Jacob L. Talmon: Mission and Testimony: Political Essays by David Ohana

Author:David Ohana [Ohana, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2015-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

First published in The New Republic: A Journal of Politics and the Arts, September 18, 1976.

European History – Seedbed of the Holocaust

Never since the dawn of history had the world witnessed such a campaign of extermination. This was not an explosion of religious fanaticism; not a wave of pogroms, the work of incited mobs running amok or led by a ringleader; not the riots of a soldiery gone wild or drunk with victory and wine; not the fear-wrought psychosis of revolution or civil war that rises and subsides like a whirlwind. It was none of these. An entire nation was handed over by a “legitimate” government to murderers organized by the authorities and trained to hunt and kill, with one single provision, that everyone, the entire nation, be murdered – men and women, old and young, healthy and sick and paralysed, everyone, without any chance of even one of those condemned to extermination escaping his fate.

After they had suffered hunger, torture, degradation and humiliation inflicted on them by their tormentors to break them down, to rob them of the last shred of human dignity, and to deprive them of any strength to resist and perhaps of any desire to live, the victims were seized by the agencies of the state and brought from the four corners of Hitlerite Europe to the death camps, to be killed, individually or in groups, by the murderers’ bullets over graves dug by the victims themselves, or in slaughterhouses constructed especially for human beings. For the condemned there was no judge to whom to appeal for a redress of injustice; no government from which to ask protection and punishment; no neighbor on whose gate to knock and ask for shelter; no God to whom to pray for mercy.

It is in all this that this last campaign of extermination differs from all the other massacres, mass killings and bloodshed perpetrated throughout history, such as the annihilation of defeated tribes in ancient times or in the African jungle, the slaughter of conquered peoples by the Mongols, the crusade of extermination against the Albigensians in the thirteenth century, the horrors of St. Bartholomew’s Night and of the wars of religion in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the Chmielnicki pogroms in 1684, and peasants’ uprisings and their suppression in rivers of blood, even the massacres of Greeks and Armenians at the hands of the Turks at various times.

The Holocaust visited on the Jews is different from all these earlier massacres in its conscious and explicit planning, in its systematic execution, in the absence of any emotional element in the remorselessly applied decision to exterminate everyone, but everyone; in the exclusion of any possibility that someone, when his turn came to be liquidated, might escape his fate by surrendering, by joining the victors and collaborating with them, by converting to the victors’ faith, or by selling himself into slavery in order to save his life.

There is no doubt that even had the Final Solution not been formally decreed, tens

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.