{"id":9093,"date":"2020-01-26T22:30:03","date_gmt":"2020-01-27T06:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=9093"},"modified":"2020-01-27T22:43:07","modified_gmt":"2020-01-28T06:43:07","slug":"post3-65","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=9093","title":{"rendered":"“The Holocaust was the worst crime in history, but at least this good came from it: Decent people learned not to shrug at genocide. Or did they?”, The Boston Globe"},"content":{"rendered":"

By<\/span> Jeff Jacoby,<\/span><\/span> Globe Columnist,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>January 27, 2020<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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BY THE TIME Soviet troops arrived at Auschwitz<\/a> on Jan. 27, 1945, the vast Nazi death-and-slave-labor complex in southern Poland was nearly empty. Ten days earlier, the SS had evacuated the remaining 67,000 inmates, sending them on brutal forced marches<\/a> westward, into Germany and Austria. Thousands died along the way; any prisoner who collapsed or couldn\u2019t keep pace was shot. Those who survived the death march out of Auschwitz \u2014 including Markus Jakubovic, a Jewish teen from Czechoslovakia who later became my father \u2014 faced months of additional terror, starvation, and slavery. For them, liberation would not come until after Germany\u2019s surrender in May.<\/span><\/p>\n

The few thousand prisoners still in Auschwitz when the Soviets entered were sick or in hiding. In Primo Levi\u2019s description<\/a>, they were \u201cragged, decrepit, skeleton-like patients,\u201d dragging themselves \u201con the frozen soil like an invasion of worms.\u201d Many were emaciated and coated with excrement. Some were children who had been subjected to sickening experiments<\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The soldiers who liberated Auschwitz 75 years ago this week had come upon the largest mass-murder site in human history. Even now, the staggering immensity of the evil committed there is more than a normal mind can fathom. Between 1941 and 1945, some 1.1 million men, women, children, and babies were killed in Auschwitz, 90 percent of them Jews. That is more than the combined US death toll in every war and military operation<\/a> of the last 155 years. Tally every American killed in the Spanish American War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan \u2014 and the total comes to less than the number of Jews murdered in Auschwitz.<\/span><\/div>\n
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And Auschwitz accounted for but a fraction of the Holocaust.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Even as Germany fought the Allied armies on multiple fronts, it never relaxed its parallel war to annihilate the Jews of Europe. To that end it established tens of thousands<\/a> of concentration camps, killing fields, and ghettoes. But nowhere was the war against the Jews<\/a> waged with more terrifying totality than Auschwitz.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the time the packed deportation trains pulled to a stop and the doors were thrown open, it took no more than an hour for everyone aboard to be robbed, stripped, and herded toward the gas chambers. A small number of prisoners were \u201cselected,\u201d tattooed, and diverted to slave labor. All the others \u2014 nearly always dazed, exhausted, frightened, and agonizingly thirsty after having traveled for days in a cramped, windowless boxcar \u2014 were hustled briskly to a painful mass death. When my father and his family were transported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, the SS was at peak efficiency, gassing Jews to death at the rate of 6,000 per day<\/a> \u2014 180,000 per month. My father was selected for labor. His parents and young siblings were dead before he knew what was happening.<\/span><\/div>\n

* * *<\/span><\/p>\n

WESTERN LEADERS knew only too well what was happening. As early as November 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain denounced in a radio broadcast<\/a> \u201cthe unspeakable evils\u201d being inflicted on Jews \u201cby Hitler and his vile regime.\u201d In 1942, American diplomats first learned \u2014 and notified Washington \u2014 of a Nazi plan to exterminate millions of Jews with poison gas. In January 1944, US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau hand-delivered a memo<\/a> to President Franklin Roosevelt that described in detail the refusal of State Department officials to cooperate with efforts to rescue European Jews. Drastic action must be taken immediately \u201cto prevent the complete extermination of Jews in German-controlled Europe,\u201d the memo warned. Otherwise, \u201cthis government will have to share for all time responsibility for this extermination.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Nothing was done. Pleas to bomb the Auschwitz gas chambers, or at least the rail lines leading to the killing facilities, were repeatedly rejected. American officials insisted that resources could not be diverted from the war effort \u2014 yet in the late spring and summer of 1944, Air Force bombers repeatedly struck industrial targets nearby. On a single morning in August, the historian David Wyman documented<\/a>, \u201c127 Flying Fortresses, escorted by 100 Mustang fighters, dropped 1,336 500-pound high-explosive bombs on the factory areas . . . less than five miles<\/i> to the east of the gas chambers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Saving Jews was not a priority. The gassing of innocents at Auschwitz continued until November 1944.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the years since World War II, the civilized world has repeatedly vowed that it would never again avert its gaze when tyrants commit mass atrocities. The Holocaust was the worst crime in history, but at least this good came from it: Decent people learned not to shrug at genocide.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or did they?<\/span><\/p>\n

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For 75 years, the searing memory of the Holocaust has been invoked with the reverential words: \u201cNever Again.\u201d And for 75 years, \u201cnever again\u201d has repeatedly become \u2018yet again.\u2019<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u201cNever again will the world stand silent, never again will the world look the other way,\u201d said Jimmy Carter in 1979<\/a>, upon receiving the report of a special presidential commission on the Holocaust. Yet for three years he and the world had<\/i> looked the other way as Cambodia\u2019s Khmer Rouge conducted a brutal campaign of slaughter<\/a> in which 2 million people \u2014 a third of Cambodia\u2019s population \u2014 were shot, starved, tortured, and overworked to death.<\/div>\n
At the dedication of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, Bill Clinton declared<\/a> that the Nazi genocide would remain \u201ca sharp thorn\u201d in the conscience of the United States, which was shamed by \u201cthe deaths of millions whom our nations did not, or would not, or could not save.\u201d His fine words were put to the test 12 months later, when Hutus in Rwanda launched a genocide against that country\u2019s Tutsi minority and wiped out 800,000 victims in 100 days. The US government under Clinton knew what was happening. It refused to intervene.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In 2012, Barack Obama mourned<\/a> \u201cthe atrocities we did not stop and the lives we did not save\u201d during the Holocaust. But he would make it clear, he said, \u201cthat preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.\u201d On his watch, however, there would be no meaningful response to horrific violence unleashed by Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. As 500,000 civilians were murdered<\/a> with bombs, chemical weapons, and starvation, America declined to halt the killing. Not even a plea from dozens of US diplomats<\/a> could persuade Obama to act.<\/span><\/p>\n

For 75 years, the searing memory of the Holocaust has been invoked with the reverential words: \u201cNever Again.\u201d And for 75 years, \u201cnever again\u201d has repeatedly become \u201cyet again<\/a>.\u201d Not only in Cambodia and Rwanda and Syria, but also in Congo<\/a> and Kurdistan<\/a>, in East Timor<\/a> and Darfur<\/a>, in Bosnia<\/a> and Guatemala<\/a>, in the North Korean gulag<\/a> and the concentration camps of Xinjiang<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Murderous ethnic cleansing is underway even now in Myanmar, where tens of thousands of Rohingya<\/a> civilians have been butchered, burned, and raped to death by government forces aided by Buddhist militias. The ghastly details have been widely reported<\/a>. The blood of the victims cries out from the ground<\/a>. But the free world will do nothing to stop the monsters. \u201cNever Again\u201d is a fine sentiment for Holocaust memorials and presidential speeches and Hollywood films<\/a>about the lessons of Auschwitz. But as a guide to action? Less than useless.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Boston Globe<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist,\u00a0January 27, 2020 BY THE TIME Soviet troops arrived at Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, the vast Nazi death-and-slave-labor complex in southern Poland was nearly empty. Ten days earlier, the SS had evacuated the remaining 67,000 inmates, sending them on brutal forced marches westward, into Germany and Austria. Thousands died along […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9093"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9106,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9093\/revisions\/9106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}