Perhaps rightfully so, we will never escape the horrible images created by the Nazi Holocaust.  We should not forget.

My favorite book about the subject was a chiller – Hitler’s Willing Executioners:  Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah (Vintage, 1996).   You can read my comments about that book on this site from a previous blog.

So, here comes another one for your list.  Late last year, Daniel Blatman wrote The Death Marches:  The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (Harvard Press, 2010).   You can read an objective editorial review of this book entitled “Death Along the Way” by Timothy Snyder in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, January 8-9, 2011 (p. C6).

Somehow, I think we get comfortable with the idea that the Holocaust is simply history.  We believe it will never happen again.  We hope it, or anything like it, will never happen again.  That is true of other historical maladies, such as the Great Depression and the polio epedemic.

Snyder’s review posits a more important question that he gains from reading this book.  Toward the end of the war, the concentration camps were not killing facilities.  They were overwhelmed with prisoners evacuated from many sites, and those evacuations are classified as “death marches,” in which 250,000 people died during their marches, or upon reaching their destination.  Snyder says this:  “because the death marches do not fit our presumptions about genocide, his [Blatman’s] important book opens again the crucial question of the 20th century:  why we kill.” 

That remains a question many people have asked many times, and fewer people have tried to answer fewer times.  It is easier to ask than to seek an answer.  But until we answer, books like this make sure we never forget to ask:  why?

What do you think?  Let’s talk about it.