Holocaust

Watch the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942 when the technology of the Holocaust was
announced to various Nazi party functionaries. Watch this film and reflect on what we know of the attempted
destruction of the Jews by the Nazis. There are people who deny that it ever happened, or who claim that the
number of Jews who perished due to Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” is exaggerated. Why
would anybody deny that?
In the early Twentieth Century the Eugenics movement was very strong. On the one hand, it sought to improve
the human race by encouraging the reproduction of ‘superior’ types (usually the group that included the
proposer of the plan). Very quickly, the sinister corollary of the concept – the suppression of the reproduction of
those deemed ‘unworthy’ became a major focus of the movement. Sterilization and institutionalization
campaigns and regulations proliferated. The Nazis took the text of their sterilization plan for mental defectives
from the state of Virginia. Many of the Nuremburg Laws, which effectively excluded Jews from German society,
were modeled on the Jim Crow laws of the American South.
The eugenics movement was thought to have been fully discredited after World War II. However, recent
demographic trends in the United States are starting to bring it back to life. Many of the most virulent antiimmigration arguments are being cast in racial, ethnic, or religious terms. When times are tough, people fear
other people whom they perceive as “Not like us.”
Since World War II, there have been other attempts at genocide often referred to as ‘ethnic cleansing’ in
Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda. In addition, there has been significant episodes of large-scale sectarian
violence in Iraq and other Islamic countries.
What do you think? What makes people behave this way ?