After the recent Holocaust – related debacles on the blog, I decided to refresh my own knowledge of the Holocaust and realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I did.
Did you know, for instance, that Hitler tried to attract Poland as its ally in a prospective war against the USSR but the Poles were very dedicated to the plan of creating a Jewish state in the territories that had been mandated to the British Empire by the League of Nations in Palestine? So Hitler and the Poles ended up being at odds, and Hitler allied himself temporarily with the USSR against Poland.
And now a question for everybody. What is it that Hitler had against Jews? What sin did he impute to them? And please don’t say world domination because that’s no answer at all. Hitler had nothing against world domination itself. It’s only the supposed Jewish world domination that bugged him. So what were Jews doing that bugged him so much?
Clarissa's Blog 
The Poles weren’t feeling altruistic toward their Jewish citizens. They simply wanted them out of Poland, and the extreme solution of slaughtering them all wasn’t on their radar screen at the time.
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The Poles were actually more anti-Semitic than Germans at the beginning of the 1930s. Jews were under 1% of population in Germany but in Poland they were the biggest Jewish community in Europe.
There seems to have actually been a hope in Poland that the expulsion of Jews would destabilize the regions where they would settle, limiting the British colonial power.
So absolutely, this was not an act of kindness on the Poles ‘ part. But it was still hugely better than what Hitler was planning.
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It wasn’t on the Germans in 1934 either. The move from forced emigration out of Europe to extermination in Europe only comes about after the invasion of Poland in fall 1939 at the earliest. But, most scholars put the decision to totally exterminate the Jews at sometime in summer 1941 after the invasion of the USSR.
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There are a number of theories about Hitler’s antisemitism. One links the Jews to the German collapse at the end of WWI. Another links it to his rejection by an art academy where he wanted to study. Another sees it as a matter of political convenience, noting that he actually delegated the design of the “final solution” to a deputy. One writer states that there were Jews close to him that he declared to be non-Jews in order to protect them. The truth is probably some combination of the above. If you are interested, I’ve assembled a set of boards on WWII history on Pinterest including one devoted to the Holocaust.
What bothers me (full disclosure, I lost relatives in the German camps) is the ignorance shown toward what the Japanese Army did in China. In terms of brutality, the Rape of Nanking is fully as horrible as what the Nazi’s did. The Japanese raped women before killing them; they tied men to posts and used them as living targets for bayonet practice.
WWII established that there is only a thin layer separating culture and extreme barbarianism.
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The ignorance (actually, more an unspoken cynical attitude of “who cares?”) is only in the Western world. Ask a Korean or Filipino or Chinese (at least the people our age), and they can give you a vivid account of Imperial Japanese horrors.
The German slaughter of Jews (and Gypsies and homosexuals and the mentally ill and everybody else the Nazis considered “inferior”) is considered in the West to be the SINGLE MOST EVIL ACT IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD because it happened in the supposedly civilized 20th century in the European heart of white civilization. (In other words, that particular genocide happened to US.)
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Isn’t another part the scale of it though? Hitler and the nazi’s killed around 11 million in the camps. Nanjing and other events were smaller (a few 100 thousand? which is obviously horriffic). I feel like that perhaps is part of it too, and that it went on for 6-7 years.
But definitely we hear about the holocaust more in the US so perhaps my understanding of japan’s scale and time frame for horrors in china is off
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Well, the Germans had modern 20th century technology to apply to their butchery, and the Japanese didn’t. Neither did Genghis Khan. That’s why the body count with the Asians is lower.
The Japanese slaughter started much earlier than the Holocaust in Europe. The fighting in World War II that ended in 1945 with the dropping of American atomic bombs began when the Japanese forces invaded Manchuria in 1931 — eight years before the Western world considered the fighting important enough to be called a war.
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It isn’t even in the western world. It has always been well known in areas of the US like northern California where there are large Chinese minorities. But, it has been much better known in other parts of the US since the 1990s. Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanjing was a best seller in the US.
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The Japanese are in deep denial over what they did. Japan is threatening to reduce or withdraw their donations to UNESCO and the current prime minister questions whether comfort women were coerced.
I’m sure there are denialists in Germany but I’m not sure they have that large of a platform.
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Denial of the Holocaust is illegal in Germany, Austria, and twelve other European countries. In Germany and Austria, public denial of the Nazis’ war crimes can result in a prison sentence of up to five years.
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Good. Because as we have seen recently on this very blog, antisemitism is the kind of poison that creeps up on you no matter what.
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The American Constitution enshrines freedom of the press and free speech, no matter how hateful or vile, with EXTREMELY rare exceptions (causing injury by falsely yelling “Fire” in a crowded building is a frequently cited example of illegal speech).
I don’t agree with the ACLU on much, but I would not support any modification or restriction being placed on the U.S. Constitution’s first amendment. None.
Hate speech should be condemned and the speakers shunned by decent people — but odious speech isn’t illegal in America, and it shouldn’t be. America is one of the freest countries in the world, and it needs to stay that way.
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I thought we were talking about European countries. The US constitution doesn’t apply to them.
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We were, and the Germans and Austrians are smart to take legal measures to keep Nazi-style fascism from rising again in their countries.
But some people in America would like to have U.S. laws that turn what they call hate speech into the equivalent of a “hate crime” punishable by law.
Free speech in America includes symbolic displays like publicly burning the American flag (and I agree, constitutionally protected). But now there’s a push by some groups to make displaying the Confederate flag anywhere an illegal hate crime because merely showing that flag is a “provocation.”
What I’m saying is that you can’t pick and choose what you call free speech. I know you didn’t suggest otherwise, I’m just making a point.
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Germany is still applying its laws against denying the Holocaust strictly.
Here’s a headline from today’s international news: “GERMAN 87-YEAR-OLD ‘NAZI GRANDMA’ JAILED FOR DENYING THE HOLOCAUST”
The German newspaper “Das Bild” reported (Fri 13, 2015) that 87-year-old Ursula Haverbeck, well-known in Germany as the “Nazi Grandma” for her pro-Nazi views, has been sentenced to 10 months in prison after being found guilty of denying the Holocaust. Haverbeck was charged earlier this year after giving an interview outside the trial of former SS Sgt. Oskar Groening, when she claimed that Auschwitz wasn’t a death camp.
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We’re getting a bit off-topic in this post. S0 tell us, Clarissa, what was the REAL reason that Hitler hated the Jews so much?
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Don’t worry, I will write a separate post on that. 🙂
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Another theory is that his grandfather was an illegitimate child of a Jewish man who abandoned the child’s mother.
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I probably didn’t word my question very well. I was asking what Hitler’s own explanation was, his guiding philosophy. Gossip is fun but hardly very important. 🙂
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Since I teach this in exchange for African groundnuts I will put in my theory. The reformation of Germany as a Volksgemeinschaft based upon scientific principles of racial hygiene required a foil to act against. There had to be an “anti-German” race and scapegoat for the problems of Germany to define the new Germany against. The Jews were chosen for a couple reason. One they were an easy target. They had no state of their own and had small spread out communities throughout Europe. Two they were a group that was from outside Europe in a number of ways. The most notable being religion, but also the idea of being the descendants of speakers of Hebrew (Semites) from Palestine rather than an Indo-European language (Aryans). Three it was easy to point to a disproportionate number of Jews both in the interantional communist movements that threatened Germany and professions like banking, lawyers, and university professors. This gave them a high visibility as being both a threat to Germany in the form of the KPD with individuals like Eisner and Luxemburg and in Soviet Russia with people like Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev as well as dominating key professions domestically. There wasn’t any other group in Europe that could serve as such a scapegoat, foil, and negative image for constructing a German racial state. The Jews and Gypsies were the only racialized minorities in Germany in 1918 and the Roma while also subjected to genocide could not be pointed to as the same type of threat. Instead they formed an intermediate group between the handicapped and menatally ill (corrupted Germans) and the Jews (alien race) in being a sub-group of Aryans that had become completely corrupted. The threat they posed was thus more akin to the anti-social groups of habitual thieves, prostitutes, and beggars all of which were practices associated with the Roma. The Jews in contrast as the above should make clear were viewed as a much more serious threat to the German state and people. Something that increased over time due to a number of factors not the least of which was the persecution of ethnic Germans in the USSR during the 1930s. The fate of ethnic Germans during the Ukrainian famine in 1932-1933 was a huge deal in Germany and organizations like Bruder in Not had a lot of popular support. These groups themselves were not anti-semitic. But, the Nazis could point to the mass starvation of ethnic Germans in Ukraine and the role of Kaganovich who was Jewish by natsional’nost in this tragedy because it was well publicized by humanitarian groups. None of this so much points to why Hitler himself was obsessed by Jews, but rather more as to why German society was willing to accept and in some cases embrace the form of anti-semitism promoted by the Nazis.
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“None of this so much points to why Hitler himself was obsessed by Jews, but rather more as to why German society was willing to accept and in some cases embrace the form of anti-semitism promoted by the Nazis.”
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\ So what were Jews doing that bugged him so much?
Destroying German culture and prosperity?
I thought the theory was that Germans earned their right to world domination by (supposed) cultural contribution, while Jews supposedly contributed nothing of the sort.
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“Destroying German culture and prosperity?”
“I thought the theory was that Germans earned their right to world domination by (supposed) cultural contribution, while Jews supposedly contributed nothing of the sort.”
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\ You are going in the right direction but it’s the exact opposite. I will write a separate post on it today.
I think I guessed it, but even if I did, still do write the post. Is it connected to Jews being the vector of cosmopolitanism, a force destroying isolation of nation states and unique national cultures?
Similar to today’s situation of American culture being everywhere and the world becoming more interconnected and similar.
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“Is it connected to Jews being the vector of cosmopolitanism, a force destroying isolation of nation states and unique national cultures?”
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They were making more of a mark on the world than he was?
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Yes, absolutely. Hitler was convinced that unless Jews were eradicated completely, there would not be a way for Germans to achieve their full potential.
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But what about the other populations targeted? I’m not talking about the people labeled dissidents or Communists. What about other non-Jewish populations that were targeted?
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The other large group that Hitler detested and wanted eradicated were Slavs. I will write about his beef with the Slavs, as well. But it’s a very different approach that Hitler had to Jews.
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In 1939, the majority of the Europeans states had a fascist regime. During the war, in the Baltic states and Poland, local people sometimes went ahead of the German troops and slaughtered Jews in masses. Then, after the war, many returning Jewish refugees were murdered when they tried to get their property back from Polish people that had taken over. The Communist post-war regime started two pogroms motivated by the “6 Day War” and the “Yum Kippur War” – I had Jewish refugees as work-mates back then. Being totally secular, even eating pork, and having no relations to Israel didn’t save them from the Communist pogroms.
Putin’s Internet warriors have spammed the net with pictures from the Ukrainian Holocaust – for obvious reasons. So you will turn up the very same pictures on hundreds of Russian sites, making picture search with pictures impossible – side after side with Cyrillic letters. As long as there were a SSSR, those pictures were kept under a lid – because some of them showed people who had been “good Communists” from childhood, lynching Jews in the streets,
Picture search with the ‘string’ [ pictures OR photos Ukraine holocaust Jews ] turns up masses of the most terrible pictures. Online newspaper Daily Mail has a collection – but be warned! The pictures are nightmarish!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3205754/Blood-oozed-soil-grave-sites-pits-alive-secrets-Ukraine-s-shameful-Holocaust-Bullets-killing-centre-1-6million-Jews-executed.html
More, texts about, with survivors. No documentary pictures here:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/12/ukraine-holocaust-history-project
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/photography-blog/2015/sep/30/survivors-ukraine-stephen-shore-holocaust
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“Being totally secular, even eating pork, and having no relations to Israel didn’t save them from the Communist pogroms.”
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I got the impression that Hitler didn’t care so much about the Jews during his first years – the Nazi party, NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – National Socialist German Workers’ Party – from the start was a party trying to appeal “the little people”, “the common man” – and had an anti-capitalistic agenda. Their enemies were the well organized Communists, and the Social Democrats. But as time went by, Hitler needed money. And when the plans for the war evolved, he also needed support from the big industrialists and the noblemen, the military cast of the Prussian officers. There were a bitter power struggle with his main opponent Ernst Röhm, the leader of the powerful SA, who favored a rather radical “leftist agenda”. Hitler made a coup with his recently formed personal guard, the SS, and Röhm was captured and killed in prison. After that, SA waned in significance in favor of the increasingly powerful SS.
Stalin didn’t allow the German Communists to cooperate with the Social Democrats – Stalin actually saw then as a bigger threat than the Nazis! So divided they fell – and Hitler was out of enemies and needed new ones to make the people focus on. And the Jews were almost perfect for this.
A story going round – fact or fiction – is that as a small child, Hitler’s life was saved by a Jewish doctor – who treated him for free as his mother couldn’t pay? I suspect that this is a case of “a too good a story to be true”.
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“I got the impression that Hitler didn’t care so much about the Jews during his first years – the Nazi party, NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – National Socialist German Workers’ Party – from the start was a party trying to appeal “the little people”, “the common man” – and had an anti-capitalistic agenda.”
“Stalin didn’t allow the German Communists to cooperate with the Social Democrats – Stalin actually saw then as a bigger threat than the Nazis!”
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“What I’m saying is that you can’t pick and choose what you call free speech. I know you didn’t suggest otherwise, I’m just making a point.”
100% agree with Dreidel here. Respect for free speech is just one of the many ways US is superior to Europe.
I may not like what he says but I’ll staunchly defend Dreidel’s right to call me a monkey-worshiping savage 7 days a week. 🙂
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Welcome back, Stringer Boy — we all missed you. 🙂
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I believe that freedoms have to be deserved and paid for with responsibilities and the readiness to fight for them. I absolutely agree that the US’s concept of free speech is wonderful. For the US. But let’s take Russia, for instance. There were never any limits placed on speech that glorified Stalinism. And now we can see the results. It makes no sense to force freedom of speech on people who are not ready for it.
Since there was never any limit on Stalinist apologetics in Russia, now these Stalin worshippers have taken away everybody else’s freedom of speech.
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“After the recent Holocaust – related debacles on the blog”
What? Can’t I leave you people alone for five minutes without you al going crazy! What is the matter with y….. (oops sorry for channeling parental recriminations there, at least I stopped myself before getting to the “I’ve preached and preached” bit).
But I can’t tell if ths makes me more or less interested in checking what happened while I was away…..
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It apparently is now OK to tell Jewish people who haven’t even mentioned the Holocaust, “Oh, enough with that silly drama of the Holocaust. The real suffering is the kind I experienced because of a really traumatic microaggression.”
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