Let me start this post by announcing that I am in no way diminishing the evil that the Nazis unleashed in Europe. My father, who volunteered for service in World War II, flew 50 missions on a B-17 bomber, pulverizing munitions plants and refineries of the Third Reich. For that I’ve always been proud. He told me, “We had to get rid of Hitler. He was a horrible son-of-a-gun” (ever the gentleman, he didn’t use “sonofabitch” in front of his daughter.)

I also remember as a kid seeing a man sitting in a booth in a diner my parents liked to frequent. He was an older man in conversation with another person. Nothing unusual there, except I saw a series of tattooed numbers on one of his wrists. When I asked my mother if he was a Jewish concentration camp survivor she confirmed that he probably was.

So yes, like most of my generation, I grew up understanding that Nazis were monsters (along with the Russian Soviets.)

But in light of the recent massacre of Israelis by Hamas on October 7, the inevitable comparison to the Reich ensued. And as horrendous as the Nazis were, Hamas is even worse.

So said the brilliant British author and journalist Douglas Murray. He told Piers Morgan why in an interview earlier this month.

Now Andrew Roberts, a member of the British House of Lords, expanded upon Murray’s opinion in an essay from the Free Beacon.

A Jewish Survivor Predicted That Islamists Would Be Worse Than Nazis

In his essay, Roberts wrote that his former publisher, Lord George Weidenfeld, knew the depravity of the Nazis. Weidenfeld, an Austrian Jew, managed to escape from Vienna in 1938 after the Anschluss. He was also able to save his immediate family. But he had other relatives who perished in the Holocaust.

He also spent World War II broadcasting to the Reich from the BBC, and after the war published the memoirs of Albert Speer. So Weidenfeld had firsthand knowledge of what made Nazis tick.

Yet Roberts recalled that some ten years ago, over tea, Weidenfeld pronounced that there were worse antisemites than the Nazis:

George said, “There are people who are worse anti-Semites than the Nazis.” He went on to explain why al Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, although of course not as genocidal on the same physical scale as the Nazis, were qualitatively worse than the Nazis in their belief systems, impulses, and instincts.

Lord Weidenfeld died in 2016, but his predictions came true. Roberts wrote:

For whereas the Nazis went to great lengths to hide their crimes from the world, because they knew they were crimes, Hamas has done the exact opposite, because they do not consider them to be so ….

By total contrast, the Hamas killers 80 years later attached GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could livestream their atrocities over social media. Although the Nazis burnt Jews alive in barns on their retreat in 1945, they did not film themselves doing it. There are plenty of photographs of Nazis standing around death-pits full of Jewish corpses, but these were taken for private delectation rather than public consumption.

Moreover, Netflix recently dropped a documentary detailing how German police were conditioned to murder Jews. Called Ordinary Men: The Forgotten Holocaust, the doc tries to answer the question as to how average men — who may have been avoiding conscription — volunteered to become policemen and then murdered Jews in eastern Europe.

It took time and conditioning for them to commit atrocities. Were they monsters? Alan Zeitlan, a reviewer for The Algemeiner, declares them to be so. However, Dónal Lynch at Irish Independent disagrees with that label. Eighty years on, and with all the participants dead, it’s difficult to say. In the end, their crimes were the result of extensive brainwashing.

But there is no question about Hamas. As Roberts noted, Their lust for torturing and murdering Jews was therefore even more powerful than the Nazis’… They teach their children the joys of slaughtering Jews. Yet they have no compunction about placing those same children into harms way to serve as human shields.

“Everyone I Don’t Like is a Nazi”

Remember how Millennials called everyone they didn’t like a Nazi? George W. Bush was “Bushitler.” Later Donald Trump was even worse — a totally depraved Nazi, and still is, according to the media.

But now it’s fashionable among privileged young adults — largely white women — to condemn Israel and support Hamas and its control over Gaza. My husband and I recently saw this protest block a major road in Liverpool, UK.

Personal image.

In short, these dunces are allying themselves with the Nazis of old in their desire to eradicate Israel and Jews. Their chant “from the river to the sea” gives voice to an evil that belies Rashida Tlaib’s fiction that the slogan calls for “freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.”

But why should they know better? Young adults are widely separated from the World War II generation. They also have very little knowledge of history. And what they do know is often fed to them on their college campuses, which are fueled by big bucks from Middle Eastern donors.

And then there’s the mainstream media, which carries water for Hamas.

The biggest difference between the Germans of old and the New Wave Nazis among young adults is one thing: religion. Germans were antisemitic, yes — antisemitism had been a feature, not a bug, in Europe for centuries. But as historian Ian Kershaw wrote in his book Hitler, The Germans and the Final Solution, the authors of the Final Solution had to keep it secret:

The very secrecy of the Final Solution demonstrates more clearly than anything else the fact that the Nazi leadership felt it could not rely on popular backing for its exterminationist policy.

Most Germans would’ve grown up in the Christian faith. It’s one reason why Hitler would often take publicity photos outside churches, even though he loathed Christianity. That faith also led Germans like Oskar Schindler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Claus von Stauffenberg, and Hans and Sophie Scholl to oppose the Third Reich — with Schindler being the only one to escape execution.

The Nazi leadership were completely depraved and wicked humans — not only the men, but their wives as well. Yet they knew they had to conceal their crimes from a culture for whom mass genocide would be abhorrent. They had to condition participants into carrying out savageries.

Hamas killers, however, experience no such stabs of conscience. And siding with them are the nonreligious know-nothings of Generation Z.

Featured image: Collage by Brand X Studio. Fars Media Corporation/CC BY 4.0. Bundesarchiv, Bild 192-111 / CC-BY-SA 3.0