AMERICAN FUTURE

At The Moderate Voice, Shaun Mullen writes that “I have broken what for me has been a cardinal rule in recent days in using Nazi analogies when writing about the Bush administration’s embrace of torture as well as a deafening lack of response from most Americans to this and other outrages not unlike the Germans who failed to speak out about the excesses of the Third Reich.”

Here’s the comment I appended to his post:

Because both of my wife’s parents were survivors of Nazi death camps, I’m particularly outraged by your decision to sink to the Bush-Nazi analogy.

Yes, it is true that the Bush Administration has violated international norms on torture, and, yes, it sickens me. But to leap from that fact and that opinion to a comparison with the Nazis is to seriously overplay your hand.

By using the analogy, you understate — by a huge margin — the qualitative and quantitative differences. The Nazis were far, far more brutal and used torture against millions of people (genocide is torture, isn’t it?)

By mentioning the Bush administration and the Nazis in the same breath, you lessen the unique evil of the Nazi regime.

If you are truly upset about human rights violations, you should be venting your spleen about Darfur, Zimbabwe, Iran, and others. Aren’t those regimes more Nazi-like than is ours? And wouldn’t their inclusion serve to show the vast distance between Bush and Hitler?

If Mullen and others who make this comparison (2.4 million “Bush-Hitler” hits on Google) had made similarly inflammatory remarks in Nazi Germany, they would have been tortured and/or murdered. Quickly.

My thanks to every member of The Greatest Generation.

. . . Hitler was really an Israel-promoting Jew! From The Moderate Voice:

We sincerely hope the Iranian leadership has a healthy mental health plan in its insurance coverage, given this one:

Just when you thought the Iranian leadership could stoop no further: A top advisor to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed in an interview with Iranian website Baztab that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s parents were both Jewish and that Hitler himself was one of the founders of the State of Israel.In the interview, translated by MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) Mohammad-Ali Ramin, a chief aide to Ahmadinejad, told Baztab that Hitler’s paternal grandmother was a Jewish prostitute and his father even kept his Jewish name until finally changing it to Hitler when he was 40.

So when was Adolf’s bar mitzvah? AND:

Ramin also claimed that the reason Hitler developed such an aversion to Judaism was because his Jewish mother was a promiscuous woman. Hitler therefore, says Ramin, tried to escape his religion.Ramin cites a 1974 book by Hennecke Kardel titled ‘Adolf Hitler: Founder of Israel’, which alleges that Hitler strived to create a Jewish state as a result of being influenced by his Jewish relatives and his cooperation with Britain – which also wanted to drive the Jews out of Europe.

Ramin claims in the interview that Hitler both identified with his Judaism and was disgusted by it. It is these ambivalent feelings, said Ramin, that formed the basis for his treatment of Jews.

Oh.

Aside from what it says about the perspective of some key members of the Iranian leadership and how this will confirm a reportedly-growing and solidifying belief in Tel Aviv that Iran is a threat that needs to be dealt with before Israel gets a Chanuka present of a mushroom cloud, it will now leave open a search for confirmation that Hitler was Jewish. Some things could help such as:

• –A photo of Hitler’s bris.


• –A photo of Hitler wearing a yarmulke.


• –Proof that Hitler loved Chinese food.

We’re waiting for a revelation in the next interview, that Yassir Arafat was actually a rabbi from the Bronx.

Even for Iran, this seems a bit extreme. On second thought . . .

The subject of the opening segment of this evening’s “60 Minutes” on CBS was the 50,000,000 pages of documents pertaining to the Holocaust that the German government recently opened to the public.

These excerpts from “Revisiting The Horrors Of The Holocaust” are from the CBS News website:

The Nazis were famous for record keeping but what 60 Minutes found ran from the bizarre to the horrifying. This Holocaust history was discovered by the Allies in dozens of concentration camps, as Germany fell in the spring of 1945 . . . the documents were taken to a town in the middle of Germany, called Bad Arolsen, where they were sorted, filed and locked way, never to be seen by the public until now.

The storerooms are immense: 16 miles of shelves holding the stories of 17 million victims – not only Jews, but slave laborers, political prisoners and homosexuals. To open the files is to see the Holocaust staring back like it was yesterday: strange pink Gestapo arrest warrants as lethal as a death sentence, jewelry lost as freedom ended at the gates of an extermination camp. Time stopped here in 1945.

Conversation with Udo Jost

[Correspondent Scott Pelley] walked through the evidence with chief archivist Udo Jost. He showed 60 Minutes a list of 1,000 prisoners saved by a factory owner who told the Nazis he needed the prisoners labor. This was the list of Oskar Schindler, made famous by the Steven Spielberg movie. “Here are the 700 men and the 300 women whose names were on Schindler’s list,” Jost explains.

The 60 Minutes team also found the file of “Frank, Annaliese Marie,” better known as Anne Frank. It’s her paper trail from Amsterdam to Bergen-Belsen, where she died at the age of 15.

But most of the names here are of unknown people. While the Nazis did not write down the names of those executed in the gas chambers at places like Auschwitz, they did keep detailed records of millions of others who died in the camps. Their names are listed in notebooks labeled “Totenbuch,” which means “death book.” The names are written here, single-spaced, in meticulous handwriting.

“Here we see the cause of death: executed. And you can see, every two minutes they shot one prisoner,” Jost explains.

“So they shot a prisoner every two minutes for a little over an hour and a half?” Pelley asks.

“Yes. Now look at the date: it’s the 20th of April. That was Adolf Hitler’s birthday. And this was a birthday present, a gift for the Führer. That’s the bureaucracy of the devil,” Jost says.

The devil is in the details – the smallest details. Pelley and the 60 Minutes crew were amazed to see the Nazis kept records of head lice.

“You can see the names and numbers of each prisoner, and the amount of lice that were found,” Jost says.

The Nazis couldn’t have disease spreading among slave laborers. “You can see he was a perfectionist. He even put down the size of the lice. Large, small or medium-sized lice,” Jost comments about the Nazi lice inspector.

Conversation with Paul Shapiro

Paul Shapiro helped pry open the archive. He’s Director of Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

“I’m curious. Why did the Nazis keep all these records? If they were gonna murder these people anyway, why keep the paperwork?” Pelley asks.

“Because they wanted to show they were getting the job done. So, in terms of people whose destiny was to be murdered, recording how well that was being done was very important,” Shapiro explains.

And those records make up the largest Holocaust archive anywhere. Run by the Red Cross, the International Tracing Service was set up after the war to trace lost family members. Survivors could write for information, but there was a backlog of 400,000 unanswered letters. And neither survivors nor scholars got past the lobby.

“What was the stated reason for keeping these documents out of the public eye for more than 60 years?” Pelley asks.

“A respect for privacy of individuals was the most-often cited reason,” Shapiro says. “On the one hand, you had governments stating ‘We’re protecting people’s privacy.’ And on the other hand, you had those very people saying ‘No, no, we want the material to be open.’”

The 67 writers and researchers who attended Ahmadinejad’s conference should visit Bad Arolsen. They won’t, but if they did, they would undoubtedly claim that the documents are fakes—all 50,000,000 of them.

The anti-Semitic outbursts emanating from today’s Middle East sound like not-so-instant replays from Nazi Germany. As well they should. Consider this recently revealed (from the British National Archives) 1937 letter sent to Berlin by a Nazi offfical in Palestine:

The Palestinian Arabs show on all levels a great sympathy for the new Germany and its Fuhrer, a sympathy whose value is particularly high as it is based on a purely ideological foundation. Most important for the sympathies which Arabs now feel towards Germany is their admiration for our Fuhrer, especially during the unrests, I often had an opportunity to see how far these sympathies extend. When faced with a dangerous behaviour of an Arab mass, when one said that one was German, this was already generally a free pass.

Another document shows that the Nazis viewed the establishment of a Jewish state with great concern. A 1937 report from German General Consulate in Palestine said:

The formation of a Jewish state… is not in Germany’s interest because a (Jewish) Palestinian state would create additional national power bases for international Jewry such as for example the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Communists. Therefore, there is a German interest in strengthening the Arabs as a counter weight against such possible power growth of the Jews.

In 1938, the British government abandonned a plan to bring to Palestine 20,000 German Jewish refugees to Palestine. The reason: a Foreign Office report concluding that it would have upset Arab opinion:

His Majesty’s Government asked His Majesty’s Representatives in Cairo, Baghdad and Jeddah whether so far as they could judge, feelings in Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia against the admission of, say 5,000 Jewish children for adoption… would be so strong as to lead to a refusal to send representatives to the London discussions. All three replies were strongly against the proposal, which was not proceeded with.

Shortly before Britain reversed its decision to partition its Palestinian mandate, promising instead all of the land to the Palestinian Arabs, Lord Chatfield, Britain’s Minister for Coordination of Defence, told the Cabinet that

If war were to break out, no trouble that the Jews could occasion us, in Palestine or elsewhere, could weigh for a moment against the importance of winning Muslim opinion to our side.

The past is with us today.

Weird is an understatement. The Times reports that a group of German priests and parishioners have begun a politically sensitive fundraising campaign to save the country’s last Nazi-era church. The image of a Nazi storm trooper side by side with Jesus Christ has been carved into the pulpit, the entrance is lit by a chandelier in the shape of an iron cross and the organ was used to stir the spirits at a torch-lit Nuremberg rally. Throughout the church, consecrated in 1933, there are bare patches where swastikas, illegal since the end of the war, have been ripped out.

The priests — Frau Boehm and the Reverend Malte Jungnickel — have applied to have the church declared a listed building and are lobbying the Government to come up with €3 million (£2 million) to fund the restoration. “Look at the face of Christ on the cross,” Herr Jungnickel said. “It is the face of a victorious Aryan, with a bodybuilder’s frame, not the suffering Jesus.”

In 1932 Nazis were encouraged to become “German Christians” and joined their local parishes to undermine the Church’s power to resist the dictatorship. By the mid-1930s, two thirds of the parish were Nazi Party members. They baptised their babies in a wooden font, which still bears the image of a brown-shirted storm trooper, and they married to music played by an organ that helped to create the dark atmosphere of the Nuremberg rallies. Until 1942 bells embossed with the swastika called the Nazi faithful to church on Sundays. Then the bells were melted down and made into cannon.

Someone please tell me why this church should be saved—much less with government money.

Little notice will be given to an approaching anniversary that’s rich with lessons for today. Seventy years ago—on March 7, 1936—3,000 German troops marched into the Rhineland, which had been established as a demilitarized zone by the Treaty of Versailles. ⁱ The German entry into the Rhineland also violated the Treaty of Locarno, a 1925 agreement that guaranteed the permanence of the frontiers of Germany and France and Germany and Belgium. ⁱⁱ

Germany’s troops were under strict orders to retreat at the first sight of French soldiers. No such encounter took place. If there had been, World War II might have been averted. In Hitler’s own words,

If the French had marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.ⁱⁱⁱ

Hitler’s words were echoed by General Jodl at the Nuremberg Trials:

Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.^iv

The occupation of the Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles and Locarno treaties was a major step forward in Hitler’s plan to re-establish Germany as a respected and feared Great Power. The failure of Britain and France to threaten, much less employ, military force to prevent or reverse the occupation revealed their unwillingness to confront a revisionist, totalitarian regime that didn’t hide its contempt for Western values—individualism, tolerance, and democracy. By allowing his gambit to succeed, the two most powerful European liberal democracies encouraged Hitler’s megalomania and fueled his transformation into Germany’s messiah. The end result was a clash of civilizations that resulted in the most destructive war in the history of the world.

Today, we’re again locked in a battle to maintain world peace and sustain Western values. This time, the threat is more complex, as it consists of several distinct but related threads. Their common denominator is political Islam, whose adherents, like the Nazis, believe that history has dealt them an unjust hand, reject our values, and seek a new world order to satisfy their grievances. The threads range from efforts to establish sharia law in Western societies to state-sponsored and transnational terrorist groups to Iran’s nuclear program.

This isn’t where the parallels end. In 1936, there were voices—both in and out of the British and French governments—who believed it was possible to negotiate with Hitler, notwithstanding his written and stated intentions and nature of the transformation of German society that had taken place during the three years of his rule. There was undeserved faith in the ability of a multilateral institution—the League of Nations—to resolve the Rhineland issue. Newspaper editorials and public opinion rejected military action to force the Germans back across the Rhine. Western guilt entered into the equation: the Allies had imposed a vindictive peace on Germany at the end of World War I; therefore, violations of the Versailles Treaty shouldn’t be punished.

Similar attitudes and perceptions are apparent today. So we’ve been here before, and, for that reason, it’s worth taking a closer look at how appeasement’s birth set the stage for unprecedented death and destruction. The following is a chronology of the events immediately before and after the Nazi takeover of the Rhineland.

1. Specifically, by Articles 42, 43, and 44. These articles declared that (1) Germany should not have or establish fortifications on the left bank of the Rhine or within fifty kilometers of its right bank, and (2) Germany should not have in this zone any military forces, nor hold at any time any military maneuvres, nor maintain any facilities for military mobilization.↩
2. Article 2 of the Treaty promised that Germany, France, and Belgium would never invade or attack across these frontiers. Should, however, Articles 42 or 43 of the Versailles Treaty be infringed, such a violation would constitute “an unprovoked act of aggression,” and immediate action would be required from the offended signatories because of the assembling of armed forces in the demilitarized zone. Such a violation would then be brought at once before the League of Nations which, having established the fact of violation, would then advise the signatory Powers that they were required to give military aid to the Power against which the offense had been perpetrated.↩
3. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s Interpreter, p. 41.↩
4. Trial of the Major War Criminals, Nuremberg Documents and Testimony, Vol. XV, p. 352.↩

Ever ask yourself “why didn’t I think of that?” That’s how I reacted to an article on Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism by Dennis Prager, from which this excerpt is taken:

. . . while both Nazi and the Arab/Muslim anti-Semites have used closed societies with their controlled press to promote horrific lies about Jews, the Nazis hid their murder of Jews from the German public. They did not have confidence that enough Germans would support the murder of Jewish men, women and children. The Arab/Muslim anti-Semites, however, have no such problem. Those who kill Jews in Israel are public celebrities.

On the West Bank, a Palestinian university in Nablus has been putting on an exhibition celebrating the Palestinian suicide bombing of a family pizza restaurant in Israel. The exhibition consisted of a replica of the Sbarro’s restaurant complete with Hebrew inscriptions. Inside the exhibit, replicas of human body parts and pizza slices were strewn. Pictures published on the Internet showed Palestinians waiting in line to see the exhibit. In Nazi Germany, there were no public exhibits of Einsatzgruppen (Nazi mobile Jew-killing units) or gas chambers.

The second more frightening aspect of Arab/Muslim Jew-hatred is that many of these haters do not value their own lives. Nazis did.

The historian in me is going to go bonkers, as the British National Archives has released a slew of documents from World War II. Here’s a sample that deals with war crimes and criminals showing a hard-nosed Churchill, who’s identified as “PM”:

The Cabinet discussed in April 1945 whether the principal Nazi leaders, including Hitler, should, when caught, be put on trial or summarily executed without any judicial inquiry:

H.O.

I agree with M.A.P. Believe all major Allies commd to execution of Hitler. This mock trial is objectionable. It is really a political act: better to declare tht. we shall put them to death.

P.M.

Agree the trial will be a farce. Indictment: facilities for counsel. All sorts
of complications ensue as soon as you admit a fair trial. I agree with H.O.: tht. they shd. be treated as outlaws. We shd. however seek agreemt. of our Allies.

P.M.

I wd. take no responsibility for a trial – even tho´ U.S. want to do it. Execute the principal criminals as outlaws – if no Ally wants them.

Smuts.

Summary execution dangerous – as I said when here last. A dangerous precedent.

S.

However much we may favour summary execution, don´t believe you will get Allied agreemt. U.S. won´t: & I gather Stalin won´t. We must therefore compromise or proceed unilaterally.

—W.M.(45)43rd Meeting held on 12 April 1945.

The situation had changed by May 1945:

S.

I prepared a statement of objns to trial procedure. Gave it to Cadogan. But see his later views as at Annex C. Esp. para. 2 & 3. Situation has changed: if we can´t agree on procedure for leaders, let us get agreed procedure for the others. The leaders are being liquidated anyhow.

P.M.

Cd. you negotiate with e.g. Himmler & bump him off later.

H.O.

Quite entitled to do so. And trouble if he isn´t – Head of Gestapo.

P.J.

Buchenwald is not a war crime.

—W.M.(45)57th Meeting held on 3 May 1945

Heinrich Himmler’s great-niece is married to an Israeli Jew. Read about it in The Times.

In May 2004, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Gold Medal at the Cannes film festival.

His film was not the first propaganda-laden documentary to be awarded a top prize by the French. That honor goes to Leni Riefenstahl, whose glorification of Hitler in Triumph of the Will won the Grand Prize at the 1937 Paris Film Festival.

This interesting historical tidbit can be found in Richard Evans’ newly published book, The Third Reich in Power.