With all the Middle East threads...

...going on here, I thought it would be a good idea to check out the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC this morning.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

If you've never been there, you need to go. Every American needs to go.

I was there for ~7 hours and didn't see everything there. The utter brutality of the Nazis and their collaborators was wrenching and horrible. The complicity and callous disregard of the rest of the world (including America and Britain, BTW) towards the victims of the Holocaust was shocking and inexcusable. Look at the footage. Read the survivor accounts. Consider the fate of the innocents and the rise of Hitler, especially his methods and reasoning. How do you get an entire continent to go along with genocide, in only 6 short years?

6 million Jews, 3 million Soviet POWs, tens of thousands of Gypsies, Poles, gays, communists, trade unionists and others?

The US knew for a fact that the death camps were running at full speed, for at least 16 months towards the end of the war, and we did nothing to stop it. We bombed a Farben IG rubber plant complex into oblivion right next door to Auchwitz 3 camp, but couldn't spare a few bombs to destroy the gas chambers, that killed a thousand people a day.

A thousand people a day. That was one-third of one death camp, out of many. Most of the death camp victims were robbed, stripped of belongings, clothing and hair, gassed, and cremated within hours of their arrival via packed train freightcars.

We created such a paper nightmare to get visas, that Jews that wanted to leave Germany could not do so, even when the Nazis wanted them to leave and allowed and encouraged them to do so(1933-1938 or so).

We turned back a refugee ship from the east coast, carrying almost 1,000 Jews, without allowing them to set foot on our shores. They ended up going back to France, and many were slaughtered in the gas chambers later.

We wouldn't even accept 20,000 jewish children - stalling a bill in comittee that would have gotten them here to safety.

We were too concerned about our citizens losing jobs to an influx of refugees. We didn't even allow the full quota of Jewish immigrants in until 1938, when the president relaxed the paperwork rules. This was also the last year the Nazis allowed Jews to legally exit Germany and the occupied teritories.

The sham conference of nations in Evian, France was designed to fail. No nation raised it's quota of allowed Jewish refugees, exept the Dominican republic, which said it would take 10,000 refugees. The British refused to allow any more Jews into Palestine, which they controlled. Kinda puts all those Zionist "terror" acts against the British into perspective, eh?

The bottom line:

The US and the British, along with the rest of the world, knew that thousands of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and others were being executed, worked to death, beaten to death, persecuted, gassed, and incinerated *every day* for years...

...and did almost nothing to stop it or help the victims in concentration camps all over Europe. Even before that, think of the death toll that could have been averted if any of the countries in the world would have offered up a place of refuge to the Jews who tried desperately to leave Germany for 5 years, and could not, because no country would take them.

I cannot do this justice in this tiny space, and words cannot describe the horror. See it for yourself, and whether you are liberal or conservative, young or old, white, black, asian, Jew or Arab -

It will make you ashamed of the world and the human race. You will not be the same person you were when you entered.

Edited to add link.
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[Edited on Nov 23, 2003 by Stiles]

This is an interesting post.

I visited the Holocaust museum with my parents a while back.. I've seen my dad shed tears only a handful of times and that was one of them.

I watched "Max" over the weekend (w/ john cusack). In this movie, Hitler is portrayed as a young, struggling artist.. although I believe this was largely a fictional account, it was very interesting to see an intelligent yet EXTREMELY mentally unstable character fall over the edge into madness. Anyway, this was the first time I've seen Hitler portrayed as a human being and I was somewhat disturbed. It's easy to think of Hitler as some evil entity.. but it's really difficult to think of him as an actual person who chose to do extremely evil things...

Anyhow, for various reasons, it seems as if I'm very inclined towards hardlined pacifism. If I lived during the holocaust, I often wonder how I would've reacted.. would I have been supportive of the U.S. going to war? or would I have taken my usual stance that follows something like "although I'm against such and such, war won't solve it"? hmmm.. I suppose there's no way to be sure.. That fact disturbs me a bit more.

sickening that our presidents grandfather helped fund the holocaust...


http://www.takebackthemedia.com/com-buchanan.html

While history shows a stunning and horriffic image of what occured in the majority of Europe during the second world war, the truly terrifying aspect of that massacre of human decency and human beings is the repurcussions that have been affecting the world for generations. That there are individuals in this world who say the photographs of the victims were fabricated - that there was no holocaust, that it was something the Jews made up for sympathy... that terrifies me almost as much as the actual chain of events. I've been privaleged to see museum displays on WWII in Singapore and have walked a small distance on the same trails that the Indonesians were forced to march themselves to death on, first by the Dutch and then by the Japanese. I stood in the Japanes Internment camps in the desert of California... and the only thing all these things have taught me is that the attrocity is just waiting to happen again. Most of the pacifists and humanists out there are bogged down - writing the digital equivalent of paper tigers, and the monsters are hiding in the shadows... waiting for their next opportunity.

As always, Lorelei keeps me honest.. But I think we had about ten minutes to go before we called it quits at 3:30 in the morning. Max was thought-provoking, yet very, very boring.

Yes, it is. It's also completely irrelevant to contemporary politics -- Bush Sr was a teenager when most of this happened, and it was more than a decade before Shrub was born. People are not responsible for the crimes of their ancestors.

There is an idiot who lives up here in Canada named Ernst Zundel who claims that the holocaust is revisionist, and claims that it is dogmatic and has no place in publicly funded schools. He was arrested in 2003, and apparently(according to the website zundelsite.org) is now a 'prisoner of conscience.'

For an example of his his brand of somewhat sickening "proof of the exaggeration of the Jewish Holocaust" style writings, there is a series of articles written by him.
http://www.zundelsite.org/101.html

I'm glad you got there. It was amazing to me, too. I can't begin to calculate how much I learned about the holocaust, growing up Jewish, but nothing prepared me for the museum.

As far as the Bush family's nazi connections, I agree that a man isn't responsible for his grandfather's actions, but he is responsible for whether he accrues benefit from them, respects them, distances himself from them, or even tries to make reparations for them. A few descendants of slaveowners fly the Stars and Bars over their homes, a few work for justice. GWB is happy to use the family money, and continues to make deals and promote people who think Israel is "the problem."

According to Dr. George Gallup's 1956 Pocket Almanac of Facts, "Germany, Federal Republic of" has a population of 47,695,672, and its main exports are pig iron and yarn.

That's the latest solid piece of information I can find about Germany. Though there was a brief "Germany craze" during the 30s and 40s - thanks to Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the massive jet-fueled knuckle sandwich we subsequently dealt him - once the Nazis were gone, people lost interest pretty quickly. What's Germany like today? Do its tiny, chattering brown natives still make a lot of yarn? Nobody knows. But, luckily, nobody cares. Without Nazis, Germany has absolutely no export that might possibly be of interest to anyone.

The one piece of news that did emerge from Germany back in the late nineties is that, evidently, the German government has forbidden the use of Nazis in games. It's tough to decide what's worse: being the country that invented and then decided to actually try out Naziism, or being the country that prohibited the best video game villains ever. It's a tie, I guess.

Waitwait, he was arrested? I can only imagine what you people did to Snidley Whiplash.

While I can accept that the UK and otherss, in retrospect probably didn't do enough to accept Jewish refugees before the war and that the Holocaust was an abomination that must never be forgotten, what the hell has that got to do with "all these middle east threads".

A line has to be drawn underhistorical events at some point and it is unacceptable that events in the 1930s and 1940s can be used to justify injustices, breaches of human rights and voilence (by both sides) in 2003.

Mein Kampf has also been translated into english. hmm...

No one understands what that humm was supposed to repre... wait, Bush? Well that's kind of retarded. I can see why you didn't finish your thought. But then again we're not the ones who hold prisoners on crimes of "conscience," so maybe I'm jumping to conclusions.

[Edited on Nov 24, 2003 by Jeff_Fries]

You have a talent for understatement, good sir. And where, in my initial post, do you find evidence of my justifying either side's actions in 2003? My comment referred to the zionist actions against the British, when they ran Palestine.

Edited to add - What this has to do with all the middle east threads is this:

The Holocaust resulted in the mass emigration of most European Jews to Palestine,when they were no longer welcome to return to their confiscated businesses and homes. This led to the creation of Israel, which is the crux of the situation today.

[Edited on Nov 25, 2003 by Stiles]

Ummm, what? Naziism has been completely banned in Germany since the end of WWII. I would hope you're being tongue-in-cheek with the rest of your comments. The companies that produced the tools of the Nazi war machine still exist. IG Farben (Zyklon B) was broken into several smaller companies and renamed, Audi was formed from several other car companies, VW is quite sucessful in the world market. There are lots more, if you care to look.

Google it.

Hold on there, Dudley.

The amount of time and effort put into prosecuting this guy is tremendous. Not only was he completely denied Canadian citizenship, but there were efforts to ratify the citizenship process in order to broaden the basis for his disqualification. Due the problems faced in Canada, and the fact that the Supreme Court categorically refused to hear anything more from him, he moved to Tennessee.

After two years or so, the INS eventually caught on and sent him back to Canada for deportation to Germany. Canada has labelled him a security threat, and will not grant him refugee status. As of now, he is currently held in solitary confinement (since Feb. 5) and, althought I'm not sure where the legal proceedings are, he will be extradited.

Another thing to point out concerning zundelsite is:

"On January 18, 2002, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal released its ruling in the matter of Citron and Toronto Mayor's Committee on Community and Race Relations v. Zündel, otherwise known as the Zundelsite trial. At issue was the charge that Zündel's Web site, a clearinghouse for Holocaust denial materials and other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, would expose a minority (Canadian Jews) to "hatred and contempt," which is illegal under Canadian law. As many expected, Zündel lost, and was ordered to remove the offending sections of his Web site -- which, as the Tribunal noted, would cover the vast majority of the site. It would appear, however, that the ruling is unenforceable, because the Zundelsite is hosted by an American company, and Zundel left Canada for the United States last year.

This is a landmark case because it is the first to apply the Canadian Human Rights Act to the Internet, in effect ruling that it is illegal to create and maintain a hate site in Canada. It would appear that other hate sites have the right to a separate hearing before the Tribunal, but Citron and Toronto Mayor's Committee v. Zündel establishes the fundamental legal principles that would apply in future cases." - adl.org

Yes, you are jumping to conclusions thinking it had anything to do with Bush. You're also right that no one understands...I did finish my thought, but I forgot that no one around here understands subtlety.

The point was that the article Sean quoted seemed to be implying that the translation of Mein Kampf into Arabic was an indication of increased anti-semitism among Muslims and particularly among the Palestinians. All I did was point out that Mein Kampf has also been translated into English, but that isn't being used as proof of anti-semitism in the English speaking world. Therefore, the translation alone proves nothing. Perhaps that's not the point he was trying to make, but that's how I interpreted it.

Signifigantly, the 'others' included anyone considered mentally unsound, as well as everyone who intermarried among those persecuted.

troglodyte said
The point was that the article Sean quoted seemed to be implying that the translation of Mein Kampf into Arabic was an indication of increased anti-semitism among Muslims and particularly among the Palestinians. All I did was point out that Mein Kampf has also been translated into English, but that isn't being used as proof of anti-semitism in the English speaking world. Therefore, the translation alone proves nothing. Perhaps that's not the point he was trying to make, but that's how I interpreted it.


That's how I interpreted it too so I for one understood your point. But then again, I am a fucking genius.

Here's a lil something a wrote a while back after journeying to the Holocause Museum...

A Journey Through Evil

Time: 12:30. Place: the National Holocaust Museum. Event: journeying through a monument to the darkest days of human existence.

It was on Sunday, March the 21st that my trek began. It was a cold miserable day and the misty rain was building up on my faded, black leather jacket. I entered the building, and for some strange reason, I had to go through the metal detector three times. But, finally entered the demesnes of the National Holocaust Museum—a memorial to a period of human existence in which an entire “civilized” society had succumbed to national hysteria. A national hysteria so severe, so ugly, so depraved, so evil, that 2/3 of every Jew in Europe were slain for no other reason than the fact that they believed the Savior had yet to walk this earth. The same God was worshipped, but there was a different interpretation.

So, there I was in the main greeting chamber to the museum, that strangely illuminated, towering hall whose main source of light is the sun, channeling it’s way though the glass ceiling. It was the first thing I noticed—the illumination, which made the interior of the building seem like it was on the outside. This conveyed the feeling that even though I was inside the memorial, about to see all the exhibits of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, I could never really understand what had happened during that most heinous of times. I, after all, was just an outsider looking in who could never truly grasp and appreciate the evil that man can do.

I proceeded to enter the first exhibit on my right, which told the story of a boy named Daniel (something that had a rather bit more significance for me than for most others). I saw that the whole exhibit was done in a cartoon manner. It could therefor easily relate to children, and yet at the same time, show adults the innocence destroyed by the Nazis. Daniel, it seemed was a Jew who lived in Germany and the exhibit told the story of how the Nazis basically took everything that was of any value and importance to him and destroyed it—his mother, his sister, his diary, his father’s medal, his father—everything. After this emotionally trying exhibit, I thought myself prepared for the rest of the museum. To say I was wrong would be a gross understatement.

I presented my ticket to the ticket taker and proceeded to get my identity card. My identity was of little consequence, but the story presented on the back of the card was. I believe I was an Austrian born Jew of some considerable trade skills who had somehow lived through the holocaust, but whose family had not been so lucky. I then proceeded to enter the elevator which took visitors to the fourth floor. The museum began on the fourth floor and sort of twisted it way in a downward spiral, symbolic of the downward spiral humanity took at the time.

What left an indelible mark upon my eyes as I exited the elevator, was a 8’ by 5’ picture of a number of charred and crisped skeletal figures which bore little resemblance to the thriving human beings that they had once been. The expressions on what remained of their faces, that of agony and despair, of the final realization of just how far religious hatred could go. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was one of the easier to take pictures.

I continued on down the first corridor of oddly angled glass walls, my large frame pressed close upon my fellow brethren. I was somewhat reminded of what the Jews must have felt as they were herded, squeezed and jam packed into cattle cars for the final ride of most of their lives. This impression was in no way accurate as it would be necessary to take my discomfort and multiply it a thousand fold to even approach the conditions on those trains.

Onward I pressed through the people, stopping here and there to read about the oppression and indignity suffered by the Jews at the hands of their Nazi overlords. The innumerable anti-Jew laws passed by the Hitler Regime, designed to strip the Jews of any and all cultural independence and heritage. The numbers of Jews in every European country, mentally multiplied by 1/3 to calculate the approximate number of survivors who were persecuted. Picture upon picture, word upon word, all becoming a myriad assortment of pigments on a canvas composed to present one evil idea—HATE.

I continued through the hallway dedicated to humanity’s inhumane nature, when I was stopped dead in my tracks by one exhibit—the first of many to deeply affect me on that day. It was an exhibit that told of how children of mental deficiencies and adults of the same malady were rounded up and slaughtered wholesale for its “humanness”. A letter written by Hitler told physicians that it was just dandy to kill the handicapped as it was just doing them a favor anyway. The most haunting images were of children flashed on a television screen who were handicapped and were, without one shred of doubt, murdered by Nazi doctors. There was even a photograph of a doctor smiling over the corpse of a child as he was about to begin an autopsy that would be “crucial” to finding out the causes of deformations. How that thing (I will not even dignify him by calling him a person), with apparently no conscience, became a doctor, I’ll never know. It utterly sickened me to see children who were to be killed—CHILDREN FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!!

I continued down to the next level, and more disturbing images imprinted themselves upon my mind. There was one photo showing a malformed dwarf who was a teacher at an elementary school. He was kidnapped, imprisoned, and subsequently killed just so the Nazis could view his skeletal structure—photographs accompanying each stage. To see a picture of a living man, and then to see his skeleton is, to put mildly, deeply saddening and entirely disheartening. “Just how evil and vile can mankind be,” I wondered.

It saw other horrible spectacles on the third floor as well. Perhaps the most disarming were the films of civilians being led, naked to pits they them selves had dug, told to enter the pits and then shot by firing squad as they reached the bottom of the pits. Entire villages and populaces were exterminated in this manner by the mobile killing squads, with mass graves of as many as 40,000—40,000!!! Other films showed mass beatings and told stories of citizens rising up against their Jewish neighbors and gleefully killing them in the name of nationality and national pride. The things done to these people are almost unmentionable and proves once and for all that truth is infinitely more horrible than fiction.

As I reached the second level, I saw the most disturbing things to date. The first were the films showing the victims of Nazi experimentation. People put in body-numbing, sub-zero water to test the effects of frostbite. Women with mutilated breasts—the purpose of that experiment still baffling to me. Horribly dismembered corpses taken apart by band saw for the purposes of anatomical study. People put in pressure chambers to test atmospheric pressure effects on people to help Nazi pilots. These and other mind-numbing visuals further disquieted me.

Then, there were the pictures of the gigantic pits filled with body, upon body. At first, the photographs from afar looked just like jumbled black and white dots. But as I was propelled forward by my own morbid curiosity, I noticed that the black and white dots had arms and legs and heads and…MY GOD, THEY WERE HUMAN BEINGS! These pits were different from the above mentioned mass graves. These were the size of eight football fields at least, filled nearly twenty feet deep with bodies of people. The sheer number of dead was staggering to the imagination and I did not even try to mentally calculate the numbers shown for fear of its affects upon my conscience. These were people and they were being treated worse than animals—a common street rat would have been given better treatment than were these people just because of their religion.

Another deeply affecting sight were the shoes of holocaust victims. This exhibit was entirely different and even more saddening than any previous exhibit, for these artifacts to cruelty were actual witnesses to the holocaust, things actually owned and worn by exterminated Jews. Included on this display was these words:

We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses,
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers,
From Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam
And because we are only made of fabric and leather and not of blood and flesh,
Each one of us avoided the hellfire.
Moses Schulstein (1911-1981)
Yiddish poet.

A provocative statement, that was. It’s amazing that because the shoes were not actual people, they survived the holocaust unscathed. Normally, objects are given less value than people, but that statement exposes the Nazi’s dimentia. The fact that they would save items and objects (things considered useful), but not Jews (ostensibly useless beings to the Nazis,) speaks more than any words could of just how wrong and depraved the Nazis were.

One shoe in particular caught my attention. It was the shoe of a child. A child that was murdered—murdered just because of beliefs he probably didn’t even comprehend at the time of his untimely demise. “How could men be such utter beasts? How can they be so totally devoid and lacking of anything considered human if they were so willing to kill children?” These thoughts drummed through my head as my heart pounded and saw through nearly tear blurred eyes, this vision.

The next room was almost equally disturbing as it contained a photograph of a warehouse filled with 40pound sack upon 40pound sack of hair shaven from victims of the holocaust. It also showed a picture of the contents of what must have been forty bags emptied upon a gigantic table—bags of hair that had once been the adornment of many a proud Jewish person. Bags of hair that had once been on the heads of the living and were now testament to the dead—their final mark upon the world.

Also in this room were the photographs of the left arms of some thirty or so survivors of the holocaust. The lucky ones depending on your point view. Of course they physically survived, but what about the effects upon their minds after seeing such things that no man should ever view? They survived, but the memories must be such a terrible price to pay—how can anybody measure that?

In addition to these ghastly sights, an entire town of Jews was represented in photographs in one section of the museum. An entire town that most assuredly was killed by the Nazis. Pictures of families, pictures of children, pictures of spouses, pictures of brothers, pictures of friends, of sisters, of all kinds of people—all dead at the hands of the German Nazis. A particularly hard to take picture showed a little boy standing on a chair, looking at the world with eyes so full of innocence, so full of wonder, so full of hope and aspirations—aspirations, hope, wonderment, and innocence all cut terribly short by the Nazis. What really caught my attention, was the shoes the child was wearing—shoes that might have, just might have mind you, been the shoes in the one exhibit. I was terribly shaken at that point and I just wanted to leave, but I forced myself to got to the last floor, the first floor and there my trek ended.

Near the end was a long, white wall, containing the names of some 10,000 individuals who helped free Jews and get them to safety. This was the only hopeful thing I experienced in the museum. To me it meant that even in a world gone entirely and completely mad, there were still individuals willing to risk their own necks and lives to stand up for what they believed was right—helping those who had no other help or means of escape. Even this mood was dampened when I thought of all the millions upon millions of people who did nothing and even encouraged the persecution of the Jews.

I left this room and entered the last room of the museum. A large, open, circular room outlined in black marble with the centerpiece being and eternal flame in remembrance of all those who perished. Surrounding this was a series of smaller candles, numbering in the thousands, symbolizing individual deaths and prayers sent out to them. An inspirational message, written on the side of the room, talks about what to do when faced with utter despair and faced also with life and death questions. It reads: “…Choose life—that you and your offspring shall live!” Deuteronomy 30:19. I especially liked this message as all of us has, at one time or another, despaired at life and the cards we’re dealt. All we must do to face the world bravely and go on is think of the ordeal the Jews endured and how the survivors chose life and did not give up.

The reason I wrote this rather prolonged piece is not just because I was assigned to. I thought that if I shared my experience on paper, I might give others at least a small inkling of just how terrible an event this was in the history of humanity. We must not and cannot ever forget this bleak chapter of history lest we be doomed to repeat it. Yet even as I write this, there is ethnic cleansing occurring in South Eastern Europe. If we have learned so little from the holocaust, I seriously wonder if we even deserve to live here on earth. Apparently we people have learned little, if anything, the lessons history has taught us so miserably. We must never stand idly by and let anything of this nature ever happen again on this planet. So, this is my warning to anyone who will listen.


[Edited on Nov 25, 2003 by Max16Characters]

If you think the point of the article is that Mein Kampf was translated into Arabic as being significant, you completely missed the train on that one. True, Mein Kampf has been translated into English and probably just about any Western Language as well as others, but the point is that MEin Kampf is not currently a best seller ANYWHERE else in the world other than Muslim countries. The textbook on eradication of the Jews and genocide is a BEST SELLER there...that's the point boyo.