Gen. Reinhard Guenzel, the head of Germany's Special Forces Command (KSK), got the hobnailed boot on Tuesday. His mistake? He expressed a bit too publicly the sort of Jew-hating sentiment tens of millions of Germans harbor privately.
In a letter to a vicious right-wing extremist who sits in Germany's parliament, the general praised the claim that Jews bear at least as much blame for the bloodshed of the Russian Revolution as Germans do for the Holocaust.
Next, we'll hear from Berlin how Jews planned the Holocaust all along. Just as we hear that Israel is the only terrorist state in the Middle East and that Palestinian suicide bombers who butcher women and children are freedom fighters.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's flacks have begun their damage-control effort, insisting that the general's views are rare and isolated. Bull. I lived in Germany for 10 years while serving in the U.S. Army. I speak German. My family's bloodlines are half German. And because of all that, the Germans among whom I lived assumed I shared their bigotry and, eventually, spilled their guts.
It wasn't pretty.
Of course, there are good Germans. Plenty of them. But they live in Philadelphia, not Frankfurt. They or their ancestors all left Germany by 1938. Those who stayed didn't just support Hitler — they loved him and fought for him to the bitter end.
The whopping difference between the Allied occupation of Germany and our occupation of Iraq is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis welcomed their liberation. We had to force freedom and democracy on the Germans at gunpoint.
They'll never forgive us — no more than they'll forgive Jews for surviving the Holocaust, making a success of Israel against all odds and enriching the United States in virtually every field of human endeavor.
And Germany? In the 19th and early 20th century, German-speaking countries led the world in culture and science. Then they killed or drove away their Jews. The result? Germany's greatest contributions to world culture since 1945 have been Milli Vanilli and Gummi Bears.
What about the charge that the terror in the wake of the Russian Revolution was the work of Jews? Like so many of the Big Lies "made in Germany," there's a tiny grain of truth in it. Yes, Jewish subjects of the Czar played a prominent role in the Russian Revolution. Had I suffered as horribly as Jews suffered under the Romanovs, I'd like to think that I would have been a revolutionary, too.
But Lenin wasn't a Jew. Stalin wasn't a Jew. And just by the way: Hitler, Himmler & Co. weren't Jewish, either, although I fully expect a revisionist historian from Munich or Marburg to argue that they were all secretly manipulated by the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy and guided by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
In Germany today, there's an utterly repulsive movement — ranging from such dreary literary "stars" as Guenter Grass down to Herr Meier behind the wheel of his Opel — to shift the blame for World War II atrocities away from Germany and to insist that the Allies were equally evil.
Tell it to the ghosts of Auschwitz. And Babi Yar. And Warsaw. And, for that matter, Malmedy.
The German resistance? Almost as big a lie as the denial of the Holocaust. Count von Stauffenberg and his fellow aristocrats, whose inept attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb in 1944 is forever cited as an example of German courage, never lifted a finger against the Nazi regime until the Red Army closed in on their hereditary lands in East Prussia. They weren't fighting for high ideals. They were defending their real estate.
The only thing most Germans regretted was that they lost.
And now we hear that it's high time for an end to German guilt, that the present generation had nothing to do with the Holocaust, that Germany paid its dues for its misdeed and, anyway, it was all a long time ago.
Sorry, Fritz. It wasn't long ago. Holocaust survivors just had a reunion in Washington, D.C. When the wind's just right, we can still smell the smoke of the ovens.
And let's not forget that the Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years. There's no reason why German guilt shouldn't last 500. That's a 50 percent discount.
Oh, sure, making anti-Semitic remarks is a crime in today's Germany. But anti-Israeli remarks are just fine. You've merely got to choose your words carefully. Don't say the J-word. Talk about "Zionists" instead.
The truth is that we're still so close to the Holocaust that, despite all the books, films and debates, we still have not come to grips with just how much the Germans destroyed. The annihilation of the great Jewish cultures and populations of Europe's heartland may have been the single most tragic loss in human history.
What is to be done?
For a start, don't buy German products. The boycott of French wine sent a strong message, but if Americans stopped buying Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and Volkswagens, it would really hurt.
Anyway, German cars of recent vintage have become a lot like the Germans themselves — grossly overrated and unreliable. Let Gen. Guenzel buy one.
(Ralph Peters in the New York Post, November 6, 2003)
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/10058.htm