COLUMN - The greatest mystery of World War II has been solved. The enigma lasted more than eight decades.
© United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumUnderprivileged children sit on the sidewalk in the Warsaw ghetto.
The most important event in recent human history, which shaped the world as it is today, was the Second World War. It is a topic covered, to this day, in a huge number of books, documentaries, plays and movies. Each writer, director and screenwriter tells a piece of the story. Each one with their own viewpoint and approach.
I personally have already contributed to this culture when I wrote and directed a
short film based on that time. I told the story of a child in love with airplanes who meets an aviator. In the movie, I explained a little about the mood in Brazil about to enter the war. Finally, I paid homage to the Brazilian pilots who went to fight, in 1944, against the fascists in Europe.
I understand that a lot of people produce on the subject - and a lot of people are interested in reading or watching - because everyone is trying to find out how the world got into that boiling point that caused, according to the best calculations,
more than 70 million deaths. Moreover, studying history has a noble goal: t
o understand the mistakes of the past so that they will not be repeated in the future. "Historians are the professional remembrancers of what their fellow-citizens wish to forget," said the intellectual Eric Hobsbawm.
The works that tell the stories of the people who fought in the war, the focus of most books and movies, are exciting. However, for me, the most fascinating thing has always been the search to understand how the thinking and motivations of each of the people involved in the conflict were.
With so many books and movies, it was possible to understand what people at all levels and from all the countries involved thought and acted, from important leaders such as Winston Churchill, one of the main ones in the conflict, to feeling the anguish of a Soviet child running away from death, as portrayed in the tense film
Come and See, an essential masterpiece by Elem Klimov.
However, even after studying and watching everything possible, for me, one single character always remained a great mystery: it is the "good German".
This person was the normal citizen of Germany, not radical, but who did not react when the Holocaust occurred. He was part of a society that accepted the elimination of 6 million Jews with a terrifying normality.It wasn't five or ten thousand people. It was six million. From within Germany, the Jewish population was relevant: 566,000 citizens. Therefore, practically every German had contact with some Jewish family. They were a society that lived in reasonable harmony. Ordinary Germans went to Jewish businesses. Germans had Jewish employees. Their children attended the same schools. They all went to the same clubs, the same restaurants, and played sports together. Friendships were common and natural.
Less than ten years later, how do you, an ordinary citizen, accept that a family of neighbors is removed on trains to concentration camps? How do you accept that your Jewish friend's neighborhood business is closed, with the owners removed from society, without any protest?
Hate speech, the book
Mein Kampf, defamation, repression, dictatorship, censorship, and Goebbels' massive propaganda, no matter how devilishly brilliant they may have been, in my view, were never enough to explain the contempt of almost a whole society for the lives of other human beings.
For something of these proportions to occur, it is not enough for there to merely be a dictatorship. It needs a totalitarian state where the population is in harmony with the dictatorial government. It needs a people that collaborates by denouncing, helping, and not caring about the evil in front of them. For this, the population needs to understand the opposite: that evil is good.Now, by studying the history of previous pandemics, I have discovered some clues to try to solve the mystery. It became a little clearer when I read a scientific paper that analyzes the typhus pandemic within the Warsaw Ghetto. I had never read anything about the conflict from this point of view.
Published in 2020, already during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study sets out to explain how the disease, which killed between 10 and 40 percent of those infected, was controlled in the ghetto. The neighborhood, surrounded by walls, housed 400,000 people in a small, densely populated space in 1940.
The article "
Extraordinary curtailment of massive typhus epidemic in the Warsaw Ghetto", published in the journal
Science Advances, was done by Australian researchers from RMIT University Melbourne.
The study is interesting and focuses exclusively on internal actions, from social distancing to combs used to fight lice. It does not set out to analyze the ordinary citizen of Germany in historical context. However, the Australian scientists, in the introduction, bring in underreported information from the external perspective, from outside the ghetto, during the era.
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Ancient Architects presents the findings in the following video: