Martyrdom 4: The Soot in the Fields

Posted on March 2, 2004 in Lies Martyrdom Series Morals & Ethics Myths & Mysticism War

Holocaust Denial depends on the emphatic rejection of mountains of fact: testimony from survivors, census data that show the disappearance of a substantial portion of Europe’s population, eyewitness accounts by those who liberated the camps, Nazi records, photographs, and the camps themselves. On a few small points they are correct: tests conducted after the Second World War disproved the assertion made by Jewish human rights organizations in the United States that the Nazis systematically turned the dead of the camps into bars of soap. The idea of Germans softening their skin using human fat was a horrid romance. That this is not true is not sufficient rebuttal to the rest of evidence for the Holocaust. Michael Shermer, a common guest on talk shows who goes face to face with the fanatics who will not see the herd of elephants stamping down the pastures of human decency, believes that Holocaust scholars should come out and admit that this particular detail is a legend. He meets resistance, I think, because those who remind us of the Holocaust have become, themselves, purveyors of a myth.

Mythology is a religious charged recounting of events which may or may not be true. Fact becomes mythic when it is embellished as it is passed on, to serve as examples of how life should be lived, to justify how it is lived, and/or to explain how things came to be as they are. The extermination of six million Jews is a fact. That nine to ten million other people — Gypsies, Poles, Belarussians, Ukrainians, homosexuals, and the disabled — is also true. The Jewish Myth of the Holocaust that I wish to address concerns who died in the Holocaust. It’s a denial of a different nature which serves the purpose of a few.

I do not believe in an International Jewish Conspiracy. I do not deny that six million Jews were first segregated in ghettos and then moved by railway cars to sidings where they were slaughtered and cremated. I believe, however, that the Government of Israel and its supporters use a Holocaust Myth to draw attention away from atrocities committed against the Palestinian people to make room for new Jewish settlers without granting, at minimum, just payment to the Palestinians whose ancestors lived on the same land for centuries; that individuals purporting to represent all Jews also employ a “Jews-only” spin to deny the Rom and other victims a share of funds paid in compensation to victims of Nazi Germany. I believe, further, that some Jews have allowed an arrogance to enter their thinking when they speak of the deaths that happened under Hitler, that the Holocaust, the sacrifice of fire, can only be used to refer to the six million Jews who the Nazis slew using methods that were scientific, barbarous, and bizarre.

In my Holocaust account, sixteen million people including Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and various people classified as “defective” by the Nazi regime died in the Holocaust. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and all the rest of the places where human beings were broken down by excessive work and starvation, where the unfit were sent to the right to be gassed and cremated belong in all their malevolence to everyone who suffered and died in them. And to those of us who have learned of their horror and want to prevent such things from happening again.

I speak here of a different type of Holocaust denial, the one that bars entrance into the pantheon of martyrdom on the basis of religion and ethnicity.

---

“Holocaust” derives from the Greek holokaustos meaning “burnt whole”. In the Jewish version of the story, Holocaust refers to the six million Jews who went up in smoke in the ovens of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other death camps. It does not refer to the others who died in the camps. Louis Jacobs defines it as the

destruction of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II. It is not known who coined the English name for this, the most terrible event in all Jewish history. In all probability the term meaning a “burnt-offering” was used because of the crematoria in which the bodies of the victims were burned.

It is the reduction of the number to less than half of those “sacrificed” that bothers me. I have a personal and a pragmatic reason for the objection. First the personal:

My grandfather’s brother, an officer in the Italian Army, attempted to surrender his sector of northern Italy to the Allies following the capitulation of Italy in 1944. His plot was discovered and he was sent to the camps, not as a POW but as an undesireable. He was one of several million people other than Jews who suffered deportation to the camps. He survived to tell about it and has resented what happened to him at the behest of pleasing Hitler.

When I mentioned this to a loud-mouthed Jewish dorm mate, he told me that there was no evidence that any Gentile suffered as badly as any Jew. Today — better educated than I was in college on these matters — I would put to him not only the fate of the members of The White Rose* but of the nine to ten million other innocents who the Nazis put to death for political, sexual, and racist reasons. Were they any less dead? The methods of execution were no different.

Pragmatically, restricting the use of the term “Holocaust” to mean only Jews is like declaring that only those who were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants died from influenza in 1918; it’s the symptoms, not the ethnicity that determine the diagnosis. From the practical point-of-view of public health, we want a definition that directs itself towards the ultimate problem, which in the case of the flu is the virus. In the case of the Holocaust, it is fascism and apathy by your neighbors in the face of atrocity.

Jewish theologians and moralists find the issue of the Holocaust problematic when they narrow their concern to why did this happen to these Jews? Rhodes states:

the daunting problem of how God, the all-good and all-powerful, can tolerate evil in His creation has always been the most stubborn the theist has to face, the problem as it confronts twentieth century man is so acute as to render banal most of the earlier attempts at a solution.

For many sensitive Jews there is the strongest distaste for even considering the problem. Haunted by feelings of guilt of having been spared when the six million were foully destroyed, there is considerable agreement among Jewish thinkers that any neat solution amounts to a callous unawareness of the magnitude of the disaster and that, for example, it would be an insufferable insult to the memory of the six million to dare even try to see their sufferings within a tidy scheme of reward and punishment. [p. 92] (emphasis mine)

Such tribal thinking does little to identify and address the root causes of the suffering of sixteen million people. Not just Jews, but Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled. The failure of early Christians to stand up to the Roman oppression resulted in Christianity departing from the will of Christ when Constantine held out the cross before his legions and bid them to conquer. Roman soldiers became Christians because the official state religion’s version of the afterlife did not ease their fears of death. Ironically, these warriors’ adoption of a faith which includes among its primary tenets “Blessed are the peacemakers” led to Christianity — an apolitical, pacifist religion — being co-opted into the Imperial system. Christians remembered only their persecutions under the pagans and became, in their time, persecutors themselves.

What bothers me is that supporters of the state of Israel seem to be using the number of six million Jews to set themselves apart and justify their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians on the West Bank.

---

If you accept that the Holocaust included the nine to ten million Gentile victims of the Nazi slaughter pens, the problem of why this happened to the Jews nearly vanishes. The Jews, like the Slavs and the Gypsies, were picked out for expansionist reasons. The Nazis sought not only to create scapegoats; they also sought to create vacant tracts of land and housing into which Germans could move into, untended wealth that they could claim as their own.

Hitler admired the American conquest of the West, which required the extermination of the American Indian. These people, who were erroneously identified as “Lost Tribes of Israel” by some, suffered through disease, starvation, enslavement, and massacre. Until the Holocaust, their’s was the most sudden and substantial decimination of a population in the history of the world. Men and women of many nations, speaking many languages disappeared. Some tribes and some languages are no more. Modern native Americans realize that calling this the destruction of the Cherokee or the Arapaho or the Pomo — to choose a few random examples — works against their greater cause. They’ve struggled to forge unity where before the Conquest there was fragmentation.

They have not used what was done to them as an excuse for wreaking horror against other people as have Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and a few other tribal groups from the world’s other great continent.

---

Holocaust deniers speak with forked tongues. On one hand, they say that six million Jews did not die — that they all emigrated to Israel, America, or were sent to Siberia by Stalin. On the other hand, they say “This is a Jewish thing. It’s only a Jewish thing.” The lyrics scan nicely to their racous tin-can-and-whiskey-jug symphony of anti-Jewish sentiment. It also serves the purpose of advancing the cause of world fascism by dividing and conquering. “We never hurt you” they say to the Slavs and others who lost relations to Hitler’s minions. “Come join us.”

To thwart them, we must tell the whole truth. Sixteen million people died in the Holocaust: Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, and “defectives”. Repeat that. That is the mantra for eternity.

---

In a review of Guenther Lewy’s The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Ian Hancock screams about the Jewish “uniquist” position. Lewy’s book

reflects one facet of a disturbing trend which seems to be emerging in Holocaust studies, most recently expressed on an Australian-based Holocaust website which proclaims that “just mentioning Gypsies in the same breath as the Jewish victims is an insult to their memory!….This statement differs hardly at all from that made by the Darmstadt city mayor who, in an address to the municipal Sinti and Roma Council, said that their request for recognition “insults the honor of the memory of the Holocaust victims” by aspiring to be associated with them….He accepts negative stereotypes without comment, quoting e.g. Martin Block, whose 1936 book was commissioned by the Nazi Party and served as one of their fundamental guides to the “Zigeuner”, and who says Romanies “are masters in the art of lying.” Having made the point once, Lewy then reinforces Block’s statement in a footnote by repeating Fonseca’s similar racist observation that “Gypsies lie. They lie a lot. More often and more inventively than other people.” He unnecessarily quotes the editor of a Roman Catholic magazine who recently wrote that Romanies are “with exceptions, a lazy, lying, thieving and extraordinarily filthy people . . . exceedingly disagreeable people to be around.”

Is this behavior any better than that of apologists for Muslim terrorism who cite the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence against the Israelis and Jews?

---

The case of the Rom and other Gentiles who died in the Holocaust should not be taken as a call for more pogroms against Jews, but for a revision of understandings about the nature of the Holocaust.

First, it happened.

Second, the sufferings of no one group should be accounted more holy than any other.

Third, we must strive to avoid the repetition of such persecutions on any scale against any people.

Fourth, the people who died in the camps were not given to any god. Auschwitz was not an altar but an extermination factory. If we cannot divorce ourselves from thinking of what happened to sixteen million people as a “sacrifice” because of the term we use, perhaps we should find another word.

The eradication of sixteen million civilians from Europe for purposes of German expansion stands as the most outrageous and incomprehensible crime ever committed by humans against humans. It must never be used to justify lesser acts of ethnic cleansing and it must never be denied.

The soot from the crematories settled in the pastures around the camps many years ago. Vegetables and straw grown in those gardens incorporated what had been human beings. The soot in the fields — the dust of the dead — consists of people, of many ethnicities. Let us not allow the memory to die with the last survivors. Don’t lose that lesson. Especially not in a pique of religious vanity or jingoism.

TomorrowFriday: Still more war.

---

* This site apparently does not cater to the overly narrow definition of the Holocaust. Not all Jews are as narrow as Rhodes or Ariel Sharon.