Pat Buchanan is now blaming the Holocaust on Great Britain, indirectly at least. He says that yes, Hitler hated Jews, but no, he wasn’t going to destroy them. Britain made him do it.
That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. “Mein Kampf” is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.
That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.
And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.
There’s a pretty big problem here for Pat. Well, there are a lot of problems with this logic. But we can start with a pretty clear indication that Hitler intended to murder the Jews. There was a group of Nazis known as the Einsatzgruppen, whose job it was to kill all of what the Nazis considered “undesirables.” They were murdering Jews before the Wannsee Conference was held.
After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Einsatzgruppen’s main assignment was to kill Communist officers and Jews on a much larger scale than in Poland[3]. These Einsatzgruppen were under the control of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) (Reich Security Main Office); i.e., under Reinhard Heydrich and his successor Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The original mandate set by Heydrich for the four Einsatzgruppen sent into the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa was to secure the offices and papers of the Soviet state and Communist Party; to liquidate all of the higher cadres of the Soviet state; and to instigate and encourage pogroms against all local Jewish populations. The orders that Heydrich drafted on July 2, 1941 stated that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute all Soviet officials of higher and medium rank; members of the Comintern; “extremist” Communist Party members; members of the central, provincial and district committees of the Communist Party; Red Army commissars; and all Communist Party members of Jewish origin[4]. In regards to Jewish populations in general, “No steps will be taken to interfere with any purges that may be initialed by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories. On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged”[5].
There is much more about them at the Jewish Virtual Library. Here’s a document from 1941 that lists the numbers of Jews murdered by the Nazis—before the Wannsee conference.
EK 3 detachment in Minsk from 28.9-17.10.41:
Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.
The distance between from the assembly point to the graves was on average 4 to 5 Km.
I consider the Jewish action more or less terminated as far as Einsatzkommando 3 is concerned. Those working Jews and Jewesses still available are needed urgently and I can envisage that after the winter this workforce will be required even moe urgently. I am of the view that the strelization programme of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterlization a Jewess becomes pregnant she will be liquidated.
Buchanan ignores facts like the above, and massacres like Babi Yar, which also occurred before the Wannsee Conference.
Kiev … contained a Jewish population of 175,000 on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Nazi forces captured the city in mid-September; within less than a fortnight, on the 29th and 30th, nearly 34,000 Jews of the ghetto were brought to a suburban ravine known as Babi Yar, near the Jewish Cemetary, where men, women, and children were systematically machine-gunned in a two-day orgy of execution. In subsequent months, most of the remaining population was exterminated.
And then there’s the sick, twisted logic to Buchanan’s claims. Hitler intended to rid Germany of all of its Jews. Here was his plan from the Wannsee Conference that Buchanan implies wouldn’t have happened without Britain’s entering the war in defense of Poland:
The purpose of the conference was to inform heads of German Government Departments that had responsibility for various policies relating to Jews of Reinhard Heydrich’s appointment as the sole executor of the “Final solution to the Jewish question”, and to obtain their agreement to subordinate their policies to him. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich presented a plan, approved by Hitler, for the deportation of the Jewish population of Europe to German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, and the use of the Jews fit for labour on road-building projects; that plan was never fully implemented, owing to the failure to achieve final victory over the Soviet Union, and most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were sent to extermination or concentration camps, or killed where they lived.
Let’s take Buchanan at his word. Let’s imagine that Britain never got into the war, that Germany fought Russia, and even beat Stalin. What do you think would have happened to the Jews of Europe, who were now in concentration camps, awaiting their fate? Slave labor camps at best, a quick execution at the worst? The Wannsee Conference was convened to discuss “The Jewish Question,” not to discuss “What Do We Do With the Jews Now That We Lost Russia?” Question. And “The Jewish Question” was a theme throughout Hitler’s reign. To pretend that he would not have murdered the six million if only Britain hadn’t started fighting him is the lowest Buchanan has gone yet.
Buchanan is a liar and a dissembler, who ignores inconvenient facts when they get in the way of his Hitler adoration. The fact is that with or without Britain, Germany would have run rampant over Europe, and murdered Europe’s Jews. The Nazis were already setting the plan in motion. Jews were being gassed in 1941, before the Wannsee Conference took place.
At another, later gassing — also in autumn 1941 — Grabner* ordered me to pour Zyklon B into the opening because only one medical orderly had shown up. During a gassing Zyklon B had to be poured through both openings of the gas-chamber room at the same time. This gassing was also a transport of 200-250 Jews, once again men, women and children. As the Zyklon B — as already mentioned — was in granular form, it trickled down over the people as it was being poured in.
The facts are there. Buchanan ignores them.
Buchanan is a liar, a purveyor of Jew-hatred and an admirer of Adolph Hitler. The man disgusts me more now than he has ever done before. That NBC continues to employ him is reprehensible. That Fox News brings him on as a commentator is reprehensible. That anyone pays this man a salary for anything repulses me. I used to say he was a more subtle David Duke. But he has brought himself down to Duke’s level with this latest book.
Babi Yar in 1941 and the formation of the Einsatzgruppen in 1939 jumped immediately to mind when I read that bit about Wansee, as well. You have presented yet more facts. It is clear evidence that Mr. Buchanan is not using facts in his opinions. SO he’s obviously using something else.
PAT PUKEANAN as well as ron paul are creating a neo fascist type org. nothing this tool says would suprise me.
Thank you for this excellent, fact-based rebuttal.
God rest their souls.
It should also be remembered that Hitler was not only killing Jews before Wannsee, but he was also murdering the mentally retarded and disabled, who were among his first victims—“useless eaters.” You’d think Pat, who supposedly prides himself on his adherence to the Catholic Church’s pro-life stance, would be appalled at this. The machinery for Genocide was in place in Germany, long before Wannsee.
Of course, this is the Pat Buchanan who defended “Ivan the Terrible” by saying he wasn’t this sadistic, brutal Nazi concentration camp guard, he was a different sadistic, brutal, Nazi concentration camp guard.
He also said at one point a while back that there’s all this talk about the wrongs European Christians did to Jews but nothing about the wrongs Jews did to European Christians–he didn’t specify what those might have been and I suppose it’s uncharitable to assume he meant using children’s blood in matzah.
As someone who survived Auschwitz and another camp, all I can say that Pat Buchanan is the classic antisemite in the good old nazi tradition.
What would have happened to the jews in the camps if the allies and russions don’t show up for another 3 months?
I would not be writing to you for there would be no survivors. we were down to one third of our weight and at the end of our proverbial rope.
Pat Buchanan should not be given the opportunity to spew his jew[hatred through the airwaves.
Another thing about “Ivan the Terrible” (John Demjanjuk) – while it was never proven whether or not he was the “real” Ivan, it was proven beyond any doubt that he lied about his past to get into the US – in other words, he was an illegal alien. I guess Pat’s new, “nuanced” position on border security is zero tolerance and summary deportation, unless he thinks someway, somewhere, somehow you murdered some innocent Jewish men, women and children. Then he wants to roll out the welcome wagon with a brass band.
Buchanan recently got a well-earned
fisking from Victor Davis Hanson.
I have written to the editors of both Townhall and Human Events magazines informing them that I would no longer read their articles or patronize their advertisers as long as they continued to promote and support the writings of Pat Buchanan. I urge everyone to do likewise. Hit them in the pocketbook and maybe they’ll take notice.
I am SO linking to this…
J.
We all know Buchanan is an anti-Jewish SOB, but what really angers me is the media adoration with this POS.
This just proves how bankrupt the media has gotten, when they can get away with bringing this liar out to spread his BS, without any consequences.
In addition to the points you make the seeds of the holocaust began long before that. 70,000 had been killed before 1939 and by 1940 the killing of all “undesirables” had begun.
Buchanan doesn’t even get the history of the German and French Navies right.
His column is painful to read.
David
Pat buchenwald learned his anti Semitism form his father – a Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin type of isolationist, Anglophobe, Jew hater. The reason why he shows up so much on MSNBC is because he is against the Iraq and Afghanistan war, hates Bush and Israel.
Murray Rothbard wanted to unite the paleolibertarians (his people) and the paleoconservatives. Rothbard adored Harry Elmer Barnes, one of the progenitors of Holocaust Revisionism. Rothbard’s intellectual heir, Lew Rockwell, seems to have written a lot of the less savory comments in Ron Paul’s infamous newsletter.
How about we put Pat, Lew, and the rest of the gang (people like Ron and Taki, the guy paying the bills for Pat’s mag American Conservative) somewhere and seal up the cave?
I try to give people the benefit of a doubt, so I think it’s unfair to call Buchanan a liar or Hitler admirer. But over the years, his isolationist views have driven him into revisionist crankery. It’s not enough for him to claim that America should tend its own garden and avoid foreign entaglements, he has to prove that foreign interventions inevitably make the world a worse place. So now he’s making the ridiculous claim that if ONLY Britain hadn’t made a treaty with Poland, the Holocaust itself would never have happened. That makes Buchanan an idiot, but not a liar.
(A comparison might be drawn to Michelle Malkin’s loathsome defense of internment during WWII. Malkin didn’t lie, but she was so obsessed with proving her thesis that she ignored all contrary evidence.)
Lefty, when you present false information as true, you are lying. Buchanan says that Hitler didn’t want to kill the Jews, but that he was pushed into it because he was losing the war. That’s not just ignoring evidence to the contrary. That’s outright lying.
As for calling him a Hitler admirer, well, he’s written glowing reviews of Hitler in the past.
When are you going to learn, Lefty, that I never write anything I can’t source?
Mr Buchanan should be shunned.
I’m reluctant to say this after my own savaging of Buchanan, but that quote is, to me, a fair summation of Hitler’s strengths and a hefty chunk of the reason he was so successful in acquiring and holding power.
Buchanan’s quote does begin with “Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide…,” that comes first — meaning the long list of Hitler’s strengths tends to linger in the mind of the reader. If Buchanan was more interested in reminding people of Hitler’s sheer evil, he would have listed the strengths, THEN mentioned the things that qualified him as a sociopath and about seven types of monster.
That’s the “Old” Buchanan — he limited himself to that was strictly and factually correct, but used omission, rhetorical gambits, implications, and selective truths to convey the unspoken message of hate and bigotry.
The “New” Buchanan, though, is a hell of a lot worse at hiding his true feelings. I find it kind of refreshing to see him expose himself as the asshole he always has been.
J.
The handwringing and protestations at Buchanan are a diversion from what is happening today: the triumph of the totalitarian Left in the good old USA. Buchanan gets media visibility for what he is seen to be: a Watergate-era Conservative, with positions and values that by implication characterize all conservatives…they’re all like Pat. That gives the Left reason to value and publicise his output.They set him up to knock us all down.
TomTom, good point!
Perhaps its a way for the liberal media to bring out the raving lunatic Buchanan and declare him typical of conservative thought, and thereby discredit all main stream conservatives as guilty by association.
Either way, I am sick and tired of seeing this POS contaminating the airwaves with his #$%^% “logic,” and few if any, immediate rebuttals.
Buchanan’s theory seems to have two parts: (a) Hitler would never have invaded either Russia or Western Europe in the first place if Britain hadn’t elected to defend Poland, and (b) Hitler wouldn’t have started gassing Jews by the million if the war in Russia hadn’t started to go badly. Both parts of this theory are pretty crazy — Meryl’s posting, in fact, demolishes part (b) — yet I’m still reluctant to call Buchanan “Hitler’s Willing Prevaricator”, which implies a deliberate intent to deceive and places him in the same league as David Irving. I’d only charge Buchanan with being an awful historian, and would note that his bad history is especially distasteful because it gives some faith and comfort to Nazi sympathizers.
You know, Lefty, I’d agree with you if this was the first time that Buchanan had tried to justify Hitler’s actions. But he has a pattern of doing so over the past several decades, to the point that William F. Buckley himself investigated all of Buchanan’s writings, and came to the conclusion that Buchanan is an anti-Semite. Buckley broke all ties with the man.
His hero worship of Hitler, his ability to refuse to acknowledge the actual facts in favor of lies that back up his story—and how can you call them anything but a lie once you acknowledge that his theories are EASILY disproven by simply stating facts—these are why I call him a liar. Plus there’s his known distaste for “neocons,” and his magazine’s ability to point out the Jewishness in the conservative movement that is apparently destroying it.
Pat Buchanan knows only one Jew that he finds utterly useful to him, and I think his former CNN partner is wilfully blind about Buchanan’s little problem.
I stand by my epithet. The man twists facts to enforce his “crazy” theories—all evidence to the contrary. That’s prevarication.
Little known fact– Pat Buchanan’s uncle died at Auschwitz.
(he fell out of a guard tower)