Wofford founded 1854

Wofford hosts Holocaust Remembrance Day

Hometown News
By Leon G. Russ

It was a somber gathering in Wofford College’s Montgomery Music Building on Thursday, April 19 as faculty and students attended the school’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day event.
Following a prayer to open the hour - long remembrance event Wofford College President Benjamin B. Dunlap noted it was an appropriate day for the event since it was exactly 68 years ago to the day that the Warsaw ghetto uprising began as Poles in that town rebelled against Nazi control.
When Adolf Hitler came to power as Chancellor in Germany in January 1933, he set about to enact his “Final Solution” to make the country a pure Aryan nation. Hitler’s Final Solution was later labeled the Holocaust.
Dunlap noted that in addition to the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust there were also tens of thousands of Polish officers and civilians along with the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals.
Dr. Clayton Whisnant, associate professor of history, explained that 10,000 homosexuals were sent to concentration camps where 7,000 of them died.
Whisnant stressed, “The Holocaust is ‘the ‘moment of the twentieth century.”
With so many people put to death during the Holocaust, Dunlap said, “the scale of it is almost impossible to grasp.”
Those gathered were reminded of the toll the Holocaust took on so much of the population of Europe.