At this point, I must digress briefly to deal with two specters that diligent researchers will find on the Internet and even on the shelves of otherwise reputable bookstores.
One is the political scientist Rudolph Rummel — , a non-China specialist who made wildly higher estimates than any other historian—that Mao was responsible for 77 million deaths. His work is disregarded as polemical, but has a strange life online, where it is cited regularly by anyone who wants to score a quick victory for Mao. Equally scorned but extremely influential is the British-based author Jung Chang.
After writing a bestselling memoir about her family the most popular in what now seems like an endless succession of imitators , she moved on to write, along with her husband, Jon Halliday, popular history, including a biography of Mao as monster. Few historians take their work seriously, and several of the most influential figures in the field—including Andrew J. Goodman— published a book to rebut it. But is starting a war of aggression less of a crime than launching economic policies that cause a famine?
If one includes the combatant deaths, and the deaths due to war-related famine and disease, the numbers shoot up astronomically. The Soviet Union suffered upward of 8 million combatant deaths and many more due to famine and disease—perhaps about 20 million. Ukrainians starving in the street during the Soviet famine of the early s. As for Hitler, should his deaths include the hundreds of thousands who died in the aerial bombardments of Germans cities?
After all, it was his decision to strip German cities of anti-aircraft batteries to replace lost artillery following the debacle at Stalingrad. And what of the millions of Germans in the East who died after being ethnically cleansed and driven by the Red Army from their homes? On whose ledger do they belong? And there is the sensitive matter of percentages. So is Mao simply a reflection of the fact that anything that happens in China becomes a superlative?
Relativizing can be perilous. It is true that we can grasp when a loved one dies but have a harder time accepting when the difference is between a million and a million and one deaths. But the correct answer, of course, is that even one extra death tilts the scales.
Death is an absolute. Yet all these numbers are little more than well-informed guesstimates. There are no records that will magically resolve the question of exactly how many died in the Mao era. We can only extrapolate based on flawed sources. One can argue that by closing down discussion in , Mao sealed the fate of tens of millions, but almost every legal system in the world recognizes the difference between murder in the first degree and manslaughter or negligence. When Khrushchev took Stalin off his pedestal, the Soviet state still had Lenin as its idealized founding father.
That allowed Khrushchev to purge the dictator without delegitimizing the Soviet state. Thus, after Mao died, the Communist Party settled on a formula of declaring that Mao had made mistakes—about 30 percent of what he did was declared wrong and 70 percent was right. Xi Jinping has held fast to this view of Mao in recent years. Xi has warned that neither era can negate the other; they are inseparable.
How to deal with Mao? Many Chinese, especially those who lived through his rule, do so by publishing underground journals or documentary films. Perhaps typically for a modern consumer society, though, Mao and his memory have also been turned into kitschy products. Read a Holocaust Encyclopedia article about Jewish resistance for more information.
In Europe, the Holocaust was not a secret. Even though the Nazi government controlled the German press and did not publicize mass shooting operations or the existence of killing centers, many Europeans knew that Jews were being rounded up and shot, or deported and murdered.
Many individuals—in Germany and collaborators in the countries that Germany occupied or that were aligned with Germany during World War II—actively participated in the stigmatization, isolation, impoverishment, and violence culminating in the mass murder of six million European Jews.
People helped in their roles as clerks and confiscators of property; as railway and other transportation employees; as managers or participants in round-ups and deportations; as informants; sometimes as perpetrators of violence against Jews on their own initiative; and sometimes as hand-on killers in killing operations, notably in the mass shootings of Jews and others in occupied Soviet territories in which thousands of eastern Europeans participated as auxiliaries and many more witnessed.
Many more people—the onlookers who witnessed persecution or violence against Jews in Nazi Germany and elsewhere—failed to speak out as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers were isolated and impoverished—socially and legally, then physically.
Only a small minority publicly expressed their disapproval. Other individuals actively assisted the victims by purchasing food or other supplies for households to whom shops were closed; providing false identity papers or warnings about upcoming roundups; storing belongings for those in hiding that could be sold off little by little for food; and sheltering those who evaded capture, a form of help that, if discovered, especially in Nazi Germany and occupied eastern Europe, was punished by arrest and often execution.
Although Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, they were not the only group persecuted. American newspapers reported frequently on Hitler and Nazi Germany throughout the s. Americans read headlines about book burning, about Jews being attacked on the street, and about the Nuremberg Race laws in , when German Jews were stripped of their German citizenship.
The Kristallnacht attacks in November were front-page news in the United States for weeks. Americans staged protests and rallies in support of German Jews, and sent petitions to the US government calling for action. But these protests never became a sustained movement, and most Americans were still not in favor of allowing more immigrants into the United States, particularly if the immigrants were Jewish.
It was very difficult to immigrate to the United States. In , the US Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act in order to set limits on the maximum number of immigrant visas that could be issued per year to people born in each country.
Unlike today, the United States had no refugee policy, and Jews could not come as asylum seekers or migrants. Approximately ,, European Jews immigrated to the United States between , most of them between The US Government learned about the systematic killing of Jews almost as soon as it began in the Soviet Union in Yet saving Jews and others targeted for murder by the Nazi regime and its collaborators never became a priority.
As more information about Nazi mass murder reached the United States, public protests and protests within the Roosevelt administration led President Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in January The establishment of the War Refugee Board marked the first time the US government adopted a policy of trying to rescue victims of Nazi persecution.
The War Refugee Board coordinated the work of both US and international refugee aid organizations, sending millions of dollars into German-occupied Europe for relief and rescue. The American people—soldiers and civilians alike—made enormous sacrifices to free Europe from Nazi oppression. The United States could have done more to publicize information about Nazi atrocities, to pressure the other Allies and neutral nations to help endangered Jews, and to support resistance groups against the Nazis.
Prior to the war, the US government could have enlarged or filled its immigration quotas to allow more Jewish refugees to enter the country. These acts together might have reduced the death toll, but they would not have prevented the Holocaust. Visit the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition for more information. Although the liberation of Nazi camps was not a primary objective of the Allied military campaign, Soviet, US, British, and Canadian troops freed prisoners from their SS guards, provided them with food and badly needed medical support, and collected evidence for war crimes trials.
The Holocaust is the best documented case of genocide. Despite this, calculating the exact numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is an impossible task. There is no single wartime document that spells out how many people were killed. Historians estimate that approximately six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, including approximately 2.
Although the Holocaust specifically refers to the murder of European Jews, Nazi Germany and its collaborators also killed non-Jews, including seven million Soviet citizens, three million Soviet prisoners of war, 1. Beginning in the winter of , the governments of the Allied powers announced their intent to punish Nazi war criminals. After much debate, 24 defendants were chosen to represent a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military leadership.
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels could not be tried because they committed suicide at the end of the war or soon afterwards. The Nazi defendants were indicted on four charges:. This information included the mass murder operations at Auschwitz, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, and the estimate of six million Jewish victims.
The trial hearings ended on September 1, On October 1, , the judges delivered their verdict. They convicted 19 of the defendants and acquitted three. The judges of the IMT sentenced twelve defendants to death. During the five years that followed the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators were tried by other courts in Germany and in the countries that were allied to or occupied by Nazi Germany.
The Allied military authorities, which now occupied the defeated Germany, began a process of denazification. The distribution of Nazi propaganda continues to be illegal in Germany today. The Holocaust was a watershed event, not only in the 20th century but also in the entire course of human history.
Studying the Holocaust reminds us that democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained, but need to be appreciated, nurtured, and protected. The Holocaust was not an accident in history; it occurred because individuals, organizations, and governments made choices that not only legalized discrimination but also allowed prejudice, hatred, and ultimately mass murder to occur.
It also teaches us that silence and indifference to the suffering of others, or to the infringement of civil rights in any society, can—however unintentionally—perpetuate these problems.
This resource contains more than articles about the Holocaust, antisemitism, and current-day mass atrocities in 19 languages. Access foundational lesson plans and lessons on Americans and the Holocaust, antisemitism and racism, propaganda, and more.
Learn more about why Nazi Germany and its collaborators targeted Jews and other victims of the Holocaust era. The ceremony at the US Capitol, featuring a candle-lighting and names reading, is happening now.
Join us right now to watch a live interview with a survivor, followed by a question-and-answer session. The Museum's commemoration ceremony, including remarks by the German ambassador and a Holocaust survivor, is happening now. What is Genocide? Key Videos Podcasts and Audio. Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial What is Antisemitism? During the cold war, it was sometimes hard for Americans to see clearly the particular evils of Nazis and Soviets.
Hitler had brought about a Holocaust: but Germans were now our allies. Stalin too had killed millions of people: but some of the worst episodes, taking place as they had before the war, had already been downplayed in wartime US propaganda, when we were on the same side. We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust.
It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom.
New understandings of numbers, of course, are only a part of any comparison, and in themselves pose new questions of both quantity and quality. It was a war that Hitler wanted, and so German responsibility must predominate; but in the event it began with a German-Soviet alliance and a cooperative invasion of Poland in The pool of evil simply grows deeper.
The most fundamental proximity of the two regimes, in my view, is not ideological but geographical. Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were, at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility.
What can we make of the fact, for example, that the lands that suffered most during the war were those occupied not once or twice but three times: by the Soviets in , the Germans in , and the Soviets again in ? The Holocaust began when the Germans provoked pogroms in June and July , in which some 24, Jews were killed, on territories in Poland annexed by the Soviets less than two years before.
The Nazis planned to eliminate the Jews in any case, but the prior killings by the NKVD certainly made it easier for local gentiles to justify their own participation in such campaigns.
As I have written in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin , where all of the major Nazi and Soviet atrocities are discussed, we see, even during the German-Soviet war, episodes of belligerent complicity in which one side killed more because provoked or in some sense aided by the other.
Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. The Germans shot so many civilians in part because Soviet partisans deliberately provoked reprisals.
The Germans shot more than a hundred thousand civilians in Warsaw in after the Soviets urged the locals to rise up and then declined to help them. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest.
Read Next. Submit a letter: Email us letters nybooks. Who was worse, Hitler or Stalin? This Issue March 10, Larry McMurtry. Garry Kasparov. The Bobby Fischer Defense. Freeman Dyson. How We Know. News about upcoming issues, contributors, special events, online features, and more. The New York Review of Books: recent articles and content from nybooks. I consent to having NYR add my email to their mailing list. Our Own Reichstag Fire Moment. What Ails America. Kirkus Reviews. John Ashbery.
0コメント