Anyone who would be surprised by this ‘discovery’ obviously hasn’t studied much history.
Next thing you know they’ll discover that the Nazis used vehicles where they vented the CO into the passenger area to kill folks.
I own the "Encyclopedia of the Third Reich" by Dr. Louis Snyder, copyright 1989. It includes entries for the Einsatzgruppen (Task Forces) and says that they killed 2 million Jews, and (of course) mentions Babi Yar, the site outside of Kiev where 35,000 Jews were massacred in 2 days.
These things have not been forgotten. The information is not new.
It occurred to me that one of the big differences between Freepers and the media/left opposition is that the former are far more likely to display a useful knowledge of history, while the lefties know history only as a series of disconnected talking points.
In this string, two people mentioned Babi Yar and the Einsatzgruppen within a few minutes and apparently without seeing each other’s messages first, and others added more detail, such as the Becker gas vans.
Media lefties would probably regard this as very arcane knowledge, since their confidence in their own intellectual superiority leads them to assume that their own abysmal ignorance is the norm. Here, it is indeed common knowledge.
It is possible to trace modern Islamic anti-Semitism back along a number of different historical and intellectual threads, but, no matter which one you choose, they all seem to pass, at one point or another, through the hands of Hajj Amin al-Husseini--Hitler’s mufti.
In late March 1933, al-Husseini contacted the German consul general in Jerusalem and requested German help in eliminating Jewish settlements in Palestine--offering, in exchange, a pan-Islamic jihad in alliance with Germany against Jews around the world. It was not until 1938, in the aftermath of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous capitulation to Hitler at Munich, that Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s overtures to Nazi Germany were officially reciprocated. But by then the influence of Nazi ideology had already grown significantly throughout the Arab Middle East.
Several of the Arab political parties founded during the 1930s were modeled after the Nazi party, including the Syrian Popular Party and the Young Egypt Society, which were explicitly anti-Semitic in their ideology and programs. The leader of Syria’s Socialist Nationalist Party, Anton Sa’ada, imagined himself an Arab Hitler and placed a swastika on his party’s banner.
Though he was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini moved his base of operations (and pro-Nazi propaganda) to Lebanon in 1938, to Iraq in 1939 (where he helped establish the strongly pro-German Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as prime minister), and then to Berlin in 1941.
Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that Hajj Amin al-Husseini “was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.” At Auschwitz, al-Husseini reportedly “admonished the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently.”
After the defeat of the Axis powers, Hajj Amin al-Husseini escaped indictment as a war criminal at Nuremberg by fleeing to Egypt, where he received political asylum and where he met the young Yasser Arafat, his distant cousin, who became a devoted protégé—to the point that the PLO recruited former Nazis as terrorist instructors. Up until the time of his death, Arafat continued to pay homage to the mufti as his hero and mentor.
This unholy legacy continues. Hajj Amin al-Husseini has inspired two generations of radical Islamic leaders to carry on Hitler’s war against the Jews, which is why today, as was true sixty years ago, it is not the Catholic Church that is the great threat to the survival of the Jewish people, it is Islamofascism.
Vividly depicted in the brilliant book, “The Lost: The Search for Six of the Six Million,” by Daniel Mendelssohn, and the movie “Everything is Illuminated,” directed by Liev Shrieber and starring Elijah Wood.
By the time the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, they had four Einsatzgruppen of some 3,000 men each. Their activities were subsequently curtailed because: [1] they became less successful as the populace became aware of their activities and tactics, [2] the SS higher command was concerned about the psychological impact of the mass shootings on the executioners, [3] it was no longer viewed as an efficient method by Heydrich, and most importantly, [4] it was impracticable to use in western Europe, and of very limited potential for executing the numbers of Jews projected for the Final Solution by the RSHA.
Considering the vast body of literature on the subject, I am constrained to wonder how this is considered a new discovery.
On the pilgrimage I took to Eastern Europe, we viewed a “killing wall” with the bullet holes still in it. So even at Auschwitz, people were gunned down as well as gassed.