Remembering the Holocaust

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin

Today, January 27, is Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's also the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Since 1997 this day has been declared a day of remembrance in Germany, and in 2005, the United Nations expanded that to an International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The flag is lowered over the Bundestag and the president addresses the parliament on the topic.

When you mention the holocaust, the first thing most people think of was the Nazis' genocidal plan to eliminate the Jews. That's appropriate, given the number - six million - of Jews who perished. But thousands of others perished as well, specifically the Sinti and Roma people, then known as gypsies, male homosexuals, people with physical and mental handicaps, Slavs - Poles in particular, socialists, communists, and Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious groups who expressed opposition to Hitler.

There have been other genocidal events in human history, including the "no good Indian like a dead Indian" policies inflicted on the indigenous population of the Americas by European settlers, and the Turkish slaughter of Armenians, to name only two of relatively recent history. And arguably the evils of Pol Pot, the mutual destruction of the Hutu and the Tutsis in Rwanda, the racial conflict in Darfur, Sudan, the turning of neighbor against neighbor in the former Yugoslavia are all examples that are pressed into service for those who would argue there was nothing unique about the German destruction of Europe between 1933 and 1945. But those of us who identify with Western Civilization still have the Nazi Holocaust in mind when we remind ourselves of Santayana's aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I just tuned into a German site where the conflict was being discussed between right-wingers in Germany like the AfD, the new right-wing political party, and most of the rest of the country over whether to "draw a line" under the term holocaust, and just get on with it. The good news is that three-quarters of the country say the holocaust should never be forgotten; the bad news is a quarter of the country thinks it's time to put it away with other historical horrors which need not take up too much of our time.

Growing up in a German-American home in the immediate post-war era, I had to come to terms with the concept of collective guilt and the question of the responsibility of Germans born after the war for what went on before. I decided long ago that the idea that one is responsible for the sins of one's fathers doesn't fly - at least not with me - but I believe in collective responsibility of those born into a country with a history of genocide to assure that it not be repeated. That means I take the side of those who insist on never forgetting. It also means I am on the same page as those Germans who see the defeat of Hitler as a victory and not a defeat for Germany, because it cleared the ground for the German democracy that leads the Western world, in my opinion, on how a modern democracy can and should be run. And, by the same token, I chafe at the daily reports of a critical mass of modern-day Republicans in the United States willing to push Democratic voters, particularly black people, off the voting registry, thus supporting white supremacy over democracy. Like ships passing in the night, just as the majority of Germans show evidence that they have not forgotten how life was in their non-democratic past, Americans, many of us, seem all too ready to toss American democracy on the trash heap of history. 

It's worth digging into the numbers here. A poll taken in Germany by the Research Group Wahlen e. V., in Mannheim, published in 2020, asked this question about "drawing a line" (i.e., Should we be paying less attention to the Holocaust?"). The poll revealed a number of trends, including these facts and figures:

• 28% said yes, 67% said no
• more women than men said yes
• the less education one has, the more likely one is to say yes
• people in rural areas and small towns are more likely to say yes than people in big cities
• ditto for more people in the West than in the East
• and for older people more than younger people (that one comes as a surprise!)

The figures show that fewer people each year want to keep these special memorial events going. That's probably inevitable, as fewer and fewer people each year have direct memories of the times. But what I find disturbing is that here in the U.S. there is this campaign to keep critical race theory out of the schools. And I don't know what's worse, the fact that the idiots making this pitch haven't got a clue what it actually is and are simply using the term to mask white supremacy. Or the fact that they can't see the parallels between the swastika and the Confederate flag as symbols of racism.  Remember the marchers in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us!" ?

And who said, last week, "African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans”?

If you guessed it was the Senate Minority leader Republican Mitch McConnell, you guessed right.

photo credit: Berlin Holocaust Memorial