Hitler's "prophecy"

Michael Moynihan takes a turn smacking down Pat Buchanan's Holocaust revisionism:

Beyond the absurdity of implicitly blaming Churchill for the Holocaust—because that is what he is really saying when he writes “no war, no Holocaust”—Buchanan ignores an enormous amount of evidence that contradicts his position. What he is really arguing is an issue of scale, for the attempted destruction of European and Soviet Jewry via the concentration camp system began in 1942. But none of this was surprising; none of it a simple reaction to America’s entry into the European war in December 1941 (recall too that it was Germany that declared war on America).

Immediately after invading Poland in September 1939, the invading Germans commenced with the elimination of racial enemies. The murderous Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht General Walther von Brauchitsch informed his fellow commanders two weeks after the invasion, were to engage in “certain ethnic tasks” that were not under the purview of the army. According to German historian Wolfram Wette, “It was in Poland that the Germans initiated their policy of enslavement and extermination…and not in the Soviet Union as is often assumed.” Wette is correct that the murderous groundwork was laid in 1939 and 1940. Under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS began “testing three different gassing technologies” during the months of September and October 1941, according to historian Christopher Browning. At Babi Yar, outside of Kiev, on September 29 and 30, 1941, Einsatzgruppe C shot, according to their own figures, 33,771 Jews. All of this was before Wannsee and before America entered the war.

And what about Hitler’s famous January 30, 1939 “prophecy” of extermination; a speech delivered before England had guaranteed Poland, before the commencement of hostilities, before American entry into the war (Buchanan mentions, though doesn’t analyze, the speech in his book; he also misdates the address). Speaking to the Reichstag on the sixth anniversary of the party’s machtergreifung, he bellowed: "Today I will be once more a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!" Some historians—like Hans Mommsen—have argued unconvincingly that this statement must be seen in "context," and should not be seen as an acknowledgement of an early plan to massacre Jews. But Hitler publically returned to his Reichstag “prophecy” dozens of times, repeatedly castigating European and Russian Jews for not heeding his warning. (See Jeffrey Herf’s book The Jewish Enemy for the countless of the instances in which Hitler and Goebbels returned to the “prophecy.”)

Damian P.

Posted by damian at June 24, 2008 04:44 PM