Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski on Antisemitic Stereotypes of Jewish Omnipotence

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 Antisemites, including those who send me mail, are convinced that Jews are omnipotent and secretly run the world. This idea is so stupid it's hard to argue against it. If Jews ran the world, the Holocaust would not have happened. October 7 would not have happened. Jews would not fear for their safety in New York City, in Paris, in London. 

The antisemites who send me messages are convinced that there is a stereotype of Brute Polaks because Jews control the world. 

This is false. The stereotype flourishes and will continue to flourish because of various factors, including Poles' failure to educate themselves, to organize and to act strategically. 

Jews are not responsible for Polish failures. Poles are. Saying this is not about blame or shame. It's a helpful comment. Things will improve when Poles improve their approach. 

One of the most powerful arguments against the antisemitic stereotype of Jewish omnipotence came from an unlikely but very well informed source. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was a Nazi war criminal with much blood on his hands. He lead massacres of Poles, Jews, and others. Under his command, hundreds of thousands of innocents died horrible deaths. 

Weirdly, as his name suggests, he was of Kashubian -- Polish -- ancestry and his ancestors were members of the szlachta. They spoke Polish at home and were devout Catholics. Von dem Bach Zelewski eventually changed his name to hide this ancestry and to sound more German. He also left the Catholic church. At first he became Protestant, and, good Nazi that he was, he dropped that association and declared himself Gottgläubig. 

The Jewish virtual library reports that "In late 1939, he proposed that a concentration camp for the non-German inhabitants of the region be created in the vicinity of the town of Oswiecim. After initial reluctancy, Heinrich Himmler agreed to von dem Bachs pleas and in May 1940 the Auschwitz concentration camp was created."

Wikipedia reports on von dem Bach Zelewski's ethnic cleansing of Poles. 

Action Saybusch (German: Aktion Saybusch, Polish: Akcja Żywiec) was the mass expulsion of some 18,000–20,000 ethnic Polish Gorals[2] from the territory of Żywiec Region (part of the region of Lesser Poland) in the area annexed to the German Province of Upper Silesia, conducted by the Wehrmacht and German police during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. The main purpose of the forcible displacement of Polish nationals was to create space for ethnically German colonists from across Eastern Europe, after the annexation of western Poland into the Third Reich in 1939.[3] 

The Action was part of the Adolf Hitler's plan known as Lebensraum which involved Germanization of all Polish areas west of the territory allocated to the General Government. The name of the Action came from the German name of the city of Żywiec – Saybusch.[3] Displacements of the Poles from Żywiec and surrounding villages and towns was led by the occupation authorities under SS-Obersturmbannführer Fritz Arlt, who replaced Bruno Müller from RKF.[4][5] 

Aktion Saybusch lasted from September to December 1940, with some 3,200 Volksdeutsche brought in Heim ins Reich (Home into the Empire) from Romanian Bukovina. The process of expulsions continued thereafter. In total, between 1940 and 1944, around 50,000 Poles were forcibly removed from the region and replaced with about 4,000 settlers from Eastern Galicia and Volhynia who were given new latifundia. Before the German attack on the Soviet Union, their transfer was agreed upon by both invaders at the Gestapo–NKVD Conferences. The expulsions from eastern Silesia were the direct responsibility of the SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was also responsible for instigating them

Von dem Bach Zelewski went on to oversee Einsatzgruppen's mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews. 

He was hospitalized for opium abuse, intestinal disorders, and "hallucinations connected with the shooting of Jews"

Von dem Bach Zelewski went on to attempts to suppress partisans. Though he oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Slavs, Asians, Communists, and other victims, his methods were not very successful. Wikipedia reports,

Bach-Zelewski's methods produced a high civilian death toll and relatively minor military gains. In fighting irregular battles with the partisans, his units slaughtered civilians in order to inflate the figures of "enemy losses"; indeed, far more fatalities were usually reported than weapons captured. The German troops would encircle areas controlled by the partisans in a time-consuming manner, allowing real partisans to slip away. After an operation was completed, no permanent military presence was maintained, which gave the partisans a chance to resume where they had left off. Even when successful in pacification actions, Bach-Zelewski usually accomplished little more than to force the real enemy to relocate and multiply their numbers with civilians enraged by the massacres.

 Von dem Bach Zelewski participated in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. Germans murdered and drove into exile hundreds of thousands of Poles. 

In August, 1945, Americans arrested von dem Bach Zelewski. In exchange for Nuremberg trial testimony, he was not among the accused. In his testimony, he stated, 

"When, for years, for decades, the doctrine is preached that the Slav is a member of an inferior race and that the Jew is not even human, then such an explosion is inevitable."

Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, says that von dem Bach Zelewski, in 1952, "denounced himself publicly for mass murder." 

This mass murderer of Jews produced one of the strongest condemnations of the stereotype that Jews are all powerful. Von dem Bach Zelewski's statement is in Raul Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews."