Auschwitz was liberated 77 years ago

Cyclingtourist

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118555658#Comment_118555658

"Nazis certainly had some policies that would of been considered left wing at the time, but they were also traditionalists, mainly of the Pagan or Christian variant. Glock is right in saying that the Allies would of held similar views on race, as did most of the Western world."

The Nazi policy in terms of looking after the 'Aryan community' certainly had social aspects in common with what we consider leftist state interventions just as in fascist Italy.

What distinguishes the Nazis however is their racial world view. This wasn't just the widespread antipathy towards Jews it was a clear idea of 'the Jew' as a malign force that must be first ostracised, financially dispossessed and eventually eliminated either by forced emigration or extermination.

To say the allies 'had similar views on race' is to equate a culture of anti-Semitism with a policy of classification and extermination based on pseuo-science.

Markus Antonius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118545105#Comment_118545105

Such an ignorant comment. You might want to brush up on your history.

Kermit.de.frog

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118544487#Comment_118544487

You say the far right but in actual fact a lot of Nazi policies were actually very left wing. Huge infrastructure spending like the Autobahns, the fiscal and other incentives to workers, work programs etc...

They weren't called the National Socialists for nothing. The irony is despite banning trade unions they put in some the very policies they had long advocated for their members.

So I don't think it's an accurate description to describe them exclusively as far right.

And the reason it's problematic is because it's an attempt to white wash the other evil in society at the time, communism.

generic_throwaway

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118555658#Comment_118555658

Well using the same logic, you could argue that the Communists had some right-wing policies, therefore the Soviet Union was a right-wing organisation.

Anyone with a) a brain and b) a book will reject both arguments as nonsense.

Glock17

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118555827#Comment_118555827

Just before WW2 white americans were still lynching blacks.... in russia jews were getting killed in pogroms.... I bet the average white Brit soldier was racist as well....

WW2 is painted as "nasty racist germans started killing jews etc. Good guys non racist Americans, brits and Russians stopped them".

Being realistic, the likes of the Russians probably wouldnt have cared that jews were getting killed.... they were killings jews themselves...

Glock17

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118556773#Comment_118556773

In the UK it was Keir Hardy that started the Labour Party. He wrote pamphlets criticising east european immigration. He said east european immigration reduced wages for British miners....

So by today's standards the Labour Party was a far fight political party....

Judging political parties from a century ago with today's political ideas gives misleading results....

gmisk

Very moving programme on more 4 now (so all4 later) called Auschwitz Untold: In Colour.

It includes interviews with 16 Holocaust survivors and restored archive footage.

Cyclingtourist

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118556859#Comment_118556859

Isolated incidents of racist violence in America do not equate to state sanctioned killing, destruction of property, synagogues being burned and Jews being arrested to spend weeks in concentration camps as happened in November 1938 in Germany. That was just the prelude to what happened in Poland a year later and the virtual annihilation of all German Jews over the following few years.

Jews weren't being killed in pogroms, some were undoubtedly executed during the Stalinist terror as were other supposed traitors and sabatuers but actually Jews were quite prominent in the Soviet hirachy and the NKVD.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118556998#Comment_118556998

Indeed, the Soviet Union wasn't a particularly racist state. Those executed by the Soviets or sent to Gulags tended to be dissidents or people who were viewed as opponents of the regime (the Nazis were doing all of this as well of course, but made a conscious decision to murder every Jewish person in Europe, even people who posed them no threat whatsoever i.e. the overwhelming majority).

B.A._Baracus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118556859#Comment_118556859

Interesting point. While the Americans and Soviets were classed as the "good guys" - they raped millions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany

This world is mad. Nothing is ever clean cut black and white.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118559540#Comment_118559540

Definitely not millions (you must have misread the article), more like thousands or possibly into five figures.

The levels of rapes and atrocities by the Red Army were on a different scale (but the Germans themselves bear considerable responsibility for this....regarding their Russian opponents as sub-human and refusing to surrender to them. Much of the brutality in the East was directly provoked by Nazi brutality and cruelty).

Dyr

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118557505#Comment_118557505

Great to see apologists in a holocaust thread.

B.A._Baracus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118559667#Comment_118559667

The link does say:

"The majority of the assaults were committed in the Soviet occupation zone; estimates of the numbers of German women raped by Soviet soldiers have ranged up to 2 million" - If you want to dispute the source, ok then, but it does say up to 2 million.

Black Noel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118554508#Comment_118554508

Bombing would have resulted in thousands of prisoner casualties.

Black Noel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118555658#Comment_118555658

Good point.

The Allies really, really care today about the Holocaust because they are under huge pressure by Jewish groups to care.

endacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118544575#Comment_118544575

It’s alway interesting to think of events as ‘peoples ago’. The nazi death camps were one people ago. As socially recent as Italia 90.

Picasso was a contemporary of both Charles Darwin and Eminem.

Tony EH

😆

Well, this thread went well.

Astartes

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118553730#Comment_118553730

I know! It's such a foolish point to make when there's over 100 million victims of leftist socialism.

timmyntc

Is 77 supposed to be a landmark year or something? Why is a big fuss being made of it now? 75 or 80 fine, but why 77? Do we have to do this every year?

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118556651#Comment_118556651

I see that this "the nazis were left wing" bollocks keeps coming up from certain posters.

They weren't.

Not even slightly.

As to why they were named Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; the reason for this lay in Hitler's idea to try and pull current voters and potential voters away from actual left wing parties like the KPD and SPD which had been gaining ground steadily throughout the 20's and 30's. It was a particular bit of genius on behalf of the future Fuhrer to elongate Anton Drexler's original party name and create a rather confusing moniker that could be used as a potential smoke screen.

The fact of the matter, however, is that nothing the Nazis did could seriously be considered "left wing". Infrastructure and work programs aren't a left wing thing. Neither are roads like Autobahns. However, actual Nazi policy like banning trade unions and jailing left wingers is certainly the work of the far right. The first people through the gates of Dachau weren't Jews. They were Communists and Socialists which shows exactly where Hitler and the Nazis political direction lay.

The Nazis also got into bed with Conservative Germany straight from the off and Conservative Germany was willing to play along, in the belief that they would be able to control him in the long term. But once Paul Von Hindenburg (a Conservative) made Hitler Chancellor, the die was cast.

Outside of Germany, everywhere the Nazis went they hunted down the left and allied themselves with the right. In France, Norway, and many other nations they invaded, a right wing conservative of some description was placed in power and the left was destroyed.

Calling the Nazis "left" remains one of the most egregious, and in many cases deliberately so, misreadings of history that one can engage in.

Greyfox

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118560790#Comment_118560790

Who's making a big fuss? People are just discussing something interesting for a change

markodaly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118560848#Comment_118560848

Some of their economic policies were certainly left-wing by today's standard

They were very much for military keynesianism, that is increasing economic output and demand by flooding the country with money.

Free marketers and capitalists (one of the reasons they hated the Jews) they were not.

Tony EH

Whether the modern right find it hard to swallow or not, the fact is that the Nazis and Hitler were right wing and no amount of weasel words will change that.

Totally awaiting some credible historians that agree with the sentiment that the Nazis were left wing....

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118544718#Comment_118544718

No it wasn't. Not even close. You demean the memory and nature of the camps and belittle their true horror by even suggesting such a ridiculous thing.

I once tried to argue with a Japanese online friend, who would have been born not long after the end of the war, that perhaps the US could have demonstrated a bomb offshore of Tokyo and said surrender or the next one's a direct hit, and she cut me off and said that wouldn't have worked and that the bombs were necessary and justified. I was floored that a native Japanese person would think that and it changed my perspective.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118563597#Comment_118563597

That's merely her opinion, though, and I don't think that it could be backed by any serious dive into the matter.

In any case, there was no way that the US were just going to show off their new weapon to the Japanese and "waste" it on a demonstration at sea, and any attempts by the likes of Leo Szilard and his group to persuade either Roosevelt or Truman into such an action fell upon deaf ears immediately. The Americans were dead set on using the bomb for a variety of reasons, not least of which were the test results that would be yielded by its use on a "virgin" urban areas like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which proved absolutely invaluable to the future development of such weaponry.

thefallingman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118563597#Comment_118563597

what does your comment say about the innocent people murdered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ?

Cyclingtourist

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118563923#Comment_118563923

Why stop at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you could start with the bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam (neutral), London, Coventry, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden (which wasn't as exceptional as some think), then you have the firebombing of Tokyo (probably more civilian deaths than H&N)?

Then there's cold blooded murder like what the Japanese did in China or the Germans in Poland and Russia. This was ordered from the top not isolated in 'the heat-of-battle' type.

But this is getting away from what this thread is supposedly about which is the Nazi racist killing machine as symbolized by Auschwitz.

cannonballTaffyOjones

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118544756#Comment_118544756

I make ze Tea you do ze vashing up!!!

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118563923#Comment_118563923

It says nothing; just include them in the overall toll. They ase but a very small drop in a larage bucket

https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/civilian-casualties-of-world-war-two/

Their deaths are no more important or somehow worse and notable than the rest of the civillians killed in that war, the number of which was far too high. Those bombs prevented far more needless deaths than they caused.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118563667#Comment_118563667

Since you are not even being subtle in suggesting I am lying - go ahead and email her and ask if it's true: http://tomoko-yamamoto.com/

Don't be fooled by the arty side, she also has a physics degree, or two, and taught that subject at a university in the US, before she moved to Austria. She's a big fan of Bach.

Potatoeman

I’m always amazed how many won’t condemn the Soviets just because they were communists. Both were terrible. Both had very little value for human life.

Hoop66

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118560790#Comment_118560790

Going by some of the replies in this thread? Yes.

Tony EH

@cnocbui Since you are not even being subtle in suggesting I am lying

What?

What part of my post even suggested that you were "Lying"?

thefallingman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118564539#Comment_118564539

what a strange view, as is your response to Tony in relation to one person you spoke too, but each to their own i guess we can agree to disagree.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118564660#Comment_118564660

"That's merely her opinion, though, and I don't think that it could be backed by any serious dive into the matter."

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118564696#Comment_118564696

How is that suggesting that you were lying?

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118564715#Comment_118564715

My interpretation was that you were doubting I could back up the existence of the person and the nature of the conversation, as neither actually existed and that I made it all up. Since you are insisting that wasn't the meaning you intended, I suppose you meant that her opinion was wrong headed. If that was the intended meaning, I would have a problem with you opining you know better than a highly and broadly educated native Japanese person who was born there and lived through the post war era in Japan. It would be like her suggesting she knows more about Irish culture than a native Irish person would.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118564836#Comment_118564836

I'd tend to lean more towards Tony's conclusions on the necessity of using the bomb at all and it's a pretty valid view. The historiography is divided on it so there's absolutely no definitive view on it. It basically amounts to what view you subscribe to and that's about it. You'll also find Japanese people who subscribe to both views or more nuanced ones.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118564836#Comment_118564836

Well, then your interpretation is most definitely wrong. Nowhere was I even remotely suggesting that you were lying.

However, your Japanese friend may have an assertion that the dropping of the A Bombs was both "necessary" and "justified". I would disagree with that and I don't believe that that assertion would stand up to a deeper analysis of it, regardless of where she's from. Many historians have disputed the necessity of using atomic weapons on Japan at that stage of the war and even people involved in the development of the weapon drafted a petition asking the US President to not use it.

In any case, this is an entirely separate discussion and probably not one that should be had on a thread about Auschwitz.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118564570#Comment_118564570

The Soviet Union was an oppressive dictatorship and probably murdered (or caused the deaths of) tens of millions of people.

I suppose what sets the Nazis apart though is that they systematically murdered millions of people who didn't even pose the slightest threat to them, including millions of women and children. I agree that both regimes had little or no regard for human life, but in terms of being purely evil, cruel and sadistic, the Nazis take the prize.

BurgerFace

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058230144/auschwitz-was-liberated-77-years-ago

The BBC also didn't mention a thing about the Soviet Army who freed those in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Birkenau, Chelmno, Belsen, Majdanek, Buchenwald, Sobibor,...not a word.

Not a SINGLE WORD about the Russians who liberated them.

n

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118568807#Comment_118568807

Well maybe because they would then have to mention stuff like this:

"After Russia invaded Poland, Stalin deported 1.7 million Poles to slave labour camps in Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Arkhangelsk Oblast in the north, in cattle trucks. Journeys that lasted weeks until they reached camps where the Russians assured them that bourgeois Poland was finished.." http://polishatheart.com/the-wwii-polish-deportations-still-an-untold-story

As many as 30,000 british troops 'liberated' by Russia from German POW camps ended up in Siberian Gulags. Many Russian POW's liberated by allies, commited suicide when they learned they would be focibly repatriated to the glorious Soviet Union. You couldn't make this stuff up.

Over 200,000 liberated Russian POWs were sent to Siberian gulags. The Gulags are said to have killed 1.5 million people.

Hitler is said to have presided over 12 million concentration camp deaths and 30 million due to the war. Stalin is probably responsible for 30-40million deaths, so perhaps the BBC didn't want to open that can of worms.

Did they mention the forgotten hollocaust?

"The saga of the Russian prisoners of war may be the forgotten holocaust of World War II. It was probably the most concentrated killing in human history. The German army killed nearly 3 million Russian prisoners of war in only eight months. From June 1941 through February 1942, the German Army was responsible for the deaths of millions of Russian prisoners through starvation, exposure and summary execution."

https://guardianlv.com/2014/03/russian-prisoners-of-war-forgotten-holocaust-of-world-war-ii/

Potatoeman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118568583#Comment_118568583

The Soviets killed though incompetence. The Nazis killed efficiently. Not much difference in the result.

The Nazino incident was pretty bleak: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_tragedy

WrenBoy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118569314#Comment_118569314

"Incompetence" !!!? As in by accident !? Jesus...

Potatoeman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118569318#Comment_118569318

Look into it. It was frequently bad planning and just following orders. Even Soviet high command were surprised by the above incident. Same thing with the Ukrainian famine. Turns out you need farmers to plant and harvest food, who knew?

WrenBoy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118569337#Comment_118569337

I have looked into it and to say the millions of deaths under the Soviet Union was just an " oopsie ' is the most brain rotting take I've heard in a long long time.

The establishment and operation of the many gulags, prisons and work camps, the mass collectivisation and transport of all produce/ resources from the countrysides to the urban centres leaving rural people to starve. The operations of the NKVD in arresting, torturing and forcing innocent people to admit to crimes they didn't commit and to name others as co-conspirators then executing many of them and many just disappearing into the system never to be seen again. See The Gulag Archipelago.

And thats just the basic most commonly known stuff.

All an accident .. God help us.

Potatoeman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118569426#Comment_118569426

It doesn’t excuse it. Sending someone to Siberia was most likely a death sentence. The people that were riled up to kill the farmers were Ukrainians from the city. They helped create their own famine. Was the intention to create a famine or the result an unintended result shrugged off with callous disregard?

Cyclingtourist

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118568807#Comment_118568807

"Soviet Army who freed those in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Birkenau, Chelmno, Belsen, Majdanek, Buchenwald, Sobibor,...not a word"

Probably because the Americans liberated Buchenwald and Belsen was liberated by the British. Treblinka, Chelmno and Sobibor were destroyed by the Germans so weren't 'liberated'. The only camps in your list liberated by the Red Army were Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek.

Edit: I believe Buchenwald eventually ended up in the Soviet zone and became a NKVD camp.....but not a word about that either.

Dyr

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118560848#Comment_118560848

It's funny, but even without the Nazis kill count, it was Socialism that caused the most amount of genocides in the 20th century.

No memorials in the west for them though

Speaking of which, you know you else hunted down Socialists and murdered them or put them in camps? Lenin and Stalin. In fact, putting rival Socialists and anyone else who gets in the way, into camps is one of the hall marks of Socialist regimes. So, rather than being proof that the Nazis weren't Socialists, it's evidence to the contrary

I do like how people get agitated about the claim that the Nazis were Socialists, almost like they're worried that people might actually look at the Nazis manifestos and actions in government and realise that Marx would have been purring in approval about most of them. 😂

Two cheeks of the same totalitarian arse, with the same result, millions dead.