The 90`s

"In Perspective"

Note: Written by Howard Barbanel, Published November 7th, 1994

Fifty-six years ago the Nazis formally launched the Holocaust with Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938.  The smashing of windows, the destruction of synagogues, Jewish homes and businesses was a metaphor for the grizzly acts that were to come.

One of my rabbis recounted his recent visit to Poland.  At a concentration camp near Lublin he tells of six ton pile of human ashes -- there is no way to accurately compute the number of human beings those ashes once were.

It seems not to matter one whit how many warehouses full of luggage, shoes, hair, eyeglasses and such are on full display at many of the camps -- the documentary films were made by the Nazis, the testimony at Nuremberg, the recollection of witnesses -- none of this matters to the purveyors of Holocaust Revisionism in all their forms.

Holocaust Revision is pseudo - scholarship that puts forth the notion that the Holocaust was a hoax, engineered by the Jews to engender world sympathy and extract reparations.  Revisionism manifests itself in many ways, from the most insidious outright denials to the more subtle lobbying efforts for even-handedness from the actual perpetrators and their spiritual heirs.

Two of the most recent manifestations of low-grade Holocaust Revisionism were recounted in two recent news reports.  The first concerns the heirs to the Topf family, formerly of Eastern Germany.

The Topfs, hard working people from Erfurt are asking for restitution for their factory and other assets which were seized by the Soviets in 1945.  They are making their claim under provisions of the new law enacted when Germany was reunified in 1990. The Topfs are seeking some $2 million -- not the biggest claim in the pile but wait until you hear what the J.A. Topf and Sons Company was manufacturing: Crematoriums.  Crematoriums used in the concentration camps. 

The Topfs were so good at building crematoria and so technologically advanced that they actually hold patent number 861,731, issued by the West German Patent Office in 1953 for the "process and apparatus for incineration of carcasses, cadavers and parts thereof."

The World Jewish Congress has been leading the fight to block any financial restitution for the Topfs.  Germany's Social Democratic Party asserted that the Topf demand "can hardly be surpassed by shamelessness" and that it was indicative of the overall climate in Germany that the heirs would feel confident enough to even apply.

The Second revisionist assault comes from German civilians interned in Polish prison camps after the war and the subsequent expulsion of millions of Germans from what was once West Prussia, Silesia and so forth.

In a New York Times article on November 1st, Craig Whitney reports on the specious claim of made by these Revisionists that some two million Germans died in the wake of forced relocation into East and West Germany with seven million forced from their homes.

Whitney reports on the witch-hunt over one Solomon Morel, Polish/Jewish/Communist commander of the converted Nazi concentration camp of Swietochlowice.   Morel fought with the Communists during the war and lost his parents and brothers to the Nazis. Germans who were incarcerated in the camp after the war charge the Mr. Morel and the other Jewish officers and guards tortured, beat and killed hundreds of German civilian prisoners.  Morel stated that typhus was the cause of prisoner deaths. Morel now lives in Tel Aviv, having immigrated in 1993. The Times accuses him of "fleeing Poland," presumably to avoid possible arrest for alleged war crimes against Germans!

These Germans bellyaching about their treatment after the fall of Nazi Germany and their pining for restitution for their lands and property in what was Prussia is one huge example of the pot calling the kettle black.  So many revisionists and apologists blame everything solely on the Nazis -- as though Nazis were a breed apart from most Germans, as though they weren't even really Germans. As though no one in Germany other than Nazis had any role to play in the Holocaust. 

The big lie these days (aside from denying the Holocaust) is that the Nazis were some small lunatic group that had nothing to do with the German masses.  Foohey!

The German people wholeheartedly embraced Hitler, his people, his cause, his ideology and his war.  They served him with pride and devotion until the bitter end. That some people in Germany have the temerity to seek redress and recompense after what they unleashed on humanity is the height of hubris and tells us that despite all the contrition of the Germans over the past few decades, they will have a good deal more work to do on their souls. 

As to the punishments the German people received at the close of the war, many Jews share my view that they hardly suffered enough and that perhaps the first use of the atomic bomb was waster on the wrong people.

The vast Jewish graveyards that are Germany, Poland, Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe are places of no return for the Jewish people.  Likewise there should be no return of assets to merchants of death and no apologies made to anyone over what happened to Germans in 1945 and 1946 as a direct consequence of their actions.