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This year is the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II; it concluded with Japan signing surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri Sept. 2, 1945. This war was responsible for the death of approximately 22 million military members from all sides. Of all the war’s tragedies, most remember the systematic killing of up to six million Jews in a collective event known as the Holocaust.
A few years following Israel’s independence (1947), their Parliament (Knesset) began working to honor those killed. On Aug. 19, 1953, the Knesset enacted the law recognizing Yom Hashoah Ve-Hagevurah, the “Day of (remembrance of) the Holocaust and the Heroism.” Occurring a week after the seventh day of Passover, this day also commemorates the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
In 1980, the U.S. Congress unanimously endorsed the recommendations of President Jimmy Carter’s President’s Commission on the Holocaust, and enacted Public Law 96-338 creating the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Charged with building the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., the council also had responsibility for encouraging annual week-long commemorations of the “Days of Remembrance” for the victims of the Holocaust – a week aligned with Israel’s Yom Hashoah.
This year, the Department of Defense military equal opportunity offices celebrate the national observance week through Sunday.
This world tragedy needs to be remembered. While not the only attempt at genocide, there had never been one as systematic and on such a scale. It began as a series of calculated actions that led to the German Parliament’s passing of the Enabling Act giving Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers. Done in hopes of restoring order after the 1933 Reichstag burning, they had effectively voted themselves out of existence.
Shortly thereafter, Hitler’s National Socialists began establishing a system of prison camps to remove “enemies of the state” from society. An abandoned World War I ammunition factory complex near Dachau became the first on March 22, 1933. It was followed by Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Ravensbrück (1939), along with countless camps of various sizes spread all across the country.
While the focus of the first arrests was on political enemies, the Nazis had already begun organizing actions against Jews. Store boycotts, educational restrictions, removal from professions, housing restrictions, creation of racial laws – all worked toward isolating the Jews from society and culminated with a nationwide violent mob attack, called Kristallnacht, on Nov. 12, 1938.
After Poland’s defeat in 1939, Polish Jews were rounded up into several ghettos purposely established near train stations. By June 1941 actions were taken to complete “The Final Solution” as mobile killing units began operations in occupied Poland, aimed at wiping out entire Jewish communities. They were followed by the establishment of extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. These differed from the other extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Chelmno in that in these new camps Jews were sent directly to gas chambers upon arrival.
Three million Jews were murdered in the extermination camps. Over the entirety of “The Final Solution” up to six million Jews lost their lives – two-thirds of all the Jews that had been living in Europe in 1939.
As Justice Robert Jackson, Chief U.S. Counsel at Nuremberg said, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn … have been so … devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
