Eighty years ago, on January 27, 1945, the Soviet Union’s Red Army came upon Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and saw the extent of the Nazis’ psychotic hatred for Jews. Six decades later, in November 2005, the United Nations marked January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
The UN General Assembly, with a strong bloc of Islamic nations, most often votes against Israel. This includes Russia, whose president, Vladimir Putin, continues the policy established by the Soviet Union. But in 2005, Israel’s proposal for the creation of Holocaust Remembrance Day was adopted without a vote. The UN's hope was that it would hasten a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, who earlier that year had ended a long and futile uprising, the Second Intifada, 2000-2005.
The fighting, however, has become even more intense.
Last year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day arrived four months after the Palestinian Arab terror group, Hamas, viciously massacred over a thousand Jews, including a large group of young Jews attending a peace rally/dance party near Gaza. Hamas took hundreds of hostages, holding them captive and brutalizing them, releasing some as it suited their agenda.
Surprisingly, many of the protests that erupted throughout the world, particularly on college campuses, were not directed at the terrorists but to condemn the Israelis for defending themselves from further attack as they sought to rescue the hostages. The word “Zionists” was used in place of “Jews,” but the protests were indeed against the Jews.
The antisemitism that had propelled the Nazis into power in Germany, that led to the Holocaust, seemingly reappeared overnight, just as virulent—and more widespread, thanks to the iPhone and Internet.
The old adage that “those who fail to learn history are destined to repeat it” does not apply here. No era in history has received more attention and discussion than that of Adolf Hitler’s murderous Nazi regime.
The U.S. Department of State attributes a large measure of the unexpected protests to Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem that “elevates malicious content” with an “illusion of credibility” to destabilize the democracies. Unfortunately for Israel and world peace, Vladimir Putin has linked arms with Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei who wages a holy war, jihad, against Israel through his proxy armies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Putin supplies Iran with missile technology and defense systems against Israel; the Ayatollah provides war drones for Putin’s assault on Ukraine.
The grandparents of today’s jihadists had similarly collaborated with Adolf Hitler, who promised them a “Final Solution” of the “Jewish question.”
The German justice inspector Friedrich Kellner (my grandfather), who had campaigned as a Social Democrat against Hitler and his Nazi Party during the short time of the ill-fated Weimar Republic, recorded this collaboration in his diary: "The lack of any good will on our side is clear to see in Palestine. At the same time in the 1930s that we were throwing Jews out of Germany, we roused up the Arabs through radio and press to resist Jewish settlement there."
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, was paid to broadcast antisemitic propaganda over Radio Berlin. "Rise and fight for your sacred rights,” al-Husseini urged Arabs in March 1944: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion."
Al-Husseini also raised volunteers for an Arab Legion in Hitler's army.
"Arabs in German uniforms? Must we now create that?” wrote Friedrich Kellner, after pasting an illustrated newspaper article about the Arab Legion in his diary. “And the Nazis are being so solicitous about Islamic customs and religion! What a pitiful band of hypocrites!”
During the Cold War that followed WWII, leaders of the Soviet Union picked up where the Nazis left off, exploiting the Arab-Israel conflict to undermine the West’s influence in the Middle East. In 1967, Leonid Brezhnev encouraged Egypt, Syria, and Jordan to attack the Jewish nation. Armed mostly with Soviet weapons, they were soundly defeated by an Israel armed with American weapons.
The embarrassed Brezhnev resurrected the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia under Tsar Nicholas II, and claimed the defeat came not from a tiny nation but from an all-powerful international cabal of Jews. The old lie about “evil Jews seeking to dominate the world” was circulated to yet another gullible generation, ensuring the failure of future Holocaust Remembrance commemorations.
In 1970 at age 85, and just a few months before his death, Friedrich Kellner decried the Soviet Union's increasing support for Islamic terrorist groups. Earlier that year, Palestinian Arabs had brought machine guns and hand grenades into Germany to attack Israeli bus passengers at the Munich airport. It was a prelude to a far more shattering attack in Munich that was to come in 1972 at the Olympics.
“Atheist Russia and jihadist Islam have created an unholy alliance of totalitarian fanatics,” my grandfather told me. “Together they will seriously challenge the democracies in the future.”
That future may be here. Vladimir Putin, in lockstep with the Islamic nations, established Russian army bases in Syria and a seaport for its navy on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. A deluge of Muslims have marched from the Middle East and North Africa into Europe. Many more passed unhindered through the open borders of America.
Their faith calls upon them to proselytize Islam and bring every nation on earth under the laws of sharia. Among them are imams who openly repeat the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s command in 1944: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them.” As for the Grand Ayatollah of Iran: he insists on building a nuclear bomb to wipe Israel off the map.
Such is the uncertain and scary environment on this International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Hamas slaughter on October 7, 2023—after two decades of Remembrance Days—makes it painfully evident that the tragic stories of the Nazis’ Jewish victims do not arouse the compassion and understanding needed to finally stop the irrational persecutions that have haunted Jews for the past two millennia.
All that keeps the remaining Jews in the world from facing yet another Auschwitz is a small nation of Jewish warriors who fight not only for themselves but for the continuation of Western civilization. And it is to be expected—and despised—that the prosecutor at the politicized International Criminal Court in The Hague, Karim Ahmad Khan, would charge the leaders of Israel with a crime for defending themselves.
Robert Scott Kellner, a navy veteran, is a retired English professor who taught at the University of Massachusetts and Texas A & M University. He is the grandson of the German justice inspector and diarist Friedrich Kellner and is the editor and translator of My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner--A German against the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom.