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Awesome thread idea, Seven Hundred Bee. This was the focus of my undergraduate history degree, and I interned at a Holocaust museum. Hope you don't mind if I chime in sometime, although it's been a few years and my knowledge is admittedly rusty. My main areas of focus have been the occupied East, the extermination camps, the post-war American far right and, in an exercise in masochism, Holocaust denial. I considered pursuing graduate-level studies but a lackluster GPA dissuaded me. What's the state of the field from your perspective? I know Christopher Browning and others are rightfully putting emphasis on studies of ethnic minorities in the East and in Axis minors. As an aside, where do you stand in regard to the intentionalist/functionalist debate in Holocaust studies? MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Apr 1, 2013 |
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Apr 1, 2013 09:24
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:When were camps like Treblinka and Sobibor discovered and understood by the Allies? Since they were completely dismantled and hidden well in 1943 it had to have been post war. I’ll take a stab at this. The short answer is that the Soviets found them and performed basic investigations before the end of 1944. For those who are unaware, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were the key Aktion Reinhard camps responsible for gassing Polish Jews. In a period of less than 14 months they “handled” the “evacuation” of their “goods” and were closed, destined to be demolished and planted over with lupine trees and farms. In some cases bodies in mass graves were exhumed and burned on iron girders to further conceal their crimes. Belzec was the first and most experimental of the camps. Despite having the most primeval gas chambers relative to the others, its successful extermination of the Lublin-area Jewish population paved the way for the program’s expansion. It’s worth noting that Belzec was so thoroughly demolished that its exact dimensions remain roughly unknown today. Sobibor was shuttered after a semi-successful revolt, and while Treblinka halted operations after a similar attempt it managed to stay open as a small, non-functioning death camp for another year. These camps, along with the hybrid extermination/concentration/POW camp of Majdanek, were discovered by Soviet forces in 1944. Investigations began almost immediately, and presumably they learned of the Reinhard camp locations from eyewitness testimony, which would account for the bulk of their evidence during subsequent investigations. Marshal Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front found Belzec, and Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front liberated Majdanek and discovered Treblinka and Sobibor. The Soviet organ tasked with war crime investigations, the State Extraordinary Commission in Moscow, was plagued with the same indifference toward European Jewry that befell its Western military counterparts. Of these camps, the Commission only devoted additional resources to the investigation of Majdanek, chiefly because it was the most intact and had also served as a final destination for Soviet POWs. News of Majdanek was published widely in the Soviet press and around the world. But just what were these additional resources for investigating Majdanek? Well, it merely meant the 1st Belorussian Front’s judge advocate officers would participate -- similar to how in the later initial Auschwitz investigation the judge officers from the 1st Ukrainian Front were utilized. In the case of the Reinhard camps, though, investigative responsibilities fell solely to non-specialized junior officers without legal or investigative pedigrees. In the cases of Sobibor and Treblinka these were officers of the subordinate 47th and 65th Armies, respectively. Sometimes the investigations overlapped. While each camp received its own investigation, a broader survey conducted by Chuikov's 8th Guards at the end of July 1944 covered Sobibor, Majdanek and several Soviet POW camps. It's important to note that these individual camp investigations were fairly informal and not directed in a top-down manner, and all are fairly brief in their reporting. They were, rather, initial impressions and findings undertaken by officers as they spoke to residents and mostly investigated the sites in situ. Despite these limited resources, each Reinhard camp investigation arrived at the correct conclusion, and their findings have been validated time and again: the Reinhard camps were explicitly extermination camps primarily for Polish Jews where victims were systematically gassed by tank engine exhaust and either buried or burned in mass graves. The investigators interviewed hundreds of area eyewitnesses, including a local Pole named Stanislaw Kozak who helped build the gas chamber at Belzec, and also confirmed that villagers were aware of camp purposes, able to see pillars of smoke wafting from the camps and able to sniff acrid death from considerable distances. Villagers likely smelled the camps from as far as 15 kilometers away, extending to perhaps a distance of 20 miles on some occasions. A Polish diary writer in the vicinity of Sobibor reports residents washing their clothes in cologne to dispel the odors, and a Wehrmacht garrison commander in the area later testified that his men constantly speculated upon, and were disturbed by, the charnel stench. A similar communiqué upward from a Wehrmacht commander downrange from Auschwitz complaining of corpse smoke is another such occurrence of this. Thus, Soviet authorities were well aware of camp purposes before the war’s conclusion, but most public emphasis was put on findings at Madjanek and later at Auschwitz. The Soviet-backed Polish civilian government of 1945 conducted another series of investigations into the Reinhard camps, this time with the benefit of returning Reinhard survivor Rudolf Reder's testimony and concerted grave excavations, and independently affirmed the 1944 Soviet Army investigation findings. By this period in 1945 the Western Allies and press were mostly up to speed on the general nature of the death camps, and Western war crimes investigators were also aided by such primary evidence as SS officer Kurt Gerstein's voluntary eyewitness report on the early Reinhard gas chambers and other survivor testimonies to which the Soviets and Poles weren't yet privy. Someone earlier asked about express orders and other such documents regarding the Final Solution, which Seven Hundred Bee and others have covered well. It’s worth noting, though, that in some cases we do have documents inadvertently kept or preserved. The Hoefle telegram, for instance, clearly delineates the number of Jews exterminated in Aktion Reinhard up to a certain point. The Jaeger Report -- of which five copies were made and only one survives -- details the number of Jews and others shot by Einsatzkommando 3 from July to November 1941 on the Ostfront. Extant operational reports and additional unit documents mirror this for other Einsatzgruppen and Security Police deployments. A 1944 letter from Odilo Globocnik to Himmler hails the success of Aktion Reinhard. And, supporting the notion that most orders were verbally given and reinforced, we have some audio recordings of Himmler’s speeches in Posen giving pep talks in no uncertain terms to officers on the necessity of what they were doing. In a weird twist, when Himmler finally witnessed a mass shooting of Jews on the Ostfront he was alleged to have taken sick, visibly shaken by the horrific nature of a mass shooting. There are more examples, of course, but for anyone interested I would suggest reading Architects of Annihilation by Susanne Heim and Goetz Aly. For some it might be a bit too firmly in the functionalist camp, but it provides a good primer on the organic and informal nature that characterized much of the Holocaust’s early development. Hope this helps! And yo, Seven Hundred Bee, I see you don't have PM's. Is there an e-mail address I can catch you at? MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 10:04
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Seven Hundred Bee posted:While I can't answer conclusively (or really academically), I will say that based on personal experiences and anecdotes I've heard about other people visiting Austria, Austria is much more anti-Semitic than Germany. I'd say it's linked to that disassociation - when you don't acknowledge the past, and don't explore the meaning and legacy of your actions, then you don't recognize the habits, traditions and behaviors that caused those events to occur in the first place. I'd agree from my experience. East Germany is still a bit of a hotbed, though. If I had a dollar for every dude in Thor Steinar I saw.
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Apr 2, 2013 17:07
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kanonvandekempen posted:This is slightly off topic, but who was the equivalent of Hitler/the Nazis before they existed? If you had a questionnaire about 'Who was the most evil man in history' I'm pretty sure Hitler would win with an overwhelming majority. Who would have won in Europe in 1920? The Assyrians got a pretty bad rap in antiquity. Romans told horror stories to their kids about Hannibal for generations. Beyond that you can also look at the Huns and Genghis Khan to some degrees. Edit: regarding Malmedy someone will answer this better, but that campaign was being executed to some degree with the same ferocity as that on the Ostfront. Germans were not particularly worried that their behaviors in the East would be called out, and a similar logic applies to the conditions that generated Malmedy. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 18:56
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Bacarruda posted:
Just wanted to clarify that these camps didn't have homicidal gas chambers, although one might have been tested once at Dachau and the jury's out on that.
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Apr 11, 2013 11:50
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LeeMajors posted:The chamber itself may have never been operational, but it was on the way. It was certainly constructed with mass execution and disposal capacity in mind. Yeah, that's true. Of the several gas chambers at Dachau one was clearly fitted for homicidal purposes -- the others designed differently for delousing -- and the crematoria were certainly capable. Each oven could incinerate nine or ten bodies in under 15 minutes. Although the Dachau chamber was likely never used (or perhaps only on a handful of occasions) they could always send inmates to nearby Hartheim castle to be gassed, as such was the fate of thousands of mentally ill and handicapped victims.
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Apr 12, 2013 09:22
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LeeMajors posted:
Nope, no edits. Think we're on the same page. That chamber was clearly intended for mass executions, probably to supplement the Hartheim gassing facility or for some future larger purpose. One Dachau doctor, Sigmund Rascher, even wrote to Himmler wondering about using the homicidal gas chamber for testing chemical weapons on live subjects. But yeah, pictures help regardless. Dachau is one of the most sobering places you can visit.
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Apr 12, 2013 11:06
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edit on me, but I totally read your post differently the first time. Oh well, pictures are fun.
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Guni posted:What were those 'showers' purpose? Were the oven's merely for the sole purpose of burning dead bodies, or would they burn people alive? While the Dachau "bath" was likely never used for its intended murderous purpose or only in trial runs, this was standard design practice for Nazi gas chambers from Treblinka to Auschwitz. It was decorated to convince victims they were going into a group shower or delousing area for anti-typhus purposes. Once the doors were sealed, Zkylon B or carbon monoxide gas would flood the chamber. The crematoriums were for incinerating the bodies, although there is some eyewitness testimony from Dachau suggesting that prisoners were burned alive on at least one occasion. That would not have been standard practice, however.
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Apr 12, 2013 13:27
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DasReich posted:It's simple. Hitler on top. gently caress everyone else. If they're busy stabbing each other in the back, they're not even considering a coup. No matter how bad things get. Unless you're Henning von Tresckow. But yeah, anyone in real power was in constant struggle with poorly delineated counterparts for much of the regime, to the point where people bowed to Himmler while he struggled with Polish occupation leaders. The whole thing was rotten.
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Apr 13, 2013 18:07
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Paxicon posted:Thanks for the replies, but I was kind of looking for specific feuds between top officials and how they were resolved There's plenty, but two are worth noting offhand. Wilhelm Canaris was head of the Abwehr intelligence agency, and Reinhard Heydrich, as Himmler's young deputy, was ambitious as hell and in a position to be so. Some historians credit him with fomenting the idea of mass gassing centers for the Jewish question, and some speculate he was priming to be Hitler's eventual successor. Heydrich sought to consolidate all German intelligence under his umbrella and readily turned against Canaris, an old family friend. Canaris caught wind, and each man had their staff memers spying on one another. Canaris sought to prove Heydrich's rumored Jewish ancestry, at one point trying to gather old photographic evidence and send it abroad. Heydrich's approach was more cautious, and he advised his spies to be wary of his foe's abilities. Nothing really decisive happened as Heydrich died shorly after the spy war started -- but a spy war that brazen was pretty remarkable. It's also worth noting that Heydrich's goal wasn't entirely unreasonable. The Abwehr produced questionable intelligence, partly because Canaris and much of his staff were secretly opposed to Hitler -- a fact kept hidden from Heydrich's prying eyes. On the other hand, you have someone like Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia and eventual Reichskomissar of Ukraine. Tight with Goering, Koch had a knack for funneling disproportionate resources into his fiefdoms. Initially this caused a collision course with agricultural minister Walther Darre that was so tense Koch once had Darre's deputies arrested. Unfortunately for Darre his powers were limited and Koch's ascension continued unabated. As administrator of Ukraine he drew stern flak from Alfred Rosenberg, who in a whiny letter accused Koch of acting as his own Fuehrer in Ukraine and expressed jealousy of Koch's one-on-one meetings with Hitler. So incensed was Rosenberg that he personally insisted on -- and got -- his presence at all future meetings between Hitler and Koch. I'm sure this chaffed Koch, but it did nothing to curb his power that included overseeing all Gestapo and police units in the East in addition to his administrative duties. Interestingly, Koch was an ardent socialist and former supporter of Gregor Strasser, earning him the nickname "Red Koch." His rise to power despite this is evidence of his ruthlessness, anti-Semitism and ability to "work toward the Fuehrer." So perhaps nothing too crazy here, but indicative of the regime's instability and infighting nonetheless.
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Apr 14, 2013 12:22
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It's also worth noting that the T4 program to kill the mentally ill and handicapped was rooted in this notion of racial hygiene, and that Aktion Reinhardt gassing camps were run by T4 staff directly on loan to Globocnik at SSPF Lublin.
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Apr 17, 2013 10:31
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Gumby posted:
What Gumby said. To elaborate, several of the camps had bordellos for staff and privileged inmates. At least 200 sex workers have been identified among ten bordellos, and although participation was initially voluntary there were certainly cases of forced recruitment. Most were German women already imprisoned as "asocials," but a number of Poles, Ukrainians, Belarussians and even a few Roma filled out the ranks. As it stands none are believed to have been Jewish. That said, the coercive, twisted nature of the camp almost certainly led to gross sexual mistreatment and favoritism. The Joy Divison concept seems to stem from a 1955 novella allegedly based on an unknown diary, so who knows. A top Yad Vashem researcher maintains the work is just fiction, and there's a debate on how rooted in reality it is versus its role in conveying the general memory of sexual abuse in the camps versus its status as possible Holocaust smut. I wouldn't say mainstream sources ignore the Joy Division concept per se, but that the evidence for something akin to what's specifically described is at this time incomplete. Across the occupied territories the Germans sent up brothels for soldiers, and more than 34,000 women were forced into them. It's possible some were Jewish, but most accounts are from Poles and others. In other cases no formal arrangements were needed. Staff at the Polish extermination camps had fixed schedules and were allowed leave to neighboring villages where they could fraternize as they pleased. A Ukrainian guard at Belzec married a local Polish girl, for example, and some guards were so loose in their talk that Christian Wirth had two sent to the gas chambers. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Apr 20, 2013 |
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Apr 20, 2013 15:28
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They did offer tax deductions for some health insurance policies, though. Not applicable to Jews.
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Apr 20, 2013 16:19
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Sunshine89 posted:Reinhard Heydrich chat. Sometimes I shudder at the thought of what role he would have played in the later Reich had he not been offed so spectacularly and relatively soon. He was so cunning, ambitious, sadistic and rightly placed to engage those traits. It is perhaps too bad he never stood in the Nuremberg docket, though. And it's also worth mentioning that many of the July 20th plotters were motivated at least in part by humanitarian purposes. Henning von Tresckow felt his loyalties turn when he witnessed the execution of Soviet POWs, and he told SS officer and cousin Alexander Stahlberg that there was systematic extermination in the East. Stahlberg reported the murder of more than 100,000 Jews to Manstein but was rebuffed by a commander who refused to believe it was possible. Swedish consul Karl Vendel visited the General Government and met with officers who were likely members of Tresckow's inner circle, and when he returned to his office in Berlin he filed a report to the Swedish government alleging mass extermination of Jews. Unfortunately the Swedish government did little with the report, and although it made it to the prime minister's office the report itself sat dormant until the 1970's. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Apr 23, 2013 |
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Apr 23, 2013 09:48
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gyrobot posted:So could the Nazi can afford to go public with the Death Camps compared to their Asian equivilant the Japanese who were not only known for their terrible treatment of the conquered but the unapologetic attitude tehy adopt to this day or would such a revelation cause Hitler's regime to crumble in fear of knowing they may next on the block if they had won the war and assumed dominion over mainland Europe. They made considerable efforts to conceal their crimes. Sonderkommando 1005 was tasked with unearthing mass graves and incinerating the bodies. They did this within the areas of the death camps, as well as with a number of Einsatzgruppen mass graves. It is clear from some evidence, though, that a number of persons transiting through or stationed in the Generalgovernment of occupied Poland would have been at least aware of extermination rumors. Two contemporary diaries from Wehrmacht soldiers -- along with post-war testimony and contemporary Polish and Jewish testimonies -- attest to this. Wehrmacht NCO Wilhelm Cornides in an August 1942 diary entry posted:6.20pm – we passed Camp Belzec. Austrian private Hubert Pfoch saw witnessed similar atrocities around the same time. Pfoch in an August 1942 diary entry posted:When at last our train leaves the station at least fifty dead, women, men and children, some of them totally naked, lie along the track [from a nearby Jewish transport]. We saw the Jewish police remove them - all kinds of valuable disappeared into their pockets, too. Eventually our train followed the other train and we continued to see corpses on both sides of the track - children and others. They say Treblinka is a 'delousing camp.' When we reach Treblinka station the train is next to us again - there is such an awful smell of decomposing corpses in the station, some of us vomit. The begging for water intensifies, the indiscriminate shooting by the guards continues.....Three hundred thousand have been assembled here [throughout the camp's history] ... Every day ten or fifteen thousand are gassed and burned. Any comment is totally superfluous. In the case of Pfoch he was traveling with an entire Wehrmacht infantry company. He later told interviewers that he and his colleagues urged their first officer, a young lieutenant, to file a complaint to the SS -- to which an SS officer menacingly retorted that he could have them put on a train, as well. It's clear, then, that from the suspicions of locals Poles and Polish Jews in other sources and validating evidence here (Cornides speaks at varying times with an engineer, two separate police officers, a police officer's wife and an ethnic German local) that knowledge of mass extermination, at least in the form of hearsay, was fairly widespread in the vicinity of the camps, and these camps shared transiting routes with units going East and were in close proximity to many garrisons. It is worth noting that the details as told to Cornides were not necessarily correct (i.e., a heatwave death) but they do confirm that whispers pretty close to the truth couldn't be kept secret. edit: Raskolnikov38 posted:Off the top of my head at least field marshal von manstein issued orders for his troops to assist the eintzgruppen and I think demanded that the soldiers assisting them be given a share of the deads' possessions instead of the SS keeping everything. Yep, about 300 Wehrmacht soldiers from the Eleventh Army joined an Einsatzkommando D subgroup in executing 400 Jews from Kodyma on August 12, 1941. The event is also recorded in the Eleventh Army's official war diary. It's also worth pointing out that all Einsatzkommando units were explicitly attached to larger armies. Ohlendorf's Einsatzkommando D was attached to Manstein's Eleventh Army and they shared headquarters together. Manstein technically had authority over Ohlendorf, and in Romania he used the Einsatzkommando for sentry purposes -- allowing them to pursue their "duties" once they were deeper East. He also furnished Ohlendorf with supplies, fuel and Wehrmacht drivers. Eleventh Army soldiers also witnessed a mass execution of Romanian Jews by Romanian forces before they made it far East, which prompted Einsatzkommando staff to issue an Army-wide order prohibiting photography of executions or mention of it in letters home. Eleventh Army HQ even required that all liquidations had to occur within 200 kilometers of the Army's HQ -- presumably to keep the unit in check. At least once the Eleventh Army command even requested the Einsatzgruppen in places before they arrived. Fearing "famine" and a lack of housing, Eleventh Army HQ requested (on the urgency of the Army's head quarter master) Ohlendorf's men for a liquidation in Simferopol that wasn't yet on Ohlendorf's agenda. The killing there was so intense that the 4th Company of Police Reserve Battalion 9, which normally assisted with liquidations, requested another assignment and forced the killings to halt until Ohlendorf brought in another police unit. Ohlendorf also spoke of the problem of "unguarded talk" among Wehrmacht soldiers causing issues. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 12:01 on May 3, 2013 |
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May 3, 2013 11:25
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Bacarruda posted:To some extent, it was. Some Ukranians, paritculalry in Western Ukraine, welcomed German soldiers as liberators. Ukranians did volunteer to fight alongside the Germans in units like the Nightingale Battalion. Though the Germans did not exploit this to the extent they could have, partly out of racial and national politics, partly out of distrust for turncoat Ukranians. Yeah, in sum about 20,000 Ukrainians served in the SS. Hundreds worked in the death camps. That said, it's clear that a lot were POWs who were conscripted.
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May 4, 2013 03:10
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Jedi Knight Luigi posted:The movie "Amen." (wikipedia link) also addresses this, and it was apparently based off that play "The Deputy." I can't speak to the larger Vatican-Nazi relations, but while this movie is loosely based on the real-life story of SS officer Kurt Gerstein it is largely fictional. Gerstein, the hygiene and sanitation officer who witnessed mass gassing at Belzec and transported Zyklon B to Auschwitz, was stridently anti-Nazi and tried on numerous occasions to spread news of the genocide to those he felt he could trust, including several clergy members, a Swedish diplomat and a member of the Dutch underground. Unfortunately since Gerstein died in jail in 1945 the chronology of his wartime activities is still a bit unclear in some areas. It appears that Gerstein attempted to visit the papal nuncio of Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, in 1941 (or possibly early '42) to tell him about the mass extermination of Jews but was refused entry to the nuncio's office. He did, however, find an auxiliary bishop who found his reports credible and fulfilled his request in sending the information to the Vatican on his behalf. It doesn't appear they responded. One certain thing is that around this time word was spreading to the German clergy about mass murder. In late 1941 Margarete Sommer, assistant to Bishop of Berlin Konrad von Preysing, prepared an eyewitness account of the Kovno massacres and distributed it widely among German bishops and likely to other anti-Nazi clergy members in the city. Roughly 18,000 Jews were murdered in these open-air shootings between July and October 1941. It's possible this information reached Orsenigo, but he was ardently anti-Semitic and fascist in leanings and his German assistant was a Nazi party member, so it likely fell on deaf ears. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 07:57 on May 17, 2013 |
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May 17, 2013 07:46
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I'm totally blanking on this, and the internet isn't helping. What was the major Nazi occult site that was a geographic formation associated with an older esoteric tradition? Not Wewelsburg or anything like that, but a place with a walking path through it buffeted by natural formations. Unfortunately I don't have Goodrick-Clark on hand, but I think the site was associated with a medieval event(s). Really vague, I know, but anyone? edit: Solved my own question. I was thinking of the Externsteine. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jun 29, 2013 |
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Jun 29, 2013 17:21
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Thanks for the quick response. I was reminded of them by discovering that there are modern-day "irminists," loosely affiliated with Asatru and other neo-pagan revivalists, who are basically 21st century Ariosophists. It never fails to amaze me how many "radical traditionalists" and others are still out there that follow quasi-neo-Nazi German pagan traditions and revere people like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi. The whole "libertarian nationalism" coupled with esoteric traditionalism is alarmingly more popular among some politically active men in their late '20s/early '30s than one might suspect. That there are more than a few hundred is shocking.
MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jun 29, 2013 |
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Jun 29, 2013 17:30
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:The Nazi's literally had Einsatzgruppen units all organized, set, and ready to go for the expected conquest of Palestine in 1942. They were going to begin murdering right away, there is no question about it. Yup, Einsatzgruppe Egypt was ready to depart from Athens. Regarding Rommel, if I recall correctly there was a general who joined his forces in North Africa that told several other officers about mass murders on the Ostfront, so presumably this knowledge trickled back to Rommel. I really wish I could find the citation now, though.
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Jul 2, 2013 15:24
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Devour posted:Does anyone know what the homeless rates were in Nazi Germany 1933-1945, assuming there was any record of it? If there were homeless ethnic Germans in the Third Reich, what did the society/leadership of Nazi Germany do about it? I ask because of the high emphasis the Nazi Party had on Aryans, which is something I've been curious about in this case. They were marked as "asocials" and put into concentration camps.
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Jul 3, 2013 07:20
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:You'd find more than a few people in the US who would support that today. Why what do you think a government job is, just a bunch of dudes digging holes and fillin' 'em back up again! Here is a good backgrounder on the broad asocial category, known as the black triangles. Anyone from prostitutes to petty criminals to substance abusers fell under the rubric. More than 20,000 were arrested, and about 10,000 in the camps.
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Jul 4, 2013 03:02
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Kemper Boyd posted:Here, too, the case was pretty much that no one managed or had the courage to frame the initiative in a way that would have appealed to Hitler, until Himmler decided to back Vlasov. If the Nazis had treated western Russia, Ukraine and Poland like how they treated Estonia it would have been a much different war. Then again, that would have been a much different Nazi party. InspectorBloor posted:The failure of this engineered famine is actually one of the main reasons why they widened the target groups of people to shoot, and in the end engineering industrial means of killing people by gas or through work. Turns out that you can't just let people starve on such a scale if you want to supply your troops directly off the land. They tend to get agitated by that and resist. Who would have guessed that? Just want to note that the Aktion Reinhardt guys were doing experimental gassings in September 1941, well after the Einsatzgruppen were under way and only months after the Hunger Plan reached its formative stages. And, of course, the gas wagons started in 1939 and were in wider use by 1941. I think it's probably better to think of industrialized murder as a complement to, rather than necessity of, the attempted Hunger Plan, and it certainly owed much of its origins to the T4 program perhaps more than anything else. I'd be interested in learning more about how the Hunger Plan affected AR and other tactics, though, if you have any. If I recall correctly Heim and Aly touched on that note in Architects of Annihilation but it's been some years for me. But yeah, mass starvation was already a major strategy by the time sites like Treblinka were in full swing. The calculated mass starvation of Soviet POWs between June 1941 and February 1942 is probably second only to the Rwandan genocide in terms of specific people exterminated in a given period of time in 20th century history. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Jul 11, 2013 |
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Jul 11, 2013 14:35
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InspectorBloor posted:The guys from T4 made a pretty fast start into Russia, as initial feedback got back from the Einsatzgruppen to the RSHA. The name slipped from my memory, [but I think it was Heydrich who was approached by some guy from the bureaucracy (a man from the Parteisekretariat, or possibly Bormann himself, as T4 was initially connected with this agency) and got them on board and tried to put their experience to use]. e: [The connection of the Parteisekretariat or Sekretariat des Führers with T4 is narrated by Ian Kershaw in "Hitler: a Profile in Power", but seems to be quite earlier than I recalled. As you can read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Stangl , the connection of T4 and RSHA is essentially a basic factor from the start, but of secret nature. I clearly don't know too much about this issue. Maybe somebody else can elaborate of how this connects exactly.] Well, Christian Wirth was RSHA Berlin before transferring over to a role in the T4 program. Given his seminal influence a few years later as inspector of the Aktion Reinhardt death camps I'd say that's a notable lead (that's probably already been explored in some depth, just not sure where offhand). I would be interesting in learning about the Belarussian occupation, though. What was the general Nazi outlook for the fate of Belarussians? How serious was the attempt to build an extermination camp at Mogilev?
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Jul 12, 2013 11:55
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InspectorBloor posted:Bunch of awesome information. It looks like Gerlach co-wrote a piece on it -- "Failure of Plans for an SS Extermination Camp in Mogilev, Belorussia," 1997, Oxford University Press. If you have academic access, which I don't, it's probably worth checking out. I do know that Topf und Söhne even sent a furnace to the site, but I think it wound up being sent for use in Birkenau or something. Also absolutely horrific at Mogilev was the one-time attempt to use explosives for mass killings.
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Jul 13, 2013 06:50
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InspectorBloor posted:Apparently the ovens that were ordered were of a capacity of 3000 bodies per day. They were for a rather unknown camp at Mogilev that was under the controll of the HSSPF (under von dem Bach-Zelewski), not Einsatzgruppe B. This camp was initially used to gather up displaced persons or refugees, or vagabonds as it was called, for anti-partisan measures. Much thanks, that makes sense. One point I'm confused on are the ovens. Were they for the same camp at Mogilev that Himmler visited, where gas vans were in action? Or, rather, what was the difference between camps controlled by the HSSPF and the Einsatzgruppe B? Anyway, thanks again. One interesting point you mention is the freezing of the canal. Just how poor was German intelligence to not factor something like this in? More broadly, how intimate was German knowledge of Soviet geography and topography?
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Jul 14, 2013 09:14
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Slip Slap posted:Again, easy for me to say in this day and age but I do not get it. Surely, there had to be an inkling of what was in store for them during the later round ups. You're being sent east to a work camp. Pack a bag, get on a train. Other families have already been sent there. They must have huge labor camps for Jews out east. It's a war and they want your labor. You see work camps around town, too. Shops where Polish women stuff shells or Russian prisoners chop wood. Sure, maybe you've heard of other, darker places, heard some stories. The Wehrmacht took all the Jewish men in another district and shot them by a creek. A young girl is marched through town carrying the sign 'traitor' and they hanged her in front of laughing men. A member of the underground swears to your rabbi that his friend knew of a guy who was sent to a work camp where they put Jews in a huge room and dragged electrical wires across the floor, and the Jews just vaporized when they flipped the switch. Somewhere south of Warsaw, maybe, or out near White Russia. But it doesn't matter when they call for you and your family. Work out east, an "evacuation" under penalty of death. Slip Slap posted:At the very least, upon entering the camps and smelling that unmistakable smell and realizing what was coming, wouldn't you fight? The train ride was really, really long and really hot or cold. You pissed on each other in the train car. Some people, mostly kids, jump off. Most will be shot later by Germans, but a few lucky ones will be taken in my sympathetic families or partisans. When you arrive at some train station deep in the night there are loud dogs and Ukrainians with machine guns shouting at you in broken Polish or German. It smells awful, but you have to go to the baths. Immediately. Some of the men have whips, raining down on everyone. A few people try to run, struck down with bullets and dogs. Some make it, though. At Belzec, two women escape in the confusion. They make it to the Zolkiev ghetto, which is liquidated shortly thereafter. Their story survives in oral history from the area, but they do not. Later, a man hides in the basin of an outhouse during the offloading, only to run to freedom later. Slip Slap posted:If someone tried to take my son away from me, I would fight to the death. Maybe you do. Maybe you fight, like Meir Berliner, who had lost everything, who was only in Poland on holiday with his family from Argentina, a foreign national caught up in it all, who fatally jammed a knife into an SS man at Treblinka. But they will still shoot you, right there, kill you like Berliner. It's not like anyone will know. Of the more than 630,000 people sent to Belzec and Sobibor, for instance, only a couple hundred will survive the war. Dozens and dozens of trains come day after day and not a single person survives. It's possible that sometimes they all fought. The records are unclear. Few of the camps guards will ever be apprehended and none will leave a known written record. Sobibor and Treblinka see major prisoner revolts, one halting Sobibor's operations for good. Belzec probably had one, too, but the sources are opaque and vary. Hell, several of the Trawniki -- the mostly Slavic staff who did the dirty guard work -- were executed for insubordination or plotting their own revolts. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Sep 27, 2013 |
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Sep 27, 2013 15:43
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Several of the Slavic guards had severe drinking issues. They didn't really leave any records for us to analyze, though. Many death camp guards simply died. From Sobibor, a few of the Germans wound up committing suicide, one during the war and a couple years later. Platedlizard is generally right, though. In the '70s a journalist spent days interviewing the former commandant of Treblinka, and I think there were lots of rationalizations. Some were disgusted, though. Officers expressed disgust at how Imfried Erbl had had failed to manage Treblinka, and I believe Wilhelm Pfannenstiel was disgusted in his later life by the gassing process, judging by his private correspondence with a prominent Holocaust denier.
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Sep 29, 2013 05:39
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Kemper Boyd posted:Since there's a bunch of records we don't have, it's possible that a whole lot of people just got transferred out of the camps after not being able to cope. It was mentioned earlier on in either this thread or the military history thread that the Nazis were concerned with the ability of the soldiers to keep functioning while carrying out mass killings. And yeah, anyone interested in the psychology of it should, as has been suggested, check out Ordinary Soldiers by Christopher Browning. In it you'll learn about the PTSD, alcoholism and depression attendant with mass killing, of which almost anyone is capable, according to Browning's research.
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Sep 29, 2013 12:19
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Omi-Polari posted:Postone argues that Nazism viewed itself as a revolt against the modern world, and that Jews in Nazi ideology represented an "immensely powerful, intangible, international conspiracy" that was "undermining the social 'health' of the nation." He also argues that central to the Nazi "revolt" was to be against the "abstract" domination of capital which became identified with the Jews, versus the productive "concrete" (or specific) social/political/economic activity of the Nazi Volk. I suppose you could frame this difference as the difference between a concrete Volkish farm community with this organic unity tying race and soil and the fruits of its labor together; versus the intangible, chaotic, alienating abstract life of the cosmopolitan (i.e. Jewish) city. Bit of a derail, but Ryan Gosling's character in The Believer personifies this mentality to some degree.
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Oct 2, 2013 15:45
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Sobieski posted:What do you think of revisionist historians such as Ernst Zundel, David Irving, etc. Irving is the only revisionist, outside Mark Weber, to have any professional historical research training. He made a career out of willfully misinterpreting evidence, but has since come around the conclusion that the Holocaust happened but was just Himmler's secret project. There's no evidence to support this, but ironically this has ostracized him from the denier community as well, who generally hold Himmler in high esteem and deny Aktion Reinhardt. Ernst Zundel is a straight-up neo-Nazi who fell out of the scene in the '90s. These days, Carlo Mattogno is the "heavyweight" of the denier crowd, but he has no formal training, willfully ignores evidence, repeats and reframes standard denailist canards and distorts historical methodology to arrive at his conclusions. Nothing new under the sun here, just more pages of bullshit. Holocaust denial has been dead on arrival since Harry Elmer Barnes (and any scholar of political thought looking for original research would be well served looking into the connection between post-war WWII isolationism/early libertarianism, with people like Murray Rothbard the editors of the Rampart journal, to early American Holocaust denial, since there was such an overlap), and for me Pfannenstiel swearing to Rassinier that he saw the gas chambers was an early nail in its coffin. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Oct 13, 2013 |
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Oct 13, 2013 05:11
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Yeah, it seems like he has a pretty technical understanding of the German military, but he's nobody's child now. Even deniers are skeptical about his forthcoming Himmler biography, which, rightfully, virtually no one will read. The only real Irving sympathizers I've ever seen who aren't public deniers are a handful of regular posters on the Axis History Forum, and even their integrity is highly suspect, in my opinion. It's strange, because Irving and his few acolytes now represent a weird, Internet-only niche of "the Holocaust happened but its scale was likely overstated and it was Himmler's, mostly economically driven, project" thesis, which is utter bullshit.
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Oct 13, 2013 06:43
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I also found Architects of Annihilation by Susanne Heim and Goetz Aly to be a good background on the economic calculus of the Hungerplan and the role of technical specialists involved.
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May 17, 2014 09:26
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Skoll posted:re: occultism It's Goodricke-Clark, the only expert to have thoroughly covered it.
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May 6, 2015 20:18
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