The Other Side for August 20. 2009

Nazism should never enter the argument

By Kelvin Wade | | August 20, 2009 14:09

Addressing the Wehrmact and Schutzstaffel (SS) troops in the summer of 1941, Adolf Hitler told his minions, 'Close your eyes to pity! Act brutally!' And they obliged.

In camps like Dachu, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and others, Jews and other prisoners were starved and worked to death. In hellish camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and others, the SS murdered millions of Jews by gassing and burning them. More than a million of the victims were children.

The Nazis murdered two-thirds of the Jews in all of Europe.

Adolf Hitler's Nazis also targeted and killed the physically and mentally disabled, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, Christian Poles, Slavs, homosexuals and others they branded deviants. There were hundreds of African-German children who were forcibly sterilized so as not to contaminate the Aryan race.

And of course this doesn't include the millions of soldiers and civilians of other countries killed in warfare by the Nazis from nations all over the globe.

The cruelty was beyond comprehension. In his book, Sonderkommando Auschwitz, Shlomo Venezia, one of the Jewish operators of the crematoriums, describes working the ovens as his own mother and cousin were cremated. On one occasion he found a live baby trying to suckle his dead mother's breast until a German guard emptied his pistol into the infant.

In a new book published this week, Das KZ Bordell (The Concentration Camp Brothel) by Robert Sommer, the author reveals that many non-Jewish women were forced into prostitution by the Nazis with the promise that they would be released. No such promises were kept.

Meanwhile, some of the conspirators in Operation Valkyrie, the plot to kill Hitler, were strangled and hanged with piano wire from meat hooks and their deaths filmed for Nazi Party officials to later watch.

According to testimony at the Doctor's Trial in Nuremburg, Nazi doctors conducted such 'medical' experiments as injecting dye into victims' eyes to try to change their color, placed people in ice water for five hours and stitched two people together hoping to create conjoined twins.

They subjected prisoners to drinking nothing but sea water, castrated and amputated limbs without anesthesia, infected prisoners with malaria, typhus and tetanus and exposed them to mustard gas, phosphorous and pressure chambers.

Gold teeth were stolen from the living and the dead as the Nazis looted everything of value. In Buchenwald, preserved tattooed human flesh was recovered. The often mentioned lampshade made of human flesh is probably urban legend but who can put it past the Nazis?

Even today at Auschwitz there is a room containing seven tons of human hair shaved from the bodies of prisoners. Hair was shipped to German factories for use in clothing and other products.

My point? No U.S. president of any political party or any American administration should be compared to Adolf Hitler, the SS or Nazis.

To do so is a profound insult to the victims and a display of massive ignorance of what Nazi Germany did. It trivializes the Holocaust. Surely, we can make our points without going to such horribly ludicrous depths. Peace.