Holocaust Awareness…Contemporary Lessons Essay

Few events in recent history have had as dramatic an impact on history as the mass murder of Jews in concentration camps during World War II, the Holocaust. The Holocaust appears to be a well documented event (Hilberg, 1992), yet today there are those who feel it is just a myth. When he discovered the concentration camps, General and future President Dwight David Eisenhower knew that a future day would come when people would claim that the Holocaust never happened, so he took great pains to document and record the events on film so that the world would never forget. Even so, his efforts did not eliminate what he knew would happen. In spite of evidence to the contrary, today, there are many who claim that the Holocaust did not occur and that there is no evidence that it did. Yet the evidence suggests that is did happen and similar events such as the murder of more than 2 million people by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia plus mass murders ethnic intolerance in Iraq, the Sudan, Rwanda and Yugoslavia continue to take place even now. During the early hours of September 1, 1939, Adolph Hitler invaded Poland bringing about the Second World War. Historically, this war began because of Hitler’s contempt regarding the way Germans were treated at the end of the First World War and other related issues. At the time World War II began, there was a world wide depression that helped bring Hitler rose to power in Germany and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to power in the U. S. It is generally viewed that Hitler used the issue of Jewish economic domination in Germany both to push for war and as an excuse for the economic woes of Germany. (Bartov, 2000; Friedman, 1993). Ultimately, Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s economic problems and to begin exterminating them in concentration camps—mass genocide. (Gigliotti and Lang, 2005) on a scale that surpassed anything that had ever happened up to that time within so short a time span. Does engraining memories of past atrocities into the public psyche eliminate future atrocities? Political campaigns demonstrate that by slinging mud candidates provide name recognition for their opponent(s). In a similar vain, perhaps remembering the events of the Holocaust and similar events throughout history (and unfortunately, still occurring around the world today) will only drive home the fact that those events exist and are continuing. Do we really want to do that? We could be reinforcing the Holocaust in the minds of individuals who might not otherwise be aware that any such thing has ever happened or ever will. We have every reason to believe that Hitler knew of the mass extermination of the millions of Jews but ironically, there is no documented evidence in writing to confirm this idea. (Irving, 1977) Most German citizens during WWII also claimed ignorance of the Jewish extermination in progress at the time. â€Å"How could such a widespread extermination and mass murder have gone unnoticed† and â€Å"Where are the documents to show that Hitler was aware of it? † Today, nearly seventy years after the beginning of WWII and Jewish extermination, the question is still asked, â€Å"Did Hitler even know about the Jewish extermination process underway? † The fact that anyone even asks this question is, perhaps, the greatest evidence that we need to teach that it is a real part of human history. While it seems irrational to assume that Hitler actually had no knowledge of what was going on, it appears to be equally true that few if any documents exist to demonstrate his knowledge of what was going on (Irving, 1977) even though there certainly appears to be a great deal of documentation about the war and the Holocaust (Wolfe, 1990). We can only wonder why these contradictory situations exist. In his 1977 book Hitler’s War, one noted British historian, David Irving, outlines why he feels that stories of the mass killings of European Jews in Death Camps are merely British and American inventions, war-time propaganda perpetrated by the Allies. Irving presents several lines of argument to support his claims. For example, he points out that there is no archival evidence anywhere for the gassings, no wartime German documents that refer to the gassings of human beings and there is no clear evidence as to who gave the orders to gas people. He also claims that forensic tests of the laboratories, crematoria, gas chambers and Auschwitz fail to find any trace or significant residue of a cyanide compound. Irving dismisses eye witness accounts on the grounds that there are equal numbers of eye witness accounts of the gas chambers in Dachau even though there weren’t any gas chambers in Dachau and he believes that photographs documenting the Holocaust have been misrepresented. Why is it so vital that we remember the Holocaust? Arguments can be made both for and against that stance, but certainly, the history of the Holocaust should not be slighted or overlooked. The repeated efforts to try to wipe the memory of the Holocaust out of the human psyche as if it never occurred may be one of the strongest points in favor or remembering it. The intended purpose of â€Å"engraining† events from the Holocaust into the mind of today’s generation is to allow them to learn the lessons of horror from the past and avoid them—so that we won’t repeat them. Whether this is true or not, we more or less taking comfort in the belief, right or wrong, that if people see the horrors of those events, they will make every effort to avoid them, prevent them and take precautions against repeating them whenever they see the signs in the future. Perhaps the way to combat future human atrocities is to focus on the opposite rather than to memorialize them. What lessons can we learn from the Holocaust? First, the Holocaust demonstrates how large groups and numbers of people, even on the scale of nations, can subtly be influenced into â€Å"groupthink† (i. e. , where groups of people think and behave alike because others are thinking and behaving the same way) (Janis, 1972) and manipulated by a very few influential individuals. Second, the Holocaust demonstrates that all too often, man treats his fellow man inhumanely. â€Å"How do we avoid this in the future? † I fear that there is no global answer. Whenever such a situation begins in the future, only then can we address the issue. Another lesson we can learn is that anyone can be the victim, so everyone should recognize and acknowledge it whenever it happens. When we recognize it, we must act together to stop it, and that, unfortunately, is much easier said then done. Perhaps there is no satisfactory solution to preventing future atrocities like the Holocaust. In he end, perhaps all be can do is to try to recognize such events when we see them approaching and then to do everything we can to prevent them. References Bartov, Omar. The Holocaust. Origin, Implementation, Aftermath. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000. Friedman, Saul S. Holocaust Literature. A Handbook of Critical, Historical and Literary Writing. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.Gigliotti, Simone and Berel Lang. The Holocaust. A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators Victims Bystanders. The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945. New York, NY: Aaron Asher Books, 1992. Irving, David. Hitler’s War. New York, NY: Viking Press, 1977. Janis, Irving L. Victims of Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972. Levi, Neil and Michael Rothberg. The Holocaust. Theoretical Readings. New Brunswick. NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Wolfe, Robert. Holocaust. The Documentary Evidence. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1990.