Those Outrageous Conservatives!

Media Matters has posted its Top Ten Most Outrageous Statements of 2004.

I took special exception to one particular statement:

Tony Blakely called philanthropist George Soros "a Jew who figured out a way to
survive the Holocaust."

For those uninitiated in the world of Holocaust criticism, some have, in the past, tried to assert that those who survived the Holocaust must have collaborated or otherwise helped the Nazis in order to survive. By this line of thought, all Holocaust survivors were automatically indicited, tried, and convicted of committing some sort of war crime or atrocity.

That's Blakely's tactic here: Soros survived the Holocaust, therefore, Soros must be a wily Jew who found some way to keep his Nazi masters happy, joining in atrocity in the process.

Bullshit.

Despite the relative order and efficiency of the overall German effort to rid itself of undesirables during WWII, what happened to any given individual in the camps was almost totally random. I have a book called Auschwitz Chronicle which details the happenings in Auschwitz day by day from 1940 to 1945. Prisoners are shuffled around from camp to camp or parts of a camp for no reason. Executions happen for no reason. People are spared for no reason.

But, most important of all, is that, in the end, collaborators fared no better than non-collaborators. In fact, many collaborators were specially marked for being killed as the Germans retreated because the collaborators knew too much.

There is absolutely no connection between surviving the Holocaust and collaborating with the Nazis or committing atrocities, and I find it disgusting in the extreme for Blakely to make such a claim.