The Palestinians and their allies should know the truth about the Nazis

The most offensive attacks made by Palestinians and their supporters against Israelis are comparisons to the Nazis. These analogies demonstrate a profound ignorance of history—and a malicious hatred of Jews. As an educational service to these ignoramuses and propagandists, I would like to provide some examples of what the Nazis did to the Jews.

First, I must apologize for the graphic nature of some of the examples, but they were purposely chosen because they are so horrific that they are not often discussed.

The discussion of the Holocaust is often antiseptic. We talk about the six million murdered by the Nazis as if it is an abstract statistic—similar to the GDP of Brazil. Israel’s detractors simply think of Jews as victims of mistreatment that is no different from the way that Palestinians are treated today. It is a lie.

Every concentration camp was horrible, but let’s consider what occurred at one of the camps that may be less familiar than Dachau or Auschwitz. According to war crimes prosecutors, here are some of the methods used to kill Jews at Mauthausen: “gassing, hanging, clubbing, heart injections, driving inmates into the electric fence, kicking in genitals, being buried alive, and by putting a red-hot poker down the throat.”

Father Patrick Desbois documented how Jews in Ukraine were killed by the Nazis “for fun,” “out of anger, boredom, drunkenness,” or “to rape the girls.”

At various times and places, Jews would be forced to strip naked and dig their own graves before the Nazis shot them so their bodies would fall into them. If a single shot did not kill a Jew, sometimes they were buried alive to save bullets. In Hungary, three Jews were tied together along the bank of the Danube. The middle person was shot, sending all three into the freezing water to drown.

Groups of Jews were corralled into buildings, and locked inside before the buildings were set on fire. In Bialystok, 800-1,000 Jewish men and boys were burned alive in the Great Synagogue on June 27, 1941.

Recently, advocates for the Palestinians have made an issue of a small number of Palestinian teenagers being arrested by Israel for various crimes. During the Holocaust, one million children were gassed, burned alive, stabbed or starved to death for the crime of being Jewish.

Jews at many camps were employed as slave laborers. For example, the Heinkel aircraft manufacturing company used between 6,000 and 8,000 prisoners from Sachsenhausen to help build a bomber. Prisoners unfit to work in the camps were murdered. Those who survived the long working hours with little food or rest were usually killed later.

In one town, Jews were taken to the butcher’s slaughterhouse. They were stripped and forced to crawl on their hands and knees up the ramp used for animals. When they reached the end, their heads were chopped off and put in baskets. Their bodies were taken and hung on meat hooks with signs that said “kosher meat.”

The Palestinians have fabricated stories about Israel infecting Palestinians with the AIDS virus. These were actual medical experiments carried out by the Nazis:

At Auschwitz, Josef Mengele injected twins and dwarfs—aged two and above — with various substances. He then killed them so he could conduct comparative pathological examinations of their internal organs.

Carl Clauberg injected chemical substances into the wombs of thousands of Jewish women to determine how long it would take to sterilize 1,000 women. Horst Schumann sterilized men and women by pointing x-rays at their sexual organs. Many subjects died after great suffering.

At Dachau, doctors experimented with methods of reviving prisoners after they had been forced to remain in a tank of ice water for hours. Other prisoners were infected with malaria to test treatments for the disease.

Here’s a description of one of the high-altitude experiments carried out at Dachau: “It was a continuous experiment without oxygen at a height of 12 Km. (7½ miles) conducted on a 37-year-old Jew in good general condition. Breathing continued up to 30 minutes. After 4 minutes the experimental subject began to perspire and to wiggle his head, after 5 minutes cramps occurred, between 6 and 10 minutes breathing increased in speed and the experimental subject became unconscious; from 11 to 30 minutes breathing slowed down to three breaths per minute, finally stopping altogether.”

If these examples are not enough, I would refer Palestinians and their supporters who repeat the calumny about Jews and Nazis to the eminent philosopher, Emil Fackenheim, who offered these distinguishing characteristics of the Holocaust:

The “Final Solution” was designed to exterminate every single Jewish man, woman and child. The only Jews who would have conceivably survived if Hitler had been victorious were those who somehow escaped discovery by the Nazis.

Jewish birth (actually mere evidence of “Jewish blood”) was sufficient to warrant the punishment of death. Fackenheim notes that this feature distinguished Jews from Poles and Russians—who were killed because there were too many of them—and from “Aryans,” who were not singled out unless they chose to single themselves out. With the possible exception of Gypsies, he adds, Jews were the only people killed for the “crime” of existing.

The extermination of the Jews had no political or economic justification. It was not a means to any end; it was an end in itself. The killing of Jews was not considered just a part of the war effort, but equal to it; thus, resources that could have been used in the war were diverted instead to the program of extermination.

Yes, Palestinians can claim their share of suffering, but they have never faced anything remotely like what the Nazis did to the Jews. The only systematic murders of Palestinians because they are Palestinians have been carried out by their fellow Arabs, not Israelis.

During Israel’s administration of the disputed territories, the Palestinian population has grown exponentially. More than 20 percent of the Israeli population are Palestinians who enjoy equal rights with Jewish citizens.

Palestinians in the territories have the right to petition Israeli courts to redress their grievances, and more than 100,000 Judea and Samaria Arabs work in Israel and Jewish settlements—with benefits similar to their Jewish co-workers.

Palestinians are not forced to wear special clothes or badges. They have no tattoos on their forearms. They have not been sent to concentration or slave labor camps, or forced to build Israeli armaments. The only camps holding Palestinians today are refugee camps—and the residents are kept there by their fellow Palestinians and other Arabs.

Dr. Mitchell Bard is executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise and author/editor of 24 books, including “The Arab Lobby” and the novel “After Anatevka: Tevye in Palestine.”