It’s not in vain, hajario. He’s on thin ice and he knows it. In this specific post, however, Captain Midnight stayed civil, didn’t issue personal insults, and didn’t cross over into hate speech.
He is, as usual, quite wrong, but being wrong isn’t against the rules of the SDMB.
[mod note]
No warning issued, but being indirect doesn’t make it any less a personal insult, Zsofia.
Funny, I thought it was actually the motto…
They didn’t start gassing Jews the day after Hitler became chancellor.
The Nuremberg laws prohibiting interracial marriage and barring Jews from professions wasn’t until 1935.
Kristalnacht in 1938.
But even in 1938, people didn’t envision mass murder. That decision was made in 1942. It was a gradual process over many years from getting harrassed by SA thugs occasionally, to discriminatory laws, to being sent to Jewish Ghettos to being being loaded on trains to the death camps in Poland. By 1942, it was wartime and there was no way out.
Many people have the idea the the holocaust started as soon as Hitler came to power. The reality of what happened is much more frightening, IMO.
This is pure speculation, but it seems to me that the Nazis must have managed to maintain the illusion that the Ghettos were for ‘resettlement’ and the train cars to the east were the same. Had everyone stepping off the train at Auschwitz known their fate, it seems they would have taken their chances and rushed the guards.
This leads me to believe that the majority didn’t realise what was really happening until the doors closed and the gas was dropped.
“Understanding the Holocaust” by Professor David Engel may be available at your local library. Modern scholar series. Book on CD.
It taught me alot.
Without defending the Japanese internment camps in the slightest, this is utterly not true.
We have reports from the Einsatzgruppen death squads that were active in the Nazi-held areas of the Soviet Union in the first phase of the Holocaust. They talk openly, frequently without euphemism, about the mass murders of tens of thousands of Jews, because they were Jews (and not because the were Communist officials or anything like that):
The Nazi commanders were also not above boasting about the occasional success of their propaganda that the Jews were merely being “evacuated to the East” or “resettled”:
Himmler, the head of Nazi Germany’s SS and Gestapo secret police empire, gave a speech to high ranking SS officers in Poznan in 1943, which as it happened was recorded, and a copy of the recording was captured by American troops after the war; that recording is now in the National Archives. Among the things Himmler said:
Their own words make it totally clear that the Nazis were intent on genocide, on eliminating the Jews as a people by murdering every one of them.
How does one fight ignorance if the ignorance doesn’t show itself?
I think that analysis ignore the history of antisemitism in Europe. Mass murder is exactly what they should have envisioned, because it had already regularly happened. Going back to the Dark Ages, there’s a long sad history of both petty local strongmen and national rulers turning on the Jews and killing them (usually for economic gain – to take land or money). Pogroms, burnings and slaughter by the sword go way back and the Jews were painfully aware of it. I am certain that large numbers of Jews and many historically-aware non-Jews understood what was coming, if not the industrial scale the Nazis brought to the practice. If you read memoirs of the day, a lot of people claim they got out of Germany (or tried to, or wanted to) early on specifically because they were afraid the Nazis would eventually get around to the killing part.
After years of dealing with Holocaust denial, I’ve formed the considered opinion that most literate deniers must know it really happened – the evidence is overwhelming. But they continue to spread the myths and to “question.” Therefore I conclude there is a deliberate agenda, not simple stupidity, behind their efforts.
Well, I like to think that some of them may do it out of an innocent longing to believe that people (well, white people) can’t really be that bad.
True. We know that even the Jews themselves were told, when the Ghettos were evacuated, that they would be resettled, and that the camps were places that they could live in. They were told to bring not more than 1 small suitcase, with the necessities and personal stuff, because other things would be provided, and people did bring suitcases. (There are photos of huge mounds of stuff that’s been sorted after the gassings, where you can see the personal effects they brought with them.)
And the gas chambers themselves were disguised as showers for that reason. Telling people that they have to get de-loused, after coming from a very crowded ghetto, where fear of diseases (esp. as soap and disinfectants were rationed because of the war shortages) was obvious, made sense, so people didn’t refuse.
Telling people that they will be killed would have complicated the matter.
Additionally, not all camps were death camps (Vernichtungslager), some were “only” work camps (Arbeitslager). Though in that case the aim shifted to “death through work (by exhaustion)” - the rationale being: instead of just killing them, why don’t we exploit them before?; similar pragmatism lead to research on how to use the fat or the bones of the dead instead of incinerating them - people still lived for months or years in the camps, wrote letters and could receive parcels, so people back home believed that it was possible to live in the camps.
Plus, the Nazis themselves used some of the ideas of the early Zionists - how about the Jews all leave Europe and be done with the progroms? - and considered deporting them to Africa or elsewhere. There was a lot of back-and-forth by the top Nazis, even Hitler, between “letting the Jews emigrate to where they can’t bother us ever again” and “let’s exterminate them”. Partly the question of “Jewish influence on press and banks / international cabal” probably fueled the fear of “if we don’t kill all of them, they will come back for revenge later”, which favoured the extermination option.
So the Nazi leaders sent contradictory signals and talked both ways.
Actually, if you look at the diaries and letters of the Jews themselves, both those who stayed and those who got out, a lot of the Jews didn’t believe it, just as most Germans didn’t really believe that Hitler meant “Mein Kampf” literally (plus, it’s hard to read - I had excerpts in my history book, and the style is terrible).
I skimmed through a lot of pamphlets about the “Jewish question” (Judenfrage) from the end of the 19th century till the 1930s, both from anti- and pro-semites, Jews and Gentiles, and most of it is about the stereotypical Eastern European Orthodox Jew - the one with long hair, a hat and dressed in black (Orthodox) who doesn’t own land (because of the anti-semite laws previously), therefore makes his living as peddler or similar and is poor and badly educated.
A lot of German Jews were neither that, nor the money-grubbing, hands-rubbing, half-criminal money-lender/ pawn-broker (the other stereotype), they were agnostic or atheists from enlightment, part of the intellengtsia, who worked as doctors, lawyers and similar, and considered themselves German, part of the German culture. They did not believe that progroms would target them, because in the past, progroms were always against the outsiders - Jews who looked different and had different religion.
Germans who had jewish ancestors, but converted or didn’t practice religion (some even put up Christmas trees for their kids, just like all the classmates), who were educated, often blue-eyed and blond because they had married gentiles - would not have been targets of old-style progroms. It was because the Nazis put “race” and not religion /otherness on their list that they were targeted.
Although well-informed Americans certainly knew or suspected what Germany was doing to the Jews, there was also some persistent doubt, as much of the anti-German propaganda during World War I had been revealed to be hyperbolic and overstated. When the concentration camps were liberated in 1945, from all I’ve read, most Americans - including those in top positions of the government and military - were genuinely shocked.
I will leave people more informed than me fill up the details, but since I’m very surprised that it still hasn’t been stated, I will do so, despite not being amongst the best informed :
Yes, the allied were informed of the existence of extermination camps well before the end of the war. Although the first reports about them were met with incredulity, there was eventually no doubt left about their existence long before the first GIs found them. The allied command made the choice of not spending military ressources to bomb the railways or even the camp themselves (although it might seem weird, bombing directly the camps despite the presence of the inmates was considered as a way to seriously hinder the ongoing massacre), since it didn’t seem very effective to them, and since they thought that they should use all ressources available to win the war as quickly as possible.
This choice is still debated today and many feel that the allies didn’t do what they should have. By “allies”, I’m refering to the western allies, since I’ve no clue about what the Soviet commanders knew or thought on this topic. Although there are a lot of informations out there on this issue regarding the USA/UK, I’ve never read or viewed anything related concerning the Soviet Union.
Here’s a link to an abstract of a book, this part specifically dealing with the general perception of the Shoah in the USA during the war that seem quite interesting in the context of this thread :
This was what got me in the end.
I mean, as a kid I’d always been grimly fascinated by World War 2 and the Holocaust. I’d read the Diary of Anne Frank and a half dozen novels taking place during the same time including The Devil’s Arithmetic – a story about a modern girl who goes back in time and experiences the Holocaust for herself, right up to the end. I thought it was horrible and fascinating. I saw the pictures, the numbers, and they never affected me beyond a detatched “oh wow, huh.”
For me, it was the piles that did it. Heaps of shoes. Heaps of teeth. Empty suitcases. Just the knowledge that I was looking at heaps of cut-off hair and realizing every handful belonged to a different person who had gone through those gates… I think it really was the shoes in the end that took me from “yeah I get it, it was horrible” to going pale and gibbering a bit in the corner. I can’t remember, but I think I had to leave the room. In high school, ordinarily that sort of thing would be blood in the water for the other kids – never show weakness, they can smell fear and all – but I didn’t get bugged about it.