[Jim O]

Tom,

I agree with much of what you said, but one has to decide whether the wholesale genocide of millions of people who were outside of the war zone was part of the war effort, or was it a social policy in which those who participated are guilty. Most of the Jews and Roma who went on the trains came from western Europe, Germany proper and central Europe, the General Government, and southern Europe. Those further east, as you well know, were murdered on the site by the Einsatzgruppen and locals. Did the railways transport men and matériel to the battlefields? Of course they did. For that they bear no more responsibility than the manufacturers of armaments, trucks, uniforms and so forth. Transporting human beings in cattle cars to their certain death, and charging a fare for it, is a different story. No single "person" may hold that responsibility today, for the reasons that you mentioned, but companies who benefited from and participated in the Holocaust retain responsibility until that debt has been paid in one fashion or another. If that is in the form of an admission and apology from the railways, or restitution from banks and insurance companies that stole money from the murdered and the displaced, it is never too late.

Neither you nor I participated in the slave trade and we have no responsibility for it. Heck, the earliest of my ancestors to come to this country came shortly after the Civil War. Nevertheless, my country still has that tainted history that can never be erased.

Just my thoughts and opinion of course.