During the Second World War, the Nazis set up extermination camps all over Europe designed for no other purpose except to efficiently murder and dispose of millions of people.
In all, the Nazis murdered somewhere between ten and twelve million people; Gypsies, homosexuals, criminals, the mentally deficient, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, Russian POWs’, etc.
But more than half of Hitler’s victims — at least six million of them — were European Jews. Men, women, children, babies — it made no difference. If they were Jews they were to be exterminated like animals.
Worse than animals, since even in those days, there were humane laws in place for euthanizing animals.
The major camps were located in German-occupied Poland, including Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. Of the millions who entered these camps, only a handful emerged.
The Nazis elevated mass murder to an art form; almost a million Jews were exterminated at Treblinka — yet Treblinka had a staff of just 120 — of whom only the 20-30 SS personnel did the actual killing.
Can you imagine the outrage, had the Allies known of these camps? Clearly, the moment the Allies discovered that the Germans were systematically exterminating the entire Jewish population of Europe, the entire tenor of the war would have changed.
No matter how critical other military targets may have been, it is difficult to imagine that any of them could be more critical than the death camps. No matter how many lives might have been at stake because of other targets, there was nothing that compared to the carnage of the Nazi death camps.
What a terrible shame that they didn’t know. Think of the millions of lives that could have been saved, had they destroyed those death camps, even as late as the last year of the war!
Except they did know. And they did nothing.
In 1944, as the Nazis began to empty Hungary of its 750,000 Jews and deport them to Auschwitz. Among them was a 19 year-old Jew named Rudolf Vrba.
Together with fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler, Vrba devised a plan of escape from Auschwitz.
The pair slipped away from their slave-labor battalion and hid themselves in a hollowed out woodpile they had prepared earlier. They sprinkled the area with tobacco and gasoline to fool the dogs.
After hiding for several days, the pair set off on a 80 mile trek to Slovakia, where they met with Jewish leaders. There, they dictated a thirty-page report dubbed “The Auschwitz Protocols.”
It included details of the mass-murder process, maps pinpointing the gas chambers and crematoria and warnings of the impending slaughter of Hungary’s Jews.
“One million Hungarian [Jews] are going to die,” Vrba told them. “Auschwitz is ready for them. But if you tell them now, they will rebel. They will never go to the ovens.”
A copy of Vrba’s Auschwitz Protocols was given to Rabbi Michoel Dov Weissmandl, a rescue activist in Bratislava, who then wrote the first known appeal for the use of Allied air power to disrupt the mass murder.
Weissmandl’s plea to the Allies to bomb the railroad lines between Hungary and Auschwitz reached the Roosevelt administration in June, 1944.
The full version of the Vrba report was actually held up in Switzerland for three months by US diplomats who regarded it as low priority.
And when the report finally reached Washington in October, the Office of War Information opposed distributing it.
Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy responded that the request was “impracticable” because it would require “diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations.”
He also claimed the War Department’s position was based on “a study” of the issue. But no evidence of such a study has ever been found by researchers.
In reality, McCloy’s position was based on the War Department’s standing policy that no military resources should be allocated for “rescuing victims of enemy oppression.”
(‘Victims of enemy oppression’ was a code for “Jews”. The Allies ACTUALLY had a policy in place to let them die.)
After receiving the Auschwitz Protocols, the Jewish Agency lobbied British, American and Soviet officials to bomb the camps or the railways leading to it. The Allies refused. The murders continued — Jews were still being exterminated even as Allied ground troops were approaching the gates of the camps.
Today in Israel, the wail of sirens brought the nation to a standstill as they observed two minutes of silence for the victims of the Nazi murderers and the indifferent Allies who did nothing to stop them.
During a two-minute silence across the Jewish state for Holocaust Remembrance Day, pedestrians stopped in their tracks, some with their heads bowed, and road traffic came to a halt.
The collective commemoration came a day after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly described the Holocaust as a “myth,” stirred a storm of criticism when he described Israel as “the most cruel and repressive racist regime” at the UN conference on racism in Switzerland.
His comments triggered outrage in the West and prompted a walkout by many European countries at the opening of the Geneva conference.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his remarks at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, said;
“If anyone thought that following the horrific events of the Holocaust this malignant phenomenon would vanish from this world, it is today obvious that he was wrong.”
“The sad fact is that while we mark the Holocaust Memorial Day here at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, some chose to attend the show of hatred against Israel held as we speak in the heart of Europe,” Netanyahu said.
“We will not let Holocaust deniers carry out another Holocaust of the Jewish people. This is the supreme commitment of the state of Israel.”
The UN conference, which had already been hit by a boycott by several governments led by the United States and Israel, fell into disarray after Ahmadinejad launched his new outburst against the Jewish state.
Ahmadinejad, who has previously called for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map, said that as compensation for racism in Europe “the most cruel and racist regime” was created in the Middle East after World War II.
“Following World War II they resorted to military aggressions to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering,” the mad little mullah told the assembled body.
To the dismay of the UN conference’s organizers, representatives from forty countries got up and walked out.
Assessment:
OK, so more than forty countries walked out. A handful of countries — Canada, the US, Israel, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Italy — boycotted it altogether. (Yes, that’s all of them.)
And lest we become too proud, the US, Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand didn’t decide until Sunday not to attend. (To their credit, Canada, Australia, Israel and Italy all dropped out of the gathering weeks or months earlier.)
But what of the one-hundred plus countries that refused to join the boycott, that found nothing wrong with having Mahmoud Ahmadinejad serve as keynote speaker and guest of honor of the conference, and that remained in their seats to politely applaud the little Iranian dictator’s renewed call for Israel’s destruction?
Think about it for a second, and in context. This conference was dubbed “Durban II” even though it is being held in Geneva, because the original Durban Conference became so infamous.
The Durban Conference on Racism was so antisemitic and racist that one could scarcely believe that the UN would try it again.
Not only did the UN decide to go ahead with the second conference, it chose such champions of international human rights as Libya to chair it and Iran to serve as a vice-chair.
The draft document upon which the conference was based affirmed the preceding conference’s concluding statement vilifying Israel, demanding Western reparations for slavery and making blasphemy against Islam an international crime.
The date selected for the conference not only coincided with the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day — it ‘just so happened’ that it opened on Hitler’s birthday.
So, what did the attending nations expect? They expected exactly what Ahmadinejad offered them — a vicious attack against Israel as a racist state — followed by a justification of racism according to the principles of Islam.
A number of delegations, mainly from Arab or Muslim countries, applauded his address, welcoming his claim that the creation of Israel had led to a “totally racist government in occupied Palestine.”
Although they claim Israel’s existence as a Jewish State is ‘racist’ they are completely comfortable with the Palestinian demand that its state be Judenrein (Jew-free).
Most mainstream Islamic countries have either expelled their Jewish populations or created such a hostile environment that they were forced to emigrate. It is difficult to imagine a more racist regime than that of Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Islam.
A Jew caught inside that country would face immediate execution — for being a Jew.
A few Islamic countries (like Iran) refuse to let their Jews emigrate so that they can use them as propaganda to show “how well they treat their Jews.”
(Don’t assume the world won’t buy into it. Hitler had a special camp — Theresienstadt — that was used as a ‘model’ camp to show the Red Cross how well the Jews were treated by the Nazis. The Red Cross never raised an eyebrow.)
The United Nations was created, ironically enough, for the same reason that world Jewry banded together and created a Jewish state in Israel. “Never again!” was Israel’s foundational slogan. The United Nations was created to prevent another Hitler and another Holocaust.
The UN exists now for the sole purpose of extending legitimacy to the haters of this world. It has been hijacked by global Islam in much the same way that the 1930’s League of Nations was hijacked by the fascists.
In 1944, the world had a chance to stop the genocide when Rudolf Vrba’s Auschwitz Protocols exposed the Nazi extermination plan for all the world to see. The world didn’t want to know anything about it until it was all over.
Despite the lessons of the Holocaust, the world learned nothing. The burden of Jerusalem remains as heavy today as ever it has over the millennia.
“Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.” (Zechariah 12:2-3)
The UN’s Conference on Racism’s keynote speaker presented the world, in no uncertain terms, with his plan to finish what the Nazis began. Only forty countries — out of more than 190 — found Ahmadinejad’s speech unacceptable.
More than 100 countries applauded politely.