Green Activists Lament Unused Space In Nazi Mass Graves

Babi Yar, Ukraine, December 5 – Ecology-oriented parties across the Continent are expressing regret that the Nazis and their collaborators did not display more efficient use of precious space by finding more Jews to fill many partially-empty mass graves, and voice readiness to correct that environmental oversight.

Minimizing waste has long been a focus of the various Green parties, whose agenda blends socialist sensibilities with concern for the environment and the conservation of natural resources. Europe’s strained resources include a premium on space, leading numerous Green activists to wish their World-War-II-era predecessors had taken such considerations into account when allocating real estate for the disposal of Jewish bodies. With the Nazis long since out of power, it falls to today’s leaders to rectify the situation, they say, and they are prepared to remedy that inefficiency by filling the graves to capacity with more Jews.

The unfortunate phenomenon of unused mass grave space is most prevalent across Eastern Europe, where Nazi execution squads teamed with local collaborators to wipe out tens of thousands of Jewish communities by marching them to forests, fields, or just the outskirts of town, forcing them to dig a large grave, and killing them with gunfire. By the end of 1942 the Nazis realized how inefficient their methods were for exterminating the Jews, and the mobile killing squads gave way to camps specifically designed to absorb and kill large numbers of Jews at a time.

The Greens do not dispute the conservation-friendly approach governing that decision, but they note that the mass-grave strategy used mainly in Poland, the Baltic states, and the Soviet Union was not implemented in such a way that efficient use of space was ever considered.

Even when the Nazis shifted to a much more efficient killing method, they neglected to fully exploit the remaining space available in existing graves. “The train lines crisscrossing that part of the continent could have been used to transfer the bodies of dead Jews to fill the remaining space in existing mass graves,” says Maikmor Dedjiws of the Dutch Green Party. “They basically left it to us to find Jews to fill that extra space.”

To that end, the Greens in several European countries have teamed up with Muslim Immigrant groups similarly concerned with ecological efficiency and limited resources. “It’s a natural alliance,” says Wafa Nesses of the Netherlands-based migrant advocacy organization North-Africa-to-Zealand Immigrants (NAZI). “I hope we can diligently and efficiently pack those graves to capacity.”