The Death Camps Where Millions Were Murdered

The memory of the horrific genocide that killed six million Jews and a million other innocent people by the Nazi regime will hopefully live forever in the collective memory of the human race. It is the anniversary of the liberation by Russian soldiers of the most notorious Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland on 27 January 1945. To recall the history is vital today as Neo-Nazi extreme right-wing racist groups and political parties emerge once again in Europe and white supremacist groups march in the United States.

Only the brave of heart will read this whole article. It has to be written, the truth has to be told again and again so the racist ideology behind mass murder, genocide and torture will be opposed, condemned and stopped and those who kill and have a policy of killing will be held accountable. Killing and murder can never ever be justified, it is always evil.

The recent anniversary events held in Israel and Poland recalled the mass murder of millions of people, most of them of the Jewish race by the German Nazi regime. The Nazi death camps and all torture cells everywhere today are the hell holes of evil on earth. Auschwitz-Birkenau is just one of forty concentration extermination camps set up in Poland after it was invaded by Hitler, September 1, 1939. There were many more throughout Germany.

As many as 1.3 million people were incarcerated in Auschwitz-Birkenau- men, women and little children some as young as two years old and of them 1.1 million were systematically murdered and exterminated in gas chambers. They were brought from all over Europe in cattle cars, treated as valueless, marched to specially built gas chambers and were told to strip naked as if for a shower then deadly poison gas was showered on them. They died twisting and crying out in agony.

The masses of bodies were carried out by prisoners, dumped in mass graves but most were brought to the ovens and burnt like rubbish, their ashes scattered in marshes. It is the most horrific genocide ever. What twisted grotesque evil in humankind can do such terrible atrocities is what we need to ask and answer. In all, as many as six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945.

The German Nazi regime that came to power in 1933 headed by Adolf Hitler, an Austrian, set out to exterminate all who disagreed and opposed it by harassment, violence and death squads. They had extrajudicial killing squads, death camps and all-out war. The prime target of the Nazis were the Jewish people, whom Hitler blamed for the economic and social problems of Germany and Europe and he and his cronies organized mass murder known as the Holocaust. It has come to mean the mass slaughter and extermination of six million Jewish people. Millions of other people too were slaughtered: political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies, intellectually and physically disabled, Roma and gay people and any group that did not meet the Nazi standard of racial purity.

The mass murder was driven by racism that is an ingrained attitude of one group that believes itself to be superior and having hatred, discrimination and antagonism towards others who are considered to be inferior, unwanted human beings.

Racists single out and target others for exclusion or extermination because they are of a different race, skin color, religion, low status in life or are poor drug dependents. The Nazis considered themselves the master race. They had the power that could humiliate, vanquish and destroy whoever they liked to kill continuously, with impunity and no accountability. Hitler promoted, protected and awarded the most effective assassins and killers.

I have not been to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp which is a memorial to the more than six million murdered Jewish people and more millions of abused, tortured, starved, worked to death and shot or poisoned to death by gas between 1933 and 1945. I have been to visit the Nazi concentration extermination camp of Buchenwald in Germany, near the historic cultural city of Weimar. Buchenwald camp was set up in 1937. The prisoners were slaves. I walked in the freezing cold where they died of hypothermia, where they suffered, where they were worked to death, where they starved, suffered cruelty and unbearable torture. I saw where they died after being hung from the trees by their hands tied behind their backs as they screamed in agony. Others were subjected to cruel medical experiments. The Nazi doctors set them on fire to test cures for burns. They poisoned others to test the speed of death. When it didn’t work, they were strangled to death. I walked in the death room where others were hung up on hooks with wire and left to die.

I stood with great sadness in a killing room. The prisoner was made to stand against a wall outside the room whose height was to be supposedly measured. I saw the hole through which he was shot in the head. Over a thousand were killed in this way. Their bodies were elevated in a large steel bin to the ovens on the floor above. There, I stared in shock at the six ovens in a row where the bodies were burnt day and night. The grey smoke of burring bodies poured out of the chimney.

The thousands of prisoners working nearby choked on the foul-smelling fumes of the incinerated humans. They waited for a similar fate like animals to the slaughter. They were brutally and shamelessly murdered at Buchenwald, almost with glee by the sadistic killers, assassins, murdering criminals who vowed to kill as many as they could.

I saw the photographs of piles of the dead skeletal bodies piled high like garbage. In all, 56,545 people out of 280,000 who were sent to the Buchenwald death camp were murdered, many Jews and people of all backgrounds. I went to touch the memorial slab. It is constant 37 degrees, a continual universal temperature of the human skin. In the freezing cold that the prisoners awaiting death endured, I walked along the once electrified fence to the entrance tower and looked up at the clock. It said 3:15, the time the US liberating troops arrived on 11 April 1945.

There are no words, actions, policies, social problems that can ever justify killing of other human beings. Wanton mass killing is a horrendous crime, never right, always wrong, never to be justified. We have to say no, no, no, stop it, and never again.

Crimes Against Humanity

 

It’s a grim gruesome record of murder, assassination and massacre that we must condemn, denounce and learn from. The man, a leader accused of giving orders to target and kill civilians with impunity, is legendary. He convinced them that they were doing a “good” thing killing any suspect to save their nation from being destroyed.

  

A majority approved without question or hesitation the terrible killings and human rights violations done in his name. Thousands of innocents were shot dead, knifed and beaten to death. He killed individuals personally including a Catholic priest. He was feared and known as the “Terminator.” Their belief was that killing is good and justified.

    

Last week, justice caught up with Bosco Ntaganda, 46. He was found guilty by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague of crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder, rape, sex slavery and using child soldiers. Ntaganda, a Rwandan Tutsi, joined rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and also joined the Tutsi rebel army fighting against the Hutu government in Rwanda. Convicting the killer of thousands gives comfort and hope to the families of victims. Bosco Ntaganda will be sentenced in a few months time likely to a life in prison and remembered as a horrific mass murderer.

    

The Rwandan genocide was begun by fanatical groups of prominent Hutus in government that hated and feared the Tutsi. The Tutsi were of a different ethnic group and were more highly educated. They ruled Rwanda for years after the colonial period until the Hutu came to power through elections. Hutu and Tutsi had lived in peace for generations but there were always tensions. There were riots in 1959 during which as many as 20,000 Tutsis were killed. Many fled abroad to other African nations. There was a rebel army of exiles threatening to invade and remove the Hutus from power.

 

What brought about the dramatic change that led to a vicious genocide in 1994 when the Hutu population was provoked to rise up and slaughter as many as 800,000 Tutsi neighbors from April to June 1994? How could this happen and what can we learn from this terrible massacre?

 

A small group of extremist Hutu in government, business people and the military feared the rise of an opposition dominated by the Tutsi. They believed that the only way for them to stay in power was to create a culture of fear, loathing and hatred among the civilian Hutu and turn them against the “other” group and provoke them to slaughter every single Tutsi.

 

The use of media propaganda was central to this premeditated plan to which every Hutu had to belong. They worked to persuade, brainwash, convince every Hutu to hate and “belong,” “to fit in,” “to follow the crowd” and made hate of the Tutsi a popular and fashionable attitude. The reluctant Hutu was marked a sympathizer of the Tutsi, and if friendly to them, they would be accused of giving aid and comfort to “The Enemy.” 

 

Today we see similar attempts in the United States and elsewhere to brand Muslims, migrants, asylum seekers, addicts, black people, journalists, social activists and human rights workers as  “Enemies of the People.” 

 

The extremist elite group of Hutu that were behind the plan owned the influential popular radio station RTLN. It had pop music, talk shows, interviews and hate speech in almost every broadcast. They sought to create a following among the Hutu population and convince them that the Tutsi were undesirable, evil people worse than cockroaches and had to be eliminated.

 

Nazi propaganda prepared and conditioned the German people to see Jews as dangerous rats and evil schemers. When the holocaust began, most turned a blind eye to the extermination of the Jews. Some saw no harm in it.

  

The Hutu extremists marked the Tutsi as cockroaches to be stamped upon and eliminated. They acclimatized and conditioned the population to believe that mass murder could be a virtuous act of civic duty. Soon, the failing and corrupt Hutu-led government had high approval and popularity ratings just like the Nazi party had. Likewise, other regimes use demonization, fear and hatred of a specific group of people to gain popularity and justify strong-armed rule and mass killing. Today, the Hutu extremists would be trolls using social media to achieve the same ends.

   

The Hutu extremists did that successfully persuading many Hutu that killing and exterminating a group of people was an okay thing to do. They branded the Tutsi using black propaganda, fake news and false accusations. They told civilians they could kill with impunity and believe it was a righteous act. Then, tragedy struck in 1994. The Hutu president was killed when his plane was shot down near the capital Kigali. The government blamed the rebels and the rebels blamed the government. It was at that moment when the Hutu unleashed the terror of mass killing against the Tutsi and the moderate Hutu.

 

They promised payments for killing and told Hutu if they killed a Tutsi they could take their property. Their carefully nurtured culture of hate, envy and anger provoked thousands of Hutu civilians to kill their Tutsi neighbors without mercy on the streets and in the countryside. Death squads and militia 30,000 strong named Interahamwe, meaning “attack together,” led the massacre.

 

In a period of 100 days, as many as 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were murdered. There were men, women, and children killed mostly with machetes and clubs. Hundreds of Tutsi were burnt to death in churches and buildings where they fled for safety. It was the world’s worst massacre in modern times built on a culture of hate that led to popular killing of a specific group. A majority of the people were persuaded it was right and they approved. It could happen here.