http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-...st-denial/
Quote: I’d never paid much attention to Holocaust issues, but the supporters of my local Palo Alto Library operate a monthly book sale, and with serious nonfiction hardcovers often priced at just a quarter each, my personal library has grown by hundreds of volumes over the years, now including several of the thickest and most influential Holocaust texts. Aside from Hilberg’s classic volume, these include Nora Levin’s The Holocaust (1968), Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975), Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust (1985), and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996).
I claim absolutely no expertise in Holocaust issues, and analyzing the evidence and argumentation these voluminous works offer is entirely beyond my ability. But I decided to attempt to assess their overall credibility by exploring a few particular items, without actually bothering to read the thousands of pages of text they provided.
Consider the interesting case of Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s very powerful number-two in the German Luftwaffe. His father was certainly a Jew, and according to researchers Robert Wistrich and Louis Snyder, there is archival evidence that his mother was Jewish as well. Now is it certainly not impossible that a Third Reich supposedly dedicated with grim fanaticism to the extermination of each and every Jew might have spent the entire war with a full- or half-Jew near the absolute top of its military hierarchy, but surely that puzzling anomaly would warrant careful explanation, and Milch’s apparent Jewish background was certainly known during the Nuremberg Trials.
Yet when I carefully consulted the very comprehensive indexes of those five books, totaling over 3,500 pages, there is virtually no discussion of Milch, except a few very brief mentions of his name in connection with various military operations. Either the authors were unaware of Milch’s Jewish background, or perhaps they hoped to keep that fact away from their readers lest it cause “confusion.” Neither of these possibilities enhances the trust we should place in their research skills or their scholarly objectivity.
Indeed, the fascinating and widely-praised 2002 book Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers by Bryan Mark Rigg notes that aside from Milch, Hitler’s military contained over a dozen half-Jewish generals and admirals and another dozen quarter-Jews of that same high rank, plus a total of roughly 150,000 additional half- or quarter-Jewish soldiers, with a large fraction of these being officers. All of these individuals would have had some fully-Jewish parents or grand-parents, which seems decidedly odd behavior for a regime supposedly so focused on the total eradication of the Jewish race.
Another obvious matter casts further doubt upon the historical quality of those five immensely thick volumes of standard Holocaust narrative, which together occupy nearly a linear foot on my bookshelves. For prosecutors of any crime, establishing a plausible motive is certainly an important goal, and in the case of the Jewish Holocaust, these authors would seem to have an easy task at hand. Hitler and his German colleagues had always claimed that the Jews overwhelmingly dominated Bolshevik Communism, and much of their struggle against the former was in order to prevent further bloody deeds of the latter. So surely devoting an early chapter or so to describing this central Nazi doctrine would provide an airtight explanation of what drove the Nazis to their fiendish slaughters, rendering fully explicable the horrifying events that would occupy the remainder of their text.
Yet oddly enough, an examination of their indexes for “Bolsheviks,” “Communism,” and all variants reveals almost no discussion of this important issue. Goldhagen’s 1996 book provides just a couple of short sentences spread across his 600 pages, and the other works seem to contain virtually nothing at all. Since all of these Holocaust books almost totally avoid Hitler’s self-declared motive for his anti-Jewish actions, they are forced to desperately search for alternative explanations, seeking clues buried deep within the German past or turning to psychanalytical speculations or perhaps deciding that what they describe as the greatest massacre in all human history was undertaken out of sheer Nazi wickedness.
The obvious reason for this glaring omission is that the authors are constructing a morality-play in which the Jews must be portrayed as absolutely blameless victims, and even hinting at their role in the numerous Communist atrocities that long preceded the rise of the Third Reich might cause readers to consider both sides of the issue. When purported historians go to absurd lengths to hide such glaring facts, they unmask themselves as propagandists, and we must be very cautious about trusting their reliability and candor in all other matters, whether great or small.