Remember the times of the Holocaust

This 27th of January is the International Day in Remembrance of Holocaust Victims, in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 60/71. It's a bell, a big cry tribute to the millions of people mbadacred by the Nazi machinery and we must remind them to bear witness to human cruelty.

The Hitler regime not only annihilated six million jews in the countries occupied by their armies, ending with a culture, a literature and a singular vision of the world that accompanied them. Gas chambers and crematoriums also entered Polish patriots, captured Soviet soldiers (Germans had captured 3.5 million in 40 days), Jehovah's Witnesses, homobaduals, gypsies (estimated at 1 million), enemy political opponents of the Reich who, according to the promises of hierarchs, last a century.

In fact, the term "Holocaust" is a Greek expression that means "everything burned" and it alludes to a type of sacrifice similar to that performed by the Jews of antiquity, offered to God, in which an animal was consumed by fire. It was an exclusively religious act. The mbadacres of 6 million Jews can be defined more precisely as "Shoa", a Hebrew word that, in the Old Testament, is translated as "calamity", "destruction", "ruin" and which, for many scholars, is more appropriate. than the term "Holocaust".

How did you come to this monument to human evil?

From the earliest times, the Jews who lived in one part of Europe before the expulsion in 70 were "foreigners", foreigners and, through the centuries, they took a contemptuous and cruel form. The Jews "they poisoned water wells", they killed children for some sacrifices, It was the prototype of the money lender abuser. The Germans, who lost in the First World War, joined this wave to consider them "traitors to the motherland", when in fact 10,000 soldiers of Jewish origin participated to the sacrifice of battle and death in the trenches. decorated at the end of the contest.

The Catholic Church had its share of responsibility in the persecution of the Jews. A misinterpretation of the Gospels equated the Jews with supposed "deicides" of Christ. But in 1965, the Second Vatican Council disengaged the Jews from this accusation.
And anti-Semitism was defined as a great sin against humanity.

A painful accusation against the Church is that Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) (1876-1958) was called to silence before and after the war with the mbadacres, of which there had been information since 1941. D & ## Other historians, on the other hand, point out that Pius XII offered Church goods to save Jews who were on the verge of death.

Some research is in favor of the Pope and others have been questioning him since his arrival in Berlin in the 1930s. The only sure fact is that it was the Croatian and Slovenian bishops who helped the Nazi leaders since 1945 to flee Europe. They had embarked them from Genoa. The murderer Mengele and Eichman, for example, were saved by these priests who brought them documents bearing false names and money. Later writings gave the name to this mbadive flight: "Operation Odessa".

Dachau was the first of many Nazi concentration camps. Founded in Germany at the beginning of Hitler's tenure, this enclosure that housed communists and opponents of the regime that took control of the country in 1933 spread over conquered Europe to Austria, Poland, France. , in Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia.

In total, the SS (Schultztafell, born under the name of Hitler's protection squadron and its hierarchies) erected 27 main camps and 1,100 others which served as secondary camps during the Third Reich. Dachau was the only one that was in operation during this entire period.

Historically, to build the concentration camps, the Germans relied on two examples. One of them was that of the English in the war against the Boers in South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The prisoners and their families were placed there with precarious food rations but without homicide treatment. Another example was the Gulag, the sum of all the Stalinist concentration camps of the Soviet Union populated after the purges of the 1930s and earlier, also located in inhospitable regions such as Siberia. However, in the Russian camps, the prisoners were forced to work the sun in the shade but they were not murdered.

Precisely the date of the recall of the Holocaust (January 27, 1945) coincides with the liberation of the Auschwitz camp by Soviet troops in its advance on Germany and more particularly on Berlinafter victories in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk where two million Russians died and hundreds of thousands of Germans fell. Auschwitz was the most complex of concentration sites where several German companies used forced labor. It is there that the deadly gas Zyklon B (manufactured by I.G. Farben) was used for the first time as a means of extermination. This is what was thrown, as if it had been fumigated, locked prisoners in special cameras. Only in this area, 1 million Jews were killed, 74,000. Poles, 21,000 Gypsies and about 30,000 people of different nationalities.

They cremated the corpses until 1944, when the war ended, and they scattered ashes in rivers nearby or were used as fertilizer in crops. The Russians managed to release 7,000 prisoners, many of whom died from the suffering they were carrying or from their extreme weakness (because they literally killed them from starvation).

There were poignant testimonials of the horror of all this. In books signed by Primo Levi, Victor Klemperer, Margaret Buber-Neumann and Gemaine Tillion, who suffered extreme damage, they were able to write after the horror. Others did not even speak in front of their families, they kept their pain until they burst into tears in their old age. Everything was indescribable.

In many camps, like Chelmno, there were 350 killings. In Belzec, everything was planned to annihilate 15,000 people a day. In Sobibor, 20,000 people are executed daily and in Treblinka 25,000 people every 24 hours.

Taken prisoner by the Poles in 1947, at the head of the concentration camp of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hess, "The Angel of Death" was forced to leave a testimony in an autobiography known as "I, Commander of Auschwitz". Then the court sentenced him to death by hanging. He told his life: as a boy, he loved animals, he was attracted to water, he always wanted to wash or wash clothes. His vocation seemed preordained because his father had promised him to enter the religious career. This father treated him with military discipline. Family and fraternal affection has not entered its nature. He participated with his teammates in the most brutal games. He fought very young in the First World War on the Turkish front and, once the conflict ended, he was still wearing a uniform that had not saved him from the prison in which he had remained for four years. From the first day, he joined the Nazis, where he gained positions in the hierarchy. From one side of Auschwitz, he settled his family. In the morning, he would get up, feed his canaries, lunch with his children, spoil him, then go to his office to specify the number of murders committed that day.

Between 1967 and 1970 Hungarian journalist, historian and biographer Gitta Sereny is interested in prisoner Franz Stangl, commander of the Treblinka and Sobibor camps. Stangl directly supervised the death of at least one million people between the two camps, where he dictated the orders. At the end of the war, he is captured by the Americans but manages to escape from prison. With the help of bishops fleeing to Syria, he moved to Brazil in 1951, where he was employed in the Volkswagen car factory. Discovered by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, the police extradited him recently in 1967. He died in jail in June 1971.

Sereny interviewed him for seventy hours of conversation. In his book "From this Darkness, Conversations with Executioner Franz Stangl", he defines: "He was an intellectually limited man, though he seems less primitive, more open, more serious and sadder than D & B. Other Nazis, born into a family of religious devotion, who forgot to fill the "final solution", annihilation by all means (concentration camps, shootings, gas chambers) of the Jews. "

The issue of mbad death has had repercussions on the Soviet side. David Grossman, journalist covering all battlefields, author of the wonderful book "Life and Destiny" arrived with the Russian troops to the liberation of the fields of Treblinka and Majdanek. With the writer Ilya Eherenburg, he was responsible for the "Black Book of Genocide" that Stalin had ordered to ban in the midst of his anti-Semitic campaigns in the years leading up to his death in 1953. Stalin said the Jews did not die for them but to be Russian citizens.

Grossman was censored until his death. His books were taken abroad by the exiles to be edited and distributed. "Vida y Destino", masterpiece of Grossman, has the literary dimension of "La guerra y la paz" of Tolstoi.

The reminder of the Holocaust of 2019 has a special meaning. New neo-Nazi or far-right forces have an active presence in Europe, considered a continent where it is not possible to live at the moment for many Jewish organizations."The future for the Jews is discouraging," they say.

These neo-Nazis use other tactics and organize themselves differently from those who followed Hitler. They participate in large groups in Germany, the Nordic countries, Hungary, the Netherlands and Austria. It is as if the story is repeated, but with different symbols and directions, through new political parties, new forms They keep thoughts similar to those of the past.