Auschwitz: Ignoring History, Predicting the Future

The gates of Auscwitz - a Nazi death camp

By Alan Caruba

The late Israeli scholar and diplomat, Abba Eban, (1915-2002) said, “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

Similarly, Winston Churchill said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else.” In Churchill’s case, he was referring to the U.S. reluctance to become involved in another war in Europe, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 changed that overnight. By 1945, along with our allies, the wars in Europe and Asia were over.

Sixty-seven years ago, on January 27, 1945, elements of the Soviet army came upon the Auschwitz concentration camps to discover a Nazi killing machine, one of several such camps created to exploit forced labor and to systematically kill Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, clerics, prisoners of war, and anyone else deemed an enemy of the Nazi state, right down to children and infants.

The Nazis killed people on such a scale that it is almost incomprehensible. It happened within my lifetime and that of many others, some of whom are among the fortunate survivors. And yet, today, the denial of the Holocaust and the millions of other Nazi victims is an article of faith among Arabs in the Middle East and countless others around the world.

A January 25th Agence France-Presse article reported that “One in five young Germans has no idea that Auschwitz was a Nazi death camp, a poll released Wednesday showed, two days ahead of Holocaust memorial day. Although 90 percent of those asked did know it was a concentration camp”, the Stern magazine poll revealed “that Auschwitz meant nothing to 21 percent of 18-29 year olds.”

It is essential that people in their respective nations know their own and other’s histories. A hallmark of the former Soviet regime in Russia was the way it rewrote history and, in George Orwell’s classic “1984”, a work of fiction about communism, there was a Ministry of Truth in which history was rewritten.

In the United States, since around the 1960s, strenuous efforts have been made to alter the teaching of the nation’s history. The Founding Fathers are often portrayed as slaveholders to downplay their devotion to liberty.

Even they knew that slavery was an abomination, but their task was to create a new nation, one dedicated to liberty. The U.S. Constitution was approved by twelve state delegations in 1787, but in 1861, barely 74 years later it would take a Civil War to put an end to slavery and another hundred years to end the exclusion of African Americans from access to their full rights under the Constitution.

Several generations of Americans have passed through our school systems—literally controlled by the federal government after the creation of the Department of Education in 1979 after being transferred from the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, a legacy of Jimmy Carter’s single term. All curriculum taught in the schools comes from the DOE thanks to its control over a national, one-size-fits-all testing system introduced with the “No Child Left Behind” program championed by George W. Bush.

To not know about Auschwitz, whether one is German, American, or any other nationality is a failure on a grand scale because it means that it can be repeated. To not know America’s epic struggle to fulfill its promise of liberty leaves new generations at a disadvantage, as in the case of a fifth of young Germans today, ignorant of their nation’s past.

In today’s world, many worry about the fate of Israel, surrounded by hostile nations and openly threatened by an Iran seeking nuclear weapons. Its independence was declared in 1948, barely three years after the end of World War II. Its first task was to absorb, not only the survivors of the Nazi regime throughout Europe, but those who were forced to flee Arab nations in the wake of the war. Its independence was greeted with the first of several wars against it. The general hostility to Jews that preceded the Holocaust by centuries is a stain on humanity.

So there is cause for concern when one in five young Germans have no idea what went on in Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps.

It is a concern when the Syrian dictatorship has already killed 5,000 of its own people to maintain itself.

It is a concern for Iraq, already falling back into an internal conflict after decades of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the end of the U.S. occupation.

It is a concern for an Iranian dictatorship on the cusp of creating its own nuclear weapons.

It is a concern for Venezuela, held in the grip of Hugo Chavez’s dictatorship, an acolyte of Communist Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

It is a concern for Europeans whose political experiment, the European Union, threatens the financial stability of its member nations with the sole exception of Germany.

It is a concern for Americans who witnessed the unilateral limited nuclear disarmament of the nation and the huge reduction of its military power by the Obama administration, less than the lifetime after the end of World War II.

The world remains a dangerous place. That is the lesson of history.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Coincidences About Life and Death

By Alan Caruba

If you’re a writer, you begin to notice how various pieces of information come at you in what appears to be a random fashion, but which have a curious way of connecting. That’s because everything human connects in some fashion. Nothing human happens in a vacuum.

On Sunday evening, the famed “60 Minutes” had a segment on the Israeli Air Force, interviews with its commander and with some of its pilots, including one girl who was small enough to be asked if they made uniforms in her size. She flew a U.S. made Apache helicopter, the kind the Israelis use to kill the leaders of Hamas if they can find them driving around Gaza. They use them to suppress the daily rocketing. She was only one of forty in her class who earned the right to kill Israel’s enemies in this fashion.

Others flew large fighter planes, acknowledging that Israel rules the skies. That’s a good thing because the field from which they fly is only fifteen minutes from Beirut or Damascus. Everyone, young men and women, in Israel must serve in its defense force, but the Air Force has the right to choose the best among them to fly. It is not a choice for those called to this duty and, even then, only the best among them will have the responsibility.

Israel cannot lose a single war. So far, as it makes ready to celebrate its sixtieth year, it has not. Against impossible odds, the Jews fought, triumphed, and survived. It is not a coincidence. They have no intention of being killed like sheep as occurred to six million European Jews during World War II. Some of the survivors made it to Israel to reclaim their lives and to resurrect their nation.

Later Sunday evening, I turned to the National Geographic Channel and it had a program that showed extremely rare photos of the commandant and staff of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where, astoundingly, a million Jews were systematically killed between 1944 and the end of the war in the following year. The work for the staff was very demanding, trainloads of Jews would arrive and as many as 8,000 at a time had to be sent to the gas chambers, their bodies burned in the crematoriums.

The photos of the staff showed them relaxing from their task. In one, maybe twenty women are shown being given blueberries, all young, smiling. In others, the men seemed in good spirits, including a smiling Dr. Mengele who, by age 32, had both a medical degree and one in philosophy. They were happy in their work and their work was not war, but murder, genocide.

The photos of a trainload of Hungarian Jews showed men, women, and children of all ages, including a mother holding her baby. With the exception of those separated to become workers, all were killed within hours of arrival. The mind cannot comprehend murder on such a scale.

The Israeli Air Force general put it this way, when Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeatedly says he wants to wipe Israel off the map, you have to take him at his word.

The world did not believe what the Nazis were saying until it was too late to realize they were telling the truth when the said that Europe must be “judenfrei”; that all the Jews must be killed. Not surprisingly, Ahmadinejad also denies that the Holocaust ever happened.

About seven months ago, the Israeli Air Force blew up a nuclear facility in Syria that we are now told was being built under the supervision of North Koreans whose chief export is death. It is only a matter of time before the Israelis will have to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities being built, we’re told, for “peaceful” purposes. One hopes that American bombers will be flying with them.

As the war clouds gathered, the British tried to negotiate peace with the Nazis. The Russians signed a peace pact. In 1939 the Nazis attacked Poland and, as they say, the rest is history. History teaches that you cannot negotiate with murderers, with people who have a history of taking hostages, with men obsessed with the belief that their god commands them to do monstrous evil. You must kill them before they kill you.

The Israelis know this.

One hopes the rest of the world and, especially, America, does as well.