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The Holocaust’s Great Escape
- andrewl 10y agoThis is a good article, but it's very difficult reading.
- akoster 10y agoIt's a difficult part of recent history that is important to be known and understood.
- yestoallthat 10y agoI often wonder what people actually have understood other than "the Nazis were bad". It's not enough to not be a racist, and it's not enough to have excuses for putting up with war and exploitation and double standards. We live in an age where narcissism and outer appearances are glorified more than ever, where showing off and fitting in are accepted and the only debate is on how to best do that, where the atrocities and all our complicity in them is a constant background hum, where tribalism and identity politics and other things are considered "natural", where people hide their own person behind pseudo-objectivity, surveillance is everywhere and eternal, robocops are around the corner, we engage in constant double think about "consumers" deserving the crap shoved onto them by corporations. It's all just human nature, it's "science" (with a deus ex machina always around the corner) -- I would say things like the above are the things which people like Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner or other people I would consider heavy weights on the subject pointed out as crucial, that is, when you asked them about the Nazis, they didn't talk about the content of their ideas so much as about their personalities, the personalities and excuses of their followers, obedience and a lack of connection with oneself and reality, and so on. In comparison to that stuff they all seemed to agree that the "content" of the Nazi ideology was just smoke and mirrors. Even their methods held more content than their content did, if you will. Sure, they needed enemies and a cult of their own supposed superiority, but any details beyond that were subject to change. Every time I learn about something like Abu Ghraib, I die a little inside. That is, I get diminished a little, and every following day I live on this planet without the perpetrators of those deeds being brought to justice I get diminished some more. That's bad enough, but the way most people don't even notice that is really scary. Please, don't take this as me snapping at you. I have no way of knowing how exactly you meant what you said, but I am reminded every single day of parallels to Nazi Germany that are perfectly accepted in polite society, so I had to rant a bit.
- mercer 10y agoOne way to look at it is that our civilized world is just a thin veneer covering up our animalistic, brutal nature. Another way to look at it is that we're a budding new form of life that seems rather distinct from what came before (consciousness, reason/science, etc.), and we're still very young and foolish and unable to fully utilize these new abilities. Of course, there's a real risk that we'll destroy ourselves, or that we'll remain stuck in some kind of local optimum, doomed to repeat ourselves and constantly wage ware against our evolutionary 'legacy code'. But as someone who can get quite depressed or cynical about all the bad things that are happening (over and over again, it seems), it helps me to focus on the amazing ways in which we did overcome our more brutal past.
- fennecfoxen 10y agoIf we're looking for ways to meaningfully understand Nazi-ism, and actually look beyond "omg bad" and "death camps" into the ideals and philosophies and the sociopolitical situation leading to the party's rise... well, you could do far worse than to start with Harper's "Who Goes Nazi?" (1941). http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/ http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
- hackuser 10y agoAlso, we need to look in the mirror. If we think of the people who were Nazis as somehow alien creatures, not ordinary people like us, we overlook a central point and a critical risk. Germany and Austria were a/the centers of science, culture, industry, and civilization; think of all those scientists, composers, industrialists, philosophers ... Humans - educated, modern people like us - did these things. A whole society provided all the services, political support, leadership, funding, engineering, manual labor, management, project management, architecture, transportation infrastructure and operations, IT (look up what IBM did), etc. etc. Imagine the scale of that project. Other whole societies helped or looked the other way; the U.S. turned away Jewish refugees from its shores, IIRC; the Roman Catholic church kept its head down, at best. (And others resisted, such as Denmark and, IIRC, the Eastern Orthodox church.) The human genetic code hasn't changed; we're biologically exactly the same as the Nazis, and millennia of humanity before that. Unless you believe in a supernatural power (and what good did that do?), nothing prevents the same (or other evils) from happening again except us. It doesn't happen randomly or instantly; we have societal norms and institutions. But we need to protect those norms and institutions and make sure we don't get to the point of doing evil; it's too late to stop by then. Rereading that, it sounds very grim; but we have all the power we need in our hands to stop it and more, to do good. I think of the people who built those institutions of freedom in the generations before us - in the U.S., for example, from Washington to Lincoln to MLK - making the world a better place. I think of the people who died in WWII - many 18 year old kids who died in pain - to give us the freedom we have today from Nazis, fascists, and religious oppression. What are we giving the next generation? (Sorry I got a bit carried away, but I don't mean it as a lecture; I feel pretty strongly about it.)
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- frostburg 10y agoDisgusting neo-nazi propaganda in the comment thread, of course.
- knodi123 10y agoDisgusting, but sociologically fascinating, too. And very valuable to keep around, in case anyone falls under the mistaken impression that the nazis were simply born evil.
- frostburg 10y agoOne gets the impression that there is a relatively small amount of people that spends a lot of time looking for related comment threads to pollute.
- paulmd 10y agoIt vastly exceeds even what you would expect from the 80-20 rule. I don't have a source for this, but I've read that about 0.7% of commenters are responsible for about 75% of the comments by volume, and they trend overwhelmingly negative.
- pjc50 10y agoThat suggests that banning a small number of people would greatly improve most comment areas.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoIt's probably not that simple. They'd just get a new account, marked green of course, but still someone "completely different" as far as comment history is concerned. You banned the account, but not the person. You could go further, by tracking the IP addresses that people post from, and banning new accounts from those IP addresses. But that's not foolproof, in an age of DHCP. It's also turning the hosting site into something that tracks you, which is a bit frightening.
- sharpray 10y agoNot everything you disagree with is "disgusting neo nazi propaganda". Josef Burg was a Jewish historian, not a nazi, who defended in court (in the Zundel case) that there were no gas chambers used to kill Jews. Paul Rassinier, an anti-nazi socialist who was detained in Auchwitz, also vouched that there were no gas chambers there nor any extermination going on. A Jewish former Auschwitz inmate Marika Frank Abrams said the same thing, and so did Jewish Auschwitz inmate Dr. Benedikt Kautsky. Roger Dommergue is another Jewish historian who defends there was no extermination program whatsoever, much less gas chambers. Robert Litoff is yet another Jewish historian who disbelieves the orthodox narrative of there being an extermination program. There are many other examples of anti-nazis who defend that there were no exterminations - Gilad Atzmon, Gerard Menuhin, Arnold Friedman, Esther Grossman, etc. Let's keep an open mind and not dismiss counter-arguments based on our prejudices. Many people, as I have shown, can disbelieve the holocaust (victor's) narrative without being a nazi (in fact, while even remaining anti-nazi).
- ranko 10y agoMaybe you should read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_Holocaust (Deborah Lipstadt, 1993)
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707529 and marked it off-topic.
- frostburg 10y agoYes, some of those people are simply wrong or "useful idiots", instead of being nazis.
- sharpray 10y agoDid you examine all of those people's claims? Even Raul Hilberg thanked revisionists for helping him come to terms with the fact there was no Hitler order (for the extermination), which he said there was in the first edition of his madterpiece, but then retracted in the second edition, among other corrections. Smugness and pretending to know what you don't does not help anything, especially to defuse racism and ulterior motives. Raul Hilberg understood that, which is why in his second book about the sources of the holocaust, he admits most of the narrative is based on testimonies and that there are no susbstantial documents to support it. He came a long way from his first impressions on his subject. I doubt you even knew he published a second book, with all due respect.
- pjc50 10y agoLet's not forget that some people tried to escape early, but were turned away by governments who didn't want to let in refugees. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267 https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- guard-of-terra 10y ago> violent series of pogroms > undertaken by the Czarist government This is a very serious claim right here. Any concrete data on "Czarist government" undertaking pogroms? The whole discourse right here reeks of 60's university left's "commies good, czars bad". This is when commies could murder the same number of people, off-war, on their not the most busy day, as the "Czarist government" during the whole early XX century.
- macintux 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Rus... ?
- guard-of-terra 10y ago> The pogroms are generally thought to have been either organized or at least condoned by the authorities. This view was challenged by Hans Rogger, I. Michael Aronson and John Klier, who couldn't find such sanctions documented in the state archives. So it's basically one big fat weasel. They can't confirm that authorities officially sanctioned anything and that's where "were behind" comes into existence. Proving that you "weren't behind" is impossible. However, I can see how, in the absense of documented sanctions, I can call the article's author, Matthew Shaer, a liar for his "undertaken" word. WRT the article. Half of Vilnus's population was Jews. How on earth could a community fear pogroms when being in such numbers? Might as well be the side doing the pogroming.
- EdHominem 10y agoBranching out from your usual immigrant-hatred for a change, or is this the norm for you?
- guard-of-terra 10y agoIf you lie about people long enough eventually you'll notice that they hate you.
- owlee 10y agoIf they were smart they could have avoided all that by taking advantage of the Haavara Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement But instead they had to miraculously survive eight gassings apiece and countless trips to the banks for decades afterwards to cash their survivor checks.
- frostburg 10y agoAnother old, dormant account comes back to post this drivel (and an holocaust denial youtube video a few days ago).
- watwut 10y agoThat claim is idiotic anyway. Majority of killed Jews were not from Germany. They were from conquered territories, notably from Eastern Europe, and given no chance to leave. German Jews were leaving in mass. Those who stayed were predominantly old, sick, poor or German patriots (e.g. were Jews by blood but not culturally with German families - shocked that they count as Jews too - that includes wwi fighters).
- mercer 10y agoI don't mean to be pedantic, just helpful: it's 'en masse', not 'in mass'.
- grepthisab 10y agoIt makes me think it's just one person with several accounts who came upon this thread. Hopefully not a regular who typically posts normal things and switched to these accounts for this topic.
- dang 10y agoWe've banned this account.
- tormeh 10y agoAs horrible as the Holocaust was, I think the thing from the Second World War that has scared me most is probably the Dirlewanger brigade[0]. I guess it's the difference between someone who kills you because that's his task, and someone who kills you because he likes it. Dirlewanger[1] was a cartoon villain. In a work of fiction he would have been easily dismissed as not believable, but he was very real. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Dirlewanger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Dirlewanger
- hackuser 10y agoHe was hardly the only murderous sadist; you can find many in the history of Holocaust camps. Look up Joseph Mengele, for example, who would perform sadistic medical procedures (called experiments, but really for sadism) on prisoners, including children, and without anesthesia. Too sickening to describe here.
- LordKano 10y agoJapan's Unit 731 did some truly horrific things too.
- neaden 10y agoLavrentiy Beria was the head of the NKVD (USSR secret police) during WW2 and also a serial rapist/murderer, the high ups including Stalin all knew, but considered him good enough at his job to essentially let it slide though of course they never let their female relatives anywhere near him.
- woodandsteel 10y agoIt's interesting talking in person with a Holocaust denier. They start out by explaining there is no evidence of the Holocaust, and in fact the Nazis killed few Jews. So you ask them why this idea is so widely believed, and they explain it is because the Jews have a vast conspiracy to mislead the world so as to gain favor for themselves and the state of Israel. So you ask them, "Have the Jews done anything else bad?" and their eyes light up, and they go into an long rant about one terrible thing after another the Jews have done, throughout the whole course of human history. And by the end they have made the Jews look so bad that it would have been a simply wonderful thing for Hitler to try to kill them all off.
- LordKano 10y agoI have observed two different kinds of revisionists. The first kind are simply Jew haters. After they say that they don't believe that the Nazis tried to kill all of the Jews, they either imply or say outright that they should have. The second kind has an Asperger Syndrome like fixation on details. If the true number was 5.4 million or 6.5 million Jewish people killed, they take exception to the "6 million" figure.
- gumby 10y ago> The first kind are simply Jew haters. I sadly can't deny that such people exist but it seems profoundly weird to me that anyone could just hate a bunch of random people they've never met. Some sort of wiring bug.
- pjc50 10y agoIt's passed on as oral culture through the family and environment they grow up in, it seems.
- InitialLastName 10y agoClassic pathway for hate
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- lisivka 10y agoIt suspicious when number of victims grows every year without any new data. Yad Vashem collected personal information of millions of victims[0], so let stick to it. Don't inflate numbers, please. [0]: http://yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en http://yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en
- hackuser 10y agoI've heard the same number, 6 million, my whole life.
- lisivka 10y agoI pointed to official site with same number, but I downvoted. :-/ Why?
- LordKano 10y agoI inflated nothing. I made reference to a hypothetical situation where either more or less were killed and then I mentioned the universally known number of 6 million.
- dang 10y agoWe've asked you before to keep nationalist politics off HN. Since you've done the opposite, we've banned this account. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13709403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13709403 and marked it off-topic.
- trogle 10y agoYes, I have had similar experiences and it's very off-putting to have "jew haters" muddy the waters of open exchange of ideas. What I am left with is this though: if there's no evidence other than eye witness accounts and a confession from Hoess extracted under torture, then it's a matter of choosing what to believe in. And if I have a choice, why would I choose to believe something so horrifying? Especially after so many things that once were accepted as true are officially no longer so: It was supposed to be 4.5 million at Auschwitz and now around 1 million and finally the guy running Auschwitz admitted on camera that what is shown to tourists (the gas chambers) have been build after the war to what it likely was before, since the Germans converted the building into an air raid shelter. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. I know it's hard getting into this topic because of it's gruesome nature and the implication that not believing in the official Holocaust means that somehow that makes you a Nazi or a Nazi defender in the eye of the public.
- tim333 10y ago>if there's no evidence other than eye witness accounts and a confession... There is a load of evidence other than that.
- trogle 10y agoMind sharing?
- yehi 10y agoBefore 1940 there are many documents, records, and letters from Jews in Europe. After that there were much less. No country received a huge influx of Jews. Where did they all go?
- tim333 10y agoPhotos - just google it. Personal records. My grandad's brother was shipped there and didn't just vapourize.
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