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Entry: Willing Executioners?--The Holocaust, Germans, and Collective Guilt Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/willing_executioners_the_holocaust_germans_and_collective_guilt#28810 Post contents: Yes, it is of vital importance that the word „Holocaust” is a recent construct in historical narratives, as opposed to a descriptor of historical realities. This religious term denoting sacrificial immolation among the ancient Hebrews has acquired its present pop meaning by imputing to the Germans industrial-scale incineration as one of their methods to mass murder Jews during WWII. During the proceedings of International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, the main methods of industrial extermination were listed as burnings, gassings (Zyklon B in Auschwitz, diesel exhaust in Treblinka), and electrocutions. Less conventional methods of extermination such as pedal-operated head-bashing machines, and the killing of 20’000 Jews in Auschwitz with a nuclear bomb were also part of the accusation (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/06-21-46.htm ). Despite Elie Wiesel’s moving account of large pyres being fed with truck-loads of Jewish babies, ‘incineration’ as the main method of extermination has steadily receded into the background of the Holocaust narrative. The same happened with electrocution and nuclear annihilation. It seems then that that the Holocaust of demotic usage is less a descriptor of the actual method of extermination, than the symbolic representation of the religious sacrifice of the Jews. This interpretation seems in keeping the exhortations made by Wiesel and other Holocaust-experts that these events ‘cannot be apprehended rationally’ that they ‘are unique in the history of mankind’, that they represent ‘purest form of evil ever seen’, and that any inquire about the actual logistics and physics of those events amount to a form of sacrilege. The orthodoxy and taboos surrounding a word that supposedly describes historical events is troubling. Especially so in Germany, Austria and France, where the full might of the state is used to crush whoever expresses any deviant thoughts on what should be the best documented crime in the History of mankind. Historical truth stands on its own and does not need the state to enforce it. I fear the Holocaust may have acquired the character of established religion in the post-Christian West. The psychodynamics is in any case is very similar: the son of God/God’s chosen are sacrificed for the sins of mankind and later resurrected, one Heaven-bound, the others settled in Palestine. Sent at: 2008 12 02