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Lessons we should have learned from the liberation of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps

It's been more than 75 years since the last prisoners were freed from Auschwitz. The farther we get from that chapter, the more important it is to focus on the lessons it taught us, lest we ignore the signs of history repeating itself.

Photo by Jean Carlo Emer on Unsplash

From 1940 to 1945, an estimated 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz, the largest complex of Nazi concentration camps. More than four out of five of those people—at least 1.1 million people—were murdered there.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet forces liberated the final prisoners from these camps—7,000 people, most of whom were sick or dying. Those of us with a decent public education are familiar with at least a few names of Nazi extermination facilities—Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen—but these are merely a few of the thousands (yes, thousands) of concentration camps, sub camps, and ghettos spread across Europe where Jews and other targets of Hitler's regime were persecuted, tortured, and killed by the millions.

The scale of the atrocity is unfathomable. Like slavery, the Holocaust is a piece of history where the more you learn the more horrifying it becomes. The inhumane depravity of the perpetrators and the gut-wrenching suffering of the victims defies description. It almost becomes too much for the mind and heart to take in, but it's vital that we push through that resistance.

The liberation of the Nazi camps marked the end of Hitler's attempt at ethnic cleansing, and the beginning of humanity's awareness about how such a heinous chapter in human history took place. The farther we get from that chapter, the more important it is to focus on the lessons it taught us, lest we ignore the signs of history repeating itself.

Lesson 1: Unspeakable evil can be institutionalized on a massive scale

Perhaps the most jarring thing about the Holocaust is how systematized it was. We're not talking about humans slaying other humans in a fit of rage or a small number of twisted individuals torturing people in a basement someplace—this was a structured, calculated, disciplined, and meticulously planned and carried out effort to exterminate masses of people. The Nazi regime built a well-oiled killing machine the size of half a continent, and it worked exactly as intended. We often cite the number of people killed, but the number of people who partook in the systematic torture and destruction of millions of people is just as harrowing.

It has now come out that Allied forces knew about the mass killing of Jews as early as 1942—three years before the end of the war. And obviously, there were reports from individuals of what was happening from the very beginning. People often ask why more wasn't done earlier on if people knew, and there are undoubtedly political reasons for that. But we also have the benefit of hindsight in asking that question. I can imagine most people simply disbelieving what was actually taking place because it sounds so utterly unbelievable.

The lesson here is that we have to question our tendency to disbelieve things that sound too horrible to be true. We have evidence that the worst things imaginable on a scale that seems unfathomable are totally plausible.

Lesson 2: Atrocity can happen right under our noses as we go about our daily lives

One thing that struck me as I was reading about the liberation of Auschwitz is that it was a mere 37 miles from Krakow, one of the largest cities in Poland. This camp where an average of 500 people a day were killed, where bodies were piled up like corded wood, where men, women, and children were herded into gas chambers—and it was not that far from a major population center.

And that was just one set of camps. We now know that there were thousands of locations where the Nazis carried out their "final solution," and it's not like they always did it way out in the middle of nowhere. A New York Times report on how many more camps there were than scholars originally thought describes what was happening to Jews and marginalized people as the average person went about their daily lives:

"The documented camps include not only 'killing centers' but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named 'care' centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel."

Whether or not the average person knew the full extent of what was happening is unclear. But surely there were reports. And we know how the average person responds to reports, even today in our own country.

How many news stories have we seen of abuses and inhumane conditions inside U.S. immigrant detention camps? What is our reaction when the United Nations human rights chief visits our detention facilities and comes away "appalled"? It's a natural tendency to assume things simply can't be that bad—that's undoubtedly what millions of Germans thought as well when stories leaked through the propaganda.

Lesson 3: Propaganda works incredibly well

Propaganda has always been a part of governance, as leaders try to sway the general populace to support whatever they are doing. But the Nazis perfected the art and science of propaganda, shamelessly playing on people's prejudices and fears and flooding the public with mountains of it.

Hermann Goering, one of Hitler's top political and military figures, explained in an interview late in his life that such manipulation of the masses isn't even that hard.

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders," he said. "That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Terrifyingly true, isn't it? This is why we have to stay vigilant in the face of fear-mongering rhetoric coming from our leaders. When an entire religion or nationality or ethnic group is painted as "dangerous" or "criminal" or "terrorists," we have to recognize that we are being exposed to the same propaganda used to convince Germans that the Nazis were just trying to protect them. Safety and security are powerful human desires that make it easy to justify horrible acts.

Hitler was also great at playing the victim. While marching through Europe, conquering countries and rounding up millions of innocent people to exterminate, he claimed that Germany was the one under attack. Blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric surely fired up Hitler's core supporters, but the message to the average German was that this was all being done in the name of protecting the homeland, rather than a quest for a world-dominating master race.

Lesson 4: Most of us are in greater danger of committing a holocaust than being a victim of one

I had to pause when this realization hit me one day. As fairly average white American, I am in the majority in my country. And as strange as it is to say, that means I have more in common with the Germans who either committed heinous acts or capitulated to the Nazis than I do with the Jews and other targets of the Nazi party. That isn't to say that I would easily go along with mass genocide, but who's to say that I could fully resist the combination of systematic dehumanization, propaganda, and terrorism that led to the Holocaust? We all like to think we'd be the brave heroes hiding the Anne Franks of the world in our secret cupboards, but the truth is we don't really know what we would have done.

Check out what this Army Captain who helped liberate a Nazi camp said about his bafflement at what the Germans, "a cultured people" allowed to happen:

"I had studied German literature while an undergraduate at Harvard College. I knew about the culture of the German people and I could not, could not really believe that this was happening in this day and age; that in the twentieth century a cultured people like the Germans would undertake something like this. It was just beyond our imagination... – Captain (Dr.) Philip Leif - 3rd Auxiliary Surgical Group, First Army

Some say that we can gauge what we would have done by examining what we're doing right now, and perhaps they are right. Are we speaking out against our government's cruel family separations that traumatize innocent children? Do we justify travel bans from entire countries because we trust that it's simply our leadership trying to keep us safe? Do we buy into the "Muslims are terrorists" and "undocumented immigrants are criminals" rhetoric?

While it's wise to be wary of comparing current events to the Holocaust, it's also wise to recognize that the Holocaust didn't start with gas chambers. It started with "othering," scapegoating, and fear-mongering. We have to be watchful not only for signs of atrocity, but for the signs leading up to it.

Lesson 5: Teaching full and accurate history matters

There are people who deny that the Holocaust even happened, which is mind-boggling. But there are far more people who are ignorant to the true horrors of it. Reading first-hand accounts of both the people who survived the camps and those who liberated them is perhaps the best way to begin to grasp the scope of what happened.

One small example is Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower's attempt to describe what he saw when he visited Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald:

"The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'"

And of course, the most important narratives to read and try to digest are the accounts of those who survived the camps. Today, 200 survivors of Auschwitz gathered to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its liberation. They warned about the rise in anti-Semitism in the world and how we must not let prejudice and hatred fester. Imagine having to make such a warning seven decades after watching family and friends being slaughtered in front of you.

Let's use this anniversary as an opportunity to dive deeper into what circumstances and environment enabled millions of people to be killed by one country's leadership. Let's learn the lessons the Holocaust has to teach us about human nature and our place in the creation of history. And let's make darn sure we do everything in our power to fend off the forces that threaten to lead us down a similarly perilous path.


This article originally appeared on 01.27.20

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A historian's grandmother never spoke about the Nazi era. Then he uncovered a document.

Greg Jenner grew up thinking his grandmother was born Catholic. That all changed on Jan. 20.

Jenner, a British historian, knew that his "Mamie" was French but never thought to investigate her past. That is, until his mother contacted him with a stunning discovery about how her mother survived the Nazi occupation.

The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images.

The news came as Jenner was watching Donald Trump's inauguration, which he recounts on his blog in a breathtaking essay titled "Discovering My Family's Holocaust History."

"As I winced at [Trump's] ugly oratory, and cheered myself up by retweeting droll barbs on Twitter, an email popped into my inbox from my mother. I quickly opened it, forgetting what it was she had promised to send me. Immediately it made me cry.  There in black and white was a series of scanned documents listing the details of my great-grandfather’s transportation to Auschwitz."

What follows is a heart-wrenching story of love, terror, and trauma — which Jenner calls "the hardest thing I've ever written."

As Jenner's mother recently discovered while leafing through a trove of old documents, Jenner's grandmother and her sister were born to a Jewish father. When the Nazis invaded, he was rounded up and transported to a concentration camp in France and eventually was sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.

Jenner's great-aunt was deported to Auschwitz as well, which she miraculously survived, while his grandmother spent the war years in hiding. Some years later, she married a Catholic man and converted — burying her family's history in the process.

The main gate at Auschwitz, where Jenner's relatives were held. Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images.

Jenner wrote the essay with one thing in mind: Holocaust denial.

Refusing to admit that the Holocaust happened, that it wasn't as severe as conventionally portrayed, or that it didn't specifically target Jews used to be a fringe phenomenon, but recently — shockingly — it's been edging into the mainstream.

The Trump administration flirted with it when it failed to mention Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day and when press secretary Sean Spicer claimed that Hitler didn't use chemical weapons against his "own people" (for which he recently apologized). Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone took a swing at it last year, claiming that Zionist Jews in Germany openly collaborated with Hitler, who Livingstone argued was himself a Zionist.

From left: Sean Spicer, Marine Le Pen, and Ken Livingstone. Photos by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images, Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images, and Ian Gavan - WPA Pool/Getty Images.

Then there's French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who Jenner singles out in his essay for particular shame. Le Pen, whose political party was founded by her Holocaust-denying father Jean-Marie, sparked controversy recently by claiming that France wasn't responsible for assisting in the roundup of French Jews during the Nazi occupation.

It's a claim, Jenner says, belied by the newly uncovered evidence of the experiences of his great-aunt and her father, who were betrayed by acquaintances and held in a prison camp guarded by French police.

"My great-aunt was probably arrested and detained by her own countrymen, but she was deported to a death camp on the orders of a Nazi," he writes. "Marine Le Pen would have you forget the first part of that sentence."

Attempts to erase the ugly details of a nation's history, Jenner argues, are what allow shallow nationalism to flourish.

Children wait behind barbed wire as Soviet troops liberate the Auschwitz concentration camp. AP Photo/CAF Pap.

By whitewashing the past, unscrupulous leaders tacitly permit citizens to take pride in their country's victories and successes without having to feel guilty for the messy parts.

In France, that can mean denying responsibility for the calamity that befell families like Jenner's, pinning the blame on an outside enemy.

In the United States, it often means landmarks and apologist textbooks that glorify Confederate history and minimize the brutality of slavery. Or completely erasing the slow-moving genocide of Native Americans out of our national story.  

Belief that one's country can do no wrong is a seductive position, which makes stoking that belief an all too effective political tactic.

In reality, almost all countries have done terrible things to their own citizens and residents.

The costs of denial, meanwhile, are the erasure of real people like Jenner's great-grandfather, great-aunt, and grandmother, for whom the memory of those years was so painful she never spoke of them.

"It’s only since my grandmother’s death that the rest of us have started to investigate what must have been an extraordinarily traumatic wound," he writes.

Jenner worries that once the last Holocaust survivors are gone, the memory of the horror will fade, allowing revisionist takes like Spicer's, Livingstone's, and Le Pen's to prosper.

A visitor explores Berlin's Holocaust Memorial. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

By documenting his family's history, he hopes that in spite of demagoguery from those who bend the facts to suit their narrow political agenda, "the truth will always float to the surface."

"This week, it was my family’s truth which was corrupted by dangerous political speech. Next week it will be someone else’s. But the fallacious statements from Livingstone, Spicer, and Le Pen were successfully challenged thanks to the combined efforts of eyewitnesses, historians, and the survivors themselves, all of whom contributed over the years to help build up an understanding of what happened in those brutal years under Hitler’s reign. In the Shoah Memorial in Paris — and other institutions like it — there are documents, photos, diaries, and carefully-assembled rosters of names, dates, and places; the weight of evidence that defies denialists."

History, he admits, is complicated. But that doesn't mean there isn't fact and fiction within it.

The Holocaust and France's complicity with it is, tragically, fact.

The motto of the generation that survived the war, cruelty, and genocide of the Holocaust is "Never forget."

Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

As his grandmother's generation passes on, Jenner wants to ensure that forgetting never becomes easier.

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A tattoo shop's offer to cover up hateful ink went viral. People are taking them up on it.

Beth Cutlip, co-owner of Baltimore's Southside Tattoo parlor, was working one day when a man walked in with some unmistakeable ink.

A gang member in Los Angeles. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images.

The man's face was covered in gang tattoos, Cutlip says, and he was there to have them covered up. He got them as a teenager while running with a rough crowd, but he was a grown man now. Married. Kids. Trying to make an honest career as an electrician.

The tattoos, Cutlip recalls him saying, made people nervous when he came into their homes to do work. He needed them gone.

But they were just too big.

"As much as I wanted to help him, I had to refer him to have them removed. But I don't think he had the money," she says.

Later, when recounting the story to her husband and co-owner, Dave Cutlip, she knew there had to be a way to help people like that.

"I said, 'Dave, these people made a mistake, changed their life, and they need to get these tattoos covered up,'" she says. "He looked at me and said, 'Are you asking me to tattoo people for free?'"

Dave agreed to set aside time in the shop, once a week, for people to come in and have hateful or violent tattoos covered up, free of charge.

Beth posted a small announcement on the parlor's Facebook page, thinking a few hundred people might see it and think it was a good idea.

Instead, the post went massively viral.

Sometimes people make bad choices, and sometimes people change. We, at Southside Tattoo would like to make a difference....

Posted by Southside Tattoo on Monday, January 16, 2017

Soon, messages poured in from all over the country and world. There were thousands and thousands of people trying to get rid of permanent ink that didn't reflect who they were anymore.

This man's gang tattoo became a rose. Photo by Southside Tattoo, used with permission.

Southside Tattoo is now completely booked with cover-ups, and Beth has been working with other parlors around the country to help people outside the Baltimore area.

They've even begun setting up a nonprofit to help pay for the work. Beth says some of the funds they've raised go toward helping people in more remote areas travel to somewhere they can have the work done properly and safely.

His arms said "white" and "power." Beth and Dave covered up the "white." Photo by Southside Tattoo, used with permission.

Beth says everyone she works with has a different story, but they all have one thing in common: They're trying to build a better life.

Along with gang tattoos, "I am seeing so many swastikas, Aryan Brotherhood, things like that," Beth says. Some get inked up in prison to fit in, for safety. Others are just trying to leave their old ways behind.

Either way, Beth and her husband are happy to help.

"The beautiful thing is I know I did something good for somebody," she says. "And they're going to leave here and they're going to do something nice for somebody else."

Together, Beth and Dave are helping people prove it's never too late to change. And that's a message we all need to hear right now.

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8 badass Jews who gave Nazis exactly what they deserved and then some.

Photo by Robert Thiemann on Unsplash

Some lit candles in celebration of Hanukkah.

Hanukkah is almost upon us, and this year, it's not just about latkes, jelly doughnuts, and exchanging disappointing gifts.

At a time of great uncertainty and fear — when swastikas are popping up in public parks, incoming government officials are not quite denying that they maybe might start putting all the people who follow a disfavored religion of their choosing on a list, and neo-Nazis are donning fedoras and mingling over chicken parm sliders at swanky D.C. chain restaurants, we (((Jews))) need to take a lesson from our Maccabee forefathers, bust out our dreidels-of-sneaky-plotting, and gear ourselves up to reject darkness and resist oppression as forcefully and righteously as we can.

Fortunately, rejecting darkness and resisting oppression as forcefully and righteously as we can is kind of our thing.

To refresh our memories and lay on some much-needed inspiration, here are eight stories of badass Jews who fought back against fascism — one for each night of Hanukkah:

1. William Cohen, who helped unite Jews in America against Hitler

war crimes, neo-Nazis, Sweden, Judaism

William Cohen was a U.S. congressman from New York in 1933.

William Cohen. Photo by U.S. State Department.

In 1933, while much of America's political leaders were busy convincing themselves that the Nazis were just passionate about stretching their triceps, Cohen, a former U.S. congressman from New York, prominently endorsed a boycott of German goods.

"Any Jew buying one penny’s worth of merchandise made in Germany is a traitor to his people," Cohen announced at a meeting of the Jewish War Veterans. While the boycott (obviously) failed to stop the Nazis, it helped galvanize Jewish resistance in the United States and frame opposition to the regime as a moral duty.

He also thoroughly kicked Hitler's ass at mustaches.

2. Danuta Danielsson, who treated Swedish neo-Nazis with an appropriate lack of respect in the 1980s

demonstration, women, community, freedom

Danuta Danielsson hits a new-Nazi over the head with a handbag.

Photo by (cropped) Hans Runesson/Wikimedia Commons.

Here's what we know about Danuta Danielsson:

  • She was of Polish-Jewish descent.
  • Her mother survived Auschwitz.
  • During a neo-Nazi rally in Vaxjo, Sweden, in 1985, she ran up to one of the demonstrators a and smacked him with her purse.

Danielsson never talked about the incident and passed away three years later, so we'll never know why she did it, but "hitting Nazis for revenge is fun and good" is probably as close a guess we'll ever get, and, you know what?

That's fine.

3. Leon Feldhendler and 4. Alex Pechersky, who helped shut down a concentration camp

On Oct. 14, 1943, Feldhendler, a Jewish council leader in the Zolkiew ghetto, and Pechersky, a Russian-Jewish soldier, led 300 of their fellow prisoners on a daring, improbable escape from the Sobibor concentration camp — the largest such prisoner escape of the war. Though only roughly 50 of the escapees survived the next two years, the camp was forced to shut down in the wake of the revolt.

Both Feldhendler and Pechersky lived to the see the Nazis kicked out of their respective homelands, though Feldhendler was killed in an ambush by right-wing Poles in early 1945. The two were instrumental in making a lot of Nazis sad and/or dead, a legacy that was, ultimately, memorialized in the 1987 film "Escape from Sobibor."

5. Faye Schulman, who provided historical documentation of the resistance movement in World War II

A photographer by trade, Schulman was initially recruited to take pictures for the Nazis when they invaded her Polish hometown in 1941. Determined to find clients less likely to enslave and, eventually, murder her, she fled into the woods, where she convinced a group of partisans to let her embed.

She spent the next two years taking pictures, documenting the day-to-day activities of the resistance. Because there were no craft stores in the woods, she made her own solutions to develop her photos.

Schulman preserved her photos through the end of the war and beyond, eventually entering them into the historical record as proof of that there was defiance behind Nazi lines from Jews and non-Jews alike.

6. Simon Wiesenthal, who tracked down Nazis after the war to bring them to justice

survivor, concentration camp, Austria, WWII

A photo taken of death camp survivor Simon Weisenthal.

Photo by Rob Bogaerts/Anefo/National Archives of the Netherlands.

A death camp survivor, Wiesenthal survived the murder of most of his family, separation from his wife, and a brutal forced march that nearly claimed his life in the years following Hitler's invasion of his native Poland. After the war, he settled in Linz, Austria, and dedicated his life to a single, glorious goal: hunting Nazis.

Wiesenthal chased Nazis all over the world — first as a freelancer (somehow, Wiesenthal even managed to make the gig economy seem badass) and eventually through his organization, the Jewish Documentation Center. He tracked down Adolf Eichmann in Argentina; Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, in Brazil; and Karl Silberbauer, the gestapo agent who arrested Anne Frank, in Austria. He helped put dozens of former SS agents on trial in West Germany. And presumably, he did it all while feeling absolutely 100% great about himself and having no regrets, ultimately passing away at a ripe old age while, it would stand to reason, shredding a killer solo on an electric guitar. He was just that badass.

7. Vidal Sassoon, who threw down with British fascists in a series of bloody street fights

fashion icon, self care, hair stylist, underground movement

Vidal Sasson photographed in June of 2006.

Image via en:User:DierkA/de:Benutzer:The weaver from Wikimedia Commons.

Yes, that Vidal Sassoon. Only one year after World War II ended in Europe, a group of British fascists, led by Oswald Moseley, attempted to rebuild their political movement by spreading fear of "aliens" — code for refugee Jews living in the U.K.

The famous hair stylist, then a teenager, was part of an underground movement of British ex-service members who grabbed knives and razor blades and punched, kicked, and slashed Moseley's thugs on the streets of East London until they gave up and crawled back down the hole they slithered out of.

Really.

That Vidal Sassoon brand shampoo that's been sitting, half-full, in your downstairs shower? That's right. That's the shampoo of justice.

8. Gertrude Boyarski, who literally burned a bridge between Nazi soldiers and the food they needed

"I want to fight and take revenge for my whole family" would not be a totally out-of-place thing for Liam Neeson to say at the beginning of a film where he teams up with a wolf to kill the man who ran over his aunt with a train. Instead, those words came from the lips of Boyarski, who actually spoke them to a Russian commander after her parents and siblings were killed by German soldiers in the Polish woods.

With vengeance on her mind, Boyarski teamed up with the Soviet partisans to create as much Nazi pain and misery as humanly possible for the next few years. According to the former partisan, she and a comrade personally set fire to a bridge used by Germans to transport food and supplies, were discovered, and subsequently were shot at.

When the bridge failed to burn fast enough, they tore parts of the flaming bridge apart with their bare hands while Hitler's troops tried in vain to machine gun them in the face.

So, um.

How many Nazi bridges has your grandma burned down? (Seriously, we should get our grandmothers together and ask them.)

While our ancestors did a heckuva job sticking it to fascism, when the last candle burns down this year, there will still be more fight to be fought.

Want to join up?

You can donate some of that Hanukkah gelt to the ACLU, Immigration Rescue Committee, Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Anti-Defamation League.

Unfortunately, they don't accept tube socks, so you're stuck with those.


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