Evening all:
Well, I will take a quick swing at it anyway even if short.
Like many of my generation, as a younger person I was both horrified and, yes, morbidly fascinated by this abberation called the holocaust. It was beyond comprehension but it happened.
The subject was, strangely enough, not terribly well discussed in the US when I was growing up but my early start in research on military vehicles obviously led me to the knowledge of the many books of the time on the subject. I read a few of the dry historical type books which were more statistics than any sort of discussion about the victims or the perpetrators.
So, my interest declined and it remained a sort of unused bookmark in my mind. It was there but not something I thought about.
The film and book "Schindler's List" awakened me with a hell of a start. Here were written about and later acted out in a film the actions of presumably real people who did things I could understand but not accept. That too passed over time (the film is some years old now).
Then, just a few months ago I picked up several books on sale about the war from the German point of view. Books written in German, published in Germany and later translated into English.
One of them had a big impact on me and relates perhaps to the situation in Holland. The book is entitled "The Good Old Days" and the title is taken from the private photo alblum of the commandant of Treblinka concentration camp Kurt Franz.
The book is not particularly well written and is actually a compendium of "letters to home from the front", private diaries and excerpts from trial testimony by defendants involved in slaughtering innocent civilians, Jews and otherwise.
What struck me the hardest was that in Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and elsewhere once the local population or parts of the population came under German control, they did not wait for the Germans to organize the killing off of Jews or gypsies or homosexuals or commissars, they got on with it on their own right away. And these were not hoodlums it seems but fairly ordinary people who apparently felt they could right the wrongs of decades or maybe centuries by just killing off those they held responsible, men, women and children with no compuction whatsoever. In fact, many of the German writers expressed disgust at these actions and indicated that they refused to take part in them and were not punished by the German authorities if they did not participate. It was a blood lust sort of thing that the perpetrators seemed to genuinley enjoy.
I will quote here part of the Foreword to this book written by Hugh Trevor-Roper who is a very astute writer in my opinion.
"This is a horrible book to read, and yet one that should be read-not in order to revive old enmities (after all it has been compiled by Germans and published in Germany) but in order that we do not forget the most somber lesson of the Second World War: the fragility of civilization, the ease and speed with which, in certain circumstances, barbarism can break through that thin crust and even, if backed by power and sanctified by doctrine, be accepted as the norm".
To me that puts it rather well and is something that is always in the back of my mind. In my own country, we harbour both racial and religious enmities, maybe hatreds, that are masked by our considering ourselves a "civilized" nation.
Please don't take my writings out of context, I am not a rabid or radical individual, merely a thinking one. But....if you would read what appears on the internet message boards in this country and on the editorial/opinion pages of common news media who are against social welfare, illegal immigration, homosexuals, etc. etc. it would scare you if at some point in time our government here would fall to a party or group similar to the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930s I truly fear that our own veneer of civilization could crumble just as it did in Europe just some 60 odd years ago.
To finish this one off for me, I can of course get my fill of genocide most any day on CNN but let me tell you I have seen this type of activity not that many years ago when living in Peru. Not seen it literally mind you but knew it took place and the details etc. In that country, if you were of the ruling class, you could and often did shoot a peasant or native indian for some real or fictitious infraction such as looking at your daughter the wrong way or perhaps stealing a piece of fruit from the orchard, wrecking a piece of equipment. This was done with no fear of any questions or actions from the authorities. If, and this did happen very often,
you struck a pedestrian with your vehicle, you never stopped and nothing was ever done.
I hope with all my being we will never fall into that chaos again but what I see in Iraq, even on the part of my countrymen, in the tsunami area, almost everywhere in the world, I can see that we are vulnerable to reverting to the concept of "Man's inhumanity to man" as an acceptable type of behavior.
Now I spoiled everyone's Friday evening and I apologize for that but otherwise I would have had to write this on Sunday, even worse.
Moderators, feel free to delete this if I overstepped the bounds.
Bill
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Dog Robber Sends
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