Polish Death Camp Lie Why Camps in Poland DEFINITIVE WORK Khiterer

The Holocaust: Memories and History, by Victoria Khiterer et al. (eds.) 2014

Bombshell: The “Polish Death Camp” Fib–a Serious Matter–Incisively Examined and Soundly Refuted in All Its Manifestations

Of all the essays in this anthology, one is eye-opening, and deep in scholarship. I focus on it:

(REAL OR IMAGINED) PRE-WWII POLISH ANTISEMITISM HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE NAZI GERMAN SITING OF THE DEATH CAMPS

Author Peter Black, a senior historian at the USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), makes the issue very clear, “This still begs the question, however: why did the Germans build stationary gassing centers? And why did they build them in German-occupied Poland? The answer is not that they expected killing centers for Jews to be more acceptable in a land known for its interwar political anti-Semitism, A NOTION THAT CONTINUES TO SURVIVE IN THE POPULAR IMAGINATION. The answer involves demographics, logistics, strategy, and situational context.” (p. 12; Emphasis added).

So there are the facts, loud and clear. Hear that, mainstream media? In addition, scholar Peter Black’s statement about the “notion that continues to survive in the popular imagination” serves as a rebuttal to the LEWAKS (Polish leftists) who would have us think that “Polish death camps” is much ado about nothing because, after all, “no one believes any of that”. The general public most certainly does—to one degree or another.

POLES WERE NOT GLAD THAT THE GERMANS WERE EXTERMINATING THE JEWS. IF ANYTHING, THE OPPOSITE!

The media canard about “Polish death camps” is not an end in itself. It exists to create negative overall impressions of Poles, one way or another. It also serves as a “bait”, or provocation, for further insinuations. For instance, we commonly hear a variant of this Polonophobic meme, “OK, OK, so the death camps weren’t Polish. But Poles were grateful to Hitler for doing the dirty work for them.”

Holocaust historian Peter Black totally upends this narrative. The Germans feared that, far from approving the genocidal murders of the Jews, Poles could actually become more inclined to help the Jews in the event of large-scale overt mass killings of Jews! (That is, if the Germans were generally to employ semi-public mass shootings, as done in the German-occupied western Soviet Union, instead of hidden-away death camps). Thus, he writes, “Nearly half of the Jewish civilians, who were to die in the Holocaust, lived in the region; the incremental movement of Jews from larger communities in numerous transports to killings centers in rural areas served to reduce German fears both that the Jews would successfully organize resistance and that non-Jewish Poles would become sufficiently uneasy to increase parallel resistance efforts or, WORSE STILL, TO COME TO THE AID OF POLISH JEWS.” (p. 13. Emphasis added).

The foregoing game-changing fact should be expanded to other considerations that involve the gratuitous accusations of Poles. Consider the meme of “complicity in the Holocaust”. Now, if a rural Pole denounced a fugitive Jew, as for known or suspected banditry, how much did the Polish villager even “know” (beyond the level of unverified rumor) that the Germans (Nazis) were in the process of exterminating all of Poland’s Jews, much less that he would one day be told that he was “complicit in the Holocaust”?

MULTI-LAYERED TRANSPORTATION LOGISTICS BEHIND THE NAZI GERMAN CHOICE OF DEATH CAMPS OR LOCAL MASS SHOOTINGS

As noted earlier (p. 13), nearly half of all the Jews, targeted for extermination in Nazi-German occupied Europe, lived in Poland, making it the most logical place to establish death camps. But that is not the whole story. Jews in Poland, unlike in Ukraine, for example, lived in massive urban concentrations that were close to railroads. Peter Black explains the significance of this fact, with reference to German-occupied Poland, “Put simply: wherever the Jewish population was dense and numerous (as in Gau Wartheland, the Government General, and the Bialystok District), the Germans constructed stationary killing centers and, if rolling stock were available, transported Jews to these facilities to kill them. Where rolling stock was not available or where the location of the Jewish community precluded easy access to a rail line, German SS and police, supported auxiliaries, shot entire Jewish communities where they lived or where their residents had been concentrated.” (p. 13).

MASS SHOOTINGS AND MASS GASSINGS COEXISTED, AND EACH TOOK AN OVERALL SUBEQUAL TOLL OF JEWS

Historian Peter Black rejects the common Holocaust myth which states that the Germans switched, from mass shootings to mass gassings, because mass shootings of civilians were causing psychological problems for “good” Germans. In actuality, there was no “switch” at all. Mass shootings of Jews (the Holocaust By Bullets) freely coexisted with mass gassings of Jews after the latter came into widespread use. In fact, of the 6 million Jews that perished in the German-made Shoah, 2.4 million were murdered by shooting (including at least 1.3 million Jews in the German-occupied USSR in her pre-1939 borders), against only relatively few more (perhaps 2.55 million) in the gas chambers of the stationary killing centers, to which must be added about 800,000 Jews who died in the ghettos and concentration camps. (p. 16).

The “Holocaust By Bullets” coexisted with mass-gassing of Jews even in German-occupied Poland. Peter Black (p. 12) estimates that as many as 200,000 Polish Jews were murdered in mass shootings, even as most Polish Jews were perishing in the Operation Reinhard death camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka).

THE GERMANS DID NOT LOSE WWII BECAUSE OF THE HOLOCAUST!

Part of the mystification of the Holocaust, and its elevation over the genocides of all other peoples (Holocaust supremacism), is the one that all genocides were rational and of benefit to the perpetrators, except for the Jews’ Holocaust, in which the Germans only harmed themselves conducting it. Not so!

Scholar Peter Black writes, “Another misleading notion has the Germans losing World War II because they devoted critical resources at crucial times to their war against defenseless Jewish communities. In fact, the Germans generally did not deploy human, material, or transport resources suitable for or needed at the front for implementing ‘final solution’ operations…The devotion of resources to the Final Solution was not the reason that Nazi Germany lost World War II.” (pp. 36-37).

NOT TRUE THAT GERMANS PRIORITIZED KILLING JEWS OVER WINNING BATTLES

Nor is it true that, forced to make the choice, the Germans would rather lose on the front than pass up the opportunity to kill more Jews. Just the opposite. Black quips, “Whenever disaster threatened on the Eastern Front and rolling stock was needed desperately to supply German troops, the German authorities halted most and sometimes all deportations of Jews from Central and Western Europe to the East.” (p. 37).

“GOLD-DIGGING” AT THE FORMER SITE OF TREBLINKA: SOVIETS DID IT FIRST

Neo-Stalinist Jan T. Gross, especially in his GOLDEN HARVEST, and supported by adulatory media coverage, has called attention to Poles sifting through the cremains for valuables of the Jewish victims. This, as intended, made the Poles out to be some kind of villains.

In actuality, grave robbery knows no nationality in terms of either looter or looted. It is as old as human history itself! Moreover, it is not limited to wartime or to episodes of desperate poverty.

Author Tomas Vojta, relying on Polish and Israeli archives, confirms the involvement of the Red Army in the initial blasting of holes at the Treblinka site in order to expose any valuables to looters. (pp. 55-56).

ACTIVE HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM IN ACTION: BELITTLING THE CAMBODIAN GENOCIDE

Most of the time, Holocaust supremacism functions passively. That is, the Jews’ Holocaust gets so much attention, in the West, that all other genocides are reduced to sideshows, if even that. At other times, however, Holocaust supremacism is overt. That is, non-Jewish genocides are actively delegitimized in order to make the Jews’ Holocaust “bigger”.

Author Dan MacMillan engages in this in relation to the Cambodian Holocaust. He writes, “The famine which directly or indirectly carried off most of the Cambodian victims resulted from economic dislocation and a shortfall in rice imports, as opposed to the Germans’ deliberate policy of murder by malnutrition. Although urban dwellers of peasants living outside zones previously controlled by the Khmer Rouge were clearly disfavored in the Cambodian genocide (Kierman [THE POL POT REGIME] estimates that 33% of them perished, versus 15% of the ‘old people’ from KR-controlled rural areas), they were not condemned to death at the outset, whereas every Jew, without exception, would inevitably be murdered, and both victims and killers understood this awful truth.” (pp. 328-329.) [The latter is dubious. Many Jews were in denial about their collective extermination until the end. As for Germans, who knew what and when?]

Considering all the complaints about victimhood competition, note that it is MacMillan that is engaging in victim competition. He has turned genocide into a competitive event (win-lose situation), pitting the Cambodians against the Jews. He has set up arbitrary (and rather dubious) criteria which the Jews’ Holocaust would win and the Cambodian Holocaust would lose.

The informed reader realizes that the very same arguments are used to delegitimize the Ukrainian Holocaust [the Holodomor, or Great Famine]. Thus, we are assured that the catastrophic food shortage was variously unintentional, not aimed at the Ukrainians as a people, and that—in any case—Stalin sought the deaths of “only” some Ukrainians, not all Ukrainians.

Let us examine MacMillan’s criteria. The Nazis said lots of things, and Jews believed a lot of things, but Hitler neither intended nor achieved the killing of all Jews. And, even if he did, who says that a partial genocide [Cambodian Holocaust or Holodomor] is one iota more worthy of recognition than a total genocide [the Jews’ Holocaust]?

Now consider genocide by starvation. The sophistry about “unintentional” versus intentional starvation policies, among other things, overlooks the practical equivalence of murder by oblique intent and murder by direct intent. [Thus, for example, an arsonist who torches a building “only” to collect the insurance, and the arsonist who torches a building in order to kill someone inside, can both be found guilty of murder if in fact someone dies in the fire that was set.]