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        When the Holocaust Memoriam Museum was inaugurated on the Washington Mall in 1980, Leon Wieseltier wrote: 'The historiography of the Holocaust was an act of intellectual heroism'. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Jews were the primary victims — more than six million Jews were murdered; Gypsies, the handicapped and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.
 

Holocaust Memoriam Museum in Wasington DC.	A pile of bodies at Auschwitz concentration campt in Poland (1944).

        Chartered by a unanimous Act of Congress in 1980 and located adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, DC, the Holocaust Museum strives to broaden public understanding of the history of the Holocaust through multifaceted programmes: exhibitions; research and publication; collecting and preserving material evidence, art and artefacts relating to the Holocaust and holding annual Holocaust commemorative events known as Days of Remembrance. The museum also organizes a variety of public programmes designed to enhance understanding of the Holocaust and related issues, including those of contemporary global significance.

        The Museum's primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy; to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a free democracy.

        There is no single, all purpose explanation of the Holocaust. I am of the view that insufficient work has been carried out on the motivation of ordinary Germans in either ignoring or cooperating with the mass deportations and murder of Jews in Europe during World War II. It was not necessary to be aware of gas chambers in Auschwitz in order to see that German Jews —— the neighbourhood tailors, doctors, shopkeepers and lawyers, once trusted members of society —— were being treated systematically like animals. Nor did it take much political sophistication to see that Nazi leaders were enriching themselves, that institutions were being corrupted. There is no doubt that part of this was also rooted in the widespread willingness of Germans to profit from the plight of the Jews, both personally and commercially.

        There are many heart-chilling stories about the Holocaust. The historian Richard Grunberger records that a Jewish Doctor in Berlin, having witnessed the deportation of his mother and sister, was then forced to show a Nazi official around his flat. This doctor was reprieved from deportation because of his mixed marriage. Finding himself at last in the grand bourgeois milieu to which he had always longed for, the Nazi official became visibly excited. 'All my life I have dreamt of furniture like this!' he exclaimed, before taking possession of the contents.

        One Jewish diarist who survived the war, Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), kept a journal from 1933 to 1945, some 5000 pages of manuscript altogether, which was discovered in the 1980s and published in two volumes in 1998 and 2000 under the title 'I Will Bear Witness'. Since Klemperer was married to a 'pure Arian' woman, his status as a problematische personlichkeit (a problematic personality) enabled him to avoid deportation to a Concentration Camp. But he still had to wear a yellow Jewish star on his jacket in public, and the constant fear of summary judgement runs through the pages of his day-to-day reports. Having been a professor of romance languages in Dresden, Klemperer was an intelligent and learned man who prepared a detailed study of what he called 'the functions and effects of Nazi language' and committed himself to writing about the unending challenge of staying alive, regardless of the punishment he risked by putting his observations down on paper. He kept the diary pages hidden in a Greek Dictionary, sending them off periodically for safe keeping to a trusted friend who was under far less scrutiny. On May 27, 1942, Klemperer reported the results of an unannounced riffling of his home conducted by the Gestapo. He wrote in his journal: 'After the house search I found several books, which had been taken off the shelf, lying on the desk. If one of them had been the Greek Dictionary, if the manuscript pages had fallen out and had thus aroused suspicion, it would undoubtedly have meant my death. One is murdered for lesser misdemeanours'. He was determined, however, to proceed. 'I shall go on writing. That is my heroism. I will bear witness, precise witness'.

        More than 35,000 artefacts have been gathered for public display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D. C. One of the most significant artefacts is a rusted metal milk can which was unearthed in Warsaw, Poland, on December 1, 1950, one of several such containers which were found buried beneath the rubble of the city at the end of World War II. Inside each of these vessels was stored a cache of materials documenting the experiences of nearly half a million Jews who had been forced by the Germans to live inside a tightly confined sector known as the Warsaw Ghetto. Among the 17,000 carefully packed items recovered from these containers were diaries, monographs, autobiographical vignettes, underground publications, and official notices all assembled between 1940 and 1944 by a group that called itself ONEG SHABBOS, Joy of the Sabbath, OS for short. This remarkable effort was organised by Emmanuel Ringelblum (1900-1944), a respected historian who was an expert in the nuances of scholarly research and, by a dint of cruel circumstance, also became a man of destiny. When it became evident to him that the Nazis were planning for the total extermination of all the Jews of Poland, he set about creating an unimpeachable record of the outrage and suffering he knew they all were about to endure.

        A graduate of the University of Warsaw with a doctorate in history, Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote his dissertation on the 'History of Jews in Warsaw up to the Expulsion of 1527'. With this formidable academic background, he built up the archives of 'OS' by training the make-shift staff he had assembled for building up a sophisticated archive for posterity. To quote his immortal words in this context: 'I laid the corner stone for 'OS' in October 1939. Comprehensiveness was the principle of our work. Objectivity was the second principle. We aspired to present the whole truth, however painful it might be. It is of paramount importance that not a single fact about Jewish life at this time and place should ever be kept away from the world.'

        Emmanuel Ringelblum and his team knew that their prospects for survival were slight, but they were bent on perpetuating their heritage by every means possible. Ringelblum wrote with great feeling: 'But the work was too holy for us, it was too deep in our hearts, the 'OS' was too important for the Jewish community 'we could not stop'. In the spring of 1943, Ringelblum helped organise an armed resistance at the Warsaw Ghetto. He and his wife were shot to death by the Nazis on March 7, 1944 and dumped along with his team members into a collective grave. The archive created by Ringelblum was retrieved by the Allied Forces after the war. The mud-encrusted milk can that preserved Ringelblum's journal, occupies a place of honour in the permanent exhibition devoted to the Warsaw Ghetto at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

        Across the Third Reich in Nazi Germany there was, in short, a massive collapse of moral and civic values. It can best be described as a process of seduction. Hitler was a political seducer, versed in the seducer's art. The Germans, in turn, allowed themselves to be seduced. Ethical options got blurred by irrational emotions in Nazi Germany. This was more than politics, it was personal-less political support than near-religious love and adoration for Fuhrer Hitler. The Fuhrer's will did not replace individual will, but it made it easier to dodge morally based decisions. Public seduction suggested a willingness to be seduced, a readiness to suspend disbelief. The complexities of ordinary people living under murderous regimes like that of Hitler must be studied and understood from a larger point of view to see how the extraordinary came to pass.

        A man of great faith and a man who knew that true faith is forged out of cruel adversity was a German theologian and preacher Helmut Thielicke, who in the immediate aftermath of Germany's defeat, published in 1948 an essay he called 'The Reality of the Demonic'. Referring to the continued bombing of Germany by the Allies in the closing phase of World War II, he wrote: 'The Nazi tyranny has not only pitched us into a ghastly war which every day is destroying our men, our brothers and so many on the battle fields. It is not only exercising the most monstrous reign of terror within the country, but it has also attacked and desecrated everything that is holy to us. It interprets all of life, it interprets birth, death, history and eternity in a way that is different from what we learned as Christians in our childhood and also found to be true and reliable. This callous Government has brought bewilderment and confusion to many people, and besides, this Godless interpretation of life, has unfortunately made a great impression upon many people'.