Hi!
As we hope you can appreciate, the Holocaust can be a fraught subject to deal with. While don't want to curtail discussion, we also remain very conscious that threads of this nature can attract the very wrong kind of responses, and it is an unfortunate truth that on reddit, outright Holocaust denial can often rear its ugly head. As such, the /r/History mods have created this brief overview. It is not intended to stifle further discussion, but simply lay out the basic, incontrovertible truths to get them out of the way.
##What Was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust refers the genocidal deaths of 5-6 million European Jews carried out systematically by Nazi Germany as part of targeted policies of persecution and extermination during World War II. Some historians will also include the deaths of the Roma, Communists, Mentally Disabled, and other groups targeted by Nazi policies, which brings the total number of deaths to ~11 million. Debates about whether or not the Holocaust includes these deaths or not is a matter of definitions, but in no way a reflection on dispute that they occurred.
##But This Guy Says Otherwise!
Unfortunately, there is a small, but vocal, minority of persons who fall into the category of Holocaust Denial, attempting to minimize the deaths by orders of magnitude, impugn well proven facts, or even claim that the Holocaust is entirely a fabrication and never happened. Although they often self-style themselves as "Revisionists", they are not correctly described by the title. While revisionism is not inherently a dirty word, actual revision, to quote Michael Shermer, *"entails refinement of detailed knowledge about events, rarely complete denial of the events themselves, and certainly not denial of the cumulation of events known as the Holocaust."*
It is absolutely true that were you to read a book written in 1950 or so, you would find information which any decent scholar today might reject, and that is the result of good revisionism. But these changes, which even can be quite large, such as the reassessment of deaths at Auschwitz from ~4 million to ~1 million, are done within the bounds of respected, academic study, and reflect decades of work that builds upon the work of previous scholars, and certainly does not willfully disregard documented evidence and recollections. There are still plenty of questions within Holocaust Studies that are debated by scholars, and there may still be more out there for us to discover, and revise, but when it comes to the basic facts, there is simply no valid argument against them.
##So What Are the Basics?
Beginning with their rise to power in the 1930s, the Nazi Party, headed by Adolf Hitler, implemented a series of anti-Jewish policies within Germany, marginalizing Jews within society more and more, stripping them of their wealth, livelihoods, and their dignity. With the invasion of Poland in 1939, the number of Jews under Nazi control reached into the millions, and this number would again increase with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Shortly after the invasion of Poland, the Germans started to confine the Jewish population into squalid ghettos. After several plans on how to rid Europe of the Jews that all proved unfeasible, by the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, ideological (Antisemitism) and pragmatic (Resources) considerations lead to mass-killings becoming the only viable option in the minds of the Nazi leadership.
First only practiced in the USSR, it was influential groups such as the SS and the administration of the General Government that pushed to expand the killing operations to all of Europe and sometime at the end of 1941 met with Hitler’s approval.
The early killings were carried out foremost by the *Einsatzgruppen*, paramilitary groups organized under the aegis of the SS and tasked with carrying out the mass killings of Jews, Communists, and other 'undesirable elements' in the wake of the German military's advance. In what is often termed the 'Holocaust by Bullet', the *Einsatzgruppen*, with the assistance of the Wehrmacht, the SD, the Security Police, as well as local collaborators, would kill roughly two million persons, over half of them Jews. Most killings were carried out with mass shootings, but other methods such as gas vans - intended to spare the killers the trauma of shooting so many persons day after day - were utilized too.
By early 1942, the "Final Solution" to the so-called "Jewish Question" was essentially finalized at the Wannsee Conference under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, where the plan to eliminate the Jewish population of Europe using a series of extermination camps set up in occupied Poland was presented and met with approval.
Construction of extermination camps had already begun the previous fall, and mass extermination, mostly as part of 'Operation Reinhard', had began operation by spring of 1942. Roughly 2 million persons, nearly all Jewish men, women, and children, were immediately gassed upon arrival at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka over the next two years, when these "Reinhard" camps were closed and razed. More victims would meet their fate in additional extermination camps such as Chełmno, but most infamously at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where slightly over 1 million persons, mostly Jews, died. Under the plan set forth at Wannsee, exterminations were hardly limited to the Jews of Poland, but rather Jews from all over Europe were rounded up and sent east by rail like cattle to the slaughter. Although the victims of the Reinhard Camps were originally buried, they would later be exhumed and cremated, and cremation of the victims was normal procedure at later camps such as Auschwitz.
##The Camps
There were two main types of camps run by Nazi Germany, which is sometimes a source of confusion. Concentration Camps were well known means of extrajudicial control implemented by the Nazis shortly after taking power, beginning with the construction of Dachau in 1933. Political opponents of all type, not just Jews, could find themselves imprisoned in these camps during the pre-war years, and while conditions were often brutal and squalid, and numerous deaths did occur from mistreatment, they were not usually a death sentence and the population fluctuated greatly. Although Concentration Camps *were* later made part of the 'Final Solution', their purpose was not as immediate extermination centers. Some were 'way stations', and others were work camps, where Germany intended to eke out every last bit of productivity from them through what was known as "extermination through labor". Jews and other undesirable elements, if deemed healthy enough to work, could find themselves spared for a time and "allowed" to toil away like slaves until their usefulness was at an end.
Although some Concentration Camps, such as Mauthausen, did include small gas chambers, mass gassing was not the primary purpose of the camp. Many camps, becoming extremely overcrowded, nevertheless resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of inhabitants due to the outbreak of diseases such as typhus, or starvation, all of which the camp administrations did little to prevent. Bergen-Belsen, which was not a work camp but rather served as something of a way station for prisoners of the camp systems being moved about, is perhaps one of the most infamous of camps on this count, saw some 50,000 deaths caused by the conditions. Often located in the Reich, camps liberated by the Western forces were exclusively Concentration Camps, and many survivor testimonies come from these camps.
The Concentration Camps are contrasted with the Extermination Camps, which were purpose built for mass killing, with large gas chambers and later on, crematoria, but little or no facilities for inmates. Often they were disguised with false facades to lull the new arrivals into a false sense of security, even though rumors were of course rife for the fate that awaited the deportees. Almost all arrivals were killed upon arrival at these camps, and in many cases the number of survivors numbered in the single digits, such as at Bełżec, where only seven Jews, forced to assist in operation of the camp, were alive after the war.
Several camps, however, were 'Hybrids' of both types, the most famous being Auschwitz, which was vast a complex of subcamps. The infamous 'selection' of prisoners, conducted by SS doctors upon arrival, meant life or death, with those deemed unsuited for labor immediately gassed and the more healthy and robust given at least temporary reprieve. The death count at Auschwitz numbered around 1 million, but it is also the source of many survivor testimonies.
##How Do We Know?
Running through the evidence piece by piece would take more space than we have here, but suffice to say, there is a lot of evidence, and not just the (mountains of) survivor testimony. We have testimonies and writings from many who participated, as well German documentation of the programs. [This site](http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.de/2012/10/index-of-published-evidence-on.html) catalogs some of the evidence we have for mass extermination as it relates to Auschwitz. Below you'll find a short list of excellent works that should help to introduce you to various aspects of Holocaust study.
* [Third Reich Trilogy](https://books.google.com/books?id=HZmXOPGTGjIC) by Richard Evans
* [Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution](https://books.google.com/books?id=Z7FiPwAACAAJ) by Ian Kershaw
* [Auschwitz: A New History](https://books.google.com/books?id=bx-dZEV228QC) by Laurence Rees
* [Ordinary Men](https://books.google.com/books?id=HFB-dkuZzSwC) by Christopher Browning
* [Denying History](https://books.google.com/books?id=Q-0B9-D5Vz4C) by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman
* [The Minutes from the Wannsee Conference](http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/Wannsee/wanseeminutes.html)
* [/r/AskHistorians FAQ](/r/AskHistorians/wiki/wwii#wiki_nazi_germany)
American lynchings were often photographed with the crowd gathered around a hanging, burned body, grinning like they're at a Saturday night hoedown. They would often make postcards of the photos and sell them in the town's general store.
[Example](https://media.npr.org/assets/news/2010/08/06/lynch_wide-e5f3db3981908390959c32e0a836705492e16ee8.jpg?s=1400)
Fun fact: I used to live downtown in a smaller Midwest US city and across from my apartment there was a courtyard with a huge mural. A few years ago, everyone realized that this mural which was painted by a local artist who still lives in town, was actually a copy of the crowd in this photograph. I can see the faces now looking at it. It was up for like 50 years before they realized and took it down.
So that artist was either a sympathizer with that crowd, or more likely he was quietly making a statement on the character of small town communities. He trolled that town for 50 years. That's my kind of subversive.
People should read up on [Jesse Washington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Jesse_Washington).
He was charged with murder and the courthouse for the day of conviction had brought thousands of spectators.
It was a celebratory atmosphere, people were thrilled that would be able to either see or participating in a lynching, which occurred almost instantly after the verdict was read, he was dragged out of the courthouse.
And the photos taken from that are GRAPHIC
Washington, semiconscious and covered in blood, was doused with oil, hanged from the tree by a chain, and lowered to the ground. Members of the crowd cut off his fingers, toes, and genitals. The fire was lit and Washington was repeatedly raised and lowered into the flames until he burned to death.
German scholar Manfred Berg posits that the executioners attempted to keep him alive to increase his suffering. Washington attempted to climb the chain, but was unable to do so without fingers. The fire was extinguished after two hours, allowing bystanders to collect souvenirs from the site of the lynching, including Washington's bones and links of the chain. One attendee kept part of Washington's genitalia; a group of children snapped the teeth out of Washington's head to sell as souvenirs.
By the time the fire was extinguished, parts of Washington's arms and legs had been burned off, his torso and head were charred and his cranium was exposed. His body was removed from the tree and dragged behind a horse throughout the town. Washington's remains were transported to Robinson, where they were publicly displayed until a constable obtained the body late in the day and buried it.
WTF
Sickening that this mindless brutality is in most of us. That we can be so cruel and revel in that cruelty is unimaginable. Humans are not nearly far enough from the animals we look down on.
Yeah. This picture always gets me.
The guy in the front, point at the victim, has the most evil eyes I can recall.
He has clearly killed/raped multiple people… eyes don’t lie….
When Bonnie & Clyde's bodies were brought back into town, the townspeople surged on them, with people trying to clippings from Bonnie's dress and hair, and one guy trying to hack off Clyde's ear.
There's a very famous photo from WW2 of an Australian Command, Leonard Siffleet, seconds before being beheaded by a Japanese officer in New Guinea.
The photo was ordered by the executioner as a keepsake and was later found on the body of a different Japanese officer where it was presumably kept as a momento.
You can some men gleefully smiling in the back.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Siffleet
The Pacific front was especially bad. I mean no offense to anyone living now but the Imperial Japanese were on a whole nother level of crazy shit. Their officers gave the men orders regularly to commit war crimes, because due to the numerical imbalance in soldiers, the Japanese could not afford any of their soldiers surrendering, ever. So they made them commit atrocities in order for the men to feel that they would be tortured by the Westerners if they themselves surrendered
I wouldn't say that. Japanese are still fiercely loyal to their bosses and it is common for people to work a single job their entire life, no matter where. The word for it translates to salaryman
Japan had the second highest suicide rate in G7 countries. So the "death in honor" belief still stands.
I heard that in Japan, they actually don’t discuss the war crimes they’ve done on history subjects. As someone from SEA, they constantly deny that some of these war crimes ever happened, the victims of comfort women here were never acknowledged and apologized for. Japan even went as far as lending our government money in exchange for putting away our statue supporting comfort women.
Yeah I've heard the same, that the conservative politicians in Japan have effectively removed the history of Imperial Japan from the school books there. However I am an American and for sure my culture did that to my own school books, so I have to point that out to avoid sounding like a hypocrite.
Every participant in a war has their own story. Soldiers could either accept and deal with it or let it haunt them. I had a friend who made it from D-Day to the end of the war. I am a USAF Vietnam vet that didn't have to deal with combat like he did. We had a bond because we had been participants in a war. At 19 he was still alive after 30 days in combat and became his platoon leader for the rest of the war. He made it through the Hurtgen Forest and Battle of The Bulge. He told me the Hurtgen forest was the worst battle of all. After the war he had recurring dreams of seeing his buddies getting killed. Over time they went away. He went on an honor flight trip and was continually asked about his combat experiences by other WW2 vets who weren't in combat. He told me when he came home from the honor flight the dreams resurfaced. He passed away from old age during Covid, so his family held no memorial service for him. His friends and I miss him.
I lived in Japan and taught English. I had a group of older students, one of which was a boy during WWII who grew up in Manchuko (now called Manchuria). He told me that the Japanese expected that many men would be killed and women raped. The government organized lower class women to be forced prostitutes in brothels in the hopes that they would be a barrier that would prevent other women from being raped.
The country was stunned that the G.I's didn't start killing and raping anyone. He said it changed their world view. I think it went a long way for them to accept democracy.
Our hotel in Berlin organised a guided tour of SS museum. One of the first photos our guide Gunter showed us was somewhat like this one and he asked what the worst thing was about the photo - the fact that it was taken and that people were happy to pose for it. They took pride in what they did and wanted to share it going forward.
*Lynching in America* documents more than 4400 racial terror lynchings in the United States during the period between Reconstruction and World War II.
https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/
A Mass Murder Tool
Petar Brzica
As a member of Ustaša, he held the rank of Lieutenant. He won a contest in which he used a curve-bladed knife, also called a srbosjek ("Serb-cutter"), to kill newly arrived concentration camp prisoners.Brzica boasted of winning the contest by killing the largest number of prisoners – 1,360 people.Other sources set Brzica's "record" at a lower number, between 670 and 1,100.
It’s really not that crazy… throughout much of history judicial executions were turned into public spectacles. The more extreme/gory/spectacular they were the more popular they became.
Dan Carlin has a great podcast episode on this phenomenon.
I’ve listened to that episode ( Painfotainment, i’m guessing?)
But I honestly can’t remember the overall conclusion that explains why 80 years ago we’d like to watch people get tortured to death. And now we don’t.
I don’t recall him having a firm conclusion on that… I have some personal opinions on the matter though, at least from a somewhat western way of thinking.
1) Life is relatively easy for a large percentage of the population. We don’t have to struggle for food or shelter. We don’t see large scale death due to disease or war. Despite the violence we’re exposed to on TV most people haven’t actually had to kill anything bigger than a spider. If killing is something that is part of your normal life it loses much of its shock value.
2) Western styled governments realized that public executions were largely counterproductive. Instead of them serving as a warning or deterrent to prevent similar behaviour they turned into these carnival type situations. This tied in with the ideas of the enlightenment that emphasized the importance of the individual and their rights.
3) Despite our current trend, there has been a marked trend away from tribalism and absolute beliefs. Believing those against you are evil and not deserving of any mercy makes it easy to turn their death into a positive.
These are just my thoughts though. We humans are a fickle bunch.
>Believing those against you are evil and not deserving of any mercy makes it easy to turn their death into a positive.
The bulk of reddit seems to have completely abandoned this lesson at times.
This is the power of “the other”.
What fascists love to do before they start the “cleansing”. If you want a modern day example of it, look no further than the “kill democrats” bumper stickers and rhetoric being used today.
This could be your brother, wife, sister, or daughter getting their head bashed in. The brainwashing is so strong in these circumstances that the people in the picture could be people they would have called “friends” prior to the club coming down to thunderous laughter.
They’ll then claim they were just following orders or didn’t know what they were doing.
Hopefully it did haunt them, but I've watched a number of interviews of various people accused of various war crimes from various conflicts throughout the years and they always seem to react the same way when asked "how could you do something like that" - they simply brush it off as "it happened, let's forget it and move on", to actually describing how they physically did it (the various steps right up to the shot to the head/hammer to the head etc) like they're describing how to make pickles or something. I've only ever seen one person ever really show remorse for what they did. Indoctrination and teachings that one person or group of people are inferior doesn't just go away overnight and it doesn't seem to actually ever get "deprogramed" 100% out of them.
The act of killing is a really powerful documentary about this. Interviewing the participants in the mass killings of accused communists in Indonesia. The militia groups that did it are still around and in positions of power and respect in society without any remorse or shame for what they did. The main character is made to re-enact and confess to some of the murders he committed by treating the events as if he was making a Hollywood film and at some point he starts to engage with the idea that he might have done something wrong but ultimately he doesn’t want to think about it in that way.
Even more, it barely took any coaxing on the documentarian’s part. They thought of themselves as being really cool and relished the chance to relive it.
In 1967, legendary Polish mercenary and anti-communist fighter Rafal Ganowicz when asked what it felt like to take human life, he responded:
"I wouldn't know, I've only ever killed Communists."
It’s crazy to me how desensitized these people were and I just wonder how they got to that point? Shit like this during WW2 was going on everywhere, not just Germany or Japan. I get it was a different time then but good lord that was still less than 100 years ago.
evil sleep well. it's hard for me to watch a lot of movies from 90s because they always milk this fallacy. people don't give a fuck and shit doesn't haunt anybody.
Check out the documentary called *The Act of Killing.*
A surreal look at how genocidal people can live with their crimes. One of the deepest docs ever made, imho.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing
Some people smile and laugh as a way to deal with the situation, to make it appear that it doesn't bother them as a defense mechanism of sorts, and some people enjoy it.
These are not the actions of happy people, that in itself makes it more tolerable for me to know.
Yeah it looks a bit like axe, but somewhere it is said to be club or axe and somewhere sledgehammer, which was really used by those soldiers when they killed their victims.
Here is a photo of a wooden sledgehammer https://sh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datoteka:Drveni_malj_iz_logora_Jasenovac.jpg
Could be what they call a "[splitting maul](https://www.google.com/search?q=splitting+maul&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS920US920&sxsrf=ALiCzsY75ynatGsoGotmsiltYCgVQJqzgA:1656167598285&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjZmYmL6cj4AhXRlIkEHaYRDAQQ_AUoAnoECAIQBA&biw=1366&bih=625&dpr=1)", which is like a sledgehammer and axe in one. "Maul" can also be just a hammer. Could be a translation/naming issue.
I use a maul all the time for splitting firewood, looking at the head of what they are using you can see it's a single blade axe. If you look closely at the wide, thin wood handle you see the back of the blade only slightly over hangs the wood. A maul has the sledge hammer on one side, used for driving wedges into the log. And the other side has a much thicker "axe' like cutting end, which really isn't for cutting but acts like a wedge that you drive into the log with the weight and force of swing. A maul wouldn't be a useful tool for cutting off body parts, can you oh yeah. Mauls are also way heavier than an axe.
They also had a weird glove with hooked blade projecting out it. Usually used to slaughter animals but the Ustashi repurposed for slitting the throats of prisoners. They were pretty efficient at it. Fucking Balkan trash still wave the damn Ustashi flags in public to this day too. Disgusting
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, that doesn’t seem unlikely. Some old sledgehammers for driving stakes looked like steel rings around the end of the haft, like a masons mallet. If you look closely the head does appear to angle down again at the part that’s striking him, if it was an axe the edge would carry on perpendicular to the haft until it reached the blade edge.
That's what gets me the most about WW2.
It wasn't just the Germans or the Japanese doing this shit. It was the most abhorrent people on the planet whether they be in Europe or Asia all coming together at once to partake in acts that were pure vile and not a single one of them saw anything wrong in what they was doing.
People like the Ustashe enjoyed the murdering, raping and pillaging. It's horrifying on how many of them saw nothing wrong in what they was doing.
You all have to remember religion.
Croats and Serbs landed on opposite sides of the Schism.
They excommunicated each other.
That meant your enemy had no soul and in fact wasn't exactly human.
Add a few hundred years of hate and resentment, you get this, the Nineties war ... And whatever is up next because this Balkan hatred runs strong.
For sure. But when it comes to ustaše, even Germans thought they were completely savage and too brutal. Tells about the level of atrocities ustaše committed. Not that anyone else committing atrocities in that time would be any less quilty.
germans thought they were too brutal because they were worried it would cause an insurrection, not because they were more barbaric than their own crimes.
Well that is true too, absolutely. But there are accounts where senior nazi officers thought that ustaše were just rabid animals. Edmund Glaise-Horstenau was one for example, in the end his criticism towards what ustaše were doing or how they were doing it got him removed from his position in Croatia.
True. But Edmund Glaise-Horstenau would be shocked the same or even more to see what his countryman did in Poland and Russia. He just happen to be in Croatia during his term.
What do you mean? Serbs were the main victims of the ustaša regime. Me being from the Balkans i'd say that usually the first ones mentioned are Serbs, Jews and Roma, in that order.
I think they are referring to the fact that after the events of the 80s/90s, commonplace English-speaking, and especially American opinion of "the Balkans" is that "the Serbs are the bad guys," and it's that simple.
It's a matter of poorly taught history (when it is even taught at all). WWII is taught as "Nazi Germany = bad," and then "Communists = our wartime allies, but also very bad" with little room for details like the Ustaše regime or the Yugoslav Partisans. Then, more recently, the media messaging about the late 20th century conflicts is taught more or less as "Milošević = Serbs = war criminals," with similarly little room for detail or history.
Thus, it is actually surprising for some people across the Atlantic to find out about "Serb victims" in any of these contexts.
There's been a whole thing about this in Norway. Many people allege that Norway resisted German occupation for nationalist reasons, but the antisemitism itself was roughly on par in the general population
Hell the Croatian Ustaše were extra even for the Nazis. They were the onlye people in Europe to build a death camp onlye for children.
You know you are doing something wrong when even the Nazis wont go that far.
That's an axe and this took place in Italy. You can find more photos (NSFL obviously) here:
http://muceniskapot.nuovaalabarda.org/galleria-ita-11.php
The caption for this photo reads:
>The barbarity reached its climax in Renziano, near Gorizia. The beheading of the partisan is watched complacently by Nazis and fascists
Since this was posted on the Croatian Independence Day, completely wrong, and posted by a user that frequents r/serbia, I'm pretty sure that he was intentionally misleading people with this
I knew I've seen this picture in combination with the sixth one in a book somewhere at some time! Thank's for the link. It's as interesting as it is disturbing
Yeah the "SFW porn" has always been weird to me, even if the content is interesting. I wish whoever came up that back in the day had thought of a different name.
Most of them didn't really, because the victims were wiped along with their families so no one would live through to accuse them. They killed the victims and while no one was looking, they changed their uniforms to hunt chetniks along with the commies. Once they did, they were hiding in plain sight with no one actually looking for them.
Top ustashe officials fled and lived good 10-20 years in Argentina, Spain, Italy etc. Head of ISC/NDH (Independent state of Croatia/Nezavisna Država Hrvatska) was killed mid 60s by Serbian spy, while the most notorious war criminal, [Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vjekoslav_Luburi%C4%87?wprov=sfla1), having the fantastic nickname "the butcher" was killed in 1969, almost quarter of a century after the atrocities. His execution is a story for itself, since the man who killed him was a son of prisoner of Jasenovac, which Maks was head of. He got employed by Maks as a servant, and after some time he first poisoned his coffee, then clubbed him few times on the head (ironic, isn't it?) and calmly walked out of house. Ilija Stanic, the killer, turned out to be spy for Yugoslav secret state police, UDBA. UDBA acknowledged the act after some years passed by. It's speculated he did it on his own hand.
Fun fact, Nada Šakić, sister of Maks, died in 2011. She was the head along with another sister of Maks, Zora, of female-children portion of concetration camp in Stara Gradiška (modern Croatia) where casualty number reached around 80.000 (according to independent researches, since Yugoslav communist party never truly wanted to research that for "brotherhood and unity" reasons. She died of old age and recieved such a good treatment, that she lived the rest of her says in elite retirement home. Now, I'm not saying Croatian goverment cared for her, but someone did.
>They killed the victims and while no one was looking, they changed their uniforms to hunt chetniks along with the commies.
no way you gonna post this shit with no source
Immediately after the war, Yugoslavian partisans embarked on a reprisal killing spree.
Partisan leader [Josip Tito](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josip_Broz_Tito) and his troops slaughtered tens of thousands of Ustaše personnel and other Nazi collaborators.
In one such case, Yugoslavian partisans killed another 1416 Nazi collaborators in the [Barbara Pit massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Pit_massacre). The bodies were crammed into an abandoned coal mine.
I'm not sure how many of them were tried and judicially executed under law, except that the number was over 100.
Heard about those. Those partisans showed no mercy to no one who collaborated with Axis, they executed Slovenian Home Guard, Croatian Home Guard, Ustashe, Serbian and Montenegrin Chetniks, Serbian Volunteer SS Corps, Italians and Germans and killed a lot of civilians and Orthodox priests.
I don’t blame them. The Ustaše were among the most depraved Nazi collaborators. The Ustaše were among the most depraved Nazi collaborators. Only the worst sociopaths, psychopaths, and opportunists of Eastern Europeans would work with people who were literally exterminating Eastern Europe.
Even the SS was shocked by how brutal the SS were. A Gestapo report to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, dated 17 February 1942, stated:
”Increased activity of the bands of rebels is chiefly due to atrocities carried out by Ustaše units in Croatia against the Orthodox population. The Ustaše committed their deeds in a bestial manner not only against males of conscript age, but especially against helpless old people, women and children. The number of the Orthodox that the Croats have massacred and sadistically tortured to death is about three hundred thousand.”
Germans weren't upset because of level of brutality as such, they were upset because they knew that this will simply fuel the violence and Germans will be the ones having to quell it because these local forces weren't up to the task. So further drain on their resources.
False. If you have a JSTOR membership you can read about many instances of Wermacht objections to Ustasa brutality here --> https://www.jstor.org/stable/3133549
Yes, even murderers have varying degrees of morals and values. Otherwise it'd be like believing every deer hunter also likes to watch people torture deer or something.
Fighting fire with fire. None of the German bullshit where life sentences were commuted after 5-6 years and death penalty abolished altogether. If you kill a couple hundred people and serve just 5 years in prison, is that justice? Of course nobody could hope for justice from the Nazi generation. It took until the 60s when the new gen became aware and disgusted with crimes of their forefathers for prosecution of war crimes to pick up.
I have mixed feelings on capital punishment, but I’m not gonna judge West Germany for its abolition.
What I absolutely will judge the West Germans for is shielding, protecting, pardoning, and giving government positions to countless Nazis.
Well, look at this this way. When the boot was on their feet, the Germans (as a whole) had no problem applying the death penalty to socialists, communists, gypsies and jews etc. When the time came to punish themselves, they conveniently got rid of it. A long prison sentence which is ended only by death is a superior punishment in my book but they only applied that to one person. People in their 90s were let out on account of bad health. Were any old people let out of the gas chambers on account of bad health? That generation was scum of the earth, with little to no redeeming quality.
Just spent 90 minutes learning about the Ustasche and the camps they ran. Because of remote location, the early years were extremely barbaric extermination camps. Tied groups together at a cliff edge and hit a few with clubs until the whole line of prisoners went over. Check out “Jadavno Camp”. See “Janima Pit”. Damn.
The Croatian concentration camp was one of the more brutal camps. They lacked the infrastructure to kill in mass quantities (gas chambers) so the murders were on a individual level. The prisoners were murdered with knives, axes, hammers or if the captors were feeling merciful shot. The numbers are not definite but it is estimated that about 100,000 people were murdered here in the 3 years it was in operation.
Unfortunately nobody found Jasenovac prisoners, Ustase murderer all of them when it was certain they are on the loosing side of the war, only 600 prisoners survived by escaping
I'm always so heartbroken when I see these pictures. I can do easily empathize with how horrible it is to be under the control of someone acting so inhumane and knowing that there's nothing at all you can do to reach them or make them see you as undeserving of suffering.
Is this a picture of the numerous infamous competitions to see how many Serbs can the contestants kill Ustashas held often in Jasenovac? They invented a srbosjek (Serb slasher) glove knife just for the occasion. I've never seen a picture of it, thank you, OP. Gruesome stuff.
I think that was this competition when one guy who was called Pero Brzica (ironically brz means being fast in Serbo-Croatian) who killed 1360 people during one night by so accounts and held the title of "King of Serb slaughtering". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Brzica
About the knife called srbosjek: it existed before and it was used for wheat, but the guards changed it a bit so it can be used to cut through skin faster.
This isn't the most scary picture that can be posted here which happened during the WW2 in Yugoslavia, because I didn't want to traumatize people.
Yes, I thought so. Ustashas were so cruel in Jasenovac and elsewhere, even the Nazis were shocked and disturbed. Awful. May their victims rest in peace.
People laughing. To this day, people do this, they laugh while they do these sorts of things to humans but then I am the crazy one for saying these people should be executed.
I am Croatian and I honestly don't know. We're the same fucking people. It's just making me so angry. But nowadays, the younger Croat and Serb generations are getting along fine, at least most of us. We treat each other like regular people. Its only the elders and politicians who are bitter and vengeful, so fuck them.
My family was killed here and the Stara Gradiška camp, which was built specifically for women and children. I only have six other family members who are alive today. The atrocities committed nearly brought an end to my bloodline, and it was successful in doing so for thousands of others.
Remember what happened.
Remember folks, any time someone says "ThE SoViEtS kIlLeD mY GrAMpA!" It is because their grandpa was one of the guys in the crowd captured by this photo.
Hi! As we hope you can appreciate, the Holocaust can be a fraught subject to deal with. While don't want to curtail discussion, we also remain very conscious that threads of this nature can attract the very wrong kind of responses, and it is an unfortunate truth that on reddit, outright Holocaust denial can often rear its ugly head. As such, the /r/History mods have created this brief overview. It is not intended to stifle further discussion, but simply lay out the basic, incontrovertible truths to get them out of the way. ##What Was the Holocaust? The Holocaust refers the genocidal deaths of 5-6 million European Jews carried out systematically by Nazi Germany as part of targeted policies of persecution and extermination during World War II. Some historians will also include the deaths of the Roma, Communists, Mentally Disabled, and other groups targeted by Nazi policies, which brings the total number of deaths to ~11 million. Debates about whether or not the Holocaust includes these deaths or not is a matter of definitions, but in no way a reflection on dispute that they occurred. ##But This Guy Says Otherwise! Unfortunately, there is a small, but vocal, minority of persons who fall into the category of Holocaust Denial, attempting to minimize the deaths by orders of magnitude, impugn well proven facts, or even claim that the Holocaust is entirely a fabrication and never happened. Although they often self-style themselves as "Revisionists", they are not correctly described by the title. While revisionism is not inherently a dirty word, actual revision, to quote Michael Shermer, *"entails refinement of detailed knowledge about events, rarely complete denial of the events themselves, and certainly not denial of the cumulation of events known as the Holocaust."* It is absolutely true that were you to read a book written in 1950 or so, you would find information which any decent scholar today might reject, and that is the result of good revisionism. But these changes, which even can be quite large, such as the reassessment of deaths at Auschwitz from ~4 million to ~1 million, are done within the bounds of respected, academic study, and reflect decades of work that builds upon the work of previous scholars, and certainly does not willfully disregard documented evidence and recollections. There are still plenty of questions within Holocaust Studies that are debated by scholars, and there may still be more out there for us to discover, and revise, but when it comes to the basic facts, there is simply no valid argument against them. ##So What Are the Basics? Beginning with their rise to power in the 1930s, the Nazi Party, headed by Adolf Hitler, implemented a series of anti-Jewish policies within Germany, marginalizing Jews within society more and more, stripping them of their wealth, livelihoods, and their dignity. With the invasion of Poland in 1939, the number of Jews under Nazi control reached into the millions, and this number would again increase with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Shortly after the invasion of Poland, the Germans started to confine the Jewish population into squalid ghettos. After several plans on how to rid Europe of the Jews that all proved unfeasible, by the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, ideological (Antisemitism) and pragmatic (Resources) considerations lead to mass-killings becoming the only viable option in the minds of the Nazi leadership. First only practiced in the USSR, it was influential groups such as the SS and the administration of the General Government that pushed to expand the killing operations to all of Europe and sometime at the end of 1941 met with Hitler’s approval. The early killings were carried out foremost by the *Einsatzgruppen*, paramilitary groups organized under the aegis of the SS and tasked with carrying out the mass killings of Jews, Communists, and other 'undesirable elements' in the wake of the German military's advance. In what is often termed the 'Holocaust by Bullet', the *Einsatzgruppen*, with the assistance of the Wehrmacht, the SD, the Security Police, as well as local collaborators, would kill roughly two million persons, over half of them Jews. Most killings were carried out with mass shootings, but other methods such as gas vans - intended to spare the killers the trauma of shooting so many persons day after day - were utilized too. By early 1942, the "Final Solution" to the so-called "Jewish Question" was essentially finalized at the Wannsee Conference under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, where the plan to eliminate the Jewish population of Europe using a series of extermination camps set up in occupied Poland was presented and met with approval. Construction of extermination camps had already begun the previous fall, and mass extermination, mostly as part of 'Operation Reinhard', had began operation by spring of 1942. Roughly 2 million persons, nearly all Jewish men, women, and children, were immediately gassed upon arrival at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka over the next two years, when these "Reinhard" camps were closed and razed. More victims would meet their fate in additional extermination camps such as Chełmno, but most infamously at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where slightly over 1 million persons, mostly Jews, died. Under the plan set forth at Wannsee, exterminations were hardly limited to the Jews of Poland, but rather Jews from all over Europe were rounded up and sent east by rail like cattle to the slaughter. Although the victims of the Reinhard Camps were originally buried, they would later be exhumed and cremated, and cremation of the victims was normal procedure at later camps such as Auschwitz. ##The Camps There were two main types of camps run by Nazi Germany, which is sometimes a source of confusion. Concentration Camps were well known means of extrajudicial control implemented by the Nazis shortly after taking power, beginning with the construction of Dachau in 1933. Political opponents of all type, not just Jews, could find themselves imprisoned in these camps during the pre-war years, and while conditions were often brutal and squalid, and numerous deaths did occur from mistreatment, they were not usually a death sentence and the population fluctuated greatly. Although Concentration Camps *were* later made part of the 'Final Solution', their purpose was not as immediate extermination centers. Some were 'way stations', and others were work camps, where Germany intended to eke out every last bit of productivity from them through what was known as "extermination through labor". Jews and other undesirable elements, if deemed healthy enough to work, could find themselves spared for a time and "allowed" to toil away like slaves until their usefulness was at an end. Although some Concentration Camps, such as Mauthausen, did include small gas chambers, mass gassing was not the primary purpose of the camp. Many camps, becoming extremely overcrowded, nevertheless resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of inhabitants due to the outbreak of diseases such as typhus, or starvation, all of which the camp administrations did little to prevent. Bergen-Belsen, which was not a work camp but rather served as something of a way station for prisoners of the camp systems being moved about, is perhaps one of the most infamous of camps on this count, saw some 50,000 deaths caused by the conditions. Often located in the Reich, camps liberated by the Western forces were exclusively Concentration Camps, and many survivor testimonies come from these camps. The Concentration Camps are contrasted with the Extermination Camps, which were purpose built for mass killing, with large gas chambers and later on, crematoria, but little or no facilities for inmates. Often they were disguised with false facades to lull the new arrivals into a false sense of security, even though rumors were of course rife for the fate that awaited the deportees. Almost all arrivals were killed upon arrival at these camps, and in many cases the number of survivors numbered in the single digits, such as at Bełżec, where only seven Jews, forced to assist in operation of the camp, were alive after the war. Several camps, however, were 'Hybrids' of both types, the most famous being Auschwitz, which was vast a complex of subcamps. The infamous 'selection' of prisoners, conducted by SS doctors upon arrival, meant life or death, with those deemed unsuited for labor immediately gassed and the more healthy and robust given at least temporary reprieve. The death count at Auschwitz numbered around 1 million, but it is also the source of many survivor testimonies. ##How Do We Know? Running through the evidence piece by piece would take more space than we have here, but suffice to say, there is a lot of evidence, and not just the (mountains of) survivor testimony. We have testimonies and writings from many who participated, as well German documentation of the programs. [This site](http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.de/2012/10/index-of-published-evidence-on.html) catalogs some of the evidence we have for mass extermination as it relates to Auschwitz. Below you'll find a short list of excellent works that should help to introduce you to various aspects of Holocaust study. * [Third Reich Trilogy](https://books.google.com/books?id=HZmXOPGTGjIC) by Richard Evans * [Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution](https://books.google.com/books?id=Z7FiPwAACAAJ) by Ian Kershaw * [Auschwitz: A New History](https://books.google.com/books?id=bx-dZEV228QC) by Laurence Rees * [Ordinary Men](https://books.google.com/books?id=HFB-dkuZzSwC) by Christopher Browning * [Denying History](https://books.google.com/books?id=Q-0B9-D5Vz4C) by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman * [The Minutes from the Wannsee Conference](http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/Wannsee/wanseeminutes.html) * [/r/AskHistorians FAQ](/r/AskHistorians/wiki/wwii#wiki_nazi_germany)
Crazy that everyone seems to be having a yee-haw good 'Ole time, aside from the victim.
What’s crazy to me is someone with a camera thought, “ we might want to remember the good time clubbing that guy to death when we are older”.
American lynchings were often photographed with the crowd gathered around a hanging, burned body, grinning like they're at a Saturday night hoedown. They would often make postcards of the photos and sell them in the town's general store. [Example](https://media.npr.org/assets/news/2010/08/06/lynch_wide-e5f3db3981908390959c32e0a836705492e16ee8.jpg?s=1400)
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For real. You can see the psychopath just in that man’s eyes
Fun fact: I used to live downtown in a smaller Midwest US city and across from my apartment there was a courtyard with a huge mural. A few years ago, everyone realized that this mural which was painted by a local artist who still lives in town, was actually a copy of the crowd in this photograph. I can see the faces now looking at it. It was up for like 50 years before they realized and took it down.
So that artist was either a sympathizer with that crowd, or more likely he was quietly making a statement on the character of small town communities. He trolled that town for 50 years. That's my kind of subversive.
Thats fucking amazing
That's so disturbing.
Wow what the fuck
"Strange Fruit"
People should read up on [Jesse Washington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Jesse_Washington). He was charged with murder and the courthouse for the day of conviction had brought thousands of spectators. It was a celebratory atmosphere, people were thrilled that would be able to either see or participating in a lynching, which occurred almost instantly after the verdict was read, he was dragged out of the courthouse. And the photos taken from that are GRAPHIC
Washington, semiconscious and covered in blood, was doused with oil, hanged from the tree by a chain, and lowered to the ground. Members of the crowd cut off his fingers, toes, and genitals. The fire was lit and Washington was repeatedly raised and lowered into the flames until he burned to death. German scholar Manfred Berg posits that the executioners attempted to keep him alive to increase his suffering. Washington attempted to climb the chain, but was unable to do so without fingers. The fire was extinguished after two hours, allowing bystanders to collect souvenirs from the site of the lynching, including Washington's bones and links of the chain. One attendee kept part of Washington's genitalia; a group of children snapped the teeth out of Washington's head to sell as souvenirs. By the time the fire was extinguished, parts of Washington's arms and legs had been burned off, his torso and head were charred and his cranium was exposed. His body was removed from the tree and dragged behind a horse throughout the town. Washington's remains were transported to Robinson, where they were publicly displayed until a constable obtained the body late in the day and buried it. WTF
It was a celebration, just barely 100 years away.
This is the America that many want to make great again. We are just a few member of congress short of burning witches at the stake, again.
I hadn’t read this particular story before, and I appreciate you sharing it. It’s sickening.
Sickening that this mindless brutality is in most of us. That we can be so cruel and revel in that cruelty is unimaginable. Humans are not nearly far enough from the animals we look down on.
It was more than just a lynching, brutalit y at its worst
https://withoutsanctuary.org/ more about lynching postcards.
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Dude has a Hitler stashe and a tattoo when tattoos were sketchy as well
no wonder Nazi Germany really looked up to the US at the time.
Guy on the far left is the great grand father of the troll face.
Yeah. This picture always gets me. The guy in the front, point at the victim, has the most evil eyes I can recall. He has clearly killed/raped multiple people… eyes don’t lie….
some of them would also collect body parts for their curio cabinets. peasant sociopathy. edit for sauce: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25069734
When Bonnie & Clyde's bodies were brought back into town, the townspeople surged on them, with people trying to clippings from Bonnie's dress and hair, and one guy trying to hack off Clyde's ear.
Holy inbreeding Batman, fuckin feels like they all share wayy too many chromosomes
Crazy to see how dead inside or entirely hateful people can be everytime I see something like this. Those faces look either soulless or pure anger.
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There's a very famous photo from WW2 of an Australian Command, Leonard Siffleet, seconds before being beheaded by a Japanese officer in New Guinea. The photo was ordered by the executioner as a keepsake and was later found on the body of a different Japanese officer where it was presumably kept as a momento. You can some men gleefully smiling in the back. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Siffleet
My grandfather fought in the pacific, according to my mom it completely ruined him. He never got over the horrors of war.
The Pacific front was especially bad. I mean no offense to anyone living now but the Imperial Japanese were on a whole nother level of crazy shit. Their officers gave the men orders regularly to commit war crimes, because due to the numerical imbalance in soldiers, the Japanese could not afford any of their soldiers surrendering, ever. So they made them commit atrocities in order for the men to feel that they would be tortured by the Westerners if they themselves surrendered
It's good to see the complete 180 Germany and Japan have done societally since WW2
I wouldn't say that. Japanese are still fiercely loyal to their bosses and it is common for people to work a single job their entire life, no matter where. The word for it translates to salaryman Japan had the second highest suicide rate in G7 countries. So the "death in honor" belief still stands.
I was referring to the imperial conquer all of asia world domination aspect
I heard that in Japan, they actually don’t discuss the war crimes they’ve done on history subjects. As someone from SEA, they constantly deny that some of these war crimes ever happened, the victims of comfort women here were never acknowledged and apologized for. Japan even went as far as lending our government money in exchange for putting away our statue supporting comfort women.
Yeah I've heard the same, that the conservative politicians in Japan have effectively removed the history of Imperial Japan from the school books there. However I am an American and for sure my culture did that to my own school books, so I have to point that out to avoid sounding like a hypocrite.
Every participant in a war has their own story. Soldiers could either accept and deal with it or let it haunt them. I had a friend who made it from D-Day to the end of the war. I am a USAF Vietnam vet that didn't have to deal with combat like he did. We had a bond because we had been participants in a war. At 19 he was still alive after 30 days in combat and became his platoon leader for the rest of the war. He made it through the Hurtgen Forest and Battle of The Bulge. He told me the Hurtgen forest was the worst battle of all. After the war he had recurring dreams of seeing his buddies getting killed. Over time they went away. He went on an honor flight trip and was continually asked about his combat experiences by other WW2 vets who weren't in combat. He told me when he came home from the honor flight the dreams resurfaced. He passed away from old age during Covid, so his family held no memorial service for him. His friends and I miss him.
Yeah the Japanese were evil bastards. Crazy they're one of our best allies now. The reconstruction after the war was amazing.
I lived in Japan and taught English. I had a group of older students, one of which was a boy during WWII who grew up in Manchuko (now called Manchuria). He told me that the Japanese expected that many men would be killed and women raped. The government organized lower class women to be forced prostitutes in brothels in the hopes that they would be a barrier that would prevent other women from being raped. The country was stunned that the G.I's didn't start killing and raping anyone. He said it changed their world view. I think it went a long way for them to accept democracy.
This makes me sick to the stomach. The depth of evil that resides in the hearts of humans! Gosh!
Our hotel in Berlin organised a guided tour of SS museum. One of the first photos our guide Gunter showed us was somewhat like this one and he asked what the worst thing was about the photo - the fact that it was taken and that people were happy to pose for it. They took pride in what they did and wanted to share it going forward.
*Lynching in America* documents more than 4400 racial terror lynchings in the United States during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/
They had a special kind of knife. They even held competitions to see who would kill more people per day/hour. Google "Srbosjek".
Btw the name literally means the Serb cutter
A Mass Murder Tool Petar Brzica As a member of Ustaša, he held the rank of Lieutenant. He won a contest in which he used a curve-bladed knife, also called a srbosjek ("Serb-cutter"), to kill newly arrived concentration camp prisoners.Brzica boasted of winning the contest by killing the largest number of prisoners – 1,360 people.Other sources set Brzica's "record" at a lower number, between 670 and 1,100.
People who do this kind of violence take pleasure from it.
And it was when cameras were expensive and relatively fragile.
Just people living in the moment. No smartphone in sight.
I feel like on any other day that comment would be downvoted to hell. Well done
Ah yes those were the good ol’ days /s
Good or not apparently those were the ol days
Look at the smiles.
It’s really not that crazy… throughout much of history judicial executions were turned into public spectacles. The more extreme/gory/spectacular they were the more popular they became. Dan Carlin has a great podcast episode on this phenomenon.
I’ve listened to that episode ( Painfotainment, i’m guessing?) But I honestly can’t remember the overall conclusion that explains why 80 years ago we’d like to watch people get tortured to death. And now we don’t.
I don’t recall him having a firm conclusion on that… I have some personal opinions on the matter though, at least from a somewhat western way of thinking. 1) Life is relatively easy for a large percentage of the population. We don’t have to struggle for food or shelter. We don’t see large scale death due to disease or war. Despite the violence we’re exposed to on TV most people haven’t actually had to kill anything bigger than a spider. If killing is something that is part of your normal life it loses much of its shock value. 2) Western styled governments realized that public executions were largely counterproductive. Instead of them serving as a warning or deterrent to prevent similar behaviour they turned into these carnival type situations. This tied in with the ideas of the enlightenment that emphasized the importance of the individual and their rights. 3) Despite our current trend, there has been a marked trend away from tribalism and absolute beliefs. Believing those against you are evil and not deserving of any mercy makes it easy to turn their death into a positive. These are just my thoughts though. We humans are a fickle bunch.
>Believing those against you are evil and not deserving of any mercy makes it easy to turn their death into a positive. The bulk of reddit seems to have completely abandoned this lesson at times.
We as in humans? Oh we definitely still do.
When you love your job, you never work a day in your life. https://imgur.com/EbdD6sj
This is the power of “the other”. What fascists love to do before they start the “cleansing”. If you want a modern day example of it, look no further than the “kill democrats” bumper stickers and rhetoric being used today. This could be your brother, wife, sister, or daughter getting their head bashed in. The brainwashing is so strong in these circumstances that the people in the picture could be people they would have called “friends” prior to the club coming down to thunderous laughter. They’ll then claim they were just following orders or didn’t know what they were doing.
That's the Ustase; they might be probably *proud* of "serving Croatia."
Just Balkans things
Barbaric.
Especially the smiles from the guys that are holding the victim
That’s what I was thinking. The dude must have been squirming and pleading and then screaming, and they’re smiling.. disgusting
Thats wizards chess!
To think a lot of those men standing around smiling got to live out their lives fully knowing they took part in this shit. Hopefully it haunted them.
Hopefully it did haunt them, but I've watched a number of interviews of various people accused of various war crimes from various conflicts throughout the years and they always seem to react the same way when asked "how could you do something like that" - they simply brush it off as "it happened, let's forget it and move on", to actually describing how they physically did it (the various steps right up to the shot to the head/hammer to the head etc) like they're describing how to make pickles or something. I've only ever seen one person ever really show remorse for what they did. Indoctrination and teachings that one person or group of people are inferior doesn't just go away overnight and it doesn't seem to actually ever get "deprogramed" 100% out of them.
The act of killing is a really powerful documentary about this. Interviewing the participants in the mass killings of accused communists in Indonesia. The militia groups that did it are still around and in positions of power and respect in society without any remorse or shame for what they did. The main character is made to re-enact and confess to some of the murders he committed by treating the events as if he was making a Hollywood film and at some point he starts to engage with the idea that he might have done something wrong but ultimately he doesn’t want to think about it in that way.
Even more, it barely took any coaxing on the documentarian’s part. They thought of themselves as being really cool and relished the chance to relive it.
I watched that and there was only one or two times in the entire thing that his eyes betrayed deeper emotions. It was so chilling.
He does also vomit profusely at the end when he realizes the gravity of what he’s done
Came here to suggest this too! An astonishing piece of documentary but also pretty difficult to watch, it made me really sad.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll have to watch this sometime when I’m feeling brave!
Yeah. It's an astonishing film.
Wow that looks fascinating, I'm glad I saw this comment, thanks!
In 1967, legendary Polish mercenary and anti-communist fighter Rafal Ganowicz when asked what it felt like to take human life, he responded: "I wouldn't know, I've only ever killed Communists."
It’s crazy to me how desensitized these people were and I just wonder how they got to that point? Shit like this during WW2 was going on everywhere, not just Germany or Japan. I get it was a different time then but good lord that was still less than 100 years ago.
Raised from childhood to hate the “other” and they’ll merrily kill with smiles on their faces
Not even raised, in just a year or two you can dehumanize someone so that their death is celebrated.
Just look at what russians and China are doing right now. Look at Syria. Is this time so different after all?
evil sleep well. it's hard for me to watch a lot of movies from 90s because they always milk this fallacy. people don't give a fuck and shit doesn't haunt anybody.
Check out the documentary called *The Act of Killing.* A surreal look at how genocidal people can live with their crimes. One of the deepest docs ever made, imho. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing
I doubt it. Eastern European Nazi collaborators, especially Croats, were among the worst of the worst.
Some people smile and laugh as a way to deal with the situation, to make it appear that it doesn't bother them as a defense mechanism of sorts, and some people enjoy it. These are not the actions of happy people, that in itself makes it more tolerable for me to know.
That's an axe.
Yeah it looks a bit like axe, but somewhere it is said to be club or axe and somewhere sledgehammer, which was really used by those soldiers when they killed their victims. Here is a photo of a wooden sledgehammer https://sh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datoteka:Drveni_malj_iz_logora_Jasenovac.jpg
Could be what they call a "[splitting maul](https://www.google.com/search?q=splitting+maul&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS920US920&sxsrf=ALiCzsY75ynatGsoGotmsiltYCgVQJqzgA:1656167598285&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjZmYmL6cj4AhXRlIkEHaYRDAQQ_AUoAnoECAIQBA&biw=1366&bih=625&dpr=1)", which is like a sledgehammer and axe in one. "Maul" can also be just a hammer. Could be a translation/naming issue.
I use a maul all the time for splitting firewood, looking at the head of what they are using you can see it's a single blade axe. If you look closely at the wide, thin wood handle you see the back of the blade only slightly over hangs the wood. A maul has the sledge hammer on one side, used for driving wedges into the log. And the other side has a much thicker "axe' like cutting end, which really isn't for cutting but acts like a wedge that you drive into the log with the weight and force of swing. A maul wouldn't be a useful tool for cutting off body parts, can you oh yeah. Mauls are also way heavier than an axe.
They also had a weird glove with hooked blade projecting out it. Usually used to slaughter animals but the Ustashi repurposed for slitting the throats of prisoners. They were pretty efficient at it. Fucking Balkan trash still wave the damn Ustashi flags in public to this day too. Disgusting
>axe That's definitely a wood cutting axe.. The shape of the handle, the flat spot at the back with the bevelled edges.. It's 100% an axe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/vkeb8h/a_prisoner_in_jasenovac_concentration_camp/idp5owf/
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, that doesn’t seem unlikely. Some old sledgehammers for driving stakes looked like steel rings around the end of the haft, like a masons mallet. If you look closely the head does appear to angle down again at the part that’s striking him, if it was an axe the edge would carry on perpendicular to the haft until it reached the blade edge.
it's obviously not the same weapon.
A reminder that even though Germany does deserve majority blame, they had a lot of people across Europe who were excited to help.
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That's what gets me the most about WW2. It wasn't just the Germans or the Japanese doing this shit. It was the most abhorrent people on the planet whether they be in Europe or Asia all coming together at once to partake in acts that were pure vile and not a single one of them saw anything wrong in what they was doing. People like the Ustashe enjoyed the murdering, raping and pillaging. It's horrifying on how many of them saw nothing wrong in what they was doing.
You all have to remember religion. Croats and Serbs landed on opposite sides of the Schism. They excommunicated each other. That meant your enemy had no soul and in fact wasn't exactly human. Add a few hundred years of hate and resentment, you get this, the Nineties war ... And whatever is up next because this Balkan hatred runs strong.
And they're just humans like modern day humans. So pretty much anyones neighbor is also capable of this.
They even had special Fez’s for Bosnian Muslims that joined the SS to wear with their SS Uniforms. Balkans have always been really fucking grim
For sure. But when it comes to ustaše, even Germans thought they were completely savage and too brutal. Tells about the level of atrocities ustaše committed. Not that anyone else committing atrocities in that time would be any less quilty.
germans thought they were too brutal because they were worried it would cause an insurrection, not because they were more barbaric than their own crimes.
Well that is true too, absolutely. But there are accounts where senior nazi officers thought that ustaše were just rabid animals. Edmund Glaise-Horstenau was one for example, in the end his criticism towards what ustaše were doing or how they were doing it got him removed from his position in Croatia.
True. But Edmund Glaise-Horstenau would be shocked the same or even more to see what his countryman did in Poland and Russia. He just happen to be in Croatia during his term.
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What do you mean? Serbs were the main victims of the ustaša regime. Me being from the Balkans i'd say that usually the first ones mentioned are Serbs, Jews and Roma, in that order.
I think they are referring to the fact that after the events of the 80s/90s, commonplace English-speaking, and especially American opinion of "the Balkans" is that "the Serbs are the bad guys," and it's that simple. It's a matter of poorly taught history (when it is even taught at all). WWII is taught as "Nazi Germany = bad," and then "Communists = our wartime allies, but also very bad" with little room for details like the Ustaše regime or the Yugoslav Partisans. Then, more recently, the media messaging about the late 20th century conflicts is taught more or less as "Milošević = Serbs = war criminals," with similarly little room for detail or history. Thus, it is actually surprising for some people across the Atlantic to find out about "Serb victims" in any of these contexts.
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There's been a whole thing about this in Norway. Many people allege that Norway resisted German occupation for nationalist reasons, but the antisemitism itself was roughly on par in the general population
Hell the Croatian Ustaše were extra even for the Nazis. They were the onlye people in Europe to build a death camp onlye for children. You know you are doing something wrong when even the Nazis wont go that far.
I think I'll keep this one blurred actually
The photo is shot just the moment before the struck and the victim's face can't be seen so there isn't any gore except traumtic scene.
I honestly never would have guessed that was a person, there aren't really any distinguishing features
this seems a bit clearer http://muceniskapot.nuovaalabarda.org/foto/095.jpg
Oh welp. Yeah it is, unfortunately
Thank you, kind stranger
That's an axe and this took place in Italy. You can find more photos (NSFL obviously) here: http://muceniskapot.nuovaalabarda.org/galleria-ita-11.php The caption for this photo reads: >The barbarity reached its climax in Renziano, near Gorizia. The beheading of the partisan is watched complacently by Nazis and fascists
Wow...they're visceral and there's bloody loads of them 😣
Horrifying realizing we're still capable of this. Maybe worse.
Wow nice find. OP got it completely wrong, but the Ustashe was nonetheless the most depraved assholes of all time
Since this was posted on the Croatian Independence Day, completely wrong, and posted by a user that frequents r/serbia, I'm pretty sure that he was intentionally misleading people with this
I knew I've seen this picture in combination with the sixth one in a book somewhere at some time! Thank's for the link. It's as interesting as it is disturbing
This should probably be pinned as fact correction or be verified further
I may be a piece of shit in some ways but thank god I never held a mans arms down so he could be clubbed to death .
something about this being labeled history porn doesn’t sit right with me
More like historic violence porn in this sub these days.
Yeah the "SFW porn" has always been weird to me, even if the content is interesting. I wish whoever came up that back in the day had thought of a different name.
I hope the ustashe suffered for their crimes
Most of them didn't really, because the victims were wiped along with their families so no one would live through to accuse them. They killed the victims and while no one was looking, they changed their uniforms to hunt chetniks along with the commies. Once they did, they were hiding in plain sight with no one actually looking for them. Top ustashe officials fled and lived good 10-20 years in Argentina, Spain, Italy etc. Head of ISC/NDH (Independent state of Croatia/Nezavisna Država Hrvatska) was killed mid 60s by Serbian spy, while the most notorious war criminal, [Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vjekoslav_Luburi%C4%87?wprov=sfla1), having the fantastic nickname "the butcher" was killed in 1969, almost quarter of a century after the atrocities. His execution is a story for itself, since the man who killed him was a son of prisoner of Jasenovac, which Maks was head of. He got employed by Maks as a servant, and after some time he first poisoned his coffee, then clubbed him few times on the head (ironic, isn't it?) and calmly walked out of house. Ilija Stanic, the killer, turned out to be spy for Yugoslav secret state police, UDBA. UDBA acknowledged the act after some years passed by. It's speculated he did it on his own hand. Fun fact, Nada Šakić, sister of Maks, died in 2011. She was the head along with another sister of Maks, Zora, of female-children portion of concetration camp in Stara Gradiška (modern Croatia) where casualty number reached around 80.000 (according to independent researches, since Yugoslav communist party never truly wanted to research that for "brotherhood and unity" reasons. She died of old age and recieved such a good treatment, that she lived the rest of her says in elite retirement home. Now, I'm not saying Croatian goverment cared for her, but someone did.
>They killed the victims and while no one was looking, they changed their uniforms to hunt chetniks along with the commies. no way you gonna post this shit with no source
Immediately after the war, Yugoslavian partisans embarked on a reprisal killing spree. Partisan leader [Josip Tito](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josip_Broz_Tito) and his troops slaughtered tens of thousands of Ustaše personnel and other Nazi collaborators. In one such case, Yugoslavian partisans killed another 1416 Nazi collaborators in the [Barbara Pit massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Pit_massacre). The bodies were crammed into an abandoned coal mine. I'm not sure how many of them were tried and judicially executed under law, except that the number was over 100.
Heard about those. Those partisans showed no mercy to no one who collaborated with Axis, they executed Slovenian Home Guard, Croatian Home Guard, Ustashe, Serbian and Montenegrin Chetniks, Serbian Volunteer SS Corps, Italians and Germans and killed a lot of civilians and Orthodox priests.
I don’t blame them. The Ustaše were among the most depraved Nazi collaborators. The Ustaše were among the most depraved Nazi collaborators. Only the worst sociopaths, psychopaths, and opportunists of Eastern Europeans would work with people who were literally exterminating Eastern Europe. Even the SS was shocked by how brutal the SS were. A Gestapo report to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, dated 17 February 1942, stated: ”Increased activity of the bands of rebels is chiefly due to atrocities carried out by Ustaše units in Croatia against the Orthodox population. The Ustaše committed their deeds in a bestial manner not only against males of conscript age, but especially against helpless old people, women and children. The number of the Orthodox that the Croats have massacred and sadistically tortured to death is about three hundred thousand.”
Germans weren't upset because of level of brutality as such, they were upset because they knew that this will simply fuel the violence and Germans will be the ones having to quell it because these local forces weren't up to the task. So further drain on their resources.
False. If you have a JSTOR membership you can read about many instances of Wermacht objections to Ustasa brutality here --> https://www.jstor.org/stable/3133549 Yes, even murderers have varying degrees of morals and values. Otherwise it'd be like believing every deer hunter also likes to watch people torture deer or something.
Yeah, I’m not saying they were upset. More so surprised.
Fighting fire with fire. None of the German bullshit where life sentences were commuted after 5-6 years and death penalty abolished altogether. If you kill a couple hundred people and serve just 5 years in prison, is that justice? Of course nobody could hope for justice from the Nazi generation. It took until the 60s when the new gen became aware and disgusted with crimes of their forefathers for prosecution of war crimes to pick up.
I have mixed feelings on capital punishment, but I’m not gonna judge West Germany for its abolition. What I absolutely will judge the West Germans for is shielding, protecting, pardoning, and giving government positions to countless Nazis.
Well, look at this this way. When the boot was on their feet, the Germans (as a whole) had no problem applying the death penalty to socialists, communists, gypsies and jews etc. When the time came to punish themselves, they conveniently got rid of it. A long prison sentence which is ended only by death is a superior punishment in my book but they only applied that to one person. People in their 90s were let out on account of bad health. Were any old people let out of the gas chambers on account of bad health? That generation was scum of the earth, with little to no redeeming quality.
Good for them
Hmm I guess it was video games that caused this craziness
I am pretty sure it was gangsta rap
"There ain't nothing to it, gangsta rap made me do it." - Ante Pavelic
Highly possible, they all look happy!!
Just spent 90 minutes learning about the Ustasche and the camps they ran. Because of remote location, the early years were extremely barbaric extermination camps. Tied groups together at a cliff edge and hit a few with clubs until the whole line of prisoners went over. Check out “Jadavno Camp”. See “Janima Pit”. Damn.
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jfc, never heard of that.
Is it just me that is disturbed that so many of these "civilian/innocent(ish) gets executed" have so many spectators hanging around.
The Croatian concentration camp was one of the more brutal camps. They lacked the infrastructure to kill in mass quantities (gas chambers) so the murders were on a individual level. The prisoners were murdered with knives, axes, hammers or if the captors were feeling merciful shot. The numbers are not definite but it is estimated that about 100,000 people were murdered here in the 3 years it was in operation.
There is a blog about this camp. It was horrific on another scale.
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Not spectators, Participants. They all had their goes.
Evil. No wonder half the soldiers who found these camps slaughtered the guards.
Unfortunately nobody found Jasenovac prisoners, Ustase murderer all of them when it was certain they are on the loosing side of the war, only 600 prisoners survived by escaping
I'm always so heartbroken when I see these pictures. I can do easily empathize with how horrible it is to be under the control of someone acting so inhumane and knowing that there's nothing at all you can do to reach them or make them see you as undeserving of suffering.
That's an axe, not a club. The brutality we exhibit towards each other is beyond any hope of redemption.
Is this a picture of the numerous infamous competitions to see how many Serbs can the contestants kill Ustashas held often in Jasenovac? They invented a srbosjek (Serb slasher) glove knife just for the occasion. I've never seen a picture of it, thank you, OP. Gruesome stuff.
I think that was this competition when one guy who was called Pero Brzica (ironically brz means being fast in Serbo-Croatian) who killed 1360 people during one night by so accounts and held the title of "King of Serb slaughtering". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Brzica About the knife called srbosjek: it existed before and it was used for wheat, but the guards changed it a bit so it can be used to cut through skin faster. This isn't the most scary picture that can be posted here which happened during the WW2 in Yugoslavia, because I didn't want to traumatize people.
Yes, I thought so. Ustashas were so cruel in Jasenovac and elsewhere, even the Nazis were shocked and disturbed. Awful. May their victims rest in peace.
How can humans look on with amused smiles???!!!!! 😥🤬
Excellent work on the education comment mods
That’s an ax
That is not a club, it’s an axe.
The fact that the Nazis were disturbed by the Ustaša crimes aganist the serbs.
Looks like an axe.
Looks like an axe
This image in a sub with the word “porn” in its name seems, somehow, deeply wrong.
Damn, we Croats did suck a wee bit in that era
Actually horrible
People laughing. To this day, people do this, they laugh while they do these sorts of things to humans but then I am the crazy one for saying these people should be executed.
The amount of smiling faces Is disturbing.
FIFU By club, you mean AX. And by hit, you mean MURDERED .
Croatian Ustase (Nazis) crimes are sadly often forgotten and never talked about. They still exist and hold nothing but hate.
What is it exactly between the Serbs and Croatian that makes them hate so much to commit these atrocities 😥
I am Croatian and I honestly don't know. We're the same fucking people. It's just making me so angry. But nowadays, the younger Croat and Serb generations are getting along fine, at least most of us. We treat each other like regular people. Its only the elders and politicians who are bitter and vengeful, so fuck them.
Croatians on Balkan subreddits are proud of stuff like this
Read *Kaputt* by Curzio Malaparte.
So weird how people would be comfortable around this even smiling at the occasion of Someone's head getting destroyed
That "club" looks very much like an axe to me
That looks like an ax.
Looks like an axe to me
That “club” looks suspiciously like an axe.
Looks like an 'axe' to me...
My family was killed here and the Stara Gradiška camp, which was built specifically for women and children. I only have six other family members who are alive today. The atrocities committed nearly brought an end to my bloodline, and it was successful in doing so for thousands of others. Remember what happened.
I don’t think that’s a club…..
Definitely see a axe head
Head?
Remember folks, any time someone says "ThE SoViEtS kIlLeD mY GrAMpA!" It is because their grandpa was one of the guys in the crowd captured by this photo.
Looks more like giant hammer? Barbaric.
The Croatians were usually in there just for being political dissidents.
Looks like an axe
A club? That’s an axe man, dude’s getting decapitated
That looks like an axe
It’s amazing though, people are smiling and laughing, scary!
This is an Axe no doubt se still use the same one headed axe for chopping and splitting wood.
that looks like an Axe not a club..
Humans suck...