German poster campaign launched to find surviving Nazis

[Johnny Canuck3]

but didn't present much in the way of evidence to support the theses presented.

The tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tevet, which is December 23 this year, is designated as the yartzeit (memorial anniversary) for Holocaust victims whose date of death is unknown. Since many victims of sexual violence were subsequently murdered on indeterminable dates, this is an appropriate time to talk about rape and other forms of sexual abuse during the Holocaust. As in other genocides, during the Holocaust the persecution of women and girls (and some men and boys) included sexual violence. Even though we cannot ever know the exact numbers, it is an indisputable fact that Jewish women and girls were sexually violated.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/time-to-talk-about-sexual-violence-during-the-holocaust/

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

however the nazis officially at least, viewed the crime of rape quite seriously because of "German blood and German honour" - ie not that rape was bad but the fact that sex wuth "non aryans" was bad. they were trained to view it as disgusting and many of them did. after krystallnacht there were quite a few arrests for rape. not because it was wrong but because its showed they didn't care about "german honour". in other words the Nazis mostly viewed their victims as too disgusting to rape or have any physical contact with.

Yet, the more well-known Nazis torture techniques were only one aspect of the suffering endured by Jewish women, for rape was also widespread, despite the existence of Nazis legislation forbidding sexual relations between Aryans and Jewish women. As one Warsaw doctor proclaimed, “One continuously hears of the raping of Jewish girls in Warsaw.”

Indeed, according to Helen Sinnreich, the director of Judaic and Holocaust Studies at Youngstown State University, “There is a strong connection between rape and genocide. Much of the recent scholarship focuses on rape as a tool for carrying out genocide. However, rape occurs during genocide not only as a systematic means of attack but also because it places its victims in physically vulnerable positions with limited or non-existent access to redress.”

http://unitedwithisrael.org/jewish-womens-suffering-during-the-holocaust/

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

When Bergen Belsen was liberated, the people in the local town, including the Mayor claimed they had no idea the camp was even there.

Unlikely that every German knew of and approved of what was being done to Jews and others; but one has to consider - if one lived in a town near one of the camps that had just been liberated by an Allied army, and the shocked, disgusted, irate soldiers of that army [all armed to the teeth] come into town and ask if you knew about the camp, what would your answer be?

 

[Pickman's model]

Unlikely that every German knew of and approved of what was being done to Jews and others; but one has to consider - if one lived in a town near one of the camps that had just been liberated by an Allied army, and the shocked, disgusted, irate soldiers of that army [all armed to the teeth] come into town and ask if you knew about the camp, what would your answer be?

i only moved here the other week.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

The Jews and others who were killed at Bergen Belsen had to reach the camp somehow. Trains were the most common method.

How many trains consisting of cattle cars crammed with human beings would it take to get that many victims to Bergen Belsen?

Maybe nobody in the vicinity noticed those trains, or if anybody did, maybe they didn't tell anyone else about what they saw.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

It was a common occurrence to stop those trains from time to time [some of them were coming a long way], in order to throw off the dead bodies of the old, or very young, who died en route.

I wonder if any local farmers etc ever noticed any of those dead bodies along the tracks?

 

[Pickman's model]

It was a common occurrence to stop those trains from time to time [some of them were coming a long way], in order to throw off the dead bodies of the old, or very young, who died en route.

I wonder if any local farmers etc ever noticed any of those dead bodies along the tracks?

what they did was chuck out the dead at the destination, which you'd know if you'd read any books on the subject.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

what they did was chuck out the dead at the destination, which you'd know if you'd read any books on the subject.

Bodies were thrown out en route as well.

But you're quibbling: there were ample opportunities for local people near the death camps, to know that the camps were in the area.

Another clue: the trains passing by going one way are full of people. The same trains leaving the other way, are empty.

 

[Pickman's model]

Bodies were thrown out en route as well.

source or stfu

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

source or stfu

http://collections.yadvashem.org/photosarchive/en-us/12426_47748.html

 

[frogwoman]

i don't think anyone is disputing that it went on. i'm certainly not.

certainly a lot of ordinary germans did know, in hadamar for example the smoke from the crematoriums where they murdered the patients was clearly visible from the town. However, knowing about something doesn't mean that they did nothing about it. lots of germans did hide jews.

A lot of the Germans who knew did do something about it. In Michael Burleigh's book there are examples of people from the town refusing to serve T4 personnel in markets and so on, there are examples of protests against the regime. however they were living in a totalitarian state where any opposition, especially on behalf of those deemed to be "life unworthy of life" was heavily stigmatised. people were living in fear for their lives.

and it wasn't as though no germans ever helped the jews, they did, but there was a limit to what they could do, they must have felt extremely isolated on their own and very very frightened.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

"The train consisted not of cattle-trucks, but open-air coaltrucks," Mrs Clarke said. "Conditions were filthy. She was on the train for three solid weeks. During the nightmare of the journey, the train was stopped in the middle of the countryside and the dead bodies thrown out."

http://www.thejc.com/news/world-news/33403/the-baby-born-nazi-camp-train

 

[frogwoman]

There are lots of examples from the Third Reich of people working in normal hospitals and so on trying their best to sabotage the processes by which patients were transferred to places like Hadamar. However, as the book describes these efforts even when they were organised were often utterly hopeless because of the Nazis were so well organised in making sure they didn't miss anyone.

 

[weltweit]

While Belsen was a concentration camp, it had no gas chambers or crematoria, nevertheless I heard stories bones and human remains were ground up and spread on the surrounding farmer's fields as fertiliser. It seems very unlikely the locals did not know what was going on.

The wikepedia page does not mention it but I believe members of the local town were given a tour of the liberated camps and some forced to assist in the burial of the dead, along with former guards.

Now all that remains at Bergen Belsen is the memorials on the massed graves, the buildings of the camp were torched shortly after liberation because of typhus.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen-Belsen_concentration_camp

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

i don't think anyone is disputing that it went on. i'm certainly not. .

Nazis mostly viewed their victims as too disgusting to rape or have any physical contact with.

 

[frogwoman]

what would you have done johnny? Let's say that you knew about this stuff going on, but it was the middle of the war, you couldn't talk to anyone, the regime made people paranoid about their personal interactions that they would be afraid to tell anyone about it, even their closest friends and family. there was a constant barrage of propaganda about Jews and "undesirables" and people may have well imagined that those around them were more anti-semitic or otherwise prejudiced than they were. there were bombs falling all the time and you might have had the feeling that what you were doing was helping "the enemy". that, and the fact that there were fucking NAZIS going around with guns who had sunk so fucking low that they would not hesitate to have you arrested and killed if you were to be found to be in any way sabotaging their "solutions". These people were scum. People were terrified of them.

i think lots of people knew what was going on, and many tried to do something about it, but they were too isolated and too scared to try and launch any sort of coherent resistance. A lot of people wouldn't have even knew where to begin with that stuff. I don't know if I would. Would you?

 

[frogwoman]

.

did you read the rest of the post where that's from?

 

[weltweit]

I'm related to him.

I think you should check into any inheritances you might have missed.. this house for example

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

 

[frogwoman]

I think you should check into any inheritances you might have missed.. this house for example

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

I'm not related to him by blood and only quite distantly, it was my mum's great uncle I think.

 

[maya]

also, people who were personally anti-semitic often ended up assisting the jews, hiding them etc - in other words they had their views changed by events during the war

Yes, and also I think that as the war entered its final phase and things changed to Germany's disadvantage, ordinary people must've become incresingly pragmatic as they had to focus on everyday survival and even the most stalwart supporters could see that things weren't going to end well... Books about the war recount the occasional fanatic who spouted the propaganda to the bitter end, but most people especially in the most war-torn areas must've been bitterly sick of the war and the insanity of leaders and just waited for it to end...

 

[frogwoman]

Not surprisingly, what was going on in these asylums became widely known, to the point where workers repairing the track that runs directly below the asylum at Grafeneck removed their hats and stood in silence whenever a train carrying patients passed through. The staff of asylums from which patients were transferred also began to suffer through association. When some orderlies from Weissenau attempted to buy cherries from a stall, the woman in charge told them, "You lot aren't having any of my cherries, go somewhere else! We're not selling you anything if you treat our neighbours like that, simply taking them away to be shot!" Sometimes the blatancy of what was being done resulted in popular outrage. In early 1941, a group of buses, under the direction of a Professor from Erlangen, pulled up in the market square of Absberg. Instead of driving into the courtyard of the Ottilienheim, the transport personnel began loading about a hundred feebleminded patients into the buses, in full view of the townspeople. The patients resisted, and had to be loaded on with physical force. The asylum priest had raised the temperature in this very Catholic area by taking the patients to confession and communion in the town church the night before their enforced departure. A crowd of weeping people gathered, including some members of the National Socialist party, who vented their hostility towards a state which was in such a deleterious condition that it was having to kill the handicapped to fund its war effort.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

what would you have done johnny? Let's say that you knew about this stuff going on, but it was the middle of the war,

There are two different things here. It was first suggested that, for instance, no one living near Bergen Belsen knew what was going on. I don't believe that to be true.

The next question is, what if anything should or would the locals have done? I think that in any town or city in Germany, some people would have been supportive of what was happening, a larger number would have been indifferent to what was going on, another part of the populace would have been wilfully blind to it, and some would have disagreed with it.

As for knowledge in general, once the tide turned against the Germans on the Eastern Front, Hitler told the Party hierarchy explicitly what had been going on in Poland, Russia etc wrt the extermination of Jews and others. He did it to stiffen the resolve of the people to keep fighting vigorously, the theory being that they [the Germans] had behaved so abominably in the East, that the Soviet armies would be coming and looking for revenge - against all Germans. So all Germans should continue to band together and keep fighting.

It's the old saw: if we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately.

Hitler spelled out that the Germans had behaved like criminals in the East, and that the people of the East would now seek justice and retribution.

 

[maya]

if anyone wants a nice cheerful read i've uploaded michael burleigh's "death and deliverance" about aktion-t4 and the killing of mental patients during the third reich

i haven't uploaded any of the sources or the index though which is all at the end (I dont understand why people do that, i prefer to have it at the end of each chapter), if people want i can do that as well
<snip>

Great stuff, frogwoman -What a horrible topic, but interesting and definitely educational... thanks for the upload.

 

[frogwoman]

Great stuff, frogwoman -What a horrible topic, but interesting and definitely educational... thanks for the upload.

you'll have to download it because i don't know how to make it so that it can rotate so people can view it properly (unless you know)

 

[frogwoman]

yeah it is horrible maya. i will never have any sympathy for these people. unless they were forced into it obviously.

as for bystanders it's difficult to blame people for not knowing what to do or being too scared or trying to ignore it. we weren't there so we can't really know imo. plenty of things go on in our own state and people don't do anything about it, not because they're cunts but because it's not possible especially with the demands of family and work etc. don't forget that many germans were simply preoccupied with day to day survival not to mention avoiding the nazi authorities themselves.

 

[butchersapron]

There are two different things here. It was first suggested that, for instance, no one living near Bergen Belsen knew what was going on. I don't believe that to be true.

No it wasn't.

 

[frogwoman]

As for knowledge in general, once the tide turned against the Germans on the Eastern Front, Hitler told the Party hierarchy explicitly what had been going on in Poland, Russia etc wrt the extermination of Jews and others. He did it to stiffen the resolve of the people to keep fighting vigorously, the theory being that they [the Germans] had behaved so abominably in the East, that the Soviet armies would be coming and looking for revenge - against all Germans. So all Germans should continue to band together and keep fighting.

the top layers of nazi bureaucrats already knew.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

the top layers of nazi bureaucrats already knew.

Yes; he made it known generally to the Party hierarchy.

 

[frogwoman]

And Hitler never spoke explicitly about the Final Solution to the public. What was in Nazi propaganda were calls which endorsed what was going on and hinted at it but never said xyz is happening, explicitly. Towards the end of the war the denunciations of the Jews became more and more obsessive, frequent and more and more bloodthirsty, Nazis talked about the war to destroy Jewry but never spoke about the reality of the Final Solution itself, they never described what had been going on, they only hinted at it. It is very hard to find anything that Hitler wrote which specifically refers to it. Even towards the end of the war people had the impression (deliberately cultivated by the regime which wanted people to blame everything on "bureaucrats" and Nazi officials rather than the Fuhrer who was untouchable) that Hitler did not know about aktion-T4 and the other atrocities, some of the relatives of the victims actually wrote to Hitler in protest about it because they believed that he couldn't know what was going on and if he did then he would stop it. The other Nazi bureaucrats who were any way important to the regime knew exactly what was going on. Goebbels wrote in his diary about visiting Poland and how the Jews were being killed by a "rather horrible process", others such as Himmler and Heydrich were involved in implementing it themselves.

But he never came out in public and described what was going on, it is notoriously hard to find him talking about it rather than in general terms of the Jews "getting what they deserve". That's why to some extent holocaust deniers and Nazi apologists have been able to point to the lack of discussion by Hitler of it and say that that is evidence for their "theory".

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Not only did he never speak publicly about it, his signature does not appear on any orders directly relating to it. What he did was 'make it known' what his wishes were - his subordinates then went out and made it happen.

Something similar happened with Iran-Contra. Reagan's signature never appeared on any document ordering drugs to be sold, or weapons sent to the Middle East. He left it to people like Oliver North to divine what he wanted from all the broad hints, and cause it to happen.