The Face of Battle (John Keegan, 2001)

“The trenches were the concentration camps of the First World War" (commenting on the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916): “Long docile lines of young men, numbers about their necks…plodded forward to their own extermination.”

Koenigsberg: More precisely, the concentration camps were the trenches of the First World War. The trenches came first, the Holocaust followed as a result of the trenches. The poison gas that seeped into the chambers was a repetition of the poison gas that had seeped into German trenches.

Hitler created the Holocaust to subject Jews to the same treatment to which German soldiers had been subjected. Jews repeated the pathetic, abject condition of German soldiers in the First World War: conveyed to a distant location in box cars; hardly imagining that death would be their fate. 
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