Topic: The history of the Holocaust

[Yorkykopite]

The history of the Jews before during and after the Holocaust had been the subject of very little serious investigation up to the late 1960's. Since then there has been hundreds of sensational books that rely on graphic details and photographs of the Final Solution.  Finkelstein and Novick lead  the latest group of dedicated serious Jewish investigators. Me I would like to know about the relationship of the Western Powers towards the Death Camps.

Have you read these books? Surely not, otherwise you wouldn’t have written that post. Novick's and Finkelstein’s books are both interesting (Novick’s especially) but they are books about how Shoah has been ‘remembered’ or ‘memoralised’. They are not books about the Jewish experience under the Nazis.

And to claim, as you do, that there had been no serious work on the holocaust until the late 1960s beggars belief. The greatest scholarly work ever written about Shoah was published in 1959 by Raul Hilberg ('The Destruction of the European Jews - 3 volumes). Hilberg had spent 14 years researching the book, sorting through hangars full of captured German documents. Has there been a better work of history this century?

It is true, as Novick points out, that interest in the holocaust was almost nil in Israel in the first fifteen years of its existence. It remained a deeply private matter and never got talked about in public. Why? There were many reasons, but the one that Novick says was most important was shame. Some of this was the "guilt of survival" (read Primo Levi on this – a man who survived Auschwitz and never lived with peace of mind again). But some of it was shame with ‘Jewishness’. To the new Israeli citizen, apparently, the orderly way in which Jews in Europe had apparently gone to their deaths was embarrassing. It spoke of a passivity that the ‘new Jew’ in Israel had clearly thrown off. This may have been bad history. It may have criminally underestimated the power of the Nazi state and the ardour of those manning Hitler’s killing machine. But that’s the way it was. Until Eichmann.

When Eichmann was captured in South America and brought to Israel for trial in 1961 everything changed. Israel started remembering – and of course the rest of the world did too. Auschwitz, a name that didn't mean sod all to most people, replaced Belsen in the popular imagination. Belsen was known because the British had filmed the horror they found there (see El Campeador's post). But Belsen, which was in Germany, was small beer compared to Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Madjanek – extermination camps, pure and simple, tucked away in Poland.

Following the Eichmann trial, and following Hilberg’s pathbreaking book, there was a rush to print. Memoirs, diaries, documentary film, fiction and works of historical scholarship - Jews and non-Jews, rightly, wanted to testify. To call this entire outpouring "sentimental" is utterly stupid. Primo Levi? Lanzmann's 'Shoah', Elie Wiesel, the ITV programme 'Holocaust' from 'The World at War'? etc etc. These are great works of art, fella.

Much of the recovery work was done by Jewish scholars. As always, when Jews discuss something, a hundred different opinions emerge. It was like this with the holocaust scholarship. To argue, as DannyD does, that there was a bland consensus about what Shoah meant is to tell the opposite of the truth. It was chaos! People argued about the origins of Shoah (Driven by ideology? Driven by culture? Driven by the exigencies of war?). They argued about the behaviour of the victims (Too passive? Too compliant? Too complacent? Too helpless?). They argued about the conduct of the Allies (Should they have bombed Auschwitz? Could they have bombed Auschwitz? What did they even know about Auschwitz?) They argued about its connection with the founding Israel (Deprived the new state of its best? Made the new state possible?)   

Some classic books works of scholarship emerged from all of this. Hilberg, Davidowicz, Arno Mayer, Saul Friedlander, Chris Browning, even the strange book by Goldhagen called Hitler’s Willing Executioners which argues that the holocaust was the result of genocidal urges in the bulk of the German population – phooey!). And the debate goes on, and on, and on and on. Which is the way it should be.

There is no conformity about what Shoah was or meant. There never will be.

But that’s ok. In fact it’s good. Because, despite all the argument, everyone is now agreed on its dimension and everyone (who’s truly human) recognises the full horror.

[Armin]

An excellent post.

I note over 3 million dead Soviet PoWs don't merit a mention...

One of the most moving places I've ever been to is the Piskariyovskoye Cemetery in what is now St Petersburg. Walking past the pits dug to hold the dead, a number marking the year of burial the only marker. You walk an awful long way before the number changes. At the memorial old women wept as if the war had ended that very day.

There's a quicktime panorama available at this site

http://ww2panorama.org/panoramas/saint-petersburg/

Figures:

107,158 air bombs, 148,478 artillery bombs, 16,744 killed, 33,782 wounded, up to 2,000,000 people starved to death.

[Veinticinco de Mayo]

An excellent post.

Seconded.  Thanks Yorky, an excellent post that has helped me to better map the yawning gaps in my reading.

[DannyD]

Have you read these books? Surely not, otherwise you wouldn’t have written that post. Novick's and Finkelstein’s books are both interesting (Novick’s especially) but they are books about how Shoah has been ‘remembered’ or ‘memoralised’. They are not books about the Jewish experience under the Nazis.

And to claim, as you do, that there had been no serious work on the holocaust until the late 1960s beggars belief. The greatest scholarly work ever written about Shoah was published in 1959 by Raul Hilberg ('The Destruction of the European Jews - 3 volumes). Hilberg had spent 14 years researching the book, sorting through hangars full of captured German documents. Has there been a better work of history this century?

It is true, as Novick points out, that interest in the holocaust was almost nil in Israel in the first fifteen years of its existence. It remained a deeply private matter and never got talked about in public. Why? There were many reasons, but the one that Novick says was most important was shame. Some of this was the "guilt of survival" (read Primo Levi on this – a man who survived Auschwitz and never lived with peace of mind again). But some of it was shame with ‘Jewishness’. To the new Israeli citizen, apparently, the orderly way in which Jews in Europe had apparently gone to their deaths was embarrassing. It spoke of a passivity that the ‘new Jew’ in Israel had clearly thrown off. This may have been bad history. It may have criminally underestimated the power of the Nazi state and the ardour of those manning Hitler’s killing machine. But that’s the way it was. Until Eichmann.

When Eichmann was captured in South America and brought to Israel for trial in 1961 everything changed. Israel started remembering – and of course the rest of the world did too. Auschwitz, a name that didn't mean sod all to most people, replaced Belsen in the popular imagination. Belsen was known because the British had filmed the horror they found there (see El Campeador's post). But Belsen, which was in Germany, was small beer compared to Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Madjanek – extermination camps, pure and simple, tucked away in Poland.

Following the Eichmann trial, and following Hilberg’s pathbreaking book, there was a rush to print. Memoirs, diaries, documentary film, fiction and works of historical scholarship - Jews and non-Jews, rightly, wanted to testify. To call this entire outpouring "sentimental" is utterly stupid. Primo Levi? Lanzmann's 'Shoah', Elie Wiesel, the ITV programme 'Holocaust' from 'The World at War'? etc etc. These are great works of art, fella.

Much of the recovery work was done by Jewish scholars. As always, when Jews discuss something, a hundred different opinions emerge. It was like this with the holocaust scholarship. To argue, as DannyD does, that there was a bland consensus about what Shoah meant is to tell the opposite of the truth. It was chaos! People argued about the origins of Shoah (Driven by ideology? Driven by culture? Driven by the exigencies of war?). They argued about the behaviour of the victims (Too passive? Too compliant? Too complacent? Too helpless?). They argued about the conduct of the Allies (Should they have bombed Auschwitz? Could they have bombed Auschwitz? What did they even know about Auschwitz?) They argued about its connection with the founding Israel (Deprived the new state of its best? Made the new state possible?)   

Some classic books works of scholarship emerged from all of this. Hilberg, Davidowicz, Arno Mayer, Saul Friedlander, Chris Browning, even the strange book by Goldhagen called Hitler’s Willing Executioners which argues that the holocaust was the result of genocidal urges in the bulk of the German population – phooey!). And the debate goes on, and on, and on and on. Which is the way it should be.

There is no conformity about what Shoah was or meant. There never will be.

But that’s ok. In fact it’s good. Because, despite all the argument, everyone is now agreed on its dimension and everyone (who’s truly human) recognises the full horror.

Who said both these books are about the experience of Jews remembering The Holocaust? Finkelstein’s book is about how The Holocaust has been hijacked by Zionism and dates that to around mid 1960 were he says himself in The Holocaust Industry there was very little serious material published. He sites, like all serious scholars Hilberg’s work, as well as two others but that is it. Published in 1959 Hilberg’s work began a serious discussion within intellectual circles inside and outside Judaism over the Holocaust, but I stand by what I say and Finkerstein also states this  that the majority of books published were sensational that dwelt on the horror of the camps and kept miles away from any discussion on how not just 6 millions Jews but 11 million people were taken and industrially exterminated, in the instance of the 6m is that not the Jewish experience under the Nazis or was The Holocaust outside of that experience?

Noviks book as opposed to Finkelsteins is about the subjective feelings, the emotions of Jews towards the Holocasut, not a broad examination of the facts that made it possible including what you choose to leave out the roll played by the Zionists movement. I have read Finkelsteins and Novick’s books. I am looking at The Holocaust Industry as I type this reply. (do you want a photo Jorky) I take my knowledge first hand not as you do search Amazon for a review and use that as a basis for a discussion. Hilbergs volumes are massive works that I read many years ago, in the Picton Library, since then I have bought the 3rd edition and go back regularly to see how he deals with any recent questions relating to The Holocaust. (would you like a photo Yorky?)

Before the trial of Eichmann there was a far more interesting trial wasn’t there, in fact there is a growing theory that Eichmann’s capture and trial was the result of the revelations during the libel case brought against Malchiel Greewald an Israeli journalist who accused Rudolph Kasztner a  Zionist and leading member of Mapia that exposed the Zionist culpability in the death camps. Eichmann’s trail was more about doing a public relations job, rewriting history and white washing Zionism’s roll in it than bringing a monster to justice. If it was why did the Israeli authorities not demand that the USA give up the dozens of Nazi war criminals it was giving sanctuary to.

I stated “”The history of the Jews before during and after the Holocaust had been the subject of very little serious investigation up to the late 1960's””

Since when did very little become none, none as you claim I declared. Nobody not even one who earns a living through research can have read every single item on any given subject. They rely on shared knowledge of these things, in fact the whole process is shared knowledge. Here is what Finkelstein has to say on the subject of a dearth of serious literature.

“”my parents brooded in private; the suffering they endured was not publicly validated. But wasn't that better than the current crass exploitation of Jewish martyrdom? Before the Nazi holocaust became The Holocaust, only a few scholarly studies such as Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of The European Jews and memoirs such as Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Ella Lingens-Reiner's Prisoners of Fear were published on the subject.' But this small collection of gems is better than the shelves upon shelves of shock that now line libraries and bookstores". (N.G. Finkelstein,The Holocaust Industry p7)

Finkelstein sites his parents subjective response to the lack of  a serious study. He also explains his disagreements with Novick for him it is all about “the self” and the individuals  memory that Novick admits is arbitrary. The choice is made , Novick argues, not from "calculation of advantages and disadvantages" A scientific approach but rather "without much thought for the consequences."  Novick The Holocaust p3-6.
Finklestein explains his reasoning against Novicks ………..The initial stimulus for this book was Peter Novick's seminal study, The Holocaust in American Life, which I reviewed for a British literary journal.' In these pages the critical dialogue I entered in with Novick is broadened; hence, the extensive number of references to his study. More a congeries of provocative apercus than a sustained critique, The Holocaust in American Life belongs to the venerable American tradition of muckraking. Yet like most muckrakes, Novick focuses only on the most egregious abuses. Scathing and refreshing as it often is, The Holocaust in American Life  is not a radical critique. Root assumptions go unchallenged. Neither banal nor heretical, the book is pitched to the controversial extreme of the mainstream spectrum. Predictably, it received many, though mixed, notices in the American media".N.G. Finkelstein The Holocaust Industry p4

He goes on "Novack’s central analytical category is “ memory” Currently all the rage in the ivory tower, "memory" is surely the most impoverished concept to come down the academic pike in a long time. With the obligatory nod to Maurice Halbwachs, Novick aims to demonstrate
How “current concerns” shape “ Holocaust memory” Once upon a  time, dissenting intellectuals deployed robust political categories such as "power" and "interests," on the one hand, and "ideology," on the other. Today, all that remains is the bland, dcpoliticized language of "concerns" and "memory." Yet given the evidence Novick adduces, Holocaust memory is an ideological construct of vested interests. N.G. Finkelstein The Holocaust Industry p5

Unlike you Yorky I do not list books as a show of how clever I am. For me it is done to point the reader in the direction of decent books on the subject. I also make direct accredited quotes giving a reference to them. Something you continually fail to do. Making me wonder if you have copies of books you claim to have knowledge of.  Just to show what your intent in your reply is lets take this paragraph

“And to claim, as you do, that there had been no serious work on the holocaust until the late 1960s beggars belief. The greatest scholarly work ever written about Shoah was published in 1959 by Raul Hilberg ('The Destruction of the European Jews - 3 volumes). Hilberg had spent 14 years researching the book".

Hilbergs work was published in 1961,you should know this if you have read it, in the 3rd edition he states  “Why then should I have pursued my own work, which I had begun more than fifty years ago, after the appearance of the first edition in 1961 and second in 1985” (Preface p ix)  Or did you purchase your copy from the same bookshop you allegedly purchased the bastardised first edition of  Terrorism and Communism:  Or is the revue of Hilberg you have taken as your own as flawed as your own accusations?

You say the Eichmann trial in 1961 began a flood of literature, and also that in the first 15 years of Israel’s existence the interest in the Holocaust was nil So that dates it 1963 so what are you arguing about Late 60s or early/mid  60s a matter of a few years OK I won’t argue with you on the span of dates, but Finkelstein does. Your intent is not to broaden out a debate with accredited facts that the reader can research and see for themselves but to shoot down the argument put before you. Looks like those 18 months you spent in a kibbutz in 1980 taught you a lot about creating mistruth out of truth, part of the collective agricultural program eh!

Now lets examine this piece ……

 “”To argue, as DannyD does, that there was a bland consensus about what Shoah meant is to tell the opposite of the truth.( here’s that kibbutz training again) It was chaos! People argued about the origins of Shoah (Driven by ideology? Driven by culture? Driven by the exigencies of war?). They argued about the behaviour of the victims (Too passive? Too compliant? Too complacent? Too helpless?). They argued about the conduct of the Allies (Should they have bombed Auschwitz? Could they have bombed Auschwitz? What did they even know about Auschwitz?) They argued about its connection with the founding Israel (Deprived the new state of its best? Made the new state possible?)   

Hang on when did I say there was a bland consensus about what the Holocaust meant? There was no agreement on anything because as you admit yourself there was very little open discussion on it. You then list a selection of questions you say was paramount to the Jewish thinking on The Holocaust, nothing to back up your opinion just a list grabbed out of your own head. But of course omitting the main question raised between the Kasztner trial and Eichmann’s, and ignoring completely that part of my post that put forward questions relating to the roll of the Zionist leadership during the Nazi occupation  of Europe. Especially through the Judenrats. The Jewish Councils set up by the Nazis to make it easier to dispatch the Jews in the Ghettos to the camps. The Nazi leadership found them indispensable and Karl Adolf Eichmann couldn’t praise them too highly.  

P.S Elie Wiesel and great works of art don’t go I am sorry another pointer that you copy and paste anything that suites. His gushing praise for another other work of art The Painted Bird that turned out to be roaring fake is about the nearest he has ever come to being close to a work of art. Here is Finkelstein on Wiesel, the man who chargers $25,000 and a stretch limo to do a Holocaust event. “”Elie Wiesel's performance as official interpreter of The Holocaust is not happenstance. Plainly he did not come to this position on account of his humanitarian commitments or literary talents.2 Rather, Wiesel plays this leading role because he unerringly articulates the dogmas of, and accordingly sustains the interests underpinning, The Holocaust””.GH Finkelstein  The Holocaust Industry p4
 

And that is one of his more charitable descriptions of Wiesel

[Yorkykopite]

Seconded.  Thanks Yorky, an excellent post that has helped me to better map the yawning gaps in my reading.

I can't recommend the Hilberg book too much VdM. It is a monumental piece of research, built on mountains of primary documents and is scrupulous to its core. Because of that, I guess, one is meant to say it's "a difficult read". But it honestly isn't. It's literature. Hilberg writes like an angel.

You will remember Hilberg if you've ever seen 'Shoah'. He is the one authority (as opposed to eye-witness) that Lanzemann interviews in that film. Hilberg has all the German railway documents in front of him and tells Lanzemann about the brilliance of the bureaucracy that organised the shipments of people to Poland from all over conquered Europe. Chilling. Throughout his book there's a suppressed rage, but he doesn't let it surface because he wants to get the bare facts on record so they're never forgotten. He wasn't popular with many Jewish groups because he dwelt on evidence which showed that the majority of the victims of Shoah were passive, believing always that there'd be a haven for them even as they neared the bitter end (They're always had been before, hadn't there? No matter how bad things got).   

Honestly, nobody who wants to understand the 20th century can afford not to read this book!!

[DannyD]

You will remember what Hilberg says in the preface to his work. On what form and structure the book is based. On what was the parameters he exercised, and taking account of the discipline  what was relevant to his work and what wasn’t. In short what the books theme is. He is very certain on that in the 1st and 3rd editions so anyone reading it from first page to last understands the work.

This alone forms many questions and arguments on his works. So Yorky come forward and tell us in your own words for once what was Hilberg discussing in his preface? Give you a hint that nonsense you say he wrote that the Jews were passive shows to anyone WHO HAS READ THE BOOK that the person who makes that remark, has never been within a mile of the work Step up to the plate Yorky from Amazon.

[DannyD]

Seconded.  Thanks Yorky, an excellent post that has helped me to better map the yawning gaps in my reading.

You can take out the 2nd edition at Picton Library. Shelf Number 323.14/HIL

The 3rd and latest edition is only available in The Reference Dept. My 3rd edition was given as a prezzy but I have checked and the price today is around £100. you can reserve the Public Library edition by going here if you have a card, if not you can join.

http://www.liverpool.gov.uk/Leisure_and_culture/Libraries/index.asp

[kesey]

Danny Brother ( especially you )  and Yorky me arl mucker.   You are both right but does it really matter who said this , that , what when or whatever........?

It's gone. It's happened live in the NOW and look to a brighter future for all of mankind.      


Come ' ed lets go .           

[Yorkykopite]

Danny Brother ( especially you )  and Yorky me arl mucker.   You are both right but does it really matter who said this , that , what when or whatever........?

It's gone. It's happened live in the NOW and look to a brighter future for all of mankind.      


Come ' ed lets go .          

I think it does matter. Those who fail to remember their history are condemned to repeat it, and all that. 

Danny, as for you pal, you are a very strange man. Why you want to turn this thread into "Yorky cribs everything off Amazon" I don't know. Some massive inferiority complex I expect.

However to pursue the Hilberg theme (because it is relevant to the thread) here's what the fella says about Jewish passivity....oh, ok pages 1038-39 vol 3 (1985 edition, Holmes and Meier). It's an amazing piece of writing and an amazing piece of analysis. 

"The Jews attempted to tame the Germans as one would attempt to tame a wild beast. They avoided 'provocations' and complied constantly with decrees and orders. They hoped somehow the German drive would spend itself. This hope was founded on a 2000 year-old-experience.....European Jewry consequently made every effort to reinforce its traditional behaviour, much as the German bureaucrats were buttressing their thrust into destruction. The Jews, like the Germans, developed psychic mechanisms for suppressing unbearable truths and for rationalising extreme decisions. One is struck by the fact that the Germans repeatedly employed very crude deceptions and ruses. The Jews were bluffed with 'registrations' and 'resettlements', with 'baths' and 'inhalations'. At each stage of the destruction process the victims thought they were going through the last stage. And so it appears that one of the most gigantic hoaxes in world history was perpetrated on five million people noted for their intellect. But were these people fooled? Or did they really fool themselves?"

Hilberg goes on to document instances of brave Jewish resistance (including from children). But he concludes (page 1044) by saying "the Jewish victims, caught in the straitjacket of their history, plunged themselves physically and psychologically into catastrophe".

Wow!

[Monkey Red]

While I was still a guard at the main gate of the camp in Hohne (Bergen Belsen) I remember being on duty one Sunday, when a car pulled up at the gate. Out stepped a little old Lady and an old Man, both must have been in their early 80´s. She approached me and asked me if they could possibly have a look at the Jewish Cemetary inside the camp, which is a British Army camp, she then proceeded to tell me their story, of how they were taken to Auschwitz and later on to Bergen Belsen, where most of her Family died, then she rolled up her sleeve and showed me her tattoo´d inmates number on her forearm. I just welled up on the spot and didn´t know what to say, she just patted me, like a little old granny would and all three of us just stood there with tears in our eyes, it was surreal.

Whenever former inmates of Bergen Belsen showed up at the main gate we moved heaven and earth to get them an escort and show them around the camp, where hundreds of inmates still died after liberation, due to typhoid and malnutrition. A very humbling experience, especially when you live just 2 miles from the former camp.

[kesey]

I think it does matter. Those who fail to remember their history are condemned to repeat it, and all that. 

Fair enough.   But Im not sure if I totally agree Yorky .   But hey we're all elements of nature trying to express ourselves I guess.

Things liike this interest me more these days and this is happening to a lot of people across our home and planet. Which can only be a good thing which can only lead to PEACE.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuSLqaW5W-8

[DannyD]

Danny Brother ( especially you )  and Yorky me arl mucker.   You are both right but does it really matter who said this , that , what when or whatever........?

It's gone. It's happened live in the NOW and look to a brighter future for all of mankind.      


Come ' ed lets go .           

History true history kesey tells us about how something evolved, it also allows us to better understand its present and the future. Israel is built on lies and deception, that is its history, but it doesn’t end there, for it to have any credibility within its own people, never mind the population of the world it has to continually re-write its history on a daily basis. How can such a nation get away with it so much, the answer that Jews themselves are coming to is The Holocaust is used as a cloak of invisibility. To question what is today you have to trace it back through yesterday.

The actions of Jews like Finkelstein and others creates a reaction from those with a vested interest in keeping myths and lies alive. Then there are those like Yorky who are apologists for the actions of Israel. No matter what crime they commit they try to balance it out or deflect it with some erroneous reason while displaying some measure of opposition. It is no coincidence that Yorky has come out of the Zionist closet during the breakout from Gaza. There is also serious questions as to his honesty, He posts quoting several diverse authorities without any link of accreditation that can be checked by the reader. It is a method used by scoundrels through the ages to discredit by any means what he opposes personally and in so doing throwing fuel on the fire for every backward tendency that takes his words for facts.

In another thread on here he sites Marx tryi8ng to make out Marx Trotsky and Luxemburg are all anti Jewish when in fact all three were Jews and fought against the pogroms of Russia and Germany. He gives no link to what he sites as Marxism in spite of me posting the link for him that gives all the works of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and about everyone else who has ever writen a Marxist piece. Doesn’t this show an intellectual dishonesty if not a total dishonesty as a person.

 The Gaza breakout has created enormous divisions and panic in Zionist circles, they thought The Palestinian masses were finished and nothing more than gullible tools for their leaderships own ambitions. Part of the Zionist panic is that the leadership both Hamas and Fattah are being questioned. Who replaces them in the void? Hopefully a revolutionary party that will unite Jews, Arabs and Christians under one flag and nation.

[kesey]

History true history kesey tells us about how something evolved, it also allows us to better understand its present and the future. Israel is built on lies and deception, that is its history, but it doesn’t end there, for it to have any credibility within its own people, never mind the population of the world it has to continually re-write its history on a daily basis. How can such a nation get away with it so much, the answer that Jews themselves are coming to is The Holocaust is used as a cloak of invisibility. To question what is today you have to trace it back through yesterday.

I have rad a lot of alternative theories about the creation of Israel , our planet and the universe. A lot of it most probably true mate. I've had a few run ins with mister Yorky over the past few years and he will tell you.

Right NOW at this part of my own spiritual evolution and that of our planet and our home Gaia I have came to the conclusion that I really do not give a shite who what when where and all that. I'd rather concentrate my energies on me, the self and my spirit. This is the place where THEY and there is a they do not want us to look because that's where the true power , realisation and GOD is to be found. When people realise this and more and more people are in this very important transitional period that we are all experincing.

So Zionists I love you. Non Zionists I love you.   Jews I love and Non Jews I love you.  Danny D I love you and Yorky I love you.

 Hopefully a revolutionary party that will unite Jews, Arabs and Christians under one flag and nation.

They day is close brother where all of mankind will be united . It is close, very close.   


Om Shanti to all .     

[Yorkykopite]

and Yorky I love you.

Thanks. I'm very lovable. 

[Yorkykopite]

Two old Jewish men are sitting on a park bench in Berlin in the early 1930s. Things are not so bad as yet, but that doesn't mean they won't get worse. One of the two men is solemnly reading a Jewish newspaper. The other is reading a Nazi newspaper, and laughing out loud.

Finally the first man stops reading and says "It's bad enough that you read that pro-Hitler rag. But to laugh at it!"

The second responds with a shrug. "What if I read your paper? It tells me about Jewish windows being broken, Jewish shops boycotted, Jewish children beaten up in school, and Jewish old folk having to clean the streets with soap. So...if I read the Hitler paper it tells me that we Jews control the whole world".

[DannyD]

However to pursue the Hilberg theme (because it is relevant to the thread) here's what the fella says about Jewish passivity....oh, ok pages 1038-39 vol 3 (1985 edition, Holmes and Meier). It's an amazing piece of writing and an amazing piece of analysis. 

Well there you go, just shows you what you can do. Pity it has taken so much badgering for you to do what should be doing voluntary and as a matter of principle.  I won’t even quibble that the authentication might be from any one of a thousand items on the internet, let’s not be churlish eh! Lets just hope this new enlightenment continues, and a proper debate on the issues can take place without me chasing your tail asking for verification of what you post. I may go along way to removing some of the mistrust a have towards you. You could go back to Gaza thread and in your new found correctness give the readers the source to that claim Marxism wants to annihilate the Jews

Re Hilberg yes that quote is in the 3rd edition further along in the 3rd Volume than the 2nd Revised edition. Having the luxury of being allowed to verify it I concede that but in my defence I never remembered it from my reading of the 1st edition. Most of those who have read Hilberg take it as a work of reference and not theoretical with a philosophical message Hilberg says of his work in the preface to the 1st edition:

To begin with, a word should be said about the scope of this book. Lest one be misled by the word "Jews" in the title, let it be pointed out that this is not a book about the Jews. It is a book about the people who destroyed the Jews. Not much will be read here about the victims. The focus is placed on the perpetrators…….. there will be no emphasis on the effects of the German measures upon Jewry in Europe and elsewhere. We shall not dwell on Jewish suffering, nor shall we explore the social characteristics of ghetto life or camp existence. Insofar as we may examine Jewish institu¬tions, we will do so primarily through the eyes of the Germans: as tools which were used in the destruction process. In short, this study does not encompass the internal developments of Jewish organization and Jewish social structure. pxv

It is in the sphere as a reference book crammed to the gills with dates figures, tables and list upon list that the praise for it is substantiated. As a work of theory it is very poor, subjective and reflects not only the reactionary Zionist theory that the Jews themselves were culpable for the Holocaust, but also his right wing republican views on the working class.

I do not recall any of his politicizing from reading the 1st edition.  I would have to go back and read what he says on that subject back then. The 2nd edition what Hilberg calls the revised edition (1985) looks to have been updated using much material from many archivists and librarians inside Israel considering that nations panache for turning facts into Israeli facts I am concerned that the revisions are not in the best interest of a broader open knowledge of the subject.

Sadly where Hilberg delves into philosophising and theory he falls down badly, none more so than the piece you reproduced on here. For him like many who support the Zionist view of history he sees the defeat of the Jews as an inherent  flaw within the “Jewish race” showing itself  through the individual who accepts the Nazi conduct towards them passively. This completely disregard  the  roll of Jewish leadership at the time, is not mentioned within this context, he names individuals and organisations but doesn’t draw the conclusion that it was the lack of any leadership that was the root cause of the Holocaust, not any timid response to it. He writes about the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto. He lists each and every Zionist organisation including those who took no part and others whose youth had split to form alliances with the Communists. He mentions the work of the Communists in fighting the Nazis across Europe on very rare occasions and never in any shining light, given that they where the corner stone for many resistance movements and that Jews who had escaped deportation in the occupied countries filled their ranks that is surprising. Again I would have to go back and check the 1st 2nd and 3rd editions to see what has changed if anything.Regarding the Warsaw Ghetto he makes the ridicules claim the communist youth in the ghetto fought “ if only to support the Soviet Union” p534. By doing so he allows the reader an indication as to his feelings towards this group.  

The Zionists took a leading roll in the Jewish community throughout Europe under Nazi occupation its dealing with the Nazi regime was based on their own national aspirations and philosophy. The Zionist movement in Germany had from the start taken the view that Hitler’s National Socialists had many things in common with their own philosophy. A good look through the archives of the time shows to what extent that closeness became a partnership. Just one item within the massive history of that time shows us how far Zionism was prepared top go to be recognised by The Nazis as the official leadership of the Jews. This eventually lead to them doing the same job in the occupied countries held by The Nazi’s.

I think Armin this would be a good time to split this thread. This debate looks to be a runner for some time.

[Yorkykopite]

Wow Danny that was a long post to make just one point.

But, thanks, I accept your apology. 

[DannyD]

Ap

Wow Danny that was a long post to make just one point.

But, thanks, I accept your apology. 

Sorry missed that where is there an apology and for what, for having to go to extremes to get you to do the correct thing and back up what you post. I hope you keep it up maybe more time will be spent on the subkect than trying to get clarity out of you.

[Armin]

Having looked at VDM's original thread with a view to splitting it I realised there's no easy point to select.

So I've arbritrarily made a decision and this thread can be used for discussing the issues surrounding the history of the holocaust.

[DannyD]

Fine with me Armin This post belongs here so I will delete the original ..cheers!!

 Re: Palestinians Break Gaza Siege.
« Reply #207 on: Today at 09:54:03 PM »    

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote from: yorkykopite on January 31, 2008, 07:22:27 PM
And who said this?


That, DannyD me old flower, is why the Zionists were prone to talking in disparaging terms about the Jews of Europe. It emphatically does NOT mean they shared the outlook - let alone programme! - of the Nazis.

So quit talking bollocks.  

------------------------------


Please do not try and use Marxism as a cover for the history of Zionism . Marxism is based on the principled fight for the emancipation of the working class. No matter what colour race or creed not the racist dogma of nationalism. It has never bent the knee as an adaptation to opportunism and despots. We where the first taken remember that, the Nazis knew they had to deal with us first, and the Stalinist goons that are still alive today can vouch for the fact we don’t bend the knee, we fight.. Zionist racism even anti Semitism and self hating has its roots within Zionism from around the start of the 20th century..

a nation of pure blood, not tainted by diseases of excess or immorality, of a highly developed sense of family purity, and of deeply rooted virtuous habits would develop an exceptional intellectual activity. Furthermore, the prohibition against mixed marriage provided that these highest ethnical treasures should not be lost, through the admixture of less carefully bred races ... there resulted that natural selection which has no parallel in the history of the human race ... If a race that is so highly gifted were to have the opportunity of again developing its original power, nothing could equal it as far as cultural value is concerned: Ignatz Zollschan, Jewish Questions (1914) pp.17-18.

Also …( Jewish youth). senses in this immortality of the generations a community of blood, which he feels to be the antecedents of his I, its perseverance in the infinite past. To that is added the discovery, promoted by this awareness, that blood is a deep rooted nurturing force within individual man; that the deepest layers of our being are determined by blood; that our innermost thinking and our will are colored by it. Now he finds that the world around him is the world of imprints and influences, whereas blood is the realm of a substance capable of being imprinted and influenced, a substance absorbing and assimilating all into its own form Whoever, faced with the choice between environment and substance, decides for substance will henceforth have to be a Jew truly from within, to live as a Jew with all the contradiction, all the tragedy, and all the future promise of his blood:Martin Buber, On Judaism, pp.15-19.

Even Mr Atom Bomb himself Alfred Einstein subscribed to Zionist race conceptions.
Nations with a racial difference appear to have instincts which work against their fusion. The assimilation of the Jews to the European nations ... could not eradicate the feeling of lack of kinship between them and those among whom they lived. In the last resort, the instinctive feeling of lack of kinship is referable to the law of the conservation of energy. For this reason it cannot be eradicated by any amount of well meant pressure. Solomon Goldman, Crisis and Decision (1938), p.116.

The American Zionist Maurice Samual doesn’t pull any punches talking about the little town of Taos New Mexico and is bohemian residents :

there came together into this small place, representatives of the African Negro, the American and Chinese Mongol, the Semite and the Aryan ... free intermarriage had set in ... Why does this picture, part actual, part fanciful, fill me with a strange loathing, suggest the obscene, the obscurely beastly? ... Why then does that village which my fancy conjures up call to mind a heap of reptiles breeding uglily in a bucket?: Maurice Samuel, I, the Jew, pp.244-6.

Editorial from the German Zionist paper Rundschau

We who live here as a “foreign race” have to respect racial consciousness and the racial interest of the German people absolutely. This however does not preclude a peaceful living together of people of different racial membership. The smaller the possibility of an undesirable mixture, so much less is there need for racial protection ... There are differentiations that in the last analysis have their root in ancestry. Only rationalist newspapers who have lost feeling for the deeper reasons and profundities of the soul, and for the origins of communal consciousness, could put aside ancestry as simply in the realm of “natural history”. Rundschau 4th August 1933                You could imagine Hitler saying theses lines couldn’t you?

Lenni Brenner goes on further about Rundschau in his Zionism in the Age of the Dictators

In the past, the paper continued, it had been hard to get Jews to have an objective evaluation of racism. But now was the time, indeed past time, for a bit of “quiet evaluation”: “Race is undoubtedly a very important, yes, decisive momentum. Out of "blood and soil" really is determined the being of a people and their achievements.” Jews would have to make good for “the last generations when Jewish racial consciousness was largely neglected. The article warned against “bagatellised” race, and also against the CV, (orthodox Jewish Organisation) who were beginning to abandon their traditional assimilationist ideology in the wake of the disaster, but “without changing basically”.
Challenging the racist bona fides of their rivals was not enough. To prove that the “Jewish Renaissance Movement” had always been racist, the Rundschau reprinted two pre-1914 articles under the title “Voices of the Blood”. “Das singende Blut” by Stefan Zweig and “Lied des Blutes” by Hugo Salus rhapsodised about how “the modern Jew... recognizes his Jewishness... through an inner experience which teaches him the special language of his blood in a mystical manner”. Zionism in the Age of the Dictator Chap 2 Bllod and Soil, The Roots of Zionist Racism.

Is it any wonder that sections of Zionism looked upon the Nazis not as oppressors but as soul mates and people they could work with and for.

In 1937, after leaving Berlin for America, Rabbi Joachim Prinz wrote of his experiences in Germany and alluded to a memorandum which, it is now known, was sent to the Nazi Party by the ZVfD on 21 June 1933. Prinz’s article candidly describes the Zionist mood in the first months of 1933:

Everyone in Germany knew that only the Zionists could responsibly represent the Jews in dealings with the Nazi government. We all felt sure that one day the government would arrange a round table conference with the Jews, at which – after the riots and atrocities of the revolution had passed – the new status of German Jewry could be considered. The government announced very solemnly that there was no country in the world which tried to solve the Jewish problem as seriously as did Germany. Solution of the Jewish question? It was our Zionist dream! We never denied the existence of the Jewish question! Dissimilation? It was our own appeal! ... In a statement notable for its pride and dignity, we called for a conference… Joachim Prinz, Zionism under the Nazi Government, Young Zionist (London, November 1937), p.18.

The document (below) reads like an arss kissing love letter with not a lot of pride in there at all.……
….
May we therefore be permitted to present our views, which, in our opinion, make possible a solution in keeping with the principles of the new German State of National Awakening and which at the same time might signify for Jews a new ordering of the conditions of their existence ... Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one’s own tradition … ... an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural, and moral renewal of Jewry ... a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life ...

On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible ... Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group ...
... fidelity to their own kind and their own culture gives Jews the inner strength that prevents insult to the respect for the national sentiments and the imponderables of German nationality; and rootedness in one’s own spirituality protects the Jew from becoming the rootless critic of the national foundations of German essence. The national distancing which the state desires would thus be brought about easily as the result of an organic development.

Thus, a self-conscious Jewry here described, in whose name we speak, can find a place in the structure of the German state, because it is inwardly unembarrassed, free from the resentment which assimilated Jews must feel at the determination that they belong to Jewry, to the Jewish race and past. We believe in the possibility of an honest relationship of loyalty between a group-conscious Jewry and the German state ...

For its practical aims, Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews, because in dealing with the Jewish question no sentimentalities are involved but a real problem whose solution interests all peoples, and at the present moment especially the German people.
The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda – such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways – is in essence un-Zionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build ... Our observations, presented herewith, rest on the conviction that, in solving the Jewish problem according to its own lights, the German Government will have full understanding for a candid and clear Jewish posture that harmonizes with the interests of the state
Lucy Dawidowicz (ed.), A Holocaust Reader, pp.150-5.

The document remained buried until 1962, when it was finally printed, in German, in Israel.

Is it any wonder that the Nazis looked upon Zionism as a complaint tool to keep the Jewish population quiet while it went about its work.

There are hundreds of instances of Zionist collaboration, how many do you want posted Yorky, and you know it wasn't just the German Nazis, Zionism wanted to form alliances with Mussolini and the British Facists.

[Maggie May]

Just found this thread.  Posting simply so it will come up in my new replies and I won't lose it.   

[Maggie May]

Danny.  You posted a very interesting reply on the Holocaust thread concerning the assets held in the Swiss banks and the efforts made to recover them.  Thank you very much for agreeing to post it here and remove it from there.  If you have any information regarding works of art or antiques belonging to the families of Holocaust victims, I'd be most grateful if you could post that also.   

[DannyD]

Danny.  You posted a very interesting reply on the Holocaust thread concerning the assets held in the Swiss banks and the efforts made to recover them.  Thank you very much for agreeing to post it here and remove it from there.  If you have any information regarding works of art or antiques belonging to the families of Holocaust victims, I'd be most grateful if you could post that also.   

Long story Maggie, but to cut it short. Jewish agencies in the US and Israel demanded from the Swiss banks money they claimed was siphoned out of German and the occupied countries and also illegal money that had been confiscated and siphoned off to Swiss Banks by the Nazi regime. They argued that the money should go to the survivors of the camps. The lawyers acting on behalf of the Jewish organisations were asked by the Swiss banks for a figure based on the survivors. This is where it got messy, the lawyers gave figures from the Jewish agencies that if true would show that only there could not have been 6 millions victims of the camps. In fact it would have been considerably less. I am a bit harsh on the Swiss Bankers (a first for me) they were after all only asking for figures they could work on and they are not the only ones questioning them. The figures given  are also weapons for the Holocaust Deniers to claim the whole event was a charade and either didn’t happen or was never as bad as the rest of the world claim.

There is also the disgraceful way the agencies distributed the money they received.  The best authority on it is Norman Finkelstein whose book The Holocaust Industry names names and shames them all. It also goes into those who make a decent living being “Holocaust experts” but the “ Double Shakedown” as he calls the settlements from Europe will astound you. One bit of information is that as well as the Swiss Banks, banks in the USA are also holding money owed to the survivors and their relatives yet nobody has pursued them to pay up. The Israeli Govt also comes under attack on a regular basis from survivors who claim the money has either never reached them or it is slow in coming.

The German Government after the war agreed to pay a pension to 85,000 survivors, that amount has reached about $50bl. They also agreed to pay $5.2bl for confiscation of assets. The Swiss Banks paid an initial $1.25bl. Britain, France and other European nations also contributed to the fund. The figures I give you are drawn from my own notes. Here is Finkelsteins website Maggie and anyone else interested in the Shake Down. You will get all you want there and take a look at the fight the survivors put up to get what is rightly theirs.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/content.php?pg=3

[Maggie May]

Very many thanks Danny.  I'll look at this thread again tomorrow, when I've got time to give it the proper attention it deserves.   

[DannyD]

Here is an extract from Finkelsteins book regarding German payments. As well as the ducking and diving that went on what I find interesting is that throughout the Nazi rule in Germany right up to its collapse Zionism was doing its utmost to get as many able bodied Jews into Palestine, even if it was a choice between another country or the camps, yet here is Germany paying to resettle Jews into Israel, anyone knowing the history of how the Jews of Europe where never given a proper choice of where they wanted to settle this looks like another piece of opportunist Chutzpah.


The German government sought to compensate Jewish victims with three different agreements signed in 1952. Individual claimants received payments according to the terms of the Law on Indemnifica¬tion (Bundesentschadigungsgesetz). A separate agreement with Israel subsidized the absorption and rehabilitation of several hundred thousand Jewish refugees. The German government also negotiated at the same time a financial settlement with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an umbrella of all major Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, Bnai Brith, the Joint Distribution Committee, and so forth. The Claims Conference was supposed to use the monies, $10 million annually for twelve years, or about a billion dollars in current values, for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution who had fallen through the cracks in the compensation process. My mother was a case in point. A survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Majdanek concentration camp and slave labor camps at Czestochowa and Skarszysko-Kamiena, she received only $3,500 in compensation from the German government. Other Jewish victims (and many who in fact were not victims), however, received lifetime pensions from Germany eventutally totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. The monies given to the Claims Conference were earmarked for those Jewish victims who had received only minimal compensation.

Indeed, the German government sought to make explicit in the agreement with the Claims Conference that the monies would go solely to Jewish survivors, strictly defined, who had been unfairly or inadequately compensated by German courts. The Conference expressed outrage that its good faith was doubted. After reaching agreement, the Conference issued a press release underlining that the monies would be used for "Jewish persecutees of the Nazi regime for whom the existing and proposed legislation cannot provide a remedy." The final accord called on the Conference to use. the monies "for the relief, rehabilitation and resettlement of Jewish victims."

The Claims Conference promptly annulled the agreement. In a flagrant breach of its letter and spirit, the Conference earmarked the monies not for the rehabilitation of Jewish victims but rather for the rehabilitation of Jewish communities. Indeed, a guiding principle of the Claims Conference prohibited use of monies for "direct allocations to individuals." In a classic instance of looking after one's own, however, the Conference provided exemptions for two categories of victims: rabbis and "outstanding Jewish leaders" received individual payments. The constituent organizations of the Claims Conference used the bulk of the monies to finance various pet projects. Whatever benefits (if any) the actual Jewish victims received were indirect or incidental/1 Large sums were circuitously channeled to Jewish communities in the Arab world and facilitated Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe.10

They also subsidized cultural undertakings such as Holocaust museums and university chairs in Holocaust studies, as well as a Yad Vashem showboat pensioning "righteous Gentiles."
More recently, the Claims Conference sought to appropriate for itself denationalized Jewish properties in the former East Germany worth hundreds of millions of dollars that rightfully belonged to living Jewish heirs. As the Conference came under attack by defrauded Jews for this and other abuses, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg cast a plague on both sides, sneering that "it's not about justice, it's a tight for money."" When Germans or Swiss refuse to pay compensation, the heavens cannot contain the righteous indignation of organised Ameri¬can Jewry. But when Jewish elites rob Jewish survivors, no ethical issues arise: it's just about money.

In reply to a question recently put by German Parliament member Martin Hohmann (CDU), the German government acknowledged (albeit in extremely convoluted language) that only about 1 5 percent of the monies given to the Claims Conference actually benefited Jewish victims of Nazi persecution., (23 Feb 2000)

[Yorkykopite]

what I find interesting is that throughout the Nazi rule in Germany right up to its collapse Zionism was doing its utmost to get as many able bodied Jews into Palestine, even if it was a choice between another country or the camps, yet here is Germany paying to resettle Jews into Israel, anyone knowing the history of how the Jews of Europe where never given a proper choice of where they wanted to settle this looks like another piece of opportunist Chutzpah.

The key thought surely.

In the light of that choice then "Zionism..doing its utmost to get as many.. Jews into Palestine" is indeed heroic. The alternative, as you say, was Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Not that they succeeded of course. The Nazis had 'The Final Solution' and this emphatically did not involve re-locating Jews to Palestine!

[DannyD]

The key thought surely.

In the light of that choice then "Zionism..doing its utmost to get as many.. Jews into Palestine" is indeed heroic. The alternative, as you say, was Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Not that they succeeded of course. The Nazis had 'The Final Solution' and this emphatically did not involve re-locating Jews to Palestine!

No for them it was Palestine or nothing. In fact Zionist groups negotiated with the SS to secure facilities to train their prisoners in Europe and then bring them to Palestine Ehud Avriel noted that “ there is keen competition for patronage of our work amongst the Nazis” E.Avriel Open the Gates London 1975 p72

The leadership in the Judenrats where taken up so as to get close and better deal with the Nazis, they were prepared to do deals that would keep the majority quiet while allowing the selected few to go to Palestine. In the early days Jews had even come to Germany from Palestine to help select those for transit

“… these Jews from Palestine spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann. They had been sent to Europe by the communal settlements in Palestine and they were not interested in rescue operations. That was not their job ... They wanted to select ‘suitable material’...”
H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem – the banality of evil, London 1994, p61

Selectivity was a major part of Zionist policy . None Zionists were overlooked as where the old infirm or those who were not useful in Palestine

Henry Montor, executive vice-president of the United Jewish Appeal explained:
“By ‘selectivity’ is meant the choice of young men and women who are trained in Europe for productive purposes either in agriculture or industry and who are in other ways trained for life in Palestine ... There could be no more deadly ammunition provided to the enemies of Zionism ... if Palestine were to be flooded with very old people or with undesirables … Until the resources of Palestine are adequately developed, immigration of 30,000 to 60,000 a year may be possible.”
B. Hecht, Perfidy, New York 1961, fn 68, p.261. Hecht’s book shook the Zionist movement to its foundations. The Zionists attacked Hecht for not being a good Zionist (i.e., not keeping quiet!).

The political overturning of Rudolph Kastner guilty verdict, a man who loaded a train with hand picked Zionists and friends from Auschwitz to take them across the Swiss border never the less brought out from Chaim Cohen the Israeli attorney general at the time (1961?) that selectivity was the roll of Zionists not only in Germany but throughout the occupied countries of Europe. He also absolved Kastner the leading Zionist member in keeping the rest of the inmates of Auschwtz  quiet and “ in the dark” He absolved Kastner from playing God.
“If in Kastner’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few. He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions ... It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine ... Are we to be called traitors?” L. Dawidowicz, The war against the Jews 1933-45, London 1975, p.195

Lucy Dawidowicz  goes on to explain

“The Zionist movement itself set up rigid standards for prospective immigrants, … which to begin with excluded anti-Zionists as applicants for certificates. Young people in good health, with some training for agricultural work or manual trades, and persons with capital were the preferred candidates for Aliyah in a process where the needs and interests of Palestine took precedence over a strategy of rescue.” Report to the 19th Zionist congress and 4th council of the JA, July 1935; cited in L. Dawidowicz, The war against the Jews 1933-45, London 1975, p238-239

But the final word ....for now . should go to the man who worked with Kasztner, Adolf Eichmann . Eichmann who described his relationship with the Zionist in an interview he gave to a Dutch Nazi journalist, Willem Sassens, in 1955:


“This Dr Kasztner … agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation – and even keep order in the collection camps – if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the price of 15,000 or 20,000 Jews … was not too high for me ... With his great polish and reserve he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself.

“Dr Kasztner’s main concern was to make it possible for a select group of Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Israel ... As a matter of fact, there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the SS and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders …

“I believe that Kasztner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. But he was incredibly persistent in trying to save biologically valuable Jewish blood – that is, human material that was capable of reproduction and hard work. ‘You can have the others,’ he would say, ‘but let me have this group here.’ And because Kasztner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape.”
L. Brenner, 51 Documents, New Jersey 2002, pp.280-81, citing Adolf Eichmann in Life, December 5 1960. Eichmann talks of “human material” whose purpose is to serve the state. This was exactly how the Zionists themselves talked. Weizmann in 1925 observed that “a certain part of the human material which gathered in the country during the Fourth Aliyah is not suited to the country nor is the country suited to them” (Carpi and Yogev [eds.], Studies in the history of the Zionist movement and of the Jewish community in Palestine, Vol.1, Tel Aviv 1975, p.169.



Tony Greenatein in his Unholy Alliance asks “Why did all of the wings of the Zionist movement play down reports of annihilation and obstruct rescue  efforts of others. Nathan Schwalb, Hehalutz representative in Switzerland provided one explanation, in a letter to Rabbi Michael Weissmandel in late 1942:” Greenstein Unholy Alliance Chapter 2 p23

“After the victory [of the Allies], they will once again divide up the world between the nations, as they did at the end of the first war … we must be aware that all the nations of the Allies are spilling much blood and if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations’ territories after the war? ... Because only through blood will the land be ours.”
R. Moshe Shonfield, Documents and testimony on Jewish war criminals, 1977, p.27-28. When this quote was used in the play Perdition, Uri Davies was sued by Schwalb for libel. Schwalb subsequently withdrew his action. See also S. Beit Zvi, Post-Ugandan Zionism on trial, Tel Aviv 1991, pp.295-96.

But as always Ben Gurion is clearer than anyone on the subject of what Zionism began to call refugeeism.

“… are we again, in moments of desperation, going to confuse Zionism with refugeeism, which is likely to defeat Zionism ... Zionism is not a refugee movement. It is not a product of the second World War, nor of the first. Were there no displaced Jews in Europe ... Zionism would still be an imperative necessity.”
49th annual convention of Zionist Organisation of America, New York Times, October 27 1946. Eliezer Livneh declared during a symposium organised by Maariv in 1966 that “For the Zionist leadership, the rescue of Jews was not an aim in itself, but only a means” (Communist Party of Israel, Information Bulletin, 1969, p.l97).

In a letter December 17 1938 to the Zionist Executive, Ben-Gurion explained:

“…if the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people’s entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and … also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism’s very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.”
Y. Elam, Introduction to Zionist history, Tel Aviv 1972, pp125-26. See also Ot, paper of youth cadre of Mapai, No.2, winter 1967.

Zionist historian Noah Lucas commented:

“As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism. Just as Weizmann in the first world war had realised the opportunities presented by the fluid political situation, so now Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe.”
N. Lucas, The modern history of Israel, 1975.

Describing a press conference he gave on his return from the USA,

“Ben-Gurion dwelt at length and replied to questions on the following topics: America in general and American Jewry in particular, anti-semitism in America, the Biltmore Plan … As for the holocaust – not a word. Nothing was said, nothing was asked; the subject was simply not on the agenda.”
N. Lucas, The modern history of Israel, 1975. p.89, citing Ha’aretz, October 9 1942.

The Evian conference, which met from July 6-15 1938, was called by US President Roosevelt to try and find a solution to the problem of Jewish refugees. The no show by the Zionists was sited by its detractors for not doing anything they took the view that if the leading Jewish movement couldn’t care why should they. In spite of this The Dominican Republic offered to take 100,000 refugees. Zvi describes in detail how the Zionist movement set out to prevent the offer of the Dominican Republic being implemented. S. Beit Zvi, Post-Ugandan Zionism on trial, Tel Aviv 1991, p315-64

 Richard Crossman, a vehemently pro-Zionist Labour cabinet minister, wrote: “The Zionists’ ... main preoccupation is not to save Jews alive out of Europe, but to get Jews into Palestine.”
R.H. Crossman, Washington Diary, 1946

Christopher Sykes wrote:“The Zionists, who played no part in the conference, were not worried by its failure ... From the start they regarded the whole enterprise with hostile indifference ... If the 31 nations had done their duty and shown hospitality to those in dire need, then the pressure on the National Home and the heightened enthusiasm of Jews with Palestine would both have been relaxed. This was the last thing the Zionist leaders wished for ...”
C. Sykes, Crossroads to Israel 1917-1948, London 1973, p.188-91.

Lucas reached exactly the same conclusion:

“The Zionists were not displeased by the failure of the Evian conference, since the opening up of the barriers to immigration elsewhere would have eased the pressure in Palestine.” N. Lucas, , p.458.

The chairman of the ‘Rescue Committee’ of the JA in Palestine was Yitzhak Greenbaum. Not only did the committee lack an organisational base, budget and administration, but for a long time it even lacked a permanent name! Greenbaum’s explained his policy:

“And when I was asked, ‘But could you donate from the resources of the United Jewish Appeal (Foundation Fund) for the rescue of Jews in Europe,’ I said no. And I say again no … In my opinion one should resist this wave which relegates the Zionist activities to secondary importance. And because of that I was called anti-semitic and was judged to be responsible for the fact that we do not absorb ourselves completely in the rescue activity.” Statement to Zionist executive council on the holocaust and on the reaction, February 18 1943.

Greenbaum related in Haboker of December 7 1942 how his comrades from Poland
“would always ask me to sound the alarm and I would throw cold water on their ideas and cool their enthusiasm.” S. Beit Zvi, p.107.

As was pointed out earlier in this post throughout 1935-36 the Jewish Agency was permitted to send training instructors from Palestine to Germany. Hagannah agent Feivel Polkes “declared himself ready to gather information for Germany that did not conflict with his own political ends. Among other things, he would vigorously support German foreign policy interests in the Middle East and use his influence to secure sources of oil for the German Reich … if German foreign currency regulations for Jews emigrating to Palestine would be relaxed.” F. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine question, London 1985, p.57

Member of the JA wanted the Nazis to use their powers of persuasion to ensure that German refugees only went to Palestine. The Gestapo were happy to do “everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine.” SS files show that in return for information from Polkes on Jewish attempts to kill Hitler, “pressure will be exerted on the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland to oblige Jews who emigrate from Germany to go exclusively to Palestine, and not to other countries.”
Leading member of the JA at the time I Polke’s file in the Hagannah Archives in Tel Aviv remains closed to researchers for reasons which are self-evident. Polkes arranged in his contacts with Eichmann and other Jewish ‘experts’ for arms supplies, Mauser pistols in particular, to be smuggled to Palestine in barrels of cement. F. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine question, London 1985p.63.

Not only were the Zionists trying to close the doors of Britain and the USA to Jewish refugees: they were pressing the Nazis not to allow anyone to leave unless it was for Palestine, and passing information to the Gestapo. Tony Greenstein Unholy Alliance - Refugeeism and territorialism.

There is also the questions of leading Zionists inside and outside Germany who deliberately kept the operations of the death camps secret. The case of  Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler who where two of only 5 prisoners to escape from Auschwitz is testimony to how far Zionists went to cover up the operations in that camp.

 The details around this case brought about the libel case of  Rudolph Kasztner and the show trial of Adolf Eichmann which blew the lid off Zionisms control of The Holocaust, and began The Holocaust Industry.

You might ask how could Jews do this to Jews, but Zionism sees itself outside of mainstream Judaism. It is above all its Nationalist aspirations not the religious that drives them forward. In that they have many things in common with The Nazis. You only have to think about how they created the state of Israel and how they treated Palestinians back then and now, the language they use to describe Arabs points to their racist philosophy They hi jacked the Jewish religion but many inside Israel itself are asking the right questions at last. Their connection to right wing goverments over the years shows us that they still feel more than comfortable with racism

[Yorkykopite]

Danny you surpass yourself.

Other than me, I don't know if anyone on RAWK ever reads these rambling, bile-driven and semi-literate posts of yours. Your theory of the holocaust is both repulsive and ignorant.  You cite a whole stream of discredited and paranoid ultra-left wing sources - people whose ideological hatred for Israel has led them to systematically distort the historical record.

I mean Christ - Lennie Brenner and Greenstein!!! They are the far-left equivalents of Irving and the other right-wing kookies who assembled in Tehran recently to do Ahmadinejad's bidding and call the holocaust as a "hoax".

It's a fucking pity that this shit gets posted on RAWK.

Just to take your first line, since in a way it's the truth you cannot see:

No for them it was Palestine or nothing.

That's right. Palestine or nothing. "Nothing" meaning sure, horrible, excrutiating death. Along with your family, your friends, your neighbours, your townsmen, your countrymen, your tribe.

That is why certain Jewish organisations - including Zionists - sometimes tried to negotiate with the Nazis.  They saw what was happening and they made faustian bargains to buy the release of small numbers of Jews. These were agonising moral dilemmas. We can hardly imagine them because we have not been in this genocidal situation. But no one else came to their rescue. And, nearly every time of course, they failed. The Nazis were more interested in killing than in bargaining.

You call these 'negotiations' "collaboration". You talk of a Nazi-Zionist agenda. You're sick. There was no collaboration. There was a vast military organisation and bureaucracy that represented the "Master Race" and there were small, pathetic, groups or lone individuals (yes, like Kastner) who tried everything to get groups of Jews out of the clutches of the homicidal maniacs.

It's amazing to me that there are still people around who push the old Stalinist line of the 1970s that these efforts at rescue were a product of Zionist-Fascism.

DannyD, you're lost mate. Completely lost.

[jambutty]

In its collective form, yorky, it's valuable as a thesis on anti-zionism.

But you ARE hard work Danny.

[stacato]

You're sick.

yup

[DannyD]

Just to take your first line, since in a way it's the truth you cannot see:

That's right. Palestine or nothing. "Nothing" meaning sure, horrible, excrutiating death. Along with your family, your friends, your neighbours, your townsmen, your countrymen, your tribe.

That is why certain Jewish organisations - including Zionists - sometimes tried to negotiate with the Nazis.  They saw what was happening and they made faustian bargains to buy the release of small numbers of Jews. These were agonising moral dilemmas. We can hardly imagine them because we have not been in this genocidal situation. But no one else came to their rescue. And, nearly every time of course, they failed. The Nazis were more interested in killing than in bargaining.

You call these 'negotiations' "collaboration". You talk of a Nazi-Zionist agenda. You're sick. There was no collaboration. There was a vast military organisation and bureaucracy that represented the "Master Race" and there were small, pathetic, groups or lone individuals (yes, like Kastner) who tried everything to get groups of Jews out of the clutches of the homicidal maniacs.

It's amazing to me that there are still people around who push the old Stalinist line of the 1970s that these efforts at rescue were a product of Zionist-Fascism.

DannyD, you're lost mate. Completely lost.

Not for some, the lucky ones who like Kasztner had friends in high places that allowed him to enter Belsen dressed in an SS uniform and choose those who lived and died, choosing friends  and fellow Zionists before all, not for money It never passed through anyone’s hands.

Even the attorney general of Israel who oversaw his appeal at the supreme court couldn’t get away from that , and if you don’t take Eichmann’s testimony Here is an eye witness to his visit to Belsen accompanied by his partner in the deal.

Rudolph Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz five weeks before the deportation of Hungary’s Jews (see below), wrote in the Daily Herald in February 1961:
“I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kasztner … I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers … Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’ Eichmann not only agreed, but dressed Kasztner up in SS uniform and took him to Belsen to trace some of his friends.”
B. Hecht, Perfidy, New York 1961, p.261, fn 68.

Are Hecht and Vrba kookies are they Holocaust deniers Yorky?  You are trying to bury Zionism’s history under the cloud of cash for bodies but you dismiss what Ben Guron said about refugees or the fact that

The chairman of the ‘Rescue Committee’ of the JA in Palestine was Yitzhak Greenbaum. Not only did the committee lack an organisational base, budget and administration, but for a long time it even lacked a permanent name! Greenbaum’s explained his policy:

“And when I was asked, ‘But could you donate from the resources of the United Jewish Appeal (Foundation Fund) for the rescue of Jews in Europe,’ I said no. And I say again no … In my opinion one should resist this wave which relegates the Zionist activities to secondary importance. And because of that I was called anti-semitic and was judged to be responsible for the fact that we do not absorb ourselves completely in the rescue activity.” Statement to Zionist executive council on the holocaust and on the reaction, February 18 1943.

Also: In the autumn of 1942 more than 70,000 Jews lived between the rivers Dniester and Bug. In February 1943 Zionist activist Ben Hecht placed an advert in the New York Times, which read: “For sale – 70,000 Jews at $50 apiece. Guaranteed human beings.” Hecht had read a Swiss newspaper clipping of an offer by the Romanian government to allow these Jews to leave Romania for that price.
The response of Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress was to issue a statement on February 23 1943 denying that such an offer had been made, and stating that “no collection of funds would seem justified”. B. Hecht, Perfidy, New York 1961, pp.191-92.

In fact, as undersecretary of state Adolph Berle confirmed to Bergson, the story was indeed true. Wise later claimed that on July 22-23 he personally obtained permission from Roosevelt to ransom the Romanian Jews, but that the arrangement was held up in the state department for five months. S.B. Beit Zvi, Post-Ugandan Zionism on trial, Tel Aviv 1991, p.284, citing S. Wise, Challenging years, New York 1949, pp.274-79.

That is another denial for you to deal with. It must  get easier for you as time goes by but can you forget The Evian conference, which met from July 6-15 1938, Richard Crossman, “The Zionists’ ... main preoccupation is not to save Jews alive out of Europe, but to get Jews into Palestine.”
R.H. Crossman, Washington Diary, 1946

Christopher Sykes: “The Zionists, who played no part in the conference, were not worried by its failure.

Lucas:“The Zionists were not displeased by the failure of the Evian conference, since the opening up of the barriers to immigration elsewhere would have eased the pressure in Palestine.”
The whole philosophy of Zionism was based on the founding of the state of Israel Ben Gurion spells that policy outclearly and the rest obeyed if you can’t understand that it is you who live in denial.

Its not about a moral dilemma there was no morals in it, The  Zionists not only didn’t purchase lives for cash they stopped others doing it unless there was a guarantee they would go to Israel and they had the choice of who went and who didn’t. The small attempt to buy lives did not come from Zionism either in Europe or Palestine.

The old Stalinist line, another attempt to discredit by association what you can’t refute with facts. Stalin was up to his neck in his own murders to worry about Zionisms and don’t forget who first recognised the state of Israel? Stalin defended the nationalist philosophy of Israel at every turn, after all under the uniform he was a nationalist himself.

[DannyD]

Danny you surpass yourself.

Other than me, I don't know if anyone on RAWK ever reads these rambling, bile-driven and semi-literate posts of yours. Your theory of the holocaust is both repulsive and ignorant.  You cite a whole stream of discredited and paranoid ultra-left wing sources - people whose ideological hatred for Israel has led them to systematically distort the historical record.

I mean Christ - Lennie Brenner and Greenstein!!! They are the far-left equivalents of Irving and the other right-wing kookies who assembled in Tehran recently to do Ahmadinejad's bidding and call the holocaust as a "hoax".

It's a fucking pity that this shit gets posted on RAWK.

.

That last line is that a plea for censorship Yorky, remove what you can't answer is that it?

The ultra left sources? Would that be Ben Gurion, Einstein or the many leaders on Zionism in the USA Europe and Israel that I used for quotes You can try and discredit me and Lenny Brenner and Tony Greenstein as much as you wish, we have been through worse, but please don’t label them Holocaust deniers by default son even for you that is a desperately cheap trick. I can see you are upset at what you have to face but that doesn’t allow you name calling and dishonesty does it.

You keep coming back to the Holocuast “rally” that you still claim was a Holocaust Denial rally, you have yet to tell us who these deniers where, you only ever refer to Irvine and have never posted anything he said at the meeting. You have never explained why a group of Jewish Rabbis one at least was a camp survivor went to the meeting. I posted their leaders contribution to the meeting and I know for a fact they didn’t come back and claim it was a Holocaust denial meeting.

Ahmadinejad's is the last person to hold a meeting on the Holocaust, he didn’t do it out of a love of the truth, it is a weapon for him. He knows Zionism is hiding its history away and he is using that fact as a pressure point. The likes of Brenner and Greenstein don’t need his support, but wouldn’t mind some honesty from others who claim to be far removed from him. Yet act in the very same manner. The data that is in my post is out in the public domain, if it was false then I am sure all those who said what they did would be up in court with a liable writ stuck to their arss. Zionism does that a lot doesn’t it? So deal with the facts Yorky. Stop ducking and diving. Oh! I see you have posted a runner to this post. Got over your tantrum then?  

[El Campeador]

What's the difference between the 2nd and 3rd editions? Is it worth stumping up for the later one?

Or should one go old school and dig up a collectible of the first edition 

[Yorkykopite]

Not for some, the lucky ones who like Kasztner had friends in high places that allowed him to enter Belsen dressed in an SS uniform.

Yeah? You have evidence for this do you? Please don't cite Rudolph Vrba. The man is a hero, but when he made this accusation he couldn't possibly have known what he was talking about.

I really would like to ignore your posts Danny because there's something a bit mad about you. Your stamina for spreading this poison is incredible. I could never match the time you put into it.

However, at the risk of appearing ridiculous myself, I might respond in detail when I have time.

But today, I have to work on the stuff I'm paid for.

El C - go for the third edition. It's worth every penny. (Then read his slim memoir, 'The Politics of Memory'. He had a hard time amongst certain Jewish circles for what he had written).

[DannyD]

What's the difference between the 2nd and 3rd editions? Is it worth stumping up for the later one?

Or should one go old school and dig up a collectible of the first edition 

For me get the first both the 2nd and 3rd reflect the times in which they were revised. The 3rd edition I have and it is expensive,. His omission in any detail to what has become known as the Vrba affair is strange to say the least, and I fear it is not alone. Vrba and his fellow escapee Alfred Wetzler get a two line mention, yet they where two of only 5 prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz. The reason for their escape was they had details of the plans for the extermination of all the Jews at Auschwitz, they handed them to Zionist leaders who spent an age getting them out to the proper channels. of course they blamed the delays on administration problems but Vrba is certain that they withheld them to allow Rudolph Kasztner’s train stuffed with party officials and friends to arrive in Switzerland. Vbra claims he knows Ksznar gave that information to Eichmann (see my earlier post)

Hilberg was at first denied access to Jewish/Zionist material in Jerusalem but I see in his Preface to the 2nd (Revised edition 1985) he was allowed information from Yad Vasham, the Holocaust museum and library in Jerusalem. Yad Vashum removed Rudolph  Vrba andAlfred Wetzler’s names from their history, they are replaced with “two young men escaped from Auschwitz …….” no mention of their heroics and this to two real heroes who should have been credited with saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews. The reason is Vbra’s story was a key to the denunciation of the then leading Israeli Zionist  Kasztner. Thankfully there are those in Israel who have not let this political act go unnoticed. Maybe Hilberg at last succumbed to Zionist pressure to tell it their way

I haven’t checked but I am also certain in the first edition he keeps away from making theoretical/political assumptions, yet from what I have read in the 3rd edition he does so on a regular basis and not very well either

I do owe him an apology though I mentioned in another post he says very little about the communists in Europe and I sited his remarks about the Communists fighting in Warsaw only to help the USSR. His statement is a bit sharp, cruel and wrong it shows his Republican anti working class leanings but he may have a point in that the Polish CP was right behind the Hitler – Stalin pact that witnessed the carve up of Poland. Once Hitler invaided the USSR it was all hands to the pump, but individually many young men who were not Jews gave their lives fighting alongside them in the Ghetto.

The 3rd edition as a reference book has more maps plans etc etc, if it for that reason alone get it, don’t buy the paper back edition my friend has one and if it is to be used often and for copying it will fall apaprt.

[Julio]

Cant believe the timing of this thread.
Just finished reading this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dealing-Satan-Kasztners-Daring-Hungarian/dp/0224077929

You should check it out Danny; it might change your opinion of the man somewhat

[DannyD]

Yeah? You have evidence for this do you? Please don't cite Rudolph Vrba. The man is a hero, but when he made this accusation he couldn't possibly have known what he was talking about.

I really would like to ignore your posts Danny because there's something a bit mad about you. Your stamina for spreading this poison is incredible. I could never match the time you put into it.

However, at the risk of appearing ridiculous myself, I might respond in detail when I have time.

But today, I have to work on the stuff I'm paid for.

El C - go for the third edition. It's worth every penny. (Then read his slim memoir, 'The Politics of Memory'. He had a hard time amongst certain Jewish circles for what he had written).

Feel free don't forget to give the links to the  authors works Yorky. I am off to Spain tomorrow for a few days so relax a bit. There is plenty out there even the Zionists can't defend him altogether, he was assassinated shortly after the trial by a government agent who says he defected to an extreme right wing group and did the job to punish Kasztner for his crimes against Jews. The good money is he was got shut of quick before he became a bigger embarrassment and more details of Zionist collaboration became public. Hence the belief that Eichmann was brought to Jerusalem not to stand trial as a War Criminal but to save the reputation of leading Zionists in Israel. Many leading Jews who were not Zionists but had dealings with Eichmann and Kaszner were never called to give evidence. Yet current Zionist officials that had no connection to Eichmann or the death camps spent days on the stand giving subjective evidence that was clearly aimed at clearing the name of Zionism.

Kasztner was also involved in the affair of Hannah Szenes which was described at the trial. Szenes was a brave young Zionist from Hungary, whom the British finally allowed, together with 31 others, to parachute into occupied Europe to organise Jewish rescue and resistance. She landed in Yugoslavia on 18 March, one day before the German invasion of Hungary; she smuggled herself back into Hungary in June and was promptly caught by Horthy’s police. Peretz Goldstein and Joel Nussbecher-Palgi followed her in and they contacted Kasztner, who conned them both into giving themselves up to the Germans and Hungarians for the sake of the train. Both were sent to Auschwitz, although Nussbecher-Palgi managed to saw through some bars on his train and escape. Szenes was shot by a Hungarian firing squad. Kasztner’s admission in court that he had failed to notify the Swiss, who represented Britain’s interests in Budapest, of the Hungarians’ capture of a British officer and spy – “I think I had my reasons” – outraged the Israeli public, many of whom had read her poetry and knew of her bravery in the Hungarian prisons. Hecht, Perfidy, p.129.

[DannyD]

Please don't cite Rudolph Vrba. The man is a hero, but when he made this accusation he couldn't possibly have known what he was talking about.

Why not mention Vrba he was treated the same way Stalin treated heroes of the Russian Revolution air brushed out of history. His crime to demand why the reports he brought out from Auschwitz were kept on ice. But like Stalins purge on history the truth will out. Here is part of an obituary written by Ruth Linn for The Gaurdian. Linn is  one of those Jews in Israel that carry through their great traditions of common people asking questions instead of accepting their ready made history ….

Although I am a native Israeli, who graduated from the prestigious Reali private high school, I had never heard about the escape from Auschwitz at the numerous Holocaust ceremonies I attended. Nor had I ever read about it in any detail in any of the Hebrew Holocaust textbooks at school in my own time or in those given to my three children, although Vrba's memoirs, I Cannot Forgive, written with Alan Bestic, were first published in London in 1963.

I became acquainted with Vrba's escape from Auschwitz during my adult life, through the non-Israeli Paris-based film-maker Claude Lanzmann, who considered Vrba's testimony central to the understanding of the Holocaust in his 1987 movie Shoah. The "presence" of the "absence" of the escape from Auschwitz in Israeli historiography on the one hand, and the moral visibility and sanctity of Auschwitz in the country's hegemonic narrative on the other, remained a puzzle for me, and my desire to gain firsthand knowledge of the escape stayed with me for many years.

Purely coincidentally, while lecturing at UBC I mentioned Vrba to a friend and was told that he taught there. Thus did we first meet. In June 1998, I succeeded in convincing my university, Haifa, to award Vrba an honorary doctorate in recognition of his heroic escape from Auschwitz and his contribution to Holocaust education. The award ceremony was planned to coincide with the first publication of the book in Hebrew by the Haifa University Press.

To my surprise, even at this undeniably historic moment, some Israeli scholars made a desperate last-minute attempt to belittle the hero and his memoirs. No less interesting was the position, as intellectual bystanders, taken up by the Holocaust historians' establishment in Israel. Not one of them publicly protested about the campaign against Vrba. It was here that the profound question posed by the American political thinker Michael Walzer crept into my mind: "What is the use, after all, of a silent intellectual?" In my book, Escaping Auschwitz, a Culture of Forgetting (2004) I try to delve into the mystery of Vrba's disappearance not only from the Auschwitz camp, but also from the Israeli Holocaust narrative.

Vrba was the only academic of the five escapees, and it is perhaps unsurprising that he chose biochemistry for his life's work, after that life was saved by the mixture of tobacco and gasoline. After the war he read biology and chemistry at Charles University, Prague, took a doctorate and then defected from a scientific delegation to the west. He worked in Israel from 1958 to 1960 at the biological research institute in Beit Dagan.

Then from 1960 to 1967 he worked in Britain, first at the neuropsychiatric research unit in Carshalton, then at the Medical Research Council. Then came the move to UBC, and after a two year sabbatical at Harvard University, a UBC professorship.

It was not just tobacco and gasoline that saved Vrba's life. It was also saved because Vrba admired knowledge, he was a scholar who knew its power, and believed that the deportees should have been given that power too. He felt that if they had known the fate that awaited them in Auschwitz, many lives would have been saved. He promised himself to bring them that knowledge, and he kept his promise. Meanwhile, I Cannot Forgive has recently been republished as I Escaped from Auschwitz.

His companion on that epic escape, Alfred Wetzler, died in Slovakia in the late 1980s.
Vrba is survived by his wife Robin, and a daughter, Zuza, who lives in Cambridge. His elder daughter, Helinka, predeceased him.
• Rudolf Vrba, Auschwitz escapee and pharmacologist, born September 11 1924; died March 26 2006


http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,1752845,00.html#article_continue

[DannyD]

Cant believe the timing of this thread.
Just finished reading this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dealing-Satan-Kasztners-Daring-Hungarian/dp/0224077929

You should check it out Danny; it might change your opinion of the man somewhat

Haven't read it of course julio and will wait for a decent revue of it, if one comes out. There has been so many articles and books denouncing Vrba and others who sited Kasztner as a collaborator, but they can never answer what Eichmann said of him or the evidence that convicted him at the first trial. It is not surprising that another book has come out shortly after his death, The case is being talked about in young Jewish circles around the world, maybe this book is to stem the ide.

Look nobody denies that buying prisoners was possibly the only real tactic left to Jews after the refusal of the leadership to do anything else. What I am saying and it reflects a broader opinion that collectively the Zionist did so out of a desire to populate Palestine, not to save Jews hence the strict selection process they adopted.........they don't hide the fact do they?

And if the outcome was not Palestine they thwarted the options to save lives.
Read my post and the quotes from Ben Gurion and others he doesn’t mix his words does he. And the Attorney General of Israel who took over The Kasztner appeal in the Israeli Supreme Court says as much. Break it down and all he is saying is Kasztner did what all Zionists have done throughout history, put The Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael) above everything else. This philosophy allows them to dismiss not only Kasztner’s crimes but the whole Zionist system, they believe what they are doing is right, but so did the Nazis didn’t they?

By the way did you see the Book Description ......
Nine Suitcases was published to wide-acclaim. Dealing with Satan is the story of Rezso Kasztner, the man responsible for saving Bela Zsolt, and the author himself.Combining history with memoir, In what is ultimately a remarkably honest analysis of morality and survival, Ladislaus Lob examines the life and actions of a man of extraordinary contradictions.

[Julio]

Haven't read it of course julio and will wait for a decent revue of it, if one comes out. There has been so many articles and books denouncing Vrba and others who sited Kasztner as a collaborator, but they can never answer what Eichmann said of him or the evidence that convicted him at the first trial. It is not surprising that another book has come out shortly after his death, The case is being talked about in young Jewish circles around the world, maybe this book is to stem the ide.

Look nobody denies that buying prisoners was possibly the only real tactic left to Jews after the refusal of the leadership to do anything else. What I am saying and it reflects a broader opinion that collectively the Zionist did so out of a desire to populate Palestine, not to save Jews hence the strict selection process they adopted.........they don't hide the fact do they?

And if the outcome was not Palestine they thwarted the options to save lives.
Read my post and the quotes from Ben Gurion and others he doesn’t mix his words does he. And the Attorney General of Israel who took over The Kasztner appeal in the Israeli Supreme Court says as much. Break it down and all he is saying is Kasztner did what all Zionists have done throughout history, put The Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael) above everything else. This philosophy allows them to dismiss not only Kasztner’s crimes but the whole Zionist system, they believe what they are doing is right, but so did the Nazis didn’t they?

The author is a man who was one of the 1,700 or so who was saved by Kasztner and travelled to Switzerland. He doesn't deny that his opinion of the man is somewhat subjective, and hence favourable, seeing as Kasztner saved his life.

However, he refutes the suggestion that Kasztner hand-picked only influential and powerful people - the author and his father were both poor Hungarian non-Zionists; in fact, there were several influential non-Zionists among the group - the name Teitelman rings a bell - albeit they did not, by any means, form the majority.
The group, according to the author, comprised of a broad selection of Jews from all walks of Hungarian life.

To be honest, Laudislas Lob (author) tries to be as objective as possible, and references (i would imagine, not having a detailed knowledge of the subject) all the people who criticised Kasztner.

As for the Eichmann testimony, I would wholly subscribe to Lob's view that to take anything that hangman said or testified seriously seems excessive to say the least.