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

Law, Justice, and History: Debating German State Crimes in the Long Twentieth Century, by Annette Weinke. 2019. Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford

Euthanasia Victims Neglected: Their Numbers. Holocaust Late Start. Admitted WWI German Barbarities

This book, by a German author, packs in a lot of information. I focus on salient matters.

The subject of euthanasia is timely, as today’s European Union, arguably the successor to the Third Reich, is trying to force its Culture of Death on Poland. This includes abortion and euthanasia. The common denominator between the Third Reich and the European Union is the arrogation of a presumed right to decide who has a right to live and who does not, ultimately based on the noxious idea of “life not worthy of life”.

EUTHANASIA VICTIMS NEGLECTED: THE SCALE OF VICTIMHOOD

Weinke identifies the scale of the Nazi German crime of euthanasia, which included tens of thousands of Poles. She writes, “According to the most recent estimates, the ‘euthanasia’ killed approximately 196,000 people within the German Reich. In addition, 80,000 died in facilities in occupied Polish, Soviet, and French territories, and about 20,000 concentration camp prisoners were murdered at ‘euthanasia’ facilities.” (p. 262).

EUTHANASIA VICTIMS NEGLECTED. JEWS FAVORED AND NON-JEWS DISFAVORED: UNLIKE THE JEWS, NON-JEWS NEVER HAD A STRONG LOBBY

By no stretch of the imagination is the search for justice, including reparations, a level playing field. The author comments, “The tendency to revictimize the victims found some form of expression in nearly all the early West German trials, but it hit especially hard with the surviving kin of the murdered sick, mentally ill, and physically handicapped patients, WHO NEVER HAD THE SUPPORT OF A STRONG LOBBY… Despite a few outliers [1948], most cases after that saw acquittals or light sentences of one to four years.” (pp. 125-126. Emphasis added).

THE HOLOCAUST DID NOT BEGIN UNTIL SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER THE GERMAN INVASION OF THE SOVIET UNION (June 22, 1941)

Citing a German-language source, Weinke writes, “[Alfred] Streim’s discovery was remarkable. Almost all the Einsatzgruppen and ‘Special Commando’ officers who had claimed there was a secret Fuhrer order but were questions about it a second time, after the end of the Nuremberg trial sequence, had either retracted or strongly revised their prior claims that such an order had been given…Second, Streim determined that the killings of civilians during the early months of the invasion of the Soviet Union had been undertaken in two phases. In the first, which lasted for several weeks, the killers had almost exclusively targeted Jewish men. Only in the second phase were women and children massacred, after they had been confined to ghettos and camps. For all the painstaking searches for evidence of an advance order to kill, none has been found. Most witnesses who were willing to talk about it did not have clear memories of it. From all this, Streim concluded that a Fuhrer order in the sense of a ‘self-contained’ instruction had apparently never been given.” (pp. 138-139).

For more on the several-week delay in the Holocaust itself, see:

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

On the fact that German mass shootings began with Poles, and not Jews, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/polokaust-early-a-summary-matthaus/

THE WARLIKE HUN: ADMITTED GERMAN IMPERIALISM AND BARBARISM IN WWI

German barbarism did not begin with Hitler! In a rare occurrence, German author Weinke confesses, “One important factor was that the circumstances and character of the best-known incidents were highly unusual by the standards of conduct usually applied within Europe itself. The attacks on Belgium and Luxembourg were only the first in a whole series of blatant international legal violations that seemed almost designed to attract public attention. The first use of poison gas, the bombing of undefended cities from the air, the unlimited U-boat war, the sinking of the Lusitania, the judicial murders of the British nurse Edith Cavell and the merchant ship captain Charles Fyatt, the mass executions of Belgian civilians and the forced deportations of Belgian civilians to labor deployments in Germany…” (pp. 34-35).

The Kaiser was justifiably considered an aggressor and imperialist. Weinke comments, “A full ten years before the war, he had repeatedly told diplomats from both Belgium and Denmark that he would not feel bound by neutrality agreements in the case of war. This history bolstered the supposition that Wilhelm II had personally ordered the German war fury on the western front.” (p. 35).