My Step Great Grandfather was a military physician and he was stationed in Germany at the end of the War - but traveling to CC refugee centers . . .

...an excellent book imho that once and for all puts to rest the myth that the general German populace didn't know, and the military were too afraid to speak out and try and stop it...

Know what kills me? How very kind those elderly Germans were to us when we were little kids living in Germany.

It used to give my mom's dad the creeps (was connected to General Eisenhower at the end of the war - saw some serious ugly). Like coming overseas to visit us and getting in between us a coddling older German women. Guess he got on my mom and dad for being too trusting.

brutality, starvation, minority rule, ghettos, prisons, torture, droning, in humane interrogations. We all know and for most of us we can't do a damn thing about it especially since the people we vote into office hardly pay any attention to us until we are needed to provide cheap labor and fight wars. We all knew about Rwanda too.

We know our gov't is using drones that kill innocents, we know about gitmo and its circumvention of Geneva and our Constitution, we know about the exploitation of foreign wars for profit. Will the victims and survivors be any more forgiving of us than we are of the Germans? Does their opinion of us even matter to us? I am NOT equating this or anything else with the Holocaust. But we can hardly argue we are better than the German people who turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed in their name and for their perceived benefit. Unless we are explicitly fighting for the end of the horrors committed by our gov't, we share its shame, to the same degree as the Germans of the Nazi era who must live and die with this stain on their souls.

of so many innocents will also be recorded by history.

I always found it hard to believe that the German people did not know and from all I have read, it seems to me that they were so caught up in 'patriotism' and jingoism and militarism, pride etc they rationalized it to themselves, choosing to believe that their leaders were only killing 'enemies'. Just like us. And anyone who questioned it eventually was silenced or told they were wrong.. Just like here.

A perfect example is Bradley Manning and the victims he tried to get justice for. And how many people even on this forum, call HIM a traitor.

History always repeats itself. Germany wasn't the first time in history where people chose to look the other way when their government was slaughtering innocent people. But we were supposed to have changed all of that.

For the record, I abhor what we are doing and will continue to say so and will continue to be greeted with all the justifications from the more 'patriotic' among us. Not that it will do any good until enough people stop making excuses for them which is unlikely, sadly.

Regarding Germany, I was also shocked to learn how few of those murderers were ever held accountable AND how many of them found sanctuary in this country.. Shameful, words cannot describe the crimes themselves or those who enabled them.

I've read stories of Germans sitting in church on Sunday and when they'd hear the deportation trains passing nearby or in the distance they would sing louder to drown out the sound.

the "First they came for the Jews, but I did not speak up because I wasn't a Jew" poem we're now so familiar with, tells about how, after he was jailed for defying the state and urging his congregants to do the same (who, being good little Germans, turned him in), he was visited by a local clergyman assigned to the jail. The pastor was surprised to find Niemoller in jail and asked him why he was in there. Niemoller retorted that that wasn't the proper question, the real question, he asked, was "why are you NOT in here? How can you claim to be a man of Christ and not be in here yourself?"

Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (one of this seminary student's favorite theologians, whom the Nazis interred in a camp and hung in April of 1945) were leaders of the "underground theology" movement working against the Nazis at the time, which took great courage and fortitude. It dismayed them and their fellow colleagues to no end that so many German clergy were indifferent to, or supportive of, what the Nazis were doing, which was one reason why their writings are so suffused with angry passion, and that such sentiment is obvious even today, nearly seventy years after they were written. The progressive seminary I attend is very attuned to Bonhoeffer and company and tries to instill in all of us not just an understanding of the importance of social justice and working against any and all oppression, hatred and authoritarianism, but to actively apply it in all aspects of our lives. It is one reason why I, as a Christian, cannot abide the so-called "religious right", who would have been right there with the Nazis and the good little Germans.

much about how the Lutheran church in particular dealt with the Nazis? Did they resist? Maybe help some Jews escape via an underground railroad or something? I might expect some complicity from the Catholics due to their historical penchant for power and fortune, but I'm curious about the Protestant denominations.

about the Jews? They coincide with Hitler's views, essentially.

Julie

even when the truth is literally staring you in the face.

If it wasn't for the direct involvement of one US corporation, IBM. Without IBM the Nazis simply wouldn't have had the logistics or ability to find, catalog, transport or sort the many millions of Jews.

..and you wonder why the Crazies are so enamored with collecting information on people.

Germany was a clever and technologically advanced nation, best engineers in Europe at the time, etc..

So the idea that they could not have managed the Holocaust without IBM's help is absurd.

The presumption is that whatever work was done with IBM help would simply not have been done without IBM help, and that's just not right.

For instance, any 1980s office was reliant on Xerox machines, and when the Xerox machine broke everything ground to standstill.

That does not, however, mean that Xerox machines were necessary to the core functions of the office.

We fought World War II and developed the atom bomb and moved millions of men around the world while knowing where each of them was with fountain pens and carbon paper.

We conduct a census every ten years. A modern census worker would think her job impossible without whatever technology she uses today, but we had a census of about 100 million people in 1900 when a lot of people still rode horses, lacked phones, etc..

What if there had been no cyanide? Then the Holocaust would have relied entirely on Carbon Monoxide, but it still would have happened.

What if there was no rail infrastructure to transport captured people to camps? Then they would have been killed where they were captured or "death marched" like the trail of tears.

shared with the Germans since it expanded their almighty profits, made it all that much easier to find all Jews living in Nazi-occupied areas, no matter how cleverly they thought they were hiding. There wouldn't have been nearly as many victims without it. A historian wrote a book on this very subject in the 90's; I can't think of the exact name of it now, but it was quite chilling. He compared it to modern insurance companies whose profits were first made, and based on, insuring slaves and perpetuating slavery.

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black.
http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corporation-Expanded/dp/0914153277/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362251474&sr=1-1&keywords=ibm+and+the+holocaust

Oh, and how did we pull off that census in 1900? Yup, with Hollerith tabulators, same machines that IBM used in Germany.

Would the lack of such high tech machines meant no Holocaust, certainly not. But it is a certainty that six million Jews wouldn't have been killed, in fact probably not even a tenth of that.

Read the book, then decide.

The Hollerith tabulator would still have existed in a slightly different form with a different name.

It is a causation error to say, for instance, that the Indians would have been better okay if Columbus had never found America.

If Columbus had not then someone else would a couple of years later, with the same general result.

If IBM exists and is selling the Hollerith tabulator then it is cheaper and easier to buy what is available to buy.

But if IBM never existed then the computing needs of the modern business and the modern state would still have been met.

Would the perpetrators of the Holocaust have been stymied by an intellectual property suit, when push came to shove? Were they too honorable to reverse engineer a business machine?

IBM should not have done business with the Nazis.

To say, however, that IBM could have prevented Germany from developing or using mechanical tabulation is silliness.

He violated the Trading with the Enemy Act ultimately. He saw profit and went for it. If IBM hadn't existed, it doesn't automatically follow that Hollerith technology would have still have been used in Nazi Germany. There were no European machines that could have performed the same tasks with the same efficiency, and if IBM hadn't bought up Hollerith, it could have died a very quiet death.

Automatically assuming that somebody else would have done what IBM and Watson did is sheer nonsense. Plenty of other US companies pulled out of Germany when the Nazis came to power, so who's to say that another US company with the same tech wouldn't have pulled out as well?

Oh, and the only tabulators in Europe at the time weren't German, they were French. These weren't simple mechanical tabulators, these were eletro-mechanical tabulators, precursors to the computer. In fact the old school punch cards that were used to program computers back in the seventies, they are directly derived from the Hollerith machines.

Not that it's really the point of the thread. But some of the biz/tech was quite decisive (IG patents, Ford, and IBM to name some of the most important).

The Holerith machine was a central and essential part of rapid census taking which was one of the technical backbones of the Holocaust.

I do wonder if that 42,500 includes the other types of people such as the disabled, homosexuals, etc.

They went to the institutions over the objections of their staff and put them to sleep. Some of the staff hid them, and others took them out of the country. There was a village in the Netherlands that was a sanctuary town for them to escape the Nazis. The propaganda machine had been complaining about how the taxes of hard working Germans undergoing hard times were going to care for them with figures of how much tax money it cost to pay for the public workers that cared for them.



Poster promoting Eugenics.

Some one is trying to get the photo removed for what I think are spurious reasons. Guess they don't want people to think about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_propaganda

Disabled people

Several hundred thousand mentally and physically disabled people also were exterminated. The Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society because they needed to be cared for by others, but first and foremost, the mentally and physically handicapped were considered an affront to Nazi notions of a society peopled by a perfect, superhuman Aryan race. Around 400,000 individuals were sterilized against their will for having mental deficiencies or illnesses deemed to be hereditary in nature. People with disabilities were among the first to be killed, and the United States Holocaust Memorial museum notes that the T-4 Program became the "model" for future exterminations by the Nazi regime.The T-4 Euthanasia Program was established in 1939 in order to maintain the "purity" of the so-called Aryan race by systematically killing children and adults born with physical deformities or suffering from mental illness.

http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/holocaust.html#Disabled_people

Naturally, they were just the beginning of the list and it is detailed here:

http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/holocaust.html

Jwirr, don't feel ashamed. Americans and all nations have done evil. Germans learned a very hard lesson and changed.

served as a blueprint to early Nazi eugenics plans. A clip from War on the Weak:

[link:

Historically, it has been termed as either positive or negative eugenics. Positive being such actions as designer babies. Negative being killing and sterilization. it's also been associated with social class.

have a severely disabled child and fear that this could easily happen here and now. We do not seem to be acting all that well lately - actually since 1980.

I can tell you the story of a dear friend in Norway whose grandparents got in trouble in WW2 by mail if you want to undestand the scope of what that era was. From those who lived it. They take what was done very seriously and AFAIK are adamant against a return to it. Horrible things are being done the disabled all over world. We're doing our part, jwirr. Stand by your child, it's what we do.

Many residents began harassing Jewish people into ghettos and shooting them even before the advance of the Nazis into those territories. Very sickening and sad.

practically a way of life in many of those states at that time, not to mention Eastern Europe and, hell, Europe in general. It was well-entrenched and ingrained, almost spoon-fed. That is why the Nazis located some of the worst camps in those areas, nobody cared. Even today, many residents and descendants in those areas blame the Jews themselves and claim to be tired of hearing about it, that it wasn't as bad as it's "been made out to be".

Just let the teabaggers get control and it'll happen as fast as it did in Germany.

The Germans aren't special or different than the rest of humanity. And neither are we better than the rest of humanity.

and it's not likely that the tea baggers get control. Why isn't it likely to happen here? Diversity for one thing. We are a hugely ethnically diverse nation. Germany at that time, was certainly not. Our political tradition is far different than Germany's was, for another. It's not about being better or worse; you're right we're not. It is about other factors as well.

that genocide is only done by other countries is sadly mistaken. I wasn't claiming it will happen here. Just that I can easily imagine that it can happen here.

The hyperbolic ones that define everything as genocide are too, but a lot of people seem to think that the legal definition of "genocide" is "the extermination of Jewish and Slavic Europeans by Nazi Germany in specialized camps between November 1938 and May 1945," allowing them to inconveniently ignore just about anything else.

The Canadian experience towards the First Nations population qualifies - it fits either all but one or all of the legal definitions of "genocide," depending on how you look at it - but so many people define the term roughly as I did above that it's way too easy to ignore what was going on until the eighties.

Try asking Native Americans, who numbered in the millions when we first arrived on these shores, about it.

Though most Americans probably didn't know much about it. The OP is talking about the German people claiming they didn't know what was going on in their own back yards.

At that time in our history, when the government was actively persecuting Native Americans the West was hardly teeming with cities. Though there is a valid question in whether white immigrants would have been OK with killing the Indians. I imagine they would have been fine with it if asked.

My bad. We're already doing that.

Diversity won't save us. They have fractured us along different lines. I have family members who would turn me in 'for her own good.'

I think we're nowhere near being on the verge of setting up death camps. And yes, part of the reason is our ethnic diversity.

But I think you give to much credit to the American people...we sit on our hands and watch as SCOTUS and Congress pass and uphold laws that we know violate the US Constitution...we now wait for a decision about pulling the teeth from the Voter Rights Act...Republican controlled legislatures across the country are looking at ways to rig the system so that they can deny people the right to vote!

Ethnic diversity is powerless, because of how voting districts are gerrymandered...in a way you could say that the Republicans are creating "ghettos" based on how people in those areas vote!

No camps yet, but then again the first Native Americans to encounter white explorers probably didn't think there was going to be a problem with those newcomers...we see centuries later, they were wrong.

Hope for the best, but expect the worst!

There is - next to a predominant dose of race- and antisemitism - a discernable classism in Nazi racial thinking. Not all subhumans were equal - a fact which was reflected in operational planning such as Baacke's "Hunger Plan".

My Dad was a WWII vet and was a nose-gunner on a B-24 that flew bombing missions out of central Italy over targets in Germany, Austria, Hungary, northern Italy, the territories of old Yugoslavia, and Romania. Several years before he passed away he told me that the US was becoming what he fought against in Europe. He had no use for the Bush Crime Family.

When I first realized my kids had graduated high school without ever hearing of the Holocaust, I was stunned.

Enlightened people ask too many questions. They might want to know why events from 1945 impact their lives today.

They might even ask the wrong questions, like "Why do we need to attack Iraq?" or "Why didn't any of the politicians who lied America into an illegel, immoral, unnecessary and disastrous war go to jail?" or "Why do the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer?" or "Where did all the money go that the banksters lost in 2008?" or "Why doesn't government tackle problems like poverty by creating jobs like during the Depression?"

You, your kids and I, know to ask questions like these because we have been trained to actively find and evaluate information. Others are not so lucky, they trust the authorities, whether government, the media or the corporate sphere (lots o' blurring there, these days).

So, it was most disheartening to read that most of the nation's public schools follow the lead of the neo-confederates in Texas.

As you've so-well documented on DU, madfloridian. There's a reason for defunding education. It's the same one for the lack of truth and all the shiny stuff on the tee vee noose: Ignorant people are easier to fool.

...of each chapter wondering how people could have been so cruel to others. Set in occupied Poland, the story also makes very clear the historical animosity of most Poles toward the Jews and their willingness to cooperate with the Nazi's in their treatment of the Jews.

In addition to the 42,500 ghettos and slave labor camps, the Nazis also starved and/or worked to death between 6 to 8 million Soviet military POWs.

And now we're learning that the Holocaust was far worse than we originally believed?

Horrible, simply horrible.

I am all for refining historical stats, but the Holocaust is not ever going to get "way more shocking."

No Jews (or identifiable members of other target groups) anywhere were exempt. The Nazis occupied almost all of continental Europe at one time or another. Given that, there was nobody in Europe in a Holocaust target class who was not affected in one way or another.

We know that, taking Jews as an example group, the upside number affected is the total number of Jews in Europe. And the Holocaust directly affected almost everyone in that group.

So our understanding of the effect of the Holocaust on European Jews cannot really *grow* because we already believed the effect to be very nearly as large as it could have been by definition.

The number of administrative subdivisions of the Holocaust is important and interesting historical research, but it is largely about how we count certain things whether we end up with 42,000 administrative entities s or 21,000 administrative entities.

In case anyone misses the point, since it is a delicate topic, 1,000 camps killing/enslaving 1,000 people each is not radically different from 500 camps killing/enslaving 2,000 each.

But it is an interesting article.

at how pervasive it was. Large camps in certain places could have limited the exposure of such deeds. However, with that many places involved, there was complicity everywhere,

BTW you can argue with the scholars who were shocked. They have studied this for years, and even they were stunned by the number.

Just like thousands of people will step past an obviously, homeless, cold, hungry person everyday.

Obliviousness is a common human trait.

A Shetl is a little town that where many Jews lived in what is now Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine...many were already segregated by the local governments, the Nazis had little trouble rounding up Jews and keeping them in holding areas until they were moved to ghettos in larger cities or directly to the camps. My grandparents came from a town in what is now Poland that had a pre-war population of 20,000 Jews. I still have letters from my relatives who lived there...complaining not of Nazi but of Polish government oppression...the last letter was from July, 1939. In the early 70s my mother went to visit the town to see if she could find out about the fate of my relatives and found there were only 4 Jews who lived in the town. All traces of past residents were wiped away by the Polish and Soviet governments. So I can imagine how difficult getting all this information could have been...especially after 70 years.

My father served in the Army Medical Corps and was involved in the liberation of several camps. Being Jewish he felt a special anger towards German people that he carried for the rest of his life. He never spoke about what he saw except to say that he never thought man could be so inhumane to another...

He said that they had to be ordered to not go shoot every German they could find. He was not exactly a man of delicate sensibilities. Even if I did not have some awareness of the horror, his reaction would have been a clue.

We learned nothing.

That doesn't excuse it, of course, but it's not the same thing.

The diagnostic of an extermination campaign is that, after a period of time, many fewer of the target populace can be found. The population of Gaza is appreciably larger today than it was ten years ago, and the number of persons the Israeli military has killed there over the span of existence is of the same statistical order as traffic fatalities.

Gaza is not, to put it mildly, a good thing, but to pretend it is the equivalent of an extermination facility is nonesense, and anyone who tries it is simply announcing themselves as persons who take noting seriously, and who cannot be taken seriously themselves.

Either you're ignorant to a degree that's almost unbelievable and you actually believe that Gaza is suffering a genocide, or you're pushing dishonest shit in order to further an agenda.

Both are lousy.

disagrees that it's genocide.

....it doesn't take much to go from oppression to genocide if one considers the people of Gaza to be a single nationality.

* Oppression: the act of subjugating by cruelty, force, etc. or the state of being subjugated in this way

* Genocide: the policy of deliberately killing a nationality or ethnic group

The human in me feels ashamed right now. Truly.

IBM in particular - if corporations are people why can't we put them on trial?

A very interesting book I have read.

http://www.amazon.com/Popes-Against-Jews-Vaticans-Anti-Semitism/dp/0375706054

realize what the fuck Jews have had to deal with for the last 1,500 years or so.

And WW2 and NAZIS were NOT the exception. Jews have been used, abused and thrown out of damn nearly every country they have been in. They are always used by the state, forced to loan out their money to the govt. and then THROWN OUT when they couldn't be paid back. Over and over and over.

And on a personal level, many of us know what anti-semitism is up close and personal.

It's certainly not going to happen here at DU.

...shocking to see how the oppressed have become the oppressors...

For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

Derrick Jensen