The Most Important Thing To Know About the Nazies

Donald Trump

Auschwitz with Elon

OŚWIĘCIM, Poland — The Soviet Red Army troops who arrived here on Jan. 27, 1945, helped uncover one of the greatest atrocities ever committed by — and against — humankind.

Inside the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the soldiers liberated roughly 7,000 prisoners who had been brutalized by a Nazi regime hell-bent on exterminating the Jewish people. The horrors there defied comprehension.

In the eyes of so many around the world, the survivors’ very existence is a resounding act of defiance against the world-historic cruelty and vast injustice of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror. Their stories of survival are also implicit pleas to the world:

Never forget humanity’s capacity to commit unthinkable crimes.

Hitler’s regime systematically murdered 6 million Jews during World War II, including roughly 1 million people at Auschwitz. The Nazis also persecuted other peoples, including Poles, the Romani, Soviet prisoners, gay men and mentally and physically disabled people.

The Nazis tried to hide evidence of the genocide they perpetrated, including burning the remains of roughly 900,000 Auschwitz victims who were killed in the gas chambers.

Eva Umlauf was only 2 when she and her mother were liberated from the camp — too young to remember the actual day. But the Holocaust is etched onto her skin — A-26,959 tattooed on her left forearm, marking her for life, along with some other Auschwitz survivors.

Eva Umlauf with her mother, Agnes Hecht, in Nováky, Slovakia, in a labor camp for Jews before their transfer to Auschwitz. As a baby, she was tattooed number A-26,959.

For Umlauf, who traveled for the ceremony along with her sister, her son and one of her grandchildren, this was more than a personal journey of memory and reflection. It was a moral responsibility.

“They have to know that it’s true. You know, because it’s so, so unbelievable, unbelievable that nobody can believe this,” she said.

But even given what has been established about the Third Reich’s crimes against humanity, some of the most vital information has still not been uncovered. Notably, the names of more than a million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis are still unknown, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial center.

Alexander Avram leads a team at Yad Vashem that has amassed more than 2 million “Pages of Testimony” and historical documents to verify more identities. The project is known as the Hall of Names.

“There are no cemeteries, there are no tombstones … for most of the Holocaust victims,” Avram told NBC News. “Each additional name that we can recover is, for us, another victory against the Nazis, because the Nazis didn’t [only] want to … exterminate the Jews physically. They wanted to obliterate even their memory and their culture.”

Avram said researchers have started experimenting with artificial intelligence to scour testimonial documents in hope of finding names that might have been overlooked. But that technology is useless without firsthand accounts provided by the shrinking pool of survivors. The Claims Conference estimates that only 1,000 survivors of Auschwitz are still alive. In that regard, Avram’s team is “in a rush against time,” he said.

In some countries, basic knowledge of the Holocaust is eroding. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a nonprofit organization that helps Holocaust victims seek compensation, released an eight-country survey last week showing that 46% of adults ages 18-29 in France, for example, “had not heard or weren’t sure if they had heard of the Holocaust prior to taking the survey.

Nearly half of Americans surveyed were unable to name a single Nazi camp, according to the Claims Conference’s findings, and more than a quarter (26%) of Americans ages 18-29 disagreed with the following statement: “The Holocaust happened, and the number of Jews who were killed during the Holocaust has been accurately and fairly described.

One thing that is significant of the death camps, is that railroad tracks entered the camps and terminated in the camps. This suggest that those brought into the camps there was no intention, by the Nazies, that those people were to ever leave the camps.

“I am against turning the page, saying that was long ago,” “We keep alive the memory of the civilizational split of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germans, which we pass down to each generation in our country again and again.”

“I think it is not taught enough in school in America, and if you watch the news in America now, you see the philosophies that people are following now and they are happy to pretend that this never happened,” Sesar said.

“It is scary, because there are not so many survivors left, and so when there [are] no survivors, people even more so try to discredit history,” he added. Aron Krell, 98, a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned at Auschwitz and ultimately liberated from the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, said it is incumbent on Jewish people, educators, historians and other advocates to keep the legacy of the atrocities intact.