As someone who works in administration, the people I deal with are often just characters on a screen. I usually don't see their faces, I don't hear their voices.
People administered the Holocaust. They put together the transport lists, they ordered the Zyklon-B, they paid the invoices from the various companies that built the architecture of mass murder. They could distance themselves from it in a way.
However, there were clerks in the camps as well. People who typed up the death certificates with false causes of death so the Nazis could claim the estates of their victims. They would have heard, seen and smelt what was going on. Alcohol abuse was extensive, being used as a coping mechanism and fuelling violence itself.
But they were of course not the real victims in all this. They, mostly, got to survive and live out their lives, unpunished for their actions for many decades, if it all in this world.
The Nazis and their allies reduced people to creatures with numbers, exploited until they were of no further use and then killed. Indeed, many of those in Auschwitz-Birkenau never even got the numbers survivors still bear to this day, being gassed on arrival, cremated and then used as fertiliser.
It is still hard to believe even when you've been to two concentration camps and a cargo facility used to ship people to the camps, now memorials. If you've not been at all, then it is sadly easy to see it as fiction.
We're seeing a worrying rise in Holocaust misunderstanding and denial among younger people. We're also seeing the same rise in alt-right views, demonstrated by Donald Trump's recent election. I suspect those two are linked and it remains important to continue educating people, even when the survivors are all gone.
We need to remember that people are more than just a label a politician might stick on them for the sake of election. They have their dreams, their hopes, their fears, their foibles.
If we forget that, then that is the start of a very nasty road.
Never again.
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