Angering B'nai B'rith

"First there was Herod, who ordered the children of Bethlehem to be killed, then there was Hitler and Stalin among others, and today unborn children are being killed in their millions." So spoke the German Cardinal Joachim Meisner in a recent homily that created a firestorm of protest in Germany. The president of the Central Council for Jews in Germany, Paul Spiegel, said the cardinal had insulted the millions of victims of the Holocaust and that he was considering taking the matter to court, which just goes to show how anti-Semitic most modern Jews have become. 

There are many myths surrounding the Holocaust. Sadly, the children of the Jewish survivors have not bothered to learn the history their ancestors lived. Instead, these children project their own incoherent political views back on their parents’ and grandparents’ catastrophic experience. As a result, we encounter absurdities such as the one stirred up in Germany. In order to see why this episode is the height of historical irony, let us examine a few of the modern myths and compare them to the realities. 

Myth #1: The Holocaust was an attack on religion. 

Fact: Eberhard Jackel’s standard biography of Hitler, Hitler’s World View, states "All Hitler had to say was that Jewry was 'definitely a race and not a religious community.' " (p. 49). Hitler saw everything in terms of race, not religion. He did this precisely because this is what the science and philosophy of the day taught. The egg cell was discovered in 1834, Darwin published Origin of Species in 1854 and The Descent of Man in 1870, while Mendel published his genetic work with peas in 1865. Darwin showed how to apply Mendel's work: genetic inheritance became the problem of the day. 

Because of Darwin, every nation was conceived as being its own separate race: the British race, the French race, the German race. The Franco-Prussian war was a race war between the French race and the German race, according to this theory. Eugenics journals were common across Europe and America. A chair of eugenics had been established at the University of London in 1911. 

A German Jew who had been sterilized was free to practice his faith. Nazis were only concerned with Jewish reproduction, not with Jewish religion. That is, the Nazis held a view of Judaism extremely similar to that of most modern rabbis: Judaism is passed on through the genes. The only difference is this: modern Judaism insists you are born a Jew only if you have a Jewish mother. The Nazis held that either parent was sufficient to make you a Jew. But, ironically, both the Nazis and today's rabbis insist an atheist can be a Jew, thus cementing the attitudes of neo-Nazi skinheads throughout the world. 

Myth #2: The slaughter of Jewish children was opposed by all Jews. 

Fact: In December, 1938, David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of the state of Israel, specifically said, "if I knew it was possible to save all children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish people." This was not just rhetoric. 

In 1945, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans from Germany to England, even though the necessary permits had been secured and these children were in grave danger of death due to the harsh winter. Zionists also managed to stop another group of roughly 500 children from reaching France, where rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven. 

Myth #3: All European Jews were opposed to National Socialism (Nazism). 

Fact: While the vast majority of European Jews (approaching ninety-five percent) were opposed to both the Nazis and the Zionists, it is generally not realized that the Zionists were themselves national socialists. The prime difference between them lay only in this: the nation the socialist Zionists supported was the state of Israel. 

Even this, however, was not an impediment, as both the Nazis and the Jews agreed that all German Jews should be moved to Israel, whether they wanted to or not. Thus, the Zionist flag was the only flag other than the swastika that was permitted to fly in Nazi Germany. In 1937, Ben-Gurion stated his coldly calculated politics, "Jewish suffering is also a political factor, and whoever says that Hitler diminished our strength, is not telling the truth." 

Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem noted that the Zionists and the Nazis often worked together because the Nazis recognized in the Zionists a group with common interests. For their part, the Zionists felt the Nazis were a force that would prevent German Jews from being assimilated into the European population and thereby disappearing entirely as a people. They were right to be concerned about this: natural assimilation was already far advanced when Hitler took power. 

Thus, Palestine was the only emigration destination a German Jew could pursue with no worrisome emigration penalty from the Nazi government. If a German Jew went anywhere else, he would suffer the loss of between fifty and ninety-five percent of his assets. In Consenting Elites, Threatened Elites, Saul Friedlander describes the preparation for the August 27th, 1933 Haavarah Agreement, the agreement on transfer of individuals concluded between the Zionists and the Nazis. Note that this agreement between the Zionists and the Nazis was signed almost exactly one month after Pope Pius XII concluded his July 20th, 1933 concordat with the Nazis, in which he unsuccessfully attempted to secure the safety of German Catholics. 

Zionists invited Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein, a man who would soon become chief of the Jewish branch of the SS intelligence headed by Reinhard Heydrich, to tour Palestine and to write a series of articles for Goebbels´s Der Angriff. Mildenstein was guided through Israel’s Jewish settlements by Kurt Tuchler, a leading member of the Berlin Zionist Organisation. The article series, "A Nazi Visits Palestine," was published and a special medallion was cast to mark the occasion, with a swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other. 

Myth #4: The Holocaust exclusively targeted Jews 

Fact: Roughly twelve million people died in the Holocaust. Six million of those were Jews. The other six million were Gentiles. The next largest contingent to die in the camps, in terms of pure body count, were Catholics. Indeed, in its first twenty-five consecutive months of operation, Auschwitz killed exactly one Jew. All the rest of the murdered were Catholics. 

In terms of per capita deaths, the Gypsies were certainly killed at a higher rate than any other group, with the only possible exception being the per capita death rate of Catholic priests and religious. Quite frankly, anyone who says only Jews have a right to speak of the Holocaust or make Holocaust comparisons is a bigot and a Holocaust denier. 

Myth #5: Abortion has nothing to do with the Holocaust 

Fact: Germany outlawed abortion in the 1871 constitution that formed the modern German state; the constitution provided jail terms and financial penalties for both the doctor and the woman who contracted for the abortion. However, just as American activist courts repealed state laws, so Hitler’s eugenics courts repealed the relevant portions of the German constitution in 1934. 

The first legal abortions in Germany took place under Hitler and Hitler both legalized and encouraged abortion and contraception for non-Aryans in every state he conquered. The saline abortion method was developed in the death camps through experiments conducted on pregnant Jews and Slavs. That Nazi method for abortion was used throughout the United States from World War II through the early 1980s. 

Conclusion: The legal methods that allow the killing of unborn children, and Jews, Gypsies or Catholics living in German-occupied territory were identical. In both cases, the persons in question were first stripped of all legal rights and declared non-persons by the state. Once this was accomplished, it was relatively easy to legally kill the targeted victims at leisure. 

Keep in mind that everyone recognized that the Holocaust was perfectly legal in terms of German law. Indeed, a major Allied argument against the US insistence on holding war crimes trials was precisely the fact that the Germans had broken no known laws. The Nuremburg trials, however, found otherwise. It condemned the captives for crimes against humanity, including the notably evil crime against humanity of abortion. 

Today, the nation of Israel is slowly disappearing due to the high contraception and abortion rates among Jewish citizens. The same thing is true of Jewish populations throughout the world: none have the necessary 2.1 replacement fertility rate. What Hitler could not finish, the Zionists seem intent on completing. Thus, it is the height of irony that a Jewish organization would object to comparisons between the German Holocaust, which wiped out six million Jews, and the abortion holocaust. Perhaps they don’t want to face what they are doing to themselves.