Hitler's Comments of March 30, 1941

Historians debate the intentions of the Nazi leadership at the moment that Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, disputing the extent to which an extermination of Soviet Jews had already been decided and, if so, whether this covered just Jewish men or also women and children. Important sources for deducing those intentions are starvation plans and Heydrich's instructions to the Einsatzgruppen and HSSPF, but a less explored source is Hitler's address to the military of March 30 recorded in the diary of Franz Halder. In this article, I analyze this source against other earlier and later statements made by Hitler.

More on "Biological eradication (biologische Ausmerzung)"

Back in 2015, in this posting, I took Mattogno to task for his ridiculous attempt (made here, pp.281-282) to neutralize Rosenberg's press briefing of November 18, 1941. I would now like to expand upon this by citing an observation made by Alex J. Kay, in this book, which includes an excellent discussion of Rosenberg's role in the planning process for occupation of the USSR up to July 1941. On June 20, 1941, Rosenberg used the term "evacuation" to refer to the starvation, not deportation, of ethnic Russians, who Hitler had decided should not be allowed to survive the bombardment of major cities, most notably Leningrad and Moscow (and subsequently Kiev).

Rosenberg's usage came in the speech presented in the International Military Tribunal as 1058-PS; Hartley Shawcross read the following extract to the court on July 27, 1946:

The object of feeding the German people stands this year without a doubt at the top of the list of Germany's claims on the East, and there the southern territories and the Northern Caucasus will have to serve as a balance for the feeding of the German people. We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity bare of any feelings. A very extensive evacuation will be necessary without any doubt, and it is sure that the future will hold very hard years in store for the Russians [translation in National Conspiracy and Aggression, III, pp.716-717].

Rosenberg's use of expulsion as a euphemism for mass death therefore had a genesis in Rosenberg's contribution to the pre-Barbarossa starvation proposals, which had been initiated by Backe but not explicitly endorsed by Rosenberg until this "evacuation" speech. As Kay shows (here, p.689), Rosenberg was using "evacuation" to euphemize the deaths of 30 million people.

Hitler and the "Asiatic Races"

In December 1942, Hitler held a meeting concerning the Netherlands with Mussert, Seyss-Inquart, Himmler, Lammers, Schmidt and Bormann. The meeting's notes, written up by Bormann, were published in 1976 in the collection De SS en Nederland Documenten uit de SS-archieven 1935-1945, which was recently made available through NIOD and Wikimedia Commons here in two pdf files. The first file, from pages 893-899, reproduces Bormann's record of the meeting.

In one of its key passages, Hitler depicts the war in the East as a life-or-death struggle because the Bolsheviks would exterminate all European strata (p.895). Hitler also makes it clear that his opposition to the Bolsheviks is racial, not political or ideological: Germany is up against the Asiatic races who intend to destroy European civilization and impose race-mixing (p.894).

These remarks can be compared to other sources. Hitler was, in part, echoing Diewerge's formulation "Who Should Die — Germans or Jews?" The same day that Bormann produced his notes, Goebbels wrote in his diary, "Jewry must pay for its crime just as our Fuehrer prophesied in his speech in the Reichstag; namely, by the wiping out of the Jewish race in Europe and possibly in the entire world." Crucially, however, Hitler's comments were not just antisemitic but pointed to a willingness to exterminate all 'Asiatic' life in his path that was incompatible with his view of European civilization. They therefore converge with the starvation goals of May 1941, in which the Nazis were willing to condemn to death thirty million people (see, for example, Kay, p.689), and the plan to to totally destroy the major Soviet cities and make the areas uninhabitable (see here).

Knowledge of the Final Solution in Nazi Satellite States: 1) Hungary

This series of articles updates information that was presented in the Critique here regarding attempts by the Nazis, from the Wannsee Conference onwards, to extend the Final Solution across all territory in which the Nazis had administrations or allies. This first piece, on Hungary, begins before Wannsee due to the fact that Jews deported from Hungary were murdered at Kamenets Podolsk in August 1941. These early murders colored much of what followed, because there could be no doubt that the Nazis harbored genocidal designs on at least some categories of Jews. The events that unfolded in 1942-44 were therefore guided by the willingness of otherwise of Hungary's leaders to collude in extermination, and this in turn depended on whether the Hungarians felt it was in their economic and strategic interests to block the deportations to death camps.

More Hitler Extermination Statements: 3.2.42 and 30.8.42

From his Table Talk:

3.2.42:

So the Jew smacks his thighs to see how his diabolic stratagem has succeeded. He bears in mind that if his victims suddenly became aware of these things, all Jews would be exterminated. But, this time, the Jews will disappear from Europe.

30.8.42:

It is here in Russia that Communism shows its true face. We must undertake a campaign of cleaning-up, square metre by square metre, and this will compel us to have recourse to summary justice. The struggle with the terrorists will be savage warfare in the real sense. In Estonia and Latvia these bands have all but ceased to be active ; but until Jewry, which is the bandits' Intelligence Service, is exterminated, we shall not have accomplished our task.

Talk about hysterics …

… Jansson continues exemplifying Peter Bamm’s assessment of Jansson’s beloved Führer, which also applies to Hitler’s "Revisionist" defense attorneys (or at least to a majority of them including Jansson).

Jansson’s latest outburst, with the title Muehlenkamp on the run (wishful thinking is also thinking, and the kind of thinking that Jansson excels in) has been addressed here and here.

Peter Bamm on male hysteria

The hysterics of my mostly male "Revisionist" interlocutors over the years have often reminded me of the following remark:

Während die weibliche Hysterie eine verhältnismäßig harmlose Bereicherung des Daseins ist, wird die männliche Hysterie oft zum blutigen Motiv der Geschichte. Daß die meisten Menschen nicht wissen, daß es Hysterie bei Männern gibt, macht die Störung nur um so gefährlicher. (Whereas female hysteria is a comparatively harmless enrichment of existence, male hysteria often becomes the bloody motive of history. The fact that most people don’t know that there is hysteria in men only makes the disturbance all the more dangerous.)

A memorable date

The present date marks the 70th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s suicide. On 30 April 1945 the fellow finally did something he should have done five years and eight months before at the latest, if you ask me.

The Battle of Berlin ended two days later, having claimed the lives of at least 170,000 soldiers and uncounted civilians (22,000 inside the Berlin Defense Area alone) within a mere 17 days.

World War II in Europe ended (mostly) 9 days after Hitler’s death. People continued dying violently in large numbers until 9 May 1945 and thereafter, many of them (perhaps including this gentleman, who was not yet 21 years old at the time) during the Soviet army’s Prague Offensive.

30 years after Hitler’s death, 30 April 1975 marked the lowest point of the USA’s military fortunes in foreign wars, with the capture of Saigon by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (also known as the Việt Cộng).

Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?

After two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, the question has been solved as concerns numbers, according to a 2011 article in The New York Review of Books by American historian Timothy Snyder.

With 11 million non-combatants deliberately killed plus another one million foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps, Hitler was clearly ahead of Stalin, whose analogous record was approximately six million deliberately killed and nine million if foreseeable deaths among deportees, Gulag prisoners and others are included.

Snyder's figures for Hitler are not much lower than those of German historian Dieter Pohl and mine.

Thomas Dalton responds to Roberto Muehlenkamp and Andrew Mathis (3)

I. Introductions
II. Documents and Numbers
IV. Techno-babble and Conclusions

Before I move to the next part of my comments about Mr. "Dalton"'s response to Andrew Mathis and me following our radio conversation with Kevin Barrett on American Freedom Radio, I shall publish what my fellow interviewee Andrew Mathis has to say about item (4) of said response, which was discussed in my previous blog.

Oooh, I almost forgot

Happy Fuehrertodestag!

Cf. Orac, Andrew.

"All comparisons to Adolf Hitler are not equal"

Chris Castle gets it right in his WaPo letter to the editor:

All comparisons to Adolf Hitler are not equal. Kristina Vanden Heuvel's March 26 Outlook article, "Had It With Hitler," left out an important part of the argument -- relevance.

Indeed, why shun from Nazi/Hitler analogies when they are relevant? Sure, comparisons with the "Hitler of the Holocaust" are probably not fair in most cases today. Not so with "budding Hitler/Nazism" analogies. What are the lessons of the Holocaust, and how can such events be prevented, if one cannot even compare specific trends the led to the Holocaust with specific trends in today's world?
So, yes, comparisons with Hitler's/NSDAP's early years can be legitimate.