Lessons of the Holocaust can never be minimized

Although it’s been 75 years, surviving World War II veterans can still recall the closing days of the global conflict that claimed an estimated 70 million to 85 million people.

Soldiers who saw evidence of the Nazi death camps were especially affected by their horrific atrocities. In late April of 1945, my uncle’s unit — the 101st airborne — discovered a subcamp of Dachau concentration camp in Germany. Both the 101st and soldiers in the 12th Armor Division — my father’s unit — liberated that camp on April 27 and 28.

They found approximately 500 dead prisoners. Other inmates had been transported by SS guards as Allied Forces closed in. The Allies forced local residents to bury the dead.

Last week marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland, where 1.1 million, including 960,000 Jews, were murdered in gas chambers, shot or starved to death.

Vice President Mike Pence joined with world leaders and Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem, pledging that the Nazi atrocities will never be allowed to occur again. While remembering the 6 million Jews killed, Pence said the world must remain vigilant to stamp out hate and be prepared to confront and expose the vile tide of anti-Semitism and violence across the world.

In his proclamation, President Donald Trump said the undaunted spirit of courageous survivors of the Holocaust compels us to ensure that the truth will endure and their stories live on.

“Those who are filled with hate must never succeed in their efforts to minimize, deny or erase the Holocaust from our memories or our history books,” Trump stated. “We have a fundamental and collective duty to ensure that each new generation knows the truth. The lessons of the Holocaust must forever be ingrained in the consciousness of humanity so that we can fulfill our solemn and sacred promise that such evil and hatred will never again come to power.”

Unfortunately, many school students we come in contact with have little historical knowledge of the Holocaust. Because it is one of the most difficult and sensitive subjects to teach, some educators ignore the atrocities while others treat it as literature and not as historical fact that the Nazi goal was to eliminate an entire race of people.

Under President Barack Obama’s revised education standards, Los Angeles students once debated in a Common Core-based essay assignment whether the Holocaust was real. Eighth-graders in one district were assigned to write a paper on whether they believe the Holocaust was a “hoax” created by Jews to “influence public emotion and gain wealth.”

Children links were also provided to “credible sources” that in some cases were disguised deniers. One claimed that Anne Frank, the young teen who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, faked her diary, while another railed against the “irrepressible Zionist influence and control of our country.”

School officials defended the class as being an exercise in “critical thinking.”

After a local press report exposed the exercise, the Anti-Defamation League, Simon Wiesenthal Center and other groups lodged complaints, and the district agreed to have its “core team” do a revision.

Even today, there are Holocaust deniers who claim that the Nazis had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews; that they didn’t use gas chambers to mass murder Jews; or that the figure of six million Jewish deaths is a gross exaggeration.

In fact, the Holocaust was well documented by the Nazi government itself. The Reich had even formed a contingency plan that if defeat was imminent, all German records would be destroyed.

To the liberators of the death camps the gas chambers, the crematoria and the piles of skeleton-like bodies were a reality. The memories from that evil that shook humanity to its core could never be erased by any Holocaust denier, history revisionist or minimized in any classroom exercise or school text book.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com