Where was humanity during the Holocaust?

 

It has been Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel.  When asked,” The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks asked, “Where was humanity during the Holocaust?”

Netanyahu Sends Heroic Message to Jews & Israel

 

Benyamin Netanyahu, who is the prime minister on Israel, says that Jews will defeat their enemies. From the Holocaust they have became victorious. 

Kristallnacht

 

Kristallnacht was the start of the Holocaust, which 6 millions Jews were killed. But in 2023 Hamas made also Holocaust. 

Japanese Diplomat Saved 6 000 Jews From Concentration Camps

 Sugihara.  Image courtesy of public domain.

Joel Kontinen

Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, a virtual event on Monday honoured a hero often referred to as the “Japanese Schindler” for helping to save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust.

Chiune Sugihara, Japanese diplomat stationed in Lithuania, defied his own government’s orders by issuing handwritten transit visas in 1940 to more than 6,000 Lithuanian Jews, enabling them to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. He continued to do so for over a month until the Japanese consulate was closed. More than 40,000 descendants of those Jews are believed to be alive today because of his courageous actions.

Sugihara died in 1986 at the age of 86.

The online event highlighted Sugihara’s heroic deeds and the lessons we can learn from him in battling contemporary anti-Semitism. The reception was hosted by the Combat Anti-Semitism Movement and B’nai B’rith International.

Sacha Roytman Dratwa, executive director of the Combat Anti-Semitism Movement, told JNS, “While Sugihara has gotten more attention in recent decades, particularly after Yad Vashem gave him the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ title in the 1980s, most people, including Jews, are still unaware of his heroic deeds. So, it is important that we honour those, such as Sugihara, who came to the aid of the Jewish people in the darkest hour of their history.”

“With fewer and fewer survivors of the Holocaust alive to tell their stories, it is vital that its lessons continue to be shared,” he continued. “The Sugihara lesson is about what one person can do in the face of evil—which, with anti-Semitism on the rise around the world, is as relevant as ever.”

He was not the only one to save Jews: Apart from Schindler, who saved 1 200 Jews from concentration camps, Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker, teamed with 20 others and smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some in ambulances and trams between October 1940 and April 1943 and placed them in Catholic homes. And in the UK, they had Frank Foley, who saved 10,000 Jews  and sir Nicholas Winton who saved 669 Jewish children..

Source 

Ghermezian, Shiryn. 2021. Honoring the Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from Holocaust Jewish News Syndicate 27 January

 

Holocaust I: German Armies Performed the First Holocaust in Africa

Austrian anthropologist Felix von Luschan made a call for people to send skulls to Germany.



Joel Kontinen

Charles Darwin has cast a shadow on African heritage and its people. Just remember, what he did to the Herero and other people in Namibia. In effect, Darwin instigated the first holocaust in Africa.

They did this also in what is presently called Tanzania.

The Austrian anthropologist Felix von Luschan made a call for people to send skulls to Germany. The von Luschan collection, originally contained 6,300 skulls.

Mangi Meli, a chief from the north of what is now Tanzania, was executed in 1900 for his role in a rebellion against German colonial rule. A relative has searched for his skull, but hasn’t found him.

After he died, Mangi Meli body was decapitated and his head was taken to Germany.

The Sunday Express told says that many skulls were sent to Germany “to prove the similarity between the Nama and anthropoid apes”. This was not a distortion but an application of Charles Darwin’s writings in The Descent of Man.

Source:

The search in Germany for the lost skull of Tanzania's Mangi Meli BBC News (14 November).

Sugihara Chiune: How a Japanese man saved 6 000 souls from the Holocaust

Sugihara Chiune, known as "Japanese Oskar Schindler. Image courtesy of public domain.




Joel Kontinen

Sugihara Chiune’s father wanted his son to study medicine. Instead, he wanted to study languages and joined the diplomatic corps.

In 1939 he was sent to Lithuania, where he ran the consulate. There he was soon confronted Jews who fled from German-occupied Poland.

Three times he called his embassy, asking for permission to issue visas to the refugees. the answer was no. Chiune desired to defy the government:

“Day and night he wrote visas. He issued as many visas in a day as would normally be issued in a month. His wife, Yukiko, massaged his hands at night, aching from the constant effort. When Japan finally closed down the embassy in September 1940, he took the stationery with him and continued to write visas that had no legal standing but worked because of the seal of the government and his name. At least 6,000 visas were issued for people to travel through Japan to other destinations, and in many cases entire families traveled on a single visa. “

He was not the only one to save Jews:


Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker, teamed with 20 others and smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some in ambulances and trams between October 1940 and April 1943 and placed them in Catholic homes. And in the UK, they had Frank Foley and sir Nicholas Winton.

Source:

Wolpe, David, 2018, the Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting The New York Times (15 October).

Holocaust Remembrance Day: Time to Remember What Science Gone Wrong Can Do and What Some Heroic Dissenters Did

The Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Image: Public Domain.





Joel Kontinen

Just two days after Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson and many others praised the wonders of consensus science, it’s time for Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It is a stark reminder of how far science can go astray. Just over 70 years ago, eugenics was seen as a valid field of research, and Josef Mengele was conducting scientific experiments on Jews at Auschwitz.

Historians will tell us that the Holocaust was inspired by Darwinian evolution. German Nazis sought to help natural selection to get rid of the “unfit”.

Fortunately, among all the destruction, Oskar Schindler and other brave dissenters saved the lives of hundreds of Jews.

Sir Nicholas Winton shipped 669 Jewish children to Great Britain.

Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker, teamed with 20 others and smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some in ambulances and trams between October 1940 and April 1943 and placed them in Catholic homes.

“Under the pretext of inspecting the ghetto's sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Mrs Sendler and her assistants went inside in search of children who could be smuggled out and given a chance of survival by living as Catholics,” the Daily Mail reported in 2008, when she died at age 98.

She risked her life in the brave operation and despite being caught in 1943 and tortured, she refused to betray any of her helpers – and outlived those who tried to stop her.

Source:

Dead at 98: Heroic Irena Sendler, who helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis. Daily Mail 12 May 2008.

Sir Nicholas Winton, Britain’s Oscar Schindler, Dies at 106

Jewish children arriving in Britain. Image courtesy of the Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S69279 / CC-BY-SA.




Joel Kontinen

After the infamous Kristallnacht in late 1938 Nicholas Winton, a young British stockbroker, heard about the plight of Jewish children in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia.

He managed to get 669 of the children to safety in Britain by putting them on trains in an operation that came to be known as the Kindertransport or child transport. Had he failed to do so, most of them would have perished in concentration camps.

Sir Nicholas Winton, who was of Jewish descent, was one of the few humanitarian heroes of an otherwise dark and gloomy era when the Nazis used science against humanity.

Source:

Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved hundreds from Nazis, dies at 106. BBC news.

BBC: Time to Forget the Holocaust?

Auschwitz was liberated 70 years ago, but for many Jews it was far too late. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

70 years ago (on January 27, 1945) the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, freeing 7,650 Jewish captives. However, for many millions, the day came far too late.

To mark this event, the BBC tweeted just two days before today’s International Holocaust Memorial Day:

“Our one big question this morning: Is the time coming to lay the Holocaust to rest? #BBCTBQ.”

It seems that anti-Semitism is by no means dead. The BBC is not entirely free of it, either.

While the liberal western press has a gross anti-Semitist tendency, the BBC could hardly have been more insensitive. Six million Jews lost their lives because the Nazis thought they were sub-human, inferior and less evolved than Aryans.

And many more were humiliated just because they were Jews.

Just recently, terrorists attacked a kosher supermarket in Paris, killing four Jews.

The answer to the big question is not blowing in the wind. It ought to be a definitive no – never.

Source:

Plosker, Simon. 2015. BBC’s Holocaust Tweet Shocker. Honest Reporting (27 January).

The Darwinian Roots of World War I

A Canadian tank advancing with infantry at Vimy in April 1917. Image courtesy of Canada. Dept. of National Defence.



Joel Kontinen

Ideas have consequences. In the early 20th century, German intellectual and military leaders had espoused Darwinian thinking. They believed that war was inevitable and it would help in the struggle for existence by allowing the fittest to destroy the nations that were not as fit.

The Germans had already tested their theory in what became known as the first holocaust in South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) in 1896 and 1904–1908, when tens of thousands of Africans were slaughtered.

World War I (1914–1918) showed what Darwinian thinking could do.

Discovery Institute has produced a new documentary film The Biology of the Second Reich: Social Darwinism and the Origins of World War I on the hidden ideological and scientific roots of The First World War.

The Gates of Auschwitz Opened 65 Years Ago

Arbeit macht frei? These gates were opened 65 years ago. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Soviet troops liberated the remaining prisoners of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. It marked the end of one of the darkest and grisliest periods of Polish and German history.

The racist ideology of the Nazis had its roots at least partly in the writings of Ernst Haeckel. A zoology professor, Haeckel (1834-1919) spread the good news of evolution in central Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Nowadays, Haeckel is mostly remembered for his faked embryo drawings. His views on race are less well known. Like Charles Darwin, Haeckel thought that the coloured ”races” were not as evolved as the white ones.

The German Nazis assumed that their racial ideology was based on good science. The consequences of that ”science” turned out to be extremely horrible.


Source:

Darwin, Charles, 1871. (republished in 1981) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Still Too Much Hatred Around – on Holocaust Memorial Day

When all German Jews were hated: A Star of David at the Judisches Museum in Westphalia, Dorsten, Germany. Image courtesy of Daniel Ullrich, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Sixty-four years after the end of the holocaust in which six million Jews were killed in Hitler’s Final Solution, anti-Semitism has by no means abated.

Yesterday, on the eve of the Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran took a swipe at Israel at the UN Anti-racism conference.

The timing could not have been more inappropriate. Just as Israel lighted candles in memory of the millions killed at the hands of the Nazis, Mr. Ahmadinejad, always the holocaust-denialist, said the nation of Israel was racist.

The latter-day Haman would want us to forget history. But the holocaust is something we should never, ever forget.