Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, by Richard Rhodes. 2003

The Polokaust and the Holocaust Were Intertwined in Nazi Ideology and Practice

This book mixes theory and history. It covers the development of Nazi ideology, details about the Einsatzgruppen operations in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, the unfolding Polokaust and Holocaust, biographical details of top Nazis, etc. It contains many photos.

THE DEEP, PRE-NAZI ROOTS OF THE POLOKAUST

Long before the Nazis came to power in Germany, various Germans thought of dispossessing the Slavic peoples for purposes of German LEBENSRAUM. (pp. 82-87). Shortly after the conquest of Poland in 1939, the Germans murdered over 16,000 Polish citizens, mostly ethnic Poles. (p. 6).

ALTHOUGH THE JEWS’ HOLOCAUST GETS NEARLY ALL THE ATTENTION, THE NAZIS MURDERED MORE SLAVS THAN JEWS

In fact, Jews constituted one-third of the victims of the Nazis. The Slavic untermenschen were the main victims–3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens, and 3.3 million Soviet POWs. (pp. 156-157). Himmler’s initial plans for the conquered USSR included death by starvation of 20-30 million Jews and Slavs. (pp. 17-18; see also GENERALPLAN OST, pp. 239-243). However, the German defeat at Stalingrad forced the discontinuation of systematic genocidal plans against the Slavs. (p. 264).

THE HOLOCAUST AND THE POLOCAUST WERE INTERTWINED IN NAZI IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICE

Although most of the victims of the Einsatzgruppen were Jews, the author does not fixate himself in a Judeocentric mindset. He realizes that the Nazi policies towards Jews went beyond anti-Semitism. They followed from a mentality that divided peoples into “worthy” and “unworthy”, with the latter including not only Jews but also the handicapped, etc. (p. 95).

JEWISH GERMANOPHILIA HELPED KEEP JEWS IN DENIAL ABOUT THE UNFOLDING HOLOCAUST

Many Jews in the USSR were unafraid of the Nazi invaders because they had remembered the WWI-era Germans as benevolent towards the Jews (pp. 149-150), because the Soviet press had avoided any negative publicity of the Nazis during the time of the 1939-1941 German-Soviet pact (p. 173), and because news of the Jew-killings travelled slowly.

AUTHOR RICHARD RHODES A FUNCTIONALIST: THE HOLOCAUST CRYTALLIZED GRADUALLY

The Nazi priority of killing Jews stemmed in part from Hitler’s belief that Jews were “the mightiest counterpart to the Aryan”. (p. 95). [The informed reader may realize that, among Europeans, Jews and Germans were rivals for first and second place in many economic, industrial, and scientific endeavors.] However, it is untrue that the Nazis had some kind of an always-present, singular obsession with destroying Jews.

In fact, for the first six weeks after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Einsatzgruppen units mainly killed Communists and Jewish men. The order to expand the shootings to include Jewish women and children did not come until late July 1941 (p. 164), which was more than a month after the Nazi German invasion of its erstwhile Soviet Communist ally. The large-scale dispatching of Jews to gas chambers began much later.

WANNSEE DEMYSTIFIED

The author believes that the “11 million Jews’ figure in the Wannsee Accords was probably a Nazi fantasy. (p. 237). Against the common misconception (mystification of the Holocaust) that most of the eventual 6 million murdered Jews died in gas chambers, Rhodes showed that most of them died from privation and shooting. (p. 156).

THE JEDWABNE MYTH–YET AGAIN

Unfortunately, Rhodes uncritically accepts Jan T. Gross shoddy research and his exclusive blame of Poles for the Jedwabne massacre. (p. 122). In actuality, according even to some Jewish sources, the Germans were the main killers of Jedwabne’s Jews. See the Peczkis review of: The Warriors: My Life As A Jewish Soviet Partisan (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust):

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/jedwabne-german-deed-zissman/