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Cassandra Koestler: if the tale’s too terrifying — 13 Comments

  1. I would suggest the propaganda efforts of WW1 probably had a nontrivial role.

  2. Exactly – from what I remember of my semester-long project to read every issue of the Chicago Tribune between 1935-45 – people did remember how they were taken in by propaganda. They weren’t going to get fooled again. People knew in a vague way, I think, that the Jews in Europe were being treated brutally, were imprisoned in labor camps and starved in ghettos, but being exterminated deliberately and systematically? That was just something they couldn’t even get their heads around, until April and May of 1945, when the Allies began liberating camps and finding the evidence. Ordinary people were stunned and horrified to find out that what had been going on was more than even the most rabidly anti-Nazi propagandist had been able to create. The Final Solution was simply unimaginable … until then.

  3. A lot of people prefer to think their masters in their social hierarchy are humans, not evil, so would never do such things.

    And since that is the case, all that needs to be done is trust in the Master and forget about all this stuff that a person can’t handle.

    Lacking a source that can be trusted (including their own brains at times) aids in this closing off of the heart and soul.

    The mind wouldn’t be closed off if it weren’t for the heart and soul

  4. Patrick-who-is-Hector and Sgt Mom;

    Yes, I was going to say the same thing. I remember several years ago when I first read about the WWI propaganda that the British spread; and so much of it was some of the same stories that came out of WWII, the only difference is that during WWII so much of it was real.

    Too much like Aesop’s fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

    Even in elementary school when we first read about the Nazi’s just marching civilians to the gas chambers, I and several of my classmates just couldn’t believe that people went “willingly.” How could you not fight back? If they are going to kill you anyway why not go out with a fight we thought.

    So, I really don’t blame most folks for not believing the horrors until given “proof.”

  5. I am very late to comment but what happened to the Jews and others at the hands of hitler and the Germans haunts me. It happened before i was born but I was so horrified when i learned about it. I dont know what the world knew but i know the German people knew what they were doing to the Jews, their fellow citizens. Germans were turning Jews over to the SS. They saw them led off on trains and then they never saw them again. They saw the smoke from the ovens and they did nothing to save them. They knew they were being systematically slaughtered.
    Italians were told to round up the Italian Jews and hand them over to Germany but, they, for the most part, did not comply. Germans as a whole did comply….. willingly.
    I don’t know how old Germans can live with that evil history and how younger Germans deal with it.

    And is it happening again? Europe is still anti-Jew. Why are they so accepting of the muslims and sharia at the risk of their own lives, freedom and liberty and so anti Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. I dont understand. Is being anti Israel a cloacked way to be antisemtic? They are appeasing muslims the way England appeased Germany.
    And this time, not only the Jews, but Christians and all non Muslims will be fodder for the final solution.
    They told us what they mean to do to us, are we going to our deaths as “willingly” as stated by another commneter, as the Jews.
    I am so confused and sad.

  6. kit:

    Please read this post, on resisting the Nazis. I call your attention to this passage, but I think you should most definitely read the whole thing:

    In looking at the idea of whether successful nonviolent resistance to some of the Nazis’ harshest edicts was possible, one must always remember this differential treatment of occupied countries. What was successful in one place could never have been so in another. Just as Gandhi’s success depended on the fact that he was facing the relatively humane British, so it was that the brutality of the Nazi occupation in one country wasn’t the same as the Nazi occupation in another. Different policies allowed differential responses, such as, for example, the ability of the relatively autonomous and respected Danes to evacuate and thus rescue their relatively small Jewish population.

    The Nazis were well aware of the possibility of resistance and the need for a cooperative captive populace. That’s one of the reasons they thought it best to disguise and keep quiet the scope of their genocide. They feared a public backlash against it, even (or perhaps especially) in Germany.

    The Nazi racial laws that singled out the Jews for special persecution started slowly in Germany during the early 30s, increasing the Jews’ isolation from the general public over the years and culminating, as we know, in the Final Solution. There’s a great deal of controversy over how much the German people actually knew about the true nature and extent of the death camps. But certainly extreme persecution of the Jews of Germany and elsewhere was common knowledge, as was their deportation to parts unknown, never to be heard from again. So even if the German people didn’t know everything, they knew a great deal.

    Some of those “parts unknown” were in concentration camps in Germany itself, such as Dachau and Mathausan-Gusen. So the Germans in the surrounding area clearly knew about these camps. However, the term “concentration camp” is so familiar that most people do not realize that it’s a general term covering two horrific but somewhat different types of institution: the labor camp and the death camp. The camps in Germany were labor camps.

    Although conditions in labor camps were dreadful, and death was a common and expected occurrence in them, the main purpose of these camps was not to exterminate directly, but rather to harshly extract the full measure of hard labor out of the inmates with the least cost. If they happened to die from the conditions there, then so be it–and die they did, in droves. The death camps, however, existed solely for the purpose of efficiently killing virtually all their inmates shortly after arrival.

    A related distinction is also not ordinarily understood: none of the death camps was located in Germany. Rather, all six were in Poland. Why was this? Poland had a large Jewish population, and therefore the camps were located near the source and less transport would be needed. But it seems that the Nazi leadership may also have wanted to protect the German population from exact and precise knowledge of what was happening, by placing the death camps far away. Perhaps they didn’t have full confidence that their own populace would support outright extermination if it came to know, unequivocally and undeniably, that this was what was actually happening.

    In order to accomplish the task of genocide, especially the all-important initial action of rounding up the Jewish population, the cooperation of the local non-Jewish population was a requirement for success. And, as the example of the Danes shows, that cooperation was not always a given. So it would be best to keep the final destination as quiet as possible, to reduce the probability of protest.

    It didn’t always work. In addition to the Danes, the Bulgarians were able to defy the Germans and save their Jews. The Bulgarians were even more autonomous than the Danes (in fact, they were unoccupied German allies). They saved their Jews through a combination of church leadership and the fact that anti-Semitism had never really taken much hold there. The Nazis didn’t want to strong-arm the citizens of countries such as Denmark and Bulgaria, who were not considered enemies, into giving up their Jews. They were willing to wait and concentrate on places such as France where it was much easier to get public cooperation for the roundup of their prey. Later, they thought, they’d tie up loose ends in other places.

    Please also read this, as well as this. Also, see this.

    As for Europe now, it is quite a leftist place, and very PC (at least, a lot of people are). Muslims are defined as underprivileged, third world people, and Jews as privileged, traditionally hated, first-world people. Therefore the first group is more favored than the second, and propaganda against Israel continues apace. However, there is also a backlash against Muslims in Europe by a subset of the European population. Jews are so uncommon in Europe now that Muslims way outnumber them (Hitler didn’t entirely succeed in making Europe Judenfrei, but he effectively did).

    As for your confusion, I think this post might go a long way towards clearing it up. An excerpt:

    …I think the desire [of Europeans] is to prove the Jews to be as guilty as the Europeans were, and thus to absolve the Europeans of guilt for participating in and cooperating with the Holocaust in such great numbers. And if the Jews and/or Israelis should happen to disappear as a side-effect of the present-day attitude of the Europeans, then so be it.

    This can be seen in the eagerness with which explicit and frequent comparisons are made between Jews—especially Israelis—and Nazis. And, in a separate but related phenomenon, I think it’s at least partly behind the comparison of Bush to Hitler. If the Israelis/Jews (and American Presidents) are as bad as the Nazis and their European collaborators, this serves a double function: first, it norms Europe’s behavior during WWII (“see, there’s nothing special about the guilt of Europeans, move along now”); and second, it can even be seen as justifying the Holocaust, as well (“Jews are evil, so it was okay for us to cooperate in attempting to destroy them”).

    Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism not only both have a long history in Europe (the first phenomenon is an ancient one; the second has existed for centuries), but they both have a more recent function, and that it is to deflect and sooth European guilt.

  7. thank you, Neo for your time, expertise and patience. I have read the entire posts very carefully and will continue to read everything you write about this. It is complicated but you have, indeed, helped my confusion. THANK YOU!
    Gratefully,
    kit

  8. Charles (Oct. 5, 9:25 PM), when people talk about the Jews “willingly” walking into the gas chambers, they forget that those who were to be gassed were told that they were about to given showers and deloused as a disease control measure before they were put into the camp population. Then, once they had stripped and entered “the shower room” they were sprayed with Zyklon-B rather than water.

    One wonders if the person/s who came up with that horribly effective way of herding a myriad victims to their death was ever identified?

  9. Another factor to keep in mind here is that even people who clearly saw the evil of the Nazis at the time had difficulty realizing the sheer magnitude of that evil.

    A short story by Stephen Vincent Benet (best remembered now as the author of “The Devil and Daniel Webster”) illustrates this. It is titled “Into Egypt” and was copyrighted in 1939. It is set at the border of a country, unnamed but obviously Germany. The view point character is a newly minted young army lieutenant given charge of a minor crossing point. Eager to do his duty to his State and his Leader, he is a very minor cog in the machinery of the great operation to cleanse the homeland of the “Accursed People” (the Jews). They are to be expelled, all of them, in three days with no more than they can carry.

    “Even the concentration camps had been swept clean, for this
    thing was to be final. After it, the State could say “How fearless
    we are we let even known conspirators depart. ‘ It is true that,
    in the case of those in the concentration camps, there had been a
    preliminary rectification a weeding, so to speak. But the news
    of that would not be officially published for some time and the
    numbers could always be disputed. If you kill a few people, they
    remain persons with names and identities, but, if you kill in the
    hundreds, there is simply a number for most of those who read
    the newspapers. And, once you start arguing about numbers, you
    begin to wonder if the thing ever happened at all. This too had
    been foreseen.”

    That line “And, once you start arguing about numbers, you begin to wonder if the thing ever happened at all.” is chillingly prophetic.

    Benet clearly regards what he describes as an atrocity and a horror but when we compare it to what actually happened we see how horribly reality outstriped the writer’s imagination.

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  11. One other thing to understand about the labor camps in Germany. They were not always the scenes of unimaginable horror and squalor that assaulted the senses of the Allied liberators. Before 1945, they were fairly orderly places; brutal to be sure, but orderly.

    The Germans had a dire need for unpaid forced labor, so they had an interest in keeping the inmates from starving and falling ill, just as a mule skinner would have an interest in keeping his mules healthy.

    But, starting with the Soviet invasion into Germany in January 1945, the whole thing, along with the Third Reich, began to fall apart. Inmates from camps in the east were forced-marched westward, which overcrowded the remaining camps. The food and medicine distribution system collapsed, or these items were diverted to the regular German people.

    In short order, epidemics began to to break out among the overcrowded sickly inmates. To add to the horror, as the Allies drew ever nearer, SS guards began mass murdering remaining inmates to remove any witnesses to their cruelty. And the result was an un-Godly horror that was not representative of what these camps had been. So you can’t point to this obvious squalor and say “How could the Germans no know of these horrors; you could smell these things from miles away.”

    But in another sense, seeing as how the Third Reich had removed all evidence of the majority of the death camps and the mass shooting pits in Russia, it is fitting that these atypical work camp scenes at the end of the war be used to represent the Holocaust — because they do convey the enormity of it.

  12. Callmelennie:

    Most people don’t even understand that there was a difference between labor camps and death camps and lump them all together. I discuss the distinction between the two at length here.

    However, the Germans’ interest in keeping laborers alive was not all that great. After all, they could easily replace them with new slave labor. The death rate at labor camps was nothing like at extermination camps, of course, but it was high.

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