Holocaust:True Or False ?

[SanteeFats]

Just take a look at what ISIS is trying to do to the Yazidis and what radical Muslims and Hamas in particular want to do to Jews world wide.

[Greenman]

I am Jewish, I've been brought up for years with horror stories of the War and the idea of 6m Jews being exterminated by the Nazis sickens me even to this day and we give thanks that had the War not been won I would not have been born let alone my parents and the world would have been a different place. People who deny it are ignorant but thank god not everyone thinks that way. It must NEVER NEVER happen again.

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by Lord Of The Sith

It truly tells the whole story of what happens when one party decides upon the extinction of another. The news stations in the United States today were talking about how ISSIS was beheading Christians in Mosul. The very kind of thing that deniers said never happened is beginning again.

Originally Posted by SanteeFats

Just take a look at what ISIS is trying to do to the Yazidis and what radical Muslims and Hamas in particular want to do to Jews world wide.

http://www.catholic.org/news/interna...y.php?id=56481

We can all say it must never happen again but as much as we may not like it the capacity for cruelty lurks just beneath the surface in human nature. To be honest religious fanatics like ISIS are cut from the same cloth as the Nazi's, their leaders dehumanise their enemies making it easier for those on the frontline to act with such venom.

Hopefully it will not happen again on the same scale as the Holocaust but although we will never eliminate these vile acts the international community must learn to show a willingness to act that it couldn't quite manage in Rwanda and Bosnia to name but two.

[danton]

Originally Posted by SanteeFats

Here a little about deniers:
...
These people (?) must have truly the epitome of evil:
On 10 April 1941, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was established, supported by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, and adopted similar racial and political doctrines. Camps were established by the fascist Ustaše government for contributing to the Nazi "final solution" to the "Jewish problem", the killing of Roma people and the elimination of political opponents, but most significantly to achieve the destruction of the Serbian population of the NDH.[11][12] The degree of cruelty with which the Serb population was persecuted shocked even the Germans.[13] The sadistic brutality of the Ustaše shocked even the Nazis.[14]

[Edit by danton. Please read SanteeFats comment in full.]

Fitzroy Maclean was parachuted into Yugoslavia with British special forces during the war. He was told by his dispatchers that if he was captured by the Germans he would be tortured and shot. It would be worse if the Ustaše caught him.

Back on topic, the best account I have read on the 'attempted destruction of Europe's Jews' was by Gerald Reitlinger: 'The Final Solution'. I am quoting his subtitle. It was he who deployed the documentary archive of the Nazi machine I alluded to in my earlier post on this topic. Every page has a handful of citations. He wrote beautifully; few people would struggle with this long text. He had been a Classicist at Oxford and knew how to write well and simply. He had no time for 'ugly' words such as genocide (partly because as a hybrid word of Greek and Latin it offended his scholarship). Instead he used the easier to understand term 'mass murder'.

He included an index of the names of 236 (- or 239; I have no copy of my own to refer to) people who had had a significant role in this crime. Almost all escaped death and some only spent trivial terms in prison. Others, a few, disappeared into thin air or Argentina, like Josef Mengele and Eichmann.

Jews do not claim to be the only victims of the Nazis and their willing allies across Europe. Just the ones picked out with great relish in an attempt to exterminate them all. Incidentally, most were killed not in purpose built camps, but in 'the open' by special teams of Sondercommando. Hardly a sensational work, I found reading 'The Final Solution' nevertheless to be extremely disturbing at times. It would be fair to say that today some disagree with Reilinger's statistics. His narrative though is hard to match.

[SanteeFats]

Here is a sickening statistic:
These genocides cost the lives of probably 16,315,000 people. Most likely the Nazis wiped out 5,291,000 Jews, 258,000 Gypsies, 10,547,000 Slavs, and 220,000 homosexuals. They also "euthanized" 173,500 handicapped Germans. Then in repression, terrorism, reprisals, and other cold-blooded killings done to impose and maintain their rule throughout Europe, the Nazis murdered more millions including French, Dutch, Serbs, Slovenes, Czechs, and others. In total, they likely annihilated 20,946,000 human beings.

[Puhbear69]

What makes me wonder all the time since I'm thinking in a politically way: where does that hatred came from, Hitler felt against the Jews. Jews made at this time at ~1% of the German population.

The Jews had been rather more as less been integrated in the "German Empire" or later in the "Weimar Republik".

I think that hatred had been documented at the first time in "Mein Kampf" 1925, the main part of the Nazi propaganda. But what has lead him into that hatred?

His first experience as a young man with a Jewish person - a doctor - had been at the dead of his mother, which died of cancer. He had been thankful for her treatment to this doctor; that's proved by historians.

His next step was the art college in Vienna, he was twice denied admission to the drawing class. But also there was no Jewish involvement at this denying at all. It's also proven. It's said he had no talent at all; I can't evaluate this because I'm having no clue of arts. But those who have, accepted it and said the same; he was free of talent.
He tried as a painter for a while - with little success, than he went to Munich.

At Munich (shortened) he joined the army as a volunteer in WWI and got into a Bavarian corps. But here too, no known antisemitism, no hatred, just a second class division as they were usual at that time.

So the formative years of Hitler as a young man had been without that hatred, IMHO.

Once more at least, what to hell might have brought him into that hatred.
Another interesting point might be, what might have lead the Germans of that time majoritarian to follow that Nazi propaganda in that particular point.

[tamsmith]

My Father in Law was called up by the British Army towards the last 6 months of the war. He was never involved in any real fighting before Armistice Day. However he was made a driver for the War Crimes Trials in 1945. He was based outside Nuremburg and he served there until 1947 when he was able to go back to "civvy street".

He never got to drive the high ranking people at the trials, from either side. He did however drive very many people to the place he and his friends called "the information or statement house",
Basically where witness statements of the holocaust victims were given and then passed onto the Allied Forces Prosecuters.

He told me some really heart rending stories ( not suitable on a family forum ) he had heard from Jews, (which included British, French and German Jews ), Poles, Russians and Muslims who had been in various camps and were still in certain types of camps as there was nowhere else to put them.

He said they gladly came to give statements as it was " a few days out of lesser hell with good food". Over time, especially when Stalin finally agreed to exchange " displaced soldiers " the British, French and to a lesser extent the Russians" were sent home.

The Germans got a little help to leave but the rest of the Jews and a minority of Arabs / Muslims ( yes they were included ) were left to fend for themselves.

This meant problems and fighting between both sides which the Allies could not or would not deal with, or help.

His words to me, long before he died, was the you could not believe the pitiful sight of these people of all nations who had been starved to near death and brutalised in an un imaginal way and yet within less than a year wanted to kill each other again. And they did.

Sad.

[noodlesoup]

A local second hand shop that buys up estate lots at auction discovered a box of holocaust denying/antisemitic books, lumped in with garden variety WWII and Nazi history. Pretty creepy. The really rotten books all looked to be pressed privately. I wonder who owned them, but it's nice to know they're dead!

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by srksmeghead

It is sickening that certain people do not believe these atrocities happened,
probably the same people who believe we never went to the moon.

Not really fair to the people who say we never went to the moon. Some people do have irrational impulses; I for example occasionally feel that it is a great tragedy for both of us that I will never seduce/be seduced by Scarlett Johansen, though I don't allow this disappointment to dominate my life. But I don't see holocaust deniers in this irrational catagory, though I am sure some of them are. I think my colleague Mal Hombre has put his finger on it when he points out that in public they deny that which they can neither justify nor excuse; but in private they gloat over it and wish it could have been completed. Most holocaust deniers are merely Nazis without the balls to admit it.

[Brecht]

Originally Posted by Puhbear69

What makes me wonder all the time since I'm thinking in a politically way: where does that hatred came from, Hitler felt against the Jews. Jews made at this time at ~1% of the German population.

The Jews had been rather more as less been integrated in the "German Empire" or later in the "Weimar Republik".

I think that hatred had been documented at the first time in "Mein Kampf" 1925, the main part of the Nazi propaganda. But what has lead him into that hatred?

His first experience as a young man with a Jewish person - a doctor - had been at the dead of his mother, which died of cancer. He had been thankful for her treatment to this doctor; that's proved by historians.

His next step was the art college in Vienna, he was twice denied admission to the drawing class. But also there was no Jewish involvement at this denying at all. It's also proven. It's said he had no talent at all; I can't evaluate this because I'm having no clue of arts. But those who have, accepted it and said the same; he was free of talent.
He tried as a painter for a while - with little success, than he went to Munich.

At Munich (shortened) he joined the army as a volunteer in WWI and got into a Bavarian corps. But here too, no known antisemitism, no hatred, just a second class division as they were usual at that time.

So the formative years of Hitler as a young man had been without that hatred, IMHO.

Once more at least, what to hell might have brought him into that hatred.
Another interesting point might be, what might have lead the Germans of that time majoritarian to follow that Nazi propaganda in that particular point.

It's a good question that should be answered in a wider context. Even in the 19th century, anti-Semitism was a geographically limited phenomenon. It occurred (or outlived) in societies still stuck with strong feudal remnants. Those societies or states were Prussia, Austria and the Russian Empire. They still didn't make the transition into the modern capitalist system. Now the capitalist mode of production was already present in these countries but yet overwhelmingly confined to its financial component. A bourgeois class like in England or France was still too undeveloped and weak to gain control over national economy. With Jews playing a significant part in modern finance, the "bad capitalist" was identified with them by the reactionary and backwards medieval guilds and lesser nobility. They attacked Jewish bankers and merchants for "keeping up with the times" which they felt was a threat to their own economic position. It was the economic and thus political backwardness in Austria, Germany and Russia that fueled anti-Semitism among the petty bourgeois classes. Russia was probably the worst example where a number of anti-Semitic pogromes already happened which is rather weird because most Jews in Eastern Europe lived in terrible poverty.

The German national movement went quite a different path, according to the specific circumstances of course. Germans were defined as an ethnic group (Volk) as opposed to the modern nation of citizens like in France or the US. Anti-Semitism began to play a major role among German nationalists, especially in Austria. Before that, hatred and prejudices against Jews had a religious character but now we had this new racist anti-Semitism. One of its chied ideologues in Austria was Georg von Schönerer, a fervent anti-Semite. And in fact, Hitler cited him as one of his main influences, the other being Viennese mayor Karl Lueger. I'd say it was a combination of Hitler's experiences during WWI (resulting in defeat and humiliation) and his own social frustrations that led him to his extreme racist beliefs. His "philosophical" influences helped him to articulate his hatred.