“The film does not hide that the Jews were the main victims of the Nazi Reich, and nothing comes near their sufferings. But the second victim was the German people, victims of themselves” ... Uri Avnery
Uri’s worst assassination attempt
[ Editors note: We have a change up piece from Uri today…the first movie review I have seen him do. It is revealing on multiple levels, the main one being why I chose to feature the quote above.
Here you have one of the most famous critics of Extremist Zionism, who was effective enough to be despised during Ben Gurion’s time so much that the Knesset tried to figure a way to pass a law to have Uri arrested on some kind of treason charge. That climate resulted in later beatings and stabbings, which he survived.
Uri has fought long and hard against the cruelty of the Israeli West Bank settler policy in true liberal fashion. He has always backed a fully-independent Palestinian state. But he has never waivered from the Zionists taking over the country in the first place…only the ‘not making peace’ part.
He reveals that for us below, including the bond that he shares with the hard core Zios…that the special victim status to which European Jews anointed themselves entitled them to push WWII’s other victims to the back of the bus…not a very liberal or fair concept to my mind.
The earlier days were just beatings on the street – the ‘Can you feel the love’ version of Zionism
We have a rough 50 million people killed during WWII as a baseline. World Jewry still claims their ‘rabbit out of a hat’ 6 million number as an historical fact, when it never has been.
The archives clearly show where it entered. The initial round of reparations paid by a post-WWII devastated Germany funded much of Israel’s new infrastructure.
The negotiators started first with how much ‘per head’ the reparations rate would be. Once they came up with that number, the Zios figured how much money they wanted in total, and the math worked out that 6 million victims times the per head rate did the trick…so that’s what was used.
When I first stumbled across this, it was an early eye opener to what a fraud that a whole slew of institutions could just conveniently ignore as a kind of mass-hypnosis to forget what happened.
At the end of the day, it simply shows that one of the greatest challenges we all face in our intellectual development is not succumbing to “believing what we want to believe.”
This is the foundation of half of all propaganda, reinforcing false but convenient beliefs that they know we have. The other half is making them up out of thin air, as the 6 million number was…and still is. The hot sauce they mix in is of course persecuting all non-believers, because there is always an army of bored persecutors hanging around with not much to do.
I have field-tested showing how the 6 million con was done to a wide variety of ‘believers’. With few exceptions, those who were happy to know the truth I can count on two hands. The others…they did not dispute anything I showed them…and neither did they acknowledge it.
Conflicting archival records can produce a lot of stress…and denial
I describe their reaction as ‘having gone quiet’. It was like, if they said nothing that I could quote them on, when they walked out of the room they could press the reset button and forget what they had seen and heard because there were no witnesses. And that is exactly what happened.
How do I know? Easy. How many asked me for additional information so they could study more on how extensive the hoax was? Of those not on my two hands count above…ZERO! I have to say that rattled my faith in my fellow man’s ability to move the human race forward.
There is no point in beating up on Uri about this. I am using him as a symbol, and this Holohoax issue as another. There are lots of scams like this, but none that have been driven with such intense propaganda. If a Palestinian civil rights activist like Uri can be schnookered on something like this, it is no surprise countless millions more are.
Is Uri a holocaust denier? Of course he is…of sorts. He denies that the 50 million people killed in WWII were its main victims. And even worse, he puts all the blame on the Nazi Reich, when the Allies and the Soviets are all gold medal contenders.
So we are left being told what not to sweep under the rug, by someone who has swept what they wanted under there, as if the rest of us don’t have access to archival records. “Welcome to that world,” as Gordon Duff likes to say on so many occasions.
And there is a good lesson for the rest of us here, no matter how smart or how clued in we think we are.
The best of all the top Intelligence analysts have always been open to abandoning any forsworn paradigm when they were confronted with evidence that it was wrong. This was in the “Pre-Dick Cheney era.”
I wish I could say that was the end of the story. But no matter how good the Intelligence people are, we live in a world where political people often make the final decision as to what is really true (for a while anyway.)
They also fall victim to what they want reality to be. A lot of people suffer and die when that happens. This is happening now as I type, with our slow-motion train wreck foreign policy… Jim W. Dean ]
It is the summer of 1941. Five youngsters — three young men and two young women — meet in a bar and spend a happy evening, flirting with each other, getting drunk, dancing forbidden foreign dances.
They have grown up together in the same neighborhood of Berlin. It is a happy time.
The war started by Adolf Hitler a year and a half before has progressed incredibly well. In this short time, Germany has conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. The Wehrmacht is invincible.
The Führer is a genius, “the greatest military strategist of all times”. So starts the film that is running now in our cinemas – a unique historical document. It goes on for five breathless hours, and continues to occupy the thoughts and emotions of its viewers for days and weeks.
Basically it is a film made by Germans for Germans. The German title says it all: “Our Mothers, Our Fathers”. The purpose is to answer the questions troubling many of the young Germans of today: Who were our parents and grandparents? What did they do during the terrible war? What did they feel? What was their part in the horrible crimes committed by the Nazis?
These questions are not asked in the film explicitly. But every German viewer is compelled to ask them. There are no clear answers. The film does not probe the depths. Rather, it shows a broad panorama of the German people in wartime, the various sections of society, the different types, from the war criminals, through the passive onlookers, to the victims.
The Holocaust is not the center of events, but it is there all the time, not as a separate event but woven into the fabric of reality.
The film starts in 1941, and therefore cannot answer the question which, to my mind, is the most important one: How could a civilized nation, perhaps the most cultured in the world, elect a government whose program was blatantly criminal?
True, Hitler was never elected by an absolute majority in free elections. But he came very close to it. And he easily found political partners who were ready to help him form a government.
Some said at the time that it was a uniquely German phenomenon, the expression of the particular German mentality, formed during centuries of history. That theory has been discredited by now. But if so, can it happen in any other country?
Can it happen in our own country? Can it happen today? What are the circumstances that make it possible? The film does not answer these question. It leaves the answers to the viewer.
The young heroes of the film do not ask. They were ten years old when the Nazis came to power, and for them the “Thousand-Year Reich” (as the Nazis called it) was the only reality they knew. It was the natural state of things. That’s where the plot starts.
Two of the youngsters were soldiers. One had already seen war and was wearing a medal for valor. His brother had just been called up. The third young man was a Jew. Like the two girls, they are full of youthful exuberance. Everything was looking fine.
The war? Well, it can’t last much longer, can it? The Führer himself has promised that by Christmas the Final Victory will be won. The five young people promise each other to meet again at Christmas. No one has the slightest premonition of the terrible experiences in store for each of them.
While viewing the scene, I could not help thinking about my former class. A few weeks after the Nazis’ assumption of power, I became a pupil in the first class of high school in Hanover. My schoolmates were the same age as the heroes of the film. They would have been called up in 1941, and because it was an elitist school, all of them would probably have become officers.
Half way through the first year in high school, my family took me to Palestine. I never met any of my schoolmates again, except one — Rudolf Augstein, the founder of the magazine Der Spiegel, whom I met years after the war and who became my friend again.
What happened to all the others? How many survived the war? How many were maimed? How many had become war criminals? In the summer of 1941 they were probably as happy as the youngsters in the film, hoping to be home by Christmas.
War weariness
The two brothers were sent to the Russian front, an unimaginable hell. The film succeeds in showing the realities of war, easily recognizable by anyone who has been a soldier in combat. Only that this combat was a hundredfold worse, and the film shows it brilliantly.
The older brother, a lieutenant, tries to shield the younger one. The bloodbath that goes on for four more years — day after day, hour after hour — changes their character.
They become brutalized. Death is all around them, they see horrible war crimes, they are commanded to shoot prisoners, they see Jewish children butchered. In the beginning they still dare to protest feebly, then they keep their doubts to themselves, then they take part in the crimes as a matter of course.
One of the young women volunteers for a frontline military hospital, witnesses the awful agonies of the wounded, denounces a Jewish fellow nurse and immediately feels remorse, and in the end is raped by Soviet soldiers near Berlin, as were almost all German women in the areas conquered by the revenge-thirsty Soviet army.
Bergen
Israeli viewers might be more interested in the fate of the Jewish boy, who took part in the happy feast at the beginning. His father is a proud German, who cannot imagine Germans doing the bad things threatened by Hitler.
He does not dream of leaving his beloved fatherland. But he warns his son about having sexual relations with his Aryan girlfriend. “It’s against the law!”
When the son tries to flee abroad, “aided” by a treacherous Gestapo officer, he is caught, sent to the death camps, succeeds in escaping on the way, joins the Polish partisans (who hate the Jews more than the Nazis) and in the end survives.
Perhaps the most tragic figure is the second girl, a frivolous, carefree singer who sleeps with a senior SS officer to further her career, is sent with her troupe to entertain the troops at the front, sees what is really happening, speaks out about the war, is sent to prison and executed in the last hours of the war.
But the fate of the heroes is only the skeleton of the film. More important are the little moments, the daily life, the portrayal of the various characters of German society.
For example, when a friend visits the apartment where the Jewish family had been living, the blond Aryan woman who was allotted the place complains about the state of the apartment from which the Jews had been fetched and sent to their death: “They didn’t even clean up before they left! That’s how the Jews are, dirty people!”
Mass grave, Bergen, 1945
Everyone lives in constant fear of being denounced. It is a pervading terror, which nobody can escape. Even at the front, with death staring them in the face, a hint of doubt about the Final Victory uttered by a soldier is immediately silenced by his comrades. “Are you crazy?”
Even worse is the deadening atmosphere of universal agreement. From the highest officer to the lowliest maid, everybody is repeating endlessly the propaganda slogans of the regime. Not out of fear, but because they believe every word of the all-pervading propaganda machine. They hear nothing else.
It is immensely important to understand this. In the totalitarian state, fascist or communist or whatever, only the very few free spirits can withstand the endlessly repeated slogans of the government. Everything else sounds unreal, abnormal, crazy.
When the Soviet army was already fighting its way through Poland and nearing Berlin, people were unwavering in their belief in the Final Victory. After all, the Führer says so, and the Führer is never wrong. The very idea is preposterous.
It is this element of the situation that is difficult for many people to grasp. A citizen under a criminal totalitarian regime becomes a child. Propaganda becomes for him reality, the only reality he knows. It is more effective than even the terror.
Can leaders heal their people?
This is the answer to the question we cannot abstain from asking again and again: How was the Holocaust possible? It was planned by a few, but it was implemented by hundreds of thousands of Germans, from the engine driver of the train to the officials who shuffled the papers. How could they do it?
They could, because it was the natural thing to do. After all, the Jews were out to destroy Germany. The communist hordes were threatening the life of every true Aryan. Germany needed more living space. The Führer has said so.
That’s why the film is so important, not only for the Germans, but for every people, including our own. People who carelessly play with ultra-nationalist, fascist, racist, or other anti-democratic ideas don’t realize that they are playing with fire.
They cannot even imagine what it means to live in a country that tramples on human rights, that despises democracy, that oppresses another people, that demonizes minorities. The film shows what it is like: hell.
The film does not hide that the Jews were the main victims of the Nazi Reich, and nothing comes near their sufferings. But the second victim was the German people, victims of themselves.
Many people insist that after this trauma, Jews cannot behave like a normal people, and that therefore Israel cannot be judged by the standards of normal states. They are traumatized. This is true for the German people, too. The very need to produce this unusual film proves that the Nazi specter is still haunting the Germans, that they are still traumatized by their past.
When Angela Merkel came this week to see Binyamin Netanyahu, the whole world laughed at the photo of our Prime Minister’s finger inadvertently painting a moustache on the Kanzlerin’s face. But the relationship between our two traumatized peoples is far from a joke.
Jim W. Dean was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.
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