she's the emory university professor of jewish & holocaust studies acquitted about 5 years ago in a libel suit brought in the UK by british holocaust denier david irving.
a few points caught my attention.
- lipstadt said irving claimed the ww2 allied bombing of dresden had no military application and killed 250k civilians. she said the true estimate was 20k-30k, and it did have military value.
- in a short discussion about simon wiesenthal, the concentration-camp survivor and nazi hunter who died recently, she made a criticism: that wiesenthal whitewashed kurt waldheim, the austrian ex-UN-secretary-general accused of being an ex-nazi when found to have been in the german military.
- she also very briefly mentioned raoul wallenberg, the swedish diplomat who tried to save hungarian jews and vanished around the end of the war. lipstadt said he was probably killed by the russians.
i looked up the dresden bombing in sir basil liddell hart's history of the second world war, published in 1970. no casualty figure was given, but i found the following:
At the beginning of 1945 the outlook became complicated.... That led to a fresh discussion of priorities. [skip] The most controversial aspect is the deliberate revival of 'terrorisation' as a prime aim. [skip] ...the distant city of Dresden was subjected to a devastating attack in mid-February—with the deliberate intention of wreaking havoc among the civil population and refugees—striking at the city centre, not the factories or railways.
well, i guess you could say killing and terrorizing civilians has military value. i'm sure al qaeda thinks so. war is hell, right?
i'm not so sure it's accurate to say wiesenthal "whitewashed" waldheim. i looked up the latter's date of birth. it was 12/21/1918, 40 days after the ww1 armistice, 26½ years before v-e day. waldheim was austrian, but of german descent, so he would've been subjected to a lot of nazi propaganda in his vulnerable teen years, when most phobias begin. then hitler took over austria before waldheim turned 20. he may very well have felt a great deal of social pressure to enlist.
there's no evidence he was as rabid as, say, zell miller, but if he was, was it his fault? i'm not so sure. recent research indicates the human brain isn't fully formed till around age 25, and one of the last faculties it develops is the ability to consider consequences, which contributes to conscience. waldheim must've been in uniform before that. i think i may be with wiesenthal on this one.
wallenberg's case is a real mystery. i can see why the germans might've killed him, but not the russians. yet i've heard evidence indicates the russians arrested him and imprisoned him, and he was never heard from again.
no good deed goes unpunished, eh?
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