How to Prevent a Holocaust (6/18/06)
by Dean Hartwell
My wife and I recently went to Washington, DC and spent some time at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There, we learned how a group of people took over a nation, identified and killed millions of people they found “undesirable” and how the specter of future genocides looms over our heads.
Adolf Hitler made his way in German politics in the 1920s and 1930s. He joined the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nazis) and became famous for his charismatic oratorical style. Angered by the insurrections Jews and Communists had started in Germany during the time he spent fighting in World War I, Hitler began to blame the Jews for Germany’s post-war misery, including heavy inflation. In poor economic times, it is often easy to find scapegoats.
After the Nazis started a fire in 1933 in the Reichstag building (German parliament) and blamed it on Communists, Hitler moved to suppress freedom of speech and the press and other civil liberties. The Nazis later deprived Jews of positions of civil service and would not allow them to go to universities or hold other professional jobs.
The pressure to persecute the Jews escalated when a Polish Jew assassinated a German diplomat in Paris. Now the Nazis made the Jews wear a yellow star to identify them. One might ask: how did the Nazis know who was Jewish and who was not?
The answer is that the Nazis had been listening in on telephone calls and had been spying on the Germans to find out who went to temple, who sympathized with Jews, etc. They spied on other groups of people that the Nazi ideology found undesirable. The following is a list of some of these groups:
Jews
Poles
Russians
Gypsies
Serbs
Freemasons
Communists
Gays
Jehovah’s Witnesses
Disabled
Blacks
Asians
Political Opponents
They used a punch card system developed by the company, Dehomag. This company was a subdivision of a famous United States corporation, International Business Machines (IBM). Once they discovered a person’s status, the employees of Dehomag simply punched in holes corresponding to the undesirable group and kept the card on record.
People in these groups were moved to the ghettos of Germany and other German-controlled areas. Sometime after that, many received notice that they were to report to trains that would take them to concentration camps. Some experts say as many as ninety percent of those sent to camps perished, either from exhausting work or the gas chambers.
What happened in Germany literally defined the term genocide. It is known as the systematic killing of groups of people considered undesirable. At the museum, people said, “Never again!” But how can we be sure it won’t happen?
While our leaders debate whether to send troops to Darfur in the Sudan, whose people may be victims of genocide, we need to identify signs of the problem here at home. Though we are nowhere near genocide here in the United States, the warnings are strong enough for us to hear them.
When we read in history that Hitler’s people started the fire at the Reichstag building and used it to suppress civil liberties, we ought to know it could happen here. Several legitimate questions exist about the government’s role in the attacks of 9/11, such as the proof of the use of controlled demolition at the World Trade Center, the lack of a military response to the object that hit the Pentagon and evidence that several of the so-called “suicide hijackers” are still alive. These revelations should make us suspect members of our own federal government of a similar strategy to silence us with tactics like the screening of participants at the President’s speeches for political affiliation.
When we read of the Nazi way of determining who was undesirable, we could look to our own Administration’s use of wiretapping telephones of United States citizens without warrants to find out who is on its list of unwanted people. Some say that the federal government is too inept to track down almost three hundred million people. But don’t bet on it: computers and their programmers have come a long way since the punch cards the Nazis used.
When we read the long list of those whom the Nazis persecuted, we should be able to look around us and see others at risk of being put on such a list. It doesn’t matter that no one is being rounded up and sent to the ghettos or the gas chambers. What matters is that the seeds are being set for groups like the gays, liberals, government skeptics, atheists and others to lose their rights in the new Nazi society we are headed towards. Just listen to the Republican-controlled Senate debate on gay marriage and hear them say nonsense that it threatens traditional marriage. Watch how a best-selling Republican author slams liberals as “godless.” See believers in the official 9/11 theory tell skeptics on the Internet that they wish they had been on the planes that crashed.
These kinds of hostile attitudes expressed by those in power against certain groups of people were present in Germany for many years before the
Nazis resorted to drastic measures. We need to bring back a measure of civility to our society now before it gets too late. I don’t want future generations to go to some far-off nation to visit a museum to learn about us.
Source: “Adolf Hitler’s Rise to Power” by David Meier - http://www2.dsu.nodak.edu/users/dmeier/Holocaust/hitler.html