The Holocaust Muzeum v knize_AJ verze

The mass murder of six million European Jews in Nazi extermination camps – for
which the term Holocaust (Hellenic: “a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial
offering) was adopted in the 1970s – remains a completely unique historical
event. It cannot be compared to any other political crime of the past – even
to the bloody genocide of Armenians after the First World War or to the crimes of
Stalin in the Soviet Union and of Pol Pot in Cambodia.
Motivated purely by racial hatred, the Nazis decided to murder all European
Jews, including infants, without exception. No Jew would be allowed to survive.
None of the victims could avert their fate – they were to be murdered because
of their “race,” rather than their religious or political affiliation. All complete
and half-Jews, whether Orthodox, non-denominational or baptized, were
destined for extermination. The Nazis gave this mass murder the form of an
“industrial process.” In 1941, they established factories of death in which automated
killings proceeded according to a pre-approved schedule. Every day,
special transport trains were dispatched from the whole of Nazi-controlled Europe
– Germany, occupied countries and satellite states – to gas chambers in
the territory of occupied Poland. This extensive atrocity was organized to the
last detail by the state apparatus of Nazi Germany. Officials of the RSHA, or
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office), attendant transport
guards, SS guards, camp commandants and the executioners themselves saw
their involvement in the mass murder as “work that had to be done” and as
a “secret they would take to the grave.” This heinous crime was supposed to
remain forever concealed from Germany and the world…