[Newsbot]

Title: The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking
Category: History
Posted By: commanderkai
Date: 2013-03-03 20:39:08

[Public_Domain]

Wooooaaaahhhhhh, can't wait for the holocaust deniers to get to this one.

(Actually, I can wait)

[sandorski]

wow

[martin14]

Anyone who buys into 'The Germans didn't know about the camps' should
be force-fed articles like this.

[sandorski]

martin14 wrote:

Anyone who buys into 'The Germans didn't know about the camps' should
be force-fed articles like this.

That's another issue. Germans certainly knew about Jews being detained. What they didn't have a clear view of was the final Extermination of the Jews.

[Thanos]

Maybe some of the civilians back home were somewhat clueless on the depth of the extermination but anyone in the military certainly knew better. The "innocence of the Wehrmacht" is a total myth as the regular armed forces were knee-deep in atrocities right from the very beginning of the invasion of Poland. The young Germans that made up the ranks of the soldiers had been educated in the Jew-hatred and Slav-hatred that the Nazis had put into the school system and their indoctrination continued in the compulsory activities of the Hitler Youth before they went on to join the army. There was no part of the armed land forces, non-SS units included, that had clean hands.

In the summer of 1940, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo), noted that: "...compared to the crimes, robberies and excesses committed by the army [part of the Wehrmacht], the SS and the police don't look all that bad".[16]

The Allies really were not all that aware of what the Germans had gotten up to in the east, or at least the average Allied soldiers weren't until they began liberating concentration camps in western Germany. With some notable exceptions aside, such as the liquidation of Oradour-sur-Glane, Malmedy, the Abbey Ardennes, and the Ardeatine caves massacre, the war in the west was almost clean by comparison to what was going on in the east.

[ShepherdsDog]

Didn't know or didn't want to know? Many of the extermination camps were located outside of Germany proper because the antisemitism of the local Slavic populations was even more intense and brutal. Poles and Ukrainians...just to name a couple nationalities...were just as guilty as the Germans.

[Thanos]

The Baltic populations were probably the worst of the collaborators when it came to the locals assisting the Nazis during the exterminations. There were a lot of guilty Poles as well but it's balanced out, sort of, by there being more Polish individuals listed among the Righteous Among Nations by Israel as having helped hide and save Jews during the round-ups.

With what's known today it's no longer credible that the majority of Germans at the time couldn't have known what the policies of their government, which enjoyed widespread popular support up to the very end of the way, had led to. The population of what was probably the most educated and intelligent nation on the face of the earth had willingly bought into a pile of medieval superstitions and pseudo-scientific lies in order to rid themselves of a group they had ridiculously come to blame for everything that had gone wrong for Germany since World War One. And at the end of it all the generations most responsible for it hid behind a pathetic defense of "I wasn't even a Nazi, I didn't know any Nazis, and I didn't know what was going on". I almost have most respect for the small handful of Nazis who admitted what they did, and why, than I do for the rest who acted the way they did after WW2 was over.

[BartSimpson]

Don't jump to conclusions here in slamming on the everyday Germans of the time. Keep in mind that there was no internet, no television, all of the newspapers and newsreels were censored, and the telephones were all monitored. It was also the case that Germany of the time was not far removed from the 19th Century in that many people still lived out their lives within a five kilometer radius of where they were born.

My father-in-law's family lived in Waldangelloch (near Heidelberg) where the family had lived for over 800 years. That there was literally a camp just the other side of the hill from their farm was only something a defiant 12-year old boy came across one day as he was ducking out on Hitler Youth training. And no one in his family wanted to know about the prison that was just a few km away.

And while individuals like my f-i-l knew about selected camps and facilities that were local to them there was no way in hell that anyone outside of the leadership had any ideas about 43,000 such facilities - a fact that we're only discovering nearly seventy years later.

Information just didn't get around back then like it does now and we need to be fair that we do not judge the past by the present.

Because, of course, one has to consider what horrible things we'll be accused of by people in the future.

[Thanos]

Hmmm. Maybe. At a certain point in the war the OKW had to clamp down on soldiers sending photographs home in mail from the front. They weren't too worried about military secrets inadvertently being given away. What bothered them though was that the pictures Wehrmacht personnel were taking of themselves participating in round-ups and executions of Jews and Slavs were being widely spread about back home. The annihilation of the inferior races was the duty of every German but they certainly didn't want any non-official documentation of their activities to occur.

[BartSimpson]

Thanos wrote:

Hmmm. Maybe. At a certain point in the war the OKW had to clamp down on soldiers sending photographs home in mail from the front. They weren't too worried about military secrets inadvertently being given away. What bothered them though was that the pictures Wehrmacht personnel were taking of themselves participating in round-ups and executions of Jews and Slavs were being widely spread about back home. The annihilation of the inferior races was the duty of every German but they certainly didn't want any non-official documentation of their activities to occur.

Keep in mind that the Germans were not alone in killing people along ideological lines. The Russians have admitted that the Katyn Forest Massacre was their handiwork but they still have yet to provide a full accounting of the Eastern Europeans they slaughtered (directly and indirectly) in the period 1945-1991. Millions of Eastern Europeans and Soviet prisoners of war were forcibly repatriated to their Soviet-run countries after WW2 and most of them faced death upon their return.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul

Quote:

On March 31, 1945, Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded the final form of their plans in a secret codicil to the agreement. Outlining the plan to forcibly return the refugees to the Soviet Union, this codicil was kept secret from the US and British people for over fifty years.[2]

It is of no small irony that the Soviets used camps like Auschwicz and Treblinka as transportation camps immediately after the war.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Yalta

[Thanos]

It'd be refreshing if all of them just admitted what they once did and got it over with. Establish some ground rules at the beginning, where admissions of guilt won't result in financial penalties for a participant's family and descendant, and just tell the truth to get it on record. If one was once proud of shooting helpless people because their government had told them it was the correct thing to do then just admit it already.

[BartSimpson]

Thanos wrote:

It'd be refreshing if all of them just admitted what they once did and got it over with. Establish some ground rules at the beginning, where admissions of guilt won't result in financial penalties for a participant's family and descendant, and just tell the truth to get it on record. If one was once proud of shooting helpless people because their government had told them it was the correct thing to do then just admit it already.

South Africa did something like this after the fall of apartheid and it ended up being quite cathartic for all involved.

[Thanos]

South Africa also turned into a crime-ridden shithole and economic basketcase after apartheid ended. Gee, I wonder why? [/myinnerracistisstrong]

Please don't ever mistake me for a liberal.

[martin14]

from the article:

Quote:

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

BartSimpson wrote:

My father-in-law's family lived in Waldangelloch (near Heidelberg) where the family had lived for over 800 years. That there was literally a camp just the other side of the hill from their farm was only something a defiant 12-year old boy came across one day as he was ducking out on Hitler Youth training. And no one in his family wanted to know about the prison that was just a few km away.

But the point being they did know about their local camps, and that people
were being used as slaves.

Not all of the 42000 camps were death camps, obviously.
In fact most were for forced labour.