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Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO and current senior chairman of Goldman Sachs, falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler did not order his military to use chemical weapons during World War II.
Of course, the German military did use chemical agents to murder Jews during the Holocaust.
With speculation swirling online and on cable news that Russia might resort to using chemical agents in its war on the people of Ukraine, Blankfein, who is Jewish, weighed in.
“Worth noting even Hitler didn’t permit his military to use chemical weapons, though he had them,” the former Wall Street banker tweeted.
Blankfein’s bad take is dead wrong, and Twitter ripped him for it.
Germany’s Wehrmacht in fact did not widely use chemical agents during battle, as Germany’s army had during the First World War under Wilhelm II.
But six million Jews died during Hitler’s Holocaust, many of them in gas chambers. The preferred method of murder by Germany was a chemical agent called Zyklon B.
Other people in German-occupied countries died following invasions in gas vans.
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After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union and Einsatzgruppe mass shootings of civilians, the Nazis experimented with gas vans for mass killing. Gas vans were hermetically sealed trucks with engine exhaust diverted to the interior compartment. Use of gas vans began after Einsatzgruppe members complained of battle fatigue and mental anguish caused by shooting large numbers of women and children. Gassing also proved to be less costly.
Blankfein’s take is reminiscent of a similar one from former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
In 2017, Spicer claimed that Hitler had not used gas on his own people, not in the same manner as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“I think when you come to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing,” Spicer said of Hitler.
As the New York Times noted, as many as 180,000 Jews who were murdered by Nazi gas during the Holocaust were from Germany.