Let’s begin with some perspective. Upwards of 80 million people died in World War II. 52 million of these were civilians, 20 million of whom died of disease or famine. Of the 30 million soldiers who died, 5 million died in prisoner of war camps.
In the Soviet Union alone there were 23 million deaths, 10 million of which were military personnel. In China there were 20 million deaths, 4 million of them soldiers.
Six million Jews were killed. They were first transported to forced labor camps, then sent to the gas chambers. The fact that 6 million Jews died is not all that consequential, given the above numbers. It’s how they died that’s the big deal.
There are a lot of extenuating circumstances. There are no and never will be any excuses, just relevant issues.
It’s not as if the Jews were suddenly swept away and killed. The Nazis had singled them out for discrimination for almost twenty years, ever since the Great Depression. Jews had long since lost their jobs, their wealth, their professions, everything. Their roots in Germany were not that deep.
Why didn’t they just leave?
A ship full of Jewish refugees sailed around the world. Not one nation on earth would take them in. Not a single one. The ship returned to Germany, and everybody got off exactly where they started from. If the whole world hated the Jews, rejected them, we all share responsibility for what happened. This happened many times in the years leading up to the war, many.
It’s not as if the Jews were the only civilians to die. A total of 52 million civilians died in World War II, 20 million of disease or famine. The great majority of Jews died of disease or famine.
5 million soldiers died in prisoner of war camps. The Nazis had been at war with the Jews for a generation. The Jews knew they were being deported to work camps. Why didn’t they fight? The fact that they didn’t fight back does not make them any less prisoners of war. Were they overall treated any worse than the prisoners of war of the Japanese?
The Jews could have formed a resistance and sabotaged Germany from the inside. If 6 million Jews had risen up in armed resistance Germany never would have been unleashed on the world. There wouldn’t have been 80 million deaths worldwide.
This is not to justify the Holocaust, just to put it in perspective.
The Japanese killed 20 million Chinese, 4 million of them soldiers. Why aren’t they vilified? Their prisoner of war camps were every bit as brutal as the German camps, if not more so.
There is plenty of blame to go around, on all sides. Nor does it justify the women and children. However, women fight wars now and children routinely conduct suicide terrorist bombings. The Germans were ahead of the times in many ways; the Jews too…