The Trump administration is doing everything it seemingly can to make us think that the holocaust was something it was not. Increasingly the White House takes a casual attitude toward the holocaust that both excuses and accepts holocaust deniers. This cannot be allowed to stand, and the only way to fight back is to speak the truth and tell the world what happened. Over, and over, and over again if necessary. I am saddened that I have to write this, but it is critically important that we do not forget.
Here are some facts. Hitler’s regime decided, with Hitler’s approval, to exterminate the Jewish people, in part by use of poisonous gasses. That is historical and legal fact, established over decades of denazification trials, Nuremberg, and by real life observations and witnesses and documentary evidence.
And so, in 1942, the mass killings “began” (I say began in quotes because there were plenty of deaths before the bulk of the administrative/bureaucratic machinery of the holocaust was put into place). There are too many stories to tell regarding the mechanics of how an entire people was systematically decimated. So many people were, for example, shot. But a lot of people were gassed in a network of German camps, and otherwise. The Germans even ran around at times with mobile gas vans to scoop up Jewish children off the street:
It was true that Germans sometimes avoided shooting younger children, instead throwing them into the pits with the corpses, and allowing them to suffocate under the earth. They also had at their disposal another means of killing that allowed them to avoid seeing the end of young life. Gas vans roved the streets of Minsk, the drivers seeking stray Jewish children. The people called the gas vans by a name that had been used for the NKVD trucks during the Great Terror a few years earlier: “soul destroyers.”
Snyder, Timothy (2012-10-02). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (pp. 236-237). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
Many (not all, of course) of the gas deaths by design occurred in designated killing sites that were under German occupation and not in the Reich per se. The Germans created administrative lawless zones, ghettos, and other areas within their area of control where they carried out much of their butchery. For example, much of German-occupied Poland was nominally ruled by a “General Government.” It was not formally annexed into the Reich, but was ruled by German Nazis. Until the Nazis came along, this area was one of the most cultured and intellectually vibrant areas in Eastern Europe. They all but emptied it out of Jews and polish intellectuals.
The killing sites were horrific and defy any sanitizing with the use of corporate PR hack phrases like “holocaust centers.”
Take, for example, Treblinka. Jews were brought to Treblinka by the trainload, many from the Warsaw Ghetto. People would be packed onto cars designed for transporting livestock, which were exposed to the elements. When a prisoner selected to be killed got off the train, typically the women and children would be split off from the men. The Germans would lie to the prisoners, telling them that they were on a stop to another camp somewhere else and needed to be showered. Prisoners would be forced to strip naked and give up all of their valuables.
Once stripped of their belongings, prisoners were gassed to death — generally first the men, then the women and children:
According to the postwar testimony of some SS officers, men were always gassed first, while women and children waited outside the gas chambers for their turn. During this time, the women and children could hear the sounds of suffering from inside the chambers, and they became aware of what awaited them, which caused panic, distress, and even involuntary defecation.
Here’s generally how it worked:
A camouflaged, fenced-in path, known as the "tube," led from the reception area to the gas chamber entrance, located in the killing area. Victims were forced to run naked along this path to the gas chambers, deceptively labeled as showers. Once the chamber doors were sealed, an engine installed outside the building pumped carbon monoxide into the gas chambers, killing those inside. Members of the Sonderkommando (special detachment)—a group of Jewish prisoners selected to remain alive as forced laborers—worked in the killing area. They removed bodies from the gas chambers and initially buried them in mass graves. In late 1942 and 1943, the Jewish forced laborers had to exhume the already buried bodies and burn them in huge trenches on makeshift “ovens” made of rail track.
In Treblinka, it was not the infamous Zyklon B that killed; it was carbon monoxide from tank engine exhaust. It was a gruesome way to die. Gas chambers would often be closed with people inside for about 20 minutes. When they opened the doors, they would find mothers embracing children in death, bodies piled up on top of one another, and worse.
When the Soviets finally closed in on the site of Treblinka near the end of the war, the Germans ultimately razed it down to the foundations on their way out in an attempt to hide the evidence of their crimes. We know what it was in part through the testimony of the very few survivors. Unlike many of the camps to the west that we Americans know better, Treblinka and similar extermination camps in the east by and large accomplished their gruesome tasks and for the most part left few if any survivors to tell the tale. Holocaust deniers have for decades used the Nazi crimes and attempted coverups to spread doubt about what actually happened.
Treblinka alone killed somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 people, the vast majority of whom were Jews, and the vast majority of people who went to Treblinka died of carbon monoxide gas poisoning. It is only one of a string of such camps.
We have an administration where holocaust denialism is on the rise. We have an administration that curiously, suspiciously, left Jews absent from its holocaust remembrance statement and then attempted to explain it away using holocaust denier type excuses. Its press secretary engages in idle historical revisionism, inexplicably attempting to burnish Hitler’s place in history, again parroting arguments of holocaust deniers. As of today, that press secretary still has his job.
This is a White House where holocaust denialism is accepted and excused. I can only conclude that it comes from the highest levels. It should shame every single one of us, whether we voted for Trump or not.
All of us have an obligation to speak the truth about what happened. We owe it to the dead to speak out against holocaust deniers and their enablers, even if they live or work in the White House.