Fraters Libertas

Lessons From the Masters of Death

It is not a lengthy or overly complicated book but Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes, is not one that you breeze through. The subject matter was at times so disturbing and the scale (1.5 million killed) so overwhelming that I had to limit my reading to short bursts. The book concerns the actions of the Einsatzgruppen or "special action groups", specially selected mobile extermination squads who followed the German Wehrmacht into the East and liquidated Jews, Soviet POWs, partisans, and other "undesirables" in Poland, the Baltic republics, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia.

They began the dirty work that was to become the "Final Solution". And dirty work it was. As unimaginably horrific as the industrialized slaughter of the death camps was, the early actions of the Einsatzgruppen were, in ways, even more ghastly. Herding men, women, and children into chosen areas with pre-dug pits waiting, either machining gunning them or administering the genickschuss (a single shot in the back of the neck), and covering their bodies with lime before filling the pits was gruesome duty. One of the main reasons that the Nazis ending up using gas (after experimentation with various other methods) was that they were concerned about the psychological state of those men carrying out the executions.

It was not an easy book to read and it's hard for me to recommend it for your reading pleasure. But I do recommend it because it's history that you should know and I believe there are valuable lessons that can be drawn from it:

-Don't Casually Call Someone a Nazi

A true appreciation of the scale and scope of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis should give pause to those who label Bush 'Hitler' and call Ashcroft a Nazi. I believe that it is insulting to the memories of the victims of the Nazi regime to use those labels with so little thought. If Bush were like Hitler, post 9/11 events would have unfolded quite a bit differently. Muslims would have been beaten in the streets of the US, some to death. Mosques would have burned. Muslim shops would have been looted. Legislation would have been passed stripping Muslims of all rights and within months camps would have been built. Muslim men, women, and children would begin to disappear into them never to be seen again. The Democratic party would have been outlawed along with all other political parties and most of its leaders killed or sent to camps. The media would be taken over and run by the state and any attempts at dissent ruthlessly crushed. Michael Moore would not be writing books. He would have been strangled with piano wire and left hanging from a meat hook (a heavy duty, reinforced meat hook to be sure). A vicious war would have been waged against all Muslim nations. Kabul, Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, and Riyadh (for starters) would have been turned to sand. All oil fields in the Middle East would have been occupied. Citizens in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan would be bombed, brutalized, driven from their homes, and eventually killed to make room for the repopulation of those regions by Texans (Bush's volk). I could go on and on with this but you get my the point.

-Evil Does Exist

No such thing as evil you say? Explain the actions of the Einsatzgruppen please. Read the reports of the killing like this that showed the "progress" they were making:

2,007 Jews, 2,290 Jewesses, 4,273 Jewish children (mopping up ghetto of superfluous Jews)

These were evil SOBs, following orders from evil superiors, and conducting evil acts. There ain't no two ways about it.

-Sometimes War Is The Answer

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the Nazi's was not what they did but what they planned to do . Once the USSR was defeated and the Jews and other undesirables were liquidated in the Ostland , the Nazis planned to "relocate" most of the native populations of Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the western areas of Russia proper to Siberia. This would have involved millions upon millions of people and given the Nazis previous actions, it's not hard to imagine that millions would have died as a result. They then wanted to resettle the Ostland with native Germans who would become soldier- farmers guarding the Reich from the Asiatic hordes. There was even a fantastic plan to relocate German-Americans to this area once the United States had been beaten. There was no amount of diplomatic nicety that would have deterred their plans. Economic sanctions would have done nothing. An international criminal court could not have issued an injunction causing them to cease and desist. Their armies had to be defeated. Their country had to be occupied. Their leaders had to be killed. War was the only thing that could have solved the problem and it did.

-Guns Can Be Good

Rhodes briefly examines one of the lingering questions of the Holocaust: Why did the Jews not put up more resistance? He comes up with a number of answers including the fact that Jewish communities in Eastern Europe had sought to not make trouble in the past and so had a mentality of passiveness, the non-violent family structure that most Jews were raised in at the time, and their lack of gun ownership. The culture did not typically involve guns and in some areas Jews were actually forbidden to possess them. He's not saying (and neither am I) that the Holocaust could have been prevented if more Jews had guns but it certainly would have allowed them to better resist and perhaps, just perhaps it could have saved some lives. The value of gun ownership goes beyond simply their use as a weapon. A culture where the citizens own guns is a cultural where people are likely to be more easily moved to fight back and resist oppression. Those who say that it's silly to think that Americans would ever be in a similar situation where their guns could protect them, would do well to consider that if you told a German Jew in 1912 that in thirty years time his race would be targeted for extinction by the German government he would have thought you ridiculous as well.

Read the book.