
The Holocaust’s Great Escape - diodorus
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/holocaust-great-escape-180962120/?no-ist
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pjc50
Let's not forget that some people tried to escape early, but were turned away
by governments who didn't want to let in refugees.

[https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267](https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267)

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woodandsteel
It's interesting talking in person with a Holocaust denier.

They start out by explaining there is no evidence of the Holocaust, and in
fact the Nazis killed few Jews.

So you ask them why this idea is so widely believed, and they explain it is
because the Jews have a vast conspiracy to mislead the world so as to gain
favor for themselves and the state of Israel.

So you ask them, "Have the Jews done anything else bad?" and their eyes light
up, and they go into an long rant about one terrible thing after another the
Jews have done, throughout the whole course of human history.

And by the end they have made the Jews look so bad that it would have been a
simply wonderful thing for Hitler to try to kill them all off.

~~~
LordKano
I have observed two different kinds of revisionists.

The first kind are simply Jew haters. After they say that they don't believe
that the Nazis tried to kill all of the Jews, they either imply or say
outright that they should have.

The second kind has an Asperger Syndrome like fixation on details. If the true
number was 5.4 million or 6.5 million Jewish people killed, they take
exception to the "6 million" figure.

~~~
gumby
> The first kind are simply Jew haters.

I sadly can't deny that such people exist but it seems profoundly weird to me
that anyone could just hate a bunch of random people they've never met. Some
sort of wiring bug.

~~~
pjc50
It's passed on as oral culture through the family and environment they grow up
in, it seems.

~~~
InitialLastName
Classic pathway for hate

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tormeh
As horrible as the Holocaust was, I think the thing from the Second World War
that has scared me most is probably the Dirlewanger brigade[0]. I guess it's
the difference between someone who kills you because that's his task, and
someone who kills you because he _likes it_. Dirlewanger[1] was a cartoon
villain. In a work of fiction he would have been easily dismissed as not
believable, but he was very real.

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS)

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Dirlewanger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Dirlewanger)

~~~
hackuser
He was hardly the only murderous sadist; you can find many in the history of
Holocaust camps. Look up Joseph Mengele, for example, who would perform
sadistic medical procedures (called experiments, but really for sadism) on
prisoners, including children, and without anesthesia. Too sickening to
describe here.

~~~
neaden
Lavrentiy Beria was the head of the NKVD (USSR secret police) during WW2 and
also a serial rapist/murderer, the high ups including Stalin all knew, but
considered him good enough at his job to essentially let it slide though of
course they never let their female relatives anywhere near him.

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andrewl
This is a good article, but it's very difficult reading.

~~~
akoster
It's a difficult part of recent history that is important to be known and
understood.

~~~
yestoallthat
I often wonder what people actually _have_ understood other than "the Nazis
were bad". It's not enough to not be a racist, and it's not enough to have
_excuses_ for putting up with war and exploitation and double standards.

We live in an age where narcissism and outer appearances are glorified more
than ever, where showing off and fitting in are accepted and the only debate
is on _how_ to best do that, where the atrocities and all our complicity in
them is a constant background hum, where tribalism and identity politics and
other things are considered "natural", where people hide their own person
behind pseudo-objectivity, surveillance is everywhere and eternal, robocops
are around the corner, we engage in constant double think about "consumers"
deserving the crap shoved onto them by corporations. It's all just human
nature, it's "science" (with a deus ex machina always around the corner) -- I
would say things like the above are the things which people like Hannah Arendt
or Sebastian Haffner or other people I would consider heavy weights on the
subject pointed out as crucial, that is, when you asked them about the Nazis,
they didn't talk about the content of their ideas so much as about their
personalities, the personalities and excuses of their followers, obedience and
a lack of connection with oneself and reality, and so on. In comparison to
that stuff they all seemed to agree that the "content" of the Nazi ideology
was just smoke and mirrors. Even their _methods_ held more content than their
content did, if you will. Sure, they needed enemies and a cult of their own
supposed superiority, but any details beyond that were subject to change.

Every time I learn about something like Abu Ghraib, I die a little inside.
That is, I get diminished a little, and every following day I live on this
planet without the perpetrators of those deeds being brought to justice I get
diminished some more. That's bad enough, but the way most people don't even
notice that is really scary.

Please, don't take this as me snapping at you. I have no way of knowing how
exactly you meant what you said, but I am reminded every single day of
parallels to Nazi Germany that are perfectly accepted in polite society, so I
had to rant a bit.

~~~
mercer
One way to look at it is that our civilized world is just a thin veneer
covering up our animalistic, brutal nature.

Another way to look at it is that we're a budding new form of life that seems
rather distinct from what came before (consciousness, reason/science, etc.),
and we're still very young and foolish and unable to fully utilize these new
abilities.

Of course, there's a real risk that we'll destroy ourselves, or that we'll
remain stuck in some kind of local optimum, doomed to repeat ourselves and
constantly wage ware against our evolutionary 'legacy code'.

But as someone who can get quite depressed or cynical about all the bad things
that are happening (over and over again, it seems), it helps me to focus on
the amazing ways in which we _did_ overcome our more brutal past.

------
frostburg
Disgusting neo-nazi propaganda in the comment thread, of course.

~~~
knodi123
Disgusting, but sociologically fascinating, too. And very valuable to keep
around, in case anyone falls under the mistaken impression that the nazis were
simply born evil.

~~~
frostburg
One gets the impression that there is a relatively small amount of people that
spends a lot of time looking for related comment threads to pollute.

~~~
knodi123
And there's no better proof of your claim than the two holocaust deniers in
this very comment chain - both of them have very old accounts, with some very
old comments, and then _over a year of utter silence_ \- and then today,
they're both all "holocaust never happened".

~~~
knodi123
reply to self:

Nevermind. The deniers are getting their comments flagged, which hides them...
so either they had a year of utter silence, _OR_ the last year's worth of
comments were all bad enough to get removed.

Fascinating, either way.

~~~
detaro
You can turn on "showdead" in your profile and check which one it is.

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guard-of-terra
> violent series of pogroms

> undertaken by the Czarist government

This is a very serious claim right here. Any concrete data on "Czarist
government" undertaking pogroms?

The whole discourse right here reeks of 60's university left's "commies good,
czars bad". This is when commies could murder the same number of people, off-
war, on their not the most busy day, as the "Czarist government" during the
whole early XX century.

~~~
macintux
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Rus...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire) ?

