THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

was the first governor of southwest Africa. The same was true of other veterans ofthe colonial experiment who held positions in Nazi Germany. The aforementioned Dr.Fischer, director of the Emperor Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Genetics, andEugenics, was appointed rector of Berlin University in 1933, just as the Nazis rose topower. He was the person who trained a generation of Nazi geneticists, physicians,and anthropologists. His colleague Theodor Molison was Dr. Josef Mengele’steacher.No politician protested the extermination of the Native Americans; no one knewof the Herero Holocaust; and no one really cared about Franz Werfel and hisArmenians. All past holocausts were denied holocausts. At first, whites annihilatedblacks far away. Then it was easier to come close, to home, and on the basis ofacquired and perfected know-how, slaughter whites from various nations, like us andlike the Gypsies, Catholics, Polish intellectuals, communists, Slavs, mental patients,and homosexuals.It is fair to say that the destruction of the European Jews, our holocaust, was notonly a Jewish historical event, or the climax of longstanding hatred of Jews. Perhapseven more, it was a universal, multifaceted event that took place in the historicaltimelines of the world. The Holocaust is the climax of a process of racial superioritytheories of the white races and their contacts with “inferior” races during theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries and half the twentieth century. The JewishHolocaust was the climax of expanding human evil.During the past decade, the nations of the world internalized the profound meaningof the European Holocaust. They came to understand what we in Israel have not yetunderstood: the denier of the other’s holocaust will eventually have his own holocaustdenied. Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, a brave anti-Nazi theologian, wrote abitter song, often mistakenly attributed to Bertolt Brecht, expressing the idea that ifwe didn’t speak up for others, there would be no one to speak up for us.The song can be rewritten in many ways: First they took the Native Americans,then the Herero, then the Armenians, then the mentally ill, the Gypsies, thehomosexuals, the Slavs, and now they are taking the Jews. But it is too late.This is not an abstract, theoretical discussion about hatred and death. It is adiscussion about the spirit of nations, especially the spirit of the Jewish nation. AKnesset debate on one anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz will illustrate this.