{"id":365585,"date":"2018-06-16T00:29:18","date_gmt":"2018-06-15T23:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=365585"},"modified":"2018-06-16T00:40:13","modified_gmt":"2018-06-15T23:40:13","slug":"against-david-irvings-view-of-hitler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/against-david-irvings-view-of-hitler\/","title":{"rendered":"Against David Irving’s View of Hitler"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, as posted originally at The Unz Review<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In response to Ron Unz\u2019s \u201cThe Remarkable Historiography of David Irving\u201d<\/span><\/a>, this note will pick up on and elucidate the reader-comment to that from James N. Kennett, which stated: \u201cIt seemed to me that the problem with his work was not the possible inaccuracy of the details that he included \u2013 but the things he had left out. Anyone can tell a good story by leaving out the evidence that does not fit. Irving also coined the phrase ‘the Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars\u2014A.S.S.H.O.L.E.S.’<\/span><\/a> You don\u2019t have to be a supporter of the Holocaust Industry to realise that this is crass insensitivity, and an ahistorical insult to those who did survive. Far from indicating a historian of unique genius, it is the product of a perverted mind.\u201d (I have added the link there in Kennett\u2019s comment \u2014 it wasn\u2019t provided by him \u2014 a link to an apt comment that had been posted at \u201cGood Reads\u201d about David Irving\u2019s statement there against those survivors.)<\/span><\/p>\n

My 2000 book WHY the Holocaust Happened<\/i> (the publisher subsequently went out of business, and so it\u2019s no longer available) discusses both the history and the historiography of the Holocaust; and, while the writings of David Irving are not mentioned there (but more \u2018respectable\u2019 proponents of his \u2018weak dictator\u2019 interpretation of Hitler were), it presented, regarding Mr. Irving, lots of (as Kennett has put it), \u201cthe things he had left out,\u201d and that I think invalidate Irving\u2019s works, because the motivation behind those omissions is clear and is not considered acceptable by most historians. Here are some of those omissions \u2014 things left out altogether, or else unjustifiably denigrated, by Irving \u2014 (with page-references to where the given excerpts appear in my book):<\/span><\/p>\n

Pages 229-230:<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the transparent frauds of the Holocaust-deniers inside and outside academia, there is no serious question that the Holocaust existed and that it constituted a crime of unimaginably vast scope. Equally without doubt \u2014 again notwithstanding hoaxers both inside and outside the universities \u2014 is the fact that Adolf Hitler held the motive for the crime, and that the Nazi Party and the other perpetrators \u201con the ground\u201d were his instruments in carrying it out. According to Adolf Eichmann, Chief of the Bureau for Jewish Affairs at the Reich Security Headquarters, in his 1983 Eichmann Interrogated<\/i> (p. 75), it was in August or September 1941 that his boss \u201cHeydrich sent for me. I reported. … He began with a little speech, then said, \u2018The F\u00fchrer has ordered physical extermination.\u2019 These were his words. … The F\u00fchrer had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.\u201d And (xxii, 92) Eichmann also acknowledged that by no later than 21 September 1939, Heydrich had made known to him the \u201cbasic conception\u201d of \u201cthe physical extermination of the Jews\u201d as \u201cthe ultimate aim\u201d that was \u201cpromulgated by Hitler.\u201d Eichmann\u2019s recollection was exact to the day: Heydrich\u2019s official order, referring to \u201cthe final goal (which will require a lengthy period),\u201d was dated 21 September 1939. On 31 July 1941 G\u00f6ring instructed Heydrich to draw up detailed plans for \u201cthe desired final solution of the Jewish question\u201d (document 710-PS in Trial of the Major War Criminals<\/i>). Hitler\u2019s signature even appears on the document (630-PS) dated 1 September 1939 authorizing the \u201ceuthanasia\u201d of the disabled and other \u201cincurables.\u201d The physicians had wanted that in writing, and got it. And in his Secret Conversations<\/i> (Table Talk<\/i>) of 21 October 1941, Hitler concluded his long tirade against Jews: \u201cBy exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.\u201d Himmler publicly stated in a speech on 24 February 1943 that this was necessary in order to have \u201cexterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it.\u201d Hitler\u2019s guilt in the Holocaust is beyond any reasonable doubt, regardless of what neo-Nazis say.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

page 218:<\/span><\/p>\n

By January 1939, Hitler\u2019s official policy was for the expulsion of all Jews. By June 1940, it was for their expulsion specifically to Madagascar \u2014 a goal even less practicable than expulsion itself, since the \u201cMadagascar Plan\u201d required as prerequisites the defeat of both France and England, and could thus realistically not even be considered as a short-term measure which is what it was presented as being. Hitler knew better. And along the way, he skillfully set up numerous highly visible public displays of the unwillingness of foreign nations to accept the flood of dispossessed Jews that he was offering as refugees. (As Rudolph Binion noted in his 1976 Hitler Among the Germans<\/i>, pp. 29-30, Hitler had even fired Reichsbank chief Hjalmar Schacht early in 1939 because Schacht had been too effective in promoting the expulsion of Jews; and both Binion, and Richard Breitman\u2019s 1991 The Architect of Genocide<\/i>, pp. 50-1, documented that even Hitler had acknowledged that expulsion of Jews was really intended as nothing more than \u201cexporting anti-Semitism.\u201d) Hitler gleefully observed the embarrassment of other countries that proclaimed their opposition to anti-Semitism but that turned a cold shoulder to these desperate refugees. Hitler was trying expulsion; other nations just refused to receive what he was offering them. The United States, for example, not only did not increase its immigration-quota for Jews; it failed even to admit as many Jews as the official quota permitted. David S. Wyman\u2019s 1984 The Abandonment of the Jews<\/i> documents (pp. 100, 365, 410) the repeated refusal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to meet with Jewish leaders to deal with the problem, and also establishes the President\u2019s own personal knowledge of the Nazis\u2019 anti-Semitic exterminations. For Hitler, such international response was itself part of the \u201csleepwalking\u201d toward genocide. By the time of the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 to coordinate the actions of all state agencies involved with the \u201cfinal solution,\u201d all participants were reading their respective roles from a playbook written by none other than the F\u00fchrer himself. And by that time, they were all prepared for those roles \u2014 knew them by heart, actually. When three days later, on 23 January, Hitler in his Secret Conversations<\/i> (Table-Talk<\/i>) addressed Himmler sarcastically about the matter, Himmler understood very well what he meant by saying of his policy toward the Jews, \u201cI\u2019m extraordinarily humane. … But if they refuse to leave voluntarily, I see no other solution than extermination.\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Page 15:<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously, the Holocaust occurred within the context of a World War; yet it actually drained the attention of Hitler and of his fighting forces away from the war-effort, needlessly hardened the worldwide opposition to Germany, and transformed into outright enemies talented people who might otherwise have been neutral or even supportive as \u201cpatriotic Germans.\u201d Judged purely as a military tactic, the Holocaust was at best dubious, and at worst counter-productive. Horst von Maltitz perceptively observed in this regard in his 1973 The Evolution of Hitler\u2019s Germany<\/i> (p. 171), that \u201crailroad transport trains carrying Jews from the West to extermination camps in Poland were given priority over trains for urgently needed troops and war supplies. Moreover, skilled Jewish laborers, desperately needed in the munitions plants in occupied Poland, were carted off to extermination centers, in spite of strong objections by plant managers.\u201d And according to the Polish Ambassador, Jan Ciechanowski, in his 1947 Defeat in Victory<\/i> (p. 179), he had personally handed U.S. President Roosevelt in the White House on 28 July 1943 a memo that, \u201cThe unprecedented destruction of the entire Jewish population is not motivated by Germany\u2019s military requirements. Hitler and his subordinates aim at the total destruction of the Jews before the war ends and regardless of its outcome.\u201d The basic question thus is posed: what was the relationship between Germany\u2019s war effort and the Holocaust? Which served which; what was Hitler\u2019s ultimate objective?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The F\u00fchrer\u2019s words right before his suicide \u2014 his final, supreme, statement of his war-aims \u2014 urged his people to continue the war, until victory, against what he held to be the sole real enemy: \u201cthe poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.\u201d The enemy for him was Jews in all nations; this also sheds light on why over 96% of the Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust did not come from Germany. We shall indeed show that, for Hitler, defeat of the enemy entailed nothing less than the extermination of all Jews.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, for Hitler, the Holocaust \u2014 the \u201cfinal solution\u201d \u2014 was not a military device, it was a military goal; in fact, it was the central military goal, which took precedence over even the expansion of Lebensraum. In order to understand why the Holocaust happened, it therefore is necessary to understand why Hitler hated Jews so fanatically and so obsessively that nothing less than their total extermination would satisfy him.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Those are the key excerpts regarding the viewpoint that David Irving presents.<\/span><\/p>\n

Irving states that Hitler didn\u2019t know about whatever extermination of the world\u2019s Jews was intended, if any was intended. However, Irving doesn\u2019t deny that local exterminations were carried out. Irving alleges that Hitler\u2019s subordinates knew about and wanted these local atrocities, but that Hitler wanted only that Jews be expelled from everywhere to be sent to Madagascar. However, such expulsion was actually the intention and expectation of Hitler\u2019s finance-chief, Hjalmar Schacht, and Hitler finally demoted him, perhaps for that very reason. Hitler certainly didn\u2019t want Schacht to know what his plans for the Jews actually were. Hitler just wanted some rich Jews to buy their ways out, since he tried to postpone for as long as possible anyone\u2019s knowledge of what his intended \u201cFinal Solution to the Jewish problem\u201d actually was. Furthermore, as my book noted, Hitler wanted to make things as difficult for FDR and for Churchill as he could. He did everything possible to avoid leaks regarding what his intentions were, and especially regarding why he held those intentions. Also, Irving noted, in a footnote, that Eichmann had testified to having been informed by Heydrich that \u201cThe F\u00fchrer has ordered physical extermination,\u201d but Irving simply dismissed that by saying: \u201cThere is no primary or secondary documentary support for such a statement. This kind of evidence, of course, would not suffice in an English magistrate\u2019s court to convict a vagabond of bicycle stealing.\u201d He dismisses everything that doesn\u2019t fit with his image of Hitler \u2014 \u201cprobably the weakest leader Germany has known this century,\u201d as Irving said in the Introduction to the 1977 edition of Hitler\u2019s War<\/i>. The 1991 edition changed this to \u201cHitler was a far less omnipotent F\u00fchrer than had been believed, and his grip on his subordinates had weakened with each passing year.\u201d Of course, that\u2019s saying the closer that events got to the actual perpetration of the Holocaust, the less responsible for whatever it was, Hitler was, in Irving\u2019s view. To Irving, Germans were tragic victims, but many of them overreacted to the abuses that they had received from Britain, Jews, communists, and some others.<\/span><\/p>\n

While my book doesn\u2019t mention Irving, it does deal extensively with (among others) a writer about the Holocaust who seems to hate Germans as much as Irving seems to hate Jews: Daniel Goldhagen. The problem with both writers is that they are tribal (one a \u201cJew\u201d and the other an \u201cAryan\u201d \u2014 i.e., pureblooded Christian, or, at least, not \u201cJew\u201d), though writing from the opposite tribal standpoints. To be a historian, instead of merely some kind of propagandist, requires abandonment of any tribalism at all. Unfortunately, Goldhagen\u2019s tribalism is considered acceptable, whereas Irving\u2019s isn\u2019t. Today\u2019s Palestinians \u2014 and many others \u2014 are victims of Goldhagen\u2019s particular form of tribalism<\/span><\/a>. But perhaps as the Holocaust recedes from view, with the passage of the decades, tribalism itself is becoming fashionable again, too. In fact, tribalism seems to be coming into vogue again throughout the world. Look, for example, at what the U.S. Government and its Saudi and UAE partners are doing to the Houthis, a Shiite tribe, in Yemen<\/span><\/a>. Even genocide is becoming \u2018acceptable\u2019 again (certainly to America\u2019s Government and its allies). The restoration of Irving to \u2018acceptability\u2019 is just a part of that broader trend.<\/span><\/p>\n

PS:<\/b> In the many reader-comments to this article at The Unz Review, there are few that address the evidence this article presents that Irving\u2019s view of Hitler and of Hitler\u2019s connection to the Holocaust was false. Some of the reader-comments are ad-hominem (and false) against me. But none of them focus on the evidence that\u2019s presented here; and especially I want to repeat here, as I did in responding to one of those reader-comments, these two quotations, as being crucially important evidence:<\/span><\/p>\n

Having read the reader-comments up to this point (comment #46), I notice that none even so much as mentions the key quotation that I present in this article, which is \u201cin his Secret Conversations (Table Talk) of 21 October 1941, Hitler concluded his long tirade against Jews: <\/i>\u2018By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service \u2026\u2019,\u201d<\/i><\/b> which should settle the matter as to whether Hitler was proud of his \u201cextermination\u201d of Jews, which people he held to be a \u201cpest,\u201d and which \u201cinfection\u201d in his other writings he called a \u201cbacterium,\u201d just as did Himmler. So, all these reader-comments evade that admission by Hitler. Furthermore, all till now have been evading: \u201cThe F\u00fchrer\u2019s words right before his suicide \u2014 his final, supreme, statement of his war-aims \u2014 urged his people to continue the war, until victory, against what he held to be the sole real enemy: <\/i>\u2018the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.\u2019\u201d<\/i><\/b> I frankly don\u2019t understand how anyone, after seeing those two statements from Hitler himself, at and near his end, can leave any reasonable doubt as to whether David Irving is a liar. This is not the Hitler that he portrays.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, as posted originally at The Unz Review In response to Ron Unz\u2019s \u201cThe Remarkable Historiography of David Irving\u201d, this note will pick up on and elucidate the reader-comment to that from James N. Kennett, which stated: \u201cIt seemed to me that the problem with his work was not the possible inaccuracy of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":365586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,519],"tags":[529,679,924,5692,59,702,804,1235,5691],"class_list":{"0":"post-365585","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-newswire","9":"tag-fascism","10":"tag-genocide","11":"tag-hitler","12":"tag-holocaust","13":"tag-military","14":"tag-nazis","15":"tag-politics-2","16":"tag-war","17":"tag-world-war-ii"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365585"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":365588,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365585\/revisions\/365588"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}