Auschwitz - 80 years since it was liberated. Have any lessons been learnt?

[cakeorwine]

On Monday 27th Jan, it will be 80 years since Auschwitz was liberated by Russian soldiers.

Despite the Nazis best efforts to destroy evidence, Auschwitz is a haunting place to visit. You can see the rooms with human hair in, the suitcases, the shoes. The cells where people were forced to stand and starved. The gallows. The gas chambers and the crematoria. The railway line and the platform where people were divided into those who would enter Auschwitz and those who would walk to the gas chambers.

1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz including 1 million Jews.

Others were forced into slave labour and to live in horrendous conditions.

The commander lived very near the camp - and was hanged several years afterwards near the gas chambers.

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8x195dnlro

Have we learnt anything? There seems more division, more hate, more othering.

There are lessons from history about the rise of the Nazis and what led up to the concentration camps and the Holocaust.

Personally I think there are parallels between the rise of Nazism and the move to the right in a lot of Countries now. Hitler could be viewed as a populist figure, talking shit but knowing exactly how to get people to believe him. A master manipulator and a crowd pleaser, I'm sure we can all think of modern equivalents.....

No, we seem to have forgotten. We're seeing the rise in the far right in the West and genocide is unfortunately, too common an occurrence.

Dehumanising language is used against marginalised communities echoing the 1930s. We're witnessing a break down in international collaboration and respect for the law.

I think the direction we're heading, especially with the advent of social media, is frightening.

I think we have learned yes, because nothing like that has happened since although the serbs tried hard with their ethnic cleansing in the 80's and 90's but were stopped much earlier - if germany had been stopped earlier it would have been a different story.

Lessons were learnt, but now seem to be disappearing into an angry quagmire of hatred and disinformation on the internet.😢

Reading some MN posts would suggest not. Suggestions of forced sterilisation for certain sections of society, the apparent overwhelming support for euthanasia of the elderly and infirm (which could very easily become a coerced/forced procedure in decades to come) etc.

Certain actions undertaken by the Nazis have become terrifyingly normalised snd supported in wider society.

DS and I were there recently. I feel it's such an important place to see. You can read about the Holocaust and read about the events that led up to it but to see it up close brings it all home.

I think we have learnt but it's very hard to stay the left side of right when they're obsessed with trans ideology....

Lots like that has happened - before, during and after the Nazis. Not just on racial grounds.

Holodomor in Ukraine
Gulags in the Soviet Union
Pol Pot in Cambodia
The massacres in Rwanda
The Cultural Revolution in China

All equivalent with millions killed, tens of millions in some cases.

Maybe not in the more western parts of Europe but the world is a big place.

Fostering hatred of random groups of people is top of the political agenda now - it rather seems that human nature cannot resist this. How very sad.

Nope.

Jews are still universally hated.

I think many of the lessons learnt have been forgotten. So many massacres, ethnic cleansing, mass incarceration of people based on race or religion. I feel relatively safe as a Jew now, living in rainy old England; it'd be a different story as a Rohinga in Myanmar or an Uighur in China. "Never again" seems to mean "Never again in Germany to Jews". It's not good enough.

Jews feel more unsafe than they ever have since the end of WW2. People celebrated 7 October attacks before there had been any retaliation. Pictures of hostages were ripped down. People feel perfectly free to call for the destruction of Israel on the streets of every major city. A Jewish man had to be removed from the area of one of these marches for his own safety. Jewish school children are being attacked on the bus. Jewish businesses are having their windows smashed and daubed with paint.

so no, I don’t think we’ve learned any fucking lessons.

Uighurs in concentrarion camps right now.
Gazans.
Rohinga.
Women in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Atrocities in Congo which are basically never reported and in Sudan which are occasionally reported.
Russia's removal of Ukrainian children to Russian territory.
The coarsening of political language.
The rampant use of social media and misinformation to foster division and fear in all facets of life and society.
The black and white attitudes in society and the unwillingness to accept (and thus create space for dialogue and growth) of real weaknesses and imperfections beyond silly-me-haha social media posts.

Nah, we've not learnt.

Talk about missing the point.

We should also mention the Genocide in Gaza and now what will amount to ethnic cleansing in the west bank. The world is happy to turn a blind eye.

What people often fail to see is that the concentration camps were the end game. The whole thing started years and years before. And there are frightening parallels between Trump and Hitler. The other problem is that people tend to think that this could only have happened in Germany and fail to see it can happen in any country. And has.

@TooBigForMyBoots hard agree - the lessons were learned (in part) in the immediate aftermath (although I do feel like a lot of mistakes were made, e.g. carving up Palestine)

There was considerable focus on "togetherness" in the 50's/60's etc (setting up the EU/common market)

But the lessons have been forgotten, and I suspect that it's actually a lot more dangerous than it was due to the sheer amount of disinformation on the internet

No. The genocide in Gaza is being streamed on the internet, yet continues.

If anything actually, you could say that in the past such atrocities occurred perhaps without full transparent knowledge of the details as it was happening. That we didn't truly know all the factors that could lead to such things happening. That we didn't have a United Nations ostensibly set up to prevent such things happening again.

But now, we've reached a new low, because we have all these things and we can all see it with our eyes at a touch of a few buttons.

Yet it continues.

And for the most part, we're happy for it to continue as long as things remain good for us.

Half of Americans in a survey could not name 1 concentration camp (in the UK, about 25% could not name one)

https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Claims-Conference-Research-Insights-01.09.25.pdf

Cambodia, Rawanda, Bosnia and Darfur are the first four that spring to mind. Atrocities occurring today may, sadly, join the list.

Those that don't want to 'learn' most certainly haven't.

There is going to be commemorations at Auschwitz tomorrow. I think there is going to be a lot unsaid about events that have happened since and continue to happen.

Firstly, I don’t think that the lessons of WW2 hit countries in the same way. We know Russia was erm problematic anyway, and stalins involvement wasn’t about freeing the death camps or dictator rule in Europe. It was simply about protecting his own territory and he was happy to ignore it before then.

I have discussed ww2 and the genocide in the death camps with friends from west & South Africa, and china, and all have specifically said that they have been shocked at the level of remembrance and conversation they have encountered in the uk, and that this is not a feature of their life in their Home Countries (this is of course, a small sample!)

it’s easy to forget in the uk that the world war was incredibly Eurocentric, effectively being a colonial war in many non European countries - Japan of course being a major exception, although they are also famously avoident of their role

for those reasons, and with globalisation, I think the learnings have pushed war out of much of europe for a significant amount of time. I think it’s clear that it’s on its way back though, and that younger generations are not learning the lessons we did

Totally disagree with this. Having worked in child protection for social services, you try it. I absolutely do not endorse forced sterilisation but something has to change. There aren’t enough adoptive or foster parents who will take on a potentially damaged child. Would you?
And assisted dying? I watched my witty, educated, articulate MIL wither and die from an awful cancer. She wanted to go, she knew her own mind and she’d had enough, her death was inevitable but the last 6 dreadful weeks could absolutely have been prevented. I wouldn’t have let a dog suffer what she did. And I am so very far from being “right wing”.