73 years ago: Dachau first German concentration camp

I was counting on my free speech. Thanks, Littlek.

Sincerely.

One thing, though. If Walter stops posting about the holocaust because it offends people, like it does you, then there's one less person in the world reminding the rest of us.

I didn't suggest he stop posting.

I just said that it offends me.

Wish I had gotten similar treatment when I said something most everyone else found offensive. They DID think I should not be able to speak what I said.

I hope someone will see the injustice. Just one person.

If the kitchen gets too hot....

I just saw this. Give me what impression? You obviously misunderstood my question.

CI-- Is the kitchen too hot for you? I guess you know what to do.

When Walter is the chef, never.

Watch what you're being served.

The potential of humans for ghastly cruelty to one another neither began nor (sadly) ended with the Holicaust. Mass exterminations of one sort or another go back as far as recorded history, whether the incident was the extermination of the population of a beseiged city or an even larger-scale event. Even the term 'concentration camp' is an artifact of an earlier war - the Boer War in South Africa.

Chumly already noted that the special quality of the Holicaust, one that is still very disturbing, is the modernity of the culture, the system and the methods associated with it. The perpetrators are not alien to us - instead they are frighteningly familiar in aspect and affect. However, in this regard, I believe we should also recognize that this too will fade. One day the details of the Holicaust will seem dusty and irrelevant, exciting no more revulsion than a report in an historical text of an ancient city beseiged and razed and its population slaughtered or sold into slavery.

I would also add the absence of any of the more common (but no less reprehensible) human motivators - fear, rage, even greed - usually associated with such cruelty. The Holicaust was done in pursuit of a relatively abstract idea, and not any of the more visceral human motives. However, even in this, the holicaust was not patricularly original. The religious persecutions of centuries past, from Diocletian to the Thirty Years War and subsequent, as well as the class and political persecutions of other Totalitarian movements in the Soviet system, China and more recently Cambodia - all had this characteristic.

Events during the last two decades in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia should also remind us that we have not really progressed far beyond this sort of thing. It can happen today and civilized nations are able to observe it and still take a great deal of time to rouse themselves to do anything about it. Something a bit like it appears to be going on right now in Sudan, and yet we have found a way to go on while doing little about it.

That may apply to some, but those images and that inhumanity--and the continuing cruelty--will never fade from my consciousness.

georege, Well stated. Violence of humans against humans will continue into the far future. Thinking it will disappear with education is nieve/ingenuous.

And they shouldn't fade from anyone's consciousness. Because it does keep happening in the world today. And will. The more we can learn from the past, the better. We seem to have learned awfully little, still not being able to prevent or at least stop similar mass killings from happening. It is universal in that it touches the core of humanity, thus should resonate with each of our own's consciousness, and it is timeless. Remembering Holocaust helps us bring the today's genocide in 'far away' places home, when we remember we have said 'never again' to such attrocity after the war. Yet we keep failing.

I believe the chief lesson of history is that a general awareness of the lessons of the past is not an adequate protection against repeating its mistakes.

In some respects human behavior and history exemplifies the characteristics of the chaotic systems so interesting to modern mathematicians - deterministic in principle, but unpredictable in detail, and yet, like the strange attractor, exhibiting the same gross characteristics, cycle after cycle.

Whenever I am tempted to believe that mankind has reached a significant new plateau, I return to the available records, historical and literary, of classical times.

One of Martial's (circa 45AD) short poems makes the point;

"You ask what I grow on my Sabine estate,
A reliable answer is due,

What I grow on that soil, far from urban turmoil.
I grow very happy at not seeing you."

Thanks for your contibution to the discussion.

May I remind that none - literally none - of those photos showed more (or less) - than can be found today (with modernised euqipment, though) as well?

But that was neither my aim for focusing at.

It was just to give some more background information about the vey beginnings, because of the date.

Was father has been mock-shot by Americans close to that castle in early April 1945. (As an army surgeon he was a non-conbattant.) Hr never went to that specific village where it happened during all his life - although he actually had to it as being in his medical district of surveiance.

I get quite often the feeling, I could murder some of those Germans in those days - nowadays, in school I always thought, people must have been brainless who did such.

That are my personal feelings. And that research I'm doing, could make me personally even more "offended" - but I try to approach these problems with the academic interest of an historian.
That works. Mostly.

Walter, history is sadly full of such stories. The wars between the Indians and early settlers in North America contain such episodes - on both sides. You will find the same in the details of Bolivar's revolution in South America, and also in the various early stages of the Mexican independence movement -- all involved significant racial warfare and slaughter. The citizens of Troy did not fare particularly well at the hands of the Greeks, nor did the Carthagenians at the hands of the Romans - or in turn the Romans during the Goth incursions, or later the Europeans and Moslems in the face of the various Mongol hordes, etc., etc.

Events sufficiently remote in time lose their power to grip us with their frightfulness. We also lose sight of our shared humanity with the perpetrators of such remote events. However when they are close enough to us, we are able to imagine and visualize the reality of it and see that the deeds were done by humans like ourselves. However the evil and frightfulness of all are about the same.

Do we learn from it? I think not. It is noteworthy that the awful history of the 20th century in Europe began in 1914 and ended in 1994 with trouble in Serbia and Bosnia.

Unlike other participants in WW2, Germany has never denied its guilt and has apologized many times. It has made reparations to Israel and the victims of the holocaust many times more than was demanded.

Israel is on good terms now with the new Germany.
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The agreement meant economic security for the new Zionist state, as Goldmann explained in his autobiography:

What the Luxembourg Agreement meant to Israel is for the historians of the young state to determine. That the goods Israel received from Germany were a decisive economic factor in its development is beyond doubt. I do not know what economic dangers might have threatened Israel at critical moments if it had not been for German supplies. Railways and telephones, dock installations and irrigation plants, whole areas of industry and agriculture, would not be where they are today without the reparations from Germany. And hundreds of thousands of Jewish victims of Nazism have received considerable sums under the law of restitution.

Goldman said in 1976:

Without the German reparations, the State of Israel would not have the half of its present infrastructure: every train in Israel is German, the ships are German, as well as the electricity, a large part of the industry ... without mentioning the individual pensions paid to the survivors ... In certain years, the amount of money received by Israel from Germany exceeds the total amount of money collected from international Jewry-two or three times as much.
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Conclusion
The Luxembourg Agreement obligated the West German government to pay three billion German marks to the State of Israel and 450 million marks to various Jewish organizations. Accordingly, the West German Finance Minister announced in 1953 that he expected that the reparations payments would eventually total four billion marks. Time would prove this a ludicrous underestimate.

By 1963, the German people had already paid out 20 billion marks, and by 1984 the total had risen to 70 billion.See 25. In late 1987 the West German parliament approved an additional 300 million marks in "restitution to the victims of National Socialist crimes."

The Bonn government announced at that time the 80 billion marks had already been paid out and estimated that by the year 2020 the payoff would total 100 billion marks which, at recent exchange rates, would be the equivalent of $50 billion.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v08/v08p243_Weber.html

http://www.facinghistorycampus.org/campus/memorials.nsf/0/DC396F572BD4D99F85256FA80055E9B1

Good posts George.

Walter this is an interesting thread and I dont criticise you for starting it, but dont you think you have done enough historical research on this? Your father and my father were quite possibly only 22 miles away from each other on opposite sides of the English Channel at one time during the war. But they are both gone now and we honour their memory, but dont you think its time to close the book now?

(It was the German ambassador to London who criticised English schools for dwelling too much on Hitler and WW2 )

I don't know about injustice, per se, but I certainly believe you have been repeatedly misunderstood in this thread.

The pictures...what they represent... conjure many feelings for me, as well, and offence is one of them… they outrage moral senses…the word was aptly chosen I think.

Walter, this is very interesting and edifying thread.

that makes sense. I though lash was offended by walter for some reason, it just wasn't clear to me from her post. plus in slovak the word 'offending' has a more specific meaning, closer to insulting... so i was confused.

I just want to add that quite some hundreds of those persons who where in the KZ's in 1933 (and later), are still alive ... here in Germany.

Another - outsite Germany mostly unknown and even here not much talked/written about fact - topic would be the tenthoudands of persons who were in the KZ's AFTER WWII - in the Soviet Zone/GDR until as late as the mid-50's.

One could also add the fate of tens of thousands of German prisoners of war in Russia held in captivity under severe conditions for a decade after the war ended - and many didn't survive the ordeal.

I believe that Germany has dealt with the afrereffects of the Nazi horrors, both with victims and itself, in a remarkably praiseworthy manner. There were some postwar reactions to be sure, but on the whole few nations have dealt so well with the dark side of their own histories. I agreed with former Chancellor Schroeder when he declared that it was past time for Germany to be considered, and to consider itself, as a 'normal nation' in all respects (it turned out that this was about the only matter on which I agreed with him, but that is another issue).

In the same vein I credit Walter's good intent in creating this thread - and note that the response of others here - including Lash - demonstrates the relevance of the lessons it still has for all of us.

One of the important aspects of these sad events that I believe is often missed in recounting them is that, despite its horrors and the ghastly motives of the perpetrators, the Holicaust was not a singularity, an utterly unique event, in human history. Shch things have happend before and since. The capacity for them is still a part of our common human nature. We must guard against them still.