The Holocaust: history's biggest crime

T. Moffatt Burriss remembers crying just one time during his tour of duty as a member of the 82nd Airborne Division, fighting across western Europe, toward victory in World War II. The moment still stirs his emotions, 70 years later.

The 97-year-old veteran recalled a young Jewish man named Jack. He had been beaten by the Germans and left for dead. Miraculously, he survived, made his way out of Germany and to the United States where he joined the U.S. Army and became a member of the 82nd Airborne Division. His personal mission was to return to Europe to find his family, which he was certain had been captured and taken to a concentration camp.

Burriss had jumped into Holland during Operation Market Garden and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Along the way, he told attendees of the Holocaust Symposium Thursday in New Orleans, “I saw arms blown off. I saw heads blown off. But I had never seen anything like this.”

“This” was a transition concentration camp that had been abandoned by the Germans, which he and his fellow paratroopers liberated. Hundreds of starving captives were discovered. Thousands more were dead, many buried in mass graves. Burriss and Jack walked through the scene, the young man asking everyone for information about his parents. A Catholic priest then told Jack “his family had been put to death three or four days earlier.”

Jack, the Holocaust survivor and U.S. Army soldier, fell to his knees and sobbed. Tears also flowed for the older American. “That was the only time during the war when I cried,” recalled Burriss, one of the presenters at the National WWII Museum symposium sponsored by the Tawani Foundation in association with the Pritzger Military Museum and Library, on the eve of the fifth International Conference on World War II. The conference, titled “1945: To the Bitter End,” continues through Saturday and can be seen streamed live online at www.ww2conference.com.

Internationally acclaimed scholars, authors, survivors and veterans are giving presentations and attending the event, which examines the final year of World War II, when the atrocities of genocide were revealed in what one speaker described as the “biggest crime in history.”

Dr. Gerhard Weinberg, one of the world’s leading authorities on Nazi Germany, and Dr. Doris Bergen, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, explained to a sold-out crowd at the conference the various motivations of the perpetrators who systematically killed Jews and others selected for extermination. “The architects of genocide were not Martians from outer space, but people,” Bergen explained. The Holocaust began as part of Adolf Hitler’s vision of a “demographic revolution” that would remove the Jews, as well as the sick, elderly, homosexuals and others who stood in the way of Nazi domination. In that way, Bergen explained, Hitler was the chief architect of the Holocaust, followed closely by his inner circle. “All the producers of genocide had other jobs, too,” she said. “Being involved in the killing of Jews brought enormous power.”

Those who participated in the mass killings were rewarded with promotions, decorations, plunder and sex, she said. Their enthusiastic participation won them the favor from, and access to, Hitler, himself.

Dr. Weinberg told the crowd that special units of “murder commandos” were deployed to execute Jews in Germany during the earliest stages of the Holocaust. He said the units consisted of 2,000 to 3,000 who were uniquely willing and qualified to perform the killings. An even bigger and often forgotten contingent of perpetrators was formed from police battalions whose members commonly went back to work in their former jobs after World War II, unlike those who were later tried for war crimes.

Records decoded and declassified only since 1996 revealed that the killings were systematic, regularly reported to higher Nazi officials and conducted throughout Germany and its conquests in the years leading up to World War II, during it, and until its end. A program to exterminate the handicapped and the elderly, clearing capacity in Germany’s hospitals, was the earliest step and continued until May 1945. “It was simply a part of hospital routine and was no secret… a matter of routine without moral implications.”

Weinberg said one motivation for those who committed the atrocities was that many saw the alternative – combat duty on the front lines in the war – as much more dangerous than leading unarmed Jews and others to the gas chambers.

Tens of thousands of local police battalions and others who fulfilled orders to commit genocide moved on with their lives after the war, never having to face hearings or the families of victims. One member of the audience at the symposium asked how such experiences psychologically affected the perpetrators after the war. “Unfortunately,” Weinberg said, “there is very little regard to this end of the issue.”

Speakers like author Alex Kershaw, whose book “The Envoy” tells the story of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who is credited with negotiating to save the lives of perhaps 100,000 Jews in Budapest, Hungary, after July 1944, spoke of the liberators and those who tried to prevent as many deaths as possible. By the time Wallenberg reached Hungary, German war criminal Adolf Eichmann was overseeing the deaths of hundreds of thousands – “one every two seconds during a six-week period,” Kershaw said. When the Nazis ran low on bullets, the author said, they would tie their victims together, shoot just one or two, and throw them into the ice-cold Danube River.

Kershaw calculated that no less than 1 million people are alive and breathing today, however, because of Wallenberg’s efforts before the Soviets liberated Budapest. Wallenberg was later arrested by the Soviets and mysteriously disappeared. Kershaw said some claim he was executed by a gunshot and others say he was poisoned. Many think he survived. “Some people swear that he is still alive,” Kershaw said. “He would be 101.”

Like T. Moffatt Burriss, Jewish concentration camp escapee David Wisnia gave attendees a firsthand perspective on the Holocaust. Wisnia was 13 years old when the Germans invaded his native Warsaw, Poland, and his family was forced into servitude. One day, when he was summoned to do carpentry work at the German-occupied airport, Wisnia returned to find his family had been killed. “I was not allowed to get off the bus,” he explained. “I smelled that something was wrong. My family was dead. There was a group of corpses at the corner of the building. I was a kid of 15 and a half. That was the end of my first life.”

Wisnia was taken to the Birkenau Auschwitz camp where his first job was to haul away the bodies of captives who had intentionally electrocuted themselves along the fence line. “We were condemned to live in a cesspool where evil reigned,” Wisnia said.

He too would have died at Auschwitz, he said, if not for his talent as a singer. He received privileged prisoner status, sang for the guards and was allowed to clean barracks as crematoriums were being constructed by others at the camp. As the war and its inevitable end drew near, Wisnia was sent into a death march, which he survived. He made two escape attempts, the second of which was successful. He heard the roar of tanks, and rushed to the highway in March 1945 to find the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division making their way toward Berlin.

His second life was suddenly underway. He was taken in by the Screaming Eagles, who enlisted him to serve as an interpreter. After the war, with no family left alive in Poland, he went to the United States where the American soldiers who rescued him in 1945 “became my family.”

Today, Wisnia reunites annually with his fellow veterans of the 101st Airborne Division and sings “The Star-Spangled Banner” which he describes as “the biggest honor bestowed upon me.” His book, “One Voice, Two Lives: From Auschwitz Prisoner to 101st Airborne Trooper,” was published in 2015.

The International World War II Conference continues Friday with presentations on the Battle of the Bulge, Manila, Iwo Jima and other topics related to the war’s final year.