Was this shown in the USSR?

The Holocaust changed little, it certainly did not end anti-Semitism in Europe. Jews were killed in pogroms AFTER WW2 just as before (Kielce Pogrom, among others). They were not integrated into European culture, most of them chose to leave for Israel. The Holocaust did not open anyone's eyes who were not blind in the first place. Without massive "christian" collaboration, the Holocaust would never have taken place on the scale it did. People chose to believe it wasn't happening even though it was right in front of their faces...few cared enough to speak up, much less intervene. More silently approved, I'm sure.

'Perhaps the only SS man assigned to the extermination camps who has been definitely shown to have remained decent in the black uniform was Kurt Gerstein, an engineer and secret member of the evangelical opposition to Hitler. He joined the SS in order to do what he could to expose the secrets of the extermination camps. At the risk of his own life he prepared a report on the camps in Poland, including an eyewitness account of the arrival of a death-train in the “killing installations” at Belzec:


There were forty-five freight cars with 6700 people, of which 1450 were already dead on arrival. Behind the barred openings peered the faces of children, pale and frightened, their eyes filled with mortal fear, as well as men and women. The train came to a halt. Two hundred Ukranians tore open the doors and whipped the people out of the box cars with leather whips. A giant loudspeaker broadcast further instructions: take off all clothes, even artificial limbs, eyeglasses, etc. Deposit valuables at the counter; no receipts were given. Shoes carefully tied together (for the clothing salvage), otherwise, in that pile a good twenty-five meters high, nobody could have reassembled the matching pairs. Then women and girls to the barber, who cuts off all their hair in two or three movements and allows it to disappear into a potato sack. “That is for some sort of special application in submarines, for insulation or something of the sort!” explains the SS sergeant on duty there. . . . “Not the slightest thing will happen to you. You must take a deep breath in the chambers; that enlarges the lungs, this inhalation is necessary on account of the diseases and infections.”

To the question, what is going to be done with them, he replies, “Of course, the men have to work, building houses and roads, but the women won’t have to work. Only if they volunteer, they can help in the household or the kitchen.” For some of these poor creatures this is a ray of hope that suffices to bring them these few steps into the chamber without resistance. A Jewish woman about forty, with flaming eyes, cries that the blood that is spilt here will be on the heads of the murderers. She receives five or six blows with the riding whip in the face, from Captain Wirth personally. Then she, too disappears into the chamber. Many people pray. I pray with them. I squeeze into a corner and cry aloud to my and their God. How gladly I would have gone with them into the chamber. How gladly I would have died their death with them. Then an SS officer in uniform would have been found in the chamber – my case would have been handled as an unfortunate accident and allowed to vanish without a trace. But I cannot die yet. First I have to bear witness to what I have seen here![18]

Gerstein told a Swedish diplomat of his experiences, and tried to present his report to the Papal nuncio in Berlin, but was turned out of the embassy without being allowed to state his case. Had he succeeded in his plan of stirring the Vatican into action, or indeed, had any of the major German churches taken a public stand against the killings, it is quite possible that the program would have been stopped. In a similar situation, when Nazi euthanasia teams had organized the “mercy killings” of some seventy thousand “erbbiologisch Kranke” (i.e., mentally handicapped people), the project was abandoned after Cardinal Galen preached a sermon against the slaughter of innocents. But no comparable voice was ever raised on behalf of the Jews. In the final analysis, the silence of the churches, and the helplessness of the Kardorffs all played their part in the terrible transformation whereby it became possible “to make such devils out of a group of people who are, on the average, good-natured and warm-hearted.” The primary responsibility, of course, rests with the leaders and with the SS, but they could have been persuaded to stop. The proof of that much-disputed contention was furnished by Himmler himself at the war’s end, when he began to see some advantages in calling a halt to the murders. There had been, after all, no personal animus in his actions. “It’s time,” he told a representative of the World Jewish Congress, Norbert Masur, at a secret meeting near Berlin in April 1945, “It’s time you Jews and we National Socialists buried the hatchet.”'