I’m speechless. I’m so sorry this happened to your family.
Wow. Now I’m crying. Bless your mother for arranging that reunion.
Oh, and I’ve been corrected. My husband tells me his grandfather surrendered to the British, not the French.
Both my grandfathers were in Europe at some point during the war, but both died many years ago and I know nothing about what they saw or did.
My family lived in Germany for a few years when I was a kid. When we were leaving Canada to move there, we were having ice cream at the airport, and met a concentration camp survivor. He showed us his tattooed serial number. I don’t remember what he talked about, though I’m sure my parents do. I was a little scared, because I understood only enough to know that something bad had happened to him in Germany. I remember he told me “You’ll love Germany. It’s a beautiful country, with beautiful people.”
Compared to the rest of this thread, that’s a really lame story, but it meant something to me.
To me, another thing that makes this sort of album important is that it shows that apart from being murderous bastards on the job, many of the SS were pretty much regular folks who flirted with girls, played with their pets, and took time off to relax at the lodge.
As long as we can look at them as inhuman monsters and nothing else, it’s easy to dismiss what they did as an aberration. But the savage lives in all of us (and yes, I include myself): we all have buttons that, when properly pushed, punch through the veneer of “civilization” we shroud ourselves in and nudge the beast. The genius (for want of a better word) of the Nazis was that they found just the right button for the majority of the German people, and once they pushed it, they never let up.
So apart from the historical value of Höcker’s album, I regard it as something of a cautionary tale. One which we ignore at our peril.
I don’t know anything specific about Buchenwald, but I know that in other camps, dogs were trained to attack people and were unleashed on the prisoners for punishment, intimidation, or just for the amusement of the officers.
I think it became a bit of a contest among the guards to see who could come up with the most horrific forms of torture. In Auschwitz they had a ‘standing room’ which was a “room” about the size of a telephone booth with no windows or ventilation. The entrance was a small rectangular opening in the bottom. For punishment, prisoners were forced to sleep in there, standing up, with a total of 4 men crammed in there together, smashed up against each other with little air. Then in the morning they had crawl out of the opening in the bottom to resume their slave labor. It was nauseating to see this room and imagine that someone came up with and implemented this sick idea…not to mention the horror that innocent people were forced to experience it.
I think this is what is so disturbing about the Holocaust. With people like Jeffrey Dauhmer or other depraved killers, it’s easy to write them off as bizarre monstrous aberrations.
But these camp guards were basically regular folk who committed unbelievably horrific acts. And the extermination of the Jews could not have been possible without the collaboration of the German people. I can’t remember the numbers off hand, but the ratio of SS officers was very low relative to the population. So they relied on ordinary citizens to report their fellow citizens and neighbors. And they did. Sure, there were some heros who spoke out, hid Jews, or otherwise protested. But the majority of the people were complicit and that, as you say, must be regarded as a cautionary tale.
My heart goes out to those whose families were impacted by this atrocity.
I worked in a nursing home which had several Holocaust survivors. Some were quite open about it. Some were in a state of dementia and seemed to confuse the nursing staff with SS guards… heart-rending stuff. The witnesses to this great act of evil will soon be passing on… we have an obligation to preserve this history and never forget what it reveals about human nature.
And the Polish people, and the Hungarian people, and the Romanian people, and the Croatian/Bosnian/Albanian people, the Lithuanian people, Latvian people, etc. And the American and British people as well, who could have easily stopped the Holocaust early on, who could have bombed the railways leading to the camps, who could have allowed Jewish refugees on the U.S. St. Louis instead of turning them back to Europe to be killed…
Nobody gave a damn about the Jews. Nobody lifted a finger to stop it. The ending of the Holocaust was completely incidental to the war, an added “bonus” of victory in Europe. It was never a direct goal.
Nobody cared.
Are you certain that the Allies knew what was going on in those places before they actually arrived there? This was before the types of intelligence gathering resources we have today.
Aw, sh*t. Now that made me cry. How awful to survive that horror only to have your mind bring you back, so you spend your final days feeling terrorized.
Witold Pilecki, a Polish member of the Resistance, gave a detailed report to the Allies on conditions in Auschwitz in, I believe, 1940.
So yes, the Allies were aware of what was happening. Here (PDF) is an interview with Yehuda Bauer, a highly regarded historian, which addresses why no action was taken.
Very interesting, thank you. So really it was a combination of factors, including a lack of capability earlier in the war, not just malignant indifference as Argent Towers seems to imply (no offense, Argent).
I’m not sure it really revealed that much.
Denmark did. (8,000 Jews in Denmark, no more than 100 killed.) Bulgaria did (All 50,000 Jews in Bulgaria proper were saved). Finland did (2,000 Jews in Finland, 22 died and all of them were in the Finnish Army.) Italy did (40,000 Jews pre-war, 8,000 killed in an Axis Power.)
Look, you’re right about Poland, you’re right about the Baltics, you’re right about goddamn Cordell Hull. But you know what country has the highest number of righteous gentiles per Yad Vashem? Poland, with 6,195. http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/statistics.asp#detailed.
Irena Sendler, Witold Pilecki, and Jan Karski did exist, and they and their fellow heroes shouldn’t be forgotten, amidst all the horror.
I can’t cry – I’m just sitting here kind of in horror. Every little tidbit I’m reading here makes me sort of unable to breath in a way.
Personally, I’ve always found the case of Albert Göring fascinating. Yes, Hermann Göring’s brother. Except Albert was violently anti-Nazi and actually aided the Jews in escaping.
People suck.
I wish it were enough to just promise that I, personally, would/will not facilitate this kind of thing. But enough people always will.
People always say they are so deeply affected by the Holocaust, and how horrified they are that it could happen, etc etc, but so many of these same people are either totally apathetic or actively supportive about very real forces that are, right now, as we speak, trying to wipe the Jewish state (Israel) off of the map and “finish what Hitler started.” They are trying as hard as they can to perpetrate a second Holocaust.
I think most people, consciously or unconsciously, prefer the Jews as victims. This is their “place”, to be objects of pity and sympathy for the other peoples of the world (who are all safe and sound in their well-established territories protected by their big armies.) When the Jews get “uppity” and get it into their heads that they can control their own destiny rather than just existing as glorified servant-classes in their “host” countries, inventing technology and writing literature and cracking jokes for the amusement of their Gentile masters - this, people are unable to accept.
I’m not saying all these people are actively and deliberately anti-Jewish, though some of them certainly are. It’s more that they are conditioned to a certain worldview (established over thousands of years) that the Jews have a certain “place” in the grand scheme of things, and that place is as a people without a military and without a homeland, which ultimately makes them non-assertive and impotent weaklings with no agency to control their fate.
Interesting. This point of view is much more lenient towards the allies than what I’ve read before.
How did they ever find that little boy again all those years later?
I had a patient (who was in mid stages of dementia) in one nursing home who had a doctors order, signed off by the local health authority that she was not to be taken into the shower room for baths or showers but given bed baths only and hair was washed at the hairdressers.
You can guess why. I hated explaining this to new staff though.
Wow, Argent, really? Outside of some Middle Eastern countries and some anti-semitic types scattered throughout the world, who are these nefarious agents trying to perpetuate a second Holocaust?
Yeah, except for that kick ass and well-supplied military called the IDF in a little place called Israel.
I’m really trying to grasp what you are implying. I just don’t see what you are seeing, at least not in a sense that what you suggest is so pervasive.