My Knowledge Of Racism Anti Semitism And The Holocaust

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My parents never educated me on Nazi War Crimes, possibly regarding such horrors as too distressing for a child’s attention, and at school, war related history centred on battles, especially the Allied victories and our endurance under fire. That changed when I was about 14 (1976) when I was among pupils sent to an all-day symposium on race-relations and the dangers presented by racism. Among the speakers was a soldier who had taken part in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in 1945. It was the camp where Anne Frank, the famous Dutch diarist, had died. The description he gave of emaciated survivors, (who initially could not be approached because of the typhoid epidemic among the neglected survivors) and the heaps of unburied corpses was heart-breaking and horrific. I later read up all I could on the Holocaust, trying to make sense of such atrocities. I have never succeeded in grasping why. I am particularly distressed and angered when I encounter Holocaust Denial, and when I see Neo-Nazi extremists who want to bring back such horrors. A lifelong reader of horror writers like Edgar Allen Poe an H P Lovecraft, I still see the history of war crimes as something very different, a real desensitizing of the senses to allow men and women to regard other human beings as somehow less than human. War has always generated cruelties of course. Crusaders decapitated captured Muslims and catapulted the heads back against the armies besieging their fortresses. Civilian peoples have been tortured, raped and / or murdered when their cities and villages have been conquered since prehistoric times. Anti-Semitism has existed since the Christian Church exploited the Bible to blame the Jews for engineering the death of Jesus. In Britain, the Norman kings used Jewish money for their castle building programmes and then killed or exiled the Jews to avoid repayment. The Jews were ill-treated throughout Europe, even in art and literature. Shakespeare’s plays As You Like it and especially The Merchant Of Venice are savagely anti-Semitic. Shylock remains one of the most archetypal of all Jewish stereotypes exploited in right wing propaganda. It was Oliver Cromwell who first invited the Jews to resettle in Britain 500 years after they were driven out, as he needed money the run his short lived Republican governance after the English Civil Wars. In 1903, an extremely hateful hoax document surfaced in Russia, known as The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. It claimed to be a blueprint for a Jewish conspiracy for global domination, largely through control of financial institutions. Though quickly recognized by many as bogus and an instrument of dishonest propaganda, the Protocols became a major excuse for pogroms, persecution, and murder against the Jews. The Nazis quoted the text in translation, and it is still cited with some sickening reverence in modern neo-Nazi cults and extremist factions to this day. Hitler was a soldier in WW1, and while most Germans were glad the fighting was coming to close in late 1918, Hitler was distressed by his sense of the shocking ease with which the army capitulated. He was in one of the few battalions successfully pushing back the enemy, unable to understand why the fighting had to stop and he stated that Germany would have been better off fighting on even to its own annihilation than ever surrendering. He would of course later let Germany fight to the last few streets of Berlin long after it was obvious his cause was lost. Anti-Semitism was rife in Germany, and ripe for Hitler’s exploitation. His open contempt for Judaism, his fury at the Armistice agreement break up of German military might, the financial impact of hyperinflation and the Depression, his recognition of the weakness of the Republican Weimar government, all played a part in the rise of National Socialism. Another major factor was fear in Germany of Communism. Lenin had hoped that the success of the Russian Revolution would lead to workers in the rest of Europe rising up in solidarity with the cause. It might have happened as most of Europe had a growing Communist movement, but the right wing grew, often with the blessing of the State, to crush the perceived red menace, absurdly blaming Jewish Capitalists for spearheading the anti-capitalist revolutionary movements. Left wing intellectuals were arrested, exiled and killed. Protesters and speakers championing socialism or communism were put down brutally. The Right wing factions served as a force field and buttress wall against the Russian Revolution fervor sweeping over Europe. It was a move Marx and Lenin never envisaged. Many right wing groups were getting ideas of their own about running their countries. Mussolini in Italy, and Franco in Spain, rose to power. Communists were among the first to warn of the threat such men presented. In Spain, the Civil War sadly crushed the anti-fascist opposition, who failed because they fought as much among themselves as against the more united forces of Franco.. Hitler was sent on a government mission to infiltrate and spy on a growing group of right wing Nationalists in Germany, The National Socialist Movement. He was supposed to observe them and report back on what they might be up to. Instead, Hitler became their leader within months. He tried rashly to lead them in a violent revolutionary march, the infamous Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. 16 Nazis died in the two day rising, and after running away, Hitler was arrested. He used his widely publicized court hearing to spread his manifesto before going to jail for 9 months, (initially on a five year sentence). He wrote Men Kampf during his incarceration, and began his political rise almost immediately afterward. By 1932, they had control of Germany. Persecution of Jews, Gypsys, homosexuals, suspected communists, intellectuals, and many other peoples began immediately (and in some cases even before full Nazi power was secured). Street beatings, fire-bombings of homes, hospitals and businesses, constant propaganda against them began proceedings. Then came the imposed wearing of badges to identify Jews and others, the yellow crosses, pink triangles, etc. Exclusion from public buildings, and dismissal from employments followed, businesses were destroyed or confiscated. Then came Kristallnacht, (The night of broken glass), actually lasting two nights, the 9th and 10th November 1938) when thousands of Jewish shop and synagogue windows were shattered throughout Germany, especially in Berlin, in one orchestrated far reaching attack. (91 Jews died in the assault, which left the streets glistening with glass shards, hence the infamous name). There were many foreign journalists in Germany at the time and the events made the international press. For the first time, the World was made inescapably aware of the plight of the Jews in Germany, many of who rightly feared worst would come, and fled often sadly only to countries that would fall to German invasion in the war. The first Concentration Camps were created and named as such by the British during the Boer Wars. They were basically over-populated prisoner of war blocks for Afrikaner POWS. They were criticized by the World for their inhumane conditions, poor sanitation and for many prisoners dying in them from malnutrition, typhoid and cholera. Inmates were expected to work, as outright slaves, and many died from the excess demands of labour on their malnourished weakened bodies. The first Nazi concentration camp sprang up in Germany in 1933, (Dachau was the first to open), primarily to contain dissident thinkers, and Communists, but soon Freemasons, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the first Jewish arrestees were to join them. By 1934, the elderly and disabled were often interred in the camps too. The early camps were not like the deliberately developed Extermination Camp that were to spring up half way into the war. Sure, inmates were brutalized, and often executed, sometimes publicly. Others died from ill-treatment and disease and the guards neither cared or faced reprisals when this happened. Far worse was to come though. The camps were growing and most occupied territories had concentration camps in operation within weeks and months of being conquered. There was even a concentration camp on the small occupied English Channel Island, Alderney. The camps were proving costly to the war effort, and many had so many prisoners that the guards struggled to cope. Polish Jews, Russian Prisoners Of War, and other so-called undesirables were stretching camp population to breaking point. In Spring 1941, a euthanasia programme was developed by the SS for reducing camp populations through execution culls, using gas chambers. Initially victims were those seemed simply unfit for forced labour, the elderly, sick, (especially if they were contagious), etc., but in several camps, ethnic origin was used in the selection process early on too. In July 1941, this practice was seen as successful enough for Goering to authorize the infamously named ‘Final Solution’. Many of the bigger concentration camps now became extermination camps, virtually abattoirs for people. This was total genocide, an attempt to eradicate whole peoples from the face of the planet. Before the Final Solution rulings, camps were inhumane but potentially more survivable. From now on, being sent to one for any reason, at any age, was a death sentence. Of course, many did survive the unspeakable horror. The sheer numbers of victims of internment meant the killing process was still slow (in proportion to the staggering number of inmates in the camps) and the allied advances slowed down supplies, and transportation, and eventually the liberators freed the more fortunate ones but not before at least six million people had perished in a literal Hell on Earth. My discovery of much of this came in my readings following the school’s response to the rise of a new Far Right, the National Front, a largely skinhead faction, who were beating up innocent Asian and Jewish citizens, and their propaganda being circulated in many schools. The symposium I went to was one such counter-measure, and a good one, opening my eyes and those of many of my friends to a horror I never knew of before. A few years later I attended a Rock Against Racism rally in Manchester, a counter-protest to marches by the National Front activists. Our rally culminated in a free concert in a major park (Alexander Park), headlined by The Buzzcocks, but the act that most inspired me was poet John Cooper Clark, and seeing him inspired my own creative writing. The NF (National Front) became the BNP (British Nationalist Party) and later, many of its members swapped the skinhead look for suits, briefcases and powerpoint presentation, taking on a veneer or respectability and being pro-establishment. Much of their contempt for refugees and foreigners in general, as well as rabid Islamophobia, is seeing them gain new ground and fresh support. They were very influential on the pro-Brexit campaign, which I still openly oppose. It is time schools ran new symposiums like that which I attended in the 70’s. Arthur Chappell