German Chancellor Angela Merkel Rejects Controversial Benjamin Netanyahu Holocaust Comments (VIDEO)

Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews long before he ever met the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

Still, this story's a freakin' trip.

At the Independent UK, "Angela Merkel forced to clarify Germany was responsible for the Holocaust following Benjamin Netanyahu controversy."

Plus, via Ruptly, "Germany: Merkel rejects Netanyahu's Holocaust claims during joint presser."

And watch, from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

Edward Rothstein Reviews Timothy Snyder's Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

This is pretty fascinating, especially the conclusion at Rothstein's review, at the Wall Street Journal, "The Frying Pan and the Fire."

And here's Snyder's book, at Amazon, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

I'm not familiar with Snyder's work, oddly enough. He's got another important work on the Holocaust, with a comparative focus, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

If I read both, I expect I'd start with the most recent volume first and work backwards. And I would do so with the requisite circumspection. Apparently, as Rothstein points out, the trend in recent historiography is to posit the Holocaust as just one more case of genocide, something not that particularly unique, but instead the starting point for a genre, a genre of promoting "tolerance" at that. And when you push tolerance as a stand-alone ideology, you're more likely to end up in an altogether different place. More like the gulags than modern enlightened democracy.

But then, that's up for the reader to decide. So, go for it. Click through at the links and have at it.

David Horowitz: 'Obama is a Traitor. It's a No Brainer' (VIDEO)

Heh, Alan Colmes "debates" David Horowtiz. Like that's some kind of contest, or something.

Obama's worse than Hitler!

Watch: "Alan Colmes vs. David Horowitz: Is Obama a 'Jew-hater'?"

West Germany Knew Adolf Eichmann's Hiding Place Years Before His Capture

Eichmann was captured May 11, 1960.

Via RealClearHistory, at Der Spiegel, "Document Find Hailed as Sensation: Germany Knew Eichmann's Hiding Place Years Before His Capture":

West Germany could have hunted down Adolf Eichmann, the chief organizer of the Holocaust, as early as 1952, eight years before Israeli agents caught him in Buenos Aires, according to a newly released document that suggests postwar Germany was unready and unwilling to put him on trial.

The revelation has been described as a sensation, and it sheds light on West Germany's reluctance to confront its past in the decades following the Holocaust...

And see Doron Geller, at the Jewish Virtual Library, "Israel Military Intelligence: The Capture of Nazi Criminal Adolf Eichmann."

Benjamin Netanyahu at Annual Holocaust Memorial Day Ceremony — Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem

He's a great guy.

Chilling Drone Footage Shows Sheer Scale of Auschwitz Death Camp (VIDEO)

Here: "Auschwitz 70th anniversary: Drone footage shows scale of camp."

And at the Irish Independent, "Chilling drone footage captures Auschwitz ahead of 70th anniversary of liberation."

Obama Will Not Attend 70th Anniversary of Auschwitz Liberation

And this is a surprise?

At Free Beacon.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew will represent the U.S. at the ceremonies. A token gesture, if that.

Moment of Passage for Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

At the New York Times, "For Auschwitz Museum, A Time of Great Change":

OSWIECIM, Poland — For what is likely to be the last time, a large number of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz will gather next week under an expansive tent, surrounded by royalty and heads of state, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of those held there at the end of World War II.

“This will be the last decade anniversary with a very visible presence of survivors,” said Andrzej Kacorzyk, deputy director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which encompasses the sites of the original concentration camp, near the center of Oswiecim, and the larger Auschwitz II-Birkenau on the city’s outskirts.

At the 60th anniversary, 1,500 survivors attended. This year, on Tuesday, about 300 are expected. Most of them are in their 90s, and some are older than 100.

“We find this to be a moment of passage,” Mr. Kacorzyk said. “A passing of the baton. It is younger generations publicly accepting the responsibility that they are ready to carry this history on behalf of the survivors, and to secure the physical survival of the place where they suffered.”

A preliminary list of those attending includes President François Hollande of France, President Joachim Gauck of Germany and President Heinz Fischer of Austria, as well as King Philippe of Belgium, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark. The United States delegation will be led by Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said he would not attend because his schedule was too crowded and because he had not received an invitation. Museum officials said no head of state had received one. Mr. Putin had attended the 60th anniversary ceremony in 2005 — it was Soviet troops, after all, who liberated the camp in 1945 — but relations between Russia and Poland have soured over the conflict in Ukraine.

Previous commemorations had been held outside, Mr. Kacorzyk said, but it can be very cold in Poland in late January. The remaining survivors will be among about 3,000 dignitaries who will keep warm beneath a tent large enough to enclose the entire redbrick gateway building to Auschwitz II and its peaked tower, familiar from many films as a symbol of Nazi atrocities.

“Auschwitz is important because it was ground zero of what the Nazis did,” said Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and a major contributor to the preservation of the museum complex. “And it is important because anti-Semitism is like a virus. You think it goes away but then it’s coming back. Right now, it is coming back very strongly.”

President Bronislaw Komorowski of Poland will open the ceremony, and Mr. Lauder will deliver a short speech. But most of the speakers at the memorial event will be survivors, telling their own stories.

“I was there from September of 1944 until the end,” said Ryszard Horowitz, a photographer now living in New York who was 5 when Auschwitz was liberated. “I remember several scenes from the end. I know we were, at one point, lined up to be killed, just before the liberation, when one of the SS people arrived screaming that the Russians were coming, so they just dropped everything and ran and left us.”

Mr. Horowitz said he would not attend this year’s ceremony.

“I went there twice after the war,” he said. “Once, when I was quite young, and then I went back during one of my return trips to Poland in the 1970s. That was enough for me. I do not want to go back.”

His sister, Niusia Karakulski, who also survived the camps, will represent the family at the event.

This year’s anniversary also coincides with a shift in the way the site’s administrators conceive of their mission. From now on, they said, the site will be organized to explain to generations who were not alive during the war what happened rather than to act as a memorial to those who suffered through it.

A foundation has been raising money for a new wave of preservation. There will be new exhibition halls, and a visitor’s center will be built in the camp’s former meat processing and dairy site. A theater used to entertain Polish troops during the war will become an education center...

More.

Plus, published just today, at the Auschwitz Museum webpage, "Revision of the way we see the world and ourselves. Auschwitz Memorial Report 2014."

Incitement to Genocide: How N.Y. Times' Coverage and U.N. Complicity Breed Anti-Semitism

From Phyllis Chesler, at Big Peace.

An #Auschwitz Survivor Searches for His Twin on Facebook

A great story, at the Daily Beast.

Holocaust Denial and the Iranian Regime

From Reuel Marc Gerecht, at the Wall Street Journal (via Google):

Well, we know that there's at least one person who won't be marking Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday. "Observe that no one in Europe dares to speak about the Holocaust even though it's not clear what the reality is about it, whether it even has a reality, or how it happened," said Iran's ruling cleric, Ali Khamenei, in a March 21 speech. "Expressing an opinion or doubts about the Holocaust is considered to be one of the greatest of sins [in Europe] where someone can get stopped, arrested, sued or imprisoned for this offense."

The ayatollah's recent comments on the Holocaust were part of a longer speech that was a scorching stemwinder against the West and Iranians who embrace Western ways. Holocaust revisionism is part of Mr. Khamenei's resistance to a world organized around Western norms and history. Other strategies include developing Iran's nuclear program, making its economy more sanctions-proof, and maintaining a religious culture capable of closing the "cracks" opened by the allure of a deviant Occident.

Many observers, including some within the Obama administration, have sought to play down the matter of Iranian Holocaust denial. So have many Iranians and Westerners who sincerely want to get past the nuclear issue and see Iran reintegrated into the world—Holocaust denial is just too awkward and painful to examine. It's an aberration, many insist, nasty insecure rhetoric without roots in Persian culture. In truth it is a symptom of a worldview utterly at odds with our own. It strongly suggests that Mr. Khamenei's republic will endure great economic hardship to realize its dream of becoming a nuclear power.

Holocaust revisionism permeates and defines the Iranian regime. Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously supported a research mission to Poland in 2005 to investigate whether millions of Jews could have died at Auschwitz. (Poland's foreign ministry turned down the request.) Today, in addition to Supreme Leader Khamenei, commanders of the Revolutionary Guard Corps—who oversee Iran's nuclear program and terrorist operations—embrace Holocaust-denial with gusto.

Even the "moderate" president elected last year, Hasan Rouhani, danced around the subject of the Holocaust in his interview last September with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, saying it was up to historians to decide—as if they hadn't already—the true "dimensions" of Nazi slaughter. Mr. Rouhani didn't deny that the Germans killed Jews, but he grouped them with other victims of Nazi barbarism.

The Tehran regime's Holocaust reflections spring in great part from two sources...

Keep reading.

Alice Herz-Sommer, World's Oldest Holocaust Survivor, Dead at 110

An amazing life, living to 110 years. That's something else.

At the Chicago Tribune, "World's oldest Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, dies in UK."

And at London's Daily Mail, "World's oldest known holocaust survivor dies aged 110: Alice, who played piano in concentration camp, appeared in Oscar-nominated short film about her life."

What Purpose International Holocaust Remembrance Day?

From Caroline Glick, at JPost, "International Holocaust Remembrance Day’s fatal flaw":

On the surface, it is very moving to see half of the members of Knesset at Auschwitz marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But in a larger sense, it is not at all clear why this is necessary.

The Jewish people have Yom HaShoah V’Hagevura, our own national day of mourning for the genocide of our people in Europe.

More importantly, we carry the legacy of the Holocaust inside of us.

Every day, at some level, we experience the ulcerative loss of a third of the Jewish people in the hell of Europe, because we feel the hollow absence of the victims.

The six million murdered have become 10 million descendants who were never born. And we miss them.

We remember them too, every day, when we look at our children and thank God we can protect them.

Israel does not need this extra Holocaust memorial day. And before we send another delegation of elected officials to Auschwitz next January 27, we need to ask whether this extra day serves any positive purpose.

In November 2005, Israel was one of the co-sponsors of the UN General Assembly resolution that made January 27, the day Auschwitz was liberated, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. At the time, Israeli politicians and American Jewish leaders extolled the resolution as signaling a new era of UN relations with the Jewish state.

Consider for instance that a week before its duly mandated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the UN ushered in 2014 as the Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The occasion was marked among other things, by the January 20 opening of a yearlong exhibit at the UN Headquarters in New York portraying Israelis as Nazis and Palestinians as Jews.

Since 2005, anti-Semitism has risen throughout Europe, as have levels of anti-Semitism among Europhilic Americans.

Jews throughout Europe feel under assault, and unprotected. The situation is so bad that Jews don’t even bother reporting most of the anti-Semitic attacks they suffer.

The more closely we consider events the more clearly we see that ironically and obscenely, Holocaust memorializing in Europe is enabling anti-Semitism.

Europeans use the focus on the Holocaust to pretend that European anti-Semitism began with the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 and ended with their defeat 12 years later. In truth, the Nazis’ rise to power was a natural consequence of 1,600 years of European Jew hatred.

From the time of Roman Emperor Constantine, persecution, expulsion and massacre of Jews was the norm, not the exception, in European life.

Hitler and his colleagues were adored not despite their hatred of Jews and their organization of German politics around the dehumanization of Jewish people. They were supported by the Germans, and by the majority of the people in the European lands they conquered because of their anti-Semitism and their dehumanization of Jews.

This Jew hatred did not die in Auschwitz.

As Ruth Wisse explained in August 2010, political anti-Semitism was resuscitated immediately after the war ended with the establishment of the Arab League. The League’s sole purpose was to reorganize anti-Semitic politics around denying the Jewish people their legal right to establish a sovereign state in their homeland.

In other words, with the establishment of the League in March 1945, the just-ended physical annihilation of European Jewry was replaced by the campaign to deny Jews political freedom and independence in our land.

Rather than combat this affront to international law and to the Charter of the United Nations, Europe, along with the rest of the world, sought to appease, and so facilitated and encouraged Arab anti-Jewish aggression.

Continue reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "Historians Uncover Scale of 'Holocaust by Bullets'."

Historians Uncover Scale of 'Holocaust by Bullets'

Well, the camps were hardly the only means of extermination for the Nazis, but this is interesting.

At NYT, "Shedding Light on a Vast Toll of Jews Killed Away From the Death Camps":

OSWIECIM, Poland — As one gazes out from the main watchtower at the grim desert that is the crumbling chimneys and crematories, vanished prisoners’ huts, barbed wire and ditches of Birkenau, it is hard to fathom that there were corners of the Nazi realm where, collectively, more killing occurred than in the death camps.

Monday, the 69th anniversary of the day Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz, was observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yet a third or more of the almost six million Jews killed in the Holocaust perished not in the industrial-scale murder of the camps, but in executions at what historians call killing sites: thousands of villages, quarries, forests, wells, streets and homes that dot the map of Eastern Europe.

The vast numbers killed in what some have termed a “Holocaust by bullets” have slowly garnered greater attention in recent years as historians sift through often sketchy and incomplete records that became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“People sat down and added the numbers up,” said David Silberklang, a senior historian at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial.

As the number of Holocaust survivors gradually declines, these documents or witness accounts — from Belarus, Ukraine, parts of Russia and the Baltic States — have illuminated a new picture of the Nazis’ methods.

Most of this slaughter occurred in Eastern Europe after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and it mixed with the increasing chaos of the war once the Germans failed to realize their ambition of subduing the Soviets in just eight to 12 weeks and faced the prospect of defeat.

“The further east the Wehrmacht went, the greater the killing,” Dieter Pohl, a professor of history at Klagenfurt University in Austria, said at a conference on the subject this month in Krakow, Poland. The executions and unmarked mass graves became “an element of German rule in Eastern Europe.”

In the years after 1945, the executions were not discussed much. The shock of the discovery of concentration camps was one factor. The camps had survivors, found in place, who told their unimaginable tale. By contrast, the local executions terrorized and silenced survivors in the eastern regions. In addition, after World War II, many witnesses were left behind the Iron Curtain, and no one was interested in their memories.

On the ground, “news about killing in local fields spread much more quickly than the murky rumors” about gassing at concentration camps, Dr. Pohl said.

“Only a few survivors could testify after 1945,” he added. As a result, “there is still no comprehensive overview of the killing sites.”

Dr. Silberklang said that “in the popular mind, this subject is far less known than the Holocaust.” The executions became, he said, “in a sense, invisible.”

Keep reading.

ICYMI: "Have You Read it? The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945." (And check the Amazon link.)

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Here's a poignant clip from CBS News Sunday:

And see the U.S. Holocaust Museum's website, "Days of Remembrance."

RELATED: "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Remembered By Holocaust Survivor Aliza Mendel" (via Instapundit). And following the links takes us to Yad Vashem, "Voices from the Inferno: Holocaust Survivors Describe the Last Months."

More at the Jerusalem Post, "Israel prepares for Holocaust Remembrance Day," and "On Remembrance Day, Canadian PM vows to fight anti-Semitism."

And at the Times of Israel, "Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day," and "30% increase in anti-Semitic incidents worldwide in 2012."

Justin Bieber Guitarist Dan Kantner Visits Auschwitz

At the Times of Israel, "'Believe' - Bieber’s guitarist tours Auschwitz."

The video's here.

That would be emotional.

DoubleTapper Visits Dachau

A photo-essay: "Memorial Day for Holocaust Victims."

'A Film Unfinished'

Opens Friday in Los Angeles. I should be able to make it. And from LAT:

Four years ago, Yael Hersonski was struck by an unthinkable concept: In the foreseeable future, there would be no Holocaust survivors left to bear witness to the atrocities they once experienced. So the Israeli filmmaker set out to find the kind of unforgettable footage she might cinematically use to help keep this horrific chapter of history alive. What Hersonski uncovered, with an assist from producer Noemi Schory, was a 62-minute, 35-millimeter rough cut of a never-released 1942 Nazi propaganda film simply labeled "Das Ghetto."

The film, discovered by Schory in a Jerusalem Holocaust museum but first unearthed in an East German film archive in 1954, was particularly curious as it was apparently abandoned after it was shot without evidence of who was behind it, its exact purpose or why it was never completed. More remarkable was the fact that it even still existed, given that a reported 90% of film footage shot by the Nazis was destroyed at the end of World War II. But this one, lost and recovered several times through the decades, had already been examined in the years following the war, its footage thought to be a starkly real depiction of life inside the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by the Nazis in occupied Poland.

It was one of many such films produced by the Third Reich to promulgate its policies, help gain and maintain power, vilify the Jews and, in some segments, portray Jews seemingly living the high life under the Nazis' "compassionate" protection.

But what Hersonski came across as she watched four unfolding reels of emaciated captives, corpse-strewn streets and even scenes of the Jewish elite attending posh Champagne balls, was a staggering fifth reel of outtakes that had been discovered in 1998 by a British researcher. In those images could be seen entire scenes being reshot, cameramen in the background and signs of staging. It was proof that the film, while capturing some genuine suffering, was being manipulated by SS cameramen.

This soundtrack-free assemblage so inspired the director it would wind up as the centerpiece of her own unique and gripping Holocaust documentary, "A Film Unfinished," which opens in Los Angeles theaters Friday.

RTWT.

The film's official homepage is here.