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

The “Goldhagen Effect”: History, Memory, Nazism–Facing the German Past, Edited by Geoff Eley. 2000. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor

Daniel Goldhagen. Jewish Attitudes and the Holocaust. Book Finally Remembers the Non-Jewish Victims of Nazi Germany

This book is much more than an analysis of Daniel Goldhagen and his controversial opinions on the exceptionality of German antisemitism. The Holocaust establishment generally dislikes Goldhagen’s thesis of exceptional German antisemitism, because it is easier to blame non-German, non-Austrian nations for the Holocaust if all European antisemitism is deemed more or less equal.

I focus on some long-term issues.

THE “GOLDHAGEN EFFECT” REJECTS DE-GERMANIZED NAZIS

Atina Grossman writes, “Goldhagen’s stress on free agency and his sharp questions about motivations clearly resonated among listeners accustomed to therapeutic self-reflexivity. Many actually relieved to have the perpetrators named as ‘Germans’ rather than Nazis.” (pp. 114-115). The foregoing statement tacitly affirms the fact that the artificially constructed dichotomy between “Nazis” and “Germans” is very real.

BLAMING POLES FOR GERMAN CRIMES IS ENDORSED BY JEWS! A CORNERSTONE OF ISRAELI POLICIES

Omer Bartov makes this bombshell comment, “The demonization of the Germans, often seen as representative of most other European gentiles, and especially the Poles–whose obverse side, namely, the state’s official recognition of ‘righteous gentiles’, merely highlights the alleged essential characteristics of the majority–has always served as a fundamental legitimization for Israeli policies, indeed for the very existence of the state.” (p. 76. Emphasis added).

That’s quite a statement! Not only do Jews demonize Poles more than they demonize Germans (who, after all, were the ones that had killed the 6,000,000 Jews), but the Jews even use Polish rescuers of Jews as a foil to reinforce their anti-Polish prejudices. In other words, Jews just take the Polish rescue of Jews and, instead of appreciating it, just twist it into something that confirms their prejudices about Poles. Talk about a perfidious, ungrateful people.

What’s more, this revealing Jewish Polonophobia is no private prejudice. It is one of the pillars of the State of Israel!

For more on the fact that Jews commonly hate Poles more than Jews hate Germans, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/07/29/yishai-sarid-jews-hate-poles-more-than-jews-hate-germans-and-germans-buy-jewish-forgiveness-jedwabne-exhumation-forbidden-pretext-destroyed-genocidal-nakba-naqba-wished-sarid/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/german-guilt-diffusion-jews-endorse-segev/

FRENCH JEW CLAUDE LANZMANN WHITEWASHES THE FRENCH AND BLAMES THE POLES

Omer Bartov writes, “But it is still possible that one reason for the success of Claude Lanzmann’s no less extraordinary 1985 film Shoah (whose title has subsequently become the name commonly used in France for the Holocaust) was that it avoided any mention of French collaboration and instead concentrated on Polish brutality and indifference.” (p. 61). This precisely confirms what many Poles have been saying for decades!

JEWS GET TOP BILLING IN GERMANY

The Berlin Holocaust Memorial is ostentatiously huge. But so is the Jewish Museum. Atina Grossman writes, “…the Jewish Museum, just inaugurated in Berlin, is the world’s largest.” (p. 128). Once again, Jews make the biggest splash.

JEWISH HOLOCAUSTIANITY

Consider first the American Jews. Bartov comments, “Within the Jewish-American community, for instance, the conception that the danger of a Holocaust for the Jewish people has not passed serves as a central component of consciousness in the struggle for the continuation of a particular Jewish identity. No wonder that many see the Holocaust as a kind of new ‘secular religion’ there.” (p. 68).

Much the same holds for Israeli Jews. Bartov remarks, “Israeli national identity is grounded in two events, the Holocaust and the conflict with the Arabs.” (p. 71).

Now if Jews want to make the Holocaust their substitute religion, it is one thing. Forcing it on everybody else (as through the Holocaust virtual monopoly in education) is quite another.

THERE WAS MUCH MORE TO NAZISM THAN ANTISEMITISM AND THE HOLOCAUST!

With or without Goldhagen’s blame-German-antisemitism thesis, Nazism is customarily reduced to its conduct against Jews and the ignoring or minimization of other victims. This is what Holocaust supremacism is all about. In contrast, Geoff Eley writes, “The Third Reich’s dehumanizing practices attacked an ever-expanding aggregation of ‘community aliens’. Under Otto-Georg Thierack (appointed Minister of Justice, August 1942), for example, over 20,000 state prisoners were transferred into the camps for ‘annihilation through labor’, some two-thirds of whom perished. They included ‘racial’ categories (Jews, Poles, Sinti, and Roma), but also ‘asocials’ convicted of criminal offenses and considered ‘unreformable.’ This system’s operation bursts the explanatory bounds of Goldhagen’s model of an ‘eliminationist’ antisemitism descended from the nineteenth century.” (p. 20).