An End to Murder by Wilson Colin; Wilson Damon;

Author:Wilson, Colin; Wilson, Damon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Ensslin was paranoid and broadly wrong; but it’s hard not to sympathise with her misunderstanding, remembering the mendacious world that she grew up in. And it was the German baby boomers of her generation who finally faced up to their nation’s shame. By fully admitting to it, they radically changed their national outlook and character for the better. Modern Germany is almost unrecognisable as being just over two generations away from Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party, and the Final Solution.

European Jews were the majority of the victims of the Holocaust (originally a Middle English word, meaning a fiery religious sacrifice). But anti-Nazis, religious non-conformists, Communists, Romanies, homosexuals, the congenitally disabled, certain conquered ethnic groups and Soviet prisoners of war were also murdered on an industrial scale by the Nazis.

Although most victims were shot or gassed, many were simply imprisoned in concentration camps and allowed to die of sickness and starvation. A large number were forced into slavery – in German munitions works, in mines and in privately owned factor ies like those of I. G. Farben and Alfried Krupp – there to work on starvation rations until they died of exhaustion. A few were used in lethal and inhuman medical experiments. And many were beaten or tortured to death, often for the entertainment of their captors.

No final, definitive death toll for the Holocaust can ever be reached, because the defeated Nazis deliberately destroyed most of the records of the arrest, transportation and execution of their victims. The often quoted figure of six million Jewish murders is actually something of a guess: based on the nine million Jewish citizens recorded on European censuses before the war, and the three million after the war. Holocaust deniers enthusiastically point out that neither figure was terribly accurate in the first place, and the ‘six million’ figure does not take into account the uncounted number of Jews who escaped abroad during the conflict.

Of course this misses the basic point about genocide, and that which differentiates it from simple mass murder: genocide is not essentially a matter of numbers, but of intent and result. Athens, for example, was guilty of genocide at Melos after killing just 1,500 men and selling maybe three times that number of Melians into slavery. Six thousand people were murdered every twelve hours at the Auschwitz death camp alone, in May and July 1944 when it was at the height of its slaughterhouse efficiency. In both cases the killers were trying to eradicate an entire culture. Genocide is genocide, regardless of the final count of dead bodies.

The Jews, the chief Nazi scapegoats, were the main target of the Holocaust; but others were also seen as a danger to the Aryan gene stock. At least a million Romanies were murdered. And around two million Ethnic Poles. And twenty-five thousand Slovenes. And between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war. All these people were regarded as subhuman by the Nazis, but were still capable of interbreeding with, and thus genetically undermining, the ‘Aryan master race’.

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