HOLOCAUST AND THE SECOND FRONT

The focus of this entry is not on Stalin, but it is so organically linked to the previous entry by the subject of the USSR, the West, and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, that to place it anywhere else than right here would be unthinkable.

 “The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.” This sharp aphorism of Nietzsche’s offers the best explanation of what the Russians saw as the position of the West toward Hitler and Stalin, not only in the years and months immediately preceding World War Two, but also at the Teheran Big Three Conference, in 1943. Stalin saw this as the main reason why the Americans and the Brits were in no big hurry to open the Second Front. Let their two enemies, Russia and Germany, destroy each other!

Curiously, Stalin had a ready plan in place, developed as early as in 1941, to assassinate Hitler, as soon as the Allies would open the Second Front, provided this was done promptly enough. General Andrei Vlasov’s planted defection to the Germans in 1942 was actually, in part, designed to set the assassination in motion. (See the separate Vlasov entry Traitor-Hero, posted on my blog on March 17^th, 2011, for more.) But having realized that the Allies were not in a hurry to open the Second Front, Stalin wisely concluded that Hitler’s assassination in 1943 or later would be too dangerous for Russia, tempting the Allies to conclude a separate peace with post-Hitler Germany at Russia’s expense. The assassination plan was therefore abandoned, with tragic consequences for General Vlasov…

But that fateful American-British decision, not to open the Second Front in Europe early, had a remarkable historical consequence for many years to come, and perhaps for all time. This historical entry uncovers not so much the history of World War II, as the attitude to history, or rather, more specifically, to one of its most delicate pages, tying the worst excesses of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews to that deliberate procrastination on the part of Stalin’s rather questionable Allies.

In the opinion of most Russian Jews (whether they might be all anxious to share it with the Americans is an altogether different matter), and, even more importantly, of the Israeli Jews, be that the Holocaust survivors themselves, or the children of Holocaust survivors, such unconscionable procrastination had resulted in the war continuing for two years more than necessary, and so it made the Holocaust of six million Jews technically possible, thus putting an indirect, but harsh blame for the Holocaust on the United States and on the British, which in today’s terms amounts to putting the blame on America first and foremost. (Haven’t the Brits, they can ask dismissively, gotten their historical global comeuppance already, by losing their great British Empire, and becoming America’s poodles, so who cares about them anymore? But America, trying to sell herself to the Jews of the world as the staunchest friend of Israel, yet materially responsible for the Jewish Holocaust in World War Two, matters a lot in this respect… Never forget!)

There is thus a hidden, but very deep resentment for the United States in the hearts and minds of millions of Jews worldwide, and particularly, in Israel herself, whose status as the closest and dearest ally of the United States has been taken too much for granted by the “bipartisan” Washington, and probably by the American Jewish community at large, which is in itself exceedingly presumptuous and, even though emotionally understandable, still rationally flawed and politically inexcusable.