Chris Dodd: “I rise today to reflect on an important and meaningful anniversary that is being commemorated worldwide this week. Two…”

“I rise today to reflect on an important and meaningful anniversary that is being commemorated worldwide this week. Two days from now, January 27, 2005, will mark 60 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, the concentration and death camp at which over 1.1 million innocent men, women, and children were murdered at the hands of the Nazis. As many of my colleagues know, I have long felt a very deep and personal connection to the tragedy of the Holocaust. My father, who would later serve two terms in this body, was the Executive Trial Counsel at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. He left this country for Nuremberg when I was only 1/2 years old, and he spent the next two years poring over documents and conducting interviews that revealed to him the shocking, staggering process by which over 6 million people were systematically killed. He found himself face to face with many of the men who had planned and carried out Hitler's "Final Solution." He found himself asking, wondering how so many human beings many of whom had loving families of their own, had been educated in universities, had enjoyed the fine arts how could they possibly conceive and execute a mass murder on an unimaginable scale? How was it that only a tiny sliver of a minority in Europe stood up against a plan to wipe out that continent's entire Jewish population, as well as Gypsies, the disabled, and homosexuals?”