To be annoyed at some views on The Holocaust

[M0naLisa]

I've just seen that one of the last surviving Holocaust survivors has died aged 110! It came up on ITV news page on Facebook. Some of the comments are vile and very nasty!!

Why don't people believe what happened in WWII actually did happen?! Makes me so angry

I was educated on this at school in History, and when my children do WWII at school we will speak to them about what happened etc. do these people who don't believe pass their views on to their children?!

dreamingbohemian but it wasn't just the Germans discussed in Goldhagens first book, he levies his finger at the Anti-Semitism across Europe. Lithuanians for example, the French with Drancy, The Ukranian's get a right pasting for their acts in the atrocities.

Anti-Semitism was rife in Europe prior to the war, one only has to look at the French attitude over the Dreyfuss affair.

By and far the biggest group of killers of European jewry throughout history has been the Catholic church (I am indifferent to Catholics btw much less so than my antipathy to Germans).

The Wansee Conference may have given a name to the final solution, but the seeds throughout Europe were already there. Perhaps Helen Fry's Denazification, may help to shed some light on the lengths that the Allies went to to deal with the post war problem. But then, The Gehlen Organisation is a shining example of how the allies re-purposed the nazi apparatchiks into something they could use.

As i said we are still reaping the whirlwind of the nazi period and its ultra nationalism through-out Europe, all one has to do is to trace The Bandera organisation, its legacy and the effects that it is currently having in the Ukraine.

Should Germany still be held accountable? Yes, yes it should. It, as a nation brought about a catastrophic event in Europe, that still ripples forward to this very day. Symbols, Ideology and a language of destruction, that is still used now by half arsed demagogues, to whip up a pointless forms of hatred against minorities, Jews, Gays, Roma, Sinta or anybody who dissents. The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei gave it a body, a name and a call to action.

Maybe a bit of Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved may help put the period into context.

Certainly in liberal Judaism shoah is the preferred term, due to the meaning of the term holocaust, and the reasons behind the choosing of that term.

My parents both fled Nazi Germany as children (with their immdiate families though lost many relatives) but far from being anti-German, my parents, esp my df, who was old enough (16) when he left to remember it very clearly, are not at all anti-German, have happily visited Germany since, stayed in touch with German schoolfriends, and renewed their German nationality. I too plan to get a German passport.

Put simply, they know only too well that there were many exceptionally brave and good Germans too, without whom they would not have survived, who risked their own lives to save ours. And lots of "normal" people who privately apologised for what Germany did to them. From my df's class at school, the three longest-surviving classmates have been my df and two not-at-all anti-Semitic friends. The ardent Nazis in his class all died young fighting "for Fuhrer and Fatherland" and got what they deserved.

Ultimately, we won the war, they lost. And modern Germany has gone out of its way to remember and make reparations for what happened, to prevent it happening again (unlike most other countries also involved). I don't think they have forgiven those Germans incriminated nor would it be their place to do so, but do not believe that blaming a nation for individual wrongs is an appropriate response either.

mirtzapine My point is that anti-Semitism alone cannot account for it. As you yourself point out, many countries were highly anti-Semitic. So why did the Holocaust originate in Germany? Why did it occur when it did and not earlier? Why were Jews in different countries treated differently? What accounts for the previous examples that the Nazis drew upon, like the Armenian genocide, or the British concentration camps in the Boer War?Obviously, there must be additional factors in play.

I strongly object to holding Germans today accountable for it. Yes, we must always remember -- and guess what, they do, more than any other country I have seen. On the street outside my house are brass plaques in the sidewalk, with the names of people who were deported from this street (just a quiet side street, nothing special). There are memorials and exhibits everywhere. Remembrance is part of everyday life in many places. Germany has paid significant reparations and aid to Israel. They are not forgetting.

If you want to hold Germany today accountable, then I hope you don't mind being held accountable yourself for the sins of British colonialism -- the slaughter and subjugation of hundreds of millions of people, with the legacy today of civil wars and mass poverty throughout the globe. People are still suffering from colonialism. Is it okay for them to blame you? Where are their memorials and reparations?

I'm not trying to engage in moral relativism. What the Nazis did was terrible and is not diminished by what anyone else did. But they are not unique, and they are not even the worst mass murderers in history. If we truly want to learn from the past, then the lesson should not be that Germans were/are evil and that explains everything. We need to look at the universal processes that infect us all, that lead to so many atrocities around the world and throughout history.

By the way, treating a people monolithically and assigning them collective guilt are two of the most important factors in ethnic conflict/genocide. It should be avoided no matter the people.

This generation of Germans aren't responsible. Those that were adults during WW2 were responsible. These weren't events going on thousands of miles away. They were going on in their streets.

Exactly, dreaming.

If we view the Germans as somehow uniquely evil, we lay ourselves open to letting similar events happen in other countries. The reality is that similar attitudes existed in many countries and were not universal in Germany. Many of those in occupied countries cooperated very willingly - even eagerly - with the Holocaust. The nationality of the perpetrators does not define or limit them.

We need to watch out for evil wherever it takes root. Blaming a nation is not just wrong and unfair. It is profoundly unhelpful in preventing another genocide.

I agree, trying.

Look at a country like Ukraine. Many people willingly collaborated with the Nazis and helped murder hundreds of thousands of Jews. Many others took to the woods and became partisans. Millions of Ukrainians were victims of genocide themselves, at the hands of either Hitler or Stalin. So how can we judge them as a country?

Even to judge all Germans alive during World War II is problematic. Some of those Germans were victims themselves of the Nazis -- hundreds of thousands of them. How can we judge people without knowing what happened specifically to them?

To be clear -- I do think there are a lot of people you can blame. I'm not trying to excuse anybody's actions. I just thinking blaming a whole country or a whole generation is not helpful. Imagine losing your whole family to the Nazis and then still being treated like a Nazi for the rest of your life, because you're German.

Havant, not always. Read 'A Social History of the Third Reich' by Richard Gruenberger. So many truly odd things were happening it was pretty disorientating for a lot of German citizens, frankly. One minute you were being told off for not having a picture of Hitler on your wall, another minute your neighbours moved away and you were told it was because of the war, when in actual fact with hindsight at the end of the war you realised they had been sent off to a camp, another minute you are told your sports club has officially become part of the Nazi party, another minute your job disappears and you don't quite know what is going on at the factory where you used to work (slavery, presumably) … it was messy and complicated and there was masses of social manipulation and the deconstructing of families and all social structures.

I am loath to invoke the DM at this point as it always weakens an argument, but if you replace the words 'benefits cheats' and 'immigrants' with 'Jew' in most contemporary newspaper reports, you start to get a feeling of the kind of manipulation that was, and is, commonplace. Only the Nazis took it to extremes, obviously.

Be scared, because it could happen absolutely bloody anywhere.

Regarding the knowledge of ordinary Germans .

Some would have undoubtedly have known. Yes. But assuming that you were in 1940s Germany, aware of what was going on, and horrified by it, what would you do? Organising any form of protest in a tyrannical regime is not a walk in the park.

You need to get in touch with other people who also think genocide is wrong, and tell them that it's happening, right? Without accidentally confiding in someone who will promptly inform the government, and quash your rebellion by executing you for treason. How?

Take for example, the protests in Egypt today. They were organised taking advantage of internet anonymity. Without that, things would look very different. In 1940s Germany, there was no such thing as internet. People had newspapers and magazines, which were either under party control, or retaining their independence by not saying anything negative about Hitler. There were two television stations, both under party control, naturally. And the radio, also under party control. All you had after that was word of mouth.

The White Rose, perhaps the most famous German resistance group, tried anonymously distributing leaflets. They started that in the summer of 1942. They got caught in February, and three days after they were caught, they were dead.

thought this was an interesting article - www.rense.com/general26/ahwh.htm

White Rose organisation

Can't see many MNetters having the balls to do what the Scholls did.

I don't think people in England have any sense of quite how oppressive that regime was, and what it felt like to be watched the entire time. Kids snitched on parents, neighbours snitched on each other, authorities kept records of anyone who appeared less than enthusiastic for the regime. You could be dead within a week if someone took a disliking to you. Just awful.

I've always remembered a particular anecdote from a woman who visited pre-war Berlin, (an Englishwoman perhaps) in a BBC schools education programme about the fear and oppression. She made a throwaway comment about the government, and her panicked host warned her to only say sweet things. How at first she didn't understand the phrase, and he repeated it more firmly.

I've watched Sophie Scholl, die letzten Tage. I can say with absolute certainty and shame, that I would not have had the courage any of them had. People don't.

That's why the people of North Korea are suffering today, and there is no massive uprising. It's not because ordinary North Koreans not-in-camps are evil.

I know about the Scholls.

It didn't start in the 1940s

www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007459

Law after law was passed in the 30s

My grandfather, a German Jew, told me once with absolute confidence that, "There are only two types of German: the creme de la creme and the scum of the earth." He went on to insist that the Austrians were far worse, and that on Kristallnacht, many German police were mobilised to prevent local citizens from rushing in to protect Jews and Jewish buildings. In Austria, on the other hand, the local police had to stop the locals from rushing in to join in the attacks and arson.

That story may not be true, but probably reflects his anger that a country at least as anti-semitic as Germany, and as happy to collude with Nazism, is seen as having 'got away with it'.

There's a very interesting book called Approaches to Auschwitz that basically compares and contrasts the fates of Jews in different European countries. It identifies the main criteria - things like the strength of Catholic Church, possibility of resistance, severity of Nazi response - and shows the incredible diversity in how Europeans acted to help Jews during those years. It's not just individuals - some nations acquitted themselves very heroically (I'm trying to remember which: Hungary, Greece?) and others not at all well (hello, France).

Havant Yes. The population didn't protest at those vile initial stages of the step-by-step progress. Nor did many members of our own English aristocracy or the Daily Mail. They riotously approved of that Mr Hitler.

Denmark, Devora? Practically the entire population of Jewish Danes were smuggled out, and King Christian of Denmark reacted to the edicts about the yellow armband by wearing one himself, an example promptly followed by many others.

It is my firm opinion that an occupied Britain would not have followed the Danish example. We would have collaborated à la France.

Yes, I know about Denmark Tilly (a friend of mine was smuggled out). I just didn't mention it because it's already well known for its heroism, unlike poor old Hungary.

My grandfather would agree with you that Britain would not have covered itself with glory if put to the test. Of course, he was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man, an experience that sounds particularly terrifying when you consider that the Germans were fully expected to cross the sea and take all the British islands. He describes it as feeling crated up by the English, ready to be collected (and killed) by the Nazis at the time of their choosing.

Devora perfectly fair reaction from him. Britain's internment offshore of the few German refugees allowed into Britain is one of the many things that makes me doubt Britain's self-congratulatory stance about what we would have done. It was disgusting. I felt horrified when I first read we'd done that.

I guess that is what defines the 'special relationship' between the UK and the US - both were allies and neither got invaded, so they have a more boisterous attitude to war in terms of sorting out problem areas around the globe. Countries that got invaded understand the shame and moral ambivalence of the whole situation.

Jst very odd to disbelieve the Holocaust. I cannot undetstand it myself.

ProfessorDent That's a really interesting point. I'd never considered that before.

TillyTellTally - that's presuming people that knew would do something about it. The fear may prevent them doing something, that doesn't mean they didn't know or actively contribute to the suffering of others. It's the teaching that "good people didn't know and that's why it happened" is what is damaging, not that fear created by the systems stops people doing things.

The average German knew because the camps were on their doorsteps, those inside being taken out for slave work in local German businesses and taken back at night, the smells of burning flesh from the camps if anything was incredibly obvious for miles, walls being built through their towns, the mass marches out of town were not done in secret. Some were kept in barns of average Germans during the marches (Roma particularly were housed in barns, which is part of the reason why their death toll - 90% of the numbers in Europe at the time - were so high). You didn't need internet to know these things were going on, they were right there, rhetoric and systems that enabled and encouraged this were required in all education (which is why a child not knowing is ridiculous and offensive, they were used as well as everyone else to perpetuate this). Those in power didn't do these by themselves, they got and still get 'normal' people to do it for them and convince them it is the right thing through the systems that those in power control. It was average people on the street turning in others because they were convinced it would for them good (either for wider society as taught or for their possessions or just for saving themselves). There were cover-ups but mainly against the murders of those connected to those the system wanted the support of (disabled children were used as guinea pigs for the gassings very early on, they were taken to "camps" and then their parents would be sent a letter that they died of the flu), but the vast majority was done because the system convinced people to cooperate.

The US knew, they had German envoys coming over and discussing it with rather powerful people and where the Germans gained a lot of the early equipment for the extermination and camps (The US was selling to all sides to remain 'neutral' at this point) which both prolonged the war and aided in the murders of others. They knew and turned away refugees. The British coined the term "illegal immigrant" to refer to Jewish people who left and tried to get to Palestine even when they knew. People knew, just as people knew in many other atrocities before and now, the systems is what prevented and still prevents action and it is those systems which perpetuates the idea that if good people only knew it would have been stopped.

Knowing, and education, are not enough if the systems in place actively fuel the problems and prevent solutions. The whole systems need to be taken apart and rebuilt (which is why Tunisia, with far less internet, had far greater success with their revolution than Egypt - they rebuilt far more of their structures of power, while Egypt was little more than changing of hands of who was in charge of the system).