Was the Holocaust inevitable? So asks Patrick Buchanan, unconsciously lending simple, eloquent expression to a theme that recurs throughout his historical articles: that the root causes for the Holocaust are somehow elusive. I will deal with Buchanan’s article in two segments. The first deals with his ignorance regarding Hitler’s attitude toward France and Great Britain; the second with the Holocaust itself.
Buchanan asks several rhetorical questions which he supposes prove his assertion that Hitler “sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain”. This is a basic misconception, one which confuses the admiration Hitler supposedly had for the British Empire with the assumption that Hitler “liked” or had affection for the British themselves. Buchanan writes:
Hitler never demanded return of any lands lost at Versailles to the West. Northern Schleswig had gone to Denmark in 1919, Eupen and Malmedy had gone to Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine to France. Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain — a war he never wanted. Why did he build his own Maginot Line, the Western Wall, in the Rhineland, if he meant all along to invade France? If he wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?
The simple fact is, Hitler did not want to fight a war with Britain or France because it didn’t suit his ultimate purpose. Not because he liked them, or because he sought an “alliance” or “friendship” (though he would have no doubt made good use of such a false pledge) but because his designs lay to the east. He wanted to swallow up Russia, at least as far as the Urals. It would have been terribly difficult to do that while also fighting two major powers in the west.
It is possible that Hitler may never have gone to war with Britain and France. It is possible that he might have been content with his Nazi hyperpower state, and he might very well not have sought to dominate the entire hemisphere, effectively reducing the British and French Empires to nervous satellite status. But the reality is, Hitler would not have lived forever, and his supposed affinity for Britain would have gone to the grave with him. Then, Britain and France would have to face an uncertain future set beside a massive, super-powerful, super-militant, morally-bankrupt state… and hope that they didn’t do anything to upset the Germans. (This seems to be Buchanan’s lofty assessment.)
My counter-argument is simple: Chamberlain and Churchill, both astute and successful statesmen, knew that this future (the best possible future, remember) wasn’t terribly advantageous to Britain. They set about making certain that the balance of power in Europe didn’t shift to an anti-democratic regime.
Buchanan suggests that Britain’s intervention was self-defeating by pointing out that the war led to the loss of their Empire. Is Buchanan, a citizen of the United States of America, the land that acts as a beacon of freedom to the entire world, honestly asserting that the independence of India, Burma, Malaysia and other Commonwealth nations from British overlordship was a bad thing? Perhaps it lowered the coffers a little in London, but, really, is that sufficient cause for a descendant of rebel colonists to start thinking like a Tory Loyalist? I think not. The break-up of the British and French empires was, by any measure, welcome.
Dictators who repeatedly break pledges, invade and annex neighboring nations, then set about committing ethnic cleansing within those nations are not to be trusted or befriended. Whether they seek alliance or friendship with you or not is irrelevant. I would have thought an American conservative would understand this.
Now I shall move on to the more significant topic of the Holocaust. How does Patrick Buchanan define the Holocaust? Most historians, including those who trained me, would define it as the systematic efforts made by the Nazi state to eliminate racial and political undesirables within the lands held or occupied by the forces of the Third Reich and its allies.
Buchanan is not a professional historian, and it is to this fact that I attribute his naïve and ignorant assumption that the Holocaust really only began with the Wannsee Conference and the genocidal efforts made after it.
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table. That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.
This seems to suggest that the Wannsee Conference was the genesis of Nazi efforts to eradicate the non-Aryan populace within their living space and the areas they had occupied. Not so. As Buchanan himself points out in this article, Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The SS-Einsatzkommando units went across the Russian border at the same time and were in full operation one week after the invasion. By the time of the Wannsee Conference, most expressly in western Russia and the Baltic regions, SS-Einsatzkommando units had already shot, bayoneted and beaten to death hundreds of thousands of Jews and other ethnic and ideological undesirables. By any reasonable definition, this must be viewed as an integral part of the Nazi Holocaust, and it was certainly treated as such by the post-war prosecutions held in Nuremberg.
Buchanan’s ignorance on this matter goes further. If we are to view the Holocaust as a systematic effort made by the Nazi state to eliminate racial and political undesirables within the lands held or occupied by the forces of the Third Reich, we must go back even further in time, to the infamous German T4 program (erroneously referred to as a “euthanasia program”) which was responsible for the systematic murder not only of the mentally ill, the physically deformed or disabled, but even those subjectively assessed as suffering from “mongoloidism” or “idiocy”.
After September of 1939, the criteria for selection was eased even further. The program was applied to all ages, to those with “limited impairments” and, yes, simply being Jewish fell within the new parameters. In 1939, under the T4 program, a special department within the wider program was set up expressly to kill “minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds”, most of the intended victims being children. Thousands were killed by that department and hundreds of thousands more of the other “undesirables” who threatened “German racial hygiene” were murdered by the program as a whole.
Buchanan compounds his misunderstanding by associating “the Holocaust” with only the work of the larger extermination camps, which went into full operation only after the dates he describes. This is, however, completely overlooking the fact that the Chelmno extermination camp had been in full operation since 1941. Over the course of the war, around 150,000 Jews, Gypsies and Slavs were killed in Chelmno, many from the Polish Ghettos. They had been shipped to Chelmno, mainly from Lodz, and we know that the extermination program was in full swing in 1941, long before the Wannsee Conference. We know that in late 1941, the Jewish population of Kolo (a town near Chelmno), some 2,000 Jews were sent to the camp, where they were gassed to death.
If the option had been available to him, would Hitler, instead of commit genocide, simply have expelled all such “undesirables” from Germany and the areas he occupied? I suppose he might, but such a question is moot, because it introduces an element which was not open to the German leader. It was not open to him because he had chosen to wage an aggressive war on two fronts. Buchanan seems to believe that if only Britain had been more compliant with militant German expansionism and the British Navy not quite so powerful, Hitler would have simply sent all the Jews to Madagascar, where they’d have lived happily ever after.
This is unsupported by the available evidence. Hitler had every opportunity to remove the eventual victims of the T4 program from Germany. He had been killing them from the beginning of 1939 – before the war with Poland, Great Britain and France. He could have shipped them off to Africa or wherever, but it was cheaper to kill them. There is no reason to believe that Hitler would have accorded the Jews, Gypsies or Slavs any greater degree of consideration. That is the kind of man Hitler was. It is perhaps time Buchanan realised that.
Buchanan in fact seems unable to recognise Hitler as a supreme sociopathic murderer. Surely any study of Hitler’s actions must originate with the basic moral consensus that ethnic cleansing is wrong. In the same way he blithely overlooks the right of non-Europeans to live independently of European Imperial overlordship, Buchanan overlooks the basic criminality of genocide and cheerfully goes straight to the mechanics of ethnic cleansing. The logic seems to go like this: Hitler can’t just ship them out; those horrid allies are making that impossible by fighting back against his war of aggression, so therefore it is the fault of the western allies that Hitler decided to kill off millions of civilians. That is patently absurd and morally reptilian.
As for his constant and bizarre attacks on Mr. Churchill, I can but ascribe them to jealousy. Churchill – no admirer of Stalin or Stalinism – in 1940-41 saw the realities of his situation in regard to Russian involvement in the war clearly. Either the Nazis took Europe, or the Russians became involved in the war and they took eastern Europe as a buffer. Either all of Europe would be doomed, or half stood a chance. Churchill chose the lesser of two evils. Perhaps Buchanan might have chosen differently?
“…for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.”
Why should an American patriot like Buchanan be trying to “root cause” the Nazi extermination program to the western powers which resisted Nazism? I wrongly assumed that it was only in vogue for the American left to find fault wherever possible with the western democracies.
The answer to the question Patrick Buchanan poses isn’t elusive; it is quite uncomplicated. The Holocaust was brought about by a man who thought a good number of our fellow human beings weren’t human beings at all, and thus deserved to die. It wasn’t inevitable, and the shame of the western nations lies only in the fact that we did not act sooner.
If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter? You might also consider making a donation to the Counterknowledge.com fighting fund.
Click here to sign up for free RSS updates.
Download the free 
Join 
23 responses
“Most historians, including those who trained me, would define it as the systematic efforts made by the Nazi state to eliminate racial and political undesirables within the lands held or occupied by the forces of the Third Reich and its allies.”
Great post, but I think the term Holocaust would generally be understood as applying particularly to the Nazi ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’.
In her 1993 book “Denying the Holocaust,” Deborah Lipstadt briefly discusses Buchanan. She drew back from calling him an outright Holocaust denier. But she pointed out that he has been parroting elements of the denier narrative since at least the late nineteen-eighties.
@ Steve
Thanks for the kind words. I always try to avoid being too specific when I use the term ‘Holocaust’, because I’ve found that it can raise some terribly raw emotions in people, especially Poles, Roma and other Eastern Europeans whose families suffered in much the same way as the Jews of the same region.
The way I see it (and it is only my view) we ought to try to be ambiguous about the Nazi atrocities, because while the Jews constituted an extremely large number of victims, their suffering was part of a larger atrocity which Hitler’s regime inflicted upon Europe. When we reflect on it, be we Jews, Christians or whatever, it should be as a shared experience, rather than something that happened predominantly to one group or another.
@ Eric
I don’t know where Buchanan’s head is at. While the things he says are irrational, he’s clearly not crazy. Perhaps he is instead quite smart - perhaps his intent from the start was to write on a sensitive topic from a point of view that is guaranteed to generate attention and an emotional reaction. The book that he wrote in connection with his article no doubt sold quite well because of it.
Great article, one small point though. The assertion “Is Buchanan, a citizen of the United States of America, the land that acts as a beacon of freedom to the entire world, honestly asserting that the independence of India, Burma, Malaysia and other Commonwealth nations from British overlordship was a bad thing”?
An American could quite easily defend Colonialism, just because they went into the Colonialism game late didn’t mean that they didn’t do it at all. American Samoa, the USVI, Guam et all still remain as Colonies. Just because they paid cash for them in some cases doesn’t make them any less colonial. Furthermore America has a great many other colonies, New Mexico, California, Texas et all, they simply took them from another Colonial power. - Spain. America greedily ate up the Spanish colonies once they had encouraged the citizens of those countries to revolt. I defy you to show me the difference between American Colonial troops in Manilla or the Canal Zone and British Colonial troops in Bombay et all. The only difference betwen the two Officers messes would be the fact that the Battle Honours would have mostly different place names and the Regimental Colonel in the American mess wouldn’t be drinking Pink Gin.
Can’t blame America for that, they were merely following the Standard Opperating Procedures of the time. Oh and freedom for Burma a bad thing - err, it hasn’t done the poor citizens of Myanmar any favors. When you’re arguing against the evils of Colonialism its best to keep quiet about Burma, Zimbabwe, Uganda etc.
Nevertheless a great article.
Pat Buchanan disturbs me. I’m an avid consumer of MSNBC, and he frequently appears on shows on that station as the “conservative analyst”. He’s obviously very bright, and has a JARRING combination of extremely insightful moments and outlandishly absurd and hateful rhetoric.
I think Buchanan is an example of how the extreme right and the left (to use conventional terminology) come full circle.
Often, ol’ Pat sounds more like Noam Chomsky than, say, William F. Buckley.
btw, I don’t think Buchanan is `conservative’ anything; he’s a fascist in the original sense - that of a Mussolini or a Franco (as opposed to Hitler). That is, he wouldn’t go for anything so bad as kiling off all the Jews; but if *somebody else* decided that was ok - well, meh.
Pat Buchanan is one of the worst pushers of counterknowledge out there because he is obviously a prolific author and a mainstream pundit on MSNBC, and people respect him. Flirting with revisionism? No, he’s getting down and dirty with revisionism.
Buchanan “blithely overlooks the right of non-Europeans to live independently of European Imperial overlordship” - I won’t defend Buchanan’s other views, which are evil, but there’s no right of non-Europeans to live independently of European rule. I am a white Texan who is about to get “ruled” by an African and his Democratic Party, for whom my state did not vote. Do I have a “right to live independently” of non-Texan rule? Given what an ass my governor is, must I *want* that right?
Non-Europeans, like Europeans, have instead the right to life, liberty, and property. Who does the actual governing is immaterial. Good luck retaining any life, liberty, and property under SLORC or Mugabe.
@ Chris
I would never attempt to downplay any proven historical wrongdoing by any western power - that certainly wasn’t my goal in this piece.
Rather, what I was referring to was the role the United States has played in forcing the old powers of Europe to de-colonialise, and the assistance they have provided (through recognition and trade) to the native peoples of those regions in their effort to build new, self-sustaining societies. This is quite clearly seen in India and Malaysia, but less clearly so in Indochina.
Buchanan had no place in sweeping that aside and suggesting, in a truly bigoted fashion, that the locals were better off being ruled from Westminister and Paris.
@ Greg
I think I even saw him on Fox fairly recently. Which I couldn’t fathom at all. Normally they have better sense.
Well, not always. They still continue to consult the fake Mossad spy Juval Aviv about Israeli, Palestinian and terrorism matters, despite the fact that I have phoned them and warned them about him being an anti-Israeli fake. Look out for my article next week, which is about him and a colleague of his, a fake DIA agent. Together, they helped to give birth to the modern “truther” movement.
@ Wayne
I think he needs to do a great deal more reading. He’s clearly exhausted the “hate Israel” collection of his local library and could benefit from a little variety.
@ Number 6
He’s a fantastic self-promoter, no doubt about it. I merely find his methods to be loathsome (I won’t say “Reptilian” again, because of my honored Lizardoid guests).
@ David
Perhaps “right” is the wrong word. Historically, there is no right to live free of oppression. However, there is a clear predicate of rebellion and revolution that makes imperial endeavors far more difficult to undertake. If enough people feel oppressed in a given region, they’ll throw out their oppressors. It’s a basic human truism.
As for Obama being an African, I don’t subscribe to the notion that he is of Kenyan birth. It strikes me as unsupported by the available evidence.
Whenever I hear Buchanan and his ilk discuss the Holocaust, I’m left with the uneasy feeling that, whatever they may think of the causes of the Holocaust, they’re not 100% sure that it wasn’t a good idea.
“If the option had been available to him, would Hitler, instead of commit genocide, simply have expelled all such “undesirables” from Germany and the areas he occupied?”
Of course. That’s why the effort to kill all the Jews was called the “final solution”. Earlier “solutions” to the Jewish ‘problem’ revolved around moving them into buffer areas between ‘greater’-Germany and its perceived enemies. But one the magnitude of the war made these other ’solutions’ impracticable, Hitler decided to ’solve’ the Jewish problem once and for all.
Well… let’s not get too ambiguous, because it’s a favorite tactic of Holocaust deniers to claim that Jews weren’t really singled out as a group for extermination — they just “happened to die” from disease, starvation, or stray bullets, as many other Europeans did during the war.
Wayne:
Although your characterization of Buchanan as a Fascist is spot on, your use of Franco as an exemplar in this particular case is inappropriate. Franco went out of his way to save Jews during the war.
*Franco went out of his way to save Jews during the war.*
Right, true enough. Even so, I don’t think Buchanan would give a darn if (in the contemporary context) Iran were to destroy Israel with a nuclear bomb. No, he wouldn’t press the button, never ever, but if someone else…
This sort of thing isn’t new, the former Thatcher cabinet minister Alan Clark was coming out with similar stuff a decade or so ago - if we’d left the Nazis to it then Britain and France would have been left alone with our empires intact and so our choosing to fight him was a mistake. As for the holocaust, Clark seemed to brush it aside with relativist arguments about our alliance with Stalin. Disgraceful stuff, of course, but not uncommon amongst the British rightwing at the time; there’s a popular idea that many of the British right were “pro-fascist” and a few of them certainly were but for the most of them the problem was that they didn’t see it as their fight or their problem.
As for Buchanan, he’s no fascist, more a paleoconservative. Fascists actually like military adventure and conquest, it’s one of the cornerstones of their ideology. Paleoconservatives, conversely, are very much the “stay-at-home and only fight to defend your own borders” types.
“British conservative right”, I meant. Obviously the fascist right were pro-fascist.
I agree that Pat is way offbase on this. You have to understand, though, that it’s part of his overall argument that the US’ involvement in foreign wars always has been ill-advised. He’s wrong about WW2, and I’m rather sorry to see him get so caught up in this no-win aspect of his narrative; but a much better case can be made that if the US hadn’t gone into the Great War, WW2 would probably not have occurred.
As to imperialism, some has been horrific — the Belgians in the Congo, for example — some uneven (e.g. the French), and some mostly constructive (the British). It would seem to me, given the history of e.g. Pakistan, Zimbabwe, or Uganda, difficult to argue that decolonialization was an unalloyed blessing.
Listen to these idiots here mumble! How pathetic! First, naziism was LEFTIST, not rightist. Second, if the evidence for the holocaust is sooo overwhelming, then why the frantic need to shove anyone who dares question any of it into a prisno cell. There’s your solution.
Third, the Jewish bolsheviks were much worse than the nazis.
Hitler’s racial theories did not come out of a vacuum.
I think this point needs to be made again-and-again in this era of Islamic intolerance, western anti-semitism and the vitriolic hatred by the left and right towards the Jewish homeland, Israel.
Mr. MacConnell,
I think you ignored the first half of Buchanan’s argument. I only agree with that first half. I believe that, given Hitler’s rise to power, WW2 from that point on became inevitable.
However, it is almost a certainty - as much as any hindsighted speculation can be a “certainty” - that had the World War I victors utilized something akin to the post-WW2 Marshall Plan, in order to rebuild Germany and make friends of them, someone like Hitler would never have come to power in the first place, thus nullifying the need for a Second World War.
Thus Buchanan is roughly half-right, and you ignore that half. However, *given* Hitler’s rise to power, in that context I agree with your reasoning. I just think your reasoning is a bit unfair toward a portion of Buchanan’s position.
Pat Buchanan’s role on MSNBC and PBS is that of “useful idiot.”
Buchanan’s beady eyed anti-semitism is a manner for liberals to cast conservatives as bad people.
This serves to distract viewers from the left’s anti-semitism demonstrated by moral relativism which uses the venacular of “occupation and victim” to cover for the atrocities perpetrated daily against Israeli citizens.
People should be reminded daily that Christ arrival on earth was always to culminate with his death for our sins.
Buchanan and his sister Bay seem to suffer from the psychological guilt of knowing the spears used to usher Jesus onto the cross and into heaven were wielded by Romans and not Jews.
Systematic murder on a very large scale is a holocaust, regardless of who the victims are. There have been several holocausts in modern times, not just during WWII: Ruwanda, Cambodia, and the so-called “Cultural Revolution” of Mao, plus the untold millions who died in the Russian Gulag. Israel and other Jews may confine the defintion of “The Holocaust” to the 6 million Jewish persons who were exterminated under the Nazis’ “Final Solution”, but in fact, there were other millions executed who were not Jewish, and I think it’s appropriate to include them in “The Holocaust” because the murderers were the same group of people. “Genocide” is another term used to describe what happened in Ruwanda, but not all mass murder is based on race alone, so I think holocaust is a good general term. Whether it is considered semantically correct by professional historians is not something I’m concerned with because the vernacular use of the English language is not so precise in every day speech. To say that Pat Buchanan is disliked by many people and considered an idiot by them is probably not an overstatement. He should have lunch with Armendihjan-whatisname, the President of Iran. Invite a few of the Hamas too since they hate Israel and frequently renounce The Holocaust as make-believe. Such people in denial are generally viewed as disgusting by the rest of the world. The evidence of The Holocaust is massive, irreproachable, and painstakingly archived. ‘Nuff said!
Bucannon is right. The only ones who challenge hinm are the Jews in the liberal media- The Holocaust was all a hoax so the Jews could use it as leverage to get what is today israel- It was power through pity