Benjamin
Matthewsof New
York asks some pertinent questions, Sunday, April
22, 2007, about the Wannsee conference of January
1942
Above:
March 2007. For some reason a long shallow pit has been dug in the forest at Sobibor, Poland; the age of the trees suggests it was dug years ago (Photo:
David Irving)
Hitler’s role in the Final Solution, still disputed
I KNOW you have talked about
Wannsee before, but I was wondering about a few things.
First of all, the list of Jews that Heydrich
produced for the conference: According to him, there were eleven million Jews living in Europe.
That is quite obviously a rounded estimate, but I believe it is probably accurate, since Heydrich (and Eichmann) would not make serious mistakes that would put them off by even a few million.
Also, how can one explain the listings for
Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Turkey (all neutral countries) and the listing for England and
Ireland? Why would the Nazis even care about Jews in countries they did not occupy or were allied with? Countries not even participating in the war?
It seems like they were intent on rounding up every
Jew in Europe, wherever they lived.
What of Josef Buhler, Hans Frank‘s representative at the conference? He insisted that
Jews in the General Government [of Poland]
be taken care of first, and this led to the development of Operation Reinhard[t] under
Globocnik.
Do you believe there were gas chambers at
Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor? I don’t believe they existed for any purpose other than to kill people, and they were dismantled once they had completed their task by the end of 1943.
I was also struck by the question of the half-Jews and those Jews in mixed marriages. Did they not choose to discuss this at a later time, defer it perhaps until the war was over? I thought maybe the Schlegelberger document you mention on your site may in fact be about the Mischlinge, rather than “full
Jews”. I could be wrong, of course.
I do not think you can divorce Nazi actions from ideology. The Nazis believed wholeheartedly in a global Jewish conspiracy. How better to thwart this conspiracy than to murder every Jew who could be a part of it? The Nazis were always fearful of this pernicious Jewish plot, which they believed was described by the Protocols of Zion.
What do you think would have happened to the
Jews if the Nazis had won the war? They certainly would have no use for them anymore. They would have turned to the Slavs as the primary laborers. Maybe too speculative, but I am curious. I am eagerly awaiting your
Himmler book. I am reading your
Goebbels book now.
-
Our dossiers on
Adolf Hitler | on
Heinrich Himmler | on
Reinhard Heydrich | on the
Schlegelberger Memorandum
Free download of David Irving’s books Bookmark the download page to find the latest new free books