Sunday, April 27, 2008

5 million non-Jewish victims? (Part 1)

[Updated on 04.04.2012 to replace broken links to the former RODOH forum.]

[Update, 25.11.2018: I corrected the information about the time at which Europe-wide genocide was decided upon according to Christopher Browning. Thanks to Sergey Romanov for bringing this to my attention.]

Part 2

When running a Google search for information about non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder, one of the first pages to show up is this one, which is headed “Five Million Forgotten” and links to a site called “Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust • Five Milion Forgotten”, hosted by Terese Pencak Schwartz. This site is also linked to by The Holocaust History Project (link # 22) and referred to there as being “A site focusing on the 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust”.



According to Mrs. Schwartz,

”Eleven million precious human lives were lost during the Holocaust. Five million of these were non-Jewish. Three million were Polish Christians and Catholics.”

Under the subheading “Who Were the Five Million Non-Jewish Holocaust Victims?”, Mrs. Schwartz writes about Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses (“For Their Religious Belief, They Stood Firm”), Rom[a] Gypsies (“For Their Race They Were Executed”), opponents of the Nazis on political, humanitarian or religious grounds (“Men and Women of Courage From All Nations”, “Priests and Pastors Died for their Beliefs”), homosexuals, disabled people, sterilized black children and spouses of persecution victims who chose death before divorce. A breakdown of the two million victims who, according to the above-quoted introductory statement, belonged to the categories other than “Polish Christians and Catholics”, is not provided here, but some partial figures are mentioned (“Half a million Gypsies, almost the entire Eastern European Gypsy population, was wiped out during the Holocaust”; “Between 5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals died in concentration camps during the Holocaust”.) Regarding disabled people, it is stated that “During Hitler's ‘cleansing program’, thousands of people with various handicaps were deemed useless and simply put to death like dogs and cats”. Regarding non-Jewish Poles, there is a link to an article by Edward Lucaire, a freelance writer, mentioning “three million dead Polish Christians who, by the way, vastly outnumbered the combined number of dead Jehovah’s Witnesses (2,000), Gypsies (400,000), homosexuals (10,000 at the most, according to Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life), handicapped, etc., usually cited in Holocaust literature”. This statement, as well as the partial figures mentioned by Mrs. Schwartz herself, suggests that the combined number of victims from Mrs. Schwartz’s categories other than “Polish Christians and Catholics” is significantly lower than the two million implied by her above-quoted statement. Indeed it is, as will be detailed in Part 2 of this article, where I shall also refer to sources showing that the “three million dead Polish Christians” mentioned by Lucaire and Schwartz are an exaggeration, resulting from an improper calculation methodology.

So where did Mrs. Schwartz obtain the total of five million non-Jewish “lives lost during the Holocaust”?

This figure apparently goes back to Simon Wiesenthal, who “invented” it “in order to make the non-Jews feel like they are part of us” – at least this is what Wiesenthal, according to a lecture by Walter Reich about “The Use and Abuse of Holocaust Memory”, told Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer. Wiesenthal’s statement is also referred to in Michael Berenbaum’s obituary to Simon Wiesenthal, published in Forward in September 2005:

Actually, Wiesenthal's most well-known philosophical battle was with Wiesel. The two squared off indirectly in the late 1970s over the question of who were the true victims of the Holocaust; that is, was the Holocaust a Jewish event or a universal event? Wiesel argued that the Holocaust was a uniquely Jewish experience, settling the role of non-Jews in the Holocaust with the turn of a phrase: "While not all victims were Jews, all Jews were victims."
Wiesenthal, in contrast, argued that the Holocaust was the death of 11 million people, 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews. The figure was invented: If we consider all civilian non-Jewish deaths, then it is too small; if we consider only those who died at the hands of the Nazi killing apparatus, then it is too large.[emphasis mine – RM] But the central point was Wiesenthal's belief that the inclusion of non-Jews was essential to his postwar commitment. Nations had to feel that they had lost their own if they were to bring the war criminals to justice.


What is the meaning of the term “Nazi killing apparatus”, as used by the author of the above?

The term evokes the image of systematic mass killing carried out by specialized killers, such as practiced in the Nazis’ extermination camps and the mobile killing operations of the Einsatzgruppen and other German formations. The former, according to Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, claimed “up to 2,700,000” Jewish victims, while around 1,300,000 Jews were killed in open-air shootings. Hilberg estimated a further 150,000 Jews killed by Nazi Germany’s Romanian and Croatian allies, 150,000 who died in “camps with tolls in the low tens of thousands and or below” (including “camps with killing operations” and concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Dachau, Stutthof) and 800,000 Jewish victims of “Ghettoization and general occupation”, his figures adding up to ca. 5.1 million victims of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry.

Which of these Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and mass murder could be considered to have died “at the hands of the Nazi killing apparatus” in the sense of Mr. Berenbaum’s above-quoted statement?

All of them, as Mr. Berenbaum, while stating that Wiesenthal’s figure of 5 million non-Jews is too high “if we consider only those who died at the hands of the Nazi killing apparatus“, does not make the same reservation in regard to the 6 million Jews he also mentions, thereby implying that he considers all 6 million to have “died at the hands of the Nazi killing apparatus”.

A significant part of the Jewish victims of what Hilberg calls “ghettoization and general occupation” died before the Nazis embarked on the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews, known as the “final solution” of the “Jewish question”. Genocidal killing of Jews by the Nazis began at the earliest in August 1941, when, as pointed out by German historian Christian Gerlach on page 63 of his book Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, German SS and police units in the occupied Soviet territories started also killing Jewish women and children in large numbers and then progressed to wiping out entire Jewish communities. Christopher Browning makes a case that the decision to wipe out all of Europe's Jews was taken between 18 September and 25 October 1941 (The Origins of the Final Solution, 2004 Arrow Books, pp. 424-428), while Gerlach maintains that Hitler’s "go ahead" for genocide on a Europe-wide level was given on December 12, 1941 and Peter Longerich holds that “A further escalation of the extermination policy can be observed in the period between May and June 1942” and that ”in July 1942 a comprehensive programme to systematically murder the Jews in the areas under German control had been implemented”. Yet long before the earliest of these dates, and even longer before deportations to Treblinka extermination camp started in late July 1942, mortality from starvation and disease had been high in the Warsaw Ghetto:

In November 1940 the ghetto was sealed off. There were already 445 deaths in the ghetto. The death toll thereafter rose rapidly: in January 1941 to 898, in April to 2,061, in June to 4,290 and in August to 5,560. Then the monthly figure fluctuated between 4,000-5,000 for as long as the ghetto existed.


In other ghettos the situation was similar:

The intolerable population density, inadequate hygienic and sanitary facilities – in the Lodz Ghetto 95% of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers – almost complete lack of medical supplies, absence of fuel for heating, and starvation rations, combined to produce conditions in which sickness and epidemics were inevitable. Lice plagued the ghetto population. In the Kutno Ghetto, which the Germans nicknamed Krepierlager ("Pegging out Camp"), between March and December 1941, 42% of all deaths were typhus patients. The overall mortality rate during that period in Kutno was almost ten times the pre-war rate, for other contagious diseases were also commonplace.


On page 96 of The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985 student edition (quoted on this HC forum thread), Raul Hilberg wrote the following:

The Jewish community of Poland was dying. In the last prewar year, 1938, the monthly average death rate of Lodz was 0.09 percent. In 1941, the rate jumped to 0.63 percent, and during the first six months of 1942 it was 1.49. The same pattern, compressed into a single year, may be noted for the Warsaw ghetto, where the monthly death rate during the first half of 1941 was 0.63, and in the second half 1.47. In their rise to this plateau, the two cities were almost alike, even though Lodz was a hermetically closed ghetto, which had its own currency and in which the black market was essentially the product of internal barter, whereas Warsaw was engaged in extensive smuggling "quietly tolerated" by the Germans. The birthrates in both cities were extremely low: Lodz had one birth for every twenty deaths, while in Warsaw at the beginning of 1942 the ratio was 1:45. The implication of these figures is quite clear. A population with a net loss of one percent a month shrinks to less than five percent of its original size in just twenty-four years.


Can the Jews who died at this rate of starvation and disease be considered to have died “at the hands of the Nazi killing apparatus”, independently of whether (as Hilberg, who in the paragraph after the one quoted above stated that the pace of Jewish dying was “not fast enough” for the German decision-makers, seems to have believed) or not (as corresponds to the views of Browning, Gerlach and Longerich, who in my opinion have the evidence in their favor) the Nazis had already intended to wipe out the Jews of Europe long before they unleashed their mobile killing squads against all Soviet Jews and built extermination camps to which Jews from all of Nazi-dominated Europe were deported, rather than Nazi policies towards Jews having gradually become more radical until they reached the stage of genocide, in August 1941 at the earliest?

They can, if Mr. Berenbaum’s term “killing apparatus” is interpreted in a broader sense than that immediately suggested by its wording, to include not only systematic direct killing but also deaths due to living conditions deliberately imposed upon a population in the knowledge that they will lead to a huge increase of mortality, whether or not the purpose of this imposition is the eradication or reduction of the population in question.

Besides submitting them to deadly living conditions, the Nazis were actively killing Jews already before what I consider the earliest start date of their Europe-wide genocidal program, the one assumed by Browning. On page 10 of Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, translated in my article One might think that …, Gerlach mentions “several ten thousand Jewish and non-Jewish Poles” murdered by the Nazis until May 1941. A recent exhibition has shown documentation about crimes committed by the Wehrmacht in Poland in September/October 1939, including the following (my translation):

Polish Jews with their traditional clothes and hair and beard cuts became free game for German soldiers. Harassments and arbitrary shootings of Jews were the order of the day.


One such case is recorded in the official minutes of a meeting between the Army Commander-In-Chief and Reinhard Heydrich on 22 September 1939, quoted on page 63 of Helmut Krausnick’s book Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen. Die Truppen des Weltanschauungskrieges 1938-1942 (1985 Frankfurt a.M.): at Pulutsk, 80 Jews were “shot down by the troops in a bestial manner” (“niedergeknallt in viehischer Weise”). In another incident near Rozan on the Narew, 50 Jews, who during the day had been employed in mending a bridge, were in the evening pushed into a synagogue and shot down “without reason” (Krausnick, page 66). A report from the leader of an Einsatzkommando mentioned that the city of Bromberg was “completely free of Jews” because during the “mopping-up action” on 11 November 1939 all Jews who had not fled before had been “beseitigt”, i.e. “eliminated” (Krausnick, page 73).

Just like the victims of Nazi-imposed privation in the ghettos, the Jewish victims of these and other early massacres, which were not yet part of a program of systematic annihilation, are obviously considered by Mr. Berenbaum as having “died at the hands of the Nazi killing apparatus”, and this is arguably correct if the term “killing apparatus” is understood as also including murderous “ethnic cleansing” and/or random massacres resulting from race-hatred inculcated into their perpetrators by a state-controlled propaganda machinery. State responsibility for mass murder resulting from such indoctrination is pointed out in Matthew Cooper’s The Phantom War, as follows (emphases added):

The history of German rule in occupied Russia in general, and of its security measures in particular, also reveals much about Hitler’s responsibility for the immeasurable atrocities that took place during the war. Certainly, although he gave orders of great cruelty concerning the policies to be pursued towards the Russian people, they included no mention of any desire to commit genocide. Perhaps, therefore, it could be argued that he had no intention of allowing his political officials and soldiers to engage in the destruction of twenty million Russians, of whom at least 750,000 were Jews - the enormity of which figures becomes clear when it is realized that the number of Soviet soldiers and partisans killed in battle amounted to around one third of the total. Perhaps, even, it might be said that the Führer had no knowledge that such wholesale slaughter, initiated solely by subordinates such as Heinrich Himmler, was taking place. Perhaps. But what can be established beyond doubt is that it was Hitler, and he alone, who created the conditions whereby such evil could be done. He shaped the mentality of the invaders. Without his diatribes against the Slavs and the Jews - the Untermensch - and without his orders, or those emanating at his instigation and with his approval from his military staffs, the High Commands of the Wehrmacht and the Army, the atrocities perpetrated by his SS men and his soldiers would not have taken place. As Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Chief of the SS Anti-Partisan formations, was to tell the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg after the war: If, for decades, a doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race, and the Jews not even human at all, then such an explosion is inevitable. For that, Hitler must bear responsibility.


When in late 1941 German occupation forces in Serbia launched a campaign of murderous reprisals against the civilian population to quash the emerging resistance movement, Jews and Gypsies were frequent, and at a certain stage even preferential targets of reprisal killings. The following is an excerpt from Christopher Browning’s article Germans and Serbs: The Emergence of Nazi Antipartisan Policies in 1941; emphases are mine:

While the Serbs received a partial reprieve from German terror, this was no help to the Jews and Gypsies. If the Germans could conceive that not all Serbs were Communists and that the random shooting of innocent Serbs would damage German interests, they had no doubt at all that Jews were anti-German and that the Gypsies were no different from the Jews. And if more care had to be exercised in selecting Serbian hostages, the pressure to find hostages elsewhere to meet the 100:1 quota was that much greater. The new German policy stated succintly: As a matter of principle it must be said that Jews and Gypsies in general represent an element of insecurity and thus a danger to public order and safety. That is why it is a matter of principle in each case to put all Jewish men and all male Gypsies at the disposal of the troops as hostages. The fate of the male Jews and Gypsies in Serbia was sealed, and their execution by army firing squad was completed by early November.
At the same time the tide of battle in Serbia turned in the Germans favor, and by December the partisans had retreated to the mountainous regions of Bosnia and Croatia beyond the Serbian border. They would continue their struggle against the Germans elsewhere but would not return in force to Serbia until 1944. With the first phase of the partisan war in Serbia at an end, the reprisal body count stood at about 15,000, of which some 4,500 5,000 were Jews and Gypsies.


Also in the Soviet Union after 22 June 1941, Jews were targeted by retaliations for attacks on German troops, before systematic mass killing by the Einsatzgruppen and other formations made them unavailable for these purposes. The following are my translations of diary entries from German soldiers, quoted in Hannes Heer, Tote Zonen. Die Deutsche Wehrmacht an der Ostfront., page 101:

From the diary of Corporal Werner Bergholz:

(…)2.7.[1941] In the night two of our guards were shot. A hundred people were executed for this. They were probably all Jews.


From the diary of Major Reich:

2.7.1941. Shot Jews. 3.7. We get going. 22 Russian soldiers, some of them wounded, are shot in a peasant’s yard.(…)9.7. Commissar liquidated by MG-detachment.(…)12.7. Neat, orderly houses. A grazing shot on my helmet from the back. Three villagers must die for this.(…)13.7. A German air force soldier killed, 50 Jews shot.
.

Like the previously mentioned victims of privation in ghettos and random brutality in occupied Poland, the Jewish victims of reprisal killings in Serbia and the Soviet Union were targets of Nazi violence against non-combatants that was not (yet) aimed at extermination, not part of the “final solution” of the “Jewish question”. Yet all these victims are obviously considered by Mr. Berenbaum as having “died at the hands of the Nazi killing apparatus”, just like the Jews killed in extermination camps or in the systematic mobile killing operations of the Einsatzgruppen and other SS and police formations. This understanding is correct under a broad definition of the term “killing apparatus” that includes not only victims of an extermination program, but also other non-combatants killed deliberately (in that their deaths were intended or at least foreseen and not minded) by violence that was not part of military actions, not meant to achieve military objectives or not justified by military necessity, i.e. by actions or omissions that were criminal and considered to be criminal under the domestic laws and international law in force at the time of their perpetration.

Now, how many non-Jews actually died at the hands of the “Nazi killing apparatus”, as defined above? While a more or less exact number is difficult if not impossible to establish, the order of magnitude demonstrably exceeds the five million “invented” by Simon Wiesenthal. In the next part of this article I shall attempt a country-by-country tabulation of non-Jews who perished through criminal violence by Nazi Germany and its allies, covering all countries that either belonged to or were at least partially occupied by the Axis powers.


Part 2

8 comments:

  1. Jehovahs Witnesses:
    Victims of the Nazi Era


    Jehovah's Witnesses endured intense persecution under the Nazi regime. Actions against the religious group and its individual members spanned the Nazi years 1933 to 1945. Unlike Jews and Sinti and Roma ("Gypsies"), persecuted and killed by virtue of their birth, Jehovah's Witnesses had the opportunity to escape persecution and personal harm by renouncing their religious beliefs. The courage the vast majority displayed in refusing to do so, in the face of torture, maltreatment in concentration camps, and sometimes execution, won them the respect of many contemporaries.


    Even before 1933, despite their small numbers, door-to-door preaching and the identification of Jehovah's Witnesses as heretics by the mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches made them few friends. Individual German states and local authorities periodically sought to limit the group's proselytizing activities with charges of illegal peddling. There were also outright bans on Jehovah's Witnesses' religious literature, which included the booklets The Watch Tower and The Golden Age. The courts, by contrast, often ruled in favor of the religious minority. Meanwhile, in the early 1930s, Nazi brownshirted storm troopers, acting outside the law, broke up Bible study meetings and beat up, individual Witnesses.

    After the Nazis came to power, persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses intensified . Small as the movement was, it offered, in scholar Christine King's words, a "rival ideology" and "rival center of loyalty" to the Nazi movement. Although honest and as law–abiding as their religious beliefs allowed, Jehovah's Witnesses saw themselves as citizens of Jehovah's Kingdom; they refused to swear allegiance to any worldly government. They were not pacifists, but as soldiers in Jehovah's army, they would not bear arms for any nation.

    Jehovah's Witnesses, in Germany as in the United States, had refused to fight in World War I. This stance contributed to hostility against them in a Germany still wounded by defeat in that war and fervently nationalistic, attempting to reclaim its previous world stature. In Nazi Germany, Jehovah's Witnesses refused to raise their arms in the "Heil, Hitler!" salute; they did not vote in elections; they would not join the army or the German Labor Front (a Nazi affiliate, which all salaried employees were required to join after 1934).


    By 1939, an estimated 6,000 Witnesses (including those from incorporated Austria and Czechoslovakia) were detained in prisons or camps. Some Witnesses were tortured by police in attempts to make them sign a declaration renouncing their faith, but few capitulated.

    In response to Nazi efforts to destroy them, the worldwide Jehovah's Witness organization became a center of spiritual resistance against the Nazis.


    The children of Jehovah's Witnesses also suffered. In classrooms, teachers ridiculed children who refused to give the "Heil, Hitler!" salute or sing patriotic songs. Classmates shunned and beat up young Witnesses. Principals expelled them from schools. Families were broken up as authorities took children away from their parents and sent them to reform schools, orphanages, or private homes, to be brought up as Nazis.

    After 1939 most active Jehovah's Witnesses were incarcerated in prisons or concentration camps. Some had fled Germany. In the camps, all prisoners wore markings of various shapes and colors so that guards and camp officers could identify them by category. Witnesses were marked by purple triangular patches.

    In the Nazi years, about 10,000 Witnesses, most of them of German nationality, were imprisoned in concentration camps. After 1939, small numbers of Witnesses from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland (some of them refugees from Germany) were arrested and deported to Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and other concentration camps. An estimated 2,500 to 5,000 Witnesses died in the camps or prisons. More than 200 men were tried by the German War Court and executed for refusing military service.

    During the liberation of the camps, Jehovah's Witnesses continued their work, moving among the survivors, making converts.

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  2. Henry Friedlander argues that there were only three groups whose deaths at Nazi hands can be classified as genocide - Jews, Gypsies and the disabled - as these groups were the ones defined in purely racial terms. Friedlander's criterion is far too narrow - and ignores the ways in which Soviets were described as 'Asiatic' and Slavs were destined for genocide after the Jews had been finished off. However, this still leaves an unanswered question as to where we draw the line between genocidal killing and pragmatic murder for strategic/military ends. I'm not sure that such a line could ever be done unambiguously. There will be some groups who could have been killed on either, or both, grounds, so it is not a simple case of "either genocide or wartime pragmatism".

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  3. There is no controversy here. All of these people died at the hand of a devil. What I think is confusing to folks is that the "burnt sacrifice" was labled as Jewish, because the Jews per capita were a smaller race of people versus the Roman Christians. Statistically there were less Jews and they were almost completely wiped off the planet. So, Hitler planned to estinguish them as a priority and almost accomplished it. This DOES NOT mean that everyone else who the Nazi's murdered should not be recognized in this atrocity. History kept this truth from all of us. Hitler started with the Jews and planned on killing the rest of the world who wasn't a Nazi. This included iranians. The same regime who says the holocaust never happened.

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  4. Roberto, looking again at Berenbaum's quote, I think he has simply made an 'apples v oranges' error when comparing the 6m Jewish Holocaust deaths with the non-Jewish deaths inflicted by the 'Nazi killing apparatus'. I think he meant the 'killing apparatus' to only include direct killing (hanging, gassing, shooting, etc) and not starvation and deliberate expose to disease, forgetting that a significant portion of the 6m died by the latter means.

    This error probably occurs repeatedly in Holocaust discussions. For example, I'm sure that Wiesenthal never considered the starvation of Leningrad when concocting his 5m fiction. The error is so ingrained that people like Berenbaum make it automatically. Your blogs are an important start in addressing that flaw in current Holocaust approaches.

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  5. >Your blogs are an important start >in addressing that flaw in >current Holocaust approaches.

    Thanks, Jon. That was one of my aims in writing them.

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  6. HIDDEN FACTS REVISIONISTS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THE JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES AND THE JEWS, NAZIS, HOLOCAUST, AND WW2.

    In the late 1960s, the WatchTower Society commissioned an exact and comprehensive history of Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany, which was to include exact and precise statistics for the Holocaust period, which were to be extracted from not only government archives, but, more importantly, from the WatchTower Cult's own METICULOUS RECORDS in Germany and other European countries. That report was published by the WatchTower Cult in 1973.

    Apparently, the WatchTower Cult was greatly disappointed in the Holocaust statistics uncovered by its own legal researchers, because that report has rarely been cited by the WatchTower Cult in its' own Holocaust-related articles published subsequent to the 1973 report. Instead of using its' own documented exact statistics, both the WatchTower Cult and individual Jehovah's Witnesses routinely cite inflated statistics from non-WatchTower sources whose numbers are inflated "guestimates", or are inflated numbers from unreliable and inaccurate records.

    Accordingly to the WatchTower Cult's own 1973 report, only 6019 Jehovah's Witnesses were arrested in Germany during the 12 year Nazi period of 1933 through 1945. Only 2000 German JWs were ever sent to concentration camps. Only 203 were executed. Another 432 German JWs died while in custody in all German jails, prisons, and camps.

    Exact numbers for other Nazi-occupied countries are unknown. Even Holocaust experts who inflate German JW statistics guestimate that only
    600-800 non-German JWs from Nazi-occupied countries were ever sent to concentration camps. Mortality figures are not known.

    Thus, only 2600-2800 Jehovah's Witnesses were ever sent to Nazi concentration camps. Death statistics are not known, but can be reasonably estimated to be in the 500-700 range. The JW TOTAL for 1933-1945 is about HALF the DAILY AVERAGE of Jewish deaths -- 1370 every single day for the 12 year Nazi period.

    During this same 1933-1945 time period, there were more Jehovah's Witnesses arrested and jailed in the United States than in Germany. In fact, just during 1941-1945, approximately 4500 American Jehovah's Witnesses men "elected" to go to prison rather than serve in the U.S. Military and help stop Nazis atrocities against their fellow JWs.

    Approximately 3000 of those 4500 American JWs were even offered "conscientious objector" status, in which they were offered "non-combatant" work as a substitute for military service, but 99% of those 3000 American JWs refused to help out even that much.

    It is an insult to memorialize the small handful of anti-societal, trouble-seeking Jehovah's Witnesses alongside the 6,000,000+ Jewish Holocaust victims given that Jehovah's Witnesses view the Jewish people much as did the Nazis.

    The WatchTower Cult preaches its own version of "replacement theology", which teaches that YHWH rejected the Jews as His "chosen people", and
    replaced the Jewish people with today's "Jehovah's Witnesses". The WatchTower Cult teaches that modern-day Jews are YHWH's enemies, and that all of the YHWH's promises of restoration for the Jewish people now belong to the followers of the WatchTower Cult.

    In fact, the title "Jehovah's Witnesses" was originally applied to the Jewish people by the Prophet Isaiah, and that scripture is even memorialized on the wall inside the front entrance of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.

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  7. The WatchTower Cult, in calling its own members -- "Jehovah's Witnesses" -- is attempting to steal that designation away from the Jewish people. This is the very reason that for the past three decades that the WatchTower Cult has had a corporate department dedicated to making certain that every single Holocaust rememberance of any size or type -- newspaper article, book, speech, museum, etc -- anywhere in the world, publicize the fact that the WatchTower Cult's own "Jehovah's Witnesses" were equally persecuted alongside "natural" Jews. This is the WatchTower Cult's way of claiming that "Satan" and his human supporters hate "Jehovah's Witnesses" as much or more than they hate natural Jews -- thus attempting to prevent the Jewish people from laying claim to any spiritual significance that might be interpreted from the Holocaust experience.

    In 1933, after the Nazis first started arresting some German JWs, the WatchTower Cult issued a public proclamation of appeasement which condemned an imagined partnership between "Jewish Big Business" and the governments of the United States and Great Britain, which supposedly oppressed and exploited other countries, including Germany. The WatchTower Cult's proclamation condemned the Americans and the British as "the most oppressive empire on earth".

    A conciliatory letter also was sent to Hitler, which highlighted those areas in which the WatchTower Cult supported the new Nazi government. The letter even claimed that the U.S. Government had imprisoned the leaders of the WatchTower Cult during WW1 because they refused to print anti-German propaganda.

    During the early years of World War 2, when Germany and Japan were having much success on the battlefields, the WatchTower Cult started teaching that the Bible prophesied that the Axis Powers would defeat and rule over the United States, Britain, and other Allies.

    In the United States, JWs went to the homes of families of American service men and women and told those parents, siblings, and spouses that Germany was prophesied to win the war, and that in fighting against Hitler, American and British soldiers were fighting against God's will. A Jehovah's Witness named Taylor was arrested after going to two homes of dead servicemen and telling their families that their sons had died while opposing God's will. Don't believe this? Read 1943 U.S. Supreme Court case TAYLOR v. MISSISSIPPI. Remember the actual historical context the next time you read some liberal newspaper or book's account about how some poor innocent Jehovah's Witness was beaten during WW2 for doing nothing except preaching the Bible door-to-door.

    While it is true that a small number of German and other European JWs suffered greatly during the early stages of the Holocaust, it is also true that during the latter stages of the Holocaust that imprisoned JWs became exemplary Nazi collaborators highly valued by the Nazis.

    Over the decades, the WatchTower Cult itself has published numerous biographical stories in which imprisoned JWs are praised for having been given positions of authority and responsibility within the various Nazi concentration camps. Various Nazi officials are quoted praising those JWs for not only their work, but their work ethic and supportive attitudes.

    In fact, one of Heinrich Himmler's deputies even sent Himmler a report suggesting that after Germany won the war that conquered non-Germanic christian countries be forced to convert to the Jehovah's Witness religion, so as to maintain a controlling religious element in those people's lives which would pose no threat to Nazi political control.

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  8. As a historian (amateur), I resent history being used and twisted to support one or another political agenda, and this is definitely happening with one class of 'Holocaust Denier' - those who wish to portray the Nazi mass murder policy as exclusively Jewish.

    Twist things as they will, we cannot hide that millions of Jews were killed by various means, and millions of non-Jews died beside them. To remember and respect one group while airbrushing the other out of history is bad for all of us.

    In a village in SE Slovakia I have seen a village memorial with the names of murdered Jewish and JW victims together. That is the way they should be remembered.

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