Holocaust Awareness...Contemporary Lessons

Holocaust Awareness .Contemporary Lessons

Few events in recent history have had as dramatic an impact on history as the mass murder of Jews in concentration camps during World War II , the Holocaust . The Holocaust appears to be a well documented event (Hilberg , 1992 , yet today there are those who feel it is just a myth . When he discovered the concentration camps , General and future President Dwight David Eisenhower knew that a future day would come when people would claim that the Holocaust never happened , so he took great pains to document and

record the events on film so that the world would never forget . Even so , his efforts did not eliminate what he knew would happen . In spite of evidence to the contrary , today , there are many who claim that the Holocaust did not occur and that there is no evidence that it did . Yet the evidence suggests that is did happen and similar events such as the murder of more than 2 million people by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia plus mass murders ethnic intolerance in Iraq , the Sudan , Rwanda and Yugoslavia continue to take place even now

During the early hours of September 1 , 1939 , Adolph Hitler invaded Poland bringing about the Second World War . Historically , this war began because of Hitler 's contempt regarding the way Germans were treated at the end of the First World War and other related issues . At the time World War II began , there was a world wide depression that helped bring Hitler rose to power in Germany and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to power in the U .S . It is generally viewed that Hitler used the issue of Jewish economic domination in Germany both to push for war and as an excuse for the economic woes of Germany (Bartov 2000 Friedman , 1993 . Ultimately , Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany 's economic problems and to begin exterminating them in concentration camps - mass genocide (Gigliotti and Lang , 2005 ) on a scale that surpassed anything that had ever happened up to that time within so short a time span

Does engraining memories of past atrocities into the public psyche eliminate future atrocities ? Political campaigns demonstrate that by slinging mud candidates provide name recognition for their opponent (s In a similar vain , perhaps remembering the events of the Holocaust and similar events throughout history (and unfortunately , still occurring around the world today ) will only drive home the fact that those events exist and are continuing . Do we really want to do that ? We could be reinforcing the Holocaust in the minds of individuals who might not otherwise be aware that any such thing has ever happened or ever will

We have every reason to believe that Hitler knew of the mass extermination of the millions of Jews but ironically , there is no documented evidence in writing to confirm this idea (Irving , 1977 Most German citizens during WWII also claimed ignorance of the Jewish extermination in progress at the time . How could such a widespread extermination...