In April of 2007 I gave a speech to a group of Soldiers in Iraq to remember the Holocaust that occurred between 1939 and 1945 in Nazi occupied Europe. One often hears the phrase “never forget” in association with this event. “Never Forget” were the words that President Bush inscribed in the guest register at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. But what is it exactly that we should “never forget”?

When I was young, I learned the facts and figures about the Holocaust, the number of dead, the inhuman conditions the prisoners were kept in, the brutality, the mass graves and the torture chambers. I saw the identification numbers, still tattooed on people, so many years later, and it is something that I will never forget. But when we say we must never forget the Holocaust, I believe that we must remember even more then the numbers and facts.

What we must never forget is that evil is a REALITY. Evil of this type did not start with the Nazi regime and Evil did not stop with the end of this regime. The same evil that pervaded the thoughts of the Nazi guards is the same Evil that caused 19 Moslems to hijack four planes and kill over 3000 people in attacks on America in September of 2001. This same evil allowed Serbians to mass murder thousands of Moslems in Kosovo and Bosnia. This same evil was present in the torture chambers of Saddam Hussein. This is what we must remember and we must understand that the only way to confront these types of evil in the world is with ACTION.

The holocaust, and the Nazi government that created it, was the worst Evil in the 20^th Century. But it also could have been stopped sooner with earlier action from the ‘free’ nations of the world. Many people, at the start of Hitler’s regime tried to appease the great evil. People like Neville Chamberlain and his followers who would do anything to avoid confrontation and have “peace in their time”. They talked and sanctioned and they allowed the evil to fester. The appeasers in power in the 1930’s did whatever they could do to avoid action. This applied to people both in and out of Germany. As Pastor Martin Niemoller said “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out- because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out- because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out- because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me- and there was no one left to speak for me.” ([1] Declaration of Guilt, signed at the Council of the Evangelical Church, Germany, October, 1945)

Ask yourself what would have happened if America and the nations of the free world had not went to war and defeated Germany and Japan in WWII. Imagine if we didn’t want to take on the additional casualties after Pearl Harbor or the Army didn’t want to fight far from home for long periods of time. How many more Gypsies, Jews, political prisoners, Homosexuals, and people declared undesirable by the state would have been wiped off the earth? But instead of giving in to Japanese and German aggression, America took on the challenge, we defeated two once powerful Nations, and we exposed the evils of the holocaust. Even with these important historical precedents, many people today when faced with modern evils in the world want to appease. They want to talk to the countries that our president so aptly called the “AXIS of EVIL”. They want to sanction, they want to watch, they want peace at any price, and they want to forget what happens when evil festers. They want to forget the true lessens of the holocaust. But, like President Bush wrote, we must never forget.

I, like many current American soldiers, enjoyed my time in Germany. The German culture, food, Beer and wine, and the many German Friends I made gave me a good impression of the German people. With this in mind, some people would blame the Holocaust on one man in Germany and excuse the behavior of a civilized nation as if Adolf Hitler misled all the people. But this is not the case. Ruthless tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jung-Il can never succeed without the willing help of thousands of loyalists and supporters. These supporters of evil do not act out of fear of one man, but because they believe in their own superiority and the righteousness of their cause. The evil intention of these leaders pervades their followers and incites them to greater and greater immoral acts. Once the leaders have gained this type of power there is no stopping the depravity to which they can sink without taking bold and decisive ACTION by the free states of the world.

When talking about the holocaust we think of drastic chambers of torture. Medical experiments on living people, exposing people to hideous penalties for the slightest offenses or for no offenses at all. And of course the use of gas chambers on a minority people who were citizens of the country. To think of these atrocities as “history”, to blame it on Hitler, or the struggles that Germany was going through following WWI , is to miss the most important lesson which is that evil that still exists in the modern world. Saddam Hussein, in continuing the Legacy of Tyrants like Hitler, used torture, murder and in 1988 he used poison gas to kill Thousands of Iraqi people.

The large-scale murder of Eastern European Jews began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units, systematically collected the Jews in each community, forced them to dig mass graves, stripped and shot them. Two million lost their lives in this way. While the size of numbers like this is staggering, it is only through the Action of the United States and the strength of our Army that the mass graves discovered in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq in recent times were prevented from growing to this size. It is through the strength of OUR great Nation, and those of our allies here, that we can show the evil tyrants in the world today, that as a nation we have not forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust.

Ultimately, large-scale gas chambers were constructed in Germany, At the height of its operation, 10,000 people per day were executed. The Nazi killing machines did not discriminate against Men, Women, Children, young or old. Yet many American people today, who remember these facts and figures think of it as “history”. When these modern appeasers are confronted with a regime like Saddam Hussein’s that used poison gas to kill men, women and children of an ethnic minority, used torture chambers on its own people, and filled mass graves with tens of thousands of people, these appeasers wanted further debate and talk before decisive action. If these appeasers were in charge of our nation we would have waited longer to take out the Evil of Saddam and the atrocities he was committing on innocent men women and children would have continued.

Some years ago, my father and I made a trip to visit the site of Dachau Concentration camp in Germany. My father wrote about it afterwards and described it as “a trip through hell”. The rooms and grounds of the place were eerily silent and everyone talked in hushed whispers. Yet to our ears we could still hear the screams and moans of the inmates and our senses replaced the ‘to clean’ smell of the place with the awful smells which must have pervaded the area. The walls of the rooms were covered in gruesome pictures depicting the evil conditions of the prisoners. Now I want to contrast these recollections of my father, with those of USA reporter Jack Kelley describing torture chambers in Iraq soon after our liberation of Iraq. Mr Kelley wrote “Pictures of dead Iraqi’s with their necks slashed, eyes gouged out, and genitals blackened, Fill a bookshelf. Jail cells with dried blood on the floor and rusted shackles bolted to the walls, line the corridors. And the screams of what could be imprisoned men in an underground detention center echo through air shafts and sewer pipes.” The same tyrannical type governments, the same evil that was in Germany, is still in places like Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Darfur many other places throughout the world. This is truly the lesson of the Holocaust that we can never forget

When we study the Holocaust, it is not simply to wring our hands over the events of a half-century ago. It is to confront our own evil instinct and the reality of evil in our world. When it comes to remembering the holocaust, we must remember that it was the US soldier who liberated the concentration camps and confronted evil. Those who fought against the Evil of the Nazi atrocities are sometimes referred to as the “Greatest Generation”. I believe that those of us here now, all of us volunteers, remembering the holocaust and not forgetting the lessons learned, making sacrifices in the dessert to do our parts in confronting Evil in the world, represent a “Great Generation”. I am proud of everyone here today and proud of the opportunity to do my part in continuing the legacy of America in confronting evil in the world. By these ACTS we do now, in fighting evil on a daily basis, that’s how WE honor the victims of the holocaust and show that WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN.

Thank you for your time and Rock of the Marne!
And I used Mr Hannity's great book when preparing this as a source along with others I listed.