Page 12 - June 2, 2010 - Back cover
65 years after the defeat of Nazism
By Jack Fuchs *
May 1945: Nazi Germany defeated, overcome their ideology, the end of World War II. It took six years of war, sixty million people. It's been 65 years. Much has been written about the tragedy, the war, victims, destruction.
From that date until the present, conflicts and wars in our world did not stop and victims continued to multiply. Who are the victims? Some researchers include in the category of "deaths in wars and conflicts" only the dead in "battleground." Some exclude deaths caused by bombs and many do not consider those human beings killed by famine or disease as a result of armed clashes and other conflicts.
The discussions are endless and complex. But what continues to bother me is the stubbornness that we have to dehumanize victims. It almost always speaks of war between ideologies or against them. Are justified and explained by geopolitical and economic motivations. Always excuses to banish the specter that terrifies us as human beings: our own aggression, unjustifiable, always.
I can not refer to my own experience. As a child, heard of the English Civil War, the armed struggle between nationalists and republicans. The cruelty of the fighting, the dead that they caused. But those killed were only Franco or Republicans. It was competing ideologies, not annihilated compatriots, human beings faced the most terrible way. They were not against English English, peasants fighting peasants, scientists against scientists, neighbors against neighbors. Only ideologies. This argument was and remains to explaining inexplicable. I myself took me many years to get rid of all the excuses and justifications and coping with pain and accept that it was men against men. Or rather in the singular: man against man.
often think that the need to dehumanize comes from the impossibility of accepting that man is the worst enemy of himself. This view, which leads us to question the source of wars, or rather the explanations we give to digest these tragedies that we ourselves generate, leaves me in a different place compared to the tragedy of which I was witness and victim.
early Nazi victims were those Germans who opposed the regime. The first concentration camps were to end with Communists, social democrats, they were an important political force in pre-war Germany, and those members of the Nazi party itself exercising any internal opposition. The victims of Nazism was not just Jewish. A joined them Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Slavic, Asian peoples who called the Soviet Union considered to belong to inferior races and political elites, intellectual and cultural life of Poland and the Soviet Union, including many members of the Catholic Church.
The level of self-destruction German people knew no bounds. In 1942 a young German of 17 years, Helmuth Hübener was guillotined by the Nazis in the Berlin prison. Arrested by the Gestapo for distributing leaflets against the regime, was sentenced to death. The court that tried him made that decision based on the youth "showed an above-average intelligence for a boy his age." For this reason, should be punished as an adult. The judge who sent him to the guillotine was not tried, as he died a few days before the end of the war, in a bombing. Currently a Youth Center in the city of Berlin is named after the young German. A story that shakes.
Again, despite the passing years, still hold many mysteries of human behavior.
* educator and writer. Auschwitz survivor.
