As a retired teacher and historian, I have spent my life understanding history is often sanitized by the very language used to record it. That words are vessels of intent. In my craft, we know that language can be used to reveal or to conceal.
The Nazis were masters of the latter. They did not speak of "murder"; they spoke of Sonderbehandlung (Special Treatment). They did not speak of "extinction"; they spoke of Die Endlösung (The Final Solution).
To understand the Holocaust, one must first deconstruct the euphemisms of the perpetrators and replace them with the "Historical Truth." This is my "Daily Kvetch" of the raw, unembellished "Historical Truth" of my years of research against the world’s selective amnesia.
The Ideological Metamorphosis
The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers; it began with words, it began with a "transformation" of the soul.
In a 1923 interview, Adolf Hitler declared, "In my scheme of the German state, there will be no room for the alien, no use for the wastrel." He described his transformation in Vienna from a student of history into a "boundless hater" of the Jewish people. This was the "Aryan" vision—a world where "race consciousness" was the only law.
In his own words in Mein Kampf (pps 56-61), Adolf Hitler described his "metamorphosis" in Vienna, where he encountered an "apparition in a black caftan" and began to ask, "Is this a German?" He describes his descent into a "boundless hatred" for his own nationality's "unnatural" state.
By 1923, in an interview with George Sylvester Viereck, he vowed: "In my scheme of the German state, there will be no room for the alien... Marxism and Germanism are antitheses."
The Closing Doors
On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht marked the end of the "emigration phase."The Kristallnacht pogrom saw 267 synagogues destroyed and 30,000 Jewish men dragged to camps as the world watched.
This was followed by the invasion of Poland ("Case White"). While the world looked on with "selective amnesia," the British White Paper and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact effectively nailed the emergency exit shut, trapping millions in a burning house.
Why didn't they leave? Because the doors were closed. The British 1939 White Paper effectively nailed the emergency exit shut. This is why Anne Frank became "stateless" in 1941; since no country would issue her family a visa, they were trapped.
Those who were "lucky" fled Eastward through Soviet-occupied Poland—facilitated by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—braving the U-boat infested Atlantic. Even the Haavara Agreement (1933), a desperate salvage operation to rescue 60,000 German Jews, was undermined by the Grand Mufti, who lobbied the Nazis to halt the transfer.
The Industry of Death
SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann was no "simple" bureaucrat; he was head of RSHA Department IV B4, managing the industrial-scale deportation of a people. He was so meticulous that he even used the IBM marketed mechanical equivalent of today's electronic computers a high-speed, data-sorting machine called a Hollerith, after Herman Hollerith, its inventor. These IBM punch cards of the Hollerith were used to automate the tracking of victims.
Eichmann was also a coward; after Heydrich's assassination in 1942, Eichmann became "camera-shy," demanding the negatives of any photo taken of him because he living in constant fear of the very justice that eventually found him in Jerusalem in 1961.
The "Death Trains" (Sonderzüge) were the arteries of this industry. Standard 10-meter cattle wagons were packed up to 200% capacity,with up to 150 people. No food or water was provided.
Kurt Gerstein recorded one transport at Belzec where 1,450 people out of 6,700 were already dead upon arrival. To "sanitize" the cars, the floors were layered with quicklime, which burned the feet of the living.
The Holocaust by Bullets
Before the gas chambers were perfected, there were the Einsatzgruppen. These mobile killing units, supported by local Trawniki collaborators, who , carried out the "Holocaust by Bullets" as they carried out massacres like Babi Yar, where 33,771 Jews were murdered in just two days.
Witness Temofis Ryzvanuk described the "production line" efficiency of the murder of the Jews as the victims were forced to strip, beaten with whips, and piled "head to head like herrings" in mass graves.
In rural areas, the ratio of local auxiliaries to Germans was often as high as 20 to 1.
Global Allies
The "Final Solution" was not restricted to Europe. Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, met with Hitler in November 1941,to ensure that the "national-Jewish homeland" would be eliminated.
He stressed that the Arabs were Germany's "natural friends" against "Britain, the Jews, and Bolshevism." He ran Nazi propaganda radio from Berlin, inciting Muslims to "kill the Jews wherever you find them." He recruited for the Waffen SS He specifically lobbied to ensure that "national-Jewish homelands" were eliminated in favor of death camps. His legacy remains a "root cause" of the Judeophobia we see today.
The Tragic Irony of the Veteran
The ultimate betrayal and cruelest irony is personified by Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann. A Jewish officer who received the Iron Cross in WWI in Hitler’s own "List Regiment,"
Gutmann was the man who recommended Hitler for the Iron Cross First Class in 1918. Despite his service, Gutmann was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938,a testament to the fact that no amount of German "patriotism" could save a Jew from the Nazi "canker."
He escaped to the U.S. in 1940, but his story proves that Nazi hatred spared no one, regardless of their patriotism.
Erasing the Evidence
As the Reich collapsed, the Nazis launched Einäscherung (Cremation) to hide their crimes. Mass graves were exhumed and bodies were burned in tiers. They ground the bones and planted seeds over the pits so that "nobody could recognize that there was once a grave there." This myth-making continued with the "National Redoubt"—a propaganda tool suggesting a last-ditch "Alpine Fortress" in Berchtesgaden that never actually existed.
Never Shall Masada Fall Again!
General Eisenhower understood the human tendency for "selective amnesia." Upon visiting the camps in 1945, he ordered every film and witness account to be recorded. He warned: "Get it all on record now... because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened." This was prophetic, as even the CIA and BND later protected Eichmann to serve Cold War interests.
Never Again- The Myth of the "Right-Wing" Slogan
Modern political discourse has often attempted to pigeonhole the phrase "Never Again" as a product of specific post-war activists.
However, historical clarity reveals a much deeper, more "Old Labor" Zionist root.
The phrase "Never Again" is not a modern partisan slogan; it is rooted in a Zionist source Yitzhak Lamdan’s 1926 poem, Masada. Writing in the Mandated Homeland, Lamdan linked the ancient resistance against Rome to the modern struggle for Jewish independence.
"Lift your legs, / Firm your knees, / More and more! / In the dance’s circling chain / Never shall Masada fall again!"
To the pioneers of the Third Aliyah, the phrase “Never shall Masada fall again!” (שנית מצדה לא תיפול) was the rallying cry of the "Old Labor" and the Palmach generation long before it was adopted by later political movements. It was the anthem of the pioneers who believed that Jewish physical strength and sovereignty were the only answers to the "selective amnesia" of the world. This was not just a reaction to the Holocaust—it was a proactive vow of national survival.
This was the "Zionist Ethos" that built the Kibbutzim and the defense forces—the belief that the Jewish people would never again be stateless victims.
The transition of this sentiment into the specific context of the Shoah was cemented by the Swedish filmmaker Erwin Leiser. In his 1961 documentary Mein Kampf, as the camera pans over the remains of Auschwitz, the narration declares: “It must never happen again—never again.” This was released the same year as the Eichmann Trial, merging the historical facts of the "Final Solution" with the moral imperative of the world.
To belittle "Never Again" as a partisan slogan is to ignore:
- Abba Kovner and the Avengers: The partisan fighters who lived the phrase in the forests of Vilna.
- Mordechai Anielewicz: Who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising under the shadow of certain death, ensuring that Jews would not go "like lemmings" (to use your earlier term) without a fight.
- The Heritage of Bar Kokhba: The line of "Fighting Jews" that stretches from the revolt against Rome to the modern IDF.
To belittle this phrase is to show a gross ignorance of our history. We have seen the consequences of being "stateless" and "neutral."
We do not run like "lemmings" to the vote; we stand as witnesses. We record the names. We remember the logistics, for we have seen the "selective amnesia" of the world.
The Reality of Historical Truth is our only shield. Never Again means Now.
No comments:
Post a Comment