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

Beyond “Ordinary Men”, by Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, Jurgen Matthaus, and Mark W. Hornburg, eds. 2019. Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh, Leiden

Ordinary Men. Poles and Not Only Jews Were Existential Enemies of the Third Reich. Auschwitz Jewish Monopoly Explained

This book is an anthology of articles commenting upon, and extending, Christopher R. Browning and his Ordinary Men. I focus on a few salient issues.

POLES AND NOT ONLY JEWS WERE RACIAL ENEMIES AND EXISTENTIAL ENEMIES OF HITLER”S GERMANY–FROM THE VERY BEGINNING

Much has been said about Jews as existential enemies of the Nazis, as if other Nazi-targeted peoples were not existential enemies. Actually, there is no clear boundary between the different contrived categories of enemies. In fact, by their very nature, racial enemies are existential enemies! The following makes this clear:

Karl L. Schleunes discusses Ernst von Heydebrand, who was active in the early 1930’s, shortly before the Nazis came to power. Heydebrand singled out the Poles as well as the Jews, as pointed out by Schleunes, who writes, “Heydebrand refined his thinking about racial matters in a book published in 1933 (written in 1932) when he was still head of the Domestic Section of the Leadership Corps. Titled German Legal Renewal in the Spirit of National Socialism, it argued that the German people were threatened by four distinctly alien racial groupings: Jews, Poles, Wends, and Gypsies. Jews, of course, were deemed the most dangerous. But the Slavic Poles and Wends, to say nothing of the Gypsies, were likewise described as polluting Aryan purity. The mixing of their inferior blood with that of their Aryan superiors demanded not only their legal exclusion from citizenship, but more important, a strict prohibition against their marriage to Aryans or their engagement in sexual relations with them. But protecting against pollution from alien blood was only the beginning.” (p. 130).

Now, when it comes to Jews as prime enemies, we must remember that Jews were a higher-profile enemy, as they had international influence, while Poles and Gypsies generally did not. In any case, the Nazi movement unambiguously reckoned Poles, as well as Jews, as special enemies. This was not some kind of secondary or war-related antagonism, as it did not begin when Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939. It existed from the very beginning–before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. This explains why Germany’s Poles, and not only German Jews, were persecuted just as soon as the Nazis came to power. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2020/07/21/poles-and-not-only-jews-persecuted-by-the-nazis-from-the-very-beginning-cyganski/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/polokaust-as-exterminatory-as-holocaust-majer/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/nazis-saw-jews-and-poles-similarly-winiewicz/

THE HOLOCAUST RULES OVER PUBLIC MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan makes some eyebrow-raising comments. He writes, “Hardly acknowledged as a distinctive crime outside Jewish survivor communities in 1945, the gradual evolution of the Holocaust and Auschwitz as a universal moral standard and symbol of evil is a largely unprecedented phenomenon. None of the previous or subsequent genocides in their targeting of racialized minorities, including the Germans’ extermination of Herero and Namaqua populations in today’s Namibia or the Ottoman Empire’s destruction of Armenians, had a remotely similar impact on supranational memory cultures and moral universalisms.” (p. 174). No kidding!

The drift is unmistakable: It is not, and never has been, about the plight of minorities! It’s all about the Jews. What’s more, the genocides of non-Jews are not quite as immoral as the genocide of the Jews (Holocaust).

Let us look at this from another angle. Clearly, this is a zero-sum game. Even in the unlikely event that a non-Jewish genocide gets the same attention as the Holocaust, it is even less likely that it will be received as having the same moral significance as the Jews’ Holocaust.  Such are the fruits of decades of Holocaust indoctrination.

WHY JEWS MONOPOLIZE AUSCHWITZ AND WHY POLES ARE SHUT OUT

Note, from the quote above, how Auschwitz is folded right into the Holocaust and its presumably valid status as “a universal moral standard and symbol of evil”. The sacralizing of Auschwitz, exclusively in terms of the Jews’ Holocaust, is telling. It explains why Jews monopolize it, why they tell Poles what they can and cannot do at Auschwitz (e. g, the Carmelite convent), and why some Jews, as much as possible, try to keep the Auschwitz Polish victims from reaching public consciousness.