Wednesday 27th January  is Holocaust Day and is the day which sees the  perennial blossoming of the controversy surrounding the extermination of over 6.4 million Jews by the Germans. Every year, someone  somewhere delivers a provocative statement which somehow finds its way onto the news wires, resulting in the inevitable outrage which has also become a significant and essential part of this  important occasion.

This year, Polish Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, former head of the Polish bishops’ conference, halted the stolid ruminations of Jewish leaders in both Poland and Italy by saying on Polish Television “the Holocaust as such, is a Jewish invention.” Needless to say, he claims that  his comments have been manipulated, misreported, misinterpreted and misunderstood. (His remarks were reported on an Italian Catholic website ) 

Exactly what he said does not really matter – because the odds are that whatever it was,  it was anti-Semitic. Little would have been lost in translation. After all, he is Polish, over 70 and a Roman Catholic priest . Potentially, you don’t get any more anti-Semitic than that. It was former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir who said  “Poles suck in anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk…..” – and they do.

In the 1920s and 30s, my father was a Roman Catholic schoolboy in Eastern Poland and he recalled “Jew-baiting” in the playground  and the same Jewish jokes that I was to hear in an English playground forty years later. When Jewish war survivors returned to Poland after the war in order to reclaim their properties and lives, they were ostracised and turned away by their Polish “friends”. Little had changed.

I clearly remember many years ago, here in the UK, a Polish parish priest spitting out the word “Zyd” during sermons. (That’s the Polish equivalent of “Yid”). The Polish Catholic hatred of Jews stems from their belief that Jesus was betrayed by Jews and that they were responsible for his death.

The average Pole is anti-Semitic  in the same way that the average American is anti-Black and the average Englishman is anti-Pakistani.

As a race, our herding instinct always wins-out. Usually, it is only a sociological issue but if the instinct becomes mutated and then metamorphoses into spitting hatred, the solution is usually sought through  the double whammy of abuse and violence. Ask the Serbs and Croats. Ask the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Ask an Alabama Redneck. Ask the Nazis.

However, Bishop Pieronek is very aware that whereas the Nazis killed over 20 million human beings, only about a quarter of them were Jewish. The dead included the handicapped, the aged, the sick, prisoners of war, forced labourers, camp inmates, critics, intellectuals, homosexuals, Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Germans, Czechs, Italians, Poles, French, Ukrainians, Yugoslavs, Greeks and many others. These people weren’t all killed in  concentration and death camps. Many were killed as hostages, by so-called “euthanasia”, starvation, exposure, medical experiments and terror bombing. Among the murdered were over one million children under eighteen years of age. 

The above figure of 20 million dead is in addition to civilian and military-combat war-deaths.

We tend to talk in terms of “genocide” but this was more specifically “democide” which is a combination of genocide and mass murder. It was the Soviet Union and Poland which suffered the most. In total, the Second World War killed over 28 million Europeans but Nazi democide  added 20 million to that figure. Stalin’s democide added a futher 13 million .

That is why some still feel that whereas we remember the 6.4 million murdered Jews, we appear to have forgotten the millions of others. Among them was my own father’s entire family- bar one young brother.

The Nazis started their killing spree as early as 1933 and it is thought that more than 750,000 non-Jewish German nationals were disposed of. Remember that not all Germans signed up for Hitler’s particular brand of politics. Consequently critics, pacifists, conscientious objectors, rebels and dissidents were executed, disappeared, or slowly died in concentration camps. But not all Nazi killings were done on the grand scale.

For instance, in June and July 1934, Hitler assassinated hundreds of top Nazi SA’s (Sturmabteilung). They were killed because under Ernest Rohm,  they   were becoming a strong alternative to the SS (Schutzstaffel). Another 5,000 Germans  were  killed after the 1944  attempted coup d’etat and attempted assassination of Hitler.  In total, 1% of the non-Jewish German population was murdered. If one includes the 5,200,000 German civilian and military war-dead, the average German’s likelihood of dying during the Hitler years was slightly better than one in eleven.

However, in Poland, the Nazis killed one in six – that was 2.4 million. They were not totally indiscriminate  but concentrated their efforts on the country’s leaders, intellectuals and professionals.They also murdered 3 million Ukrainians, 1.6 million Russians and 1.4 million Belorussians. The vast majority were the crême de la crême of society and not all were Jewish.

The Nazis also used murder as an administrative and control device. For instance, if partisans killed a single German soldier, the Nazis would round up and execute all the men in a nearby village, burn the village to the ground, and send all the women and children off to concentration camps. In retaliation for sabotage, they would shoot dozens and even hundreds of hostages. They even had a tariff:

One hundred civilians would be killed for every German soldier killed; fifty for every one wounded. Often this was a minimum which was often doubled or tripled. They thus killed vast numbers of innocent peasants and townspeople. Most executions were small in number but day-by-day they added up.

The atrocities were not confined to Poland and Russia. They also slaughtered hundreds of thousands in Yugoslavia, Greece, France and Czechoslovakia. For example, in Greece they burned and destroyed as many as 1,600 villages, each with populations of between 500 and 1000 people.

Many other regimes have  killed opponents and critics or used reprisals to maintain power. Saddam Hussein is a modern example. What distinguished the Nazis was the sheer scale of their democide. People were machine-gunned in batches, shot in the head at the edge of trenches that they had often dug themselves, burned alive whilst crowded into churches, gassed in vans or fake shower rooms, starved or frozen to death, worked to death in camps, or beaten or tortured to death simply because of their race, religion, handicap, or sexual preference.

The Nazi High Command  believed utterly in the superiority of the “Aryan” race. They had no doubt that they were the pinnacle of evolution and  that eugenically, they were the “best”.  As  many have done before and since, they turned to science – or their version of science in order to provide data and evidence for their doctrine. Doctrine first then “experiments” provided the “facts” to support their views.  They believed that inferior races had to be removed and dealt-with like a disease. It was the Jews who were at the head of the queue.

In addition, Gypsies, homosexuals and the handicapped were in the Nazis’ sights. The Slavs were also to be removed but only after they were exploited for slave labour. The ultimate plan was to deport any remaining Slavs to Siberia.

Before we start tut-tutting, we should remember that the Nazi view of these groups was not much worse than our own view of black slaves only a few hundred years ago – a view which unfortunately still persists among many.

So, is it fair to argue that the Jews “invented” the Holocaust and have hijacked the world’s sympathy while the other murdered 20 million lie forgotten?

No.

There is no doubt that the Jews were singled-out for special treatment.  Here is an example taken from Robert Payne’s The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler:

“Hitler told Himmler that it was not enough for the Jews simply to die; they must die in agony. What was the best way to prolong their agony? Himmler turned the problem over to his advisers, who concluded that a slow, agonizing death could be brought about by placing Jewish prisoners in freight cars in which the floors were coated with…quicklime…which produced excruciating burns. The advisers estimated that it would take four days for the prisoners to die, and for that whole time the freight cars could be left standing on some forgotten siding…. Finally it was decided that the freight cars should be used in addition to the extermination camps.”

May you all rest in peace.