Country in depression, nation in despair One man seeking reasons everywhere Growing hate and anger, the Führers orders were precise Who was to be blamed and pay the price Wicked propaganda turning neighbours into foes Soldiers of the Third Reich searching homes And then their former friends are watching as they are round up one by one Times of persecution has just begun Ever since it started on Kristallnacht ’38 When liberty died and truth was denied Sent away on trains, sent on a one way trip to hell Enter the gates, Auschwitz awaits When freedom burns, the final solution Dreams fade away and all hope turns to dust When millions burn, the curtain has fallen Lost to the world as they perish in flames There was a country in depression, there was a nation in despair One man finding reasons everywhere Then there was rising hate and anger, the Führers order still apply Who was to be blamed and sent to die
The Holocaust was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews, including 1.5 million children and about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who lived in Europe at that time. The persecution and genocides were carried out in stages, culminating in what Nazis termed the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. The German government established a network of concentration camps in 1933, then passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society in 1935, ghettos following the outbreak of WW2 in 1939. In 1941, as Germany conquered new territories in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered about two million Jews, partisans and others often in mass shootings. By the end of 1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of the war in Europe, in 1945. Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles, soviet citizens and POW, Slavs, Romanis, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled. (Text credits: Gregory Sandoz)