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.

I think it's really important for people in power - and people who are trying to get power - to see Auschwitz in person.

And I think it's really important to try to understand how it happened.

The scary thing is the world is aligning into autocracies versus democracies, and the autocracies seem to be in the ascendancy. At the end of the Cold War there was this incredibly naive and arrogant idea that trade, financial and technological ties with autocratic countries would make those countries receptive to Western liberal democracy and bring them progress. What has actually happened is most of the influence has gone the other way and corrupted and compromised us.

We now have people on the right, like Trump and the AfD, who, for all their talk, are in thrall to strongmen leaders like Putin and who primarily care about acquiring resources for the super-rich and their very dodgy pals. Then countries such as China and Qatar have bought up many of our universities and institutions, and Russia, China and Iran run massive bot factory operations and social media propaganda campaigns, meaning we have a growing movement on the left that absolutely hates the West and wants to tear everything down over identity politics while simultaneously thinking Hamas is great.

Is that putin posting? Come on saying Ukraine has Nazi battalions is not only incorrect but offensive to people that suffered from the real Nazi.

CreationNat1on · Today 12:39

The first concentration camp was established in the 1898 Boer war.

The Athenian prisoners in the quarry near Syracuse, 404 BC might have disagreed...

HauntedBungalow · Today 17:13

Zelensky eh. Leader of the only country in the world to have actual self-declared Nazi battalions on its army payroll.

Zelenski is Jewish. Most of the Azov crowd have been wiped out, they were sent in first, in the early days. Also, there are large numbers - bizarrely- of Russian troops, who proudly display Swastika tattoos and brag about how great they think Hitler was.

Blimey, that sounds more like indoctrination in the case of Trump. There is no comparison between Trump and Hitler at all. Is this was academia has come to?

Don't be silly.

You're a few years out of date, pet

U24 £10

I don't think we have learned anything. Jewish people still live in fear, Jewish children need security at schools!

I feel so sorry for the Jewish people I really do

Yes I was astonished !

It's always the way.

Same old.

Thank you for this wholeheartedly!
A lot of people tend to forget that the current situation in Gaza was started by Hamas in October 2023 & Israel responded in defence of itself. I truly believe that Hamas knew what they were doing when they started, an act of provocation against Israel. I don't agree with how things have escalated
In any way but it's hard to see how the conflict will be resolved if a 2 state solution cannot be agreed upon.

Therefore I don't buy into the genocide theory. If this was the case Israel would have started it with the intention of eradicating the Palestinian population & not Hamas. Many attending pro Palestinian matches tend to forget that hamas is a recognised terrorist organisation.

I find the use of the phrase "genocide" abhorrent, particularly as it was a term that came about in order to describe the nazi's campaign to eradicate the jewish people.

There's always been fascists in Russia, they never really went away. The Russian practice of "recruiting" prisoners and keeping the recruits in place, using systematic rape and other methods of brutalisation, involves the Wagner group - at best, private military/mercenaries who use fascist and neo Nazi networks, slogans and symbols. Putin of course never mentions this when he talks about how he is "de-Nazifying" Ukraine.

It's a whole murky world, for sure.

It was the Balkan conflict that got things moving across the region, Nazi wise - lots of mercenaries joined the extra-state forces that styled themselves as Ustase and a lot of these guys drifted from hotspot to hotspot, it's been going on at least as long as that.

What does "U24 £10" mean?

If you think it's troll hunting, then report

And who the fuck do you think you are calling a tedious berk.

I've already reported bombastix for troll hunting but Mumsnet don't seem to regard accusing posters of taking bribes from the Russian government (!) as troll hunting. Sad times really.

I think that people on this thread are confusing right wing democratic parties in Europe and the US and the rise of extreme nationalist/fascist groups which exist in many countries including in Europe and the US and have done for decades - the two things are completely different.

Extreme nationalist groups will link themselves to wwII Nazis, but their growth today is for completely different reasons from that of fascism in Germany and Italy during wwII - there are always things to learn, but it isn't very useful to make direct comparisons in relation to these two issues, nor link the rise of fascism to what is happening today - the world is very different today. The leaders of those two countries - Hitler and Mussolini - if you look at their ideology (eg look at mein kampf and how Hitler rose to power) and their governance, Hitler's lebesnraum and Jewish ideology, the social aspects of their nationalism Sophie Scholl (German resistance) is a really interesting film as it looks at both the allied west ideology and also the social provisions provided by government to Germans - and Hitler was supported by western monied groups for a long time because he was anti Bolshevist ie anti Soviet Union and anti Slav (as well as being anti Jewish) - and monied groups were more terrified of communism spreading than of Hitler's anti Jewish rhetoric. Basically the historical background is complicated and worth knowing, and of course there are always lessons to be learned, but there aren't straightforward "oh it is happening today" simplistic parallels in terms of geopolitics and world politics.

What IS relevant about the Holocaust, however, is that it showed profound inhumanity, and sadly pockets of profound inhumanity have contined to exist ever since - and like the Holocaust, it is often discovered after the event, enough people were not aware at the time to do anything about it. The Vietnam war, on the other hand, it was public opinion which helped to put a stop to it. It is not just countries which are/were communist or "autocratic dictatorships" or discredited by labels - we in the west, our democratic countries, have also been involved in some appalling situations too, sadly.

The rise of extreme nationalism is a different thing again - it is usually connected with socially disadvantaged, traumatised, young people with a lack of formal education being targeted and groomed, manipulation and funding is often a part of the landscape, and it is very much a global phenomena. With joint action from all world leaders a lot could be done to stop this.

With joint action from all world leaders, all international crime could be dealt with more effectively, not just extremism - trafficking, dark web etc. Public opinion will also give weight to requiring joint action by all world leaders about this. And where activities are not yet illegal, all world leaders could together make them illegal if necessary to get to the root causes and stop it.

Like saying the Azov brigade have swastikas on their helmets ?

sorry - i meant the rise of fascism before wwII not during wwII (with reference to the start of my second paragraph)

I don't know that it's particularly good to try and distinguish between ultra nationalism and fascism - the gap that you create there lends legitimacy to dangerous people.

Fascism always looks different everywhere it crops up because it is linked to ultra nationalism and nationalism itself presents differently in different nation states.

As for it being in world leaders' power to eradicate it, well maybe so in theory but in practice world leaders are quite happy to use these groups for all the dirty work at disputed borders and resource centres that they don't want their regulated activity linked to.

Legitimacy will exist where there is an internationally recognised government. An acting government whether labelled fascist or not is a completely different situation from people who are groomed and manipulated to become part of illegitimate groups. You make that distinction in your final paragraph too where you talk about illegitimate groups being used by world leaders.

Will world leaders ever do the right thing? Well, it is possible that they want to, and that it is in fact the illegitimate groups - or their "leaders" - who have the stranglehold...the mind boggles at the possibility. But in which case yes, theory could become practice.

As to fascism looking different wherever it crops up - well, that is right. The two leaders I mentioned identified as fascists, this is another difference between then and now. The definition of fascism on wiki is different from the definition in my old politics book which says that fascism is basically the idea that one nation is superior to another.

And indeed, labelling governments as fascist is sometimes done to discredit a government, when a regime change is sought to benefit other countries for economic reasons.

All quite complicated, huh.

If you're referring to the original Nazis, you might care to research the extent of collaboration with the Nazis in occupied territories during WW2.

There was a lot of collaboration, from SS divisions recruited (an example is the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division SS - 1st Galizien, mainly from western Ukraine/ Galizia) to 'police' actions in the Baltics, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine and western Europe too, in furtherance of genocidal aims.

The Waffen SS recruited almost a quarter of a million volunteers to its ranks from all over conquered Europe, and also from Finland and Spain, which remained independent but allied.

Norway and the Netherlands were notable for making these men and all others associated with the occupation regimes pay dearly for their betrayal. Eastern European SS members who survived the war and were neither deported to the Gulags/ otherwise imprisoned nor reintegrated quietly back into civilian life often found their way to the west, where they became viewed as brave opponents of the Soviets (a view they themselves promoted successfully in the Cold War era).