I know I may be labeled as an anti-Semitic hick for this, but it really is annoying me that so many people seem to think that Jews were the only ones to die in the ghettoes, labor, concentration, and Death camps of the Nazi Holocaust. We have just covered the Second World War in my high school class, and our text mentions the six million Jews to die in concentration camps first, talks for two paragraphs, and THEN MENTIONS THE SIX MILLION OTHER MINORITIES KILLED IN AN INTERJECTORY CLAUSE AT THE END! In our review sessions or question and answer sessions, everybody says, "The Jews that were killed in the Holocaust…,” not “minorities” or “victims of the Holocaust.” My history teacher failed to correct students for this (what review and Q+A sessions are for), and whenever I remind her that six million non-Jews faced the same extermination attempts as Jews in the Holocaust, my comments are brushed aside. This is starting to become a little more than annoying.
What do you mean you covered the 2nd World War ? Two paragraphs and a bit . Go read more .
And yes the Jews were not the only people targeted . **SO WHAT **. Everyone who knows anything about that period knows this .
So who do you blame for the anger you feel ? Jewish people or the shite education system you seem to be in?
No, two paragraphs were spent on the Holocaust in an entire chapter on WW II. My anger? I am irritated about the way that our textbook teaches history. I have to admit that I suspect the entire thing was written without an Economics 101 graduate, especially “the road to workers rights” and the Great Depression.
Ok maybe anger was a bit strong .
And yes , I agree with you that school texts should always give accurate and complete facts.
May I suggest, threemae, that you read up a little more about this topic.
First, WW2 and the Holocaust are two different things.
Second, it’s true that other minorities, such as Gypsies suffered just as greatly at the hands of the Nazis.
But for numbers, all the other minorities combined did not even come close to the number of Jews that perished at the hands of these monsters.
It was truly a Holocaust. And the Jews, as a people, suffered the most by far.
Over 90% of European Jewry was wiped out during that horrible time.
Wally, this is precisely what irritates me. Nobody can claim that public education has done a suffecient job of educating you withoug without at least going through the facts of the Holocaust, and this means a complete representation of the facts as Yojimbo suggested. The fact that you can claim the combined losses from other minorities does not even come close to the losses by Jews is precisely what I am talking about. Non-Jews accounted for almost half of those to die at the hands of the Nazi’s, and here are just a few sources.
http://library.thinkquest.org/12663/summary/1939frame.html
http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/
I was talking about the systematic *murder[/] that the Nazis engaged in to “purify” Europe.
A majority of non Jews perished in work camps, from starvation and disease. Their suffering was no less, but I was referring to the Holocaust, which was an attempt to eradicate “inferiors”, namely, the Jews.
This seems pretty accurate doesn’t it?
That statistic was solely for Auschwitz. Overall, the 5 million deaths of non-Jews seems pretty consistent. I am not sure about statistics concerning if non-Jews were murdered or starved, etc., but I do not quite see the relevance of how they were killed. For the record, there are other masacares that are not covered beyond a sentence or two that I believe should be, including Pol Pot, mass starvations in the USSR, and Armenian genocides, but I digress, this is U.S. Histroy, not World History.
I do not wish to diminish the suffering of Jews in any way but the systmatic murder of the untermenschen as the Nazis termed the Russians and Poles is not given the treatment it deserves.
The Nazi plan to carry out these atrocities was apparent well before the outbreak of hostilities.The treatment of the Jews was an act of policy but so too was that of the aforementioned.
There must be room in our hearts for all the victims equally.
I have covered this before, over in GD (where I think this belongs, hint, hint), but it is horrible the way the Holocaust is covered. It is usually mentioned as “where 6 million Jews died at the hands of Nazis” Once in a while the term “and others” is tossed in after Jews, almost as an after thought. Thanks, and I’m sure my Ukranian Relatives, who died in the same damn concentration camps as Jews, and were bulldozed into the same damn mass graves, really feel better, wherever they are, about that “and others”, like their lives meant less than the Jewish.
There are some figures that show up to 7 million Slavs dying in concentration/slave labor camps. Very poor records, and Soviet disinformation means we will never have a good number. In any case, it was about TEN million total, AT LEAST, who died in Nazi Camps- because of their race or religion. 14 Million might be the right figure.
Oh, Wally; more Jews died in work/concentration camps than Death camps. And non-Jews were murdered there , also. True, the Jews had is very, very, Bad. But let us tell the whole story, it is that important. Let NONE of us forget, Jew, AND non-Jew.
One of the reasons the Nazis were able to succeed is exactly because they started with murdering the smaller minorities: the mentally retarded and the handicapped were among the early victims.
The great lesson of the Holocaust for me has always been that poem that I never quite remember, but goes effectively,
“When they came for the gypsies, I did not object because I was not a gypsy. When they came for the Jews, I did not object because I was not a Jew. When they came for the Slavs, I did not object because I was not a Slav. And when they came for me, there was no one left to object.”
The waters become very muddied when you mention the deaths of the Poles, because while many Poles were victims, far more Poles were willing killers, helping the Nazis kill the others.
The Jews are usually mentioned first in the list, because there was a huge systematic propaganda effort directed at them. The “others” were ground up by the machinery that was put in place for the Jews. That doesn’t make it less tragic, and it is important to always remember that the Evil once set up became insatiable. It has become a “convenient short-hand” to refer to the Jews and not the others; personally, I very much regret this short-hand, which understates the true Evil.
threemae,
If you really want to annoy your teacher, do some research and submit an extra credit report with the real numbers. Making your point in such an academic manner will really tick her off.
an extra tidbit of info for you three, aside from the Holocaust in Europe, before the actual war started, in both Russia and Germany were Pogroms, look that up, they don’t account in the six million for all the Jews and Gypsies killed in those.
And, if you really want extra credit, at around the same time, horrendous atrocities were abound en masse in China, Korea and Vietnam by the Japanese. One example, The Japanese using the Chinese prisoners they took as bayonet practice dummies. Thats some rough shit if you ask me.
The Axis epitomized evil.
Excuse me! Gay guy speaking up here for the men with the pink triangle!
What a coincidence that I should be watching Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich as I type this…the movie doesn’t discuss the Holocaust, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Concerning the Holocaust: yes, many other social and ethnic minorities were persecuted and murdered. But no single group was more singled out, more repressed, more persecuted, and more deeply affected than European Judaism.
Back in March, I spent a few hours (okay, most of a day) at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The museum is structured more or less chronologically, and it’s rather unsettling to see how subtly Hitler introduced anti-Semitism into the popular culture. It began quite simply: the census. No question on religion had ever been on the census previous to Hitler’s appointment; in Hitler’s census, ‘Jewish’ is listed not under a question on religion, but as an answer for “race”.
From there, the government-sponsored anti-Jewish campaign escalated. Children’s books like “The Poison Mushroom” taught young Germany that Jews were evil. Jews had to have a yellow stripe or a watermaked yellow ‘J’ on their passports and other identifying papers. The government, telling people that Jew-owned businesses were becoming wealthy at the expense of the people during an intense depression, sponsored boycotts. The government in essence sponsored Kristallnacht, or “Night Of Broken Glass”, during which citizens were encouraged to “rise in bloody vengeance against the Jews” and vandalize Jewish-owned businesses. The government then forced the business owners to pay for the damage themselves and confiscated any insurance payments made to the businesses, “as punishment for their abominable crimes.”
From there, it was a short journey to mandating wearing identifying marks, such as a yellow Star of David, when in public and forcing the Jews into walled ghettos.
Hitler’s actions came very close to eliminating Judaism in Europe entirely. Poland, in particular, is a ‘success story’ for his programs; the Jewish population of Poland dropped from more than 3 million in 1938 to perhaps 8,000 today.
In summary: yeah, a lot of groups were persecuted and methodically killed, but none so extremely and pervasively as the Jews.
I think some of you didn’t read some of the posts in here more carefully. What threemae, daniel, ckdexthaven, and others were trying to point out is not that the Jews did not suffer the greatest number of losses at the hands of the Nazis, but that there was an almost equal number of deaths of other “undesirables” that are rarely mentioned.
Yes, the Jews suffered terribly, and as a whole they suffered the greatest number of deaths. But I don’t think this should be a “Who has the highest tally? Oh, then they had it worst.” Regardless of how it was done, millions of people of many races, classes, and lifestyles died horribly at the hands of the Nazi Regime.
While we should study carefully how Hitler succeeded in persecuting a whole group of people as he did with the Jews so that it cannot happen again, it is disrespectful to ignore the other victims simply because the campaign against them was not as strong as it was against the Jews.
Thankfully I had a wonderful history teacher in high school who made sure to teach us the whole history of WW2. That included how the Nazis persecuted the Gypsies, gays, people of other nationalities, as well as the Jewish people.
I think what these posters were trying to say was that it is an atrocity to forget any of the victims of Hitler’s regime. Let us remember all who had to suffer so that their fate cannot be revisited on others.
Thanks, Sinsapple.
I think that one thing this points out is how nice it will be to research history on your own, beyond the bland shorthand of any high school text. High school books are just a starting point, and one to be taken with a grain of salt if you think about the convoluted political process that is textbook adoption. And if your teacher is one who is just three pages ahead of you in the book, well no wonder you get resistence.
As you have read from earlier responses to this post, it is a “well, duh!” that the Nazis had a spectrum of undesirables that were impediments to the greater glory of the Third Reich. I think is also a “well, duh!” that Jews were singled out in Mein Kampf and other Nazi literature (using that word in the Madison Ave sense, not the Moby Dick sense) as the lightning rod for anger and revenge (e.g., it was the infusion of fresh American troops in the first world war that spelled the end of German effectiveness, but it was the "back-stabbing " Jews that got the blame). But this is not a zero-sum game among people who care about the truth. It is horrible in all its manifestations; horrible for Jews, horrible for gays, horrible for Romany and Poles and Russians, horrible for the mentally ill. And the fact that in the popular mind holocaust = Jews–considering that it was a Jew who coined the usage of holocaust to describe this particular instance of genocide–is not a “problem” Jews should answer for. Perhaps the term Hyperholocaust should encompass all the victims of the Nazis (he said only slightly facetiously).
There is so much of history that needs more than a paragraph in a high school text, so much more that one needs to understand some of the currents that shape international interactions today. How old were you when you learned that the US invaded Russia in 1919? How old were you when you learned that Britain made war on China to protect Britain’s opium trade there? How old were you when you learned that the Soviet Union really did direct the programs of the CPUSA and other left-leaning groups in the 40s and 50s? How old were you when you learned that East German pilots were flying combat against UN aircrew in the Korean War? How old were you when you learned that the Soviets executed thousands of Polish officers and blamed it on the Nazis? It is a complex, messy mix out there.
So jump in and get dirty.