Sorry, I wasn’t making it clear: he wasn’t writing to the paper for publication, he was writing from the paper to some SS authority that he presumably thought responsible for the squad in question.
I was there in November 1994, not that long after it opened.
I saw Marc Maron there, but even I knew not to run up to a celebrity at the Holocaust Museum.
How did you find this out about him? :eek:
A man at my church, who died a couple years ago at age 97, liberated a concentration camp. We all knew he was a WW II veteran but not that he did this until shortly before his death; it took that long for him to be able to talk about it.
I have no problems snuffing out the life of a scumbag who takes delight in harming others. To me, that’s no different than swatting a fly.
It’s quite another to kidnap an honorable person and torture them to death because of their ethnic group.
The Holocaust dead did not deserve their fate. However, American serial killers deserve what they get.
Here is the Gitta Sereny interview with Franz Stangl, commander of Treblinka.
https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-9/commandants-view
This is why Hanna Arendt should be mandatory reading for anyone in high school. Even in Germany, she’s not common - I had to seek her out myself. (well, okay - I sought out the cliffs notes version on youtube. I really do need to read that fucking book.) The banality of evil. It takes surprisingly little to convince people to do awful things. It doesn’t take much to turn off a person’s empathy towards another. Convince someone that someone else is hurting them merely by existing, and it’s easy to convince them to hurt them back.
Bingo. This is one interpretation of the Niemöller poem:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
By the time they’re rounding up the outgroup, it’s already too late. They’re doing that, they’re able to do that, because the society has already normalized the idea that the outgroup is evil and deserves to be killed - otherwise, where would they find people so desensitized that they would be willing to send thousands or millions off to be murdered? By that point, it’s too late - you’ve lost the battle against fascism, and if you try to stand up then, well… you’re one of them, that dreaded outgroup, and we should be rounding you up.
Every step towards that gruesome future must be opposed, violently if need be.
So there you go. You’ve just answered the question. You turn them into a scumbag who hates other people and you can kill them as easily as an insect. Of course, how you define scumbag is highly determined by culture and propaganda. In Norway, a murderer might just be a sick person in need of help. In Nazi Germany, a Jewish child might be the offspring of an oppressor who will grow up to dominate the innocent. Dehumanize people and turn them into monsters and apparently we find it quite easy to snuff out other lives. QED.
I spent a week in D.C. a couple of summers ago, and the Holocaust Museum was one of the places I visited. Unlike all the other museums and places I visited that were a bustle of activity and babbling conversation, the Holocaust Museum was very subdued and quiet because of the content.
I had to turn away a few times and literally find a place to stand quietly and collect myself because of the intense emotional feelings I had.
Those are two different, yet similar, circumstances. To convince a large group of people to systematically kill/enslave/abuse another specific group (or groups) of people, the target group must be dehumanized either by:
- convincing a large enough segment of the majority that the “others” are sub-human (or at least not “good enough” to live) as was done over many years in Germany, or
- convincing a large enough segment of the majority that the “others” are enemies, as in your OT and war examples. This way may seem quicker because in hindsight we can see the “tipping point” that started the violent part of the conflict, but it really requires a lot of time to develop hatred to the level that leaders can convince followers to kill/capture/torture the "enemy. No war starts overnight.
Yes, and that is the point.
Imagine you jumped in a time machine and went back to 1942. You visit an extermination camp and you ask a guard, “Why are you doing this?”
The guard would reply, “I have no problems snuffing out the life of a scumbag who takes delight in harming others. To me, that’s no different than swatting a fly.”
The Germans were indoctrinated to the point that many of them genuinely believed the Jews were evil people. So in killing them, they were saving Germany (and Europe in general) from the curse of those ‘wicked, greedy, manipulative Jews.’
It is hard to understand, because we know that this perspective is 100% totally, completely, without a doubt WRONG. But that feeling of contempt you have for a guilty criminal is the same feeling of contempt a German had when looking at a Jew. He believed they were guilty and therefore deserved to be killed.
It follows then that if you had been raised by KKK members, you would kill any black man like swatting a fly. Because you would know, as you had been taught since childhood, that all black men were rapists and murderers and lazy. You would know that all the financial woes of your family were due to such people taking the jobs for less money than your father could afford to accept. You would know that the long lines at the grocery store didn’t exist back when “they” had to stand at the back. You would know that the menial tasks of the world belonged to “them” and not to you or yours.
And you would accept that, because why on Earth wouldn’t you? Unless and until some incident occurred to bring to the fore the humanity of “those” you would feel perfectly justified in wasting them simply for the convenience of it.
Hitler did not create antisemitism; he exploited it. This is why acknowledging some grey zone within which it is acceptable to kill is so dangerous. These false equivalencies do not stand up to societal pressure.
The only way to avoid the danger is to teach and demonstrate the value of all life. Either you value life or you don’t.
There comes an awful tipping point, were you are either among the predators or the prey. The base instincts set in and we focus on our own survival. The specific tasks before become our entire world and we carefully narrow our horizons to include only what we can control and protect. Our family, our children, ourselves.
We crop the picture.
Oh, he’d tell us. He didn’t perceive not only that, but many other things he did through his life, as not wrong except inasmuch as they could get him punished if certain people found out*. When I say that he saw no wrong in what he did I mean exactly that he saw no wrong; he was never ashamed of any of it. He knew better than to talk about that kind of things in front of certain people (such as my father and his whole side of the family), but remove those safeties at your own risk. The closest he came to having a moral compass was “wanting to avoid having my son-in-law rant at me”.
- “Punishment” being defined as anything he disliked. He avoided whores thanks to his father, who was a cop: when great-gramps found out his son had started cruising the streets, he took the boy to the female wing of the nearest prison and told him the stories behind several of the prisoners (including medical histories). Managed to scare the shit out of him forever.
I felt the same way when I visited Dachau. These are heavy, horrific places, a tangible reminder of the evils of humanity. Every tour ends at those unused gas chambers - as our social studies teacher put it, “a corpse factory” - and it never gets any less horrific or brutal for me.
Nope. I didn’t turn anyone into a scumbag. The people on death row turned themselves into scumbags by their actions. You take some monster who takes delight in peeling the skin off little girls in strips, or shooting up a shopping mall, or kidnapping innocent people to ‘bind, torture, kill’ and I have no problems sending them to Hell with a single pistol shot. By contrast, Hitler’s victims were chosen based purely on flawed racial theory - there was no objective evidence that they posed any threat to the Reich or any harm to its citizens. To put it a different way - I’m pretty sure that Anne Frank’s family was a little different from the Manson family.
Yeah, Dachau was crazy. When I toured it, they took us into the ‘gas chamber’ and closed the doors. I can still remember the sound they made. It was horrible.
That was the last sound millions of people heard. Sick, no?
That’s how the Rwandan genocide managed to happen - one tribe convincing everyone that the other tribe were “cockroaches”, combined with a society where children were trained from birth to never question authority, according to survivor and author Immaculee Ilibagiza.
Actually, the last sound they heard was most likely their own screaming, mixed in with the screams of their fellow victims. But point taken.
To me, perhaps the most gut-wrenching scene (among many) in Schindler’s List was the one where the female Schindlerjuden were shaven, stripped and herded into a chamber; then the doors closed. The silent tension and fear are absolutely palpable — then the lights go out and the screaming starts. Then the water comes on, and the crying takes on a completely different tone when they realize they’re going to live. Reduces me to an emotional wreck every time.
Hanged if I can find it, but some time back we had a thread that revolved around photo albums kept by SS death camp guards. They were just plain chilling — not because of the photos themselves, which primarily showed everyday recreational activity, but because of the sense they conveyed that to these people, slaughtering millions of (sub)human beings was just their day job.
Does your faith in The System extend only to the current American system, only to specific cases within it, or to any System so long as it’s not Nazi Germany? The Holocaust was preceded by taking rumors and stories from hundreds of years of making Jews the scapegoat for anything that went wrong and taking them to 11. The same people who nowadays say things such as “we should just bomb every country where there’s ever been terrorist groups” were perfectly happy to see the good flat in #3 become open for rent because the previous leaseholders had taken a forced train trip.
I visited Auschwitz a few years ago & it still haunts me to this day. The vastness of the ‘camp’ is impossible to describe. It also happened to be raining the day I went, which somehow just further drove home the bleak suffering of so many innocent people. The anguish of the children in particular felt like a dagger right into my heart. It’s hard to imagine how anyone, under any circumstances could ever participate in such horror… but as history suggests, the capacity for such evil lies within each & everyone of us & we need to fight it constantly.
Everyone needs to study the Holocaust, because as a wise man once said “Those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it”.