Today, members of the England football team will visit the site of Auschwitz, part of the vast complex of industrial death factories the Germans created in the 1940s to eradicate all Jews. They say birds don’t fly over the ground where over a million were murdered. The day I visited it was too bitterly cold for birds. They say a visit to Auschwitz changes you forever. It does.
The site England’s football stars will visit is part of a larger group of buildings, administrative centres and labour camps. The part they will see is Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the site selected by Heinrich Himmler as one of the main death camps for the Final Solution following the Wannsee Conference in 1941. It is here that the gas chambers and crematoria worked day and night, and millions of Jews, Gypsies, gay men and lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others perished.
I visited the site as part of a delegation of journalists organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust. You can fly to and from Poland in a day, and spend several hours at the camp. I arrived in a business suit and city shoes, wholly unprepared for three feet of snow. The England team will see the railway tracks which brought cattle-truck loads of Jews from across Europe; they will see the notorious sign over the gates Arbeit Macht Frei; their blood will chill at the sight of gas chambers, restored after the war, or a huge mound of human hair, shorn from the camp’s inmates; they will shed a tear when they see a pile of shoes, spectacles and suitcases.
This is an important visit. By going, the England team do more than merely pay respects or commemorate a vast human tragedy. This is not the same as visiting a war memorial or military cemetery. This is more than a wreath at the Cenotaph. The Holocaust was a unique event in human history. It was directed at removing an entire people from the earth. Understanding its political and philosophical rationale, and the widespread public support throughout Europe which allowed it to almost succeed, is a vital part of preventing such an event in the future.
As Daniel Goldhagen argues in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the Holocaust was an enterprise on such an industrial scale it could not have been perpetrated without the enthusiastic support of millions of people. To blame ‘the Nazis’ is to fail to understand the virulent strains of antisemitism which ran through European societies for many centuries. It fails to explain why the authorities in France, Greece, Holland and all the other countries the Germans conquered handed over Jews to be sent to the death camps. On British soil too, there is evidence of complicity in murder. The Channel Islands, occupied by the German army for the full five years of war, had a small community of Jews. On Monday, 21 October 1940 a notice appeared in the Jersey Evening Post calling for Jews to make themselves known for ‘registration’ with the authorities. Thereafter, this tiny British Jewish community had their businesses ‘Aryanised’ and were forced to wear yellow stars.
It is of course right that we remember Oskar Schindler, the heroes of the Kindertransport who brought Jewish children to England (see the statue at Liverpool Street station), and the Polish resistance fighters who broke into Auschwitz and helped the inmates overpower their SS guards. But we must also remember every police officer, council official, railway guard, customs officer and town mayor who looked the other way.
The Holocaust Educational Trust was founded in 1988. It has ensured that the Holocaust is taught in schools, and that British schoolchildren can make the same trip the England team are making today. This work is vital in understanding the Holocaust, which is why it was well supported by the Labour government after 1997. It is right that the HET chief executive Karen Pollock received her MBE last month. Holocaust Memorial Day is another important part of the picture. We commemorate it on 27 January, the date in 1945 that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz.
It is about more than preserving the testimony and honouring the dead. There are thousands of people who seek to deny that the Holocaust took place. Using faux-history and faked documents, they challenge everything from the numbers killed, the use of gas chambers, and whether the Final Solution was actually Nazi policy. They claim Anne Frank’s Diary and other eyewitness accounts were forged by the Allies’ propaganda departments. Such views can be heard in respectable university departments and in Middle Eastern governments just as surely as in the Klu Klux Klan or neo-Nazi parties of Europe. Just as the death camps sought to eradicate the Jews, the deniers seek to eradicate the Holocaust itself.
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Paul Richards writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics. He tweets @LabourPaul
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When I went to Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau with HET in February it was truly an experience I will never forget. When I remember my experience, I Remember how I felt walking through the gates at Auschwitz 1 and going in the gas chamber where many people perished.
It really does affect you, to this day I find it hard to put the experience into words I get as far as saying ‘it was….’ then I’m lost for words. It’s a truly breath taking experience and one you’ll never forget.
One of the lessons from the visit was to remember that all the people who perished during the Holocaust were individual and had different stories. They’re not just a number of Six Million.
And to humanise the by-standers and perpetrators as they are like us. They read stories to their children etc.
When I went to Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau with HET in February it was truly an experience I will never forget. When I remember my experience, I Remember how I felt walking through the gates at Auschwitz 1 and going in the gas chamber where many people perished.
It really does affect you, to this day I find it hard to put the experience into words I get as far as saying ‘it was….’ then I’m lost for words. It’s a truly breath taking experience and one you’ll never forget.
One of the lessons from the visit was to remember that all the people who perished during the Holocaust were individual and had different stories. They’re not just a number of Six Million.
And to humanise the by-standers and perpetrators as they are like us. They read stories to their children etc.
Very wel written!
Will Progress call for all Labour members who deny that the Holocaust took place to be thrown out of the party? No, didn’t think so. How about supporting a policy that Labour never attends meeting with political leaders that rely on the support of those who deny the Holocaust ? Another negative. What exactly is the point of this article?
Tell us who these people are, in all my years in labour I’ve not seen or recall anyone say it did not happen, oh I’ve seen people talk about the problem we had and have with concentration camps, or detention camps within the UK where we place women and children.
I cannot say I think Hitler was a great bloke he was a raving lunatic , but the problems of the past and what we have done and not accepted just because it’s in History, the history of Churchill so not that far back.
But in the end of course Hitler was recent enough so people can remember and the shocking sight of the news reals of the time the stories of those that survived, means anyone who does not believe are a minority of Nazis sympathizers but are any in labour are any MP’s councilors I know of none myself
David,
Of course the Labour party should(and I believe would) throw Holocaust deniers out of the party. If you are aware of any such people, share the information, and hopefully it can be put to the party that they should be expelled.
Regarding your second point, I’m not completely clear what you mean; I don’t think Labour can infringe on the freedom of members to meet with whomever they like. However, if you’re saying that MP’s should not be allowed to share a platform with Holocaust deniers, and should face disciplinary measures or having the whip withdrawn, that seems eminently sensible to me. If an MP sat next to someone who denied the Holocaust, and didn’t speak up against that, I think they’d be gone pretty quickly.
My Polish hosts (in Castellianka, just outsideKrako’w!) were exceptionally courteous and helpful in 1987, especially in analysing the concept of totalitarianism,and how it explains the genocidal activities of the Soviets, whom Hitler regarded as excellent precedents. Lenin on the enforcement of The Taxin Kind (it is there in the Collected Works – FLPH Moscow, 21 Zubovsky Boulevard): “the enemy is everywhere,he is amongst us, he is us…..”. 1921-2 was long before Himmler renounced his 1940 view that ‘mass murder of peoples is impermissible – and unGerman’…. (refBrowningPathtoGenocide). Citing Daniel Goldhagenas an authority on the relationof theGerman civilianpopulation to the Nazi massmurder isridiculous. Finkelstein (sackedforhis analysis ofTHE HOLOCAUSTINDUSTRY) and David North(www.wsws.org) amongst many others have destroyed Goldhagen’s – and thereforeRichards’ – claims to credibility; Goldhagen’s misuse of documentary evidence is a complete scandal.. Richardsdoesnot even cite Hilberg Destruction of European Jewry. (1961, 3 volume edition 1985). As for Arbeit machtFrei, Richards might mention that Goebbels carefully used the language of British imperialism -concentration camps -to describe the Nazi camps,and the placardsover the entrances to the British camps inKenya echoed him; during the British genocidal repression of the Land Freedom Army of Kenya (Barbara Castle made herself very unpopular in the Labourmovment for indicting British murderous repression in Kenya- though her attacks were not as effective as Enoch Powells’ indictment of the Hola murder and concentration camp in Kenya.I at least recall the Stuermer-esque libels against the LFA(so -called MauMau). When the CIA were opposing(British)imperialism,their publishing-house Praeger published a good study byRotberg onBritish barbaritieson colonialsubjects….
It was only quite recently that British governments aswell as’progressives’ were diligently attributing the 1940 Katyn massacre ofsome 15,000 Polish officers to the Nazis,although all available evidence – available since 1943- made it obvious that it was the Soviets who committed this massacre.
So we should certainly remember if not name and shame the British officials,MPs, Labour movement notablesand others who under a peacetime bourgeois democracy and without any coercion supported the murderous activities of ‘our heroes’, and of their Soviet allies, and systematically lied for a good 45 years afterthe end of the Second WorldWar.
I imagine that Richards’ venture as a minor special constable in the thought police will profit his reputationonly amongstthe narrowest circleofcareerists,opportunists,and double-standard self-deluders.Meanwhile Kristallnacht in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem intensifies with the gleeful incitment of MKs including Israeli government ministers….
On Friday, Patricia Blue-Rousakis plans to be at Arlington National Cemetery where she has spent many June 8ths for the past 15 years.
There, she’ll join with a handful of survivors of the 1967 attack on the surveillance ship USS Liberty, which was struck by Israeli air and naval forces. The group will hear a retired chaplain say a prayer, visit with those in attendance — some, like herself, who lost family members on the Liberty — and then go off to lunch in Alexandria, Va.
But even after so many years, and knowing full well that the topic of the Liberty is widely viewed as poisonous, the visitors still note the absence of political and military officials at the observance.
“We talk about it among ourselves,” said Blue-Rousakis, whose first husband, Alan Blue, was a National Security Agency linguist on the ship. He was among the 34 men killed and 174 wounded in the attack.
“Of the family members and the survivors, every single one of us at one time or another has invited our representative from [the House] and the Senate. And no one has ever shown up. No one. It’s a very sad little gathering.”
It’s just not the politicians, she said.
Forty-five years after the attack, no uniformed officers are expected to attend the ceremony.
“They won’t do it. They absolutely will not do it,” she said.
The lightly armed American spy ship was strafed, napalmed and torpedoed by Israeli air and naval forces for more than an hour in broad daylight during the Six-Day War. But for a crewman gerry-rigging a radio to get a message out to the fleet, many Liberty survivors believe they would have been sunk with all hands.
President Lyndon Johnson accepted Israel’s apology for the attack, but it has remained hotly controversial ever since, a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists. Alternative theories about Israel’s attack — about it being deliberate; about cover-ups — have made the topic of the Liberty too radioactive for members of Congress or Pentagon leaders.
Journalist and author James Scott, whose father survived the attack, wrote in “Attack on the Liberty” that Johnson believed the attack was deliberate. But he let Israel off the hook because he feared “alienating” American Jewish leaders, from whom he was getting “pressure” for escalating the war in Vietnam.
Joseph Meadors, a Liberty survivor and the current president of the Liberty Veterans Association, said he and his predecessors have been inviting members of Congress to Arlington since they began holding the observances in the 1980s, he said.
“This year I’ve invited every member of Congress who represents a congressional district where a USS Liberty KIA lived,” Meadors said. This meant invitations to lawmakers from 21 states. So far three lawmakers have said they would send staffers, but as of Wednesday one staffer had bailed out, saying there was a scheduling conflict.
This is usually how it works, Meadors said. He said he’d be surprised if the other staffers show.
One lawmaker, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, responded to the invitation with a brief note to be read at the ceremony. Cornyn offered his “deep sympathy to the friends and loved ones of the 34 brave Americans who were lost that day.
“Although words are hardly adequate, please know that you and your families are in my thoughts and prayers.” The note spoke of honoring the dead who protect the United States, and of remaining dedicated, “just as they were dedicated, to the principles foundational to our Constitution, we must willingly defend them whenever necessary.”
same toxic crap from the left