Did anyone else here see this important testimony on Holocaust Memorial Day?  I put this in our Individuals section because. as several said they had been dehumanised as children. Many such witness films have been made but by pep[le who were several stages older when taken into the thrall of an evil regime. Their testimony was ever harrowing because they knew what they were missing or would lose. These children had a different experience - even to becoming somewhat inured to the horrors about them; the loss of family taking hold the more so once liberated. 

They were some of the most grown up elderly profound people I have heard speak for a very long time …. awesome.

Priscilla wrote:

Did anyone else here see this important testimony on Holocaust Memorial Day?  I put this in our Individuals section because. as several said they had been dehumanised as children. Many such witness films have been made but by pep[le who were several stages older when taken into the thrall of an evil regime. Their testimony was ever harrowing because they knew what they were missing or would lose. These children had a different experience - even to becoming somewhat inured to the horrors about them; the loss of family taking hold the more so once liberated. 

They were some of the most grown up elderly profound people I have heard speak for a very long time …. awesome.

Priscilla,

can you give a link?

I found this:
https://www.hmd.org.uk/activity/children-under-the-nazis-2/
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/holocaust-memorial-day-talk-no-home-to-return-to-listening-to-child-survivors-testifying-to-the-tickets-53649112941#

PS: After my back listening to BBC 2 Politics live and sometimes looking to it and with English subtitles...

Kind regards from Paul.

Paul - I never give links neither do I look up most doled out here. Res Hist - or rather used to be for me 0 an interesting cut and thrust discussion forum. However, definitive - "Challenge that if you dare2"  began to creep in . Erudition has its place. of course, but allowance for other opinion faded in part. I have never known if links are for information or if to justify opinion so I do not bother with them anymore than to contribute to posts with nothing to offer to it (well allright I do sometimes but not for the sake of posting because it can stop others with something to say. I realise that there was a darn too much Priscilla post sometimes and that I ought stand back.

This post was ask if others saw this  particular BBC documentary - and for their opinion and further observation.

I too have been watching or political system at work live...…...perhaps it gave me the courage to say my piece above...….. all right Ordeeeeer! Order!

Priscilla, I didn't see the documentary you cite, but I did see a feature about the people visiting the remains of Auschwitz on a Sky news item (via YouTube) the other day.  Priscilla, for myself at least I would say please don't feel hesitant about posting though I myself sometimes lurk rather than saying anything.  My posts are sometimes asking for information so I don't mind if people provide a link in that instance.  I have sometimes provided links when I don't want to present another person's information or research as if it were my own.

But back on track, I haven't seen the English-born Polish lady I knew who married a French-born Polish man since we were both in our early 20s but I recall her saying that on a visit to Poland some relations took her to visit Auchswitz without her realising where it was (because they called it by its Polish name).  She said it was very distressing to visit the former camp.  I suppose the site has been tidied up a little now that it is more than 70 years since Word War II ended and when the item was on the news the site was blanketed in snow which I suppose made it look less sinister.  I get quite angry when I hear people talking about a "holohoax", especially when the matter is well documented.  Not that I have met anyone in real life who said such a thing but there was that Mr Irving the historian who even if he didn't deny it, downplayed the seriousness of the Holocaust.  I remember him being on TV albeit a long time ago although he was given short shrift.  There are holocaust deniers on the weird side of YouTube (which I am currently trying to avoid).

YES , The Holocaust did happen and some 6 million Jews were murdered and burned and  we should remember that on Memorial day BUT....

…….what about the other estimated 50 million men, women and children who died as a result of World War 2.


Is there a Memorial day for them?



Dirk

Well, in the UK we remember the fallen of World War I and World War II (and other conflicts) on Armistice Day (11th November).  The anniversaries of Victory in Europe Day and Victory in Japan Day are still commemorated to a degree.  I remember seeing a memorial to animals who had fallen in war in London.

Dirk, I didn't mean to demean any other victims (than Jewish) of World War II - gypsies, gay people and some Slavonic races fell prey to the Nazis I am aware. There was a concerted effort to wipe out the Jewish people though (and I'm not Jewish by the way) and holocaust deniers get on my wick.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Well, in the UK we remember the fallen of World War I and World War II (and other conflicts) on Armistice Day (11th November).  The anniversaries of Victory in Europe Day and Victory in Japan Day are still commemorated to a degree.  I remember seeing a memorial to animals who had fallen in war in London.

Dirk, I didn't mean to demean any other victims (than Jewish) of World War II - gypsies, gay people and some Slavonic races fell prey to the Nazis I am aware. There was a concerted effort to wipe out the Jewish people though (and I'm not Jewish by the way) and holocaust deniers get on my wick.

Lady,

 But I, just as an example, like to mention that an estimated 25 million Russians were killed during WW2 but when is their Memorial day?

Many million Chinese were killed but is there a Memorial day? 

NO , I don't deny that Holocaust happened , as a matter of fact I was in Europe during the German occupation and saw Jewish people (I was friends with a Jewish twin) being arrested and put on trains to camps awaiting to be transported to Germany and then as I later learned later  onwards to Poland.

But my question is why are we told In January every year on radio and TV about the Holocaust Memorial ( the Jewish massacre ) yet no mention is made about Russian , Chinese and the many hundred of thousands who were murdered/killed?

I was at university when I first heard of the 6 million Jews killed, and I remember being highly shocked. My father was a soldier in WW2 but he only spoke of the peripheral things, like his girlfriend Yolande (we had to give ourselves French names in our French class and that was what our French teacher called us till Year 13, and I chose Yolande) and being a cook in the army. My father hated the war and the fighting, from the letters he wrote home. 
We have Anzac Day to commemorate our war heroes and there are always books put out then, so the other victims are definitely not forgotten here. And to a lesser degree we have Armistice Day. Every ten years there is added emphasis put on war victims of whatever race. But certainly what happened to the Jews was demonstrably cruel and I often think of the horror of the gas chambers.
We here in New Zealand don't have a Holocaust Day of remembrance.

I'm steeling myself to watch the programme Priscilla mentioned in her original post. May I give the link, Priscilla, so others (if they can get BBC iPlayer) may view it too?  The effects of being a child in these hells on earth are unimaginable. Our modern psychobabble is surely utterly inadequate to describe what survivors  of the Holocaust - and other man-made horrors - have lived through and with.


The Last Survivors

Temperance wrote:

I'm steeling myself to watch the programme Priscilla mentioned in her original post. May I give the link, Priscilla, so others (if they can get BBC iPlayer) may view it too?  The effects of being a child in these hells on earth are unimaginable. Our modern psychobabble is surely utterly inadequate to describe what survivors  of the Holocaust - and other man-made horrors - have lived through and with.


The Last Survivors

Thank you very much Temperance for the link. Had a look to it, but it is only for the UK they say, because of rights and if I understood it well, you have nowadays to subscribe to have access even in the UK. I hope it isn't that way either for the "audio" that we can still receive abroad.


To come back on the "Last survivors", I was in the time interested in survival stories of WWII, especially in the Jewish ones. And as you mention the "pshychobabble", I was thrilled to read to what a human being is capable in times of life danger. I also still today see, especially on the French/German Arte the testimonies and life description of surviving ones of WWII including or perhaps mostly Jewish people.
About novels of surviving Jewish people, I remember as a highlight the story of a nine year old Hungarian girl and her surviving in 1944.
I read it in Dutch from the local library Bruges Belgium, but I mentioned it already on the BBC board and I knew by that the English title...
But nordmann is right when you seek on Google you don't find that much specific and I added unless you know the exact terms.
And so I came to nothing while I put "Burning castles" in google until I saw in the 60th or sowhat entry that it was "castles burning" and that the author was the girl: "Magda Denes" and then immediately I found everything. For a lot of entries one has to subscribe nowadays as the "Washington Post", who had also an article about her.
https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/A-Child-s-Light-in-the-Darkness-of-the-Holocaust-2851102.php
https://www.amazon.com/Castles-Burning-Childs-Life-War/dp/0684846888
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/514939.Castles_Burning
"There are few figures in literature as riveting as the precocious nine-year-old Magda Denes who narrates this story. Her stubborn self-command and irrepressible awareness of the absurd make her in her mother's eyes "impossibly sarcastic, bigmouthed, insolent, and far too smart" for her own good. When her family goes into hiding from the fascist Arrow-Cross, she is torn from the "castle" of intimacies shared with her adored and adoring older brother and plunged into a world of incomprehensible deprivation, separation, and loss. Her rage, and her ability to feel devastating sorrow and still to insist on life, will reach every reader at the core. Recounting an odyssey through the wreckage and homelessness of postwar Europe, Castles Burning embodies a powerful personality, a stunning gift for prose and storytelling, a remarkable sense of humor, and true emotional wisdom and makes a magnificent contribution to the literature of childhood and war."

Kind regards from Paul.

Dirk Marinus wrote:

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Well, in the UK we remember the fallen of World War I and World War II (and other conflicts) on Armistice Day (11th November).  The anniversaries of Victory in Europe Day and Victory in Japan Day are still commemorated to a degree.  I remember seeing a memorial to animals who had fallen in war in London.

Dirk, I didn't mean to demean any other victims (than Jewish) of World War II - gypsies, gay people and some Slavonic races fell prey to the Nazis I am aware. There was a concerted effort to wipe out the Jewish people though (and I'm not Jewish by the way) and holocaust deniers get on my wick.

Lady,

 But I, just as an example, like to mention that an estimated 25 million Russians were killed during WW2 but when is their Memorial day?

Many million Chinese were killed but is there a Memorial day? 

NO , I don't deny that Holocaust happened , as a matter of fact I was in Europe during the German occupation and saw Jewish people (I was friends with a Jewish twin) being arrested and put on trains to camps awaiting to be transported to Germany and then as I later learned later  onwards to Poland.

But my question is why are we told In January every year on radio and TV about the Holocaust Memorial ( the Jewish massacre ) yet no mention is made about Russian , Chinese and the many hundred of thousands who were murdered/killed?

Dirk and LiR and Temperance,

perhaps the specificity of the Nazi crimes against "non Arian" groups in comparaison to the other crimes as the Stalin ones, are that they are not "normal" crimes as in "normal" dictatorships seeking to eliminate the contradictors of the regime and the dictator, but eliminating people because they are "other" human beings than the kind the dictator want to have. In a vitriolic debate on Historum at least that was my point of view. Nowadays, especially Germans want to compare the Nazi atrocities with the Soviet ones of the other dictator.
Perhaps the Tutsi/Hutu comes in the neigbourhood, but wasn't that not a war between "clans", rather than a war between different "species" of human beings? The same with the "religious" wars, not because they were other human beings, but because they were infidels of another religion? The same with Pol Pot because they weren't good supporters of the "Communist" religion?

Not that I find that a lot of nowadays Jewish people have  learned their history, as I saw in a documentary a couple Jewish settlers on the Westbank about the illegaly occupied land: It is our land, it belongs to us from 3000 year ago. The "Blut und Boden" sentence came again in my memory...I was in Israel and have a nice rememberance of the people I met overthere, especially the new Russian ones, the older Belgian ones...but from documentaries I saw that they have again a very high thinking about themselves ('n groot gedacht van zichzelf hebben) especially those of American origin...among others about the "chosen" people, the special ones, a bit as the other Germans from the time...but still the fact remains that a lot of their forebears are murdered first with the "Holocaust par balles" and then on a nearly industrial manner, as on a conveyor belt...and yes as the Gypsies and the other "undesirables"...

Kind regards from Paul.

Is the statistic Dirk quotes above for Russia regarding the present day Russian Republic or for the former Soviet Union?  This is just me giving an opinion and not to be taken as fact but could the reason that more attention is focused on the Jewish Holocaust than on Russian and Chinese loss of life relate to post-war attitudes when "iron curtain" countries and Communist regimes in general were viewed with suspicion.

My late friend and neighbour who was married to a Palestian (Christian) man said that in her husband's youth the Muslims, Jews and Christians in what was then Palestine lived peacefully together, in fact her husband's first girlfriend had been Jewish.  Since 1948 of course things have been different.

Dirk Marinus wrote:

 But I, just as an example, like to mention that an estimated 25 million Russians were killed during WW2 but when is their Memorial day?

Many million Chinese were killed but is there a Memorial day? 

NO , I don't deny that Holocaust happened , as a matter of fact I was in Europe during the German occupation and saw Jewish people (I was friends with a Jewish twin) being arrested and put on trains to camps awaiting to be transported to Germany and then as I later learned later  onwards to Poland.

But my question is why are we told In January every year on radio and TV about the Holocaust Memorial ( the Jewish massacre ) yet no mention is made about Russian , Chinese and the many hundred of thousands who were murdered/killed?

May 9th, celebrated as "Victory Day" in the Soviet Union, and now referred to just as often as the"National Day of Remembrance" within the Russian Federation, is a mixture of military parades and lower key remembrance services held in graveyards, near monuments erected to war-dead, and lately religious services too. This day specifically commemorates those millions of Russians and other Soviets' citizens who died in World War Two. It may not be widely reported in Britain, but I can certainly vouch for its coverage in Ireland, Norway, Germany and Greece, who also in fact often organise memorial services too to coincide - in Oslo it is one of those very rare events that brings Christians, Muslims, Jews and atheists under one roof, their common bond being their respective families' Russian heritage. Two other days have lately been declared national holidays in Russia too, October 30th and 31st, one mainly to commemorate Stalin's victims though now with an international focus covering all such incidents wherever they have arisen - the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions - and the second to commemorate all those who underwent detention and forced labour under the same regime - the Day of the Detention Centres and Prisons Workers. October 30th is widely reported around the world too, though again probably not in Britain outside of those who may be kept up to speed by Amnesty International or similar international agencies.

China also has similar annual holidays - recently one set up purely to commemorate the victims of the Nanjing Massacre - though for various reasons these do not receive international attention to the same degree as their Russian equivalents, mainly because they are largely run by a regime which overtly seeks to employ them to impart a particular political ideology rather than allow them serve as purely commemorative events, an approach that also taints and colours any attempt to objectively report them to the international community, whether by the Chinese themselves or by international news agencies.

So I think you have maybe applied a peculiarly British perspective in the implication of your question "why are we told In January every year on radio and TV about the Holocaust Memorial?". It may well be the case that this memorial day alone impinges on official British consciousness so that it receives publicity and promotes discussion to an extent that others do not. And I am sure it is the case also that of all the memorial days which focus on mass murder on gigantic scale from that period in history the one focused on the Holocaust certainly retains a higher international profile. You may even be justified - as your tone implies - in believing that this is evidence of effective lobbying by pro-Israeli and other Jewish agencies over the years who exploit coincidence with agendas pursued by certain governments that may not in fact be motivated purely by compassion and empathy. However it is also the case that of all the great atrocities that occurred during that period -and there were indeed many - the Holocaust most advertises and reminds us all in no uncertain terms, especially in Europe, of how any society that may regard itself as civilised can, with just a few subversions of the processes designed to maintain that state and belief, descend into barbaric genocide on an industrial scale. This is not something that should ever be forgotten, and whatever the ethnicity of the victims concerned in any popular commemoration of such an atrocity, the Holocaust is still one of the most effective ways of instructing later generations of the sheer scale of the horror that can so quickly arise in societies in which we still live today, with all the arrogant assumptions of being civilised that Germans also entertained even as they unleashed such a fate on millions of innocent victims.

If you're dissatisfied with the level of media coverage in Britain afforded to Russian and Chinese victims during World War Two, I recommend that instead of simply criticising what you regard as disproportionate focus in your domestic media on the fate of European Jews, you could instead make the rather more valid case as vocally as you can that the Holocaust, even with all its horrors and the power to disgust, appal and terrify us in equal measure more than 70 years later, was not completely unique and shared methods and effects with other genocidal atrocities conducted before, during, and after it by other states against other victims, some even by Britain itself. One suggestion may be to get more involved with Amnesty International's UK organisation, amongst whose members you will find many who equally share your interest in highlighting historical and contemporary atrocities that also deserve rather more media interest than they receive domestically, especially those that are ongoing now.

I would not disagree with anything in the above post, but I wonder if something is being missed here? Sadly not surprising if posters who live abroad cannot access the programme that stirred Priscilla to set up this thread.

I have just finished watching this remarkable documentary and I am really lost for words. This all goes so much deeper than any other programme I have seen about the Holocaust. It is, as one of the speakers said, about "the darkness out there" - or rather, I suppose, the darkness within: Conrad's "heart of darkness". As I think the same survivor commented, "Who can make sense of it?" These men and women have spent a lifetime trying. I do not believe any of them - not even the elderly lady who chain-smoked her way through her testimony with a creditable attempt at sardonic indifference to it all - were "inured" to anything. And the trauma has been passed on to the next generation - and the next - as was clear from the  testimony of the daughters of survivors who contributed to the programme.

I do not want to bang on my religious/spiritual drum again, but immediately I think of "deliver us from evil":  these men and women - as children - were not so delivered. No crueller fate. Perhaps the boy who died in the forest and the little girl who did not survive to receive her birthday present (the carrot her brother had carved into a boat for her) were the lucky ones.

And apologies if the following offends anyone, but this Jewish lament - Psalm 22 which, we are told, Christ struggled to recite as his last words to mankind - speaks not just for the Jewish people, but for all the dead whom Dirk remembers - and for those whom we do not remember. Hear, O Israel, indeed - let us all "hear" - listen - whether to the voice of God or to the voice of our human understanding and compassion, voices which are, in the final analysis, probably the same thing.



EDIT: So many of those interviewed admitted they had been unable to speak about what had happened to them for many, many years - in fact still cannot confront fully the horror of it all. Who on earth could? Hearing that old man talking to his daughter as they went on that dreadful visit - the "sight-seeing tour" of Auschwitz - brought inexplicably Wordsworth's lines  (from Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood) into my head. The elderly Jewish survivor of that death camp was unable to cry as he revisited the scenes of horror from his childhood: indeed so many of the people interviewed said they could not; and the camera at that point oddly focused on a flower - a weed? - that had taken root outside one of the huts. I had not realised the place was so huge - rows and rows of huts...



Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

I haven't seen the programme in question yet, Temperance and Priscilla, though the musical clip Temperance has posted is very moving.  I remember seeing a documentary Shoah in the 1980s about the Holocaust and the transports which was very sad.

Thank you for that, LiR.

I actually regretted posting that clip (too religious perhaps, I thought, although it was not meant as "pushing" any agenda): I am so glad you found it moving.  I did too - heart-rending comment on the human condition that surely speaks to us all whatever our beliefs - or none.

A great topic for discussion and believe me if I mention here that I appreciate each and everyone's thoughts and views.


Dirk

Temperance and nordmann,

as I was eager to see the film I tried all kind of tricks to got to the film. Tried to subscribe to the BBC in order I thought I could have had access to it. But after a lot of distress with passwords it happened that I was already subscribed and now I remember we had to subscribe in the time to have access to the frozen BBC history message board...but to see the film one has to pay his BBC fee, but as the more than 75 don't have to pay a fee I had again hope, but no you have to be a British 75+...
That said I found this, which don't say that much I suppose as the film says:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jan/27/the-last-survivors-review-an-extraordinary-memorial-to-children-of-the-holocaust

"And apologies if the following offends anyone, but this Jewish lament - Psalm 22 which, we are told, Christ struggled to recite as his last words to mankind - speaks not just for the Jewish people, but for all the dead whom Dirk remembers - and for those whom we do not remember. Hear, O Israel, indeed - let us all "hear" - listen - whether to the voice of God or to the voice of our human understanding and compassion, voices which are, in the final analysis, probably the same thing."

Thank you very much for this moving piece of film. And indeed "speaks not just for the Jewish people, but for all the dead..."

And now as I in one of my former messages spoke about the "specificity" of the "Holocaust" (I saw already a discussion about that. I mean the word Holocaust used as I do, about all the "indesirables", who didn't fit in the Nazi "Volk" identity, as also the Gypsies, the feeble of mind, the gay people.)
And now I start to doubt, reading what nordmann said:

"However it is also the case that of all the great atrocities that occurred during that period -and there were indeed many - the Holocaust most advertises and reminds us all in no uncertain terms, especially in Europe, of how any society that may regard itself as civilised can, with just a few subversions of the processes designed to maintain that state and belief, descend into barbaric genocide on an industrial scale. This is not something that should ever be forgotten, and whatever the ethnicity of the victims concerned in any popular commemoration of such an atrocity, the Holocaust is still one of the most effective ways of instructing later generations of the sheer scale of the horror that can so quickly arise in societies in which we still live today, with all the arrogant assumptions of being civilised that Germans also entertained even as they unleashed such a fate on millions of innocent victims...
that the Holocaust, even with all its horrors and the power to disgust, appal and terrify us in equal measure more than 70 years later, was not completely unique and shared methods and effects with other genocidal atrocities conducted before, during, and after it by other states against other victims, some even by Britain itself. One suggestion may be to get more involved with Amnesty International's UK organisation, amongst whose members you will find many who equally share your interest in highlighting historical and contemporary atrocities that also deserve rather more media interest than they receive domestically, especially those that are ongoing now."

"of how any society that may regard itself as civilised can, with just a few subversions of the processes designed to maintain that state and belief, descend into barbaric genocide on an industrial scale."
" This is not something that should ever be forgotten, and whatever the ethnicity of the victims concerned in any popular commemoration of such an atrocity, the Holocaust is still one of the most effective ways of instructing later generations of the sheer scale of the horror that can so quickly arise in societies in which we still live today, with all the arrogant assumptions of being civilised that Germans also entertained even as they unleashed such a fate on millions of innocent victims..."

Indeed, as in the BBC series "the Nazis a warning of history"
https://vimeo.com/215757893

and as nordmann said it: "the most effective ways of instructing later generations of the sheer scale of the horror that can so quickly arise in societies in which we still live today, with all the arrogant assumptions of being civilised that Germans also entertained even as they unleashed such a fate on millions of innocent victims..."

But about the specificity of the Holocaust that I mentioned I start to doubt because of what nordmann said:

"that the Holocaust, even with all its horrors and the power to disgust, appal and terrify us in equal measure more than 70 years later, was not completely unique and shared methods and effects with other genocidal atrocities conducted before, during, and after it by other states against other victims"

Perhaps any mass murder against civilians can be described as murders because of their "otherness" in the view of the perpetrators, be it socalled "race", religion, nationality or any other perceived deviation of the perpetrators' model.
I recall from the just mentioned BBC series (I hope that some have the time to see the series while it is still available online), that I think it was in Lithuania the Jews were even more abhorred than in Germany: the German soldiers and officers were even surprized by the sheer atrocity of a whole Jewish Hamlet, who was murdered by the locals just with wooden clubs...but perhaps it was too atrocious, while they were used to the murdering with the modern methods as weapons (in French they speak about the Holocaust par balles).
I followed in the time intensively the civil war in Yugoslavia and in one of the documentaries there was an episode where the Serbs painted a Serb cross on the houses and those houses were spared and from the others the inhabitants were murdered...yes nationalism and religion...
When I visited Israel some 40 years ago: the Israëli guide went still as many others to the dentists, he said, in the Gaza strip because there they were much cheaper than the Israeli ones...
And to speak again about Pol Pot, more than a million were murdered because they wanted not to live as the "Communist model" as the "government" obliged it...as their model was an "otherness" toward the "state" model...

Kind regards from Paul.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

a documentary Shoah in the 1980s

The superb chef d'oeuvre of the late Claude Lanzmann. It's very long (over 9 hours) and was 11 years in the making but highly recommended to anyone who hasn't seen it.

A U.S. television miniseries from 1978 called Holocaust popularised that word. Before 1978 the term 'the Shoah' (i.e. 'calamitous destruction' or 'catastrophe' in Hebrew) tended to be used. If one were to hear the word 'holocaust' in common usage before 1978 then it would more than likely have been in the context of a 'nuclear holocaust'. In fact, many Israeli people object to the Greek term 'holocaust' but still prefer to use Shoah instead. And among some Jewish communities the Yiddish-language equivalent 'Hurban' is used. Over the last 40 years, however, in the English-speaking world at least, the term 'The Holocaust' has become almost absolute in its usage.

Thank you very much for the link to the "Shoah" of "Claude Lanzmann"






Kind regards from Paul.

Vizzer,

"A U.S. television miniseries from 1978 called Holocaust popularised that word. Before 1978 the term 'the Shoah' (i.e. 'calamitous destruction' or 'catastrophe' in Hebrew) tended to be used. If one were to hear the word 'holocaust' in common usage before 1978 then it would more than likely have been in the context of a 'nuclear holocaust'. In fact, many Israeli people object to the Greek term 'holocaust' but still prefer to use Shoah instead. And among some Jewish communities the Yiddish-language equivalent 'Hurban' is used. Over the last 40 years, however, in the English-speaking world at least, the term 'The Holocaust' has become almost absolute in its usage."

Thank you for this explanation too. And I already heard about the discussion of Jewish people who prefer Shoah above the American "Holocaust".
I said it already in a former message, many nowadays use it as a general term for all the racial victims as the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals and other undesirables. At least I see the word Holocaust as such. And I saw in the time discussions as to limit it only to the Jewish people, especially American sources.
But even our "prestigious" BBC seems to adhere to that more extended view




http://www.bbc.co.uk/tyne/content/articles/2005/01/20/holocaust_memorial_other_victims_feature.shtml

A Polish and an African prisoner

Non-Jewish Holocaust Victims : The 5,000,000 others

5 million of those murdered were non-Jewish. Others were Nazi victims because of what they did, who they were, their genetic or cultural origins, or health conditions.










Kind regards from Paul.









Kind regards from Paul.

On January 20th 1942, a group of German officials met at a house in Berlin. The meeting was short - ninety minutes - and there was only one item on the agenda. It was the Wannsee Conference and was the subject of the superb 2001 film, starring Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth. I knew nothing of this meeting and recognised the name of only one of the officials who attended - Eichmann. Here is the trailer:




The charming and urbane psychopath played by Branagh - SS-Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant-General) Reinhard Heydrich - was the epitome of  the "civilised barbarian" whom nordmann mentions. The Wiki entry tells us : Of the 15 who attended, 8 held academic doctorates.

"Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" Shakespeare had Lear ask his Fool. Jung - and the later psychologist, Alice Miller - tried to offer an answer, but this thread is probably not the place to go into all that.

"Inside the man there seems to be nothing."

A good film, and I highly recommend it.

From the point of view of historical accuracy however I had only one major quibble with it. The producers made great play of the fact that the script practically wrote itself,  the scenes at the conference (90% of the content) depicting verbatim exchanges between the participants as plucked from the actual minutes of the meeting. This was not a false claim, but it led to difficulties when trying to assess the true nature and conduct of those involved.

As defeat loomed in 1945, several of those who had attended the meeting quite logically destroyed their copies of these minutes along with other documentary evidence that might be used against them should they be captured and arraigned for trial. Fortunately for posterity however one copy (only those few in attendance had ever received a copy so they were easy to eradicate) which had been given to Martin Luther (irony abounds), the Foreign Office Under Secretary, had ended up in true civil service fashion neatly filed away in the vaults of the FO headquarters in Berlin. Wilhelmstrasse, the headquarters' address, became for a while the subject of a dispute in the immediate aftermath of the war in that its north-south alignment meant that it did not form a natural point of demarcation between what were to become the Soviet and American sectors of Berlin, and while the military commanders and politicians argued over the exact point along the street which would mark a boundary the building and its environs ended up in a sort of no-mans-land with neither side taking responsibility for it and all but essential personnel (bomb disposal, unsafe building demolition workers etc) allowed within the disputed few blocks. In 1946 large-scale demolition of this area was in full swing, and its non-existent domestic residencies meant that the most practical method was often to use high explosive to quickly remove damaged properties that may themselves contain undetonated ordnance. This would have been the FO headquarters' fate too but for the fact that it straddled a disputed zone.

It wasn't therefore until 1947 that a proper forensic retrieval and examination of the old Foreign Office records was possible - the building itself being relatively undamaged. Although it ended up in the Soviet area of control this also coincided with the phase of the Nuremburg War Trials, the form and conduct of which had now been agreed by all the allied powers, in which prosecution lawyers were assembling their cases. It was therefore an American-led team of investigators, under military protection but not command, who undertook the evacuation of documents. As a result Luther's minutes came to light and were swiftly impounded as evidence, under international law being now the property of no individual allied power and subject to very strict authentication protocols as they assumed evidential status, something that would become of crucial importance later as conspiracy theorists and similar attempted to cast doubt over the authenticity and provenance of documents available to later historians, especially those which proved that a systematic genocide of Jews occurred.

My quibble with the film, ironically enough, arises from legal testimony given later by one of the Wassensee Conference attendees - Adolf Eichmann. The minutes of the meeting, which were actually typed up under his and Heydrich's direction, could not be "verbatim" - as Eichmann himself explained in his trial fifteen years later; "How shall I put it – certain over-plain talk and jargon expressions had to be rendered into office language by me". He did not elaborate on what he meant by "over-plain talk", but it is not too difficult to understand his inference when looking at other correspondence and recorded utterances from many of those who were there with him (and indeed his own).

Those who wrote the screenplay were of course aware of this, and could have chosen to invent (with good chance of accuracy) dialogue containing the full pejorative and obscene extent of vocabulary which these people were demonstrably apt to employ when referring to Jews, and which even Eichmann knew would be dangerous to record in official minutes to a meeting, especially one at which his own prime aim was to promote his ambition to be seen as chief executive of this Führer-pleasing "strategy" as designed by Heydrich. It was important therefore that Hitler also be impressed by the matter-of-fact logic and professionalism of these two actors, as well as posterity itself when such minutes might well become hallowed historical documents charting the events leading to a Jew-free thousand-year Reich.

For the purpose of the film however it was decided to stick with what might be called "Eichmann's edit". In fact the bureaucratic officialese and polite interplay around the table as depicted in the film does indeed highlight just how cold, calculating, barbaric, cognitively dissonant, and border-psychopathic these people actually were, and all the more chilling for that in terms of how we might relate the portrayal of this meeting to more contemporary political behaviour end events - not a bad thing to do at all. However it also encourages us to see these people as perhaps more urbane and intelligent than they actually were (also very much Eichmann's own intent), and therefore prone to probably thinking that in some way therefore it wasn't too surprising that they had risen to high office, for all the office's, the system's, and their own obvious flaws. It encourages us also to be secure in the belief therefore that urbanity and inferred social superiority of status are themselves natural accelerators of promotion to high office, being so equally valid in any society that they perform this function also even in one that was demonstrably flawed to the core as much as in one more "civilised", such as our own. This is a dangerously naive appreciation of how status should be regarded or urbanity and intelligence assessed, as anyone observing present day British politics cannot also surely have failed to notice.

So while I certainly recommend the film, and even forgive its historical inaccuracies which are largely in fact historical proofs of Heydrich's and Eichmann's attempts to re-write history even as it occurred, I was left feeling slightly uneasy with the idea that it basically reinforces some dangerously false notions about power, status and class which in more recent times merit dissection and examination equally as urgent as the rather more obvious potential "lessons from history" that the film set out to deliver.

nordmann wrote:

Fortunately for posterity however one copy (only those few in attendance had ever received a copy so they were easy to eradicate) which had been given to Martin Luther (irony abounds)...

Yes, a very unfortunate name for the man. I noticed the Firth character gave one of his reasons for hating the Jews: "They were the killers of the Christ" - irony upon irony.

Will read your post again and will think carefully about what you say, especially your last couple of paragraphs.

nordmann wrote:

In fact the bureaucratic officialese and polite interplay around the table as depicted in the film does indeed highlight just how cold, calculating, barbaric, cognitively dissonant, and border-psychotic these people actually were...  

I do not believe these people were "borderline", nor were they "psychotic." They were full-blown psychopaths. A person may be psychotic - a distressing condition that can be treated -  but not necessarily be psychopathic (see link below). A true psychopath is indeed "cold and calculating" - a human being not quite human, a personality without the smallest drop of the milk of human kindness. Such people cannot be treated or "cured". It is not a mental "illness"; it is rather a way of being - possibly the most terrifying of the personality disorders; in fact it goes beyond "disorder" and strays into the realm of pure evil. And psychopaths are known for their charm, their intelligence and their urbanity - so long as they are getting what they want. These types are without conscience, without moral scruple and, God help us, they are everywhere: they run the world.



https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/beautiful-minds/201103/psychotic-is-not-the-same-psychopathic

Thanks, I corrected my spelling. I left "border" there as every society apparently employs a border between where such behaviour is deemed tolerable, acceptable or useful and where it's not. That line is easy to see in retrospect in Germany's case - it's a little more challenging to identify it where it exists in our own society.

Sorry, I honestly didn't mean to "correct" your spelling which is always excellent. I genuinely thought you had muddled up the two terms.

nordmann wrote:

I left "border" there as every society apparently employs a border between where such behaviour is deemed tolerable, acceptable or useful and where it's not. That line is easy to see in retrospect in Germany's case - it's a little more challenging to identify it where it exists in our own society.

Yes - a very important point. Eternal vigilence is needed here. I actually like Aldous Huxley's variation on the Curran? Jefferson? quotation:

“The price of liberty, and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.”

Did anyone see Anne Marie Waters on the BBC Big Questions last week, pushing her idea that "All Muslims are Evil"? No charm or urbanity evident in her character, and it is easy to dismiss this extremely unpleasant woman as an unhinged ranter, but she's still out there, spewing poison disguised as concern for women - and she has her supporters. What is more worrying is that there are others - educated "gentlemen" - on the loose in the UK who need to be watched very carefully indeed. Interesting that Cameron  (in a rare moment of insight) called Dominic Cummings, the mastermind behind Brexit (First from Oxford in Ancient and Modern History), as "a career sociopath". Some say sociopath and psychopath are much the same thing. Cummings' favourite author is Sun Tzu (The Art of War)

Here is an earlier film about the Wannsee Conference (1984) - full movie in German with English subtitles:

Temperance wrote:

I do not believe these people were "borderline", nor were they "psychotic." They were full-blown psychopaths. A person may be psychotic - a distressing condition that can be treated -  but not necessarily be psychopathic (see link below). A true psychopath is indeed "cold and calculating" - a human being not quite human, a personality without the smallest drop of the milk of human kindness. Such people cannot be treated or "cured". It is not a mental "illness"; it is rather a way of being - possibly the most terrifying of the personality disorders; in fact it goes beyond "disorder" and strays into the realm of pure evil. And psychopaths are known for their charm, their intelligence and their urbanity - so long as they are getting what they want. These types are without conscience, without moral scruple and, God help us, they are everywhere: they run the world.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/beautiful-minds/201103/psychotic-is-not-the-same-psychopathic

We need to be wary of casually labelling strangers and historical figures etc with psychological conditions. If for nothing else such amateur diagnosing can merely add to ‘erroneous and dangerous stereotypes’ as suggested in the linked article above. Even that article falls foul of itself as it seems to be making a moral differentiation between people with psychosis and those with psychopathy.

It calls to mind some of the primitive reactions to the Aids epidemic when it first emerged as mainstream news in the 1980s. Those who had contracted HIV through contaminated blood transfusions (i.e. ‘no fault of their own’) were deemed to have got ‘good Aids’ and were therefore deserving of public sympathy, while those who had contracted HIV by sharing hypodermic needles in drug abuse or engaging in promiscuous and unprotected sex (i.e. ‘their own fault’) were deemed to have got ‘bad Aids’ and were thus deserving of public opprobrium.    

It’s estimated that psychopaths make up about 1% of the population. And it is indeed a stereotype to suggest that they are all charming, intelligent and urbane and are to be found among the captains of industry and politicians who run the world. This is just as much a stereotype as to suggest that any successful person who is also charming, intelligent and urbane must therefore be a psychopath. A significant proportion of psychopaths are actually to be found in our prisons and juvenile detention centres. And it is precisely their affliction which can destroy their social relationships with family, friends and colleagues and also their educational, job and career prospects etc. It’s a serious social problem and using it to make sweeping accusations regarding the likes of attendees at the Wannsee Conference just does us all a disservice. In fact even the Nazi Party disowned the Berlin S-Bahn serial killer in 1941 and rejected his lame excuse that a ‘Jew’ was responsible for turning him into a misogynistic murderer.  

The overwhelming majority of psychopaths, however, are not murderers or serial killers. And although psychopathy may well be ‘the most terrifying of the personality disorders’, simply labelling a psychopath as ‘evil’ would seem to be inaccurate at best and also an unhelpful approach. Most psychopaths go through life never committing a single crime and are quite well adjusted. And neither does their inability to empathise with others or their ability to switch off empathy negate an ability to ‘contribute positively to society’ as that article might suggest.

A better approach (to my mind at least) would be one of a cost/benefit analysis to society. That minority of a tiny minority of the population who are indeed violent and disruptive psychopathic offenders, nevertheless, cost us an inordinately disproportionate amount of money in terms of hospital, police, courts, prison and probation resources and time etc. And although there is not yet a medical ‘cure’ for psychopathy, there is increasing evidence that it is a condition which can indeed be treated or at least conditioned. This is mainly through the concept of positive rewarding for good behaviour. Some of the trials schemes in this (particularly with regard to young and first-time offenders) have shown very encouraging results. In these cases incidents of re-offending plummet and (if rolled out across the whole criminal justice system) such an approach could well save the exchequer hundreds if not thousands of millions of pounds annually.

The debate about the "Nazi personality" continues. This article from the American Psychological Association may be of interest: it acknowledges the difficulties even the professionals face when trying to assess what went on in these men's minds.


https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/03/nazi.aspx


In the aftermath of World War II, Allied forces captured and detained many of the remaining Nazi leaders, including Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer. The Allied leaders in charge of the Nuremberg trials sought psychological profiles of the Nazis and asked psychologist Gustave Gilbert, PhD, and psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, MD, both Americans, to collect the data using psychological tools such as the Thematic Apperception Test, Rorschach Inkblot Test and the German translation of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Test. Even though the tests played little role in the trials, the scientists were searching for answers to a question that still lingers today: Were the Nazis evil men or merely ordinary people who did horrific deeds because they were ordered to do so?

Both Kelley and Gilbert claimed that all of the war criminals were legally sane. Nonetheless they interpreted the data on these men differently and eventually published separate books to argue for the validity of their disparate analyses. In his book, "The Psychology of Dictatorship" (unknown binding, 1950), Gilbert concluded that there were three different personality types in the group that could all be classified under a psychopathic personality: schizoid, narcissistic and paranoid types, and thus their pathology led them to engage in their horrific actions. Gilbert was attuned to the socio-cultural context of the Nazi leadership. He claimed that the Nazis were raised in a culture that had a primary value of deference to authority to which all other reason and intelligence took a backseat. He concluded that democratic leaders should be trained as critical thinkers to prevent that same kind of blind obedience.


Sadly it must be admitted that I am indeed a mere amateur in these matters, so probably I should not voice an opinion. That said, I do know a bad bastard when I see one, and those characters at Wannsee - men who could so dispassionately discuss the extermination of millions - all qualify. I shall probably delete this last paragraph later.

Temperance wrote:

Here is an earlier film about the Wannsee Conference (1984) - full movie in German with English subtitles:

Temperance, thank you vey much to have made a link to the film. And I thank both, you and nordmann, for the interesting discussion.

Kind regards from Paul.

Vizzer, thank you very much for the warning about the labeling of historical figures and yes of all figures too.
It is even for psychiatrists nearly impossible to analyse what the real motives are in a person's mind.
But it seems that they more and more in modern psychatry learn to understand, what plays in a person's mind...
In a thread sometime ago I gave the example of the Danish Lone Frank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Frank
https://reshistorica.forumotion.com/t1245-nature-versus-nurture-again
"As I said the Danish Lone Frank has made a queste around the world to see how her heritance had shaped some wiring in her brain that genetically pushed to some behaviour as depression and ruminating about certain events that for other persons (called in the documentary "warriors" are just a fast passing event that they the next second are already forgotten...and yes there are substances in the human genome (as she found out) that influence your psychological behaviour...as something you are predestinated to act as you act...but she found also out during her queste that this predestination can be altered by circumstances especially in the forming years of the childhood...and also as she learned you can act on these genetical inclinations, especially once you know them...therefore she find it interesting to look at your own genome to see where your special inclinations lie...and then you can act upon them...and the good news is that after a time your brain is altered..."

Kind regards from Paul.

Temperance wrote:

Sadly it must be admitted that I am indeed a mere amateur in these matters, so probably I should not voice an opinion. That said, I do know a bad bastard when I see one, and those characters at Wannsee - men who could so dispassionately discuss the extermination of millions - all qualify. I shall probably delete this last paragraph later.

I don't see why you should - it's a very valid point.

There undoubtedly exists a glaring inadequacy when applying psychological terminology designed to account for individuals' behaviour when such behaviour is sanctioned and exhibited by many within a community at any one time. There is a tendency simply to place the prefix "mass-" before these terms and hope that no one asks too closely about how or why a body of people can display, "en masse", most or all of the classic indications of various mental disorders as have originally been identified and named from examining individual cases. This reticence is easy to understand - especially if one is in any way associated with or a member of that community, be it defined within national terms, cultural terms, or using any other vector of commonality that is pertinent to the actions giving rise to the need for such observation and analysis. There is however a huge requirement, when ascribing phrases such as "psychopathic" or "delusional" to large masses of people within the same society that you inhabit, to look hard and long at how much you as an individual have helped give rise to the phenomenon being described, or indeed to what extent a facet of the apparent communal disorder can be ascribed to your own behaviour as an individual. Not an easy or comfortable thing to do, and in truth it is (thankfully) not often required. A feature of adopting common mores is that it removes an absolute requirement for such self-analysis when a society requires to communally adapt and respond to circumstances, especially ones which may threaten it, and more often than not it guarantees therefore a community functioning reasonably well enough in the meantime never to give rise to such a need for self-critique except in very exceptional circumstances.

My views on religion are well known here, so I needn't elaborate about how I have concluded to my own satisfaction that this nebulous amalgam of unreasonable thinking all too often promotes such activity through inferring legitimacy where no such quality would be entitled to exist using any of the civilised criteria we tend to apply to other areas of behaviour and rationale.

However in the context of what we are talking about here we must, I reckon, regard religion anyway as being simply symptomatic of another, more fundamental, human tendency which tends to show itself most often simply as benignly shared mores and received experiences, a requirement for which is apparently hard-wired within us and contributes to helping establish a notion of common identity and moral purpose without which human communities struggle to stay viable. However it is when this process, even more nebulous than religion when attempting to pin it to a point of logical psychological origin or even to philosophical meaning, encourages members of a particular society to self-destruct as a community rather than adapt, that we begin to see tell-tale symptoms of "bad bastards" wielding power and influence with the apparent approval of those who they will inevitably destroy. Again, anyone in Britain at this exact moment in time can see immediately what I mean, though in truth this is only a rather blatant and seemingly irreversible instance of communal self-destruction along these lines - the reality is that this tendency appears always to be bubbling beneath the surface of any extended community, especially ones in which the constituent members are largely ignorant of or denied access to the means of exercising influence, or even the means of understanding those means. In most cases this potentially destructive force is kept in check naturally through illusory or actual access to both of these things, which in turn ensures a status quo maintained by a critical mass (not necessarily a majority) within that society. Once the critical mass is composed however of people who rightly or wrongly feel they have lost or cannot ever achieve such access then history shows again and again that this is where, in retrospect, we often begin to find in the analysis of such a social decline various psychological and psychiatric terms prefixed by "mass-".

The men who sat around a table at Wannsee and calmly formulated a plan to murder millions of individuals on a global scale are easy to identify as "bad bastards". The hundreds of thousands, and then millions, of people who directly contributed to allowing these men ever arrive at that table discussing these things are less easy to label as "bad bastards", but in true chicken and egg fashion cannot be left out of the equation when tracing in retrospect how it ever got to that stage. And no matter where one apportions blame in retrospect what they all had in common - the executors and their facilitators - was an absolute refusal to even contemplate how such behaviour and thinking so drastically imperilled the chances of their own society's ultimate survival, despite the many rather potent indications that existed even in 1942 which should have easily disabused them of their delusional belief in their own survival's chances had they countenanced them. In fact the opposite applied - as each demonstrable proof of the error of their rationale was presented for countenance, the critical mass (of which the Wannsee executors were simply an epitome) stubbornly persisted in pursing its catastrophic and ultimately suicidal course, causing untold damage, pain and terror to countless other people outside that body politic along their self-ruinous way.

Sound familiar?

Forgive my more simple take which I planned to write before nordmann's in depth observations above. Temps noted that eight of the Wannsee group had academic backgrounds - some to Phd level. And surely that would have been effected by many Jewish tutors. In the search for 'why' perhaps the under acknowledged threat of intellectual strengths in all the great fields of human advancement is an under lying reason for aversion. The survival of the fittest to produce an epic Wagner styled master race knew where a huge challenge could be sited.

Reaching old age now, it has become increasingly clear to me now - not least because people have eventually confessed to it, that envy is a far more incidious motivation than I was ever aware. Those eight academics all along the line had surely been exposed to both teaching and sources of many great minds and thought - much of which had little to do with religion.

And of that I have one observation. Islam and Judeism….are both total life style coded. Others can be annoyed by demonstration of instances of it.

We all live on  a very thin fragile vaneer of humanity  as yet, like children avoiding the cracks in the pavement. I do not know - or understand - all the pathe labels for cruel behaviour only that our paths are fraught with cracks and we must be ever aware of allowing distraction to overcome our caution.

Priscilla wrote:

Forgive my more simple take which I planned to write before nordmann's in depth observations above. Temps noted that eight of the Wannsee group had academic backgrounds - some to Phd level. And surely that would have been effected by many Jewish tutors. In the search for 'why' perhaps the under acknowledged threat of intellectual strengths in all the great fields of human advancement is an under lying reason for aversion. The survival of the fittest to produce an epic Wagner styled master race knew where a huge challenge could be sited.

I agree with the point you make regarding how base envy plays a greater role in motivating individuals to behave abominably than it generally gets credit for. And in the specific case of Germany of that period there were undoubtedly terrible levels of resentment grounded on little else against a perceived Jewish academic "elite", which was dismissed therefore by those who resented them as little other than an arm of a Jewish "conspiracy against the state" with its members planted within influential cabals, including the top levels of academia. This theory survived little scrutiny even at the time, but it certainly spoke volumes about how the accusers thought, not only about Jews but probably even more tellingly about themselves and how they perceived society functioned, all in a manner that could only be expressed eloquently using the most disparaging and negative language. When the language became reasonable, the theory itself evaporated. These were not nice people, and neither was the world they thought they inhabited. Once assuming power, everyone was brought into that world whether it was based on reality or not.

Having said that, I think in the case of the Wannsee participants it would be very dangerous to ascribe the motive behind their personalities, outlook and behaviour as based on a probable educational system experience which may in turn be assumed from their ages and their claims to hold PhDs and the like. These were people who could basically award themselves academic honours if they so wished (what third level educational establishment in Nazi Germany would dare refuse them?) - and in the case of at least two of those around the table, Eichmann and Heydrich, we know they did exactly that on more than one occasion. And since I earlier drew what might seem fanciful parallels between this group of reprehensible individuals and more recent phenomena being experienced in Britain, I should be obliged to add that the current British political administration is not immune to such practice either, at least if one compares their Wikipedia claims regarding academic qualifications and what even basic research throws up. The parallel proves nothing of course, except that in a community in which its so-called leaders have no primary basis for their actions except to propel it into ruin even while they claim to be improving it, then simple traditional evidences of individual worth - such as academic degrees denoting expertise - are among the first to be devalued. Appropriating them falsely in order to improve one's chances of accelerating the process by which they're then devalued is simply par for the course. These people don't "do" irony.

Such interesting posts from you two this morning - thank you.

Priscilla's point about jealousy and resentment - not just economic, but academic - is interesting (and valid, as nordmann acknowledges). Many Nazis probably did "invent" academic qualifications, but surely many did not. Dr Wilhelm Stuckart and Dr Gerhard Klopfer (Colin Firth and Ian McNeice in the "Conspiracy" clip above) both were highly qualified lawyers, educated at the Universities of Munich and Frankfurt am Main and at the University of Jena repectively.  They hated each other and Stuckart clearly fancied himself as the intellectual superior of the two. He loathed and despised his fellow "Aryan". Klopfer's resentment was obvious  (that chilling, "I will remember you!") - imagine how much greater it would have been if his fellow lawyer, whose arguments he opposed, had been a Jew!

Superb Jewish intellectuals were everywhere in Germany during the pre-war years: they worked in  government, in education, in higher education, in scientific research and in industry. Many were indeed distinguished academics and professors at the universities - men who would have taught or supervised the studies of so many non-Jewish students. There must have been rejections and failures within the great intellectual centres of Germany, as there are anywhere, with all the usual resentments such rejections and failures inevitably cause. The banning of Jews from government began in 1933, I believe, and Jews were excluded from exerting any influence on education after 1936. Many Jewish intellectuals - philosophers, writers, scientists, doctors (not to mention the artists and musicians) - got out in time: many, alas, did not. How many great German minds were lost; it does not bear thinking about.

Interestingly, Stuckart (see Colin Firth in clip) acknowledged the "cleverness", the "intelligence" of the Jewish race as a whole; but he spoke with no admiration or respect, but with hatred and fear. I wonder if his comments were taken from the actual minutes of that terrible meeting? I do think Priscilla's point is an important one.

PS The professors at the Vienna College of Fine Art who rejected Hitler as a potential student - were they Jewish, I wonder? I have no idea - just a thought.

nordmann wrote:

...but it certainly spoke volumes about how the accusers thought, not only about Jews but probably even more tellingly about themselves ...

Absolutely - and that, I think, is the key. We hate in others what we fear in ourselves: "In sterquiliniis invenitur"  - interpreted by Jung as, "That which you most need will be found where you least want to look."

Again one can find a parallel with the current Brexit shenanigans in Britain - a predominance of people with "dubious" academic claims to being qualified spearheading political initiatives, and a slew of those with "genuine" qualifications recruited voluntarily or involuntarily to lend authority to the often ludicrous claims used to publicly justify those initiatives (if such a word is really the right one to use in this case). While those whose academic works and research are recruited against their will and most likely misrepresented anyway represent an understandable, if distasteful, phenomenon that speaks volumes about how ineffective academia actually is in dictating public policy, the reason why genuinely qualified academics might actually voluntarily subscribe to any such initiatives is in Britain, just as in Germany in the 1930s, rather more complex a phenomenon than it appears at first sight. A minority of these only, it appears, subscribe purely because they regard the political initiative as grounded in intellectual reasoning that corresponds and is of equal worth to that which they employ in their own field of expertise - misguided perhaps, but intellectually honest in their error. A far greater bunch of these reveal the rather more stunted extent of their own intellectual honesty when they tend to use expressions like "on the whole" or "fundamentally" or "largely" when challenged to publicly reconcile the politically expressed reasoning that they actively support with current academic thinking within their own field of expertise. And then an even greater bunch commit themselves to public obfuscation of the issues using the language of academia but the approach of a politician nevertheless, and indeed of the worst kind of politician too. These academics are schooled enough to recognise when their intellectual honesty might be found wanting under intelligent challenge, and choose to simply ignore any such challenge. In terms of intellectual honesty they are therefore on the thinnest ice of all, but maybe exactly for that reason tend also to be the most vocal and adamant in their claims.

The danger, as I said, is to presume too much based solely on a person having an academic qualification. It is no guarantee of intellectual honesty, and in many cases not even a guarantee of intelligence.

Hitler decided that his rejection from Art College had been engineered by Jews, though even he admitted that they were hardly organised enough at that point to identify him alone as a target. He maintained that they were pursuing a policy of moral corruption so naturally discriminated against honest little landscape painters like himself in favour of decadent rubbish designed to corrupt true blooded Aryans etc etc. The problem with this "theory" was that it was difficult to extend as a policy covering all of academia - the Nazis in their early assimilation of absolute power were very careful not to argue with academia on its own terms (when they did they were invariably shown up as fools) and simply took it over through systematically forcing the exclusion from academic organisations of anyone, Jews included, who they arbitrarily deemed as "unsuitable". It didn't take long either - as the policy progressed more and more professional academics (the middle group above) - voluntarily stepped into line to save their own skins.

EDIT: One participant at the Conference, Dr Friedrich Kritsinger, was obviously unhappy at what was going on. Wiki gives the following information, but I note the warning "citation needed":


After he conference, he attempted to resign his position in the Chancellery, but his resignation was refused on the grounds that "it would be worse without him".^{[This quote needs a citation]} It is speculated by historians that he may have openly and vocally opposed the Wannsee protocols, which would have explained his resignation, but no accurate historical record exists to support or confirm such speculation.^{[citation needed]}

Kritzinger was eventually arrested, along with most of the other surviving members of the Wannsee Conference, in 1946. During the Nuremberg Trials, where he was a witness, he publicly declared himself ashamed of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. He was released, and died in Nuremberg the following year.


Heydrich became the notorious "Butcher of Prague" and died of his wounds following an assassination attempt. Eichmann escaped to South America and continued to enjoy his "ordinary little life" there for fifteen years or so. He was eventually tracked down by the Israelis and brought to justice. He was hung in 1962.

Temperance wrote:

It seems having a written constitution makes not a jot of difference once a tyrannical dictator and his henchmen gain power, a point I tried to make on Priscilla's "Constitution" thread.

Having a written constitution that contains an article such as that of Article 48 in the Weimar Constitution certainly plays into the hands of tyrants, and as far as I know Weimar was particularly unique historically in that respect. The Weimar Constitution was that of a federation of states in which "the Reich" was initially deemed a part (a union of some German federal states that excluded others which had threatened secession from the German state altogether after WWI). It became ineffective the moment the federal components, as was also their constitutional right, agreed to be governed within the Reich union, at which point Hitler (who was technically "Reichsführer", not "German President" when he came to power) could easily invoke Article 48 in which civil liberties could be suspended within any federal component. Only by the time he did so it now applied to the entire country of Germany. It had been initially put there at the insistence of Bavaria who refused to sign up to the Weimar Republic unless they could take any local measures they deemed necessary within their own jurisdiction to counteract insurgency and a very real communist threat as they perceived it, and though its original architects, including Preuss, certainly foresaw how it could be abused they also reckoned a natural check on its disruptive potential was that it was hardly likely to be invoked by all the federated states at one time, thereby guaranteeing political pressure on the suspender of liberties not to go overboard. They were wrong.

If you compare that to a more effective constitution governing federations, such as in the USA, then not only do you not find any such Article, but you also find several Articles which specifically anticipate and countermand any such move to suspend civil liberties at state level by ensuring that these can only be defined and legislated about at federal level. No state can define civil liberties in a way that removes those as stipulated in the US constitution or which might lead to laws that supersede those enacted at federal level.

The bottom line is that a well written constitution works, a badly written one works badly (and tends to fail completely), and non-existent ones mean even the limited assurances that may be - however temporarily - provided by a bad one simply do not exist at all. To infer from this that it is better not to have one at all because bad ones have failed, despite the proven track record of good ones, suggests a profound misunderstanding and under-appreciation of what good ones guarantee. In the UK the obvious fallacy in such reasoning is addressed by simply pretending to have one, though the inherent fallacy in that approach too should be by now evident to most Britons.

Edit following your Edit: It is speculated that Luther also filed his copy of his minutes in the FO as a form of protest, hoping that it constituted a record of the fact that he was only doing his masters' bidding should it ever end up being the only copy in existence and the whole policy had blown up in their faces (he knew that the others weren't too keen on keeping theirs, though like him it wasn't so much from fear of being indicted after losing the war, but a very real fear of what Hitler might do should the policy prove disastrously over-ambitious, unworkable, and even impact on the war effort). Having the only hard-copy of the meeting (in which he could be seen to intentionally downplay the full meaning of what "deportations" and "expulsions" meant in the context of planned extermination camps) meant that he could either play the fool or the sensible strategist if ever judged by his Nazi peers when the plan approved by his boss failed. Unfortunately with Martin Franz Julius it was therefore really more a protest against his FO boss, von Ribbentrop. Luther met an ignominious end - he first tried a little coup within the FO with Himmler's help to replace von Ribbentrop though apparently couldn't even coerce his typist into following him when he attempted to "arrest" the minister at gunpoint, ended up in a concentration camp himself when Himmler persuaded Hitler not to hang him, and though freed by the Soviets at the end of the war was so poorly that he died of heart failure before he could even be debriefed by his "liberators". He should have stuck to furniture removals and interior decoration - which is how he had started before joining the party as late as 1933.

One of the channels (can't remember which one) showed this:

Night will Fall

nordmann wrote:

 The bottom line is that a well written constitution works, a badly written one works badly (and tends to fail completely), and non-existent ones mean even the limited assurances that may be - however temporarily - provided by a bad one simply do not exist at all. To infer from this that it is better not to have one at all because bad ones have failed, despite the proven track record of good ones, suggests a profound misunderstanding and under-appreciation of what good ones guarantee. In the UK the obvious fallacy in such reasoning is addressed by simply pretending to have one, though the inherent fallacy in that approach too should be by now evident to most Britons.

Well, we are not quite Nazi Germany here yet, nordmann, although, as I have said up thread somewhere, eternal vigilance is most definitely needed, even in England's green and pleasant land. My point is that in the face of tyranny - once it is allowed to get a hold - we are all prisoners: the most elegantly written and legally-binding constitution is worthless if a copy of it is held up to a determined madman who is pointing a machine gun at you. I am reminded of the exchange between Lange and Kritzinger, as reproduced below - those final lines went straight through my heart:



Kritzinger : Yes. The rest is argument, the curse of my profession.
Lange : I studied law as well.
Kritzinger : And how do you apply that education to what you do?
Lange : It has made me distrustful of language. A gun means what it says.




Here is the whole exchange:




Kritzinger : Lange?
Lange : Yes, sir?
Kritzinger : Who were those 30,000 you say you shot, when you say, YOU shot?
Lange : In Riga, Latvia. 27,800 I have some responsibility for. And stood by with my men and allowed Latvian civilians to kill in mobs. I received memos directing the, one would say "evacuation" of Jews who, shot and buried in soil and corpses, managed to crawl out, still alive. Not exactly war, is it? And gas chambers about to come?
Kritzinger : What gas chambers? Gas chambers?
Lange : I hear rumours, yes.
Kritzinger : This is more than war. Must be a different word for this.
Lange : Try "chaos".
Kritzinger : Yes. The rest is argument, the curse of my profession.
Lange : I studied law as well.
Kritzinger : And how do you apply that education to what you do?
Lange : It has made me distrustful of language. A gun means what it says.

Temperance wrote:

My point is that in the face of tyranny - once it is allowed to get a hold - we are all prisoners: the most elegantly written and legally-binding constitution is worthless if a copy of it is held up to a determined madman who is pointing a machine gun at you.

Point taken, though until that terrible event occurs it's still handy to have a written constitution as a protection against disasters of the more self-inflicted kind. In some cases it's even been enough to stop some would-be tyrants in their tracks, which I suppose by your reckoning may simply show they weren't quite determined enough ("must try harder" end of political term report). All the same, wouldn't it be not only terrible but downright risible should a country be taken over by the most casually motivated demagogue or tyrant simply because the people forgot or didn't understand the importance of that little bit of paper (which means so much)? Mightn't even need Lange's gun then ...

Triceratops wrote:

One of the channels (can't remember which one) showed this:

Night will Fall

Triceratops,

I was nearly sure that I had it already mentioned on this board and by adding "arte" in google I came again to my thread overhere:
https://reshistorica.forumotion.com/t815-liberation-of-the-dead-camps-germany-poland-wwii


Kind regards from Paul.

Temperance wrote:

nordmann wrote:

 The bottom line is that a well written constitution works, a badly written one works badly (and tends to fail completely), and non-existent ones mean even the limited assurances that may be - however temporarily - provided by a bad one simply do not exist at all. To infer from this that it is better not to have one at all because bad ones have failed, despite the proven track record of good ones, suggests a profound misunderstanding and under-appreciation of what good ones guarantee. In the UK the obvious fallacy in such reasoning is addressed by simply pretending to have one, though the inherent fallacy in that approach too should be by now evident to most Britons.

Well...

Temperance and nordmann,

I discussed the article 48 and the enabling act with the two thirds majority nearly to death on several fora. And yes it is perhaps specific to the Weimar republic, but even during the Weimar republic it was already used several times and it became nearly routine. I mean the Nazis used only an existing routine to bow it to their goals. And indeed as a French Pétainist said to me: Hitler came legally to power. But he never spoke about the "tricks" that they used to achieve the goal.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/article-48
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_48_(Weimar_Constitution)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_act


But I tend to agree to Temperance that a constitution is not a garantee for not drifting off into dictatorship, but it is perhaps a first diffiulty to achieve personal power, after all even Hitler had to use the constitution to come to power. Even a Pétain had to look to the legislation to rule his Vichy France.
And even in Belgium there was a lot to do about the ruling by "volmacht"
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volmachtenwet
A law by proxy?
Een volmachtenwet, ook wel bijzondere of buitengewone machtenwet genoemd, geeft een zeer ruime bevoegdheid aan de Koning (in de praktijk de regering) van België. In de materies die worden aangewezen in deze wet mag hij de bestaande wetten wijzigen door middel van Koninklijk Besluit. Dit kan echter ook via opdrachtwetten, maar dan is de opdracht duidelijk omschreven waar bij volmachtenwetten het gaat om een hele reeks domeinen.
It gives a broad competence to the King (in practice the government). In the fields designed in this law, he may change the existing laws by way of a "royal decree".
For me is that a bit as the ruling by decree, but in contrast? with article 48? the initiative? has to come from the parliament?
And yes the famous American legislation...
Ruling by "executive orders" isn't that the same as the article 48?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order
An article from UPI
https://www.upi.com/Presidential-suppressors-Trump-would-rule-by-decree-if-he-could/6761541185619/
As England, the US seems not yet in any case in Nazi mode ...

Kind regards to both from Paul.

Paul, please will you edit your post for me and alter the spelling of "vigilance" in the quotation you have made from my message? I've altered it in my own post, but you have copied my original typing. You can alter it easily - just click on "edit": you can  then alter anything in your own post, even other people's spelling!

I am embarrassed because it was a spelling mistake and not a typo! 


But we are drifting away from Priscilla's original topic here - above is perhaps for her Constitutions thread? My fault - I should have put my post there yesterday. Sorry, P.


Adden-dumb to messages posted yesterday.

Just will add that I also feel very silly because, if I am honest, I must admit I knew nothing about Article 48. This period of history is new to me, apart from watching films and getting upset. I had best shut up - and/or try to learn a bit more. We have our own Article 48 I suppose (even though we don't have a writtten Constituion) in the Henry VIII clauses which are still law. But that is possibly another daft remark?

Well off track with the constitution stuff, you're right, Temp. Sorry, P.

The children Priscilla mentioned, indeed anyone unfortunate enough to end up in a German concentration camp, were hardly going to waste much time analysing the niceties of the various constitutional failures which were a feature of how they ended up where they did. Many of them were too young even to comprehend the actual mechanics of their delivery into such a hell or the full extent of that they had been deprived of - it was quite literally all they knew and they simply took it from there, as all children do.

UNICEF have worked quite a bit in recent years attempting to get people to understand the plight of modern child refugees, and one way has been to publish the testimony in short vignettes (that even Trump might understand) of this dwindling group of survivors from WWII death camps and others of that age who, as children, maybe avoided incarceration but ended up as perpetual refugees, having lost parents, siblings, home and any semblance of what we naively presume to be civilised normality. This short video is a good example, but there are many to be found out there and all worth listening to.

This has received an Oscar nomination for Best Short Film:

A Night at the Garden