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Show 161 Everywhere human beings were being exterminated like so much vermin only because they did not belong to the so-called «Master Race.n In Frankfurt am Main there was a company which produced a product called "Zyklon B." It was used to exterminate pests by giving off cyanide gas. This company one day was ordered to increase its pro- duction manyfold. The ingenuous employees surmised that all of German-occupied Poland and Russia was being rid of vermin. In reality the poison was being used to exterminate humans, humans like you and me, exterminated by the thousands, yes by the millions, as though they were so much vermin. This horror proceeded with German thoroughness. Railway cars were used by the hundreds to tranSport humans to the places of extermination. 'The Auschwitz proceedings underway now in Germany, once again reveal the horrible story of wickedness which was perpetrated in the name of Germany. The significance of the uprising of July 20th is that it represented a humanist and Christian "no" thrown into the face of this unfettered evil at the risk_of life. It represents as well the yearsulong silent resistance carried in the hearts of the best of the German peOple including many who had no direct connection with the conspiracy of the 20th of July. In Munich a philosophy professor, Kurt Huber, took it upon himself to sow the seeds of liberty and human dignity in the hearts of his pupils during the darkest years of German history. He could not do it Openly, torch in hand. He had to do it privately from person to person. The Scholl brother and sister were in this group. 'In youthful exuberance they kindled the torch Openly at the University of Munich and paid for their deed with their lives.1 Kurt Huber himself suffered the same fate. condemned to death on April 20th, He was 1943, more than a year before the 20th of July. His final words have been preserved by the records and if it were left to me,]2would cause every school child to memorize them just as they memorize the 17Under the romantic name of the White Rose, Hans and SOphie Scholl wrote some twenty pamphlets denouncing the Nazi destruction of Warsaw and Rotterdam. Caught scattering pamphlets from a rooftOp, they were guillotined. |
