I have been researching the Holocaust now for about 5 years, and the stuff that I have been reviewing this last week has just sickened me to the stomach. And last night's episode of Band Of Brothers did not help.
How could people do this to other people simply on their merits of different religion, creed or ideals. And the sick bastards that gained pleasure from doing this s**t-GRRRRR!!!
I'm sorry but it's utterly disgusting. I don't care what anyone thinks of Hitler as a military leader, but as a human being-he is a pathetic and sour excuse for a human being.

Look at one image from BoB-Yes, It's a show, but the Holocaust did happen. The tissues came out last night when the poor Jewish guy is carrying his all-but-dead father, and an inmate hugs and kisses a guy from Easy Company. It was one of the most horrific TV images I have ever seen.

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"CURRAHEE"-War-cry of the US 506th PIR.
"Everybody thinks that they are going to get the chance to punch some Nazi in the face at Normandy-and those days are over, they are long gone"-Lt Chris Burnett

The BoB team did a pretty good job for those scenes. The only comfort while watching is that it's all just a movie. But take a look at the photos made by the Russian, British and American troops after liberating these camps, and you no longer have that comfort.

The Holocaust is the most sickening thing I think has ever taken place in the history of mankind. There have been larger slaughters, yes. Man-made famines have killed far more people, yes. But nobody else has industrialised mass murder as the Nazis did. As for Hitler, it wasn't all just him. There were thousands involved in it. Some of the people, like Eichmann, probably never saw a camp from the inside. To them it may all have been a game of numbers and statistics.

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„Solange man nicht mit dem Kopf unterm Arm rumläuft geht es doch noch!" Erwin Rommel

You ask the question 'was hitler human?' But then this could apply to many. The Nazis were not the first, or last, to carry out slavery and/or mass murder. We have the slave trade started by the British. The attempted genocide of bthe ative Americans. And more recently, the death camps and ethnic cleasing in Bosnia. The after affects i've seen for myself.

But what made what the Nazis did different from the rest. While many of the things they did went way beyond what anyone else had done, the experiments on live people for example,the scale on which they did it was down to the time they were in.

There were no TV images showing the camps to raise public opinon, as in Bosnia. The size of the population they targeted was greater than other attepted gencides, and they were for the first time, able to industralise it.

So were they any worse than many others, or were they simply in a situation that allwoed them to commit these acts on a larger scale than anyone else.

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'England confides that every man will do his duty' Nelson
'I'm a Norfolk man, and glory in being so' Nelson

Proud to be a GRUNT

That's a really good point. I think what is often most disturbing about Hitler and the nazis is the way the institutionalized their genicide policies. I wonder what would have been different about WW2 had there been the media outlets we have today? If the rest of the world had earlier been exposed to a full picture of what the nazis were doing?

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Seriously, all today is missing is free cotton candy and the annual Bay State Hooker Parade to make it any better.

Panzerknacker -

A couple years ago I had to do some pretty heavy research on the topic for my senior project for my history degree. I know what you mean, I went home either pissed off or depressed every night.

Have you ever read the transcripts from the Wanasee conference?

Have you read much about Einsatzgruppen? (Sorry, I can't spell in English, much less German). They tried to carry out the plan by hand in the east. I seem to remember reading that they had to ship tons of vodka to the guys and get them sh*t-faced drunk in order to execute the people. But it was not efficient, so they took a more industrial approach.

My Uncle (in the US army) ended up at Dachau at the very end of the war, and it is the only thing out of all those years in the infantry that still chokes him up.

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I don´t think Stalin´s concentration camps were any better...

There has always been and will be such creatures like Hitler,Stalin, etc. Remember the red Khmers in Cambodza, remember the Spanish inquisition,Idi Amin etc. Unfortunately!

The saddest thing I remember was the Children´s Crusade. As they came to southern France they were all sold to slaves, I think.
Or the killing method of Idi Amin. Instead of losing bullets people were gathered as queue and the one in front put his head down, while the one behind hit his head to pieces with a hammer.After that the queue moved one person further and on...

I think Hitler had lost the ability to feel somehow ( "cold as fish " ). He accused other people ( that is the jews ) of his problems and did not care what happened to them as long as he was ok.In the end he went as far as calling jews and Russians "untermenschen" who were inferior and had no right to live. I have treated many people ( though not a psychiatric ) who for example think they have the right to stay in hotels and not pay a penny or take whatever they see and like even if it´s already somebody else´s. It´s not a big step after that to go into killing other people and not feel a thing I think. One even hit a child in the face because the child had looked at her for too long...

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I did some study on Holocaust, too, and even after years, there are some things - aside the horror or the unbelievable amount of victims in that short time period - which bothers me very much. It's not the "industrial means" of killing or the cases of sadism etc., but the idea that

a) the perpetrators had a cold, logical "reason" to kill those people. It made sense to them, not in a human way, but in a "logical" way. In their believes, to thier society, they were living in, they did the "right" thing.

b) why so many "ordinary men" like you and me voluntarlily joined the extermination process: few were "forced" to kill Jews, most would have had any chance to _not_ participate in the extermination process, but very few took the way out.

c) those "monsters" who killed jewish women and children by the dozends in 1941-1944, became respected, normal democrats like you and me after 1945. This is a German problem (the nice old man living next to me, playing with my son: what did HE do during WWII?), but not only: just look how much SS-worshipping is going on in these kind of forums. The killers are more interesting than the victims.

It's very hard to believe that there is any humanity at all in the human being. I always need to read some "positive" stories from time to time of those few people who actually "helped" Jews during that time.

Man is a wolf to man. Give him the means and a free hand, he'll kill as much as he can.

Cheers,

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"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
(President Merkin Muffley in "Dr. Strangelove")

When it comes to humanity, its all shades of gray. Hitler happened to be of a very dark shade, one that fortunately doesnt show itself very often. I too am apalled at the Holocaust, but often it is the only genocide people seem to see. Pol Pot in Cambodia killed 3 million of his own people. The Japanese killed close to 6 million in China. Joesph Stalin killed close to 40 million in the blood purges, which is 3 times the amount that dies under Hitler. I'm certainly not excusing this kind of behavior, just showing that Nazi Germany is not the only country to pull off deeds like the Holocaust.

About SS worshipping...I don't think anyone here is fanatic about them. They were the elite soldiers of Nazi Germany, and yes, quite a few of them took part in murder of innocent people. But every army does that. The Red Army is a prime example, as is the Japanese. In fact, you could make a case that the bomber crews who flew over Dresden were mass murderers. True, different means, but same end; masses of dead innocent.

[ 22 October 2002, 03:56 PM: Message edited by: dasreich ]

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"If your gonna buy the angel s**t, you might as well go for the zombie package as well."
-George Carlin

Bish OBE "We have the slave trade started by the British."
NO NO NO
The British did not start the slave trade. Slavery and the trading of them goes back to before the Romans. Every nation( which existed before the 19th Century) has at one time practiced it, even the native Americans practiced it.
Britain did not even start the importing of slaves to the America`s this "dishonour" belongs to the Spanish and Portugese
While Britains role in the Slave trade is indeed shamefull, we didn`t start it.

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if in doubt....Panic!!!!

Well, yes, bad wording. But you know what i mean. Britains slave trade was one of a number of shameful acts in our countries past. But shows it is not just the Germans who are capable of such things.

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'England confides that every man will do his duty' Nelson
'I'm a Norfolk man, and glory in being so' Nelson

Proud to be a GRUNT

But this was/is not uniquer to the Nazis.

When i was last in Bsna, in the summer of 2000, we made a gruesome discovery. About 20 yards from a track used by troops for years,was an underground cave. In this cave was found the bodis of approx 21 Muslims. There bodies had been there for about 8 years. They had all been tortured an executed. The grave was a few miles from a Serbian run Concentration camp.

What was worse was that some years after they were killed, spmeone had come along, thrown in a load of horse flesh, an a few hand grenades to try to cover it up. On top of this, the site is overlooked by a number of Serb farms.

The grave was never reported, and no one spoke of it.
And any of the monsters who commited these crimes, especially the non-Serbs, were never touched,and are still in power.

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'England confides that every man will do his duty' Nelson
'I'm a Norfolk man, and glory in being so' Nelson

Proud to be a GRUNT

If you really belive in this fantastic number, I have to say that you're pretty extensivly brainwashed...Oh, wait, let me guess, this numbers include all russisians died because of the German invasion/occupation during 1941-45, as without Stalin _that_ would never had happened, huh? Plus counting those kids who never had been born because their parents died etc. etc.?

[qoute]
About SS worshipping...I don't think anyone here is fanatic about them. They were the elite soldiers of Nazi Germany, and yes, quite a few of them took part in murder of innocent people. But every army does that.[/quote]

First, "quite a few" is apologizing nazi propaganda, which you seem to took for face value. Maybe you're right from 1944 onwards, when the W-SS became a mass army, but not between 1939-1944.

Second, I never heard that such "elite" units like the U.S. Marines or others killed innocent civilians up to the tens of thousands or run concentration camps. Waffen-SS was the Nazi Army, like it or not. Only some few of their divisions were considered to be elite (in fact they had huge losses and some success-stories, a better equipment, and were completely politically indoctrinized and fantics, guess that makes a unit "elite", if you neglect the aspect of training and militariy ability). The Waffen-SS was only a part iof the entire SS.

After having studying the history of the SS to a certain degree, I'd say that the vast majority of Waffen-SS Divisions were crap & cannon fodder.

Still good enough to commit atrocities en masse, though.

Cheers,

[ 23 October 2002, 06:13 PM: Message edited by: AndyW ]

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"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
(President Merkin Muffley in "Dr. Strangelove")

I've stated many times that Hitler's rise to power was possible only with the huge financial support he recived from certain large banks and industries. Too much credit is given to Hitler during these early years. He was not the "political genius" people describe him as.
When you read about the Thule Society and the Order of New Templars, and the other wacky cults from which the Nazis decended, you can see how totally out-to-lunch this crowd was--from the very beginning. Hitler had a lot of help. And he had a lot of help planning the Blitzkrieg, too.
It was when he started turning help away, at the end of '41, that things started to get bad. I think he was a real idiot. How many hours every day did he spend having tea with the ladies? What was that all about?

There was a docu-dramatisation of the Wannsee Conference on British television earlier this year. It's called Conspiracy and stars Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich, a co-production by BBC/HBO. I had read about Wannsee before, but seeing the plans take shape, and listening to the statistical way the delegates could talk about murdering every single Jew in Europe (and how they fully expected History to applaud them) was extremely chilling. Also of interest was the level of disagreement between figures such as Kritzinger, Klopfer, Stuckart and Heydrich.

It is easy and very human for someone to say 'lets get rid of these people' and as Fuhrer to make it happen. But it does not impact you much if you are not doing or seeing the dirty work. It is those at the lower levels that made it happen which I would consider inhuman.

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American by birth, TEXAN by the grace of GOD!

What sort of sums up the spirit of the Holocaust for me is a technical report (I may be inaccurate in its quotation, but not by much) concerning three buses that used their exhaust gases to kill the occupants.

The report proudly says something like "we have processed over 93 000 pieces and had not one technical fault!"

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„Solange man nicht mit dem Kopf unterm Arm rumläuft geht es doch noch!" Erwin Rommel