People sometimes tell me that the pictures of the piles of corpses, in the concentration camps are the most disturbing ones from the Holocaust.
However, I am not in total agreement because I found the photo above much more disturbing. It shows the cause of the Holocaust. Hitler understood for the Nazi ideology to work and he needed the youth. They had to be indoctrinated at a young age. The two boys in the photo above, I reckon, are about age three or so.
I often hear people say, “Love will conquer hate.” That is not really true, though—there is a thin line between love and hate, and it is easy to cross that line given the right circumstances and environment.
Education is the key to the battle of hate. However, education must not be confused with teaching. Teaching is only a small part of education. Children (and some adults) need to be educated—not only by teachers, trainers or coaches—but also by parents, grandparents and family.
The photograph above was taken in 1931—when membership in the Hitler Youth wasn’t compulsory. I don’t know who the parents were, but I can envisage that maybe they weren’t engrossed in the Nazi messages. Perhaps they only liked some of the elements initially.
However, the NSDAP was well funded and were able to facilitate childcare through means of holiday camps, after school activities, etc. What parent would not sign up to that? The mistake many Germans made in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they didn’t question this generosity. They may have seen that Hitler and his cronies weren’t the nicest of people, but they put food on the table and looked after the kids. So they were willing to turn a blind eye. At the start even the Nazi propaganda appeared to be reasonably harmless, it echoed what many people thought, albeit without foundation.
It wasn’t only the Nazi supporters who benefited from this generosity, at least not at the start.
Another question people often ask me is, “What political movement was responsible for the Holocaust?” The honest answer is all of them. Yes, it is true the communist were anti-NSDAP, but on the other hand, the Nazis struck a deal with the USSR just before the war. The USSR was the communist country in Europe at the time. People accepted how things were going because it suited them. When it no longer suited their lifestyles, they started to ask questions. By then, it was too late. In 1936, the Hitler Youth movement had reached five million members. Five million young minds were indoctrinated into an evil ideology that snuck in as a gradual virus.
So why is there a lesson to be learned for the near future? For starters—I suggest reading the book, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism by Julia Boyd and Angelika Patal. All you have to do is to change the decade from the 1920s to the 2020s.
Parents nowadays have their children following different ideologies without asking the question, “Who is behind these ideas?” I am not saying that every ideology a child is exposed to is menacing—the majority are probably good. However, I see more ideas sneaking into the mainstream and our youth should be questioning them—but very few are doing so. Critical thinking seems to have disappeared from our schools and universities. In case you wonder what the consequence of that will be…
In 2023, there appears to be an upsurge of people having a photograph of a political leader as their profile picture on social media. This is the 21st-century equivalent of having an image of a political leader hanging in the living room. (Like so many did in the past with pictures of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro and Adolf Hitler.) This has never ever been a good idea in history. All you are doing is telling your children that you worship someone who doesn’t have their best interest at heart and you are willing to follow them blindly.
The Holocaust happened in the past but could effortlessly occur again. What scares me is that the foundation of the next Holocaust has already been laid.
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