The First Anti-Genocide Postcard Campaigner?

by Michelle . · 2009-09-26 19:12:00 UTC
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Can activist postcard campaigns be effective? The tactic is often used by advocacy organizations, often mocked by critics, and often sidelined by skeptics as pointless.

Postcards certainly aren't a magic bullet -- nothing is -- but at least one example shows that they can have an impact. Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who turned Nazi hunting into a profession, used postcards in several successful campaigns:

To convince Germany to rescind its statute of limitations of the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, he used postcards featuring a well-known photograph of a Nazi SS officer torturing Jewish prisoners (shown below).

To convince Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to extradite Nazi fugitive Walter Rauff, he used postcards depicting the gas vans -- mobile gas chambers responsible for the death of an estimated 100,000 people -- that Rauff pioneered.

Wiesenthal's tactics were not without criticism, but they were effective. (And, as far as I know, Wiesenthal might have been the first to use postcard campaigns in a genocide-related campaign.)

[Photo of Simon Wiesenthal holding photos of Walter Rauff and a gas van used during the Holocaust.]

Michelle . has been involved in various activist endeavors, including the Teach Against Genocide pilot campaigns.
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