Changing perceptions and attitudes to a WW2 narrative

“A body that has been killed with hydrocyanic acid (HCN) cannot be safely touched without protection...
Stanislavsky Lech claimed that he was ‘almost crushed as more and more bodies were heaped on top of him’ and surrounded for hours by ‘the mountain of cadavers’ that had recently been gassed to death. If this had been the case, Lech would have been poisoned by these dead bodies.”

HOLOCAUST PREEMINENCE SERVES POLITICAL PURPOSES, INCLUDING ‘THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY’ 
The opined uniqueness of the Holocaust is no longer a matter of ongoing scholarly interest: It is now something tacitly assumed in matters of public policy. Bloxham writes, “Yet the idea of uniqueness, and there universal significance, is important to the establishment of various Holocaust memorial days and museum exhibitions across the Western world. If there is a ‘Holocaust Industry’, these ideas of didactics and commemoration are its workshops and uniqueness one of its most important raw materials.” (p. 319).

HOLOCAUST UNIQUENESS IS A CONSTRUCT BASED ON MYSTICISM, NOT FACTS
The issue is lucidly spelled out by Bloxham, “Ultimately, uniqueness is not susceptible to proof by agreed means of testing.” (p. 317). That says it all.

AMBIGUITIES IN THE WANNSEE PROTOCOL: ‘TOTAL EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS’ SHOULD NOT BE INFERRED
The author makes it clear that it is dangerous to read-in too much into the Wannsee Protocol. This is especially the case with the notion that it was some kind of blueprint for the destruction of all Jews of continental Europe, and even that of the world. It was no such thing!

To begin with, the fates of the 11 million Jews, including those of neutral and Allied countries, was predicated on an unconditional German victory. (p. 227). No wonder Bloxham calls Wannsee, “an aspiration, rather than a plan”. (p. 227).

The bulk of the world’s observant Jewry lived in Eastern Europe. Heinrich Himmler concluded that the destruction of Eastern European Jewry meant that “‘Jewry as a whole would never recover from the blow.” (p. 188). Obviously, the destruction of all the Jews of the world, or even those of continental Europe, was not necessary in order to achieve Nazi objectives. The destruction of the essence of Jewry, and not necessarily that of every single Jew, parallels the ideas of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew who coined the term genocide, on the Nazi German genocide of Poles (Polokaust). That is, the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia, Polish culture, etc., was sufficient for the destruction of the essence of Polishness. (pp. 188-189). The death of every single ethnic Pole was not necessary.

Far from being a master blueprint, the Wannsee Protocol had always been subject to evolving interpretations as a result of actual events. For instance, both Himmler and Goebbels wrote of “the Jewish question being settled” by the end of 1943. (p. 244). This is despite the fact that Hungarian Jewry had yet to be exterminated, and the Jews of Britain were probably now forever out of reach. Thus, Himmler and Goebbels were referring to that part of Europe then under direct German occupation. Furthermore, had the later wartime contingencies not allowed for the 1944 destruction of Hungarian Jewry, the nowadays-popular perception of the Holocaust as a European-wide project would have been significantly weakened. (p. 246).

Finally, and most important of all, Wannsee related to the politics involving Reinhard Heydrich, as concluded Bloxham, “The extent of genuine possibility was of less concern to Heydrich than the claim to authority over continent-wide deportation IF it ever became a possibility.” (p. 227; Emphasis in original).

SOME JEWS WERE, AS PREPLANNED, DIVERTED TO FORCED LABOUR
The provisions of Jews for forced labor, in Wannsee, were real (p. 225), and not simply a disguise for extermination. Obviously, the sparing of some Jews for forced labor had been built-in in accordance to Nazi German planning, and not some kind of afterthought brought about after Germany was clearly losing WWII.

DESTROYING JEWS WAS NEVER AN ALL-CONSUMING NAZI GERMAN PRIORITY  
Bloxham takes issue with the presumed “unique irrationality” of the Holocaust, “This is also the popular understanding of the Holocaust, the view that the Nazis would have gone literally to the ends of the earth to track down each and every living Jew with no regard for the practical consequences. But the historical record shows that it is SIMPLY NOT TRUE.” (p. 187, Emphasis added).

He adds that, “We have also seen that the idea that Hitler (and Himmler) actively sought to murder every last Jew everywhere is open to question. It is far from clear that Hitler himself was overly concerned with the fate of Jews of Norway or Rhodes.” (p. 316).

A GERMAN VICTORY WOULD NOT NECESSARILY HAVE MEANT THE DEATH OF EVERY SINGLE EUROPEAN JEW 
Bloxham pokes more holes in Holocaust orthodoxy as he comments, “It has been contended that any European Jews exempted from genocide during the war would have been murdered had the Nazis won the war. Barring perhaps the small Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula and in other neutral countries this is sensible contention, though, depending on the absolute or conditional nature of victory British Jewry may also have escaped. THE ONLY PROBLEM WITH THE ARGUMENT IS THAT IT IS AN EXTRAPOLATION BASED ON A CONSTANT TRAJECTORY RATHER THAN THE CHANGING TRAJECTORY THAT ACTUALLY EXISTED.
 
www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/holocaust-exceptional-false-bloxham/