On January 20, 1942, the Nazi leadership gathered in a villa on the outskirts of
Berlin and adopted the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The Wannsee
Conference, as this became known, from the suburb where the meeting was held,
formalized the process that exterminated so much of European Jewry.
As we
mark the 70th anniversary of that 90-minute meeting in which 15 people condemned
millions to death, there are many crucial lessons to learn from the Holocaust. I
wish to highlight two.
Firstly, the killing of a people begins not with
violence, but through race-based hatred, progressing to institutionalized
discrimination and only then culminating in murder. This is why anti-Semitism,
racism and institutionalized discrimination must be addressed, for if left to
fester the consequences can be tragic, severe and widespread.
Secondly,
the Nazis may have come to power hating Jews, and by the time they launched
World War II virulent anti-Semitism was a central policy, but they neither came
to power nor launched World War II with the aim of exterminating European Jewry.
Hitler wanted Europe “Judenrein” but it was only after plans to deport Jews to
places such as Madagascar failed and no one else was willing to accept these
Jewish refugees, and only after the mass killing by bullets failed to raise the
ire of the local international community, that the Nazis felt they had the green
light to take genocide to an unprecedented place.
Today, as Europe
teeters on the edge of an economic abyss, as the movement of refugees and asylum
seekers literally racing to cross borders soars on a daily basis, and as
anti-Semitism evolves and shows no sign of abating, it is imperative that the
evolution, nature and consequences of the Holocaust remain clear. But Holocaust
memory is under unprecedented attack. Crass Holocaust deniers like David
Irving have been discredited since he lost his libel trial in London in 2000,
but new trends in denial are alive and well in new-accession member states of
the European Union, particularly the three Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia
and Estonia, with much support from rightwing political forces in Hungary, the
Czech Republic and others.
Articulated in the 2008 Prague Declaration,
and actively pursued by the leadership of a number of Eastern European Union
states, the “Prague Process” (as the Prague Declaration is referred to by its
proponents) has been active in the European Union, most notably securing passage
of a 2009 resolution calling for all of Europe to enact a single day of
commemoration for Nazi and Soviet crimes. Other dangerous proposals being pushed
include the effort to “overhaul” textbooks throughout the European Union to
ensure “equal treatment” of Nazi and Soviet crimes, and efforts to criminalize
the opinion that the Nazi Holocaust was the only genocide in 20th-century
Europe.
HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE has made Jews empathetic to the suffering
of others, and indeed the East European countries suffered brutally under four
decades of Soviet rule. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, were
deported, were forced into labor camps by Communist regimes whose cruelty was
beyond doubt, and far too many perished or had their lives ruined. Soviet
crimes were nothing less than horrible and should be remembered in their own
distinct way. But there was no Soviet genocide. There was no Soviet
Holocaust.
By blurring the definition of genocide, that earth-shattering
term loses its meaning. If everything is genocide then nothing is
genocide.
To mark the anniversary of Wannsee and to counter the dangerous
trends in Europe today, I have released the Seventy Years Declaration on the
Anniversary of the Final Solution at Wannsee, together with Professor Dovid
Katz, author of the
DefendingHistory.com blog. The declaration has been
signed by over 70 parliamentarians from 19 European Union countries, including
three former Europe foreign ministers, two vice presidents of the European
Parliament and a vice president of the Bundestag. In addition to remembering the
Final Solution plan with “humility and sadness,” the declaration explicitly
rejects the notion of “double genocide.”
Seventy years after the Wannsee
Conference, the reconciliation process for the crimes of World War II is not yet
complete, particularly in the Baltics. Accordingly, the declaration calls
for EU member states to “continue efforts to acknowledge their own roles in the
destruction of European Jewry” and the “need for ongoing genuine Holocaust
education and memorialization across the European Union.” The rise of
anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and xenophobia in general, and the
implementation of double genocide policies in Eastern Europe, makes this an
urgent imperative.
Unfortunately most global Jewish organizations and the
relevant branches of Israel’s government have yet to invest their resources in
countering the threat of double genocide, which is necessary in order to
preserve the memory of the Holocaust.
The time has come for them to join
the European parliamentarians and put their names to this task. The way
the Holocaust is remembered, and the success or otherwise of the Prague Process,
is central not only to Europe’s past, but also its future.
The writer is
an associate professor at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia and a
documentary filmmaker whose latest film is ’Rewriting History’
(www.rewriting-history. org). He can be reached at
danny@identity-films.com. The 70th anniversary declaration can be viewed
at www.defendinghistory.com.