Auschwitz was liberated 77 years ago

Because it can be seen to absolutely trivialise the great evils of this man and to make it into a laughing matter. He is not some pantomime baddy. He is responsible for destroying so many lives and hope.

In the same way that certain words should not be used now because of their historical connotations, certain images of Hitler should not (in my opinion) be used for a laugh and to show how risky one is

My issue? I just find it interesting that you immediately tried to discredit the poster just because they had a different opinion to you (and they explained their reasoning quite well).

I don’t think you’d see it as an issue if the poster had agreed with you. But anyway, we are derailing the thread.

There is a plenty of evidence that the Nazis went to great lengths to try and hide what happened.

In Treblinka the concentration camp was actually demolished before the end of the War and a "farm house" was built on the site in an effort to cover up nazi atrocities

It wasn't until recent years that the mass graves there were found, but the remains will never be excavated as that would be a violation of Jewish law and tradition which bans the exhumation of the dead

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16657363.amp

A lovely way of remembering the dead, is the the traditional practice by those of the Jewish faith who leave small stones on the graves of those who have died.

I think today would a good day to do something akin to that by simply remembering all those killed during that time because of the realities of intolerance and hate.

Auschwitz was 'liberated' by the Red Army which was the army of the Soviet Union, a state that practiced murder on a comparable scale.

Maybe you should reread my post, or perhaps you quoted the wrong one, because your replying to points I never made and parroting my own point back to me. It really does not make any sense.

How is criticising someone for their avatar simply because they disagree with a point made earlier trying to have a meaningful discussion? You haven't even tried to discuss their point. If you want a discussion you'd actually the topic, not invent faux outrage to discredit people.

good point and fair enough, personally i just think it deserved more than being lightly signposted with a plaque but to be fair i didn't know that was there so i take your well made point.

Not really the same is it Oisin, like there was no gassing people to death in their millions, or ripping babies apart in front of their parents, no skinning bodies to make furniture. Perhaps you just have the same edgy humour as your friend here.

And don't forget what the far left did either - Stalin, Pol Pot etc.

Extremes at both ends are equally as bad as each other. The Hitchcock documentary was one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen, to watch a visual record like that really makes it hit home how depraved it was.

On the topic of World War 2 horrors, have folks seen the Russian film 'Come and See'? A really hard watch but one of the best war films ever IMO. It focuses on the German occupation of Belarus and the horrors they inflicted on villages while they were there.

Would put it up there beside Schlinder's List in the 'films about WW2 you'll have a hard time watching but really should watch' category.

I hope you don't mind an actual German chiming in here.

The story of how "Germans" treat the holocaust and the Nazi era in general is rather complex and not made any easier by the fact that until 1990, you were dealing with two German states with radically different ideologies who approached the issue completely differently.

As for Western Germany, there was indeed a tendency to suppress the whole thing for around the first ten years or so of the existence of the Federal Republic. This coincided with the rule of conservative chancellors Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard and Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, and the focus at that time was on getting Germany back on its economic feet. The issue was only brought to the public attention in 1963 with the beginning of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, when Germany itself began prosecuting nazi war criminals. These trials actually set the precedent for any following prosecution of nazi & SS war criminals & accomplices, which continues to this day, there are still ongoing proceedings against people involved in the running of concentration camps.

It was also at this time when the first generation of post-war children, including my own father, started asking uncomfortable questions about what had happened during the war. I know that my dad did so as both of my paternal grandparents had been involved in the war, my grandfather as a junior officer in a combat engineering & airfield repair unit and my grandmother as a nurse in and around Hamburg. From what dad told me, my grandparents, who had both turned into ardent anti-fascists after the war, were generally open about their experiences, though my grandfather didn't talk a lot about what had actually happened on the actual front. A lot of families weren't as happy about it though and many German institutions were at the time still staffed with a lot of Wehrmacht veterans or former nazi activists, which led to a crackdown that in turn led directly to the student protests of the late 1960s.

The big changes started in the late 1960s with the election of Willy Brandt as chancellor. He started the process of reconciliation with the likes of Poland, footage of him kneeling at the memorial for the victims of the Warsaw ghetto is considered one of the crucial moments of post-war German history. His successors, both fellow social democrat Helmut Schmidt, a former colleague of my grandfather, and conservative Helmut Kohl, continued this new policy. It was at this time that a lot of the concentration camps that had been built in western Germany, such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen or Neuengamme began being converted to memorial sites. Other nazi-era structures met with a variety of fates. The "Berghof", Hitler's residence in the Alps near Berchtesgaden, was a US military installation until the 1990s, so Germany couldn't really do anything about that, while the compound used for the large nazi party rallies in Nuremberg (Reichsparteitag-Gelaende) had already suffered major damage due to allied air raids, so there really wasn't much to restore there. Other facilities, such as the Wewelsburg, a renaissance castle used as an SS "cult site" or the Neulandhalle, a nazi congregation site on a polder in Northern Germany that had been reclaimed from the North Sea by the Nazis, have been turned into memorial sites or museums.

As for education. generally, German schools start teaching about the nazi era and the holocaust from around 5th grade onwards, though of course initially adapted to be suitable for the age group in question. Books such as "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" or the Diary of Anne Frank are required hearing and these days, and aspects of the nazi era and the holocaust are continually taught from 5th grade onward until graduation, not just in history, but also in German, arts, music and other subjects. These days, many schools also organise field trips to camps such as Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Mittelbau Dora and so on.

That's West Germany. East Germany, the GDR, had a bit of a different story. From the beginning, the GDR positioned itself as a proudly anti-fascist state that truly broke with the militaristic tradition of both the nazis and imperial Germany before that. Whilst memorials at the site of the likes of Sachsenhausen concentration camps were eventually built, the leadership didn't really want to dwell on it for too long. In their mind, they were the only anti-fascist German state, there was no reason to memorialise the crimes of a state that had nothing to do with the GDR. All of the evils of naziism were projected onto western Germany and any evidence that nazi veterans, such as Friedrich Paulus, infamously commander of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, was aiding in the buildup of the Nationale Volksarmee in the GDR was carefully swept under the rug. That's also why there's literally nothing left of the Führerbunker in Berlin. The site of the Reichskanzlei at Wilhelmsstrasse, under which the bunker had been built, fell into the Soviet occupation zone after the end of the war, and there was a desire to literally wipe the slate clean. There may have been more to the way East Germany dealt with the nazi times, but as I was born in what was at the time West Germany, I can't really say much about that.

Now granted, I do wholeheartedly believe that massive mistakes were made in the way Germany, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, dealt with the aftereffects of the holocaust and nazi rule in general. Could, or should it have been addressed more agressively? Undoubtedly yes, but to claim that Germany as a whole has not dealt with it or is trying to sweep it under the rug, is pretty emphatically not true. I doubt Israel would have led German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier speak at the memorial in Yad Vashem two years ago at the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, if that had been the case.

It's often overlooked that for almost the first two years of WW2 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union collaborated together and this included both security services (Gestapo & NKVD) exchanging information. While the ideologies were different the outcomes were similar for any Poles perceived as enemies of their respective regimes.

It's also overlooked that the number of Poles who perished was pretty equal between Jews and non-Jews although of course the proportion of the Jewish community was much higher.

It's in this context that the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet forces should be viewed.