What We Know and What To Do With It

It's taken a long, long time, but finally there is a flood of scholarship that admits the German people knew that the "Final Solution" meant rounding up Jews from throughout Germany and the occupied territories and sending them to their deaths, whether in mass graves, work camps, or gas chambers.

There were just too many witnesses to the arrests, confiscation of property, cramming people onto cattle cars (if they were lucky) or into ditches if they were shot on the spot. These acts were carried out by human beings, German soldiers, some of whom kept diaries, wrote letters, and spoke with colleagues and family. Rail stations had ticket sellers and conductors. The witnesses had nightmares, too.

Read the book reviews in the May issue of The Atlantic, Hitler's Co-Conspirators, for the details of when and how German citizens knew of the "Final Solution," and how that knowledge made them complicit in the exterminations.

The Third Reich at War, by Richard J. Evans, Penguin

Life and Death in the Third Reich, by Peter Fritzsche, Harvard

Germany and the Second World War, Vol. IX: German Wartime Society 1939–1945, Oxford

Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, by Ian Kershaw, Yale

I'm not saying that the Bush administration's "war on terror" reached the level of the Holocaust. And I resent folks who offer such hyperbolic comparisons. But here is where I do find a parallel: in the complicity.

Now we know. Well, we've known that the White House Principals were obsessively involved in tracking the interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and black sites around the world. Those stories were leaked back in 2004. So when former CIA director Michael Hayden defends the use of torture on, where else but Fox News, we know we are at a turning point.

President Obama, I know it's hard, it's painfully hard to withstand the criticism of authorizing an investigation into just what was done in our names from 2001-2009.

It was torture, no matter what Jay Bybee, John Yoo, or Steven Bradbury called it.

Read this post from Sheri Fink, a medical doctor on propublica.org. It's still torture if it's done in front of doctors:

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the memos is their intimation that medical professionals conducted a form of research on the detainees, clearly without their consent. “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,” one memo reads. The documentation included not only how long the procedure lasted, how much water was used and how it was poured, but also “if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled… and how the subject looked between each treatment.” Special instructions were also issued with regard to documenting experience with sleep deprivation, and “regular reporting on medical and psychological experiences with the use of these techniques on detainees” was required.

The Nuremberg Code, adopted after the horrors of “medical research” during the Nazi Holocaust, requires, among other things, the consent of subjects and their ability to call a halt to their participation.

So now we have knowledge, and with that knowledge comes complicity, just like the Germans during World War II, if we don't do anything. That isn't a pleasant comparison, it's uncomfortable. But now that Dick Cheney isn't running the American government, we don't have the same fears of retribution either, not like the fear that silenced the Germans during WWII.

How will we use this knowledge?