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Subject: Holocaust Almanac - Nazi Emigration Policy re Jews
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Archive/File: holocaust/usa/lipstadt lipstadt.002
Last-Modified: 1994/02/10
Subject: Nazi Emigration Policy

Discussing Richard Harewood's [actually Richard Verral] "Did Six
Million Really Die?  The Truth at Last," and David Hoggan's "The Myth
of the Six Million" to illustrate the scholastic duplicity of
Holocaust deniers, Deborah Lipstadt turns her attention to the
"emigration myth," and demonstrates how this duplicity occurs again
and again in works of denial:

   "In order to rehabilitate the reputation of National Socialism,
   these two publications tried to prove that the Nazis' intention was
   emigration, not annihilation. First they argued that the Final
   Solution was nothing but a plan to evacuate all Jews from the
   Reich. Then they tried to give this evacuation plan historical
   legitimacy by linking it with the name of the founder of the modern
   Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl. They claimed that the Nazis were
   simply trying to realize Herzl's original goal of transferring all
   the Jews to Madagascar. In fact Herzl never addressed the issue of
   Madagascar. At one point he briefly considered Uganda as an
   alternative to the land of Israel but dropped the idea when it met
   with furious opposition from other Zionists.

   This is not the only way Harwood used revised history to transform
   the Nazis into supporters of immigration. Attempting to prove that
   the Nazis were primarily interested in a benign population
   transfer, he wrote that a main plank of the National Socialist
   party platform before 1933 was Jewish emigration to Madagascar.  In
   fact emigration of the Jews was never included by the Nazis in
   their party platform prior to 1933, let alone used as a main
   plank.<20> The Madagascar Plan was never mentioned as a possibility
   until the late 1930s.  The Nazi slogan was 'Juda Verrecke,' 'perish
   Judah,' not 'emigrate Judah.' The full meaning of 'Juda Verrecke'
   is lost in English translation. It is akin to perishing like a
   'lice-ridden cur'.<21> Nazi leaders, among them Josef Goebbels,
   Julius Streicher, and Hans Frank, frequently described Jews as
   vermin in need of extermination. In 1929 Goebbels wrote :
   'Certainly the Jew is a human being. But then the flea is a living
   thing too -- only not a pleasant one.  Since the flea is not a
   pleasant thing, we are not obliged to keep it and let it
   prosper....  but our duty is rather to exterminate it.  Likewise
   with the Jews.'<22> In an article in the 'Vo"lkischer Beobachter'
   in 1921 Hitler described the Jews as 'lice and bugs sucking the
   German people's blood out of its veins.'<23>

   The claim that the Nazis were interested in Jewish immigration
   exemplifies how deniers draw falsehoods from truth.  Emigration
   _was _ indeed employed by the Nazis in the thirties as a means of
   ridding the Reich of Jews. From 1933 until 1939 the Nazis
   vigorously pushed the Jews to emigrate, and more than
   three-hundred-thousand, or approximately 50 percent of the German
   Jewish population, did so. While deniers use this data to portray
   the Nazis as benignly engaged in a population transfer, the Nazis'
   true intentions during the 1930s were to brutally destroy the
   German Jewish community and simultaneously sow seeds of
   anti-semitism abroad.  During the prewar period this was their
   means of creating a German that was 'Judenrein.' The chaos of the
   war allowed them, or some would argue, forced them to move from
   emigration to annihilation.  (footnote dealing with differences
   between to historic schools of thought omitted.  See Lipstadt, 108)
   But even emigration -- when employed by the Nazis as a solution to
   the Reich's Jewish 'problem' -- had diabolical intentions.  A
   Foreign Office memorandum of January 25, 1939, delineated the more
   cynical aspects of the emigration plan: 'The poorer and therefore
   more burdensome the immigrant Jews to the country absorbing them,
   the stronger the country will react and the more favorable will the
   effect be in the interest of German propaganda.' <24> As the Nazis
   exported penniless and desperate Jews, they also exported
   antisemitism.  This was, in part, the reason why they stripped the
   Jews of their possessions through an increasingly onerous
   emigration tax.  By January 1939 they had been totally excised from
   the German economy.  On occasion Reich leaders simply took groups
   of Jews and placed them outside Germany's borders, forcing their
   neighbors to have to accommodate a large group of destitute
   immigrants.  The best known of these incidents took place on the
   Polish border at the end of October 1938 on the eve of
   Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish Nazi pogrom of November 1938 during
   which hundreds of synagogues were destroyed and twenty-six-thousand
   Jews were put into concentration camps.

   The emigration myth -- the idea that the Nazis stuck to their
   original aim of getting rid of Jews by emigration -- is easily
   refuted by Nazi documents, newspapers, and journals themselves,
   which are replete with statements by high-ranking officials and
   party leaders, attesting to their ultimate objective.  The Nazi
   leader, Dr.  Robert Ley, articulated these intentions in 1942 when
   he said that it was not enough to 'isolate the Jewish enemy of
   mankind.  The Jews have got to be exterminated.'<25> " (Lipstadt,
   107-109) 

Once this technique is exposed to those concerned about the issue,
they can devote their time to mounting a more effective response by
addressing the duplicity itself; neither logic nor fact are of any use
in dealing with these folks.  They will simply ignore it and maintain
their blatant manipulation of reality, in the hope that many readers
simply will not have the time, nor the resources, to properly examine
seemingly confident assertions. Those who have the time and the
resources permitting historical research will simply be dismissed and
forgotten, lost to the cause.

Lipstadt's footnotes:

<20> For background on the Madagascar Plan see Leni Yahil, "The
     Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry" (New York, 1990), pp. 
     253-55; Philip Friedman, "The Lublin Reservation and the
     Madagascar Plan: Two Aspects of Nazi Jewish Policy during the
     Second World War," "YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies (1953),
     pp. 151-77; Christopher R. Browning, "The Final Solution and the
     German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat D3 of Abteling
     Deutschland, 1940-1943" (New York, 1978)
<21> Aronsfeld, "The Text of the Holocaust, p.1.
<22> Joseph Goebbels, "Der Nazi-Sozi" (Munich, 1929), p. 8, cited in
     Aronsfeld, "The Text of the Holocaust," p. 13
<23> Eberhard Ja"ckel and Axel Kuhn, eds., "Hitler, Sa"mtliche
     Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924" (Stuttgart, 1980), p. 368; Aronsfeld,
     "The Text of the Holocaust," p. 12.
<24> Nuremberg Document PS 3358, cited in Aronsfeld, "The Text of the
     Holocaust," p. 13.
<25> In a speech at Karlsruhe as reported in the "Strassburger Neueste
     Nachrichten," May 2, 1942, cited in Aronsfeld, "The Text of the
     Holocaust," p. 13.
                             Work cited

Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth 
and Memory. New York: The Free Press (A division of Macmillan, Inc.), 1993.

Editor's note: Lipstadt's work is a worthwhile addition to the library
of anyone concerned about Holocaust denial. Copies may be ordered from
any bookstore, but internet users may wish to avail themselves of the
services of the internet bookstore, available from any Gopher site*, or
those of the Social Studies School Services. To obtain contact
information and pricing for the Social Studies School Services, send a
message to LISTSERV@ONEB.ALMANAC.BC.CA and use the commands:

GET HOLOCAUST/BIBLIOGRAPHY SSSS.BOOKS-1
GET HOLOCAUST/BIBLIOGRAPHY SSSS.BOOKS-2
GET HOLOCAUST/BIBLIOGRAPHY SSSS.VIDEO-1
GET HOLOCAUST/BIBLIOGRAPHY SSSS.VIDEO-2

* To reach the on-line service, Bookstacks Unlimited, internet users can
"telnet books.com" - once you've gone through a brief login procedure,
you can search the stacks in a variety of ways, and order books on the
spot. I have found this service faster than my local bookstores, which
is saying something, since I live in Canada, and I highly recommend it
as a primary source for Holocaust-related books. DISCLAIMER: I have no
financial or other association with the company, or anyone employed
there.

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