[Vision2020] Holocaust History

[Phil Nisbet]

Reading an exchange on the evidence for the Shoah, the Holocaust, tells me 
why those pushing for mythological status have legs in our day and age.  
Nick rallies against anti-intellectualism, but here in black and white we 
have the more typical reality of simple lack of knowledge and a lack of a 
desire to gain it.  The Holocaust Denial movement, of either the Nazi kind 
or the Islamic variety, banks on the fact that so few have bothered to gain 
an understanding of genocide and tend to see those who have as simply ‘over 
sensitive’.

>From 1939 to 1945 six million Jews and six million other minorities and 
political dissenters were murdered by the German Government and its 
political allies.  Some were gassed, but many were shot, starved, killed by 
disease, experimented on and a number of other not too nice ways to die.  
Gays, Gypsies, blacks, Poles, Russians and those who simply refused to 
follow Hitler were gathered together, processed like cattle and removed from 
the face of the earth.

And the Germans are a wonderfully bureaucratic race, so we have records of 
liquidations, what the SS termed Aktions.  We have the records of the people 
and the units involved how many people they killed and where they buried the 
victims.  They include film records, photos and the statements of the people 
both in charge and those doing the deeds.

The Holocaust happened and 12,000,000 people were systematically murdered.  
They were killed by a German organized system, but with the assistance of 
Poles, Latvians, Ukrainians, Russians, Frenchmen, and Dutchmen and even by 
Arabs.  They were killed not by mindless little sniveling bigots without an 
education, but by highly trained and efficient well cultured individuals who 
saw genocide as a distasteful job that one day they could be proud of.

So people were rounded up, marched to ditches and shot in scores until well 
over a million bodies’ filled mass graves.  But that was a waste in bullets, 
took too long and was hard on the ‘men’ forced to machine gun women and 
babies.  So alternative methods, working to death, carbon monoxide gassing, 
irradiation, poisoning and a host of other methods were tried to speed the 
process.

Zyklon B, a hydrocyanic acid adsorbed to diatomaceous earth and used until 
1940 primarily as an insecticide ended up as the death gas of choice.  When 
exposed to the air, this material produces Hydrogen Cyanide gas, a highly 
efficient killer that will rapidly break down in the presence of oxygen and 
sunlight.  Things like mustard gas, bis-(2-chloroethyl) sulfide, were of 
little interest, since death was not immediate and such chemical warfare 
agents tended to linger.  With Zyklon B, you could kill a group, flush the 
gas, process the dead and be ready to gas the next lot by tea time.

Even in the gas used the Holocaust deniers try to play games.  But the 
concrete of the ‘showers’ is loaded with cyanide byproducts, just as their 
floors are loaded with human waste products associated with gassing deaths.  
And the cremation ovens and the burning pits are loaded with fine ash, bone 
ash, calcium phosphate that geologically does not belong in the killing 
grounds in which it is found.

Yet instead of using eyewitness testemony from Jewish survivors, I will use 
some from Maria Del Pilar Wittlesbach, Princess of Bavaria, who spent the 
war first in Ravensbruck and then in Dachau.  At one time Pilar was the 
Infanta and also the heir apperent to the Throne of Bavaria, but on her arm 
was the tattooed number for condemning Hitler’s treatment of Jews and 
refusing the back down from her principles.  Twenty years after the war, she 
still hide food whenever she ate, just in case.  She was not a communist or 
a jew or a gypsy or a Jehovah’s Witness or gay, just a German woman who said 
no and whose refusal to support Hitler’s policies had meaning because of who 
she was.

And she told tales, while she painted, of the Stomping Mare, who kicked 
small childern to death in front of their mothers or of the executions for 
failure to work hard enough at slave labor, of sickly small childern 
standing in lines waiting to be gassed.  From eyes that had seen horrors few 
of us can ever understand, a person who could have said, no more and seig 
heiled her way to safety, refused and stood witness as a human being.  And 
her painting was always of the complete contrast to her words, mountain 
scenes in pastel water colors, things that she thought of to block out the 
terror and hope for a day when it would all end.

I have stood in synagogues where the walls give testimony to the lack of 
survivors, whole communites wiped out, forgotten except for a few human 
artifacts, a few gravestones and a building gathering dust.  And perhaps 
that dust contains a trace, blown on the cold winter winds from out of the 
Northeast, of the bone ash that swirls in the air at Auschwitz, Madanek, 
Sobibor and Treblinka, the only return that those families destroyed will 
ever know.  And the words that Pilar spoke to me and the silence of the pews 
are all the science that I need.

It is not about race or culture.  Pilar was a German through and through, 
yet she stood up to what she called ‘that crowd’.  Serbian’s killed Kosvar 
Moslems with just the same lust and Hutus chopped Tutsis with emotions no 
different.  And at Yad V’Shem there is a book of the Righteous that lists 
the names of the many who refused at risk of death to dehumanize and offer 
the innocent to be slaughtered.  In that I see Avraham, argueing with the 
Most High, seeking salvation for this world, “If there are but ten, will you 
withhold your judgement?”.  For the bulk of people will turn their backs and 
take the easy path, the safe walk that allows the murderers to dehumanize 
and justify and will claim that they never knew or that it never happened.  
The few who act, in the face of danger and death, against their own personal 
interests, they are the light and the salvation of this ball of mud spinning 
in an ever so dark universe.

Those who seek to deny genocides, do so to justify the evil that is in 
themselves.  They seek to kill the empathy that is required to be a fellow 
human so that their later actions will not be crimes.  I will bring up 
Hitler, the Holocaust, Rwanda, Pol Pot, Kosovo and all of the other examples 
I can think of if even for a few minutes any of you will pause and halt the 
dehumanization that starts us down the path to bone ash falling as fine dust 
in a grey winter wind.

And the best way to achieve that is to remember that history and hold it as 
a bright image that tells us “Never Again”, not if we can help it, not if we 
can save one life, not if we can speak out against it.

Phil Nisbet

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