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How do you kill a million people in 18 months at one location? How can you kill six million jews in three years? The Nazis spent enormous time and effort on this "problem," running A/B tests and trying many methods, none of which scaled out to their purpose until they perfected their death camps. Some of the Nazi methods were used by smaller mass murders before or after the Holocaust. Some of these methods include:
- Special-purpose teams were sent to round-up the jews, force them to dig their own graves, then shoot the jews, and move on to the next group (Islamic State, Yazidi)
- Barges filled with hundreds of jews were sunk in the middle of the sea.
- Buses had their own exhaust gas piped into the passenger compartments, killing the passengers.
- Death marches between locations (Turks, Armenians).
- Build a wall around a town and burn the town (Turks, Smyrna)
Here is how the Polish people and German Nazis accomplished their world-record numbers in the Holocaust:
Step 0: Gather up all the jews from their homes and put them into internment camps. The Poles had 1,000 concentration camps or ghettos in Poland. The french had about a dozen in France, and more in Morocco and Tunisia.
Step 1: Rail lines move tens of thousands of victims per day to the death factory:
Step 2: Upon arrival, deceive the victims and tell them they must be disinfected in a group bath, and have them enter the waiting area.
Step 3: Have them undress:
Step 4: Pour in sufficient cyanide gas through the chimneys to murder all the jews inside:
Step 5: Other jews use hand-crank elevators to lift out and burn dead jews in mass crematoria:
The museum has many aspects of the mass murder to present and consider. The first several exhibits spend some time explaining the history, motivation, ideas, and anti-semitism that led up to the mass murder. One point they missed entirely is the complete passivity and assimilation of the victims: Many of the victims had almost no Jewish identity -- they were secular Poles, French, Germans, Dutch, or whatever. The victims refused to believe their own people would murder them. And even in the Ghettos as they starved to death they were waiting for the problem to blow over.
I liked the areas that celebrated the lives of each murder victim individually. There are special buildings and exhibits for the 1.5 million children who were murdered. You can read and see photos of individuals that makes the mass murder more real and personal.
The museum was overcrowded and we had to skip a few exhibits. I was crying, of course. We checked for our own murdered grandparents and relatives and found some of them but not all. We are considering registering the victims with their photos, biographies, and official records.
It is really scary to me how the current 21st century upsurge in anti-semitism, usually masked in other terms such as anti-Israel sentiment or politically correct fear of offending anti-semites, has reached similar intensity to the feelings of the people at the time of the Holocaust. And I will always refuse to record any ethnographic information about myself or anyone.
We ate lunch at the cafeteria there, then headed back to prepare for Shabbat in Jerusalem (everything shuts down).
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