he beginning. The missionary Bartolome de Las Casas recorded what he witnessed and I will later quote him at length. The analogies between the conditions in the death camps of the conquistadors and of Nazi concentration camps are appalling, keeping in mind that we still have a Columbus day. The Sixteenth Century... War, conquest, pestilence, and genocide continued in the 1500s with Fernando de Soto and Hernando Cortes, among others, commanding this page of the Holocaust. Evidence strongly suggests that both Cortes and de Soto were heartless killers. Both men raided islands looking for humans to sell as slaves. The Spaniards found natives often, and under the command of de Soto, Columbus, and others, put them to work in mining camps, starving, beating, raping, and burning them to death. In describing these events, missionary Bartolome de Las Casas wrote: ". . . Whenever the Spaniards found them, they piteously slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral." It was a general rule to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut an Indians hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying Go now, spread the word to your chiefs. They would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow. They burned or hanged captured chiefs. (Stannard pp. 70 & Las Casas, History of the Indies) The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties, the more cruel the better, with which to spill human blood. They built a long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen natives at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles. When the Indians were still alive and hanging, the Sp...
