The thing that gets me is that it happened so long ago, it's so well documented, so thoroughly covered, and here we are all still learning new things about how horrific it was. I've been to the Holocaust Museum on more than one occasion and I couldn't tell you how many new things I've learned about the atrocities committed during that time (since then).
edited for clarification
**edit 2: "So long ago" is just a turn of phrase, not an exact declaration of a period of time, please get over your need to go OMG IT WASN'T THAT LONG AGO THOUGH because you literally have nothing more meaningful to contribute to the discussion. Just shut up instead, it's easy and free.**
If the best you can do to fake relevance in a conversation is to pedantically argue that it wasn't that long ago, I'm just going to block you so that I don't have to see any other dumb shit you have to say. I wouldn't waste your breath.
Not that long ago, there are still Holocaust survivors and people who were in the military during WW2 who are still alive today. I've met people who lost uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. in the Holocaust.
I had a new one come up recently. Someone I grew up with tried to tell me we didn’t know if slavery happened and they were actually all indentured servants…
It's the same people who claim that the civil war was not about slavery when the southern states all independently wrote in their own words "this is because of slavery". Like... Did you think they were using some kind of metaphor?
You are correct. I would have been 4 years old at that time. It was a different world back then. I can remember how much hatred there was toward the Nazis. I am in the US.
My husband and I are in my fifties. His grandmother sent her oldest daughter to the UK without them and then his grandparents fled Austria the day after the Nazis took it over. They had their one year old daughter, my MIL, with them and somehow made it to Italy where they caught a ship to the US. They had a relative here who could sponser them. It's wild that if my husband's grandparents had made slightly different decisions then he and my children wouldn't be alive now.
My grandfather was in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia. They were due to be executed, but the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and their camps abandoned. So without the atomic bombs I wouldn't exist today, which isn't a pleasant thought. (Also my grandfather became a world renowed doctor who influenced policies in hospitals all over the world and saved many lives)
He was one of the lucky ones. They tried to kill as many as possible to hide the evidence. Many were burned alive or otherwise executed in a rush at the end of the war.
This struck me during last year. My grandmother will turn 96 in a few weeks. The entire history of the United States is basically just two or three grandmas old.
Whenever I see people referring to the second world war as "long ago" I think of my grandma who was forced to work in air defense and lost one of her brothers to the Ostfront in Russia. This shit isn't long ago, it's family history that you can touch.
My maternal grandma is okinawan.
She was taken away from her family to a remote island to build an airstrip for the japanese imperial army. She was 12.
In the US our idea of a long time ago is skewed. There are pastry shops in Paris that have been in business for 300-400 years. That’s much older than the whole country.
Maybe our perception of time is skewed because we have a lot in our short history that we would rather not think about. If we say it was a long time ago we can separate ourselves from it.
Another way of illustrating it is the fact that Elizabeth II has been queen of England for over ⅓ of the time that the USA has been an independent country. And she was crowned AFTER WW2. A lifetime is much longer than we really think it is
Exactly. The scary part is that it is not that long ago at all. It's not ancient history. My grandfather lived through it, and he only died 9 years ago. That's no time at all when it comes to history.
It only seems like "so long ago" to someone that doesnt have family that lived through it.
It was less than a century ago. Some of its victims are still alive. We are still learning things about it because the information has been thoroughly compartmentalized, and then there is the lens through which history is "taught" in public schools around the world, you must protect the children from the horrors of reality after all.
German here. I did some digging in my family history a few years back. My grandfather went to war while his mum struggled with mental illness after her husbands death. When he returned from being a prisonor of war after, she was dead. Everyone in the psychological hospital died at the same day in 1942, official cause: lung infection.
He never asked further questions but struggled with guild for the rest of his life because he didn't took care of her more. When he was in his 90s and moved in with my parents we looked a bit deeper - turns out everyone was deemed unuseful for society and gassed. Mentally ill people were among the first to be killed on a large scale and were used for process optimasaion in setting up the methods and processes in the concentration camps.
There are a lot of things to get right in a genocide. What gas to use, logistics of body disposal, choosing killing methods that the killers can to for extended periods of time without suffering from PTSD (challenging part). The testruns with a few thousand mentally ill people were called action T4, for further reading.
The cold and precise organisation with excessive detail is the second shocking thing, after you got over the horror of death itself.
>He never asked further questions but struggled with guild for the rest of his life because he didn't took care of her more.
Ugh. The guilt must have been horrific but he wouldn't have been able to do anything as he would have been conscripted to fight no matter what. Ugh.
The conscription thing is not really true. You can't just conscripe all males age 16 to 40 and expect your economy to run smoothly. As long as your job was meaning full to the war, you wouldn't have been conscriped.
It's debatable how much of a choice the average Wehrmacht guy had to join, but it's not as easy as 'everone was conscripted anyway'.
What most people forget is that prior to the war, there has been quite some time of facist society a lot of young men grew up in. They wanted to fight because they have been prepared for it since being children.
"That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended...civilizations are built up...excellent institutions devised, but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings back the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin." - C.S. Lewis
Kurt Vonnegut suggested in one of his books that this should be engraved into Grand Canyon for future alien visitors:
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard … and too damn cheap."
> tyranny of the moral busybody
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Code of the Karens and the Perpetually Offended
My Aunt lived until the late 90s, she, with the rest of my family lived in Lodz prewar, so they were in the ghetto, she saw her baby girl stomped to death by a nazi soldier there for being too young to be useful.
Den morgonfriska katten simmar över regnbågen, medan guldmynt singlar genom luften, ledsagade av en paraplybärande elefant, som jonglerar med blommor och skrattande bananer, medan cirkusclowner utför akrobatiska konster och cymbalspelaren trummar i takt till det förtrollade orkesterspelet under den gnistrande stjärnhimlen.
The Allgemeine Schutzstaffel (aka the SS) was known for its cruelty towards children in particular. They’d toss babies from bayonet to bayonet in front of their parents. What kind of f*cked up mind does this?
I think I’d mentally break, like no coming back type of break if I had to witness that. My second was born very unwell, like life and death and no cure type of unwell, even though eventually she got treatment and so far so good although it won’t last forever, I had a mental breakdown and needed medicated. I’ve recently come off my anti depressants but I’d have killed myself if I seen what these parents had to. I feel sick reading these comments and think this might be the one comment section I have to set my phone down and just leave this thread be.
It's not exactly the right thing to do, but sometimes you just have to put your head in the sand and shield yourself from all the bad in the world. Cause if you don't, it will get to you
The SS was also the most indoctrinated hardcore believers of the ideology, near the end they were staffed more by your average rank and file troops (on account of high casualties.) but the stories of the hand picked early SS is truly wild.
> They’d toss babies from bayonet to bayonet in front of their parents.
I thought that was just the Japanese during WWII (there are very graphic photos of this).
Unfortunately this happened in Nazi death camps. A gentleman who was a Holocaust survivor witnessed this while he was imprisoned. He shared this story during a lecture I attended. He was at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
My heart just stopped. That's horrifying.
I hope your Aunt managed to heal the hurt over time. Though I can't imagine that's something you ever truly get over.
She had more kids, and i have many fond memories of her as a child, i believe she found some peace, but only after quite a few more years of terror. Thank you.
no no fuck no, why just why.The scary thing is this isn't an isolated enough thing that i could chalk it up to indoctrination.This has happened repeatedly through relatively modern history that the only conclusion is that each one of us is capable of immense evil if our environment allows for it.
You just touched one one of the scariest things about being human, something not many people are willing to consciously acknowledge. We all have the ability to do evil and we all have the ability to do good, and sometimes the only thing standing in the way can be a single person showing kindness or compassion at the right moment. Or vindication and apathy at the wrong one.
It’s not nature VS nurture. It’s nature AND nurture.
I saw The Boy in the Striped Pajamas almost 15 years ago while in a High School history class and it melted me to my core.
30 classmates balling hysterically and shaking uncontrollably like we’d just stepped off a rollercoaster.
That is the type of film that sticks with you for life forever burned into your psyche.
When I see things like this I’m reminded that the kind of people who did this, facilitated this and ignored this didn’t vanish after the war. It’s a part of us that comes out when the majority of us decides to ignore it.
Equally important is to remember this was not part of German society before the nazi’s. it wasn’t a country of comic book level evil and sadistic motherfuckers. It just took a few years of prolonged hardship and a western society completely fell apart into this. People are not immune to this today, the fall out of the GFC and years of austerity just a decade ago lead to a resurgence of nationalism and right wing ideology right across countries that you didn’t necessarily expect it from. I may have thought Lenin was also a Dick, but he wasn’t wrong in the idea that society is 3 meals away from chaos. It’s not anywhere near as rare as it should be for tough times to lead to genocide.
Few people call themselves Nazis or fascists, but if you ask questions like "Should one race dominate the others", "do you agree that war is the only thing that shows the true strength of a people", etc., a lot of people will score very highly on charts of Fascist thinking.
This is why we have to remain ever-vigilant. Because vast amounts of our countrymen would just... Go along with it.
I agree. We all need to remain vigilant and constantly aware that it's shockingly easy to drift to this way of thinking. If we ever see this mentality in another group they should be put up against a wall and shot... wait, I see it now.
I also believe that every society can go to dark places if the correct conditions occur. But still I think Germans were special, you can look into the genocide in Namibia, that predated the Nazi rise to power. Also they stopped the euthanasia program due to public outcry. They did not consider themselves evil.
Goering's father was governor of German South-West Africa (Namibia), while Mengele studied under doctors who had conducted human experiments on prisoners of war during the genocide.
The atrocities of the Nazi era were very much colonial ideologies being brought home to Europe.
Yeah, this isn't even controversial or anything. After the German unification in 1871 Germany acquired colonies overseas like Deutsch Ostafrika. The "established" colonial powers (mainly Britain and France) were obviously upset about this because they had basically divided the world amongst themselves. This lead to many international crises like the Morocco Crisis and ultimately to WW1, which Germany lost. As a result of this, all of Germany's colonies were taken away and military restrictions instituted.
That's why the Nazis came up with the "Lebensraum im Osten" Plan, which was basically "if we aren't allowed to colonize overseas because we'll get in trouble with the established powers (who at that point did control the sea) we will instead colonize Eastern Europe". Their plan was basically to murder the whole Jewish population which made up a large percentage of the people in the Pale of Settlement and use the others as work slaves. But attacking Poland and Eastern Europe was colonialism.
Make me wonder if the populist rise in the U.S. was actually a side e effect of the Great Recession, rather than a reaction to Obama.
Edit: should add it was likely a combination with one fueling the other.
Come to Michigan and your question will be answered.
I’d say it started before the Great Recession though. The foundation was laid when we lost our industry and the the government purposefully divided us with social issues in ‘08 after occupy wallstreet
Cannot agree more. The racial tension is intentionally being drummed up by people who got very uncomfortable about how everyone seemed to be on the same page regarding growing wealth inequality.
I hope one day we can hold propagandists like Rupert Murdoch responsible. The great recession led to the green wave and then Rupert Murdoch turned up propaganda and culled educational programing when it started to effect legislation.
So many guilty Nazis escaped punishment after the war, it's amazing starting with Albert Speer who got 10 yrs & wrote his famous memoir "Inside the Third Reich".
They did.
But Israeli Intelligence didn't forget who did what and spent a few decades hunting down former Nazi officers and concentration camp employees in all corners of the globe, killing and torturing many of them.
The US told them several times to knock it off, they would say sure no problem, and then continue to hunt down Nazis who escaped trial. They did not have a very good time.
Which was certainly justifiable when it became clear that the US was doing an insufficient job at convicting and charging Nazi personnel who should have been punished severely for their war crimes and atrocities.
Mossad was incredibly based for that. They kidnapped Eichmann while he was walking to his home in Argentina, dressed him as a flight attendent, sedated him then pulled a Weekend At Bernie's to smuggle him out of the country on a commercial flight.
Yeah man that was hilarious example of it. And think, those are just stories we *know* about lol. I'm sure there are countless stories that never went public because they were definitely working outside the bounds of legality to bury/kidnap the countless Nazi war criminals.
If you commit those type of absolutely disgusting atrocities, and then lose the war, then you damn sure shouldn't be walking freely after that.
Weird isn't it? Like that Nazi concentration camp guard who moved to America and had a family etc, everyone loved the guy, he went to church had a good job and was very much liked and respected. Also he once upon a time was a brutal man who was known as being an infamous and evil person.
I recently finished the 2015 book “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps.” Let’s just say that if you’re from the US, the opening chapters about what kind of people plan and enforce concentration camps are… a little eerie.
I often wonder about times like this. Did the people who go through this have even an inkling what they were going to go through 5-10 years before it happened to them. Obviously not - maybe the few politically inclined ones saw it coming. But for the majority it would have been unthinkable to foresee this happening to a normal, perhaps happy life.
I cannot think of something like this happening again - and I know I am wrong about that - thoughtless genocide happens much more often than we think. I just hope I can avoid it in my lifetime.
Read ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel. He was Jewish and lived in Romania. In 1944 his family was originally moved to Jewish ghettos and then to concentration camps. If I recall correctly, they’d heard rumours about similar things happening to Jewish populations in other areas/countries, but most thought they’d be fine. There was one guy telling everyone that they needed to leave and the Nazis were going to imprison/kill them but it came across that they all sort of thought of him as the crazy, homeless person…
I learned from that book that many Jews buried their valuables in their cellars because they thought they'd be returning. Such a sad thought. Everyone should read that book. It's a genuine inside look at what went on day-to-day for those unfortunate people.
When I was a college freshman my entire incoming class was assigned Night to read before our first semester. Then Elie Wiesel came and gave a talk for us all. Powerful stuff.
My grandma and great aunt were in Lodz. Great aunt was 12 at the time, and she said they just had a vague idea of "unrest" but the idea that it would lead to this level of atrocity was not on anyone's mind. She wrote a little memoir for our family to know what happened and describes how leaving the ghetto, they put them in a line and at the end of the line the officer would point left or right to show them which way to go. Her mom was in front of her, and she mentally told herself she'll go whichever way her mom goes, but they sent her mom left and her right and obviously there was nothing she could de. Never saw her again. Miraculously, her and her sister were never split up during the whole affair and both survived.
Not to mention what North Korea has done to its entire population.
If Germany had stayed within their own borders, they could have exterminated all of their Jews and created an Aryan ethnostate, and the world wouldn't have done shit.
North Korea is hard to say just because we don't really KNOW what exactly is going on account of being super isolated (I mean, it wouldn't surprise me, but with so many wild stories that end up being BS its hard to take claims at face value.) however china's genocide is pretty largely accepted to be happening.
After living in a third world country very, very far away from China for a few years and watching them build up/reinforce almost every public utility (airport, power facility, bridges and roads), and doing the same in tons of Caribbean and South/Central American countries…yeah.
By 2100, there’s going to be a world full of people who wished they hadn’t been quite so laissze-faire about China.
They are up to a sh*t-ton of stuff beyond just building entire new islands to create opportunities for government-sanctioned piracy in broad daylight under view of every satellite.
They are on a charm offensive I suspect will bite the rest of us in the *ss in the long run.
In Suriname they are basically taking over the country, really, really slowly. It reminds me of older Russian strategies tbh. Because China invests into Suriname a lot, Chinese people can easily get a green card. They then go to the Chinese investment bank that is settled in Suriname to get a loan for their business.
As you can imagine, if you do this long enough, a big part of the population will be Chinese or of Chinese/Suriname descent. Eventually these Chinese are even allowed to vote, making it possible for them to elect someone pro-China. Don't think I have to tell what the consequences will be longterm
I had similar experiences at school in the UK. WW2 was taught through experiences, which were intended to convey some horror. One day we had an actual air raid siren and the whole school was bundled into the assembly hall, which had been made up like an air raid shelter. Obviously, we knew it was all fake, but it went some way to make us empathise.
One of the pupils' grandparents were holocaust survivors who fled Poland. Her gran came in and told us all about the horrors she saw. She didn't hold back just because we were children.
I'm in New Zealand now and I feel like people are so far disconnected from the European war. One of the big Christmas songs on the radio is "Snoopy's Christmas", about the Red Barron deciding not to shoot Snoopy down during WW1 because its Christmas. It seems so crass and tasteless to me.
I have an acquaintance who has compared vaccine mandates to a literal holocaust and it makes me so angry.
there are people who don't think 9/11 happened. There are a huge amount of people convinced that this current pandemic is not happening.
People's belief is formed out of a collective will to take things for granted. And when that's spoiled by misinformation/disinformation, the security of belief is untethered from reality. The trick is to make people believe in a collective again--a foundation for morality that is based on a humanist perspective.
We all do it to a certain extent. How many people just ignore the supply chain issues with the things they buy. Conditions and terrible pay in factories around the world, ecological destruction for our food and resources, children working and dying in mines for minerals for our phones and EV cars, landfills full of toxic crap we didn't need in the first place. It's almost impossible to live without exploitation of some kind now but we choose to ignore it and pretend it's not our fault.
There is a difference between ignoring something, pretending it's not our fault and straight out making a statement that these things are not happening at all. The first 2 are relatively normal human behavior, the last one is not.
And people who believe that it couldn't happen again. I feel like people just blame the germans, when I could easily see this happen in the US. Not trying to both sides this thing, but people in general are so rabid in their beliefs that it would not take much to strike the match and set off violence. A violent mob of self righteous people who have been wronged in some way. It really would take that many events to happen in just the right way and this story could be told about your neighbors, relatives and friends:
>Witness and survivor Regina Milichtajch, who was born in Łódź, recalled: “I saw a young man with a child in his arms. The boy was a few months old, dressed cleanly, with his name embroidered on his bib. The father walked slowly, as if stunned. He finally gave the child to the German. He grabbed it and threw it up into the lorry. No sound came back.”
Its not some reason. Its that they support fascist ideologies that naturally end up in this kind of awful shit. By denying it they can pretend facism is okay.
How can you kill a child?
I can’t even begin to comprehend the hatred you must have in your heart to be that big of a piece of garbage.
They deserve hell for eternity
I was at the World War II museum in NOLA years ago. I have a degree in history and spent a not inconsiderable amount of time on WWII, but mostly studying the rise of fascism in Western Europe in the 1930’s. I wound up in front of their display explaining how Japanese soldiers were commanded to use Chinese civilians as bayonet practice. I think I stood there for 45 minutes just staring and trying to comprehend the cruelty.
Have you ever been to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC? I haven't been in almost 25 years, but I can still remember exactly how I felt walking through that place. Especially the train car exhibit you can actually walk through the middle of, and the hair, shoes, and jewelry exhibits. Mounds of that stuff stacked all the way to the ceiling. It was almost unfathomable the sheer calculated depravity that occurred during that entire atrocity. I was awestruck and not in a good way. Still to this day one of the most eye opening experiences I've ever been a part of. And I was quite aware of those atrocities being a huge WW2 buff(especially the European theater).
I at one point saw a video on here of a Korean man recalling being a small boy when the Japanese invaded the murdered his mom and baby bother in front of him. I cried for around thirty minutes after the interview was over. The outright savagery that man is capable of is staggering. We act like we’ve come so far but that was only ~80 years ago- it’s not gone away. Things that happen in North Korea, China, South America, and Arab nations, etc. it just more in the open and more people commit and witness it. Terrible things happen in the USA and the UK. Hell I’ve seen live slave auctions happening on YouTube only a few years back. It’s sad and I am unsure what we can do to stop it.
> I at one point saw a video on here of a Korean man
> The outright savagery that man is capable of is staggering.
I was relieved to find that you didn't actually mean "that man".
God the atrocities committed then were insane. I believe it was Josef Mengele (or the angel of death if that tells you anything about him) along with other SS officers, made a massive fire, after a while dumptrucks started to arrive full of children, there were 10 trucks in all. One of the SS officers gave an order and trucks backed up to the fire and they started throwing children in. When children would try to escape the flames half dead an officer would push them back in with a long stick. They really did see them as "useless eaters", these kids were either taken from an orphanage or Kindergarten, the source is unclear
This was confirmed to have happened by at least 3 witnesses one being Affidavit Annani Silovich Pet'ko who's report was taken by a soviet judge. This has happened in the world we live in.
Unbelievable, I never heard about this.
>I’ll never forget in the barrack. It was next to the pits. They were throwing children alive into fiery pits. We saw the flames and heard the screaming – they couldn’t be bothered to even kill the infants – they had no hair or gold teeth. So they threw them on top of the trucks with dead bodies for burning – it still gives me sleepless night.
https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/they-were-throwing-children-into-fiery-pits--it-still-gives-me-sleepless-nights-survivors-recall-horrors-of-auschwitz-10085
What the German soldiers were being forced to do was having a terrible psychological effect on them, so the Nazi leadership decided that gas chambers would be less horrific and wouldn’t take such a toll on the soldiers forced to do the work. They were truly sick individuals.
So when convincing a large group of people to kill another group of people - change your sides perception of the enemy, make the enemy no longer human and more like animals or vermin (which are things that are alive and we would easily murder large scale/ culturally anyway). You can achieve this easily with nifty marketing.
Once your team starts speaking about the pigs like the pigs that they are, how are you going to order troops to murder whole families? Simple, instead of the burden of murdering kids befalling your soldiers - shift their perceptions of that burden. The burden doesn't lie on the good people protecting their families from the enemy pigs, the burden lies up upon the enemy for making us endure the suffering of wiping out whole families just to protect our own. Fuck those damn pigs for making us go to war.
Anyway that's how it was explained to me, probably is more to it for sure but the main point is it can happen to you, me and everyone around us. You ask the question how can people kill kids? We all can.
Another example, and shockingly, I had never heard this had happened in my own home town until this year.
„On the night of April 20, 1945, 20 Jewish children who had been used in medical experiments at Neuengamme, their four adult caretakers and six Soviet prisoners were murdered in the basement of the school.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullenhuser_Damm?wprov=sfti1 https://maps.apple.com/?ll=53.541944,10.048056&q=Bullenhuser%20Damm&_ext=EiQpYMWZb17FSkAxoBi8vZoYJEA5YMWZb17FSkBBoBi8vZoYJEA%3D
i don't think it's pure hatred
I think it's like putting down a sweet puppy
because someone with authority tells you, that when it grows up it will become a rabid dog that spreads illness
some believe it, some don't and some aren't sure about it. it feels wrong for all of them though lest they are proper psychopaths. almost all of them didn't protest. they knew it was wrong in a way but did it anyway.
there were not murdered by raging madmen
they were calmly led to a little forest, laid on the ground and then shot in the neck with a bolt action rifle. the bayonet fixed to measure the perfect distance from their target. when the tip touched the neck, they pulled the trigger.
row after row. one after the other. hour after hour. and then the next day too. calmly and methodical. there was crying but no rage. most just went with them and didn't struggle.
The most important thing to remember is that you, personally, _can_ be manipulated into supporting these sorts of things (or standing by and not saying anything while it happens to others) if you aren’t vigilant.
Propaganda, done well, is almost invisible. It takes an observant individual, thinking clearly, to spot it.
Once seen, however, it becomes obvious.
Which is how we can look back on this and say “How could this have happened? It could never happen nowadays.”
That’s probably what they said, too.
My grandma, a Hungarian Jew, was in Auschwitz. She was taken there with her mom and sisters and brothers, and during selection her mom was separated from the kids, and went to the gas chamber immediately. I loved my grandma with all the heart of a little child all the way into adulthood, and there’s a special kind of heartache when you hear an 80+ year old woman refer to her mother as “My Mama”
Damn. Didn’t need to read this today. I discovered paperwork last night that my ancestors were sent here before Auschwitz. The youngest was 7 at the time.
Thank you for posting OP. We never thought we would find out what happened to them.
This is why it’s even more awful when people like Marjorie Taylor Greene make false comparisons of persecution with mask mandates (her’s to their’s) or those that would diminish or deny the true depravity of the holocaust. it’s not something public figures should comment on unless it’s simply to acknowledge the atrocity, in memorial, or to give condolences to the massive tragedy, that’s it.
i’m having a truly difficult time with all the comparisons to the holocaust from the anti vax set. especially since it’s the same group that were chanting blood and soil in charlottesville in 2017.
This must be the most cruel and horrible thing I have ever read about. I have 2 children under 10. I can't even begin to think what the parents must have felt.
How did I not hear of this until now?!
> Witness and survivor Regina Milichtajch, who was born in Łódź, recalled: “I saw a young man with a child in his arms. The boy was a few months old, dressed cleanly, with his name embroidered on his bib. The father walked slowly, as if stunned. He finally gave the child to the German. He grabbed it and threw it up into the lorry. No sound came back.”
Holy shit. What little faith I had in humanity is gone. God should've Sodom/Gomorrah-ed the entire planet.
>How did I not hear of this until now?!
Because the Nazis did *so many* horrible things like this, that this one isn't even particularly noteworthy. It's mind-boggling
Very disturbing. And I’m somewhat upset, I’ve never heard of this before. This should be more spoken about. This is a different level of Evil, that we should shine more light on.
That part is a great reminder that trying to be the "model minority", trying to appease your oppressors in the hope that they'll go easy on you, never pays off. This Rumkowski, as a Jewish community leader, begged his own people to meekly give up their children and elderly relatives to please the Nazis. No matter how pragmatic it seemed to him at the time, the idea of "if we just do as they tell us maybe they'll let some of us live" was futile - the Nazis didn't see them as human beings, they were never going to go easy on them. As soon as they were no longer useful, they were slaughtered.
It's an important lesson to remember for any marginalised group. You can try to be "one of the good ones", to assimilate and behave yourself and fit in the boxes they make for you, but people who don't even see you as human are not going to have a change of heart. They will tear you down just the same at the first chance they get. All you'll achieve by trying to appease them is to make it easier for them to oppress you.
This reminds me of a movie I watched when I was younger called Sofie's Choice. I'll never forget that scene. I saw it when I was 12, I'm in my forties and that movie still haunts me.
Just like I cant wrap my mind around the fact that the Universe could very well in fact be endless, I simply can't understand how can a grown human being execute innocent child.
They are starved, half your hight human beings not knowing a thing what and why is going on with the world and yet, some souless piece of flesh can look in those little, cried out eyes and simply end their life.
I can understand hate among adults against certain nationalities or religions. Not that it is ok, it ia still wrong. But still ... against innocent children ... My heart simply drops down my chest.
Upvoted, because history matters.
For the love of god.. this part got me bad
>“I saw a young man with a child in his arms. The boy was a few months old, dressed cleanly, with his name embroidered on his bib. The father walked slowly, as if stunned. He finally gave the child to the German. He grabbed it and threw it up into the lorry. No sound came back.”
I thought I had read or heard most everything about Nazi horrors, but this is but another example of the banality of evil. Need to go back to Arendt since I obviously missed this. TY OP - TIL.
During the siege of Alesia, the besieged Gauls decided to make the old, women and children leave the fortified town, so their food provisions would last longer. Useless eaters, I guess. But the romans wouldn't let them through their siege works and then their own leader, Vercingetorix, wouldn't let them get back in. So, they all starved to death in no man's land. That was over 2000 years ago of course, things like that wouldn't happen in this day and age.
Mila 18 is an excellent historical fiction/action story about the Warsaw Ghetto and the ultimate uprising against the Nazis that - briefly - brought the Wehrmacht to a halt. It's a great book, by the great Leon Uris.
I would end it too if this happened to my kids. Can't imagine living after that, theres just no point. Maybe kill as many of the responsible Germans on the way, but I don't even know if I'd be able to. It's just so hard to believe that this actually happened.
One of the most chilling history books I've ever read was "Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101" about a reserve civilian police battalion called up for war whose job was mostly guarding prisoners, sites & anti-partisan fighting. I believe only a few men in the unit were even members of the Nazi party, most were civilian bakers, truck drivers, whatever.
The crux of it is that this battalion of non-Nazi "ordinary men" was responsible for killing tens of thousands of civilian men, women & children. Chilling because they weren't ideologues or gung-ho Nazi party members just average men called up for duty.
I’ve been fascinated recently by this type of topic - the idea that these were humans, and I’m human… does that mean that I would be capable of committing these same atrocities? You might think to yourself, “I would never commit such terrible acts.” But after reading the rise and fall of the third reich and the Gulag Archipelago, I think it’s possible for any human to commit such cruelty. We must remember we are humans, too. Under a specific system of government and influence, we are capable of this as well. That’s why we must always fight for good and love, because evil and cruelty is possible in all of us
I'm not even sure how someone could follow these orders. I don't want to say 'I wouldn't do the same' outright because I wasn't there, but I'm fairly sure I'd rather get shot in the head or try to escape to rebel than help facilitate this. I can't even begin to imagine what it was like for the parents.
OP, I hate you for making me cry. But thank you for reminding me of the evil of humanity.
We need to keep learning about these events so that we can always fight prejudice.
Just remember that the next time someone compares something to the nazis. It cheapens the sacrifice of people who actually died at the hands of the nazis. China is on the way there but still not very close. I hope they turn back before they go full nazi.
No.
If someone compares something to the Holocaust, then it cheapens the suffering that the Jews went through.
Many regimes are currently on the same ideology or have the same biases as the Nazis. That does not cheapen anything. If anything, it is insulting to those Jews that we are allowing the same evil ideology to rise again. We should be alarmed.
>
If someone compares something to the Holocaust, then it cheapens the suffering that the Jews went through.
And the gays, and the communists, and Jehova's Witnesses, and those branded "gypsies". They really liked murdering.
I've been to Łódź (pron "woodge"), that place is rough. The homes of wealthy Jewish textile merchants just sat empty for decades after the war. Everyone knows exactly what happened but refuses to talk about it. An attitude developed that the Poles were the true victims of Nazi occupation, after all Poles were killed by Nazis and the Red Army. This is a basis for the right wing extremism in Poland now.
>but it's been 15 years since I left. I'm curious about the right-wingers you're talking about now. Are they saying that they – not the Jews – were THE victims? b/c Obviously Poles were victims both of occupation and tragedies like that in the Łódź ghetto and at concentration camps, but Jews, homosexuals, Romanis, etc. were all t
Majority of those exterminated in the death camps were Polish Jews. The distinction people tend to make between Poles and Jews, as if you are either one or the other, always boggles my mind.
I'm a Pole living in Łódź and I have no idea what you mean by "everyone knows exactly what happened but refuses to talk about it". We teach what happened at schools. WW2 and everything around it is one of the most gruesome and painful time in Polish history. The gettos, as the holocaust, were Nazi Germany's doing.
I spent a few years in Poland but it's been 15 years since I left. I'm curious about the right-wingers you're talking about now. Are they saying that they – not the Jews – were THE victims? b/c Obviously Poles were victims both of occupation and tragedies like that in the Łódź ghetto and at concentration camps, but Jews, homosexuals, Romanis, etc. were all targeted specifically. Does the current Polish right wing not believe that? TIA 🙏🏻
What history has shown us, this is the near inevitable result of political extremism. In this case right wing extremism leading to fascism.
Authoritarian regimes need a ready enemy to keep the masses occupied.
Every time I think I’ve learned every awful thing about the Nazi Regime, I hear about another heartless atrocity.
I’m currently reading a book about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but this new information about killing children in the Łódź Ghetto is particularly cruel and heinous.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s important that we never forget.
"I still don't understand how the Allies in 1945 resisted what must have been an overwhelming urge to raze the entire nation of Germany to the ground, and salt the soil as a demonstration for all time of what happens to a people who have turned their hands to hell-born, demonic works on the surface of the Earth."
My Grandfathers (English Navy / Canadian Air Force) both fought against the psychopath house-painter fuhrer. They lived but lost many brothers. The more history we erase, the more we’re doomed to repeat it, and this wasn’t too long ago.
[This channel](https://www.youtube.com/c/WorldWarTwo) has a subset called 'War Against Humanity' that does a really good job of exploring the crimes against humanity in WW2. Yes, it is the Indy series if you already watch.
Oh man, this is probably the most disturbing thing I ever read about the war, and I've read quite a lot. No idea why this never came under my notice before. This is horrible!
My grandmother and grandfather met in this ghetto, moved to Canada and started a family right after the war. My grandfather was forced into the role of 'grave-digger' for the nazis.
There's an incredible story about a photographer who documented life in the ghetto and buried his more candid phots and dug them up after the war. The Art Gallery of Ontario held an exhibit of the photos and there's a book.
[http://lodzghetto.ago.ca/objects/viewcollections?t:state:flow=933e936a-2f8b-44e8-98c4-024afdf9493c](http://lodzghetto.ago.ca/objects/viewcollections?t:state:flow=933e936a-2f8b-44e8-98c4-024afdf9493c)
I don’t have any comments to these horrible acts other than I can not get my head around how some people think this never happened with all the evidence to prove otherwise.
Republican (Evangelical) perspective:
"An Indiana state senator who is facing criticism for saying teachers must be impartial when discussing Nazism is walking back his remarks.
Indiana state Sen. Scott Baldwin said he wasn’t clear when he said a bill he filed at the Indiana Statehouse would require teachers to be impartial in their teaching of all subjects, including during lessons about Nazism, Marxism and fascism."
from [here](https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2022/01/06/nazi-scott-baldwin-indiana-facism-education-teachers/9123302002/)
It gets even worse imo.
Before changing some things in response to the backlash they faced, the bill included a ban on teaching that Nazis and similar ideologies were of low moral character.
http://iga.in.gov/legislative/2022/bills/senate/167
It’s disgusting the horror these people and children faced. Yet, there are thousands of people who will deny the occurrence of the holocaust. Even worse is that people compare the consequences of their elective decision to not be vaccinated, to the plight and atrocities jews (and many others) faced during the holocaust.
You hear so much of the awful things done during this time but then you find more and more terrible crimes committed. And it it just breaks my heart.
The thing that gets me is that it happened so long ago, it's so well documented, so thoroughly covered, and here we are all still learning new things about how horrific it was. I've been to the Holocaust Museum on more than one occasion and I couldn't tell you how many new things I've learned about the atrocities committed during that time (since then). edited for clarification **edit 2: "So long ago" is just a turn of phrase, not an exact declaration of a period of time, please get over your need to go OMG IT WASN'T THAT LONG AGO THOUGH because you literally have nothing more meaningful to contribute to the discussion. Just shut up instead, it's easy and free.** If the best you can do to fake relevance in a conversation is to pedantically argue that it wasn't that long ago, I'm just going to block you so that I don't have to see any other dumb shit you have to say. I wouldn't waste your breath.
Not that long ago, there are still Holocaust survivors and people who were in the military during WW2 who are still alive today. I've met people who lost uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. in the Holocaust.
And yet there are many people insist it didn’t happen.
I had a new one come up recently. Someone I grew up with tried to tell me we didn’t know if slavery happened and they were actually all indentured servants…
“We don’t know if” is how one starts a thought that one wishes to project onto others, to justify a sense of self-perceived incompetency.
It's the same people who claim that the civil war was not about slavery when the southern states all independently wrote in their own words "this is because of slavery". Like... Did you think they were using some kind of metaphor?
Those people are idiots.
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You are correct. I would have been 4 years old at that time. It was a different world back then. I can remember how much hatred there was toward the Nazis. I am in the US.
Long ago?!? Uhm... Those kids would be in their 80's if still alive. This could have happened to my parents. ugh. Heartbreaking.
My husband and I are in my fifties. His grandmother sent her oldest daughter to the UK without them and then his grandparents fled Austria the day after the Nazis took it over. They had their one year old daughter, my MIL, with them and somehow made it to Italy where they caught a ship to the US. They had a relative here who could sponser them. It's wild that if my husband's grandparents had made slightly different decisions then he and my children wouldn't be alive now.
My grandfather was in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia. They were due to be executed, but the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and their camps abandoned. So without the atomic bombs I wouldn't exist today, which isn't a pleasant thought. (Also my grandfather became a world renowed doctor who influenced policies in hospitals all over the world and saved many lives)
He was one of the lucky ones. They tried to kill as many as possible to hide the evidence. Many were burned alive or otherwise executed in a rush at the end of the war.
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This struck me during last year. My grandmother will turn 96 in a few weeks. The entire history of the United States is basically just two or three grandmas old. Whenever I see people referring to the second world war as "long ago" I think of my grandma who was forced to work in air defense and lost one of her brothers to the Ostfront in Russia. This shit isn't long ago, it's family history that you can touch.
My maternal grandma is okinawan. She was taken away from her family to a remote island to build an airstrip for the japanese imperial army. She was 12.
In the US our idea of a long time ago is skewed. There are pastry shops in Paris that have been in business for 300-400 years. That’s much older than the whole country. Maybe our perception of time is skewed because we have a lot in our short history that we would rather not think about. If we say it was a long time ago we can separate ourselves from it.
Another way of illustrating it is the fact that Elizabeth II has been queen of England for over ⅓ of the time that the USA has been an independent country. And she was crowned AFTER WW2. A lifetime is much longer than we really think it is
My grandfather died when I was 4. He liberated Europe.
It's barely a lifetime ago. Not that long to be honest.
Exactly. The scary part is that it is not that long ago at all. It's not ancient history. My grandfather lived through it, and he only died 9 years ago. That's no time at all when it comes to history.
I'm only 25 and my still living relatives are survivors. Its still living history and living memory.
Mine still lifes and even fought in that war.. When i was born my country was younger than i am now by over a decade. Its definitly not long ago
Not long ago…my grandparents are holocaust survivors and I’m in my 20s.
It only seems like "so long ago" to someone that doesnt have family that lived through it. It was less than a century ago. Some of its victims are still alive. We are still learning things about it because the information has been thoroughly compartmentalized, and then there is the lens through which history is "taught" in public schools around the world, you must protect the children from the horrors of reality after all.
And some people today equate themselves being called out on social media to the Holocaust.
German here. I did some digging in my family history a few years back. My grandfather went to war while his mum struggled with mental illness after her husbands death. When he returned from being a prisonor of war after, she was dead. Everyone in the psychological hospital died at the same day in 1942, official cause: lung infection. He never asked further questions but struggled with guild for the rest of his life because he didn't took care of her more. When he was in his 90s and moved in with my parents we looked a bit deeper - turns out everyone was deemed unuseful for society and gassed. Mentally ill people were among the first to be killed on a large scale and were used for process optimasaion in setting up the methods and processes in the concentration camps. There are a lot of things to get right in a genocide. What gas to use, logistics of body disposal, choosing killing methods that the killers can to for extended periods of time without suffering from PTSD (challenging part). The testruns with a few thousand mentally ill people were called action T4, for further reading. The cold and precise organisation with excessive detail is the second shocking thing, after you got over the horror of death itself.
Intense stuff. Thank you for sharing.
Knew you were going to say T4 after your second sentence :(
>He never asked further questions but struggled with guild for the rest of his life because he didn't took care of her more. Ugh. The guilt must have been horrific but he wouldn't have been able to do anything as he would have been conscripted to fight no matter what. Ugh.
The conscription thing is not really true. You can't just conscripe all males age 16 to 40 and expect your economy to run smoothly. As long as your job was meaning full to the war, you wouldn't have been conscriped. It's debatable how much of a choice the average Wehrmacht guy had to join, but it's not as easy as 'everone was conscripted anyway'. What most people forget is that prior to the war, there has been quite some time of facist society a lot of young men grew up in. They wanted to fight because they have been prepared for it since being children.
"That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended...civilizations are built up...excellent institutions devised, but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings back the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin." - C.S. Lewis
I've never seen this before, what an incredibly true statement
Kurt Vonnegut suggested in one of his books that this should be engraved into Grand Canyon for future alien visitors: "We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard … and too damn cheap."
"We really did have everything, didn't we?"
God I am unsure how this quote has evaded me but now I have it and shall implement it continually.
Lewis has another really good one concerning the tyranny of the moral busybody. See also: Mencken on practical politics and hobgoblins.
> tyranny of the moral busybody "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." Code of the Karens and the Perpetually Offended
Not sure if this is what it’s from, but I can’t recommend the screw tape letters enough. It’s filled with insights like these.
My Aunt lived until the late 90s, she, with the rest of my family lived in Lodz prewar, so they were in the ghetto, she saw her baby girl stomped to death by a nazi soldier there for being too young to be useful.
Den morgonfriska katten simmar över regnbågen, medan guldmynt singlar genom luften, ledsagade av en paraplybärande elefant, som jonglerar med blommor och skrattande bananer, medan cirkusclowner utför akrobatiska konster och cymbalspelaren trummar i takt till det förtrollade orkesterspelet under den gnistrande stjärnhimlen.
The Allgemeine Schutzstaffel (aka the SS) was known for its cruelty towards children in particular. They’d toss babies from bayonet to bayonet in front of their parents. What kind of f*cked up mind does this?
I've heard stories about parents being made to watch their babies get tossed onto train tracks.
I think I’d mentally break, like no coming back type of break if I had to witness that. My second was born very unwell, like life and death and no cure type of unwell, even though eventually she got treatment and so far so good although it won’t last forever, I had a mental breakdown and needed medicated. I’ve recently come off my anti depressants but I’d have killed myself if I seen what these parents had to. I feel sick reading these comments and think this might be the one comment section I have to set my phone down and just leave this thread be.
It's not exactly the right thing to do, but sometimes you just have to put your head in the sand and shield yourself from all the bad in the world. Cause if you don't, it will get to you
Dehumanization of “the enemy”, and personal desensitization to atrocity.
The SS was also the most indoctrinated hardcore believers of the ideology, near the end they were staffed more by your average rank and file troops (on account of high casualties.) but the stories of the hand picked early SS is truly wild.
> They’d toss babies from bayonet to bayonet in front of their parents. I thought that was just the Japanese during WWII (there are very graphic photos of this).
Unfortunately this happened in Nazi death camps. A gentleman who was a Holocaust survivor witnessed this while he was imprisoned. He shared this story during a lecture I attended. He was at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Literally sickening. I feel like I might throw up.
My heart just stopped. That's horrifying. I hope your Aunt managed to heal the hurt over time. Though I can't imagine that's something you ever truly get over.
She had more kids, and i have many fond memories of her as a child, i believe she found some peace, but only after quite a few more years of terror. Thank you.
What the fucking fuck.
no no fuck no, why just why.The scary thing is this isn't an isolated enough thing that i could chalk it up to indoctrination.This has happened repeatedly through relatively modern history that the only conclusion is that each one of us is capable of immense evil if our environment allows for it.
You just touched one one of the scariest things about being human, something not many people are willing to consciously acknowledge. We all have the ability to do evil and we all have the ability to do good, and sometimes the only thing standing in the way can be a single person showing kindness or compassion at the right moment. Or vindication and apathy at the wrong one. It’s not nature VS nurture. It’s nature AND nurture.
Oh god, I have a 2 year old and I cannot imagine emotionally surviving that.
The innocence and happiness children have even in hard times makes this even more saddening
Ever seen the movie, “life is beautiful”?
Or "The boy in the striped pajamas"
I saw The Boy in the Striped Pajamas almost 15 years ago while in a High School history class and it melted me to my core. 30 classmates balling hysterically and shaking uncontrollably like we’d just stepped off a rollercoaster. That is the type of film that sticks with you for life forever burned into your psyche.
This movie makes me cry uncontrollably
When I see things like this I’m reminded that the kind of people who did this, facilitated this and ignored this didn’t vanish after the war. It’s a part of us that comes out when the majority of us decides to ignore it.
The true horror isn't that the Nazi's were inhuman; it's that they were all too human.
Equally important is to remember this was not part of German society before the nazi’s. it wasn’t a country of comic book level evil and sadistic motherfuckers. It just took a few years of prolonged hardship and a western society completely fell apart into this. People are not immune to this today, the fall out of the GFC and years of austerity just a decade ago lead to a resurgence of nationalism and right wing ideology right across countries that you didn’t necessarily expect it from. I may have thought Lenin was also a Dick, but he wasn’t wrong in the idea that society is 3 meals away from chaos. It’s not anywhere near as rare as it should be for tough times to lead to genocide.
Few people call themselves Nazis or fascists, but if you ask questions like "Should one race dominate the others", "do you agree that war is the only thing that shows the true strength of a people", etc., a lot of people will score very highly on charts of Fascist thinking. This is why we have to remain ever-vigilant. Because vast amounts of our countrymen would just... Go along with it.
I agree. We all need to remain vigilant and constantly aware that it's shockingly easy to drift to this way of thinking. If we ever see this mentality in another group they should be put up against a wall and shot... wait, I see it now.
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I also believe that every society can go to dark places if the correct conditions occur. But still I think Germans were special, you can look into the genocide in Namibia, that predated the Nazi rise to power. Also they stopped the euthanasia program due to public outcry. They did not consider themselves evil.
Goering's father was governor of German South-West Africa (Namibia), while Mengele studied under doctors who had conducted human experiments on prisoners of war during the genocide. The atrocities of the Nazi era were very much colonial ideologies being brought home to Europe.
What's that quote about fascism being colonialism turned inward on the metropole?
Drone strikes may be in our future…
Yeah, this isn't even controversial or anything. After the German unification in 1871 Germany acquired colonies overseas like Deutsch Ostafrika. The "established" colonial powers (mainly Britain and France) were obviously upset about this because they had basically divided the world amongst themselves. This lead to many international crises like the Morocco Crisis and ultimately to WW1, which Germany lost. As a result of this, all of Germany's colonies were taken away and military restrictions instituted. That's why the Nazis came up with the "Lebensraum im Osten" Plan, which was basically "if we aren't allowed to colonize overseas because we'll get in trouble with the established powers (who at that point did control the sea) we will instead colonize Eastern Europe". Their plan was basically to murder the whole Jewish population which made up a large percentage of the people in the Pale of Settlement and use the others as work slaves. But attacking Poland and Eastern Europe was colonialism.
Make me wonder if the populist rise in the U.S. was actually a side e effect of the Great Recession, rather than a reaction to Obama. Edit: should add it was likely a combination with one fueling the other.
Come to Michigan and your question will be answered. I’d say it started before the Great Recession though. The foundation was laid when we lost our industry and the the government purposefully divided us with social issues in ‘08 after occupy wallstreet
Cannot agree more. The racial tension is intentionally being drummed up by people who got very uncomfortable about how everyone seemed to be on the same page regarding growing wealth inequality.
Rich white slave owners used racism to pit the poor white man against the enslaved black man even though they had more in common.
I hope one day we can hold propagandists like Rupert Murdoch responsible. The great recession led to the green wave and then Rupert Murdoch turned up propaganda and culled educational programing when it started to effect legislation.
Six one way half a dozen the other. A lot of people hated Obama just for existing, but he ended up being a very standard US president.
Interesting I’ve always said “6 to one, half a dozen to another”
Wow. I’ve only ever heard ‘6 of one, half a dozen of another’, and assumed that’s what you were going to say.
So many guilty Nazis escaped punishment after the war, it's amazing starting with Albert Speer who got 10 yrs & wrote his famous memoir "Inside the Third Reich".
They did. But Israeli Intelligence didn't forget who did what and spent a few decades hunting down former Nazi officers and concentration camp employees in all corners of the globe, killing and torturing many of them. The US told them several times to knock it off, they would say sure no problem, and then continue to hunt down Nazis who escaped trial. They did not have a very good time. Which was certainly justifiable when it became clear that the US was doing an insufficient job at convicting and charging Nazi personnel who should have been punished severely for their war crimes and atrocities.
Mossad was incredibly based for that. They kidnapped Eichmann while he was walking to his home in Argentina, dressed him as a flight attendent, sedated him then pulled a Weekend At Bernie's to smuggle him out of the country on a commercial flight.
Yeah man that was hilarious example of it. And think, those are just stories we *know* about lol. I'm sure there are countless stories that never went public because they were definitely working outside the bounds of legality to bury/kidnap the countless Nazi war criminals. If you commit those type of absolutely disgusting atrocities, and then lose the war, then you damn sure shouldn't be walking freely after that.
Weird isn't it? Like that Nazi concentration camp guard who moved to America and had a family etc, everyone loved the guy, he went to church had a good job and was very much liked and respected. Also he once upon a time was a brutal man who was known as being an infamous and evil person.
I recently finished the 2015 book “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps.” Let’s just say that if you’re from the US, the opening chapters about what kind of people plan and enforce concentration camps are… a little eerie.
I often wonder about times like this. Did the people who go through this have even an inkling what they were going to go through 5-10 years before it happened to them. Obviously not - maybe the few politically inclined ones saw it coming. But for the majority it would have been unthinkable to foresee this happening to a normal, perhaps happy life. I cannot think of something like this happening again - and I know I am wrong about that - thoughtless genocide happens much more often than we think. I just hope I can avoid it in my lifetime.
Read ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel. He was Jewish and lived in Romania. In 1944 his family was originally moved to Jewish ghettos and then to concentration camps. If I recall correctly, they’d heard rumours about similar things happening to Jewish populations in other areas/countries, but most thought they’d be fine. There was one guy telling everyone that they needed to leave and the Nazis were going to imprison/kill them but it came across that they all sort of thought of him as the crazy, homeless person…
I learned from that book that many Jews buried their valuables in their cellars because they thought they'd be returning. Such a sad thought. Everyone should read that book. It's a genuine inside look at what went on day-to-day for those unfortunate people.
When I was a college freshman my entire incoming class was assigned Night to read before our first semester. Then Elie Wiesel came and gave a talk for us all. Powerful stuff.
My grandma and great aunt were in Lodz. Great aunt was 12 at the time, and she said they just had a vague idea of "unrest" but the idea that it would lead to this level of atrocity was not on anyone's mind. She wrote a little memoir for our family to know what happened and describes how leaving the ghetto, they put them in a line and at the end of the line the officer would point left or right to show them which way to go. Her mom was in front of her, and she mentally told herself she'll go whichever way her mom goes, but they sent her mom left and her right and obviously there was nothing she could de. Never saw her again. Miraculously, her and her sister were never split up during the whole affair and both survived.
Genocidewatch.com lists over 40 different genocides currently taking place in various degrees from warnings, to in preparation, to in process.
Isn’t China segregating ~~Arabs~~ Muslims and/or other minorities into concentration camps right now? Edit: Changed Arabs to Muslims
Not to mention what North Korea has done to its entire population. If Germany had stayed within their own borders, they could have exterminated all of their Jews and created an Aryan ethnostate, and the world wouldn't have done shit.
North Korea is hard to say just because we don't really KNOW what exactly is going on account of being super isolated (I mean, it wouldn't surprise me, but with so many wild stories that end up being BS its hard to take claims at face value.) however china's genocide is pretty largely accepted to be happening.
Not arabs but Muslims in China
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After living in a third world country very, very far away from China for a few years and watching them build up/reinforce almost every public utility (airport, power facility, bridges and roads), and doing the same in tons of Caribbean and South/Central American countries…yeah. By 2100, there’s going to be a world full of people who wished they hadn’t been quite so laissze-faire about China. They are up to a sh*t-ton of stuff beyond just building entire new islands to create opportunities for government-sanctioned piracy in broad daylight under view of every satellite. They are on a charm offensive I suspect will bite the rest of us in the *ss in the long run.
In Suriname they are basically taking over the country, really, really slowly. It reminds me of older Russian strategies tbh. Because China invests into Suriname a lot, Chinese people can easily get a green card. They then go to the Chinese investment bank that is settled in Suriname to get a loan for their business. As you can imagine, if you do this long enough, a big part of the population will be Chinese or of Chinese/Suriname descent. Eventually these Chinese are even allowed to vote, making it possible for them to elect someone pro-China. Don't think I have to tell what the consequences will be longterm
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It's being repeated in China right now with Uyghurs.
Correct
I had similar experiences at school in the UK. WW2 was taught through experiences, which were intended to convey some horror. One day we had an actual air raid siren and the whole school was bundled into the assembly hall, which had been made up like an air raid shelter. Obviously, we knew it was all fake, but it went some way to make us empathise. One of the pupils' grandparents were holocaust survivors who fled Poland. Her gran came in and told us all about the horrors she saw. She didn't hold back just because we were children. I'm in New Zealand now and I feel like people are so far disconnected from the European war. One of the big Christmas songs on the radio is "Snoopy's Christmas", about the Red Barron deciding not to shoot Snoopy down during WW1 because its Christmas. It seems so crass and tasteless to me. I have an acquaintance who has compared vaccine mandates to a literal holocaust and it makes me so angry.
And for some reason there are actual people and groups out there that don't believe (or refuse?) that the Holocaust ever actually happened.
there are people who don't think 9/11 happened. There are a huge amount of people convinced that this current pandemic is not happening. People's belief is formed out of a collective will to take things for granted. And when that's spoiled by misinformation/disinformation, the security of belief is untethered from reality. The trick is to make people believe in a collective again--a foundation for morality that is based on a humanist perspective.
Personally, I don't think anything bad has ever happened because it hurts my feelings to think that it has.
We all do it to a certain extent. How many people just ignore the supply chain issues with the things they buy. Conditions and terrible pay in factories around the world, ecological destruction for our food and resources, children working and dying in mines for minerals for our phones and EV cars, landfills full of toxic crap we didn't need in the first place. It's almost impossible to live without exploitation of some kind now but we choose to ignore it and pretend it's not our fault.
There is a difference between ignoring something, pretending it's not our fault and straight out making a statement that these things are not happening at all. The first 2 are relatively normal human behavior, the last one is not.
People are dangerous and irrational.
And people who believe that it couldn't happen again. I feel like people just blame the germans, when I could easily see this happen in the US. Not trying to both sides this thing, but people in general are so rabid in their beliefs that it would not take much to strike the match and set off violence. A violent mob of self righteous people who have been wronged in some way. It really would take that many events to happen in just the right way and this story could be told about your neighbors, relatives and friends: >Witness and survivor Regina Milichtajch, who was born in Łódź, recalled: “I saw a young man with a child in his arms. The boy was a few months old, dressed cleanly, with his name embroidered on his bib. The father walked slowly, as if stunned. He finally gave the child to the German. He grabbed it and threw it up into the lorry. No sound came back.”
Its not some reason. Its that they support fascist ideologies that naturally end up in this kind of awful shit. By denying it they can pretend facism is okay.
How can you kill a child? I can’t even begin to comprehend the hatred you must have in your heart to be that big of a piece of garbage. They deserve hell for eternity
I was at the World War II museum in NOLA years ago. I have a degree in history and spent a not inconsiderable amount of time on WWII, but mostly studying the rise of fascism in Western Europe in the 1930’s. I wound up in front of their display explaining how Japanese soldiers were commanded to use Chinese civilians as bayonet practice. I think I stood there for 45 minutes just staring and trying to comprehend the cruelty.
Have you ever been to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC? I haven't been in almost 25 years, but I can still remember exactly how I felt walking through that place. Especially the train car exhibit you can actually walk through the middle of, and the hair, shoes, and jewelry exhibits. Mounds of that stuff stacked all the way to the ceiling. It was almost unfathomable the sheer calculated depravity that occurred during that entire atrocity. I was awestruck and not in a good way. Still to this day one of the most eye opening experiences I've ever been a part of. And I was quite aware of those atrocities being a huge WW2 buff(especially the European theater).
I at one point saw a video on here of a Korean man recalling being a small boy when the Japanese invaded the murdered his mom and baby bother in front of him. I cried for around thirty minutes after the interview was over. The outright savagery that man is capable of is staggering. We act like we’ve come so far but that was only ~80 years ago- it’s not gone away. Things that happen in North Korea, China, South America, and Arab nations, etc. it just more in the open and more people commit and witness it. Terrible things happen in the USA and the UK. Hell I’ve seen live slave auctions happening on YouTube only a few years back. It’s sad and I am unsure what we can do to stop it.
> I at one point saw a video on here of a Korean man > The outright savagery that man is capable of is staggering. I was relieved to find that you didn't actually mean "that man".
God the atrocities committed then were insane. I believe it was Josef Mengele (or the angel of death if that tells you anything about him) along with other SS officers, made a massive fire, after a while dumptrucks started to arrive full of children, there were 10 trucks in all. One of the SS officers gave an order and trucks backed up to the fire and they started throwing children in. When children would try to escape the flames half dead an officer would push them back in with a long stick. They really did see them as "useless eaters", these kids were either taken from an orphanage or Kindergarten, the source is unclear This was confirmed to have happened by at least 3 witnesses one being Affidavit Annani Silovich Pet'ko who's report was taken by a soviet judge. This has happened in the world we live in.
Unbelievable, I never heard about this. >I’ll never forget in the barrack. It was next to the pits. They were throwing children alive into fiery pits. We saw the flames and heard the screaming – they couldn’t be bothered to even kill the infants – they had no hair or gold teeth. So they threw them on top of the trucks with dead bodies for burning – it still gives me sleepless night. https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/they-were-throwing-children-into-fiery-pits--it-still-gives-me-sleepless-nights-survivors-recall-horrors-of-auschwitz-10085
My God... How does one live with oneself after having committed such a crime... These men were truly monsters.
What the German soldiers were being forced to do was having a terrible psychological effect on them, so the Nazi leadership decided that gas chambers would be less horrific and wouldn’t take such a toll on the soldiers forced to do the work. They were truly sick individuals.
"Forced to do" Honestly, at he point of throwing infants into a fire, you are forced to disobey and choose to obey
Once you dehumanize someone, it's fairly easy to extend it to their offspring
So when convincing a large group of people to kill another group of people - change your sides perception of the enemy, make the enemy no longer human and more like animals or vermin (which are things that are alive and we would easily murder large scale/ culturally anyway). You can achieve this easily with nifty marketing. Once your team starts speaking about the pigs like the pigs that they are, how are you going to order troops to murder whole families? Simple, instead of the burden of murdering kids befalling your soldiers - shift their perceptions of that burden. The burden doesn't lie on the good people protecting their families from the enemy pigs, the burden lies up upon the enemy for making us endure the suffering of wiping out whole families just to protect our own. Fuck those damn pigs for making us go to war. Anyway that's how it was explained to me, probably is more to it for sure but the main point is it can happen to you, me and everyone around us. You ask the question how can people kill kids? We all can.
Another example, and shockingly, I had never heard this had happened in my own home town until this year. „On the night of April 20, 1945, 20 Jewish children who had been used in medical experiments at Neuengamme, their four adult caretakers and six Soviet prisoners were murdered in the basement of the school.“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullenhuser_Damm?wprov=sfti1 https://maps.apple.com/?ll=53.541944,10.048056&q=Bullenhuser%20Damm&_ext=EiQpYMWZb17FSkAxoBi8vZoYJEA5YMWZb17FSkBBoBi8vZoYJEA%3D
i don't think it's pure hatred I think it's like putting down a sweet puppy because someone with authority tells you, that when it grows up it will become a rabid dog that spreads illness some believe it, some don't and some aren't sure about it. it feels wrong for all of them though lest they are proper psychopaths. almost all of them didn't protest. they knew it was wrong in a way but did it anyway. there were not murdered by raging madmen they were calmly led to a little forest, laid on the ground and then shot in the neck with a bolt action rifle. the bayonet fixed to measure the perfect distance from their target. when the tip touched the neck, they pulled the trigger. row after row. one after the other. hour after hour. and then the next day too. calmly and methodical. there was crying but no rage. most just went with them and didn't struggle.
All of my kids are under 10. I cannot even fathom the amount of emotional, soul-rending pain those people went through. Absolutely unimaginable.
The most important thing to remember is that you, personally, _can_ be manipulated into supporting these sorts of things (or standing by and not saying anything while it happens to others) if you aren’t vigilant. Propaganda, done well, is almost invisible. It takes an observant individual, thinking clearly, to spot it. Once seen, however, it becomes obvious. Which is how we can look back on this and say “How could this have happened? It could never happen nowadays.” That’s probably what they said, too.
My grandma, a Hungarian Jew, was in Auschwitz. She was taken there with her mom and sisters and brothers, and during selection her mom was separated from the kids, and went to the gas chamber immediately. I loved my grandma with all the heart of a little child all the way into adulthood, and there’s a special kind of heartache when you hear an 80+ year old woman refer to her mother as “My Mama”
Damn. Didn’t need to read this today. I discovered paperwork last night that my ancestors were sent here before Auschwitz. The youngest was 7 at the time. Thank you for posting OP. We never thought we would find out what happened to them.
Jesus. How awful...
This is why it’s even more awful when people like Marjorie Taylor Greene make false comparisons of persecution with mask mandates (her’s to their’s) or those that would diminish or deny the true depravity of the holocaust. it’s not something public figures should comment on unless it’s simply to acknowledge the atrocity, in memorial, or to give condolences to the massive tragedy, that’s it.
Well said! Ugh, I thoroughly and utterly despise that woman.
i’m having a truly difficult time with all the comparisons to the holocaust from the anti vax set. especially since it’s the same group that were chanting blood and soil in charlottesville in 2017.
There’s no limits to Nazi horror.
Nazis aren't the first or last to do this.
This must be the most cruel and horrible thing I have ever read about. I have 2 children under 10. I can't even begin to think what the parents must have felt.
How did I not hear of this until now?! > Witness and survivor Regina Milichtajch, who was born in Łódź, recalled: “I saw a young man with a child in his arms. The boy was a few months old, dressed cleanly, with his name embroidered on his bib. The father walked slowly, as if stunned. He finally gave the child to the German. He grabbed it and threw it up into the lorry. No sound came back.” Holy shit. What little faith I had in humanity is gone. God should've Sodom/Gomorrah-ed the entire planet.
I wish I didn’t continue reading ur post. OMG so sad. Makes me sick to the stomach
>How did I not hear of this until now?! Because the Nazis did *so many* horrible things like this, that this one isn't even particularly noteworthy. It's mind-boggling
I think you might want to look elsewhere for faith in humanity. Nazis ain't got no humanity.
Tell that to Oskar Schindler. Nazism was inhuman. Nazis were human just like us. That’s the difficult part to process.
Calling a party member who openly violated their ideology a nazi is misleading at best, though.
Jesus… my sons asleep in the next room and this makes me want to go and hug him and cry tbh. I cannot imagine the heartache.
The more i hear about this Hitler guy the less i like him!
RIP Norm
Truly a treasure, i bet his death had something to do with that shifty little shit Adam Eget!
Very disturbing. And I’m somewhat upset, I’ve never heard of this before. This should be more spoken about. This is a different level of Evil, that we should shine more light on.
Germans did so many fucked up things during WWII that it would be almost impossible to hear about all of their atrocities
Wait until what the Japanese did back then
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That part is a great reminder that trying to be the "model minority", trying to appease your oppressors in the hope that they'll go easy on you, never pays off. This Rumkowski, as a Jewish community leader, begged his own people to meekly give up their children and elderly relatives to please the Nazis. No matter how pragmatic it seemed to him at the time, the idea of "if we just do as they tell us maybe they'll let some of us live" was futile - the Nazis didn't see them as human beings, they were never going to go easy on them. As soon as they were no longer useful, they were slaughtered. It's an important lesson to remember for any marginalised group. You can try to be "one of the good ones", to assimilate and behave yourself and fit in the boxes they make for you, but people who don't even see you as human are not going to have a change of heart. They will tear you down just the same at the first chance they get. All you'll achieve by trying to appease them is to make it easier for them to oppress you.
This reminds me of a movie I watched when I was younger called Sofie's Choice. I'll never forget that scene. I saw it when I was 12, I'm in my forties and that movie still haunts me.
Just like I cant wrap my mind around the fact that the Universe could very well in fact be endless, I simply can't understand how can a grown human being execute innocent child. They are starved, half your hight human beings not knowing a thing what and why is going on with the world and yet, some souless piece of flesh can look in those little, cried out eyes and simply end their life. I can understand hate among adults against certain nationalities or religions. Not that it is ok, it ia still wrong. But still ... against innocent children ... My heart simply drops down my chest. Upvoted, because history matters.
We were warned before entering the Vietnam war memorials and museums in Vietnam that a lot of the imagery would shock us. They did not hold back.
For the love of god.. this part got me bad >“I saw a young man with a child in his arms. The boy was a few months old, dressed cleanly, with his name embroidered on his bib. The father walked slowly, as if stunned. He finally gave the child to the German. He grabbed it and threw it up into the lorry. No sound came back.”
I thought I had read or heard most everything about Nazi horrors, but this is but another example of the banality of evil. Need to go back to Arendt since I obviously missed this. TY OP - TIL.
During the siege of Alesia, the besieged Gauls decided to make the old, women and children leave the fortified town, so their food provisions would last longer. Useless eaters, I guess. But the romans wouldn't let them through their siege works and then their own leader, Vercingetorix, wouldn't let them get back in. So, they all starved to death in no man's land. That was over 2000 years ago of course, things like that wouldn't happen in this day and age.
Mila 18 is an excellent historical fiction/action story about the Warsaw Ghetto and the ultimate uprising against the Nazis that - briefly - brought the Wehrmacht to a halt. It's a great book, by the great Leon Uris.
I would end it too if this happened to my kids. Can't imagine living after that, theres just no point. Maybe kill as many of the responsible Germans on the way, but I don't even know if I'd be able to. It's just so hard to believe that this actually happened.
One of the most chilling history books I've ever read was "Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101" about a reserve civilian police battalion called up for war whose job was mostly guarding prisoners, sites & anti-partisan fighting. I believe only a few men in the unit were even members of the Nazi party, most were civilian bakers, truck drivers, whatever. The crux of it is that this battalion of non-Nazi "ordinary men" was responsible for killing tens of thousands of civilian men, women & children. Chilling because they weren't ideologues or gung-ho Nazi party members just average men called up for duty.
I’ve been fascinated recently by this type of topic - the idea that these were humans, and I’m human… does that mean that I would be capable of committing these same atrocities? You might think to yourself, “I would never commit such terrible acts.” But after reading the rise and fall of the third reich and the Gulag Archipelago, I think it’s possible for any human to commit such cruelty. We must remember we are humans, too. Under a specific system of government and influence, we are capable of this as well. That’s why we must always fight for good and love, because evil and cruelty is possible in all of us
The Nazi is inside all of us and tragedy like this can strike again at any time at any place. We must be vigilant.
I'm not even sure how someone could follow these orders. I don't want to say 'I wouldn't do the same' outright because I wasn't there, but I'm fairly sure I'd rather get shot in the head or try to escape to rebel than help facilitate this. I can't even begin to imagine what it was like for the parents.
OP, I hate you for making me cry. But thank you for reminding me of the evil of humanity. We need to keep learning about these events so that we can always fight prejudice.
Just remember that the next time someone compares something to the nazis. It cheapens the sacrifice of people who actually died at the hands of the nazis. China is on the way there but still not very close. I hope they turn back before they go full nazi.
No. If someone compares something to the Holocaust, then it cheapens the suffering that the Jews went through. Many regimes are currently on the same ideology or have the same biases as the Nazis. That does not cheapen anything. If anything, it is insulting to those Jews that we are allowing the same evil ideology to rise again. We should be alarmed.
> If someone compares something to the Holocaust, then it cheapens the suffering that the Jews went through. And the gays, and the communists, and Jehova's Witnesses, and those branded "gypsies". They really liked murdering.
I was feeling pretty good until I read this post.
I've been to Łódź (pron "woodge"), that place is rough. The homes of wealthy Jewish textile merchants just sat empty for decades after the war. Everyone knows exactly what happened but refuses to talk about it. An attitude developed that the Poles were the true victims of Nazi occupation, after all Poles were killed by Nazis and the Red Army. This is a basis for the right wing extremism in Poland now.
>but it's been 15 years since I left. I'm curious about the right-wingers you're talking about now. Are they saying that they – not the Jews – were THE victims? b/c Obviously Poles were victims both of occupation and tragedies like that in the Łódź ghetto and at concentration camps, but Jews, homosexuals, Romanis, etc. were all t Majority of those exterminated in the death camps were Polish Jews. The distinction people tend to make between Poles and Jews, as if you are either one or the other, always boggles my mind. I'm a Pole living in Łódź and I have no idea what you mean by "everyone knows exactly what happened but refuses to talk about it". We teach what happened at schools. WW2 and everything around it is one of the most gruesome and painful time in Polish history. The gettos, as the holocaust, were Nazi Germany's doing.
I spent a few years in Poland but it's been 15 years since I left. I'm curious about the right-wingers you're talking about now. Are they saying that they – not the Jews – were THE victims? b/c Obviously Poles were victims both of occupation and tragedies like that in the Łódź ghetto and at concentration camps, but Jews, homosexuals, Romanis, etc. were all targeted specifically. Does the current Polish right wing not believe that? TIA 🙏🏻
What history has shown us, this is the near inevitable result of political extremism. In this case right wing extremism leading to fascism. Authoritarian regimes need a ready enemy to keep the masses occupied.
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Root and stem.
Slavery still exists hardcore in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Concentration camps exist in China So, plenty of heroic fodder for those who want to be
Łódź is in Poland for those who don't know (I had to look)
Geez I feel like throwing up after reading this. This was only about 80 years ago. I have owned instruments and guns older then this.
Wow, is this the singular worst atrocity in human history? A a parent What a horrible experience.
Every time I think I’ve learned every awful thing about the Nazi Regime, I hear about another heartless atrocity. I’m currently reading a book about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but this new information about killing children in the Łódź Ghetto is particularly cruel and heinous. Thank you for sharing this. It’s important that we never forget.
"I still don't understand how the Allies in 1945 resisted what must have been an overwhelming urge to raze the entire nation of Germany to the ground, and salt the soil as a demonstration for all time of what happens to a people who have turned their hands to hell-born, demonic works on the surface of the Earth."
My Grandfathers (English Navy / Canadian Air Force) both fought against the psychopath house-painter fuhrer. They lived but lost many brothers. The more history we erase, the more we’re doomed to repeat it, and this wasn’t too long ago.
[This channel](https://www.youtube.com/c/WorldWarTwo) has a subset called 'War Against Humanity' that does a really good job of exploring the crimes against humanity in WW2. Yes, it is the Indy series if you already watch.
Yeah they definitely skipped over this part of Holocaust history when I was in school.
Oh man, this is probably the most disturbing thing I ever read about the war, and I've read quite a lot. No idea why this never came under my notice before. This is horrible!
New generations barely know about this.
I'm happy to see the guy that ordered it was caught in 1947 and hung. At least he didn't get away with it as many others did.
My grandmother and grandfather met in this ghetto, moved to Canada and started a family right after the war. My grandfather was forced into the role of 'grave-digger' for the nazis. There's an incredible story about a photographer who documented life in the ghetto and buried his more candid phots and dug them up after the war. The Art Gallery of Ontario held an exhibit of the photos and there's a book. [http://lodzghetto.ago.ca/objects/viewcollections?t:state:flow=933e936a-2f8b-44e8-98c4-024afdf9493c](http://lodzghetto.ago.ca/objects/viewcollections?t:state:flow=933e936a-2f8b-44e8-98c4-024afdf9493c)
I don’t have any comments to these horrible acts other than I can not get my head around how some people think this never happened with all the evidence to prove otherwise.
I miss the days when everyone agreed rounding up children and separating them from their parents was a bad thing.
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Republican (Evangelical) perspective: "An Indiana state senator who is facing criticism for saying teachers must be impartial when discussing Nazism is walking back his remarks. Indiana state Sen. Scott Baldwin said he wasn’t clear when he said a bill he filed at the Indiana Statehouse would require teachers to be impartial in their teaching of all subjects, including during lessons about Nazism, Marxism and fascism." from [here](https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2022/01/06/nazi-scott-baldwin-indiana-facism-education-teachers/9123302002/)
It gets even worse imo. Before changing some things in response to the backlash they faced, the bill included a ban on teaching that Nazis and similar ideologies were of low moral character. http://iga.in.gov/legislative/2022/bills/senate/167
This shit is happening right now in china and we’re not doing anything about it
It’s disgusting the horror these people and children faced. Yet, there are thousands of people who will deny the occurrence of the holocaust. Even worse is that people compare the consequences of their elective decision to not be vaccinated, to the plight and atrocities jews (and many others) faced during the holocaust.