ALEXANDER KIMEL - HOLOCAUST UNDERSTANDING & PREVENTION

Although it was Hitler that issued the orders, the German people do bear a responsibility for the Holocaust. First of all, in initial stages of Nazism they accepted the persecution, humiliation of their Jewish fellow citizens, without raising a voice of protest. They gave Hitler the green light for pursuing his insane, destructive policies.

In 1938 Hitler started the euthanasia of the retarded Germans, the voice of protest, lead by the Churches, stopped the process. Eugene Kogon a former Buchenwald prisoner, later Professor of Political Science at the University of Munich commented on the German participation in his book "Der S.S. Staat (The Theory and Practice of Hell):

"All the Germans had been witnesses to the multiform anti-Semitic barbarity. Millions of them been had been present - with indifference or with curiosity, with contempt or downright malign joy-at the burning of synagogues or humiliation of Jews and Jewesses forced to kneel in the street mud."

The acceptance of the injustices done to the Jews affected soon affected the Germans. It was Hans Frank, the so-called Justice Minister of the Reich later hanged in Poland, realized the insanity of the Police State. In June of 1942 he declared in Berlin:

"Without law - or contrary to law- no German Reich is conceivable. A people cannot be ruled by force, a community without law is unthinkable. . . It is intolerable that the State should be able to deprive a member of the community of honor, liberty, life and property, declare him an outlaw and condemn him . . . "

In Vienna University he declared on July 1, 1942:

" I shall continue to assert with all the force at my command, that it would be bad if the Police State were to be presented as ideal of National-Socialism . . . in no circumstance can a State be endangered by being humane . . . Even in wartime, a mode of life based on the rule of law is important for the development of the community . . . force alone cannot make the State strong. Brutality is never synonymous with strength."

The tragedy lies in the attitudes of the Church leadership that did not understand that violence against any minority will soon spread and engulf the majority. The Churches were the only institutions that could have stopped the violence, but chose to remain silent. In the later stages of the Holocaust the German people, chose not to see and not know. Prof. Kogon writes:

"Not a single German could have been unaware of the fact that the prisons were full to overflowing, and that executions were taking place continually all over the country. Thousands of magistrates and police functionaries, lawyers, priests and social workers knew generically that the situation is grave. Many businessmen who dealt with the camp S.S. men as suppliers, the industrialists who asked the administrative and economic offices of the S.S. for slave-laborers, the clerks in those offices, all knew perfectly well that many of the big firms were exploiting slave labor. Quite a few workers performed their tasks near concentration camps or actually inside them. Various university professors collaborated with the medical research centers instituted by Himmler, and various State doctors and doctors connected with private institutes collaborated with professional murderers. A good many members of military aviation had been transferred to S.S. jurisdiction and must have known what went on there.

Many high-ranking army officers knew about the mass murders of the Russian prisoners of war in the camps, and even more soldiers and members of the Military Police must have known exactly what terrifying horrors were being perpetrated in the camps, the ghettos, the cities, and the countryside of the occupied Eastern territories. Can you say that even one of these statements is false?"

"In my opinion, none of these statements is false, but one other must be added to complete the picture: in spite of the varied possibilities for information, most Germans did not know because they didn't want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know. It is certainly true that State terrorism is a very strong weapon, very difficult to resist. But it is also true that the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. In Hitler's Germany a particular code was widespread: those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not asked questions; those who did not asked questions received no answers. In this way the typical German citizen won and defended his ignorance, which seemed to him sufficient justification of his adherence to Nazism. Shutting his mouth, his eyes and hears, an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door. "

"Knowing and making things known was one way (basically then not all that dangerous) of keeping one's distance from Nazism. I think the German people, on the whole, did not seek this recourse, and I hold them fully culpable of this deliberated omission."

kimel@systec.com