HAVE WE FAILED AT TEACHING WORLD WAR 2?
Just last month thousands of skinheads in Europe marched in open support of Hitler.
In Iran, holocaust deniers cheered and laughed each other on - some holding photos of dead bodies in hands, explaining with a callousness that defies humanity a lack of gas burns and the like. Grim, ugly stuff.
I can find loads of examples of National Socialists calling for extermination of the Jews, starting in the very beginning of their cause.
Yet holocaust deniers can't find one.
Long before the war started, before any Jews were put in camps, members of the party were being prepared.
Perhaps if you know someone who doesn't know what to believe the following will help.
I wonder if these ideas get out there because no college in America covers World War 2 from the German or Russian side- only the Americans? Maybe the way to fight such historical nonsense is to let kids read what the nazis wrote!
Background: The following lead article from Der Stürmer appeared in July 1933, soon after Hitler took power. Note the last sentence, which calls for the extermination of the Jews..
The source: "Die Geheimpläne gegen Deutschland enthüllt," Der Stürmer, #34/1933.
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Secret Plans against Germany Revealed
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Exterminate!
The Jew was so sure of his cause in 1897 that he could write in the Protocols:
"Even if a spiritual hero should arise in the enemy's camp and make war against us, he will be defeated. The newcomer cannot stand against an experienced warrior. The battle between us and him would be pitiless, waged in a manner never before seen in the world. The spiritual hero would be too late."
The Jew miscalculated. The spiritual hero did not come too late. He took up battle with Pan-Jewry and won the victory. The world knows the name of this hero. He is Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German freedom movement. The Jew sank under his blows in the dust. Now he sees the enormous danger he faces. He has been uncovered, his criminal plans have been discovered, and a battle is coming like the world has never seen. World Jewry faces Adolf Hitler. World Jewry faces Germany. The Jews will fight without pity. We must also fight without pity against Pan-Jewry. The Jewish people is the people of the Devil. It is a people of criminals and murderers. The Jewish people must be exterminated from the face of the earth.
Now that seems pretty clear to me.
Yet the above comments are banned from discussion in may Euro countries, even though in this case it ends the argument- before the killings had even started.
They couldn't wait.
The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion was yet another piece of Russian black ops propaganda ( only not from the Marxists) to justify killing Jews.
Yeah the protocols were traced to their original propaganda source long ago.
LONG AGO.
I still wonder if kids fall for this rubbish because they've never actually read any nazi writing? It is hard to study history when you can't study all sides. There are so many examples of open, printed calls and cheers for extermination as to be nuts to deny it.
The study would have to each step clarify- the protocols were fake, etc, but no one in their right mind would even entertain such notions.
The National Socialist publications are considered politically incorrect. I say if you want European and American and Arab kids to understand that the party knew, planned for and executed those plans in every sense of the word- you need only look to their own writing.
Another part of the problem is this country dragging its feet to declassify documents.
What I am about to write is open source material from the UK press. I have to write this because for reasons that boggle the mind, this is still classified here. Using an open source, in this case the BBC, I can write or talk about it. (And I urge those that really do care about their world from any perspective to make time the visit The Economist that I'm not kidding news has you won't find here http://www.economist.com/ )
Himmler made it clear that he could have Hitler arrested, release the remaining Jews and take over as President if the U.S. allowed the National Socialists to stay in power.
He was negotiating with a third party (from Sweden I believe) who asked him how many Jews remained.
Himmler replied, 1 million.
The full horror hit the guy we were using. He had been briefed and knew that just months before 2 and 1/2 million Jews from Romania and Hungary had been sent to the camps.
They didn't "fall off a train" obviously. And that also lets you know how quickly they could accomplish that feat. What did our representative think as he realized all those placed in the camps from the start of the war on were gone?
End of story. Nothing to debate. But Americans don't know this. And Europeans aren't taught it.
David Irving found out, saw the documents, and retracted his holocaust denial. He had actually done this retraction before he was jailed.
Just saying Hitler and Stalin were evil isn't good enough for history, and we may be inadvertenly creating new Little Hitlers by by not showing the facts.
The reason we couldn't make the case against Germany during the war about the camps was that we had placed people in camps at the start of the war- Japanese Americans and German Americans. Have we faced that?
Almost no one remembers the German American camps anymore. They were held longer than the Japanese Americans, pictures of Hitler adorned the cafeterias. Because they believed in order, the Bund and National Socialists ran the camps for all intents and purposes. There were murders of anti- Hitler people to shut up the camps populations that remain unsolved.
There was no bombing of the railroad tracks that led to the death camps, long after all sides had seen airel photos of crematoriums. No one tried to bomb the camps so people could flee. Or sneak into the country and set explosives at the gates. Nothing.
When Russian soldiers "liberated" one camp- they raped the women in it. A clear sign of what Russians had in mind when they went into Germany.
What was it like for Germans to be carpet bombed day in and day out?
Was there post traumatic stress afterwards? What happened to the tens of thousands of Germans taken prisoner who never were seen again? What happened to the 20,000 American soldiers held by Russia and taken to Siberia as bargaining chips?
And then we turned 200 million over to Stalin, after dropping flyers on them for the entire war promising freedom, election and democracy.
The results of that war led to the Cold War, the deaths of militants and freedom fighters and innocents for decades to come.
By painting the war in a Hollywood fashion we have created the void that fascism can fill.
But if we tell the truth, we will also have to come clean ourselves. Then those that were German children who went out every day to clear bodies from rubble, can at last tell their stories. It isn't going to be easy, and we will have to give up playing John Wayne. Or taking sole credit for ending the war. But maybe by telling the truth, the whole truth, those skinheads in Europe will begin to understand how complex the situation was.
The so- called revisionist historians are trying to find reasons to support ideas they already have. In a true investigation of hidden history, they would have discovered all this and more. But they have failed to.
We have seen the result of not allowing the paragraphs at the start of this piece to be read. By not wanting to offend anyone, and banning the old Nazi propaganda, we may be inadvertantly drawing those kids back to the potent propaganda. It's time to come clean. All of us.
The result of not studying the past......