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Niall
McNamara
of Ireland asks on
Wednesday, November 15, 2000
Christian Gerlach's Thesis
Christian Gerlach has asserted that Hitler had decided on the physical extermination of European Jewry on the 12th of December 1941, as a result of Germany's decision to declare war on America following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, and because of Germany's military setbacks on the eastern front.[1] His thesis is growing in popularity amongst tenured historians.
Due to the fact that no Fuehrer Order exists to corroborate Gerlach's thesis, the documentary evidence for the extermination policy rests on two diary entries. One is from the diary of Hans Frank, head of the Generalgouvernement; the other is from the diary of Dr Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda. The quote from the Goebbels diary entry reads:
"In respect of the Jewish question, the Fuehrer has decided," so says Goebbels, "to make a clean sweep. The world war is here; the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary result. This question is to be regarded without sentimentalism. We are not here to have sympathy with the Jews, but rather with our German people. If the German people have sacrificed 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, so the authors of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives".
Can the above diary entry really provide the documentary evidence needed to sustain Gerlach's thesis that Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jewish people? Or, if any historian fails to accept it, are they "Holocaust deniers?" In a later part of the article the following opinion was offered:
"Independent of Hitler's fundamental decision, the practitioners of the German racial policy had discussed the murder of the Jews in all occupied eastern European countries, asked for it, or already begun it."
[i.e. by the 12th of December 1941]. Does this nullify the argument of those who write that the origin for genocide dated from the period Hitler wrote Mein Kampf? And does it fail to prove any direct documentary or other link between Hitler and those who purposefully but "independently" instituted a murderous policy against the Jews and others?
[1] December 12, 1941, by Gotz Aly ; translated by Gordon McFee (from the German edition of the Berliner Zeitung, December 13th, 1997). Source: Holocaust-history.org.
David Irving