The Holocaust: A New History

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The Holocaust: A New History

By Panagiotis Heliotis

Abstract

British historian Laurence Rees, the former Creative Director of History Programmes for the BBC, has written a new "magnum opus": The Holocaust: A New History. This review lays bare a few of the shortcomings of this old wine in new wineskins.

Give Me an Order

As there is no written order for the Holocaust, historians have been struggling for years to find a way around this. Rees concludes with the following:

“From quite early in my interaction with this history I had seen how some people had decided that, because the crime of the extermination of the Jews was so horrendous, it must have been orchestrated and planned at one monumental moment. But it seemed to me that this was a mistaken leap. As I hope this book demonstrates, the journey to the Holocaust was a gradual one, full of twists and turns, until it found final expression in the Nazi killing factories.” (p. 429)

So let’s examine some specific points about this. Regarding Hitler’s Prophecy, a speech he gave on 30 September 1939 (where he stated that if the Jewish financiers plunge mankind into another world war, the result will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe), Rees comments as follows:

“What exactly did Hitler mean by this? A serious threat against the Jews, certainly. But did he explicitly mean that he intended to kill the Jews in the event of a world war? That is debatable, especially since there is no evidence that he had a detailed plan of destruction in mind for the Jews as he uttered these words. An alternative, more persuasive interpretation is that by ’annihilation’ Hitler meant ’elimination’, and thus one possible ’solution’ to the Nazis’ Jewish ’problem’ remained the destruction of the Jews in Europe by forcibly removing them from the continent.” (p. 147)

Rees backs this up with other Hitler statements, thus poking another hole in the Holocaust storyline. Harsh words like these appear all the time as proof, but clearly they are not enough anymore. But Rees still has to explain the absence of a written order. He tries with the following trick:

“Much better, from Hitler’s perspective, to make sure that no order in his name about this sensitive project ever existed. He was well aware that written orders could come back and haunt the sender. That is one reason he remarked in October 1941: it’s much better to meet than to write, at least when some matter of capital importance is at issue.” (p. 230)

That statement is from Hitler’s Table Talk (2000, p. 56). But if someone checks the source, he will realize that Hitler did not talk about orders at all, but how he... managed his mail! Here is the full passage:

“I dictate my mail, then I spend a dozen hours without bothering about it. Next day I make a first set of corrections, and perhaps a second set the day after. In doing so, I’m being very prudent. Nobody can use a letter in my own hand against me. Besides, it’s my opinion that, in an age when we have facilities like the train, the motor-car and the aircraft, it’s much better to meet than to write, at least when some matter of capital importance is at issue.”

Ohhh Rees, that trickster. And it doesn’t end here. It has just begun. A few pages later we arrive at this:

“But does all this mean that Hitler made a decision in autumn 1941 to exterminate the Jews? Is this when the Holocaust as we know it began? A number of new initiatives certainly came together at this time, including not only the decision to deport Jews from the Old Reich and Protectorate to the east, and the construction of killing installations at Chelmno and Belzec in Poland, but also Hitler’s own comments in private that October about the Jews. Ominously, he quoted from the ’extermination’ speech he had given in January 1939. ’From the rostrum of the Reichstag’, he said on 25 October 1941, ’I prophesied to Jewry that, in the event of war’s proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War, and now already hundreds of thousands more... It’s not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews.’” (p. 237)

This is the quote from Hitler’s Table Talk (p. 87) that Rees had previously falsified in his book on Auschwitz. This time he quotes it correctly but as can be seen he omits something. He also quotes it in a previous chapter with the same omission (p. 32). The unsuspected reader will not notice this, and it’s actually the most important part:

“Let nobody tell me that all the same we can’t park them in the marshy parts of Russia!”

As this sentence did not fit with the extermination claim, it had to go. In the same book we also find Hitler’s statement on the Jews one week after the Wannsee Conference:

“The Jews must pack up, disappear from Europe. Let them go to Russia. Where the Jews are concerned, I’m devoid of all sense of pity.” (p. 260)

This is the first tactic of the official historians: Suppress the evidence when possible. The other? What else? The “code language”:

“On 19 July 1942, on a visit to Poland, Himmler ordered that the ’resettlement of the entire Jewish Population of the General Government’ should be ’carried out and completed by 31 December 1942.’ According to Himmler, a ’comprehensive clearing out’ was necessary. This was a euphemistic way of saying that he wanted virtually all of these Jews to be murdered by the end of the year.” (p. 295)

No historian ever bothers to explain this simple contradiction (they just hope you won’t notice). What’s the point for the Germans to hide their words but not their actions? Rees himself admits:

“The Nazis did not hide the concentration camps. Their existence was well known and newspapers across the world carried stories about them.” (p. 73)

And if we suppose that nobody paid attention:

“The dead bodies were burnt in ditches and the smoke that filled the sky was noticeable for miles around.” (p. 305)

Simple facts like these are enough to throw any claims about a code language in the garbage.


https://codoh.com/library/document/4989/?lang=en