Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the liberation of the Nazi Death Camp, Auschwitz, 76 years ago.

Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the liberation of the Nazi Death Camp, Auschwitz, 76 years ago. 

Why should we remember the Holocaust? Many books have been published on this topic in addition to my own, but in short, here are a few very important reasons why, as a Holocaust historian, I think it needs to be remembered.

First, genocide and mass murder are still happening. When people say, “Never Again!” they should mean it. When genocide was going on in Bosnia from 1994 to 1995 with the world’s knowledge, it took the United States getting involved to stop it. One would think that Germany, with its cries of Nie Wieder! (never again), would have sent military units to stop it, but they DID NOTHING.  Cowards.

Second, when I hammer Germany, I also need to hammer us, the United States of America. We should have acted far earlier when Serbian Orthodox Christians were slaughtering Bosnian Muslims. The Muslim world needs to know that we bombed Serbian Christians to get them to stop killing their own citizens of the Islamic faith.

I also need to be critical of the U.S. during the Rwandan genocide, also in 1994. A million people were murdered during the uprising of the Hutu against their Tutsi neighbors. It was akin to Catholics slaughtering Catholics because of their skin color and ethnicity (Rwanda is one of the most Catholic countries in Africa). It took us months to respond properly, and by the time we did, a million people had been, by and large, hacked to death by machetes. (That is a lot of work and much harder to accomplish in that amount of time than using gas chambers.)

Third, we need to realize that if a country like Germany, which had one of the most educated and sophisticated cultures in the history of humankind by 1933, could drop to the Satanic level of slaughtering innocent civilians because of their ethnicity or beliefs, then the question we need to ask is, “What nation is incapable of doing such a thing?”

The motivation of primitive groups, like the Islamic fascist organization ISIS/ISIL, seems apparent when they slaughtered the Yazidis because it is led by fanatical, uneducated Muslim radicals. 

However, if a country that produced Mozart, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Heine, Mendelssohn, Einstein and many others of incredible sophistication and intelligence could also conduct one of the most evil persecutions known to history, then we need to study it intensively. We need to be forever mindful that genocide is ALWAYS an ever-present danger from any country.

Due to America’s involvement in World War II, we helped bring the Axis powers to their knees and defeated them soundly. Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust, called the Shoah by Jewish scholars, killed six million Jews, as well as Romani, Soviet POWs, political prisoners, Communists, homosexuals and a host of others numbering11.7 million people. 

Imperial Japan under Emperor Hirohito slaughtered 22 million people, mostly Chinese. They, too, were viewed as inferior and sub-human. And Japan also has the record for conducting millions of rapes of women, girls and boys, the most of any country during the Second World War—far more than the Soviet military, which tolerated, and even encouraged, the rape of enemy women. While their record of sexual crimes is well established, the Russians were only in Germany during the war for about six months, whereas Japan had almost 20 years to dominate and persecute the people in the Chinese lands they occupied.

In the end, the U.S., with help of our Allies, took out the Axis powers and stopped Hitler and Hirohito, two of the most horrific mass-murderers in the history of humanity. We, as Americans, can take pride in this. However, we also need to be mindful that we were often late to respond to post-WWII genocide and mass slaughter until it appeared in the newspapers and intelligence reports for months, if not years. The examples I mentioned above are far from a complete list of all that has happened up to the present day.

In remembering the Holocaust, let us try to respond sooner to stop the enemies of the human family who are killing others because of their skin color, beliefs and/or nationality. When we cry, “Never Again!” we should also say, “Never sit on our hands when people are getting slaughtered.”  How does we do this?  Serving in the military is one of the best ways in my opinion, but a close second is to put pressure on our government to act immediately once knowledge is obtained of crimes against humanity being committed anywhere in the world. Doing nothing makes us complicit. That’s not the American way.

For more about Holocaust and World War II history, visit my website: www.bryanmarkrigg.com.