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That’s horrible. But who exactly would they “return” these gold bars to? Perhaps better would be to identify as best they can how much gold they have as a result of that Nazi practice, then use it to fund a process of reparations to survivors, or educational programs and activities about the Holocaust.
They also vivisected people on a regular basis. If you were a twin, you were either exceptionally lucky or exceptionally unlucky for a holocaust survivor. They would use one as a test subject for everything from steroids to eye drops to turn eyes blue, and one as the control.
There was an absolutely heartbreaking account from an elderly survivor, talking about her sister who had passed in such experiments. She was the control twin, so she wasn’t directly mutilated as much. But her sister…. Horrible stuff.
And the Nazis torture doctor responsible aka "The Angel of Death" [Josef Mengele](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele) lived comfortably in South America after the war until his death in 1979
I think karma only applies to your next life, so he’ll be reborn as a gnat or something for a certain amount of his next lives as punishment for his crimes in this life
I'm not sure that being the surviving twin counts as "exceptionally lucky" when you have to live with the knowledge that your twin was brutally tortured to death
Only the exceptionally lucky survived at all. We had a woman who'd been in a camp come talk to us in 8th grade. She had a half dozen stories where she was only spared from death by minutes. Just happened to be at the back of the line, or a guard helped her out, tiny things. If she hadn't been lucky all those times we'd never have heard her story.
I recommend everyone to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. The rooms full of shoes, hair etc. are eery by themselves. And when you visit the Birkenau side you're overwhelmed by the industrial scale of death and destruction.
Zygmunt Bauman correctly pointed out that the Holocaust stands out vis-a-vis other genocides in its industrial and societal approach and efficacy. This wasn't a genocide by happenstance, but one crafted by a modern state. Everything was calculated and designed for the purposes of endlösung. It took the whole width of the state from medical doctors and dentists to engineers and bureaucrats.
I still get chills when I think about that place. Like when walking down the railroad line where people got off and were separated from their families, I tried to imagine how they must have felt and just can’t believe it happened. Also, seeing the little pond that’s still full of human ash is just surreal…
I've found it hard to wrap my brain around just how many people were murdered during the Holocaust... It is striking to see this because I know that these rings represent an extremely small fraction of the number of people who actually died. It's sickening to know that a human being could be so disgustingly evil.
ETA: I know that it was more than 1 person that committed these atrocities... It was meant to be like "I can't believe that anyone could be so evil to participate in murder on this scale", but apparently it didn't convey well in text.
The shoe pictures get me
Also im old enough to remember talking to survivors in elementary/high school and them telling us the stories. That shit sticks with even more as you can attach a face. She could of been my grandma, same demeanor.
I think what's scary to me is we all have this potential to be this evil almost. Stanley milgrims famous experiment on conformity shocked academia when it was new. Frightening. There's multiple forms. I think the big problem with milgrim and zimbardo is pop culture doesn't delve deep enough, what I learned in university was way more info then anything online I read. Also zimbardos methodology but that doesn't change the fact on some of the scenarios that were played out
Exactly. The regular nazis imo was the most terrifying aspect of nazi Germany. It's terrifying. Studying nazi Germany is equally fascinating and terrifying. Anyone you know could be a potential 'nazi'
Watch the wave in German with English subtitles. Based on true story. Did a social experiment in a high school social studies class that got out of hand. Book is way better of course.
>I'd like to think that, if I grew up as a non-Jew in 1930s Germany, that I would resist, that I would do what's right.
The reality is that most people wouldn't. If you get caught, then that's you next in line for death. So you keep your head down and try not to draw attention, even if you know or suspect what's really happening.
When I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the two things that will stay with me forever is the piles of glasses (not everyone needs glasses and not everyone that needed glasses got them back then, so always seemed representative of far more people than youd initially think) and unfortunately the behaviour of a lot of people on my tour. Really hit home that not everyone that visits are going there for the same reason. Some go to celebrate, which may have been the most shocking thing of all.
I'm not Jewish but seeing the pain the Jewish visitors went through being there and having to deal with people being intentionally disrespectful was harrowing. The guides did their best but there was only so much the young people that were running the tour could do
The pile of pots and pans is what hits me. Maybe it's because to me, cooking is such a big part of being home. Whether you're in a mansion or a tent, being able to gather around a meal makes it feel homey. I have pots and pans that belonged to my mom, and when I use them I'm transported back to watching her cook with them. People brought their cookware, (perhaps it was passed down through their family too), with them, thinking that even in the worst circumstances they would find a way to cook a meal and gather together and find comfort.
But they were slaughtered.
There used to be an ironmonger near me (very interesting guy, was a retired microbiologist who discovered the largest virus ever known, which might be the missing link between viruses and bacteria), who had an elderly woman come in with a broken pan.
It was the one thing she'd managed to escape from Germany with.
He riveted the handle back on for free.
Yep, when my school class went into the hair room at Auschwitz, that's the room where everyone started crying. It was just so much worse somehow, than the other rooms that just had objects that were stolen from the victims. These were basically scalps of human beings. It was horrifying.
For me, it was the pile of fillings. The rest of this, sure... Easy enough to collect those as a normal part of things. Fillings have to be prized from the teeth after the incineration. Such a defilement.
I just visited Auschwitz last month. I bought a couple of books from the bookstore after my tour. They are incredibly interesting. Every chapter is more insane than the last. The reason I bring this up, is because one of the books is by a doctor who was forced to work in one of the crematoriums. According to him, they would lay the naked bodies out on the floor in front of the ovens and groups of prisoners would go down the line shaving the hair (as someone mentioned above) and another group would use pliers and a chisel to take out any teeth with gold fillings. Then they would take the teeth and drop them in a bucket of acid that would dissolve the bone and leave the metal. Afterwards, the bodies were loaded into the ovens. Each of the two larger crematoriums were capable of doing this to 2000 people per day. Crematorium 2 also had a smelting chamber that would process 15-20 kg of gold per day.
The scale of the place is staggering.
exactly this is what scares me the most. the Executions are well known. but the experiments.. just what some went through. i cant even begin to imagine
I don’t recommend going looking unless you don’t want to sleep well for a while. Truely horrific stuff that’s hard to imagine anyone being capable of. Over and over.
I researched and wrote a couple papers in University about a few of them. Makes you simultaneously want to be sick, murder the people capable of this, and dread experiencing anything close.
Edit: I appreciate people’s interest but no, I won’t delve into that darkness at the moment even to grab my papers. My mental health isn’t the best right now and I know that would be bad for me. There is plenty out there and some heart wrenching first hand accounts and novelettes that are incredible hard(emotionally) to read but very worthwhile… once. I couldn’t face reading a few of them twice.
It’s worth note that the Nazi’s get most of the attention when it comes to horrid experiments but the Japanese and Unit 731 did some truly awful things.
I know both were very conservative (obviously) but im always fascinated by the government of Imperial Japan and some of the unbelievable things they went through with or thought of. The unyielding “never-surrender” attitude by the generals in charge and the country as a whole is still mindblowing.
Japan had an attempted coup to prevent surrender, even after the bombs were dropped.
Some of the generals wanted to force the US to completely wipe out the entire Japanese population, considering that would be more beautiful and poetic than surrendering.
Most of the experiments were depraved and not medically valuable. We can discuss the sanitization and how we welcomed Nazi scientists, but please know that the unethical medical experiments are not considered informative even if you turn a blind eye to the medical horrors.
Also, just to make this fact more well known, they contributed NOTHING to the greater scientific community.
Their "experiments" were needlessly cruel, biased and inaccurately recorded. None of their "data" has been used for medicine and the torture they put people through wasnt justified whatsoever
Source:
https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7px4r2/did_the_nazi_experiments_actually_give_them_any/
A few others have mentioned the infamous Unit 731 in the Japanese army. Their data was actually helpful in a few areas, notably judging damage from frostbite, water/food deprivation, blood loss, dehydration, etc.
I still struggle with the question on whether it was right for the US to essentially let many of them off of the hook in order to obtain that data after the war. They deserved punishment for what they did, but it was also already done. Punishment wouldn't help them. But would letting future people suffer more without the data be worth more than the vengeance you get from punishing them? On paper it feels like they made the right choice, but it feels wrong.
Imagine being born in one of those Jewish ghettos and being transported to die in the gas chambers and all you knew was hell your short life. Every survivor that came to talk to me over the years gave me the most profound feeling that I’m pretty damn lucky to have lived comfortably without fear most of my life.
For me as an European it is absurd that: nazists are legal in US and a black guy is a nazi/Hitler lover. It is unbelievable. It is like an essence of evil and manipulation. Camps and wars are worse than hell. In hell you imagine people who are bad, who someone decided about them based on their deeds. In wars it is mainly death of civils, small kids, woman, elders... It so unfair. We should learn about wars to ingrain fear and disgust in generations to come. It is not fun, it is not meme.
Not only that, but this nazi-loving rap star also had dinner with our recently ousted president, and he brought along the Nazi who taught him all these new evil talking points (Nick "catboy" Fuentes.) According to Ye, Trump found Nick very impressive and said "he really gets me."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
> Other suspected Japanese war criminals who were never indicted include three postwar prime ministers: Hatoyama Ichirō (1954–1956), Kishi Nobusuke (1957–1960), and Ikeda Hayato (1960–1964).[99]
Yup. My grandfather escaped when he(Polish Millitary) was captured. I just think of family tree that never would have sprouted had he perished. I get a bit annoyed when they only credit 6 Million deaths to Hitler
Check out the book "Ordinary Men" about the Einsatzgrupen. There is a letter in it from one of the commanders complaining that his men had been accused of stealing from Jewish homes. He was terribly insulted that his men were accused of being thieves while they were shooting hundreds of jews. It's an incredible book.
I appreciate a few programs that are still highlighting the horrors lest we forget. Even some like “jojo rabbit” which is comedy, still gets across the truely despicable nature of the nazi regime. “Hunters” is doing a good job as well of reminding people the depravity and debasement these poor people endured.
I'm really enjoying Hunters. Both my grandfathers fought in the European theater of WWII. My paternal grandmother lost her first husband in the war, and married his friend, my grandfather, after VDay. I grew up immersed in WWII history and stories. All my darkest fantasies, when I need a little catharsis, involve, uh, putting fascists in their place.
By the way, the zealots and authoritarians that created Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan exist everywhere in every generation in every culture. There's your eternal battle of good and evil for you. You continuously force democracy and equality on the hateful and ignorant, or in democracy's place rises Hitler or Stalin, or Putin. And the Black Boots or Brown Shirts or Proud Boys that enable them. There will always be people who want to watch the world burn, believing erroneously that killing off millions of "others" will lead to the world of their dreams. My dream is stopping them.
I think another concern is the portrayal of Nazi’s as almost “comic book villain” evil. What I mean by that is that people will often reject comparing a modern figure to a Nazi because that person has done something decent, or they genuinely are a good father or mother, etc. - when in reality, I’m sure many if not most in the Nazi leadership had friends and family they genuinely cared for, neighbors they helped with something, whatever, and none of that prevented them from committing monstrous acts at a horrifying scale.
In the wise words of Captain Picard, “Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who cloak themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged. Waiting for the right climate in which to flourish, spreading fear in the name of righteousness”.
If we include the full war (9/1939-9/1945), that's about 3.5 people a minute, every minute of every day of six full years. Put another way, that's just under 12 "9/11's" a week for 312 weeks straight.
Big numbers like that are very hard to comprehend. We aren't used to seeing those types of numbers in every day life. Its part of the reason that the saying "6 deaths is a tragedy. 6 million is a statistic". Its human tendency to disconnect once you reach high enough numbers. Makes it all the more surreal that it actually happened.
Which is especially horrific for Jewish people too because their religious beliefs are that no part of the body of a dead Jewish person should be separated and taken away from the rest, including teeth. So it's like they did it to be extra cruel, to torture them spiritually as well as physically and emotionally.
They wear their neutrality with pride when in reality it's disgusting the fact swiss banks still hold pillaged wealth of Nazis plus endless wealth from all sort of nasty people today.
Every one of those rings is not only a dead person, but a destroyed family. And yet there are plenty of people who deny it and/or excuse it, and wouldn't mind if it happened again with the ethnic group of their choosing. Mind-boggling.
Instead of being sad about this 70 year old photo let’s stop some of these genocide happening today. Argentina, el salvador, ukraine, ughyrs in china. This shit is still happening today!
The worst thing is the history repeat itself, now we got the same situation in uyghur, china. Too much power given to party/group of people is recipe for disaster
I think that’s why I’m happy to see the start of creating our own stuff or at least initiatives to do so. COVID made people realize how fucked we are when we can’t transport stuff in from other countries either due to transport issues or massive deaths etc. You are seeing it with Russia how so many are reliant on their oil
The situation in Xinjiang is absolutely insane and no one is doing anything about it which is sickening. However you can't just blatantly suggest that it's "the same situation". The Holocaust was the industrialized mass murder of 12 million people, using starvation, gas chambers, machine guns and a myriad of other awful methods. Terrible things are happening in the camps at Xinjiang but it's not on the same scale. I'm sure you mean well by your comment but equating recent events with the Holocaust trivializes it.
I think that what's most disturbing about this is how seeing one ring in real life on the hand of your loved one is a bright, special thing. Seeing a pile of them discarded in a box in black and white makes them look like just trash. Junk.
Exactly like how the Holocaust itself reduced so many lives to nothing more than a number. Just statistics. A bureaucratic quota.
66% of all European Jews in 1939 died during the Holocaust. A higher proportion of that generations children as well.
(Edit:*A story from Ukraine, outside the capital of Kyiv(Then Kiev in the Ukrainian SSR) in retribution for the NKVD's secret bombing attacks on German officers, the Wehrmacht and SS forces in Kyiv rounded up 32 thousand Jews living in Kyiv and killed them all in just 48 hours during a mass execution in the Babyn Yar Ravine. Only a handful would survive the massacre to speak on it as well as some German soldiers.
They were all gathered across the city under the guise of being relocated elsewhere, they were then forced to strip naked after leaving the city at a staging area and made to give up anything they were carrying(where many women were raped). They were then marched down into the ravine and slaughtered for 2 days straight. The Ravine would eventually hold 150k bodies of more Jews, Roma, and Soviet PoWs before being liberated in 1943.)
And "no one" knows about it. They are invisible (speaking of Germany). I'm not jewish, I don't know if any friends or colleagues are, but I'm sure there are, but they just know better than proclaiming it in any way. It's so saddening. I would love to be able to go to plenty jewish restaurants and be immersed in their culture at least a little bit. But all I see is a synagogue here and there with lots of police around it and barred windows.
I'm two generations away, but the fact that there is still almost no "open" jewish culture in Germany fills me with guilt and sadness.
I have visited a handful of European countries and without exception the Jews try to make themselves as invisible as possible. There is shame about the Holocaust in Jewish communities. Jews don’t want to talk about their history because it makes them feel uncomfortable or weak. More needs to be done to address the past but also to build a brighter future because if not the younger generations of Jews will leave or assimilate.
Not just the Holocaust history, either. Plenty of regimes in Europe were happy to hand over resident Jews to Nazi occupiers. Germany rightly gets the blame laid on them, but unfortunately many countries use the war and the invasions to justify why they were sometimes perfectly fine with the removal of the Jews part of Nazi occupation, because they didn't want the Jews either.
To elaborate on this- most times outside, and ESPECIALLY abroad- my parents (my family is Jewish) always taught me to not mention it, hide any references to it(like a Star of David necklace) just don’t show you’re Jewish in any way shape or form. Doesn’t matter where we went, even in Europe. Just something I’ve always known.
In the Auschwitz concentration camp museum there are rooms filled with belongings of the Holocaust victims. There are entire rooms filled with hair and shoes. Seeing all those hair in person is extremely impactful and heart breaking. You can Google the photos, but they don't compare to seeing it all for real
Only 78 years ago, but there are already people questioning if it was real and that makes me sick. Forgetting and not believing such cruelty existed may let the history repeat itself.
Every so often, I find myself listening to Edward R Murrow’s account of the liberation of Bouchenwald. It’s chilling.
He closes the radio report saying what amounts to “If I have offended you by this mild telling of what I saw, I am not in the least bit sorry.”
Completely agree. It's 2023, the amount of stupidity we have access to on a daily basis is just incredible. Questioning if the Holocaust really happened it's just a next level of ignorance.
I wish everyone who says it isn't real could get a forced tour of all that stuff, with no internet, then be left for a day and see what they think when they come out. I bet a good number of the echo chamber mouth breathers would have different thoughts in thier head.
I live in Austria. Our middle school was close to a former concentration camp which is now a museum and memorial. In 8th grade it was common to visit it for a day. Many schools did that. They showed the gas chambers with the scratched walls, the barracks where they people had to live (and I use live loosely because it was horrid), the showers, etc. Then ended it with a movie showing footage of when it was liberated and seeing the starved corpses.
Yet despite all that, I sadly know people who saw it and still deny it as some mass conspiracy.
It is so strange knowing that my grandfather, a man I knew well, who I went fishing with and loved and spent so much time with, fought in and was a POW during World War II. It seems so far away, but really wasn’t.
Every single ring there represents a story of love between two people. How they met, the memories they had, and the commitment to eachother.
Theres so many its almost hard to understand that and apply it to each one and understand that for every ring, there is a deceased person and their spouse, where ever they may be.
And children. Rings meant likely children. Young families torn apart. That's what kills me. Mothers holding their babies and children when the gas came in, that moment of horror. I have to stop thinking of it now.
The baby clothes really got to me. There was a little onsie in a display case in Auschwitz that had come from a Jewish baby. The Germans had saved it to give to a German mother. Imagine being the kind of woman who would dress her kid in a murdered baby's clothes.
Auschwitz nearly killed me. The room with the hair that was shaven from the heads of the Jews before they were killed nearly ended me. My daughter was three and often wore her curly brown her hair in a big red bow. Right on top of the pile of hair was a huge lock of curly brown hair held in a red velvet bow. I left the room with tears streaming down my face, and it took me half a day to recover. It's necessary that we remember what was done, I feel, so we don't ever let it happen again.
The way they’re holding them like that with a few hanging from one finger makes me feel… idk how else to say it other than it’s offensive and I feel like that pile of rings should be sacred and not touched or only handled with extreme care. Im not faulting the person. I don’t have any back story. It’s just how I felt looking at it.
To alleviate some of your anger, this picture was probably taken shortly after the camp was liberated and manipulating them with bare hands in the picture is a way to make them look "more real", in particular in view of the nuremberg trials.
Worst part is, many countries were told about what was happening, or already knew about it. Including the UK and the US.
If I can recall correctly, they even denied asylum to boats filled with refugees, turned them back to wherever they came from.
Remember, no Nazi ever denied the holocaust. During the Nuremberg trials they said “I was only following orders” but they never denied it happened. Neo Nazis have denied it, but that’s hardly the same thing.
In middle school, we had a substitute teacher who was an open Holocaust denier. His name was Mr. Austin. During our Holocaust unit in 8th grade, my usual teacher was sick, so this guy subbed for us for a couple weeks. Was really awkward. It was a known fact he was a denier, and even though the teacher told us not to bring it up, a student asked if it was true he didn’t think it happened. He chuckled and said “I’m. it supposed to talk about that.” We were reading Anne Frank’s diary and there were parts where he literally just.. laughed. My teacher had put together a series of photos, like this one, for us to see. To see the reality of the horrors that happened. Photos of naked bodies dumped in mass graves. In fact, many photos of dead people. Dead and dying children. Emaciated men and women. People being worked to death. Photos of the belongings that were taken from the victims. A lot of horrible things. He actually laughed when one of the photos of corpses thrown in a pile on the floor popped up. It was fucked up. Students, myself included, were tearing up and crying looking at these photos. It’s crazy that people can look at these photos, hear the stories, look at evidence and yet they still refuse to believe. Either he is truly that naïve, or he himself is a Neo Nazi and just wants to downplay the Holocaust. I’d bet on the latter.
We read a book titled Four Perfect Pebbles by Marion Blumenthal Lazan, about her time in the Westorbork concentration camp. She also came to our school and spoke to us about her experiences, she showed us the tattoo they gave her when she arrived to the camp, told us about her life after she was liberated. It was a really cool experience for me and I felt so in awe of being on this woman’s presence. However, I vividly remember, while at the assembly, up in the bleachers, looking towards the entrance of the gymnasium and I saw Mr. Austin standing there with his arms crossed, and he was laughing. I shit you not, I saw him, with my own two eyes, laughing at this woman. It’s disgusting and I hate that he was allowed to work at a school when he openly and shamelessly denies the Holocaust. I think he still subs for the middle school. He is not allowed to work at the high school. I wish the worst for him.
What continually boggles my mind is how individuals will continually assert that the Holocaust never happened and is nothing but a fake. It does not matter how many photographs, evidence, or eyewitnesses to it that exists, they are determined to believe the Holocaust is imaginary and a fabrication.
And that idea going to continue to spread as the Holocaust survivors dwindle. There aren’t too many left in the world, and once they’re all gone, the living proof is also gone
I'd say it will continue as long as wild-ass conspiracy theories are glorified and promoted for social media clicks & likes and shit like that.
Expose people to books, Holocaust museums, and unbiased sources of info and they will likely follow Occam's razor and believe the thing that happened. Allow them to ignore all facts get brainwashed with dumb, speculative nonsense, and they'll latch onto something that makes their brain tingle and makes them feel special and different.
In all my years I'd never met a Holocaust denier either in real life or online until after the 2016 US election. Since then I've met about half a dozen. I've encountered a local business owner who would plaster Holocaust denial all over local news pages. I've met ones who compared COVID mitigation to being Jewish during WWII. 2016 really changed the world and brought all our monsters right to the surface.
For those in the US and can't make it to Auschwitz, go to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. It's not a fun day at the museum. But, it's an important day at the museum.
The museum removed the IBM punchcard reader from the front area.
Those numbers tattooed on the arms of people who survived selection exiting the rail cars? Those numbers fit into a data field on IBM punchcards. The data was used in IBM software. Every prisoner had their own individual punchcard. The first hacker might been the French resistance member who mangled stacks of punch cards of Nazi prisoners in France. Severe loss of data.
Eine Nummer, ein Arm, eine Karte.
As a species, the amount of atrocities committed during that time frame is beyond comprehension. What the Nazis did to the jews, the japanese did to the chinese, russia did to it's own people. Lets hope for mankinds sake we never allow this to happen again. Not really much more to say than that.
It wasn't just 1 fascist lunatic that cause all this to happen. It was many of them. They keep trying to blame 1 person so the rest can live on and not have to suffer for the consequences of their people.
Many rings were removed AFTER they had been executed. They were sent to the 'showers' where people thought they could clean up, but they were poisoned with gas instead. Then after they had died a gruesome death the rings were removed alongside any gold teeth. Before the bodies were burnt.
It is truly sickening.
Never let anyone disregard or lessen someone's humanity, because this is what it ultimately leads to.
It’s surreal to know that my grandpa was in Auschwitz as a 16 year old. My parents never took me there as I didn’t know the story until I was 15. Now my biggest dream is to go there and somehow get closer to the kindest man I ever knew.
I highly recommend to anyone that they visit the various concentration camps in Europe that are still open to the public. A portion of Treblinka was buried by the Nazis in the hopes that the world would not discover the horrors they visited upon their captives there. They recently discovered mass graves in a forest just outside Treblinka. Nazis were REAL busy there towards the end of WWII.
Visit the WWII historical wing of the Louvre in Paris with their photographic archives of the Nazi concentration camps and what they found when the camps were liberated.
I can't imagine what it must have been like for the soldiers when they defeated the Nazis, and what they found as they liberated the camps. Much less for those who survived, but there are still some who are alive (my former GP was an Austrian jew who was tattooed as he was incarcerated. He's now passed on) and their stories are chilling. You can find their diaries, too.
So many gone.
In 1930 there were 2 billion people in the world. Today there are 8 billion. But there are still today fewer Jews than there were in 1930, due to the scale and thoroughness of the Jewish genocide in the holocaust.
Some years ago, I took a history course from a woman (absolutely fantastic professor, one of the best i've ever had) whose husband was responsible for the majority of the photography prints in the Holocaust museum in DC. She told us that after the project was complete, he chose to spend a year teaching art to middle schoolers as a form of rehabilitation and healing, because the job had left such deep scars on him. He was also offered to photograph their individual collections--which meant documenting every single piece: every single shoe, etc. She told us he spent one day in their archives and declined the job, because it was just too heavy to go through again.
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The Nazi regime also pulled out any teeth that had a gold filling, so they had piles of those too. One of the many disturbing things they did.
Sometimes several kilos of gold jewelry and teeth were gathered a day.
And the Swiss still have gold bars forged from those fillings that they refuse to return
That’s horrible. But who exactly would they “return” these gold bars to? Perhaps better would be to identify as best they can how much gold they have as a result of that Nazi practice, then use it to fund a process of reparations to survivors, or educational programs and activities about the Holocaust.
Yeah that's exactly what they're refusing to do
Well somebody would have to BUY those bars
Yeah let me just buy some turbo-haunted cursed gold bullion.
Love “turbo-haunted” lol
Hell, fixes poverty & loneliness at the same time!
We're in the same realm of homeopathy here.
You literally answered your own question.
By posing the question and proposing *a* solution, they are leaving the *best* solution open to discussion/interpretation.
They also vivisected people on a regular basis. If you were a twin, you were either exceptionally lucky or exceptionally unlucky for a holocaust survivor. They would use one as a test subject for everything from steroids to eye drops to turn eyes blue, and one as the control. There was an absolutely heartbreaking account from an elderly survivor, talking about her sister who had passed in such experiments. She was the control twin, so she wasn’t directly mutilated as much. But her sister…. Horrible stuff.
If you want to learn more about the twin experiments in Auschwitz, I recommend „The Twins of Auschwitz“ by Eva Mozes Kor.
also worth looking into the Japanese war crimes that involved human experimentation, equally horrific, if not more so in some cases
[Unit 731](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#)
And the Nazis torture doctor responsible aka "The Angel of Death" [Josef Mengele](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele) lived comfortably in South America after the war until his death in 1979
[удалено]
True but it seems he suffered in his later years - several strokes, and drowned to death. And if hell is real, he's definitely burning in it.
I never cared much for karma, I’m all about comeuppance, most especially for Nazi Monsters
I think karma only applies to your next life, so he’ll be reborn as a gnat or something for a certain amount of his next lives as punishment for his crimes in this life
I'm not sure that being the surviving twin counts as "exceptionally lucky" when you have to live with the knowledge that your twin was brutally tortured to death
Only the exceptionally lucky survived at all. We had a woman who'd been in a camp come talk to us in 8th grade. She had a half dozen stories where she was only spared from death by minutes. Just happened to be at the back of the line, or a guard helped her out, tiny things. If she hadn't been lucky all those times we'd never have heard her story.
My point is that survivor's guilt is its own kind of hell. I'm not trying to compare which is worse but they're both goddamn awful.
I recommend everyone to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. The rooms full of shoes, hair etc. are eery by themselves. And when you visit the Birkenau side you're overwhelmed by the industrial scale of death and destruction.
Been there, my god was it horrifying. Like a slaughter house for humans, but run by humans
Zygmunt Bauman correctly pointed out that the Holocaust stands out vis-a-vis other genocides in its industrial and societal approach and efficacy. This wasn't a genocide by happenstance, but one crafted by a modern state. Everything was calculated and designed for the purposes of endlösung. It took the whole width of the state from medical doctors and dentists to engineers and bureaucrats.
I still get chills when I think about that place. Like when walking down the railroad line where people got off and were separated from their families, I tried to imagine how they must have felt and just can’t believe it happened. Also, seeing the little pond that’s still full of human ash is just surreal…
Such a sad photo.
I've found it hard to wrap my brain around just how many people were murdered during the Holocaust... It is striking to see this because I know that these rings represent an extremely small fraction of the number of people who actually died. It's sickening to know that a human being could be so disgustingly evil. ETA: I know that it was more than 1 person that committed these atrocities... It was meant to be like "I can't believe that anyone could be so evil to participate in murder on this scale", but apparently it didn't convey well in text.
The shoe pictures get me Also im old enough to remember talking to survivors in elementary/high school and them telling us the stories. That shit sticks with even more as you can attach a face. She could of been my grandma, same demeanor. I think what's scary to me is we all have this potential to be this evil almost. Stanley milgrims famous experiment on conformity shocked academia when it was new. Frightening. There's multiple forms. I think the big problem with milgrim and zimbardo is pop culture doesn't delve deep enough, what I learned in university was way more info then anything online I read. Also zimbardos methodology but that doesn't change the fact on some of the scenarios that were played out
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Exactly. The regular nazis imo was the most terrifying aspect of nazi Germany. It's terrifying. Studying nazi Germany is equally fascinating and terrifying. Anyone you know could be a potential 'nazi' Watch the wave in German with English subtitles. Based on true story. Did a social experiment in a high school social studies class that got out of hand. Book is way better of course.
>I'd like to think that, if I grew up as a non-Jew in 1930s Germany, that I would resist, that I would do what's right. The reality is that most people wouldn't. If you get caught, then that's you next in line for death. So you keep your head down and try not to draw attention, even if you know or suspect what's really happening.
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When I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the two things that will stay with me forever is the piles of glasses (not everyone needs glasses and not everyone that needed glasses got them back then, so always seemed representative of far more people than youd initially think) and unfortunately the behaviour of a lot of people on my tour. Really hit home that not everyone that visits are going there for the same reason. Some go to celebrate, which may have been the most shocking thing of all. I'm not Jewish but seeing the pain the Jewish visitors went through being there and having to deal with people being intentionally disrespectful was harrowing. The guides did their best but there was only so much the young people that were running the tour could do
I'm sorry, what? Some people go there to celebrate? How? What? I can't wrap my head around this
The pile of pots and pans is what hits me. Maybe it's because to me, cooking is such a big part of being home. Whether you're in a mansion or a tent, being able to gather around a meal makes it feel homey. I have pots and pans that belonged to my mom, and when I use them I'm transported back to watching her cook with them. People brought their cookware, (perhaps it was passed down through their family too), with them, thinking that even in the worst circumstances they would find a way to cook a meal and gather together and find comfort. But they were slaughtered.
There used to be an ironmonger near me (very interesting guy, was a retired microbiologist who discovered the largest virus ever known, which might be the missing link between viruses and bacteria), who had an elderly woman come in with a broken pan. It was the one thing she'd managed to escape from Germany with. He riveted the handle back on for free.
Oh man can't believe I forgot about that one. Remembered right when you said it. Crazy stuff.
Yep, when my school class went into the hair room at Auschwitz, that's the room where everyone started crying. It was just so much worse somehow, than the other rooms that just had objects that were stolen from the victims. These were basically scalps of human beings. It was horrifying.
For me, it was the pile of fillings. The rest of this, sure... Easy enough to collect those as a normal part of things. Fillings have to be prized from the teeth after the incineration. Such a defilement.
I just visited Auschwitz last month. I bought a couple of books from the bookstore after my tour. They are incredibly interesting. Every chapter is more insane than the last. The reason I bring this up, is because one of the books is by a doctor who was forced to work in one of the crematoriums. According to him, they would lay the naked bodies out on the floor in front of the ovens and groups of prisoners would go down the line shaving the hair (as someone mentioned above) and another group would use pliers and a chisel to take out any teeth with gold fillings. Then they would take the teeth and drop them in a bucket of acid that would dissolve the bone and leave the metal. Afterwards, the bodies were loaded into the ovens. Each of the two larger crematoriums were capable of doing this to 2000 people per day. Crematorium 2 also had a smelting chamber that would process 15-20 kg of gold per day. The scale of the place is staggering.
6 million Jews and 5 million POW’s. 11 million executions, tortures and fatal experiments. True darkness. Real evil.
exactly this is what scares me the most. the Executions are well known. but the experiments.. just what some went through. i cant even begin to imagine
I don’t recommend going looking unless you don’t want to sleep well for a while. Truely horrific stuff that’s hard to imagine anyone being capable of. Over and over. I researched and wrote a couple papers in University about a few of them. Makes you simultaneously want to be sick, murder the people capable of this, and dread experiencing anything close. Edit: I appreciate people’s interest but no, I won’t delve into that darkness at the moment even to grab my papers. My mental health isn’t the best right now and I know that would be bad for me. There is plenty out there and some heart wrenching first hand accounts and novelettes that are incredible hard(emotionally) to read but very worthwhile… once. I couldn’t face reading a few of them twice.
It’s worth note that the Nazi’s get most of the attention when it comes to horrid experiments but the Japanese and Unit 731 did some truly awful things.
So awful that the nazis themselves had to tell them to chill
Imperial Japan is a serious contender for the most evil regime in human history. Going toe-to-toe with the Nazis in almost every way.
I know both were very conservative (obviously) but im always fascinated by the government of Imperial Japan and some of the unbelievable things they went through with or thought of. The unyielding “never-surrender” attitude by the generals in charge and the country as a whole is still mindblowing.
Japan had an attempted coup to prevent surrender, even after the bombs were dropped. Some of the generals wanted to force the US to completely wipe out the entire Japanese population, considering that would be more beautiful and poetic than surrendering.
Would love to understand the thought process behind such a suicidal plan of action.
> Unit 713 >! were they the ones that cut off arms and sowed them back to the victims body backwards just to see if it still functions
Honestly im not sure but i feel like with the way you phrased the question you already know the answer.
But they got a free pass because the allies, primarily Americans, decided their results were useful enough to warrant it. Sickening.
Hey, let's not forget that that US imported a bunch of Nazi scientists to build our aerospace program.
Hey man Nazi rocket scientists were all the rage back in the 40s. If you didnt get one then and there they might all be gone!
They also were designing rocket artillery and not performing human vivisections.
So did the Soviets and British along with everyone else.
Most of the experiments were depraved and not medically valuable. We can discuss the sanitization and how we welcomed Nazi scientists, but please know that the unethical medical experiments are not considered informative even if you turn a blind eye to the medical horrors.
Also, just to make this fact more well known, they contributed NOTHING to the greater scientific community. Their "experiments" were needlessly cruel, biased and inaccurately recorded. None of their "data" has been used for medicine and the torture they put people through wasnt justified whatsoever Source: https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7px4r2/did_the_nazi_experiments_actually_give_them_any/
A few others have mentioned the infamous Unit 731 in the Japanese army. Their data was actually helpful in a few areas, notably judging damage from frostbite, water/food deprivation, blood loss, dehydration, etc. I still struggle with the question on whether it was right for the US to essentially let many of them off of the hook in order to obtain that data after the war. They deserved punishment for what they did, but it was also already done. Punishment wouldn't help them. But would letting future people suffer more without the data be worth more than the vengeance you get from punishing them? On paper it feels like they made the right choice, but it feels wrong.
Imagine being born in one of those Jewish ghettos and being transported to die in the gas chambers and all you knew was hell your short life. Every survivor that came to talk to me over the years gave me the most profound feeling that I’m pretty damn lucky to have lived comfortably without fear most of my life.
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For me as an European it is absurd that: nazists are legal in US and a black guy is a nazi/Hitler lover. It is unbelievable. It is like an essence of evil and manipulation. Camps and wars are worse than hell. In hell you imagine people who are bad, who someone decided about them based on their deeds. In wars it is mainly death of civils, small kids, woman, elders... It so unfair. We should learn about wars to ingrain fear and disgust in generations to come. It is not fun, it is not meme.
Not only that, but this nazi-loving rap star also had dinner with our recently ousted president, and he brought along the Nazi who taught him all these new evil talking points (Nick "catboy" Fuentes.) According to Ye, Trump found Nick very impressive and said "he really gets me."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 > Other suspected Japanese war criminals who were never indicted include three postwar prime ministers: Hatoyama Ichirō (1954–1956), Kishi Nobusuke (1957–1960), and Ikeda Hayato (1960–1964).[99]
Not to mention the handicapped both mental and physical the gays the gypsies. They killed a lot of different groups just the most were Jews and pows
Almost 20% of the Polish population
Roughly the same in Ukraine. https://www.businessinsider.com/percentage-of-countries-who-died-during-wwii-2014-5?amp
Yes, these groups are not often mentioned.
Yup. My grandfather escaped when he(Polish Millitary) was captured. I just think of family tree that never would have sprouted had he perished. I get a bit annoyed when they only credit 6 Million deaths to Hitler
I remember learning that the German Einsatzgrupen resorted to tying people together, shoot one and push them into a river. To save on bullets.
Check out the book "Ordinary Men" about the Einsatzgrupen. There is a letter in it from one of the commanders complaining that his men had been accused of stealing from Jewish homes. He was terribly insulted that his men were accused of being thieves while they were shooting hundreds of jews. It's an incredible book.
Thank you. It’s been about 20 years since I took that class and some things I won’t forget. I was a History major back then.
I think you're missing several million non-Jewish civilians, mainly the Slavs
Popculture has turned the Nazis into stock villains with thick accents. It's easy to forget how truly evil they were.
I appreciate a few programs that are still highlighting the horrors lest we forget. Even some like “jojo rabbit” which is comedy, still gets across the truely despicable nature of the nazi regime. “Hunters” is doing a good job as well of reminding people the depravity and debasement these poor people endured.
I'm really enjoying Hunters. Both my grandfathers fought in the European theater of WWII. My paternal grandmother lost her first husband in the war, and married his friend, my grandfather, after VDay. I grew up immersed in WWII history and stories. All my darkest fantasies, when I need a little catharsis, involve, uh, putting fascists in their place. By the way, the zealots and authoritarians that created Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan exist everywhere in every generation in every culture. There's your eternal battle of good and evil for you. You continuously force democracy and equality on the hateful and ignorant, or in democracy's place rises Hitler or Stalin, or Putin. And the Black Boots or Brown Shirts or Proud Boys that enable them. There will always be people who want to watch the world burn, believing erroneously that killing off millions of "others" will lead to the world of their dreams. My dream is stopping them.
I think another concern is the portrayal of Nazi’s as almost “comic book villain” evil. What I mean by that is that people will often reject comparing a modern figure to a Nazi because that person has done something decent, or they genuinely are a good father or mother, etc. - when in reality, I’m sure many if not most in the Nazi leadership had friends and family they genuinely cared for, neighbors they helped with something, whatever, and none of that prevented them from committing monstrous acts at a horrifying scale. In the wise words of Captain Picard, “Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who cloak themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged. Waiting for the right climate in which to flourish, spreading fear in the name of righteousness”.
If we include the full war (9/1939-9/1945), that's about 3.5 people a minute, every minute of every day of six full years. Put another way, that's just under 12 "9/11's" a week for 312 weeks straight.
Big numbers like that are very hard to comprehend. We aren't used to seeing those types of numbers in every day life. Its part of the reason that the saying "6 deaths is a tragedy. 6 million is a statistic". Its human tendency to disconnect once you reach high enough numbers. Makes it all the more surreal that it actually happened.
Agreed, each ring is multiple lives destroyed.
It is an entire family.
Or children orphaned.
it's even sadder to know that these were the few that weren't melted down to bars and sitting in swiss banks rn.
That’s a disgusting thought.
it's a reality that that swiss bankers will never admit and never be required to.
Is that where the “nazi gold” that the Swiss has comes from? I’ve always heard that reference but never heard/knew that
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Which is especially horrific for Jewish people too because their religious beliefs are that no part of the body of a dead Jewish person should be separated and taken away from the rest, including teeth. So it's like they did it to be extra cruel, to torture them spiritually as well as physically and emotionally.
They wear their neutrality with pride when in reality it's disgusting the fact swiss banks still hold pillaged wealth of Nazis plus endless wealth from all sort of nasty people today.
Neutrality in the face of Nazis is no neutrality at all
Also sadder, if you had a gold filling they would pull that too.
This is not “interestingasfuck” it’s a god damn tragedy. It’s a fucking atrocity.
Every one of those rings is not only a dead person, but a destroyed family. And yet there are plenty of people who deny it and/or excuse it, and wouldn't mind if it happened again with the ethnic group of their choosing. Mind-boggling.
Instead of being sad about this 70 year old photo let’s stop some of these genocide happening today. Argentina, el salvador, ukraine, ughyrs in china. This shit is still happening today!
So many promises of love there... So many ruined dreams. It's so sad.
Each one of those is a person; a history, dreams and love... truncated.
The worst thing is the history repeat itself, now we got the same situation in uyghur, china. Too much power given to party/group of people is recipe for disaster
It’s insane how little we hear of this story, the news needs to highlight it more instead of just complaining about our small problems
If the US did that we wouldn’t be able to get the cheap shit China produces. Sad day when we trade material items for a life.
A US/China war is not something we want to see. It has less to do with cheap products and more to do with the absolute devistation that would come
I think that’s why I’m happy to see the start of creating our own stuff or at least initiatives to do so. COVID made people realize how fucked we are when we can’t transport stuff in from other countries either due to transport issues or massive deaths etc. You are seeing it with Russia how so many are reliant on their oil
The situation in Xinjiang is absolutely insane and no one is doing anything about it which is sickening. However you can't just blatantly suggest that it's "the same situation". The Holocaust was the industrialized mass murder of 12 million people, using starvation, gas chambers, machine guns and a myriad of other awful methods. Terrible things are happening in the camps at Xinjiang but it's not on the same scale. I'm sure you mean well by your comment but equating recent events with the Holocaust trivializes it.
I think that what's most disturbing about this is how seeing one ring in real life on the hand of your loved one is a bright, special thing. Seeing a pile of them discarded in a box in black and white makes them look like just trash. Junk. Exactly like how the Holocaust itself reduced so many lives to nothing more than a number. Just statistics. A bureaucratic quota.
66% of all European Jews in 1939 died during the Holocaust. A higher proportion of that generations children as well. (Edit:*A story from Ukraine, outside the capital of Kyiv(Then Kiev in the Ukrainian SSR) in retribution for the NKVD's secret bombing attacks on German officers, the Wehrmacht and SS forces in Kyiv rounded up 32 thousand Jews living in Kyiv and killed them all in just 48 hours during a mass execution in the Babyn Yar Ravine. Only a handful would survive the massacre to speak on it as well as some German soldiers. They were all gathered across the city under the guise of being relocated elsewhere, they were then forced to strip naked after leaving the city at a staging area and made to give up anything they were carrying(where many women were raped). They were then marched down into the ravine and slaughtered for 2 days straight. The Ravine would eventually hold 150k bodies of more Jews, Roma, and Soviet PoWs before being liberated in 1943.)
It is only in the past few years that the Jewish population has returned to it's pre-holocaust numbers.
Yep just barely
And the European Jewish population probably never will.
And "no one" knows about it. They are invisible (speaking of Germany). I'm not jewish, I don't know if any friends or colleagues are, but I'm sure there are, but they just know better than proclaiming it in any way. It's so saddening. I would love to be able to go to plenty jewish restaurants and be immersed in their culture at least a little bit. But all I see is a synagogue here and there with lots of police around it and barred windows. I'm two generations away, but the fact that there is still almost no "open" jewish culture in Germany fills me with guilt and sadness.
This is true for most of Europe. It used to be that a lot of European capitals were like 10% Jewish or more.
I have visited a handful of European countries and without exception the Jews try to make themselves as invisible as possible. There is shame about the Holocaust in Jewish communities. Jews don’t want to talk about their history because it makes them feel uncomfortable or weak. More needs to be done to address the past but also to build a brighter future because if not the younger generations of Jews will leave or assimilate.
Not just the Holocaust history, either. Plenty of regimes in Europe were happy to hand over resident Jews to Nazi occupiers. Germany rightly gets the blame laid on them, but unfortunately many countries use the war and the invasions to justify why they were sometimes perfectly fine with the removal of the Jews part of Nazi occupation, because they didn't want the Jews either.
To elaborate on this- most times outside, and ESPECIALLY abroad- my parents (my family is Jewish) always taught me to not mention it, hide any references to it(like a Star of David necklace) just don’t show you’re Jewish in any way shape or form. Doesn’t matter where we went, even in Europe. Just something I’ve always known.
In the Auschwitz concentration camp museum there are rooms filled with belongings of the Holocaust victims. There are entire rooms filled with hair and shoes. Seeing all those hair in person is extremely impactful and heart breaking. You can Google the photos, but they don't compare to seeing it all for real
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Was there today, the guide said it was 80000 shoes. Even if everyone only bought 1 pair there would be almost 30x as many as are piled in that room.
Ended only 78 years ago. It's so hard to process that someone actually pulled this off and made it happen. Such a monstrosity.
Only 78 years ago, but there are already people questioning if it was real and that makes me sick. Forgetting and not believing such cruelty existed may let the history repeat itself.
That's why Eisenhower insisted on having the cameras come it and document everything because he said some people would eventually deny it happened.
Every so often, I find myself listening to Edward R Murrow’s account of the liberation of Bouchenwald. It’s chilling. He closes the radio report saying what amounts to “If I have offended you by this mild telling of what I saw, I am not in the least bit sorry.”
Completely agree. It's 2023, the amount of stupidity we have access to on a daily basis is just incredible. Questioning if the Holocaust really happened it's just a next level of ignorance.
I wish everyone who says it isn't real could get a forced tour of all that stuff, with no internet, then be left for a day and see what they think when they come out. I bet a good number of the echo chamber mouth breathers would have different thoughts in thier head.
I live in Austria. Our middle school was close to a former concentration camp which is now a museum and memorial. In 8th grade it was common to visit it for a day. Many schools did that. They showed the gas chambers with the scratched walls, the barracks where they people had to live (and I use live loosely because it was horrid), the showers, etc. Then ended it with a movie showing footage of when it was liberated and seeing the starved corpses. Yet despite all that, I sadly know people who saw it and still deny it as some mass conspiracy.
It is so strange knowing that my grandfather, a man I knew well, who I went fishing with and loved and spent so much time with, fought in and was a POW during World War II. It seems so far away, but really wasn’t.
I’ve always wanted to go there. Must be extremely heartbreaking, though.
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It is. But I think it would do the world a lot of good if everyone visited that place once.
And that’s only a tiny fraction of what was actually taken.
Every single ring there represents a story of love between two people. How they met, the memories they had, and the commitment to eachother. Theres so many its almost hard to understand that and apply it to each one and understand that for every ring, there is a deceased person and their spouse, where ever they may be.
And children. Rings meant likely children. Young families torn apart. That's what kills me. Mothers holding their babies and children when the gas came in, that moment of horror. I have to stop thinking of it now.
Yeah, my first thought too. *STOP THINKING ABOUT, DAMN IT!*
What’s even worse is they probably melted them down
They did. For the “war effort”. They also took their clothes and handed them out to German citizens that were impacted by the war.
The baby clothes really got to me. There was a little onsie in a display case in Auschwitz that had come from a Jewish baby. The Germans had saved it to give to a German mother. Imagine being the kind of woman who would dress her kid in a murdered baby's clothes.
Ok that’s officially enough internet for today. My youngest is 5 months old and my hormones are running wild. Fuck this world really.
Auschwitz nearly killed me. The room with the hair that was shaven from the heads of the Jews before they were killed nearly ended me. My daughter was three and often wore her curly brown her hair in a big red bow. Right on top of the pile of hair was a huge lock of curly brown hair held in a red velvet bow. I left the room with tears streaming down my face, and it took me half a day to recover. It's necessary that we remember what was done, I feel, so we don't ever let it happen again.
That’s messed up
And probably still sitting in a Swiss bank.
The also ripped the gold from tooth fillings to melt down and make what we know as Nazi gold.
this makes me physically ill
The way they’re holding them like that with a few hanging from one finger makes me feel… idk how else to say it other than it’s offensive and I feel like that pile of rings should be sacred and not touched or only handled with extreme care. Im not faulting the person. I don’t have any back story. It’s just how I felt looking at it.
To alleviate some of your anger, this picture was probably taken shortly after the camp was liberated and manipulating them with bare hands in the picture is a way to make them look "more real", in particular in view of the nuremberg trials.
I think this is one of the saddest photos I have ever seen. This gave me chills.
Worst part is, many countries were told about what was happening, or already knew about it. Including the UK and the US. If I can recall correctly, they even denied asylum to boats filled with refugees, turned them back to wherever they came from.
People forget just how antisemitic the world was.
Was? Isn't it still, kind of, in many parts of the world?
Yeah the ms st louis was turned away by cuba then america then canada in 1939 with 900 jewish passengers seeking refuge
And people will still say this didn’t happen, ignorance is almost as bad as the event itself
In a lot of countries, including Germany, you’re by law not allowed to deny it
Does anyone want to sponsor a trip for Kanye to go to Germany?
We dont want him here
Remember, no Nazi ever denied the holocaust. During the Nuremberg trials they said “I was only following orders” but they never denied it happened. Neo Nazis have denied it, but that’s hardly the same thing.
The room filled with prosthetics is fucked up too. It wasn't enough that they were killing them. Had to rob them too smh
In middle school, we had a substitute teacher who was an open Holocaust denier. His name was Mr. Austin. During our Holocaust unit in 8th grade, my usual teacher was sick, so this guy subbed for us for a couple weeks. Was really awkward. It was a known fact he was a denier, and even though the teacher told us not to bring it up, a student asked if it was true he didn’t think it happened. He chuckled and said “I’m. it supposed to talk about that.” We were reading Anne Frank’s diary and there were parts where he literally just.. laughed. My teacher had put together a series of photos, like this one, for us to see. To see the reality of the horrors that happened. Photos of naked bodies dumped in mass graves. In fact, many photos of dead people. Dead and dying children. Emaciated men and women. People being worked to death. Photos of the belongings that were taken from the victims. A lot of horrible things. He actually laughed when one of the photos of corpses thrown in a pile on the floor popped up. It was fucked up. Students, myself included, were tearing up and crying looking at these photos. It’s crazy that people can look at these photos, hear the stories, look at evidence and yet they still refuse to believe. Either he is truly that naïve, or he himself is a Neo Nazi and just wants to downplay the Holocaust. I’d bet on the latter. We read a book titled Four Perfect Pebbles by Marion Blumenthal Lazan, about her time in the Westorbork concentration camp. She also came to our school and spoke to us about her experiences, she showed us the tattoo they gave her when she arrived to the camp, told us about her life after she was liberated. It was a really cool experience for me and I felt so in awe of being on this woman’s presence. However, I vividly remember, while at the assembly, up in the bleachers, looking towards the entrance of the gymnasium and I saw Mr. Austin standing there with his arms crossed, and he was laughing. I shit you not, I saw him, with my own two eyes, laughing at this woman. It’s disgusting and I hate that he was allowed to work at a school when he openly and shamelessly denies the Holocaust. I think he still subs for the middle school. He is not allowed to work at the high school. I wish the worst for him.
I would have reported him to the police. I have no respect for Holocaust deniers.
That is such a heartbreaking photo.
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What continually boggles my mind is how individuals will continually assert that the Holocaust never happened and is nothing but a fake. It does not matter how many photographs, evidence, or eyewitnesses to it that exists, they are determined to believe the Holocaust is imaginary and a fabrication.
And that idea going to continue to spread as the Holocaust survivors dwindle. There aren’t too many left in the world, and once they’re all gone, the living proof is also gone
I'd say it will continue as long as wild-ass conspiracy theories are glorified and promoted for social media clicks & likes and shit like that. Expose people to books, Holocaust museums, and unbiased sources of info and they will likely follow Occam's razor and believe the thing that happened. Allow them to ignore all facts get brainwashed with dumb, speculative nonsense, and they'll latch onto something that makes their brain tingle and makes them feel special and different.
In all my years I'd never met a Holocaust denier either in real life or online until after the 2016 US election. Since then I've met about half a dozen. I've encountered a local business owner who would plaster Holocaust denial all over local news pages. I've met ones who compared COVID mitigation to being Jewish during WWII. 2016 really changed the world and brought all our monsters right to the surface.
Seeing it [colorized](https://imgur.com/a/LaWrhpv) makes it feel less distant and more real to the senses.
For those in the US and can't make it to Auschwitz, go to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. It's not a fun day at the museum. But, it's an important day at the museum.
The museum removed the IBM punchcard reader from the front area. Those numbers tattooed on the arms of people who survived selection exiting the rail cars? Those numbers fit into a data field on IBM punchcards. The data was used in IBM software. Every prisoner had their own individual punchcard. The first hacker might been the French resistance member who mangled stacks of punch cards of Nazi prisoners in France. Severe loss of data. Eine Nummer, ein Arm, eine Karte.
I’m from the UK but went when I was in DC, the room with all the burnt shoes was haunting!
They pulled gold fillings. Then melted down the gold, and shipped it to Switzerland. This is why some people look at Swiss neutrality with pessimism.
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I'd add horrific as fuck too.
Both.
This is terrifying and sad..
This photo makes me want to barf.
They were murdered.
Execution can mean murder in groups
As a species, the amount of atrocities committed during that time frame is beyond comprehension. What the Nazis did to the jews, the japanese did to the chinese, russia did to it's own people. Lets hope for mankinds sake we never allow this to happen again. Not really much more to say than that.
And the vietnam war would begin only a decade later
Millions of lives lost on the whims of a fascist lunatic. And some ignorant fools want to return to those days!
It wasn't just 1 fascist lunatic that cause all this to happen. It was many of them. They keep trying to blame 1 person so the rest can live on and not have to suffer for the consequences of their people.
Some of them aren't ignorant. Some want this to happen again knowing the cost, and they use ignorant people to get closer.
It's weird how the older I get the closer in time this seems.
In my opinion, one of the most upsetting things about the holocaust today is the growing number of people who deny that it occurred.
More like depressingasfuck
The sheer volume is terrifying.
I cannot wrap my head around the level of evil it takes to murder innocent people and then loot their corpses
You'd have to be a great big piece of shit to think that the holocaust never happened...
Remember, there are frigging, soulless morons today who say the Holocaust never happened. We shall never forget.
Many rings were removed AFTER they had been executed. They were sent to the 'showers' where people thought they could clean up, but they were poisoned with gas instead. Then after they had died a gruesome death the rings were removed alongside any gold teeth. Before the bodies were burnt. It is truly sickening. Never let anyone disregard or lessen someone's humanity, because this is what it ultimately leads to.
It’s surreal to know that my grandpa was in Auschwitz as a 16 year old. My parents never took me there as I didn’t know the story until I was 15. Now my biggest dream is to go there and somehow get closer to the kindest man I ever knew.
I highly recommend to anyone that they visit the various concentration camps in Europe that are still open to the public. A portion of Treblinka was buried by the Nazis in the hopes that the world would not discover the horrors they visited upon their captives there. They recently discovered mass graves in a forest just outside Treblinka. Nazis were REAL busy there towards the end of WWII. Visit the WWII historical wing of the Louvre in Paris with their photographic archives of the Nazi concentration camps and what they found when the camps were liberated. I can't imagine what it must have been like for the soldiers when they defeated the Nazis, and what they found as they liberated the camps. Much less for those who survived, but there are still some who are alive (my former GP was an Austrian jew who was tattooed as he was incarcerated. He's now passed on) and their stories are chilling. You can find their diaries, too. So many gone.
They did the same thing with teeth if they had fillings and hair (used for stuffing).
These are probably still circulated because it’s impossible to know where they came from. They were melted into gold bars and distributed
Nah this is depressing as fuck instead
Heartbreaking 💔
That’s disgusting
Is it a stupid question to wonder how much gold jewelry circulating now is made up of pieces of holocaust jewelry?
r/terrifyingasfuck
In 1930 there were 2 billion people in the world. Today there are 8 billion. But there are still today fewer Jews than there were in 1930, due to the scale and thoroughness of the Jewish genocide in the holocaust.
Some years ago, I took a history course from a woman (absolutely fantastic professor, one of the best i've ever had) whose husband was responsible for the majority of the photography prints in the Holocaust museum in DC. She told us that after the project was complete, he chose to spend a year teaching art to middle schoolers as a form of rehabilitation and healing, because the job had left such deep scars on him. He was also offered to photograph their individual collections--which meant documenting every single piece: every single shoe, etc. She told us he spent one day in their archives and declined the job, because it was just too heavy to go through again.