Extent of Nazi Camps Far Greater Than Realized

What we are seeing in this project is that all of Europe was a camp."

Extent of Nazi Camps Far Greater Than Realized

Decade-Long Study by Holocaust Museum Scholars Could Alter Public Understanding

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 4, 2009

A little more than a decade ago, researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum decided to create an encyclopedia of concentration camps. They assumed the finished work would be massive, featuring a staggering 5,000 to 7,000 camps and ghettos.

They underestimated by 15,000.

Their ultimate count of more than 20,000 camps -- which they reached after a year of research -- is far more than most scholars had known existed and might reshape public understanding of the scope of the Holocaust itself.

"What's going to happen is that the mental universe of how scholars operate is going to change," said Steven Katz, director of Boston University's Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies. "Instead of thinking of main death camps, people are going to understand that this was a continent-wide phenomenon."

The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos: 1933-1945 "is the first major reference work for Holocaust studies since . . . the fall of the U.S.S.R." and the opening of many European archives, says Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. As a result, more information was available to researchers than had ever been before. Scholars chased footnotes in old books and used Internet mailing lists to find historians who might possess tiny pieces of the puzzle. Volume 1 is scheduled for release June 12.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/03/AR2009060303690.html?nav=hcmodule

so that I might exist at all.

Most of the rest are all dead, except for one branch in Israel.

mark

Everyone who stayed behind was killed. But I wasn't really told anything until I was about 18 and they thought I could handle it.

I should have suspected it when there was trouble in South Africa and my mother told the cousins there that she would take every child in the family. Get them on a plane and we would take them in. It never came to that. And only later did I realize what a burden of guilt she carried, because she, a teenage girl, wasn't able to rescue her grandfather and her uncles and aunts, whom she had never met.

Have you been there to visit? It seems that everyone in Rzeszow has a cousin in Chicago or Buffalo. While it must have been a really crappy place right before World War I, nowadays life in Poland is much improved.

they narrowly escaped due to a very fortunate miscommunication between the ss and the landlord as to the number of jewish families in the building (three families but occupying only two units). the ss took two families and left. when the landlord realized he still had jewish tenants, he immediately evicted them lest the ss realize their mistake.

my grandparents had to go through the heart of nazi germany to belgium, with nothing but a picnic basket (that was their cover) and casually stroll through the ardennes forest, leaving everything behind, into belgium. the only money they had was what they needed to pay off the smugglers.

from there, a year later, they got their visa to america during the few weeks between the invasion of poland and the blitz through belgium toward france.

and the world would have been poorer for it. This is an abomination isn't it.

it was so wierd looking through pictures after my aunt died that were in the house... relatives with that swastika on their arm. my grandpa had a passport that had a swastika stamp in it.. i think... i am not sure, but it said he went over there at some point after the nazis took over. Sent a chill down my spine. I know I have relatives who still live in germany... though i have never met them. it is just odd and something that just seeing the pictures and stuff somehow makes it less abstract than it had been before to me. so removed from my life.

I recently realized that it was a world wide effort. IBM, among other American companies, was integral in making the situation much worse than it would have been without the organizational help they gave. And they knew what was happening. So it actually spanned more than one continent.

Bushes, Rockefellers, IBM, GM, Ford, Bayer, Morgans, Dulleses, Walkers, and many other eugenicists and corporofascists were part of the plan according to many solid histories.

Konrad Heiden wrote about the anglo-nordic-american corporate/financial alliance deals cut by Hitler with WASP Americans and others in his seminal histories "Der Fuehrer" and "A History of National Socialism"

The fact that there were never serious prosecutions after the war led to everything from mass death camps in Latin America to the historical continuity from Auschwitz to Gitmo and even plans for massive camps here in the US by our shadowy and treasonous National security state.

K&R

The Nazis didn't really LOSE the Second World War. They just rebranded and ditched the odious swastika and party logos.

Heiden says that the alliances Hitler cut with the WASP wall street corporofascists in the 1930's (even though Hitler railed against "international bankers" and the rich) was designed to be a totaliarian fascist and brutal corporate state based on lies and the proof of "aryan" supremacy was in the ability of these "aryan" or Nordic elites to conquer with brute force all the rest of the world.

IMHO while they succeeded in this global fascist empire, they demonstrated their inferiority precisely because brutality and horror and terror or the most beastly and inhuman of qualities.

We now have the means to undo this corporofascist global Reich (that Hunter S. Thompson called the "Fourth Reich of Bush et al).

But understanding its methodologies and the facts pertaining to global corporate fascism (including what actually happened and how the camps and systems operated et) is critical

That is why I K&R this OP.

"turn their head", but Breckinridge Long in the State Dept ACTIVELY impeded the processing of visas for Jews who were trying to escape Europe - told staff in Europe to delay the processing of visas as long as possible. Also, in 1942 and early 1943 the US Government actively BLOCKED information about the genocide that was coming out of Europe.

America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/
Excerpts:
David Wyman, historian: In 20 years of research, probably the most disgraceful document that I've ever run into is this memorandum written by Breckinridge Long in June 1940 in which he outlines the means by which consuls secretly and illegally can cut very sharply into immigration:
NARRATOR: "We can delay and effectively stop, for a temporary period of indefinite length, the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas."

Watch this film - it's horrifying and infuriating to watch - not because of graphic pictures (there's little of that, IIRC), but because of the utter shamefulness of US govt actions (inaction, more accurately). An important chapter of our history to learn about - because it certainly isn't covered in schools. David McCullough, host of the American Experience series, in his introduction to the film describes it as "one of the most powerful and disturbing films to appear in this series".

Netflix carries this film, and your local library may carry it as well - ours has quite a few of the American Experience series.(a transcript of the film is included at the above website, but it's VERY much more powerful to watch it.)

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Binghams-List.html


Saving the Jews of Nazi France
As Jews in France tried to flee the Nazi occupation, Harry Bingham, an American diplomat, sped them to safety
By Peter Eisner
Smithsonian magazine, March 2009


An internationally known german novelist, Lion Feuchtwanger had been a harsh critic of Adolf Hitler since the 1920s. One of his novels, The Oppermanns, was a thinly veiled exposé of Nazi brutality. He called the Führer's Mein Kampf a 140,000-word book with 140,000 mistakes. "The Nazis had denounced me as Enemy Number One," he once said. They also stripped him of his German citizenship and publicly burned his books.

In July 1940, the Nazis had just occupied Paris, and southeastern France—where Feuchtwanger was living—was controlled by a French government with Nazi sympathies. As the French authorities in the south began rounding up the foreigners in their midst, Feuchtwanger found himself in a lightly guarded detention camp near Nîmes, fearing imminent transfer to the Gestapo. On the afternoon of Sunday, July 21, he took a walk by a swimming hole where inmates were allowed to bathe, debating whether to flee the camp or wait for exit papers that the French had promised.

Suddenly, he spotted a woman he knew along the road to the camp and hurried over. "I have been waiting for you here," she said, shepherding him to a car. A few hours later, the novelist was safely in Marseille, enjoying the hospitality of a low-ranking U.S. diplomat named Hiram Bingham IV.

.....

But as World War II approached, Bingham made a series of life-altering choices. By sheltering Feuchtwanger in his private villa, Bingham violated both French law and U.S. policy. To draw attention to hunger and disease in the French camps, he challenged indifference and anti-Semitism among his State Department superiors. In speeding up visa and travel documents at the Marseille consulate, he disobeyed orders from Washington. In all, an estimated 2,500 refugees were able to flee to safety because of Bingham's help. Some of his beneficiaries were famous—Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst—but most were not.

Bingham accomplished all this in a mere ten months—until the State Department summarily transferred him out of France. By the end of World War II, his hopes of becoming an ambassador had been dashed.


MORE AT LINK, including info on concentration camps in France

Just had time to skim, will definitely come back to later.
What a hero Bingham was, and he totally got the shaft from the State Dept. Confirms my impression that Breckinridge Long was a major league asshole. Yeah, bigtime. (I don't believe in Hell, but such a place is where Long belongs.)

that is what this story is really about.

Opposing the rescue of antiNazis on political and ethnic grounds equals complicity of the State Department and FDR FAILED to do much at all to help.

He authorized only about 200 emergency visas for Jews and other antiNazis who were endangered in France (those who could not otherwise qualify due to relatives or normal visa rules).

That si hy thousands had to be smuggled out through Spin and North Africa by an American progressive journalist Varian Fry and others working with Bingham who defied his direct orders to help Fry and others in the smuggling ops.

Chagall and Arendt no less.

nt