Holocaust v holocaust

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, 24 October 2007 00:43.

Several years ago, when I was researching the post-war history of Germany and the establishment of the Federal Republic, I found a library copy of Aidan Crawley’s Spoils of the War: The Rise of Western Germany 1945-1972. It’s out of print these days. But it was a good read, an eye-witness testimony mostly of the administration of the British Zone of Occupation, where Crawley was stationed.

Still, this was the first time I had read in any detail of the rapine onslaught of the Red Army, and the terrible conditions in the West visited upon the German civil population. Their daily ration of calories was lower than that fixed by the SS for camp inmates. Yet the Army threw good food away because they could not eat it all, and forbade locals from scavenging for it. Crawley witnessed the spread of tuberculosis among the ruins and, inadequately treated, the toll it claimed through the terrible winter of 1946/7.

He savaged the French administration to the north for their staging of insanely grandiloquent military displays, the purpose of which was to teach the German dogs how a cultured victor behaves. Meanwhile, of course, the dogs were starving.

But the French, as always, were of passing importance. It was for the Americans, and most especially the high American hand in policy for all three zones, that he reserved his greatest ire. He deplored the treatment of German soldiers, and did not shrink from calling the worst of it torture. He railed, too, at the American insistence on reparations - in effect ripping out every worthwhile industrial machine and denying the people any chance of much-needed, normal economic activity.

Crawley, an exceptional man, died penniless in 1993 and amid much personal tragedy, which has continued to stalk his family in the years since. I am glad, though, that he wrote Spoils of the War and helped introduce me to this extraordinary time in Europe’s history.

In April this year, though, another, weightier book was published about the same period. It is After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift by Giles Macdonogh. The Telegraph reviewed it on 18th April:-

How three million Germans died after VE Day

MacDonogh argues that the months that followed May 1945 brought no peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler’s Reich, but suffering even worse than the destruction wrought by the war. After the atrocities that the Nazis had visited on Europe, some degree of justified vengeance by their victims was inevitable, but the appalling bestialities that MacDonogh documents so soberly went far beyond that. The first 200 pages of his brave book are an almost unbearable chronicle of human suffering.

His best estimate is that some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. A million soldiers vanished before they could creep back to the holes that had been their homes. The majority of them died in Soviet captivity (of the 90,000 who surrendered at Stalingrad, only 5,000 eventually came home) but, shamingly, many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they dropped like flies. Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave labour in a score of Allied countries, often for years. Incredibly, some Germans were still being held in Russia as late as 1979.

The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.

Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.

Given that what amounted to a lesser Holocaust was unfolding under their noses, it may be asked why the western Allies did not stop this venting of long-dammed-up rage on the (mainly) innocent. MacDonogh’s answer is that it could all have been even worse. The US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, favoured turning Germany into a gigantic farm, and there were genocidal Nazi-like schemes afoot to starve, sterilise or deport the population of what was left of the bombed-out cities.

The discovery of the Nazi death camps stoked Allied fury, with General George Patton asking an aide amid the horrors of Buchenwald: ‘Do you still find it hard to hate them?’ But the surviving inmates were soon replaced by German captives - Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and even Auschwitz stayed in business after the war, only now with the Germans behind the wire.

Now, I didn’t know anything about McDonogh’s opus until today when Michael R, one of our readers who is generous enough to spy out interesting stories for us, sent me the Telegraph link. But, and here’s the point, he also sent me this link from JTA Daily Briefing:-

Expelled Germans asked to quit Shoah comparisons

A German Jewish leader has asked expelled Germans to stop comparing their suffering to that of Holocaust victims.

Dieter Graumann, a vice president of the Central Council for Jews in Germany, called on the German Association for Expellees on its 50th anniversary to stop inappropriate comparisons, heal rifts with Poland and the Czech Republic, and clear its slate of nationalistic slogans.

The association of Germans expelled from the country at the end of World War II, which marked its milestone Monday with an address by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has lobbied increasingly for public attention to the suffering of Germans forcibly expelled from Nazi-occupied lands. The association, which at its inception represented some 15 million Germans, has created an exhibit on the subject that has caused tensions with neighboring countries.

Speaking with the Netzeitung Internet news agency, Graumann said that the anniversary presents a “great opportunity to make a clean slate. It would be good if the association could actually shake off all the chains of nationalistic thinking.”

Graumann urged the association to “formally and clearly end all its demands on neighboring countries” and stop demanding compensation through the Prussian Trust Fund. He also called for an end to the “unfortunate tradition of drawing parallels between the Holocaust and the expulsion of ethnic Germans.”

You might expect that our exquisitely sensitive elder brothers in faith would recognise fellow suffering, and extend a hand in compassion. But not a bit of it. I was particularly impressed by Herr Graumann’s chutzpah-laden invitation to the German Association for Expellees to “shake off all the chains of nationalistic thinking.” Here is the website of the offending Expellees. Perhaps one of our German-speaking readers would do us the service of translating any of these nationalistic slogans.

It would be nice to know what really upsets the Central Council for Jews in Germany. Competition, probably.

Tags: History

Comments:

Posted by Red Baron on Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:52 | #

An assertive post, considering it comes from an Englishman. Must be thatsense of fairness that it is claimed comes from that breed.

(Who was that mainstream British historian that said WWI was not caused by Germany and another that wrote Auschwitz was simply a transit camp? )

It is one of the most unfortunate turns of history that Britain chose to antagonize Germany, mostly out of jealousy for economic reasons. The consequences led to a disaster of whose dimensions are a large as those of the Peloponnesian War. Now here is a real holocaust, fighting amongst racial kin.

Posted by James OMeara on Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:32 | #

“t would be nice to know what really upsets the Central Council for Jews in Germany. Competition, probably.”

Too right, mate. That is to say, I already made the same connection recently:

Sunday, September 30, 2007

David Irving gets one thing right, at least

Without getting into the whole ‘denial’ thing, or discussing David Irving’s ‘reputation’, professional or otherwise, he absolutely nails the whole issue in this off-hand remark:

“Asked if he now accepts there had been a Holocaust against the Jewish people he said he was “not going to use their trade name”.”

That’s it right there: “their trade name.” The hebraic obsession with ‘The Holocaust’ amounts to getting a term trademarked, policing its use [references to ‘the Armenian Holocaust’ or Amerindian or negro ‘genocide’ are forbidden, as they ‘water down’ the trademark] and even requiring everyone to use it, and pay a fee [‘denial’ laws, reparations]. It’s like those guys in the early years of the commercialization of the Internet, who would buy up potential domain names like ‘starbuck.com’ and then demand a fee for ‘use’ of the obvious name.

Posted by onetwothree on Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:59 | #

Compare MacArthur’s honorable administration of Japan. The Japanese, maybe, looked like noble savages to an extent…“We will teach them about Democracy”.

The Germans, of course, knew all about democracy and rejected it…and so there was nothing corrective to impart but the stick.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:38 | #

Another mass killing, another story. But, of course, it in no way detracts from the unique suffering and special cruelty accorded the six million Jewish dead. As we know.

World War II mass graves open a wound in Slovenia

LANCOVO, Slovenia: After digging for two hours in a chilly forest clearing, the workers had their evidence: bones and the soil-covered, blackened remnant of a shoe confirmed that this was a secret mass grave from World War II.

In the trees a short distance from where the diggers worked, an elderly man looked on. He would not give his name, but said he was at the same spot when he was 16, one morning in 1945, after he heard shouting in the night.

The Lancovo grave is one target of a Slovenian government program to help people come to terms with a hidden legacy of unprecedented slaughter during the war.

So far, 540 such sites have been registered across Slovenia. They are believed to hold up to 100,000 bodies.

“The killings that took place here have no comparison in Europe. In two months after the war, more people were killed here than in the four years of war,” said Joze Dezman, a historian who heads the committee for registering hidden graves.

... Those killed in Slovenia were mostly soldiers who collaborated with the Nazis. Most were slain in the woods without trial. They were victims of a vengeful killing spree by partisans of the Yugoslav leader after British-led Allied troops turned them back from Austria and handed them over.

Slovenia, now a European Union country of two million people, declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, but the graves remained a public secret until excavations in recent years.

“These killings took place in Slovenia because this is where the war was ending: this is where the Iron Curtain was anticipated, this is where refugees found themselves at the end of the war,” Dezman said.

The graves’ existence has been quietly known for decades, but some elderly people are still too afraid of reprisals to speak about them. In Lancovo, the anonymous onlooker shared a distant memory of what he saw as a youth.

“There was blood and remnants of burnt clothes,” he said. “Blood was flowing all over. They were not shot. They were beaten up.”

Mitja Ferenc, chief historian in charge of grave research, said Yugoslavia’s communist authorities persistently refused to acknowledge that the killings had taken place and refused to tell relatives where the bodies were buried.

For almost 50 years, people were not allowed to visit the graves. Many of them were destroyed by deliberate explosions or covered by waste. In some places, like Celje, about 60 kilometers, or 37 miles, east of Ljubljana, parts of towns were built on them.

However, local knowledge persisted: farmers did not allow their livestock to graze in their vicinity. Dezman said that only medical students sometimes visited the sites, when they needed skulls or bones for their studies.

“People who come to me are still afraid someone will see them talking to me. They have fear in their bones,” Dezman said.

Although the graves were known to exist, their number was unknown.

“Only after we started researching the first graves did we realize how many secret graves there were, as people started to open up, calling us and telling us of locations they knew of,” Ferenc said.

In August, Slovenian researchers confirmed there were at least 15,000 victims in a secret mass grave in Tezno, about 120 kilometers northeast of Ljubljana, where mostly Croat and Montenegrin soldiers were slain and buried.

Registrations of secret mass grave locations have grown from 40 in 2002.

“It is high time to acknowledge these graves - after all, more than 60 years have passed since the Second World War,” said Lado Erzen, the local community’s representative for secret graves at Lancovo.

Slovenians account for about a fifth of all victims but, so far none of the killers have been brought to trial.

Posted by Rusty on Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:47 | #

Many say that Jews were the commies in control in the Soviet Union. Can someone post their best and most concise links on this topic, for our guests?

Posted by john on Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:13 | #

Re above:

http://www.vdare.com/macdonald/051105_stalin.htm

http://www.vdare.com/girin/060408_executioners.htm

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:06 | #

Regarding the Eugene Girin piece linked by John above (second link in his comment): In referring to

“ex-Jews like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the thousands of Cheka operatives and Bolshevik party members”

and in adding,

“In fact, Jewish Bolsheviks were simply apostates who turned their back on their faith and people. Some of them were simply violent scoundrels without any sense of ethnic pride and belonging, shunned and despised by their community. Others were brutal revolutionaries — like Trotsky who refused to bury his father in a Jewish cemetery, refused to meet with Jewish delegations, and violently persecuted Russian Zionists. ‘I am not a Jew and have nothing in common with the Jewish people,’ he said around 1919,”

Eugene Girin implicitly disputes the existence of a Jewish tribe whose membership isn’t limited to believing, practicing Jews but includes non-believing non-practicing ones as well. There’s no way to deny Leon Trotsky was a member of the Jewish tribe. Saddam Hussein had the reputation of being a non-believing non-practicing secular Moslem Arab in his personal life and also, to the extent politically possible, in his political policies and preferences but it can’t be denied he was a member of the Moslem Arab tribe in his culture, thinking, politics, fundamental sense of identity, general prejudices, views on history and the world, personal habits, feelings of kinship, and so on. It’s the same with “secular Jews” although it’s common to see anti-leftist Jews deny that Jewish leftists should be viewed as Jews, on grounds they’re not religious. This argument is, of course, so trivially wrong that it’s hard to believe it’s advanced in good faith. Either it’s advanced frivolously or there’s a profound misunderstanding on the part of those advancing it as to the nature of the problem.

Posted by Rusty on Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:15 | #

Diolch, john, perfect. How about the stats for Jewish Lawyers? A guy on the radio yesterday actually said—and I still can’t believe that he admitted it in public—that a majority of the best lawyers were Jewish (the topic was Halle Berry and her Jewish nose joke).

Posted by Matra on Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:52 | #

World War II mass graves open a wound in Slovenia

Slavyanski should arrive any time now to say the slain were all collaborators and class enemies who deserved it.

Here’s a book on all this

From an Amazon review:

Very few of these victims were real traitors or war criminals. Most of them were just opposing the communist revolution, which started after June 22, 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Initially the Communists did not disclose their real objectives - to seize power after the war. They acted under the disguise of struggle against the Germans, Italians and Hungarians, who had occupied Yugoslavia two months earlier. But their real intentions soon became apparent, when they began killing honest and patriotic Slovenes, just because they were opposing communism. Besides some sabotage, or killing a few enemy soldiers, the actions of partisans in the Liberation Front (OF) too often caused more harm to the local population than to their enemy. In their reprisals against the nearby village populations, the German and Italian occupiers killed hostages, or sometimes the entire adult male population, sent the rest to a concentration camp, and burned down the whole village. After almost a year of this kind of suffering, the Slovenian population, supported by the Catholic Church asked the occupiers for arms, to defend themselves against the Communist partisans. When they got the arms they formed the “Village Guards”, later renamed to “Home Guards” (Domobranci) and this meant the beginning of a civil war, with many crimes and victims on both sides. Though the partisans kept attacking the occupiers, it appeared that the struggle against the foreign intruders became of secondary importance.

None of this should be surprising. The French communist ‘resistance’ only started to resist the German occupation after the USSR was attacked.

Posted by danielj on Fri, 26 Oct 2007 01:45 | #

Re Jews in Communist Russia:

From a Jewish source: Stalin’s Jews

From a non-Jewish source: Judaic Communism…

Posted by Duncan Tyyne on Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:22 | #

It’s the same with “secular Jews” although it’s common to see anti-leftist Jews deny that Jewish leftists should be viewed as Jews, on grounds they’re not religious. This argument is, of course, so trivially wrong that it’s hard to believe it’s advanced in good faith.

See the column at the top of this page: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/content.php?pg=1 The .author, one Ezra Levant, writes:

“[Finkelstein’s] greatest asset is that he has a Jewish last name, and that his parents survived the Holocaust.” (emphasis mine)

Posted by VLC on Fri, 26 Oct 2007 05:10 | #

“stop demanding compensation”-jew Graumann

a jew tells the goyim victims of WW2 to stop demanding compensations???? Imagine a german leader telling them to shove their compensation demands up their asses. This would be world news and there would be a boycott of german products. I’m so tired of these kikes

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:06 | #

In the Ezra Levant letter linked in Duncan Tyyne’s comment it says, “Finkelstein denies that six-million Jews died in the Holocaust.” How many does Finkelstein say died? I haven’t read Finkelstein’s book, don’t know much about him, and am not a fan of his (though I support him against Dershowitz in the dePaul tenure outrage), so am unfamiliar with his views. I just skimmed the Wikipedia entry on him but it doesn’t say how many non-combatant Jews he thinks died in the war.

As for Graumann, he’s a piece of filth and should be expelled, with all his unacceptable ilk, not only from Germany but from all decent countries and sent who cares where — Rhodesia, the New & Vastly Improved South Africa, Port Moresby, Antarctica, the bottom of the ocean, the moon, no matter, just get Jews like him away from decent people and normal populations (assuming any normal popuations still exist on the planet, given what the Jews have infiltrated and polluted since the Jewish victory in WW II). The worst aspects of the negative stereotype of Jews that won’t die but keeps cropping up generation after generation are due to exactly this type of Jew — the Graumann type. This type has brought untold misery down on the heads of Jews and apparently will continue to do so, from the looks of this particular specimen and myriads more just like him still operating out there, who’ve learned strictly nothing. It’s precisely because Jews like Graumann can’t be weeded out of the Jews — they seem to always pop up no matter what you do; they’re in the genes or something — it’s precisely because of them that Jews shouldn’t be permitted to settle in European countries in any but the most microscopic numbers and even those are potentially toxic, so perhaps they shouldn’t be permitted to settle at all: zero. Jews like Graumann are a curse on Euros. They’re also a curse on Jews. Thanks to Jews like Graumann it never stops being “déjà-vu all over again” where the Jews are concerned. It just never stops. “On my God, THAT AGAIN?” “Yes, I’m afraid so!” As soon as this piece of sewage opens his mouth you have this appalling sinking feeling of disgust mingled with vague sick dread in the pit of your stomach that it’s back to square one, nothing has been learned, and everybody has to go through everything all over again as if we hadn’t just lived through the past hundred years we’ve lived through. It’s all gone for naught and we’re in for a repetition of the same series of nightmares.

Posted by Duncan Tyyne on Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:54 | #

How many does Finkelstein say died?

To my knowledge he has never specifically disputed the six million figure. If he does believe the number to be smaller, I’d guess he’d put it at 4.7-5.1 million, which were estimates from the early days of Holocaust studies, if I’m not mistaken. I’m almost positive 5.1 million is the number in Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews.