The Holocaust

I need to vent.

Tonight's 60 Minutes rubbed salt in an open wound. No, not the Holocaust itself--and the enormous damage it did to my family, along with so many others--but, rather, it reminded me that many people don't even realize how a whole nation managed to go mad and slaughter innocent people by the millions. The Holocaust is both a horrible part of human history, although some deny it happened, as well as a cautionary tale. The cries of "Never Again!" are as important today as ever, for genocide still occurs, and we have a duty to stop it. But let's get back to my venting.

A recent recounting of the mechanisms of slaughter made me question how modern Americans--and others--were perceiving what happened in World War II, specifically relating to the Holocaust.

This wasn't one of the little slaughters (of mere scores of people) that littered the landscape of World War II. This was the wholesale rounding up and murdering of twelve million people. 12,000,000! Six million Jews and six million others the Germans considered undesirables. That's on top of the millions of war casualties.

This was an effort so large that there were conspirators in other countries, of other nationalities. It wasn't just limited to Germans.

If someone said to me that there were Germans who were opposed to this butchery, but they couldn't stop it--they were too afraid that speaking out would result in their own deaths--I could understand that. It might well be true--it probably is in many cases. But to suggest that the average German didn't know what was going on is to ask way too much. For any German of that time with even a modicum of intelligence to not have had an excellent grasp of what was happening would have been extraordinary.

For years, Jews and others were stripped of their rights and their property. Jews specifically were stripped of their citizenship in 1935. During Kristallnacht, scores of Jews were murdered and more than 1,000 synagogues were burned.

From the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, in a country formerly the welcoming home to many Jews, intellectuals and other minorities, all of these people began to vanish. In huge numbers, they simply ceased to exist in daily life. At the very least, to claim a lack of knowledge of what was happening would mean that those not involved in the arrest, transport, imprisoning and murder of the victims utilized an extraordinary effort at willful ignorance.

As for those working in the camps or in towns anywhere near the camps--be they slave labor concentration camps that eventually became murder factories or the "death camps" made for only one purpose--to claim any sort of ignorance of what was happening defies all logic and shows utter disrespect for the victims of the horror.

They knew. They all knew. Maybe some knew and couldn't stop it, but don't think for one second that anyone who was there didn't know. Visitors to the camps years (sometimes even decades) later said there was still an indescribable smell of burnt flesh, rot and death. That's what happens when so many people are killed and bodies burned or buried in one place.

When people talk about conspiracies, they say that they never can stay secret when more than a few people know--and often not even then. Little conspiracies to commit little crimes or hide things for political reasons leak out regularly.

So let's just give this one more review. We're talking about rounding up people at gunpoint, marching them to railroad boxcars, locking them inside, transporting them to concentration camps and murdering them. Those that even made it there, unlike the 23 members of my family who were murdered right in their home town.

Let's look at the numbers again when we consider what was going on and what some claim they had no idea was happening...

Rounding up at gunpoint the population of Manhattan and taking every single person away to be murdered.

And then again rounding up the population of Manhattan and taking every single person away to be murdered.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Every man, woman and child in Manhattan, from the Battery to 220th Street, totals about 1.5 million people. We're talking about making 12,000,000 people disappear. Many were from outside of Germany (although the Germans managed to kill just about every Jew--and gay, Gypsy, intellectual, political activist, etc.--in Germany), but we're talking about 12 million people murdered by a country whose population at the time was around 55 million. And the average person had no idea? Not a chance.