Transcript

EP28 Superhumanly Inhuman

From Dan Carlin · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 3 h 18 min · 32,900 words · 194 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "EP28 Superhumanly Inhuman", an episode of Dan Carlin published February 16, 2024 (3 h 18 min, about 32,900 words). It mentions 27 people, works and ideas, including Adolf Hitler, Dan Stone, Nazi Germany, Romania, Nazi.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 15:00: Hardcore History, Nazi Germany, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, Dan Stone
  2. – 30:00: Adolf Hitler, Dan Stone, Hardcore History, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
  3. – 45:00: Adolf Hitler
  4. – 1:00:00: Adolf Hitler, Kingdom of Judah, Kingdom of Israel, Cyrus the Great
  5. – 1:15:00: Dan Stone, Herman Friedrich Graba
  6. – 1:30:00: Christopher Browning, Dan Stone, The Holocaust and Unfinished History
  7. – 1:45:00: Dan Stone, Adolf Hitler, Frederick C. Tuach
  8. – 2:00:00: Dan Stone, Nazi Germany
  9. – 2:15:00: Adolf Hitler, Dan Stone, The Holocaust and Unfinished History, University of London
  10. – 2:30:00: Adolf Hitler, Romania, Anton Drexler, Christopher Browning
  11. – 2:45:00: Adolf Hitler, Romania, Nazi Germany
  12. – 3:00:00: Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany
  13. – 3:15:00: Adolf Hitler, American case, British Empire
  14. – 3:18:15: Concentration Camp system, Dan Stone, The Holocaust and Unfinished History

Notable quotes from "EP28 Superhumanly Inhuman"

  • And look if these go well we'll add some other cities down the road it's Hardcore History we're going to issue one of our rare pre-show warnings before the conversation we're about to have here concerning the nature of the material.
    about Hardcore History · at
  • And Yours Truly the Publishers of Dan Stones historian Dan Stone's new book on the Holocaust got in touch with me and said would we like to talk to the professor about the book now stone for those who don't know is one of the foremost.
    about Dan Stone · at
  • Right wipe them out exterminate them it was an attempt to come up with a term for what Winston Churchill in 1940 one when the Soviet Union was invaded by the Germans called a…
    about Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill · at
  • Worse where the modern organization of sophisticated States right in the case of Nazi Germany 20th century States harnesses the organizational and Industrial power of these modern States and applies it to the job of trying to.
    about Nazi Germany · at
  • Said it meant and if it changed tomorrow that's okay too I mean when you listen to Hitler talk about socialism you get a really interesting glimpse into the idea that what he…
    about Adolf Hitler · at
  • Kingdoms Jewish kingdoms with Israeli and Jewish Kings right the Kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah right the Israeli Kingdom in the north Judah in the South if you know your history you know that those arose in the early.
    about Kingdom of Judah · at
  • Humanity's coin right let's start with the people who seem to enjoy it in his book The Holocaust and unfinished history Dan Stone talks about the Willing collaborators as he…
    about The Holocaust and Unfinished History · at
  • About who knew what about who was responsible etc and the debates that are ongoing in Romania or Hungary or Poland for example are in essence no different in a sense no country…
    about Romania · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Adolf Hitler — Person · 36 mentions · first at
  • Dan Stone — Person · 12 mentions · first at
  • Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill — Person · 3 mentions · first at
  • Christopher Browning — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    Entertainers spent the following day amusing themselves by murdering people Holocaust historian Christopher Browning also mentions this incident but the question remains did…
  • Julius Streicher — Person · 2 mentions
  • Cyrus the Great — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Did you know scattering them all over removing them to babyon and it's in the early 500s like the 530s that Cyrus the Great right the guy who founds the ained Persian Empire…
  • Herman Friedrich Graba — Person · 1 mention · first at
    This but I feel like breaking them up is to lose some of the impact Herman Friedrich graba's eyewitness account of what he saw goes like this quote on 5th October 1942 when I…
  • Frederick C. Tuach — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Their ends in the book German voices memories of life during Hitler's thirdd Reich Frederick C tuach quotes hus talking about this and just so you know it's not a direct quote…
  • Anton Drexler — Person · 1 mention · first at
    The coming to prominence of Hitler you would have had a small movement driven by crazy theorists like Anton Drexler and julus Striker and himler I suppose in his early stages…
  • Adolf Eichmann — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

  • Nazi Germany — Company · 7 mentions · first at
  • University of London — Company · 2 mentions · first at
    Second world war he's the director of the hust Research Institute at Royal Holloway at the University of London he's written a lot of books and articles on the subject and the…
  • Royal Holloway — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Historians of the Holocaust in the second world war he's the director of the hust Research Institute at Royal Holloway at the University of London he's written a lot of books…

Concepts & topics

  • Nazi — Concept · 5 mentions
  • Kingdom of Judah — Concept · 3 mentions · first at
  • Kingdom of Israel — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
    Kingdoms Jewish kingdoms with Israeli and Jewish Kings right the Kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah right the Israeli Kingdom in the north Judah in the South if you know your history you know that those arose in the early.
  • Concentration Camp system — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
    Are themes in the book that U we haven't touched on very much for example the Concentration Camp system the sub camps that I think people don't know more than 1100 right something like that more than 1100 absolutely more than 1100 sub camps.
  • British Empire — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Bit yes I think it works to a certain extent so this no doubt for example that the British Empire and the expansion of the US were things that fascinated Hitler he talks at one…
  • American case — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    We'll do the same in Russia and but I think he's really he's much more fascinated by the American case he sees the West westward expansion of the us as really a model for the…

Places & events

  • Romania — Place · 5 mentions · first at
  • Gaza — Place · 2 mentions
  • Madagascar — Place · 1 mention · first at
    There then they talk about things like Exile they look to places like Madagascar right the big island off the eastern coast of the African continent at one point as a place to…
  • Auschwitz — Place · 1 mention
  • Babi Yar — Place · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

hi everyone before we get to a very dark and uh upsetting piece of subject matter how about a little good news I'm going to be doing some speaking engagements in uh March and April 2024 in a couple of different locations if one of them is near you and you'd like to go I'd love to see you uh we're going to be in Los Angeles on March 21st 2024 Salt Lake City March 23rd 2024 Portland Oregon March 28th 2024 in New York City April 9th 2024 you can go to the front page of our website at Dan car.c for more info on those venues and those dates and how to get tickets you can also sign up for our free substack page at dancarlin.com where we will try to provide updates regularly on this as well I'd love to see you out there if you have the time and um look if these go well we'll add some other cities down the road it's Hardcore History we're going to issue one of our rare pre-show warnings before the

conversation we're about to have here concerning the nature of the material that's going to be discussed now obviously when you have a show entitled Hardcore History nobody should be expecting much in the way of rainbows and unicorns that is understood but sometimes the material gets even darker than normal and today is going to be one of those times I don't think it's as heavyduty or as um intense as as the painfotainment show we did on public executions and public violence and all that sort of stuff but maybe not because the material is any lighter because it isn't but perhaps because the show isn't quite as long and doesn't Hammer you um for quite as significant a duration maybe you could say but it's heavy duty stuff and I'm warning you now that maybe it's not for you you'll have to decide the show today came about as the result of a communication between the people who publish a book that's just uh

about to come out in the United States and um Yours Truly the Publishers of Dan Stones historian Dan Stone's new book on the Holocaust got in touch with me and said would we like to talk to the professor about the book now stone for those who don't know is one of the foremost historians of the Holocaust uh in the second world war he's the director of the hust Research Institute at Royal Holloway at the University of London he's written a lot of books and articles on the subject and the new book believe it or not after all these years still breaks new ground and ties the Holocaust into modern times in a way that's valuable and important and when this offer was presented to me I thought to myself you know I don't think we've actually addressed the Holocaust straight on and so maybe having such an August um researcher and um Professor on the subject is a great idea but I did think that there was one thing

missing in a discussion about this between a host and an interview subject and that is the emotional content to a degree because when you have an interview there is an educational slash classroom sort of feel sometimes to things a high-minded discussion on a subject that is much more bloody and muddy and horrifying and traumatizing than can often be brought out in a straight conversation no fault of the interview subject or the host it's just doesn't lend itself to the level of color that a conversation between myself and you where I can bring in things like eyewitness accounts and whatever can do and so the way I thought maybe we could have this is to try to re-inject the emotion back into the story before the interview starts and maybe sort of reconstitute if you will the dried blood a little bit and remind ourselves what we're talking about before we start talking about it I mean there's a legitimate point to

be made about how long the memory of a terrible historical event remains fresh enough to emotionally impact us because we can think I'm sure you can I know I can of terrible Terri terrible historical tragedies from time immemorial and they don't all affect us with the same level of visceral reaction you know I mean we can talk about things if you will like the destruction of the Assyrians you know in 612 when Nineveh Falls which is a holocaust if you happen to be ayrian and living there doesn't really move the needle very much does it but if we talk about the genocide for example example in a place like Rwanda which is a recent event historically speaking it's a lot more likely to get your blood boiling and um maybe make you a little sick to your stomach so there's a question of how long these sorts of events bother us before they slip into a a category where they're more something we think about dispassionately you know

the Mongol conquest was a long time ago right but once upon a time that was the worst thing that ever happened to anybody but we write books today about this subject and talk about the you know upsides of the Mongol Holocaust if you will so you know things change right so injecting a little bit of the original horror that comes with a subject like this before we talk about a subject like this seem to be a good way to set the conversation up before we talk to Professor Stone about his new book The Holocaust is an endless ly fascinating subject it's one of those sorts of occurrences where there's it holds a mirror up to humanity in a way that um well I don't know about you but that that bothers one and makes us ask fundamental questions about ourselves as a species and the sorts of structures we create for our you know arranging our societies if you will and what they're capable of doing to us if they fall into

the wrong hands or they're not carefully managed the word genocide is important here it's a word you see used all the time now but a lot of people don't know its origin genocide is not an old word it's an old practice but it's not an old word genocide was a term coined in the 1940s by a writer who was writing about what the Nazis were doing during a time per period when it wasn't altogether clear exactly what was going on the term itself essentially means I mean there's a very legalized formalized version of the term now but when it was originally coined it essentially means an attempt to destroy whole peoples right wipe them out exterminate them it was an attempt to come up with a term for what Winston Churchill in 1940 one when the Soviet Union was invaded by the Germans called a crime which has no name now he didn't know that this was a crime against Jews specifically at the time churcher was talking about what the

German Army was doing in the Soviet Union where they were depopulating whole districts and it wasn't just Jews it was all kinds of people we had already seen this happen at the start of the war in Poland where what had happened to the polls if it wasn't genocide it was something damn near genocide and perhaps what's so shocking about it is not that it happened because as I said we all understand that the attempts to wipe out whole peoples is I mean you can go back to Biblical times and every time in between I mean it is not an uncommon occurrence but what seems so strange is when it happens in the modern world right it's one thing to say that once upon a time you know a people like the Huns or the Assyrians or I mean you just there you could fill in the blank right tons of peoples tried to wipe out peoples nearby them doesn't surprise us at all but at a certain point you think that societies and

civilizations has moved past a point where you do that or where the um International structures the laws the um agreements the collective morality of us all has moved to a point where that sort of thing shouldn't happen anymore and instead of that occurring it in fact becomes somehow worse where the modern organization of sophisticated States right in the case of Nazi Germany 20th century States harnesses the organizational and Industrial power of these modern States and applies it to the job of trying to exterminate peoples this is part of the problem of trying to talk about the Holocaust in the context of when it happened because it happened during a time period where Mass industrial killing and death was going on at a pace that is probably unprecedented in humankind sometimes you can point to certain times and places um China for example had certain rebellions where if you actually look at the death

rate and how many people died I mean it might be comparable to certain you know world wars but by and large what was going on in the second world war was on such a scale that when you talk about a particular people maybe losing five or six million of their members it this is a crazy thing to say but it might not even be that noticeable at the post-war war crimes trials where the Victorious Allied Powers were all involved the Soviet Union which of course was one of the victor ious allied powers and had suffered mightily maybe the worst of all if not them then China but probably them of any of the of the combatants in the war they some time sort of resented the idea that anyone would focus on a Jewish Holocaust specifically because their point was it's just entirely wrapped up in in the greater Holocaust entirely right the horrific things that Nazi Germany and their allies did to everyone that they

fought right and 6 million Jews was the Jewish price that was paid but look at what happened to the poles look what happened to the Russians look what happened over and over and over again all these peoples that were devastated it was only after the second world war that it started to seep in exactly what the Holocaust meant and in the early 1960s um after the founding of the state of Israel when Israel was going out and finding war criminals right Nazis that had eluded capture and had gotten away and they got their hands for example on Adolf ikan in South America where he was hiding out and they brought him back I think they drugged him and they flew him back and they put him on trial in the early 1960s in Israel and so much of the world's attention was focused on this and by that time the world had sort of internalized some of the you know what the Soviets were talking about right the

greater death that everybody had had had to suffer and brought out the specific attempts on the parts of the Nazis and their allies to wipe out Jews at least Jews in Europe but maybe Jews everywhere at a certain point and amman's testimony and what came out of that trial was so outrageous and had so many implications for modern Humanity as a whole that that began to build the knowledge and understanding and to some degree the fact fasination and um intense examination of the Holocaust in a way that had been building up till that time but really took off then and then in the 1970s there was quite a bit of um work in popular culture and everything and and of course now we have it where the Holocaust is um well you'd have to be obviously living under a rock and and not be particularly uh educated to not have heard or know about it but you might not know a lot about it and hopefully we can add a little bit

of information to that today I imagine many of you know a great deal about it already though it's one of those modern sorts of occurrences that's hard to ignore it is one of the ultimate examples of the literary theme of man's inhumanity to man and just when you think it can't get any worse there's a story or a Rememberance or a document or something else maybe even sometimes film footage that comes into play where you just shake your head and can't believe that Humanity ever went there in Winston Churchill's history of the Second World War um and you if you really are interested in that series by the way don't buy one of The Abridged versions go get your hands on one of the original uh works because they include all the appendixes Churchill throws in a lot of letters that he wrote during the war itself and Communications that he had with other people for example in 1944 Churchill wrote a a letter

or a communic and in it he talked about what was happening to the Jews in Hungary now in 1944 even though ever since the war people have been trying to figure out how much the Allies realized what was or wasn't going on in the occupied territories and in the places where Jews were being persecuted and killed and Churchill in 1944 in this communic shows that they know something's going on and listen to how he refers to it it's in the appendix of volume six of his history of the Second World War the volume entitled triumphant tragedy it is a communic from him to the foreign secretary in Britain dated July 11th 1944 and he writes quote there is no doubt that this persecution of the Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world and it has been done by scientific Machinery by nominally civilized men in the name of a

great state and one of the leading races of Europe it is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved I cannot therefore he writes feel that this is the kind of ordinary case which is put through the protecting power as for instance the lack of feeding or sanitary conditions in some particular prisoners Camp there should therefore be in my opinion no negotiations of any kind on this subject declarations should be made in public so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death end quote let's recall that this is before the finding of the concentration camps the death camps the camps that the Nazis themselves referred to as Annihilation camps I should probably address something right now that's already going

to get me some feedback so that we uh make the distinction between Nazis and Germans and I've heard for example from Polish people over the years that they resent us referring to the Germans as Nazis as though that somehow exempts them from their crimes right that there are Nazis and Germans and that they're not the same but I think we should point out that this is the Nazi period of German history and that that is a unique period in German history and even if German troops for example in the first world war were exceedingly harsh with the civilian populations in some places right the Germans are famous for Collective punishment in the war if some um partisan shoots at a German soldier in the first world war it is not unusual for the Germans to line up a bunch of Civilian hostages and put them up against a wall and shoot them but that's not Nazi activity that's just well a lot of countries would do that but the

Germans and before them the prussians specifically were very harsh about that kind of stuff but making a distinction about between that and putting people in concentration camps and gassing them is a very different thing that is the Nazi era specifically and what Dan Stone's book talks about and we'll get into it with Professor Stone himself is that you just can't write it off to Germans in any case because there were a lot of other Europeans whose anti-semitic ideas were tapped into and who became willing accomplices in all this but maybe we should talk for a second about who the Nazis were because the Holocaust becomes something difficult to imagine without them trying to describe the Nazis is difficult it's like a moving Target and there's a reason for for that but certainly they are fascinating to us even today I've heard it said that if you are a writer and you want to increase Book Sales all you need to do

is figure out a justification for slapping a swastika on your book cover and you can be assured of increased Book Sales that says something doesn't it that's indicative of something the Nazis are a very strange group and you can contrast them with their great geopolitical and ideological opponents the Communists and in many ways they're opposites from each other the Communists of the Bolshevik movement the menik the maoists later all these groups were filled with communist intellectuals who killed bazillions of trees to use paper to make these arguments that even today make the heads of doctoral candidates in political science departments all over the world's headspin talking about the dict dictatorship of the proletariat and the historical dialectic and all these you know arguments that divide communism into all sorts of factions that disagree about that specific element of the ideology or not you didn't see this in

Nazism because Nazism believed in something called the furer princip the leader principle and what that meant is these little discussions over you know what things like the word socialism meant didn't matter cuz all that mattered is what the leader said it m it said it meant and if it changed tomorrow that's okay too I mean when you listen to Hitler talk about socialism you get a really interesting glimpse into the idea that what he thinks socialism means doesn't sound anything like what somebody today would describe it as but he didn't have to be consistent and he didn't have to be accurate it didn't matter the Nazis are a strange group of what we would today call conspiracy theorists they are made possible by the disruption caused cused by the first world war and ironically the Communists in the Soviet Union were too it's not a movement that makes any sense without talking about the first world war and

the loss in the first world war was something that Hitler and many people like him considered to be the greatest tragedy in German history and he blamed it on certain people people he called the November criminals the November criminals were socialists and Jews both of whom were almost the same in Hitler's mind sometimes the Nazis came to power in an era where the idea of radical extremes was particularly in Vogue because there wasn't a widely admired sort of moderate choice for the German people the government at the time the viar Republic was seen as corrupt it was seen as ineffectual it was seen as something that was installed by Germany's enemies and at the time that the viar Republic was falling apart the two extremes on the political Spectrum the farle with the Communists and the far right with the Nazis were at in open Warfare in the streets against each other and so if you were an average German voter your

choices were the far left the far right or the discredited moderate government in the middle which many people saw as no choice at all there is an attitude in the United States especially today that the Germans were a left-wing Movement Like Communists and socialists this Bears a little bit of discussion although I've done a whole Hardcore History addendum show about it with danieli belli where we talked about why this isn't so but the bottom line is that when you talk about things like right-wing or left-wing and political spectrums these are all human constructs and if you change the criteria you're using you can put any sort of political system anywhere you want but if we're playing the game here comparing Apples to Apples well then you have to use the political spectrum that was in Vogue from the beginning which is like 18th century France up until about the 1980s when people started creating their own

political spectrums with different criteria um if you want to say that the Nazis are a left-wing movement you have to use a criteria that only bases you know where you place systems on something like freedom in which case oh you can lump all totalitarian regimes on the left and all free regimes on the right and and call the Nazis anything you want but traditionally there's a list of criteria that's been used from time immemorial and if you use that one the Nazis fit firmly on the right let me show the differences very quickly between say the far left and the far right the far right is nationalistic right they're they believe in in a country a nation or a race they're not internationalist it's an Us and Them kind of philosophy the farle is internationalist their belief is class-based which means that people in other countries can be allies or countrymen just as much as people in your own country I mean the old

communist line and socialist line was workers of the World Unite well that's not something people on the far right would say because they don't want people from other countries uniting with them generally they believe in their country workers of the World Unite is a national is an internationalis phrase the far-right regime often hearken back to a glorious past a mythological past a romanticized past that they want to take you know the people back to right whereas the farle are looking forward to some sort of Glorious future which has never happened before and is only made possible by things like the progression of systems right so the Communist believe that capitalism eventually would uh destroy itself from its internal contradictions and when it did it would it would naturally progressed to the next stage of economic human development communism so it looked forward to some sort of Glorious untested utopian

future the Communists and the far left believed in the proletariat the working class the far right believed in the vulk or the folk the uh the racial society and Community the farle had an academic sort of patina on top of you know their systems in other words a whole bunch of intellectuals debating this aspect or that aspect guys like Lenin or trosy or cev or zenov or buaran and all these you know people that were economic theorists the far rights mystical and in the furer prin of believes in the idea that the charismatic leader can determine all this for himself both the far right and the far left can be considered populist at times and if you're somebody that thinks that the name uh the Nazi part party which is officially the national German Socialist Workers Party or the National Socialist German Workers Party uh proclaims that they are socialist you have to dig a little deeper into what that

means first of all never take movements or the names of Nations at face value because there's always some marketing going on so for example if you look at a place like North Korea today North Korea is a hereditary dictatorship right a hereditary dictatorship they are an autocratic Society but what's their official name they are the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea so they have both the words Democratic and Republic in their name even though they're nothing like either one of those systems the Communist Chinese are the People's Republic of China the Islamic um dictatorship of Iran is the Islamic Republic of Iran officially so these are all marketing terms and Hitler made it very clear in mind comp that they would often laugh at the fact that they would choose these phrases that would confuse the German public about what they were all about so if you go read mine comp by the way which is

Hitler's let's call it a Manifesto written when he was in prison and he was sentenced to prison because he was part of a failed coup and when he was in prison he dictated this book to his followers it was meant to be uh a political document it's it's propaganda but it does tell you quite a bit about his thinking and in it he talks about choosing symbols that are normally associated with the farle but doing it deliberately and in mind conf Hitler writes quote the red color of our posters in itself drew them meaning the Communists and socialists to our meeting Halls the run-of-the-mill Bourgeois were horrified that we had seized upon the red of the Bolsheviks and they regarded this as all very ambiguous the German national Souls kept privately whispering to each other the suspicion that basically we were nothing but a species of Marxism perhaps marxists or rather socialists in Disguise for to this very

day these scatterbrains have not understood the difference between socialism and Marxism especially when they discovered that as a matter of principle we greeted in our meetings no ladies and gentlemen but only National comrades and among ourselves spoke only of party comrades let me stop for a minute and just say what he's basically saying is they were using even the terminology that Communists use when they greeted each other they comrades and they found this even more confusing he continues quote the Marxist spook seemed demonstrated for many of our enemies how often we shook with laughter at these simple Bourgeois scare cats at the sight of their ingenious witty gessing games about our origin our intentions and our goal which chose the red color of our posters he writes after careful and thorough reflection in order to provoke the left to drive them to indignation and lead them to attend our

meetings if only to break them up in order to have some chance to speak to the people end quote when Hitler talks about Reds by the way he's talking about the Communists when he talks about using terms like he's not using ladies and gentlemen but he's using party comrades and all that that's all communist sort of terminology too but the Nazis were fanatically anti-communism enemies and they saw the Communists as being um a Jewish movement but being the conspiracy theories that they were and they're almost bipolar in their conspiracy theories because they could at the same time believe that the Jews were a subhuman species and yet they controlled the world right in the Nazi mind right they they control both the capitalistic societies the banking centers of London and New York and places like that by pulling the strings like Puppet Masters but they also controlled the most anti- capitalist most anti-democratic

societies of the world too right the the Soviet Union and the Communist so they they were this subhuman group of people that controlled most of the world it's a strange sort of bipolar way of seeing these um individuals they the Nazis saw them as polluters of the blood and the blood was part of the Nazi philosophy that Al goes into the late 19th century mid 20th century ideas of things like social Darwinism and eugenics in his history of the second world war in the first edition of the series of books the Gathering storm Winston Churchill tried his hand at describing the philosophy of the Nazis as outlined in mine comp and Churchill wrote quote the main thesis of mine comp is Simple Man is a fighting animal therefore the nation being a community of Fighters is a fighting unit any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is doomed to Extinction a country or race which ceases to fight is equally doomed the

fighting capacity of a race church or rights about Mom depends upon its Purity hence the need for ridding it of foreign defilements the Jewish race owing to its universality is of necessity pacifist and internationalist pacifism is the deadliest sin for it means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence the first duty of every country is therefore to nationalize the masses intelligence in the case of individuals is not of first importance will and determination are the prime qualities the individual who is born to command is more valuable than countless thousands of subordinate Natures only brute force can ensure the survival of the race hence the necessity for mil military forms the race must fight a race that rests must rust and perish end quote he then points out that the aristocratic principle meaning you know the rule of a single individual like a king is fundamentally sound and

intellectualism is undesirable then you get to the socialism part when it comes to Hitler's view of the party now it should be pointed out that when people will talk about about the Nazis as a socialistic leftwing movement they often will quote things from the party very early on in the party's history like the early 1920s for example which is a decade before Hitler comes to power those sorts of ideas predated Hitler in a lot of respects and by the time he comes to power in the early 1930s he completely transformed the party and and exiled or often murdered the people who believed in socialism as a real thing I've heard it described the Nazi party when Hitler took over as a corporate shell or the equivalent of a corporate shell where he goes in and just takes the forms and then revamps it all you know to suit his Viewpoint if you want to hear Hitler describe socialism you have to decide

which speech you want to try to pin him down on because he changes his mind all the time and again as part of the leader principle the furer princip that's just fine for example in 1922 uh American journalist William Shyer who was stationed in Germany uh as a news reporter dur the entire rise of the Nazis who went from speech to speech to speech watching Hitler talk uh and never got his mind around what the heck the Nazis were all about tried to understand it spoke German uh Shyer quoted Hitler in a speech describing what socialism was in 1922 and this is a definition that would apply to Americans who believe in the Second Amendment the flag God and the singing of America the Beautiful with your hand over your heart shyra says in 1922 this is Hitler's description of what a socialist is from a speech he gave and that shyra rended quote whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows

no higher ideal than the welfare of his Nation Whoever has understood our great national anthem deuts land Uber ales to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany people and land that man is a socialist and end quote then there's the Messianic leader side of this um there is a religious or pseudo religious um belief in the almost God chosen role of this furer figure in the country that defies rational analysis this is the mystical side of Nazism and it's discussed in historian Stephan melanowski who was born in Berlin by the way he's at the University of Edinburgh now um historian he describes it in his book Nazis and Nobles and this is an important thing to pay attention to because as one of my history professors said once when you're trying to nail down the political uh allies the place you would put someone on the political Spectrum right are the Communists far

left or far right are the Nazis far left or far right he said don't listen to what they say look at who they associate with right judge them by the company they keep and malinowski writes about the weird Messianic uh charismatic rule of the furer and how that plays into the whole system this is something that was not a part of bolshevism at least not until Joseph Stalin's time uh when the cult of personality took over and malanowski writes quote although they certainly did not see eye to eye on every detail the general thrust of the furer follower ideal a concept that stood in in Stark opposition to the Democratic and egalitarian social models represented one of the most significant bridges that facilitated relationships between the different groups of the emergent new right there were two main reasons for this firstly the concept contained various diffus but eminently powerful blends of irrational Messianic pseudo

religious elements that were comfortingly similar to the new rights typical rhetorical and symbolic idiom and secondly both both the ideal and the reality of National Socialist ferum came to signify a system of charismatic personal rule that was worlds apart from democracy's Anonymous elections and the cold mechanisms of modern bureaucracy indeed the Nazis ideal furer was a decisive Warrior who had been annealed by the staler literally the storm of Steel that was rained down by artillery fire and represented the antithesis of the feeble desk bound bureaucrat end quote he says that this ideal of charismatic rule was a phenomenon that was rooted in irrational religious and emotional forces and now based on this idea of judging a movement by the company it keeps right so if if the Nazis are socialists then you would think of people who would talk about you know labor unions and trade unions about the

ownership of the means of production I mean there's a whole lot of things that go into what Socialism or communism is but the Nazis didn't work with workers they worked with management they worked with the giant corporate firms that made Germany the industrial Powerhouse that it was and there was a partnership between the two in his fantastic book economic historian Adam tw's in the wages of Destruction talks about a very famous meeting between the Nazis when they first come to power and the great industrial firms in Germany on February 20th 1933 he talks about the amount of money that these giant firms gave and what the promises of the Nazis to these groups were and T writes quote the meeting of 20th February and its aftermath are the most notorious instances of the willingness of German big business to assist Hitler in establishing his dictatorial regime the evidence cannot be dodged nothing

suggest that the leaders of German big business were filled with ideological ardor for national socialism before or after February 1933 nor did Hitler ask krupen company to sign up to an agenda of violent anti-Semitism or a war of Conquest he continues but what Hitler and his government did promise was an end to parliamentary democracy and the destruction of the German left and for this most of German big business was willing to make a substantial down payment end quote how substantial are we talking about well Adam tws runs down some of the big contributions from the big industrial Giants of Germany to the Nazi party to give them the crucial early support that allowed them to solidify their position and he writes quote the largest individual donations came from IG farbin 400,000 reichs marks and the Deutsche Bank 200,000 reichs marks the association of the mining industry also made a generous deposit of

400,000 Reich marks other large donors included the organizers of the Berlin automobile exhibition 100,000 reiches marks and a cluster of electrical engineering corporations including tunen AEG and the accumulator in fabriek end quote again if we are judging a movement by the company it keeps the German Nazi party is aligned with groups of military par paramilitary by this time uh veteran soldiers like the stalh helm and the fry cor who go after socialists and Communists in the streets with their fists or Worse Hitler is appointed Chancellor initially the first time he gets in there by the old Field Marshal the Prussian Field Marshal Von Hindenberg who was himself a devote of the German Emperor and was a virtual military dictator of Germany in the last couple of years of the first world war no violent revolutionary he and if you look at the geopolitical allies of Germany in the second world

war they're all right-wing regimes they all prosecute and persecute socialists and Communists I mean my goodness by the standards of the traditional political Spectrum it would be hard to find a more right-wing regime than the Imperial Japanese of the second World War era they worship a Divine Emperor for goodness sakes along with the persecution jailing and or worse of the Socialists and Communists in their midst trying to get your mind around what Hitler and the Nazis did believe though is really difficult because it is wrapped up in the mystical as we said I had a professor my favorite professor in college Robert po wrote a whole book on what he called the religion of nature which is how he described the Nazi belief system the main thing to focus on perhaps though is that it is not economic at all which is what's so weird about the way we think now because we tend to think of political systems as

rooted in um economic questions right are you a a capitalist are you a socialist I mean what do you believe Hitler's belief system focused on blood and soil William Shyer in his book The Rise and Fall of the the Third Reich says that Hitler said on many occasions that his whole philosophy was rooted in something called The fola Mind shaft which is a certain kind of racial Community rooted in Blood and soil but shyra says you know he heard multiple Hitler speeches where Hitler said this is the whole key to understanding Nazism and it never once sounded the same and shyra never understood it he did quote Hitler as saying quote the state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development and then from later in the speech the state is a racial organism and not an economic organization end quote so perhaps this is where our problems develop as we try to understand a system using our modern

lenses for how we evaluate things trying to you know get our mind around a system that's rooted in late 19th century ideas of eugenics and social Darwinism and blood and soil and folks M shaft and a whole bunch of Concepts that people don't talk about very much anymore because well in part they're pretty discredited because in part well we had things like the second world war and the Holocaust in a book uh written about genocide called why not kill them all the logic and prevention of mass political murder the authors Daniel cherro and Clark mccaulay run down the reasons for some of this idea connected to what the Nazis believed in about well what would make up the folks mind shaft right the idea of a racial Community because in the vks of Mind shaft you could be in it if you were part of you know the people that met the criteria and if you didn't you weren't a part of it the people that met

the criteria weren't people who believed a certain things they were people who you know had a certain ethnicity and ancestry Hitler had this weird idea about what Aryans were um in his mind they were Nordic so you think Scandinavians right blonde hair blue eyes those kind of people never mind what the word Aryan really means in history and why not kill them all the authors point out that if you believe everything about a culture and people revolves around race then the biggest threat to that reality is people that would dilute or pollute or breathe the race out of existence the Nazis were worried about blood pollution and what they sometimes refer to as the Jewish disease and then why not kill them all they point out that that can be a trigger for things like genocide and the author's right quote the most powerful fear is fear of Extinction the fear that our in quotation marks people our cause our

culture our history may not survive this fear will elicit the most violent and extreme reactions group identification caring about what happens to our group is what makes Intergroup conflict possible without such identification individuals would be loow to risk their own lives for the collective yet we know that people commonly do take risks and sometimes invite almost certain death on behalf of their families close friends Clans tribes religions and Nations those groups developing the most powerful common identification are those that promise some kind of immortality few are willing to die for their Tennis Club but many are willing to Die For A Cause religion ethnic group or nation in which the individual can continue after death through the survival and success of the group end quote they then point out this particular attitude that the Nazis had which is rooted in things like the folks

Comm mind shaft this racial community and the fear that it might be polluted by inferior blood and they write quote fear of pollution or contamination is a particular kind of survival fear the fear that the group as we know it will not survive even if many of its members do the group will exist in the future only by losing what is most important and distinctive about it and being Amalgamated with some other group The relevant emotion for this kind of survival concern combines fear with disgust fear of pollution is not so much a threat to the physical continuation of the group as to the essence or nature of the group Hitler's Obsession they write with the Jewish disease and race mixing fantastic as it may seem to those who do not take such pseudo science seriously was a deep fear that his idealized Germanic race would not survive combined with disgust for what he perceived to be the increasing judaization of the world

world end quote so if this is your number one fear and if you think Jews control the world and if you're giving speeches saying that if the Jews because they control the world plunge the world into another world war they're sort of going to reap the Whirlwind what do you do I mean what's the logical answer The Logical solution to that sort of problem well in Nazi Germany it starts almost immediately once the Nazis gain power Jews have to start wearing identifiable symbols so people know who they are they quickly get banned from multiple kinds of professions right we can't have them in positions of power then the persecution starts right the crystal knock type events the um pograms the Smashing of Windows the destruction and boycotting of businesses then all of a sudden it moves to something that would be recognized by people for example in the Americas because it's you know Hitler's reading

about these sorts of things and he likes the approach that the Americas took to the native indigenous peoples right put them on reservations he has for a while his people think about putting Jews and subhumans on specific reservations and keeping them isolated there then they talk about things like Exile they look to places like Madagascar right the big island off the eastern coast of the African continent at one point as a place to maybe send all your Jews one can't help but think that if that had actually happened we would be talking about some of the same sorts of problems in Madagascar today that they're talking about in the Levant right now and then eventually it moves from the idea of exiling all the Jews to a far away place to Simply killing them where they are now we should point out that the idea of exiling the Jews was not about sending them away from their homes it was about sending them back to where

they came from or getting them out of what was perceived to be a part of the world where they were the equivalent of an invasive species that had put down Roots this is fascinating to me because it's almost the exact opposite Viewpoint of one you'll hear from the Middle East sometimes today from Arab or Islamic societies who will say that the Jews in the Levant in in Western Asia in what's now the state of Israel that they're an invasive species from outside the region right so you can't be an invasive species in Europe and an invasive species you know in the middle you come from somewhere don't you so when the Germans are thinking about sending Jews back to where they belong the obvious question is where do they belong now to me the obvious answer is if you've been living there multiple Generations ever since the middle ages for example in a place like Europe well in my mind you belong there but you know

the Jews are one of those peoples that because they're from a different religious group and because they have ideas about marrying within the religion and they're so persecuted and there's so much prejudice against them that other people don't want to marry them that a lot of times they stay sort of a group apart right it's tough to assimilate in a lot of these places so where do they come from is an interesting question I'm not going to go into a whole bunch of the history of the Jewish people but we should just point out that the Jews the Israelis the Hebrews whichever name you'd like to apply to are an ancient group of people despite the almost conspiracy theory that at least the ashkanazi Jews the ones in Europe um are actually European right there are some people that believe that they're uh the descendants of a Turkish step tribe called the kazars and we talked about this in the Viking show

we did a while back uh because unlike most people around the world and to to convert to Judaism as a group is rare and the kazari nobility may have converted in the Middle Ages to Judaism it's still very controver verial but if they did they haven't really left their genetic markers on the ashkanazi because the Jews are one of the most studied people in terms of DNA and genetics and there's really no kazari markers found in Jewish genetics from Europe there are however from the patrilineal line as I've researched it and understand it in my you know very narrow and shallow way a patrilineal line that goes all the way back to the modern Middle East so the connection to the roots in the region where once upon a time there were kingdoms uh Jewish kingdoms with with Israeli and Jewish Kings right the Kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah right the Israeli Kingdom in the north Judah in the

South if you know your history you know that those arose uh in the early early Iron Age so think the 900s BCE right approximately 3,000 years ago these are the um kingdoms that the well the Christians would call it the old Old Testament the Jews would refer to as the Tanakh that the Old Testament of the Bible talks about right King Solomon King Saul King David those people and historians are continuing trying to figure out whether these kingdoms are glittering Rich powerful almost Imperial type kingdoms or whether they're much more you know rudimentary small city states with you know clusters of villages that sort of have allegiance to them regardless the only reason that they can flourish in their golden age from about like 900 is to the 700s and in one case 600s uh cuz Israel fell before Judah fell is because the superpowers in the region are at a particularly low EB during that time period right the superpowers being Egypt

uh in the north the Hittites in the east in what's now Iraq uh the Assyrians in the North and the Babylonians in the South normally all those guys are fighting over the territory that's now um Israel and as a matter of fact when the Egyptians run the place and they're the normal super power that controls the region this is going to be just an interesting aside but they rule it from their Command Center in the city of Gaza and yes it's the same place as the city of Gaza today Gaza has like a 4,000 year old history but during the time period when the Kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah Thrive they they're able to do so because the powers that would normally control them are you know at a lowb uh that is a temporary situation and when those powers uh regain their strength they take over those areas in the seven early 700s the Israelis um the Kingdom of Israel is destroyed by the Assyrians who go in

there and level cities and take the Jewish people and move them around the the Assyrians are great population transfer people today we would call it ethnic cleansing and this becomes the first early time period where Jews are sent away from where they considered to be their Homeland and moved all around found in the late 500s I think the 580s the Babylonians who took over from the Assyrians as the big dog in what's now the country of Iraq they went in and destroyed the southern Kingdom the kingdom of Judah destroying Jerusalem uh leveling the sacred Temple of the Jews and doing the same things the Assyrians did you know scattering them all over removing them to babyon and it's in the early 500s like the 530s that Cyrus the Great right the guy who founds the ained Persian Empire gets such wonderful you know publicity in the Old Testament of the Bible the Tanakh when he supposedly or allegedly allows the Jews to return

back to those areas rebuild the Temple and if not gain political control again because the Persians weren't going to let anybody rule that area but themselves then to sort of be the local governors in charge of their own destiny as long as you pay your taxes to the great King of Persia then of course as we all know right that Persian Empire is destroyed and overthrown by Alexander the Great in the 300s when Alexander dies in 323 bcee his many generals rip his Empire apart and all rule their individual pieces like hereditary Kings and the area that's now uh Israel and the West Bank and Gaza are all areas that are being fought over by two you know success they were called dynasties of Alexander's generals the tmes and the solids the Jews um are always one would say maybe a freedom loving people another might say an independence loving people if you happen to be the ones ruling them you might call them a

Troublesome rebellious people but they're always rebelling against the local rulers in the 160s you have something called the maban Revolt where they revolt against the saluca government and they gain control of the region again for a while until the Romans come in in 64 BC and sort of conquer the place for good that doesn't mean that the uh the Jewish folks aren't rebelling against them because they have all kinds of problems the Romans with them and in 70 CE ad the Romans finally give the Jewish people in the region the Roman treatment which is one Roman writer once described it they create a wasteland and call it peace that's where you get things like The Saga of Mada and all that but nobody knows in all these conflicts how many Jews died but it's probably in the millions when you realize how many uh Kelts the Romans just under Julius Caesar killed it's not a hard thing to imagine but when the

Romans give them the final you know treatment they created a genocide they kill tons of Jews the um the Banning of Jews from the region Begins the great Exodus and diaspora that sends Jews all over the known world uh if it hadn't already started it really takes hold and this is where if you look at history you can start to trace the movement of Jewish people up you know from originally this Ground Zero in the Holy Land to first of all the Roman Empire so you'll see them in Italy you'll see them in Spain all the areas around the Mediterranean and then you can almost trace the movements northwards over the generations and by the Middle Ages they're all over Europe but if you know your history you know that they are always a minority in all these countries they are often persecuted they are almost always discriminated against there are then occasional times where they're thrown out of countries England

Spain pgrs and um and mass killing sprees are common uh in the First Crusade there's Mass killing of Jews anytime that there's sort of uh The Taking of cities the Jews in them are are often killed what's interesting is if you study the anti-semitic actions of for example Le European governments the Germans are not considered to be one of the particularly bad ones now take that with a grain of salt because there's anti-semitic activity everywhere but the Russians have maybe the worst reputation up until the second world war with tons of programs and many of the Jews that immigrated to the United States in the Golden Age of Jewish immigration did so coming from places like Russia due to the persecutions and pams but of course the Nazis take over the lead spot in the anti-Semitic of Europe when Hitler gains control and by the early 1930s um Germany is becoming a very dangerous place indeed to be

Jewish we should point out that at no time were Jews not a part of the uh Middle Eastern population and because of that people like the Nazis and a lot of other European governments at times considered sending them back where they came from although if you're a Jewish person whose family's been in a place like Russia or for you know 10 Generations 12 Generations something like that does it really seem like you belong in a place thousands of miles from where your family's from where they speak a language you don't know well if that doesn't sound like a good idea to you now maybe after the Holocaust it might at the start of this show I felt the need to give a warning about what was to come and the warning was because there's a need when discussing something as horrific as genocide to step back and take emotional stock in the subject matter you can have an intellectual discussion and those are

important engaging the mind and reason when discussing these things is key but if you do that without re-injecting the psychological trauma into the conver conversation then you run the risk of having a sterile dialogue or monologue which is not a whole lot different than what some of the perpetrators of a genocide like the Holocaust were having in conference rooms where people served coffee and showed documents and discussed Logistics and uh challenges and numbers and in other words one needs to fuse the intellectual with the emotional in order to be in the right frame of mind I mean when Heinrich himler as recounted in nor 11's book The Holocaust tells his underlings who are setting up these Annihilation camps that he expects them to act in a superhumanly inhuman way well that's easy to say in the conference room it's a whole different situation when you're actually on the ground acting in a superhumanly inhuman

way we also need to understand that as I say about all of the past there's no way for us to understand it there's no way to put ourselves in the shoes of the people here all we can ever hope for by engaging the intellect And the emotions is to have a better view of this than we had beforehand right sometimes subtly better but better nonetheless and the real challenge was how to use the atrocious material in a way to accomplish that goal there is no lack of atrocious material there is no lack of eyewitness accounts there is no lack of documentation there were tons of this stuff when I was a kid and there's so much more now the fall of the Soviet Union uh multiple sorts of uh conferences and educational seminars and Museum exhibitions since then have exploded the amount of information we have about the Holocaust including tons more photographs and accounts and diary entries I mean if you're a holocaust

denier you're work is a lot harder than it was in the past and it was difficult you know in the 1960s to deny the Holocaust especially when you had participants in it sometimes bragging about it I mean Adolf ikeman was not ashamed of his role in the Holocaust right so you have difficult to deny that this happened ever much more difficult now with so much more stuff but how to use that stuff in a way that's helpful in understanding is difficult and look I'm not a historian as I say all the time but this is a classic problem that historians have which is you have a ton of information how do you organize it and use it in a way to accomplish the goal of helping to illuminate the past even a little bit so the way I did it and I hope I did it well I mean or usefully anyway I tried to bear in mind what Dan Stone said said in his book talking about this a little bit and he wrote quote no doubt it is right to say that there is

something numbing about recounting a seemingly endless sequence of atrocities it is also a reflection of what happened leaving the victims numb and sometimes he writes it is important to T with a tiny atrocity tiny in the grand scale of the murders but the whole world to those who were affected end quote that's sort of the annefrank approach to looking at the Holocaust I choose a single individual and show what the impact is on them so I did that also but I also chose some of these very large incidents where your mind almost explodes at the scope one of the things that gets lost in uh conversations or portrayals of the Holocaust and something that Dan Stone's latest book uh tries really hard to reemphasize is how much of the Holocaust actually was done by hand with bullets and guns um and shooting as opposed to the image we more usually have anyway of gas and Annihilation camps and all this it was

much more dirty and grimy and old-fashioned if you want to look at this as something that jenas Khan would have understand stood when he destroyed whole cities and executed whole populations it's very similar to that and a lot of people witnessed it so there are accounts years ago I marked one of these accounts that I go back to occasionally so I I just sometimes when I I feel like I need a refresher infusion of Soul crushing psychological trauma to remind me of exactly what we're talking about here I go back to this account I call it 23 and you'll understand why when you hear it I actually read it when I was a kid it was in a book called The Holocaust by nor 11 written in the late 1960s but it's an eyewitness account of one of these mass killings the eyewitness account came out in the nurburg trials where a German civilian construction engineer had watched the annihilation of a Jewish ghetto in

Ukraine the man's name was Herman Friedrich graba and his affidavit nor 11 says froze the nurenberg court with pity and horror she writes that it is a document which must stand as one of the most terrifying in the literature of the Holocaust and it absolutely destroys me every time I read it it is an extensive one and I hope you'll pardon some of the long quotes in this but I feel like breaking them up is to lose some of the impact Herman Friedrich graba's eyewitness account of what he saw goes like this quote on 5th October 1942 when I visited the building office at duno monus and I went directly to the pits nobody bothered us now I heard rifle shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth Mounds the people who had got off the trucks men women and children of all ages had to undress upon the order of an SS man who carried a riding or dog whip they had to put down their clothes in fixed

places sorted according to shoes top clothing and underclothing I saw a heap of shoes of about 800 to a th000 pairs great piles of underlinen and clothing without screaming or weeping these people undressed stood around around in family groups kissed each other said farewells and waited for a sign from another SS man who stood near the pit with a whip in his hand he continues during the 15 minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for Mercy I watched a family of about eight persons a man and a woman both about 50 with their children of about 1 8 and 10 and two grown-up Daughters of about 20 to 24 and an old woman with Snow White hair was holding the one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it the child was cing with delight the couple were looking on with tears in their eyes the father was holding the hand of a boy of about 10 years old and speaking to Him Softly the

boy was fighting his tears the father pointed toward the sky stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him at that moment the SS man at the pit shouted something to his comrade the latter counted off about 20 persons and instructed them to go behind the Earth Mound among them was the family which I have mentioned I well remember a girl slim and with black hair who as she passed close to me pointed to herself and said 23 I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave people were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible ible nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads some of the people shot were still moving some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive the pit was already 2/3 full I estimated that it already contained about a thousand

people I looked for the man who did the shooting he testified he was an SS man who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit his feet dangling into the pit he had a Tommy Gun on his knees and he was smoking a cigarette the people completely naked went down some steps which were cut in the clay wall of the pit and clamored over the heads of the people lying there to the place where the SS man directed them they lay down in front of the dead or injured people some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice then I heard a series of shots I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads l Ling already motionless on top of the bodies that lay before them blood was running from their necks I was surprised that I was not ordered away but I saw that there were two or three postmen in uniform nearby the next batch was approaching already they went down into the pit lined

themselves up against the previous victims and were shot end quote when you read account after account of these incidents you know part of what was called the Hol Holocaust by bullets before the Holocaust by gas really got going it's just as organized sometimes and just as mechanized and institutionalized but there are crazy aspects to it and if you try to imagine being a victim in this case and living through it there are certain parts that and it's stupid but bother me more than others like for example there's an account by a German general who went to one of these Mass killing sites and he talked about all these people having to wait in long lines like up to a mile long as they inched their way towards the killing pits as the people in front of them slowly but surely were wiped out and then there were stops along the way and at this stop you take off your clothes at this stop you drop off your

valuables and the people knew what was going on in the book sold Doon by Sanka nitel and Harold welzer they quote German Major General Walter Brun description his eyewitness account of one of these as he says lining up for death sort of incidences and the general says quote six men with tommy guns were posted at each pit the pits were 24 m in length and 3 m in bread they had to lie down like sardines in a tin with their heads in the center above them were six men with Tommy Guns who gave them the Cuda gr when I arrived those pits were so full that the living had to lie down on top of the dead then they were shot and in in order to save room they had to lie down neatly in layers before this however they were stripped of everything at one of the stations here at the edge of the wood were the three pits they used that Sunday and here they stood in a queue he says a a 1 and a 12 kilm long that's about a mile long which

approached step by step aing up for death he says as they drew nearer they saw what was going on about here they had to hand over their jewelry and suitcases all good stuff was put into the suitcases and the remainder thrown on a heap this was to serve as clothing for our suffering population and then a little further on they had to undress and 500 MERS in front of the wood stripped completely they were only permitted to keep on a shammy or knickers they were all women and small 2-year-old children then all those cynical remarks if only I had seen those Tommy Gunners who were relieved every hour because of overexertion carry out their task with distaste but no nasty remarks like here comes a Jewish Beauty I can still see it in all my memory a pretty woman in a flame covered shammy talk about keeping the race pure at Ria they first slept with them and then they shot them to prevent them from Talking

end quote so he says even at the end as these people are about to be shot as they've been waiting and lining up to be shot as they were approaching the gunman the gunman make comments like here comes a pretty Beauty and things I mean it's Humanity to quote Johnny Thunders in a song Once society makes me sad of course probably the most famous mass shooting of the war of Jews is the one that occurred in the famous babiar Ravine outside of Kiev in Ukraine on the 29th and 30th of September 1941 where between and 40,000 Jews were shot into the Ravine over a weekend the Ravine by the way continued to be used to kill people uh for the entire time that the Germans controlled that region and there may be as many as 100,000 bodies buried there or they were cremated eventually and and pounded into dust but the entire area is a giant charal house there was a horrible story nor 11 told in her book The

Holocaust where the guy who was in charge of the killings was giving a tour in the spring right after Bobby yar's occurrence and the person who was with the architect of the killing said that he was shown the Ravine itself and he said during the Spring thaw small explosions were exploding the dirt up into the air and that was a result of the spring thaw bringing the gases in all of the bodies buried underground to the surface and the architect of the killing who was with him a man named Paul blobel said to him here my Jews are buried and bobar by the way is not even the worst of the mass killings of Jews during the war there are at least two that are thought to be larger than that but sometimes that what the mass killings do is overshadow the regular amounts of death that are occurring continually as the machine just grinds on it's not as overwhelmingly powerful as stadiums full of people being shot

over a weekend but the numbers add up quickly and give a greater sense of the you know death machine as it operates for example there was an operation called operation je free it only lasted two months from October to December 1941 and it was only happening on one relatively small part of the front but when you look at the record of the numbers of Jews killed over this two-month period it's every day or every two days a thousand killed in this Village 3,000 killed in this Village 2,000 killed in this Village and within two months it's like 70 to 990,000 Jews it's a stadium of people but they're all killed as their towns or Villages or ghettos are overrun and taken over right wiped out as the machine continues to move forward and a lot of this stuff by the way is well cataly logged some of the most damning evidence as you might imagine are the official reports by German officers to their

superiors about carrying out these mass killings during the 1990s there was a very important Museum exhibition which intended and succeeded in overthrowing what was called the myth of the clean Vermont this idea that the killings were all done by the SS and the azat group and in the Gestapo and allies of those people and not the you know proud German military but in this exhibition all kinds of reports and photographs that had been kept by soldiers that they either took themselves or bought and kept forever a lot of them found in atcts and places like that showed the reality of what was going on and that in a lot of cases these soldiers were willing participants in operations several books came out of these Museum exhibitions by the way one was called war of extermination the German military in World War II 1941 to 1944 with every chapter written by a different expert on the chapter of the killings

that went on especially of Jews in occupied Yugoslavia University of Vienna Professor Walter manek writes quote the execution squads were comprised mainly of soldiers from units that had suffered losses in skirmishes with partisans the soldiers regarded the mass execu of Jews and gypsies as a legitimate tactic numerous eyewitnesses confirm that the execution squads consisted of volunteers when a native of Vienna who belonged to the 521st Army intelligence regiment returned from leave to Belgrade he was greeted by his comrades with the jovial challenge coming along to shoot some Jews two reports of the shootings of Jews and gypsies yield insight into the soldiers mentality end quote now he quotes a report labeled secret so that shows you the Nazis were trying to cover this stuff up uh the commander being an obber liutenant Walter dated the 1st of November 1941 the first part of the report lists all the things that he did

to take precautions to keep the intentions of what they were about to do Secret but then he writes quote when we arrived at a spot some 1.5 to 2 km from The Chosen place the prisoners got out of the trucks and marched to the place while the trucks were being sent back at once in order to give the civilian drivers the least possible grounds for suspicion then I ordered the street blocked for reasons of security and secrecy the place of execution the report States was secured by one light machine gun and 12 Riflemen one to prevent Escape attempts by the prisoners two to guard against the possible attacks of Serbian gangs digging the graves the report says takes most of the time the shooting itself goes quickly 100 men in 40 minutes luggage inv valuables the report says were collected earlier and transported in my truck for turning over to the nsv shooting Jews is simpler than shooting gypsies one has to

admit that the Jews die stoically standing quietly while the gypsies howl scream and are in constant motion even when they're already standing in place to be shot some even jumped into the grave before the Salvo and played dead initially he writes my soldiers were not impressed on the second day it was becoming apparent that some did not have the nerves required for carrying out extended shootings my personal impression is that one does not experience inhibitions during the shootings these first manifest themselves after several days when one thinks about things quietly in the evening end quote signed Walther overlo this is actually a part that I find super interesting and I think I think about it more than even you know the position that the victims found themselves in I think it's natural to think what would happen if I was standing in line a mile long waiting to die with my family but there's something about being

a perpetrator you know not the victim but the victimizer that makes one curious about Humanity because these people in the line waiting to Die the victims there's no choice in there there's no agency and there's no thinking about it for decades afterwards but what about the guy who has the submachine gun sitting on the edge of the pit with a cigarette in his mouth dangling his legs off the side of this horrific scene well it's interesting because it kind of goes both ways you have the people that are really bothered by it and the people that actively enjoyed it and it's it's really like two sides of Humanity's coin right let's start with the people who seem to enjoy it in his book The Holocaust and unfinished history Dan Stone talks about the Willing collaborators as he calls them and it is a sign that you did not have to be a Nazi to be anti-semitic and he talks about an incident that was recounted it's famous

and there are photos I believe that happened in Kus in Lithuania and stone writes quote across the occupied areas of the western Soviet Union Local collaborators willingly took part some did so out of hatred for the Jews wrapped up in the anti-communist belief in so-called judeo bolshevism though again it should be stressed that this was a form of anti-Semitism first and foremost since one did not need to hate Jews to be anti-communist but the combination of these two hatreds made a ferocious synthesis one of the most famous examples he writes is the so-called death dealer of Kus who beat Jews with an iron rod in Kus as onlookers stood and watched the rivers of Blood Run higher the report of an astonished German Soldier who photographed the scene is instructive now P account from the German Soldier and as as I think I said photographs do exist quote a young man he must must have been a Lithuanian with rolled up

sleeves was armed with an iron crowbar he dragged out one man at a time from a group and struck him with the Crowbar with one or more blows on the back of his head within 3/4 of an hour he had beaten to death the entire group of 45 to 50 people in this way the behavior of the civilians present women and children was unbelievable after each man had been killed they began to clap and when the national anthem started they joined in singing and clapping end quote and stone points out that sometimes this isn't even anti-Semitism sometimes it's just complete self-enrichment and he quotes a Polish journalist who says quote for the Germans 300 Jews are 300 enemies of humanity for the lithuanians they are 300 pairs of shoes trousers and the like end quote there are some weird psychological things going on in all this too and I don't attempt to speculate on what they were but when I was growing up there was this

feeling because this was the sort of thing that was used as a defense at the nurburg war crime trials that a lot of these people found themselves in positions where they just had to follow orders and do distasteful things but there's enough evidence out there to show that a lot of people enjoyed this a lot of people wanted to watch um execution tourism was such a problem that the German leaders often had to issue uh severe reprimands warning that you know we can't have this happen again but it did people show up in their bathing suits women would show up there's one incident recounted in the book so doton by Sanka nitel and Harold welzer where they talk about a group of Berlin police officers who were musicians and performers so you think of like entertainers who asked if they could take part in the execution you know just for the experience and in the book The authors write quote Daniel

goldhagen writing about one of the few known cases of this sort concluded that Germans in general were motivated by a kind of exterminatory anti-Semitism gold hogen focused on a Berlin Police Unit consisting of musicians and performers that was sent to the front to entertain troops in mid November 1942 they asked the commander of a reserve police Battalion in the German Town of lukau if they could take a turn shooting Jews at an upcoming execution their request was granted and the entertainers spent the following day amusing themselves by murdering people Holocaust historian Christopher Browning also mentions this incident but the question remains did the Germans in question need anti-semitic motivation to find killing fellow human beings and entertaining Pastime end quote and then one of the authors who's um trained in social psychology goes into all the reasons a human being might find this an

interesting option he says quote the police officers in question enjoyed doing things they would never have been allowed to do under normal circumstances they wanted to experience what it felt like to kill without fear of consequences to exercise total power and do something extraordinary and monstrous free from the possibility of any negative consequences this is what sociologist Gunter Anders has called the quote chance for an unpunished inhumanity end quote for some people senseless murder was apparently a Temptation that could hardly be resisted violence of this nature needs neither a motive nor a reason it is its own motivation end quote well it's clear that there was enormous amounts of anti-Semitism in the German Army it's also clear by the accounts that a lot of people enjoyed killing Jews thought it was just right and proper to kill Jews um there's also a lot of evidence because

the German government was very concerned about the effects on their soldiers of carrying out these Mass executions with guns one of the rationals for shifting from the What's called the Holocaust by bullets to the Holocaust by gas in places like the annihilation camps of owitz is to minimize not the effect on the victims but the effect on the victimizers and while it is almost s sa religious to have sympathy for the murderers of Jews and the perpetrators of the Holocaust I always try to put myself in the shoes of the people who may have been caught in the gears of History obviously the victims in the Holocaust are fatally caught in the gears of history but there were people that had to for the rest of their lives live with what they did in the Holocaust and I'm fascinated by that too and remember these are not armies where a person could have said you know uh if you make me do these terrible things I'm out I'm

just not going to do them well you can do that but that may be a oneway ticket to a concentration camp for you so that's what I mean about being caught in the gears of History there's a fascinating list of remembrances at the back of the book called the German Army and genocide which is edited by the Hamburg Institute for social research it's one of the books that came out of that um groundbreaking exhibition in the 1990s that shattered the myth of the clean Vermont but by shattering the myth of the clean Vermont you denied all of the children and grandchildren of these German soldiers a an ethical place to hide for their loved ones because if you were able to claim that it was only the gestapo and the SD and the SS and the inets group and that did all these killings you could say that Granddad was clean that he just fought you know in a noble effort as part of the military to defend Germany or you could even say he

didn't even want to do all these things he was just drafted he didn't take part in any of the bad stuff and this exhibition forced Germans to confront that and some people were angry about it and offended and took offense and and and were upset at the exhibition and what it said but others were chastened and it shocked them one of the accounts in the back of the book when they recorded the reactions of Germans to this exhibition involves a woman named Kristen Nichols who was in the government as a green party member but her father was in the war and she's recorded as telling the researchers her reaction to this exhibition and having to come to grips with what her father did and she says quote I want to say that my father was not young when he went to war he was born in 1908 and died in 1991 he was not a party member she continues later he was drafted my mother told me that in the 1950s my father never slept with the window

open and screamed terribly in his sleep every night about fire and children she said it was simply horrible naturally she says I love my father very much he never told how it was when one shoots another person for the first time today that surprises me end quote she then mentions a famous if you were alive you remember in the 1980s a famous meeting where Ronald Reagan met the German Chancellor at a German Cemetery in bitburg and it became controversial because the press releases had said that they were just going to have sort of a Reconciliation meeting but then it was discovered that at the cemetery in bitburg some of the SS people were buried so in other words the people that at the time were thought to be the only people really guilty for the Holocaust and um Miss Nichols says quote back then I noticed for the first time that my father in the only photo of him that we have from that time is wearing a

uniform that is black and has skulls on it at the time I was already a representative of the greens in the bundestag and didn't dare to ask my father it was incredibly difficult for me end quote she then says that in 1989 she traveled to Warsaw and went to one of the death camps she says that during the travel to the death camp she simply broke down because she was so shocked at what happened there but then she started to think as any of us might do about a loved one that found themselves caught in the gears of history as sacrilegious as it might be to think about them she says I was terribly shocked at what happened at the Concentration Camp quote but just as much about what they did to the men one of whom was my father they were for the most part Men Who Loved life and children it is horrible what they made out of men in this criminal War most of them didn't have the strength to extricate themselves from it

all of them made themselves guilty of infinite atrocious wrongs the men women and children I am the daughter of such a German soldier are still marked by that today end quote what if you had found yourself in a position where you thought you were just a soldier and then one day you're standing on the edge of a pit where men women and children are stripped naked forced to lie down in the pit head to toe head to toe while you shoot them and then another batch comes in lays down on the dying people and forms another layer of human sardines for you to shoot them again I have a hard time trying to put myself in their shoes and yet at the same time I imagine that there must have been a lot of people in that position some of whom never thought twice about it some of whom bragged about it and enjoyed it and kept pictures in their wallets for the rest of their lives showing what they did and then others who woke up screaming every

night ranting about fire and children there's an almost heretical sort of way to view the transition of the Holocaust from killing people at the sides of pits with bullets to gassing them in facilities and Mass and the heretical way to look at that is that you're trying to spare people the damage that this does to them and by the way not necessarily the victims but the victimizers I mean how many people especially women and children could you kill before it bothered you sounds like an obvious question doesn't it most of us are going to say any one right single person but I often wonder if the guy who clubbed those 45 or 5050 Jews in Lithuania on the back of the head one right after another ever woke up screaming about it later my dad used to say Different Strokes for different folks but that also applies to whether or not you can kill people easily and sleep well at night but there are plenty of clues that

the transition to this sort of relatively dispassionate and insulated method of wiping out lots of people by using gas ass was meant to spare the people who had to shoot the people otherwise in the Holocaust by bullets take for example what the guy who ran a schwitz said um Rudolph hes was executed after the war he ran owitz for a couple of years um especially during the period where it really ramped up and got going hos made statements that he was relieved that they were finally going to figure out a way to save the Germans who had to execute all these people from the fate of waking up at night for years screaming you know about children in fires afterwards right not so worried about the victims but more the victimizers although sometimes they talked about it you know as somehow sparing the victims some of the you know psychological torment before they met their ends in the book German voices

memories of life during Hitler's thirdd Reich Frederick C tuach quotes hus talking about this and just so you you know it's not a direct quote because there's three dots between some of the statements which means some of the intervening stuff maybe cross talk with an interviewer has been excised but I'm going to read it as though it's a single quote because it gives you an idea of how these people might somehow tell themselves that gassing large numbers of people was more merciful than shooting them at the sides of ditches and if not for the victims then for the people that had to do the shooting in the book describes his promotion to Commander at awit this way quote there was no turning back with strange feelings I entered my new range of activities a new world to which I was bound and chained I knew all about the life of prisoners but the Concentration Camp was something new to me end quote

the author then says that with the impending arrival of the mass transports of Jews hos felt relieved that the efficient gas ovens were to be used rather than the traditional method of mass shootings now quoting hos again quote I was always appalled by shootings particularly when I thought of the women and children now I was relieved that we were going to be spared these bloodbaths gruesome scenes are said to have taken place the running away of the Wounded the killing of the Wounded above all women and children the frequent suicides in the ranks of the execution squads because they couldn't stand waiting Through Blood some became insane end quote well you kind of hope so don't you restores your faith in humanity a little to think that a cultured educated religious right seemingly uh moral people from a society that should know better were bothered by this at least some of them you would hope so

right the annihilation camps though brought their own sorts of horrific of course to the scene I mean first of all of all that there was a big difference as pointed out in many sources between killing Jews where you found them right right right outside the towns or the cities or nearby where they lived and having to get them from one place to a centralized killing area where you could dispose of them cuz sometimes they started off a long way away from where they were supposed to end up and the trip itself could be a vision of hell in his book Dan Stone talks about and recounts the story of a bunch of Jews that were packed into Railway cars in Greece where they were from to be taken to the place where they would be annihilated turned out they weren't destined to die in the gas Chambers they died on the way and he writes an account a firsthand account by a vienes Jew named Simon umwe who whose

job it was uh to work for the Nazis and unload these Railway cars transporting Jews to their death and he's the one that in the case of the Jews coming from Greece found them already deceased when they got there and he said quote the wagons meaning on the train were sealed and nailed shut as we opened them we were presented with a terrible image crammed in by The Hundreds the people squatted on their possessions since they were unable to get out their excr remained in the wagon everything was a stinking Heap there was no one alive the air was so poisoned that comrades in our Commando fainted we had to throw everything the corpses the possessions and the filth into huge pits which Burns Day and Night the pits were 8 m deep and 4 M Square children up to the age of four who had arrived on other transports were also thrown alive into these pits end quote if you look at the infrastructure and the logistics of killing and wiping

out and causing a genocide amongst an entire people it's larger than we think it is and we should recall that even though people like to argue about how many Jews died in the Holocaust cuz 6 million was an estimate we should note that the Germans were planning for far more and had they won the war they were planning on having some 11 million Jews available for them to kill and the amount of INF structure that goes into those kinds of genocidal type Logistics is a lot larger than most people think and Dan Stone points out in his book that at the start of the war there were six main concentration camps in existence he says by the end of 1943 that had become 260 Main and satellite camps by July 1944 he said almost 600 camps and by January 19 45 more than 730 camps he says that there was a list compiled by polish prosecutor Yan SE in 1950 that contain the names of more than a thousand camps Stone says that by some reckonings

the number of subcamps was more than 1,00 so if you're going to try to kill 11 million people in your long-term plans you're going to need a lot of locations to do it Dan Stone gives us a sense of the pace of the killings at times and says it was probably the fastest rate of genocidal killing in world history and he says quote in December 1941 and March 1942 gassings began at shelo and belac respectively in May and July soore and trinka also began operating the Operation Reinhard camps were built to kill the Jews of Poland Al although some Jews from the Netherlands Czechoslovakia and elsewhere were also murdered at soor and trinka by 1943 they had accomplished their task and trinka the last to be closed was dismantled in August in about 18 months somewhere in the region of 1.7 million Jews had been killed at these three camps with the rate of killing at its height in an extraordinary 3-month

period from August to October 1942 in this period of intense killing over 1 million ion victims were murdered at the Reinhard camps and if one adds in those killed by the einot groupin and at aitz at the same time then these three months saw the murder of approximately 1.47 million Jews about one quarter of the total killed in the six years of the war this rate of murder he writes makes this period of the Holocaust probably the fastest rate of genocidal killing in history end quote we had mentioned earlier that great SE secrecy was employed to try to keep prying eyes from seeing what was going on here there's a reason the Allies did not know more about what was going on during the Holocaust and it's because great care was taken to prevent people from knowing what was going on during the Holocaust when Germans in Germany said they didn't know about it there's a reason that they might be able

to claim that and mean it but it's kind of hard to keep the shootings of thousands and thousands of people in the open a secret even though as we read earlier the accounts from the commanders on the scene of these executions the first thing that they write is you know when they're writing to their commanding officers of the methods that they took to help maintain secrecy but it's a lot easier in some of these Annihilation camps to keep prying eyes from knowing what's going on because you can control access to them so the accounts of what was going on in them are rare the actual uh people whose job it was to handle the dead bodies and all those kinds of things uh often times were inmates themselves in these death camps and often times they were killed every three or four months to make sure that what they knew died with them but occasionally information leaked out there's a famous report called the

gashin report and it was written by an SS soldier named Kurt gashin now gin's story is fascinating and it is hard to know what to believe he claimed to essentially be an infiltrator someone who lost a close relative killed in one of these camps because they were one of those people who was deemed by the Nazis to be unfit to live because they were disabled and he says that was the moment that as a very religious person he decided he was going to join the SS and find out exactly what was going on and expose it again I don't know if that's true or not but that's his story and after the war he wrote several different accounts in several different languages uh explaining what he saw and then he hung himself but gin's job was he was one of the people that was going to replace the way that they were killing people in these Annihilation camps with a new way because the way they started killing them was with the fumes from diesel

engines right they would back a truck up or a tank up to the gas Chambers connect a tube or something like it to the exhaust of these engines and then pump in the diesel fuels into these enclosed rooms and kill everyone in them but it wasn't something that worked very well and gashin and others were part of the uh process of Shifting it to something more efficient that turned out to be the famous Cyclone B uh cyanide gas and because of this gashin was given a tour of one of these death camps belits in Poland and shown how the process worked it is horrifying he says he arrived there for his tour in a Hot August day he said he saw no corpses in the open but he said just the smell of the whole region was stinking to high heaven he says and millions of flies were everywhere so you got the gist of what was going on he describes the methods taken by the designers of the camp to sort of hide what the camp was all about and it's

borderline diabolical I mean they have signs that say things like inhalation in bathrooms they have geraniums planted they have a star of David which he refers to as a clever little joke in front of one of the buildings and then there was an inscription on another building that said hacken Holt Foundation which he didn't know what that meant initially he found out later what a cruel joke that was when he found out that hacken halt was the name of the guy who started the diesel engine that pumped the noxious fumes into the gas chamber he describes the experience of the victims as they arrived in the trains all the way to when their bodies were pulled out of the gas chamber it is horrible but it is necessary to recount them it's a little long I'll break it up if I can but he writes and like I said there's a couple of different versions of this I got mine from the Jewish virtual library but there's several

online and he writes quote the next morning shortly before 7: a.m. someone announced to me in 10 minutes the first transport will come in fact the first train arrived after some minutes from the direction of lenberg 45 wagons with 6700 people of whom 1450 were already Dead on Arrival behind the barred hatches children as well as men and women looked out terribly pale and nervous their eyes full of the fear of death the train comes in 200 ukrainians fling open the doors and whip the people out of the wagons with their leather whips he says a large loudspeaker then gave further orders and he quoted the loudspeaker as saying quote undress completely also remove artificial limbs spectacles Etc end quote he says that everyone undressed and then he continues by saying quote then the procession starts moving in front a very lovely young girl so all of them go along the alley all naked men women and children without artificial

limbs I myself stand together with helpman verth which is the commander on top of the ramp between the gas Chambers mothers with babies at their breasts they come onward hesitate enter the death Chambers at the corner a strong SS man stands who with a voice like a pastor says to the poor people now quoting him there is not the least chance that something will happen to you you must only take a deep breath in the chamber that widens the lungs this inhalation is necessary because of the illnesses and epidemics he says on the question of what would happen to them he answered yes of course the men will have to work building houses and roads but the women don't need to work only if they wish they can help in housekeeping or in the kitchen he says quote for some of these poor people this gave a little glimmer of hope enough to go the first few steps to the chambers without resistance the majority he says though are aware the

smell tells them of their fate so they climb the small staircase and then they see everything mothers with little children at the breast little naked children children adults men women all naked they hesitate but they enter the death Chambers pushed forward by those behind them or driven by the leather whips of the SS the majority he says without saying a word a Jewish of about 40 years of age with flaming eyes calls down Vengeance on the head of the murderers for the blood which is shed here she gets five or six slashes with the riding crop into her face from hman personally and then she also disappears into the chamber end quote he then says that the commander says to the people filling the chamber that they should pack well and he says people stand on each other's feet 7 to 800 people in 45 cubic meters he says the SS physically squeezes them together as far as possible and then he continues

remember this man's watching 7 to 800 people being killed in front front of him through a small window with an electric light he continues the doors close at the same time the others meaning the next batch of people are waiting outside in the open air naked the people are brought to death with the diesel exhaust fumes but the Diesel doesn't work halman verth comes one can see that he feels embarrassed that this happens just today when I am here that's right I see everything and I wait my stopwatch has honestly registered everything 50 minutes 70 minutes the Diesel doesn't start the people are waiting in their gas Chambers in vain one can hear them crying sobbing he then continues quote after 2 hours and 49 minutes the stopwatch has registered everything well the diesel starts until this moment the people live in these four chambers four times 750 people in four times 45 cubic M again 25 minutes

pass right many are dead now one can see that through the small window in which the electric light illuminates the chambers for a moment after 28 minutes only a few are still alive finally after 32 minutes everyone is dead he then says the people from the work command open the doors these are um the s Commandos some of them uh Jews who've been promised their freedom but instead every 3 or four months they're killed too it helps keep everybody quiet and he describes the way the dead are situated in the gas Chambers which are so crammed with people nobody can even bend over and he writes quote like Basalt pillars the dead Stand Inside pressed together in the chambers in any event there was no space to fall down or even Bend forward even in death one can still tell the families they still hold hands tensed in death so that one can barely tear them apart in order to empty the chamber for the next batch the

corpses are thrown out wet from sweat and urine soiled by excrement menstrual blood on their legs children's corpses fly through the air there is no time the riding crops of the ukrainians Lash down on the work commands two dozen dentists open mouths with hooks and look for gold gold to the left without gold to the right other dentists break gold teeth and crowns out of jaws with pliers and hammers end quote he then points out something that should remind us of why it is so hard to figure out exactly how many people died in the Holocaust he says neither at belitz or trinka was any trouble taken over registering or counting the dead he said the numbers were only estimates of a wagon's Content imagine this going on every day at lots of different facilities for years trying to imagine the reality of that description is almost impossible I mean even trying to get your mind around what Smartphone highdef video with audio

would be like is it boggles the mind to try to get yourself to a place where this makes any sort of logical sense and you can try to put yourself in the shoes of anyone looking at these sorts of events through their eyes hearing the sounds smelling the smells one of the things Dan Stone says in his book is that you sometimes have to shrink this down to a level where we're talking about an individual experience of just one of the people in the story I often look at the pictures of the people who were killed by the communist kameha Rouge government in Cambodia and those people um the kameha Rouge took photographs of their victims before they killed them and you can see those photographs and you look into the eyes of these people and you think you know what are the stories of all these individuals right you don't see them as a giant um you know many millions of people as a mass of humanity with no

names and no stories instead you sort of look at them and you think how did this person end up there what happened to their family did anybody miss them you know the stories of not five or six million people in the Holocaust but five or six million individuals who all had their own horrific tale that brought them to where they they were and stone has a story in his book that's a perfect example it's kind of the Anne Frank zooming in moment of the Holocaust where he talks about some Jews who are hiding out and a homeowner is hiding them but they're having a problem with a child in the group who can't control the fact that he's making noise CU he's terrified and at a certain point the homeowner says either that child gets quiet or you're going to get found out putting these Jews that are hiding in an absolutely unimaginable situation and remember we should think about this not as this specific story for these

specific people but as an individual representation of the sorts of incredible conundrums and dilemas that all these people who found themselves in the Holocaust at one point or another in their lives had to face and stone writes quote in baroo milk's account of his time in hiding with his wife sister brother-in-law and the their son during the war he recounts how when the noise made by the 9-year-old boy lunic led to the group being threatened with expulsion by the man hiding them his father strangled him the description is matter of fact now the description quote we all sat down again withdrawn into ourselves and lunic went wild again unable to calm him we thought we would go mad suddenly as though struck by lightning my brother-in-law B Ed from his seat and wrapped a hand around his son's tender neck as if to stifle his cries instead the boy's eyes rolled in their sockets his tongue protruded and

he fell silent his father knew exactly where to squeeze he like me was a doctor when he finally let go of his son's throat the boy was lifeless I took his hand and felt no pulse his father left him covered his son's face with a blanket seated himself in a corner and began to tear tear his hair I am forever a cursed as the murderer of my son he mumbled but I spared him much more suffering at least I didn't let him die at the hands of the murderers end quote that's a situation where if one can't get their mind around the enormity of the Holocaust in the macro sense we can all sort of sit there and just shake our heads and try to imagine what you know the individual story of simp one group of people in a micro sense found themselves confronted with and then for the rest of their lives living with I actually had quite a few more firsthand accounts and eyewitness accounts that I was going to use but

after recording that last one I feel like that is enough horrific eyewitness accounts to make the point and we should also for the sake of completeness mentioned that these are hardly all the people that were the victims of Nazi Germany I mean part of the reason the Soviets uh weren't paying enough attention one knows now to the Holocaust after the war is because 6 million Jews was a drop in the bucket as crazy as that sounds compared to all the damage that was done and no one still knows how many people died but before the Jews became the people that were being eliminated disabled people people with all sorts of Developmental problems the sick I mean the Nazis killed you know something like 20 to 35 million people or thereabouts I mean the numbers again are not known but they killed men women priests handicapped aged sick PS forc laborers Camp inmates critics socialists gays Slavs serbs Czechs

Italians the Dutch belgians Norwegians poles Frenchmen ukrainians killed more than a million children at least I mean that it's you can't get your mind around numbers like that and there was a phrase that popped up in the 1960s I think it was from a a Jewish group that said never again right never again you're the lesson here if there is a lesson is that this must never happen again but of course it has there's a quote that's been used many times about incidents like these in the past and the quote is those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it but you know this is kind of a Trope and I think most historians would say that not being one myself but I've read enough to know that this is considered to be one of those truisms that's not really true for all sorts of reasons right do people really learn from history I mean can't the facts of the past for lack of a better word facts

even being you know a word that can be argued but I mean can't those things be used like a tool like a like a sort of a plastic kind of tool for those who want us to come to sort of pre-arranged conclusions right they say even the devil can quote scripture for his purposes I feel the same way about using history right you can just rearrange whatever you consider facts to be to make a wonderful argument that leads to a conclusion you want people to come to but that if you rearranged all the facts differently you could come to a different conclusion it's it's a dangerous thing to put in the hands of people who are trying to convince us of something but even if we did learn from the past do the lessons stick I mean I get a feeling here that even when we are traumatized by things like the the Holocaust for example that there's an expiration date on that you there's an old line that time heals all

wounds but when a wound is something like the Holocaust and there are important things that you need to pay attention to if you want to avoid another one is it a good thing that something like that might be you know healed up there's a line that I like better than the those who did not learn from the pastor doomed to repeat it it's a line from the Roman orator Cicero and I've seen it translated several different ways one translation is on the library at the University of Colorado where I went to school but the translation of the phrase that I pulled up I like the best I think and it says to be ignorant of what occurs before you were born is to remain always a child and what this sort of implies is that history doesn't teach you lessons that will stick it does seem to indicate though that if you study the past you will be more informed about the range of possibilities and the things that can

tend to happen maybe sometimes it's just useful to know for example what a worst case scenario might look like right what's possible given the things that have already happened right it's not a theoretical argument that there could be a Hol if there has already been a holocaust right if you'll allow me to try to mention what strikes me after diving into this subject and reading all these eyewitness accounts and the thought that keeps popping into my head as I do is that this is a sort of warning about the dangers of political extremism and maybe that's a simplistic thing to come up with right CU it's sort of obvious right the dangers of you know murderous dictators I mean you don't have to be a genius to figure out that that's going to end badly but here's the thing if that was obvious in the decades after the second world war it's been a long time since the second world war if I touch a hot stove and burn

myself I probably don't need to touch another hot stove to know that that's something I don't want to do if I teach my children what happened to me when I burned the hot stove maybe they learn that lesson and if they teach their children about what happened to Grandpa when he touched a hot stove maybe that sticks too but does there come a time when that lesson seems so far away and so many things have changed since Grandpa touched the hot stove that maybe you could question whether the stove is really that hot maybe you have to touch it for yourself to know again right time heals all wounds even the hand you burned on the hot stove the interesting thing about political extremism is there's enough examples in the past to look at that you would think people would know good and well the dangers involved and avoid it like the plague but there's always elements to extremism that make it enticing to human

beings otherwise it wouldn't come around so often right there's something that we want from this sometimes so that we can write off past examples that nobody wants to go back back to a holocaust but maybe we'll you know think about the upsides of a little political extremism sometimes and assume you know that we've learned enough to avoid the downsides of the political extremism right the other thing that comes up too when you try to avoid another Holocaust is that political extremism when it shows up never quite looks like it did the last time or the time before I mean if we're on the lookout for political extremism to avoid worst case scenarios and we want to avoid a holocaust too many of us are looking for a person you know with a small little toothbrush mustache right we're looking for a redo of the way it looked last time without realizing that political extremism is going to disguise itself in

a completely new form in order to make it something that we might consider a viable option again the other thing that's worth pointing out and this is where I think a lot of people can fall into a trap is political extremism doesn't always show up from the same side of the political Spectrum right extremist governments come in all forms right right-wing left-wing fundamentalist religion I mean a government like the Islamic Republic of Iran is neither really right-wing or leftwing it's its own kind of religious fundamentalism but it's an extremist government with intense EXE ex cutive power and you can see that it doesn't matter whether it's right-wing or leftwing sometimes I mean just take a look at an example from just a few years after the second world war ended right the the period where the bodies are still fresh from the Holocaust and yet one of the Allies on the Victorious side in the second world

war the Soviet Union begins a program demonizing the Jews in the Soviet Union right calling them rootless cosmopolitans and beginning to implement things that are known to history as the doctor's plot looking at the potential for moving Jews to reservations I mean five years right so if you worry about touching the hot stove and that lesson being forgotten I mean five years the blisters are still on your hand and we're ready to deport Jews to reservations and that is a nominally left-wing extremist government right doing the exact same thing that the right-wing extremist government of Hitler did to the exact same people by the way the lesson is about the dangers of unchecked power on the old classic original political spectrum that people from my generation grew up with the one that dates back to the French Revolution the societies that emphasize the importance of things like human rights civil rights the rights of

individuals over the collective diffused power right checks and balances those societies were in the general center of the political spectrum that includes things like the center left and the center right right so I mean you can have more conservative or more liberal governments but the so-called you know Overton window as it's known could move a bit in either direction sometimes you know you you'd move into a more conservative phase of your country's history sometimes you'd move into more liberal phases but what you're supposed to be protected from in these systems is the extremes of either side the extremes and the sorts of government that would throw out the Norms of behavior right the things that were considered okay and that keep societies within the ranges that were safe that kept us from going off the rails Germany under Nazism was off the rails but let's not fool ourselves that just because we live in a

representative elected system that we somehow protected against extremism Hitler was a politician before he was an autocrat if you have a system where the people elect the government and the system is populated by people who have lost faith in non-extreme approaches I mean if they're made up of racists or anti-semites or utopianist or people that hate their nation's opposition well democracy has some safeguards against extremism but not if the voters themselves are demanding extremist Solutions right then then a government that responds to the will of the people is itself going to be extreme it's going to give the people what they want in that case the danger is that the people want something that's going to take them down a road that leads to outcomes that nobody wants I can't think of any extremist government in history where a decent number of people living in a modern-day representative system

would go oh yeah that's what I want there are things that should be considered warning signs for us all when we begin on a wide ranging level right not just a few people here and there not just the C when we begin to dehumanize our fellow human beings when we begin to turn them into something that's not seen as a person when we refer to them as Vermin or subhuman or or animals or deplorables or enemies of the people or anything like that you begin to open the door to having these human beings treated as whatever you're referring to them as I mean if they're Vermin what do you do to Vermin the way we label our fellow human beings opens up the door to logical solutions that are only considered logical due to the way we've recast them things that would never be okay to do to another person become okay if they're not considered another person you saw that in the second world war there's a book that I bought in the

1980s I think it's still viable although the numbers are a little Wrong by a professor named RJ Rummel it's called Death by government and the shorthand explanation of what the book is about is the dangers of extreme governments right governments that do not have enough checks and balances governments with too much executive power and authority on the right or the left right whatever political label you want to use and professor rumel says over and over in the book power kills and absolute power kills absolutely now he has some interesting statistics about the different governments in the 20th century that killed large numbers of people genocidal numbers he calls them demoes right death by government um he says that the communist Chinese and the Soviet Union to name just two of the far-left governments killed more people than the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese before and during the second world war so the

right-wing far right-wing governments but he says that they've had 75 years to do it right whereas you know the Third Reich famously only lasted like 12 years and Imperial Japan's reign of terror in Asia probably not much longer so the death rate was higher for the farri government but the farle governments have had 3/4 of a century to rack up an even higher death total the point is is that there's no Monopoly on which end of the political spectrum is more murderous when you get too far away from the middle uh and I had a professor that said that both ends of the political Spectrum shouldn't be seen as a line they should be seen as more of a horseshoe shape or maybe even a circle and then when you get to the very very far right it almost touches the very very far left and even though the rationals for why they're doing what they do right-wing rationals or leftwing rationals the actual experience of living in these

totalitarian States might not be that different on the ground rumble's point though is that all these people were killed because governments came to power that saw the normal limitations that might prevent or Safeguard against these kind of actions thrown out the window and in a forever action there's an equal and opposite reaction way there's often a dynamic in play where extremists on one side are empowered by extremists on the other if the Nazis don't have the German Communists to use as Boogeyman and vice versa do they ever come to power I feel like you can see this dynamic in play among the one government in the world who should know better than any other the dangers of extremism the Israelis the Israelis have Regional enemies that use and often Revel in anti-semitic genocidal imagery and more than imagery actions extremist governments and extremist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran who might not be

dissatisfied with another Holocaust and who showed once again in in late 2023 that they will happily rape Jewish women and kill Jewish children the more this goes on the harder the electorate in Israel wants to push back and the harder they push back the more extreme the other side becomes and the more traditional safeguards and firewalls are breached It's Not Unusual to hear Jews in Israel dehumanized ized by their anti-israeli neighbors but when the Israeli government officials of the more extreme Wing begin to use terms like animals or amalekites to describe their enemies their adversaries one loses hope hope over the question about learning from history because no people on Earth knows what dangers lurk in extremist governments better than the victims of the worst genocide in world history and if they aren't immune from those traps and those pitfalls and those dangers then who is when you consider how dark the

subject that we just talked about was and how long it might take you and how long it might take me to recover from it imagine if this is what you did for a living you dove into the archives read The Original Stories you catalog the numbers and the accounts and all that sort of thing every day of your working life think about how much fortitude one would have to have to do that well our guest on the show today is Dan Stone who's a professor of modern history and the director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal hallay University of London this is what he does he's the author and editor of numerous articles and books he wrote histories of the Holocaust The Liberation of the camps the end of the Holocaust in its aftermath and concentration camps a very short history he is an expert on this subject and we brought him on to add some context and some depth uh and to talk about his new book in paperback the

Holocaust and unfinished history where he points out something that has not been paid enough attention to the fact that this is not just a German thing the Germans get the Lion Share of the uh blame for the Holocaust traditionally but they couldn't have done what they did without a lot of other help and in this book The Holocaust and unfinished history Dan Stone helps us to understand you know the motivations the roots and the extent of that help so without further Ado Professor Danone all right so why don't we start with the most obvious question which is you've spent a lot of time writing about this subject already how does one decide that there is a need for a new book and how does one find enough material that wasn't covered in the old books to make um to make something like this seem important to you and important for the reading audience M that's a very valid question I I mean there's there's a lot

of books right I mean that's uh perfectly clear and and you're right I think to emphasize that but it seems to me and it seemed to me before I wrote this book that there was a need for a mid-length study that did more than simply narrate the sequence of events in other words there's a there's a lot of academic studies there are a number of very large histories of the Holocaust most of which are uh event-based history one thing after another um they're very good books but they're hard I think often to retain the information that you're reading as you turn the page you kind of forget uh much of what you've read on the on the previous page uh and then there are some very short introductions but they tend to treat the reader as um ill informed knowing nothing and I think you know there's enough literature out there now for there to be a readership that is already quite well informed about the history of the

Holocaust but that wants more than simply A Narrative of events but wants also something that is more analytical at the same time and so I set out to to write a book that took into account the uh very rapidly changing and developing uh body of scholarship on the literature uh on the topic but to then weave that into a narrative that didn't lay on the academic stuff in a kind of heavy way but is there in the architecture of the book so that readers can follow the the footnotes if they want and they can see that that what I've written is based on the most recent scholarship uh but it tries to combine A Narrative of the events in so far as uh I I've been able to choose what I wanted to emphasize with also a kind of explanatory framework at the same time as I was going over some of the books that I have that date back all the way to the early 60s about this it it occurred to me that you and and people

writing about the Holocaust like you in the modern world have a sort of a different and certainly more complex task because those ones in the early 60s and late 60s are not writing for an audience for example in Eastern Europe or places like that you've got to deal with people whose countries sometimes prohibit even talking about this in the way that that your book discusses some of this right a sort of a of shared responsibility for some of these crimes against humanity how does that change what you have to do and how did you address something like that knowing that this is going to be read by people who are in countries that maybe deny that they had anything involved in this correct it's it's a very interesting observation because the before I even address the question of of that you directly asked me it it's also the case that now the scholarship on this topic is written by people from

across Europe so where a up until the end of the Cold War there was only a very small number of internationally regarded historians who came from behind the Iron Curtain now much of the leading scholarship is written by Scholars who come from Eastern Europe who Al who often can speak five languages have access to local archives uh and so on and so there there's a very impressive and extremely rapidly growing historiography of the Holocaust in Hungary for example or Czechoslovakia um and and the rest of um of of Europe including parts of Europe like Gree that were neglected for similar reasons for for many decades I think the the question of how to approach this knowing that people in those countries will also be uh reading this is to behave like a historian and simply follow the evidence and uh of of course that um can sometimes be uncomfortable reading I think but that's true for places in Western Europe as well

there are ongoing debates in France and in the Netherlands about collaboration about who knew what about who was responsible uh etc etc and uh the debates that are ongoing in Romania or Hungary or Poland for example are in in in essence no different in a sense no no country likes to face up to the darker side of its history uh we can say the same about uh the US and slavery or treatment of Native Americans or Britain and colonialism uh and so the the question of let's say um Romania's involvement in the Holocaust maybe something we'll come back to is is something that's many Romanians remain quite reluctant to face up to but you have I think as a historian simply to present the evidence it's not about bashing a particular group of people and saying oh you are somehow uniquely responsible for this but saying this also happened here and uh the evidence shows that and we need to think about what that means well then

of course anti-Semitism uh pgrs persecution and discrimination against Jews has been going on basically from time immemorial in Europe how does something like you know we always taught when I was younger that the Nazis were a completely almost different sort of an event or phenomenon altogether but is there a sort of a throughput if you will like maybe we're talking about an amplitude rather than a completely different sort of event I mean how do you sort of see the the Holocaust as as it was carried out by Nazi Germany in connection to earlier prgrams and discrimination and and disasters during the First Crusade and all that kind of stuff there there is of course a throughput and and that's I think uh the notion of the Jews as the the other of Europe the the people that it it made sense for Nazism to focus on the Jews because this had a resonance and it has a very ancient resonance in in European

history um but what's interesting I think about Nazism and you see this in the Nazi idealogues and particularly of course in in mine Camp is that there's this kind of mishmash of elements taken from most of the the modern um illiberal uh reservoir of ideas including racism anti-Semitism Eugenics anti-feminism etc etc but what Hitler does I think and and what's different from what's gone before is to make this not just one part let's say of the states functioning so in zaris Russia allowing pograms to take place against Jews at Easter for example but what Hitler does is to make uh Jew hatred the the very centerpiece of everything that he thinks about the world and so it's the lens through which he understands everything and and eventually becomes a kind of philosophy of History that's to say uh the Hitler and the leading Nazis understand the the essence of world history as the as the struggle between good and evil which

means Aryan versus non- Arian which means essentially the the Aryan or German people against the Jews and and so whether you look at um School textbooks or debates in Nazi technology societies um or explicitly racist uh um Fields like biology or anthropology this Viewpoint becomes the centerpiece through which the whole world is understood that I think is what distinguishes Nazism from what's gone before in the history of anti-Semitism and what distinguishes it from uh most of the um countries and institutions that are Allied to the Nazis during World War II when you read mind CER when you read some of the you know Julius Striker type stuff it seems like these are crazy conspiracy theorists right it's as though crazy conspiracy theorists got a hold of a country and then built an ideology around their crazy conspiracy it's you know if you compare it to the to the people on the opposite side of the extreme political

Spectrum the Communists and the Bolsheviks they had Reams and reams of philosophies and papers and arguments over the historical dialectic and the dictatorship of the proletarian they're bashing it out and the Nazis don't seem to have any of that at all can you can you kind of explain to me how we have an almost anti-intellectual conspiracy movement going on on here that one of the most intellectual culturally oriented countries in Europe buys into it's also very complicated the you're right uh obviously the history of Communism is is one from an from a history of ideas perspective is one of uh minute debates about the negation of the negation and dialectical materialism and all of those things that that we know about um struggles between different uh sects of Communists within the Nazi ideology that what the first thing to say I think is that the Third Reich existed for 12 years Nazi ideology

for let's say another 15 years before 1933 or so um and yet the amount of uh material written material that the the Nazis and their ideologues produced was absolutely vast and so was in a in a way we're still discovering it so it's it's not true to say that there was nothing written but but the difference is that um where communism claimed at least to be evidence-based you know the history of Marxism based on statistics and economics and and readings of the of the the working class and its working conditions and so on and and who owned the means of production and and all of those things Nazism was before any evidence uh came into the debate Nazism was based on a belief system which is as as I've described this notion that race first of all existed that race was the essence through which world history should be understood and that the enemy of the U the German race was the Jews and everything else followed from that

so then you have all sorts of anthropological debates let's say about the constitution of the of the German race what percentage of uh of the of the of the German race is made up of nordics alpines dinics uh Mediterraneans etc etc these kinds of Arcane uh intellectual debates debates about whether whether whether it's necessary to go out into the field and measure people through taking physical measurements to determine who is and who is not Arian all of these kinds of things um took place and there is a vast literature on on this stuff but it's all uh you're right to say that this is fundamentally a paranoid conspiracy theory that the the Nazis didn't view the Jews simply as um unmention as subhumans they also in I'm talking about a small stratum now of the leading um of the leaders Nazi leadership they understood the Jews also as uh the wire pullers behind world events so they were dangerous they were

a threat to the to the Arian race in a way let's say that the disabled or uh romanes were not these were people that were unesthetic that were physically threatening to the health of the race but they didn't uh in a way undermine the very existence of the Arian Race by virtue of their machinations whereas the the Jew particularly the international Jew as Hitler put it uh was behind Churchill and Roosevelt and Stalin and all of the great events of of world history Were Somehow driven by uh this hidden cabal of Jewish interests and in that sense it's absolutely correct I think to talk about Nazism as a as a conspiracy theory well then let's talk about the lead conspiracist for a minute um I read one historian who said that that this is a a conversation about the use of bureaucratic measures to enforce magical beliefs right and the Magical beliefs are are the heart are Hitler and and you look at this and wonder no

Hitler no Holocaust no Hitler no Nazism uh if if Hitler dies or one of those assassination attempts Midway through the war are successful how do you think and I realize we're off in fantasy land now but this is partly trying to determine the old line about whether you get any of this without a Hitler if Hitler dies Midway through the war do you think this changes how this whole thing plays out in terms of the number of Jews who end up dying at the end of the war or any of of those sorts of things it's a very hard question um I think at the early in the early stages of the rise of the Nazi movement without the coming to prominence of Hitler you would have had a small movement driven by crazy theorists like Anton Drexler and julus Striker uh and himler I suppose in his early stages uh these were people who were on the extreme fringes of German politics and probably the National Socialist Workers Party

would have remained on those fringes um when it comes to halfway through the war that's very difficult to say because once the final solution to the Jewish question was in place as a continent-wide crime let's say by the spring of 1942 it was it was then functioning and it had its own bureaucracy and and offices in the Gusto and the SS and so on who were carrying out this program had Hitler been killed I mean of course I'm guessing now but I I would I would guess that the number of Jews killed would have been smaller that the number of people willing to speak out and say this is not going to end well for us would have been higher uh nevertheless the program was in train and it wouldn't have come immediately crashing to a halt it would have taken some time I think I was um you know and I've read a lot about this and and and I still was being shocked by some of the things that I read in your book in terms

of them being novel ideas that I had heard one was that uh you said quote in March 1942 75 to 80% of Holocaust victims were still alive 11 months later 80% of the victims of the Holocaust were dead that is an incredible statistic what should we think about a statistic like that I should I should say first of all that that comes from Christopher Browning that okay all right he he actually uses that statistic in the um preface I think to ordinary men so so I borrowed that from him but it's it's still I think a startling statistic I mean it tells us that you we think about however you define the Holocaust so we we can think about it as being purely The Killing process 1941 to 1945 or there are historians who who defined the Holocaust as uh the whole Nazi period 1933 to 1945 to take into account the years of the persecution um before the war what it tells us is that 1942 is the absolute height of uh The

Killing process and within 1942 actually there's a 3-month period in the Summer where which is probably the fastest killing rate of any genocide in history so that the uh the Operation Reinhard death camps are working in full swing that's belet soore and trinka uh the uh gas Chambers in aitz have just started to operate and the um the Holocaust by bullets the murders the face to- face shooting by the group and and their um helpers in Eastern Europe are also not yet finished so you have this coming together of a number of different ways of of killing uh Jews across Europe that is really at its height in in the summer of 1942 and that's no coincidence because that's also the point at which the Nazi Empire is at its height where uh with the exception of Hungary which comes later the the the Germans have access to huge numbers of Jews that they haven't had access to before they still in this stage of thinking that they will

win the war and winning the war also uh from a military perspective even means eradicating the Jews because this the the the murder of the Jews is uh one of the key War aims of uh of the Germans I had a Polish listener take me to task once because I used the word constantly Nazis when I was talking about the Germans in the second world war and he said don't don't call them Nazis he said call them Germans you're you're excusing uh uh uh the German people but it occurs to me after reading your book that all these people in Europe had anti-semitic backgrounds in their histories and that these things were harnessed by the Nazis in their Endeavor I think that's one of the main takeaways from your book too can you talk a little about the fact that six million or however many Jews probably don't die in this whole thing without a bunch of willing collaborators in other countries with long histories

of antipathy towards that particular minority group I I think that's correct I I would say however that it it still is worth differentiating um between Germans and Nazis because I do think that the really the impetus for the Holocaust comes from a quite a small stratum of the Nazi leadership everybody else that's involved um whether it's the kind of um Regular membership of the Nazi party down to Ukrainian peasants looting their Jewish neighbors uh stuff after they've been murdered was involved for one reason or another and it's not always clear-cut that they were involved because they were Radical anti-semites that most people involved in The Killing process did not need to believe in this notion of uh the the kind of metaphysical philosophy of history of of the Jews threatening the Arian race in order to take part in the Holocaust um and there were of course plenty of Germans who kept their heads down during

the Nazi regime who didn't like what was happening around them um we may think that they by virtue of not doing anything that they in a sense facilitated the regime but they nevertheless were not active supporters and there were plenty of Germans in Exile um who of course were anti-nazis and so I don't think it's entirely fair to to say that German equals Nazi at this period and that's also true whichever country we look at so if we look at um countries where there were um that were Allied to the Germans so vichi France or Norway under quisling or Croatia under pavich um Slovakia under tiso in each case you will find constituencies in those countries who did not support um the regime that was in power and certainly did not necessarily support the murder of the Jews but it's also true uh that there were enough people in every country that the Nazis occupied um including Poland where uh the only country that was not

invited to form an SS uh regiment where there were people who were willing to take part in the murder of the Jews or who understood what was happening across Europe as an opportunity to fulfill a longstanding nationalist dream of of creating an ethnically homogeneous nation state as for example in Hungary or Romania where there were some radical anti-sites in power but for many of those uh close to the regime this what what was happening with um the alliance with the Third Reich was an opportunity they didn't necessarily have to buy into the idea again of uh the international Jew as this kind of great metaphysical threat what they had to do was say okay now we have the opportunity presented to us to do some of the things that we've long wanted to do and by that I mean since the late 19th early 20th century and then from the creation of the Modern Nation States after uh the treaties of of world war one so in the Hungarian

case uh to eliminate not just Jews but romanes uh and and others in let's say in the Croatian case to get rid of um serbs and romanes as well as Jews the the croats killed far more serbs than they did Jews because this was a general aspiration to create uh an ethnically pure State uh and so killing Jews in those places was simply one aspect of um creating this this phenomenon and in Romania for example the the antonescu regime was responsible for the murder of huge numbers of Jews and a smaller number of romanes but it's also the case that after the um summer autumn of 1942 the Romanians stopped killing Jews because they could see which way the wind was blowing in terms of um the war and decided that uh it would be safer for them and the outcome in terms of saving the Romanian state would be better if they were to stop killing Jews and so you have a kind of u a radical attack on the Jews at one

point uh and then a stop at after a certain point whereas for the for the diard Nazis that would be impossible um and even at the very end of the war the Nazis are still killing Jews because for them this was this was the war effort whereas for the Nazis allies it was something that they bought into in so far as it was expedient for them and when it no longer was expedient they stopped doing it so help me out with the dichotomy here um the dichotomy is the the Nazi regime being being open about their anti-semitic feelings and yet trying very hard it seems like and correct me if I'm wrong uh trying very hard it seems like to keep a lot of this stuff secret right the actual killings um I was reading One account uh uh that was talking about how one uh uh person at awit told another one that he was showing around that this is the really super secret thing and we'll all be shot if any of this comes out um if I'm

having a hard time figuring out where where the openness on one side you know Hitler saying if the if we're plunged into another world war by the Jews you know they'll be so that's very open but with the hiding then of the ramifications of playing that idea out to its logical conclusion uh how should we see this it's also a complex question because you can see both things going on at the same time it's often the case with Nazi Germany that there's a kind of public statement um and then there's a reality and in the Third Reich I mean you just cited Hitler's famous Reich speech uh from January 1939 um and throughout the war if you read Jeffrey H's work on um the Nazi propaganda during the war actually the those words continue to be used over and over again throughout the war and towards the end of the war when the vast majority of the Jews have been already murdered actually in some ways the uh

the anti-semitic rhetoric is ramped up because there's now the threat of Retribution from the international Jew and so this anti-semitic language continues to be extremely shrill even towards the end of the war at the same time there is a kind of secrecy but I think that secrecy is more designed to prevent the Jews being targeted from understanding what's being hap what's going to happen to them than it is from a fear of advertising to the rest of the world what's what's going on for example um it's forbidden for German soldiers to take photographs of uh of massacres or to take photographs in the camps and yet we know from the ver exhibition from the 1990s that German soldiers took these photos yeah in in in the millions actually I mean at least hundreds of thousands of of photographs taken of these massacres if you think of Wendy L's uh book The Ravine and her detailed reconstruction of uh of trying to show

what happened in the leadup to the one photograph that she has on the cover of the book and to find out who is in the photograph where it was and so on it's just one example of a photograph that shouldn't exist because those photos were forbidden but in reality did exist and were shown around and that when German soldiers went on leave they would show them to their family members uh and of course what the what the verm exhibition showed was that even by the 1990s um people who had their father's or grandfather's uniforms hanging in the Attic often had photographs in the pockets and that these could be um shown around so there there was on the one hand the this use of euphemistic language uh we talk about it without talking about it uh and at the same time um an open display of what was going on which is very important because it creates of course a shared complicity not just in the direct perpetrators but

across the whole of uh of German society and Beyond and of course one can't help but contrast the photographic technology of the time with what we have today and how some of these massacres shot in high definition color on an iPhone with audio might impact the way we see these kinds of things um I help me now with the difference between the genocide by bullets versus the genocide by gas idea a lot of people don't understand that for a lot of the Holocaust this was about shooting people into pits and then bringing more people to shoot them into pits and then having them fall on the Stacked like sardine bodies below them uh talk a little about this einz grouping uh U genocide by bull that's part of the genocide sure I mean I think what's important here is that the this this phase of of the Holocaust um we're talking now about the IM the period immediately after the invasion of the Soviet Union so from the end of June

1941 through to the spring of 1942 excuse me in other words before the final solution was framed as a european-wide project you see this phase in which the Nazis decide that as they as the ver uh goes into the Soviet Union the azat grin which is this group of about 3,000 men chosen from within the SS and SD uh will follow behind and murder uh Jewish uh groups as they find them uh and so those 3,000 men on their own are not responsible for the murder of about 1 and a half million Jews they had considerable assistance first of all from the order police that's to say the the regular police uh and their battalions the people that um Chris Browning wrote about in ordinary men for example uh but they also had lots of assistance from local auxiliaries particularly in Ukraine and um across that s of Borderlands up to through Belarus and up to the Baltic states and again Wendy LA's book shows that because

some of the people in her uh the photograph that she describes are ukrainians and the same is true in uh in Romania in transnistria uh where they carry out massacres it's also with the assistance of local folks deut that's to say ethnic Germans living in uh that region and of um ethnic Ukrainian uh auxiliaries who also did much of of the shooting but what we're talking about here is U the the so-called war of annihilation in the Soviet Union so that when because for Hitler uh bolshevism is not not just a hated ideology it's an ideology that is driven by the Jews so we should when we think about the Soviet Union through a Nazi lens we shouldn't necessarily think about bolism we should think about judeo bolshevism this is what the how the Nazis think that bolism is a Jewish system uh and therefore uh to eradicate it you have to kill the Jews uh in the Soviet Union this will be the only way to uh to do away with

bolshevism as as a system so you have this uh period where beginning immediately after um the verm enters into the Soviet Union for about six weeks where only uh men of fighting age are targeted but within a very short period that that's extended to include everyone uh women children the elderly uh and so as exactly as you say uh in these small towns and also larger cities the most famous being in in Kiev uh the shooting at babiar the Jews were often identified by their neighbors where uh it wasn't obvious to the to the Germans uh whether they were Jews or not uh taken to pits outside of the Town um and and shot into them uh and so for this phase of the Holocaust we're talking essentially about a huge scale effectively something like a colonial Massacre RIT large U this is by no means what we often think of as the Holocaust as this kind of technologically sophisticated uh industrial genocide it was still

genocide on a huge scale but it was done by um face to-face shooting it's extraordinarily brutal but was extremely efficient nevertheless I me think of the um the tens of thousands killed at babiar or in some of the some of the massacres in in transnistria huge numbers of of people shot into into pits there you know I was reading in some of these accounts and and I think you know when you read a lot of this stuff and I can't imagine how you do your job because you read this stuff all the time but when you read this stuff there's this tendency to think of the Nazis and and the ones who carry out these brutal murders you know to quote some of the nurenberg justifications as just following order orders and all that kind of stuff what really knocks you down sometimes is the fact that sometimes people were curious enough to just want to do this for the experience I'm moved in a bad way by that story of the of the

police unit uh entertainers the musicians and and actors who uh wanted the opportunity one day to just shoot Jews to just see what it was like and how this was uh portrayed in one of the books I was reading it might have been yours I get them conflated sometimes as almost a psychological chance to commit an inhuman Act without any sort of ramifications to be paid for it is there some sort of difference between and maybe that's not the right way to phrase the question but but I'm having a harder time for some reason with that than I am maybe with an idea that I've become comfortable with over the 58 years of my lifetime of this Nazi State and regime and the political orders from himler on down uh what do we make of like or or like the guy with the Crowbar in Kus Lithuania right in the crowd cheering and or the crowds cheering at some of these mass shootings you know I I I don't know what to make of the average

people enjoying this so much as opposed to some attempt to wipe out you know this enemy of judeo bolshevism it's also it's a difficult question it's a very uncomfortable one I think uh and again there's a kind of spectrum that you can see in uh research by the German hisor historian Michelle vilt you can see photographs of Jews being deported from the German provinces so not they're not being murdered there they're simply being rounded up and and deported but you can see the crowds laughing and and jeering at the Jews as they're being rounded up and and taken away through to exactly as you described the so-called death dealer of Kass uh or um these volunteers if you like who turn up and and want to have a go at shooting i i i a little bit reluctant to say U this takes us back to some of the sort of you know Stanford Prison experiments or mgrm and so say you know there's there's an Ian in all of us and

and so on um but I I do think that at least forly what what you see in eastern particularly in Eastern Europe where the killings take place is that the Nazis create and their allies also the Romanians in transnistria do the same they create effectively a lawless Zone where the there's a state of exception the Reg law of the land no longer applies the Jews are fair game um anyone can do anything to them with no comeback and so in a sense it's an I've written elsewhere I wrote an article some years ago called genocide as transgression uh and it's what I tried to argue there was that the the Holocaust presented an opportunity to people to fulfill their wildest fantasies with no come back and afterwards I I think that for some some of the perpetrators at least they probably looked back on what they'd done and couldn't quite believe it when they were back in regular Society where normal law applied and so on and and

probably couldn't couldn't even fathom what they'd done themselves uh and yet there was this state of exception created uh that allowed this um this this madness if you will to to take place and it's it's uncomfortable because it makes you think well perhaps that's what human beings are that people kill other people because they can when the opportunity arises that's what happens uh nevertheless it's it's more than just a pogram you know this was a state sanctioned State of Affairs U which is why we see the the genocide on the scale that we do I was interested and maybe this is part of how one at the ground level rationalizes what they're being uh what they're doing was this equating the Jews in the East to partisans especially right and and when you read these accounts by German soldiers often they'll talk about either how the partisans were Jews or how the partisans were working with the Jews and that then

when you reply by killing Jews you are in effect killing partisans and this is okay because they were just shooting at your buddies um what do you make of this and listen I guess I guess Hitler himself was had said at one point just call them all partisans I mean this became a wonderful blanket and obviously this obscures the number you know when people talk about how many deaths in the Holocaust it must be impossible to you know to untease Jews from partisans at this because often times that's what they'll say what do we make about this partisan rationale I think exactly as you say it pro it provides um a a means of self-justification um but it only goes so far because when the inet group or members of the ver or the order police are shooting um elderly men and women or children of course this partisan argument Falls away immediately uh and then you have to say well then what are they thinking so the I think the the

partisan arguments uh worked well at first in the early stages of of the war in the Soviet Union as a kind of psychological buffer uh but it I think once the The Killing squads got used to what they were doing they no longer needed it they continued to use that language to some extent if you if you look at the the Ein Gren reports they are often couched in this euphemistic language but the uh the killings themselves I I don't think they could possibly have believed it when they were shooting whole whole population groups okay this idea of psychological insulation is interesting to me because so often and please again correct me if I've misunderstood or if the sources have changed or the attitudes and and um assessments have changed but it's interesting when you read because the Nazis were paying close attention to how these shootings were going how they could make it more efficient what could

be done differently and they never show a whole lot of sympathy obviously for the victims but they sometimes show sympathy or at least concern over what the perpetrators are experiencing having to shoot all these people all the time and when I was growing up and again correct me if this has changed this was always one factor that went into the idea of something like creating Annihilation camps where you don't have to hold a Tommy Gun and spend the whole afternoon shooting women and children it just becomes a process where there's as you suggested more of a psychological insulation um maybe talk to me a little bit about because I'm interested in the human angle I always talk about people who are caught in the gears of history I mean if you find yourself tasked with having to be at bobar and being one of the gunmen there um it's almost heartening for me that there's enough people bothered by

this that you have to find another way can you talk to me and it's a good transition to go from the genocide of bullets to the genocide of gas but talk to me a little about this the effect it has on The Killers MH um it's a good question because I think again the evidence is mixed there's a I think a small number of killers who enjoy the process and then there's a larger majority who get used to it and then who write letters back to their families who's saying things like oh it takes nerves of Steel to do what we're doing here but we have to do it uh for the sake of our children and grandchildren um and then there's a a very small minority of uh of those who simp who won't do it uh or who have to be persuaded and who eventually do it um thanks to being ped with alcohol or because they don't want to uh look bad in front of their comrades and so on um I think one of the things that has changed is that I think we Now

understand that this did have psychological ramifications for the killers and um nobody needs to feel sorry for them but probably many of those who um were not uh P prosecuted after the war probably did suffer from PTSD from uh from what they'd experienced what and what they'd done um again which is is not um does not mean we need to you know it's not an apology for them um but they they certainly did experience psychological effects from uh from what they' done not all of them but but many did I think um but the you're right to say I think that one of the reasons for the transition from the Holocaust by bullets to uh the creation of gas Chambers was uh a notion that this would involve fewer people in in direct face-to-face killings uh that the process would be less traumatic for the perpetrators um there was no regard I think there has been a certain amount of apologetics uh trying to say this this

was less barbaric for the victims as well but that's clearly nonsense that the when you read the description one of the things I wanted to do in the book actually was to say that when you look at the the death camps they're they're not this um clean industrial process of murder uh sites that that they're sometimes thought of they were extremely brutal violent and uh and nasty and and that way of killing people is also um horrendous and and by no means efficient and and clean nevertheless from the perpetrator's point of view it took far fewer people uh and when you look at the places like the Reinhard camps a very small core of ss uh and local helpers um could could kill thousands and thousands of of victims uh very quickly uh but again that transition I don't think it was only driven by psychological needs it was also contingent that's to say uh that the the idea for the gas chamber came from uh the so-called euthanasia uh

program beforehand so that the uh or the T4 project to kill the the disabled not necessarily not primarily Jews but members of the the Arian uh race in Germany who were considered to be deficient and and disabled and and should be done away with um it was there that gas Chambers were first created and as that program was being wound up many of the uh leaders of it were transferred then to the Reinhard camps because they' suggested that this would be a more appropriate way of of killing Jews than simply shooting them so the psychological um explanation is I think a correct one but it also has to be understood as as uh emerging out of other things that were happening in in the the first uh mass murder projects being carried out by Nazi Germany that's to say the euthanasia program maybe some of it also goes to the idea of hiding this sort of stuff I was I was shocked to read an account from early 1942

talking about the bobar area where the mass grave was and that when things started to unfreeze that there were like minor explosions created by the gas from the bodies buried in the in the pit you think to yourself about crematoriums and whatnot maybe solving that problem somewhat but it is a you know it seems to me that the reason maybe we focus so much on on that even if it wasn't his Factory line genocide as we've always thought is because that's the Great break from past history right Jenis Khan can kill a lot of people too but he does it the same way the aats group and did essentially the the new you know it's almost a science fiction Star Trek episode to go in there and wipe people out I mean I um Levan's book from the late 1960s has this rundown and we're going to use it in the show where they go from like the train you know the announcement that the train is arriving all the way to pulling the bodies out of

the um out of the um gas chamber and efficiency is an interesting word I mean I was struck by the little things like that there were geraniums planted along the way little things that were it it just if you were making a horror movie there's something worse about putting geraniums along the side than just making it like a bunch of cattle going to slaughter uh there's no question there but what does that make you think about um I mean I think I think you're right there there is Theon reason I think why we're still morbidly fascinated with aitz is precisely because it does Mark this break that you describe that there there's something about the modernist architecture you know the Bare House inspired architecture of the entrance gate to Bean now the uh the railway age you know the epitome of modernity uh being used and the the conscious design of this place as nothing more than a killing Factor

that's there is something that remains shocking about that uh and I've said so in in the book uh you know I refer to aitz there as um an abire of concentrated genocidal fantasy uh and and and that's that's what it is uh at the same time I I also I wanted to say that there's more to the Holocaust than aitz and the death camps but by saying that I I don't mean to detract from the significance of aitz it is the uh the points if you like of uh of the Nazis genocidal program I mean with respect to the geraniums and so on um again it's become a kind of well-worn cliche that we see you know the the land of uh yeah this Trope of the the land of the poets and thinkers also being the land of of murderers if you think about you know the piano playing murderer uh in in Schindler's List or The Pianist or whatever I mean the George Steiner wrote about this kind of thing in in his essays in the the 1960s uh and it

Remains the case today that we're still kind of shocked when we see these um murderers people we like we want to think of as crazy sadists and so on sitting down to play aach Sonata uh at the end of the film conspiracy which is the film about the van conference um which is one of the one of the few truly great docu dramas about about the Holocaust at the end of that that film uh you see um you see hyrich and ikman set Ling down with a brandy L listening to U classical music again um Shubert maybe I can't remember but U you know this is something that continues to to shock us and it shouldn't shock us anymore because we we understand there's this this dialectic of civilization and barbarism that characterizes uh the Third Reich uh but that goes all the way through from the individual perpetrators and and their sensibilities through to the architecture of of the death camps I love the line the banality of E

um so so let's let's bring that up a little bit because you mentioned shock and I think that's an interesting word when we talk about events from 70 plus years ago now uh one almost feels like it's good to be in shock about something like this but shock wears off um and yet we still produce quite a few books on the Holocaust one gets the impression that the difference between the reaction of those who were either part of that generation or close to it is quite a bit different than what we see now I was struck you'd mentioned the exhibit in the 1990s that helped dispel the myth of the clean Vermont and the books that came out of that there was an interview in one of them at the end with a green party member of the bundestag who said that her father had been um you know had the black uniform and the whole thing but that he was this good guy and she said all through the 1950s he meant he he mandated that the window be closed

and that he would have nightmares screaming about fire and children right so that that impacts him it impacts his wife it impacts his children but now you get a generation farther or two generations farther does this stuff wear off and and then one also sort of asked the question considering the trauma involved or the fact that as we get farther away we're getting farther away from the perpetrators here and one might ask when the Germans can start thinking of themselves as innocent because they're three or four or five or six Generations removed from this H how do we deal with something that is so overwhelmingly guilty and shocking with the that it's going to wear off at some point and maybe when we're talking about guilt of peoples maybe in some respect there's a right for it to wear off wow what a question um there's well I don't know I don't know myself actually no but there I mean there's

there's a lot in there that you're that you're asking I mean I I think um first of all in terms of natural memory three generations right a 100 years is a about um the the span of natural memory uh and so after that period of 3 Generations everything is is history so there are no longer any uh there's no longer anyone alive who remembers uh World War I within a couple of years there will no longer be anyone alive who remembers World War II there will be for some Years yet a small number of people who we we class as Holocaust Survivors but who were babies or children in 1944 1945 right there will be nobody left who can speak in terms of their personal experience about the Holocaust and World War II and I think that despite the fact that there are people who claim that uh the intergenerational transmission of trauma can reach three or four generations I have my um doubts about that uh to to a large extent I think

that um there's a cultural memory that particularly within Jewish communities uh that cultural memory is largely shaped by uh the Holocaust but I don't really believe that let's say the great grandchildren of H Holocaust Survivors are traumatized in a meaningful clinical sense by uh by the Holocaust I also think that the time is coming where for the moment we still have um a large amount of uh cultural emphasis on the Holocaust new museums are still being built now in Amsterdam in Bucharest and and elsewhere a huge amount of Holocaust film uh fiction and so on continues to be produced but I think that the the current emphasis on commemoration Holocaust Memorial days and so on that is going to change over the next generation or so and I think you're right in a sense that there there's no reason why it should be the case that five or six Generations after the event people should feel the same about it as they did five or 10

years after the event or even 50 years after the event that's natural uh we can read about the black death and go oh yeah that was horrible but we're not upset by it in in the same way that people the children or grandchildren of those who were affected by it in the Middle Ages uh were and so I I think there will come a point where the history of the Holocaust remains will always remain important it's a major event in 20th century European history and I think we we will continue to be uh fascinated by it um but the the broader cultural emphasis on commemoration and and memory I think over time will I don't think it will disappear but I think it will dissipate and and shift in ways that at the moment we can't really predict you brought up um and and I I hadn't been exposed to this thought in the books from the 60s and the 70s and the 80s but it's it's I I've been thinking a lot about it since I since

I've been exposed to it and your book does this quite a bit equating what the Nazis were doing to something that's very interesting to a lot of people today the question of colonialism and then I went back and started rereading things like mind confidence some of those earlier books with with Hitler's interest in for example how Native Americans were treated by the Americans or or the colonial uh European powers in places like Africa can you talk to me a little bit I mean seeing the Jews as as as being treated the same as the belgians treated Africans in the Congo or the Americans treated the Cherokees at the Trail of Tears um it's a very fascinating new way to approach this subject can you talk about it a little bit yes I think it works to a certain extent so this no doubt for example that um the British Empire and the expansion of the US were things that um fascinated Hitler he talks at one point about how

um Russia will be our India and that with in the same way that the the British rule several hundred million Indians with a couple of hundred thousand men so we'll do the same in in Russia uh and but I think he's really he's much more fascinated by the American case he sees the West westward expansion of of the us as really a model for the Eastward expansion of um of lean's real living space for uh for Germany uh because Poland is kind of an irrelevance that just has to be swept away uh really what's uh what the Nazis are interested in is is Ukraine and Western Russia up to the urals this is the real uh space that the the Germans need to to develop and grow so the the Nazi project is I think inherently a colonial one in that sense when it comes to the Holocaust it's a little bit harder to explain using that Paradigm because in the case of let's say the the treatment of Native Americans um in the US and in Canada and

and elsewhere you you immediately see that these are people who who from the settlers point of view have to be got rid of because they're the people who are on the land the difference with the Jews is that for the most part they're not land owners they're a small minority who mostly are Urban dwellers small towns and cities across the whole region if you're if what you're interested in is the acquisition of territory you don't need to kill the Jews to do to do that so the killing of the Jews is about more than simply acquiring territory uh and the real problem I think then comes well how do you explain the murder of the Jews of France or why late in the war do the Nazis uh go to Great Lengths to deport the Jews of Corfu or or uh roads or to try and work out how they're going to get hold of the Jews of Albania for example this this makes no sense if from a colonial point of view there I think the only explanation is

the idea of uh the the security the permanent security of of the German people relying on the eradication of Jews everywhere so the colonial Paradigm works in the sense that the Nazis want to acquire territory and they want to get rid of the people who who inhabit that ter territory that's why they have this uh plan the so-called uh the hunger plan uh or the the general Plan East which um has nothing to do with Jews but envisages the the murder of between something like 30 to 50 million slaves eventually to make way for German settlers uh but everywhere they go the first people that the Nazis Target are the Jews and that's not because they're land owners that's because they're perceived in this conspiracy theory that we already discussed as this uh as a threat to the safety and and purity of the Aran race this is going to be an uncomfortable question cuz it's an uncomfortable question for me um but

when one talks about learning from the past which is you know that this is the great Trope of all time right the learning from history and our our ability to do but one one thinks of the the statement never again right the idea that you know we're going to learn from this we're never going to have another one of these but then there will be a politician in a place of all places in Israel that will start using terms like the amalekites to describe modern day people I I don't even know how to get my mind around that or how something like that didn't prompt an immediate counter reaction that was nuclear almost in its in its um in in its nature but there's also something so human about the fact that those most affected by the Holocaust might have a politician somewhere who could use a phrase like that and have it work for them again there is no question here but your book brought up a few very uncomfortable

points about using the Holocaust as a rationale or a or a motiv you know I think I think anything that's going to be that large is going to be co-opted by human beings who have agendas but what do we make of the word amalaki coming into play at all it is uncomfortable uh but I think that the at least we can say that what's currently happening in in Gaza um shows that the subtitle of my book that the Holocaust is an unfinished history um is clearer now than even than when I wrote it um your example of am malachite is just one example of many uh examples we can point to being used by uh Israeli farri right Israeli ministers uh to describe uh the Palestinians in Gaza uh in similar terms you know as human animals and the Palestinians simply as as Nazis um look I think um the George Steiner's fear that the um his opposition to the creation of Israel was not um was on the basis that it would it would simply

become a state like any other is is now in evidence uh that you can see that the um the Israelis are people like anybody else and so uh when I talk about the Israelis here in the same way that people talk about the Germans I'm talking about the people who are currently in power uh and and the Israeli cabinet is dominated by far-right politicians who if they were in power uh anywhere else in in Europe let's say um there would be there would be an outcry uh about such people being in power they're people who for the most part are not fit to hold office uh so and there are people who are driven by conspiracy theories here I think you can see um you can see a kind of Holocaust trauma in in evidence um one of the things that the Survivor Ruth kuger wrote in in her Memoir was uh in she relates a conversation that she had with some students when she went back to to Germany in gingham and and um they start

to to say oh you know how how can the Israelis of all people who' have experienced genocide treat the Palestinians so badly and she says aitz was not a human rights uh laboratory you it was not it was not an instructional facility um you didn't learn anything there about human rights and so this idea that people who are the victims of genocide should behave impeccably um actually the reverse is often the case and we've we can point to other cases of of genocide and and show that those who are the victims often then will behave like perpetrators uh if the opportunity presents itself or that they have built into their psyche this notion that um the only way to defend ourselves is through this allout response nothing else will do uh because otherwise the people are out to get us uh and so again I'm talking about I think here a small number of people uh who are in power currently in Israel but

the rhetoric that they're using is um is quite scary I would agree well and let's let's broaden it out from Israel to a lot of the world it almost seems like what's going on with that sort of problem with a very far right government in Israel is becoming a trend I mean that's almost like just keeping up with the Joneses in a lot of other countries where movements and rhetoric that we thought were long gone aren't just thriving again but the attitudes and the pronouncements of those regimes or wannabe regimes are resonating with human beings on the ground again what do we make and your book mentions this quite a bit but I mean there's a sense here that what we're seeing is a sort of revanchism if you will of ideas from the mid 20th century which of course were ideas from the late 19th century I mean there's almost cyclical nature to some of this stuff I think one of one of the things that's

so important about Nazism and and here I'm understanding Nazism as if you like a a variety of fascism the most radical variety of fascism is and one reason why actually this period will continue to resonate for for some while is that fascism somehow it created a a store of ideas as well as a kind of an athetic uh a vocabulary that Contin that I think it went beyond what was acceptable in terms of normal Democratic politics and it appeals to people's deep psychology and there is something you know we continue to live in an age of of nation states we think about nation states as the the natural way that the world should be ordered and so when people in those States whether rightly or wrongly objectively or not statistically uh correctly or not uh consider themselves to be under threat this vocabulary this style that was created by fascism in the mid 20th century comes back into play it is there now um you know the cat's out

of the bag and it can't be uh put back in again so it's it's that extreme reaction is something that people reach to when um when things are tough or are perceived to be tough what's interesting I mean we see fascism um in power now in in the Netherlands in Italy um we seek like in in Victor orban's Hungary the illiberal democracy and so on uh the rise of the afd in in Germany uh the uh the rightwing of the Republican party in in the US and so on um are all appealing to people's basist instincts in in this respect uh and there is a fight back against it but the I think from a historian's point of view at least you can see it's it's fascinating let's say uh that something that was created nearly 100 years ago uh well more than just over 100 years ago now if we think about Italian fascism uh continues to shape the way that uh people think and and behave today even in the face of quite different

circumstances or a lot of historical evidence Professor is there anything that I didn't ask about that you feel like we should get into or talk about a little bit here I'm still digesting some of the things you've said but is there anything we haven't spoken about that needs to be said no not really I mean I think there are themes in the book book that U we haven't touched on very much uh for example the the Concentration Camp system the sub camps that I think uh people don't know more than 1100 right something like that more than 1100 absolutely more than 1100 sub camps attached just to the the main concentration camps as as well as a whole world of other camps labor camps and so on across the whole of Europe uh many many camps also created by axis regimes um the the camps created by the Romanians in transnistria or the the croats sovats and and and other camps uh these are places that um you sometimes

come across in in um Memoirs or testimonies by survivors but that I think haven't really been appreciated as crucial to the history of the Holocaust in many of the mainstream narratives and I've tried to um at least start to do some of that work in in the book so there are th themes like the Concentration Camp system uh as well as uh we touched a little bit on collaboration but I go into a great sort of a great detail particularly in in one chapter of the book about what collaboration means what the different regimes and and uh institutions involved in collaborating with the Third Reich so there are there are other things that we could talk about but I think readers can uh discover those for the for themselves in the book well it's a fantastic book I don't know how you do it immersing yourself in the primary sources as you do all the time and keeping your mind and and head straight on but it's uh

it's fascinating I hope you continue to do this kind of work and we'd love to talk about the next book when it's out thank you so much it's been a pleasure thank you I appreciate it take care cheers thank you goodbye my thanks to Professor Dan stone for coming on the program his latest work is out in paperback now the Holocaust and unfinished history and as usual we will put a link to the book in the show notes for this latest show uh a reminder by the way I'm uh going to be on a speaking tour in March and April 2024 if you'd like to join me we're going to be in Los Angeles Salt Lake City Portland Oregon and New York City go to the front page of dancarlin.com for more info on that or feel free to sign up to our free substack page at dancarlin.com Dan Ben and the existence of these podcasts rely on your support and donations please go to dancarlin.com for classic episodes only available for sale

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What is discussed in "EP28 Superhumanly Inhuman"?

In order: 0:00 Hardcore History, Nazi Germany, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, Dan Stone; 15:00 Adolf Hitler, Dan Stone, Hardcore History, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill; 30:00 Adolf Hitler; 45:00 Adolf Hitler, Kingdom of Judah, Kingdom of Israel, Cyrus the Great; 1:00:00 Dan Stone, Herman Friedrich Graba; 1:15:00 Christopher Browning, Dan Stone, The Holocaust and Unfinished History; 1:30:00 Dan Stone, Adolf Hitler, Frederick C. Tuach; 1:45:00 Dan Stone, Nazi Germany; 2:00:00 Adolf Hitler, Dan Stone, The Holocaust and Unfinished History, University of London; 2:15:00 Adolf Hitler, Romania, Anton Drexler, Christopher Browning; 2:30:00 Adolf Hitler, Romania, Nazi Germany; 2:45:00 Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany; 3:00:00 Adolf Hitler, American case, British Empire; 3:15:00 Concentration Camp system, Dan Stone, The Holocaust and Unfinished History.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

27 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Adolf Hitler, Dan Stone, Nazi Germany, Romania, Nazi, The Holocaust and Unfinished History. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP28 Superhumanly Inhuman"?

The episode runs 3 h 18 min; the transcript is about 32,900 words in 194 timestamped sections.

More from Dan Carlin

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.