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The recurring question of why the Jews didn’t leave Germany and Europe in time — 75 Comments

1. I’ve found working around the world that people are very aware of where they can and can’t go to get out of a risky or just unfortunate home country. They know visa policies of places like the USA better than many junior foreign service officers. We haven’t improved in our ability to manage/judge true refugee applicants, confusing pure economic migrants with people who will be killed.

   Equally important is the ability to shelter and transfer funds. The traditional Swiss bank accounts were lifesavers for many. Our current government obsession with grabbing every penny has ruined these safe havens. What would you do if the state police were after you for your religion and they froze your bank account?

2. William Rubenstein of the University of Wales calculated (IIRC) that 72% of the Jewish population of Germany had emigrated by September 1939 and that the rest would have been gone within a few years had not the war prevented emigration. The trouble was, quite a number went to neighboring countries. France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Poland were all under occupation by the middle of 1940.

   The United States was another destination for German Jews seeking to leave the country, though the number allowed to immigrate was restricted due to the Immigration Act of 1924. Between 1933 and 1939, more than 300,000 Germans, some 90% of them Jews, applied for immigration visas to the United States. By 1940, only 90,000 German Jews had been granted visas and allowed to settle in the United States…

   Depression-era legislation allowed the mortgaging of immigration quotas in order to provide more inflow.

   Here’s the answer, and it will almost undoubtedly surprise you

   No surprise. Have a gander at Steve Sailer’s comboxes. They’re chock-a-block with shnooks who fancy the Jewish population is a collection of criminal supervillains, so capable of damaging society no matter how small are their numbers.

3. It is worth remembering that many people in the 1930s, especially outside of Germany, simply had no true comprehension of the magnitude of the horror that the Nazis were planning. One illustration of this is a short story published in 1939; “Into Egypt” by Stephen Vincent Benet. It tells of the expulsion of the “Accursed People” (read Jews) from the land (read Germany) at the command of the Leader and the Party. It begins:

   ” It had finally been decided to let them go and now, for three days, they had been passing. The dust on the road to the frontier had not settled for three days or nights. But the strictest orders had been given and there were very few incidents. There could easily have been more.

   Even the concentration camps had been swept clean, for this thing was to be final. After it, the State could say “How fearless we are–we let even known conspirators depart.” It is true that, in the case of those in the concentration camps, there had been a preliminary rectification–a weeding, so to speak. But the news of that would not be officially published for some time and the numbers could always be disputed. If you kill a few people, they remain persons with names and identities, but, if you kill in the hundreds, there is simply a number for most of those who read the newspapers. And, once you start arguing about numbers, you begin to wonder if the thing ever happened at all. This too had been foreseen.”

   The story is told from the view point of a newly commissioned lieutenant in charge of a minor border crossing. He is fanatically loyal to the Leader and the Party, very proud to be part of this “great victory” and, at the same time, extremely anxious that he not fail in his first independent command. I won’t reveal the twist at the end.

   Benet (best remembered today for his story “The Devil and Daniel Webster”) obviously regarded the persecution of the Jews in Germany as an atrocity, a horror. His story shows this clearly. But, when we look back, knowing the real horrors of the Holocaust, how better the fate of those in his story looks compared to the ghastly reality. Only a few hundred killed in the camps? Just being forced to walk into exile with only what you could carry? How much better that would have been than enslavement, starvation, torture and the murder of millions. Benet died in the early ’40s so he never saw the evidence from the liberated concentration camps.

   You can find this story in a collection entitled “By the Waters of Babylon and Other Fantasies and Prophecies” Stephen Vincent Benet (available on Kindle).

4. I had read the same thing, as Art Deco notes, in a book called “The Myth of Rescue” a couple of years ago, by a researcher named William D. Rubenstein. He outlined very clearly that the majority of German Jews, especially the younger generation saw very clearly that there was no safety for them under the Nazis – and the only ones remaining in Germany were elderly, or optimistic, or had family responsibilities and couldn’t leave. And there were many – like Otto Frank’s family, who did leave, but didn’t go far enough, and were caught when Germany occupied Holland.
   The serious roundups and killings of Jews didn’t really get underway until after war began, and then there was damned little that could be done. An interesting book, I thought.

5. Those letters are just heart-breaking!

6. charles:

   I find them heart-breaking, too.

7. Sgt. Mom, another example of fleeing the Nazis but not far enough is the story of Francoise Frenkel. She was Jewish, born in Poland, and in 1921 she opened a French language bookstore in Berlin. It became a famous center for French culture and literature. She finally fled Germany in 1938 after Kristallnacht. Naturally, as a Francophile, she sought refuge in Paris. Not a good choice as it proved.

   Amazingly she survived the war and wrote a remarkable account of her experiences which has recently been reprinted: “A Bookshop in Berlin,
   The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman’s Harrowing Escape From the Nazis”.

8. John+F:
   Wait a minute! Benet wrote about concentration camps in 1939?!
   When most in America had zero knowledge of them. Remember, it was the Great Depression, and newspapers then were the same biased voices as now. I believe the US would not have entered the European war except for Pearl Harbor and Hitler, allied with Japan, then immediately declaring war on the USA. Yes, he did. Stupid? Yes.

   Did FDR et al. know this in 1939 or did they simply pretend ignorance, refusing to grant entry of the large majority of German Jews seeking US admission? A shipload of Jews was denied landing at all US ports at about that time, IIRC, after crossing the Atlantic. Several hundred souls.

   FDR was naturally a Democrat. The history of the Democratic Party is morally filthy, going all the way back to the Civil War era.
   Social Security when initiated was a con job, with eligibility at age 65. But life expectancy for a white American male that same year, 1935, was 64 years. Not coincidental, in my view.

9. My maternal grandfather was one of two surviving members of his entire extended family, who lived in northeast Poland, not far from Suvolk. I have family members who have been enslaved much more recently than any relatives of Ibram X. Kendi or Ta Nehisi Coates.

10. I have the impression there was much casual antisemitism in 30s America. That, combined with the isolationist mood of the time, made it unlikely FDR would have let in big waves of Jews immigration.

    Furthermore, though I haven’t looked into it, there is a fair amount of writing that FDR himself was at least somewhat antisemitic. It wouldn’t surprise me.

11. Cicero, yes people knew about concentration camps in 1939. Remember the Nazi had been in power about 6 years by then. The information was available…if you wanted to look for it. But people, at the time, thought of concentration camps not as mass extermination centers but open air prisons. It is also worth remembering that the Nazis took the term “concentration camps” from the British. The British set up concentration camps in the latter stages of the Boer War. They were intended to “concentrate” the population under British control and thus cut off support for Boer guerrillas. The British camps in South Africa did cause a lot of deaths, principally because a lack of medical knowledge and proper provisions. The Afrikaners still remember this with great bitterness.

    The sheer scale of the horrors discovered when Allied troops entered the camps was stunning. One of the reactions to it was to document it with movies and photographs so that people back home could see it for themselves. Otherwise, military commanders feared civilians would never believe it.

12. “Some 100,000 German Jews also moved to Western European countries, especially France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. ”

    Yes , Anne Frank wasn’t a Dutch Jewish girl, but rather a German Jewish girl.

    A bigger question should be why did Jews keep on returning to Germany after one genocide after the other .( the Shoah was one of many)
    the Ravensberg massacre, the Crusade and Rhineland massacres, the Black Plague massacres, the stealing of the host massacres, Hussite war massacres, thirty year war massacres etc,
    and when things were occasionally good it was a top down thing with a righteous sovereign, never the Volk.
    do we bear any accountability?

13. ”
    Furthermore, though I haven’t looked into it, there is a fair amount of writing that FDR himself was at least somewhat antisemitic. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
    hard core. when FDRyms was on the Harvard Board in the 20’s he instituted the Jewish quota

14. “My maternal grandfather was one of two surviving members of his entire extended family, who lived in northeast Poland, not far from Suvolk. I have family members who have been enslaved much more recently than any relatives of Ibram X. Kendi or Ta Nehisi Coates.”

    and your family came here long after scum like Obama were forced to give up their slaves

15. It was a reasonable calculation from 33 up until 38/39 that as a Jew one did not have a long-term future in Germany. Nazis took a certain pleasure in applying some rather unkind Nudge policies to encourage them to decamp. In 2021, the likes of Thaler and Sunstein are celebrated for giving Whitey the Nudge, whether he likes it or no. Forcing a wage slave to buy ‘Health Insurance’ that doesn’t insure his health isn’t as bad as making him wear a yellow star and cancelling his law licence or tearing up his habilitation, I’ll grant. Then again Jeremy Bentham or Peter Singer might have looked at relative numbers and areas under the curves — relative sum totals of human misery. Climate definitely got nastier in 38 with Kristallnacht and was clear that war was just around the corner and then emigration became orders of magnitude more difficult.

    But clearly the aim was to Nudge (Force. Same thing.) German Jews to emigrate, whilst of course emptying out their pockets.

    To wit, The Haavara Agreement:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement

    More interesting question about the mid-30s is why other countries were not super enthusiastic about an influx of Jews. All other things being equal, who wants an influx of anyone alien? So not super surprising that world was largely indifferent, except for diaspora Jews who had a perfectly natural concern for their ethnic kin. I guess so too, did engaged elements of the Left who until Molotov-Ribbentrop were ideologically bound to at least point the finger.

    Now, the Polish Jews were right to live in fear once Hitler started picking on Poland. As were the Poles. The Nazis were determined to get rid of as many Slavs as possible — perhaps keeping some of the peasantry around as serfs, but they ran a campaign of elimination against the Polish Intelligentsia from the get go once they had Poland. But again… it was possible for a Pole to have doubts about how things would go until 1939. Don’t forget that Poland got a Chunk of Czechoslovakia as part of C’s dismemberment by Hitler. The big push up until things soured in 39 was to get Danzig back and some kind of right of way to Koenigsberg. Poles were stupid not to cut a deal. Would have been a bad deal, but might have bought some time. Poles pretty much brought the First Partition upon themselves and didn’t do themselves any favours in the 30s after Pilsudski’s untimely death… hopefully they’ve learned.

    But still… think about being a Jew in Poland. You lived under a hyper-nationalist regime that in 1935 was probably *more* anti-Semitic in daily life to the average Jew than Germany itself was. But you got by. Why? I guess one reason was that a Polish Jew lived in a Sea of Jews mostly — there were a lot of them and the Poles were, well Slavs… not the most efficient most of the time. German efficiency later on… well… that was another thing.

    What I’m trying to get at is that we look at this with hindsight. In the moment it really wasn’t that clear. Until it became Very Clear. And then it was too late. But it’s always like this and suddenly Too Late when History turns into a Bitch.

    And so when Clio flipped into PMS Mode and the Nazis went full horror show on Slavs (more) and Jews (we *hear* more, but still 6M is a terrible crime), well what were a few more German Jews but an afterthought… so into the trains they went along with the rest.

    The lesson should be that past performance is no guide to future results and that beastliness goes exponential faster than we can imagine.

16. In addition to the Haavara Agreement, there’s this interesting historical footnote:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_settlement_in_the_Japanese_Empire

    Never let it be said that the Japanese lack a sense of humour. They named their plan to leverage Jewish Emigration to Manchukuo and other bits of their empire the Fugu Plan. Fugu is a deady poisonous (neurotoxin, no less) Puffer Fish which requires extremely careful handling and preparation — which if done successfully results in a culinary delight and if bungled rapidly kills he who ingests it. Safer than Russian Roulette, but there’s always that frisson when you sit down to guzzle Fugu Sashimi.

    Japanese Imperialists traipsing around China were not unfamiliar with Jewish Success.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassoon_family

    Just to pick the most prominent.

    To this day, one of the wealthiest families in Hong Kong is descended from a Sassoon protege:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadoorie_family

    Their bank account ticks over as I sit here with the aircon going. All hail the Kadoories. And to be fair I’d rather enrich them than the Chinese scumbag who owns the other power company.

    One of history’s weird by-ways and what-ifs.

17. Re: Fugu…

    Zaphod:

    One of the hottest sushi restaurants in San Francisco when I lived there was “Blowfish: Sushi to Die For.” Catchy. Pretzel, my yoga teacher, took me there for some computer work I did on her behalf.

    Apparently it’s still closed due to Covid, but looking to reopen. In the meantime a copycat restaurant in the Mission grabbed the name and is running with it.

18. As to what was known when, there are a couple of complexities.
    For example, most camps in the west were built as and run as forced labor camps. Dachau, one of the most recognizable, was built in 1933. It took in criminals, enemies of the party, communists, homosexuals, gypsies, etc. For all its horror, eighty-five percent of the intake survived the war.
    My father’s division, 104th ID TImberwolves, liberated Mittelbau Dora. About two thirds of those inmates survived.
    We can reasonably presume that conditions worsened as the war went on, which would mean the death rate in the beginning was not as high as it would have been later. So…don’t be a commie, keep your mouth shut about politics, you should be okay and not go to prison.

    It wasn’t until the Wannsee Conference, January of 42 when the war was well and truly on, that the formal process of total extermination was on the docket. Everything had been handled except, to be a smart ass, the railroad schedules, and that’s what Wannsee was about. These camps were to be built in Poland and only later than the forced-labor models of the west. Auschwitz killed 85% of its intake and would have done more if not interrupted by the Red Army which arrived with many of the most recent intake not yet processed plus the inmates required to do the dirty work.

    Whatever the Jews in Germany thought prior to, say, 1940, from the outside it may well have looked as if the Nazis were being particularly rough in handling the internal upsets–nothing like the US or UK or France or others would have done–which were embroiling much of Europe. Note that almost without pause, after the Armistice, large units of Friekorps were fighting in the Baltics. Clemenceau, looking at the chaos of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, remarked, “Must every little language have its own country?”
    The Spanish Civil War was inexplicable, killed many tens of thousands, and gave us the Fifth Column which proved that just because a guy’s on your side of a line and speaks with the same accent you do doesn’t mean he’s on your side.
    The Brits had, among others, the Tonypandy riots which were severe and required massive outside resources to quell. Why wouldn’t things get worse and in a benighted place like Germany, late opponent in the worst war in anybody’s grandfather’s living memory, get much worse?
    Then we might picture a politician asking a woman, most of whose male relatives were dead or crippled in the war and who has maybe one son left on hand what ought to be done about forced labor camps harboring rioters and suchlike in the accursed Germany?

    That national governments would do severe things to get on top and stay on top would not have surprised onlookers, even if the severity were seen to be excessive.

    Thus, I suggest, outside concern was likely in accord with what was happening, not what would happen, until nothing else could be done but win the war.

    As an appendix, the call to “bomb the camps” would have resulted, in the west, the deaths of tens of thousands who otherwise would have survived the war. And the extermination camps were in the east, beyond the combat radius of our bombers.

19. @Huxley:

    Catchy name. I like it.

    Second helpings all round!

    I took delivery of a kilogram of Biltong yesterday. Take a while to gnaw through that lot. All I need now is a Horse, a Mauser and some Britishers to shoot at.

    https://www.shootingtimes.com/editorial/longgun_reviews_st_boermodel_201007/99362

20. Richard Aubrey:

    Great stuff!

    Eisenhower and everyone fighting the Nazis, who thought they knew Nazi brutality, were still shocked by the real camps. The second-guessing about what we should have done is a little too easy.

21. Richard Aubrey:

    Just to add another grim detail, in the East, beyond Poland, the Germans killed millions IIRC without camps, Eisenstatzgruppen and the Heer (not just the SS).

    huxley, so true. As if the Poles were dealing with civilized regimes in 1939.

22. Another major branch of the Diaspora — I knew about the WWII refugees, but not the earlier migrations. But then, are Conversos* still Jewish?
    Somewhat like the distinction of white and non-white Hispanics**, I suspect that they are whatever suits the needs of the current Power That Be.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Latin_America_and_the_Caribbean

    The history of the Jews in Latin America began with conversos who joined the Spanish and Portuguese expeditions to the continents….the first Jews came with the first expedition of Christopher Columbus, including Rodrigo de Triana and Luis De Torres.[1]

    However, throughout the 15th and 16th centuries a number of Converso families migrated to the Netherlands, France and eventually Italy, from where they joined other expeditions to the Americas. Others migrated to England or France and accompanied their colonists as traders and merchants. By the late 16th century, fully functioning Jewish communities were founded in the Portuguese colony of Brazil, the Dutch Suriname and Curaçao; Spanish Santo Domingo, and the English colonies of Jamaica and Barbados. In addition, there were unorganized communities of Jews in Spanish and Portuguese territories where the Inquisition was active, including Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Peru. Many in such communities were crypto-Jews, who had generally concealed their identity from the authorities.

    By the mid-17th century, the largest Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere were located in Suriname and Brazil. Several Jewish communities in the Caribbean, Central and South America flourished, particularly in those areas under Dutch and English control, which were more tolerant.

    More immigrants went to this region as part of the massive emigration of Jews from eastern Europe in the late 19th century. During and after World War II, many Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to South America for refuge. In the 21st century, fewer than 300,000 Jews live in Latin America. They are concentrated in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, with the first considered the center of the Jewish population in Latin America.

    *”A converso, “convert”, was a Jew who converted to Catholicism in Spain or Portugal, particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries, or one of his or her descendants.”
    ** by TommyJay
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/06/11/whiteness-as-quasi-religious-dogma-in-the-new-anti-racism-church/#comment-2559101

23. Those missives are incredible and incredibly sad. Thank you for sharing them.

    I recently read “Defying Hitler” on recommendation from the commentariat here. Thank you for that.

24. Another good book that addresses the question of what people knew (or thought they knew) about Germany under the Nazis before the war is “Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945” by Julia Boyd, 2018. There were people who visited Germany in the 1930s and saw the growing threat. But there were also a lot of people who returned and essentially told everyone “Nazi Germany, it’s a great tourist destination!”

25. If you look hard enough, or even if you don’t, you will find examples of “man’s inhumanity to man” throughout history, in all places and for a myriad of reasons. We have this from the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica just for starters:
    “According to Thucydides, for example, the people of Melos were slaughtered after refusing to surrender to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, in ancient times it was common for victors in war to massacre all the men of a conquered population. The massacre of Cathari during the Albigensian Crusade in the 13th century is sometimes cited as the first modern case of genocide, though medieval scholars generally have resisted this characterization. Twentieth-century events often cited as genocide include the 1915 Armenian massacre by the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire, the nearly complete extermination of European Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and other groups by Nazi Germany during World War II, and the killing of Tutsi by Hutu in Rwanda in the 1990s.”
    Not to mention the Communist slaughters of hundreds of millions in the century just passed. So, it hardly comes as a surprise that Jews were targeted during one particularly notorious period. What does surprise me is the total absence of a single mention in any of these comments regarding the common denominator in all this carnage, namely, the inability of the slaughtered to fight back against the slaughterers. So allow me to interject this admonition: If you want to avoid being pogromed and genocided, never, ever give up your guns. Even if you are eventually unsuccessful in your efforts at self-defense, it’s better to die on your feet than on your knees.

26. OM. WRT non-camp massacres; among other things, they tell us of the regime’s determination which wouldn’t be stopped by some magic inconvenience or international condemnation.

27. @Steve:

    Yes to all.

    Jews without Guns could profitably go read Ron Unz for 30 minutes and then scald any incoming malefactors to death with the steam coming out their ears.

    But Guns are always best. You guys are still incredibly lucky to be able to have them.

28. Steve (retired/recovering lawyer):

    Their have been other genocides, it’s true, but the Holocaust was a unique genocide. Here’s a post of mine explaining what was unique about it.

29. Billy Wilder famously said that the optimists died in the gas chambers and the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.

30. A bigger question should be why did Jews keep on returning to Germany after one genocide after the other .( the Shoah was one of many)
    the Ravensberg massacre, the Crusade and Rhineland massacres, the Black Plague massacres, the stealing of the host massacres, Hussite war massacres, thirty year war massacres etc,

    Contemporary accounts from medieval sources can be rather florid. (Barbara Tuchman discusses the problem in A Distant Mirror). Try as a null hypothesis the notion that the massacres in question had a death toll an order of magnitude smaller than conventional accounts would indicate.

31. “Try as a null hypothesis the notion that the massacres in question had a death toll an order of magnitude smaller than conventional accounts would indicate.”

    But don’t try it at home on *this* one if you know what’s good for you 😀

32. The massacre of Cathari during the Albigensian Crusade in the 13th century is sometimes cited as the first modern case of genocide, though medieval scholars generally have resisted this characterization.

    Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie provided a quite detailed account of how the Albigensian crusade played out in one particular French village, and, no, there was nothing resembling any massacre.

33. But don’t try it at home on *this* one if you know what’s good for you

    Why do you fancy my family would object?

34. Twentieth-century events often cited as genocide include the 1915 Armenian massacre by the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire, the nearly complete extermination of European Jews

    I think about 1/3 of Europe’s Jewish population did survive. Britannica‘s going down hill.

35. Art Deco; Zaphod:

    The Jews kept being chased out of countries in Europe periodically, and then welcomed back by other regimes in those countries, only to be expelled again. Germany was actually one of the countries that, from the 1800s until the Nazis, gave the Jews the most rights. However, plenty of countries had higher percentages of Jews than Germany did, and were considered better for Jews. Poland was the country with the highest percentage of Jews because it was considered most welcoming de jure and de facto. That certainly didn’t make it any picnic for Jews, even before the Nazis came.

    As far as the massacres go, the German ones were probably at least as awful as described, and there is some genetic evidence for that. At least, that is a a hypothesis described here as an explanation for the severe genetic bottleneck in the past of Ashkenazi Jews as evidenced by their DNA. The DNA indicates that the Jews of Europe were reduced at one point to about 350 breeding individuals.

36. Art Deco:

    If you look at the link I gave to “Steve” the recovering lawyer, you will find this, which I believe explains what the encyclopedia is talking about:

    The Nazis lost the war. But they accomplished one of their major goals: the virtual elimination of the Jews of Europe. Before the Holocaust, the majority of the Jews of the world resided there. Afterwards, only a tiny fraction remained. Two out of every three Jews in Europe were murdered during the Holocaust, and most of the rest emigrated. This is part of the unique horror of the Holocaust, as well: that it succeeded almost completely in its audacious and seemingly impossible goal of making Europe Judenfrei.

    In other words, the Nazis killed nearly all the Jews who had remained in Europe. About a third had escaped through emigrating. Most of these Jews lived in Poland, where they were trapped when the Nazis successfully invaded and succeeded with lightning speed to take over the country. Many of them – like the author of the letters in the present post – tried desperately to escape even prior to the Nazi invasion but could not.

37. If not all German Jews saw it coming, the Diaspora was more on the ball:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany_Must_Perish%21

    History is not just weird. It’s weirder than any of us can imagine.

    A Thousand Years Hence, the Chinese Historians won’t know what to make of us.

38. In other words, the Nazis killed nearly all the Jews who had remained in Europe. About a third had escaped through emigrating.

    IIRC, there were ca. 1980 not quite 3 million Jews living in Britain, France, and Soviet Russia. I suppose some of them could have been those who returned to Europe after the war.

39. The DNA indicates that the Jews of Europe were reduced at one point to about 350 breeding individuals.

    I hear you. I’d have some native reserve to taking that at face value and would want to see if this conclusion is replicated. It’s hard to imagine a population that size being multifocal, so just where were they hiding out in 1300?

40. Rogan, in The Fall of The Ottomans, gives a detailed account of the Armenian issue. Originally, the Ottomans wanted to move Christians and western-oriented ethnic groups away from the coast(s) where they might aid the Allies.
    That included the unpopular Armenians.
    The result was a catastrophe made up of indifferent and incompetent logistics, the control by sadistic and/or incompetent managers of the move, and disease.
    I am reluctant to use the term “genocide” unless there is official notice in advance of the desire to eliminate an ethnic/religious group. What happened to the Armenians might have satisfied a number of Turkish citizens, or not, presuming anybody knew anything about it. But, unless there are references to elimination officially, it would be a worse Trail of Tears.

41. I’ve found this site to be useful in examining the various mass killings done over the centuries.
    http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html

42. Art Deco:

    Britain was a place to which some of the Jews of mainland Europe in countries with much larger Jewish populations managed to emigrate during the 1930s. Of course, by 1980, the Jewish population of Britain also included their descendants. Here are the population stats for Jews in Britain.

    I don’t know where you’re getting your figures, but here are current figures for the Jewish population of those countries and others. Not many Jews at all compared to before the war.

43. I don’t know where you’re getting your figures

    Newspaper stories lodged in my memory. I think the Jewish population of all three countries has declined. In the case of Russia and the old Union Republics, there was mass emigration after 1984, with the largest segment going to Israel. IIRC, there are only about 200,000 Jews left in Russia proper. I think it has declined in Britain and France as well. Non-orthodox Jews tend to have low fertility and Jews outside the orthodox and conservative illuminations tend to boil off into the surrounding goy population. One of the critiques of Charles Silberman’s A Certain People said he was far too sanguine about the vigor of Jewish community life and maintained pace Silberman that the descendants of the mid-19th century German Jewish influx simply did not consider themselves Jews and that undermined one of his theses (that conversion of gentile spouses balances out losses to the gentile society). (A prominent example would be the Ochs and Meyer families who’ve owned The New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively). Orthodoxy has had such a commanding position in British Jewry that you’d think they’d be demographically vigorous, but I think they’re declining there.

44. Art Deco:

    The Jews of Russia were mostly in Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Lithuania rather than Russia proper. However, quite a few of those people escaped east to Russia as the Germans advanced, and survived there, although a huge number were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine and the rest. After the war the remaining Jews of Russia (most of them ethnic rather than religious Jews) had a rough time under the Soviets and many emigrated to other countries (US and Israel, primarily I think) when they were finally allowed to do so.

45. Pingback:Strange Daze:

46. Edith Stein seemed to be coldly realistic about the degree of violence in the making.

47. Perhaps… but could be that Edith Stein is about as popular as Israel Zolli or Jean-Marie Lustiger in these parts.

    But objectively, a Convert who joined a strict religious order and did not convert merely to smooth way to marriage or assimilation / social advancement is a rare bird indeed and bespeaks an outlier mindset.

    Brave enough anyway. She had a chance to run and chose not to.

    Really though.. and as much as I enjoy poking folk with a stick.. the real lesson of the increasing troubles of the Jews in Europe during the 30s and then the switch flip to outright mass murder is that it’s all debatable and one can find example and counter-example and delicious irony until one is blue in the face but simple fact is that up until the gates of hell opened it was possible for people to doubt the outcome and comfort themselves with the thought that things couldn’t get much worse.

    Although like most non-Jews I am suffering from Holocaust Fatigue (Just the Facts, Ma’am) there’s a valuable lesson here which was I guess the point of Neo’s post. We live in Interesting Times now and it’s impossible to predict how bad things might become. Future Chinese or Robot Historians may well look back and wonder why we were so sanguine in 2021.

48. ” Future Chinese or Robot Historians may well look back and wonder why we were so sanguine in 2021.”

    For myself I am “sanguine” do to age, and personal conditions which make all those “flee-flee-flee” scenarios non-starters. Plus in any case, we, the USA, are the place others flee to when things get bad. We don’t really have a place to flee to and so we must stand and fight, as we can, where we are.

    One advantage we have over those in the ’30s is we now truly know, or should know, what monsters those who yearn for totalitarian rule are.

49. On seeing what’s coming, and fleeing:

    A family friend grew up in Vienna in the 1930s. Her father was a businessman. He saw what was coming and stashed money in various cities in East-Central Europe and in Turkey. They got out of Vienna in 1938 and managed to stay one step ahead of the Nazis. First Prague, then Belgrade, then Istanbul, then, finally, Palestine. In Palestine they taught our friend to sew and to shoot. With a Mauser, but an 8×57, not a 7×57 (the South American/Boer variant). She also met her husband there. He was originally from Berlin, got out in 1939, and served with the British Army in the Middle East and Italy. They emigrated to the States after the war.

    Austrian filmmaker Axel Corti made a great dramatic trilogy about Jewish WWII refugees for Austrian TV back in the 1980s. Called “Where To and Back” (“Wohin und Zuruck”), it came out on DVD in 2007 or 2008:

    https://jewishfilm.org/Catalogue/films/wheretoandback.htm

    Samples from the third installment, set in Vienna in late 1945:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAMKy1Ee_9o

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQeMjqPx5os

    Reviews on NPR and in The Forward:

    https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=28310288

    https://forward.com/culture/12482/to-black-and-back-01129/

    Worth watching, if you can still get it.

50. @Hubert:

    “A family friend grew up in Vienna in the 1930s. Her father was a businessman. He saw what was coming and stashed money in various cities in East-Central Europe and in Turkey. They got out of Vienna in 1938 and ***managed to stay one step ahead of the Nazis***.”

    Smart man. It’s not just about Head-on-a-swivel-sniff-the-air, it’s not just about being fortunate enough to have the financial means to escape, let alone set up diversified options for escape, there’s some X-Factor ‘Always Be Closing’ survival trait as well. You had to be quick on your feet and lucky… but that flexibility was the have-to-be-in-it-to-win-it precondition for ‘Luck’. Escape like much business success was probably more often an iterative process than the ‘Miracle’ or ‘Good Samaritan’ tropes which make for compelling drama.

51. Can Do! assumes there will be Chinese historians in 1000 years. Much like the Inca Historians, Aztec Historians, Egyptian Historians, the future is a funny thing, but we don’t live there.

52. @om:

    Chinkydides:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Records_of_the_Grand_Historian

    “In all, the Records is about 526,500 Chinese characters long, making it four times longer than Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and longer than the Old Testament.[16][17]”

    Ever heard of the Lindy Effect? It’s a handy metric for estimating survival of institutions, trends, whatever. GIYF.

    I’d say there’s a far better chance of there being Han Chinese Historians 2000 years hence than White Caucasian Chroniclers.

    Here’s the thing. The Aztecs, Incas, Egyptians are History. Their genes survive as Fellaheen Peasantry. Probably coming to live next door to you next year :).

    The Chinese have a good 3,000+ years of continuous history and Civilization. They absorbed and assimilated barbarian invaders multiple times and wore them down.

    Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great that you’re an American Chauvinist. So go forth and smite some people who have no business living in your street, town, county… Bloviating about Chinese is just wasting your Oxygen budget.

53. Can Do! lecturing me about bloviating about the Chinese. Do mirrors or work in Can Do! land? Are there concepts of “self awareness” or “own goal?” in the mind of “Can Do!” ?

    Here’s a clue for Can Do! Next door neighbors are hispanic Americans and have been for most of the last 40 years. Good people. Try your dusky people phobias on someone else. It’s the character not the melanin. You are such a small tool.

    Can’t Do! beeblebrox Can’t Do!

54. Can Do!

    GIYF

    Duck Duck Go.

    I try not to give Google any clicks. You be you Can Do!

    Worship the Han, your new masters, everyone has a price or so I’ve heard.

55. Zaphod,

    Our friend’s father was apparently a very clever man, and very quick on his feet. She told a story about how he once passed off his son as his wife’s gigolo to deflect a documents check during a surprise visit by the police. The family was accompanied in flight by their Austrian housekeeper, who exclaimed “Da iss er schon wieder!”–“There he (Hitler) is again!”–when the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia (1939) and Yugoslavia (1941). Eventually they got beyond his reach, but there were some close calls.

    Axel Corti’s “Welcome in Vienna” has some interesting interplay between Sergeant Adler, a German Jewish Communist refugee serving with a U.S. Army propaganda outfit, and his Jew- and Communist-hating alcoholic lieutenant, an earlier German immigrant to the States. You might enjoy it.

56. The Chinese have a good 3,000+ years of continuous history and Civilization.

    There’s been continuous history and civilization in the Near East, in India, and in Europe all that time. The Erlitou culture was confined to a modest segment of the Yellow River valley and left no written records. It postdated the Indus Valley civilization, Sumer, Egypt, and Minoan Crete by more than 1,000 years. The advent of the Shang dynasty was contemporary with that of Mycenean Greece and the Ganges civilization in India.

57. Although like most non-Jews I am suffering from Holocaust Fatigue

    No, you’re suffering from projection.

58. @Hubert:

    “She told a story about how he once passed off his son as his wife’s gigolo to deflect a documents check during a surprise visit by the police.”

    That’s some next-level Judo right there. Julius Streicher would not have been amused by that bit of borrowing.

    Thanks for the Corti tip. Would have been fascinating to have been a fly on the wall during Gustave Gilbert’s interviews with the surviving Nazi leadership before the Nuremberg Trials. Must read the book he wrote about this one day.

59. Updated for 2021 (taking the broad view)?
    https://www.jns.org/opinion/lethal-own-goal-war-journalism/

60. “…and many emigrated to other countries (US and Israel, primarily I think)…”

    Rather ironically, many decided (and were encouraged by the German govt.) to move to Germany…(to be joined later by significant numbers of Israeli youth who were among other things attracted by the vibrancy, openness and effervescence of a reunited Berlin; though I suppose it may also have appealed to a certain perversity of sentiment, not uncommon in youth, generally, at least until they “grow up”…).

    “History may not repeat itself but it [has a wicked sense of humor]”?

61. “…interesting interplay…”

    Reminds one of the not-so-delicate dynamics behind the Iron Curtain woven into “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”…..

62. @BarryMeislin

    They’d be well advised to not make it excessively vibrant. Not everybody was positively inspired by the Christopher Isherwood stuff last time around.

63. Good point….

    Though I’m not sure they really listen to anyone, actually.
    (It’s more like “I am a Smartphone” so sod off…).
    Though maybe at some stage they’ll “listen” to Erdogan and his merry minions of Young (German-speaking) Turks…hopefully before it’s too late….

    But at least when push comes to shove they’ll have somewhere to go back to (unless Hamas, Iran, Hezbullah and friends get lucky…which is entirely possible, I mean what are the odds? One in ten? Twelve—now THERE’s a lucky number—Fifteen? Twenty?…To be sure, this time around they have “Biden” at their backs…but—ssshhhh—don’t tell anyone, since it is very well known, by practically everyone, that the Democrats are fully supportive of the Zionist Entity, didn’t you know…)

    Well, never a dull moment….sigh…..

64. @Barry Meislin:

    “I am a Smartphone”

    Well played, Sir!

    (Om: Look up Ping Pong Diplomacy)

    “Well, never a dull moment….sigh….”

    The Chinese “May you live in Interesting Times” curse is apocryphal, but…

    *hoofbeats*

    Oh.. crap!

65. Ping Pong diplomacy was really terrific while it lasted. Seems like such an innocent time, actually. (And relatively cheap as sports go, especially in relation to the Nuclear Olympics.)

    Now, it just seems like endless Wuhan Follies, bottomless Orwellian pieties and a nasty world that’s ever increasingly ZUBAR.
    http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0621/steyn061421.php3

    Gotta be a way out, though, especially since the evil ones usually, ultimately, do themselves in…but “How long, Lord?….

66. “…usually, ultimately…”

    Exhibit ~:
    https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/moneighteen-months-later-democrats-first-impeachment

    OTOH, what if a sequoia-sized scandal fell down in the forest and all news about it was squelched?….

67. Rather ironically, many decided (and were encouraged by the German govt.) to move to Germany…(to be joined later by significant numbers of Israeli youth who were among other things attracted by the vibrancy, openness and effervescence of a reunited Berlin;

    Yah. The Jewish World Review puts the Jewish population of Germany at 118,000. I think it was around 33,000 in 1980.

    Total population within the boundaries of Tsarist Russia is about 250,000, of whom 65% are supposedly in Russia proper and 19% in the Ukraine.

68. Zaphod studies his ancient history and finds the China Card and Ping Pong Diplomacy. Lived through that. What does that have to do with this topic? Well it is Can Do! and a new day. More smoke from the CCP it seems.

    Can’t Do! beeblebrox Shan’t Do!

69. Barry,

    Good catch. Fiedler the Jew and Mundt the ex-Nazi: two people ostensibly on the same side and in the same organization (East German secret police) who hate each other’s guts. “The Spy Who Came In from the Cold” has to be one the grimmest movies ever made.

    Om,

    I appreciate Zaphod’s warnings about the PRC’s growing technical expertise. Remember the U.S. Navy’s dismissal of the IJN’s surface warfare capabilities before WWII. We got a rude awakening in the Java Sea and at Savo Island. If the balloon goes up in the Pacific again, we won’t have a year in which to make mistakes and get our act together.

    My problem with Zaphod’s race realism prism is precisely what he is always encouraging us to pay attention to: what is happening in front of our noses. I live in a small town in the deep South that is 50 percent African American. Most of the people I rub shoulders with around town and at work just want to get along and provide for their families. Unless I’m missing something–and I’ve lived here almost 20 years–the level of interracial tension is low. In fact, people are extremely civil to each other. The kind of black-on-white violence that Zaphod likes to highlight hasn’t happened here (black-on-black violence is another story), perhaps because of the region’s history (e.g. the Klan, and the cautionary realization that there are still some people around who would be happy to revive it if given a pretext). Furthermore, I work every day at university with black and brown people who are way smarter than I am, including a physicist colleague from the Virgin Islands. Finally, I’m old enough to remember when there was a rising black middle class in this country and inner-city black high schools that outperformed their white counterparts. Given Zaphod’s experience, I understand his jaundiced view of multiracial societies and his contempt for CivNattery. Based on my own Lived Experience, I don’t buy into his worldview. Yet. With enough malice and stupidity, however, anything is possible. So he could turn out to be right in the end.

70. Hubert:

    cdrsalamander.blogspot.com has been keeping an eye on the state of the US Navy and the CCP (and most other actors) for a long time. I check in with them daily. Zaphod is way behind their curve as far a information goes. Three Gorges Dam, 3000 year flood. His race obsession is a sad thing to “watch.” I see Zaphod stoking that malice and stupidity.

71. I live in a small town in the deep South that is 50 percent African American. Most of the people I rub shoulders with around town and at work just want to get along and provide for their families.

    There’s daily life, which is unremarkable. Then there’s the world of politics / media / education / and corporate HR, which is insane. The question is, can the normies get their act together and stomp the woke-tards flat? I’m not optimistic.

72. @Hubert:

    That’s a fair and charitable statement of my positions, for which thanks.

    I think that you are fortunate to live in a smaller community and in the South at that. It’s a truism that racial relations are generally better in the Rural South (even if Northerners cannot get their heads around this) because Blacks and Southern Whites know each other’s foibles and have long experience of rubbing along together. Whether that is true or not today in the bigger cities is a separate question.

    There’s always going to be Blacks who are smarter and better people than I am. That’s cool. Bump into them professionally too, even out here — although Asia is not necessarily the most fun posting for them. But while it’s the individual who counts in our normal daily lives, it’s Mass Man who matters when the Earth tips off its axis (metaphor alert for Art+Deco + Om). Which seems to be on the cards.

    For the rest, I try to be a Realist. Idealists of all sorts have killed more than enough people already directly and via their policy prescriptions and it worries me that Idealism has insinuated itself into just about every aspect of discourse today.

73. @om:

    Commander Salamander spends most of his time railing about Nautical Tranny Worship Week and pissing money away on Littoral Combat ships and the various corruption / incompetence cluster@#@%ks around getting the Ford Class carriers shaken down and the catapults working, not to mention the minor detail of their being all kinds of horror show holes in planning for next generation of what they’re going to fly off these giant floating missile targets.

    You *do* realise that the main reason the USN has carriers in 2021 is because the only Cursus Honorum that counts in the USN is through Naval Aviation to command of a battle group. Cart pulling horse. They’re useful for intimidating Somalis. Giant Floating Big Swinging @#$%s.

    So I wouldn’t say that it’s all under control.

    I also wouldn’t say that All Is Lost, We’re Doomed!

    But see if you can get your head around this basic concept:

    In both World Wars, the Western Democracies started off way behind the Militarist Non-Democracies — a whole bunch of poor sods had to die killed by incompetent peace time perfumed princes and boondoggle equipment that didn’t perform as advertised before military reverses taught the relevant lessons. This used to be a feature, not a bug. The Arsenal of Democracy (hohoho) bestirred itself, spooled up, processed the information from its ‘unfortunate early mistakes’ (Open Society, yay!) and in a year and a bit was excreting Liberty Ships like you after a trip to your local Turkish Kebab shop.

    Given a long enough war with the right incentives and your factories out of range of the enemy on a huge continent with bloody great oceans protecting it and a more or less homogeneous more or less agreed on kicking asses population whipped up by a patriotic press (Yes, Virginia), well yeah. All the squabbling competing interests and the freer movement of information signals through the entire vast decision making process will probably beat out the Militarist Monolithic Robot State of Prussians or Japs. Gross oversimplification, but in effect that is the argument.

    Great. Tried and Tested. Worked Twice Before.

    That’s a huge trend we got right there. Twice. Let’s bet the farm on it.

    OK it’s 2021. Distance means next to nothing. Your factories are mostly inside your one serious Peer Competitor’s landmass. You don’t have time to spend a year sorting your @#$% out. And even if you did have a year, you can’t build back Pittsburgh and 50 other cities.

    So I’d be putting on my Yamamoto Cap and thinking hard.

    Oh.. and blowing the Three Gorges Dam. That’s Los Angeles and San Diego. Might be worth the trade. Not my call.

    Hint: During the Japanese rape and pillage of China the KMT did this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood

    to try to stop a Japanese advance. You might want to look at how the Communists broke Nationalist morale at the Siege of Changchun and other sieges late in the Civil War. There’s a different calculus about human life once conflict starts with the Chinese and other East Asians.

    I think better to be focusing on cleaning out the Augean Stables at home in the USA and instituting some kind of Autarky to get back a good deal of the physical and social capital which has been strip mined and exported these past decades. Of course the guilty parties who would do badly in a National Purification / Scouring of the Shire would rather see you die in an EMP event while they chill in their bunkers than that happen.

    America is still a great power and there’s a huge amount of ruin in a nation… if nobody does anything stupid.

    Smart money should be on letting the Chinese dig their own holes in their own time.

    But what would I know?

74. Pingback:Once Burned, Twice Wary – Chicago Boyz

75. I recommend the The Journal of Helene Berr published in 2009. It is the diary of a Parisian Jewish girl in her eraly 20s. Being an older man, I almost didn’t read it, not wanting to wade through crushes and such. I couldn’t put it down. The journal entries take you through the increasing humiliations imposed by nazi occupation to the unhappy end. This young woman knows what is coming, is alarmed by the denial of many around her, but decides not to flee, but to stay and help her community within her means.

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