I'm looking for a situation in history similar to the Holocaust

in terms of proportionality and rate of killing (deaths per day, for example) both Rwandan and Cambodian genocide were worse than Holocaust. Of course not in the sense of organized and mechanized killing, it was more raw. and in cambodia many died of starvation --which some would leave out, some not.

You seem to think that everybody had a telephone in Poland before WWII
Europe had not more than 1.9 telephones per 100 inhabitants

In USA 65% of the telephones were private phones and in Europe they were very scare except in the Nordic countries where already 1928 57% had a private phone in Sweden.
Of course there were more telephones in the cities than in the countryside.
As you had to call an operator first to get connected and these could listen to the conversation. Calling was expensive you people prefered to write letters.

I've just read that it was in Namibia that an anti-Wiesentahl obituary was published, financed from Germany.

Would you please point out who from Germany financed an anti Wisentahl obituary? And also in what publication it was published.
Of course there are some anti Jews in Germany just like in the rest of the world - but in Germany politicians, Jews and many others are very much against any form of publications which would be anti Jewish or anti Semetic.

Link to report about that ad.

http://www.economist.com/images/20051029/CEU913.gif

This map (from another thread here) shows that exactly in the south-east the concentration of Polish conservative Catholics is the greatest.

Before WW2, 30% of Polish GDP was in Jewish hands.

so...what are you really saying?

Just additional info connected with the subject.
Not sure where this will lead us.
Imagine that the police come and arrest your next-house neighbor. What would your impressions be?
- Wow! It's not me.
- He must've committed something illegal.
- Better not to go close. The police are armed.

it was army, not police, and people knew very well why they came.

you know... you want people to take Poland and the Polish with respect and then you're not able to take half a critical look at your own history. "It's the Germans... it's the Jews (or leftists or whatever you call them)...it's the times....they didn't know....." - now THAT is a joke. No surprise that people can't take you very seriously after all you've said.

I'm a Slovak by the way. We fared even worse than the Poles, having voluntarily organized our own transports to concentration camps. But Poles were no angels.

Yes, I know, the priest Tiso. And Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, Hungarians, the French etc. Nowadays historians speak openly about these matters, some maybe want to make careers on that period of smaller or greater collaboration.

of course. that's why people talk about it....they want to make careers out of it

i hope you're not a history or international relations major. but whatever your profession or future profession is, an open mind will not do you disservice. try it.

People can multiply answers such as this ad infinitum--based on the population in the affected area, one could allege that the slaughter inflicted by Boudicca in first century Britannia was the worst in history.

The point about the NSDAP is the scale, the organization and the exportation of their genocide. The Turks did not export the killing of Armenians. The Hutus of Rwanda slaughtered Tutsis there, and have done so in the DRC--but no formal organization for the slaughter was erected as was done by the NSDAP, and there was on conscious "exportation" of the slaughter by a Rwandan government. Pol Pot's horrors cannot necessarily even be described as genocide, at least to the extent that that was not the conscious aim--he had some sort of horribly distorted plan à la Mao's cultural revolution.

People who are unfamiliar with the NSDAP plan, and who can stomach the implications, should search for "Wannsee Conference." This was the meeting early in 1942 during which the "final solution" was promulgated. Lines of responsibility and authority were set up and formalized. A chain of command was established within the NSDAP and within the SD-Sipo (SD was the Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS and the NSDAP). SD was given responsibility for security in "ausland" ghettos, and in the concentration camps. The responsibility and accountability of the Gestapo and all the agencies of the SS were detailed, and the relationship of the army to the SD was established, making the army subordinate to the SD in all "security" considerations in the "ausland" (this resulted in hundreds of instances of SD officers commandeering Wehrmacht supplies and/or transport, often for use in the ausland concentration camps, or to evacuate death camp inmates and SD personnel as the Soviets advanced).

The "final solution" was organized in a meticulous manner to which it is arguable that no other NSDAP or merely German enterprise was in the last three and a half years of the war. Before the Wannsee conference, certainly there were concentration camps, and the Nazis were rounding up Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals and the physically and mentally disabled. But the Wannsee conference established a bureaucratic organization to accomplish the purposes of the final solution, which was arguably the most well-organized and most powerful bureaucracy in Germany.

There is, quite simply, nothing else in history which compares to the intentional, organized genocide perpetrated by the NSDAP, which exported that genocide and the mechanism to achieve it in the wake of Germany's military invasions.

There is nothing in history which even remotely resembles what was done by the NSDAP.

(I wasn't picking on you, Dashenka, i was just using your post as a point of departure.)

Here is a good overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history

Notice the Dzungar Mongols (peaceful China around 1750).

<sound of buzzer> Sorry. Wrong answer. The correct answer is: Foofie actually takes much of his virtual activity in a light-hearted jovial manner.

And, for those that want another reference to Setanta, other than the Chief of the Kiowa Indians:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%BAchulainn

Hip, hip, hooray. A truth teller speaks.

Sorry, for hundreds of years, Poles and Jews were not amicable neighbors. A small anecdote: some Poles taught their dogs to run after Jewish children walking to school.

Please remember that it was a Polish King that invited Jews into his Kingdom, to enhance the Polish economy. That does not mean the Polish peasant was happy to have these new arrivals.

While much is clouded in history, what might be telling is that Russian Jews did adopt much of the Russian culture. Russian food, Russian music, Russian dance. However, Polish Jews sort of avoided everything Polish. The food, the music, the dance. Odd? Both country's Jews did learn the respective native language, since one does go into town now and then for something.

I believe we could point out a likely common denominator, in that Jews, and the respective victims in Rwanda and Cambodia were not considered part of the world of many westerners that required real concern and empathy.

Pre-WWII anti-Semitism did an excellent job of de-humanizing Jews in the eyes of many, and the victims in Rwanda and Cambodia were not the Caucasians that many could only relate to. Just my cynical opinion of western man's hypocritical nature.

I read awhile back how in Poland today there is an interest in the Jewish music (Klezmer) of the pre-WWII Polish Jewish community. And, supposedly an interest in things Jewish (Polish Jewish). Does this have anything to do with white-washing history, perhaps, as countries in the EU jockey for "gold stars" from the proverbial teacher?

I would add, not only in the scale of killing, and the number of countries it fed on, to do the killing, but perhaps most telling, was the scale of the lack of concern after the killing. The birth of Israel to some extent was an attempt, I believe, to assuage guilt, but also to give credence that much of Europe was quite content with the result - no Jews. That lack of remorse may also be a record of sorts.

Notice how two generations later, there are those that think that 60 years is too long for Israel to exist. What is telling is that if Israel has made mistakes, or is not handling their new found existence in the most commendable way, how many people are ready to "throw the baby out with the bath water," so to speak.