Hate kills! the consequences of bigotry

The nazi holocaust

When we think of genocide in the 20th century, the Holocaust is our model of its evil. In the 12 years of Nazi rule from 1933-1945, nearly 20 million non-combatants were killed—14 million in the camps, where six to seven million Jews were murdered, and six to seven million others including Muslims, Latvians, Estonians, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists, and Poles were also among the slaughtered. The gate to Auschwitz, one of the most heinous of all the death camps, had a sign that “greeted” new arrivals—the sign read, Arbeit Macht Frei , “Work will make you free!” As many as 100,000 prisoners a day met their deaths in the showers that were filled with Zyklon B, a deadly gas. The ovens were used to burn the remains. After D-Day however, the ovens were sometimes used to burn people alive. Many of the ovens used to cremate both the living and the dead were manufactured by firms who made ovens for commercial bakeries. (External Link)&ModuleId=10005143 (External Link) (External Link) (External Link) (External Link)&b=4441251

Kristallnacht

The Warsaw Ghetto, home to Polish Jews for centuries, was a battle ground where Jews tried to hide, to protect each other, and to resist Nazi domination. Even though not all the Jews had been removed, the ghetto was eventually burned to the ground. One night in November 1938, military men, SS officers, and mobs of thugs attacked the Jewish sections of many Eastern European cities. For hours they walked through the streets breaking all the glass in every building they passed. Jews all over the world remember that night as Kristallnacht —the Night of Broken Glass—and on the anniversary of that event, Jews gather together to pledge their eternal vigilance and resistance to such terror ever again occurring. On Kristallnacht , a synagogue burned to the ground, while firefighters and neighbors stood by and watched. German-Jewish children were singled out for humiliation in their schools. (External Link) (External Link) (External Link)

Children were also victims of the Nazi “medical experiments” at Auschwitz and other death camps and there are photographs that show children who have been burned deliberately. The so-called medical experiments of the Nazis, such as the amputations and mutilations shown in some photos, were thinly veiled torture conducted without anesthetic. The Nazis didn’t confine their murders only to those they had imprisoned in the camps. There is one photograph that shows Russian civilians who were forced to dig the trench into which their bodies fell when shot by German soldiers. There were thousands of bodies found in mass graves all over Europe after the war, but one of the sites of such atrocities was Babi Yar in the Soviet Union where 30,000 non-combatants were slain in two terrible days, September 28-29, 1941. (External Link) (External Link)&id=5383 (External Link)

Many bodies of the dead at places like Dachau death camp were thrown into a heap like badly stacked cord wood. Hundreds of starving prisoners were found by the Allied forces at the liberation of the concentration and death camps. So that they could maintain order and efficiency, the Nazis tattooed on the arm everyone in the camps. These tattoo numbers were entered into the extensive files that the Nazis kept. Holocaust victims were often forced to dig their own graves. Sometimes, however, there was no one left alive to bury the dead who were thrown by their murderers into the pits that the victims themselves had dug. The photo shows bodies thrown into an open pit at Auschwitz shortly before the allied troops arrived. (External Link) (External Link) (External Link)