Nolte, Revisionism, Browning, and Revenge as an Early Motive for the German Deportation of Jews to Ghettos

Nolte, Revisionism, Browning, and Revenge as an Early Motive for the German Deportation of Jews to Ghettos

By

J. Otto Pohl

It has been nearly 40 years since Ernst Nolte wrote his infamous “The Past that Will Not Pass" speech, printed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In this essay, Nolte correctly noted that already in the 1920s that the Soviet regime under Lenin had already committed all of the crimes later associated with the National Socialist regime in Germany “with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing.” The crimes of the Lenin regime became magnified by orders of magnitude under Stalin and continued all the way until past his death in 1953. That the Bolsheviks from 1918 to 1926 (when the ruling politburo was between 40% and 60% Jewish) committed numerous acts of political repression including mass shootings, forced food requisitioning, and establishing concentration camps was of course well documented by Russian emigres and others. But, where Nolte seems to have missed out on the biggest piece of the jigsaw puzzle connecting National Socialist crimes to Soviet ones is the brutal persecution of ethnic Germans in the USSR from 1918 onward and the prominent role of Jews in this repression. The dekulakization of Volga and other ethnic Germans in the USSR, famine in the Volga, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, the 1936 deportation of Germans from western Ukraine to Kazakhstan, the “German Operation” in 1937-38, and finally the mass deportation of the Russian Germans in 1941 all involved high ranking Jewish officials. These men included Genrikh Yagoda, Matvei Berman, Leon Belsky, Izrael Leplevsky, and Lazar Kaganovich. The specificity of high ranking Jewish officials especially in the OGPU and NKVD engaging in the mass starvation, arrest, shooting, and deportation as special settlers of Germans in the USSR often solely because they were ethnic Germans was well known in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.

Perhaps the strongest link between Soviet repression of its citizens of German ancestry and the treatment of Jews by the National Socialist regime in Germany was articulated by Christopher Browning, the author of Ordinary Men, in an essay on the website of The Museum of Tolerance (https://www.museumoftolerance.com/education/archives-and-reference-library/online-resources/simon-wiesenthal-center-annual-volume-1/annual-1-chapter-6.html) In this essay Browning made clear that the very first deportation of Jews from Germany to ghettos in Lodz, Minsk, and Riga were undertaken as explicit retaliation for the deportation of the Volga Germans under Kaganovich starting on 3 September 1941. Browning, wrote:

“On September 14, however, Rosenberg urged Hitler to approve the immediate deportation of German Jews in retaliation for the Russian deportation of Volga Germans to Siberia. Four days later, Himmler informed Greiser of interim deportations to Lodz because the Fuhrer wished to make the Old Reich and the Protectorate judenfrei as soon as possible, if possible by the end of the year. In Prague, shortly thereafter, Heydrich likewise announced the Fuhrer's wish that, insofar as possible, the German Jews were to be deported to Lodz, Riga, and Minsk by the end of the year.”

This paragraph shows that not only were high ranking NSDAP officials like Rosenberg fully aware of the deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan starting on 3 September 1941, but that they also considered it a provocation and motive for relocating Jews from Germany to Lodz and other eastern ghettos. The continued lie that revenge played absolutely no role what so ever in NSDAP policies towards Jews from 1933-1945 is completely unsustainable.

The deportation of the Volga Germans took place from 3 to 20 September 1941. The deportation was ordered by a joint resolution of the SNK (Council of People’s Commissariats) and CC CPSU (Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) on 26 August 1941 . This decree gave responsibility for the rail transport of the deported ethnic Germans to Kazakhstan and Siberia to the NKPS (Peoples’ Commissariat of Transportation/Communication) under Lazar Kaganovich (GARF, F. 9479, O. 124, D 85, ll. 5-6.). Lazar Kaganovich was an ethnic Jew from Ukraine and had been appointed as a full member of the politburo by Stalin in 1930. He remained in that position until 1957. A later public deportation decree was issued on 28 August 1941 by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (RGASPI, F. 17, O. 3, D. 1042, l. 112). This second deportation decree was publicly announced in both Russian (Bolshevik) and German language (Nachtrichten) Soviet newspapers on 30 August 1941. Thus Rosenberg’s urgent meeting with Hitler about the issue took place before the NKVD had finished ethnically cleansing the Volga region of its German population. This mass operation was the second largest ethnic cleansing in recorded history at the time after the Ottoman deportation of Armenians into the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia during World War One. In total the NKVD recorded deporting 447,168 ethnic Germans from the Volga German ASSR, Saratov Oblast, and Stalingrad Oblast to Siberia and Kazakhstan (GARF, F. 9479, O. 1, D. 372, ll. 266-269). This was more than twice as many people as the next largest example of Soviet ethnic cleansing at the time, the 1937 deportation of ethnic Koreans from the Russian Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The total number of people forcibly resettled in this earlier internal deportation was 172,597 (V.D. Kim, ed., Pravda - Polveka Spustia. Tashkent: Ozbekistan, 1999, pp. 76-77). Both of these mass internal deportations by the NKVD greatly exceeded the September 1941 deportation of Jews in Germany to the ghetto in Lodz which numbered only about 60,000.

The preceding facts clearly establish that the Soviet NKVD undertook the mass ethnic cleansing of the Volga Germans starting on 3 September 1941. On 14 September, Rosenberg met with Hitler to ask for the deportation of Jews in Germany to the ghetto in Lodz. Four days later Hitler authorized the deportation of 60,000 Jews from Germany to the Lodz Ghetto. Rosenberg had pled his case for deportation to Lodz as explicit retaliation for the ongoing Soviet deportation of the Volga Germans under the supervision of Lazar Kaganovich. These facts disprove three specific lies currently being strongly promoted on Twitter. These lies are the claim that there were no Jews in the Stalin regime. The role of Kaganovich in the Stalin regime completely disproves this lie. The second lie is the claim that there was no persecution based on ethnicity or race against Germans in the USSR. It is clear that the ethnic cleansing of the Volga Germans was a massive act of racially targeted violence. The third and final lie which depends on the first two lies is the claim that revenge or retaliation played absolutely no role whatsoever in NSDAP policies towards Jews. It is quite clear as Browning has argued that the first deportation of Jews from Germany to the ghetto in Lodz were undertaken as explicit retaliation or revenge for the deportation of the Volga Germans.