By Mark Vogel

From his jail cell in Germany in 1923, Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, predicting a European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

In the early 1940’s Germany, under the rule of Hitler and the Nazi party, conquered or were joined by Albania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, France, Montenegro, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Croatia, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Norway, The Netherlands, Monaco, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, San Marino, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Saar, the Ukraine, and sections of the USSR.

Exceeding his prediction of exterminating 525,000 German Jews, Hitler’s program of death expanded to all of the conquered and allied countries, resulting in the systematic murder of 6,000,000 European Jews.

Beginning in 1935 German Jews were subjected to increasing indignities and brutalities; property and possessions taken, careers ruined, public stigmatization, humiliation,and violence. In 1939 a program of taking Jews from their homes, destroying families, forcing people into ghettos, and ultimately into barbed wire surrounded concentration camps began. At first such camps were deemed work camps where starved, individuals strained to survive cruelties, rapes ,beatings, inhumane scientific experiments, and routine executions. Ultimately concentration camps were holding spots for transport to death camps such as Chemlo, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkennau.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question” required technological ingenuity. Execution by bullet was far too slow to exterminate millions. A process of gassing hundreds of people at once in a closed space using the pesticide gas Zyklon-B was the next step. The problem of disposing of the enormous amount of corpses was solved by the use of vast crematoria. In this way, over a four year period from 1941-1945, 6 million Jews met their death.

This profound trauma effects every Jewish person to this day, and will be remembered by Jews forever. Literally every living Jew in every country on earth is effected. Most every family has lost members. Jews still morn lost loved ones.

Painful as it may be, the Jewish people commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day to honor those lost and to raise the world’s awareness to the extent of unchecked cruelty. Today we see signs of public forgetting, even denial by hate groups that the Holocaust occurred. If we don’t remember, the forces of evil may again gain ascendance, targeting Jews or some other group for persecution and death.