[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 12 (Tuesday, February 8, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E169-E170]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ADDRESS OF DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PAUL WOLFOWITZ, U.S.
REPRESENTATIVE AT THE SPECIAL SESSION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL
ASSEMBLY COMMEMORATING THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF NAZI
DEATH CAMPS
______
HON. TOM LANTOS
of california
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, February 8, 2005
Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, on January 24 of this year, the United
Nations General Assembly commemorated the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Nazi death camps. January 27, 1945, was the date on which
Russian troops liberated Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death
camps, and the symbol of the Holocaust, in which over 6 million Jews
and hundreds of thousands of other nationalities were brutally murdered
during World War II.
The United States was ably represented by Paul Wolfowitz, our Deputy
Secretary of Defense who addressed the General Assembly on behalf of
the United States and the American people.
Mr. Speaker, I ask that the outstanding statement of Secretary
Wolfowitz be placed in the Congressional Record. He addressed ``the
larger meaning'' of the Special Session noting: ``We are here to
reflect on . . . how totalitarian evil claimed millions of precious
lives. But just as important, the member nations attending today are
affirming their rejection of such evil and making a statement of hope
for a more civilized future, a hope that `never again' will the world
look the other way in the face of such evil.'' I urge my colleagues to
read Secretary Wolfowitz' thoughtful remarks:
Thank you, Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General,
distinguished delegates, distinguished guests.
Thank you, Mr. President for convening this 28th Special
Session and thank you to the member states that supported the
request for commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of the Nazi death camps.
Thank you Mr. Secretary General for your eloquent statement
today and for your encouragement of this initiative.
Thank you, Sir Brian Urquhart for your service in the war
and your witness here today.
And our special gratitude goes to Elie Wiesel, not only for
his inspiring words today, but for all he has taught us with
his life. Elie Wiesel has taught us that ``in extreme
situations when human lives and dignity are at stake,
neutrality is a sin. It helps the killers,'' he says, ``not
the victims.''
Elie Wiesel teaches us that we must speak about unspeakable
deeds, so that they will be neither forgotten nor repeated.
Most of all, he offers personal witness to all humanity that
in the face of the most horrific oppression, there is always
hope that the goodness of the human spirit will prevail.
That is the larger meaning of why we gather here today.
We're here to reflect on the magnitude of the occasion how
totalitarian evil claimed millions of precious lives. But
just as important, the member nations attending today are
affirming their rejection of such evil and making a statement
of hope
[[Page E170]]
for a more civilized future, a hope that ``never again'' will
the world look the other way in the face of such evil.
For if there is one thing the world has learned, it is that
peaceful nations cannot close their eyes or sit idly by in
the face of genocide. It took a war, the most terrible war in
history, to end the horrors that we remember today. It was a
war that Winston Churchill called ``The Unnecessary War''
because he believed that a firm and concerted policy by the
peaceful nations of the world could have stopped Hitler early
on. But it was a war that became necessary to save the world
from what he correctly called ``the abyss of a new dark age,
made more sinister . . . by the lights of a perverted
science.''
This truth we also know--that war, even a just and noble
war, is horrible for everyone it touches. War is not
something Americans seek, nor something we will ever grow to
like. Throughout our history, we have waged it reluctantly,
but we have pursued it as a duty when it was necessary.
Our own Civil War was one of the bloodiest the world had
known up to its time. And it too was fought to end a great
evil. As that war was nearing its bloody close, President
Abraham Lincoln spoke to the nation hoping that the war would
end soon, but saying that it would continue if necessary
``until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be
paid by another drawn with the sword.''
Two months after the Battle of Antietam, where the number
of American dead was four times the number that fell on the
beaches of Normandy, President Lincoln told members of the
U.S. Congress that those who ``hold the power, and bear the
responsibility'' could not escape the burden of history, ``We
shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of
earth.''
Americans have fought often to liberate others from slavery
and tyranny in order to protect our own freedom. Cemeteries
from France to North Africa, with their rows of Christian
crosses and Stars of David, attest to that truth.
When Americans have taken up arms, it was believing that,
in the end, it is never just about us alone, knowing that
woven into our liberty is a mantle of responsibility, knowing
that the whole world benefits when people are free to realize
their dreams and develop their talents.
Today, we remember the people who fell victim to tyranny
because of their political views, their heritage or their
religion, in places where human slaughter was perfected as an
efficient and systematic industry of state. We can only
imagine how different our lives would be had those millions
of lost souls had the chance to live out their dreams.
Today, we also pay tribute to all the soldiers of many
Allied nations who participated in the liberation of the Nazi
death camps, for their courage and sacrifice and for the care
they provided to the survivors.
We are proud of the role of our own American soldiers, the
so-called ``young old men'' of 19 and 20 years of age, who
fought through their own horrors at Anzio and Normandy and
Bastogne and who thought that a world of evil no longer held
surprises for them, but who were astonished to the deepest
part of their souls when they confronted the human ruins of
Nazi tyranny in the spring of 1945.
Just one week before the end of the war in Europe, the U.S.
Seventh Army would reach Dachau. Lt. Colonel Walther Fellenz
described what he saw as the 42nd Infantry Division neared
the main gate of that concentration camp, it was ``a mass of
cheering, half-mad men, women and children . . . their
liberators had come! The noise was beyond comprehension,'' he
said. And ``our hearts wept as we saw the tears of happiness
fall from their cheeks.''
Sensing the approach of victory, General Dwight Eisenhower,
the Supreme Commander, was unprepared for what greeted him at
the camp at Ohrdruf as he walked past thousands of corpses in
shallow graves and saw the instruments of torture used by the
SS, he was moved to anger and to action.
He cabled Army Chief of Staff George Marshall words which
are now engraved at the entrance of the U.S. Holocaust Museum
in Washington, D.C.: ``The things I saw,'' Eisenhower wrote,
``beggar description . . . the visual evidence and the verbal
testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so
overpowering.'' He insisted on looking into one particular
room that contained piles of skeletal, naked men, killed
through starvation. ``I made the visit deliberately,'' he
said, ``in order to be in a position to give first-hand
evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there
develops a tendency to charge these allegations to
`propaganda.' ''
Eisenhower wanted others to see this crime against
humanity. So, he urged American Congressmen and journalists
to go to the camps. He directed that a film record the
reality and that it be shown widely to German citizens. And
he ordered that as many GIs as possible see the camps.
American soldiers became what one writer called ``reluctant
archeologists of man's most inhuman possibilities.''
Jack Hallet was one of the soldiers who liberated Dachau
found that it was difficult to separate the living from the
dead. As he looked closer at a stack of corpses, he noticed
that deep within the pile, he could see sets of eyes still
blinking.
Dan Evers was in the 286th Combat Engineer Battalion at
Dachau: ``The gas chamber door was closed,'' he recalled,
``but the ovens were still open. There was a sign in German
overhead which said: `Wash your hands after work.' ''
Another soldier wrote to his parents, asking them to keep
his letter, because ``it is my personal memorandum of
something I personally want to remember but would like to
forget.''
From Ebensee, Captain Timothy Brennan of the Third Cavalry
wrote to his wife and child: ``You cannot imagine that such
things exist in a civilized world.''
From Mauthausen in Austria, Sergeant Fred Friendly wrote to
his mother: ``I want you to never forget or let our
disbelieving friends forget, that your flesh and blood saw
this . . . Your son saw this with his own eyes and in doing
so aged 10 years.''
Beyond the shock and horror, American and Russian and other
Allied soldiers who liberated the camps were also witnesses
to hope. Tomorrow, you will have the opportunity to hear an
American GI tell one such story. Tomorrow Lt. John Withers,
of the all African-American Quartermaster Truck Company 3512,
will speak about how he and his soldiers changed the lives of
two young boys forever who were rescued from Dachau.
Yet, as proud as we are of the role our soldiers played in
the liberation of the concentration camps, we know that we
all arrived too late for most of the victims.
Just last week, a great Polish patriot passed away. During
World War II, Jan Nowak, who was not Jewish, risked his life
to leave Poland to bring news of the Nazi genocide to the
West. I was privileged to meet Jan Nowak in his Warsaw
apartment just three months ago. He recalled that after the
war when he was able to see the records of his secret
meetings with Western officials, there was no mention of what
he had told them about Poland's Jews. Nowak put it down to
``wartime inconvenience.'' He was telling truths that people
wanted not to know.
And, despite our fervent promises never to forget, we know
that there have been far too many occasions in the six
decades since the liberation of the concentration camps, when
the world ignored inconvenient truths so that it would not
have to act, or acted too late.
We have agreed today to set aside contemporary political
issues, in order to reflect on those events of sixty years
ago in a spirit of unanimity. But let us do so with a
unanimous resolve to give real meaning to those words ``never
forget.'' And with a resolve that even when we may find it
too difficult to act, we at least have an obligation at least
to face the truth.
Last Thursday, as he began his second term in office,
President George Bush expressed his belief that our nation's
interests cannot be separated from the aspirations of others
to be free from tyranny and oppression. ``America's vital
interests,'' he said, ``and our deepest beliefs are now one.
From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every
man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and
matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of
Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed
the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to
be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing
these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is
the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the
urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling
of our time.''
Americans remain committed to working with all nations of
good will to alleviate the suffering of our time. And we
remain hopeful that when generations to come look back on
this time they will see that we in it were dedicated to
fulfilling the pledge that arose from the ashes of man's
inhumanity toward man--Never again.
Never again and never forget. We must keep remembering to
continue to speak about unspeakable things. So we commend the
United Nations for a remembrance of the Holocaust befitting
its significance in human history. In doing so, perhaps we
can help avoid such inhumanity and the warfare that is so
often the result.
Thank you very much.
____________________