Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
Just my thoughts and opinion of course.
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Agreed Jim. Any German company still in business today that played a role with full knowledge as to the fate of those being transported, and profited either through payment by the regime or by the theft of the victims assets, should offer both a moral apology and financial restitution.
These actions were not a matter of war, but rather of murder and extortion of non-combatants.