Horrors of Nazi death camps

Poles were complicit. Afterall it was Jews and Commies and Roma and Fag. They didn't give a shit. Horrible cold people.

The public was told the camps were for SAFETY!

Polish are cold horrible peoples.

What r1 said. And now the current fascist government is going after anyone who points that out.

Another thing I’ve never understood, the labor camps (Belsen, Dachau, Mathausen, etc) are always described as filthy, with corpses laying around, human feces, and rats. Yet by most accounts Germans are fastidious about tidyiness, order, sanitation, etc. These were German camps, even the ones in occupied lands. Why did they tolerate filth? How could they have a workforce in factories who were caked in shit and stank of urine?

^because it fed into their believe that these people were subhuman.

er, belief

...does anyone on this thread speak English fluently?

I don’t know about the polish but I visited Dachau and if ordinary Germans got noisy or interested they threw them in there.

I suffer from migraines, when I get one I’m down for the count and can’t do anything. What if you had a migraine in a concentration camp? How did you shovel ditches or fell timber for 14 hours while in such pain? I’ve heard there wasn’t even an aspirin, even in the so-called hospitals.

The Poles were under the foot of the Nazis- big time. They were considered a slave race. OP- this is not a simple issue- Russians also help the Nazis slaughter Jews early in the war. Get off your butt and read a little history and inform yourself of the range of issues related to the holocaust .

Yeah because Nazi switchboard operators allowed long distance calls to Brooklyn in WWIl.

Reading philosophies of Nazi camp survivors have been some of the most valuable insights I’ve learned about life. How you are able to live despite the misery and pain - and more importantly, having seen how horrible the world is.

Poles would actually pack picnic lunches and watch as the mobile murder squads shot thousands of their townspeople.

The stench! Der Gestank!!! Der Gestank!!!

Gottverdammt!!! Gottverdammt!!!

Why go over the same thing over and over and over again OP. Why not talk about the camps that nobody knows about? For instance, those in Kenya set up by the British to get rid of any 'dissident elements' in their colonialist aspirations. Or are black Kenyans still not human enough that people worry when they are exterminated in the thousands or millions?

Start your own thread R16, this is about THE Holocaust.

Is that true R14?

I honestly think that the reason why most Western powers co-sign a lot of Israel’s actions, good and bad. They failed to lift a finger to stop the gassing and shooting of millions of Jews. They knew exactly what was going on...there was ample opportunity to offer safe havens to Jewish refugees before the war and time to save them during the war. They failed to do anything decent and as a rule, they’re agreeing with them regardless because of the blood on their collective hands.

Let's talk about the immigrant child camps the Trump administration operates in Texas and elsewhere.

OMFG!!!!

This is like asking why people that live near gangsters or mobsters keep to themselves. When your curiosity might risk the safety of you and your family it becomes very easy to see and hear no evil. I think the environment of the situation and paranoia need to be taken into consideration from our modern view.

r20 I do not stay this to sound like an antisemite, but I think the support of Israel's support is based on money. Many wealthy Jews are smart enough to influence enough politicians to create pro-Israel support. The money, coupled with the atrocities from WWII, created a perfect opportunity to create the pro-Israel support in the West.

AA would have the same political clout if there was the same concentration on money.

R24 that's true.

With the danger of sounding like an anti-Semite, when the Jews start mentioning the holocaust, I switch off. There are many other races that have been and are going through genocide, but the Jews somehow have managed to have the 'monopoly on suffering'. They are the eternal martyrs.

I’d never seen that docu at R22

Jesus fucking Christ 👿🤢

r26, yes but Jews have light colored skin. People don't care as much about people with dark skin.

Hitler seemed a bit fey to me. It think it was the wrist back thing.

Yes, local citizenry was complicit in many ways BUT information about the camps DID get out and reach the allies.

But you're right, OP, I don't know why they didn't get on Twitter and get it out there or notice that their Jewish friends were all of a sudden no longer posting on FB.

OP, my parents were young teenagers in England during WWII. I asked them if they ever heard anything about the Nazi death camps. They told me that it wasn’t common knowledge what was happening to the Jews in those camps. They were shocked like the rest of the world when the war was over. Just like the killing of Cambodians by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, we heard about it but no one was doing anything about it. The killings in Rwanda. The genocide in the Slavic republic. The massive displacement of Native Americans by Andrew Jackson. Bottom line, albeit simplistic, those in power/control can do a lot of damage unless/until they’re stopped. Keep that in mind in 2020.

The ghetto in Warsaw was everyone to see, also Polish people bought valuables from Jews living in the ghetto. Black market, Jews needed food and sold gold rings etc and people outside of the ghetto bought them with very low prices. R19 I’ve read about it, too, but R14 I’ve read same thing happened in Ukraine, too. Locals came to see how Jews were shot dead, many women had babies in their hands and those babies were shot first. It is so difficult to understand and how anyone was able to watch without trying to stop it. In occupied countries locals helped nazis. In Was and Remembrance there is a scene where locals are watching when Jews are being murdered. I know it is tv series but those scenes were realisticly filmed.

I've been to Auschwitz/Birkenau. There were a lot of Poles at Auschwitz, including kids on school trips, lighting candles and crying. I asked why and was told that Auschwitz was a camp for Poles too, so the Poles were mourning their own relatives.

Shame on you!!! You don't know what the Poles' situation was like. In Warsaw, the Nazis would impose a random curfew, like at 1:00 in the afternoon. They would close off a street and arrest whoever happened to be on that street at that moment. Then they would ship those people off to labor camps. Imagine living in that kind of fear, where you leave your house in the morning to go to work and you never know if you're going to wind up being shipped off to a labor camp that day. In small towns, the Nazis imposed collective punishment. If just one person was discovered to be aiding anyone (a prisoner, a resistance fighter, etc) the entire town would be punished, usually a brutal death. The towns on the Eastern Front (Poland, Belarus, Ukraine) suffered horrific stuff. But of course you wouldn't hear about any of that from Hollywood because all it does is shove "holocaust" movies in your face day in day out. Watch a movie called "Come and See" from 1985 which was made by Russia and has nothing to do with Jews or their "holocaust". It shows what happened to some small towns in Belarus.

[quote]yet this never came up in conversation when they’d call their relatives in Brooklyn?

You make it sound like the Poles were WhatsApp-ing and Viber-ing with their relatives in the US in 1942.

Poland was invaded by Nazis and occupied by the German military. Its' not like the Nazis were encouraging dissent. Of course, people kept their heads down and tried not to get arrested and killed. Of course.

Regarding the Holocaust, it as important to remember that the Nazis were interrupted in their killing spree. Not finished. Not done. Not by any means. Jews were first on the list and they suffered greatly. But Poland's Catholics believed, with good reason, that they might well be next on the Nazi's hit list. As soon as he had solved his Jewish problem, there would be additional problem populations singled out for extermination. All the more reason to lie low, attract no attention, and hope for the best.

"There were some very fine people on both sides."

^ that should be written on his tombstone.

He shouldn't be allowed a tombstone.

R24, R25 = Ilhan Omar

Every family in Poland has their own ghetto/death camp story. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. It's not always death, but most of the time. Some of you don't know what you're talking about. Go read a history book.

R32 You are right, occupation was terrible for majority of locals who had to live under fear of getting shot or sent to labor camps. But the truth is there were locals who helped nazis in their horrible actions against Jews. How large part of the population helped, no idea. Many tried to helped Jews to escape or going hiding, too. These issues are very complicated. R39 I am sure they have, Poland has the worst European history, occupations for centuries. Polish people suffered very much during wwii.

My dad’s unit liberated a camp in Werl and I think I remember him referring very disparagingly to the civilian locals (specifically with regard to them being complicit). But he almost never spoke abut the war and I may not be recalling it correctly.

R38 = Sheldon Adelson

Watch the movie "Come and See" it's Ukrainian, about the invasion of a small village. Based on the directors life. Shows how people were overwhelmed

People are complicated. The guy who coauthored this book used to help his psychopathic wife stalk me around a college campus. His wife had a sadist sexual obsession with me and was a budding serial killer. Yet he didn't try to help me, he helped his wife to stalk me.

R32 = classic Jew hater and probably Polish, and probably voted Trump because of course

It's just like the GOP that us is complicit to the Orange Idiot's stupidity: too afraid to speak up for what is right.

A lot of people choose to ignore or thought they somehow deserved what was happening.

It's not very different from what's going on near the border. They're arresting and imprisoning thousands, and while they are not systematically killing them, people are dying; but many Americans are either ignorant about it or do not care.

How are Americans turning a blind eye to our government keeping people in cages?

Because they have made it so that those are "bad" people, much like the Nazis did. They convinced the people that the root of their suffering was because of "those people."

R45 Oh don't start with that "anti semitic" crap. That's really just a form of censorship.

What an idiotic thread. And if we want to talk about people picnicing while their neighbors are slaughtered, the Israelis did the exact same thing whenever Gaza is bombed. They picnic on the hill like it's a summer holiday.

An incident from 2014

Front row seats

I went to visit Auschwitz when I was traveling around Europe. It felt extremely in the middle of nowhere. We took a cab between the camps (there were actually two or three) and the cab driver spent the entire ride complaining about how no one ever talks about how the Nazis stole their land. I understood what he was saying, but compared to the Nazis you know gassing entire branches of my family, it felt unnecessary and inappropriate.

From the photog's twitter :

Sderot cinema. Israelis bringing chairs 2 hilltop in sderot 2 watch latest from Gaza. Clapping when blasts are heard.

pic.twitter.com/WYZquV62O7

— Allan Sørensen (@allansorensen72) July 9, 2014

Ok we get it R54, Israelis are awful, tacky people.

As a Jew I don't understand why every discussion on the DL that references anything Jewish immediately gets turned into something about Israel.

Israel accounts for 40% of the world Jewry.

MANY, MANY, MANY Jews do not support what is going on in Israel.

When you continually hold non-Israeli Jews accountable for anything that happens in Israel, you are an antisemite. It's no different than the bigots who would hate a Jordanian Muslim for something bad that happened in Iran. It's tiresome.

[quote]I suffer from migraines

Then stop working in an envrionment where the air isn't clean. That's what causes migraines. You know, that and brain injuries.

environment

Why is nothing done about the horrors of North Korean prison camps nowadays?

Cambodia

Darfur

Rwanda

Bosnia

All in my life time.

It's not like Gaza isn't the first doing the bombing. And you can bet Muslims everywhere celebrate the death of Jews.

One only has to check the story of the Sbarro bombing and the mastermind, Ahlam Tamimi, behind the planning of the attack. Pure evil!

If you are surrounded by people like this, after a while it's all about survival and eliminating your enemy. Antisemitism in Europe is rampant again, the reason for this is middle eastern migrants.

What about us?

Victims of Unit 731

Victims of the Nanking Massacre

Victims of the Bataan Death March

Victims of the My Lai Massacre

Whataboutusism is going to be the death of us all.

R59, damn right! I remember hearing about and seeing footage of emaciated inmates in concentration camps during the Bosnia/Serbia war of the mid 1990s. These were modern-day concentration camps, mind you. This whole idea that war horrors begin and end with Jews in WWII is preposterous. We should post a non-Jewish movie list for all the naive people out there:

Come and See The Killing Fields Hotel Rwanda

for starters

[quote] This whole idea that war horrors begin and end with Jews in WWII is preposterous.

R59 here. That wasn't what I was suggesting. I was saying how if OP can't imagine how people stood by or claimed to not know, we have numerous times since.

What sets the murder of the Jews apart was the planning of it. As awful as the casualties were of non Jewish victims, it was more or less collateral-bombing and deprivations associated with warfare. Almost from the outset, the extermination was meticulously designed and planned for.

OP = Why didn't the villagers just post the details with pics on their Facebook!? I just don't get it!

R65 Oh, they were planning to do much more. It wasn't just about the Jews.

And nobody has mentioned the Armenians...

For the same reasons that many are keeping quiet about Trump. He may not be murdering millions- but he is treating a significant number of asylum seekers (which is not illegal) like camp inmates, including children. He is doing business with murderous dictators- etc. Same phenomenon- to get along, to not make waves- despite the consequences. OP, did you think denying global warming and climate change is much less evil than the holocaust- massive human misery and death put off? Consider the consequences of climate change unchecked on all life on earth (we are already going through a mass extinction of life on earth). Consider that climate change is one the major factors driving Central Americans to our Mexican border.

R65 Not true, the Nazis' original plan was to TRANSFER Jews. The Nazis had considered moving Jews to Madagascar. Plans changed, as they did with other groups as well, such gypsies. Hitler wasn't sure what to do with gypsies at first, since they were technically Aryans. Eventually many of them were murdered in death camps. There's a movie on Youtube called And The Violins Stopped Playing, about a clan of gypsies who flee from the Nazis until they eventually get rounded up and sent to a death camp. Also, in terms of total casualties from the war, only 6 million Jews died compared to 44 million gentiles. I don't see how that 6 million figure trumps 44 million in any shape, way, or form.

POles are weak, stupid peasant trash who rolled over and put it in the air for Nazis. They were thrilled that Jews were one rung lower on the ladder than they were.

Cowardly ugly nation of serfs.

Lots of new haters On here spreading lies about history and Gaza. Anyone paying attention since at least 1947 knows the Arabs are the ones who start all aggression. The hamas charter which is online for all to see spells out their goal of killing all the Jews.

Hamas was enabled by the US and Israel in order to destabilize the Palestinian Authority. Divide & Conquer, eh?

Yeah, the Palestinians before the Nakba, just farming their land, fishing their waters and picking their olives AGGRESSED the Jews invading their homes.

Next R72 is going to pull out the old Zionist chestnut: "A land without a people for a people without a land."

OP, because they were told that if they said anything they'd be shot. many were.

My mother was a Jewish child in Poland during this time. When the German soldiers came to her town, her neighbors were only too happy to point out the Jewish homes to them. Mom, her sister and their mother (my grandmother) climbed on the roof of their home to escape them. They heard the soldiers take my great grandmother (mom’s grandmother) away, presumably to her death. Guess what they heard next? Their Polish neighbors looting their house. They stripped it of everything of any value. They were complicit in all of it.

R75 Were you mother her sister and mother able to escape or hide from nazis? Or maybe the right question is how your mother survived through it all? I also wonder how those Polish neighbors were able to live with themselves? Sending people to death. Just awful.

The Polish were just as anti-Semitic as the Germans, they even murdered Polish Jewish survivors of the holocaust when they returned to their homes.

Ridiculous how y'all want to label Poles as "anti-semitic" and claim that they all were aiding Nazis. So ignorant!!! Just because a nameless, faceless poster on the internet makes such a claim doesn't mean it's actually true. Poland openly welcomed Jews in the Middle Ages, and 1/3 of Warsaw's pre-war population was Jewish. Pray tell, what other European country did that?

R73 now has outed himself as psychotic loon.

Take your meds.

The german nazi freaks got their idea of racial aeyan supremacy when the 2nd reich in the early 20th century were putting black africans in concentration camps. It lead to a genocide of two ethnic groups which were almost wiped put and the german descendants today in namibia live with more lands than germany itself. The nama and herero got no compensation and western powers forced the newly black namibian government to let these invading 20th century german proto-nazis descendants to keep the lands else. Even nazis after 1945, ironically, escaped to sub-sahara Africa Namibia because there were Germans already there and the racist apartheid "afrikaans", they are Dutch and not Africans, aided and protected them when they controlled the place. The Germans nazis started with black african native people first inside Africa and later went after others.

Someone upthread asked how the orderly Germans could've have allowed filth and dead bodies to accumulate at concentration camps. I think that happened towards the end, when things were falling apart.

Poles had been killing Jews for hundreds of years. They were complicit in the killing of the neighbors and often stole their homes and possessions.

That being said, over 6,000 Poles have been awarded The Righteous Among The Nations for saving Jews during the Holocaust. Many were executed, along with their families. There were entire villages in Poland that united to save their Jewish neighbors.

OP I suggest you watch Shoah (1985, directed by Claude Lanzmann, a French Jew who joined the resistance). This film featured Lanzmann traveling throughout Poland to discuss the Holocaust (Shoah) with Poles who were alive during the Holocaust. The findings were grim - most Poles interviewed expressed antisemitic beliefs and demonstrated an indifference to the suffering of Jews

Richard Brody's review in the New Yorker: "the underlying question remains about what those responses were; it’s a question that is addressed, in great detail, in “Shoah.” There, Claude Lanzmann interviews many Poles who lived in towns where the German occupiers had set up extermination camps, and hears from them a significant range of anti-Semitic opinions, regarding the wealth of Jews, the arrogance of Jews, the odor of Jews, ...

"The extermination of Jews in Poland was not at all a secret: it happened in plain view of everyone, it was an absolutely public affair. In the very heart of their cities, the Poles, at first, were present at the installation of the ghettos, they lived with the ghettos and it was, for them, the most natural and least scandalous thing in the world. It went without saying. Later—and I collected innumerable accounts on this subject—they were the impassive witnesses to the actions that were perpetrated before their eyes…"

For those who asked and/or doubted my previous post, mom and family had to flatten themselves on the roof of their home for two days. Once things quieted down, they made their way to the forest and met other Jews that managed to escape, including my grandfather (mom’s father). They built tunnels to hide in. At some point, my grandfather was shot to death by German soldiers who were searching for Jews in that forest. Eventually, mom and her remaining family made their way to Austria and planted themselves outside a displaced persons camp. They didn’t have the right documentation to be admitted. An American soldier who was Jewish took pity on them and got them inside with forged papers. After two years, they came to the US because we already had family here. Obviously, I’ve left a lot of detail out, but that’s the gist of it. I can only speak to my mom’s experience as she related it to me over the years.

R84 Thank you for telling.

How many gay men were exterminated?

I read somewhere that homosexuals were considered lowest of the low, more than Jews. Apparently even Jewish prisoners looked down on them. The pink triangle was a mark of shame. How true is this?

The Poles knew. The Allies knew.

In 2019 we forget how hard it was for anyone to actually believe this was happening. The death camps were sort of the least of it. Before that, the Germans were killing hundreds of thousands of Jews in the former Soviet Union by making them dig trenches, lining them up in front, naked, and machine gunning them. When the German high command (and let's not call them "Nazi" as if that were some odd offshoot of "German") realized this was turning their SS troops into alcoholics with high suicide rates, they came up with Plan B.

Poland was a undescribable during the war. The Germans considered the Poles one step up from Jews, but still subhuman. There was much subtext too, since the Poles lived in lands that the Germans considered there's (google "Danzig Corridor" and "East Prussia"). Jerzy Kosinski's (sp?) The Painted Bird sheds some light onto just how lawless Poland was at that time--if you've ever read "Cold Mountain" about the US Civil War, there's overlap.

But back to Poland. In many villages, the first thing the Germans did was line up the village priest, the nuns, the schoolteacher, the mayor--anyone who might have any authority, put them against a wall in the town square and shoot them. Just in case the townspeople got any ideas. So factor that in to a long history of both antisemitism and the shared history of a country with a sizable Jewish population and you can sort of see why both the worst and best of behavior was on display--why so many Poles risked their lives to save Jews and so many told the Nazis where they were hiding.

Remember too that when Poland was invaded and when the Polish Jews were being killed, the Germans were winning the war. France had fallen, the US was still neutral, the Wehrmacht was at the outskirts of Moscow. So if you were Polish, you sort of figured this was permanent and none of us really have no idea how we would have reacted at that time.

(1/2)

[2/2] The killing of the Hungarian Jews in 1944-45 is where it really gets sick.

Quick back story: The Hungarian fascist government was allied with the Germans, but much to their dismay, did not allow the Germans to kill off their Jews. The Hungarians had the men join slave labor battalions and passed all sorts of antisemitic laws banning them from earning a living, but mass murder was apparently a bridge too far.

In April 1944, the Russians were at the Hungarian border and moving quickly westward so the Hungarian government tried to surrender to them. The Germans, who wanted the oil fields near Budapest for their last stand, were having none of that and quickly invaded Hungary and installed their Arrow Cross allies as the puppet government.

At this point, Adolph Eichmann (the guy the Israelis kidnapped from Argentina in 1960 and hung) was was in charge of killing Jews, decided it was time to start again. He began rounding up Jews in the provinces in May 1944 and sending them to Auschwitz, which had more or less shut down as a killing facility, the Polish Jews having all been wiped out.

The Allies knew what was going on by that point and had considered bombing the tracks to Auschwitz. There are many stories about why they didn’t: they feared that the retribution would be worse and could involve American and British POWs. They knew—and here is where it really gets crazy—that there was much infighting between the SS and the regular army because the army, which was being decimated by the Russians, needed the trains and supplies and tracks and the SS were using it to kill Jews instead.

Fast forward to winter 1945. D-Day happened months earlier and the Allies have retaken Paris. The Russians are near Budapest. And Eichmann is still rounding up Jews and sending them to death camps. For some odd reason the Nazis would look at random pieces of paper from the Swedish, Swiss and Spanish governments saying “this Jew is one of ours” and not kill them.

But otherwise the Germans were killing Jews up until the very end of the war, marching them from Poland to camps deeper inside Germany, shooting the ones that couldn’t keep up. Literally up until the day the Germans surrendered.

^^This is why the majority of Shoah survivors are Hungarians--the Germans didn't have enough time to kill all of them off and those who were not killed right away at Auschwitz were in the camps for less than a year before the war ended. And the Russian Siege of Budapest frustrated Eichmann's plans to kill off all of Budapest's Jews.

But to OP's question, at that point the Allies all knew what was going on and what fate awaited the Jews who were being deported. As I noted, there are still many questions about whether more could or should have been done and what the ramifications of trying to do something would have been. At the time, the Allies were in shock that this was happening. Organized mass murder had never happened before and their fear that the Germans might retaliate by gassing all the American and British POWs might have seemed very real.

R90 I don't understand this notion that Allies should've done something about Jews who were being deported. What special rank did Jews have that the Allies needed to make saving them a priority?

Even though you are just a nasty St0rmfr0nt Troll, R91, the Allies knew the Jewish civilians were being sent to their deaths. It was discussed whether or not bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz or even bombing Auschwitz was worth it to save lives

In those pre-Trumpian days, America and the Allies were still on the side of good.

And of course it turns out (no surprise) that R91 is a Holocaust Denier with multiple other posts to that effect on this thread.

R89 yes, the Holocaust only gets really sick in 1944-45.

r90, give the Caudillo credit. A Jew could go to the Spanish Embassy in Budapest and claim they had an ancestor thrown out by the Inquisition and get Spanish travel papers. Some 60,000 were saved that way.

R92 "St0rmfr0nt Troll" and "Holocaust Denier"? That's what people get called if they don't agree with your "Jews come first above all others" mentality?

Most of them hated Jews and thought the camps were good things.

They were in on it.

Yes R95-- Caudillo (Spain), Wallenberg (Sweden) and Lutz (Switzerland) all saved thousands because the Germans respected those little pieces of paper.

[bold] Q: How do R91 and R96 tie their shoelaces?

A: Into little knotsies [/bold]

Almost three million non-Jewish Poles were murdered by the Nazis. After the Russians (the worst sufferers) and the Jews, the Poles were the people who suffered the most in the Nazi genocide.

R96, PEOPLE COME FIRST.

Do you understand that? The reason why R92 calls people like you out, is because by denying that the majority of people who were murdered, starved to death, or were rescued while starving to death, were in fact, JEWS

Let’s stick to only this event (the Holocaust) and this period of just, in order to keep it simple.

By emphatically arguing that Jews deserved equal treatment in protocols to being rescued to other groups such as Roma or other groups of people who the Nazis vowed as genetically inferior to Germans, you dehumanize, once again, the majority of people who were dehumanized for simply being Jewish.

These people were dying in large numbers, yet like most racists and antisemites who are hung up on Jews being “special”, your thinking plays out as follows: Jews rule the world, because they are “special”. The only time that they weren’t “special”, was during the Holocaust, since they were gassed and killed shoulder to shoulder with others who weren’t Jewish.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the numbers of non Jews who were killed in concentration camps, is equal to each number of groups who were non-Jewish, but also killed. Where does that line of thinking actually take you? What does it do for you? I am genuinely asking, because I am curious to understand why this is such a point of contention for people like you.

I fail to understand what your arguments are attempting to convey.

People were rounded up and ultimately starved to death or killed, and here you are, arguing that other groups were also killed. Ok, AND??? We know this. We don’t deny this, and we ALSO have compassion for others who have experienced racial or religious driven genocides due to oppressive regimes.

A human being who cannot afford compassion to a group of persons due to their Jewish, Roma, or non Aryan ancestry, is a person who is emotionally broken inside.

There is absolutely NOTHING about you, myself, or anyone else that is different than Hews who were exterminated during WW2, other than our religion and/or race. You are not special because you are not Jewish. At any time, you can also find yourself in a situation where you are targeted for abject cruelty, simply because of any ridiculous variance, such as your hair color, or the shape of your fingers. But instead, here you are, claiming that a group of people who were killed for something as arbitrary as a physical trait, didn’t really have it so bad.

Just fuck off. You’re truly one of the biggest pieces of shit on this forum, and my only regret for you is that you must have been raised by a fucking MONSTER or two, in order to be the person who you are at this exact moment in time.

R88 R89 R90 You explained the situation very well. Hungarian Jews was the final proof how much nazi leaders hated Jews. They knew end was near yet they tried to kill all of Hungarian Jews. This was the reason why in Auschwitz was killed more Jews than in Treblinka. R87 Never heard of this. Homosexuals were sent to work camps, at least first. Terrible conditions but still better than Jews were forced to live.

I recently saw a document of French working camp for French political prisoners. Conditions were impossible, hard labor, non stop brutal actions. Hardly anyone survived.

Denmark or Norway, forgot which, paid for nazis to keep them alive but many died in shock where they were taking from their home land. One country (Den, Nor) was able to send majority of its jews to Sweden, the other one paid to nazis.

In Belgium mainly women were able to create very complicated system to hude children to other families.

I'm currently travelling in Germany and, when we were in Berlin, my partner and I visited the Topographie des Terrors exhibit which charts the rise and the fall of the Third Reich, mostly focusing on what happened in Germany between 1932 to 1948 or so, but it gives you a good idea as to how people think under oppressive regimes. It started on the small scale by discouraging people to patronize Jewish-owned businesses, but by the end, walking through the exhibit, I felt I had lost my faith in humanity. In 1944, the Nazi regime went so far to unofficially order extermination of anybody, including Germans, who were deemed to have "bad genes". That included German children - one story that really moved me was a little 4-year old girl suffering from epilepsy who they took away from her parents, hospitalized where she was euthanized, and the parents were told of that when they came to look for her. Similar stories about gay people, people who refused to be conscripted on the basis of religious objections, etc. Not to excuse Eastern Europeans who turned a blind eye on what was happening but people who were already deemed an inferior race probably just shut up and tried to survive minding their own business. Actually, the Croatian Nazi puppet state created extermination camps which made Nazis themselves horrified, they were far more brutal than Poles.

The Jews being accused of being entitled or selfish or unconcerned about anyone else is anti-Semitism in action. Accepting the accusation as serious is the same as trying to reason with any criminal or criminally minded person wanting to defend herself and serve her cause by doubling down.

But I understand R101's statements and information. But the scum who purvey irrational, hate-filled claims of bias and bigotry enjoy the upset and pain they cause.

Thinking about the OP's question, I had a neighbor growing up who lived in a town through which the trains traveled to and from Dachau. She said that they always went to the camp full and always returned from the camp empty, and that the people did not ask questions about it or actively draw conclusions. She was in her teens at the end of the war. Dachau was established in the early 1930s and held political prisoners, later expanding the diversity of its victims.

I know Dachau wasn't Auschwitz, but it was what it was. She even married a former political prisoner, a Serb, who was held there. When the Cold War was on they were being targeted and they escaped East Germany by crossing the border and cutting and climbing under the fences.

She did not feel guilty. To her the war hurt everyone, would kill anyone who challenged it, and you were just trying to survive because you had no personal power. In her town she would prostitute herself to Soviet army and security to keep her family on the good side. She came home one morning with two mismatched Russian boots on and her mother was hysterical. She hated Hitler, hated the Russians, and felt like she could look Jewish people in the eye because, "We all suffered in our way."

It was chilling to hear. And there are lessons for us now, because fascism and totalitarianism are always here. We're at grave risk now, and I hear her arguments being used, as well as the arguments of today's collaborators, defenders, apologists, deniers and "I see nothing" types.

It is the same dynamic taking shape here and in Hungary, Poland, Russia, elsewhere. Even in Israel, where the cynicism and criminality have gutted the honor of the leadership. How absurd is it that Trump/the GOP accept support from the KKK and other racist/anti-Semitic groups, while playing footsie with Israeli intelligence and agents to support the campaign and obtain funding and playing with Netanyahu to distract from corruption scandals by banging the war drum? My Jewish friends are very confused and conflicted - and disgusted.

R87, I'm not sure whether your question is serious or not, but yes, thousands upon thousands of homosexuals were exterminated.

Paragraph 175 (linked) will provide some background.

A Google search will show you the traditional concentration camp garb where the Jews wore a star and the gays had to wear one with a pink triangle.

When I was at Auschwitz and Birkenau several years back, I asked our tour guide why no mention was made in any of the exhibits as to the homosexuals that had been exterminated (as was the case with Poles, Roma, and other groups).

"Oh, its something embarrassing that we don't like to talk about".

I lost it. "We just saw rooms of teeth and buildings full of hair and personal possessions of people murdered, and homosexuality makes you embarrassed??"

R22 That documentary needs to be colourised. Such films and photos thus treated have a very strong resonance.

I hope people understand now the intransigence and refusal of the Israelis to give in. Never again is said for very good reasons.

We currently huge numbers of people enslaved right under our noses here in the US. Trafficking humans has become much more profitable than drugs. It's not hard to see if you look. And I don't hear any hue and cry.

The Norwegian Jews were completely unprepared for deportation and camp life. They had no experience with ghettos, or with black market procurement of food and supplies, racial laws, any of that. Just the long journey alone from Norway killed many of them. The Polish Jews had the ‘advantage’ of ghetto life in that they already had extensive experience with dire living conditions. Being selected for a grueling work detail in Auschwitz, while starving and cold, wasn’t something they were entirely unprepared for. The Norwegians just weren’t equipped and hardened for that kind of existence.

Greek Jews same thing, although they usually died on the way to the camps by being in a cattle car for over a week with no food, water, air, or toilet.

The truth is after the War, Germans should have been exterminated from the planet. And Russian should have been nuked into submission.

The anti Jewish Kielce pogrom took place after the war, in Poland, in 1946. Leading me to believe that there were plenty of Poles who didn’t care too much.

[quote] Get off your butt and read a little history and inform yourself of the range of issues related to the holocaust .

This. It's scary how many people seem to rely on DL for basic knowledge of history. Fucking get some books and READ, OP (and watch, too - there are plenty of good documentaries relating to the Holocaust). Don't rely on clusterfuck DL threads like this one.

Again, my tour guide in Saint Petersburg in 1993 said that Hitler and Stalin were both homosexual and murdered tens of millions of people to keep their secret.

How does murdering tens of millions of people keep the secret of being a big swish?

I recall my family in New England calling Florida in the 1960s. There was a delay in transmission on both sides, and it was hard to hear. And it was very expensive. The kids were always told to leave the room or be very very quiet during the rare long distant calls my parents made or received.

So, during WWII, before the US entered the war, there weren’t a lot of calls from Europe to Brooklyn. Telegrams, maybe. Oh, also, IIRC, the British cut the international Atlantic cables so that communication had to pass through the UK.

I saw a tv program where a German crew interviewed a German woman about her experience during the war. They surprised her with a copy of a written complaint she filed with the Gestapo about her neighbor. Apparently the neighbor was a woman who had only butch women friends, and who didn't respond to the Heil Hitler greeting. The neighbor was taken away, never seen again.

I further saw that the Gestapo were few in numbers, and relied on civilians to report on each other.

SMH at OP and R114

If only there was some way to learn about the existence of transatlantic phone service in the 1940s.... especially from rural Poland to the US....

Or this:

[quote] The first commercial radio-telephone service between New York and London opened in February 1927...From that date until the laying of the first submarine telephone cable in 1956, radio was the only means of sending speech across the Atlantic.

Thank you to those who recommended books and movies on the subject.

Aside from the few idiots, this has been an interesting discussion and I appreciate the stories about family members recollections.

A question about the immigration camps in the US. A serious question. How can we help these people? Either by storming the camps, secretly getting supplies to them or something. Calling the useless twats in Congress does NOTHING. They don't even answer the phone anymore.

I want to help. I am physically far removed from the border, my Spanish is rusty but I want to do something besides call, write and march. I am ready to storm these camps and get these kids out.

Video of neighboring Germans forced by the Allies to tour the camps after the war. Skip to 16:00 if you’re in a hurry. I think they knew the Jews were treated harshly, but probably didn’t believe it was as bad as it was.

In Schindler’s List, some of the Jewish prisoners in work camps didn’t believe there were extermination camps. Because it was too awful to believe, and because they though the Germans needed them as slave laborers.

That's the thing R119

It's very hard to judge from a 2019 perspective what people knew, what they knew but couldn't admit to themselves was true, etc.

The horror of the Shoah is how systematic and organized it was.

No other genocide was as well documented or carefully planned.

The Germans kept lists of everything. Had pseudo-scientific rationales for everything-- killing gays kept degenerate genes from replicating

German women marched groups of small children to the gas chambers to be killed because that was on their worklist for that day and the children's usefulness had been examined and deemed to have run its course.

Having never even considered anything on that scale to be possible, I think people just shut their minds to it, convinced themselves that what they could see happening wasn't because to do otherwise would force them to confront how evil an entire nation could be.

Thank you R102

The metaphor a professor of mine once use, which is sort of apt, is to imagine what it would have been like had the Confederate Army, towards the end of the American Civil War, just marched all of their slaves out to the fields and shot them, rather than let the Union Army free them. And if they had succeeded in murdering 70% of the slave population before Lee surrendered.

There was a foreign language movie released in the last couple years about some German soldiers who were forced to clear a beach of mines after the war. The soldiers were boys of about 14-16, I’d guess. Hitler’s last enlisted soldiers. The Danes didn’t intend on the Germans getting hurt, but weren’t overly worried about it if they were, either.

I think after so many years of German occupation and death all around, people’s values were lowered.

Another movie I saw, based on events, revolves around the German women of Berlin, IIRC, who had married Jewish men before the Nuremberg laws forbid it. The NAZIs left the men alone through most of the war, but then rounded them up and kept them in the local Gestapo headquarters. The German women rebelled and held a protest out front. I don’t remember how long it took, but the Jewish husbands were eventually released.

I remember learning about that R123, it was momentous for other reasons too--it was one of the first real signs of internal resistance to the government in Germany. (There was the White Rose movement in Munich, but those were students. There were middle class, middle aged German women.)

Germans thought of Berlin they way Deplorables think of NY or LA and the Nazis were less popular in Berlin than in the rest of the country.

Side note: Most German Jews actually escaped the Shoah. They had 6 years from the Nazi rise to power to the start of WW2 to try and get out of the country and about 60% of them did. Jews in the rest of Europe did not have that luxury and were trapped.

The Allies used the German POWs and civilians to clean up the camps after the war, including digging graves. I’ll bet the Germans were afraid they’d be put into the camps themselves.

The Rosenstrasse movie I referenced in R123 is in German, fyi.

[quote] R2: The public was told the camps were for SAFETY!

Exactly like flight attendants claim to be there to ensure our safety.

Why are flight attendants there?

R127, they used to be there to ensure our comfort. Today, they can be heavy handed and say it’s to ensure our safety, when safety is t at stake and it’s really just to make their own job easier. I’ve seen videos online when they are crushing a passenger revolt of some kind, and they demand that other passengers either stop filming them or face arrest. That’s not about safety.

In any event, I was trying to be funny.

When I read through this, I can’t help but be reminded of what kind of man Trump is, and what they are doing with immigrants.

No one can believe it’s really as bad as has been reported.

It’s so far away.

I can’t be bothered making a fuss over it.

They deserve what they get for breaking the law.

I have more urgent matters to think about...

A “foreign language movie.” 😂😂😂

There are some really fascinating accounts of German Prisoners of War who were imprisoned in the United States during the war. Two things that struck me:

1. They said the American guards treated them with courtesy (and great food) until newsreels and newspaper accounts of the American liberation of Ohrdruf/Buchenwald and the Russian liberation of Auschwitz were disseminated in early 45. They said the difference was night and day....the guards stopped smiling, even spat at them.

2. The camps offered classes on mechanics, accounting, business basics, and the like. These were considered treats and the Germans could continue with the classes unless they had bad behavior. Overwhelmingly the prisoners took the classes because at the end of the war, each was given a piece of paper saying they had completed a given course, which they could then use to show to potential employers in post-war Germany.

oh and No. 3: When the prisoners landed in some East Coast port, and if the destination was in the South such as Texas, they were placed in better carriages than the segregated ones that paying black American customers they were put in.

R131 there were German POWs imprisoned in the IS? Why? That seems unlikely, but I’m no history expert.

R133 There were over 700 camps in the U.S.....housing almost half a million German POWs.

Here's a former POW describing his experience in a Texas camp.

It was a safe place to keep them. You didn’t have to worry to much about them escaping and rejoining the German military. And there was plenty of food in the US. Britain had rationing into the mid 1950s, IIRC. A lot of them worked on farms.

Come on, R106, anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, especially those in the Gaza Strip, is horrific. Absolutely inhumane.

And also knows that Israel uses its friends in the US to influence the US congress to fight, or pay for, or provide weapons, or all, for Israel's wars.

Really, stop. We are about to attack Iran for Israel, just like we attacked Iraq for Israel.

Hi Josef!

A very large % of Holocaust victims in Israel live, or lived until they died, under the poverty line.

Shlomo at R137 and the government of Israel are perfectly willing to use Holocaust victims for propaganda points but can't be bothered to treat them decently.

[quote] A survey in 2015 found that of the roughly 189,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel, about 45,000 are in poverty.

Polish right wing government and parliament have made illegal to even suggest Polish back then had anything to do with the Holocaust. Accusing Polish may lead to criminal charges. Polish people voted the same party into a power the second time.

Why are the gay victims if the holocaust never mentioned? Even on this thread they have been ignored. There were thousands sent to camps yet we sweep it under tue rug like it never happened.

R137 Josef perfectly illustrates why there always must be a safe haven for Jews.

^^^ R138, not R137^^^

And now the US puts babies in concentration camps and you do nothing

Why do you think that the Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Iranians, Name Israel's Enemy-of-the-Day Here, should pay for what the Germans and other Europeans did?

What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is criminal, and yet you, R141, deflect to a time and place that the Palestinians had nothing to do with to justify Israel's heinous treatment of the Palestinians.

Do gay men not care about the homosexual victims, or are we just in denial?

R98 (Your Millenial Friend) Thank you for your posts - you are incredible.

And R101 I also love you.

R140 Memorial at Dachau

Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and others---though it is not cricket in the US to say it---were collaborators and willing murderers of their Jewish neighbors to the extent that the Nazis didn't need to send many of their own to those areas.

R88 r89 r90 thanks for your informative posts. You are quite well read on the subject. And for the posts complaining that the discussion focuses too much on Jews, no one is stopping you from discussing the harm done to other ethnic and minority groups during ww two. These things should be discussed in full. But the reality is that none of these things would have happened if it weren't for Nazis psychotic animosity towards Jews,to the point that they were willing to destroy Europe to satisfy their pathology.

R124 I'm not entirely sure if this is correct but I vaguely remember reading that another factor was that German Jews were wealthier than eastern European Jews and thus stood a better chance of escape (ie money and resources to leave the country.)

R123 I think that must have been Rosenstrasse that you saw

The children in Trump's Border Camps aren't even the worst part of the story.

The most evil ICE action was transporting children across the country in the dead of night to be given to alleged "foster families" of whom we now have zero record.

Mass kidnapping. Child trafficking. Say it for what it is.

There exist photos of one such moment when three young immigrant girls are shown being led somewhere on a dark NYC street by two women to go knows where.

Those missing girls, and maybe hundreds or more like them, can never see their mothers again, never see their home or school or cousins or friends ever again.

Nor will their loved ones ever see them again, desperate and forever to mourn.

We have had evil done in our name, and there is no turning our collective face and soul from that truth.

R152 That is chilling

Fuck off John. This is a subtle Holocaust denial post.

[quote] But the reality is that none of these things would have happened if it weren't for Nazis psychotic animosity towards Jews,to the point that they were willing to destroy Europe to satisfy their pathology.

Europe, pathologically driven by 1,700 years of Catholic Church fomented Jew hatred, enthusiastically enabled and collaborated in the genocide of Europe's Jews. It would not have happened if, like Denmark and Bulgarian, Europe would have refused to cooperate. But Europe did cooperate. Most willingly.

R154, To whom are you speaking? I surely hope not me, r148/r152. I have read much on the Holocaust, from a very young age. I have taken high school students to Dachau.

Deniers are insane, sick, and beyond bigoted. The Nazis kept such meticulous records (and stores of grotesque "loot" as hair, gold from teeth, shoes, etc.) of their murderous depravities that to claim anything other than what the perpetrators themselves claimed is to display utter lunacy.

When the Nazis 1st invaded Poland authority figures and leaders were rounded up and shot including the Catholic teachers, local government officials, lawyers, and basically anyone who could lead a protest.

Serbians were often the concentration camp authorities.

Maybe the HOAs forbid such talk?

[quote]Why won't this thread stay in my "Watched Threads" window?

Mildred broke DL and won't fix it.

R157 Apologist rubbish! Poland, vicious Jew haters of long standing, was only too happy to collaborate with the extermination of Jews. It is no coincidence that most of the Nazi extermination camps were in Poland.

[QUOTE] most of the Nazi extermination camps were in Poland

ALL of the Nazi extermination camps, the camps designed for efficient industrial mass murder, were in Poland. Belzec, Chelmo, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Auschwitz.

R10 Is that a real question? If you were not useful I'm pretty sure you got a bullet in the head. Easier than to deal with sick people.

Actually R161, R157 is correct.

I had noted this at R88 -- one of the Germans tactics was to eliminate anyone with any authority or leadership in Poland, on a local level so as to make it easier to control the populace. And since the Germans were winning the war and seemingly unstoppable during the worst of the Polish occupation, it proved quite effective as did the notion of reminding that Poles that the Germans were their masters now--the Poles needed curry favor with the master in order to survive

That is why you had both the worst and the best behaviors on display simultaneously. Because contrary to Datalounge dogma, groups of people are not uniformly one way or another.

Many Poles had excellent and close relationships with their Jewish neighbors and others were vicious antisemites.

Polish Jews were not a monolith either. Many still lived very separate lives in shtetls--small villages--similar to Fiddler on the Roof. They spoke Yiddish and looked very different from the majority of poles.

But many were influenced by the Enlightenment (Haskala) movement in the 1800s and dressed the same as everyone else, spoke Polish and lived in cities and towns where they held a variety of jobs, even served in the Polish Army.

It all made for a very complex situation in the years 1939-44., where, as noted, there were both the worst and the best behaviors on display.

Thank you R149 and others. I was, as you probably guessed, a history major in college.

R150--having more money than Polish Jews certainly played a role in the earlier years but many families saw their finances decimated by the Nuremberg Laws because they could no longer work. There was also a concerted effort by the US Jewish community to rescue German Jews--think of the Kindertransports where Jewish children were sent to England to get out of Germany, (that is how Dr, Ruth got out) --but it was to escape extreme prejudice at that point (1938) not certain death--the decision to murder the Jews came much later. Remember too that in the 1930s, when many German Jews were leaving, there was no war on. For the Polish and Russian Jews, there was nowhere to go, no matter how rich they were.

R24, like Barry and Honey Sherman... I don’t know exactly what happened to them, but I’m convinced it had to do with their political involvement and lots and lots of money.

But back to the Holocaust...

Finally--those of you asking for something to read on the topic, the Maus books, but Art Spiegelman are excellent

They're graphic novels, with animals standing in for people, but historically accurate and do a great job of telling the story of what life was like

R164 Over 90% of Poland's Jews were exterminated. And after the Holocaust, when the few Jews who survived returned to Poland, hundreds more were butchered by those Poles who had "excellent and close relations" with Jews. See the Kielce Pogrom for details.

To instill fear in all of its conquered peoples, Germans often exacted severe retribution for Germans killed due to partisan activities. There was usually some mathematical formula, i.e. 5 locals killed for every German killed. And if you happened to be anywhere nearby, you were SOL, whether or not you had knowledge of the incident.

Yes R168

I am agreeing with you than many Poles were indeed vicious antisemites and there has been much written about Poland's problem of "antisemitism without Jews" in the post-WWII era.

90% were killed because the Germans were there for over 5 years and what Zyklon B and bullets didn't accomplish, starvation disease often did.

That said, there are more Polish names in The Hall of the Righteous in Yad VaShem than those of any other country. Only the Netherlands comes close. [Yad VaShem is the Shoah museum and memorial in Israel, it's also the largest repository of information.)

So there were Poles who acted nobly despite the fact that they and their entire families would have been killed if caught. They were clearly not the majority of the population

R152, there is some sinister fuckery going on with that. Believing that they’re being adopted into nice Christian families is like believing your old dog is now living on a farm upstate.

This might be off-topic, but in the general vein of shitty things happening to marginalized people...My sister sent me a FB post on her feed. A woman soliciting a “host family” for an undocumented tenth grade girl from Mexico. Maybe she meant well, but my sister and I were horrified. Maybe she’d be “placed” with a nice family, but what are the chances she’d find someone who wouldn’t take advantage of her. Even in a nice family, she might wind up being a sort of indentured servant, “babysitting” or “doing chores” or worse. Maybe she’d be better off than in a Homeland Security camp, who knows.

R169 And yet the Danes banded together, refused to cooperate with the Nazis and their enablers and saved 7,200 Jews. Poland, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. collaborated, not out of fear, but out of agreement.

R170 For every one humane Pole, there were 10,000 happily handing over those reviled Jews to the Nazis and their enablers. Your attempts mitigation and revisionism are ludicrous.

The Final Solution was started in late 1941. 2 years after the war started in 1939. It's a bit academic to single out the systematic slaughter of Jews specifically, if you consider Aktion T4 - the mass murder of the mentally ill and sick - started in 1939. The Nazi madness was up and running from the get go. The Soviets starved to death millions of Ukranians and millions of Kazakhs in the 30s. Ottomans had their genocides in the teens. So the Nazis were not uniquely new and evil in their deadly genocide, which was very much a political strategy from the start of the 20th Century.

Otto Frank chose to stay on the continent, moved the family from Germany to The Netherlands. If only he had the foresight to go to The UK instead, that is if they were making visas easy in those early days. The Dutch royal family made their way out, I’m sure they would have been on display as puppets and then would have been seen as accomplices to the Holocaust.

R172 seems really committed to the notion that the Poles are the Worst Humans Ever. This is not uncommon with an older generation of American Jews.

In terms of Allies not bombing Auschwitz in late 1944/early 1945 and the Nazi commitment to killing Jews up to the end, I just remembered this (I had forgotten the name) It's a very touching story:

One of the only Americans in the RIghteous Gentiles at Yad VaShem is Sgt. Roddie Edmonds of Knoxville, TN. He was the lead NCO at the Stalag 9 POW camp in January 1945 when the German commander asked him to identify the Jewish American soldiers and have them show up for roll. Edmonds refused and had all the American soldiers show up when the Germans asked for the Jews. The German commander put a pistol to his head and threatened to shoot him if he didn't turn overe the Jewish soldiers, but he refused, telling them they'd have to kill all of the Americans and the Germans backed down.

One of the soldiers he saved was Brooklyn-born Sonny Fox, who went on to host "Wonderama" a popular NYC-area childrens show I'm guessing many of you know

R175, I remember “Wonderama”! I didn’t know that part of the story. Thanks for sharing it.

R175 All it takes is for people to shout STOP, and the madness will not happen, just like Ronnie.

“STOP!!!”

Yeah ok

R178 You're so fucking dumb you should be shot and mankind would not miss you.

YourMillenialFriend is very committed to her pro-Polish, they weren’t all bad, there’s bad Jews too, stance. That makes sense if she truly IS a millennial, because we all know they hate Israel and support Palestine first and foremost in that region’s struggles.

There were absolutely German POWs scattered throughout the US. My hometown in rural Florida had one, and the imprisoned soldiers were sent out to pick oranges. My grandfather, dirt poor and also an orange picker, would make casual conversation with them as they worked. My grandmother would not speak to them.

*my hometown in Florida had one POW CAMP.

Honestly, if you want a good perspective of the Polish attitudes toward the Jews during the Holocaust, you should check out Agnieszka Holland's harrowing Holocaust film, IN DARKNESS.

It's a TRUE STORY about a Polish guy who assisted a bunch of Jews living in a Polish sewer during the war. It's NOT for the faint of heart.

*SPOILER ALERT* The real-life guy who helped the Jews was hit by a truck in 1946, a freak accident that killed him. His Polish neighbors said it was God's punishment for when he helped the Jews.

There were German POW camps not far from where I grew up on suburban Long Island, NY. One was on the grounds of a massive mental hospital called Edgewood, which no longer exists. In fact, they repurposed the buildings rather than build a ‘camp’ structure. They also kept some at the other massive psychiatric hospital Pilgrim State.

Did you know that Patton left Germans in charge of the camps he liberated? He hated Jews and he hated the idea of repatriations too. He thought they were filthy and the Germans honorable and organized.

[QUOTE] [R178] You're so fucking dumb you should be shot and mankind would not miss you.

I’m reacting to R177, who says ones just needs to say “STOP!” and the injustice of the world will go away

You know the famous gateway of Auschwitz Birkenau where the rail tracks enter? The trains never entered the camp like that before the Hungarian deportations. They came in via a different way and had to walk into the camp along a long paved sidewalk, else they were put on trucks. The tracks into the camp proper were built (via prisoner labor) in order to facilitate the murder of the Hungarian Jews, because they knew there would be hundreds of thousands inundating the camp and they needed things speeded up.

[quote]seems really committed to the notion that the Poles are the Worst Humans Ever. This is not uncommon with an older generation of American Jews.

R175 Poles ARE the Worst Humans Ever. They spent centuries discriminating against and persecuting Jews, gleefully participated in Jewish genocide and then have the audacity to protest "but Poles weren't all THAT bad and Poles were victims too". Passing the "Holocaust Law" simply re-enforced that Poles are indeed THE WORST.

[QUOTE] Fuck off John. This is a subtle Holocaust denial post.

Who? Why is there a John accuser on this thread?

As per usual, the black-and-white thinkers are here to rail against those capable of nuanced thought.

Most of the Jewish people who left Europe once the Nazi's began to seize power were the poor or middle class ones. The rich felt that they were an integral part of society and would be needed by the German's to help run things. Plus many of them did not want to leave their homes, businesses and possessions. By the time they realized their mistake, it was too late. Read the book "The Hare With Amber Eyes". It details the story of the Ephrussi family, one of the richest Jewish families in Austria. They were related to the Rothschilds. The day the Germans crossed over into Vienna, soldiers came to the Ephrussi palace and took the artwork because Hitler wanted it for the museum he planned. Also, over night, the currency was converted to Reichsmarks which Jews could not own. People went to bed as millionaires and woke up to find they were penniless. Also, see the "The Woman in Gold". That is a very accurate portrayal of what happened.

There’s an old black humor joke:

“Why didn’t the Jews just leave?”

“Because they didn’t know what to do with their pianos.”

Tangential, but the Ringstraßenpalais of the Ephrussi is astounding, for a late 19th Century built family residence in a large city. Immense fanciful pile!!!!

This is true R190. Many of the extremely wealthy families did not leave at first for all the reasons you stated. Plus many felt it was a "phase" and believed that the Junkers, the old Prussian aristocracy, would be able to control Hitler. (They could not, though they did engage in many of the unsuccessful later plots of assassinate him.)

But as the German government took away their houses, factories, stores, etc., they were often no longer rich, or at least no longer upper middle class (the truly rich had money in Switzerland if they were smart.)

Of course the Germans generally made them pay to get out and did not allow Jews to leave with more than a few dollars. (Similar to what happened to Jews in countries like Iraq and Libya when they were forced out in the 1950s.)

America and Britain knew about the concentration camps.

There were many non-Jewish Poles in Dachau who were considered "political rebels". Many people don't seem to know that Poles besides Polish Jews were sent there if it was uncovered that they were aiding anyone working against Nazi invasion.

r191 Black and White humor.

Holocaust=$cam that has looted Germany of billion$!

My Austrian, non-Jewish uncle was sent to Dachau in September, 1940. Categorized as "asocial," he was forced labor. He died in November of that year.

r194, it was my understanding that Russia was assigned the bombing of Poland at Tehran, and the death camps with it. The Germans had the reputation of repairing the bombed railroads by the next day. And the first priority of American and British airpower was the allied troops fighting.

[quote] R140: Why are the gay victims if the holocaust never mentioned? Even on this thread they have been ignored.

I did!

R167 The Maus books were excellent.

Italy under the Mussolini also dragged its feet (foot?) about persecuting Jews. It wasn’t until Germany occupied parts of Italy that Italian Jews were systematically attacked.

The King of Italy’s daughter wound up in Buchenwald and died there. The Bavarian royal family were in Dachau or Matthausen, forget which. One of them came out of it completely fucked up and she never recovered.

I find the images of pogroms on the city streets of Poland the especially affecting.

That poor woman in the middle pic.

Setting children on them.

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The Nazis recording what's happening - for their pleasure.

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Racial laws would have made it illegal for a Gentile to have sex with a Jewess, so rapes were probably not a usual pogrom activity. So beating, murder, humiliation, looting, etc. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the women were raped occasionally.

All these stupid and racist theories when all that is needed is dehumanization of a group. You prove a group is your enemy and is here to get you with false flags and what not (literally what the Nazis did and the US government still does ) and you'll have free volunteers. There's a reason lynching of rapists is common still in Latin America. It could be back to the US soon. There's never too much civilization. We failed as a species.

forced to wear the Jewish star in Berlin.

'What if you had a migraine in a concentration camp? How did you shovel ditches or fell timber for 14 hours while in such pain? '

Lmfao, snowflake! Anyone not fit for work was shot dead.

The Nazis had their Joy Division, local Polish or German beauties conscripted to serve the Reich as hoes.

Female Gentile prisoners, usually Poles or Ukrainians, sometimes lucked out and got a position working in the brothel. They had better food and better clothing. Jewish make prisoners weren’t allowed brothel privileges, Gentiles only.

[quote] R184: Did you know that Patton left Germans in charge of the camps he liberated? He hated Jews and he hated the idea of repatriations too. He thought they were filthy and the Germans honorable and organized.

I can’t comment on what Patton thought, but I have some questions about this. Who were these Germans? Germany had the SS; the Gestapo; other NAZI party members; regular army; conscripts and volunteers from other countries; regular police; and civilians.

I would find it hard to believe that the US allowed the Gestapo, the SS, or other NAZI party members to take charge of the camps. It would not surprise me if Patton left regular army or police in charge of the camps, until its captives could be identified and safely relocated.

I ask because some of you may remember the chaos in Iraq immediately after Gulf War II, after the US disbanded the Iraqi organizations that were responsible for keeping order, and neglected to implement a replacement for them. It was anarchy. .

I also recall reading about the thousands of newly freed American Black slaves following Sherman through Georgia. This created problems for Sherman. The Union army didn’t have food for thousands of followers, and couldn’t risk tending to these followers when their job was a military one, not a humanitarian one.

I further recall how America initially demanded the “unconditional surrender” of Japan, but later agreed to terms with the condition that the Emperor remain as a figurehead. I have no doubt that the US thought the Japanese would be easier to control with the Emperor, rather than without him.

My point is that, especially in wartime, civil order is necessary, and it makes a difference which Germans had Patton left in control.

Oh, Patten probably didn’t have the troops to spare, to take charge of the camps. His men were fighters, not humanitarians.

Also, everyone in the camps had to be identified to make sure that war criminals weren’t hiding among the prisoners, and to make sure that “legitimate” criminals, like sodomites, murderers, and thieves, weren’t inadvertently released. I read that Gays were not released by the allies.

Finally, the area German civilians needed to be protected from retribution by the newly release camp survivors.

[QUOTE] German civilians needed to be protected from retribution by the newly release camp survivors.

Bullshit. Those civilians (who knew) deserved retribution.

To the poster who asked who I meant when I said Patton left the Germans in charge, I should have clarified. He left the Kapos in charge. These weren’t always German criminals though, they could easily been Polish, Ukrainian etc

I saw a movie once, which I don’t recall the name of, when a German General was called a NAZI. The general countered by saying that he was he was regular army, not a NAZI party member, or in the SS, and was actually a monarchist. He added that there were Americans who hated FDR, and supported the Republican opposition to him, but who still were loyal to their country, as he was loyal to Germany.

The German General added that he went to military school in the Southern US, and that the NAZI treatment of Jews was, in his opinion, not much different than the way Southerners treated Blacks.

I thought it was an interesting scene.

Patton's problems came from the fact that his father ran for the Senate from California as a DEMOCRAT.

R87. That is not true. The Nazis had various groups they wanted to be rid of, but none were treated as badly as the Jews. Jews were humuliated, and tortured in additiin to being murdered.

[quote] R219: Bullshit. Those civilians (who knew) deserved retribution.

With practically every German after the war claiming to have always opposed the NAZI regime, it would have been impossible to identify exactly who knew, and were in a position to oppose them, from who those who didn’t know.

Besides, the US rejectes “collective guilt”, calling it a war crime. The NAZIs believed in collective guilt, especially when it came to blaming Jews. But allowing the Camp prisoners to, potentially, slaughter the people in the surrounding towns, was not in the US interest.

Actually, the Lithuanians were far worse. They offered to do the killing for the Germans. 96% of Lithuanian Jews were murdered. And Lithuania has never apologized.

I watched another move recently, based on a true story, where a factory owner, a German in Czechoslovakia, I think, was very good to his employees and supported the resistance.

The town mayor, who had access to birth records, found that the wife of his factory-owning friend was born Jewish, even though she was raised as a Christian in an orphanage. They mayor told the Gestapo, and they took the women away. I think she survived that war. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the kindly German factory owner was turned on by his employees and neighbors, tortured, and lynched, because he was German.

Please don’t parrot the dumb AOC and call our detention centers for immigrants “concentration camps. Makes me sick to hear it. My father was in a concentration camp and my young uncle died of typhus in the Budapest ghetto. All of these places were infested with fleas, lice and rats and had raging epidemics. My father dug ditches and laid train tracks for the Nazis in the Austrian mountains. It was freezing. He had only the clothes on his back, a bowl of soup a day, and no place to wash, so my father bathed himself every single day in the snow and ice. The commandants were sadists and made inmates do things like ridiculous exercises just for their own amusement.

[quote] “Many survivors have testified that men with pink triangles were often treated particularly severely by guards and inmates alike because of widespread biases against homosexuals.”

This statement from the US Holocaust Museum.

[quote] R226: Please don’t parrot the dumb AOC and call our detention centers for immigrants “concentration camps”.

Yeah, it can’t possibly be as bad as has been reported. It’s just propaganda, intended to divide us and undermine the government.

Said the neighbors of Buchenwald.

Well, what are YOU doing about it, r228, since you are a believer in Buchenwald at the Border? Tell us. We have no idea what one can actually DO.

Actually, R226, I could not imagine the detention centers to be as bad as Buchenwald, but we shouldn’t compare one evil against the other. They’re both evil, and that’s enough to know.

As far as the phrase “concentration camp”, it originated in 1897 when the "reconcentration camps" were set up in Cuba by General Valeriano Weyler. They’ve been used through history and I think the term can be used appropriately even when not for WWII camps in Germany.

[quote]some homosexuals were also victims of cruel medical experiments, including castration. At Buchenwald concentration camp, SS physician Dr. Carl Vaernet performed operations designed to convert men to heterosexuals: the surgical insertion of a capsule which released the male hormone testosterone. Such procedures reflected the desire by Himmler and others to find a medical solution to homosexuality.

Sounds like...

Screw you, R226.

Children are dying, they have no hot food, no chances to bathe or change their clothes and have no where to sleep.

They are being treated INHUMANLY by this fucking government. CHILDREN.

FUCK YOU.

[quote] R229: Well, what are YOU doing about it, [R228], since you are a believer in Buchenwald at the Border? Tell us. We have no idea what one can actually DO.

I’m open to suggestions, R229. I don’t feel like I have any power, myself, to influence events, but I do condemn Trump, and his liars/enablers at Fox. I did support Hillary and will support the Democratic nominee for President even if it’s a yellow dog.

My comment at R228 was directed, in part, towards those above who assert that the German people must have all known what was happening in their camps. We simply can’t know, what they knew.

Exactly like how people today think about our treatment of immigrants at the border. Maybe some day, there will be books written about how American’s must all have known, since the atrocities at the border are all over the media.

It also reminds me of how we used torture at Guantanamo. Implemented by sadists with no education or experience with interrogation, providing no useful info, and actually being counterproductive. Too many in the general public either didn’t care, didn’t believe it, or believed the prisoners there deserved torture.

The Polish people and the Germans are disgusting pigs. They knew what was happening in those camps and didn't give a shit because it gave them a chance at a better life.

The interesting thing is they have not changed one bit since then..

[quote]Please don’t parrot the dumb AOC and call our detention centers for immigrants “concentration camps"

By the strict definition of that term, they are, in fact, concentration camps. And the reason that we're spending so much time talking about them is because she called them out for what they are. Not to mention that you have a Justice Department lawyer actually arguing that the government doesn't have to provide basic necessities like a warm place to sleep, a bed, a toothbrush, or soap.

And like many such concentration camps over the centuries, the cruelty is the point. This is being done to children in our name by our own government.

R234, I think Germany has changed considerably. There were huge anti war protests in Germany prompted by US/Soviet interaction. They are not a militaristic people today. I also see no evidence of society-wide racism as was present until 1945.

I recall growing up in the 1960s with the widely accepted fiction that the German People were different from the NAZI Party. I think the German people came around to widely support the NAZI Party when they were, well, making Germany Great Again. This fiction was created because it simply wasn’t possible to prosecute an entire country. And the Allies wanted to avoid the failure of the WWI peace treaty, which was too harsh and just perpetuated resentment and prompted another war.

“The boy in the striped pajamas” was a decent movie. The pajamas were the camp inmate uniform, of course.

I think R236 is asleep at the wheel

Also for R236

re the pictures above from the Lviv pogrom - Lviv is now ground central for the "new Ukraine", which was birthed by the west, by western officials, JEWISH western officials(Victoria Nuland Kagan being the most notorious, passing out cookies on the Maidan, but using actual Ukrainian NEONAZIs circa to overthrow the government and act as shock troops to their own recalcitrant countrymen, kidnapping and assassinating anyone who ws against the takeover. And then awarding thesenazi leaders with cabinet posts. Now, several years later, the newly elected president is a stand-up comedian, much like our own unqualified reality TV leader. And the brave US-controlled Kiev regime is still shelling its own countrymen in the east.

But no outcry over ANY OF THAT because the only people to die were Eastern Ukrainians who are seen as subhuman by the superior Western Ukrainians. Anyway, Jewish oligarchs now control the country(and colluded with Joe Biden's son). Crickets, about all of that. The abused became the abuser yes, but not just in Israel.

LVIV POGROMS, in WW2?? How about the ODESSA POGROM in 2014 where an entire gov. building was set on fire by bussed-in Israeli dual-citizen-oligarch-funded NAZI thugs and everyone in it died? More crickets.

What about the POGROMS on Yemen that happen every other day, facilitated by the US who is in charge of basically everything technical in the Saudi military? etc

[quote]The Polish people and the Germans are disgusting pigs. They knew what was happening in those camps and didn't give a shit because it gave them a chance at a better life. The interesting thing is they have not changed one bit since then.

The Americans also knew what was happening and didn't bomb the camps.

When information about Auschwitz reached the White House (I saw this in a documentary just this week) someone (can't remember who) said "bury this".

[quote]What about the POGROMS on Yemen that happen every other day, facilitated by the US who is in charge of basically everything technical in the Saudi military? etc

You could fill this page with "what abouts"?

[quote]What an idiotic thread.

^^ From the same poster. A gem.

I have read that the Allies thought the best way to help the Jews of Europe was to defeat the NAZIs as quickly as possible. This meant using air power to hit German military targets and not be diverted to bomb the train tracks at the camps. Tracks the Allies knew would be rebuilt quickly.

Also, bombing wasn’t was very accurate at that time, and there was a possibility of hitting the inmates.

Finally, the Allies feared that their POWs would be held responsible, mistreated, and killed.

Exactly, r245.

"Finally, the Allies feared that their POWs would be held responsible, mistreated, and killed."

They were, especially Allied pilots shot down over Germany as the war neared its end in late 1944-1945. Many of them ended up in Buchenwald.

R247, I heard that about German pilots who bailed out or crashed in Britain. It’s understandable. Especially if your town was just bombed.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

I once knew a woman who was in one of the camps. She had a shrill, unnatural, voice. My mother said she though it was a nervous reaction from having been in the camps.

I had a Dutch friend who was in a Japanese internment camp. I’m not quite sure if that is accurate. He has a Wikipedia entry that says he evacuated Indonesia before the Japanese invaded, so it isn’t clear to me what happened.

R249 Go back to Poland, why stay in a country you hate?

R251: typical, big mouthed, lard-assed Dee-ploorable who refuses to accept the naked truth about his beloved 'Merkah.

Why don't you go back to whatever European shithole sent you here, R251. But leave your motorized scooter here. That's paid for by US taxpayers, including "illegals" you so despise.

The Nazis has a huge slave labor workforce, men AND women prisoners would be marched to the sites where tracks were bombed and simply rebuild them. Or, they could revert to their original plan and shoot them in ravines.

The irony is that Hitler wanted a Germany occupied only by Aryan Germans....yet during his years in office, Germany experienced more non-German, non-Aryans living within its border than at any time in its history. As the war progressed, the need for manpower became astronomical and through forced labor almost 7 million individuals from the conquered lands were shipped in.

Germany was attacked and destroyed because she issued her own debt-free money and refused to allow a privately owned central bank, same as Iran today

That's nonsense, r34.

Half of the Germans were / are Catholic, including Hitler's family and Hitler's professed beliefs.

'History" is written by the victors.

r69 Trump isn't murdering people, yet. But you can bet Steven Miller has a Final Solution tucked away in a drawer somewhere. Why are we allowing Trump to put children in concentration camp where they die from neglect? Why aren't we doing something about that? Are we waiting for gassing? Ovens? Firing squads? Because that's what's coming.

"There are no concentration camps on the border."

I watched a European documentary on the Holocaust on YouTube. A survivor returned to his former home. Not to claim it; he lived in the UK and was a successful businessman...he only wanted to see if his family’s home was still there. He knocked on the door and a man answered. The Jewish man explained that he was visiting and wanted nothing, only to look at the house..the current owner stared at him incredulously and blurted out, “ YOU ARE THE JEW WHO USED TO LIVE HERE! YOU have come back for the money! Well, it’s my house now! Just tell me where you hid it! You Jews are so good at hiding money. Where is it? Where is it?”. Shocked and insulted, the guy turned around and left. The owner then tore the house apart, breaking walls and hacking up floors with an axe. So much damage was done to the house, that is was irreparable. He couldn’t even find anyone who wanted to buy it at a lower price! He was forced to move and the house was demolished.

And no, he didn’t find any money.

STOP LICKING THEM, OP!

That’s a first step.

Oops, wrong thread, sorry.

Boy , you sure embellished that story, R260. You should write fiction.

Not embellished asshole at r263. Are you sure that you mom and dad aren’t blood relatives to one another?

What IS a "not embellished asshole," anyway?

We have recently found out that the camps for the undocumented coming in through the US borders are squalid and filthy. We have no idea what's going on in Guantanamo...yet, most Americans don't particularly care.

Before you say, "It's not the same! These are criminals!" Jews, gays, and others in the intern camps were also considered criminals at the time.

The ONLY reason we give a hoot about Holocaust camps now is Jews have actively kept it an issue in the headlines. In fact, all the genocide laws only came about after much lobbying post WWII. There was tons of resistance for years, even after WWII, to passing anti-genocide legislation.

Unfortunately, people think you can't call anything a concentration camp unless the government is murdering people