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- American Pravda: The\u00a0Nakba<\/em>\u00a0and the Holocaust<\/a>
\nRon Unz \u2022\u00a0The Unz Review<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0\u2022 December 11, 2023 \u2022 14,600 Words<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n![](\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/91qt9SGnbYL.jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\nI read or reread more than a dozen books for my long review article, and also glancingly mentioned an additional one, which I\u2019ve now digested as well. My main focus had been on the Israeli\/Palestinian conflict, and\u00a0The Seventh Million<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Tom Segev<\/a>\u00a0only slightly touched on that topic. But his descriptive subtitle \u201cThe Israelis and the Holocaust\u201d suggested a related subject of inquiry that proved quite fruitful.<\/span><\/p>\n
Born in 1945, Segev is generally regarded as one of Israel\u2019s leading journalists, the author of numerous widely-praised histories regarding Israel\u2019s origins and its various wars. Although his 1991 bestseller was controversial, the back cover carried glowing praise from such top Israeli figures as\u00a0Abba Eban<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Amos Elon<\/a>, as well as important Holocaust scholars such as Prof. George L. Mosse and leaders of the Jewish diaspora such as Nobel Laureate\u00a0Elie Wiesel<\/a>. I found it quite enlightening, though perhaps not entirely in the way the author intended.<\/span><\/p>\n
Even aside from its main theme, the first chapter provided some extremely useful information. Back in 2018, I\u2019d drawn upon the shocking research found in the books of maverick leftist Lenni Brenner to publish a long article on the surprising relationship between the various Zionist factions and Nazi Germany, which spent most of the 1930s working together in a close economic partnership that laid the basis for the creation of the State of Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n
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- American Pravda: Jews and Nazis<\/a>
\nRon Unz \u2022\u00a0The Unz Review<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0\u2022 August 6, 2018 \u2022 6,800 Words<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nAlthough Brenner\u2019s documentary research seemed rock-solid and had never been seriously challenged, I\u2019d always had a few slight doubts at the back of my mind. I had wondered whether such utterly astonishing facts could really be true and yet remained totally concealed for generations by virtually all of our journalists and academics, but Segev\u2019s brief discussion completely put those concerns to rest. Segev is a very mainstream pro-Zionist Israeli writer and he probably despised Brenner, a radical anti-Zionist Trotskyite, never mentioning the name of the latter anywhere in his nearly 600 pages of text. But Segev drew upon the same underlying archival sources to fully confirm all of Brenner\u2019s most incendiary historical claims and even added a few additional ones, though all of this similar material was obviously presented in a very different fashion.<\/span><\/p>\n
By the 1920s the mainstream leftist Zionist movement was heavily influenced by Marxism and led by Russian-born\u00a0David Ben-Gurion<\/a>, who\u00a0modeled himself after Lenin<\/a>, but those Zionists still eagerly formed a 1930s economic partnership with Nazi Germany based upon an obvious commonality of interests. Hitler was eager to encourage the departure of Germany\u2019s problematical 1% Jewish minority while the Zionists were just as eager to receive them, along with the huge infusion of financial and industrial capital they could provide. During this period, important SS leaders including Adolf Eichmann were invited to Palestine as honored Zionist guests and then published their flattering accounts of the successful development activities of their Zionist partners in Joseph Goebbels\u2019 leading Berlin Nazi newspaper. Some Zionist leaders reciprocated, traveling to Germany for very friendly meetings with their Nazi counterparts, and they reported how well the Jews of that country seemed to be doing despite Hitler\u2019s supposedly harsh new regime.<\/span><\/p>\n
Indeed, Segev\u2019s figures demonstrate the enormous prosperity of German Jews, explaining why the Zionists were so eager to arrange for them to relocate to impoverished Palestine. The Nazis agreed that every such Jewish emigrant could take with him the present-day equivalent of $200,000 in foreign currency, plus another $250,000 or more in German merchandise. These were huge sums for what had been the desperately poor society of Weimar Germany, and such Jewish wealth had obviously been one of the major sources of anti-Semitic resentment in that country.<\/span><\/p>\n
If the main Zionist groups cooperated with Nazi Germany on purely utilitarian grounds, their right-wing Zionist rivals had more ideological motives since they had modeled their movement after that of Mussolini, and always regarded themselves as fascists as did their bitter opponents. Many of these Zionists even considered Hitler\u2019s notorious anti-Semitism as a mere political blemish rather than as an insupportable obstacle preventing their admiration. In 1933 a leading Zionist writer ranked the German dictator among the world\u2019s \u201cshining names,\u201d alongside Mussolini, Ataturk, and the various other right-wing heroes of his movement, while another Zionist figure had loudly declared that \u201cHitler saved Germany.\u201d Even after World War II began, one of these Zionist factions led by a future prime minister of Israel repeatedly sought to enlist in the Axis Powers, hoping to join the military alliance led by Hitler and Mussolini.<\/span><\/p>\n
One of the interesting points made by Segev is that although a large majority of ordinary Jews around the world were intensely hostile to Hitler\u2019s regime, the leadership of most of the different Zionist factions quietly became fierce competitors for German patronage, with those that lost out then sometimes hypocritically denouncing the Nazi affiliations of their more successful rivals. These bitter words led to the 1933 assassination of one of the top mainstream Zionist leaders in Palestine at the hands of his right-wing critics.<\/span><\/p>\n
Although this Nazi-Zionist partnership was controversial at the time, it obviously became much more so following the Axis defeat and the concerted Allied effort to demonize the Nazis through the Nuremberg show trials and other propaganda spectaculars, so the newly established State of Israel made every effort to hide this dark secret of its recent past. When those 1930s historical facts later threatened to leak out in the mid-1950s due to the legal problems of an important Israeli political figure, the man was assassinated, and Segev suggested that Israel\u2019s government had probably arranged the killing in order to permanently shut his mouth.<\/span><\/p>\n
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After that rather surprising first chapter, the bulk of Segev\u2019s narrative shifts to a very different topic, namely Israel\u2019s tangled relationship with the Holocaust, the deliberate extermination of some six million helpless Jewish civilians by Nazi Germany, mostly in the gas chambers of various World War II concentration camps. On these basic facts, the author\u2019s views seem absolutely conventional ones, and at several points he notes the bestial cruelty of the diabolical Nazi plan to erase all Jews from the world. But although references to the Holocaust, gas chambers, or the most famous concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Dachau are sprinkled across a large fraction of all these pages, Segev largely avoids discussing the details of that industrial slaughter, apparently assuming that all of his readers are thoroughly familiar with the standard narrative account produced by modern Holocaust scholarship, which began in the wake of Raul Hilberg\u2019s seminal 1961 volume. Ironically enough, Segev notes that as of the date of his writing, Hilberg\u2019s classic work still remained untranslated into Hebrew, probably because it had reported that all those many millions of Jews had willingly gone to their deaths, shepherded by their own community leadership and without ever showing any signs of active resistance.<\/span><\/p>\n
However, Israeli society is unusual in that such a substantial fraction of its founding population consisted of postwar Holocaust survivors, \u201cthe seventh million\u201d of Segev\u2019s title, individuals who had themselves passed through the various Nazi death camps. Therefore, their gripping personal accounts seem to have provided much of the understanding of those momentous events for the Israeli public, including Segev himself, who was born just weeks before Hitler\u2019s suicide and the collapse of his German regime.<\/span><\/p>\n
Perhaps because Segev\u2019s first chapter documented the close Nazi-Zionist partnership of the 1930s, which might disconcert his readers, he preceded this discussion with a Prologue that recounted the utter horrors of the Holocaust that soon followed chronologically. He focused upon the books of a particular Auschwitz survivor named Yehiel De-Nur, who had spent two years at that notorious death camp, and although the name of that writer means little in America these days, he became a celebrated postwar author in Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n
Although all of De-Nur\u2019s several autobiographical volumes were published under a pseudonym and his true identity remained concealed for many years, his works constituted some of the earliest Holocaust literature in Israel and were hugely influential in bringing the horrifying details of that catastrophe to Israeli popular attention, with a special literary prize established in his honor, awarded every two years by Israel\u2019s president.<\/span><\/p>\n
Indeed, Segev explained that he and most other Israeli teenagers of his generation first learned the extremely disturbing details of the Holocaust from De-Nur\u2019s books, so when he managed to arrange a personal interview with the author, he did so with great trepidation. De-Nur\u2019s writing had always emphasized the sadistic acts that were a daily part of life at Auschwitz, including the widespread sexual abuse of young Jewish boys and girls by their Nazi captors, and Segev describes the works as considerably pornographic.<\/span><\/p>\n
According to Segev, De-Nur had been a young Yeshiva student in pre-war Poland with huge literary pretensions, desperately trying to get his writing into print when the war came along and he ended up at Auschwitz. De-Nur later claimed that Eichmann had personally condemned him to that fate so he served as a leading witness at the 1961 Eichmann trial, with his testimony ended in a fainting spell, supposedly reflecting the unspeakable personal memories that still haunted him even decades later.<\/span><\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/316cSQuxapL.jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\nAs it happens, I also recently read\u00a0Hannah Arendt<\/a>\u2018s 1963 classic\u00a0Eichmann in Jerusalem<\/em><\/a>, and De-Nur was one of the few witnesses whom she also focused upon, treating his testimony far less gently than did Segev. According to her account, De-Nur\u2019s bizarre, rambling monologue included a heavy focus upon astrology and all sorts of other strange things, considerably embarrassing the serious legal proceedings. When the prosecutor finally interrupted to ask a couple of basic, factual questions, De-Nur immediately collapsed in a hysterical fit, allowing the judge to salvage the situation by ordering the witness permanently removed from the stand. Arendt suggested that De-Nur\u2019s testimony demonstrated the tremendous difficulty that emotional eyewitnesses sometimes have in distinguishing between their actual memories of events from many years earlier and the products of their own vivid imagination.<\/span><\/p>\n
Indeed, Segev seemed to confirm Arendt\u2019s observation, explaining that De-Nur had been so emotionally broken by his experiences at Auschwitz that he required many years of psychiatric counseling and also began a series of LSD treatment-sessions, in which he recalled visions of his days in the camp. Eventually, he produced a new Holocaust manuscript that included presumably imaginary scenes of such brutal events as an SS guard murdering the Jewish boy who had been the victim of his sexual perversions, then grilling the boy\u2019s body on a spit and devouring the flesh piece by piece.<\/span><\/p>\n
These bizarre pages of the Prologue apparently represent much of the Holocaust narrative as understood by most Israelis and I found it rather disconcerting that they were immediately followed by the chapter describing the mundane details of the Nazi-Zionist partnership of just a few years earlier, an extremely odd juxtaposition of such radically different situations. Thus, according to Segev\u2019s apparent reconstruction, the friendly and respectful business arrangements between German Nazis and Zionist Jews of the late 1930s were suddenly replaced in the early 1940s by a diabolical and sadomasochistic effort by the Nazis to totally exterminate all of the world\u2019s Jews, an extremely strange transformation that raised serious questions in my mind.<\/span><\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\nAs far as I know, the mainstream Holocaust narrative in America has never portrayed the German concentration camps as hotbeds of rampant sadomasochistic sexual perversion. However, such themes were found in a series of popular 1970s exploitation films beginning with\u00a0Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS<\/em><\/a>. This leads me to wonder if many of those survivor-based accounts in Israel might fall into that same category. And indeed, according to\u00a0De-Nur\u2019s Wikipedia page<\/a>, a Holocaust organization in Israel has denounced De-Nur\u2019s books as merely pornographic fiction, not least because Nazi law absolutely prohibited any sexual relations between Aryans and Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n
Equally bizarre and scatological stories had also been found in\u00a0The Painted Bird\u00a0<\/em><\/a>by writer\u00a0Jerzy Kosinski<\/a>, which in 1976 became America\u2019s first widely popular Holocaust memoir. But that huge bestseller was later revealed to be totally fraudulent, and the plagiarizing author eventually committed suicide. Indeed, there have been\u00a0so many fake Holocaust memoirs over the years<\/a>\u00a0that they nearly constitute a literary genre of their own. Probably the most world\u2019s most famous Holocaust survivor was Elie Wiesel, who parlayed the stories of his wartime suffering into becoming an enormous political celebrity, capping his career with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, whose announcement declared him \u201ca messenger to mankind.\u201d Yet journalist\u00a0Alexander Cockburn has persuasively argued<\/a>\u00a0that Wiesel was simply a fraud, and his famous autobiographical work\u00a0Night<\/em>\u00a0just another literary hoax.<\/span><\/p>\n
According to Segev, one odd element of Israeli Holocaust dogma has been the widespread, almost universal conviction that the Nazis had rendered Jewish bodies into soap, with even top government leaders firmly describing that atrocity as fact. Not only was this a notorious hoax, but Segev explained that Yad Vashem, Israel\u2019s most authoritative center of Holocaust research has fully debunked it as totally fraudulent.<\/span><\/p>\n
Meanwhile, even some of the less gruesome stories that Segev passes along seem rather doubtful. According to a prominent Israeli attorney who later claimed to have liberated death camps as a Jewish officer during the war, a large group of men, women, and children were herded into one of the gas chambers, but because their numbers were insufficient, the penny-pinching Germans didn\u2019t want to waste a full dose of gas on them, so they were forced to stand there naked for a day and a night awaiting additional victims, only to be rescued from death when their camp was suddenly liberated.<\/span><\/p>\n
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In reading Segev\u2019s account of the role of the Holocaust in Israeli society and the sort of outrageous Holocaust stories that dominated the narrative in that country, I couldn\u2019t avoid noticing a strong connection to much more recent events.<\/span><\/p>\n
The surprisingly successful Hamas attack on October 7th was deeply embarrassing to the Israelis, and pro-Israel propagandists soon began heavily emphasizing ridiculous hoaxes such as the claims of forty beheaded babies or a baby roasted in an oven. All of these frauds were provided by\u00a0extremely disreputable characters<\/a>, but eagerly accepted and promoted by leading Western political elites and media outlets.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imgur.com\/2MKo5Bh.png\")
<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\nThe latest wave of very doubtful claims has focused upon second-hand stories of Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations. These accounts only came to light two months after the events in question and lacked any supportive forensic evidence, with many of the claims coming from the same individuals behind the beheaded babies hoax, suggesting that they are equally desperate propaganda ploys. Journalists Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, and others\u00a0have discussed<\/a>\u00a0the extreme credulity of the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0and other media outlets in\u00a0promoting<\/a>\u00a0these blatantly fraudulent stories. Many of these points are summarized in a brief video discussion:<\/span><\/p>\n
- American Pravda: Jews and Nazis<\/a>