On January 27th 1945, soldiers from the Red Army of the Soviet Union liberated Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The horrific things these veteran soldiers had witnessed in their fight against Nazi Germany had not prepared them for what they discovered in Auschwitz. Approximately one million people had been murdered in Auschwitz and the survivors were described as ‘living skeletons’. What had occurred in Auschwitz was just one part of the Nazis’ so-called ‘Final Solution’, the name given to the process through which approximately six million Jewish people were systematically murdered. An additional eleven million people were also murdered on the basis of their sexuality, ethnic identity, political background and medical status. How did this happen? How is it that millions of people could be murdered? What led to this happening? The economist Milton Friedman once said:
All of us are affected by the status quo. We tend to take for granted the situation as it is, to regard it as the natural state of affairs, especially when it has been shaped by a series of small gradual changes.
The Holocaust did not happen immediately but was instead the result of a series of measures and actions implemented by the Nazi government which controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945. Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany in January 1933, having won the 1932 election with only approximately 37% of the popular vote. It did not take long for Hitler to extend his power. In March 1933, the Reichstag (Germany’s equivalent to our Parliament) was burned down. The Nazis claimed their political opponents were responsible, though in reality it seems likely that it was the Nazis themselves who committed the act. But what was crucial in this case was the level of fear which the Nazis propagated. Fear that Germany and its people were at risk from an enemy within, and that the only way to tackle the problem was to grant Hitler unlimited powers in the form of the Enabling Act.
Marketed as just a temporary measure, the Enabling Act was never repealed. It provided Hitler and his Government with a legal justification for persecuting groups of people and crushing the civil liberties which German people had enjoyed up until that point. At first this took the form of censoring publications produced by Jewish people. From there, a gradual increase in restrictions occurred. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, effectively stripping Jewish people of their German citizenship. By 1936, Jewish people had found that they were no longer allowed to vote, and by 1937 they found themselves either barred or dismissed from professions like teaching and they were forced to hand over their businesses. By 1938, Jewish people were forced to carry identity cards and by 1941 they were forced to wear the Star of David.
In that same year, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and it was at that point that different methods for murdering people en masse were tested. Initially, the Nazis tried mass shootings. An organisation known as the Einsatzgruppen followed the main German forces and killed anyone who did not fit in with Nazi ideology, though their methods were considered to be too inefficient and time consuming. By January 1942, during what was known as the Wannsee Conference, the Nazi regime officially determined that they would develop a system involving extermination camps to murder millions of people. The Nazis dressed up their twisted ideas as a form of science; they were not the first and would not be the last government to do so. They applied Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to create a system which claimed that certain groups of people, whether defined by race or medical status, were superior to others and by doing so justified their persecution and criminal actions.
I recall sitting in a lecture at Keele University some years ago. I unfortunately forget the specifics of context, but the lecture dealt with aspects of the Holocaust. The lecturer exclaimed his disbelief that nobody had tried to intervene or stop the mass executions. I remember thinking at the time that it was surely quite easy to explain why such intervention did not happen. It was surely obvious: the Nazis had the full power of government machinery, such as the military, the SS and Gestapo; anyone who did not follow orders would potentially risk being executed themselves, so people were compelled to obey instructions which led to the murder of millions of people. In German legal frameworks there exists the concept of Befehlnotstand, or necessity, where someone may face a situation in which they are required to perform an action and their refusal to do so could lead to drastic consequences to themselves. This was actually used as a defence by those who committed war crimes during the Second World War.
However, the reality of what happened during the 1940s is more disturbing. The Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes was formed in 1958 by the German government to investigate the crimes committed under the Nazi regime. Its research found that, contrary to the implications of Befehlnotstand, there was not a single known case where a German soldier was severely punished for refusing to carry out an order that contributed to the Holocaust. These findings were confirmed in the research conducted by Manfred Oldenburg, who could likewise find no cases where the refusal of either a Wehrmacht or SS soldier to carry out orders led to themselves facing dire consequences. A particularly interesting example where this was the case can be found in the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101, which operated alongside the Wehrmacht and became a major perpetrator of the Holocaust in Poland. On July 13th 1942, the unit’s commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, was tasked with executing a group of Jewish people. An eyewitness testimony records that:
Trapp then made an extraordinary offer to his battalion: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out. Trapp paused, and after some moments, one man stepped forward. The captain of third company… began to berate the man. The major told the captain to hold his tongue. Then 10 or 12 other men stepped forward as well. They turned in their rifles and were told to await a further assignment from the major.
This example is especially revealing. It is quite clear that Major Trapp was not prepared to punish anyone under his command for refusing to take part in mass executions. So, if there was no actual punishment for refusing to perform such horrific actions, why then did nobody say anything? How was it the Holocaust happened? The possible answers to such questions are rather disturbing.
In 1996, an historian called Daniel Goldhagen suggested the Holocaust happened precisely because people enjoyed murdering other people. It is no doubt true to an extent that some people indulged in sadistic depravity and mass murder due to some twisted sense of pleasure. One need only think of figures such as Dr Josef Mengele, who performed horrific medical and scientific experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, to find evidence of that. But Goldhagen’s theory has, in the years since, been challenged as an overall explanation for the Holocaust. More recent years have seen the emergence of another, though arguably equally disturbing, theory. A German historian called Sven Felix Kellerhoff has suggested that peer pressure was the key driving force behind the Holocaust. Indeed, the example of Police Battalion 101 also suggests this. The testimony I cited a minute ago not only shows Major Trapp was not prepared to punish a soldier for refusing an order but it also shows how a more junior officer was ready to exert pressure on the men in the battalion. Depressingly, it also shows how only a minority refused to perform the orders. Peer pressure and fear ruled and determined most people’s lack of action and therefore resulted in them following orders without question, even when those orders involved murdering civilians, non-combatants and prisoners of war.
To be sure, there were others who made a stand against the crimes committed by the Nazis. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944 was partly driven by his disgust at the mass murder of Jewish people. Major Karl Plagge used his position as an engineer in the Wehrmacht to save hundreds of Jewish people throughout the war, as did Helmut Kleinicke, whilst Joseph Hartinger tried to use his legal expertise to fight the Nazis during the 1930s. More famously, the industrialist Oskar Schindler used his position to save thousands of Jewish people whilst the Catholic Cardinal Clemens August Graf von Galen openly criticised the Nazis’ euthanasia programme which was responsible for murdering people on the basis of their medical status. Sadly, in the scheme of things, these people were few and far between; there simply weren’t that many who were strong enough to be what we might call upstanders. Most were either directly involved and complicit or were simply bystanders and allowed horrific events to unfold. But why?
Well, perhaps part of the answer lies in the development of vested interests. The Nazi government forged strong links to key industries and key individuals who led those industries. Significant financial incentives might explain why the Nazis secured such levels of support. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, for example, ran a vast steelworks empire and stood to gain massively from the Nazis’ need for weapons. Similarly, I.G. Farben, the company responsible for developing the cyanide gas called Zyklon B, received significant contracts from the Nazi regime for scientific research. Many individuals would also profit from the Nazis’ seizure of property which had been owned by minority groups. But vested interests only partly explain why the Nazis were able to murder millions of people.
The 18th-century French writer, Voltaire, once warned that “anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. Given the sheer scale and volume of propaganda which was produced and circulated by the Nazi government, with key institutions like the media and education being infiltrated and controlled, there is the distinct possibility that those who were complicit may very well have been conditioned into thinking their actions were justified. Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is reputed to have said words to the effect that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. With a narrative or belief system established and promoted by the Nazi regime, people may perhaps have thought their crimes were absolved by virtue of the fact that they were following orders from officials. Perhaps they believed that their own criminal actions were acceptable simply because their peers were likewise engaged in them too. I am reminded of the words of the American writer Robert Anton Wilson who observed how “the obedient always think of themselves as virtuous, rather than cowardly”. For some of those who perpetrated the Holocaust, compliance and conformity with the Nazi Government’s ideology, demands and orders was justification enough. But compliance and conformity are precisely what enabled terror to emerge and flourish. One can only wonder what might have happened had more people been prepared to either speak out or take action; the Nazis, after all, appear to have been too intimidated by the influence of someone like Cardinal Galen to arrest him, even though he was openly critical of them.
So where does this leave us? What can we learn from all this? I would like to share with you the concluding comments of a speech that was delivered by US President Lyndon Baines Johnson at John Hopkins University on April 7th 1965. At the time Johnson delivered this speech, the Second World War was still a relatively recent memory and tensions were escalating in Vietnam as the USA was increasing its military commitment in the region. Obviously, this speech was delivered in a different context to that in which the Holocaust happened. However, I believe there is an important and timeless lesson for us all within Johnson’s words and his words were:
Every night before I turn out the lights to sleep I ask myself this question: Have I done everything that I can do to unite this country? Have I done everything I can to help unite the world, to try to bring peace and hope to all the peoples of the world? Have I done enough?
Ask yourselves that question in your homes – and in this hall tonight. Have we, each of us, all done all we could? Have we done enough?
We may well be living in the time foretold many years ago when it was said: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
This generation of the world must choose: destroy or build, kill or aid, hate or understand.
We can do all these things on a scale never dreamed of before.
Well, we will choose life. In so doing we will prevail over the enemies within man, and over the natural enemies of all mankind.
Johnson would go on to try using the power of the U.S. Government to fix various social and racial issues. I would suggest that an important aspect to Johnson’s speech is his imploration that we, as individuals, look to ensure that we have done everything we can. Have we shown respect, tolerance and understanding to the people around us? Have we tackled things which are unjust? Have we had the courage to ask questions, to challenge that which infringes civil liberties and democratic rights? On January 5th 1967, the then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, made an astute observation that:
Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.
If we sit here and think ourselves far removed from the events of the Holocaust and that such a thing could never happen again, then we are unfortunately deluding ourselves with a false sense of security and self-assurance. Georg Hegel, a German philosopher, observed “the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”, the implication being that people never learn from the mistakes of the past. Genocides, attacks on groups of people and suppression of civil liberties have happened repeatedly in the decades since the 1940s, with authorities relying on misinformation, peer pressure and fear to control people and compel them into committing horrific acts. History shows that those who should have taken action or spoken out; indeed people who held positions of responsibility and who should have known better, failed to do so. What is extremely worrying is that those who have been complicit in such crimes, either directly or indirectly, have often entered a state of denial in the aftermath of their actions.
But there is much that we as individuals can do to help ensure the very evil which leads to discrimination, persecution and ultimately genocide happening will never emerge again. Be an upstander, not a bystander. Plato once said, “the price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men”. Be informed about the world, people and powers around you; do not simply accept the narratives you’re given. The individual can question and challenge and, if need be, take action and intervene. It is perhaps difficult to do; to be an upstander might risk upsetting the status quo which Milton Friedman alluded to and result in you being targeted too. But equally, it can make a difference and the community, society and perhaps even the world may just end up better off.
Dr. Paul Jones is Head of History and Politics at an independent school. This article is a speech he will deliver this morning at the school to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
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I struggle to understand how this comes from a Department of Education under a nominally Conservative government. The possibilities I can think of are a) benign stupidity on the part of Ministers, b) malign non-compliance by guardians in the teaching profession, or c) both.
Maybe fake Tory MPs like fake Labour MPs send their children to private schools where they will uphold the political impartiality that by law must be upheld in all schools.
Can any parent justifiably complain of the political indoctrination of their children if they don’t register their outrage and objections to children’s indoctrination with the school managers and their MPs?
https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2022/02/17/political-impartiality-guidance-for-schools-what-you-need-to-know/
Woke is too polite a word for what these people are doing and are responsible for.
The root of the problem is the same as with almost every other industry: the centralisation of power in organisations and bodies that define standards and objectives. These self appointed arbiters of what is correct eliminate debate.
Then their ideas and standards infuse every aspect of the industry. Training standards, certification, accreditation, curricula.
This is what the left do. They concentrate power and then crush opposition and dissent to their ideology. They don’t believe.in the market.place of ideas.
Earlier I ran into a friend in a coffee shop, a teacher. She was working away at a laptop. I asked if she was a strike breaker, she said that many of her colleagues were resentful of today’s strike action & that they’d be using the time to catch-up.
I agree with the author that not all teachers are irretrievably lost but I suspect a majority are.
My husband is using todays strike day to mark 50 pieces of A level coursework.
My daughter is working today and like the previous comment, she’s using it to catch up on lesson planning and marking. Her school is a London comprehensive in a very multi cultural area – woke isn’t massively a thing at her school. She said she can’t afford to lose pay but disagreed with the strike on principle, having endured striking lecturers at uni. She was surprised how many teachers showed up for the first strike day.
The wokesters hate this, but the greatest determining factor for becoming successful in life and therefore ‘powerful’ is growing up in a stable, loving family with both parents.
Hence the Government trying to force a million more women into work when many would like to be helped stay home and bring up their children. I’ve know so many girls down the years who have said they hate the idea of having to put their children into childcare under the auspices of strangers.
Implying that running a home and rearing children is not “work” as the media does relentlessly is reprehensible. The reason childcare is expensive is because it is very hard work indeed. Not only is the proposal to deprive a nine-month old baby of love from 8 am to 6 pm repulsive, but it seems to be driven by two factors. Increasing the tax take and distancing infants from the influence and attitudes of their parents or carers, allowing for the fact that early-years education is also important. I have several grandchildren and would confirm the final two paragraphs of this excellent article. The brainwashing often doesn’t work because these youngsters have experienced something entirely different at home, among other things. Placing infants in a controlled environment for conditioning of a different kind is the clear objective of universal “wrap around” childcare. We used to be disgusted by this when decades ago it was introduced as common practice in communist countries and it is not a example we should follow.
Teacher’s Unions. A beast that won’t be slain. Good luck finding anyone willing to fight that monster. It is weaponised. ‘Teachers’ went to brain washing school, read the Guardian, watch the BBC and adore (as the article says) Thunturd, White privilege, Burn Loot Murder, xi Biden and every other dogma including the mental illnes of LGBTQZ+++ theology.
Teachers are as ridiculous in the main, as the NHS. Yes a few good ones here and there, but the Union is a beast of evil. Hence home schooling rising in popularity. But if you home school your kids….well you know what you will be called (‘literally H……)
A beast that thrives under Labour and Tories alike. The Tories are too afraid to tackle the issue but make lots of promises as elections approach whilst Labour arguably benefits from the indoctrination of children in a Leftist progressive educational system.
There needs to be decentralisation of the education system.
We introduced much greater scrutiny using the excuse that schools related to a certain religion were teaching terrorist sympathies. However, with left wing extremists in the Ofsted and school inspections having a bunch of standards incompatible with moral decency for many people, teachers have fled the profession, leaving a core of SJW extremists many of whose woke ideals appear, at core, to be a smokescreen for paedophilia.
There needs to be a loosening of state oversight and removal of requirements for schools – particularly church schools – to teach sexual material, under the banner of EDI. Parents should be given an education voucher and be able to choose to send their children to schools that best suit their beliefs for how children should be taught.
Parents should be given access to all teaching materials at the start of a term and all lessons should be recorded by CCTV camera and made available for download. It means teachers’ competence can be assessed and stops false accusations against teachers.
I note that there’s a load more public money being made available to force mums back into work and dump their infants into ‘childcare.’ A pity the money couldn’t be used to help mums (or dads) stay at home to bring up their children.
“We do not live in some kind of feudal system…”
Not yet, but if the sheeple don’t wake up and get a grip…
I couldn’t stomach the training and the implied expectation of adherence. So those going into it now are going to have a certain predilection which is a pity when it is antithetical to the spirit of education itself. But I think it goes deeper than this. The mystery schools were wont to use a technique called occult imprisonment if they wished to contain an adepts activities, if they strayed too far into politics for example. This happened to Helena Blavatsky – by means of ritual magic they were able to tie her energies up so that they wouldn’t manifest in political form in her early life. The greatest push of British occultism over the last four hundred years is the idea that the Anglo-Saxon culture would come to replace the Graeco-Roman culture.and have the same predominance. There is also an understanding that the future lies with the Slavic people and the attempt to thwart the inevitable lies at the heart of many evils. Rudolf Steiner said that in the time we are living in now, there will be laws against thought. Not explicit laws but certain hidden orthodoxies within the ideology and he said that it is our duty to oppose these forces.
“. . . a growing number of young people are increasingly tired of having woke narratives . . ”
Let’s hope natural rebellion of youth takes over …
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
My metalwork teacher was a socialist but I grew up to be right learning. I grew up. Lefties never do. Most schoolchildren dislike their teachers so we can see the outcome.
OMG this is like, so racist yeah? I mean, like, this was litchrally written by a Nazi, yeah?
I’ve taught (French/Spanish) in the state and private sectors (Kent/Norfolk) on and off over the years (now most definitely OFF), and as a private tutor. Now I drive a taxi, since the lockdown/vaccines killed my previously (moderately) successful business and I’m kind of, er, up against it. While temporarily engaged last year as a classroom assistant at the most highly regarded school in Dereham (centre of Norfolk), I kept a list of the most egregiously moronic/politically correct/whatever comments I heard uttered by the universally leftwing staff. Some examples:
The teacher (female, late 20s) read several pages of The Great Gatsby to the class (13 year olds) – difficult writing which they didn’t remotely understand. Sophisticated adults struggle with Fitzgerald; the teachers at N******* High considerably more:
– ‘notoriety’ pronounced “notoraty” (accent on second syllable)
– ‘ineffable’ = “intefal”
– ‘Nevada’ = “nirvana”
– ‘Duluth’ = “Dultha”
– ‘contingencies’ = “congencies”
– ‘saloon’ = “salon”
– ‘florid’ = “floor-rid”
– ‘singularly’ = “singuly”
– ‘antecedents’ = “anticents”
– ‘ingratiate’ = “ingranate”;
– ‘Buchanan’ = “Butchernon”. Repeated three times. Butchernon. BUTCHERNON.
– ‘haughtily’ = “hauntily”
– ‘the lady sat in state’ = “sat in a state”
– ‘vigour’ = “vye-gaw”
– ‘menagerie’ = “margery”
– ‘contralto’ = “contrarlo”
– ‘dilatory’ = ‘dial a tory’
– ‘tuning-fork’ = “turning fork”.
‘other’ was “uvva” and ‘rhythm’ was “rhyv’m”. There were plenty of other mistakes – the above were only the worst examples. She missed words out and she added words that weren’t there. She bored the children to tears and of course they learnt nothing because the text was too difficult for them.
This was a blizzard of ignorance. It took place in just one lesson. Why did Miss W***** choose The Great Gatsby as a text to be read aloud to the class in this way? Many other less challenging but still meaningful texts are available, so why this one? And having chosen it, why did she not pre-read it in order to be able to read it properly? What precisely does she think the children got out of this reading? Week in, week out, she delivers lessons of this kind. And she’s far from the only one at the glorious, respected N******* High, Dereham, Norfolk.
It isn’t teaching, it’s indoctrination. And the Government wants to ensure that even more children are indoctrinated from cradle to adulthood with increased taxpayer funding for state-controlled childcare … whilst doing nothing to encourage grandparents to care for their grandchildren, presumably because they might learn some “unauthorised” values and some independence.
Thank you for this insightful and ultimately encouraging article. There is another reason for optimism: the influence of parents is much greater than the influence of all teachers put together can ever be. All of us who have children have an opportunity and a duty to be an informal source of moral education for our children. It is a central part of being a parent.
I also believe that parents must be a source of pressure on schools. We have seen in America parents fight back on school boards, and in this country too, it is important that parents complain, calmly and politely but forcefully, to individual teachers or to head teachers, when their children are fed politically biased nonsense at school.
It’s posible we can make a difference. As an example, I wrote to our daughter’s head teacher disagreeing with him, rather strongly, on his request for parents to respect the teachers’ right to strike. His letter this time round excluded that request. Small steps …
Why are we surprised? The teaching unions have no respect at all for our children; they’re just pawns to be used for their political purposes. They decided not to teach due to the non-existent covid dangers posed to them by the kids. Now they’re on strike for more money. They are nothing more than f***ing hypocrites trying to blackmail the country.
I take great pleasure in drivig past the flag waving morons outside our local comp and giving them the finger.
I know it won’t make a bit of difference to them, but I get a lot of pleasure 🤣