The rail from Auschwitz to Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp
I must say that I am surprised that its is only 20% of Canadian youth who don't know about the Holocaust.
Back
in 2013, I went on a Holocaust tour of Europe to see places like the
Warsaw Ghetto, Belzec, Treblinka, Josefow, Auschwitz I and II,
Neuremberg, etc. in person.
What
struck me is how in such a short period of time a basic message of
"Make Germany Great Again" and run-of-the-mill prejudice against people
who didn't look like "real Germans" caught hold. This, despite the fact
that the bogeymen didn't live an ocean away, but were in many cases
working and middle class families that lived amongst them, who tended
the stores that sold them their bread, who fixed the roads they drove on
and who administered treatment when they were sick.
A
large segment bought into the narrative and were willing to commit mass
murders on a large scale by hand, eventually creating or serving a
network of extermination factories to increase the scale. Another large
group, I guess numbed by the daily narrative, were complicit in letting
it happen and keeping silent.
There
was nothing special about Germany in the 1930s. Germans were not evil
monsters. Jews weren't their evil overlords that needed to be put down. A
small group of people made them both into that and a large group
followed along.
Yes, it could happen again.
Oh, and in the end, it didn't make Germany great again.
Treblinka, Poland
Belzec Extermination Camp Memorial, Poland
Auschwitz I Concentration, Extermination Camp
Prague, Czech Republic
Auschwitz I Concentration, Extermination Camp
Belzec Extermination Camp Memorial, Poland
Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp
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