“Perhaps it is because of my own bias toward [Darryl Cooper as a friend, but the responsibility for such imprecise talk is something I place on [Tucker] Carlson, not on his interview subject.”
I have, for many years, recommended Darryl Cooper’s hit podcast Martyr Made to the relative handful of people kind enough to listen to my own show History Impossible and read my thoughts on various publications, including my own Substack. And not fully to bury the lede, I still do, though admittedly with a little more reservation than I might otherwise have only a month earlier. The reason why there is any reservation on my part can be summed up in the following email I received a few days before writing this essay:
“You’ve previously recommended the Fear & Loathing in New Jerusalem series by the Martyr Made podcast as a good resource for learning about the Israel-Palestine conflict. In light of Darryl Cooper’s recent Holocaust denial, would you still recommend that podcast?”
This is one among several messages I have been receiving in recent weeks I was not surprised when they started coming in—I have been producing a historical podcast since 2019 and occupied a similar space (that is, until 2021) as Cooper (a space one might presumptuously call the “Dan Carlin School of Podcasting,” with long-form episodes lasting anywhere from two to six hours). I had even collaborated with Cooper once in 2020, and he and I had developed something of a friendly relationship and occasionally (but playfully) antagonistic banter online. This friendly relationship was solidified when he offered to fly me back across the country to my hometown of Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s death to be with my mother while “neighborhood incursions” were taking place in my childhood home’s immediate vicinity (I grew up five blocks from where Floyd was killed). By then, I knew he and his work were controversial but does that not matter less than someone who would offer a kindness he had no obligation to offer?
Thanks to this experience, I find myself, as a historical podcaster with at least some audience crossover with Cooper’s, in a strange space, after Tucker Carlson’s now-infamous interview with Cooper has been given time to gestate and be reacted against. Thanks to one of our conversations, I had known Cooper was planning to discuss World War II from the German perspective for some time at that point, and while I thought it was a potentially interesting and illuminating angle on which to tackle our world’s most famous conflict, I immediately knew this would not go over smoothly, whenever it happened. Fast forward to September 2, 2024, it indeed happened, and not in a way that I believe Cooper necessarily wanted or was prepared for.
In The Free Press on September 5th, Bari Weiss referred to Cooper as a “pseudo-historian,” with “a disgust toward Judaism [that has] inspired him to turn Hitler […] into a misunderstood figure.” On the same day and in the same publication, Sohrab Ahmari wrote that Cooper was someone who had long since “made known his nutty views about the Jews as well as his sympathy for the Third Reich,” and linked him to what he called the “Barbarian right,” which enjoys membership of figures and groups as diverse and unlikable as Nick Fuentes’ “Groypers” movement and race science peddlers like Steve Sailer.
Similarly, and perhaps most harshly, historian Niall Ferguson called Cooper “a nasty little Nazi apologist,” that engages in “anti-history.” Joshua Treviño wrote in Armas did not even directly reference Cooper and Carlson, but said very plainly that we were living through an “abrupt resurgence of antisemitism” relating to “the generation that experienced antisemitism’s most-horrific episode in the Holocaust [being] mostly gone.” Konstantin Kisin wrote on his Substack that this whole affair confirmed his thesis on a new “woke Right,” while referring to Cooper’s interview as “so historically illiterate that every major claim he made was debunked on X itself within hours with Community Notes and in articles published by prominent historians.” Some criticisms were less sweeping, but no less damning, including Winston Churchill scholar Andreas Koureas tweeting that Cooper “know[s] nothing about Churchill,” followed by several points of refutation against some of Cooper’s subsequent claims. Even the White House chimed in, calling the interview “Nazi propaganda” that was a “disgusting and sadistic insult.”
It has become quite obvious that Cooper’s claims are full of interpretations that most reputable historians of the Second World War, Churchill, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust would consider inaccurate, and that his use of sources is questionable at best. I still consider him a friend, and I do not believe he is some rank bigot like some of his detractors have claimed, and I do not even believe that we are living through some era of “Hitler reappraisal,” just because Cooper is being lumped in with the likes of Candace Owens. However, I also believe that it is not unreasonable for someone who does not know him, or especially is not familiar with his previous work (as many of his critics have stated) to feel differently. This was thanks to how he presented his claims, both on Carlson’s show, and in his immediate response following. He has since added much more clarity to his approach on the Martyr Made Substack, which is worth reading for a fuller picture. However, his initial claims are always going to be his first impression on the topic and thus require challenging, especially on their merits and, more importantly, sourcing. This will help provide the necessary context—or grain of salt—for when he actually finishes and releases the work that he has now officially announced.
To begin, while the interpretations of Churchill’s quality as a leader are certainly up for debate, some of Cooper’s significant contentions that arose in his follow-up thread to the interview have been directly refuted by scholars of the Old Lion and the Second World War. One relatively minor example was Cooper’s claim that Churchill “insisted” on the use of mustard gas on the “uncivilized tribes” of Iraq (which, in 1919-1920, the British Empire was at work pacifying). The problem is that this quote is inaccurate. Churchill did indeed refer to Iraqi tribes as “uncivilized” and in need of gassing, but the departmental minutes, presented by the International Churchill Society, reveal that Churchill advocated for the use of “lachrymatory gas,” (that is, tear gas), and that “it is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses.” This is a fundamental error of context that, while small, harms the overall picture attempting to be painted of Churchill as someone possessed with bloodthirstiness. Are there not better examples? Cooper seems to believe so, and yet, those examples have their own issues.
In explaining how wretched conditions became in Germany during and especially after the First World War (which did indeed contribute to the conditions that would allow such a reactionary populist movement as National Socialism to gain ground), Cooper also claims that this was due to a long-unprecedented tactic of starving out Germany’s civilians with naval blockades. Cooper is right to point out that “up to” 750,000 Germans would starve to death (scholars agree that the number is likely lower, but his phrasing is appropriately careful here) thanks to the blockade. However, his framing is wrong, with his use of Churchill’s explanation that “The blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population,” serving as evidence for the then First Lord of the Admiralty’s unique cruelty. Cooper is not necessarily incorrect in pointing out this tactic as being problematic at best, but the problem is that this tactic was not unique. Germany’s own infamous U-boat campaign, which frequently sank unaligned and civilian ships, was in response to the blockade, but its goal was to starve out the British before the blockade devastated Germany the way it ultimately did. The only thing that makes Britain appear more like a villain in this case—the idea that they started it—is the fact that they won and Germany lost the war. In other words, had Germany won, there would be revisionists likely making the opposite claim, revealing equally little about moral complicity except that everyone involved is complicit in their intentions.
Likely anticipating this, Cooper then dismisses the argument that “war is hell,” in order to make his broader point that Churchill and the British were uniquely evil in this regard by claiming that “for two-and-a-half centuries, Europeans had refrained from tactics like mass starvation and other means of targeting civilian populations when they fought each other.” This is likely in reference to the modernizing efforts taken up by the Prussian military in the mid-17th century, in which Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg de-emphasized the use of mercenary soldiers and tried to professionalize the military. According to H.W. Koch, “One innovation finding general approval was the introduction of severe discipline in the army,” in which “any act of plundering would be punished by hanging,” and “any officer who physically attacked a civilian would be stripped of his rank for a year and have to carry the musket as a common soldier.” This frames the Prussian military—and thus early modern European military standards—as being both noble and disciplined, too morally upstanding to engage in anything resembling a war crime or, more to the point, a hunger blockade.
Noble as this was, naval blockades occurred in Europe well-after this time and well-before the British blockade of Germany (to say nothing of Germany’s aforementioned unrestricted U-boat warfare). Napoleon engaged in wartime blockades of Britain known as the “Continental System,” in which English industries were harmed in the process. While one can quibble with the intent behind such blockades being different, it is simply not accurate to claim that these blockades were not designed to put pressure on warring nations’ civilian populations, whether through starvation or unemployment. In addition, during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the siege of Paris by Prussian forces was, in essence, a blockade against the city, resulting in a massive death toll of civilians. According to Geoffrey Wawro, “In three weeks of firing, the German gunners had hit hospitals, schools, churches, prisons, and apartment houses, but were still far behind the death toll wrought by cold and hunger, which were killing 3,000 to 4,000 Parisians every week in January.” The blockade against Germany by Great Britain in the First World War was no doubt significant in its effects and arguably cruelty, but it was by no means unprecedented in European history.
The framing Cooper engages in also neglects to reckon with the German airship bombing campaigns of the First World War against England, which began before the British blockade of Germany and Austria-Hungary started. This framing involving Germany’s late war misery also neglects one of the largest blind spots in the history of the First World War and its effects: that is, the devastation wrought by the so-called “Spanish flu,” which ultimately killed German soldiers at higher rates than British or French troops, arguably cost them the war, and whose effects in Germany even correlated with later support for the National Socialists, as shown by the scholar Andrew Price-Smith. These areas of neglect, and others, further demonstrate a deeper issue with Cooper’s framing: a skewed perception of historical agency in favor of motivated reasoning, in which Churchill—the chief villain of this framing—is given full agency, and Adolf Hitler, the anti-villain, is given none.
We can see this with how Cooper explains the relationship between Churchill and Hitler as late as 1937, which he characterizes as “not hostile,” because Churchill said of the dictator, “Those who have met Hitler face to face… have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” This is a selective quotation, and one likely derived from paleoconservative writer Pat Buchanan’s own 2008 revisionist tract, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (which Cooper has since proudly admitted is one of his sources). To his credit, Cooper has since admitted that he made an error with this citation. That is, the full context of this quote is missing from Buchanan’s account, in which Churchill was expressing, as Scott Manning puts it, “awe and caution,” not reverence or respect. Buchanan claimed that Churchill ended his analysis of the Führer on “a hopeful note,” when nothing could be further from the truth; Churchill ended his essay with a note of caution, if not outright fear for what Hitler’s Germany was coming to mean for Europe. As he wrote, “the great wheels revolve; the rifles, the cannon, the tanks, the shot and shells, the air-bombs, the poison-gas cylinders, the aeroplanes, the submarines, and now the beginnings of a fleet flow in ever-broadening streams from the already largely war-mobilized arsenals and factories of Germany.” Was this “not hostile?” Perhaps not, but it was certainly not friendly, and letting “not hostile” do the heavy lifting certainly implies such.
This leads to Cooper’s implication that Churchill’s anti-Semitism was little or even no different than Hitler’s, which he accomplishes by claiming that “Like Hitler, Churchill blamed Jews for communism.” While it is certainly true that Churchill trafficked in anti-Semitism, once writing that “They have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer,” this made him little different than many world leaders at the time, especially in the West (Franklin Roosevelt was no different). However, as Andreas Koureas explains, Churchill’s contention “was that though many, many Bolsheviks were Jews, few Jews were Bolsheviks.” Though certainly politically incorrect to make such sweeping statements today, Churchill also stated that “Some people like Jews and some do not, but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” This sounds remarkably unlike Hitler’s quote from around that same time that the Jews were “a race-tuberculosis of the peoples.”
Churchill’s feelings on the Jews vis-à-vis Hitler’s treatment of them also contradicts the idea or even implication that Hitler had few problems with him or England on the basis of the so-called “Jewish question.” In August of 1932, he ran into Hitler’s press secretary, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who asked if Churchill would meet with Hitler. In response, Churchill stated, “Why is your chief so violent about the Jews? I can quite understand being angry with Jews who have done wrong or are against the country, and I understand resisting them if they try to monopolize power in any walk of life; but what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth?” In response to Churchill’s challenge, Hitler refused to meet with him that day. Churchill later stated that, “Hitler [then] lost his only chance of meeting me. Later on when he was all-powerful, I was to receive several invitations from him. But by that time a lot had happened, and I excused myself.” This is hardly an example of “non-hostility” toward what Hitler was already representing on the European stage.
Cooper’s implication of Churchill as an anti-Semite of similar caliber as Hitler is self-evidently problematic thanks to hindsight, but also demonstrable of selective application of historical agency. The problem is that this appears to be applying agency based on motivated reasoning rather than a coherent view of human motivation and interaction. Churchill and Hitler made their own choices, both in response to one another, and independent of one another. It is a deterministic fallacy to believe, as Cooper seemed to in his assessment, that Hitler was pushed into the choices he made by the choices Churchill made; that is, that Churchill possessed all the agency in the world, and Hitler possessed none (or at least significantly less). This framing can be seen from Cooper’s original claim in the Carlson interview that “[Churchill] wanted a war, he wanted to fight Germany,” while claiming in his follow-up thread that “Hitler said he did not want war.” Taking the notoriously dishonest Hitler at his word, especially with the benefit of hindsight, is a curious choice, but again, it suggests motivated reasoning at work, so it is hardly surprising.
From the history, it is clear that Hitler wanted war, just not with Britain; Churchill likely also wanted war, but as we have seen, it was thanks to a growing distrust of the then-obviously dishonest dictator’s motives and openly admitted desire for more lebensraum. What Churchill understood then, just as many of us more clearly understand now, is that a push for territorial acquisition by force of arms is never going to be peaceful, especially when it involves people that you have frequently and loudly designated as undesirable at best and subhuman at worst. You can be your average aristocratic anti-Semite like Churchill supposedly was and still understand the potential for monstrous consequences at appeasing such a regime’s actions. However, according to Cooper, the British essentially involving themselves in the affairs of Poland after it was invaded and ripped apart by Europe’s reigning totalitarian forces, was their biggest crime. This is because, by guaranteeing war, this was really what placed the crosshairs on the backs of Jews and millions of other civilians in the Eastern territories.
By linking Britain’s involvement and Churchill’s supposed bloodthirstiness to how the Second World War turned out in the East, Cooper revealed not just his other major blind spot in the history of the conflict, but also let himself get sucked into the most controversial part of his analysis.
In the interview with Carlson, Cooper claims the following:
“Nazi Germany, launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners. [They] went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have, you have like, letters, as early as July, August 1941, from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people that are rounding up and […] they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin, saying, ‘We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.’ And one of them actually says, ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?'”
The characterization here was, to put it mildly, striking, and it was understandable that, along with the comments made about Churchill, many were so offended by this. It seemed to demonstrate a willingness to offer the Nazis the benefit of the doubt where it has long been agreed there is no evidence to support it. The open-ended phrasing also allowed people to easily use their imaginations on what was being implied, since it sounded very similar to things stated by people like David Irving. However, this was spoken off-the-cuff, and Cooper elaborated a little further in his response on X, writing that, “Would Germany have eventually attack the Soviet Union? Perhaps. But they would not have done so in June 1941 if England had agreed to end a war which had no hope of victory short of expanding it into a much larger conflict, by bringing in the USA, USSR, or both.” However, this claim is still very broad, as it remains so in Cooper’s more fleshed-out explanation on his Substack. He concludes his explanation there in a similar way, arguing that, “The second objection is that Hitler had always had his eyes set on the east, and would have eventually invaded regardless of what the Allies did. And that may be true. Jim Jones and the hostage-taking father may have killed their families no matter how much they were appeased. But maybe not. And, agree or disagree, that “maybe” is worthy of discussion.” [Emphasis added]. While Cooper is certainly entitled to his open-mindedness on this question—and I respect him for that—unless he is actively avoiding the vast majority of available evidence that exists on the subject, he’s not likely going to come away with a much different conclusion than that of the mainstream once he stacks up that available evidence. Because there is less evidence suggesting “maybe or maybe not” about what Hitler planned for the east than the amount of evidence suggesting he absolutely knew. Similarly, there is no evidence suggesting that there was no plan for what to do with the people who already lived there. The context Cooper provided in his follow-up post was welcome, and his speaking off-the-cuff during the Carlson interview is not going to be the best representation of his interpretations. However, because that phrasing is what set this controversy off to begin with, it is worth unpacking with as much clarity as possible.
To imply that Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland and then later the Soviet Union was carried out with “no plan,” and done only because of Britain’s intransigence is simply untrue. The Nazis—from Hitler on down—always had a plan and one that was largely independent of anything Great Britain said or did. The problem for them was not that there was no plan, it was that their plan kept changing, thanks largely to circumstances created by the choices made by the Nazi leadership. It is important to reiterate here that these choices made by the Nazi leadership were not merely made as reactions to other leaders’ choices, as Cooper suggests with his claims about Churchill.
The best example of this was the decision by Hitler to send thousands of troops and aircraft into Yugoslavia on April 6th, 1941 and subsequently partitioning the kingdom and divvying it up among the Axis powers. Hitler was not compelled to issue “Führer Directive No. 25” on March 27th, 1941 by Churchill’s belligerence or desire to spill German blood. In fact, it was because he was so enraged by a poorly executed and badly planned coup d’état that had been launched by Yugoslav military leaders opposed to the absolutist Serb monarchy that had been making promises to the Germans. William Shirer wrote of the Führer’s reaction in his classic 1960 work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as follows:
“The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the fortunes of the Third Reich. He hurriedly summoned his military chieftains to the Chancellery in Berlin on March 27th […] and raged about the revenge he would take on the Yugoslavs. The Belgrade coup, he said, had endangered both [the planned invasion of Greece] and, even more, [the planned invasion of the Soviet Union]. He was therefore determined, ‘without waiting for possible declarations of loyalty of the new government, to destroy Yugoslavia militarily as a nation. No diplomatic inquiries will be made,’ he ordered, ‘and no ultimatums presented.’ Yugoslavia, he added, would be crushed with ‘unmerciful harshness.'”
It is important to note that Hitler did accuse Britain of “pulling the strings” with this coup, and it would turn out they did play a role, but Hitler had already been at war with Britain for nearly two years by this time and ultimately took his rage out on the Yugoslavs, whose coup plotters were already planning on making a deal with the Axis, and whose civilians would suffer tens of thousands of casualties in Germany’s initial invasion. The point remains that Hitler made his own choice and this was one he did not have to make. He could have simply continued his plan to unleash Operation Barbarossa in May of 1941, not altering the timetable as his Yugoslav adventures did. It has been claimed by some historians, including by Shirer, that the Yugoslav partition operation is what cost Nazi Germany the ability to make the necessary headway for Operation Barbarossa to be a success. What this demonstrates is quite the opposite of what Cooper appeared to be claiming in the Carlson interview: that instead of there being no plan, that there were many plans, and oftentimes, they were changing at a rapid pace and at the whim of one, out-of-control man.
The fact that there were plenty of plans in place when it came to the invasion of the Soviet Union is also very well-known, refuting the implication that Nazi Germany simply threw together an invasion with no notion of what kind of actions would be “necessary” when it came to their ultimate goal of territorial expansion, and as a consequence, what ultimately became millions of civilians and prisoners-of-war “ending up dead,” to use Cooper’s words. The phrasing “ending up dead” carries with it a pretty obvious moral error, but Cooper was very careful, especially in his follow-up posts, to make it clear that the Nazis did not just “accident their way into the Holocaust.” However, the emphasis on a lack of preparedness, as well as the idea of the Nazis believing that summary execution was a mercy given that lack of preparedness, does not track with the multitudes of evidence available. The evidence Cooper used does support this framing; namely, the letter from the SS administrator Rolf-Heinz Höppner to Adolf Eichmann that Cooper quoted both in his response thread and his follow-up post. In fact, Christopher Browning wrote that he believed this memo from Höppner was among the first pre-Wannsee confirmations of what would ultimately be the fate of Europe’s Jews. This is not completely at odds with Cooper’s interpretations, since, as he wrote in his follow-up post, “Lack of food was, at the very least, used as an excuse for murder—one which may have helped overcome the uncertainty of men like this Höppner, who did not seem overjoyed at the prospect of mass killing.” However, even with the “at the very least” qualifier, there still appears to be an implication that mass killing was not necessarily part of the original plan. And that simply does not hold water. As Browning also notes:
“Immediately after the invasion of the USSR, Himmler and Heydrich traveled together behind the advancing German lines, inciting and sanctioning the execution of Jews and recruiting killing units beyond the Einsatzgruppen for this task. After midsummer both Heydrich and Himmler gave instructions to different units to now target Jewish women and children. Although the onset of the Final Solution in Soviet territory in midsummer 1941 sealed the fate of Soviet Jews, the fate of the rest of European Jewry remained undecided. Heydrich did not need a new authorization to continue his previous planning. He procured one from Göring on July 31 to submit a plan for a Final Solution for the Jews in the rest of the German sphere in Europe precisely because he faced a new task—determining if and how the Final Solution underway on Soviet territory could be extended to the rest of Europe.”
Cooper is correct to point out that Höppner did not like what was being implied by the realities staring at him in the face in the summer of 1941. However, as Browning points out, mass executions were already taking place, primarily from the infamous SS-Einsatzgruppen squads. These forces were sent in directly behind the Wehrmacht specifically with the orders to massacre what ultimately became about a million and a half people (a third of which were killed within six months), eventually with the help of the Reserve Police Battalions that Browning covered in his masterpiece, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Browning explains that he believes consensus on the so-called “Jewish question” was reached in October of 1941, but that is merely consensus. As we have seen, there was already plenty of clarity among Hitler’s inner circle on what must be done with the broad category of “enemies of the Reich” that the Nazi forces came across in their push to the East. As Burleigh and Wippermann pointed out in their monograph on Nazi racial policies, Hitler ordered the execution of Soviet functionaries who were “less valuable Asiatics, Gypsies and Jews,” by the Einsatzgruppen squads; there is no doubt about the intentions of such orders. And as Ferguson pointed out in his 2006 book, War of the World:
“From the outset Hitler had determined that his campaign against the Soviet Union would be fought according to new rules—or rather, without rules at all. It was to be, as he had told his generals on March 30, ‘a war of extermination’ in which the idea of ‘soldierly comradeship’ would have no place. This meant the ‘destruction of the Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia.’ The decision systematically to shoot certain Red Army prisoners, foreshadowed by the brutal way the war in Poland had been fought, was taken on the eve of Operation Barbarossa and subsequently elaborated on during the campaign. The ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia’ issued on May 19, 1941, called for ‘ruthless and vigorous measures against the Bolshevik inciters, guerrillas, saboteurs [and] Jews.'”
However, the atrocities against civilians were already occurring well before Barbarossa, mere days into the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. These atrocities had already been set into motion even before the invasion, thanks to the “famously thorough” SS practices put in place by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, to use the words of historian Richard Rhodes. In his book Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, Rhodes quotes from an SS officer who explained their indexing system as “a series of lists, including the names of every active member of the Communist party,” as well as “all the non-party intelligentsia, and listings of scholars, teachers, writers and journalists, priests, public officials, upwardly mobile peasants, and the most prominent industrialists and bankers.” [Emphasis added]. It also listed “relatives and friends, in case any subversive scum tried to hide.” Given the Nazis’ propensity for collective punishment measures even in response to mere suspicion, one can see what the policy would lead to. If it was not clear enough, however, Rhodes quotes from an Englishwoman eyewitness to one of the 714 mass executions that occurred after the German invasion of Poland, this one in the town of Bydgoszcz (which would come to be known as the Valley of Death):
“The first victims of the campaign were a number of Boy Scouts, from twelve to sixteen years of age, who were set up in the marketplace against a wall and shot. No reason was given. A devoted priest who rushed to administer the Last Sacrament was shot too. He received five wounds. A Pole said afterwards that the sight of those children lying dead was the most piteous of all the horrors he saw. That week the murders continued. Thirty-four of the leading tradespeople and merchants of the town were shot, and many other leading citizens.”
This tosses water on the idea that there was any sense of necessity, or a lack of proper planning in place. This is clearly the thirst for blood.
There are other reasons that the idea of there being “no plan,” when it comes to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, simply does not stack up in the face of the historical record. For one, the basis of Operation Barbarossa’s territorial acquisitions, known as the A-A Line (referring to Arkhangelsk in the north and Astrakhan in the south), was put forth by Hitler on December 18th, 1940 under the name “Führer Directive 21,” a full six months before the actual invasion was set to take place (and even longer, after the delay caused by the invasion of Yugoslavia). The A-A Line in that directive can be traced even further back to a military study drafted by General Erich Marcks published in the summer of 1940, a full year before Operation Barbarossa was supposed to take place.
However, it is clear that there were already plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union in place—with it also being made clear, at the very least through strong implication, that it would be a war of extermination. In 1939, Hitler spoke to his generals of engaging in “a racial war” with the Soviets, while Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine was putting out nonstop content depicting the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as a land populated with racial undesirables. The propaganda film, Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) was released on November 28th, 1940 and contained the infamous visual comparisons of Jews and vermin. A Nazi reviewer of the film even wrote that the film made it clear that, “We are the initiators of the fight against world Jewry, which now directs its hate, its brutal greed and destructive will toward us. We must win this battle for ourselves, for Europe, for the world.” This was merely one film and one reviewer’s interpretation of it, but both were one among many. The implication of what the Nazis “must” do in response to their so-called “Jewish problem” could not be clearer.
What seems to be a constant in Cooper’s skepticism is the idea that there was preemptive intentionality when it came to the destruction of Europe’s Jews. This is at root why I do not believe he is a Holocaust denier. He has not and still does not deny that the Nazis killed the Jews, and that they hated the Jews. It is his connection between that hatred and that killing that comes across as weak, because he has shown no indication that he believes the Nazis set out to eliminate the Jews from Europe by any means necessary from day one. This could be construed as a type of revisionist prudence, but given the problems with his interpretations combined with the evidence that is already available and well-known by scholars, it is unwarranted. It also requires some unpacking.
A frequent argument brought into the conversation with revisionists and which also will likely apply to Cooper’s ultimate thesis, is the so-called Madagascar Plan, in which the Nazis would ship the Jews under their sphere of control to Madagascar, in order to be rid of them. While this is obviously a form of ethnic cleansing, on paper, it also does not come across as monstrous as what eventually happened in places like Auschwitz. Revisionists will latch onto that self-evident fact. Those who wish to blame Great Britain for the Jews’ ultimate fate will point to the fact that, had Britain not gunned for war in 1939, their control of Mediterranean Sea lanes—which the Germans expected to have taken by 1940—would not have prevented the Madagascar Plan from being dead in its crib. However, this is a simplistic interpretation that, like a lot of things in this controversy, places far too much charity in the minds of the Nazi leadership.
According to David Blackbourn, the Madagascar Plan was welcomed across the board by just about everyone, including Eichmann, Heydrich, Himmler, and Hitler himself. However, as Blackbourn writes, “It hardly needs to be said that implementation of the Madagascar plan would have meant high death rates by attrition, and it was intended to.” [Emphasis added]. After the abortion of the Madagascar Plan, places like the Pripet Marshes and even the Arctic Circle were suggested. The former was considered “arable land yet to be cultivated,” according to a Reich Office of Regional Planning report discussing the use of forced labor (which had been implemented into law in 1939), and the latter, given the environs of the Arctic Circle, was little different than the Turks sending the Armenians into the desert in 1915. As Blackbourn writes, “There is no doubt that—like the Madagascar plan before it—the idea of forcing Jews to ‘settle’ and perform forced labor here, or in the Arctic Circle, was an intentionally genocidal proposal.” Genocide by expulsion to inhospitable land, genocide through attrition, or genocide by gas chamber—all with the purpose of eliminating a so-called race of people—genocide is genocide, especially when the purpose of complete elimination is clear. This attitude can be seen in a speech given at a Nazi party reception given in Lublin in January of 1941, where to raucous laughter, the head of the German General Government in occupied Poland Hans Frank said, “Whether they go to Madagascar or somewhere else, none of that interests us. We are clear that the best thing for this mishmash of Asiatic progeny is that they slouch back to Asia, where they have come from.”
However, the plan to take the lands to the east and replace the people who existed in those lands came long before war was even declared in 1939. Hitler himself had been speaking of invading and taking the lands to the east—namely Russia—for over a decade and a half by the time Operation Barbarossa began. In analyzing Mein Kampf, Roderick Stackelberg explained in his 1999 book Hitler’s Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies that Hitler’s designs for Russia were quite clear by 1925, especially when he spoke of the need for a “Drang nach Osten” (“drive to the east”), writing in Mein Kampf that, “It is eastwards, only and always eastwards, that the veins of our race must expand. It is the direction which nature herself has decreed for the expansion of the German peoples.” [Emphasis added]. It is extremely doubtful that this meant simply stopping in Poland when “Generalplan Ost” placed the Ural Mountains as the natural border against which the new Third Reich would abut.
This view was not some fringe view in isolation with the Führer either; indeed, the German geographer Martin Bürgener was instrumental in providing “natural” justifications to Germany taking these lands, particularly when describing them during his travels there in the mid-1930s as a “gray-dark wilderness” where the masses—Slavs—were “vegetating in hopeless apathy.” According to Bürgener, the main impediment to developing these lands were the Jews and Slavs living on them. Their removal and replacement with “healthier” Germans would be necessary. This was all derived from German naturalistic explanations that had been circulating through the German academies for nearly a century at this point, and they were enthusiastically incorporated into what David Blackbourn describes as “the National Socialist vocabulary of blood, soil, living space, and—above all—race.”
Given all of this (and much more that exists in the scholarship), there is plenty of evidence to suggest that something—and it is quite clear what—was always in the works regarding the eastern territories at some level within the Nazi leadership. It is also extremely doubtful that there was not an awareness of who was already living in these places, what was thought about them as people, and what would be necessary in order for the long-held dream of Drang nach osten to be completed. There is simply no evidence for a lack of a plan, and there is a wealth of evidence for there being perhaps an overabundance of plans. There is also no evidence that avoiding war with Britain and France would have somehow quelled such savage violence to be unleashed on the men, women, and children the Wehrmacht, SS, and Reserve Police Battalions came across. Not when the evidence that is available suggests the exact opposite.
It is important to point out that there is an element of truth in discussing the lack of appropriate preparation the Nazis had when it came to their “Eastern operations,” but it was not necessarily in the way that Cooper has described it, and indeed seems to discount the slapdash nature of the Third Reich’s actions he initially seemed to be suggesting during the interview with Carlson. The problem that the Nazi leadership was not prepared for was the psychological toll such mass murder was going to take on soldiers, both volunteers and especially conscripts. Christopher Browning’s famous work, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, paints an incredible picture of this. It illustrates both the horror that many of these men felt and, more to its point, the resignation they experienced in taking part in such ghastly atrocities thanks to the simple realities of self-imposed social pressure.
In this narrow sense, the Nazis were not prepared for anything like that Battalion (and obviously many others) experienced as they butchered Jews, Poles, and Russian POWs by the hundreds of thousands. This was, in large part (along with a push for efficiency and a desire for slave labor) what led to the construction of extermination factories like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek. The thinking went that it would be much easier to kill multitudes of unwanted civilians by shoving them behind a sealed door and letting them be gassed rather than shooting them in the back of the head into open pits.
However, the point remains the same: the plan changed. That does not mean there was no plan, or even poor planning, and that does not mean the Nazis were not operating with literal genocidal intent from very early stages; that has been proven in every way possible, however imperfectly. The plans to accomplish this outcome are what changed. As Victor Davis Hanson has written, that even though “some of the invading Wehrmacht officers may have been disturbed at the sheer mass of captives and Germans’ inability to offer even the bare essentials of humane treatment […] their deaths were consistent with prior Führer directives for the future resettling of western Russia.” What never changed was what came to be known colloquially as “Hitler’s Prophecy,” that appeared in his speech before the Reichstag on January 30th, 1939. In this speech, he made it clear who he was blaming for the coming conflagration, and it was not Churchill or the British Empire:
“If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
One may ask: Why do we take Hitler, and by extension the Third Reich, at his word here, and not when he was supposedly making his overtures toward peace? Because what he said here lines up with what happened leading up to and during the Second World War and the Holocaust, and what he said in his peace overtures did not; both obviously after the fact, as well as before. Along with the multitudes of other evidence of what Hitler’s long-term intentions for the eastern territories clearly were, and along with the propaganda and rhetoric that he was engaging in, he was not simply saying the Jews would be to blame for another world war for the first time or the last time. He had reportedly said it in private meetings in the wake of Kristallnacht in 1938, and he continued to say it in the years that followed. As Jeffrey Herf noted in his monograph, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Hitler was up front about how he felt about what was happening to the Jews, stating in a speech on September 30th, 1942:
“The Jews in Germany once laughed about my prophecies. I don’t know if they are laughing today or if the laughter has already gone out of them. I can promise only one thing. They will stop laughing everywhere. And with this prophecy as well I will be proved right.”
That there are still people questioning whether or not the Holocaust would have happened as it did is not necessarily an indictment on them or their questions; the Holocaust, with its deliberate, industrialized nature and sheer scale, along with its fundamental tether to the ideology of National Socialism itself, is truly unthinkable. It is not some capitulation to a corrupt Establishment or to the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of history to state this. The throat-clearing might be irritating and a waste of time, as Cooper suggested in his Substack post from September 7th, 2024, and fair enough. But asking such questions about the motives at work in the Holocaust in a way that diminishes the obvious villainy of Hitler is not nuance, nor is it forbidden; it is basic moral contrarianism that is very familiar and it continues to have fundamental problems with its sourcing.
If the problems with Cooper’s analysis of Churchill, the Second World War’s causes, and the treatment of the Eastern peoples under the boot of the Third Reich were frustrating, then the sourcing he seems to have used for such claims is even more so. As already mentioned, he has proudly admitted that he has found inspiration in Buchanan’s work on the subject. Some, like Ferguson, have claimed there is inspiration to be found in the disgraced Holocaust denier and anti-Jewish bigot David Irving, but until Cooper starts citing the notorious historian, I see no reason to make such bad-faith implications.
However, the citation of Buchanan is indicative of a trend seemingly present in this interpretation of the secondary sources from which Cooper is pulling. His other source, which he has cited in both his X response thread and his follow-up post—thus reasonably suggesting its importance in coming to the conclusions that he has thus far—is the book, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, written by the erotic novelist and self-described pacifist Nicholson Baker. This is not to say that Cooper has not used other secondary sources in his research or looked directly at many of the primary sources he has used that are also found in Baker’s work. However, given the importance Baker’s work took in Cooper’s later explanations of his comments, we are forced to assume that Baker’s work is one of the main sources of information that he was using.
Citing a non-historian is not a crime, nor is it even completely pointless. Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, for all of its historical faults, is still a good book, and Baker’s work is no different as a piece of non-fiction literature; it often tugs at the heart strings, even in its clinical use of primary source documents. However, if one’s source has been criticized by multiple historians and journalists, one must, at the very least, acknowledge such controversy for the sake of transparency, especially if it is the only source that one is actively citing. At most, one should perhaps cite the criticisms and counterarguments themselves, and let the reader or listener decide. It is impossible to say whether or not Cooper plans to do this with his upcoming podcast series on the subject, so one must not assume, but working with what we have, the use of Baker’s Human Smoke as the source to support the claims being made suggests a fundamental weakness in the scholarship at work.
When Human Smoke was released in 2008, it faced an avalanche of criticism. Most pointed among them was the late Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in The New Statesman that its title alone was “either very courageous or very tasteless (or conceivably both).” This was not a compliment, because as he continues, “I myself […] grew increasingly impatient with Baker’s assumption of his own transgressiveness,” because “I still detect something smug and vacant in the superior attitudes struck by the peace-lover.” Hitchens’s ultimate criticism, and one that resonates most relevantly to the current controversy, is this: that those in the anti-war faction “underestimate and understate the radical evil of Nazism and fascism, they forget that many ‘peace-loving’ forces did the same at the time, and they are absolutist in their ahistoricism.”
However, Hitchens was not alone. Historians like Noel Malcolm, Piers Brandon, Dominic Sandbrook, and Louis Menand all had very strong and fair criticisms of the book’s selective use of primary sources in order to promote a self-described pacifist agenda. Malcolm even went so far as to write for the Telegraph that Baker either engaged in “incompetence or malice,” but that “So far as the reliability of this strangely childish book is concerned, it hardly matters which.” Sandbrook expressed frustration in the same publication because while he “dearly wanted to like this book” because “it is right and healthy for historians to puncture the patriotic myths of the Second World War,” he found it to be a “self-righteous book […] that cheapens the serious moral arguments [Baker] tries to make.” Brandon and Menand were both slightly less harsh, but no less pointed in their criticism that Baker had made some serious errors in his sourcing, to the point that it had become fair to question his motives in writing the book in the first place. As Menand wrote, “Baker’s presentation may seem empirical—these things happened, you can look them up, no varnish has been applied—but the effect is entirely emotional, because there is no nesting argument, no narrative, to give events a context.” This can be seen in Baker’s selective use of a quote that Cooper also used in his response thread, where Churchill stated that Leon Trotsky, in the end, “was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that.” This is meant to suggest that Churchill was as virulent an anti-Semite as Hitler, and yet, when looking at the full quote Baker used, it is clearly suggesting something different:
“In 1922 so great was the appreciation among the military for Trotsky’s personal attitude and system that he might well have been made Dictator of Russia by the armed forces, but for one fatal obstacle. He was a Jew. He was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that. Hard fortune when you have deserted your family, repudiated your race, spat upon the religion of your fathers, and lapped Jew and Gentile in a common malignity, to be balked of so great a prize for so narrow-minded a reason! Such intolerance, such pettiness, such bigotry were hard indeed to bear.”
This suggests not a malice towards Trotsky for being a Jew, but rather, a broader appreciation of the circumstances in which Trotsky found himself (that is, the notoriously anti-Semitic Russian Empire). Baker’s robbery of the context in the original quote is, to put it bluntly, galling.
This is all to say that sourcing matters. As Geoff Shullenberger wrote in his own reaction to this affair, “this is a good illustration of why certain scholarly standards exist (even if they’re often not well-respected in current academia),” and that there is a broader pattern of “the person who repudiates institutions only to reproduce the same errors he finds there (mythmaking) on a grand scale, and without any of their self-correction mechanisms.” As of right now, it is not clear how much of Cooper’s sourcing is up to snuff, at least when it comes to making the claims that he has made publicly, and thus is running the risk of becoming what he is repudiating. Until he makes it clear what all of his sources are, what he ultimately claims will need to be taken with a very large grain of salt. Taking the word of a noted paleoconservative politician like Buchanan or an erotic novelist like Baker simply is not going to cut it, no matter how compellingly the points are made or the stories are being told.
This is because many other, far more reputable books have been written about the Second World War from the German perspective. These include several memoirs that have been translated into English, including the famous The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Mouminoux, Blood and Soil: The Memoir of a Third Reich Brandenburger by Sepp de Giampietro, Blood Red Snow: The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front by Gunter Koschorrek, and Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949 by Siegfried Knappe. There is also no shortage of secondary sources, including , Jonathan Trigg’s Through German Eyes series of books, and Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 by Harald Jähner. There are even broader cultural and social histories, like Konrad Jarausch’s Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century, which pulls together dozens of memoirs by Germans born in the 1920s, and, for an added twist of complexity, the memoirs of Afro-German Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. If one wants to understand why Germans did what they did, and why so many Germans believed in the nobility of the National Socialists, all without the baggage of hindsight, modern contrarianism, and motivated reasoning (like the kind found in the works of Buchanan and Baker), this is where you start. You gather the leads found within all these pages, and then connect them to further evidence that might have otherwise been missed as part of the larger picture.
I find it hard to believe Cooper does not understand this process or even that he has not already accumulated these sources as part of his research; he is a very intelligent and well-sourced storyteller. But he has not yet demonstrated that with this particular story, and has instead taken a more zoomed out, generalist view of the conflict that has already been discussed and described by previous authors who have questionable-at-best credibility. It is therefore not completely fair to judge what has yet to come out—namely, his planned podcast series—but it is fair to wonder where he will be getting his information and its overall quality given what he has shown. He has since said that he is using Nicholas Stargardt’s 2015 work, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945, John Toland’s 1976 tome, Adolf Hitler, and Thomas Fleming’s 2001 book, The New Dealers’ War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, which suggests that despite Buchanan and Baker still topping his list and still being the only ones he has cited, he is pulling from some higher-quality secondary sources than it initially seemed. However, he would be even better suited if he hired a research assistant—perhaps a graduate student of history over in Germany who has direct access to the archival material and, most importantly, a fluency in German. This is not a tall ask, especially considering the financial enrichment he has achieved, just from this incident alone. And perhaps he is already planning to do something like that. None of us have any way of knowing. But one can still hope.
When I reached out to Cooper for comment, he explained that given the noise this has all created, he would prefer to let his work speak for itself when it is actually finished, so then a proper debate on the subject can be had. It is reasonable to be frustrated at this, since that was arguably a more advisable course of action to begin with. However, the past, as they say, is the past, and his overall point is sound. We can only wait for his final word on this, while treating his now-immortalized comments as the proper grain of salt they are.
When it comes to Cooper’s comments, I believe it is vitally important and fair to someone who I consider to be a good person, and who I am glad to know, to be as charitable as possible with the way he initially expressed himself. Thankfully, he has indeed elaborated on his thinking, and has stated the following in his aforementioned Substack post:
“Even if the deaths were largely the result of resource deficiencies and poor planning, it doesn’t change the fact that Jews were targeted for death. Under circumstances that forced a choice between who would eat and who would starve, the built-in antisemitism of the Third Reich guaranteed that Jews would be among the last in line. That is not to say that Jews were not massacred. Of course Jews were massacred. Peoples of all ethnicities were massacred, and it would have been quite a mystery if the Jews were an exception—doubly so, given the Third Reich’s unique antipathy toward them.”
This is a far cry from the implications many people saw in the Carlson interview, because frankly, the way Cooper communicated his ideas was deeply disturbing to many people. While the attempts to make this interview a facet of a growing “trend” of Holocaust revisionism and anti-Semitism are crude and unfair, the topic remains hot-button, and people’s propensity to misread things poorly expressed is understandable. To wit, using phrasing like “no plan,” or “people ended up dead,” while never once saying the word “Holocaust,” “genocide,” or even “murder” (unless one is claiming that Volodymyr Zelenskyy has had his political opponents murdered), is inevitably going to create tension, to put it mildly. Never mind the fact that the person interviewing Cooper—that is, Carlson himself and really, the main reason this whole story became such a firestorm in the first place—was saying “you’re not allowed to talk about this” because apparently “you can get arrested, even in the United States” for such talk. But such talk about what, exactly? What is it that gets you arrested in other countries—which does happen—for discussing frankly and in the open? That unanswered question paired with the lack of saying the word “Holocaust” or “genocide” is going to stick out to anyone watching or listening with an interest in such subjects, and it would be naïve to pretend it would not. While it has always been Carlson’s style, the fact that he never once pushed back or even asked difficult follow-up questions and merely nodded along, was just going to make the backlash all the more inevitable.
Perhaps it is because of my own bias toward Cooper as a friend, but the responsibility for such imprecise talk is something I place on Carlson, not on his interview subject. Anyone who knows Cooper will tell you that he is unfailingly polite and, as I suggested from the outset, someone who does sincerely care about the people in his life, even people he does not know very well, and shows it through action, not words. Carlson is the reason Cooper is as famous as he is. While I believe Cooper deserves his success for his storytelling abilities on extremely complicated subjects, the fact remains that had Carlson not read Cooper’s viral Twitter thread from 2021 about why so many Americans believed the “Stop the Steal” narratives—leading to former President Donald Trump to actually name-check Cooper in one of his speeches—Cooper would not have the scale of reach that he does. And Cooper knows that, and likely considers Carlson a friend, and someone to whom he owes everything he currently has and enjoys. Why jeopardize that, or make it awkward, by pushing back or even admonishing Carlson for such low-resolution and, frankly, immature claims about “not being allowed?” There is certainly something honorable in that, but it is also frustrating, especially when discussing controversial interpretations of history in such a public way.
Cooper’s strength is not in off-the-cuff interviews (as he himself has admitted). His strength is in well-written, considered, long-form storytelling (putting aside the quality of some of his conclusions). I think he is a brilliant and unique storyteller, and his podcasts, when they are at their best, offer us one of the best entry points to some of the most difficult historical topics of our time—from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Jonestown massacre to Dostoyevsky. I would even wager that, had he not been speaking off the cuff in this interview with Carlson and simply let this upcoming project speak for itself, it might have served that purpose admirably. However, until he demonstrates a better (and transparent) ability at sourcing and drawing reasonable, non-motivated, non-overtly-provocative conclusions, it is unlikely that as many people will take this project as seriously as they perhaps should have. There is certainly a greater scrutiny—which is not necessarily a bad thing—facing historical podcasters now, but given how it has been framed, it could just as easily become a type of delegitimization. One might call this growing scrutiny and criticism elitist, but that is small comfort to the creators who do not make millions of dollars a year. Nevertheless, calling Cooper an “unabashed Holocaust denier” is not true, helps nobody, and just makes things worse for everyone in historical podcasting.
A final note: Cooper is known for encouraging empathy with his listeners, and he has spoken many times about how that is his goal. At his best, he demonstrates that we can have some measure of empathy for monsters. He reminds us that we can even try and live in the heads of monsters in order to better understand them. This can be a noble goal, but that does not mean we have to try and prove (or even imply) that they were not actually monsters, which is a risk. That in and of itself proves the limitations of what we call empathy. If the empathy we feel is merely to serve the contrarian impulses so many of us possess, then what kind of empathy is that? It certainly does not appear to foster a greater, more complex understanding of the human condition. In fact, it simply sounds like a typical way to shift loyalties from one narrative over to another. We have seen this happen before with the Noam Chomsky’s and Howard Zinn’s of the world, reflexively believing that the supposedly oppressed can do no wrong because oppressors were the ones who wrote the history. This is not just a wrong-headed way to approach history, but I believe it is a wrong-headed way to perceive the world in general, and simply breeds distrust and paranoia. While an honest examination of power imbalances in both the past and present can be illuminating, it is a far-too-reductive way to look at the world, to say nothing of complex historical processes. That is what creates the selective application of agency bemoaned earlier in this essay.
Ultimately, that is not history. That is politics. This is not to say history cannot be political in nature, or should not inform political positions today, but pushing politics (especially without the utmost transparency) while discussing history is skipping a step. Politics blinds human beings to the truth in the present; even more so when it comes to our interpretations of the past. We would (and have) said the same about the motivated reasoning that fuels the de-colonialist crowd. We have yet to see what Cooper will produce with his finished product, so we must withhold full judgment (and I would hope stop impugning motives on him that no one can possibly know). Despite my significant reservations with the early interpretations he has shared, I look forward to seeing what he creates. I hope my concerns are proven wrong.
Alexander von Sternberg is a graduate student in history, as well as a writer and podcaster living in Los Angeles. He has written essays and reviews for a number of publications and hosts the historical podcast History Impossible.
