Yale historian Timothy Snyder is indebted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently made Snyder’s new book even more newsworthy than his extraordinary scholarship deserves to be. And Netanyahu is indebted to Snyder, whose theory of Hitler’s anti-Semitism is germane to two questions: Is the Iranian regime’s anti-Semitism rooted, as Hitler’s was, in a theory of history that demands genocide? If so, when Iran becomes a nuclear power, can it be deterred from its announced determination to destroy Israel?
Netanyahu recently asserted, again, that a Palestinian cleric was important in Hitler’s decision to murder European Jews. Netanyahu said that on Nov. 28, 1941, when Hitler supposedly preferred to expel Europe’s Jews rather than exterminate them, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, met with Hitler and urged him to “burn them.”
Certainly the Mufti favored genocide; he certainly was not important in initiating it. The Holocaust accompanied the German army, especially after the September 1939 outbreak of war, and especially after the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Granted, it was not until the January 1942 Wannsee Conference that the “final solution” became explicit. But by the time Hitler met the Mufti, approximately 700,000 Soviet Jews had been shot. Snyder, not Netanyahu, should be heeded concerning the Holocaust’s genesis.
Christopher Browning, author of “Ordinary Men” (1992), a study of middle-aged German conscripts who became consenting participants in mass-murder police battalions in Poland, noted that protracted socialization — centuries of conditioning — could not explain the Khmer Rouge’s murder of millions of Cambodians, or the Chinese slaughter of millions of Chinese during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.