The crimes we cannot forgive or forget
1985Carole Seligman 1985-06Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 5 →
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SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1985 5 that the U.S. government is a friend of the Jews are aware that our government, despite voluminous and irrefutable information as to what the Nazis were planning and already carrying out, refused to give sanctuary to Jews trying to escape Nazism?
How many know that the United States never altered its immigration quota system for Jews-or even filled 7k! 1-x3 ENTRY NA TASIM, ANDIJEMTRAA INTERMIT TARAS LIN SOLINE PARTY CHiRIN WARNIA PARTY Memory of the Camps: A British documentary film narrated by Trevor Howard.
Locked in British archives since the end of World War II, these are filmed records of what the Allied forces found when they marched into German concentration camps.
Alfred Hitchcock was a technical consultant for this documentary. Trevor Howard, in an understated narration presents the facts: 11 million people died in the camps, over half of them-6 million-were Jews. The other 5 million included communists, trades unionists, and gypsies.
There were concentration throughout Germany. Ten of them, including the notorious Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, were shown and described in "Memory of the Camps.
Part of Reagan's purpose in visiting the Bitburg cemetery was to "forgive and forget" Nazi atrocities in order to cement the U.S.-German alliance, including the installation of Pershing missiles in Germany and German support for Reagan's "Star Wars" plan. "Memory of the Camps, shown widely on public television stations, will help make that impossible for all who see it.
When British forces entered BergenBelsen, the Jews imprisoned there had been without food and water for six days. A typhus epidemic was raging. The smell of death was heavy and omnipresent. Thirty thousand people had already been killed at that camp.
The Nazi guards were made to dispose of the bodies and the local German capitalists were brought in to observe (impassively, the camera showed) what their support to Nazism had wrought.
Many of the survivors were so emaciated they looked like corpses and were too weak to eat, let alone walk.
The camera hides nothing. The naked corpses of men, women, and children lie in massive piles, killed by deliberate starvation and disease.
The film shows the ashes of some of the 10,650 Jews burned in the ovens of Dachau in the last month alone. It describes the 80,000 killed at Buchenwald and the 300 per day cremated in Mauthausen. Four million were killed at Auschwitz.
"Memory of the Camps" was painful to watch. But it must be watched. It will help engrave this crime on the memory of humankind. Those who know can help stop repetitions.
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SociAlist Action FORUM This month's FORUM section is devoted to a discussion Socialist Action contacted leaders of the Nuclear Freeze movement and specialists on the arms issue to present their views on this urgent topic.
Our goal in the FORUM section is to encourage a wide-ranging discussion on subjects of interest to those active in the labor, antiwar, Black, women's, and other In this issue of FORUM we are presenting the views of Charlene Tschirhart, director of the San Francisco Nuclear Freeze; Gene Carroll, labor coordinator for the national Nuclear Freeze; and Stephen Jay Gould, renowned scientist and building the antinuclear-weapons movement.
movements.
author.—The editors on the perspectives for