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Auschwitz: Afterword by Judith Gayle | Oct. 13. 2006 NATONALISM, which is a form of tribalism, is a frightening business and one which we must grow out of if we are to become a peaceful global entity. Yes, we love our country, and we love our flag -- or maybe the vote is out on that ... maybe some of us in the US of A are mature enough to see that this nation is not always right, and as much as we love the flag we wince when we see it now, knowing what it represents. Will that get us kicked out of the tribe? Or worse -- shot at dawn? There is a lie at the base of nationalism that is too often misused by the powerful -- that we're better than everyone else. Everyone outside of our big national tent is just a "stranger," not to be trusted; in a nation formed by an amalgam of immigrants, that's not been an effortless sell ... but the spin on 9/11 swept us away. We're us -- they're them. Where it gets dicey is when there is perceived threat. It is then that we're called upon to sacrifice [rights, liberties, individualism, treasure, moral judgment, dissent] to the state in order to empower it against that which threatens it. The National Socialists used such mythology to drive their own to blindness, and ultimately, madness. Interestingly, both Germany in the 30's and America in the last few years have entered into such a situation without an actual, a specific, enemy. The mood of mainstream Germany had been ploughed by years of circumstance -- a growing decadence that alarmed the straight-laced, the loss of a world war, long periods of economic scarcity -- so that a heavy-handed maniac like Hitler could produce an instant harvest when he planted a few lies into that fertile national soil. The Big Lie was easy enough for a defeated and deflated public to buy ... we are superior and I will lead you to the greatness you deserve. It should be noted that Hitler and his minions created an emergency, declared one, and swept aside the German constitution in order to deal with it. It happened so quickly that most citizens weren't aware of the magnitude of it, or the danger. After that ... well ... history tells that tale. So the Biggest Lie was that there was REASON for the rise of the Fatherland, other than cold, calculated ambition. It's not difficult to find a parallel in the United States to this same lethal nationalism. Leaving out the obvious -- that the far Right wants to distance from, if not destroy, everything that does not look and think exactly as do they -- in the early 90's, Newt Gingrich launched a war against the "obscene" [that being whatever he decided it was] and began a great harangue about the declining morals of our country that was echoed by the evangelicals in their uber-moralism. In the same way that Hitler dressed up the pretty young frauleins like milkmaid's and had them volkstanz by the thousands to summon memories of homespun "values," Gingrich and his ilk [i.e., Robertson, Falwell, Dobson] set out to remake us into little prototypes of Norman Rockwell's America, praying devoutly over our Thanksgiving turkey and guarding the chastity of our children. Our embarrassing war effort? We took a great drubbing on that Viet Nam affair and averted our eyes in shame, reeling back to the old reliable Cold War to keep our military industrial complex spinning ... and when that came to an abrupt halt, we were suddenly without an enemy -- how would we show our military superiority without one? How would we float our economic boat? We needed a new enemy ... and fast. And what about that economy? Well -- the Clinton years were flush, but they'd already showed us a dark underbelly of personal debt and desire for instant gratification. Now we know it also gave us loosey-goosey accounting practices and a ruthless streak of get-rich-quick'ism. And let's never forget that the American consciousness has been sold lies for generations in corporate advertising. When I was a little kid, I remember Lucy lighting up on camera and telling me how much smoother and more delicious a [Pall Mall, Lucky Strike, Camel ... who remembers!] was than any other brand -- and hey! It was Lucy that said it, beloved redhead and television icon. What? We weren't going to believe Lucy? We're sold a bill of goods from dawn til dusk in this nation, we're used to being lied to, and now we even accept that we'll be victimized by business. After 9/11, when those of us who remembered wars of the past expected to be asked to sacrifice for the national good, we were told to shop til we drop. Consume, citizen! Keep the corporate money going, Patriot! Keep the lies and the commerce moving along. We were told that the terrorists would win if we didn't go on with our daily lives ... but the terrorist within had already won; the emergency that was required for amping of militarism and conquest had already been established. It was our job is continue to fund it. Until recently, we considered the press a different entity than advertisement, but that's moot at this point ... news is held to a corporate standard, stockholders must be pleased and profit must be made. News is sold to the American public to direct them toward compliance with the most profitable outcome. Since Americans are a decent, if distractable, lot, and make decisions on what we understand to be true, truth is substituted with truthiness, the facts kept from us as corporate and political policy -- keep 'em shopping, keep 'em producing, keep 'em calm. You know -- a kind of Arbeit Macht Frei, but with an iPod and without the barbed wire. That's old news in this nation, actually -- what Henry David Thoreau called the quiet desperation of the average man; but it's the improved, upbeat version of drudgery and servitude in our new century. And that hook-up ... the quickly-fading hope for a better life than the last century, and the frantic race to achieve it ... is like a decades-long heroin drip, delivering us a kind of faux-freedom -- it leaves us disconnected from the earth that feeds us, distant from family ties that ground us, and hysterical lest something interfere with the privileges of our selected "lifestyle." We scramble like rats in a maze to keep the drip coming ... and we'd fight to the death if somebody took it away. The Soma of Huxley's Brave New World is our rampant consumerism, and we're lost in its dreams. We were ripe for some sharp little despot to come along and tell us we're not safe -- and we bought it hook, line and sinker, offered up our liberties to keep the rat race protected, the children chaste and the flag waving. We have all the makings of serious fascism going on here, today -- nationalism, corporatism, religious fervor, and a kind of public apathy that defies description. It's hard ... almost impossible ... to accept that we've made these same egregious mistakes that history has warned us of [we should have guessed when we heard the term Homeland] or that this kind of prevarication has found purchase in the American national soul. But we did and it has ... and the fault lies in ourselves, not our stars. The biggest lies of all are the ones we tell ourselves, the ones our ego's whisper to us in the night. They're not like us. We're morally superior. God is on our side. What we do, we do for the benefit of all. What we do is necessary. The government will keep us safe. Winning is everything. And the worst of them ... They want to hurt us; we have to kill them. The chatter of ages. Big lies. The oldest lies, the one's that have delivered nations into obscurity for eons ... but not without first leveling them for their arrogance and aggression, leaving a legacy of repression and mass murder behind as their "comma" in the history books. Freedom isn't free. It requires constant diligence. It requires us to want it badly enough to fight for it, to guard against it's erosion -- our failed delivery of "democracy" in Iraq should tell us that it can't be given, it must be earned. The Righty's will tell us the price of freedom is the sacrifice of our liberties in these troubled times, and the acceptance of the loss of our children deployed to kill those who are deemed enemies. But freedom isn't about killing others to keep it ... it's about policing the mythologies and illusions about who we are as a nation and entering the uncomfortable space of taking responsibility for every policy and action. Freedom isn't a condition of the body, it's a state of the soul. Hitler's Germany compromised it's soul to care for the "rise" of it's body ... and in so doing it stacked the actual bodies of the poor, frightened "enemy" ... innocents all, including children and old people ... like cord wood for the fire. America has compromised her soul by allowing herself to be led by cowards and liars ... how different is Bush's policy of preemption than Hitler's Blitzkrieg? How different are Hitler's earliest concentration camps [designed to incarcerate political prisoners ... called enemies of the regime ... and security risks] than Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and the thousands of nameless, faceless political prisoners [called enemy combatants] they hold? How different is Hitler's Aryan Brotherhood fantasies than George Bush's Onward Christian Soldiers jihad? Aren't the mythologies they sell us -- return to a grandeur we never actually embodied and the notion that the end justifies the means -- chillingly similar? Lies. Big ones. They ripped the world apart in the last century, within our memory -- they're being used to do it again. I guess the only question left to us is ... what's freedom worth to us? And what are we going to do about it? Leaving | Oct. 12, 2006 AUSCHWITZ was just part of my trip to Poland, a beautifully alive place. I think Krakow may have been the most pleasant, vital city I've ever visited in Europe. The great thing about it from my viewpoint is that you can basically talk to anyone; they are for the most part curious and friendly people. Through much of western Europe and England I find that people look down at the ground when they walk, or they walk past you like a horse wearing blinders staring straight ahead. In Poland I saw a lot of eyes looking back at me. What I'll remember from my trip to Auschwitz - Birkenau are the young people I met there. One thing everyone who gets to that horrendous place has in common is that they're willing to face the truth. Whether it's for curiosity or to observe the tragedy, the willingness is the same. Every day, thousands of people come there seeking the truth. It is like a temple to reality. Two students I met there stand out in memory. One was a guy named Robert, who I met when I cozied up with the group from Norway and Sweden, and sat down on the lawn outside gas chamber/crematorium #2. Someone in the group asked about this in-ground, concrete pool of water that was standing next to the train tracks as you came into the camp. Leonard (pictured earlier this week), who was giving the presentation, said, well, it's like this. The Nazis wanted to insure their facility, and the insurance company required them to have a little reservoir in case they needed to fight a fire. Robert turned to me and said, "Isn't that sick? They took out an insurance policy on a death camp." The irony was unbearable. We were sitting in front of a crematorium, where everyone wound up getting burned anyway. "That's not Nazism," I said. "That's capitalism. But they're close cousins." After the talk, we were milling around the memorial and I shared a little about Dick Cheney and Halliburton and its $400 million contract to build detention centers in the United States, none of which they had not heard of -- but I scribbled the references on the back of my business card, along with the word "Wikipedia." (The detention center bit I read an article about in Le New York Times, if you trust them.) Then there was Amalia. She was part of the same group. I walked up to her and some of her friends who were standing around by the memorial, in front of the ruins of gas chamber/crematorium #3. Such a beautiful young woman with loops of long brown hair -- secretly, I swooned a little, and took a deep breath of her energy. She was wearing a Star of David and a crucifix. Interesting image in that moment. She turned out to be Armenian, but was now living up north. I said, "Ah, the first Christian nation." Any Armenian will smile at that. Hardly anyone knows. Then I opened my mouth and said, "May I photograph that?" "Sure," she nodded. I took a few photos of her neckline, and thanked her. Later, we walked back toward the main gate, which was open and which we were free to walk through; and walking past old brick barracks, talked about what we experienced, and how we felt about it. That's the feeling I took from that place with me. The Big Lie | Oct. 11, 2006 Photo Above: Young students make their mark in the Earth beside human ash pit, Auschwitz ii -Birkenau, Sept. 27, 2006. Photo by Eric Francis. BEFORE we wrap up this photo and essay series on Auschwitz, we need to discuss the Big Lie. Everyone who is literate and concerned about the world needs to understand what this historical reference is. It is about something specific, and relevant today. The Big Lie was a propaganda technique -- more like psychological warfare -- used on the German people so they would fall for the crime we now call the Holocaust. This involved their government and military murdering more than 12 million people in death camps, half of them Jews, and nearly all the Sinti and Romany people, along with waging open war on Europe and England for many years. That is to say, bombing great swaths of Europe, people and all, level to the ground. We can all agree from the ash pit, depicted above, where hundreds of thousands of human lives were thrown, that the Holocaust was a crime. We must not lose sight of that in discussing how that crime was committed. We need to hold two thoughts at once: the ash pit, and the technique. Much of how this crime was committed involved the use of fear and violence, but more of it involved the use of deception. The excerpts below explain why deception works so well. You will, I think, probably need to think about them for a while to really grasp the notion. Fraud is a subject I have studied pretty closely, and it's taken me some time to wrap my mind around this idea. The basis of the Big Lie is that people are more likely to believe a great deception than a small one. Big, as in so big, it is inconceivable that someone ever possibly could do or say something like that. Hitler and his men understood that people tell small lies all the time. They play on this fact. Because people tell small lies as a matter of getting through the day, they expect others to do so. What we do not expect is for someone to be so brazen as to tell a lie so huge it could have absolutely no basis in truth, and yet be used to justify astonishing, outrageous conduct, and to destroy civilization, or some large part of it, at the same time. Now, if you're thinking: "This is too outrageous to be true. Who told you this?" then you fell for it. You swallowed the hook and it's connected to your television. Be careful, you could get a shock. First let's check in with the Office of Strategic Services intelligence report which during the war and the peak of Nazi atrocities assessed the psychological tactics of the Nazi government. His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. - OSS report page 51 [2]Hmm. Does this strategy ring a bell? It should. We've been living with it for the past five years. Never accept blame. Never admit you're wrong. Blame one enemy at a time and blame him for everything. Our civil servants at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. are not deviating one iota from the program. I can name a couple who probably have that OSS report in their desk drawer. But it gets deeper; the OSS report glances over the surface. Here's how Hitler himself put it. Vocabulary word: Impudence. It means gall. Nerve. Audacity. Watch that word. This is from his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf (James Murphy translation, page 134) and the bold type is my addition, as this particular observation is so stunning that somebody ought to posthumously award Hitler the Pulitzer Prize for his contribution to psychology: All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.When we are looking at the ash pit at Auschwitz, we need to think of the Big Lie. Let's go back to the faces we began with, Hlawica Zdenka and Holan Adalberta. Take a look please, first. http://planetwaves.net/home/homepix/mug_shots_homepix.jpg Is it too much to visualize their sincere, gentle faces while they are inhaling cyanide gas? Is it too much to imagine what they thought about as they died, naked, on a concrete floor, if indeed the pain allowed them to think of anything at all? Is it too much to visualize their bodies curling up, in agony, for a lie? Is it too much to imagine them being put into an incinerator semi-conscious, if the gas did not work? I have spent much of the past week thinking about them going through this, and making the connection between all the evidence I've photographed at Auschwitz, all the stories that have been told to me, all I have learned, and these two women, Hlawica and Holan. Women I have grown to love this week, looking at their faces every day, wondering what they felt and what they witnessed. The real issue with the Nazis was the lies they told, lies that were a conscious part of their strategy of mass murder. I will say this again: What they did could not have been perpetrated in an atmosphere where truth had any value. Indeed, where truth lacks value, where that lack is the primary value, anything at all can happen. This is why we need to breath truth like we breathe oxygen -- remembering WHY it is we breathe. Anything else is Zyklon B. More than half a century has passed since the Nazi disaster, and the conduct of all those who let it go on without saying boo; without daring to complain. We know the terrible results of the German police state. We have all heard about it. We have all seen the movie. We were there in the shower room with the people in Schindler's List. None of us can claim ignorance. Some of us know the remnants of the Nazi scientific and military establishment found homes in US corporations such as Dow Chemical, and the CIA. I've been hearing from a lot of readers this week about this series, and one letter came from a writer I respect greatly who was concerned that I was not addressing the issue of the "Nazi within." I would like to address that one now. Yes, I agree we all have an inner Nazi. But contrary to most images of this being, the domestic version of someone who might kick an innocent camp inmate in the ribs, to death, for no reason other than as a rite of passage (true fact, learned at Buchenwald), I have a different image of the Inner Nazi. This is the well-meaning person within us who is willing to believe anything. It's the person who is unwilling to challenge the lies we are told, unwilling to even see them, unwilling to admit we are wrong or were fooled. It is the person within us for whom the truth is inconvenient. The Inner Nazi watches a lot of TV these days and feels well informed, but doesn't get angry. Hey, it's all good, things will work out. I have read many spiritual philosophies, studied and become acquainted with many therapy philosophies, and read Brad Blanton's book Radical Honesty, which I bought and checked out because I know him. He's someone who understands lying because he's studied liars so much (and he works near Washington DC). He is very eloquent and yet there is one thing I have not been able to get him to discuss. With the notable exception of A Course in Miracles, not in any of these books, or presented, published teachings, have I come across the idea that there's something seriously wrong if we consistently believe what is not true. This is the one rather unusual thing that A Course in Miracles states explicitly: That we believe lies, and this is the cause of all our suffering. But it's funny, I don't see that message going too far. In the sanctity of our therapy room, not in print and not in a class, my own therapist Joe Trusso most definitely held the value that what was true was what mattered, in terms of what we accept and live for. In essence, that was the theme of our work. My impression of those years was that he was deeply aware of the sham our parents pulled on us, however "well intentioned," and how important it is to get past that veil. And this is directly related to the Big Lie, because the presumed, unquestioned infallibility of our parents is the first setup for the government doing no wrong, or being excused when it does. Please be assured, I know how far people (Monsanto salesmen, and those individuals who produce cigarette ads, for instance) can go to foist their Big Lies on people; how smooth and seductive they are. How friendly. And I know how, if you were paying attention, that your common sense would vomit in their faces, on the spot. I know from my environmental coverage, where I came into contact with many, many contamination victims, nearly all of whom told me to fuck off -- and I did feel like throwing up. Has nobody mentioned this little notion out loud, in public political discourse? That if you believe lies, you've got a problem? And your problem becomes our problem? If not, please, allow me to be the first to raise the point. Terrible Symmetry | Oct. 10, 2006 Full series is here: http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/auschwitz_photo_series.html View of Birkenau. Posted without comment, except for this excerpt from Adrienne Rich:
Teaching Our Kids | Oct. 9, 2006 Full series is here: http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/auschwitz_photo_series.html THE GUY in the photo above is called Leonard. He is a minister who brings groups of kids to Auschwitz a few times a year from Norway and Sweden. There were a lot of students there the day I went, and I trust that this is pretty much true most days. For some reason, most of the students I met at Auschwitz and in Krakow were from the progressive democratic countries in northern Europe, who have made the connection between dignity, freedom and keeping the world safe from another disaster like this. Here, in a very straightforward way, he is explaining to these students that they are in front of the ruins of gas chamber/crematorium 2, and what that means. This is at Auschwitz ii - Birkenau, the extended camp, the extermination complex. About 50 teenagers are listening attentively as he speaks. Beside us is another group going on in French. I understand enough French to know that the teacher is putting it to the students a little at a time, very tactfully, but getting the basic facts across. Here, day after day, crowds of 1,000 or more people, most of them newly arrived by train, would go downstairs to undressing rooms, remove their clothes, and go upstairs to the "showers." They had been instructed to fold their clothes neatly and remember exactly where they left them, so they'd be able to find them when they came back. Then, together with their families and the people they had traveled with, they would be gassed to death. The chamber would be left sealed for about half an hour to make sure nobody was missed (which didn't always work). Bodies, alive or dead, were then taken in carts on little tracks to the crematoria and incinerated in ovens up to three at a time. The ashes would be dumped in pits that are still there, where you can still find bits of bone in the nearby topsoil -- direct evidence of what happened. The reason the buildings are in ruins is because the elite Nazi SS men, who ran the camp system, dynamited them just before the camp was liberated, in order to hide the evidence of their crimes against humanity. That kind of gesture is seen more of an admission of knowing it was wrong. From 70% to 75% of the new arrivals at Auschwitz ii - Birkenau were killed immediately. The rest, the strongest among them, were allowed to live for about a month, and do their part in the German war effort, whether it was forced labor or taking part in "scientific" experimentation. We need to pause and remember that these survivors lived out their short lives knowing that the rest of their families, with whom they arrived, had gone to the ovens. Toward the end of the war, there was a rubber factory called Auschwitz iii - Monowitz that used prisoners in an industrial setting; a concentration camp combined with a factory. This served for the Buna-Werke factory of the IG Farben concern*. There were many of these. We need to add slave labor to the list of Nazi atrocities. Leonard explained about a place at the camp called Canada, which was where everyone's baggage was sent, and there, sorted through for valuables (most of which were put into to the war effort). Many of the suitcases had some food in them. So the camp inmates who worked at Canada were the well-fed ones, as opposed to those who survived their remaining month of life on bread, margarine, and broth made from rotten vegetables. Apparently, those in Auschwitz considered the nation of Canada to be their idea of the safest haven in the world. So the part of the camp where you would actually get to eat and do reasonable work was named for their utopia. I didn't see this place, or the museum that was made from its contents: a lot of belongings of a lot of people. People disappearing by the thousands from the streets of Paris, vanishing from Amsterdam, being vacuumed off the roads and countrysides of Romania and the Baltic states, kids being collected from hospitals and put on trains, families being shipped in from Warsaw, and so on. There are mountains of prosthetic limbs, hair (of women, shaved off prior to gassing) which was sold into the war effort, recycled into some product), family photos, clothing... When I visited Buchenwald some years ago, they had a display, in a glass case about 18 inches wide and 20 meters long, of coat buttons. You would walk by this thing and see an endless variety and endless quantity of coat buttons going by, and you would get the point quickly. We could be extremely polite and call it human harvesting. It is kind of how we treat most animals, particularly food animals -- if you want a graphic comparison. They actually had people sleeping on straw. Not straw mats, straw, like sheep and pigs, thrown on the floor. But there is another word for it, which is genocide. The question that nobody has answered to satisfaction is "how does this happen?" But that should not keep us from asking, because it happens often enough; in some odd way it seems endemic to the human condition that, fairly soon, somewhere in the world, somebody is going to start a genocide. We know enough about what happened to be able to break it down to details, events and developments; we know enough about the politics and the social psychology to recognize it, and see it in action. The reasoning processes are easy to spot. One of them is, "These people are not human so we're doing everyone a big favor by killing them." Then add, "If you don't support us, you could be next." There just seems to be a fairly wide-scale refusal, as there was in Europe during the war, to admit what is happening when it's happening. Could we really torture and bomb Muslims if we also admitted their humanity? Could it be glorified on TV, if we revealed their real agony and loss, and actually felt it? Or do we let ourselves get away with it by figuring well, these are bad people. As I proposed earlier, the real problem with the Nazis was that they were liars. Everything else that followed came from that one quality. You could not do something like this in an atmosphere of truth, which is why it's important to tell the truth. This is a tall order in politics, I know. Because truth is somewhat difficult to establish, and often subject to debate, it is sometimes difficult to identify lies and liars. But it's also very easy to lie. Yet it would help a lot if people did not find it so comforting to be lied to -- which is a big part of why it's so easy. We must develop a distaste for this, and connect with the appropriate rage that would be a healthy response to deception. And we need to teach our kids. I was taught to be aware of this subject by Ira Zornberg, my social studies teacher at John Dewey High School, who was also the first person who recruited me to be a writer on a serious journal. The Holocaust Education Center at Dewey had the role of being the place within the New York City school system where elementary school kids would come and see films and hear discussions of what happened during the Second World War in the 1930s and early 1940s. The discussions were led by other students, mainly Mr. Zornberg's specially trained social studies students. This is a tradition we have to keep alive. It was really good to meet Leonard. The guy felt like a brother. And I had some excellent discussions with his students as we walked around the memorial at the back of the camp, between crematoria 2 and 3. Some of them wanted to know what I was doing there, and I said, well, I went to this really progressive high school and just like you, we were made aware of the truth, and it stuck. -- Today is the anniversary of the death of Oskar Schindler. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler -- *I just looked up IG Farben in Wiki - link provided below, one of the most disturbing Wiki entries I've seen. Farben was the principal Nazi corporation that had a near monopoly on chemical production in Germany during the war, and which owned the patent on Zyklon B gas. The Nazis were part and parcel of IG Farben, to the point where chemical factories in conquered territory were turned over to the company, which in turn did work for the war effort, for profit. (This is why fascism is also called corporatism.) After the war, the company was broken up; three of the units survive today. One of the units became BASF, which makes recording tape and many other products. BASF appears in the history of dioxin, as one of the worst offenders (there is something called the Badische incident, infamous in dioxin history, where people were contaminated). Agfa we've all heard of -- you can buy their film in drug stores today. Bayer sells their products in every 7-Eleven and supermarket in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASF Taking it All In | Oct. 8, 2006 AS I left Auschwitz, the original camp, I stopped to study and photograph the reactions of people gathered near the entrance listening to tour guides tell the story. This photo, taken from inside the camp gate looking outward, pretty much sums it up: a combination of disgust and shock. These folks look sixtyish, so what they are hearing about happened in their lifetimes or very close to it. This the thing we need to remember: the Holocaust happened recently, in a society just like ours, where a lot of middle class people wanted to enjoy their lives and not be bothered with the affairs of the government. This is why we need to keep it in mind, and watch to see if any patterns are repeating. One of the framers of the U.S. Constitution once remarked that the time to start worrying is not when all your rights are gone, but rather when the first of them is threatened. I have noticed that it's finally becoming less taboo to "be political," as we figure out that "political" is about OUR lives, our futures. We might want to think of more creative ways to do that, how to raise awareness and how to take action. Tomorrow night we will begin exploring Auschwitz ii - Birkenau, and see if the history of this place, the Nazis' most cherished mass human extermination complex, holds any clues for us today. This series will remain on the cover of PlanetWaves.net and EricFrancis.com for about six more nights. Additional photos are being added to the October cover photo gallery: http://planetwaves.info/gallery2006/index.php?m=10&st=& The full series, in chronological order, is kept here: http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/auschwitz_photo_series.html I'll catch you tomorrow. e The Death Penalty as Murder | Oct. 7, 2006 Photo Above: Execution wall between Cell Blocks 10 and 11 at Auschwitz. Here, several thousand Poles and Russian prisoners of war lost their lives. Eventually, the executions were moved to other locations, including Auschwitz II - Birkneau. Additional photos are in October cover gallery. Related articles at Eric's blog. The full series is here: http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/auschwitz_photo_series.html WE ARE accustomed to the story of the Nazis being about mass murder, hearing about thousands at a time gassed and cremated. At the beginning, it happened one at a time, and inside the gas chambers, it also happened one at a time. Was it really the tendency of the Nazis to kill millions that made them what they were, or was it their nonexistent value on the life of an individual? In the scene above, you are witness to a Nazi execution facility. People such as your mother, your sister, your grandfather, your boyfriend, or yourself, were forced to strip naked, walk barefoot out into the cold, face that wall, and be shot in the back of the head. They had no trial, no lawyer, and had committed no crime except for being who they were. The philosophical rationale was that certain groups were undesirable. But it always comes down to an individual person being held as worthless. This is how we must think of the Holocaust: remembering that each life was indeed a life; that each person who was murdered experienced the fear, horror, shame, and loss of being thrown violently from the Earth, for nothing -- on the basis of a lie. Imagine facing that wall yourself, and that wall being the last thing you see before you close your eyes and brace for whatever comes next, however it might feel. Imagine that this conduct was a government policy perpetuated under color of law (that is, supposedly legal), which many people approved of, and many, many others stood silent as it went on. Part of how it went on was because people had no rights. The German government, in part by terrifying people, and in part by blatant trickery, had suspended them all, just like the American government is doing now. People were convinced they were safer without their rights. The German government committed many of its crimes on foreign soil, just like the American government is doing now. But the most menacing thing that both have in common is that the enemy can be anyone, including you. Then, step two: You have no right to prove otherwise. As I explained yesterday, this scene is the yard between Cell Blocks 10 and 11 at the first Auschwitz camp. Cell Block 10, the gynecological torture ward, is visible in the background. The black covering on the window is there to prevent inmates of Block 10, themselves in incredible pain and fear, from seeing what was going on outside their window. Of course, they could hear most of it -- the screams of those hanging with their arms behind their backs; the orders of vicious military men; condemned people wailing and crying; the shots fired; the wagons coming and going for the corpses. It was all done for 'good reason' -- these people were speaking against us, these were polluting our pure race, this one was caught giving food to someone, this one is gay. Once you can visualize their murder, do the political rationales matter? Once you can feel the pain they experienced, do the reasons make a difference? Does it really matter that it's happening to 'other people'? At what point do you identify with what is happening enough to see yourself in the situation, and speak up? Really, I think that it's so easy to relate to that we must go into denial, and fast. We must pretend that it's not happening, that it cannot happen, that it won't happen. That's exactly how it happens. Scenes like the one above are why I object to the death penalty in any form, under any circumstances. Even if you agree with the thin logic that those found guilty of crimes should be executed, you still have the problem of the innocent. Many innocent people are what is called exculpated or acquitted after they are convicted, and even after they have already been killed [see first link below if you are curious]. Many go to their deaths stating flatly that they are guilty of no crime, sometimes after having had their appeals thrown out on technicalities. The stories of people who spend 15 years on death row, only to be freed, or who are exonerated while in their graves, are so heartbreaking it's no wonder they are ignored. Nobody wants to think it's possible that supposedly 'democratic' governments are strapping innocent people to gurneys and stopping their heart with drugs, or putting them into gas chambers where they are made to inhale cyanide gas (along with test animals to make sure the gas is working properly). Except for the size and scale, I see no difference between this and what was done in Auschwitz, because the mentality is exactly the same. A society that resorts to murdering its undesirables becomes complicit in a "final solution," and the voices that are silenced in such a proposition stand as martyrs to our failure to understand the essential organizing law of humanity -- thou shalt not kill. The Innocence Project http://www.innocenceproject.org/ A Special Comment about Lying by Keith Olbermann http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15147009/ Juvenile Offenders on Death Row http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engAMR510101998 Wiki on United States death penalty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_penalty Habeus Corpus RIP http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0928-20.htm Death Penalty in Illinois http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Ryan#Opposition_to_capital_punishment Mumia Abu Jamal - and coverage of Illinois exculpations http://planetwaves.net/mumia2.html Cell Blocks 10 and 11 | Oct. 6, 2006 Photo above: View from Cell Block 11 towards Cell Block 10 at Auschwitz. Photo by Eric Francis, Sept. 27, 2006. Additional view of Block 10 in current cover photo gallery. Link to full series: http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/auschwitz_photo_series.html YOU HAVE to hand it to the Nutsies: they really were evil, possessed by evil and devoted to its full expression. They were more devoted to evil than the Beatles were to music, and they were more prolific. And it's funny, we prefer to remember the Beatles. The Nazis are now like a joke or a cliché. They are a bunch of movie characters. If you mention them, you must be ignorant, or a film buff. Besides, it was so long ago. If you take a look at what happened, it's really pretty shocking. Any public library will have a dozen books on the shelf. Librarians know what happened. Yet no matter how much we may look at them in astonishment, the ordinary people who let it go on, who knew and looked away, are, to me, stranger still. Perhaps we have some reckoning to do with the awesome power of fear. Tell me: when was the last time you said anything to anyone about the rendition and torture flights conducted by the United States all across Europe the past five years? How many times have you discussed with your friends the American torture center at Guantanamo Bay? I truly hope your answers were 'recently' and 'often'. Could you bring it up at a dinner party? I concede, it's impolite. I am uncomfortable doing it myself. Mentioning torture at dinner spoils the fun -- and there must be something wrong with you. And who knows if it's really true? The media always lie, right? But could it be that so many people believe that Muslims are a problem, that they are inherently evil, that they are terrorists, and that they are 'against our way of life', that it's more convenient to shut up than speak on their behalf? Maybe you don't like how they're being treated (imprisoned, bombed and tortured), but maybe some of them are bad people, right? If you speak up, then you can be accused of being soft on terrorism. Welcome to Nazi reasoning. They did not invent it -- like a lot of things, they just perfected it. The core of Nazi evil expressed itself in Cell Blocks 10 and 11 at Auschwitz, camp 1. Some of the planning and thinking went on elsewhere; the ecology of anti-Semitism within which it festered was to some extent resident in many millions of people, and deeply rooted in old cultural attitudes. But the actual expression of the worst atrocities and the thoughts lurking behind them found their true home in Cell Blocks 10 and 11. These were the working prototype. These were the place the model was created, for everything from sexual experimentation to gassing hundreds of people at a time. The photo above is what you might have seen in your last moments of life if you were imprisoned in Cell Block 11, the Death Block. You might have meditated on this view for some days, but probably not long, and miserably; those in Block 11 were beaten and tortured regularly, and like in the rest of Auschwitz, they were hungry, tired and sick. Interestingly, the Death Block includes a room that was used as a 'court' where sham military trials were held and people were condemned for various rationales. This got me angrier than any of the torture cells I saw. It's why you want your country to have real, civilian courts and actual trial by jury. It's why you want to have judges who are not appointed for their political stances but rather for their fairness and experience. True, it's accused criminals who get those trials, but you never know -- you could be one of them some day. Even my dad, a professor who worked as a consultant to police administrators for many years, was arrested once. The charge was dropped. It was ridiculous, but there he was -- facing the same bullshit as everyone else. So that little fake Auschwitz courtroom -- I would love to have smashed the place up. It was the room where the Nazis helped themselves feel better about what they were doing, condemning the innocent to death. Several thousand people were killed in the yard outside this window, which we will visit tomorrow. Most were shot, many were hung by the arms and allowed to die slowly as they helplessly watched others be executed. Further down the corridor, to the right of where this photo was taken, is a women's undressing room, with a toilet, where women undressed and went to their deaths one or a few at a time, stepped outside, faced a special wall, and were shot from behind. I did not see a corresponding room for men, but I am sure it's there somewhere. The Nazis had a morbid fascination with sex and nudity. Was it really necessary to shoot their victims naked? In their minds, yes. In part it contributed to the necessary belief that the victims were not human -- an idea perpetuated so fully that many upon whom it was projected apparently accepted it themselves. Many who survived the camps say that keeping their sense of humanity intact was how they did it. In the basement of Block 11 were something called 'standing cells', little brick cubicles where prisoners were forced to stand up for extended periods of time, sometimes all night, and even for days on end, sometimes till they died. Across the basement corridor was the test gas chamber where Zyclon B was tested on 600 prisoners, the first mass gassing at Auschwitz and, say the museums notes, the first time in the history of the German Reich. Also in the basement were suffocation cells, where prisoners were placed, in the dark, until the oxygen slowly ran out. If you tried to help someone escape, the punishment was death in a starvation cell. No form of murder was left out of the question. They were all interesting to the Nazis and there were plenty of people coming in every day to experiment on. In this photo, you are looking from the main corridor on the first floor, through a cell, and across the courtyard. The black fixture on the building across the courtyard is one of the blinded windows of Block 10, which was a special ward for gynecological torture. The blinds were put up so that the 'patients' in the that block could not see the continuously ongoing executions and torture in the yard outside their window. Who were those patients? I suggest considering they may have been Hlawica Zdenka and Holan Adalberta, the women whose pictures we began with. Those in Block 10 met a more sinister fate than their neighbors. There, Prof. Dr. Carl Clauberg conducted sterilization experiments on women of 'undesirable' races and nationalities. Make no mistake: this is where racism and prejudice lead. This is the logical conclusion. The methods of sterilization included the extremely painful injection of caustic chemicals into the uterus, and use of X-rays. Those to whom this was done were usually too sick to recover, and were killed with an injection of a chemical called phenol to the heart. This is from the Wikipedia entry on Clauberg, who was actually turned free for a time in West Germany after the war, but later arrested: Clauberg looked for an easy and cheap way to sterilize women. He injected liquid acid into their uterus - without anesthetics. Most of his test subjects were Jewish or Roma women who suffered permanent damage and serious infections. Damaged ovaries were then removed and sent to Berlin for additional research. Sometimes subjects were bombarded with x-rays. Some of the subjects died because of the tests, and others were killed so they could be autopsied. Estimates of those who survived but were sterilized are around 700. The Nazis perfected this kind of conduct, but the Americans are excellent copycats. Personally, I find the ongoing silence of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal to be as frightening as anything I've ever encountered in a few decades of considering Nazi atrocities. We don't really know what's going on inside these extra-legal prisons, but we have a clue. (Did you ever wonder why Guantanamo is on the island of our supposed communist enemy, Cuba? Because it's outside the reach of legitimate American constitutional law and lawyers -- for a good reason.) And to think: if you're an American, you pay the salary of Donald Rumsfeld, you pay for Abu Ghraib, you pay for Guantanamo. These things always start small, and are directed at the obvious villainized enemy. As Americans, Europeans, Brits or Australians, we are used to calling a lawyer when we have legal problems. If we get arrested for something like DUI, pot, shoplifting, protesting or writing an article, we can get bailed out and then have some semblance of a judicial hearing. If your case is interesting, it gets in the newspaper, and that helps a heck of a lot. But we really should stop to consider just what it is that keeps that system in place -- and how fragile it is, and how subject to being rendered meaningless or nonexistent by fear and hatred. Finally, I leave you a question: What is the relationship between Janet Jackson's breast and the second photo down, at this next link? Wiki on Abu Ghraib Prisoner Abuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prisoner_abuse ...on Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detainment_camp ...on Dr. Carl Clauberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Clauberg A Prison System for the Innocent | Oct. 5, 2006 Photo above: Looking to the right as you walk in through the main gate of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Oswiecim, Poland. This is the view standing directly beneath the sign that says 'Arbeit macht frei', or, 'Work makes one free'. Photographed Sept. 27, 2006 by Eric Francis. Link to full series: http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/auschwitz_photo_series.html WHEN the Nazis took control of Germany in February 1933, there was a fast seizure of, and concentration of, government power, and within eight days, the roundup of enemies of the Reich began. Hitler was not initially elected. After many months of extremely complex political maneuvering, he was appointed to the office of chancellor by Paul von Hindenburg, then the president of Germany, and this was the transition to the Nazi state. Hitler had been an up-and-coming figure in Germany for decades, and was the leader of something called the National Socialist movement. It had nothing to do with socialism in the true sense of the word; it was fascism supported by business leaders. Much of how power was concentrated involved a 9/11-like incident called the Reichstag Fire. This is an infamous event in 20th Century history that everyone should know about. Less than a month after Hitler assumed the chancellorship, the building where the German Parliament met in Berlin was burned down, and this was used as an excuse to give the government carte blanche to do anything it needed to "protect people." The fire was blamed on the Communists (enemies of the Nazis), but there is trial testimony from the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that it was set by the Nazis, particularly Hermann Göring (who, according to court testimony, admitted to it). Wikipedia states that "it is generally believed the Nazi hierarchy was involved in order to reap political gain -- and it obviously did." In the aftermath of the fire, all basic civil liberties were curtailed, including freedom of the press, and the state granted itself extra powers to stop its supposed enemies -- which soon turned out to be everyone. Hindenburg, after signing these laws, died of lung cancer the next year, after which Hitler declared the office of the president perpetually vacant, in effect merging it with the office of chancellor. He thus held both offices for the duration of his life, and the war, about 11 more years. Initially, prisoners of the Reich were kept in makeshift or improvised facilities, such as the torture yard in Ilvers Gehoffen, now part of Erfurt, or a Roman Catholic citadel on a hill in central Erfurt. [Both of these are covered in my 1998 series written in Germany.] Soon after, construction of a highly organized camp system began, and then mass arrests, deportations, relocations, and then extermination of many millions of people. Jews were a central focus, and a major excuse, but nobody was exempt. The people arrested were guilty of no crime, though many of the early ones were those who opposed fascism. Many others were simply on the list of who was going next. The terror created by the roundups was enough to keep the rest of the population silent, and for the most part, people were glad the Gestapo were coming for their neighbors and not for them. Then the effort spread to the countries neighboring Germany, where poor farmers are said to have resented the wealthier urban Jewish people. At the beginning, this sentiment (known as rampant anti-Semitism) was an excuse for looking the other way as the atrocities began. There is a name for this routine: divide and conquer. The entity we call Auschwitz started with a relatively small facility, winding up with perhaps 50 brick buildings, in the polish town of Oswiecim (the Germans pronounced this 'Auschwitz' and that is where the name of the camp came from). It was founded May 20, 1940, based on the grounds of an old Polish army barracks, but soon expanded to the surrounding homesteads and farms of the locals. Of the 24 original farms in Oswiecim, only seven remained after the war, and were in bad shape; the rest had been subsumed into Auschwitz. Wikipedia tells us, "The camp was initially used for interning Polish intellectuals and resistance movement members, then also for Soviet prisoners of war." Today it's a seemingly pleasant enough place, with tree-lined walkways and neat brick buildings about three or four stories tall. Workmen are busy restoring the details and doing maintenance projects. The presence of graceful old trees 60 years later suggests that the Nazis were planning to be there for a while (they were obviously not planted by the survivors). Architecturally, it feels a little like an old-time psychiatric hospital or sanatorium; it's a bit too organized and sterile to be a college campus. Gradually, seeing detail after detail, one connects with the menacing purpose the place was invested with. Most of what we know about Auschwitz we know from movies, which perpetuate various inaccuracies. Few people -- I suspect even most visitors to the camps -- have read a book about the Holocaust. The facility depicted in the photo above was not the extermination facility, which was called Birkenau, and by modern historians, Auschwitz II - Birkenau. That came a little later. Let's start with the first one, and then deal with the second. Except for size and scale, one is no less atrocious than the other. Inside these gates, it's estimated that 70,000 people lost their lives, mostly Poles and Russian prisoners of war. It was originally a forced labor and torture center, but the first extermination experiments and mass exterminations were carried out here. Indeed, the first time Zyklon B gas was used was in the basement of Block 11, the Death Block, which was the 'prison within the prison'. It was basically a place people were sent to die, many by shooting, torture and hanging by the arms. But in the quest for more efficient ways of killing ever more people, new methods were developed. Wiki reports that, "On September 3, 1941, 600 Soviet POWs were gassed with Zyklon B at Auschwitz camp I; this was the first experiment with the gas at Auschwitz." Prior to that, 250 Gypsy children at Buchenwald had been used as guinea pigs for the gas, which was originally designed as an insecticide. Block 11 is preserved in its nearly original state, including the test gas chamber; we'll get to pictures of that tomorrow. Many of the other blocks have been renovated lightly and converted to museums and memorials which are open to the public without tour guides necessary. Some are dedicated to specific nationalities or religious faiths; others to photographic and artifact displays. The shock of the place sets in slowly. The war itself comes into some focus, particularly thanks to a photo display of the bombing damage to Warsaw. The day I went was a beautiful clear blue day, and the presence of tourists and a lot of students brings a higher vibration. But as you look at people's faces, it becomes obvious the difficulty they are experiencing processing what they are seeing. Many have pensive, tortured looks. Sometimes the teens are clowning around, which is the result of nervousness, but also sign that they have a guide who has not put them in the appropriate frame of mind. Most people are somber and reflective, slowly slipping into an altered state. I saw nobody crying. Most people are a little curious, even if it has a grim quality to it. Many seem to be struggling for understanding. There really is no way to comprehend what happened, but being confronted by the direct evidence is a step in the right direction. My first cognitive impression of the place involved the sign above the gate, "Work makes one free." I thought: the problem with the Nazis was that they were liars. Everything else derived from that. Wiki on Reichstag Fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire ...on Auschwitz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz ...on Zykon B gas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyklon_B ...on Paul von Hindenburg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_von_Hindenburg Auschwitz Photo Series | Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006 Photo Above: Mug shots of Auschwitz Concentration Camp victims Hlawica Zdenka and Holan Adalberta, in Oswiecim, Poland, surrounded by hundreds of others. Documentary photos that will be presented this week were all taken by Eric Francis, on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2006. WHILE I WAS visiting Poland last week, I went to pay my respects at Auschwitz. I actually didn't plan to go, and I didn't really want to go, but I've also had a lifelong commitment to do so, and this was my chance. Avoiding the place was why I planned a trip to Warsaw for a week -- halfway across the country, far away. But everyone I talked to said that Krakow was the more beautiful city, not bombed so badly during the war, still intact with all its old character, and that I must see it. So I went to Krakow, 70km from Auschwitz, not sure what I would do when the time came to decide if I wanted to make the rest of the trip. I arrived in my hotel, a beautiful, elegant little place that cost just $40 per night, including breakfast, and a dependable Internet connection in my room. There was a big Manora on the lobby window, facing out to the street -- the Jewish symbol of Hanukah. It seemed bold and reassuring to be staying in a place that was advertising its Jewishness to the world so close to where so much evil happened. Seeing that, I felt I had a purpose for being there. The next morning, I woke up, and called Arthur, the taxi guy who'd taken me from the train station the day before, who also takes people to Auschwitz for the day. It didn't cost that much more than a tourist bus, and I wanted the freedom to keep my own schedule as I explored the territory. He showed up for me, my cameras and my iPod stereo, on which I played a lot of Grateful Dead songs driving through the Polish countryside for an hour on the way to the camp. Arthur happened to be a fan of old American rock and roll, he knew some impressive details, and he'd heard of Jerry Garcia and loved Johnny Cash. It was still a grim journey, despite the great tunes and even if the land and buildings were beautiful. I've been involved with Holocaust studies for a long time, thanks to a teacher who ran a special center dedicated to the subject at my high school in Brooklyn. [This was Ira Zornberg at the Holocaust Education Center in the John Dewey High School library.] There is a reason we study these things, which is so that we can both honor history, and respect the loss to humanity. But it's also to be forewarned, in the present, when something amiss is happening again. The real problem with the Holocaust is how systematically exterminating 12 million people in the midst of civilized Europe kind of snuck up on the world. As part of my personal investigation, I had visited three different Nazi facilities prior to this -- first being the places I believe the Holocaust began in February 1933, in an urban neighborhood in Erfurt, Germany called Ilvers Gehoffen (see article "Hell's Bells" on the Planet Waves cover Wednesday). Incredibly, the one of the very first concentrations camp was surrounded by inhabited apartment buildings on all sides. On the same trip, I visited the Citadel of St. Peter and St. Paul, an actual citadel more than 1,000 years old, placed on a little hill in Erfurt. This is the walled-in Roman Catholic facility that was taken over by the Nazis and -- starting eight days after Hitler assumed office without havng been elected -- was used for imprisonment of people who disagreed with Hitler, for sham capital (as in death penalty) trials, and probably for executions. Napoleon had also been there -- the massive barracks he built in the Citadel were used by Hitler's army, too. Then some days later, I visited Buchenwald, the famous concentration camp for political prisoners near Weimar, in the "green heart of Germany." Fifty-four thousand people were shot, strangled or died of starvation, disease and overwork at Buchenwald, but it was not a death camp, per se, it was a forced labor camp where many people lost their lives. These visits were in 1998, and I've been considering what I saw ever since. So I had some preparation. Yet nothing prepares you for Auschwitz. I walked in knowing that. This was an industrial-scale factory devoted to mass murder and torture. It is as large as any full-scale state university campus, with land and buildings stretching in either direction as far as you can see. There were in fact three main camps and about 100 smaller sub-camps. Five gas chambers and crematoria were the murder scenes of as many as two million Jews, Poles, Sinti and Romany people, and nationals of every country in Europe from Russia all the way west to France; north into Scandinavia; and south into Greece. I lived in Paris for a while, and on every street, I mean every block, there is a plaque somewhere about the people who were deported to the camps during the war. They were sent to die in Auschwitz and similar facilities, sometimes after having been sold "new land" and "new businesses" in their "new homes" by the German government. Auschwitz was the prototype and the biggest of the death camps. About three-quarters of the people who arrived, with bags packed in earnest, with precious family photos and a little to eat, were taken to the gas chambers instantly on arrival; the strong were made to work for a month or two, to support the German war effort, and then they too were gassed. Those deaths could be called humane, compared to the thousands killed following medical torture and sexual experimentation (from castration of men to sterilization experiments conducted on women), most of whom were killed by injections of phenol to the heart; who died of starvation and exhaustion; who were beaten to death; who died of the cold or of dehydration. In this photo series, I'll share images of interior and exterior facilities at Auschwitz and Auschwitz II-Birkenau as they exist today. When people were allowed to live briefly after arriving, they lived like we treat animals in industrial farms. They could be beaten or killed for having an accident outside the vastly overcrowded latrines. When condemned to die, they were made to strip naked and face a wall where they were shot, or died huddled naked together in gas chambers, breathing in cyanide. If they happened to be alive after the gassing, they were burned alive. Their hair, previously shaved off, was sent to a factory in Bavaria that made some kind of materials for the war out of it. It all sounds like so much. It sounds like nothing that could ever happen, but it did happen, and it happened yesterday. Though there have been many genocides in the 20th and 21st centuries, some of which are ongoing, the most frightening thing about what happened under the Nazis is that it occurred in a society just like our own, supported or acquiesced by normal people living normal lives. People with things to worry about other than the Jews or some dirty Gypsies. We need to remember how modestly this started, with a few undesirable people here and there rounded up for "good reasons" (they were the wrong religion, they were gay or lesbian, they were alleged Communists, they were alleged terrorists, they did not want to work so hard, etc.), until it knew no limits -- and 1,500 men, women and children could be gassed and cremated in a single session. On the way out at the end of the war, the SS men dynamited the gas chambers and crematories to hide the evidence of their crimes. The big problem with the Nazis is we consider them someone other than ourselves; a culture other than our own. But Nazi Germany was an advanced industrial and technical society, with ethics and an economy and lots of people who wore crosses around their necks and who went to church every Sunday. Germans are proud, intelligent people who like to do things right. The mass murder that was perpetrated was conducted by well-heeled, supposed Christians; by the highest orders of elite military men; and supported by capitalists and businessmen. One of the big things the whole plan had going for it was a "united Europe" which meant big business for certain people. According to what I learned in Holocaust Studies and in my follow-up research, the gassing effort was also supported by IBM (whose German subsidiary lent computers to the Reich to track concentration camp inmates); by ITT (which provided other technology); by Dow Chemical (which provided chemical components for the cyanide gas, called Zyclon [Cyclone] B). Other United States corporations and some politicians were involved. Swiss banks that today still exist processed all the gold taken from the teeth of the victims. I have read recently that there is no processed gold on the market that does not contain traces of concentration camp gold. And we forget how recently it happened. My parents were born in 1941 and 1942, when Auschwitz and many other death camps were in full operation. If something happened in your parents' lifetime, it happened yesterday, and it could happen tomorrow. The same is true if your grandfather or grandmother remembers it. That is the definition of 'very recently'. Mainly, we forget how it happened -- because people let it happen; because they were in denial about what was going on two miles from their house, or right outside their window. We forget that an environment of anti-Semitism in Europe allowed the beginning to occur, and that fear of others was used as a weapon against people -- much like in our own country (UK, United States and Australia) where an atmosphere of anti-Muslim sentiments is allowing many laws that protect everyone to be suspended. Why? Because who cares about them? "They're all terrorists." Ah, but then all these really weird powers are in place and the normal rules of the game are off. That is the true beginning, the elimination of basic rights: the ones you never hear of, such as Habeus Corpus. Or the ones you do, such as elections. Habeus corpus is the right of a person to demand to know why they are being imprisoned. It used to exist in Germany before the Holocaust, and it used to exist in the United States, before last week, when a law supposedly directed at "terrorists" took that right away, little noticed by the public and the media. But at the heart of it all is cruelty. Cruelty is existent in the world, like bacteria. But it grows better under certain conditions, fuelled by its fertilizers, intolerance and hatred. It is said that a picture paints so many words. All the images in the world don't quite sum up Auschwitz like this letter scribbled on a scrap of paper by a man about to have his life taken for nothing: Farewell, my most beloved wife, my dearest Lolunia, and my mother. I am about to leave this world. I am going to be sent to the ovens on the 30th at 7 o'clock in the evening. I have been sentenced to death as a bandit. Archives 2006: December 1 to January 4 | January 5 to February 14 | February 15 to April 1 | April 2 to April 24 | April 24 to June 1 | June 1 to August 13 | August 14 to September 23 Archives 2005: Dec. 29 to Feb. 7 | Feb. 8 to March 15 | March 16 to April 25 | April 26 to May 25 | May 26 to July 17 | July 18 to August 9 | August 10 to September 19 | September 21 to October 19 | October 22 to December 1 Archives 2004: Oct. 25 to Nov. 9 | Nov. 10 to 23 | Nov. 24 to Dec. 28 |