A former president of the United States dined in recent days with a Nazi who says the Holocaust never happened, who says 6 million Jews were not murdered, says it is all a lie.
It is just the latest execrable demonstration of Jew-hate in the United States. Ugly to say it that way isn’t it? So to assuage language, it is called antisemitism. Call it what you will, it is eternal through two Christian millennia.
Until the 19th Century, hatred of Jews was immersed in Christian religious fears, hartred, bigotry, church teachings and myths like the blood libel. In the 19th Century, in England but especially in Germany it began to morph into racial hatred – Jews being defined as a race rather than members of a religion. Whether religious or racial begs the eternal question,why?
Why, century, after century and, after all, this century is the century after the Holocaust, are Jews the object of unending, unyielding hate ?
We have rational historical, physchological and other explanations that meet all the tests of rational reductive, reserved, understanding, analysis and explanation across two millenia. And yet, and yet…
And yet, across 22 centuries those who hate Jews the most hate themselves and their failed lives even more. They are ever in need of an object for and receptable into which to pour resentment born of their own lacks, for an explanation for everything in the world they cannot explain, understand and fear.
For one moment, at the end of WWII, the world took stock of what this special, unending, unyielding hatred had resulted in during the conflict. It paused to consider what resulted from Germany’s policy to murder all the Jews in Europe as prelude to murdering all the Jews in the world. Germany’s leader said he would do it. Then Germany and Germans did it.
Most of the world, cognizant of what had happened, which then as now included every nation in which it happened, stood back, took an historically deep breath and for a brief, a very brief moment condemned hatred of Jews.
In this spasm of redemptive guilt, the nation of Israel came into being, not with overwhelming support, but with help that mattered from the U.N. Security Council, and because in the General Assembly most of Latin America’s nations voted yes to partition then Palestine. Until 1918 it had been an Ottoman province. After WWI the Treaty of Versailles awarded it to Britain as a protectorate, a nice bad word for colony.
The partition meant to create a Jewish nation, Israel, and an Arab nation, Palestine. We know what happened and keeps happening there, down to the recent Israeli election and its woeful outcome. There is only one nation, Israel. It rules a Palestinian colony.
This is not about all of that, except to observe that the total population of Israel, including the land partitioned in favor of the Arabs and now known as the West Bank, includes 9.2 million citizens of Israel – not people but Israeli citizens because there are many millions more who are not citizens but stateless Arabs.
Among the 9.2 million citizens are 7.4 million who are Jewish and 1.8 million who are Arab Israeli citizens, for whom it might as well be 1925 in Alabama because being a Jewish Israeli does not make you a saint.
All the other Arabs in the West Bank and the territory in Gaza are citizens of no nation. They are, as it turned out and remains, a colonial people.
All of that is context.
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It is polite to bemoan antisemitism. It is impolite and raw to say what it really is. It is Jew-hate. Say it in those words and you want to cover your ears.
In Charlottesville, Va. in July 2017 at a Nazi rally they chanted “Jews will not replace us”.
Politely we say they were – that they are white nationalists. We say they were -that they are racists. But what is that if not a Nazi? They were, they are Nazis in exactly the meaning it had in Poland in 1942 when the extermination camps began their work.
The man who had dinner with former President Trump is no different from the SS in the camps. He is one of them.
They are Nazis because from Jan. 30, 1933 unto time immemorial the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany stamped all who hate Jews as one thing and one thing only, of one belief.
It is not white supremacy. It is Nazism, the political gorgon that murdered millions of people for one and only one reason, that they were Jews.
In that context, let’s examine the Virginia Nazis’ replacement proposition.
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Across a range of historical sources the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust ranges from about 5.8 mill0n to as high as 6.6 million. The number estimated by the Israeli national memorial Yad Vashem is the one assigned and accepted – 6 million.
It is 6 million – 6 million Jews dead at the hands of Germans and Austrians but also thousands upon thousands of willing accomplices in Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Byelorussia and Hungary, and yes France and Holland. In Paris the SS did not round up the Jews for deportration. The gendarmes did.
How close did they come to achieving what historians increasingly view as the main war objective of the Nazi Party and Nazi State as ordered by its leader and chancellor – the murder of all the Jews in Europe as a prelude to worldwide destruction of all Jews?
The “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” superceded even Lebensraum, the conquest of Eastern Europe to reduce it to slavery under the heel of Germans who would be resettled into those former nations. In the Nazi universe, Jews were for killing, Slavs for enslavement, for reduction to what Plutarch called “living tools”.
Lebensraum and the Final Soultion went hand in hand as one policy in the hands not just of the SS, the Waffen SS, Gestapo and the SD, but the Wehrmacht – the entire German military, including, as the historical record amply shows, the entire German Army.
Then surely, you say, as monstrous as the murder of 6 million people is, it didn’t come close to killing all the Jews in the world. After all, you would think with all the past and present commotion about them, there must be hundreds of million of Jews in a world of 8 billion people, or at least many, many tens of millions of Jews.
If hatred of Jews is so old and persistent then – surely – the Jewish population of the world must always have been and must even now be a very big share.
If the tiki torch bearers in Charlottesville believe Jews could replace them then they must believe there are so many tens, even hundreds of million of Jews that they could do that (i.e. as if one human could or would replace another).
Let’s examine the proposition.
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The world population on Sept. 1, 1939 was 2.2 billion people. The worldwide Jewish population on that date was 16.8 million (estimates vary but this is a very real, reliable number and no estimate is higher than 18 million).
On the 16.8 million Jews worldwide in 1939, 9 million lived in Europe including the European parts of the Soviet Union incorporating what are now the Baltic nations, Ukraine and Beyelorussia. The largest European Jewish population was in Poland, home to 3.3 million Polish Jews. The next largest concentration in Europe was in Hungary, about 850,000 and the next largest in Romania, about 550,000.
However, when talking about those and other easter European countries in 1939 and during the war it is important to remember that they were delineated by national lines drawn by three nations who presided over and decreed the Treaty of Versailles that formally ended World War I (France, Britain and the United States – the fourth victor, Italy, content with its Austrian spoils, was largely disinterested otherwise).
The treaty redrew the map of Europe, a not uncommon occurence on that continent over the centuries. What had been part of one country one year might well be part of another the next, especially in the Balkans and eastern Europe.
The biggest thing Versailles did in redrawing the map of Europe was to reconstitute Poland as an independent nation after nearly 150 years of partition between Prussia/Germany, Russia and the now defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The treaty dictated a smaller two-piece defeated Germany with a corridor between the pieces given over to Poland – the Polish corridor. It carved from Austria-Hungary a much diminished Austria, a much diminished Hungary. It expanded Romania at the expense of Hungary and Russia, and created two new nations, one called Czechoslovakia and the other Yugoslavia. It establised three small Baltic nations, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from territory taken by Russia from Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania in the 18th Century.
As reborn at Versailes, Poland included the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, parts of which, notably a region called Bessarabia, would move on the tides of war back and forth in the 20th Century betwen Romania and Ukraine. Today it is mostly in Moldava.
The city of Lemburg as the Austrians called it became the city of Lvov when it became part of the new Poland, and is now Lviv as part of Ukraine from the post WWII redrawing of boundaries. When you look at the map of Ukraine today, embroiled as it is in war with Russia, Lviv is its easternmost big city. In 1900 it was a far-western outpost of Austria-Hungary.
Complicated? Oh yes, as are the hatreds that remain among the peoples of those lands for one another but where one universal hatred subsumed all others.
The nations of eastern Europe contained more than two-thirds of the 9 million Jews of Europe at the start of the WWII. The highest toll was taken among Polish Jews, 2.9 million, most of whom died between September 1939 and the end of 1943.
The Polish Jews did not mostly die at Auschwitz but were killed in main part at the first giant killing camp, Treblinka. It is estimated 1 million of the 1.1 million who died at Auschwitz were Jewish. About half of them came from Hungary. At Treblinka alone, 925,000 Polish Jews perished.
The bulk of Poland’s Jews died in five death camps Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec, and Majdenak. These were not concentration camps but death camps, built for murder, not for confinement or to extract the slave labor of inmates.
Second highest, the toll of Hungarian Jews, 55 percent of whom died between March and July 1944 after the Germans occupied the country with the allowance of the Hungarian facist allied government. The Germans sent them to Auschwitz. A further 110,000 were killed after the the Hungarian Black Arrow Party (the political antecdent of the present Hungarian government) overthrew the government of Admiral Horthy.
The admiral, the Hungarian leader, was a fascist nationalist and German ally – until he wasn’t. By early 1944 he was wary, fearing there would be accountability if the Germans lost – and by 1944 he was convinced they would. While in power he kept the Jews of Hungary as a relatively untouched bargaining chip. When the Germans, doubting his shifting loyalty, took over Hungary early in 1944, Adolph Eichmann arrived and the transports to Auschwitz began.
After it overthrew the Horthy govenrment, the Black Arrow rounded up a further 110,000 Jews for the Germans, including an estimated 10,000 shot to death on the banks of the Danube in Budapest, leaving their shoes on the riverbanks by order of the Hungarian kiillers. Today, sculptures of empty shoes at the river bank memorialize them.
To understand how complicated nationality and borders and boundaries were in Eastern Europe consider the case of perhaps the most famous figure to emerge from the Hungarian Holocaust.
Ellie Wiesel was born and lived with his family in a small town in Romania. But the fortunes of war resulted in the town and its environs moving inside the wartime boundaries of Hungary.
When the Holocaust came to Hungary, Ellie Wiesel and his family became caught in the deportations to Auschwitz. Was he Romanian? Or Hungarian? Does it matter? Did it matter? Only as to when the Final Solution would consume the nation in which you lived. All that mattered to the Germans was were you a Jew – a man, a woman or a child to be murdered because you were (1.2 million of the victims were children under the age of 12).
The Romanians for their part, gave up well over 100,000 Jews to the Germans from territory they had annexed from Hungary after WWI and in the Balkans. When they toyed with switching sides as the Red Army moved inexorably east, the Germans took over and Romania’s Jews perished. Before the war there had been 550,000 Jews living under Romanian rule. The Holocaust consumed 500,000 of them.
In all, of the 6 million killed, over 1.3 million were shot to death by the killing units that accompanied the Wehrmacht into the Baltic nations, in eastern Poland, which had been ceded brefly to the Soviets in the August 1939 non-aggresi0n pact with Germany; and by shooting in Ukraine, Byelorussia and other western Russian areas after Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
Some 4 million Jews died in the killing and concentration camps. A further 800,000 were consumed by disease, starvation, slave labor and murder in the ghettos and concentration camps.
At war’s end the remnant of European Jews totaled about 3 million, perhaps half living in parts of the Soviet Union the Germans did not reach, and in small surviving communities in east European nations, in partisan units, in the remnant that emerged from the camps and among the fortunate 300,000 who lived in Great Britain.
Nonetheless, the hatred continued. Several thousand Polish Jews were murdered in Poland when they attempted to return in 1945 and 1946 to what had been their native land – their country.
Thus, at the end of the war, the worldwide Jewish population, less than 17 million at its start, had been reduced to 11 million as two-thirds of the Jews of Europe were murdered.
Notwithstanding the great toll of the war, world population remained above 2.2 billion.
Besides the 3 million still alive in Euyrope, who included more than 1 million in the Soviet Union, where were the remaining Jews in the world in 1945? Mostly in one place, the United States, where Jews numbered about 4.5 million in a nation of 140 million people.
There were about 600,000 in Palestine, several hundred thousand in
Arab nations including Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Iraq and several hundred thousand across Latin America, with the largest such population in Argentina.
Fast forward across 70 plus years. Today worldwide Jewish population has recovered to about 15 million, including 7.4 million in Israel proper and the West Bank and 7.3 million in the United States. Britain and France still have sizeable communities of about 300,000 each though rising antiseimitism in France caused an exodus the past 20 years.
So in all the world today there are but 15 million Jews among 8 billion people. In the United States, a nation of 330 million according to the 2020 census, there are about 7 million Jews.
How exactly would 7 million people replace 323 million other people, even if they so intended, which of course they don’t?
The tiki torch bearing American Nazis of Charlottesville are – in their bitter, mordant, losers’ sense – right. Jews will not replace them because first no one is replacing anyone and second because 7 million cannot and could not replace 323 million others even if they intended to try – that’s just math, never mind humanity or reasonable common sense, a quality devoid in Jew haters.
No, the only people – the only people — being ever so slowly replaced in this world are 6 million murdered Jews of Europe.
Peeling the Onion 