Haiti’s ‘Holocaust Rescue’ and the Backwards Nature of ‘Holocaust History’
I have written in the past describing how the ‘Holocaust’ has a tendency as an event to be read backwards. What I mean by that is that historians espousing the orthodox point of view – whether they be intentionalist or functionalist - begin with the conclusion that the ‘Holocaust’ both occurred and was in some form predestined by the rise to power of the NSDAP in early 1933 as well as the ‘failure to challenge’ the Third Reich during the so-called ‘years of appeasement’ (i.e. 1936 to 1939).
Then they go on to read the historical narrative as less a series of events leading to that conclusion, but rather as a series of steps that were preordained to reach that conclusion and which could thus have been divined by any individual willing and able enough to ‘read the signs’.
My nod to divination is intentional, because that is essence how orthodox historians read and understand the ‘Holocaust’.
A good example of this can be found in the rather under-researched history of jewish immigration to Haiti during the existence of the Third Reich. We can largely thank Bill Mohr – a ‘Holocaust Survivor’ who ‘escaped’ to Haiti himself – for doing the digging on this subject and for that he certainly deserves more credit than he has been given thus far. (1)
Mohr’s research indicates that Haiti admitted some 150 to 300 jews during the period of the Third Reich’s existence and they either settled there or moved on to other countries such as the United States; as was the case in the original mass emigration from the Pale of Settlement to Western Europe and North America from 1881 to 1914.
Many of these refugee immigrants to Haiti had their applications financially supplemented by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (better known as ‘The Joint’). (2)
Now I come to what is interesting and beautifully illustrates the backwards and uncritical – dare I say almost religious nature of – orthodox ‘Holocaust’ history.
Those same jewish refugees were charged circa $5,000 for one visa by the Haitian government (3) and Paul Talalay testifies that his family was charged a total of $136,000 for their visas. (4)
To give you some perspective; the average US annual salary in 1937 was $1,780. (5)
Now doesn’t that sound like the Haitian government weren’t so much ‘rescuing jewish refugees’, but rather using jewish refugees from continental Europe as a cash cow to pad out their finances?
Yes: it does.
In essence: they were using the manifest desperation of the jews to ‘get out’ of continental Europe to fleece them of as much money as they possibly could.
Yet orthodox historians of the ‘Holocaust’ don’t see this obvious conclusion from the available source material, but rather assume that because it was in essence preordained in their minds that the ‘Holocaust’ was going to happen. It therefore follows that anything that anyone else did to help jews ‘get out’ of continental Europe was right and good no matter what the underlying motivation for it was.
This is exactly what I mean; orthodox historians of the ‘Holocaust’ read the events backwards and with a… shall we say… religious-cum-ideological eye that they cannot separate the wood from the trees.
References
(1) http://www.jweekly.com/2010/05/14/escape-to-haiti-local-man-recalls-how-nation-saved-jews-from-nazis/
(2) Ibid.; http://www.jpost.com/Features/In-Thespotlight/A-look-into-Haitis-tiny-Jewish-community; http://www.jdc.org/jdc-field-blog/2010/from-the-archives-haiti.html
(3) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/haiti-virtual-jewish-history-tour
(4) http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/palm-beach/boynton-beach/fl-bbf-haiti-0531-20170524-story.html
(5) http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1937.html