Indian Defence Review

COULD LAWRENCE REES EXPLAIN THE FUNDAMENTAL PRECONDITIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST?

British historian and scholar Lawrence Reese in his latest book published in May 2024 explains in the following words “The fundamental precondition for the Holocaust happening was Adolf Hitler,” he explains from his home in London. “Even as far back as 1921, Hitler said that solving the Jewish question was a central question for National Socialism. And you can only solve it by using brute force.” Hitler had no blueprint for the Holocaust at that point, says Rees. But he did have a pathological problem with Jews. “Hitler believed that something needed to be done,” Rees explains, “and that evolved and changed according to circumstances and political opportunism.” An intriguing part of Rees’s book is his determination to figure out when the collective set of initiatives we now call the ‘Final Solution’ became official Nazi policy. It’s a question that doesn’t come with a straightforward answer, Rees maintains. What is clear, though, is that in the summer of 1940 there was still no concrete plan in place for the extermination of Jews. Furthermore, up until that point, Rees argues, the Nazis were still clinging to the belief that in the long term, the way to solve what they called “the Jewish question” was by expulsion and hard labor. At that point, mass murder was still not the preferred option. By the summer of 1942, however, a sea change had taken place. By that time, the Holocaust was in full swing.

Therefore, within the previous two-year period, Rees points out, there were several milestones on the road towards mass extermination. But trying to pinpoint an exact moment where the decision was taken to commit to mass killing is very difficult, says Rees — especially since much of the planning was done in secret without written records. Hitherto, many historians, filmmakers, and writers have pointed to a single meeting where plans for the Holocaust were finally decided upon in the power structures of Nazi officialdom. This was known as the Wannsee Conference. It was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in January of 1942 and involved several mid-ranking Nazi officials devising a plot to murder Jews over a shorter timescale and in more efficient ways. But even then, Rees says, no final plans were resolved at the infamous conference. He also points out that key figures from the upper tiers of the Nazi hierarchy — Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler himself — were not present. “I cannot see how there can have been a decision in 1941,” says Rees. “By that stage, you can say a decision to implement what we would now call the Holocaust had been. The moment of no return for the Holocaust,” says the historian, “was in the spring and early summer of 1942 when a decision was taken to kill all of the Jews in the General Government in Poland — a German-occupied zone established by Hitler after the joint invasion by the Germans and Soviets in 1939.By that stage, you can say a decision to implement what we would now call the Holocaust had been made,” said Rees with convincing authority.

BENITO MUSSOLINI NEVER BELIEVED IN RACIAL SUPERIORITY

Though Adolf Hitler had great admiration for Mussolini the latter had no belief in the concept. One has to remember that Mussolini’s girlfriendwas a Jew and exercised considerable influence in Mussolini’s propaganda machine. Surprisingly this had not affected Hitler’s adoration for Mussolini. One can assume that till that time at Potsdam Hitler had not reached his conclusion of a final solution for the Jews. One wonders what led Hitler to his “conclusion” thesis.

DONALD TRUMP’S NEW ADOLPH HITLER

No less surprising was President Donald Trump’s admiration for Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban whose central guiding philosophy and preferred method of governing are similar to Trump’s, and could provide insight as to what a second Trump presidency would look like. Like Trump, Orbán is hostile toward immigrants and notably built a massive border fence in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis to keep asylum-seekers out of Hungary. His political party, Fidesz, has cracked down on press freedom and has sought to revise textbooks to exclude mentions of the LGBTQ+ community. And most revealingly, Orbán has made changes to Hungary’s government that allow him to stay in power for an extended period. While addressing a crowd at Mar-a-Lago, Trump extolled his leadership style publicly, saying “There’s nobody better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán, he’s fantastic… He says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. He’s the boss.”  The vile reason Hungary’s Viktor Orban is manipulating US politics Trump’s comments caused significant alarm on social media, with journalists, commentators, and elected officials urging voters to pay attention to the former president’s praise of an “autocrat.” “How many different ways does Trump need to tell you he’s going to rule as a dictator before you believe him?” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch Former federal prosecutor Richard Signorelli wrote that Orbán was “Trump’s Mussolini,” suggesting the former president and the Hungarian leader could be the “new Axis powers’ alliance.”

CONCLUSION

“Journalist and lawyer Daniel Miller called on the New York Times in particular to publish a “massive headline about Trump wanting to be a dictator” every day until the election. And Sarah Longwell, who is the publisher of the anti-Trump conservative website – The Bulwark–urged news outlets to not hold back in calling out Trump’s affinity for far-right dictators. “Just because it’s old news that Donald Trump loves autocrats doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve wall-to-wall coverage when he does things like this,” she wrote, “Because it’s insane.” Columnist and podcaster Charles Adler tweeted about his firsthand experience with Orbán’s brand of governing, writing that he “destroyed democracy in Hungary – the land of my birth.“Hungarians of my generation fled to the US and Canada to get the hell away from authoritarianism,” Adler said.