Why the Holocaust Happened: Its Religious Cause & Scholarly Cover-Up

350 Pages·2000·1.553 MB·English

by  Eric Zuesse

ERIC ZUESSE
Winner of the H.L. Mencken Award for Investigative Reporting

WHY
THE HOLOCAUST HAPPENED

Its Religious Cause &
Scholarly Cover-Up
Eric Zuesse is a cultural anthropologist, general systems theorist, economist,
and investigative journalist. He has been published by Dell Publishing
Company, Crown Publishing Company, The New York TIMES, REASON,
JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR, GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY, and
others. Zuesse is a winner of the H.L. Mencken Award for The Year's Best
Investigative News Report."
The Bible is history told as religion tells it. WHY The Holocaust Happened is history
told as science tells it. ...No longer is the challenge to the religious account just Copernicus
and Galileo - the Bible got the cosmology wrong. No longer is the challenge to the
religious account just Darwin and Mendel - the Bible got the prehistory (i.e. evolution)
wrong. Now it is history itself that is at stake; the final fig leaf covering the old myth is ripped
away; and what stands exposed this time is rape. People's minds have been raped by a false
historical account; and now we know both why it lied, and that the Holocaust was its result.
Never again.
Dedicated to the victims.
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the
abuses of grief which the history of mankind had produced—the Cross.
Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"
John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, September 3, 1816
* * *
"The teachings of Christ have laid the foundations for the battle against
Jews as the enemy of Mankind; the work that Christ began, I shall finish."
Adolf Hitler, speech to his followers, December 18, 1926
Contents
Preface 11
PART I: Hitler's "Holy War" Against "the Jews"
A Map of the Argument 24
J: The Problem 27
2: Hitler the Mystery-Man 33
3: Bible 53
4: Mission 67
5: Collateral Damage 84
6: Church Response 95
7: Historical Background 100
8: Hitler's Medievalism 108
9: Anti-Science 121
10: The Cover-Up by Scholars 127
PART II: Where the Bible's Anti-Semitism Came From
A Map of the Argument 146
11: Our Methodological Approach 149
12: The Pre-Pauline Background 154
13: Summary of the Case 161
14: How the Scientific Approach Differs from the Religious One 171
15: Paul's Detailed Account of Christianity's Split from Judaism 176
16: Christianity's War Against Judaism 190
CONCLUSIONS
17: Bringing It All Together 216
18: Of Smoking Guns and Hot Bullets 229
19: Completing the Work of Nuremberg 241
20: Policy-Implications 244
Appendix 1: Hitler's Essay, "My Theory of Eugenics" 254
Appendix 2: Random Thoughts on Causation 277
Acknowledgments, and Why I Wrote this Book 353
Index/References 356
PREFACE
Why did the Holocaust happen? Of all unexplained historical events, of all
Man's irrationalities, is there any that so challenges our understanding? Man has not
yet come to terms with the most-systematic and vast genocide in history. Testimony
to this sad fact has been provided by each subsequent genocide, all mocking the
prevailing platitudes about "the brotherhood of Man." Perhaps the failure to
understand the Holocaust's cause has contributed to the ineffectiveness of
prevention-efforts, as well as policies after the fact, in places such as Cambodia,
Bosnia, and Rwanda, where subsequent ethnocides have occurred. Indeed, how
would it even be possible to prevent genocide if the cause of one so vast as the
Holocaust remains a mystery? With more than a half-century separating us from
the Holocaust, we still have not answered the most basic question: why it occurred.
Thus, younger generations of Gentians, both Christians and Jews—as well as
the ethnic minorities new to the country—continue even today to debate the
issues of guilt. After all this time, the Holocaust remains an unsolved riddle.
The implications of this failure reverberate throughout the world, but
perhaps nowhere more so than in Europe, the home of the Holocaust. On 2 April
2000, European Affairs correspondent Sylvia Poggioli, on National Public
Radio's Weekend Edition program, brilliantly summed up the looming dangers
of Europe's failures in this regard by pointing to a recent resurgence there of
majority assaults against minorities. She reported a continent slipping back toward
racial chaos eerily reminiscent of events that were thought and hoped to belong
only to the past, and that were consequently of ominous portent for the future:
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The most recent case was a four-day rampage in southern
Spain against Moroccan immigrants, but there's racist violence
everyday, everywhere: in Birmingham, in Frankfurt, in Florence,
in Copenhagen, in Marseilles. A typical site is soccer stadiums. In
Britain, in France, and in Italy, you can see ultra-right-wing fans
carrying banners with pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic slogans, and
often Black players in the field are booed and insulted. What's
shocking is that xenophobia is gaining acceptability. The
populist parties that embrace anti-immigrant platforms are
gaining popularity everywhere—not only in France and Austria,
but also in Switzerland, in Belgium, in Denmark, and in Norway.
The wave of xenophobia has begun to affect the traditional
attitudes of many ruling leftist and center-left parties. Voters
who used to form the backbone of leftist parties are now
attracted to these right-wing anti-immigrant slogans, so
governments are introducing political restrictions against
immigrants. ...
In Denmark, for example, the ruling Social Democrats have
made requirements for family reunification very, very difficult.
I found everywhere I went, in Italy, in France, in Germany, in
Sweden, and in Austria, immigrants live almost exclusively in
closed enclaves—ghettos, whatever you want to call them. For
example, in Sweden, 1 saw one community outside of Stockholm
where the only blue-eyed Swede was the security guard. In
Lyons in France in the downtown area, which is the heart of the
City, I never saw anyone who wasn't white. And it's a country
with a large immigrant community from its former colonies, but I
never saw [an immigrant as aj policeman or anchor on TV. And in
Germany, most members of the large Turkish minority live in
neighborhoods that are known as little Istanbuls.
Ms. Poggioli was asked by the interviewer to explain the possible causes
of the problem. The first to be raised was the standard explanation: hard economic
times. Ms. Poggioli, however, quickly rejected this:
Racism and xenophobia are strongest in the most affluent of
European countries—in Austria, in Switzerland, and in some
Scandanavian countries. More than anything, I think that
Europeans believe that it's their cultural identity that is being
threatened.
Modern European states were built on the idea of mono-
ethnicity. . . . Europeans are not shocked by the idea of ethnic
division and partition. This is also the reason why right-wing
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parties have succeeded in creating an image of immigrants as
an underclass of undeserving members of society.
Recent polls show that xenophobia is gaining respectability.
Over two-thirds of those polled admitted to being a little racist,
and 33% admitted they were very racist or quiet racist. ... There
are also many much more worrisome signs, what former Swiss
President Ruth Dreyfuss called the return of the repressed in
European politics. She meant that all of a sudden we see an
acceptance of ultra-right-wing language and platforms that have
been rejected since World War II, and this made me think about
what I believe is Europe's dirty secret: its continuing reluctance
to come to terms with the worst crime ever committed against
humanity, and which happened on its territory by Europeans
against Europeans half a century ago, ... the Holocaust. And I
think it's this reluctance by Europe to come to terms with its
past that makes it much more difficult for it to confront its new
racism.
I agree with Ms. Poggioli that continuing to evade the Holocaust's cause
will not do; finally, it must be addressed. After all, how can a physician treat a
disease he has not even diagnosed? Thus, the moral challenge of the Holocaust
towers over all our futures. But how approach such a gigantic subject? It is not
just the senselessness of the thing that so puzzles us: the Holocaust was
monumental in its sheer evil. It even appears to have been evil for the sake of
evil. To comprehend such a phenomenon, where do we start?
Historically speaking, the questions themselves started virtually
tumbling over each other at the moment when Allied troops first entered the
death camps as liberators and found themselves facing gaunt, hollowed out,
survivors strewn around huge mounds of corpses. United State General Omar
Bradley recounted as follows the shocking scene when he first entered a camp
in Poland: "The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed the
stockade. More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into
shallow graves." And as reported by Richard J. Evans in his 1989 book In
Hitler's Shadow (p. 5), an American GI recalled of his entry into the
Nordhausen camp, that there were "piles of skeletal corpses, amid which the
living were still lying, weak, lice-ridden, starving, and apathetic."
Complicating the intrinsic difficulties of understanding such
monstrosities have been the persistent contrary attempts at obfuscation by some
historians (discussed at length in In Hitler's Shadow, and in Deborah Lipstadt's
1993 Denying the Holocaust) to prevent precisely that objective,
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and to keep the roots of the Holocaust, if not the reality of the Holocaust itself, in
the dark. In other words, the search to find the Holocaust's origins has also had to
contend with a very active effort to confound it.
Nonetheless, a number of approaches to explaining the Holocaust have
been tried, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Unfortunately, none has
stood the test of time. Perhaps the commonest sublime explanation has been that
science (or Us consequences, such as modernity) caused this hell on earth.
Science has long been routinely blamed for having caused the
Holocaust, even though no accusation could be further from the truth. In 1993,
the German historian Detlev Peukert (in the book Reevaluating the Third Reich,
edited by Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan) expostulated upon "The Genesis
of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science." Four years before, sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman had published his Modernity and the Holocaust, saying (p. 61),
"racism is unthinkable without the advancement of modern science. ... Racism
is strictly a modern product. Modernity made racism possible." Essentially
similar charges had been prominently made by the German historians Michael
Stunner and Ernst Nolte during the mid-1980's. But even before that, the
German-Jewish philosopher and Nazi refugee to the United States, Leo Strauss
had long been making the same charge against science. Strauss was a student of
the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, a disciple of Hitler's leading legal
theoretician Carl Schmitt, and himself the leading philosopher inspiring
America's conservative Reagan Revolution during the 1980's. He was a hero to
many within the Reagan Administration. During Hitler's reign, Heidegger and
Schmitt proudly promoted Naziism as an essential response to what they both
viewed as the socially corrosive challenges of modernity and science. All of these
politically conservative intellectuals, from the time of Hitler to the present, have
agreed: science caused the Holocaust. They did not all agree, however, that the
Holocaust was bad; the outright Nazis amongst them seem to have felt that it was
either all right or excellent. However, none of them liked either science or
modernity.
One might think that with so many proponents, the thesis that science caused
the Holocaust would surely have been documented in extensive detail.
Remarkably, it has never been documented at all. Even more amazingly, only
one person even so much as attempted to do so: Daniel Gasman, in his
speculative and poorly informed 1971 The Scientific Origins of National Socialism.
The reason for this failure to document is amazingly simple: the assertion is false,
as will herein be documented in full. Philosophers and social "scientists," such
as historians, have accepted it
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Preface
on nothing more than faith, and proceeded to build their analyses upon it. How
fitting a basis on which to condemn science: religion, which is to say faith itself,
makes yet another jab at science, its epistemological foe. Some of the proponents
of this attack against science have even held that only a more religious Germany
will be safe against a return of Naziism. We shall show that that would be like
injecting cyanide into a person in order to "cure" his cyanide poisoning.
Adolf Hitler famously scapegoated Jews as the source of Germany's
problems. Historians and others favorable toward religion have similarly
scapegoated science as the source of the Holocaust. Both scapegoatings are
based on frauds, as the present work will also show.
However, science as the "cause" of the Holocaust has been only one
among the many insupportable "theories" put forth to explain this horror. As
mentioned before, the Holocaust's cause remains a mystery, despite the passage
now of more than a half-century after the event. Why did it happen? Why did
Hitler do it? Why did the German nation do it? Even today, no one really
knows.
One reason for the mystery is that—just as with the science-scapegoating
"explanation"—none of the obvious or easy "explanations" withstands even
cursory investigation. For example, consider the genocide as a possible military
device. Obviously, the Holocaust occurred within the context of a World War;
yet it actually drained the attention of Hitler and of his fighting forces away from
the war-effort, needlessly hardened the worldwide opposition to Germany, and
transformed into outright enemies talented people who might otherwise have been
neutral or even supportive as "patriotic Germans." Judged purely as a military
tactic, the Holocaust was at best dubious, and at worst counter-productive. Horst
von Maltitz perceptively observed in this regard in his 1973 The Evolution of
Hitler's Germany (p. 171), that "railroad transport trains carrying Jews from the
West to extermination camps in Poland were given priority over trains for
urgently needed troops and war supplies. Moreover, skilled Jewish laborers,
desperately needed in the munitions plants in occupied Poland, were carted off to
extermination centers, in spite of strong objections by plant managers." And
according to the Polish Ambassador, Jan Ciechanowski, in his 1947 Defeat in
Victory (p. 179), he had personally handed U.S. President Roosevelt in the
White House on 28 July 1943 a memo that, "The unprecedented destruction of
the entire Jewish population is not motivated by Germany's military
requirements. Hitler and his subordinates aim at the total destruction of the Jews
before the war ends and regardless of its outcome." The basic question thus is
posed: what was the relationship
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