On 27 February, 1943, the Gestapo began rounding up Berlin’s male Jews to deport them to…well, kingdom come. Their pestilent presence clashed with the Nazis’ declared aim of making Germany Judenrein, rid of Jews.
Yet many of those men were married to Aryan women, most of whom refused to divorce their husbands, in spite of the pressure the Nazis applied and the incentives they offered. Some of the husbands were part-Aryan themselves, rather than what the Nuremberg laws defined as “full Jew”.
However, the women and their families didn’t accept that outrage meekly. They came out in force to demonstrate on Berlin’s Rosenstrasse. The protests lasted seven days and ended in… I’m not going to tell you.
Instead, if you happen to know any Russians, ask them to guess the outcome of the action. Any such guess would be based on their knowledge of the Nazis’ monstrosity, and also on their own experience of Putin’s Russia.
Five gets you ten, they’ll assume that the police ploughed in with rubber truncheons, laying about them like Macduff, the Thane of Fife. The demonstrators dispersed, their wounds sputtering blood on the nearby Alexanderplatz.
Many were dragged to police stations, where they were all beaten up and tortured. Some of the men were raped with broom handles; some of the women, the old-fashioned way. Prison sentences were then meted out en masse.
Right? No, those poor Russians guessed wrong. The Nazis did no such thing. On Goebbels’s orders 1,800 Jews were released. This, though the Nazis had just lost at Stalingrad and were feeling enough heat to become even more brutal than usual.
The parallel with Putin’s regime is as inexact as such parallels usually are. There were some anti-war demonstrations all over Russia immediately after 24 February, when the bandit raid on the Ukraine began.
Yet they ended in the way my hypothetical Russians hypothetically ascribed to the Rosenstrasse protest: truncheons, torture, imprisonment. Since then the country has been silent. Demonstrating is fine, but not if that turns into a suicide pact.
Then again, not one person among the thousands in the upper reaches of the Russian government has uttered a single word of protest against the brutal, genocidal attack on the Ukraine. Yet, with all the suitable disclaimers, the situation in the Third Reich was different.
Many top German generals, such as Beck, Halder, Blomberg, Fritch, Schleicher, were openly opposed to Hitler’s war – and as openly looked down on him as an upstart corporal. And Admiral Kanaris, head of the Abwehr, not only opposed the war but even plotted against Hitler, some sources suggest in cahoots with the British.
Yet none of those generals was imprisoned or suicided, although some were cashiered. It was only after the July, 1944, plot that some dissidents, including Kanaris, were arrested and executed.
In other words, the blind obedience and uniformity of opinion within Putin’s elite outdo even Nazi Germany. The conclusion makes itself: Putin isn’t Hitler. He is worse.
Many of Hitler’s acolytes, including some of those I’ve mentioned, were Hitler’s stooges. But they weren’t his mindless puppets.
As a Russian émigré commentator mentioned, what goes on in Russia resembles not so much a dictatorship as a death cult. Putin is typologically closer to Jim ‘Kool-Aid’ Jones, than to Hitler.
(For my younger readers, Jones created a fanatical sect. Like many madmen, he emitted powerful emanations, which he used to turn the adherents of his cult into unthinking automata. On his command, in 1978 all 918 cult-followers, a third of them children, committed suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.)
Hitler too could hypnotise multitudes with his evil charisma – but not quite to the same extent. Putin achieves the same purpose admirably, if by means other than charisma. That’s why he isn’t so much a dictator as a shaman of an evil, brainwashed cult.
And that’s why his 5,000 top henchmen open their mouths and repeat, on Putin’s cue, insane mantras, along the lines of Russia’s natural border being Pas-de-Calais, threats of a nuclear incineration of the world and calls for the genocide of Ukrainians.
Some will take issue with the observation that Putin is worse than Hitler. After all, the KGB major hasn’t murdered millions, occupied most of continental Europe or plunged the world into the most devastating war ever. Not yet, would be my way of completing that sentence.
Actually, Hitler hadn’t done any of those things either, until 1 September, 1939. If Putin acts on ten per cent of his eminently believable threats, Hitler, even post-September, 1939, will look like a humanitarian by comparison.
If the parallel with Hitler is imprecise, the one between the Munich appeasers and today’s EU is unimpeachable. Not all of the EU, just its rotten core.
France, Germany, Italy and Hungary are actively sabotaging the efforts of Poland and the Baltics, which, in alliance with Britain and the US, are doing all they can and even more to help the Ukraine. All those Putinversteheren cover up their cowardice and greed with bien pensant soundbites about the urgent need to stop the bloodshed, save lives and Putin’s face, and some such.
Manny Macron has even gone so far as to say that the last thing Europe wants is the destruction of Russia. The alternative to such a cataclysm is for the Ukraine to capitulate, cede another chink of her territory and stay supine – until Russia has amassed enough power to grab what little is left, and then push on.
Nobody wants to destroy Russia, Manny. Don’t listen to your friend Vlad – he is lying to you. What all decent people (which category manifestly doesn’t include Messrs Stolz, Macron, Draghi and Orban) want is to prevent Putin from destroying others. Ukraine first, the Baltics second, Poland and possibly Finland third – and tomorrow, to borrow a well-known phrase, the world.
President Zelensky keeps appealing to the West with Churchillian pleas: Give us the tools, and we will finish the job. The job he has in mind isn’t destroying Russia. It’s recovering the Ukraine’s possessions stolen by the sadistic death cult that goes by the name of Putin’s Russia.
Unable to produce cars, computers, up-to-date equipment or anything people would want to use, the death cult excels in one manufacturing category only: mass production of corpses.
Those who don’t realise that the cult threatens the survival not just of the Ukraine, but of our civilisation, what’s left of it, are either fools or knaves. Or, as some European ‘leaders’ prove, both.
My only possible criticism of this article relates to the persecution of those German army leaders who disagreed with the Nazi’s war aims; I am not sure that your list is entirely accurate. But as far as Putin and any criticisms of him by such as Macron are concerned you are spot-on as usual, Mr Boot.
I wish you would explain what is in it for Macron and/or France; that question baffles me, evidently a bear of very little brain.
All post-war French leaders have made a point of making France the European counterweight to American power. That explains France’s ambivalent relationship with Nato — and it also explains her flirting with Soviet, and now Russian, leaders. ‘The greatness of France’ is their invariable slogan, and they hope to ride to greatness on the back of Russia. Plus, of course there’s the money, there always is. And let’s not forget that more than half of the French electorate vote for various extreme parties, most of which support Putin or are even funded by him.
“There were some anti-war demonstrations all over Russia immediately after 24 February, when the bandit raid on the Ukraine began.”
Like I said at the time, probably the demonstrations carefully orchestrated by Vlad.