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It's weird that the article explicitly mentiones various groups that were killed/deported to German concentration camps across Europe and commemorated by the st
by gpjanik 4y ago
It's weird that the article explicitly mentiones various groups that were killed/deported to German concentration camps across Europe and commemorated by the stones, but does not mention the second largest one - Poles. German historical policy tends to not include Poles as victims the 1939-1945 Germany, but in spite of that, there are multiple stones commemorating them in today's Berlin.
- tokai 4y agoApparently putting down the stones in Poland is met with resistance. If poles want to commemorate killed poles with these stones they will have to take the initiative.
- kybernetyk 4y agoIn Germany there has been a lot of resistance too. Including court cases etc.
- durnygbur 4y agoIt's their way of commemorating their victims and somehow in the process the second largest group slipped through. I don't want their way of commemorating their victims in my home Poland.
- kybernetyk 4y ago[flagged]
- arlcode 4y agoThat wasn't what I was (and still is) taught in school in Germany. The blame was always squarely put on Germany. It was always stressed that most of the German population had more than an inkling of what was going on and many agreed. The first time I heard the term "polish extermination camps" was a few years ago when the Polish Government outlawed it. So I'm really at a loss here.
- brodo 4y agoWhere did you get that idea? I'd say if you'd claim something like that in public in Germany, you can kiss your career goodbye.
- Lichtverschwend 4y agoWhich German government do you mean ? There were 2 at that time.
- zaat 4y agoThe German government had reiterate the German responsibility continuously, in words, diplomatic action and payments for the surviving victims. The Polish government however has decided lately on line of denying their share in the war crimes, effort that includes anti-historic legislation.
- jebronie 4y agoNobody in germany generally calls them "polish death camps" and nobody thinks poles are in any way to blame. Even if you called them polish deaths camps, people would assume you mean the Nazi concentration camps on occupied polish land.
- fs111 4y agoThis is absolute nonsense. We are all very much aware that it was us, the Germans, who did this.
- gpjanik 4y agoThe Poles I'm refering to were killed in Germany and the stones commemorating them exist. My comment is saying that the article is not mentioning them. There are stones like this in Poland commemorating Jews, e.g. former German city of Breslau, nowadays Wrocław. I believe the resistance came from the fact that Poles were not organizers of those killings/deportations and it was expected to be misunderstood by people unfamiliar with history (e.g. stone commemorating murdered Jews in a city that was formerly German but nowadays Polish, or Jews murdered in Poland by Germans). Important to mention: there were killings (not supported by the state) of Jews and systemic antisemitism (clearly supported by the state) in Poland conducted and organized by Polish people before and during the war (this was, though, not supported by the state at that time), but incomparable in scale.
- waffleiron 4y ago> My comment is saying that the article is not mentioning them. If you care about this, the "article" is wikipedia, and in the time you wrote this posts you could have added it already. edit: I was quick to comment, the article is protected. So unless you already have an active Wikipedia account, you'd have to request an edit on the talk page.
- gpjanik 4y agoYou're generally right, I can take on it and I will - but before I do it, I wanted to point out that as a consensus of work of many people, it ended up in mentioning petty criminals, but not tens of thousands of people who were expelled, prosecuted, killed, etc. because of their nationality. It's hard to tell if this is some anti-Polish resentiments of one or many of the authors, or just extremely low level of historical knowledge, but something tells me it's the first.
- rob74 4y agoI wouldn't say that "historical policy" doesn't include Poles, but yes, the popular view of the Holocaust is dominated by the organized extermination of the Jews (and some other groups) in the concentration camps. Non-Jewish Poles were also Nazi victims, but according to https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/polish-victims https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/polish-vic..., they were mostly murdered during the invasion of Poland or immediately after, so it's much more difficult to estimate the total number of victims. Also, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims, Soviet civilians and POWs are the second and third largest groups (not that it matters much, especially since Poland is a much smaller country).
- kybernetyk 4y agoGermany has a very interesting views on poles. While Germans living in Poland are officially recognized as a minority with all the rights (German schools, street names) the German government to this day refuses to recognize poles living in Germany as a minority.
- gpjanik 4y agoPoles living in Germany are usually working migrants, not a minority that has lived there since centuries (like Germans in Poland). It's hard to compare those situations.
- keiferski 4y agoNo, you are not correct. Poles have been in Germany for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_in_Germany
- waffleiron 4y agoFrom the wikipage: >The position of the German government is that after the German territorial losses after World War II, the current Polish minority has no century-old roots in the remaining German territory, because Germany lost all the territories where people of German and Polish ethnicity overlapped. Since they are therefore only recent immigrants, they do not fulfill the requirements of a national minority according to the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the Treaty of Good Neighbourship. Being German citizens, they still retain all civil and political rights every German citizen possesses, and therefore can voice their will in the political system.[10]
- Someone 4y agoAs far as I can tell, it doesn’t mention nationalities at all. For example, it doesn’t mention Germans, either. If so, why would it have to mention Poles?
- gpjanik 4y agoIt does mention Jews, Sinti and Romas. It doesn't mention Germans because it was Germans who were the perpetrators and were not targetted based on their ethnicity. Meanwhile being Polish (it's an ethnic group, not a nationality - nationality was obviously German in this context) was, same as for the aforementioned ethnicities, a condition that could get someone killed.
- 9dev 4y agoWell, but Germans were most definitely targeted: The disabled, for example, the homosexuals, the homeless, the mentally sick, the vocal critics… This is not to say Germans were not the perpetrators, but that they weren’t targeted is factually wrong. Edit: I’m sorry, I just read your comment again, and realised I misunderstood. I still feel those marginalised groups get overlooked often; the Nazis didn’t specifically select for Germans, but for „pure“ aryans, which excluded lots of different groups.
- wrthfl 4y agoI looked into the german version, expecting it to mention it more, but Poland is just mentioned once in a side sentence. It kinda saddens me.
- Semaphor 4y agoThat’s because the German version doesn’t list groups at all. It just talks about "victims of the NS regime" in the general.
- perlgeek 4y agoIt's the wiki, just add them to the article! Yes, these biases exist, help work against them by editing those pages that can easily be edited. Edit: I just tried, that article is locked. Could add it to the Talk page.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y agoPolish Jews were targeted as Jews, but non-Jewish Poles were not targeted in the same way (i.e., the Germans were brutal occupiers, but Catholic Poles were not targeted for extermination). However, there is a modern historical myth in Poland about extermination camps targeting non-Jewish Poles. For many years, there was a Wikipedia article about a fictional extermination camp for Poles. That theory is now discussed in a subsection of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_concentration_camp#Discredited_extermination_camp_story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_concentration_camp#Disc.... The idea behind these theories is to draw an equivalence between what the Germans did to Catholics and Jews in occupied Poland, something that is popular among modern Polish nationalists.
- gpjanik 4y agoIt's true that there's a nationalist movement exploiting that notion, and especially after the war, there's been a lot of mangling with numbers of victims (plenty of the so-called Polish historians, especially the ones tied to the Soviet-installed government, tried to elevate the number). On the part that non-Jewish Poles were not targetted - while I think we agree the fictious concentration camp is part of what I mentioned above, hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Poles from both modern day Poland and modern day Germany have been victims of organized killings (take note, I don't necessarily mean concentration camps and holocaust as commonly understood). I can agree that catholic Poles were not targeted in the same way - there were numerous differences - nevertheless, the goal of Germany was to eradicate Poland as a country and Poles as a nation through either killings (which materialized in war casualties and through mass extermination), or germanization.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y agoThe Germans did terrible things in Poland and had even more terrifying plans for Poland after the war, but there was no Holocaust against non-Jewish Poles. The way that Jewish and non-Jewish Poles were treated was worlds apart. About 90% of Polish Jews were killed (a majority of all Polish deaths during the war, despite making up only 15% of the pre-war population). Edit: The people trying to draw an equivalence between what happened to Jewish and non-Jewish Poles are largely aligned with right-wing, strongly Catholic Polish nationalists, and are not in and way fond of the Soviet era. This is mostly a post-Soviet phenomenon.
- edanm 4y agoI don't know if this was added because of this comment, but the list does include poles: > The majority of Stolpersteine commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Others have been placed for Sinti and Romani people (then also called "gypsies"), Poles, homosexuals, [...] Edit: It looks like the word Poles was added today, so I assume it's because of this comment (otherwise that's a pretty wild coincidence.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]