Responses to My Column about Stupidity and Hitler I will discuss the readers’ e-mails in response to my column “Stupidity, not Evil, Brought Hitler Into Power.” I will ignore e-mails like that of Eric Robinson of Huntington Beach, CA, who sent me on June 1 an e-mail, occupying a full page in fine print, but I cannot see how this e-mail relates to my column. The author should find a publisher who would publish his essay as his independent piece. So I discard such e-mails.

On the other hand, unlike such irrelevant essays, Pon Kipfer (Bluffton, IN) writes in his mail, also dated by June 1:

Thank you for writing this as it gives me food for thought. An acquaintance of mine and his wife are concentration camp survivors. He worked for Corrie ten Boom as a young boy delivering ration cards to Jews and taking the Jews themselves on bike rides to safe houses.

Mr. Navrozov, I would love to see you write an article on how the dynamics of the 1930’s compares to today. Who are the Lloyd Georges and who are Hitlers? I fear for the future of the USA, but I’m not certain what to do about it.

Thanks for your article.

Let me cite the document that shows how Hitler’s anti-Semitism originated as a public propaganda pose. WW1 was over and Hitler met with Alfred Rosenberg, who described their meeting as he was waiting for his death sentence at the Nuernberg Trial. Rosenberg was a Russian German who fled from Russia after the Communists seized power in 1917. The Communists? Rosenberg would have noted that Marx was a Jew, so was Trotsky, Lenin mispronounced the Russian “r” the way Jews do it, and Kamenev and Zinoviev were also Jews. At that time, no one heard of Stalin, who was not a Jew. Hitler complained to Rosenberg that Communists were unstoppable as had been Christians. Rosenberg said: Because the Christians had the Enemy—the Devil. The Devil of the Communists is the Capitalist. Hitler must also have the Devil—the Jew.

Note that Rosenberg had lost everything he had in Russia and had to flee from the country. He could well ascribe his disaster to the Jews ruling Russia in the name of Marx, also a Jew. Nothing like that had happened to Germany and to Hitler in Germany. But Rosenberg called on Hitler to regard “the Jew” as a political symbol.

Hitler considered Rosenberg a thinker of genius, gave him the post that later went to Goebbels, since Rosenberg had a Russian accent, and then placed Rosenberg above Goebbels.

But the historical documents indicate that Hitler was propelled to the top of political power in Germany not by the fear of Roseberg’s Russian Devil—the Jew, but by the well justified fear that the Treaty of Versailles left Germany defenseless, and having occupied Germany, Stalin (not a Jew!) would convert it into hell, and in particular, would annihilate the German businessmen and the rest of the middle class.

Pon Kipfer would like me to compare the dynamics of 1919-1945 and of today. Who are the Hitlers? They are the dictators of China, developing post-nuclear super weapons. Who are the Lloyd Georges? The U.S. presidents in the past 20 or so years and all presidential candidates I have seen on TV so far. They ignore the “China threat” as the Lloyd Georges ignored the “German threat” before 1939, the year in which Hitler launched a conventional war. What to do about it? To find a presidential candidate who would understand the danger of the dictatorship of China, and to create TV programs and documentary movies that would prompt their audiences to vote for that candidate.

Ram Boze writes in his e-mail of June 1:

In your May 17, 07 article on the fantasy about China [“China: the Fantasy and the Reality”], I find your comprehension of the situation between China and the West quite profound. I have been trying for some time to convince my peers that we as a nation, what’s left of it, have better concentrate on China as I believe we shall see the Dragon raise its ugly head in our lifetime. I’m a Viet Nam vet and have never trusted the Chinese. The response I usually get is, “Oh, don’t worry about China; they would not do anything to jeopardize economic relations with the West.” “How foolish!” I say, “it’s their economy that they are using to build the largest and most technologically advanced military the world has ever seen.” Again, I think I will see the Chinese make their move in my lifetime. What about you? RamBoze

The Chinese dictators will make their move when they have ready their super weapons able to annihilate the United States (and perhaps the West as a whole) without Mutual Assured Destruction (which nuclear weapons cannot avoid).

The next e-mail of June 1 is bitterly hostile to me. The author (who named himself Aikon) believes that if Hitler had a visceral hatred of Jews, he was a monstrous criminal. But if he ordered his subordinates to annihilate millions of Jews so that his subordinates could not expect anything but the death sentence even if they had betrayed him to the English-speaking, then I whitewash Hitler, according to Aikon!

Aikon is full of irony:

Stalin loved the Kulaks, too. Perhaps deported and murdered them en mass as merely a distracting PR campaign.

Actually, in the 1920s, the “kulaks” (owners of private farms) were expected to “grow into socialism.” But in the 1930s, Stalin needed hands for his “industrialization.” Collective farms were organized to make farmers work as much and as cheaply as possible, and make many of them go to work at industrial enterprises under the same terms. What was Stalin to do with farmers who owned their profitable farms? To take the farms away from them! But those dispossessed farmers would create a large hostile class. Deport them!

So, according to Aikon, Stalin loved the “kulaks” in the 1920s, but began to hate them in the 1930s. And this is what a criminal is: he hates his victims, and to imagine that one can kill millions of human beings without any personal hatred, but for his safety or other personal goals, is laughable according to Aikon. “How you collapse in intellectual respectability,” Aikon exclaims.

Well, to do away with my “intellectual respectability,” let me add that in the last years of his life, Stalin (who died in 1953) decided to deport Jews, and many of them were summarily fired. Now, in the 1920s, an anti-Semitic remark was considered a crime, and Jews had privileges in the matriculation at higher schools.

Will Aikon say that Stalin loved Jews in the 1920s, but came to hate them in the 1950s?

No! Stalin was pushing his Russian nationalism (based on the Byzantine worship of the emperor as of God) to new extremes, and the deportation of Jews was in keeping with his new ambitions.

Emson Smith’s e-mail consists of two lines, but it is worth quoting:

Re “Stupidity brought Hitler to power.” Is it possible that stupidity will also bring Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton back to power? Just wondering.
Kindest regards!
Emson Smith, Vidalia, GEORGIA, The Sweet Onion City

In 1938, Americans like Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton were sure that Hitler meant “peace in our time.” Had not Hitler started a conventional war by having invaded Poland, etc., but would have “peacefully” allocated all available resources to the development of nuclear weapons, and would have outstripped the U.S. Manhattan Project, the world would have been his. But before Hitler’s nuclear bombs would begin to annihilate U.S. cities (unless and until the United States accepted unconditional surrender), dozens of millions of Americans no more and no less intelligent than Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton would disregard Germany (except as a trade partner) as they have disregarded and would disregard China (except as a trade partner). The only difference is that Hitler would have developed nuclear weapons, while China has been developing POST-NUCLEAR super weapons.

One reservation is in place. When the dictators of China crushed the Tiananmen Square movement in 1989, Bill Clinton condemned the dictators’ battle against their own unarmed people who were after a peaceful reform. Most U.S. top government officials say not what they consider right, but what is publicly good for them. It was considered good and proper to condemn the crushing of the Tiananmen Square movement. Later on, Bill Clinton forgot his condemnation as one forgets his necktie, no longer fashionable. Only Bill Clinton’s smile never goes out of fashion, and certainly he smiled his eternal smile to the Chinese when they donated to his reelection for the second term.

Wolfgang Schremser’s e-mail cannot be answered adequately because it occupies more than a full page. He says that the effect of the Treaty of Versailles “is covered by your article in detail and this is covered rather nicely, I must say.”

So what is not “covered rather nicely”? You see, I “call Hitler not anti-Semitic.”

It is still widely believed that to kill six million Jews simply because they are Jews is not anti-Semitic. What is anti-Semitic is to hate Jews and, in particular, to kill them out of hatred.

The e-mail from Brinton G. Marsden Jr. is, on the contrary, brief:

Mr. Navrozov,
Well done sir, spot on. I took a course in college called “Hitler’s Germany,” and many of the same points were touched. I’m a big WW2 history buff, since I had family members in both the US Army and the Army Air Corp.

One relative had both the Silver Star, and the Bronze Star for bravery.

Keep on telling the truth, and spread it to the ignorant. “Those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

An even briefer e-mail from Ken Bowers requires my comment:

Sir: Your description of the “Blutkitt” does not comport with history. The murder of Jews in Russia by Germans began before Stalingrad. Ken Bowers.

The “Blutkitt” was Hitler’s decision, after the rout of his troops near Moscow in December 1941, to make his subordinates begin the annihilation of Jews on the industrial scale (recall the Wannsee Conference, which he did not attend since he pretended that he had nothing to do with this its “final solution of the Jewish problem”). His subordinates should know that in case they would choose to betray him to the English-speaking to save their own lives, they would not escape the death sentence.

On June 2, a reader who calls himself Ousoonersocal, e-mailed to me and five other persons my NewsMax.com column “Stupidity, Not Evil, Brought Hitler into Power.”

He says: “Lev, I have never heard such a far-fetched viewpoint.”

Well, when in the West there were internationally known and heard political thinkers, they expressed “far-fetched viewpoints,” not platitudes. But who is an internationally known political thinker in the USA today, after the death of Sidney Hook, whom I had the honor to know personally?

A few years ago I learned that some British academic experts on Hitler’s Germany contend that Hitler knew nothing about the industrial annihilation of Jews. Their conclusion? It was his subordinates who did it, but the blame was shifted onto the innocent Hitler. Perhaps no one has been heard or will be heard asking internationally this question: How was it possible that the dictator of Germany did not know about the transportation from 1942 to 1945 of millions of victims to the buildings, constructed to gas and then cremate them?