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.