BEN KINGSLEY, WHO not too long ago played the pacifist-at-any-price Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, now stars in a new film as the nazi’s chief death planner, Adolph Eichmann.
Quite a stretch.
At least on the surface.
WILL THE REAL GANDHI PLEASE speak up.
In one of several similar internet articles on Gandhi1, the sage is alleged to have told Jews to give up their lives to the nazis and the English to allow the nazis to take over their island.
- In 1938, he suggested that Jews suffering under Nazism should commit mass suicide to “arouse the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” After the Holocaust, he reaffirmed this view:
“Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.”
During World War II, Gandhi offered this advice to the British people:
“I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions… If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”
Another site2 quotes Gandhi stating:
- “If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is therefore outside my horizon or province,” Gandhi once said.
Gandhi wrote to the British during the war, “This manslaughter must be stopped. You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man.” (Emphasis mine.)
Gandhi’s advice to the Jews was no less bizarre.
“If I were a Jew and were born in Germany... I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon.... And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy.... The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant.”
Obviously Gandhi did not understand the world’s convenient blindness in regard to Jews. His conviction that the slaughter of Jews would cause the world to rise up against the nazis was absolutely incorrect. Even in the U.S., every liberal Jews favorite president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
- * Turned away the MS St. Louis with nearly 1,000 Jews trying to escape Eichmann’s death camps3, and
* Refused to let U.S. bombers destroy railroad tracks and death camps over which they were flying to and from approved targets4, 5
ADOLPH EICHMANN is less complicated that Gandhi.
According to Wikipedia6, Eichmann had no regrets. He was quoted in Life magazine, while awaiting trial, “To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing.” Two other quotes from the same source deserve attention.
- ”Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on those trains meant nothing to me. It was really none of my business.
“I was never an anti-Semite. … My sensitive nature revolted at the sight of corpses and blood... I personally had nothing to do with this. My job was to observe and report on it.”
A biography7 might give a clue to Eichmann’s hatred of Jews. “As a boy, Eichmann was teased about his looks and dark complexion and was nicknamed "the little Jew" by classmates.
He soon attracted the attention of Heydrich and SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler who appointed Eichmann to head a newly created SD Scientific Museum of Jewish Affairs.
Eichmann was then assigned to investigate possible "solutions to the Jewish question." He visited Palestine in 1937 to discuss the possibility of large scale immigration of Jews to the Middle East with Arab leaders. British authorities, however, ordered him out of the country.
The “Final Solution” was really the nazis’ final plan – all others either having failed or proven too telling on the killers’ psyches – came about in 1942.
- On July 31, 1941 Heydrich was told by Göring to prepare "a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired Final Solution of the Jewish question."
In January 1942 Eichmann helped Heydrich organize the Wannsee Conference in Berlin during which Heydrich and Eichmann along with 15 Nazi bureaucrats planned the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe and the Soviet Union, estimated at 11 million persons.
With the end in sight, Eichmann, disobeying orders, had “another 50,000 Hungarian Jews rounded up and forced on an eight day death march to Austria.”
Even awaiting trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann remained true to his dementia (ibid.).
In 1950, with the help of the SS underground, he fled to Argentina and lived under the assumed name of Ricardo Klement for ten years until Israeli Mossad agents abducted him on May 11, 1960.
Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes. During the four months of the trial over 100 witnesses testified against him. Eichmann took the stand and used the defense that he was just obeying orders. "Why me," he asked. "Why not the local policemen, thousands of them? They would have been shot if they had refused to round up the Jews for the death camps. Why not hang them for not wanting to be shot? Why me? Everybody killed the Jews."
From Encyclopaedia Britannia8:
- Following the war, U.S. troops captured Eichmann, but in 1946 he escaped from a prison camp. After dodging in and out of the Middle East for several years, Eichmann settled in Argentina in 1958. He was arrested by Israeli secret service agents near Buenos Aires, Argentina, on May 11, 1960; nine days later they smuggled him out of the country and took him to Israel. After settling the controversy that arose over this Israeli violation of Argentine law, the Israeli government arranged his trial before a special three-judge court in Jerusalem. Eichmann’s trial was controversial from the beginning. The trial—before Jewish judges by a Jewish state that did not exist until three years after the Holocaust—gave rise to accusations of ex post facto justice. Some called for an international tribunal to try Eichmann, and others wanted him tried in Germany, but Israel was insistent. At stake was not only justice but also honour, as well as an opportunity to educate a new generation about the Holocaust.
Perhaps Kingsley’s portrayal of of Eichmann will enhance the world’s curiosity about the Holocaust and the people who murdered more than 12 million civilians and caused the deaths of thousands of soldiers.
Kingsley told the Associated Press9 that “he didn't portray Adolf Eichmann out of love or admiration. Rather, he wanted to "nail him to the gates of Auschwitz.”
The actor said he “dedicated my performance to Elie Wiesel and the millions who lost their lives under [Eichmann's] command"
There is another Eichmann movie, a YouTube film made in 2016.
The movie revolves around Eichmann’s time in Israel prior to the trial.
The URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuhR59GK-vw
Sources
1. http://tinyurl.com/ybtu6k74
2. http://tinyurl.com/yclrepnp
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate
5. http://tinyurl.com/y8uugvuq
6. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adolf_Eichmann
7. http://tinyurl.com/yzpz2o
8. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adolf-Eichmann
9. http://tinyurl.com/y7lzhwtf
PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.
Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.
