On Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2009, theTrumpet.com recalls to mind the tragedy of the death of 6 million people. In the long river of human history, this noxious, bloody pool of misery and murder mankind showed it is capable of committing is not that far upstream.

A man, a government, a people and a world caused and allowed this horror movie to happen. A race was demonized, its freedoms stolen. Fathers, daughters, brothers, grandmothers were humiliated. Their houses were burned, and mountains of possessions were stolen from them as they were herded like animals into ghettos—then like cattle into railcars.

They were enslaved in factories. They lived in humiliation and fear. They learned about sadism in a way that makes your mind bleed. Art shows were dedicated to their demonization. Board games rewarded players for getting them out. Posters depicted them as literal backstabbers. Their friendships were revoked, their allies punished. They were deliberately, systematically, unemotionally and universally pushed into a factory of hatred and death and down a conveyor belt of destruction. Then what was left of them was murdered.

Institutionally. As a rule. Six million times.

Women were humiliated, dangled by their hair, stripped, raped. Children, babies were marked for destruction as if insects. Men were kicked to death, beaten with axes and hammers and hanged. Massive groups of Jews were lined up at the edge of pits and shot into mass graves. Some were forced to lie like cordwood on the corpses of the already-murdered before their killer ended their life. Others were emaciated, asphyxiated, piled into carts and dumped into ravines. Others died through being burned alive. Still others experienced the perverted enlightenment of “science” and lived a fate worse than death in the agony of experimentation: frozen to death, injected with poisons, cut apart, fatally depressurized—whatever the demonic mind could invent to apply to human guinea pigs.

Their bodies were left in streets or dangling from ropes, or unnamed and unmarked in unconscionable mass graves better suited to a mammoth construction site than the destruction of precious, real, tormented lives.

But the horror and degradation continued even thereafter. Thousands of corpses were dug out of this hellish end, stacked again with wood, doused with fuel, and burned with fire. Then their bones were broken and ground up like bonemeal. Then those slaves-at-gunpoint who did this to these corpses became corpses themselves.

New cattle-car arrivals to the death camps sometimes heard orchestras playing tunes that served two purposes: to calm the new victims and to cover the shrieks of the current ones.

Inside the camps, as one survivor said, “There were rats as big as cats running about and gnawing the corpses and even attacking the dying, who had not enough strength left to chase them away. … [Inside,] the straw mattresses were dirty and were changed only when absolutely rotten. The bedding was so full of lice that one could see them swarming like ants.”

At Plaszów, one rotund SS commandant stood on his villa balcony, sometimes shirtless, sucking on a cigarette in one hand, holding a rifle in the other. When he saw a Jewish prisoner and he fancied it, he would shoot him or her, for sport.

Another commander (of Einsatzgruppe D) ordered 90,000 people slaughtered. At his trial in 1947, he declared it was a “military necessity” to kill Jews. They “posed a continuous danger for German occupation troops and might someday attack Germany,” he said. As for murdering children, this he acknowledged, saying that they “were people who would grow up and, being the children of parents who had been killed, would constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents.”

It was not just the work of a fanatic dictator and a cabal of close leaders. It was not even simply the work of a terrifying military. It was also the shared and proud work of an army of massive businesses and gargantuan industries employing millions of people. A total of 12 companies carefully constructed gas-chamber/crematorium facilities at one work site using slave labor. The murder facility was drafted, calculated, revised and finally installed for the specific need of turning thousands of Jews per day into smoke. When one lead engineer found that “the [crematorium] bricks were damaged after six months because the strain on the furnaces was colossal,” businessmen designed schematics for bigger, better buildings that would rely on the “conveyor-belt principle.” “That is to say,” another explained, “the corpses must be brought to the incineration furnaces without interruption.”

It was not just the work of businessmen, industrialists and their workers, however. Generally speaking, it was the work of an entire nation. But it could not have destroyed one third of the Jews in the world—and countless others—without help. Police forces, fascist extremists, separatists and terrorists, paramilitary groups and governments in Croatia, Hungary, Ukraine, Estonia, Romania, Crimea, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, even France and the Netherlands, made this horror possible. The Roman Catholic Church failed to intervene in the process and assisted the perpetrators after the ethnic-cleansing, massive murder was over. In the rest of the world, Britain and America included, obvious opportunities to save at least some of the lives from demonic torture and extinction were ignored.

One precious, valuable, bright, beautiful human life—slaughtered. Times 6 million.

Mankind is capable of this. Nothing says it cannot happen again.

Facts courtesy of The Holocaust Chronicle, a comprehensive work published by Legacy Publishing.