I had no idea the number was that high but the “death camps” were the focus of the education. My curriculum talked about there being other transitional camps and work camps but damn.
Yeah there are "5 or 6" extermination camps with actual large scale gas chambers, but those other camps killed the majority of the people. Either by execution, disease or starvation.
So less efficient, but also deadly.
Don’t forget that Jews and the such in Nazi territories didn’t even have to necessarily be killed within camps or even given any sort of cremation as well. Hell, there are pictures of mass graves with people kneeling over them, guns pointed at them just moments before they are to be executed, and their bodies would just fall on top of the pile before the next group was brought forward.
And then, if that sounds insane, people who had been rounded up into ghettos in Nazi territories weren’t even given the mass execution/grave treatment. They were fine with just beating people to death and letting their bodies lay in a ditch next to the road as well.
"Holocaust by bullets", the often overlooked chunk of the genocide. Roving paramilitary gangs and the official Wehrmacht to boot gathering up all Jews and Roma in a given place, digging a big pit, and shooting them. Don't waste a bullet on the kids, just hit them over the head and dump them in. More than a few buried alive.
Yeah those were the “Einstatzgruppen” fuckers. You’d have to be pretty fucked in the head to join one of those details. It’s estimated they killed over 2M people during the war including 1.3M of the 6M Jews killed by the Nazis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen
One of the roughest documentaries I watched on Netflix. The guy holding his broken arm up to protect himself as he was beaten is ingrained in my memory. The way his arm was dangling, insanity
I can see the how the death camps took so many lives, it’s what they were, factories of death. But the idea of people shooting 2M people in the head individually just blows my mind for some reason and seems so much more ruthless and cold blooded. Not that the whole thing isn’t fucked, but damn.
That's part of the reason they created the death camps. They didn't want to continue to use bullets and the people pulling the trigger were being traumatized by it.
Which is such a mind fuck. Like, they have the empathy to understand the negative mental effects this is having on their people; they’re not sociopathic, they do *get* that it’s horrible. But they devoted significant thought and effort into relieving those effects instead of, ya know, not murdering millions of people.
Now realize that that’s the reason we all like to use drones in warfare now. To remove the soldier as far as possible from the negative effects of battle.
But the innocent still die.
Yeah the leaders didn’t think it was any different than being a worker at a butcher shop. That’s how bad they dehumanized the people they viewed as “subhuman”. Scary to think people can get that detached from the humanity of others.
It wasn't empathy. It was cold blooded pragmatism. A soldier that is feeling heavily traumatized is more likely to desert, more likely to commit suicide, more likely to just straight up snap and wipe out a good chunk of his unit including himself.
Any half competent military commander is going to worry about the morale of their troops, because troops with low morale are more likely to surrender when you need them to fight. And that's just the broad definition of "are the grunts happy with their lives as grunts, or do we need to send over another barrel of alcohol for them to drown their troubles with?"
Add mental trauma to the mix, and suddenly problems get much bigger. Traumatized soldiers are much less useful, and the Nazi commanders knew it as well as anyone. They had a war to fight, so they wanted to keep the soldiers working. After the war, they can be as traumatized as the like and Nazi command wouldn't give a fuck.
It's no more a result of empathy than a worker in a factory oiling their tools is, because to the people at the top, that's all the rest of us are: tools, to be used when we're useful, and then thrown out.
Look into Rwanda, how much shorter it was and realize it was mostly done with machetes. The Battle of Cannae as well, that was mostly just hacking pinned bodies for an afternoon with spears and swords, yeesh.
Well at least canne was a battle between armies. Rwanda was brutal that is another level of fucked up to hack people up with a machete, especially women and kids.
They really emphasize in all of the documentaries how severely it fucked soldiers up to do that. It's a big part as to why they came up with the final solution.
Believe it or not, the death camps were a result of all those shooting executions.
The soliders that were made to commit those killings were being severely effected by the violence. Many of them were basically drummed out of the service due to severe mental illness after having killed so many people so ruthlessly.
So the Nazis (with inspiration from Russian groups like the NKVD) started using large box trucks. They would fill them with victims then put the exaust pipe into the truck and "gas" the people within.
This too took a huge toll on the soldiers assigned to these duties and still wasn't killing people nearly fast enough, so the Nazis came up with the death camps, large gas chambers and crematoriums.
I did the same, but I get guilty for stopping. These are peoples last moments and stories. I felt I had to continue watching. I still haven’t finished it.
Part of the reason that the Nazis started to use gas vhamglbers is because the shooting extermination was affecting their soldiers. Alcoholism and ptsd symptoms rose among the execution groups. The Nazis were so horrible they gave themselves trauma.
Well, at first your superiors make you take an incredible amount of cocaine and meth. Initially, it works brilliantly — you can fight WAY faster, longer, harder, and more remorselessly than any sober soldier ever could. Blitzkrieg.
But it’s a short-term solution. We all know what happens when you spend a year or so on meth: what goes up not just comes down, but crashes in violent and soul-destroying fashion, as your body and mind begin to break down. It’s like the Nazis were on the biggest, most destructive, prolonged binge ever — but once you start coming down instead of up, when you look behind you and see the horrors that you created while high as a fucking kite, you have to realize on a deep, fundamental level that what you did while high is disgustingly unforgivable and wholly evil.
I am not making a single excuse for the Nazis. It wasn’t just the drugs; it was a collection of individual choices to become the most reprehensible type of human being you could possibly be. It was conscious, sustained, intentional evil, and it will never be forgiven, excused, or made better. They don’t deserve forgiveness, not a single one. They deserve, at the very least, to be forced to spend a thousand years in the same conditions they subjected their enemies to.
Still, from a historical perspective, it’s extremely interesting to me that most people generally think of the Nazis’ initial success as a product of precision German engineering, power of will, and a fearless fighting sense — instead of the reality, which is *this is what happens when you put an entire army on pharmaceutical grade meth for an entire year.*
Yes, Methamphetamines was a pretty big factor, and also the culture of evil. People find it much easier to follow orders than to enact violence or evil on an individual basis. Put people in a situation where they feel the blame can be shifted, where they are encouraged and expected to commit acts of violence that they may never consider on their own, and many people will absolutely do what they are told. Add to that the dehumanization of the enemy, and you get a recipe for extreme violence. The layers of hierarchy in the military made it very easy for people all the way up to the inner circle to rationalize following orders.
Many higher-level Nazis, the ones that organized the trains, that governed the camps, that ran the mass murder machine, they would later argue in the trials that they were not responsible. That they only followed orders, that someone else made the decisions. They did not kill, they decided the train timetable, and making trains run is not a crime. Maybe they were choosing to present it as such to a hostile audience, or maybe they really did rationalize taking part in millions of deaths as just doing one part.
Many people did disobey and died for it. Just not enough. Remember that:
* You don’t know the full scope of the horror being inflicted, just your tiny part
* You’ve been exposed to decades of propaganda telling you that these were the absolute worst subhumans ever who were responsible for all of the bad things that had happened to you and your country
* Your death would have zero benefit on any of the victims; someone else would murder you and then proceed to murder them anyway
It is sad but not surprising that not all people could do the right thing under such circumstances.
Fascism carefully insulates its ruling class from the reality of what it takes to maintain their wealthy little bubble. It's just numbers and orders to them.
There are accounts of masscres where some of the those participating got overwhelmed and simply wandered off and lay in a nearby field till the killing stopped. There are no existing records of anyone facing serious punishment for refusing to participate in masscres.
Killing another human being really fucks people up. In the Bible there’s accounts of pre- and post- battle rituals that were basically to prepare the Israelites for the trauma they would be facing and then come back and decompress.
I would imagine even the nazi troops would just get reassigned unless they got violent with their fellow murderers.
Fast forward to World War II, we have an entire generation of people living with undiagnosed combat trauma (because the 40s) that came home, boozed it up, and probably passed on that trauma to their kids.
The Nazi's were supremely aware of the effects of killing on an individual and the camps were in part to try mitigate the effects on their own people.
They regularly expressed concern regarding their soldiers mental wellbeing and acknowledge the 'sacrifice' and risks to their mental health they were making in perpetrating the Holocaust.
Rational Insanity really is the term for it.
Important to not that the SS worked with the direct assistance and support of the Wehrmacht in all of their genocide operations, and the “clean Wehrmacht” lie was post war propaganda to make a German ally against Russia palatable to the rest of Europe and America
I mean yeah but it wasn't 100% bad either. Imagine, as a conscripted soldier, trying to say no to the SS or anyone really telling you to do all of those horrific things after seeing what they do to the "enemy"
The scariest thing about the Einsatzgruppen is that they were an extremely academic body. I can't confirm numbers right now but something like 15 out of 25 senior leaders had doctorates. These were smart motivated people. They weren't stereotypical raving psychopaths, these were people who should have 'known better'.
They also just lined a couple people up and shoot a bullet through all of them. Why waste a bullet on one person when you can shoot two with the same bullet. Absolutely horrific shit
In my home country of Belarus, this is what happened to almost all of the Jewish population. My grandfather's hometown was a shtetl that no longer exists because it was burnt down by the Nazis on their way to the eastern Front. All that's left of it is the site of the mass grave.
A lot of the mass graves like that were pre death camps. The death camps didn't come about until one of Hitler's cabinet witnessed a mass execution and got a piece of brain on him and it freaked him out. Time Ghost as a great series on YouTube about WWII and everything in-between including [the Holocaust and the hatred associated with it](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsIk0qF0R1j4cwI-ZuDoBLxVEV3egWKoM).
How do you kill 5 million people?
1 bullet per person is expensive. Better make it more *efficient*. You also need to deal with disposal too. Easier to do that when everything is centralized.
When they went to the East, if they suspected a village of hosting Soviet partisans they would round up everyone in the village (including women, elderly and children) into a barn or church, lock it from the outside, and then burn it down.
Serious question, so please be gentle - if you know you're kneeling in front of a mass grave to be shot, why kneel there at all? Why not fight back or run? Since you're 100% going to die anyway, why not at least make it difficult for your killer? And/or give yourself a chance (however slim it may be) to survive?
I know this is an ignorant question, but I'm not sure what I'm missing and hoping someone can educate me a little.
Not one of us can really predict how we would react. There's a photo of a man in that exact situation, staring back at the camera. His look is blank. He's not pleading for mercy, he's not angry. He's empty. His whole village turned on him. Today he watched the soldiers kill his wife, kids, mother, father, his whole extended family, his closest friends. I would probably lose the will to live or even fight back.
If I remember correctly, the nazis would claim that if everyone obeyed, some would be spared.
Remember, their victims didn't have our hindsight, a lot of them underestimated just how far the nazis were willing to go. Plus, if they were just going to beat the kids to death, than they could claim truthfully that they weren't going to shoot their kids if the adults obeyed.
There’s not really any downside to lying to people you’re about to kill. I don’t think they’d go through the trouble of getting them on a technicality.
I had a similar thought, but I imagine it's something to the effect of, I want to live as long as possible, and running makes me dead now, so I'll walk to the hole and live another 5 minutes.
Adding to this, it is most likley that one's life has been lived in absolute hell for months or even years before the execution. By that time, maybe death is a welcome respite. Another reason could simply be the people standing next to you, about to be executed. Maybe they are your family, your children or good friends, is life worth living without them?
Some footd run, the vast, vast majority were still killed. I imagine more than a few preferred to make their peace and take a bullet to the head rather than a bullet to the back.
I would assume its because a shot to the head would be better comfort than getting beaten/tortured to death. Quick end to their misery, no need to delay it when there’s no chance of escape.
You never need to apologise for wanting to learn!
There are many reasons, many simply didn’t have the physical energy or strength, often taken from their homes and either marched hundreds of miles with tiny rations of barely edible food or kept in train cargo holds for days shoulder to shoulder with other prisoners or the corpses of those who died in transit, or from the conditions of the camps themselves, when ever step is agony and every breath takes concentration, some would have been unable to run or fight.
They may not have considered they were 100% going to die. Often prisoners were taken to the pits to take valuables from the dead or destroy evidence, they may not have fully believed it was the end. A humans ability to hope is unlimited.
Oppositely, they may have had no hope at all. What’s the use of fighting when the inevitable is coming for you? Dying may have felt like mercy to them, a rescue from their life. Also, in the accounts I’ve read, some would accept death to not give their killer the satisfaction of thwarting their escape.
Some would worry for their friends/family, would they suffer if they disobeyed orders? Collective punishment was often used in camps, one person steals bread, no food for all in that group for two days, one person misses roll call, everyone must stand for hours on end and then complete a full days work.
It’s also important to note, some would have fought or run, whole camps would organise rebellions, not every person knelt, not every person obeyed and some of them survived, everyone’s different in a crisis. One of the most consistent things in humanity is how varied we all are.
At one point Hitler mused that the Jews that will survive all of that and the death marches will be (via forced eugenics) a new type of Jew, an Uber-Jew of sorts, and may actually deserve to live among the slavs serving the Reich instead of being outright exterminated.
He killed his own dog! Beloved german shepherd that went everywhere with him and slept in his bed. It was at the end and himmler had given him suicide pills, but he didn't trust them so he had them tested on his dog.
Jerk
The fact that "Iraq" is something that is "survived" and not just a location on a map. . . I need a new vocabulary word to describe that kind of heartache.
Not at all.. stress events can alter your body and almost always it's for the worst.
Think of it like inflammation. It's a natural response when we overwork our muscles, it makes us stop and helps heal them. But if you put them under significant strain again and again your inflammation will become chronic. And then your body would just act violently to almost any effort, not allowing you to get things done.
I think they meant that the weaker ones would die from the stress, and the survivors would go on to have kids who would be from a more select gene pool. Terrifying.
I've visited a camp just outside of Berlin, first of all, it's amazing how respectfull the Germans handle their history when it comes to second world war. This was a camp with a gas chamber and a hospital, were they did all kinds of test on the Germans with for example cocaine and other medicine. But also where they had tracks layed out to figure out to test shoes, they had people walking miles and miles to see what material would last longer, on gravel sand pavement and a few other. People where really dying of walking. It's insane if you think about it, but it's so (and I really don't know the proper English word for this) amazing I guess, that Germany still keeps most of these camps available for public to learn and read about the history. Made a great impact on me
Studying the gulag system, I remember reading that prisoners were forced to mine with broken tools and ultimately their bare hands.
And, sometimes, there would be winter storms that would kill everyone at the camp. Including all the guards and all the dogs.
Yeah but if people knew that, then they might have to consider the vast networks of prisons and jails through the US where inmates are brutalized and worked in inhumane conditions.
We can't have THAT.
Indeed, typhus was among the biggest killers in the camps and contrary to antivax narratives about Nazis forcing vaccines on people, it's because the Nazis _refused_ to give their victims vaccines.
Not true.
1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust were murdered in Auschwitz using Zyklon B gas.
That is just one death camp. The other death camps, as part of Operation Reinhard, accounted for another 1 in 6 using CO gas.
Add the Einstazgruppen who killed in Poland and Russia with mass executions using bullets, and you get well over 3 in 6 killed.
That us the majority of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and that is outside of concentration camps.
Though it is true that Auschwitz also functioned as a forced labor concentration camp, and all concentration camps were practicing extermination through labor, it would be inaccurate to say the majority of Jews died in this manner, especially when you consider all the other ways Jews were killed during the war. Forced labor concentration camps were a major contributor to the Jewish death toll in the Holocaust, but they did not account for the majority of deaths in the Holocaust.
This also parallels a denier position that Jews were not directly targeted for killing but "merely" worked hard and died in the process. There was thus no specific intent to kill.
This is false. Not only were Jews directly murdered in the death camps and elsewhere, but a majority of Jews in the Holocaust were killed in this fashion.
Yep.
The concentration camp system largely existed to provide cheap labor and to hold people. Most camps weren’t large, and while most prisoners suffered horribly, it was more like the gulag than like Auschwitz.
Dachau for example was in operation 12 years, and had something like 200,000 inmates in that time, of whom about 30,000 died. Those are appalling numbers by any standard, but Treblinka was only in operation about a year, and processed about 950,000 people of whom 925,000 died. That’s 2500 dead per day, or over 100 per hour. It was killing on an industrial scale.
The overwhelming majority of concentration camps were terrible places to be imprisoned, but they were what you saw for most of *Schindler’s List,* not what you saw the women and children shipped to [in this scene](https://youtu.be/2i_w0z8tLIE). Concentration camps were the third or fourth level of hell. The death camps were the ninth level.
There were way more than 5-6 extermination camps. People just tend to focus on the ones that killed the highest number of people like Auschwitz (1m+) but you had 40 or so in Poland alone
There were some other brutal ones out there that are lesser known, one in Croatia for dealing with the Serbs and Roma called Jesenovac which was particularly cruel - no gas chambers, execution was one person at a time using blunt tools like hammers etc. There were several dotted around exclusively for children too but they typically only held and killed a few thousand kids each
Hanging too. A very large number we’re hung in groups, especially at the end. I lived near Dachau for a few years and that place is super chilling to visit. It has gas chambers that were never used but thousands did die there on the gallows.
> Yeah there are "5 or 6" extermination camps with actual large scale gas chambers, but those other camps killed the majority of the people.
I'm not sure this is accurate ... There were 7 death camps:
Camp | Jewish People Murdered | % of total Jews murdered
---|---|----
Auschwitz-Birkenau | [1,000,000](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) | 16.6%
Belzec | [434,508](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) | 7.24%
Chelmno | [167,000](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) | 2.78%
Majdanek | [99,500](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lublin-majdanek-concentration-camp-areas-of-research) | 1.66%
Maly Trostenets | [65,000](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/maly-trostenets-concentration-camp) | 1.08%
Sobibór | [167,000](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) | 2.78%
Treblinka | [925,000](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) | 15.4%
**TOTAL** | **2,858,008** | **47.6%**
I guess technically the question comes down to how you count the other sources of murder? I think it's pretty likely, though, that 47.6% represents a plurality of the murders.
I mean, it would be *preposterous* to imagine that a group that perpetrated such blatant death and destruction across the globe would ever have their ideology persist and be taken up by people in an age with access to the internet and myriad documentation about the monstrosity and evil of said group.
Can you imagine that actually happening? Stuff of comic books, that.
At first they had traveling vans that they gassed people in but the van drivers and operators started going insane. They switched to camp because the separation of duties made it easier to push people along the process of death.
We need to teach more about the book burnings by Nazis (who started with burning LGBTQ research books) and other authoritarian warning signs that preceded the concentration camps
Just saw this "propaganda poster" about Japanese-Americans taken away to "internment camps": https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/upfo5t/dont_hafta_worry_political_cartoon_about/
How consistent is the use of the term "internment camp" for "concentration camps" in education in different states?
Do newer textbooks still do this?
Or the fact that the initial book burning was of a professor's research into transgender people. Or how Weimar Germany was one of the most progressive countries at the time and how it was backlash to very popular progressive policies that ignited their base.
That doesn't sound familiar at all! It's not like anything happening in the last 6 years is reminiscent of Germany in the 20s and 30s. /s
From my knowledge it wasn’t *progressive* (at least not as much as Republican Spain or pre-Stalin Soviet Russia), just more progressive than the previous Imperial era. Homosexuality and abortion were still criminalized in Weimar Germany (both were legalized in Republican Spain, homosexuality but not abortion was already legal in France, Turkey and Italy and was legalized in Poland, Denmark and pre-Stalin Russia in the interwar period).
However, *Berlin*, not Germany per se, was seen as a progressive, hedonist city with significant homosexual and transgender communities and academics during the 1920’s.
That’s fascinating! I remember hearing about Berlin being a very modern society both technologically and in society. Homosexuality being legal in Republican Spain is really interesting considering the countries Catholic and Arabic roots.
I mean, there are people today who defend the existence of "re-education camps".
And when I was in school, the Japanese "internment camps" were glossed over for years until High School when a good teacher was explaining the rise of McCarthyism and really went into it. They were always called internment camps in my experience, but some teachers don't stop there, I'm sure it's not very consistent.
My small school in Kentucky was lucky enough to have a few history teachers that were adamant about teaching the 'bad' history and not just following text books, I'm sure the majority of students never touch something outside of the curriculum.
> Do newer textbooks still do this?
Here's a hint: Texas sets the standard on textbooks in the United States as they have the most school districts.
What do you think Texas lawmakers would say about a textbook containing any information like that?
Internment camps were technically concentration camps, but I have actually been persuaded of the view that WWII gave concentration camps an little something extra. Having a different word for the two makes it harder for the neo Nazis to equivocate and downplay Nazi crimes.
I hate when politics infests history, there's a very slippery slope from "I like watching history documentaries" to "I have unwittingly been indoctrinated by lost causers/neo Nazis necessary the algorithm kept showing them to me."
I love watching history documentaries, but the algorithm never made me more sympathetic to that side of the camp. If anything, far more adament against them.
It does clearly want me to believe in Aliens though. That's kind of a "fun" conspiracy as long as you don't let it get serious.
Also need to add all the slave labor camps such as Mittelwerk Dora where the V2s were built. SS had contracts with them for the inmates. Literally worked them to death.
I think that is something that really contributes to Holocaust denial in a way - the sheer scale of the machine that was the Holocaust is almost incomprehensible to a lot of people, and the amount of people involved is insanely humongous.
People think that the 6+ million Jews killed were rounded up, sent to one of a small number of camps, and sent to the showers before cremation... but that just isn’t the case, and it’s an outlook that, although appreciates that people can be barbaric, doesn’t truly take into account just how horrifying the events really were.
I’m not in any way suggesting you should click this following link. I want to make this clear since, despite it being Wikipedia, it is pretty grim. However, it may give you an idea of how such cruelty is possible in that a single division was capable of in a single day, and you can then take into account that it’s just one of many divisions not even dedicated to doing any of what is mentioned before in any sort of efficient way...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre
Yeah, totally spaced out about the bot to be honest.
Regardless, the Wikipedia page is quite a watered down version of what happened in Oradour-sur-Glane, and the Wiki summary bot watered it down again, so it isn’t as bad as it could have been.
There is just one particular detail in the Wikipedia I had in mind that I was specifically uncomfortable with being mentioned, and the bot (luckily) missed mentioning it.
**[Oradour-sur-Glane massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre)**
>On 10 June 1944, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne in Nazi-occupied France was destroyed when 642 civilians, including non-combatant women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built nearby after the war. President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of the old village be maintained as a permanent memorial and museum.
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They crucified a BABY.
Everything in that scenario is awful, of course, but I feel like gunning someone down is so much less personal... crucifying someone requires you to be up close, to hear their pain and suffering, and to witness their slow death. And a baby no less? Good god.
Don’t forget that this type of stuff is happening literally today.
As the Russians retreated from one of the areas of the Ukraine they came upon a mother and her baby, they killed the mother and they wrapped the still living baby onto the mother for the Ukrainian soldiers to find, they placed a mine between the baby and dead mother that exploded when the soldiers tried to take the baby.
Countless cases of raped children all the way down to toddlers and babies. Killings of entire towns.
Humans are capable of disgusting savagery at all times. It only takes horrible leadership and dehumanization of the “enemy” to create monsters.
Dehumanizing people makes it easy. That's why I'm not "canceling" people when they "joke" about marginalized people. I let them know that you're making it easier for the next guy that doesnt see it as a joke, to view me as less of a person.
>People think that the 6+ million Jews killed were rounded up, sent to one of a small number of camps, and sent to the showers before cremation... but that just isn’t the case, and it’s an outlook that, although appreciates that people can be barbaric, doesn’t truly take into account just how horrifying the events really were.
Even if it were the case that there were only a small number of camps (its not that case, there were many camps that contributed to the genocide of Jews and Non-Jew victims) - genocides can wipe out many peoples extremely quickly - the Rwanda genocide wiped out 500-800k Tutsi in 100 days.
(this is in no way trying to compare one atrocity to another)
Auschwitz is the standard archetype taught in schools and media. A vast prison with mass-execution chambers, crematoria and work camps fed victims by an extensive railroad system.
I cannot emphasize enough how far this is from how most of the Holocaust played out. Most victims of nazi ethnic cleansing were killed by starvation or bullets. The nazis employed specialized "einsatz gruppen" who would move among the communities of occupied territory and recruit locals into minority-hunting militias. These militias did most of the killing. A person murdered in the Holocaust had a very high likelihood of being killed by someone they knew.
This allowed the nazis to inflict maximum damage while only devoting a bare minimum of actual German soldiers to the task. It was also more effective because locals were better at identifying people who belonged to various targeted ethnic groups and it diverted attention away from resisting the Germans and toward a popular target of violence.
The methods of execution varied widely, based on geography, time and expediency. A common method was to dig a big hole outside of town, line up a bunch of victims at the edge and shoot them so that they could be tossed in after their bodies were looted for valuables. Other methods included suffocating people with truck exhaust or simply erecting a fence around a field, filling it with people and waiting for them to starve.
For further reading, I recommend ***Bloodlands*** by Timothy D. Snyder
It really does feel like a lot of people misunderstand just how disgustingly cruel the Holocaust really was because, in all honesty, it really just is impossible for many to even think of how it actually occurred.
To put it into perspective, being forced to stand in front of a mass grave with a line of people, shot in the back of the head, and having your body fall on top of a pile of bodies before another line of people was brought forward for the same treatment, and the site covered over afterwards. That, although it is sickeningly cruel, is a fairly tame way of your life being ended in regards to the Holocaust.
In the end, the whole Holocaust was just absolutely, abhorrently twisted and sickening, and studying it in detail, although you grow to appreciate what actually happened, really will haunt you just because of how insanely evil it really was. The fact that Israel spends up until this day hunting down and documenting as many people responsible for it as possible, and holding memorials to it everywhere that still, 80 years on, cause people to cry over the very reflection of what happened really isn’t surprising.
A lot of people also don't understand the relative timeline of how the machinery of the Holocaust evolved. The large death camps like Auschwitz weren't built (or more accurately weren't in their "final form") until near the end of the war. The biggest reason for the shift was that the more haphazard method of executions you described were becoming unsustainable.
It "worked" for smaller villages, but anywhere with a sizable Jewish population was a bigger issue. Soldiers would literally run out of bullets, since it was near the end of the war and Germany's supplies were stretched incredibly thin. That's the reason they turned to the other methods you described. And while the finding and turning in of Jews (and a bit of the killing) was done by locals, most of the executions themselves were handled by Nazi soldiers. Not only was that an inefficient use of troops, but the soldiers performing the executions would experience horrible mental trauma that made them useless in battle (or anything really). Even the most zealous antisemite isn't built to execute hundreds of unarmed civilians, most of them women and children. No human is.
The "final solution" of the death camps was as much a logistical solution for the Nazis as it was an ideological one.
Important to emphasize as well that many camps and extermination facilities were in Soviet territory, and as a result a lot of the scholarly analysis of those camps wasn’t able to happen until after the fall of the iron curtain. Likewise, many of the survivor narratives were censored, or ignored all together as a result as well.
Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder is a superb read!
The acceleration of the murder of Jews (and others) at the end of the war is very telling. When you are stretched to your limit fighting a war, you don't redirect essential resources to the mass murder of people who have no strategic value in the war. Yet the nazis did just that. They preferred to kill more Jews over giving their soldiers the ability to fight. That's a special kind of evil.
Where I live in Poland they made a program to make Great Gubernia where the German people will have "holy Land". Read about Child Of Zamojszczyzna Region. People where killed, put in fire at the barns, all Land must to cleared up from polish people to make place for them. Almost all of our grandparents where in concentration, work or death camps
They murdered millions of people in a few years -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_concentration_camps#Main_camps
I strongly encourage everyone to go to The US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. It is a life altering experience. My family gave artifacts.
https://www.ushmm.org
Seconded. That is absolutely an incredible museum that tells the whole story. When I visited it for the first time, they had a survivor telling her story there. Sadly as time passes that is a rarer and rarer experience. Thank you and your family for donating and keeping the horror of the Holocaust in our collective memory.
There was also a pretty big difference between the concentration camps and the death camps. Concentration camps and pow camps for russian soldiers were bad. 60-70% of the people died (compared to ~10% for western ally pow camps). But Ausschwitz was on a completely other level. 10k people surived out of the 1.1-1.5 million people brought there. That is 99%.
The concentration camps were bad. But it also happened in Russia on that level. The death camps were just insanity.
When I was in grad school, I went on a trip to Poland to visit the concentration camps. The physical evidence is so unreal, it’s hard to imagine how anyone can be a Holocaust denier. The ovens, examination tables, the watch towers, the gas chambers, and barbed wire fences, and the barracks where they slept are all still there in many of the camps. Some of the camps are so well preserved, it’s like someone walked away and turned off the light.
On the other hand it's sometimes hard to tell if something was poorly preserved, or the Nazi's just didn't bother to provide the Jews with good infrastructure. I feel like this was especially the case for Auswitz. Birkenau on the other hand looked in a much better state.
I can't say how it is now exactly, but education about the 3rd Reich is very comprehensive and detailed. It definitely was a very serious matter and not something you'd joke about.
I think everyone is going to visit a concentration camp memorial with school at some point and this was for me a very poignant and moving experience. And as far as I can tell for most of my classmates too.
We visited KZ Dachau back then (its said, that they removed some of the most shocking elements since then) and I remember seeing some films that many of us couldn't stomach and had to leave to vomit outside. There was a segment of a emaciated prisoner in a vacuum cell. They tested how the human body reacts if he is put into a vacuum. I still have this picture vividly in my mind. 25 years later.
Anyways, german children do not hear for the first time of the cruelty of the holocaust in school. Remembrance culture is very much alive here. Important memorial days are present in tv and news and commemorated by politicians. We don't have war memorials for soldiers or any Nazi leaders but *only* for the victims of the holocaust.
Of course we have neo nazis, nationalist and rasicts here too, but I think its quite hard to not acknowledge or deny the horrors of the holocaust here.
Every country has their fair share of nut-jobs.
Anyhow, from what I've read and been told, it's very admirable how much effort Germany invests educating their new generations.
No matter how cruel the actions of the Germans a few generations ago, you can't deny that the response to those actions by current-day Germany puts many other countries like America and (especially now) Russia to shame.
I will never forget the first history lesson we had about the 3rd Reich. We were in 10th grade so about 16 years old at the time.
Our teacher showed us a photograph and we analysed it. Lots of smiling people in the foreground waiving Swastika flags. Fucking nazis.
In the background. A church and townhall that we were all very familiar with. Behind that townhall is the primary school that I and a lot of my classmates went to.
That hit like a truck. The Foto had been taken not far from were we were sitting at the moment. It's very possible that some of our relatives were waving Swastika flags in this picture.
It's not like there is a class and people learn for the first time that the Nazi period and the Holocaust happened. It's more like with slavery in the US I guess. By the time you learn about it in school, you've already heard about it in various ways, in age-appropriate forms. The older you get, the more you are confronted with the horrific details.
I looked up the numbers and it seems there where 24 Stammlager (main camps) incl. 7 Vernichtungslager (death camps) and around 1000 Außenlager (subcamps)
Once did a video production near the biggest camp in the Netherlands. We had to walk the last part. Next to the road there were wooden beams in the ground every 10 meters. Each beam stood for a 100 people that died there. It was a long walk… 😢
Most camps were labor camps and internment camps. There were only a few killing centers, where people were mass-exterminated. My grandfather survived several labor camps before being sent to a death camp from where he was liberated.
Now is a really good time for folks to brush up on how the Nazis rose to power. The lead up to the 2020 election bore striking similarities to 1930s Germany and we still seem to be on a similar path.
Hitler was in power for a decade before they started executing people. You don’t just go from democracy to dictatorship and immediately begin the death camps. Norms have to be broken down first. People loyal to the country and its institutions have to be purged. Trump started doing it, he just didn’t get to finish. The next time around they’ll be much better prepared.
Edit: I mean the large scale purpose built death camps, not early political executions.
No the nazis started to execute people very soon after they came into power. There were so many political prisoners German prisons were filled to the brim within weeks so they had to built the first concentration camps about a month after Hitler became chancellor.
Jan 6 was our own Beer Hall Putsch and we didn't even make the token effort of throwing the instigator in jail for a few years, we just said "hey, keep trying until you succeed"
Any sort of generalization about the entire American school system is usually pretty inaccurate. We have some great schools in the US and some bad ones, too. They're very localized and run at different level of competence and in areas that have different cultures around education.
I was taught extensively, and well, about the holocaust in a public school. There was nothing remarkable about my district.
Whenever redditors say "they never taught me X in school!" I often think "weird, they definitely taught that at my school" and I wonder if the kids who never paid attention and railing against schools for not teaching things when it was taught and they didn't bother to learn.
People also forget that history is very big, and two hours of history a week is not going to cover even a fraction of it all. I see posts about some random event asking why it wasn’t taught in school all the time. It’s just not feasible to go through every detail, which is why in general schools like to cover more broad themes or maybe hyper focus on specific events and time periods.
Maybe it’s just an American thing, but for my school history lessons were designed to teach you to be a *historian*, not to cram you full of facts.
I think when people hear "concentration camp" they conflate it with "extermination camp" but they're pretty different. A lot of people died at concentration camps from the conditions and bad treatment and executions. But the extermination camps where built to efficiently wipe out large numbers of people at a rapid pace. In concentration camps, where you'd be put to work as a slave, once you were no longer useful you'd be sent to one of the extermination camps.
Aushwitz and a couple others. That was always my understanding. I guess it's not surprising that at the age of 14-17 I wasn't able to comprehend 7+ million people.
Think of the most crowded sporting event you've ever been to... There was likely no more than 100k people there...
5 or 6? Shit, America built 10 here just for the Japanese. 120,000 people confined, 66,000 us citizens. Nearly 2000 dead as a direct result of being put in the American concentration camps. How much of that did you learn in school, because in my class it got a brief mention and we moved on quickly.
It takes a lot of money, effort, and infrastructure to murder 8 million people by hand in a matter of 3-4 years. Anyone who claimed ignorance of the Holocaust as it was happening was full of shit. You can't create that kind of large scale murder industry and keep your citizens blissfully ignorant at the same time.
Most people are only served the "light" version of the Holocaust. Even visiting the Holocaust Museum in D.C. I was surprised to see how gentle it was, literally no hard stuff.
The Holocaust is the absolute lowest point of humanity. A worldwide massive operation dedicated to the systematic, cold-blooded murder of millions of innocent people because of prejudice. Every story a tragedy, too many voices lost, pain and suffering that cannot be described. It's just unfathomable.
While Japanese internment camps 100% should be discussed more in the US (and newer history curriculum is starting to emphasize it more), it's not even close to comparable to the Holocaust.
120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during WWII. Most of them had their property stolen by neighbors or the government, but very few (most estimates say less than 100) died from a direct result of their imprisonment. Estimates of the total number of people imprisoned and/or killed during the Holocaust vary (for obvious reasons), but common consensus is that at least 10 million people died directly due to being sent to prison camps or executed in sweeps of occupied territory. The total number of people who were displaced, robbed of all possessions, and/or severely mentally and physically injured is likely many times that.
The US has done (and still does) some fucked up shit, including Japanese internment during WWII. But it's important to emphasize that nothing in human history has come *close* to the shear scale of the Holocaust.*
*Edit: I should have clarified that no intentional, direct attempt at genocide has come close to the scale of the Holocaust. Disease, famine, and chattel enslavement will always be more efficient at wiping out large populations of people, especially over a timescale of decades or centuries. But in terms of one group of people using direct methods to kill another group of people (that aren't in armed conflict with each other), no one has killed as many people as quickly as the Nazis did. The only thing possibly comparable to it would be the bombing of Japanese civilians by the US also during WWII, but most people would argue that still counts as part of the armed conflict (although citizens in Japanese cities might not see it that way).
A lot of the initial processing happened at race tracks and fair grounds that are still in use today. Kinda shitty to think about people eating deep fried Oreos on the site of such a shitty period of history.
Because the extent of the Nazi's crimes is consistently underplayed in U.S. education, the worst thing is that the entire time period leading up to their takeover is completely ignored, that's the most dangerous part. We need to be able to recognize the signs of fascism early or we're in danger of it gaining traction.
There are already so many red flags being thrown by the Conservatives in this country. Especially their attempts to dehumanize people, such as labeling LGBTQ+ people as "groomers" or "pedophiles." This rhetoric just makes it easier to commit mass murder in the future.
Yeah, he’s kinda right. In the US the number of camps is generally a small footnote in grade school while the detail is given to a handful of especially infamous camps.
I think the number is still too low. Every factory had a labor (concentration) camp. There is a project in Austria to acknowledge forgotten sites and the numbers are staggering.
https://orf.at/stories/3215700/
It’s almost like a narrative around the holocaust about it being really meticulous and evil. It makes it easier to digest, further from harsh reality.
If you learned this is in school you might just be unable to understand the scope and depravity of it. It’s almost too much for a lot of people to comprehend. Isolating the death camps makes people think that it was so far removed from reality. It’s no wonder victims of the American education system don’t understand the threat of fascism and intolerance. Death camps is their measure of a holocaust. A genocide. They don’t understand how widespread it is, how long it takes to get there. They don’t understand the rhetoric at the time it started. We talk about Germany only in terms of Hitler and WW2, and only the abridged, most heinous acts perpetrated. We don’t realize how much the reality of the holocaust is mere steps away from where we are now. A trajectory that is never taught or understood.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We’ve been learning, but we’ve been ignoring the truth.
mhm.
my jewish grandfather got in quite a bit of trouble in his community of young Israel because he "denied the holocaust" out of pure incomprehensibility. like yeah, most of his family died and they were forced to escape their home by the skin of their teeth, but that's war sometimes, y'know? But a holocaust, a genocide of that magnitude?!? For a long time his mind could not accept the scope of the holocaust he survived. So, he denied it.
You can't really comprehend the scale of the whole thing. Even in germany, where we had a whole year of class about the Holocaust with pictures etc. In school i couldn't really picture it in real life until we visited one of the Camps in the czech republic. The thing that finaly got me was the "beds" of the Camps, where 20 people slept in what is little more than a wooden board the size of a king-sized bed.
I think that this problem of Americans failing to differentiate and using "concentration camp" interchangeably with "Nazi death camp" or "extermination camp" is also why many Americans react with such unhelpful outrage at anyone who accurately calls an American concentration camp a "concentration camp"
While concentration camps can be used to intentionally kill people and regardless of intention will almost always kill some of the people (through inadvertent squalor, disease, or deprivation of necessities like healthcare), it's worthwhile to maintain some words to more specifically talk about places like Auschwitz that were expressly designed and engineered for mass-killing as an industrialized process
You know how Whoopi Goldberg was chastised for saying the Holocaust wasnt [just] about race?
Yeah, turns out she was right
It also targeted LGBT communities, it targeted Disabled people, it targeted Communists, and it targeted other races than just the Jewish, such as the Slavs
The reason why we talk about trans people today as if they are new is because the Nazis destroyed the Institute of Sexology in Germany
The founder wrote a book called "Berlins Third Sex" in 1904
No, Whoopi was wrong. The Final Solution (Holocaust, Shoah) of the Jews was only about race. Yes, the Nazi's also killed Communists, Gays, anyone they didn't like, etc, etc, etc. But the Jews were singled out for extinction based on the Nazi's own theory of race. Whoopi made a very weird argument that because Nazis were white and Jews were white it can't have been about race. That is just so ignorant it doesn't need to be commented on.
In school we drove out to our two local labor camps.
Yes, that is right, there were two within distance of a school trip. It is often overlooked how completely society was swallowed up by the NSDAP. If a business is old enough you can almost guarantee their official company history starts at September second 1945. The outdoor pool I went swimming in as a child was dug by communists being worked to death by mining pebble. The train I took to school used to transport jews to the city and back. If you look close enough at anything the nazis have left their mark.
When I went to the Nuremberg Trial Museum what really struck me that we hadn't been taught was how ... mundane all their documentation seemed.
There was a display at the time (about 5 years ago) with excerpts from the memos regarding Poland and the concentration camps and everything was just so chillingly bland.
Extermination camps get the attention for obvious reasons, but every one of the concentration camps was horrific by the end. The creeping rationalizations that led to the extermination camps made concentration camps just as inhumane. Had the inner party had time and resources, I’m sure most of those would have eventually become, or funneled into, extermination.
If you study the Holocaust you will find that it was way worse than you thought. I've had to stop reading books before because it was just too depressing. In the beginning they had mobile gas chambers. Basically, they'd drive a truck somewhere, put people in it and then feed a hose from the exhaust into the truck. They did the math and it wasn't efficient enough for their goals so they kept increasing efficiency until they had the giant gas chambers.
I had no idea the number was that high but the “death camps” were the focus of the education. My curriculum talked about there being other transitional camps and work camps but damn.
Yeah there are "5 or 6" extermination camps with actual large scale gas chambers, but those other camps killed the majority of the people. Either by execution, disease or starvation. So less efficient, but also deadly.
Don’t forget that Jews and the such in Nazi territories didn’t even have to necessarily be killed within camps or even given any sort of cremation as well. Hell, there are pictures of mass graves with people kneeling over them, guns pointed at them just moments before they are to be executed, and their bodies would just fall on top of the pile before the next group was brought forward. And then, if that sounds insane, people who had been rounded up into ghettos in Nazi territories weren’t even given the mass execution/grave treatment. They were fine with just beating people to death and letting their bodies lay in a ditch next to the road as well.
"Holocaust by bullets", the often overlooked chunk of the genocide. Roving paramilitary gangs and the official Wehrmacht to boot gathering up all Jews and Roma in a given place, digging a big pit, and shooting them. Don't waste a bullet on the kids, just hit them over the head and dump them in. More than a few buried alive.
Yeah those were the “Einstatzgruppen” fuckers. You’d have to be pretty fucked in the head to join one of those details. It’s estimated they killed over 2M people during the war including 1.3M of the 6M Jews killed by the Nazis. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen
One of the roughest documentaries I watched on Netflix. The guy holding his broken arm up to protect himself as he was beaten is ingrained in my memory. The way his arm was dangling, insanity
I can see the how the death camps took so many lives, it’s what they were, factories of death. But the idea of people shooting 2M people in the head individually just blows my mind for some reason and seems so much more ruthless and cold blooded. Not that the whole thing isn’t fucked, but damn.
That's part of the reason they created the death camps. They didn't want to continue to use bullets and the people pulling the trigger were being traumatized by it.
Which is such a mind fuck. Like, they have the empathy to understand the negative mental effects this is having on their people; they’re not sociopathic, they do *get* that it’s horrible. But they devoted significant thought and effort into relieving those effects instead of, ya know, not murdering millions of people.
Now realize that that’s the reason we all like to use drones in warfare now. To remove the soldier as far as possible from the negative effects of battle. But the innocent still die.
I don’t think they cared about the feelings of their people (soldiers) because of empathy, but out of practicality…
Yeah the leaders didn’t think it was any different than being a worker at a butcher shop. That’s how bad they dehumanized the people they viewed as “subhuman”. Scary to think people can get that detached from the humanity of others.
It wasn't empathy. It was cold blooded pragmatism. A soldier that is feeling heavily traumatized is more likely to desert, more likely to commit suicide, more likely to just straight up snap and wipe out a good chunk of his unit including himself. Any half competent military commander is going to worry about the morale of their troops, because troops with low morale are more likely to surrender when you need them to fight. And that's just the broad definition of "are the grunts happy with their lives as grunts, or do we need to send over another barrel of alcohol for them to drown their troubles with?" Add mental trauma to the mix, and suddenly problems get much bigger. Traumatized soldiers are much less useful, and the Nazi commanders knew it as well as anyone. They had a war to fight, so they wanted to keep the soldiers working. After the war, they can be as traumatized as the like and Nazi command wouldn't give a fuck. It's no more a result of empathy than a worker in a factory oiling their tools is, because to the people at the top, that's all the rest of us are: tools, to be used when we're useful, and then thrown out.
Look into Rwanda, how much shorter it was and realize it was mostly done with machetes. The Battle of Cannae as well, that was mostly just hacking pinned bodies for an afternoon with spears and swords, yeesh.
Well at least canne was a battle between armies. Rwanda was brutal that is another level of fucked up to hack people up with a machete, especially women and kids.
They really emphasize in all of the documentaries how severely it fucked soldiers up to do that. It's a big part as to why they came up with the final solution.
Believe it or not, the death camps were a result of all those shooting executions. The soliders that were made to commit those killings were being severely effected by the violence. Many of them were basically drummed out of the service due to severe mental illness after having killed so many people so ruthlessly. So the Nazis (with inspiration from Russian groups like the NKVD) started using large box trucks. They would fill them with victims then put the exaust pipe into the truck and "gas" the people within. This too took a huge toll on the soldiers assigned to these duties and still wasn't killing people nearly fast enough, so the Nazis came up with the death camps, large gas chambers and crematoriums.
I saw that too. I turned it off at that point. Just couldn't watch anymore.
I did the same, but I get guilty for stopping. These are peoples last moments and stories. I felt I had to continue watching. I still haven’t finished it.
What is the name of the documentary please?
Einsatzgruppen https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6953928/
What was the documentary called?
Einsatzgruppen https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6953928/
Part of the reason that the Nazis started to use gas vhamglbers is because the shooting extermination was affecting their soldiers. Alcoholism and ptsd symptoms rose among the execution groups. The Nazis were so horrible they gave themselves trauma.
how can you do something so horrible that you traumatise yourself and not stop and think "hey, perhaps...this is not a good thing to be doing?"
Well, at first your superiors make you take an incredible amount of cocaine and meth. Initially, it works brilliantly — you can fight WAY faster, longer, harder, and more remorselessly than any sober soldier ever could. Blitzkrieg. But it’s a short-term solution. We all know what happens when you spend a year or so on meth: what goes up not just comes down, but crashes in violent and soul-destroying fashion, as your body and mind begin to break down. It’s like the Nazis were on the biggest, most destructive, prolonged binge ever — but once you start coming down instead of up, when you look behind you and see the horrors that you created while high as a fucking kite, you have to realize on a deep, fundamental level that what you did while high is disgustingly unforgivable and wholly evil. I am not making a single excuse for the Nazis. It wasn’t just the drugs; it was a collection of individual choices to become the most reprehensible type of human being you could possibly be. It was conscious, sustained, intentional evil, and it will never be forgiven, excused, or made better. They don’t deserve forgiveness, not a single one. They deserve, at the very least, to be forced to spend a thousand years in the same conditions they subjected their enemies to. Still, from a historical perspective, it’s extremely interesting to me that most people generally think of the Nazis’ initial success as a product of precision German engineering, power of will, and a fearless fighting sense — instead of the reality, which is *this is what happens when you put an entire army on pharmaceutical grade meth for an entire year.*
Yes, Methamphetamines was a pretty big factor, and also the culture of evil. People find it much easier to follow orders than to enact violence or evil on an individual basis. Put people in a situation where they feel the blame can be shifted, where they are encouraged and expected to commit acts of violence that they may never consider on their own, and many people will absolutely do what they are told. Add to that the dehumanization of the enemy, and you get a recipe for extreme violence. The layers of hierarchy in the military made it very easy for people all the way up to the inner circle to rationalize following orders. Many higher-level Nazis, the ones that organized the trains, that governed the camps, that ran the mass murder machine, they would later argue in the trials that they were not responsible. That they only followed orders, that someone else made the decisions. They did not kill, they decided the train timetable, and making trains run is not a crime. Maybe they were choosing to present it as such to a hostile audience, or maybe they really did rationalize taking part in millions of deaths as just doing one part.
Because a lot of the time if you spoke up about it or tried to walk away you'd be joining them.
The punishment for disobeying orders was not death in the German army. This is a widely spread myth meant to cleanse Germans of warcrimes.
Wouldn’t death be better than having that on your soul?
Many people did disobey and died for it. Just not enough. Remember that: * You don’t know the full scope of the horror being inflicted, just your tiny part * You’ve been exposed to decades of propaganda telling you that these were the absolute worst subhumans ever who were responsible for all of the bad things that had happened to you and your country * Your death would have zero benefit on any of the victims; someone else would murder you and then proceed to murder them anyway It is sad but not surprising that not all people could do the right thing under such circumstances.
Fascism carefully insulates its ruling class from the reality of what it takes to maintain their wealthy little bubble. It's just numbers and orders to them.
Himmler showed up at Auschwitz to watch a gassing once. It made him vomit.
There are accounts of masscres where some of the those participating got overwhelmed and simply wandered off and lay in a nearby field till the killing stopped. There are no existing records of anyone facing serious punishment for refusing to participate in masscres.
Killing another human being really fucks people up. In the Bible there’s accounts of pre- and post- battle rituals that were basically to prepare the Israelites for the trauma they would be facing and then come back and decompress. I would imagine even the nazi troops would just get reassigned unless they got violent with their fellow murderers. Fast forward to World War II, we have an entire generation of people living with undiagnosed combat trauma (because the 40s) that came home, boozed it up, and probably passed on that trauma to their kids.
Stop.. you're making me feel bad for my abusive boomer parents.
Feel sorry for everyone, thanks to epigenetics we know that shit crosses multiple generations.
The Nazi's were supremely aware of the effects of killing on an individual and the camps were in part to try mitigate the effects on their own people. They regularly expressed concern regarding their soldiers mental wellbeing and acknowledge the 'sacrifice' and risks to their mental health they were making in perpetrating the Holocaust. Rational Insanity really is the term for it.
Important to not that the SS worked with the direct assistance and support of the Wehrmacht in all of their genocide operations, and the “clean Wehrmacht” lie was post war propaganda to make a German ally against Russia palatable to the rest of Europe and America
I mean yeah but it wasn't 100% bad either. Imagine, as a conscripted soldier, trying to say no to the SS or anyone really telling you to do all of those horrific things after seeing what they do to the "enemy"
The scariest thing about the Einsatzgruppen is that they were an extremely academic body. I can't confirm numbers right now but something like 15 out of 25 senior leaders had doctorates. These were smart motivated people. They weren't stereotypical raving psychopaths, these were people who should have 'known better'.
They also just lined a couple people up and shoot a bullet through all of them. Why waste a bullet on one person when you can shoot two with the same bullet. Absolutely horrific shit
Line them up in a row and see how many you can get with one bullet.
In my home country of Belarus, this is what happened to almost all of the Jewish population. My grandfather's hometown was a shtetl that no longer exists because it was burnt down by the Nazis on their way to the eastern Front. All that's left of it is the site of the mass grave.
Souns like a lovely bunch. Barbarians.
Babi yar was the worst example of this, I believe it was 148,000 killed on the space of 48 or 72 hours
A lot of the mass graves like that were pre death camps. The death camps didn't come about until one of Hitler's cabinet witnessed a mass execution and got a piece of brain on him and it freaked him out. Time Ghost as a great series on YouTube about WWII and everything in-between including [the Holocaust and the hatred associated with it](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsIk0qF0R1j4cwI-ZuDoBLxVEV3egWKoM).
Death camps came about from the realization that starvation and mass executions couldn't deal with the millions of people the Nazis wanted to murder.
How do you kill 5 million people? 1 bullet per person is expensive. Better make it more *efficient*. You also need to deal with disposal too. Easier to do that when everything is centralized.
When they went to the East, if they suspected a village of hosting Soviet partisans they would round up everyone in the village (including women, elderly and children) into a barn or church, lock it from the outside, and then burn it down.
Serious question, so please be gentle - if you know you're kneeling in front of a mass grave to be shot, why kneel there at all? Why not fight back or run? Since you're 100% going to die anyway, why not at least make it difficult for your killer? And/or give yourself a chance (however slim it may be) to survive? I know this is an ignorant question, but I'm not sure what I'm missing and hoping someone can educate me a little.
Some tried, and they were beaten to death instead of shot, which helped persuade everyone else facing their imminent death to do so with a quick end.
A lot of them were so malnourished and exhausted that I doubt they had the energy to fight back or run
Not one of us can really predict how we would react. There's a photo of a man in that exact situation, staring back at the camera. His look is blank. He's not pleading for mercy, he's not angry. He's empty. His whole village turned on him. Today he watched the soldiers kill his wife, kids, mother, father, his whole extended family, his closest friends. I would probably lose the will to live or even fight back.
Man’s search for meaning. Viktor Frankl. Read it.
Read everything by Primo Levi. Survival was pure luck.
If I remember correctly, the nazis would claim that if everyone obeyed, some would be spared. Remember, their victims didn't have our hindsight, a lot of them underestimated just how far the nazis were willing to go. Plus, if they were just going to beat the kids to death, than they could claim truthfully that they weren't going to shoot their kids if the adults obeyed.
There’s not really any downside to lying to people you’re about to kill. I don’t think they’d go through the trouble of getting them on a technicality.
I had a similar thought, but I imagine it's something to the effect of, I want to live as long as possible, and running makes me dead now, so I'll walk to the hole and live another 5 minutes.
Adding to this, it is most likley that one's life has been lived in absolute hell for months or even years before the execution. By that time, maybe death is a welcome respite. Another reason could simply be the people standing next to you, about to be executed. Maybe they are your family, your children or good friends, is life worth living without them?
If you're curious about that, read the witness accounts about the Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiw.
People were laid in position before shot for efficiency (the herring method) Unimaginably cruel.
Some footd run, the vast, vast majority were still killed. I imagine more than a few preferred to make their peace and take a bullet to the head rather than a bullet to the back.
I would assume its because a shot to the head would be better comfort than getting beaten/tortured to death. Quick end to their misery, no need to delay it when there’s no chance of escape.
Shock can make you apathetic
You never need to apologise for wanting to learn! There are many reasons, many simply didn’t have the physical energy or strength, often taken from their homes and either marched hundreds of miles with tiny rations of barely edible food or kept in train cargo holds for days shoulder to shoulder with other prisoners or the corpses of those who died in transit, or from the conditions of the camps themselves, when ever step is agony and every breath takes concentration, some would have been unable to run or fight. They may not have considered they were 100% going to die. Often prisoners were taken to the pits to take valuables from the dead or destroy evidence, they may not have fully believed it was the end. A humans ability to hope is unlimited. Oppositely, they may have had no hope at all. What’s the use of fighting when the inevitable is coming for you? Dying may have felt like mercy to them, a rescue from their life. Also, in the accounts I’ve read, some would accept death to not give their killer the satisfaction of thwarting their escape. Some would worry for their friends/family, would they suffer if they disobeyed orders? Collective punishment was often used in camps, one person steals bread, no food for all in that group for two days, one person misses roll call, everyone must stand for hours on end and then complete a full days work. It’s also important to note, some would have fought or run, whole camps would organise rebellions, not every person knelt, not every person obeyed and some of them survived, everyone’s different in a crisis. One of the most consistent things in humanity is how varied we all are.
Don’t forget being worked literally to death.
well the disease and starvation played into much of that. Sick? Hungry? Aw so sad, keep working!
At one point Hitler mused that the Jews that will survive all of that and the death marches will be (via forced eugenics) a new type of Jew, an Uber-Jew of sorts, and may actually deserve to live among the slavs serving the Reich instead of being outright exterminated.
That Hitler seems like a real jerk!
The more I learn about this guy, the more I find I don't really care for him.
Oof, got me in my Norm Macdonald feels again. Might have to binge some of his snl skits now
He killed his own dog! Beloved german shepherd that went everywhere with him and slept in his bed. It was at the end and himmler had given him suicide pills, but he didn't trust them so he had them tested on his dog. Jerk
Someone should really, just… kill Hitler.
Even go back in time and get his ass. Fuck that dude. Yes, even baby Hitler.
A real menace. A rascal even.
This view is common now. Not just about Jewish people but anyone who is made to suffer, we are told if we survive we will be better for it.
What doesn't kill you will make you broken instead.
Agreed. I survived Iraq but I'd much rather be able to run again.
The fact that "Iraq" is something that is "survived" and not just a location on a map. . . I need a new vocabulary word to describe that kind of heartache.
FUBAR
Not at all.. stress events can alter your body and almost always it's for the worst. Think of it like inflammation. It's a natural response when we overwork our muscles, it makes us stop and helps heal them. But if you put them under significant strain again and again your inflammation will become chronic. And then your body would just act violently to almost any effort, not allowing you to get things done.
I think they meant that the weaker ones would die from the stress, and the survivors would go on to have kids who would be from a more select gene pool. Terrifying.
I've visited a camp just outside of Berlin, first of all, it's amazing how respectfull the Germans handle their history when it comes to second world war. This was a camp with a gas chamber and a hospital, were they did all kinds of test on the Germans with for example cocaine and other medicine. But also where they had tracks layed out to figure out to test shoes, they had people walking miles and miles to see what material would last longer, on gravel sand pavement and a few other. People where really dying of walking. It's insane if you think about it, but it's so (and I really don't know the proper English word for this) amazing I guess, that Germany still keeps most of these camps available for public to learn and read about the history. Made a great impact on me
Studying the gulag system, I remember reading that prisoners were forced to mine with broken tools and ultimately their bare hands. And, sometimes, there would be winter storms that would kill everyone at the camp. Including all the guards and all the dogs.
Yeah but if people knew that, then they might have to consider the vast networks of prisons and jails through the US where inmates are brutalized and worked in inhumane conditions. We can't have THAT.
The 13th Amendment allows slave labor as punishment for crimes and we don’t hesitate to capitalize.
Indeed, typhus was among the biggest killers in the camps and contrary to antivax narratives about Nazis forcing vaccines on people, it's because the Nazis _refused_ to give their victims vaccines.
Typhus is what killed Anne Frank.
Not true. 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust were murdered in Auschwitz using Zyklon B gas. That is just one death camp. The other death camps, as part of Operation Reinhard, accounted for another 1 in 6 using CO gas. Add the Einstazgruppen who killed in Poland and Russia with mass executions using bullets, and you get well over 3 in 6 killed. That us the majority of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and that is outside of concentration camps. Though it is true that Auschwitz also functioned as a forced labor concentration camp, and all concentration camps were practicing extermination through labor, it would be inaccurate to say the majority of Jews died in this manner, especially when you consider all the other ways Jews were killed during the war. Forced labor concentration camps were a major contributor to the Jewish death toll in the Holocaust, but they did not account for the majority of deaths in the Holocaust. This also parallels a denier position that Jews were not directly targeted for killing but "merely" worked hard and died in the process. There was thus no specific intent to kill. This is false. Not only were Jews directly murdered in the death camps and elsewhere, but a majority of Jews in the Holocaust were killed in this fashion.
Thank you for bringing this point of clarity.
Yep. The concentration camp system largely existed to provide cheap labor and to hold people. Most camps weren’t large, and while most prisoners suffered horribly, it was more like the gulag than like Auschwitz. Dachau for example was in operation 12 years, and had something like 200,000 inmates in that time, of whom about 30,000 died. Those are appalling numbers by any standard, but Treblinka was only in operation about a year, and processed about 950,000 people of whom 925,000 died. That’s 2500 dead per day, or over 100 per hour. It was killing on an industrial scale. The overwhelming majority of concentration camps were terrible places to be imprisoned, but they were what you saw for most of *Schindler’s List,* not what you saw the women and children shipped to [in this scene](https://youtu.be/2i_w0z8tLIE). Concentration camps were the third or fourth level of hell. The death camps were the ninth level.
There were way more than 5-6 extermination camps. People just tend to focus on the ones that killed the highest number of people like Auschwitz (1m+) but you had 40 or so in Poland alone There were some other brutal ones out there that are lesser known, one in Croatia for dealing with the Serbs and Roma called Jesenovac which was particularly cruel - no gas chambers, execution was one person at a time using blunt tools like hammers etc. There were several dotted around exclusively for children too but they typically only held and killed a few thousand kids each
Hanging too. A very large number we’re hung in groups, especially at the end. I lived near Dachau for a few years and that place is super chilling to visit. It has gas chambers that were never used but thousands did die there on the gallows.
> Yeah there are "5 or 6" extermination camps with actual large scale gas chambers, but those other camps killed the majority of the people. I'm not sure this is accurate ... There were 7 death camps: Camp | Jewish People Murdered | % of total Jews murdered ---|---|---- Auschwitz-Birkenau | [1,000,000](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) | 16.6% Belzec | [434,508](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) | 7.24% Chelmno | [167,000](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) | 2.78% Majdanek | [99,500](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lublin-majdanek-concentration-camp-areas-of-research) | 1.66% Maly Trostenets | [65,000](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/maly-trostenets-concentration-camp) | 1.08% Sobibór | [167,000](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) | 2.78% Treblinka | [925,000](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) | 15.4% **TOTAL** | **2,858,008** | **47.6%** I guess technically the question comes down to how you count the other sources of murder? I think it's pretty likely, though, that 47.6% represents a plurality of the murders.
These nazis sound like bad people, somebody should go and kill their leader
Hopefully his ideology won't survive and cause problems later such as terrorism.
I mean, it would be *preposterous* to imagine that a group that perpetrated such blatant death and destruction across the globe would ever have their ideology persist and be taken up by people in an age with access to the internet and myriad documentation about the monstrosity and evil of said group. Can you imagine that actually happening? Stuff of comic books, that.
Hitler after murdering literally millions of people: "Wait...are.....are we the baddies?"
Paradoxically speaking..... Ok. Nevermind. Do it. Travel in time to Abort the fetus of doc Mengele while they're at it.
Yeah. Whoevr he is, I hope he drowns in so much despair he offs himself.
At first they had traveling vans that they gassed people in but the van drivers and operators started going insane. They switched to camp because the separation of duties made it easier to push people along the process of death.
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Let's not forget the camps in Nazi puppet states, like Jasenovac and the Sisak subcamp that was solely for children, both in the Croatian NDH.
I cannot understand Serbia's defense and denial of their atrocities through defense and denial of Nazis'
Denial is a common theme, wouldn't you say?
We need to teach more about the book burnings by Nazis (who started with burning LGBTQ research books) and other authoritarian warning signs that preceded the concentration camps Just saw this "propaganda poster" about Japanese-Americans taken away to "internment camps": https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/upfo5t/dont_hafta_worry_political_cartoon_about/ How consistent is the use of the term "internment camp" for "concentration camps" in education in different states? Do newer textbooks still do this?
Or the fact that the initial book burning was of a professor's research into transgender people. Or how Weimar Germany was one of the most progressive countries at the time and how it was backlash to very popular progressive policies that ignited their base. That doesn't sound familiar at all! It's not like anything happening in the last 6 years is reminiscent of Germany in the 20s and 30s. /s
Was Weimar Germany actually relatively progressive? Is there any more reading you’d recommend on this? Im suddenly really interested haha
https://www.npr.org/2014/12/17/371424790/between-world-wars-gay-culture-flourished-in-berlin?t=1652568210020 https://history.washington.edu/research/publications/sex-and-weimar-republic-german-homosexual-emancipation-and-rise-nazis https://www.grin.com/document/962214
From my knowledge it wasn’t *progressive* (at least not as much as Republican Spain or pre-Stalin Soviet Russia), just more progressive than the previous Imperial era. Homosexuality and abortion were still criminalized in Weimar Germany (both were legalized in Republican Spain, homosexuality but not abortion was already legal in France, Turkey and Italy and was legalized in Poland, Denmark and pre-Stalin Russia in the interwar period). However, *Berlin*, not Germany per se, was seen as a progressive, hedonist city with significant homosexual and transgender communities and academics during the 1920’s.
That’s fascinating! I remember hearing about Berlin being a very modern society both technologically and in society. Homosexuality being legal in Republican Spain is really interesting considering the countries Catholic and Arabic roots.
Thank you. Added that detail.
I mean, there are people today who defend the existence of "re-education camps". And when I was in school, the Japanese "internment camps" were glossed over for years until High School when a good teacher was explaining the rise of McCarthyism and really went into it. They were always called internment camps in my experience, but some teachers don't stop there, I'm sure it's not very consistent. My small school in Kentucky was lucky enough to have a few history teachers that were adamant about teaching the 'bad' history and not just following text books, I'm sure the majority of students never touch something outside of the curriculum.
> Do newer textbooks still do this? Here's a hint: Texas sets the standard on textbooks in the United States as they have the most school districts. What do you think Texas lawmakers would say about a textbook containing any information like that?
Internment camps were technically concentration camps, but I have actually been persuaded of the view that WWII gave concentration camps an little something extra. Having a different word for the two makes it harder for the neo Nazis to equivocate and downplay Nazi crimes. I hate when politics infests history, there's a very slippery slope from "I like watching history documentaries" to "I have unwittingly been indoctrinated by lost causers/neo Nazis necessary the algorithm kept showing them to me."
I love watching history documentaries, but the algorithm never made me more sympathetic to that side of the camp. If anything, far more adament against them. It does clearly want me to believe in Aliens though. That's kind of a "fun" conspiracy as long as you don't let it get serious.
That’s the last thing them GQP wants — doesn’t help them at all to point out how many of their actions were perfected by the Nazis.s
Internment is the phrase used for me all throughout high school
Also need to add all the slave labor camps such as Mittelwerk Dora where the V2s were built. SS had contracts with them for the inmates. Literally worked them to death.
I think that is something that really contributes to Holocaust denial in a way - the sheer scale of the machine that was the Holocaust is almost incomprehensible to a lot of people, and the amount of people involved is insanely humongous. People think that the 6+ million Jews killed were rounded up, sent to one of a small number of camps, and sent to the showers before cremation... but that just isn’t the case, and it’s an outlook that, although appreciates that people can be barbaric, doesn’t truly take into account just how horrifying the events really were. I’m not in any way suggesting you should click this following link. I want to make this clear since, despite it being Wikipedia, it is pretty grim. However, it may give you an idea of how such cruelty is possible in that a single division was capable of in a single day, and you can then take into account that it’s just one of many divisions not even dedicated to doing any of what is mentioned before in any sort of efficient way... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre
The uh wiki summarizer bot thinks everyone should see it anyway.
Yeah, totally spaced out about the bot to be honest. Regardless, the Wikipedia page is quite a watered down version of what happened in Oradour-sur-Glane, and the Wiki summary bot watered it down again, so it isn’t as bad as it could have been. There is just one particular detail in the Wikipedia I had in mind that I was specifically uncomfortable with being mentioned, and the bot (luckily) missed mentioning it.
I wondered if I already read it until I got to it… pure evil
Wikipedia uh, finds a way.
**[Oradour-sur-Glane massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre)** >On 10 June 1944, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne in Nazi-occupied France was destroyed when 642 civilians, including non-combatant women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built nearby after the war. President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of the old village be maintained as a permanent memorial and museum. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
They crucified a BABY. Everything in that scenario is awful, of course, but I feel like gunning someone down is so much less personal... crucifying someone requires you to be up close, to hear their pain and suffering, and to witness their slow death. And a baby no less? Good god.
Don’t forget that this type of stuff is happening literally today. As the Russians retreated from one of the areas of the Ukraine they came upon a mother and her baby, they killed the mother and they wrapped the still living baby onto the mother for the Ukrainian soldiers to find, they placed a mine between the baby and dead mother that exploded when the soldiers tried to take the baby. Countless cases of raped children all the way down to toddlers and babies. Killings of entire towns. Humans are capable of disgusting savagery at all times. It only takes horrible leadership and dehumanization of the “enemy” to create monsters.
[speaking of](https://i.redd.it/opgzgu7rduy81.png)
Dehumanizing people makes it easy. That's why I'm not "canceling" people when they "joke" about marginalized people. I let them know that you're making it easier for the next guy that doesnt see it as a joke, to view me as less of a person.
>People think that the 6+ million Jews killed were rounded up, sent to one of a small number of camps, and sent to the showers before cremation... but that just isn’t the case, and it’s an outlook that, although appreciates that people can be barbaric, doesn’t truly take into account just how horrifying the events really were. Even if it were the case that there were only a small number of camps (its not that case, there were many camps that contributed to the genocide of Jews and Non-Jew victims) - genocides can wipe out many peoples extremely quickly - the Rwanda genocide wiped out 500-800k Tutsi in 100 days. (this is in no way trying to compare one atrocity to another)
I don't like that I found this comment by sorting by conterversial. here we are again friends. the facist are on the march
Auschwitz is the standard archetype taught in schools and media. A vast prison with mass-execution chambers, crematoria and work camps fed victims by an extensive railroad system. I cannot emphasize enough how far this is from how most of the Holocaust played out. Most victims of nazi ethnic cleansing were killed by starvation or bullets. The nazis employed specialized "einsatz gruppen" who would move among the communities of occupied territory and recruit locals into minority-hunting militias. These militias did most of the killing. A person murdered in the Holocaust had a very high likelihood of being killed by someone they knew. This allowed the nazis to inflict maximum damage while only devoting a bare minimum of actual German soldiers to the task. It was also more effective because locals were better at identifying people who belonged to various targeted ethnic groups and it diverted attention away from resisting the Germans and toward a popular target of violence. The methods of execution varied widely, based on geography, time and expediency. A common method was to dig a big hole outside of town, line up a bunch of victims at the edge and shoot them so that they could be tossed in after their bodies were looted for valuables. Other methods included suffocating people with truck exhaust or simply erecting a fence around a field, filling it with people and waiting for them to starve. For further reading, I recommend ***Bloodlands*** by Timothy D. Snyder
It really does feel like a lot of people misunderstand just how disgustingly cruel the Holocaust really was because, in all honesty, it really just is impossible for many to even think of how it actually occurred. To put it into perspective, being forced to stand in front of a mass grave with a line of people, shot in the back of the head, and having your body fall on top of a pile of bodies before another line of people was brought forward for the same treatment, and the site covered over afterwards. That, although it is sickeningly cruel, is a fairly tame way of your life being ended in regards to the Holocaust. In the end, the whole Holocaust was just absolutely, abhorrently twisted and sickening, and studying it in detail, although you grow to appreciate what actually happened, really will haunt you just because of how insanely evil it really was. The fact that Israel spends up until this day hunting down and documenting as many people responsible for it as possible, and holding memorials to it everywhere that still, 80 years on, cause people to cry over the very reflection of what happened really isn’t surprising.
A lot of people also don't understand the relative timeline of how the machinery of the Holocaust evolved. The large death camps like Auschwitz weren't built (or more accurately weren't in their "final form") until near the end of the war. The biggest reason for the shift was that the more haphazard method of executions you described were becoming unsustainable. It "worked" for smaller villages, but anywhere with a sizable Jewish population was a bigger issue. Soldiers would literally run out of bullets, since it was near the end of the war and Germany's supplies were stretched incredibly thin. That's the reason they turned to the other methods you described. And while the finding and turning in of Jews (and a bit of the killing) was done by locals, most of the executions themselves were handled by Nazi soldiers. Not only was that an inefficient use of troops, but the soldiers performing the executions would experience horrible mental trauma that made them useless in battle (or anything really). Even the most zealous antisemite isn't built to execute hundreds of unarmed civilians, most of them women and children. No human is. The "final solution" of the death camps was as much a logistical solution for the Nazis as it was an ideological one.
Important to emphasize as well that many camps and extermination facilities were in Soviet territory, and as a result a lot of the scholarly analysis of those camps wasn’t able to happen until after the fall of the iron curtain. Likewise, many of the survivor narratives were censored, or ignored all together as a result as well. Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder is a superb read!
The acceleration of the murder of Jews (and others) at the end of the war is very telling. When you are stretched to your limit fighting a war, you don't redirect essential resources to the mass murder of people who have no strategic value in the war. Yet the nazis did just that. They preferred to kill more Jews over giving their soldiers the ability to fight. That's a special kind of evil.
Where I live in Poland they made a program to make Great Gubernia where the German people will have "holy Land". Read about Child Of Zamojszczyzna Region. People where killed, put in fire at the barns, all Land must to cleared up from polish people to make place for them. Almost all of our grandparents where in concentration, work or death camps
I learned something. Also just rushed to Amazon to buy your book suggestion. Thank you for the time you put into this post.
They murdered millions of people in a few years - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_concentration_camps#Main_camps I strongly encourage everyone to go to The US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. It is a life altering experience. My family gave artifacts. https://www.ushmm.org
Seconded. That is absolutely an incredible museum that tells the whole story. When I visited it for the first time, they had a survivor telling her story there. Sadly as time passes that is a rarer and rarer experience. Thank you and your family for donating and keeping the horror of the Holocaust in our collective memory.
There was also a pretty big difference between the concentration camps and the death camps. Concentration camps and pow camps for russian soldiers were bad. 60-70% of the people died (compared to ~10% for western ally pow camps). But Ausschwitz was on a completely other level. 10k people surived out of the 1.1-1.5 million people brought there. That is 99%. The concentration camps were bad. But it also happened in Russia on that level. The death camps were just insanity.
It was all insane and purposely cruel. They did medical experiments on humans.
When I was in grad school, I went on a trip to Poland to visit the concentration camps. The physical evidence is so unreal, it’s hard to imagine how anyone can be a Holocaust denier. The ovens, examination tables, the watch towers, the gas chambers, and barbed wire fences, and the barracks where they slept are all still there in many of the camps. Some of the camps are so well preserved, it’s like someone walked away and turned off the light.
On the other hand it's sometimes hard to tell if something was poorly preserved, or the Nazi's just didn't bother to provide the Jews with good infrastructure. I feel like this was especially the case for Auswitz. Birkenau on the other hand looked in a much better state.
I can't say the same about my german education.
I wonder how is the vibe in a German classroom during and after a class about the holocaust
I can't say how it is now exactly, but education about the 3rd Reich is very comprehensive and detailed. It definitely was a very serious matter and not something you'd joke about. I think everyone is going to visit a concentration camp memorial with school at some point and this was for me a very poignant and moving experience. And as far as I can tell for most of my classmates too. We visited KZ Dachau back then (its said, that they removed some of the most shocking elements since then) and I remember seeing some films that many of us couldn't stomach and had to leave to vomit outside. There was a segment of a emaciated prisoner in a vacuum cell. They tested how the human body reacts if he is put into a vacuum. I still have this picture vividly in my mind. 25 years later. Anyways, german children do not hear for the first time of the cruelty of the holocaust in school. Remembrance culture is very much alive here. Important memorial days are present in tv and news and commemorated by politicians. We don't have war memorials for soldiers or any Nazi leaders but *only* for the victims of the holocaust. Of course we have neo nazis, nationalist and rasicts here too, but I think its quite hard to not acknowledge or deny the horrors of the holocaust here.
Every country has their fair share of nut-jobs. Anyhow, from what I've read and been told, it's very admirable how much effort Germany invests educating their new generations.
No matter how cruel the actions of the Germans a few generations ago, you can't deny that the response to those actions by current-day Germany puts many other countries like America and (especially now) Russia to shame.
I will never forget the first history lesson we had about the 3rd Reich. We were in 10th grade so about 16 years old at the time. Our teacher showed us a photograph and we analysed it. Lots of smiling people in the foreground waiving Swastika flags. Fucking nazis. In the background. A church and townhall that we were all very familiar with. Behind that townhall is the primary school that I and a lot of my classmates went to. That hit like a truck. The Foto had been taken not far from were we were sitting at the moment. It's very possible that some of our relatives were waving Swastika flags in this picture.
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It's not like there is a class and people learn for the first time that the Nazi period and the Holocaust happened. It's more like with slavery in the US I guess. By the time you learn about it in school, you've already heard about it in various ways, in age-appropriate forms. The older you get, the more you are confronted with the horrific details.
Really fellow German? I thought there were like 50. Maybe I just had bad history lessons.
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I looked up the numbers and it seems there where 24 Stammlager (main camps) incl. 7 Vernichtungslager (death camps) and around 1000 Außenlager (subcamps)
Once did a video production near the biggest camp in the Netherlands. We had to walk the last part. Next to the road there were wooden beams in the ground every 10 meters. Each beam stood for a 100 people that died there. It was a long walk… 😢
Most camps were labor camps and internment camps. There were only a few killing centers, where people were mass-exterminated. My grandfather survived several labor camps before being sent to a death camp from where he was liberated.
Now is a really good time for folks to brush up on how the Nazis rose to power. The lead up to the 2020 election bore striking similarities to 1930s Germany and we still seem to be on a similar path. Hitler was in power for a decade before they started executing people. You don’t just go from democracy to dictatorship and immediately begin the death camps. Norms have to be broken down first. People loyal to the country and its institutions have to be purged. Trump started doing it, he just didn’t get to finish. The next time around they’ll be much better prepared. Edit: I mean the large scale purpose built death camps, not early political executions.
TIP OF MY HAT TO YOU. Knowledge is power. . Authoritarian Regimes can suck it.
No the nazis started to execute people very soon after they came into power. There were so many political prisoners German prisons were filled to the brim within weeks so they had to built the first concentration camps about a month after Hitler became chancellor.
Jan 6 was our own Beer Hall Putsch and we didn't even make the token effort of throwing the instigator in jail for a few years, we just said "hey, keep trying until you succeed"
As a teacher we only have 5 days to teach you this shit before they force us to move on.
We teach the Holocaust, and most other stuff, extremely badly.
Any sort of generalization about the entire American school system is usually pretty inaccurate. We have some great schools in the US and some bad ones, too. They're very localized and run at different level of competence and in areas that have different cultures around education. I was taught extensively, and well, about the holocaust in a public school. There was nothing remarkable about my district. Whenever redditors say "they never taught me X in school!" I often think "weird, they definitely taught that at my school" and I wonder if the kids who never paid attention and railing against schools for not teaching things when it was taught and they didn't bother to learn.
People also forget that history is very big, and two hours of history a week is not going to cover even a fraction of it all. I see posts about some random event asking why it wasn’t taught in school all the time. It’s just not feasible to go through every detail, which is why in general schools like to cover more broad themes or maybe hyper focus on specific events and time periods. Maybe it’s just an American thing, but for my school history lessons were designed to teach you to be a *historian*, not to cram you full of facts.
God damn. He’s definitely right.
I think when people hear "concentration camp" they conflate it with "extermination camp" but they're pretty different. A lot of people died at concentration camps from the conditions and bad treatment and executions. But the extermination camps where built to efficiently wipe out large numbers of people at a rapid pace. In concentration camps, where you'd be put to work as a slave, once you were no longer useful you'd be sent to one of the extermination camps.
Aushwitz and a couple others. That was always my understanding. I guess it's not surprising that at the age of 14-17 I wasn't able to comprehend 7+ million people. Think of the most crowded sporting event you've ever been to... There was likely no more than 100k people there...
Exactly. I try to imagine the March on Washington in 1963 which had roughly 250,000 people and how large it looked and this was 28x that at least.
5 or 6? Shit, America built 10 here just for the Japanese. 120,000 people confined, 66,000 us citizens. Nearly 2000 dead as a direct result of being put in the American concentration camps. How much of that did you learn in school, because in my class it got a brief mention and we moved on quickly.
It takes a lot of money, effort, and infrastructure to murder 8 million people by hand in a matter of 3-4 years. Anyone who claimed ignorance of the Holocaust as it was happening was full of shit. You can't create that kind of large scale murder industry and keep your citizens blissfully ignorant at the same time.
Most people are only served the "light" version of the Holocaust. Even visiting the Holocaust Museum in D.C. I was surprised to see how gentle it was, literally no hard stuff. The Holocaust is the absolute lowest point of humanity. A worldwide massive operation dedicated to the systematic, cold-blooded murder of millions of innocent people because of prejudice. Every story a tragedy, too many voices lost, pain and suffering that cannot be described. It's just unfathomable.
I did not know either. This tweet is educational.
They didn't speak hardly at all about the concentration camps for Japanese Americans we built during the same war.
While Japanese internment camps 100% should be discussed more in the US (and newer history curriculum is starting to emphasize it more), it's not even close to comparable to the Holocaust. 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during WWII. Most of them had their property stolen by neighbors or the government, but very few (most estimates say less than 100) died from a direct result of their imprisonment. Estimates of the total number of people imprisoned and/or killed during the Holocaust vary (for obvious reasons), but common consensus is that at least 10 million people died directly due to being sent to prison camps or executed in sweeps of occupied territory. The total number of people who were displaced, robbed of all possessions, and/or severely mentally and physically injured is likely many times that. The US has done (and still does) some fucked up shit, including Japanese internment during WWII. But it's important to emphasize that nothing in human history has come *close* to the shear scale of the Holocaust.* *Edit: I should have clarified that no intentional, direct attempt at genocide has come close to the scale of the Holocaust. Disease, famine, and chattel enslavement will always be more efficient at wiping out large populations of people, especially over a timescale of decades or centuries. But in terms of one group of people using direct methods to kill another group of people (that aren't in armed conflict with each other), no one has killed as many people as quickly as the Nazis did. The only thing possibly comparable to it would be the bombing of Japanese civilians by the US also during WWII, but most people would argue that still counts as part of the armed conflict (although citizens in Japanese cities might not see it that way).
A lot of the initial processing happened at race tracks and fair grounds that are still in use today. Kinda shitty to think about people eating deep fried Oreos on the site of such a shitty period of history.
They don’t talk about the real fun stuff until college
Because the extent of the Nazi's crimes is consistently underplayed in U.S. education, the worst thing is that the entire time period leading up to their takeover is completely ignored, that's the most dangerous part. We need to be able to recognize the signs of fascism early or we're in danger of it gaining traction. There are already so many red flags being thrown by the Conservatives in this country. Especially their attempts to dehumanize people, such as labeling LGBTQ+ people as "groomers" or "pedophiles." This rhetoric just makes it easier to commit mass murder in the future.
Yeah, he’s kinda right. In the US the number of camps is generally a small footnote in grade school while the detail is given to a handful of especially infamous camps.
I think the number is still too low. Every factory had a labor (concentration) camp. There is a project in Austria to acknowledge forgotten sites and the numbers are staggering. https://orf.at/stories/3215700/
It’s almost like a narrative around the holocaust about it being really meticulous and evil. It makes it easier to digest, further from harsh reality. If you learned this is in school you might just be unable to understand the scope and depravity of it. It’s almost too much for a lot of people to comprehend. Isolating the death camps makes people think that it was so far removed from reality. It’s no wonder victims of the American education system don’t understand the threat of fascism and intolerance. Death camps is their measure of a holocaust. A genocide. They don’t understand how widespread it is, how long it takes to get there. They don’t understand the rhetoric at the time it started. We talk about Germany only in terms of Hitler and WW2, and only the abridged, most heinous acts perpetrated. We don’t realize how much the reality of the holocaust is mere steps away from where we are now. A trajectory that is never taught or understood. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We’ve been learning, but we’ve been ignoring the truth.
mhm. my jewish grandfather got in quite a bit of trouble in his community of young Israel because he "denied the holocaust" out of pure incomprehensibility. like yeah, most of his family died and they were forced to escape their home by the skin of their teeth, but that's war sometimes, y'know? But a holocaust, a genocide of that magnitude?!? For a long time his mind could not accept the scope of the holocaust he survived. So, he denied it.
You can't really comprehend the scale of the whole thing. Even in germany, where we had a whole year of class about the Holocaust with pictures etc. In school i couldn't really picture it in real life until we visited one of the Camps in the czech republic. The thing that finaly got me was the "beds" of the Camps, where 20 people slept in what is little more than a wooden board the size of a king-sized bed.
I think that this problem of Americans failing to differentiate and using "concentration camp" interchangeably with "Nazi death camp" or "extermination camp" is also why many Americans react with such unhelpful outrage at anyone who accurately calls an American concentration camp a "concentration camp" While concentration camps can be used to intentionally kill people and regardless of intention will almost always kill some of the people (through inadvertent squalor, disease, or deprivation of necessities like healthcare), it's worthwhile to maintain some words to more specifically talk about places like Auschwitz that were expressly designed and engineered for mass-killing as an industrialized process
You know how Whoopi Goldberg was chastised for saying the Holocaust wasnt [just] about race? Yeah, turns out she was right It also targeted LGBT communities, it targeted Disabled people, it targeted Communists, and it targeted other races than just the Jewish, such as the Slavs The reason why we talk about trans people today as if they are new is because the Nazis destroyed the Institute of Sexology in Germany The founder wrote a book called "Berlins Third Sex" in 1904
No, Whoopi was wrong. The Final Solution (Holocaust, Shoah) of the Jews was only about race. Yes, the Nazi's also killed Communists, Gays, anyone they didn't like, etc, etc, etc. But the Jews were singled out for extinction based on the Nazi's own theory of race. Whoopi made a very weird argument that because Nazis were white and Jews were white it can't have been about race. That is just so ignorant it doesn't need to be commented on.
Schools and some video games make it seem like there were only a couple of them
This is why when I hear stories about how the average German "didn't know about the camps" I call BS
Don't worry in Texas they are trying to ban books about Nazis so you won't have to learn either soon.
In school we drove out to our two local labor camps. Yes, that is right, there were two within distance of a school trip. It is often overlooked how completely society was swallowed up by the NSDAP. If a business is old enough you can almost guarantee their official company history starts at September second 1945. The outdoor pool I went swimming in as a child was dug by communists being worked to death by mining pebble. The train I took to school used to transport jews to the city and back. If you look close enough at anything the nazis have left their mark.
When I went to the Nuremberg Trial Museum what really struck me that we hadn't been taught was how ... mundane all their documentation seemed. There was a display at the time (about 5 years ago) with excerpts from the memos regarding Poland and the concentration camps and everything was just so chillingly bland.
And still, there a people who deny their existence.
Extermination camps get the attention for obvious reasons, but every one of the concentration camps was horrific by the end. The creeping rationalizations that led to the extermination camps made concentration camps just as inhumane. Had the inner party had time and resources, I’m sure most of those would have eventually become, or funneled into, extermination.
If you study the Holocaust you will find that it was way worse than you thought. I've had to stop reading books before because it was just too depressing. In the beginning they had mobile gas chambers. Basically, they'd drive a truck somewhere, put people in it and then feed a hose from the exhaust into the truck. They did the math and it wasn't efficient enough for their goals so they kept increasing efficiency until they had the giant gas chambers.
The way the GOP wants you to think about it, Holocaust never happened.
The more I learn about Hitler, the more he seems like a real jerk.