The day after D-Day is appropriate for looking back at the results of WWII, among which was finding proof of the Holocaust.  The extermination camps were known about before the war ended, but not everyone wanted to believe they could exist.  Germany, after all, was perhaps the most cultured modern country in the world.  Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.  The Solvay conferences.  Goethe.  Heisenberg.  Nietzsche.

Oh, well.

Many say the Holocaust (Shoah, in Hebrew) didn't happen.  It did happen.  It was not history's first or last determined effort to wipe out a people, but it warrants all the opprobrium heaped on it.  Its sheer awfulness should be taught in the schools and condemned in the harshest terms.

Some Jews think ordinary Germans supported Hitler's Jew-hatred and therefore willingly went along with the genocide effort.  I don't agree with that.  It doesn't seem possible not to have known something, at least a little bit, about the camps, but Himmler had Germany by the throat.  Nobody could stop the killers, and efforts to do so would only have resulted in them themselves, and probably their families, being killed.

This formulation recognizes reality while excusing nobody.  No excuses are adequate to the crime.  Nor are any alibis.  Before the war even began, Hitler made it plain that he wanted all Jews gone from Europe.  Though Jews are an educated, law-abiding population who unfailingly help the economy and enhance culture wherever they go, no one would take them.  Not America, not Canada, not Argentina, not Brazil.  All had the space.  All could have used the additional brains, energy, and creativity.

Think about that.  Had America taken Western Europe's Jews, there would have been no Holocaust.  It would still have happened in Poland and Russia, but several million Jews would have survived who perished.  We didn't have the imagination or the generosity of spirit; we couldn't imagine what that hateful man would do, and we couldn't rise above our own spitefulness.

From extensive reading on the subject, I think for most Germans, the Shoah wasn't personal, just business.  And not, they consoled themselves, their business.  One suspects that many Americans would take that same attitude if sufficiently inconvenienced or endangered.  The way we have rolled over for political correctness in our own day shows that we are doing what Jews themselves did before WWII: accommodating the distasteful, hateful political left, hoping the worst of it will just burn out in time.

Yes, Nazism was of the left, not the right.  Scholarship has established this beyond doubt, most readably that of Jonah Goldberg in his Liberal Fascism.  It means we are up against disguised Hitlerism in George Soros, Barama, the Clintons, et al., which explains why the tactics of these vicious goons so smack of the Brownshirts.  To say the least, it's ironic that they call us Nazis; the left, as the original Nazis, understands nothing of irony and little of history.