First the Nazis, and Now IS

Hitler in 1939 and his troops at the Eastern Front

Nadene Goldfoot          
How did Germany, the center of enlightenment, turn into a machine that destroyed civilization and its people?  We look to history for the prevention of such a repeat in our own history.  We are watching something akin to this right now with the atrocities practiced by IS against their own people, their own Muslims.  Now they are even destroying museums and ancient cities going back 3,000 years, records of civilization and history.  Nothing is sacred to them.                                                           

Warsaw, Poland Jewish Ghetto attacked
Jews fled from Poland and Germany in vast numbers.  Between 1921 and 1937, 395,223 Polish Jews emigrated but this was only 10% of Polish Jews.  They had no safety through flight because of their large numbers.  Hitler called the Jews an evil disease, poisoning the blood of decent humanity, a conscious plague-bacillus infecting the pure, innocent "Aryan".  Sound familiar?  It's the tact Ahmadinejad had been using and his Ayatollahs also in Iran.

What happened was like a virus spreading which was anti-Semitism, rising up again today as well.  This virus was in evidence in 1936, spreading across national borders, and in that virus the Nazi slogan, "Get out to Palestine!"  Many went and now we hear the call to get out again.  

Something we have learned from WWII is the warning that "Violence is in the end self-destructive, power futile, and the human spirit is unconquerable."  
                                                         

Jews of Hungary marched to waiting boxcar trains

In  1939 we had 2 billion people, and we lost 60 million who were killed in WWII.  That's over 3% of the total world population. 

Today the world holds 7 billion people.  In the past 76 years we have regained the 6 million Jews who had been murdered as shown in the population of Israel today, which has gone from 650,000 in 1948 to 6 million Jews and 1.7 million Arabs today.  

                                                                           

Landsberg Concentration Camp-65 km west of Munich, Germany October 1944 held 5,000 prisoners.  These were starved down below 80 lbs, didn't survive.  

There were 8 million Jews in the world in 1939, and 6 million were tortured and slaughtered, turned into ashes.  More than 10 million other non-combatants were killed by the Nazis.  Under their scheme of things, the Poles, Czechs, Serbs and Russians were to become subject peoples;  slaves, the workers of the New Order.
                                                                         
The Jews were to become extinct.  Only the Jews were marked out to be completely  destroyed; every man, woman and child.  There was to be no future Jewish life in Europe, which had been in existence since before 1,000 CE that had come with the Roman soldiers.

Thus, modern Germany's Nazi regime took over police, railways, civil service, industrial power of the Reich, and had poison gas, soldiers, mercenaries, criminals in high positions, machine guns, artillery, and a method of complete deception of the German people including the Jews.

To the Nazis, Jews were not people, but just numbers.  They were referred to as "dogs."  It didn't take too long for the Jews to realize what was being done to them, and the remnant thought they were the last Jews left alive and wanted facts left so that the next generations would know what had happened to them.

The facts were that between 1939 and 1945, the Germans killed many millions of non-Jewish civilians in Germany itself, and in every occupied country, often in massive reprisal actions or after long torture.  It's reminiscent of what IS is doing to Iraqis and Syrians right now.  The Nazis shot down in cold-blood, and often with such delighted zeal, the unarmed, defenseless Greeks, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Russians, and men, women and children of a dozen other nationalities, all civilians who had taken no part in military action.

Among those murdered after being tortured beyond belief were a quarter of a million Gypsies, tens of thousands of homosexuals and  tens of thousands of "mental defectives."  Also were tortured and murdered were several million Soviet prisoners-of-war.  They had been captured and disarmed, then either shot or starved to death long after capture.

One thing is evident.  Nazi propaganda did not die out with the Nazi regime.  Books that were popular then are still popular now by those who need the  excuse for their sadism.  The cruelty of it all is that Jews were killed after Germany lost the war by many Europeans themselves.  Only a few were documented to have been kind.  Those who risked their lives to give food or water to a Jew were  murdered by the Nazis.  Many never even thought of a kind act; only too ready to slaughter Jews themselves. They had bought into the propaganda mill.

Resource:  THE HOLOCAUST by Martin Gilbert, pages 53, 54;  824-825.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsberg_am_Lech