HISTORIKERSTREIT Holocaust Supremacism Stifled Recognition of Red Crimes Knowlton

Forever in the Shadow of Hitler, by James Knowlton (ed.) 1993

HISTORIKERSTREIT: German Historians’ Debate Challenged: Holocaust Supremacism, the Ignoring of Non-Jewish Victims, and the Devaluation of Communist Genocides. Long-Term Implications: Double Genocide. Red=Brown. Nazi=Soviet

This volume consists of English-language translations of the papers of German historians that had participated in the HISTORIKERSTREIT of the mid-1980s. My main focus is on how the debate reinforced Holocaust supremacism, effectively making Communist crimes secondary to Nazi German crimes (against Jews that is). This standard narrative is now being enforced on Eastern European and post-Soviet nations, with a near-hysteria voiced about “double genocide”, as in the Baltic states.

THE HISTORIKERSTREIT: SCARE TACTICS DESIGNED TO PROTECT HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM FROM EVEN A GLIMMER OF SCHOLARLY CHALLENGE

Historian Joachim Fest has a perceptive grasp of the situation as he comments, “Several observers have termed the HISTORIKERSTREIT ‘superfluous”. Anyone who examines the substances of the differences of opinion expressed in this debate could easily have come to this conclusion. For no opponent has ever doubted or even contested the crimes committed against the Jews. No one attempted to relativize these crimes or to balance them with the crimes of other peoples. And it took the ever-astonishing excitability of a Rudolf Augstein to invent the formula of the ‘new Auschwitz lie.’ This is, as we now, clearly a form of journalistic dyslexia. Not even Ernst Nolte challenged the singularity of Nazi crimes—although he is being accused of just that. It is also uncontested that these crimes have a singular character for the Germans themselves. These mass murders are an elementary component of the Germans’ past and will continue to be, perhaps for generations, a part of their future.” (p. 264).

Note the standard, exclusive Judeocentric focus. There is not even a cursory mention of the millions of non-Jews murdered by the Third Reich.

NO VALID DICHOTOMY BETWEEN “NAZIS” AND GERMANS

Any notion that the problem rested only with Hitler or a few German leaders quickly evaporates in the face of the following fact: Historian Rudolf Augstein writes, “One knows in the meantime that approximately a million German-speaking people were directly involved with the annihilation of the Jews, and this does not count their relations.” (p. 132).

Note, once again, the standard, exclusive Judeocentric focus. No one even considers how many individual German-speaking people were directly involved in the Polokaust, or in the genocides of other non-Jews. Evidently they do not really matter.

GERMAN REPENTANCE FOR NAZISM WAS FORCED BY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND THEN WAS LARGELY LIMITED TO CRIMES AGAINST JEWS (MOREOVER MEDIATED BY MONEY), AND NOT CRIMES AGAINST POLES AND OTHER NON-JEWS

Historian Christian Meier makes the following revealing statements, “Among the three nations into which Hitler’s Reich was divided, only the citizens of the Federal Republic have troubled themselves to any degree about the mass murder of more than FIVE MILLION JEWS in the Second World War. There are, I assume, three reasons for that: The Federal Republic accepted the legal succession of the Third Reich. The only way the country could again achieve a respected place among nations INCLUDED REPARATIONS and a lot of hard thinking. Finally, the repudiation of everything that Germany did between 1933 and 1945 provided the foundation for the fledgling democracy…IN ESSENCE, THIS HAS TO DO WITH CRIMES COMMITTED AGAINST THE JEWS. Other people, as much as they had to suffer under us, ARE OF SECONDARY IMPORTANCE, compared to what was done to the Jews.” (p. 24; Emphasis added).

So there you have it. The non-Jewish victims of Nazi Germany are of secondary importance. It is no more complicated than that!

THE SHOE EXHIBITS OF THE JEWISH VICTIMS [AS AT THE USHMM]: PLAYING ON EMOTIONS TO PROMOTE HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM

Historian Joachim Fest sagely comments, “We know the horrifying images of piles of bodies, the shoes, eyeglasses, suitcases, and other valuables of the victims that were brought together into greater and smaller mountains. BUT WHAT JUSTIFIES US IN THINKING THAT THAT SORT OF THING DID NOT HAPPEN IN THE MURDER FACTORIES OF THE STALIN PERIOD? We did not see it.” (p. 65; Emphasis added).

[Consider the shoe exhibit, of course only of Jewish victims, located in the USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D. C.) I once computed that 100 million pairs of shoes, which are those of the 100 million non-Jewish victims of 20th century genocides all over the world, would fill FIVE buildings of the same volume as the USHMM!]

SUBTLE ORWELLIAN PROMOTIONS OF HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM AND DEVALUATION OF NON-JEWISH GENOCIDES

The subtitle of this work is “the controversy concerning the singularity of the Holocaust.” I never hear of any “controversy surrounding the singular of the Cambodian genocide”, etc.

Now consider this loaded question repeated by historian Heinrich August Winkler, “Why was it you, you Germans, who committed the GREATEST CRIME of the twentieth century, the mass murder of the Jews?” (p. 171; Emphasis added to the loaded phrase). How instructive that none of the other 100 million victims of 20th century genocide is even considered for the status of “the greatest crime of the twentieth century”!

A number of the historians involved in the HISTORIKERSTREIT (for example Joachim Perels, p. 249) insinuate that discussion of Soviet Communist crimes is a device for Germans to make their crimes “less horrible”. However, and this is not mentioned, it could just as easily be said that the avoidance or belittling of Communist crimes is a device for the crimes of the Zydokomuna (Judeo-Bolshevism) to be less visible and “less horrible.”

Historian Horst Moeller takes historian Jürgen Habermas to task for his doublespeak on Nazi and Soviet genocides. Moeller warns that, “This so-called expulsion [of the kulaks] is in fact not ‘only’ a deportation but, beyond that, a mass murder of a class of persons that the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party had declared to be ‘exploiters and enemies of the people.’ The act was organized by the Party and was handed over to liquidation commandos.” (p. 218).

For his part, historian Jürgen Habermas now acknowledges that, “I accept the criticism that ‘annihilation’, not ‘expulsion,’ of kulaks is the appropriate description of this barbaric event.” (p. 170).

SO THE JEWS WERE MURDERED NOT FOR WHAT THEY DID BUT FOR WHO THEY WERE. BUT SO WERE THE VICTIMS OF COMMUNIST CLASSICIDES

Historian Joachim Fest nicely lays the lumber on the Holocaust supremacists as he writes, “At first it is claimed that the monstrous and unheard-of aspect of the so-called Final Solution is that the perpetrators were not concerned with guilt or innocence. Instead, they made membership in a race the exclusive cause for decisions about life and death. But at the end of 1918, in a speech before the commissars, one of the first heads of the Cheka, the Latvian Martyn Latsis, declared that in the course of the Bolshevik revolution not guilt but membership in a social group would determine punishment and liquidation: ‘We are in the process of exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. You do not have to prove that this or that person acted against the interests of Soviet power. The first thing you have to ask of a prisoner is, ‘What class do you belong to, where do you come from, what education have you had, what is your occupation? These questions are to decide the fate of the accused. That is the quintessence of the Red Terror.’” (pp. 64-65).

Historian Ernst Nolte adds that, “The ‘extermination of the bourgeosie’ and the ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ were, in contrast, proclaimed quite publicly.” (p. 153).

VICTIMHOOD COMPETITION: DO NOT CONFUSE TECHNOLOGY AND SPEED OF MASS MURDER WITH THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MASS MURDER

Historian Joachim Fest points out that the Holocaust was not the only genocide based on a government bureaucracy. So were the Communist genocides and classicides. (p. 65). Stalin generally did not use gas chambers, but his Red bullets left their victims just as dead. (p. 65).
Although the Soviets did not have giant centralized extermination centers like the Nazis, their geographically-scattered concentration camps did the same job, only more slowly. Historian Richard Lowenthal comments, “They [kulaks] were shipped to far-away concentration camps and in general were not killed right away but were forced to suffer conditions that led in the course of time to a miserable death.” (p. 200).

——-

THE CORNERSTONE MYTH USED TO JUSTIFY HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM: AN EMPTY CLAIM

Historian Eberhard Jäckel brushes of all other considerations, and blindly repeats the canned cornerstone talking point as follows, “I, however, claim (and not for the first time) that the National Socialist murder of the Jews was unique because NEVER BEFORE had a nation with the authority of its leader decided and announced that it would kill of AS COMPLETELY AS POSSIBLE a particular group of humans, including old people, women, children, and infants, and actually PUT THIS DECISION INTO PRACTICE, USING ALL THE MEANS OF GOVERNMENT POWER AT ITS DISPOSAL.” (p. 76; Emphasis added to the loaded phrases). Let us look as this closer:

“NEVER BEFORE”

How can Jäckel possibly know which other genocide-mongers in history had tried, but failed, for one reason or another, to exterminate all members of a targeted people?

Now tell the “NEVER BEFORE” to the Armenians and Gypsies, some of whom some likewise insist that they were targeted for eventual complete annihilation.

Finally, who has decreed that an (inferred) total genocide is one iota more significant than “only” a partial genocide?

“AS COMPLETELY AS POSSIBLE”

Compared with what? Germany never invaded Finland or Sweden, for example, to ensure that the Jews living there (including those from Denmark) would be left dead. The Jews of North Africa were almost untouched, despite up to two years of German occupation.

“PUT THIS DECISION INTO PRACTICE”

If so, then not very well. Nearly one-third of all the Jews mentioned in the Wannsee Protocol were still alive at the end of the defeat of the Third Reich. And don’t forget all the Nazi-spared Jews, including the Jewish Honorary Aryans and those Jews released for ransom.

“USING ALL THE MEANS OF GOVERNMENT POWER AT ITS DISPOSAL”

Really? Reread the last section. Besides, how much effort was needed to kill millions of unarmed civilians? And contrary to much Holocaust mythology, the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews did not harm Germany militarily or economically. [See the works of Götz Aly.]

——-

WHY THE NAZIS USED KURT TUCHOLSKY AS A PRIME EXAMPLE OF THE DEGENERATION OF GERMAN SOCIETY CAUSED BY JEWISH INFLUENCE

Historian Ernst Nolte writes, “Thus it is a weakness, not a strength of the established literature that the shameless commentary of the Fascist press about the assassination of Walter Rathenau is often cited, but not Kurt Tucholsky’s far worse comments in 1927 in which, expressing himself vividly, he wished German women and children of the educated classes death by gas.” (p. 152).