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Nations Have the Right to Kill continues to generate excitement throughout the world—as scholars assimilate insights which, as Ruth Stein says, “cut trenchantly through conventional, rationalized notions about nationalism and war.”
In Nations Have the Right to Kill, Koenigsberg shows how the Holocaust arose as a response to Hitler's traumatic experience of the First World War.
The Holocaust reenacted what Hitler went through: “Do unto others as has been done unto you.”
Just as German soldiers had been slaughtered in the First World War, so Jews would be slaughtered in the Holocaust.
German soldiers in cattle cars on their
way to the Western Front in France |
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In the First World War, cattle-cars transported German soldiers to fight and die on the Western Front. These same cattle-cars transported Jews to death camps. Historian Denis Winter (2014) notes that after a stint at base, the railway lines took German soldiers to the front:
To a generation with visual memories of the railway lines running into Hitler's death camps, there is something disconcerting about the imagery of this journey from the base camp. Soldiers went in wagons of the same type, forty of them in each wagon, kit hanging from hooks in the roof. Death was a high probability for both generations of travelers in these cattle cars.
It is disconcerting to realize that just as Jews were sent in cattle-cars to die in the Holocaust, so German soldiers had been sent to die in identical cattle-cars.
The photo directly below shows Jews in freight cars on their way to a death camp. The photo on the left shows German soldiers in freight cars as they travel to the Western Front in 1914 to fight and die in the First World War.
| The boxcars that transported Jews to their deaths in the Holocaust were the same boxcars that transported German soldiers to their deaths in the First World War. |
Jews from the Lodz ghetto board
trains for the death camp at Chelmno |
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Robert Whalen reports that after four years of battle, 2,037,000 German soldiers had died; 4,300,000 were wounded; and 974,977 reported missing or wounded. Total casualties: 7,311,977. Jews killed during the Holocaust: approximately 5,933,900 (Dawidowicz).
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