Sometimes I feel like Pacino in Godfather III: “I keep trying to get out and they keep pullin’ me back in.” You might have seen on Drudge or Ynet today that one of the advisers to genocidal clown Ahmadinejad had opined that Hitler was a Jew and that his consciousness of Jewishness led him to perpetrating the Holocaust, except of course the Holocaust didn’t happen. Sorry, it was Hitler the Jew collaborating with the U.K. and the U.S.S.R. to create the state of Israel. There’s your true history for you.
It perpetrates one of the most lasting and pernicious urban legends about Hitler. It’s one I spent some time investigating and debunking in %%AMAZON=006095339X Explaining Hitler%%. Almost all versions of it stem from the unfounded allegations of mass murdering Jew hater Hans Frank, who presided over the Holocaust in Poland, and by conniving blackmailing Hitler half-nephew William Patrick Hitler.
In contemporary times it’s been sold to the credulous by over-credulous Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller, who wanted to use it to prop up her theory that paternal physical abuse made Hitler Hitler, thus advancing her otherwise noble goal of ending corporal punishment. (She foolishly and without evidence argued that Hitler’s daddy was mad at little Adolf because Daddy had issues about maybe being half Jewish. In the Iranian version surfacing today, both Hitler parents and a grandparent seem to be Jewish. One is tempted to use the word “overkill”, although in this context…)
In any case there exists no evidence for any of the claims.(Hitler’s father was illegitimate but no evidence has surfaced the father’s father father was Jewish). Nonetheless the myth has been taken up in a peculiarly cruel way by anti-Semites, most lately the Ahmadinejad’s adviser (by their kooks you shall know them).
As I say in my book “The remarkable persistence of the will to believe the Jewish blood theory…suggests it fills some deeper need…to find some Jew, any Jew…to blame for the Holocaust.”
It’s not exactly Holocaust-denial, but it shares with that movement a disdain for facts and a hatred of Jews, and what might be called Holocaust perpetrator denial. Nobody committed this hideous crime. the Jews did it to themselves. In any case it’s of a piece with the Iranian “Holocaust conference” agenda: delegitimize the State of Israel, delegitimize the original Holocaust of the Jews in order to prepare the ground for the next one.
I thought it was impossible to have any more contempt and loathing than I already did for the Ahmadinejad clique. I guess I was in denial about that.
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