Why we must never forget: Hatred has staying power

Published 9:00 pm Monday, December 19, 2005

I had a Christmas column ready to go.

It was one of those pieces you feel obligated to write at this time of the year, light and filled with expressions of the promise of the season.

Recent news, however, made me choose to go with this one.

I’ll do better next year. Promise.

With that as explanation, here are some things that were being said 60 or 70 years ago by the leaders of a nation then hostile to the Jews:

“But what is to become of the Jews? Do you think that they will be settled in villages in the conquered eastern territories? In Berlin we have been told not to complicate matters: since neither these territories (nor our own) have any use for them, we should liquidate them ourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to remain unmoved by pleas for pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we encounter them and wherever possible, in order to maintain the overall mastery of the Reich” – Hans Frank, Governor General of occupied Poland, December 1941.

“The Jewish question is not only a German matter. It is also not only a European problem. The Jewish question is a world question. Just as Germany is not safe from the Jews as long as even one Jew remains in Europe, so Europe cannot solve the Jewish question as long as Jews live in the rest of the world. … The Jewish danger will be eliminated only when Jewry throughout the world has ceased to exist.” – Ernst Hiemer in Der Strmer, 1942.

“… I realized once again that the Jewish race is the most dangerous one that inhabits the globe, and that we must show them no mercy and no indulgence. This riffraff must be eliminated and destroyed.” – Joseph Goebbels, 1942

“We have – I would say, as very consistent National Socialists, taken the question of blood as our starting point. We were the first really to solve the problem of blood by action, and in this connection, by problem of blood, we of course do not mean anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness.” – Heinrich Himmler, April 1943.

“I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of. We come to the question: how is it with the women and the children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. That is to say I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men – so to speak killing or ordering them killed – and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision has to be taken, to cause this Volk (people) to disappear from the earth.” – Heinrich Himmler, October 1943.

Ugly stuff. Took a war to put a stop to it and the human cost was staggering.

By 1945, 6 million Jews had been killed, tens of millions of others had died, and Europe was in shambles.

At the end, though, there was hope. Hope that we’d put this kind of thinking behind us. Hope that we’d seen more than enough of what it led to and would never travel that road again.

Unfortunately, we hadn’t then and still haven’t now.

Irrational hatred is like an invasive weed – once seeded, hard to eradicate and, if ignored, quick to grow out of control. It seems that we’ve now got another weed crop started because Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently stated that the nation of Israel must be “wiped off the map.”

It’s easy to ignore this stuff when it’s being spewed by some no-name crackpot. It becomes a bit tougher when it’s said by the head of a nation about to become a nuclear power.

The question to now ask is whether anyone can conjure up a peaceful means by which to “wipe” a nation off the map. A close follow-on would be: Does anyone believe that the Jewish people will ever again go quietly to the trains?

And we’d better ask because, given recent world history, it’s important – especially since Mr. Ahmadinejad has also stated that the Holocaust was a myth.

For anyone wishing to investigate that “myth,” I’d suggest starting with an excerpt from the diary of SS Dr. Johann Paul Kremer: “For the first time, at 3:00 a.m. outside, attended a special action. Dante’s Inferno seems to me almost a comedy compared to this. They don’t call Auschwitz the camp of annihilation for nothing!”

Sixty years later and it starts again.

Makes one shudder is what it does.

Larry Simoneaux lives in Edmonds. Comments can be sent to larrysim@att.net.