вторник, 27 января 2009 г.

The point of view:The many faces of the Holocaust


The many faces of the Holocaust
The mass extermination of Jews by Nazi Germany is one of the cornerstones of the current world order. This ugly page of history is read with grief, penance and speculation.

Jews were not the first people in history who faced persecution and death solely for their ethnicity. There was the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. The ill fate of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia or Africa, who were decimated by European colonists, was no less grave in terms of loss of life and suffering either.

Neither were Jews the only group whom Nazi deemed unworthy to live. Roma people, Slavs, and even fellow Germans who were unlucky to have mental illness or be homosexual suffered from the regime obsessed with racial purity. And while Nazi war crimes were grave and many, the attention paid to them largely surpasses that to the atrocities of, say, Japan in the Asian countries that they conquered during World War II.

Still many scholars consider the Holocaust as a unique tragedy of the Jewish people, the Disaster.

It’s true that Nazi leadership treated Jews with special hatred and wanted them wiped out from the world. And they did much to reach their evil goal, slaughtering Jews in pogroms, summary executions and death marches, starving them and in ghettos, creating a whole industry that existed only to kill people. An estimated six million Jews fell victim to the Holocaust, with up to 90% of the population wiped out in some countries like Germany itself, Poland or the Baltic states.

What makes the persecution special is the involvement of the winners in the war in these atrocities. In many countries occupied by Germany there was widespread anti-Semitism and too many people became willing accomplices to the Nazi. For instance the Auschwitz death camp was run by German officers, but many of the guards were Ukrainians. Collaborators assisted in hunting down Jews in occupied territories. While many of those involved in the crimes were prosecuted after the war, the scale of involvement was too large to simply dismiss it.

Many more people didn’t take active part in the Holocaust, but had good reasons to feel guilty for taking conformist stance and turning a blind eye on the crimes. When the true scale of the tragedy meticulously documented by Germans was revealed, it couldn’t help but leave a mental scar on millions of Europeans who lived under Nazi rule. Moreover, unlike the East, Western Europe didn’t witness many of the horrors of the war and was not prepared for this injection of the ugly reality.

The sense of guilt was one of the reasons why for so many nations the Holocaust became not just a war crime, but the war crime: the ultimate evil that history has ever borne witness to. The support that the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine had from Europe, despite the resistance from the Arab world, can be seen as an act of penance. Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Israel and in 12 European countries, including Germany, Austria, Romania and Poland – countries that were among the perpetrators. It’s no wonder that some people see it all as a Zionist conspiracy and claim the Holocaust is a hoax.

Perhaps in several generations the acute memory of the Holocaust will weather. Even now some politicians challenge Jews’ monopoly for the term while pursuing their agendas, like Hamas political leader in Damascus Khaled Mashal, who labelled Israel’s resent offensive in Gaza Strip a holocaust of Palestinians, or President Yushchenko who referred to the Holodomor – the mass famine in the 1930s that he claims was orchestrated by Stalin – as Ukraine’s Holocaust.

On January 27 the world remembers the victims of the Holocaust. On this day in 1945, Soviet troops liberated the remaining 7,500 prisoners of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The retreating SS troops were ordered to execute the prisoners, but it was never carried out.

Alexandre Antonov, RT

2 комментария:

Chernevog комментирует...

Yes, i have often noted the tendency to treat the Holocaust as an almost totally Jewish event. Even when the deaths of millions of other ethnicities are mentioned it is almost as an aside, but if you simply consider Slavs as a dicreet ethnicity, rather than dividing them into distinct sub-ethnic groups like Poles, Slovaks, or Russians, the number of Slavic deaths may equal or exceed the Jewish deaths according to some who have studied this history. two distinctly different ways of looking at the holocaust are used to get to this position. When considering the Jewish Holocaust, by using the religion as the defining factor for ethnicity, the figure of six million Jews arises, but if one were to take the count by nationality, you would have a certain number of Poles of Jewish religion who were victims, or Germans who were of Jewish religion. This is the method used to count slavic victims of the holocaust. One might equally say that there was a huge Orthodox Holocaust, by counting the number of Orthodox believers who perished, or that there was a huge Catholic holocaust because so many Catholic Poles were victims.

And had it been Germany, not the Allied forces who had prevailed in this war, the plans for Russia were rather horrific. Tens of millions of Russian were slated for anihilation, others for slave labor and still others for deportation from European Russia in order to create the lebensraum that was a prime factor in the Nazi plan for Eastern Europe.

In Poland, the number given in Nazi records for total deaths was six million or all Polish nationals, with 3 million of them being Jewish by religion, and 3 million non Jews.

The primary reason that the six million figure for the Jewish holocaust is well known, they were the only peoples who actually took the effort to count their own victims. In the case of other ethnic groups, no one ever did a precise head count, but rather, estimates have been given.

For example, on the eve of the invasion of Poland reports from those present at a meeting with Hitler have recorded his speech:

I have issued the command--and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by firing squad--that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness--for the present only in the East--with orders to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space that we need.


The problem is that there was really no effort to directly count the other victims of the holocaust and it was largely the various Jewish agencies in Europe who counted their own in efforts to reunite families or provide care for other Jews or eventually to relocate many to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.

Because most of the information is fragmentary, it may never be possible to get more direct counts of other ethnic groups that died as a result of war and placement in the various camps.

Dr Purva Pius комментирует...

Hello Everybody,
My name is Mrs Sharon Sim. I live in Singapore and i am a happy woman today? and i told my self that any lender that rescue my family from our poor situation, i will refer any person that is looking for loan to him, he gave me happiness to me and my family, i was in need of a loan of S$250,000.00 to start my life all over as i am a single mother with 3 kids I met this honest and GOD fearing man loan lender that help me with a loan of S$250,000.00 SG. Dollar, he is a GOD fearing man, if you are in need of loan and you will pay back the loan please contact him tell him that is Mrs Sharon, that refer you to him. contact Dr Purva Pius,via email:(urgentloan22@gmail.com) Thank you.

BORROWERS APPLICATION DETAILS


1. Name Of Applicant in Full:……..
2. Telephone Numbers:……….
3. Address and Location:…….
4. Amount in request………..
5. Repayment Period:………..
6. Purpose Of Loan………….
7. country…………………
8. phone…………………..
9. occupation………………
10.age/sex…………………
11.Monthly Income…………..
12.Email……………..

Regards.
Managements
Email Kindly Contact: urgentloan22@gmail.com