I find this comment troubling. I don't understand why you wrote it. What is your position on the Holocaust, the systematic murder of some six million Jews by Germans and their allies ?
“I find this comment troubling.”
Why?
“I don’t understand why you wrote it.”
As I explained in a later post, there have been a number of phony holocaust memoirs published in recent years. I am wary of them now.
“What is your position on the Holocaust, the systematic murder of some six million Jews by Germans and their allies ?”
I’ll answer that in just a moment, but let me say something else first. What I believe about the holocaust or not has nothing to do with my wariness about this story. And I resent the implication that your question contains - intended or otherwise - that I might have some sort of “position” on the holocaust which doesn’t meet whatever standard you hold. Now, having said that, I will tell you my exact “position” on the holocaust:
1) After seizing control of Germany, Hitler and the Nazis drummed up anti-semitic sentiment (which already was a latent part of the culture in some ways) to a great extent.
2) Throughout the 1930s, the Nazis passed laws through the German parliament (the Reichstag) which curtailed the rights of minorities, especially Jews, and created an obscene system of racial classification on the one hand and institutionalized the “superiority” of “Aryans” on the other. Jews were hounded, harassed, and humiliated in their own country. Until that time, Jews had succeeded in Germany more than in any nation in Europe - perhaps more than in any nation on earth because only the U.S. could compete with Germany on that score.
3) Using the cover of the Second World War, the Nazis and some allies in the countries they conquered rounded up, abused, enslaved, and murdered millions of people whom they believed were racially inferior or politically or culturally a threat to them or their mostly mythological Aryans: Jews, Gypsies (Roma), Slavs, Africans, some Asians, Catholic priests and nuns, communists of various stripes, democrats, and criminals and others.
4) The Nazis murdered - both through their abuse (starvation, humiliation, over work, etc) and outright direct methods (shootings, bayonetings, live burials, gassings, beatings, etc) - over 12 million people. Almost six million of those were Jews.
5) The Nazis were evil. They supported an evil philosophy of the “superman”. They carried out actions of unspeakable evil. ‘Crimes against humanity’ is simply too gentle a term to sum up what they did.
Have I made my position on the holocaust perfectly clear?