Adi's Fan Club

Back in the early noughties, I visited Oklahoma City. It was an interesting drive up the I-35 from Fort Worth, Texas. I had rented a car equipped with what are known in the trade as “taxi tyres”. These last an incredibly long time – 80,000 miles can be expected – but the downside is that they provide absolutely no grip. I was terrified.

Thankfully, I got there and back in one piece and, overall, it was a pleasant visit. However, my hosts struggled somewhat when it came to sightseeing. There are not a lot of tourist attractions in the middle of the Great Plains, so I was brought along to probably its best-known landmark: The monument to the Oklahoma bombing of 1995.

To the City Fathers’ credit, this is an impressive venue. It is a modern, stark design providing just the sort of sombre ambiance appropriate to remember that appalling event.

However, as I left the Memorial, I couldn’t help feeling a little perturbed by the place. As someone who didn’t know any of the victims, it struck me as a monument to Timothy McVeigh, the architect of it all.

That seems to be a general issue with these tributes to the victims: They end up being monuments to the lunatic that created them. As another example, I have the same sense of unease around Holocaust Museums.

Not only do these places immortalize Adolf Hitler’s shocking reign, they have a specific message to get across. They are all part of what Norman Finklestein describes as the Holocaust Industry and their purpose is to drive home the message that six million Jews were murdered in Hitler’s death camps during the Second World War. The subliminal message is that there can be no criticism of Jews (or especially the Jewish State) because of all the trauma Jews went through.

The message is clear and, if you ask young people about places like Auschwitz or Dachau, they will dutifully declare that these were where six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis. However, press further and you realize that they are unaware of the bigger picture.

There were a similar number of Gentiles massacred by der Führer and his cronies. Hitler might have had a special distaste for Jews, but he certainly did not see a world where the “untermenschen” (sub-humans) had any role other than slaves.

History does not recall if Hitler suffered from any cognitive dissonance championing the stereotype blue-eyed, blond Teuton, while he himself was a 5’9” Austrian, with an unfortunate taste in moustaches and not a blue eye or blond hair in sight.

But, nevertheless, they all had to go. This was his “lebensraum” policy. Literally meaning “space to live”, he argued that the German people needed more real estate and the obvious place to find it was in the East. Basically, lebensraum would require the genocide of the entire Slavic people!

It is interesting to look at the nationalities of those who died in his death camps. 3.8 million of those 6 million Jews were from Poland; 2.1 million were from Russia. I suspect that the country commanders given the order to exterminate the population would have picked up on the large Jewish populations in Eastern Europe at the time (many were refugees from the Russian Tsar’s pogroms). Indeed, when the war broke out, almost one-third of Poland’s population was Jewish.

So, it is not surprising that these were picked on first. Other “undesirables”, like gypsies, homosexuals and both the mentally and physically handicapped were done for as well. But the plan was to carry on, until the Slavs were entirely wiped out.

Germany had form when it came to genocides. Their African colony – German South West Africa, or Namibia as it is known today – experienced the extermination of the native Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1908. Small beans compared to Adolf’s version – fewer than quarter of a million Namibians were killed.

German officers are alleged to have been involved in the Ottoman Empire’s genocide of the Armenians in 1915-16. Certainly, Germany’s Mauser company provided the Turks with rifles and Krupp provided the cannons that put an end to Armenian resistance on the Musa-Dagh Mountain. But this still pales beside the Nazi’s figures, as it is estimated that between 800,000 and 1,200,000 Armenians were killed back then.

It is ironic that Hitler’s legacy will be the Volkswagen Beetle and the Jewish State. Most of the other despots of the 20th Century are more or less forgotten. Who remembers Franco (Spain), or Mussolini (Italy), or Salazar (Portugal), or Metaxas (Greece) today? Even Josef Stalin and Pol Pot do not register with the Smartphone generation.

But Adolf (or Adi, as he was known as a child) Hitler lives on as the face of evil, thanks to the tireless work of Jewish groups throughout the world. I wonder what the man himself would think if he saw the world today? Would he revise his opinion of the Jews, seeing their operation in Palestine, where tens of thousands of another Semitic people are being exterminated? Maybe he would appreciate having a Fan Club that upholds such a venerable, Teutonic tradition.