"CIVILIZED" MURDERERS

Perhaps the most inexplicable of all the aspects of the Holocaust – the question that forces us to come to grips with the very meaning of the word "civilized" – is the realization that took place in the twentieth century and was the work of so-called "cultured," "civilized," highly educated Germans. "The death camps," as Franklin Littell pointed out, "were designed by professors and built by Ph.D.s." Nazis tortured by day and listened to Wagner and Bach at night. They put down a violin to torture a Jew to death. They used their advanced scientific knowledge to design crematoria and, most amazing of all, they had highly skilled people devise the most fiendish medical experiments to test levels of pain, how long someone could be immersed in freezing water before dying, and even, as the infamous Dr. Joseph Mangele (chief "physician" at Auschwitz) was fond of doing, performed gruesome experiments on twins such as sewing two children together to create a "Siamese pair" and to measure their reactions.

Romain Gary, author of The Dance of Genghis Cohn, bitterly came to this shocking conclusion: "In the ancient times of Simbas, a cruel, cannibalistic society, people consumed their victims. The modern-day Germans, heirs to thousands of years of culture and civilization, turned their victims into soap. The desire for cleanliness, that is civilization."

The Holocaust was different because it came at the hands of those we would have been certain were incapable of committing atrocities. The Holocaust forces us to rethink the meaning of culture not rooted in a religious or ethical foundation.

from: "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jewish History and Culture," pp. 259-260, by Rabbi Benjamin Blech, Alpha Books, New York, 1999

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