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

The Historiography of the Holocaust, edited by Dan Stone. 2004. Palgrave MacMillan, Hampshire, New York

An Improvised Holocaust. Holocaust Not Unprecedented, Not Limited to Jews, Not Irrational. Jedwabne Preceded the Holocaust

This detailed book has little-known facts, and one might be surprised to learn that we are dealing with an improvised Holocaust. I focus on a few items.

“POLES WERE NEXT FOR THE GAS” AT AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

Andrew Charlesworth makes these thought-provoking remarks, “Gas chamber I at Auschwitz had earth embankments planted with grass, young trees and flowers to conceal its true purpose. Around the gas chambers at Birkenau saplings were planted to screen them, though the screening effect never worked given the size of the saplings. No one has speculated why this was done. Did it mean that the Germans believe that they would need the gas chambers for the Polish population as the trees came to maturity, that is long after all the Jews and Romanies of mainland Europe had been exterminated?” (p. 223).

For more on the future German mass gassing of Poles at Auschwitz-Birkenau, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2021/12/29/holocaust-supremacism-tacitly-repudiated-mass-gassing-of-poles-coming-polish-death-camp-lie-a-variant-max-dimont/

AN IMPROVISED HOLOCAUST. THE HOLOCAUST WAS AMATEURISH

Holocaust supremacists regularly tout the “professionalism” behind the Jews’ Holocaust, as if the fact and significance of a genocide had anything to do how “well” it was conducted. Ironically, the Holocaust was anything but “professional”.

Consider Auschwitz-Birkenau. Charlesworth writes, “The connection between the gas chambers and farmhouses is even more complex. With no budget for mass murder the Germans adapted whatever was at hand in the landscape. At Birkenau the brick barracks and the gas chamber complexes were built from the farmhouses that existed in the area prior to the camp.” (p. 238. Emphasis added).

For more on the amateurish character of the Jews’ Holocaust and the improvised Holocaust, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/german-guilt-diffusion-at-berlin-memorial-fogu/

JEDWABNE NOT HOLOCAUST!

Citing a German-language source, Martin Dean comments, “Karlis Kangeris, for example, argues that the Germans deliberately sought to propagate the imagine of local initiative in the murder of the Jews, in order to justify their own actions, and therefore any German evidence on this point should be treated with great caution.” (p. 137).

Christopher R. Browning points out that the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings of Jews did not acquire a consistent kill-all-Jews character until AFTER the Jedwabne massacre (July 10, 1941). He writes, “Beginning in late July–at different times in different places at different rates–the killing was gradually expanded from adult male Jews to encompass all Jews except indispensable workers–a process nearly complete in the Baltic by the end of 1941, but not yet elsewhere on occupied Soviet territory until 1942.” (p. 185).

For more on the Jedwabne massacre preceding the Holocaust, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2024/05/19/introducing-the-ways-of-jew-killing-victim-non-uniqueness/

JEWS’ HOLOCAUST: A RATIONAL GENOCIDE AFTER ALL

Frank Bajohr writes, “The destruction of the economic existence of the Jews and the step-by-step expropriation of their assets stand as one of the largest transfers of wealth in recent European history, comparable in scope to the gradual elimination of private property in Communist eastern Europe after 1945.” (p. 52). That is saying a lot! Clearly, material gain motivated the German-made Holocaust as much as ideology.

DO NOT MYSTIFY THE HOLOCAUST

Charlesworth throws cold water on the mystification of Auschwitz. He comments, “We have almost come to believe that while the death camps were in operation they were placed shunned by nature through some sense of anthropomorphic repulsion. ‘No birds sang at Auschwitz’ is commonly heard. It is true that in the main prisoner sections no grass grew because it was consumed as soon as the first shoots emerged. One SS officer, however, wrote a book on the birds of Auschwitz, some of which must have been seen perching on the branches of the trees that were dotted through the camp…Wild flowers were growing in Birkenau in 1943-44…” (p. 222).