The Nazis No-One Wants to Talk About

Truth, as they say, is the first casualty of war. Rationality and nuanced debate are usually next up against the wall. Once the war drums start pounding, brains stop working and everything collapses into a black-and-white dichotomy. “We” are invariably on the side of the angels, and “they” are demons incarnate.

Any nuanced, reality-based views have largely gone out the window.

Israel has lashed out at Russia over “unforgivable” comments by its foreign minister about Nazism and anti-semitism – including claims that Adolf Hitler was Jewish. Israel, which summoned the Russian ambassador in response, said the remarks blamed Jews for their own murder in the Holocaust.

Except that that’s not what Lavrov actually said.

Asked in an interview with an Italian news channel about Russian claims that it invaded Ukraine to “denazify” the country, Sergey Lavrov said that Ukraine could still have Nazi elements even if some figures, including the country’s president, were Jewish.

“So when they say ‘How can Nazification exist if we’re Jewish?’ In my opinion, Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean absolutely anything. For some time we have heard from the Jewish people that the biggest anti-semites were Jewish,” he said, speaking to the station in Russian, dubbed over by an Italian translation.

In some of the harshest remarks since the start of the war in Ukraine, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called Lavrov’s statement “unforgivable and scandalous and a horrible historical error”.

“The Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust,” said Lapid, the son of a Holocaust survivor. “The lowest level of racism against Jews is to blame Jews themselves for anti-semitism.”

Stuff

While we can entirely understand Israel’s sensitivity regarding the Holocaust, that doesn’t justify lying in return.

More importantly, it doesn’t justify the continued glossing-over of the demonstrated fact that there are neo-Nazi elements prominent in Ukraine.

Because Lavrov did not say that “Hitler was Jewish”. He said that Hitler had “Jewish origins”. This might seem hair-splitting to the uninformed, but it’s a big difference. To be technically “Jewish”, under Israel’s Law of Return, a person must be born of a Jewish mother, or convert to Judaism. Jewish religious law stipulates matrilineal Jewish ancestry.

So, no Hitler wasn’t “Jewish” — and Lavrov didn’t say he was.

But did Hitler have “Jewish origins”, as Lavrov actually said? This question has long bedevilled scholarship — after all, wouldn’t it be the great joke of history if its most notorious anti-Semite had what by his twisted ideology would have been “tainted” origins? The answer is: maybe.

Rumours of Hitler’s Jewish origins circulated even in the 1920s and 30s. Nazi lawyer Hans Frank detailed the claim in 1930, claiming to have discovered that Hitler’s grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, who gave birth to an illegitimate son (Hitler’s father, Alois) was knocked up by a Jew. Many have rubbished the story, arguing that there were no Jews in Grandma Hitler’s town at the time. Others counter that that is a falsehood spread by Nazi sympathisers, and that archives suggest a Jewish community did exist in the town. Indeed, the Jewish Virtual Library claims that Maria “is known to have worked in the home of a wealthy Jew”.

More concretely, genetic evidence suggests that there may be some Jewish ancestry in the Hitler line. A study which analysed saliva samples from 39 known Hitler relatives found, inconclusively, evidence of a gene linked to Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish Jews (as well as Berbers).

So, Lavrov may have over-egged the pudding and peddled disputable claims, but it’s hardly a “horrible historic error”.

But what about “blam[ing] Jews themselves for anti-semitism”?

Well, again, note that Lavrov did not say that at all. He said that “the biggest anti-semites were Jewish”, presumably meaning in the Holocaust. Is that true?

No. The “biggest anti-Semites” would clearly be those who planned and executed the Holocaust — the German Nazi leadership. But the Germans didn’t do the Holocaust all on their own: they had collaborators in many countries. Ukraine was a notable example.

And some of their collaborators — some of them extremely vicious collaborators — were indeed Jewish.

Many were forced to become collaborators through circumstance (George Soros is a famous example), some through cowardice or, like Adam Czerniakow, a desire to protect their own families at any cost and to minimise Nazi excesses where they could. But others were much worse, collaborating enthusiastically.

So, what’s the upshot of all this?

Lavrov has obviously exaggerated and asserted inconclusive claims — and without doubt, Russia is eager to justify its unjustified invasion. Israel is justifiably sensitive to what it construes as Holocaust revisionism. But that shouldn’t be used to continue the Western wall of denial about the presence of neo-Nazis in eastern Ukraine. Before the war, Western media were quite happy to dub neo-Nazis like the Azov Brigade Ukraine’s most serious threat. The UN documented numerous atrocities they committed against civilians.

More damningly, the Obama administration was secretly funding and training Ukraine’s neo-Nazis. The Zelensky administration did little to curb their activities (at the same time that Zelensky was and is banning opposition parties and media, and arresting opposition politicians). In fact, today the neo-Nazis are leading the defence of Mariupol.

Does this mean that Vlodomyr Zelensky is a Nazi, or an anti-Semite? No. That is obvious nonsense. What it does mean, though, is that despite his own Jewishness, Zelensky is clearly prepared to dance with the neo-Nazi devil in order to preserve his own political hide.

And that’s something we need to have an honest discussion about — which is about the last thing we’re likely to get.