19505_HMD_Cover:Layout 1 - Holocaust Education Trust Ireland

Holocaust Memorial Day 2013
In March 1942 every major Jewish community was still intact, and 80% of those European Jews who
would be murdered in the Holocaust were still alive. By February 1943, just under one year later, 80%
of those European Jews were already dead.
Christopher R. Browning
Killing sites/Einsatzgruppen
Operation Reinhard
Einsatzgruppen
On 21 June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet
Union (Operation Barbarossa). Special killing
squads called Einsatzgruppen followed the German
army into Eastern Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia and other eastern territories occupied by the Nazis,
where they operated hundreds of killing sites in these regions.
Einsatzgruppen comprised police, local collaborators,
SS units, as well as officers and soldiers of the German
army. They murdered more than 1.5 million Jews in the
forests, fields and cemeteries or herded them into ravines
or pits which the victims had to dig themselves before they
were shot. Einsatzgruppen killed mostly Jews, but also
murdered Gypsies, communists and others. This “slow and
cumbersome” method of eradicating the Jews as well as the
face-to-face killing which was having a psychological effect
on some of the killers, prompted the Nazis to find a more
efficient solution to the elimination of the Jewish people –
death by poison gas. Einsatzgruppen continued to operate
in rural areas in parallel to the extermination taking place
in the death camps.
Belzec extermination camp stood at this place. A memorial has since been
erected on this site
Named after Reinhard Heydrich, this was the
establishment of three death camps (killing
centres) at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, in
which Jews were murdered by poison gas. Between
March 1942 and August 1943 some 1,700,000 Jews,
mostly from Poland,
were murdered in gas
chambers in these
camps. They were
dismantled on completion
of their “function”
and all traces of
their existence were
destroyed. The lands
where they had stood
were planted with
forests, farms and
grasslands.
ORDINARY MEN
It is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler
or Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. We must
remember that these faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not
born torturers, were not (with few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist but
they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous is the common men, the functionaries
ready to believe and to act without asking questions, like Eichmann; like Hoss, the commandant of
Auschwitz; like Stangl, commandant of Treblinka.
Primo Levi
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