Some thoughts on the holocaust.

seeing the execution of women,makes sad viewing and reading,I cannot imagine what thoughts would be in the mind of the soldier ordered to carry out this horror,and yes the person to be executed god only knows! how you accept death without showing fear as some pics depict..no one should want to carry out this barbaric order,such shame,such evil...

Execution of women by the Nazis

 

RE: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE HOLOCAUST

I think the Nazi years and subsequent Holocaust are a chilling chapter in the vulnerability of the human spirit and it's ability to be manipulated beyond the depths of decency and compassion. The approach was straight forward and with repeated reinforcement and constant indoctrination of young men beginning in their early childhood the SS, which functionally became the enforcers of the elimination of the Jews, was began in the late 1920's via the Hitler youth and by the end of the 1930's was a powerful and unstoppable force of evil. Hitler started by blaming Jews for Germany's plight and economic disparity; then told German people that they were entitled to Jewish property and possessions because they were "superior" which justifies Nazi seizure of property; next, convince the German people that Jewish ways are inferior and not worthy of propagation; now, seize land that Jews occupy under guise that native Germany needs "living space"; and now the only thing left is to convince people that the Jews aren't worth living and that they consume resources and materials necessary for the Fatherland and the entitled German native citizenry and you have the recipe for the Holocaust. In essence, the 5 D's: Desensitive the people, Demean the Jews, Desecrate Jewish customs and culture, Destroy property and possessions, and Deny right to live. It is a chilling recipe that even has been attempted in modern years....Slobodan Milosevich and the Serbs comes to mind!

 

I remember when I was little - about 10 or so? - I saw something on TV about the Holocaust, it must have been the first time I'd ever heard of it, and I distinctly remember asking my mother, "Why would they want to kill people just because they are Jewish?" Out of the mouths of babes, huh? I really didn't get it. I understood it to be a religion, but I couldn't understand the hatred.

And then I had to grow up and now I know that people do, indeed, hate simply because someone is Jewish, or a different race, etc. Now I understand that, but it's still incomprehensible to me.

 

Yes, unqualified hate for an ethnic group is a difficult thing to explain and I suspect it is an unnatural emotion...one that needs to be taught or allowed, consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively, for it to develop and propagate. Ethnic cleansing I think is how Slobadon Milosevic referred to it....don't recall how Saddam Hussein referred to the gassing of the Kurds.

Don't think Holocaust could ever happen again....camera phones, satellites, media, and instantaneous revelation of mass murder and crimes of humanity such as Polish ghettoes in the movie Schindler's List would lead to rapid world condemnation and intervention...just like the good ol USA did to protect Serbs in the 1990's and Kurds in recent Iraq war.

I know as the father of little girl and a retired Army man, watching Shindler's list and the scene with the little girl in the red coat made my blood curdle and I would have been ready to go off to war to kill those Nazis right then and there!

 

It should be mentioned, particularly in light of the article posted by our esteemed JCFalkenburgIII that the eugenics emphasis was from the SS and not directly from Hitler. I've both his editions of Mein Kampf and have specifically searched it for any eugenics leaning or reference and there are none whatsoever, Hitler's problem was ideological, not racial as he saw it. But he did assert that culture which can often be synonymous with race breeds political ideology and this was his concern. It was Himmler who personally put the eugenics bend on Nazism, which is the way the SS saw it, mixed with occultism such as wotanism.
That was Himmler, not so much Hitler although what he did was readily provide the environment for it, he effectively encouraged it. But generally his most clear political tactic was disarray, with which to maintain dictatorship within his own court, to cite Dr Martin Kitchen's analysis (Cambridge and Dean of Simon Fraser Uni History Dept).

 

I think you`ve got your idealists and your pragmatists.
I`m not suggesting that all, or even most, pragmatists would participate in such appalling acts, but I suspect there`d be a higher proportion of pragmatists to idealists willing to do so.
Incidentally, I don`t think that Britain would ever have become a Fascist state, or wanted to join up with the Germans, or have participated in genocide.
Why ?
Two reasons.

One. The British take the mick out of everything and everyone. Seeing Hitler striding about in his uniform, raising his right arm in the air and haranguing his audience, would have most British in fits of giggles. Even today my first reaction on seeing films of Hitler sounding off is to start laughing at him, and I can`t believe I`m alone in that. It`s a pity that he was also one of the most warped and evil men who ever lived.

Two. We`re a bolshy lot who don`t like being pushed around, or, quite often, even being told what to do. This has some unfortunate consequences, but we`d never have ended up as Nazis. Not in a million years.

 

We all like to think it couldn't happen again, but I have no doubt that it could. Maybe not the Jews this time but some other group. MAybe Muslims. This happened a mere 65 years ago. This happened in the modern era in a modern country. This happened with the endorsement of the German academia.

Anti semitism wasn't isolated to Germany and eastern Europe, it was rampant in western Europe and in the USA. Woodrow Wilson was extremely anti-semitic as was Henry Ford to name just a few. Anti-semitism had been going on since the beginning of Christianity and it got worse and worse over the centuries. It was really bad in Britain from time to time. I believe Jews were expelled from Britain on at least one occasion. Look at the anti-semitism expressed by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales.

No I think the Holocaust was inevitable, and I think it's naive to think that something similar could never happen again.

 

There`s a big big difference between expelling Jews (or any ethnic group, not that I`m advocating it anyway), and exterminating them.
If your quote "the Holocaust was inevitable" means their extermination was inevitable, I think you`re completely wrong, in fact I think it`s a disgraceful thing to say.
And I`m not Jewish by the way, in fact in the last 20 years I`ve slowly changed from being pro Israel to something rather less enthusiastic *. It`s not anti-semitism, I`m certainly not anti Jewish, I just think the Palestinians have had a raw deal and many (not all) Israelis don`t seem that bothered about it.

* Since, on the one hand, the Palestinians stopped hijacking planes, and on the other hand, the Israelis started nicking even more of the Palestinians` land.

 

I always think we often are just a hair's breath away from falling into the trapped mindset that Germany fell into with the Jews. Propaganda plays an important part in this and we certainly have that going on in our media in varying degrees. When you combine propaganda with the power of peer pressure and manage to direct it on defenseless elements of society.....how quickly we all become so suspicious that their elimination would be a "solution" to the perceived illness of an economy/society. In his first breath of power Hitler realized he needed the Jews for a recovering German economy...........with hatred and propaganda building he reversed his protections of those elements and pursued the "solution". I point out how quickly we were able to "tolerate" certain defined "tortures" to be used against some of our own in the name of preventing furtherance of 911 dangers. Certainly we accepted leadership talk of what has been defined as atrocities at Geneva which came about because of atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust. I don't fool myself into the false assumption that we cannot and are not susceptible to the same illnesses of thought that brought about the holocaust....rather I see it as an imminent threat only now and then warded off by some educated knowledge that manages to kick this can a bit farther down the road rather than avoiding it entirely. The fact that we "accept" that Geneva defined torture isn't torture when "we" use it clearly shows we are only inches away from similar mistakes of society. How comfortable it must be to act like it couldn't happen here when we are often partaking of similar lineage of thoughts and justify it as necessary for our defense, when experts in obtaining intelligence argue vehemently against our torture tactics.

 

I read through this entire thread. I can't express what I feel when I think of what these people went through. The years of cold and hunger, physical and mental abuse. I read a book a few months back called "All but my life" written by a surviver. She mentioned the guards seemed to enjoy the distress the Jews were enduring. She wrote of being sepparated from members of her family and the not knowing if they were alive. They didn't know at first they were off to die. It's hard to fathum the degree of hate one must have to be able to inflict that kind of punishment on a group of people every day and moraly believe it's for the good of your country or your own race.

 

Just read through this thread, and picking up on a couple of things....

Justin - in real life, standing in front of a living, firebreathing Adi might have been different. I've seen interviews with two cardcarrying KPD'ers who attended speeches of Hitler's, and started wondering how this insignificant little man with the hollow voice could be so popular - but by the end of them were howling for blood like the rest of the audience...



There's been quite a few references to the Dutch protesting the roundups of the Jews (IIRC they were kept in two large transit camps and slowly sent East from there; in the meantime they were relatively well treated) and taking thousands of them in and hiding them...

Something that hasn't been mentioned is that this only formed a part of the whole, huge "LO" movement, the Landelijke Organisatie voor hulp aan onderduikers, or National Organization for Help to People in Hiding - the Onderduikers movement, the civil disobedience movement that took in and hid MANY thousands of Dutch workers due to be transferred to Germany - and their families - and hid them until Liberation. It was a huge undertaking; not just the hiding of them - but at the height of the war and rationing the feeding of them! The movement couldn't have survived except for the cooperation and support of a large number of Dutch civil servants, who procured thousands of ration cards, identity papers etc..enough to move and feed the ~300,000 people that were in hiding by the time Holland was Liberated in September 1944!

The organisation also enjoyed "official" support; along with one of the larger resistance groups - NOT the SOE-networked one that Giskes suborned wholly! - it had direct contact with the Dutch government-in -exile and the Royal Family in London, and received financial support from them channeled via Walraven Van Hall's "NSF" or Nationale Steun Fonds, or National Support Fund. And the Germans knew about it; they knew that workers identified for transit were going missing by the thousand, and had to be living underground - and at one point attempted to bust the movement by printing enough of a new ration card type for the entire population and stockpiling it for a sudden recall and re-issue over a single weekend. But the pro-Movement civil servants got to know about it and requested that London I.E. the British do something about the warehouse full of new ration cards. London refused...eventually the movement took the matter into their own hands and the contents of the warehouse were IIRC torched.

Sadly, the great undertaking that was the Onderduiker movement isn't anywhere near as well remembered outside Holland as other resistance organisations elsewhere Which, given what they took on to do, is a great pity. They saved tens of thousands of people...and faced the same penalties that any Resistance worker would have faced.



It's also worth noting that although yes...as the Germans occupied a number of European countries, they moved fast to impose their range of anti-Semitic social laws, and eventually round up and deport the Jewish populations - but in Germany...especially IN BERLIN - this action was taken relatively late in the war - it didn't begin until 1942 IIRC!

Berlin and its environs was the heart of the German munition industry And the Jewish workers in that industry kept it going at full output. Eventually, though, Hitler demanded that the Jews be gotten "out of his sight", and the operation was given to Goebbels as titular head - although the SS (with Wehrmacht assistance) carried out the roundups under Heydrich's command (he liasied directly with Goebbels).

However - as recorded in Goebbels' diaries - the operation did not go smoothly! There seems to have been a degree of armed resistance against the first roundup; Goebbels fulminates against the nerve of those who fought off the troops sent to round them up! And many thousands were priotected by their employers. The second roundup was only slightly more successful; IIRC up to 7-8000 Jews were warned by their employers in time NOT to be at home....a huge undertaking given that the telephone system wasn't secure! It took a third roundup to resolve the "whole" problem...although many Jews simply went underground, and as in Holland with the assistance of friends managed to survive until the end of the war! Among these were people like Theodor Bruck, a Jewish dentist who appeared out of hiding in May 1945 immediately after VE Day to take over Hugo Blaschke's (Hitler's dentist) vacant practice.

 

THEODOR-GREAT BRITAIN DID NOT refuse entry to Jews. On the contrary, right up until September 3 1939 Great Britain was allowing the entry of ''Kindertransports '' trains from Germany and Czechoslovakia of Jewish childen who found sanctuary in the United Kingdom .I t was the Nazis who stooped these childen's parents from accompanying them to Britain.
B-The Holocaust threw up many unexpected heroes, For example the Japanese Consul and his wife in the Baltic states between 1940-41 who persuaded the Soviet occupiers after 1940 of Estonia and Latvia to allow Baltic Jews -on payment of $100 equivalent use exit visas suuplied by the Japanese Consul to go to Japan where they were well treated and lived until 1945 in an enclave there.
A senior S.S. man went to Japan in 1943 to aske the Japanese govt to alow him to repatrate these Baltic Jewish refugees in Japan but the Japanese -after interviewing Jewish leaders of the enclave group declined to do so and sent him home to Germany empty handed.
That Japanese Consul now has a place in Vad Yashem in Israel as a ''Righteous Gentile,.''
Poland has a long history of anti-Semitism linked to the Church doctrine that Jews were ''Deicides'' killers of Christ. When Plish Frnciscan priest Father Max Kolb was made a Saint by Pope John Paul for saving a Polsh prisoner's life in Auschwitz by volunterring to take his place in the cells where prisoners were left to strave and dehydrate to death modern people raised objections because they alleged that Kolb had been a virulent anti-Semite during his priesthood.

 

There is an excellent read here on a now closed Forum Thread
- due to how controversial (and so upsetting to some) these threads can become.
One member here in particular has posted a tremendous wealth of information here.

 

The Dentist of Auschwitz, Ch. 13: Fürstengrube

There is a rather good article if you follow the above link.

What always disturbed me were those inmates who were Kapos - even one of who was a Jew -

"Kapo Hermann wore a redtriangle without yellow corners, which marked him as a political non-Jewishprisoner. Nathan Green became the Blockkapo in Block 4, to which Papa, Josek,and I were assigned. He was the only Jewish criminal I had seen in Auschwitz andcame from nearby Katowice. What crimes he had been convicted of I neverlearned. Green was tall, trim, and handsome. Like other Kapos, he wore betterprison clothes, which distinguished him from common inmates. In thistopsy-turvy world, being a criminal was not a stigma. In fact, criminals thrived in Auschwitz,because they did whatever the Nazis ordered them to do. Green's prison numberwas around 70000, which meant that he had been in Auschwitz for at least a yearand a half. It was demeaning, being ruled by the lowest element of society."


Of course IG Faben was the only company to run its own Concentration camp at Monowitz. Conditions were so bad that even the SS complained that the Company was treating its inmates too serverely (ie dieing too quickly when better treatment would have got more work out of them).

The SS specifically complained that the IG Farben Kapos were too severe.

It is said that the very worst conditions were to be found in the two coal mines worked by IG Farben at Auchwitz.

 

Believe me Phylo, I know I`m a very lucky man not to have been around in Nazi Germany. My idealism, my pathological honesty, my obstinacy, my inflexibility, and my intense dislike of being told what to do (particularly if I think they`ve no right to do so), would have meant I`d have been lucky to survive a year.......