Holocaust Conditioning

For many (or some) of us that were subject to intensive Holocaust conditioning as kids in American public schools, we saw films of hundreds and thousands of piled bodies from old WWII footage a few times a year - year in, year out. We were told they were Jews that had been murdered, gassed mostly, by the Nazis. I recall seeing my first one of these films in the early 1970’s when I was about nine or ten years old. It went on for my entire education in the Boston area and then in high school in Columbia, Md. when my family had moved. In 1978 when the NBC television miniseries “Holocaust” was required watching for my social studies class, it seemed perfectly natural that we were expected to sit through four nights of television that even Elie Wiesel called “untrue, offensive, cheap.”

As a kid, I always felt a little sledgehammered after being subjected to those movies in the darkened classroom, surrounded by my fellow students with the teacher sitting in the back to keep an eye on us to make sure we didn’t fool around or otherwise be distracted from the Important Information that was being injected into our still-forming minds. Dark rooms under veil of authority are very conducive to making certain that attention is given to what’s to be taken in.

What was being funnelled into our brains was a steady diet of grainy black and white movies of Jews being herded through towns like cattle, bodies being bulldozed into pits, mass trench shootings, prisoners that looked like the walking dead, emaciated corpses piled like firewood. If you had a similar experience in school, you know of what I speak. Then there was usually some kind of after-lesson given by the teacher when we were at our most traumatized. Bad Nazis. Nice teacher.

And we all took it in, without question. Six million Jews died in gas chambers, were made into soap, burned in ovens. Four million Jews died in Auschwitz. Nazis made lampshades out of Jewish skin. Gas chambers in Germany. And thus was the core of my childhood education of the Holocaust. I never questioned what I’d been taught. I had no reason to. Leaving any idea of academia behind in 1980 when high school was over, I went along with my merry little life and to be honest, I didn’t think much about the Holocaust again.

That changed for me in the late 1990’s when I learned, via the internet and my own research afterwards, that the number of dead at Auschwitz had been revised downward from four million to one million, but the overall six million Jewish dead still stood as gospel. Or maybe five million as of now. It was six million no questions asked when I was a kid.

Anyway, over time I also learned that the soap stories had been deprecated, Jews hadn’t been made into lampshades after all and there hadn’t really been any gas chambers on German soil. Having to unlearn this new information was coupled with learning that people were being charged with and going to jail for having the wrong opinion about history when it came to the Holocaust by publicly stating that there was no evidence for mass exterminations of Jews by gas chamber.

Frankly, life was easier before the blinders came off. What had all of these people done to the Holocaust stories of my youth? ..... Read More ....