Cadets host panel on cause, effects of Holocaust

  • Published
  • By Amber Baillie
  • Academy Spirit staff writer
U.S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. --  During the Holocaust, 42,500 camps were set up across Europe during World War II to exterminate an entire race of people, resulting in the deaths of approximately 6 million Jews.

How could humanity allow the genocide of millions of people? Three cadets asked this very question during their "Leadership Lessons of the Holocaust: A Cadets' Perspective," presentation here Feb. 27.

This perspective was expanded by the cadet's summer travels to Europe, Washington and New York, specifically to visit Holocaust memorials.

"I wonder, 'At what point in Nazi Germany did the anti-Semitism become so large that they headed down an unavoidable track?" said Cadet 1st Class Nathan Orrill, a presenter. "I keep thinking, here in America, 'What language do we use? What phrases do we say? How do we treat people and at what point does it start becoming self-reinforcing behavior?'"

Through the American Service Academies Program here, Orrill and Cadet 1st Class Jessica Adams traveled for 16 days with cadets and midshipmen from the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy to Holocaust sites including Auschwitz, a complex that included a killing center where more than 1 million perished.

Adams said a crucial moment for her while touring Auschwitz was learning that women's heads were shaved when they entered concentration camps.

"I always knew this," she said. "What I didn't know was this human hair was then often sold to different civilian companies to turn into clothing, stuff into mattresses and put in the bumpers of boats. That struck me because as a girl, my hair is part of my identity and when I got to the camp, I entered a room where there was this big glass wall piled with human hair. That was a striking sight for me."

Orrill said seeing fingernail scratches on the walls of the gas chambers there made his heart sink.

"It was a life changing moment for me," he said. "I don't think I'll ever come close to experiencing that again. Walking outside was almost too much to handle because it was a beautiful day but I could not help but feel the despair reeking from every crevasse of that building. It radiated hate, ignorance and it made you sick on the inside."

Orrill also spotted a rock at the camp with "No More War" in German painted on it.
"It was placed right at the steps to the gas chamber at Auschwitz II, where hundreds of thousands of people went down the steps and never came back up," he said.

The panel asked cadets in the audience to share their thoughts and think critically on how they will approach ethical dilemmas as officers.

"During World War II, Germans lived next to Jews who were later put in gas chambers." Adams said. "These were friends. I went on the trip because I wanted to study why a neighbor would do this to a neighbor."

Among their many other questions, the panel asked cadets what they would do as commissioned officers if ordered to have their subordinates killed.

Cadet 2nd Class Austin Gouldsmith, Jackson Porreca, a Colorado College student, and Dr. Craig Foster, a professor here, were also a part of the panel. They visited Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic for three weeks through a co-institutional course on political psychology.

Porreca said the Nazi party created an environment at Auschwitz in which violence was mechanized.

"The violence was sterile and factory-like," Porreca said. "To me, that is a very important point because I think creating an environment like that allowed Nazi ideology to become more normalized and the violence that occurred there to become normalized for the people who engaged in it."

In Poland, Adams and Orrill met a woman who received the Righteous Among the Nations award for risking her life during the Holocaust by sheltering a Jewish girl.

"Through her own generosity and courage she was able to save a person's life and to this day they're still great friends," Adams said. "Amidst all of the hate we were studying, there were rays of hope. There were individuals who went out of their way to stand up against the Nazis and do what was right."