The Holocaust: A Warning From History

The Jews were not the only victims of Hitler's New Order. Millions of others, particularly in occupied Russia, had been shot, gassed and beaten to death. To those who opposed this policy, arguing that liberated Russians should be treated as potential allies against the Soviet regime -- and even allowed the right of self-determination -- Hitler said: "It's only an illusion. You have a right to think only of the moment and of the situation weighing upon us at the present time, but that is also where you fall short. I have a duty of think of tomorrow. I cannot forget the future for the sake of a few momentary successes." In a hundred years, Hitler argued, Germany would be a nation of 120 million people. "For that population I need empty space. I cannot grant the Eastern peoples any sovereign rights of independence and replace Soviet Russia with a new national Russia which is, for that very reason, much more firmly knit together. Policy is made not with illusions but...

Early in June 1943, Pope Pius XII addressed the Sacred College of Cardinals on the extermination of the Jews. "Every word We address to the competent authority on this subject, and all our public utterances," he said in explanation of his reluctance to express more open condemnation, "have to be carefully weighed and measured by Us in the interests of the victims themselves, lest, contrary to Our intentions, We make their situation worse and harder to bear." He did not add that another reason for proceeding cautiously was that he regarded Bolshevism as a far greater danger than Nazism. The position of the Holy See was deplorable but it was an offense of omission rather than commission. The Church, under the Pope's guidance, had already saved the lives of more Jews than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organization combined, and was presently hiding thousands of Jews in monasteries, convents and Vatican City itself. The record of the Allies w...

Photo: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Excerpts from FDR by Jean Edward Smith: From the beginning of his presidency Franklin Roosevelt had been sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. Yet he faced insurmountable obstacles. The immigration Act of 1924 was unyielding, and the Seventy-eighth Congress was in no mood to consider changes. Public opinion, always susceptible to nativist appeals, was at best indifferent. Church leaders for the most part remained silent, and the intellectual community, with few exceptions, took little notice. The State Department's striped-pants set (particularly those charged with immigration matters) was permeated with genteel anti-Semitism. The War Department -- from Stimson and McCloy to Marshall and Eisenhower -- resisted any diversion of military resources from the central effort to defeat Germany. And at the time the American Jewish community itself was divided. Members of the old-school Jewish establishment, primarily German in ori...

On the last day of September 1942, Adolf Hitler addressed Winter Relief Rally in the Sportpalast in Berlin. It was a short, uninspired speech delivered without the usual sparkle. It struck many foreign listeners as pure bombast of no import, but they missed the implications of the anti-Semitic remarks that accompanied Hitler's pledge to take Stalingrad. Perhaps it was because his words about the Jews had been so oft repeated. For the third time that year he reiterated his prediction that if the Jews instigated "an international war to exterminate the Aryan peoples it would not be the Aryan peoples that would be annihilated but Jewry itself." The motivation for this repetition was obscure except to those privy to the secret of the Final Solution. Each mention was a public acknowledgement of his program of extermination; each gave reassurance and authority to the elite charged with the task of mass murder. Noteworthy, too, was his repetition of the false date of the origin...