An unsettling and shocking view of Auschwitz

[patricia]

I'm afraid I have to agree with you, Alexander.

It's been shown that, even when people DO consider their charges to be human, they are still prepared to treat them with complete callousness. (I'm thinking of the experiment conducted with students playing roles in, I think, a California university.)

Oh, and I don't think this is political; it's more like what it is to be human.

MG

I believe you're referring to the experiment done at Stanford in which ordinary students were part of an experiment in human behaviour in which they were randomly divided into guards and prisoners. Within a very, very short time the experiment had to be discontinued because the participants had so embraced their roles that the safety of the "prisoners" was feared.

This is a very well-known experiment, which is why I'm puzzled as to how anyone is surprised at the behaviour of guards at Abu Ghraib and similar American detention centres recently.

At Abu Ghraib, guards who had not that long before held jobs at places like KFC in the U.S. suddenly had people's lives in their hands. The results were predictable.

As for the normalcy of their lives otherwise, some who have spoken to journalists since they returned to the U.S. have only now begun to feel anything like remourse, and not all of them do.

Normal is a very flexible condition. Whatever is happening as part of one's everyday routine becomes normal.

You might want to look for "The Good Old Days - The Holocaust As Seen By It's Perpetrators and Bystanders" edited by Ernest Klee, Willi Dresson and Voelker Rees.

It is a collection of fond memories of the personnel who ran the concentration camp, Treblinka.

If anything, it reads like a memoir from summer camp, rather than a chronicle of evil.

That's what's so horrifying about it.

Edited September 23, 2007 by patricia

[AndrewHill]

That's an interesting issue. Maybe too complex for discussing here. Basically I think that our psychology works exactly like our self preservation instinct, both as victims then as executioners. Like a wolf that cut herself a leg trapped, we cut some part of our "psychological body". This has some effects on our mental health, we have to live like a crippled wolf. Obviously I am oversimplyfing here.

I have to say that there's no easy answer to a problem of this magnitude. Has anyone here read the book 'The Good Ole Boys' published by the Free Press about 15 years ago? It gives a pretty interesting account of what happened on the 'other' side of genocide. Essentially, it included personal accounts of how the Jewish problem was handled, and in many instances, how the Wehrmacht and the SS would intoxicate themselves in order to handle their gruesome tasks, because if they were not capable of carrying out their orders, then they too would be killed for their incompetence. The photos included in the book were also peronsal snapshots of Jews in their last minutes of life or in death, which made the book all the more chilling. WWII, is tantamount of what mankind is capable of doing and I think 60years later, we have not learned our lesson from this darkest time in history. History tends to repeat itself, yet humankind are slow to learn from its mistakes.

Edited September 23, 2007 by Holy Ghost

[patricia]

H G, I think we may be referring to the same book.

[Kalo]

Geez, just when I had Auschwitz all tidied-up in my mind, this kinda news has to break.

Seriously, what about Auschwitz then and now isn't shocking and unsettling? It wasn't Hogan's Heroes, that's for sure.

[king ubu]

gee what a useless thread, haven't we seen and said all before...

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I suspect the problem is that we've learned (or some of us have) lessons too well from this and other atrocities. We've learned that people can be manipulated into doing such things. And some of us think this is an opportunity, rather than a disaster. And THAT, I think, is the real problem.

MG

[Christiern]

Don't mean to, in any way, minimize the barbarity documented by the posted photos, just had to point out that they are almost an after-shock at this point--at least to those of us who are old enough to be experiencing dèjá vu.

I think that's part of the point though. There are new generations that didn't experience what you did, or saw what you've seen. It's not readily available for most of the world's population. If this helps younger people to begin to understand the atrocities that the Nazis perpetrated on fellow humans, it's beneficial, IMO.

Agreed, I guess my point is that this "new" material is not as shocking as much of what preceded it. If the purpose of the post was to remind the old and educate the young, more effective documentation has been available for over 6 decades. Let's face it, many of these newly discovered photos are pretty uneffective when taken out of context--an up-turned blueberry bowl is not even remotely as horrifying as piles of shoes, life-starved faces, or a glimpse of Ilse's lamp shades.

It's all disturbing beyond measure and, Ubu, you shouldn't take anything I say here personally. Thanks for starting this thread, which no one really regards as useless.

[king ubu]

Don't mean to, in any way, minimize the barbarity documented by the posted photos, just had to point out that they are almost an after-shock at this point--at least to those of us who are old enough to be experiencing dèjá vu.

I think that's part of the point though. There are new generations that didn't experience what you did, or saw what you've seen. It's not readily available for most of the world's population. If this helps younger people to begin to understand the atrocities that the Nazis perpetrated on fellow humans, it's beneficial, IMO.

Agreed, I guess my point is that this "new" material is not as shocking as much of what preceded it. If the purpose of the post was to remind the old and educate the young, more effective documentation has been available for over 6 decades. Let's face it, many of these newly discovered photos are pretty uneffective when taken out of context--an up-turned blueberry bowl is not even remotely as horrifying as piles of shoes, life-starved faces, or a glimpse of Ilse's lamp shades.

It's all disturbing beyond measure and, Ubu, you shouldn't take anything I say here personally. Thanks for starting this thread, which no one really regards as useless.

It's just that this been there done that attitude that's spreading all over the board can be a bit of a nuisance, hence my reaction - I'm young, I've not been there and said everything, and indeed I found the article and the site interesting and it did move me. Anyway, this thread is of course not useless, there's been some interesting points made and I enjoyed reading people's comments, mostly. As I said, just that attitude does annoy me, here and elsewhere, too...

[Niko]

i did find the photos interesting and revealing, of course, young as i am, i have seen this and that over the years... admittedly i also thought that Auschwitz was a little like that for those who worked there, ate blueberries, met the love of their lives, whatever... (and if Auschwitz had just been what we see on these photos, people eating blueberries and feeding their dogs, nothing would have been wrong with it) i found these pictures were a great reminder of what the world we live in is like

i have the strong feeling that all this will come back in one form or other, that people will always have these cruel, ignorant and stupid sides and that they will come out again more pronouncedly and more concentrated than they do these days; i don't think an additional reminder of the holocaust will prevent that but i would certainly not call it inappropriate...

i see this is not a well-written post but i hope what i waned to say comes out clear enough (and is not too stupid)

[Christiern]

I don't know what "attitude" you refer to here, or whether I am part of that. However, I understand where you are coming from with this thread, and think you may have misinterpreted some of the responses.

That's it from me regarding that.

[medjuck]

I think these photos are really important. When we see the photos of the atrocities we all like to believe that they are committed by people who are somehow unlike ourselves. They aren't. We all like to believe that we would never work at a concentraton camp but do we know that we couldn't be convinced that it was for the betterment of the country?

And (to finally get this moved to the politics thread) I found living in the US in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq pretty scary. It seemed to me that when the government and the media collude they can convince most of the populace of almost anything. It's informative to go back and read what the such supposedly liberal publications as the New Yorker and the NY times wrote in those months.

[Alexander]

Just to clarify, I don't think that these photos are unimportant, nor do I think that this thread is useless. I merely said that, given my very jaundiced view of humanity, they do not suprise me in the least. Human beings are very resiliant. Put them to work in a death camp, and they will soon become indifferent to the death they see every day. It will become routine, part of the background. I honestly do not see the difference between the perpetuation of ordinary life in the death camps among the SS, and the perpetuation of ordinary life among American soldiers in Iraq. How could it be otherwise? How could you go on amidst so much death without negating it, at least to some extent?

[Christiern]

Why would the kids have to be Jewish? All kids should be taught the lesson. People often forget that Hitler's atrocities were not limited to any one segment of humanity.

[Jazzmoose]

if you have jewish kids, show them a movie like schindler's list rather than taking them to auschwitz. it will affect them more. trust me.

I'll check to see if our kids are jewish...

[king ubu]

"Schindler's List" is wrong in so many ways. Rather wait till they're grown up and show them Lanzman's "Shoah". And get rid of the expression "holocaust" which is wrong, too.

[Christiern]

"Holocaust" (as in "the holocaust") is definitely an unfortunate term; applied years later to Hitler's atrocities, it has always struck me as a PR term. Sad to say, we have seen many holocausts throughout history, including the present time--no single segment of the population can lay exclusive claim to it.

Getting back to the suggestion that "Schindler's List" should be shown to children, I think the grim reality of actual photos and footage is far more effective than any Hollywood film, even one based on fact.

[king ubu]

Yes, and what's fact and what fiction about the Schindler story isn't so clear, either...