This
winter seems to have unearthed numerous elderly Nazis, and
today has proved to be no exception. Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth
is reporting the finding by an American called Mark Gould
of a 97-year-old former SS officer, Bernhard Frank, who,
according to the report, “was responsible for signing the
first order of the Reich instructing the mass murder of hundreds
of thousands of Jews”.
This claim is pure junk.
Although I’ve no doubt that Frank
was in the SS, the significance of his role in the Holocaust
has been blown grossly out of proportion. The story says
that Frank signed a ‘Commando Stadt order’ on July 28 1941,
which I assume actually means an order issued by Himmler’s
Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS, which was established in May
1941 to conduct anti-partisan operations, and by late June,
to perform what Himmler ominously called ‘other tasks’ –
ie, killing Jews.
Himmler started issuing orders to
‘comb the Pripet Marshes’ in early July, and on July 19 and
22, he ordered his units to ‘impose peace’ on the occupied
territories. The order he gave on July 28 simply provided
further directives for this ongoing operation, and also formally
handed control to Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. Two days later,
Himmler made himself more explicit, by insisting that ‘all
Jewish men should be executed, and the women and children
pushed into the swamps’. (Source: Holocaust and Genocide
Studies, Volume 1, Number 1, pp 11-25, 1986, ‘Kommandostab
Reichsführer-SS: Himmler’s Personal Murder Brigades in 1941′
by Yehoshua Büchler.)
Furthermore, according to Dr Efraim
Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Frank’s signature
is one of many on the document, and Frank’s responsibility
only seems to encompass the language used in the document
rather than the actual order itself. Frank himself has been
living openly in Germany for years, and there is no evidence
to link him to committing any war crimes.
It should also be borne in mind that
these orders are far from the first in which the murders
of Jews were called for. Bernhard Frank may not have been
a good man during the war, but the idea that he somehow started
the Holocaust is ludicrous.
UPDATE: I’m glad to see the scepticism
is gaining a lot of traction. There’s a great piece in the
New York Times by Michael Slackman that nicely captures the
motivation of Gould, while my friend Michael Burleigh observes
that the memories of elderly former Nazis are often tainted
by endless documentaries about the Third Reich. “Old Nazis
watch a lot of telly too,” he says. “Sometimes they can’t
even remember if they were at Auschwitz or Austerlitz.”
blogs.telegraph.co.uk
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