Airmen learn from Holocaust

Published May 6, 2005
By Tech Sgt. David Duggins
91st Missile Security Forces Squadron

MINOT AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. (AFPN) -- Many years ago, I saw a documentary called "Night and Fog," made in 1955 by concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol and French director Alain Resnais. Only 32 minutes long, depicting concentration camps, medical experiments and starved skeletal victims of the Nazi Final Solution, the film affected me deeply. I felt I had lived in a concentration camp, watched my family die of starvation and seen them stacked like cordwood and bulldozed into mass graves.

It was the longest 32 minutes of my life.

I’m not Jewish. Born in 1963, I am 18 years removed from the unconditional surrender of German forces in May 1945. It was a distant memory before I began reading history books. This is true for many of us.

So why do we remember?

The best argument is the simplest: There are lessons in this terrible event, relevant to us today as Airmen and human beings.

In 1933, 9 million Jews lived in Europe. By 1945, 6 million had fallen under a methodical state-sponsored program of genocide. Adolf Hitler, advocating the Voelkisch, or National Movement, believed Germans were racially superior. The Nazis sought to cleanse their society of “inferiority” -- Jews, Romanians, the Polish and Russians. The campaign also encompassed political and ideological dissidents, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals.

It ended in 1945, but history often repeats itself. Vietnamese, Chinese and Cham Muslims were among the 2 million victims of Cambodian dictator Pol Pot’s ethnic cleansing from 1974 to 1979. In April 1994, the ethnic majority Hutu exterminated 937,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. Former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic was charged with genocide by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for crimes against humanity carried out from 1992 to 1995. Mr. Milosevic’s numerous offenses were disturbingly similar to those perpetrated by the Nazis.

The lesson? Hatred still happens. Prejudice and intolerance are here and now. Each of us, armed with doctrines of equality and tolerance, can influence others to follow the right path. As Airmen, we have many opportunities to positively influence our peers, subordinates, friends and families.

Enough positive influence can reach the global family of humanity. We have made great strides, but as poet Robert Frost reminds us, there are miles to go before we sleep.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has chosen “From Liberation to the Pursuit of Justice” as the theme for this year’s Days of Remembrance observance to honor the continuing accomplishments initiated at the Nuremberg trials. The International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the recently created International Criminal Court are all children of Nuremberg, a testament to the legacy of equality embraced by the United Nations and the U.S. Air Force.