Today in Israel is Holocaust Day. This is the one day each year we make sure to think about the horror Nazi Germany perpetuated against the Jewish people.
It is very difficult to write about the Holocaust in 800-1,000
words. The subject is too large. There are simply too many horrors to consider.
Six million Jews were murdered for no reason other than they
were Jews. These murders weren’t an accident. They weren’t coincidental to World
War Two. They were deliberate.
The seeds of the Holocaust were sown six years (1933) before
World War Two (1939-45). It became a state-sponsored, state-run systematic
persecution and process of annihilation developed to fulfil an ideological
goal—to purify Germany (S.D. Stein, “Statements by Hitler and Senior Nazis
Concerning Jews and Judaism”, phdn.org, 03/04/00).
Germany’s Adolf Hitler invented the mass extermination of Jews. He began the journey down that road slowly. He argued his case before the German public. He said that,
if Germany was to get healthy once again (after being both devastated and
humiliated in World War One), it had to rid itself of a poison called, ‘the
Jew’. For example, less than two years after World War One had ended, Hitler was
already arguing that the only way for Germany to become once again the “captain
of her soul and master of her destinies” was, among other things, to turn
against the Jew (D. Irving, The War Path: Hitler's Germany 1933-1939.
Papermac, 1978, p.xxi). In August, 1920, he gave this speech in Salzburg,
Austria, saying:
“…it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover
its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated. Don't be misled into thinking you can fight a
disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus. Don't think you can fight racial tuberculosis
without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial
tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination
will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier
himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst (Applause)” (ibid).
Jew-hate was one of the favorite themes of Nazi discourse. It
appeared in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It showed up in Nazi speeches. It was a
major theme of Nazi propaganda (Karthik Narayanaswami, “Analysis of Nazi
Propaganda”, HIST E 1572: Holocaust in History, Literature, and Film, blog.harvard.edu,
no date).
Adolf Hitler wanted to cleanse Germany of the last Jew (John
Toland, Adolf Hitler. London: Book Club Associates, 1977, p.116). Between
1933-1945, he passed “More than 2,000 racist laws and decrees” (“The Nazi Rise
to Power”, The Nazi regime, projetaladin.org, no date) to do that.
The Nazi killing machinery showed everyone he meant what he said.
Some say the fate of Europe’s Jews was sealed at a place
called, Wannsee, just outside Berlin, in early 1941 (Carla Brewington, “70
Years Later, Still No Answers on the Holocaust”, algemeiner, February
24, 2017). It was here that the Holocaust’s ‘Final Solution’ for the Jews is
said to have been officially created. But
that fate was presaged years earlier--the moment Hitler got elected in the 1933
Reichstag elections.
By 1945, Hitler had brought to the world a modern,
mechanized Jew-hatred never seen before. He had instituted an anti-Jew racism more
sophisticated than anyone have ever experienced. He had made that anti-Jew
racism especially toxic because he linked it to the very survival of Germany:
he declared that “the primacy and self-preservation of the German race” would,
essentially, forever be stillborn so long as the Jew existed (Walter Zwi
Bacharach, “Antisemitism and Racism in Nazi Ideology”, yadvashem, 2007).
Hitler spilt the blood of six million Jews—including more
than a million children—trying to cleanse Germany’s soul. His obsession (to
ennoble Germany primarily through murdering Jews) turned the most civilized
nation in the world into its most brutalizing nation. That was the Holocaust.
On April 24, 2017, all of Israel pauses to remember what Hitler
wrought. The entire civilized world would be wise to remember, too. Hitler’s
Jew-hate hasn’t gone away. It’s become the driving feature of the ‘Palestinian
Cause’.
One might argue that murderous Jew-hate was originally planted
into the Arab-Muslim psyche through Haj Amin al-Husseini (1897-1974), a vicious
anti-Semite who became Islam’s Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921. During World
War Two, Al-Husseini spread his vicious anti-Semitism (“Slaughter the Jews
wherever you find them”) from Nazi Berlin. He collaborated with Hitler. He gave
Nazi-style anti-Jew radio speeches to Arabs back home. He helped Hitler
organize Muslim SS units.
He hated the Jew with a true Nazi passion. The Nazis are
said to have called him, “the Fuhrer of the Arab world” (“Grand Mufti Haj Amin
al-Husseini”, palestinefacts.org, 2011). He more than lived up to the
title.
Between 1920 and
his death in 1974, al-Husseini was “unrelenting in his espousal of a virulent
Judeophobic hatred as the focal tenet of his” Arab nationalism (“Voices of
Palestine: Haj Amin al-Husseini”, frontpagemag, November 7, 2011). That
hatred became the foundation of the ‘Palestinian Cause’. It remains the
favorite theme of the ‘Cause’.
When we remember
the Holocaust, we must remember that virulent, Nazi-like anti-Jew hate is still
alive and well. It lives in the
‘Palestinian Cause’, where Jews are still targeted for extermination (Cheryl K.
Chumley, “Hamas cleric tells Jews: ‘We will exterminate you’”, washingtontimes,
July 31, 2014).
Do not forget that.
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