Tony Greenstein uncut

I posted the published version of a letter from Tony Greenstein to the Guardian. which was a response to a rather shabby history lesson by messrs Cesarani and Longerich. I thought I detected bad editing and this was confirmed for me in a comment to the post. Anyway here's the letter in full:

David Cesarani and Peter Longerich ask, concerning the film Downfall, [Guardian 7th April, ‘The Massaging of History’] whether the main thesis of the film, that the German’s were also victims of Nazism and the war, is becoming "a new form of German nationalism." The answer to this is that it will only become so if historians persist in putting forward a sanitised version of German history whereby all the German people, regardless of class, are held responsible for the rise of Naziism.

Downfall may be written from a right-wing, nationalist perspective, but there can be no doubting that the majority of Germans, were also victims of German fascism. Indeed to deny this is to accept the Nazi’s own racial categorisation of peoples as a single political and social whole.

The Germans were not collectively guilty for Naziism and the Holocaust, any more than the Spanish were collectively guilty for Franco, the Italians for Mussolini, the Chileans for Pinochet or indeed the British for Blair and Thatcher.

Messrs Cesarani and Longerich should acquaint themselves with some facts. The first concentration camp at Dachau was for the internment and murder of German communists and social democrats. The first victims of poison gas were not Jewish, they were the physically and mentally handicapped.

Electorally the Nazis never gained a majority of the popular vote. Indeed between July and November 1932, they actually lost 2 million votes. In the last free elections, in November 1932, the Communists (KPD) and Social-Democrats (SPD) received 13.2 million, mainly working-class votes, one and a half million more than the Nazis. And it was the working class and its organisations, prime among them the trade unions, which suffered from the Nazis. It was the German Right, not the German people, who put Hitler in power.

And there is of course another category of Germans who suffered under Naziism - German Jews. The central tenet of the Nazi’s Nuremberg Laws, that the Jews were not German, should never be accepted.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

I'm curious as to why Tony uses "yours sincerely". I was taught that you write "sincerely" when you have named the recipient and "faithfully" when you haven't. No doubt lots of zionists will accuse him of a serious inaccuracy for that.