Holocaust

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What can I add to the millions of words written and tears shed on this subject? The German State became a diseased organ, poisoned by the virus of anti-Semitism, an irrational disease that inflames the mind while deadening the conscience. The Germans, whether you wish to believe it or not, were one of the most cultured, civilised societies at the turn of the century. Yet a few decades later these people were engaged in, or supporting, or turning a blind eye to, the most inhuman, evil activities ever conceived by the mind of man. But consider this. If Haman, or the Inquisition, or the Medieval State Church had had the 20th Century transportation systems or technologies of death and destruction, wouldn’t they have done the same? The ultimate aim of anti-Semitism is not simply hatred of the Jews, but the extinction of the Jews. Wouldn’t earlier anti-Semites, who also considered Jews to be inferior, sub-human or demonic, have chosen the same ‘solution’, rather than the ‘inconvenience’ of conversion, pogrom or deportation? We’ll never know; we can only guess.

We can get a flavour of the mindless hatred that drove these Nazis by considering that so much energy, enthusiasm and – most importantly – material and human resources were expended by Nazi Germany in their attempted extermination of the Jews, that there is every possibility that they could have won the war if these resources had been diverted towards the war effort.

There are many individual stories that work together to make up the Holocaust; six million of them, in fact. Each story tears at the heart and begs to be told, demands to be remembered. Yet we can’t do them justice, just as these victims suffered without justice. So there will be no stories and no statistics. This sad story has been extensively documented in so many other places.

But before we pour out our righteous indignation against the Germans, what about the World community at large? In 1938, just before the start of the Second World War there was a conference in Evian, in France, called by the US President and attended by 32 nations with the objective of discussing the future of the European Jews. The Jews at that time were still free to move but it was clear to many right-minded people that, by staying within the clutches of the Nazi state, they were putting themselves in great danger. So these delegates sat round a table and asked each other, “Who’s going to take in these Jews to save them from this fate?” Do you know the outcome of this conference? Out of the millions of Jews in central Europe, the danger zone, only a few thousand were accommodated by these nations. One by one they all gave reasons why they couldn’t take Jewish refugees – they would have loved to have taken them, but their hands were tied!

Golda Meir, the future Israeli leader, was there. She commented, “I don’t think that anyone who didn’t live through it can understand what I felt at Evian – a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror. I wanted to get up and scream at them all, ‘Don’t you know that these numbers are human beings, people who may spend the rest of their lives in concentration camps, or wandering around the world like lepers, if you don’t let them in?’“

Hitler saw the report of this conference and saw this indifference as the ‘all clear’ for the commencement of the next stage of his master plan. Four months later came Kristallnacht, the ‘night of the broken glass‘, when the word ‘Jude’ (Jew) sprayed on your shop front or stitched on your garments, meant nothing less than a death sentence. It was the first major step of the Final Solution against the Jews.

How did the Holocaust get started?