The Strange Rehabilitation Of Adolf Hitler

There aren't two sides to every story.

Krakow, Poland, 1942. Toby Biber, along with several thousand other Orthodox Jews, is moved from the Krakow ghetto to Plaszow forced labour camp.

Despite rumours that those who can’t work will be shot on sight, several desperate parents hide their infant children in bags and rucksacks rather than leave them behind. But to their delight, when the Gestapo discover that children are hiding in the camp, they set up a small nursery for them.

For two weeks, the parents send their sons and daughters to the nursery to be cared for while they work. Then, a truck arrives and takes all the children away. They’re never seen alive again.

Krakow, Poland, 1943. SS troops raid the house where Jan Imich, a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy, has been hiding since the beginning of WWII. One of the soldiers becomes suspicious when Jan shows his fake ID, and forces him to drop his trousers. He is arrested immediately.

Jan is taken to Gross-Rosen concentration camp where the Nazis conduct medical experiments on him and force him to work in the crematoriums. But the guard who registers him, despite knowing he is Jewish, gives him a red triangle signifying a political prisoner instead of a yellow triangle signifying a Jew. And this small detail saves Jan’s life.

Fortunately, nobody thought it was odd for a thirteen-year-old to be a political dissident.

Mauthausen, Austria, 1942. Premysl Dobias is arrested for helping Jews in Austria and shipped to Mauthausen concentration camp.

The guards tell new arrivals that they need volunteers to feed the pigs. And seeing a chance to avoid the worst of the forced labour, and maybe even survive by eating the pigswill, Dobias tries every trick he can think of to get the job. Unfortunately, several other prisoners have the same idea.

Dobias looks on in envy as twelve other prisoners are selected and marched towards the farm. At least until they reach the pig pens, where the guards shoot them dead so they can use their bodies as pig feed.

“Who else knows how to feed pigs?” laughs one of the soldiers.

I don’t know if it’s social media-induced apathy or the ~450 Holocaust movies made since 1945, but it seems some people have started to find stories like these a little…dull.

Schindler’s List, The Grey Zone, Sophie’s Choice, Zone of Interest, it’s easy to forget they happened to real people in the real world in societies that, give or take an iPhone or two, were indistinguishable from our own.

But thankfully, on a recent episode of Tucker Carlson’s show, a history podcaster and part-time Hitler advocate named Daryl Cooper shared a fresh, new take on WWII with Tucker Carlson’s 34 million-strong audience.

In Cooper’s version of events, Hitler wasn’t a brutal, psychotic megalomaniac, but a maligned, misunderstood figure, eager to work with Europe to find an “acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”

The Holocaust wasn’t a deliberate, calculated genocide, just an innocent miscalculation, with the Nazis caught “unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war” and asking themselves, “Wouldn’t it be more humane to finish them off quickly?”

And the “chief villain of World War II” wasn’t Adolf Hitler, oh no! It was that petty war-mongering, Winston Churchill, who escalated the harmless little invasion of Poland into a blood-soaked global conflict by ignoring Hitler’s calls for peace.

You may have spotted one or two problems with this story.

You might have noticed that Dachau, one of the Nazis’ first concentration camps, opened six years before Churchill declared war. And that the Nazis ratified the legal framework for their mass slaughter of Jews, Roma, disabled people, and LGBT people five years before they started racking up prisoners of war.

You might suspect that given what we know about Hitler (and given that he’d invaded Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France by the time Churchill became Prime Minister), Churchill was probably wise to doubt the sincerity of his peace offers.

And most glaring of all, you might note that Hitler’s “acceptable solution to the Jewish problem” turned out to be the industrialised slaughter of six million Jews.

But the real problem with Cooper’s story isn’t the chronological errors or, as Cooper tries to frame it, that you’re “not allowed” to criticise Churchill. It’s not even that Cooper chickened out of defending his claims against a highly respected WWII historian because he “knows how that would go for [him].”

It’s that rather than glancing at a history book or demonstrating a basic understanding of cause and effect, millions of people came away with a reaction like this guy’s: