The holocaust- an era of unexplained attrocities

Sixty-nine years ago, on January 27, 1945, soldiers from the Russian Red Army arrived at the Auschwitz extermination camps in Southern Poland. They found 7,500 people – clad in rags – sick – close to starvation – and several hundred dead bodies.

What they also found indicated that this place had indeed been hell on earth: 350,000 men's suits and 840,000 women's garments, gas chambers to murder people by the thousands, and crematoria to burn the dead bodies. 

In Auschwitz, between 1942 and 1945, of between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died in the gas – forming a large part of the total number murdered by the Nazi regime –- around six million men, women and children. The killings took place in a highly industrialised manner – organised and executed in a shockingly professional way by a specialised bureaucratic elite – free from any moral considerations. 

The overwhelming majority of the victims were Jews, but among them were also other minorities such as Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, political dissidents and people with other sexual orientations. The atrocities that were perpetrated, remain – and will remain – unexplained. We'll never fully understand the “why“ of these crimes. 

But what we as the second and third generation – after – the generation of the victims and culprits of the Holocaust can and must do, is: See to it, that history will – not – be repeated. We have to make sure that indifference towards other people's suffering, social exclusion, racism, and hatred won't have a chance to develop again in our midst. And this, unfortunately, remains a task not only for Germans and Europeans. History has shown us – again and again – that this is a global – and a timeless – task. 

So let's go ahead and live up to this challenge. We owe it to those who lost their lives in the Holocaust. 

The writer is German Ambassador designate to Ghana