0:00

Hi everyone, before we get to a very

0:02

dark and upsetting piece

0:04

of subject matter, how about a little good news? I'm

0:07

going to be doing some speaking engagements in March

0:09

and April 2024 in a couple of different locations.

0:13

If one of them is near you and you'd like to go, I'd love

0:15

to see you. We're going to be in Los

0:17

Angeles on March 21st, 2024, Salt Lake City March 23rd, 2024, Portland

0:23

Oregon March 28th, 2024, and New York City April 9th, 2024. You

0:28

can go to the front page of our website at

0:30

dancarlin.com for more info on those venues and those dates

0:32

and how to get tickets. You can also

0:34

sign up for our free sub-stack page at dancarlin.substack.com

0:36

where we will try to provide updates regularly

0:38

on this as well. I'd love to see

0:40

you out there if you have the time

0:43

and look, if these go well, we'll add

0:45

some other cities down the road. It's

0:50

hardcore history. Attention.

0:55

We're going to issue one

0:57

of our rare pre-show warnings

0:59

before the conversation we're about

1:01

to have here concerning

1:04

the nature of the material that's

1:06

going to be discussed. Now, obviously,

1:09

when you have a show entitled hardcore

1:11

history, nobody should be

1:13

expecting much in the way of rainbows

1:15

and unicorns. That is understood. But

1:18

sometimes the material

1:20

gets even darker than normal

1:22

and today is going to be one of those times. I

1:24

don't think it's as heavy

1:26

duty or as intense

1:29

as the painful attainment show

1:31

we did on public

1:34

executions and public violence

1:36

and all that sort of stuff, but maybe not

1:38

because the material is any lighter because it isn't,

1:41

but perhaps because the show isn't quite as

1:43

long and doesn't hammer you for

1:46

quite as significant

1:49

a duration. Maybe you could say, but

1:52

it's heavy duty stuff and I'm warning you now that

1:54

maybe it's not for you. You'll have

1:56

to decide. The

1:59

show today. came about as

2:02

the result of a communication between

2:04

the people who publish a

2:07

book that's just about to come out in

2:09

the United States and yours

2:11

truly, the publishers of Dan

2:14

Stone's, historian Dan Stone's new book on

2:16

the Holocaust got in touch with me

2:18

and said, but we like to talk

2:20

to the professor about the book. Now,

2:23

Stone, for those who don't know, is

2:25

one of the foremost historians of the

2:27

Holocaust in the Second World War. He's

2:29

the director of the Holocaust Research Institute

2:31

at Royal Holloway at the University of London. He's written a

2:34

lot of books and articles on the subject and

2:36

the new book, believe it or not, after all

2:38

these years, still breaks new ground and ties the

2:40

Holocaust into modern times in a way that's valuable

2:43

and important. And when this offer

2:45

was presented to me, I thought to myself,

2:47

you know, I don't think we've actually addressed

2:49

the Holocaust straight on. And

2:52

so maybe having such an august

2:55

researcher and professor

2:57

on the subject is a great idea. But

3:00

I did think that there was one thing

3:02

missing in a discussion about this between a

3:05

host and an interview subject. And that is

3:08

the emotional content to

3:10

a degree, because when you have an interview,

3:12

there is an educational slash

3:14

classroom sort of feel sometimes

3:17

to things. A

3:20

high-minded discussion on

3:22

a subject that is much more bloody

3:25

and muddy and horrifying

3:27

and traumatizing, then

3:29

can often be brought out in a

3:32

straight conversation, no fault of the interview

3:34

subject or the host. It's just, it

3:36

doesn't lend itself to the

3:38

level of color that a

3:41

conversation between myself

3:43

and you, where I

3:45

can bring in things like eyewitness accounts

3:47

and whatever can do. And so

3:50

the way I thought maybe we could

3:52

have this is to try to re-inject

3:55

the emotion back into the story

3:57

before the interview starts and maybe...

4:00

sort of reconstitute, if

4:03

you will, the dried blood a little bit

4:06

and remind ourselves what we're talking

4:08

about before we start talking

4:10

about it. I

4:13

mean, there's a legitimate point to be made about

4:16

how long the memory of a

4:18

terrible historical event remains

4:21

fresh enough to emotionally impact

4:23

us, because we can

4:25

think, I'm sure you can, I know I can,

4:28

of terrible, terrible historical

4:30

tragedies from time

4:33

immemorial, and they don't all

4:35

affect us with the same level of

4:37

visceral reaction. You know,

4:41

I mean, we can talk about things, if you will,

4:43

like the destruction of

4:46

the Assyrians, you know, in 612 when Nineveh

4:49

falls, which is a Holocaust if you happen

4:51

to be Assyrian and living there, doesn't really

4:53

move the needle very much, does it? But

4:56

if we talk about the genocide,

4:58

for example, in a place like

5:00

Rwanda, which is a recent event

5:03

historically speaking, it's a lot more

5:05

likely to get your blood boiling

5:08

and maybe make you a little sick to your

5:10

stomach. So there's a question of how long these

5:13

sorts of events bother us before

5:15

they slip into a category where

5:18

they're more something we

5:22

think about dispassionately. You know,

5:25

the Mongol conquest was a long time ago, right? But once

5:27

upon a time, that was the worst thing that ever happened

5:29

to anybody. But we write

5:31

books today about this subject and talk

5:34

about the, you know, upsides of the

5:36

Mongol Holocaust, if you will. So, you

5:39

know, things change, right? So

5:42

injecting a little bit of the original

5:45

horror that comes with a subject like this before

5:47

we talk about a subject like this seemed to

5:49

be a good way to set the conversation up

5:52

before we talk to Professor Stone

5:54

about his new book. The

5:57

Holocaust is an endlessly fascinating

5:59

story. subject. It's one of

6:01

those sorts of

6:03

occurrences where it holds a

6:05

mirror up to humanity in

6:07

a way that—well, I don't

6:09

know about you, but that

6:12

bothers one and makes us

6:14

ask fundamental questions about ourselves,

6:16

the species and the

6:18

sorts of structures we create

6:21

for our—arranging our

6:23

societies, if you will, and what they're capable

6:25

of doing to us if

6:27

they fall into the wrong hands, or

6:30

they're not carefully managed. The

6:35

word genocide is important here.

6:38

The word you see used all the time

6:40

now, but a lot of people don't know

6:43

its origin. Genocide is not an old word.

6:45

It's an old practice, but it's not

6:47

an old word. Genocide was

6:49

a term coined in the 1940s by a writer who

6:54

was writing about what the

6:56

Nazis were doing during

6:58

a time period when

7:01

it wasn't altogether clear exactly

7:03

what was going on. The

7:06

term itself essentially means—I mean, there's a

7:09

very legalized, formalized version of the term

7:11

now, but when it was

7:13

originally coined, it essentially means an attempt

7:15

to destroy whole peoples, right?

7:17

Wipe them out, exterminate them. It

7:21

was an attempt to come up with a

7:23

term for what

7:25

Winston Churchill in 1941, when the

7:27

Soviet Union was invaded by the

7:30

Germans, called

7:33

a crime which has no name. Now,

7:37

he didn't know that

7:40

this was a crime against Jews specifically.

7:42

At the time, Churchill was talking about

7:44

what the German army was

7:46

doing in the Soviet Union, where they

7:49

were depopulating whole districts, and it wasn't

7:51

just Jews, it was all kinds of

7:53

people. We had

7:55

already seen this happen at

7:57

the start of the war in Poland, where what it

8:00

happened to the Poles, if

8:02

it wasn't genocide it was something damn

8:04

near genocide, and

8:07

perhaps what's so shocking about it is not

8:10

that it happened, because as I said we

8:12

all understand that the attempts

8:14

to wipe out whole peoples is,

8:17

I mean you can go back

8:19

to biblical times and every time in between, I

8:21

mean it is not an uncommon occurrence, but

8:24

what seems so strange is when it happens

8:26

in the modern world, right, it's one thing

8:28

to say that once upon a time, you

8:31

know, a people like the Huns

8:33

or the Assyrians or I mean

8:35

you just you can fill in

8:37

the bike, where tons of people

8:39

tried to wipe out peoples nearby

8:41

them, doesn't surprise us at all, but

8:44

at a certain point you think that societies and civilizations

8:46

move past a point where you do that or where

8:48

the international structures,

8:51

the laws, the agreements,

8:55

the collective morality of

8:57

us all has moved to a point

8:59

where that sort of thing shouldn't happen

9:01

anymore, and instead of

9:04

that occurring, it in fact

9:06

becomes somehow worse, where

9:09

the modern organization of sophisticated

9:12

states, right in the case of

9:15

Nazi Germany, 20th century states, harnesses

9:19

the organizational and

9:21

industrial power of these modern states

9:24

and applies it to the job

9:26

of trying to exterminate peoples. This

9:31

is part of the problem of trying to

9:33

talk about the Holocaust in

9:35

the context of when it happened, because

9:38

it happened during a time period where

9:41

mass industrial killing and death

9:43

was going on at a

9:47

pace that is probably unprecedented in humankind.

9:49

Sometimes you can point to certain times

9:52

and places. China,

9:55

for example, had certain rebellions where if you

9:57

actually look at the death rate and how

9:59

many people died, I mean it might be comparable

10:01

to certain world wars, but by

10:03

and large what was going on in the

10:05

Second World Wars on such a scale that

10:08

when you talk about a particular

10:10

people maybe losing five or six

10:12

million of their members, this

10:16

is a crazy thing to say, but it might not

10:18

even be that noticeable. At the post-war

10:21

war crimes trials where the

10:24

victorious Allied powers were

10:26

all involved, the Soviet Union, which of

10:28

course was one of the victorious Allied

10:30

powers and had suffered mightily, maybe the

10:32

worst of all, if not them in

10:34

China, but probably them, of any of

10:36

the combatants in the war, they

10:40

sometimes sort of resented

10:42

the idea that anyone would focus

10:44

on a Jewish Holocaust specifically, because

10:47

their point was it's just entirely

10:49

wrapped up in the

10:52

greater Holocaust entirely, right? The

10:54

horrific things that Nazi Germany

10:56

and their allies did to

10:58

everyone that they fought, right?

11:01

Six million Jews was the Jewish

11:04

price that was paid, but look at what happened to the Poles, look

11:06

at what happened to the Russians, look at what happened over and over

11:08

and over again. All these peoples that

11:11

were devastated, it

11:13

was only after the Second

11:15

World War that it started to seep in

11:18

exactly what the Holocaust meant, and

11:21

in the early 1960s, after

11:24

the founding of the State of Israel, when Israel

11:26

was going out and finding war

11:28

criminals, right? Nazis that had diluted capture

11:30

and had gotten away, and they got

11:33

their hands, for example, on Adolf Eichmann

11:36

in South America where he was hiding out, and

11:38

they brought him back, I think they drugged

11:41

him and they flew him back and they

11:43

put him on trial in the early 1960s

11:45

in Israel, and so much

11:47

of the world's attention was focused on this,

11:49

and by that time, the world

11:51

had sort of internalized some of the, you

11:53

know, what the Soviets were talking about, right?

11:55

The greater death that everybody had to suffer,

12:00

and brought out the specific attempts on

12:02

the parts of the Nazis and their

12:04

allies to wipe out Jews, at least

12:07

Jews in Europe, but maybe Jews everywhere

12:09

at a certain point. And

12:13

Eichmann's testimony and what came out of that

12:15

trial was so outrageous

12:18

and had so many implications

12:21

for modern humanity as a

12:23

whole that that began to

12:25

build the knowledge and

12:27

understanding and to some degree the fascination

12:30

and intense

12:33

examination of the Holocaust in a way that had

12:35

been building up till that time but really took

12:37

off then. And then in the 1970s there was

12:39

quite a bit of work

12:41

in popular culture and everything and

12:44

of course now we have it where the Holocaust is, well

12:47

you'd have to be obviously living under a

12:49

rock and not be particularly educated

12:52

to not have heard or know about it but you

12:54

might not know a lot about it and hopefully we

12:56

can add a little bit of

12:59

information to that today. I imagine many of you

13:01

know a great deal about it already though, it's

13:04

one of those modern sorts of occurrences

13:06

that's hard to ignore. It

13:11

is one of the ultimate examples

13:13

of the literary theme of

13:16

man's inhumanity to man and

13:18

just when you think it can't get any worse there's

13:21

a story or a remembrance or

13:23

a document or something

13:25

else maybe even sometimes film footage

13:27

that comes into play where you

13:29

just shake your head and can't

13:32

believe that humanity ever went there

13:34

in Winston

13:36

Churchill's history of the Second World War. And

13:40

if you really are interested in that series by the

13:42

way don't buy one of the abridged versions, go get

13:44

your hands on one of the original

13:47

works because they include all the appendixes. Churchill

13:49

throws in a lot of letters that he

13:51

wrote during the war itself and communications that

13:53

he had with other people. For example in

13:56

1944 Churchill wrote a

13:58

letter or a communication letter. and

14:00

in it he talked about

14:03

what was happening to the Jews in Hungary.

14:06

Now in 1944, even though ever

14:09

since the war people have been trying to figure

14:11

out how much the Allies realized what was or

14:13

wasn't going on in the occupied

14:15

territories and in the places where

14:18

Jews were being persecuted and killed,

14:21

and Churchill in 1944 in

14:23

this communique shows that they

14:25

know something's going on and listen

14:27

to how he refers to it. It's

14:30

in the appendix of volume six of his

14:32

history of the Second World War, the

14:35

volume entitled Triumph and Tragedy.

14:37

It is a communique

14:40

from him to the Foreign

14:42

Secretary in Britain dated July

14:44

11th 1944 and he writes,

14:47

quote, there is no

14:50

doubt that this persecution of the

14:52

Jews in Hungary and their expulsion

14:54

from enemy territory is probably the

14:56

greatest and most horrible crime ever

14:58

committed in the whole history of

15:00

the world and it has been

15:02

done by scientific machinery, by nominally

15:04

civilized men in the name of

15:06

a great state and one of

15:08

the leading races of Europe. It

15:10

is quite clear that all concerned in

15:13

this crime who may fall into our

15:15

hands, including the people who only obeyed

15:17

orders by carrying out the butcheries, should

15:20

be put to death after their association with

15:22

the murders has been proved. I

15:24

cannot therefore, he writes, feel that

15:26

this is the kind of ordinary

15:29

case which is put through the

15:31

protecting power as, for instance, the

15:33

lack of feeding or sanitary conditions

15:35

in some particular prisoner's camp. There

15:37

should therefore be, in my opinion,

15:39

no negotiations of any

15:41

kind on this subject. Declaration

15:43

should be made in public so that

15:46

everyone connected with it will be hunted

15:48

down and put to death, end quote.

15:51

Let's recall that this is before the

15:54

finding of the concentration camps, the

15:56

death camps, the camps that the

15:59

Nazis themselves referred to as

16:01

annihilation camps, I

16:04

should probably address something right now that's

16:06

already going to get me some feedback

16:08

so that we make

16:10

the distinction between Nazis and Germans.

16:13

And I've heard, for example, from Polish people

16:15

over the years that they

16:17

resent us referring to the Germans as

16:19

Nazis as though that somehow exempts them

16:21

from their crimes, right? That there are

16:24

Nazis and Germans and that they're not

16:26

the same. And I

16:28

think we should point out that this is

16:30

the Nazi period of German history and

16:32

that that is a unique period in

16:34

German history. And even if German troops,

16:37

for example, in the First World War

16:39

were exceedingly harsh with the civilian populations

16:41

in some places, right, the Germans are

16:43

famous for collective punishment

16:45

in the war. If some partisan

16:49

shoots at a German soldier in the First World

16:51

War, it is not unusual for the Germans

16:53

to line up a bunch of civilian hostages and

16:56

put them up against a wall and shoot them. But

16:58

that's not Nazi activity. That's just, well,

17:01

a lot of countries would do that. But the Germans

17:03

and before them, the Prussians specifically were very harsh about

17:05

that kind of stuff. But making a

17:07

distinction about between that and

17:10

putting people in concentration camps and gassing

17:12

them is a very different thing. That

17:15

is the Nazi era specifically. And

17:18

what Dan Stone's book talks about, and we'll get

17:20

into it with Professor Stone himself, is

17:23

that you just

17:25

can't write it off to

17:27

Germans in any case, because

17:30

there were a lot of other

17:32

Europeans whose anti-Semitic ideas were tapped

17:34

into and who became willing

17:36

accomplices in all this. Maybe

17:40

we should talk for a second about

17:42

who the Nazis were, because

17:45

the Holocaust becomes something difficult

17:47

to imagine without them.

17:52

Something to describe the Nazis

17:55

is difficult. It's like a moving target

17:57

and there's a reason for that, but

17:59

certainly... They are fascinating to

18:01

us even today. I've heard it said

18:03

that if you are a writer and

18:05

you want to increase book sales, all

18:07

you need to do is figure out

18:09

a justification for slapping a swastika on

18:12

your book cover and you

18:14

can be assured of increased book sales. That

18:17

says something, doesn't it? That's indicative of

18:19

something. The Nazis

18:21

are a very strange group and

18:24

you can contrast them with their great

18:26

geopolitical opponents, the

18:28

communists, and in many ways

18:30

they're opposites from each other. The

18:33

communists of the

18:36

Bolshevik movement, the Mensheviks, the

18:38

Maoists later, all these groups

18:40

were filled with communist intellectuals

18:42

who killed bazillions of trees

18:45

to use paper

18:47

to make these arguments

18:49

that even today make the heads

18:51

of doctoral candidates in political science

18:54

departments all over the world's head

18:56

spin, talking about the dictatorship

18:58

of the proletariat and the historical dialectic

19:01

and all these arguments

19:03

that divide communism into all

19:05

sorts of factions that

19:07

disagree about that specific element of

19:10

the ideology or not. You didn't

19:12

see this in Nazism because

19:14

Nazism believed in something called the Fuhrer

19:16

principle, the leader principle. What

19:19

that meant is these little discussions

19:21

over what things like

19:23

the word socialism meant didn't matter

19:25

because all that mattered is what the leader said it meant

19:27

and if it changed tomorrow

19:30

that's okay too. When

19:32

you listen to Hitler talk about socialism

19:34

you get a really interesting glimpse into

19:36

the idea that what he thinks socialism

19:38

means doesn't sound anything like what somebody

19:40

today would describe it as but

19:43

he didn't have to be consistent and he didn't

19:45

have to be accurate, it didn't matter. The

19:49

Nazis are a strange

19:51

group of what we would

19:53

today call conspiracy theorists. They're

19:56

made possible by the disruption caused by

19:58

the first world war. and

20:00

ironically the Communists in the Soviet Union were

20:02

too. It's not

20:04

a movement that makes any sense without talking

20:06

about the First World War, and

20:09

the loss in the First World War

20:11

was something that Hitler and many people

20:13

like him considered to be the greatest

20:15

tragedy in German history. And he blamed

20:17

it on certain people, people he

20:19

called the November criminals. The

20:22

November criminals were socialists and

20:24

Jews, both of whom were almost

20:26

the same in Hitler's mind sometimes.

20:30

The Nazis came to power in an era

20:33

where the idea of

20:35

radical extremes was

20:38

particularly in vogue because there

20:40

wasn't a widely

20:42

admired sort of moderate choice for

20:45

the German people. The government at

20:47

the time, the Weimar Republic, was

20:49

seen as corrupt, it was seen

20:52

as ineffectual, it was seen as

20:54

something that was installed by Germany's

20:57

enemies, and at the

20:59

time that the Weimar Republic was falling

21:02

apart, the two extremes on the

21:04

political spectrum, the far left with the Communists

21:06

and the far right with the Nazis, were

21:09

at an open warfare in

21:11

the streets against each other. And

21:13

so if you were an average German

21:15

voter, your choices were the

21:17

far left, the far right, or the

21:19

discredited moderate government in the middle,

21:21

which many people saw as

21:23

no choice at all. There

21:26

is an attitude in the United States,

21:29

especially today, that the

21:31

Germans were a left-wing movement like

21:33

Communists and Socialists. This

21:35

bears a little bit of discussion, although I've

21:38

done a whole hardcore history addendum show about

21:40

it with Daniele Bolelli, where we talked about

21:43

why this isn't so. But the bottom

21:45

line is that when you talk about

21:47

things like right-wing or left-wing and political

21:49

spectrums, these are all human constructs. And

21:52

if you change the criteria you're using,

21:55

you can put any sort of political

21:57

system anywhere you want. But

21:59

if we... So if we're playing the game here

22:01

comparing apples to apples, well then you

22:03

have to use the political spectrum that

22:05

was in vogue from the beginning, which

22:08

is like 18th century France,

22:11

up until about the 1980s when people

22:13

started creating their own political spectrums with

22:15

different criteria. If you

22:17

want to say that the Nazis are

22:19

a left-wing movement, you have to use

22:21

a criteria that only bases where

22:24

you place systems on something like freedom,

22:27

in which case, oh, you can lump all totalitarian

22:29

regimes on the left and all free regimes on

22:31

the right and call the Nazis anything

22:33

you want. But traditionally, there's a

22:35

list of criteria that's been used from time

22:37

immemorial, and if you use that one, the

22:40

Nazis fit firmly on the right. Let me

22:42

show the differences very quickly between, say, the

22:44

far left and the far right. The

22:46

far right is nationalistic, right? They

22:49

believe in a country, a nation, or a

22:51

race. They're not

22:53

internationalist. It's an us and them kind of

22:56

philosophy. The far

22:58

left is internationalist. Their

23:00

belief is class-based, which means that people

23:02

in other countries can be allies

23:05

or countrymen just as much as

23:08

people in your own country. I mean, the

23:10

old communist line and socialist line was workers

23:12

of the world unite. Well, that's

23:14

not something people on the far right would

23:16

say because they don't want people from other

23:18

countries uniting with them generally. They believe in

23:20

their country. Workers of the

23:22

world unite is an internationalistic phrase.

23:26

The far right regimes often

23:28

harken back to a glorious past,

23:30

a mythological past, a romanticized past

23:33

that they want to take the

23:36

people back to, right? Whereas the far

23:38

left are looking forward to

23:40

some sort of glorious future, which has never

23:42

happened before and is only made possible by

23:45

things like the progression of

23:47

systems, right? So the

23:49

communists believe that capitalism eventually

23:51

would destroy

23:54

itself from its internal contradictions and when

23:56

it did, it would naturally progress to

23:58

the next stage of economic human

24:00

development communism. So it looked forward

24:02

to some sort of glorious untested

24:04

utopian future. The

24:07

Communists and the far left believed in

24:09

the proletariat, the working class, the far-right

24:11

believed in the folk or

24:13

the folk, the racial

24:16

society and community. The

24:21

far left had an

24:23

academic sort of patina on top

24:25

of, you know, their systems,

24:27

in other words, a whole bunch of intellectuals

24:29

debating this aspect or that aspect, guys

24:32

like Lenin or Trotsky or Kamenev

24:34

or Zenoviev or Bukharin and all

24:36

these, you know, people that were

24:39

economic theorists. The far-right's mystical and

24:42

in the Führer Princip believes in

24:44

the idea that the charismatic leader

24:46

can determine all this for himself.

24:49

Both the far right and the far left

24:52

can be considered populist at times and

24:54

if you're somebody that thinks that the name, the Nazi

24:57

party, which is officially the National German

25:00

Socialist Workers Party, or

25:02

the National Socialist German Workers Party, proclaims

25:05

that they are socialist, you have to

25:07

dig a little deeper into what that

25:10

means. First of

25:12

all, never take movements or the

25:14

names of nations that face value because

25:16

there's always some marketing going on. So

25:18

for example, if you

25:21

look at a place like

25:23

North Korea today, North Korea

25:25

is a hereditary dictatorship, right?

25:27

A hereditary dictatorship. They

25:29

are an autocratic society, but what's their official

25:31

name? They are the Democratic

25:33

People's Republic of North Korea. So they

25:36

have both the words Democratic and Republic

25:38

in their name, even though they're nothing like

25:40

either one of those systems. The

25:43

communist Chinese are the

25:45

People's Republic of China. The

25:48

Islamic dictatorship

25:51

of Iran is

25:53

the Islamic Republic of Iran officially. So these

25:55

are all marketing terms and Hitler made it

25:57

very clear in Mein Kampf that

26:00

they would often laugh at the fact that

26:02

they would choose these phrases that would confuse

26:04

the German public about what they were all

26:06

about. So if you go read Mein Kampf,

26:08

by the way, which is Hitler's, let's

26:11

call it a manifesto written

26:14

when he was in prison, and he

26:16

was sentenced to prison because he was part of

26:18

a failed coup. And when he

26:20

was in prison, he dictated this book to his

26:22

followers. It was meant to be a political

26:25

document. It's propaganda, but it

26:27

does tell you quite a bit about

26:29

his thinking. And in it,

26:31

he talks about choosing symbols that

26:34

are normally associated with the far

26:36

left, but doing it deliberately. And

26:38

in Mein Kampf, Hitler

26:40

writes, quote, the red

26:43

color of our posters in

26:45

itself drew them, meaning the communists

26:47

and socialists, to our meeting halls.

26:50

The run of the mill bourgeoisie were

26:52

horrified that we had seized upon the

26:54

red of the Bolsheviks. And they regarded

26:57

this as all very ambiguous. The

26:59

German national souls kept privately

27:01

whispering to each other the

27:03

suspicion that basically we were

27:05

nothing but a species of

27:07

Marxism, perhaps Marxists or rather

27:09

socialists in disguise. For

27:12

to this very day, these scatterbrains have

27:14

not understood the difference between socialism and

27:16

Marxism, especially when they

27:18

discovered that as a matter of

27:20

principle, we greeted in our meetings,

27:23

no ladies and gentlemen, but only

27:25

national comrades and among ourselves spoke

27:28

only of party comrades. Let

27:30

me stop for a minute and just say what he's

27:32

basically saying is they were using even the terminology that

27:35

communists use when they greeted each other, right? Comrades.

27:37

And they found this even more confusing. He

27:39

continues, quote, the Marxist spook seemed

27:42

demonstrated for many of our enemies.

27:45

How often we shook with laughter

27:47

at these simple bourgeois scare cats

27:49

at the sight of their ingenious

27:51

witty guessing games about our origin,

27:54

our intentions and our goal. We

27:57

chose the red color of our posters, he

27:59

writes. after careful and thorough

28:01

reflection in order to provoke the left,

28:03

to drive them to indignation, and lead

28:06

them to attend our meetings, if only

28:08

to break them up in order to

28:10

have some chance to speak to the

28:12

people." When

28:15

Hitler talks about reds, by the way, he's

28:17

talking about the Communists. When he

28:19

talks about using terms like he's not

28:21

using ladies and gentlemen, but he's using

28:23

party comrades and all that, that's all

28:25

communist sort of terminology too. But

28:28

the Nazis were fanatically anti-communistic. Those were

28:31

their main enemies, and they saw the

28:33

Communists as being a

28:35

Jewish movement. But

28:39

being the conspiracy theories that they were,

28:41

and they're almost bipolar in their conspiracy

28:43

theories, because they could at

28:45

the same time believe that the Jews

28:47

were a subhuman species, and yet

28:50

they controlled the world, right, in

28:52

the Nazi mind, right? They controlled

28:54

both the capitalistic societies, the banking

28:56

centers of London and New York

28:59

and places like that, by pulling

29:01

the strings like puppet masters, but

29:03

they also controlled the most anti-capitalist,

29:05

most anti-democratic societies of the world

29:08

too, right? The Soviet Union and

29:10

the Communists. They were this subhuman

29:13

group of people that controlled most of

29:15

the world. It's a strange sort of

29:17

bipolar way of seeing these individuals.

29:21

The Nazis saw them as polluters of

29:23

the blood, and the blood was

29:25

part of the Nazi philosophy that

29:27

also goes into the late 19th

29:29

century, mid-20th century ideas of things

29:31

like social Darwinism and eugenics. In

29:35

his history of the Second World War, in

29:37

the first edition of

29:39

the series of books, The Gathering

29:42

Storm, Winston Churchill tried his hand

29:44

at describing the philosophy of the

29:47

Nazis as outlined in Mein Kampf.

29:50

Winston Churchill wrote, The

29:53

main thesis of Mein Kampf is simple.

29:55

Man is a fighting animal, therefore the

29:58

nation being a community of fighters. fighters

30:00

is a fighting unit. Any living

30:02

organism which ceases to fight for its

30:05

existence is doomed to extinction. A country

30:08

or race which ceases to fight

30:10

is equally doomed. The fighting capacity

30:12

of a race, Churchill writes about

30:14

Mein Kampf, depends upon its

30:16

purity, hence the need for ridding

30:18

it of foreign defilements. The

30:21

Jewish race, owing to its

30:23

universality, is of necessity pacifist

30:25

and internationalist. Pacifism is the

30:27

deadliest sin, for it means

30:29

the surrender of the race

30:31

in the fight for existence.

30:34

The first duty of every country

30:36

is therefore to nationalize the masses.

30:38

Intelligence, in the case of individuals,

30:41

is not of first importance. Will

30:43

and determination are the prime qualities.

30:46

The individual who is born to

30:48

command is more valuable than countless

30:50

thousands of subordinate natures. Only

30:53

brute force can ensure the survival

30:55

of the race, hence the necessity

30:57

for military forms. The race

30:59

must fight. A race that rests

31:01

must rust and perish." He

31:05

then points out that the

31:07

aristocratic principle, meaning the rule

31:09

of a single individual like

31:11

a king, is fundamentally sound

31:14

and intellectualism is undesirable. Then

31:18

you get to the socialism part when

31:21

it comes to Hitler's view

31:23

of the party. Now,

31:25

it should be pointed out that when people will

31:27

talk about the Nazis as a socialistic left-wing movement,

31:29

they often will quote things from the party very

31:32

early on in the party's history, like the early

31:35

1920s, for example, which is a decade before

31:37

Hitler comes to power. Those

31:39

sorts of ideas predated Hitler in a

31:41

lot of respects, and by the time

31:43

he comes to power in the early

31:46

1930s, he's completely transformed the party and

31:48

exiled or often murdered the people

31:50

who believed in socialism as a

31:53

real thing. I've heard

31:55

it described the Nazi party when Hitler took

31:57

over as a corporate shell or the equivalent

32:00

of a corporate shell where he goes in

32:02

and just takes the forms and then revamps

32:04

it all, you know, to suit his viewpoint.

32:08

If you want to hear Hitler describe socialism, you

32:10

have to decide which speech you want to try

32:13

to pin him down on because he changes his

32:15

mind all the time. And again, as part of

32:17

the leader principle, the Fuhrer principle, that's just fine.

32:20

For example, in 1922, American

32:22

journalist William Shirer, who was stationed in

32:25

Germany as a news reporter

32:27

during the entire rise of the Nazis, who went

32:29

from speech to speech to speech watching Hitler talk

32:32

and never got his mind around what the

32:34

heck the Nazis were all about, tried to

32:36

understand it, spoke German. Shirer

32:38

quoted Hitler in a speech describing what socialism

32:40

was in 1922. And

32:44

this is a definition that would

32:46

apply to Americans who believe in

32:49

the Second Amendment, the flag, God,

32:51

and the singing of

32:54

America, the beautiful with your hand over your

32:56

heart. Shirer says in

32:58

1922, this is Hitler's description of

33:00

what a socialist is from

33:02

a speech he gave and that Shirer

33:04

attended. Quote, whoever is prepared

33:07

to make the national cause his own to

33:09

such an extent that he knows no

33:11

higher ideal than the welfare of his

33:13

nation, whoever has understood

33:15

our great national anthem, Deutschland-Uborales,

33:17

to mean that nothing in

33:19

the wide world surpasses in

33:21

his eyes this Germany, people,

33:23

and land that man is

33:25

a socialist. End quote. Then

33:29

there's the messianic leader side of

33:31

this. There

33:34

is a religious or

33:36

pseudo-religious belief in

33:38

the almost

33:40

God-chosen role of

33:42

this Fuhrer figure in

33:44

the country that defies rational

33:48

analysis. This is the mystical side

33:50

of Nazism and it's

33:52

discussed in historian Stefan

33:54

Malinowski, who was born in Berlin, by the

33:56

way. He's at the University of Edinburgh now.

34:00

and he describes it in his book Nazis and

34:02

Nobles. And this is an important thing to pay

34:04

attention to because as

34:07

one of my history professors said once, when

34:09

you're trying to nail down the political allies,

34:12

the place you would put someone on the political

34:14

spectrum, right? Are the communists far left or far

34:17

right? Are the Nazis far left or far right?

34:19

He said don't listen to what

34:21

they say. Look at who

34:23

they associate with, right? Judge them by the

34:25

company they keep. And Malinowski

34:28

writes about the weird

34:31

messianic charismatic

34:34

rule of the Fuhrer and how that

34:36

plays into the whole system. This is

34:38

something that was not a part of

34:40

Bolshevism, at least not until Joseph Stalin's

34:43

time when the cult of

34:45

personality took over and Malinowski writes quote

34:48

Although they certainly did not see eye to

34:50

eye on every detail, the general

34:53

thrust of the Fuhrer follower ideal,

34:55

a concept that stood in stark

34:57

opposition to the democratic and egalitarian

34:59

social models, represented one

35:01

of the most significant bridges that

35:04

facilitated relationships between the different groups

35:06

of the emergent new right. There

35:08

were two main reasons for this.

35:10

Firstly, the concept contained

35:12

various diffuse but eminently

35:14

powerful blends of irrational,

35:16

messianic, pseudo-religious elements

35:19

that were comfortably similar to

35:21

the new right's typical rhetorical

35:23

and symbolic idiom. And

35:26

secondly, both the ideal and the

35:28

reality of national socialist Fuhrer-tum came

35:30

to signify a system of charismatic

35:33

personal rule that was worlds

35:35

apart from democracy's anonymous elections

35:38

and the cold mechanisms of

35:40

modern bureaucracy. Indeed,

35:42

the Nazis ideal Fuhrer was

35:44

a decisive warrior who had

35:46

been annealed by the Stalgevitter,

35:48

literally the storm of steel

35:50

that was rained down by

35:53

artillery fire and represented the

35:55

antithesis of the feeble deskbound

35:57

bureaucrat. End

35:59

quote. He says that this

36:01

ideal of charismatic rule was

36:03

a phenomenon that was rooted

36:05

in irrational, religious, and emotional

36:07

forces. And

36:09

now based on this idea of judging a

36:12

movement by the company it keeps, right?

36:14

So if the Nazis are socialists, then

36:16

you would think of people who

36:19

would talk about labor unions

36:22

and trade unions, about the

36:24

ownership of the means of production. I mean,

36:26

there's a whole lot of things that go

36:28

into what socialism or communism is, but the

36:31

Nazis didn't work with workers.

36:34

They worked with management. They worked

36:36

with the giant corporate firms that

36:38

made Germany the industrial powerhouse that

36:41

it was, and there was a partnership

36:43

between the two. In

36:46

his fantastic book, economic historian Adam

36:48

Toos in The Wages of

36:50

Destruction talks about a very famous meeting between

36:52

the Nazis when they first come to power

36:55

and the great industrial firms in Germany on

36:57

February 20th, 1933. He

37:00

talks about the amount of money that

37:02

these giant firms gave and what the

37:04

promises of the Nazis

37:06

to these groups were. And

37:09

Toos writes, quote, the

37:12

meeting of 20th February and its

37:15

aftermath are the most notorious instances

37:17

of the willingness of German big

37:19

business to assist Hitler in establishing

37:22

his dictatorial regime. The

37:24

evidence cannot be dodged. Nothing

37:26

suggests that the leaders of German

37:28

big business were filled with ideological ardor

37:31

for national socialism before or after February

37:33

1933, nor did Hitler ask Kruppen Company

37:37

to sign up to an agenda

37:39

of violent antisemitism or a war

37:42

of conquest. He continues,

37:44

but what Hitler and his government did

37:47

promise was an end to parliamentary

37:49

democracy and the destruction of the

37:51

German left. And for this,

37:53

most of German big business was willing to

37:55

make a substantial down payment. End

37:58

quote. What the

38:00

hell are we talking about? Well, Adam Toos runs

38:02

down some of the big

38:04

contributions from the big industrial giants of

38:07

Germany to the Nazi Party

38:09

to give them the crucial early

38:11

support that allowed them to solidify

38:13

their position. And he writes, quote,

38:16

the largest individual donations came from

38:18

IG Farben, 400,000 Reichsmarks and the

38:20

Deutsche Bank,

38:23

200,000 Reichsmarks. The association of

38:25

the mining industry also made

38:28

a generous deposit of 400,000

38:30

Reichsmarks. Other large donors

38:33

included the organizers of the

38:35

Berlin Automobile Exhibition, 100,000 Reichsmarks,

38:37

and a cluster of electrical

38:39

engineering corporations, including

38:41

Telefunken, AEG, and the

38:44

Accumulatory in Fabrique, end

38:46

quote. Again,

38:48

if we are judging a movement

38:50

by the company, it keeps the German

38:53

Nazi Party as aligned with

38:55

groups of military, paramilitary by

38:57

this time, veteran soldiers

38:59

like the Stahlhelm and the

39:01

Freikor, who go after socialists

39:04

and communists in the streets with

39:06

their fists or worse. Hitler

39:10

is appointed Chancellor initially the

39:12

first time he gets in there by

39:14

the old Field Marshal, the

39:17

Prussian Field Marshal, von Hindenburg,

39:19

who was himself a

39:22

devotee of the German Emperor, and

39:25

was a virtual military dictator of Germany

39:27

in the last couple of years of the

39:30

First World War, no violent

39:32

revolutionary he. And

39:37

if you look at the geopolitical

39:39

allies of Germany in the Second

39:41

World War, they're all right wing regimes.

39:43

They all prosecute and persecute socialists and

39:46

communists. I mean, my goodness, by the

39:48

standards of the traditional political

39:50

spectrum, it would be hard to find

39:53

a more right wing regime than the

39:55

Imperial Japanese of the Second World War

39:57

era. They worship a divine for

40:00

goodness sakes, along with the

40:02

persecution, jailing, and or worse of

40:05

the socialists and communists in their

40:07

midst. Trying

40:10

to get your mind around what Hitler and

40:12

the Nazis did believe, though, is really difficult

40:14

because it is wrapped up in

40:17

the mystical, as we said. I had a

40:19

professor, my favorite professor in college, Robert Poise,

40:21

wrote a whole book on what

40:23

he called the religion of nature, which is

40:25

how he described the Nazi

40:27

belief system. The

40:32

main thing to focus on, perhaps, though,

40:35

is that it is not economic at all, which

40:37

is what's so weird about the way we think

40:39

now, because we tend to think of political systems

40:41

as rooted in economic

40:43

questions, right? Are you a capitalist?

40:45

Are you a socialist? I mean, what do

40:47

you believe? Hitler's belief

40:50

system focused on blood and soil. William

40:54

Shirer, in his book The Rise and Follow

40:56

the Third Reich, says that Hitler said on

40:58

many occasions that his whole

41:00

philosophy was rooted in something called

41:03

the Volksgemeinschaft, which

41:05

is a certain kind of racial community

41:08

rooted in blood and soil. But Shirer

41:10

says he heard multiple Hitler

41:12

speeches where Hitler said, this is the whole

41:14

key to understanding Nazism, and it never

41:16

once sounded the same. Shirer never understood it.

41:21

He did quote Hitler as saying, quote,

41:24

the state has nothing at all

41:26

to do with any definite economic

41:28

conception or development. And

41:30

then from later in the speech, the

41:32

state is a racial organism and not

41:34

an economic organization. End

41:36

quote. So perhaps this

41:38

is where our problems develop as we try

41:40

to understand a system using

41:43

our modern lenses for how

41:45

we evaluate things, trying to

41:48

Get our mind around a system

41:50

that's rooted in late 19th century

41:52

ideas of eugenics and social Darwinism

41:54

and Blood and Soil and Volksgemeinschaft

41:56

and a whole bunch of concepts

41:58

that. People don't talk

42:01

about very much anymore, because while

42:03

in part, they're pretty discredited because

42:05

in part, well, we had things

42:08

like the Second World War and

42:10

the Holocaust. In

42:12

a book written about genocide

42:14

called why Not Kill Them

42:16

All The logic and Prevention

42:18

mass political murder, the authors

42:20

Daniel Surat and Clark Mccauley

42:23

run down the reasons for

42:25

some of this. Idea

42:27

connected to what the Nazis believed in

42:29

about. well, what would make up the

42:31

folks guy chef right? The idea of

42:33

a racial community is in the Vulture

42:35

mine shaft. You could be in it.

42:38

If you were part of. You. Know

42:40

the people that met the criteria. If you didn't,

42:42

you weren't a part of. The people that met

42:44

the criteria weren't people who believed a certain things.

42:47

They were people who. You. Know

42:49

had a certain. Ethnicity and ancestry.

42:51

Hitler had this weird idea

42:53

about what areas were. In.

42:57

His mind they were of Nordic so you

42:59

think Scandinavians read blond hair, blue eyes? Those

43:01

kind of people are never mind with the

43:03

word area in really means in history. In

43:08

why not Kill Them All

43:10

the authors point out that

43:12

if you believe everything about

43:14

a culture and people revolves

43:16

around race, than the biggest

43:18

threat to that. Reality

43:20

is people that would

43:22

dilute or pollute. Or.

43:25

Breed the race out of existence.

43:27

The Nazis were worried about blood

43:29

pollution and what they sometimes referred

43:32

to as the Jewish Disease and

43:34

in why not kill them all?

43:36

they point out that that can

43:38

be a trigger. For. Things like

43:41

genocide for the authors write quote. the

43:45

most powerful fear is fear

43:47

of extinction the fear that

43:50

our in quotation marks people

43:52

our cause our culture our

43:54

history may not survive this

43:57

fear will elicit the most

43:59

violent and extreme reactions. Group

44:02

identification, caring about what happens

44:04

to our group, is what

44:06

makes inter-group conflict possible. Without

44:09

such identification, individuals would be

44:11

loathe to risk their own

44:13

lives for the collective. Yet

44:15

we know that people commonly

44:17

do take risks and sometimes

44:20

invite almost certain death on

44:22

behalf of their families, close

44:24

friends, clans, tribes, religions, and

44:26

nations. Those groups developing

44:28

the most powerful common identification are

44:30

those that promise some kind of

44:32

immortality. Few are willing to

44:35

die for their tennis club, but many are

44:37

willing to die for a cause, religion, ethnic

44:40

group or nation in which the individual

44:42

can continue after death through the survival

44:44

and success of the group." They

44:48

then point out this particular

44:51

attitude that the Nazis had, which

44:53

is rooted in things like the

44:55

Volksgemeinschaft, this racial community, and the

44:57

fear that it might be polluted

45:00

by inferior blood. And they

45:02

write, quote, "...fear of

45:04

pollution or contamination is a particular

45:06

kind of survival fear. The

45:09

fear that the group, as we know it,

45:11

will not survive, even if many of its

45:13

members do. The group will

45:15

exist in the future only by losing

45:17

what is most important and distinctive about

45:20

it, and being amalgamated with some other

45:22

group. The relevant emotion

45:24

for this kind of survival

45:26

concern combines fear with disgust.

45:29

Fear of pollution is not so much a threat

45:31

to the physical continuation of the group as

45:33

to the essence or nature of the group.

45:36

Hitler's obsession," they write, "...with the

45:39

Jewish disease and race mixing, fantastic

45:41

as it may seem to those

45:43

who do not take such pseudoscience

45:45

seriously, was a deep

45:47

fear that his idealized Germanic race

45:49

would not survive, combined with disgust

45:51

for what he perceived to be

45:53

the increasing Judaization of the world."

45:56

End quote. So

45:58

if this is your number one fear. And

46:01

if you think Jews control the world,

46:04

and if you're giving speeches saying that

46:06

if the Jews, because they control the

46:08

world, plunge the world into another world

46:10

war they're sort of going to reap

46:12

the whirlwind, what do

46:14

you do? I mean, what's the logical

46:17

answer, the logical solution to

46:19

that sort of problem? Well,

46:21

in Nazi Germany it starts almost immediately. Once

46:24

the Nazis gain power, Jews

46:26

have to start wearing identifiable symbols so

46:28

people know who they are. They quickly

46:31

get banned from multiple kinds of professions,

46:33

right? We can't have them in positions

46:35

of power. Then the persecution

46:38

starts, right? The Kristallnacht type

46:40

events, the pogroms,

46:42

the smashing of windows, the

46:44

destruction and boycotting of businesses.

46:47

Then all of a sudden it moves

46:50

to something that would be

46:52

recognized by people, for example,

46:54

in the Americas because Hitler's

46:57

reading about these sorts of things. And

46:59

he likes the approach that the Americas

47:01

took to the native indigenous peoples, right?

47:03

Put them on reservations. He has, for

47:05

a while his people think about putting

47:08

Jews and subhumans on specific

47:10

reservations and keeping them isolated

47:12

there. Then

47:15

they talk about things like exile. They

47:17

look to places like Madagascar, right? The

47:19

big island off the eastern

47:22

coast of the African continent at one

47:24

point is a place to maybe send

47:26

all your Jews. One can't

47:28

help but think that if that had actually

47:30

happened, we would be talking about some of

47:32

the same sorts of problems in Madagascar today

47:34

that they're talking about in the Levant right

47:36

now. And

47:38

then eventually it moves from

47:40

the idea of exiling all the Jews

47:42

to a faraway place to

47:44

simply killing them where they are. Now

47:49

we should point out that the idea of

47:51

exiling the Jews was not about sending them

47:53

away from their homes. It was

47:55

about sending them back to where they came from

47:57

or getting them out of what we're talking about.

48:00

was perceived to be a part of the

48:02

world where they were the equivalent of an

48:04

invasive species that had put

48:06

down roots. This is fascinating

48:08

to me because it's almost the exact opposite

48:11

viewpoint of one you'll hear from the Middle

48:13

East sometimes today from Arab or Islamic

48:15

societies who will say that

48:17

the Jews in the Levant in Western

48:19

Asia, in what's now the state of

48:21

Israel, that they're an invasive species from

48:23

outside the region, right? You can't be

48:25

an invasive species in Europe and an

48:27

invasive species in the

48:29

Middle East. You come from somewhere, don't you?

48:32

So when the Germans are thinking about sending

48:34

Jews back to where they belong, the obvious

48:36

question is where do they belong? Not

48:40

to me the obvious answer is if you've

48:42

been living there multiple generations ever since the

48:45

Middle Ages, for example, in a place like

48:47

Europe, well, in my mind you belong there.

48:50

But the Jews are one of those

48:52

peoples that because they're from a different

48:54

religious group and because they have ideas

48:56

about marrying within the religion and they're

48:58

so persecuted and there's

49:01

so much prejudice against them that other people don't want

49:03

to marry them that a lot of times they stay

49:05

sort of a group apart, right? It's tough to assimilate

49:07

in a lot of these places. So

49:12

where do they come from is

49:14

an interesting question. I'm not going to go

49:16

into a whole bunch of the history of

49:18

the Jewish people, but we should just point

49:20

out that the Jews, the Israelis,

49:22

the Hebrews, whichever name you'd like to apply

49:24

to them are an ancient group of people

49:27

despite the almost conspiracy theory that

49:30

at least the Ashkenazi Jews, the

49:32

ones in Europe, are

49:34

actually European, right? There are some people that believe that

49:36

they're the descendants of a Turkish

49:38

steppe tribe called the Khazars and we talked about

49:40

this in the Viking show we did a while

49:42

back because unlike

49:45

most people around the world, to convert

49:47

to Judaism as a group is rare

49:50

and the Khazari nobility may have

49:52

converted in the Middle Ages to

49:54

Judaism. It's still very controversial. But

49:57

if they did, they haven't really left their

49:59

genetic markers. Ashkenazi because

50:02

the Jews are one of the most

50:04

studied people in terms of DNA and

50:06

genetics and there's really no kazari markers

50:08

found in Jewish genetics from Europe. There

50:11

are however from the patrilineal line as

50:13

I've researched it and understand it in

50:15

my you know very narrow

50:17

and shallow way a patrilineal

50:20

line that goes all the way back to

50:22

the modern Middle East so the

50:24

connection to the roots in the region

50:26

where once upon a time there were

50:29

kingdoms Jewish kingdoms with

50:31

with Israeli and Jewish kings right

50:33

the kingdom of Israel and

50:35

the kingdom of Judah right the Israeli kingdom

50:37

in the north Judah in the south if

50:41

you know your history you know that those arose in

50:44

the early early Iron Age so think

50:46

the 900s BCE right approximately 3,000

50:48

years ago these are the

50:52

kingdoms that the well the Christians would call it

50:55

the Old Testament the Jews would refer to it

50:57

as the Tanakh that the Old Testament of the

50:59

Bible talked about right King Solomon King Saul King

51:01

David those people and historians

51:04

are continuing trying to figure out

51:07

whether these kingdoms are glittering rich

51:09

powerful almost imperial type kingdoms or

51:11

whether they're much more you know

51:14

rudimentary small city-states with you know

51:16

clusters of villages that sort of

51:18

have allegiance to them regardless

51:22

the only reason that they can flourish in their golden age

51:24

from about like 900 ish to the 700s and in

51:28

one case 600s because Israel

51:30

fell before Judah fell is because the

51:32

superpowers in the region are particularly low

51:34

ebb during that time period right the

51:36

superpowers being Egypt in

51:39

the north the Hittites in the east in

51:41

what's now Iraq the Assyrians in

51:43

the north and the Babylonians in the south

51:45

normally all those guys are fighting over the

51:48

territory that's now Israel and as

51:51

a matter of fact when the Egyptians run the place and

51:53

they're the normal superpower that controls

51:55

the region this is going to be

51:58

just an interesting aside They

52:00

rule it from their command center in

52:02

the city of Gaza. And yes, it's

52:04

the same place as the city of

52:07

Gaza today. Gaza has like a 4,000-year-old

52:09

history. But

52:11

during the time period when the Kingdom of Israel

52:13

and the Kingdom of Judah thrive, they're

52:16

able to do so because the powers that

52:18

would normally control them are at a

52:21

low ebb. That is a temporary

52:23

situation. And when those powers regain

52:26

their strength, they take over those

52:28

areas. In the early 700s, the

52:30

Israelis, the Kingdom

52:32

of Israel is destroyed by

52:34

the Assyrians who go in there

52:37

and level cities and

52:39

take the Jewish people and move

52:41

them around. The Assyrians are great

52:43

population transfer people. Today, we would

52:45

call it ethnic cleansing. And

52:48

this becomes the first early time period

52:50

where Jews are sent away from where

52:52

they considered to be their homeland and

52:54

moved all around. In

52:57

the late 500s, I think

52:59

the 580s, the Babylonians who took

53:01

over from the Assyrians as the

53:03

big dog in what's now the

53:05

country of Iraq, they went in

53:07

and destroyed the southern kingdom, the

53:09

Kingdom of Judah, destroying Jerusalem, leveling

53:12

the sacred temple of the Jews and doing

53:14

the same thing as the Assyrians did, scattering

53:17

them all over, removing them to Babylon.

53:20

And it's in the early 500s, like

53:22

the 530s, that Cyrus the Great, the

53:24

guy who founds the Achaemenid Persian Empire

53:26

gets such wonderful publicity

53:29

in the Old Testament of the

53:31

Bible, the Tanakh, when he supposedly

53:33

or allegedly allows the Jews to

53:35

return back to those areas, rebuild

53:38

the temple, and if

53:40

not gain political control again, because the

53:42

Persians weren't going to let anybody rule

53:44

that area but themselves, then to sort

53:46

of be the local governors in charge

53:48

of their own destiny as long as

53:50

you pay your taxes to the Great

53:52

King of Persia. Then

53:55

of course, as we all know,

53:58

right, that Persian Empire is destroyed

54:00

and overthrown by Alexander the Great in

54:02

the 300s, when Alexander dies

54:05

in 323 BCE,

54:08

his many generals rip his

54:10

empire apart and all rule

54:12

their individual pieces like hereditary

54:14

kings, and the area

54:16

that's now Israel and the West Bank

54:19

and Gaza are all areas that are

54:21

being fought over by two successor

54:25

they were called dynasties of Alexander's

54:27

generals, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids.

54:31

The Jews are always,

54:33

one would say, maybe a freedom-loving

54:35

people, another might say

54:37

an independence-loving people. If you happen to

54:40

be the ones ruling them you might

54:42

call them a troublesome rebellious people, but

54:44

they're always rebelling against the local rulers

54:46

in the 160s. You have something

54:50

called the Maccabean Revolt where they revolt against

54:52

the Seleucid government and they gain control of

54:54

the region again for a while

54:56

until the Romans come in in 64 BC

54:59

and sort of conquer the place for

55:01

good, that doesn't mean that

55:04

the the Jewish folks aren't rebelling against

55:06

them because they have all kinds of problems the

55:08

Romans with them and in 70 CEAD

55:11

the Romans finally give the

55:14

Jewish people in the region the

55:16

Roman treatment which is one Roman

55:18

writer once described it they create

55:20

a wasteland and call it peace,

55:22

that's where you get things like the saga

55:24

of Masada and all that, but

55:27

nobody knows in all these conflicts how many

55:29

Jews died but it's probably in the millions.

55:32

When you realize how many Celts

55:34

the Romans just under Julius

55:36

Caesar killed it's not a hard thing

55:38

to imagine but when the

55:41

Romans give them the final treatment

55:43

they create a genocide, they kill

55:46

tons of Jews, the

55:49

the banning of Jews from the

55:51

region begins, the great exodus and

55:53

diaspora that sends Jews all over

55:55

the known world. If

55:58

it hadn't already started it really takes and

56:00

this is where if you look at history

56:02

you can start to trace the movement of

56:05

Jewish people up, you know, from originally this

56:07

ground zero in the Holy Land to First

56:11

of all the Roman Empire, so you'll see them in

56:13

Italy You'll see them in Spain all the areas around

56:15

the Mediterranean and then you can almost trace The

56:18

movements northwards over the generations and by the

56:20

Middle Ages, they're all over Europe But

56:23

if you know your history, you know

56:25

that they are always a minority in

56:27

all these countries. They are often persecuted

56:30

They're almost always discriminated against there are

56:32

then occasional times where they're thrown out

56:34

of countries England Spain pogroms

56:37

and and mass killing

56:39

sprees are common in

56:42

the first crusade There's mass killing of

56:44

Jews anytime that there's sort of the

56:46

taking of cities the Jews in them

56:48

are often killed what's

56:50

interesting is if you study the Anti-Semitic

56:53

actions of for example European governments The

56:55

Germans are not considered to be one

56:57

of the particularly bad ones now take

56:59

that with a grain of salt because

57:01

there's anti-Semitic activity everywhere

57:04

but the Russians have maybe the worst reputation

57:06

up until the Second World War with tons

57:08

of pogroms and Many of the Jews that

57:10

immigrated to the United States in the Golden

57:12

Age of Jewish immigration Did

57:15

so coming from places like Russia due

57:17

to the persecutions and pogroms But

57:20

of course the Nazis take over

57:22

the lead spot in the anti-Semitic

57:24

Nations of Europe when Hitler gains control and by the

57:26

early 1930s Germany

57:29

is becoming a very dangerous place indeed to

57:31

be Jewish we

57:34

should point out that at no time

57:36

were Jews not a part of the

57:39

Middle Eastern population and because

57:41

of that people like the Nazis

57:44

and a lot of other European governments

57:46

at times considered Sending them back where

57:48

they came from although if

57:50

you're a Jewish person whose family's been

57:52

in a place like Russia or Germany

57:54

for You know ten generations

57:57

twelve generations something like that. Does it

57:59

really? It really seemed like you

58:01

belong in a place thousands of miles

58:03

from where your family's from, where

58:06

they speak a language you don't know. Well,

58:09

if that doesn't sound like a good idea to you now,

58:12

maybe after the Holocaust it might. At

58:17

the start of this show, I

58:19

felt the need to give a

58:21

warning about what was to

58:23

come. And

58:25

the warning was because there's a

58:28

need when discussing something as horrific

58:31

as genocide to step back and take emotional

58:33

stock in the subject matter.

58:41

You can have an intellectual discussion and

58:43

those are important. Engaging the mind

58:45

and reason when discussing these things is

58:47

key. But if

58:49

you do that without re-injecting

58:52

the psychological trauma into the conversation,

58:54

then you run the risk of

58:56

having a sterile dialogue or monologue,

59:03

which is not a whole lot different than

59:05

what some of the perpetrators

59:07

of a genocide like the Holocaust were

59:09

having in conference rooms where people served

59:12

coffee and showed documents

59:14

and discussed logistics and challenging

59:18

challenges and numbers. And in other

59:20

words, one needs

59:22

to fuse the intellectual with

59:25

the emotional in order to be in the right

59:27

frame of mind. I mean,

59:31

when Heinrich Himmler as recounted in

59:33

Nora Levin's book, the Holocaust tells

59:35

his underlings who are setting

59:38

up these annihilation camps that he

59:40

expects them to act

59:42

in a superhumanly inhuman way.

59:46

Well, that's easy to say in the conference room.

59:49

It's a whole different situation when

59:51

you're actually on the ground acting in a superhumanly

59:55

inhuman way. We

1:00:00

also need to understand, as I

1:00:02

say, about all of the past. There's no way

1:00:04

for us to understand it. There's no way to

1:00:06

put ourselves in the shoes of the people here.

1:00:08

All we can ever hope

1:00:10

for by engaging the

1:00:13

intellect and the emotions is

1:00:15

to have a better view of

1:00:18

this than we had beforehand, right?

1:00:20

Sometimes subtly better,

1:00:22

but better nonetheless. And

1:00:24

the real challenge was how

1:00:26

to use the atrocious material in a

1:00:28

way to accomplish that goal. There

1:00:32

is no lack of atrocious material. There is

1:00:34

no lack of eyewitness accounts. There is no

1:00:36

lack of documentation. There were tons of this

1:00:38

stuff when I was a kid. And

1:00:41

there's so much more now. The fall of the

1:00:43

Soviet Union, multiple sorts of

1:00:46

conferences and educational seminars

1:00:48

and museum exhibitions since

1:00:50

then have exploded the amount of

1:00:53

information we have about the Holocaust,

1:00:55

including tons more photographs and accounts

1:00:58

and diary entries. I mean, if

1:01:00

you're a Holocaust denier, your work is a lot harder

1:01:03

than it was in the past. And it was difficult,

1:01:05

you know, in the 1960s to deny the Holocaust,

1:01:08

especially when you had participants

1:01:11

in it sometimes bragging about

1:01:13

it. I mean, Adolf Eichmann was not

1:01:15

ashamed of his role in the

1:01:17

Holocaust, right? So you have difficult to deny

1:01:20

that this happened ever much

1:01:22

more difficult now with so

1:01:24

much more stuff. But how to use that

1:01:26

stuff in a way that's helpful

1:01:30

in understanding is

1:01:32

difficult. And look, I'm not a historian, as I

1:01:34

say all the time, but this is a classic

1:01:36

problem that historians have, which is you have a

1:01:38

ton of information. How do you organize it and

1:01:40

use it in a way to accomplish the goal

1:01:42

of helping to illuminate the past even a little

1:01:44

bit? So

1:01:46

the way I did it, and I hope I did it, well,

1:01:49

I mean, or usefully anyway, I

1:01:52

tried to bear in mind what Dan Stone said

1:01:54

in his book, talking about this a little bit.

1:01:56

And he wrote, quote, no doubt

1:01:58

it is right to say that there is something numbing

1:02:01

about recounting a seemingly endless

1:02:03

sequence of atrocities. It

1:02:06

is also a reflection of what happened,

1:02:08

leaving the victims numb. And

1:02:10

sometimes, he writes, it is important

1:02:12

to Terry with a tiny atrocity,

1:02:15

tiny in the grand scale of the

1:02:17

murders, but the whole world to those

1:02:19

who were affected." That's

1:02:24

sort of the Anne Frank approach

1:02:26

to looking at the Holocaust, right? Use a

1:02:28

single individual and show what the impact

1:02:30

is on them. So

1:02:34

I did that also, but I also show

1:02:36

some of these very large incidents

1:02:39

where your mind almost explodes

1:02:41

at the scope. One

1:02:46

of the things that gets lost in conversations

1:02:49

or portrayals of the Holocaust, and something

1:02:51

that Dan Stone's latest book tries

1:02:54

really hard to reemphasize is how much

1:02:56

of the Holocaust actually was done by

1:02:58

hand with bullets and

1:03:00

guns and shooting

1:03:02

as opposed to the image we

1:03:05

more usually

1:03:08

have anyway of gas and annihilation

1:03:10

camps and all this. It

1:03:12

was much more dirty and grimy and

1:03:15

old-fashioned if you want to look

1:03:17

at this as something that Genghis

1:03:19

Khan would have understood when he

1:03:21

destroyed whole cities and executed whole

1:03:23

populations. It's very similar to that,

1:03:25

and a lot of people witnessed it. So

1:03:28

there are accounts. Years

1:03:31

ago, I marked one of these accounts that

1:03:34

I go back to occasionally. So

1:03:36

I just sometimes when I

1:03:39

feel like I need a refresher

1:03:41

infusion of

1:03:43

soul-crushing psychological trauma to remind me

1:03:46

of exactly what we're talking about

1:03:48

here, I go back to this

1:03:50

account. I call it 23, and you'll

1:03:52

understand why when you hear it. I

1:03:55

actually read it when I was a kid. It was

1:03:57

in a book called The Holocaust.

1:04:01

by Norr 11, written in

1:04:03

the late 1960s, but it's

1:04:06

an eyewitness account of one of these

1:04:09

mass killings. The

1:04:12

eyewitness account came

1:04:14

out in the Nuremberg trials, where

1:04:18

a German civilian

1:04:21

construction engineer had

1:04:23

watched the annihilation of

1:04:25

a Jewish ghetto in Ukraine. The

1:04:29

man's name was Herman Friedrich Grebe, and

1:04:33

his affidavit, Norr 11, says,

1:04:36

froze the Nuremberg

1:04:38

court with pity and horror. She

1:04:42

writes that it is a document which must

1:04:44

stand as one of the most terrifying in

1:04:46

the literature of the Holocaust, and

1:04:49

it absolutely destroys me every time I

1:04:51

read it. It

1:04:54

is an extensive one, and I hope

1:04:56

you'll pardon some of the long quotes in this, but

1:04:58

I feel like breaking them up is

1:05:00

to lose some of the impact.

1:05:04

Herman Friedrich Grebe's eyewitness account of

1:05:06

what he saw goes like this. On

1:05:10

5th October 1942, when I visited

1:05:12

the building office at Dunbow, Monicus

1:05:15

and I went directly to the pits. Nobody

1:05:18

bothered us. Now I heard

1:05:20

rifle shots in quick succession from behind

1:05:22

one of the earth mounds. The

1:05:25

people who had got off the trucks, men,

1:05:27

women, and children of all ages, had

1:05:30

to undress upon the order of an

1:05:32

SS man who carried a riding or

1:05:34

dog whip. They had to put

1:05:36

down their clothes in fixed places, sorted

1:05:39

according to shoes, top clothing,

1:05:41

and under clothing. I saw

1:05:43

a heap of shoes of about 800 to 1,000 pairs, great piles of underlinen

1:05:45

and clothing. Without

1:05:50

screaming or weeping, these people undressed,

1:05:53

stood around in family groups, kissed

1:05:55

each other, said farewells, and waited

1:05:58

for a sign from a another

1:06:00

SS man who stood near the pit with a

1:06:02

whip in his hand. He

1:06:04

continues, During the

1:06:06

fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit,

1:06:09

I heard no complaint or plea for mercy.

1:06:12

I watched a family of about eight

1:06:14

persons, a man and a woman both

1:06:16

about fifty, with their children of about

1:06:18

one, eight, and ten, and two

1:06:20

grown-up daughters of about twenty to

1:06:22

twenty-four. An old woman

1:06:24

with snow-white hair was holding the one-year-old

1:06:27

child in her arms, and singing to

1:06:29

it and tickling it. The

1:06:31

child was cooing with delight. The

1:06:34

couple were looking on with tears in their

1:06:36

eyes. The father was holding the

1:06:38

hand of a boy of about ten years old,

1:06:41

and speaking to him softly. The boy

1:06:43

was fighting his tears. The

1:06:45

father pointed toward the sky, stroked

1:06:47

his head, and seemed to explain

1:06:49

something to him. At that

1:06:51

moment the SS man at the pit shouted

1:06:53

something to his comrade. The latter

1:06:55

counted off about twenty persons, and instructed

1:06:58

them to go behind the earth mound.

1:07:01

Among them was the family which I have mentioned. I

1:07:04

well remember a girl, slim and with

1:07:06

black hair, who as she passed close

1:07:08

to me, pointed to herself,

1:07:10

and said, Twenty-three. I

1:07:13

walked around the mound and found myself

1:07:15

confronted by a tremendous grave. People

1:07:18

were closely wedged together and lying on

1:07:20

top of each other, so that only

1:07:23

their heads were visible. Nearly

1:07:26

all had blood running over their shoulders from

1:07:28

their heads. Some of the people

1:07:30

shot were still moving. Some were

1:07:32

lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that

1:07:34

they were still alive. The pit

1:07:36

was already two-thirds full. I

1:07:39

estimated that it already contained about a

1:07:41

thousand people. I

1:07:43

looked for the man who did the shooting, he testified.

1:07:46

He was an SS man who sat at the

1:07:49

edge of the narrow end of the pit, his

1:07:51

feet dangling into the pit. He

1:07:53

had a Tommy gun on his knees and he

1:07:55

was smoking a cigarette. The people,

1:07:57

completely naked, went down some- steps which

1:07:59

were cut in the clay wall of

1:08:01

the pit and clamored over the heads

1:08:03

of the people lying there, to the

1:08:06

place where the S.S. man directed them.

1:08:08

They lay down in front of the dead

1:08:10

or injured people, some caressed those who were

1:08:13

still alive and spoke to them in a

1:08:15

low voice. Then I heard a series

1:08:17

of shots. I looked into

1:08:19

the pit and saw that the bodies were

1:08:21

twitching, or the heads

1:08:23

lying already motionless on top of the

1:08:25

bodies that lay before them. Blood

1:08:28

was running from their necks. I

1:08:30

was surprised that I was not ordered away,

1:08:32

but I saw that there were two or

1:08:34

three postmen in uniform nearby. The

1:08:36

next batch was approaching already. They

1:08:39

went down into the pit, lined themselves

1:08:41

up against the previous victims, and were

1:08:44

shot." When

1:08:48

you read account after account of these

1:08:51

incidents, part of what was called

1:08:53

the Holocaust by bullets before the

1:08:55

Holocaust by gas really got going,

1:08:58

it's just as organized sometimes

1:09:00

and just as mechanized and

1:09:03

institutionalized. But

1:09:05

there are crazy aspects to it. And if

1:09:07

you try to imagine being a victim in

1:09:09

this case and living through it, there are

1:09:11

certain parts that, and it's stupid, but bother

1:09:14

me more than others. Like for example, there's

1:09:16

an account by a German general who went to

1:09:18

one of these mass killing sites, and

1:09:21

he talked about all these people having to

1:09:23

wait in long lines, like

1:09:25

up to a mile long, as they

1:09:27

inched their way towards the killing pits,

1:09:30

as the people in front of them slowly but

1:09:32

surely were wiped out, and that there were stops

1:09:34

along the way, and at this stop you take

1:09:37

off your clothes, at this stop you drop off

1:09:39

your valuables, and the people knew what was going

1:09:41

on. In

1:09:43

the book Soldaten by Sanka Nitzel

1:09:45

and Harold Weitzer, they

1:09:48

quote German Major General Walter

1:09:50

Brunn's description, his eyewitness account of

1:09:53

one of these, as he says,

1:09:55

lining up for death sort of incidences,

1:09:57

and the general says, quote. Six

1:10:00

men with Tommy guns were posted at each

1:10:02

pit. The pits were 24 meters

1:10:05

in length and three meters in breath

1:10:07

They had to lie down like sardines in a

1:10:10

tin with their heads in the center Above

1:10:12

them were six men with Tommy guns who gave them

1:10:14

the coup de grace When I

1:10:16

arrived those pits were so full that the

1:10:18

living had to lie down on top of

1:10:20

the dead Then they were shot

1:10:23

and in order to save room They

1:10:25

had to lie down neatly in layers Before

1:10:28

this however, they were stripped of everything at

1:10:30

one of the stations here at

1:10:32

the edge of the wood were the three

1:10:34

pits They used that Sunday and here they

1:10:36

stood in a queue. He says

1:10:39

a one and a half kilometers long That's about

1:10:41

a mile long which approached

1:10:43

step by step a queueing

1:10:45

up for death He says as they

1:10:47

drew nearer they saw what was going

1:10:49

on about here They had to hand

1:10:51

over their jewelry and suitcases All

1:10:54

good stuff was put into the suitcases and

1:10:56

the remainder thrown on a heap this

1:10:59

was to serve as clothing for our

1:11:01

suffering population and then a little

1:11:03

further on they had to undress and 500

1:11:06

meters in front of the wood stripped completely.

1:11:09

They were only permitted to keep on a

1:11:11

shammy or knickers They were all

1:11:13

women and small two-year-old children Then

1:11:16

all those cynical remarks if

1:11:18

only I had seen those Tommy Gunners who were

1:11:20

relieved every hour because of overexertion Carry

1:11:23

out their task with this taste but

1:11:25

no Nasty remarks like here

1:11:28

comes a Jewish beauty I can

1:11:30

still see it in all my memory a pretty

1:11:33

woman in a flame-covered shammy Talk

1:11:35

about keeping the race pure at Riga

1:11:38

They first slept with them and then they shot

1:11:40

them to prevent them from talking end

1:11:43

quote so he says even at

1:11:45

the end as these people are about to be shot

1:11:47

as they've been waiting and lining up to be shot

1:11:49

as They were approaching the gunman

1:11:51

the gunman make comments like here comes

1:11:53

a pretty beauty and things. I mean

1:11:55

it's humanity to

1:11:58

quote Johnny Thunder's in a

1:12:00

song once, society makes

1:12:03

me sad. Of

1:12:06

course, probably the most famous mass

1:12:09

shooting of the war of Jews is the one that

1:12:12

occurred in the famous Bobby Yar ravine

1:12:15

outside of Kiev in Ukraine on the

1:12:19

29th and 30th of September, 1941, where

1:12:21

between 30 and 40,000 Jews were

1:12:23

shot into the ravine over a weekend.

1:12:30

The ravine by the way, continued to be used to kill

1:12:32

people, uh, for the entire

1:12:34

time that the Germans controlled that region. And

1:12:36

there may be as many as a hundred

1:12:38

thousand bodies buried there, or they were cremated

1:12:42

eventually and pounded into dust,

1:12:44

but the entire area is

1:12:47

a giant charnel

1:12:49

house. There was

1:12:51

a horrible story in or 11 told in her

1:12:54

book, the Holocaust where

1:12:56

the guy who was in charge of the killings

1:12:58

was giving a tour in

1:13:00

the spring right after Bobby Yar's

1:13:03

occurrence. And the

1:13:05

person who was with the architect of

1:13:07

the killing said that he was shown

1:13:10

the ravine itself. And he

1:13:12

said during the spring fall, small

1:13:14

explosions were exploding

1:13:17

the dirt up into the air. And

1:13:20

that was a result of the spring

1:13:22

fall, bringing the gases in all of

1:13:24

the bodies buried underground to the surface.

1:13:27

And the architect of the killing who was

1:13:29

with him, a man named Paul Blobel said

1:13:32

to him here, my Jews are buried. And

1:13:35

Bobby Yar, by the way, is not even the worst

1:13:38

of the mass killings of Jews during the war. There

1:13:40

are at least two that are thought

1:13:43

to be larger than that. But

1:13:45

sometimes that what the mass killings

1:13:47

do is overshadow the regular

1:13:50

amounts of death that

1:13:52

are occurring continually as the

1:13:54

machine just grinds on. It's not

1:13:56

as overwhelmingly powerful

1:13:58

as stadium. full of

1:14:00

people being shot over a weekend, but

1:14:03

the numbers add up quickly and give

1:14:05

a greater sense of the, you know,

1:14:07

death machine as it operates. For example,

1:14:09

there was an operation called Operation Jew

1:14:11

Free. It only lasted two

1:14:13

months, from October to December 1941, and

1:14:16

it was only happening on one relatively

1:14:18

small part of the front. But

1:14:22

when you look at the records of

1:14:24

the numbers of Jews killed over this

1:14:26

two-month period, it's every day or

1:14:28

every two days a thousand killed in this

1:14:30

village, three thousand killed in this village, two

1:14:32

thousand killed in this village, and

1:14:35

within two months it's like 70 to 90,000 Jews. It's a stadium of people,

1:14:39

but they're all killed as their towns or

1:14:41

villages or ghettos are

1:14:43

overrun and taken over, right? Wiped

1:14:46

out as the machine continues to

1:14:48

move forward. And a lot of this

1:14:50

stuff, by the way, is

1:14:52

well catalogued. Some

1:14:56

of the most damning evidence, as

1:14:58

you might imagine, are the official

1:15:00

reports by German officers to their

1:15:02

superiors about carrying out

1:15:04

these mass killings. During

1:15:07

the 1990s there was a very important museum

1:15:10

exhibition which intended

1:15:12

and succeeded in overthrowing what was

1:15:14

called the myth of the Klinvermacht,

1:15:17

this idea that the killings

1:15:19

were all done by the SS and the

1:15:21

Einsatzgruppen and the Gestapo and allies

1:15:24

of those people and not the proud

1:15:27

German military. But

1:15:29

in this exhibition all kinds

1:15:31

of reports and photographs that have been

1:15:33

kept by soldiers that they either took

1:15:35

themselves or bought and kept forever,

1:15:38

a lot of them found in attics and

1:15:40

places like that, showed the reality of what

1:15:42

was going on and that in

1:15:44

a lot of cases these soldiers were

1:15:46

willing participants in operations. Several

1:15:48

books came out of these museum exhibitions, by

1:15:50

the way. One was called War of Extermination,

1:15:53

the German Military in World War II, 1941

1:15:55

to 1944,

1:15:58

with every chapter written by a different expert

1:16:01

on the chapter of the killings

1:16:04

that went on especially of

1:16:06

Jews in occupied Yugoslavia, University

1:16:09

of Vienna professor Walter Manashek

1:16:12

writes quote the execution

1:16:14

squads were comprised mainly of soldiers

1:16:16

from units that had suffered losses

1:16:19

in skirmishes with partisans the

1:16:21

soldiers regarded the mass executions of

1:16:23

Jews and gypsies as a legitimate

1:16:26

tactic numerous eyewitnesses confirm

1:16:28

that the execution squads consisted

1:16:30

of volunteers when a

1:16:33

native of Vienna who belonged to

1:16:35

the 521st Army Intelligence Regiment returned

1:16:37

from leave to Belgrade he

1:16:40

was greeted by his comrades with the

1:16:42

jovial challenge coming along to shoot some

1:16:44

Jews two reports

1:16:47

of the shootings of Jews

1:16:49

and gypsies yield insight into

1:16:51

the soldiers mentality end quote now

1:16:53

he quotes a report labeled secret so that

1:16:55

shows you the Nazis were trying to cover

1:16:57

this stuff up the commander

1:16:59

being an overloitnant Walter dated

1:17:02

the first of November 1941 the first

1:17:04

part of the report lists all the things that

1:17:07

he did to take precautions

1:17:09

to keep the intentions

1:17:12

of what they were about to do secret

1:17:16

but then he writes quote when

1:17:18

we arrived at a spot some 1.5 to

1:17:20

2 kilometers from the chosen place the

1:17:23

prisoners got out of the trucks and marched

1:17:25

to the place while the trucks were being

1:17:27

sent back at once in order to give

1:17:29

the civilian drivers the least possible grounds for

1:17:32

suspicion then I ordered the

1:17:34

street blocked for reasons of security and

1:17:36

secrecy the place of

1:17:38

execution the report states was secured

1:17:40

by one light machine gun and

1:17:42

12 riflemen one to prevent

1:17:45

escape attempts by the prisoners

1:17:47

to to guard against the

1:17:49

possible attacks of Serbian gangs digging

1:17:52

the graves the report says takes most

1:17:54

of the time the shooting itself goes

1:17:56

quickly 100 men in 40 minutes Luggage

1:18:01

and valuables, the report says, were

1:18:03

collected earlier and transported in my

1:18:05

truck for turning over to the

1:18:07

NSV. Shooting Jews

1:18:09

is simpler than shooting gypsies. One

1:18:11

has to admit that the Jews

1:18:13

die stoically, standing quietly, while the

1:18:15

gypsies howl, scream, and are in

1:18:17

constant motion even when they're already

1:18:19

standing in place to be shot.

1:18:22

Some even jumped into the grave before the

1:18:24

salvo and played dead. Initially,

1:18:27

he writes, my soldiers were not impressed.

1:18:29

On the second day it was becoming

1:18:31

apparent that some did not have the

1:18:33

nerves required for carrying out extended shootings.

1:18:37

My personal impression is that one

1:18:39

does not experience inhibitions during the

1:18:41

shootings. These first manifest themselves after

1:18:44

several days, when one thinks about

1:18:46

things quietly in the evening. End

1:18:50

quote. Signed, Walther

1:18:52

Oberleutnant. This

1:18:55

is actually a part that I find super

1:18:57

interesting, and I think I think about it

1:18:59

more than even the

1:19:02

position that the victims found themselves

1:19:04

in. I think it's natural to think what

1:19:06

would happen if I was standing in

1:19:08

line a mile long waiting to die with

1:19:10

my family. But

1:19:13

there's something about being a perpetrator,

1:19:15

not the victim but the victimizer

1:19:17

that makes one curious about humanity.

1:19:20

Because these people in the

1:19:22

line waiting to die, the victims, there's

1:19:25

no choice in there. There's no agency, and

1:19:27

there's no thinking about it for decades afterwards.

1:19:31

But what about the guy who has the

1:19:33

submachine gun sitting on the

1:19:35

edge of the pit with the cigarette in his mouth

1:19:38

dangling his legs off the side of this

1:19:41

horrific scene? Well,

1:19:44

it's interesting because it kind of

1:19:46

goes both ways. You

1:19:48

have the people that are really bothered by

1:19:50

it and the people that actively

1:19:53

enjoyed it. It's really

1:19:55

like two sides of humanity's

1:19:58

coin, right? Let's

1:20:00

start with the people who

1:20:02

seem to enjoy it. In

1:20:06

his book, the Holocaust and unfinished history,

1:20:08

Dan Stone talks about the willing collaborators,

1:20:10

as he calls them. And

1:20:13

it is a sign that you

1:20:16

did not have to be a Nazi to be

1:20:18

anti-Semitic. And he talks

1:20:20

about an incident that was

1:20:22

recounted. It's famous. And there are photos,

1:20:24

I believe, that happened in

1:20:26

Conas in Lithuania. And

1:20:28

Stone writes, quote, Across

1:20:30

the occupied areas of the

1:20:33

Western Soviet Union, local collaborators

1:20:35

willingly took part. Some

1:20:37

did so out of hatred for

1:20:39

the Jews wrapped up in the

1:20:41

anti-communist belief in so-called Judeo-Bolshevism. Though

1:20:44

again, it should be stressed that

1:20:46

this was a form of anti-Semitism first

1:20:48

and foremost, since one did not need

1:20:50

to hate Jews to be anti-communist. But

1:20:52

the combination of these two hatreds made

1:20:55

a ferocious synthesis. One

1:20:58

of the most famous examples, he writes, is

1:21:00

the so-called death dealer of Conas,

1:21:03

who beat Jews with an iron rod

1:21:05

in Conas as onlookers stood and watched

1:21:07

the rivers of blood run higher. The

1:21:10

report of an astonished German soldier

1:21:12

who photographed the scene is instructive.

1:21:15

Now the account from the German soldier, and

1:21:18

as I think I said, photographs do

1:21:20

exist. Quote, A young man, he must

1:21:22

have been a Lithuanian, with rolled up

1:21:24

sleeves, was armed with an iron crowbar.

1:21:27

He dragged out one man at a time from a

1:21:29

group and struck him with the crowbar with one or

1:21:31

more blows on the back of his head. Within

1:21:34

three quarters of an hour, he had beaten to death

1:21:36

the entire group of 45 to

1:21:38

50 people in this way. The

1:21:40

behavior of the civilians present,

1:21:43

women and children, was unbelievable.

1:21:45

After each man had been killed, they

1:21:48

began to clap. And when the national

1:21:50

anthem started, they joined in singing and

1:21:52

clapping. End quote. And

1:21:55

Stone points out that sometimes this

1:21:57

isn't even anti-Semitism. Sometimes it's just...

1:22:00

complete self-enrichment. And he quotes a Polish

1:22:02

journalist who says, quote, for

1:22:04

the Germans, 300 Jews are 300 enemies of humanity.

1:22:08

For the Lithuanians, they are 300 pairs of shoes,

1:22:12

trousers, and the like, end quote.

1:22:16

There are some weird psychological things going on

1:22:18

in all this too, and I don't attempt

1:22:20

to speculate on what they were. But when

1:22:24

I was growing up there was this feeling because

1:22:26

this was the sort of thing that was used

1:22:28

as a defense at the Nuremberg war crime trials

1:22:31

that a lot of these people found themselves in

1:22:33

positions where they just had to follow orders and

1:22:36

do distasteful things. But

1:22:38

there's enough evidence out there to show that a

1:22:41

lot of people enjoyed this. A lot of

1:22:43

people wanted to watch. Execution

1:22:45

tourism was such a problem that

1:22:47

the German leaders often had to

1:22:49

issue severe reprimands warning that,

1:22:51

you know, we can't have this happen again,

1:22:54

but it did. People show up in their

1:22:56

bathing suits, women would show up. There's

1:22:59

one incident recounted in

1:23:02

the book Sol Datten by Sanka Nitzil

1:23:04

and Harold Welzer where they talk about

1:23:07

a group of Berlin

1:23:09

police officers who were

1:23:11

musicians and performers. So

1:23:13

you think of like entertainers

1:23:16

who asked if they could take part

1:23:18

in the execution, you know, just for the

1:23:20

experience. And in the book the

1:23:22

authors write quote. Daniel

1:23:24

Goldhagen writing about one of the

1:23:27

few known cases of this sort

1:23:29

concluded that Germans in general were

1:23:31

motivated by a kind of exterminatory

1:23:34

anti-Semitism. Goldhagen focused on

1:23:36

a Berlin police unit consisting of

1:23:38

musicians and performers that was sent

1:23:40

to the front to entertain troops

1:23:43

in mid-November 1942. They

1:23:45

asked the commander of a reserve police

1:23:47

battalion in the German town of Lukau

1:23:49

if they could take a turn shooting

1:23:51

Jews at an upcoming execution. Their

1:23:54

request was granted and the entertainers

1:23:56

spent the following day amusing themselves

1:23:58

by murdering people. Holocaust

1:24:00

historian Christopher Browning also mentions

1:24:02

this incident, but the question

1:24:05

remains, did the Germans in

1:24:07

question need anti-Semitic motivation to

1:24:09

find killing fellow human beings

1:24:11

in entertaining pastime? End quote.

1:24:14

And then one of the authors who's trained

1:24:17

in social psychology goes into

1:24:19

all the reasons a human

1:24:21

being might find this an

1:24:24

interesting option. He says quote,

1:24:26

the police officers in question enjoyed doing

1:24:29

things they would never have been allowed

1:24:31

to do under normal circumstances. They wanted

1:24:33

to experience what it felt like to

1:24:36

kill without fear of consequences, to exercise

1:24:38

total power and do

1:24:40

something extraordinary and monstrous free from

1:24:42

the possibility of any negative consequences.

1:24:46

This is what sociologist Gunther

1:24:48

Anders has called the quote,

1:24:50

chance for an unpunished inhumanity

1:24:52

end quote. For some

1:24:54

people senseless murder was apparently a

1:24:56

temptation that could hardly be resisted.

1:24:59

Violence of this nature needs neither a

1:25:01

motive nor a reason. It is

1:25:04

its own motivation. End quote.

1:25:08

While it's clear that there was

1:25:10

enormous amounts of anti-Semitism in

1:25:13

the German army, it's also clear

1:25:15

by the accounts that a lot of people

1:25:17

enjoyed killing Jews, thought it was just right

1:25:19

and proper to kill Jews, there's

1:25:23

also a lot of evidence because

1:25:25

the German government was very concerned

1:25:27

about the effects on their soldiers

1:25:29

of carrying out these mass executions

1:25:31

with guns. One

1:25:34

of the rationales for shifting

1:25:36

from the what's called the Holocaust

1:25:38

by bullets to the Holocaust by

1:25:40

gas in places like the annihilation

1:25:42

camps of Auschwitz is to

1:25:44

minimize not the effect on the victims

1:25:47

but the effect on the victimizers. And

1:25:51

while it is almost sacrilegious

1:25:53

to have sympathy for the murderers

1:25:55

of Jews and the perpetrators of

1:25:58

the Holocaust, I owe I always

1:26:00

try to put myself in the shoes of the

1:26:02

people who may have been caught

1:26:04

in the gears of history. Obviously,

1:26:06

the victims of the Holocaust are fatally caught

1:26:09

in the gears of history, but there

1:26:12

are people that had to, for the rest

1:26:14

of their lives, live with

1:26:16

what they did in the Holocaust. And I'm

1:26:18

fascinated by that too. And

1:26:20

remember, these are not armies where

1:26:22

a person could have said, you know, if you

1:26:25

make me do these terrible things, I'm out. I'm

1:26:27

just not going to do them. Well, you can

1:26:29

do that, but that may be a one-way ticket

1:26:31

to a concentration camp for you. So

1:26:34

that's what I mean about being caught in the gears

1:26:36

of history. There's

1:26:38

a fascinating list of remembrances at the

1:26:40

back of the book called The German

1:26:42

Army and Genocide, which is edited by

1:26:45

the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. It's

1:26:47

one of the books that came out of that groundbreaking

1:26:50

exhibition in the 1990s that shattered

1:26:52

the myth of the Klean-Vermacht. But

1:26:55

by shattering the myth of the Klean-Vermacht,

1:26:57

you denied all of the children and

1:26:59

grandchildren of these German soldiers an

1:27:02

ethical place to hide for their loved ones. Because

1:27:05

if you were able to claim that it

1:27:07

was only the Gestapo and the SD and

1:27:09

the SS and the Einsatzgruppen that did all

1:27:11

these killings, you could say

1:27:14

that Grandad was clean, that

1:27:16

he just fought in a noble effort

1:27:18

as part of the military to defend Germany, or

1:27:20

you could even say he didn't even want to

1:27:22

do all these things. He was just drafted. He

1:27:24

didn't take part in any of the bad stuff,

1:27:27

and this exhibition forced Germans to confront that. And

1:27:30

some people were angry about it and offended and

1:27:32

took offense and were upset at the exhibition and

1:27:34

what it said, but others were chastened and

1:27:37

it shocked them. One

1:27:39

of the accounts in the back

1:27:42

of the book when they recorded

1:27:44

the reactions of Germans to this

1:27:46

exhibition involves

1:27:48

a woman named Krista

1:27:51

Nichols, who was in the

1:27:53

government as a Green Party member, but her father

1:27:55

was in the war. And

1:27:57

she's recorded as telling the researchers... her

1:28:00

reaction to this exhibition and having to

1:28:02

come to grips with what her father

1:28:04

did. And she says, quote, I

1:28:07

want to say that my father was not young when he

1:28:09

went to war. He was born in 1908 and died

1:28:11

in 1991. He

1:28:14

was not a party member. She

1:28:17

continues. Later he was

1:28:19

drafted. My mother told me that

1:28:21

in the 1950s, my father

1:28:23

never slept with the window open

1:28:25

and screamed terribly in his sleep

1:28:28

every night about fire and children.

1:28:31

She said it was simply horrible. Naturally,

1:28:33

she says, I love my father very much.

1:28:36

He never told how it was when one

1:28:38

shoots another person for the first time. Today

1:28:41

that surprises me. End

1:28:43

quote. She

1:28:45

then mentions a famous, if you were alive, you remember

1:28:48

in the 1980s, a famous meeting where Ronald

1:28:50

Reagan met the German Chancellor

1:28:52

at a German cemetery in Bitburg. And

1:28:54

it became controversial because the press

1:28:56

releases had said that they were just going

1:28:58

to have sort of a reconciliation meeting. But

1:29:01

then it was discovered that at the cemetery

1:29:03

in Bitburg, some of the SS people were

1:29:05

buried. So

1:29:07

in other words, the people that at the time were

1:29:09

thought to be the only people really guilty for the

1:29:11

Holocaust. And

1:29:14

Miss Nichols says, quote, back

1:29:17

then I noticed for the first time that

1:29:19

my father in the only photo of him

1:29:21

that we have from that time is

1:29:23

wearing a uniform that is black and has

1:29:25

skulls on it. At the

1:29:27

time, I was already a representative of the

1:29:29

greens in the Bundestag and didn't dare to

1:29:32

ask my father. It was incredibly

1:29:34

difficult for me. End quote.

1:29:37

She then says that in 1989, she traveled to

1:29:39

Warsaw and went to one of the death camps.

1:29:42

She says that during the travel to

1:29:44

the death camp, she simply

1:29:46

broke down because she was so shocked at

1:29:48

what happened there. But then

1:29:50

she started to think, as any of us

1:29:53

might do about a loved one that found

1:29:55

themselves caught in the gears of history, as

1:29:57

sacrilegious as it might be to think about

1:29:59

them. She says, I was

1:30:02

terribly shocked at what happened at the concentration

1:30:04

camp, quote, But just as

1:30:06

much about what they did to the men, one

1:30:09

of whom was my father. They

1:30:11

were for the most part men who loved

1:30:13

life and children. It is

1:30:15

horrible what they made out of men in this

1:30:17

criminal war. Most of

1:30:19

them didn't have the strength to extricate themselves from

1:30:21

it. All of them

1:30:24

made themselves guilty of infinite

1:30:26

atrocious wrongs. The men,

1:30:28

women and children, I am the daughter

1:30:30

of such a German soldier, Are still

1:30:32

marked by that today. End

1:30:34

quote. What if

1:30:37

you had found yourself in a position where you

1:30:39

thought you were just a soldier and

1:30:41

then one day you're standing on the

1:30:43

edge of a pit where men, women

1:30:45

and children are stripped naked, forced

1:30:48

to lie down in the pit, head

1:30:50

to toe, head to toe, while you shoot

1:30:53

them. And then another

1:30:55

batch comes in, lays down on the

1:30:57

dying people and forms another

1:30:59

layer of human sardines for you to shoot

1:31:01

them. Again,

1:31:04

I have

1:31:06

a hard time trying

1:31:08

to put myself in their shoes. And

1:31:11

yet at the same time, I imagine

1:31:13

that there must have been a lot of people

1:31:15

in that position. Some of whom

1:31:17

never thought twice about it. Some of whom

1:31:19

bragged about it and enjoyed it and kept

1:31:21

pictures in their wallets for the rest of

1:31:23

their lives, showing what they did. And

1:31:26

then others who woke up screaming every night,

1:31:29

ranting about fire and children. There's

1:31:34

an almost heretical sort

1:31:37

of way to view the

1:31:41

transition of the Holocaust

1:31:43

from killing people

1:31:45

at the sides of pits with bullets

1:31:48

to gassing them in facilities and

1:31:50

mass. And

1:31:52

the heretical way to look at that is that

1:31:55

you're trying to spare

1:31:57

people the damage

1:32:00

damage that this does to them.

1:32:02

And by the way, not necessarily the

1:32:04

victims, but the victimizers. I

1:32:06

mean, how many people, especially women and

1:32:08

children, could you kill before it bothered

1:32:10

you? Sounds like an

1:32:12

obvious question, doesn't it? Most of us are gonna

1:32:14

say any one, right? Single

1:32:17

person. But I

1:32:19

often wonder if the guy who clubbed

1:32:22

those 45 or 50 Jews in Lithuania on

1:32:24

the back of the head, one right after

1:32:26

another ever woke up screaming about it later.

1:32:29

My dad

1:32:31

used to say different strokes for different folks, but

1:32:33

that also applies to whether or not you can

1:32:35

kill people easily and sleep well at night. But

1:32:38

there are plenty of clues that

1:32:41

the transition to this sort of

1:32:44

relatively dispassionate

1:32:47

and insulated method of wiping out

1:32:49

lots of people by using

1:32:51

gas was meant to spare the

1:32:53

people who had to shoot the people otherwise in

1:32:56

the Holocaust by bullets. Take for example

1:32:59

what the guy who ran Auschwitz said.

1:33:03

Rudolf Hess was executed after the war.

1:33:05

He ran Auschwitz for a couple

1:33:07

of years, especially during the period

1:33:09

where it really ramped up and got going. Hess

1:33:13

made statements that he

1:33:16

was relieved that

1:33:18

they were finally going to figure

1:33:20

out a way to save the

1:33:22

Germans who had to execute all

1:33:25

these people from the fate of

1:33:27

waking up at night for years screaming about

1:33:29

children and fires afterwards. Not

1:33:32

so worried about the victims but more the

1:33:34

victimizers, although sometimes they talked about it as

1:33:37

somehow sparing the victims some of the psychological

1:33:40

torment before they met their ends. In

1:33:43

the book German Voices, Memories

1:33:45

of Life during Hitler's Third Reich,

1:33:47

Frederick C. Tubach quotes Hess talking

1:33:49

about this. And just so

1:33:51

you know it's not a direct quote because

1:33:53

there's three dots between some of the statements

1:33:55

which means some of the intervening stuff maybe

1:33:58

cross-talk with an interviewer who's been excised. But

1:34:00

I'm going to read it as though it's a single quote,

1:34:02

because it gives you an idea of

1:34:04

how these people might somehow

1:34:07

tell themselves that

1:34:09

gassing large numbers of people

1:34:11

was more merciful than

1:34:13

shooting them at the sides of ditches. And if not

1:34:15

for the victims, then for the people that had to

1:34:17

do the shooting. In

1:34:20

the book, Has describes his

1:34:22

promotion to commander at

1:34:24

Auschwitz this way, quote, there

1:34:27

was no turning back with strange feelings.

1:34:29

I entered my new range of activities,

1:34:31

a new world to which I was

1:34:34

bound and chained. I knew

1:34:36

all about the life of prisoners, but the

1:34:38

concentration camp was something new to me. End

1:34:41

quote. The author then says

1:34:43

that with the impending arrival of the

1:34:45

mass transports of Jews, Haas felt relieved

1:34:48

that the efficient gas ovens were to

1:34:50

be used rather than the traditional method

1:34:52

of mass shootings. Now quoting Haas again,

1:34:55

quote, I was always appalled

1:34:57

by shootings, particularly when I thought of

1:34:59

the women and children. Now

1:35:01

I was relieved that we were going to

1:35:03

be spared these blood baths. Gruesome

1:35:05

scenes are said to have taken place. The

1:35:08

running away of the wounded, the killing of

1:35:10

the wounded, above all women and children, the

1:35:13

frequent suicides in the ranks of

1:35:15

the execution squads, because they couldn't

1:35:17

stand waiting through blood. Some

1:35:20

became insane. End quote.

1:35:23

Well, you kind of hope so, don't you?

1:35:25

Restores your faith in humanity a little to

1:35:28

think that a cultured,

1:35:30

educated, religious, right?

1:35:33

Seemingly moral people

1:35:35

from a society that should

1:35:37

know better were bothered by this. At

1:35:39

least some of them, you would hope so. Right?

1:35:43

The annihilation camps though, brought

1:35:45

their own sorts of horrificness,

1:35:48

of course, to

1:35:50

the scene. First of all, there was a

1:35:52

big difference, as pointed out in many sources,

1:35:55

between killing Jews where you found

1:35:57

them, right? the

1:36:00

towns or the cities or nearby where

1:36:02

they lived and having to get

1:36:04

them from one place to

1:36:06

a centralized killing area where you

1:36:09

could dispose of them. Because

1:36:11

sometimes they started off a long way away

1:36:13

from where they were supposed to end up

1:36:16

and the trip itself could be a vision

1:36:19

of hell. His

1:36:22

book Dan Stone talks about and recounts

1:36:24

the story of a

1:36:26

bunch of Jews that were packed into railway

1:36:29

cars in Greece where they were from

1:36:31

to be taken to

1:36:33

the place where they would be annihilated.

1:36:37

Turned out they weren't

1:36:39

destined to die in the gas chambers.

1:36:42

They died on the way. And he

1:36:44

writes an account, a first-hand account

1:36:47

by a Viennese Jew named Simon

1:36:50

Umshuef whose job it was to

1:36:53

work for the Nazis and unload

1:36:55

these railway cars transporting Jews to

1:36:58

their death and he's

1:37:00

the one that in the case of the Jews

1:37:02

coming from Greece found them already deceased when they

1:37:04

got there and he said, quote, the

1:37:07

wagons, meaning on the train, were sealed

1:37:09

and nailed shut. As we opened

1:37:11

them we were presented with a terrible image. Crammed

1:37:14

in by the hundreds, the people squatted

1:37:17

on their possessions. Once they

1:37:19

were unable to get out, their excrement

1:37:21

remained in the wagon. Everything

1:37:23

was a stinking heap. There was

1:37:25

no one alive. The air was so

1:37:27

poisoned that comrades in our commando fainted.

1:37:30

We had to throw everything, the corpses,

1:37:32

the possessions and the filth into huge

1:37:34

pits which burned day and night. The

1:37:37

pits were eight meters deep and four meters

1:37:39

square. Children up to the age

1:37:41

of four who had arrived on

1:37:43

other transports were also thrown alive

1:37:45

into these pits, end quote.

1:37:50

If you look at the infrastructure

1:37:52

and the logistics of killing and

1:37:54

wiping out and causing a genocide

1:37:56

amongst an entire people, it's larger

1:37:59

than ever. than we think it is. And

1:38:02

we should recall that even though people like

1:38:04

to argue about how many Jews died in

1:38:07

the Holocaust, because six million was an estimate,

1:38:09

we should note that the Germans were planning for

1:38:12

far more. And had they won the

1:38:14

war, they were planning on having some 11 million

1:38:16

Jews available for them

1:38:18

to kill. And the amount

1:38:21

of infrastructure that goes into

1:38:23

those kinds of genocidal-type

1:38:27

logistics is a lot

1:38:29

larger than most people think. And Dan Stone points

1:38:31

out in his book that at the

1:38:33

start of the war, there were

1:38:35

six main concentration camps in existence.

1:38:39

He says by the end of 1943, that had become 260 main and satellite

1:38:41

camps. By

1:38:45

July 1944, he said almost 600 camps. And

1:38:49

by January 1945, more than 730 camps. He

1:38:54

says that there was a list compiled by Polish

1:38:57

prosecutor Jan Sejn in 1950 that contained

1:39:00

the names of more than a thousand

1:39:03

camps. Stone

1:39:05

says that by some reckoning, the number of

1:39:08

sub-camps was more than 1100. So

1:39:10

if you're going to try to kill 11 million people in

1:39:12

your long-term plans, you're going to need

1:39:14

a lot of locations to do it.

1:39:20

Dan Stone gives us a sense of

1:39:23

the pace of the killings at

1:39:26

times and says it

1:39:28

was probably the fastest rate of

1:39:30

genocidal killing in world history. And

1:39:32

he says, quote, in December

1:39:34

1941, in March 1942, gassings began at Chelno and Belzec, respectively.

1:39:42

In May and July, Sobibor and

1:39:44

Treblinka also began operating. The

1:39:46

Operation Reinhard camps were built to

1:39:49

kill the Jews of Poland, although

1:39:51

some Jews from the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia

1:39:53

and elsewhere were also murdered at

1:39:56

Sobibor and Treblinka. By 1943,

1:39:58

they had accomplished their

1:40:00

task, and Treblinka, the last to

1:40:02

be closed, was dismantled in August.

1:40:05

In about eighteen months, somewhere in the region of

1:40:07

1.7 million Jews had been

1:40:09

killed at these three camps, with the

1:40:11

rate of killing at its height in

1:40:14

an extraordinary three-month period from August to

1:40:16

October 1942. In

1:40:18

this period of intense killing, over one

1:40:20

million victims were murdered at the Reinhardt

1:40:23

camps, and if one adds in those

1:40:25

killed by the Einsatzgruppen and at Auschwitz

1:40:27

at the same time, then these three

1:40:29

months saw the murder of approximately 1.47

1:40:31

million Jews, about

1:40:35

one quarter of the total killed in the six

1:40:37

years of the war. This rate

1:40:39

of murder, he writes, makes this period

1:40:41

of the Holocaust probably the fastest rate

1:40:44

of genocidal killing in history." We

1:40:49

had mentioned earlier that great secrecy

1:40:51

was employed to try

1:40:53

to keep prying eyes

1:40:55

from seeing what was going on here.

1:40:57

There's a reason the Allies did not

1:41:00

know more about what was going on

1:41:02

during the Holocaust, and it's because great

1:41:04

care was taken to prevent people from

1:41:06

knowing what was going on during the

1:41:08

Holocaust. When Germans in

1:41:10

Germany said they didn't know about it, there's a

1:41:12

reason that they might be able to claim that

1:41:14

and mean it, but

1:41:17

it's kind of hard to keep the

1:41:19

shootings of thousands and thousands of people in

1:41:21

the open a secret, even

1:41:23

though, as we read earlier, the accounts

1:41:25

from the commanders on the scene of