04 September 2024
Recently, Darryl Cooper, in a podcast with Tucker Carlson, made statements that grossly misrepresent the German Nazi regime’s actions during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Cooper claimed that the Nazis were "unprepared" to handle millions of prisoners of war and political dissidents, suggesting their brutality was a result of poor planning. This statement is patently false. The German invasion of the Soviet Union was long-planned and included genocidal strategies of dealing with the local Jewish population not as a response to logistical challenges, but as an ideological one.
Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan remarked:
"Tucker Carlson and his guest Darryl Cooper engaged in one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years. These far-fetched conspiracy theories are not only dangerous and malevolent, they are antisemitic."
Cooper attempts to prove his mistaken point by quoting a letter supposedly from a German Wehrmacht officer, where he indicates that the murder of civilians and POWS in the USSR was out of “humane” concerns due to insufficient food supplies. This, too, is patently false. In reality, the letter by SS officer Rolf-Heinz Höppner on 16 July 1941, advocated for the murder of all the Jews in the western region of occupied Poland, called by the Nazis the Warthegau. Misrepresenting this as anything but intentional mass murder distorts history and downplays the Nazis responsibility for the Holocaust and for their other crimes.
Head of Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research Prof. Dan Michman states:
"Mr. Cooper isn't known for having done any scholarly research on Nazism and the Holocaust, and his statements in this interview clearly demonstrate his ignorance."
It is crucial to uphold the truth of these events. Approximately six million Jews, including some four million killed near their homes in Eastern Europe, were murdered as part of the Nazis’ systematic genocide called by them “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Any attempt to distort these historical facts or explain this away sanitizes these genocidal crimes and dishonors the memory of the victims.
