How do holocausts happen?
The 15 July 1939 edition of the Mirror, a Perth weekly broadsheet, hit newsstands about six years and four months after the Nazi dictatorship was formally established in faraway Germany, and a month and a half before the beginning of World War Two. This seemingly obscure bit of information is relevant only because the edition carried a report about a mid-week address by Prime Minister Robert Menzies at Anzac House in the city’s CBD. Inside, the prime minister declared:
“History will label Hitler as one of the really great men of the century. As far as the German people are concerned, Hitler has proved himself a great man and a tireless worker. He dragged his nation from bankruptcy and revolution.”
The first thing that strikes a reader today is not that Menzies found something to like in Nazism, even if he wasn’t himself a fascist. His sympathies are well known, at least by people familiar with the history of the Liberal Party. It’s that his Führer fawning was so gratuitous, and so public, so close to the outbreak of the war.
If you’ve grown up believing that WWII was about defeating Nazism—that the conflagration ought to be read as the twentieth century’s great parable of good vs. evil, favourably resolved by democratic virtue mobilised as a military arsenal—Menzies’ words would be difficult to reconcile. The inconvenient truth, however, is that much of the establishment, in what today is broadly called the West, admired the Italian and German governments of the time. Among conservative politicians, Britain’s royal family, industrialists and the “respectable” middle classes, fascism was fashionable.
This is illustrated, in part, by the Mirror’s report, which described the PM’s pro-Hitler comments as “perfectly sound reasoning”. It is also shown by another article in the same edition of the paper, describing a reception at the Palace Hotel attended by “most of Perth’s business executives and industrial chiefs”. The event occurred several days after Menzies’ Anzac House address, and there is no indication that his Nazi nuzzling was cause for consternation. Indeed, it seems to have passed without comment by Western Australia’s luminaries. The prime minister, readers are informed, “Showed fine command of words and never hesitated, mixing subtle humour with politics in a pleasing manner”.
Bear in mind, again, that this was July 1939: six years after the establishment of the Dachau concentration camp; four years after the Nuremberg Laws, which, to protect the “purity of German blood”, outlawed marriage or sex between Jews and “German nationals”; sixteen months after the annexation of Austria; eight months after Kristallnacht, the grotesque nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom carried out by Nazi paramilitaries; and five months after Hitler’s well-publicised 30 January speech to Reichstag delegates at Berlin’s Kroll Opera House, in which he warned that, if another world war were declared, the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”.
To be fair to the capitalist establishment of the time, it wasn’t the Nazis’ virulent antisemitism that was the main attraction. They were sympathetic primarily because Hitler’s government had waged war on the left, banning the Social Democratic Party, the Communist Party and the trade unions. While Dachau is today known primarily for being part of the Nazi network of Jewish extermination centres, it was established in Munich to house political prisoners. Heinrich Himmler, then the city’s chief of police, was open about this, telling the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten (Munich Latest News) in March 1933 ahead of the camp’s opening:
“All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner [a returned soldiers’ organisation associated with the Social Democrats] and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here ... [T]hese people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organise as soon as they are released.”
This was widely known. As early as July 1933, the Argus in Melbourne was repeating German secret police claims that they were fighting off daily communist plots to overthrow the Nazi regime. The leftists were described as “terror groups”.
“The police allege that hardly a day passes without their unearthing new Communist ‘cells’, notably in the Ruhr Valley, where storm troops at Bochen discovered an organisation of between 4,000 and 5,000 members”, one report noted. The correspondent said that there had been arrests around the country before mentioning, almost in passing, “18,000 Communist prisoners in Prussia”.
The Nazis’ war on the left, in which up to 1 million civilians were murdered, was a war on a common enemy of the Western ruling classes, which were trying to combat socialist and left-wing movements in their own societies. Capitalists and establishment politicians had a natural ideological affinity with fascism, which led them to ignore, downplay, tolerate or even celebrate Hitler’s crimes against democracy and against Jewish people, who were disproportionately represented in the communist movement. Indeed, Hitler painted his antisemitism in anti-communist colours: Bolshevism was Jewish, and Jews were Bolsheviks.
The people who run the world today try to bury the fact that their old brethren and political heroes were ideologically aligned with fascism. Moreover, they bury the fact that the systematic eradication of left-wing political opposition to Nazism, which they supported, opened the terrain for the extermination of 6 million Jews. Instead, they make out that the antisemitic fascist-sympathising statesmen of the time were responsible for snuffing out Nazism.
We are now told that it is illegitimate to draw parallels with the Holocaust because it was uniquely evil. Yet it is arguable that drawing parallels is precisely the way to honour the call “never again”—because as soon as one does, it invites an investigation of who exactly was complicit, of what the preconditions were for such shocking barbarity, and of how such conditions might again materialise.
What about Palestine today? To be sure, there are obvious differences. Western politicians do not generally hold up Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as an example of how to run a country; few state leaders appear to want to emulate his domestic policies. And, as Israel’s supporters frequently point out, the project in Gaza does not involve gas chambers. If Netanyahu’s goal was to exterminate all Palestinians in the territories Israel controls, he could have carried it out. That he hasn’t is considered enough proof that there is no genocide, let alone another Holocaust.
Yet there are clear echoes today of some of the political dynamics of the 1930s.
As noted above, the Nazis did not entirely distinguish between their barbarity against the left and Jews—hence they were fighting “Judaeo-Bolshevism”. Similarly, Israel’s war against “Palestinian terrorism” cannot be separated from the country’s broader role as Western imperialism’s regional enforcer.
The ruling classes of the 1930s watched on, often with admiration, as the Nazis smashed their common enemy: the political left, in which Jews were the vanguard. The Western establishment today does more than watch on—it supplies Israel as it smashes all vestiges of resistance to Western domination of the Middle East. And like European Jewry in the early twentieth century, the Palestinians have been the vanguard in, and their cause has often been a catalyst for, the anti-imperialist struggle in the region. That is precisely why the carnage in Gaza has been allowed to go on for so long: there is a coincidence of interests between the ethno-nationalist Israeli regime and Western ruling classes.
It is why there is no end to the declarations that there can be no peace unless Hamas is eradicated—by which they mean not simply that particular organisation, but any organisation that refuses to accept and make peace with the Zionist state and Western imperialism. It is why German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in June said of Israel’s criminal attack on Iran: “This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us”. It is why Israel’s earlier terrorist attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon made Netanyahu such a celebrated figure: overnight, in Western eyes, he went from being a man without a plan to the guy who might have the final solution to the niggling problem of regional anti-imperialism.
As in the 1930s, the rhetoric today among sections of establishment opinion is increasingly fascistic. That’s true in Israel, the government of which is propped up by fascists, and in the heartlands of Western imperialism, where the far right either leads or has a genuine chance of leading governments in France, Italy, Germany, the United States, Britain and elsewhere.
Insofar as the far right is making ground, the left is again often labelled the primary enemy within—even if “communism” now includes the cosmopolitan capitalism of such radical organisations as the Democratic Party in the US. There are no concentration camps (although the US is skating close). Still, the repression brought to bear on left-wing activism and Palestine solidarity activism is now significant. It began to ramp up during the war on terror, when there was endless talk of an Islamo-leftist alliance against Western civilisation, which sounded much like the old Judeo-Bolshevism canard.
Another political echo: just as Nazi sympathisers in the West were broadly hostile to Jews and Jewish immigration, so too are many of Israel’s friends in the West hostile to Arab/Muslim/Palestinian immigration. Take then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s comment last year that welcoming refugees fleeing Gaza was “very bad for cohesion and harmony”. He sounded eerily similar to Australia’s representative to the 1938 Evian Conference, Colonel Thomas W. White, who said: “As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration”. (The Evian Conference was an international summit to discuss the growing number of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany.)
The Australian press did carry critical commentary about the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, particularly after Kristallnacht in November 1938. Some politicians spoke out, too. But prevailing establishment attitudes can be divined from press responses to Hitler’s odious and ominous diatribe the following year, threatening “the annihilation of the Jewish race”. A front-page headline in Melbourne’s Argus on 1 February read “reassuring on the whole”. The associated article reported:
“The [London] Daily Telegraph says that it is not too optimistic to read into the speech a promise of better things to come, while the Daily Express points out that the speech shows that the Fuhrer does not intend to embark upon any adventures at the moment.”
Again, this optimism was because the Jewish question hardly figured in Western calculations. The key concern was the possibility of Germany going too far and upsetting the existing imperialist applecart. So when the war came, it was not about a clash of ideologies, let alone about saving European Jewry; German expansionism—regrettably, in the view of the establishment—came to threaten the interests of the other European imperialists. Viewed from the top of society, the war was just another power struggle among the ruling classes.
Returning to the 1939 Mirror article, we find another notable thing: unlike the Palace Hotel reception attended by the upper classes, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Menzies at Anzac House. The correspondent noted that some in the audience reacted badly to the PM’s pro-Hitler talk:
“In the back of the hall a good-looking young woman jumped up waving aloft a placard. Another let fly at Mr. Menzies a battery of words that were finally drowned in cat-calls and cheers ... Then a voice close to the microphone whispered to the speaker: ‘Would you like her thrown out?’ Mr. Menzies hesitated, then decided that, if he was going to finish his speech, the interjectors would have to be given their walking orders.
“So the police had a busy few minutes, and the ranks of the interjectors were lessened by a dozen or so. But Mr. Menzies saw the humorous side of it before the meeting closed. ‘I would like’, he said, ‘to thank all those present—and those who are no longer present’. And even the opposition gave him a good hand for that.”
An uncivilised “hullabaloo” disrupted proceedings. But all officialdom united—even the “opposition”—to have the cops take care of them. Again, we find echoes in today’s political atmosphere and the treatment of anti-fascist and anti-genocide activists. How, then, do holocausts and genocides happen? With the complicity of the capitalist establishment and the maligning, marginalising and worse, of the left.
