10 ms·

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

112 points by MarlonPro 14y ago

flexie 14y ago
The scale of this is absolutely shocking. How did they even manage in just 12 years to set up 30,000 slave labor camps, 980 concentration camps, 1,000 prisoner of war camps, 500 brothels with sex slaves and "thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm ...". They must have really wanted it as a society and hundreds of thousands must have been involved, one way or another. That's not the work of just a few crazy fanatics.
- notlisted 14y ago
  Yeah, somewhat like this craziness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment#List_of_camps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment#Li...
  - sigzero 14y ago
    Not even close. Though what we did was certainly bad enough.
  - cafard 14y ago
    That was bad enough, and it is yet more depressing to know that Hitler got some of his ideas from the US reservation system. Yet to compare the internment of Japanese Americans to the wholesale murder of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs is a reaching.
    - krapp 14y ago
      And our fascination with eugenics, apparently.
      - illuminate 14y ago
        Which didn't end until what, thirty-ish years after the end of WWII, if that?
    - Spooky23 14y ago
      I'd argue that the British provided inspiration closer in spirit from their concentration camp system in South Africa during the Boer war. The Brits had a tough time with the Boers, who mostly used cavalry and light artillery to conduct guerrilla raids on the British soldiers. The British solution was to round up the non-combatant Boer population and starve them until the men surrendered.
  - flexie 14y ago
    No. Whereas the Japanese American internment was certainly bad, it doesn't compare to holocaust.
  - notlisted 14y ago
    Sure, vote me down. Keep the myth alive. The discovery described entailed new ghettos, forced labor camps, etc. In other words, it's not about new killing centers, and as such NOT about the Holocaust in the typical sense of the word. Do read on in the link I supplied please: "Many camps were built quickly by civilian contractors during the summer of 1942 based on designs for military barracks, making the buildings poorly equipped for cramped family living. To describe the conditions in more detail, the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in northwestern Wyoming was a barbed-wire-surrounded enclave with unpartitioned toilets, cots for beds, and a budget of 45 cents daily per capita for food rations.[67] Because most internees were evacuated from their West Coast homes on short notice and not told of their assigned destinations, many failed to pack appropriate clothing for Wyoming winters which often reached temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (−18 degrees Celsius). Many families were forced to simply take the "clothes on their backs." Armed guards were posted at the camps, which were all in remote, desolate areas far from population centers." In short: the new sites discovered were in many ways JUST like the Japanese internment camps (and vice versa), where Japanese people, often citizens of the USA, were kept against their will.
    - NoPiece 14y ago
      The internment was bad, but magnitude of the holocaust is so much worse that they are not comparable. From your wiki link: "A number of persons died or suffered for lack of medical care, and several were killed by sentries; James Wakasa, for instance, was killed at Topaz War Relocation Center, near the perimeter wire." To compare to: "Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed.[5] Over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men." You say: "the new sites discovered were in many ways JUST like the Japanese internment camps" and the article says: "The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel." Your sense of morality is totally broken if you can't differentiate these things.
- gdubs 14y ago
  There's a (somewhat controversial) book called IBM and the Holocaust [1], which posits that the scale of the Holocaust was owed to the massive information gathering capabilities of computers. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
  - btilly 14y ago
    I think of that every time I hear about the IBM exemption to jslint's license. See http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502 http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502 for what that is if you do not know. It is only funny until you realize the likely reason that IBM's lawyers are taking that term so seriously. (You think they don't still have clients who are despotic dictators?)
    - sharkweek 14y ago
      I have a bizarre fascination with companies that produce(d) the technology that is (was) used in evil ways by the wrong people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_t...
    - packetslave 14y ago
      The jslint thing happens because no sane corporate lawyer would ever sign off on a contract that says "X may not be used for evil", where "evil" is completely unspecified in the contract. What happens if Crockford decides one day that all online advertising is "evil"? Has nothing at all to do with wanting to be evil; it has to do with liability and a cute, but legally-unwise license.
      - btilly 14y ago
        If so, then does no other large company that wants to use jslint ever raise the issue? And why has it happened multiple times with IBM?
        14y ago
- robryan 14y ago
  I would say that those same people, those that were part of the machine, wouldn't share the same views if they were part of society today. If anything I think it shows peoples ability to see circumstances as normal (even if they are horribly out of whack with morals from other times) if it appears to be the prevailing wisdom of the group at the time. I would like to think though that it was pretty much the last possible time that this could happen in history on such a large scale. Today we still have outliers like north korea but in general the world is too connected for the same effect to happen.
  - flexie 14y ago
    I would like to believe that too but with Rwanda, the Balkans, Gulag etc. it seems mostly like a wish...
  - steve19 14y ago
    Respectively, that attitude is why these horrific events continue to happen. Writing them off as one-off events, outliers, which won't happen again in the modern world only serves to relieve our conscious for doing nothing to stop them. They happen frequently and will happen again. Internet or no internet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
    - belorn 14y ago
      The current forced labor camps in North Korea looks to be indistinguishable from how the nazi forced labor camps worked, except on a single nation scale. The sad part is that there are no clear stop to it in any time soon. It seems that as long it is a powerful enough nation/allied nation, they can do what ever crimes they like. Only once it is all over will people be look back and wonder why they let it happen.
      - rdl 14y ago
        Going to war with NK right now, even if China withdrew support, would cause even more suffering to both NK people and SK/foreign people than we have now. It's really lose/lose -- the best hope is isolation and clear amnesty/reconstruction on offer, to encourage domestic political change. Even somehow encouraging revolution could be dangerous, as long as the military stays intact, since one way to deal with a domestic problem is to start a foreign war against (what most of the population believe) is a serious adversary. My evolving theory of intervention is that any militarily opposed action which can't be accomplished by a single brigade or smaller force in less than 3 months will bring more harm than good, and should only be executed in defense with all other options exhausted. Liberating the people of Equatorial Guinea or ending the MEND conflict (or destroying AQ presence in Afghanistan in 2001) probably would be a net win for humanity (and each could be accomplished by a very small force, maybe 500 + support); NK is at the extreme other end of the scale with occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
- mikeash 14y ago
  Aside from the obvious horror of it all, it's interesting to me to think about how much these efforts took away from the German efforts to actually fight the war. How much better would they have done if they had played nicer? Then, perhaps, after subduing the USSR and achieving a more secure position in Europe, these plans could have been carried out, even farther from prying eyes and with no hope that anyone would come by to liberate them.
  - graycat 14y ago
    With so much in stories and history of Hitler, the Holocaust, The Third Reich, WWII, etc., off and on for some years I tried to understand what happened and see if parts of the world or here (in the US) remain vulnerable to a similar disaster. There are stacks of history books and many hours of TV. I boiled it down to: (1) Authority. At one time, Germany was a battle ground with the children eating by thawing out frozen soldiers in the snow. One reaction was Prussia that became intensely 'militaristic'. Somehow that Prussian development spread over Germany and created an 'intensity' and a big respect for 'authority'. At best there are pros and cons with that direction, and somehow, on balance, Germany long went too far. (2) WWI. That was a disaster. England, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, and more suffered. Finally the US came in and broke the stalemate and ended it. Yes, the US lost, too. Among all the suffering, Germany was near the top of the list and, much of Germany had a hugely bitter reaction. (3) Versailles. There were 'reparations'. So, Germany printed money to pay off the reparations more quickly. Then the inflation ruined the finances for much of Germany and created more bitterness. (4) Democracy. The German efforts at democracy in the 1920s were clumsy -- more bitterness. (5) The Great Depression. Sure, the stock market crash was in the US. So, people had borrowed from the banks to buy stocks and suddenly had no hope of paying back. So, the banks went bust. So, the economy slowed enormously. The 2008 housing crisis was similar; we did it to ourselves and didn't often enough see the disaster coming and haven't been very smart about fixing the problem, and the same song, first verse was in the 12 years after the 1929 crash. Then somehow the more developed economies were much more closely linked than one would expect. So, the US slowed down buying from Germany, and some Germans lost their jobs; they didn't buy, and more Germans lost their jobs; they didn't buy from the US, and more in the US lost their jobs; etc. (6) Hitler. He was mad, and in particular he was mad about all the disasters that happened to Germany. And did I mention, he was mad? Determined. Ambitious. Ruthless. Can think of various 'reasons' from his relationship with his mother, with girls, his struggles in his career, his WWI experience, etc., but none of these factors has any 'predictive' power since many others with similar backgrounds didn't go nuts. (7) Fertile Ground. Hitler found fertile ground for organizing and leading, especially leading out of work, angry, ex-WWI German soldiers. Hitler wanted to be able to speak and get his followers up on their hind legs, practiced a lot, and got good at it. (8) German Army Politics. The German Army had some funds for political activities, liked what they saw in Hitler, and provided just enough 'seed' money to keep Hitler going in politics. (9) Communists. In politics it usually can be helpful to have a visible enemy, and Hitler had the Communists. And they were also likely a genuine threat. (10) Elections. By 1933 or so, Hitler had enough political followers to start to make some waves in elections. He didn't do really well, but he did stay in the game. (11) Industry. As might be expected, German industry had some political power. Well, they thought that Hitler could help them, and Hitler no doubt was good at playing along. So, eventually Hindenburg asked Hitler to form a government. (12) Double Down. Then Hitler and his Nazis were the government, but they still didn't have much power. Hitler called for new elections and used the power he did have to 'stuff the ballot boxes' and do better in the second election. So, he had more in the Reichstag, i.e., congress. Then there was some rough and tumble politics, i.e., before a vote in the Reichstag some of Hitler's tugs could 'arrange' that the majority they wanted was present and voting and the rest were still outside. (13) Hindenburg Died. Then Hitler got Hindenburg's job, also, which made Hitler close to a dictator. E.g., his buddy Goering was head of the police force in Prussia. Generally his buddies were running things. (14) Then, in the words in one of the Star Wars movies, Hitler pushed through some 'special powers' for, as I recall, 4 years, to get the economy going again. Amazingly, he actually did it. So it was roads, bridges, ships, planes, whatever. The US should have done as well over the last 4 years. Of course, it's easier to put people to work when also have thugs trash the unions and just dictate what people will get paid -- we don't do such drastic things in the US. Hitler ran what can be called a 'command economy'. Why most economies run from the center flop and his didn't, I don't know. But German industry had reason to be happy with Hitler. (15) Progress. By 1936 and the Berlin Olympics, Hitler had Germany looking good, if didn't look too closely. There was a lot of 'authoritarianism', but Germany was 'susceptible' to that. (16) Dictator. Then Hitler got his second term of special powers, was an absolute dictator, and the real monster started to come out. "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.". Plenty of people in Germany with good sense saw the threat, but opposing Hitler was not possible. (17) Dreams. Hitler had 'dreams'. One of his dreams was to take over the land to the east, essentially from Germany to the Arctic, the Urals, and the Black Sea. He wanted to turn this land into 'farms' owned by Germans and with Slavs as slave labor on deliberate starvation diets. Everyone else in that land he wanted just to kill off right away. So Hitler started making war. E.g., he took half of Poland and half of France. For war production, he would turn captured people into slaves. (18) England. Hitler thought that he could quickly take England. But before a landing, he had to defeat the Royal Air Force -- thus started the Battle of Britain. But Hitler's air force was really just not up to the job: Both his fighter planes and his bombers had range too short. Hitler got angry and tried to bomb London, but his fighters could not provide protection as far as London, and, net, in The Battle of Britain Hitler's air force took unacceptable losses, and Hitler gave up. (19) Russia. Hitler came close actually to capturing and holding the lands to the east he had in mind. But, he got delayed: (A) Stalin was also running a 'command economy'. So, as Hitler moved east, Stalin packed up nearly everything of value and moved it much farther east. (B) As Hitler moved east, his front grew to be too wide and his supply lines, too long. (C) Hitler planned badly for the Russian winter. (D) The Russians regrouped and pushed back against Hitler and gained time. (E) Due to events elsewhere, Hitler ran out of time, got over extended and, basically, was not able actually to win in Russia. His losses were huge. Hitler's buddies in Japan declared war on the US, so so did Hitler, and now he was in a two front war, with the US, and on a long walk on a short pier. Hitler was going to take North Africa, move east and take the Suez Canal and, thus, cut off oil, etc. to England, and continue to move east and take the Mideast oil for Germany, but he blew it. First, the US provided massive supplies to Monty a little west of Suez. Rommel got pushed back to the west. England broke the German code, and, thus, much of Rommel's supplies went to the bottom of the Med. Ike invaded North Africa, and Rommel went back to Germany. Hitler's efforts in North Africa were a bust. So, Hitler had lost in England, North Africa, and Russia. England. The US turned England into an unsinkable aircraft carrier, and the US Eighth Air Force along with the Royal Air Force started bombing anything and everything in Germany. Meanwhile the Russians were moving west. By D-Day, June 6, 1944, Hitler was unable to put much of anything into the air. The Normandy invasion was a great success, in spite of some cases of hard times, and then it was a fast charge all the way across France and into Germany. Germany was getting it from the air, from Russia from the east, and from the US, England, etc. from the west. For the German submarines in the Atlantic, too soon for Germany the US and England looked at the maps, blimps, airplanes, radar, sonar, small aircraft carriers, etc. and from bases in Canada, Greenland, Iceland, England, etc. had fairly safe passage across the North Atlantic. Hitler also had bought heavily into the whole 'eugenics' stuff, Darwin, the image of human breeding much like dog breeding, etc. and for that reason, his general resentment and madness, and some long 'tensions' in Europe, long a very bloody place, wanted to kill off everyone he regarded as undesirable. He did a lot, especially in Poland. It appears that since WWII the main lessons were not lost on Germany: No more dictators, Nazis, hate speech, mass unemployment, big inflation, or militarism. A big social safety net. Work hard and smart and just do not mess up again. Could it happen in the US? I'm too afraid it could. We have to be careful.
- pan69 14y ago
  "The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of notable social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1LQ1ee_Gdo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1LQ1ee_Gdo
- azernik 14y ago
  The best explanations I've seen of the social and political roots of that period are Richard Evans's "The Coming of the Third Reich" [1] (going from 1870 to the establishment of Nazi power in 1933-34) and the later volumes of his series. The main points he hits are: a) The fact that by 1933, the majority of the population was voting for parties that were explicitly against the democratic system. Even if there was no majority for the Nazis, there was also no majority in defense of protection of constitutional limits on power. b) The government bureaucracy and much of the elite (including the then President, Hindenburg, and old military man) were loyal to the State/Realm (Reich) to which they swore their oaths, but not to the democratic order and the constitution, and so were not functional impediments to Nazi power. I was also struck, when reading about their actions and motivations, how little they realized that democratic protections and limits on power protected them as well - when the Nazis took power, the conservative establishment was removed from civilian power by force or the threat of force, using powers that the conservatives had originally intended for use against the Left. c) Once the Nazis came to power, they succeeded in instilling in the German public apathy and an unwillingness to get involved in political opposition (though not necessarily active devotion to Nazi ideology). A fanatical minority can do a lot of damage if the majority is apathetic or is distracted by more popular policies (like national greatness and revenge on the WWI Allies). [1] http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693/ http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/01...
- mcantelon 14y ago
  >How did they even manage in just 12 years 42500 sites/12 years/365 days would be an average of 9.7 sites created per day. Hrm.
  - rcknr 14y ago
    Congratulations! You've just unlocked "Revisionist" badge. And if you're in the EU, you're also under arrest.
rdl 14y ago
I guess I'm just willing to accept the holocaust without questioning the evil involved -- a small kernel of evil, and then lots of self-reinforcing fear and self interest, could lead a population of some evil and some just weak people to do horrible things. The banality of evil and all. It's less bad than otherwise because the Nazis were utterly destroyed; yes, they were horrible almost beyond consideration, but they're gone now, so there isn't as much of an ongoing concern there. But what amazes me and makes me feel the most shame about humanity is how the US and other western nations acted w.r.t. immigration and refugees during the pre-war period, and then how the victors acted after the war (large numbers of German civilians and non-nazi German POWs died after the war, too, and in the USSR, there were POWs in "prison" for a decade after). And the US Japanese-American internment, etc. Very little was said about any of this until the 1980s.
- oijaf888 14y ago
  I thought after the war the victors (at least England and the US) treated the refugees and immigrants quite well. Admittedly not as well as their own troops in the area but humanely. I know France and the USSR treated the refugees very harshly though.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I don't know how much of it was limited resources vs. punitive, but even the US and UK (who were the best of the victors) allowed hundreds of thousands (potentially millions) to die of starvation and disease. But life for UK civilians in the immediate post-war period was also not very good. The US is the country which probably retained the most industrial/agricultural capacity and could have done more.
    - oijaf888 14y ago
      Yeah from my understanding everyone was on rations in Europe and the civillians got the short end as far as quantity and quality goes. That is a good point though, I wonder if the lack of food was due to long supplie lines and a decrease in production in the US or if it just wasn't prioritized high enough.
shantanubala 14y ago
World War II never fails to horrify me. The holocaust is only one part of it - the Japanese were brutal in unimaginable ways as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre They killed, raped, tortured, and experimented on living humans (the first time I found out what a vivisection was, I felt my stomach churn). It takes a lot of effort to make an atomic bomb seem humane, and somehow World War II manages to do it.
- jbm 14y ago
  The act of soldiers hopped up on religion and hiropin (speed) means it is morally justified dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian city? To the extent possible, I will never do business with you or any company you are associated with. You sound like a horrible person.
  - benjohnson 14y ago
    I would expect eradicating evil would normally be a violent endeavor.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    So if the pilot of the Enola Gay was hopped up on speed when he dropped the bomb, that would make it OK? Either way, inasmuch as it helped to shorten the war, prevent American invasion, and prevent Soviet invasion the atomic bombs actually probably saved Japanese lives overall (civilian and military both). Most notably, news of the second atomic bomb came while the Emperor Hirohito and his cabinet were meeting to discuss what to do about the first, and about the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Even though they received the news of the second bombing earlier that day the cabinet still deadlocked 2-2 on the question of whether to surrender; it was Hirohito himself who had to decide that enough was enough. The Emperor would record his surrender announcement to be played back the next day... in the meantime elements of the Imperial Japanese Army decided to overthrow the government in order to prevent the surrender announcement from being broadcast. Two high-level officials were killed in the process, a senior Army general killed himself rather than stop the coup, and the bravery of some of the palace staff managed to keep the broadcast from falling into the hands of the conspirators. So I'm not sure we'll ever know exactly how much the atomic bomb weighed into that, but it certainly appears to have been more than zero, even though its destructive effect was not significantly more than what was already being experienced by other Japanese cities sustaining wave upon wave of conventional bombing (which relatively few people ever seem to complain about for some reason).
apaprocki 14y ago
It is still pretty shocking to realize how lucky I am to be alive. My grandfather was captured by Germans, sent to prison in Germany, escaped from Germany, was re-captured in Warsaw, sent to a prison which then forwarded him to Auschwitz. Then for the next 3 years he was kept there, sent on to Mauthausen, and then to Gusen until he was liberated by Americans in 1945. The facts that make it even stranger -- he was not Jewish and was born in Massachusetts in 1916. He apparently told them left and right he was a US citizen and they just ignored him. Talk about beating the odds.
- enjo 14y ago
  Mauthausen (not Auschwitz) is a trip everyone needs to make. The most moving experience of my life was visiting it when I was younger. There's just something about that camp. It's remote and ominous. It really gives you a chance to contemplate just how awful that whole episode of human history was.
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  First congratulations on beating the odds :) he was not Jewish and was born in Massachusetts in 1916. He apparently told them left and right he was a US citizen Could he prove that he was an American or maybe Americans weren't that popular by then either?
  - apaprocki 14y ago
    He was arrested while using a fake ID to evade the police from his first capture and that ID had a fake first name and birthplace, so perhaps that is the reason. (I never met him -- he died before I was born) Passports were not required back when he left the US, so I doubt he had proof handy and even if he did it was probably a fine line. Showing proof he was American could have made him a target instead of helping.
- meaty 14y ago
  I think this sort of story is surprisingly common. Most of our knowledge of such things is derived from films and books written by the victors (don't forget the UK government had a propaganda wing for WWII until the 1970s). These promote the nazis as well organised and ruthless. In fact, much as most design by committee systems are, the nazi regime was a bit of an incompetent mess with holes left right and centre. If you ever meet a Jew who is willing to discuss it, they usually have a relative or two who escaped to a more friendly country.
dajohnson89 14y ago
"History in Images"[0] is a gold mine of photographs and research into some atrocities committed during WW2. I highly encourage you to view the pictures. The accompanying articles are extravagant, but many of the facts, anecdotes, and statistics are from somewhat credible sources ([1], [2]). One quote, describing the Red Army occupation of East Berlin: "In one notorious instance, Red Army soldiers entered the maternity hospital at Haus Dehlem and raped pregnant women, women who had just given birth, and women in the process of giving birth."[3] [0]: http://historyimages.blogspot.com/ http://historyimages.blogspot.com/ (WARNING: Graphic images, and poor formatting) [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465003389 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465003389 [2]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/01/news.features11 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/01/news.features11 [3]: http://historyimages.blogspot.com/2011/10/mass-rape-of-german-women-when-germany.html http://historyimages.blogspot.com/2011/10/mass-rape-of-germa...
jnxfgf456 14y ago
I know you will recoil in horror, you won't believe me, you will fling hate at me. But my duty as a hacker and a person who prides intellectual curiosity above everything: THE HOLOCAUST DID NOT HAPPEN. It's a propaganda lie with no substantiated evidence to defame White European people. To extract monies for Israelites and to justify the ethnic cleansing and race replacement of Whites in Europe and western countries through the "asylum industry".
- alexgartrell 14y ago
  Excuse me for stating the obvious but [citation needed]. Apologies to good HNers for feeding the troll here, but I've always been curious about how holocaust deniers could have the balls to carry through with their opinions despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary.
  - NuZZ 14y ago
    One must also be open to the possibility that due to the Jews' disproportionately large influence on the media - in that they are more commonly know as to "control the media", that said Jews would propagate lies to forward their own agendas. I would argue that the holocaust has afforded the Jews enough to warrant motive. To say "it did not happen", though, I wouldn't take such a stance. I personally would dispute its scope, greatly, in regard to the specific slaughter of Jews, and more relevantly, the constant reminder (read: disproportionately, as mentioned by other commenters) to sympathize with them. Also, I'm with you on the [citation needed]. I've too little interest to contribute, myself.
  - boboblong 14y ago
    The burden of proof does not lie on him. There is a stunning lack of hard evidence that the holocaust took place as we're told it did. Whenever you ask for hard evidence, you're given the same run-around. I'd be happy with any of the following: 1. The remains. When you ask about this, you're first told that the bodies were cremated. The extremely implausible logistics of this aside, cremation leaves behind a significant amount of remains that would not have decomposed yet. The next line of defense is that exhumation violates Jewish law. Well, you know what? Too bad. Religious law may be violated in the course of a murder investigation. 3. Millions of birth certificates with no corresponding death certificates. 2. Records of who was gassed that can be corroborated. I'm aware that the Nazis kept records, but the records that people come up with when I ask for this are, at best, lists of people who have died of typhus or starvation. If I press, the defense becomes, "Well, why would they incriminate themselves?" Well, I don't know, but as far as I'm concerned this is a murder trial, and it's innocent until proven guilty. I've had this discussion online half a dozen times and no one has ever provided any of these three things.
friendly_chap 14y ago
A genuine question, please don't take it as an attack, I have some remote jewish blood in my veins, but I have to ask: What was so special in the Holocaust? I mean there were a lot of similarly dark points in history, both in terms of numbers (people killed) and cruelty, but still, it seems we always only care about the Holocaust (or at least it overshadows everything else). I think we should remember other events too, more frequently.
- tkahn6 14y ago
  You live in a Western country. The Holocaust was perpetrated by a Western people, people very similar to you. It was systematic and calculated, not a result of wild raping and pillaging. It was not the result of famine. That's why we focus on it more heavily. Here is archival footage from Night and Fog of people very similar to you calmly waiting to board trains as if they were going on vacation. Look at what they're wearing. All are wearing nice clothing, their bags are packed with a week's worth of clothes. You can see them then being crammed into the cattle cars. Most of these people were gassed immediately upon arrival. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8Da7lxpk&t=4m56s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8Da7lxpk&t=4m56s Is there anything else like that in history? Genuine question.
  - paganel 14y ago
    The girl seen in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8Da7lxpk&t=6m22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8Da7lxpk&t=6m22s, her name was Anna Maria Settela Steinbach, she was gipsy, she, her mother and her four brothers and sisters were killed at Auschwitz in August 1944. More about her in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settela_Steinbach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settela_Steinbach
    - reddit_clone 14y ago
      In one brief shot, I saw a guy from inside the carriage helping the soldier outside to close the door ! I feel all weirded out.
- mcantelon 14y ago
kgarten 14y ago
There are 2 major problems I have with world war II stories (the article tackles the first one extremely well) ... First of all, most Holocaust memorial articles etc. in general just focus on jews, however, there were other people also equally affected by it (sinti and roma, homosexuals, political left etc.). They all were systematically identified and killed with the knowledge and help of "normal" people in Germany. Why does the US not focus on their own wrongs in history? I'm German and as a consequence as adolescent I was "forced" every year during high school to hear about Nazi Germany (in German and History courses). This is very important and shaped me as an individual and a lot of my friends. So don't get me wrong, it is important to remember and it's important to understand what happend (and to realize that it's easy to do/support similar ideologies .. most of the German people at the time were no monsters and had also support from people all over the world, who believed that Hitler was needed against Communist Russia ... This is sad to hear yet important. Also a lot of the German scientists who did abysmal things to Humans continued working for the US after the war). I believe the lessons we should draw from Nazi Germany in World War II is that it is very easy for us (for everybody) to accept inhuman behavior, racism and genocide :( Maybe as German, I don't have the right to say that ... yet,I find it hypocrite to hear from US researchers, French, Austrians or Swiss how much we Germans did do wrong ... When part of the Austrians/French/US actively supported it and some Swiss took the money and gold from Nazi Germany and closed the borders for the victims. This is by no means meant as a justification of the crimes towards humanity my ancestors did, it's important to remember. everybody should visit Dachau or a similar concentration camp and remember not what cruelty we Germans were capable of but what cruelty we as human race are capable of. *edit: typos
- Svip 14y ago
  I particularly took notice of this: >Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time. >“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.” We all know that the allies were almost oblivious to these concentration camps during the war.[1] I would be surprised to learn that the allies did not have agents, spies or informants stationed in Germany during the war. How did these people also fail to notice what - according to Dr Dean - would have been obvious? Even 40'000+ sites takes few people to pull off in a country of over 50 millions. It was a very different time, and as the parent correctly points out, people accepted genocide, torture and blatant racism. Not just in Germany, but everywhere. A lot of people seem to think that it is something inherently German that made the Holocaust so terrible, but truth be, any other country could have fallen victim to the same propaganda had their situation been similar. That being said, I still find the Second World War rather uninteresting. [1] Although, as their progressing through German held Europe moved forward, the true picture began to emerge.

112 points by MarlonPro 14y ago

The scale of this is absolutely shocking. How did they even manage in just 12 years to set up 30,000 slave labor camps, 980 concentration camps, 1,000 prisoner of war camps, 500 brothels with sex slaves and "thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm ...". They must have really wanted it as a society and hundreds of thousands must have been involved, one way or another. That's not the work of just a few crazy fanatics.

notlisted 14y ago
Yeah, somewhat like this craziness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment#List_of_camps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment#Li...
- sigzero 14y ago
  Not even close. Though what we did was certainly bad enough.
- cafard 14y ago
  That was bad enough, and it is yet more depressing to know that Hitler got some of his ideas from the US reservation system. Yet to compare the internment of Japanese Americans to the wholesale murder of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs is a reaching.
  - krapp 14y ago
    And our fascination with eugenics, apparently.
    - illuminate 14y ago
      Which didn't end until what, thirty-ish years after the end of WWII, if that?
  - Spooky23 14y ago
    I'd argue that the British provided inspiration closer in spirit from their concentration camp system in South Africa during the Boer war. The Brits had a tough time with the Boers, who mostly used cavalry and light artillery to conduct guerrilla raids on the British soldiers. The British solution was to round up the non-combatant Boer population and starve them until the men surrendered.
- flexie 14y ago
  No. Whereas the Japanese American internment was certainly bad, it doesn't compare to holocaust.
- notlisted 14y ago
  Sure, vote me down. Keep the myth alive. The discovery described entailed new ghettos, forced labor camps, etc. In other words, it's not about new killing centers, and as such NOT about the Holocaust in the typical sense of the word. Do read on in the link I supplied please: "Many camps were built quickly by civilian contractors during the summer of 1942 based on designs for military barracks, making the buildings poorly equipped for cramped family living. To describe the conditions in more detail, the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in northwestern Wyoming was a barbed-wire-surrounded enclave with unpartitioned toilets, cots for beds, and a budget of 45 cents daily per capita for food rations.[67] Because most internees were evacuated from their West Coast homes on short notice and not told of their assigned destinations, many failed to pack appropriate clothing for Wyoming winters which often reached temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (−18 degrees Celsius). Many families were forced to simply take the "clothes on their backs." Armed guards were posted at the camps, which were all in remote, desolate areas far from population centers." In short: the new sites discovered were in many ways JUST like the Japanese internment camps (and vice versa), where Japanese people, often citizens of the USA, were kept against their will.
  - NoPiece 14y ago
    The internment was bad, but magnitude of the holocaust is so much worse that they are not comparable. From your wiki link: "A number of persons died or suffered for lack of medical care, and several were killed by sentries; James Wakasa, for instance, was killed at Topaz War Relocation Center, near the perimeter wire." To compare to: "Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed.[5] Over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men." You say: "the new sites discovered were in many ways JUST like the Japanese internment camps" and the article says: "The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel." Your sense of morality is totally broken if you can't differentiate these things.
gdubs 14y ago
There's a (somewhat controversial) book called IBM and the Holocaust [1], which posits that the scale of the Holocaust was owed to the massive information gathering capabilities of computers. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
- btilly 14y ago
  I think of that every time I hear about the IBM exemption to jslint's license. See http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502 http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502 for what that is if you do not know. It is only funny until you realize the likely reason that IBM's lawyers are taking that term so seriously. (You think they don't still have clients who are despotic dictators?)
  - sharkweek 14y ago
    I have a bizarre fascination with companies that produce(d) the technology that is (was) used in evil ways by the wrong people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_t...
  - packetslave 14y ago
    The jslint thing happens because no sane corporate lawyer would ever sign off on a contract that says "X may not be used for evil", where "evil" is completely unspecified in the contract. What happens if Crockford decides one day that all online advertising is "evil"? Has nothing at all to do with wanting to be evil; it has to do with liability and a cute, but legally-unwise license.
    - btilly 14y ago
      If so, then does no other large company that wants to use jslint ever raise the issue? And why has it happened multiple times with IBM?
      - 14y ago
robryan 14y ago
I would say that those same people, those that were part of the machine, wouldn't share the same views if they were part of society today. If anything I think it shows peoples ability to see circumstances as normal (even if they are horribly out of whack with morals from other times) if it appears to be the prevailing wisdom of the group at the time. I would like to think though that it was pretty much the last possible time that this could happen in history on such a large scale. Today we still have outliers like north korea but in general the world is too connected for the same effect to happen.
- flexie 14y ago
  I would like to believe that too but with Rwanda, the Balkans, Gulag etc. it seems mostly like a wish...
- steve19 14y ago
  Respectively, that attitude is why these horrific events continue to happen. Writing them off as one-off events, outliers, which won't happen again in the modern world only serves to relieve our conscious for doing nothing to stop them. They happen frequently and will happen again. Internet or no internet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
  - belorn 14y ago
    The current forced labor camps in North Korea looks to be indistinguishable from how the nazi forced labor camps worked, except on a single nation scale. The sad part is that there are no clear stop to it in any time soon. It seems that as long it is a powerful enough nation/allied nation, they can do what ever crimes they like. Only once it is all over will people be look back and wonder why they let it happen.
    - rdl 14y ago
      Going to war with NK right now, even if China withdrew support, would cause even more suffering to both NK people and SK/foreign people than we have now. It's really lose/lose -- the best hope is isolation and clear amnesty/reconstruction on offer, to encourage domestic political change. Even somehow encouraging revolution could be dangerous, as long as the military stays intact, since one way to deal with a domestic problem is to start a foreign war against (what most of the population believe) is a serious adversary. My evolving theory of intervention is that any militarily opposed action which can't be accomplished by a single brigade or smaller force in less than 3 months will bring more harm than good, and should only be executed in defense with all other options exhausted. Liberating the people of Equatorial Guinea or ending the MEND conflict (or destroying AQ presence in Afghanistan in 2001) probably would be a net win for humanity (and each could be accomplished by a very small force, maybe 500 + support); NK is at the extreme other end of the scale with occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
mikeash 14y ago
Aside from the obvious horror of it all, it's interesting to me to think about how much these efforts took away from the German efforts to actually fight the war. How much better would they have done if they had played nicer? Then, perhaps, after subduing the USSR and achieving a more secure position in Europe, these plans could have been carried out, even farther from prying eyes and with no hope that anyone would come by to liberate them.
- graycat 14y ago
  With so much in stories and history of Hitler, the Holocaust, The Third Reich, WWII, etc., off and on for some years I tried to understand what happened and see if parts of the world or here (in the US) remain vulnerable to a similar disaster. There are stacks of history books and many hours of TV. I boiled it down to: (1) Authority. At one time, Germany was a battle ground with the children eating by thawing out frozen soldiers in the snow. One reaction was Prussia that became intensely 'militaristic'. Somehow that Prussian development spread over Germany and created an 'intensity' and a big respect for 'authority'. At best there are pros and cons with that direction, and somehow, on balance, Germany long went too far. (2) WWI. That was a disaster. England, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, and more suffered. Finally the US came in and broke the stalemate and ended it. Yes, the US lost, too. Among all the suffering, Germany was near the top of the list and, much of Germany had a hugely bitter reaction. (3) Versailles. There were 'reparations'. So, Germany printed money to pay off the reparations more quickly. Then the inflation ruined the finances for much of Germany and created more bitterness. (4) Democracy. The German efforts at democracy in the 1920s were clumsy -- more bitterness. (5) The Great Depression. Sure, the stock market crash was in the US. So, people had borrowed from the banks to buy stocks and suddenly had no hope of paying back. So, the banks went bust. So, the economy slowed enormously. The 2008 housing crisis was similar; we did it to ourselves and didn't often enough see the disaster coming and haven't been very smart about fixing the problem, and the same song, first verse was in the 12 years after the 1929 crash. Then somehow the more developed economies were much more closely linked than one would expect. So, the US slowed down buying from Germany, and some Germans lost their jobs; they didn't buy, and more Germans lost their jobs; they didn't buy from the US, and more in the US lost their jobs; etc. (6) Hitler. He was mad, and in particular he was mad about all the disasters that happened to Germany. And did I mention, he was mad? Determined. Ambitious. Ruthless. Can think of various 'reasons' from his relationship with his mother, with girls, his struggles in his career, his WWI experience, etc., but none of these factors has any 'predictive' power since many others with similar backgrounds didn't go nuts. (7) Fertile Ground. Hitler found fertile ground for organizing and leading, especially leading out of work, angry, ex-WWI German soldiers. Hitler wanted to be able to speak and get his followers up on their hind legs, practiced a lot, and got good at it. (8) German Army Politics. The German Army had some funds for political activities, liked what they saw in Hitler, and provided just enough 'seed' money to keep Hitler going in politics. (9) Communists. In politics it usually can be helpful to have a visible enemy, and Hitler had the Communists. And they were also likely a genuine threat. (10) Elections. By 1933 or so, Hitler had enough political followers to start to make some waves in elections. He didn't do really well, but he did stay in the game. (11) Industry. As might be expected, German industry had some political power. Well, they thought that Hitler could help them, and Hitler no doubt was good at playing along. So, eventually Hindenburg asked Hitler to form a government. (12) Double Down. Then Hitler and his Nazis were the government, but they still didn't have much power. Hitler called for new elections and used the power he did have to 'stuff the ballot boxes' and do better in the second election. So, he had more in the Reichstag, i.e., congress. Then there was some rough and tumble politics, i.e., before a vote in the Reichstag some of Hitler's tugs could 'arrange' that the majority they wanted was present and voting and the rest were still outside. (13) Hindenburg Died. Then Hitler got Hindenburg's job, also, which made Hitler close to a dictator. E.g., his buddy Goering was head of the police force in Prussia. Generally his buddies were running things. (14) Then, in the words in one of the Star Wars movies, Hitler pushed through some 'special powers' for, as I recall, 4 years, to get the economy going again. Amazingly, he actually did it. So it was roads, bridges, ships, planes, whatever. The US should have done as well over the last 4 years. Of course, it's easier to put people to work when also have thugs trash the unions and just dictate what people will get paid -- we don't do such drastic things in the US. Hitler ran what can be called a 'command economy'. Why most economies run from the center flop and his didn't, I don't know. But German industry had reason to be happy with Hitler. (15) Progress. By 1936 and the Berlin Olympics, Hitler had Germany looking good, if didn't look too closely. There was a lot of 'authoritarianism', but Germany was 'susceptible' to that. (16) Dictator. Then Hitler got his second term of special powers, was an absolute dictator, and the real monster started to come out. "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.". Plenty of people in Germany with good sense saw the threat, but opposing Hitler was not possible. (17) Dreams. Hitler had 'dreams'. One of his dreams was to take over the land to the east, essentially from Germany to the Arctic, the Urals, and the Black Sea. He wanted to turn this land into 'farms' owned by Germans and with Slavs as slave labor on deliberate starvation diets. Everyone else in that land he wanted just to kill off right away. So Hitler started making war. E.g., he took half of Poland and half of France. For war production, he would turn captured people into slaves. (18) England. Hitler thought that he could quickly take England. But before a landing, he had to defeat the Royal Air Force -- thus started the Battle of Britain. But Hitler's air force was really just not up to the job: Both his fighter planes and his bombers had range too short. Hitler got angry and tried to bomb London, but his fighters could not provide protection as far as London, and, net, in The Battle of Britain Hitler's air force took unacceptable losses, and Hitler gave up. (19) Russia. Hitler came close actually to capturing and holding the lands to the east he had in mind. But, he got delayed: (A) Stalin was also running a 'command economy'. So, as Hitler moved east, Stalin packed up nearly everything of value and moved it much farther east. (B) As Hitler moved east, his front grew to be too wide and his supply lines, too long. (C) Hitler planned badly for the Russian winter. (D) The Russians regrouped and pushed back against Hitler and gained time. (E) Due to events elsewhere, Hitler ran out of time, got over extended and, basically, was not able actually to win in Russia. His losses were huge. Hitler's buddies in Japan declared war on the US, so so did Hitler, and now he was in a two front war, with the US, and on a long walk on a short pier. Hitler was going to take North Africa, move east and take the Suez Canal and, thus, cut off oil, etc. to England, and continue to move east and take the Mideast oil for Germany, but he blew it. First, the US provided massive supplies to Monty a little west of Suez. Rommel got pushed back to the west. England broke the German code, and, thus, much of Rommel's supplies went to the bottom of the Med. Ike invaded North Africa, and Rommel went back to Germany. Hitler's efforts in North Africa were a bust. So, Hitler had lost in England, North Africa, and Russia. England. The US turned England into an unsinkable aircraft carrier, and the US Eighth Air Force along with the Royal Air Force started bombing anything and everything in Germany. Meanwhile the Russians were moving west. By D-Day, June 6, 1944, Hitler was unable to put much of anything into the air. The Normandy invasion was a great success, in spite of some cases of hard times, and then it was a fast charge all the way across France and into Germany. Germany was getting it from the air, from Russia from the east, and from the US, England, etc. from the west. For the German submarines in the Atlantic, too soon for Germany the US and England looked at the maps, blimps, airplanes, radar, sonar, small aircraft carriers, etc. and from bases in Canada, Greenland, Iceland, England, etc. had fairly safe passage across the North Atlantic. Hitler also had bought heavily into the whole 'eugenics' stuff, Darwin, the image of human breeding much like dog breeding, etc. and for that reason, his general resentment and madness, and some long 'tensions' in Europe, long a very bloody place, wanted to kill off everyone he regarded as undesirable. He did a lot, especially in Poland. It appears that since WWII the main lessons were not lost on Germany: No more dictators, Nazis, hate speech, mass unemployment, big inflation, or militarism. A big social safety net. Work hard and smart and just do not mess up again. Could it happen in the US? I'm too afraid it could. We have to be careful.
pan69 14y ago
"The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of notable social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1LQ1ee_Gdo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1LQ1ee_Gdo
azernik 14y ago
The best explanations I've seen of the social and political roots of that period are Richard Evans's "The Coming of the Third Reich" [1] (going from 1870 to the establishment of Nazi power in 1933-34) and the later volumes of his series. The main points he hits are: a) The fact that by 1933, the majority of the population was voting for parties that were explicitly against the democratic system. Even if there was no majority for the Nazis, there was also no majority in defense of protection of constitutional limits on power. b) The government bureaucracy and much of the elite (including the then President, Hindenburg, and old military man) were loyal to the State/Realm (Reich) to which they swore their oaths, but not to the democratic order and the constitution, and so were not functional impediments to Nazi power. I was also struck, when reading about their actions and motivations, how little they realized that democratic protections and limits on power protected them as well - when the Nazis took power, the conservative establishment was removed from civilian power by force or the threat of force, using powers that the conservatives had originally intended for use against the Left. c) Once the Nazis came to power, they succeeded in instilling in the German public apathy and an unwillingness to get involved in political opposition (though not necessarily active devotion to Nazi ideology). A fanatical minority can do a lot of damage if the majority is apathetic or is distracted by more popular policies (like national greatness and revenge on the WWI Allies). [1] http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693/ http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/01...
mcantelon 14y ago
>How did they even manage in just 12 years 42500 sites/12 years/365 days would be an average of 9.7 sites created per day. Hrm.
- rcknr 14y ago
  Congratulations! You've just unlocked "Revisionist" badge. And if you're in the EU, you're also under arrest.

rdl 14y ago

I guess I'm just willing to accept the holocaust without questioning the evil involved -- a small kernel of evil, and then lots of self-reinforcing fear and self interest, could lead a population of some evil and some just weak people to do horrible things. The banality of evil and all. It's less bad than otherwise because the Nazis were utterly destroyed; yes, they were horrible almost beyond consideration, but they're gone now, so there isn't as much of an ongoing concern there. But what amazes me and makes me feel the most shame about humanity is how the US and other western nations acted w.r.t. immigration and refugees during the pre-war period, and then how the victors acted after the war (large numbers of German civilians and non-nazi German POWs died after the war, too, and in the USSR, there were POWs in "prison" for a decade after). And the US Japanese-American internment, etc. Very little was said about any of this until the 1980s.

oijaf888 14y ago
I thought after the war the victors (at least England and the US) treated the refugees and immigrants quite well. Admittedly not as well as their own troops in the area but humanely. I know France and the USSR treated the refugees very harshly though.
- rdl 14y ago
  I don't know how much of it was limited resources vs. punitive, but even the US and UK (who were the best of the victors) allowed hundreds of thousands (potentially millions) to die of starvation and disease. But life for UK civilians in the immediate post-war period was also not very good. The US is the country which probably retained the most industrial/agricultural capacity and could have done more.
  - oijaf888 14y ago
    Yeah from my understanding everyone was on rations in Europe and the civillians got the short end as far as quantity and quality goes. That is a good point though, I wonder if the lack of food was due to long supplie lines and a decrease in production in the US or if it just wasn't prioritized high enough.

shantanubala 14y ago

World War II never fails to horrify me. The holocaust is only one part of it - the Japanese were brutal in unimaginable ways as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre They killed, raped, tortured, and experimented on living humans (the first time I found out what a vivisection was, I felt my stomach churn). It takes a lot of effort to make an atomic bomb seem humane, and somehow World War II manages to do it.

jbm 14y ago
The act of soldiers hopped up on religion and hiropin (speed) means it is morally justified dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian city? To the extent possible, I will never do business with you or any company you are associated with. You sound like a horrible person.
- benjohnson 14y ago
  I would expect eradicating evil would normally be a violent endeavor.
- mpyne 14y ago
  So if the pilot of the Enola Gay was hopped up on speed when he dropped the bomb, that would make it OK? Either way, inasmuch as it helped to shorten the war, prevent American invasion, and prevent Soviet invasion the atomic bombs actually probably saved Japanese lives overall (civilian and military both). Most notably, news of the second atomic bomb came while the Emperor Hirohito and his cabinet were meeting to discuss what to do about the first, and about the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Even though they received the news of the second bombing earlier that day the cabinet still deadlocked 2-2 on the question of whether to surrender; it was Hirohito himself who had to decide that enough was enough. The Emperor would record his surrender announcement to be played back the next day... in the meantime elements of the Imperial Japanese Army decided to overthrow the government in order to prevent the surrender announcement from being broadcast. Two high-level officials were killed in the process, a senior Army general killed himself rather than stop the coup, and the bravery of some of the palace staff managed to keep the broadcast from falling into the hands of the conspirators. So I'm not sure we'll ever know exactly how much the atomic bomb weighed into that, but it certainly appears to have been more than zero, even though its destructive effect was not significantly more than what was already being experienced by other Japanese cities sustaining wave upon wave of conventional bombing (which relatively few people ever seem to complain about for some reason).

apaprocki 14y ago

It is still pretty shocking to realize how lucky I am to be alive. My grandfather was captured by Germans, sent to prison in Germany, escaped from Germany, was re-captured in Warsaw, sent to a prison which then forwarded him to Auschwitz. Then for the next 3 years he was kept there, sent on to Mauthausen, and then to Gusen until he was liberated by Americans in 1945. The facts that make it even stranger -- he was not Jewish and was born in Massachusetts in 1916. He apparently told them left and right he was a US citizen and they just ignored him. Talk about beating the odds.

enjo 14y ago
Mauthausen (not Auschwitz) is a trip everyone needs to make. The most moving experience of my life was visiting it when I was younger. There's just something about that camp. It's remote and ominous. It really gives you a chance to contemplate just how awful that whole episode of human history was.
OGinparadise 14y ago
First congratulations on beating the odds :) he was not Jewish and was born in Massachusetts in 1916. He apparently told them left and right he was a US citizen Could he prove that he was an American or maybe Americans weren't that popular by then either?
- apaprocki 14y ago
  He was arrested while using a fake ID to evade the police from his first capture and that ID had a fake first name and birthplace, so perhaps that is the reason. (I never met him -- he died before I was born) Passports were not required back when he left the US, so I doubt he had proof handy and even if he did it was probably a fine line. Showing proof he was American could have made him a target instead of helping.
meaty 14y ago
I think this sort of story is surprisingly common. Most of our knowledge of such things is derived from films and books written by the victors (don't forget the UK government had a propaganda wing for WWII until the 1970s). These promote the nazis as well organised and ruthless. In fact, much as most design by committee systems are, the nazi regime was a bit of an incompetent mess with holes left right and centre. If you ever meet a Jew who is willing to discuss it, they usually have a relative or two who escaped to a more friendly country.

dajohnson89 14y ago

"History in Images"[0] is a gold mine of photographs and research into some atrocities committed during WW2. I highly encourage you to view the pictures. The accompanying articles are extravagant, but many of the facts, anecdotes, and statistics are from somewhat credible sources ([1], [2]). One quote, describing the Red Army occupation of East Berlin: "In one notorious instance, Red Army soldiers entered the maternity hospital at Haus Dehlem and raped pregnant women, women who had just given birth, and women in the process of giving birth."[3] [0]: http://historyimages.blogspot.com/ http://historyimages.blogspot.com/ (WARNING: Graphic images, and poor formatting) [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465003389 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465003389 [2]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/01/news.features11 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/01/news.features11 [3]: http://historyimages.blogspot.com/2011/10/mass-rape-of-german-women-when-germany.html http://historyimages.blogspot.com/2011/10/mass-rape-of-germa...

jnxfgf456 14y ago

I know you will recoil in horror, you won't believe me, you will fling hate at me. But my duty as a hacker and a person who prides intellectual curiosity above everything: THE HOLOCAUST DID NOT HAPPEN. It's a propaganda lie with no substantiated evidence to defame White European people. To extract monies for Israelites and to justify the ethnic cleansing and race replacement of Whites in Europe and western countries through the "asylum industry".

alexgartrell 14y ago
Excuse me for stating the obvious but [citation needed]. Apologies to good HNers for feeding the troll here, but I've always been curious about how holocaust deniers could have the balls to carry through with their opinions despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary.
- NuZZ 14y ago
  One must also be open to the possibility that due to the Jews' disproportionately large influence on the media - in that they are more commonly know as to "control the media", that said Jews would propagate lies to forward their own agendas. I would argue that the holocaust has afforded the Jews enough to warrant motive. To say "it did not happen", though, I wouldn't take such a stance. I personally would dispute its scope, greatly, in regard to the specific slaughter of Jews, and more relevantly, the constant reminder (read: disproportionately, as mentioned by other commenters) to sympathize with them. Also, I'm with you on the [citation needed]. I've too little interest to contribute, myself.
- boboblong 14y ago
  The burden of proof does not lie on him. There is a stunning lack of hard evidence that the holocaust took place as we're told it did. Whenever you ask for hard evidence, you're given the same run-around. I'd be happy with any of the following: 1. The remains. When you ask about this, you're first told that the bodies were cremated. The extremely implausible logistics of this aside, cremation leaves behind a significant amount of remains that would not have decomposed yet. The next line of defense is that exhumation violates Jewish law. Well, you know what? Too bad. Religious law may be violated in the course of a murder investigation. 3. Millions of birth certificates with no corresponding death certificates. 2. Records of who was gassed that can be corroborated. I'm aware that the Nazis kept records, but the records that people come up with when I ask for this are, at best, lists of people who have died of typhus or starvation. If I press, the defense becomes, "Well, why would they incriminate themselves?" Well, I don't know, but as far as I'm concerned this is a murder trial, and it's innocent until proven guilty. I've had this discussion online half a dozen times and no one has ever provided any of these three things.

friendly_chap 14y ago

A genuine question, please don't take it as an attack, I have some remote jewish blood in my veins, but I have to ask: What was so special in the Holocaust? I mean there were a lot of similarly dark points in history, both in terms of numbers (people killed) and cruelty, but still, it seems we always only care about the Holocaust (or at least it overshadows everything else). I think we should remember other events too, more frequently.

tkahn6 14y ago
You live in a Western country. The Holocaust was perpetrated by a Western people, people very similar to you. It was systematic and calculated, not a result of wild raping and pillaging. It was not the result of famine. That's why we focus on it more heavily. Here is archival footage from Night and Fog of people very similar to you calmly waiting to board trains as if they were going on vacation. Look at what they're wearing. All are wearing nice clothing, their bags are packed with a week's worth of clothes. You can see them then being crammed into the cattle cars. Most of these people were gassed immediately upon arrival. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8Da7lxpk&t=4m56s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8Da7lxpk&t=4m56s Is there anything else like that in history? Genuine question.
- paganel 14y ago
  The girl seen in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8Da7lxpk&t=6m22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8Da7lxpk&t=6m22s, her name was Anna Maria Settela Steinbach, she was gipsy, she, her mother and her four brothers and sisters were killed at Auschwitz in August 1944. More about her in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settela_Steinbach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settela_Steinbach
  - reddit_clone 14y ago
    In one brief shot, I saw a guy from inside the carriage helping the soldier outside to close the door ! I feel all weirded out.
mcantelon 14y ago

kgarten 14y ago

There are 2 major problems I have with world war II stories (the article tackles the first one extremely well) ... First of all, most Holocaust memorial articles etc. in general just focus on jews, however, there were other people also equally affected by it (sinti and roma, homosexuals, political left etc.). They all were systematically identified and killed with the knowledge and help of "normal" people in Germany. Why does the US not focus on their own wrongs in history? I'm German and as a consequence as adolescent I was "forced" every year during high school to hear about Nazi Germany (in German and History courses). This is very important and shaped me as an individual and a lot of my friends. So don't get me wrong, it is important to remember and it's important to understand what happend (and to realize that it's easy to do/support similar ideologies .. most of the German people at the time were no monsters and had also support from people all over the world, who believed that Hitler was needed against Communist Russia ... This is sad to hear yet important. Also a lot of the German scientists who did abysmal things to Humans continued working for the US after the war). I believe the lessons we should draw from Nazi Germany in World War II is that it is very easy for us (for everybody) to accept inhuman behavior, racism and genocide :( Maybe as German, I don't have the right to say that ... yet,I find it hypocrite to hear from US researchers, French, Austrians or Swiss how much we Germans did do wrong ... When part of the Austrians/French/US actively supported it and some Swiss took the money and gold from Nazi Germany and closed the borders for the victims. This is by no means meant as a justification of the crimes towards humanity my ancestors did, it's important to remember. everybody should visit Dachau or a similar concentration camp and remember not what cruelty we Germans were capable of but what cruelty we as human race are capable of. *edit: typos

Svip 14y ago
I particularly took notice of this: >Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time. >“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.” We all know that the allies were almost oblivious to these concentration camps during the war.[1] I would be surprised to learn that the allies did not have agents, spies or informants stationed in Germany during the war. How did these people also fail to notice what - according to Dr Dean - would have been obvious? Even 40'000+ sites takes few people to pull off in a country of over 50 millions. It was a very different time, and as the parent correctly points out, people accepted genocide, torture and blatant racism. Not just in Germany, but everywhere. A lot of people seem to think that it is something inherently German that made the Holocaust so terrible, but truth be, any other country could have fallen victim to the same propaganda had their situation been similar. That being said, I still find the Second World War rather uninteresting. [1] Although, as their progressing through German held Europe moved forward, the true picture began to emerge.