Challenger Middle School teacher Bruce Galler of Palmdale once saved two students from expulsion from the Lancaster campus after they scratched swastikas onto test booklets.
Continue readingTreblinka
Ian MacMillan’s new novel dares to go where perhaps no novel should
- VILLAGE OF A MILLION SPIRITS: A NOVEL OF THE TREBLINKA UPRISING, by Ian MacMillan. Steerforth, 257 pages, $24.
The Holocaust as kitsch
In St. Petersburg, Fla., the powers that be have graciously prepared a list of “40 Fun Things to Do” in their city. Number 11 on the list is “Remember the Holocaust.” Those out for an enjoyable afternoon are invited to visit the local Holocaust museum, where for $39.95 they can purchase a scale-model replica of a Polish boxcar once used by the Nazis to transport Jews and others to the concentration camps. (If that’s not enough, they can donate $5,000 or more to the museum and receive a genuine railway spike from Treblinka preserved in Lucite.)
[…]
In Los Angeles, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance promotes itself like a theme park. “Travel Leaders and Tour Operators!” barks the publicity material. “Make the Museum of Tolerance part of an exciting and informative itinerary for your group. Check us out for group discounts, special bonuses.”
[…]
Matters are even worse in the academic world. […] Today, with the emergence of a new discipline called Holocaust studies, the academicization of the subject is proceeding apace, complete with meaningless jargon and political agenda-setting.
Where one leading scholar pronounces the Holocaust “a multidimensional, many-person event,” another contends that it offers grounds for “non- objectivist, anti-positivist, feminist objectivity.” The titles of papers delivered at the 29th annual Holocaust scholars’ conference last week — “An Afrocentric Critique of The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Pop Art Representations of the Holocaust,” the “Holocaust and Femicide/Female Feticide” — give all too keen a sense of the academic fashions that have taken hold of the field.
Why does the Holocaust exert such great fascination these days outside the Jewish community? And why are its images being abused by those who purport to be custodians of its memory?
The answer to both questions undoubtedly lies at least in part in the rising culture of victimhood, visible in our society at large but particularly ensconced in the universities. As the ultimate in victimization, the Holocaust is simply assuming pride of place in a field that also comprises women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, disability studies and all the other victim disciplines that today constitute the cutting edge of the academic world.
It is in the interest neither of American Jews, nor of the broader public, to turn the Holocaust into grist for the mill of academic trendiness or into a carnival.
Source: GABRIEL SCHOENFELD, The New York Times, query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=
FA0A13F93D550C7B8DDDAA0894D1494D81
Webmaster note: On January 30, 2002, a man identifying himself as Gabriel Schoenfeld called me and demanded that I remove this article from this site immediately, calling me a “dirty dog.” (Those senior editors at Commentary certainly are eloquent!) Subsequently, on February 6, 2002, I received a letter from The New York Times’ legal department, demanding that the page be taken down immediately. The above text is a fair-use excerpt of Schoenfeld’s opinion piece, which appeared in The New York Times on March 18, 1999. If you have access to back issues of the NYT, look for “Death Camps as Kitsch,” by Gabriel Schoenfeld, The New York Times, March 18, 1999, Op-Ed 682 words, Late Edition — Final, Section A, Page 25, Column 1. It may be worth the effort, considering how much trouble they’re going through to suppress it.
Holocaust book sparks fresh controversy
- From ‘Mein Kampf’ to Auschwitz
your stories
my father,75 years old had a wife and 2 kids,one 2 year old a boy .and a 1 year old girl,they arrived in treblinka in june 1942 ,they are dead,thats a FACT,now tell me where they are?,or maybe they just went for a walk and got lost?,allso my dad had 5 brothres,and 2 sisters,this poor souls had the luck to be send to auschwitz,another “work camp”,,,,i dont have a problem with your theory ,i am just wondering i KNOW of MY FAMILY and there are at least 85 pepole dead,so the number 6 million make sense to me,and if you are so sure its all a hoax,WHERE ARE THIS PEPOLE?
holocaust denial
Sir,
Having spent a vast portion of my life trying t trace missing members of my family who perished in Treblinka I am left wondering what someone with obvious intellegence such as yours feels he has to gain by publishing the drivel you laboriously produce in a feeble attempt to try and cover up the indescribable beastiality that those you admire perpertrated against the Jews of Europe.
Continue readingMemory is fallible
Trials of an Expert Witness
- Research into memory shows that people often remember things differently from the way they were
Yeah, but he was such a good witness
Holocaust scholar quoted ‘madman,’ publishing trial told
One of the world’s leading authorities on the Holocaust has quoted selectively and extensively a German SS officer who was obviously a madman, the defence at the Ernst Zündel trial has alleged.
Among the claims sworn to by the Nazi, who ultimately hanged himself while awaiting trial for war crimes, was a statement that 25 million Jews were killed in two small extermination camps and that 700 to 800 people could be crammed into a 25-square metre gas chamber.
“Don’t you think it reflects on an author that some statements are absolutely ridiculous?” defence counsel Douglas Christie asked Raul Hilberg, a professor at the University of Vermont who has spent more than 35 years studying the Holocaust.
Mr. Zündel is charged with two counts of publishing false news which caused or was likely to cause racial or social intolerance. His articles question the Holocaust and postulate an international conspiracy of Communists, Zionists, bankers and secret societies. The Crown must prove Mr. Zündel knew the information was false.
Professor Hilberg agreed that Obersturmbanführer Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer, was most unreliable on some topics covered in sworn affidavits. But Prof. Hilberg defended his decision to quote the officer on other subjects in a book he wrote on the Holocaust.
Obersturmbanführer Gerstein was one of the few people who could provide information about gas chambers at the Treblinka and Belzec camps in Poland, Prof. Hilberg explained.
The officer said he was responsible for dispensing poison to several camps in Poland to be used to kill internees.
“Beyond that, I realized, of course, what kind of person he was and I did not rely on any statements I regarded as imaginative or incredible,” the witness said. “I think he was given to great excitability. What can you say?”
“You could say he was crazy,” Mr. Christie said crisply. The lawyer accused Prof. Hilberg of quoting only those statements from the “madman” which bolstered conventional ideas on the Holocaust.
“I’m not making diagnoses here,” Prof. Hilberg replied. “I would not characterize him as totally rational, but I’m not here making those kinds of judgments.”
Prof. Hilberg has been accepted as an expert witness. He has testified that about five million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis.
Yesterday, he said some of the SS officer’s claims were outrageous, while others, such as the number of people who could fit into a chamber warranted skepticism.
He said it was intellectually sound to use the portions which withstood scrutiny or seemed plausible, while making no mention of the outlandish statements. “For my purposes, it sufficed that there were gas chambers,” he said.
Mr. Christie maintained that if Prof. Hilberg can quote selectively with impunity, then his client is not guilty of any sin either.
For most of the morning session, Mr. Christie engaged in a grim battle over what really took place during the last days of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and whether documents exist to show Adolf Hitler actually ordered the extermination of the Jews.
Prof. Hilberg said nobody has to believe or try to verify there was such an order just because he concludes in his book there was.
Mr. Christie then asked if that statement could not also apply to the articles Mr. Zündel is charged with publishing.
“No, it is not the same,” Prof. Hilberg said.
The argument was typical of the strenuous going-over Prof. Hilberg’s writings and previous testimony are getting at the hands of Mr. Christie. The lawyer demands precise sources for everything and then frequently criticizes those.
One protracted argument concerned the use of the word “resettle” in Nazi reports and whether it was a euphemism for annihilate, as Prof. Hilberg fiercely maintained.
“The word used was relocate,” Mr. Christie said at one point. “To me that doesn’t mean annihilate.”
“That’s the difference between you and me,” the witness replied hotly. “I’ve read thousands of documents. I know what it means in the context.”
“You alone understand, right?” Mr. Christie asked sarcastically.
Later, Mr. Christie questioned whether crematoria Prof. Hilberg saw on a recent trip to Poland were really as the Germans left them.
“They were as you’ve been told the Germans left them, right?” he asked.
“I was not present when these buildings were blown up,” Prof. Hilberg said in exasperation.
Source: Kirk Makin, The Globe and Mail
Pedal-actuated brain-bashing machine at Sachsenhausen
On the 2d day of May 1945, there was captured in Berlin a member of the SS, Paul Ludwig Gottlieb Waldmann …
Continue readingIMT XXXII [p. 153 — 158]
Document 3311-PS
- CHARGE NUMBER 6 OF THE POLISH GOVERNMENT AGAINST HANS FRANK: MASS MURDERS OF JEWS SYSTEMATICALLY CARRIED OUT AT THE EXTERMINATION CAMP OF TREBLINKA ESTABLISHED 1942; DESCRIPTION OF ATROCITIES THERE PERPETRATED; FRANK’S RESPONSIBILITY FOR THESE CRIMES (EXHIBIT USA-293)