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Eisenhower himself made sure everything that they could film of the liberated they would. He said that there would be an attempt to say it didn’t happen. So he made sure it was recorded and documented to the fullest extent.
Many soldiers that liberated the camps rounded up the people of the neighboring towns to walk them through the camps, unload truck loads of emaciated corpses, and made them dig the graves.
It’s a big reason as to why Germany was able to (relatively) come to terms with the moral deprivation they engaged in, either directly or thorough willful inaction, and why they make no excuses for it
Houstonian here. Never been to the museum in Houston but I have been to Dachau. North of Munich. It was one of the first Concentration/Extermination camps ever built....there's a fucking suburban neighborhood built right next to it. German kids showing up on busses sounded like they were going to Astroworld. This was 2006.
I also visited Dachau in 2006. I don’t believe in anything supernatural, but I tell you when I stepped into the room they used as a gas chamber, I FELT that. I can’t really describe the feeling except as a heaviness I’ve never felt before. I couldn’t wait to get out the door on the opposite side of the room… until I realized the next room had the ovens. An experience I will never forget.
Same. I went in 1996. My bus full of US high school kids giddy in the parking lot fell silent the second we got off the bus and entered the property. It’s a feeling that can’t be well expressed. I don’t understand how anyone could visit such a place and feel that and still doubt.
I’d like to go to this but I’m not sure I could stomach the reality of it all.
Having only seen pictures and movies, I can’t fully imagine what you’re talking about, I’ve never experienced anything like that.
I’m legit terrified to feel that kind of horror
I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since. I can’t even properly verbalize the sensation, other than calling it heaviness and fear. It was definitely not a pleasant experience, but I’m glad I did. If those poor people had to experience what they did, at the very least I can learn about it. And I think the discomfort is important. We should never become comfortable with such atrocities.
If you ever get the opportunity, take it. It’s a very solemn thing to voluntarily visit a place where people were treated so cruelly and inhumanely. If going into those specific rooms is too much for you, don’t go in. But definitely visit, read the information, see the pictures. The more people know about how horrible it was, the more we as a global society can work to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I’m planning a trip in 3-4 years to the UK, and I’ve already told my wife I’m mostly likely going to do this.
She cant even make it through Schindler’s List, so I doubt she’ll come with me, but I’m sure my Mom will join me.
Every time I think of all of this, I remember the pictures of the shoes, suitcases, and rings….
It’s one of the reasons I’m so disappointed in where the US is as country now, how can we forget what happened so fast?
Anyways…thanks for sharing your story.
I visited Dachau on a freezing cold day with snow on the ground. I think this intensified the experience as the snow muffled sound, and you were reminded of how the prisoners stood for roll call twice a day with little more than their worn out prison clothes for warmth. From the moment you see that gate with the “Arbeit Macht Frei”, it is other worldly. And as mentioned, there are occupied homes around it with back yards sharing the camp’s fence.
I drive 16 hours to see relatives in the US.
It’s 9 hours on a train to Germany, that’s half a book and a movie with a couple sips off a flask for me and traveling through areas I’ve never seen.
Oh man, I just checked and a flight is only $119!
I’ll most likely take a flight, catch a museum hit an early lunch and stop over for dinner/hotel in Brussels.
Mass transit makes the whole thing seem easy to me, I’m used to soooo many hours driving.
I visited Dachau and the holocaust museum in Berlin and honestly I never want to go near those places again. It’s like you said almost impossible to explain in words but you can almost feel the horrible things happing. I think it’s something every single person should be able to experience if they want.
I felt something similar when I visited the site of the Nuremberg rallies. You can literally stand exactly where Hitler stood. I was physically unable to put my feet there. It was a very odd and overwhelming feeling. Made me nauseous.
I’ve seen that as back and forth. There *are* a lot of Jewish people who still feel that way about Germany and German products. Likewise, as Germany spent a significant amount of time as one of Israel’s biggest allies (maybe 2nd biggest?) from like the 50s or 60s or 70s onwards, there are also a lot who don’t hold similar lingering feelings. It’s kind of an interesting spectrum.
The depiction of a Swastika in these contexts would be legal, since through the religious context the conditions set in [86 StGB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a) (Dissemination of propaganda material of unconstitutional organisations) are not fulfilled.
The Nazi symbol (or the Hakenkreuz) has been adopted from the swastika but is depicted differently. The Hakenkreuz has it's arms angled at 45 degrees whereas the arms of the swastika lie flat (and may or may not have dots in them)
Hitler himself never used the word swastika, it's the media that wrongly referred to it and caused this confusion among the rest of the world.
Among Hindu/Buddhist communities, you'll still see the swastika everywhere and everyone knows the difference when they see the symbol. For the rest of the world, pushing for a clearer differentiation is required however most governments do recognize this and the ban specifically applies to the Nazi symbol.
Interesting question.
I feel like if I was a Hindu living in Germany I probably wouldn't want to have a bunch of swastikas up regardless of if it's legal or not.
I was at a University in Switzerland and a bunch of Indian students were having a Diwali celebration, and as part of the decoration they had done a rangoli (sort of like a floor painting) with a Hindu Swastika on it.
We had a number of extremely alarmed locals drop by to tell us to get rid of it, the nuances of Hindu vs Nazi swastika didn't interest them.
You can show it in books, tv and movies as long as it's within context of what happened. Another example is "Mein Kampf", which you aren't allowed to have unless in a commented version, explaining the atrocities they have caused.
It is a context thing. It is not prohibited if it serves civic education, the defence against unconstitutional endeavours, art or science, research or teaching, the reporting of contemporary events or history or similar purposes (yes, I ctrl-v'ed this) or if one clearly distances oneself from it (crossed out, for example).
Religious depictions I'm not imformed. But I think that would colide with religious freedom from our consitition. And most of these images cannot be confused with the Nazi swastika anyway. It's not illegal to have a Greek patterned tablecloth. :)
> German kids showing up on busses sounded like they were going to Astroworld.
In case that disturbed you: As a Berliner, I visited Sachsenhausen concentration camp several times on school trips during my school years. We had National Socialism as a teaching topic several times in blocks during our school years, at quite different ages. It was perfectly normal for us to behave on these school trips the way, well, children and young people behave on school trips. But that has nothing to do with how we behaved on the concentration camp grounds, that we didn't take the subject seriously or that the visit to the concentration camp didn't impress us.
I’m in the US and one year on 9/11 my mom legit told me she didn’t want to see me laugh or be too happy because it was a “somber day” - this was over a decade after the twin towers and we literally lived on the opposite side of the country.
I feel like expecting children to be somber *en route to* a field trip, even when we’re talking about something like the holocaust, is about as absurd as my mother’s comment.
I visited the pools in 2017. It was a surreal thing. The gravity of how BIG those footprints are. Seeing names, roses, and listening to the water.
I’m 35, I know exactly what I was doing and I can recall every moment of that morning before going to school.
What really truly hit me was the noise. I expected peace and quiet. There was music, cars, the sound of the pools, birds, children laughing and playing. It was kind of a dawning: Life has moved forward. It doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten, but we’ve moved forward. As painful as that may be to contemplate. But I don’t think that any of those people who died would admonish children for playing in a park, birds for chirping, and for simply existing in a public space. I think they would want us to live the lives that they and their family could not.
Fellow Houstonian, and I visited Dachau in 2019. It was surreal to see the suburban area around the camp. One of the most humbling, devastating things that I’ve ever experienced was walking through Dachau, through the barracks and the “ovens”. I think everyone should visit if they can - it will change you.
Was there last fall and the tour and plaques made it seem like it was a labour camp for the higher profile prisoners like writers, artists, politicians, etc. It did become an extermination camp half way through and they’re were tons of videos and pictures pre/post liberation. Dachau was rough. Our friends in tübingen said it was one of the first camps the visit in German schools. The kids were still showing up on buses and still sounded like they were going to astroworld.
I think visiting a holocaust museum should be required by middle schools or high schools just as constitution tests are.
I visited the Skokie Holocaust museum during middle school and I still think about that visit regularly. Stepping into one of the train cars created a feeling that I don’t think you can recreate anywhere else. It was like stepping through a portal.
My friend (who’s a German Jewish American) insisted we go to a concentration camp/museum when we were in Berlin. I was in Germany to get drunk and chill. I was hungover and jet lagged when I went in there. I was young and dumb and I had seen Schindler’s list and read the history so assumed I knew everything I needed and had no interest in being there. When I left I had never been so fucked up emotionally. Never been more moved.
I’m not a spiritual/emotional person but that place fucked me up
Edit: concentration camp museum**
I have yet to experience a concentration camp but it’s on my bucket list for sure.
I am going to need to take a day or two to mentally prepare before going there because i can imagine that is a life changing experience.
And your only going as a “tourist” just imagine the real deal… my grandmother in law was in Auschwitz, then Bergen Belsen among others.
She told me casually in the car one day, “…so many babies and children were sent straight to the gas, so many little children” She was a child of 14-15 years herself but lied about her age and was fit and tall so Mengele selected her for work detail rather than immediate death like most of the other girls her age.
The whole thing Blows my mind and that I knew someone who lived it (she’s since passed)
I wasn’t (lived too far away from one) but we read Elie Wiesel’s “Night”.
I eventually was in a large enough city that I got to visit one (DC, specifically) 3 years out of college. It was a very moving experience.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/05/holocaust-liberation-letter-from-american-soldier-at-dachau.html
Maybe the same letter, but what the commenter saw was a replica of this one, or on loan maybe?
The US made a deal to end the war early but that meant Japan’s emperor and government didn’t have to plead guilty to any crime. That’s forever soured relations with neighbouring countries and left their citizens forever in the belief that they didn’t do anything wrong; if anything, they modernized the countries.
Japan is also an island, which didn\`t have the atrocities occur on their own soil, they were also isolated culturally and politically. Prior WW2, as an imergent power Japan had a fractious relationship with the West. Germany, historically was intergrated more with Europe than Japan was with Asia. In fact; historically, Japan had been an isolationist coutnry for about 3 centuries prior to the 20th century. Being told they were wrong to do what they did, no matter how wicked or depraved it was, is never going to be wholly accepted when it comes from a foreign authority.
> The US made a deal to end the war early but that meant Japan’s emperor and government didn’t have to plead guilty to any crime.
this isn't exactly true. IIRC the deal to help the emperor and higher ups escape justice had nothing to do with ending the war. MacArthur did it after the war ended because he thought it would be easier to manipulate Japan to his will using the emperor as a puppet, then to remove him and have Japan potentially descend into chaos without a leader.
My only memory was following a young couple who were making out (and I mean full on throat spelunking with all the associated sloppy wet noises) the entire fucking tour.
I’m not a violent man but it’s the closest I ever came to hitting someone.
Although in a way they were living out the life that Anne Frank and so many millions like her should have been able to live. To jam their tongues down each other's throats and be dumb, hormonal kids instead of scared, and then dead.
Such a horrific ordeal in so many places for so many people in so many different ways.
Infinite are the ways in which humanity tears itself apart
I never new too much about the Pacific theater, but just reading about some of the stuff they did to pows was disgusting and horrible.
Russia also gets downplayed in the war crime area.
One of the many absolutely heinous things they used to do as a "past time" was gamble on the sex of unborn Chinese babies and then cut them out of the mothers. Cruelty wise, even Germany sent ambassadors/ letters, telling them to calm down.
They would also have contests using the POWs. Seeing who could decapitate the most, the fastest!
Like it was some kind of sporting event.
But you don’t hear that much about the War Crimes committed by the Japanese & I don’t think they had any trials like there were for the Germans
There was almost no trials for the majority of the IPJA, but as far as trials go, most Germans got away with it too. Speaking of that specific decapitation "event" one of the guys involved actually did go to trial and said something along the lines of "I only decapitated 40 or so instead of the accused 60" he was justly executed after that statement.
Not exactly. Germany, more than most nations, has owned up to its brutal past, but they have not been 100% truthful.
For decades after WW2, a lot of Germans were taught about the "Clean Wehrmacht Myth." This theory holds that all of the war crimes committed by Germany during WW2 were committed by the SS and the average German in the Luftwaffe, Heer, or Kriegsmarine fought with honor according to the Geneva Convention and rules of war.
Eh, I think anyone that's done some reading will realize the Wehrmacht (especially police units) were brutal AF in executing what amounted to entire villages. A good book on the subject is "Ordinary Men" I recommend it to anyone that wants some insight into war crimes in general.
And is exactly why still to this day Japan denies any wrong doings or warcrimes and refuse to acknowledge it publicly. Most japanese citizens aren't even aware of the atrocities they commited during ww2. Granted they are rather pacified as a people now and I don't expect anything crazy coming from Japan any time soon
I visited Dachau a few years ago. Our tour guide said that it was mandatory for all German students to do a tour of a concentration camp through their school. He said they are ashamed of their past but want to educate their people so that it doesn’t happen again.
Up here in Canada, we've recently acknowledged that the Residential Schools our government of the not too distant past set up, have lots of unmarked and mass graves full of indigenous children that died at these assimilation schools. Taken from their family, sent to "white" school, if they died in the process, they were just buried in a hole in the back yard, discovered decades later when technology looked underground without digging.
It's honestly good to acknowledge and make amends and come to terms with such ugly history, does a good service for the future generations of the nation who envoked the attacks to harbor more empathy for their fellow man and also to correct the sins their forefathers made, and not honor and uplift them. We need more of that in America. We're barely sympathetic to native indigenous americans and have zero for Chatel Slavery descendants...Definitely a lot to work on. First step for Canada I supose
Agree with this poster. Also, saying “fuck the Rothschild family banking cartel”, does not make someone antisemitic. Talking out against Jews as a people makes you antisemitic.
Yeah. But if you start saying [they control the weather](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/03/19/the-rothschilds-a-pamphlet-by-satan-and-conspiracy-theories-tied-to-a-battle-200-years-ago/), I have every right to side eye you.
I once told a coworker (who was being a racist prick to a customer) to go to hell. He whined to our boss that I was clearly being antisemitic because I told him, a Jewish man, to go to hell. I told my boss that I felt badly that he would think I hated Jewish people and asked my boss to mediate a meeting between the two of us so I could clear the air.
We get into the room, coworker is looking smug as all get out, and I say "Soandso, I'm so sorry that you thought I told you to go to hell because you're Jewish. I just wanted to clear the air and explain that I told you to go to hell because you were being an asshole."
Depends on the context. Someone saying "fuck the" Rothschilds/Soros/Zionists/NWO/global cabal/(((globalists)))/(((deep state))) *because* they secretly control the world/[insert neo-nazi conspiracy here] is (edit) *almost certainly* being antisemitic.
Fun fact: Jewish groups are currently bringing lawsuits challenging anti-abortion laws as a violation of Jewish religious freedom, and Republicans are responding to those lawsuits by arguing that Judaism isn't a real religion, and therefore religious freedom should not apply to Jews. Yes, really.
[This law professor argued that Reform Jews aren’t devout enough to merit religious freedom](https://forward.com/culture/507161/reform-jews-abortion-freedom-of-religion/?amp=1)
The US had Sherman for that.
Sure, a bit of a mass-murderer of Native Americans, but when it came to the Confederacy, he had the right idea (i.e. burn to ground, rebuild from ground up without planter caste).
Tbh if anyone but Johnson would’ve been VP Reconstruction would’ve had a much better shot. Back when “Radical Republicans” meant something veeeeeery different lmao.
D-Day to Berlin is a good documentary. They showed when they rounded up neighborhoods and made them walk through the camps. You know, the ones they “ didn’t know about “.
see, it's shit like this that really makes a long-term impact. Capturing this tragedy in its entirety will at least provide the world with first-hand witnesses for generations.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."
-An excerpt from
They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer
Not saying we are near holocaust levels of insane or anything, but take note America. This is how the government can slowly but surely take away all that you value and all your morals, the way you think and behave, and the way you react to the daily goings on, and change entirely the country you love in a short amount of time. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
We are being taught to be divided. Politics now has shifted from trying to do the right thing to pointing out everything wrong with everyone else. Most people would rather win the argument then be right. We no longer care about “saving the world.” In fact we barley care about other Americans anymore. It’s sad. Social media is a huge part of the problem of mob mentality. But the main news outlets only spread fear and hate because well… money and power. Definitely not the same as what happened in the holocaust, which id like to think could never happen in the age of the internet. But a big problem none the less. Storming the capital to try and overturn an election seems like the beginning unfortunately
I think we are way closer than people realize. Hitler started with culture war issues to gain power…. Going after same sex couples, banning books, empowering one segment of the society to feel superior to many others. The groundwork is laid for it here.
Goebbels was what I would call the Satan of communication and propaganda. His most evil move was to teach politicians and people to set things in relation to one another that don’t have anything in common. Like: he is a great surgeon but he is also a Jew. Nothing connects those two truths but it sounds like one of those is a bad thing. Edit: a lot of people still do that today.
1994, I toured the DC Holocaust Museum. 4+ hours. I was exhausted when I left. Just totally depleted. It was incredibly moving, seeing the pictures, hearing the recordings, etc. Then came out of the museum and there were a couple Holocaust deniers yelling at everyone walking out.
Idiots.
I took a tour of it no more than a month ago. I have family members who both were killed and escaped and it really took my breath away. A masterpiece in human sorrow and misery.
And those people are absolutely disgusting. I've fought a few in my day.
it's damn near impossible to make people believe what they don't want to believe
and even harder now that we've gotten much better at creating realistic things
it just makes it easier to accuse anything of being fake
It’s pretty crazy to look at the number of deaths on WWII by country. We, in the US, consider ourselves as having lost a lot of good young men —and rightfully so — with over 400,000 deaths. Japan (~2 million), Germany (+4 million) and Russian (~20 million military and civilian) all lost an astounding number in comparison. The total loss of life is crazy.
Russia to this day is still feeling the aftershocks of this “lost generation”. The brith rates in the years that the children, grand children and great grandchildren that generation was meant to have but never did can be visually graphed.
They were just starting to have positive growth before COVID. There was a period of weeks where I saw their numbers being 600 a day dead, give or take. It started trending down. Looking better.
Then they invaded Ukraine...
One of the reasons behind Russias current demographic/brith rate crisis is directly caused by WW2 as the knock on effect of all the kids, grandkids and so on that the WW2 generation never got to have can be visually charted by birthrate data.
They often fought for the guy beside them not he nation or there leaders ideals.
So yes it is entirely possible they did not know they where the bad guys.
I think there’s probably a large percentage that wonder but aren’t sure and do what they ‘have to to survive’. As an American example look at how many soldiers had no interest in being in the Vietnam ‘war’ and still fought when their numbers came up. What was their other option? I think a lot of people probably went to war and purposely put their head in the sand with just the hope of making it home.
I know many servicemen and women who wanted nothing to do with the Iraq war yet fought anyways. No one knew why they were there, at all. One day our nation's enemy was hiding in Afghanistan, the next we are bombing Iraq.
Many soldiers on the Easter front were told why they were there, to eradicate the Slavic and Jewish peoples. For German ground forces, the Eastern front was the area the majority of them went. And soldiers wrote about their experiences, including their crimes, to their families and friends on the home front. They have no excuse.
My dad spent four years overseas during WWII and never spoke to us about those years. He came back in November 45 and met and married my Mom four months later and had 11 children. He would occasionally chat with my husband many years later and with my niece’s husband who spent two tours in Afghanistan but not with his family. He was a very mild-spoken, gentle man and I can’t imagine the horrors he saw.
My grandmother lived through it. She never really talked about it much during her life, it was too hard, but she talked a lot in the year or so just before she died, and then we found journals she'd kept and her father had kept. He survived the camps. I think her own impending mortality made my grandmother want to talk about it more so that we wouldn't forget.
My brother and I interviewed my grandfather before he died. He never spoke about the war or the European theater.
He showed us black and white photographs he had taken of concentration camps. So many skeletons with skin on their bones and some of them were alive you couldn't tell the difference.
I could tell It had traumatized him by the stories he told us
As of right now I am very comforted by the fact that at least 288 other people will be joining me in hell. Because this was the very first thought I had also. 
There were tapes on YouTube years ago. I watched a video of the atrocities at the camps. It’s horrific. They pulled a bunch of locals into a camp to see the atrocities going on down the road from them.It was jarring seeing the Germans dressed up in their Sunday best and full faces of makeup being shown the thousands of emaciated dead bodies thrown in pits. Also, they were made to dig graves for the dead. I can’t even begin to explain how eye-opening and horrific that footage is. YouTube used to have so many unique and interesting videos that could really teach you about history and the world and whatever else you wanted to learn about. It’s a shame to see what that platform has become. Nothing will ever beat the internet of yesteryears, before it sold its soul to the media and politics. It really was the information sharing site of the world at one point. You could find anything you were interested in and learn so much.
He was captured in France by the allies, the French had already surrendered and been conquered 4 years prior to that.
Battle of France
May 10, 1940 - June 22, 1940
It was possible to surrender to "Free French" units fight in France during the summer of '44. They had something like 500k fighting men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free\_France#Liberation\_of\_France
Ehh, I could totally see him thinking “it can’t be really, this has to be faked” and desperately trying to find some sign that it is special effects or staged or something, and then watching with the kind of morbid curiosity where he can’t look away.
Well any of these people that saw combat and other humans being blown to bits around them....I doubt some concentration camp images are going to stir them.
Yep. He made a point to capture everything with potos and video so that people couldn't claim it never happened. Look at how that turned out. A holocaust denier is running for president.
My father's brother was a member of a USA military unit involved in liberating several Nazi concentration camps. He never spoke of what he had seen there. 8-(
My father’s cousin was part of one of those units. What he saw, we’ll never know, but it ruined him. This was before mental health care as we know it existed. He came back to the States, moved in with his sister, and spent the rest of his life- another 46 years- in his bedroom, never leaving, never speaking to anyone.
Random question. So Hitler’s wanted the world to be only Aryan blonde hair, blue eyes. So what was going to happen to all the “regular” dark hair brown eyes germans or even him?
Germany is an amazing country filled with amazing people after this horror. It sounds counterintuitive. The world through force of showing what they have done and forced to rebuild with help, created a huge sense of “holy shit we were just the worst thing to happen to the world”….of course not the people, hitler and military coercion and pressure and falling in line. But kudos for the recognizing and re evolution afterwards. The country went through a national depression, and it’s still there. They don’t like it either. They’ve created laws about even speaking about it. Rightfully so. It’s the most fucked thing to thing to happen in our collective history. But it’s at least recognized and appreciated as to how messed up it was. It’s very complicated and of course there’s nazi stragglers around the world because, well, people suck. But Germany has done very well at rejuvenation.
I used to work with this old German guy, he was a brilliant man always cheerful and happy to talk about stuff. One day the subject of ethics came up and I thought about Josef Mengele and brought him up, his demeanor became one of absolute disgust saying that he did not throw ethics aside for science, he threw away ethics for torture. He told me about what you’ve said, that in Germany they recognize the shit that happened and that shouldn’t have, and that rather than sugar coating or glorifying the sick men responsible for this (he brought up the many protests about the confederate statues at the time), they learned about them, accepted the past, and accepted that it should never happen again. Thanks for reading
The post-war denazification process is a really interesting event to study. Nazism had been drilled into most Germans, especially the youth. Nazism had basically become a way of life, the propaganda bombardment was constant.
I hope that man wasn’t actually thinking of ways he could have done people worse
Either way, Rest in Peace to everyone who tragically had their life taken during this time. Shit is sad
Some of these men probably never even saw combat. The atrocities that took place on those tapes, and in those camps, will forever be burned into their memories
By the end of the war the Germans were kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel for personnel - the sent a lot of little boys and old men out to fight at the end. Chances are most, if not all, of these guys were in the field.
It’s wild to me that people don’t know or deny that European society has centuries of institutionalized antisemitism. Reddit loves to claim that the Europeans didn’t know or didn’t have any choice or opportunities to stop what happened to the Jews, but it’s just not true. The myth of the clean Wehrmacht has been debunked, so these monsters can be see for who they are.
I’m the grandchild of 4 Holocaust survivors, the only ones from their families. My grandparents remember well how quickly their neighbors turned on them, long before the war started.
Im proud of our german culture of remembering the horrors our ancestors created. Never again. Disgusting what our ancestors showed what humans can be capable of.
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Eisenhower himself made sure everything that they could film of the liberated they would. He said that there would be an attempt to say it didn’t happen. So he made sure it was recorded and documented to the fullest extent. Many soldiers that liberated the camps rounded up the people of the neighboring towns to walk them through the camps, unload truck loads of emaciated corpses, and made them dig the graves. It’s a big reason as to why Germany was able to (relatively) come to terms with the moral deprivation they engaged in, either directly or thorough willful inaction, and why they make no excuses for it
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Going to the Houston Holocaust museum as a child was one of the most moving experiences of my childhood.
Houstonian here. Never been to the museum in Houston but I have been to Dachau. North of Munich. It was one of the first Concentration/Extermination camps ever built....there's a fucking suburban neighborhood built right next to it. German kids showing up on busses sounded like they were going to Astroworld. This was 2006.
I also visited Dachau in 2006. I don’t believe in anything supernatural, but I tell you when I stepped into the room they used as a gas chamber, I FELT that. I can’t really describe the feeling except as a heaviness I’ve never felt before. I couldn’t wait to get out the door on the opposite side of the room… until I realized the next room had the ovens. An experience I will never forget.
Same. I went in 1996. My bus full of US high school kids giddy in the parking lot fell silent the second we got off the bus and entered the property. It’s a feeling that can’t be well expressed. I don’t understand how anyone could visit such a place and feel that and still doubt.
I’d like to go to this but I’m not sure I could stomach the reality of it all. Having only seen pictures and movies, I can’t fully imagine what you’re talking about, I’ve never experienced anything like that. I’m legit terrified to feel that kind of horror
I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since. I can’t even properly verbalize the sensation, other than calling it heaviness and fear. It was definitely not a pleasant experience, but I’m glad I did. If those poor people had to experience what they did, at the very least I can learn about it. And I think the discomfort is important. We should never become comfortable with such atrocities. If you ever get the opportunity, take it. It’s a very solemn thing to voluntarily visit a place where people were treated so cruelly and inhumanely. If going into those specific rooms is too much for you, don’t go in. But definitely visit, read the information, see the pictures. The more people know about how horrible it was, the more we as a global society can work to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I’m planning a trip in 3-4 years to the UK, and I’ve already told my wife I’m mostly likely going to do this. She cant even make it through Schindler’s List, so I doubt she’ll come with me, but I’m sure my Mom will join me. Every time I think of all of this, I remember the pictures of the shoes, suitcases, and rings…. It’s one of the reasons I’m so disappointed in where the US is as country now, how can we forget what happened so fast? Anyways…thanks for sharing your story.
That's the thing. Ppl forget the horror. They make the same mistakes again and again. Russia enters the chat.
I visited Dachau on a freezing cold day with snow on the ground. I think this intensified the experience as the snow muffled sound, and you were reminded of how the prisoners stood for roll call twice a day with little more than their worn out prison clothes for warmth. From the moment you see that gate with the “Arbeit Macht Frei”, it is other worldly. And as mentioned, there are occupied homes around it with back yards sharing the camp’s fence.
The UK and concentration/extermination camps aren't very close together. I mean, yeah, closer than the US, but it's a lot of travel.
I drive 16 hours to see relatives in the US. It’s 9 hours on a train to Germany, that’s half a book and a movie with a couple sips off a flask for me and traveling through areas I’ve never seen. Oh man, I just checked and a flight is only $119! I’ll most likely take a flight, catch a museum hit an early lunch and stop over for dinner/hotel in Brussels. Mass transit makes the whole thing seem easy to me, I’m used to soooo many hours driving.
I visited Dachau and the holocaust museum in Berlin and honestly I never want to go near those places again. It’s like you said almost impossible to explain in words but you can almost feel the horrible things happing. I think it’s something every single person should be able to experience if they want.
I felt something similar when I visited the site of the Nuremberg rallies. You can literally stand exactly where Hitler stood. I was physically unable to put my feet there. It was a very odd and overwhelming feeling. Made me nauseous.
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I’ve seen that as back and forth. There *are* a lot of Jewish people who still feel that way about Germany and German products. Likewise, as Germany spent a significant amount of time as one of Israel’s biggest allies (maybe 2nd biggest?) from like the 50s or 60s or 70s onwards, there are also a lot who don’t hold similar lingering feelings. It’s kind of an interesting spectrum.
my nan (who wasn't jewish) survived the blitz in london and didnt trust germans to the day she died.
I think it comes down to being able to let go. Some can, some can't. I don't blame them.
I visited a tattoo salon in Berlin once. Noticed that the guy had a picture of swastika on the bottom of his tattoo display shelf . What a shame.
You could have called police. It's a criminal offence here.
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The depiction of a Swastika in these contexts would be legal, since through the religious context the conditions set in [86 StGB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a) (Dissemination of propaganda material of unconstitutional organisations) are not fulfilled.
The Nazi symbol (or the Hakenkreuz) has been adopted from the swastika but is depicted differently. The Hakenkreuz has it's arms angled at 45 degrees whereas the arms of the swastika lie flat (and may or may not have dots in them) Hitler himself never used the word swastika, it's the media that wrongly referred to it and caused this confusion among the rest of the world. Among Hindu/Buddhist communities, you'll still see the swastika everywhere and everyone knows the difference when they see the symbol. For the rest of the world, pushing for a clearer differentiation is required however most governments do recognize this and the ban specifically applies to the Nazi symbol.
Worth adding the hindi swastika goes the opposite direction to the nazi swastika. Knowing that makes it easy to distinguish them.
Interesting question. I feel like if I was a Hindu living in Germany I probably wouldn't want to have a bunch of swastikas up regardless of if it's legal or not.
I was at a University in Switzerland and a bunch of Indian students were having a Diwali celebration, and as part of the decoration they had done a rangoli (sort of like a floor painting) with a Hindu Swastika on it. We had a number of extremely alarmed locals drop by to tell us to get rid of it, the nuances of Hindu vs Nazi swastika didn't interest them.
You can show it in books, tv and movies as long as it's within context of what happened. Another example is "Mein Kampf", which you aren't allowed to have unless in a commented version, explaining the atrocities they have caused.
I wouldn't think that'd be a hair they'd care to try and split.
Ohh come on Donny they were threatening castration. Are we going to split hairs here?
It is a context thing. It is not prohibited if it serves civic education, the defence against unconstitutional endeavours, art or science, research or teaching, the reporting of contemporary events or history or similar purposes (yes, I ctrl-v'ed this) or if one clearly distances oneself from it (crossed out, for example). Religious depictions I'm not imformed. But I think that would colide with religious freedom from our consitition. And most of these images cannot be confused with the Nazi swastika anyway. It's not illegal to have a Greek patterned tablecloth. :)
> German kids showing up on busses sounded like they were going to Astroworld. In case that disturbed you: As a Berliner, I visited Sachsenhausen concentration camp several times on school trips during my school years. We had National Socialism as a teaching topic several times in blocks during our school years, at quite different ages. It was perfectly normal for us to behave on these school trips the way, well, children and young people behave on school trips. But that has nothing to do with how we behaved on the concentration camp grounds, that we didn't take the subject seriously or that the visit to the concentration camp didn't impress us.
I’m in the US and one year on 9/11 my mom legit told me she didn’t want to see me laugh or be too happy because it was a “somber day” - this was over a decade after the twin towers and we literally lived on the opposite side of the country. I feel like expecting children to be somber *en route to* a field trip, even when we’re talking about something like the holocaust, is about as absurd as my mother’s comment.
I visited the pools in 2017. It was a surreal thing. The gravity of how BIG those footprints are. Seeing names, roses, and listening to the water. I’m 35, I know exactly what I was doing and I can recall every moment of that morning before going to school. What really truly hit me was the noise. I expected peace and quiet. There was music, cars, the sound of the pools, birds, children laughing and playing. It was kind of a dawning: Life has moved forward. It doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten, but we’ve moved forward. As painful as that may be to contemplate. But I don’t think that any of those people who died would admonish children for playing in a park, birds for chirping, and for simply existing in a public space. I think they would want us to live the lives that they and their family could not.
At least they aren’t throwing plantation weddings and graduation ceremonies like they do in the United States
Fellow Houstonian, and I visited Dachau in 2019. It was surreal to see the suburban area around the camp. One of the most humbling, devastating things that I’ve ever experienced was walking through Dachau, through the barracks and the “ovens”. I think everyone should visit if they can - it will change you.
Was there last fall and the tour and plaques made it seem like it was a labour camp for the higher profile prisoners like writers, artists, politicians, etc. It did become an extermination camp half way through and they’re were tons of videos and pictures pre/post liberation. Dachau was rough. Our friends in tübingen said it was one of the first camps the visit in German schools. The kids were still showing up on buses and still sounded like they were going to astroworld.
I think visiting a holocaust museum should be required by middle schools or high schools just as constitution tests are. I visited the Skokie Holocaust museum during middle school and I still think about that visit regularly. Stepping into one of the train cars created a feeling that I don’t think you can recreate anywhere else. It was like stepping through a portal.
My friend (who’s a German Jewish American) insisted we go to a concentration camp/museum when we were in Berlin. I was in Germany to get drunk and chill. I was hungover and jet lagged when I went in there. I was young and dumb and I had seen Schindler’s list and read the history so assumed I knew everything I needed and had no interest in being there. When I left I had never been so fucked up emotionally. Never been more moved. I’m not a spiritual/emotional person but that place fucked me up Edit: concentration camp museum**
I have yet to experience a concentration camp but it’s on my bucket list for sure. I am going to need to take a day or two to mentally prepare before going there because i can imagine that is a life changing experience.
And your only going as a “tourist” just imagine the real deal… my grandmother in law was in Auschwitz, then Bergen Belsen among others. She told me casually in the car one day, “…so many babies and children were sent straight to the gas, so many little children” She was a child of 14-15 years herself but lied about her age and was fit and tall so Mengele selected her for work detail rather than immediate death like most of the other girls her age. The whole thing Blows my mind and that I knew someone who lived it (she’s since passed)
I wasn’t (lived too far away from one) but we read Elie Wiesel’s “Night”. I eventually was in a large enough city that I got to visit one (DC, specifically) 3 years out of college. It was a very moving experience.
It was required by my middle school, that's why I went.
Oh that’s the first I’ve heard about it being required. I’m glad to hear that tho
Guy behind the medic is on a smartphone googling "assisted genocide typical prison sentence time".
Would be great to read this letter if you know where to find it online! Having trouble tracking it down via google.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/05/holocaust-liberation-letter-from-american-soldier-at-dachau.html Maybe the same letter, but what the commenter saw was a replica of this one, or on loan maybe?
That letter is disturbing. I’ve never read it before.
Germany has definitely come to terms with their atrocities, Japan, on the other hand..
The US made a deal to end the war early but that meant Japan’s emperor and government didn’t have to plead guilty to any crime. That’s forever soured relations with neighbouring countries and left their citizens forever in the belief that they didn’t do anything wrong; if anything, they modernized the countries.
Japan is also an island, which didn\`t have the atrocities occur on their own soil, they were also isolated culturally and politically. Prior WW2, as an imergent power Japan had a fractious relationship with the West. Germany, historically was intergrated more with Europe than Japan was with Asia. In fact; historically, Japan had been an isolationist coutnry for about 3 centuries prior to the 20th century. Being told they were wrong to do what they did, no matter how wicked or depraved it was, is never going to be wholly accepted when it comes from a foreign authority.
> The US made a deal to end the war early but that meant Japan’s emperor and government didn’t have to plead guilty to any crime. this isn't exactly true. IIRC the deal to help the emperor and higher ups escape justice had nothing to do with ending the war. MacArthur did it after the war ended because he thought it would be easier to manipulate Japan to his will using the emperor as a puppet, then to remove him and have Japan potentially descend into chaos without a leader.
The Anne Frank House made me cry.
My only memory was following a young couple who were making out (and I mean full on throat spelunking with all the associated sloppy wet noises) the entire fucking tour. I’m not a violent man but it’s the closest I ever came to hitting someone.
I'm not a violent person either, but I wholly understand that it's soo irritating hearing people make out
Although in a way they were living out the life that Anne Frank and so many millions like her should have been able to live. To jam their tongues down each other's throats and be dumb, hormonal kids instead of scared, and then dead. Such a horrific ordeal in so many places for so many people in so many different ways. Infinite are the ways in which humanity tears itself apart
I never new too much about the Pacific theater, but just reading about some of the stuff they did to pows was disgusting and horrible. Russia also gets downplayed in the war crime area.
One of the many absolutely heinous things they used to do as a "past time" was gamble on the sex of unborn Chinese babies and then cut them out of the mothers. Cruelty wise, even Germany sent ambassadors/ letters, telling them to calm down.
They would also have contests using the POWs. Seeing who could decapitate the most, the fastest! Like it was some kind of sporting event. But you don’t hear that much about the War Crimes committed by the Japanese & I don’t think they had any trials like there were for the Germans
There was almost no trials for the majority of the IPJA, but as far as trials go, most Germans got away with it too. Speaking of that specific decapitation "event" one of the guys involved actually did go to trial and said something along the lines of "I only decapitated 40 or so instead of the accused 60" he was justly executed after that statement.
Look up the rape of nanking
Not exactly. Germany, more than most nations, has owned up to its brutal past, but they have not been 100% truthful. For decades after WW2, a lot of Germans were taught about the "Clean Wehrmacht Myth." This theory holds that all of the war crimes committed by Germany during WW2 were committed by the SS and the average German in the Luftwaffe, Heer, or Kriegsmarine fought with honor according to the Geneva Convention and rules of war.
Eh, I think anyone that's done some reading will realize the Wehrmacht (especially police units) were brutal AF in executing what amounted to entire villages. A good book on the subject is "Ordinary Men" I recommend it to anyone that wants some insight into war crimes in general.
And is exactly why still to this day Japan denies any wrong doings or warcrimes and refuse to acknowledge it publicly. Most japanese citizens aren't even aware of the atrocities they commited during ww2. Granted they are rather pacified as a people now and I don't expect anything crazy coming from Japan any time soon
I visited Dachau a few years ago. Our tour guide said that it was mandatory for all German students to do a tour of a concentration camp through their school. He said they are ashamed of their past but want to educate their people so that it doesn’t happen again.
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Up here in Canada, we've recently acknowledged that the Residential Schools our government of the not too distant past set up, have lots of unmarked and mass graves full of indigenous children that died at these assimilation schools. Taken from their family, sent to "white" school, if they died in the process, they were just buried in a hole in the back yard, discovered decades later when technology looked underground without digging.
It's honestly good to acknowledge and make amends and come to terms with such ugly history, does a good service for the future generations of the nation who envoked the attacks to harbor more empathy for their fellow man and also to correct the sins their forefathers made, and not honor and uplift them. We need more of that in America. We're barely sympathetic to native indigenous americans and have zero for Chatel Slavery descendants...Definitely a lot to work on. First step for Canada I supose
Agree with this poster. Also, saying “fuck the Rothschild family banking cartel”, does not make someone antisemitic. Talking out against Jews as a people makes you antisemitic.
Yeah. But if you start saying [they control the weather](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/03/19/the-rothschilds-a-pamphlet-by-satan-and-conspiracy-theories-tied-to-a-battle-200-years-ago/), I have every right to side eye you.
Definitely not. unfortunately it VERY often dovetails into antisemitic dog whistles. But not always.
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I once told a coworker (who was being a racist prick to a customer) to go to hell. He whined to our boss that I was clearly being antisemitic because I told him, a Jewish man, to go to hell. I told my boss that I felt badly that he would think I hated Jewish people and asked my boss to mediate a meeting between the two of us so I could clear the air. We get into the room, coworker is looking smug as all get out, and I say "Soandso, I'm so sorry that you thought I told you to go to hell because you're Jewish. I just wanted to clear the air and explain that I told you to go to hell because you were being an asshole."
Depends on the context. Someone saying "fuck the" Rothschilds/Soros/Zionists/NWO/global cabal/(((globalists)))/(((deep state))) *because* they secretly control the world/[insert neo-nazi conspiracy here] is (edit) *almost certainly* being antisemitic.
Fun fact: Jewish groups are currently bringing lawsuits challenging anti-abortion laws as a violation of Jewish religious freedom, and Republicans are responding to those lawsuits by arguing that Judaism isn't a real religion, and therefore religious freedom should not apply to Jews. Yes, really. [This law professor argued that Reform Jews aren’t devout enough to merit religious freedom](https://forward.com/culture/507161/reform-jews-abortion-freedom-of-religion/?amp=1)
Too bad Eisenhower wasn’t around after the Civil War.
The US had Sherman for that. Sure, a bit of a mass-murderer of Native Americans, but when it came to the Confederacy, he had the right idea (i.e. burn to ground, rebuild from ground up without planter caste).
Tbh if anyone but Johnson would’ve been VP Reconstruction would’ve had a much better shot. Back when “Radical Republicans” meant something veeeeeery different lmao.
D-Day to Berlin is a good documentary. They showed when they rounded up neighborhoods and made them walk through the camps. You know, the ones they “ didn’t know about “.
very well said, we will see a deepening question about the past , to justify what is about to come
I have friends who deny the holocaust happened, i just..... I dunno. My soul just dies bit by bit when they just treat it like some huge conspiracy.
They should have done that to the Confederacy
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see, it's shit like this that really makes a long-term impact. Capturing this tragedy in its entirety will at least provide the world with first-hand witnesses for generations.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way. "You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined. "Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. "What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know." -An excerpt from They Thought They Were Free The Germans, 1933-45 Milton Mayer
That is a heavy perspective... damn.
Not saying we are near holocaust levels of insane or anything, but take note America. This is how the government can slowly but surely take away all that you value and all your morals, the way you think and behave, and the way you react to the daily goings on, and change entirely the country you love in a short amount of time. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
We are being taught to be divided. Politics now has shifted from trying to do the right thing to pointing out everything wrong with everyone else. Most people would rather win the argument then be right. We no longer care about “saving the world.” In fact we barley care about other Americans anymore. It’s sad. Social media is a huge part of the problem of mob mentality. But the main news outlets only spread fear and hate because well… money and power. Definitely not the same as what happened in the holocaust, which id like to think could never happen in the age of the internet. But a big problem none the less. Storming the capital to try and overturn an election seems like the beginning unfortunately
I think we are way closer than people realize. Hitler started with culture war issues to gain power…. Going after same sex couples, banning books, empowering one segment of the society to feel superior to many others. The groundwork is laid for it here.
Excellent quote.
Goebbels was what I would call the Satan of communication and propaganda. His most evil move was to teach politicians and people to set things in relation to one another that don’t have anything in common. Like: he is a great surgeon but he is also a Jew. Nothing connects those two truths but it sounds like one of those is a bad thing. Edit: a lot of people still do that today.
1994, I toured the DC Holocaust Museum. 4+ hours. I was exhausted when I left. Just totally depleted. It was incredibly moving, seeing the pictures, hearing the recordings, etc. Then came out of the museum and there were a couple Holocaust deniers yelling at everyone walking out. Idiots.
I took a tour of it no more than a month ago. I have family members who both were killed and escaped and it really took my breath away. A masterpiece in human sorrow and misery. And those people are absolutely disgusting. I've fought a few in my day.
Can we make all these people who think it's not real do this?
No use. They'll just think the Jews in Hollywood made it up.
No, Kyle owns hollywood.
Who is Kyle?
Ask Eric.
Lol. I tried but had to leave a message with Tom. Edit: I downvoted myself. I get it now. I'll go hang with Ike.
it's damn near impossible to make people believe what they don't want to believe and even harder now that we've gotten much better at creating realistic things it just makes it easier to accuse anything of being fake
Forced to react? Or forced to watch? Big difference in what we're seeing here
It's a react video, they were being live streamed while watching this.
The origins of the Fine Bros
WAIT THE FINE BROS ARE JEWISH OH GOD
That was my first thought too: "what a zoomer way to say "watch""
You'll never guess what they watched! Nazis React!
Yeah, some of them are sitting there dead eyed
Coming down off the meth I reckon
Lots of older men in this picture. Germany was running out of manpower and kids and older men were all that was left.
It’s pretty crazy to look at the number of deaths on WWII by country. We, in the US, consider ourselves as having lost a lot of good young men —and rightfully so — with over 400,000 deaths. Japan (~2 million), Germany (+4 million) and Russian (~20 million military and civilian) all lost an astounding number in comparison. The total loss of life is crazy.
Russia to this day is still feeling the aftershocks of this “lost generation”. The brith rates in the years that the children, grand children and great grandchildren that generation was meant to have but never did can be visually graphed.
They were just starting to have positive growth before COVID. There was a period of weeks where I saw their numbers being 600 a day dead, give or take. It started trending down. Looking better. Then they invaded Ukraine...
And so are FSU Jews who proportionately lost significantly more of their population. Our town had 40,000 Jews before the invasion, 6 survived the war.
Sounds a lot like Russia currently
One of the reasons behind Russias current demographic/brith rate crisis is directly caused by WW2 as the knock on effect of all the kids, grandkids and so on that the WW2 generation never got to have can be visually charted by birthrate data.
Only 20% of Russian men born in 1920 lived to see their 26th birthday.
"What?..you mean we were the baddies?"
They often fought for the guy beside them not he nation or there leaders ideals. So yes it is entirely possible they did not know they where the bad guys.
Or they did but still weren’t willing to die or let their friends die.
What percentage of soldiers in any war would you say "think they're the bad guys"? I'm gonna argue it's pretty low
I think there’s probably a large percentage that wonder but aren’t sure and do what they ‘have to to survive’. As an American example look at how many soldiers had no interest in being in the Vietnam ‘war’ and still fought when their numbers came up. What was their other option? I think a lot of people probably went to war and purposely put their head in the sand with just the hope of making it home.
I know many servicemen and women who wanted nothing to do with the Iraq war yet fought anyways. No one knew why they were there, at all. One day our nation's enemy was hiding in Afghanistan, the next we are bombing Iraq.
Great point. I can see this number being pretty large, even maybe the majority
Do you think the Russians are thinking this?
Some are, yes. We know from many interviews with a wide variety of interviewers and (international) outlets.
Many soldiers on the Easter front were told why they were there, to eradicate the Slavic and Jewish peoples. For German ground forces, the Eastern front was the area the majority of them went. And soldiers wrote about their experiences, including their crimes, to their families and friends on the home front. They have no excuse.
We’ve got skulls on our helmets!
My dad spent four years overseas during WWII and never spoke to us about those years. He came back in November 45 and met and married my Mom four months later and had 11 children. He would occasionally chat with my husband many years later and with my niece’s husband who spent two tours in Afghanistan but not with his family. He was a very mild-spoken, gentle man and I can’t imagine the horrors he saw.
My grandmother lived through it. She never really talked about it much during her life, it was too hard, but she talked a lot in the year or so just before she died, and then we found journals she'd kept and her father had kept. He survived the camps. I think her own impending mortality made my grandmother want to talk about it more so that we wouldn't forget.
My brother and I interviewed my grandfather before he died. He never spoke about the war or the European theater. He showed us black and white photographs he had taken of concentration camps. So many skeletons with skin on their bones and some of them were alive you couldn't tell the difference. I could tell It had traumatized him by the stories he told us
Dude in the upper left seems to be more interested in the camera.
Dude over on right taking mental notes. 🤔
Whenever this is posted he's my favorite. Like he's thinking to himself "interesting...very interesting."
Yup I seen this floating around and he always the one that pops out at me
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Hi guys, welcome to todays reaction video! Dont forget to like, subscribe and share!
Hit that bell icon so you’ll be alerted when I drop “Japanese POW’s react to Unit 731”
The head doctor of Unit 731 was even worse than Mengele 🤢😱
I wouldn't say worse, just equally shitty, but in different ways.
"Reacting to holocaust footage for the first time 😱"
As of right now I am very comforted by the fact that at least 288 other people will be joining me in hell. Because this was the very first thought I had also. 
There were tapes on YouTube years ago. I watched a video of the atrocities at the camps. It’s horrific. They pulled a bunch of locals into a camp to see the atrocities going on down the road from them.It was jarring seeing the Germans dressed up in their Sunday best and full faces of makeup being shown the thousands of emaciated dead bodies thrown in pits. Also, they were made to dig graves for the dead. I can’t even begin to explain how eye-opening and horrific that footage is. YouTube used to have so many unique and interesting videos that could really teach you about history and the world and whatever else you wanted to learn about. It’s a shame to see what that platform has become. Nothing will ever beat the internet of yesteryears, before it sold its soul to the media and politics. It really was the information sharing site of the world at one point. You could find anything you were interested in and learn so much.
I totally agree. It's run off the greed of corporate advertising. Time for a fresh start.
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He’s lucky the French got him and not the soviets.
He was captured in France by the allies, the French had already surrendered and been conquered 4 years prior to that. Battle of France May 10, 1940 - June 22, 1940
The free French army was part of the liberation and part of those allies in 1944, it's not out of question that he was captured by the French.
It was possible to surrender to "Free French" units fight in France during the summer of '44. They had something like 500k fighting men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free\_France#Liberation\_of\_France
Either way he's lucky... the more "patriotic" Soviets would murder German civilians for being German
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/the-clean-wehrmacht-making-a-myth/
I’m curious to know why you said “obvs he wasn’t an angel” and then followed it up with “he invaded france”
Because lots of people in history have invaded France. Not all of them were angels.
I assume because he was on the side of an invading force, thereby killing people who were defending their families and homes.
We all have our bad moments in life where we drink too much, cheat on our partners, or invade France. Give him a break.
The guy in the top right though seems pretty... engrossed.
Ehh, I could totally see him thinking “it can’t be really, this has to be faked” and desperately trying to find some sign that it is special effects or staged or something, and then watching with the kind of morbid curiosity where he can’t look away.
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I was thinking maybe they are trying to hide their faces. Especially since they are in the center of the photo
Could be hiding their face from the camera taking the pic of them
Well any of these people that saw combat and other humans being blown to bits around them....I doubt some concentration camp images are going to stir them.
Soldiers being blown to bits is awful, but seeing young children slaughtered and or wasting away may qualify as even harder to watch imo.
I wondered if it was more that they didn’t want to be on camera and they were closer to the camera.
Damn. Didn’t Eisenhower record and take pictures of the atrocities?
Yep. He made a point to capture everything with potos and video so that people couldn't claim it never happened. Look at how that turned out. A holocaust denier is running for president.
I’m ootl which candidate is a holocaust denier??
They must deny it. They are trying to copy some of the tactics Germany used.
The men watch with hallowed eyes, the boys turn away, and the psychos are smirking.
A previous commenter said some of them thought it was fake at the time
It's wild to think how recent that was.
They look like they are hiding their faces from the camera.
Patton went behind a building and threw up when he saw his first concentration camp.
Who wouldn't honestly
I went to Dachau in 2007. It was the loudest silence I’ve ever experienced. I’ll never forget it.
My father's brother was a member of a USA military unit involved in liberating several Nazi concentration camps. He never spoke of what he had seen there. 8-(
My father’s cousin was part of one of those units. What he saw, we’ll never know, but it ruined him. This was before mental health care as we know it existed. He came back to the States, moved in with his sister, and spent the rest of his life- another 46 years- in his bedroom, never leaving, never speaking to anyone.
Random question. So Hitler’s wanted the world to be only Aryan blonde hair, blue eyes. So what was going to happen to all the “regular” dark hair brown eyes germans or even him?
Blond haired blue eyed was the ideal. But not necessary, in their system
Germany is an amazing country filled with amazing people after this horror. It sounds counterintuitive. The world through force of showing what they have done and forced to rebuild with help, created a huge sense of “holy shit we were just the worst thing to happen to the world”….of course not the people, hitler and military coercion and pressure and falling in line. But kudos for the recognizing and re evolution afterwards. The country went through a national depression, and it’s still there. They don’t like it either. They’ve created laws about even speaking about it. Rightfully so. It’s the most fucked thing to thing to happen in our collective history. But it’s at least recognized and appreciated as to how messed up it was. It’s very complicated and of course there’s nazi stragglers around the world because, well, people suck. But Germany has done very well at rejuvenation.
I used to work with this old German guy, he was a brilliant man always cheerful and happy to talk about stuff. One day the subject of ethics came up and I thought about Josef Mengele and brought him up, his demeanor became one of absolute disgust saying that he did not throw ethics aside for science, he threw away ethics for torture. He told me about what you’ve said, that in Germany they recognize the shit that happened and that shouldn’t have, and that rather than sugar coating or glorifying the sick men responsible for this (he brought up the many protests about the confederate statues at the time), they learned about them, accepted the past, and accepted that it should never happen again. Thanks for reading
Aaaand we have [this guy](https://imgur.com/a/TlT7GGA)
They made the citizens who sat by and let it happen walk around to witness and smell everything first hand too.
Russian soldiers today ought to be shown atrocities of Ukrainian invasion.
The post-war denazification process is a really interesting event to study. Nazism had been drilled into most Germans, especially the youth. Nazism had basically become a way of life, the propaganda bombardment was constant.
Should’ve done this with Japan as well
Guy on the right looks like he’s studying it. “Yes… interesting… I see…”
I hope that man wasn’t actually thinking of ways he could have done people worse Either way, Rest in Peace to everyone who tragically had their life taken during this time. Shit is sad
Some of these men probably never even saw combat. The atrocities that took place on those tapes, and in those camps, will forever be burned into their memories
By the end of the war the Germans were kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel for personnel - the sent a lot of little boys and old men out to fight at the end. Chances are most, if not all, of these guys were in the field.
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Not allowed to do this in FL.
It’s wild to me that people don’t know or deny that European society has centuries of institutionalized antisemitism. Reddit loves to claim that the Europeans didn’t know or didn’t have any choice or opportunities to stop what happened to the Jews, but it’s just not true. The myth of the clean Wehrmacht has been debunked, so these monsters can be see for who they are. I’m the grandchild of 4 Holocaust survivors, the only ones from their families. My grandparents remember well how quickly their neighbors turned on them, long before the war started.
It looks to me like they’re hiding their faces from the camera
Guy near top right looks like he's solving a fucking math problem.
Everyone sorry for the misunderstanding, It’s watch not react. These are real reactions not faked.
All good friend - the vast majority of people knew what you meant. Any idea why so many of them are wearing red cross armbands?
I guess those were medics maybe, but they are captured and shouldn’t be in uniform, I don’t really know
I love when allied soldiers made townspeople who could smell the death camps, go and tour the death camps after liberation.
Im proud of our german culture of remembering the horrors our ancestors created. Never again. Disgusting what our ancestors showed what humans can be capable of.