A Holocaust of Biblical Proportions
Posted: Wed Nov 01, 2023 6:25 pm
A Holocaust of Biblical Proportions
LAURENT GUYÉNOT
Jewish blood for Zion
Holocaust is term taken from the Hebrew Bible (in the Greek translation), designating the religious sacrifice of animals that are burned completely on an altar. The first holocaust recorded in the Bible is performed by Noah in Genesis 8. In a fit of rage, Yahweh has said to himself: “I shall rid the surface of the earth of the human beings whom I created, […] for I regret having made them.” But after drowning almost all his creatures in a flood, Yahweh regrets having regretted, when Noah offers him a huge holocaust. “Yahweh smelt the pleasing smell and said to himself, ‘Never again will I curse the earth because of human beings, because their heart contrives evil from their infancy.” Yahweh has been addicted to the “sweet smell” of carbonized flesh ever since. According to the Book of Ezra, a gigantic holocaust was offered to Yahweh by the Judeo-Babylonians who (re)colonized Palestine, in preparation for the (re)building of the Temple (7:12-15).
Why, then, was the name “Holocaust” chosen to designate the destruction of “six millions” European Jews during World War II? Everything of importance in the history of Israel gets a biblical name, even Israel’s nuclear deterrence policy, the “Samson Option”. But why “holocaust”? In what sense is the Holocaust a holocaust? The obvious implication is that the death of millions of European Jews pleased Yahweh, and, by consequence, hastened the fulfillment of his messianic promise. As evident as it is, that implication is of course unspeakable in explicite terms. It will only be whispered cryptically among initiates (read for example about Irving Greenberg’s controversial statements on Wikipedia). At best, it can be veiled in religious terms: “The State of Israel is God’s answer to Auschwitz,” in Abraham Herschel’s Trinitarian formula linking Yahweh (the Father), Israel (the Son), and the Holocaust (the Holy Ghost?).[1]
But in his book The Holocaust Victims Accuse, anti-Zionist rabbi Moshe Shonfeld comes close to the outrageous claim that the Zionists needed six millions cremated Jews for the foundation of the Jewish State: “The Zionist leaders saw the spilt Jewish blood of the holocaust as grease for the wheels of the Jewish national state.” (Read a review of Moshe Shonfeld’s book here, and get the book on pdf here.)
Are there any facts to back the theory that the Zionist elites willingly sacrificed the German Jews on the altar of Zionism? I think there are. We can start with the declaration of war published on the front page of the British Daily Express, March 24, 1933, at the initiative of Zionist Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer: “the Israeli people around the world declare economic and financial war against Germany.” The words were carefully chosen to implicate the 400,000 Jews living in Germany among the conspirators against the German State and the German people: “Jews of All the World Unite in Action,” read the headline, while the article insisted: “Fourteen million Jews dispersed throughout the world have banded as one man … to stand by the 600,000 Jews of Germany.” This declaration, heard loud and clear in Germany, was a provocation meant to put the German Jews in extreme danger, at a time when “not a hair on a Jew’s head had been touched,” as Goebbels protested.
Many Jews, it must be said, protested at the irresponsibility of the Jewish financial elites’ call for boycott. American rabbi Harry Waton would write in 1939 in his in Program for the Jews:
“by this stupid boycott they aggravate the position of the Jews in Germany. In their vanity and stupidity the Jews in this country do not realize how inhuman and cruel it is to sacrifice the Jews in Germany in order to satisfy a stupid, and insane vanity. […] Six years passed since the Jews outside of Germany declared war against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Jews will never admit that the recent pogroms had much to do with their stupid boycott.”[2]
Neither would they admit, of course, that the pogroms were the intended outcome of the boycott, as the necessary pretext needed to escalate the economic war into a military one, which would in turn bring hell down upon the German Jews.
How Hitler was trapped by his own prophecy
Predictably, five days after the declaration of the boycott, Hitler announced a counter-boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany as “defensive measure.” At the same time, he warned that, “Jewry must recognize that a Jewish war against Germany will lead to sharp measures against Jewry in Germany.”[3]
On January 30, 1939, in an ultimate attempt to deter England from declaring war on Germany, Hitler sent her a warning from the Reichstag tribune. After recalling that he had often been a prophet, as when he predicted his own rise to power, Hitler added:
“I want once again to be a prophet. If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of earth, and thus a Jewish victory, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.”
This “prophetic warning to Jewry!” as the headline of Völkische Beobachter put it the following day, was widely distributed and discussed. As if in response to it, England declared war on September 3, 1939. The World Jewish Congress (founded in 1936 to rally world Jewry against Hitler) immediately stated that it stood wholeheartedly by Britain.
Hitler repeated his prophecy on January 30, 1941, this time at the address of the United States. The New York Times responded with an article that was tantamount to challenging him to act on his word:
“there is not a single precedent to prove he will either keep a promise or fulfill a threat. If there is any guarantee in his record, in fact, it is that the one thing he will not do is the thing he says he will do.”[4]
The United States entered the war in December 1941. A few days later, during the Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941, according to Goebbels’ diary, Hitler declared that his prophecy “was not just a phrase. The world war is here, and the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.” Again, Hitler should have considered the obvious: he was being pushed to act on his prophecy.
That same year of 1941, in response to a plea for rescuing the Jews of Europe, Nathan Schwalb, head of the Jewish Agency in Switzerland, declined with the following justification:
“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 and territories after the war? […] only through blood will the land be ours.”[5]
Already in 1938, the Anglo-American Zionists had sabotaged the Evian International Conference on Political and Economic Problems Caused by the Expulsion of Jews from the Reich, and the resolution of Western democracies to open their borders to the Jews that Germany would be happy to get rid of, because, said David Ben-Gurion, this “will endanger the existence of Zionism.”[6] German Jews were either to be forcibly converted to Zionism and emigrate to Palestine—but the British only allowed limited quotas—or be left to die in Nazi concentration camps—in both case, for the ultimate benefit of Zionism. When war broke out, there remained in Germany about 275,000 Jews who, for want of a visa granted by a foreign country, were unable to emigrate. This had been planned by the Anglo-American Zionists.
Everything possible was done to intensify German rage against Jews. In early 1941 appeared the 96–page booklet by Jewish American businessman Theodore Kaufman, Germany Must Perish, advocating “the extinction of the German nation and the total eradication from the earth, of all her people,” by sterilizing all German males under sixty, and females under forty-five, which could be done in less than a month by about twenty thousand surgeons. “Accordingly in the span of two generations, […] the elimination of Germanism and its carriers, will have been an accomplished fact.”[7] Interviewed by the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, Kaufman speaks of the Jews’ “mission” to guide humankind toward “perpetual peace”; thanks to them, “slowly but surely the world will develop into a paradise”; but for the moment, “let us sterilize all Germans and wars of world domination will come to an end!”[8] Kaufman’s book was reviewed positively in the New York Times and the Washington Post. In 1944, it would be commented upon by Louis Nizer in his influential book What to Do with Germany? (highly praised by Harry Truman). Nizer rejected Kaufman’s solution as exaggerated, but recommended the death penalty for 150,000 Germans, and “labor battalions” for hundreds of thousands more.[9]
Louis Marschalko, in The World Conquerors: The Real War Criminals (1958), cites a few more well-published Jewish authors advocating a “final solution” for the “German question”: Leon Dodd, who in How Many World Wars (New York, 1942), proclaims that no Germany and no German race must be left after the war; Charles Heartman, who in There Must Be No Germany After This War (New York, 1942), also demands the physical extermination of the German people; Einzig Palil, who in Can We Win the Peace? (London, 1942), demanded the dismembering of Germany and the total demolition of German industry; Ivor Duncan, who in the March, 1942, issue of Zentral Europa Observer, demanded the sterilization of forty million Germans, estimating the total cost at five million pounds sterling.[10]
Shortly after the Normandy landings, Roosevelt and Churchill discussed the future of Germany at the Second Quebec Conference of September 11, 1944, and signed a project developed under the leadership of Jewish-Americans Henry Morgenthau Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury, and his assistant Harry Dexter White. This Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany, or Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III, “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character,” by dismantling and transporting to Allied nations “all industrial plants and equipment not destroyed by military action,” while calling for “forced German labor outside Germany.” The revelation of this insane “Morgenthau Plan” by the Wall Street Journal (September 23) pushed the Nazis into a desperate fight-to-the-death mentality, and further rage against Jews.[11]
Meanwhile, in 1944, a new effort by the Roosevelt administration for opening the borders of allied countries to Jewish refugees was again aborted by American Zionists. When Morris Ernst, sent by Roosevelt to London to discuss the project, returned with British agreement to welcome 150,000 refugees, Roosevelt was satisfied: “150,000 to England—150,000 to match that in the United States—pick up 200,000 or 300,000 elsewhere and we can start with half a million of these oppressed people.” But a week later, Roosevelt announced to Ernst the abandonment of the project “because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.” The Zionists, said Roosevelt, “know they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘There is no other place for this poor Jew to go.’ But if there is a world political asylum, they cannot raise their money.” Incredulous, Ernst made the rounds of his Jewish contacts. He wrote in his memoirs that, “active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration [into the US] in order to undermine political Zionism.”[12]
The same Jews who had lobbied so hard until the 1930s in favor of unrestricted Jewish immigration in the US now wanted Jews to remain trapped in Germany, until the survivors could be forced into Palestine.
How, otherwise, could they be able to capitalize on a death toll of six million Jews? Six million is the number they had settled on long ago for Israel’s founding holocaust, it seems (read “Two hundred ‘Six million Jews’ allegations from 1900-1945” or watch “Six million Jews 1915-1938”). On October 31, 1919, for example, in an article titled “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!” The American Hebrew had warned of “this threatened holocaust of human life” on “six millions” European Jews (a figure repeated seven times in one page) who “are being whirled toward the grave … through the awful tyranny of war and a bigoted lust for Jewish blood,” and concluded that “Israel is entitled to a place in the sun.” “Jewish blood” referred in this case to the pogroms by Russian and Ukrainian counter-revolutionaries, which made 6,000 victims that year—a disappointing number.
Ever since Theodor Herzl used the Dreyfus Affair as a springboard for Zionism, it was understood that “Anti-Semitism is a propelling force which, like the wave of the future, will bring Jews into the promised land,” as Herzl wrote in his dairy. “Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow—and so do I.”[13] Logically, the propelling force will be proportional to the violence of the anti-Semitism, that is, to the reported number of its victims and the graphic horror of their doom.
The Nazis’ good Jews
The Jews who suffered the most under Nazi Germany were not the Zionist Jews. The Zionist Jews were regarded by the Nazis as the good Jews.[14] And for good reasons: they applauded the 1933 Nuremberg laws, and they protested against the economic boycott imposed by American Jews. The Zionist Federation of Germany addressed a memorandum to “the New German State” (dated June, 21) condemning the boycott, and expressing sympathy for the Nazi ideology:
“Our acknowledgment 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 and reject any trespasses in the cultural domain.” “The realization 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.”[15]
A prominent leader of German Jewry, Joachim Prinz, future president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in his book Wir Juden (“We the Jews”) published in Berlin in 1934:
“We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind.”[16]
This was not just opportunism. There had always been sympathy between Jewish and German racialism, to the point that rabbi Waton (quoted above) claimed that, “Nazism is an imitation of Judaism.”[17] It was not Hitler, but Zeev Jabotinsky who wrote in his Letter on Autonomy, some twenty years before Mein Kampf:
“A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German custom, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-racial type are Jewish. […] A preservation of national integrity is impossible except by a preservation of racial purity.”[18]
So it was very logically that Reinhardt Heydrich, chief of the SS Security Service, wrote in 1935 in Das Schwarze Korps, the SS journal:
“We must separate Jewry into two categories: the Zionists and those who favour being assimilated. The Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state. […] The time cannot be far distant when Palestine will again be able to accept its sons who have been lost to it for over a thousand years. Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.”[19]
Sixty thousand wealthy German Zionists were allowed to settle with their fortune in Palestine under the Haavara Agreement, a decisive contribution to the Jewish colonization of Palestine.[20] As Hannah Arendt reminded in 1963, “all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed ‘Reichsvereinigung’ [compulsory organization of all Jews in Nazi Germany, who selected Jews for emigration] were held by Zionists.” This created “a situation in which the non-selected majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies—the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities.”[21] The Zionists and the Nazis were united against the very notion of assimilation and the abomination of intermarriage.
To say that Hitler was a Zionist would be exaggerated, for he wrote in 1923:
“For while Zionism tries to make the other part of the world believe that the national self-consciousness of the Jew finds satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian State, the Jews again most slyly dupe the stupid goyim. They have no thought of building up a Jewish State in Palestine, so that they might inhabit it, but they only want a central organization of their international world cheating, endowed with prerogatives, withdrawn from the seizure of others: a refuge for convicted rascals and a high school for future rogues.”[22]
Yet from 1933 to 1938, Hitler regarded German Zionists as ideological and strategic allies in his desire to rid Germany of its Jews. And there is no question that most Jews who died under Nazism were among the assimilationist Jews, those who had no sympathy for Zionism, and whom Zionists regarded as apostates and traitors to their race.
That, I believe, explains why the Holocaust is called the Holocaust: the idea that assimilationist Jews must perish is consistently biblical. The notion comes straight from Deuteronomy:
“If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries secretly to seduce you, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ […], you must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God. […] All Israel, hearing of this, will be afraid, and none of you will do such a wicked thing again” (Deuteronomy 13:7-12).[23]
And if in one town, “scoundrels from your own stock […] have led their fellow-citizens astray, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’” then
“you must put the inhabitants of that town to the sword; you must lay it under the curse of destruction—the town and everything in it. You must pile up all its loot in the public square and burn the town and all its loot, offering it all to Yahweh your God. It is to be a ruin for all time, and never rebuilt” (Deuteronomy 13:13-17).
Or, according to another translation: “the entire town must be put to the torch as a burnt offering to Yahweh your God.”
The Levites’ rule of terror
In biblical terms, assimilation means “serving other gods.” The Jews who seek assimilation deserve death, and their death will serve as an example to the rest. When, in the second century BC, some Israelites said, “let us ally ourselves with the gentiles surrounding us, for since we separated ourselves from them many misfortunes have overtaken us,” the Maccabees “organized themselves into an armed force, striking down the sinners in their anger, and the renegades in their fury” (1Maccabees 1-2), and established their Hasmonean theocracy.[24]
Terrorizing the Jews into submission to strict separateness and endogamy is the essence of the Yahwist covenant. The Torah shows that Yahweh’s rule of terror rests on the sacrifice of assimilationist and rebellious Jews. In the Book of Numbers, when an Israelite had the gall to appear before Moses with his Midianite wife, Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, “seized a lance, followed the Israelite into the alcove, and there ran them both through, the Israelite and the woman, through the stomach.” Yahweh congratulated Phinehas for having “the same zeal as I have,” and, as a reward, gave “to him and his descendants after him, […] the priesthood for ever” that is, “the right to perform the ritual of expiation for the Israelites” (Numbers 25:11-13). Let us ponder the fact that, according to the Bible, the Aaronite priesthood was a reward for the double murder of an assimilationist Israelite and his non-Jewish wife.
Even more revealing is the story in Exodus 32. After the episode of the Golden Calf, Moses conspires with the sons of Levy who rallied around him:
“He said to them, ‘Yahweh, god of Israel, says this, ‘Buckle on your sword, each of you, and go up and down the camp from gate to gate, every man of you slaughtering brother, friend and neighbour.’ The Levites did as Moses said, and of the people about three thousand men perished that day. ‘Today’, Moses said, ‘you have consecrated yourselves to Yahweh, one at the cost of his son, another of his brother; and so he bestows a blessing on you today’” (Exodus 32:27-29).
As a reward for having slaughtered 30,000 Israelite “apostates”, the Levites receive their privilege as the hereditary sacerdotal class, an oligarchy sustained by the other tribes. Here is how the biblical scholar Karl Budde paraphrases this episode, the founding story of the institution of the Levites:
“Here we have, in fact, the very moment of Levi’s origin, and this is how it must be understood. At Moses’ call the faithful from all the tribes hasten to him and lend him their arm even against their own kindred. Those thus tested and proved remained from this time on united, and formed a new tribe, ‘Levi.’ […] Levy is thus, as it were, the bodyguard, the pick of those faithful to Yahweh who gather about Moses, renouncing the old ties of tribe and family.”[25]
In Numbers 16-17, a group of two hundred and fifty Levites, led by Korah, are themselves exterminated for having rebelled against Moses and Aaron. “I am going to destroy them here and now,” said Yahweh, and “Fire then shot out from Yahweh and consumed the two hundred and fifty men offering incense” (16:20-35). “On the following day, the whole community of Israelites were muttering against Moses and Aaron and saying, ‘You are responsible for killing Yahweh’s people!’” Then Yahweh said “I am going to destroy them here and now,” and a plague decimated fourteen thousand seven hundred of them (17:6-14).
What these episodes highlight is that the authority of Yahweh and of his elite cast of Levites is entirely founded on violence and terror against the Israelites themselves. It also shows that the Covenant is based on the permanent threat of destruction. Jews who challenge their representative elites and who socialize with their non-Jewish neighbors, who eat with them, who intermarry with them, and who, while doing all this, show respect to their gods, are the dregs of the Jewish people, traitors to Yahweh and to their race. They deserve to be eliminated without mercy, especially since they endanger the whole community by attracting Yahweh’s wrath.
Yahweh teaches the Jewish people that friendship with non-Jews is a betrayal of the covenant, and will be punished by disaster, possibly extermination. Joshua, Moses’ successor, said to the Israelites who had taken possession of Canaan:
“Never mix with the peoples who are still left beside you. Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them. […] if you make friends with the remnant of these nations still living beside you, if you intermarry with them, if you mix with them and they with you, then know for certain that Yahweh your god will stop dispossessing these nations before you, and for you they will be a snare, a pitfall, thorns in your sides and thistles in your eyes, until you vanish from this fine country given you by Yahweh your god. […] For if you violate the covenant which Yahweh your god has imposed on you, if you go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then Yahweh’s anger will be roused against you and you will quickly vanish from the fine country which he has given you.” (Joshua 23:6-16)
LAURENT GUYÉNOT
Jewish blood for Zion
Holocaust is term taken from the Hebrew Bible (in the Greek translation), designating the religious sacrifice of animals that are burned completely on an altar. The first holocaust recorded in the Bible is performed by Noah in Genesis 8. In a fit of rage, Yahweh has said to himself: “I shall rid the surface of the earth of the human beings whom I created, […] for I regret having made them.” But after drowning almost all his creatures in a flood, Yahweh regrets having regretted, when Noah offers him a huge holocaust. “Yahweh smelt the pleasing smell and said to himself, ‘Never again will I curse the earth because of human beings, because their heart contrives evil from their infancy.” Yahweh has been addicted to the “sweet smell” of carbonized flesh ever since. According to the Book of Ezra, a gigantic holocaust was offered to Yahweh by the Judeo-Babylonians who (re)colonized Palestine, in preparation for the (re)building of the Temple (7:12-15).
Why, then, was the name “Holocaust” chosen to designate the destruction of “six millions” European Jews during World War II? Everything of importance in the history of Israel gets a biblical name, even Israel’s nuclear deterrence policy, the “Samson Option”. But why “holocaust”? In what sense is the Holocaust a holocaust? The obvious implication is that the death of millions of European Jews pleased Yahweh, and, by consequence, hastened the fulfillment of his messianic promise. As evident as it is, that implication is of course unspeakable in explicite terms. It will only be whispered cryptically among initiates (read for example about Irving Greenberg’s controversial statements on Wikipedia). At best, it can be veiled in religious terms: “The State of Israel is God’s answer to Auschwitz,” in Abraham Herschel’s Trinitarian formula linking Yahweh (the Father), Israel (the Son), and the Holocaust (the Holy Ghost?).[1]
But in his book The Holocaust Victims Accuse, anti-Zionist rabbi Moshe Shonfeld comes close to the outrageous claim that the Zionists needed six millions cremated Jews for the foundation of the Jewish State: “The Zionist leaders saw the spilt Jewish blood of the holocaust as grease for the wheels of the Jewish national state.” (Read a review of Moshe Shonfeld’s book here, and get the book on pdf here.)
Are there any facts to back the theory that the Zionist elites willingly sacrificed the German Jews on the altar of Zionism? I think there are. We can start with the declaration of war published on the front page of the British Daily Express, March 24, 1933, at the initiative of Zionist Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer: “the Israeli people around the world declare economic and financial war against Germany.” The words were carefully chosen to implicate the 400,000 Jews living in Germany among the conspirators against the German State and the German people: “Jews of All the World Unite in Action,” read the headline, while the article insisted: “Fourteen million Jews dispersed throughout the world have banded as one man … to stand by the 600,000 Jews of Germany.” This declaration, heard loud and clear in Germany, was a provocation meant to put the German Jews in extreme danger, at a time when “not a hair on a Jew’s head had been touched,” as Goebbels protested.
Many Jews, it must be said, protested at the irresponsibility of the Jewish financial elites’ call for boycott. American rabbi Harry Waton would write in 1939 in his in Program for the Jews:
“by this stupid boycott they aggravate the position of the Jews in Germany. In their vanity and stupidity the Jews in this country do not realize how inhuman and cruel it is to sacrifice the Jews in Germany in order to satisfy a stupid, and insane vanity. […] Six years passed since the Jews outside of Germany declared war against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Jews will never admit that the recent pogroms had much to do with their stupid boycott.”[2]
Neither would they admit, of course, that the pogroms were the intended outcome of the boycott, as the necessary pretext needed to escalate the economic war into a military one, which would in turn bring hell down upon the German Jews.
How Hitler was trapped by his own prophecy
Predictably, five days after the declaration of the boycott, Hitler announced a counter-boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany as “defensive measure.” At the same time, he warned that, “Jewry must recognize that a Jewish war against Germany will lead to sharp measures against Jewry in Germany.”[3]
On January 30, 1939, in an ultimate attempt to deter England from declaring war on Germany, Hitler sent her a warning from the Reichstag tribune. After recalling that he had often been a prophet, as when he predicted his own rise to power, Hitler added:
“I want once again to be a prophet. If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of earth, and thus a Jewish victory, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.”
This “prophetic warning to Jewry!” as the headline of Völkische Beobachter put it the following day, was widely distributed and discussed. As if in response to it, England declared war on September 3, 1939. The World Jewish Congress (founded in 1936 to rally world Jewry against Hitler) immediately stated that it stood wholeheartedly by Britain.
Hitler repeated his prophecy on January 30, 1941, this time at the address of the United States. The New York Times responded with an article that was tantamount to challenging him to act on his word:
“there is not a single precedent to prove he will either keep a promise or fulfill a threat. If there is any guarantee in his record, in fact, it is that the one thing he will not do is the thing he says he will do.”[4]
The United States entered the war in December 1941. A few days later, during the Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941, according to Goebbels’ diary, Hitler declared that his prophecy “was not just a phrase. The world war is here, and the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.” Again, Hitler should have considered the obvious: he was being pushed to act on his prophecy.
That same year of 1941, in response to a plea for rescuing the Jews of Europe, Nathan Schwalb, head of the Jewish Agency in Switzerland, declined with the following justification:
“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 and territories after the war? […] only through blood will the land be ours.”[5]
Already in 1938, the Anglo-American Zionists had sabotaged the Evian International Conference on Political and Economic Problems Caused by the Expulsion of Jews from the Reich, and the resolution of Western democracies to open their borders to the Jews that Germany would be happy to get rid of, because, said David Ben-Gurion, this “will endanger the existence of Zionism.”[6] German Jews were either to be forcibly converted to Zionism and emigrate to Palestine—but the British only allowed limited quotas—or be left to die in Nazi concentration camps—in both case, for the ultimate benefit of Zionism. When war broke out, there remained in Germany about 275,000 Jews who, for want of a visa granted by a foreign country, were unable to emigrate. This had been planned by the Anglo-American Zionists.
Everything possible was done to intensify German rage against Jews. In early 1941 appeared the 96–page booklet by Jewish American businessman Theodore Kaufman, Germany Must Perish, advocating “the extinction of the German nation and the total eradication from the earth, of all her people,” by sterilizing all German males under sixty, and females under forty-five, which could be done in less than a month by about twenty thousand surgeons. “Accordingly in the span of two generations, […] the elimination of Germanism and its carriers, will have been an accomplished fact.”[7] Interviewed by the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, Kaufman speaks of the Jews’ “mission” to guide humankind toward “perpetual peace”; thanks to them, “slowly but surely the world will develop into a paradise”; but for the moment, “let us sterilize all Germans and wars of world domination will come to an end!”[8] Kaufman’s book was reviewed positively in the New York Times and the Washington Post. In 1944, it would be commented upon by Louis Nizer in his influential book What to Do with Germany? (highly praised by Harry Truman). Nizer rejected Kaufman’s solution as exaggerated, but recommended the death penalty for 150,000 Germans, and “labor battalions” for hundreds of thousands more.[9]
Louis Marschalko, in The World Conquerors: The Real War Criminals (1958), cites a few more well-published Jewish authors advocating a “final solution” for the “German question”: Leon Dodd, who in How Many World Wars (New York, 1942), proclaims that no Germany and no German race must be left after the war; Charles Heartman, who in There Must Be No Germany After This War (New York, 1942), also demands the physical extermination of the German people; Einzig Palil, who in Can We Win the Peace? (London, 1942), demanded the dismembering of Germany and the total demolition of German industry; Ivor Duncan, who in the March, 1942, issue of Zentral Europa Observer, demanded the sterilization of forty million Germans, estimating the total cost at five million pounds sterling.[10]
Shortly after the Normandy landings, Roosevelt and Churchill discussed the future of Germany at the Second Quebec Conference of September 11, 1944, and signed a project developed under the leadership of Jewish-Americans Henry Morgenthau Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury, and his assistant Harry Dexter White. This Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany, or Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III, “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character,” by dismantling and transporting to Allied nations “all industrial plants and equipment not destroyed by military action,” while calling for “forced German labor outside Germany.” The revelation of this insane “Morgenthau Plan” by the Wall Street Journal (September 23) pushed the Nazis into a desperate fight-to-the-death mentality, and further rage against Jews.[11]
Meanwhile, in 1944, a new effort by the Roosevelt administration for opening the borders of allied countries to Jewish refugees was again aborted by American Zionists. When Morris Ernst, sent by Roosevelt to London to discuss the project, returned with British agreement to welcome 150,000 refugees, Roosevelt was satisfied: “150,000 to England—150,000 to match that in the United States—pick up 200,000 or 300,000 elsewhere and we can start with half a million of these oppressed people.” But a week later, Roosevelt announced to Ernst the abandonment of the project “because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.” The Zionists, said Roosevelt, “know they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘There is no other place for this poor Jew to go.’ But if there is a world political asylum, they cannot raise their money.” Incredulous, Ernst made the rounds of his Jewish contacts. He wrote in his memoirs that, “active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration [into the US] in order to undermine political Zionism.”[12]
The same Jews who had lobbied so hard until the 1930s in favor of unrestricted Jewish immigration in the US now wanted Jews to remain trapped in Germany, until the survivors could be forced into Palestine.
How, otherwise, could they be able to capitalize on a death toll of six million Jews? Six million is the number they had settled on long ago for Israel’s founding holocaust, it seems (read “Two hundred ‘Six million Jews’ allegations from 1900-1945” or watch “Six million Jews 1915-1938”). On October 31, 1919, for example, in an article titled “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!” The American Hebrew had warned of “this threatened holocaust of human life” on “six millions” European Jews (a figure repeated seven times in one page) who “are being whirled toward the grave … through the awful tyranny of war and a bigoted lust for Jewish blood,” and concluded that “Israel is entitled to a place in the sun.” “Jewish blood” referred in this case to the pogroms by Russian and Ukrainian counter-revolutionaries, which made 6,000 victims that year—a disappointing number.
Ever since Theodor Herzl used the Dreyfus Affair as a springboard for Zionism, it was understood that “Anti-Semitism is a propelling force which, like the wave of the future, will bring Jews into the promised land,” as Herzl wrote in his dairy. “Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow—and so do I.”[13] Logically, the propelling force will be proportional to the violence of the anti-Semitism, that is, to the reported number of its victims and the graphic horror of their doom.
The Nazis’ good Jews
The Jews who suffered the most under Nazi Germany were not the Zionist Jews. The Zionist Jews were regarded by the Nazis as the good Jews.[14] And for good reasons: they applauded the 1933 Nuremberg laws, and they protested against the economic boycott imposed by American Jews. The Zionist Federation of Germany addressed a memorandum to “the New German State” (dated June, 21) condemning the boycott, and expressing sympathy for the Nazi ideology:
“Our acknowledgment 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 and reject any trespasses in the cultural domain.” “The realization 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.”[15]
A prominent leader of German Jewry, Joachim Prinz, future president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in his book Wir Juden (“We the Jews”) published in Berlin in 1934:
“We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind.”[16]
This was not just opportunism. There had always been sympathy between Jewish and German racialism, to the point that rabbi Waton (quoted above) claimed that, “Nazism is an imitation of Judaism.”[17] It was not Hitler, but Zeev Jabotinsky who wrote in his Letter on Autonomy, some twenty years before Mein Kampf:
“A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German custom, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-racial type are Jewish. […] A preservation of national integrity is impossible except by a preservation of racial purity.”[18]
So it was very logically that Reinhardt Heydrich, chief of the SS Security Service, wrote in 1935 in Das Schwarze Korps, the SS journal:
“We must separate Jewry into two categories: the Zionists and those who favour being assimilated. The Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state. […] The time cannot be far distant when Palestine will again be able to accept its sons who have been lost to it for over a thousand years. Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.”[19]
Sixty thousand wealthy German Zionists were allowed to settle with their fortune in Palestine under the Haavara Agreement, a decisive contribution to the Jewish colonization of Palestine.[20] As Hannah Arendt reminded in 1963, “all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed ‘Reichsvereinigung’ [compulsory organization of all Jews in Nazi Germany, who selected Jews for emigration] were held by Zionists.” This created “a situation in which the non-selected majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies—the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities.”[21] The Zionists and the Nazis were united against the very notion of assimilation and the abomination of intermarriage.
To say that Hitler was a Zionist would be exaggerated, for he wrote in 1923:
“For while Zionism tries to make the other part of the world believe that the national self-consciousness of the Jew finds satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian State, the Jews again most slyly dupe the stupid goyim. They have no thought of building up a Jewish State in Palestine, so that they might inhabit it, but they only want a central organization of their international world cheating, endowed with prerogatives, withdrawn from the seizure of others: a refuge for convicted rascals and a high school for future rogues.”[22]
Yet from 1933 to 1938, Hitler regarded German Zionists as ideological and strategic allies in his desire to rid Germany of its Jews. And there is no question that most Jews who died under Nazism were among the assimilationist Jews, those who had no sympathy for Zionism, and whom Zionists regarded as apostates and traitors to their race.
That, I believe, explains why the Holocaust is called the Holocaust: the idea that assimilationist Jews must perish is consistently biblical. The notion comes straight from Deuteronomy:
“If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries secretly to seduce you, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ […], you must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God. […] All Israel, hearing of this, will be afraid, and none of you will do such a wicked thing again” (Deuteronomy 13:7-12).[23]
And if in one town, “scoundrels from your own stock […] have led their fellow-citizens astray, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’” then
“you must put the inhabitants of that town to the sword; you must lay it under the curse of destruction—the town and everything in it. You must pile up all its loot in the public square and burn the town and all its loot, offering it all to Yahweh your God. It is to be a ruin for all time, and never rebuilt” (Deuteronomy 13:13-17).
Or, according to another translation: “the entire town must be put to the torch as a burnt offering to Yahweh your God.”
The Levites’ rule of terror
In biblical terms, assimilation means “serving other gods.” The Jews who seek assimilation deserve death, and their death will serve as an example to the rest. When, in the second century BC, some Israelites said, “let us ally ourselves with the gentiles surrounding us, for since we separated ourselves from them many misfortunes have overtaken us,” the Maccabees “organized themselves into an armed force, striking down the sinners in their anger, and the renegades in their fury” (1Maccabees 1-2), and established their Hasmonean theocracy.[24]
Terrorizing the Jews into submission to strict separateness and endogamy is the essence of the Yahwist covenant. The Torah shows that Yahweh’s rule of terror rests on the sacrifice of assimilationist and rebellious Jews. In the Book of Numbers, when an Israelite had the gall to appear before Moses with his Midianite wife, Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, “seized a lance, followed the Israelite into the alcove, and there ran them both through, the Israelite and the woman, through the stomach.” Yahweh congratulated Phinehas for having “the same zeal as I have,” and, as a reward, gave “to him and his descendants after him, […] the priesthood for ever” that is, “the right to perform the ritual of expiation for the Israelites” (Numbers 25:11-13). Let us ponder the fact that, according to the Bible, the Aaronite priesthood was a reward for the double murder of an assimilationist Israelite and his non-Jewish wife.
Even more revealing is the story in Exodus 32. After the episode of the Golden Calf, Moses conspires with the sons of Levy who rallied around him:
“He said to them, ‘Yahweh, god of Israel, says this, ‘Buckle on your sword, each of you, and go up and down the camp from gate to gate, every man of you slaughtering brother, friend and neighbour.’ The Levites did as Moses said, and of the people about three thousand men perished that day. ‘Today’, Moses said, ‘you have consecrated yourselves to Yahweh, one at the cost of his son, another of his brother; and so he bestows a blessing on you today’” (Exodus 32:27-29).
As a reward for having slaughtered 30,000 Israelite “apostates”, the Levites receive their privilege as the hereditary sacerdotal class, an oligarchy sustained by the other tribes. Here is how the biblical scholar Karl Budde paraphrases this episode, the founding story of the institution of the Levites:
“Here we have, in fact, the very moment of Levi’s origin, and this is how it must be understood. At Moses’ call the faithful from all the tribes hasten to him and lend him their arm even against their own kindred. Those thus tested and proved remained from this time on united, and formed a new tribe, ‘Levi.’ […] Levy is thus, as it were, the bodyguard, the pick of those faithful to Yahweh who gather about Moses, renouncing the old ties of tribe and family.”[25]
In Numbers 16-17, a group of two hundred and fifty Levites, led by Korah, are themselves exterminated for having rebelled against Moses and Aaron. “I am going to destroy them here and now,” said Yahweh, and “Fire then shot out from Yahweh and consumed the two hundred and fifty men offering incense” (16:20-35). “On the following day, the whole community of Israelites were muttering against Moses and Aaron and saying, ‘You are responsible for killing Yahweh’s people!’” Then Yahweh said “I am going to destroy them here and now,” and a plague decimated fourteen thousand seven hundred of them (17:6-14).
What these episodes highlight is that the authority of Yahweh and of his elite cast of Levites is entirely founded on violence and terror against the Israelites themselves. It also shows that the Covenant is based on the permanent threat of destruction. Jews who challenge their representative elites and who socialize with their non-Jewish neighbors, who eat with them, who intermarry with them, and who, while doing all this, show respect to their gods, are the dregs of the Jewish people, traitors to Yahweh and to their race. They deserve to be eliminated without mercy, especially since they endanger the whole community by attracting Yahweh’s wrath.
Yahweh teaches the Jewish people that friendship with non-Jews is a betrayal of the covenant, and will be punished by disaster, possibly extermination. Joshua, Moses’ successor, said to the Israelites who had taken possession of Canaan:
“Never mix with the peoples who are still left beside you. Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them. […] if you make friends with the remnant of these nations still living beside you, if you intermarry with them, if you mix with them and they with you, then know for certain that Yahweh your god will stop dispossessing these nations before you, and for you they will be a snare, a pitfall, thorns in your sides and thistles in your eyes, until you vanish from this fine country given you by Yahweh your god. […] For if you violate the covenant which Yahweh your god has imposed on you, if you go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then Yahweh’s anger will be roused against you and you will quickly vanish from the fine country which he has given you.” (Joshua 23:6-16)