Caution:
1) This is a very very long post and needs a lot patience and will power to read through.
2) This is a post about events in History; people who hate History are strongly advised to skip this post.
3) This was supposed to be an Independence Day post, but because of the hectic schedule of yours truly this has been posted within the month of IDay. The thought of the parallels came at midnight of 14/15th Aug while watching ‘Gandhi’ with my cousin in B’lore.
4) Some of the descriptions, events and photos in this post are of a graphic nature. Reader discretion is strongly advised before beginning to read the post.
5) Some of you might question the order in which the title has been framed, it is in strict chronological order and is not indicative of the patriotism level of yours truly.
The 20th Century has been the bloodiest in recorded human history and the two World Wars together accounted for more human lives than all the wars put together in human history. The two World Wars exacted such a heavy toll on all nations in terms of human lives, that it is amazing that just about 65 years after the end of the last WW the world’s population has touched new highs.
One of the major differences of the WW I and II from the wars fought earlier was the heavy toll of civilian lives that were lost. The advent of the air force and the aerial bombings during the fag end of WW I and throughout WWII and the use of nuclear weapons to end WWII were targeted at innocent civilian lives.
Apart from these WWs, there are two other major events that account for the maximum civilian casualties of the 20th Century and both these events happened very close to one another – one during WW II and the other just a couple of years after the end of WW II. The first event was The Holocaust – the mass extermination of European Jews by the Nazis. The second event was The Partition of India – and the resultant massacres, ethnic cleansing and mass migrations.
A) The Holocaust resulted in the slaughter of 6 million Jews in a methodical, well planned and executed operation. Actually, the machinery was so well oiled and so well masked that many of the western nations did not realize the enormity of the massacres till they started marching into the Concentration camps at the end of the war in Europe. There were many of these camps spread across Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Slovakia. The most infamous of these were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Theresienstadt, Sobibor (only camp to be dissolved due to a mass escape), Krakow-Placzow and Treblinka. The Nazis were so fixated with what they called the ‘Final Solution’, that they marched the remaining Jews from one camp to another as these fell to either the Allied or Russian troops.
The modus operandi was typically this - when the Nazis occupied a territory, they would round up all the Jews into a small portion of a city called the ‘Ghetto’. Warsaw, the Polish capital was the first and largest of the Ghettos. Then these Ghettos were slowly liquidated by the movement of the people by train or trucks to the Concentration camps. Once the Jews arrived at the Concentration camps, they were segregated based on age and physical fitness. The weak, sick, old and children were immediately killed. The people who were fit and agile were made to do all sorts of work with very poor food and unhygienic conditions. The result was that out of every 100 people who were selected to work in a Concentration camp on the day of arrival, only 10 survived at the end of the first year.
Initially, the Nazis used firing squads to kill the Jews. They would make them dig a big pit and opened fire with machine guns to kill them at the edge of the pit and push the bodies in. An officer would go around and fire a single pistol shot into the head or neck of people who survive the machine guns. The pits would be closed. The only problem with this was that all these countries were cold and the bodies took ages to decompose with the risk of discovery always looming large. The Nazis also tried Carbon monoxide poisoning by taking the Jews in trucks were the exhaust was diverted into the holding area of the truck. But both these methods were messy and created a lot of problems. Then the Nazi brilliance in science kicked in and they formulated a chemical Zyklon B. The Nazis constructed special chambers that resembled huge bath areas with several shower heads. The Jews were herded into these bath chambers after being undressed and shaved with the pretext of de-licing treatment and instead of water the shower heads spewed Zyklon B. Once all the Jews were killed, the bodies were dumped into huge incinerators that burned the bodies to ashes and the ashes were spread across the landscape as fertilizer.
The Jews were made to handover all their belongings and undressed fully before being subjected to this brutal killing. The gold was extracted even from the teeth of dead bodies by breaking the jaw. The human hair that was derived from the shaving weighed in tons and sold off for making brushes. Every facet of the operation was meticulously planned and executed (pun intended). By the end of WW II, an estimated 6 million Jews were exterminated, with the entire Jewish population of countries like Germany, Poland and Slovakia decimated. In addition to the mass killings, there were atrocities against women on a large scale. The women were also made to fully undress in front of male guards and many of them were subject to rape before being killed.
The aftermath of this incident was the creation of the State of Israel in the same area of Zion – the Promised Land, which became the refuge of the remaining Jews and kick started the Middle East crisis that continues to this day.
B) The Partition of India was a haphazardly unplanned event that resulted in the migration of an estimated 14.5 million people with the death estimates ranging from 100,000 to 1 million people. The British had encouraged the call for a Muslim nation when Jinnah proclaimed it in 1940 at the Lahore Conference. It was mainly done as a continuation of the policy of ‘Divide and Rule’ and the British never thought that it would actually happen. But as the call became more and more vociferous with the radical Hindu elements joining in, the British had a big mess on their hands. The Cabinet Mission that visited India in 1945 recommended the Partition, but the work on dividing the great land mass was a daunting challenge. The first challenge was that the area was not one homogenous territory, but split in two corners (today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh). The next challenge was to share the resources and cities across the two countries to be formed. While Mumbai was given to India, Karachi went to Pakistan, Lahore to Pakistan and Amritsar to India, Calcutta to India and Dhaka to E. Pakistan (Bangladesh). The Radcliffe line was drawn within a very short time span without much consideration of what would be the consequences for the population.
The Indian Independence Act that was passed in July 1947 did not address this problem at all. The result was that the two countries were given independence without a formal boundary. The resources were split and shared that included the police, armed forces and civil service. Passions were already high on account of the division of the country and it got fanned by the radical elements in both the Hindu and Muslim communities. What resulted was a bloodbath of epic proportions. As the human populace started migrating both ways at the two corners of the country, there were massacres and what would be called ethnic cleansing today. The two worst affected regions were the Punjab on the west and Bengal on the East. The Sikhs in W.Punjab (Pak) were targeted by Muslims and the Sikhs in E. Punjab (India) retaliated by cleansing Amritsar and Gujranwalla of the huge Muslim populations. On the eastern front, the situation was no different with Kolkatta and Dhaka burning. There were mass killings, rapes, gang rapes, killing of children and infants and organized massacres. Militias roamed the streets every night and targeted areas zone by zone.
Added to all these massacres and killings was the actual problem of migration. With no modern means of fast transport and no roads, people traveled either by train or ox-carts or on foot. People died en route due to hunger and thirst. Trains were filled to capacity and there were equal number of people inside the trains as on the outside- on the roof of the trains. Both the new countries absolutely had no control over the actual migration or the law and order. The estimated death toll had crossed the hundreds of thousands by now. But the worst was yet to come. The migrations happened in the middle of August and September – the months of monsoon fury in the subcontinent. The refugees who settled into camps started dying of diseases of the monsoon like Cholera, Typhoid and Dysentery. Average life expectancy in those days would have been very minimal indeed. The total death toll is estimated from one lakh to a million lives.
The aftermath was the creation of two separate nations that are still at war with each other. The passions run really high to this day in the Northern regions of India like the Punjab & Delhi and the Eastern regions like Bengal which bore the brunt of the effects of the Partition.
Both these events occurred due to hatred and intolerance. If the first was based on ethnicity, the second was based on religion. Both resulted in massive loss of lives and changed the geopolitical landscape of the respective regions. Both these events have never really died down. Though time has healed many wounds, the Middle East crisis and the Indo-Pak enmity are still simmering to this day with occasional flare ups that result in more human lives being lost. Even today, we see ethnic cleansing and killings on the basis of religion in Kosovo, Sudan, Bosnia, Serbia etc. Will the human race ever learn from past mistakes? NO.
P.S.: On hindsight decided not to add any photos as they were too graphic.
