The Jewish Holocaust remains one of the blackest pages of the 20th century. A century that ultimately turned out to be particularly brutal; during it we had the first two conflicts on a global scale. Every world war gave birth to a genocide, the First the Armenian genocide with hundreds of thousands of victims, the Second the Jewish genocide with 6 million victims. The first genocide is limited geographically to the area of the then Ottoman Empire and was never subject to repression by the international community; perhaps if it had been, the second would have been avoided.
For a portion of historians there was the intention of the Great Powers to do it, for others never, the powers that were the protagonists at that time did not really want to deal with this thorny problem.
Many other tragedies occurred during the 20th century, but the genocide of the Jews was one of the worst and has many specifics and symbols.
The English word Holocaust and the Hebrew Shoah were not used immediately after the war to describe the event. At the Nuremberg trials the term used was "Jewish genocide". It was Israel and the USA that were the first two countries to understand the importance of the event and tried to promote it systematically; the interest of other countries really moved after 1980.
The Holocaust was a tragedy of European civilization. It was a tragedy of Christian civilization. It was a tragedy of Western civilization. It was a tragedy of modernism. It was a tragedy of human nature.
It was a tragedy of European culture because it was carried out on the European continent, with the central but Nazi instigation, with local complicity throughout Europe. It was an organized operation of a police nature where train shipments left loaded with Jews and destined for the large concentration camps of central Europe. In Holland, France, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Bohemia, the Baltic States, Greece, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine; everywhere the same situation. Only four countries that were neutral in World War II did not: Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden.
But beyond the concentration camps, millions of Jews died of hunger, cold, poverty, mistreatment in the various ghettos of European cities.
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It was a tragedy of Christian civilization. All Europeans were Christian, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant with the exception of the Jews and Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Albania.
In the first pages of his book "My Struggle" Hitler recalls that his Catholic education and his religious education played a major role in the formation of his personality.
Elsewhere in his book he describes his favorite moment in Jesus' life: Jesus' angry (and unique) gesture of driving the Jewish merchants out of the Temple with a rope that he uses as a whip...
Revealing!
For Hitler there is a "true Christianity", not that of the preaching of love, peaceful (pacifiste), but that of Jesus who hunts the Jewish merchants who think only of their money and self-interest. In the Gospel according to John, moreover, it is mentioned that Jesus says that the Jews "have a father the devil". The 4 Gospels are full of anti-Semitic references (40 in Mark, 80 in Matthew, 130 in John).
This Christ-founder of a new doctrine that does not love the Jews is admired by Hitler; he considers him to be true.
This will also be the ideology of National Socialism. Deeply anti-Semitic, with Jesus' whip morphing into gas chambers.
On the belt of every soldier of the Third Reich, there is the inscription "Gott mit uns" "God with us".
For Hitler, religion must first serve the nation, the homeland, the people. A Catholic or a Protestant can be a German first, a Jew never; he will always be a Jew first, therefore unassimilable and incompatible in a purely German Aryan society that Hitler dreamed of.
Officially the Vatican did not condemn the Nazi atrocity and "My Struggle" was never on the Pope's list of banned books. Books by Descartes, Kant, Diderot, Rousseau, Spinoza, Voltaire... but not Hitler are banned.
Be silent or consent to this destruction. Instead of repenting even in retrospect, he continued in the same line.
The phrase of Pope Pius XII in 1953 at the international conference on criminal rights is revealing:
"He who was not involved in the conflict feels uncomfortable when, after hostilities are over, he sees the victor judging the vanquished for war crimes, while this victor has done similar acts to the vanquished"!!!! (exclamation marks mine)
What does the Pope want to say?
That the US, Canada, England, Australia and the rest of the allied powers used gas chambers to exterminate millions of German civilians?
I was unaware of it.
The Vatican continued to play the score of shame 8 years after the end of the war, forgetting that one of the main pillars of the philosophy of the Christian religion is repentance.
There is of course another side that it would be unfair and dishonest not to mention.
The Vatican was different before March 2, 1939 when Pius XII became Pope. Perhaps events would have taken a different turn if the previous Pope, Pius XI, had not died suddenly on February 10, 1939.
The head of the Catholic Church (from 1922 to 1939) sharply and clearly denounced the positions and philosophy of Nazism in a 1937 encyclical written deliberately in German rather than in Latin as was customary. In 1938, when Hitler is in Rome for an official meeting with Mussolini, Pius XI ostentatiously closes the Vatican Museum and forbids the German dictator from visiting. A few months later he will declare. "Anti-Semitism is unacceptable. We are all Semites spiritually" With the same severity he denounced fascism and communism. He was a great Pope who unfortunately died early in the war. (Michel Onfray “La decadence”)
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It was a tragedy of Western civilization, took place in one of its most important centers, Germany, which from an economic, social, administrative, cultural, spiritual point of view was one of the most advanced, according to many the most advanced of Western civilization.
The homeland of Beethoven, Goethe, Bach.
The Western Allies, although they fought bravely against the Axis, did not take any substantial measure, did not make any official international appeal, did not take any effective initiative to save the Jewish populations of Europe en masse. Even the USA, which while opening its doors and receiving thousands of Jews, did not do as much as it really could for a mass reception of Jews after 1938.
It was a tragedy of modernism. The Nazi machine to be able to exterminate so many human lives en masse had to put at its service all the technological and scientific achievements of the time. Rational organization from an administrative, diplomatic or police point of view, based on the division of work and responsibilities, based on the most modern technological means of communication of the time - telex, telegrams, telephone - trains, construction of roads and buildings. The best scientists and researchers, doctors, chemists, biologists contributed to the formulation, preparation and effectiveness of the final solution.
Modern technology can always be put to the service of dangerous totalitarian ideologies.
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It was a tragedy of human nature, which creates a terrible perspective on the awesome capacity of civilized man to do evil.
The brutality knew no bounds, weakening man's confidence in himself, revealing the brutality he hides in his depth.
In the paradox of human nature, one man's insanity at some point became collective.
Hitler was a great reader. Because he suffered from insomnia, he read at least one book every night. He owned a library of 16,000 books! His National Socialism was an intellectual product of his grudge (grudge = one who does not forget the wrong done to him).
In 1914 he declared his official profession: artist. (He was never able to fulfill his dream and get accepted to the Vienna School of Fine Arts, he was rejected twice, always considering himself a great talent).
Then he wanted to be an architect.
At the beginning of the 20's he declared his official profession: writer (although he had not published anything)!
His anti-Semitism is the simplistic answer to all questions, the solution to all problems. His ideology becomes pathology, or perhaps his pathology becomes ideology.
The Jew becomes the scapegoat:
- Poverty and misery? The Jews are to blame.
- Poverty and street prostitution? The Jews are to blame.
- Social injustices? The Jews are to blame.
- Inabilities and imperfections of the democratic state? The Jews are to blame.
- Pacifism leading to defeat? The Jews are to blame.
- Capitalism and exploitation society? The Jews are to blame.
- The guy who lies and propagandizes? The Jews are to blame.
- Bolshevism threatening Europe? The Jews are to blame.
- War serving the arms dealers? The Jews are to blame.
- The degenerate art? The Jews are to blame.
- His personal failings? The Jews are to blame.
Simple thinking attracts simple people.
Hitler was not born anti-Semitic; his parents were not. It's happening.
When his mother dies of cancer he donates one of his works to her Jewish doctor; when he learns of the misery and poverty in Vienna he lives for three years in a small room financed by Jewish families; when he has not even the minimum money for his most basic needs he receives the systematic help of a Jewish friend; when he needs to sell some of his watercolors, he gives them to a Jewish merchant who sells them to buyers who are all Jews.
And like any vindictive and insane human being, Hitler makes them pay dearly for the good they did him.
In the double humiliation he felt, one personal, as a failed artist looking for recognition and celebrity, the other collective for the dishonorable defeat of the First World War and the humiliating terms for Germany of the Treaty of Versailles, he managed in a few years to create a collective national grudge of an entire people defeated by the French in 1918 who now sought only revenge.
The author Max Weinreich in 1945 in his book "Hitler and the Professors" analyzes in detail and penetrating subtlety the mechanism that created the collective resentment of the German people. And as my favorite French philosopher Michel Honfret rightly notes among many others in his book Decline
"In human nature, humiliation breeds nothing but an irresistible desire for revenge"
Six of the nine million Jews of Europe will perish in one of the worst moments of mankind.
Serge Clasferd, who dedicated his life to preserving the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, says characteristically:
"The Holocaust must not only represent millions of victims, but one victim, plus one victim, plus one victim, in order to give each of them, their elements, their path, their dignity. To be retrieved from oblivion and anonymity, so that from objects of History, these names become subjects of History again"
*Cover photo: Ibrahim Metinoz