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>Interesting to note that nazis killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews Wow. Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims? I

>Interesting to note that nazis killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews Wow. Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims? I thought Jews were the only significant group of victims, but that's clearly not true. It's also interesting to note that one legitimate government still exists in the world that funded the genocide of what many estimate to be a larger number of people than were killed in the Holocaust, but it's commonly not referred to as a genocide. Instead, it's "wartime deaths," or something else.[1] 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_tol... 2 - http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california-genocide-20160522-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california...

2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_the_Polish_nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_the_Polish... I only skimmed it but maybe because Jews suffered relatively more. > Note: Polish losses amount to 11.3% of the 24.4 million ethnic Poles in prewar Poland and about 90 percent of the 3.3 million Jews of prewar times. The IPN figures do not include losses among Polish citizens of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity. Maybe I an interpreting that wrong. But really not many Jewish people globally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country
- 6d6b73 9y ago
  What you don't consider is that these Jews were Polish citizens. They lived in that country for hundreds of years and became an integral part of the culture, science and economy. Do you consider Jewish-Americans not Americans? When you talk about people lost in 9/11 do you split people by race or religion? Now, when you consider that these 11.3% of the 24.4 ethnic Poles and 90% of 3.3 mln POLISH Jews died, can you still say that Polish losses were smaller?
rangibaby 9y ago
The American extermination of the Indians was Hitler's inspiration for his plan to exterminate the Slavs and take their land (Lebensraum). He wrote about it in Mein Kampf
adrianm 9y ago
Please don't jump to conclusions based on a misinformed comment on the internet. You can't compare the number of dead and conclude anything meaningful from that alone. Hatred of Jews in particular was a cornerstone of Nazi philosophy and they made the unique persecution of them a priority in government. From the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, to the Nuremberg Laws, to Kristallnacht, to complete disenfranchisement and seizure of all Jewish property and rights, to widespread European collaboration with the Nazis throughout the war which led to the extermination of countless Jews who were betrayed by their fellow citizens, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Zyklon B, and the systematic extermination of the Jewish people. If you want to learn more, visit a Holocaust museum. Better yet, talk to survivors. They are still here in NYC and around the world. But they won't be for much longer.
- mtempleton 9y ago
  >You can't compare the number of dead and conclude anything meaningful from that alone. Of course you can. The number of innocent people murdered is a very meaningful number. I never disagreed with the rest of what you said. I don't disagree with you that Jewish hatred was not a cornerstone of Nazi philosophy and that other European countries did not collaborate in anti-antisemitic policies. However, it's not appropriate to just throw aside the number of lives lost as "not meaningful alone." What other single metric would you select to be considered to be more meaningful?
  - DanBC 9y ago
    > What other single metric would you select to be considered to be more meaningful? Genocidal intent; proportion of the group killed.
dspillett 9y ago
> > Interesting to note that nazis killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews > Wow. Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims? A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution). A lot of the other groups were either attacked for more general reasons (being allied to the "wrong" group, not being Aryan enough, speaking against the Nazi regime, to give three examples) or abused generally simply because many the Axis command structure where generally abusive and encouraged that sort of behaviour further down the chain.
- 6d6b73 9y ago
  "A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas " What about other groups that were deliberately target like mentally retarded, Roma, homosexuals etc?. Why they are less important in this discussion? Is it only because they still have no voice in our society, and (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?
  - dang 9y ago
    Your comments in this thread stand out as provocative and inflammatory, as do some others'. We need you and everyone else not to comment this way on HN—not on any topic and especially not this one. HN is for reflective conversation. If we're going to talk about the Holocaust we need to do it that way, not this way ("what about", "didn't lift a finger", etc.)
    - 6d6b73 9y ago
      I don't see what's wrong with reminding people that there were other groups of people that we killed in WW2. I'm also surprised that "didn't lift a finger" is considered inflammatory. I admit that I allowed myself to be little provocative but I think it would be better not to censor comments, but instead moderate non-technical links from the forum before inconvenient discussions take place. If this is not a place for discussions like that, it's also not a place for links to articles that will start such discussion, right?
kasey_junk 9y ago
I certainly learned about other groups when I was taught about the Holocaust in high school. Other groups are mentioned in the Holicaust museum in Washington DC. I've seen movies about other persecuted groups & read books about them as well. Is it possible you are just not well versed on the subject? Further, any discussion on the topic requires special treatment of the Jewish holocaust because of its scope and how central it is to the politics of Naziism.
- mtempleton 9y ago
  >Is it possible you are just not well versed on the subject? Well I took required history classes in high school and university and scored well enough in those courses. This is what I was taught. That's what my statement is about. I was aware that other ethnic groups were targeted, but did not know the numbers in some cases were similar to those that Jews suffered. I had a very real understanding they were, by a far margin, the largest group to suffer.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    They were the largest group to suffer, by a factor of 3.
  - kasey_junk 9y ago
    Asking "Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims" is different than asking "why did my education not discuss victims of the Holocaust other than Jews". The latter is an interesting question and could potentially lead you to a better understanding of subjects you've missed. The former implies a systematic bias in the education about WWII history and assumes it based on a data point of one that goes against other data points (for instance my own). Another thing you may not be well versed on, implication of a systematic bias in teaching the Holocaust is a standard part of the bag of dirty tricks that many neo-Nazi, white nationalist and other anti-semitic groups employ to paper over the Holocaust. They trot it out in venues where more extreme versions of Holocaust denialism or outright Holocaust justification won't fly.
    - 9y ago
tptacek 9y ago
Possibly because the Poles were killed largely in genocidal military operations, such as large scale bombing of cities, and not (in numbers comparable to the Jewish people) in death camps.
- mtempleton 9y ago
  OK, well I don't claim to be an authority on this subject. It just really appears to look like two methods that reached the same result; though one sounds more unnatural than the other to us (i.e. in 2016 the US dropped 26,000+ bombs on Muslim-majority countries, but we have very few places resembling death camps, and none of them are--at least in name--racially motivated). Anyways, both I think we can all agree are bad. I just didn't know so many non-Jews died in the holocaust.
- 6d6b73 9y ago
  How about the fact that Polish Jews were Polish citizens. Why are people keep separating these people from their country? If something similar were to happen in the US, would we be talking about Jews, or Jewish Americans? These Polish Jews were as much citizens of the country are all other minorities. They were part of Poland for close to 600 years. Poland lost 20% of population during WW2. The fact that half of the lost population were of a different religion does not make them any less Polish.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    I'm not sure I understand the argument here. I agree: Polish Jews were Poles. It's possible we don't disagree at all. If you ask me why, at least in the US, there's so much attention paid to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, then the answer I'll give is that the Germans killed far more Jews, but also did so more deliberately and carefully, thus supporting that narrative. I didn't go to US public school --- I went to Catholic school --- but we were always taught about the other victims of the Holocaust. At 12 I'd have told you the Nazis targeted not just Jewish people but also "gypsies", gay people, and communists. We were, for instance, taught about Maximilian Kolbe, a name I remember principally from the story I was taught in grade school.
dang 9y ago
I'm going to assume that you're commenting in good faith but this is painfully close to trolling, so please don't do it here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191667 and marked it off-topic.
- mtempleton 9y ago
  This comes across as unreasonable to me. Of course I am not trolling. I am responding directly to the comment above me, and I'm not aware of why you would say something so accusatory. Yes, I could be wrong about this, and I'm aware this is a controversial topic now, but I'm not sure what you are asking me to "not do." I think disagreement should be met with facts to support why you disagree, not with insults.

2muchcoffeeman 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_the_Polish_nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_the_Polish... I only skimmed it but maybe because Jews suffered relatively more. > Note: Polish losses amount to 11.3% of the 24.4 million ethnic Poles in prewar Poland and about 90 percent of the 3.3 million Jews of prewar times. The IPN figures do not include losses among Polish citizens of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity. Maybe I an interpreting that wrong. But really not many Jewish people globally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country

6d6b73 9y ago
What you don't consider is that these Jews were Polish citizens. They lived in that country for hundreds of years and became an integral part of the culture, science and economy. Do you consider Jewish-Americans not Americans? When you talk about people lost in 9/11 do you split people by race or religion? Now, when you consider that these 11.3% of the 24.4 ethnic Poles and 90% of 3.3 mln POLISH Jews died, can you still say that Polish losses were smaller?

rangibaby 9y ago

The American extermination of the Indians was Hitler's inspiration for his plan to exterminate the Slavs and take their land (Lebensraum). He wrote about it in Mein Kampf

adrianm 9y ago

Please don't jump to conclusions based on a misinformed comment on the internet. You can't compare the number of dead and conclude anything meaningful from that alone. Hatred of Jews in particular was a cornerstone of Nazi philosophy and they made the unique persecution of them a priority in government. From the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, to the Nuremberg Laws, to Kristallnacht, to complete disenfranchisement and seizure of all Jewish property and rights, to widespread European collaboration with the Nazis throughout the war which led to the extermination of countless Jews who were betrayed by their fellow citizens, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Zyklon B, and the systematic extermination of the Jewish people. If you want to learn more, visit a Holocaust museum. Better yet, talk to survivors. They are still here in NYC and around the world. But they won't be for much longer.

mtempleton 9y ago
>You can't compare the number of dead and conclude anything meaningful from that alone. Of course you can. The number of innocent people murdered is a very meaningful number. I never disagreed with the rest of what you said. I don't disagree with you that Jewish hatred was not a cornerstone of Nazi philosophy and that other European countries did not collaborate in anti-antisemitic policies. However, it's not appropriate to just throw aside the number of lives lost as "not meaningful alone." What other single metric would you select to be considered to be more meaningful?
- DanBC 9y ago
  > What other single metric would you select to be considered to be more meaningful? Genocidal intent; proportion of the group killed.

dspillett 9y ago

> > Interesting to note that nazis killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews > Wow. Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims? A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution). A lot of the other groups were either attacked for more general reasons (being allied to the "wrong" group, not being Aryan enough, speaking against the Nazi regime, to give three examples) or abused generally simply because many the Axis command structure where generally abusive and encouraged that sort of behaviour further down the chain.

6d6b73 9y ago
"A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas " What about other groups that were deliberately target like mentally retarded, Roma, homosexuals etc?. Why they are less important in this discussion? Is it only because they still have no voice in our society, and (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?
- dang 9y ago
  Your comments in this thread stand out as provocative and inflammatory, as do some others'. We need you and everyone else not to comment this way on HN—not on any topic and especially not this one. HN is for reflective conversation. If we're going to talk about the Holocaust we need to do it that way, not this way ("what about", "didn't lift a finger", etc.)
  - 6d6b73 9y ago
    I don't see what's wrong with reminding people that there were other groups of people that we killed in WW2. I'm also surprised that "didn't lift a finger" is considered inflammatory. I admit that I allowed myself to be little provocative but I think it would be better not to censor comments, but instead moderate non-technical links from the forum before inconvenient discussions take place. If this is not a place for discussions like that, it's also not a place for links to articles that will start such discussion, right?

kasey_junk 9y ago

I certainly learned about other groups when I was taught about the Holocaust in high school. Other groups are mentioned in the Holicaust museum in Washington DC. I've seen movies about other persecuted groups & read books about them as well. Is it possible you are just not well versed on the subject? Further, any discussion on the topic requires special treatment of the Jewish holocaust because of its scope and how central it is to the politics of Naziism.

mtempleton 9y ago
>Is it possible you are just not well versed on the subject? Well I took required history classes in high school and university and scored well enough in those courses. This is what I was taught. That's what my statement is about. I was aware that other ethnic groups were targeted, but did not know the numbers in some cases were similar to those that Jews suffered. I had a very real understanding they were, by a far margin, the largest group to suffer.
- tptacek 9y ago
  They were the largest group to suffer, by a factor of 3.
- kasey_junk 9y ago
  Asking "Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims" is different than asking "why did my education not discuss victims of the Holocaust other than Jews". The latter is an interesting question and could potentially lead you to a better understanding of subjects you've missed. The former implies a systematic bias in the education about WWII history and assumes it based on a data point of one that goes against other data points (for instance my own). Another thing you may not be well versed on, implication of a systematic bias in teaching the Holocaust is a standard part of the bag of dirty tricks that many neo-Nazi, white nationalist and other anti-semitic groups employ to paper over the Holocaust. They trot it out in venues where more extreme versions of Holocaust denialism or outright Holocaust justification won't fly.
  - 9y ago

tptacek 9y ago

Possibly because the Poles were killed largely in genocidal military operations, such as large scale bombing of cities, and not (in numbers comparable to the Jewish people) in death camps.

mtempleton 9y ago
OK, well I don't claim to be an authority on this subject. It just really appears to look like two methods that reached the same result; though one sounds more unnatural than the other to us (i.e. in 2016 the US dropped 26,000+ bombs on Muslim-majority countries, but we have very few places resembling death camps, and none of them are--at least in name--racially motivated). Anyways, both I think we can all agree are bad. I just didn't know so many non-Jews died in the holocaust.
6d6b73 9y ago
How about the fact that Polish Jews were Polish citizens. Why are people keep separating these people from their country? If something similar were to happen in the US, would we be talking about Jews, or Jewish Americans? These Polish Jews were as much citizens of the country are all other minorities. They were part of Poland for close to 600 years. Poland lost 20% of population during WW2. The fact that half of the lost population were of a different religion does not make them any less Polish.
- tptacek 9y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the argument here. I agree: Polish Jews were Poles. It's possible we don't disagree at all. If you ask me why, at least in the US, there's so much attention paid to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, then the answer I'll give is that the Germans killed far more Jews, but also did so more deliberately and carefully, thus supporting that narrative. I didn't go to US public school --- I went to Catholic school --- but we were always taught about the other victims of the Holocaust. At 12 I'd have told you the Nazis targeted not just Jewish people but also "gypsies", gay people, and communists. We were, for instance, taught about Maximilian Kolbe, a name I remember principally from the story I was taught in grade school.

dang 9y ago

I'm going to assume that you're commenting in good faith but this is painfully close to trolling, so please don't do it here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191667 and marked it off-topic.

mtempleton 9y ago
This comes across as unreasonable to me. Of course I am not trolling. I am responding directly to the comment above me, and I'm not aware of why you would say something so accusatory. Yes, I could be wrong about this, and I'm aware this is a controversial topic now, but I'm not sure what you are asking me to "not do." I think disagreement should be met with facts to support why you disagree, not with insults.