A picture shows the South Darfur village of Hamada, north of the region's capital town Nyala on February 3, 2021, as residents return to the village. - Darfuris who have long been displaced are returning to their villages after the October peace deal between Sudan's transitional government and rebel groups. (Photo by ASHRAF SHAZLY / AFP)
Chelmno. Belzec. Sobibór. Treblinka. Majdanek. Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The six extermination camps built on Polish soil during World War II, responsible for slaughtering millions of Jews.
A visitor views an exhibition at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre, on the eve of the ceremonies marking the Holocaust remembrance day in Jerusalem on April 6, 2021. (Photo by Emmanuel DUNAND / AFP)
While the actual number is still an ongoing investigation, the tally of six million came from Dr Wilhelm Hoettl, “an Austrian-born official in the Third Reich and a trained historian who served in a number of senior positions in the Schutzstaffe, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week in a rerun of its 2013 article, “Holocaust facts: where does the figure of 6 million victims come from?”
“In the 1961 testimony [at the trial of Adolf Eichman], Hoettl recalled, “according to [Eichmann’s] information, some six million Jews perished … four million in extermination camps and the remaining two million through shooting by the operations units and other causes, such as disease”.
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It is believed about two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe was wiped from existence.
Neither were Jews singled out.
Millions of people considered “Untermensch” (subhuman) were killed in mass shootings, pogroms or worked to death in concentration camps.
And the world has yet to learn the lessons of the time.
Up to three million Cambodians are believed to have been killed in the Cambodian War; more than 200 000 Hutus in the first Congo War; up to half a million so far in Darfur, Sudan; 20 000 in the Gukurahundi massacres by the Zimbabwe National Army which sought to exterminate the Ndbele people, and not forgetting the Rwandan genocide against about 600 000 Tutsi.
SA, too, under Jacob Zuma, has played its part in failing to arrest Sudanese President Omar al Bashir for Darfur war crimes in 2015 when he visited here.
The Darfur conflict is ongoing.
Amanda Watson
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