1945 was named Adolf Hitler Strasse. I work in Munich , a pleasant
Metropolitan city of a little over a million inhabitants, whose Bavarian
charm tends to obscure the fact that this city was the birthplace and
capital of the Nazi movement.
Every day when I go to work I pass by the sites of apartments Hitler lived
In, extant buildings in which decisions were made to murder millions of
Innocent people, and plazas in which book burnings took place, SS troops
paraded and people were executed. The proximity to evil has a way of
concentrating one's attention, of putting a physical reality to the textbook
narratives of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans.
Then the little things start to happen, that over a period of time add up to
something very sinister. I'm on a bus and a high-school boy passes around
Grandpa's red leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf to his friends, who respond
by saying "cool !" He then takes out a VCR tape (produced in Switzerland ) of
the Great Speeches of Joseph Goebbels.
A few weeks later I'm at a business meeting with four young highly-educated
Germans who are polite, charming and soft-spoken, to say the least. When the
subject matter changes to a business deal with a man in New York named
Rubinstein, their nostrils flair, their demeanor attains a threatening mien. And
one of them actually says, and I'm quoting verbatim here: "The problem with
America is that the Jews have all the money." They start laughing and another
one says, "Yeah, all the Jews care about is money."
I found that this type of anti-Semitic reference in my professional dealings
with Germans soon became a leitmotif, (to borrow a term made famous by
Richard Wagner, another notorious German anti-Semite). In my private
meetings with Germans it often happens that they will loosen up after a
while and reveal personal opinions and political leanings that were thought
to have ceased to exist in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. Maybe it's
because I have blond hair and my last name is of German origin that the
Germans feel that I am, or could potentially be, "one of them." It shows how
much they don't understand what it means to be an American.
Whatever the reason, the conversations generally have one or more of these
components:
(1) It was unfortunate that America and Germany fought each other in World
War II because the real enemy was Russia ..
(2) Yes, the Nazis were excessive, but terrible things happen during wars, and
anyway, the scope of the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated by the
American media, which is dominated by Jews.
(3) CNN is controlled by American Jews and is anti-Palestinian. (Yes, I
know it sounds incredible, but even among highly intelligent Germans, even
those with a near-native fluency in English, there is the widespread belief that
the news network founded by Fidel Castro's friend Ted Turner, who was
married to Hanoi Jane Fonda, is a hotbed of pro-Israeli propaganda.)
(4) Almost all Germans were opposed to the Third Reich and nobody in
Germany knew anything about the murder of the Jews, but the Jews
themselves were really responsible for the Holocaust.
(5) Ariel Sharon was worse than Hitler and the Israelis are Nazis. America
supports Israel only because Jews control the American government and
media.
For the first time in my life, then, I became conscious of anti-Semitism.
Sure, anti-Semitism exists elsewhere in the world, but nowhere have the
consequences been as devastating as in Germany . Looking at it as
objectively as possible, 2002 was a banner year for anti-Semitism in Germany .
Synagogues were firebombed, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, the No. 1 best-
selling novel, Martin Walser's Death of a Critic, was a thinly-veiled Roman a
clef, containing a vicious anti-Semitic attack on Germany 's best-known
literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, (who was a survivor of both the
Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz ). The Free Democrat Party unofficially
adopted anti-Semitism as a campaign tactic to attract Germany 's sizeable
Muslim minority; and German revisionist historians began to define German
perpetration of World War II and the Holocaust, not as Crimes against
Humanity, but as early battles, (with regrettable but understandable
excesses), in the Cold War against communism.
The situation is so bad that German Jews are advised not to wear anything in
public that would identify them as Jewish because their safety cannot be
guaranteed.
How can this be? Isn't this the "New Germany" that's gone 60 years without a
Holocaust or even a pogrom, where truth, justice and the German way prevail
amidst economic wealth, a high standard of living that is the envy of their
European neighbors, and a constitution guaranteeing freedom for everyone
regardless of race, creed or national origin?
What's changed? The answer is: absolutely nothing. My thesis is quite simple
While Germany no longer has the military power to enforce the racist
ideology of the Nazis and while all extreme manifestations of Nazism are
officially outlawed, the internal conditions -- that is, the attitudes, world
view and cultural assumptions - that led to the rise of Nazism in Germany
are still present because they constitute the basic components of German
identity.
Nazism was not an aberration; it was the distillation of the German psyche
into its essential elements. External Nazism may have been utterly defeated
in May of 1945; internal Nazism, however, remains, and will always remain, a
potential threat as long as there exists a political and/or cultural entity
known as Germany .
Now hold on a second, I hear many people saying. You can't possibly claim
that Germans are as anti-Semitic today as they were during the years
1933-1945.
It is true that Germany today is much different than during the Third Reich.
What is different is that due to its total defeat by the allies, Germany today
is a client state of America and must do its bidding. That means repressing
overt anti-Semitism. It's bad for business.
The other thing that has changed is that, even though Hitler lost World War
II, he was phenomenally successful in carrying out his ideological agenda.
Germany , indeed virtually all of Europe , is essentially Judenfrei, (free of
Jews), today, due to the efficiency and zeal of the Germans as they
perpetrated the Holocaust during the Third Reich. In fact, a very convincing
case can be made that Nazism is one of the most successful political
programs of all time. It accomplished more of its goals in a shorter amount
of time than any other comparable political movement, and permanently
changed the face and political structure of several continents.
Germany is wealthy, stable, relentlessly bourgeois, and for all intents and
purposes, free of Jews Yes, there is a tiny minority of Jews, mostly
centered in Berlin , and yes, there have been a number of Jews from the
former Soviet Union who have emigrated to Germany , but most of the
immigrants from Russia are not practicing Jews and do little if anything to
promote a unique Jewish-German identity.
The result of all this is that Germans today are able to reap the benefits
of Hitler's anti-Semitic policies while paying lip service to the "need to
remember." Young Fritz doesn't have to be overtly anti-Semitic today because
his grandfather' s generation did such a bang-up job of the Holocaust. There
just aren't that many Jews left to hate any more, and besides, the Germans
have their old buddies, the Arabs, to do their hating for them.
You might call the overwhelming German support for the Palestinians to be a
form of anti-Semitism- by-proxy. The German government has made cash
payments to the State of Israel , as well as to individual Jews, to settle claims
of murder, torture, false imprisonment, slave labor and genocide. Talk to most
Germans and you'll soon discover that they think that the score has been
Settled, that somehow the return of just a portion of what the Germans stole
from Jews is fair recompense for the deliberate murder of millions of people.
If you think the Germans are truly sorry for what they did to the Jews,
think again. There's never been an official "tut mir leid" offered by the
Germans to the victims of the Holocaust and their descendants because that
would admit culpability. Germany has paid off all claims against it without
acknowledging responsibility, in the same way that the Ford Motor Company
engages in recalls of automobiles. It's all done to avoid liability.
I have previously mentioned that Germans overwhelmingly support the
Palestinians as opposed to the Israelis, and that this overwhelming support
represents a form of anti-Semitism-by-proxy. Germans may claim to be
supporting Palestinians because they think they are an "oppressed people”,
but let's be honest - they are supporting the Palestinians and their Arab
handlers because Palestinians and Arabs share the same ideals as the Nazis.
There's a long-standing history of German co-operation with the Arabs. In
1942, Hitler personally assured the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem that as soon as
German forces conquered Great Britain , the Jews in Palestine, (which was
then under control of the British Mandate), would be exterminated.
We should also keep in mind that the Arab terrorists who perpetrated the
9/11 atrocities did their planning in Germany . There are several reasons
for this. The first is the well-known bungling and de-centralized chaos of
the German federal bureaucracy, where literally the "linke" hand doesn't know
what the "rechte" hand is doing.
The second is that Arab terrorists can count on a substantial number of
Germans who share their anti-American and anti-Semitic views. The former
members of the SS and Hitler's praetorian guards, along with their neo-Nazi
supporters, who gather weekly in Munich beer halls, made Osama bin Laden
an "honorary Aryan" after the 9/11 attack.
Mein Kampf is also a best seller in the Arab world, especially in Saudi Arabia,
America 's putative "friend." Indeed, there is very little difference between the
anti-Semitic rantings of Hitler and those of the so-called "spiritual leaders" of
al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Fatah.
The Arabs also owe Hitler and the Germans big time. Hitler killed off the Jews,
and Konrad Adenauer and his "democratic" descendants replaced them with –
the Turks.
Yes, the Turks aren't Arabs, but they are Muslim, and although Turkey is a
member of NATO and has relations with Israel , many Turks identify and
support their radical Arab co-religionists. Turkey remains as fragile a
democracy as Weimar Germany during the 1920s. It wouldn't take much for
Turkey to fall into the dark side of Muslim extremism.
The end result of Muslim immigration into Germany has been twofold:
(1) It allows the Germans to feign liberalism and being open to freedom and
diversity; and
(2) By replacing the Jews they murdered with Muslims, who for the most part
are as viciously anti-Semitic as were the Nazis, the Germans have cynically
assured that those few Jews who remain in Germany will be unable to reassert
political power, even in a minority role.
A final point I would like to make concerning the reasons for the a
resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany is one that many will find at odds
with the prima-facie evidence, or even appear to stretch the boundaries of
common sense. Yet, I ask you to consider carefully my line of reasoning.
In many respects Germany got away with the Holocaust without paying much
of a price. Yes, many Germans died as a result of German perpetration of
World War II and the Holocaust, and yes, there was much physical destruction
in the country, but the situation is like the little boy who steals a cookie from
the tray when it is cooling on the kitchen table. For his efforts he may have
gotten his hand slapped by his mother, but the stolen cookie remains eaten.
After having committed the worst crimes in the history of humankind, the
Germans were allowed to regain their sovereignty after only ten years; their
infrastructure was completely rebuilt, thanks to the generosity of the
American people; and relatively few Germans were brought to trial for their
monstrous crimes. Even those who were tried and convicted, received
relatively short sentences or had those reduced or commuted in general
amnesties.
For example, some members of the Einsatz kommandos, those Germans who,
before the construction of the death camps, hunted and murdered Jews by the
hundreds of thousands, received sentences of as little as five years
imprisonment. If there were true justice in the world, Germany would no longer
exist as a separate country, but would have long ago had its territory divided
up and dispersed among the Allies.
It was an unfortunate historical coincidence that the Cold War began just as
Germany was at last being brought to task for its many crimes and atrocities
extending back to the First World War. The new threat of the Soviet Union
took precedence over a just settling of accounts with Germany . The tragic
result is that many of the countries raped and despoiled by Germany , such as
the Czech Republic and Poland , are just now coming out of decades of
economic decline, while Germany - fat, sassy, arrogant, self-satisfied, and
essentially Judenfrei - has enjoyed four decades of undeserved economic
prosperity.
We can't turn back the clock to redress all of the historical wrongs that
have been committed by the Germans, but there are a number of things that
can be done to assure that Germany can never again be in a position to
threaten the rest of the civilized world.
First and foremost is the realization that, while not all Germans are
anti-Semitic, there is an anti-Semitic tendency within German culture that
extends back to the time of Martin Luther. Germans are instinctively
anti-Semitic in the same way that Americans are instinctively freedom
loving. Anti-Semitism has been and unfortunately remains the default
ideology of the German people.
All things being equal, Germans will instinctively support the enemies of
the State of Israel . Therefore, America will need to monitor closely and be
ready and politically willing to intervene at a moment's notice in German
affairs when it appears that Germany is back-sliding into anti-Semitism.
Additionally, it should be a goal of American foreign policy to oppose and
to accelerate the dismemberment of the European Union. We must not allow
German domination of the EU to accomplish through parliamentary
maneuvering and brokered deals what Hitler and the Germans were unable to
accomplish during the Third Reich.
Given Germany 's resurgent anti-Semitism (and that of France as well), a
strong, German-dominated EU that tolerates and even benignly encourages
anti-Semitism, and is diplomatically allied with the Arab world, is potentially
the greatest threat to Judaism since Nazi Germany - and a major threat to the
United States as well.
The enemies of Israel are the enemies of the United States . Let all Jews
and Americans stand united as we proclaim never again to both the Holocaust
and 9/11.
************************************************************************************************
The following seems to be a commentary on this, written by a Jewish man:
This is the very first post-Holocaust picture of Germany that i have ever
seen published that depicted the post-Holocaust country of the Nazis with
absolute accuracy in every detail. Over the years i have often written about
the reunification of the two Germanys, and described it as one of the
greatest mistakes ever made in history. I wrote that instead, Naziland
should have been divided into the four historical parts that is its nature,
never to rise to brutalize its neighbors or the world again. A crucial and
horrible error!
It took only a few minutes during my first visit back to the land of my
birth for me to realize that the place was clearly no different than when my
parents and I had the good fortune to be among the very last Jews to escape,
literally "minutes before midnight", when the gates of that man-made hell
slammed shut with a resounding clang for the final time, dooming those of my
People left behind, including over 50 of my immediate family.
I recall the words of my beloved grandfather as we came to Breslau to say
our final farewell, knowing that there was no likelihood of ever seeing each
other again. He ran alongside the slowly rolling departing train we were on,
knowing he was bidding a final farewell to his only son and his family.
Even then he optimistically maintained that "no harm will come to us. After all,
I served my country and my Kaiser as an officer, and have always been a good
citizen."
I do not know Mr. Grim, but I salute him for his clear view and thank him
for writing this piece, which, had it been written by a Jew, would never be
believed nor given its proper credence.
Please do forward this article to your lists and see that it gets the widest possible circulation
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