Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

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ljadw
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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#46

Post by ljadw » 28 Feb 2021, 18:16

Sid Guttridge wrote:
28 Feb 2021, 15:39
Hi GLG,


You post

You post, "What you have posted is that "Mein Kampf is an explicitly anti-semitic book

You post,"250,000 copies of the book were in circulation. In the 1932 November election 11,737,395 Germans voted for the Nazi Party." So, Nazi Party ant-Semitism was in plain sight. How many of them do you think were unaware that the Nazi Party was anti-Semitic, and how much would it have mattered if they were aware?



You post, "Why do you think the Nazi Party did not use anti-semitism in their election campaigns when trying to gain power?" Do we know that?

You post, "I highly doubt that someone votes for a party and agrees with every single policy." I agree. But if you fundamentally disagree with one of its basic tenets, one would hope it would give one pause for thought.

You post, "In the case of the Nazi Party, the Nazis never actually gained enough votes to come to power by Hitler being elected. One may argue that Hitler was in the right place at the right time. There's a good case to argue that if Hindenburg hadn't of appointed Hitler as Chancellor then Hitler would have gone down in history as a complete failure and the Nazi Party would have been an absolute mess." Quite possibly. (As a matter of interest, did Hindenburg have any constitutional choice but to first ask the leader of the biggest party in parliament to try to form a government?)

Cheers,

Sid.
A lot of these points are founded on wrong assumptions ,as
1 That people voted for the Nazis after reading Mein Kampf : this is not corrects : most people who voted for the Communists did not read Das Kapital .
2 That people read Mein Kampf after voting for the Nazis :most people who bought Mein Kampf did not read it .
3 That Mein Kampf was openly anti-Jewish : Mein Kampf was a collection of pub talk .
4 That people voted for Hitler because he was anti-Jewish/because they were anti-Jewish .
5 That Hitler's electoral meetings were focused on the Jews : NO : they were focused on the November traitors .Hitler said that the economic depression in Germany was the result of the loss of the war,for which the Weimar leaders were responsible and that he would bring back economic prosperity and would eliminate the Versailles Diktat .
6 That anti-Semitism was limited to the Nazis . It was not so : there was in Germany, as in France, Britain, US,... a strong anti-Semitism and those who joined the SA when Hitler was winning,were already anti-Semites when they were fighting in the Socialist and Communist militias .
7 Last point : the reason why Hindenburg appointed Hitler PM with special powers was not because the NSDAP was the strongest party in the Reichstag,but because NSDAP and KPD had the majority in the Reichstag . Thus : the choice was between Hitler and Thälmann as Reichskanzler,and as Thälmann was excluded ( he would not find any allies in the Reichstag)...it was obvious that Hitler was the only possible choice .
The alternative : a Präsidialkabinet (as were leading Brüning, Papen, Schleicher )was no longer possible as this would evolve in a military dictatorship,for which the army was not ready and unwilling,and civil war .

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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#47

Post by George L Gregory » 28 Feb 2021, 18:26

It is unlikely that anti-Semitism was as powerful in its motivational force for recruits in the Party’s ‘mass phase’ after 1929-30 as it had been for the early activist core of the NSDAP. A striking feature of the Abel material—and more than half of the sample came from members who had joined the Party before its ‘take-off in 1930—is indeed that even among ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement—according to Merkl’s ranking of‘main ideological theme’—only about one-eighth saw antiSemitism as their most salient concern, while what he calls ‘strong ideological antisemites’ comprised only 8.5 per cent of the total sample. Merkl summarized his findings as follows: ‘A breakdown by dominant ideological theme ... shows about one-third to be primarily preoccupied with the solidaristic Volksgemeinschaft and over one-fifth to be superpatriots. Nearly that many are devotees of Hitler’s personal charisma. About one-seventh appears to be motivated mostly by their antisemitism. ... Ranked by the chief object of their hostility, Abel’s early Nazis by two-thirds turned out to be anti-Marxists.’ Merkl pointed out, of course, that these other categories by no means excluded anti-Semitic feelings, which were encountered in around two-thirds of the ‘biographies’ In fact, one could go further and claim that the negative image of the Jew provided a common denominator which was able to combine and provide justification for all these ideological themes.

However, the figures are certainly compelling enough to suggest that features other than anti-Semitism dominated the image of the Nazi Party in the eyes of its pre-1933 membership. If we accept that Hitler was regarded by most if not all as the embodiment of the Party, it would seem that, for most new recruits to the Nazi Movement during the rise to power, his own undoubted extreme antiSemitism formed a secondary rather than primary component of his image and appeal.

In the absence of modern opinion-surveys, the motivation of Nazi voters can only be inferred. But if we extend the above argument, drawn from the motivation of‘Old Fighters’ of the Party to the wider electorate, we would have to conclude that here—probably to an even greater extent—Hitler’s image was not dominated by his obsession with the ‘Jewish Question’. This inference gains some backing from the comparison of the content of Hitler’s speeches—revealing his self¬ profile—in the early 1930s, when the Nazi Movement was making huge electoral gains, with .the early 1920s, when it was a fringe völkisch sect. Examination of election propaganda before the 1930 ‘breakthrough’ poll has indicated that attacks on Jews provided more of a background than a main theme, and it appears that Hitler’s speeches tended not to tackle the ‘Jewish Question’, especially if dealing with an upper middle-class audience. By 1932, when Hitler was running for Reich President and the Nazi Movement was gaining the support of over a third of the population, the ‘Jewish Question’ scarcely featured in Hitler’s public addresses. Jews and the ‘Jewish Question’ were mentioned as such neither in Hitler’s New Year exhortation to his Party at the beginning of 1932, nor in his notorious speech to the Düsseldorfer Industrieklub in January, nor in his ‘Appeal to the Nation’, sold as a record in July and typical of his election addresses in the first half of the year.11 The main target was clearly ‘Marxism’ and the Weimar ‘system’, and the main message that he alone and his Movement offered the hope of salvation from these and from the disaster which they had brought upon Germany. Of course, for Hitler himself—and for some of his oldest and most fanatical supporters—all these ills were reducible solely to the ‘Jewish Question’, a point of dogma which was a fundamental premiss within the Nazi Movement. But the public image of Hitler at this time did not reflect the pre-eminence of the ‘Jewish Question’ in his own thinking. Though his popular image undoubtedly embodied the broad ideological prejudices and aspirations of the masses—including antiSemitism-it appears hard to argue that at the time that Hitler was gaining his widest electoral support the ‘Jewish Question was the decisive element in his growing appeal. The absence of verbal onslaughts against the Jews is also a striking feature of Hitler’s public speeches in the years 1933 and 1934. The ‘Jewish Question’ is not touched upon in a single major public address by Hitler in this period of the ‘seizure’ and consolidation of power—a time, as we saw earlier, in which his popularity was greatly extended and the ‘Führer myth’ massively enhanced. Only the exhortation to ‘all Party organizations’ on 28 March 1933 to carry out a nation-wide boycott aimed at Jewish businesses, goods, doctors, and lawyers, starting on 1 April, concentrated explicitly on the ‘Jewish Question’. Proclamations to the Party after the ‘seizure of power’ generally went out under Hitler’s name. In this case, however, though the style is recognizably Hitlerian (apart from the accompanying specific instructions for implementing the boycott, which seem to have been composed by Goebbels), the ‘appeal’ was signed collectively by ‘the Party Leadership’. No one, of course, could have imagined that the boycott was proceeding without Hitler’s express support. But the wording of the ‘appeal’ couched the action solely in terms of justifiable retaliation for the ‘campaign of agitation’ and ‘lies’ in the foreign press allegedly initiated by Jewish emigrants, and the claim that ‘hardly a hair had been touched’ on Jewish heads in the course of the ‘national revolution’ was meant to suggest that the Party Leadership (including Hitler) was ignorant of the daily maltreatment of Jews which had taken place at the hands of the Party rank-and-file. It was possible, therefore, so far as Hitler was specifically linked to the boycott at all, to see him only in connection with presumed justifiable action, and detached from the ‘unfortunate excesses’ of Party activists. As is well known, the boycott was less than a resounding success in terms of popular reactions, and, as an organized nation-wide affair, was called off after only a single day. The relative lack of resonance of the boycott can only have indicated to Hitler that he had been right to keep a fairly low public profile on the ‘Jewish Question’. Nor did the ‘Jewish Question’ feature in either Sieg des Glaubens or Triumph des Willens, the films of the first two Party rallies after the ‘seizure of power’, in which the Führer cult was so prominently projected of overt reference to the ‘Jewish Question’ in his major speeches, and the omission of his name as a signatory to the boycott ‘appeal’ can only be seen as a deliberate policy to detach the Führer himself in his public image from the violent anti-Jewish rhetoric and actions of which he privately approved. As we have seen, it appears that, despite his own obsessions, Hitler was politically aware from an early date— perhaps as early as 1923—that a wider currency than anti-Semitism was needed to distinguish the NSDAP from the purely sectarian politics of other völkisch groups, to extend the Party’s appeal, and to make a serious bid for power. The closer he came to attaining power, the more, purely for presentational purposes, anti-Semitism had to be subordinated to or subsumed within other components of the Hitler image. And once he had become Head of Government, the need to detach himself in public from the distasteful gutter tactics of his activist anti-Semites was prompted above all by foreign political considerations as well as by the necessity to avoid gratuitous alienation of the conservative German establishment around Hindenburg, whose own ingrained anti-Semitism nevertheless stopped short of arbitrary open violence. Moreover, by 1935, if not before, it was being made abundantly clear that anti-Semitic outrages and terroristic hooliganism aimed at Jews by Party activists were generally un¬ popular among the public at large. Nevertheless, by this time the violence provoked by the new anti-Semitic wave and incited by propaganda had put the ‘Jewish Question’ back in a high place on the agenda, and pressure was mounting from within the Party for antiSemitic legislation to fulfil the aims of the Party programme, and from the public for regulations to put an end to the ‘individual actions’ which had characterized the summer of violence. Hitler could no longer remain aloof from the ‘Jewish Question’.

In his address to the assembled Reichstag at the Nuremberg Party Rally np 15 September 1935, Hitler took up the ‘Jewish Question’ in a major public speech for the first time since becoming Reich Chancellor, recommending acceptance of the three laws placed before it—the ‘Flag law’, and the two notorious anti-Jewish ‘Nuremberg Laws’ (the Reich Citizenship Law, preventing Jews from becoming citizens of the Reich, and the ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’, banning marriage and sexual relations between Jews and ‘Aryans’). As in 1933, he accused the Jews abroad of stirring up agitation and boycotts against Germany, and claimed that this had made an impact on Jews inside Germany itself, whose public provocative behaviour had stirred up countless complaints and calls for action by the government. He justified the ‘legal regulation of the problem’ as the only way of heading off the likelihood of spontaneous ‘defensive actions of the enraged population’, and claimed the German government had been compelled ‘by the idea of being able, through a once and for all secular solution, of perhaps creating a basis on which the German people might possibly be able to find a tolerable relationship with the Jewish people’. If this hope was not fulfilled, and international agitation continued, he threatened, the situation would have to be re-examined. In subsequent speeches the same day, Hitler exhorted the Party and nation to maintain discipline, and not to depart from the path of legality in the matter. He emphasized that the laws opened up to Jews the possibility of their separate existence within Germany in all spheres of life, and renewed the command forbidding all ‘individual actions’ against Jews. The hypocrisy of Hitler’s expressed sentiments needs no emphasis. But in terms of his public image as seen at the time, he had been careful to distance himself from the unpopular anti-Jewish terror of the Nazi mobs and had placed himself on the side of legality. Reactions among Party members varied. Some activists were disappointed at the emphasis on legal measures and discouragement of ‘direct action’ and felt that legislation did not go far enough in tackling the ‘Jewish Question’. Others suspected the truth: that Hitler’s public stance did not represent his real feelings on the issue. A situation report from Hesse in March 1936 expressly mentions the opinion, allegedly widely held among the population in the area, 1 though undoubtedly reflecting above all the views of Party activists, ‘that the Führer had for outward appearances to ban individual actions against the Jews in consideration of foreign policy, but in reality was wholly in agreement that each individual should continue on his own initiative the fight against Jewry in the most rigorous and radical form.'
Ian Kershaw, The `Hitler Myth' Image and Reality in the Third Reich.
Last edited by George L Gregory on 01 Mar 2021, 16:07, edited 2 times in total.


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wm
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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#48

Post by wm » 28 Feb 2021, 18:35

What was going in Russia in 1941 wasn't the Holocaust, the Holocaust began at the end of 1941.

Yes, they claimed that the Nazis were making soap from Jews and it was untrue. There were lots of such, frequently false rumors floating around and the Holocaust was just one of them.

People didn't believe in British propaganda they knew from the ww1 that the British employed massive lies about the war, including that one that the Germans were making soap from their soldiers.

That the people living near death camps knew is irrelevant.
It wasn't that they were going to post it on the Internet. You didn't know what was going in the nearby city, what was going in a God-forgotten village in Poland nobody knew.

It's possible that many Germans knew in 1944 but I would like to see good evidence of it.

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wm
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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#49

Post by wm » 28 Feb 2021, 18:42

ljadw wrote:
28 Feb 2021, 18:16
3 That Mein Kampf was openly anti-Jewish : Mein Kampf was a collection of pub talk .
Of course Mein Kampf is openly anti-Jewish and even more, in the paranoid, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion sense. But there are no gas chambers or executions there.
The Jews were political opponents that had to be defeated.

Sid Guttridge
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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#50

Post by Sid Guttridge » 28 Feb 2021, 20:17

Hi wm,

You post, "What was going in Russia in 1941 wasn't the Holocaust, the Holocaust began at the end of 1941."

The "Holocaust" wasn't the Grouse, Deer or Moose Hunting Season. It didn't have an official opening day.

Cheers,

Sid.

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Sheldrake
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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#51

Post by Sheldrake » 28 Feb 2021, 20:29

wm wrote:
28 Feb 2021, 18:35
What was going in Russia in 1941 wasn't the Holocaust, the Holocaust began at the end of 1941.

Yes, they claimed that the Nazis were making soap from Jews and it was untrue. There were lots of such, frequently false rumors floating around and the Holocaust was just one of them.

People didn't believe in British propaganda they knew from the ww1 that the British employed massive lies about the war, including that one that the Germans were making soap from their soldiers.

That the people living near death camps knew is irrelevant.
It wasn't that they were going to post it on the Internet. You didn't know what was going in the nearby city, what was going in a God-forgotten village in Poland nobody knew.

It's possible that many Germans knew in 1944 but I would like to see good evidence of it.
Read the book and assess the evidence for yourself. When exactly the holocaust started is a matter of debate. Thousands of jews were executed in Russia in 1941 and the direction of travel was evident. Stargardt documents how, even without the internet, information about horrific and traumatic events was passed around.

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wm
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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#52

Post by wm » 28 Feb 2021, 20:49

The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews. The decision to do that was made at the end of 1941.

As late as 1939 the Nazis supported orderly emigration of German Jews in cooperation with Jewish groups.
As late as 1940 Hitler and Himmler fully agreed that the best solution to the "Jewish problem" was emigration.
As late as 1941 the Jews in occupied Poland were able to receive food packages and money from the US and the USSR - and were able to emigrate to Palestine.
In 1941 Jews, Soviet commissars, ordinary Soviets were killed for security reasons.
Since the end of 1941, the Jews were killed because it was the Holocaust.

ljadw
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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#53

Post by ljadw » 28 Feb 2021, 21:58

wm wrote:
28 Feb 2021, 18:42
ljadw wrote:
28 Feb 2021, 18:16
3 That Mein Kampf was openly anti-Jewish : Mein Kampf was a collection of pub talk .
Of course Mein Kampf is openly anti-Jewish and even more, in the paranoid, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion sense. But there are no gas chambers or executions there.
The Jews were political opponents that had to be defeated.
The biggest enemies were the politicians who signed the Diktat of Versailles .

ljadw
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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#54

Post by ljadw » 28 Feb 2021, 22:05

Hitler was an orator, not a writer : MK was the collection of the speeches he had done in pubs . It was not a book where he wrote his program . He did not write in MK that when he became dictator,he would expel all Jews from Germany .Besides: most of his supporters did not read MK.They knew what was in MK. How? By listening to Hitler's speeches .

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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#55

Post by ljadw » 28 Feb 2021, 22:15

Sid Guttridge wrote:
28 Feb 2021, 20:17
Hi wm,

You post, "What was going in Russia in 1941 wasn't the Holocaust, the Holocaust began at the end of 1941."

The "Holocaust" wasn't the Grouse, Deer or Moose Hunting Season. It didn't have an official opening day.

Cheers,

Sid.
The official opening day was the day of the Wannsee Conference (January 20 1942 ) which was scheduled for December 1941, but was delayed .
Till that day the hunt on the Jews was ''limited '' to the USSR : more Jews were at life in the Government General than in the USSR in December 1941 . The extermination camps ,where the West European Jews would be sent,were not build .
It is not so that Auschwitz,etc, were the logical continuation of what happened in the USSR .There was a change, a rupture in December 1941,after the final failure in the East and the DOW on the US.

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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#56

Post by George L Gregory » 28 Feb 2021, 22:46

Sid Guttridge wrote:
28 Feb 2021, 20:17
Hi wm,

You post, "What was going in Russia in 1941 wasn't the Holocaust, the Holocaust began at the end of 1941."

The "Holocaust" wasn't the Grouse, Deer or Moose Hunting Season. It didn't have an official opening day.

Cheers,

Sid.
You’re being disingenuous here.

Most historians agree that Hitler gave the order to exterminate Jews at around the time wm mentioned.

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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#57

Post by George L Gregory » 28 Feb 2021, 22:49

Can someone be a Nazi (National Socialist) and disagree with the Holocaust? Can someone be a National Socialist without necessarily being anti-Semitic?

I would argue ‘yes’ to both. There were Nazis who were against the killing of Jews and other people. Anti-semitism isn’t why people became Nazis.

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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#58

Post by Sid Guttridge » 01 Mar 2021, 15:26

Hi GLG,

No, not disingenuous. Just telling it like it is.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews had been killed before the Wansee Conference by Einsatzgruppen, gas vans, malign neglect, etc.

On what grounds are they to be arbitrarily excluded from being victims of the so-called "Holocaust"?

They were murdered by the same organizations following the same ideology and leadership as those who died later.

The Jews don't exclude them at Yad Vashem.

Virtually all unnatural deaths of Jews in Europe over 1933 to 1945 were part of the continuum of rising horror that we now know as the "Holocaust".

Nobody cut a ribbon and declared the mass murder of Jews officially open.

Cheers,

Sid.

George L Gregory
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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#59

Post by George L Gregory » 01 Mar 2021, 16:06

Sid Guttridge wrote:
01 Mar 2021, 15:26
Hi GLG,

No, not disingenuous. Just telling it like it is.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews had been killed before the Wansee Conference by Einsatzgruppen, gas vans, malign neglect, etc.

On what grounds are they to be arbitrarily excluded from being victims of the so-called "Holocaust"?

They were murdered by the same organizations following the same ideology and leadership as those who died later.

The Jews don't exclude them at Yad Vashem.

Virtually all unnatural deaths of Jews in Europe over 1933 to 1945 were part of the continuum of rising horror that we now know as the "Holocaust".

Nobody cut a ribbon and declared the mass murder of Jews officially open.

Cheers,

Sid.
Back to history 101 again.
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

[...]

Most Holocaust historians define the Holocaust as the genocide of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

But, I get the feeling that you're now trying to start a functionalism–intentionalism debate.

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Re: Nazi vs Neo-Nazi

#60

Post by wm » 01 Mar 2021, 21:53

In 1941, (i.e., during the invasion of the USSR) Jews (and Soviets) were executed for the same reason the Poles were executed during the invasion of Poland - to pacify the resistance by indiscriminate means.
Hitler believed that the Jews were the backbone of communism so from his point of view it was reasonable.

At the end of 1941, Hitler and Himmler decided that all Jews had to be killed. Why, we don't know.

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