JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE EXTREMELY SENSITIVE TOPIC OF "HOLOCAUST DENIAL" - THE HOLOCAUST'S CONNECTION WITH THE INVASION OF RUSSIA, THE BLOODIEST EVENT IN HUMAN HISTORY - THE LOSSES OF RUSSIA AND AMERICA AND GERMANY IN THE WAR - AMERICA'S OWN KIND OF "HOLOCAUST DENIAL" ABOUT WHO WON THE WAR - HITLER'S VISION OF GERMANY'S FUTURE AND THE ROLE OF RUSSIA - AMERICA'S "MANIFEST DESTINY" - HITLER'S HATREDS

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER


“Holocaust Denial Should be Illegal in America, Say Many on the Left”


Years ago, I read some of the best authors on WWII and on the Nazi efforts to annihilate Jews and other people regarded as undesirable – eg. Gypsies, homosexuals, and other groups - these last being often left out of discussions. Once the Eastern Front was really active, large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war, about 3 million, also were murdered.

These matters are facts of history. Anyone who wants to deny them is free to do so, something the current President does with many matters almost daily, but you should do so in your private life, not in public. Even if you have reason to doubt some number or detail of that history, what is the point of insisting on it in so vast an enterprise of horror? Public insistence represents needless hostility and incivility towards others. Inappropriate laws around speech in a free society are a response to that hostility and incivility. I am not in favor of either course.

It was the invasion of the Soviet Union that provided a huge smokescreen for the operations of the death camps. Concentration camps had existed since the days after the Reichstag fire, but they were prisons for many thousands of communists and other people considered subversive, their operation not unlike America’s internment camps for Japanese Americans during the war. Some of those camps were then converted to death camps for the grim work of the final solution.

Hitler certainly did hate Jews, but in his early years he wanted them segregated and restricted, ultimately to be removed from all German or “Aryan” territories, something, sadly, much resembling contemporary Israel’s attitude towards Palestinians.

It is not clear just what generated his intense hatred, already obvious in “Mein Kampf,” 1925. In his early years in Vienna, Hitler actually had a Jewish friend or two. Although we can speculate, it is also not clear just what contributed to his embracing “the final solution.” Such matters of course are not documented.

The invasion of the USSR was the bloodiest event in all of human history, claiming the lives of 27 million Soviets. Those too are facts often overlooked, especially in America which regards itself as having defeated Germany, another kind of “holocaust denial,” if you will. For perspective, America’s total losses, including both Europe and the Pacific, were just over four hundred thousand, about one-and-a-half percent of Soviet losses.

Hitler’s nightmare vision for the USSR included removing tens of millions of people from the most desirable lands, reducing them to slavery or letting them die if they could not be useful. He very much hated Slavs and regarded them as inferior. Germans or other selected “Aryans” would repopulate such regions, effectively creating a Greater Germany. He saw the very physical size of the United States as a key part of its long-term success, and he wanted to emulate it.

Russia was always Hitler’s central focus, back to his days of writing “Mein Kampf.” Its acquisition was essential to his vision for Germany’s future. He viewed it in much the same way Americans had viewed their great trek westward complete with talk of “Manifest Destiny.” If he could have, he might have pursued that goal without getting tied up in the war in Europe which delayed the invasion and consumed resources.

German deaths in the war were about 8 million, overwhelmingly most of that number being at the hands of the Red Army.