Paul Kendal, writing for The Telegraph in Britain, reported that in 1941 a medical officer named Major Leo Skurnik received the Iron Cross from the German high command. Notably, Skurnik was Jewish. Kendal further observed that Skurnik was not an isolated case; more than three hundred Jews served on the German side when Finland—sharing a common adversary in the Soviet Union—entered the war in June 1941.[1]
Yet Kendal, without offering any meaningful critical reflection, asserts: “The alliance between Hitler and the race he vowed to annihilate — the only instance of Jews fighting for Germany’s allies — is one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Second World War, and yet hardly anyone, including many Finns, knows anything about it.”[2]
The serious historical questions that Kendal fails even to raise—and which are often, and in some cases quite deliberately, elided by the mainstream Holocaust narrative—are as follows: If Hitler’s ultimate objective was the extermination of an entire people, how does one account for the presence of thousands of individuals of Jewish descent living in Nazi Germany during the war? Is it historically or intellectually coherent to uphold both propositions simultaneously—that Hitler sought total annihilation, and yet that large numbers of Jews continued to live, serve, or even be decorated under his regime? Is it philosophically defensible to suggest that these Jewish individuals were merely “duped” and entirely unaware of Hitler’s alleged intentions? Were they oblivious to what is now said to have been their inevitable destiny in the concentration camps? What, in fact, motivated them to join or cooperate with the Third Reich in the first place? These are among the questions I posed to an author who published a widely circulated monograph on Nazi Germany under the imprint of the University of California.
