The Holocaust

[KateLMead]

Dear God, " I am truly wondering whether one exists"
I cannot contain my tears seeing those survivors over the last week, and the Horrors that were inflicted on the Jews. Men, women and children babies and all of them trusting Innocents.
Children used for experiments, bodies of men women and children thrown by the thousands naked starved into mammoth pits, others met their end in gas chambers with guards looking on utterly emotionless.
Now we know that many SS nazis actually escaped exposure and lived in UK and othe countries.. I know that those teenage Germans joined the Hitler Youth Movement out of fear and for their own safety.. lessons have not been learned. LThe same horrors are happening all over the world, Sudan.Africa. Ethiopia.and indeed closer to home
I think I was eight Now 81 (Frank or Suff will put me right) ! during the time when 6million. Jews were coldly cruelly put to death, massacred and murdered, horrific starvation, abuse and cruelty. I look at those survivors who still face terrible threats to their race with hope and love. Peace is what we pray for. .
Yes show the halocaust in every school. In Muslim schools,Christian and every other religious establishment.
Never let us forget. My children were taken around a concentration camp, my late son never could erase the memory, he wrote a heart rendering account and poem when he was an adult

[Suff]

Kate, it started shortly after Hitler came to power so you would have been around 4 at the beginning. However you were, indeed, 8 when they changed tactic and started really ramping up the death camps.

I visited Dachau when I worked in Munich. It was a SS training camp so does not have the same aura as, for instance, Auschwitz. I worked with people who visited Auschwitz, they are very quiet about it and tell me it was the most harrowing experience of their lives. Most of them were most shocked when they exited the camp and realised that when inside it there was not the sound of one living thing but outside you could hear birds and animals. Even so Dachau was a sobering experience even for someone like me who had an inordinate interest in WWII as a teenager and spoke to people who had been there when the camps were liberated.

It's not common knowledge in the UK that there were more than 2,000 camps in Germany. Most of which were slave labour camps rather than death camps. They worked them to death and oversalted the food and restricted the intake of water to make them constantly thirsty and therefore more easy to manage.

One of my ex bosses was very surprised that in the last weeks of the war Germany was still turning out more aircraft in it's bombed and battered factories then we were turning out in Britain. Not hard to work out when you realise it was with slave labour whom they did not care whether they lived or died.

Another point not widely talked about was that they killed 12 million people in the death camps, of whom only 6 million were Jews. They executed 6 million Poles of whom 3 million were Christians and 3 million were Jews. Most of the other 6 million were Germans, only 3 million of whom were Jews.

It's a tangled mess overall. Only Denmark and Sweden came out of the whole mess without stain on their Character. Denmark got every Jew that wanted to go over the water to Sweden in one night. The Swede's took them and hid them from the Germans. Every other country gave up their Jews with smaller or larger levels of resistance, but nobody really cared enough to make a big stand on it. I kind of stand with Mrs S on the Polish issue. They quite simply gave their Jews up. It was easy, they still forced them to live in ghettos which had a curfew at night. Whilst I think 3 million Christians sacrificed for giving up the Jews is a hell of a high price to pay, I also lean slightly to the "Brought it on yourself" mindset. I know myself well enough to know that I would have been one of those getting the Jews out no matter the cost.

In many ways it is not so much the number of Jews Hitler killed that was the biggest horror. All over Western and Eastern Europe Jews were killed wholesale every time a scapegoat was needed and very few countries stopped it. It was the brutal inhuman and above all mechanised way in which it was done that is so abhorrent. The Model T Ford version of Genocide. The sadder fact for me is that before Hitler there were so many wealthy Jews in Germany because Germany was about the most tolerant country for Jews to live in out of the whole of Europe, east or west and I include the UK in that.

[KateLMead]

Yes Suff. Not a bird, not a bee complete silence, it was heart rendering .my Polish brother in law was interned at the age of 11, an amazing man who Never discussed the horrors willingly. He was a gentle man who survived the most horrendous horrors. I am listening to the memorial service. Tears flow at "Man's inhumanity to man"

[Workingman]

Quite a few of us who were stationed in Germany did the tour of Dachau, the eeriest day of my life. It was, as Suff says, mainly an SS training facility, but within it was the Dachau concentration camp. It was never an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Sobibor, but many of its prisoners died in their 10's of thousands through disease, starvation or forced labour. The entrance to the prison part of the camp had the now infamous sign "Arbeit macht frie" used throughout the concentration camp regime.

I was watching a documentary the other night about the Army Media Corps set up towards the end of the war to record events leading up to the German surrender. It was staffed by volunteers who were given movie cameras to film whatever was in front of them. One group was attached to the British and Canadian battalion that freed Bergen-Belsen. Alfred Hitchcock's used their footage to make his unseen Holocaust documentary. The film was so shocking that it was never shown, but the programme had excerpts, none of which I will want to see again.

Also, when I was in Germany there had been a forced labour camp just down the road. Its sole purpose was to service one of Hitler's Aryan Race projects. Lots of blue eyed and blond boys and girls producing more blond and blue eyed babies. They needed food and clothes and bedding and furniture and............. All of it was provided by the prisoners. There had been nearly 400 Aryans plus their staff and trainers to have their every need catered for and all of it done by working the prisoners to death in the fields and workshops.

It is also true that the Holocaust was not only about Jews, though they were the largest and most well known group. Others included Roma, Gypsies, Slavs, Poles, the physically and mentally disabled, Atheists, poets, artists, novelists...... nobody was safe.

[Aggers]

What I cannot understand is how the German people allowed this
terrible business to come about and to continue. Surely, if this sort
of inhuman atrocity were to be proposed in England, would we English
have carried out the terrible business? Is it correct to blame just the
political party in power at the time?

[KateLMead]

Man's inhumanity to man

[Suff]

I guess, Aggers, you would need to go back to the mess at the time. The Weimar republic had, famously, collapsed with wheelbarrows which were required to haul money about, being worth more than the money they carried.

Reparations forced on Germany after WWI had almost destroyed the country, French Businessmen were buying large swathes of Germany and German businesses for a song then using the Franc to build up wealth and business in Germany to repatriate the wealth home. Germans could see themselves becoming an agrarian society feeding their neighbours around them.

Enter Hitler. He painted lead with Gold and "found" new reserves. He told the rest of Europe to go stuff themselves for the debt and started building a "defence force" to make it stick. France was still rolling in German money and didn't want to spend on huge forces, Britain was still downsizing the military as it came out of the great depression.

Hitler gave them their pride back. Then he gave them a scapegoat for where all the money had gone. At the same time he created the secret police and put the Army on the streets to back them up in the force of the SS. People went from pride to fear in short order. He also took children and started to force feed them about the master race and make them into machines to do his bidding.

Remember that the press would not be reporting the bad stuff and the camps were presented as a place for the Jews to work off their "debt" to German society for hogging all that money when people were starving.

It would have been seductive and easy to follow. The Germans are inordinately susceptible to this kind of thing because their belief in their superiority, the superiority of their engineering and the quality of their work is huge in their eyes. Much larger than British pride in British goods ever was. Even to this day most Germans buy German. You only have to see them out of Germany to realise what lengths they will go to in order to import German goods. It's better you know.

So I guess that many of them were fully into it by the time the whispers made it round. It would probably have been late 42 before people realised the war was not going the way the propaganda stated and then they would put more credence to the whispers.

As for the camps? You have to understand how Germany was in the war. Any soldier could be shot dead at any time by any superior so long as they had a good enough reason for doing so. No questions asked, just another billet to fill. So whilst there will have been plenty of willing advocates of murdering so many people, for the good of the reich, the rest will have been scared out of their wits.

The Germans were maniacal about record keeping and about spying on every single person in the country. The country was full of good "party member" informers who had probably been nobodies in society until the party gave them the opportunity to lord it over everyone else.

Take all that, put it together and even an order as insane as "Gas and burn 6 million people" would be followed to the letter.

I won't say it can't happen in the UK. All I can say is that it would take a very radical shift in our comfort levels to allow that much power to fall into so few hands. It's why our civil liberties are so important to fight for. Hence my signature below.

[Aggers]

Thanks, Suff.

Food for thought, indeed.

[Workingman]

I suppose one had to live it to understand it.

RAFG employed German civilians in many roles, from clerks to engineers. Many of them were 'of and age' if I can put it that way. They were quite open and able to talk about their times as children when Hitler and the Nazis were seizing power.

Imagine living in an area when one night a family is removed, never to be seen again. The authorities let it be known that Herr Gunther said something he should not have, something not supportive of what was being done in Germany. Would you be the second to express the same sentiments? One family removed, one huge area subdued. Now use that trick throughout a country. It becomes easier to understand how things evolved.

I like the Germans - in Germany. They are damned good workers and very proud of Germany. They know how to have a good time, are very friendly, and, despite their stereotype, do have a sense of humour. However, once they step over that border they, many of them, instantly turn into the most obnoxious people on the planet. It will have been very easy to use their national traits of record keeping, attention to detail, superiority, organisation and deferring to hierarchy to mould such a nation using fear and persuasion.

[KateLMead]

Frightening Frank, we are looking at the uprisings wherever Muslim fanatics are intent on taking over. I have had a close friendship for over fifty years with a German family formed when we lived and I worked there for three years in Darmstadt
Paderborn and elsewhere. One dear friend was the first one to admit he fought the British in the war, it was a subject they avoided the children of the children still come and stay with me.it is almost impossible to believe such terrible cold blooded atrocities were committed on innocents .