Hindsight and Crystal Balls

 Rethinking The Causes of World War II

As we approach ANZAC remembrance in New Zealand, thoughts will be turning once again to war, and in particular, New Zealand's involvement in World Wars I &II, along with lots of smaller actions since the Korean War to which New Zealand has contributed soldiers.

We have been ruminating once more on whether World War II could have been averted.  Now, a disclaimer is required: hind sight is always 20/20 vision, which means that it is speculative to one extent or another.  But the matter has assumed more relevance, given that Hitler turned out to be the wild-card which led Europe into armed conflict.  In our days, we face similar kinds of threats.  Replace Hitler with Kim Jong-un and we all get the point.

Therefore, re-thinking how Britain failed to avoid the conflagration which exploded when Hitler unleashed his legions, is not as academic today as it was three or four years ago.  Historian Robert Tombs provides a list of some things, which, in hindsight, Britain got wrong during what he calls the "Twenty-Year Truce" between the two world wars.  These become potential lessons for the future.

Merkel's Well-Meant Folly

Two World Wars Are Quite Enough

One of the more insidious doctrines of humanitarianism and secularism is the belief that the State is the Great Redeemer.  This necessitates the duties, responsibilities, functions, and roles belonging to the Church being assumed and taken over by the State.

In Europe this particular defalcation has been long in the cooking.  But as secularism has advanced, this dangerous doctrine of the Redemptive State has become pretty much full-flowered.  Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has become the avatar of a theology which has the State as Saviour and the Great Redeemer.

In her New Year's address she assured the people that the German government would triumph as the Great Redeemer of mankind.  It would triumph over hatred and Islamism with compassion, not punishment.  In Merkel's world-view and twisted theology, the State has become the Church and assumed its functions.  Historically and biblically, the State is God's servant with a sworn duty to punish evildoers.  The Church is God's servant to extend compassion to the poor, the needy, the suffering.  But in Merkel-world, the State has assumed all of these responsibilities to itself.

In the federal chancellor’s New Year address to Germany, Merkel asserted that the terror attacks committed by Islamist migrants in Würzburg, Ansbach, and recently at a Christmas market in Berlin were not attacks on Western civilisation but an attack on ‘refugees’ and Germany’s willkommenskultur (‘welcome culture’).

Lest We Forget

Miracle That Saved Girl 

The Auschwitz Gas Chamber

By Paul Ewart
NZ Herald

Yvonne Engelmann was just 15 when she was rounded up with her family and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, one of the network of German Nazi extermination camps operated by the Third Reich in Poland in World War II from 1940-1945.

But it was an unlikely miracle that saw her survive to tell the disturbing tale.  After arriving at the camp, Yvonne was immediately sent to the gas chamber. Thanks to some strange twist of fate, it malfunctioned and she was left naked in the chamber overnight before being freed.

By some miracle, the Nazi's kept her alive, and she was sent to sort through the clothes of newly arrived Jews to find any gold or valuables they'd hidden.  Her "job" saw her stationed in between the crematorium (which burnt 24-hours daily) and the gas chambers. She ended up being the sole survivor from her entire family, and made a new life for herself in Australia.

Yvonne's Story

"I was 14 and a half when war broke out," Yvonne tells news.com.au.  "I wasn't allowed to go to school, I couldn't walk on the street, I had to wear the yellow Star of David and couldn't mix with any non-Jewish people. Friends I'd grown up with now totally ignored me, solely because I was born a Jew.

"My father was taken to the police station many times and we never knew if he would come back. One day he returned and his front teeth had been knocked out. We lived in fear constantly - we had no idea what would happen to us in the next hour, let alone in the next day."

Born in Czechoslovakia to shopkeeper parents, Yvonne was an only child.  "I had the most wonderful childhood that anyone could wish for, but unfortunately it was short-lived."  At the approach of her 15th birthday, she and her family were taken from the ghetto - along with hundreds of others - to the railway station where they were piled into dozens of cattle wagons.

Lest We Forget

Elie Wiesel, 1928 – 2016

Patterico

Death camp survivor, Nobel Laureate, prolific writer, and tireless fighter for human rights Elie Wiesel has died. From his obituary at the Jerusalem Journal:

Wiesel was a hollow-eyed 16-year-old when he emerged from the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. He had been orphaned by the Nazis and their identification number, A-7713, was tattooed on his arm as a physical manifestation of his broken faith and the nightmares that would haunt him throughout his life.

Wiesel and his family had first been taken by the Nazis from the village of Sighetu Marmatiei in the Transylvania region of Romania to Auschwitz, where his mother and one of his sisters died.Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, ended up in Buchenwald, where Shlomo died. In “Night” Wieselwrote of his shame at lying silently in his bunk while his father was beaten nearby.

After the war Wiesel made his way to France, studied at the Sorbonne and by 19 had become a journalist. He pondered suicide and never wrote of or discussed his Holocaust experience until 10 years after the war as a part of a vow to himself. He was 27 years old in 1955 when “Night” was published in Yiddish, and Wiesel would later rewrite it for a world audience.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed …,” Wiesel wrote. “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.”

It is utterly sobering to be reminded of what so many like Wiesel endured. And not just endured, but miraculously lived to tell, spending the remainder of his days confronting evil for the sake of righteousness.

He was often described as somber. An old friend, Chicago professor Irving Abrahamson, once said of him: “I’ve never seen Elie give a belly laugh. He’ll chuckle, he’ll smile, there’ll be a twinkle in his eye. But never a laugh from within.”

As his burden of pain and sorrow is lifted in passing, may he be surprised by laughter finally unloosed from the deepest reaches of his soul.

–Dana

Willing Executioners

Eliminationist Anti-Semitism is Alive and Kicking

We have been reading Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners with great interest.  [Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Abacus, 1997)].  The book has attracted significant academic controversy.  Goldhagen's central thesis is that ordinary Germans in the nineteen thirties and forties were captured by an ideology of eliminationalist anti-semitism.  

The idea is that the great majority of German people were not just anti-semitic, but had come to believe that the only solution to the "Jewish problem" was the elimination of Jews from Germany--not by expulsion, but by their extermination.  The Nazis institutionalised this idea and sought to effect it as the "Final Solution".  But--and this is where Goldhagen's thesis becomes more controversial--eliminationist anti-semitism was not distinctly Nazi; it was, argued Goldhagen, a widely held idea within Germany.  One fundamental trail of evidence produced by Goldhagen was the enthusiastic extermination of Jewish people perpetrated by non-Nazi, German Order Police Reserve Battalions,  made up of older, middle-aged German men.

The historical reality is that anti-semitism became "eliminationist" in Germany.

A Different Time, A Different World

Roddie Edmonds, late WWII U.S. veteran, is 1st soldier honored for saving Jews

Washington Times

By Aron Heller - Associated Press - Wednesday, December 2, 2015

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Nazi soldiers made their orders very clear: Jewish American prisoners of war were to be separated from their fellow brothers in arms and sent to an uncertain fate.  But Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds would have none of that. As the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer held in the German POW camp, he ordered more than 1,000 Americans captives to step forward with him and brazenly pronounced: “We are all Jews here.”

He would not waver, even with a pistol to his head, and his captors eventually backed down.
Seventy years later, the Knoxville, Tennessee, native is being posthumously recognized with Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. He’s the first American serviceman to earn the honor.

“Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds seemed like an ordinary American soldier, but he had an extraordinary sense of responsibility and dedication to his fellow human beings,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and memorial. “The choices and actions of Master Sgt. Edmonds set an example for his fellow American soldiers as they stood united against the barbaric evil of the Nazis.”

It’s a story that remained untold for decades and one that his son, the Rev. Chris Edmonds, only discovered long after his father’s death in 1985. 

Edmonds was captured with thousands of others in the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 and spent 100 days in captivity.

Koba The Dread's Wilful Ignorance

Purblind Prejudice

We have been reading with great interest and pleasure Winston Churchill's six volume, The Second World War.  We are nearly halfway through, in the midst of volume III.  In chapter xx, "The Soviet Nemesis", Churchill details the lead up to the German invasion of Russia, June 1941.

One would be on safe ground believing that Churchill had little time for either Communism in general and Stalin in particular.  Somehow the-oh-so-stuck-in-the-mud, antediluvian UK Prime Minister had not got caught up in the adulation communism, and of the Soviets that swept up UK intellectuals at the time. 

Churchill made the following comments against the backdrop of an evident build-up of the Nazi war machine along the line between the USSR and Hitler's eastern border.  This build-up was an open secret throughout the UK and US governments at the time, and was well known amongst European nations.  Only Stalin remained completely blind to it--so much so that when Hitler finally attacked, a great deal of the Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground within a matter of hours.

Churchill writes: