The term ‘holocaust‘ has evolved over time, he argues, adding that various literary and propaganda influences including TV shows (like Holocaust, a miniseries starring Meryl Streep, which came out in the 1970s) and films have shaped our understanding of history. In other words, 'holocaust' has changed in its meaning over the decades. It used to mean 'a burnt offering.' --
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Partial Transcript from Interview.
The fundamental paradigmatic camp beginning right after World War II was Dachau. It was not Auschwitz. Dachau was the first camp to be created in 1933. Dachau is a suburb of Munich. It was for Catholics. There were a lot of different people there but the main group was Catholic priests. There was a Catholic narrative after the war, basically, a priest writing memoirs about what it was like in Dachau, and it all came down to the same thing, "there's a purpose to suffering. The German nation had committed the sin of atheism. They had turned away from God. Germany is being punished for the sin of atheism, and we as these catholic priests are called to expiate that sin." That's the narrative as of 1955 with books like Christ in Dachau by Johannes Lenz, 1960. Three years later, Elie Wiesel's book Night comes out, and the Jews hijack the narrative. At this point, what is the moral of Night? God died at Auschwitz. So Night now, the Jewish narrative, shifts the paradigmatic camp [from Dachau] to Auschwitz. It's not Dachau. Now the only people who suffered are Jews. And now the moral has completely flipped. It's now propaganda for atheism. That was the development of this narrative.
02:34 Was Adolph Hitler a Catholic?
02:36 Yes. He was baptized Catholic. Okay, it comes down to a conference at Wansee. Wansee is a lake near Berlin, Wansee Lake, where they were trying to deal with the developments in the war. This is not . . . 1942 is an absolutely crucial year in the war because that's when the 3rd Reich reached its greatest extent and then it started to collapse inward. When Lenz talked about being a priest in Dachau, the turning point was August 1942. He said we all would have died of starvation and disease if the word hadn't come down from Himmler to say "We need these people to work. We need . . ."
In early 2024, I recorded a fascinating podcast episode with Dr. E. Michael Jones (@EMichaelJones1) about his book The Holocaust Narrative, 2023.
Comments by Jerm,
Dr. Eugene Michael Jones (commonly known as E Michael Jones) was an Assistant Professor of American Literature at St. Mary’s College and is widely known for his critical views on contemporary cultural and religious issues.
He was dismissed in 1981 due to his excellent anti-abortion stance, leading him to leave academia and start a magazine, initially named Fidelity and later Culture Wars, which focuses on the disarray in the Catholic Church including the subversion of the Catholic faith.
However, the focus of this podcast episode was his fascinating book, The Holocaust Narrative.
The word hadn’t really been used by anyone until around the 1970s and, as Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein pointed out to me, almost nothing had been written about it for the first 20 years.
It took about two decades to write a book about the Holocaust but only three months to write about the sinking of the Titanic. Why?
Dr. Jones adds that some of the most influential WW2 figures like Eisenhower, Churchill, and de Gaulle did not mention gas chambers or the genocide of Jews in their memoirs. In fact, in 2005, Richard Lynn, 1930-2023,—Professor Emeritus, University of Ulster—confirmed this:
I've checked out Churchill's Second World War, 1948-1953, and the statement is quite correct—not a single mention of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war.
Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe, 1948, is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill's Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle's three-volume MΓ©moires de guerre, [1954, 1956, 1959], is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war.
Adolf Hitler was hated by the Allies, yet the three most significant Allied leaders—Churchill, de Gaulle, and Eisenhower—said absolutely nothing about either death camps or the extermination of Jews in their extensive post-war biographies.
Please check out more interviews of E. Michael Jones.