• For almost three years German trains, operating on a continental scale, in densely civilized regions of Europe, were regularly and systematically moving millions of Jews to their deaths, and nobody noticed?
• Even those few Jewish leaders making public ‘extermination’ claims were not acting as though it was happening.
• Ordinary communications between the occupied and neutral countries were open, and they were in contact with the Jews whom the Germans were deporting, who thus could not have been in ignorance of "extermination" if those claims had any validity.
• What ‘evidence’ we have was gathered after the war, almost all oral testimony and ‘confessions,’ otherwise, there would be no significant evidence of "extermination."
• Yet this three-year program, of continental scope, claiming millions of victims, required court trials to argue its reality.
• Thus, the Jews were allegedly gassed with a pesticide, Zyklon, and their corpses disappeared into the crematories along with the deaths from ‘ordinary’ causes (neither ashes nor other remains of millions of victims having ever been found).
These issues are well discussed in Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: the Great Imperial War 1931-1945. His conclusion which I have no reason to disagree with.
"The bleak narrative of European collaboration in the German pursuit of a Europe 'cleansed of Jews' was related to the creation of the German Empire in the East only because Hitler, like Himmler or Eichmann, could not in the end envisage either a territorial empire in the East, nor a larger Grossraum, as an area inhabited by millions of Jews.... the permanent tension between imperial fantasy and imperial reality prompted a spasm of unlimited violence that turned the empire from imagined utopia into a dystopian nightmare of frustration, punishment and destruction." (p. 233)
willing blindness to the Holocaust? Consider this
• For almost three years German trains, operating on a continental scale, in densely civilized regions of Europe, were regularly and systematically moving millions of Jews to their deaths, and nobody noticed?
• Even those few Jewish leaders making public ‘extermination’ claims were not acting as though it was happening.
• Ordinary communications between the occupied and neutral countries were open, and they were in contact with the Jews whom the Germans were deporting, who thus could not have been in ignorance of "extermination" if those claims had any validity.
• What ‘evidence’ we have was gathered after the war, almost all oral testimony and ‘confessions,’ otherwise, there would be no significant evidence of "extermination."
• Yet this three-year program, of continental scope, claiming millions of victims, required court trials to argue its reality.
• Thus, the Jews were allegedly gassed with a pesticide, Zyklon, and their corpses disappeared into the crematories along with the deaths from ‘ordinary’ causes (neither ashes nor other remains of millions of victims having ever been found).
These issues are well discussed in Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: the Great Imperial War 1931-1945. His conclusion which I have no reason to disagree with.
"The bleak narrative of European collaboration in the German pursuit of a Europe 'cleansed of Jews' was related to the creation of the German Empire in the East only because Hitler, like Himmler or Eichmann, could not in the end envisage either a territorial empire in the East, nor a larger Grossraum, as an area inhabited by millions of Jews.... the permanent tension between imperial fantasy and imperial reality prompted a spasm of unlimited violence that turned the empire from imagined utopia into a dystopian nightmare of frustration, punishment and destruction." (p. 233)
Interesting assertions, to be sure, but I'm puzzled by facts that seem to contradcict them that Hitler
1. urged jews to leave Germany in 1933 and, by 1939, two-thirds had done so.
2. paid for the first significant land purchased for the Jews in Palestine,
3. had Jewish generals, admirals and officers. Jewish NCOs were especially prominent in the regular army.