Book Reviewed: Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, by Mary Fulbrook

Understanding the genocide during holocaust

What made people to participate in a genocide that systematically killed six million Jews and destroyed much of Europe? How was that possible that Nazi-collaborators worked coherently to bring holocaust to a massive scale? Did anyone know what was happening and why didn’t they try stop it. These are some of the questions posed by the author in this 620 pages of anthology. I am not sure if all the historical facts documented in this book is authentic and verifiable, but the author is a well-respected German scholar and a professor at the University College, London.

The Third Reich was complicit in many ways for political and economic dominance of German race. War efforts and displacement was preceded by chronic abuses in German life. They grew indifferent to the fate of those who were suffering. But passivity was born due to the fear of the consequences of acting. Lots of people did feel sympathy with victims of persecution but had themselves also experienced it: their husbands was in a concentration camp for having been a communist, socialist, gay, Jew or a Romani gypsy. There was also a sense that your own father, brother, son, friend, or neighbor was fighting for the good of the fatherland. Jews were undoubtedly the largest and widest victims of Nazi era, but less sung victims like Romani gypsies, gays and communists also suffered. Gay were criminalized for a quarter of a century after the war. They often didn’t talk about it because they were so ashamed, and if they did talk about it they were shoved back into prison. Homosexuality was a mortal-sin and was treated as a criminal offence in German justice system. Gypsies were regarded as harmful to the German society. They were treated with suspicion and distrust.

Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi camp were built in March 1933 in Dachau after Hitler became Chancellor, and his Nazi Party was given control of the police. Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps and extermination camps. The latter was built by Nazi Germany for the industrial-scale mass murder of Jews using gas chambers.

The iconic picture of Nazi atrocities is remembered by the numerous pictures published since WWII. There were several notorious concentration camps; one of them is Auschwitz in Poland. Many photographs published in books and museums stand as monuments of this great tragedy. One of them is Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the train ramp that was used as a "debarkation-stop" during 1942–1944 operation. They are the monuments of intense human suffering; you hear a shrill of chill, coldness and emptiness that took the lives of so many children, women and men.

When humanity was abused at such a massive scale; justice was never done with accuracy. Big fishes found a way to escape punishment, and even mid-level masterminds of SS Army, Gestapo, administrators of armed forces, doctors and engineers, anti-Semites, reactionaries, and collaborators of the Third Reich didn’t come close to being caught. But it was frequently the minions like care-assistants and nurses in sanatorium and euthanasia clinics. Auschwitz, one of the largest concentration camps in the history of mankind employed more than 6,000 people, but only about 50 of those were brought to justice system.

The book is long and sometime repetitive, but readers interested in holocaust find this book appealing.