Inhumanity of 70 years ago lingers today

It was there, in a 90-minute speech to the people assigned to carry it out, that SS commander Reinhard Heydrich outlined the German Reich's plan for the deliberate extermination of European Jewry. Heydrich assembled the heads of the many departments of the Reich bureaucracy affected by the plan. He told them all Jews west of Poland were to be evacuated to the east, mainly to Poland, where they would be placed in labor camps and worked to death. Heydrich's remarks described a "radical plan" which the Reich called the "final solution to the Jewish question."

In fact, the extermination of Jews had already begun in the east. Beginning in September 1939 German armies had swept into western Poland, and within a year and a half, violating a pact with Soviet Russia, had moved east into the Baltic states (today's Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and Ukraine (an area that includes modern Belarus), clear to the Black Sea. There, paramilitary units of the SS, the infamous Einsatzgruppen, operating behind German army lines, systematically murdered Jews, Poles, and hundreds of thousands of others in what historian Timothy Snyder has called Bloodlands, in his chilling recent book of that title.

It is appropriate that we remember the Holocaust, the pre-meditated murder of as many as 5.4 million Jews between 1939 and 1945. Snyder reminds that also, between 1933 and 1945, Germans and Russians between them intentionally killed 14 million people in the east. These were politically motivated killings; the people died not in combat, but "because someone made the deliberate decision to murder them" (Anne Applebaum, New York Review, Nov. 11, 2010), by planned starvation, or gunshot, or gassing. The Einsatzgruppen alone killed one million. Four million of the Holocaust Jews lived in the "Bloodlands."

Before the Germans invaded Soviet territory, Stalin had instigated starvation in Ukraine in the collectivization of farms there, and as the Russians moved westward, ethnic populations were methodically targeted and made victims of mass murder. Both Hitler and Stalin shared a hatred not only of Jews, but of all of the ethnic residents of the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine, and of such smaller regions as Bessarabia, Bukovina and Hertza. The totalitarian leaders considered these peoples inferior and coveted their lands for the agricultural expansion of their empires.

In the United States, most people even now are hard pressed to find Belarus on a map of Europe, or even Ukraine. Knowledge of the regions east of Germany was inexact at best and for most Americans, a distant vagary. That did not mean, however, that people in the U.S. government did not know what was going on. The prolific historian Walter Laqueur summarized what was known by whom, when, in his 1982 book "The Terrible Secret." The numbers were too great and general mobility too widespread for knowledge about the famines, the shootings and the death camps not to circulate around the globe quickly. Laqueur addressed the question of the Holocaust specifically. The volume of data -- first-hand testimony from escapees, photos from surreptitious observers, even smuggled letters from inmates -- was so great that in December 1942, eleven Allied governments issued a public declaration that the Reich government was carrying into effect Hitler's intention to exterminate Europe's Jews.

But for most, the news, and the events it placed before the imagination, was so inconceivable that, as Laqueur wrote, "it did not register." It was simply incomprehensible in a culture that aspired to tolerance and inclusion. Additionally, anti-Semitism was still rife in America and the rest of the west at the time. It was convenient not to-believe.

Labeling a people or a class as inferior or otherwise unacceptable in general society justifies all manner of inhumanity. A defensive posture toward those we do not know or understand comes all too naturally. Transcending that tendency takes unflinching self-reflection and uncompromising will. We would like to believe such labeling is a thing of the past; but it's not. Look around.

Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.