I don’t think Gack will ever reflect that what the Irish Catholic former New York politician was in reality speaking about close to 7 million starving Jews. He is really not thinking about the children.
The idea was to generate sympathy for the Jews in Europe leading to funds to support their emigration to Palestine. It all became explicit during WW I as the Heddesheimer book documents.
As established upthread, the number of recorded typhus deaths was very small. You’ll note Gack stopped talking about the meticulous records after this was pointed out. They say The Fuhrer was a terrific dancer, and Gack likes to tap dance, too.
Yes, and once sent there they were kept in camps and worked to death or exterminated. It’s not as if they were settled into new townships.
Theresienstadt was an unusual case and it wasn’t a death camp. It was a concentration camp, and the Nazis used it to try to prove that captured Jews were living in humane conditions. Nonetheless tens of thousands of people died of disease and tens of thousands were later sent to death camps.
Hardly surprising. If one has decided Oprah is a dean of Holocaust studies, it’s unlikely one is going to look at actual data.
Fact is, you’ve not given any of this a single moment of critical thought. Anything that does not fit in with your revisionist, dare I say, anti-semitic views, is summarily ignored. There’s a reason you exclusively quote from fanatic holocaust deniers and ignore generally accepted historic accounts. We’ve all drawn our own conclusions by now. Something tells me we’re not the first or the last to do so.
Now, one more time…
Why did Hitler want jews out of Germany and Europe?
Hitler encouraged Jewish immigration? Immigration? WTF? He wanted more Jews in Germany? After his tirades in Mein Kampf? After his speeches blaming the International Jewish Consipracy for all of Germany’s problems? Not to mention stealing one of his balls! Why would he want more Jews around him?
What?? Oh, you mean emigration.
Never mind.
Why did Hitler want the Jews out of Germany, Gack?
They needed funds? The Jews… They needed funds? OK, so they were poor, then. The Jews were poor. Really, really poor. So terribly poor, in fact, that they couldn’t even afford emigrating to Palestine. And yet, despite their abject poverty, they were, somehow, so extremely powerful and influential that they managed to organize both 1) a thirty-plus-year disinformation campaign planting the idea of “six million Jewish victims” in the heads of the foolish goyim, and 2) a motherfucking world war.*
Is this what you believe?
- Or two world wars, in case you believe they organized WWI as well as WWII. Do you?
I obviously can’t speak for him but since he has implicitly said that evil American Jews manipulated the US into the Iraq War to benefit Israel, that American Jews are untrustworthy Zionists, and seems to believe that Mossad was behind 911, I’d say its because he thinks Jews are evil and attempt to manipulate Gentiles for he interests of the Jewish community.
I would of course he overjoyed if he proved me wrong and have a different explanation.
Obviously us capitalistic-communistic, clannish-cultural-infiltrators defy your puny gentile logic. Us Jews are just that badass. Don’t try to understand. We’re like wavicles, except we rule the world.
And only Hitler had the brilliant insight to understand why the Jews were engaged in a complicated self-contradictory plot that didn’t make any sense.
No, silly. Hitler was a Jewish puppet.
Draw your own conclusions…
I just googled S.S. Doctor Fritz Klein photos, the famous one of Fritz in the mass grave is the most popular shown. Just down the Google search page, we get Gack’s incredible and most informative source of info* on the typhus infestation, how Fritz was only at Belsen camp for “a few weeks” and how Fritz was “tortured and forced to confess, he was sentenced to death and hanged.” It seems like he’s just paraphrasing the retarded captions under the photos given. (Hey, there’s even one photo of the luxurious triple-teird bunk beds!)
Is there a word for people who actually trust a bumbling website with no real background other than paranoid ramblings over thousands of educated historians with evidence that they have personally sought, found and collaborated?
( * = Yes, it’s whale.to / A good laugh if anything. )
I think this might be my first post in Great Debates. Go figure.
First thanks to Gack for not posting one inflammatory post and then disappearing. Debate requires discussion and you’ve provided that. I disagree with your viewpoint but at least you are trying to make an argument. The website with “prothink” in it was good in that I got to hear others that think along your lines explain themselves in their own words. I disagree wholeheartedly with them, but at least it wasn’t filtered through some other person’s viewpoint,
The other point that, I think it was** tomndeb** made, sometimes goes by the boards is that six million isn’t the overriding number of deaths. I realize that the OP is specifically addressing the number of Jewish deaths but don’t forget that was only half the effort. 12 to 17 million people in total were killed by the Nazi regime. There was a seriously large amount of genocide (attempted or successful) that occurred.
If that is the entirety of the situation, then you have no point.
Typhus does not result in emaciation; it kills too quickly (two weeks or fewer) to permit starvation. The emaciated bodies are those of people who starved.
If the starved bodies are not from the extermination camps, then your nonsense about them not being gassed is irrelevant because we are not talking about the same victims.
To Hitler, though, the Jews were more than a convenient scapegoat, they really were the source of most evil in the world.
In a nutshell: The Nazi Party was, among other things, the most successful political movement in history based on a conspiracy theory.
To start with, Hitler did not invent the linkage between radical German nationalism and radical antisemitism; it had been in the air for some time, even in respectable academic circles, when Hitler first started attending NSDAP meetings as a police spy. The waves of nationalism of the 19th Century engendered some extreme variants, including the rather mystical idea that every nation-race has some kind of Volksgeist, a collective race-spirit in which all members participate. Something like Rousseau’s General Will, perhaps. But to participate you had to belong to the “race” in question by blood. The 19th Century also produced scientific racism, which could be refined down to the level of ethnocultural nations as “races” with their own distinctive, essential characteristics.
Put it this way: Nowadays, I think practically everybody will agree that if you switch an Irish baby and an English baby in the cradle, the Irish baby, raised by English parents, will not grow up to be a drunken, brawling, hot-tempered poet (unless getting teased for his red hair drives him to it); nor will the English baby, raised by Irish parents, grow up to be a cold-blooded, stupid, rigidly decent and honest prig.
But in 1920, many people would have assumed exactly that. That’s how important heredity was thought to be, and how unthinkingly accepted both racial/ethnic/national stereotypes and class stereotypes were. Plots going back to ancient times play on the baby-switch theme, often on the assumption that the slave raised as a senator or vice-versa will somehow appear to be out of place. Like in Big Business – Jupiter-Rose and Manhattan-Sadie fit in just fine where they are, but Jupiter-Sadie and Manhattan-Rose are fish out of water.
Getting to the Jews: There had always been a prejudice against them in Christian Europe, which in theory they could escape by converting. In Germany, this was known as Judenhaas (Jew-hate) and had a venerable history. The word “antisemitism” was coined about the same time as a new movement that embraced the label, a movement that regarded Jews as racially evil, by their hereditary nature. In Germany, more or less beginning with Wagner, this new antisemitism synergized with German nationalism in its most chauvinistic form.
It also synergized with a tradition of "It’s all a plot by them!" conspiracy theories in modern Europe going back to Abbe Barruel, who in 1797 published a book blaming the French Revolution on secret societies, including the Illuminati, a short-lived Masonic offshoot. This kind of thing actually got some traction – there was a minor Anti-Masonic Party in the U.S.
Substitute the Jews for the megalomaniacal radical-rationalist intellectuals and you’re good to go. Being, well, outsiders to the religion that in a sense united everybody else in Europe, living in their quasi-autonomous ghetto-enclaves, and preserving this strange Oriental language and culture, Jews had always been the subjects of bizarre conspiracy theories – e.g., that they poisoned wells and caused the plague, or kidnapped Christian babies to drink their blood or use it to make Passover matzohs. Now, ignorant as these theories were, they were at least things people of an oppressed and powerless minority could theoretically do. But in the 19th Century – not long after the Jewish emancipation relieved Jews all over Europe of their old legal disabilities – the new antisemitism started quite insanely attributing all the world’s troubles and wars to Jewish plots.
This dovetailed neatly with traditional European cultural stereotypes about the Jews. Consider the historical position of the Jews in Europe. Most times and most places, they were not allowed to own land, not even allowed to be serfs – a serf could in theory have a subtenant, and to own land was to rule it, and there could never be a situation where a Jew had authority over a Christian. So, unlike most Europeans, Jews couldn’t be farmers. Nor could they be knights or soldiers. Nor, of course, could they pursue a career in the Church. But they were allowed to be merchants, shopkeepers, craftsmen, artisans, physicians . . . and moneylenders, a lucrative field they had nearly all to themselves in a Europe where the Church regarded lending money at any interest at all as “usury” and forbade Christians to do it. Of course, moneylenders are never loved, they have this nasty obsession with being repaid and all, and from the POV of a manual laborer they don’t seem to make anything or do anything and yet they seem to be rich. Jews could also be agents and factors for gentile kings and landlords, and that endeared them to few. (See the tragic fate of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer. And the movie the Nazis made out of it.) People always first blame the parasite they can see. The Russian peasant who complained “Every kopeck I earn goes into the pocket of some damned Jew!” would be overlooking the fact that the Jewish factor who collected his rent had to pass along nearly all of it to a gentile landlord, the Jewish shopkeeper had to buy from a gentile-owned factory, and even moneylenders can often be in danger of bankruptcy. “The American nation makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the Negro’s inferiority by the fact that he is a bootblack.” – George Bernard Shaw. So Christian Europe made shopkeepers and moneylenders of the Jews, and proved them to be a bunch of greedy, bean-counting shysters.
And by Hitler’s time there was also a “Jewish Bolshevik” stereotype to complement the Jewish capitalist. Certainly, in the late 19th Century, a lot of oppressed Jews in the Russian-ruled Pale of Settlement (where the majority of Europe’s Jewish population lived) were very attracted to socialism, a political movement that promised equality for all, Marx himself was an ethnic Jew (raised a Lutheran and by choice an atheist), and many prominent leftist leaders were Jewish. (Of course, there were also many religious and conservative Jews who were against the whole thing, and there was Zionism as a sort of competing ideology.)
And all of this dovetailed neatly with radical German nationalism, as noted above. From The City in Mind, by James Howard Kunstler, chapter on Berlin:
The Jews, of course, were alien, rootless, cosmopolitan, etc. – the “mushroom of humanity,” as Hitler called them, springing up everywhere overnight with no deep roots in the soil. They were not German, not even European, in origin, and no matter how long they lived in one place in Europe they could never truly belong there, never be part of the race-community.
So. The Nazis took all negative stereotypes about greedy Jews and combined them with racial antisemitism and conspiracy-theorizing and radical German nationalism and cranked it all to eleven: Jews are by their heredity nature prone to be parasites, to invade and leech off of every gentile nation they find themselves in, to make themselves rich and powerful – mainly by pulling strings from behind the scenes, somehow. And they are, by their nature, very good at all that, very clever and cunning and duplicitous and persuasive. Jews are responsible for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution – for Communism and for capitalism (“National Socialism” being in theory opposed to both, but that’s another discussion.) But they are not by their nature creative of anything, that depends on their host nations. The “Aryan” race, OTOH, is a culture-builder.
Now, you must understand, Hitler believed all this. His world-view was built around it. There might have been some Nazis who took a more cynical attitude, regarding antisemitism as merely a useful tool for unifying the people; but none would have dared say so in public.
And that dovetailed neatly with Hitler’s principal war-aim, which was to destroy the nations of Poland and Russia. Not merely to destroy Communism. Not merely to conquer Poland and Russia and exploit them like a colony in Africa. But to destroy them utterly as nations, and colonize them with Germans, and build a Greater Germany on their bones, and make Germany a continental power like the U.S. and a world-power like Britain. In the process killing all the Jews there and reducing the surviving Slavs to slavery or, at best, a sort of second-class noncitizenship.
A good source here is Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, by Paul Johnson, Chapter 10, “The End of Old Europe”:
Same book, Chapter 11, “The Watershed Year”:
Pride goeth. And its fall can destroy much besides.
Which, from the perspective of a 1906 article, would pretty much correspond to legitimate fears of the Jewish people following the most recent (to that date) pogroms, extending from 1903 through 1906.
Amazing! After three years of (Russian) government supported pogroms, Jews in Russia feared that they were all to be killed.
This argument is nearly as dumb as the claim that a film that showed the “wrong” atrocity was useful in proving that no atrocity occurred.
Don’t hold your breath, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gack sought to disprove that the pogroms in Russia took place.
Of course. That was just a fictional back story invented by the producers of* Fiddler on the Roof.*
Utter nonsense.
Germany assessed an exorbitant “flight tax” that few people could afford, to begin with, and that even fewer could afford after the laws proscribing the hiring of Jews or by Jews put so many Jews out of work and Jewish companies out of business. They also imposed restrictions on what sort of property, even personal property, a Jew could take with himself or herself, meaning anyone who emigrated would face certain poverty in whatever land their destination might have been.
The notion that Hitler “encouraged Jewish immigration[sic]” is starkly false and if you got that from your usual sources, it is a clear indication that those sources lie.
Unless “encouraged” means “alternately compelled and forbade.” In the words of the Nazis themselves (Wannsee Conference, again):