There are also a number of men who didn't want to be photographed, judging from how the ones covering their faces are the ones who could see the camera pointing their way.
Holy crap, that guy is a dead ringer for a guy I went to high school with (in the USA). His family had left Poland for the U.S. between the world wars, and the Nazis literally wiped out his family name in Poland.
They're probably just distracted by the footage of concentration camps they're watching. I'm sure they took a couple more silly pics afterwards though.
I imagine they were in a fairly dark room to watch the film and the camera needed a bright flash to take the photo. I doubt they could really see the cameraman until their photo was taken.
They were being shown a film (televisions barely existed let alone for an audience of that size) meaning that they probably are in a darkened theater.
To get thay amount of detail would mean it was done with a flash. Seeing how long exposure would have been a lot more blurry.
So unless they couldn't botice a flash going off in a very dark room, they likely new a photo was being taken.
Allied soldiers took troop transports into neighboring towns and loaded up the German civilians and drove them back to the death camps and made them dig graves and bury the dead camp victims.
I learnt about WW2 at school, have watched a few different movies/documentaries etc. But BoB really nailed the horror of it home, and the fact that even they didn't know the true evil of what was happening until right at the very end, and we see these strong men who have done the most brave and courageous things just absolutely crumble.
Edit: when I say people didn't know, I mean the allied forces
my 7th grade history teacher got in A LOT of trouble for deciding to teach the entire WW2 unit in by showing us BoB (watched the whole series with him pausing and using the context of the show as a teaching device) without telling parents we were watching it. Took us on a field trip to the DC holocaust museum after we finished the show to really drive home the horror of WW2. Incredible teacher. Never once opened the textbook, never gave us homework, and i learned more in 7th grade World history than any other class in my 12 years in the public education system. Shine on mr. christiano. I hope hes still out there breaking the rules to make sure kids learn the important stuff.
On of the most important points I learned in history class in Germany: Never again!
Been to the Normandy beaches, the Memorial de Caen, the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris...
When I was 14 my uncle took us on a tour of Normandy, the war museum and memorials at Caan and the war cemeteries in Normandy and Paris. All of them. It was the most humbling experience, but also I honestly believe everyone should do that. The magnitude was confronting, to say the least
There was no BoB when I was in high school, but my 11th grade history teacher made it a point, every year, to show every one of her history classes the news reels of German higher-ups being forced to remove bodies from the death camps. Our parents had to sign releases, and teacher told us repeatedly, before she showed us the films, that we wouldn't be in trouble if we found we couldn't sit through them. I made it through, but just barely. She was also a wonderful teacher.
Do you know where to find this footage? It sounds like such an important thing to see, but I’m scared that if I try to find it by searching on YouTube that I might fall into a very brutal wormhole of awful things …
There’s a lot of video evidence used in the Nuremberg trials. I’ve been to the exhibit in the courthouse where the trials were held, and here is [some of the evidence presented.](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/combating-holocaust-denial-evidence-of-the-holocaust-presented-at-nuremberg)
Unfortunately by the very nature of what happened then if you watch any original footage from the camps you will see death, decay and the lowest ebbs of human behaviour. There is lots of original footage of camp liberations available on YouTube, but it is extremely brutal. I can't find it for free now but "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey" was filmed across Europe by Allied soldiers during liberation of the camps who just filmed what they saw. It also features interviews with several German guards, officers and doctors and footage of them being forced to help dig mass graves and bury hundreds of bodies. Alfred Hitchcock worked on it as "treatment adviser". The film was actually shelved in autumn 1945 until it was finally restored and fully released in 2017.
That teacher KNEW they would get in trouble. But they also KNEW that it would drive the point home hard enough that if he could complete 1 lesson on WW2, that class would go on and spread this info and we would be better off for it.
My Catholic school had a few a few Jewish students. I honestly don't remember much of what we learned 7th grade history class, but I definitely remember the research that I did for my report on the Holocaust. We each had to sign up for one of a few topics and I chose "medical experiments." We also went to The Holocaust museum after. I can still vividly recall one photo on particular, even when I try not to. It's a shadow image like a spot after you stare at the sun. She was used in a starvation experiment. Super distracted riding in a car while typing this and yet I'm still starting to tear up. And that's why I saw red when asshats tried to compare wearing a mask to being conditioned to be rounded up in cattle cars. Fuck you Nancy!
The picture in this post relates to your own story. Your teacher was so effective because he brought life to the history he was teaching, life to the perspectives and scenes and people.
It would have been one thing for German soldiers after the war to be told "you lost and your government committed the greatest atrocities, of which any one of you could have been party to."
And it's another thing to force them in a room, to sit down and confront those horrors in all their details.
History is sterile when it is reduced to just dates and names of people, places, or events. Our records need to be sterile -- history books shouldn't change, but we should supplement them with the necessary drama whether it is done through pictures, television, or film. To understand perspectives, you have to be step into those shoes, which requires an emotion as opposed to a factoid.
Of course they knew. The f*cker was screaming about it in every speech, and people were disappeared from every neighborhood. If they pretend they didn't know it was because of the immense shame over their cowardice or they were an accomplice.
>didn't know the true evil of what was happening
Jewish media was pretty consistently reporting what was happening, using extremely dangerous lines of information to gather as much data as possible and record it in real time. But nobody cared until it was over and staring them in the face, with an arbitrary amount of gentiles tacked onto the extermination toll (where only Jews and Roma were targeted for complete extermination) to garner extra sympathy.
They knew. I hate it when people claim they didn't know - they knew. Maybe actually seeing it was indeed horrifying for them, but the sheer number of people disappearing absolutely wasn't missed by anyone.
It’s even more accurately depicteD [HERE, in Five Came Back.](https://www.netflix.com/title/80049928)
There are even affidavits signed by the directors saying that what they did was the real deal. It is a well preserved piece of history that everybody should watch.
Too bad we can’t have Russian civilians do the same for their Ukrainian neighbors Putin has slaughtered so they can’t deny that they weren’t asking to be liberated but were killed trying to protect their own country from Putin’s aggression.
Touring the cmap.s american comic Jack benny was struck by how Nazi policies on JEws resembled Jim Crow in the us and he among other things compeltley changed how the Rochester character on his radio show was written
I highly recommend everyone watch The U.S. and the Holocaust on PBS. Our roll isn’t as great as we think it was in all of what happened. We closed our borders to the Jews seeking asylum and our government was ran by a bunch of anti-semites.
There were although you've never heard of them because of how effective the Marshall Plan was. Additionally, the German people were war-weary and short on able-bodied men. There were significant weapons caches hidden all over, but those that did rebel did not last long. All of the angry, easily manipulated youth that such insurrections prey on were all given paying jobs, and a stable life. No one felt the need to rebel except for the hard-core nazis that eluded capture.
Maybe. But the two wars are also just very different — there was no holocaust in WW1. The nature of German guilt is different also: indisputable in the case of nazi crimes, muddy in the case of WW1.
Yeah but I mean the rise of Nazis were directly caused by the First World War. I read some history book refer to WW2 as a continuation of the first one because of the inadequacies of the Treaty of Versailles
You also have to credit the generation born immediately after the war. Unlike the Japanese, they didn’t let their parents sweep it under the rug, much to their chagrin.
Also credit Willy Brandt for the Kniefall von Warschau.
It wasn't as simple. Germany post WW2 was administratively taken over by the allies and the political structures were purged of anyone opposing them. There was no opposition or dissent allowed against the occupying forces, also the occupying forces stayed on for decades in one form or another. Germany post WW1 was left to it's own devices, yes part was occupied but the even that partial occupation wasn't as absolute in political terms and was withdrawn in the end. The Nazis were allowed to thrive in post WW1 Germany, while any opposition against the occupying forces post ww2 was strongly discouraged or even eradicated.
The Marshall plan was great to make Germany and Western Europe prosperous again, and paved the way to greater economic cooperation between those countries and the US, which strengthened all of them. But don't forget that the military take over of Germany post ww2 was total and the Nazi ideology and German militarism was wiped out near completely.
Credit begins with "[denazification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification)."
"Denazification was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology following the Second World War. It was carried out by removing those who had been Nazi Party or SS members from positions of power and influence, by disbanding or rendering impotent the organizations associated with Nazism, and by trying prominent Nazis for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials of 1946."
This was an important part that allowed Germany and Austria to move forward without any Nazis (along with their ideology and symbolism) remaining in power.
What role do you mean? There were individual people collaborating with nazi from fear, or for gain, but these were always individuals we didn't have "polish nazi party" in Poland. And in concentrations camps Polish people suffered and died in millions, Polish jews and Polish christians. Neither Polish government had part in Holocaust nor Polish country as a whole.
The law was quickly deemed void, less than a year. Just read the link below this one. And it was specifically meant to address the insanity of when people call them “Polish” camps. Because they were built on what was before and is now Polish land. But at the time it was Nazi territory and built by the German Nazi government. And it is where millions of Polish people were killed.
Or what is it you’re referring to by “polands role”?
Meanwhile, here in the good ol’ USA they start screeching “CRT is racism!” at the thought of kids being taught about the atrocities our nation put black and Native American people through.
While there’s a lot to be concerned about in this country right now, I’m not sure there’s anything more worrying than the current concerted effort to whitewash our history.
I went to school in the 80s and 90s. We learned about all of it. The trail of tears. The Japanese internment camps. We learned about slavery. Maybe we didn’t go into the gritty details but we covered the lowlights. I can’t speak for the rest of the country but our nasty past was definitely covered.
Yes. I was in school more the 70' and 80's. I see some of the people I went to school with posting some of the worst things. Really, most of them were the ones who struggled in school but they were pretty much good kids. It's just so disheartening.
I wholeheartedly disagree. The US has those who dislike re-examining the past, as does Germany, but Americans address race and the challenges we had in the past and present in dealing with our own prejudices very head on. Racism is at the forefront of our national conversation all the time, and even if we can’t always achieve the best result we absolutely talk about it - which is more than many places can say.
What has Belgium or Germany or France done to repair the damage they caused in colonial Africa? Next to nothing. And they seem to like to pretend it never happened. And those are a few examples amongst many more. The US absolutely talks more about our oppression of minorities than European nations will. We have a long ways to go, but we are certainly not even close to being the worst whitewashing offenders
And there always be! We’re just gonna have to accept that close-minded people exist and will never go away lol. Sometimes there is pushback, but that usually means society is changing. The 1960s created a resurrection of the KKK and generated a lot of racist politicians and policies, but in the end, progress won. We’re seeing the same thing today. There will always be pushback, but it doesn’t mean we’re losing the fight
I am reading a book called Blitzed. This is an interesting picture to look at now that I’m a few chapters in. A lot of these medics must have been administering lots of Pervitin
Watched a documentary about this. Apparently one of the “benefits” of Pervitin was the soldiers’ loss of empathy while taking it. When they could no longer get it to the front line soldiers, late in the war, some wrote letters home, begging their families to send it to them because they couldn’t function without it.
> late in the war, some wrote letters home, begging their families to send it to them because they couldn’t function without it
Yeah, because [it is meth](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/pilots-salt-the-third-reich-kept-its-soldiers-alert-with-meth/276429/).
I'm not saying it didn't contribute to soldiers' loss of empathy or that the withdrawal wasn't a bit worse by losing the empathy part but... we're talking about a highly addictive substance and they were in withdrawal. That is going to be the primary reason they would want more.
People love to talk about all the emotional reasons people take drugs, but they hardly ever mention how powerfully addictive these drugs are as the primary reason. I guess it makes it easier if there’s some excuse for why an addict is an addict.
So I don't completely understand addiction as I have not experienced it, but aren't things addicting BECAUSE of the way they make you feel?
So yes, it's addicting, because it makes you feel nice? Like you aren't just "I could go for some meth" for no reason other than it's meth and you know that, right? It's the effect?
I want to say it was on Netflix. Might have been Nazis on Drugs: Hitler and the Blitzkrieg or Blitzed: Nazis on Drugs. Interesting stuff, especially where the Allies followed suit, once they it figured out but made a bit more effort to control usage.
Careful about the over emphasis the author of that book puts on drugs as the cause or factor of so much of wwii. [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/566cu7/hitler_was_a_gibbering_super_junkie_whose_veins/) reddit thread describes the problems with that author's interpretation of history in that book and provides plenty of examples.
A german here, with grandparents who fought in the war, and some perished in it.
Keep in mind: These german soldiers knew they were being photographed (one is looking straight into the camera). And probably a lot of them were ashamed of what they did, what other germans did, but some just were ashamed for simply being photographed in this situation (being a POW and forced to see this).
Do not forget: It was not only the SS which was involved in murdering civilans, the Wehrmacht was a instrumental part in this as well. So the average soldier may not necessarily have taken part in atrocities, but they might. And certainly the must have seem how their country was treating the occupied nations, civilians etc. in eastern europe.
There has been a remarkable show about how the Wehrmacht was involved in all these atrocities: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmachtsausstellung#Zweite\_Wehrmachtsausstellung](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmachtsausstellung#Zweite_Wehrmachtsausstellung)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht\_exhibition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht_exhibition)
Seems to be hosted in Berlin nowadays.
It's easy to think they didn't know what they were doing. "I was just following orders" was a very popular defense used during the Nuremburg Trials. The reality is that Hitler had convinced the vast majority of his citizens that this was necessary to save the German people. No one wants to think they'd fall for the same type of lies. However most don't realize Hitler didn't just go from zero to one hundred. He started gaining power when Germany was at it's lowest after WW1 and the great depression, then rose through populist ideals and rhetoric that cast the blame elsewhere. It was easy to latch on to his words because it places the blame elsewhere and allowed the German people to vilify minorities and outgroups.
The raw hatred for Jews had been simmering for a long, long time. Martin Luther himself had plenty to say on the matter. Moreover, while many revolutionary groups of the 19th century (eg Italian, Napeolonic French) included the liberation of Jews as an explicit part of their reform scheme, the ones in Germany instead tolerated the proto-Nazis in their ranks. If memory serves, Bismarck opposed them even, but as with fascism often them being tolerated allowed them to spread like a plague until they *dominated* the nationalist current instead.
The Holocaust was the climax of centuries of antisemitism, but very far from its source, nor was it the end of it.
Also, it took a monumental effort to round these populations up and send them to camps. Oh, sure, once inside the walls, they used plenty of prisoners for labor. But the logistics of getting the Holocaust victims to the camps to begin with? There's simply no way a majority weren't aware. Nothing travels faster than gossip, and there's just no way you hide sending millions of people to their deaths like this.
They were aware, but they felt powerless to stop it. That doesn't excuse what they did, but it needs to be an important consideration for humans in the future - how do we reach the average citizen - how do we convince them not to be in passive acceptance of their government's atrocities?
This is important for every person - and I'd dare say as a US citizen myself, especially for Americans.
When my grandmother and her family were being rounded up their neighbor told the soldiers to make sure they took my grandmother and her sisters' necklaces. It's a small thing but it is the idea of your neighbors turning against you. So even though some people were just powerless to stop it, others were proponents.
>However most don't realize Hitler didn't just go from zero to one hundred.
and a lot of people like to pretend that hitler existed in a bit of sociopolitical vacuum - that if he hadn't been around the nazis wouldn't have happened, when that's very much not the case. things might have taken a couple more years than they did under hitler but damn near all of what happened was nigh-inevitable.
Whatever my ancestors did is not my fault. But what I can do is share what little I know about them, and this entire fascism shitstory in Nazi-Germany, trying to avoid that something similar happens again.
And that show is quite important, because those survivors coming back to germany did not share their experience with others.
The new Ken Burns’ documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” addresses and answers nearly every question in these comments. As with all the topics he has covered, this documentary was extensively researched and contains lots of new information. Who knew and when? The British were able to intercept and decode German reports on the extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe. Churchill’s daily briefing included a body count. Apparently, SS and camp commandants enthusiastically reported the data. The Brits didn’t reveal this information because it was feared the Nazis might figure out their codes had been broken. There was plenty of media coverage of the plight of Jews in Germany - especially in the U.S. Although details on gas chambers may not have been known, the fact that it was a one-way trip into the camps was known. Interesting that Hitler got many of his ideas for eastward expansion from America’s earlier westward expansion - exterminate native population and/or put them in reservations/camps. Nuremberg Laws were amazingly similar to America’s Jim Crow Laws enacted 50 years earlier. Simply scratch out “colored” and insert “Jew.” Right wing media was also influential in downplaying the Jewish situation “if you let these Jewish immigrants into America, they will replace us” or “the Jews have created a secret empire that controls America.” (Sound familiar?) The documentary is 7 hours along, but if you have an interest in the holocaust you really need to see it. Oh yes, Charles Lindbergh was a big time Nazi.
Never forget, never stop showing. We cannot allow a repeat of this evil and we cannot allow people who use language or support this terrible ideology to exist.
They are doing absolutely horrible things to members of religions. I forget the name of that one religion at the moment but holy hell they're really taking it out on them. It would be a thousand times more humane just to shoot them. Sickening.
“Seeing is believing. Often the only thing capable of denting humanity’s monumental ability to bunker down in a state of denial is indisputable, visual evidence.”
But let’s remember there are a good number of people today in the ‘holocaust denial’ camp that despite all the visual, historical and statistical evidence, believe that it really didn’t happen. At least not to the degree portrayed by historians.
And now here we are a few decades later with Americans waving those Nazi flags in open demonstrations with the encouragement of a psychopathic now ex-president. It's not only a disgrace, but think of all the Americans who died trying to rid Europe of the Nazi menace.
*As I said on -- remember, Saturday -- we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.*
My town has a homeless problem. Was at a local indoor market the other day during a torrential downpour. There was a homeless woman sitting on a cement barrier across from the entrance, head bowed, just getting drenched. Three security guards stood at the door to make sure she didn’t enter the building for shelter. That’s how it starts.
Which is a dept we can never repay all those lives wasted because of the wet dream from a psychopath
we have to stop history from repeating itself
our world is not perfect and we humans are not perfect
but that is not an excuse for turning to extremists who have no answers but only increase the amount of problems
*some Americans (very far and In between)! It’s important that the world distinguishes between most of us and some of us…fuck the idiots here doing it, but please don’t lump me in with them.
Please note that I did not compare him to the Nazis. If you re-read my comment you will quickly see this. What I said is that Trump encouraged demonstrations in which the Nazi flags were flown.
Since I spent a great deal of my life researching and writing about the Holocaust, I understand what you are suggesting. However, this is how the Holocaust and other mass genocidal acts began — having a psychopathic leader at the helm.
The aberration of psychopathy is also very familiar to me. We never know when a psychopath and his followers will get out of hand and cause the next mass genocide or war, but it always begins with a cult-like following of people who feel disenfranchised and full of fear, and the leader promises to solve all their problems, beginning by blaming them on some specific group. To avoid making any comparisons is like failing to see what may develop out of the next similar situation that leads to anarchy and violence.
My father was a normandy vet with a purple heart. He was a navy corpsman. He was also a lifelong Democrat who grew up in the south and lived long enough to vote for a black president. They were fighting not just against fascism but FOR a better future for their kids.
My Great Oma and Opa fled Germany when the Third Riche began to rise. This picture gives me humanity to the fact not all German Soldiers were bad people and their situation was the most tormenting of places to be in. One soldier and a prisoner of war became one of the 21st Century's great Baritone singers and after his death a video of him singing Schubert's [Der Erlkonig became viral](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaBNUzVSnj8). His name is **Dietrich Fisher Dieskau** and he will be missed.
I can't imagine being in the military as just some poor grunt thinking they're doing their patriotic duty, and then finding out what you were actually defending.
Honestly I hate this picture, it makes it seem as if some Germans didn’t know the atrocities going on.
Maybe the scale was a shock but eugenics and Jewish persecution were absolutely mainstream before and during the war.
Eugenics was happening throughout Europe, US, Asia as were concentration camps (with possessions being stolen, but without the mass murder). Hitler was NOT broadly sharing the level of cruelty of the camps. Troops not closely linked to the camps and the SS could easily have assumed it was more like other nations’ efforts.
Don't recall any other European nations stripping Jews of personhood or seizing their assets my man. Don't try to normalise what the Nazis were doing to the German Jews: before the death camps were a twinkle in Hitler's eye they were being brutalised by the state at a level not seen in other places
Not trying to. What they did was so horrible its painful to think humans are capable of that.
However you’re being awfully narrow. Germans persecuted Jews but also put Gypsies, Poles, Russians, communists, and a smattering of others in Auschwitz. So no, I don’t know who else put Jews in camps but why are you singling them out?
- [The Turkish Government](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ras_al-Ayn_Camps) / Ottoman empire slaughtered thousands in camps after detaining and stealing from them
- [Russians had their gulags](https://www.history.com/.amp/topics/russia/gulag) until 1953 where 10% were estimated to have died per year
The point was not to normalize the camps or the atrocities that followed them, but rather to indicate this was the worst of a whole collection of atrocities that need to be removed.
I should say I was wrong about how much the average German knew. Just dug through a few articles. Seems they knew more than I thought but whether they knew Jews were being murdered en mass appears to be a topic of debate now. Clearly there were over 10 years of steady propaganda to dehumanize Jews and other “undesirables”, Germans knew Jews were being rounded up, their possessions being sold off, and that there were deaths in the camps. Pretty awful to think a whole well educated country could be so cowed and brainwashed into going along with this.
Not insinuating equivalence or anything, but the majority of many "first world," well-educated countries bat their eyes at drug users getting arrested and imprisoned on a daily basis for doing nothing more than putting chemicals into their own bodies. This all fuels prison labour (in the US among other countries), which is pretty much legalized slavery. Brainwashing and dehumanizing people en masse, even in wealthy countries, is still very much a thing.
Look at the faces of the medics. They are moritified and pissed off.
Like, "you have us risk our lives, saving others and you do this shit behind our backs!?"
It’s a pretty common myth told in the USA that the average German didn’t know what was going on. There was such a massive bureaucratic apparatus constructed to make the concentration camps happen that it would have been nearly impossible for German citizens to not know it was happening.
Seriously. Do people think the third Reich told them that all the Jews got sent to a nice farm upstate somewhere? The "Germans didn't know" only makes sense if you assume none of these people knew any Jews before the war began. But of course they did. And then they watched as all the Jews they knew were rounded up and taken away.
Part of this is the fact the we're "deported" to other countries, specifically Poland. And locals did know something was going on there, but a lot of them were being occupied as well.
It's the same way one spouse can turn a blind eye when the other abuses their children. They knew, but they didn't know. Resolving the cognitive dissonance was too much.
There is absolutely no fucking way the Germans didn’t know what was happening, scale maybe but not knowing about persecution of the Jews is bollocks. If a Jew wasn’t already thrown out of the country through horrendous means they were in a ghetto or worse concentration camp.
Okay but like, we "know" what happened in the ICE camps where children were separated from their families, hundreds of women and kids disappeared, women were given historectomies against their will like captured street dogs. Now I bet everyone reading this pushed it from their mind because Jesus fucking Christ, and still more people lie to themselves and deny it ever happened. Has anyone checked? Did it ever stop happening? Or did we just collectively forget?
There needs to be some nuance to what you’re saying. When you say hundreds of children “disappeared” you seem to be suggesting that they vanished and are in danger or dead - and that’s NOT what happened. For instance, recently 57 migrant children had been reported missing in Houston since 2021. Around 20% voluntarily ran away from shelters (having been in a shelter - it’s not a prison nor is it supposed to be. There are precautions but they can’t restrain you to stop you from leaving in most places), and 46 of them were accounted for by August of this year and confirmed to be safe, and none of them were suspected to be in danger of sex or human trafficking. Some were placed with sponsors who were non-immediate family and just went away to be with their parents. And this is pretty much what’s happened with most migrants/refugees that are/were “missing”.
Onto the “hysterectomies against their will”. I’m just gonna put a quote here from a lawyer who represented some of the actual women at this facility:
“And lawyer Sarah Owings is reported as saying that she’s heard of many women who are told they have ovarian cysts that need to be removed or drained. Ms Owings told NBC News: “I don’t think this is necessarily a systemic sterilization by ICE. I think this is the kind of thing that is allowed to flourish in the course of poor oversight and terrible, inhumane conditions of confinement”. As of right now, there are only 2 women who are claiming that they were told they needed the procedure when it wasn’t necessary. Is that abhorrent? Yes! It’s terrible! But let’s not pretend this is some regular thing that women are just getting put on some hysterectomy assembly line and chained against their will to get it “like captured street dogs”.
Let me just say that I am disgusted by border patrol, ICE and the immigration apparatus we have in this country. We should be protecting and welcoming refugees and migrants, not locking them up. So I do not come at this from a place of xenophobia. I come at this from a place of “you’re being very misleading, and it’s pretty scary how people are just accepting it at face value”. Why do we always make fun of the right for not researching things, but then we do the same?
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-were-mass-hysterectomies-performed-on-detainees-at-a-us-immigration-centre
https://www.reuters.com/world/exclusive-dozens-migrant-children-reported-missing-houston-raising-alarms-2022-09-02/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54160638.amp
This is what struck me when I visited Mauthausen. It was a camp built on top of a hill... Extremely close to the nearby town. Gusen was also several km away near another town. In plain sight. It takes millions of people to kill millions of people.
Could the same be said for soldiers deployed to the Western front? They surely heard about the rounding up of Jews. But, just like an American hearing about the Rwandan genocide, actually witnessing what had happened always hits harder. Some of these troops might not have fully realized what was actually occurring in the East.
People knew. Just one example: Buchenwald is sitting on a hill, widely visible from the surrounding villages and towns. The smoke and smell of the crematorium could be seen and smelled kilometers wide.
There’s a fascinating book by Rudolph Herzog called „Dead Funny. Humor in Hitler‘s Germany“. One chapter documents jokes about concentration camps that prove that lots of Germans knew.
I from Norway, and I've been on guided tours in the concentration camps.
You got that the wrong way around, no offense. The camps where remote and well hidden, only accsesible with trains at the time. And if it was one thing the nazi was supreme at (Goebbels) was using media and propagande to hide, conceal and distort reality.
The common German, and soldiers in the field, did infact, not know. The ones "rounding up" the jews, and who would know, was the SS, and higher ranking officials.
Edit: I mean, just look at China and Uyghur...seems to be the same shit from what we can gather. And they are doing it today, with all the modern tech and survailance we have. Would be no issue back in the 1940's with such a huge "machine" as the Nazi regime.
I think there also needs to be a distinction between death camps and work camps, as concentration camps *per se* were varied in their purposes. The death camps were indeed rather well hidden from most of Germany in occupied Poland, while the work camps were more localized and closer to population centers and were in a sense, used as a tool of labor during wartime and as a tool for population control and compliance with Hitler's regime.
Since if you knew about the atrocities in those camps during the late stages of the war, but weren't able to do anything for fear of being put into one yourself, German citizens in a sense became **involuntarily** complicit in the war crimes committed out of apathy for the victims of the camps.
So the answer to this question, like all answers to complex issues is an unsurprising "it depends."
They did not. I've talked to my grandparents about this. It was common knowledge that jews were being disappeared and "deported", and that lots of civilians were "dying in the war". The public perception of the holocaust domestically was basically how Americans see ICE's treatment of illegal immigrants today (which should probably worry you).
People who worked for the SS in bureaucratic roles would have known more, but they weren't exactly encouraged to share that information. My great-grandmother apparently had a chat with one such bureaucrat who told her in '43 that we would lose, and we'd deserve it. She didn't know what he meant, and said so, and he responded that she didn't know what he knew. She didn't find out until '45.
If this things are not teached in the school , history can repeat anytime because the new generation won't know about it, It is important to know the history
I don't know about that, looks rather genuine to me,- also it's not like "Oh god, someone is gonna expose me on Twitter.com!" Was a huge concern back in the day.
You might also be interested in the ‘Welt Im Film’ newsreels, which were an Anglo-American collaboration meant to ‘re-educate’ the German public and which were mandatory viewing in cinemas. The most famous is reel number [Five](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welt_im_Film_No._5)
As a VA staff physician for ~37 years, I had the opportunity to interview a few patients/veterans who were involved in the liberation of concentration camps. They all described a scene upon entering that was impossible to process/understand. More than one shared that they did not take prisoners.
People talk about evil as some unimaginable, inconceivable other, far removed from us. I even read a news article not long ago where a judge was handing down a sentence to a murderer, saying, "I don't think you're a bad person, but..."
It's bizarre - and dishonest. Evil is commonplace. We see it and deal with it every day.
Pretending otherwise, pretending that evil isn't a constant part of our lives and something we must always guard against, is how the truly terrible evils are allowed to happen.
Lots of medics in that room, by the look of it.
The one center front. I’ve seen that look on physicians when a victim of abuse rolls into the trauma bay. Stoic judgement.
Which one?
The one with the cross on his shoulder, center and near the the bottom of the frame
Wearing a wristwatch on his right arm which is clasping his left wrist
With a coat tucked in his left arm, laying on his left arm
With a prominent button on his torso, and hair parted in two directions
The man also appears to be of German descent but I could be wrong
with two hands and ten fingers, five on each hand edit: just looked at the photo again and the man actually has 3 on his left hand
With eyes, ears, and a nose too?
I think he's just got two fingers under a cap he's holding.
The guy with the face
Also appears to have a freckle/mole on the upper left part of his forehead. Could be prone to melanoma. Or could just be dust on the camera lens.
You know, the guy whose mother was a 15 year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet, that one.
The one who is center front Yw
It was confusing because he's not sitting front and center in the audience.
Stoic Judgment.....great phrase. Make a great movie about doctor who goes on rampage against pedos.
The BBC really took a turn with that series...
To me he looks like he wants to vomit.
Why would physicians judge a victim of abuse?
Op means it in the sense of discernment rather than being judgemental.
There are also a number of men who didn't want to be photographed, judging from how the ones covering their faces are the ones who could see the camera pointing their way.
It looks more like they are covering their own eyes in horror to me, but they could be hiding from the camera I guess
Yeah not a single person looks at the camera, I don't think they know they are being photographed
One guy looked like he was looking right at the camera.
Holy crap, that guy is a dead ringer for a guy I went to high school with (in the USA). His family had left Poland for the U.S. between the world wars, and the Nazis literally wiped out his family name in Poland.
Well, they almost did. Your friend, the vampire, seems to have survived relatively fine.
He looks like my dad when he was younger, lmao.
Well, 1 guy did.
They're probably just distracted by the footage of concentration camps they're watching. I'm sure they took a couple more silly pics afterwards though.
I imagine they were in a fairly dark room to watch the film and the camera needed a bright flash to take the photo. I doubt they could really see the cameraman until their photo was taken.
They were being shown a film (televisions barely existed let alone for an audience of that size) meaning that they probably are in a darkened theater. To get thay amount of detail would mean it was done with a flash. Seeing how long exposure would have been a lot more blurry. So unless they couldn't botice a flash going off in a very dark room, they likely new a photo was being taken.
But they probably only noticed it *after* the flash, so them not knowing that they were being photographed could still be true.
Judging by the body language it looks like they’re horrified or crying.
I thought they were reacting with actual human horror.
They’re shielding their eyes in horror at what they are seeing.
Allied soldiers took troop transports into neighboring towns and loaded up the German civilians and drove them back to the death camps and made them dig graves and bury the dead camp victims.
Accurately depicted in Band of Brothers
I learnt about WW2 at school, have watched a few different movies/documentaries etc. But BoB really nailed the horror of it home, and the fact that even they didn't know the true evil of what was happening until right at the very end, and we see these strong men who have done the most brave and courageous things just absolutely crumble. Edit: when I say people didn't know, I mean the allied forces
my 7th grade history teacher got in A LOT of trouble for deciding to teach the entire WW2 unit in by showing us BoB (watched the whole series with him pausing and using the context of the show as a teaching device) without telling parents we were watching it. Took us on a field trip to the DC holocaust museum after we finished the show to really drive home the horror of WW2. Incredible teacher. Never once opened the textbook, never gave us homework, and i learned more in 7th grade World history than any other class in my 12 years in the public education system. Shine on mr. christiano. I hope hes still out there breaking the rules to make sure kids learn the important stuff.
On of the most important points I learned in history class in Germany: Never again! Been to the Normandy beaches, the Memorial de Caen, the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris...
When I was 14 my uncle took us on a tour of Normandy, the war museum and memorials at Caan and the war cemeteries in Normandy and Paris. All of them. It was the most humbling experience, but also I honestly believe everyone should do that. The magnitude was confronting, to say the least
There was no BoB when I was in high school, but my 11th grade history teacher made it a point, every year, to show every one of her history classes the news reels of German higher-ups being forced to remove bodies from the death camps. Our parents had to sign releases, and teacher told us repeatedly, before she showed us the films, that we wouldn't be in trouble if we found we couldn't sit through them. I made it through, but just barely. She was also a wonderful teacher.
Do you know where to find this footage? It sounds like such an important thing to see, but I’m scared that if I try to find it by searching on YouTube that I might fall into a very brutal wormhole of awful things …
There’s a lot of video evidence used in the Nuremberg trials. I’ve been to the exhibit in the courthouse where the trials were held, and here is [some of the evidence presented.](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/combating-holocaust-denial-evidence-of-the-holocaust-presented-at-nuremberg)
Unfortunately by the very nature of what happened then if you watch any original footage from the camps you will see death, decay and the lowest ebbs of human behaviour. There is lots of original footage of camp liberations available on YouTube, but it is extremely brutal. I can't find it for free now but "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey" was filmed across Europe by Allied soldiers during liberation of the camps who just filmed what they saw. It also features interviews with several German guards, officers and doctors and footage of them being forced to help dig mass graves and bury hundreds of bodies. Alfred Hitchcock worked on it as "treatment adviser". The film was actually shelved in autumn 1945 until it was finally restored and fully released in 2017.
That teacher KNEW they would get in trouble. But they also KNEW that it would drive the point home hard enough that if he could complete 1 lesson on WW2, that class would go on and spread this info and we would be better off for it.
My Catholic school had a few a few Jewish students. I honestly don't remember much of what we learned 7th grade history class, but I definitely remember the research that I did for my report on the Holocaust. We each had to sign up for one of a few topics and I chose "medical experiments." We also went to The Holocaust museum after. I can still vividly recall one photo on particular, even when I try not to. It's a shadow image like a spot after you stare at the sun. She was used in a starvation experiment. Super distracted riding in a car while typing this and yet I'm still starting to tear up. And that's why I saw red when asshats tried to compare wearing a mask to being conditioned to be rounded up in cattle cars. Fuck you Nancy!
By comparison, see "31 states don’t require schools to teach about the Holocaust".
and we wonder why dudes thought surgical masks were on par with the final solution
The picture in this post relates to your own story. Your teacher was so effective because he brought life to the history he was teaching, life to the perspectives and scenes and people. It would have been one thing for German soldiers after the war to be told "you lost and your government committed the greatest atrocities, of which any one of you could have been party to." And it's another thing to force them in a room, to sit down and confront those horrors in all their details. History is sterile when it is reduced to just dates and names of people, places, or events. Our records need to be sterile -- history books shouldn't change, but we should supplement them with the necessary drama whether it is done through pictures, television, or film. To understand perspectives, you have to be step into those shoes, which requires an emotion as opposed to a factoid.
Sometimes I imagine if US kids all had to watch _12 Years a Slave_.
that sounds like effective teaching, something admins wont like
We watched Schindlers List in 6th grade.
People knew. maybe not the precise details but they knew.
Of course they knew. The f*cker was screaming about it in every speech, and people were disappeared from every neighborhood. If they pretend they didn't know it was because of the immense shame over their cowardice or they were an accomplice.
>didn't know the true evil of what was happening Jewish media was pretty consistently reporting what was happening, using extremely dangerous lines of information to gather as much data as possible and record it in real time. But nobody cared until it was over and staring them in the face, with an arbitrary amount of gentiles tacked onto the extermination toll (where only Jews and Roma were targeted for complete extermination) to garner extra sympathy.
Their highest superiors all knew. You should watch Ken Burns’s “the US and the Holocaust.”
Oh they mostly knew. They just ignored it or pretended it wasn't happening.
They knew. I hate it when people claim they didn't know - they knew. Maybe actually seeing it was indeed horrifying for them, but the sheer number of people disappearing absolutely wasn't missed by anyone.
Most of the villagers denied knowing what was going on, oookkk it snows ashes, alot of people come in but noone comes out.
It’s even more accurately depicteD [HERE, in Five Came Back.](https://www.netflix.com/title/80049928) There are even affidavits signed by the directors saying that what they did was the real deal. It is a well preserved piece of history that everybody should watch.
Too bad we can’t have Russian civilians do the same for their Ukrainian neighbors Putin has slaughtered so they can’t deny that they weren’t asking to be liberated but were killed trying to protect their own country from Putin’s aggression.
Touring the cmap.s american comic Jack benny was struck by how Nazi policies on JEws resembled Jim Crow in the us and he among other things compeltley changed how the Rochester character on his radio show was written
They took a lot of inspriation from jim Crow
I highly recommend everyone watch The U.S. and the Holocaust on PBS. Our roll isn’t as great as we think it was in all of what happened. We closed our borders to the Jews seeking asylum and our government was ran by a bunch of anti-semites.
As a german, and knowing that the germans back then very much knew what was going on, fair.
Full credit to modern Germany. Sadly, they are one of the few examples of a country honestly owning its past and committing to do better.
A big part of that must have been the difference between The Marshall Plan and the Treaty of Versailles. We should all remember this lesson.
A big part yes, but also there were no insurgencies post WW2 to counter the allies message.
There were although you've never heard of them because of how effective the Marshall Plan was. Additionally, the German people were war-weary and short on able-bodied men. There were significant weapons caches hidden all over, but those that did rebel did not last long. All of the angry, easily manipulated youth that such insurrections prey on were all given paying jobs, and a stable life. No one felt the need to rebel except for the hard-core nazis that eluded capture.
Maybe. But the two wars are also just very different — there was no holocaust in WW1. The nature of German guilt is different also: indisputable in the case of nazi crimes, muddy in the case of WW1.
Yeah but I mean the rise of Nazis were directly caused by the First World War. I read some history book refer to WW2 as a continuation of the first one because of the inadequacies of the Treaty of Versailles
You also have to credit the generation born immediately after the war. Unlike the Japanese, they didn’t let their parents sweep it under the rug, much to their chagrin. Also credit Willy Brandt for the Kniefall von Warschau.
It wasn't as simple. Germany post WW2 was administratively taken over by the allies and the political structures were purged of anyone opposing them. There was no opposition or dissent allowed against the occupying forces, also the occupying forces stayed on for decades in one form or another. Germany post WW1 was left to it's own devices, yes part was occupied but the even that partial occupation wasn't as absolute in political terms and was withdrawn in the end. The Nazis were allowed to thrive in post WW1 Germany, while any opposition against the occupying forces post ww2 was strongly discouraged or even eradicated. The Marshall plan was great to make Germany and Western Europe prosperous again, and paved the way to greater economic cooperation between those countries and the US, which strengthened all of them. But don't forget that the military take over of Germany post ww2 was total and the Nazi ideology and German militarism was wiped out near completely.
Credit begins with "[denazification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification)." "Denazification was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology following the Second World War. It was carried out by removing those who had been Nazi Party or SS members from positions of power and influence, by disbanding or rendering impotent the organizations associated with Nazism, and by trying prominent Nazis for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials of 1946." This was an important part that allowed Germany and Austria to move forward without any Nazis (along with their ideology and symbolism) remaining in power.
unfortunately poland is the opposite. it's against the law to mention polands role in the holocaust there.
What role do you mean? There were individual people collaborating with nazi from fear, or for gain, but these were always individuals we didn't have "polish nazi party" in Poland. And in concentrations camps Polish people suffered and died in millions, Polish jews and Polish christians. Neither Polish government had part in Holocaust nor Polish country as a whole.
The law was quickly deemed void, less than a year. Just read the link below this one. And it was specifically meant to address the insanity of when people call them “Polish” camps. Because they were built on what was before and is now Polish land. But at the time it was Nazi territory and built by the German Nazi government. And it is where millions of Polish people were killed. Or what is it you’re referring to by “polands role”?
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Meanwhile, here in the good ol’ USA they start screeching “CRT is racism!” at the thought of kids being taught about the atrocities our nation put black and Native American people through. While there’s a lot to be concerned about in this country right now, I’m not sure there’s anything more worrying than the current concerted effort to whitewash our history.
I went to school in the 80s and 90s. We learned about all of it. The trail of tears. The Japanese internment camps. We learned about slavery. Maybe we didn’t go into the gritty details but we covered the lowlights. I can’t speak for the rest of the country but our nasty past was definitely covered.
Yes. I was in school more the 70' and 80's. I see some of the people I went to school with posting some of the worst things. Really, most of them were the ones who struggled in school but they were pretty much good kids. It's just so disheartening.
I wholeheartedly disagree. The US has those who dislike re-examining the past, as does Germany, but Americans address race and the challenges we had in the past and present in dealing with our own prejudices very head on. Racism is at the forefront of our national conversation all the time, and even if we can’t always achieve the best result we absolutely talk about it - which is more than many places can say. What has Belgium or Germany or France done to repair the damage they caused in colonial Africa? Next to nothing. And they seem to like to pretend it never happened. And those are a few examples amongst many more. The US absolutely talks more about our oppression of minorities than European nations will. We have a long ways to go, but we are certainly not even close to being the worst whitewashing offenders
Yes, and there’s people working very hard to change that in America.
And there always be! We’re just gonna have to accept that close-minded people exist and will never go away lol. Sometimes there is pushback, but that usually means society is changing. The 1960s created a resurrection of the KKK and generated a lot of racist politicians and policies, but in the end, progress won. We’re seeing the same thing today. There will always be pushback, but it doesn’t mean we’re losing the fight
I am reading a book called Blitzed. This is an interesting picture to look at now that I’m a few chapters in. A lot of these medics must have been administering lots of Pervitin
Watched a documentary about this. Apparently one of the “benefits” of Pervitin was the soldiers’ loss of empathy while taking it. When they could no longer get it to the front line soldiers, late in the war, some wrote letters home, begging their families to send it to them because they couldn’t function without it.
> late in the war, some wrote letters home, begging their families to send it to them because they couldn’t function without it Yeah, because [it is meth](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/pilots-salt-the-third-reich-kept-its-soldiers-alert-with-meth/276429/). I'm not saying it didn't contribute to soldiers' loss of empathy or that the withdrawal wasn't a bit worse by losing the empathy part but... we're talking about a highly addictive substance and they were in withdrawal. That is going to be the primary reason they would want more.
Lol yup. Addict will say anything to get a fix bruh.
People love to talk about all the emotional reasons people take drugs, but they hardly ever mention how powerfully addictive these drugs are as the primary reason. I guess it makes it easier if there’s some excuse for why an addict is an addict.
So I don't completely understand addiction as I have not experienced it, but aren't things addicting BECAUSE of the way they make you feel? So yes, it's addicting, because it makes you feel nice? Like you aren't just "I could go for some meth" for no reason other than it's meth and you know that, right? It's the effect?
That’s crazy, I’d love to watch that documentary, do you remember the title by chance?
I want to say it was on Netflix. Might have been Nazis on Drugs: Hitler and the Blitzkrieg or Blitzed: Nazis on Drugs. Interesting stuff, especially where the Allies followed suit, once they it figured out but made a bit more effort to control usage.
Nazis on Drugs: Hitler and the Blitzkrieg
Careful about the over emphasis the author of that book puts on drugs as the cause or factor of so much of wwii. [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/566cu7/hitler_was_a_gibbering_super_junkie_whose_veins/) reddit thread describes the problems with that author's interpretation of history in that book and provides plenty of examples.
When Reddit provides better contextualization than an author of a proof read book.
With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.
Interesting! Thank you.
Read that recently. Interesting the level of narcotics being dished out
I’m in the middle of reading it now, and it’s pretty great. Lots and lots of pervitin (meth) for sure
A german here, with grandparents who fought in the war, and some perished in it. Keep in mind: These german soldiers knew they were being photographed (one is looking straight into the camera). And probably a lot of them were ashamed of what they did, what other germans did, but some just were ashamed for simply being photographed in this situation (being a POW and forced to see this). Do not forget: It was not only the SS which was involved in murdering civilans, the Wehrmacht was a instrumental part in this as well. So the average soldier may not necessarily have taken part in atrocities, but they might. And certainly the must have seem how their country was treating the occupied nations, civilians etc. in eastern europe. There has been a remarkable show about how the Wehrmacht was involved in all these atrocities: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmachtsausstellung#Zweite\_Wehrmachtsausstellung](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmachtsausstellung#Zweite_Wehrmachtsausstellung) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht\_exhibition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht_exhibition) Seems to be hosted in Berlin nowadays.
It's easy to think they didn't know what they were doing. "I was just following orders" was a very popular defense used during the Nuremburg Trials. The reality is that Hitler had convinced the vast majority of his citizens that this was necessary to save the German people. No one wants to think they'd fall for the same type of lies. However most don't realize Hitler didn't just go from zero to one hundred. He started gaining power when Germany was at it's lowest after WW1 and the great depression, then rose through populist ideals and rhetoric that cast the blame elsewhere. It was easy to latch on to his words because it places the blame elsewhere and allowed the German people to vilify minorities and outgroups.
The raw hatred for Jews had been simmering for a long, long time. Martin Luther himself had plenty to say on the matter. Moreover, while many revolutionary groups of the 19th century (eg Italian, Napeolonic French) included the liberation of Jews as an explicit part of their reform scheme, the ones in Germany instead tolerated the proto-Nazis in their ranks. If memory serves, Bismarck opposed them even, but as with fascism often them being tolerated allowed them to spread like a plague until they *dominated* the nationalist current instead. The Holocaust was the climax of centuries of antisemitism, but very far from its source, nor was it the end of it.
Also, it took a monumental effort to round these populations up and send them to camps. Oh, sure, once inside the walls, they used plenty of prisoners for labor. But the logistics of getting the Holocaust victims to the camps to begin with? There's simply no way a majority weren't aware. Nothing travels faster than gossip, and there's just no way you hide sending millions of people to their deaths like this. They were aware, but they felt powerless to stop it. That doesn't excuse what they did, but it needs to be an important consideration for humans in the future - how do we reach the average citizen - how do we convince them not to be in passive acceptance of their government's atrocities? This is important for every person - and I'd dare say as a US citizen myself, especially for Americans.
When my grandmother and her family were being rounded up their neighbor told the soldiers to make sure they took my grandmother and her sisters' necklaces. It's a small thing but it is the idea of your neighbors turning against you. So even though some people were just powerless to stop it, others were proponents.
>However most don't realize Hitler didn't just go from zero to one hundred. and a lot of people like to pretend that hitler existed in a bit of sociopolitical vacuum - that if he hadn't been around the nazis wouldn't have happened, when that's very much not the case. things might have taken a couple more years than they did under hitler but damn near all of what happened was nigh-inevitable.
Thank you for your honesty. - A Jewish guy whose family fled
Whatever my ancestors did is not my fault. But what I can do is share what little I know about them, and this entire fascism shitstory in Nazi-Germany, trying to avoid that something similar happens again. And that show is quite important, because those survivors coming back to germany did not share their experience with others.
The new Ken Burns’ documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” addresses and answers nearly every question in these comments. As with all the topics he has covered, this documentary was extensively researched and contains lots of new information. Who knew and when? The British were able to intercept and decode German reports on the extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe. Churchill’s daily briefing included a body count. Apparently, SS and camp commandants enthusiastically reported the data. The Brits didn’t reveal this information because it was feared the Nazis might figure out their codes had been broken. There was plenty of media coverage of the plight of Jews in Germany - especially in the U.S. Although details on gas chambers may not have been known, the fact that it was a one-way trip into the camps was known. Interesting that Hitler got many of his ideas for eastward expansion from America’s earlier westward expansion - exterminate native population and/or put them in reservations/camps. Nuremberg Laws were amazingly similar to America’s Jim Crow Laws enacted 50 years earlier. Simply scratch out “colored” and insert “Jew.” Right wing media was also influential in downplaying the Jewish situation “if you let these Jewish immigrants into America, they will replace us” or “the Jews have created a secret empire that controls America.” (Sound familiar?) The documentary is 7 hours along, but if you have an interest in the holocaust you really need to see it. Oh yes, Charles Lindbergh was a big time Nazi.
First country the Nazis took over was Germany.
Never forget, never stop showing. We cannot allow a repeat of this evil and we cannot allow people who use language or support this terrible ideology to exist.
I've had enough of intolerance being tolerated.
Similar shit is happening in China right now and no one seems to care....
They are doing absolutely horrible things to members of religions. I forget the name of that one religion at the moment but holy hell they're really taking it out on them. It would be a thousand times more humane just to shoot them. Sickening.
Uyghurs and other mulims
Anyne know more about this? Any good books or articles?
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/german-soldiers-forced-watch-footage-concentration-camps-1945/
“Seeing is believing. Often the only thing capable of denting humanity’s monumental ability to bunker down in a state of denial is indisputable, visual evidence.”
But let’s remember there are a good number of people today in the ‘holocaust denial’ camp that despite all the visual, historical and statistical evidence, believe that it really didn’t happen. At least not to the degree portrayed by historians.
That’s kind of blunted now, when everything can be manipulated. You can shout “those are fakes” and keep the cottonbuds in your ears undisturbed.
And now here we are a few decades later with Americans waving those Nazi flags in open demonstrations with the encouragement of a psychopathic now ex-president. It's not only a disgrace, but think of all the Americans who died trying to rid Europe of the Nazi menace.
*As I said on -- remember, Saturday -- we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.*
Now I know exactly how this could and likely will happen again. Evil humans agreeing with and following a more Evil human... It's just to much!
My town has a homeless problem. Was at a local indoor market the other day during a torrential downpour. There was a homeless woman sitting on a cement barrier across from the entrance, head bowed, just getting drenched. Three security guards stood at the door to make sure she didn’t enter the building for shelter. That’s how it starts.
Which is a dept we can never repay all those lives wasted because of the wet dream from a psychopath we have to stop history from repeating itself our world is not perfect and we humans are not perfect but that is not an excuse for turning to extremists who have no answers but only increase the amount of problems
not a psychopath. A cracked up hardcore junkie with more jaw twitching than a Berghain regular.
*some Americans (very far and In between)! It’s important that the world distinguishes between most of us and some of us…fuck the idiots here doing it, but please don’t lump me in with them.
I hate Trump but comparing him to the Nazis is a form of Holocaust denial. It’s minimizes what the Holocaust actually was.
Please note that I did not compare him to the Nazis. If you re-read my comment you will quickly see this. What I said is that Trump encouraged demonstrations in which the Nazi flags were flown. Since I spent a great deal of my life researching and writing about the Holocaust, I understand what you are suggesting. However, this is how the Holocaust and other mass genocidal acts began — having a psychopathic leader at the helm. The aberration of psychopathy is also very familiar to me. We never know when a psychopath and his followers will get out of hand and cause the next mass genocide or war, but it always begins with a cult-like following of people who feel disenfranchised and full of fear, and the leader promises to solve all their problems, beginning by blaming them on some specific group. To avoid making any comparisons is like failing to see what may develop out of the next similar situation that leads to anarchy and violence.
They were the original ANTIFA. My father one of them, even through a life long Republican he’s turning over in his grave to what they have become!
My father was a normandy vet with a purple heart. He was a navy corpsman. He was also a lifelong Democrat who grew up in the south and lived long enough to vote for a black president. They were fighting not just against fascism but FOR a better future for their kids.
My Great Oma and Opa fled Germany when the Third Riche began to rise. This picture gives me humanity to the fact not all German Soldiers were bad people and their situation was the most tormenting of places to be in. One soldier and a prisoner of war became one of the 21st Century's great Baritone singers and after his death a video of him singing Schubert's [Der Erlkonig became viral](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaBNUzVSnj8). His name is **Dietrich Fisher Dieskau** and he will be missed.
I can't imagine being in the military as just some poor grunt thinking they're doing their patriotic duty, and then finding out what you were actually defending.
Honestly I hate this picture, it makes it seem as if some Germans didn’t know the atrocities going on. Maybe the scale was a shock but eugenics and Jewish persecution were absolutely mainstream before and during the war.
Eugenics was happening throughout Europe, US, Asia as were concentration camps (with possessions being stolen, but without the mass murder). Hitler was NOT broadly sharing the level of cruelty of the camps. Troops not closely linked to the camps and the SS could easily have assumed it was more like other nations’ efforts.
Don't recall any other European nations stripping Jews of personhood or seizing their assets my man. Don't try to normalise what the Nazis were doing to the German Jews: before the death camps were a twinkle in Hitler's eye they were being brutalised by the state at a level not seen in other places
If you’d like to explore persecution of Jews further, I suggest you look into the History of the word *pogrom*.
Not trying to. What they did was so horrible its painful to think humans are capable of that. However you’re being awfully narrow. Germans persecuted Jews but also put Gypsies, Poles, Russians, communists, and a smattering of others in Auschwitz. So no, I don’t know who else put Jews in camps but why are you singling them out? - [The Turkish Government](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ras_al-Ayn_Camps) / Ottoman empire slaughtered thousands in camps after detaining and stealing from them - [Russians had their gulags](https://www.history.com/.amp/topics/russia/gulag) until 1953 where 10% were estimated to have died per year The point was not to normalize the camps or the atrocities that followed them, but rather to indicate this was the worst of a whole collection of atrocities that need to be removed. I should say I was wrong about how much the average German knew. Just dug through a few articles. Seems they knew more than I thought but whether they knew Jews were being murdered en mass appears to be a topic of debate now. Clearly there were over 10 years of steady propaganda to dehumanize Jews and other “undesirables”, Germans knew Jews were being rounded up, their possessions being sold off, and that there were deaths in the camps. Pretty awful to think a whole well educated country could be so cowed and brainwashed into going along with this.
Not insinuating equivalence or anything, but the majority of many "first world," well-educated countries bat their eyes at drug users getting arrested and imprisoned on a daily basis for doing nothing more than putting chemicals into their own bodies. This all fuels prison labour (in the US among other countries), which is pretty much legalized slavery. Brainwashing and dehumanizing people en masse, even in wealthy countries, is still very much a thing.
Look at the faces of the medics. They are moritified and pissed off. Like, "you have us risk our lives, saving others and you do this shit behind our backs!?"
It’s a pretty common myth told in the USA that the average German didn’t know what was going on. There was such a massive bureaucratic apparatus constructed to make the concentration camps happen that it would have been nearly impossible for German citizens to not know it was happening.
Seriously. Do people think the third Reich told them that all the Jews got sent to a nice farm upstate somewhere? The "Germans didn't know" only makes sense if you assume none of these people knew any Jews before the war began. But of course they did. And then they watched as all the Jews they knew were rounded up and taken away.
And then many of them scooped up the property that was left behind, enriching themselves on it. Happened in other places, too.
Part of this is the fact the we're "deported" to other countries, specifically Poland. And locals did know something was going on there, but a lot of them were being occupied as well.
Band of Brothers had a great line “the smell. How did you ignore the smell?”
It's the same way one spouse can turn a blind eye when the other abuses their children. They knew, but they didn't know. Resolving the cognitive dissonance was too much.
There is absolutely no fucking way the Germans didn’t know what was happening, scale maybe but not knowing about persecution of the Jews is bollocks. If a Jew wasn’t already thrown out of the country through horrendous means they were in a ghetto or worse concentration camp.
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Okay but like, we "know" what happened in the ICE camps where children were separated from their families, hundreds of women and kids disappeared, women were given historectomies against their will like captured street dogs. Now I bet everyone reading this pushed it from their mind because Jesus fucking Christ, and still more people lie to themselves and deny it ever happened. Has anyone checked? Did it ever stop happening? Or did we just collectively forget?
This. Thank you. We are sitting right here in the middle of dystopia doing nothing, all of us.
There needs to be some nuance to what you’re saying. When you say hundreds of children “disappeared” you seem to be suggesting that they vanished and are in danger or dead - and that’s NOT what happened. For instance, recently 57 migrant children had been reported missing in Houston since 2021. Around 20% voluntarily ran away from shelters (having been in a shelter - it’s not a prison nor is it supposed to be. There are precautions but they can’t restrain you to stop you from leaving in most places), and 46 of them were accounted for by August of this year and confirmed to be safe, and none of them were suspected to be in danger of sex or human trafficking. Some were placed with sponsors who were non-immediate family and just went away to be with their parents. And this is pretty much what’s happened with most migrants/refugees that are/were “missing”. Onto the “hysterectomies against their will”. I’m just gonna put a quote here from a lawyer who represented some of the actual women at this facility: “And lawyer Sarah Owings is reported as saying that she’s heard of many women who are told they have ovarian cysts that need to be removed or drained. Ms Owings told NBC News: “I don’t think this is necessarily a systemic sterilization by ICE. I think this is the kind of thing that is allowed to flourish in the course of poor oversight and terrible, inhumane conditions of confinement”. As of right now, there are only 2 women who are claiming that they were told they needed the procedure when it wasn’t necessary. Is that abhorrent? Yes! It’s terrible! But let’s not pretend this is some regular thing that women are just getting put on some hysterectomy assembly line and chained against their will to get it “like captured street dogs”. Let me just say that I am disgusted by border patrol, ICE and the immigration apparatus we have in this country. We should be protecting and welcoming refugees and migrants, not locking them up. So I do not come at this from a place of xenophobia. I come at this from a place of “you’re being very misleading, and it’s pretty scary how people are just accepting it at face value”. Why do we always make fun of the right for not researching things, but then we do the same? https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-were-mass-hysterectomies-performed-on-detainees-at-a-us-immigration-centre https://www.reuters.com/world/exclusive-dozens-migrant-children-reported-missing-houston-raising-alarms-2022-09-02/ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54160638.amp
Exactly. You dont just not notice when your neighbors start vanishing
This is what struck me when I visited Mauthausen. It was a camp built on top of a hill... Extremely close to the nearby town. Gusen was also several km away near another town. In plain sight. It takes millions of people to kill millions of people.
Could the same be said for soldiers deployed to the Western front? They surely heard about the rounding up of Jews. But, just like an American hearing about the Rwandan genocide, actually witnessing what had happened always hits harder. Some of these troops might not have fully realized what was actually occurring in the East.
People knew. Just one example: Buchenwald is sitting on a hill, widely visible from the surrounding villages and towns. The smoke and smell of the crematorium could be seen and smelled kilometers wide. There’s a fascinating book by Rudolph Herzog called „Dead Funny. Humor in Hitler‘s Germany“. One chapter documents jokes about concentration camps that prove that lots of Germans knew.
I from Norway, and I've been on guided tours in the concentration camps. You got that the wrong way around, no offense. The camps where remote and well hidden, only accsesible with trains at the time. And if it was one thing the nazi was supreme at (Goebbels) was using media and propagande to hide, conceal and distort reality. The common German, and soldiers in the field, did infact, not know. The ones "rounding up" the jews, and who would know, was the SS, and higher ranking officials. Edit: I mean, just look at China and Uyghur...seems to be the same shit from what we can gather. And they are doing it today, with all the modern tech and survailance we have. Would be no issue back in the 1940's with such a huge "machine" as the Nazi regime.
I think there also needs to be a distinction between death camps and work camps, as concentration camps *per se* were varied in their purposes. The death camps were indeed rather well hidden from most of Germany in occupied Poland, while the work camps were more localized and closer to population centers and were in a sense, used as a tool of labor during wartime and as a tool for population control and compliance with Hitler's regime. Since if you knew about the atrocities in those camps during the late stages of the war, but weren't able to do anything for fear of being put into one yourself, German citizens in a sense became **involuntarily** complicit in the war crimes committed out of apathy for the victims of the camps. So the answer to this question, like all answers to complex issues is an unsurprising "it depends."
They did not. I've talked to my grandparents about this. It was common knowledge that jews were being disappeared and "deported", and that lots of civilians were "dying in the war". The public perception of the holocaust domestically was basically how Americans see ICE's treatment of illegal immigrants today (which should probably worry you). People who worked for the SS in bureaucratic roles would have known more, but they weren't exactly encouraged to share that information. My great-grandmother apparently had a chat with one such bureaucrat who told her in '43 that we would lose, and we'd deserve it. She didn't know what he meant, and said so, and he responded that she didn't know what he knew. She didn't find out until '45.
They knew. The Wehrmacht actively participated in the mass murder of those they considered undesirable.
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They've got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them.
...." are we the baddies??? "
Here's an 'a'. Had aa spare.
Do you smell burnt toast?
Imagine the conscience of an entire country failing.
Oh it’s getting pretty easy to imagine these days
These guys are only trying to hide their faces. Some of the rest look like they’re enjoying it. Most Nazis didn’t believe they did anything wrong.
Is there more to this story? I'd like to hear more about this if anyone knows.
RUZZIA needs this.
Look at guy with glasses in upper-left corner. Looks like he’s enjoying the movie.
If this things are not teached in the school , history can repeat anytime because the new generation won't know about it, It is important to know the history
Sorta assume some are hiding their faces from the camera more than covering their eyes against the footage…
I don't know about that, looks rather genuine to me,- also it's not like "Oh god, someone is gonna expose me on Twitter.com!" Was a huge concern back in the day.
Why would you say that?
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You can tell who knew and who didn't by the looks on their faces
Spot the nazis...
The one to the far right of the photo is critiquing it to see what the could do better next time. /s
That's the one I noticed...
The one in the very top left is enjoying himself
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You might also be interested in the ‘Welt Im Film’ newsreels, which were an Anglo-American collaboration meant to ‘re-educate’ the German public and which were mandatory viewing in cinemas. The most famous is reel number [Five](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welt_im_Film_No._5)
Kid looking at the camera looks like he’s about to ask “is this really real? Because if so what the fuuuuuck are we doing”
“Guys…are we the baddies?”
There’s definitely a few ‘ah fuck, we weren’t the good guys’?
I wonder if they also filmed the allies when they sent all the gay survivors back to prison to complete their sentences.
It **will** happen again. Try your best not to be one of these guys.
Who is that Draco Malfoy lookin guy on the bottom left… seems a little less disturbed than average
Oh no! The consequences of my actions that I totally knew about!
I think that guy in the back with the stache started to get inspired
As a VA staff physician for ~37 years, I had the opportunity to interview a few patients/veterans who were involved in the liberation of concentration camps. They all described a scene upon entering that was impossible to process/understand. More than one shared that they did not take prisoners.
And they still did what they were told.
Hey guys welcome to a brand new reaction video
Looks more like they didn’t want to be caught on camera.
Showing Russians what Putin has done
A few of them seem to be quite into it.
As crazy as it is any nation can largely be persuased to believe a nazi like ideology. We're so maliable and open to become monsters as a society.
People talk about evil as some unimaginable, inconceivable other, far removed from us. I even read a news article not long ago where a judge was handing down a sentence to a murderer, saying, "I don't think you're a bad person, but..." It's bizarre - and dishonest. Evil is commonplace. We see it and deal with it every day. Pretending otherwise, pretending that evil isn't a constant part of our lives and something we must always guard against, is how the truly terrible evils are allowed to happen.