Lack of empathy, or just history?

[two sheds]

It took a while for me to understand: In Germany there were no people with learning disabilities older than 50 years. They were all killed. I had never seen or met a person with a learning disability who was beyond their middle age

fucking hell

 

[gosub]

This is why I wasn’t happy with Mojo Pixy’s numbers. In brief, the number of gypsies killed in the Holocaust is usually estimated at 500k, disabled people at 270k, homosexuals (that is, able bodied Aryan homosexuals) 15k. Serbs and freemasons are also significant groups, but the total of non-Jews killed in death camps, mass executions etc is still only around 1.1m compared with the fairly well attested 6m Jews.

For those who want to minimise Jewish suffering under the Nazis, the best statistics to deploy are the numbers of Russian and Polish POWs and civilians who were murdered. That gets to nearly 10m according to some accounts. But much of this was fog-of-war stuff, not really akin to organised extermination, and it’s a tricky argument to deploy in good faith.

Not sure why you'd particularly want to minimise Jewish suffering under the Nazi's.
The homosexuals that weren't killed were taken from concentration camps to prison in order to finish their sentences - always struck me as a bit harsh

 

[Silas Loom]

Not sure why you'd particularly want to minimise Jewish suffering under the Nazi's.

Me neither.

 

[klang]

Obviously, I am moved by images of the Holocaust - when I see photos of piles of corpses at Auschwitz, its with the knowledge some of those bodies could literally be members of my family.

I don't feel guilty or anything, but I have huge issues and identity problems with my grandparents having been on the other side.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

This teacher, and others apparently, is complaining that kids seem really unempathetic about the Holocaust, that they joke about it, etc.

But I wonder whether this is not lack of empathy but simply that this is really old history to kids. People my age and older tend to assume that because there's film footage it's 'modern history' and will feel immediate, but I don't think it will necessarily feel that way to kids and the fact is it is quite old history now. Obviously it's still incredibly important but I'm not sure we can expect reverence or immediate empathy from most kids.

Having gone off on a Generation Identity idiot I once overheard, I used the holocaust as an example of what he was espousing to another younger kid who was lapping up the reimmigration shit coming out his mouth.
It was miserably boring to learn about in school and I was fucked if my kids were going to have to listen to a repetition of the same thing. Because never again to me means never again. But the ease which his clueless politics came out his mouth, said to me, he hadn’t been paying attention that day.

 

[AnnaKarpik]

This is why I wasn’t happy with Mojo Pixy’s numbers. In brief, the number of gypsies killed in the Holocaust is usually estimated at 500k, disabled people at 270k, homosexuals (that is, able bodied Aryan homosexuals) 15k. Serbs and freemasons are also significant groups, but the total of non-Jews killed in death camps, mass executions etc is still only around 1.1m compared with the fairly well attested 6m Jews.

For those who want to minimise Jewish suffering under the Nazis, the best statistics to deploy are the numbers of Russian and Polish POWs and civilians who were murdered. That gets to nearly 10m according to some accounts. But much of this was fog-of-war stuff, not really akin to organised extermination, and it’s a tricky argument to deploy in good faith.

Mojo Pixy's right. The last time I looked into this - about 20 years ago - the best estimates of the numbers killed was between 10 and 12 million, about half of them Jewish. This figure is pretty much the one that was accepted early on as the best estimate. The 6 million figure for Jewish deaths is much repeated as true rather than founded on evidence. You'd be better off reading books on the topic than looking at the internet - mine didn't make the move to this house.

 

[Silas Loom]

I pulled it out of my memory and I'll let someone else check if they want but IIRC ~6 million were jews and ~5 million weren't. It was a majority but not a great majority.

I seem to recall ~3-4 million were gypsy/rom? And actually IIRC nearly all (10m+?) were poles, for what that's worth.

Happy to be corrected, I'm having a really busy day so will read up later if I need to.

Mojo Pixy's right. The last time I looked into this - about 20 years ago - the best estimates of the numbers killed was between 10 and 12 million, about half of them Jewish. This figure is pretty much the one that was accepted early on as the best estimate. The 6 million figure for Jewish deaths is much repeated as true rather than founded on evidence. You'd be better off reading books on the topic than looking at the internet - mine didn't make the move to this house.

If you can find a book by a reputable historian which states that 3-4 million Romani were killed in the holocaust, do please go ahead and cite it.

I’d argue that the death camps have a unique place in collective memory, and the vast majority of people killed in those were Jews. When we start defining the Holocaust in much broader terms, in the context of a huge continental war with massive displacement of people, we can get to higher numbers against which the six million (a number which is frankly not up for debate) look less consequential. But again, I have no idea why you would want to do that.

 

[CNT36]

I’d argue that the death camps have a unique place in collective memory, and the vast majority of people killed in those were Jews.

It's worth remembering though that although hatred for Jews had a special place in Nazi ideology and they died in larger numbers than any other targeted group the Nazi's planned to have carried on killing if they had not been defeated and millions of others would have shared their fate.

 

[AnnaKarpik]

If you can find a book by a reputable historian which states that 3-4 million Romani were killed in the holocaust, do please go ahead and cite it.

I’d argue that the death camps have a unique place in collective memory, and the vast majority of people killed in those were Jews. When we start defining the Holocaust in much broader terms, in the context of a huge continental war with massive displacement of people, we can get to higher numbers against which the six million (a number which is frankly not up for debate) look less consequential. But again, I have no idea why you would want to do that.

In the immediate aftermath of WWII the term Holocaust did have a wider meaning, one that included everyone murdered by the Nazi regime. The term has been gradually eroded to the extent that an internet search defines it as the murder of Jews. Why would anyone do that?

 

[ouirdeaux]

In the immediate aftermath of WWII the term Holocaust did have a wider meaning, one that included everyone murdered by the Nazi regime. The term has been gradually eroded to the extent that an internet search defines it as the murder of Jews. Why would anyone do that?

The term wasn't widely used before the 1960s, and even then didn't enter popular usage until there was a TV series with that name in the 1970s. It is only found sporadically before that in this context.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

This is why I wasn’t happy with Mojo Pixy’s numbers. In brief, the number of gypsies killed in the Holocaust is usually estimated at 500k, disabled people at 270k, homosexuals (that is, able bodied Aryan homosexuals) 15k. Serbs and freemasons are also significant groups, but the total of non-Jews killed in death camps, mass executions etc is still only around 1.1m compared with the fairly well attested 6m Jews.

For those who want to minimise Jewish suffering under the Nazis, the best statistics to deploy are the numbers of Russian and Polish POWs and civilians who were murdered. That gets to nearly 10m according to some accounts. But much of this was fog-of-war stuff, not really akin to organised extermination, and it’s a tricky argument to deploy in good faith.

The figures for Roma are comparable to those for Jews, though. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but something between half and a third of all the Roma in Europe were killed. Something like two-thirds of all Europe's Jews were killed - a higher proportion but in the same kind of area. You could argue that there was a similarly systematic approach towards the extermination of both Roma and Jews, and that that approach had a similar effect, it's just that the total number of Roma in Europe pre-Holocaust was much lower.

I'm not saying this to minimise Jewish suffering, more to highlight that Roma suffering was comparably horrific. And you could also argue that one reason this isn't so well known is that there are fewer people around to advocate for the Roma and the commemoration of their suffering.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

FWIW Primo Levi always made a point of reminding people of the suffering of the Roma in the Holocaust. It was important to him that they should be remembered too. Like Jews, they had been singled out as racially inferior. I like this quote from the Israeli sculptor Danni Karavan, who made the Berlin memorial to Roma victims of the Holocaust:

“They killed all of them together. Therefore I feel that they are my brothers and sisters. At the inauguration I said in Hebrew that I feel like my family was killed and burned with the Sinti and Roma in the same gas chambers and their ashes went with the wind to the fields. So we are together. It is our destiny.”

Remembering the Romani Holocaust - European Roma Rights Centre

That's true empathy.

 

[planetgeli]

Not to mention that only about half the victims of it were jews. The millions of gypsies, homosexuals, disabled, communists and others who were slaughtered alongside barely even get a look in when it comes to how we talk about it. There's something that feels wrong about that.

The Dachau concentration camp memorial, which looked pretty much like a museum to me, is an amazing place to visit. It also does not ignore the sentiments in your paragraph. It's actually where I learned most about the persecution by the Nazis of groups other than Jewish people. Recommended. Definitely one of the best 'museums' I have ever visited.

While there Cloo I was pissed off with the numbers of young kids on school trips who were...irreverential to say the least.

 

[Griff]

Being a little 15 year old oik in 1982 and going on a German student exchange week in Hamburg, we visited this place on a coach trip one day:

Home

Geschichtliche Informationen über das ehemalige Konzentrationslager und Hinweise zu Veranstaltungen.

www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de

It was all laughs and jokes on the way but after spending an eerily quiet day there, the coach was silent on the way back with what seemed like everybody in deep solemn thought. Never forget that day.

All kids should go to these places at least once before they grow up.

 

[scalyboy]

This teacher, and others apparently, is complaining that kids seem really unempathetic about the Holocaust, that they joke about it, etc.

But I wonder whether this is not lack of empathy but simply that this is really old history to kids. People my age and older tend to assume that because there's film footage it's 'modern history' and will feel immediate, but I don't think it will necessarily feel that way to kids and the fact is it is quite old history now. Obviously it's still incredibly important but I'm not sure we can expect reverence or immediate empathy from most kids.

I wonder if the teacher's kids would appear similarly unempathic about other historical horrors, like the First World War or the Bengal or Irish Famines. Someone posted below about the effect of video games, mobiles, internet etc in desensitising young people - presumably in that youngers today are daily exposed to horrific images that oldies like myself were not - I can remember being under 10 and very troubled for a couple of days each time each time the teacher showed us a couple of art postcards - 1. a Hieronymous Bosch painting (of a quack doctor doing trepanation and producing a stone as cure for the patient's headaches) and 2. a Dutch (?) painting of a body being dissected as a lesson for medical students. I doubt such postcard imagery would have such shock value these days when photos of Jeffery Dahmer's photos of his eviscerated victims are a click away, or autopsy photos of the 1996 Rettendon shotgun Range Rover murders.

Aged 13 and we were shown Alain Resnais's 1956 'Night and Fog'; we were all pretty stunned by what we'd seen, even two NF-oriented lads who muttered about the emaciated bodies being dummies made of paper maché and being shouted down, even them two looked pretty green around the gills. I've never forgotten that film, can remember the room where we were shown it, even the smell of the room.

Lack of empathy isn't the same ignorance of, so I may be veering off the point. But I have been appalled and infuriated in equal measure reading in the last few years stats showing that a significant minority or even a majority of UK kids don't know what the Holocaust is, or think it was an event that killed '50,000' or so European Jews. But from speaking to friends who are teachers, history teaching is pretty dire all round (taught on a modular basis without any chronology, and therefore no context or cause and effect), so that 18-year-olds can enter universities without knowing who Churchill was, or that the Anglo-Saxons post-date the Celts etc... and university teaching, don't get me started. Maybe the sciences are more immune but arts and humanities are going down the crapper.

Six months ago I would've been appalled by widespread ignorance of the Holocaust by the younger generation, but when I see figures suggesting British Jews under 30 or 25 are significantly more critical of Israel I can only see this as a good thing. I doubt the same thing is happening to Israel's younger generation. But given Israel's instrumentalisation of the Holocaust using to it justify the indefensible (collective punishment against Palestinians, mass bombing of civilian refugee areas, hospitals, aid convoys, starvation as policy etc) and deflect any criticism as 'antisemitism', isn't this a good thing if it helps isolate Israel globally?

I never used to think this way as my late Mum's family were Jewish (her parents came to London from Latvia and Belarus c.1902) and it appears many of her aunts and uncles were murdered during the earlier 'Holocaust by bullets' phase. She didn't like me asking questions about it and her family were of the ' we don't talk about that' school. So I did my own reading and felt emotionally connected, also reacting sharply to any sense of the Holocaust being diminished in importance. In the same way that I used to get irate if I read of kids not knowing what D-day was or the dates of WW2, because two uncles were WW2 veterans.

So as remaining Holocaust survivors are (sadly) passing away, and with a new generation (or two generations) who aren't connected to WW2 or the Holocaust by their immediate ancestors, does that mean the Holocaust is sinking into becoming just another historical atrocity of which most people know little. That appalls me, but equally I wonder if it may be an overall good, in the sense that on an international stage, Israel will be less able to silence criticism of its actions because its instrumentalisation of the Holocaust will have less and less currency.

Not sure if the above is coherent, or whether I appear to be arguing against myself.

 

[Cloo]

I mean, maybe there's less empathy, but I question the extent to which we can expect people to feel deeply empathetic about things in the past. At some point the Holocaust will recede into history and its impact will be lessened, that is just nature. Obviously we should remember within reason, but we can't expect it always to be as impactful as it might have been to our own generation.

It's interesting that some posters have got into a bit of an argument about numbers - I have always said it doesn't matter if exactly 6million, or 'only' 5.2 million or 500,000 or even 5000 Jews were killed. It was an abomination at any number - the fact, for example, that others have commented that there was a whole infrastructure built for this, in a democratic culture. My mum has always said was what gets her is that someone sat down and designed this industrial-scale murder, someone designed rail terminus, gas chambers. Maybe that's what we should focus on more than the sheer numbers or the emotions of it - and something that perhaps in this day and age is the biggest warning of all, to never forget to ask why we are doing something, what its impact is on others.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

Martin Niemöller Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the Socialists..."

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

Intelligent Business Machines. Unfortunately. Not to be brought up in business meetings.

 

[Silas Loom]

I mean, maybe there's less empathy, but I question the extent to which we can expect people to feel deeply empathetic about things in the past. At some point the Holocaust will recede into history and its impact will be lessened, that is just nature. Obviously we should remember within reason, but we can't expect it always to be as impactful as it might have been to our own generation.

It's interesting that some posters have got into a bit of an argument about numbers - I have always said it doesn't matter if exactly 6million, or 'only' 5.2 million or 500,000 or even 5000 Jews were killed. It was an abomination at any number - the fact, for example, that others have commented that there was a whole infrastructure built for this, in a democratic culture. My mum has always said was what gets her is that someone sat down and designed this industrial-scale murder, someone designed rail terminus, gas chambers. Maybe that's what we should focus on more than the sheer numbers or the emotions of it - and something that perhaps in this day and age is the biggest warning of all, to never forget to ask why we are doing something, what its impact is on others.

Yes. It was the concrete railings and barbed wire that got me, at Birkenau. They were so precisely placed and the fencing in general was so well engineered that I had just the same thought as you describe your mum having: someone planned all this, someone with a lot of civil engineering expertise sat down and worked out how best to design a death camp for killing people from my ethnocultural group, giving careful consideration to the bend of the railings and how best to secure the wires. It got me worse than the shoes.

 

[Silas Loom]

Intelligent Business Machines. Unfortunately. Not to be brought up in business meetings.

International? But, yeah. Also BASF and Agfa.

 

[gosub]

Intelligent Business Machines. Unfortunately. Not to be brought up in business meetings.

You'd have thought it might have come up at the 'who we going to get to do the translation at the Nuremburg trials?'

 

[JimW]

Read this essay by Postone years ago and he makes some good points about the specific nature of Nazi anti-Semitism and what distinguishes the Holocaust from other genocides:

This essay attempts, rather, to determine more closely what it was that achieved a breakthrough, by suggesting an analysis of modern anti-Semitism that indicates its intrinsic connection to National Socialism. Such an examination is a necessary precondition to any substantive analysis of why National Socialism succeeded in Germany. The first step must be a specification of the Holocaust and of modern anti-Semitism. The problem should not be posed quantitatively, whether in terms of numbers of people murdered or of degree of suffering. There are too many historical examples of mass murder and of genocide. (Many more Russians than Jews, for example, were killed by the Nazis.) The question is, rather, one of qualitative specificity.

Particular aspects of the extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis remain inexplicable so long as anti-Semitism is treated as a specific example of a scapegoat strategy whose victims could very well have been members of any other group. The Holocaust was characterized by a sense of ideological mission, by a relative lack of emotion and immediate hate (as opposed to pogroms, for example), and, most importantly, by its apparent lack of functionality. The extermination of the Jews seems not to have been a means to another end. They were not exterminated for military reasons or in the course of a violent process of land acquisition (as was the case with the American Indians and the Tasmanians). Nor did Nazi policy toward the Jews resemble their policy toward the Poles and the Russians which aimed to eradicate those segments of the population around whom resistance might crystallize in order to exploit the rest more easily as helots. Indeed, the Jews were not exterminated for any manifest “extrinsic” goal. The extermination of the Jews was not only to have been total, but was its own goal—extermination for the sake of extermination—a goal that acquired absolute priority.

That bit about it's lack of functionality stands out. Whole thing is thought-provoking, though it's about the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism rather than the Holocaust per se: Anti-semitism and National Socialism - Moishe Postone

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

I mean, maybe there's less empathy, but I question the extent to which we can expect people to feel deeply empathetic about things in the past. At some point the Holocaust will recede into history and its impact will be lessened, that is just nature. Obviously we should remember within reason, but we can't expect it always to be as impactful as it might have been to our own generation.

I think empathy outside those quite close to you is a tricky one anyway isn't it. Who here can honestly hold their hand up and say they lose a lot of sleep over the victims of the ongoing wars in the Congo for example? And even if you do there's always something else isn't there. That's not to criticise, I think you probably need some ability to isolate yourself from the horrors of the world or you wouldn't be able to cope with life.

So it's always going to be selective and I think given that it's probably not surprising that time is a factor in what ends up on the 'arms length' side of things (which isn't to say that's a good thing of course).

 

[Red Cat]

I must admit I didn't watch the video but for someone teaching history she has a rather ahistorical view of her complaints about children these days, which is perhaps understandable as she is a very young adult herself.

I don't think there's any evidence of children feeling more or less empathy and I don't believe people felt more deep empathy in the past than they do now about situations that were beyond their own lives.

 

[Aladdin]

I must admit I didn't watch the video but for someone teaching history she has a rather ahistorical view of her complaints about children these days, which is perhaps understandable as she is a very young adult herself.

I don't think there's any evidence of children feeling more or less empathy and I don't believe people felt more deep empathy in the past than they do now about situations that were beyond their own lives.

There is some evidence as regards the development of the prefrontal cortex part of the brain that handles something like empathy isnt there? Something about the full development taking 25 years?

 

[girasol]

You're really happy to cast insults like calling someone untrustworthy on the basis of er no evidence or previous interaction. It's really weak, casting an insult and being so taken aback when it provokes a response.

I said I trust AI more than I trust you and put this guy on, to indicate a jokey, tongue in cheek comment. You totally overescalated the situation and called me a fucking idiot... So, yeah, I've no desire to interact with someone who takes things so mortally seriously and escalates things for no reason. It's reactions like yours that puts me off posting on here. The internet is infested with people like you who make a mountain out of a molehill and get over outraged over nothing. That's a great example of lack of empathy. Picking fights with people on the internet over inconsequential stuff.

Using AI as a starting point isn't a crime, nor is it a sign of being a 'fucking idiot'. Whether you like it or not it's how young people use the internet. If you think the facts in there aren't right - that's fine, I actually wouldn't know, I don't know ALL THE genocides in depth. I'm not a historian, I haven't read tons on books on the subject. I was actually interested in finding out if what Silas Loom said about the uniqueness of the Holocaust methodology was true.

You didn't actually answer the points I made in bold or any of my questions, so I'm guessing you are not a Historian/expert on the subject either.

 

[8ball]

There were kids who made jokes about the Holocaust when I was a kid. Kids are very often right cunts.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

Question(s). The organised, systematic, bureaucratic, semi-scientific, industrialised extermination of European Jewry somehow seems more frightening than other historical genocides. Just how true is this, though? You might argue that the hiding away of the killing in camps, the lack of information or publicity, the fact that what was going on was largely hidden, even though many knew about it - all this reflected an underlying shame on the part of the perpetrators. Even many allied governments needed convincing about what was going on.

The Turkish genocide of Armenians and Assyrians was equally horrific. Less systematised. Just as murderous, maybe more so, pro rata. Still largely hidden away, even when in full view. Also denied to this day by the Turkish government.

What about the deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tatars and ethnic Germans in the USSR to Kazakhstan, Siberia or Uzbekistan? Up to 45 or 50% died from killings, starvation, dehydration, disease, exposure to the elements, overwork. But it was arbitrary, casual, indifferent, and even now the Russian state won't own up to the scale of their crime.

Do any of these massacres really stand out as exceptionally different? If so, how? Does the secrecy or denial of the events have any significance?

 

[8ball]

Question(s). The organised, systematic, bureaucratic, semi-scientific, industrialised extermination of European Jewry somehow seems more frightening than other historical genocides. Just how true is this, though? You might argue that the hiding away of the killing in camps, the lack of information or publicity, the fact that what was going on was largely hidden, even though many knew about it - all this reflected an underlying shame on the part of the perpetrators. Even many allied governments needed convincing about what was going on.

The Turkish genocide of Armenians and Assyrians was equally horrific. Less systematised. Just as murderous, maybe more so, pro rata. Still largely hidden away, even when in full view. Also denied to this day by the Turkish government.

What about the deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tatars and ethnic Germans in the USSR to Kazakhstan, Siberia or Uzbekistan? Up to 45 or 50% died from killings, starvation, dehydration, disease, exposure to the elements, overwork. But it was arbitrary, casual, indifferent, and even now the Russian state won't own up to the scale of their crime.

Do any of these massacres really stand out as exceptionally different? If so, how? Does the secrecy or denial of the events have any significance?

I’ve just bolded the bits that seem to me perhaps uniquely horrific about this particular genocide under discussion.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Question(s). The organised, systematic, bureaucratic, semi-scientific, industrialised extermination of European Jewry somehow seems more frightening than other historical genocides. Just how true is this, though? You might argue that the hiding away of the killing in camps, the lack of information or publicity, the fact that what was going on was largely hidden, even though many knew about it - all this reflected an underlying shame on the part of the perpetrators. Even many allied governments needed convincing about what was going on.

The Turkish genocide of Armenians and Assyrians was equally horrific. Less systematised. Just as murderous, maybe more so, pro rata. Still largely hidden away, even when in full view. Also denied to this day by the Turkish government.

What about the deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tatars and ethnic Germans in the USSR to Kazakhstan, Siberia or Uzbekistan? Up to 45 or 50% died from killings, starvation, dehydration, disease, exposure to the elements, overwork. But it was arbitrary, casual, indifferent, and even now the Russian state won't own up to the scale of their crime.

Do any of these massacres really stand out as exceptionally different? If so, how? Does the secrecy or denial of the events have any significance?

Haven't you answered your own question here? It was "organised, systematic, bureaucratic, semi-scientific, industrialised extermination". Not semi-scientific, though. Pseudo-scientific, based on total untruths. Important distinction.