By now everyone not living in a cave knows that 'View' personality Whoopi Goldberg was suspended from the talk show after she said repeatedly during one segment (on Monday's broadcast) that "the Holocaust was not about race." She said specifically "it was about man's inhumanity to man and not about race."
Where Goldberg was wrong:
Apart from assuming all Jews to be racially homogeneous she is unaware of the history of Hitler's Third Reich. To wit, the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 defined a Jew to be anyone with three Jewish grandparents, while those with only one or two Jewish grandparents were classed as Mischling , or “mongrel” (first or second degree), to be partially protected from discrimination. However, Reinhard Heydrich wanted to “ride roughshod” over the laws to bypass delays that might be caused by time-consuming judgments about who is Jewish. This according to the new book ('Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution') by Peter Longerich:
about the infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942, which defined the parameters of the Final Solution. The Nazis, however, were careful to leave no explicit written records of the conference, other than copies of the minutes (15 pages worth) which were kept by Adolf Eichmann. He had also been charged with overseeing the deportations of Jews from across Europe to the death camps, such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. The sole remaining extant copy of the Wannsee minutes - which were available to Longerich, making his book a critical historical addition - promised "Europe will be combed from west to east and around 11 million Jews will be involved."
Less well known, was that the monstrous Nazi lust to kill was incepted from as early as 1939 with the (carbon monoxide) gassing of the mentally ill and infirm children. All of these were white race, and ethnic German, but simply didn't meet Hitler's standards for his ideal eugenically pure "Aryans". This brings us to:
The error of Goldberg's co-host Joy Behar that "the Holocaust was driven by White Supremacy" which also needs correction. In fact, it was driven by a warped notion of Eugenic supremacy, i.e. that there actually existed a type or kind of human eugenically 'pure' and able to survive anything. As author Ian Kershaw notes in his chapter 'Licensing Barbarism' (p. 234) from his book, Hitler Nemesis - 1936-45, the Jews 'were the foremost racial target" but they were not the only one.
Legions of German whites deemed "unfit" to live in the Reich included (ibid.): "homosexuals, prostitutes, habitual criminals, the infirm, mentally ill, Gypsies and any others seen as sullying the new society by begging, refusing work or any other sort of 'antisocial behavior" adding, "And the Number One racial and social enemy, the Jews." The point of emphasis here is that all the prior mentioned "unfit" were white and mainly ethnic Germans, though also Slavs. The common denominator for slaughter then, was that these outgroups did not meet Hitler's standard for eugenic survival. You could not tolerate a white German beggar, or prostitute, or habitual criminal any more than a white Romanian Gypsy or a Jew. These became UnterMenschen Causasians. The kernel of Hitler's genocide against the Jews, then, began with the extermination of "unfit" German whites, and non-Jews.
It was also no surprise that mentally ill German whites in insane asylums were among the first to be exterminated (Kershaw, p. 261), wherein we read:
"The medical staff of the asylums selected their own patients for inclusion in the ('T4') euthanasia action.... The killing, mostly by carbon monoxide gas was administered by doctors under no compulsion to participate. It was carried out in selected asylums, the most notorious of which were Grafenick, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandenburg, Hartheim and Sonnenstein."
Meanwhile, the head of the Fuhrer Chancellery "had little difficulty in persuading Hitler to deal with the authorization for the children's euthanasia". This included all non -Jewish seriously infirm, mentally disabled or retarded children - who would all be considered as affronts to the Reich model "Aryan".
Kershaw - like Longerich - points out the use of poison gas became the primary source for extermination of the "undesirables" - whether undesirable whites or Jews. In his parlance (p. 483): "More efficient, less public- and with characteristic Nazi cynicism - less stressful for the murderers, than mass shootings." The first use of Zyklon B was probably at Auschwitz for Soviet prisoners, and then "by the summer of 1942 in regular use for the extermination of the Jews of Europe."
How or why could Hitler include so many German Caucasians in his extermination plans, which again, prioritized the Jews? German author Konrad Heiden ( The Fuehrer , p. 237) described Hitler's thinking in his own words:
"If Germany should get a million children each year and eliminate seven to eight hundred thousand of the weakest, in the end the result would be an increase in power."
Heiden's point was that Hitler believed he could attain the eugenic "ideal" by brutally murdering those he regarded as the weakest, especially those he saw as a human sub species, the Jews. But this also accounted for why he included German white homosexuals, prostitutes, Gypsies, beggars, the infirm and retarded as well as the mentally ill in his extermination plans. Again, there is no equivalent magnitude of the slaughter of these "unfit". only to emphasize again the issue was one of eugenic supremacy not explicitly "white" supremacy.
Heiden in his earlier German work, 'Hitler - Das Leben Eines Diktators', traces extreme German nationalism (as embodied in the Volkisch movement) extant in Germany since the Middle Ages. It extolled a eugenic Aryanism that tracked back to Nordic myths, but also incorporated many of the most scurrilous beliefs about Jews - i.e. sacrificing Christian infants, embodied in blood libel, e.g.
What is Blood Libel | Glossary | ADL
Elements of which we now also see revived in the QAnon conspiracy ideations concerning Dems. It was this sort of depraved anti-Semitism that Hitler first used to demonize the Jews, but then extended it to they're being political enemies of the state.
When the overt mass persecution of the Jews and others did finally begin, we are informed by Heiden (0. 456);
"Up until this time, foreign countries, as well as the German public, had been lulled by the National Socialists in the comfortable faith that 'things would not be so bad', that the anti-Jewish agitation was not meant so seriously ...Now it turned out this was a lie. The anti-Semitic agitation was meant seriously. The persecution of political enemies, bestial as it was, was part of the political struggle but the attack on Jews was an attack on a peaceful group".
Something Americans may wish to heed now, as we finally begin to grasp the extent to which Trump wanted to retain power and impose his own brand of racial hegemony.
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