History /
remember, forget, forgive, blame ... Holocaust Memorial Day in Poland [231]
David Irving - all I really know about him is he put Hitler's doctor's notes on the internet free of charge. I think Konrad Heiden is very instructive as regards Hitler. Heiden is credited with the mickey-take insult of "Nazi" (from Ignacy - Catholic country bumpkin party) and wrote widely about Hitler. He credited Hitler's anti-Semitism to the over-representation of Jews in the Communist movement, not the over-representation in the financial sector. Heiden was a German Jew and a socialist.
Moving on - it was mainstream thinking in Germany 1900-1930s that Germany needed to compensate for the lack of worldwide empire (Bismarck's clever but boring choice) with an eastern European empire. It was a given. Hitler didn't invent the concept of Lebensraum - moreover, they got it with Brest-Litovsk. Mainstream thinking saw Lebensraum as involving enslavement and displacement of tens of millions, whereas Hitler's plan was to kill 30 million through starvation.
You have to remember that Hitler was an invention of the German Army - they trained him politically then financed him in the early years to keep the working class anti-Communist. He was merely an exaggeration of what they wanted. The taxi driver made absolutist, incompetent monarch. Fortunately Eichmann (the logistics man behind the Holocaust) had been equally efficient when the policy was forced exile of Germany's Jews - which is why 76% of them survived, despite the hostile stance taken to Jewish refugees most notably by the US - Britain was the most welcoming, by the way, taking 80,000 in the UK and probably around the same in Palestine, despite Arab hostility.
Can we include Poland to this discussion? Thank you. 