75 years ago, the worst manifestation of the worst crime in history came to an end. On 27 January 1945, Russian troops liberated Auschwitz, the biggest of the Nazi (National Socialist) concentration camps, where over a million people, mainly Jews, were either worked to death or killed in gas chambers.
I believe that the German Holocaust of about 6 million Jews and other people was the worst crime in history. It was by no means the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin and Mao each killed far more people. Genghis Khan probably killed a bigger fraction of the Earth’s population. But the nature of the Holocaust, the deliberate slaughter of people simply because of their race, makes it the worst of all.
Who was to blame for it? And why did it happen? Nobody has ever been able to answer these questions.
Besides being evil, the Holocaust is very strange. I find it strange to think that ordinary people could spend their day forcing children, women and invalids into gas chambers, listening to their screams of agony, watching as other ordinary people removed gold teeth and hair from their dead, contorted bodies, and then go home to the warmth and love of their own wives and children.
The Holocaust would not have happened without Hitler. This strange political genius almost single-handedly took control of Germany at a critical time and changed the course of the century. He was a lonely, friendless, sexless, rather sad little man driven by demonic will power. He had great gifts of oratory, showmanship, administration and psychology. Loathing of the Jews was central to his whole philosophy, but it was a detached, impersonal loathing. He seemed to regard the Jews not with fear or hatred but with disgust, as if they were vermin that should be exterminated. Although he approved of the Holocaust, he took little part in its operation and never himself visited a death camp. He seemed to take no pleasure in the slaughter but just a quiet approval, as if they were killing rats.
Far more worrying was the attitude of ordinary Germans. Very few protested or resisted when the Nazis, who came to power in January 1933, immediately began to persecute Jews. Germans are no different from the rest of us. The attitude of ordinary people in Nazi-occupied countries such as France and Poland was the same. (Auschwitz was in Poland.) Most did nothing to help the Jews but, on the contrary, helped the Germans to round them up for the death camps. There were honourable exceptions such as Denmark, but they were few.
If I were a Jew, this would be my uppermost concern. I think this anti-Jewishness led to the founding of Israel: ‘We have seen how our non-Jewish countrymen can turn against us, so the best thing we can do is to establish a Jewish country where we are in charge.’ Of course, this leads to awful moral problems, since it was Germans not Palestinians who ran Auschwitz.
It is ironic that it was Russians – from Socialist Russia – who liberated Auschwitz from National Socialist Germany. WW2 only happened because of a pact between the two socialist countries, between Hitler and Stalin, in August 1939. Both then invaded Poland, which provoked Britain into declaring war against Germany – but, interestingly enough, not against Russia, who invaded shortly afterwards. Moreover, the Gulag slave camps, set up all over Russia by Stalin, were every bit as horrible as Hitler’s death camps except in the crucial detail that they were not deliberately intended for extermination and did not kill children.
Since 1945 there have been dreadful slaughters, notably those by Stalin and Mao, by the Tutsi minority of the Hutu majority in Burundi in 1972, by Communists in Cambodia in 1975, by the Hutu majority of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994, of various tribes by Idi Amin in Uganda, and by endless bloodshed in the Congo.
There are signs of rising anti-Jewishness (I prefer this term to ‘anti-Semitism’) around the world. This seems to be caused by resentment of a gifted, successful, identifiable people. The UK Labour Party has an unfortunate tradition here. Some Democrat politicians in the US, in the guise of attacking Israel’s policies, seem actually to be attacking Jews.
How to stop Auschwitz happening again? Without doubt the best measures are bright light and loud information. The leading Nazis, who approved of the Holocaust, took pains to keep it a secret. Perhaps the most terrifying speech ever made was by Heinrich Himmler, a more dedicated racist than Hitler, at Posen, Poland, on 4 October 1943. Here he explained that slaughtering Jewish children would lead to glory but must be kept secret. You can listen to his speech on YouTube. It ends: ‘This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.’
Therefore, it must be written as soon as there is any hint of its happening again, and immediately broadcast for all the world to hear.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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