The Holocaust
pickupyourwill
Posts: 3,135
I was just watching a show on the History Channel about it. WOW
You learn about it in school and you always know it happened--but the reality of it is still so disturbing every time you see, read, or hear something about it. It makes me stop in my tracks every time.
Feel free to share your thoughts on this ugly, tragic time in history.
You learn about it in school and you always know it happened--but the reality of it is still so disturbing every time you see, read, or hear something about it. It makes me stop in my tracks every time.
Feel free to share your thoughts on this ugly, tragic time in history.
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Some of the torturing posts were still there and the pit were they shot people. So sad.
One of many massacres that has plagued human history.
People suck :(
I think I saw Schindler's List around junior high. I still have never read the Diary of Anne Frank--guess I'll save that one for a rainy day and then stay off my anti-depressant for those 24 hrs--no use wasting good money on one pill that history's ugliness could wipe-out in one book.
And if "what goes around comes around", will Germany and those people involved ever be good with their karma? All those thousands of lives? Its so crazy to think about.
And here's another crazy thought. I have much German decent on both sides of my family. I'm sure if you traced my ancestry all the way back there, some distant ancester of mine was probably involved somehow in the killing of thousands of Jews. Were all of their future generations cursed in some way? Maybe not, but maybe so. Scary to think about.
sorry for the huge dose of depression y'all
I would recommend reading the diary of Anne Frank. Not only is it a picture of what it took to survive in unbelievable circumstances, it's also a picture of an adolescent girl with the dreams and problems of any teenage girl. Read one of the newer editions; while her father was still alive he did not permit some entries to be published. They are pretty normal things for a teenage girl to have thought about (sexuality, complaining about her mother) but he thought they were too personal. One of the really amazing things about the diary is that she was moved to write something for posterity. She wanted her experiences to be read by others so they would know how things had been during the war. She was also a very talented writer for someone so young. If she had lived, we would be reading her work because of her ability, not just because she left behind a diary.
Most of the Nazis died at the end of the war, and i would doubt that you have any "Nazi Blood". A better thought would be if any of your german anscestors helped the Jews, or fought against the Nazis like many germans did. (Ex: Operation Valkyrie). I think thats a much better thought for you to have
but I wholeheartedly agree!
i read the diary
saw the house
but nothing shook me to the core as the history channel show
how some people do not believe it happened at all is so beyond me
btw, what kind of antidepressant do you take
"what a long, strange trip it's been"
effexor. so far, so good. and you?
it seems like everyone's on something these days.
never heard of it
i've been taking paxil for eight years and i don't EVER want to stop
i didn't want to take away from the seriousness of your holocaust comments
i was just curious about how the effects can be felt (or not felt) if you skip a day/dose
"what a long, strange trip it's been"
Not true. After 1946, an "organisation" (German spelling/translation) was formed called Odessa. They faked some of the Nazis' deaths, like Martin Bormann, and helped them escape.
Also, the History Channel said something like thousands were accused, only some were tried, and even less actually convicted of the crimes. Descendants don't fall too far from the thinking tree. Its been almost a hundred years. What's scary is that while the dust has settled, hatred has still slowly been growing in some people. Hopefully, good will overcome evil this time around. Hopefully, there won't be a this time around.
I said most of the Nazis died. If you think that the Nazi army was only a couple thousand people then you are grossly mistaken. the army contained about 800,000 people. So saying that most of the Nazi's died is a fair statement. Say that say a few thousand nazi extremists survived, the population of Germany now is 81 million. The chance of having Nazi blood in you is extremely low.
dude, chill.
I just wanted to point out the ODESSA thing. I already know I don't have any Nazi blood anyway because my grandparents and great-grandparents were already in America by then. But the ones before that may have slaughtered some Indians or slaves :(
That's so crazy. How can people deny footage of piles of dead corpses. Atleast I think there was real footage of this?--am I confusing it with Schindler's list?
Historians and scientists should go back and dig up all the remains and evidence they can. I remember that many remains were burned right? That is mind-boggling that people think they can deny it. I do understand, though, how something like that can be so hard to talk about and remember and how it seems that any survivors may have been just as happy not talking about it to live out the rest of their lives in peace. They could have even been afraid for their lives upon talking about it.
The nice thing about all these people tracing their ancestors and family trees, is that now we can all finally map our origins. Everyone is on the map--not just today, but maybe even those in the past.
Historians and educators need to keep knowledge of the Holocaust alive for every generation--so that it doesn't get turned into heresy, and then thousands of years later end up like the Bible with half believing it and half not. If it all stays documented and preserved by trusted individuals then the evidence will always be there.
Eisenhower was adament about it, too. He went so far as to have Germans from local villages bury the victims in certain areas so they saw it and believed.
He said to preserve it because some bastard will try to say it never happened...his words.
Awesome. I have a newfound respect for him. I will definitely read up more on it.
reminds me of Nazi zombies. Damn i wish i wasn't at work....
Gotta love the rose-colored glasses!......focus on the good, should we?
Ten million people were slaughtered....try explaining your views to their descendents.
My grandparents, uncle and countless cousins perished in the Holocaust. My dad, my aunt and 2 uncles survived, but to this day, they worry about everything at the drop of a hat, and they protect their assets in fear that they all may be taken away from them again.
I applaud you for trying to see the positives here, but obviously, to me, they are very difficult to see!
No offense but you really have no idea what you're talking about. The majority of German citizens who weren't members of the Nazi party weren't out fighting the Nazis. There was never a unified resistance movement among German citizens nor is there evidence of any large scale protests regarding the treatment of Jews. In fact Nazi persecution of Jews was common knowledge in Germany starting with the Boycott of April 1, 1933, the Laws of April, and the Nuremberg Laws. Kristallnacht was a public pogrom carried out in full view of the entire population. German corporations used Jews as slave labor in most cases literally working them to death. Dachau was less than 10 miles away from Munich and there were 20 other camps inside of Germany where over 500k people were murdered. The German people were complicit in what was going on and thousands were active participants. Many Germans were anti semitic long before Hitler rose to power and the majority supported him and the Nazis right up until the very end.
Oh, but Bronx, you must think of the positive...think of bunny rabbits and cotton candy...that'll make the bitter aftertaste disappear!
But seriously, thanks for being a voice of reason!
Anyway, one of the best books on the subject I've read is this:
Jean Amery - At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities
Also, I've got a copy of Raul Hilberg's 'The Destruction of The European Jews' but I found it a bit too difficult to finish. It becomes a bit overwhelming after a while. I'm not sure if it's healthy to immerse yourself too heavily in this subject.
Actually, this book has been widely trashed by many of the leading authorities on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s ... r_response
'The overwhelming majority of American scholars have dismissed the book as racist, unscholarly and irresponsible. Its "mostly scathing" reception among historians,[2][32][33][34][35] who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and,[36] in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless".[3][4] The pre-eminent Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia.'
http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/crazygoldie/FINKEL1.html
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis:
A Critique of Hitler's Willing Executioners
by Norman G. Finkelstein
'...Hitler's Willing Executioners adds nothing to our current understanding of the Nazi holocaust. Indeed, recycling the long discarded thesis of a sadistic 'German mind', it subtracts from our understanding. The fact is that Goldhagen's book is not scholarship at all. Between the gross misrepresentations of secondary literature and the glaring internal contradictions, it does not deserve consideration as an academic inquiry. Yet the book did indisputably elicit an avalanche of praise. How does one account for this paradox and what is its significance? I want to address these questions in two areas: scholarship and politics. It bears emphasis that, however informed, the remarks that follow are speculation. They clearly belong in a separate category from the preceding analysis of the text itself.
[82] The Nazi extermination of the Jews spawned two parallel, indeed contradictory, bodies of literature. Historians working with the German materials have gradually reached consensus that most ordinary Germans did not share Hitler's obsession with the Jews. A broad range of solid scholarly research has concluded that popular German anti-Semitism neither accounted for Hitier's triumph nor was it the impetus behind the Final Solution. Focusing on the Jewish victims, a second corpus held as its major premise that popular German anti-Semitism was the mainspring of Hitler's success and the Jewish catastrophe that ensued. Ideological and politically driven, this field, currently known as 'Holocaust studies', is largely devoid of scholarly interest. (74) Indeed virtually every substantive work touching on relevant themes -- for example, Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Arno Mayer's Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? has landed on the 'Holocaust studies' index. (75) The division of labour between those working with the German and Jewish materials on the Nazi genocide was, until the publication of Hitler's Willing Executioners, mutually respected. For reasons not difficult to discern, neither side ventured too far afield: scholars in the German field steered clear of the political hornet's nest of Holocaust studies; mainly a propaganda enterprise, Holocaust studies ignored German scholarship. (76)
Firmly anchored in the Holocaust paradigm, yet scrutinizing not the Jewish victims but the German perpetrators, Goldhagen's book marks the first foray of a holocaust ideologue across the divide. The venture comes at a time when Holocaust studies is trying to entrench itself as a reputable field of scholarly inquiry. (77) Indeed, Goldhagen himself is a candidate for the first endowed chair in 'Holocaust and Cognate Studies' [83] at Harvard University. Although it obscures the meaning of the Nazi holocaust, Goldhagen's foray does cast a harsh if unwitting light on Holocaust studies. Seeking to reconcile an ideologically loaded thesis with radically incompatible empirical findings, Goldhagen mangles the scholarly record and gets mired in a morass of internal contradictions. What Hitler's Willing Executioners conclusively demonstrates is the intellectual barrenness of Goldhagen's field: ignoring as they do the findings of German scholarship, the claims of Holocaust ideologues prove unsustainable when put to an empirical test. (78)
Holocaust studies first flourished in the wake of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. This is the crucial political context for comprehending the Goldhagen phenomenon. It is a fact seldom noticed that, until the war, Israel and Zionism occupied barely a marginal place in American Jewish intellectual life. In the wake of Israel's victory and its realignment with us power, Jewish intellectuals suddenly discovered the Jewish state, now celebrated as a bastion of Western Civilization doing battle on the front lines with and, against all odds, smashing the Arab hordes. They also suddenly discovered the Nazi genocide. (79) A tiny cottage industry before 1967, Holocaust studies began to boom. This was not a coincidence. Basking as they were in Israel's reflected glory, American Jews had also to contend with increasing censure of its repressive policies. In these circumstances, the Nazi extermination proved politically useful but only as it was represented in a specific ideological account. Anti-Semitism, according to Zionist ideology, expresses the Gentile's natural and irreconcilable animus for Jews. The Nazi genocide marked in this reading the ineluctable culmination of Gentile anti-Semitic hatred. Thus interpreted, the Nazi extermination both justified the necessity of Israel and accounted for all hostility directed at it: the Jewish state was the only safeguard against the next outbreak of homicidal anti-Semitism and, conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism was behind every attack on, or even defensive manoeuvre against, the Jewish state. 'The Holocaust' is in effect the Zionist account of the Nazi holocaust. It was seized upon and methodically marketed [84] because it was politically expedient. Politically inexpedient was the scholarly consensus showing that most ordinary Germans did not elect or later support Hitler because of his anti-Semitism; indeed, that they opposed Nazi violence and did not approve the genocide.
In this light, key elements of Goldhagen's study take on new resonance. 'Without a doubt... the all-time leading form of prejudice and hatred within Christian countries', anti-Semitism, according to Goldhagen, 'has been a more or less permanent feature of the western world.' Effectively derogating all other forms of bigotry, Goldhagen thus endows anti-Semitism with a unique ontology, one that virtually defies historical analysis. We have already seen that, for Goldhagen, where anti-Semitism is not manifest it may yet be latent, and that anti-Semitism and even philosemitism 'tend strongly toward a genocidal "solution".' (80) Thus all Gentiles are potential if not actual homicidal anti-Semites. Going well beyond Zionist, let alone standard scholarly, analyses, Goldhagen purports that anti-Semitism 'is always abstract in its conceptualization and its source.' Goldhagen conceives anti-Jewish animus as 'divorced from actual Jews', 'fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish action', 'independent of the Jews' nature and actions', and so on. Indeed according to Goldhagen, anti-Semitism is strictly a Gentile mental pathology: its 'host domain' is 'the mind.' (HWE, pp. 34-5, 39, 42, original emphases)
A Manichean View
Seen through Goldhagen's effectively ultra-Zionist lens, in the dialectic of anti-Semitism, not only can Gentiles do no good but Jews can do no evil. Ever-guilty Gentiles and ever-guiltless Jews: these are the reciprocal faces of the supra-historical, Manichean paradigm in which Goldhagen situates the judeocide. It is worth emphasizing that the issue is not the Nazi genocide per se but rather Goldhagen's ideological framework. Indeed what makes Goldhagen's ideological framework seem so plausible is that in the Nazi holocaust the reality was, if not absolute Gentile guilt, at any rate absolute Jewish innocence. Yet his approach implies that Gentiles always harbour homicidal anti-Jewish animus and Jews never bear responsibility for Gentile animus. By this logic, Jews a priori always enjoy total moral impunity. The Jewish state is accordingly immunized from legitimate censure of its policies: all criticism is and must be motivated by fanatical anti-Semitism. If Gentiles are always intent on murdering Jews, then Jews have every right to protect themselves however they see fit; whatever expedient Jews might resort to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defence. Is it any wonder that many Jews in particular, apologists for Israel warmed to Goldhagen's thesis? (81)
[85] In this connection, one cannot but be struck by the parallels between the Goldhagen phenomenon and an earlier ideologically serviceable best-seller, Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, which maintained that Palestine was literally empty on the eve of Zionist colonization. In both cases, 1) a relative unknown claimed to scoop a stodgy, benighted academic establishment. Peters was an occasional journalist, Goldhagen a recent Harvard Ph.D. 2) the scholarly breakthrough was actually a caricatured version of a stale, Zionist thesis long repudiated in the academic literature. 3) purporting as it did to be an academic study, the book had to cite the documentary record and extant scholarship, both of which pointed to the opposite conclusion. Thus the evidence adduced in support of the novel thesis was either grossly misrepresented or else actually gainsaid the thesis. 4) prominent scholars with no specialized knowledge of the field helped to launch the ideological enterprise. Peters's book jacket featured fulsome blurbs by Lucy Dawidowicz ('the historical truth') and Barbara Tuchman ('a historical event'); Goldhagen's book jacket has blurbs by Simon Schama ('phenomenal scholarship and absolute integrity') and Stanley Hoffmann ('truly revolutionary... impeccable scholarship ... profound understanding). 5) once the ideological juggernaut achieved sufficient momentum, what little mainstream criticism there was subsided. (82)
Touted as the ultimate testament to the Nazi Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners in fact fundamentally diminishes its moral significance. For what is the essence of Goldhagen's thesis if not that only deranged perverts could perpetrate a crime so heinous as the Final Solution? Lurid as Goldhagen's account is, the lesson it finally teaches is thus remarkably complacent: normal people -- and most people, after all, are normal -- would not do such things. Yet the overwhelming majority of SS guards, Lingens-Reiner testified after the war, were 'perfectly normal men who knew the difference between right and wrong.' 'We must remember', Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi wrote, that 'the diligent executors of inhuman orders were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men.' Not deranged perverts but 'perfectly normal men', 'ordinary men': that is the really sensational truth about the perpetrators of the Final Solution. 'From our findings', observed the American psychiatrist responsible for the Nuremberg defendants, we must conclude not only that such personalities are not unique or insane, but also that they could be duplicated in any country of the world today. We must also realize that such personalities exist in this country and that there are undoubtedly certain individuals who would willingly climb over the corpses of one half of the people of [86] the United States, if by so doing, they could thereby be given control of the other half.
Indeed the men sitting in the dock at Nuremberg constituted Germany's, as it were, 'best and brightest'. Of the twenty-one Nazi leaders indicted at the Trial of German Major War Criminals, six scored 'superior' and twelve 'very superior' on the IQ test. Truly these were the 'whiz kids' of Germany. Or consider the Nazi elite murderers sitting in the dock at the Einsatzgruppen trial. 'Each man at the bar', recalled the Nuremberg Tribunal in its final judgement, has had the benefit of considerable schooling. Eight are lawyers, one a university professor, another a dental physician, still another an expert on art. One, as an opera singer, gave concerts throughout Germany before he began his tour of Russia with the Einsatzkommandos. This group of educated and well-bred men does not even lack a former minister, self-frocked though he was. Another of the defendants, bearing a name illustrious in the world of music, testified that a branch of his family reached back to the creator of the 'Unfinished Symphony'... (83)
'The most refined shedders of blood', Dostoyevsky long ago recognized, 'have been almost always the most highly civilized gentlemen', to whom the official criminal misfits 'could not have held a candle'. No doubt the intellectual class singing Goldhagen's praises much prefers his conclusion that, unlike the crazed Nazis, truly 'civilized gentlemen' do not commit mass murder.'
I read it when it came out and Im aware of the criticism, like I said it has its flaws but also from wiki it "served to refocus the debate on the question of German national responsibility and guilt", in the context of a reemergence of a German political right, which may have sought to "relativize" or "normalize" Nazi history.
hmmmm......did i say most citizens were fighting against the Nazis????? No. I said many were, don't quote me saying something i didn't say. MANY Germans were completely against how the Jews were treated, and that is a fact. I know that most Germans weren't out fighting the Nazis, i'm not crazy. Sorry for trying to bring out the point that there was some good in that time of evil, but you must only see the evil in things?
'Nuff said:
ENDORSEMENTS
"Among the dozens of reviewers of Hitler's Willing Executioners, Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman Finkelstein stand out for the seriousness and thoroughness with which they have undertaken their task. Even if I do not embrace every aspect of Finkelstein's conclusions concerning the politicization of the Holocaust historiography, I am grateful for these writers' courageous, conscientious and labour-intensive efforts."
-- Christopher R. Browning
Author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police
Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
"No serious student of history can afford to ignore these well-reasoned and withering reflections on the perils of pseudo-scholarship."
-- Arno Mayer
Author of Why did the Heavens Not Darken?
"All readers of Goldhagen's controversial book should take note of these much-needed studies, which, in line with serious historians, convincingly and authoritatively dismantle its arguments."
-- Eric Hobsbawm
Author of The Age of Extremes
"Finkelstein and Birn provide a devastating critique of Daniel Goldhagen's simplistic and misleading interpretation of the Holocaust. Their contribution to the debate is, in my view, indispensable."
-- Ian Kershaw
Author of Hitler
"Highly recommended to the many readers of Goldhagen's controversial book, especially those who were mesmerized by its hypotheses. Fortunately, in an open society all scholarship is subject to public scrutiny, and the advance of historical knowledge cannot do without rigorous criticism of the kind of provided in this important and courageous collection."
-- Volker R. Berghahn
J.P. Birkelund Professor of European History, Brown University
So sorry to read about those so close to you that perished. Your family should document everything--names, pictures, addresses, tombstones--EVERYTHING. Don't let the world forget about it. Never Forget.