Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYchamber question. If the final solution is basically equated with massextermination in gas chambers, then each noteworthy reduction of thenumber of those killed that way, which has commenced already a longtime ago and which will possibly continue, will also assign a lower rankto the final solution. And does it not signify a new and different kind ofselection, if the gas chamber victims count as victims of first degree,whereas those who died of epidemics and of {p. 35} starvation arehardly ever mentioned? Was the camp Salaspils, for example, less awfuljust because it had no gas chambers? The obsession with gas chambersdiverts the eye from the essential and plainly undeniable.There exists a little known and hardly ever cited monumental workresponsibly published by an institution of impeccable repute, which inmy judgment is much more impressive than all those statements byeyewitnesses which evoke memories of Dante’s Inferno. It is the twovolume Gedenkbuch [memorial book] edited by the Bundesarchiv aboutthe Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischenGewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933-1945 [Victims of the Persecutionof Jews under National Socialist Tyranny in Germany 1933-1945].On more than 1,700 pages in landscape format, each page has some 75names of deportees, and with each name are listed the residence, thedate of birth and the location from where the last news came. The penultimatecolumn contains information of the respective fate. It does notsay “gassed” for some and “perished of typhus” or “starved to death” or“died of old age” for others. In most cases it merely reads “missing” or“declared dead,” and under the name of the last whereabouts very often“Auschwitz” appears, but also “Sobibor,” “Riga” and “Theresienstadt.”Over and over again entire extended families are listed, and almost everyolder German is well familiar with names such as Abel, Abendroth orMarkus, which are frequently enough linked to specific memories aboutindividuals. In light of these lists and knowing that these roughly130,000 individuals comprise almost the total number of Jews that hadremained in Germany at the outbreak of the war, {p. 36} every contemporaryperson has to realize that on 30 January 1939 Hitler was not jokingwhen he threatened the Jews with extermination in case of the outbreakof a war. He has to feel shame about the fact that he failed to payattention to this phrase, and the recollection has to torment him that hewatched the deportation of the co-residents of his town without indignation,because National Socialist propaganda had reported that the Germansin England and the Japanese in the U.S. had been put into camps,282