PMW bulletin on Fatah's Holocaust justification reported on by Times of Israel
Fatah posts story claiming Jews were willing to bury Russians alive in WWII
Facebook page of PA president’s party publishes passage from unsourced Russian memoir that recounts how Jewish people allegedly agreed to brutally kill others to save themselves
In a recent Facebook post, the Fatah party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas shared a story alleging that Jews during the Holocaust were willing to bury Russian civilians alive in order to save themselves.
The post featured three World War II images of mass graves alongside text from an unsourced Russian prisoner’s memoir, allegedly detailing how Russians refused Nazi instructions to bury Jews alive, but Jews were willing to carry out the same order against the Russians.
The photos and story were posted alongside several other photos under the headline “These are important documents that should be reviewed.”
“In 1941 the Germans made us dig deep pits in the ground. When we finished doing what they wanted, they brought a group of Jews, threw them into the pits, and ordered us to bury them. We refused to carry out this atrocious act,” the former prisoner allegedly wrote.
“So the Germans ordered to throw us in instead of the Jews, and ordered them to bury us. The Jews began to pour dirt on us without hesitation. The dirt almost covered us, but the Germans stopped them and took us out. We were surprised when the German commander shouted at us: ‘I just wanted you to know who the Jews are and why we are killing them!'”
No sources were provided for the alleged account.
The post, published on February 27, was reported on Monday by the Palestinian Media Watch group, a Jerusalem-based non-government monitoring organization.
“One anti-Semitic message expressed by the PA is that the Jews are the source of all evil in the world, and that they possess wicked character traits and therefore must be eliminated for the good of all humanity,” PMV said.
“Fatah chose to post the text without comment,” the group added. “It did not condemn this story for portraying Jews as evil, selfish, and ungrateful. Nor did it distance itself from the Nazi commander’s justification of the murder of Jews in the Holocaust based on the anti-Semitic libel that Jews are defined by these character traits.”
PMW noted that the story had slight similarities to a historical account in a 1942 report by the Jewish Telegraph Agency in which Ukrainian civilians, Jewish and non-Jewish, were instructed by Nazis to bury each other alive — but both sides refused to do so. The Nazis then killed all of them together. The JTA story was based on a report by a Red Army sergeant.