I had dinner recently with some lovely people were impressed by my work and filled with praise for the job I am doing with my students in preserving the past.
Near the end though, the conversation turned to some of the emigres after the war that these folks had known. One person insisted that the folks she knew who grew up in Germany during the war had had the “gun to their heads” if they did not join the Hitler Youth as children. “They had to do it, or they were dead.” And, by extrapolation, that Germans were forced at gunpoint to carry out the policies of the Third Reich.
I politely explained that that was most likely not the case, but in any event I was not at this gathering to pass judgment on their wartime behavior, especially if they were kids. But the myth persists, and I guess I kind of decided right then that I have to do more educational outreach on the topic. Why?
Because of what I saw this summer. Because I am realizing that I have been placed in a position to witness the testimony of what I have learned, and corroborated to be true. I guess I am coming to the realization that for a high school teacher I am pretty uniquely qualified, especially as the post survivor and post liberator soldier world dawns, to offer up first hand experiences with folks with whom I have shared a very special bond with.
Lots of teachers can count survivors who come to their classrooms as friends. But think of the bond when you are the person to actually introduce him, or her, to his or her actual liberators. The actual human being who freed them from physical captivity and probable death.
You tend to get close, and they tend to share- a lot- with you. Because they trust that you will preserve the word after they are gone. I guess the word is love. Not for their sake- but for the sake of humanity.
Like Levar Burton and his comments in the previous post, sometimes it’s just time to call bullshit.
The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.
What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.
The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and
itself, during ’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.
“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.
“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”
The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.
Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.
The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and
, but reaching in all directions.The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)
The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was.
The brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites.
When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.
But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left forearm.
In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.
First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.
Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.
By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. “Nobody even knows about these places,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Everything should be documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and they’ll remember.”
The research could have legal implications as well by helping a small number of survivors document their continuing claims over unpaid insurance policies, looted property, seized land and other financial matters.
“HOW many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a camp that we didn’t even know about?” asked Sam Dubbin, a Florida lawyer who represents a group of survivors who are seeking to bring claims against European insurance companies.
Dr. Megargee, the lead researcher, said the project was changing the understanding among Holocaust scholars of how the camps and ghettos evolved.
As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the researchers have found.
The biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000 people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the smallest camps, the München-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of prisoners were sent there from the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard. They were reportedly whipped and ordered to do manual labor at the home of a fervent Nazi patron known as “Sister Pia,” cleaning her house, tending her garden and even building children’s toys for her.
When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.
The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.
In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.
Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.
“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”
I had no idea! And I agree that many more people knew what was going on but for one reason or another they chose to help the Nazis. Heart breaking!
The research is groundbreaking, chilling, and clear. However, who is to say what one would have done under the circumstances. I am just saying one can no longer stand by and allow myths to be perpetuated for posterity.
“Gun to their heads” is nonsense. Hell, even members of the Einsatzgruppen were allowed to sorta excuse themselves from their inhuman tasks. They might be called a coward or a promotion might be postponed, but they could transfer out. Hitler Youth is a different discussion. Keep up the great work! peace, george
Yep. I refer to comment above, and also note that while they could be dismissed without serious damage to their well being or even careers, few took that step.
Agreed re: few were willing to act independently and stand against that massive Nazi machine. Some who did, like my heroes from my Alma Mater, the U. of Munich, (the Scholl kids and their Professor) or Bonhoeffer, paid for it with their lives.
Having a German mother who served a guy I normally refer to only as the AH in a Munich restaurant (pocketing the silverware, like all the young ladies would have) and even receiving a couple of his little watercolors (guess he gave them to cute, young ladies at times), the question of “what would I have done” has long been a compelling one.
Much is yet to be learned. The opening (finally) of the Red Cross archives in 2007 at Bad Arolsen will certainly lead to new discoveries. When last I looked fewer than 15 million of the 50 million or so documents had been digitized/looked at. Visited it last year. Here you go: http://www.its-arolsen.org/en/homepage/index.html
And, the AH himself and his “influence” over folks like my mom, who was born the year of the failed Putsch (1923) and grew up knowing only the Nazi brainwashing reality?
If you’ve never heard him in his everyday voice, this recording is fascinating. Surreptitiously done and I guess the only known one we have. A very different “picture’ than the ranting maniac we encounter in the speeches to the masses and perhaps helpful in understanding his “pull” on folks like the Schwester Pia mentioned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClR9tcpKZec
Schwester Pia and that Schwabing camp?
I looked it up when I originally saw the article you’ve included months ago, since I know the area well. She, a devout Roman Catholic nurse, meets the AH on a tram in Munich early on, is the only woman to participate in the Putsch, takes an interest in Dachau, hates Poles and Jews, but is regarded as “angel” by some of the folks at Dachau. The “work detail” itself at what we’re calling now a “camp” at her house. Some probably enjoyed going there, for the conditions were better than at Dachau and they could stay there during the week. Here you go. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007389
An insane reality that must never be forgotten…or, repeated.
Keep up the great work. Still much to be learned….peace, george
Dear Matt,
I read your blog with continuing awe and thankfulness for the job you’re doing. In your newest post, “They were everywhere,” you strike again upon those three unnerving and possibly never-to-be-answered questions: “Who knew?” “How did they know?” and the most awful “How did they participate?” While the “why question”—i.e., why did it happen—always seems to be considered the largest of the category of never-to-be-answered questions of modern history, the question of participation offers an avenue into some kind of understanding of why it occurred. But, with reference to your post, those first three questions necessitate a fourth: “How was it covered up, both during the war and in subsequent decades?”
Whenever there’s the possibility for denial, cover up, blame shifting, and whatever other means are used to run from those questions, it is incumbent upon us all to keep on presenting the facts over and over and over, so that the light of the truth will drive the Holocaust deniers, cockroaches that they are, into the dark recesses. It is also incumbent upon historians to continue to uncover previously unknown factual data that will open more eyes to the hell on earth that was Nazi Germany. The latest “discovery” of the Nazis’ stolen artworks in a German art dealer’s home is proof that Nazi crime lives on. A reading of articles on it show that while modern day Germany is facing the past, the tentacles of the past are still alive. A November 19, 2013 New York Times article is particularly horrifying: “Enduring Nazi Law Impedes Recovery of Art” (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/arts/design/enduring-nazi-law-impedes-recovery-of-art.html?_r=0) This article that is about “ ‘Landscape With Horses,’ ” a possible study for a 1911 painting by the German Expressionist Franz Marc,” notes that, “[t]he 1938 law that allowed the Nazis to seize it— and thousands of other Modernist artworks deemed “degenerate” because Hitler viewed them as un-German or Jewish in nature — remains on the books to this day.”
A law promulgated by the Nazi government is on the books to this very day? It’s as unbelievable as it is disgusting! (For other articles related to it, see the English language online version of der Spiegel at http://www.spiegel.de/international/topic/world_war_ii/.)
Obviously, historical researchers still have a huge part to play. I’ve always believed that there must be, amidst the millions of Nazi archives confiscated at war’s end, actual written records from the Wannsee Conference and as well as written records of protocols and orders generated by that meeting in 1942—written records that would prove in writing what we all know to be true from the verbal testimony of millions of Holocaust survivors: that the Final Solution was real. For years, we believed that that there was only a partial copy of Goebbels’ diaries—the remnant found at the end of WW II. Then a complete microfilm of all his diaries were found. What else might there be in those archives?
Keep up the good work, Matt!
Joe
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