THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

So familiar and yet so far removed from us, from the historical humanistic values ofthe Jewish people. The history of the Herero is not part of the mandatory curriculaof Israeli high schools. The Herero are not a subject for discussion in the Shoah tripsto Poland, and not mentioned at the fast-growing Shoah museums. The hair-raisingsimilarity between the two holocausts does not end with torture and death. Thehumiliating laws governing both the Jews and their brethren in southwest Africa weresimilar: banned ownership of firearms, land, and cattle. All adult Herero, fromfourteen years of age, were forced to wear a metal plate bearing a serial number.Inside the camps, the German carried out medical and “racial” experiments. Corpses,skeletons, and skulls were scrubbed clean by forced Herero women and sent to“racial anatomical” research labs and museums in Germany. The geneticist Dr. EugenFischer, who “investigated” local Herero children, concluded that they were of“inferior racial quality” and that “interracial breeding” degenerates the “superior race.”Sounds like an introduction to the Nuremberg laws, does it not?What was the political, cultural, scientific, and intellectual backdrop in Europe thatallowed this to happen? What are the sinister forces in the European first world thatburst in such a force against the black third world?The superiority that healthy and well-to-do individuals felt over the less luckyothers translated into the feeling of collective German national superiority. It waspossible then, explains Kershaw, that:More than anything, the national resolve grew out of the feeling ofgrandeur that was attained through occupations and was based oncultural superiority—the feeling that Germany was a great andexpanding power, and a great power needed and deserved an empire. . . ideas of territorial expansion to the East at the expense of thesubhuman, the Slavic Untermensch. 11Thus an amalgam of race theories were created based on arrogance, political andterritorial aspirations, illusions of worldwide grandeur and blatant disregard for the lifeof others. Africa was the distant test ground. Eastern Europe was the coveted prizeclose to home. A line of destruction and killing was drawn from the African Herero tothe unwanted Germans who were handicapped or mentally ill to the “inferior” Slavsto the Jews. The latter were at the top of all these theories and the ultimate victims ofthe extensive German know-how that had been acquired forty years earlier.