Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: The Holocaust denier

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On Wednesday, 21 October 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the World Zionist Congress that in November of 1941, it was the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini that convinced Hitler to exterminate the Jews. Haaretz reported:

In a speech before the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu described a meeting between Husseini and Hitler in November, 1941: "Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jew. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here (to Palestine).' According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: "What should I do with them?" and the mufti replied: "Burn them."

What I recount in the remainder of this post is a small part of the history of the Nazis extermination campaign that took place before the Mufti spoke to Hitler. If Netanyahu believes what he told the Zionists, either he believes what I am about to recount did not happen or he doesn't consider these mass murders to be part of the Holocaust. There is no other logical conclusion. Either way, Netanyahu is clearly a Holocaust denier.

Jewish women about to be killed by an Einsatzgruppe - not part of Netanyhu's Holocaust

All this happened before the Palestinian Grand Mufti met Adolph Hitler in November 1941. This selection is from WW2history.com:

Einsatzgruppen killing squads start 22 June 1941
Just as he had during the invasion of Poland, two years before, SS General Reinhard Heydrich ordered Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) of security personnel (mostly SS, Gestapo, Police and SD) to enter the Soviet Union in the wake of the German invasion in June 1941. Their task was simple – to kill those people who were believed to pose a threat to Nazi rule.

Hitler had announced that the war against the Soviet Union was to be a war of ‘annihilation’ and this time, unlike during the invasion of Poland, the army leadership were fully aware – and, indeed, complicit – in the criminal nature of the enterprise. Central to the army’s compliance were the ‘Commissar Order’ and the ‘Barbarossa Decree’. The first called for German soldiers to isolate and then kill any Soviet Political Commissars they found; and the second authorized the army to shoot out of hand any ‘partisans’ they saw, and also permitted the enforcement of collective reprisals against local communities. The German army leadership was in no doubt, therefore, that this was to be a war unlike the one in the west. ‘In Great Russia force must be used in its most brutal form,’ recorded General Franz Halder in his diary on 17 March 1941, after a meeting with Hitler. ‘The intelligentsia put in by Stalin must be exterminated.’i

The army leadership also knew that there would be special units – the Einsatzgruppen – under the control of Heydrich and his boss, Heinrich Himmler, who would be doing much of the dirty work of killing away from the front line. So when, in May 1941, Heydrich briefed the 3,000 members of the Einsatzgruppen at their training base in Pretzsch in eastern Germany, the scale of the murderous task ahead of them was obvious. The overall vision of this war of ‘annihilation’ was so clear, and the threat posed by what Hitler called ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ perceived to be so great, that Heydrich almost certainly did not find it necessary to be overly proscriptive about the exact categories of people the Einsatzgruppen should kill. Indeed, the one document which exists – dated 2 July 1941 - in which Heydrich outlines the tasks of the Einsatzgruppen, mentions only the bare minimum of people to be killed (‘officials of senior and middle rank and ‘extremists’ in the party… the people’s commissars, Jews in the service of the party or the state’). That this was the least expected of the Einsatzgruppen is clear from another key passage in the document: ‘No steps will be taken to interfere with any purges that may be initiated by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories. On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged.’ And since no one could predict the scale of these ‘purges’ that were to be ‘secretly encouraged’ it is safe to conclude that no Einsatzgruppe commander risked censure no matter how many people his unit shot.

From the start of the war the men of Einsatzgruppe A, operating in the Baltic States, were the most murderous, often killing all the male Jews of military age they found. They also discovered they could, as Heydrich wished, successfully ‘incite’ purges. In Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city, Jews who had just been released from prison were clubbed to death by a local ‘patriot’ known as the ‘Death Dealer’, who after he had killed them, climbed on the bodies and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion.ii

Then, over the next few weeks and months across the whole of Nazi occupied Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen changed their policy and started targeting every Jew – including women and children. This change occurred after more manpower was allocated to the killing task by Himmler towards the end of July. [months before the Mufti met Hitler] Two SS brigades were ordered to assist in the ‘cleansing’ task so far pursued by the Einsatzgruppen – and eventually 40,000 people would be involved in the killings.

‘The transition from the killing of male Jews to the extermination of entire communities happens quite early, in August,’ says Professor Omer Bartov. ‘In August Himmler goes on a visit to the front and while he does that, in every place that he visits there seems to be a change in the policy. We don’t have orders by him, but it is quite likely that he orally transmits the order that now it is time to destroy entire communities. Whether that is the beginning of the ‘Final Solution’ or not is again another big debate, [ Clearly Netanyahu doesn't think so.] because what is happening there at that point in these communities is that people are being killed where they live.

Einsatzgruppe killings summer of 1941, not part of the Holocaust according to Netanyahu

This next exert is from the excellent PBS series on Auschwitz:

After a series of meetings between Hitler and Himmler in the summer of 1941 there was an escalation in the persecution of the Soviet Jews. New units were committed to special duties in the East, among them the 1st SS Infantry Brigade. In a typical action, they approached the town of Ostrog in the western part of the Ukraine on August 4th 1941, where over ten thousand Jews from the surrounding area had been gathered together. Among them were 11 year old Vasyl Valdeman and his family. They were now at risk. The Nazi killing squads in the East had now began to target Jewish women and children as well as men.

Vasyl Valdeman—Jewish resident, Ostrog: We knew something would be done to us here. When we saw people hit and driven along here with spades, even small children realised why people were carrying the spades.

One of the members of the 1st SS Infantry Brigade at the time was Hans Friedrich. He claims not to recall exactly which actions he took part in that summer, but he does admit to participating in killings like the one in Ostrog.

Hans Friedrich—1st SS Infantry Brigade: "They were so utterly shocked and frightened, you could do with them what you wanted."

Vasyl Valdeman: "Kids were crying, the sick were crying, the elderly were praying to God. Not on their knees but seated or lying down. It was very tough to go through it all, hearing all this wailing and crying. Then they had everyone get up and said 'Go', and as soon as people started moving, they selected people for shooting, for execution."

The selected Ukrainian Jews were taken out to this spot and a pit was dug. In scenes which were repeated right across the areas of the Soviet Union occupied by the Nazis, men, women and children were ordered to strip and prepare to die.

We don't know what was really said between the Mufti and Hitler, but clearly the Holocaust was well underway before they met. Netanyahu is willing to deny this, and prettify Hitler, if he thinks he can score propaganda points against the Palestinians that the Zionists are oppressing and dispossessing today. During World War II, the Zionists had an ignoble history of collaboration with the Nazis, and they have never tired of using the Holocaust to justify their theft of Palestine. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now shows us how quickly he is willing to deny the true source, history and extent of the great massacre of his people if he can use it to score points against those they seem willing to exterminate. Holocaust denial is illegal in 14 European countries. Netanyahu should be arrested the next time he visits any one of them.