My first visit to the new yad vashem - what I learned

On Tuesday I went to the new Yad Vashem, which is Israel's national Holocaust memorial museum. I've been there before, but it was eight years ago and the museum has since been completely re-done. Having been a student of genocide studies for 3-4 years during my time at Stand Canada, I was particularly interested in seeing the new methods Yad Vashem chose to teach about the Holocaust.

Most tour groups use a Yad Vashem guide when they tour the museum, but in our case our regular gave us the tour, as he has studied the Holocaust extensively, even teaching at Yad Vashem for a number of years. His knowledge shined through and I certainly developed a better understanding of certain aspects of the Holocaust as a result. One thing in particular that he talked to us about how the Nazi's engineered their killing machine to make it easier for their rank-and-file to carry out the mass murder. Early on the primary method of the mass murders was lining people up and shooting them. However, not surprisingly German soldiers could not stomach this, and did not like having to do so.

In order to make their atrocious acts more palatable, the Nazi regime removed the human element from the killing as much as possible. For example, they enlisted Jews to help round up people from the ghetto's to send them off to the camp's, and then upon their arrival, another group of Jews shepherded those who weren't fit to work to the gas chambers. Even the use of gas chambers was a way of creating a disconnect between killer and victim. By not actually seeing their victims die in front of them, the Nazi's were better equipped to mentally deal with the horrid acts they carried out. This is also why they had Jews remove the bodies from the gas chambers and bring them out to be burned, or dealt with in whatever way the camp in question disposed of the piles of dead bodies.

Putting people into prison like uniforms and then stripping them naked upon their death was another way of dehumanizing the victims of the Nazi genocide, as Hitler's inner circle discovered that when they were naked the Jews and other victimes were seen as less human by the rank and file German soldiers. Apparently even Himler himself almost threw up at the site of some of the atrocities the Germans carried out.

Another thing I think our guide did an excellent job of was getting us to stop and think about the implications of Wannsee conference. It was a meeting where relatively high ranking Nazi officials planned the logistics of stepping up "The Final Solution" so that they could see Hitler's plan of exterminating the Jews taken to it's fruition. Just like there is probably a group of people in a room somewhere in Bentonville Arkansas discussing how to more efficiently get men's pants from coastal China to their stores in North America, there was a group of Nazi officials discussing how to most efficiently get Jews from even the smallest towns scattered across Eastern Europe into the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The level of planning and coordination that went into the Holocaust is almost unthinkable - the only comparison I can think of to better comprehend the scale is the logistics challenges facing global retail stores.