Yet Another World War Ii
...not speak, for I am
not a gypsy. When they came for the Jews, I did not speak,
because I wasn't a Jew. When they came for the Catholics,
I did not speak, for I am not a Catholic. And when they
came for me, there was no one left to speak." -On the Wall
at the Holocaust Museum in Washington It is impossible to
learn about the Holocaust and the Second World War
without the question of how it possibly could have happened
arising, and along with that question comes another. The
question of whether or not the Western World did enough to
help the Jews in Europe. What was their reaction to the
campaign of systematic persecution, robbery and murder the
Third Reich inflicted upon the Jewish people? During the
time leading up to the outbreak of World War II, the
Western Press consistently carried numerous reports of the
German's anti-Jewish policies and their purposeful
victimization of the Jews living in Nazi Germany as well as
the annexed territories. The general public cannot claim that
they did not know what was going on, that they were
uninformed. Whether or not they chose to believe it
however, is a completely different story. The public were
indeed outraged in many of the cases but the governments of
the major European democracies felt that it was not for them
to intervene for they felt that the Jewish problem classified as
an internal affair within a sovereign state. The truth behind
this is simply that the governments were anxious to establish
cordial relations with Germany and didn't want to cause any
hostility. Thus they stood idly by and remained silent as
Hitler went from denying the Jews of their civil rights to
denying them of their means of earning their daily bread. As
much as they wanted to remain neutral, the countries of the
Western World were finally forced to take a stand on the
issue of emigration of Jews from the Reich...
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