Open Letter to Kathrin Meyer, Secretary-General of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

The Only Lesson You Have Drawn From the Holocaust is that Genocide is Fine When Israel Does It

Why is it Anti-Semitic to Compare Israel to Nazi Germany?

Sent to:        info@holocaustremembrance.com

Dear Ms Meyer,

I’ve lost count of the number of genocidal statements by Israeli leaders. Statements worthy of Hitler and Himmler themselves.

Israel's defence that the meaning of 'Amalek' has been distorted by South Africa's legal team is, frankly, perverse.

The story of Amalek is the only example in the Scriptures in which God orders the Israelites to exterminate an entire nation.

Benjamin Netanyahu declared:

"You…

— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) January 12, 2024

Netanyahu began Gaza’s genocide by invoking the memory of Amalek

“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”

That memory being Samuel’s instruction to Saul to

“attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

Or Finance Minister Smotrich lamenting that he could not starve all 2 million Gazans, even though it was the most ‘moral’ thing to do.

No-one can seriously doubt that the above sentiments are those of Nazis yet according to the intellectually bankrupt definition that you foster, to say so is ‘anti-Semitic’.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism has been used the world over by racists and anti-Semites (Trump, Bannon, Braverman etc) to brand criticism of Zionism and Israel as anti-Semitic.

Today, in the midst of Gaza’s Genocide, the IHRA is being used in order to shield and justify Israel’s war crimes. Your silence about what is happening in Gaza is no surprise given that the IHRA was drawn up specifically to render Israel immune from criticism.

The IHRA Anti-Semitism Definition states that

criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic

but Israel is not like any other country. What other country has occupied another people’s land for over half a century? What other country has instituted a system of Apartheid and ethnic cleansing? What other country continues to destroy the villages and homes of the people it rules over in order to make way for settlers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX27DnEek5o

American Surgeon volunteers in Khan Younis hospital, Gaza

Your role in legitimising genocide, Kathrin Meyer, is not surprising given that you are part of the German State Academic Establishment. From Heidegger onwards, German   academics have always been willing to lend a helping hand to the cause of genocide and colonial barbarities. You follow in the footsteps of those who justified eugenics and racial supremacy in the first half of the last century.

I refer not just to Heidegger, the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University but to people like Eugen Fischer, a professor of medicine, eugenics  and anthropology as well as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology and Rector of the Frederick William University.

Fischer served as a doctor in the extermination camp of Shark Island, also known as Death Island, in South-West Africa from 1906-7. He conducted medical experiments on African prisoners. These included sterilisation, injection of smallpox, typhus as well as tuberculosis.

“The numerous cases of mixed offspring upset the German colonial administration and the obsession with racial purity. Eugen Fischer studied 310 mixed-race children, calling them “Rehoboth bastards” of “lesser racial quality”. Fischer also subjected them to numerous racial tests such as head and body measurements, eye and hair examinations.

The links between Germany’s African Holocaust and the Nazi Holocaust are clear and obvious yet they are nowhere to be found on the IHRA’s website. A search for the Namaqua and Herero peoples turns up nothing. This is not accidental. As a German state functionary your job is not to help us understand the causes of the Nazi holocaust but to normalise it for imperial purposes.

The antecedents of the Nazi holocaust are not difficult to locate. In November 2017 Elizabeth Baer published a book “The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich,” about the connections between Germany’s first holocaust and the Nazi holocaust. As an article in the Times of Israel  explained ‘Genocide of African tribes was Germany’s Holocaust dress rehearsal’. Baer argued that a connection could be made between the two genocides by analysing literary texts such as

a diary by Nama revolutionary Henrik Witbooi, who kept a record while battling colonization, to works by German author Uwe Timm, which include a novel about the genocide in Southwest Africa and a memoir about his brother’s death fighting for Hitler in World War II.

What Baer defined as the “genocidal gaze” was

“the attitude of German imperialists toward the indigenous people of German Southwest Africa that is then perpetuated by the Nazis.”

Germany’s colonial era lasted for 30 years and ending with its defeat in World War I. Genocide in South-West Africa killed 80 percent of the Herero and 50% of the Nama. Thousands of Hereros and Namas were imprisoned in concentration camps, where the majority died. “[In] many respects, it seemed a precursor to the Holocaust” Baer said. “I could see the parallels.”

The Nazi concept of lebensraum or living space was developed in 1897 by Freidrich Ratzel while the Germans were fighting native resistance in what is now Namibia. The Times of Israel described how

Infamous German Lothar von Trotha defeated the Herero ... in 1904 and the Germans campaigned mercilessly toward an endlosung — or final solution — “a way to eradicate indigenous people,” according to Baer.

Memorial on Shark Island to the Victims of German Imperialism

Final Solution was of course the term used by the Nazis to indicate the methods necessary for a solution of the ‘Jewish Question’.

Von Trotha’s army forced the survivors of Waterberg — tens of thousands of men, women and children — into the Omaheke Desert, dooming them to death from thirst and starvation. They also created konzentrationslager, or concentration camps... They also founded what Baer calls “the first death camp, a prototype for Auschwitz” — Shark Island, where “people were subject to rape, medical experimentation, no shelter, no food, in cages on the beach.”

The colony’s imperial administrator, Heinrich Goring, was the father of Hermann Goring, Hitler’s Deputy. Dr. Eugen Fischer performed experiments on indigenous people, sending their severed heads back to Germany. Fischer went on to train the Nazi SS doctors including Josef Mengele who performed similar experiments at Auschwitz.

Baer was quoted as saying that:

“the genocide in Africa was a kind of dress rehearsal. So much of what the Germans did there, the Nazis did subsequently in the methods, the ideology, of the Holocaust.

As you say in your Linked In bio ‘I am passionate about empowering governments and civil society to reflect on their history to inform policy.’ That certainly is one way of putting it, but when it comes to German history you are remarkably reticent.

This can hardly be an oversight. It is clearly relevant given that Germany is supplying 30% of the weapons that Israel is using to commit genocide in Gaza. Last year, the German government authorized arms exports worth a total of €326.5 ($355.3 million) to Israel.

The truth is that there hasn’t been a holocaust that the German state... hasn’t smiled upon

Yet you seem to have missed this in your ‘educational’ efforts. The truth is that there hasn’t been a holocaust that the German state and its academic functionaries, of which you are one, haven’t smiled upon.

Germany was also involved in the Armenian holocaust. In Armenia German military advisors signed some of the orders that led to Ottoman deportations of Armenians, a major component of the genocide. In World War I over 25,000 soldiers and 800 officers of the Imperial German Army were sent to the Middle East to fight alongside the Ottoman Army, with German commanders serving in the Ottoman high command and general staff.

According to Vahakn Dadrian’s German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide the Turkish denial of Armenian genocide served as a shield for Nazi Germany. Two German generals Bronsart and Boettrich served as members of the military mission in Turkey.

Bronsart, in particular, knew in advance about the real purpose of the mass Armenian deportation and did nothing to prevent the mass execution. He even scolded the German Vice consul for wanting to help the Armenians.

A German document of May 4, 1916, which the German state did its best to disappear, indicated that the annihilation of the Armenians was ordered by the Germans (p.160-163)

Three prominent officials served in both the Turkish Army and then in Nazi Germany. They included Franz von Papen, who was the Chief of General Staff of the IV Turkish Army in World War I, and served as Hitler’s Vice Chancellor and President of Prussia and Konstantin von Neurath, who served as Hitler’s first Foreign Minister and who was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg. Dadrian wrote that:

"what stands out in that evidence is a central feature of German complicity, namely, the willingness of a number of German officials, civilian and military, to aid and abet the Turks in their drive to liquidate the Armenians" (p.186).

Dadrian argued that full disclosure and knowledge of the Armenian genocide could perhaps have prevented the Jewish holocaust of World War II. Yet there is no mention of the Armenian holocaust on the IHRA’s website. A strange omission is it not?

I am writing this letter because of the open support in Israel for the annihilation of the Palestinians. As you know that was also the policy of the Hitler government in respect of Gypsies, Jews and others. Yet despite you wanting people to learn from history you are actively supporting and justifying Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.

There are many examples of Israel’s exterminationist mindset. The most popular car bumper sticker in Israel today is ‘finish them’.  The host of the most popular English language podcast in Israel ‘Two nice Jewish boys’, Eytan Weinstein, is quoted as saying:

“If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.”

Weinstein claimed that “most Israelis” would do the same. His co-host Naor Meningher added that they would also want to wipe out Palestinians in “the territories”.

Nor are these ‘2 nice Jewish boys’ alone Defence Minister Yoav Gallant began the attack on Gaza by describing the Palestinians as ‘human animals’ the very phrase Himmler used about the Jews on October 4 in a talk to SS Generals when justifying the Final Solution.

There is no doubt that the Israeli state has now entered its genocidal phase and that the Palestinians are in danger of extermination. Most people have no difficulty in making a comparison between what the Nazis did and what Israel is doing today.

Yet none of the above appears on the IHRA website. You state in your ‘Founding Principles’ that your mission, is

to remember the Holocaust, educate future generations on the tragic events of the past and strengthen governmental cooperation to work towards a world without genocide.

How can you do this if you erase from memory the German involvement in the Armenian holocaust and Germany’s holocaust in SW Africa?

It would seem that your mission is altogether more sinister. It is to provide the ideological underpinning for Germany’s support for Israel’s exterminationist policies today. Even worse you are legitimising false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ directed against anyone who dares questions those policies.

Eugen Fischer - the Link Between German Colonialism and Nazism

The IHRA is built on fraud. As Jamie Stern-Weiner explained in his report ‘THE POLITICS OF A DEFINITION - How the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism Is Being Misrepresented.

In the foreword Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, wrote that

What is touted as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism is not a definition, has little to do with antisemitism, and was neither written nor endorsed by IHRA....

Scholars and legal experts have convincingly argued that IHRA’s definition is incoherent, vague, vulnerable to political abuse, and not fit for purpose. It fails even to meet the most elementary requirement of a definition, which is to define. The decisive role of pro-Israel advocacy groups in drafting and promoting the definition has also been established.

This remarkable report... also breaks important new ground. Expert criticism and political controversy have focused on a list of 11 highly problematic examples of purportedly antisemitic statements and behaviours. Seven of these 11 examples relate to Israel. ...

The report shows that IHRA’s decision-making body, the Plenary, in fact decided to exclude all of these examples from its definition. The IHRA definition includes no examples. If there is widespread confusion about this, it is because champions of the examples... have systematically and methodically misrepresented the Plenary’s decision.

The examples, falsely represented as part of the IHRA definition, have been used to delegitimise and censor legitimate criticism of Israel and, more broadly, to curtail free speech on Israel. This shields Israel from accountability for its serious human rights abuses...

... The sad truth is that these [IHRA] officials have been complicit in a deliberate effort to conflate criticism of Israeli policies with antisemitism. IHRA’s core mandate...

Jamie Stern-Weiner’s report demonstrates in irrefutable detail how a definition intended to protect Jews against antisemitism was twisted to protect the State of Israel against valid criticisms that have nothing to do with anti-Jewish racism

The 10^th illustration of the definition that your organisation propagates states that ‘contemporary examples of antisemitism’ include

Ø Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Naturally, not wanting to be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ I thought I should seek your advice as to why calling for the extermination of Palestinians is any different from calling for the extermination of Jews? I would be grateful for your advice in this respect and look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein