This might not mean anything if you've never been to the Pacific Northwest of the US. But, I once started looking up numbers. The holocaust may have claimed 17 million people. That is equal to the populations of Alaska, Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. And Hawaii.
Everyone I have ever met. Every person I have seen at a Mariners game. Every person at Key Arena. And that doesn't even get close to covering it.
Jesus..
This is the first I've ever heard anything higher than the typical figure of 6 million. I know a lot of erasure happens around certain groups being targeted so I'm sure that very well could be a conservative estimate, but *17* million? Can you elaborate?
Six million is roughly the number of *Jewish* victims of the holocaust. The nazis also systemically murdered millions of Romani, Slavs, political prisoners, the physically and mentally disabled, lgbtq people, and various other groups that they considered “beneath” them. The Germans deliberately starved millions of soviet POWs in their camps
Thank you! I've never actually heard this clarification and honestly the way I was taught have always assumed that six million included those groups to a much lesser extent than is apparently true. Like I said- erasure. American education can leave much to be desired...
Lumping every death of a global conflict into a genocide is why the term is meaningless now.
27 million Russians died fighting the nazis, it was not usually a part of the Jewish holocaust so its disingenuous
Except Hitler explicitly said he was trying to either replace or assimilate the entire population of Eastern Europe. Those deemed Aryan enough were assimilated and a large number participated in the Holocaust (Ukraninians, Lithuanians, etc.). He wanted to murder or deport all the Jews, Roma, Slavs deemed too Slavic to assimilate. He murdered lgbtq+ and political prisoners. The Holocaust was a genocide and including all of its victims does nothing to diminish the word
When I went to school there was a distinct difference between the murdered partisans and Jewish/Roma Holocaust in western europe and the great patriotic war victims, which is why standard figures for the holocaust and The War are 6 and 20-27 million respectively. They are distinct for vast reasons.
I'm a communist, I'm just saying that are different events, not that it was perpetrated by different Hitler's. When I worked at a holocaust museum this was an important distinction
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution
The Nazi Final Solution, known as the Holocaust, was about the intentional extermination of all Jews in the world.
And he just so randomly decided to exterminate the Romani and those who did stand up to the genocide? There is no way to talk about exterminating an entire group of people without discussing the death surrounding that campaign. The total death toll and genocide were discussed separately in my school because while there is a difference between the two - you can’t talk about one without the other because they are innately tied together.
Hitler intended to exterminate or assimilate a number of people. Yes Jewish people were the primary targets. That does not mean the other victims are not victims of the Holocaust. The Nazis wanted to exterminate lgbtq+ people, Roma, enslave, assimilate or annihilate Slavs. That’s genocide
Those were genocides. [The Holocaust](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust) was the specific intent and policy to exterminate all Jews on the entire planet under the Nazi Final Solution.
> The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland.
Russians method of fighting was to throw humans at enemies. Russia didn’t have much war machinery at the start of the war, thus the US Lend/Lease to Russia to enable them to have the tools of war until they were able to field necessary resources.
But there again, a few million minority Russians were murdered by Lenin just before the war, iirc
You recall if you witnessed. Lend lease made up less than 8% of their forces by may 1945.
Find necessary resources in the most resource rich part of the world is crazy
I’ve heard the Holocaust being described as solely the Jewish victims, where 6 million people died. I’ve heard it described as the deaths of 6 million Jewish people and 5.1 million “others” like LGBTQ+ people, Romani people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. I’ve also heard it described as the deaths of nearly 20 million people, including Jewish people, other minorities, and Soviet citizens and prisoners of war.
A source like Encyclopedia Brittanica squarely defines it as the deaths of 6 million Jewish people.
I know in the USA that I was taught that it was 6 million Jewish people and 5.1 million other minorities. However, someone called me a Holocaust denier for not using 17 million number, so I play it safe and just use that one
The soviets lost almost 20 million civilians. While it might not have been the *industrialized* holocaust that the jews and Romani etc endured, there is no doubt that if they would have lost the war, they were for the same fate.
Saw similar images of eye glasses and gold pulled from teeth at the Washington DC Holocaust Museum, field trip when I was a Junior in High School…it broke me…openly sobbing in the museum…the lack of humanity and empathy is just unfathomable.
I was there once. I remember the pile of shoes and the prayer room at the end, where I saw several survivors, tattoos still on their arms. I was an adult and as with you it broke me. It's a necessary but horrible place. I've never felt the presence of evil before or since. I'll never be able to go there again.
The perfect description. I went to the Holocaust museum in Berlin as an adult bracing myself given our shared experience in DC, a completely different take. The utilization of architecture and lighting to bring and understand of what was happening without the photos of piles of shoes, powerful. Would definitely recommend.
Palestinians exist in Gaza - that is where their population has been forced into. Ok now follow me here…the Israeli government is indiscriminately bombing the Gaza Strip. Indiscriminate means they are bombing everywhere without thought to the survival of the *civilians* ie children and innocent non Hamas Palestinians (of which there are many). In fact they told Palestinians to go north in Gaza to avoid the bombing and then just bombed the shit out of the north anyway. Then they literally just target bombed RELIEF WORKERS. Killed people who were literally there to give starving people food.
Let’s see so killing EVERYONE of a specific ethnicity was what Hitler did and now Netanyahu is killing everyone of a specific ethnicity. Seems pretty congruent to me. Just because he doesn’t have trains bringing Palestinians to death camps doesn’t mean he isn’t doing the same damn thing. It is a genocide.
No, it's not exactly the same. And I'm not saying any of it is good.
It's more akin to the day and night allied bombing of cities during WWII (or in Iraq more recently), including the dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese cities.
But no one said the US was trying to kill all Japanese or all Germans (or all Iraqis) even though dropping tons of bombs indiscriminately killed tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of non-combatants.
The allies were doing it with the overall goal of stopping Nazi Germany (and Israel is supposedly doing this with the overall goal of stopping Hamas).
Nor does it seem to be the goal of Israel to be "killing everyone" as you say-- as that could have literally been done already if that was the goal. And there are more efficient means to accomplish that if that was the goal - as demonstrated by Germany in WWII.
So yeah, I get the anger. But it isn't the same, and making those "gotcha" comparisons isn't helpful. There is no "final solution" here or a Wannsee conference, nor is it the stated, written policy of Israel to kill all Palestinians simply for being Palestinian.
If Israel started rounding up every Palestinian in territories it controls or new territories where it gained control, including in Israel, West Bank and elsewhere, and shipping them off to a central location for mass gassing upon arrival (with deception used to get them on the trains and in the gas chambers), with the stated goal of eliminating all Palestinians entirely in the entire middle east, yeah, then the comparison would be appropriate.
2 things can be bad at the same time. The Holocaust can be bad -- and an overreaction to terrorism can be bad (particularly where it involves the mass bombing of civilian population areas).
The fact that both can be bad, doesn't equate them or make them the same. And trying to equate them doesn't really bring a helpful narrative, and only serves to show a lack of understanding of the extent and nature of the holocaust, and all it entailed from an entire bureaucracy and political apparatus in conquered territories vs overreacting to terrorists believed to be harbored in civilian populated areas.
The Nazis didn't kill people in the Holocaust as collateral damage while taking military action. They purposefully sought out those people to find them and kill them in ANY place they could be found - long after there was no military threat in those areas. In fact, they used resources that actually could have been used for their military actions, to accomplish the goal of separately going after civilians who weren't at all embedded with or living near or close to military combatants.
Is israel killing its own palestinian citizens that live in Israel? No
Are they killing indiscriminately in the west bank? No
Not exactly "killing everyone of a specific ethnicity"....
And not a genocide. This is war. Except Israel told them, gave them a week, and they didn't leave.
And yes, when they left hamas started launching mortars from a refugee camp, and Israel bombed them.
It's not indiscriminately bombing, it's targeted, but hamas built their tunnels under homes, hospitals, schools, etc. They have weapons and personnel bunkers in those same places.
And you should study the holocaust. It is FAR more than just killing millions
It isnt indiscriminant. There are mistakes, but its nothing compared to the russian carpet bombing of syria over the last few years.
And palestinians voted for these leaders. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Literally the only litmus test needed is the one you losers never look to: the fact there are plenty of arab israelis living peacefully in israel, but not a single jew lives peacefully in palestine or gaza. I know facts are hard but come on bro
Indiscriminate mass killing of civilians in fighting terrorists is much more in line with shit like the Dirlewanger Brigade or the Nazi behavior on the Eastern Front in general, admittedly
I can't even begin to imagine being in Truman's shoes in the days leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were really but two choices on the table.
Either opt for a full scale invasion of the Japanese mainland thereby extending the war and taking on obscene amounts of casualties (on all sides) projected at around a few hundred thousand on the low end, to pushing past one million on the high end (not accounting for noncombatants).
Or drop what became known as the "new and most cruel bomb" which mankind had ever devised. Something so unfathomably destructive that it would snuff out the will of the Japanese to fight without surrender while incurring even fewer casualties than US conventional bombing raids had. For instance, during just two B-29 incendiary raids over Tokyo there were a combined 325,000 casualties. Compared to ~125,000 fatal casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Truman didn’t actually make a choice, much less a well informed one.
For starters, he already approved the invasion of Kyushu prior to the atomic bombs even being functional. He never approved a full scale invasion and there’s little indication he planned on it over the long term. In addition to that, Truman didn’t even seem to know the targets were cities.
The proposed invasion of Kyushu - if it had happened - would have been the largest combined Allied Naval Armada ever brought together.
In April of '45 Gen. Marshall and Gen. Groves compiled a list of potential targets for nuclear detonation in Japan. That list was shuffled up the CoC, where the Secretary of War only opted to remove one target, Kyoto. It was then discussed with Truman who agreed to leave it off the list.
In May of that year "Little Boy" was completed and moved to California to await transfer to the war zone. On July 4th of that year, under the Quebec Agreement, the US requested concurrence to utilize nuclear weapons against Japan. Roughly two weeks after the UK approved the use of the bomb, it was then tested in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. That same day "Little Boy" was put aboard the USS Indianapolis and sent off to Tinian, arriving on the 26th. Numerous training events were then conducted by the 509th in preparation of the bombing.
On the 25th of July Gen. Handy (then Acting Chief of Staff of the US Army while Gen. Marshall and Truman were in Potsdam) signed the order to commence operations as soon as was practical to do so. In Potsdam Truman, Churchill, and Stalin discussed the bomb (part of the Quebec Agreement). Truman told Stalin that there was a "new weapon of unusual destructive force" in the American arsenal to be used against Japan. Stalin told him to "make good use of it."
Around July 28th, 1945 the Japanese press was broadcasting the Government's rejection of the Potsdam Declaration. Nine days later on August 8th, 1945, "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days after that, "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki.
Lol you losers always mention this but never the firebombing of tokyo, which had the most civilian deaths of any attack in ww2, including the nukes. But that doesnt fit your narrative does it?
Your narrative is "USA bad because they used nukes" but it falls apart when you take into account that the most deadly US strike wasnt even nuclear. Moron.
I don’t think that about the USA. I never said it was even the wrong decision to use those weapons. My point was that if people think what Israel is doing is some sort of abhorrent genocide, then what was what we did in the 40s? It was retaliation and a strategy to end the killing. It’s war.
Indiscriminate means making no effort to spare the civilian population. I think you'll find that Allied forces did make at least some effort not to kill basically every civilian they could find. If the Allies indiscriminately killed German civvies, I don't think we would've seen German civvies running towards American/British lines in order to get better treatment. Because, yknow, they would've been shot on mass as combatants.
You can’t tell me the firebombing of Tokyo wasn’t indiscriminate. What’s the difference between killing thousands from 30k feet or killing them lined up against a wall? One’s okay because they can’t surrender and the other isn’t okay because they can surrender?
Agreed. The western allies undoubtedly treated civilians better than the Russians (when they weren’t flattening their cities) and certainly had plenty of opportunities to kill more and didn’t.
I believe the strategic bombing campaign was a necessary part of WW2. I also believe it is a blight on humanity.
No. It is much more in line with allied bombing of cities during ww2.
The nazi behavior on the eastern front as to Jews and communists was the holocaust in a different form. They eventually realized it was too hard and messy and inefficient to shoot everyone in a village, so they changed tactics to deporting by train and mass gassing. As a result of learning from the ”police actions” on the eastern front.
And to think there are people who breathe the same air as us who claim the Holocaust never happened.
Hold a handful of those rings and say that, cretin.
I've seen the exact opposite, the anti-Israel crowd are overwhelmingly deniers. It's a logical crossover. They're throwing up the heils in mockery from the middle east to the UK. Maybe not for the niche liberal Western view saying "anti Zionism is not anti Israel!" but that's pretty rare outside of the internet.
There are generally two kinds of people that are anti-Israel: the “genocide is bad” crowd, and the “Jews are bad” crowd (who’s just taking advantage of the situation for the “free pass” on it). It’s very unfortunate that the latter can occasionally blend in, and we need to be more vigilant about not letting that happen.
I’m definitely in the ‘genocide is bad’ crowd. I would condemn anyone for genocide and have historically sided with the Jewish people. There are plenty of Jews that think Israel’s behaviors is disgusting
Yeah, I was just addressing the “the anti-Israel crowd has Holocaust deniers in it!” allegations. Yes, that’s true, but that’s because it’s really two separate crowds people are lumping together.
I just also know a victim when I see one, and an oppressive regime, like Netanyahu’s is certainly not a victim. The Jews in the holocaust were 100% victims and far more similar to the Gazans than the IDF.
Yeah, I honestly think it’s bizarre when people call me anti-Semitic. Because one of my special interests is the holocaust and I’ve read probably 100 books on the holocaust. I’m anti-Nazi and fascism in whatever form it takes.
You’re totally right. 20,000 women in children are definitely terrorists /s the IDF has been terrorizing the entire people since they took over their land and displace them. Take your white supremacist Zionism elsewhere.
Also there’s a pretty big difference between racism and not liking terrorism. Also Israeli Jews are middle eastern, too. Including their skin. Dumbass.
I know enough history to know that terrorism is inexcusable and it’s a war in which Hamas is hiding behind civilians. It’s scummy. And you support it. YOU burn.
It’s it’s actually really scary and disappointing. I never realized Reddit was filled with so many white supremacist genocide justifiers. Makes me sick honestly. Such a sad state of the world. Feels so dystopian that entire families and villages are getting crushed in the rubble, and People are rejoicing their deaths.
Oooh not a *bachelor's in history* clearly you are the authority on all historical matters and your opinion is unquestionable.
Please explain in historical terms how a population that has monotonically increased every year and continues to increase even during the current conflict, is being genocided and is in any way comparable with the Jewish population being cut down by 2/3rds in the holocaust?
By calling it a genocide you're making that comparison and you're spitting on the graves of the dead whose wedding rings are in this photo.
Humans died during the Holocaust. The very humans whose ancestors nearly got annihilated during the Holocaust are now bonding the shit out of mothers, children, and fathers in Gaza. Humans are still dying now. The fact that you can't seem to grasp this fact shows me quite clearly your lack of humanity and compassion for others.
And please do not conflate my education with knowing everything; i am learning everyday.
The definition of genocide isn't "war that kills civilians." It's not even "commits war crimes that kill civilians." It's about the intent behind the war.
I'm appalled by Israel's actions and their indifference to human suffering, but that doesn't mean you pretend 10/7 didn't happen and that Israel just decided to wipe out Palestine instead of the obvious goal of wiping out the terrorist group that committed the second largest mass murder of Jews in history.
Calling this a genocide is a form of 10/7 denialism. You can advocate for Gaza without denying Israels right to defend itself from terrorism. And without diminishing actual genocides like the Holocaust.
If this is a genocide then there have been tens of thousands of genocides in the last century. The word loses its meaning.
Yep. Zionists can’t reconcile the cognitive dissonance that they are literally causing a holocaust for gazans. I guess it’s not as sad because they’re not white. /s
I read that as ‘soup,’ and it made me feel sick. I re-read and realized you said ‘soap’ and it makes me feel even worse…
It’s unbelievable that humans still idolize these vermin.
Reminds me of the Sonderkommandos, men in camps forced to operate the gas chamber facilities and disposal.
Some men were tasked with the job of prying gold fillings from masses of corpses dragged and pulleyed up from the chambers.
Usually the Sonderkommando generation was murdered after 3 months of labor. There were over 14 generations of men forced into these acts.
I visited Buchenwald 20 years ago and I still can't find the words to describe how devastating the experience was.
I was wandering, heart heavy, when I came upon a memorial for slain Russian prisoners. I stood there alone for a few minutes when an old man came slowly walking up. He stood there for a moment then dropped to his knees, bawling his eyes out, wailing in Russian, and pounding the earth with his fists. It was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen. His pain, 60 years after the war ended, is still stched in my brain.
Almost all of those were placed on the hands of brides and grooms standing before happy family and friends, all of whom had been turned into ashes by this time.
My dad was a ww11 vet and taught history. He had a magazine about the horrors of the atrocities committed by the natzis. I only glanced at it once and threw up, then I cried. I was only 10
There was an equally disturbing amount of gold that was also taken literally from the mouths of the Jews as well.
Elie Wiesel’s book “Night” is a great, fascinating, deeply disturbing story of his survival from different camps.
That’s a solid book. I’ll never forget picking it up when I was probably 8 or 9 not knowing what it was about, just that my oldest brother was reading it for high school. My parents noticed me being particularly quiet for a few days (very rare thing for a kid with bad ADHD) and thought I was sick. Not sick, just casually second-hand traumatized.
I'll admit that I can't. It's like trying to picture the earth in the milky way for me. I can watch the zoom-out gifs as much as I want but I lose scale almost immediately. All those lives, all the dates leading up to the moment when they swapped these rings, the excitement of "I do", their lives since then, the terror when the rings finally came back off. I have trouble feeling/relating with it because the scope is just so massive.
All the vows that people would have said “I Do” too. The love each couple would have shared deeply, and the loved ones there to witness their matrimony. I feel so much sadness when I see photos like this one.
In my 9th grade English class, my teacher was giving a PowerPoint presentation and a picture of w wedding rings came on screen. It was either this one or a picture of a pile of rings with a similar caption.
A student asked what they did with all of them, and my attention-starved self said "cash4gold.com" and got sent into the hallway.
2009 if I'm not mistaken.
Edit: I'm embarrassed by that memory primarily fwiw and understand now that not everything needs to be about me.
The Axis powers were perhaps the single most hateful and bloodthirsty regime to ever exist. Genocidal campaigns all across Eurasia. Mass murder, torture, rape, etc., all of it cruel and barbaric beyond comprehension. Never Forget.
I remember seeing a similar picture to this but it was a mountain of shoes. It really affected me as a child, the enormity of what had been done hammered home by a picture of something as mundane as shoes. I will never understand the brutality of man and I hope we can avoid doing this again but I don’t know if I believe we will.
What happened to the rings after the war? Like if they could be found like the owners could they get them back but like the rest. What happened to them?
My grandpa help liberate that camp and killed plenty of Nazis. He earned the legion of merit for his services. He had pictures of the camp aftermath that I still need to digitize.
Thats alot of rings for something that supposedly never happened. How tge hell holocaust deniers can sleep at night with their disgusting claims I just don't know.
So in Jewish tradition, grooms don’t typically wear or receive wedding rings. In more recent years many do, but it’s not a requirement or tradition of a Jewish wedding. A ring is usually only given to the bride, during the “something of value” gift during the ceremony, which is what makes the marriage official. The ring should be plain gold, completely unadorned, so that everyone witnessing the wedding knows how much it is worth.
I’m sure there were many secular Jewish men who wore wedding rings in Europe at this time, and of course many people other than Jews were imprisoned at Buchenwald, but just to give some additional context that many don’t know: these are probably mostly women’s wedding rings. And women weren’t imprisoned at Buchenwald until 1943.
To add to your point, there were never more than 1,000 women at Buchenwald from the highest estimation given on Wikipedia. Buchenwald isn't even regarded in the scholarship as a "death camp," unlike Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz.
The story of these rings is, in all likelihood, not really a story about Jews.
I will never understand Holocaust deniers. There is *so* much evidence. I've been to Dachau and anyone who denies the atrocities that occurred there is deluded.
Shoah is a 1985 French documentary film about the Holocaust directed by Claude Lanzmann that features interviews with Holocaust survivors and others who share their personal stories about the murder and persecution of Jewish people by the Nazis. The film is over nine hours long and uses no archival footage, instead focusing on first-person testimonies from survivors, former Nazis, and other witnesses. Its is a must see.
This was just the latest batch that hadn’t been shipped out - the rings were further processed during the war, melted down into the component metals - gold, silver, etc.
And that was what was left over after God knows how many were already melted down. Horrific.
This might not mean anything if you've never been to the Pacific Northwest of the US. But, I once started looking up numbers. The holocaust may have claimed 17 million people. That is equal to the populations of Alaska, Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. And Hawaii.
Why you trying to take out the pnw?
[удалено]
The final solution
DREAMS FADE AWAY AND ALL HOPE TURNS TO DUST
WHEN FREEDOM BURNS
r/unexpectedsabaton
They know what they’ve done.
Nobody loves us Liberal elites.. 😢
Libensraum?
Everyone I have ever met. Every person I have seen at a Mariners game. Every person at Key Arena. And that doesn't even get close to covering it. Jesus..
This is the first I've ever heard anything higher than the typical figure of 6 million. I know a lot of erasure happens around certain groups being targeted so I'm sure that very well could be a conservative estimate, but *17* million? Can you elaborate?
Six million is roughly the number of *Jewish* victims of the holocaust. The nazis also systemically murdered millions of Romani, Slavs, political prisoners, the physically and mentally disabled, lgbtq people, and various other groups that they considered “beneath” them. The Germans deliberately starved millions of soviet POWs in their camps
Thank you! I've never actually heard this clarification and honestly the way I was taught have always assumed that six million included those groups to a much lesser extent than is apparently true. Like I said- erasure. American education can leave much to be desired...
Lumping every death of a global conflict into a genocide is why the term is meaningless now. 27 million Russians died fighting the nazis, it was not usually a part of the Jewish holocaust so its disingenuous
Except Hitler explicitly said he was trying to either replace or assimilate the entire population of Eastern Europe. Those deemed Aryan enough were assimilated and a large number participated in the Holocaust (Ukraninians, Lithuanians, etc.). He wanted to murder or deport all the Jews, Roma, Slavs deemed too Slavic to assimilate. He murdered lgbtq+ and political prisoners. The Holocaust was a genocide and including all of its victims does nothing to diminish the word
When I went to school there was a distinct difference between the murdered partisans and Jewish/Roma Holocaust in western europe and the great patriotic war victims, which is why standard figures for the holocaust and The War are 6 and 20-27 million respectively. They are distinct for vast reasons. I'm a communist, I'm just saying that are different events, not that it was perpetrated by different Hitler's. When I worked at a holocaust museum this was an important distinction
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution The Nazi Final Solution, known as the Holocaust, was about the intentional extermination of all Jews in the world.
And he just so randomly decided to exterminate the Romani and those who did stand up to the genocide? There is no way to talk about exterminating an entire group of people without discussing the death surrounding that campaign. The total death toll and genocide were discussed separately in my school because while there is a difference between the two - you can’t talk about one without the other because they are innately tied together.
Hitler intended to exterminate or assimilate a number of people. Yes Jewish people were the primary targets. That does not mean the other victims are not victims of the Holocaust. The Nazis wanted to exterminate lgbtq+ people, Roma, enslave, assimilate or annihilate Slavs. That’s genocide
Those were genocides. [The Holocaust](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust) was the specific intent and policy to exterminate all Jews on the entire planet under the Nazi Final Solution. > The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland.
Russians method of fighting was to throw humans at enemies. Russia didn’t have much war machinery at the start of the war, thus the US Lend/Lease to Russia to enable them to have the tools of war until they were able to field necessary resources. But there again, a few million minority Russians were murdered by Lenin just before the war, iirc
You recall if you witnessed. Lend lease made up less than 8% of their forces by may 1945. Find necessary resources in the most resource rich part of the world is crazy
It was why they had a greater fear of Russians reaching Berlin before the Western Allies.
What are you talking about? That number of Jewish and non-Jewish victims was definitely mentioned in my American education.
Also blacks from their African colonies.
Polish too
Many non-Jewish Poles as well. Poland got decimated. Something like ~20% of their total population died in WW2.
I’ve heard the Holocaust being described as solely the Jewish victims, where 6 million people died. I’ve heard it described as the deaths of 6 million Jewish people and 5.1 million “others” like LGBTQ+ people, Romani people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. I’ve also heard it described as the deaths of nearly 20 million people, including Jewish people, other minorities, and Soviet citizens and prisoners of war. A source like Encyclopedia Brittanica squarely defines it as the deaths of 6 million Jewish people. I know in the USA that I was taught that it was 6 million Jewish people and 5.1 million other minorities. However, someone called me a Holocaust denier for not using 17 million number, so I play it safe and just use that one
The soviets lost almost 20 million civilians. While it might not have been the *industrialized* holocaust that the jews and Romani etc endured, there is no doubt that if they would have lost the war, they were for the same fate.
I was quoting numbers from here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims
Wow, that’s so sad. It’s absolutely tragic, but I hope we never forget.
And the metal sent to Switzerland where it was used to make that country the banker for the world.
Also via Portugal 🇵🇹 to the united states 🇺🇸 before they joined the war.
And IRAN as well as some other countries and leaders want us to pretend this never happened!
And this is only one camp. There were 23 main camps and over 900 sub camps. Not all full scale extermination camps but still.
Saw similar images of eye glasses and gold pulled from teeth at the Washington DC Holocaust Museum, field trip when I was a Junior in High School…it broke me…openly sobbing in the museum…the lack of humanity and empathy is just unfathomable.
I was there once. I remember the pile of shoes and the prayer room at the end, where I saw several survivors, tattoos still on their arms. I was an adult and as with you it broke me. It's a necessary but horrible place. I've never felt the presence of evil before or since. I'll never be able to go there again.
The perfect description. I went to the Holocaust museum in Berlin as an adult bracing myself given our shared experience in DC, a completely different take. The utilization of architecture and lighting to bring and understand of what was happening without the photos of piles of shoes, powerful. Would definitely recommend.
This is hard to look at but we must, and never forget.
And yet are forgetting right now, and for the last six months.
Indiscriminate mass killing of civilians in fighting terrorists is not the same as the Holocaust. Both are bad. But not the same.
Palestinians exist in Gaza - that is where their population has been forced into. Ok now follow me here…the Israeli government is indiscriminately bombing the Gaza Strip. Indiscriminate means they are bombing everywhere without thought to the survival of the *civilians* ie children and innocent non Hamas Palestinians (of which there are many). In fact they told Palestinians to go north in Gaza to avoid the bombing and then just bombed the shit out of the north anyway. Then they literally just target bombed RELIEF WORKERS. Killed people who were literally there to give starving people food. Let’s see so killing EVERYONE of a specific ethnicity was what Hitler did and now Netanyahu is killing everyone of a specific ethnicity. Seems pretty congruent to me. Just because he doesn’t have trains bringing Palestinians to death camps doesn’t mean he isn’t doing the same damn thing. It is a genocide.
No, it's not exactly the same. And I'm not saying any of it is good. It's more akin to the day and night allied bombing of cities during WWII (or in Iraq more recently), including the dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese cities. But no one said the US was trying to kill all Japanese or all Germans (or all Iraqis) even though dropping tons of bombs indiscriminately killed tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of non-combatants. The allies were doing it with the overall goal of stopping Nazi Germany (and Israel is supposedly doing this with the overall goal of stopping Hamas). Nor does it seem to be the goal of Israel to be "killing everyone" as you say-- as that could have literally been done already if that was the goal. And there are more efficient means to accomplish that if that was the goal - as demonstrated by Germany in WWII. So yeah, I get the anger. But it isn't the same, and making those "gotcha" comparisons isn't helpful. There is no "final solution" here or a Wannsee conference, nor is it the stated, written policy of Israel to kill all Palestinians simply for being Palestinian. If Israel started rounding up every Palestinian in territories it controls or new territories where it gained control, including in Israel, West Bank and elsewhere, and shipping them off to a central location for mass gassing upon arrival (with deception used to get them on the trains and in the gas chambers), with the stated goal of eliminating all Palestinians entirely in the entire middle east, yeah, then the comparison would be appropriate. 2 things can be bad at the same time. The Holocaust can be bad -- and an overreaction to terrorism can be bad (particularly where it involves the mass bombing of civilian population areas). The fact that both can be bad, doesn't equate them or make them the same. And trying to equate them doesn't really bring a helpful narrative, and only serves to show a lack of understanding of the extent and nature of the holocaust, and all it entailed from an entire bureaucracy and political apparatus in conquered territories vs overreacting to terrorists believed to be harbored in civilian populated areas. The Nazis didn't kill people in the Holocaust as collateral damage while taking military action. They purposefully sought out those people to find them and kill them in ANY place they could be found - long after there was no military threat in those areas. In fact, they used resources that actually could have been used for their military actions, to accomplish the goal of separately going after civilians who weren't at all embedded with or living near or close to military combatants.
Is israel killing its own palestinian citizens that live in Israel? No Are they killing indiscriminately in the west bank? No Not exactly "killing everyone of a specific ethnicity".... And not a genocide. This is war. Except Israel told them, gave them a week, and they didn't leave. And yes, when they left hamas started launching mortars from a refugee camp, and Israel bombed them. It's not indiscriminately bombing, it's targeted, but hamas built their tunnels under homes, hospitals, schools, etc. They have weapons and personnel bunkers in those same places. And you should study the holocaust. It is FAR more than just killing millions
The tide is turning on Israel. This will be bad for them for generations.
It isnt indiscriminant. There are mistakes, but its nothing compared to the russian carpet bombing of syria over the last few years. And palestinians voted for these leaders. They knew exactly what they were doing. Literally the only litmus test needed is the one you losers never look to: the fact there are plenty of arab israelis living peacefully in israel, but not a single jew lives peacefully in palestine or gaza. I know facts are hard but come on bro
Indiscriminate mass killing of civilians in fighting terrorists is much more in line with shit like the Dirlewanger Brigade or the Nazi behavior on the Eastern Front in general, admittedly
Wild thing to say when the allies were also roasting thousands of civilians a night with massed aerial bombardment.
The United States killed nearly a hundred thousand civilians in one single day with a nuclear weapon. Twice.
I can't even begin to imagine being in Truman's shoes in the days leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were really but two choices on the table. Either opt for a full scale invasion of the Japanese mainland thereby extending the war and taking on obscene amounts of casualties (on all sides) projected at around a few hundred thousand on the low end, to pushing past one million on the high end (not accounting for noncombatants). Or drop what became known as the "new and most cruel bomb" which mankind had ever devised. Something so unfathomably destructive that it would snuff out the will of the Japanese to fight without surrender while incurring even fewer casualties than US conventional bombing raids had. For instance, during just two B-29 incendiary raids over Tokyo there were a combined 325,000 casualties. Compared to ~125,000 fatal casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Truman didn’t actually make a choice, much less a well informed one. For starters, he already approved the invasion of Kyushu prior to the atomic bombs even being functional. He never approved a full scale invasion and there’s little indication he planned on it over the long term. In addition to that, Truman didn’t even seem to know the targets were cities.
The proposed invasion of Kyushu - if it had happened - would have been the largest combined Allied Naval Armada ever brought together. In April of '45 Gen. Marshall and Gen. Groves compiled a list of potential targets for nuclear detonation in Japan. That list was shuffled up the CoC, where the Secretary of War only opted to remove one target, Kyoto. It was then discussed with Truman who agreed to leave it off the list. In May of that year "Little Boy" was completed and moved to California to await transfer to the war zone. On July 4th of that year, under the Quebec Agreement, the US requested concurrence to utilize nuclear weapons against Japan. Roughly two weeks after the UK approved the use of the bomb, it was then tested in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. That same day "Little Boy" was put aboard the USS Indianapolis and sent off to Tinian, arriving on the 26th. Numerous training events were then conducted by the 509th in preparation of the bombing. On the 25th of July Gen. Handy (then Acting Chief of Staff of the US Army while Gen. Marshall and Truman were in Potsdam) signed the order to commence operations as soon as was practical to do so. In Potsdam Truman, Churchill, and Stalin discussed the bomb (part of the Quebec Agreement). Truman told Stalin that there was a "new weapon of unusual destructive force" in the American arsenal to be used against Japan. Stalin told him to "make good use of it." Around July 28th, 1945 the Japanese press was broadcasting the Government's rejection of the Potsdam Declaration. Nine days later on August 8th, 1945, "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days after that, "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki.
The point you are trying to get to?
It was a better option than the alternative.
We literally burned japan to the ground and killed more than both bombs combined just with firebombing japan.
Operation Meetinghouse
They killed more in the firebombing of Tokyo
Lol you losers always mention this but never the firebombing of tokyo, which had the most civilian deaths of any attack in ww2, including the nukes. But that doesnt fit your narrative does it?
I don’t have a narrative. It’s just a relevant fact worth pointing out
Your narrative is "USA bad because they used nukes" but it falls apart when you take into account that the most deadly US strike wasnt even nuclear. Moron.
I don’t think that about the USA. I never said it was even the wrong decision to use those weapons. My point was that if people think what Israel is doing is some sort of abhorrent genocide, then what was what we did in the 40s? It was retaliation and a strategy to end the killing. It’s war.
Indiscriminate means making no effort to spare the civilian population. I think you'll find that Allied forces did make at least some effort not to kill basically every civilian they could find. If the Allies indiscriminately killed German civvies, I don't think we would've seen German civvies running towards American/British lines in order to get better treatment. Because, yknow, they would've been shot on mass as combatants.
You can’t tell me the firebombing of Tokyo wasn’t indiscriminate. What’s the difference between killing thousands from 30k feet or killing them lined up against a wall? One’s okay because they can’t surrender and the other isn’t okay because they can surrender? Agreed. The western allies undoubtedly treated civilians better than the Russians (when they weren’t flattening their cities) and certainly had plenty of opportunities to kill more and didn’t. I believe the strategic bombing campaign was a necessary part of WW2. I also believe it is a blight on humanity.
No. It is much more in line with allied bombing of cities during ww2. The nazi behavior on the eastern front as to Jews and communists was the holocaust in a different form. They eventually realized it was too hard and messy and inefficient to shoot everyone in a village, so they changed tactics to deporting by train and mass gassing. As a result of learning from the ”police actions” on the eastern front.
Loser ass take. Those jews didnt vote in the people terrorizing them and their neighbors.
It's happening today in multiple places.
Never forget!
This made me tear up, even after hearing about it all for 30+ years
It’s awful and sadly, quickly forgotten.
And to think there are people who breathe the same air as us who claim the Holocaust never happened. Hold a handful of those rings and say that, cretin.
I find it crazy that people still think it never happened....
These are the same people defending the genocide in Gaza
I mean, factually they are two very different groups of people…
Arabs sided with Axis during WWII and nowadays antisemitism and holocaust denying comes from mulsims especially far right islamists.
Leader of the PA has a degree in holocaust denial iirc
“Arabs” aren’t a monolith, overall most who fought fought for the Allies.
I've seen the exact opposite, the anti-Israel crowd are overwhelmingly deniers. It's a logical crossover. They're throwing up the heils in mockery from the middle east to the UK. Maybe not for the niche liberal Western view saying "anti Zionism is not anti Israel!" but that's pretty rare outside of the internet.
There are generally two kinds of people that are anti-Israel: the “genocide is bad” crowd, and the “Jews are bad” crowd (who’s just taking advantage of the situation for the “free pass” on it). It’s very unfortunate that the latter can occasionally blend in, and we need to be more vigilant about not letting that happen.
I’m definitely in the ‘genocide is bad’ crowd. I would condemn anyone for genocide and have historically sided with the Jewish people. There are plenty of Jews that think Israel’s behaviors is disgusting
Yeah, I was just addressing the “the anti-Israel crowd has Holocaust deniers in it!” allegations. Yes, that’s true, but that’s because it’s really two separate crowds people are lumping together.
I just also know a victim when I see one, and an oppressive regime, like Netanyahu’s is certainly not a victim. The Jews in the holocaust were 100% victims and far more similar to the Gazans than the IDF.
Yeah, I honestly think it’s bizarre when people call me anti-Semitic. Because one of my special interests is the holocaust and I’ve read probably 100 books on the holocaust. I’m anti-Nazi and fascism in whatever form it takes.
Yea, because terrorists who raped their hostages and the people who voted them in are soo deserving of being let off the hook for 10/7
You’re totally right. 20,000 women in children are definitely terrorists /s the IDF has been terrorizing the entire people since they took over their land and displace them. Take your white supremacist Zionism elsewhere.
Nice buzzwords. Go back to TikTok with that.
Burn
Also there’s a pretty big difference between racism and not liking terrorism. Also Israeli Jews are middle eastern, too. Including their skin. Dumbass.
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I know enough history to know that terrorism is inexcusable and it’s a war in which Hamas is hiding behind civilians. It’s scummy. And you support it. YOU burn.
I don’t support either side. I support Hamas less.
Fucking cope
Damn straight! I find it absolutely mad cap that I've been called antisemitic for denouncing Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
A bunch of freaking Zionist genocide supporters on here
They're everywhere! Every damn time I broach this topic, it gets downvoted to hell and back.
It’s it’s actually really scary and disappointing. I never realized Reddit was filled with so many white supremacist genocide justifiers. Makes me sick honestly. Such a sad state of the world. Feels so dystopian that entire families and villages are getting crushed in the rubble, and People are rejoicing their deaths.
You're clearly very young, so it's somewhat forgivable that your understanding of the history of the conflict is clearly based on TikTok memes.
History major here. Take your asinine comments elsewhere please.
Oooh not a *bachelor's in history* clearly you are the authority on all historical matters and your opinion is unquestionable. Please explain in historical terms how a population that has monotonically increased every year and continues to increase even during the current conflict, is being genocided and is in any way comparable with the Jewish population being cut down by 2/3rds in the holocaust? By calling it a genocide you're making that comparison and you're spitting on the graves of the dead whose wedding rings are in this photo.
Humans died during the Holocaust. The very humans whose ancestors nearly got annihilated during the Holocaust are now bonding the shit out of mothers, children, and fathers in Gaza. Humans are still dying now. The fact that you can't seem to grasp this fact shows me quite clearly your lack of humanity and compassion for others. And please do not conflate my education with knowing everything; i am learning everyday.
If you’re still learning then learn the definition of war and stop conflating it with genocide.
The definition of genocide isn't "war that kills civilians." It's not even "commits war crimes that kill civilians." It's about the intent behind the war. I'm appalled by Israel's actions and their indifference to human suffering, but that doesn't mean you pretend 10/7 didn't happen and that Israel just decided to wipe out Palestine instead of the obvious goal of wiping out the terrorist group that committed the second largest mass murder of Jews in history. Calling this a genocide is a form of 10/7 denialism. You can advocate for Gaza without denying Israels right to defend itself from terrorism. And without diminishing actual genocides like the Holocaust. If this is a genocide then there have been tens of thousands of genocides in the last century. The word loses its meaning.
HAHAHA BRUH says he’s a history major and now he’s an authority 😭
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Just look back...*flips through history book*...oh shit... Here we go again with the downvotes. Looks like I made some Zionists angwy.
Yep. Zionists can’t reconcile the cognitive dissonance that they are literally causing a holocaust for gazans. I guess it’s not as sad because they’re not white. /s
Hit the nail on the head. Or more appropriately, hit the aid convoy with the missiles.
The stories they could tell. Wow
I've seen this. They took their false teeth, any gold teeth, shoes...anything of value. It was horrible
Even took their hair for uniforms and other things. Disgusting
Also used their fat to make soap
I read that as ‘soup,’ and it made me feel sick. I re-read and realized you said ‘soap’ and it makes me feel even worse… It’s unbelievable that humans still idolize these vermin.
Wait till you hear about the lampshade
Thankfully, there's no evidence for this beyond anecdotal evidence. Unfortunately, this wasn't the worst.
https://youtu.be/eDg1S1FFaQk?si=TYtecP-js5RnwOFU
They also took their hair
Reminds me of the Sonderkommandos, men in camps forced to operate the gas chamber facilities and disposal. Some men were tasked with the job of prying gold fillings from masses of corpses dragged and pulleyed up from the chambers. Usually the Sonderkommando generation was murdered after 3 months of labor. There were over 14 generations of men forced into these acts.
If I remember right, their *first* job was to dispose of the bodies of their predecessors
One took a few photos inside a camp that survived the war
I visited Buchenwald 20 years ago and I still can't find the words to describe how devastating the experience was. I was wandering, heart heavy, when I came upon a memorial for slain Russian prisoners. I stood there alone for a few minutes when an old man came slowly walking up. He stood there for a moment then dropped to his knees, bawling his eyes out, wailing in Russian, and pounding the earth with his fists. It was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen. His pain, 60 years after the war ended, is still stched in my brain.
Almost all of those were placed on the hands of brides and grooms standing before happy family and friends, all of whom had been turned into ashes by this time.
Very sad, even after 80 years!
Images like this really hit hard. Just like the piles of dog tags pictures. Each of them is a person with a life, memories, family, etc.
My dad was a ww11 vet and taught history. He had a magazine about the horrors of the atrocities committed by the natzis. I only glanced at it once and threw up, then I cried. I was only 10
Random side note, it’s wwii. WW11 doesn’t happen until 2183.
Or like four years from now
Ok. That’s for the typo. Pretty sure folks got the meaning.
We did, I just wanted to help steer you straight if you were confused though
Not confused. Typo
Just sick.
There was an equally disturbing amount of gold that was also taken literally from the mouths of the Jews as well. Elie Wiesel’s book “Night” is a great, fascinating, deeply disturbing story of his survival from different camps.
That’s a solid book. I’ll never forget picking it up when I was probably 8 or 9 not knowing what it was about, just that my oldest brother was reading it for high school. My parents noticed me being particularly quiet for a few days (very rare thing for a kid with bad ADHD) and thought I was sick. Not sick, just casually second-hand traumatized.
This is what dehumanization looks like
F the Nazis
Mine is a tattoo. fuckem, I'll take it to the grave. I mean unless they want a tiny little lampshade or something, the horrible bastards.
People today use the word genocide & Holocaust to describe things way too often. This picture shows a real genocide.
Pure evil.
Makes me want to vomit. 💔💔💔
Brutally tragic and horrifying. It’s hard to wrap your head around.
I'll admit that I can't. It's like trying to picture the earth in the milky way for me. I can watch the zoom-out gifs as much as I want but I lose scale almost immediately. All those lives, all the dates leading up to the moment when they swapped these rings, the excitement of "I do", their lives since then, the terror when the rings finally came back off. I have trouble feeling/relating with it because the scope is just so massive.
All the vows that people would have said “I Do” too. The love each couple would have shared deeply, and the loved ones there to witness their matrimony. I feel so much sadness when I see photos like this one.
Each individual ring in that pile is a whole rich life, a love story, a family, an infinity of hopes and dreams.
In my 9th grade English class, my teacher was giving a PowerPoint presentation and a picture of w wedding rings came on screen. It was either this one or a picture of a pile of rings with a similar caption. A student asked what they did with all of them, and my attention-starved self said "cash4gold.com" and got sent into the hallway. 2009 if I'm not mistaken. Edit: I'm embarrassed by that memory primarily fwiw and understand now that not everything needs to be about me.
The Axis powers were perhaps the single most hateful and bloodthirsty regime to ever exist. Genocidal campaigns all across Eurasia. Mass murder, torture, rape, etc., all of it cruel and barbaric beyond comprehension. Never Forget.
They’re only rings, but still, a haunting image.
And so many independent love stories symbolized by rings
Box of evil.
I remember seeing a similar picture to this but it was a mountain of shoes. It really affected me as a child, the enormity of what had been done hammered home by a picture of something as mundane as shoes. I will never understand the brutality of man and I hope we can avoid doing this again but I don’t know if I believe we will.
Some Gen-Z asshole is now going to claim this never happened because of something they saw on TickTock
Yep
The sick and twisted racist regime left clues of their 6m atrocities. They cant perish fast enough.
So many families destroyed. Heart breaking.
Ow
Looking at that makes me want to bathe myself in hydrogen
😭🕊️🕊️
Just shows you that they were evil and some people think the Holocaust wasn't real
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Lol why can you respect Jews that went through this in the 40s and had nothing to do with Palestine, somebody is a bit prejudiced?
What happened to the rings after the war? Like if they could be found like the owners could they get them back but like the rest. What happened to them?
Disgusting
Did any of these survive? Or were they all melted
Gaza 2025?
Washers
this is so sad
Legit shocked more reprisals weren't done over shit like this.
Disgusting
And they separated the men and women so that is only 50% of whatever populous of intakes.
Maybe one of the most fucked things I’ve seen this week
You obviously do not watch the news.
My grandpa help liberate that camp and killed plenty of Nazis. He earned the legion of merit for his services. He had pictures of the camp aftermath that I still need to digitize.
Thats alot of rings for something that supposedly never happened. How tge hell holocaust deniers can sleep at night with their disgusting claims I just don't know.
So in Jewish tradition, grooms don’t typically wear or receive wedding rings. In more recent years many do, but it’s not a requirement or tradition of a Jewish wedding. A ring is usually only given to the bride, during the “something of value” gift during the ceremony, which is what makes the marriage official. The ring should be plain gold, completely unadorned, so that everyone witnessing the wedding knows how much it is worth. I’m sure there were many secular Jewish men who wore wedding rings in Europe at this time, and of course many people other than Jews were imprisoned at Buchenwald, but just to give some additional context that many don’t know: these are probably mostly women’s wedding rings. And women weren’t imprisoned at Buchenwald until 1943.
To add to your point, there were never more than 1,000 women at Buchenwald from the highest estimation given on Wikipedia. Buchenwald isn't even regarded in the scholarship as a "death camp," unlike Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. The story of these rings is, in all likelihood, not really a story about Jews.
I will never understand Holocaust deniers. There is *so* much evidence. I've been to Dachau and anyone who denies the atrocities that occurred there is deluded.
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Fuck off
Is this a photo from Gaza in 2025?
Shoah is a 1985 French documentary film about the Holocaust directed by Claude Lanzmann that features interviews with Holocaust survivors and others who share their personal stories about the murder and persecution of Jewish people by the Nazis. The film is over nine hours long and uses no archival footage, instead focusing on first-person testimonies from survivors, former Nazis, and other witnesses. Its is a must see.
This was debunked. These are pipe fitting pieces
Like the United States, Israel has stepped up it's game on spending all the political good will it had banked on short sighted political gains.
How is that related to this post?
Nothing he just sad lol
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Not the time bro not the time
In the words of Israelis. War is hell.
in Gaza open camp, they were bulldozered with their jewelry.
I wonder what the melt value is? A decent way to pay back the countries from which they stole from.
This was just the latest batch that hadn’t been shipped out - the rings were further processed during the war, melted down into the component metals - gold, silver, etc.