World Holocaust Day

People lay flowers at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP

It is curious to see a superstition dying out. The idea of a Jew (which our pious ancestors held in horror) has nothing in it now revolting. We have found the claws of the beast, and pared its nails, and now we take it to our arms, fondle it, write plays to flatter it: it is visited by princes, affects a taste, patronizes the arts, and is the only liberal and gentleman-like thing in Christendom.
Charles Lamb, Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets: Marlowe's Rich Jew of Malta

Who hateth me but for my happiness? 
Or who is honoured now but for his wealth?
Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus,
Than pitied in a Christian poverty.
Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act i, sc.1

Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea!
Jehovah has triumph'd -- His people are free.
Thomas Moore, Sound the Loud Timbrel

He hath ... laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew.
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act iii, sc.1, l.58

Scientists have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species, Homo sapiens. The unity of mankind was recognized by the founder of systematic biology,Carolus Linnaeus (Carl Linne, 1707, 1778) who gave mankind the name Homo sapiens in 1758. The name Homo sapiens means literally "Man the Wise", which as Oscar Wilde wittily remarked is perhaps the most premature oafishly arrogant definition ever offered of any species. In the nineteenth century there were several scientists who challenged the conception of the unity of mankind, but their position proved untenable. In his famous book, The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin (1808 - 1882) summed up the best, and general, scientific opinion on the subject in the following words:
"Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these are of no unimportance or of so singular a nature, that is extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man.
"But the most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed.
"As it is improbable that the numerous and unimportant points of resemblance between the several races of man in bodily structure and mental faculties (I do not here refer to similar customs) should all have been independently acquired, they must have been inherited from progenitors who had these same characters."
Ashley Montagu, Statement on Race

The General Assembly of the United Nations
proclaims
This Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and educating to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
articles 2 - 30. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml

During the second half of the nineteenth century politicians and extreme nationalists began to discover the usefulness of racism, and to find "race" to be a far more effective device than reason, for the achievement of their nefarious purposes. As Hitler remarked in conversation with Hermann Rauschning: "I know perfectly well, just as well as all those tremendously clever intellectuals, that in the scientific sense there is no such thing as race ... I as a politician need a conception which enables the order which has hitherto existed on historic bases to be abolished and an entirely new and antihistoric order enforced and given an intellectual basis ... With the conception of race National Socialism will carry its revolution abroad and recast the world."

Ashley Montagu, Statement on Race

Adolf Hitler was born in 1889. His whole life was a cliche. He was a poor student, an undistinguished soldier, an unsuccessful house painter, and pathetic in his ambition to become an artist because he had no talent. Statesmen who came into contact with him were appalled by his ignorance and vulgarity.
What then was the nature of the hold Hitler had on his followers? Wherein did he differ from other racists? To say that he had hypnotic, spellbinding powers is to say nothing. Perhaps the answer is that whereas other racists merely toyed with the idea of making murder a civic virtue, Hitler made it a reality by opening the Pandora's box of man's unconscious mind. Hitler freed those evil impulses which man has tried to chain and tame in the name of civilization ever since his emergence from the primeval forest. It was not by accident that those who rose to the highest posts in Hitler's inner circle were drug addicts like Goering ... sadists like Heydrich, murderers like Himmler.

Once Hitler had political power there was no holding him back. The entire state was organized for brutality. In 1935 the Reichstag passed the so-called "Nuremberg Laws", disenfranchising all those deemed to have "Jewish blood"  which included anyone with one Jewish grandparent. One by one the Nuremberg Laws stripped the Jews of their professions and their businesses; blackmail striped them of their liquid assets. The businesses of the Jews fell into the appreciative hands of the Germans. The liquid assets found their way into the pockets of Nazi party officials. Hundreds were hauled off to concentration camps, where they were greeted by the Christian prisoners who had preceded them.

The entire Jewish phase of the "final solution" was placed in the hands of one Adolf Eichmann, a slender, owlish failure-prone salesman of oil products who rose rapidly within the Nazi hierarchy and became a cynical boastful, sycophantic S.S. lieutenant colonel...  When apprehended fifteen years after the war by Israeli agents, Eichmann modestly disclaimed any credit for his achievement.

Though there was a shortage of steel for tanks and airplanes, there was no shortage of steel to build furnaces for the disposal of the cadavers. This excerpt from a business letter from the director of the Didier Works in Berlin gives proof of the knowledge German industrialists had of the use of their products.

For placing the bodies into the furnaces, we suggest simply a metal tray moving on cylinders. Each furnace will have an oven measuring only 24 by 18 inches, as coffins will not be used. For transporting corpses from the storage points to the furnaces we suggest using light carts on wheels, and we enclose diagrams of these drawn to scale.

With German efficiency, chambers for the administration of Zyklon B gas were built to resemble large shower rooms. Arrivals were informed they would have to take a shower, were ordered to undress, and then were herded into the "shower rooms". Small children were often thrown in after the adults. The steel doors to the gas chambers were shut. Then the amethyst-blue Zyklon B crystals were funnelled through the large-holed shower nozzles into the hermetically sealed room. The hydrogen cyanide gas released from the crystals slowly rose to the ceiling, slowly gassing the people in the room, slowly turning the gasping, retching bodies into bright pink, green-spotted, convulsed corpses.
Max I. Dimont, Jews, God and History

Between 1944 and 19487, after their liberation from the Nazis, some 250,000 Jews fled from Eastern Europe to the countries of Central Europe -- Germany, Austria and Italy. Their goal, generally speaking, was Palestine. This mass movement was usually effected by illegal or half legal ways, and it included not only men but encumbered families with children and old people. The outcome of these wanderings was necessarily uncertain, for at the time Palestine was not open to these refugees, nor did any other country open its gates to accept them.

During the early years of Nazi Germany, Jews crossed borders illegally into Belgium, Holland, France and Luxembourg. In 1938, when the Germans expelled large numbers of Polish Jews from Germany, many others tried to cross into Poland illegally because the anti-Semitic government of Poland would not let them enter the country openly, although they had been Polish citizens. German Jews driven into no man's lands on the Czech borders, Polish Jews driven by the Poles out of border territories annexed from Czechoslovakia in 1938,Slovak and Hungarian Jews expelled by their respective countries into Hungary or Slovakia and refused entrance there -- in many of these and similar cases Jews were forced to try to save themselves by illegal entry into one or the other of the countries concerned. 
Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brighah: The organized escape of the Jewish survivors of Eastern Europe, 1944 - 1948

Mobilized and activated by the elementary desire to escape death at the hands of the Germans and motivated by generalized anti-Semitism, a movement of Zionist youth began the process to be responsible for surreptitiously aiding Jewish refugees passage into Israel. Jews encountered vicious anti-Semitism in Europe even after the Holocaust. But, according to Yehuda Bauer, "...there was a world of difference between even the worst kind of postwar anti-Semitism and the war of extermination waged against the Jews by the [Nazi] Germans".

In the 21st Century, we see history repeating itself. Anti-Semitism is on the rise, the world over. Israel, established as a homeland for Jews whom no other country wanted, is facing its very own potential for destruction. The more things change, the more similar they become in their dreary sameness.