There is an interesting book on this grim subject - the book "Yes to Life" of Viktor Frankl. He managed to survive concentration camps and stay mentally sane person. He describes the life of prisoners there and what was helping them to survive. Sad but remarkable book on both history and psychology.
Also, someone in this discussion said that as more and more people pass away there is less and less truth about WW2 and less and less respect to its lessons. There is also another interesting observation: the more related to WW2 people die the more Cold War #2 we see. Cold War hasn't become "hot" because during these times almost everyone except kids knew what is war and how it looks and that it causes. War heroes were not imaginary movie personalities, they were everywhere. And kids could hear real stories from someone who has seen it all with own eyes. And so, everyone knew that war is hell and that nuclear weapon can make war even worse, so that WW2 will look like a picnic.
But what do we have now? Movies about WW2 with expensive SFX and cheap plot, Call of Duty, etc. War isn't scary anymore. People are eager to fight something. This mad mad mad mad mad world.
Believe me, kids nowadays don't want to fight. They'll be sitting in the tanks, on the battlefield on tiktok or something. Worse, (better?) is the ideas they pick up from the movies. Superbly advanced civilizations, with an almost [Edit: actually] unbelievable array of weapons, still hang their fate on individual superheroes. Their principal weapons are (get this) modern day swords and spears and body armour! also, the weapons are quickly abandoned in favour of punching the opponent in the face, with no apparent effect, and they don't even do that properly. If anything, violent superhero movies should be encouraged.
This zeitgeist is not ubiquitous. There are plenty of newly minted adults who jump into the military. Not all of them are lifers, but the government incentives are very good for the poor facing minimum wage at a McDonald's.
It wasn't popular during either world war for a lot of people (from what i remember from my [canadian] high school history, quebec in particular wasn't thrilled about conscription)
Thanks for your comment. In ww1 about 25,000 conscripted Canadians were sent over seas, in ww2 12,000. Many more were conscripted but didn’t leave the country. I didn’t realize Canada had conscription at all, or the divide between French and English.
At the end of the day, war is pretty different when its a plausible existential threat, instead of just going violent adventuring in some back water that had no realistic chance of ever hitting back.
I'll second Frankl. I enjoyed his (other) books around love and searching for meaning, drawing from his experience. I'll have to check that one out as well. Very humbling stuff.
It is still one of the most important books i ever read, but quick note, yes to life is the original title, still in german version, but currently in english it is usually published as ‘men’s search for meaning’
The average person on the internet can view more war and carnage than even the average soldier in WWII (remember that the majority of the fighting forces don't actually "fight", per se). We can also connect to survivors of even the smallest of conflicts. We're steeped in the miasma of geopolitics. For sure, it's nowhere near as saturated as post-WWII, but we are still connected to the sad reality of violence.
no not in the same way, we instead live it vicariously in movies and games, and if we die we reload and go kill more "other" be it Nazi Communist or Islamic Fundamentalist, we go shoot more enemy a get a steady drip of dopamine with every virtual bullet.
In "All Quiet on the Western Front" I recall one of the characters teachers encouraging the young kids to go... Did your teacher preach about the glory of fighting for freedom in Iraq?
Reading wikipedia it seems when the book came out it was critically received by some for "it's pacifists agenda".
Sure, we still glorify warfare, but our culture and tolerance for casualties have changed dramatically.
It's called dark humor. Tragic events can be respected and grasped without some puritanical concept of them being "untouchable" subjects. A joke about 9/11 is almost certainly taking advantage of (and probably directly in opposition to) the exact attitude that lead to it becoming "off-limits" in the first place, and playing with it.
Wait, really? I'm a millennial, not gen-z, but I feel like Nazi/WWII jokes were way more popular in the 90's and early 2000's than they are now.
For example, in Seinfeld, they had a character called the "soup Nazi", a character that was extremely asshole-ey about who he gave soup to. This was not a controversial episode or anything, and became one of the most quoted episodes of the series. Nowadays I'm not sure if that would be considered "ok."
I feel like the rise of domestic terror, white nationalism, and fascism is scary, but seems to a) by mostly composed of millenials my age and older, and b) a lot more complicated than some edgelord humor.
That said, despite the fact that I love edgey subversive humor, I agree that trivializing things as "just jokes" isn't a good thing; if it means fewer memes, I can live with that.
There is a long history of lampooning nazis for comedic effect, very often performed by Jewish comedians. Hogan's Heroes is a sitcom about POWs sticking it to the foolish krauts. The concept would never fly today but it was standard fare for post war comedy. The children who grew up with that culture continued using it into the 90's.
I mean I don't know if I would go that far; things like Hipster Hitler got a fair amount of traction, at least for a bit [0]. Hardly indicative of the entirety of human culture, and obviously it's not a major network sitcom like Hogan's Heroes (or Seinfeld).
Also, a staple of the Call of Duty franchise is a tongue-and-cheek mode of running around killing zombie Nazis, isn't it? (I admittedly haven't played it), and it's not like "Iron Sky"[1] was meant to be taken super seriously.
I think it's unnecessarily reductive to say "one generation is ok with subject X and another generation isn't." I don't think humans really form big, homogeneous groups completely based around the year they were born.
I think it's kind of silly to act like groups of people separated by year really has any meaning for most things. I (an Anglophone millenial) tend to enjoy really edgy subversive comedy, as do most of my friends of the same age. My grandmother (a bit too old to be a boomer) will get upset if I say any word that could be considered vulgar.
No need to tell us this, tbh. Your easy reference to "the rise of domestic terror, white nationalism, and fascism" to rationalize shutting down humor already marked you as a millennial, my dude, your claims to enjoy edgy humor notwithstanding.
Humor has unsettled fragile, self-righteous authoritarians throughout history, including but sadly by no means limited to, fascists. Attempts to shut it down are always concerning. They will never say "we want to stamp our boot on the face of humanity" as the reason for shutting down humor. It will always be a plausible reason: "we are at war" or "some things are too serious to joke about" or "vulnerable people need our protection"
Embrace your love of edgy humor. It's how people deal healthily with their anxieties and concerns.
So, I guess you didn't really read my other posts in this thread; getting upset about certain jokes is hardly unique to millennials, and it's pretty silly to act like it is.
I realize I didn't make it as clear as I'd like (and that's my fault), but I wasn't suggesting "shutting down" humor. What I was trying to say (unsuccessfully) was that we should potentially be less tolerant of certain humor en masse via social pressures. I'm really not in favor of having a government entity disallowing humor.
For example, throughout the 90's and early 2000's, it used to be somewhat tolerated to use gay stereotypes to make fun of gay people. Eventually we realized (for the most part) that these stereotypes might be harmful, and for the most part have stopped making these kinds of gay jokes. It wasn't like the government stepped in and said "it's illegal to make fun of gay people", we just socially moved on from that.
> throughout the 90's and early 2000's, it used to be somewhat tolerated to use gay stereotypes to make fun of gay people
This is true. Today, being gay is generally accepted.
Before the 1970s, homosexuality was so unacceptable even joking about it was unacceptable. Homosexuality was invisible. At best, if you were enlightened, you would consider it a mental illness. Most just considered it a moral abomination.
I would argue that jokes from Eddie Murphy, Andrew Dice Clay, Sam Kinnison were simultaneously an expression of society's anxiety about social change, and part of the start of a national, or even global conversation that led to "Enh, being gay is no big deal. As long as it's consensual, let people do what they want."
Today those jokes aren't funny, but I wonder if homosexuality would be as accepted as it is without them. The conversation became increasingly about whether the jokes were fair or not; funny or not. Which at the time was miles better than one mustn't joke about homosexuality
Jokes can be mean-spirited bullying moving society towards being more oppressive and less tolerant, but not always. Not inevitably. Humor pushes taboos and boundaries, sometimes towards good.
The first two are most definitely for a millenial+Gen X audience. Carlin is arguably Gen X but as an elder millenial I heard a lot about him from the folks I looked up to.
Ostensibly, some topics are off the table because it would upset vulnerable people and we cannot have that. The real reason is that authoritarianism is on the rise on both the left and the right, and shutting down humor is one method to assert control.
Disclaimer: It could legitimately be argued that these folks were canceled for lack of funny, or for anti-Semitism, and not their Nazi jokes, per se. But canceled for Nazi jokes:
When you saw the wide support for communism after the war and the blindness to its own concentration camps and genocides, a lot of people who lived ww2 didn't really respect its lessons either.
Well, your post has no question, but I will comment anyway.
First of all, I am not going to defend soviet concentration camps, USSR has had it's own share of sins. But comparison of Third Reich and USSR is an anti-communist propaganda cliché. For obvious reasons: no jew could become a member of national-socialist party, but anyone could become a communist. So, no matter how disgusting the stalinism was, it cannot be compared to nazism.
As for popularity of communism, well, Red Army was victorious, USSR was one of those who survived and won, so it's ideology was gaining supporters. There were many true believers in ideas of communism. E.g in socialist Czechoslovakia there was an attempt to build "socialism with a human face." In USSR there was a generation called "sixtiers" who were true believers in communism but saw stalinism as something horrible that should never happen again. But, for better or for worse, it looks like believers was the last thing the communist party needed.
By the way, the book "Monday begins on Saturday" by Strugatsky brothers is exactly about a RnD institute (almost) full of people sincerely trying to make world a better place. Strugatsky brothers were believers themselves. To the end of USSR they have become bitter haters.
PS. I am not stating that communism is good or better than capitalism.
The double agent Oleg Gordievsky was at heart a sixtier, and after hearing about the demise of the prague spring, while either drunk, stupid, or unbelievably brave - if I have the story right - actually indicated his desire to defect, while on duty as a KGB officer in Denmark, by phoning his wife and going on a tearful tirade against the Soviet Union.
He knew the line was bugged, likely by both PET and the KGB. His cries were heard, and after a "chance" meeting at a squash game he became a double agent, years later stationed in London where he nearly became the rezident (~CEO) at the Embassy. He was betrayed by Aldrich Ames at some point around 1985, and went on to become the only (as far as I'm aware) person to be exfiltrated from the Soviet Union directly under the nose of the KGB. Not a bad life story.
"First of all, I am not going to defend soviet concentration camps, USSR has had it's own share of sins. But comparison of Third Reich and USSR is an anti-communist propaganda cliché. For obvious reasons: no jew could become a member of national-socialist party, but anyone could become a communist. So, no matter how disgusting the stalinism was, it cannot be compared to nazism."
Wait, your whole argument for why Stalinism can not be compared to Naziism was that jews could become members of the communist party?
Stalinism/communism provided you a moral/ideological choice: to be part of it or to oppose it. Although sometimes people who were taking the side of stalinism and were active in whistleblowing and finger pointing in the name of ideological purity were later repressed themselves.
Nazism, on the other hand, gives you no choice if you are a jew. It is already decided for you.
But again, stalinism was awful. I am not going to defend it. I too have some far relatives who died because of it. My grandmother survived thanks to luck. But to compare communism or even stalinism to nazism is wrong.
> Stalinism/communism provided you a moral/ideological choice: to be part of it or to oppose it. Although sometimes people who were taking the side of stalinism and were active in whistleblowing and finger pointing in the name of ideological purity were later repressed themselves.
The point is there them being repressed themselves. Stalin, & Co. were rather indifferent to who was pointing fingers at whom with regards to who goes to GULAG first.
Very often both the "stukach," and his victim were sharing the same train to Magadan.
"But comparison of Third Reich and USSR is an anti-communist propaganda cliché. For obvious reasons: no jew could become a member of national-socialist party, but anyone could become a communist."
The main reason Jews could become communist in the USSR is that Stalin died before he could commit his own explusion/genocide. Had he lived, he would have likely used the Doctor's Plot to deport Soviet Jews to Siberia. Read Stalin's Last Crime:
several million people died in the famine during the initial forced collectivization in Ukraine and other soviet states. Walter Duranty, an American reporter lied to the West about the extent of the famines and added to many elites' delusions about soviet communism. this isn't propaganda, it's history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
That a one-eighth Jewish man was allowed to stay in the Party due to a personal dispensation from the Führer, against Himmler's strenuous objections, does not make the point you seem to be aiming at.
I’m not fine with it, and Amazon’s practices are gross. I wish we as a global community would put more pressure on China rather than turn a blind eye towards their more heinous acts.
Avoiding buying Chinese goods seems almost impossible, we have outsourced also much manufacturing now.
This is a view held by actual Eastern European Jews who first survived the Holocaust, and then after the USSR's arival saw their compatriots either imprisoned locally or deported to Siberia, or living in constant fear of such for the long years until Stalin died. For just one of many, many examples of this "out of the frying pan, into the fire" feeling, I can recommend the work of Imre Kertész.
I think it’s the way history works. Napoleon was pretty horrible, yet even the enslaved Dalmatians forgot what he did and praise him for building roads.
I’m pretty sure Hitler will have a similar public image to Napoleon in a few hundred years. We do similar things with Roman emperors and praise their accomplishments forgetting the massive amounts of suffering they caused.
By the way, this is quite interesting! Most events of 20th century were related to ideology. But before that, in old times maybe only religious wars were close to this. Other wars and conflicts were good old attempts to conquer someone and/or to gain resources and power. But was there as much hatred as produced by ideology? E.g. during the napoleonic wars many people died but does someone hate France because of Napoleon? I guess not. Or take WW1, it was only 107 years ago. Surely a lot of people died. Does someone remember it with hatred? Only as a great tragedy I think.
I'm pretty sure that you needed ideology to convince people to go to these incredibly long wars. It just gets washed away by other explanations given by the historians.
I mean, does Russia have memorials of their leaders? Germany also has a bunch of memorials even going back to Prussian days. Yet many of these individuals caused massive suffering.
Aside from the similarly fated Russian invasions, they are completely different. Napoleon was not genocidal and contrary to his popular reputation was not a warmonger. England & the coalition was generally the aggressor because they wanted to restore the Monarchy (The Bourbons) to France & weren't happy about the Rights of Man and Liberalism that the Grande Army was spreading.
Yes. The backstory... England was very hostile to France, especially because of Pitt, and France lost its navy at Traflager so Napoleon's only option was to get all of Europe to Embargo England [1]. Russia eventually decided to trade with England anyway which is what triggered the French invasion to enforce the embargo. The other factor is that after Napoleon divorced Josephine, he had the option of marrying the daughter of the Emperor of Austria or Russia, he choose Austria which cooled relations with Russia.
Napolean and the Roman emporers of which you speak had some actual military victories to counterbalance their other atrocities. Hitler brought nothing but ruin and dishonor to his beloved German people, and lost the war to boot. No. History will remember Hitler forever as a blustering fool who invented industrial scale genocide. He'll be sitting alongside Nero and Caligula in the collective memory, not Napolean and Julius Caesar.
This is the current sentiment yes, but time will shed a bunch of facts.
I personally find Napoleon and Julius Caesar as completely uninspiring figures. Their accomplishments are worthless but for some reason praised from the perspective of history.
A big reason for this is that history finds explanations after things happened. They attribute to these "leaders" way too much.
Facts related to the atrocities committed during his rule. The current sentiment does not really tell how the future will look at the events.
Russians have monuments that praise the rulers that were ruthless and brutally destructive towards the human spirit and it's been less than 100 years ago since these events happened.
Just because current rule in Europe/Germany finds him horrible it does not mean that in 200 years these events will be looked at with the same eyes.
Attila the Hun is to this day considered a ruthless barbarian and killer. Practically no one could tell you who he was or what he did, but everyone knows he was a bad dude.
Hitler will be remembered for the ovens, long after everyone has forgotten Archbishop Ferdinand.
My grandfather was on a train to Auschwitz, but managed to avoid it and survive. A childhood friend of his survived in the camp until liberation. They always paid tribute to the liberators along with those who died in the attempt, at a ceremony commemorating their community.
I once met a Polish Jew who had barely escaped being deported to Auschwitz. He had been in the Polish army, escaped to France through Switzerland (a whole movie could be made about that) with his father to fight here, didn't go too well either. They got arrested by the Vichy police. The policemen guarding them told them, "you know, we're not looking winkwink" His father was too sick to run away, he had to leave him behind. He was deported and died in Auschwitz. He managed to join the maquis. He was a distant relative of a friend who told me, "he never told that story, I think he may be dying." And he did, a few weeks later, I learned.
My great uncle died at Bergen-Belsen - he was a doctor in Vienna, and he had been harbouring a Jewish family. His young sister - my grandmother - sold him out for a promotion in the hitlerjugend.
From what I gather, he managed to get quite a few people out of there on medical grounds - but not himself.
She never spoke of him. I only found out from the posthumous memoir of her surviving brother, who was a conscientious objector who got sent to Stalingrad. Not an easy read, but one that made me acutely aware of just how quickly things can go incredibly bad.
It didn’t, as I didn’t know about her other brothers while she was alive. I always thought it was just Siegfried and Sigrid, but they had pretty much a whole Ring Cycle of siblings.
I think I would have forgiven her, however - I have, now, at any rate.
She was born in 1928 - she grew up in Vienna, immersed in an increasingly fascist culture, and joined the Hitler youth because it was simply what everyone did. In the last days of the war, she, in terror for her life, married a German officer who promised to get her out of Vienna before the Russians arrived - which he did, dumping her, pregnant with his child, in Kano Nigeria.
At the same time, many of her cousins were also fleeing Europe to escape war crime prosecution, and many remained in subsaharan Africa.
She met my grandfather there, a British war and famine profiteer, through a lonely hearts advert. They had many miserable years together.
All in all, I feared her as a younger child, pitied her as a young man - she was a cruel and angry woman, who was scornful to me as a child, and bitter to her (fourth) husband. Her brother, Sigrid, who by the time I was around lived with her, his wife long dead, always looked out for her, told us to be kind, that we didn’t and couldn’t understand why she was as she was.
And then his death, her death, his memoir, and I understood. I wish now that I had known while she was alive, but then, I was a younger man, and I may not have understood. Now, I see her as a victim as much as any of them - her entire life was a pyre of guilt and shame and self-loathing, always running, and never escaping her past, her actions.
As to me, I learned several things I felt were of critical importance:
- That cruel people are usually the product of cruelty - that they are cruel because they are ashamed, and wish to hate themselves.
- That righteous people, working with what they know to be right and good can carry out acts of atrocious evil.
- That you should be aware that your actions, if sufficiently bad, will haunt you til the end of your days.
Interesting, my grandfather was also on the train to Auschwitz and also survived - he was in an orphanage in Katowice, after his parents were taken to camps in Germany, but a few months later Nazis decided to clear out the orphanage as well - he was taken along with all the other kids and put in a train carriage destined to Auschwitz, but a nurse who worked at the orphanage managed to sneak into the trainyard and grabbed the first kid that she had a chance to - my grandfather. As far as we know he was the only kid to survive from that orphanage, thanks to the actions of that nurse.
He was then placed with the family of Kazimierz Gołba, a Polish poet(who was himself hiding first from Nazis then from the secret police after the war) - and lived with them using a fake name for a while, only going to back to his original name and surname some years after the war.
Him and my grandma spent years and years of their lives trying to find any trace of what happend to his parents or any of his other family, but without any luck.
Unfortunately, he passed away last year, almost certainly due to covid(I say almost certainly - he passed away due to respiratory problems, and grandma got diagnosed with covid a day later, he was never tested).
Him and grandma and myself and the rest of our family have always lived literally 10 minutes away from the former Auschwitz camp as well - in a little town nearby.
Bless his memory too, and those who saved him. Heroism and tragedy of that era is beyond my comprehension.
My Grandmother (wife of the man I spoke about) was from your area, Wadowice. She was 16 on the eve of invasion, and her family survived by fleeing east.. gambling on Stalin over Hitler. Her father almost turned them back, having fought Russians in WW1. They were refugees for 7 years, most of the time in central asia. They returned for a while, but a couple of murders over property disputes convinced most survivors (very few survived from Wadowice) to leave. I have some family members who married out and converted. We're not in touch, unfortunately. The live in Krakov, last I heard.
She always maintained ties to her old community, even their most famous member. This is her elbowing past a Prime Minister to say hi and try to get him to do some renovation on an old synagogue.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeM...
A long series of events, 3 years. Initially there was a backlog. Not enough trains to Poland. He went through several camps, work assignments. He never got shipped to Poland. Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented. Most survival stories that I know of personally involved the church, one way or another. The brother who worked tirelessly to save him had been the one on the list. He had a baby on the way, born the following morning. My grandfather volunteered to take his place, while the couple hid. The daughter became a teacher. He survived the rest of the war as a partisan. I don't know the whole story. He rarely spoke of it.
Many/most of the Lubaks (local SS) were from the area, and he'd gone to school with some of them. That's part of the story, but I don't know exactly how it fits in.
As a German, born roughly 40 years after the war, I still cannot fathom the atrocities we Germans brought to the world at large and to so many million individuals.
I grew up learning the history, I know my grandparents (as well as probably great grandparents) played their part in what happened. I am deeply sorry for what they/we did and even saying it these words just sound hollow in light of the magnitude of cruelty and injustice that happened.
I am very sorry what your grandfather had to endure and I am happy he survived. Though it doesn't change the past I will make sure that my children and grandchildren will remember what happened in order to prevent anything like that happening in our lifetimes again.
He held no grudges by the time I knew him, certainly not against unborn generations. He visited in Berlin in the 70s, as a tourist, spoke german, had german friends and felt sorry for those who (like him) had their communities destroyed after the war. We were brought up to believe the remembering does matter, fwiw.
I have a lot of respect for Germany's honest portrayal and study of its past. It is a rarity, perhaps singular.
Hey fellow European. Please allow me to thank you deeply for that. You cannot be held responsible for anything that some people 3 generations before yours did, but nevertheless your sense of responsibility is really truly inspiring.
> I am very sorry what your grandfather had to endure and I am happy he survived. Though it doesn't change the past I will make sure that my children and grandchildren will remember what happened in order to prevent anything like that happening in our lifetimes again.
You might want to check out the new podcast Day X. It's about resurgence of far right extremism in Germany going on right now. Sadly, the same thing seems to be happening in my country (US).
Germany has an extremely healthy attitude towards the Holocaust; it would do most western nations well to model it as regards their own historical atrocities.
If someone initiates war, brings war to your people, threatens the destruction of your people (I mean as a nation state) - you are morally entitled to do anything required to defend your people. Anything. Without exception, and up to including killing every single person of the attacking nation if that is what is required to stop the war (which you did not initiate). Realistically you won't have to go that far, however there is no scenario where you can have total war on the scale of WW2, and civilians from the attacking side are not likely going to die in very large quantities. All of those deaths, without exception, rest on the moral back of those who began the war.
The attacking party holds the moral responsibility for what is required to stop them.
If you have to kill all the civilians supporting the industrial side of the war in order to stop the war machine supplies (whether in Nazi Germany or under the Empire of Japan), the moral responsibility rests with the party that initiated the war.
Your moral duty as a defending nation is not to trade your people's lives at a equal proportion so that you feel great about not killing too many people. It's to make the attacking party stop, capitulate, give up, surrender their efforts, and that is all. If that requires killing their civilians at a 100 to 1 ratio, that is entirely morally rational and just. The guilt of those deaths entirely rests with the attacking nation.
Which is also not the same as saying that the defending side should kill as many civilians as possible, just to do it. It means they're absolved of civilian deaths on the attacking side as a concern morally, so long as the civilian deaths serves the purpose of helping to end the war.
All arguments of just war and the morality of self defense aside: this a disastrously foolish way to go about being a sentient species on a single planet.
Like the Allies did? lets not forget the German Bombing campaign against the UK in the Battle of Britain. Bombing population centers for years until after the US joined the war. Or the Rape Nanjing by the Japaneses troops, a act so brutal the Nazis found it disturbing and inhumane.
I would suggest avoiding some sort of self-inflicted trauma from this horrible past (which might not be happening but it reads like that to me).
There is no point getting depressed from one's ancestors past - if one looks in the past far enough, there will be probably something utterly horrible that given nation/tribe/group did to somebody innocent. Basically all western european democracies fall into this category, and many, many other nations too.
Don't forget about it by any means, tech your kids as I will do, but don't put emotions into this just because your nation was the culprit. There were similar things happening to innocent civilians en masse in the past elsewhere. Genocides are not an invention of Germany or 20th century, life was often pretty horrible and violent in the past.
I don't know if personal guilt or shame is the correct feeling either, but I also don't think OP should feel nothing.
Time and entropy (empires dissolving or population groups migrating) definitely diffuse the responsibility for a horrific act. Of which there are many in history. But this specific thing happened in living memory, was performed by an organization that still exists (a German speaking nation state, with almost the same borders as before), and by people the OP knows personally. In fact, it's a very wealthy nation that OP has gained a lot of advantage from living in. It's subjective and graduated, but I don't think it's been nearly "long" enough that the Holocaust just background noise next to all other events that have happened in human history.
Modern Germany is awesome btw. Really respect how they've reckoned with this awful time in their history.
> Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented.
I want to remind how little people today remember who 3rd reich collaborators were.
The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost.
Those were often very mainstream, and popular political parties. Some of them exist to this day.
Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.
> The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost.
Not to mention Ordinary Men [0], the dynamic that makes your average citizens with no ideological indoctrination become the murderers of tens of thousands of Jews, to the point they'd shoot at small children with a clear conscience. They'd even have the option not to directly take part in the murders, but still do.
Again, these were average, ordinary people. No strong party affiliation, SS membership or anything.
The fact that Christopher Browning's book was a revelation when it came out shows how little we've learned from WWII. We might have put the lid on undisguised antisemitism, but we have merely channeled its otherising roots elsewhere. Otherwise, we wouldn't find it so easy to turn a blind eye to the settler colonialism happening right now in Palestine.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say - hopefully not that there weren't any unwilling collaborators?
Read the biography of Stanislaw Lem for instance, who grew up in Lwów(current Ukraine, back then Poland) - Nazis frequently recruited local population to both kill and then bury anyone they wanted to get rid of, under a) promise of reward b) threat of being killed themselves. But you don't need to trust the biography of one man and his experiences - we also know this because Nazis kept extensive video and photo evidence of those executions, which they would show back in the 3rd Reich as "evidence" of the barbarism of the local people in places they were occupying ("look at those stupid Poles/Ukrainians/Jews, killing each other for a scrap of food!").
"Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them."
Again, because some of them were given a choice of either joining the ghetto kommando unit, or being shot there and then, along with their families. It didn't matter at all in the end of course, because they all got executed in the end anyway. Can you say with with 100% confidence that you wouldn't make the same choice in the same situation? And I do mean 100% confidence?
Polish nobelist, Wiesława Szymborska, said something about these choices people faced in WW2 that I will always remember - "we only know ourselves as much as we have been tested - and I pray that my moment of trial never comes".
I think she's absolutely right - it's easy to judge what people have done from the comfort of our homes in 2021. But I do hope that I am never put in front of the same choice. I hope I will never be tested in the same way those people were.
And I will clarify here - of course there were willing collaborators too. 100%. But your comment reads as if that wasn't the case and the "myth" of unwilling collaborators was purely made up. I see no reason to believe such a thing.
Then all I can say is that I envy your confidence in your resolve, and I wish I could be as confident about what I would do with a gun to my head(or worse, to my children and my wife heads) as you are.
Like I said above - I hope my moment of trial never comes.
I wouldn't even necessarily call the SLS collaborators. They were primaries. Broadly though, yes. When we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. Even (especially) individuals are not one thing or another.
> we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated.
The history is simple, in this case. There were bad people, and there are bad people trying to muddy the boundary of a very clear cut difference of who was bad, and who was good.
I know everyone has a story, here, but I knew several survivors when I was younger. The "general" answer is that the few that survived were highly exceptional — they Nazi machine wasn't perfect. So, most of them had stories that were really over-the-top & full of coincidence. Everyone who had a normal story was dead before the war ended.
One of the survivors I knew was executed twice. He said "it didn't catch".
> Dushman has said he was unaware Auschwitz existed during the war, only learning about the atrocities carried out there in the years after.
It's always jarring to me, with my modern/simplistic/naive perspective of these major historical events, to consider that the people who lived during and/or participated in these events didn't understand full extent of what they were seeing or what was happening. It totally makes sense, academically...fog of war, slow/spotty spread of information, determining what's propaganda and what's not.
But still, there's something mind-blowing to me about a soldier mowing down the fence at Auschwitz with a tank, but not knowing what the place was.
> to consider that the people who lived during and/or participated in these events didn't understand full extent of what they were seeing or what was happening.
No internet. Television was in its infancy (meaning few even had a television). There were no "24-hour news channels" anywhere. News arrived via newspaper, film short before a movie in a movie theater, or a brief "news update" on a radio station. Information flowed (worldwide) at a snails pace as compared to how quickly we learn of some happening on the other side of the globe today.
It makes me think that some truths may take years, decades to really come out. Things we read today in the news might only become clear in the future, specially politics and such.
I have never been interested in “breaking news” because it is usually pretty impossible to give it context. Reading the news from a few days or even weeks past helps make clear what matters amd what does not.
There is a theory that the Nazis were just a sub group of a much older and secret group. This group empowered Hitler to become a major distraction while they took control of the worlds economy, shipping and communications in the background. This theory supposed that nazis were completely invented purposely as a group of villains performing evil that no one can ignore. The theory also suggests that the jews were chosen because it was known that it would evoke the largest response from the Christian nations
You mean the least response?
"it would evoke the largest response from the Christian nations"
Christian/American/European leaders didn't care at all about jews.
The rock you are hiding under should be analyzed for potential breakthroughs in stealth and soundproofing technology. Christian nations are the biggest supporters of the Jewish ethnostate Israel.
It does make sense that a soldier didn’t know. On the other hand, the American military knew of Auschwitz and Birkenau, had the opportunity to bomb and incapacitate it, and didn’t apparently at the request of FDR to direct all munitions toward winning the war. His administration was implored by escapees and refugees. One of the greatest tragedies of many during the war.
"The first proposal to bomb Auschwitz was made on 16 May 1944 by a Slovak rabbi." That was 3 weeks before D-Day (June 6, 1944).
Eisenhower's policy was to defeat Germany, and not get distracted. He had planned to bypass Paris, which wasn't on the route to Berlin.[2] (De Gaulle went off-script and liberated Paris ahead of schedule, but that's another story.) Eisenhower was trying to hold an alliance with different goals together. All the allies were agreed on "defeat Germany", but there were other national goals. Britain was concerned about preserving its empire, for example. To hold the alliance together, Eisenhower focused on "win the war" above all else.
The person this article is about was in the Red Army. "One of just 69 men in his 12,000-strong division to survive the war, Mr Dushman suffered serious injuries during the conflict". The USSR had about 20 million casualties in WWII. Never forget that.
The "Slovak Rabbi" was Michael Ber Weissmandel. If FDR and co. had demonstrated even a fraction of his determination to save his fellow Jews, many hundreds of thousands could have been saved. That "not getting distracted" is an absolutely terrible excuse. If FDR had acted, the almost 1 million Hungarian jews still living might not have perished.
Wouldn’t bombing the camp kill the prisoners? Or are you suggesting that they could have successfully bombed and “incapacitated” the camp without killing the prisoners? How exactly?
There were probably some who wanted to try something targeted/infrastructural to avoid that, but there were also some advocates (including Jewish ones) who explicitly supported bombing the camps, including their occupants, because even if they died, it would be net-life-saving as future waves of trains would no longer have a place to go.
The Americans strafed the concentration camp my grandfather was working at in 1944 from air -- my grandpa still carries a scar from that. It was definitely not an easy decision to attack or not attack these camps.
I think the general "hope" was to bomb the train tracks so that they couldn't keep bringing trainloads of people to the camps. This could be done without bombing barracks of people.
My grandfather used to tell me how one time he "flew" with his "bed" when he was there ;
How he woke up safe on his bed in the middle of the courtyard ; There were walls when he had gone to sleep before, but the walls weren't there anymore.
When I became older, I learned that fifty prisoners in his barrack had died this night.
“Bombing accuracy was terrible. The average circular error in 1943 was 1,200 feet, meaning that only 16 percent of the bombs fell within 1,000 feet of the aiming point”
I agree. Hence the scale of the bombings in WW2. But the camp operated multiple years. Maybe there was a price to pay but in the long run, maybe it would have been worth taking a chance. We will never now, it’s a maybe game.
We're Monday morning quarterbacking, but I wonder if destroying the railroad lines into the camps would've been effective. Less chance for a missed bomb to kill camp prisoners, lots of opportunity to hit the tracks.
I think the same trains or tracks that carried prisoners carried the (paltry) food for the camps, so I guess it's a trolley problem still.
That’s right, and 200000 in Warsaw. It’s not certain, however, approximately 1.1 million people died in gas chambers. Let’s not forget about the atrocities of those who were not sent to the gas chamber. It’s all ifs and maybes but maybe the camp would have to be abandoned if mass gassing wasn’t possible.
Plenty of concentration camps didn't have gas chambers.
The tools of killing were bullets, disease, and starvation.
The Nazis ran out of many things, towards the end of the war. But never bullets.
Edit: I have no idea why people are doing the drive by downvote thing here? Maybe you think I'm denying that gas chambers were real?
No. I'm saying there were concentration camps without them, where prisoners were mass-murdered as I described above. That statement is not controversial.
I don't think destroying the gas chambers would have been enough to stop Auschwitz.
The best payoff would have been the train tracks running into the camps.
But how many planes would this have taken? How many would have been lost? No loss was affordable during most of the war; industrial production won it for the Allies as much as anything did.
Not necessarily. The international Red Cross was famously invited to tour Auschwitz[1] where they were given a carefully staged show of how well their prisoners were being treated. Plus prisoners would have been in danger.
It's questionable how much it would have inhibited their genocide capabilities, it almost certainly would have killed the people in the camps and it was only an option late in the war. Prioritizing strategic targets to end the war & regime faster is defensible.
Well, oftentimes people don't -want- to know or believe the truth, too. We've seen ample evidence of that recently, with one noted politician even flat out telling his followers a couple years ago that "what you are seeing and reading is not what is happening".
How much do you know about what is going on in North Korea? The little you do know is probably due to it being politically expedient for the US to trot them out as the evil empire.
Well, we could obviously just ask the North Korean emigres who work in our countries. Surely they will tell us the truth? Or the many North Korean tourists who visit Europe and North America? Or indeed the vast numbers of North Korean folks visiting around the world for work purposes?
Oh, wait. We can't ask any of those people, because they seem not to exist. Is that because North Korea is so wealthy that no one wants to leave to work elsewhere? Because North Korea is such a utopia that they don't even want to travel overseas? Because their industry is so advanced and self-sufficient that they need no trade deals with others?
You don't have to believe everything you read about North Korea, but to dismiss it all as US propaganda without offering a significant countervailing body of evidence is, well, silly.
While I do definitely mistrust US propaganda on North Korea, I don't doubt at all that it's a terrible place to live in every possible way, I have read several books by defectors (and visited numerous communist and post-communist countries).
My point was more that the reason we have heard about it is mostly because that suits the Western agenda. Otherwise very few would have any idea about what is going on there. Just like few Americans or even Europeans know much about Transdniestria, a present day communist state in Europe. Or Bhutan, a seemingly very happy little country.
Even in the days of Wikipedia and internet news, most people don't know much more about the world than what is convenient for Western media to tell us.
All this to say that it's inconceivable that people outside Germany could be pretty ignorant about what was going on in the late 30s.
Part of it may also be that people don't want to know. Take the ongoing Uyghur genocide right now, but most are ignoring it. Why isn't it an emergency and headline news every day?
they're not ignoring it, plenty of countries have been recognising it. the issue is that much of the available information isn't exactly reliable, a lot of the research comes from one single person (an ultra-christian extremist), and plenty of the people who have been detained are leaving from the front door, unlike the armenians in 1895-1925 and the jews in 1943-1945. mosques are still open and there are plenty of videos of 2021 eid al fitr in xinjiang.
not saying "there is nothing going on there" and "those incarcerations are complete lies" but the whole thing is fishy, especially considering that there are political motives behind screaming bloody murder – for comparison, there is literally zero western pressure on israel on the occupation issue, and the EU is blatantly ignoring the insane conditions migrants are subjected to on the other side of the EU barriers.
this is the same question that china asks when confronted with the uyghur problem. they believe they are fighting terrorism and extremism and those camps are (part of) the solution. we can disagree with them – and if the extreme claims about those camps are correct, then i do disagree with them.
on the EU issue: there isn't one single solution since all the cases are different. a few come to mind. i would not pay blood money to morocco and libya to "keep them at bay" because the EU can't just champion human rights at home and then fund concentration camp-like establishments outside of its borders – we are not funding the ones in xinjiang, we are funding the ones in the libyan litoral. a way more efficient refugee processing scheme with the participation of everyone else would be ethically better. much as i disliked him, matteo renzi put it very well for the eastern european extremists: no refugees, no money. on an EU level i'd also crack down on pushbacks (such as the ones happening in spain and in greece), where the carrot should be a better refugee distribution.
let's not forget that europe's exploitation caused this problem, it's also on us to help people and figure out a solution.
the Uighurs aren't a problem though (unless your problem is that they aren't ethnically Han chineses) they are people living in their homes in their own country
the "uyghur problem" for china is that there is an ethnic minority that is substantially poorer than the average, worse educated, less integrated and some of which has been involved in terrorist attacks. this is the same thing that france calls "separatism". they use a better word but it's inevitably about muslims.
as i have said a thousand times though, i don't think they're approaching this "problem" the right way.
You are participating in the denial when you make statements like this. Let's say we start at our most charitable to the ruling party: there's no work camps, Uyghurs are treated fairly, paid a decent wage. Why then are the compounds, which we can see from the sky, off-limits to human rights observers? Why are these complexes expanding at an alarming rate?
I expect evidence. I do not get upset because it is the fashion to do so. If someone calls me a liar and demands proof I didn't mislead them, I do my best to display evidence in my defense. All that the CCP offers is threats to other sovereign nations.
There is a pattern of behavior from the CCP which indicates duplicity and untruthfulness from the destruction of viral lab samples in Wuhan, to entire fishing fleets going dark off sovereign waters. Every day we receive more of these reports of bad behavior. If China wants us to believe them, they need to start producing evidence. Let observers in. Show the world.
> Why then are the compounds, which we can see from the sky, off-limits to human rights observers? Why are these complexes expanding at an alarming rate?
Can you prove that this refutation of those satellite images is false? Let's remember that there were satellite photos of WMDs before the Iraq War also. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1208288.shtml
The Palestinian, Pakistani, and Syrian ambassadors to China have commented on camera about what they observed in Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ebeGipO6-gU?t=490
Do you have evidence that they are lying? Which Muslim-majority countries or non-Western-aligned Muslim interest groups have condemned China for human rights abuses in Xinjiang?
Your journalist sources are from the Global Times, "part of a broader set of Chinese state media outlets that constitute the Chinese government's propaganda apparatus." [1]
> The Palestinian, Pakistani, and Syrian ambassadors to China have commented on camera about what they observed in Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ebeGipO6-gU?t=490
There is every indication that these are sanitized media tours. [2]
> Your journalist sources are from the Global Times, "part of a broader set of Chinese state media outlets that constitute the Chinese government's propaganda apparatus."
Right, and the Western claims all stem from people or organizations connected to the US state department or intelligence apparatus. These claims are propagated by the same bastions of journalistic truth which stoked popular fervor in the run-up to the Iraq War and every other unjustified US foreign coup or war (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony).
I don't know what you're trying to do here as you appear to believe Wikipedia (and its citations) is trustworthy enough to source for your own arguments but not for mine.
Global Times is an organ under the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP. There is no controversy of its origins or whose authority it acts. Given that no newspaper can be wholly privately-owned in China, conflicts of interest are unavoidable.
Did I dispute that? Of course it’s going to present the Chinese perspective. My point is there’s just as much conflict of interest with US corporate media. As a matter of historical record, there is no hard separation between the US corporate elite and the elite of the US state and intelligence apparatus.
I don’t think Wikipedia is objective in any way on geopolitics. I don’t think that’s possible. My point was simply that some geopolitical facts are so indisputable that even Wikipedia admits them (of course this only tends to happen once the US has gotten what it wants). You have to decide whether you’re going to reckon with those facts or just talk more about sources. At the end of the day that’s a cover for not having any hard evidence.
So in summary your argumentation rests on the case that Western media is corrupted by American interests. At the same time you admit that the CCP manipulates their own media to use as propaganda but you prefer to believe those vehicles, from a single nation rather than a collective of media across multiple cultures because all of them are under the fold of American influence.
or, worse, someone who is a fellow at the "victims of communism memorial foundation", like it's not a completely bogus entity. literally any article on the topic this week (and plenty before) has him as the only source.
there are a few rhetorical tricks here. what am i denying exactly? the genocide? yes i am. it's not a genocide. there isn't a planned extermination of uyghurs going on. there have been planned exterminations of armenians from anatolia and jews from europe.
on the other hand: am i denying the existence of fishy "re-education camps" targeting one ethnic group and one only, where they are brought in under very opaque circumstances? no, i am not denying that.
there are a bunch of things there, a full timeline of the "conflict", a couple of articles debunking both poor google maps journalism and a few poorly-made BBC & vice docs on the matter.
there's also the fact that some of the "punishments" against the uyghurs are forcing children to go to school, to mandarin-speaking public ones even, which is the same policy most countries in the world adopt (a recent request in france to partially allow schooling in catalan in the region of perpignan has been rejected). there are some claims that state-funded xinjiang schools are even bilingual but i haven't dug enough on it.
i won't comment on the wuhan issue because i don't really know enough about it, but as someone who is born in an island with plenty of US bases i laugh at everyone claiming china is "flexing their muscles" with their navy.
to be clear: nobody approaching any of those bases gets allowed in, just like in the "xinjiang camps". does this excuse china? no, it doesn't, but we should probably be fair in our judgment.
We have plenty of data to prove the camps are real, birth rates among Muslims in the country fell through the floor. People disappear in the night, cities that were once heavy Uighur communities are now devoid of them. We've intercepted shipments of Uighur Muslim hair, etc. It's not to the extreme level of the Holocaust with mass executions, but it is real.
China has done a great job of making people frame it as the US/EU lying and the "whataboutism" in your last paragraph. This is also a tactic that Putin loves to use. Using Western shortcomings to justify their own tyranny.
> It's not to the extreme level of the Holocaust with mass executions, but it is real.
Those may well be actual death camps. The stated amount of people disappeared (2m+) far exceeds just how much people you can physically fit into those camps. They may fit few hundred thousands, but not millions.
It's possible, but I would bet most are scattered about doing slave labor, while also having been sterilized. So they get free labor and can effectively kill new generations. That to me seems like the most likely CCP method than mass executions and has a much smaller paper trail/footprint.
let's first address the heart of the matter, as i've said in a few comments: i think it would be great to have an explanation from china on what the hell is actually going on in xinjiang, and if those claims are correct, i obviously think that policy is atrocious. it's still not a genocide, of course, as there is no planned extermination. it's not just "not to the extreme level of the holocaust". it just isn't a genocide. it doesn't have to be a genocide to be despicable.
on the data: if by "we" you mean adrian zenz then you're out of luck when it comes to quality. i'd like to see better sources than someone who thinks he's in a mission from god like he's the blues brothers. china hasn't done "a great job" at framing the west for lying otherwise there wouldn't be a wikipedia page and we wouldn't be discussing this on hacker news. the sad reality is that china doesn't give a shit about its reputation abroad, which is why many of the rebuttals to those claims are in chinese. one is here: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/13029926735409111... – it's by the chinese state media so one can still claim they're lying.
on the "cities that were once heavy uyghur communities ..." as i mentioned above: kashgar still has a lot of uyghurs. they go to their mosques and so on.
what is true, however, is that china is encouraging resettlement of han chinese (they've been doing it for decades), for the sole purpose of making the uyghurs a minority in their own land. this is something that personally i don't like, but (here comes the whataboutism) i have not seen a single piece of criticism when this happened literally everywhere else, minus of course when it was accompanied by planned extermination, which only applies to anatolia's christian minorities, as the jews were already a small minority in the locations that were affected by the deportations.
Because it's China and the ruling class in America decided it would not be in their interests to press them on the issue. So they spread propaganda to dismiss it as a Conspiracy Theory. Which is the mental short circuit the media uses to shut down any further thought on the matter.
When I was in Russia last time in 2016 (and was robbed for third time in my life btw,) it was then when I stated a chat with a youngster in a case about WW2, and my jaw dropped when he said the same.
The future would be Allies did not really believe they were postponing anything.
A big part of the Western establishment was happily planning for chummy future in Europe with Hitler, and things he did.
Of course when the war came, and German attacked not some Czechoslovakia, but France — a Great Power, and made aggression towards GB, and USA, everybody instantly picked a barely believable narrative about them not doing so.
And yes, they soiled their pants. Chamberlain locked himself in his cabinet and drank for days.
"Germany was USSR's ally in their planned occupation of Europe."
That's a lie/hyperbole that is being pushed in the last decade or so.
Although I imagine every country had some plans of occupying Europe at some point or another, saying USSR was planning on occupying it based on Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is lie.
It is fair to say it is exaggerated somewhat, but none the less the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact did divide Europe into "spheres of influence" which included the redrawing of other countries borders:
To this public pact of nonaggression was appended a secret protocol, also reached on August 23, 1939, which divided the whole of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Poland east of the line formed by the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers would fall under the Soviet sphere of influence. The protocol also assigned Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland to the Soviet sphere of influence and, further, broached the subject of the separation of Bessarabia from Romania. A secret supplementary protocol (signed September 28, 1939) clarified the Lithuanian borders. The Polish-German border was also determined, and Bessarabia was assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. In a third secret protocol (signed January 10, 1941, by Count Friedrich Werner von Schulenberg and Molotov), Germany renounced its claims to portions of Lithuania in return for Soviet payment of a sum agreed upon by the two countries.
1. what was exactly (and please be specific) was the Soviet military's objective after moving 600,000 – 800,000 troops, in 33 divisions with ~5,000 guns, 4,700 tanks, and 3,300 aircraft onto Polish soil on 17 September 1939?
2. were say the USA to land a similar expeditionary force in Russia tomorrow, what would you call it?
Nothing here again implies occupation of Europe. More like fear. You can also mention mass executions of its army officers corps. Red army was weak, disorganized and lagging technologically. Does it really signals an army that is about to occupy Europe?
Was Poland a Nazi ally with intention of occupying Europe when it amassed its army in Czechoslovakia?
Stalin certainly had expansionist ambitions, but Poland isn't Europe and historically its boundaries have gone through numerous changes. Europe's history is one of numerous countries struggling for territorial and military control of the others.
Right, but in spirit of responding to the strongest interpretation of a preceding comment, it's rather hard to miss how advanced were the talks in November 1940. It was not the lack of planning, but rather too much of it. I am talking about official diplomatic notes, all the evidence remains documented.
> Stalin directed Molotov to draft a new pact with a much greater scope, including the division of Europe, Asia and Africa among the four powers [i.e. USSR, Germany, Italy, Japan]. On November 25, the same day as the surprise statement of Soviet nonresistance to Bulgaria's joining the Axis and a potential Soviet joining of the pact [sic], the Soviets offered a counterproposal to Ribbentrop's draft agreement. It began, "The Soviet government is prepared to accept the draft of the Pact of Four Powers on political cooperation and economic mutual assistance". [...]
> On several occasions, Molotov asked German officials for their response to Moscow's counterproposals, but Germany never answered them.
> Regarding the counterproposal, Hitler remarked to his top military chiefs that Stalin "demands more and more", "he's a cold-blooded blackmailer" and "a German victory has become unbearable for Russia"...
Also, I'm not saying that these talks were honest - they were diplomacy after all. But none of the sides were in the "minding my own business" business.
> I imagine every country had some plans of occupying Europe at some point or another, saying USSR was planning on occupying it based on Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is lie.
Well, Stalin saying this, on record, many times, also told "American lies?"
The giant USSR's military buildup prior to WW2 was for fighting whom? Stalin did not believe his own spies telling him Hitler was planning an attack on him.
Wow, I happened to watch the pianist last night, a movie about the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during world war 2, which only mentioned treblinka in passing, and then came across your comment today. I read the whole interview. Both the movie and this interview contain unimaginable horrors. Like something that can’t be unseen, I don’t think I’ll ever forget them. I hope humanity doesn’t go down that road again
I remember having a conversation with a coworker about the Holocost in the 90's.
We were walking to my truck. He said, "What do you think about the event."
I said something along the lines of, "Well--others have had it worse?".
I blame it on stupidity, a bad American education, and an angry 20 something that was completely lost in every aspect of my life.
I so regret how flipped my response was. I don't think I have ever said anything so stupid. I bet the guy I said it to remembers it too. He went into programming after our stint in the snack bar, and I imagine he's on hn.
I too remember a time in during college when I taunted a Sikh student with an extremely racist joke. I said sorry but even after many decades I have great regret at how callously I said that joke. To this day I don’t say any jokes and many people consider me uptight.
> The Soviets suffered a horrific toll in WWII. 25 million dead is an unimaginable number.
It is.
In the town in the Russian Far East where I spent my last few years in Russia, one old timer was telling me how extreme food confiscations were.
There were people basically solo living in sticks, hunting, fishing, gathering, doing crafts etc. One such guy probably only catches, and dries few fishes a week, and lives off that. He lives in really unpassable wilderness, weeks of travel to get to his place.
Nevertheless, NKVD had few men teams to regularly reach, try in a show trial them for "connivance," do simulated executions, and confiscate their few fishes which rot from improper storage by the time they come back to the city.
At some point, there were nearly equal amount of men drafted into NKVD, and other political police, than the men on front lines. At every moment of the war, communists were equally scared of their own people, as they were of Germans, if not more.
Communists fought the war betting fully on assumption that they had more soldiers than Hitler had bullets. And it was Stalin's fright, and surprise of a lifetimes when Germans somehow popped up within 10km of Moscow. He was hours away from taking a plane away from Moscow. He wasn't afraid of Germans as much as the prospect of meeting his end Gaddafi style.
> Communists fought the war betting fully on assumption that they had more soldiers than Hitler had bullets.
This just isn't true. The myth of the endless "Asiatic hordes" and the "human wave attack" (a tactic the Soviets didn't really use) is mostly postwar propaganda, a way to save face by German generals in later accounts to their Cold War allies.
I suggest you read "The Myth of the Eastern Front" for more debunking of false narratives about this, as well as any of Col. David Glantz books on the Eastern Front.
The Soviets didn't win the war because they were numberless. They won it because Germany never had any hope of taking their territory, and because they learned fast and outmaneuvered and out fought the Germans.
Soviet Union would have lost the war if Stalin and his henchmen didn't stop terrorizing the people. Only when Stalin strategically decided to give more freedom, Soviet people started to mobilize and defend their homeland. Before it was no difference between the two evils. The rest is history.
Of course after the war, NKVD and the rest were given free reign again.
Agreed! As the war progressed, an interesting parallel developed: as Stalin learned to trust his generals and give them free reign to make plans, Soviet successes increased. Conversely, as Germany experienced its first dramatic setbacks, Hitler grew more paranoid and trusted his generals less and less, and disasters grew larger and more frequent.
I think it should be pointed out that Auschwitz was by no means the worst of the concentration camps. In fact that's the only reason it's so famous, because there were more survivors. Of the absolutely worst of the worst, like Treblinka, little is known, precisely because they were so terrible.
Son of Saul is a hungarian dramatic film about a member of the sonderkommando in auschwitz that i appreciated. it is the only production about the holocaust that didn’t feel fetishistic to me somehow. i feel like it gave a small sense of the totality of defeat that must have been overwhelmingly present in that place, and the desperate reality of existence and struggle despite all, though the main character is by no means a fighter.
it’s beautifully made, in a very personally close and intensely emotional style. it’s entirely fictional but based in part on secret diaries and photographs found buried within the camp.
>Dear finder of these notes, I have one request of you, which is, in fact, the practical objective for my writing ... that my days of Hell, that my hopeless tomorrow will find a purpose in the future. I am transmitting only a part of what happened in the Birkenau-Auschwitz Hell. You will realize what reality looked like ... From all this you will have a picture of how our people perished.
i recommend this film, and the book Blessed is the Flame by Serafinski, to anyone interested in the people within the camps.
Incredibly, in my native Belgium, there's an old lady turning 100 (!) come September. She helped save almost 1000 jewish children by moving them to safe places. Many were hidden amongst other children in catholic boarding schools.
I have been lucky to visit some of the camps in Auschwitz during a high-school trip about 15 years ago.
It's quite hard to describe how it feels to be in such a place. Since we were guided, I could understand quite a lot of it, but otherwise I think it would be difficult to realize the horrors that went on here.
The most striking is the sheer size of it. Especially when you enter Birkenau, you only see a range of buildings as far as the horizon.
On this topic broadly, read the autobiographical "Survival in Auschwitz" by Primo Levy. If I recall correctly, out of his original convoy of 700 souls, three survived. One insane detail I remember from that book is that there was a hospital in Auschwitz where some (lucky?) prisoners could convalesce before subsequently being worked to death. Levy himself was able to survive due to his skills as a chemist which the Nazi's put to use in a laboratory and was therefore able to work in relatively sheltered conditions.
I don't think it's a coincidence that we've seen a rise in holocaust denial, nazi sympathisers, etc. as this population has left us.
It's a sad thought really, no number of history books will ever have the same effect as talking to your grandpa about his experiences on the beaches at Normandy, or marching in to liberate a concentration camp. I fear we're on the brink of forgetting a lot of lessons.
My grandpa was a paratrooper in the 504 PIR from Bizerte into Germany. The times he talked about the war with me, he talked about times he was scared shitless. Husky Two. Strafed in Italy. Jeep blown off the road by artillery fire. Holed up in a barn at night in the Ardennes snow.
The most glamorous thing he ever mentioned was bivouacing somewhere with enough French wine to keep a functional drunk on…that story was over glasses of Port because his war experience inclined him to functional drunks for the rest of his living days.
I don’t recall ever meeting a veteran who thought the important lesson was D-day or liberating the camps. Invariably the point was how much war sucks.
My experience has been that when I meet people who saw actual combat, they invariably focus on how much it sucks. The folks who glorify it seem to always be the people who never experienced it first hand.
> "They were standing there, all of them in [prisoner] uniforms, only eyes, only eyes, very narrow - that was very terrible, very terrible," he said.
My grandfather helped to liberate Dachau. The only detail he ever told us about that day was how thin the prisoners were. The men were light enough to carry out two at a time, one on each arm; and they felt fragile, like small children.
I've long felt that the last 20-30 years have shown a slow reversal from international cooperation back to nationalist protectionism. I've wondered whether this is a consequence of the dying out of the generation that experienced just how badly wrong that can go.
Forget about talking to grandpa to remember lessons. Most Europeans who fought in World War 2 either participated in or experienced the horrors of World War 1 or had live family members who did.
The chimp brain of ours is highly over rated in what lessons it can learn from blundering about. The more complex the issue blundering is garaunteed no matter what lessons are available and who tells a good story. Look no further than Afghanistan. No lessons learnt.
The only thing to do when things get too complex is get out of the room and run for the hills. Let the buffoon class who think they have a handle on complexity because of their grandpas stories blunder away. When the dust settles return and rebuild.
This is a good lesson from history. The Jews who stayed in Europe say that it crept up gradually, an actual slippery slope, and this is one of the reasons they didn't uproot themselves until it was too late.
If you're not a member of the majority group in society and you feel a fomenting hatred towards you, it's probably a good idea to sell your stuff and run away quickly. The downside of a false positive isn't that bad.
Fortunately in modern wealthy countries few have had to do that in a rather long time.
> If you're not a member of the majority group in society and you feel a fomenting hatred towards you, it's probably a good idea to sell your stuff and run away quickly.
What if you feel a hatred fomenting towards you but you're still the projected majority for at least a few more years?
It would be a good idea to teach kids about the biological and psychological factors behind these atrocities as an addendum to the classic history curriculum. It'd give them a more well rounded interdisciplinary understanding of exactly how this happens and hopefully give them a better ability to introspect if they get caught up in similar mob insanity in their future.
I also fear that due to the extreme "politification" of everything the narratives that survive might not be accurate. But oh well, "the victors write history" I guess.
I don't know if you meant it to sound this way, but this comment comes off as sympathetic to the Nazis- you're implying the concentration camp 'narrative' is not accurate, but imposed by the 'victors' (Allies).
Not to mention that many folks (including a lot of HN -- see: the recent thread on the ACLU) seem to be fighting to the death for the right to spread holocaust denialism and misinformation.
> Not to mention that many folks (including a lot of HN -- see: the recent thread on the ACLU) seem to be fighting to the death for the right to spread holocaust denialism and misinformation.
If this is true, why not give some links to a few HN comments, if not a lot, to add a lil evidence to what seems, on the face of it, a truly ridiculous claim.
It's less ridiculous if you take the charitable interpretation of the comment as they are referring to those in support of generic free speech which often devolves into debates about these extreme cases in isolation rather than there is a group campaigning here with the literal text "spreading holocaust denial is a right" as a singular primary/starting issue.
Ok thanks (replying to both). I thought I was being super-charitable asking for evidence instead of just downvoting, flagging and perhaps complaining. I don't hear any charitable interpretation applied to me, rather telling me I was the one exaggerating here!
I'm not in the USA, like about 50% of HN, and know very little about the subjects, so asked only about the HN-part of the claim, that
> a lot of HN ... seem to be fighting to the death for the right to spread holocaust denialism and misinformation.
How many comments or HN users until you get to reasonably call them "a lot"? What percentage? What if it's actually 0.0001%? How bad the "holocaust denialism and misinformation" before "fighting to the death for the right to spread it" is reasonable? Especially in a comment particularly targeting misinformation, such extreme hyperbole and writing like that apparently breaks the guidelines in a lot of ways.
Also, being charitable, different people read different parts of HN, maybe the GP reads mostly the political topics with disgusting comments, and "a lot of HN ... seem to be fighting to the death for the right to spread holocaust denialism and misinformation" is reasonable. UH but no, it's ridiculous exaggeration, is precisely an area such a thing is not helpful, even on a very charitable interpretation. "Fighting to the death" really means literally that, or anything like it? or..just writing one or a few comments on HN?
So, what would you or anyone say the "strongest plausible interpretation" of "a lot of HN ... seem to be fighting to the death for the right to spread holocaust denialism and misinformation" is? (genuine question) I'm struggling to give it any remotely plausible interpretation, even assuming it's extreme exaggeration. Even in the "strongest plausible interpretation", though, it seems to me, drastically changing the meaning of most of its words in favour of the writer, the comment is still hysterical, break a lot of guidelines[0], and is itself misinformation.
Edit: Sorry, I should have had morning coffee before writing above comment. (Also I have the flu!) I reread your comment, you seem to be saying that you thought the GP was trying to say in essence "a lot of people on HN support total free speech" (or whatever you want to call that, if it even makes sense). OK! That does make some sense. But still, describing that as "fighting to the death for the right to spread holocaust denialism and misinformation" seems the kind of writing that regularly gets people banned from HN. It still breaks the same guidelines. Thank you, much appreciated!
[0] You know, like Please don't fulminate, Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive., Eschew flamebait., Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. etc
Edit: wrote the below prior to your edit. I've been on too long today and have gotten overly irritable - we could both probably use a drink of choice ;). Cheers and I hope you have a good rest of the day. I'll leave the original raw and un-edited as it always seems cowardly to me to hide from my own imperfections by trying to remove that they ever existed so apologies if any of it is overly inciteful. Still curious of your stance on the topic about 3/4 the way down if you have the time for it though!
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> I thought I was being super-charitable asking for evidence instead of just downvoting, flagging and perhaps complaining.
"charitable interpretation" as in "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." from the guidelines not the generic "charitable" as in you felt you were giving GP something extra because you decided to discuss what you weren't sure you understood instead of immediately flagging/downvoting it.
> I don't hear any charitable interpretation applied to me, rather telling me I was the one exaggerating here!
Same as the above but also there is some bit of irony in saying "I was being super-charitable asking for evidence instead of just downvoting, flagging and perhaps complaining." yet when replying to a comment by someone else giving you the information asked for and a different interpretation of GP's comment you immediately follow up with "I don't hear any charitable interpretation applied to me". Regardless, if there was a different interpretation beyond your doubt of the claim and the desire for evidence of it please give that (as I gave the other interpretation of the GP) instead of just saying you don't feel one was given.
> I'm not in the USA, so was asking only about the HN-part of the claim
Same assumption here, hence only providing evidence for the HN-part of the claim in the response.
> How many comments or HN users until you get to reasonably call them "a lot"?
Hmm, probably something each person gets to decide - that being said the ACLU topic had hundreds of comments on multiple pages, most in supporting of support free speech even in cases the message is disagreeable so I'd hazard to guess that meets most people's criteria for "a lot of comments on HN recently".
> How bad the "holocaust denialism and misinformation" before "fighting to the death for the right to spread it" is reasonable?
Well that's probably the center of the whole debate, crack that and you've got an answer for the whole show. Personally I lean on the "support free speech even in cases the message is disagreeable" side of the fence because I don't think we can trust what's popularly true at an instant to guide what is right to publicly discuss and I imagine GP lives much more on the "if it's even a small amount of denial or misinformation on the holocaust we shouldn't defend it" side of the fence for their own reasons.
I'd be curious of your particular stance and reasoning if you're willing and have the time.
> Especially in a comment particularly targeting misinformation, such extreme hyperbole surely breaks the guidelines in multiple ways.
How much it's hyperbole depends on your interpretation of the comment and how much the comments in the threads do/don't back it up. At the very least it's a bit of a "shoot first ask questions later" approach to start out saying you haven't checked the comments out yet and end saying the claim about the comments has such hyperbole it's surely against the guidelines. Maybe you'll find it is, maybe you'll find it isn't, but it's a bit hyperbolic in itself to claim it beforehand.
Personally I don't think the original claim was hyperbolic because the linked articles are literally about ACLU supporting free speech for card carrying Nazis and there are very many comments in the thread which share my "support free speech even in cases the message is disagreeable" view (which the ACLU does as well, per the articles).
Thanks for the comments, very much appreciated. I'm very impressed if that is you being over-irritable and inciteful! haha. Am not feeling up to getting more into this today sorry, I just wanted to say that by
>> How bad the "holocaust denialism and misinformation" before "fighting to the death for the right to spread it" is reasonable?
I was referring to the reasonableness or otherwise of using the phrase "fighting to the death for the right to spread it", not the reasonableness of fighting to the death for the right to spread it. Sorry that wasn't clearer.
#/media/File:Chiang_Wei-kuo_Nazi_2.jpg){kind=link}
Also, someone in this discussion said that as more and more people pass away there is less and less truth about WW2 and less and less respect to its lessons. There is also another interesting observation: the more related to WW2 people die the more Cold War #2 we see. Cold War hasn't become "hot" because during these times almost everyone except kids knew what is war and how it looks and that it causes. War heroes were not imaginary movie personalities, they were everywhere. And kids could hear real stories from someone who has seen it all with own eyes. And so, everyone knew that war is hell and that nuclear weapon can make war even worse, so that WW2 will look like a picnic.
But what do we have now? Movies about WW2 with expensive SFX and cheap plot, Call of Duty, etc. War isn't scary anymore. People are eager to fight something. This mad mad mad mad mad world.