WWII–-75th ANNIVERSARY DISCUSSION--#30---JANUARY 1942 (2)

The Wannsee Conference is one of the events that came to mind when I was listening to one of the documentary extras in the Lord of the Rings DVD set.  In this documentary, a commentator – I forget who – is talking about the Ringwraiths and he says that they illustrate a very 20th-century concept of evil: the notion that evil can be defined as a moral vacuum, whereby the performance of evil deeds becomes “just a job” for certain people.  He goes on to note that some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century were committed by bureaucrats, which is what made me think of the Wannsee Conference with all of its paper-shuffling and minute-taking around a conference table.  I once saw a German-language film which reennacted the conference virtually word-for-word, in real time, and if you watched it with the sound off you could easily imagine that the participants – albeit wearing Nazi armbands and so forth – were discussing something as bland as office supply purchase quotas for the Department of Motor Vehicles.  Hannah Arendt, who wrote a book about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann (who participated in the Wannsee Conference), encapsulated this idea concisely in her phrase about “the banality of evil.”

Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union conducted a number of show trials. These were used to consolidate Stalin’s hold on power, and liquidate rivals, potential rivals, and anyone who believed something different from the official Soviet party line.

Of 1,966 delegates to the party congress in 1934, 1,108 were arrested. Of 139 members of the Central Committee, 98 were arrested. Three out of five Soviet marshals . . . and several thousands of the Red Army officers were arrested or shot.

The movie Mission to Moscow was created in response to a request by FDR.

Completed in late April 1943, the film is, in the words of Robert Buckner, the film’s producer, “an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation.” . . . . “When the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich saw it, he observed that no Soviet propaganda agency would dare to present such outrageous lies.”[15] . . . The film “defends the purges, complete with a quarter-hour dedicated to arguing that Leon Trotsky [who was Jewish] was a Nazi agent”.[13]

FDR was a very big fan of the film. In May of 1943, FDR had Joseph Davies show Stalin the movie. Davies was America’s ambassador to the Soviet Union. FDR and Davies had hoped that after Stalin had seen the film he’d warmly bestow his approval. Instead, all they got from him was a grunt. The movie was also distributed to the American people as part of our wartime propaganda effort.

If FDR was willing to praise Soviet show trials, as was done in Mission to Moscow, might he also be willing to participate in them? The argument has been made that FDR and his successors did exactly that, at Nuremberg.

Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Harlan Fiske Stone called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. “(Chief U.S. prosecutor) Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,” he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[73] . . .

Art.19 “The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence.” Charter of the International Military Tribunal.

Art.21 “The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof.”

Supposedly, minutes of the Wannsee Conference were “discovered” by the Allies in 1947. But bear in mind this “discovery” took place at a time when the Allies felt fully entitled to tell whatever lies they wanted, in support of their wartime and postwar propaganda efforts. Movies such as Mission to Moscow and the decision to join the Soviets in conducting show trials at Nuremberg undermines and destroys whatever credibility the Allied governments might otherwise have had. A less reliable source for anti-Nazi propaganda could not be imagined.

Suppose, for example, that the government of some random tin pot dictatorship were to produce large volumes of accusatory content, mostly directed against internal and external enemies. The natural reaction to that would be, “Well, maybe some of that is true. But who knows which parts? How do you separate the wheat of truth from the chaff of exaggerations, misrepresentations, half truths, or outright lies?” The Allied governments lacked even a tin pot dictatorship’s commitment to objective truth. Their accusatory content does not have more credibility than the accusatory content emanating from a standard-issue tin pot dictatorship. Typically such a stream of accusatory content will contain bits and pieces of truth. Normally neutral third parties are called on to examine such streams of accusatory content, with a specific accusation confirmed as true only after verification by a trusted and objective third party. Such neutral third parties were notably absent during the Nuremberg show trials, presumably because the weakness of the evidence presented would not stand up to third party scrutiny.

Were they truly evil at heart or just following the orders of Hitler and Himmler?

To answer your question:

Today marks 72 years that Auschwitz was liberated and it is also Holocaust Remembrance Day in several European countries. I’ve visited Auschwitz-Birkenau several years ago, walked between its barracks and seen the piles of shoes, human hair and even the lamp shades made of human skin made from its prisoners.

Those historical artifacts that the Nazis didn’t manage to completely destroy while they were evacuating the camp in an attempt to hide their crimes, and the stories from the survivors of those camps to me fully prove that the Holocaust was real, and it was the work of truly misguided people, who were following orders but also many of them, if not all, shared and truly believed on that ideology of horror.

But the important thing to remember to me is that Nazism and other atrocious beliefs aren’t the work of the Devil, but of ordinary men and women, and nowadays there are still those amongst us who support or condone such ideologies.

@Hobbes:

Were they truly evil at heart or just following the orders of Hitler and Himmler?

To answer your question:

Today marks 72 years that Auschwitz was liberated and it is also Holocaust Remembrance Day in several European countries. I’ve visited Auschwitz-Birkenau several years ago, walked between its barracks and seen the piles of shoes, human hair and even the lamp shades made of human skin made from its prisoners.

Those historical artifacts that the Nazis didn’t manage to completely destroy while they were evacuating the camp in an attempt to hide their crimes, and the stories from the survivors of those camps to me fully prove that the Holocaust was real, and it was the work of truly misguided people, who were following orders but also many of them, if not all, shared and truly believed on that ideology of horror.

But the important thing to remember to me is that Nazism and other atrocious beliefs aren’t the work of the Devil, but of ordinary men and women, and nowadays there are still those amongst us who support or condone such ideologies.

The human skin lampshades were a hoax, and have been debunked. The Allies knew they could create that kind of fact-free emotion-driven propaganda, because no one would call them out on their (many) lies.

As for the Holocaust itself: I have no doubt that large numbers of Jews died in German captivity during WWII. The Allied food blockade of Germany, and Britain’s White Paper of 1939, made any other outcome impossible.

Unfortunately, the atrocious beliefs which led to those (and many other) Allied war crimes are still very much alive. If the Allied Establishment is not Satanic, it may as well be. Not Satan Himself could possibly be more evil than that Establishment.

Hey Kurt have you ever been to Auschwitz, Dachau or Wewelsburg?