Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,soc.history Subject: Holocaust Almanac - Nazi Emigration Policy re Jews Summary: Reply-To: kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca Followup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac, Vancouver Island, CANADA Keywords: Lines: 159 Archive/File: holocaust/usa/lipstadt lipstadt.002 Last-Modified: 1994/02/10 Subject: Nazi Emigration Policy Discussing Richard Harewood's [actually Richard Verral] "Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last," and David Hoggan's "The Myth of the Six Million" to illustrate the scholastic duplicity of Holocaust deniers, Deborah Lipstadt turns her attention to the "emigration myth," and demonstrates how this duplicity occurs again and again in works of denial: "In order to rehabilitate the reputation of National Socialism, these two publications tried to prove that the Nazis' intention was emigration, not annihilation. First they argued that the Final Solution was nothing but a plan to evacuate all Jews from the Reich. Then they tried to give this evacuation plan historical legitimacy by linking it with the name of the founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl. They claimed that the Nazis were simply trying to realize Herzl's original goal of transferring all the Jews to Madagascar. In fact Herzl never addressed the issue of Madagascar. At one point he briefly considered Uganda as an alternative to the land of Israel but dropped the idea when it met with furious opposition from other Zionists. This is not the only way Harwood used revised history to transform the Nazis into supporters of immigration. Attempting to prove that the Nazis were primarily interested in a benign population transfer, he wrote that a main plank of the National Socialist party platform before 1933 was Jewish emigration to Madagascar. In fact emigration of the Jews was never included by the Nazis in their party platform prior to 1933, let alone used as a main plank.<20> The Madagascar Plan was never mentioned as a possibility until the late 1930s. The Nazi slogan was 'Juda Verrecke,' 'perish Judah,' not 'emigrate Judah.' The full meaning of 'Juda Verrecke' is lost in English translation. It is akin to perishing like a 'lice-ridden cur'.<21> Nazi leaders, among them Josef Goebbels, Julius Streicher, and Hans Frank, frequently described Jews as vermin in need of extermination. In 1929 Goebbels wrote : 'Certainly the Jew is a human being. But then the flea is a living thing too -- only not a pleasant one. Since the flea is not a pleasant thing, we are not obliged to keep it and let it prosper.... but our duty is rather to exterminate it. Likewise with the Jews.'<22> In an article in the 'Vo"lkischer Beobachter' in 1921 Hitler described the Jews as 'lice and bugs sucking the German people's blood out of its veins.'<23> The claim that the Nazis were interested in Jewish immigration exemplifies how deniers draw falsehoods from truth. Emigration _was _ indeed employed by the Nazis in the thirties as a means of ridding the Reich of Jews. From 1933 until 1939 the Nazis vigorously pushed the Jews to emigrate, and more than three-hundred-thousand, or approximately 50 percent of the German Jewish population, did so. While deniers use this data to portray the Nazis as benignly engaged in a population transfer, the Nazis' true intentions during the 1930s were to brutally destroy the German Jewish community and simultaneously sow seeds of anti-semitism abroad. During the prewar period this was their means of creating a German that was 'Judenrein.' The chaos of the war allowed them, or some would argue, forced them to move from emigration to annihilation. (footnote dealing with differences between to historic schools of thought omitted. See Lipstadt, 108) But even emigration -- when employed by the Nazis as a solution to the Reich's Jewish 'problem' -- had diabolical intentions. A Foreign Office memorandum of January 25, 1939, delineated the more cynical aspects of the emigration plan: 'The poorer and therefore more burdensome the immigrant Jews to the country absorbing them, the stronger the country will react and the more favorable will the effect be in the interest of German propaganda.' <24> As the Nazis exported penniless and desperate Jews, they also exported antisemitism. This was, in part, the reason why they stripped the Jews of their possessions through an increasingly onerous emigration tax. By January 1939 they had been totally excised from the German economy. On occasion Reich leaders simply took groups of Jews and placed them outside Germany's borders, forcing their neighbors to have to accommodate a large group of destitute immigrants. The best known of these incidents took place on the Polish border at the end of October 1938 on the eve of Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish Nazi pogrom of November 1938 during which hundreds of synagogues were destroyed and twenty-six-thousand Jews were put into concentration camps. The emigration myth -- the idea that the Nazis stuck to their original aim of getting rid of Jews by emigration -- is easily refuted by Nazi documents, newspapers, and journals themselves, which are replete with statements by high-ranking officials and party leaders, attesting to their ultimate objective. The Nazi leader, Dr. Robert Ley, articulated these intentions in 1942 when he said that it was not enough to 'isolate the Jewish enemy of mankind. The Jews have got to be exterminated.'<25> " (Lipstadt, 107-109) Once this technique is exposed to those concerned about the issue, they can devote their time to mounting a more effective response by addressing the duplicity itself; neither logic nor fact are of any use in dealing with these folks. They will simply ignore it and maintain their blatant manipulation of reality, in the hope that many readers simply will not have the time, nor the resources, to properly examine seemingly confident assertions. Those who have the time and the resources permitting historical research will simply be dismissed and forgotten, lost to the cause. Lipstadt's footnotes: <20> For background on the Madagascar Plan see Leni Yahil, "The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry" (New York, 1990), pp. 253-55; Philip Friedman, "The Lublin Reservation and the Madagascar Plan: Two Aspects of Nazi Jewish Policy during the Second World War," "YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies (1953), pp. 151-77; Christopher R. Browning, "The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat D3 of Abteling Deutschland, 1940-1943" (New York, 1978) <21> Aronsfeld, "The Text of the Holocaust, p.1. <22> Joseph Goebbels, "Der Nazi-Sozi" (Munich, 1929), p. 8, cited in Aronsfeld, "The Text of the Holocaust," p. 13 <23> Eberhard Ja"ckel and Axel Kuhn, eds., "Hitler, Sa"mtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924" (Stuttgart, 1980), p. 368; Aronsfeld, "The Text of the Holocaust," p. 12. <24> Nuremberg Document PS 3358, cited in Aronsfeld, "The Text of the Holocaust," p. 13. <25> In a speech at Karlsruhe as reported in the "Strassburger Neueste Nachrichten," May 2, 1942, cited in Aronsfeld, "The Text of the Holocaust," p. 13. Work cited Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: The Free Press (A division of Macmillan, Inc.), 1993. Editor's note: Lipstadt's work is a worthwhile addition to the library of anyone concerned about Holocaust denial. Copies may be ordered from any bookstore, but internet users may wish to avail themselves of the services of the internet bookstore, available from any Gopher site*, or those of the Social Studies School Services. To obtain contact information and pricing for the Social Studies School Services, send a message to LISTSERV@ONEB.ALMANAC.BC.CA and use the commands: GET HOLOCAUST/BIBLIOGRAPHY SSSS.BOOKS-1 GET HOLOCAUST/BIBLIOGRAPHY SSSS.BOOKS-2 GET HOLOCAUST/BIBLIOGRAPHY SSSS.VIDEO-1 GET HOLOCAUST/BIBLIOGRAPHY SSSS.VIDEO-2 * To reach the on-line service, Bookstacks Unlimited, internet users can "telnet books.com" - once you've gone through a brief login procedure, you can search the stacks in a variety of ways, and order books on the spot. I have found this service faster than my local bookstores, which is saying something, since I live in Canada, and I highly recommend it as a primary source for Holocaust-related books. DISCLAIMER: I have no financial or other association with the company, or anyone employed there.
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