Holocaust:True Or False ?

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

The weird thing is that the Japanese,Like most oriental peoples,had no comprehension of Antisemitism.The Germans urged them to persecute and murder Jews in the territories they had conquered but They saw no reason to.

It's true that the Japanese had no history of hatred for Jews, they were however happy just concentrating on torturing and murdering anyone else they came across regardless of race religion or colour.

Hopefully the world will never again see two such inherently evil ideological powers joining together again.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by Wendigo

To this day it just seems astounding that the allies were not aware of what was going on and that more strategic bombing missions to destroy the infrastructure that fed the concentration camps like railways wasn't undertaken. Maybe they knew something was going on but had no idea of the scale or how twisted the Nazi inspired hatred had become.
The German leaders at that time found perfect ideological allies with their even more vicious allies in Japan.

The British knew, maybe not the whole horrendous depravity and scale of the crime, but plenty. It is a terrible pity that RAF Bomber Command was not employed to strike at the Auschwitz railhead and similar targets, though the German railways and roads were targetted on general principles. There may well be pragmatic reasons why the Auschwitz crematoria, gas chambers and railway were never bombed, same as with most if not all of the other concentration camps, but it seems very hard to excuse that decision; for sure, the British side knew that a ghastly crime was being perpetrated there. Bletchley Park had broken the SS codes among many others, and were listening in to concentration camp radio traffic.

The British government did make clear both that it knew about the persecution of Jews (and others) inside Nazi occupied Europe and that it planned to inflict retribution whenever the time came when this could be done. At first the British saw the Nazi occupations as a general crime against the entire occupied population and did not at once catch on to the targetted nature of Nazi racial policies. Speaking in August 1941 after his first meeting with FDR, Churchill commented on Operation Barbarossa:

As his armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of thousands of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale or approaching such a scale. And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks.
We are in the presence of a crime without a name.

The name of this crime had to be invented. Today it is called "Genocide".

But no later than December 1942, the British government was calling attention to the specific crime against the Jewish population of Europe. There was a joint declaration by 11 Allied governments on 17th December 1942, issued in the UK by Anthony Eden, who gave a speech in the Commons in which he read the declaration aloud and explained the circumstances which gave rise to it. In effect, a wholesale extermination of Jewish people was known to be happening, and the British government has stated that it would come looking for the murderers when Germany lost the war. At least to some degree this particular promise was kept and Britain did hang quite a few SS personel for their part in the Holocaust. Her forces also found others and handed them over to face justice in the places where they committed their crimes; Rudolf Hoess being one of the ones tracked down by the British. But the Holocaust was separated from the actual war and not treated as a part of the war, so that military action against the Holocaust machinery was never taken. To my mind, this was a bad misjudgment. But I wasn't there at the time and if I had been, I too might have felt that directly prosecuting the war against Germany had to be the priority.

[SanteeFats]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

The weird thing is that the Japanese,Like most oriental peoples,had no comprehension of Antisemitism.The Germans urged them to persecute and murder Jews in the territories they had conquered but They saw no reason to.

Yeah the Japanese just slaughtered any one regardless of religious orientation or nationality.

[rustler]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

The British knew, maybe not the whole horrendous depravity and scale of the crime, but plenty. It is a terrible pity that RAF Bomber Command was not employed to strike at the Auschwitz railhead and similar targets, though the German railways and roads were targetted on general principles. There may well be pragmatic reasons why the Auschwitz crematoria, gas chambers and railway were never bombed, same as with most if not all of the other concentration camps, but it seems very hard to excuse that decision; for sure, the British side knew that a ghastly crime was being perpetrated there. Bletchley Park had broken the SS codes among many others, and were listening in to concentration camp radio traffic.


Rudolf Hoess being one of the ones tracked down by the British.

Didn't the RAF actually bomb part of Dachau at one point? I seem to recall them bombing a part of it that was making bomb, or V2 components ? Maybe I am imagining this, or possibly it Was another camp?
Also situated at Dachau was the master blade maker, Paul Dingler. who made many of the beautiful dagger blades for the nazi hierachy. The mere mention of the name Dachau, even though he was not in the camp proper, was enough to get him 20 years imprisonment!

Regarding Rudolf Hoess, IIRC., the British forces that finally captured him dressed, again IIRC. orginally as a sailor and finally as a farmer, nearly beat him to death when they finally got him.
Again, IIRC, complaints were actually filed against his brutal treatment after his capture. I think he was finally hanged at Auschwitz in 1947.

[cicciobuki]

Originally Posted by rustler

Regarding Rudolf Hoess, IIRC., the British forces that finally captured him dressed, again IIRC. orginally as a sailor and finally as a farmer, nearly beat him to death when they finally got him.
Again, IIRC, complaints were actually filed against his brutal treatment after his capture. I think he was finally hanged at Auschwitz in 1947.

Didn't Rudolf Hess die in the Spandau prison? In the 80ies?

[rustler]

Originally Posted by cicciobuki

Didn't Rudolf Hess die in the Spandau prison? In the 80ies?

That was Rudolf Hess, the deputy fuhrer, not Rudolf Hoess!

[cicciobuki]

Originally Posted by rustler

That was Rudolf Hess, the deputy fuhrer, not Rudolf Hoess!

Ahhh! I thought it was a typo, sorry

[rustler]

SS-ObersturmBahnführer ( Lt-Col.) Rudolf Hoess was SS camp Commandant at the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.

[Puhbear69]

Originally Posted by SanteeFats

Yeah the Japanese just slaughtered any one regardless of religious orientation or nationality.

And the US have always been nice to the "Japanese" ?

I mean such, who were US-citizens, born in the US but for their "mistake" or "fault" they were of Japanese origin sometime in the past.

----------------------------------------------

Hitler: He was as a young man in Vienna, he grew up near Linz (near the boarder to Czechoslovakia) until than. But that argument with the major of Vienna (Karl Lueger) at this time is a strong one.
I think, Lueger has been more a populist than a real anti-Semite (as far as I worked at his bio). Nevertheless, Hitler learned at his example how to activate the far right of (at the very most brainless) voters.

At his first political speeches in Munich that anti-Semitic theme wasn't on the topic (it was before "My Struggle"). Later it was on the topic and he got more success.
I think I've got now the coherencies; it simply disturbed my logic how a person, never having bad experiences with Jews - to the contrary, he mad a few good once - could mutate into an anti-Semite.

[scoundrel]

Rudolf Hoess was the commandant of Auschwitz between May 1940, when the camp was originally established in a former Polish Army cavalry barracks, and November 1943, in which time more than a million people were murdered there. Having worked at Treblinka, Hoess decided that the gas chambers there were too small, and that murdering people in batches of 200 at a time was not enough; so he made the chambers at Auschwitz ten times bigger, to fit 2,000 people at a time. Later, in May 1944 and until August 1944, he took command again because Eichmann was sending the last survivng Jewish community in Nazi occupied Europe from Hungary to Poland in order to be killed; in this ten week window, Hoess murdered 430,000 more victims.

Cruelty and sadism were not particularly strong in him; rather, he was a man with very little empathy and colder than a frozen fish finger. He wrote an autobiographical account of his tenure, in which his detached and unemotional description of his repulsive behaviour reads rather like a businesslike project report. For example:

Technically it wasn't so hard—it would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers.... The killing itself took the least time. You could dispose of 2,000 head in half an hour, but it was the burning that took all the time. The killing was easy; you didn't even need guards to drive them into the chambers; they just went in expecting to take showers and, instead of water, we turned on poison gas. The whole thing went very quickly.

What a charmer, eh.

He disguised himself and used false papers, but the British found his wife and family, and explained to her that they would send her oldest son, Klaus, to be imprisoned and perhaps tortured by the Russians. Officially the British accounts claim this was a bluff to play upon her fear of the Russians, but I wouldn't like to bet on that; I would not be surprised if the threat was deadly serious. She indicated her husband to save her son.

Hoess was recognised and the British knew who he was from his wife, but he was beaten because he stuck to his story and the British soldiers knew he was lying. They also had seen the newsreels and heard the rumours; they knew what he had done. At one point a doctor who was present insisted that the beating had to stop because otherwise Hoess would die. The officer, who was actually a naturalised British citizen, a German Jewish refugee called Hans Alexander, and an interpreter attached to the British forces at Bergen-Belsen, did as the doctor asked and told his men to stop, but then spoke to Hoess:

We know who you are and we know what you did. Either you will tell me your real name, or my men will kick you until you die. I don't care which.

Still Hoess refused to talk. But then Lt Alexander noticed his wedding ring, and told him to hand it over. Hoess claimed it was stuck on his finger, but Alexander produced a knife and had his men pin down Hoess's hand so he could cut the finger off; and Hoess removed his ring. The names "Rudolf" and "Hedwig", his wife's name, were engraved inside the ring. QED.

He was hanged from his own gallows in his own camp, the last man to die upon them before the Russians tore them down. In Britain we used to bury people such as he in pits of quicklime, where the water in his corpse would have reacted with the quicklime in a reaction which generates heat of 820c; thus entirely destroying his remains. Maybe the Russians cremated him.

RWOP Rudolf Hoess.