Idiotarians United

VodkaPundit reports on some upcoming 'scholarship' at the 'Institute' for 'Historical' 'Review'. (He credits Midwestern Conservative Journal, but that site is down at the moment for bandwidth profligacy.) This particular paragraph of the IHR's blurb caught my eye:

Robert Faurisson, Europe's foremost Holocaust revisionist scholar, will provide another of the witty and thought-provoking presentations that never fail to delight audiences. He brings to the podium the insight and savvy of a scholar who was educated at the Paris Sorbonne, and who served for years as a professor at the University of Lyon II. He will speak on a little known fact of World War II history: punishments, including death sentences, of German soldiers, officers and government officials for killing or even mistreating Jews.

I don't doubt that Faurisson can come up with a few examples. The problem is that they would not necessarily do much, or anything at all, to exonerate the Nazis. Consider this one, from last July's Guardian.

In 1942 in Drogobych, Poland, Gestapo agent Karl Günter murdered Bruno Schulz, author of Street of Crocodiles and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. He did so to spite his boss, Felix Landau, Gestapo chief of Drogobych, who later served fifteen years of a life sentence for murdering or deporting 15,000 local Jews. That comes out to almost nine hours in jail for each Jew murdered or deported.

To quote The Guardian:

Landau, a junior SS officer, was a notorious sadist with a penchant for the fine arts.

A bit further down:

. . . when the Nazi looting of Drogobych was in full swing, [Landau] needed a local Jew "with perfect written and spoken German" to catalogue the art works and valuables being plundered.

Schulz fitted the bill. He survived a little longer by being given a German pass enabling him to move in and out of the ghetto.

When Landau learned that he was also a painter, he commissioned Schulz to decorate the walls of the nursery of his [five-year-old] son Wolf-Dieter.

But Landau's subordinate Günter nursed a grudge against his boss for shooting a Jewish man Günter employed as his private dentist. Günter took his revenge by killing his boss's painter.

The Guardian article does not record whether Landau punished Günter. If he did, it would prove nothing about the decency of these particular Nazis. The Guardian does mention that the Nazis killed 230 Jews that day in Drogobych, and that Günter's other two personal victims were both young women.

It is perfectly clear that, to Landau and Günter, Schulz and the unnamed dentist were no better than cows being kept back from the slaughterhouse so long as they produced plenty of milk. To put it another way, the crime itself would have been like shooting someone else's dog to punish him for shooting your own. If charges were filed against Günter, I imagine that it would have been for gross insubordination rather than murder.

Assuming for the moment that Landau did punish Günter for shooting Schulz, I wonder whether Faurisson will present the case as evidence for his disgusting and ridiculous thesis.

Finally, it is always worth remembering that this is the same Faurisson whose book of historical revisionism somehow ended up with a five- or six-page preface by Noam Chomsky.

Posted by Dr. Weevil at June 13, 2002 08:59 PM