'You Do to Us What the Nazis Did to You'

One of the central propaganda lines of the pro-Arab Palestine school of misleading misinformation is that the establishment of the state of Israel was made, and ageed to by Europe and America, as a form of an assuaging of their guilt for their responsibility for the Holocaust.

The line continues that the Arabs are being forced to pay for the sins of Europe which is unfair. Europe wants to placate their consciousness over the year 1939-1945, do it somewhere else.

Of course, that ignores 3000 years of Jewish national identity bound up with the Land of Israel - which the Arabs turned into 'Palestine" after conquering it and then occupying it.

But I have now found a pre-war claim on that theme in the Palestine Post's review on January 26, 1939 of Arnold Toynbee's volume Survey of nternational Affairs, 1937 in which he asserts the Mandate of Palestine "pays for Europe's sins".

Nothing new under the sun. Toynbee, of course, is infamous for this observation:

"There remains the case where victims of religious discrimination represent an extinct society which only survives as a fossil. .... by far the most notable is one of the fossil remnants of the Syriac Society, the Jews."

In fact, he continued this line and in 1955, Commentary Magazine published this in a review:

Under title of “The Modern West and the Jews,” A. J. Toynbee devotes a subsection of Volume VIII of the last four books of his Study of History to the fate of Jewry under the Nazis and to subsequent developments in Israel. His remarks therein about Zionism and Israel have, quite rightly, outraged Jews and other people. Mr. Toynbee equates the monstrous crimes perpetrated upon the Jews of Europe by the Germans with what the Israelis did to the Arabs of Palestine, and seems to find the Israelis as much at fault as the Nazis were! 

That year, he had a letter published which read, in part:

I do believe that, in the issue between the Palestinian Arabs and the Zionists, the Palestinian Arabs are in the right and the Zionists in the wrong...But the tragedy, as I see it, goes back far further than the date of the Balfour Declaration. I see earlier stages of it in the conversion of both the Zionists and the Arabs to a Western secular ideology, Nationalism. The fanatical spirit in Nationalism comes, as I see it, from Christianity; and Christian and Muslim fanaticism, as well as Christian and Muslim charity, comes, I believe, from Judaism...

...The tragedy of recent Jewish history is that, instead of learning through suffering, the Jews should have done to others, the Arabs, what had been done to them by others, the Nazis.

Though I was careful to bring out the Zionists’ innocence of the Nazis’ cold-blooded, systematic ‘genocide,’ and the disparity in numbers between the Jewish victims of the Nazis and the Arab victims of the Zionists, I am sure I am right in holding that degrees of sin and tragedy are not determined by the numbers of the souls concerned. Sin and tragedy are done and suffered by each of us individually; they are not, and cannot be, collective. Nor is the tragedy of the Palestinian Arabs’ sufferings at the hands of the Israelis a peculiarly Jewish tragedy; it is a common human tragedy, like the Jews’ own sufferings at the hands of the Nazis...

In 1961, JTA reported:

Arnold J. Toynbee, the British historian, in an address here last night, equated Zionism and anti-Semitism as representing “an identical point of view” and said that anti-Semitism will end and Judaism become “one of the great spiritual possessions of the whole human race” when Jews and non-Jews “abandon” their ethnic or national reservations” about Jews. Jewish leaders immediately took issue with his views charging him with making “distorted statements. “

Dr. Toynbee made-his statements as the principal speaker at the dinner of the 17th annual conference of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. Both Zionism and anti-Semitism, he declared, assume “that it is impossible for Jews and non-Jews to grow together into a single community and that, therefore, a physical separation is the only way out. “

“The watchword of anti-Semitism,” Dr. Toynbee continued, “is back to medieval apartheid; the watchword of Zionism is back to the medieval ghetto. All the far-flung ghettos of the world are to be gathered into one patch of soil in Palestine, to create a single, consolidated ghetto.”

Asserting that Zionism “was born of a pessimism” about the prospects of Jewish emancipation, Dr. Toynbee held that “if the Jewish community in the West were to continue to be an ethnic–even if only a partly ethnic and partly religious–community, co-existing with the present State of Israel, it could hardly avoid falling, sooner or later, into the position of being a political dependency of Israel."

He manages to squeeze in a parallel to apartheid as well.

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Eagle That Eagle

The Boys, I have learned, is a television series, now in its second season. It deals with a " team of vigilantes as they combat superpowered individuals who abuse their abilities."

One character, played by Aya Cash (who considers herelf Jewish* and has visited Israel), is Stormfront with plasma-based abilities. Native to Nazi Germany, she holds supremacist views towards minorities and individuals without superpowers.

Here she is in costume

Notice the belt:

And notice the historical accuracy:

Is there a problem?

Here's Cash, who 

told Refinery29 during a recent Zoom call. “That I’m the face of that is a very intense, confusing thing.” 

Expanding, she added

While The Boys does a lot with Stormfront, it certainly doesn’t celebrate her. Her execution of an entire apartment building filled with Black residents is one of the most upsetting scenes in the series...It’s a satire..It was important to show that and to show the newer dangers of white supremacy: the way that they have been using the internet and using narratives. I thought, I can do that.” 

How many reading this think real White Supremacists are smart enough to grasp the staire and not get excited, er, very excited, over such a character? 

From the trailer when she gets her tits lasered (at 1:42)

Looking like that, talking like that and dressed like that?

*

I learned that she has a hawk tattooed on her back because she was told that Aya means “hawk” in Hebrew. However, when she visited Israel she was told that “Aya” is an archaic translation of “hawk.” 

Actually, in my neck of the woods, Aya (אי"ה) stands for ארץ ישראל השלמה or the Complete Land of Israel. Or אם ירצה השם, If God Wills It, for that matter.

The word she might have been looking for is עיט, which means eagle.

In any case, "Aya" was a popular song, here sung by Shoshana Damari, a favorite of Jewish soldiers who enlisted in the British Army during Worl War II from Manate Palstine.

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Revisiting Netanyahu on the Mufti’s Holocaust Role

Remember the contretemps when, five years ago, Binyamin Netanyahu attacked the Grand Mufti of the Palestine Mandate?

Examples:

The Guardian

Anger at Netanyahu claim Palestinian grand mufti inspired Holocaust

Israeli PM accused of trivialising the Holocaust for saying grand mufti of Jerusalem gave Hitler idea of exterminating Europe’s Jews

The New York Times

Netanyahu Denounced for Saying Palestinian Inspired Holocaust

Israeli historians and opposition politicians joined Palestinians in denouncing the Israeli prime minister

Haaretz:

Netanyahu: Hitler Didn't Want to Exterminate the Jews

Prime minister tells World Zionist Congress that Hitler only wanted to expel the Jews, but Jerusalem's Grand Mufti convinced him to exterminate them, a claim that was rejected by most accepted Holocaust scholars.

And then there is this:

...at a war crimes trial on 26 July 1946 Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified that “the Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan.”   

which is from Joseph B. Schechtman, The Mufti and the Fuehrer: The Rise and Fall of Haj Aminel-Husseini (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965), p. 160.  

In the British Foreign Office file, 371/52585/E1984/515/31, F.O. minute, October 6, 1946, you can find this quotation of Wisliceny:

"According to 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."

Phillip Mattar describes those affidavits as unreliable yet Eichmann himself, in his testimony at his trial, confirmed that the Nazis had "an agreement with the Grand Mufti" to prevent emigration to Palestine (The Eichmann Trial: Proceedings, Session No. 58, p. 1053).

But the British did not feel confident to place him on trial.  Other historical surviews of the Mufti disagree with the Mufti not bein involved firectly in the Holocaust.  Here. And here.

Rafael Medoff took to task those who had an interest in downplaying the Mufti Nazi links.  He notes a 1990 study of American Zionism during the Holocaust years. Its author

claims that American Zionist organizations exaggerated the Mufti's crimes and sought his indictment as a war criminal on the false premise that he had a role in formulating the Final Solution

What they did seek to charge the Mufti was this

the Mufti's organizing the Arab Legion, his role in the pro-Nazi revolt in Iraq in 1941, and the Yugoslavia atrocities — but not the genocide.

Medoff includes, in a footnote,  reliable evidence of a Nazi link to Palestinian Arab violence before the outbreak of World War II during 1938 based on five original British police documents proving such a link that were published in Efraim Dekel, Shai: The Exploits of Haganah Intelligence, New York, 1959.

More from Medoff:

A specific link between the Mufti and the Final Solution became known in early 1946 when a prominent American journalist, Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the New York Post, cited documents revealing Husseini's effort to interfere in ransom negotiations over European Jewish refugees. The documents referred to a proposal by the British in the spring of 1943 to permit 4,000 Jewish refugee children from Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Slovakia, accompanied by 500 adults, to enter Palestine, in exchange for the release of 20,000German prisoners of war. The Germans were interested in the scheme and entered into negotiations with the British, but later withdrew after the Mufti protested...Surely the Mufti knew something about the Final Solution from the visit by his top aides to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Oranienburg. David Yisraeli long ago uncovered German Foreign Office correspondence documenting how the Mufti arranged, in 1942, for several of his assistants to undergo training by the SS, including a visit to Sachsenhausen,adjacent to the headquarters of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, in order "to learn how to deal with the enemy, particularly the Jews."

And

Eichmann himself confirmed that the Mufti's aides were given SS training, and that he himself briefed them on the genocide process. He testified at his 1961 trial that on one occasion, three of the Mufti's Arab associates "came to work in my Section for their information for a day or two."  He recalled: "I received the order to open everything to them, to let them look everywhere, also state secrets."  In his testimony, Eichmann also acknowledged that the Mufti's aides were given training, in his department and others, to "recondition [them] into experts for any Gestapo to be set up in the Near East" in the event that the Nazis conquered that region.

The 1943 Himmler congratulatory telegram to the Mufti is, alas, too non-specific although being friendly enough with Himmkler to receive such a missive is interesting.

At the time of the Netanyahu-Mufti affair, Time Magazine had this to offer from 
David Kaiser on the Mufti:

He proposed an Arab revolt all across the Middle East to fight the Jews...He also wanted to form an Arab legion, using Arab prisoners from the French Empire who were then POWs inside Germany. He also asked Hitler to declare publicly, as the German government had privately, that it favored “the elimination of the Jewish national home” in Palestine.Netanyahu uttered a half-truth when he referred to Hitler’s supposed desire to expel, rather than murder, the Jews. 

Nevertheless, the Holocaust was not the brainchild of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem although he had plans for crematoria in the Dotan Valley in northern Samaria.  And let us not forget this from Bernard Lewis' 1999 book, "Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice", pages 146-47, that I posted five years ago

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Photos of Bibi as Hitler? or Just a Nazi?

I had this photo stored for a while since I really didn't know how to deal with it:

It was found at a extreme left-wing site and of course, plays on a similarity to a Sieg Heil salute.

And then DG set me these:

from AP:

From Reuters:

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The Eight Most Ugly Women You'll See (UPDATED)

I was mislead.

See this source, as the picture is from the mid-1920s of a British Columbia hockey team.

----------------------------------

via Copyranter.

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Nazi Mufti - And Shame on Today's Pal. Supporters

Following my earlier post this week on the Grand Mufti of Mandate Palestine and his Nazi connections, here is from a review by Norman Goda (University of Florida) of Klaus Gensicke's The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years, 1941-1945. Edgware: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010:-

...scholars and journalists have asked whether there exists a link between Nazi thinking on the Jewish question and current discourse in the Arab/Muslim world on Jews and on Western modernity. These questions are of great importance. Current “anti-Zionist” rhetoric is said to center on anticolonial narratives, which carry moral authority with many on the political left in Europe and in formerly colonized regions. But this moral authority would vanish should the roots of anti-Israel thinking be shown to have its roots in Nazism.

...a key piece to the puzzle is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948. In 1941 the mufti, having triggered failed revolts against the British in both Palestine and Iraq, gravitated to Berlin, where for four years he tried to tighten bonds between Nazi Germany and the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East. After Germany’s defeat he fled to Paris, then Cairo, then Beirut, while styling himself as a nationalist and anti-imperialist. Was the mufti’s policy in Berlin simply a question of anti-British pragmatism? Or was he the missing link between the Nazis’ war against the Jews and more extreme forms of Muslim antisemitism today? And whom did the mufti ultimately speak for in the Middle East?

...[the Mufti] endorsed Nazism’s war against the Jews on ideological grounds, and contributed where he could to the Jews’ destruction...Husseini adopted an uncompromising antisemitism that viewed Jews not just as Western interlopers in Palestine and not just as religious infidels, but as an existential threat as per the modern European antisemitic tradition...Husseini argued to German interlocutors that, “Current Jewish influence on economics and politics is injurious all over and has to be combated” (p. 29). Living in exile in Baghdad after his failure in Palestine, he further demanded the expropriation of the 135,000 Jews there--who were hardly part of the European Zionist movement--and he instigated the pogrom that eventually erupted in Baghdad after the failed anti-British revolt in 1941.

Most crucial is the mufti’s period in Berlin from 1941 to the end of the war...When he met personally with Hitler in November 1941, Nazi propaganda on the Jews had been clear for two decades, and the Germans, with local help, had been killing Jews in the Soviet Union for four months.

Here indeed was the crucial link between the mufti and the Nazis. Unable to agree on Middle Eastern geopolitics, they could agree that Jews controlled the governments in Moscow, London, and Washington, and that murder was a desirable policy by which to eradicate Jews from the Middle East. The mufti was pleased to broadcast this message to the Arab world through the use of German radio facilities, and the Germans were pleased to have him do so, particularly after June 1942 when it looked as though the Afrika Korps, with an attached SS murder squad, would break through British defenses. As late as December 1942, with the Allies having taken the offensive in North Africa, Husseini, on the opening of the new Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, proclaimed that “the Holy Koran ... is full of evidence of Jewish lack of character and their insidious lying and deceitful conduct” and that the Jews “will always remain a divisive element in the world ... committed to devising schemes, provoking wars, and playing people off against one another” (p. 108). As scholars have pointed out, the tone and content of Arab propaganda from Berlin, speaking as it did of Jewish global conspiracies, has much in common with extreme Arab narratives today.

...regardless of the mufti’s frustrations with Hitler, the Jews remained his existential enemy. In spring 1943 when gas chambers in Poland murdered Jews from all over Europe, the mufti engaged in quiet diplomacy with the Romanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian governments, urging them not to allow a few thousand Jewish children to travel to Palestine as was then being discussed in London. The Jews would be better off, the mufti said, in Poland where the Germans could keep an eye on them. Husseini enjoyed a close relationship with Heinrich Himmler and knew what awaited deported Jews...he worked to ensure that as many Jews were killed as possible. In the meantime he tried to fuse Islam with Nazism, creating seven new “pillars” that included the thesis that, “In the struggle against Jewry, Islam and National Socialism come very close to one another” (p. 149).

...“The Mufti,” concludes Gensicke, “bore much of the blame for the naqba,” by which the attack on Israel in 1948 created throngs of Arab refugees (p. 189)...Yassir Arafat was among Husseini’s mourners when he died in exile in 1974, and he referred to Husseini as “our hero” as late as 2002 (p. 203). And as Gensicke shows in this important book, the mufti threw a long shadow as a precursor to the Arab and Muslim factions who reject all compromise with Jews in the Middle East and whose brand of antisemitism borrows much from the Western traditions that they otherwise despise.

And to all the progressives, the radicals, the anti-colonialists, the liberals, Jews and otherwise, shame on you for not realizing what was --- and what is in great part --- the local Arab principled opposition to Jewish nationalism, Zionism, in the territory of the historic Jewish homeland.

P.S.

It continues:

Sheik Nayef Najjaj Al-Ajami of Kuwait: Servants of Allah, let us be aware that our struggle with the Jews is one of faith, identity, and existence. Read the Koran, where Allah says: “Never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with you until you follow their creed,” so that you may know what the Jews conceal within their hearts.

Read what Allah says: “Strongest among men in enmity to the believers you will find the Jews and the polytheists,” so that you may know the magnitude of their enmity towards the Muslims, and their hatred towards the followers of the Prophet Muhammad. These people...

Brothers and sisters, you should read history books, so you my know the history of this people, and so you may know that the Jews of the past were evil, and the Jews of today are even worse.

They are ungrateful, they distort the word [of Allah], the worshippers of the golden calf, the slayers of the prophets, the enemies of the divine prophecies, the scum of mankind, who incurred the curse and wrath of Allah, and whom Allah transformed into apes and pigs and into taghut worshippers. ("Taghut" means anything people worship besides Allah)

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More Info on the Mufti's Nazi Connections

If you go here, you can learn this from a CIA report about the Mufti, Haj Amin El-Husseini:-

...the Muslim leader was paid “an absolute fortune” of 50,000 marks a month (when a German field marshal was making 25,000 marks a year). It also said he energetically recruited Muslims for the SS, the Nazi Party’s elite military command...The report details how Mr. Husseini himself was allowed to flee after the war to Syria — he was in the custody of the French, who did not want to alienate Middle East regimes...

...“You have an actual contract between officials of the Nazi Foreign Ministry with Arab leaders, including Husseini, extending after the war because they saw a cause they believed in,”...In October 1945, the report says, the British head of Palestine’s Criminal Investigation Division told the assistant American military attaché in Cairo that the mufti might be the only force able to unite the Palestine Arabs and “cool off the Zionists. Of course, we can’t do it, but it might not be such a damn bad idea at that.”

Barry Rubin writes to me that:

I've had this for a year and it is all in my book on German-Middle East policy that will be published by Yale University Press. We obtained more than 1,000 pages on Husayni alone and a huge amount of other material on the Nazis and their connections with Arab regimes and movements, including in the post-1945 period.

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I Didn't Know The CIA Employed Comedians

This guy:

C.I.A. and Former Nazis

Published: November 18, 2010

To the Editor:

“Secret Papers Detail U.S. Aid for Ex-Nazis” (front page, Nov. 14) cites the Central Intelligence Agency’s interaction with former Nazi officials in the early years of the post-World War II era.

We would like to make clear that the agency at no time had a policy or a program to protect Nazi war criminals, or to help them escape justice for their actions during the war. It is unfortunate that the article suggests otherwise.

The C.I.A. has cooperated for decades with the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations.

George Little
Director of Public Affairs
Central Intelligence Agency
Langley, Va.

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"America, America..."

Reported:

A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

.

The NYTimes Reviews "Inglourious Besterds"

I've been following this film's evolution at this blog (I, II, and last August) and here it is in the NYTimes:

Tarantino Avengers in Nazi Movieland

From the moment the charming, smiling, laughing Nazi in “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s latest cinematic happening, sweeps onto the screen, he owns this film even more than its maker...

...the American avenger, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), is a nod to the Hollywood actor Aldo Ray, a sandpaper-voiced 1950s Everyman who often seemed most at ease wearing Army fatigues, as he does in Anthony Mann’s 1957 masterpiece “Men in War.” (Mr. Ray’s widow, Johanna Ray, served as one of the casting directors for “Inglourious Basterds.”)

Raine leads a pack of Jewish avengers, the inglourious basterds of the misspelled title, who occupy one part of the sprawling narrative and whose numbers include a bat-wielding American nicknamed the Bear Jew (the director Eli Roth, dreadful). Also elbowing for attention is a young French Jew, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who’s running a cinema in Paris under a pseudonym, and a German Army hero, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who dangerously woos her, unaware of her true identity. There’s the British film critic turned spy, Lt. Archie Hicox (a very good Michael Fassbender), and the German movie star turned spy, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Mr. Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt.

Mr. Tarantino likes to take his sweet time — he can be a master of the slow windup — but rarely has one of his movies felt as interminable as this one and its 2 hours 32 minutes...

As usual Mr. Tarantino gives you a lot to chew on, though there’s plenty to gag on as well...Set against a sweeping stretch of green French countryside in 1941, it opens with a dairy farmer, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), chopping wood. As his ax looms ominously in the foreground of the shot, he readies himself for some unwelcome German visitors. Colonel Landa, nicknamed the Jew Hunter, has come looking for hidden prey, a task for which he is, as he explains in a long verbal jag, eminently suitable. Because Germans are like hawks, Landa explains, most cannot think like Jews, who are more like rats — a characterization that, of course, was a privileged metaphor and ideological instrument in the Nazi’s campaign against European Jewry.

The invocation of Jews as rats is ghastly — both times I’ve seen the movie I could almost hear the audience holding its collective breath — but Landa keeps smiling and talking and charming, and Mr. Waltz’s performance is so very good, so persuasive, seductive and, crucially, so distracting that you can readily move past the moment if you choose. Mr. Tarantino makes it easy to do just that by capping this exegesis with an abrupt sight gag: after asking the farmer if he can smoke, Landa pulls out a pipe so comically large it immediately undercuts his threat, transforming him from a ferocious Jew hunter into a silly man whose flamboyant pipe suggests he suffers from some masculinity issues.

The joke fades quickly, as they do in this film, because Landa has already guessed there are Jews hiding where you might expect to find rats, under the floorboards. Mr. Tarantino reveals them in their hiding place, the camera slipping through the floor to show the terrified family members prostrate, their hands over their mouths and eyes wide in fear. It’s a shocking moment partly because this image resonates with horror, but it’s also shocking because it comes cushioned with laughs. Yet the shock dissipates because the Jews are irrelevant here. What matters is how he builds the tension with unnerving quiet and a camera that circles Landa and the farmer like an ever-tightening rope. What matters, to Mr. Tarantino, is the filmmaking.

But too often in “Inglourious Basterds” the filmmaking falls short...The film’s most egregious failure — its giddy, at times gleeful embrace and narrative elevation of the seductive Nazi villain — can largely be explained as a problem of form...This isn’t to say that the film’s representation of National Socialism, its repellent invocation of the Holocaust crematoriums in the final blowout and calculated use of the Jews-as-rat metaphor are not vulgar in the extreme. Mr. Tarantino likes to push hard against accepted norms, as his chortling exploitation of spectacular violence and insistent use of a noxious epithet for blacks has shown in the past. But complaining about tastelessness in a Quentin Tarantino movie is about as pointless as carping about its hyperbolic violence: these are as much a constituent part of his work as the reams of dialogue. This is, after all, a man who has an Oscar for a movie with a monologue about a watch stashed in a rectum.

...Mr. Tarantino is really only serious about his own films, not history. In that sense “Inglourious Basterds,” which takes its title if not its misspellings from an Italian flick in “The Dirty Dozen” vein, is simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love.

Justice Delayed

From a book review of Hunting Evil by Guy Walters

...After the exemplary hangings at Nuremberg, many of Hitler’s lesser creatures ­vanished into German society, where they were protected by fellow countrymen. Both the Soviet and western intelligence services cynically recruited scores of terrible men for their own purposes, and protected them from justice thereafter. One of the worst, Friedrich Buchardt, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews, was employed by the British because of his spying contacts in eastern Europe.

Senior Vatican figures, many of them with ideological sympathies, played a deplorable role in assisting Nazis to reach South America. Adolf Eichmann wrote: “It was odd how throughout my escape journey I was helped by Catholic priests… In their eyes, I was just another human being on the road.”

A fascist named Clarita Stauffer ran an escape network through Spain. A 70-year-old English fascist vet named Arnold Leese hid two Dutch SS men on the run in Guildford. Only MI5’s intervention prevented their escape abroad. Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife tried to “do their bit” for old Nazis around the world, and Diana Mosley even founded a support network, the Bond of Brotherhood, for “our German colleagues”. It is extraordinary that some people regard her indulgently as the Mitford family’s “fun fascist”. She was an impenitent Nazi sympathiser until the day she died...

One way or another, only a tiny fraction of Nazis guilty of crimes against humanity faced legal process, and most served laughably short sentences. Tom Bower wrote the first important book about the allied failure to exact justice, Blind Eye to Murder, in 1981. Now, Walters has updated the story, aided by much new information. He gives gripping accounts of the international ­odysseys of such monsters as Eichmann, Mengele, Klaus Barbie and Erich Priebke.

P.S.

And this on the backdrop of what is trying to be done to Israel:

Churchill was always uneasy about war crimes ­trials. He feared demands that allied personnel should be indicted — for instance, for murdering ­prisoners or even for bombing ­cities. I am aware of scarcely any case of British or American soldiers being tried for the illegal killing of Germans, though there were plentiful examples. To say this is not to subscribe to a doctrine of moral equivalence — of course the Nazis were vastly more wicked — but merely to acknowledge a difficulty.

Last and Not Least

From The Independent

They Left Out the Flag Removal

This story in Haaretz magazine, Swastikas in Jerusalem by Dalia Karpel couldn't find the two sentences to mention the torching of the German Consulate in Jerusalem's doors on Lag B'Omer 1933, after the regime went Nazi and the swastika flag went up nor the the taking down of that flag a few eeks later by Moshe Svorai of the Brit HaBiryonim.

Islamic Antisemitism's German Roots

From Jeffrey Goldberg's book review article on JIHAD AND JEW-HATRED: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. By Matthias Küntzel. Translated by Colin Meade. 180 pp. Telos Press:-

...German scholar Matthias Küntzel tells us this is a mistake. He takes anti-Semitism, and in particular its most potent current strain, Muslim anti-Semitism, very seriously indeed. His bracing, even startling, book, “Jihad and Jew-Hatred” (translated by Colin Meade), reminds us that it is perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if these idiotic ideas are broadly, and fervently, believed...Hezbollah officials employ language that shamelessly echoes Nazi propaganda, describing Jews as parasites and tumors and prescribing the murder of Jews as a kind of chemotherapy.

The question is not only why, of course, but how: how did these ideas, especially those that portray Jews as all-powerful, work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse? The notion of the Jew as malevolently omnipotent is not a traditional Muslim notion. Jews do not come off well in the Koran — they connive and scheme and reject the message of the Prophet Muhammad — but they are shown to be, above all else, defeated. Muhammad, we read, conquered the Jews in battle and set them wandering...

Obviously, then, these modern-day ideas about Jewish power were imported from Europe, and Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The story of the mufti is a familiar one: he was the leader of the Arabs in Palestine, and Palestine’s leading anti-Jewish agitator. He eventually embraced the Nazis and spent most of the war in Berlin, recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the SS and agitating for the harshest possible measures against Jews. Küntzel writes that the mufti became upset with Himmler in 1943, when he sought to trade 5,000 Jewish children for 20,000 German prisoners. Himmler came around to the mufti’s thinking, and the children were gassed.

Hassan al-Banna did not embrace Nazism in the same uncomplicated manner, but through the 1930s, his movement, aided by the Germans, led the drive against not only political Zionism but Jews in general. “This burgeoning Islamist movement was subsidized with German funds,” Küntzel writes...

...Küntzel marshals impressive evidence to back his case, but he sometimes oversimplifies...Still, Küntzel is right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East, and he is right to be shocked. His invaluable contribution, in fact, is his capacity to be shocked, by the rhetoric of hate and by its consequences. The former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi once told me that “the question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.” The Jews, he said, deserved their punishment. Küntzel argues that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

And a great graphic there:-



And here's the first chapter.

Music to One's Fears

There's a new book out and it deals with an issue that has not lost any of its cultural ferocity here in Israel - the music of Wagner. Jascha Heifetz, the violinist, had his arm injured when, in the early 50s, he dared to attempt to play Strauss (although I had thought it was Wagner).

Here's the Wikipedia version:-

Heifetz was attacked after his recital in Jerusalem outside his hotel by a man who struck blows to his right arm with an iron bar. As the attacker started to flee, Heifetz alerted his companions, who were armed, "Shoot that man, he tried to kill me." The assailant escaped and was never found. The incident made headlines in the press and Heifetz defiantly announced that he would not stop playing the Strauss. Threats continued to come, however, and he omitted the Strauss from his next recital without explanation.

The book, by Jonathan Carr, is entitled "The Wagner Clan".

And I've selected from the London Times' review some comments:-

In a fascinating new study of the Wagner family – from the composer’s widow, Cosima, right up to the present day – Jonathan Carr has charted in forensic detail the sections of family history that will never have made it into official festival literature, including the true extent of their association with Hitler and the Nazis.

The conclusions are as grimly compelling as they are soberly delivered. Unlike the most blinkered detractors of both Wagner and the Wagners, he doesn’t rush to find links that don’t exist between the music and the political ideology. Indeed, one of Carr’s most intriguing findings is how the number of Wagner performances declined during the Third Reich, and that many of the party faithful were turned off by five-hour Wagner marathons, preferring light operetta or jazz.

But what he does reveal, in the most gripping section of the book, is the depth of the assocation between the Bayreuth management of the 1930s – headed by Wolfgang’s mother, British-born Winifred Williams – and Hitler. Fascinated as much by the cosy family set-up of Bayreuth as much as by his musical hero, Hitler gave them his personal protection and backing.

In 1934, he had Joseph Goebbels buy up enough tickets to make up a third of the festival’s budget; in 1939, the Führer’s personal office subsidised Bayreuth to the tune of half a million marks.

As for Wolfgang and his siblings, provided that they professed their loyalty they would be personally rewarded. As Carr recounts, Wolfgang got a shiny Mercedes from the Führer when he passed his driving test, and, when invalided out of the Second World War in 1939, received a personal visit while recuperating.

As the war went on, Bayreuth remained an unreal oasis, attended by tens of thousands of workers and soldiers bussed in by the Nazis. The final wartime performances, in 1944, featured SS members drafted into the depleted chorus. What was the opera? Naturally, Die Meistersinger.

But perhaps worse than Carr’s careful detailing of all the kickbacks the Wagners received under the Third Reich was the family’s lack of readiness to own up to it afterwards. Only one Wagner grandchild, Friedelind, fled Germany during the Third Reich and opposed Hitler. But when she returned to the festival, in 1952 (the brothers Wolfgang and Wieland had opened shop again in 1951, requesting visitors to “desist from discussion or debate of a political nature”), she was comprehensively rebuffed as an oddball rebel.

It is this inheritance, Carr implies, that has poisoned the Bayreuth legacy, and continues to warp its artistic aspirations.