Remembering the Wannsee Conference and the Liberation of Auschwitz

January 20th, was the anniversary of the 1942 Wannsee Conference. In the course of that Conference, the Nazi hierarchy formalized the plan to annihilate the Jewish people. Understanding the horrors of Auschwitz, and the Holocaust requires that one be aware of the premeditated mass-murder that was adopted at Wannsee. Hence a BlogBurst by bloggers around the world, simultaneously commemorating this great evil. A list of those participating may be found here.

Today, January 27, 2005, is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. As the generation of Holocaust survivors who suffered most directly, and bear witness most directly, gradually dies off, we must assure that this mark of Cain is never rubbed off those who butchered defenceless innocents, and the wider world that simply stood by and did nothing. It is essential that history record forever the horror that was perpetrated. We must never forget, nor may we permit others to forget, lest it happen once again.

The Holocaust, symbolized by Auschwitz, the worst of the death camps, occurred in the wake of a consistent, systematic, unrelenting anti-Jewish propaganda campaign. As a result, the elimination of the Jews from German society was accepted as axiomatic, leaving open only two questions: when and how?

As Germany expanded its domination and occupation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Poland, parts of the USSR, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Italy and others countries, the way was open for Hitler to realize his well-publicized plan of destroying the Jewish people.

After experimentation, the use of Zyklon B on unsuspecting victims was adopted by the Nazis as the means of choice. Auschwitz was selected as the main factory of death (more accurately, one should refer to the “Auschwitz-Birkenau complex”). The green light for mass extermination was given at the Wannsee Conference, and the mass gassings took place in Auschwitz between 1942 and the end of 1944, when the Nazis retreated before the advancing Red Army. Jews were transported to Auschwitz from all over Nazi-occupied or Nazi-dominated Europe, and most were slaughtered in Auschwitz upon arrival. Sometimes as many as 12,000 were brutally murdered in one day. Some victims were selected for slave labour, others for “medical” experimentation. All were subject to unimagineable brutal treatment whose ultimate aim was their death.

In all, between three and four million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles and Red Army POWs, were slaughtered in Auschwitz alone (though some authors put the number at 1.3 million). Other death camps were located at Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec (Belzek), Majdanek and Treblinka.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, after most of the remaining prisoners were forced into a Death March westwards. The Red Army found only about 7,600 survivors on entering Auschwitz, but even of that number not all could be saved.

For a long time, the Allies were well aware of the mass murder, but deliberately refused to bomb the camp or the railways leading to it. Ironically, during the Polish uprising, the Allies had no hesitation in flying aid to Warsaw, sometimes flying right over Auschwitz.

There are troubling parallels between the systematic vilification of Jews before the Holocaust and the current vilification of the Jewish people and Israel. Suffice it to note the annual flood of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN; or the public opinion polls taken in Europe, which single out Israel as a danger to world peace; or the divestment campaigns being waged in the US against Israel; or the attempts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. The complicity of the Allies in WW II is mirrored by the support the PLO has been receiving from Europe, China and Russia to this very day.

If remembering Auschwitz should teach us anything, it is that we must all support Israel and the Jewish people against the vilification and the hatred we are witnessing. For today no one can claim they do not know where it will inevitably lead.

"Remember what Amalek did to you ... and he struck those of
you who were hindmost, all the weaklings at your rear, when you were faint and
exhausted, and he did not fear God. It shall be that when Hashem, your
God gives you rest from all your enemies all around, in the land that Hashem, your God gives you ... you shall not forget!"

Deuteronomy 25:17-19

"For the sake of my brothers and companions I will now say peace be
within thee. For the sake of the house of the Lord our God I will seek thy good.
The Lord will give strength unto His people, the Lord will bless His people
with peace."

Talmud, Tractate Berakhot, 64a