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The upcoming trial in Germany of John Demjanjuk will throw the spotlight on part of the Holocaust that is not widely known. Der Speigel reports on Hitler’s European Helpers. Long before the ovens were fired up at the camps, Gemans killed a million and a half people in occupied Eastern Europe. It is grimly ironic Himmler pushed for the gas chambers because of humanitarian concerns. Seems he as worried about his men having to kill people at close range.
The Germans are responsible for the industrial-scale mass murder of 6 million Jews. But the collusion of other European countries in the Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention until recently. The trial of John Demjanjuk is set to throw a spotlight on Hitler’s foreign helpers. …
…Denunciation was so common in Poland that there was a special term for paid informants “Szmalcowniki” (previously a term for a fence). In many cases, the denouncers knew their victims. And while the French, Dutch or Belgians could submit to the illusion that the Jews deported to the east from Paris, Rotterdam or Brussels would be all right in the end, the people in Eastern Europe learned through the grapevine what lay in store for the Jews in Auschwitz or Treblinka.
For sure, many counter-examples can easily be found. A senior officer in Einsatzgruppe C, responsible for the murder of more than 100,000 people, complained that the Ukrainians lacked “pronounced anti-Semitism based on racial or ideological reasons.” The officer wrote that “there is a lack of leadership and of spiritual impetus for the pursuit of Jews.”
Historian Feliks Tych estimates that some 125,000 Poles rescued Jews without being paid for their services. It’s clear that the perpetrators always made up a small minority of their respective population. But the Germans relied on that minority. The SS, police and the army lacked the manpower to search the vast areas where the Nazi leadership planned to kill all people of Jewish origin. Across the 4,000 kilometers stretching from Brittany in western France to the Caucasus, the Nazis were bent on hunting down their victims, deporting them to extermination camps or to local murder sites, preventing escapes, digging mass graves and then carrying out their bloody handiwork.
Of course only Hitler and his entourage or the army could have stopped the Holocaust. But this doesn’t invalidate the argument that without the foreign helpers, countless thousands or even millions of the approximately six million murdered Jews would have survived. …
Looking at Demjanjuk’s background:
…It was a gigantic killing program in which most of Poland’s Jews, 1.75 million, were murdered. The SS preferred to recruit its helpers among Ukrainians or ethnic Germans in prisoner-of-war camps where Red Army soldiers like Demjanjuk faced the choice of killing for the Germans or starving to death. Later, increasing numbers of volunteers from western Ukraine and Galicia joined the unit. The men had to sign a declaration that they had never belonged to a communist group and had no Jewish ancestry. Then they were taken to Travniki in the district of Lublin in south-eastern Poland where they were trained for their deadly profession on the site of a former sugar factory. In mid-1943 some 3,700 men were stationed in Travniki. Training for the Holocaust took several weeks. The SS men showed the new recruits how to carry out raids and how to guard prisoners, often using live subjects. Then the unit would drive to a nearby town and beat Jewish residents out of their homes. Executions were carried out in a nearby forest, probably to make sure that the recruits were loyal.
At first the Travniki were used to guard property and to prevent supply depots from being plundered. Then their German masters sent them to clear ghettos in Lviv and Lublin, where they were remorseless in rounding up their Jewish victims. Finally they were put to work in eight-hour shifts in the extermination camp. “Everyone jumped in where he was needed,” recalled one SS officer. Everything worked “like clockwork.”
Historians estimate that a third of the Travniki absconded despite the punishment that entailed if they were caught. Some were executed for disobedience. And the others? Why didn’t they try to get out of the killing machine? Why didn’t Demjanjuk? Die he allow himself to be corrupted by the feeling of “having attained total power over others,” as historian Pohl argues. Was it the prospect of loot? In Belzec and Sobibor the Travniki engaged in brisk bartering with the inhabitants of surrounding villages and paid with items they had seized from the prisoners.
Perhaps there was something else, something even more disturbing that many people have deep in their psyche: following orders from authorities even if they ran counter to their conscience. Total and utter obedience. …
Rick Richman presents striking parallels between the Carter and Obama presidencies.
…Hedrick Smith, in a long analysis in the January 8, 1978, New York Times, summarized what had happened:
Jimmy Carter first surprised and impressed the professional pols in 1976 with the cold, cocksure, methodical manner with which he stalked the Presidency. The surprise of 1977 was that Jimmy Carter was actually not the master politician they had imagined. . . . President Carter’s exaggerated aspirations and his profusion of proposals invited inevitable disappointment.
Four years later, Carter published his memoirs, which (in the words of Times reviewer Terrence Smith in 1982) admitted he had “overloaded the legislative agenda” in his early months in office and “the result was that his most cherished domestic initiatives—welfare and tax reform and a national health program—went down to early defeat.” His presidency never fully recovered. …
…After a year in office, it became apparent that a great slogan, image, and autobiography were not by themselves sufficient for an inexperienced politician with grandiose ideas to govern the United States. And Carter’s foreign-policy disasters were still ahead of him. …
…Jimmy Carter faced a more dangerous world and soon had crises to deal with in Iran and Afghanistan for which he was woefully unprepared. Three decades later, a president is pursuing exaggerated aspirations and a profusion of proposals while a storm is gathering abroad. It is not a situation that will be solved by triangulation
Matt Welch wrote a wonderful piece on big government, ending with the “Top Ten Obama Government Grabs”. Here is the opening:
It’s been a hilarious August, watching media supporters of President Obama’s health care package puzzle over the obscure motivations of the noncompliant Americans rallying against it.
“Racial anxiety,” guessed New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
“Nihilism,” theorized Time’s Joe Klein.
“The crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy,” historian Rick Perlstein proclaimed in the Washington Post.
While the commentariat’s condescension is almost comical, the whole evil-or-stupid explanation misses the elephant in Obama’s room: Americans of all stripes, it turns out, aren’t very keen about the government barging into their lives. …
Liberal anger is back. Matthew Continetti has the details.
…The Angry White Liberal finds it simply incomprehensible that somebody might honestly and in good faith disagree with the Democrats’ efforts. On August 14, blogger Steve Benen wrote on the Huffington Post that the “far-right apoplexy is counter-intuitive.” After all, “Why would people who stand to benefit from health care reform literally take to the streets and threaten violence in opposition to legislation that would help them and their families?”
Forget Benen’s exaggerated claim of threatened violence. Note, instead, that Benen cannot conceive that someone might actually think the costs to the Democrats’ program outweigh the unrealized and perhaps unachievable benefits. …
…The Angry White Liberal directs his fury not only at conservatives. Another target is the Obama administration itself. After all, the White House has been unable to convince a majority of Americans that liberals are right and their health care reform is necessary. Comedian Jon Stewart opened a recent Daily Show by saying, “Mr. President, I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi–10 steps ahead of everything–or if this whole health care thing is kickin’ your ass.” In the Washington Post, Robert Kuttner blamed Obama’s economic team, which is “far too cozy with Wall Street.” For columnist Richard Cohen, Obama’s “klutziness” has hampered reform. MSNBC host Ed Schultz said the White House was “dazed and confused.” His colleague Rachel Maddow thinks the Democrats are “too scared of their own shadow.”
All this vituperation, this unrelenting urge to discredit opposing views, builds and builds. It’s uncontainable. Inconsolable. First the Angry White Liberal blames conservatives, then Democrats, then Obama . . . before you know it, he’ll be blaming the entire country for the failure to pass “comprehensive health care reform.” Everyone, that is, but himself.