full article
“The U.S. Congress and Adolf Hitler on the Armenians”
by Dr. Heath W. Lowry
reviewed by Leon Picon
Speaking before the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh in 1983, Professor Richard Hovannisian of UCLA, the dean of Armenian-American historians, echoed a bit of the crumbling pseudo-history on which Armenians today base much of their claims of the ill-termed ~genocide of 1915.” He told his audience interalia:
“Perhaps Adolf Hitler had good cause in 1939 to declare, according to the Nuremberg trial transcripts, ‘Who, after all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?”
It is now obvious that Professor Hovannisian never checked the Nuremberg trial transcripts to which he attributes this Hitlerian quotation. Dr. Heath W. Lowry of the Institute of Turkish Studies, however, did go through the Nuremberg records painstakingly, and the results of his research are fascinating. Lowry shows quite conclusively that “the Hitler Quote,” which has taken on a life of its own among Armenian— and even Holocaust scholars—during the past forty years, does not appear at all anywhere in the Nuremberg transcripts.
Mr. Hitler gives a speech
“There is no proof [writes Lowry] that Adolf Hitler ever made such a statement. Everything written to date has attributed the purported Hitler quote, not to primary sources, but to an article that appeared in the Times of London on Saturday, November 24, 1945. Said article, entitled “Nazi Germany’s Road to War,” cites the quote and bases its attribution to Hitler on an address by him to his Commanders-in-chief six years earlier, on August 22, 1939, a few days prior to his invasion of Poland. According to the unnamed author of the Times article, the speech had been introduced as evidence during the November 23, 1945, session of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Hitler is quoted as having stated, 'Thus, for the time being I have sent to the East only my Death’s Head units, with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?’ However, this version of the address was never accepted as evidence in this or any other session of the Nuremberg Tribunal.”
The first appearance of this spurious “quotation” was in a book entitled What About Germany? written by an American newspaperman, and published in 1942. It is to this book and to the Times article—and only to them that the Hitler Quote is traceable; yet, while the quote has been used a myriad of times by Armenian scholars ad publicists, no one has attributed it to either of these sources. Nor is mention ever made of the fact that an attempt was made to have the quote inserted into the Nuremberg proceedings, but the Tribunal rejected the material as evidence because it was a “garbled merger” of two Hitler speeches obtained from questionable sources. The American newspaperman, undoubtedly Louis Lochner of the Associated Press, as Dr. Lowry documents, had a penchant for embellishing facts. Officers of the Nuremberg Tribunal, obviously aware of this, sought and fortunately located the original minutes taken of the Hitler speech (or speeches); these were admitted as evidence; and nowhere is there any mention of Armenians!
In taking on a life of its own, the spurious Hitler Quote has gone through several metamorphoses in the hands of Armenian publicists. Claiming that Hitler made this statement to justify his plans for the extermination of the Jews of Europe, Armenians have used the “quotation” to help them gain access to Holocaust programs and curricula. The fact remains that nowhere, even in the Lochner and Times versions of the Hitler speech of August 22, 1939, are Jews mentioned at all! Nevertheless, Armenians have been successful in persuading members of the United States Congress to read into the Congressional Record statements linking the Hitler quote to the Holocaust. Dr. Lowry has done us a service by detailing the lack of knowledge of a number of members of our Legislative Branch and their blind acceptance of the output of the Armenian Assembly.
Dr. Lowry’s article, which appeared in Political Communication and Persuasion, Volume 3, Number 2 (1985), is compact and well-documented. An appendix to the article contains excerpts from the Congressional speeches on the Armenians. Were it not so tragic, it becomes amusing to read these excerpts just to see the degree to which Members of Congress can garble a single quotation and distort its alleged purport. It is with justification that Lowry concludes his article with a plea to the Congress:
“Finally given the serious problems facing our nation, e.g., the arms race, unemployment, and budget deficits, in conjunction with the fact that as this study has repeatedly demonstrated, history is clearly not the forte of many U.S. Congressmen and Senators, it is not impertinent to suggest that the Congress would be better served if its members were to confine their activities to the business at hand and leave the writing of history to the historians.”
It is of more than passing interest to observe that with the publication of Heath Lowry’s research another of the props sustaining the Armenian claims of “genocide” collapses. Now, after more than forty years since its fabrication, the “Hitler Quote” has been exploded. The central problem still remains, however. The mythology that has been developed around the events of 1915 has been repeated so often that large segments of even educated people have come to to accept the mythology as History. One can only hope that as solid research continues to be conducted on this period of history by dispassionate scholars, truth will sift down and displace the mythology at all educational levels. It has been said that myths die hard. The Myth of the “Hitler Quote” should have died in infancy
The West's Deal with the Devil
Originally Posted by Targlish
