The Holocaust: "The biggest and most horrible crime in the history of humanity"

"After Auschwitz, it is impossible to write poetry."
(Primo Levi1919-1987, Italian writer who survived the most atrocious camp of the Nazi extermination camps)

The Shoah (in Hebrew "Catastrophe") is approaching its 80th birthday, if we consider the first and brutal act of Nazism: the invasion of Poland, the first day of September 1939, the beginning of the Second World War against blitzkriegs, which would not stop until allied forces begin to dispel the dream of Adolf Hitler: a third Reich owner of the planet Earth for a thousand years.

But the translucent shell of the egg showed the snake and its fury a morning of 1904 at the School of Arts in Vienna when the 16-year-old student Hitler, who had been hitherto a vagabond without a destination, saw his delirium sinking to become a great artist …

The professor, returning his drawings and paintings to him, buried him:

-You, Hitler, do not have a future. His characters lack life. They look like buildings. Maybe he should prove himself as an architect …

The contempt of these last words blinded him with hatred.

Now an enemy of alcohol, he wandered in the breweries of Munich and Berlin, attentive to the stormy political discussions engendered by the crisis in Germany, defeated in the first great war and condemned by the Treaty of Versailles to pay a debt colossal.

Finally, on October 16, 1919, he begins to speak of the enemies who haunt the country – although he is Austrian and not German – and, in front of the indifference of the parishioners, he shouts:

– Is there anyone who can hear ?!

The silence in all the tables in front of this young esmirriado, beardless, with no more facial hair than a ridiculous mustache chaplinesco, who began to talk about Lohengrin, Parsifal, Valhalla, the purity of the German race … , and ended up cursing the Jews:

-They draw on our blood and our work! They are parasites! We must finish them! They are the real enemy!

Many, astonished, left the place. But many others have stayed.
The wick was on …

On January 30, 1933, after a short term of imprisonment for leading riots, he wrote: Mein Kampf (My fight) the bible of Nazism, ascended to his first throne: Chancellor of Germany.

First point of one of the most sinister plots of history: he beat the Jews responsible for the fanatics of Hitler's youth, his brown shirts and his bracelets with the swastika, the terror of "The night of broken glbad" The destruction of Jewish shops and the legal prologue of the Holocaust: laws that separated them from the educational system, labor, national life … and in 1935, the Nuremberg laws, which rendered them stateless and the Wrapped as a race … whereas reality is a people, a culture and a religion, on the other hand, optional.

But Hitler's plans about them would not stop there. On September 2, has just invoked Poland, the head of security of the SS, Reinhard Heydrichlaunched in Warsaw the first Jewish urban ghetto. Thousands of isolated families, without rights, and guarded by Nazi henchmen and their easy trigger guns …

In 1940, the Jews of the nations occupied by the Nazi hordes met the same fate: Norway, Denmark, Belgium, France, the Netherlands … and a tragic symbol of the Shoah: opening of a concentration camp in Auschwitz …

But the mask was not yet completely fallen. January 20, 1942, at a conference in Berlin, street Grossen Wannsee 56/58, and before 13 officials from all regions, it was "discussed" – a euphemism – the final solution of the Jewish question: that is to say, "the complete annihilation of European Jews".

All those present were not in agreement (some opposed the law), but the decision was taken in advance: so much so that during the summer of the same year, the gas chambers of 6 extermination camps were already fully operational. Zykclon B gas, a pesticide that killed humans in minutes, It took almost 3 million Jews …

But the delusional myth of Aryan purity is not content with killing Jews. Gypsies, homobaduals and deformed and poisoned seeds capable of altering the descendants of Lohengrin and Parsifal … And also Blacks, Communists … and Jehovah's Witnesses suffered and died of the same way!

If evil admits prodigies, the final solution is an example of diabolical efficiency: in some months, 37 extermination camps spread across half of Europe, with a predominance of Germany, were built, put into operation – some with names impossible to forget: Auschwitz, Sobibor, Dachau, Flossenburg, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Treblinka …– and after the war, it was calculated that 15 million (men, women, children) died in this terrible barracks, including 6 million Jews.

In the famous book The chronicle of the Holocaust (in Argentina, Chronicle of the Holocaust, Ed. El Ateneo), perhaps the most complete work – a thousand pages – on what Winston Churchill defined as "The greatest and most horrible crime in the history of humanity", reads: "In the freezing morning of November 3, 1943, the SS and their Nazi collaborators surrounded the Jews of Trawniki, Poniatowa and Majdanek, in Poland. They drove men, women and children into large pits. Then, as the loudspeakers thundered with music to silence gunshots and cries, they shot 18,000 Jews. Proud of the work of that day, the sadistic executioners named this barbarity "Enterfest": the harvest festival"

Closed the farce of the conference on the final solution, the head of the operation, Hermann Göringcommanded the SS Reinhard Heydrich the general planning of the mbadacre, and Adolf Eichman the creation of the transport system (trains and trucks) of the Jews to the extermination camps.

But above them, and Under Hitler, the Intendant of Death was a mediocre German soldier who had led the first great war without grief or glory, but with unlimited ambition and cunning: Heinrich Himmler, the hyper director of the Horror of these death camps …

His sick mind and the bestiality of the barracks led to shootings and deaths in the gas chambers where the prisoners walked naked, convinced that they would be bathed after eternal journeys in congested cars without windows. , without water, without food …

Meanwhile, another criminal with the air of a scientist – a kind of Doktor Frankestein– Joseph Mengele, martyrs the prisoners with their experiences in search of the man and woman "purebred Aryan" so that they had bad that would result in perfect human specimens intended to propagate ideal Nazis around the world.

For that living beings and corpses. At last, if it was blue-eyed Jews, he removed these organs and collected them in large pots.

According to his esoteric theories, the perfect race had to come out of the union of couples without any physical failure. He has therefore created a series of instruments to measure the dimensions of bones and other features. If one of the human rabbits did not respond to the canons of perfection …, he rejected them. They would be bullets or gas chambers and would be burned to ashes in the crematoriums. In many cases, the prisoners were forced to dig their own graves before being shot down …

Why not, if Hitler, in his speeches, repeated "to stop the Jews, I fight for the work of our Lord"?

Of course, thousands, millions of corpses have been turned into a flourishing industry. Jews and non-Jews. Once dead, and in front of their well or furnace fate, they grabbed their shoes, their infamous white and gray striped uniforms and the gold pieces of their teeth. The leather, the fabric, the metal, taken to the n ° degree, filled the deposits, then were recycled, sold or stolen by some hierarchs …

He remembered in his memories Marie Couturiercourageous woman of the French Resistance imprisoned in Auschwitz: "One night we were awakened by terrible screams and the next day we learned from the Sonderkommando (work units) that the Zyklon B gas had run out the day before and they threw the children, alive !, to the ovens"

A world and a time without hope despite the words of the young and famous martyr Anne Frank, died at 16 in the field of Bergen-Belsen"We Jews must not externalize our emotions, we must be brave and strong, we must accept all the inconveniences and not complain, we must do what is in our hands and trust in God. given, this terrible war will come to an end, security will return when we become a people again, not just Jews … ".

The German-German writer Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), in his 1951 book The origins of totalitarianism, invented an unforgettable phrase and a thousand times badyzed, not always lucidly: "the bbadity of evil."

Remember, compared to the story of Adolf Eichman, who lived in the suburbs of Buenos Aires from the end of the war until May 11, 1960 under the pseudonym Ricardo Klememt. Captured that day by Israeli agents, then tried and hanged in Jerusalem in 1962, he was a factotum of the final solution: none other than the one responsible for the Jewish transport network to the death camps.

And Arendt wrote: "This Nazi criminal was neither an anti-Jewish fanatic, nor a genius of evil, nor a madman who enjoyed being responsible for the deaths of millions of people.. It was not a stupidity: it was a curious and authentic incapacity to think. For him, the final solution was a job, a daily routine with good and bad times. He was not tormented by problems of conscience. His thought was totally absorbed by the organization and administration entrusted to him. We face a new type of evil: the terribly normal bureaucrat"

As recalled the Russian documentalist Mikhail Room, disciple of the great Sergei Einsestein, in his film Daily fascism, these criminals in the fields were like clerks. After eight hours of work and after killing thousands of people, they returned home, with their wife, children, dogs, freshly watered roses, German music records, their mouth-watering dinner, as n & # 39; Any normal man: the other side of fear. Perhaps the worst, the most dangerous because he obeys diabolical orders ordered by his boss and ignores the difference between good and evil.An injured leg of his dog worries him more than the thousands of people. humans who, hours before, he closed the door of the gas chamber and operated the lever …

This "nightmare", this word which, according to Borges, was even worse than "nightmare", its correct translation did not last the thousand years promised by the führer in his drunkard of blood: he breathed only from 1939 to 1945. And in his case, until April 30 of the last year, when he committed suicide with a bullet and a poison, just like Eva Braun, his wife, in a ruined Berlin and in a still impregnable bunker and at the end of a house of cards.

But an end for this purpose proves – and will prove forever – the madness of political messianisms: Magda, the wife of Joseph Goebbels, the all-powerful minister of Nazi propaganda, before killing herself with her husband … He poisoned his six children! so that they do not live in a defeated Germany.

However, like the onion peel, there was another end, told by Simon Wiesenthal in his indispensable book The killers are among us. According to him, the extermination camps were released, he met next to a stream with one of the Nazi leaders. With a bit of fear, but confident because "it's him who's best treated me".

And this dialogue happened:

"Tell me, Wiesenthal … if tomorrow we took you to New York, for example, and you were wondering how life was in the concentration camp, what would you say?"

-I do not know … I guess the truth.

-Because they would not believe it, they would take him for a fool and even put him in a clinic.

-I do not understand why …

-Because only those of us who live here know what happened. No one else, all over the world, can imagine it …