 |
| pn247 |
__________
The Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish Question. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to the camp's gas chambers. Of the estimated 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, at least 1.1 million died,[5] around 90 percent of them Jews; approximately one in six Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp.[6][7]
Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah's Witnesses, tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities, and an unknown number of gay men.[8] Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments. -- Wikipedia.
Auschwitz survivors pay homage as world remembers Holocaust
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/world/auschwitz-survivors-pay-homage-world-remembers-holocaust
2 comments:
I visited Auschwitz in 1951 when I was 18. The memory has never left me. Rooms filled with crutches, glasses, false teeth. The gas chambers. Fragments of human bone for hundreds of yards one side of the railway line.
The ideology, system and human beings who could do such things, and the deniers who say it never happened. I was, and remain, speechless.
Auschwitz became a symbol of the Holocaust, but it was really just the final stage of a series of developments and the answer to the conundrum of what should we do with the Jews.
Initially the Nazis planned to get rid of Jews in Germany by expelling them and perhaps resettling them in Madagascar. Geography was not their strong suit, they didn't realize that Madagascar is nowhere near large enough to accommodate so many additional people.
Then they planned to expel Jews to the far reaches of Siberia or eastern Soviet Union. The Soviets had already set up a Jewish republic there. Unlucky for the Germans, the Soviet Union refused to collapse as anticipated. With the occupation of Poland and much of Ukraine and Belarus the problem of what to do with all these Jews was increased. Killing them was a last resort, but this had to be done more efficiently than shooting them. That was too slow, inefficient, and took a toll on the poor German soldiers and policemen who had to execute these missions. Auschwitz was the answer to this problem of efficiency. Make use of Jews while there is some residual value in them and then murder them on an industial scale.
My story, the story of Hungarian Jewry, is a bizarre last stage to this warped thinking. By March 1944 the gas chambers ran out of people to kill, the crematoria lay idle, there were not enough bodies to burn. The Hungarian Jewish community was the one large Jewish community left alive. Those stubborn Hungarians refused to hand over Hungarian Jews to be murdered. This was an indication that these Magyars were not trustworthy allies. They didn't like Jews, but they wouldn't let the Germans relieve them of the problem. The Hungarian government had to be overthrown to teach the a lesson. One of the lessons was how to solve the Jewish problem; transport 432,000 Jews to Auschwitz over 52 days and murder some 300,000 on arrival. That kept the expensive gas chambers and crematoria going for another few month until the pesky Russians came and stopped the process.
The Holocaust was the outcome of warped ideology, bad science and loyalty to a misconstrued notion of nationhood and patriotism. Long live the Italian suspicion of authority, faith in corruption and decent gut feeling humanism.
Post a Comment