HORRIFIED!


I have been studying little known facts about the darkest days in history, the reign of the Nazis and the horror of their death camps. This is what i came up with: There were more than 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe from 1933 to 1945.

There were 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1000 prisoner of war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, "Germanizing" prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

The best estimate using current information available is 15 to 20 million people who died or were imprisoned in sites controlled by the Germans throughout the European continent."

Rows of bodies fill the yard of the Boelcke-Kaserne (Boelcke Barr acks) located in the south-east of the town of Nordhausen. The barracks was a subcamp of the en:Mittelbau-Dora Nazi concentration camp.


Simply put, in the words of Hartmut Berghoff, Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, "The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought; we knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was, but the actual numbers are unbelievable."

And what makes this revelation so important is that it forces us to acknowledge a crucial truth about the Holocaust that many people have tried to ignore or to minimize - a truth that has profound contemporary significance: The unspeakable crime of the 20th century, more than the triumph of evil, was the sin of the "innocent" bystander.

For years our efforts to understand the Holocaust focused on the perpetrators. We looked for explanations for the madness of Mengele, the obsessive hatred of Hitler, the impassive cruelty of Eichmann. We sought answers to how it was possible for the criminal elements, the sadists and the mentally unbalanced to achieve the kind of power that made the mass killings feasible.

That was because we had no idea of the real extent of the horror. With more than 42,000 ghettos and concentration camps scattered throughout the length and breadth of a supposedly civilized continent, there's no longer any way to avoid the obvious conclusion. The cultured, the educated, the enlightened, the liberal, the refined, the sophisticated, the urbane - all of them share in the shame of a world that lost its moral compass and willingly acceded to the victory of evil.

These are the facts and for those holocaust deniers who still believe in their sick minds that these atrocities never happened may they rot in hell!! Remember what I've always said both on radio and print: If we can't learn from our past we don't have a future