Monday 27 January 2020

Holocaust Remembrance Day


Muslim Magomaev – The Alarm Bells of Buchenwald

Today marks 75 years since soldiers of the Soviet Red Army liberated over 7,000 prisoners from the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. After 1,689 days and more than 1 million dead, the murder, suffering and pain finally came to an end.

Today thousands of events took place all around the world to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and to say “never again”.  And I want to briefly focus on the implications of what “never again” means in the face of something so monstrous and evil.

As an editorial by the British socialist newspaper Morning Star on January 27, 2020 put it: “The murder of six million Jews, millions of Soviet prisoners of war, hundreds of thousands of Roma and many gay and disabled people by the Nazi regime and its collaborators is far from history’s only example of genocide, but the calculated and systematic approach to a project aimed at exterminating entire races was unique. It justifies global commemoration of this as the most horrendous crime committed by any government in history.”

Death was truly an industry in the Holocaust.  Camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau have accurately been termed “murder factories”.  And many corporations, including many that still exist today such as I.G. Farben and Thyssen-Krupp, made massive profits on the backs of a workforce that was literally being worked to death.  Nazi officials and SS commanders amassed personal fortunes by stealing from camp inmates and contracting out slave labor to the big industrial firms.  Never before or since has there been such a grotesquely twisted marriage between genocidal violence and industrial capitalism.

And, of course, what followed World War II and the Holocaust was the Cold War.  And the capitalist powers of North America and Western Europe certainly looked after their own.  Communism was the main enemy now and the fiercely anti-communist Nazis were seen as very useful.  And so, apart from the top Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg, the majority of the surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust in West Germany went totally unpunished.  Under the protection of the U.S. occupation authorities, the West German police, courts, military, security agencies and bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served the former Nazi regime or by their ideological sympathizers (in stark contrast to socialist East Germany, where Nazis were thoroughly purged from virtually every profession).  As Michael Parenti points out in his book Blackshirts and Reds, “The perpetrators of the Holocaust murdered six million Jews, half a million Roma, thousands of homosexuals, several million Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and others, and got away with it – in good part because the very people who were suppose to investigate these crimes were themselves complicit.” Hundreds of Nazi war criminals were welcomed into the United States and Canada, many of whom did very well for themselves working for U.S. intelligence agencies during the Cold War or for an American military-industrial complex that was hungry for Nazi technology and know-how.

The German capitalists who profited from the Holocaust were likewise never punished.  Hermann Abs, the head of Deutsche Bank under the Nazis and effectively “Hitler’s paymaster”, was even celebrated by the New York Times for playing a “dominant role in West Germany’s reconstruction after World War II.” Of course, as Robert Carl Miller pointed out in an article in the Portland Free Press in October 1994, the Times failed to mention that Abs was a Nazi, that his bank had played a key role in the plundering of occupied Europe, and, as a board member of I.G. Farben, he was majorly involved in the use of slave labor at Auschwitz.  And he’s just one of many examples.  US corporations such as Du Pont, Ford, General Motors, ITT and IBM were heavily involved in the Nazi economy and in the use of slave labor but were likewise never held to account.

Fighting Holocaust denial means maintaining an accurate historical memory and, ever since 1945, there have been massive efforts to re-write history to erase the facts that I’ve just presented, which implicate capitalism and its role in facilitating the Holocaust. 

But equally concerning is the concerted effort to rewrite the history of the second world war to portray our wartime ally the Soviet Union as jointly complicit with Nazi Germany in starting the conflict, something which is both dishonest and dangerous.

Nazi Germany would not have been defeated were it not for the Soviet Union.  80 per cent of all German military casualties during the war were on the Eastern Front.  The 58 Wehrmacht divisions based in Western Europe at the time of the D-Day landings, were dwarfed by the 228 divisions deployed at the same time against Operation Bagration, the Soviet advance from the east.

The peoples of the Soviet Union also paid the highest price for victory, with 27 million lives lost — more than one in seven of the country’s entire population. To dismiss this colossal sacrifice on the part of millions of Red Army soldiers or to portray them as oppressors no better than the Nazis they fought, as is now commonplace in Ukraine, Poland and a number of other eastern European countries, is a shameful insult to the memory of those who liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as a shameful distortion of history.

The 21st Century propaganda effort, in North America and in the European Union, to present communism and fascism as twin “totalitarian” ideologies is likewise an insult to the communist partisans and Resistance fighters — “the bravest of the brave,” in the words of the late British Labour leader Michael Foot — who formed the backbone the underground resistance to Nazi occupation and fascist regimes in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Czechoslovakia and France among other countries.

This re-writing of history facilitates the rehabilitation of fascism and legitimizes modern far-right movements that are growing in power and influence across Europe and beyond; posing a direct threat to marginalized peoples, ethnic minorities, working class people, women, migrants, and LGBTQ people. 

Stepan Bandera, who has been elevated to the status of a national hero in Ukraine since the Maidan coup of 2013 swept a far-right, US-backed government to power in that country, was a blatant and high-profile Nazi collaborator.  His Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists participated in the Holocaust and massacred hundreds of thousands of Jews and ethnic Poles, working hand-in-glove with the Nazi occupation authorities.

This is hardly an isolated case, however.  Poland has passed laws against referring to the role of Polish collaborators in the Holocaust. Lithuania is now debating a similar ban. Monuments to the Red Army liberators of Europe are torn down and defaced while fascist regimes from Hungary to Italy are being rehabilitated.

Anti-Semitism is growing throughout Europe along with the growth of far-right movements and political forces.  As I’ve pointed out on previous shows, the Government of Apartheid Israel has effectively shifted the framing of Anti-Semitism from attacks and discrimination against Jewish people to any criticism of the State of Israel and its genocidal, colonizing policies toward the Palestinian people.  I talked last month, in the aftermath of the British election, about how Jeremy Corbyn was relentlessly attacked in the media as an Anti-Semite because he is a supporter of Palestinian rights, while the real far-right Anti-Semites who firebomb synagogues and smash Jewish graves effectively got a free pass…to say nothing of the Neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, who worship monsters like Stepan Bandera, and who are now getting their guns from Israel.  This what the Israeli human rights activist Shir Hever had to say about this particularly disgusting form of political and historical revisionism on the Real News Network on January 24:


Midnight Oil – White Skin, Black Heart

Now, there’s another less well-known anniversary today that I would like to draw your attention to, comrades and friends.  January 27th, 1944 – the siege of Leningrad was lifted – it lasted 900 days. The starving besieged Red Army garrison and workers’ militias managed not only to lift the siege but even to encircle and eliminate the Nazi troops which had besieged the city from 1941-1944.

According to different estimations, from 600 000 to 1.5 million civilians died of famine and bombing during the siege.

Economic destruction and human losses in Leningrad exceeded those of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Moscow, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite the massive hardship and destruction, the people of Leningrad didn't surrender and continued heroically resisting the Nazis. The capture and destruction of Leningrad was one of three strategic goals in the Nazis' Operation Barbarossa, in which over 4 million soldiers invaded the USSR along a 1,800 mile front, the largest invasion in the history of warfare.

The Nazi focus on Leningrad was motivated by its political status as the former capital of Russia and the symbolic capital of the Russian Revolution, its military importance and industrial importance, including numerous arms factories. The brutal siege on the city was finally broken in the wake of the Operation Iskra offensive. After fierce battles the Red Army units overcame the powerful German fortifications and on January 27, 1944 the Soviet forces expelled German forces from the southern outskirts of the city, breaking the siege.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union ultimately resulted in 95% of all German Army casualties from 1941 to 1944 and 65% of all Allied military casualties accumulated throughout the war. It was in Leningrad and Stalingrad that the incalculable sacrifice and heroic resistance of the Soviet people broke the back of the Nazis and ensured the defeat of fascism in World War 2.

Oi Polloi – Bash the Fash

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