On Veterans Day, I was asked to give a few remarks at an exhibition hosted by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University in Greensburg.

The focus of the exhibition was a collection of my father’s wartime photographs of the little-known German massacre of 1016, mostly Polish slave laborers in the idyllic northern German town of Gardelegen. History recognizes this atrocity as the Gardelegen Massacre.

My father photographed what he and his fellow soldiers witnessed. I had donated those photographs to the school to ensure their safekeeping.

My father, Harry B. Knights Jr., was a warrant officer with the 102nd Infantry Division when, guided by columns of thick black smoke, it entered Gardelegen on April 14, 1945, discovering a horrific scene.

Threatened by advancing allied columns, the SS attempted to evacuate by train the inmates of several concentration camps. They got as far as Gardelegen before war-damaged rail lines halted their escape. Ultimately, their solution was to herd their prisoners, many weak from sickness and hunger, into a large stone and timber barn and then burn them to death.

The SS didn’t act alone. They had help from the citizens of Gardelegen, including aged Home Guard members, fire department, Hitler Youth, Air Force and others.

The Gardelegen Massacre was one small paragraph in the many chapters of Nazi atrocities.

Prior to speaking, I wanted to become familiar with genocide in a wider sense.

I found that in the past 266 years, there have been 32 genocides as defined by United Nations Convention on Genocide. This excludes other mass atrocities such as Japanese war crimes, the Soviet Red Terror, the Soviet Great Purge and the Chinese Communist Great Leap Forward, among others.

Of those 32 officially recognized genocides, 13, or more than a third, have occurred just in the 76 years since the end of World War II.

That means that over one-third of the genocides in history have occurred during the span of a single lifetime.

Those genocides alone account for as many as 11,316,000 victims. Some names will be familiar, such as Cambodia, Bosnia and Bangladesh.

Genocides are still occurring today against the Darfuri people in Western Sudan, which has been called the first genocide of the 21st century, and against the Rohingya in Myanmar. Since 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has incarcerated more than 1 million Uyghars. That is the largest-scale detention of an ethnic and religious minority since Adolf Hitler’s creation of concentration camps.

And we can’t forget the Taliban.

By the way, those atrocities not considered as genocides as defined by the United Nations account for as many as an additional 94 million dead.

That totals 105 million souls.

Educators tell us that we know learning has taken place when there is a change in behavior.

Well, as far as mass murder is concerned, the human race has shown no change in behavior. The rate of genocides is not decreasing: it’s increasing at an alarming rate. We have apparently learned nothing. Our propensity for self-destruction is growing in direct proportion to our technological progress.

Climate change is currently front-and-center as the most significant threat to humanity, but at the current rate we human beings are willfully murdering each other, it will be truly a wonder if any of us are left to die from pollution or drown in the rising oceans.

We must act to stop the insanity of genocide.

Retired FBI special agent James Knights lives in Adams Township, Butler County.

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