The Face of Battle 
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 by John Keegan

“The trenches were the concentration camps of the First World War" (commenting on the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916): “Long docile lines of young men, numbers about their necks…plodded forward to their own extermination.”

Koenigsberg: The trenches came first, the Holocaust followed. The poison that seeped into the gas chambers was a repetition of the poison gas that had seeped into German trenches in the First World War.

Hitler created the Holocaust to subject Jews to the same treatment to which German soldiers had been subjected in the First World War. Jews repeated the pathetic, abject condition of German soldiers, conveyed to a distant location in box cars, hardly imagining that death would be their fate.