic) and hair from the victims of the Nazis.

It made an indelible impression on the future film maker’s mind and illustrated to him the power that pictures exhibit over the mind and that words can never emulate( he had heard his parents speak about the German camps earlier, without taking any greater notion.)

It also illustrates the limits of a pictural impression when it comes to facts and contexts. 40 years and a completed education had not “revised” to the film maker what he actually saw.

I can remember myself a photo in a book, of a room full of hair (at Auschwitz?), hair that was described as coming from the corpses of gassed women, and had chemical traces of the extermination gas(sic) Zyklon B.

Just a few years ago, on the Net, I read about the type of typhus that is spread by lice, and that women had their hair cut off when they arrived in the camps, in order to stop the typhus from spreading.

The hair didn’t necessarily prove that the women were gassed, as I had believed.

So what? It described the horrors of the Holocaust, didn’t it? Whether it was Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, or whether the haircut was before or after the gassings, is a minor point?

It’s the readers responsibility not to misinterpret the picture, or mis-read the captions.

Roberto once gave the following link:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/~jamie ... tion.shtml

The Germans could easily have provided the inmates of Bergen-Belsen with food, if they had wanted to. So the victims of the camp were Holocaust victims just the same.

But was it the Holocaust, the extermination of the European Jews, according to Hilbergs definition - …sorry, “discussion” – given below?

Or the horrible exigencies of war?

A Swedish historian of some provincial repute lectured 10 years ago on a popular TV show about the Holocaust. He enumerated the most infamous camps under the heading “german concentration and extermination camps”, and did not differentiate between Belsen and Belzec.(I’ve read the lecture in writing recently.) You got the impression that there was no difference.

And why should there be a difference?

I.e. : WHY didn’t the Nazis use gaschambers in the German camps? Was the moral and administrative resistance (see Hilbergs discussion below) too strong?

Here is a witness, Dr Dupont, from the Nuremberg Trial. He was a prisoner at Buchenwald.

<<Im Zusammenhang mit Nummer 61, dem Vernichtungsblock, wurden weitere Namen genannt: Der Name des Chefarztes aller Lager, Lolling, wurde sehr oft erwähnt, besonders von einem SS-Arzt des Lagers, der Bender hieß. Im Zusammenhang mit der Auswahl der Invaliden oder Juden, die zur Vergasung nach Auschwitz oder Bergen-Belsen geschickt wurden, hörte ich den Namen Pohl nennen.>>
[Der Nürnberger Prozeß: Vierundvierzigster Tag. Montag, den 28. Januar 1946, S. 110. Digitale Bibliothek Band 20: Der Nürnberger Prozeß, S. 6442 (vgl. NP Bd. 6, S. 279)]

He perhaps couldn’t see why the Nazis shouldn’t have gassed people in Bergen-Belsen, since he was convinced that they did so in Auschwitz(?).

Quote:
What is the Holocaust?

“Die deutsche Ausrottung der europäischen Juden war der erste vollendete Vernichtungsprozess der Weltgeschichte. Zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte der westlichen Zivilisation hatten die Täter alle eine Tötungsoperation im Wege stehenden administrativen und moralischen Widerstände überwunden”. (Hilberg “Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden”, sid 1115 (Fischer 1999)).

“The German extirpation of the european Jews was the first complete(d?) extermination process in world history. For the first time in the history of western civilization had the murderers removed all administrative and moral resistance to a killing operation”. (my translation)

“The attempt to extirpate them has been made under the most favourable auspices and on the largest scale; the most considerable means that man could command have been pertinaciously applied to this object for the longer period of recorded time.” (Benjamin Disraeli, ”Lord George Bentinck : a Political Biography”(1852). Kap XXIV, ”The Jewish Question”.)

There was a pre-Nazi “Final Solution”, according to Disraeli.


<<The former, whatever it was, did not involve homicidal killing on an enormous scale.>>

That’s true. But that is the 20th Century “scale”.

Disraeli differentiated between the Egyptian, Babylonian, Roman, “Gothic” “scale”, that was what “man could command” and apply at the “auspices” of the particular time and age. The exterminators of those times didn’t care to wait for more “considerable means”. They made the scale as enormous as they could “command”.

Wiesenthal has stated his view that Luther would have done what Hitler did, if he had commanded the same means.

Why “extirpation” instead of “extermination” for “Ausrottung” in the translation of Hilberg’s statement, by the way? To create some fuzzy and unintelligible parallel to Disraeli’s statement, perhaps?

Well, I haven’t thought about the parallell until I read this comment of yours. (Maybe because it is “fuzzy and unintelligble”?)

I know it is a moot(?) point in Holocaust discussion what Himmler meant by “ausrotten”. I won’t argue that point with a natural German speaker. I used “extermination” for “Vernichtung”, as you can see. Maybe I should have used “annihilation” instead? (“nihil” = “nicht(s)”?)

In Swedish with at least 40 % of the vocabulary of German origin, “ausrotten” sounds like “utrota”, where “rot” is the same as “root” in English. “Stirps –is” is Latin for “root”…well, now I am “arguing” after all!!

Here is what Dawidowicz has to say on page196 of 1975 edition of “The War against the Jews”:
“Himmler, in his speech to the SS-gruppenführer on 4 october 1943, used the word ‘Ausschaltung’, meaning ‘elimination’, as synonymous with ‘Ausrottung’, meaning ‘annihilation’.”

She adds : “There was no reason to invoke esoteric language to that particular audience on that occasion at that late date, but by then the political need for a esoteric language had given way to the psychological need for euphemistic language”.

There seem to be all sorts of “political need” for all kinds of “esoteric language”.

Quote:
Consequently, the “Phase 2” that George Will is suggesting in the title of his essay…

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will.html

(click on “George Will Archives”, and “’ Final Solution’, Phase 2” (2 May 2002)

…ought to be numbered “3”, perhaps?

Will writes:

<<Did not Hitler, the foremost avatar of anti-Semitism, fail? No, he did not. Yes, his 1,000-year Reich fell 988 years short. But its primary work was mostly done. Hitler's primary objective, as he made clear in words and deeds, was the destruction of European Jewry.>>

Will agrees with Hilberg.


Whatever the terminology, the issue at hand is mass murder on a rarely equaled scale, which claimed the lives of five to six million people. Get used to the idea, philosopher.

But it takes some “using” to “get used to the idea” when the terminology of “the issue at hand” must be decoded all the time to understand what is “clear in words and deeds”.

Quote:
But the Palestians would perhaps disagree? They are likely to see themselves as “destroyed” by “European Jewry”?


Yeah, unfortunately the Nazis didn’t manage to kill all of Europe’s Jews for several reasons (slave labor needs, moderate policies of allied countries and, most important, the fact that they lost the war). Enough survived for European Jews to make up slightly more than 30 % of the population of Israel these days, according to the CIA World Factbook. As to the poor Palestinians, I wonder if the philosopher would even mention them if their oppressors didn’t happen to be Jews.

You suggest that I am an anti-Semite, which makes me feign solidarity with the palestinian Arabs, just to “get at” the Jews.

But on the other hand :

I see that ET is again giving vent to what makes him tick: Concern that he will one day have to share his fat Swedish pension with dark-skinned people from all over the world and second-class whites from Eastern Europe.

In order to forestall that, let’s stop making a fuss about anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, and let's all vote for Le Pen and his brothers-in-spirit in other European countries.

Did I read you correctly, my friend?
(See side 3 above.)

Do I hope that a new Holocaust in the Middle East, with the Palestinian Arabs as perpetrators, will help me to get rid of the Jews, and in this way make it easier to “forestall” any objections to racism here in Europe, against those who want to share my “fat Swedish pension”?


Here is a quote from an article in the “New York Observer”. (I have taken it from a posting by “Scott” (=”Scott Smith”?) on the Codoh.org BBS.)

Make no mistake of it, the Palestinians are victims of history as well as the Jews. The last thing the nations of Europe wanted to do was the right thing, which would be to restore the Jews to their stolen homes, and so they acquiesced in the creation of a Jewish state and then did nothing to make it viable for either the Jews or the Palestinians, preferring to wash their hands of the destruction: let the Semites murder each other and blame the Jews, the Semites they were more familiar with hating.
And now it’s so much easier for the Europeans to persecute the Jews, because they can just allow their own Arab populations to burn synagogues and beat Jews on the street for them. The way Hitler used the eager Croatians, for instance, as death-camp guards.
http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=5715
by the author of Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum

This quote can be connected with this thread as a whole (“Why the Jews and the gas chambers?”) and the “Who” and “How” of the Holocaust as well.

If “I”, Erik, feign symphathy of the Palestinians, and vote for a government here in Europe that support their Cause, am I a participator in this new Holocaust? Am I to be compared to the eventual Germans present at the massacre at Jedwabne? I let the Palestinians “beat Jews on the street for me”, to say the least? And are the Palestinians to be compared to “the eager Croatians, for instance, as death-camp guards”? Used by me, as Hitler used Poles, Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Croatians?

There is a horrid but obvious dynamic going on here: At some deep level, Europeans, European politicians, European culture is aware that almost without exception every European nation was deeply complicit in Hitler’s genocide. Some manned the death camps, others stamped the orders for the transport of the Jews to the death camps, everyone knew what was going on—and yet the Nazis didn’t have to use much if any force to make them accomplices. For the most part, Europeans volunteered.

Is here a connection to what Disraeli said to his fellow Europeans in 1852, and what Usshiskin said to the British in 1918?

This is the way it is likely to happen: Sooner or later, a nuclear weapon is detonated in Tel Aviv, and sooner, not later, there is nuclear retaliation—Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, perhaps all three. Someone once said that while Jesus called on Christians to "turn the other cheek," it’s the Jews who have been the only ones who have actually practiced that. Not this time. The unspoken corollary of the slogan "Never again" is: "And if again, not us alone."
So the time has come to think about the Second Holocaust. It’s coming sooner or later; it’s not "whether," but when. I hope I don’t live to see it. It will be unbearable for those who do. That is, for all but the Europeans—whose consciences, as always, will be clear and untroubled.

The difference is that this time it will be “bearable” to the Europeans.Our consciences will of course as always “be clear and untroubled”, like it was when we let Hitler exterminate the European Jews without lifting a finger to help.

Well, the world did let it happen—with extraordinary complacency, a deaf ear, a blind eye and not a little pleasure on the part of some. And it’s clear from the reaction of Europe today that the world is prepared, is preparing itself, to let it happen again.

Is this the reward to Europe that Hitler promised us in his political Testament? His great historical achievement?

By exterminating the European Jews, he made sure that not only our consciences remained “clear and untroubled”, but our societies as well? If the Jews had been given Bavaria instead of Palestine, as a arabian king suggested (Abdullah Ibn Hussein of Jordan?) then Paris and London would be in dire straits today, instead of Bagdad and Damascus?

Roberto think I have a chance to keep my “fat Swedish pension” by supporting the palestinians against the Jews.

Rosenbaum confirms the vision of Hitler?

Of course the dispairing heartbroken words of Mr Rosenbaum are meant as a satire. But they illustrate the uses of the Holocaust just the same.

Perhaps they also illustrates the uses of the Jews by the Germans in Eastern Europe during WW2.

Quote:
What has this to do with the horrible photo and the horrible finds in the Serniki and Ustinovka archaeological excavations?


<Let me guess: the photo shows, and the graves of Serniki and Ustinovka contain, some of the victims of the genocide. Am I right?>

Ernst Nolte wrote Der Europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917-1945 in the 80’s and maintained a connection between the Gulag of Stalin and Auschwitz. Lipstadt mentions him as one of the (or a kind of Denier?) Deniers of the Holocaust.

A “European Civil War” :
the Holocaust as described by, for example, Dawidowicz above, suddenly appears in another light, when the Western and Middle European political interpretation of the October Revolution during the interwar years is taken into consideration. The horrors and tragedies are of course undiminished – but the actions was “unmystified”.

Hitler’s Willing Executioners were not only the Germans. They were the traditional actors of all Civil Wars since Biblical and Homeric times.

If the graves of Serniki and Ustinovka contain, -- AMONG victims of the Holocaust! -- the victims of a Civil War raging in these parts of Ukraine since 1917(?), and if the Sovjets present at the excavations (see earlier posting, with the whole lecture of Prof Wright supplied by Roberto) had an interest to let these be counted among the victims of the Holocaust, then this fact – if it IS a fact, of course! – will also shed a new light on the Holocaust, like the Gulag makes Auschwitz look different.

The particulars of Prof Wright’s relations of the excavations make a certain caution concerning the conclusions necessary.

The “grim satisfaction” he felt when the extravagant dimensions of the mass grave indicated that the Germans had “hoped for” many more Jews to slaughter, may have been shared by the Sovjets present at the exhumations – and even planned by them.

(The grave may incidentally have been part of a projekt to drain the marshes in the district by ditches(?))

The Israelis refused the investigation of the alleged massacre at Jenin presumably because they expected such a “grim satisfaction” on the part of certain opinions.

Stalin probably killed more communists than Hitler ever did – even before WW2. The PLO and king Hussein and the Phalangists of Libanon can have killed more Palestinians than the Israelis – i.e the Civil Wars in these parts of the world between the arabs themselves are probably crueller than the occupation by Israel.

It may be the FAULT – morally, politically – of the occupation by the Israelis. But not every corpse come from their bullets.

Now I get it. The philosopher is hinting that the dead found at Serniki/Ustinovka may have fallen victim to their Ukrainian neighbors rather than to German forces. If so, they would be part of the comparatively low number of Jews (ca. 24,000) who at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union fell victim to pogroms in the Western Ukraine that were instigated by the Einsatzgruppen. A trifle compared to the ca. 500,000 people the Einsatzgruppen killed themselves within the first half year of their activity, according to their own reports. But the philosopher has little but hollow suspicions to show for the thesis he hints at, as I see it.

You are right in that last sentence. But these are suspicions that are aroused not least by the historical treatments of this epoch that I have came upon.

And let me hasten to add that I am ashamed of how little I have read on the subject, compared to many at this Forum!!

Has the mass grave at Khmelnitski Proskurov, Ukraine, January 1943(the one shown in the picture) been exhumed by the Sovjets? Or were the corpses excavated and cremated during the Enterdungsaktion?

[Erik]

A correction to my posting above.

This change of perspective and interpretation on the Holocaust during the last quarter of a century probably reflects the political climate after the collapse of Communism.

Hilbergs discussion on bureaucracy predates the Rise of the Curtain and the fall of Sovjet Communism, and so cannot reflect these events as suggested in the quote above.

Furthermore, Hilberg is an empiricist that follows documental evidence, and so his discussions in the 80's must reflect the fact that the two decades of research since the first edition of his Magnum Opus, "The Destruction...", had failed to unearth an explicit Hitler order for the Final Solution, and an explicit budget for destruction of the Jews, and so on.

[Roberto]

I perhaps should have use quote marks around the word “photo” instead. It certainly looks like a painting. It is “too beautiful” to be “true”!!!

Not if you take off your ideological blindfolds. What you see then is a photograph of a mass grave full of naked people, mostly women and children, lying together as they are described to have lain together in eyewitness accounts of the Einsatzgruppen killings that the killers themselves reported about to their superiors in great detail. The photograph was most probably taken by one of the participants or an onlooker from another formation for his private photo album. If caught, the photographer may have been busted for having taken pictures of mass executions, like SS-Untersturmfuehrer Max Taubner was:

1. The accused shall not be punished because of the actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss. Although the accused should have recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of Kommandos which were set up especially for this purpose, he should be excused for considering himself to have the authority to take part in the extermination of Jewry himself. Real hatred of the Jews was the driving motivation for the accused. In the process he let himself be drawn into committing cruel actions in Alexandriya which are unworthy of a German man and an SS-officer. These excesses cannot be justified, either, as the accused would like to, as retaliation for the pain that the Jews have caused the German people. It is not the German way to apply Bolshevic methods during the necessary extermination of the worst enemy of our people. In so doing the conduct of the accused gives rise to considerable concern. The accused allowed his men to act with such vicious brutality that they conducted themselves under his command like a savage horde...

2. By taking photographs of the incidents or having photographs taken, by having these developed in photographic shops and showing them to his wife and friends, the accused is guilty of disobedience. Such pictures could pose the gravest risks to the security of the Reich if they fell into the wrong hands...

Translation of an excerpt from the verdict against SS-Untersturmfuehrer Max Taubner, 24 of May 1943.

Source of quote:

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/t/ ... 43-verdict

Yes, we have all to force ourselves to look at the Holocaust through all kinds of “nasty, immediate and confronting” aspects. We are also asked to believe what we see, and that what we see is the Holocaust.

<<I sure love these hollow “Revisionist” phrases like “we are asked to believe”. Nonsense. We are supposed to do nothing other than follow the evidence and our own common sense, which some people stubbornly refuse to do because it does not fit into their ideological bubble.>>

Your professional training has perhaps made you able to “look at Horror bare”. To”…follow the evidence and our own common sense,…”??
What is the evidence?

Confessions of perpetrators, eyewitness testimonials, incriminating documents and the physical traces of the crimes.

What is the sense?

The reasoning it takes to observe and to draw conclusions that are warranted by such observation.

Is there any chance that the evidence is misleading? That the sense is even more common than we are lead to believe?

After 57 years of criminal investigation and historical research, the chance is rather slim. It is actually non-existent, I would say. But the philosopher is entitled to keep dreaming, of course.

Why is refusal to “follow” considered criminal?

I don’t consider those who refuse to follow the evidence where it leads criminal. I just see them as a sorry bunch of idiots. Their nonsense obviously supports a hate speech agenda and is therefore criminalized in some countries, but I consider this to be a wrong approach.

Quote:
Then we are faced with the question of definition: What is the Holocaust? Is it history, a detail in history, or Real History? Without precedent? Or an Intention in our Western Civilization(the school of Intentionalism)? A black hole in Universal History?

Blah, blah, blah. How about “the genocidal killing of five to six million Jews by the Nazi regime”? That’s what corresponds to the proven facts.

Even if “that’s what correspond to the proven facts”, the question “what it is”, is still pertinent.

The answer to the “pertinent question” is that the Holocaust was the genocidal killing of five to six million Jews by the Nazi regime. Period.

What if the Holocaust was invented to exculpate the Western powers from an expected WW3 ; against the Soviets,with atomic weapons?

What if the philosopher fell out of bed tonight and broke his neck? That’s a lot more probable than the Holocaust having been "invented to exculpate the Western powers".

Gitta Sereny has described her reaction at the sight of Treblinka : “We know that more than a million human beings were killed and lie buried in these few acres, but it cannot be believed!!”
(“Into that Darkness” 1974, side145)

What she obviously meant is that it defies the imagination that people should have undertaken to murder so many other people in so small a place. Not that there are any doubts about it having been possible. The means were there, and so was the burial space. The Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland found ashes and other partial human remains on the site all over an area of more than 20,000 square meters after the war, buried to a depth of 7.5 meters. The philosopher is welcome to present his calculations as to how many whole dead bodies fit into that area considering the depth of the graves, and how many after they had been reduced to little more than ashes.

“Just follow the facts!”says Roberto. “Leave the Faith to the True Believers!”

Exactly. Let those freaks try to explain away the eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence that offends their Faith, so that we may all laugh at so much imbecility. Let them explain what they think happened to the 713,555 Jews from the Polish General Government who disappeared behind the gates of Treblinka until 31.12.1942, according to the Höfle memorandum. If the philosopher's contention is that they don’t lie at Treblinka, can he account for them otherwise?

On other links he has cited the German historian Gerlach :

This shows that with his possibly strongest intervention in the extermination process Hitler by no means decided or had to decide all, and that his intervention had clear-cut but in a certain sense limited consequences. The findings of research on the crucial responsibility of other instances, especially the authorities in the very areas of occupation, is hereby confirmed.

But the Gerlach quote ought to be read in its entirety.

I actually recommend that the philosopher read the whole of Gerlach’s book Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, from which the quote is derived. He might acquire some knowledge of history, of which he seems to be woefully short.

This was written by Dawidowicz 27 years ago. (Warning! The reader is supposed to beware of the misrepresentation of the historian’s views by selective use of quotes!! I (Erik) may have a secret agenda and an ideological bubble!)

This reader just wonders why the philosopher makes such a fuss about what Mrs. Dawidowicz wrote 27 years ago, considering that many of her conclusions have been overruled by posterior research.

The world and its history doesn’t look the same anymore when the “Curtain” is up – so why should the Holocaust escape “revision” when “new light” suddenly appears?

The assessment of the Holocaust by historiography has been and keeps being reviewed, like that of any other historical event. Such review is done by competent and objective historians. The propagandists who call themselves “Revisionists” are not needed for it.

Ok for “feeble” – but it was not an “attempt to hoax around”.

Perhaps I’m mistaken? Perhaps those photos are still captioned as they always have been, although it is agreed that there were no gas chambers at Belsen?

Perhaps the philosopher could show us one source where the Belsen photos have been captioned as showing gassing victims? Or one source from which it becomes apparent that at any given time historians or criminal investigators assumed that gassings had occurred at Belsen?

I can remember myself a photo in a book, of a room full of hair (at Auschwitz?), hair that was described as coming from the corpses of gassed women, and had chemical traces of the extermination gas(sic) Zyklon B.

Wow, for once the philosopher’s memory seems to be accurate.

Just a few years ago, on the Net, I read about the type of typhus that is spread by lice, and that women had their hair cut off when they arrived in the camps, in order to stop the typhus from spreading.

The hair didn’t necessarily prove that the women were gassed, as I had believed.

Not by itself, but in connection with eyewitness accounts of the Sonderkommando members describing how they cut the hair off dead women after the gassing. A convergence of physical and eyewitness evidence.

So what? It described the horrors of the Holocaust, didn’t it? Whether it was Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, or whether the haircut was before or after the gassings, is a minor point?

To the public media, perhaps. Not to historiography. Does the philosopher expect the public media to teach him history?

It’s the readers responsibility not to misinterpret the picture, or misread the captions.

It seems he does. That being so, he should blame no one but himself for being misinformed about the details of certain historical events. I wonder if he also relies on Quo Vadis (or, more recently, Gladiator) to tell him the history of ancient Rome.

Roberto once gave the following link:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/~jamie ... tion.shtml

The Germans could easily have provided the inmates of Bergen-Belsen with food, if they had wanted to. So the victims of the camp were Holocaust victims just the same.

But was it the Holocaust, the extermination of the European Jews, according to Hilbergs definition - …sorry, “discussion” – given below?

Or the horrible exigencies of war?

It was no longer the “Final Solution”, which had been called off by Himmler in October 1944. It had something to do with the chaos of the war’s final months, for sure, but it would never have occurred if there had not been hundreds of thousands of tormented beings in German concentration camps before that final chaos came about and if it had not been Himmler’s policy to keep what he saw as the bargaining chips for his return to civilian life from being liberated by the Allies. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the “horrible exigencies of war”. The food that could have saved tens of thousands of lives at Belsen was not needed by either the military or the civilian population, neither of which suffered from hunger at Belsen or anywhere else in Germany - with the possible exception of the eastern territories overrun by the Red Army - while the war was going on.

A Swedish historian of some provincial repute lectured 10 years ago on a popular TV show about the Holocaust. He enumerated the most infamous camps under the heading “german concentration and extermination camps”, and did not differentiate between Belsen and Belzec.(I’ve read the lecture in writing recently.) You got the impression that there was no difference.

And why should there be a difference?

Was that Swedish historian the philosopher himself before becoming a True Believer? I wouldn’t be surprised.

I.e. : WHY didn’t the Nazis use gaschambers in the German camps? Was the moral and administrative resistance (see Hilbergs discussion below) too strong?

Some of the camps in Germany and Austria (Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof and Natzweiler) did have gassing facitlities, but they were used rather sporadically for executions or medical experiments. The extermination camps in Poland were a different matter: they were meant to eliminate the Jewish “useless eaters” well out of sight of the local population - those of the Warthegau at Chelmno, those of the General Government at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. For the Jews from other European countries there were mainly Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, both of which had extermination facilities where those Jews who could not be used for slave labor were killed upon arrival. Here the Germans killed the remaining Jews of Poland as well as those of the Reich, France, Belgium, Greece, Hungary and other countries, far out of sight of the non-Jewish populations of those countries so as to avoid possible interference with other local policies.

Here is what Dawidowicz has to say on page196 of 1975 edition of “The War against the Jews”:
“Himmler, in his speech to the SS-gruppenführer on 4 october 1943, used the word ‘Ausschaltung’, meaning ‘elimination’, as synonymous with ‘Ausrottung’, meaning ‘annihilation’.”

Dawidowicz, who obviously read Himmler’s handwritten notes for the speech but not the recordings of the speech as it was actually made, is wrong. “Auschaltung” does not necessarily mean physical extermination of a group of people. “Ausrottung” does.

Whatever the terminology, the issue at hand is mass murder on a rarely equaled scale, which claimed the lives of five to six million people. Get used to the idea, philosopher.

But it takes some “using” to “get used to the idea” when the terminology of “the issue at hand” must be decoded all the time to understand what is “clear in words and deeds”.

Not always were euphemisms used (examples of exceptions are Himmler’s Posen speeches and the Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Reports, among others), and the euphemisms are in fact rather transparent if you look at them without an ideological blindfold. Care to see some examples, philosopher?

Sometimes no euphemisms were used at all, as a matter of fact. The Höfle memorandum, for instance, tells us nothing other than that about one and a quarter of a million people were taken until the end of 1942 to three rather small places, but this information alone is conclusive enough. If the philosopher has a problem with getting used to the idea that these people were murdered there, despite the absence of any evidence to their having been moved anywhere else or left the place alive and despite the eyewitness, physical and further documentary evidence to the killings, he is welcome to present his theory as to what became of these people, with the respective evidentiary backup.

Do I hope that a new Holocaust in the Middle East, with the Palestinian Arabs as perpetrators, will help me to get rid of the Jews, and in this way make it easier to “forestall” any objections to racism here in Europe, against those who want to share my “fat Swedish pension”?

No. The philosopher sees the Holocaust as an obstacle to the ethnic cleansing of Europe and thus argues against the factuality of it with contentions that can’t be silly enough, such as the one of there still being enough Jews left to kick the poor Palestinians in the butt.

If the graves of Serniki and Ustinovka contain, -- AMONG victims of the Holocaust! -- the victims of a Civil War raging in these parts of Ukraine since 1917(?), and if the Sovjets present at the excavations (see earlier posting, with the whole lecture of Prof Wright supplied by Roberto) had an interest to let these be counted among the victims of the Holocaust, then this fact – if it IS a fact, of course! – will also shed a new light on the Holocaust, like the Gulag makes Auschwitz look different.

If this, if that. Are there any indications that the graves at Serniki and Ustinovka contain victims of other mass killings than those carried out by the Nazis? I haven’t yet seen any. On the contrary, I expect the result of Wright’s archaeological investigations to corroborate and be corroborated by other evidence, namely eyewitness testimonials. But let’ assume that the bullets used on the victims had come from Soviet and not German weapons. What would that tell us? That these particular mass graves hold not victims of one of the countless massacres perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen and other German formations on the territory of the Soviet Union and documented by the killers themselves, but victims of an NKVD execution. Nothing else. How the fact that Stalin also killed his own people makes the Nazi mass murder look any less horrible is beyond me. As it is beyond why on earth the Gulag should make look Auschwitz look any better.

The particulars of Prof Wright’s relations of the excavations make a certain caution concerning the conclusions necessary.

The “grim satisfaction” he felt when the extravagant dimensions of the mass grave indicated that the Germans had “hoped for” many more Jews to slaughter, may have been shared by the Sovjets present at the exhumations – and even planned by them.

(The grave may incidentally have been part of a projekt to drain the marshes in the district by ditches(?))

Can the philosopher offer only “may have been” - speculations born out of his wishful thinking, or can he also offer some evidence to the possibilities he suggests?

The Israelis refused the investigation of the alleged massacre at Jenin presumably because they expected such a “grim satisfaction” on the part of certain opinions.

If so, that would not lead us to the conclusion that the Soviets (didn’t the excavations take place in post-Soviet Ukraine, by the way?) manipulated the physical evidence assessed by Wright so as to cover up a long-ago crime of the Soviet regime, would it?

Stalin probably killed more communists than Hitler ever did – even before WW2. The PLO and king Hussein and the Phalangists of Libanon can have killed more Palestinians than the Israelis – i.e the Civil Wars in these parts of the world between the arabs themselves are probably crueller than the occupation by Israel.

Rather inappropriate parallels. Stalin and Hitler had different categories of victims. Stalin focused on the “kulaks” and his own party comrades, Hitler on Jews, gypsies, mental patients, Soviet prisoners of war or others deemed undesirable on account of their ethnicity and/or their connection with Bolshevism and/or their being considered “useless eaters”. Stalin killed a few million more people than Hitler in cold blood - but then he was also much longer in power.

Now I get it. The philosopher is hinting that the dead found at Serniki/Ustinovka may have fallen victim to their Ukrainian neighbors rather than to German forces. If so, they would be part of the comparatively low number of Jews (ca. 24,000) who at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union fell victim to pogroms in the Western Ukraine that were instigated by the Einsatzgruppen. A trifle compared to the ca. 500,000 people the Einsatzgruppen killed themselves within the first half year of their activity, according to their own reports. But the philosopher has little but hollow suspicions to show for the thesis he hints at, as I see it.

You are right in that last sentence. But these are suspicions that are aroused not least by the historical treatments of this epoch that I have came upon.

By no means, philosopher. You "suspicions" are aroused by your woeful and deliberate ignorance of those “historical treatments” and the urge to engage in propagandistic rambling against inconvenient historical events.

And let me hasten to add that I am ashamed of how little I have read on the subject, compared to many at this Forum!!

When one reads only cherished articles of faith plus what he thinks he can make a fuss about, such ignorance is inevitable.

Has the mass grave at Khmelnitski Proskurov, Ukraine, January 1943(the one shown in the picture) been exhumed by the Sovjets? Or were the corpses excavated and cremated
during the Enterdungsaktion?

I don’t know. Maybe the answers to these questions are in Berenbaum’s book where the photo is shown. Both alternatives are possible, given that there were so many mass graves produced by German mass killing on the territory of the Soviet Union that Blobel’s Kommado 1005 didn’t manage to locate let alone destroy them all.

A correction to my posting above.

[...]

Furthermore, Hilberg is an empiricist that follows documental evidence, and so his discussions in the 80's must reflect the fact that the two decades of research since the first edition of his Magnum Opus, "The Destruction...", had failed to unearth an explicit Hitler order for the Final Solution, and an explicit budget for destruction of the Jews, and so on.

Was that a correction, or was it a change for the worse? Considering in how many steps and with input from how many sides the decision to exterminate Europe’s Jews came about, plus the regional differences in execution related to occupation policies and the freedom of action left to the officials in charge, it is extremely unlikely that there was such a thing as an explicit “Hitler order for the Final Solution”, an “explicit budget for destruction of the Jews” or other such simplistically expected features. It seems that the philosopher hasn’t read the quoted passages from Gerlach’s book after all. Here's my translation of these passages, once again:

Page 131:

[…]The ministry’s directive passed on by Bräutigam did not, on the other hand, mean that all Jews were to be killed immediately; it only indicated a line of principle. This is important for the understanding of Hitler’s initiative in December 1941 as a whole, which was not a concrete instruction to begin with the murder of the Jews immediately and everywhere or to conclude it, but a decision of principle. The practical organization and the speed of extermination were to a great extent left to the competent bodies.[…]

Pages 160 and following:

[…]The principle decision of December 1941 is a central missing link in the decision process for the murder of the European Jews. It out the planning for this crime against humanity on a new basis. It does not relieve anybody, however, for it only had the consequence that the many already existing ideas, suggestions and initiatives for extermination actions on a regional level were supported, legitimized, systematized and got a new impulse.

Characteristically the first extermination camp, Chelmno, had initiated its murder activity four days prior to the Führer’s decision and independently of it. Greiser had for this purpose literally obtained a special authorization from Himmler and Heydrich for the killing of 100 000 Jews. It does not seem very probable that Hitler was involved, given that Greiser, had be had the authorization of Hitler, would not have had to thank Himmler for it. This he did, however.

To make it clear: my exposition does not mean that I want to dismiss the results of the past more than twenty years of research on the bases, especially by the so-called Functionalist school. The extermination of the Jews was by no means based simply on this one decision of Hitler’s or only on his decisions, directives and initiatives as a whole, but we are talking about just one, though an important point within the scope of the process that led to the murder of the European Jews. The analysis of this impulse can contribute to also visualize more accurately the role of Hitler. It is surely difficult to understand that Hitler took a principle decision on the murder of all European Jews after the mass murder in a number of countries had already victimized almost a million Jewish people. It is difficult to comprehend that this decision was not taken all at once, but step by step, region by region. Yet especially the case of Chelmno indicates that this is how it was. The prevailing assumption that the basic decision already occurred between the spring and the autumn of 1941 is based on the belief that before crossing the border to mass murder of the Jews there need to have been something like an authorization by the state leadership. Yet for the National Socialists these extermination decisions were political, not moral decisions. They thus could be limited to certain territories or even groups of people (e.g. those “unfit to work”).

How are the contents and consequences of Hitler’s principle decision to be assessed? First of all, his utterances on 12. December were but a relatively short passage of a long speech, and at this time there were political questions that required the German leadership’s attention far more and seemed more urgent to it than the persecution of the Jews. This passage of the speech was already unequivocal, but by itself not yet concrete. The contents of Hitler’s separate meetings with Himmler, Bouhler, Frank, Rosenberg and others we must assume to have been much more concrete. The issue regarding the occurrences in December 1941 is not whether the actors used a more or less radical language (they also did that at other times), but the verifiable results. The three essential results of the speech on 12 December and the ensuing meetings can be summarized as follows:

1.) new principle guidelines for the murder of the Jews by the government of the General Government and the Eastern Ministry – the administrative entities with power of the greatest number of Jews within the German area of influence,
2.) the intensification of the planning and preparations for the murder of Jews in various areas by poison gas,
3.) by announcing the murder of all European Jews, Hitler had also decided on the fate of the German Jews. This is shown e.g. by Hans Frank’s utterance in Cracow on 16 December 1941 that in regard to the murder of the Jews in the General Government “what is happening in the Reich will at the very least have to happen here as well”. This decision contrasts clearly with Himmler’s telegram to Jeckeln fifteen days before. About the systematic murder of Jews in the German Reich only Hitler could decide, for it was he alone who according to the Nuremberg Laws had the right to exempt Jews and so-called half-breeds from the restrictions of these laws and had in 1941 vehemently pointed out that he was the only one to decide on an eventual worsening of the situation of the half-breeds.

Hitler’s decision was necessary for the authorities involved both in regard to the murder of the German Jews an in order to obtain the basis for a central planning of the genocide. Despite all use of camouflage language the indications in Frank’s speech on 16 December in Cracow and in Heydrich’s address after the writing of the protocol of the Wannsee Conference must be taken serious in this respect, for we can see in them the first drafts of an overall planning of the crime. Such an overall planning for short-term murder had obviously not existed before. For the murderous proceeding against the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories the guideline of December 1941 represented only a small step further. The step was somewhat greater in the General Government, where the pressure by the police and parts of the civilian administration was in the direction of a large-scale extermination was already so great that it would have inevitably led to terrible consequences sooner or later.

This shows that with his possibly strongest intervention in the extermination process Hitler by no means decided or had to decide all, and that his intervention had clear-cut but in a certain sense limited consequences. The findings of research on the crucial responsibility of other instances, especially the authorities in the very areas of occupation, is hereby confirmed.

For the understanding of the decision process towards murder an approach via the term of the utopian seems useful. Of course ideas about the annihilation of the Jews and the respective preparedness had been there for many years prior to 1941, especially on the part of Hitler. Yet there was a difference between ideas, firm intentions to commit genocide and the implementation thereof. The first plans for a “final solution” contained strongly destructive aspects of slow decimation through horrible living conditions and impediment of reproduction, but also utopian aspects characterized by the impossibility of carrying out these seriously pursued solutions in practice. This applies to the plans of 1939/40 for the “pushing away” of the Jews to the Lublin district as well as to Madagascar. The destructive elements became stronger in the plan to deport Jews to the Soviet Union after a military victory over that country. The procedure of annihilation only became imaginable gradually – despite the widespread preparedness for it. The steps from utopian resettlement and extermination programs to actually executable murder programs were decisive for the execution of the mass murder. Thus the plan decided upon at the beginning of 1941 to force about 30 million people in the Soviet Union to starve to death in order to guarantee the feeding of German-dominated Europe turned out to be unfeasible. It was thereupon replaced in the autumn of 1941 by programs for the murder of certain segments of the populations, such as millions of Soviet prisoners of war “unfit to work”. For the intentions directed against the Jews the point-settings in December 1941 constituted a crucial step towards the realization, i.e. the implementation of the plans for genocide.

As little as this monstrous process was normal politics, as much as Hitler produced it – in this respect the decision about the lives of the European Jews were taken almost as in a “normal” political deliberation: the “Führer” did not take the decision all alone, but after a given time, in a given situation and on a given occasion he approved the initiatives from the state and party apparatus. Many insisted on the murder of all European Jews, but before they could begin with it systematically, there was the need in the National Socialist system for a decision taken by Hitler.

Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: the history of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Museum. ISBN O-316-09135-9 (hc). First edition 1993. Page 96.

Caption to photo reads: Mass graves of seven thousand murdered in Khmelnitski Proskurov, Ukraine, January 1943. _Museum of the Polish Army, Warsaw, Poland._

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/places/ft ... -grave.ref