Michael Berenbaum gets it Right… for Once

Michael Berenbaum – who is himself a ‘Holocaust historian’ attached to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) – wrote an interesting piece for the ‘Jewish Daily Forward’ in April 2017 commenting on the extraordinary level of ignorance about basic facts of the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ theory among senior (and relatively young) Israeli politicians.

I quote the relevant parts as follows:

‘Bennet spoke about the ghettos in Warsaw and Lodz but also in Paris and Vienna. Surely the Ministers of Education of France and Austria wondered how little does this man know. There were no ghettos in Paris or Vienna.’

‘He then castigated the Allies for not bombing Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944. Once again, he erred. Unbeknownst to Bennet but not to historians, educators and Auschwitz officials was that Allied bombing was not possible until the spring of 1944. In 1943, Allied troops were not within range, they were not on the Continent. Allied bombing was not possible until the spring of 1944 when the US occupied southern Italy and could fly 528 miles to Auschwitz and return.

What Bennet clearly does not know is that as late as June 11, 1944, David Ben Gurion and the Yishuv Cabinet voted not to request that Auschwitz be bombed. The minutes reveal their reasoning. “David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the executive, said: “We do not know the truth concerning the entire situation in Poland and it seems that we will be unable to propose anything concerning this matter.” What concerned Ben-Gurion and his colleagues was that bombing the camps could cause the death of many Jews or even one Jew.’

‘Bennet was not alone. Last year, at the same ceremony, the Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked made similar mistakes. She even had the audacity — and the staffing incompetence — to give the same speech twice to an overlapping audience, making elementary mistakes to an academic audience composed of some of the world’s most sophisticated Holocaust and legal scholars.’ (1)

Berenbaum’s broad point is to make the case for even more ‘Holocaust education’ and specifically that senior Israeli politicians should know the basic outline and places concerned with so momentous an event that in many way forms the basis for modern jewish identity.

He wonders how people can be so ignorant about the basic facts of the theory and I thought I’d elaborate on that a little bit.

Now in the first instance Berenbaum’s argument assumes that ‘Holocaust’ literature is generally coherent, but this isn’t actually the case. The details of the alleged conspiracy and mechanisms used to kill the jews differ a great deal depending on who and what you read.

I’d agree that the facts Berenbaum cites are relatively basic ones with exception that of David Ben-Gurion’s decision to oppose bombing Auschwitz, which you won’t find cited in many works on the subject even of a manifestly academic variety.

However what Berenbaum fails to comprehend is that – as I have documented almost religiously in my articles on ‘Holocaust Survivor Stories’ – the ‘survivors’ who form the basis of the ‘Holocaust’ in most people’s minds routinely make fantastic and absurd claims (like the ‘living with wolves for three years’ claim of several years ago or the Kushner family claim of living alone in an exposed hole in the ground for three years) and/or assert they did things that ‘Holocaust historians’ say could never have happened (like be de-trained, disinfected in a shower and re-trained again without being killed at a secret death camp like Treblinka).

The fact remains that people routinely encounter ‘Holocaust Survivor’ stories that differ markedly from the academic narrative and as such that tends to confuse them. Thus you increasingly have people making elementary factual mistakes in regards to allegedly settled ‘Holocaust history’, because there are an abundance of books, testimonies and claims made by proponents of the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ theory that assert contradictory or incorrect information. In large part due to the primary source of much of the information (i.e., ‘Holocaust Survivors’) itself being contradictory.

Thus it is not hard to see that the ‘Holocaust’ – whether you believe in the orthodox theory or not – in the popular mind is always going to be more fantasy than fact in the popular imagination, because of the conduct of the very industry that is supposed to be promoting ‘Holocaust awareness’ by ‘educating’ people about it.

References

(1) http://forward.com/opinion/370376/why-cant-israeli-officials-get-holocaust-history-right/