The European Jewish Congress released a declaration in 2004 and again in 2006 that comparing the Israeli government to the Nazis was a form of anti-Semitism. Booker Prize winner, British novelist Howard Jacobson wrote that comparisons between the Palestinians and the situation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto are intended to “wound Jews in their recent and most anguished history and to punish them for their own grief.” Jacobson adds that the analogy is a form of Holocaust denial that accepts the reality of suffering but accuses Jews of “trying to profit from it…. It is as though, by reversal of the usual laws of cause and effect, Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday.”
The legacy of the Holocaust is not just passed down to subsequent generations through stories of survival but may be inherited through DNA. Rachel Yehudah, a professor of psychiatry at the Icahn school of medicine at Mt. Sinai hospital, has proven that trauma has an impact on DNA and may leave a molecular imprint that Holocaust survivors can pass on to their children. The study involved 32 men who had survived a concentration camp, witnessed or experienced torture or were hiding during World War II, and their children. “The gene changes in children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in parents,” Dr. Yehuda said, according to Jenna Price of The Canberra Time. The study demonstrates epigenetic inheritance, or the idea that genetic changes can occur because of environment and can be passed onto offspring. Environmental influences can modify genes through tags that attach to genes and switch them on and off. Prior to the study, tags on DNA were thought to have been cleared during conception. Dr Yehuda said, “The message is not that we are damaged forever as a result of the things we experienced. It could be that the offspring change is the reaction to parental biology. The last thing you should say is we are stuck, what we have is a way of adapting to our environment.”
The recent debate over the Iran nuclear deal involved a debate within a debate over the appropriateness of invoking the Holocaust when discussing the potential destruction for Israel that could result from a nuclear Iran. Richard Cohen wrote in the Daily News, “As I tour Dachau, I think of Iran. I do not endorse the tasteless rhetoric of Mike Huckabee, who said the agreement with Iran will ‘take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.’ Nor do I endorse the apocalypse-soon warnings of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu … but I recoil at the treacly descriptions of Iran, with its unexpressed love for America, and its vast deprived middle class.” The problem is that the putative goodness of the average Iranian doesn’t matter any more than the virtue of the typical German in the WWII era; these people are “not very different than us.” However, the Nazi government was determined to exterminate the Jews, and the current Iranian leader, the Ayatollah Ali Kahemeni, said “This barbaric, wolf like and infanticidal regime which spares no crime has no cure but to be annihilated.” Cohen concludes, “The lessons of history are very clear. The Iranian people are irrelevant; only the country’s leadership matters. The US should make the deal with Iran, but be prepared–belligerently so–to enforce it and to keep Israel safe. I don’t believe a second Holocaust is in the cards. But in 1933 when this camp (Dachau) was being built, few saw it coming.”
There are still many loose ends in the history of the Holocaust as many of its perpetrators managed to secure lenient sentences or evade justice altogether. An examination of Germany’s laws and court rulings showed that the country made it easy for former Nazis to avoid prosecution or harsh sentences. One historian concluded that, when it came to punishing the perpetrators of the Holocaust, “justice was not served.” The claim that Nazi soldiers were “just following orders” did work as a defense, since German courts interpreted crime in a subjective sense, making many of those who actually killed victims merely accessories to murder if they had done so because they were ordered. Since these ex-Nazis were regarded as accomplices to murder, even as they did cause huge number of deaths, they were often given shockingly light sentences. A guard who chased inmates into the gas chambers at Treblinka served no more than three years. A lower level unit commander who shot 90 infants to death served an 8 year sentence. Biological and psychological defenses were accepted and often meant lighter sentences. For instance, criminal proceedings were thrown out against one defendant who planned mass murders in Poland because of his chronic problems with poor circulation. Legal shields were also used by the Germans to prevent extradition and double jeopardy was applied loosely to keep those who were prosecuted for prior offenses, even if those offenses did not involve murder, from being tried for killing Jews.