Christopher Browning on Netayahu's Holocaust revisionism

Christopher Browning addresses the now-notorious piece of Holocaust revisionism that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used before the Zionist Congress last Tuesday in A Lesson for Netanyahu from a Real Holocaust Historian Yahoo! News/Foreign Policy 10/22/2015.

On the particular claim that Netanyahu made about the Grand Mufti's advice to Hitler, Browning writes:

As of this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has undertaken an even more blatantly mendacious attempt to exploit the Holocaust politically. In a speech to the World Jewish Congress, Netanyahu claimed that at the time of the meeting between Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, on Nov. 28, 1941, the former was still in favor of expelling Jews and the latter opposed this because the expelled Jews would come to Palestine. Instead, according to Netanyahu’s version of history, the mufti urged Hitler to “burn” them, thus becoming the prime instigator of the Final Solution. The Netanyahu account of this meeting is an historical fabrication, or more simply a lie.

That's one thing that someone like Browning, one of the world's preeminent Holocaust historians, can say directly with credibility: "The Netanyahu account of this meeting is an historical fabrication, or more simply a lie."

Browning also addresses the meeting to which Netanyahu referred:

There’s plenty more evidence contradicting Netanyahu’s account. Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt, recorded the meeting with the mufti, and his memorandum of the meeting has long been available in the official publication of German foreign-policy documents. According to Schmidt, it was Hitler who assured the mufti that he had no territorial ambitions in the Middle East. Germans would come as liberators: “Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.” Hitler conveniently and deceptively did not tell the Husseini that he deferred to Italy’s Benito Mussolini concerning the final disposition of Arab-populated territories in the Mediterranean region. As Hitler had done with Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and others, he seemed to be playing upon the wishful thinking of the grand mufti, trying to give the impression that if Arabs helped in the murder of Jews, this would facilitate their own national independence. Husseini, rather, was not the instigator of the Final Solution but rather the target of Hitler’s attempted manipulations.

He adds, "When Hitler met with Husseini, the fateful shift in Nazi Jewish policy from expulsion and decimation to systematic and total mass murder had already occurred."

Browning concludes his piece, "Netanyahu’s shameful and indecent speech is a disservice to anyone — Jew and non-Jew — for whom research, teaching, and preservation of the historical truth of the Holocaust has value, meaning, and purpose."

One thing that the work of Browning and other historians of the Holocaust have rightly stressed in that the mass killing operations by the Germans against the Jews and others took place in a wartime context. As he summarized his conclusions in The Nazi Decision to Commit Mass Murder: Three Interpretations: The Euphoria of Victory and the Final Solution: Summer-Fall 1941 German Studies Review 17:3 (Oct 1994):

I will argue that there were two decisions for implementation: mid-July 1941 for the total mass murder of Soviet Jewry and early October for the Final Solution in German-occupied Europe. Each of these decisions was probably preceeded [sic] by several months of preparation initiated by Hitler. Each coincided with a peak of victory euphoria on the eastern front that emboldened Hitler to pass the point of no return-a pattern consistent with his earlier decisions for the Lublin Reservation and "ethnic cleansing" in western Poland in September 1939 and for the Madagascar Plan in June 1940.

It was the conditions created by the world war, from the nationalist fanaticism it inspired to the fact of the German forces being physically in control of the territory where millions of Jews in Russia and eastern Europe lived, in which Hitler actually began implementing the "Final Solution."

Another propaganda source using the same Holocaust revisionist story as Netanyahu

Chemi Shalev presents another proximate source for Benjamin Netanyahu's infamous Holocaust revisionism of last week in Adelson-linked Think Tank Article Preceded Netanyahu’s Hitler-Mufti Claim Haaretz 10/24/2015.

An article written earlier this year by a New Hampshire professor of philosophy [Joseph Spoerl of St. Anselm University] for a Jerusalem think tank funded in the past by [rightwing Republican casino mogul] Sheldon Adelson supplies an ostensibly academic underpinning for the prime minister’s contentious claim that the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini persuaded Adolf Hitler to annihilate European Jews. ...

The article, “Palestinians, Arabs and the Holocaust” was published in March 2015 by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), a think tank headed by Netanyahu confidante Dore Gold from 15 years until his appointment in June as director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry. According to an article in the Forward and U.S. tax files on public view, one of the main financers of JCPA in recent years has been Adelson: in 2012 he gave a million dollars to the JCPA through the Baltimore-based Center for Jewish Community Studies, which Gold also headed. According to the Forward, Adelson’s contribution constituted two thirds of JCPA’s annual budget.

The Forward article linked there is Sheldon Adelson Is a Philanthropist Like No Other by Nathan Guttman 11/03/2015:

For many Americans, the name Adelson is synonymous with outsized political donations and the opening of corporate floodgates to back candidates following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010. The Las Vegas-based casino mogul is also known as a prominent backer of often hawkish pro-Israel organizations. But less noisily, he has also established himself as one of the leading donors to purely charitable Jewish and non-Jewish groups, ranging from schools, to elder care, to medical research.

Ranked as the ninth largest donors in America in 2013, Adelson and his Israeli-American wife, Miriam Adelson, split their giving between Jewish and pro-Israel causes, which are funneled mostly through their family foundation, and medical programs funded by the Dr. Miriam & Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation. ...

According to the most recent records available, Adelson’s philanthropic and pro-Israel contributions in 2012 amounted to about $44 million. Since its founding in 2007, the family foundation has given out $191 million. This sum does not include gifts given in 2013, and excludes all political donations. It also excludes the huge sums Adelson is sinking into several for-profit ventures with political ramifications, such as Israel Hayom, Israel’s largest newspaper.

New scholarly article by Michael Sells on Netanyahu's variety of Holocaust pseudohistory

Benjamin Netanyahu's very public whopper that the Arab Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the one that gave Hitler the idea of killing the Jews of Europe (Speech at the 37th Zionist Congress) got a lot of press this past week, including commentary from historians like Yehuda Bauer, Dina Porat and Tom Segev about how the claim was baseless. By a coincidence of timing, the Journal of Religious Ethics just published a piece by Micahel Sells in its most recent issue (43:4/2105) tracing the lineage of this particular claim, "Holocaust Abuse: The Case of Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni." The Grand Mufti's name in English is also rendered as "al-Husseini."

A note from the author at the link just given says:

This article, which is the result of four years of research, dialogue, and critical peer review, happened to appear the same day that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu made headlines by claiming, during an address to the World Zionist Congress, that the former Palestinian mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni was the instigator of the Holocaust -- the claim concerning which my article exposes the history, sources, and promoters and offers an ethical as well as historiographical critique. The Journal of Religious Ethics has made the article available to non-subscribers for the period of one month. Those who click on the link given here will find the abstract as well as icons for the full text online and for downloading the full text in pdf form.

Sells' article does not address the specific melodramatic claim that Netanyahu made that Al-Husseini told Hitler, "Burn them." But it turns out there's a whole subset of pseudohistory propaganda that has been built around the core of the undisputed fact that the Grand Mufti was pro-Nazi. Sells quotes the historian Omer Bartov saying that all Holocaust research done right requires that "the historian place information in context, document claims and sources, [and] acknowledge possible bias or agendas in sources.” Actually, that's just a statement of the principles of responsible historical research in general. What Sells explains is that the tale that Al-Husseini inspired Hitler to commit himself to the extermination of the Jews of Europe is based on nothing but hot air. Not that it will stop people committed to lying propaganda from continuing to use it, whether their purpose is to smear "the Arabs" or to minimize the Hitler regime's responsibility.

This is a 25-minute program from Aljazeera English on the controversy Netanyahu's claim sparked, Inside Story- Why is Netanyahu trying to rewrite history? 10/22/2015:

As Sells explains, The main source of the claim asserted by Netanyahu was a document by Israel Rudolf (Rezcö) Kastner and Andre Steiner, who he describes as "two Zionist activists who had dedicated themselves to rescuing Jews of wartime Hungary and Slovakia from deportations," each submitted affidavits claiming that SS Col. Dieter Wisliceny that Al-Husseini had, in the words the Kastner attributed to Wisliceny, "repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he has been in contact, above all before Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry."

Wisliceny himself later agreed to the basic claims that Kastner and Steiner made, and added additional ones about Al-Husseini's role in the Holocaust. This is a classic case in which extraordinary claims should be asked to provide extraordinary proof. The Holocaust was an action decided upon and implemented by the Hitler government in Germany. They had collaborators, sympathizers and enablers, inlcuding the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The history of the Holocaust is extensively documented, with a background extending from Hitler's own rancid Jew-hating politics dating from his pre-First World War years in Vienna up to the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, immediately after which the Hitler regime began the systematic mass killing of Jews.

As Sells points out, the notion that Hitler would have adopted so momentous a policy based on the recommendations of Al-Husseini, who was an Arab was part of what Hitler regarded as an inferior race, is unlikely on its face. In this passage, he uses the term "Perish-Judea" to describe the propaganda narrative that gives the Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular a major role in Hitler's Holocaust against the Jews:

... no written Holocaust order from Hitler has been found and he may not have issued one; direct written or oral communication regarding the extermination program was discouraged; and a language of euphemism was used to keep the operations hidden from the outside world and from the targeted Jewish populations ... Historically accepted as well is the fervid ethno-nationalist character of Nazi Germany, which resulted in few non-ethnic Germans being privy to sensitive state matters. The new Perish-Judea literature, by contrast, presents Husayni, an Arab fugitive with no state, army, or organized constituency, as intervening in high Nazi circles, persuading or helping persuade Hitler to commit to the policy of extermination; receiving Himmler’s promise for a special advisor from Eichmann’s staff; receiving and approving lectures from Eichmann on the details of the final solution; actually instructing Eichmann on how to carry out the policy; and with or without his green turban and with or without his coterie, not only visiting Nazi camps, but entering into their most sensitive and highly guarded areas or even singling out the best crematoria workers for praise. ... no significant testimony from survivors or from witnesses other than Wisliceny has been cited in support of the core Perish-Judea narrative.

In words, it's an extraordinary claim, for which it would be generous to say that the evidence is threadbare.

Sells also looks at the political and ideological agendas of various players in promoting the narrative. Wisliceny's position at the time he made his allegations is especially important:

Wisliceny played an important role in the deportation of Slovakian Jewry and headed the Special Command for Jewish Affairs in Greece in 1943, which organized the ghettoization of Jews in advance of their deportation to death camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka. He also became known for extracting funds from Jewish communities in exchange for his promises to end or slow the deportation process in Eastern Europe. After Germany’s surrender he was arrested in Austria on suspicion of war crimes. He testified for the prosecution at Nuremberg, providing the major exposé of Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust. He also produced extensive accounts before, during, and after his January 3, 1946 testimony before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, but, with the three exceptions discussed below, made no mention of Husayni playing an important role in the Nazi genocide.

The three exceptions to which Sells refers are the two from Kastner and Steiner, respectively, and the subsequent set of claims directly from Wisliceny to which Sells refers as the "Kartenzimmer/Map Room" documents.

Wisliceny also faced potential war crimes charges from his role as a close associate of Adolf Eichmann:

It is likely that Wisliceny would have heard or been apprised that Rudolf Kastner was testifying on behalf of other Nazi officials, including Hans Becher and Hermann Krumey, who worked with Eichmann and were implicated in the Nazi extermination program, and who had escaped prosecution in large part as a result of Kastner’s intervention. As a desperate and crafty criminal, Wisliceny would likely have gathered or attempted to infer what kinds of information the Zionist activists might find of interest.

This in itself, of course, doesn't mean that the information he provided should be simply disregarded. But along with his uncorroborated assertions about the extraordinary claim that an Arab leader from the Middle East played a major role in getting Hitler to commit the Holocaust, it doesn't help the case.

And it's not as though the crimes of Eichmann and his circle haven't been extensively investigated:

The Holocaust is the most investigated crime in history, as has often been pointed out in response to deniers. Eichmann may be that crime’s most investigated criminal. Yet neither the intense effort of Eichmann-hunters to track down and gather every possible clue regarding Eichmann’s life, nor Eichmann’s multiple accounts of his role in the Holocaust, nor the interrogations of Eichmann between his capture and his arrival in Israel, nor the investigations by Bureau 06 established in Israel to prepare the Eichmann case for the prosecution, nor the testimony at the trial, nor the investigative journalism and historical studies that followed, have uncovered evidence that Husayni was a close collaborator of Eichmann, influenced his decisions, or inspected death camps with him.

In other words, we have no reason to regard Netanyahu's assertion on Al-Husseini and the Holocaust as anything but fake.

More on Netanyahu's Holocaust pseudohistory

It's both a blessing and a curse when a major historical topic comes up in the news as a political polemic. Netanyahu's Holocaust revisionism this week in the form of anti-Arab propaganda is of course one of those.

The good side is that it makes good references on the historical work on the topic more immediately accessible, even if it's second or third hand, to a larger audience. The bad part is that when history meets lazy journalism, it can come out reported as "historian say ...", when the better way to report it would be: this is factually wrong.

Some say the Moon is made of green cheese. Others say it's composed of solid matter not involving processed foods. Opinions differ. Let's discuss the controversy.

Doesn't really work for me.

The Young Turks, Netanyahu's Holocaust Conspiracy Theory DEBUNKED 10/21/2015:

This Ofer Aderet story from Haaretz, What Really Happened When the Mufti Met Hitler 10/22/2015, explains what documentation is available on the meeting between Adolf Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini on November 28, 1941, the meeting Neyanyahu referenced in his Holocaust revisionist statement on October 20 this week in his Speech at the 37th Zionist Congress. (The comment his week that sparked the current controversy wasn't the first time he had publicly made the claim.) The relevant portion of Netanyahu's speech is:

And this attack and other attacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the final solution. He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, "If you expel them, they'll all come here." "So what should I do with them?" he asked. He said, "Burn them." And he was sought in, during the Nuremberg trials for prosecution. He escaped it and later died of cancer, after the war, died of cancer in Cairo. But this is what Haj Amin al-Husseini said.

The headline on Aderet's story is itself somewhat misleading, because what he explains is:

The meeting between Adolf Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, took place in Berlin on November 28, 1941, from 4:30-5:45 P.M. The meeting was not transcribed, but the main points were detailed by Fritz Grobba, a Nazi diplomat and Middle East expert who had previously served in the German consulate in Jerusalem and as German ambassador to Iraq. Those points are outlined below.

Zack Beauchamp also looks at this particular corner of Holocaust revisionism, Benjamin Netanyahu blames the Holocaust on a Palestinian mufti. That's ludicrous. Vox 10/21/2015.

Aderet's description of Grobba's account of the meeting does not include the exchange that Netanyahu cited.

A popular version of the claim that the Arabs were responsible for the Holocaust has reportedly been circulating in Israel for decades. So to some extent the idea has become part of people's ideology, which is often very unyielding confronted with, you know, facts.

Which brings us back to the problem of history-as-political-symbol and history as an accurate description of the past. Here, it's important to keep in mind the scientific notion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The idea that it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem that talking Hitler into the attempted extermination of the Jews in Europe is a very extraordinary claim.

But propaganda doesn't work like history or science in that respect. You can picture Rush Limbaugh or some other talk radio or FOX News blowhard demanding negative proof against Netanyahu's extraordinary claim: "The Prime Minister of Israel wouldn't say that unless he had reason to know it's true! Can you prove it didn't happen the way he said it did? Can you, huh, huh, huh?"

Which is can be frustrating to try to have a good faith conversation with someone who isn't acting in good faith. Anyone who digs into the swamp of Holocaust denial will quickly encounter instances of this. So will anyone who engages with neo-Confederate arguments about the American Civil War.

Because people who actually are trying to be careful are going to pay attention to qualifications that liars won't. I mentioned lazy journalists above. But even the most conscientious journalist is going to make qualifications about secondary sources. If they are interviewing historians, they have to say that they are reporting an interview. Even in the case of Ofer Aderet, who is apparently reporting on his own original research into the source document, he has to describe the nature of the source. And people acting in bad faith will jump on the fact that he's not stating flatly and absolutely that it just didn't happen the way Netanyahu said.

But in the end, you can't really placate people who don't care about honesty or reality, or who have no sense of responsibility or integrity in such things. For anyone who cares about such things, lack of evidence means essentially the same as "it didn't happen." But no professional historian or journalist will state something quite so unequivocally, nor should they.

Robert Fisk in Dumping blame for the Holocaust on a Palestinian is an insult to its six million victims The Independent 10/22/2015 refers to a recent book making the case for the Grand Mufti as the inspiration for the Holocaust:

Its two authors, the late Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz, claim this Palestinian Jew-hater (let us not avoid the truth here) was actually responsible for the mass killing of the Jews of the Holocaust, that without him – without this single, one Arab Muslim who was largely treated by the Nazis themselves with the scorn he deserved – the greatest crime against humanity in modern generations would not have taken place. You get the point, of course. Haj Amin was a Palestinian. He brought about the mass murder of the Jews. Therefore the Palestinians were responsible for the Holocaust. Ergo ...

Well, you can imagine. How can the Palestinians be trusted with a state when they and their fellow Arabs “demonstrated how the same radical views that had once found the Nazis to be congenial, right-thinking allies, had such a powerful, long-lived effect in shaping the contemporary Middle East”. This, the authors assert, “is the terrible secret of modern Middle Eastern history”. At which, you have to cry: ‘Whoah there!’

The book to which he refers appears to be (now I'm doing it!) Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2014).

Fisk also addresses the value of the Fritz Grobba source on the November 1941 Hitler/Grand Mufti meeting:

After some extraordinary research – and a lot of new archive material – [Rubin and Schwanitz] formulate the theory that Haj Amin was the architect of the Holocaust and that he had so much power over Hitler and his cronies that he was, in effect, the perpetrator of the mass murder of the Jews of Europe. Much of the material to support this comes from Fritz Grobba (former German envoy to Kabul, Baghdad and Riyadh, and Muslim-Arab affairs officer in the Nazi foreign ministry) – “highly dubious evidence”, in the words of Gilbert Achcar, whose own research fills a volume of tremendous historical importance (The Arabs and the Holocaust) – and from the observation that Haj Amin and his colleagues were the only Nazi allies (apart from fascist movements) who gave their support to the “genocide plan”. [my emphasis]

Fisk notes that the book cites circumstantial evidence that the Grand Mufti may have visited the Auschwitz death camp, possibly even Treblinka and Majdanek, as well. And he cautions:

A highly incriminating story, if true – but “possible” is hardly the stuff of history. The authors record some fatuous conversations between the Palestinian and Nazi officers, the former favourably comparing Islam to Nazism and the latter exclaiming their admiration for the religion, even though both sides knew this was nonsense. Having established that these two views had little in common, Rubin and Schwanitz then make an astonishing leap of faith by recording Hitler’s suicide – then adding that “the Third Reich’s Arab and Islamist allies were just getting started in conducting what would become the longest war of all”. [my emphasis]

Surprisingly to me, though, Fisk's first paragraph includes a qualifier that isn't really supported by the rest of his argument:

... that devious, hypocritical – yes, and anti-Semitic – man, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the prelate who visited Hitler and Himmler and supported their persecution of the Jews of Europe. Did he know that the Holocaust had started? Of course he knew. Did he make morally iniquitous broadcasts for the Nazis? Of course he did. Did he appeal to the Germans to send Jews “to the east”? Of course, he made just such a call which may – or may not – have sealed the fate of Jews in Europe. [my emphasis]

It's highly unlikely that anything the Grand Mufti said decisively or even tangentially influenced Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe, given that Hitler would have regarded the Mufti as a stooge from an "inferior race" and give Hitler's own long-time obsession against Jews.

Raphael Ahren points to a different and apparently even less credible source for Netanyahu's claim (In Netanyahu’s mufti-Holocaust allegation, echoes of his father’s maverick approach to history Times of Israel 10/22/2015):

Defending his contentious remarks Wednesday as he made his way to Berlin, the prime minister said: “There is much evidence about this, including the testimony of [Adolf] Eichmann’s deputy at the Nuremberg trials — not now, but after World War II.”

Netanyahu then cited two statements attributed to SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, who served under Eichmann in the Jewish affairs department of the Reich Security Main Office and who from 1940 acted as adviser on Jewish affairs to the Slovakian government, participating in the deportation of Jews from Slovakia, Greece, and Hungary:

“In my opinion, the Grand Mufti, who has been in Berlin since 1941, played a role in the decision of the German government to exterminate the European Jews, the importance of which must not be disregarded. He has repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he has been in contact, above all before Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this as a comfortable solution for the Palestine problem.”

That quote comes from the 1946 Nuremberg trials. Netanyahu also cited a sentence that Wisliceny is believed to have uttered in Bratislava while the Holocaust was raging, in 1944:

“The Mufti was one of the instigators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and was a partner and adviser to Eichmann and Hitler for carrying out this plan.”

That source has not fared well among Holocaust historians:

Netanyahu is not the first to cite the Wisliceny quotes. They feature, for instance, in a 2012 book, “Israel: The Will to Prevail,” by the man Netanyahu recently appointed as his ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon. But Danon acknowledges the problematics of the claim: “Some historians have cast doubt on al-Husseini’s involvement in the ‘final solution,’” he writes, “since it was already under way after [sic] al-Husseini’s arrival on the scene.”

In fact, it is not some, but rather most serious historians who doubt the veracity of Wisliceny’s account.

Yehuda Bauer, Israel’s preeminent Holocaust scholar, is a prominent case in point. “After the war, they caught him (Wisliceny) and tried him at Nuremberg, where he tried to eschew all responsibility, saying: ‘It wasn’t Hitler, it wasn’t me, it was the mufti,'” Bauer told The Times of Israel on Thursday. “I am not sure if Wisliceny ever met the mufti. I doubt it, but it’s doesn’t matter. It’s clear that his account is untrue: the Germans had started annihilating the Jews half a year before Hitler and the mufti met. Netanyahu’s story is entirely baseless.” (Wisliceny was executed for war crimes in 1948.)

Bauer, a professor emeritus of history and Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University and an academic advisor to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, is far from alone among elite historians in rejecting Netanyahu’s reliance on Wisliceny’s testimony.

The “Wisliceny hearsay is not merely uncorroborated, but conflicts with everything else that is known about the origins of the Final Solution,” Rafael Medoff, the head of the Washington, DC-based David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, wrote in a 1996 article for the Journal of Israeli History.

Ahren makes an interesting comparison of Netanyahu's Holocaust revisionism and the work of his historian father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, on Spanish Jews.

J.J. Goldberg of The Forward speaks to Netanyahu's bad historical claims and its current propaganda uses in Why Benjamin Netanyahu's Defense of Hitler Is So Wrong — and Matters So Much 10/22/2015:

By the end of November, when Hitler met Husseini for the first and only time, planning was well underway for the Wansee Conference, which assembled various German government department heads in January 1942 to coordinate the immense bureaucratic blueprint for genocide that Heydrich had mapped out. Heydrich actually sent out the invitations to the conference on November 29, the day after the mufti met the fuehrer.

Netanyahu’s version of history is so demonstrably and utterly at odds with the historical record that it’s hard to fathom what could have driven him to offer it in a heavily watched keynote address to an international convention. The prime minister famously prides himself on his grasp of history. He makes frequent and facile use of the Holocaust as an object lesson for humanity. Even his harshest critics must have difficulty absorbing the realization that he can be so ignorant of the most basic facts of that history. There’s no lack of observers who disagree, often sharply, with his policies. But this goes to his competence.

There’s another, perhaps larger question raised by Netanyahu’s speech. It goes to the rapidly escalating level of vitriol that the prime minister is directing at Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. One of the clearly evident goals of the Zionist Congress speech was to draw a straight line between the Final Solution and today’s Palestinian national movementand its leader. At a time when Abbas has been peppering nearly every major speech with an appeal for a two-state solution, for a Palestinian state alongside Israel within defined borders, trying to paint him as an heir to the Nazis perverts the truth. Nor does the prime minister stop there. Just hours after the Zionist Congress speech, during a joint press conference with United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, he said that Abbas had “joined” with Hamas and ISIS.

And Roy Isacowitz asks, "If Netanyahu can get the provenance of the Holocaust so appallingly wrong, what does it say about all the other historical 'truths' that underlie and buttress his maximalist Zionism – which, it goes without saying, is the governing creed in the country today? How many other crank theories are hidden in the dark crevices of the prime ministerial mind?" (In Mufti Speech, Netanyahu Showed His Obsessive Hatred of the Palestinians Haaretz 10/22/2015)

German Chancellor Angela "Mutti" Merkel, who met with Netanyahu yesterday, had her spokesperson issue a statement disclaiming Netanyahu's implied alibi for Hitler and the Germans (Germany in response to Netanyahu: We are responsible for Holocaust i24 News 10/22/2015):

Germany on Wednesday said that responsibility for the Holocaust lay with the Germans, after Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked controversy before a visit to Berlin by saying a Muslim elder had convinced Adolf Hitler to exterminate Jews.

"All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust," Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said when asked about Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks.

"This is taught in German schools for good reason, it must never be forgotten. And I see no reason to change our view of history in any way. We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own."

In The truth about Jerusalem’s grand mufti, Hitler and the Holocaust Jewish Journal 10/21/2015, Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman discuss the Grand Mufti's history, which is obnoxious enough without making stuff up:

According to Historian Robert Wistrich’s Hitler and the Holocaust (2001), the Mufti escaped British scrutiny in Jerusalem after the war’s outbreak for the more friendly confines of Berlin, where, in November, 1941, he had tea with Hitler who asked him “to lock in the innermost depths of his heart” that he (Hitler) “would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist Empire in Europe.” In 1942, Fred Grobba wrote approvingly of the Mufti’s visit with members of the Nazi elite to “the concentration camp Oranienburg . . . . The visit lasted about two hours with very satisfying results . . . . the Jews aroused particular interest among the Arabs. ... It [the visit] ... made a very favorable impression on the Arabs.”

In 1943, the Mufti extended his relations with the German Foreign Office and Abwehr directly to the SS Main Office. Gottlob Berger arranged a meeting between al-Husayni and SS chief Heinrich Himmler on July 3, 1943. Al-Husayni sent Himmler birthday greetings on October 6, and expressed the hope that “the coming year would make our cooperation even closer and bring us closer to our common goals.” The Grand Mufti also helped organize a Muslim Waffen SS Battalion, known as the Hanjars, that slaughtered ninety percent of Bosnia’s Jews, and were dispatched to Croatia and Hungary. The Mufti also made broadcasts to the Middle East urging Arabs and Muslims to honor Allah by implementing their own Final Solution.

After the War, Great Britain, the U.S., and Yugoslavia indicted the Mufti as a war criminal, but Yugoslavia dropped its extradition request to France, and legal proceedings were abandoned so as not to upset the Arab world. Escaping back to the Middle East, Al-Husseini continued his genocidal exhortations and rejectionist demands that the Jewish presence be erased from Palestine continued unabated before and during the 1948 War by five Arab states against Israel. Only then, did his influence gradually decline. He died in 1974, not long after Arab armies almost succeeded in destroying Israel in an attack launched on Judaism’s holiest day, Yom Kippur.

Haaretz also has a new piece on the Mufti's actual biography by Ben Sales, Who Was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem? 10/22/2015:

Husseini was an advocate for Arab nationalism, and in 1936 he joined with other Palestinian leaders in revolt against the British. The revolt lasted until 1939, claimed thousands of lives, including hundreds of Jews, and led the British to seek an exit from the territory. In 1937, the British removed Husseini from his position, prompting him to flee to Lebanon.

During World War II, Husseini supported an anti-British rebellion in Iraq and became the rebels’ envoy to Germany and Italy. When the rebellion was suppressed, he fled to Italy and continued his contacts with the Axis powers from there, famously meeting with Adolf Hitler in November 1941. He continued to support the Nazis in various ways throughout the war.

After the war, Husseini escaped to Beirut, his influence diminished. He died there in 1974.

Netanuyahu in his controversial statement quoted above, wrongly identified Egypt as the country where Al-Husseini died.

Sales is pretty explicit about how misleading Netanyahu's clims was:

Contrary to Netanyahu’s assertion, nowhere in the record is there a suggestion that Husseini told Hitler to exterminate Europe’s Jews. The record does report that Hitler announced his intentions, noting that he planned to “ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem.”

“To say Hitler was influenced by the mufti is far from the truth,” said Hebrew University professor Moshe Maoz. “He didn’t need the mufti to perform the extermination.” [my emphasis]

As I mentioned in yesterday's post on this, the chief historian at Yad Vashem, Dina Porat, also rejected Netanyahu's claim. Ofer Aderet reports in Yad Vashem’s Chief Historian on Hitler and the Mufti: Netanyahu Had It All Wrong Haaretz 10/22/2015:

Porat ... called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that Hitler did not seek to exterminate the Jews until his meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at the time, Haj Amin al-Husseini “completely erroneous, on all counts.”

Porat, a senior historian at Tel Aviv University who specializes in Holocaust studies, told Haaretz on Wednesday: “Hitler did not need anyone to encourage the final solution. In terms of the facts, there’s no debate ... all these actions, Hitler’s obsessions, have no link to the mufti.” ...

According to Porat, “all of the facts show that during Hitler and the mufti’s meeting, the ‘final solution’ was already under way.” [my emphasis]

Netanyahu's Holocaust revisionism

Between Bibi Netanyahu i Israel and Dr. Ben Carson in the US, it seems to be the season for prominent politicians to indulge in Holocaust pseudohistory.

Bibi's flirtation with Holocaust revisionism provoked quick response and refuation: Barak Ravid and Jonathan Lis, Opposition Blasts Netanyahu for 'Distorting' Holocaust History Haaretz 10/21/2015:

Israel's opposition head and Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog strongly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday for the premier's claims that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was the one who planted the idea of the extermination of European Jewry in Adolf Hitler's mind.

... Zionist Union MK Itzik Shmuli demanded Netanyahu apologize to Holocaust victims. "This is a great shame, a prime minister of the Jewish state at the service of Holocaust-deniers – this is a first," he said. "This isn't the first time Netanyahu distorts historical facts, but a lie of this magnitude is the first."

Meretz leader Zehava Galon also criticized Netanyahu's comments: "This is not a Jörg Haider speech. It's not a part of [Mahmoud] Abbas' doctorate. It's a real quote from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu," she said. "Maybe the 33,771 Jews murdered in Babi Yar in September 1941 – two months before the Mufti and Hitler met - should be exhumed and updated that the Nazis didn't mean to destroy them." Those who can't change the future, she said, "are left with rewriting the past."

Al-Husseini definitely was pro-Nazi. But Netanyahu's claim is a typical piece of pseudohistory. For one thing, there is no actual evidence that the alleged conversation that he describes took place, though the meeting did, on November 27, 1941. Alan Posener says flatly that the exchange was "frei erfunden," simply made up. (Was, ein Araber hat sich den Holocaust ausgedacht? Die Welt 21.10.15)

Josh Marshall describes it somewhat more mildly as a "purported conversation "(Netanyahu Reduced to Defending Hitler. Really ... TPM 10/21/2015:

And he provides this historical background:

Sympathy for the Nazis was not at all uncommon among Arab nationalists during the 1930s and 1940s. One example that may surprise you is the now much-lauded Anwar Sadat. Arab nationalism was mainly focused on the British who either directly or indirectly controlled Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and other parts of the Arab world at the time. There was a natural alliance of convenience between those fighting the British and Britain's mortal enemy, Nazi Germany. For some Arab nationalists, this alliance of convenience mixed with a revulsion for the parliamentarism with which the British were associated and grew into an outright embrace of fascism and Nazism. As you might expect, the degree to which is a matter of endless controversy. But that's beyond the scope of the issue at hand.

But even in this context, al-Husseini was an extreme case, a thoroughgoing anti-Semite who completely embraced Hitler and Nazism and spent the war years in Germany working in various ways on behalf of the Nazis. There's really nothing good to be said about the guy. (Not that it's terribly relevant, but I'm not sure what the reference to al Husseini's dying after the war in Cairo is about. As far as I know he died in Beirut in the 70s.)

All that said, al-Husseini didn't convince Hitler to exterminate European Jewry. Hitler didn't need to convinced. (It's hard to believe this requires saying.) As bad as he was, al-Husseini was a insignificant small fry in the tragic drama of the final years of the Third Reich.

The chronology is also plainly off. Holocaust historians like Christopher Browning have long since established a solid timeline for the decision-making on the mass killing of the Jews. The basic decision was made by the senior German leadership at the latest in 1941 prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union. The mass executions of Jewish men began immediately after the invasion. Within the year, it was expanded to include Jewish women and children, a systematic and deliberate program of genocide. As Zehava Galon noted in the quote above, the Holocaust was well under way when the meeting between Al-Husseini and Hitler took place in November 1941.

Christopher Browning's essay "Beyond 'Intenionalism' and 'Functionalism': The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered" is included in his book The Path to Genocide: Essay on Launching the Final Solution (1992).

Adiv Sterman and Raphael Ahren report (Netanyahu blames Jerusalem mufti for Holocaust, is accused of ‘absolving Hitler’ Times of Israel 10/21/2015)

Tom Segev, a leading Israeli historian who has conducted extensive research on the Holocaust, told The Times of Israel Wednesday that the notion that Hitler needed to be convinced to exterminate the Jews was “entirely absurd.” He stressed that “one can surely say that [Husseini] was a war criminal, but one cannot say Hitler needed his advice.”

Segev, born in Jerusalem to parents who escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, further stressed that by the time Husseini and Hitler met in 1941, the annihilation of the Jews had already begun. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Jews had been killed by the Nazis and their collaborators by the time of the meeting. ...

Other commentators pointed out that Hitler had discussed the possible extermination of European Jewry as early as 1939, even before World War II began and certainly before he met with Husseini. The order to carry out a Final Solution against Jews was given in July 1941 — months ahead of the mufti and Hitler’s meeting — after which the infamous Wannsee Conference was called in order to finalize the logistics and details of the mass-murder operation.

The Wannsee Conference, held in on January 20, 1942, came after the meeting between Hitler and Husseini.

The Wannsee Conference is sometimes popularly misunderstood as the time and place that the decision for genocide was made. But that's not the case. I say "popularly," because it's very clear that Wannsee was more of a planning conference around methods, not a decision-making body that determined the aim of exterminating the Jews.

The chief historian of the Yad Vashem museum also joined in dismissing Netanyahu's claim (Luke Baker, Israel's Netanyahu stirs trouble by linking late Muslim leader to Holocaust Reuters/Yahoo! News 10/21/2015):

"To say that the mufti was the first to mention to Hitler the idea to kill or burn the Jews is not correct," Dina Porat, a professor at Tel Aviv University and the chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial museum, told Israel Radio.

"The idea to rid the world of the Jews was a central theme in Hitler's ideology a long, long time before he met the mufti." ...

A German government spokesman, asked about Netanyahu's comments, said the Holocaust was Germany's responsibility and there was no need for another view on it.

So did the US State Department: Lesley Wroughton, Netanyahu Holocaust comment not backed by scholarly evidence?: U.S. Reuters 10/21/2015.

Inflation-phobia in Germany

Interesting reflections by Frances Coppola on the possible reasons for Germany's inflation-phobia. (The dangers of historical taboos 10/11/2015)

She hasn't convinced me of her argument, because I think the inflation fixation is related to the very conservative economic doctrines now dominant in the German economic and political elite. I doubt that it reflects any kind of deep-seated preference on the part of the general public there.

But I like the fact that she emphasizes that the public spending that stimulated the German economy during the Third Reich were oriented toward war.

Watching what's happening (1934 version)

Der Jüdische Arbeiter 09.02.1934, a Zionist weekly newspaper published in Vienna, ran this short piece:

Die Gefahr des Hitlerismus und des Krieges

In einer gefahrerfüllten Stunde hat unsere Bewegung eine schwere Verantwortung für das Schicksal des Zionismus übernommen, schwerer als jede zuvor. Das Ungluck, das das deutsche Judentum betroffen hat, macht nicht Halt an den deutschen Grenzen[.] Hitlers Macht bringt das ganze jüdische Volk und nicht nur dieses in Gefahr.

Der Nationalsozialismus kampft nicht nur gegen die deutschen Juden, sondern gegen die Juden der ganzen Welt. Hitler breitet ein Netz von Agenten aus, um in allen Ländern das antisemitische Gift zu verbreiten.

Aber Hitler attackiert nicht nur die Juden. Das Hakenkreuzregime kann nicht lange bestehen, ohne Revanchekrieg gegen Frankreich und die übrigen Nachbarländer, oder ohne Krieg gegen Sowjetrussland. Heute wird Deutschland keinen Krieg beginnen, da es ungerüstet ist — aber es rüstet fur morgen.

[In an hour full of danger, our movement has taken upon ourselves a heavy responsibility for the fate of Zionism, heavier than ever before. The misfortune that has struck German Judaism, doesn't stop at the German borders. Hitler's power brings the entire Jewish people in danger, and not only they.

National Socialism [Nazism] doesn't fight only against the German Jews but also against the Jews of the entire world. Hitler is unfolding a net of agents to spread the anti-Semitic poison to all countries.

But Hitler will attack not only the Jews. The swastika regime cannot long survive without a revanchist war against France and the other neighboring countires, or without a war against Soviet Russia. Today German will not start a war because it is unarmed - but it is arming itself for tomorrow.]

Tags: anti-semitism, austria, germany, national socialism,, nazism, third reich

When the past isn't even past

Silbertal Bürgermeister Willi Säly

Eric Geiger makes an interesting report on a small town in western Austria in Austrian village faces down its Nazi past San Francisco Chronicle 02/17/08, which appeared on the front page of the Sunday print edition.

It's an interesting story in itself, though I'm struck by how the story seems to be shaped by an outdated "conventional wisdom" about Austria. Bürgermeister (Mayor) Willi Säly of Silbertal has set up a "history workshop", which sponsors education events on the history of the Third Reich in their region. More specifically:

Mayor Willi Saly is intent on finding out whether there's anything in the historical record that would provide a clue to what drove a village farmer named Josef Vallaster to become one of the most brutal concentration camp guards of World War II. The records, which surfaced last summer, show that Vallaster was a mass murderer. The data say he participated in the deaths of 250,000 Jews at the Sobibor and Belzec death camps in Poland, and of 20,000 mentally and physically disabled persons at a clinic in Nartheim, Austria.

I'm someone who enjoys learning about history, though "enjoyable" isn't quite the right word for this kind of history. And I even still persuade myself to hope that people can learn something constructive from doing so, despite much empirical evidence to the contrary.

Säly is a member of the Austrian conservative, Christian-Democratic Party, the Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP) [People's Party]. This is not surprising, but it's notable, because he's is not some leftwing outlier from the Green Party or something.

Josef Vallaster served as an "Oberbrenner" in Nartheim, where he operated machinery, a task that included piping gas into gas chambers to kill inmates". Geiger reports that Vallaster joined "the local chapter of the Nazi party in 1933, and [traveled] to Germany to join a paramilitary force especially organized for Austrian Nazis." This means that Vallaster was a hardcore Austrian Nazi, not some poor shlub who was drafted into the Wehrmacht and required to participate in questionable activities.

Members of the Civil Guard, a party militia of the ruling Fatherland Front, mobilizes to oppose the German-backed Nazi coup of 1934 - the Fatherland Front was essentially a Mussolini-style fascist party, but they were preferable to the Nazis in 1934 by almost any measure

In an incident that is little remembered in US accounts of the Third Reich, Germany sent that group of Nazis into Austria in 1934 in a coup attempt that failed, although the Austrian Standestaat (Corporate State) dictator Engelbert Dollfuss was murdered during the attempt. At that time, Mussolini's Italy was an ally of Austria, and Mussolini threatened to intervene to support Austria against German aggression, a threat that was far more credible in 1934 than it would have been after several more years of German rearmament. Germany had to back off, and Hitler's first attempt at international aggression was defeated.

Vallaster at some point joined the SS and became an SS-Scharführer (company leader). He served in his SS role in the death camps Belzec und Sobibór, where he performed a similar function as at Nartheim. There was a famous uprising of the prisoners at Sobibór in October 1943, in which Vallaster was killed.

This article on Säly's project is presumably the one to which Geiger refers in his article as one in "the leading daily in Silbertal's province of Vorarlberg", Silbertal arbeitet NS-Zeit Vorarlberger Nachrichten 28.07.2007.

This article is from Der Standard (presumably also the one to which Geiger refers) on the story, Ein Dorf mit Erinnerungskultur: Silbertal zeichnet Weg eines Einwohners zum KZ-Schergen nach von Jutta Berger 14.10.07. Berger quotes Säly as saying that he's not only undertaking this project because of his Bürgermeister role, but also as someone "mit mehr oder weniger belasteten familiären Erinnerungen" (with more-or-less guilty family memories). Säly is 62, so he would have been born at the earliest in the final months of the Second World War. He is one of the generation who would be asking, "What did you do in the war, Daddy?"

Berger reports that Vallaster's son, Klaus Vallaster, has actively cooperated with Säly's project. Geiger quotes Vallaster's 80-year-old sister, Elizabeth Stemer, "A lot of filthy lies are being spread about Josef. ... I knew Josef as a very decent man who just did his duty as a soldier and died for his country."

Josef Vallaster, mass murderer

One may have some sympathy for the elderly Stemer's affection for the memory of her long-dead brother. But her defense of him is, to use the technical term, bulls**t. The guy joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in 1933, and took part in an attack on his own country from Germany under the direction of the Germans, an attack which was plain treason in any normal sense of the word. Also, the guy was an SS member. You got into the SS by volunteering for it. This was an NSDAP Party organization, not a part of the Wehrmacht. You joined the SS because you were volunteering to be a killer on behalf of the Nazi Party. (There is a partial exception to this in the case of the Waffen-SS, which late in the war did include some Wehrmacht draftees who were assigned to fight in Waffen-SS units. But the Waffen-SS as such was not the group that acted as concentration camp guards and executioners.)

Austria and its Vergangenheit

It does strike me that the framing of Geiger's article reflects an outdated conventional wisdom about what I would call the quality of historical memory in Austria generally. Austrians and Germans tend to refer to this as die Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (the working out of the past).

I won't try to rehash the long and complicated history about how Germany and Austria have collectively remembered the Third Reich period. In any case, the notion of the "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit" is not something that can be precisely measured. It's a matter of judgment, though not totally subjective, by any means. Generalization like "national memory" are only metophors, in any case. The specifics include everything from official state positions to how the historical profession treats matters to how schoolbooks present issues to things like Herr Bürgermeister Säly's project.

The question of how well Austria has handled its "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit" was much discussed in the United States around the 1986 campaign of Kurt Waldheim for the Austrian Presidency. Information became public about Waldheim's possible involvement in war crimes during his career as a Wehrmacht officer during the Second World War. I posted several times about Waldheim on the occasion of that awful man's death last year: Kurt Waldheim 06/15/07; Waldheim's posthumous plea for "Versöhnung" (reconciliation) 06/15/07; Kurt Waldheim, the "all-powerful lobby" and contemporary anti-Semitism 06/17/07.

The notion quickly became conventional wisdom in the US and elsewhere that, compared to Germany, Austria had insufficiently come to grips with the role that Austrians played in the Third Reich. And that was a reasonable and accurate judgment at the time. Austrian accounts of the Third Reich tended to stress Austria as the "first victim" of Hitler's aggression, which it was. The Allies in the Second World War officially regarded Austria as a nation "occupied" by Germany, and therefore the military taking of Austria was officially termed "liberation" by the Allies, as opposed to the official term of "conquest" applied to Germany in its 1937 borders. This was not just a semantic distinction. It had definite legal implications on how Austria would be governed under occupation. It was probably inevitable that Austria's postwar status as a "liberated" nation would encourage both official and unofficial accounts to draw a sharp distinction between Germany proper and the "Ostmark" (the name assigned to Austria when it became a province of the German Reich in 1938).

In any case, I do tend to think that those like Hubertus Czernin, who was publisher of the newsweekly Profil for years, and the researchers of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichische Widerstands (DöW) were right in the years since 1986 in stressing the need for a more complete public understanding of the real history of those years.

But the state of Austria's "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit" is hardly the same in 2008 as in 1986. The very fact that a small-town Bürgermeister like Willi Säly - from Waldheim's own party - is promoting a project like that and getting national attention for it is one sign of that. Plus, since a very significant percentage of what I know about the Third Reich and how it has been interpreted in Austria comes from Austrian newspapers, periodicals and books, it's hard to see how anyone today could say that Austrians in general have a drastically deficient understanding of what happened in their country in 1934-1945.

Also, Waldheim wasn't the last controversial politician in Austria. A guy named Jörg Haider, who became head of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) in 1986, made it a key part of his schtick to appeal to old Nazis and younger rightwingers by making favorable references to the Third Reich, ususally in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink way. The FPÖ captured a significant bloc of swing voters during the 1990s and eventually in 2000 became part of the national coalition government when it briefly achieved second place ahead the ÖVP and behind the Social Democrats (SPÖ) in the national election of 1999.

Haider himself turned out to be more of a narcissist who loved seeing himself on TV than he was a Mussolini wannabe. But his constant promotion of Nazi symbolism in various ways in itself produced a great deal of discussion in the press about the historical background of that period. And, in general, the end of the Cold War in itself provoked new interest in the Second World War period in Austria like elsewhere, because the fall of Communist rule in eastern Europe was in a real sense the end of the postwar alignment of power in Europe.

So it strikes me that Geiger's article employs an outdated framework of how well the "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit" is going in Austria. For instance, he writes:

For Saly, 62, who has been mayor of this picturesque ski resort of 900 residents for 23 years, it makes no difference that Vallaster died 65 years ago or that the Austrian media has ignored his efforts.

Most observers say Saly's mission is unique in a country that has long been reluctant to acknowledge its Nazi past. Unlike most European countries occupied by the Third Reich, many Austrians welcomed Germany's annexation in 1938, seeing integration as a remedy to soaring domestic unemployment, and a solution to the fractious politics that had caused a 1934 civil war between socialists and rightists. ...

To date, only two newspapers have covered the landmark project - Vienna's Der Standard and the leading daily in Silbertal's province of Vorarlberg. (my emphasis)

Now, it's true that most Austrians seemed to welcome annexation by Germany in 1938, though there it certainly wasn't accomplished by democratic vote. The late Simon Wiesenthal once remarked that the only thing that slowed the German army down as it was entering Austria was the large number of women bearing bundles of flowers for the German troops.

But then, 1938 was even longer ago than 1986. And Austria paid very dearly for their incorporation into the Third Reich. The number of Austrians today who would want to be annexed to Germany or who would approve the 1938 annexation is tiny. Even Haider repudiated the German-nationalists who supported him at one point.

But the fact that Der Standard and the Vorarlberger Nachrichten (which must be the Vorarlberg paper Geiger references) is hardly any sign of Austria being "reluctant to acknowledge its Nazi past". Der Standard is the country's best newspaper (the tabloid Krönen Zeitung is the most popular). And the Vorarlberger Nachrichten, which is a sister paper to the Salzburger Nachrichten and the Oberöesterreichische Nachricten, is also an excellent and respected newspaper. That they both covered which is essentially a local history project in a small town shows quite a bit of interest, I would say.

This page at the Web site of Gemeinde Montafon, the district (county, more-or-less, in American terms) of which the town of Silbertal is a part, has an article on this project, Gemeinde Silbertal zu NS-Verbrecher Vallaster (n.d.).

Then there's this puzzling passage in Geiger's article:

But if the Austrian media has ignored Silbertal's history project, historians and Holocaust survivors have not.

"Thanks to Saly, Silbertal is far more open and honest now about a native who became a Nazi mass murderer than many other Austrian communities," [historian Werner] Bundschuh said in an apparent dig at Braunau, the Austrian village where Hitler was born in 1889.

The Braunau reference is cryptic to me. Braunau is the town where Hitler was born, though he actually grew up in the city of Linz. Braunau has always been cautious about making any big deal out of Hitler's birth house for fear it would become a pilgramage site for rightwing extremists, something they have actively discouraged. Something may have been lost in the editing there.

Memorial at Hitler's birth house, Braunau-am-Inn (The inscription says, For peace, freedom and democracy/Never again fascism/Remember the millions dead)

At the end of the online article is a section called "Austria starting to come to grips with the past" which appears as a sidebar in the print edition. "Starting"? Not to put too much emphasis on the headline, but it also encourages the outdated framework from 1986. Only in the last four paragraphs does it present cases in which actions are presented which supposedly represent adequate ways of "starting to come to grips with the past".

Since I have an interest in this (obvious from the length of this post), I'm going to look at the incidents that come off in the sidebar as insufficient "starting to come to grips with the past". This one is especially puzzling:

In 2006, the ruling Social Democratic party released a 333-page study that detailed how postwar party officials courted many of the 700,000 Austrians who had become members of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party to work in industry, the judicial system and state health services rather than allowing repatriated Jews to have the jobs.

I'm sorry to say that I haven't read the SPÖ's report. But as a contemporary case of "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit", that is clearly a positive thing. Although the FPÖ was the favored party home for ex-Nazis in the immediate postwar period, both the SPÖ and ÖVP also had lots of former Party members. The SPÖ report was done to make that record explicit, a kind of self-criticism in which political parties are inherently reluctant to engage.

Another negative example from the sidebar:

Since the end of World War II, Austria has been slow to atone for its Nazi past, even electing Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, as head of state from 1986 to 1992 despite revelations that he had been a Nazi officer in a unit implicated in war crimes.

Now, I'm no fan of Kurt Waldheim. The historical record convinces me that he did willingly participate in war crimes in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. You can check the links above to see other unfriendly comments of mine about the nasty old guy. And while there was sufficient evidence in the public record at the time to show voters he had been involved in war crimes, the charges were highly contested. Not only Waldheim himself steadfastly denied them, but his fellow ÖVP member Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary "Nazi hunter", defended Waldheim (though he later became convinced Waldheim had lied about his wartime past). In any case, as I've explained above, there's a lot of water under the bridge since 1986 when it comes to the "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit".

This is also odd to me:

With few exceptions, postwar governments have neither restored nor given compensation to Austrian Jews. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, about 120,000 of Vienna's 190,000 Jews were expelled or forced to flee. More than 65,000 were killed, many of them at the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps.

While there's validity to this criticism, it's also the case that Austria in recent years has made substantial compensations, including returning stolen works of art that wound up in Austrian state-owned museums. And this does involve some tangled legal issues, getting back to Austria's official postwar status as a "liberated" country, i.e., to what degree can Austria's postwar democratic Second Republic be considered a legal or moral successor to the Third Reich. Because, after all, Austria was taken over by Germany and aborbed into that country.

Finally, there's this:

Despite demands by a small Jewish community and some politicians, the city of Salzburg has yet to rename streets bearing the names of Josef Thorak, Hitler's favorite sculptor, and Heinrich Damisch, the editor of a Nazi hate sheet.

Okay, I would agree that those street names should be changed, depending in Thorak's case on what he actually did in support of the Nazi state. But, hey, come on. Who the heck knows who streets are named after? I don't recall ever having heard of Thorak or Damisch before. This is a trivial example compared to things like the SPÖ's report.

There are tourist videos of Silbertal available, like this one, on this Silbertal Tourismus Web site.

A pleasant side of Silbertal

Tags: austria, drittes reich, engelbert dollfuss, eric geiger, josef vallaster, silbertal, third reich, willi säly

More daffy history from Bush

Does this man look like a Muslim terrorist to you?

Dear Leader Bush addressed his grateful subjects at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday. There was a lot of the usual: terror, evil people, the "war on terror", the value of torture, the need for indiscriminate domestic spying, etc. You can find the full text with audio and video at the White House Web site. A highlights version is available from TPM.

I was struck by the fact that Our Leader mentioned a couple of antiwar groups by name, MoveOn.org and Code Pink. He positioned them as allies of the Democrats against American national security, soldiers and veterans, starting at about 19:30 in the White House video:

I ask Congress to send me a clean veterans funding bill by Veterans Day; and to pass a clean defense spending bill. Congress needs to put the needs of those who put on the uniform ahead of their desire to spend more money. When it comes to funding our troops, some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the requests of our commanders on the ground, and less time responding to the demands of MoveOn.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters.

This is sleazy as all hell, though the Republicans generally have been slinging such charges for basically the last six years, and they're getting more and more hysterical about it.

But the Heritage Foundation crowd responded with warm enthusiasm.

I'm a little surprised by his singling those two groups out, though. It's obvious that when the President considers them significant enough to mention in a speech, that's likely to raise their profile. So why are they doing that? One reason is obviously that the Republicans have been focusing hard lately on discrediting antiwar activists and critics. But this is Dick Cheney's government, after all. So I can't help but wonder just how much they are intending to escalate against those named groups.

At about 4:50 in the White House video, Bush starts his grand history lesson. I found myself thinking about it a lot after I first heard that passage. For the first half hour or so, I was pretty much in a state of wonderment at the strangeness of it. And I don't pretend to understand it. But the jist of it is that Bin Laden is kind of like Hitler and Lenin and therefore we should pay attention to what they say, which would then make everyone go along with Bush and Cheney's plans for whatever they want to do.

Here are Dear Leader's own words on the topic starting at around 4:40 on the White House video:

We must take the words of the enemy seriously. The terrorists have stated their objectives. They intend to build a totalitarian Islamic empire - encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In pursuit of their imperial aims, these extremists say there can be no compromise or dialog with those they call infidels - a category that includes America, the world's free nation [sic], Jews, and all Muslims who reject their extreme vision of Islam. They reject the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the free world. Again, hear the words of Osama bin Laden last year: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

History teaches that underestimating the words of evil, ambitious men is a terrible mistake. In the early 1900s, the world ignored the words of Lenin, as he laid out his plans to launch a Communist revolution in Russia - and the world paid a terrible price. The Soviet Empire he established killed tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war.

In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews - and the world paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives and treasure.

Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. And the question is: Will we listen? (my emphasis)

This is more of the usual threat inflation. But I still marvel at the notion of history here.

Karl Kautsky: forerunner of the Taliban?

Let's pretend for a minute that when Woodrow Wilson entered the Oval Office in 1913, he was less worried about rising European tensions and German Imperial aggressiveness under Kaiser Bill than about the threat of communist revolution. And that he set up a crack team of assassins to go after the leader most likely to lead such a movement. He would most likely have gone after Karl Liebknecht or maybe even Lenin's ideological nemesis Karl Kautsky. They were both high-profile leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). And the SPD was generally considered the strongest of the Social Democratic parties and the most likely to come to power first. (The split into Social Democratic and Communist Parties came in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917.) It's unlikely that he would have gone after Lenin in his exile in Cracow, Poland, hanging out at the Jama Michalikowa Café. Because despite the Russian Revolution of 1905, which saw the first appearance of the workers' committees known as "soviets", Russian Social Democrats appeared even to most Marxists and Social Democrats elsewhere as unlikely leadership for a world revolution. Preventive assassination, like preventive war, is an inherently uncertain business.

John Kenneth Galbraith writes about Lenin in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

With his high forehead greatly accented by the bald dome above, his neat mustache, dark, quiet suit and something very near a Van Dyck beard, he looked like the head of a firm of chartered accountants. Leon Trosksy, with his fierce and glittering eye and much less disciplined beard, was a man of far more satisfactory aspect [to fit the popular image of a revolutionary]. ...

Previously in London he had been astonished that the library at the British Museum was run for the public and that the librarians actually regarded themselves as the servants of the readers. (Years later, according to legend, it occurred to someone to ask one of the library attendants if he remembered Lenin. He did, a most diligent little man. The librarian wondered whatever had become of him.)

Though he didn't look like The Greatest Threat to Civilization in 1912 or thereabouts, it's not as though Lenin was completely ignored, though. Anyone who had reason or inclination to know about Russian politics or the European socialist movement had probably heard of him and knew something about the Bolshevik political stance. Kaiser Bill in 1917 decided to allow Lenin to travel through Germany from Switzerland on the way back to Russia, where the Kaiser thought Lenin could cause trouble for Germany's Russian enemy in the First World War then still under way.

Karl Liebknecht: Did he want to create a worldwide caliphate?

And after Lenin came to power, Wilson hardly ignored him. In fact, Wilson had a Protestant moralistic streak not completely unlike that associated with Bush. He regarded Lenin as something like the incarnation of evil, to the point of declining to pursue a proposal from Lenin that would have given the Communist government a much smaller area of control than what they wound up with. Wilson even joined with the British in landing troops in Russia. The small clashes that ensued were actually the only time in the existence of the Soviet Union that American and Soviet troops entered directly into hostilities with each other.

So I'm not really sure what the [Cheney] Bush means when he says, "the world ignored the words of Lenin".

Then there's Hitler. The original one, I mean, not Osama Hitler or Ahmadinejad Hitler or Code Pink Hitler. Bush says, "In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews". That's actually a bit vague.

There seems to be a fascination among authoritarian types with the notion that Hitler mapped out his later strategy in Mein Kampf, which he published in 1925. Not really. Written during his brief stint in prison after making a failed coup attempt in Munich in 1923, now known as the Beer Hall Putsch, it is mostly a propagandistic rant derived largely from the extremist pamphlets he had read voraciously in Vienna prior to the First World War.

Here again, anyone paying attention in internal German politics in the 1920s would have had some knowledge of Hitler as the leader of the NSDAP (Nazi Party). Henry Ford even sent money to the NSDAP, so he knew about them. Ford was the only American singled out for praise in Mein Kampf.

But the NSDAP was one of several splinter parties in the German Parliament in the 1920s. According to my trusty multi-color chart from Fragen an die deutsche Geschichte (1991), the NSDAP in 1928 had 12 seats in Parliament, versus 73 for two other overtly anti-Semitic parties, the Christlichsoziale Partei and the Deutsche Reformpartei. Of the two "Weimar parties", as they are sometimes called, the SPD had 153 seats and the Catholic Center Party 62. The Communists had 54 and the liberal Deutsche Staatspartei 25. The two other most significant rightwing parties were the Duetsche Volkspartei with 45 seats and the Deutschnationale Partei with 73 seats.

So, if you were an American looking at German politics in 1928, how worried would you have been about the NSDAP? Even if the Internet had been around then, how much time would you have spent searching out their Web sites? In fact, the NSDAP at that point looked to be a party in decline, its Parliamentary representation having fallen from 32 in 1924 to 14 and then to the 12 of 1928. It was the onset of the Great Depression in Europe in 1929 that gave the NSDAP its fateful boost. In the 1930 elections, the increased their representation to 107 seats. Prior to Hitler becoming Chancellor in January, 1933, the NSDAP's electoral strength peaked at 230 seats in early 1932, which made it then the largest party in Parliament for the first time, and then fell in the elections of late 1932 to 196.

From 1929 onward, anyone who was paying attention to German politics was paying attention to Hitler and the NSDAP. But the real failure of judgment wasn't a failure to listen to Hitler's words. They didn't get votes in those parliamentary elections without practicing the usual political arts of targeting pleasing messages to various segments of the public. Not all of their public positions in 1928-32 turned out to be blueprints for their policies.

The most significant failure on the part of Western nations was failing to recognize the inherently threatening nature of his military buildup, which was at the center of Hitler's domestic economic program from the day he became Chancellor. And a failure to develop foreign policies and military policies consistent with them to be able to contain Germany once they began to revise the Versailles Treaty limits by force with the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March, 1936.

So, the bottom line here is that Bush's little history lesson was as ditsy as most Republican pop history is. The main thing he seems to be trying to do is to inflate the menace of Osama bin Laden running a terrorist network from a cave or village hunt in some godforsaken corner of Wazirstan or wherever he is to the military threats represented by Nazi German and by the Soviet Union at the height of their power.

For that amount of threat inflation, I guess you need to come up with some pretty creative alternative history.

Tags: authoritarianism, bolshevik revolution, bush, germany, german politics, lenin, republican party, soviet union, third reich