If only we had sided with Hitler
Let’s bring back…um…anti-Semitism?
“The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guest told Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.
“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the far-right podcaster Candace Owens asked in July 2024. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’”
What do you mean “almost”? Is six million not enough to count as ethnic cleansing? And we actually didn’t to the Germans; what we did is prevent Hitler from winning the war that Hitler started.
In 1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S. St. Louis, which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and killed by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not only kept the country’s refugee caps largely in place but also rejected pleas to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks that led to it. When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not out of any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately dispelled when the Allied Forces liberated several of the Nazi camps where millions of Jews had been murdered. Entering the gates of these sadistic sites, American service members came face-to-face with unspeakable Nazi atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands of emaciated adults. Denial gave way to revulsion.
And then Nuit et brouillard came out, in 1955, and more people saw some of what service members had seen, albeit at a much more comfortable distance.
Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American troops. “I made the visit deliberately,” he cabled to Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower then requested that members of Congress and prominent journalists be brought to the camps to see and document the horrors themselves. “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow told his listeners after touring the camp. “I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”
Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American soldiers, drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had been carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we had to get rid of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass, a Black veteran whose segregated unit entered Buchenwald, later testified. In this way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish prejudice led—and the country was transformed.
Though slowly, and never 100%.
Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.
Bad. They will be bad.
This is absolutely sickening. The holocaust has to be the one historical fact that everybody should have their noses rubbed in, if they don’t learn a bit of history beyond that. Those pictures of piles of naked corpses are not easily forgotten, nor should they be. It gets a bit personal to me too, since I have come to know the son of a Norwegian jew who miraculously survived both Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I can only imagine what he would think.
Palestine has complicated the way outsiders see the Holocaust, to put it mildly.
I lurked on 4chan many years ago. I remember when the owner “m00t” (Christopher Poole) added the board /pol/ (“Politically Incorrect”) as a “containment board” to keep this kind of thing off the other boards (/b/ “Random” in particular). But then /pol/ became an incubator for this kind of thing, like “Hitler did nothing wrong” and “Hitler never killed anybody”. I don’t have any links to add here for documentation, because I put all of that behind me. I can’t even say what years I lurked there, because I really don’t remember, and I’m not going to figure it out. And there might have been another site 8chan that was worse, but I never went there. I don’t know how any of this relates to Tucker Carlson today, because I’m not going to get myself dirty looking into it.
Wise. All this is deeply depressing and, as you say, dirty-feeling-making.
I was 18 when I visited Dachau – and 1 week later, Auschwitz. The war had only ended 30 years earlier and it still echoed over the whole of Europe. Traveling cross country by train, wrecked tanks still dotted the countryside. At the camp, a survivor shared his story with any who would listen. Tens of thousands died from hunger, disease, abuse. And Dachau wasn’t even a ‘death camp’.
Auschwitz was more visceral. Some of that was due to it being on the other side of the iron curtain at the time. But mostly it was haunted by so much murder. The pile of eyeglasses. That’s what I will remember til my dying day. So much casual evil.
I returned with my Daughter when she was studying abroad in Berlin. Dachau seemed cleaner – more sterile than I remembered.(I believe some of what I saw in the ’70’s was shipped to the US for the museum in DC.)
I was 22 when I visited Dachau. I was annoyed by American people my age being flippant about how not all that bad it looked, and then smoking on the bus back to Munich despite the rauchen verboten sign and the driver repeatedly saying “Rauchen verboten!!” You’d have thought it was a trip to an amusement park.
‘What ifs?’ (counterfactuals to philosophers) are intriguing in this regard. The disastrous landing by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey (Gaba Tepe and, to the Turks) on April 25, 1915 was covered in a TV program I saw years ago with onsite commentary by a then General of the NZ Army.
The ANZAC assault force had made insufficient allowance for the currents coming out of the Black Sea, which caused them to land on the wrong beach. The right beach was on the other side of a headland, and which the Allies called ‘Brighton Beach.’ Its rolling sand dunes would have provided excellent cover for the invaders. The General went on to say something like: “If they had landed here on Brighton, there was nothing between them and Istanbul. They could have knocked Turkey out of the war, denying the Rumanian oilfields to the Kaiser’s forces, and brought the whole war to a speedy end.”
And then he added the punchline: “And who knows? The world may have never heard of a man called Adolf Hitler.”
If only.
And another major benefit might have been Lenin & Stalin being unknown names.
But hopefully not Lennon.
Or (the) Marx (brothers).
Hail Fredonia!