THE MANY FACES OF THE HOLOCAUST
Alexandre Antonov, RT

Russia Today
76
Jan 27 2009
Russia

The mass extermination of Jews by Nazi Germany is one of the
cornerstones of the current world order. This ugly page of history
is read with grief, penance and speculation.

Jews were not the first people in history who faced persecution
and death solely for their ethnicity. There was the genocide of
Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. The ill fate of the indigenous
peoples of the Americas, Australia or Africa, who were decimated by
European colonists, was no less grave in terms of loss of life and
suffering either.

Neither were Jews the only group whom Nazi deemed unworthy to
live. Roma people, Slavs, and even fellow Germans who were unlucky to
have mental illness or be homosexual suffered from the regime obsessed
with racial purity. And while Nazi war crimes were grave and many,
the attention paid to them largely surpasses that to the atrocities
of, say, Japan in the Asian countries that they conquered during
World War II.

Still many scholars consider the Holocaust as a unique tragedy of
the Jewish people, the Disaster.

It’s true that Nazi leadership treated Jews with special hatred and
wanted them wiped out from the world. And they did much to reach their
evil goal, slaughtering Jews in pogroms, summary executions and death
marches, starving them and in ghettos, creating a whole industry that
existed only to kill people. An estimated six million Jews fell victim
to the Holocaust, with up to 90% of the population wiped out in some
countries like Germany itself, Poland or the Baltic states.

What makes the persecution special is the involvement of the
winners in the war in these atrocities. In many countries occupied
by Germany there was widespread anti-Semitism and too many people
became willing accomplices to the Nazi. For instance the Auschwitz
death camp was run by German officers, but many of the guards were
Ukrainians. Collaborators assisted in hunting down Jews in occupied
territories. While many of those involved in the crimes were prosecuted
after the war, the scale of involvement was too large to simply
dismiss it.

Many more people didn’t take active part in the Holocaust, but had good
reasons to feel guilty for taking conformist stance and turning a blind
eye on the crimes. When the true scale of the tragedy meticulously
documented by Germans was revealed, it couldn’t help but leave a mental
scar on millions of Europeans who lived under Nazi rule. Moreover,
unlike the East, Western Europe didn’t witness many of the horrors
of the war and was not prepared for this injection of the ugly reality.

The sense of guilt was one of the reasons why for so many nations the
Holocaust became not just a war crime, but the war crime: the ultimate
evil that history has ever borne witness to. The support that the idea
of a Jewish state in Palestine had from Europe, despite the resistance
from the Arab world, can be seen as an act of penance. Denying the
Holocaust is a crime in Israel and in 12 European countries, including
Germany, Austria, Romania and Poland – countries that were among the
perpetrators. It’s no wonder that some people see it all as a Zionist
conspiracy and claim the Holocaust is a hoax.

Perhaps in several generations the acute memory of the Holocaust
will weather. Even now some politicians challenge Jews’ monopoly for
the term while pursuing their agendas, like Hamas political leader
in Damascus Khaled Mashal, who labelled Israel’s resent offensive
in Gaza Strip a holocaust of Palestinians, or President Yushchenko
who referred to the Holodomor – the mass famine in the 1930s that he
claims was orchestrated by Stalin – as Ukraine’s Holocaust.

On January 27 the world remembers the victims of the Holocaust. On this
day in 1945, Soviet troops liberated the remaining 7,500 prisoners
of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The retreating SS troops were
ordered to execute the prisoners, but it was never carried out.