The Hamas Massacre Would Have Been Unthinkable without Influences from Nazi Germany: Interview with [author].Martin Cüppers

The Hamas Massacre Would Have Been Unthinkable without Influences from Nazi Germany: Interview with Martin Cüppers By Bernhard Junginger · Monday, December 18, 2023.

Editor’s note: Martin Cüppers directs the Research Unit Ludwigsburg at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, where he also teaches in the Department of History. He studies the crimes of the Nazi regime, especially the Holocaust, and how they were treated by postwar German society and its judiciary. Together with Klaus-Michael Mallmann he published Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina [Half Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine] in 2006. His work belongs to a growing body of scholarship that exposes how Nazi Germany was able to insinuate its exterminationist antisemitism into the Middle East and how that influence continues to poison Arab and especially Palestinian views of Israelis and Jews in general. Other contributions to this important line of research include books by Matthias Küntzel, such as Jihad and Jew-Hatred (Telos Press, 2009) and Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East (Routledge, 2024), Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale Univ. Press, 2009), and Elham Manea’s The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism. The Nazi genealogy of Palestinian animosity toward the Jews helps understand the particular viciousness of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. This interview originally appeared in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung on December 5 and appears here with Cüppers’s permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose commentary appears here...

“The final phase of the Greek Genocide took place at Smyrna in September 1922 when Kemalist forces entered the city and took part in an orgy of looting, rape and massacre that targeted the city’s Christian population, primarily Greeks and Armenians. They then burnt the city to the ground. The term Smyrna Holocaust refers to the wholesale slaughter of the Smyrna populace, which at the time was majority Christian, and also to the fire that completely destroyed the city.”

“Turkish forces moved from house to house in the Armenian quarter systematically murdering civilians not before taking all their cash and jewelry and raping women and girls.”

“I was particularly struck with one group consisting of women and babies, and a young girl, almost nude, shot through the breast, and with clotted blood on her thighs and genital organs, that spoke only too clearly of her fate before death.”

https://www.greek-genocide.net/index.php/overview/documentation/the-smyrna-holocaust

In the spirit of understanding the history of Nazi Germany and how it relates to the current war...

https://archive.org/details/KlausPolkehnTheSecretContacts-ZionismAndNaziGermany1933-1941/mode/2up

THE SECRET CONTACTS: ZIONISM AND NAZI GERMANY, 1933-1941 / KLAUS POLKEHN

Anti-Semitism became official German government policy when Hitler was named Chancellor of the German Reich on January 30, 1933. The spring of 1933 also witnessed the beginning of a period of private cooperation between Zionism and the German fascist regime to increase the inflow of German Jewish immigrants and capital to Palestine. The Zionist authorities succeeded in keeping this cooperation a secret for a long period, and only since the beginning of the 1960's have criticisms of it been expressed here and there. The Zionist reaction has usually consisted of declarations that their onetime contacts with Nazi Germany were undertaken solely to save the lives of Jews. But the contacts were all the more remarkable because they took place at a time when many Jews and Jewish organizations demanded a boycott of Nazi Germany.

To question the reaction of the Zionist movement to German fascism, which in the course of its twelve-year rule murdered millions of Jews, is a taboo in the eyes of the Zionist leaders. Only rarely is it possible to come across authentic evidence or documents concerning these occurrences. The following enquiry consists of information gathered up to this date about some important aspects of the cooperation between the Zionists and the fascists. It remains in the nature of things that this enquiry does not present a complete picture. This can only be possible when the archives (above all those in Israel), in which the documents concerning these events are under lock and key, are made available for scholarly research.

The article Klaus Polkehn wrote is sympathetic to the Jewish people, but not to the Zionists who took advantage of them. He makes an argument that the Jewish people - especially the working classes - were left out to dry, both by the Zionists, and by the Jewish upper classes, who could afford making the payments to get out of Germany.

Why were the Jews only allowed to emigrate to Palestine? There were Jewish populations in countries all over the world, and especially in the U.S. - where they would have been safe and free from harm.

If the Zionists wanted to be open and up front about what really transpired during the Nazi regime - they would release the historic documents that are “under lock and key” in Israel.

Antisemitism makes you stupid and traitor spreading literal communist propoganda

Rather than calmly debate this issue, you - like so many, especially here at FR, would rather resort to hyperbolic insults. Which accomplishes nothing.

When people don’t have a rational argument to make about Israel - it always ends up with accusing someone of antisemitism. Every time. How can you accuse someone of antisemitism when they don’t say anything bad about Jewish people…when in fact they are sympathetic to the plight of the many Jews who were ignored by powerful people who decided that instead of being allowed to emigrate, they would perish in the gas chambers?

World history has always been about the struggles of the powerless against the powerful. The story of the Holocaust, the Zionists and Nazi Germany - and all of those who perished because they weren’t given any choices - will never be told in the mainstream. So we have to look for it elsewhere.

As a postscript: when discussing the Holocaust, it is only fair to acknowledge the millions of non-Jews who also perished. From ilholocaustmuseum.org:

It is best when referencing the total number of victims of the Holocaust to say 6 million Jews and millions of others. All Holocaust organizations are making a united move to adhere to this message, and we must maintain a consistent record as a center of Holocaust education.

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