Tuesday, 28 October 2003

Bergen-Belsen is perhaps best known as the final resting place of Anne Frank, though she was but one among 100,000 who were murdered here. Unlike many of the other camps (there were over 1100 of them), Bergen-Belsen used neither guns nor gas to kill its victims: It relied on typhoid and starvation to do its unholy work.

Bergen-Belsen was still in operation as late as April 1945; other camps, closer to the front, shipped or death-marched their victims here as the Allied troops closed in. The British liberated the camp a bare three weeks before the end of the war in Europe; the museum shows part of a film from the British archives that utterly defies description.

Part of the horror of the Holocaust is that we made war on Hitler because he invaded Poland—not because he was rounding up human beings as a prelude to slaughtering them like cattle, but because he failed to respect the sovereignty of neighboring states. If Hitler had merely murdered all the German Jews, instead of trying to redraw the European map, who would have stopped him?

No one stopped Stalin from killing thirty million peasants, or the Cambodians or Rwandans from butchering each other, or Kim Jong Il from reducing his people to cannibalism. If nations were houses we'd live in a world where it was legal to beat your wife and murder your children, so long as you kept the noise down and didn't get any blood in my yard.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:00 am. comments.