Remembering to not forget
This is the week that marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where the unthinkable took place and the modern benchmark for man's inhumanity to man was established. To be sure, the world has witnessed its fair share of horror these past six decades, but Auschwitz remains the great warning to us all as to what can happen when nationalism is combined with racism and power. It was this unholy trinity that enabled the logistics of the killing camps where human beings — millions of them — who did not meet the standards of the master race were reduced to ashes, but not before they had been humiliated, robbed, deported, terrorized, exploited and starved.
What was it like to experience the unimaginable? Rainy Day recommends If This Is a Man, Primo Levi's account of the time he spent as a prisoner at Auschwitz. After reading Levi, one understands why some people would want to deny the Holocaust. The wickedness involved defies comprehension and suggests that "civilization" is but a veneer, and a thin one at that.
For the rest of the week, in remembrance of the liberation of Auschwitz, Rainy Day will be presenting diary entries written during the Second World War by those who were either caught up in the Nazi murder machine or by those who oiled it. We begin with an example of the latter. Why? Well, in the last few years Germany has witnessed a return of a specious 1950s theory that presents the perpetrators as victims. Actually, in this revisionist scenario the enablers of Auschwitz are double victims, first of Hitler the Great Seducer, and secondly of the Allied air campaign that destroyed the supply chains that filled the railway cars that delivered the men, women and children from all over Europe to the death factories. For those Neo-Nazi members of the parliament of Saxony who, last Friday, sought to equate the bombing of Dresden with the Holocaust, here's a pertinent entry from the diary of Josef Goebbels:
4 December 1940 "Watch the newsreel with the Führer, who is very pleased with it. The shots of London burning make a particularly profound impression on him. He also takes careful note of the pessimistic opinions from the USA.Nevertheless, he does not expect the immediate collapse of England and probably rightly. The ruling class there has now lost so much that it is bringing up its last reserves. By which he means not so much the City of London as the Jews who if we win will be hurled out of Europe, and Churchill, Eden, etc., who see their personal existences as dependent on the outcome of the war. Perhaps they will end up on the scaffold. We can expect little resistance to them from the masses at the moment. The English proletariat lives under such wretched conditions that a few extra privations will not cause it much discomfort. There will be no revolution, anyway, because the opportunity is lacking. England will thus survive through the winter. The Führer does not intend to mount any air-raids at Christmas. Churchill, in his madness, will do so, and then the English will be treated to revenge raids that will make their eyes pop."
Josef Goebbels (1897-1945) became an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler in the 1920s and edited the Nazi rag, V ölkische Freiheit. Ultimately, he was head of the Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment. Vain, rabidly anti-Semitic and ruthlessly ambitious, he retained Hitler's confidence to the last. His diaries cover the years 1924 to 1945.
