"Al Hayat" about Iraqi emigration
"Tageszeitung" about the problem of second wives of Muslim refugees
"Nezavisimaya Gazeta" about genocide and Holocaust
"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" about foreign students in St. Petersburg
"Wall Street Journal" on endangered languages
"Newspaper" about the "untouchables" in Japan
"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" about foreign compatriots
"Literary newspaper" about compatriots and the law "On repatriation"
"Izvestia" about the national composition of the population of Russia and Moscow
"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" about the census and Cossacks
"Vremya Novostey" about social reforms in Russia
"Izvestia" about the problem of poverty in Russia
"Izvestia" about male reproductive health
"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" about the health of Russian conscripts
"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" about drug crime and the fight against it
... about genocide and holocaust
The extermination of Jews by the Nazis and its interpretation played a special role in shaping the modern world
For many years, there has been debate as to whether the Holocaust - the extermination of the Jewish people during World War II - can be considered as a unique phenomenon that goes beyond the concept of “genocide,” or whether the Holocaust fits well into a number of other genocides known to history. The most extensive and productive discussion on this issue, called Historikerstreit (“dispute of historians”), unfolded among German scientists in the mid-80s and played an important role in further research.
Although the main topic of discussion was the actual nature of Nazism, the issues of the Holocaust and Auschwitz, for obvious reasons, occupied a key place in it. During the discussion, two directions emerged that defended opposing theses. Proponents of the "nationalist-conservative trend" ("nationalists") - Ernst Nolte and his followers, such as Andreas Hilgruber and Klaus Hildebrand - believe that the Holocaust was not a unique phenomenon and can be placed on a par with other catastrophes of the 20th century, for example, the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916, Vietnam War and even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The “left-liberal trend” (“internationalists”) was represented primarily by the famous German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. The latter argued that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in German history and in the psychology of the Germans, from which comes the special specificity of the Holocaust, focused on Nazism and only on it. Later, the American historian Charles Mayer formulated three main substantive characteristics of the Holocaust, identified during the discussion and which became the subject of dispute between the parties: singularity (singularity), comparability (comparability), identity (identity). In fact, it was precisely the characteristic of singularity (uniqueness, originality) that became the stumbling block in the subsequent discussion.
The subjectivity of pain and the language of science
First of all, it should be noted that the topic of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust is extremely sensitive. The “painful center” of this topic is that when considering it, one encounters, as defined by the French researcher Paul Zawadzki, the language of memory and evidence with academic language. Viewed from within Jewry, the Holocaust experience is an absolute tragedy: because all suffering is personal, it is absolutized, made unique, and forms the identity of Jewry. “If I take off... my “sociologist’s cap” in order to remain only a Jew whose family was destroyed during the war, then there can be no talk of any relativism,” says Zawadzki. “...The internal logic of the identification process pushes into side of emphasizing uniqueness."
It is no coincidence that any other use of the word “Holocaust,” for example in the plural (“Holocaust”) or in relation to another genocide, usually causes a painful reaction among Jews. Comparing ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia with the Holocaust, comparing Milosevic with Hitler, expanding the interpretation of the Klaus Barbier trial in the 1987 trial in France as “crimes against humanity”, when the genocide of Jews was considered only as one of the crimes, and not as a unique crime , caused strong protests from the Jewish community. We can also add here the recent controversy over the removal of crosses that had been arbitrarily erected by Polish nationalist Catholics in Auschwitz, when the question was debated whether Auschwitz should be seen solely as a place and symbol of Jewish suffering, although it was also the site of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles and people of other nationalities.
In other words, any comparisons, invading the area of individual and collective memory of Jews, inevitably reduce the pathos of the exceptionalism of Jewish suffering. At the same time, the Holocaust loses its specific content and is considered as one of many genocides, or it acquires a “universal” dimension. The logical development of the deconcretization of the Holocaust is to deprive it of even the signs of genocide itself, when the “Holocaust” is transformed into the most general model of oppression and social injustice. Thus, the author of the play about Auschwitz, the German playwright Peter Weiss, stated: “I identify myself with the Jews no more than with the Vietnamese or South African blacks. I simply identify myself with the oppressed of the whole world.”
In the grip of contradictions
On the other hand, the Holocaust is a historical and social phenomenon, and as such it naturally aspires to be analyzed in a broader context than just at the level of memory and testimony of the Jewish people - in particular, at the academic level. The very need to study the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon just as inevitably forces us to operate in academic language, and the logic of historical research pushes us towards comparativism. But it immediately becomes apparent that the very choice of comparative analysis as a tool for academic research ultimately undermines the idea of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust in its social and ethical significance.
Even simple logical reasoning based on the assumption of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, in fact, leads to the destruction of currently established ideas about the historical role of the Holocaust for humanity. In fact, the content of the historical lesson of the Holocaust has long gone beyond the historical fact of the genocide of the Jews: it is no coincidence that in many countries of the world the study of the Holocaust has been introduced into the school curriculum as an attempt to cultivate national and religious tolerance. The main conclusion from the lesson of the Holocaust is: “This (ie, the Holocaust) must not happen again!” However, if the Holocaust is “unique”, i.e. is unique, unique, then there can be no talk of any repetition of it from the outset and this important conclusion is meaningless: the Holocaust cannot then be any “lesson” by definition; or it is a “lesson,” but then it is comparable to other events of the past and present. As a result, it remains to either reformulate the idea of “uniqueness” or abandon it.
Thus, to a certain extent, the very formulation of the problem of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust at the academic level is provocative. But the development of this problem also leads to certain logical inconsistencies. Indeed, what conclusions follow from recognizing the Holocaust as “unique”? The most famous scientist who defends the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, US professor Steven Katz, formulated in one of his books the answer to this question: “The Holocaust highlights Nazism, and not vice versa.” At first glance, the answer is convincing: the study of the Holocaust reveals the essence of such a monstrous phenomenon as Nazism. However, you can pay attention to something else: the Holocaust turns out to be directly linked to Nazism. And then the question literally begs to be asked: is it even possible to consider the Holocaust as an independent phenomenon without discussing the essence of Nazism? In a slightly different form, this question was asked to Katz, puzzling him: “What if a person is not interested in Nazism, Professor Katz?”
Given all that has been said, we will still take the liberty of expressing some thoughts regarding the uniqueness of the Holocaust, strictly within the framework of an academic approach.
Analogies are inevitable
So, one of the well-known theses of modern academic science involved in Holocaust research is that the tragedy of the Jews carries with it general signs other genocides, but also has characteristics that make this genocide not just special, but still unique, exceptional, one of a kind. The three main characteristics of the Holocaust that make it “unique” are usually cited as follows:
1. Object and purpose. Unlike all other genocides, the Nazis' goal was the total destruction of the Jewish people as an ethnic group.
2. Scale. In four years, 6 million Jews were killed - a third of the entire Jewish people. Humanity has never known genocide on such a scale.
3. Means. For the first time in history, the mass extermination of Jews was carried out by industrial means, using modern technologies.
These characteristics, taken together, according to a number of authors, determine the uniqueness of the Holocaust. But an impartial study of the comparative calculations presented, in our opinion, is not convincing confirmation of the thesis about the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust.
So, let's look at all three characteristics in turn:
a) The object and purpose of the Holocaust. According to Professor Katz, "The Holocaust is phenomenologically unique due to the fact that never before has it been aimed, as a matter of deliberate principle and actualized policy, at the physical destruction of every man, woman and child belonging to a particular people."
The essence of this statement is this: before the Nazis, who sought to make the world Judenrein (“clean of Jews”), no one had ever deliberately intended to destroy an entire people. The assertion seems dubious. Since ancient times, there has been a practice of complete elimination of national groups, in particular, during wars of conquest and inter-tribal clashes. This task was solved in different ways: for example, by forced assimilation, but also by the complete destruction of such a group - which was already reflected in the ancient biblical narratives, in particular in the stories about the conquest of Canaan (Isa. 6:20; 7:9; 10: 39-40).
Already in our time, in intertribal clashes, one or another national group is slaughtered, as, for example, in Burundi, when in the mid-90s of the twentieth century, up to half a million representatives of the Tutsi people were slaughtered during the genocide. It is obvious that in any interethnic clashes people are killed precisely because they belong to the people participating in such a clash.
Another important circumstance, which is often referred to by defenders of the “uniqueness of the Holocaust,” is that the Nazi policy aimed at the physical extermination of all Jews essentially had no rational basis and amounted to a religiously determined total murder of Jews. One could agree with this point of view, if not for one serious “but”: modern historians have to argue about facts that clearly do not fit into the concept. It is well known, for example, that when big money came into play, it overwhelmed the Nazis' passion for murder. Quite a large number of wealthy Jews were able to escape from Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the war. At the end of the war, part of the Nazi elite actively sought contacts with the Western allies for their own salvation, and the Jews became the subject of bargaining, and all religious fervor faded into the background. When Goebbels' party comrades called him to account for multimillion-dollar bribes, thanks to which the wealthy Jewish Bernheimer family was released from a concentration camp, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, in the presence of Hitler, uttered his famous and quite cynical phrase: “Wer Jude ist, bestimme nur ich!” (“Who is a Jew, only I determine!”) The dissertation of the American Jew Brian Rigg caused lively controversy: its author provides numerous data that many people who were subject to Nazi laws on Jewish origin served in the army of Nazi Germany, some of them they were occupied high positions. And although a number of similar facts were known to the high command of the Wehrmacht, for various reasons they hid it. Finally, the amazing fact of the participation of 350 Finnish Jewish officers in the war with the USSR as part of the Finnish army - Hitler's ally, when three Jewish officers were awarded the Iron Cross (and refused to receive it), and a military field synagogue operated on the Finnish side of the front (! ). All these facts do not in any way diminish the monstrosity of the Nazi regime, but they make the picture not so clearly irrational.
b) The scale of the Holocaust. The number of Jewish victims of Nazism is truly amazing. Although the exact number of deaths is still a matter of debate, historical scholarship has established a figure close to 6 million people, i.e. a third of the world's Jewish population and about half of European Jewry perished. However, in historical retrospect, one can find events quite comparable to the Holocaust in terms of the scale of victims. Thus, Professor Katz himself cites figures according to which, in the process of colonization of North America, by the middle of the 16th century, out of 80-112 million American Indians, 7/8 died, i.e. 70 to 88 million Katz admits: “If numbers alone constitute uniqueness, then the Jewish experience under Hitler was not unique.”
The Armenian genocide, which is considered the first genocide of the 20th century, is similar in scale to the Holocaust. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, from 1915 to 1923, from 600 thousand to 1250 thousand Armenians died, i.e. from one third to almost 3/4 of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which by 1915 amounted to 1,750 thousand people. Estimates of the number of victims among the Roma during the Nazi period range from 250 thousand to half a million people, and such a reputable source as the French encyclopedia Universalis considers the figure of half a million to be the most modest. In this case, we can talk about the death of up to half of the Roma population of Europe.
Moreover, in Jewish history itself there have been events that, in terms of the scale of victims, are quite close to the Holocaust. Unfortunately, any figures relating to the pogroms of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, in particular to the Jewish pogroms committed by the Cossacks of Khmelnytsky, are extremely approximate and are often considered overestimated. However, even modern estimates, in the years 1648-1658, from a quarter to a third of Polish Jews, who at that time made up the world's largest Jewish community, could have died.
c) “Technology” of the Jewish genocide. Such a characteristic can only be determined by specific historical conditions. For example, at the Battle of Ypres in the spring of 1915, Germany used chemical weapons for the first time and the Anglo-French troops suffered heavy losses. Can we say that in this case, at the beginning of the 20th century, weapons of destruction were less technologically advanced than gas chambers? Of course, the difference here is that in one case they destroyed the enemy on the battlefield, and in the other - defenseless people. But in both cases, people were “technologically” destroyed, and in the Battle of Ypres, weapons of mass destruction, which were used for the first time, also left the enemy defenseless. And during the Middle Ages, several thousand “witches”, before being burned at the stake on charges of witchcraft, were tortured using the most advanced technological methods of that time, and many died during these tortures. Anyone who has visited the Torture Museum in Amsterdam can fully appreciate the monstrous sophistication and technological sophistication of the executioners. How, in fact, are these torture machines inferior to gas chambers? But the idea of creating neutron and genetic weapons that kill a huge number of people with a minimum of other destruction is still being discussed. Let's imagine for a second that this weapon (God forbid) will ever be used. Then the “manufacturability” of murder will be recognized as even higher than during the Nazi period. As a result, in fact, this criterion also turns out to be quite artificial.
Civilization after Auschwitz
So, each of the arguments separately turns out to be not very convincing. Therefore, as evidence, they speak of the uniqueness of the listed factors of the Holocaust in their totality (when, according to Katz, the “how” and “what” are balanced by the “why”). To some extent, this approach is fair, since it creates a more comprehensive vision, but still, the discussion here may be more about the amazing atrocities of the Nazis than about the radical difference between the Holocaust and other genocides.
But nevertheless, we are convinced that the Holocaust has a special and truly unique, in the full sense of the word, significance in world history. Only the characteristics of this uniqueness should be sought in other circumstances, which are no longer categories of purpose, instrumentation and magnitude (scale). A detailed analysis of these characteristics deserves a separate study, so we will only briefly formulate them:
1. The Holocaust became the final phenomenon, the apotheosis, the logical conclusion of a consistent series of persecutions and disasters throughout the history of the Jewish people. No other people knew such continuous persecution for almost 2 thousand years. In other words, all other, non-Jewish genocides were of an isolated nature, in contrast to the Holocaust as a continuous phenomenon.
2. The genocide of the Jewish people was carried out by a civilization that, to a certain extent, grew up on Jewish ethical and religious values and, to one degree or another, recognized these values as its own (the “Judeo-Christian civilization”, according to the traditional definition). In other words, there is a fact of self-destruction of the foundations of civilization. And here it is not so much Hitler’s Reich itself with its racist-semi-pagan-semi-Christian religious ideology that appears as the destroyer (after all, Hitler’s Germany never renounced its Christian identity, albeit of a special, “Aryan” kind), but rather the Christian world in in general, whose centuries-old anti-Judaism significantly contributed to the emergence of Nazism. All other genocides in history were not of such a self-destructive nature for civilization.
3. The Holocaust to a large extent turned the consciousness of civilization upside down and determined its future path of development, in which persecution on racial and religious grounds is declared unacceptable. Despite the complex and sometimes tragic picture of the modern world, the intolerance of civilized states towards manifestations of chauvinism and racism was largely due to the understanding of the results of the Holocaust.
Thus, the uniqueness of the Holocaust phenomenon is determined not by the characteristic features of Hitler’s genocide as such, but by the place and role of the Holocaust in the world historical and spiritual process.
Municipal educational institution.
Secondary school No. 97
Scientific work
“The Holocaust is a tragedy X X century"
Completed by: 9th grade student A
Shneidman Evgeniy
Head: Tsilina M. A.
Nizhny Novgorod
“The Holocaust is a tragedy of the Jewish people”
I Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………
II “The Holocaust is a tragedy of the Jewish people.”
1Anti-Jewish policy of Nazi Germany from 1931-1945... ....
2The beginning of World War II and the forced emigration of Jews from the Nazi Reich ……………………………………………………………………………………….
3The implementation of the policy of genocide against the Jewish people during the Second World War
and the Jewish ghetto ………………………………………………………………………………………...
b Mass executions and concentration camps ……………………………
4 The Jewish Resistance Movement during the catastrophe…………..
and the Uprising in the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos………………………………..
b Janusz Korczak – life for the sake of children ………………………………………………………..
5Soviet Jewry during the Holocaust………………………………………..
6 Participation of the world community in the salvation of the Jewish people..
a Righteous Among the Nations ……………………………………………………………………
b Raoul Wallenberg…………………………………………………………………………………
IIIConclusion …………………………………………………………………………………………….
IV Help machine ……………………………………………………………………………
V Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………………
V Applications
1 Terminological dictionary………………………………………………………………...
2 Chronological table…………………………………………………………………..
INTRODUCTION
April 18 is Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day in 1943, prisoners of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the Nazis. This was one of many acts of tragedy for the Jewish people during the Second World War.
What does the word "Holocaust" mean? Of Ellen origin, it briefly means burnt offering, which is the name of the greatest tragedy of mankind of the 20th century. Without knowledge of the history of the Holocaust, the history of the twentieth century as a whole cannot be understood. Writer Leonid Koval 1 said: “The Holocaust is the tip of the arrow of anti-Semitism, whittled over centuries.”
Why is it necessary to single out Jews among the victims - after all, Nazism killed many peoples? Elie Wiesel 2 said this very succinctly: “Not all the victims were Jews, but all the Jews were victims of the Nazis.” The “Holocaust” is not the only historical insult, trampling of dignity and destruction of a person. But even in its non-uniqueness the phenomenon is exceptional. It was an organized and planned with insane care, executed destruction of the people. Probably the only one on earth whose numbers cannot return to the level of 39-40 years.
During the Holocaust of European Jewry, approximately 6 million Jews were exterminated. The extermination of the Jews was coded by the German bureaucracy as the “final solution to the Jewish question.” European Jewry died in ghettos, concentration camps, death marches and mass executions.
Jews were not the only victims of extermination: more than 50 million people died during World War II. However, only Jews (as well as Gypsies) were killed only for their nationality. The extermination of Jews stemmed from the ideology of racial anti-Semitism. The Nazi regime attached such importance to the liquidation of Jews that it was ready to sacrifice military successes for this. More than 9 million Jews lived in Europe at the beginning of the war, three-quarters of them - about half of world Jewry - were concentrated in Eastern Europe. Hitler set out to destroy them.
My work is dedicated to the exploits of people who saved Jews during the years of Nazi occupation, the courage of those who survived and the suffering of those who perished. The relevance of the topic is that currently there is a revival of the swastika, which represents the universe, and the threat of a catastrophe that stops a person within himself is once again emerging.
The world of the Holocaust is also the world of Kampuchea, the world of Karabakh, the world of Sarajevo. The killing of man by man has once again acquired a gigantic force that controls our existence, trying to turn the entire planet into its field. Why did Murder become, at the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century, the root point of all conflicts - spiritual, moral, political, drawing into itself all other problems.
This topic is also interesting to me because the Holocaust is a tragedy of my people, a tragedy that has long been a closed topic, although the facts were known, they were hidden for decades. We need to talk about this topic without being afraid of the severity of the questions that arise during its discussion.
Purpose of the work: To show, using the example of the genocide of the Jewish people during the Second World War, what national intolerance leads to. Reveal the events of the Holocaust, show all the horrors of those days, warn people before a big mistake that could happen again.
To cover the topic, I use the following work tasks:
1 Systematize material on the Holocaust.
2 Analyze the material on Jewish resistance.
3 Show the policy of genocide against the Jewish people carried out by the German Reich.
4Show the life of people in the ghetto.
When creating the work, I used various sources. The main sources for me were the magazine “Lechaim”, which periodically publishes information about the Holocaust (from various authors), and websites on the Internet, which contain a large amount of various information that helped me in working on my essay. I also used the book by Helena Cups, which provides detailed information about Auschwitz, and the book by Samuel Root, which provides information about the entire history of the Jewish people as a whole.
My work can be used in history lessons, electives and as propaganda for the Holocaust.
ANTI-JEWISH POLICY OF NAZI GERMANY
(1933-1939)
The Nazis came to power in Germany on January 30, 1933. Along with the first measures to strengthen its power, the new regime began an anti-Jewish campaign. It was expressed, first of all, in the removal of Jews from public positions, as well as in the persecution of Jews - teachers, writers, artists, musicians, journalists.
On April 1 of that year, the Nazis announced a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses. At the entrances to these places there were posts of stormtroopers with posters in their hands: “Don’t buy from Jews!” The purpose of the boycott is to “prove” to the German people that the Jews have taken over the German economy.
On the night of May 10, 1933, the Nazis organized a public burning of books by German writers of Jewish origin in city squares. Beautiful works of literature were thrown into the fire. And among these books were the works of Heinrich Heine, who once said that “those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.” The German press was overwhelmed by a stream of unbridled attacks against the Jews. The weekly newspaper Stürmer especially specialized in anti-Semitic slander.
At the same time, racial theory began to be introduced into school curricula.
Anti-Jewish laws were created. At the beginning of 1935, the German government began preparing comprehensive anti-Jewish legislation. On September 15, the so-called “Nuremberg Laws” were issued, depriving Jews of citizenship and relegating them to the status of subjects without political rights. On the same day, a law was issued “for the protection of German blood and German honor,” according to which marriages between “Aryans” and Jews were declared a criminal offense and extramarital relations between Jews and non-Jews were prohibited. As a result of the adoption of the Nuremberg Laws, racial theory became an integral part of German legislation.
Until 1937, German Jews could still engage in trade and own businesses. Many took comfort in the fact that although the Nazis had deprived them of the equality they had won through the struggle of many generations, they still had a certain role in the economy.
The escalation of persecution began at the end of 1936 along with preparations for World War II. 1938 turned out to be a turning point. The Nazis began systematically expropriating Jewish property. Jewish organizations and institutions were deprived of any public status.
Also in 1938, the forced expulsion from Germany of Polish Jews who had lived there for many years began. Poland also did not accept them, and they were forced to wander without shelter over their heads in “no man's land” (that is, the border strip).
Among these exiles were the parents of the young man Herschl Grynszpan, who was studying in Paris at that time. Outraged by the inaction of the world community regarding the unprecedented expulsion of Polish Jews, he made an attempt on the life of the adviser to the German embassy, von Rath, and mortally wounded him in the process.
This shot was the trigger for the massive Jewish pogrom of 1938, a pogrom that occurred on the night of November 10 and was known as Kristallnacht (due to the many shards of glass that littered the streets). That night, 92 Jews died, synagogues were set on fire throughout Germany, and over seven thousand shops and stores were destroyed and looted. About 30 thousand Jews were arrested and deported to concentration camps, and a fine of one billion marks was imposed on Jewry as a whole.
After Kristallnacht, most Jewish organizations and institutions in Germany were closed.
Surveillance of the Jews was handed over to the Gestapo (secret police). Pressure on Jews intensified to force them to leave the country.
As a result of all these events, many of the German Jews came to the conclusion that they no longer had a place in Germany. A significant number of them applied to the embassies and consulates of various countries, but the closed-door policy resorted to by the United States and a number of other states prevented them from leaving in many cases.
BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR II
On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland. England and France responded to this by declaring war on Germany. As a result of the German "blitzkrieg" ("lightning war"), Poland was defeated within three weeks and was divided into three parts. The western part went to Hitler's Reich, the eastern part (with its large Jewish population) to the USSR, and the central part, with the cities of Warsaw, Lublin and Krakow, was turned into the German "Governor General" (a special region under the "general control" of Germany). All this pushed people to emigrate.
During 1933, 37 thousand Jews left Germany - approximately 7.5% of the total Jewish population. They went mainly to France, Switzerland and Holland, where there was also an economic crisis and unemployment and the influence of Nazi propaganda was felt. Many Jews continued to maintain patriotic feelings towards Germany, and this was one of the reasons for the relatively small emigration.
In March 1938, Hitler's Reich carried out the Anschluss, that is, the annexation of Austria to Germany. The 200 thousand Austrian Jews were immediately subjected to all the restrictions from which their German brethren had already suffered. The Nazi Party entrusted Adolf Eichmann with carrying out the "emigration" of Austria's Jewish population. The property of Austrian Jews was very quickly confiscated. A significant number of Jews left Austria as a result of pressure.
After the annexation of Austria, the Western European and American public became convinced that the problem of refugees, primarily Jewish refugees, would become increasingly worse. A plan was developed, thanks to which it was possible to place about 7,500 Jewish children in England and 3,500 children in other Western European countries. A similar measure in the United States did not receive public support and was removed from the agenda. It should be noted that great powers and small countries turned their backs on the persecuted Jews with equal indifference.
Since the Nazi occupation, a wave of arrests and pogroms began in Poland. Thousands of Jews were sent to forced labor, where they endured all kinds of torture and humiliation. Jews were ordered to wear a white or yellow band with the "shield of David" ("Magen David"). Jewish shops and stores were closed, and ghetto residents were forbidden to walk the streets after curfew or ride trains. Within a few weeks, Polish Jews found themselves in the same position as German Jews. Soon their situation became even worse. At the end of 1939, it was announced that all Polish Jews were obliged to move to the ghetto - quarters designated for their forced settlement. The first ghetto was established in Lodz in February 1940; Warsaw ghetto - in November 1940; in 1941, ghettos were established in many other Polish cities. Most of them were surrounded by a blank wall. At first, the Germans issued numerous permits to leave and enter the ghetto, but from October 1941, all Jews found in the city outside the ghetto were legally subject to the death penalty. At the end of the same year, the jurisdiction of Jews in ordinary courts was abolished and they were left completely at the mercy of the Gestapo. Jews were effectively outlawed.
Only the smuggling of food into the ghetto saved many from starvation. Inside the ghetto, the Jews created a semblance of community life and, as far as possible, took care of providing those in need with work, food, housing and medical services. Cultural life also existed in certain forms in the ghetto.
German authorities organized councils of Jewish elders in the ghetto. - "Judenrat". Through the Judenrat, the Germans transmitted their orders and instructions to the inhabitants of the ghetto. Members of the Judenrat often tried in various ways to make the lives of their fellow tribesmen easier. In the most difficult conditions of the ghetto, their inhabitants decided to save their lives at all costs, because they saw this as a great goal - to stay alive for the sake of preserving the existence of their people on earth. To reassure the public, the German government. To reassure the public, the German government created a special plan:
Perhaps Terezin is famous to few in the history of the Czech Republic, and it would not have entered the history of European Jews at all if not for the German fascists: in 1941 they chose it as a place to implement one of the most sophisticated ideas in its cruelty. Theresienstadt, as they changed the Czech name into German, became one of the most tragic places in the history of the Holocaust. The Nazis set up a transit ghetto camp here, where they brought Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia, Moravia and other European countries. Hitler's ideologists conceived the idea of creating a “demonstration” camp. And the Terezin ghetto was truly unlike any other institutions of this kind. On the instructions of Eichmann, who personally supervised it, it was endowed with all the external attributes of a “free Jewish city.” “Jewish self-government” (council of elders), Jewish and Christian worship, hospitals, post office, court, libraries, bank, theater, cabaret, lecture activities... Theater was especially important! It was necessary to professionally direct this “Jewish performance” in order to demonstrate to the whole world that the Fuhrer is a great humanist and cares about Jews. Especially for them, in a picturesque place 60 kilometers from Prague, so beloved and significant in the history of Jews, a city was created where they can not only work, study, pray to God, but also realize their talents!..
By special order of Eichmann, prominent artists were brought to Terezin: artists, musicians, directors, actors, writers. With their help, the Germans made propaganda films in which Jewish actors and especially children with happy faces sang songs, acted out skits, and created the appearance of well-being, which was able to convince the envoys of the International Red Cross: yes, Hitler cares about the Jews!...
Those who refused to participate in filming were immediately sent to Auschwitz.
Then the incredible happened in Terezin: the love of art, on the verge of death, united the prisoners and accumulated in them enormous creative forces that were not subject to fear. People lived last years, hours, days at the peak of creative perfection. In fact, they played their roles not so much in front of people as in the face of Heaven. And they didn’t cry, but laughed!
From the Terezin cabaret: “The fortress of defensive importance was always ready to repel the enemy, but no one encroached on it. Except for the Jews. They managed to take it by storm. But how can you get your troops out of here?..”
Such powerful creative Jewish life on a tiny piece of land has probably never existed anywhere. From 1941 to 1945, over 600 performances were performed, more than 100 pieces of music were written, thousands of drawings and paintings were created, hundreds of pages of children's illustrated magazines and adult humorous magazines were published, 1000-page diaries were written, a chronicle of events and thoughts was captured, hundreds of articles, read more 2500 lectures.. People indulged in art so much that they forgot where they were. Some prisoners said:
“The theater replaced real life for us, it became the measure of the highest freedom that we could achieve,” Jan Fischer 3, actor in Terezin, director.
“If an actor didn’t show up for rehearsal, consider him no more. But everything we did, we stubbornly connected with some happy future... In Terezin it was impossible to write a tragic play and stage it.” - Ludek Elias 4, actor in Terezine, director.
Back at the end of March 1944, when thousands of Terezin prisoners had already been sent to the ovens of Auschwitz and Majdanek, Gogol’s “The Marriage” was staged on the city’s theater stage in its music cafe in the most talented, according to the memories of Terezin prisoners, production by Gustav Schorsch.
The Red Cross visitors arrived in Terezin much later than expected (at the end of July 1944), and the Nazis were well prepared: tens of thousands of prisoners were sent to Auschwitz; the issue of overpopulation of the city was resolved.
Preparations for the meeting of the commission followed all the rules of the totalitarian regime. Rehearsals for future meetings were worked out in the same way as was done during the preparation of trials in the USSR in 1937. That is, the details of the behavior of the “actors” and “extras” were carefully worked out for the meeting with the commission. In the spring of 1944, flower beds were laid out in the city, new cafes were opened - heavenly life!
Of course, with this preparation it was not difficult to create a promotional film “ New life Jews under the protection of the Third Reich.” This film played an ominous role in the history of the Holocaust: how was it possible to prove that the “chronicle” was staged? Spectators looked at smiling people - from children to old people, listened to music performed by wonderful musicians, saw exhibitions of children's drawings, and posters for theatrical productions.
How could the viewers of “New Life of the Jews” - Red Cross inspectors - know about the true rules of life in the Terezin ghetto? For example, that Jews were forbidden to contact SS guards or gendarmes in general for anything; an attempt to leave the camp or escape was punishable by execution on the spot. The prisoners were divided by gender: boys up to the age of 12 lived with their mothers, after 12 they moved to their father. Family life was out of the question. Men were sometimes allowed to enter the women’s camp, but first they had to obtain special permission from the commandant... Just look at one clause of the ghetto charter: “Free swimming is strictly prohibited.” Not to mention walking from barracks to barracks. A little historical background.
In the 16th century, Terezin was a place of defensive importance: there was a fortress intended to protect the borders of the Habsburg Empire, and before the creation of a ghetto on this site there was no city - only a fortress, on the territory of which there were many barracks. History owes the fact that the city appeared here Nazis!..
Anticipating defeat and retribution, in April-May 1945 the Nazis tried to cover their tracks. As in other camps, they killed prisoners and burned documents. Of the 150 thousand Jews of the Terezin ghetto, only a fifth survived. And from the 620 performances played there, that’s two and a half minutes of film.
Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was founded in the spring of 1940. There were from 25 to 30 thousand Jews from many European countries there at the same time. There were eight cremation ovens at Auschwitz. But since 1944 this quantity has become insufficient. The SS forced the prisoners to dig collas ditches, into which they set fire to brushwood doused with gasoline. The corpses were thrown into these ditches. And if there was not enough gas for suffocation, then the people were burned alive. People were brought here continuously for four years. The first transport arrived in Auschwitz in March-April 1942 from Slovakia, then from France. Thus, from March 27, 1942 to September 11, 1944, 69 large and two smaller trains arrived from France alone, containing about 69 thousand people, including 7.4 thousand children. But in those years there were trains from other countries. On some days, 8-10 trainloads of prisoners arrived. All those who could not work, women, old people, children, and the sick, were separated from healthy men and destroyed immediately. Here are some quotes on this topic from the book of the famous Polish researcher Helena Kubka 7 “Children and Youth in the Auschwitz concentration camp: “The fate of children and youth in the Auschwitz concentration camp was especially tragic. Children were taken from their mothers and killed in front of them using the most insidious methods - a blow to the head, throwing them into a burning pit. This sadism was accompanied by the terrible screams of the still living parents.” Those able to work were sent to separate barracks in the southern part of the camp. German soldiers stood on both sides of the road, beating everyone with whips and ramrods, often to death. In the barracks, the prisoners were stripped, then they were gassed in special cells, and the corpses were burned in crematoriums. Those left alive were used as free labor in mines and synthetic fuel factories. The prisoners were fed very poorly: once a day, water soup and 150-200 grams of bread. From overwork and hunger, people became weak and died. Three times a week, a doctor examined the prisoners, and those unable to work were sent to the gas chambers. In the last two years, male prisoners have also been exterminated. 90 percent of those killed in Auschwitz were Jews. Based on the total number of transport vehicles and the number of carriages in the trains, it can be calculated that 1.3-1.5 million children brought from different European countries died in Auschwitz alone.
In total, about 3.5 million Jews were killed in death camps during the war. About 1.5 million were shot by “operational detachments.” About a million Jews died in ghettos, during deportations, in train cars and in transit camps (on the way to concentration camps) as a result of epidemics, famine and all kinds of torture, as well as during non-stop “death marches” in the period before the end of the war. In addition to concentration camps, mass executions were organized.
After the German attack on the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941), the systematic and consistent extermination of the Jewish people began. The Nazis created four special groups ("Einsatzgruppen") whose task was to exterminate "commissars, Jews and gypsies." The activities of these detachments were organized according to a certain pattern: upon entering a city or town, they immediately established, with the help of local residents, the names of rabbis and the most famous members of the Jewish community and demanded that they gather the entire Jewish population for registration and sending to the “Jewish district” ". The Jews, unaware of the true intentions of the Nazis, obeyed the orders of the occupiers. They were driven behind barbed wire into a ghetto.
A document of those years, published in the small Ukrainian town of Bar, Vinnytsia region, gives an idea of what the Jews were experiencing then.
Decree No. 21
P. 1. Jewish population of the Barsky district since December 20 this year. The city is located in isolated places (ghettos) in the cities of Bar and Yaltushkovo.
Clause 2. The Jewish population of these settlements must move to the ghetto by December 20.
P. 3. The Jewish population of the city of Bar is located in the following parts of the city: ghetto No. 1 - former Sholem Aleichem Street, the location of the former old synagogue; ghetto No. 2 - former 8 March street, Komsomolskaya and Kooperativnaya; Ghetto No. 3 is part of the former 8 March Street, which is adjacent to the stadium.
Note: Ghetto No. 3 is inhabited exclusively by artisans according to a list that will be announced through the Jewish council.
P. 4. The ghetto for the Jewish population of the city of Yaltushkovo will be designated by the village council of the city.
P. 5. In connection with the relocation to the ghetto, the entire Jewish population is prohibited from destroying their homes, which they leave behind.
Clause 6. The Ukrainian population who lives in areas designated as a ghetto must vacate their premises and report to the housing department of the district government to obtain other premises.
P. 7. I order the Housing Department to register all premises that will be vacated by the Jewish population.
Clause 8. The security authorities of the city of Bar are responsible for organizing the above event.
The shootings began. The SS took the Jews out of the city and killed them without exception - men, women and children. In some places, Jews were drowned at sea or poisoned with poisonous gases in special vehicles (gas chambers).
Here are just some of the events of those terrible years:
One of the most shocking murders took place in September 1941 at Babi Yar near the city of Kyiv - more than 33,700 Jews were killed there by the Germans in one day. In total, more than 250 thousand Jews were killed at Babi Yar during the years of occupation.
During the occupation in the Nikolaev region, executions were carried out in 19 populated areas and a total of 94,500 people were killed.
In Donetsk, in the pit of the 4-4bis mine, 25 thousand Jewish men, women and children who were shot here found their final refuge. In the city of Artemovsk, more than 3,000 Jews were walled up alive in alabaster workings.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews were exterminated before the end of this year in Dnepropetrovsk, Riga, Vilnius, Minsk and other cities.
In Belarus, which lost a quarter of its population during the war, the Nazis killed more than 800 thousand Jews.
In March 1942, “death camps” began operating, and the Nazis demanded that the Juden Rath allocate people to be sent to these camps. The Judenrat had to submit, although some of their members committed suicide in protest. Under the cruel supervision of German overseers, people doomed to death were herded to assembly points. The agony of the ghettoized Jewish population of Eastern Europe began.
The decision to exterminate all Jews was made by Nazi leaders back in 1941. And on January 20, 1942, a meeting of a number of leaders of the Nazi party and members of the German government apparatus was held in Berlin, at which a detailed plan for the extermination of European Jewry was developed, according to which the Nazis intended to destroy 11 million Jews. This meeting is known in history as the Wannsee Conference. The Nazi leaders urged the SS* and the Gestapo to speed up the process of extermination.
The deportation of Jews from the Reich and European countries enslaved by Germany to death camps began. The largest of them were located on the territory of Poland - Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Auschwitz.
The Nazi “final solution to the Jewish question” is an unprecedented phenomenon, having no analogues even in the darkest eras of world history.
RESISTANCE AND HEROISM OF THE JEWS DURING THE CATastrophe.
Armed resistance to the Nazi authorities was
almost impossible. Firstly, the Jews did not have weapons, and secondly, any attempt at resistance would lead to massacres and the most brutal reprisals.
However, from the early days of the ghetto, various groups of Jewish youth made repeated attempts to create underground organizations to fight the police and German authorities. The largest in the history of Jewish resistance during the Second World War was the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Part 1
Uprising in the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos .
In January 1943, out of 450 thousand Jews driven into the Warsaw ghetto, about 55 thousand remained. For several years, the unfortunates were sent from the ghetto to death camps - Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz, where they were exterminated in gas chambers. At the end of 1942, at the height of the mass deportation of Jews, youth movements created a number of militant organizations in the ghetto. These organizations launched an uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.
The first clash between Jews and Nazis occurred on January 18, 1943, when one of the groups subject to deportation opened fire on the guards and attempted to escape. After this, the Germans carried out urgent searches, to which the Jews responded with armed resistance. At the same time, the Judenrat stopped collaborating with the Germans. Then the Germans decided to completely liquidate the ghetto.
The uprising broke out on April 19, 1943, when German soldiers entered the ghetto to send another batch of Jews to be exterminated. They were met by rifle and machine gun fire. The Germans, who did not expect any resistance, rushed to cover. The battle lasted three days. On the fourth day of fierce resistance, the Germans were forced to retreat. They could not understand where the Jews got their weapons? And it accumulated gradually: through cunning, bribery and outright theft. Weapons had to be bought in Warsaw at exorbitant prices and carried into the ghetto at incredible risk. The Warsaw ghetto became a system of fortified bunkers and underground shelters, prepared in advance over a number of months. A supply of food and water, medicine and weapons was stored there. The entire civilian population, hidden in bunkers, helped 750 Jewish rebels led by Mordechai Anielewicz (1919-1943).
The suppression of resistance in the Warsaw ghetto was entrusted to General Jürgen Stroop, who even used artillery against the rebels. The uprising lasted a month and a half. German artillery swept away house after house, block after block. The ghetto was bombed from the air and attacked by tanks. But the Jews held out. Jewish boys threw Molotov cocktails under the tanks, men from the attics of surviving houses machine-gunned the SS units storming the ghetto. But the forces were unequal. In vain did the organizers of the uprising appeal to the Poles for help; no one helped them. And the ghetto fell...
Almost all the defenders of the ghetto died in battle, many were burned in bunkers. Of the 55,000 inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto, about 5,000 survived the uprising. None of the rebels had any hope of holding out in the besieged ghetto, but their feat acquired the deepest symbolic meaning for the remaining Polish Jews and for the Jewish people throughout the world.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which lasted about a month - from April 19 to May 16, 1943, is an amazing example of heroism. This uprising is distinguished by two features: the support that the majority of the ghetto residents provided to the rebels and the determination of the rebels themselves to fight to the last drop of blood. The ghetto defenders resisted longer than even some European countries.
During this period, there were uprisings and other acts of resistance in the ghettos of Bialystok, Vilna, Minsk and others.
By the time the occupation began, the Jewish population in the Bialystok region was 350,000 people, of which in Bialystok itself there were about 50,000..
Immediately after the capture of the city, the Germans began to pursue a policy of terror and mass murder against the Jews. The second day of the invaders' stay in the city, June 28, 1941, it was Saturday, was marked by a pogrom in which about 2,000 Jews were killed, many of them burned alive in the old synagogue set on fire by the Germans. On Thursday, July 3, and the following Saturday, July 12, raids were carried out in the city, the Jews captured then were later shot in Pietrasz, on the outskirts of Bialystok. There were more than 5,000 of them. The wives whose husbands died on those Sabbath days were also called “widows of the Sabbath.”
On August 1, 1941, all the Jews of the city were herded into a ghetto, which was soon transformed into a huge labor colony. The evidence of impending death was mixed with the hope of salvation so common to people. While still alive, they continued to dream of a peaceful life, a warm home, and bread. Meanwhile, the Nazis were preparing to destroy the ghetto.
In 1942, 28 young activists of the Zionist-socialist movements “Dror” and “Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair” arrived in Bialystok from blood-drenched Vilnius to create a Jewish underground and a combat-ready organization. The leader of the group was a 25-year-old Jew from Warsaw, Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamarov. Mordechai came to Vilnius at the beginning of the war and became one of the leaders of the Dror and HaHalutz movements there.
A handful of activists managed to create a large and powerful Tel-Hai organization in the city.
An underground “Group for Combating the German Occupation” was created. She managed to contact a partisan detachment operating in the forests.
The supply of weapons for the ghetto was organized. The main source of weapons was smuggling. Weapons were bought from peasants in the surrounding villages, and sometimes even from the Germans. Dressed as peasant women or workers, underground girls transported purchased weapons in loaves of bread, baskets of food, and pipes from bourgeois stoves. Through the courtyard of the weaving factory, adjacent to the “Aryan” part of the city, or through the gate to the street. Sheinkevich, they carried weapons into the ghetto, exposing themselves to mortal danger. Sometimes it was possible to accomplish the impossible: ghetto messengers robbed the Germans in broad daylight in an area staffed with guards.
In July 1943, about a month before the start of the uprising, the process of uniting youth movements ended. The communists agreed to unite with the Zionists only in the ghetto, for the duration of the joint struggle. At the end of the uprising, in the forests, in partisan detachments, they preferred to act separately.
In preparation for the uprising, they adhered to strict secrecy; commanders used codes and ciphers. The basis of the combat groups were the “fives” - five trained fighters led by a commander.
On August 15, 1943, at 4 o'clock in the morning, the Germans posted a notice on the walls of the ghetto houses that its residents were obliged to report to the street by 9 o'clock. Yurowiecka, from where everyone will be evacuated to Lublin. At 8 o'clock, underground fighters on the streets tried to convince people that the promised relocation would result in the death of the entire ghetto. People refused to believe it. By 2 o'clock in the afternoon, many fighters had been killed in the battle with the Germans. Ammunition was running out. 72 fighters, few of the survivors, took refuge in a bunker in the courtyard of house No. 7 on the street. Khmilna. On August 19, the Germans discovered a bunker, and on August 20 - another, last shelter on the street. Chepla, 13. All the defenders of the ghetto, along with their commanders, died.
There are known cases of uprisings even in death camps. At the end of 1943, Jewish uprisings took place in Treblinka and Sobibor. After this, both camps were liquidated. In 1944, Jewish prisoners in Birkenau and Auschwitz rebelled. Almost none of the rebels survived.
In the towns of Ukraine and Belarus, some Jews managed to escape from the ghettos and joined the partisans fighting against the Germans. About 30 thousand Jewish partisans fought in Soviet partisan detachments
Often people lived in the ghetto for 2-3 years. This was a life contrary to the Nazis’ desire not only to physically destroy the Jews, but also to humiliate them. However, the prisoners fought not only to prolong their days, but also for human dignity. Many kept diaries, wrote letters and poems, composed music... The spiritual protest filled with nobility amazed even the executioners. Many Jews helped each other, who gave food, and some replaced their parents for orphans, and I will tell you about one of these people:
Part 2
JANUSZ KORCZAK
He is known to the world as Janusz Korczak, although at birth in 1878 in Warsaw he received the name Heinrich Goldschmidt. A doctor, writer and teacher, he became a teacher in a children's colony. His pets were able to experience the delights of living nature and feel unity with it. The Orphanage and Our Home were created in Poland, where chauvinism flourished, but despite this, Korczak’s children’s republics existed during his lifetime for a quarter of a century.
War... It rolled inexorably across Europe, sweeping Poland
and, of course, did not pass through the shelter of J. Korczak. The orphanage was transferred to the ghetto. The doctor's devoted teachers and associates remained with the children.
But the children lived as before, hoping for their protection from adults. And it became increasingly difficult to hide my concern for the children, to maintain the usual routine of studying, doing art, etc. It was difficult. There was no food in the ghetto. “The old doctor” extracted what he could and how he could so that the children could exist. And only in his diary did he trust a clear understanding of the premonition of the end: “I would like to die, maintaining my presence of mind and in full consciousness. I don’t know what I would tell the children in the future.” farewell. I just wanted to say, “Choose your own path." He hoped that he would die alone, that the children would survive. Despite the surrounding evil, they would carry the seeds of goodness and nobility he had sown into the depths of the century. Alas, the barbarism and misanthropy of the fascists has passed all the way crazy borders. They encroached on the holy of holies - the lives of children, they encroached on the Future.
They tried to help Janusz Korczak. “They rented a room for him in Belany, prepared documents,” says Korczak’s employee Igor Neversh 5. “Korchak could leave the ghetto at any minute, at least with me, when I came to him, having a pass for two persons - a technician and a plumbing mechanic. sewer network. Korczak looked at me so that I shrank. It was clear that he did not expect such a proposal from me... The meaning of the doctor's answer was this: you cannot abandon your child to misfortune, illness, danger. And here are two hundred children. "How can you leave them alone in a gas chamber? And is it possible to survive all this?"
On August 5, 1942, by order of the Nazis, the Orphanage was built on the street. Emanuel Ringelblum, who was subsequently tortured by the Nazis, led the underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto. His story was preserved in the archive: “We were told that they were running a nursing school, pharmacies, and Korczak’s orphanage. It was terribly hot. I sat the children from boarding schools at the very end of the square, against the wall. I hoped that today they would be saved... Suddenly an order came to withdraw the boarding school. No, I will never forget this sight! This was not an ordinary march to the carriages, it was an organized silent protest against banditry!.. A procession began that had never happened before. Children lined up in fours. At their head was Korczak, his eyes directed forward, holding two children by the hands. Even the auxiliary police stood at attention and saluted. When the Germans saw Korczak, they asked: "Who is this man?" I couldn’t stand it any longer - tears poured out of my eyes, and I covered my face with my hands.”
There is a legend that the commandant, who was sending a death train to Treblinka, seeing on the Unschlagplatz an orphanage built in a clear square with a banner and leadership at the head, asked the director if he had written a good book, known to him since childhood. Having received an affirmative answer, he said: “You can stay, doctor...” J. Korczak refused. I don't believe in this legend. I don’t believe it, first of all, because a person who read J. Korczak could not and cannot become a child killer, cannot assist the fascists. And what is the life of one, even from their point of view, outstanding person for murderers of such magnitude!.. Janusz Korczak died in the terrible gas chambers of Treblinka along with his pets.
His books remain, his pedagogical works remain. There remains a feat that cannot be forgotten.
Vilnius, a city called the Jerusalem of Lithuania, was the center of the glorious humanistic traditions of Jewish medicine for many decades before the outbreak of World War II.
During the occupation, a ghetto was created in the city.
As long as the ghetto existed, there was a continuous battle to preserve, albeit briefly, the life and health of its inhabitants. The battle was fought by doctors and nurses - prisoners of the ghetto, themselves doomed to destruction.
Researchers now call this type of resistance “medical.” What was the medical resistance in the Vilnius ghetto? The Jewish hospital continued to operate under incredibly difficult conditions. Ghetto doctors provided the patients with the maximum possible care. The main thing was that it was necessary to prevent the spread of mass diseases. The ghetto doctors were aware of this.
Besides the occupiers themselves, the most dangerous enemies of the ghetto inhabitants were incredible overcrowding, dirt, hunger, poverty, and the threat of the spread of infections.
The ghetto prisoners themselves, at every hour the risk of becoming victims of another Nazi action, the ghetto doctors fought highly professionally and selflessly to preserve, or rather save, the lives of Jews.
A sanitary-epidemiological service for the ghetto was organized. The diary of Dr. Mark Dvorzhetsky testifies to the main directions of the doctors’ struggle to maintain the health of the ghetto inhabitants.
It was very important to provide people with good quality drinking water. For this purpose, boiling water points (teahouses) were installed in various places in the ghetto. Their importance is difficult to overestimate. The epidemiological situation in Vilnius was difficult. In the late spring and early summer of 1941, a large water epidemic of typhoid fever and dysentery spread in the city. It was only possible to cope with it in the fall. And the great merit of the ghetto doctors is that they reduced the number of infections to isolated cases.
The fight against hunger required constant attention. In various ways, often at the risk of life, bread, potatoes, cabbage, and, with rare luck, horse meat were delivered to the ghetto in exchange for things, clothes. Wild herbs served as a source of vitamin C. On the initiative of Dr. M. Gershovich, vitamin B was produced from brewer's yeast waste.
First of all, measures to combat exhaustion, nutritional dystrophy, and vitamin deficiency concerned children. Through the efforts of Dr. Rosa Shabad-Gavronskaya, a children's canteen was opened. Children received an extra piece of bread, sweetened ersatz coffee, vegetable soups, sometimes with a piece of horse meat. Particular attention was paid to the most weakened people.
The consequence of incredible overcrowding was the spread of scabies ghettos. An anti-scabies station was opened on Shpitalnaya Street, where a nurse, under the guidance of dermatologist Liebe Holem, rubbed anti-scabies into patients, obtained with great difficulty. The patients' clothes and bedding were treated in a primitive disinfection chamber.
To raise the spirits and optimism of the ghetto inhabitants, and to combat despondency and hopelessness, medical and nursing rounds were regularly undertaken. Doctors went from house to house, from apartment to apartment, from room to room, convincing exhausted, hungry people to keep clean, to clean houses and courtyards, to look after trash cans and latrines in the courtyards.
Doctors were practically powerless in the fight against the growing cases of tuberculosis among adults and children. Overcoming incredible difficulties, experienced phthisiatrician Vladimir Pochter created an anti-tuberculosis isolation ward, where he treated and advised patients, and, if necessary, performed pneumothorax.
A common problem in the ghetto was lice. There was a threat of typhus epidemic, which meant real opportunity liquidation of the ghetto with all its inhabitants. With all determination, displaying high professionalism and ingenuity, the ghetto doctors fought the battle on this front. The battle against lice was led by epidemiologist Lazarus Epstein. His faithful assistants were doctors Goldburt, Bernstein, Gliksberg, Imenitova, Zeidler, Kolodner, Kosechevsky, Smushkovich, Dvorzhetsky. Nurses helped them.
Having divided the ghetto territory into sections, doctors during their rounds insisted that the population undergo sanitary treatment. On Rudninku Street, through the efforts of engineer Markus, a large sanitary checkpoint (a bathhouse and a dry-heat chamber) was built. In groups of 22 people, the ghetto residents washed themselves, and in the meantime their clothes were disinfected. The complete sanitization procedure for one group lasted an hour. The point was valid until late evening.
It should be noted the ingenuity of doctors who created unusual forms of struggle for the sanitary well-being of the ghetto. Dr. Epstein and his colleagues organized an "open trial of lice." The streets of the ghetto were covered with posters announcing this unique event. In the large hall of the ghetto, filled to capacity, Dr. Epstein spoke as an accuser of lice, which are carriers of the causative agent of typhus. The roles of experts in determining the epidemiological danger of lice to humans were performed by doctors Kolodner and Dvorzhetsky. Those who gathered for the “trial” unanimously supported the verdict: “Lice in the ghetto must be destroyed in the disinfection chamber.” Thanks to the dedicated work of doctors, a typhus epidemic was prevented.
Doctors' lectures on the prevention of infectious diseases were a great success among ghetto residents. Through the efforts of Noemi Gordon and Abram Pinchuk, the laundry that operated at the Jewish hospital was expanded. Now every inhabitant of the ghetto could use it.
For some time, three elementary schools, kindergartens, a gymnasium, religious schools, technical courses, and children's workshops operated. The health of children (to the extent available) and medical supervision were carried out by the school medical center under the leadership of Dr. Dvorzhetsky. At the beginning of the organization of the ghetto, about three thousand children were under the supervision of the center. The center was able to organize several children's parties, where children were treated to vitamin drinks. For the upcoming holidays, children prepared posters, drawings, and their own works. There was even a ballet "Your friends are a towel, a toothbrush, soap, and nail scissors." Dr. Finkelstein, among other things, was involved in the fight against the spread of childhood struma, not without success.
The activities of doctors in the Vilnius ghetto were varied. After many years, one never ceases to be amazed at their high moral spirit, nobility, and loyalty to serving their medical duty in the most difficult conditions of the ghetto.
They certainly deserved the right to remain in the tragic history of the Jewish people as heroes of medical resistance against the barbaric genocide carried out by the German occupiers.
The above material proves the courage and heroism of the Jews. It also talks about the exploits of people in relation to the Jewish people.
Chapter 5
SOVIET JEWRY IN THE YEARS OF THE CATastrophe.
During the years of the Holocaust, enormous disasters caused an upsurge of national feelings among the Jews of the Soviet Union. The war led to great changes in the life of Soviet Jewry. Some Soviet Jews came under Nazi rule and were almost completely exterminated. The other part fought in the Red Army. A significant number of Jews escaped death through evacuation and flight to unoccupied areas of the country.
Victory or death! For the Jews, this was not a propaganda slogan, but a constant internal motivation for military action. More than 500 thousand Jews fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. 205 thousand did not return from the war; they died in battle and from wounds. 160,772 Jewish soldiers were awarded orders and medals, 154 were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. More than 55 thousand Jewish partisans took part in the partisan movement alone, which waged an irreconcilable struggle against the Nazis in the territories they occupied.
Soviet military equipment became famous in the war: MIG, LAGG fighters, KV tanks, created by the creative genius of designers - Gurevich, S. Lavochkin, J. Kotik and others. Hundreds of thousands of Jews - men and women - under the motto "Everything for the front, everything for victory!" They worked selflessly in research institutes, military factories, front aid societies, hospitals and various national economic facilities. You can talk about this a lot and for a long time, but not within the limited space of a newspaper article. In conclusion, I would like to note once again: the Second World War and its heroic component - the Great Patriotic War - is a grandiose chapter in the history of many peoples, including the Jewish people, who survived not only the Holocaust, but also, together with all anti-fascists, smashed the hated enemy of all fronts of the great battle.
At the beginning of the war, the authorities of the Soviet Union began to encourage manifestations of Jewish solidarity, hoping that Western Jewry would support the USSR in its fight against Germany. On April 7, 1942, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed, which included prominent representatives of the Jewish intelligentsia, led by the world famous actor and director Solomon Mikhoels (1890-1948). The main task of this Committee was to organize assistance Soviet Union from foreign Jews; however, by the very fact of its existence, it also became the organ of Jewish social activity within the country.
The catastrophe awakened national feelings even in the assimilated circles of Soviet Jewry. Many Jews, who in the 1930s lost all connection with the life of their people, again felt their involvement in their destiny.
Chapter 6
Participation of the world community in the salvation of the Jewish people
Part 1
Righteous Among the Nations
Jews, doomed to complete extermination in ghettos and death camps, were looking for a way to salvation.
Those who decided to flee needed reliable shelter and documents. Much depended on the local population. Most people were indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbors and took the position of outside observers. The motives for this attitude were different: fear of Nazi reprisals, anti-Semitism, etc. In the occupied territories of the USSR, there was no organized assistance to Jews from the anti-fascist underground. There was not a single official appeal to underground organizations or the local population with calls to provide assistance to Jewish Soviet citizens who were victims of total extermination. However, throughout the occupied territories there were people and families who, on their own initiative, devoted themselves to saving Jews. They hid Jews hiding from extermination in their homes and their loved ones, supplied them with documents, and provided them with all kinds of assistance. The family of priest Glagolev in Kyiv helped save many Jews, hiding Jewish families at home and in villages with friends. Dozens of Jews were taken out of the Riga ghetto and safely hidden by loader Jan Lipke. In honor of such noble and selfless people, trees were planted in the alleys of Yad Vashem, the museum-monument to the victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem. The data on the saviors is very incomplete. In my work I will talk about one of them.
Part 2
The feat of Raoul Wallenberg. His destiny.
The most famous person who helped Jews during the Holocaust was Raoul Wallenberg. He is credited with saving the lives of twenty to one hundred thousand Jews.
The Wallenbergs are one of the richest families in Sweden, the "Rockefellers of Sweden." In July 1944, Wallenberg was sent to Hungary as a diplomat; he was entrusted with the mission of helping 200 thousand Jews remaining in Budapest; By that time, 437 thousand Jews had already been taken to Auschwitz. Since Sweden was a neutral state, Wallenberg was allowed to travel throughout almost the entire country (he had diplomatic immunity). Although Hungarian Jews sheltering in the Swedish embassy in Budapest could count on their refuge, only a small number of people could fit there. Wallenberg therefore began purchasing houses in Budapest, which he then declared to be inviolable Swedish property, protected by international law. In a short time he created thirty-one such "sanctuaries", granting Swedish citizenship to thousands of Jews.
The Nazis and their Hungarian henchmen did not know what to do: they did not want to spoil relations with Sweden and at first did not interfere with Wallenberg. He acted fearlessly, stopping trains heading to concentration camps, removing Jews from there, and declaring them Swedish subjects under his diplomatic protection.
“Overburdened beyond measure,” wrote Wallenberg’s biographer John Bierman, 6 “and caring for the fate of thousands of people, Wallenberg at the same time found time for concrete manifestations of kindness. All hospitals were closed to Jews. When Wallenberg heard that Tibor Vandora’s wife , a young Jew who worked ... at the diplomatic mission on Tigris Street, was about to give birth, he hastily found a doctor and brought him with his young married couple to his apartment on Ostrom Street. There he gave his bed to Agnes, the future mother, and he settled down to sleep in the corridor."
IN last days, preceding the liberation of Budapest, Wallenberg, with the help of the Hungarians and the Jewish Council, managed to thwart the joint plan of the SS and the Hungarian Arrow Cross organization, which included blowing up the ghetto before the upcoming surrender of Budapest. As a result of this act - the only one of its kind in the history of the Holocaust - approximately one hundred thousand Jews who were in two ghettos were saved.
The threat to Wallenberg's life from enraged Nazis grew steadily. But ultimately he died at the hands of the communists. When control of Budapest fell into Soviet hands, Communist leaders decided that Wallenberg was an American spy (he did receive some money for his affairs from the US War Refugee Administration; this was the largest effort to help rescue Jews from the Nazis undertaken by America in end of the war). The Marxist worldview of the Soviet leadership did not allow one to imagine that a member of one of the richest Swedish families could risk his life to save Jews. Hardly in the entire history of mankind has anyone experienced greater injustice towards himself for his heroism than Wallenberg. He was arrested and sent to a Soviet prison. His fate is still unknown. The Swedish government was timid in front of the Soviet government and did not actively discuss the fate of Wallenberg, so as not to spoil relations with its Soviet neighbor.
At first it was assumed that Wallenberg was killed several years after his arrest in one of Stalin's camps. However, later, already in the 1960-1970s, reports began to come from released Soviet political prisoners about a prisoner who claimed that he was a former Swedish diplomat Wallenberg, who was involved in saving Jews in Hungary. The possibility that Wallenberg suffered in a Siberian camp for over 30 years is even more terrible than the thought that he was shot by Beria's executioners shortly after his arrest.
Wallenberg's most grateful followers - the Jews whom he saved - found themselves scattered all over the world after the end of the war, then having neither the means nor the political influence to use them in his interests. As time passed, more and more Jews occupied prominent positions in society and began to actively demand clarity about Wallenberg's fate. When Tom Lantosch, one of the people Wallenberg saved, was elected to the US House of Representatives from one of the California districts, he achieved the passage of a bill by which Raoul Wallenberg, the only person since Winston Churchill, was granted honorary US citizenship. Lantos hoped that this bill would give the US government more reason to actively investigate Wallenberg's fate.
Wallenberg is one of the greatest heroes of Jewish history, and his life serves as a powerful reminder that, despite a long history of anti-Semitism, Jews had extraordinary friends in the non-Jewish world
CONCLUSION
The further away the events of the Jewish Holocaust of 1933-1945 are from us, the more courage is required to remember the deaths of six million Jews and millions of other people killed because they were Gypsies or Slavs, dissidents or prisoners of war...
Understanding the Holocaust as a unique phenomenon, historians at the same time try to determine the role of the Jewish tragedy in the fate of humanity, to find out how such terrible atrocities could have been committed, what parallels can be seen with what happened in Germany in the mid-twentieth century and what is happening today.
When comprehending the tragic experience of the past, one must return in the footsteps of evil, realizing that the roots of the phenomenon that led to the Jewish Holocaust have not yet been uprooted. In most countries of the world, the Holocaust is perceived not only as a tragedy of Jews who died as a result of a carefully developed and carried out plan of mass extermination, but also as a warning.
That is why in many countries around the world the day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is celebrated as the Day of Remembrance of Jewish Victims of Nazism. That is why hundreds of Holocaust research centers have been created and museums operate.
In the civilized world, the theme of the Holocaust is universal: Jews are victims of a war in which the Nazis and their accomplices acted as executioners. The international community emphasizes the universal human aspects of the Holocaust. Indeed, today it is especially clearly visible that any other people can take the place of the Jews. And we need to learn lessons from the total propaganda of the Nazis, under the influence of which civilized Germans turned into conductors (or silent accomplices) of misanthropic ideas. In other words, the history of the Holocaust forces people to think about the consequences of racism and xenophobia, which is exactly how the Nazis started.
Most of the victims of fascism, for example, in Germany, were not followers of Judaism at all. Having long been assimilated, having almost forgotten about their roots, or even not knowing them at all, the Germans in culture and way of life, Catholics, Protestants and atheists were used as cannon fodder at the fronts and died in gas chambers just because there was at least something flowing in their veins. a drop of Jewish blood.
All sensible people understand that the “final solution to the Jewish question”, the complete extermination of the Jews according to Hitler, leads to the eradication of the foundations of all religions “infected” with “Jewish” ideas, to the collapse of a civilization incapable of progress without humanism.
Today, in many countries around the world there are memorials, museums, and research centers that set themselves the goal of perpetuating the memory of the victims of the Nazi genocide. A Holocaust research center has been created in our country, which studies the history of the catastrophe that befell the Jewish people half a century ago.
In my work, I talked about the main moments of the Holocaust (concentration camps, ghettos, resistance, the courage of people). While creating the work, I discovered many new things that I had not even suspected before. When searching for material, I gained the skill of working with literature, boarding schools and the media. I would like to continue working on this essay and greatly expand the main part.
I would like my work to evoke sympathy for the affected people and respect for the people who managed to achieve this Great Victory.
REFERENCE DEVICE
1 Samuel Root, “On the Paths of Jewish History.” ed. Library-Aliya, 1991, 122 p.
2 Vladimir Poznansky “Everyone should know about the Holocaust”
in the magazine “Lechaim” No. 1 2001 p. 12
3 Internet site www.HOLOCAUST.ru
4 Internet site www.HOLOCAUST.ru p.45
6 Internet site www.HOLOCAUST.ru p.24
7 Helena Cup “Children and Youth in Auschwitz” on the Internet site www.HOLOCAUST.ru
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2Velikovskaya Irina “Chronicle of the Bialystok Ghetto” in the magazine “Lechaim”
3Vestermanis Marger “Motives of Jewish identity in the poetry of the Holocaust in Latvia” in the magazine “Lechaim” No. 5 May 2000
4Vladimir Poznansky “Everyone should know about the Holocaust”” in the magazine “Lechaim” No. 1 January 2001
7Zak Mikhail “Medical resistance of the Vilnius ghetto” in
9 S.M. Lokshina “Dictionary of Foreign Words” “Soviet Encyclopedia” Moscow 1968
10 Ruth Samuels, “On the Paths of Jewish History,” ed. Library –Aliya 1991
11 Internet site www.HOLOCAUST.ru
13 Helena Cups “Children and youth in the Auschwitz concentration camp” on the Internet site www.HOLOCAUST.ru
TERMINOLOGICAL DICTIONARY:
Antisemitism- one of the extreme forms of racial chauvinism, inciting hostility towards Jews.
Genocide- the destruction of certain groups of the population on racial and national grounds is a grave crime against humanity.
Ghetto- a quarter, an area of the city set aside for the forced settlement of people of a certain race, nationality, or religion, most often created for Jews.
Gestapo- the secret state police in Nazi Germany carried out mass terror, both in Germany itself and in the countries occupied by the Nazis.
Xenophobia- obsessive fear of an unfamiliar face.
Concentration camp-created after the establishment of the dictatorship in Germany (1933) with the aim of isolating and suppressing opponents of the fascist regime. In 1938-39, the K.l. system was spread in the occupied territories and turned into an instrument of repression and genocide against Jews.
Nazism- German fascism
SS- “security detachments”, one of the main pillars of the fascist regime. This organization existed independently since 1934 and was the main conductor of mass terror in Germany and the occupied territories.
Totalitarian regime- based on the open terrorist dictatorship of the imperialists, fascist.
Fascism- the most reactionary political movement, expressing the interests of the most aggressive circles of the imperialist bourgeoisie, the openly terrorist dictatorship of monopoly capital, fascism, fascists - are characterized by extreme chauvinism, racism, anti-communism, the destruction of democratic freedoms, the outbreak of wars of conquest.
Holocaust(burnt offering) - the policy pursued by Germany towards the Jewish people in 1933-1945
Chauvinism- an extremely aggressive form of nationalism.
Bill- bill.
Chronology of events:
To be honest, Jürgen Graf’s book made me take a slightly different look at the Nuremberg trials and the attitude towards the Second World War, but I am generally silent about the attitude towards the Holocaust. Israel is still the main opponent of official recognition of the Holodomor - after Russia, naturally, as well as recognition of the Armenian genocide, and the question is - why? Well, everything is clear with Russia; in fact, it fears that claims may be made against it, as the legal successor of the USSR, and possibly a demand for compensation. These fears are justified only if Russia really considers itself not just a successor, but a continuator of the Soviet state: then it will really have to not only use the achievements of the USSR, but also take responsibility for the crimes of the Soviet regime. But with Israel the situation is a little more complicated.
Well, let’s first define the term genocide:
Genocide is an action aimed at the complete or partial destruction of a national, ethnic or religious group by killing members of this group, causing serious harm to their health, forcible relocation, or otherwise creating living conditions calculated to lead to the physical destruction of members of this group (Large Legal Dictionary / Under edited by A.Ya. Sukharev, V.E. Krutskikh - 2nd ed., revised and supplemented - M.: INFRA-M, 2000, p. 115).
First of all, by recognizing the genocide of another people, Israel is afraid that the Holocaust will no longer be perceived as a unique phenomenon. But the entire Jewish statehood, and the state itself, arose thanks to the Holocaust. Somehow unexpectedly, after its creation, a law appears in many countries that punishes the mere doubt in the existence of the Holocaust. Those. a person may openly not believe in the existence of God, in the fact that the earth is round, and in absolutely everything except the unique genocide of the Jews, for the mere doubt of which he is immediately punished by a harsh law.
Immediately after the war, the Allies began to churn out hundreds and thousands of works, memoirs, textbooks, describing more and more crimes of the Germans. Although there are many incidents. The International Red Cross visited Auschwitz on inspection in October 1944 and did not find any gas chambers there. In general, according to various estimates, during the entire Second World War, 300-500 thousand people died in Nazi concentration camps, and not all of them were Jews. And people died mainly from epidemics - in particular, from typhus. Say, when a tourist arrives in Dachau, he can also see the gas chamber, but he will be told that it was never in operation. According to official data, its construction was begun by the Germans in 1942, but was never completed. What a cruel blow to the legend of German industriousness, and this despite the fact that there was an acute shortage of gas chambers and crematoria. There are many other incidents, the author calculated that it took only 63 seconds to burn a corpse using the number of all the ovens in the concentration camps, in relation to the number of declared exterminated Jews, with round-the-clock continuous work. By comparison, a modern computerized crematorium burns in more than two hours.
To avoid hokhlosrach, I want to immediately indicate who published the book: MOSCOW, “RUSSKY VESTNIK” 1996.
Well, actually to the literature itself. The book by the representative of the revisionist school of historians, the Swiss scientist Jürgen Graf, is not the first among works on this topic, but it is the most concise and at the same time the most informative - a kind of summary of the entire problem. The revisionist school of historians includes scientists who, based on the analysis of documents and “evidence” of eyewitnesses, cast doubt on claims about the “Holocaust” - the extermination of 6 million Jews by Hitler’s Nazis. The author shows that with the help of the myth of the “Holocaust” the world behind the scenes is trying to impose on world public opinion the idea that the Jewish people suffered more than all others during the war, therefore other peoples are obliged to feel guilty, repent and pay compensation. The author comes to the conclusion that about 500 thousand Jews died under German rule. Exposing the "Holocaust" lie could have devastating consequences not only for Zionism, but also for the political and intellectual ruling caste of the world.
To burn a human corpse in a crematorium oven until ashes form, it takes not 20-30 minutes, but at least 1.5 hours. And in the open air, it takes even longer for a corpse to be completely burned. (In Moscow there are 3 state and 1 hour crematoriums. Mitinsky and Khovansky have 4 furnaces each, Nikolo-Arkhangelsky - 14 and the private JSC Gorbrus - 2 furnaces. With modern corpse burning technology, the burning time of 1 corpse is 1.5 hours. When continuous operation of 24 furnaces per day should burn 252 corpses. But the furnaces are stopped to remove the ashes (in the muffle furnace, the ash from the fuel and the ashes of burnt bodies are separated) and preventive repairs. Total: all 4 crematria in Moscow burn about 200 corpses per day, i.e. - 6,000 corpses. This figure refutes the claim that 279,000 corpses were burned monthly in Auschwitz.)
1. “Witness” Miklos Nyisli claims that in Auschwitz 20 thousand people were gassed every day, and another 5-6 thousand were shot or even burned alive in the crematorium. That is, for each muffle furnace there were 435 corpses per day.
2. None of the direct participants in the extermination of people during the Nuremberg trials was interrogated. From this we can conclude that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz.
3. There is no article on the Holocaust in the Concise Jewish Encyclopedia, but there are articles on several German concentration camps that provide some insight into the Jewish victims. For example, an article about Majdanek states that “only in 1942-43. Over 130 thousand Jews were deported to Majdanek. Prisoners were used for various jobs. By November 1943, 37 thousand people died from overwork. The rest were liberated by the Red Army in 1944.”
Here Jewish propagandists, contradicting themselves, are forced to admit two indisputable facts. The first is that people in the camp were not killed or gassed, but “they were used in various jobs and they died from overwork.” The second is that almost 100 thousand Jews were not exterminated, but liberated by the Red Army.
4. To convince the reader that Robinson’s data is correct, the article “Disaster” makes reference to the verdict of the Nuremberg International Tribunal, which allegedly noted that “according to A. Eichmann’s calculation, the Germans killed 6 million Jews.” Here, in general, it is obvious nonsense, because Eichmann did not make any calculations, and he himself was not at the Nuremberg trials. He was caught and executed in Israel 15 years after the war.
5. Jewish journalists, screaming about the 6 million victims of the Holocaust, deliberately hush up the fact that in German concentration camps there were detailed camp files indicating the names of prisoners. From them it turned out to be possible to determine the total number of victims, down to one person. In Buchenwald this figure was 51,572 people.
In the encyclopedia “The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.” The article on Buchenwald provides additional information:
“Prisoner labor was used in mines and industrial plants, especially at the large military enterprise Gustloverke.”
The Germans did not separate prisoners based on nationality, which was confirmed by a British parliamentary commission.
In the Auschwitz article: “In the period until the end of December 1942, according to reliable information and testimony, the victims included 85 thousand Poles, 52 thousand Jews from Poland and other countries, 26 thousand Russian prisoners of war.” Next, it is reported in what conditions the prisoners were, how much food they were given, and at the end, without any reference to documents (and in Auschwitz, like other camps, there were books recording all prisoners arriving at the camp), a stunning conclusion is made: “... Thus, 5 million human beings were killed in Auschwitz.” What kind of “reliable information” this is, what kind of human beings these are (possibly goyim?) and why the number of victims was limited to December 1942 is unknown. It is not said how many of these “human beings” were Jews. Even common sense told the Germans why, having such an amount of cheap labor, they should destroy it. Government orders ordering the mass extermination of Jews. The Nuremberg Tribunal did not record it.
Majdanek: “In 1940, the Germans set up a concentration camp in Majdanek, near Ljubljana, in which 1.5 million people of various nationalities, mainly Poles and Jews, were imprisoned for 4 years.” And then the absolutely incredible follows: “1.7 million human beings were killed in Majdanek.” It is unknown how many Jews there are among them.
6. All documents considered by the court of the international tribunal were assigned a number. It is not on this document. When reading this “report”, many questions arise. Why is it placed not in the 3rd volume, where documents about the atrocities of the Germans are collected, but in the 2nd? If this is a “report,” then who made it, when and where? At that time there was no Polish government as such, but a Provisional Polish Government of National Unity, formed on June 23, 1945. There is no date or signature on the document certifying its authenticity.
7. Even common sense told the Germans why, having such an amount of cheap labor, they should destroy it. The Nuremberg Tribunal did not record any government orders ordering the mass extermination of Jews.
8. If 6 million Jews became victims of the Germans (this is almost half of all the Jews in the world), then why are they still alive? After all, they are considered destroyed in gas chambers, where they were driven 10-12 thousand a day!
Today they demand compensation, like victims of the Holocaust. (Finkelstein writes that only 15% of German compensation for former prisoners reached their goal, the rest were stuck in the pockets of the leaders of various Jewish organizations, such as the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, B'nai B'rith, Joint, etc. Jewish demands for compensation turned into racketeering and extortion , writes Finkelstein. Not only those who were in German concentration camps, but also those who had never been there began to extort money.)
9. Jews demanded compensation for the forced labor of their fellow tribesmen during the 2nd World War, and under pain of a boycott and legal action, German companies agreed to begin paying. Here the “victims” of the Holocaust exposed themselves. They did not die in gas chambers, but worked in German factories.
10. To cremate one corpse, 130 kg of coal is needed, and the Germans, as is commonly believed, had to burn about 1,300 corpses daily. Germany did not have enough raw materials for the war, let alone for burning Jews 11. How can we explain that the American Jewish Yearbook (“American Jewish Yearbook”, issue 43, p. 666) indicates that in 1941 there were only 3 living in the territory of occupied Europe, 3 million Jews?
12. Is it possible to believe that with the help of Cyclone-B a thousand people were destroyed at the same time? It is reliably known that American gas chambers, designed to execute one (maximum two) criminals, are incredibly complex. In addition, in 1949, during the trial of Degesh, who produced Zyklon-B, it was concluded that the mass extermination of people in this way was completely impossible and even unthinkable.
13. "Witness", SS medical officer Kurt Gerstein, testified that in the Belzetse camp alone, 20-25 million people were killed by Zyklon-B gas containing hydrocyanic acid - i.e. half of the total losses of the Second World War That for this purpose 700-800 people were pushed simultaneously into a gas chamber with an area of 25 square meters, i.e. 28-32 people per square meter!!!"Cyclone-B".This is extremely expensive, produced in scanty quantities an insecticide that is only suitable for killing insects that carry typhus. (According to professionals, not a single room in any concentration camp is technically suitable for use as a gas chamber)
14... Vrba colorfully describes the burning of Krakow Jews in crematorium number two in January 1943 in honor of Himmler’s visit to it. Although this crematorium was built only in March 1943. The last time Himmler was in Auschwitz was in July 1942.
15... Shmul Fainzilberg: “There were three ovens, each with two doors. You could fit 12 corpses through each door.” But the muffles have dimensions of 200x70x80 centimeters. Even 12 Lilliputians cannot fit in such a space;
16... The car as a murder weapon due to the exhaust gases of the engine, as well as the diesel engine installed specifically for murder in the cells, have not yet been completely erased from the charges. But unfortunately for the “Holocausters,” this lie was also invented by ignoramuses in chemistry. In a gasoline engine, there is only five percent carbon dioxide per cubic meter of exhaust. But there is a lot of oxygen. And in diesel there is only one percent carbon dioxide. It would be much more effective to simply close the chamber windows so that people die from lack of oxygen;
17. “Witness” Perry Broad, Philipp Müller and Rudolf Hess testified that the flammable substance methanol was used to burn the corpses. But a simple experiment, feasible for every person, will confirm that it is impossible to burn even a dead sparrow with any amount of methanol.
18... An article in Pravda reports that 2,819 rescued Auschwitz prisoners were interviewed, among whom were representatives of different countries, including 180 Russians. But for some reason the testimony came exclusively from Jewish prisoners. And why are there no testimonies from prisoners in other countries? According to all laws of jurisprudence, the testimony of witnesses must be verified and confirmed by documents and other sources, such as photographs.
FICTION literature describes many examples of phenomena and conditions when what happened to our ancestors turns out to be more relevant for people than what is happening today. These phenomena and states have different names: the memory of ancestors, other people's memories, ghosts of the past. Despite the importance of the problem, social memory is extremely rarely discussed in scientific works, and most often - element by element: as social ideas in psychology, mentality in history, transformation of culture in cultural studies.
Connections with the past, characteristic of any small nation, are usually not considered in psychological science. However, the influence of significant historical events very noticeable in the process of national identification, intra- and intergroup perception and interaction, self-awareness, self-perception, self-acceptance.
This work discusses the phenomenon of social memory from a perspective different from most works. We understand social memory as the influence of events experienced by ancestors on descendants. We assume the presence of information not recorded in material sources, circulating within the family and determining some aspects of cognitive, emotional and behavioral sphere personalities of descendants. Methods of transmitting information about experienced events are contained not only in oral family histories, but also in the style of raising children, family structure, and the life attitudes of family members who experienced these significant events. On the other hand, family experience of significant events influences not only the cognitive and emotional attitude of the younger generation towards them, but also deeper personal formations that are not directly related to this experience, which is the result of the influence of social memory.
It was not by chance that such a significant event as the Holocaust was chosen for analysis. On the one hand, the extermination of six million people simply for belonging to a certain nationality cannot go unnoticed by representatives of this nationality. According to American researchers, the Holocaust is considered the most important symbol of Jewish culture and history by 85% of adult Jewish Americans (Markova, 1996). On the other hand, there are still alive people who survived the ghetto or concentration camp, who saw the death of their loved ones and are now involved in raising their grandchildren. At the same time, there are many Jewish families who have no direct experience of the Holocaust. Thus, it is possible to find out not only the presence of social memory, but also to determine whether family experience of the events experienced is a necessary condition for its influence on subsequent generations, or whether social memory exists at the macro level, being an attribute not of the family, but of the people.
Basic approaches to the study of social memory
One of the authors who mentioned the concept of “social memory” was G. Tarde (Tard, 1996). He connects memory with consciousness, and consciousness with imitation. The individual's established, firm adherence to concepts and rules was at first a conscious imitation of his ancestors, gradually moving into the layer of the unconscious. For G. Tarde, imitation is the main mechanism for the formation of social memory, which in turn is defined as a repository of concepts, customs, prejudices, etc., borrowed from the life of ancestors.
Another classic of social psychology, G. Le Bon, following G. Spencer, without using the expression “social memory,” essentially talks about it (Le Bon, 1995). He divides the influence to which an individual is exposed throughout his life into three groups: the influence of ancestors, the influence of direct parents, and the influence of the environment. Further, using the example of race, G. Lebon speaks about social memory at the macro level, on the scale of a large group, and using the example of long-term intergenerational connections. A race, in his opinion, consists not only of the living individuals who constitute it at a given moment, but also of the long line of dead who were their ancestors. They control the immeasurable region of the unconscious - that invisible region which holds under its power all manifestations of the mind and character. The fate of the people is controlled to a much greater extent by the dead generations than by the living ones. They convey to us not only physical organization, they also instill in us their thoughts. The dead are the only undisputed masters of the living. We bear the weight of their mistakes, we receive the reward of their virtues (Le Bon, 1995).
Guided by the logic of the influence of social memory, it is worth turning to an area adjacent to psychology - the history of mentalities. Despite the replacement of the term “social memory” with “mentality” and a less psychologized approach, the point of view of the followers of the Annales school on changes in history transferred to changes in mentality is very useful in understanding the mechanisms of social memory (Gurevich, 1993; History of mentalities, 1996) .
The well-known scheme of Braudel, who distinguished three types of duration in history, can, according to J. Duby, be applied to mental processes (History of mentalities, 1996).
Some of them are fleeting and superficial (for example, the resonance caused by a sermon, the scandal caused by an unusual work of art, short-term popular unrest, etc.). It is at this level that the relationship between the individual and the group is formed (the group’s reaction to the individual’s action and the individual’s reaction to pressure from the group arises).
Less fleeting, medium-duration mental processes affect not only individuals, but entire social groups. As a rule, we are talking about smooth mental processes, without sudden changes. Transformations of this type (for example, a change in aesthetic taste among the educated part of the population) give rise to a phenomenon known to everyone: children reason, feel and express themselves differently than their parents did.
The next level is the “dungeons of long time” (according to Braudel), mental structures that stubbornly resist change. They form a deep layer of ideas and behavior patterns that do not change with the change of generations. The combination of these structures gives each long phase of history a specific flavor. However, these structures are not completely immobile: J. Duby believes that their change occurs as a result of fairly rapid, although perhaps imperceptible situations. Finally, J. Duby mentions another, most deeply lying mental layer associated with the biological properties of a person. It is motionless or almost motionless and changes along with the evolution of the biological properties themselves.
What exactly is the object of change? AND I. Gurevich introduces the concept of a world model - a “coordinate grid” for perceiving reality and constructing an image of the world. A person is guided in behavior by the model of the world, with the help of its categories he selects impulses and impressions and transforms them into internal experience - interiorizes. These categories precede the ideas and worldview that are formed among members of society or its groups and therefore, no matter how different the beliefs and ideologies of these individuals and groups, they can be based on universal, mandatory concepts and ideas for the whole society, without which the construction of ideas is impossible , theories, philosophical, aesthetic, political and religious concepts and systems.
The model of the world, according to A.Ya. Gurevich, consists of two large groups of categories: social and universal, cosmic. He refers to the social categories of the individual, society, freedom, wealth, property, law, justice, etc. Cosmic, at the same time, defining categories of human consciousness include concepts and forms of perception of reality, such as time, space, change, cause, fate, number, the relationship of the sensory to the supersensible, the relationship of parts to the whole (Gurevich, 1993). The division of society into social and natural cosmos is very arbitrary, but for a better understanding of the problem it is quite understandable.
It is worth mentioning that the basic conceptual concepts and ideas of civilization are formed in practical activities, based on experience and traditions inherited from the previous era. A certain stage of development of production, social relations, etc. correspond to certain ways of experiencing the world. They reflect social practice and at the same time determine the behavior of the individual and groups. Therefore, they influence social practice, contributing to the fact that it is cast into forms that correspond to the model of the world into which these categories are grouped.
Representatives of the French sociological school speak not about memory, but about ideas. Social memory is considered here as a storage place and a way of transmitting social ideas from generation to generation. Let us present some aspects of S. Moscovici’s concept related to social memory.
Most general definition This concept apparently belongs to D. Jodela, a student and follower of S. Moscovici: “The category of social representation denotes a specific form of cognition, namely knowledge common sense, the content, functions and reproduction of which are socially determined. In a broader sense, social ideas are properties of everyday practical thinking aimed at mastering and understanding the social, material and ideal environment. As such, they have special characteristics in the areas of content, mental operations and logic. The social determination of the content and the process of representation itself is predetermined by the context and conditions of their occurrence, circulation channels, and finally, the functions they serve in interaction with the world and other people... they represent a way of interpreting and comprehending everyday reality, a certain form of social cognition, which involves cognitive activity of individuals and groups, allowing them to fix their position in relation to situations, events, objects and messages that affect them" (Dontsov, Emelyanova, 1987).
According to the authors of the concept, social ideas are described by a model containing three dimensions: information, field of ideas and attitude. Information is understood as the sum of knowledge about the object of representation. A certain level of information is a necessary condition for the emergence of social representation. The field characterizes representations from the qualitative side. It exists where a “hierarchized unity of elements” is presented, a more or less expressed richness of content, and figurative and semantic properties of representation are present. The content of the field is characteristic of certain social groups. The attitude expresses the general attitude of the subject to the object of representation. Unlike the previous two dimensions, an attitude can exist when the field of ideas is insufficiently informed and unclear. On this basis, S. Moscovici makes a conclusion about the genetic primacy of the attitude.
Social representations are figurative in nature, while S. Moscovici persistently defends its understanding as an active creative principle, and not a mirror image of an object. In addition to activity, representations are also characterized by indicative, directing activity. It is through representations that the facts of the surrounding world become knowledge used in Everyday life, undergo transformation and evaluation.
Representations perform certain social functions: the function of cognition, decomposed into description, classification and explanation; mediation of behavior; adaptation of new social facts to already existing, formed views, assessments, opinions.
The process of formation of social ideas, so important for our problems, can only be judged conditionally from the concept of S. Moscovici. For the authors, “formation is rather a possible connection between phenomena” (Dontsov, Emelyanova, 1993). A phenomenon is an element of everyday consciousness, in the form and through which the subject gets acquainted with the world, that is, representation is a product of constructing reality from images and concepts.
To analyze how the object of representation is “fitted” into a previously developed, established system of knowledge, S. Moscovici introduces the concept of an “identification matrix”. It is evaluative in nature, connects incoming information with certain social categories, endowing the object of representation with appropriate meaning and significance. Undoubted for S. Moscovici is the social relevance of matrices, the dependence of what is permitted and prohibited on belonging to a certain class.
So, summing up the theoretical review of phenomena that are as close as possible to social memory, we can propose the following integrating scheme.
By social memory we mean the second level of influence, i.e. the influence of the parental family on the individual, ensuring slow transformations within the group. First of all, the social categories of the world model are subject to this influence.
Remembering G. Spencer as presented by G. Lebon, we can talk about the influence of ancestors, the deep structures of mass consciousness on more superficial categories, and this also falls under the definition of social memory, but at the macro level. In addition, we made an assumption about the influence of parents on the “prisons of a long time,” that is, on structures of a deeper order. This hypothesis arose as a result of empirical research and requires more detailed discussion.
In practice, the problem of social memory was realized in psychotherapy. Methods of data collection and correction include, for example, the technique of analyzing early memories of A. Adler, described in detail in the article by E.N. Ispolatova and T.P. Nikolaeva (Ispolatova, Nikolaeva, 1998). The method is based on the position of psychoanalysis that the earliest childhood memories express a person’s basic life attitudes, the main difficulties in life and the way to overcome them, contain a person’s fundamental assessment of himself and his situation, in a word, everything that can be the result of the influence of social memory.
In other words, early childhood memories may serve as a storage site for information conveyed in the manner we describe, and therefore be highly diagnostic.
Another case of applying the concept of social memory in practice is directly related to our empirical problems. For several years now, meeting groups have been held at the annual conferences of the International Association of Family Therapists for children of Holocaust victims and German soldiers (Kaslow, 1998). It is believed that the trace of the Holocaust remained both in the collective unconscious and in the consciousness of each of these people. F. Kaslow, describing the procedure for the work of these groups in his article, notes that he considers parent-child relationships to be the most difficult topic for his clients. Their parents are at two poles of a continuum: some talk about the Holocaust constantly, others don't talk about it at all. Often the father is reserved, and the mother is talkative. These people have one thing in common - an identity sharpened by the legacy of war.
The vast majority of them, writes Kaslow, have achieved a lot, made careers in the so-called humane professions, and are more concerned than others about the well-being of their parents. The shadow of the Holocaust forces children to break through terrifying experience parents more than fifty years ago. They are forced to mourn relatives whom they have never met, but feel their presence in their lives. All these qualities are found in people living both in Israel and in such prosperous countries as Sweden, the USA, and England.
Descendants of German soldiers usually talk about shame and guilt, distance from parents who do not discuss this period of history and their role in it with them, a lack of identification with their country and the need to love it, about the harm and comedy of denying what happened.
F. Kaslow's conclusions once again confirm the influence of social memory on the entire personality structure, not only and not so much cognitive as emotional-volitional. This will be discussed in the empirical part of our study.
Experience in empirical research of social memory
The study was conducted on the basis of a specially developed questionnaire, three tests, one of which is aimed at studying the value-semantic sphere, and the other two represent drawing projective techniques, and a focused interview.
In the main part of the study, two categories of respondents were interviewed: 30 young people aged 16–22 of both sexes, whose relatives did not survive the Holocaust, and 30 people whose families had such extreme experiences. The second group consisted of eleventh grade students from Jewish schools in Moscow and Riga, grandchildren of people who survived the Holocaust and spent the war at the front or in evacuation.
Using focused interviews, 10 elderly people who survived the ghetto or concentration camp, and 12 people who were at the front or in unoccupied territories were interviewed.
The questionnaire included the following groups of questions:
(a) dedicated to knowledge about the Holocaust (number of victims, places of destruction, knowledge of other peoples subjected to genocide, etc.);
(b) affecting attitudes towards the Holocaust (should you tell children about the Holocaust, why, did your family tell you about it, associations with words directly related to the Holocaust: ghetto, Germans, Warsaw, execution, etc.);
(c) on national identification (from whom did you learn about your nationality, what feelings does belonging to it evoke in you, an invitation to write 7 adjectives characterizing a representative of the respondent’s nationality, the meaning of nationality when meeting, attitude to national traditions). The questionnaire also included projective questions aimed at identifying unconscious structures, namely, word associations and unfinished sentences.
The value-semantic sphere of respondents was studied using the methodology for studying value orientations (VO). This technique, adapted by D.A. Leontiev, consists of scaling a fixed and previously known set of values according to scales specified by instructions using ranking. It is based on the methodology of M. Rokeach, who distinguishes two classes of values – terminal and instrumental. The stimulus material here is two lists of values – terminal and instrumental (18 qualities in each). The subject is asked to rank both lists of values, and then estimate as a percentage the degree of realization of each of them in his life (Leontyev D.A., 1992).
In addition, respondents were offered two tasks with the following instructions: “on one sheet of paper, draw the past, present, and future, on the other - fear, and write a few words about the feelings that arise in you. Try to draw not specific objects, but symbols. Quality of the drawing does not play a role."
Research results and discussion
The purpose of this phase of the study was to explore how the personal experiences of Holocaust survivors influence their perception of historical events and, in particular, their perception of the Holocaust itself. The results showed that the emotional attitude of former ghetto prisoners to the war, the Germans, the Nazis, and the Holocaust was sharper than that of representatives of the second group. In the first group there is a tendency to separate Jews into special group and the identification of oneself with it was expressed much more strongly among the first category of people than among the second. People who survived the ghetto are better informed about the details of the extermination of Jews, the number of dead, the places of extermination, etc. Among the members of the first group there are more people who revere national traditions, but due to cosmopolitan tendencies Soviet ideology It's difficult to talk about this. The starting point for further research was the information that the children and grandchildren of members of the first group are more effective and successful in life. Therefore, more interesting results were expected from the main stage, when Jewish youth became the object of the study.
The results obtained on the basis of a questionnaire of value orientations showed that adolescents whose ancestors survived the Holocaust are more focused on successful adaptation and positioning in society, both in the rational and emotional sphere, in contrast to adolescents who did not have such experience and relied on the first place is comfort and harmony of the inner world.
In addition, adolescents of the first group are guided by the ideal of a rational person, achieving certain goals, while in the second group such tendencies were not noticed. In general, representatives of the first group show more high level aspirations, motivation to achieve, orientation to the future, ignoring many factors that impede progress. But at the same time, they demonstrate the importance of the happiness of others in their lives and highly value the development of sensitivity and tolerance in themselves. In addition, adolescents of the first group value their actual family, which is presumably more united, more highly, and are more actively involved in its life than members of the second group.
Respondents of the first group demonstrated a more pronounced individualistic position and orientation towards personal goals. Their demands are relatively high, and at the same time they recognize the existence in society of positions with more pronounced demands, which are a guideline for them.
Summarizing the results of the survey, we made the following conclusions, some of which differed from the results of the CO questionnaires.
Firstly, as it turned out, the attitude towards the Holocaust, genocide, anti-Semitism, etc. It is much more emotionally charged among teenagers whose families have no experience of the Holocaust. In both groups (22 drawings of fear in the group with Holocaust experience and 24 drawings in the second group), the swastika took first place in terms of number: six drawings in each group. In the word association test for the word “fear,” 13% of associations in the first group and 18% in the second were associated with the Holocaust, as well as fascism, Nazism, pogrom, disaster, etc. A similar situation is with the words “grief” (6% and 10% of “military” associations, respectively), “pogrom” (10 and 12%), “horror” (67% and 33%), “anti-Semitism” (11% and 16 %). As can be seen, in most cases, teenagers who did not experience the direct influence of relatives who survived the Holocaust demonstrate a much more emotionally charged attitude towards these historical events. It is very difficult to explain this fact unambiguously. It can be assumed that Holocaust survivors diligently protect their children from traumatic information. It is possible that the events of the Holocaust were “domesticated” in the families that survived it, and therefore do not emerge in the ranks of associations in the first place. In any case, one must keep in mind the existence of a certain factor that equates the unconscious attitude of adolescents from both groups to these historical events.
Secondly, the future and present seem darker to teenagers with Holocaust experience than their peers, personal prospects are not so rosy and achievements are not so obvious. In addition, in their opinion, career, success, position in society in most cases are the result of luck, and not hard work and abilities.
Thirdly, teenagers with Holocaust experience in their families are more willing to identify themselves with children, show an infantile attitude towards the world and the people around them, and demonstrate an unwillingness to accept new age roles, which is why they differ from their peers from the second group. In the group of teenagers with extreme family experience, 20% of respondents said that family history begins with themselves, while in the second group this was only 4%. In general, “yaking” in the answers of the first group was much more common: in associations with the words “children,” “Jew,” and “people,” the pronoun “I” was very common. From here we can put forward the following assumption. It is possible that in families with extreme experience, the parenting style was more centered on children, as an extension of life and the highest value. A child, finding himself in such a situation, feels like the center of the universe and goes through life with this feeling. Then children's egocentrism does not go away over time, in this regard a person remains infantile until the end of his days. Giving associations to the word “children,” 9% of adolescents from the first group and 38% of adolescents from the second wrote words associated with adult attitudes towards them: responsibility, pride, meaning of life, main value in life, hope. In our opinion, these data once again confirm the infantilism of adolescents from families with extreme experiences, identification of themselves with children and unwillingness to accept new age roles. This is inconsistent with the data of the CO questionnaire, where in the hierarchy of values the first positions were occupied by those that are characteristic of adults.
Further, from the reactions of adolescents from families with an extreme past, one can see how high the value of actual family relationships is, the need to belong to a family, clan is expressed, how great is the special unity around the “hearth”, knowledge of family history, non-dissociation of past and present, observance of customs and traditions, preservation of family heirlooms, respect for the past in children. When talking about roots and family stories, teenagers from the group with Holocaust experience often remember material objects, such as a photo album, a vase, clothes, or the smell of shoe polish in a communal apartment. Twice as often, the family history for these teenagers begins with the generations preceding their grandparents; among them, unlike the other group, there are no people who do not know their genealogy. More often they express their attitude towards their family history with the words: “dear”, “holy”, “very important”, “pride”, etc.
And finally, the identification of adolescents from families with Holocaust experience with their nationality and historical homeland is not as pronounced as that of their peers who do not have such experience in social memory. For example, 13% of teenagers from the first group and 30% from the second feel themselves to be Jews “always”, 5% of respondents from the second group associate the word “people” with the word “Jews” and the word “Israel” with themselves and their country, while while in the first group there were no such answers. This is at odds with the working hypothesis that in families with extreme past experiences, more attention is paid to national education, especially if this experience is associated with genocide of an entire people, and children more acutely perceive their nationality as a possible source of discrimination. There could be several explanations here. The first, very superficial, is precisely connected with national discrimination, when parents, taught by bitter experience, do not consider it necessary to form a national identification in a child in order to protect him from oppression. The second explanation, like everything that is inconsistent with the main hypothesis, will be given below.
The data from the CO questionnaire paint a portrait of a socially successful, well-adapted person. In our opinion, adolescents from the first group gave socially desirable answers, met social expectations that were relevant to them, and followed the stereotype of a successful person. On a conscious level, these teenagers strive to conform to such stereotypes; social positioning and success come to the fore for them. This is confirmed by the fact that 13% of associations for the word “loser” in this group were “not me.”
Unconsciously, they correspond much less to the ideal they have drawn, and demonstrate infantilism, maladaptation, uncertainty, and an external locus of control. The conscious desire for adulthood and responsibility, encrypted in the high importance of the happiness of others, faces an unconscious unwillingness to accept this role, identifying oneself with children. In this regard, adolescents who do not have Holocaust experience behave much more adaptively and successfully, without creating a contradiction between their conscious and unconscious status. In addition, they do not suffer from the discrepancy between ideal and reality, because these two formations are very close to each other.
Perhaps this is due to the style of upbringing in the family, the ideal of social success and strict requirements for compliance with these ideals, coupled with a focus on the child, overprotection, and increased anxiety for the life and health of children. Both parts of this contradiction may be a consequence of extreme past experiences in the social memory of the family, but in action it creates the above-described discrepancies in the conscious and unconscious sphere. It can be assumed that in families where there is no experience of the Holocaust, such a contradiction, if it exists, is not so pronounced.
Another interesting discrepancy with the original hypothesis concerns the emotional attitude towards war, the Holocaust, genocide, and anti-Semitism. As noted above, adolescents from families without Holocaust survivors identify with these events much more often than adolescents with Holocaust experience in the family. In our opinion, this does not indicate a lack of influence of historical events within the family, but rather a broader framework, the influence of events affecting the entire nation on the entire generation of descendants, without distinguishing specific family experiences. In everyday language, the Holocaust affects a person not only if his grandfather was in the ghetto, but also if his neighbor's grandfather was in the ghetto. This is the same social memory at the macro level that G. Lebon spoke about.
In our case, adolescents of both groups experienced approximately the same influence of the Holocaust, with the only difference being that in the second group, fantasy additions, feelings of guilt for the better fate of their ancestors, and other mechanisms that enhance emotionality and correlation with the Holocaust are more often possible.
Another hypothesis that arises when analyzing the data obtained in our study is the presence of protective mechanisms in the case of adolescents from families with Holocaust experience. It is possible that the experience of the impact of this event is so strong that adolescents repress emotional information about it, unconsciously underestimating its significance in their lives. A similar situation may exist with national identification as a sign of belonging to an event, because the demonstrated indifference to one’s ethnicity cannot be typical for students of a national school.
LITERATURE
- Gurevich A.Ya. Historical synthesis and school of annals. – M., 1993.
- Dontsov A.I. Emelyanova T.P. The concept of social representations in modern French psychology. – M., 1987.
- History of mentalities, historical anthropology. – M., 1996.
- Ispolatova E.N., Nikolaeva T.P. Modified technique for analyzing early memories of a person // Questions of psychology, 1998. No. 6.
- Lebon G. Psychology of peoples and masses. – M., 1995.
- Leontyev D.A. Methodology for studying value orientations. – M., 1992.
- Tard G. Social logic. – St. Petersburg, 1996.
- Kaslow F.W. A Holocaust Dialogue Continues: Voices of Descendants of Victims and of Perpetrators // Journal of Family Psychotherapy. 1998. Vol. 9 (1)
- Markova J. Towards an Epistemology of Social representations // Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. 1996. Vol. 26(2).
Holocaust is a term by which Zionist propaganda understands the systematic extermination, according to a predetermined plan, by Germany and its allies during the Second World War of all Jews simply because they are Jews. The Holocaust theory claims that a total of 6,000,000 Jews were exterminated, and most of of which (over 3/4) - in stationary (diesel) and mobile gas chambers, followed by cremation in camp crematoria or by burning at the stake (mainly in pits). The term “Holocaust” also has other names that are not semantically related to it: Shoah (Hebrew השואה from Hebrew “natural disaster”) and “Catastrophe”. At the official level, the Holocaust is considered to be the greatest crime known to world history, and without precedent.
Etymology
The English word "holocaust" is borrowed from the Ancient Greek Bible (where it is used in the Latinized form holocaustum along with holocau(s)toma and holocaustosis). There it comes from the Greek also biblical forms òλόκαυ(σ)τος, òλόκαυ(σ)τον “burnt whole”, “burnt offering, burnt offering”, òλοκαύτωμα “burnt offering”, òλοκαύτωσι ς “bringing a burnt offering.”
In the Russian language it was found in the forms “olocaust” and “olocaustum” (“Gennadievskaya Bible” 1499), in Kurganov’s “Pismovnik” (XVIII century) the concept of “holokost” is given with the interpretation “sacrifice, burnt offering”.
Some researchers argue that the word "holocaust", meaning sacrifice, was chosen by the Zionists because they intended to sacrifice six million Jews to gain the land of Palestine.
It is believed that the word “Holocaust” in relation to the events of World War II was first used in the 1960s by Elie Wiesel, who claimed that Jews were exterminated in large numbers by throwing them alive in ovens, and the word came into wide circulation after the release of the multi-part television film “Holocaust” "(1978).
General information
The well-known story about the Holocaust is that the government of the Third Reich allegedly intended to exterminate the Jews in Europe, and that during World War II, as a result of their policies, six million Jews died. It is alleged that the only victims of the Holocaust were Jews - the complete extermination of this particular people as part of the so-called program “ final decision Jewish question" allegedly was important element A. Hitler's politics. It is alleged that 6 million Jews were exterminated in this way (this number is sacred to Holocaust preachers). Moreover, it is argued that not only the Germans are to blame for the deaths of these people, but also all other European peoples, who allegedly turned a blind eye to the extermination of the Jews (while even attempts to ask the question “Why didn’t the Jews even try to defend themselves?” cause instant accusations of anti-Semitism).
Holocaust ideology can essentially be reduced to the following five principles:
1. Jews have always suffered, and always innocently.
2. Their suffering culminated in the Third Reich in 1933-1945, when Hitler decided to exterminate all Jews.
3. Although it was mainly the Germans who destroyed them (and this guilt will remain with them forever), all the peoples of the world are guilty because they allowed the destruction of innocent Jews.
4. The Germans and other European peoples, being directly or indirectly responsible for the extermination of the Jews, are the peoples of Christian civilization. Therefore, Christianity is responsible for the mass death of Jews.
5. Jews not only suffered from Nazism, their suffering is incomparable and surpassed everything that can be imagined. Including the suffering of Christ on the Cross. Therefore, Christianity is refuted. There has not yet been a true Messiah, and the true Savior of mankind is the Jewish people, who become the collective "messiah".
The set of hypotheses that explain the Holocaust as the result of a direct plan and conspiracy on the part of the National Socialists is a typical conspiracy theory.
According to the Jews, the Holocaust does not fit into the human consciousness - it was a unique, phenomenal, exceptional, incomprehensible, extraordinary, amazing, extraordinary, unusual, supernatural, extraordinary, unparalleled, unprecedented, out-of-the-ordinary and indescribable event on a cosmic scale, it is impossible explain, understand and know.
Nevertheless, the Jews managed to turn the death of their people during the war into victory and benefit from it. No other nation that suffered as a result of the war claims a separate mention of itself in history. In fact, the Russian people deserve special mention, as the people who suffered the greatest human losses, several times higher than the human losses of any other nation (in absolute terms). However, in such a large-scale war, which engulfed a large number of states, it is blasphemy to count who killed more and who died less. The only ones for whom nothing was sacred and who even began to earn capital from the suffering and sacrifices of their people were the Jews.
In the West, the topic of the Holocaust completely overshadowed the battles for Stalingrad, Berlin, Kyiv, and the siege of Leningrad. Today, the West is dominated by a strange retelling of the events of World War II, which centers on the fate of the Jewish people. According to Holocaust theorists, the Nazis decided to destroy the entire Jewish people, young and old, and for this they started a war with the whole world. But the world did not care about the fate of the Jews and looked at their death in cold blood. Nevertheless, a miracle happened: the seemingly dead Jews were saved and created their own state.
In the endless corridors of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, the Soviet army is not even mentioned. The millions of dead Soviet soldiers do not fit into the Zionist narrative of Jewish tragedy, Jewish heroism and the indifference of the “goyish” world. The average American and some Europeans have accepted this Jewish concept, as it is stated in hundreds of films, books, newspaper articles and monuments. In Western Europe, World War II and victory are completely replaced by the theme of the Holocaust.
The most famous propaganda centers specializing in the creation and dissemination of myths and legends of the Holocaust are the Israeli National Memorial of Disaster and Heroism (Yad Vashem) and the American Holocaust Memorial Museum. In Russia, this is the Holocaust Center and Foundation, the founder and co-chairman of which is Ilya Altman, and the director is Alla Gerber.
Many historians find many contradictions and inconsistencies in the legend of mass extermination called the Holocaust. However, any attempt to cast doubt on the reality of the Holocaust or its scale provokes a violent reaction from the Jewish public and can end in court, as happened with the British historian D. Irving. He was detained in Austria on charges of violating the law banning the propaganda of National Socialism and whitewashing its crimes. 16 years before his arrest, giving two reports in Austria, he denied the presence of gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp and the fascist pogroms during Kristallnacht in 1938. The court in Vienna, despite the historian’s “repentance,” sentenced him to three years in prison (instead of the initially required 10 years). Another historian, Ernst Zündel, was sentenced to 5 years in prison on February 15, 2007 by a court in Mannheim (Germany) for denying the Holocaust. The chairman of the court, Ulrich Meinertzhagen, called the convicted “a dangerous political agitator and instigator.”
As of the end of January 2007, the resolution condemning the denial of the Holocaust as a historical fact (it has no legal force and is advisory in nature) was supported by 103 countries out of 192 members of the UN General Assembly, including all European states, Israel, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Laws making Holocaust denial a crime exist in a number of European countries and in Israel.
The debunking of the Holocaust myth is a scientific feat comparable to the feat of naturalists during the Inquisition, and was carried out throughout the second half of the 20th century by the efforts of a relatively small group of historians called revisionists. Many of them were persecuted and imprisoned for denying the Holocaust, forced to flee their homelands, and their lives and those of their families endangered by Zionist paramilitaries. However, repressions against leading scientists are unable to change the global trend towards exposing Zionist propaganda. Every year the Zionist propaganda about 6 million Jews being gassed loses its popularity.
Official version
Classic works that describe versions of the Holocaust are Gerald Reitlinger's "The Final Solution", 1953, Raul Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews", first edition 1961 , second and “definitive” edition 1985), as well as the “Encyclopedia of the Holocaust”, published by V. Lacker in Russian in Moscow in 2005.
The classic works on gas chambers are the books “National Socialist Mass Murders with Poison Gas”, authors E. Kogon, H. Langbein, A. Ruckerl “Nationalsozialistishe Massentotungen durch Giftgas”, 1983) and “Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers”, author Jean-Claude Pressac. AUSCHWITZ: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, 1989); The classic work on the issue of the number of Jewish losses is the collection “The Scale of Genocide”, published by W. Benz (W. Benz “Dimension des Volkermordes”, 1991).
Classic versions of the Holocaust are based solely on eyewitness testimony and are not supported by documents, trials, or forensic research.
Back in 1950, the first Holocaust historian, the French Jew Léon Poliakov, wrote:
“The extermination of the Jews, both regarding its planning and in many other points, is shrouded in the darkness of the unknown... Not a single document has survived - perhaps such a document never existed at all.”
French journalist Jean Daniel, a Jew by birth, characterizes the Holocaust as follows:
“Only the devil could have come up with such a thing... And not the slightest trace remained. A hell of a trial, a perfect crime."
There is no single canonical version of the Holocaust because each “expert” or “Holocaust historian” puts forward his own interpretation, interpretation and vision of events, based not on material evidence and historiographic sources, but only on the contradictory and often incredible testimony of “Holocaust witnesses.” The assumptions and calculations of “Holocaust experts”, who express a fairly wide range of judgments, guesses and opinions, very often do not agree and do not fit in with each other - therefore the “official” version of the Holocaust is characterized by a range of assessments, lack of specificity and vagueness. A particularly characteristic example is the estimate of the number of deaths in Auschwitz - among different “experts” and “witnesses of the Holocaust” it ranges from 300 thousand to 9 million. “Holocaust specialist” Lucy Davidovich in her book, recognized as exemplary, “The War against the Jews" (War against the Jews. 1987, p. 191) writes that 5.37 million Jews were killed in 6 camps. Another, also well-known “Holocaust specialist,” Raoul Hilberg, in his three-volume opus “The Extermination of European Jews” (1990, p. 946), insists on 2.7 million killed in 6 camps. The difference, therefore, is 2.67 million, while both luminaries do not explain where they got these numbers from. For more details see http://maxpark.com/community/politic/content/1864648
Historians of all stripes agree that the National Socialist policy towards the Jews after Hitler came to power was initially aimed solely at removing Jews from Germany. Already on August 28, 1933, the Reich Ministry of Economics concluded with the Jewish Agency, which was involved in the colonization of Palestine, the so-called “Haavara Agreement,” which was to become the basis for the emigration of 52 thousand German Jews to Palestine until 1942.
On January 25, 1939, Reichsmarshal G. Goering issued a decree on the creation of the “Imperial Center for Jewish Emigration.” But after the outbreak of World War II, when Germany captured territories with a Jewish population numbering in the millions, a “solution to the Jewish question” through emigration was no longer achievable. An option initially discussed was to resettle all European Jews in Madagascar, but due to the practical impracticability of this project in wartime, it was replaced by a plan for a "territorial final solution" by deporting Jews to the occupied eastern regions while maximizing the use of Jewish labor.
According to the works of Orthodox historians, the terms “emigration”, “transfer” and “eviction”, often found in German documents in connection with policies towards the Jews, from some point, which is not precisely specified, were used as shorthand terms denoting “physical extermination” " For a long time it was considered proven that the plan for the physical extermination of European Jewry was adopted on January 20, 1942 at a conference on Lake Wannsee near Berlin.
Back in 1992, leading Israeli Holocaust theorist Yehuda Bauer called the Wannsee Conference a “stupid story,” yet other Holocaust theorists still seriously argue that the conference allegedly decided on the Jewish question. All Orthodox historians admit that Hitler's order to exterminate the Jews has not been discovered, but many of them explain this by saying that such an order could have been given orally - and consider their assumption a powerful argument in favor of the existence of the Holocaust. Historians who link the start of the Holocaust to Hitler's orders are called “functionalists.” For many years they have been arguing with another scholastic school of professional Holocaust researchers - “intentionalists”, who proceed from the idea that the Holocaust happened spontaneously without orders from above and was carried out by the German bureaucracy out of anti-Semitic motives.
According to Orthodox historians, starting in 1942, European Jews were allegedly killed by the millions in six “extermination camps” located on Polish territory. Four of them (Belsen, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chelmno) were supposedly exclusively murder centers, while Auschwitz and Majdanek were originally conceived as labor and prison camps and only at some point acquired the additional function of extermination centers. Exterminists (supporters of the version of the genocide of the Jews) unfoundedly claim that in Belsen, Sobibor and Treblinka mass murders were allegedly carried out in stationary gas chambers using exhaust gases from diesel engines; a mass of corpses were allegedly first buried in huge ditches, and then, when there was a threat of Germany’s defeat, they were dug up again, burned in the open air and the ashes scattered to the wind. In Chelmno, instead of stationary gas chambers, “gas chamber” cars were allegedly used. In Auschwitz and Majdanek, the pesticide Zyklon-B containing hydrocyanic acid was allegedly used for murder (and in Majdanek, in addition, carbon monoxide from bottles); in the last two camps, the corpses of those killed were allegedly burned in crematoria.
In 1996, the anti-revisionist French historian Jacques Baynac admitted that due to the “absence of any traces” (by which he meant both documents and material traces), it was impossible to scientifically prove the existence of gas chambers in Nazi camps for killing people, nevertheless many exterminists accept the existence of gas chambers without evidence.
The international Internet resource Wikipedia, the Russian-language section of which is moderated primarily by Jews from the USSR living in the CIS and beyond, is trying to combine all these far-fetched assessments and contradictory statements into a single brief Zionist version of the Holocaust. However, articles on the Holocaust in all international sections of Wikipedia completely ignore facts that deny the existence of the Holocaust or reduce its “generally accepted” scale.
Distinctive Features of the Holocaust
. a deliberate attempt to completely exterminate an entire nation,
. about six million Jews were exterminated,
. Jews were exterminated deliberately, and were not victims of war,
. the purpose of extermination was the genocide of Jews,
. existence of a system designed for the mass extermination of Jews
. grandiose, inter-ethnic scale of extermination: Jews were persecuted and exterminated throughout German-occupied Europe
. the blame for the Holocaust lies with everyone: the Nazis, Germany, its allies, neutral states and states that fought with Germany (for not saving them), but not with the Jews,
. The Holocaust is a unique phenomenon in human history in terms of the size, quality and meaning of the suffering caused, and no other mass extermination of people can compare with it: they are either not so large-scale, or unintentional, or were not aimed at exterminating entire ethnic groups.
In addition, the official version contains details such as:
. the complete defenselessness of the Jews,
. the extermination of Jews took place in six death camps specially created for this purpose in Poland,
. killing of Jews in gas chambers,
. disposal of Jewish bodies: clothes, shoes and valuables were collected, gold teeth were torn out, hair and skin were sent to the needs of light industry, soap was made from fat, glue and machine oil were produced.
. burning the bodies of Jews in crematoria,
. the cruel and lethal inhumane medical experiments that the Nazis carried out on victims of the Holocaust
The main thesis of Holocaust theorists is that the Nazis had a plan or program to exterminate the Jews.
Methods of extermination of Jews
From modern literature About the Holocaust you can find out that the mass murder of Jews was carried out in the following ways:
. in Auschwitz and Majdanek using the insecticide Zyklon-B; in Majdanek partially by carbon monoxide;
. in Chelmno by introducing exhaust gases into a van mounted on a truck;
. in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka using diesel engine exhaust gases in wooden gas chambers;
. in the occupied territories of the USSR in gas cars and through mass executions.
Evolution of the official version
The story of the Holocaust has changed significantly in a relatively short period of time. Many claims of alleged mass extermination that were once believed by the general public have been quietly removed from the repertoire of Holocaust propagandists.
For a long time, the following methods and methods of exterminating Jews were considered “reliable and respectable” information:
. in electric baths;
. burning alive (the word “Holocaust” means burning a victim alive among the ancient Jews);
. thermite bombs;
. quicklime;
. using an insecticide against bedbugs and lice (gas holocaust);
. by grinding in a huge mill;
. drowning;
. by venting exhaust fumes inside the truck (diesel holocaust);
. pneumatic hammer;
. dissolution in acid;
. by execution (bullet holocaust)
. steam (steam holocaust);
. suffocation by pumping air out of the room;
. morphine injections;
. air injections;
. boiling water;
. heavy rubber truncheons (all stamped “Krupp”), with which the prisoners’ heads and genitals were smashed”;
. feeding to wild animals.
Soon after the war, any mention of these exotic methods of mass extermination was almost completely excluded, not only from official statements, but even from fiction. Then Elie Wiesel's lie that Jews were allegedly thrown alive into burning ovens was rejected. Instead, a myth was invented about the existence of special gas chambers in concentration camps for the mass, deliberate extermination of Jews and about crematoria for burning millions of corpses.
Modern adherents of the historicity of the “Holocaust” now do not want to know anything about all these false stories, although at one time they were all confirmed by “credible witnesses,” as is the case today with gas chambers, the existence of which is prohibited from being doubted by the laws of a number of “free” countries. democratic" world.
After chambers with hot steam, mills, cars with lime, etc. were replaced by gas chambers, many years of fuss began among “historians” on this issue. They really want the theory of gas chambers to somehow fit into the framework of common sense, but in vain. The structures that are passed off as gas chambers were preserved in the “death camps” and their characteristics are too far from what exterminists (supporters of the version of the genocide of the Jews) propose to believe.
At one time it was believed that the Germans gassed Jews in Dachau, Buchenwald and other concentration camps in Germany itself. This part of the story about the mass extermination of the Jews was so untenable that it was abandoned more than 30 years ago.
Not a single serious historian now supports the story of “extermination camps” on the territory of the former German Reich, which was once considered proven. Even the famous “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal admitted that “there were no extermination camps on German soil.”
According to the documents of the Nuremberg trials, more than 13 million Jews died in the “fire of the Holocaust” - more than six million were exterminated by the Gestapo, more than four million were killed in Auschwitz, more than one million were killed in Majdanek and at least two million in Dachau, Saxenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg , Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, Gusen, Natzweiler, Gross-Rosen, Niederhagen, Stutthof and Arbeitsdorf.
Before 1960, exterminists claimed that there were gas chambers in camps in Germany and Austria. Thousands of “survivors” spoke about them, German officers gave “confessions” and were executed after the Nuremberg trials for participating in the extermination of people in the gas chambers in these camps, but in 1960 the Allies themselves admitted that all these testimonies and confessions were false and there were never gas chambers in these camps.
During the Tribunal in Nuremberg, the chief adviser of justice of the USSR L.N. Smirnov stated that the "technical minds of the SS" were developing methods for producing soap from human bodies and tanning human skin for practical purposes. Allied prosecutors presented evidence, Dr. Spanner's supposed formula for making soap, and soap allegedly made from humans. In April 1990, the director of the archives of the Israeli Yad Vashem center, Samuel (Shmul) Krakowski, stated: “Historians have concluded that soap was not made from human fat.”
Based on evidence from the Nuremberg Tribunal, the number of victims in Auschwitz was estimated at 4 million. However, in 1995, Jewish organizations replaced the memorial plaque in Auschwitz. Instead of four million, there are now one and a half million dead. However, this did not change the overall dogmatic Holocaust figure of 6 million.
Currently, some exterminists, realizing that the myth about the gas chambers is beginning to completely collapse, are trying to diversify the version of the murders, diverting attention from the alleged gas chambers and gas chambers towards the SD, or rather towards the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD http://ejwiki. org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%86%D0%B3%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BF%D0 %BF%D1%8B_%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B8_%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%BE %D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8_%D0%B8_%D0%A1%D0%94
. For example, the French Jew Jacques Attali writes:
“The vast majority of Jewish deaths were killed between 1940 and 1942 by the personal weapons of German soldiers and police, rather than in the death factories that were introduced later.”
Using new phraseology, Jews call it a "bullet holocaust", which is currently intended to replace the exposed "Holocaust from gas, from lice" And "Holocaust from diesel engine combustion products."
Evidence of the Holocaust
Article for January 9, 1938, New York Times. Even then there was talk of six million Jewish victims in Europe, nine months before Kristallnacht. Revisionists have counted more than a hundred pre-war media references to “six million dead Jews” since 1900.
All evidence of the Holocaust consists of post-war testimony from a small group of “miracle survivors.” Their testimonies are contradictory and only a few of them claim to have been a direct witness to the “gassing” - they mostly learned these rumors from others. There are no documents confirming the existence of the Holocaust, no reliable statistics and reliable evidence: no mass graves of Jews, no mountains of ashes, no crematoria capable of processing millions of corpses, no “human soap”, no “gas chamber” machines, no lamp shades have been found , made from human skin - nor any other artifacts that prove the existence of an event called the "Holocaust".
Witness's testimonies
The entire Holocaust myth has no material evidence and is based only on the testimony of the so-called. “witnesses of the Holocaust” or in other words “miracle survivors.”
An example of the falsification of history and how unceremoniously many Jews - former prisoners of concentration camps - treat the truth is the French Catholic priest Abbot Renard. He and the revisionist Paul Rassinier were in Buchenwald. After the war, Abbe Renard published a book about his camp experiences, in which, in particular, he wrote: “I saw how thousands of people stood under souls, from which, instead of life-giving moisture, a suffocating gas came out.”
This prompted Rassinier to track down his former comrade in misfortune - this was in early 1947 - and remind him that, as is known, there were no gas chambers at Buchenwald. “Of course,” the pious husband objected, “it was a literary turn, an empty phrase, a common place, but, in the end, it doesn’t matter at all whether everything really happened like that or not.”
Speechless with surprise that this servant of God would lie so carelessly, Rassinier left. The official version of what happened to the Jews during World War II is based on evidence such as the pious abbot's invention, which is why the scientific research methods used by revisionists cause horror among propagandists of the Holocaust myth.
Another famous example is Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a professional “Holocaust survivor” who travels from country to country talking about Auschwitz and being a “ living proof» Holocaust. Wiesel was in Auschwitz with his father. In the 50s he wrote a thick book in Yiddish. In its French version, entitled "Night", there is not a word about gas chambers. He says that the Germans burned Jews - especially infants - in giant fiery ditches.
At the end of his book, he reports that at the end of 1944 he underwent surgery in the Auschwitz “extermination camp” hospital (although exterminists constantly claim that the Germans killed children, old people and the sick) and that the Germans later said: “The sick and those recovering can remain with doctors when the Russians come.” As Eli reports, he and his father decided to stay with the “German executioners” rather than wait for the “Russian liberators.”
It is interesting that in the German translation of Wiesel’s book, wherever “crematorium” appears in the French text, this word is replaced with “gas chamber”. Wiesel is not a “survivor,” but a former prisoner. He is living proof that there was no extermination of the Jews.
Jews do not know whether there were gas chambers or not, but they believe that there were. Believers do not lie, they believe. In addition, the stories about gas chambers are very reminiscent of Talmudic lies. T.n. "survivors", especially when visiting schools, describe relationships in concentration camps. Only a very few of them claim to have been present when people were exterminated in gas chambers. Their testimony contradicts each other regarding the number of victims of each such operation, the route to the gas chambers, the time until the death of the victims, the methods of destroying the corpses, etc. Witnesses at the Nuremberg trials were not cross-examined and could tell the most incredible things, reliability which no one questioned.
Evidence
No material evidence was found in the form of ash heaps or crematoria in which 6 million corpses could be burned. There is no hard evidence of the existence of gas chambers in the camps and no reliable demographic statistics. Also, not a single mass grave of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, gassed or shot, has been found in Europe. Extremists reject any methods of investigation (forensic, forensic, ballistic, chemical, etc.) of suspected murder sites to provide evidence.
Historians generally consider physical (i.e., physical) evidence to be conclusive (unless, of course, it is subsequently shown to be fraudulent). However, in the case of the Holocaust, the lack of physical evidence to support the existence of a large-scale extermination program is not considered to be of any significance. It is alleged that the Nazis destroyed their gigantic deadly production so thoroughly that there is no way to discover it after the war. There can be no doubt that the Nazis really could have destroyed all physical evidence so thoroughly, including making sure that the ashes of six million people disappeared from all the places in which they were supposed to be buried. To think and doubt in this way is to commit a thought crime, and to voice these doubts is to incite hatred.
Thus, it is more convenient for historians today to assume that the Nazis had supernatural powers (that is, they could cause all physical evidence to evaporate without any hope of recovery and discovery, even with the most advanced modern technology), rather than concluding that volume, that the lack of physical evidence supports the claims of Holocaust revisionists.
