Jewish Collaboration Double Standards Bazyler

Jewish Collaboration With the Nazis. Double Standards

I offer a more analytic perspective of this book.

JEWISH COLLABORATION WITH THE NAZIS: AN EXCULPATORY APPROACH

The most disappointing chapter in this book is the one on the Kapo Trials in Israel. The authors treat the Holocaust as a self-evidently unique event, making Jews out to be under a different standard from everybody else. Following this dubious reasoning, they summarily reject any criminal wrongdoing on the part of Jews who served the Nazis as Kapos. (pp. 215-217; See especially p. 224). In doing so, they ignore evidence that the Jews—just as members of other incarcerated nationalities–DID have real choices. Jews were not forced to become kapos. Jews serving the Nazis were not generally forced to be brutal to their underlings, and, as was the case with non-Jews in the camps, were free to reject the rewards offered by the Nazis in exchange for collaboration against other inmates. For more on this, please click on, and read my detailed review, of A Narrow Bridge to Life: Jewish Slave Labor and Survival in the Gross-Rosen Camp System, 1940-1945. (My review was posted August 9, 2011).

Now let us consider the only Jewish kapo trial in the USA—that of Jacob Tannenbaum in the late 1980’s. In a plea deal, Tannenbaum was stripped of his U. S. citizenship, but was allowed to live out the rest of his life, in the USA, as a free man. Tannenbaum’s defense attorney, Elihu Massel, explained this as follows, “‘It [would] avoid a truly ghastly trial in which Jews would have had to testify against Jews, none of whom really want to remember.’” (p. 201).

The double standard is palpable! Only Jews are exempt from testifying against other Jews. The sensibilities of non-Jews, who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, are entitled to no such deference, and they are forced to re-live their horrible experiences whenever they are called upon to testify in court.

Now let us remember the feeding frenzy of the media and academia, regarding presumed Polish guilt for Jedwabne, and in support of neo-Stalinist Jan T. Gross. “Polish guilt” is largely based on the 1949 trials at Lomza, in which Poles had to testify against other Poles. Moreover, Poles had to testify against other Poles under imminent threat of torture, under the jeopardy of being convicted themselves, and in an atmosphere of rampant Communist terror (including Jewish Communist terror), during which tens of thousands of Poles were being murdered, and many more imprisoned. Where is justice?

WERE JEWS CONSISTENTLY TREATED WORSE THAN EVERYBODY ELSE?

The Judeocentric bias of the authors is evident in other ways. They selectively cite facts that support the premise that Jewish inmates were treated more harshly than gentiles, as at Dachau (pp. 76-77), and in Nazi concentration camps generally. (p. 195). However, the reader should be aware of other testimonies that contradict this premise. I urge the reader to click on the following, and read my detailed reviews. (I provide the date of my review, to make it easier to find):

At the Nazi German concentration camps at Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau, Jews were not treated worse than Poles, at least not consistently: Shavelings in Death Camps: A Polish Priest’s Memoir of Imprisonment by the Nazis, 1939-1945. (February 21, 2014).

Jews at Mauthausen were treated noticeably better than Poles, at least in 1945: Poles Apart: The Tragic Fate of Poles During World War II. (July 18, 2014).

Jews at Buchenwald were not treated as harshly as the Poles: The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. (November 19, 2009).

The last eyewitness testimony is particularly instructive, as the author had no natural sympathy towards Poles or Roman Catholics. He was a German and a radical leftist.

A LITTLE BIT OF RECOGNITION OF THE GENOCIDAL SUFFERINGS OF NON-JEWS

Authors Michael J. Bazyler and Frank M. Tuerkheimer briefly depart from the customary Judeocentric approach to Nazi war crimes. They introduce Poland’s “Nuremberg”, the trial of Amon Goth (Goeth), as follows, (quote) Next to the Soviet Union, no country suffered as much as Poland from German occupation. Poland was in fact more ravaged than the USSR. While the latter’s large territory, spanning eleven time zones, was only partially occupied, all of Poland eventually came under the yoke of Nazi rule. Between 18 and 20 percent of the prewar Polish population perished during the six years of occupation from 1939 to 1945, making Poland the country that suffered proportionately the largest loss of any belligerent during the Second World War. Polish infrastructure was devastated as well. (unquote). (p. 101).

As for other Slavic peoples, Bazyler and Tuerkheimer introduce the Kharkov Trial of 1943 as follows, (quote) In the brutal history of humanity, no other tragedy compares to the scale of death and destruction brought by Germany in the years between 1941 and 1945 to the territories of present-day Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. During the forty-seven months of what is known in the region as the Great Patriotic War, approximately 30 million Soviet civilians and soldiers lost their lives. Twenty million of these were civilians. Over sixty years later, more than 2.4 million are still officially considered missing in action, while 6 million of the 9.5 million buried in mass graves remain unidentified. (unquote). (p. 15).