The Gray Monk

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January 27, 2005

Auschwitz remembered

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the "liberation" of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp by the Red Army. At Auschwitz itself and in almost every European country memorial services have been held to commemorate those who died in the horror of industrialised ethnic extermination that this and the six or seven other such camps represent. Never before in history and not until Pol Pot has the world seen or would see, such a systemised and calculated effort to wipe from the face of the earth an entire population simply for their ethnic identity.

Recently watching the film "Fiddler on the roof", I was reminded that this was the culmination of a long history of persecution of Jews in Europe, and the scenes depicted in the film were the result of the publication of the blatantly false "blood libels" by the Tsar's Secret Police to justify their seizure of Jewish owned property and the expulsion of Jews from cities, towns, and villages across Russia. It was these "Blood Libels" that were quoted by Hitler and his gang from 1936 onwards and even today are quoted by radical Muslim clerics as their justification for persecuting the Jews. Even though the "blood libels" have again and again been exposed as a fraud, those of an evil disposition still use them to justify their attacks on Jews and the Jewish faith. Even in Britian these spurious works were, and still are quoted by those of an anti-Jewish persuasion. Having grown up with neighbours whose families had been expelled under the Stalinist pogroms and one of their relatives who had survived Belsen, it is something I can picture all too clearly. I would find it very difficult to walk through the museum that is now in the camp that was Auschwitz.

For me the really frightening aspect of the Auschwitz death camps is the sheer numbers of perfectly ordinary and probably perfectly decent people who were involved. It goes all the way from the neighbours who let their Jewish neighbours be seized and dragged away, to those who drove the trucks to the railways stations, loaded the trains, drove the trains, switched the signals and points, and knew that these trains carried a cargo of unbelievable suffering yet did nothing to alleviate it or to prevent it. It shows all to clearly how conditioned we are to put our own preservation first and to accept orders in the face of threat even when we know those orders to be wrong. Some, of course, did not - and paid a very dear price indeed. But, it was still a very few who orchestrated it all and held an entire nation in thrall.

Nor can I forget the comment made in all seriousness by an ex-Battle of Britian pilot, that, had the invasion of England been carried through and been successful, the Gestapo and the SS would have had no shortage of people willing to join them or to carry out their orders. His reason for saying it was that he had just been told by a local authority "Jobs Worth" that something he had wanted to fit to his roof was not permissable in the regulations! It is no less shocking then to learn, if one has the stomach to read it, that Heinrich Himmler was a non-descript little man whose power lay in his attention to detail and his ability to plan meticulously. The history books available show this monster as a man who loved his wife and children, was kind to animals - and yet created a system that murdered over 6 million people. That, and his phenomenal memory for inconvenient facts about those under him, around him, and above him. This little bureaucrat ran an organisation that held a nation in fear and, through his selection of equally ruthless and efficient men, ran the death camps. But again, and again, one is confronted by the ordinariness of the thousands of civilians who carried out the tasks which delivered people into his organisation's clutches.

It is well that we remember, and it is equally good that we remind ourselves that for evil to triumph it is necessary only for good men and women to do nothing. Above all we should ponder on the fact that all those involved later claimed in their defence that they had simply "obeyed the rules" or "followed orders". Such was the claim of the French officials and Gendarmes who rounded up and shipped out French Jews to the death camps. As we now live in a society that is ever more closely bound by rules and led by people who insist that everyone slavishly obey the rules, it is all too easy to slide towards Auschwitz if we contnue this way.

Let us not forget that it was people all too like us that did this!

Posted by The Gray Monk at January 27, 2005 05:40 PM

Comments

Posted by: tommy fielder at April 1, 2005 02:45 AM