The Jewish Tragedy - Part 1
At this point we must take stock. Up to the Anschluss with Austria, Hitler had been pursuing a course of conquest in restoring Germany to its pre-1918 size. Like it or not, it was justifiable and many countries simply accepted that line of reasoning. Just as they accepted the line of reasoning that said that what Germany did with Germans of Jewish descent, was a domestic matter and could not be interfered with. But, with the Anschluss, it became apparent that Hitler's crazed ideas of racial purity were now to be part of his policy and all countries would have to take note.
However, it was some years before 'the final solution' became almost the sole aim of pursuing the war, and so we shall need to step back every now and then to bring the terrible events of the genocide up to date. Such an occasion is now when the world awaits the war which the German Jews have been experiencing, in their own country, since 1933.
In titling this and subsequent articles a conscious decision has been made not to use the word holocaust. Originally meaning a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire, it later came to mean the massacre of a large number by way of sacrifice, possibly as expiation for the sins of the murderer. It certainly seems to be the wrong word to apply to the deliberate killing of 6 million Jews and about 5 million non-Aryans and misfit Aryans, for no other reason than to fulfill the mad dreams of Hitler to create a pure-blooded master race. That it was a tragedy there is no doubt, for the world and for the individuals killed and their surviving families. And it continues to be a tragedy because mankind has learnt no lesson from it, continually returning to the age-old solution to ethnic problems of trying to kill those different people over there simply because they are different, plus the accrued bitterness of centuries of the killing that difference has caused.
Certainly the victims did not ask for the killing, and neither did they deserve it. In most instances, they were indistinguishable from their fellow citizens in each of the countries involved, and could usually only be told apart by the fact that they attended a synagogue. Undoubtedly, also, the traditional reason for the dislike of Jews, that they had been pronounced anathema by the Catholic church centuries before for the killing of Jesus, played a part but not to the extent of wishing to kill them, and the church still prayed for their conversion to Christianity.
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