Martin M. van Brauman
A boor cannot know, nor can a fool understand this: When the wicked bloom like grass and all the doers of iniquity blossom, it is to destroy them till eternity. But You remain exalted forever, Lord. For behold Your enemies, O Lord, for behold, Your enemies shall perish; dispersed shall be all doers of iniquity. Psalms 92: 7-10.
Theological and cultural anti-Semitism roared into the 20th century with a vengeance in governmental laws with political anti-Semitic agendas for the achievement of certain political ambitions. Political anti-Semitism was on a world scale that was going to change the course of history comparable only for the Jews to the destruction of the Second Temple and Jerusalem by Titus in 70 C.E.
From 1933 to 1948, Amalek returned as the Fűhrer and Haman returned as the anti-Semitic British Colonial Secretary and they bloomed and blossomed until the point in time for the rebirth of Israel.[1] The period of the Holocaust begins with the rise of the Nazi Reich with Hitler appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933 to the dissolution in 1948 of the Displaced Persons (“D.P.”) Camps in Central Europe, with the survivors emigrating either to Israel or to the West.[2] On August 2, 1934, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, president of Germany, died and under Hitler’s Enabling Act governmental powers were vested in Hitler as both the chancellor and Reich president.
The Holocaust under Nazi ideology had two central fundamentals: the planned, total annihilation of the entire Jewish race and a quasi-apocalyptic, religious component whereby the death of the victim becomes an integral ingredient in the drama of Nazi salvation.[3] Yet out of the ashes, the surviving European Jews, especially those in the D.P. camps, played a critical part in the forces that enabled Palestinian Jews to fight for independence in 1948.[4]
During the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, the overwhelming majority of the Evangelical clergy remained monarchists and denounced from the pulpit parliamentary sovereignty, Western liberalism and democratic socialism as un-German, anti-Christian and Jewish.[5] Only a minority of Protestant clerics stood against Nazi political anti-Semitism, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller and Martin Dibelius, who all came from the Calvinist school of the German Protestant church.[6]
Hitler had the anti-Semitic teachings of Luther and the support from the long European experience of theological and cultural anti-Semitism. Since the world did not want the Jews, then logically the “Final Solution” (die Endlősung) must be extermination following Luther’s diatribes against the Jews. National Socialism, as a pseudo-religious ideology, owed its image of the Jew to Christian anti-Semitism with Nazi racial biology the driving force behind the Final Solution.[7] The Final Solution for National Socialism was part of an apocalyptic and salvation ideology that envisioned the attainment of Heaven by bringing Hell on earth, the last destruction before salvation.[8]
In 1939, Dr. Hermann Rauschning wrote in Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims “that Hitler and his movement are the apocalyptic riders of world annihilation,” when earlier Hitler had exclaimed to his inner circle at Wachenfeld House in Obersalzberg during 1933 that when war comes “[w]e shall not capitulate – no, never . . . We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us – a world in flames.” [9] During the meeting, Hitler hummed the central recurring theme in Götterdämmerung,[10] the twilight of the gods – the conclusion of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, when in the final Act III of the Ring cycle the castle Valhalla and the assembled gods are totally consumed by fire. As Hitler proclaimed on many occasions to understand National Socialism, one must understand Wagner.
Earlier in 1933, Hitler related to his inner circle at the Brown House in Munich his personal views on religion and the future destruction of the German churches:
But for our people it is decisive whether they acknowledge the Jewish Christ-creed with its effeminate pity-ethics, or a strong, heroic belief in God in Nature, God in our own people, in our destiny, in our blood . . . One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both.[11]
. . .
Do you think these liberal priests, who have no longer a belief, only an office, will refuse to preach our God in their churches? I can guarantee that, just as they have made Haeckel and Darwin, Goethe and Stefan George the prophets of their Christianity, so they will replace the cross with our swastika.[12]
Hitler allowed the “Aryan of Jesus” nonsense of Chamberlain and other “professors” to explore Nordic religion movements to create unrest and help disintegrate the Christian church.[13] Hitler privately had less use for Christianity than Alfred Rosenberg and repeatedly stated in 1933 that “One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both . . . We need free men who feel and know God in themselves.”[14] Hitler’s objective was to rise up an Aryan paganism that was superficially Christian, but supported a racist canon with the mission to “dejudaize” Christianity.[15] Hitler was quoted saying that “Conscience is a Jewish invention. It must be done away with.”[16] The Catholics and Protestants wanted a re-Christianization of Germany society and they believed that the Nazi regime responded to that hope of religious reinvigoration with its attack against the communist who were atheists.[17]
Germany was on the way by the end of the 1930s of becoming a racist and vicious anti-Semitic society and the Nazi regime was racing ahead on this path with growing popular support.[18] Under the redemptive mythology of National Socialism, Hitler used the Jew as the embodiment of Satan, who had to be removed from German society and the world for the cleansing of the individual and society and for the spiritual, moral and physical redemption of Aryans to gain control of themselves and dominance over all subhuman races.[19] The religious leader Karl Barth said at the time that “It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam.”[20]
By combining messianic hopes and expectations to historic Christian anti-Semitic ideas and social Darwinist perversions of natural science, National Socialism created a powerful appeal and force in its struggle for the souls of the German elites and of the general population that traditionally had held restrained anti-Semitic beliefs.[21] Out of social Darwinism emerged the theory that most personal and social problems were inherited from bad genes and an eugenics movement evolved by the 1920s in Germany, England and the United States, promoting active intervention to ensure that only superior people survived to create a perfect society.[22]
Behind the purpose of Ellis Island in the United States to screen undesirables was Darwin’s theory of evolution and primitive genetic theory, in which poverty, disease and illiteracy was hereditary traits passed to future generations thereby weakening the nation’s gene pool.[23] After World War I, the growing popularity of eugenics contributed to the establishment of the quotas and immigration restrictions favoring Northern Europeans.[24] Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, a eugenics consultant hired by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, asserted that certain races were inferior and eugenics movement author Madison Grant wrote that Jews, Italians and others were inferior because of alleged differences in skull size.[25]
The new immigration laws, setting quotas by nationality and country basis, went into effect on July 1, 1921, limited immigration to a total of 355,000 quota immigrants per year (immigrant children and wives of American citizen were not counted) and restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe.[26] The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 established quotas by country of origin with the intent to exclude as many Jewish, Slavic and Italian immigrants as possible.[27]
In 1941 prior to America’s entry into the war, opinion polls indicated that 75 to 85 percent of Americans opposed opening up immigration quotas to help Jewish refugees.[28] President Roosevelt did nothing to change the policy even when the extermination of the Jews were fully known, except passing the issue to the State Department known to have a policy of avoidance and obstruction with regards to any Jewish rescue.[29]
For the period of 1933 to 1945, only 36 percent of the quota for immigration from Germany under the National Origins Law of 1924 was actually used because American consulates reported to Washington that anti-Jewish persecutions by the Nazis were greatly exaggerated.[30] Representative Martin Dies, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee stated that “we must ignore the tears of the sobbing sentimentalists . . . and permanently close, lock and bar the gates of our country to new immigration waves and then throw the keys away.”[31] In 1939, Senator Robert Wagner attempted to pass a law to allow 20,000 Jewish children from Germany to be admitted to the United States, but the bill was easily defeated by a coalition of anti-Jewish groups, the Catholic welfare conference and conservative women’s organizations, arguing that there was no emergency to justify the immigration.[32]
The Germans took the racial hygiene science further than other nations by its extreme anti-Semitic element.[33] Professor Ludwig Woltmann, editor of a Nordic racial supremacy journal, believed “the Germanic race has been selected to dominate the earth.”[34] In 1895, German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz founded the Society for Racial Hygiene and promoted the purifying of the Aryan race by selection.[35]
Eugenics was the doctrinal basis for the initial forced sterilizations and killings by the Nazis of homosexuals, the elderly, the disabled and the chronically sick.[36] Conservative party leader Ernst Haeckel insisted on death for “incurables” and the mentally ill and believed that Jews carried hereditary diseases of blood and brain.[37] Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel scientist praised among Nazi circles, shared Oswald Spengler’s belief in the popular The Decline of the West (1920) that racial purity can prevent cultural declines and proposed a biological racial hygienic solution of a deliberate, scientifically founded race policy in the elimination of degenerate races.[38]
The roots of Nazism was drawn from the occultism that spawned the Thule Society, the Germanenorden, the Völkisch movement, Pan-Germanism and other nationalist cults that believed in the Aryan god-men.[39] William Shirer in 1940 commented in his Berlin Diary that the Nazi regime awoke the “primitive, tribal instinct of the early German pagans . . . to whom brute strength was not only the means but the end of life . . . [and] . . . [i]t is this primitive racial instinct of ‘blood and soil’ which the Nazis have reawakened in the German soul . . . and which has shown that the influence of Christianity and western civilization on German life and culture was only a thin veneer.”[40]
During his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann declared himself to be and all of his life a Gottgläubiger, a Nazi term for “those who had broken with Christianity and ascribed to ‘a higher Bearer of Meaning,’ an entity somehow identical with the ‘movement of the universe,’ to which human life, in itself devoid of ‘higher meaning,’ is subject.”[41] The Nazis used the designation of Gottgläubig, “god-believing,” to correspond to the characteristic piety of the German and people of similar blood, which excluded Christian church members and Jews.[42]
Nazi anti-Semitism adopted “Christian” anti-Semitism while rejecting fundamental Christian theology, which it saw as a Jewish invention.[43] The Nazi accusations against the Jews were that there was a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world; that Jewish influence is satanic and Jews are out to corrupt the civilizations of their host peoples and countries; that the Jews are parasites and bloodsuckers; that they kidnap and kill Christian children and so on.[44]
In 1934, Hitler discussed the full impact of the coming National Socialist revolution:
Our revolution is not merely a political and social revolution; we are at the outset of a tremendous revolution in moral ideas and in men’s spiritual orientation. Our movement has at last brought the Middle Ages, medieval times, to a close. We are bringing to a close a straying of humanity. Of truth and conscience: The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, like circumcision. A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence. There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense.[45]
The war against the Jews, bellum judaicum, and the Final Solution primarily took shape in Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1924.[46] Eventually, a pocket-sized edition of Mein Kampf was published for the German troops at the front and total sales of Hitler’s bible reached 5,950,000 copies during the war.[47] Hitler outlined his goal of achieving Aryan racial superiority in Mein Kampf:
A state which in an age of racial pollution devotes itself to cultivation of its best racial elements must someday become master of the earth . . . We all sense that in a far future mankind may face problems which can be surmounted only by a supreme Master Race supported by the means and resources of the entire globe.[48]
Hitler’s ideas in Mein Kampf combined three concepts that became the underpinning for the Final Solution and the Holocaust.[49] First, he turned political anti-Semitism into a racial doctrine whose purpose was the destruction of the Jews and, second having defined Bolshevism as a Jewish conspiracy for world domination; he transformed anti-Bolshevism into a holy crusade to liberate Russia and the Eastern territories from their Jewish masters.[50] Finally, using race as a rationale, he transformed the imperialist drive for world power into a concept of Lebenstraum for a perfectly homogeneous German race, extending into Eastern Europe.[51]
Hitler’s salvation history in Mein Kamp was based upon the myth of the Aryan race and its rise in history through the great cultures of the past and their destruction by intermarriage with inferior races.[52] Salvation meant the restoration of a great culture through biological regeneration, resulting in a new age of the master race.[53] Hitler stated that “[b]y defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”[54] The Nazi redemptive ideology of anti-Semitism radically transcended the traditional Christian anti-Semitism of the past by its exterminatory march to the Holocaust.[55]
Hitler was obsessed with the concept of the “chosen people” and its imagined power and, since there could not be two chosen people, Hitler’s messianic salvation necessitated the elimination of the people who had personified chosenness for over three thousand years.[56] Hitler held “an almost metaphysical antagonism to the Jew,” an actual war of the gods’ type of anti-Semitism:
Israel, the historic people of the spiritual God, cannot but be the irreconcilable enemy of the new, the German, Chosen People. One god excludes the other.[57]
Hitler saw “the whole hated doctrine of Christianity, with its faith in redemption, its moral code, its conscience, its conception of original sin, [as] the outcome of Judaism.”[58] Hitler perceived himself as a “Germanic warrior ‘Christ’” and “the chosen redeemer of a secular Salvationist religion,” a new political religion called National Socialism.[59] Hitler’s vision of an anti-Jewish Jesus, a Siegfried, developed out of the Austrian Catholicism of his childhood.[60] During the establishment of the religious foundations of Nazidom of the 1930s, required reading and memorizing was Friedrich Wolfgang Lindenberg’s ridiculous biography of Hitler, Hail Our Führer, which “attributes to this maniacal Austrian qualities heretofore possessed only by the Man of Galilee.”[61]
Anti-Semitism was an essential component of National Socialist ideology,[62] a political religion which was based upon a pseudo-science of a myth of a pure race and racial superiority.[63] On theological grounds, National Socialism may be explained as man’s natural hatred of God’s chosen people as the witnesses to the God, who exercises grace in judgment.[64] Anti-Semitism is the sign of man’s enmity to the grace of God.[65] Hitler and his legions, like Haman, was driven “. . . to destroy, to slay and to exterminate all Jews, from young to old, children and women . . . and to plunder their possessions.” Esther 3:13.
Chaim Kaplan wrote from the Warsaw Ghetto in his diary of 10 March 1940 that Nazi anti-Semitic hatred was deeper than political ideology.[66]
It is a hatred of emotion, whose source is some psychopathic disease. In its outward manifestation it appears as physiological hatred, which sees the object of its hatred as tainted in body, as lepers who have no place in society . . . But the founders of Nazism and the party leaders created a theoretical ideology with deeper foundations. They have a complete doctrine which represents the Jewish spirit inside out. Judaism and Nazism are two attitudes to the world that are incompatible, and for this reason they cannot co-exist side by side. For 2,000 years Judaism has left its imprint, culturally and spiritually, on the nations of the world. It stood fast, blocking the spread of German paganism . . . Two kings cannot wear one crown. Either humanity would be Judaic or it would be pagan-German. Up until now it was Judaic. Even Catholicism is a child of Judaism, and the fruit of its spirit . . . The new world which Nazism would fashion, would be pagan, primordial, in all its attitudes. It is therefore ready to fight Judaism to the finish.[67]
Nazi anti-Semitism was based more upon the hatred of the Jewish character and the social morality posed by Jews and Jewish values than upon general racism or the scapegoat thesis.[68] To Hitler, all attempts to solve the Jewish “Problem” through conversion or assimilation were pointless.[69] Since every other solution had been tried and had failed over thousands years, the Nazis would implement the “Final Solution” in order to make all German controlled territory Judenrein (free of Jews) and to obtain Lebensraum (living space) for Germans to expand into Eastern Europe. To Hitler, the destruction of European Jewry was more important than winning the war.[70] The Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz wrote:
Serious people. Responsible people, thought that Hitler’s notions about the Jews were, at best, merely political bait for disgruntled masses, no more than ideological window dressing to cloak a naked drive for power. Yet precisely the reverse was true. Racial imperialism and fanatic plan to destroy the Jews were the dominant passions behind the drive for power.[71]
Most of the German church clergy agreed that Germany had a right to Lebensraum at the expense of “Judeo-Bolshevism.”[72] The official church Handbuch (handbook), written by Archbishop Gröber, called Bolshevism despotism “in the service of a group of terrorist led by Jews.”[73] Upon the Nazi invasion of Russia, Bishop Michael Rackel declared the war “truly a crusade, a holy war for homeland and people, for faith and Church, for Christ and his most holy Cross.”[74]
Most Christian leaders outside of Germany were horrified by the Nazi terror and yet there was not a perceived failure of Christianity generally in Germany.[75] Protestant clergy in Holland, Denmark and Scandinavia denounced the Nazi deportation of Jews and many ordinary Catholic clergy in France and Italy protected Jewish citizens.[76] However, the anti-Semitism of medieval Christianity remained embedded within the German and Austrian church establishment, which had never been diminished by any liberal enlightenment.[77] Also, the anti-Semitic feelings which were disseminated in Germany by völkisch ideology had been absorbed and were shared by German Protestantism.[78]
On February 28, 1933 after the Reichstag fire started by Hitler and blamed on the Communists, the legal basis for the future concentration camp system was declared by Hitler under Hindenburg’s emergency decree “For the Protection of People and State,” which promised protection against Communist acts of violence.[79] The Nazis used this law to create the impression of a Communist threat in order to carry out mass arrests of their political opponents and society’s undesirables. In March 21, 1933, Heinrich Himmler, then Commissioner of Police for Munich, announced in the paper, Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten:
On Wednesday, March 22, 1933, the first concentration camp will be opened in the vicinity of Dachau. It can accommodate 5,000 people. We have adopted this measure, undeterred by paltry scruples, in the conviction that our action will help to restore calm to our country and is in the best interests of our people.[80]
Thus, the first concentration camp of the Third Reich from hell was born nine miles from Munich with a large iron gate bearing the deceptive inscription “Arbeit macht frei (“Work makes you free”).[81] Theodor Eicke’s motto was adopted by the camps to represent during the mid-1930s the concept of incarceration of asocials or citizens used as tools for the International Jew, in which hard work would bring about structure and re-education.[82] The motto became the 20th century version of Dante’s Lasciate ogni speranza (All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here) at the Gate of Hell.[83] Just as Dante remarked to Charon,
Seeing these words inscribed in somber hue
Upon the lintel of a gate, I said,
‘Their meaning, master, is too hard for me.’[84]
Dachau became the “training school” for the professional torturers and executioners for the future concentration camps of Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Papenburg, Esterwegen, Mauthausen, Flossenberg, Belsen, Auschwitz and others.[85] The future commandant of Belsen and the chiefs of Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Auschwitz had their apprenticeship at Dachau in torture and murder.[86]
In Hitler’s first “Memorandum on the Jews” on September 1919, he distinguished between anti-Semitism for purely emotional reasons, which leads to pogroms, and “rational” anti-Semitism, which must lead to the systematic legal struggle to remove Jews from society, and with both resulting in the final goal of removing the Jews completely.[87]
Rational anti-Semitism of the Jews began on April 1, 1933 (the April First pogrom) when the Nazis initiated a boycott of Jewish businesses and was followed by racial laws barring Jews from civil service jobs and teaching positions in schools and universities.[88] In 1933, nationalist students interrupted Albert Einstein’s lectures in Berlin and immediately thereafter he was deprived of his professorship and membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences.[89] His books were burned publicly on May 10, 1933 and the “great” German Nobel Prize-winning Nazi physicists Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard attacked what they called Einstein’s “Jewish physics” and his so-called relativity theories that undermined true German Aryan science.[90]
In 1933, the Nazis convinced the German public to solve the employment problem by replacing Jews by Gentiles wherever the Jews held too high a percentage of jobs based upon the ratio of Jews to Gentiles in the general population.[91] The Nazis persuaded the German public that too many of the high positions in the universities and professions had been monopolized by Jews and drastic action was required.
The Law for the Restoration of the Regular Civil Service on April 7, 1933 under paragraph 3 ordered the immediate retirement of civil servants of non-Aryan origin.[92] On the same day was passed the Law Concerning the Admission to the Legal Profession, which removed the Jews from the judiciary.[93] The Law Against the Overcrowding of the German Schools and Universities on April 25, 1933 set a 1.5 percent quota on the total number of Jewish students in high schools and universities for the country and a maximum of 5 percent for any school.[94] When the Jews were excluded from the practice of law in 1933, the great majority of Berlin lawyers and in some courts a majority of the judges were Jews.[95]
Also in April of 1933, the Nazi government announced new laws that required all citizens to document their racial descent. Since the churches were the custodians of baptismal records and marriage registrations for generations, the churches supplied the Certificates of Aryan Descent to prove Aryan status by showing all four grandparents were Christian.[96] The objective was to replace the religious distinction between Christianity and Judaism with the racial laws of Aryan versus Jew. [97] Under the first set of regulations issued in 1933, the non-Aryan category included quarter, half, three-quarter and full Jews.[98] After the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, all of the quarter Jews and some of the half Jews were removed from the non-Aryan category.[99]
On October 4, 1933, the Editorial Control Law placed all newspaper and periodical editors under the control of the Reich press chief Otto Dietrich, thereby ending the free press.[100] The Law established courts under the Reich League of the German Press to punish and purge editors deemed contrary to Nazi ideology.[101] On December 12, 1933, major German press services were merged into the official German News Agency, which was placed under the control of Dietrich’s Press Office in the Propaganda Ministry.[102] The Nazis also gained control of the press by acquiring newspapers and periodicals at forced prices.[103] By 1939, the Nazis controlled 1,500 publishing houses and over 2,000 newspapers and by 1945 the Nazis controlled 82.5 percent of total press circulation.[104]
In March 1933, Hitler appointed Josef Goebbels head of the Propaganda Ministry and by 1939 his ministry included departments for propaganda, the domestic press, the foreign press, the periodical press, radio, film, writers, theater, fine arts, music and popular culture.[105] Der Völkische Beobachter, the national official daily paper of the Nazi party, translated Nazi ideology into an ongoing anti-Semitic narrative of events.[106] The daily was founded in 1920 and in 1923 Alfred Rosenberg became its editor until 1938 when Wilhelm Weiss became editor and circulation exceeded 1 million by 1940 and 1.4 million by 1944.[107]
The Active Propaganda Division in the Propaganda Ministry was responsible for visual propaganda with political posters and the weekly Wandzeitungen (Word of the Week) wall newspapers represented visual propaganda in everyday occurance in Nazi Germany from 1937 to 1943.[108] Daily life brought the German masses through central public places of transportation (railroad stations, streetcars, subways, buses and major pedestrian intersections) and bystanders could spend a few minutes observing the colorful anti-Semitic Word of the Week posters and papers.[109] The anti-Semitic consensus of the German public formed by the Propaganda Ministry during the 1930s created the public hatred, contempt and indifference toward the Jews that allowed the Nazis to proceed unimpeded towards the Final Solution.[110]
Both Goebbels and Dietrich held doctorates from prestigious German universities and the staffs of the Reich Press Office and of the Propaganda Ministry were highly educated people, who constituted a large number of anti-Semitic intellectuals.[111] An enormous amount of intelligence and talent was involved in the production and distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda among the various governmental departments and ministries designed to enrage Germans against the Jews and justify a war of self-defense against international Jewry’s drive for world domination and Jewry’s determination to destroy Germany and the German people.[112]
In August of 1933, a meeting was set up in Lindau, Switzerland with Ernst Hanfstaengl, who was within Hilter’s inner circle, and Max Steuer, a Jewish lawyer from New York representing various wealthy members of the American Jewish community such as the Speyers and the Warburgs.[113] These families were prepared to finance the emigration to the United States of all German Jews, particularly recent arrivals from Eastern and Central Europe, who wanted to leave.[114] Although Hanfstaengl thought that it was a chance to handle an insoluble problem, Hitler responded to him by saying “Do not waste my time, I need the Jews as hostages.”[115]
During a social meeting in the Reich Chancellery in 1933, Hitler told his guests about “Jews as hostages” in that:
The Jews, he said, laughing, were Germany’s best protection. They were the pledge that guaranteed that foreign powers would allow Germany to go her way in peace. If the democracies did not withdraw their boycott, he would take from the German Jews as much of their property as would cover the damage done to Germany by the boycott. We’ll show them how fast they’ll have to stop their anti-German propaganda! The Jews will yet make Germany’s fortune! Everybody laughed. Hitler went on to say that there must, of course, come a time when there would be nothing left to take from the Jews. But then he would still hold their lives in the palm of his hand: their precious Jewish lives. The company burst out laughing again.[116]
Before 1933, the Nazi party established the Kinship Research Office (“RSA”) to investigate the racial background of new party members.[117] After the Nazi obtained power, the RSA became a governmental genealogy office under the Ministry of the Interior.[118]
Under the Nazi plan, if Christians were to be reclassified as Aryans, the Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants could not be treated as legitimate Christians.[119] However, tens of thousands of Jews had been baptized over the centuries in Germany.[120] In April 1933, the size of the official Jewish community was over 500,000, but there was also an equal number non-Aryan Christians of Jewish descent.[121] For converted Jews, the arbitrary line was the year 1880 before Jewish emancipation and assimilation into German society, in which racially Jewish descendants baptized before that date may be counted as Aryan, but those baptized after the date remained racially Jewish.[122]
The central Nazi objective when Hitler achieved power was to identify and destroy Germany’s Jews, regardless of their assimilation, intermarriage, religious association, or even Christian conversion.[123] German Jews were the most assimilated in Europe and the Nazis defined a Jew by ancestry and blood, not just by religious affiliation.[124] When the Nazis made the “Jew” a biological identity of the blood more than just a religious and culture identity, conversion was no longer a solution but only genocide. Only after their identification could Jews be targeted with property confiscation, ghettoization, deportation and extermination.[125] The IBM Hollerith punch card and card sorting system supplied through IBM’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft, or Dehomag (German Hollerith Machine Company), formed a genocidal partnership with the Third Reich and ensured huge profits for Thomas Watson and IBM in New York.[126]
An adversary [Satan] stood against Israel, and enticed David to take a count of [the people of] Israel . . . This matter was bad in God’s eyes . . . I Chronicles 21:1, 7.
The custom-designed IBM technology for the Nazis provided an unprecedented speed and accuracy to the Nazis in identifying Jews in census reports, governmental registrations and racial-ancestry programs as well as in organizing railway transportation and concentration camp registrations.[127] During the war years, IBM Hollerith systems kept the railways of Nazi controlled Europe on schedule and provided information on freight car locations and cargo tracking.[128] Nearly every Nazi concentration camp operated a Hollerith department to keep track of work assignments, transfers, general death and inmate statistics by Personal Inmate Cards, in which prisoners were identified not by name but by a personally assigned Hollerith five or six digit number.[129]
The Hollerith systems provided the magical scheduling process that allowed millions of Jews to step onto train platforms throughout Europe, travel for two or three days by rail, then step onto a ramp at a death camp and within an hour be marched into a gas chamber hour after hour, day after day.[130] The Hollerith systems assisted Germany with its general commercial, social and military infrastructure and allowed it to conduct a war with blitzkrieg efficiency.[131]
During the opening of the new IBM facility in Berlin to manufacture machines to Nazi specifications, Willy Heidinger, a rabid Nazi and head of Dehomag, publicly announced that “Dehomag were with the Nazi race scientists who saw population statistics as the key to eradicating the unhealthy, inferior segments of society . . . We are very much like the physician, in that we dissect, cell by cell, the German cultural body . . . on a little card . . . [and] . . . our Physician [Adolf Hitler] can take corrective procedures to correct the sick circumstances . . . rooted in our race.”[132]
On May 1933, IBM’s Dehomag subsidiary secured the first major contract with the Nazis to conduct the census on the 41 million people living in the state of Prussia, three-fifths of the German population in four months.[133] By June 16, 1933, one-half million census takers were recruited from the “nationalistically minded” along with SA and SS to create a virtual census army to obtain data about every household, which was reduced to punch cards in IBM’s operations in Berlin, bringing together pseudo-science and official race hatred.[134]
After the war began, Watson’s personal representatives primarily operated out of the Swiss office of IBM for instructions, profit funneling and coordination of IBM’s activities throughout Europe and for placing IBM technology at the disposal of Hitler’s Final Solution and territorial domination.[135] When trains needed to run on time from ghetto to concentration camp, IBM provided the solutions and no solution was out of the question for Germany even identifying the Jews by name on a punch card.[136]
The Hollerith punch cards exposed from every corner of Germany all those of Jewish blood and enabled the Nuremberg Laws to be enforced with efficiency and complete effectiveness by the Nazis.[137] Some 400 laws were adopted between the time Hitler came to power and the beginning of World War II that robbed the Jews of everything and demonized their religion.[138] Edwin Black commented in IBM and the Holocaust that “the dawn of the Information Age began at the sunset of human decency.”[139]
Along with IBM, other American corporations had made possible the genocide conducted by Hitler against the Jews, such as the Ford Motor Company and its anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent and The International Jew, the Carnegie Institution and its eugenics research, the Rockefeller Foundation and its Standard Oil and General Motors. The Ford Motor Company through its Cologne plant supplied trucks to Hitler that rolled his army of death across Europe during the war to such an extent that a 1945 U.S. Army report called Ford “the arsenal of Nazism” with the “consent” of the company in Dearborn.[140] Ford’s German subsidiary, Ford-Werke, used slave labor from Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944 and 1945.[141] Ford’s International Jew, volume 4, quoted “Imagine for a moment that there were no Semites in Europe. Would the tragedy be so terrible now? Hardly! . . . Some day they will reap what they have sown.”[142]
The Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune funded research on the pseudo-science called eugenics, in which the Nazis benefited to support their programs of racial hygiene, Rassenhygiene, to purge the German nation of Jewish blood.[143] The Rockefeller Foundation supported financially the German eugenics research programs under the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which influenced Hitler’s race ideology in Mein Kampf and later fueled the Nazis’ implementation of sterilization and mass extermination.[144] When Hitler demanded in 1935 racial genetic fractions to determine the full Jew, the half-Jew and the quarter-Jew for the Nuremberg race laws, the race ancestry charts created by Harry H. Laughlin of the Carnegie Institution and American eugenicists provided the answers to their eugenic hero, Adolf Hitler.[145]
The dean of Nazi racial hygiene was Professor Otmar von Verschuer at the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity, University of Frankfurt, who provided the Final Solution its intellectual respectability.[146] His most promising assistant at the Institute was Dr. Josef Mengele, who later carried out Verschuer’s research on the human subjects at Auschwitz as the “Angel of Death.”[147] Later, Verschuer, as director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, still was closely involved in his protégé’s research at Auschwitz.[148] Mengele’s overall objective and that of Verschuer was to test various genetic theories in support of Hitler’s racial theories, especially testing twins.[149] The Rockefeller Foundation and the eugenics science it sponsored was the inspiration behind Mengele’s medical experiments on twins as a control group in the death camps to discover the secrets in genetic engineering to produce a master race.[150]
Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors and its German division, Adam Opel A.G., made the three-ton Blitz truck that motorized the German military and powered the Nazi war machine that quickly rounded up and exterminated the Jews of Europe.[151] Alfred Sloan was one of the primary founders of the American Liberty League, an anti-Semitic group formed to rally Southern votes against Roosevelt in the 1936 election, and which funded the Sentinels of the Republic that provided anti-Semitic campaigns and labeled Roosevelt’s New Deal as the “Jew Deal.”[152]
GM working with Standard Oil developed an important gasoline additive tetraethyl lead to boost octane for a faster and more mobile Wehrmacht.[153] In a partnership of GM and Standard Oil contributing the technology with the German chemical company, I.G. Farben, they built ethyl plants in which after the war Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer stated that the invasion of Poland in 1939 would not have been possible without the ethyl additive.[154] Along with trucks, Opel’s Brandenburg plant built airplane engines for the Luftwaffe’s JU-88 bombers, built land mines and torpedo detonators for the military.[155]
During the Nuremberg trial of I.G. Farben on August 27, 1947, General Telford Taylor, the U.S. prosecutor, read the indictment of wholesale enslavement, plunder and murder against the 23 executives of the world’s largest chemical company as “the men who made war possible . . . the magicians who made the fantasies of Mein Kampf come true.”[156] I.G. Farben greatest claim to infamy was the development of the Auschwitz-Birkenau facilities into the first industrialized killing machine with Zyklon B to run the gas chambers and slave labor to run its nearby Buna-Werke factory.[157] IG’s Bayer pharmaceutical division supplied the test prototype serums and drugs used by Josef Mengele at Birkenau with his experiments on identical twins to prove his racial theories.[158]
The opening act of annihilation began with the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 (Hitler’s “rational” anti-Semitism) that reduced the Jews to surplus people by taking their property, their livelihood and citizenship. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriages between Jews and “citizens of German or kindred blood.”[159] The Reich Citizenship Law restricted citizenship only to people “of German or kindred blood.”[160] The new Marriage Law of Greater Germany recognized only the marriage performed by civil officials in the name of the Reich as a public act not a private act for the good of the Volk under the new State religion.[161]
After the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, many Jews thought that the discriminatory measures would cease, if they accepted life as second-class citizens.[162] However, the underlying purpose of the Laws was to deprive German Jews of German citizenship and of protection under the laws.[163] By the middle of 1938, most Jewish businesses had been seized by Aryan Germans.[164]
Then came the announcements under penalty of immediate arrest that Jews were forbidden to speak, greet, acknowledge greetings, correspond, deliver to or receive objects from Gentiles.[165] Jews were forbidden to enter public places, such as theaters, cinemas, restaurants, cafes, schools, parks, post office, city hall, or libraries.[166]
On March 28, 1938, the Law on the Legal Status of Jewish Religious Organizations (Gesetz über die Rechtsverhältnisse der jüdischen Kultusvereingungen) stripped Jewish religious nonprofits of their protected status as public bodies, but were treated as only registered associations subject to various tax burdens and discriminations.[167] On April 26, 1938, the Law on the Registration of Jewish Assets (Verordnung über die Anmeldung jüdischen Vermögens) placed the property of German Jews under state control.[168]
On August 17, 1938, the Law on the Amendment of Family and First Names (Zweite Verordnung zur Durchführung des Gesetzes über die Änderung von Familien und Vornamen) required Jewish women and men to assume the compulsory names of “Sara” and “Israel,” respectively, if they did not have first names that were included on a list of recognized Jewish first names.[169] With the yellow Star of David, it was a return to the yellow patches of the Middle Ages.[170] As stated by Herman Kruk in his diary from the Vilna Ghetto, “I put myself in the hands of fate and wear the yellow patch, as Christ wore the crown of thorns. This is how I shall go with the . . . “[171] Livia Bitton Jackson as a thirteen year old in Somorja, Hungary, described the feeling of humiliation when hearing the proclamation that all Jews must wear a six pointed yellow star or face immediate arrest.[172] She wrote:
My God, what next? A yellow star? The Middle Ages, evil tales of long ago. I used to hate Jewish history in the after-school Hebrew class. I hated the misery, the suffering, the badge. The Jew badge.[173]
In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria and 183,000 more Jews fell under Nazis control.[174] Before the Anschluss (Annexation) of Austria, the IBM subsidiary in Austria was working feverously with the Hollerith punch card operations to identify the Jewish population from the 1934 Austrian census for forced expulsion.[175] Before Hitler under the Munich Pact of September 30, 1938 marched into the Germanic Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, IBM was in Czechoslovakia after Hitler took power in 1933 registering Jewish property and families as defined by the Nuremberg Laws for Hollerith punch cards throughout Czechoslovakia.[176] On May 17, 1939, 750,000 census takers swept through the Greater Reich’s 22 million households, 3.5 million farmhouses and 5.5 million shops and factories registering on Hollerith punch cards some 80 million residents according to their ancestry and property holdings in the spirit of the Nuremberg Laws.[177] Later, IBM subsidiaries throughout Europe would assist the Nazis in turning populations in the invaded countries into punch cards to make all Europe Jew-free.[178]
President Roosevelt initiated an International Conference in Evian-les-Bains, France to address the Jewish refugees being forced out from Germany and Austria in July 1938, but the organizers emphasized the conference was to focus on political refugees from all countries.[179] The Polish government of the thirties acted to promote mass emigration of Jews in the League of Nations with France to the island of Madagascar and with England for immigration to Palestine.[180] The Polish government at the Evian Conference demanded, along with Romania, that emigration from Poland and Romania should be discussed.[181]
Earlier on June 4, 1936, the prime minister General Felicjan Slawoj-Skladkowski of Poland declared in parliament that physical attacks on Jews were wrong, but attacks against Jewish economic survival was “of course [owszem]” all right.[182] Pogroms occurred against the shtetl of Przytyk in central Poland between 1936 and 1939 and in Brest-Litovsk in the Belorussian area of Poland on May 13, 1937.[183] In 1937, the Polish foreign minister Józef Beck told the Polish parliament that Poland had room for only half a million Jews and had over 3 million that needed to leave.[184] Over three hundred and fifty Jews were murdered in Poland between 1935 and 1939.[185]
In Poland, Catholicism was identified with Polishness and the leading Catholic primate Augustyn Cardinal Hlond on February 29, 1936 declared
. . . that the Jews fight against the Catholic Church, that they are free-thinkers, and constitute the vanguard of atheism, of the Bolshevik movement and of revolutionary activity. It is a fact that Jewish influence upon morals is fatal, and their publishers spread pornographic literature. It is true that the Jews are committing frauds, practicing usury and deal in white slavery . . . let us be just. Not all Jews are like that . . it is not permissible to hate anyone. Not even Jews.[186]
Hlond’s speeches portrayed Jews as a satanic group, acting collectively to corrupt the non-Jewish population.[187]
Violent anti-Semitic attacks were part of the daily life for all Jews in Poland as encountered by Lucy Dawidowicz in 1938, while visiting Vilna and observing that “[i]t wasn’t so much an ideology or a racist philosophy as it was raw and ungovernable hatred, different from what was happening in Germany.”[188] She contrasted that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis had been “orchestrated from above,” while it “erupted spontaneously [and] volcanically” in Poland.[189]
As prime minister of Romania, Octavian Goga of the National Christian Party initiated anti-Semitic decrees in 1937 that stripped Romanian Jews of citizenship and other rights.[190] During the war, Marshal Ion Antonescu, the Romanian dictator, murdered between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews within his territory.[191] In the Ukraine, approximately 900,000 Ukrainian Jews, 60 percent of Ukrainian Jewry, were murdered.[192] The pro-Nazi Roman Catholic priest Josef Tiso, president of the Slovak state during the war, was directly responsible for the deportation of over 80,000 Jews to die in Poland after 1942.[193]
When America, the sponsoring nation of the Evian Conference, set forth its unwillingness to open up U.S. immigration, it doomed the Conference.[194] It seemed that the Conference was planned by the U.S. State Department to divert refugees from the United States and delay international pressure to liberalize U.S. immigration laws.[195] Not only were the Western nations unwilling to accept Jewish refugees, but they were unwilling to criticize the Nazi anti-Semitic legislation and preferred to treat it as an internal German matter.[196] Golda Meir, an observer at the Evian Conference and the future Israeli prime minister, wrote “I don’t think that anyone who didn’t live through it can understand what I felt at Evian – a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror.”[197]
The Australian minister explained that his country could do nothing more for Jewish refugees and had no desire to import a “racial problem” by “encouraging any scheme of large-scale racial migration.”[198] The Canadian representative raised economic uncertainties and unemployment problems.[199] The British delegation was able to avoid mentioning Palestine and claimed a lack of resources for its refusal, but vaguely promising to investigate a limited number of refugees being settled in East African colonies.[200] Argentina only needed “experienced agriculturalists,” which would eliminate most Jewish refugees.[201] Belgium would not invite such obligations “whose consequences she cannot foresee.”[202]
Foreign correspondent William Shirer at the Evian Conference wrote in his Berlin Diary that:
The British, French, and Americans seem too anxious not to do anything to offend Hitler. It’s an absurd situation. They want to appease the man who is responsible for their problem. The Nazis of course will welcome the democracies’ taking the Jews off their hands at the democracies’ expense.[203]
The Conference made it clear that the world did not want the German and Austrian Jews, or any Jews. Hitler offered “his” Jews to the international community and he knew the offer would be refused.[204] Roosevelt feared he would risk his voter popularity, if he accepted Jewish refugees.[205] Roosevelt chose not to send a high-level official, but instead sent a businessman and close friend Myron C. Taylor to represent the U.S. at the conference in which thirty-two countries offered excuses for not accepting the Jewish refugees.[206]
Only the Dominican Republic responded with proposed agricultural colonies for the German and Austrian refugees.[207] The dictator, General Rafael Trujillo, had ordered the massacre and violent expulsion of Haitian workers in 1937 and the Evian conference offered him the opportunity to improve his image and seek millions of dollars for refugee settlement compensation.[208]
Responding to Evian, the German government was able to explain with great pleasure how “astounding” it was that foreign countries criticized Germany for their treatment of the Jews, but none of them wanted to open up immigration to them when “the opportunity offer[ed].”[209] The conference provided an excellent propaganda justification for Germany’s policy against the Jews.[210] Earlier in 1934, Hitler told his inner circle that:
My Jews are a valuable hostage given to me by the democracies. Anti-Semitic propaganda in all countries is an almost indispensable medium for the extension of our political campaign. You will see how little time we shall need in order to upset the ideas and the criteria of the whole world, simply and purely by attacking Judaism . . . Anti-Semitism, continued Hitler, was beyond question the most important weapon in his propagandist arsenal, and almost everywhere it was of deadly efficiency.[211]
The conference closed by forming the Inter-Governmental Committee (IGC), which would convene in London on August 3rd to decide on Jewish refugee resettlement.[212] Taylor reported to Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the Evian meeting had accomplished its purpose in creating the IGC and hopefully forcing Germany to be involved with the process of resettlement.[213]
During the Evian conference, Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Nazi party’s Foreign Policy Office, published his resettlement solution to the Jewish refugee problem as the island of Madagascar in the Vőlkischer Beobachter.[214] The island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean was taunted by European anti-Semitics, such as Paul de LaGarde, as a place for French Jews when France imposed a protectorate over the island in 1885.[215] Poland proposed it as a destination for its unwanted Jews and discussed it with French negotiators through 1938.[216] Poland had such interest in the Nazi Madagascar plan during the Evian conference in order to rid their country of Jews that there was a 1938 Polish mission to Madagascar.[217]
All the proposed dumping grounds for the Jews such as Madagascar, the Nisko reservation near Lublin, Poland, and arctic Russia were unworkable for the Nazis and murder proved easier.[218] In 1941, the German writer Raimund Pretzel (under the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner) stated
If the Nazis have ever had a propagandist success in Germany even among their sworn enemies, it was their advertisement of this attitude of the Western Governments, who offered the suppliant fugitives nothing but vague prospects of being sent, later on, to New Guinea – of course not all at once – while they were being tortured to death in the concentration camps.[219]
Further Nazi appeasement occurred on September 29, 1938, when France and Britain, without the Czechs’ consultation, negotiated the Munich Agreement, recognizing Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proudly announcing “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.”[220] Earlier on September 10th, Goring’s speech at the Nuremberg Nazi Party rally delivered Hitler’s message on the fate of Czechoslovakia by proclaiming that “[a] petty segment of Europe is harassing human beings [Sudeten Germans] . . . This miserable pygmy race [the Czechs] without culture – no one knows where it came from – is oppressing a cultured people and behind it is Moscow and the eternal mask of the Jew devil . . .”[221]
On October 27, 1938, Germany arrested and expelled 18,000 Polish Jews living in Germany by cattle cars to the Polish border. Only 4,000 were allowed into Poland with the rest stranded at the border.[222] Herschel Grynszpan’s family was stranded at the border, while he was working in Paris.[223] On November 6, Herschel, seeking revenge for his destitute family, entered the German Embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, the Third Secretary, who died on November 9th.[224] Herschel told French investigators that “[m]y people have a right to exist on this earth.”[225]
Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, realized that the killing was an opportunity to destroy the Jewish communities in Germany and Austria.[226] The Nazis denounced the killing as a “declaration of war” and part of a worldwide Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.[227] In honor of Martin Luther’s birthday on the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht or the “night of broken glass,”[228] the Nazis attacked Jewish communities by destroying over 200 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses, sending over 35,000 Jews to concentration camps and killing over 1,200 Jews.[229]
The Jewish community in Aachen, Germany existed since the time of the Carolingian Empire and Charlemagne sent a Jew among his delegation in 797 CE to the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad.[230] The Aachen synagogue built in 1862 with the inscription over the front door from Isaiah of “[F]or my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” was destroyed on Kristallnacht.[231]
They have sent Your Sanctuary up in flames; to the ground have they desecrated the Abode of Your Name. In their heart, they said – their rulers all together – they have burned all of God’s meeting places on earth. Our signs we have not seen; there is no longer a prophet, and there is none among us who knows for how long. Until when, O God, will the tormentor revile, will the foe blaspheme Your Name forever? Why do You withdraw Your hand, even Your right hand? Remove [it] from within Your bosom! For God is my King from days of old, working salvations in the midst of the earth. Psalm 74:7-12.
While political leaders in some countries condemned the violence of Kristallnacht, the leaders in Britain had no sympathy for the German Jewish refugees as typified by Neville Chamberlain.[232] Chamberlain, in a private letter on July 30, 1939 of Kristallnacht, wrote that “I believe the persecution arose out of two motives: A desire to rob the Jews of their money and a jealousy [sic] of their superior cleverness . . . No doubt Jews aren’t a loveable people; I don’t care about them myself – but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom.”[233]
When President Roosevelt was asked five days after the November 9th pogrom, whether U.S. immigration restrictions against Jews would be eased, he replied with a resounding and unqualified – No![234] Roosevelt graciously agreed to allow the 15,000 German Jews currently visiting in the United States to remain, but he resisted any increase of immigration quotas from Nazi-occupied countries, any action against Germany, and any mobilization of any international coalition against Hitler.[235] A combination of factors, such as economic insecurity, diplomatic isolationism, and anti-Semitism, kept the United States from assisting Germany’s Jews.[236]
The mass migration of Eastern European Jews to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries intensified informally expressed anti-Semitism that did not overtly contradict America’s founding principles of equality and religious pluralism.[237] Unconscionably, thousands of Jews who might have immigrated to the United States under existing quotas were denied entry due to barriers raised by many anti-Semitic bureaucratic officials, who essentially became Hitler’s accessories to murder.[238] The State Department’s Breckinridge Long with his subordinates obstructed the entry of thousands of Jewish refugees, resulting in 90 percent of the quotas for German and Italian immigrants unfilled during the war.[239]
Breckinridge Long, responsible for refugees during the Roosevelt administration, was an obsessed anti-Semitic who thought Mein Kampf was “eloquent in opposition to Jewry and to Jews as exponents of Communism and Chaos.”[240] When Henry Morgenthau’s U.S. Treasury Department attempted to license the transfer of money from Jewish charities to fund relief and rescue of Jews, Long and other State Department officials delayed the transfers for months.[241] The State Department was encouraged with this delay by a December 1943 cable from the British government opposing such relief programs because “of the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued.”[242]
Based upon an investigation of the State Department, a document dated January 13, 1944 entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this government in the murder of the Jews” reported not only did the State Department officials fail to use the American government at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, they sought to prevent such rescue, they actively obstructed private relief organizations, they tried to stop the flow of information to Jewish and other organizations about the Holocaust and they issued false and misleading statement to hide their crime.[243]
The War Refugee Board, created in January 1944 without any military resources diverted to the Board, was a sick joke by obtaining the admission of less than 1,000 refugees.[244] Although too late, the Board was free to work on the Jewish refugee issue without obstruction from the American State Department and the British Foreign Office.[245]
The world would not intervene to save the Jews as evident by doing nothing with respect to immigration quotas. A month before Kristallnacht, the Nazis had cancelled the passports of all German Jews and required them to reapply for new documents marked with the letter “J” to identify them as Jews to the world.[246]
On November 12th after Kristallnacht, the Executive Order Pertaining to the Restoration of the Appearance of Streets in Respect of Jewish Business Premises made the victims responsible for the damage and fined the Jews as a whole one billion Reichsmarks.[247] The Jews were excluded from all businesses and all claims were denied by the insurance companies.[248] Following that night, the Jews were removed from the economy by legislation.
Hitler used Kristallnacht as a test to determine the public reaction in Germany to attacks against Jews and he was empowered by the German public’s acquiescence.[249] As historian Joseph Tenenbaum stated “It is doubtful if without the demonstrable failure of Evian on July 6-13, and the Munich betrayal of September 29-30, the Nazis would have dared to stage the ‘Crystal Night’ pogrom of November 9-10.”[250]
On 24 November 1938, Hitler told the South African Defense Minister Oswald Pirow in Berlin that “world Jewry” (referring to American Jews) regarded their European coreligionists as “the advance troops for the Bolshevization of the world” and the Jewish “invasion” from the east and Hitler declared that “one day the Jews would disappear from Europe.”[251] On January 21, 1939, Hitler told the Czech foreign minister that
We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on November 9, 1938. The day of reckoning has come.[252]
Nine days later Hitler publicly declared war on the Jews in the Reichstag on the anniversary of his obtaining power.[253] On January 30, 1939, Hitler made his internationally publicized speech:
In the course of my life I have often been a prophet and have usually been mocked for it. At the time of my struggle for power it was the Jews in particular who scoffed at the prophecy according to which I would assume the leadership of the state and of the entire people and, among other things, would bring the Jewish problem to a satisfactory conclusion. I think that the echoes of the laughter of those days are now sticking in the gullets of the Jews.[254]
Today, let me once again be a prophet: if international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.[255]
Resentment and apocalypse are imbedded in the declaration of January 1939.[256] Hitler was donning the mantle of a prophet, suggesting a religious pronouncement with the anti-Semitic theme of a Jewish war fomented by world Jewry.[257] In future speeches, Hitler repeated the role of prophet and the theme of Jewish mocking, such as on September 30, 1942.[258] While exterminations were occurring, Hitler declared, “In the past, in Germany, the Jews laughed at my prophecy. I do not know if they are still laughing today or if their desire to laugh has already passed. Right now, however, I can assure you that it certainly will pass.”[259] Also during this same Nazi rally in the Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler repeated his prophesy that “it will not be the Aryan peoples, but rather Jewry, that will be exterminated” to an enthusiastic overflowing audience.[260]
Beginning in 1939, the Nazis started the “euthanasia” program using poison gas and lethal injections to murder over 80,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans.[261] The success of Operation T4 (named because of its headquarters at 4 Tiergarten Strasse, Berlin) proved the feasibility of mass murder by ordinary people and the government bureaucracy would cooperate in the mass murder.[262] The German bureaucracy, the “machinery of destruction,” was ready to meet the professional challenge in solving the Jewish Problem aided by the emerging Nazi Jewish laws.[263] Raul Hilberg commented that the German bureaucrat “beckoned to his Faustian fate.”[264]
During the summer of 1939, aboard the ship S.S. St. Louis Jewish refugees, of whom half of the 937 were women and children, were fleeing Nazi Germany and its concentration camps.[265] They were caught in Goebbels’ propaganda machine between corrupt Cuban officials, rejecting any disembarkation without additional bribes being paid in spite of valid Cuban visa permits, and an indifferent world.[266] Anti-Semitism was imported to Cuba by Falangist Spanish exiles and pro-Nazi agents leading up to an anti-Semitic rally in May 1939, when German-Jewish refugees on the SS St. Louis were being denied landing rights in Havana.[267]
How could the world criticize Germany for its treatment of its Jews, when President Roosevelt and all other countries rejected them as a burden no one wanted?[268] With knowing that the passengers of the St. Louis would return to the death camps of Nazi Germany, Cordell Hull, the U.S. Secretary of State, answering for Roosevelt simply stated that it was “a matter for the Cuban government” with respect to their “final solution.”[269] This indifference can be understood only in terms of widespread anti-Semitism.[270] The tragedy of the SS St. Louis was the world reaction regarding the fate of the Jews, which encouraged Hitler to begin a more abhorrent pogrom leading to the complete destruction of the entire Jewish population of Europe. As pessimistically remarked by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, the world was divided between places where Jews could not stay and places where Jews could not go.[271]
The German radio stations announced: “Since no one will accept the shabby Jews on the St. Louis, we will have to take them back and support them” [in the concentration camps].[272] In Paris, the French national chief of police, exercising considerable restraint, told the press that he “regretted our American friends, to whose country the majority of the refugees were eventually going, stopping at Cuba only en route, were not able to direct them to one of their ports instead of sending them back to Europe.”[273]
Most Jews hoped to immigrate to the United States, whose welcoming symbol, the Statute of Liberty, proclaimed on its base to the world the words of the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus of
Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”[274]
Lazarus, a Sephardic Jew from a New York family, was inspired to write her poem New Colossus after learning of the terrible 1881 and 1882 pogroms in Russia against the Jews.[275] However, the United States was admitting only 200,000 refugees.[276]
The United States was emerging from the Great Depression and it was argued that a flood of refugees would threaten the recovery and be a burden on the economy.[277] Also, the country preferred an isolationist policy and there was a strong feeling of anti-Semitism with a general suspicion of foreigners.[278] A 1938 poll by the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago found 72 percent were opposed to admitting a large number of German Jews to the United States.
While in Palestine to appease the Arabs, the British issued yearly immigration quotas on the number of Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Europe who could enter Palestine.[279] The immigration quotas for 1935 and 1936 were 60,000 and 30,000 per year, respectively.[280] The British White Paper for Palestine in 1939 proposed to limit Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next 5 years with zero afterwards.[281] The rationale in the British governmental papers indicated that if Jews came into Palestine, the Arabs would turn to the Axis Powers and Britain would lose its control over the Middle East and its oil.[282] Also, an Arab Palestine with a Jewish minority was thought to be the best position for the British Empire and the fewer Jews the better.[283]
To embarrass the British Government, Adolf Eichmann, in charge of a Committee for Sending Jews Overseas, deported over 3,600 Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia from the Romanian Black Sea port of Tulcia in September 1940 to Palestine without the necessary British immigration papers.[284] Following the policy of Chamberlain’s White Paper, the Royal Navy intercepted the immigrants in Haifa and transferred them to the ship, Patria, for transfer to internment camps in Mauritius.[285] The Haganah, the Jewish Agency’s military arm, placed explosives to prevent the ship from leaving Haifa.[286] The explosive charge was too devastating and caused the death of 267 refugees, but General Wavell, the British Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East who like most British officers was pro-Arab, was intent on shipping the survivors to Mauritius until Churchill intervened and the survivors were allowed to remain in Palestine.[287]
On December 12, 1940, over 200 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe across the Black Sea and the Aegean for Palestine were drowned on the “illegal” ship Salvador, which sank in the Sea of Marmara.[288] T.M. Snow, the head of the Refugee Section of the British Foreign Office, commented that “There could have been no more opportune disaster from the point of view of stopping this traffic.”[289]
On December 12, 1941, the SS Struma, an unseaworthy vessel, carrying Romanian Jews, left Constanza in the Black Sea for Palestine, but was held up for two months when it limped into Istanbul.[290] With appalling sanitary conditions, the refugees suffered with dysentery and other health problems, while politicians casting lots negotiated their fate.[291]
The British ambassador to Turkey, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hegesson suggested that, rather than send the old substandard vessel back into the Black Sea where it would certainly sink, the charitable decision would be to allow the refugees to reach Palestine.[292] The Colonial Office fraudulently asserted for political ends that somehow Nazi agents were masquerading as Jewish refugees and that the suggestion by the ambassador to Turkey was “absurdly misjudged on humanitarian grounds.”[293] Lord Moyne, the Colonial Secretary, and Sir Harold Mac Michael, the High Commissioner, both denied the refugees’ admission to Palestine on the basis of the May White Paper that must be implemented in spite of whatever the cost in human lives.[294]
In February 1942, the SS Struma with damaged engines was towed out into the Black Sea to be cast adrift.[295] After twelve kilometers out, a torpedo sunk the ship and out of the 769 men, women and children only one survived.[296] The Struma tragedy was the watershed event that confirmed for Jews that rather than relying upon Britain for support they must prepare for armed resistance to fight the anti-Semitic immigration policy.[297] The Struma tragedy resulted in the decision by the Extraordinary Zionist Conference in New York during May of 1942 to demand the recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine as an immediate war aim.[298]
Of the 522,000 German Jews living in Germany in 1933 (566,000 based upon Nazi racial definitions), more than 160,000 lived in the capital.[299] In 1671, the Great Elector of Brandenburg granted Jews permission to resettle in Berlin.[300] By May 1939 over half of the Berlin residents had fled Germany, but Berlin still had 65,000 residents plus an additional 9,000 by Nazi definition when the first deportations began in October 1941.[301] Until March 1945, 65 transports to the east and 122 transports to Theresienstadt[302] deported over 55,000 Jews from Berlin, who were murdered in Lodz, Minsk, Riga, Piaski, Warsaw, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and Sachsenhausen.[303] After the war, only 1,900 deported Jews returned to Berlin, between 1,400 and 1,500 survived underground in the city and 4,700 were protected through marriages to non-Jews.[304]
On October 18, 1941, the first deportation of Berlin’s Jews was sent to the Lódz ghetto.[305] Over 1,000 Jews arrived from Berlin by October 27, 1941 to the Lodz Ghetto.[306] Wealthy German Jews transported to the Lodz Ghetto were reduced to begging within a few months of their arrival and suffered not only German brutalization but the indifference in the ghetto as being a foreign and destitute refugee.[307]
In the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names at Yad Vashem, there was a German speaking family from Berlin listed as died at house number 13 Flat 49, Adolf Hitler 79, Krauter Street, Lodz Ghetto: Icek Brauman, born 1903, accountant; Ruchla Brauman, born 1905, housewife; and Felicja Brauman, born 1935, child. There was another German speaking family from Berlin listed as died at house number 13 Flat 63, Krauter Street 13, Lodz Ghetto: Wolf Abram Brauman, born 1907, hairdresser; Sara Brauman, born 1908, housewife; Tauba Brauman, born 1900, accountant; Porja Brauman, born 1900, housewife; Felicja Brauman, born 1928; Fela Brauman, born 1933, pupil. By 1942, the Jews of Lodz were all death-bound with the Final Solution set in motion.[308]
Sara Grossman was 21 years old in the Lodz ghetto, and wrote about the Nazis’ deliberate death by starvation or disease:
Children where brought into the ghetto who couldn’t walk for lack of nourishment. They just couldn’t walk. This is how rampant hunger was. That is what malnutrition did to us. We were always on the lookout for some food, for some crumbs. You wouldn’t dare to leave a crumb on the table. You would put anything in your mouth.
I don’t think anything hurts as much as hunger. You become wild. You are not responsible for what you say and what you do. You become an animal in the full meaning of the word. You prey on others. You will steal. That is what hunger does to us. It dehumanizes you. You’re not a human being any more.
Slowly, slowly the Germans were achieving their goal. I think they let us suffer from hunger, not because there was not enough food, but because this was their method of demoralizing us, of degrading us, of torturing us. These were their methods, and they implemented these methods scrupulously.
Therefore, we had very many, many deaths daily. Very many sick people for whom there was no medication, no help, no remedy. We just stayed there, and lay there, and the end was coming.[309]
Andreas Hillgruber, a German political history expert, argued that Hitler had four motives for the invasion of Russia with the primary motive of exterminating the Jewish Bolshevik leadership and the millions of Eastern European Jews.[310] Hitler identified the other motives in a speech to senior officers of acquiring land for German settlers, imposing German domination over the Slavs and seizing raw materials necessary for the war.[311] As Hitler told his generals before the invasion of Poland “[w]ho, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”[312] The Nazis were convinced that anti-Semitism would become the common denominator that would unite all of Europe.[313]
With the military invasion of Poland and Russia, mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, were deployed by the SS to “purify” the area.[314] The Einsatzkommandos could not have operated in Poland, Lithuania, Russia, the Ukraine and elsewhere without the logistical support and active cooperation of the Wehrmacht.[315]
The Einsatzgruppen had orders from Reinhard Heydrich and Bruno Streckenbach to annihilate all Jews in the territories occupied by the army.[316] In 1939, Poland had a population of 3.3 million Jews, representing about 10 percent of the total population.[317] By the spring of 1943, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered over 1,250,000 Jewish men, women and children simply because they were Jews.[318] The mobile killing squads consisted of “ordinary men,” a cross section of the German population, and of many commanders who were college educated.[319]
Historian Martin Gilbert marks Chelmno on December 7, 1941 as the start of the Final Solution for on that day the Nazis realized that they could make Europe Judenrein.[320] In the town of Chelmno, the Nazis began their experiment in moving masses of people to walk into the death camps by rounding up unsuspecting Jews under the guise of eastward resettlement and the Nazis set in motion the annihilation of six million Jews.[321]
The killing process began in the summer of 1941 and within six months the Wannsee Conference occurred, turning mass murder into industrialized genocide.[322] Within less than a year, six killing centers complete with gas chambers were in place and the deportations from the ghettos of Poland to the death camps had started.[323]
In Lithuania, the Nazis sent Jews from the Vilna ghetto to the killing pits in a wooded area near the suburb of Ponary and ten kilometers southwest of Vilna on the road to Grodno.[324] Giant pits were excavated by the prior Soviet occupying army to serve as storage tanks for airplane fuel. During the German occupation, these pits became the killing site for 50,000 to 60,000 men, women and children, who were shot on the edge of the pit and fell into the mass graves.[325]
Although the Einsatzgruppe B was in charge of the extermination of all Jews in the Lithuanian area,[326] the Lithuanians manned the firing squad at the pits and were known as the Shaulists or the Sauliu Sajunga (the Riflemen’s association), who were a paramilitary nationalist organization.[327] The victims’ clothes and other personal effects were booty for the Lithuanian murderers, who profited from the resale market in Jewish articles.[328] Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish journalist who lived in Ponary near the killing pits,[329] recorded the mass executions for three years from his hiding place in his cottage attic and from his outside observations in his diary[330] and commented:
On November 1 [1941], God-fearing representatives of the Catholic Lithuanian nation liquidated four truckloads of Jews. They have already begun shooting in their military clothing. November 1 (Saturday) was All Saints’ Day. It did not disturb their executions.[331]
Sakowicz in his diary commented that “[i]n Ponary after ‘Judgment Day’ [the Judgment Day massacre of 4,000 Jews in Ponary on April 5, 1943, which represented the liquidation of four ghettos in eastern Lithuania – Swieciany, Mikhalishki, Oszmiany and Soly][332] most people do not drink unboiled water because they are afraid that there is blood in the water.”[333]
At the Wannsee conference in a Berlin villa on the shores of Lake Wannsee during January of 1942, the bureaucratic arrangements for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (“Endlősung der Judenfrage”) was implemented with the goal of exterminating over eleven million Jews from all areas to be conquered including England.[334] The purpose of the Conference of the Staatssekretäre (Undersecretaries of State) was to enlist the active cooperation of all Ministries and the Civil Service towards the implementation of the Final Solution.[335] At the Wannsee conference, Reinhard Heydrich became the “true architect of the Final Solution” by attaining the consensus among the central agencies.[336] The members of the various branches of the Civil Service did not only express opinions, but contributed concrete propositions to the implementation of the Final Solution with extraordinary enthusiasm.[337] Also, another purpose of the conference was to discuss the inclusion of Jews from non-German states and the question of mixed marriages.[338]
For the Holocaust, the Germans and local collaborators would use special language to “beautify” (verschönern) the murders and developed a subspecies as Victor Klemperer termed Lingua Tertii Imperii, the use of terminology to hide atrocities or Sprachregelung.[339] Without Hitler and the Nazis, the Holocaust would not have occurred, but the anti-Semitic beliefs of the Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Belorussians made the Nazis’ extermination policy possible.[340]
The Vichy government under Marshal Philippe Pétain revived France’s anti-Semitic tradition supported by Catholic, socialist, racist and nationalist sources by enacting Statut des Juifs and other anti-Semitic legislation eliminating all Jewish presence in public life, dispossessing Jewish property and deporting eastward 80,000 Jews to the death camps.[341] The Vichy government sponsored a propaganda campaign blaming the French defeat on Jewish politicians and Jewish financiers of the Third Republic.[342]
Without the full cooperation of the French police of rounding up Jews and substantial collaboration from the local administration to prepare detailed race censuses and identity cards, the Nazis could not have murdered so many French Jews.[343] The Pétain government abolished the emancipation decree of 1791 and established concentration camps on French soil to hold French Jews, some of whom died of starvation and disease before transit on the death trains.[344]
The murder of millions in five years required the voluntary complicity of tens of thousands in public and private institutions: army, police, civil service, Foreign Office, railroads, postal services, utilities, bureaucrats, corporations, bankers, lawyers, judges, physicians and scientists.[345] Professor Wistrich wrote that the organization of mass murder involved not only the immediate murderers, but tens of thousands of doctors, lawyers, diplomats, accountants, bankers, clerks and the railway workers who kept the trains running to the death camps.[346]
The culture of anti-Semitism that brought Hitler to power also brought voluntary cooperation in the destruction of the Jews.[347] For example, IG Farben was involved not only in the Nazis’ predatory policies throughout Europe, but in their crimes by employing slave labor from concentration camps.[348]
Nora Levin, in her history of the Holocaust said:
In Hitler-Germany, a highly developed people devised the rationale and methodology for exterminating six million human beings – over a million of them children – and for converting them into fat for soap, hair for mattresses and bone for fertilizer. For the Nazis, Jews became part of the non-human universe – the objects of functional exploitation, undifferentiated from other non-human matter in nature, and requiring the same detachment. This new formulation enabled mass murderers to think of themselves as technicians following orders and to call mass murder “special treatment.”[349]
Hannah Arendt during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem describes the typical S.S. mentality of which Eichmann was very proud of the “objective” attitude when talking about concentration camps in terms of “administration” and about extermination camps in terms of “economy.”[350] The S.S. calculated the “absorptive capacity” of the various killing installations and the requests for slave workers from the numerous industrial enterprises established around the death camps with the purpose to kill through labor.[351] German firms, such as I.G. Farben, the Krupp Werke and Siemens-Schuckert Werke, had established plants in Auschwitz and the Lublin death camps.[352]
Hannah Arendt in describing the death camps spoke about the calculated program of the Nazis to destroy not just the ideas and faith of people, but to destroy their humanity, by first removing all rights of citizenship or access to justice, the “juridical person.”[353] The second step in the destruction of one’s humanity was the destruction of the “moral person” by eliminating all decisions of conscience, and then the final step in destroying the human was the removal of the “individual person” by bringing all to the same state of malnutrition, of working to death and of disease.[354] Primo Levi described work in Auschwitz as a “horrifying parody of work, useless and senseless – labor as punishment leading to agonizing death.”[355]
Primo Levi commented on the hollow men of the extermination camps after losing their family, their home, their country and their livelihood.[356]
Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains. [357]
Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, contends that the Nazi actions against the Jews were largely impersonal and the cumulation of decisions dispassionately concluded from a rationally formulated plan to remove all obstacles to the fulfillment of Germany’s destiny as defined by Nazi ideology.[358] For the Nazis who organized the plans and made the decisions, the deprivation or emptiness of human spirit was so complete that they considered the Jews not in any human way, but disposable objects to be eliminated by way of a few freight trains, a few engineers and a few chemists.[359] Primo Levi was amazed when he first arrived at Auschwitz of the mystery in “how can one hit a man without anger?”[360]
However, this deprivation of spirit afflicted the leaders of the West as evident by their silence in order to resolve their own “Jewish problem.”[361] Beginning in1942, the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor and Chelmno were fully operational.[362] In May 1942, the Jewish Labor Bund sent a report to London stating that over 350,000 Jews had been murdered and the Nazis were planning to exterminate all European Jews.[363] In August 1942, Gerhart Riegner, secretary of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, sent a telegram to London and Washington detailing the plan and implementation of the “Final Solution,” but both the Foreign Office and the State Department doubted the Riegner telegram.[364]
In 1942, the prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, advised Washington and London about the Jews being gassed at the Chelmno concentration camp and proposed Allied bombing of railroad lines leading to the death camps, but British and American military and political leaders were skeptical of the reports about Auschwitz and other death camps and did not consider bombing the camps or rail lines as a military priority.[365] In November 1942, Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York publicly announced and the U.S. State Department confirmed the mass murder of 2 million Jews and the Nazi intention to murder all the Jews of Europe, which was further reported by the BBC.[366] In December 1942, Britain, the United States, the USSR and nine allies finally condemned the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.[367]
Jewish leaders requested Roosevelt and Churchill to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz, but the requests were ignored.[368] How strong is the chain of guilt that links 1,900 years of Christian hatred against the Jews to Nazi Germany’s systematic execution of a whole people.[369] At Madison Square Garden in March 1943 to rally protest against Jewish extermination in Europe, the author and dramatist, Ben Hecht spoke to the crowd about the “veil of silence” around the Holocaust by saying:
The corpse of a people lies on the steps of civilization. Behold it. Here it is! And no voice is heard to cry halt to the slaughter, no government speaks to bid the murder of human millions end.[370]
In April 1943, an Anglo-American Bermuda conference was held to debate the public clamor for rescue initiatives for the Jewish population of Europe.[371] However, no plans of rescue, no sanctuaries, no agreement to increase immigration to the U.S. or Palestine, nothing was proposed or done at the conference, except only silence while the Warsaw ghetto was destroyed by the Nazis.[372] On June 19, 1943, Josef Goebbels proclaimed Germany to be Judenfrei (free of Jews).[373] By the end of 1943, almost three million Polish Jews had perished about ninety percent of the prewar Jewish population. In Western Belorussia, this Jewish destruction occurred with the German liquidation of ghettos and camps.[374]
However, some Jews escaped from the ghettos to the forests of Western Belorussia. The Bielski Partisans hiding in the forests of Western Belorussia numbered more than 1,200 Jews by 1944 and became the largest armed rescue operation of Jews from the ghettos by Jews during the war.[375] While the Soviet Army opened its Great Offensive on Belorussia and the Baltic states in 1944, the Jewish partisans were disrupting the arrival of German reinforcements by destroying important roads and bridges.[376] From the beginning, the Bielski Partisans realized that fighting the Germans was not heroism, but heroism was to save a child, a woman, a human being and save as many Jews as possible in the forest.[377]
If the world really condemned the extermination of the Jews, why were those trains allowed to roll unhindered into Poland?[378] Why were the tracks leading to Birkenau never bombed?[379] Why was nothing done at least to slow down the operations of the death camps?[380] Birkenau was exterminating 10,000 Jews per day.[381] Why did not a single Allied military aircraft try to destroy the rail lines converging on Auschwitz?[382]
After September 1943, American and British bombers reached all over Europe.[383] By certainly in the fall of 1943, the Nazi death camps were within range of the Soviet air force, but there was no order from Stalin to bomb the gas chambers, in contrast to Nazi fantasy propaganda about Jewish domination of the Soviet regime.[384] On August 20, 1944, 127 Flying Fortresses escorted by a 100 Mustang fighters dropped bombs on a factory less than 5 miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau and on other occasions bombed nearby industrial targets of Auschwitz III while flying over death camps and railway lines not considered as military targets.[385]
American planes, bombing the factories surrounding Auschwitz in 1944, took photos in broad daylight of the camp.[386] In the summer of 1944, American bombers did strike at the Buna synthetic oil plant of I.G. Farben near Birkenau and on September 13, 1944 bombs were dropped in error from the intended military target and hit the SS barracks on the Auschwitz Main Camp killing 15 SS soldiers.[387] Shalom Lindenbaum, who had been at Birkenau and worked at the slave labor camp for the Farben plant described the emotions from the September 13th bombing from the American planes:
We ceased to work, and the German soldiers and civilians ran to the shelters. Most of us didn’t. So probably, we expressed our superiority feeling, and a kind of revenge. We had nothing to lose, only expected to enjoy the destruction of the big factory which we were building for the I.G. Farben Industrie. It was naturally so.
This happy feeling didn’t change also after the Americans indeed, began to bomb, and obviously we had casualties too – wounded and dead. How beautiful was it to see squadron after squadron burst from the sky, drop bombs, destroy the buildings, and kill also members of the Herrenvolk.
Those bombardments elevated our morale and, paradoxically, awakened probably some hopes of surviving, of escaping from this hell. In our wild imagination we also saw a co-ordination between the Allies and the indeed small underground movement in the camp, with which I was in touch. We imagined a co-ordinated destruction and escape; destruction from above by the bombers, and from our hands, while escaping, even if we have to be living bombs – to be killed. Unfortunately, this never occurred.[388]
When requests to bomb the railway lines leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the crematoria reached Washington, the War Department official who received the requests gave the instructions to “kill” the requests.[389] However, Churchill understood the slaughter and wrote to Anthony Eden in July 1944: “There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible single crime ever committed in the whole history of the world!”[390] Martin Gilbert remarked in Auschwitz and the Allies that “In 1944, as that [Nazi] deception began to fail, and while a series of detailed reports of continuing Nazi atrocities were reaching the west, it was not German policy, but Allied skepticism and disbelief, as well as political considerations and even prejudice, that served to inhibit action.”[391]
Alexander Werth, a BBC correspondent based in Moscow, reported about the industrial scale of the Majdanek death camp near Lublin during its Red Army liberation in August 1944.[392] However, the West thought the descriptions of such barbarism was inconceivable and Wert wrote “When I sent the BBC a detailed report on Majdanek in August 1944, they refused to use it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt, and it was not until the discovery in the west of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were convinced that Majdanek and Auschwitz were also genuine.”[393]
During a White House meeting about forming a Commission on the Holocaust, President Carter presented to Elie Wiesel from government archives the photos of where Wiesel was held prisoner during the war.[394] Wiesel points out the chimneys of Auschwitz and Birkenau and asks whether these photos were available to President Roosevelt in 1944.[395] After President Carter responded yes and that Roosevelt knew what was happening in Auschwitz, Wiesel asked why did Roosevelt refuse to bomb the railways leading to Birkenau?[396]
There was no answer and the president’s smile was gone.[397] President Carter’s own actions in office and later out of office reflect his own visceral anti-Semitic nature that is anti-Jewish and anti-Israel without doubt and his biased whitewash of Arab abuses and terrorist violence.[398] Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia has been a major donor to the Carter Center at Emory University[399] and the Carter Center and other Carter projects have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and other infamous Arab sources, such as Osama bin Laden’s brothers, Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman, Saudi arms merchant Adnon Khashoggi, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Fund for Development, Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan and other despots and anti-Semitics.[400]
The lack of action during the war demonstrates that the free world did not, and does not, care whether Jews lived or died and whether they were annihilated one day or another.[401] Even during the destruction of European Jewry, the British Colonial Secretary decided to allow only 30,000 entries for Jews emigrating from Nazi-held countries in 1944.[402] Reprehensibly, only 8,000 Jews were rescued before immigration was canceled by Britain in December 1944 for Palestine.[403] When the Germans began evacuating Greece in July 1944 and rail transportation was critically needed for German troops, the deportation of Jews continued on schedule without interference from the world.[404]
While Adolf Eichmann was in Hungary from April to July of 1944, he had the pleasure of personally sending Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz for extermination.[405] The Nazis occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944.[406] During the late spring and early summer of 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz and the remaining Hungarian Jews were driven into ghettos.[407]
From 1941 to 1943, 42,000 Jewish men were drafted into the labor service for the Hungarian army.[408] The Jewish labor servicemen in the Hungarian army fighting on the Russian front were subject to slave labor conditions of working until death by exhaustion, starvation, disease, or frost bite while the guards and officers entertained themselves with the labor battalions’ misery.[409] Sandor Brauman from Martonvasar died in a Hungarian Labor Battalion at age 43 in 1945 as listed at Yad Vashem.
Wiesel in his book, From the Kingdom of Memory, describes how they heard during the spring of 1944 in his childhood home of Sighet the distant sounds of cannons from the Russian front and assumed liberation from the Nazis was soon.[410] Wiesel wrote that we did not know Eichmann was planning the deportation and extermination of the Jewish communities.[411] Wiesel asks why did not the world tell us – for we could have fled to the mountains – “A mass escape would have had every chance of success. But we did not know.”[412]
Richard Rubenstein related a Jewish plea to save Hungarian Jews:
When informed by Joel Brand, a Hungarian Jewish emissary, that there was a possibility of saving one million Hungarian Jews from extermination at Auschwitz through Adolf Eichmann’s infamous “blood for trucks” deal, Lord Moyne (the British High Commissioner in Egypt in 1944) replied, “What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?” Lord Moyne and his government understood that Hitler’s “final solution” was the most convenient way of solving the problem of disposing of one group of surplus people for themselves as well as for the Germans. The British government was by no means averse to the “final solution” as long as the Germans did most of the dirty work.[413]
During a speech on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem on July 10 1944, David Ben-Gurion said:
What have you done to us, you freedom-loving peoples, guardians of justice, defenders of the high principles of democracy and the brotherhood of man? What have you allowed to be perpetrated against a defenseless people while you stood aside and let them bleed to death? . . . If instead of Jews, thousands of English, American, or Russian women, children, and the aged had been tortured every day, burnt to death, asphyxiated in gas chambers – would you have acted in the same way?[414]
The Holocaust was unique because the Jews were not and never had been a menace to Germany, except in the anti-Semitic mythology that the German people accepted without question.[415] This Satanic delusion was contained in Hitler’s Last Testament, when he wrote “[i]t is not true that I or anyone else in Germany wanted war in 1939 . . . [i]t was willed and prepared exclusively by those statesmen who were either of Jewish origins or worked for Jewish interests.”[416]
Hitler’s last political testament dictated on April 29, 1945 in his Berlin bunker blamed the Jews for their own death and once again guilty of their own fate, since the Jews were behind the massive Anglo-American bombings of Germany and the atrocities committed by the Jewish–Bolshevik enemy and prophesied a postwar retribution against international Jewry.[417] However, the seeds of this evil have found many disciples, imitators and potential heirs to the Nazi anti-Semitic legacy in the Middle East, in which the Nazi madness planted during the 1930s and 1940s has emerged in the Muslim and Arab world.[418]
In July 1945 before the end of the war, general elections in Britain removed the Conservative Party and installed the Labor Party with Prime Minister Clement Attlee, appointing the new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who continued the infamy of the White Paper.[419] In 1929, Bevin attributed the Arab Riots in Palestine to Arab indignation against the power of Jewish money, which was ridiculous with the Zionist movement struggling with lack of funds and the burden of defending Jewish communities against Arab attack.[420]
Bevin was against allowing into Palestine the Holocaust survivors, who were interned in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany.[421] Bevin wrote a British diplomat that the Jews “have gone through, it is true, the most terrible massacre and persecution,” and indifferently added, “but on the other hand they have got through it and a number have survived.”[422] Bevin believed that “the Jews were organizing a world conspiracy against poor old Britain” and with the Soviet Union would attempt to bring down the British Empire.[423] The first U.S. ambassador to Israel, James G. Mc Donald, traveling through London on August 3, 1948, recorded in his diary the following notation:
Facing Bevin across his broad table, I had to tell myself that this was not Hitler seated before me but His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs . . . His bitterness at [American president] Mr. Truman was almost pathological: it found its match only in his other scapegoats – the Jews, the Israelis, the Israeli Government.[424]
The British Foreign Minister “graciously” set the immigration quota to 1,500 per month.[425] Bevin’s policies were distinctly anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic. In the summer of 1946, the British government increased its war on Jewish immigration to Palestine by severe quota limitations.[426] The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was anti-Zionist and considered that British interests were served best by a pro-Arab policy.[427] Sir Ronald Storrs, the British governor of Jerusalem, objected to the proposal that “Arab soil” should be the “involuntary dumping ground for people unacceptable elsewhere.”[428]
In March 1945, Lord Gort, the high commissioner for Palestine, wrote to the colonial secretary in London that “the establishment of any Jewish State in Palestine in the immediate future will almost inevitably mean the rebirth of National Socialism in some guise.”[429] Blinded by his anti-Semitism, Gort was equating Zionism with Nazism, while ignoring the fact that the Arab nationalists were the ones who actively collaborated with Hitler.[430]
The Nazi-Zionist analogy was a favorite weapon of the pro-Arab British elites, while busy repressing the Jewish armed struggle for survival in Palestine and ignoring Arab atrocities committed against the Jewish communities.[431] In June 1946 (Black Saturday), British troops raided Jewish settlements, searching for arms and arresting thousands.[432]
On August 12, 1946, the British announced that “illegal immigrants” would be deported to concentration camps in Cyprus.[433] The deportations to Cyprus lasted from August 1946 until April 1948, in which 52,260 were sent to Cyprus.[434] The British treated the detainees as prisoners of war and supplied food based upon 60 percent of the rations of a British solider, which was insufficient for young people and children.[435] The Jewish Agency had to supply the additional food for their limited diet.[436]
The British upheld the monthly quota of certificates until the day of British departure from Palestine on May 15, 1948.[437] The British totally ignored the UN decision that a port would be placed at the disposal of the Jews on February 1, 1948, which was not surprising since the British opposed the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947 and did everything to interfere with its implementation.[438]
Of the tens of thousands of people guilty of Holocaust atrocities, a few hundred were put on trial and most were eventually released after a few years, but from the punishment of the scarred memories of the survivors there is no release.[439] In Germany, the farce of self-de-Nazification after 1945 swiftly sanitized the Nazi past for the leadership in industry, science, medicine, the church and the universities.[440]
The vast majority of industrials, who employed slave labor, escaped punishment.[441] The behavior of industrialists during the Third Reich was not simply the consequences of greed or fear, but simply they felt no guilt when they enslaved and murdered millions of sub-humans.[442] The vast majority of physicians, health-care workers and scientists in the Nazi racial purification programs were never tried.[443] German culture and society were different from those of other Western nations and German business leaders, bureaucrats, lawyers, military officers and civilian society who assisted in mass murder were creatures of a long history that made anti-Semitism normal among educated society.[444]
However, Gerald Reitlinger in 1952 asked the question “[a]re the Germans the only racial-political group in the world who are capable of setting back the clock to the early ages of man? Is it, on the other hand, the age itself as a whole which is moving that way? Is the discarding of selected victims endemic in the overgrown modern ‘democratic’ State? Can it happen again and can it happen here?”[445] The suffering of the Holocaust survivors did not end with the liberation of the camps; the world still did not want them.[446] For the Jew, there existed no home in the world for “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in” as epitomized in the Robert Frost poem “The Death of the Hired Man.”
The Canadian government represented the attitude of most governments in unwilling to offer immigration to the surviving Jews with its officials declaring that “None is too many!”[447] Without any country offering sanctuary, the Jewish survivors in Europe were kept in the places where they had suffered, which were referred to as Displaced Persons’ (“DP”) camps.[448] Most DP camps were former concentration or slave labor camps, or barracks that housed the SS Death Heads.[449]
The displaced Jews were treated as United Nations nationals within the DP camps system, but there was no political body with the power to offer diplomatic protection or ensure their rights as they were herded into the camps by the occupation military authority.[450] The German and Austrian DP camps still in 1946 contained over a quarter of a million Jewish refugees and these were not all of the Jews who wanted to leave Europe.[451]
During the summer of 1945, Earl Harrison, appointed by President Truman to lead a delegation to investigate conditions in the DP camps in Germany, summed up his report (the Harrison Report) by saying:
We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder if the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.[452]
The Jews, who attempted to return to their former countries and homes, were met with postwar anti-Semitism of “What, you’re back? Auschwitz must not have been so terrible after all.”[453] The predominant motive for postwar anti-Semitism was that the populace feared the return of the Jews, whose homes and businesses they had confiscated.[454] The historian Jan Gross explained the hatred for Jews in postwar Poland as:
Jews were perceived as a threat to the material status quo, security, and peaceful conscience of their Christian fellow citizens after the war because they had been plundered and because what remained of Jewish property, as well as Jews’ social roles, had been assumed by Polish neighbors in tacit and often directly opportunistic complicity with Nazi-instigated institutional mass murder.[455]
There were pogroms in Kraków in August 1945 and in Kielce (south of Warsaw) in July 1946 with over 1,500 Jews murdered by Poles within two years after the war.[456] On July 4, 1946 in Kielce, Poland, nine-year old Henryk Blaszczk led the citizens to the community center building where 200 Jews were living and repeated the centuries-old anti-Semitic lie of ritual murder by Jews of Christian children by claiming to have been imprisoned by Jews where there were corpses of fifteen children.[457] In the pogrom that followed, local Poles murdered forty-one Jewish people, including women, children and a seven-month-old fetus in broad daylight.[458] The police and local militia assisted in the pogrom, while the Christian Church authorities declined to intervene.[459]
The Polish primate August Cardinal Hlond refused to publish a letter on ritual murder, anti-Semitism, or the mob killing of Jews in Kielce, which led the British ambassador to Poland to remark to London in August 1946 that “I fear the Polish clergy are fundamentally anti-Semitic.”[460] Catholic clergy reinforced the post-1918 myth that the Jews plotted to enslave postwar Poland to Soviet Communism, although Jews accounted for less than 20 percent of the small prewar Communist Party.[461]
The Kielce massacre initiated the flight of Polish Jews to the displaced persons camps in allied-occupied Germany with the hope of reaching Palestine.[462] From the end of the war in May 1945 until the birth of Israel in May 1948, almost seventy thousand Holocaust survivors left the DP camps, crossing borders at night, walking through forests and over the Alps to secret ports in southern France and Italy and with illegal boats to reach Eretz Israel.[463]
During the first conference of Holocaust survivors in Germany in July 1945, the concentration camp survivors declared:
We the remnant of the masses of European Jewry, who have been murdered as a people, whose sons and daughters have fought the hateful [enemy] in the forests of Europe, in the bunkers of the ghettos, in underground movements, in the ranks of the Allied armies, in the Jewish Brigade, and in the units of the Palestinian services, raise our voices as a people and demand: the immediate establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the recognition of the Jewish people as an equal with all the Allied nations, and its inclusion in the peace conference.[464]
Members of the Jewish Brigade traveled to DP camps to recruit refugees and organized transportation to Palestine.[465] The Jewish Brigade was formerly a unit of the British Army of Jewish volunteers from Palestine who served under a Jewish flag in Italy during the war.[466] Brigade members were active in Aliyah Bet (illegal immigration).[467] Bricah (escape) was an underground organization helping refugees across Europe to Italian ports and Mossad for Aliyah Bet was the organization that directed the illegal immigration from the Mediterranean ports to Palestine.[468]
In July 1947, the ship President Warfield joined the illegal immigration fleet transporting Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine and was renamed the Exodus 1947 and flew the Mogen David.[469] The Exodus 1947 had 4,554 refugees (which was originally designed for 400 passengers): 1,600 men, 1,282 women, 1,017 young people and 655 children.[470] The Haganah[471] ship Exodus 1947, the desperate attempt by Jewish refugees from the concentration camps of Europe to find asylum in the Promise Land, became the national symbol for the State of Israel, in which her decks had seen the unwanted find strength in each other and in the strength to build a nation.[472]
On her decks teeming with refugees gazing longingly at Mount Carmel, the Exodus lost the battle to dock in Haifa by being stopped by the British navy and forced to re-embark the refugees on three British “cage” prison ships, a floating Auschwitz, for transport appallingly back to DP refugee camps in Germany, but the Exodus won the war of Israel’s birth through public opinion as the “ship that launched a nation.”[473]
It shall be on that day that the Lord will once again show His hand, to acquire the remnant of His people, who will have remained, from Assyria and from Egypt and from Pathros and from Cush and from Elam and from Shinar and from Hamath and from the islands of the sea. He will raise a banner for the nations and assemble the castaways of Israel; and He will gather the dispersed ones of Judah from the four corners of the earth. Isaiah 11:11-12.
For whatever the real reason, President Truman on November 29, 1947 instructed the American delegation to intervene in favor of partition with a U.N. resolution that divided Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.[474] The same reason led Truman to recognize the State of Israel over the opposition from the State Department and his Secretary of State, George Marshall, who advised against recognition, warning Truman that Arab countries would cut off oil and unite to destroy the Jews.[475]
The State of Israel was not created by the Holocaust, but because of the Holocaust the attempt to establish a state almost failed.[476] With the millions of Jews who were murdered, there were almost not enough Jews alive to fight for a state.[477] If the German Reich had held out another year, it is possible that there would have been no Jewish survivors.[478] The survivors were the basic reason for the mobilization of American Jews by the Zionists, which resulted in American pressure on Britain to turn the Palestine issue over to the United Nations.[479] The pressure was compounded by the activities of the Jewish underground in Palestine and by illegal immigration organized by the Hagana.[480]
The link between the Holocaust and Israel is an indirect connection.[481] Rabbi Greenberg wrote that the State of Israel was not a reward or a product or an exchange for the Holocaust, but it was a response to the total assault of death by an outpouring of life and the enduring covenant with the reestablishing and repopulating of the Land.[482] The rebirth of the State of Israel is the Exodus of the 20th century.
Although the Holocaust survivors were a critical part in the fight for independence, the devastation of the Holocaust endangered the very struggle for independence.[483] The considerations that led the majority of the nations to support partition were for purely political reasons.[484] The partition decision of the United Nations did not establish the Jewish state, but the Palestine Jews and its military arm, which emerged from the Hagana, established Israel by their faith in God’s eternal promises.[485]
My Lord is my shepherd, I shall not lack. In lush meadows He lays me down, beside tranquil waters He leads me. He restores my soul. He leads me on paths of righteousness for His Name’s sake. Though I walk in the valley overshadowed by death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me. Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in view of my tormentors. You anointed my head with oil, my cup overflows. May only goodness and kindness pursue me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the House of the Lord for long days. Psalms 23:1-6.
[1] Abraham J. Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, (1st ed. 3rd Printing 1969), p. 17.
[2] Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, (1st ed. 2001), p. 242.
[3] Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, (2nd ed. 2003), p. 88.
[4] Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 259.
[5] John Weiss, Ideology of Death, Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, (1st ed. 1996), p. 34.
[6] Ibid., p. 34.
[7] Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 42.
[8] Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, (1st ed. 1975), p. xxxvi.
[9] Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims. (1st ed. 1939), pp. 9, 15. ( Rauschning was part of Hitler’s inner circle during the 1930s and won election as the National Socialist President in the Danzig Senate.)
[10] Ibid., p. 15.
[11] Anna Rauschning, No Retreat, (1st ed. 1942), p. 57.
[12] Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p.58.
[13] Ibid., p. 59.
[14] Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany. (1st ed. 1964), p. 26.
[15] Philippe Burrin, Nazi Anti-Semitism: From Prejudice to the Holocaust, (1st English ed. 2005), p. 58.
[16] Marcia Sachs Littell, Holocaust Education: A Resource Book for Teachers and Professional Leaders, (1st ed. 1985), p. 18.
[17] Burrin, pp. 58-59.
[18] Ibid., pp. 62-63.
[19] Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, pp. 115-117.
[20] Franklin H. Littell and Hubert G. Locke, editors, The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust. (1st ed. 1974), p. 15.
[21] Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust , pp. 116-117.
[22] Lagnado, Lucette M. and Sheila C. Dekel, Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz, (1st ed. 1991), pp. 42-43.
[23] Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island, (1st ed. 2009), p. 8.
[24] Ibid., p. 335.
[25] Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. (1st ed. 2009), pp. 129-130.
[26] Cannato, p. 333.
[27] Robert S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust,(1st ed. 2001), p. 188.
[28] Ibid., p. 189.
[29] Senor and Singer, p. 130.
[30] Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany, (1st ed. 2001), p. 22.
[31] Ibid., pp. 22-23.
[32] Ibid., p. 23.
[33] Lagnado and Dekel, p. 43.
[34] Weiss, p. 129.
[35] Ibid., pp. 129-130.
[36] Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, (1st ed. 2010), p. 52.
[37] Weiss, p. 130.
[38] Diane Ackerman, The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story,(1st ed. 2007), p. 84.
[39] Ibid.
[40] William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941, (1st ed. 1941), p. 582.
[41] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (2nd revised and enlarged ed. 1964), p. 27.
[42] Stewart W. Herman, It’s Your Souls We Want, (1st ed. 1943), p. 73.
[43] Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust , p. 43.
[44] Ibid., p.42.
[45] Rauschning, Hitler Speaks. p. 220.
[46] Dawidowicz, p. 150.
[47] Shirer, Berlin Diary, p. 285.
[48] Ibid., pp. 85-86.
[49] Dawidowicz, p. 150..
[50] Ibid., pp. 150-151.
[51] Ibid., p. 151.
[52] Harry James Cargas, When God and Man Failed: Non-Jewish Views of the Holocaust, (1st ed. 1981), p. 170.
[53] Ibid.
[54] James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, (1st ed. 2001), p. 256.
[55] Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, (1st ed. 2010), p. 21.
[56] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 8.
[57] Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 232.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Carroll., p. 240.
[60] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 123.
[61] Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 182.
[62] National Socialism, or Hitlerism, is the name of the movement founded by Adolf Hitler in 1919. Arthur C. Cochrane, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, (1st ed. 1962), p. 19.
[63] Cochrane, pp. 21-22.
[64] Ibid., p. 22.
[65] Ibid.
[66] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 77.
[67] Ibid.
[68] Prager and Telushkin, pp. 138-140.
[69] Ibid. p. 139.
[70] Ibid. p. 141.
[71] Dawidowicz, p. 4.
[72] Weiss, p. 351.
[73] Ibid.
[74] Ibid., p. 368.
[75] Ibid., p. 350.
[76] Ibid.
[77] Ibid.
[78] Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, Volume One: Preliminary History and the Times of Illusions 1918-1934, (1st ed. 1988), p. 270.
[79] Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, (1st ed. 1996), p. 100.
[80] Dr. Johann Neuhäusler, What Was It Like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?: An Attempt to Come Closer to the Truth, (1st ed. 1960), p. 7.
[81] Ibid., pp. 7-8.
[82] Dwork and van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, pp. 101-102.
[83] Ibid., p. 361.
[84] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, (The Folio Society 1979), p. 11.
[85] Barbara Distel and Ruth Jakusch, editors, Concentration Camp Dachau 1933-1945, (17 ed. 1978), p. 220.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Scholder, vol. I, p. 255.
[88] Mitchell G. Bard, The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance that Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East, (1st ed. 2010), p. 1; Scholder, vol. 1, p. 264..
[89] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, pp. 241-212.
[90] Ibid.
[91] Roy S. Durstine, Red Thunder, (1st ed. 1934), p. 132.
[92] Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight From the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946, (1st ed. 2009), p. 16.
[93] Ibid.
[94] Ibid.
[95] Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, (1st ed. 1944), p. 589.
[96] Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945, (1st ed. 1992), p. 261.
[97] Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin, (1st ed. 2007), p. 3.
[98] Ibid., pp. 9-10.
[99] Ibid., p. 10.
[100] Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (1st ed. 2006), p. 18.
[101] Ibid.
[102] Ibid.
[103] Ibid.
[104] Ibid., p. 19.
[105] Ibid., p. 20.
[106] Ibid., p. 26.
[107] Ibid.
[108] Ibid., p. 28.
[109] Ibid., p. 29.
[110] Ibid., p. 49.
[111] Ibid., pp. 271-272.
[112] Ibid., pp. 272-273.
[113] Ernst Hanfstaengl, Unheard Witness, (1st ed. 1957), pp. 221-222.
[114] Ibid. p. 222.
[115] Ibid.
[116] Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims, (1st ed. 1939), p. 94.
[117] Hertz, p. 10.
[118] Ibid.
[119] Ibid., p. 3.
[120] Ibid.
[121] Ibid., p. 10.
[122] Stewart W. Herman, Jr., It’s Your Souls We Want, (1st ed. 1943), pp. 24-25.
[123] Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Stratgic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, (1st ed. 2001), p. 8.
[124] Ibid., p. 53.
[125] Ibid., p. 8.
[126] Ibid., p. 22.
[127] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 220.
[128] Black, IBM and the Holocaust, p. 265.
[129] Ibid., pp. 351-353.
[130] Ibid., pp. 425-426.
[131] Ibid., p. 117.
[132] Ibid., pp. 50-51.
[133] Ibid., p. 55.
[134] Ibid., pp. 56-59.
[135] Ibid., p. 73.
[136] Ibid., pp. 73-74
[137] Ibid., p. 108..
[138] Bard, p. 2.
[139] Black, IBM and the Holocaust, p. 104.
[140] Edwin Black, Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust, (1st ed. 2009), p. 14.
[141] Ibid., pp. 122-123.
[142] Ibid., p. 15.
[143] Ibid., p. 20.
[144] Ibid., pp. 33-35.
[145] Ibid., pp. 42-43, 48.
[146] Lagnado and Dekel, pp. 43, 48.
[147] Ibid., pp. 46, 52, 75.
[148] Ibid., p. 59.
[149] Ibid., p. 60.
[150] Black, Nazi Nexus, p. 52.
[151] Ibid., p. 96.
[152] Ibid., pp. 109-110.
[153] Ibid., p. 107.
[154] Ibid., pp. 107-108.
[155] Ibid., p. 114.
[156] Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel: I.G. Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine, (1st ed. 2008), pp. 3-4, 7-8.
[157] Ibid., 301.
[158] Ibid., p. 327.
[159] Dwork and van Pelt, p. 94.
[160] Ibid.
[161] Herman, pp. 37-38.
[162] Bard, p. 2
[163] Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, A Lifelong Friendship, (1st ed. 2007), p. 106.
[164] Bard, p. 2.
[165] Ibid., p. 19.
[166] Ibid.
[167] Arendt, p. 85.
[168] Ibid.
[169] Ibid., p. 86.
[170] Cargas, p. 14.
[171] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles From the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944, (1st ed. 2002), p. 49.
[172] Livia E. Bitton Jackson, Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust, (1st ed. 1980), p. 15.
[173] Ibid.
[174] Bard, p. 2.
[175] Black, IBM and the Holocaust, pp. 141-142.
[176] Ibid., pp. 157-159.
[177] Ibid., p. 169.
[178] Ibid., p. 173.
[179] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 57.
[180] Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl, (1st ed. 2009), p. 16.
[181] Ibid.
[182] Ibid.
[183] Ibid.
[184] Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland, (1st ed. 1986), p. 18.
[185] Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl, p. 16.
[186] Ibid., pp. 21-22.
[187] Ibid., p. 22.
[188] Allan Levine, Fugitives of the Forest: The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance and Survival During the Second World War, (1st Lyons Press ed. 2009), p. xxvi.
[189] Ibid.
[190] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 188.
[191] Ibid.
[192] Ibid., p. 208.
[193] Ibid., p. 194.
[194]Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 57.
[195] Ibid.
[196] Ibid., p. 58.
[197] Ibid.
[198] Ibid., p. 57.
[199] Ibid.
[200] Ibid., p. 58.
[201] Ibid., p. 57.
[202] Ibid.
[203] William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941, (1st ed. 1941), p. 120.
[204] Weiss, p. 331.
[205] Ibid.
[206] Susan D. Bachrach, Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust, (1st ed. 1994), p. 27.
[207] Dwork and van Pelt, p. 100.
[208] Ibid.
[209] Bachrach, p. 27.
[210] Wiess, p. 331.
[211] Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 233.
[212] Dwork and van Pelt, p. 101.
[213] Ibid.
[214] Ibid., pp. 102-103.
[215] Ibid., p. 102.
[216] Ibid.
[217] Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland, p. 18.
[218] Dwork and van Pelt, p. 118.
[219] Dwork and van Pelt, p. 303.
[220] Bard, p. 3; Shirer, Berlin Diary, pp. 144-147.
[221] Shirer, Berlin Diary, pp. 125-126.
[222] Bard, p. 3.
[223] Ibid.
[224] Ibid., p. 4.
[225] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 61.
[226] Bard, p. 6.
[227] Ibid., p. 61.
[228] During the “night of broken glass,” the equivalent of half the Belgium glass industry’s annual production was destroyed. Ibid., p. 196.
[229] Wiess, pp. 331-332.
[230] Martin Gilbert, Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past, (1st ed. 1997), p. 4.
[231] Ibid., p. 5.
[232] Bard, p. 188.
[233] Ibid.
[234] Cargas, p. 207.
[235] Bard, p. 189.
[236] Maria Mazzenga, American Religious Responses to Kristallnacht (1st ed. 2009), ps. 2-3.
[237] Ibid., p. 6.
[238] Ibid., p. 3.
[239] Ibid.
[240] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 189-190.
[241] Ibid., p. 190.
[242] Ibid.
[243] Ibid.
[244] Ibid.
[245] Ibid., p. 197.
[246] Bard, p. 174.
[247] Ibid., p. 196.
[248] Ibid.
[249] See Bard, p, 154.
[250] Bard, p. 183.
[251] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 68.
[252] Bard., pp. 198-199.
[253] Ibid., p. 199
[254] Burrin, p. 76.
[255] Wiess., p. 336.
[256] Burrin, p. 78.
[257] Burrin, p. 72.
[258] Ibid., p. 80.
[259] Ibid.
[260] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 248.
[261] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 220.
[262] Ibid., p. 221.
[263] Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942, (1st ed. 2004), p. 11.
[264] Ibid.
[265]Gordon Thomas and Max M. Witts, Voyage of the Damned, (1st ed. 1974), p. 262.
[266] Ibid.
[267] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 623.
[268] Thomas and Witts, p. 262.
[269] Ibid. p. 252.
[270] Jocelyn Hellig, The Holocaust and Antisemitism, A Short History, (1st ed. 2003), p. 44.
[271] Black, IBM and the Holocaust, p. 126.
[272] Thomas and Witts, p. 263.
[273] Ibid. p. 283.
[274] Bard, p. 177.
[275] Yaakov Astor, The Hidden Hand, Uncovering Divine Providence in Major Events of the 20th Century, (1st ed. 2007), pp. 88-89.
[276] Bard, p. 177.
[277] Ibid., p. 178.
[278] Ibid.
[279] David C. Holly, Exodus 1947, (Revised 2nd ed. 1995), p. 60.
[280] Ibid. pp. 60-61.
[281] Ibid. p. 61.
[282] Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 214.
[283] Ibid., p. 215.
[284] Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 178.
[285] Ibid., pp. 178-179.
[286] Ibid., p. 179.
[287] Ibid., pp. 179, 181.
[288] Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, (1st ed. 1981), p. 21.
[289] Ibid.
[290] Norman Rose, ‘A Senseless, Squalid War:’ Voices from Palestine 1945-1948, (1st ed. 2009), p. 61.
[291] Ibid.
[292] Ibid., pp. 61-62.
[293] Ibid., p. 62.
[294] Ibid.
[295] Ibid.
[296] Ibid.
[297] Ibid., p. 63.
[298] James Parkes, A History of Palestine From 135 A.D. to Modern Times, (1st ed. 1949), p. 341.
[299]Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon and Chana Schütz, Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation, (1st ed. 2009), p. x.
[300] Ibid. p. vii.
[301] Ibid., p. x.
[302] Theresienstadt, a former Czech fortress, served beginning in June 1942 as the initial deportation destination for German and Austrian Jews and functioned primarily as a transit camp to eastern extermination camps. Ibid., p. 221.
[303] Ibid., pp. x-xi.
[304] Ibid., p. xi.
[305] Arendt, p. 91.
[306] Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, Lodz Ghetto, Inside a Community Under Siege, (1st ed. 1989), p. 176.
[307] James M. Glass, Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Moral Uses of Violence and Will, (1st ed. 2004), p. 38.
[308] Adelson and Lapides, p. 513.
[309] Dwork and van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, pp. 122-123.
[310] Israel Gutman, Resistance and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, (1st ed. 1004), p. 100.
[311] Ibid.
[312] Louis P. Lochner, What About Germany? (1st ed. 1942), p. 2.
[313] Arendt, p. 154.
[314] Gutman, p. 100.
[315] Elie Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969 – ,(1st ed. 1999), p. 228.
[316] Gutman, p. 101.
[317] Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl, p. 13.
[318] Gutman, p. 101..
[319] Ibid.
[320] Astor, pp. 49-50.
[321] Ibid.
[322] Gutman, p. 102.
[323] Ibid.
[324] Kazimierz Sakowicz, Ponart Diary 1941-1943: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder, (1st English ed. 2005), p. xiii.
[325] Ibid.
[326] Ibid., p. 6.
[327] Ibid., p. 12.
[328] Ibib., p. 10.
[329] Ibid., p. xiv.
[330] Ibid., p. x.
[331] Ibid., p. 39.
[332] Ibid., pp. 67, 69.
[333] Ibid., p. 91.
[334] Weiss, p. 338.
[335] Arendt, pp. 112-113.
[336] James S. Pacy and Alan P. Wertheimer, Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Raul Hilberg, (1st ed. 1995), p. 47.
[337] Arendt, p. 113.
[338] Pacy and Wertheimer, p. 39-40.
[339] Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl, p. 11.
[340] Levine, p. 36.
[341] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 277.
[342] Julius, p. 16.
[343] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 277.
[344] Ibid.
[345] Weiss, p. 342.
[346] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 219.
[347] Weiss, p. 342.
[348] Burrin, p. 104.
[349] Cargas, p. 134.
[350] Arendt, p. 69.
[351] Ibid., p. 79.
[352] Ibid.
[353] Cargas, p. 143.
[354] Ibid., pp. 143-144.
[355] Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, (First Touchstone Edition 1996), p. 178.
[356] Ibid., p. 27.
[357] Ibid.
[358] Cargas., p. 184.
[359] Ibid., pp. 185-186.
[360] Primo Levi, p. 16.
[361] Cargas, p. 186.
[362] Rose, p. 60.
[363] David Patterson, Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary,(1st ed. 1999), p. 152
[364] Rose, p. 60.
[365] Levine, p. 55.
[366] Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, (1st ed. 1998), p. 195.
[367] Ibid.
[368] Cargas, p. 186.
[369] Ibid.
[370] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 193.
[371] Dwork and van Pelt, p. 289.
[372] Ibid.
[373] Hertz, p. 11.
[374] Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, (1st ed. 1993), p. 186.
[375] Ibid., p. vii.
[376] Ibid,, p. 196.
[377] Ibid., p. 83.
[378] Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Memoirs, (1st ed. 1995), p. 74.
[379] Ibid.
[380] Ibid.
[381] Ibid.
[382] Ibid.
[383] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 195.
[384] Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, p. 96.
[385] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 195.
[386] Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full, p. 183.
[387] Martin Gilbert, Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past, (1st ed. 1997), p. 145.
[388] Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, pp. 315-316.
[389] Gilbert, Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past, p. 145.
[390] Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, p. 341.
[391] Ibid., p. viii.
[392] David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, (1st ed. 2011), pp. 162-164.
[393] Ibid., p. 164.
[394] Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full, p. 183.
[395] Ibid.
[396] Ibid.
[397] Ibid.
[398] See Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 490.
[399] Bard, The Arab Lobby, p. 103.
[400] Ibid., pp. 134-135.
[401] Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 74.
[402] David C. Holly, Exodus 1947, (Revised 2nd ed. 1995), p. 73.
[403] Ibid.
[404] Dawidowicz, p. 142.
[405] Ruth Gruber, Exodus 1947, the Ship That Launched a Nation, (1st ed. 2007), p. 5.
[406] Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, When the Danube Ran Red, (1st ed. 2010), p. 13.
[407] Ibid., p. 12.
[408] Ibid.
[409] Ibid., p. 48.
[410] Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory, p. 153.
[411] Ibid.
[412] Ibid., p. 128.
[413] Cargas, p. 138.
[414] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 185.
[415] Wiess, p. 384.
[416] Ibid.
[417] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 248.
[418] Ibid., p. 249.
[419] Mordechai Naor, HAAPALA, Clandestine Immigration 1931-1948, Ministry of Defense Publishing House, p. 41.
[420] Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 249.
[421] Ibid.
[422] Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land, Zionism and Statecraft, (1st ed. 2007), p. 180.
[423] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 376.
[424] Ibid., p. 375.
[425] Holly, p. 61.
[426] Mordechai Naor, p. 61.
[427] Makovsky, p. 227.
[428] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 375.
[429] Ibid.
[430] Ibid.
[431] Ibid., pp. 378-379.
[432] Mordechai Naor, p. 61.
[433] Ibid.
[434] Ibid., p. 68.
[435] Ibid., p. 69.
[436] Ibid.
[437] Ibid, p. 100.
[438] Ibid.
[439] Lawrence L. Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust, (1st ed. 2006), p. 96.
[440] Ibid., p. 389.
[441] Weiss, p. 391.
[442] Ibid.
[443] Ibid.
[444] Ibid., p. 395.
[445] Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, (1st ed. 1953), p. 483.
[446] Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Memoirs, p. 145.
[447] Senor and Singer, p. 130.
[448] Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Memoirs, p. 145.
[449] Ibid.
[450] Dwork and van Pelt, p. 298.
[451] Parkes, p. 356.
[452] Howard Greenfeld, After the Holocaust, (1st ed. 2001), pp. 72-74.
[453] Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Memoirs, p. 145.
[454] Ibid.
[455] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession, p. 24-25.
[456] Ibid., p. 24.
[457] Kevin P. Spicer, Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust, (1st ed. 2007), pp. 276-277.
[458] Ibid. p. 277.
[459] Ibid. p. 278.
[460] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession, p. 25.
[461] Ibid.
[462] Rose, p. 75, note.
[463] Ruth Gruber, Exodus 1947, the Ship That Launched a Nation, (1st ed. 2007), p. 4.
[464] Leni Yahil, The Holocaust, the Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, (1st English ed. 1990), p. 660.
[465] Howard Greenfeld, After the Holocaust, (1st ed. 2001), p. 92.
[466] Ibid.
[467] Ibid.
[468] Ibid., p. 93.
[469] Holly, p. 219.
[470] Ibid. p. 45.
[471] Haganah was the Defense Movement, which later becomes the Israeli Defense Force (“IDF”).
[472] Holly, p. 203.
[473] Ibid. pp. 213, 221.
[474] Bauer, p. 256.
[475] Ibid.
[476] Ibid.
[477] Ibid.
[478] Ibid.
[479] Ibid., p. 258.
[480] Ibid.
[481] Bauer., p. 259.
[482] Irving Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity, (1st ed. 2004), p. 339.
[483] Bauer., p. 259.
[484] Ibid.
[485] Ibid., p. 256.
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