The Holocaust. What were the lessons?

[TooBigForMyBoots]

I'm from the Cold War generation but WWII loomed large in our consciousness. Our grandparents were part of the war, so it wasn't just history, it was the story of our families. It was personal.

At this time of the year we remember what happened. It is said that the lessons from the industrial destruction of humankind should be learnt. But what lessons?

What did it teach you? What did you learn?

Well, I was born 6 years after the liberation of concentration camps.

I guess it's taught me not to hate any group. But to be very wary of those that use other groups to tell me I'm ok, because I'm better than the group that is currently being demonized, so I better be wary of the demonized group.

No, I'm wary of those who encourage me to be frightened of the demonized group.

And I've noticed, that it's always those with some power, who want me to hate.

I was always bewildered at how people could treat others like that but now it seems obvious. It begins with othering and dehumanising people and ends in finding justification for atrocities.

Doesn't really feel like those in charge have learned any lessons, as apparently now it's fine for a member of the US government to perform a Nazi salute publicly. Absolutely shocking but at the same time not unexpected.

Well from a european perspective, there was the United Nations, NATO, the european common market, the European Union and nigh on 75 years of peace in europe - the longest continuous stretch in history. So people learned some lessons.

edited to say I was really thinking of lessons from the second world war in europe - and this doesn't really address the specific question of the holocaust so sorry. but I like to think (maybe I shouldn't) that the horror witnessed in Europe did make europeans in general more inclined to trying to work together rather than act like nation states.

From the holocaust specifically I sometimes wonder. The things that are said and done these days ...

Israel certainly hasn't learned any lessons. They aren't just waving a hand around in the air, they have been committing actual genocide of the Palestinians and are moving on with that and the west have turned the other way, acting exactly how ordinary people did during WWII.
Turning a blind eye.

No lessons have been learned.

Yes, this.

A big lesson must surely be that the average person, will in fact look the other way (at best) or participate in terrible acts (at worst), to protect themselves/their families.

So many (myself included) like to believe that they would stand up for what is right, regardless of risk to self. History tells us that quite simply is not true.

Dan Snow did a really interesting podcast on this on his History Hit channel - his argument was that the generations who remember are no longer in power. As a result we are seeing a generation of newer politicians who don't place the same value in the institutions that were set up in the wake of the war in order to keep Europe together.

Yes this is true. And you never know what stage of history you are at - the its ok just a bit of rough talk stage or the round up the others stage. I'm in the US and I sometimes wonder are we in the 1930s and if so are we in 1933, 1935 or 1937.

Thanks for the responses so far.

I'd rather the focus be on what you, as an individual learnt from it rather than what governments did or didn't.

From the historian Heather Cox Richardson's post today - talking about a speech Abraham Lincoln gave aged 28 as the tensions of slavery etc. swirled about the USA.

“[M]en of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won. Their ambition could not be served simply by preserving what those before them had created, so they would achieve distinction through destruction.

For such a man, Lincoln said, “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of “establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty” and would instead turn against each other.

Resonates with me for Brexit and MAGA.

I'd love to hear what you've learned.

I've learned that people are capable of justifying atrocities when people have been othered. That we must always remember the human.

Did anyone watch the last musician at Auschwitz programme tonight? Very moving, and interesting in what they did amd didn't want to talk about. The Romany section was particularly interesting for me as I went into it from a music perspective,.my sister studied with the grandson of the main character but I hadn't heard much Romany music. It was a bit of recreation, interviews with descendants and also interviews with the last living orchestra member. Who insisted on smoking on camera, which amused mean it's infra dig these days, it's her right. I cried, several times.

I learnt loads of stuff. From back when I was a child in the 70s until now.

I think the first thing I learnt was that Jewish people were murdered in their millions by the Nazis because of their religion. All of them. Men, women, children, grannies, babies etc.

I learnt of the horrors inflicted on them. I saw the pictures, the images of liberation were not uncommon on the TV at the time.

At some point I thought that the Germans, as a nationality, were outliers and monsters.

And all before the age of ten. I learnt more as I got older.

I think we should learn from the ease in which people can be manipulated by those in power. With enough propaganda, especially during difficult times, it’s actually easy to convince a large percentage of a population to scapegoat and hate a minority group. We see this happening constantly…see how the newspapers constantly bombard us with “migrant” news.

I didn't realise you wanted to know what factual things we had learned about the holocaust. I thought it was lessons learned after WW2 and the Holocaust.

I learned the facts in my history classes and in my reading. And learned even more when my 3 children all went through the Facing History And Ourselves programme in middle/high school.

The Holocaust and the stories of survivors taught me that we are mostly the same. Most people just want to be able to have a normal life. A family, love, friends, religion, work, a home. Safety. Freedom.

Later I learnt about propaganda, psychopaths and how easily people can be manipulated.

Not factual lessons, more personal lessons @Pallisers. What did you learn?

That human nature doesn't change or improve. That it takes almost nothing to rip off the thin veneer of civilisation. That evil exists.

This.
And I can see now how social media is capable of doing the same. There s lot of anti immigrant feeling out there.
Im not saying that's right or wrong. Just observing levels of hate going up

I don’t believe children should be learning the details of the holocaust. It’s just creating pointless trauma

I learned that it could happen to anyone, including me.

I remember an English lesson at secondary school when our teacher was talking about the Holocaust. Near the beginning, she said something like, “well we’re all fair with blond or brown hair so we would have been all right. But the Jews were darker.” (Looking back, our school was extremely undiverse).

As an older teenager, I learned that my estranged grandfather was Jewish. My mum doesn’t look stereotypically Jewish, but my aunt does.

I realised how arbitrary the hatred was, and how anyone could be targeted. Similarly, when I read about Hitler and other feared dictators such as Saddam Hussein, I realised that in those regimes, no one was safe. Not the leader and their family, not the ambitious, fawning members of the leader’s inner circle and not the ordinary people. This is because dictators who rule by fear become very paranoid. No one dares to be honest with them, so they make ill-informed decisions and don’t know who they can trust.

The Holocaust and the stories of survivors taught me that we are mostly the same. Most people just want to be able to have a normal life. A family, love, friends, religion, work, a home. Safety. Freedom.

Really? so most people in Germany or Poland wanted to have a normal life - family, love etc ... and then the holocaust?? That explains nothing.

I agree with Mathanxiety to a certain extent.

People can be evil. It can happen anywhere. People in the face of evil can be heroic. It happens over and over again.

I agree. My own DCs studied the Holocaust and other genocides in 8th grade (in the US; age 13-14). It was a combined English and History course. They worked their way through several books, finishing with Night by Elie Wiesel, and studied anti-semitism in western culture through the centuries and why in particular it expressed itself the way it did in Germany - the Nazis' rise to power, propaganda, involvement of 'ordinary' people, and the mechanics of the genocide. They also studied the Khmer Rouge and the Rwanda genocide, as well as the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks. There was a class trip to the local excellent Holocaust Museum. I think they were old enough.