Recording - 'How Germany Transfers its Holocaust Guilt to the Palestinians'

The German State’s Support for Israel Mirrors the Nazis' Support for Zionism in the 1930s 

Recording of How Germany Transfers Its Guilt 20.6.25.

Wieldand Hoban, Iris Hefets, Ronnie Kasrils, Tony Greenstein, Tom Suarez

On Friday we are holding a webinar on the theme ‘How Germany Transfers Its Guilt to the Palestinians’ on German complicity in Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.

We will ask why is it that the German State has been so vociferous in supporting Israel’s Genocide in Gaza? What is it that compelled Germany to join Israel in defending itself at the International Court of Justice? Why is it that Germany supplies Israel with 30% of the weapons used to kill Palestinians?

Angela Merkl described Israel as the German State’s Staatsräson,”, its reason to exist and with good reason. After WW2 it was the reparations agreement between Germany and Israel which enabled Germany to join the Western Alliance against the Soviet Union.

Germany supplied billions of marks to Israel, much of it in military equipment, and in return Israel turned a blind eye to the failure of the German state to deNazify. During the Eichmann Trial strenuous efforts were made to keep the name of Hans Globke, Chancellor Konrad Adenaeur’s closest adviser out of the trial. 

Globke had been instrumental in drawing up and implementing the Nuremberg Laws which stripped German Jews of their nationality and citizenship. 

Israel in essence traded the memory of the Jewish dead in the holocaust for arms and money. This caused a massive uproar in Israel itself but the reparations agreement went ahead. The reparations themselves were paid to the Israeli state not the holocaust survivors.

The Nazis and the Zionists – the untold story

There is however nothing new in the German State’s support for Israel and Zionism. In the 1930s the Nazis were also very fond of the Zionists who they considered the ‘good Jews.’

The Zionists alone were able to organise and even wear uniforms and parade with their own flags. Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy to Himmler in the SS, who Gerard Reitlinger described in The Final Solution as ‘the ‘real engineer of the final solution’ issued, on 28 January 1935 a Directive stating that:

the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership…. (they are) not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organisations (assimilationists).

The result was that the activities of Zionist groups were supervised with ‘more benevolence’ than comparable activities by non-Zionist Jewish groups. The Gestapo and the SD ‘place(d) no restrictions on Zionist organisations.’

In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, paper of the SS, wrote that:

the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptised in order to subvert National Socialist principles.  [Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, p.118]

Even the Nazis left the Jewish Hospital in Berlin alone whereas Israel has attacked every single hospital in Gaza

The Nazis and their fellow German nationalists had long favoured the Zionists who they saw as legitimising what they said about the Jews being a separate nation from the Germans. As early as 1919 Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s main theoretician, who was hanged at Nuremberg, wrote that 

Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.

The German State has instigated or been involved in four genocides or holocausts since the beginning of the 20^th century. It is therefore no surprise that the German state should leap at the opportunity to lend its support to a fifth holocaust in Gaza.

The first were the Maji Maji and Herero/Nama genocides in East and South-West Africa between 1904 and 1907. The next genocide was the Armenian genocide carried out by the Turkish army but with the complicity of senior German generals. Turkey and Germany were allies in the first World War. Last of all was the Nazi Holocaust.

There were intimate links between the African holocausts and the Nazi holocaust. The German Colonial Governor of German South-West Africa during the genocides was Heinrich Ernst Göring, the father of Hermann Goering, Hitler’s Deputy.

It is therefore no surprise that the German state is funding and arming Israel’s genocide. There isn’t a genocide that the German State hasn’t smiled upon but this time it is being carried out with the support of most of Western Europe?

The Israeli state itself is being Nazified. Gaza is being subject to the same policy the Nazis applied to the Jewish ghettos of Poland, Death by Hunger. Gaza today is a death camp.

At the beginning of May, a well-known television producer, Elad Barashi posted on X: "Good morning, let there be a Shoa (Holocaust) in Gaza." 

And just in case the message hadn’t sunk home, wrote in another post

"I can't understand the people here in the State of Israel who don't want to fill Gaza with gas showers... or train cars... and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza."

The Israeli Police, who are quick to arrest Israeli Arabs for the slightest expression of support for the Palestinian resistance, have of course done nothing. Only Israeli Palestinians get arrested for ‘incitement’. Channel 14, the far-right TV Channel that supports Netanyahu has likewise done nothing.

Exterminatory, holocaust language has become normalised in Israel today where 47% of the population supports the extermination of every Palestinian in Gaza. In fact 65% believe that the lesson of Amalek, the tribe that god told the Israelites to wipe out to the last infant, is taken into consideration.

Israel’s so-called Humanitarian Aid Foundation has become a honey trap where massacres of hundreds of starving Palestinians take place daily.

We had an inkling of the true attitude of Israelis to even Palestinian citizens of Israel, who they falsely boast have equal rights when an Iranian missile struck Tamra, an ancient Palestinian town in Israel.

What was the reaction of residents in a nearby Jewish town? A video taken at the time shows one man crying ‘To the village! To the village!’ 

and then several women’s voices join in, someone starts clapping and together they sing a verse that has become a Jewish extremist anthem. It consists of one line: “May your village burn” sung over and over again

Four members of the Khatab family died because unlike Jewish citizens in Israel they did not have a bunker to hide in. The Guardian reported that:

in common with most Palestinian-majority towns, Tamra does not have a single underground shelter. Like much else in Israel, there is nothing equal about the way death comes from the sky.

“The Israeli government, since the creation of the state, didn’t invest in one public shelter for the Arab part of society.”

Tamra’s mayor, Mussa Abu Rumi, said. The reinforced “safe rooms” in new-build houses are an inferior alternative, as the fate of the Khatibs showed, and Abu Rumi said only 40% of Tamra residents even have those.

This is the reality of Israeli Apartheid yet miserable racist creatures like Starmer, Lammy and Kemi Badenoch talk about Israel being ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ even as it commits a genocide in Gaza.

The Zionists Wrote Off the Millions of Jews in Europe as 'Dust on the wheels of history'

An article in Ha’aretz 'When You Leave Israel and Enter Gaza, You Are God': described how many soldiers in Gaza reported moral injuries: "I felt like, like, like a Nazi ... it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews."

Ironically this is exactly what the Italian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, Primo Levi, said to a reporter, Filippo Gentiloni, from the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, that “Everybody is somebody’s Jew,”. At that point in the interview, printed on June 29, 1982, Gentiloni closed the Levi quote and added a sentence of his own: “And today Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”

Today it should be clear to all except the politically blind that Zionism, the ideology of Jewish Supremacism that created the Israeli state, was drawn from the same poisonous stream that the Nazi party and its ideologues drank from.

Is it any wonder that the German state enthuses over Israel? Far from assuaging its guilt, Israel’s genocide in Gaza helps Germany normalise and relativise the Nazi holocaust.

Tony Greenstein 

How Zionism Rewrote the History of the Holocaust & Erased The Name of Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz to Warn Hungarian Jewry of the Danger of Annihilation

 Zionism was a Quisling Movement That Collaborated with the Nazis and Obstructed the Rescue Efforts of Others

To Register for this Webinar Please Click Here

https://tinyurl.com/yykp987e

To judge by its weaponisation of the holocaust in its war propaganda, people would be forgiven for thinking that during the holocaust the Zionist movement worked relentlessly to try and rescue Jews from Hitler’s clutches. Yet the reverse is the case.

Rudolf Vrba Interviewed by Claude Lanzmann

During the holocaust the Zionists did not want to know about what was happening in Europe. They had one goal and one goal only – to build their genocidal ‘Jewish’ state.  Indeed they did their best to obstruct the rescue efforts of others if the destination was not Palestine. That is why I wrote my book, Zionism During the Holocaust, to set the record straight.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just read the last chapter of Shabtai Teveth’s official biography of Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, which is entitled Disaster Means Strength. The disaster of the holocaust meant strength for the Zionists.

As Zionist historian Noah Lucas observed:

As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement. [A Modern History of Israel, pp. 187/8]

In November 1935 Ben-Gurion explained that:

To the disaster of German Jewry we must offer a Zionist response, namely, we must convert the disaster into a source for the upbuilding of Palestine.

In October 1941 as the holocaust was raging Ben-Gurion wrote:

Disaster is strength if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation. 29F [Shabtai Teveth, The Burning Ground 1886-1948, p. 853]

Tony Greenstein offers an excoriating account of how Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland falsified the historical record in his biography of Rudolph Vrba, the first Jew to escape Auschwitz.

One might wonder why Vrba's incredible story has been buried for decades, given how…

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) August 24, 2024

 

Rudolf Vrba

In 1935 the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which Gerald Reitlinger described as ‘‘the most murderous legislative instrument known to European history’.  It turned German Jews from citizens into subjects. Only the Zionists welcomed the laws. Zionist Executive President, Menahem Ussishkin, was effusive:

There is something positive in their [German Jewry’s] tragedy... and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would simply have converted to Christianity.

German Zionist leader Joachim Prinz explained that:

(The Jews) have been drawn out of the last secret recesses of christening and mixed marriages. We are not unhappy about it... The theory of assimilation has collapsed…. We want to replace assimilation by something new: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state, built according to the principle of purity of the nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind.  'Wir Juden' Berlin 1934, p.154 https://tinyurl.com/yxqvmaq5

The Zionists alone amongst Jews saw the advent of the Nazis as something positive. Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai and editor of the Histadrut paper Davar, as well as Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’ [Francis Nicosia, Zionism & Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p. 91]

When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30 1933 most Jews reacted instinctively by boycotting everything German. Not so the Zionists. They were eager to trade with the Nazis to build their ‘Jewish’ state and in August 1933 they reached a trading agreement with them, Ha’avara.

When the last major Jewish community in Europe was under threat, after the Nazi invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944, the Zionists suppressed the Vrba-Wetzler Report which, exposed Auschwitz, not as a labour camp but an extermination camp. But first a little background.

On April 10 Rudolf Vrba and his friend Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz with the purpose of warning Hungarian Jews what was in store for them. They had heard SS men talking about looking forward to Hungarian salami, the food that the deportees would bring with them. On April 24 after a perilous journey they reached Slovakia and set down what they knew to the Jewish Council there.

On or about April 29 Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism, paid his monthly visit to Bratislava and was given a copy. What did he do?  Spread the word far and wide?  On the contrary he took them to Eichmann, told him of them and agreed in negotiations that in exchange for a train out of Hungary to safety for 1684 Zionist and rich Jews, Kasztner would not only suppress the news of Auschwitz but positively misinform the Jews who were getting on the deportations trains.

Kasztner's Train for the elite

Of this there is no doubt. When Malchiel Greenwald called Kasztner a collaborator in Israel in 1953, he was sued by the Israeli state for libel by Kasztner. But it didn’t turn out as expected. Jews who had survived Auschwitz testified to Kasztner’s treachery. When David Rozner was asked why Kasztner would have been killed if he had set foot in Koloszvár, his home town, after the war, he replied, ‘Because he was the man who misled the Jews to believe in the good intentions of the Germans.’ [Ben Hecht, Perfidy p. 109].  

It later turned out that Kasztner had gone to Nuremberg to give evidence that exonerated some of Eichmann’s worst butchers like Hermann Krumey and Dieter Wisliceny. Not surprisingly Rudolf Vrba, who had done his best to ensure that the Vrba-Wetzler Report was distributed to other people, laid the blame at Kasztner’s door and that of the Zionist movement. The response of the Zionist historians was to erase Kasztner from historical memory.

In the Israeli school syllabus and holocaust texts there was no mention made of the two Jewish escapees or even the fact that there had been Jews who escaped from Auschwitz.

Vrba’s memoirs, I Cannot Forgive, were printed everywhere but in Israel. No mention was made of Vrba or Wetzler’s name in Yad Vashem, the obscene holocaust propaganda museum in Jerusalem where assorted fascists, neo-Nazis and racists now visit to pay their homage to the Israeli state.

In articles and publications the names of Vrba and Wetzler were never mentioned – they were ‘two Jewish chaps’ or ‘two Jewish prisoners’. In the words of Ruth Linn, an Israeli Professor of Education from Haifa University, who happened, by chance, to meet Vrba at the University of British Columbia,

‘The problem was that none of the escapers had even a ‘minimal layer of Zionist veneer.’ [Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz, a Culture of Forgetting p. 85].

Like Marek Edelman, the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Vrba was eliminated from the history books and by the holocaust industry because he didn’t fit into the Zionist narrative. Linn wrote that

Like Vrba, Edelman never ‘ascended’ to Israel, refusing to become the ‘dead and obedient hero who could be molded along with the political order of that time…. extremely inconvenient for the creation of a heroic Zionist condensing and compensating myth… Israel was not their home.’  Linn, pp. 6, 87.

As people may remember, over 2 months ago I wrote, for Electronic Intifada and my own blog, what Jonathan Cook called an excoriating review of Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist, a biography of Vrba. Freedland’s book was a cheap imitation thriller of Vrba’s own memoirs, I Cannot Forgive. It was dishonest in its justification of Vrba’s silencing.

I decided, at this time of genocide, that it would be appropriate to organise a webinar on the subject of Rewriting the Holocaust and we have an excellent panel of speakers. Stephen Kapos is well known to people as a child survivor of Budapest under the Nazis. Tom Suarez has written two amazingly researched books and Haim Bresheeth, from Jewish Network for Palestine is a long time Israeli-Jewish activist who has just been arrested whilst speaking at a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy, as I was a month ago.

The days when Israel and the Zionists had a monopoly over the holocaust are gone. The holocaust in Gaza demonstrates that Zionism has not learnt any lessons from the Nazi holocaust. On the contrary the Zionists believe that the Nazi holocaust entitles them to commit their own holocaust, a view that the German State also holds.

Ruth Linn, whose book, Escaping Auschwitz – A Culture of Silence exposed the machinations of Yehuda Bauer and the other establishment Zionist holocaust historians. I invited her to join the panel and initially she accepted. However Ruth Linn is a Zionist and she got cold feet about speaking with anti-Zionists. However you should read Linn’s Who’s afraid of the man who escaped from Auschwitz?  

Tony Greenstein

See Defending Vrba and Freedland on Vrba