"Those of us in childhood during the war years were introduced to Hitler only as a caricature…Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him. But Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path."
St. Louis Globe – Democrat, Aug 25, 1977
"Perhaps this endless search for Nazi war criminals, these endless re-enactments, on stage and screen, of Hitler’s concentration camps are good for the soul. To what end, however, all this wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime when there is scarcely a peep of protest over the prison camps, the labor camps, the concentration camps operating now in China and Siberia, in Cuba and Vietnam."
Washington Times, August 24, 1983
"That the United States would sit still for anything was brought home to the Israelis, long ago, on the third day of the Six-Day War, when Lyndon Johnson ordered a coverup of an Israeli rocket-and-machine gun attack on the U.S. intelligence ship Liberty off the Sinai, an attack costing the lives of 37 brave American soldiers.
When it suits them, our Israeli allies launch air strikes on Tunis, Baghdad or Beirut; they invade Lebanon; they even enlist U.S. traitors, like the Pollards, to loot the secrets of a nation that has manifested toward them an extraordinary indulgence."
- January, 1990
"The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody."
- NY Post, March 17, 1990 (from a column about the trial of accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk)
"Whatever Rudolph did during World War II, his quarter century of service to the United States entitles the old man to a public hearing before he goes to his grave."
- NY Post, July 14, 1990, on Arthur Rudolph, Nazi rocket scientist investigated by OSI who aided the American space program
"I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism…"
- William F. Buckley
National Review, December 30, 1991
"There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."
- The McLaughlin Group, Aug 26, 1990
In an August 25,1990, column, Buchanan criticized commentators urging military intervention in Iraq, naming Abe Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthamer and Henry Kissinger. On August 29th, he wrote the following:
"’The civilized world must win this fight,’ the editors thunder. But, if it comes to war, it will not be the ‘civilized world’ humping up that bloody road to Baghdad; it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown."
- Washington Times, August 29, 1990
"David Duke is busy stealing from me. I have a mind to go down there and sue that dude for intellectual property theft."
- Manchester, NH Union Leader, December 15, 1991
"I know the power of the Israeli lobby and the other lobbies, but we need a foreign policy that puts our own country first."
- Meet the Press Interview. September 12, 1999.
"After World War II, Jewish influence over foreign policy became almost an obsession with American leaders."
A Republic, Not an Empire. P. 336.
"Senator Joseph McCarthy, in his career fighting communists, did nothing to their collaborators, sympathizers, and defenders to compare with what was done to the patriots of America First. But the acolytes of FDR won the great debate as decisively as America won the war. To this day, any who oppose U.S. commitments to fight wars in Europe or Asia, or new global entanglements, must first answer to the intimidating charge that they are nothing but ‘isolationists.’"
A Republic, Not an Empire, P. 250
Buchanan is the most prominent defender of accused Nazis in America. The most famous case is that of John Demanjuk, who was accused of being an infamous death camp guard named Ivan the Terrible. Buchanan proclaimed his innocence for years, against ample criticism, and felt vindicated when an Israeli court declared there was not enough evidence to convict Demanjuk of being Ivan.
Buchanan continues to declare that Demanjuk has been proved "innocent". Actually, a key piece of evidence (from German documents) that exonerated him as Ivan showed Demanjuk to be a willing guard at Sobibor, another extermination camp where 250,000 died. Even the National Review, while generally defending Demanjuk and Buchanan's support for him, concedes that "Demanjuk was probably guilty of being a lesser accomplice in the Nazi machinery of genocide. That is a fair summary of the Israeli court's findings."
More to the point, Demanjuk is only one of several accused Nazis Buchanan has defended in one way or another. These include Karl Linnas (Buchanan personally appealed to Ed Meese, then Attorney General, to block his deportation to the Soviet Union); Klaus Barbie (Buchanan did not oppose his trial, but argued the US should not have apologized to France for sheltering Barbie after WWII); Arthur Rudolph, a rocket scientist involved in slave labor and severe punishments at a German rocket factory (Buchanan argued his confession was a "lie" while acknowledging he was a "nominal member of the Nazi party and of the SA until 1934"); and Frank Walus (of all the accused, the one most likely innocent.)
One of the most striking examples is Kurt Waldheim, the disgraced former UN leader. Buchanan repeatedly attacked him during his tenure, but once his Nazi past came out, Pat complained that "the ostracism of President Waldheim [has] an aspect of moral bullying and the singular stench of selective indignation." He also rationalized that "like others in Hitler's army, Lt. Waldheim looked the other way."
In each of these cases, Buchanan found a factual reason to defend the accused, an appeal to justice. But put together, it is striking how often he rushes to the defense of accused Nazis. He has also attacked the US Justice Department's Office of Special Investigation (which pursues war criminals) more generally:
"You've got a great atrocity that occurred 35, 45 years ago.... Why... put millions of dollars [into] investigating that?"
Holocaust Revisionism
Perhaps the single most extreme and scary thing Buchanan has done is to question whether the Holocaust was really that bad. In the course of defending Demanjuk, he argued that charges of complicity in mass murder using Treblinka's gas chambers were false -- because the gas chambers didn't really work.
In his March 17, 1990 column, he wrote that diesel engines, the exhaust from which was used in the Treblinka gas chambers, "do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody. ... Demanjuk's weapon of mass murder cannot kill."
His evidence was a 1988 accident where a train stalled in a tunnel, with the engine running for a few minutes. No one died. Of course, the train operator was not trying to kill anyone. Apparently, properly tuned diesels do not produce much carbon monoxide, but they can be (and were) tweaked to produce deadlier exhaust. Many people actually think that in the gas chambers, the exhaust was used to suffocate, not poison. In a crowded, sealed chamber this would happen much more quickly.
As Muravchik points out in the Commentary article, "diesel exhaust fumes were used not only at Treblinka but also at Chelmno, Sobibor, and Belzec, and were moreover employed extensively by the Nazi killing squads inside the USSR." Denying that diesel exhaust can kill means that much of the generally accepted history of the Holocaust must be false.
Buchanan has refused to discuss his statements on the record, but told reporter Jacob Weisberg of a "bolder debunking claim (concerning the gas chambers) than he is willing to endorse in print." When Weisberg asked him where he got the anecdote about the stalled train, he would say only "Somebody gave it to me." All evidence points to Buchanan getting this from Holocaust Revisionist groups. Treblinka is often singled out by these extremists, because the gas chamber was destroyed, and most witnesses murdered, before Allied troops arrived at the end of the war.
A well-researched article by Jamie McCarthy persuasively identifies Buchanan's source as the July 1988 issue of the German American Information and Education Association, a revisionist group.That issue goes on to say "the German people were 'holocausted' after WW II, especially by the Bolsheviks, originally a Jewish/Zionist movement."
In his Ivan the Terrible column, Buchanan also tried to explain away death camp eyewitnesses by saying "Since the war, 1,600 medical papers have been written on 'The Psychological and Medical Effects of the Concentration Camps on Holocaust Survivors.' This so-called 'Holocaust Survivor syndrome involves 'group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.' "
To this day - the last week of February 1996 to be exact - Buchanan still defends his Demanjuk columns as "the best journalism I ever did."
And he contests several other generally accepted aspects of German history. (He is himself entirely German, on his mother's side, and half Irish on his father's.) Buchanan argued that the British started the terror-bombing in WWII (causing Germans to retaliate). He wrote Reagan's infamous description of the German soldiers buried in Bitburg, Germany (including SS members) as "victims of the war". He wrote a column in 1990 publicizing "Other Losses", a book alleging that one million German POWs died in American camps at the end of WW2, due to General Eisenhower's supposedly fanatical hatred of Germans. He argued Britain started WWI and pulled us into a fight with Germany through "lying British propaganda."
And during the reunification of Germany in 1989, many neighboring countries pressured Germany to accept its postwar borders and give up claims to land it lost at the end of WW2. Buchanan applauded Helmut Kohl as a "patriot" for his "reluctance to sign away all rights to the lost German territories."
Defender of Nazis sources
"Buchanan on Trial", Joshua Muravchik (letter), National Review, November 29, 1993 p2
"The Demanjuk fallout" (editorial response to above letter), National Review, November 29, 1993 p18
"Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews", Joshua Muravchik, Commentary, January 1991 p35-36
The column defending Waldheim was reportedly in the Chicago Sun Times, March 1989.
Holocaust and Historical Revisionism sources
"Ivan The Terrible -- More Doubts?", Pat Buchanan, New York Post, March 17, 1990
"Denying the Holocaust", Deborah Lipstadt, ISBN 0-452-27274-2, p 5-6, p 26, p 238 notes 13 & 14
"The Heresies of Pat Buchanan", Jacob Weisberg, The New Republic, October 22, 1990 p26-27
Jamie McCarthy, USENET, April 8, 1995
"Buchanan on Trial", Joshua Muravchik (letter), National Review, November 29, 1993 p2
"The Demanjuk fallout" (editorial response to above letter), National Review, November 29, 1993 p18
"Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews", Joshua Muravchik, Commentary, January 1991 p35-36
"The Beltway Populist", Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, March 4, 1996 p26
Allied with Fringe Anti-Semite Socialists -- Did Venereal Disease Keep Him Out of the Army? -- Watergate -- dirty tricks, IRS abuses, obstruction of justice -- Disgruntled Staff -- Hypocrite -- Praise for Hitler -- Racist -- Holocaust Revisionism -- Anti-Semitic Statements -- Defender of Nazis -- Sheltered Washington Insider -- All talk, no action (the Republican Jesse Jackson) -- Flirting With Fascism -- Assaulted Police Officers -- Good Points -- Character -- Quotes -- Sources