missed the edit window- just wanted to add:
But Jehovah’s Witnesses are Christians, so yes, they did specifically target certain Christian groups.
there’s also the catch-all “career criminal.” And I can tell ya which color patch they wore in the camps, to indicate their category of prisoner.
Gee, sometimes I wish I could forget all the things I learned while working at the Holocaust Museum.
Maybe, but in this case, I think the catalyst was aftermath of WWI in Germany, not the Nazis per se. The anti-semitism that was already present in the culture created Hitler rather than the other way around.
Still not because they were Christians in a generic sense but because they weren’t the right sort of Christians. And there weren’t 10 million of them in the camps.
They aren’t diminishing the death camps - they give the widely quoted figure of 6 million for this. They are objecting to denial of the Holocaust. This message is anti-Muslim, which is why they mention the Christian deaths as well. They are not trying to minimize the crimes of the Nazis in any way, they are emphasizing their scope.
I think they’re minimizing it by not aknowledging any distinction between the deliberate targeting and genocide of Jews (and Gypsies and JW’s and homosexuals and handicapped, etc.) and the incidental violence to everyone else. It may be anti-Muslim in its overreaching intent but I still think they’re tring to “us too” what happened to the death camp victims in a deceptive and unjustified way.
The whole thing is so badly phrased I think it is a real stretch to project that intent on it.
The second paragraph goes out of its way to emphasize the Holocaust deniers as being the villains here, so I don’t can’t see the intent being to minimize crimes against Jews.
A couple points:
If I were guessing, I’d say this letter was originally written by somebody of Polish ancestry. Most non-Jewish Poles were Catholic. The Germans did kill a lot of Poles, including targeting people who were felt to be leaders in Polish society. Catholic Priests were one of the targeted groups. And the Soviet Union, while not as bad as the Reich, was pretty complicit in the occupation of Poland.
The Nazis did probably kill more non-jews in their efforts so put down sabotage, make room for Gemans and the like. However, the massacre of Jews was intended to kill an entire group of people (i.e. the Final Solution to the Jewish “problem”) which I don’t think was the case with any other group, with the possible exception of the Romany (Gypsies).
The Nazis killed millions of Slavs in the Concentration/slave labor camps. I have seen estimates ranging from 5 mil to 10 mil. One can assume that they were mostly Christian, mostly Orthodox. This pretty well matches with Colibri’s cite of “deaths due to the Nazi Holocaust which totaled 12.1 million, plus 5.7 million Jewish Holocaust victims that are listed separately”. Wiki sez “Taking into account all of the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises considerably: estimates generally place the total number of victims at 9 to 11 million… Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition would produce a death toll of 17 million.A figure of 26 million is given in Service d’Information des Crimes de Guerre: Crimes contre la Personne Humain, Camps de Concentration (Paris, 1946), 197.”
Thus, 10 Million Christians is not impossible.
In fact, it is quite likely. But the disclaimer is still worthwhile: the vast majority of them were not killed on account of being Christian. (But, a disclaimer to the disclaimer: some where, and the Nazi party certainly made a concerted effort to subvert the church and eliminate Christian doctrine; it was in no way above killing or imprisoning those who objected.)
Because you forgot the word “Priests.”
I think I understand your intent with this post, but you’re running the risk of an alternative form of atrocity denial.
Qualifying the ‘violence to everyone one else’ as ‘incidental’ is as outrageous as ‘holocaust denial’. One of the explicit goals of Operation Barbarossa was to clear away the ‘inferior’ peoples from Ukraine and Belarus in order to instore the German ‘New Order’. The massive scale massacres of Slavs were in no way incidental to a more conventional military engagement, but rather one of the major stated goals of the campaign. Poland was also targeted, with non-Jewish Poles accounting for similar numbers of victims as Jewish Poles. There were also genocide campaigns in other occupied territories - the Jasenovac camp in Yugoslavia is one example of a death camp which specifically targeted Serbs.
While it’s true that the Second World War has been revised and recuperated beyond recognition by just about everybody, and there was a time when it seemed politically judicious to ‘overlook’ much of what took place, I believe that denial of the genocide against Ukrainians, Poles, Serbs etc is just as dangerous as denial of the Jewish Holocaust. Recent Balkan history may be a case in point.
I guess the economic and social circumstances weren’t dire enough. Nevertheless, anti-semitism was preached from pulpits and pogroms were a longstanding tradition in Europe for centuries before Hitler. It used to be common for Christians to go into Jewish ghettos and kill Jews as a way to celebrate Easter (they’d get worked up by overtly anti-semitic Passion plays). There was also this little thing called the Inquisition.
The Jews were scapegoated for a lot of social ills. After WWI, Germany went into a deep depression and cultural crisis. Hitler used anti-semitism to inspire them but he didn’t create it. If the Church hadn’t been portraying Jews as Christ killers for all those centuries, Hitler couldn’t have succeeded.
It’s a floor wax, and a dessert topping.
Seriously, I think you’re both right. I think the overt intent of the piece is to bash Muslims, but I also think the underlying biases are peeking through a bit. While the Jew-baiting and Jesus-martyr-wailing business doesn’t seem to me to be the primary purpose of the glurge, I agree with DtC that it’s there, but more out of reflex than due to some sort of camoflaged agenda.
They still weren’t killed because they were Christian. I still think the authors of the glurge in question are trying to piggyback onto the victimhood of those (all of those) who suffered or were killed by the Nazis. Under the guise of protesting holocaust denial, they’re trying to insert themselves as even greater victims than the Jews, which is bullshit. It’s just part of the recent trend for some Evangelicals to portray themselves as persecuted when they are not and never have been any such thing. They just can’t stand to admit that maybe some other groups have had it just a little bit tougher than they have (and usually at their own hands).
In some ways the Soviets were just as bad: the Katyn Massacre specifically targeted the leadership and future leadershp of Poland to enhance Soviet control, and serious attempts were made to pin it on the Nazis.
Not that I’m letting the Nazis off the hook, of course.
Sailboat