Hitler and the genocide of European Jews, or what did he know about the Holocaust?

Autor: PhDr. Ladislav Kudrna, Ph.D. / Ladislav Kudrna 🕔︎︎ 👁︎ 55.916

Publicist in the service of Nazi ideology

At the beginning of his career, the British publicist David Irving was not nearly as crazy as the perex of the article would suggest. On the contrary, some of his works were also well received by the historic community. Sure, it was never a matter of frenetic applause, but it was still not the publications or statements that eventually led him to the camp of Holocaust deniers. Today, David Irving is probably the most famous " celebrity " of the neo-Nazi movement. Regarding the statement quoted above, it is worth noting that a young girl died in Edward Kennedy's car.


Holocaust survivor

Reklama

On the threshold of the 21st century, Irving has already stood firm among those who downplay, ridicule or directly deny the suffering of European Jews during World War II. At the same time, the political plans of neo-Nazi parties ( groupings ) are often behind the effort to rewrite history. According to Irving, however, Hitler actually protected Jews all the time. He often had to repent to his family members if German Jews had been the subject of violence, bullying or ostracism. As far as extermination camps were concerned, in reality they were only pleasant sanatoriums for the Jewish population. It is no surprise that the British icon of neo-Nazism further claims that the gas chambers in Birkenau were built by the Allies only after the war. However, many will surely be surprised that the unyielding David can come up with something new than this neo-Nazi song.

In an interview with the British daily The Independent, he stated that Adolf Hitler had chosen him as his biographer. Somewhat surprising, isn't it? At the time when the beloved leader ended his life improperly with his own hand, David was only seven years old. However, it would not be Irving if he did not have an agile yet " logical " explanation at hand. In the 1970s, he managed to find Erwin Giessing. The German doctor treated Hitler after the failed assassination attempt on July 20, 1944. During the treatment, the leader told Giessing that one day an Englishman would appear and write his biography. However, he will be a British citizen from the next, prejudiced generation. This Englishman will have a perfect command of the German language and the relevant archives. The " Messiah, " Irving, did come. The British journalist lamented that it would probably not be an interview about history, but pathology ...

Hitler's final solution

In his pivotal opus of Hitler's War, David Irving directly states: “ The biggest explosion after the first edition of this biography was caused by my analysis of Hitler's role in the Jewish tragedy. Streams of sulfuric acid have flowed from my critics, but so far I see no reason to revise my main hypothesis, which is based on records from that time: that Hitler understood at the outset that anti-Semitism in Germany was a very strong card to ensure success in elections; that he had absolutely no scruples to reach the gates of the Chancellery on this stinging wave, but once he came to power and became Chancellor, he professed this part of the party's credo only lukewarmly. [...] However, it was his subordinate Nazi criminals who continued to fight, even though Hitler ordered something else, as was the case in November 1938. Hitler left the question of concentration camps, the dark part of the Nazi regime, carelessly to Himmler. He had never visited a single one of them. [...] Himmler is known to have visited Auschwitz in 1941 and 1942. Hitler never did that.[...] Despite the lack of clear evidence - and in 1977 I offered a thousand pounds of reward to anyone who could present even a single document from the war, which would explicitly prove that Hitler, for example, knew about the Auschwitz concentration camp. - my critics resorted to arguments that ranged from subtle allusions to an iron mallet ( in one case, literally ). "



Jewish women and children are waiting for their terrible end near the crematorium in Birkenau

So here we go! The goodman Hitler never knew about the existence of concentration camps, let alone Auschwitz. Himmler and similar creatures are responsible for the genocide of the Jews. Hitler tried unsuccessfully to persecute the persecution of the Jewish population ( Irving claims elsewhere in his work ), but was powerless against the powerful of the Third Reich ( ! ). The anti-Semitism of " ordinary " Germans helped him to power. It is clear that Irving did not take much work to analyze the Vilém Empire or the Weimar Republic, respectively, as he could not cite such nonsense as the basic electoral success of the NSDAP in the 1932 elections.

On the contrary, the German historian Thomas Nipperdey, in his extremely precise and exploratory work ( Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918 ), pointed out that German society did not differ significantly from Western European society before the Great War. German nationalism was no greater than French or British, and the same was true of prejudice against the minority Jewish population. After all, glaring manifestations of anti-Semitism in modern European society on the threshold of the 20th century were associated with cosmopolitan France and the Czech lands, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The first was the Dreyufus affair ( 1894–1906 ), and the second was the infamous Hilsneriad ( 1899–1900 ).

Reklama


Leader, lover of German, Aryan children

The Nazis came to power mainly due to several factors: the Peace of Versailles, hatred of the Weimar Republic, nostalgia for the golden times of the German Empire, the alleged leftist threat, street riots, but especially the severe economic crisis, which meant mass unemployment and misery. It must be added that millions of Germans were literally fascinated by Hitler's brutal hatred and straightforwardness against Germany's real and perceived enemies, to whom he only wanted a place of prominence. Many Germans saw the Nazis as the only force capable of restoring order in the country, bringing about social peace, and restoring the power of a beloved homeland abroad. Given that so many factors intertwine here that attracted millions of Germans to Nazism, it is extremely difficult to determine how much the NSDAP was for electoral success ( on July 31, 1932, the Nazis won 37.4% of voters, ie almost 14,000,000 Germans ). important is its anti-Semitism. However, it was Adolf Hitler who enriched Nazi ideology with racial hatred (a program written by Hitler and party founder Anton Drexler called on NSDAP members to fight the Jewish-materialist spirit, which essentially entrusted them with an extermination project ), because in Italian fascism we can hardly to talk about targeted anti-Semitism, which ended in a horrible death in gas chambers. Only after the occupation of a substantial part of Italy by German troops was the deportation of Italian Jews to Auschwitz. Until then, Mussolini's government did not allow Berlin to expel its inhabitants of Jewish faith or origin to the east.I refer the reader to a fundamental work on the issue of the Holocaust by the Italian intellectual, artist and scientist Primo Levi ( If this is a man ). Levi tried to communicate the incommunicable. Thus, how was it possible for an individual of Jewish descent to survive the German extermination machinery and not destroy himself by hatred of his tormentors, who often murdered their entire family.


The leader has arrived! A common picture from a common German city in the late 1930s

It was Hitler, shocking his more educated companions (the leader's education included only a basic pension because he did not finish high school ) at the beginning of his campaign to power with his indiscriminate anti-Semitic outpourings. Mein Kampf (1925 ) also incorporated his " scientific " views on the Jewish population into the Nazi Bible. At the end of January 1939, he prophesied before the Reichstag the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe in the event of the outbreak of war: " Today I want to be a prophet again. If international Jewish financiers in Europe and beyond once again succeed in plunging nations into World War II, then the result will not be the Bolshevism of the world and thus the victory of Judaism, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe. In his "fight, " he spoke in an equally murderous spirit as far as the role of German Jews during the Great War was concerned. According to Hitler, if at the beginning of the war and during it 12,000 or 15,000 of these Hebrew pests of the nation were silenced by annoying gas, millions of " real " Germans would not have died. He also devoted his place to his " protégés " ( as Irving would say ) in his political will of April 29, 1945: " It is not true that I or anyone else in Germany wanted a war in 1939. It was wanted and encouraged exclusively by those statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests. [...] I have no doubt that - if the peoples of Europe view these financial plots as bundles of shares, then those peoples will also be held accountable - the culprit itself will be: Judaism! [...] Because there are not enough forces to continue to face the enemy's attack in this situation, their own resistance is also gradually devalued by blinded and characterless misers, I would like to share my fate with the million others by staying in the city . Besides, I don't want to fall into the hands of enemies who need a new, Jewish-arranged spectacle to cheer up the raging masses. "

Apparently, there is no written order from Hitler for the genocide of the Jews. However, that does not mean that he did not know about her. Well-founded historians are convinced that sometime in the late 1940s or early the following year, Hitler decided to carry out his murderous plan to exterminate all European Jews. Heydrich , in charge of drawing up the proper plan, submitted a proposal to the Endlösungsprojekt at the end of January 1941. It is no coincidence that it was at this time that Hitler invoked his prophecy of January 30, 1939. This time, however, he was not talking about vague prognoses, but of a firm intention that was soon to reach its terrible fulfillment. It was on January 30, 1941, two years after his apocalyptic prophecy, that he told his nation that two years ago: “he pointed out that if the outside world were allowed to be drawn into war by Judaism, all Judaism would play its part in Europe. Even today (the Jews ) can still laugh at it, just as they laughed at my earlier prophecy. The coming months and years will show that I was right. "In less than half a year, the Eastern campaign and the horrific massacres of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews began. The construction of death camps soon followed. In 1942, mass gas killings began in extermination camps set up by Reinhard: 17.March in Bełzec , early May in Sobibor and July 23 in Treblinka ( in the Chełmno camp on December 8, 1941, the murder in gas cars began, which no longer worked on an experimental basis ). The systematic gas extermination of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau began in March 1942.

Laurence Rees in his admirable book (Auschwitz. The Nazis and the 'Final Solution') states: "it is not difficult to imagine Hitler as saying in December 1941 Himmler that he wanted the Jews to exterminate, but that he will not ask how the desired result was achieved . Of course, we cannot know for sure how this conversation went, because during the war Hitler was very careful not to use Himmler as a buffer between himself and the realization of the final solution. Hitler knew the extent of the crimes that the Nazis had intended, and did not want to leave any evidence of them. Nevertheless, his fingerprints are everywhere - starting with the open rhetoric of hatred and the close connection between Himmler's meetings with Hitler in his East Prussian headquarters and the subsequent radicalization in the persecution and murder of the Jews. "


Heinrich Himmler, Reich SS leader and Hitler's right hand man

The change in the war situation in December 1941 had catastrophic consequences for the fate of the Jews. As early as December 13, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: " As for the Jewish question, the leader decided for a thorough cleansing. He prophesied to the Jews that if they provoked world war again, they would see their own liquidation. That was not an empty phrase. World War II is here, and the extermination of the Jews must be a necessary consequence of it. This question must be looked at without sentiment. Shortly afterwards, on December 18, 1941, after a four-eyed conversation with Hitler, Himmler wrote in a diary: " The Jewish question - they must be exterminated like guerrillas. “On January 20, 1942, a meeting took place on the shores of Lake Wannsee near Berlin, still mistaken for the decisive milestone of the Holocaust. In fact, by then, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews had been murdered in the " classical " manner in the East. The next phase of the genocide was to begin on a new basis of mass murder, which was to be more considerate of the nervous system of Himmler's ( Hitler's ) katanas. Gas chambers and cremation furnaces became the solution. The Wannsee conference was, in fact, a " secondary " meeting, only part of the dissemination of knowledge about the extermination process, which has already been decided elsewhere.


Boycott of Jewish shops

The opinion of Auschwitz Commander Rudolf Höß ( not only ) on Hitler's role in the extermination of European Jews is interesting: “ I could not see so far about whether this mass liquidation of Jews was necessary or not. If the "final solution to the Jewish question" was ordered by the Leader himself, there were no further considerations for the old National Socialist, much less for the SS commander. 'Leader, command' we will follow you '- it was by no means just a phrase, a password. It was meant cruelly serious. "Although David Irving tells us that Hitler had no idea about Auschwitz, suggesting to the reader that he could not know more about the ongoing massacres of European Jews, two German historians have convicted the British" messiah "of lying.In their editorial work ( Akta Hitler ), Henrik Eberle ( 1970 ) and Matthias Uhl ( 1970 ) quote from the protocols of Hitler's aide Otto Günsche and valet Heinz Linge obtained by the NKVD between 1948 and 1949. As for the Holocaust, they provide the following information: “ At one time, Hitler was personally interested in the development of gas chambers. He studied in detail the development projects presented to him by Himmler. Himmler ordered to provide the gas chamber designer, one engineer from Eisenach, with full support and the best technical forces. [...] Hitler asked Himmler ( in April 1945 ) the same question: what happened to the prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp? Himmler replied that the most important prisoners had been shot, but the rest could not be taken away for technical reasons. Hitler paled even more. In a hopping voice, he asked, 'What: weren't they taken away? Technically impossible? Why weren't they disposed of in time? [...] Then he added more quietly: 'Himmler, make sure your people are not sentimental! I expected more from you! ' As early as the summer of 1939, one of the German workers working at Hitler's residence was sent to the Dachau concentration camp to tell the other workers at the Berghof about the leader's " valuable " library, which included detective stories and adventure novels. In the conditions of the " feudal " Third Reich, it was unthinkable for Hitler to know anything about the ongoing extermination of European Jews. According to moderate estimates, a full 100,000 people took part in the direct genocide. Also, given the number of concentration camps, it is almost impossible for him to have any idea of their existence. After all, the above quotations prove that Hitler was sufficiently informed about both.


Jews are not welcome here

Reklama

At one point, it is necessary to agree with Irving. The horrific outcome of the Holocaust could not have taken place without the enthusiastic support of Hitler's vision by millions of Germans. Or if we want to use the title of Daniel Goldhagen's exceptional work: Hitler's willing katanas. Before his "revelation" was because David Irving in January 1976 or in January 1989 can claim that "the burden of guilt for the bloody and crazy massacres of Jews based on a number of Germans (and not only Germans), many of whom are still alive , and not just one "crazy dictator," whose orders had to be carried out without apology. "


The Einsatzgruppen were happy to document their crimes

" Because nothing was known about it at all "

This title comes from an exquisitely crafted publication by three German authors bearing the all-encompassing title: My grandfather was not a Nazi. While the image of the suffering of family members in Soviet captivity, the " terrorist " attacks of the Allied air force, the last months of a war full of horror, hunger and rape of German women and girls by Red Army soldiers survives in German family memory, the image of the Holocaust was almost displaced by these memories. The Nazis did not exist in their own families. The Nazis were the " others ": Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, etc. The fathers and mothers of the post-war German generation never had anything to do with these thugs. If a document confirming the opposite nevertheless appears, a shocking surprise arises in the family of the person concerned. However, there are honorable exceptions. Alfons Heck, a former member of the Hitler Youth, recalls that: “ After the Crystal Night, no German who was big enough to walk could defend himself by not knowing about the persecution of the Jews. "At the time of the deportation of the German Jewish population, there were rumors throughout Germany of their mass murder in the east.One German teacher commented on the deportations: " It is clear above the sun that this means liquidation. In December 1942, a German woman wrote in her diary: " Jews disappear all over the crowd. Terrible rumors are circulating about the fate of the evacuees - mass shooting and starvation, torture and gasification. "The German pastor Walter Hochstadter vain in their challenge to German soldiers secretly circulated in June and July 1944, said:" The terrible fate of the Jews can not listen to the community of Jesus differently than modesty, the merciful compassion and awestruck. "


Mass murders of Jewish women in Ukraine

Post script

David Irving eventually lost a civil dispute to historian Deborah Lipstadt ( author of Holocaust Denial ) and was identified as a Holocaust denier, racist, anti-Semite and forger. In Austria, he was even convicted and imprisoned for questioning the genocide. On January 27, 2021, it was 76 years since the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. The number of living witnesses of the Shoah is declining, and it is not only up to historians to preserve for future generations the image of this horrible modern European chapter.

Published with the kind permission of the author.
Published in the magazine Fakta a svědectví 2/2011 published by Naše Vojsko .

Join us

We believe that there are people with different interests and experiences who could contribute their knowledge and ideas. If you love military history and have experience in historical research, writing articles, editing text, moderating, creating images, graphics or videos, or simply have a desire to contribute to our unique system, you can join us and help us create content that will be interesting and beneficial to other readers.

Find out more