The spread of diseases such as Typhus at concentration camps during the Holocaust was obviously not the result of failed or derelict management. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate Nazi effort to make disease spread, and the body count rise with less effort. No one faults the Nazis for failing to have an adequate medical staff on hand at Bergen-Belsen — we fault them for deliberately murdering millions of people.
Ultimately, Anne Frank was not killed by Typhus or any other disease — she was murdered by Nazi Germany.
This is news to hardly anyone, except for the far-left NowThis news website, which has a long history of trouble getting basic facts right.
In a video this week, NowThis has a number of fashionably Palestinian-keffiyeh clad students explain why the Trump administration’s recent anti-Semitism executive order is bad. That order affirms that government-supported universities must protect Jews from civil rights violations. Critics fear that President Trump’s order will restrict free speech because Trump also recognizes anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism in some cases — after all, the two are at times connected.
But they are, of course, delusional. Were the government to withhold funds simply because a member of faculty criticized Israel, for example, the courts would rule that action in contravention of the First Amendment.
But skip to the video’s four-minute 45-second mark, and you’ll see why I’m writing this article.
‘[Trump] has no right to define what being Jewish is’ — These Jewish and Palestinian students are speaking out against Trump for equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism in his Judaism executive order pic.twitter.com/TJGTBiMGb6
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 14, 2020
As the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy points out, this isn’t just stupid, it’s absurd. To compare the Trump administration’s border policies with the Nazis’ final solution is idiotic enough, to begin with. But to suggest that Anne Frank died, not because of Nazi policy at concentration camps, but rather because of Typhus? That’s like saying that the more than 1 million Jews who were gassed to death between 1939 and 1945 weren’t killed by the Nazi weaponization of Zyklon B, but because their neurotransmitters shut down and their lungs stopped working.
To vary a line from Curb Your Enthusiasm, it is pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty stupid.
But it’s also a serious stupidity because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature and intent of the Third Reich. Whatever you think about the failings of Trump’s border policy, related U.S. government facilities are not operated with an intention to kill. They are operated to detain individuals in lieu of further civilian legal proceedings. People in those facilities receive medical care — often, they show up in desperate circumstances from their trek across the border and require care urgently.
In contrast, Adolf Hitler’s final solution was most certainly intended to kill. And it was affected by a mixture of means; gassing, shooting, slave labor, and the deliberate spread of disease. From the Nazi perspective, the Typhus carrying fleas on the rats that infested Bergen-Belsen’s barracks were not incidental to the Holocaust, but a useful tool of it. Remember, the Nazis openly viewed Jews as human rodents scheming to infect humanity.
This is part of what made the Second World War, not just a struggle for human freedom, but for human existence. Histories such as Richard Evans’s trilogy demonstrate that much. And if you’re unwilling to read a book, just consider the moral juxtaposition of the movies Schindler’s List and The Longest Day.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the discussion of the Holocaust, even where folks don’t know much. But to dissect the cause of Anne Frank’s murder from its source and intent isn’t just ridiculous. It’s pathetic. And it must be called out as such.
