Things that don't keep me up at night, the post.Kath wrote:Damn, Nuke - I had no idea you were a Holocaust denier. The teeny tiny amount of respect I had for you just flew out my window.
Published on Feb 19, 2013
10 newspapers from 1915-1938 before the Holocaust allegedly happened.
Here's some more articles:
Library of Congress http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/sea...
New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/search/sites...
"It is an undisputed fact of history that, during World War II, the Germans ran a network of prison and labor camps, both in Germany and in the territories they controlled. Into these camps were sent Jews, prisoners-of-war, resistance fighters, Gypsies, and other people considered enemies of the Third Reich.
The largest of these camps was the one called Auschwitz, located in Poland. Those interned at Auschwitz came from all over Europe and consisted of men, women, and children. Those able to work were used as labor for the German war effort. Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army in January of 1945.
But that is where the consensus ends.
Since the end of World War II we have been told repeatedly that many of these camps served a darker purpose: the genocide of six million Jews and the execution of five million non-Jews through the use of homicidal gas chambers in what is now commonly known as the "Holocaust." The largest number of people are said to have been murdered at Auschwitz.
But there are some people who maintain these claims of mass murder have never been proven. These people point to the lack of documentation other than the highly questionable and partially discredited evidence supplied by the Soviet Union at the Nuremberg Trials and the unreliable nature of the eyewitness testimonies, many of which have also been discredited. (For example, many former camp inmates, as well as American soldiers, still speak of "gassing" at the Dachau camp in Germany, even though it is no longer held that any [homicidal] gas chamber was ever in use at that camp.)
Still, the Holocaust is an event that has seemingly grown in importance since the end of the war, taught as fact...usually accepted without question.
But how do we know it really happened? What "proofs" are offered for those not willing to take history on faith alone?
This video deals with, among other things, one of those proofs, one piece in a very large puzzle: the supposed gas chamber at the Auschwitz Main Camp."
I was a translator at the front. Our forces had taken half of Poland. At New Years we reached Krakow. I interrogated German and Italian officers there, because I knew Italian and Polish besides Russian. I’ve learnt that from my mother and during school. We then got the order to push beyond the town and into the concentration camp Auschwitz. When our tanks reached the front gates of the KZ [KZ = Konzentrationslager; German for concentration camp] early on the 27th of january 1945, the guards had already caught wind and had fled. Only some remained, others had died by their own hands.
Nobody resisted. The front gate of the camp was locked. Our tank broke through. One truck after the other, full of soldiers, drove onto the camp site. Our soliders disembarked, disarmed the remaining guards of the camp and arrested them.
So we drove up to the extermination camp Birkenau.
Knowing the Red Army was closing in, the SS gave the boilermen (?) [people operating the ovens] the order, to throw the prisoners, who were already emaciated to the point of looking like skeleton, into the crematorium alive. They wanted to get rid of the sick and weakened to cover up their tracks as fast as possible.
The boilermen looked surprised to see us officers and soldiers. They were strong people, mostly Kapos [prisoners forced to work in the camps]. They greeted us with shy smiles on their faces, a mix of happiness and fear. Like on command, they threw away their poker. With us, they talked freely. Angry words about Hitler were spoken. I still remember an old boilermen stammer “Thank you”. “Thank you, friend. May I call you [the Russians] friends?”.
One of them, a Ukrainian, I asked: “Why did you do that?” and pointed towards the ovens. Without blinking he replied: “They didn’t ask if I wanted to. No, I didn’t want to. But better be the guy working the oven, then be the one burning. That’s why I did it.” I was speechless, could just shake my head. “Why aren’t the other ovens burning? There’s no smoke coming up the chimney”, I asked the guy. “Deconstructed”, he said.
Caught in our own thoughts, everyone just stood around. Nobody cared about the burning ovens. “Stop this. Out! All of you!”, the commanding officer Sergejew shouted. Outside, he was shaking and said with a stuttering voice: “How can this be in the midst of the 20th century! I can’t comprehend this. If there’d be a god, maybe he could explain how this all came to be.”
We visited the barracks and couldn’t believe our own eyes. Naked and groaning people, hardly looking like humans, were laying on straw bags. I touched one of the people laying there. He didn’t move. He wasn’t alive anymore.
In another barrack, a woman was dying. I asked if someone from her family was also in the camp. She said yes. Via speakers we tried to find her relatives and reunited the family. Shortly after, the woman died, although our doctors tried to save her.
After that we concentrated on the camp headquarters. In the hallway towards the office of the camp management I found a paper pinned to the wall which concerned me, too, since I’m slav. It said something along the lines of “Germans! We are the masters. Our interests are the only that matter. The reproduction of the slav people is not desired. Childlessness and abortian are to be encouraged. Education of slav children is unnecessary. If they can count up to 100, that’s sufficient. Those who can’t work, shall die.”
I translated the text for the others who just shook their heads. One teared it down. The offices were empty and chaotic so we went outside.
In the meantime our soldiers had gathered the female guards and brought them to us. “Should we…?”, asked a Corporal. “No, don’t do anything stupid”, the officer replied. “This is to be decided by the Ordnungstruppe” [something like 'commanding unit' or 'military police' perhaps; definitely a higher authority; can’t find a solid translation;].
“What does she have in her bag”, I asked another woman, since I saw how filled her bag was. A soldier grabbed into the bag. It was a brochure. The headline was “About the law to defend the hereditary health of the German people”. I took it, read some pages. Proof of being aryan, marriage prohibition, anglo-jewish plague … I took note of it and was shocked. People are still carrying these with them! [Nikolai Politanow is suprised that these people still carry things that will be used as evidence against them.]
“Are you all Aryan women?”, I asked. They give me a cold look. “I don’t know”, one of them replied. We laughed. “Where are the camp doctors?”, I asked. “Not here, ran off”. “And the male prisoners, where are they? I haven’t seen a single man. What is this all about?”. “A week ago they’ve been escorted out of the camp. Probably relocated to Majdanek or Treblinka”, she replied. I tore the brochure into pieces and threw it onto the piles of garbage.
Until evening, many reporters had arrived. Nonstop buzzing and flashing cameras everywhere inside and ouside the barracks. We had to learn one step after the other that Auschwitz was a central selection camp. Jewish people were selected for forced labour or death in the gas chambers. The immediate extermination by jews who were unable to work was expressly insisted upon.
The field kitchens arrived soon. Nearly at the same time, the Ordnungstruppe and surprisingly high ranking officers from the staff of Rokossowski and Konjew showed up. Medics distributed sheets and clothing to the prisoners. To prevent the prisoners from eating snow, soldiers distributed tea and bread to the nearly starved skeletons. In the meantime, military trucks had arrived. Around midnight, all prisoners were taken out of the camp. Those still able to walk had no patience to wait and had already taken off by foot towards Sosnowitz. The only remaining people were Kapos and guards. Those were immediatly ordered to dig up mass graves outside the camp and to bury the dead bodies there. Floodlights and generators had already been put in place.
The camp was now empty and it was as silent as a monastery. Some torches were lighting the ground here and there. We had to leave, since we are a combat unit assigned to the front. We caught up to the rest of our unit in Sosnowitz, approximatly 15 kilometer east of Kattowitz.
Sometimes you just cannot win, can you? And often it's the innocent that suffer the most, not the actual guilty.adwinistrator wrote:My grandmother's family would be included in this group, though not the most typical of scenarios.jbird4049 wrote:Okay. This of course will not make a speck of difference, but the evidence of the mass murder of Germans during, and right after, the war is similar in style to the Holocaust, half of whose victims were non Jews such as Jehovah's Witnesses, political prisoners, gays, Gypsies, and so on. The main difference was that the latter lasted a few years longer, covered more area, and had all those lovely, thorough German documents.
So if one is willing to accept the very real ethnic cleansing, genocide, rape, and robbery of millions of Germans, logically one should accept the same of twice that number of Holocaust victims, half of whom were not Jews. Now I would ask my relatives for some more details. After all they saw some of the camps, and/or talked to survivors, during and after enjoying the Wehrmacht's attention, but they died two decades ago. Strangely they were not in hurry to relate Hell to me, but hey.
There have been excavations of Sobibor.
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science- ... or-n206591
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zei ... 93733.html
Her father was a German through and through (Wilhelm), but her mother's family was Silesian. If you know anything about Silesia, than you can probably guess what happened to them.
While her mother's family would normally be considered Polish by the German's, they were protected at the time by her father's German/Prussian heritage. When the Nazi's began terrorizing the Poles, Jews, and Slavs in the years leading up to the war, the family was kept safe, they spoke German and had a German surname. Even during the war, they were never treated as Polish citizens, though without the marriage to Wilhelm, they most certainly would have been.
When the war was over, Luckily for me, my grandmother was able to meet a dashing young US serviceman named Herman, who decided to smuggle her and her newborn son back to America on a passenger ship.
Unfortunately for the family, under the Potsdam Conference their home of Beuthen was returned to Poland and renamed Bytom. While you would think a Silesian family, with their culture and heritage interconnected with Poland, would be fine with this, things did not work out so well for them.
Turns out, the Polish people were quite upset about all that invasion, occupation, and systematic genocide, and they really didn't see the distinction between the Silesian people who had always been in Beuthen, and the German citizens who had brought destruction to their country and their people. They didn't pass the "Verification of Polishness" test.
I'll let my second cousin give the account, please forgive his English.
Thomas wrote:So Sophie Martha was my Grandmother, she dies on liver cancer as i was 12 years old 1988 she was nobody important she was doing the job she was allowed to, she was cleaning the public swimming baths. The life in Silesia after the world War II was hard and the Family has lost a lot even the appartment and my grandfather become a slave worker in the russian mines. My grandma was sleeping as homeless for many years in churches with their children Dieter, Marianne and Monika. My father Peter is born 1950 after my grandpa cames back from russia as creeple. He has lost his right hand thats why the russian has sended him back. My Grandfather died before i was born but what i know from my father it was that he dies as broken man. To become slave worker in UDSSR was a common destiny for silesian miners after the war so my grandgrandpa from the mothers side was also there. My Fathers Family because of beeing German and just speak German has suffered a lot, Silesia suffered as first the revange of the winners.
I am happy for you and your Family that you was growing up with the chance to become somebody. The real chance to become somebody after the war it was me. The problem by such poor family like the Family of my grandma Sophie was that the children was working very early. My Father started to work in the mine with 14 as apprentice and he was the one who broght the money home his sisters went early out and had married. The Same about his older Brother Dieter. I have never really keeped the contact with oncle Dieter and hes Family. I just keep the contact with my cusins from aunt Marianne. Belive me the poverty and violation of human souls is something that needs generations to heal and 50% of Sophies children and grandchildren was growning up with familiar problems. What does not mean that the another 50% are not proud hard neck and strong silesian people they never give up.
True but I believe more tha one firebombing was more lethal then either of the two nukes. And it wasn't the military that got hit, except for some aircraft, and a few odd soldiers. It was hundreds of thousands of mostly old men, women, and children.Fife wrote:It reminds me that I like seeing nazis get wasted. Too bad we didn't have the a-bomb in 1942.
Anti-Semitism was still relatively normal at the time in alot of Western countries. But it seems it was, in that time period, already on the decline. And while some leaders were anti-Semitic, they might, under certain circumstances work with Jews:Speaker to Animals wrote:One thing I found interesting was how the British Empire refused to allow European Jews to immigrate to Palestine. I wonder if things would not have been so bad had Jews been able to just leave Europe when they still had the chance.
As it was, those who tried to escape were often turned back, including from Ellis Island.
While the Germans were the ones trying to exterminate them, I wonder how complicit our own leaders were in locking the Jews in place so that it would happen.
I haven't looked at it, but there was killing coming from the Germans, Red Army, Soviet Partisans, and Independent Partisans. The whole eastern front was a clusterfuck of killing.BjornP wrote:As to the OP story, interesting find Penner. While the Nazis were good record keepers, the number of mass murders committed along and across the Eastern front that took place in woods, fields or other non-"processing" sites, are unlikely to have been recorded as meticulously.
GrumpyCatFace wrote:Dumb slut partied too hard and woke up in a weird house. Ran out the door, weeping for her failed life choices, concerned townsfolk notes her appearance and alerted the fuzz.
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