Lectures on the Holocaust - Part 1
Food for thought
Ladies and Gentlemen, dear guests. Before I take up the subject of my talk, allow me to show you an article from Germany's most prestigious daily newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which illustrates, in a very useful manner, the kind of topic we are dealing with and the problems that are related to it. The title of the article is "Traces of the Crime; Shoes, Shoes, even Children's Shoes." It is the report written by a journalist about his visit to the Stutthof concentration camp not far from Danzig, in post-war Poland, that has been turned into a museum.[11] The author, in his fourth sentence, states that he cannot imagine what an extermination camp might look like and talks of "installations in which '6 million Jews and a total of 26 million detainees [...] were killed.'" At the end of his account the author writes that he found himself facing "the remains of the most brutal genocide, the most modern killing machines of the time, the cruelest crime of humanity." By putting things that way, one of the most highly regarded newspapers in the world has given its definition of the Holocaust. The annihilation of a total of 26 million people by the National Socialists in ultra-modern killing machines is the cruelest crime in the history of humanity.
