Sunday, August 19, 2007

Six Million People

Six Million People at Flickr

During World War II, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered approximately six million Jews. According to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, the Holocaust is the name used to define a systematic, bureaucratic, and state-sponsored campaign of persecution and murder. Beginning with racially discriminatory laws in pre-World War II Germany, the Nazi campaign expanded to the mass murder of all European Jews by the War's end. The goal of this group is to collect 6 million pictures of different people, with one person in each picture, as a representation of the massive number of Jews the Nazis murdered during World War and to help remember both them and the other victims of Nazi Germany.

Although Jews were the primary victims of Nazi racism, others targeted for death included tens of thousands of Roma (Gypsies) and at least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled people. As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans persecuted and murdered millions of other people. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, or maltreatment. The Germans killed tens of thousands of non-Jewish Polish intellectual and religious leaders, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet citizens for forced labor. From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, homosexuals and others deemed to be socially unacceptable were persecuted. Thousands of political dissidents (including Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists) and religious dissidents (such as Jehovah's Witnesses) were also targeted. Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.

The United Nations General Assembly reaffirms that 'the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice."

Please help us remember the holocaust dutifully and respectfully by adding your self-portrait, or a photo of a person you love, to our pool. Add as many photos as you want, but please submit no more than 1 picture of any person, so that in the end we will have close to 6 million pictures of people, with a different person the subject of each picture. It's going to take a long time to add up to 6 million pictures—that's 200,000 Flickr pages with 30 images each—but our goal is 6 years or less. When we complete the project, it will be a memorial to those who died, and will provide us a with a way to visualize all those people. Thank you for helping and supporting us in our goal.

Please keep the tone of the group serious, and please contact an administrator if you would like to help moderate the group.