While civilians caught up in the conflict were able to record footages of Nazis razing whole cities, Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun filmed the ‘Fuhrer’ relaxing at his chalet in the Alps in the middle of the Nazi invasion of Europe.

Braun’s stained home movies, previously unseen images, have been treated through the efforts of archivists and private collectors. These recordings offer a valuable glimpse and showcase many nuances.

The new material, considered ‘top secret’ for seven decades, is now part of a documentary by the National Geographic Channel.

This documentary brings a different vision of victims and executioners – two very different realities at a point in history. It offers a visual evidence of the soldiers who participated in the Nazi campaign across Europe, the effect on the people who suffered, and the political and military leaders of the Holocaust.

The sacrifice of soldiers in Stalingrad, the Nazis holding their victory in Dunkirk, and horrific moments of bombings in France and England are some of the home movies put together in the six-episode documentary by the National Geographic Channel.

But the up close and personal images of Adolf Hitler could have only been recorded by his mistress, Eva Braun. Braun’s personal film recordings captured Hitler’s other side.

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Via PBS

It was UNESCO that took the initiative after the Second World War to organize ‘the world conferences against racism.’ The first two rounds were held in Geneva, with a particular emphasis on ‘apartheid’ in South Africa, and the first conference was held in Durban in 2001. The recently held UN Conference on Racism, dubbed Durban II, was supposed to be a review of what have so far been accomplished since Durban I. As was widely publicized, many countries such as the United States boycotted the conference, Iran’s president went on a rant and tirade against Israel, and many country representatives walked out because of his hate-filled speech.

The controversy raged once again simply because some people confuse religion with race. The conference against racism has become the occasion for radicalized expression of issues that have never been uniformly understood by all. Racism has remained to be a blur to most, no matter how much has been spoken or written about it. If Durban I was a fiasco, Durban II was a charade. These UN conferences on racism were just venues for the age-old issues of religion and race that are seemingly irresolvable.

The organizers should have smelled the things to come even before Durban II commenced. When one gets Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the most eager participant to attend an anti-racism conference, one already gets more than an inkling of what is to come. With Ahmadinejad as the virtual poster boy of an anti-racism conference, one can see boycotts and walk-outs a mile ahead. The Holocaust, indeed, casts a long, long shadow.

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Via Montreal Gazette

Josias Kumpf, now 83, did active service during the Holocaust as an armed SS guard at three Nazi concentration camps: the Sachsenhausen Camp, slave labor sites in Nazi-occupied France where prisoners built launching platforms for Germany’s V-1 and V-2 rockets that were used in attacks on Britain, and Nazi forced-labor camps for Jews in Trawniki, Poland. He was born in Serbia but was taken by the Nazis from his home in Yugoslavia when he was 17 and forced to serve as a guard starting in October 1942.

Kumpf was part of the November 1943 Operation Harvest Festival, a mass execution where 42,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered at three camps in eastern Poland in a span of two days. He was also a guard when about 8,000 Jewish prisoners, including 400 children, were shot and killed in pits at Trawniki. In fact, Kumpf is known as the ‘murder pits’ guard. According to him, his task was to “shoot and kill those who were still half-alive to prevent their escape.”

In 1956, Kumpf migrated from Austria to the US. He became a US citizen in 1964 and eventually settled in Racine, Wisconsin. In May 2005, his US citizenship was nullified because he violated a law that says those with records of persecution cannot enter the US. This meant that he falsified his identity and documents to obtain US citizenship. The US government has deported him to Austria.

The Holocaust is one of the most tragic times in human history. It has redefined the meaning of guilt, giving it more than a singular meaning. Of late, controversy surrounds the Catholic Church and the Vatican regarding the issue of Holocaust denial.

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Via BBC

There is yet another kind of guilt that the Holocaust produced. This is the moral guilt that those who survived the genocide eventually suffered from. Many times, this has been called ‘survivor guilt’ or the feelings of people who survived a disaster that killed others. If guilt is defined as an awareness of having done wrong or committed a crime, accompanied by feelings of shame and regret, then the feelings of shame and regret felt by survivors of the Holocaust are both difficult to fathom and not justified. Guilt becomes the anger directed toward the self. In some twisted logic, guilt becomes the penance one pays for the gift of survival.

Survivor guilt may also motivate an individual to bear witness and to remember those who were murdered, in a bid to educate the world about the Holocaust. This kind of guilt, and the subsequent recollection, was explored most painfully in Primo Levi’s survivor memoir entitled The Drowned and the Saved. This kind of guilt cannot be called sin of omission because sin of omission still implies responsibility or accountability.

Those afflicted with moral guilt, though the phenomenon is inescapable for those who survived the Holocaust, did not have the prerequisite of accountability in the act. If they failed to do something because they were powerless to have done something at all, it can be said that they did not commit any wrong. The kind of guilt they had is of those who suffered the trauma of the Holocaust. They were victims themselves. Their dilemma was not knowing if surviving was, indeed, less tragic than dying during those times.

Guilt is the topic that runs through Levi’s book, with an entire chapter devoted on the question of guilt. He explains that it was the recognition of one’s own moral dwindling that led to so many post-Liberation suicides, as the survivors came to realize that “our moral yardstick has changed” (Levi 57). A pall of gloom and sadness permeates Levi’s recollection as he himself tries to surmount the moral guilt, justifying that those who lived were not necessarily the best but who usually demonstrated the worst human qualities.

This may be the height of self-hatred for outliving one’s loved ones. While regarding himself as innocent, Levi finds himself in a never-ending quest for justification of survival, only because he was one of those who survived. He writes, “Is the shame of that time justified or not? I couldn’t sort it out then, and I still can’t today, but the shame existed and exists, concrete, heavy, everlasting” (Levi 62).

Levi characterizes this guilt as that which “gnaws and shrieks” (Levi 63). These noises have been kept in his head because he felt the possibility that, maybe, he survived at the expense of another person, and this person was perhaps someone more worthy of survival. Liberation was not joyous. In anguish, the survivors returned to their former lives and lived among their former friends and family knowing that they had lived for a prolonged period “at an animal-like level” (Levi 57). What they did not return to were their former selves.

In mankind’s recent history, the Holocaust is the most painful and costliest reminder that bad men can do everything when good men do nothing. It also showed us that in a time of extreme trauma, the ones who survive are not necessarily better off than the ones who perished. The Holocaust also redefines the concept of guilt and places it at several levels, with many variegated hues. Guilt has never been the same since.

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The issue of complicity in the crimes of the Holocaust is made even more complicated with the existence of a unit of average middle-aged Germans who became the mass murderers of tens of thousands of Jews. They helped the Holocaust succeed as they were transformed from ordinary men into active criminals. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution by Christopher Browning is the story of how Hitler and his top officers manipulated and changed regular citizens into mass murderers by brainwashing them on the concept of duty and patriotism as they carried out Hitler’s Final Solution in Poland. By the time the 500 men of Police Battalion 101 disbanded in late 1943, they had killed at least 83,000 Jews.

The orders that were given to them were chilling, to say the least. The words did not seem to come from leaders of conscience at all. The activities of the men of Police Battalion 101 were measured and strictly accounted for. The phenomenon that was this battalion makes people today ponder at the mind-boggling transformation of ordinary men into killing machines.

No matter how the Nazis were successful in transforming these ordinary men into mass murderers, human conscience crept in, nonetheless. Some of the men showed remorse and tremendous guilt. The book’s author deftly explains how guilt slowly crept into the minds and hearts of these men who were, by all indication, not the evil souls that Nazi leaders were.

In a time of utter confusion when evil men were running their very dark world and their very troubled lives, there were still some of those that helped orchestrate the grand design of the Holocaust who saw a glimpse of conscience through the pangs of guilt. Nevertheless, they did what they did and were, thus, guilty of the sin of commission as much as they were criminally culpable.

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Richard Williamson, a Roman Catholic bishop who questioned the truth about the controversial Holocaust. The British born bishop caused outrage among the public in Argentina.

Williamson who was living in Buenos Aires for five years now at St Pius X seminary was asked to leave the country within ten days. The bishop arrived at Heathrow airport and was escorted by the police. The bishop questions the Holocaust causing outrage among the Jews and embarrassed the Vatican.

The bishop suggested that the historical evidence suggested that only 300,000 Jews died in the concentration camps and that there were no gas chambers. He reiterated that he would confirm his views not by visiting the Auschwitz but by reading a book by the former Holocaust denier Jean Claude Pressac.

The British catholic bishops of England and Wales totally condemned Williamson for his views. The Vatican also claims to have no knowledge about the bishop’s Holocaust beliefs before lifting his excommunication. However, amidst the protests, the bishop found one supporter in Britain named Michele Renouf, a socialite and a documentary maker. She opined that it’s a disgrace that there could be no debate on this issue and blamed Germany for its Holocaust-denial law.

Via: Guardian

The award-winning novel ‘The Reader’ was written by Bernhard Schlink who happens to be a German law professor and judge. It is small wonder that the novel is suffused with the topic of Holocaust guilt. In fact, ‘The Reader’ sags so heavily beneath the weight of the subject of guilt. Hanna (played in the movie adaptation by Kate Winslet which bagged for her a first Oscar award) is guilty of war crimes. Her young paramour Michael is guilty of betrayal. Michael’s father is guilty of ineffectiveness as a father. Everyone is guilty. Even the Holocaust survivors reel in survivor guilt.

‘The Reader’ is legal practitioner Schlink’s own mental and spiritual terrain of guilt. The Holocaust’s damage is, indeed, as deep as the core of the earth.

The story of ‘The Reader’ begins in Germany after the Second World War. In 1958, Michael Berg was a middle-class, 15-year old boy living in West Germany. Recovering from a prolonged illness, he meets a 38-year old working-class woman named Hanna Schmitz.

Returning from school, the teenager Michael suddenly feels ill and finds Hanna, a stranger who was more than double his age, helping him to get home. Thus starts a passionate romance between the two. Michael discovers that Hanna loves to read and discovers, too, for himself a profound physical relationship with an enigmatic older woman.

However, Hanna soon disappears, leaving the young Michael devastated and confused.

Eight years later, law student Michael attends the trials for Nazi war crimes and meets Hannah once more. This time, she is a defendant.

The subject of Holocaust guilt has been mined a thousand times in art and literature. ‘The Reader,’ just like William Styron’s ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ is one shining example that the mine is of gold.

The usual definition of Holocaust as “the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children, and million of others, by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II” is far from complete. The list of millions of other victims include the Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, political prisoners, religious dissenters, the physically and mentally handicapped, and homosexuals. In War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, the author Doris Bergen includes Jehova’s Witnesses and Freemasons to the long list of Holocaust victims.

There were nine million Jews living in 21 European countries in 1933. These countries were all occupied by Germany during the war. Twelve years later, by 1945, more than 60 percent of European Jews had been killed. More than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children, and thousands of handicapped children were included in the mass slaughter. It has been an erroneous piece of information that Jews were the only victims of Nazism. As many as 15 million non-Jewish people were also killed, among them Slavs, ‘asiatics,’ and Germans of African descent. If Soviet civilian deaths are to be included in the list of victims of the Nazi network, the total number of deaths should be rightfully pegged at 17 million.

Adolf Hitler was the master architect of the Holocaust by authorizing the mass killings of what the Nazis called “undesirables” in the T-4 Euthanasia Program and ordering the “annihilation of the Jews.” He had accomplices. The Nuremberg Trials only tried twenty-two major Nazi criminals for crimes committed during the Holocaust, but the mass killings needed a massive network of people to carry out the grand effort. German soldiers, the German police, the SS, government officials, clerks, German doctors, and civilians were all involved in accomplishing the mass cleansing of the Jewish race in Europe. All those who obeyed the order to run the prison camps and exterminate the Jews were all complicit in the Holocaust complex crime.

The extent of guilt, however, is as complex as the crime itself. The government-in-exile of Poland, the British government, and the United States of America had all heard rumors of the gas chambers. Yet, they did not act on time. The Vatican failed, too. It admitted that the Church turned its back on the fate of the persecuted Jews because it wanted to protect its institution.

The free world was distant and quiet when the Jews were being summarily slaughtered. The Jews, on the other hand, only marched helplessly into the gas chambers.

The Holocaust, an industrial project of extermination, is a reminder that some men can do everything when the others do nothing.

Several Holocaust memorial museums and monuments of commemoration exist in the world today because Holocaust guilt still ravages humankind for not being able to do what could have been done.

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In his first statement since the controversy arose from his Holocaust negation, Williamson said he will focus on evidence of the historical existence of gas chambers before considering a correction. “There should be historical evidence, not emotions. And if I find the evidence, then I stand corrected. But it will take time,” he said in an interview with the weekly Der Spiegel. In the interview, he also renews his criticism against Vatican II, accusing the council of causing “the theological chaos that we have today” and denouncing the “dictatorship of relativism” imposed by “liberal bishops.”

Der Spiegel says that they were not able to conduct a face-to-face interview with Richard Williamson. The bishop only agreed to answer questions via e-mail from Argentina where he lives. The answers, though, were confirmed by the bishop through telephone.

The lifting of his excommunication has sparked an outcry in many countries, especially in the Catholic circles of Germany, and triggered a crisis that has affected the Vatican’s relations with Jews, thereby tarnishing the image of the pope. According to theologians and church leaders, hundreds of Germans were outraged with Pope Benedict’s decision to rescind the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson.

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Via ZEENEWS

The United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, urged the citizens of the world to honor the victims of the Holocaust that was perpetrated by the Nazi regime during World War II, through the reaffirmation of the belief in the values and standards promoted by the UN. In a corporate message on International Day in Memory of Victims of the Holocaust, Ban said that people should continue to teach future generations the lessons learned in “the darkest chapters of history.” “We must fight Holocaust denial, and denounce hatred and intolerance and we must enforce the standards and laws created by the United Nations to protect people and fight impunity for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Ban said.

Ban laments that the world is “plagued by relentless violence, the total disregard for human rights and an attack on people because of their identity.” He is encouraged by the academic and educational initiatives started in recent years around the world to prevent the neglect of this tragedy. In November 2005, the member countries of the UN adopted a resolution which stated that each January 27 be commemorated worldwide for the liberation in 1945 by Russian troops of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz.

The Holocaust was the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population in Europe that was sponsored and perpetrated by Hitler’s Nazi regime. In many popular accounts, the death toll is pegged at approximately 6 million Jews who perished. A more careful look into history, taking into account all those affected by the Holocaust network, will reveal a total death toll of 17 million people that includes non-Jews.

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Via UN News Centre