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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 168 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 168, October 1993.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Nazi Holocaust
Ronnie S. Landauu
IB Taurus £12.95
One of the priorities for revolutionary socialists and anti-racists of all political hues is to stem the rising tide of racism and fascism across Europe. Alongside the rise of racist violence comes a propaganda campaign of Nazi lies to deny that the Holocaust ever happened. To counter these lies, the Anti Nazi League’s excellent pamphlet, Holocaust Denial: The New Nazi Lie, is limited by its very nature in the amount of detailed evidence it can present.
It is in this context that The Nazi Holocaust can be used as a complementary source of hard evidence and detailed information.
All aspects of the Holocaust are dealt with, and set in the context of Jewish history from 300 BC, the aftermath and impact of the Holocaust, and modern day Israel up to the Gulf War. There are many statistics concerning the mass murder of the Holocaust, but what gives terrible reality to these numbers are the many eyewitness accounts.
In a section on Nazi medical experimenters, for example, is an extract from the diary of a professor of medicine assigned to Auschwitz for ten weeks:
‘12 October: A special action during the night
(1,600 people from Holland) terrible scenes near the last bunker.
23 Sept: In the evening dinner in the commandant’s house ... a
real banquet. We had apple pie, as much as we wanted, good coffee,
excellent beer and cakes ...’
Another document, described by Landau as‘one of the most alarming documents of the 20th century’, is a technical memorandum written by a welder to his line manager about the size of a van and its ‘load’. This seems innocent enough until the context becomes clear. ‘The manufacturers told us during a discussion that reducing the size of the van’s rear would throw it badly off balance. The front axle, they claim, would be overloaded. In fact, the balance is automatically restored, because the merchandise aboard displays during the operation a natural tendency to rush to the rear doors ...’
The writer, a minor bureaucrat using the dehumanised language of so many involved in the technicalities of mass murder, is in fact expressing his opinion that the trucks used for poisoning Jewish prisoners with carbon monoxide gas could be made into still more efficient killing machines.
The book shows how Jews were stopped by Britain and the US from seeking asylum when they could have escaped from Germany. It also accuses Britain of doing nothing, either militarily or in propaganda terms, to try and help rescue the Jews even though from July 1942 onwards it was known that they were being systematically massacred.
Many references are made to the anti-semitic attitude of the British ruling class including a statement from Churchill that could have come from Mein Kampf: ‘This worldwide Jewish conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence ...’
But, strong as the book is in its factual information, much of the political analysis is counter-productive in terms of building a mass anti-fascist movement today.
Only a mass struggle uniting socialist and Communist workers, as described by Leon Trotsky, could have stopped the Nazis. It is because the activity of the working class is not seen as in any way important to the overthrow of fascism, that the disastrous role that Stalin played in dividing socialist and Communist workers is not even mentioned.
Landau’s book does not end with any clarion call to action, but in a whimper with justification for the state of Israel and woolly ideas about the need for the United Nations and international law to prevent the Holocaust happening again.
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