From A World to Win News Service:
Auschwitz and today’s world
February 9, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
February 2, 2015. A World to Win News Service. Seventy years ago, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops reached the walls of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex in Poland and liberated the few thousand prisoners still alive out of the 1.3 million people taken there. The memorial ceremony at Auschwitz was not meant to express sorrow and keep alive the memory of those who suffered and died, but merely to serve as an opportunity for reactionary governments to push agendas that have brought and will bring the world even more suffering and death.
Child survivors of AuschwitzThe presidents of Austria, France, Germany and Poland attended, along with royals from Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. U.S. President Obama sent his treasury secretary. Russia’s President Putin was not invited, despite the former Soviet Union’s role, when it was still a socialist country, in liberating Auschwitz. This was another sign of the Western powers’ bellicose contention with their Russian imperialist rival. Inter-imperialist conflict, at the heart of World War 2, is not confined to the past.
Further, in the name of defending Western “civilisation” against the “barbarism” of Islamic fundamentalism, painted as the successor to Nazism, these Auschwitz commemorations covered up the fact that the rulers of the imperialist countries are the world’s biggest perpetrators of barbaric crimes—not only in the past, but also today.
By invading or otherwise destroying Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Mali and so many other countries, just to speak of today, not to mention the millions killed in their wars against Algeria and Vietnam, they have achieved a death toll unmatched in history. Not to mention the ordinary workings of their lethal global system.
Furthermore, this anniversary was used to glorify the barbaric and criminal state of Israel. It is worth noting an editorial in the Guardian, because actually this UK newspaper attempts to distinguish itself for being critical of Israeli policies, in contrast to the governments of the U.S., UK, Germany, France and so on. It said, “A people who came close to extinction cannot be blamed for not wanting to put their fate ever again in other hands.” This is an excuse for Zionism, even if the editorialists might wish for a kinder Zionism than has ever existed or could exist, a state built in the name of one ethnicity and religion (a political outlook that belongs to the Dark Ages) through murder, expulsion and terrorism against the people whose land it was built on.
The Nazi genocide, a real historical event that should shed light on the inherent cruelty and unreformability of the imperialist system, has been turned into a mystical token to justify more crimes. The Zionists and ruling classes served by Zionism try to make it forbidden—even blasphemous—to ask why this genocide occurred, as though understanding it meant justifying it. Today, when the imperialist powers are claiming to represent certain values in their conflict with Islamic fundamentalism, and use the dangerous revival of anti-Semitism to hide their own historic and current crimes, more than ever what is needed is a scientific analysis of a past that seems to loom larger and larger.
The following is from an AWTWNS article published on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz a decade ago.
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A thick stench of hypocrisy and lies filled the air as world leaders gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the largest Nazi death camp. The truth is that the U.S. and UK failed to lift a finger to stop the genocide, covered it up while it was happening, and after the war protected the men who did it. The question is, why, and what does that mean for today?
When the Nazis came to power in the German elections of 1933, their hatred of the Jews was well known. Germany had about half a million Jews, less than one percent of the population. The Nazis started by repressing the communists. Many of the tens of thousands of German Jews who emigrated in the first wave were leftists. This was followed by the secret murder of the mentally ill, handicapped and other “misfits” in what turned out to be a pilot project for the death camps inaugurated eight years later. Homosexuals were also especially targeted.
Street violence and murder against the Jews aimed to drive them out of Germany. In 1936, the Nuremberg laws deprived them of civil rights and made marriage between Jews and non-Jews illegal. Yet once they were swept out of all positions of authority, there was a pause that some people took to mean that the worst was over. This illusion was shattered by the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in 1938, when the Nazis led mobs in attacking Jewish businesses and homes. With that event and the German annexation of Austria that year, more and more Jews were trying to leave.
But few countries let them in. In fact, only one welcomed them in unlimited numbers: the then socialist USSR [Soviet Union]. In 1938, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened the Evian Conference, a meeting of 32 countries held in France, to decide what to do about Jewish refugees. Although the U.S. and UK were admitting tens of thousands a year, ten times more were applying for visas. The two main powers asked other countries to take them instead. France refused. The only country in attendance that agreed to increase its quotas was the Dominican Republic. The Nazi press saluted the conference as a sign that the world was coming around to its racial policies.
The ship St. Louis departed Hamburg, Germany, in May 1939 bound for Cuba with 937 desperate refugees aboard, nearly all German Jews. Most had applied for visas to the U.S. Cuba had given them permission to land there while they waited for an answer. Just before they arrived, the U.S. pushed Cuba to change its mind and forbid the refugees to leave the ship. No other Latin American country would take them either. The ship sailed so close to American shores that passengers could see the lit streets of Miami at night. It waited offshore for a response to a cable sent to Roosevelt asking for humanitarian refuge. The U.S. government had already decided against them, but sent no reply. In June, the ship was forced to return to Europe, where many of its passengers ended up in Nazi death camps.
By 1941, when the Nazis officially forbade Jewish emigration, more than 80 percent of German Jews had already left. But the German invasion of Poland had brought Europe’s main concentration of Jews under the control of the Third Reich. As the Nazi armies moved through Eastern Europe and into the Soviet Union, rampaging through heavily Jewish areas in what are now Belarus and Ukraine, many millions of Jews came under their boot. In January 1942, at a conference in a leafy green suburb of Berlin called Wannsee, they adopted a plan for “the final solution”: all Jews would be sent to camps in the east. Those too weak to work would be exterminated. The rest would be worked and starved to death. Those who survived would also be exterminated.
The Western Allies [revcom.us editor’s note: mainly the U.S., Britain and France] knew about this, but kept it secret. When the World Jewish Council in Geneva sent the U.S. State Department a cable detailing the Wannsee plans, the government not only ignored it but told a leading American rabbi who had also received the report to keep his mouth shut. The Vatican knew the full story from the beginning through Catholic sources, but despite requests from below, Pope Pius XII refused to make a public statement against killing Jews, whom the Church still officially considered “Christ killers”.
In the Warsaw ghetto, a Jewish fighting organisation led by communists and other resistance forces sent scouts through the sewers and beyond the walls where the Nazis had locked them in. They followed the trains that were taking families away by the thousands to an unknown destination. [revcom.us editor’s note: The trains from the Warsaw ghetto led to the Treblinka concentration camp. Other Jews were sent to Auschwitz, where eventually more than a million Jews, 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 18,000 Roma (Gypsies) and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war were to perish, killed by poison gas, their bodies burned in ovens.]
A representative of the pro-British Polish government overthrown by the Nazis was brought into the ghetto to hear their story. They described the camp and told him that the trains were carrying 10,000 Jews a day to their deaths from Warsaw alone. Although not particularly inclined toward Jews, he agreed to slip out of Poland and tell the British and American authorities, thinking that as a political ally they would listen to him. He was the kind of man who expected to meet with Churchill, and he had a long talk with Roosevelt. Nothing happened.
Auschwitz, like the other concentration camps, was fed its constant intake of Jewish lives and coal by rail starting in 1942. Without those railroad tracks, the death factory would have ground to a halt and the gas ovens grown cold. Why didn’t the Allies bomb them? After all, they were pounding German-occupied European ports into ruins to wreak economic havoc, and bombed the city of Dresden into an all-consuming firestorm for the same reason. What held them back?
It has been argued that Auschwitz lay too far to the southeast to be within range of UK-based bombers. But, if that was ever true, by April 1944, at least, it was no longer. This was publicly proven recently when an RAF aerial surveillance photo of the camp came to light. Such photos were made to prepare bombing runs. The photo clearly shows the prisoner barracks, the gas chambers and the crematoriums. It is known that Allied intelligence received reports from two escapees from Auschwitz that month, and two more the following month.
Auschwitz was approaching its infernal climax. Poland was emptied of Jews. The trains brought 440,000 Hungarians, half of the country’s Jewish population, to their deaths over the course of only a few weeks in May and June. The U.S. and Britain merely watched.
In August and September of that year, the U.S. Air Force staged bombing runs on an industrial complex less than five minutes by air away from the Birkenau gas chambers. An Auschwitz survivor speaking in a recent BBC documentary bitterly recalls how she and other prisoners watched hundreds of warplanes pass over their heads. They said to each other, "Why don’t they bomb this place? Even if they kill many of us, that’s the only chance any of us have to live."
October 1944 saw one of the known prisoner revolts at Auschwitz. Hundreds of prisoners attacked the guards with axes and rocks. They used smuggled explosives to blow up a gas chamber and set a crematorium on fire. The Allies were considering air-dropping guns on the camp. They never did.
In fact, the camps continued running without outside interference until 27 January 1945, when the Soviet Red Army arrived at its gates. They found about 7,000 survivors, all too weak to walk. The Nazis had taken another 58,000 with them on a death march as they fled to the west. They were determined that even if they were defeated, no Jews would remain alive.
The crimes of the U.S., however, did not stop on that date. Very few Nazi leaders and executioners were ever brought to justice for the simple reason that the U.S. protected them. Shortly after the war, the U.S. recruited many former leading Nazis as allies against the Soviet Union.
The Allies identified three million Germans as having committed crimes during the war. A million were tried. Eleven were sentenced to death. A few received short prison sentences. Most of the rest had to pay a fine or were briefly ineligible to hold public office. In 1951, almost all of them were amnestied. Big capitalists like Krupp whose factories had used concentration camp labour were given their fortunes back.
The Nazi commandant at Auschwitz was hung. But of the 10,000 members of the elite Nazi SS who administered the murders there, only about 750 suffered even the slightest punishment.
As recently reaffirmed by the book U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis by Norman J. W. Goda, based on official American archives, thousands of Nazis and SS officers were brought to the U.S. where “they could be useful in countering communist leanings in immigrant communities,” as an Associated Press article put it. The Catholic Church and American military intelligence worked together to smuggle some of the most notorious Nazis out of Germany. In fact, Goda says, the CIA took a group of German officers who had been responsible for intelligence on the Eastern Front and used them as the core around which to build West Germany’s future intelligence service, still at work today.
In our time historians who defend Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s conduct make two contradictory arguments. One is that the two men were fearful that if the war became identified with saving Europe’s Jews, anti-Jewish “public opinion” in their own countries might hurt the war effort. In other words, this account blames the people of the Western countries, who were kept in ignorance of what the Nazis were doing. This is putting the truth upside down.
The other, more commonly made by military experts, is that if the truth about the extermination camps became known, public pressure to do something about it would have interfered with their freedom to set military priorities according to their overall war aims.
If you want to know what the U.S.’s aims were, look at what came out of it when they won: America became the chief imperialist power, able to fatten on exploitation around the world. The UK, although taken down a peg from its former position, survived as a major power and became the U.S.’s chief partner. Germany and Japan, which had tried and failed to achieve the kind of global dominance the U.S. did achieve, had no choice but to become associate members in the U.S.-led crime syndicate. The U.S. and UK could not spare a single bomb to save Jewish lives because they had other aims. They protected Nazis after the war for the same kind of imperialist reasons.
It is worth thinking about what political and ideological reasons fueled the Nazi genocide against the Jews, and why the Western powers chose to ignore it.
The Nazis always associated Jews and communism, not just for demagogic purposes, but as part of their overall outlook. Of course anti-Semitism flourished long before modern times, but that doesn’t explain why it took the virulent, genocidal form the Nazis gave it as they prepared for what they considered the inevitable conflict with the USSR, a cause they hoped would win the support or at least neutrality of the Western allies. The Nazis’ murderous hatred of the Jews turned especially acute as the eastward-moving German armies found themselves first stalemated and then pushed back by the “Bolshevik Jew”.
Many Jews had good reason to hate the existing world order. They were strongly represented in the communist movement, and a great many looked to the Soviet Union as a beacon of salvation. The Soviet Union, in fact, was a beacon to the Jewish people as well as to the oppressed in general. The Bolsheviks emancipated the Jews in a country, Tsarist Russia, which had been a hellhole for them for centuries. They welcomed Jews into the revolutionary movement and the public life from which they were previously banned. In the course of World War 2, the Red Army saved the lives of 1.5 million of the 4 million Jews in German-occupied or invaded territory, according to the well-known American historian Arno Mayer.
Like other forces in the war, the American and British rulers had their own political and ideological agendas. One reason why they were anxious to limit a Jewish presence was precisely because of the influence of the socialist Soviet Union and revolutionary Marxism among many Jews. Further, they wanted to win public opinion to fight this war on the most backward basis possible. They wanted to weaken anti-imperialist and pro-Soviet public opinion and fan patriotic and chauvinist sentiments instead. They wanted this war waged in a way that would serve their imperial plans and prepare to confront the then-socialist USSR even as they were compelled to ally with it to defeat Germany.
The clearer it is that all the world’s top reactionaries allowed the Nazi genocide, the clearer it is that today’s rulers are trying to use this experience once again to further their present aims. Many of them are, for example, trying to use that experience to excuse or even justify Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. But opposing this is not enough. The question of why such a crime happened also needs to be addressed. Was it because there is “evil” lurking in human hearts, as many people say, or instead because of real political, economic and ideological forces at work in the world? It was an evil that took a particular form in a particular global context. It was a world configured differently than the one we live in today, but one in which the imperialist powers were driven no more and no less by the same motives as now: the quest for empire in a capitalist system whose inevitable product is the constant division and redivision of the globe.
A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine, a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.
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