Status Updates From Zionism During the Holocaus...

“The SS established a mental institution in the East for men suffering the effects of murdering women and children by November 1941. Helmut James von Moltke met a nurse who worked in this hospital. After the war, Bach-Zelewski... explained to his American interrogators that ‘(the) death camp was something that the Russians could not accomplish: it reflected the German gift for organization. Bureaucrats created it.’ ”

“The Nazis largely abandoned their previous method of extermination, shooting, because of the psychological effect they were having on the killers. SS Obergruppenfuehrer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski told Himmler that: ‘These men were now finished for the rest of their lives: they would either be neurotics or savages….’ ”

“Almost certainly there was no written order to destroy European Jewry. There didn’t need to be. The word of the Fuhrer had the force of law: Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft. When one judge, Lothar Kreyssig, complained to Justice Minister Franz Gürtner about the immunity of the SD and Gestapo he was told that ‘the will of the Führer is the source of law’. ”

“Eichmann was told by Heydrich in late summer 1941 that ‘I have just come from the Reichsfuhrer: the Fuhrer has now ordered the physical annihilation of the Jews.’ Radio reports from the field of operations contained exact numerical reports of executions. On 16 December 1941 Hans Frank told leaders of the GG of the need to ‘exterminate the Jews wherever we find them.’ ”

“The Nazis never admitted to the Holocaust. Terms such as ‘special measures’ and ‘resettlement’ were devised as euphemisms for extermination. Occasionally the Nazi leaders let the truth slip. ... Victor Brack, the leading organiser of the Euthanasia programme, admitted it had been an open secret in senior party circles.”

“The Final Solution was a product of fascism, war imperialism and the quest for lebensraum. It was: an economically driven plan of mass population resettlement and extermination to benefit ethnic Germans, which included the state-sponsored starvation of tens of millions of Slavs.”

“It is arguable that the Final Solution in the East, Germany’s India, had been decided upon as soon as Poland was invaded. At Nuremberg Erwin Lahousen of German Counterintelligence testified that, ‘As early as September, 1939, Hitler had decided the murder of Polish Jews.’ ”

“Despite the fact that the leaders of the Reichsvereinigung [RV], the Nazi-imposed Jewish Council, were becoming aware in 1942-43 of what ‘resettlement’ in the East meant, they continued organising the transports. As death notices began arriving back and rumours of mass shootings spread, Jews chose to go into hiding. RV staff were ‘under orders to inform their functionaries… who in turn informed the Gestapo.’ ”

“In their hatred of Jewish ‘assimilation’ the Zionist movement had ended up welcoming the Nuremberg Laws.”

“For most Jews the preservation of life came first. For Zionism, the preservation of the Jewish nation/race was more important. Reinhard Heydrich, who became the head of the Reich Security [RSHA] explained that the Nazis were: in agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, Zionism, whose position is based on the recognition of the unity of Jewry... and the rejection of all ideas of mixing in.' "

“On 15 September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws, ‘the most murderous legislative instrument known to European history’ were enacted, depriving German Jews of their citizenship and forbidding sexual relations between Jews and Aryans. From now on the Jews were subjects. Twelve days later they were amended to include Romanis and Black people.”

“Expressions of ‘sympathy, abhorrence, and shame’ were the reaction to Kristallnacht. The SD's annual situation report for 1938 spoke of how: ‘the actions against Jewry in November have been received very badly…. Out of liberalistic principles many people found it imperative openly to intervene on behalf of the Jews’ ”

“In Berlin and Vienna, ‘the SD ordered the release from jail of all Jews arrested during the Kristallnacht pogrom who were... connected with the Palästinaamt.’ The only way Jews who had been imprisoned in concentration camps after Kristallnacht could gain their release was by producing proof of entry to another country. Of the 300,000 Jews who left Germany between 1933 and 1939, 150,000 left after Kristallnacht.”

“The Department of Warfare Against Jewry (II 112 SD) spoke about how violence against the Jews was having a ‘repulsive effect on the enlightened population’. Otto Dov Kulka reported that ‘in some places the police stepped in to halt acts of terror only after the maltreatment of Jews aroused spontaneous popular opposition.’ ”

“Anti-Semitism met its greatest resistance where the Nazis tried to destroy traditional economic relationships between Jews and non-Jews. ‘Peasant attitudes were determined almost wholly by material considerations and self-interest.’ In one... village, peasants who worried that Hitler Youth posters ‘Jews not wanted here’ would result in a loss of Jewish customers replaced them with ‘Jews very much wanted here.’!”

“Saul Friedlander suggested that ‘the undercurrent of sympathy for the persecuted Jews must have been significant enough’ because in June 1935 Goebbels attacked those Germans who ‘shamelessly’ argued that Jews were human beings too. ”

“Bauer believed that it was ‘the moderate anti-Semitism of the bulk of the German population (that) was absolutely crucial... Mass murder of a designated minority can be achieved without the deep-seated hatred of the perpetrating majority. The Germans did not have to hate the Jews in order to kill them.’ ”

“By November 1932 the Nazis had passed the peak of their popular support. It was this that led to pressure on Hindenburg to offer the Presidency to Hitler. The goal of physically destroying the organisations and parties of the German working class appeared to be slipping away.”

“Auschwitz was first designated as a suitable site for Russian prisoners-of-war at the beginning of 1940. Within a few months the SS moved in. The first gas chamber was tested on Russian prisoners in the fall of 1941. Auschwitz’s first inmates were Poles and its main purpose was the exploitation of their labour. ... It is estimated that 120,000 non-Jews died in Auschwitz, of whom 60% were Poles.”

“Of the 5.7 million Russian soldiers who were captured, 3.3 million were murdered, often in the death camps. Total Soviet losses are estimated at over 20 million. This too was part of the Holocaust. The Nazis looked upon Russians as livestock. Millions would have to starve if the German Army, the Wehrmacht, was going to be fed during the invasion of Russia.”

“It was Bolshevism that was Hitler’s main enemy... ‘Knowledge of the Jews is the only key whereby one may understand the inner nature and therefore the real aims of Social Democracy… and then out of the murk and fog of social phrases rises the grimacing figure of Marxism’ ...But in arguing that anti-Semitism was subordinate to anti-Bolshevism, Bauer unwittingly conceded that the Jews were not the Nazis’ main target.”

“The first victims of the Nazi regime were the organisations of the German left and the working class, not the Jews. The trade unions were banned on 2 May 1933 .... the first concentration camp, Dachau, which was set up shortly after the federal elections of March 5. The persecution of the Jews only began in earnest after the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The repression of the German working class began immediately.”

“It was an elite in the Nazi Party, some 200 men, who Christopher Browning called the ‘true believers’, who bore primary responsibility for the Holocaust. The real success of Nazi propaganda lay in the ‘depersonalization’ of the Jews.”