The troops of the American 82nd Airborne Division were among the first to liberate Wöbbelin, a concentration camp northwest of Berlin. What they found that May 6, 1945 defied all notions of humanity. A US soldier predicted that the camps “will stand for all time as one of history’s most gruesome symbols of inhumanity. There our troops found sights, sounds and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind."
In Wobbelin, as in some other concentration camps, US troops decided to show ordinary Germans from the surrounding villages what they had done. The townspeople were forced to view the corpses, bury hundreds of bodies and attend their funerals. Pictures of Germans show them holding scarves over their noses as they looked at the dead bodies.
A few Germans were indignant, insisting that they hadn't known what was going on in the camps. And speaking out against Hitler or the Third Reich almost always resulted in the death penalty. What was a good German citizen to do? Most townspeople, however, walked through the camps in shock and disbelief.
The slaughter of Jews and Romany had accelerated in the final months of the WW II. Dachau in southern Germany saw between 2,600 and 4,000 inmates die of disease and starvation each month. That's roughly 100 every day, about the same death rate of Palestinians in Gaza.
Are Americans more aware of the Palestinian genocide than German citizens were of the Holocaust? There has been no blackout of news coverage and pictures of starving Palestinian children. Moreover, criticism of Israel's war crimes is not a capital offense. So far, we still have our First Amendment freedom of speech.
So what is our excuse for arming and supporting the murderous Israeli death machine? Will we be taken some day through the killing fields of Gaza with our handkerchiefs over our noses? We already know what a good American citizen should be doing.
Fred Nagel