Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Those Who Justify Genocide

Michael McManus asks what remains of morality in the face of genocide.

“I made the effort to shoot only children… it was soothing to my conscience to redeem children unable to live without their mothers.”
– Member of a Nazi police death squad

Israel recognises 6,620 Poles for their sacrifices, sometimes of their lives and their children’s lives, in helping Jews during WWII. The figure far exceeds the number of heroes in France, or in fifty other countries listed at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust (one exception is the Netherlands). Some of the Polish heroism is described in Code Name: Zegota (2010) by Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski. It is therefore a tragedy that Poland briefly brought in penalties for anyone speaking of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, for complicity there was.

…