SHOAH ' Twentieth Century Genocide'

"It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader's civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one's eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who perished." 

                                                                                                                          - Vasily Grossman Soviet war correspondent during WW2.

This site is dedicated to all the victims of the holocaust - Never Again!

(Please Note: Semites are/were a group of people who speak a Semitic language which includes the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Jews and Arabs.  And because of this, I try not to use the term 'anti-Semitic' or 'anti-Semitism' throughout this site. Instead, I use the terms 'anti-Jewish' or 'anti-Judaism' to describe prejudice and hatred towards the Jews or Judaism)

Symbols of Hatred

Hitler's Third Reich was the precursor of South Africa's apartheid state where the blacks were seen as an inferior race by their white political masters and therefore were denied their full rights as citizens.  In Hitler's Germany, it was the Jews who were viewed as the untermenschen (subhuman) and therefore treated as an inferior race and as such they were denied their rights of citizenship within the Gemeinschaft (community). They were barred from virtually all aspects of German life, whether it be in the field of work, sport or leisure, Jews were simply not welcome and were eventually forcibly removed from that Gemeinschaft. The Swastika, the symbol adopted by Hitler to be the National Socialists emblem alongside the German eagle would grow to become a worldwide symbol of hate; prejudice; intolerance; death and destruction, a symbol of pure evil. And places like the Warsaw and Łódź ghettoes alongside Auschwitz; Treblinka and Sobibor would become the symbols of man's inhumanity to man. 

Murder on a Scale Never Seen Before

The world has seen many a catastrophe in her time but none that can parallel Hitler's holocaust against real and imaginary foes, including all those men, women and children whom he personally felt were undeserving of life. 

His personal loathing for others cost the lives of some 6 million European Jews; 200.000 gypsies; 187,000 physically and mentally disabled people, and a plethora of perceived asocial elements; including homosexuals; nonconformists and criminals.  And coupled with his obsession for 'lebensraum' (living space) caused a devastating war which engulfed the world in flames and cost the lives of over 50 million others.

This site looks at Hitler's rise to power and looks at the Holocaust which he initiated. These pages are therefore dedicated to the memory of all those who suffered at his hands as well as his henchman's, and to act as a potent reminder of what can happen when we in society turn our backs on our humanity.  

'I touch the scar on my left forearm, just below the elbow. I had the tattoo surgically removed. There was so many people who didn't know and so many questions: "What do those numbers mean?"  "Is that your address?"  "Is that your phone number?"  What was I supposed to say - "That was my name for three years and forty-one days?" One day a kind doctor offered to remove it for me. "This is not charity", he assured me. "It is the least I can do as an American Jew. You were there, I was not" 

 Rena Gelissen (Survivor of Auschwitz)

 Rena's Promise A

 Story of Two Sisters in Auschwitz 

 (Prologue) (1996)

The Twisted Mentality of Heinrich Himmler:

Heinrich Himmler, Lord of the SS, the German police, including the Gestapo, and Commander of the Replacement Army was an ardent supporter of Hitler's policy of extermination of the Jewish people and as such was a key cog within Hitler's killing machine.  He is noted to have said that even the Jewish child must be exterminated without pity: 

"The child in the cradle must be trampled down like a poisonous toad...we are living in an epoch of iron, during which it is necessary to sweep with iron brooms".  (Himmler. September 1941)

Interesting Fact: The Jewish people had never suffered from such persecution for being Jewish until Christianity became a political force within the Roman empire and then it suffered regularly and most of the people employed by Hitler in carrying out the total destruction of the Jewish people were themselves Christians. 

Anti-Judaism as a phenomenon is centuries old, and its roots lay in religion.

For centuries the Jews as a whole, have been labelled by Western Christians as "Christ killers", and not just Christ killers but they were guilty of deicide!"    In fact, we find this charge of deicide being levelled at them in sermons given by the end of the second century.  A bishop from Asia Minor, Melito of Sardis claimed that Jesus was God and that the Jews murdered him, and these types of rants led to Christian intolerance and hate of the Jews, which in turn led to numerous pogroms and murder being initiated against whole Jewish communities living within Europe.   Without this hate being peddled from Christian pulpits, the Jewish people may well have been spared centuries of vitriolic campaigns of organised hate. 

Hate in Scripture:  The Christian Weapon Against the Jews

In the Gospel of John (the most anti-Jewish of all the Gospels) we see Jesus himself labelling the Jews as evil (which is strange seeing that Jesus himself was a Jew):

"Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.  He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.  when he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar, and the father of it."  (John 8:44 KJV)

Also, in the gospel of Matthew we see the Jews accepting their complicity in the death of Jesus.

"When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person:  Then answered  all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children."  (Matthew 27:24-25 KJV).

This is known as the 'blood libel' and it has been used to justify all sorts of repressive measures against the Jews throughout the centuries. 

Below are some examples of accusations issued by the Catholic Church against Jews throughout the centuries!

'Murderers of the Lord!'
'Rebels and destroyers of God'
'Companions of the Devil'
'No better than hoggs in their lewd grossness and gluttony'.

Of course, it wasn't just the Catholic Church who peddled this kind of hate against the Jews, other Christian denominations did likewise include the Jehovah Witnesses, for according to Rudolf Hoess, Auschwitz Commandant said: "Strangely enough they were all convinced it was right that the Jews should now suffer and die, since their forefathers had betrayed Jehovah."  (Commandant of Auschwitz (2003) p136. Rudolf Hoess)

The Prejudice of Pastor Martin Niemöller.

Pastor Martin Niemöller, who himself became a victim of the Nazis also promoted anti-Jewish sentiments within his own parish. He referred to the Jews as being under a curse because they had Jesus crucified, and he also claimed that Judaism was dark and sinister.

Martin Luther: The Jew Hater. 

The so-called great reformer of Christianity, Martin Luther was no saint when it comes to bigotry and prejudice, for he wrote down his own views concerning how Jewish populations should be dealt with: That their homes and places of worship should be turned into rubble and that they should be forced to live in barns.  All their assets should be confiscated and that they should be put to work for the greater good of the people, or simply be expelled from the country.  As it turned out, these Lutheran policies would be adopted en masse by Hitler and his sycophantic followers within a few centuries

Poisoning of the Well

In the 14th century, the plague known as the Black Death was rampaging throughout Europe, Christians blamed their Jewish communities of creating this plague and many were massacred as a consequence, especially after they accused them of poisoning their drinking water which had also been claimed from the pulpit.

Jozef Tiso: Slovakian President and Roman Catholic Priest.

Jozef Tiso, President of Slovakia, the newly formed independent state which had declared itself independent from Czechoslovakia in 1939 was a hard-line anti-Jewish Roman Catholic priest who stripped the Slovakian Jews of their citizenship, because in his mind, the Jews, all of them, were Christ killers and therefore were unwanted within Christian Slovakia.  Under Tiso, the Jews were handed over to the Nazis to be exploited as slave labour who shipped them out to places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau for special treatment.  

Anti-Jewish views echoed throughout medieval Europe and some Jews in some locales were forced to live in ghettos and were forced to wear yellow cone-shaped hats so that local Christians could easily identify them as Jews.  In some other places, Jewish children where be seized from their Jewish parents by the authorities to be raised as Christians.  These children would only be returned if the parents converted to the faith. Jews would also suffer other draconian restrictions imposed upon them from the Christian authorities and at times they would also suffer from organised and spontaneous pogroms, leaving many injured or dead, and with their homes and synagogues in ruin.  One of the most disturbing and most antisemitic Christian documents we find is the Papal Bull known as the Cum Nimis Absurdum (1555)  which authorised Jewish ghettoes, forced Jewish men to wear specific (yellow) headwear so as to easily differentiate them from Christians and Jewish women had to wear some other identifying clothing, yellow in colour to show that they are Jewesses, banning them from having more than one synagogue in each ghetto (All other synagogues were to be destroyed), forbade Christian nurses and maids from attending Jews, Jews were banned from owning property and they were forced to sell whatever properties they had to Christians, Jews were forbidden to work on the Christian Sabbath  and were banned from attending public feasts that the Chrisian Church had organised.  Jews were told that they could not incriminate Christians in any way, Jews were also banned from fratrnizing in any way with Christians.  Jewish trade would be seriously curtailed, and they could only deal in rags Jews were forbidden to practise medicine on Christians or even simply care for their needs.  Jews were to be seen as inferior people when it comes to Christians, even poor and destitute Christians. Most of these things would later be adopted as policy in Nazi Germany when it came to the Jews of Europe. 

Without Christianity Judaism would have just been another small and irrelevant religion, but because of Christian hatreds, the Jews were elevated to 'Christ Killers', and the persecution they faced at the hands of the Church festered in the minds of many of their congregationalist's and it was through these hatreds that Hitler learnt to blame them for all of Germany's woes, which would in turn, cumulate into the Holocaust.

It wasn't until 1965 that the Catholic Church, under Pope Paul VI, would we see the Church finally exonerate the Jews of deicide (Google: Nostra acetate).  But by then, the damage had already been done.

This fact may be unsettling to most modern-day Christians; however, the Church did play the leading role in anti-Jewish sentiments throughout the years.  Had this hatred and mistrust of the Jews not been promoted by the Church, we may never has witnessed what became known as the holocaust. 

The Nazis used every means at their disposal to dehumanise and demonise so-called enemies, whether real or imaginary, which in turn caused an unspeakable genocidal mania to spread throughout Germany and then into the occupied and unoccupied territories that came under the German spheres of influence, culminating in the massacre of millions of men, women and children throughout Europe. 

Today, have we learned the lessons of history?  Some have, but others have not. The world has seen many other genocides take place since the fall of the Third Reich, and here in Britain, there are educated Britons who are still voting for organisations such as the British National Party (BNP) and openly supporting the likes of the National Front (NF), which use demagoguery speech as a tool to promote their hatreds within our communities.

To defeat extremism, we must engage with their bad ideas openly and freely, this way we can educate and inform people to the consequences of blind hatred. We must be willing to dispel the myths generated by these hate groups by engaging with society with the facts of other cultures and religious beliefs.

People have, at times voted for extreme political parties in the past simply as a form of protest against the ruling elite, but we should show why this is not the way forward for anyone. Doing that simply gives these hate groups hope that people's views are changing in their favour, thus prompting more hate campaigns and when they secure a large chunk of votes, it gives them a pseudo-form of credibility, which they can go on and exploit in their favour.

Of course, there are those who feel that we should censor them at every stop, but this tactic endangers democracy and damages our rights to free speech. To remove one's right to speak freely, makes us just as bad as those whom we are trying to combat against. Bad speech should only be challenged through better speech.  The only time speech should be criminalised, is when threats of violence is being used, directly or indirectly against an individual or a group. Free speech is sacrosanct to a liberal, free democracy, and should be defended at all costs especially against the far right and far left, as well as those who take offense too easily and therefore feel that people's feelings should be protected by law.

It's worth noting that had Hitler succeeded in winning his genocidal war, most of those individuals who today subscribe to the National Socialist worldview, especially those from the eastern European countries, wouldn't even be alive today. Hitler's plan in the east was to enslave hundreds of thousands of Slavs, and those not utilised as forced labour would simply be either killed within their concentration camp system or deliberately allowed to starve to death. So, it is ironic that these neo-Nazis are idolising the man who would have enslaved or murdered their grandparents, long before they even knew each other. 

Nazism denied people of their dignity, it glorified torture, terror, cruelty and sadism, and it has had no qualms in exterminating vast groups of undesirables as if they were nothing but cockroaches. And this was all done in the name of the community!  And this hateful ideology should never be allowed to rise again. 

The exact figures of how many people died because of Hitler's mania cannot be truly known, and so we can only use estimates, below is a rough estimate of those who paid the ultimate price, these figures do not represent the numbers of victims who survived Hitler's genocidal war or from his violent and mental persecutions, but they were in the millions.  One of the first groups to be singled out for state sponsored murder were non-Jewish German citizens. Men, women and children who were deemed unfit to belong within the national community were Germany's mentally and physically handicapped and because they were deemed a waste of resources, a policy of racial hygiene was introduced to sweep these undesirables into oblivion.  At first, the Nazis adopted a policy of forced sterilisation so that they could not produce anymore 'useless mouths to feed', and later they were simply murdered at the hands of those who had sworn to uphold the 'Hippocratic Oath'. Nazi doctors, paved the way for the holocaust to occur, and one can even point to these (German) victims as the first victims of Hitler's holocaust.

War related: 50 + million.

Jews: 5-6 million 
Soviet P.O.W: 3 + million
Soviet Civillians: 2 + million
Polish Civillians: 1 + million
Yugoslav Civillians: 1+ million
Gypsies: 200,000 +
T4 Euthanasia Programme: 187,000 +
Political: Unknown
Resistance Fighters: Unknown
Deportees: Unknown
Homosexuals: 5000 -15,000+
Criminals: Unknown
Other (war casualties): Unknown
Other (victims of survivor guilt who would later commit suicide): unknown


Did You Know? 

Antisemitism:

The term 'antisemitism' was coined in 1879 by a German publicist and anti-Jewish demagogue by the name Wilhelm Marr (1818-1904).  The term 'Semite' refers to a group of people belonging to the Middle East. Which included Ammonites, Amorites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, as well as the Phoenicians.  It does not necessarily mean 'Jew'. However, the term: anti-Semitism is generally directed against Jewish people.  

Holocaust:
The word 'holocaust' comes from the Greek 'holos' which means 'whole' and 'caustos' which means 'burnt'. Originally it meant 'Sacrifice consumed by fire'. It is now associated with Hitlers attempt to eliminate Europe's Jews, Gypsies, political prisoners and anyone else his Third Reich classed as 'undesirables'.

Shoah:
In Hebrew, the holocaust is called 'Shoah' which means 'a great and terrible wind'.

Endlõsung:

The German term Endlösung simply means: 'The Final Solution' and was used in connection with the haphazard plan to annihilate Europe's Jews by the Nazis. 

Mussulmen:

Mussulmen were prisoners who were so emaciated that they were nothing but walking skeletons.

Post-war Struggle to reunite Jewish children in hiding:

After the war, the Jewish community struggled to reclaim their children whom had been placed into Christian institutions (convents, homes throughout Europe) in an effort to save them from Nazi persecution and death. It took years of legal wrangles at great financial cost to have these children returned to their Jewish communities.

International Holocaust Memorial Day is on the 27th day of January.  It was on this day in 1945 that Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army. 

The Swastika

The term 'swastika' comes from the Sanskrit 'svastika,' which simply means 'good fortune' or 'well-being.' It is now used by many right-wing groups as a symbol of hate and division. However, the symbol is still used as a sacred symbol within Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.

Aktion Reinhardt 

‘Aktion Reinhardt’, was the operation to systematically murder all Jews within the General-Government [that what was left of over of Poland after German annexation] was named in honour of Reinhard Heydrich, aka, ‘The Hangman of Europe’, who had been assassinated by Czech Parachutists in Prague in June 1942.

Heinz Heydrich

Heinz Siegfried Heydrich, the younger brother of Reinhard Heydrich, who worked as an SS officer and journalist who worked for the Wehrmacht’s propaganda newspaper, ‘Die Panzerfaust’, actively helped a couple of Jewish friends and others to escape capture by the gestapo and other SS departments by supplying them with forged exist visas between 1943-1944. He would however go on and commit suicide, allegedly because he was facing a court martial after being accused of corruption and theft[1], but others believed that he feared that the Gestapo were about to uncover his role in helping Jews escaped from the clutches of the Nazis.  It is possible that Heinz began to help save the lives of Jews after he had read some of his older brother’s files, that had been given him after his brother’s death and was ashamed at what his brother had been doing as leader of the Gestapo and SD.

[1] Hitler’s Hangman. The Life of Heydrich (2012) Robert Gerwarth Tale university Press (UK). P. 289-290

Bishop Ludwig Müller (1883 – 1945) 

German Protestant theologian and staunch Nazi supporter who wanted to 'dejudify the Bible'. What he failed to explain was 'how does one take out the Jewishness found in Jesus?' He also seemed to have ignored the fact that had Jesus been alive during the Nazi era, he too would have been arrested and shipped off to the gas chambers. 

Stolperstein's

Stolperstein (Stumbling stones or blocks) are small memorials embedded in the doorways of the last known residencies prior to arrest and deportation of victims of the Nazis or on the sidewalks. These stones, which are made up of a small concrete cube, topped with a brass plate which gives the name of the victim or victims and where they died or where they were deported to. The Stolperstein project was the brainchild of the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992. Today there are tens of thousands of stones laid at various sites throughout Europe.