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Jewish Historian Portrays Holocaust as Improvised

Saturday, April 9, 2016 4:10

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Hungarian women and children arriving at Auschwitz, May/June 1944

A work camp. Really?

According Jewish historian David Cesarani, Hitler’s progress

towards mass extermination of the Jews was never pre-planned

or preordained. The Nazis were sensitive to world opinion and didn’t get

started in ernest until after it became clear they were losing the war.

by Sarah Helm

Review of Final Solution: Fate of the Jews 1933-1949

(Abridge by henrymakow.com)

Early in what he calls his “reappraisal” of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, David Cesarani details the absurdity of an earlier “solution” to the “Jewish question”. In May 1940, nine months into the war, Hitler still had no concerted plan for ridding Europe of its Jews, particularly the two million Polish Jews who had come under his rule since the invasion of Poland in 1939. When the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, produced “some thoughts”, including “the large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or some colony”, the idea was seized on.

The imminent defeat of France meant French colonies would soon become available, including the island of Madagascar, which was to be turned into “an open-air prison… like a parody of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine”. The transfer could start within a month, with millions of Jews sent by ship. Such was the Germans’ confidence that the building of ghettos in Poland was halted, and the SS started learning Swahili.

But Madagascar, like so many other improvised “solutions”, was a non-starter, not least because 25,000 French still lived there and no Axis ships could reach it through the British-controlled sea lanes. Once France collapsed, Hitler believed, Britain would sue for peace. But Hitler’s “ham-fisted” offers didn’t even warrant a response from Winston Churchill and, Cesarani writes, the Germans were left “to continue to fumble their way towards a solution according to their racial-biological precepts, but under circumstances they could not entirely control”.

This detailed presentation of the Madagascar episode gives an early taste of the form Cesarani’s “reappraisal” takes. Over the next 800 pages, he traces a path across a vast mass of material – new and old – demonstrating with urgency and verve how Hitler’s progress towards mass extermination of the Jews was never pre-planned or preordained. This tale of false starts and botches finally leads to the building of the gas chambers; far from being conceived on an industrial scale, they were themselves, at first, “jerry built”.

Cesarani challenges the widely held view that the extermination of the Jews was ever Hitler’s first priority. Of course, his “Jew hatred” was never in question. But his plan for a Europe rid entirely of Jews was always secondary to military aims, and had to be adapted to strategic realities.

Under the cover of war, mass slaughter first became possible, but still plans were only “hatched”, “brashly conceived” or “dreamt up”. Even as Himmler’s death squads began to kill off Russia’s three million Jews – 8,200 were shot within the first few weeks – it was “a contest of arms rather than a preconceived agenda for the murder of Jews” that provoked the savagery. By killing hungry Jews, scarce food was also preserved for Aryan mouths.

Another fallacy challenged here is that the “Holocaust” was implemented by ranks of well-organised Nazis. Much of the work, Cesarani reminds us, was done by collaborators who were recruited hastily and motivated as much by fear or greed as by anti-Semitism.

AUSCHWITZ

It is no coincidence that Cesarani doesn’t delve into the monstrous horror of Auschwitz until page 520. By this time, he has already reset the received “lopsided” story of the genocide by recounting in extensive detail how a million Jews were slaughtered – both in the Russian killing fields and in the often sidelined death camps of Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor – before the Auschwitz gas chambers were fully operating.

(Cesarani who died of cancer last October. His book was published in February.)

Indeed, so frustrated is Cesarani with public “misconceptions” that he proposes “retiring” the word Holocaust, which has “passed its sell-by date” due to the false picture it summons of industrialiZed efficiency. Rather, Cesarani says – apologiZing for the crassness of the term – it was a “cock-up”, a catastrophe that unfolded in the manner it did because the other paths Hitler’s henchmen might have taken to find a “solution” were closed off.

Cesarani is not the first person to challenge the view that the Final Solution was scientifically planned and enacted with industrial efficiency. But, to date, his is the most authoritative and urgent voice to present the story this way – all the more urgent, perhaps, because, as he wrote the last chapters, Cesarani knew this would be his last chance to set the record straight. The acclaimed British scholar died in October at the age of just 58.

For me, Cesarani’s reappraisal seems utterly convincing, not least because it fits entirely with evidence I uncovered while working on the story of Ravensbrück, the only Nazi camp built for women. Here, testimony often referred to the “chaos” and “insanity”, to the “nonsensical” and “improvised” nature of the day-to-day rule in the camp. For example, when there were not enough doctors to abort unwanted babies, a sudden decision was taken to let the babies be born, in the sure knowledge that they would starve to death, albeit under their already-starved mothers’ eyes….

Nowhere are the echoes of the past more poignant to us now than in Cesarani’s accounts of the failure of the West to accept Jewish refugees – either on the eve of war, or as the disaster unfolded. At one point, as more and more visa restrictions were imposed on Jewish immigrants, Hitler ridiculed the West for its hypocrisy in attacking his attitude to the Jews.

The importance of this “reappraisal”, however, lies first and foremost in Cesarani’s incontestable demonstration of the chaotic and ramshackle way the world’s greatest ever crime against humanity came about. The Final Solution would not have been enacted without Hitler’s coming to power, but from then on it didn’t need a master plan; it unfolded in large part thanks to improvisation and chance, as the world looked elsewhere. This makes it all the more possible that something similar could unfold again.

——–

Obituary: David Cesarani, historian and acclaimed biographer of Adolf Eichmann

———- Was Polish Holocaust Also a Hoax?

———– The Macabre Holocaust Numbers Game

Note: Andrew Joyce cites a contradictory Nazi image in his review at Occidental Observer:

“Germans were not being asked to hate Jews; they were being asked to love other Germans. … It would be a mistake to equate Nazi values with hate.” — Cesarani

“Between mid-1933 and mid-1935 “there was no major legislation on Jewish matters.” The State continued to try to monitor and control the “high pressure” felt by some elements of the population in relation to the persistent manifestations of Jewish economic influence. At the start of 1934 the Reich Interior Ministry forbade any interference with Jewish businesses. Several months later Hitler personally “called on Frick and Göring, who controlled the police, to ensure that Jews were not molested.”

Around that time Max Eicholz, a Jew from Hamburg, was able to successfully sue an SS man for calling him a “dirty Jew,” and the CV continued working with the government to reinstate Jews who had been unfairly dismissed. During a trip to the races in Hamburg, English diplomat Sir Eric Phipps noticed that “several prominent Jewish race-owners” were comfortably seated in the same enclosure with National Socialist dignitaries. Another British consul wrote to Phipps that in Frankfurt “even the SA and SS men in uniform do not hesitate to visit Jewish shops.”

American journalist William Shirer visited a spa town south-east of Berlin and found it heavily populated with Jews. Given all the atrocity propaganda he had been exposed to, he remarked that he and his wife were “a little surprised to find so many of them still prospering.” James McDonald began winding up the League of Nations” High Commission for Refugees, writing to a colleague that “within Germany the Jews were better off” than if they decided to go elsewhere as “refugees.”

And the Jews knew it. The German authorities remarked in October that Polish Jews were sneaking into the country looking for work. Many residents of towns targeted by migrants and, in the words of one police chief, suffering “the aggressive behavior of the Jews,” struggled to understand why the regime continuously failed to react to domestic and international Jewish provocation. Letters of complaint were addressed to Hitler that Jews still dominated the livestock trade and “even the Storm Battalion does business with Jews.”

According to Cesarani, all complaints and individual actions “ran up against the protective mantle of the authorities.” The Gestapo noted that the frustrated population was losing faith in National Socialism, and that Jews were once again continuing to grow in strength and influence with “self-assurance and aplomb.” The difficult balance struck by the National Socialists was not ideal, but at least peaceful. This peace would be shattered by successive Jewish bullets.

—–

Source: http://henrymakow.com/2016/04/Jewish-Historian-Says-Holocaust-Improvised.html

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