Seventy years ago, on Jan. 27, 1945, the Auschwitz death camp was liberated. The Nazis built the death camps to advance the "Final Solution" to the problem of the world's Jews, after finding mass shootings to be too inefficient, slow, and public a method.
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Around 3.5 million Jews, along with tens of thousands of Romani, prisoners of war, and others, were murdered with poisonous gas. The annihilation of Europe's Jews, which trickled over into North Africa, was methodical in such camps, where only a small minority was kept alive to provide forced labor or serve as undertakers. British intelligence had precise information on the number of Jews who lost their lives in the camps in 1942 thanks to a telegram dispatched in January 1943: 434,508 at the Belzec death camp, 101,370 at Sobibor, 713,555 at Treblinka, and 24,733 at Majdanek. To these numbers was added the inconceivable number of those who perished as a result of the inhuman conditions of the cattle cars in which Jews were packed together en route to the camps.
In a speech to the Reichstag in January 1939, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler spoke directly about the extermination of the Jews, saying: "Today, I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."
A poster bearing this quote was disseminated in 1941 following an order to hang it in every government office.
Why was there such a deep-seated need to carry out this methodical extermination campaign? What made the Jews different from other people in Europe? Why was it that only their elimination down to the very last individual would lead to the murderers' redemption? Jew hatred is the result of Jews not comprising a "normal" religious group. The Jews in general did not look like a "natural" nationalist minority due to their lack of a territorial base as well as the strong religious component of their nationalist identity and their "cosmopolitan" tendencies. The Jews were perceived as a unique minority differentiated from other similar groups.
Judaism was seen by its enemies as joining together elements of primality and uniqueness that did not fit in with the basic concepts of the political community in the European nation-state. A strong and principled group developed among many sectors of European society that believed Jews could not be part of the nationalist project. This rejection was framed in modern, secular, nationalist, and racist terms, the likes of which is seen in modern antisemitism, that paved the way for the negation of the possibility for Jews to become part of new European nations.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day remains necessary still today, not just to ensure the memory is honored but for the very intransigent and methodical struggle in various arenas against Holocaust denial. The path of Holocaust deniers is aimed at eliminating Nazi crimes and continuing harm to Jews. Their ideas are disseminated among not just radical groups but also in academic articles. They argue that the Holocaust is a Jewish invention and that six million Jews were not in fact murdered. There were no gas chambers for the mass annihilation of the Jews, and there was never any intention of killing Jews.
Some historians have adopted a method that sees them dilute the Holocaust to the point where they argue it was a negligible and inconsequential detail. To their minds, many genocides have taken place throughout history, so there is nothing unique about the Holocaust. Another argument they make is that Holocaust remembrance is a testament to the existence of an anti-Nazi propaganda machine created by world Jewry in coordination with the US. They further argue that the Holocaust was created by the Zionists to justify the State of Israel's establishment and the deprivation of the Palestinians' rights to Palestinian territories.
The struggle is underway. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, each and every one of us must dedicate a moment of silence, introspection, and contemplation to what was done during the Holocaust and keep in mind that we were meant to remember and not to forget.
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