The ceremonies held at the end of January marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of the German extermination camp at Auschwitz in Poland were a reminder of the obscene and barbarous horrors of the Holocaust. Many of us who watched and mourned, especially perhaps the dwindling number of those of us who served in allied forces during the war, must have reflected on the causes and effects of that devastating conflict.
I have no doubt that it was a just war. Hitler's Germany had to be defeated if civilization was to be preserved. The Nazi Party adopted Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" as its "bible." The Germans, Hitler asserted, were a superior race. Jews, Gypsies and weaklings were unacceptable and should be eliminated from the Earth. It was the destiny of the superior German people to dominate Europe and in due course the rest of the world.
Jewish refugees from Germany began to escape in the late 1930s from the land in which their families had lived for generations. In the infamous Kristallnacht of Nov. 9-10,1938, Jewish synagogues, buildings and shops were attacked by anti-Semitic mobs while the police watched. Hundred of Jews were killed and some 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Millions more from Germany and German occupied territories were to follow and be exterminated.