In mid-November 1938, all the reading world heard about KRISTALNACHT and the organized Nazi attacks against all Jewish people they could get their hands on at the time.
It wasn't till exactly seven long years later,
that all the reading world again learned about fresh Nazi attacks against Jews.
Mid-November 1945 marked the beginning of the most famous of the Nuremberg trials.
Only this time, the Jews the Nazis could get their hands on numbered nine million ,not ninety thousand , and the Nazis were hardly restrained by world public opinion - though as it turned out, they had no fears on that account.
Amazingly,death camps like Treblinka had started being discovered a good year before the Nuremberg Trials.
However the world hadn't immediately realized that they were a new low in global cruelty - camps designed for death (and death only) .
Rather they were seen as particularly brutal versions of the long familiar 1930s Concentration Camps seen in Germany proper.
(Basically imprisonment-at-hard-labour camps.)
In addition, Jews were seen at first as just one of dozens of ethnic groups killed in these camps - rather than being these camps' prime focus and their largest number of victims - in absolute numbers and ,above all, in relative terms.
November 1945 changed all that as the world heard about the Six Million Dead for the first time.
This because while reports about the millions of Jews, Poles and Russians being killed during the war were also reported during the war, they were not featured in any media - this knowledge was public but not popular, in my special sense of those terms.
WWII has been given many labels : a very damning one is "The SEVEN YEARS of Silence" ...
Somewhat akin to the line from a familiar song that goes,"There is none so blind as he who will not see".
ReplyDeleteWith present day high speed internet, it seems it should be less and less possible to claim or
proclaim "We just didn't know"! or "If only I'd known, I would have helped".