Remembering the Holocaust
By Gary Leazer,
President of Center For Interfaith Studies

Reprinted with permission from CIS Interfaith Report

On 12 September, I had the pleasure - although that is probably not the right word - of accepting an invitation from Aaron T. Kornblum, reference archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for a 3 1/2-hour guided tour of the museum. The museum is arranged chronologically, beginning with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. I visited Dachau, near Munich, Germany, in 1980, but I was not prepared for the scope of the Holocaust so graphically presented in the museum. After a couple of hours of looking at photographs and reading about the Holocaust, I found myself ready to leave. The demonic horror of the Holocaust is too much to fathom.

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of up to 13 million people by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. The most often targeted group was Jews. Up to six million of the more than nine million Jews in Europe in 1933 died from starvation, slave labor, firing squads or in gas chambers or ovens during Adolf Hitler’s bloody reign.

Within a month of being named Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler (1889- 1945) began targeting people he believed undesirable in the Third Reich. Communists were his first target; the first concentration camp was set up at Dachau to imprison Communists. The first nationwide boycott against Jewish businesses and professional offices began on 1 April 1933. A Jew was anyone with one-quarter Jewish blood or someone with one or more Jewish grandparents. The Star of David was painted in yellow and black on doors and windows of businesses owned by Jews. Newspaper headlines and signs proclaimed, “Germans! Defend yourselves. Don’t buy from Jews” and “The Jews are our disaster.” Books were targets. On 10 May 1933, 25,000 books, most by non-Jews, were burned in Berlin.

A new law passed in September 1935 stated that only persons of “German or kindred blood” could be citizens of the Third Reich. People were said to be either Aryan or non-Aryan. A hierarchy of races was established with German and Nordic people, who were considered “racially superior,” at the top of the list. Slavs (which included Poles), Roma or Gypsies, and Blacks came next on the list. Jews were at the bottom. In 1937, children of German soldiers and African women were sterilized. Jehovah’s Witnesses were also targeted in 1933, and, beginning in 1937, sent to concentration camps as “voluntary prisoners.” They were released if they recanted their faith; none did. Children of Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent to reform schools.

In 1934, homosexuals were imprisoned in concentration camps.

In 1935, all Masonic lodges were abolished and Masons were put in concentration camps for being “allies of Jews in the international conspiracy.” Roma or Gypsies were first sent to concentration camps in 1935. German invaders executed Catholic priests and teachers in Poland after the 1939 invasion. As many as 50,000 “Aryan looking” Polish children were taken from their parents to be adopted by Germans.

Protestants also were targeted by the Nazis. Pastor Martin Niemoeller’s famous statement sums up the attitude of too many people,

“In Germany, the Nazis first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.”

Only the dissident Protestant Confessing Church declared that unquestioning obedience to the state was not compatible with the Christian faith.

The Nazis first tried to find other countries to take Jews as immigrants. While this failed, Hitler turned to the “Final Solution.” The first methodical gassing of Jews occurred on 8 December 1941 in Poland. Despite urgent appeals, the United States refused to accept Jews as immigrants from Germany. Jewish refugees aboard the ship S.S. St. Louis were not allowed to disembark in the United States; the ship returned the refugees to Europe. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, mobile killing squads accompanied the invading army with orders to kill all Jews, Communists and Roma, as well as handicapped persons and psychiatric patients. Between June 1941 and May 1945, 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German custody, most of starvation, disease and exposure.

Of the Soviets, Heinrich Himmler (1900- 1945), head of the state police called the Gestapo, and the Schutzstaffel troops, also known as the SS, said, “On the other side stands a population of 180 million, a mixture of races whose very names are unpronounceable, and whose physique is such that one can shoot them down without pity and compassion… These people have been welded by the Jews into one religion, one ideology, that is called Bolshevism.”

In January 1945, 714,000 people were inmates in concentration camps; 200,000 were women. Auschwitz, the most notorious of the concentration camps, housed 405,000 inmates during its five years of operation. “Anatomical research” and other medical experiments were performed on inmates. Valuables, including clothing and gold teeth and fillings, were taken from inmates before they were gassed. Women were shorn of their hair.

The museum’s primary mission is to inform Americans about this unprecedented tragedy, to remember those who suffered, and to inspire visitors to contemplate the moral implications of their choices and responsibilities as citizens in an interdependent world. The museum succeeds in fulfilling its mission.

December 1998/January 1999