Remembering the Wannsee Conference and the Liberation of Auschwitz

This article is posted as part of the January 27, 2005, BlogBurst , to remember the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, sixty years ago, on January 27, 1945.

Highlighting these events now has become particularly important, even as the press reports that '45% of Britons have never heard of Auschwitz' (Jerusalem Post, December 2, 2004)
 

The Holocaust, symbolized by Auschwitz, the worst of the death camps, occurred in the wake of consistent, systematic, unrelenting anti-Jewish propaganda campaigns. As a result, the elimination of the Jews from German society was accepted as axiomatic, leaving open only two questions: when and how.

As Germany expanded its domination and occupation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Poland, parts of the USSR, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Italy and others countries, the way was open for Hitler to realize his well-publicized plan of destroying the Jewish people.

After experimentation, the use of Zyklon B on unsuspecting victim was adopted by the Nazis as the means of choice, and Auschwitz was selected as the main factory of death (more accurately, one should refer to the “Auschwitz-Birkenau complex”). The green light for mass annihilation was given at the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942.

The Wannsee Conference formalized "the final solution" - the plan to transport Europe's Jews to eastern labour and death camps. Ever efficient and bureaucratic, the Nazi kept a record of the meeting, which were discovered in 1947 in the files of the German Foreign Office. The record represents a summary made by Adolf Eichmann at the time, even though they are sometime referred to as "minutes".

Several of the Conference participants survived the war to be convicted at Nuremberg. One notorious participant, Adolf Eichmann, was tried and convicted in Jerusalem, and executed in 1962 in Ramlah prison.

The mass gassings of Europe's took place in Auschwitz between 1942 and the end of 1944, when the Nazis retreated before the advancing Red Army. Jews were transported to Auschwitz from all over Nazi-occupied or Nazi-dominated Europe and most were slaughtered in Auschwitz upon arrival, sometimes as many as 12,000 in one day. Some victims were selected for slave labour or “medical” experimentation before they were murdered or allowed to die. All were subject to brutal treatment.
 

Children, victims of Nazi "medical" experiments

In all, between three and four million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles and Red Army POWs, were slaughtered in Auschwitz alone (though some authors put the number at 1.3 million). Other death camps were located at Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec (Belzek), Majdanek and Treblinka. Adding the toll of these and other camps, as well as the mass executions and the starvation im the Ghettos, six million Jews, men, women, the elderly and children lost their lives as a consequence of the Nazi atrocities.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, sixty years ago, after most of the prisoners were forced into a Death March westwards. The Red Army found in Auschwitz about 7,600 survivors, but not all could be saved.

For a long time, the Allies were well aware of the mass murder, but deliberately refused to bomb the camp or the railways leading to it. Ironically, during the Polish uprising, the Allies had no hesitation in flying aid to Warsaw, sometimes flying right over Auschwitz.

There are troubling parallels between the systematic vilification of Jews before the Holocaust and the current vilification of the Jewish people and Israel. Suffice it to note the annual flood of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN; or the public opinion polls taken in Europe, which single out Israel as a danger to world peace; or the divestment campaigns being waged in the US against Israel; or the attempts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. The complicity of the Allies in WW II is mirrored by the support the PLO has been receiving from Europe, China and Russia to this very day.

If remembering Auschwitz should teach us anything, it is that we must all support Israel and the Jewish people against the vilification and the complicity we are witnessing, knowing where it inevitably leads.

To read an extended version of this post, click here.

This post and BlogBurst is the creation of Joseph Alexander Norland, of IsraPundit, a champion of Israel advocacy.

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PM Sharon’s Speech at the Knesset Special Session Marking the Struggle Against Anti-Semitism

01/26/2005

"For the second year, we mark the day commemorating the State of Israel’s struggle against anti-Semitism.  We chose to mark this day of struggle against anti-Semitism on the day of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp that horrible symbol of the Holocaust.

The allies knew of the annihilation of the Jews.  They knew and did nothing.  On April 19, 1943, the Bermuda Conference gathered, with the participation of representatives from Britain and the United States in order to discuss saving the Jews of Europe.  In fact, the participants did everything in their power to avoid dealing with the problem.  All the suggestions for rescue operations which the Jewish organizations presented were rejected.  They simply did not want to deal with it.

The Bermuda Conference was nothing more than a continuation of the shocking story of the “Ship of the Damned” – the Saint Louis – which set sail from Germany in 1939 with 1,000 Jews who succeeded in escaping from the Third Reich on board.  The passengers knocked on the doors of Cuba and ports in the eastern United States, but were refused sanctuary and were forced to return to the shores of Europe.  Most of them were murdered in the death camps.

The leadership of the British Mandate displayed the same obtuseness and insensitivity by locking the gates to Israel to Jewish refugees who sought a haven in the Land of Israel.  Thus were rejected the requests of the 769 passengers of the ship “Struma” who escaped from Europe – and all but one [of the passengers] found their death at sea.

Throughout the war, nothing was done to stop the annihilation [of the Jewish people].  When, in the summer of 1944, the mass deportations in Hungary were carried out, the allies did not bomb the train tracks which led to Auschwitz from Hungary, nor the murder facilities in Birkenau, and this was despite the fact that they had the ability to do so.  Allied planes attacked targets near Auschwitz, but they refused to bomb the camp itself, in which 10,000 Jews were murdered daily.  Thus were 618,000 Jews annihilated in a number of weeks – the Jews of Hungary.

Mr. Speaker, the sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered.

“Do not put your trust in men in power” – said the poet of the Psalms – and, indeed, during the most terrible critical hour, those in power, and the declared friends did not lift a finger.  This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust – and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us, the enchained people.

The State of Israel learned this lesson – and since its establishment, it has done its utmost to defend itself and its citizens, and provide a safe haven for any Jew, wherever he may be.  We know that we can trust no one but ourselves.

This phenomenon – of Jews defending themselves and fighting back – is an anathema in the side of the new anti-Semites.  Legitimate steps of self-defense which Israel takes in its war against Palestinian terror – actions which any sovereign state is obligated to undertake to ensure the security of its citizens – are presented by those who hate Israel as aggressive, Nazi-like steps.

Many of the manifestations of anti-Semitism in the past years are no longer aimed only at Jews as individuals.  Rather, they are aimed at the embodiment of all Jews – the State of Israel, the Jewish state.  As early as 1967, in “A Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend”, Dr. Martin Luther King wrote that anti-Zionism is no less than disguised anti-Semitism.

I quote: “The times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews.  This being the case, the antisemite must constantly seek new forms and forums for his poison… He does not hate the Jews, he is just ‘anti-Zionist’!  My friend… when people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews – make no mistake about it.”

These days, the generation which was witness to the horrors is disappearing, and ignorance is increasing.  Fewer people around the world have heard of the Holocaust or are aware of what happened in Auschwitz, and the manifestations of anti-Semitism are on the rise.  60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz – the evil which gave rise to the horror still exists – and still threatens us.

Israel stands with governments, as well as Jewish and international organizations around the world which remember Auschwitz and are determined to fight this evil uncompromisingly and relentlessly.

We will continue to act tirelessly in order to ensure that the memory of Auschwitz and the lessons of the Holocaust will not be forgotten, so that Auschwitz will never again return.

Israel is a very small country, blessed with talented and courageous people.  However, it must always be remembered that this is the only place in the world where we, the Jews, have the right and the capability to defend ourselves, by ourselves.  And we will never relinquish this.

It is our historic responsibility.  It is my personal historic responsibility".
 
 

In Europe, an Unhealthy Fixation on Israel
Robin Shepherd, Washington Post, January 30, 2005

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia

It may not have been apparent on the surface, but Europe's recent commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was steeped in irony. Even while the Old World stirringly recalls the horrors of Hitler's death camps and vows never to forget the Nazi genocide of the Jews, it also embraces an increasingly -- and alarmingly -- antagonistic attitude toward the Jewish state that arose from the ashes of World War II.

As the Middle East conflict burns on, more and more Europeans are turning against Israel. A growing number subscribe to the belief that the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians is the wellspring of much of the world's ills today, and that the blame for all this lies squarely with Israel -- and by extension, with its staunchest ally, the United States. As President Bush seeks to find common ground with Europe in his second term, he might do well to acquaint himself more thoroughly with this reality. For as surely as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict divides Jews and Arabs, it also divides Europeans and Americans. If you're looking for root causes of the growing transatlantic split that go beyond the easy cliches about U.S. unilateralism, it's time to sit up and take notice.

Go to a dinner party in Paris, London or any other European capital and watch how things develop. The topic of conversation may be Iraq, it may be George Bush, it may be Islam, terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. However it starts out, you can be sure of where it will inevitably, and often irrationally, end -- with a dissection of the Middle East situation and a condemnation of Israeli actions in the occupied territories. I can't count how many times I've seen it. European sympathy for the Palestinians runs high, while hostility toward Israel is often palpable.

And the anger is reaching new -- and disturbing -- levels: A poll of 3,000 people published last month by Germany's University of Bielefeld showed more than 50 percent of respondents equating Israel's policies toward the Palestinians with Nazi treatment of the Jews. Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed specifically believed that Israel is waging a "war of extermination" against the Palestinian people.

Germany is not alone in these shocking sentiments. They have been expressed elsewhere, and often by prominent figures. In 2002, the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning writer Jose Saramago declared, "What is happening in Palestine is a crime which we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz." In Israel just last month, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, the Irish winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize, compared the country's suspected nuclear weapons to Auschwitz, calling them "gas chambers perfected."

Moreover, in a Eurobarometer poll by the European Union in November 2003, a majority of Europeans named Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. Overall, 59 percent of Europeans put Israel in the top spot, ahead of such countries as Iran and North Korea. In the Netherlands, that figure rose to 74 percent.

Perceptions of Israel in the United States, meanwhile, contrast sharply. A poll by the Marttila Communications Group taken in December 2003 for the Anti-Defamation League had Americans putting Israel in 10th place on a list of countries threatening world peace, just ahead of the United States itself.

What accounts for this transatlantic values gap?

Part of the explanation is that, despite all the Holocaust commemorations, the memory of that event really does appear to be fading in Europe. Increasing numbers of younger Europeans have no real sense of what the Nazis did. In Britain, Prince Harry isn't the only one who's oblivious to the realities of Nazi tyranny. A BBC poll of 4,000 people taken late last year, in the run-up to Holocaust Remembrance Day last Thursday, showed that, amazingly, 45 percent of all Britons and 60 percent of those under 35 years of age had never heard of Auschwitz -- the Nazi death camp in southern Poland where about 1.5 million Jews were murdered during World War II. Such ignorance compounds anti-Israeli feelings; for those who have no understanding of the Holocaust, Israel exists and acts in a historical vacuum.

This faltering awareness of the most vivid example of racist mass murder in the 20th century is accompanied by enduring anti-Semitism. A poll in Italy last year, for example, by the Eurispes research institute showed 34 percent of respondents agreeing strongly or to some extent with the view that "Jews secretly control financial and economic power as well as the media." The Eurobarometer survey quoted above also showed 40 percent of respondents across Europe believing that Jews had a "particular relationship to money," with more than a third expressing concern that Jews were "playing the victim because of the Holocaust."

Yet while the persistence of anti-Semitism is undeniable, it's not likely to be the chief explanation for European hostility to Israel. After all, surveys show that some anti-Semitic attitudes persist in the United States as well, but they don't translate into visceral animosity toward the Jewish state. Instead, the intense antagonism toward Israel appears to be a subset of the wider European hostility, emanating mainly from the left, toward the United States. It's unlikely to be a coincidence that the 2003 Eurobarometer survey put the United States just behind Israel as the greatest danger to world peace, on a par with Iran and North Korea.

Many European intellectuals see Israel, perhaps rightly, as one of the central pillars of U.S. hegemony in the modern world. European leftists implacably opposed to America are implacably opposed to Israel as well, and for exactly the same reasons. Over dinner in Berlin not long ago, a Frenchwoman told me emphatically that Israel was "America's policeman in the Middle East." Her companion, nodding in furious agreement, insisted that the two countries are partners in a "new imperialism," leading the world inexorably into war.

In the contorted universe of the chattering classes, Israel is at once America's servant and the tail that wags the dog -- doing America's bidding while forcing it into madcap adventures such as Iraq. As Peter Preston, the former editor of Britain's Guardian newspaper, put it in an op-ed last October, bemoaning both U.S. political parties' alleged servility toward Israel: "Republican policy is an empty vessel drifting off Tel Aviv, and the Democratic alternative has just as little stored in its hold."

The left-leaning antipathy toward Israel is moreover buttressed by deeper and wider pathologies in Europe's collective memory, particularly in our overriding sense of guilt about the past, a guilt that springs from the great 20th-century traumas of war and imperialism. The first has made Europeans, especially continentals, overwhelmingly pacifistic: In the German Marshall Fund's 2004 Transatlantic Trends survey, only 31 percent of Germans and 33 percent of the French could bring themselves to agree with the ostensibly tame proposition that "Under some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice." Such attitudes do not mesh well with television pictures of Israeli helicopter gunships firing missiles at militant targets in the crowded Gaza Strip, whatever the justification for Israel's actions.

Europe is also awash in post-imperial guilt, and I frequently get the sense that Israel's claim to a piece of land in the Middle East revives guilt-inducing memories, among my English countrymen and others, of white Europeans carving up the Third World and subjugating "lesser peoples" in the 19th century. While the disturbing view that there's an equivalence between Nazi Germany and modern Israel is a relatively new development, another view equating Israel with apartheid South Africa and referring to Palestinians herded into "Bantustans" has been around for decades.

Mixed with the supercharged ideological hostility of the European left, the demons of the continent's past can make for an intoxicating cocktail of anti-Israeli sentiment There is undoubtedly room for criticism of Israel and its policies in the Middle East, but reasoned criticism appears to be giving way to emotional and irrational antipathy that is coloring the wider debate. And as that sentiment grows, American support for the Jewish state will continue to scratch raw nerves in the Old World.

There is much, of course, that the United States should be doing to improve its relationship with Europe. But repairing transatlantic relations is a two-way process. Americans should now be aware that on one crucial issue, at least, it is Europe, and not America, that needs to clean up its act.

Author's e-mail: r_shepherd2001@yahoo.com

Robin Shepherd is an adjunct fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is based in central Europe.