Abd al-Haqq Marshall
16th January 2007, 01:27 AM
In many countries it's illegal to question the number of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, but Jewish groups have themselves perpetrated a vicious and racist campaign against recognizing the vastly greater number of gentiles killed.
" Many Jews, like prominent polemicist Alan Dershowitz, completely overlook the suffering of the Polish people, their own history, their own culture, and their own nationality to obnoxiously proclaim that Poland (the site of most of the Nazi concentration camps) "can only [my emphasis] be a Jewish cemetery with no tombstone." [DERSHOWITZ] What was the wider story of the sufferings in Europe during World War II? What was the context of the Holocaust? We all know what happened to the Jews; it is heralded everywhere. But what was happening to other people?
In the first two years of the German invasion of Poland, the ill-treatment of Poles was worse than Jews, so much that Poles would sometimes don the Nazi-enforced "Yellow star" marker for Jews to blend in with them. [LUCAS, p. 34-35] On August 22, 1939, Hitler declared the necessary killing "without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need." [GUMBOWSKI, p. 59] Hitler also planned that "the destruction of Poland is our primary task. The aim is not the arrival at a certain line but the annihilation of living forces ... Be merciless! Be brutal! ... The war is to be a war of annihilation." [LUCAS, p. 4]
William Shirer writes that:
"Hitler ... wanted ... a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources
would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people
would be made slaves of the German master race and whose
'undesirable' elements' -- above all, the Jews, but also many
Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them --
would be exterminated. .. The Jews and the Slavic peoples
were the Untermenschen -- subhumans. To Hitler they had
no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs,
might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves
of their German masters. Not only were the great cities of
the East, Moscow, Leningrad, and Warsaw, to be permanently
erased but the culture of the Russians and Poles and other
Slavs was to be stamped out and formal education denied
them ... As early as September 18, 1941, Hitler had specifically
ordered that Leningrad was to be 'wiped off the face of the
earth.' After being surrounded it was to be 'razed to the
ground' by bombardment and bombing. Its population
(three million) was to be destroyed with it. [SHIRER, p. 937]
As Charles Sydnor notes about the Nazi invasion of Russia, beginning on June 22, 1941:
"A three mile-wide strip of territory stretching the length of Eastern
Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains erupted in
a torrent of fire and flying steel as German aircraft, artillery, and
armor blasted across the Soviet frontier. In the violence of its initial
collision, the immensity and ferocity of its subsequent development,
and the profligacy of its destruction of human life and resources, the
German-Russian conflict transcended anything then in the human
experience. To the men of the SS Totenkopfdivision, who were
to fight exclusively against the Russians until the end of the war,
the campaign became a grim crusade of extermination." [SYDNOR,
C., 1977, p. 138-139]
"The Poles," concedes a rare Jewish author, Eva Hoffman,” in the Nazi hierarchy, were next only to Jews and Gypsies in the order of inferior races -- slated for complete subjugation and, in the more visionary Nazi plans, for eventual extermination." [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 6] "The Nazi leaders," noted Jewish author Raphael Lemkin (the inventor of the term genocide,"), "had stated very bluntly their intent to wipe out the Poles, the Russians; to destroy demographically and culturally the French element in Alsace-Lorraine, The Slavonians in Carniola and Carinthia. They almost achieved their goal in exterminating the Jews and gypsies in Europe." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 100]
And as Richard Lukas notes about conquered Poland: "The genocidal policies of the Nazis resulted in the deaths of about as many Polish Gentiles as Polish Jews.... this [Polish Gentile] holocaust has been largely ignored because historians who have written on the subject of the Holocaust have chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivist terms -- namely, the as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them, the Holocaust was unique to Jews, and they therefore have had little or nothing to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million Poles, who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever known." [LUKAS, p. ix] (In nearby Ukraine, notes Myron Kuropas, an estimated 14.5 million Ukrainians, including 600,000 Jews were lost... through deaths, deportations and evacuations. The war also destroyed over 700 Ukrainian cities and towns and some 28,000 villages.") [KUROPAS, M., 1995]
Twenty million tablets of cyanide for the gas chambers were discovered after the war in Nazi storehouses, many times the numbers necessary to exterminate Jews only. At one gas chamber site -- Kulmhof (Chelmo) -- a group of 5,000 gypsies were among the first to be murdered. Others exterminated there included convoys of non-Jewish children from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia ("These children were killed just as the Jews were") and even a busload of nuns. [GAS, p. 91-92] At Buchenwald, 250 Gypsy children were the first to be gassed. [HANCOCK, p.55] Throughout the territory of German occupation, people of all nationalities, and specifically invalids, the sick, and homosexuals, were subject to institutionalized murder, by gas or otherwise. The last gas chamber murders at the Mauthausen site were 181 Austrians who were against the Nazi regime.
Nazi Germany had clearly stated policies concerning surrounding European countries and their inhabitants of Slavic descent:
"By October 15, 1940, Hitler had decided on the future of the Czechs, the first Slavic people he had conquered. One half of them were to be 'assimilated,' mostly by shipping them as slave laborers to Germany. The other half, 'particularly' the intelligentsia, were simply to be, in the words of a secret report on the subject, 'eliminated.'" [SHIRER, p. 938]
Nazi mistreatment of prisoners of war, particularly Russian Slavs, was notorious:
"Dr. Otto Brautigam, deputy leader of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories wrote ... It is no longer a secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war have died of hunger or cold in our camps..."
The conceptual dehumanization of the Slavic people by the Nazis was not far behind the portrayal of Jews. Jews, however, were believed to pose a greater immediate threat, an innately alien and antagonistic element within German society, dimensionally international, conceived to be far more powerful in influence than Poles. Jews were to be exterminated first in a "Final Solution," the Slavs later, except those to be used as slaves.
"Martin Boorman, Hitler's party secretary ... wrote a long letter to Rosenberg [another Nazi official] ... 'The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don't need them, they may die ... The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable.... Education is dangerous... [SHIRER, p. 939] Chaim Kaplan, eventually murdered by the Nazis, noted the conditions for his maid after the German invasion: "When the Nazis confiscated our apartment, they permitted our Christian maid to remain. She is exempt from the Nazi Nuremberg laws, they raped her. After that they beat her so that she would reveal where I hid my money." [KAPLAN, C., p. 46]
The Nazi occupation of Poland was intended to de-Polonize the entire country and reconstruct it in a Germanic image. Polish names of towns and places were torn down and replaced by German ones (exactly as the Jews of Israel have done in replacing Arabic geographical names with Hebrew ones). "Property in Poland belonging not only to Jews but to Poles was subject to confiscation without compensation." [SHIRER, p. 944] "The planned deportation [of Poles to the Auschwitz concentration] camp," says Franciszek Piper, head of the Historical Research Department of the Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, "of tens of thousands of men, women, and children from the Zamosc region -- foreseen as one of the first bridgeheads for Germanization in eastern Poland -- demonstrated the Nazis' goal of exterminating the Poles, which they only achieved to a small degree." [PIPER, F., Political, p. 15]
Hideously monstrous medical experiments on Jews by sadistic Nazis is well known. But "Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans... At the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates -- the 'rabbit girls' they were called -- were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to 'experiments' in bone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water." [SHIRER, p. 979] Priests were also tortured and experimented upon at Dachau. [GOLDBERG, M., H., 1979, p. 223]
There were grandiose medical visions for others who were not Jews: "An S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote Himmler ... that ... the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity should be sterilized." [SHIRER, p. 979]
The suffering of millions of non-Jewish Poles, Czechs, Russians, Gypsies and other nationals and ethnics during the Holocaust era has been completely forgotten and overlooked in our own time. (Between December 1939 and August 1941, the Nazis even murdered 50,000 Germans -- defined as "mentally sick" -- with carbon dioxide gas in chambers disguised, like other mass murder sites, as showers. [ARENDT, p. 108] Among the murdered were even Germans who protested against the Nazi treatment of Jews -- people like clergyman like Bernard Lichtenberg and philosopher Kurt Huber. [RUBENSTEIN, p 188-189] Even Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp of Jewish Holocaust symbology, was instituted by sending to the gas chambers 300 Poles and 700 Russian prisoners of war. [LUCAS, p. 38]
The numbers always cited for people murdered at Auschswitz (and the Holocaust in general) are only guesses and estimates -- citing this fragmentary document or that, and then presuming from there -- and they vary widely. While Franciszek Piper claims 90% of those who died at Auschwitz were Jews, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has ascribed 2.5 million Jewish and l.5 million non-Jewish dead to the place. Scholar Norman Davies echoes whatever he read that one-quarter of the Auschwitz dead were non-Jews. Whatever the case, Auschwitz has become the consummate symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and Judeo-centric discourse has completely appropriated the human misery of Auschwitz, the Holocaust, concentration camps in general, and the neglected whole of World War II as an ethnocentric pillar of their own specialized victimization.
As Polish/Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz notes, "the meaning of the word Holocaust [has undergone] gradual modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of other nationalities." [LUKAS, p. ix] Unlike other European nations, underscores Milosz, "there was no collaboration between Poles and Nazis. There was no collaboration. This should be said clearly, because there was no Polish pseudo-government under the Nazis. The Polish population was treated by the Nazis as the next to be destroyed and the Poles knew that." [MILOCZ, p. 37]
Although far fewer in numbers, the people most directly parallel to the Jewish situation in World War II were the Gypsies (Sinti and Romani). By any criteria, their own catastrophe alone under German fascism ruins modern Jewish claims to "Holocaust uniqueness." There are numerous surviving documents attesting to Nazi policy of complete annihilation of Gypsies, including a memo from the Office of Racial Hygiene stating that "all Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination." [HANCOCK, p. 43]
Ian Hancock, a University of Texas professor and himself of Romani heritage, has struggled for years to call attention to the disaster that befell his people. "It is abundantly clear," he says, "that some historians see only what they want to see, that a very blind eye is being turned in the direction of Gypsy history, and that when the Romani genocide in Nazi Germany is acknowledged, it is kept, with few exceptions, carefully separated from the Jewish experience." [HANCOCK, p. 40]
Hancock has discovered Jewish resistance to the intrusion of the Gypsy story on Jewish sacred turf to be widespread. Sometimes the undercurrent of Jewish exclusionism is revealed to be nakedly racist:
"The director of one Holocaust center referred to me as a troublemaker;
another writer on the Holocaust called my discussion of the Romani case
in the Jewish context 'loathsome.' A representative of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Council, whom I have never met, told a researcher
who called to find out how to reach me that I was a 'wild man.' People
have walked out when it was my turn to speak at conferences about the
Porrajmos [the Gypsy "Holocaust"], and one former professor at the
university where I teach adamantly refused even to mention Roma and
Sinti in his regular course on the Holocaust. There is an element of
racism evident in the Jewish response; after all, Gypsies are a 'third world
people of color' ... At one presentation I gave at a Hillel center, I was
interrupted by a woman who leaped to her feet and angrily demanded
why I was even comparing the Gypsy case to the Jewish case when Jews
had given so much to the world and Gypsies were merely parasites and
thieves. On another occasion a gentleman in the audience stood up and
declared that he would never buy a book on the Holocaust written by a
Gypsy." [HANCOCK, p. 55-57]
(Adamant Jewish conviction of intrinsic superiority -- and elitist distinction -- over Gypsies is reflected in famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz's autobiography:
"'I admire old tribes,' said [a German baron], 'I once traveled for weeks
with Gyspies, and I found them fascinating . You realize Gypsies have a
tradition as old as the Jews, don't you?' I confessed ignorance of Gypsy
tradtion, but the next day, as the baron and I sat at the airport, I said
thoughtfully, 'I've been thinking about the Gypsies and the Jews, and it
seems to me that for better or worse, the Jews have given the world
Einstein, Freud, Marx, and for that matter, Jesus Christ himself -- but I
can't think of many Gypsies who've changed the world, can you?'
Even that bloody awful baron had to laugh and say, 'Touche.'"
[KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 306] )
Among those few Jews who publicly supported the Gypsy's struggles for attention to their own "Holocaust" history was famed "Nazi-hunter" Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal once described the run-around he experienced at the Washington DC Holocaust Museum in his efforts to get a Gypsy on the museum thirty-member governing board. "I felt the attitude of the Holocaust Memorial Council to be unjust," he said, "... I received a number of copies of other letters in which all kinds of people had approached [Council head Elie] Wiesel with the request that he should support the claim of the gypsies."[WIESENTHAL, p. 222-223] Only after Wiesel left as head of the group was a Gypsy allowed to sit on the Council.
"The Nazis selected the Jews as their first candidates for annihilation," notes Israeli Boas Evron, "but the Gypsies were extirpated with equal thoroughness and much larger and more ambitious plans were afoot for the enslavement and piecemeal extermination of the Slavs (Soviet losses during World War II are estimated at twenty-five million people, only a minority of whom were soldiers)." [EVRON, p. 51]"
Taken from When Victims Rule (http://jewishtribalreview.org/18holo1.htm)
" Many Jews, like prominent polemicist Alan Dershowitz, completely overlook the suffering of the Polish people, their own history, their own culture, and their own nationality to obnoxiously proclaim that Poland (the site of most of the Nazi concentration camps) "can only [my emphasis] be a Jewish cemetery with no tombstone." [DERSHOWITZ] What was the wider story of the sufferings in Europe during World War II? What was the context of the Holocaust? We all know what happened to the Jews; it is heralded everywhere. But what was happening to other people?
In the first two years of the German invasion of Poland, the ill-treatment of Poles was worse than Jews, so much that Poles would sometimes don the Nazi-enforced "Yellow star" marker for Jews to blend in with them. [LUCAS, p. 34-35] On August 22, 1939, Hitler declared the necessary killing "without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need." [GUMBOWSKI, p. 59] Hitler also planned that "the destruction of Poland is our primary task. The aim is not the arrival at a certain line but the annihilation of living forces ... Be merciless! Be brutal! ... The war is to be a war of annihilation." [LUCAS, p. 4]
William Shirer writes that:
"Hitler ... wanted ... a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources
would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people
would be made slaves of the German master race and whose
'undesirable' elements' -- above all, the Jews, but also many
Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them --
would be exterminated. .. The Jews and the Slavic peoples
were the Untermenschen -- subhumans. To Hitler they had
no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs,
might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves
of their German masters. Not only were the great cities of
the East, Moscow, Leningrad, and Warsaw, to be permanently
erased but the culture of the Russians and Poles and other
Slavs was to be stamped out and formal education denied
them ... As early as September 18, 1941, Hitler had specifically
ordered that Leningrad was to be 'wiped off the face of the
earth.' After being surrounded it was to be 'razed to the
ground' by bombardment and bombing. Its population
(three million) was to be destroyed with it. [SHIRER, p. 937]
As Charles Sydnor notes about the Nazi invasion of Russia, beginning on June 22, 1941:
"A three mile-wide strip of territory stretching the length of Eastern
Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains erupted in
a torrent of fire and flying steel as German aircraft, artillery, and
armor blasted across the Soviet frontier. In the violence of its initial
collision, the immensity and ferocity of its subsequent development,
and the profligacy of its destruction of human life and resources, the
German-Russian conflict transcended anything then in the human
experience. To the men of the SS Totenkopfdivision, who were
to fight exclusively against the Russians until the end of the war,
the campaign became a grim crusade of extermination." [SYDNOR,
C., 1977, p. 138-139]
"The Poles," concedes a rare Jewish author, Eva Hoffman,” in the Nazi hierarchy, were next only to Jews and Gypsies in the order of inferior races -- slated for complete subjugation and, in the more visionary Nazi plans, for eventual extermination." [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 6] "The Nazi leaders," noted Jewish author Raphael Lemkin (the inventor of the term genocide,"), "had stated very bluntly their intent to wipe out the Poles, the Russians; to destroy demographically and culturally the French element in Alsace-Lorraine, The Slavonians in Carniola and Carinthia. They almost achieved their goal in exterminating the Jews and gypsies in Europe." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 100]
And as Richard Lukas notes about conquered Poland: "The genocidal policies of the Nazis resulted in the deaths of about as many Polish Gentiles as Polish Jews.... this [Polish Gentile] holocaust has been largely ignored because historians who have written on the subject of the Holocaust have chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivist terms -- namely, the as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them, the Holocaust was unique to Jews, and they therefore have had little or nothing to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million Poles, who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever known." [LUKAS, p. ix] (In nearby Ukraine, notes Myron Kuropas, an estimated 14.5 million Ukrainians, including 600,000 Jews were lost... through deaths, deportations and evacuations. The war also destroyed over 700 Ukrainian cities and towns and some 28,000 villages.") [KUROPAS, M., 1995]
Twenty million tablets of cyanide for the gas chambers were discovered after the war in Nazi storehouses, many times the numbers necessary to exterminate Jews only. At one gas chamber site -- Kulmhof (Chelmo) -- a group of 5,000 gypsies were among the first to be murdered. Others exterminated there included convoys of non-Jewish children from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia ("These children were killed just as the Jews were") and even a busload of nuns. [GAS, p. 91-92] At Buchenwald, 250 Gypsy children were the first to be gassed. [HANCOCK, p.55] Throughout the territory of German occupation, people of all nationalities, and specifically invalids, the sick, and homosexuals, were subject to institutionalized murder, by gas or otherwise. The last gas chamber murders at the Mauthausen site were 181 Austrians who were against the Nazi regime.
Nazi Germany had clearly stated policies concerning surrounding European countries and their inhabitants of Slavic descent:
"By October 15, 1940, Hitler had decided on the future of the Czechs, the first Slavic people he had conquered. One half of them were to be 'assimilated,' mostly by shipping them as slave laborers to Germany. The other half, 'particularly' the intelligentsia, were simply to be, in the words of a secret report on the subject, 'eliminated.'" [SHIRER, p. 938]
Nazi mistreatment of prisoners of war, particularly Russian Slavs, was notorious:
"Dr. Otto Brautigam, deputy leader of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories wrote ... It is no longer a secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war have died of hunger or cold in our camps..."
The conceptual dehumanization of the Slavic people by the Nazis was not far behind the portrayal of Jews. Jews, however, were believed to pose a greater immediate threat, an innately alien and antagonistic element within German society, dimensionally international, conceived to be far more powerful in influence than Poles. Jews were to be exterminated first in a "Final Solution," the Slavs later, except those to be used as slaves.
"Martin Boorman, Hitler's party secretary ... wrote a long letter to Rosenberg [another Nazi official] ... 'The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don't need them, they may die ... The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable.... Education is dangerous... [SHIRER, p. 939] Chaim Kaplan, eventually murdered by the Nazis, noted the conditions for his maid after the German invasion: "When the Nazis confiscated our apartment, they permitted our Christian maid to remain. She is exempt from the Nazi Nuremberg laws, they raped her. After that they beat her so that she would reveal where I hid my money." [KAPLAN, C., p. 46]
The Nazi occupation of Poland was intended to de-Polonize the entire country and reconstruct it in a Germanic image. Polish names of towns and places were torn down and replaced by German ones (exactly as the Jews of Israel have done in replacing Arabic geographical names with Hebrew ones). "Property in Poland belonging not only to Jews but to Poles was subject to confiscation without compensation." [SHIRER, p. 944] "The planned deportation [of Poles to the Auschwitz concentration] camp," says Franciszek Piper, head of the Historical Research Department of the Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, "of tens of thousands of men, women, and children from the Zamosc region -- foreseen as one of the first bridgeheads for Germanization in eastern Poland -- demonstrated the Nazis' goal of exterminating the Poles, which they only achieved to a small degree." [PIPER, F., Political, p. 15]
Hideously monstrous medical experiments on Jews by sadistic Nazis is well known. But "Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans... At the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates -- the 'rabbit girls' they were called -- were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to 'experiments' in bone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water." [SHIRER, p. 979] Priests were also tortured and experimented upon at Dachau. [GOLDBERG, M., H., 1979, p. 223]
There were grandiose medical visions for others who were not Jews: "An S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote Himmler ... that ... the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity should be sterilized." [SHIRER, p. 979]
The suffering of millions of non-Jewish Poles, Czechs, Russians, Gypsies and other nationals and ethnics during the Holocaust era has been completely forgotten and overlooked in our own time. (Between December 1939 and August 1941, the Nazis even murdered 50,000 Germans -- defined as "mentally sick" -- with carbon dioxide gas in chambers disguised, like other mass murder sites, as showers. [ARENDT, p. 108] Among the murdered were even Germans who protested against the Nazi treatment of Jews -- people like clergyman like Bernard Lichtenberg and philosopher Kurt Huber. [RUBENSTEIN, p 188-189] Even Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp of Jewish Holocaust symbology, was instituted by sending to the gas chambers 300 Poles and 700 Russian prisoners of war. [LUCAS, p. 38]
The numbers always cited for people murdered at Auschswitz (and the Holocaust in general) are only guesses and estimates -- citing this fragmentary document or that, and then presuming from there -- and they vary widely. While Franciszek Piper claims 90% of those who died at Auschwitz were Jews, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has ascribed 2.5 million Jewish and l.5 million non-Jewish dead to the place. Scholar Norman Davies echoes whatever he read that one-quarter of the Auschwitz dead were non-Jews. Whatever the case, Auschwitz has become the consummate symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and Judeo-centric discourse has completely appropriated the human misery of Auschwitz, the Holocaust, concentration camps in general, and the neglected whole of World War II as an ethnocentric pillar of their own specialized victimization.
As Polish/Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz notes, "the meaning of the word Holocaust [has undergone] gradual modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of other nationalities." [LUKAS, p. ix] Unlike other European nations, underscores Milosz, "there was no collaboration between Poles and Nazis. There was no collaboration. This should be said clearly, because there was no Polish pseudo-government under the Nazis. The Polish population was treated by the Nazis as the next to be destroyed and the Poles knew that." [MILOCZ, p. 37]
Although far fewer in numbers, the people most directly parallel to the Jewish situation in World War II were the Gypsies (Sinti and Romani). By any criteria, their own catastrophe alone under German fascism ruins modern Jewish claims to "Holocaust uniqueness." There are numerous surviving documents attesting to Nazi policy of complete annihilation of Gypsies, including a memo from the Office of Racial Hygiene stating that "all Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination." [HANCOCK, p. 43]
Ian Hancock, a University of Texas professor and himself of Romani heritage, has struggled for years to call attention to the disaster that befell his people. "It is abundantly clear," he says, "that some historians see only what they want to see, that a very blind eye is being turned in the direction of Gypsy history, and that when the Romani genocide in Nazi Germany is acknowledged, it is kept, with few exceptions, carefully separated from the Jewish experience." [HANCOCK, p. 40]
Hancock has discovered Jewish resistance to the intrusion of the Gypsy story on Jewish sacred turf to be widespread. Sometimes the undercurrent of Jewish exclusionism is revealed to be nakedly racist:
"The director of one Holocaust center referred to me as a troublemaker;
another writer on the Holocaust called my discussion of the Romani case
in the Jewish context 'loathsome.' A representative of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Council, whom I have never met, told a researcher
who called to find out how to reach me that I was a 'wild man.' People
have walked out when it was my turn to speak at conferences about the
Porrajmos [the Gypsy "Holocaust"], and one former professor at the
university where I teach adamantly refused even to mention Roma and
Sinti in his regular course on the Holocaust. There is an element of
racism evident in the Jewish response; after all, Gypsies are a 'third world
people of color' ... At one presentation I gave at a Hillel center, I was
interrupted by a woman who leaped to her feet and angrily demanded
why I was even comparing the Gypsy case to the Jewish case when Jews
had given so much to the world and Gypsies were merely parasites and
thieves. On another occasion a gentleman in the audience stood up and
declared that he would never buy a book on the Holocaust written by a
Gypsy." [HANCOCK, p. 55-57]
(Adamant Jewish conviction of intrinsic superiority -- and elitist distinction -- over Gypsies is reflected in famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz's autobiography:
"'I admire old tribes,' said [a German baron], 'I once traveled for weeks
with Gyspies, and I found them fascinating . You realize Gypsies have a
tradition as old as the Jews, don't you?' I confessed ignorance of Gypsy
tradtion, but the next day, as the baron and I sat at the airport, I said
thoughtfully, 'I've been thinking about the Gypsies and the Jews, and it
seems to me that for better or worse, the Jews have given the world
Einstein, Freud, Marx, and for that matter, Jesus Christ himself -- but I
can't think of many Gypsies who've changed the world, can you?'
Even that bloody awful baron had to laugh and say, 'Touche.'"
[KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 306] )
Among those few Jews who publicly supported the Gypsy's struggles for attention to their own "Holocaust" history was famed "Nazi-hunter" Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal once described the run-around he experienced at the Washington DC Holocaust Museum in his efforts to get a Gypsy on the museum thirty-member governing board. "I felt the attitude of the Holocaust Memorial Council to be unjust," he said, "... I received a number of copies of other letters in which all kinds of people had approached [Council head Elie] Wiesel with the request that he should support the claim of the gypsies."[WIESENTHAL, p. 222-223] Only after Wiesel left as head of the group was a Gypsy allowed to sit on the Council.
"The Nazis selected the Jews as their first candidates for annihilation," notes Israeli Boas Evron, "but the Gypsies were extirpated with equal thoroughness and much larger and more ambitious plans were afoot for the enslavement and piecemeal extermination of the Slavs (Soviet losses during World War II are estimated at twenty-five million people, only a minority of whom were soldiers)." [EVRON, p. 51]"
Taken from When Victims Rule (http://jewishtribalreview.org/18holo1.htm)