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Auschwitz - we must never forget

It's this sort of thinking which makes me think that Western civilisation is fundamentally misconceived. That all the systems we have developped to transform the human monkey into a moral agent just treat the most superficial aspects, and can soon be wiped away, to let loose the horror which remains in our dark heart.

Are there better alternatives? How were the Tibetans from a moral point of view? Or the druids?
I dont know if its a uniquely western problem but I take your point.
 
This is just unbelievable.

In 2017 a Körber Foundation survey found that 40 percent of 14-year-olds in Germany did not know what Auschwitz was.[490] The journalist Alan Posener attributed the country's "growing historical amnesia" in part to a failure by the German film and television industry to reflect the country's history accurately.[491]

Thats a surprising stat. Generally I credit Germany with facing up to its past, showing contrition, and educating its population about this stain on their past. This has included school visits by survivors and children of perpetrators and visits to death camps. Certainly all Germans I've met in this country have been extremely well informed and open in discussing the subject as well as suitably condemnatory but rightly without feeling direct guilt for deeds not of their doing.

Overall they demonstrate a much better knowledge of their history than we do of ours. I know this was not always the case. Maybe they need to redouble their efforts.
 
I went to Auschwitz in 1986. The camp is mind-boggling. What happened there is so harrowing it is hard to understand how Holocaust denial exists. If you are in Poland and have a chance to visit the camp, go. It is something you will never forget.

Jack
I second that but would advise visitors to understand that thee are two sites-Auschwitz and Birkenau and they are a couple of miles apart. Some miss out on one part, so allow time and plan your visit.
 
They have to be held responsible for all of the deaths they were the aggressors, no invasion of Czechoslovakia or Poland ergo no WW2.
I know that nazi Germany lit the fuse but I disagree, would you include deaths at the hands of Japan with China or the USA?
 
I know that nazi Germany lit the fuse but I disagree, would you include deaths at the hands of Japan with China or the USA?

Without the Germans there would have been no war in the Pacific and no Hiroshima or indeed Russia & the Eastern front.

Maybe not attribute China/Nanking to the Germans as that was already an on-going thing pre WW2
 
Am moved by several posts in the thread so far.

If anyone would like to read a contemporary account, a diary actually, of how Germany became so radicalised, and how some saw it and regretted not acting earlier, I would strongly recommend Diary of a man in despair by Count Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen. You can find reprints easily. I urge you to do so.

Here Reck-Malleczewen recounts to his journal - 11 Aug 1937 - four or five pages of thoughts on meeting Hitler over the years, and this is more or less the summation:

110837.jpg



Think about that last line.
No, we must never forget.
 
We mustn't forget and we mustn't see ourselves as somehow superior to the ordinary Germans who went along with the appalling treatment of Jews. We were not then, and are not now, immune to ignoring the ill-treatment of "others".

This from"The Independent" 19th Jan. 2016:

"Between 12 and 29 million Indians died of starvation while it was under the control of the British Empire, as millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain as famine raged in India.

In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Winston Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine swept through Bengal.

Talking about the Bengal famine in 1943, Churchill said: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.”
 
Well, yes, ultimately it was, surely?
Without the Germans there would have been no war in the Pacific and no Hiroshima or indeed Russia & the Eastern front.

Maybe not attribute China/Nanking to the Germans as that was already an on-going thing pre WW2
I’m uncomfortable with the use of ‘the Germans’ here as it appears to apportion blame to a nation as a whole. Let’s not forget that many ordinary Germans were victims of the Nazi regime, some at the death camps.
 
I’m uncomfortable with the use of ‘the Germans’ here as it appears to apportion blame to a nation as a whole. Let’s not forget that many ordinary Germans were victims of the Nazi regime, some at the death camps.

The nazis couldn't have functioned with the complicity of the vast majority of the German people, I mean you can't transport millions of people from all over Europe to concentration camps without the 'employees' carrying out their duties.

The nazis were in power for 13 years and were voted into power by the German people and they subsequently 'voted' for them again another four times, I'm well aware that those referenda were rigged votes and there were no other political parties in Germany at that time but thirteen years is a long time period in which to build an opposition to the nazis but the German people never did that.
 
'Vast majority' is hyperbolic. I think you need to do a little more reading. And perhaps reflect on the practicalities of living under a system where even a small trangression could result in summary brutality or execution.
 
I doubt I will ever get the chance to visit one of the concentration camps. Closest I’ve come was a visit to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum back in the mid-1990’s. It was an incredibly emotional experience that is impossible to forget.

IMO, teaching young people about it (and other horrible mass murders throughout history) is an absolutely necessity. The holocaust photos and movies may shock and offend some, and they may cause (hopefully temporary) emotional problems for a few, but what choice do we have? I keep hoping that the next generation, or the one after that, is finally the one to not only say “never again”, but actually mean it.
 
Millions of ethnic Chinese were murdered in SE Asia by Japanese troops also. Very few were punished after the war as politics got in the way and the victims weren't European.
 
My late mother was Norwegian, born in 1942 during the Nazi occupation. I knew her father [my grandfather] who was active in the Norwegian Resistance throughout the occupation and survived the War, living till 1993. He was blown eighteen months before the end of the War and was thus an outlaw in his own country for his anti-German activities. Eighteen months of never staying in one place for more than one night. In his old age he would sometimes start a story, but never once did he get to the end of it. He would go quiet and then take himself to bed.

I am not going to gloss what my grandmother [his wife] told me as she really could not forgive the Nazis, though my grandfather accepted some difference between Nazi and non-Nazi Germans.
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I visited Lublin [Majdanec] Camp in Poland in 2006. It was the day after All Souls Day [which Poland takes very seriously], and there was the first snow of Winter at Lublin. It was an unforgettable visit and the place was terrible even then. I still have the little visitor guide in Polish and English. I last read through it at Easter last year.
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If anyone is curious as to how the people of Britain might have reacted had the Nazi invasion of the UK taken place, they need only read up on the occupation of the Channel Islands. No room for doubt after that. The British would have collaborated in sufficient numbers to allow the horror to have happened here in the UK. The British have no reason for smugness on this. The evidence is there for anyone to examine and think about.
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I have absolutely no hope for human nature. As a specie we are tribal at a very primal level. Of course we think we have a liberal outlook that suppresses this more or less inherent tribalism, but it is there and shows its ugly head in countless instances throughout history and still in the post Holocaust era. I don't think the Western Judeo-Christian culture is inherently more or less flawed than other cultures. Look at Myanmar today concerning the treatment of their Muslim minority as an ongoing tribal horror.

Strangely, we have advanced to a point where the human population has long ago exceeded what is sustainable, and as the system of agriculture collapses under the weight of this population and its destruction the of environment, I believe that the worst of the tribal evil of our specie is still in front of us.

Best wishes from George
 
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The nazis couldn't have functioned with the complicity of the vast majority of the German people, I mean you can't transport millions of people from all over Europe to concentration camps without the 'employees' carrying out their duties.

The nazis were in power for 13 years and were voted into power by the German people and they subsequently 'voted' for them again another four times, I'm well aware that those referenda were rigged votes and there were no other political parties in Germany at that time but thirteen years is a long time period in which to build an opposition to the nazis but the German people never did that.

With respect, I suggest dropping this focus on apportioning blame in this way.

Please let us focus, as far as possible along with our fellow humans of all nations, on commemoration.
 
The nazis couldn't have functioned with the complicity of the vast majority of the German people, I mean you can't transport millions of people from all over Europe to concentration camps without the 'employees' carrying out their duties.

The nazis were in power for 13 years and were voted into power by the German people and they subsequently 'voted' for them again another four times, I'm well aware that those referenda were rigged votes and there were no other political parties in Germany at that time but thirteen years is a long time period in which to build an opposition to the nazis but the German people never did that.
The problem with putting the blame uniquely on the Germans is that we fail to recognise the antisemitism in the UK and elsewhere before the war. More important, If we pigeon hole the blame in such a manner, if we label the problem as belonging to another place in another time, we’re in danger of failing to recognise the rise of racism today in the here and now, of failing to recognise the small steps that led to the massive thing that was the holocaust.
 
The nazis couldn't have functioned with the complicity of the vast majority of the German people, I mean you can't transport millions of people from all over Europe to concentration camps without the 'employees' carrying out their duties.

The nazis were in power for 13 years and were voted into power by the German people and they subsequently 'voted' for them again another four times, I'm well aware that those referenda were rigged votes and there were no other political parties in Germany at that time but thirteen years is a long time period in which to build an opposition to the nazis but the German people never did that.

This happened just a month ago...

‘Sickening’ antisemitic graffiti on synagogue and shops in London investigated by police
‘Something truly monstrous is rising from the slime,’ says historian Simon Schama


  • Sunday 29 December 2019 11:45
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ynagogue-shops-london-hampstead-a9263176.html
 


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