L&T Publisher Earl Watt
My grandpa Dude loved to watch television shows about history, especially about World War II.
He had a set of video tapes called “News Reels” that were actual news reports that were shown in movie theaters during World War II.
It seem bizarre today to watch Adolf Hitler and his motorcade driving down the streets of Paris to roaring crowds as he passed by the Arc d’Triumph. At some places along the route flowers were being tossed.
How could Hitler be welcomed into a country he just conquered to such applause?
In many cases it comes back to a hatred of Jews.
Hitler hated Jews. Hated them.
It wasn’t a religious disagreement. It was an idea that being Jew was not even human.
Slavery had a connotation very similar. The reason many supported the barbaric practice was the belief that some people did not rise to the level of others, that they had not yet achieved status among humanity — as if they were animals.
When a group of people believes another group to be something less than human, then there is no limit to what can be done to them.
That’s what we see in 1930 Germany and in extension throughout Europe. Some places were worse than others, but the message was loud and clear — Jews were responsible for economic hardship, and in particular their unwillingness to fight in World War I led to the defeat of Germany, or so that is what Hitler was selling.
And before some people “go there,” this isn’t anything like border security today. Not a soul believes those trying to come to America are less than human. And no one believes illegal immigrants should be treated inhumanely. This column isn’t about immigration at all, but there will be some who want to make that leap, and so I’ll head that off here.
Hitler blamed Jews for Germany’s economic collapse, and he sought to rid the world of what he called the “Jewish race.” That’s another falsehood. Being Jewish may have ties to ancestral lands, but it is a religion that anyone who chooses can follow.
As I watched these historic news reels with my granddad, the war progressed to a point where the American soldiers were starting to liberate the concentration camps, and that’s when the world saw for the first time what Hitler and his Third Reich were doing to other human beings.
Piles and piles of bodies, mostly malnourished and diseased, were piled up, just waiting for disposal which was, of course, the forced labor of other Jewish prisoners.
Some were used as science experiments. In one case the German military threw Jews into ice cold water until they died so the Germans would know how long they had to rescue a pilot if his plane went down in the icy ocean.
In other cases experimental drugs were used on Jews.
Many were told they were going in to be purified as they entered gas chambers before they took their last breath.
Their clothing and belongings were stripped away to remove their humanity.
After their deaths some had their skin removed so it could be used to make lamp shades and other furnishings.
How can one group of people treat another with such cruelty?
A look at history has shown the Jewish people have been the victim of such crimes for thousands of years, but in the modern era anyone who saw what happened to the Jewish people in World War II and had half a conscience knew the Holocaust was unlike anything ever witnessed in human history.
More than 6 million Jews were systematically exterminated by the Nazis.
This is why we have to be careful when we toss around terms like racist. No one believes it acceptable to treat any other human like the treatment imposed on the Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.
But what are we seeing today?
Last year we saw the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip breach the Israeli border and murder Jews.
We’ve seen Jews in the United States on college campuses vilified and degraded.
Most recently we’ve seen Jews in Australia starting the celebration of Hanukkah gunned down on the beach by a father and son.
Why?
Truly there are some Jews who are dangerous, just like their are Christians and Muslims who are dangerous.
Thats doesn’t give anyone the right to murder anyone who fits the mold.
The world is taking a nasty turn, and had I not sat there as an early teen and watched those videos with my granddad, I don’t know if I would fully understand the absolute misery that has been the existence of the Jewish people.
If there were Jews committing terrorist acts around the world, maybe someone could justify a response. But in my lifetime I can’t think of any shooter or terrorist that was specifically Jewish and was seeking to harm others who were not.
In a world that is supposed to be on the cutting edge of knowledge and technology, a world that has the collective database of the world at its fingertips, how can such hatred and violence against a people be tolerated?
I watched a documentary of a survivor of Auschwitz, a particularly brutal concentration camp, and she talked about stripping a dead woman for her clothing. She talked about using cess pool latrines and watching the dead pile up.
Another survivor shared how she became a number rather than a person. That number was tattooed to her arm, and how she lost toes to the freezing cold with no shoes.
She shared how she and a group of Jews were placed in a barn by Nazi soldiers as the American forces closed in and how the barn was supposed to be blown up, but the rain damaged the bomb, and they were liberated.
The liberation continues. The hatred has to stop.
