The
internationally recognized date for Holocaust
Remembrance Day corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew
calendar. It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw
ghetto uprising. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom Hashoah. This year it begins at sundown Sunday, April
27th.
Never forget the Holocaust. The Holocaust
was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder
of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
"Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by
fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed
that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed
"inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial
community. [i]
Never forget the role that religion played in the
creation of and the failure to stop the Holocaust. In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at
over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany
would occupy or influence during World
War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three
European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to
murder the Jews of Europe.
How could one of the worst catastrophes in
human history have started in one of the most Christian countries of Christian
Europe (94% Christian population), birthplace of Martin Luther and the
Protestant Reformation? Father Michael
McGarry, a Paulist priest and rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in
Jerusalem articulates this most disconcerting reality:
“We
Christians need to remember that studying the Shoah is not simply reading about
what happened to the Jews, but what some Christians – some still worshiping,
others long drop-outs from the Church – did to the Jews. The Shoah is part of
Christian history. It is part of our history if we are Christian. This is
frightening, this is sickening, this is, for many, unbelievable. But the first
thing we Christians need to recognize is that we study the Shoah because it is
part of our history, as well as part of Jewish history. Not only do we study
what happened to them but what happened to us Christians. . . .
Nazi
terrorism alone did not induce ordinary people to become complicit in mass
murder. It was Christianity’s long history of Jew hatred. It was anti-Judaism
that enabled Christians to assent willingly to Nazi eliminationist
anti-Semitism. Among the causes of the Holocaust are:
● An
evil, amoral, and charismatic leader
● Chaotic
post-WWI conditions
● Popular
discontent
● Masterful
use of propaganda
● A
brutal totalitarian regime (intolerant central government)
● State
sponsored terrorism
● The
fog of war - diminishes cultural taboos (theft, torture, rape, murder)
●
Sadism (enjoyment in being cruel)
● Careerism
(values success in career above all else)
●
Anti-Judaism (religion) / anti-Semitism (race)
● Fear
of Judeo-Bolshevism Jews are driving force behind Communism)
●
Extreme nationalism / patriotism
●
Paralysis of will
●
Unquestioning obedience to authority
● Lack
of moral guidance
●
Failure of conscience
●
Widespread culpability, complicity, and indifference
Jews ponder the Holocaust and rightly
ask: Where was God? Christians must do the same, but also ask: Where were we
Christians? And where was the Church? It was not only the perpetrators who were
guilty, but also the accomplices and bystanders.”[ii]
● Red triangle—political
prisoners: social democrats, socialists, trade unionists, Freemasons, communists,
and anarchists.
● Green triangle—
"professional criminals" (convicts).
●Blue triangle—foreign
forced laborers, emigrants.
●Purple triangle—primarily Jehovah's
Witnesses, and members of other Bible Student groups.
●Pink triangle—primarily homosexual
men, as well as sexual offenders including rapists, paedophiles and zoophiles.
●Black triangle—people who were
deemed "asocial elements" and "work shy" including:
●Roma (Gypsies), who were later assigned a
brown triangle
●The mentally ill
●Alcoholics
●Vagrants and beggars
●Pacifists
●Conscription resisters
●Lesbians
●Prostitutes
●Some anarchists
●Drug addicts
●Uninverted red
triangle—an
enemy POW, spy or a deserter.
See the badges and read more about them at --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badges
Never forget the role that multinational
corporations played in the Holocaust. Edwin
Black is the son of Polish Jews who were survivors of the Holocaust. His
mother Edjya, from Białystok, had only managed to survive the Holocaust when as
a 12-year old in August 1943 she was pushed to safety by her mother and other
prisoners through the vent of a boxcar en route to the Treblinka
extermination camp. His father as a young man had escaped his murder by
successfully fleeing to the woods from a long march to an isolated
"shooting pit" and had subsequently fought the fascists as a Betar partisan.
The pair had survived World War II by hiding in the forests of Poland for two
years, emerging only after the end of the conflict and emigrating to the United
States.[iv]
Mr. Black wanted to know how his mother came to be in that boxcar at that time.
What he discovered is shocking. He has written several books about it. Below
are his words:
“For IBM, Hitler’s Reich represented an
immense source of profit. Indeed, from the first moments of its strategic
relationship with Germany, beginning in 1933, the Reich became IBM’s largest
overseas customer. . . Working hand-in-hand with the Nazis, a massive,
door-to-door national census was undertaken throughout Germany in 1933. . . This
required IBM engineers to design and print millions of compatible punch cards
and paper forms, assemble and train an army of secretaries to punch in data,
and deliver large numbers of machines – sorters and tabulators – and ensure
that the settings could read the data properly. Finally, IBM had to produce the
clear, printed results that the Nazis desired. The Nazis were amazed. But
identification was just the first step. . . .
Once Germany’s Jews were identified, the
second solution the Nazis sought was to effectively oust them from ever segment
of society. Lawyers, judges, doctors, teachers, merchants, traders, government
officials, journalists, musicians, employees of all types, even members of
organizations such as auto clubs and gardening groups were all caught up in the
cross-comparison of directories, membership books, rosters, and other lists. .
. .
The labor index created for the labor
and extermination camps required a five-digit Hollerith (IBM) number for each
prisoner. The number was tattooed on their arms so they could be read easily,
even when their dead bodies were placed in piles. . . .
IBM never sold their machines to the
Nazis. It leased them. IBM was paid monthly – right through the war years. IBM
New York maintained strict control over the location and use of their machines.
. . The last monthly rent check was given by a Reich representative to a U.S.
Army officer in occupied Berlin in 1945. He told the Army man, “Please give
this check to Mr. Watson.”. . .
Why did IBM do this? It was never about
the anti-Semitism. It was never about National Socialism. It was always about
the money.[v]
Read
more about Edwin Black at -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Black
Learn
more about the history of the Holocaust at -- http://www.ushmm.org/learn/holocaust-encyclopedia
Never forget by learning
the facts about the Holocaust
and teaching them
to the next generation and the uninformed.
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