The Holocaust:

Millions exterminated on Jan 27, 1945 - a grim reminder

By Pramod DE SILVA

The train arrived in the middle of the night, so we were greeted by very bright lights shining down on us. We were greeted by soldiers, SS men, as well as women. We were greeted by dogs and whips, by shouting and screaming, orders to try to empty the train, by confusion... There is no way to describe your first coming to Auschwitz.

-Survivor Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

Auschwitz buildings

So I was hiding out in the heap of dead bodies because in the last week when the crematoria didn't function at all, the bodies were just building up higher and higher. So there I was at nighttime, in the daytime I was roaming around in the camp, and this is where I actually survived. I was one of the very first, Birkenau was one of the very first camps being liberated. This was my survival chance.

- Survivor Bart Stern

"... in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again."

- Anne Frank

A couple of months back, I watched a remarkable film called The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas on DVD. The film portrayed a moving story about one of the most shameful and horrendous episodes in human history, through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy, the son of a Nazi official. The innocent boy does not know what goes on inside the big building just a kilometre or so away from his home in Auschwitz. When he eventually discovers what actually happens there, it is too late for him and everyone else.

Yes, the whole world was too late to realise the gravity of Adolf Hitler's ambitions. It took a world war and millions of deaths to defeat his ideology of creating a pure Aryan State and dominating the globe. He perpetrated the biggest crime against humanity in this process - the extermination of millions of innocent people - especially Jews - in concentration camps built especially for one purpose - gassing people to death. The carnage was so unimaginable that no existing word could describe it - a new term "Holocaust" came into being.

Adolf Hitler

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, State-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat. This was the basis for the genocide of members of the Jewish community.

Nazi policy

In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. By 1945, Nazi rulers had killed two out of every three European Jews as part of the Final Solution, the official Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe in concentration camps and elsewhere. German SS and police units, supported by units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, murdered more than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others.

In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often called "death marches," in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners. The marches continued until May 7, 1945, the day the German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.

German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Gypsies, the disabled, and Slavic peoples. Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioural grounds, among them Communists, Socialists and homosexuals. In the eyes of Hitler, they all deserved the gas chamber.

Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of its Axis allies to ghettos and to extermination camps, where they were murdered in especially developed gas chambers.

This is a horror that the world can never forget. Every year, on January 27, people around the world commemorate the greatest human tragedy ever. The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day to reflect on one of the darkest periods in contemporary history and mourn the millions of victims. But why January 27?

Educational programs

It was on January 27, 1945 that Soviet troops liberated the largest and most infamous concentration camp of them all - Auschwitz Birkenau. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD), an annual day of commemoration to honour the victims of the Nazi era. Every member nation of the UN has an obligation to honour the memory of Holocaust victims and develop educational programs as part of an international resolve to help prevent future acts of genocide. The UN resolution that created the IHRD rejects denial of the Holocaust, and condemns discrimination and violence based on religion or ethnicity.

Located 37 miles west of Krakow (Cracow), near the pre-war German-Polish border, Auschwitz was the largest camp established by the Germans. A complex of camps, Auschwitz included a concentration, extermination, and forced-labour camp. The Soviet army liberated more than 7,000 remaining Auschwitz prisoners, who were mostly ill and dying. It is estimated that at least 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 and at least 1.1 million of them were murdered. Treblinka was another well-known camp in Poland where Jews were massacred.

In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz camp complex, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its satellite camps. Nearly 60,000 prisoners were forced to march west from the Auschwitz camp system. Thousands had been killed in the camps in the days before these death marches began. Tens of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, were forced to march to the city of Wodzislaw in the western part of Upper Silesia.

SS guards shot anyone who fell behind or could not continue. Prisoners also suffered from the cold weather, starvation, and exposure on these marches. More than 15,000 died during the death marches from Auschwitz. A new book, launched this week, claims that some brainwashed German civilians too killed these death march inmates. 'The Death Marches: The Final Phase Of Nazi Genocide' by Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem is the first book to reveal this fact obscured by history.

Auschwitz inmates                           A gas chamber at Auschwitz

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the survivors found shelter in camps established and administered by the Allied powers. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Other Jewish displaced persons emigrated to the United States and other nations. The last such camp was closed in 1957. The crimes committed during the Holocaust devastated most European Jewish communities and entirely eliminated hundreds of Jewish communities in occupied eastern Europe.

Nuremburg Trial

Following World War II, governments and individuals such as Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of an extermination camp, began hunting Nazi officials directly responsible for the genocide of Jews. Many Nazi leaders (apart from Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Josef Goebbels who had committed suicide) were tried at Nuremberg. The first and best known of these trials was the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which tried 22 of the most important captured leaders of Nazi Germany. The initial trials were held from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. The most high profile Nazi leaders to be tried were Martin Bormann (in absentia - he had committed suicide, though the Allies did not know it at the time) and Herman Goring. Ten of the Nazi leaders were executed on October 16, 1946. However, many Nazi leaders had escaped to various countries, mainly in South America. Wiesenthal and several others dedicated their lives to tracking them down and bringing them before the law.

Simon Wiesenthal dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust and hunting down the perpetrators still at large. "When history looks back," Wiesenthal explained, "I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it."

As founder and head of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, the freelance Nazi hunter, usually with the cooperation of the Israeli, Austrian, former West German and other governments, ferreted out nearly 1,100 Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, the administrator of the slaughter of the Jews; Franz Murer, "The Butcher of Wilno," and Erich Rajakowitsch, in charge of the "death transports" in Holland. Eichmann was captured in Argentina, brought to Israel and executed in 1961. Sadly, there are many more Nazi officials who were never caught and could still be living free.

But no one can forget the massive carnage they caused. The memory of their victims will never fade away. The main commemoration ceremonies this year will be held at the United Nations headquarters in New York, the highlight being the exhibition 'The Memories Live On' comprising drawings of Auschwitz made by an unknown prisoner of the concentration camp, focusing on the legacy of the survivors to young people. Memorial events will be held around the world.

Even if you cannot go to any of these events, just light a candle for the millions of Holocaust victims who were killed mercilessly for no fault of theirs.