Anglo-American Fingerprints on the Walls of the Nazi Holocaust

Jewish history features distinctive characteristics. It does not go along a continuous narrative, but seems composed of scattered dark spots, not unrelated to the journalism of the time. The second thing is that Jewish historians focus on highlighting painful events and calamities that befell them, as though they are proud of their setbacks and defeats.

In the middle of the 20th century, a diplomatic lie was spread that it was the decision of the world community for the United Nations to partition Palestine (Nov. 29, 1947). The international community’s goal was to solve the Jewish problem, which was a problem of life or death in most eras of Jewish history, for differing reasons, most having to do with economic factors of the religion.

In the fourth century B.C., the Israelites were sheep-herders in the semi-arid region of the southern Sinai. It is thought that Moses’s origins were in these communities, which claim Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as their ancestors. But all that we know about these tribes is that generation after generation suffered lives of hardship in the desert; squabbles abounded amongst them; and they sometimes fought one another.

These tribes continued to roam in the desert for hundreds of years and sometimes gazed into the land of milk and honey. There were green fields and fertile pastures in the Jordan River valley and palm trees and wheat fields in the Nile River delta. These good things were secured behind city walls, by organized armies. The shepherds thought of breaching them, and were called by the Canaanites “Hebrews,” i.e., those that came from the other side of the river. When the pharaohs needed slave labor in the fields and buildings, the shepherds were allowed to graze their sheep and cattle in the delta; when one of the Palestinian kings took pity on them, he gave them the opportunity to access his waters and pastures.

The Hebrews reached the city of Babel during the height of the glory of the second Babylonian kingdom, in the era of Nebuchadnezzar, who rebuilt the city, its famous walls, the glory of Babylon and the nearly mythical stature of its king. In Babylon he built the hanging gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The city was known to the Greeks as a place of delights and to the Hebrews as the cradle of civilization. To Mesopotamia came Abraham, peace be upon him, grandfather of Jacob and grandfather of the tribe of Israel.

The prophet Jeremiah, one of the prophets of Israel, prophesied the fall of Jerusalem and called on the Jews to submit to the Babylonian kings. He warned them against resisting them: “Lo, I will bring a nation upon you from afar, O house of Israel, saith the Lord: it is a mighty nation, an ancient nation, whose language thou knowest not, neither understandest what they say. Their quiver is as an open sepulcher; they are all mighty men. They shall impoverish thy walled cities, wherein thou trusted, with the sword.” (Jeremiah:5)

But the Jews did not listen to Jeremiah’s advice and fought the Babylonians, so Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem in 586 B.C. and destroyed its walls, bringing more than 30,000 of its best priests, doctors and artisans back to Babylon as prisoners. But otherwise the Babylonians did not kill or steal one of the Jews when they took Jerusalem.

Nebuchadnezzar chose a Jew named Mettanyahu, gave him the name Zedekiah and installed him as king of the Jews. But Zedekiah broke his pact with Nebuchadnezzar and led a revolt against Babylon.

So Nebuchadnezzar returned and besieged Jerusalem. He seized the city and punished Zedekiah, executing his sons in front of him and then gouging his eyes out and consigning him to prison for the rest of his life. This was the end of the last king of the Jews.

When the Persian king Qurush the Great seized Babylon in 538 B.C., he allowed the Jews to return to Palestine, honoring his Jewish wife Esther. But a large portion of them had settled in Babylon and accumulated wealth from their work in trade between the East and the West, so they preferred to stay.

The situation of the Jews that preferred to stay in Babylon was preferable to the situation of those that chose to return to Palestine, for Jerusalem was burned and destroyed. For 70 years, it was vulnerable to pillaging and looting; the Temple of Solomon became a pile of rubble. From those remaining Jews after the Babylonian Captivity, only a few paid royalties to the thieves and robbers and obtained a block on their number. But those who returned from Babylon found in Jerusalem a breeding ground for thieves, thugs, starvation and chaos; they fell prey to frustration and despair.

Jerusalem and its environs remained under the protection of the Persians, so the Jews did not have their own army. Instead, they offered to get involved in wars that did not concern them in order to prevent calamities. When Alexander the Macedonian entered the Persian Empire, Palestine became part of the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt. And then, when the Seleucids entered Palestine in 198 B.C., the Jews did not show any resistance at all. War was no longer a thing that they cared about; for hundreds of years, the Jews had no military strength.

The destruction and fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. at the hands of the Romans is considered the end of the Jewish state and the end of a Jewish presence in Palestine. Money was the source of the hostility between the Jews and the Romans; it ignited the Jewish war in Palestine. The Roman government had stressed collecting taxes from the Jews. The Jews hated paying taxes, though not paying taxes was a crime punishable by death, making it necessary for the Romans to equip their armies with scorpions. Therefore the Jews formed gangs against the Romans in the era following the death of Herod in 4 B.C., until the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 C.E.

The famous Jewish historian Josephus returned because of the calamities that befell the Jews in 70 C.E. to teach Judas of Galilee, who was hard hit by the Roman Empire in 6 C.E. In that year, Emperor Augustus ordered a census of the residents to levy taxes upon them. This caused Judas of Galilee to incite the Jews to refuse to pay taxes and refuse to recognize the Roman Emperor’s authority. Josephus recognized the tragic consequences of confronting the Romans.

Violence and terrorism by Jewish extremists called the Sicarii erupted in 70 C.E. spreading throughout Palestine, though there was no consensus among the Palestinian Jews on fighting the Romans; many shared in the fearful insurgency by joining the Sicarii gang, which knew no mercy. At this time, Josephus realized the tragic consequences of confronting the Romans and, preferring peace, joined the Romans.

The remnants of the Sicarii returned to Jerusalem and, on entering the city, stormed the temple, slaughtered those guarding it and burned Jerusalem’s stores of wheat and barley. Thousands of Jews then fled Jerusalem, not out of fear of the Romans but to save themselves from the Jewish terrorist Sicarii. Tongues of flame escalated in Jerusalem so that the cemeteries were full and bodies were piled in the streets. Those who didn’t die at the sword died of starvation.

The remnants of the Sicarii who fled Jerusalem headed to the stronghold Masada under the leadership of Eliezar, one of the descendants of Judas of Galilee. They seized the fortress and stood firm there for three years. When the fortress came close to falling into the hands of the Romans, the besieged Jews killed themselves, out of fear of being subjected to torture at the hands of the Romans.

The Jewish terrorists disappeared from the theater of events. With the fall of Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans and the demise of the Jewish state, the Jews saw the futility of war. They dispersed to many countries, submitted themselves to their governance and learned their tongues. After the fall of the second temple in 70 C.E., it was replaced with a church; 2,000 years passed without the incitement of another war.

The Jews settled in Spain in the first century of the Roman Empire. In the year 616 King Sisebut issued a decree requiring Jews to convert to Christianity, or else the kingdom would seize their property and exile them.

In 711, the Arab army under the leadership of Tariq ibn-Ziyad crossed the mountains into Spain.

The Jewish-American writer Howard Fast says, “The golden age of Spanish Jews began under the rule of the Arabs,” when the survivors of the genocide could now travel freely and returned to building their temples which the Goths had destroyed. Those who had converted to Christianity returned anew to the embrace of Judaism. The Jewish writer Cecil Roth comments, “It was not difficult for the Jewish hypocrite to become a Christian hypocrite.” But the American writer Max Diamond says, “A large number of Jews were forced to convert to Christianity,” because of Spanish power, “from unbelievers outside of the church for the heretics within.” The Catholic Church took a stand against the Jews whose conversions had been lies; they burned them at the stake to prove that they were heretics and then confiscated their property. The smell of the Jews’ burning flesh spread through the air of the cities and villages in Castile and Aragon.

During the Wars of Religion, thousands of Jews fled from Germany to Poland and Lithuania. In the era that followed these wars, Germany became a place that raised fear in the hearts of the Jews who were vulnerable to massacres; the Germans thought that Jews killed Christian children, especially blond ones, to use their blood to make their Passover matzoh. So Baron Rintfleisch led a popular army of Germans to finish off the Jews in 146 cities and villages; in the year 1336 a German group calling itself the Armleders formed to kill the Jews in the provinces of Alsace and the Rhine Valley. When the plague spread in Europe, Germany was assailed by rumors that the Jews had poisoned the water wells, so a genocidal movement against the Jews developed in 200 cities and villages.

After the Wars of Religion, a total change occurred in the lives of the European Jews. They were isolated in ghettos and all communication was stopped between them and non-Jews. Their trading organizations collapsed. Some of their trading vessels were impounded by the French and Italians and some of them were burned. The Jews became the antichrist, the devil that was within reach for Europeans.

We must not all decide as one mind to deny the Holocaust as a concept that the Jews based on remembrance, but it is a loose concept that includes any attempt to be precise in the number of victims or methods of death. Hundreds of students and researchers were exposed to various forms of suffering and persecution, mental and physical abuse and prosecution in court, or expelled from their high-ranking, important jobs. Their morals were questioned and they tried to expose prejudice in the traditional concept of the Holocaust, with its object of six million Jews killed and burned by Hitler and his German Nazi regime.

After the Nazis came to power, they issued the Aryan Decree on April 11, 1933, which said that a person was not known to be Aryan unless his father and mother were Aryan. This discriminated against the Jews because they were considered not to be Aryans as a prelude to their genocide. After Hitler’s rise to become head of the government, Jews began to flee Germany and regions that were subject to the German government. It is not known precisely when the decision was made to exterminate the Jews, but it is more than likely that the decision was made between Hitler and his close advisors in 1939 to confine the population in special train cars.

Responsibility for the Holocaust is mainly on Hitler and the German Nazis, but there is also some responsibility spread on the involvement of Britain and the United States, though they were not directly responsible. There were immigration laws that applied to Britain in Palestine. A White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, but circumstances proved that the continuous flow of Jewish immigration to Palestine was illegal. But in America, the Jews had accused Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles of causing the genocide of six million Jews because they set a limit of 50,000 European Jews allowed to immigrate to America annually.

The Jewish American writer Howard Fast says that “of the millions of Ashkenazi Jews that were subjected to genocide in Nazi death camps, many would have been able to escape if the great powers were not consumed by games of oil and death.” Fast goes on to say, “Regarding the Nazi Holocaust that killed more than six million Jews, more than a third of the number of Jews in the world, the question is of immigration and responsibility for blocking it; these questions cannot be answered.”