Every year on January 27, the most horrific crimes of genocide and mass murder on an industrial scale by the criminal Nazi regime in Germany are remembered. This happened during their vicious and brutal conquest of Europe from 1939 to 1945.
In a planned genocide, six million Jews (a million of them children) and other minorities and political prisoners were exterminated by individual and mass shooting. Hundreds of thousands were worked to death, killed by starvation, and millions more gassed to death and burnt in the ovens of the infamous concentration and extermination camps that the Nazis built around Europe.
As Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, said: “They who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” These crimes must never be allowed to be repeated, although they have been.
I have visited the extermination camp at Buchenwald, near the city of Weimar. It was a terrible place of isolation, cruelty and mass murder. In the countryside, it was bitterly cold and forbidding. I saw a massive prison camp surrounded by an electrified fence.
There was no escape for the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, prisoners of war, Jewish people, Roma people, mixed race people and Afro-Germans. Anyone who disagreed with the Nazi regime was sent to the death camps where the SS death squads executed them.
As Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, said: “They who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” These crimes must never be allowed to be repeated, although they have been.
I walked around the camp. The wooden huts where the prisoners slept were demolished. In a concrete building in the corner of the camp with a tall chimney, I saw the “murder room.” One by one, prisoners stood against the wall to have their height measured and they were shot dead through a hole in the wall.
In the basement, there is a room with hooks fixed in the cement ceiling. The innocent prisoners with hands and legs tied and a wire around their necks were hung to slowly die by strangulation. Then, their bodies were placed in a large metal bin that was elevated to the extermination room where six large ovens continually incinerated the bodies like rubbish.
Outside, a greatly enlarged photograph showed a large pile of emaciated bodies of those who died of cruel starvation or firing squad waiting to be delivered to the ovens. Prisoners were forced to do the dirty work.
Memorials of these crimes are held every year by a repentant German people and a new generation all over Germany. Many monuments honouring and remembering the victims have been built so that Germans and people everywhere will mourn, be informed, be aware and strengthened in their resolve that such crimes and hateful neo-Nazi ideology and racism in any form are resisted, opposed and countered by peace initiatives.
There have been genocides since. In Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Sudan, Iraq, Cambodia, Myanmar, the list goes on and on.
The Nazi regime was built on a political party espousing national socialism that was racist and politically extreme right wing. They believed themselves to be the white supremacists destined to conquer and rule, by violence if necessary.
People everywhere have to take a stand against such arbitrary killings and atrocities, and never stand by in silence and allow it to happen without protest. Such silence is to approve and give consent by inaction and be an accomplice to the crime.
To stand against such killings, people need a conscience formed by the gospel values of human rights and dignity to repudiate and condemn such murders, war crimes and genocide.
Here, we condemn as evil and wrong all such killings.
As we celebrate the 500 years of Christianity in the Philippines. The Chaplaincy to Filipino Migrants organises an on-line talk every Tuesday at 9.00pm. You can join us at:
https://www.Facebook.com/CFM-Gifted-to-give-101039001847033
The Nazi regime was built on a political party espousing national socialism that was racist and politically extreme right wing. They believed themselves to be the white supremacists destined to conquer and rule, by violence if necessary.
Adolf Hitler, an Austrian migrant, obtained German citizenship by astute political manipulation. The mainstream political parties compromised with his racist policies and ideology and paved his way to total power. He became chancellor and his cult-like fanatical followers started a fire in the parliament building, the Bundestag. He blamed the communists and had them all arrested and thrown out of parliament by presidential decree. Then, his Nazi party had a majority and he ruled Germany with an iron fist and worked to exterminate Jews and the communists.
When we see white supremacists and neo-Nazi extreme right-wing groups in Europe and in the United States marching with Nazi swastika flags and symbols, and a (former) United States president supporting them, we should think of Hitler and summon up the courage to stand and oppose by word and action this insidious racist political movement.
Everyone ought to support the freedoms and human dignity, and freedom of true, fair democracy or for sure we will lose them. This white supremacist ideology has divided America, threatens parts of Europe as neo-Nazis proliferate once again, spreading hatred and violence against migrants.
Some member states of the EU (European Union) have right wing populists in power and they pass odious oppressive laws. The police and armed forces of America and Europe are reportedly infiltrated by racist neo-Nazi sympathisers, it seems.
The reluctance of the Republican members of the US Senate to convict Trump for this blatant attack on the Capitol, the heart of the democratic process, is shocking and disgusting. They are, in effect, condoning this criminal action by the Trump mob.
Witness the killing and harassment and abuse of so many immigrants, asylum seekers and people of colour in Europe and the United States. It is a poison affecting the police day by day, a dangerous trend of what has yet to come. Police brutality incites protests and demonstrations. Witness the Black Lives Matter movement, demonstrations in Belarus, Lebanon, Tunisia and many more.
Complacency, ignorance, apathy, indifference and tolerance that give consent and support for such racism is participating in the politics of racism, hatred and violence. We should not be surprised that the US Capitol was attacked by these Neo-Nazi groups trying to overthrow the democratic process, egged on by former president, Donald Trump, blaming progressive groups for its ransacking and desecration. It smacks of Hitler-like dirty tricks in burning the Bundestag.
The reluctance of the Republican members of the US Senate to convict Trump for this blatant attack on the Capitol, the heart of the democratic process, is shocking and disgusting. They are, in effect, condoning this criminal action by the Trump mob.
Trump followers have to throw off the obsession and worship of the Trump cult and admit they have been duped and lied to, and reject all the hatred and racism that Trumpism promotes and encourages. They must resist and break free from the manipulation by social media. Freedom from racism and hatred is the freedom to love our neighbour in peace and with understanding.
Father Shay Cullen
www.preda.org
