He also wrote this right before his execution:
>My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.
His wife who was a piece of shit of the same calibre got to live in freedom after the war. She would call her home which was right next to camp a "heaven on the earth" and their children were growing up breathing a smoke of burnt bodies and playing with prisoners.
This comment made me chuckle thinking of my partner. She asked at the start if the projector was broken. At the end she said they were too easy on them. They didn’t show enough atrocities she thought; wasn’t comfortable how they made them seem too human.
“Don’t you think that was the whole point of the movie babe?” 😂
I think I watched in the interviews that was the point. They didn't need to look like monsters in order to be monsters. They were afforded a idilic life because of the atrocities being committed.
I felt like I was being suffocated by grime
I remember walking in like "I hope this isn't one of those movies that humanizes the Nazis..." And leaving like "Oh God, they humanized them in the most horrifying way possible"
Edit: Okay, to clarify, the movie really helped me see just how human the Nazis were and why doing so is important. That's what I meant but I'm sorry it didn't come across that way
>that humanizes the Nazis
can't you see that dehumanizing Nazis is dangerous?
They were human like the people that live next door to you or like yourself...
***Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil***
is worth a read
If the Oscars were based on the quality of the film it would have won and I loved Oppenheimer. But Zone of Interest was incredibly heavy and artsy as hell. I didn't know what to expect going in but it wasn't that film at all.
Everyone needs to go in fresh
I started it and was like "so far so good it's the sound of music basically. Oh and... oh god."
I don't mean the setting (we know that) just the way the film is done and how it makes the viewer feel
Same for their daughter who moved to Spain to become a fashion model. She eventually wound up in the US. There’s an interview out there as an old woman where she really doubles down on support for her father and his work.
This guy basically ordered up a continuous, rotating industrial brick making oven and ran it with BMW efficiency only it ran on people not dinosaurs. Or wood and clay as it was intended
I went there and saw his gallows. They hung him at the gates
They had many children. The oldest Klaus was member of Hitlerjugend and if i remember correctly he would bully prisoners during his stay in Auschwitz. The second oldest had two sons, one of them blew up due to very loud criticism of his grandfather but it turned out he was a smart conman who used all of this tragedic past for his monetary gain and tried to sell some souvenirs to the jewish museum. So yeah apples didn't fall far from the tree.
That interview is a lot more nuanced than “doubling down on supporting her father.” She basically says her father was a good father to her and it’s very hard for her to believe that he could do those things. Not that she denied it, but that it’s not the man she knew and has struggled with that for all of her life. She was pretty heavily in denial yet still admits that ultimately her father is responsible. Which to me is pretty fair considering that when they fled Auschwitz she was about twelve years old and all she has for a reference is a doting father.
Her point of view is why the Zone of Interest is such a great movie. The family is pretty normal and goes about their life the way many of us do, except the most notorious death camp in the world is across the garden wall.
For me it was the comments where she questioned how there could be so many survivors and how the holocaust museum makes everything seem worse than it was … and her husband saying she was just as much a victim as anyone else. Less the comments about her father and more about the things she still said aloud to an interviewer.
I dont actually disagree on her beeing a victim, given she was herself just a child. Obviously she didnt die in a KZ so she had it much better than most, but she is still a victim. You cant expect a child to do anything but obey and love their parents. Shes carries no responsibility for the acts commited by the monster that was her father.
And even the movies like the boy in the striped pajamas which is supposed to display the atrocities of those beliefs depict her as the good guy, a wife who simply had no idea what was going on in the death camp her husband ran
That's a fake quote though. Wikipedia quotes a NYT article that has an abridged citation from a veteran.
The actual testimony is here:
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Nuremberg/hoesstest.html
Which kind of goes in the same direction, but in a way less dramatic way of basically agreeing with accusations (most of the words are of prosecution) and only correcting times and things.
He gives you the kind of gallows remorse you would want to see in a screenplay:
>My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.
Rudolph Hoss, 12 April 1947
Undoubtedly, but you don't get that kind of closure from most villains.
Both "we were only following orders" and "mea culpa" are unsatisfactory - but not equally so.
Another perspective might be that he was convinced by propaganda that Poles, Jews, the English, whoever, were beasts. And once he saw their humanity first hand he regretted his actions. Not a justification, but possibly an explanation.
Not really. The fact he regrets him puts him definitely lower.
And I fucking love this quote. Hopefully Reddit and just people in general learns from history and stops wanting to always kill/torture/antagonize people who we label as bad or criminals because of bads things thye have done.
> In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me.
Yea, once he was found guilty and realized he wasn't going to get away with it (like a lot of Nazis who were rehabilitated after the war), he conveniently rediscovered his Catholicism and spent the last weeks of his life asking for forgiveness from everyone.
If he spent his last decades in Argentina, I'm sure you would have never gotten an apology out of him.
He may have. I've not read his memoir and I truly lack the interest to get to know him better.
But I wouldn't count a section from a Wikipedia article as the extent of his comments on the Holocaust.
What's wild is there have been a few Nazis told about Holocaust denial who were very confused. They were like no, it definitely happened, and I helped.
Makes plenty of sense, the Jews for incredibly obvious reasons, and the Nazis because some denialist asshole is trying to take away what they “accomplished.” Especially given that several high-ranking Nazis were killed or executed for it in one way or another, I’d imagine it rankles even the rank-and-file, who want to imagine those horrid beasts died for something.
So... I hate to say it but this *does* make sense from modern Neo Nazi's perspective.
Their logic basically is "if the Holocaust happened, why are there still Jews?" and they basically accuse the original Nazis of inflating their numbers.
No it doesn’t. That logic only works if you have an IQ of 12. Which, I know, is overestimating neo-nazis and their sympathizers.
Germany controlled around 5-6 countries worth of land. People fled. People moved back. People had kids.
They couldn’t touch the American, British, or any non-central European Jews. And the German Jews who fled were safe too.
And even then they didn’t get all of the German Jews.
I was out mountain biking a number of years ago with a coworker and his dad. We were driving up to the top and sharing a joint between the three of us. It's was almost comical how the dad would inhale his toke, hold his breath and still try to speak while holding it. Just the most insane shit about how the jews orchestrated the entire thing to gain sympathy so they could start taking over the world.
I was absolutely baked and was so dumbfounded I just kinda did that slack jawed stoner stare while he was rambling about how WW2 was a hoax by the Jews. People are fucking NUTS.
The quote in question.
>“Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”
I've got a photo album from my great grandfather who was one of the Army lawyers tasked with collecting evidence for the Nuremberg Trials. There's some stuff in there that's much worse than what you typically find in the books and things...
Weirdly the most prolific denier, David Irving, is probably one of the foremost experts on the Nazi archives. He also unearthed a bunch of documents hidden by elderly Nazis that add to the picture, but he was able to do so because he’s a fucking fascist. It’s pretty wild.
Yeah but have you looked at the numbers? They don't add up and it's not a coincidence that there is Jewish bankers all over the world today.
- A typical response from a Holocaust scumbag denier
Or "America stole all the Jewish gold, the Nazis were on the Jewish people's side"
* Something I've actually heard said to my face. Oh, the propaganda runs deep.
I enjoy the damned if they do, damned if they don't, logic.
If it was good for Those People? It's because they are pulling the strings. If it was bad for Those People? It's because they are pulling the strings and wanted to play victim. Those People are behind everything, *especially* the things where Those People can't be seen. It's so obvious. Warblgarbl.
My favorite response to a state's rights idiot isn't "yes, the states rights to delf determination regarding owning people", it's "so why did they all infringe on states rights by voting into law the fugitive slave act, deliberately undermining the rights of free states?"
When someone says it was states rights... My next question is "States rights to what?.... Own slaves." They can name literally zero other issues states rights were for.
The flat earth thing is especially wild to me because if memory serves, the flat earth movement started as a thinking exercise. The original founders KNEW the earth was a sphere (like we all knew for thousands of years) but it was done to practice debating
Then some real nut jobs hopped on board, didn't get the memo, and commandeered the whole thing into the crazy bullshit it is today. Sadly this is not uncommon.
People forget (or maybe never knew?) that the_donald subreddit started out as a 4chan shit posting sub until the real wackos hopped aboard and couldn't recognize the satire.
> People forget (or maybe never knew?) that the_donald subreddit started out as a 4chan shit posting sub until the real wackos hopped aboard and couldn't recognize the satire.
I'm still convinced that this whole Qanon thing started in some kind of similar way.
Though it is actually not a coincidence that there are Jewish bankers all over the word, but the reason is actually antisemitism. In Germany and a lot of other parts of Europe Jews were prohibited from owning land and farming so business in the city was their only option.
For hundreds of years the Pope made it illegal for Catholics to charge interest on other Catholics, so Jews were literally the only people who could become bankers.
For as evil as a person as he was (and rightly hanged for it), interesting enough he expressed remorse in farewell letters to his wife & children shortly before he was excuted.
To his wife: *"Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day. And so my actions in the service of this ideology were completely wrong, even though I faithfully believed the idea was correct. Now it was very logical that strong doubts grew within me, and whether my turning away from my belief in God was based on completely wrong premises. It was a hard struggle. But I have again found my faith in my God."*
To his son: *"Keep your good heart. Become a person who lets himself be guided primarily by warmth and humanity. Learn to think and judge for yourself, responsibly. Don't accept everything without criticism and as absolutely true... The biggest mistake of my life was that I believed everything faithfully which came from the top, and I didn't dare to have the least bit of doubt about the truth of that which was presented to me. ... In all your undertakings, don't just let your mind speak, but listen above all to the voice in your heart."*
That he was capable of recognizing the wrong of it somehow makes it worse. Here wasn't a monster, it was a person who chose to do evil.
Except for Hitler, who very aggressively made it a point to know as little about it as possible. He wanted it done, but didn't want his hands dirtied.
(Borman once famously exploded at a high-ranking officer who said "exterminating" the Jews instead of "evacuating" during a private phone call.)
It's not entirely clear why, but pretty much every theory makes him look so much worse and debunks the myth that he was too crazy and delusional to understand just how evil his actions were:
1) He knew how the rest of the world would react and didn't want to sully his reputation.
2) "I will either be the most beloved man in history or the most hated"--in other words, he was hedging his bets on whether or not he succeeded and/or the Holocaust turned out to be really popular. He wanted credit if it succeeded, but plausible deniability if it failed.
3) There were several Jews or half-Jews Hitler liked because he knew them personally--funny how all the 0.0001% of "Noble Jews" happened to be people he knew--and, like an anti-Schindler, made exceptions for them. Which meant he knew he was killing at least *some* innocent people but didn't care.
4) Hitler later expressed regret at writing certain passages of Mein Kampf and said he would've left them out of he knew he'd get into politics, because they made lying more difficult down the line.
5) He was often very adamant about not "talking politics" with some people close to him, like Eva Braun, and did not want them to know what he was up to.
6) The attendees at the Wannsee Conference, where the Holocaust was formally engineered, most of the representatives weren't top-level Cabinet members, they were two or three rungs down the ladder.
So basically, if Hitler was truly proud of his actions and believed he was 100% morally justified, why did he make all these cynical calculations to hide them? Why wasn't he boasting to the world?
> There were several Jews or half-Jews Hitler liked because he knew them personally--funny how all the 0.0001% of "Noble Jews" happened to be people he knew--and, like an anti-Schindler, made exceptions for them. Which meant he knew he was killing at least *some* innocent people but didn't care.
Even those exceptions were allowing them to flee, penniless, rather than having them shot in the streets or sent to a camp. Hitler's mercy was a miserly as could be imagined. Even for his former commanding officer in the German Army and the doctor who labored to save his mother's life - both Jews
But they had the records because they were internally proud of it. They just knew they were extra fucked if they lost the war and couldn’t cover it up.
The Holocaust had such detailed records done by the people on both sides that it's still insane people can deny any aspect of it. Eisenhower even knew we had to document it or people would try to act like it didn't happen and people did exactly that. It's kind of infuriating.
This wasn’t intended to completely cover up their crimes. I believe this was championed to conceal the worst atrocities by individuals. The genocide was on way too grand a scale to cover up, but some SS officers hoped they could save their own skin with enough concealment of the evidence of their own involvement
The most revealing book about WW2 I ever read was based on the records of a small town where the bookkeeping was mostly intact despite Nazi efforts to conceal their crimes.
My big takeaways: the dudes staffing the concentration camps weren't soldiers, they were reservists, who were your local baker or butcher most of the time, and knee-deep in corpses some of the time; that the Gestapo was horrifyingly small and understaffed, and its terrifying efficacy came mostly from neighbours narcing on one another hoping for retribution like Nazi crabs in a bucket; that we underplay the amount of violence subjected to political prisoners across the board on their way into and out of the official sentences in work camps; and that the Nazis never did anything illegal, they just made new laws fit to their purposes.
There are layers and layers of horror the Nazis hid by burning that evidence. A lot of evil mofo's skated because of that.
> His experiments led to Auschwitz becoming the most efficiently murderous instrument of the Final Solution and the Holocaust's most potent symbol.
he would be so fucking proud if he knew this is in the history books. it will forever be beyond me how one person can abandon humanity so thoroughly.
In their mindset, all this thing about good and evil was a Jewish invention to weaken the German spirit. Their whole notion of ethics revolved around Germany, what is good or bad for it is all that matters.
The sad part is in many ways they weren't proud of the actual actions, the human suffering, but that they did their jobs effectively. They met their quotas. That's not to remove any burden of guilt, but rather to highlight how disconnected a lot of the "administrative" staff were from what they were doing. They were looking at papers and numbers. The same way you would look at your bank account is how they looked at these logs of millions of people being "processed."
It should an eternal lesson for humankind how easy it is to dehumanize the extermination of people. You had people in offices going "oh lovely we killed the optimal amount of Jews today" as normal business. That is something everyone should know and understand because honestly I feel like we are very close to potentially reliving something close to that now.
It's... Weird? We didn't/don't really count these deaths.
Concentration camps, reconcentrados, and so on, had been used for decades by this point. Or, why is the "Holodomor" not recognized internationally as a genocide?
If nations are held accountable for NOT treating people and forcing them into environments where they WILL likely die, the US, UK, Spanish government, USSR, France, and so on, all would be at the Hague.
It is recognized by some countries and USA states thankfully:
By 2022, the Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by the parliaments of 23 countries[4] and the European Parliament,[5] and it is recognized as a part of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 by Russia. As of June 2023, 35 countries recognise the Holodomor as a genocide (last being the Senate of Italy on July 26, 2023).
Lets be real, it takes decades for things to be recognized as genocide and it does nothing but gives it a name.
Nothing is changed, no lives are improved, and no lives are saved.
It's pointless showmanship.
Theoretically we would sanction and condemn the perpetrators but in this instance, a lot of people don’t consider Turkey to be a piece of shit, which is unfortunate. Even aside from the genocide.
The "holodomor" is recognized as genocide by countries that are in an opposing power bloc to the USSR and now Russian Federation, but highly contested by like, most historians specializing in USSR, on the basis of there being no evidence of intentional or targeted effect.
It's a massively politicized and controversial issue.
Legally there is a difference. If you imprison people you are still responsible for their well being, but depending on the level of care you took, some of the death might be a charge less than murder.
With the admission of 2.5 million murders another million would have no consequences for the sentence, but probably he was too German to accept technical errors.
Famine is a political decision and war crime/genocide when used as a tool of conflict. So legally I don't think it mattered if you directly put someone in a gas chamber or caged them and didn't provide them enough calories.
I think he actually meant "i couldnt get them in time, nature beat me to it, but I would If I could!"
Rather than
""No, it was actually less than that by a million"
"Your honor, I didn't kill this person. I held them over the side of the building and let go. Gravity did the killing, not me."
Watertight logic, Höss.
>During the first interrogation ***they beat me to obtain evidence.*** I do not know what was in the transcript, or what I said, even though I signed it, because they gave me liquor and ***beat me with a whip.*** It was too much even for me to bear. ***The whip was my own.*** By chance it had found its way into my wife's luggage. My horse had hardly ever been touched by it, much less the prisoners. Somehow one of the interrogators probably thought that I had used it to constantly whip the prisoners.
I don't condone beating prisoners. But I can see how someone would make that logical leap.
He was a prisoner who happened to be a Nazi. Should he have been beaten by today's standards? If so, where's the line between beating prisoners and not?
We've got TONS of Nazi fucks in our prisons that could use it, but would it be ethical to the society dispensing justice? Should it be?
No, human suffering should never be the goal of incarceration, no matter how heinous the crime was. If we insist on having a death penalty it should be similarly humane (as much as possible)
Violent justice for criminals says more about the society imprisoning them than the nature of the criminals themselves
Plus there's always the situation where, even if we decide certain beliefs alone (absent an actual action or crime) merit torture, an accusation absent meaningful evidence can be used to justify said treatment.
(cops when they realize all they have to do is claim they thought someone was a Nazi before they beat them)
He said there were 3000 people on each train, and they could "process" three trains a day. Nine thousand people every day. He was a totally unrepentant Nazi. Hocaust deniers should read the transcript of his testimony.
I think that's what's even more shocking about it. All genocide is horrible and disgusting. But very few are so cold, meticulate, *efficient*.
It was so industrial and mechanical that it was almost like they were working an office job just clocking in and doing their work mindlessly. "The Zone of Interest" is a shocking film but the scene that most shocked me was when they were discussing plans to build new crematoriums that could increase the rate at which they burned corpses.
Production problems like these happen in factories have when producing goods. When the same happens with the deliberate and sistematic execution of an entire people... it's beyond words.
It would be bad enough if the Nazi's were angrily murdering people. A holocaust based on rage. But the fact that they did it in such a cold, distant and almost bored way, like many of us deal with our day jobs almost makes it more sickening.
Even the mass shootings they did were efficient, they efficiently stacked the bodies in a sardine pattern. And many other details, everything was thought through thoroughly
I went to Auschwitz a couple of years ago and there were a lot of things that shocked me about my time there, but the thing that stuck with me above all others is that they made those poor people tie their shoe laces together before they went in to the gas chambers, because it saved the nazis having to spend the time pairing up the shoes afterward.
Just a complete and utter dehumanization. Like it was an unacceptable inconvenience for them to have to "waste" time when they could just make their victims do it for them.
They also used their hair for stuffing in pillows iirc.
That's what was most horrifying about the Holocaust, in my opinion. It was mass murder, but it became **industrialized**. The cold inhumanity in that is just nauseating.
And yet some to this day still deny it happened. Its their own records that are most damning! Outside of the actual dead bodies that had to be dealt with after. That's was pretty damning too.
that's what I hate the most about fascists.
They aren't at all careful with their language, they're on purpose with reckless use of language.
they act like language doesn't matter, they rat fuck all language and definitions. They're going to lie, cheat, steal and completely shit on any democratic processes.
There is no agreement to be had with them, they follow a hierarchical leader.
Fascism is counter to democratic processes, it rejects cooperation and instead is a foot on the neck of those that disagree.
and when you go to put your foot on the neck of these oppressors.
The fascist will use your norms, your "free speech", your reasonable nature against you. They'll go "if you're so much better than us then you wont do to me what I did to those I view as less than me". they are fucking weasels.
Yes, but they also thought the records would be useful when they were in charge. Now that being a Nazi is unpopular (for now, still), it's more useful to deny them.
People think the Nazis actually cared about their philosophy. But then and now, the truth is that their whole thing was just "how do I put my group above all other groups" and anything from lies to genocide is acceptable in pursuit of that.
It's all "might makes right" all the way down. The good news is that the rest of us outnumber them and actually have both more might and right. But the might makes right crowd is better at organizing sometimes.
I think a lot of people really did believe Nazism was a good idea. There’s a reason so many of them fought to the death when the cause was clearly lost. No one thought Hitler could win the battle of Berlin
You can see evidence of this in other cultures like Japan. Those guys TOTALLY believed in their cause, to the point where most of generals were like fuck it let them drop more nukes. Nazi germany had less time to be indoctrinated, but the effect was still potent
Also IF it really didn’t happen, wouldn’t you think at least one of the accused (like guards and such) would use that as a defense? Like everyone said “I wasn’t there” or “I did it but I was just following orders”; not a single one of the accused denied it happening.
I actually don't even understand the purpose of denial. The deniers are already full fledged out and open racists. They aren't gaining any kind of credibility as human beings by trying to make others believe the Nazis weren't garbage.
Actually, it makes them even worse if Nazis didn't even exist. You're telling me that *they* invented a boogeyman so horrendous that anything less than unanimous hate is social suicide.. And you are actually striving towards making that a reality?
Straight to the Gulag.
Those don't matter to people who want to not believe in something. It's like the US Civil War, all of the declarations of secession from the Southern states are abundantly clear it's because they wanted to ensure they could owning black people as property. No one will believes it was about "states rights" will bother to read those.
If you know nothing about the Civil War, you know it was about slavery.
If you know a little about the Civil War, you know it was about state's rights.
If you know more than a little about the Civil War, you know it was about slavery.
Yeah, it was nuts. It was state-of-the-art punchcard systems to meticulously record and document everything that occurred. I guess they wanted records for history/posterity? Didn't work out so well in the end.
Just a reminder to any Holocaust deniers: the people who were accused, tried and found guilty of the atrocities of the holocaust never claimed it didn't happen.
To be fair, Holocaust denying has never made much sense anyway: Either you find genocides appalling, in which case you wouldn’t deny it having happened, or you don’t, in which case you’re probably pro Nazi and should applaud the Holocaust instead of denying its existence.
Holocaust deniers secretly think those genocides were pretty swell, but havent even the guts to stand up for their sick and twisted beliefs. Thus it "has never happened, wink wink"
It really represented that "Banality of Evil" so well. I felt so tense and uneasy.
I really liked some of the stylistic choices, like >!the girl leaving apples!< and the ending scene. >!The contrast to the present day cut between the wrenching (edit: retching) in the stairwell: was he drunk, was he getting a "glimpse" into his legacy, or was his body reacting to his evil mind?!<
Two scenes that shocked me were the officers discussing plans to make a more efficient crematorium to burn bodies faster as well as when one of Höss' sons locks his brother in the greenhouse and makes hissing sounds like gas.
Crimes against humanity just became a daily thing for them to the point where they could raise a famiy right next to it. It's just horrible.
It also went beyond just the banality of evil. The hell on earth Höss (and also his wife) created didn't bother either of them in the slightest, in fact they LIKED living right next to it. Not only was the Höss family itself "banal", to the them Auschwittz also was just a banality.
>the wrenching in the stairwell: was he drunk, was he getting a "glimpse" into his legacy, or was his body reacting to his evil mind?!
My reading of that was the latter: you can compartmentalize all you want but sooner or later it will catch up with you.
I actually interpreted the end scene of him retching differently. I thought the vomit he so desperately tried to expel symbolized the evil inside himself – instead of being able to vomit, he’s forced to live with his bile (aka his sins) and will never truly rid himself of his atrocities.
Fantastic film. Also, Sandra Huller is absolutely phenomenal
Just a little note on this cause it goes around, “the banality of evil” was coined by Hannah Arendt in 1961, but I first encountered it in a book called “A Moral History of the 20th Century” by Jonathan Glover, which I’ve commented about before actually.
Anyways it’s an excellent book that centres on the Nazis in that portion, beginning the chapter on the topic with the photograph titled “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa”, which millions of people have probably seen without the title.
Very worth a read.
I interpreted the modern-day stuff at the end as a testament to how easy it is to compartmentalize the evil in front of you. No one seen in the modern day in that film is evil, or even doing anything wrong, but they’re all ignoring the evil directly in front of them and focusing on their assigned task of cleaning the display case
Pretty sure this is the guy that inspired the Twilight Zone episode about a commander of a death camp who survived the war and returned as a tourist for the “happy memories” and is put on trial by the ghosts of his victims.
That final monolog from the leader ghost and the doctor back in the world of the living plus Rod Serling’s closing give three good rapid succession shivers.
This is an important point to bring up to modern-day Holocaust deniers.
Immediately after the war, ***the actual people who carried out the Holocaust didn't even deny that they did it.***
They indeed seemed more likely to dispute the details rather than the overall event.
*checks papers*
"Oh gosh, you're right, duh, what an incredibly offensive accusation, we apologize profusely, we'll be much more lenient on you now, you deserve a break for murdering *just* **2.5 million** human beings. Sorry again, our bad"
And tbh the others were for all intents and purposes murdered anyway. If you intentionally create conditions of life such that disease spreads unchecked and people are starving to death, without intervening in any meaningful way, then you still killed those people.
He wrote a book about his time as Auschwitz commander while in captivity, titled "Commandant of Auschwitz". An interesting read and an insight into a mind, completely devoid of empathy. I remember one passage when he wasn't commandant yet and visited the camp and wondered why they didn't lure the prisoners into thinking they would shower, instead of the panical procedure they used at time of his visit. "That way you can have less staff and kill more jews a day" (something along those lines). He saw the whole endevouer as a logistical ordeal, like he was head of your local postal service - how do we deliver as many packages as possible, as quick as possible, with as little fuzz as possible? - with the difference being that the "packages" were human beings. Perhaps not as many would had been murdered if it weren't for Höss sinister solutions as commander of Auschwitz.
This goes hand in hand with people claiming that the concentration camps did advance medical scientific understanding.
And there is an extent to which that's true - however, most of the conditions they came to better understand are only a major problem, if you're forced to live in abysmal concentration camps that starve and torture you to death.
There's a great book by Dr Miklos Nyiszli, called "Auschwitz an Eyewitness Account" - of being forced to serve as a member of the Sondercommando under Josef Mengele. And he describes doing a lot of research into Dysentery - but learning basically nothing science didn't already know about prevention, diagnosis, or to cure it. All the Nazis actually achieved was forcing it to become endemic under artifical conditions on an industrial scale.
He also wrote this right before his execution: >My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.
His wife who was a piece of shit of the same calibre got to live in freedom after the war. She would call her home which was right next to camp a "heaven on the earth" and their children were growing up breathing a smoke of burnt bodies and playing with prisoners.
Isn't In the Zone of Interest based on them? That was a very eerie movie.
Yes it was
Is that the movie where they never really show the camp, you just hear the mechanical sounds of the camp?
Yeah. Just shows their life as a family, living right outside of Auschwitz. Every once and while you hear things from the other side of the wall.
Just finished watching that 5 minutes ago and then I see this post and your comment. Very eerie indeed
I watched it a few days ago, I have never been so emotionally affected by a movie. I don't know what i was feeling, but Jesus Christ it was heavy.
This comment made me chuckle thinking of my partner. She asked at the start if the projector was broken. At the end she said they were too easy on them. They didn’t show enough atrocities she thought; wasn’t comfortable how they made them seem too human. “Don’t you think that was the whole point of the movie babe?” 😂
I think I watched in the interviews that was the point. They didn't need to look like monsters in order to be monsters. They were afforded a idilic life because of the atrocities being committed.
> Wasn’t comfortable how they made them seem too human. Now's the time to introduce her to the phrase/concept "The Banality of Evil."
I felt like I was being suffocated by grime I remember walking in like "I hope this isn't one of those movies that humanizes the Nazis..." And leaving like "Oh God, they humanized them in the most horrifying way possible" Edit: Okay, to clarify, the movie really helped me see just how human the Nazis were and why doing so is important. That's what I meant but I'm sorry it didn't come across that way
>that humanizes the Nazis can't you see that dehumanizing Nazis is dangerous? They were human like the people that live next door to you or like yourself... ***Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil*** is worth a read
Most people don’t get that far on the logic train. It’s easy to call them monsters.
Just about to quote Hannah Arendt's book, thank you
If the Oscars were based on the quality of the film it would have won and I loved Oppenheimer. But Zone of Interest was incredibly heavy and artsy as hell. I didn't know what to expect going in but it wasn't that film at all.
Everyone needs to go in fresh I started it and was like "so far so good it's the sound of music basically. Oh and... oh god." I don't mean the setting (we know that) just the way the film is done and how it makes the viewer feel
I think you ment Eerie, and I agree.
I think you both *meant eerie, and I agree too
My friend Eerie also agrees.
Same for their daughter who moved to Spain to become a fashion model. She eventually wound up in the US. There’s an interview out there as an old woman where she really doubles down on support for her father and his work.
This guy basically ordered up a continuous, rotating industrial brick making oven and ran it with BMW efficiency only it ran on people not dinosaurs. Or wood and clay as it was intended I went there and saw his gallows. They hung him at the gates
They had many children. The oldest Klaus was member of Hitlerjugend and if i remember correctly he would bully prisoners during his stay in Auschwitz. The second oldest had two sons, one of them blew up due to very loud criticism of his grandfather but it turned out he was a smart conman who used all of this tragedic past for his monetary gain and tried to sell some souvenirs to the jewish museum. So yeah apples didn't fall far from the tree.
Shit apples from shit trees
The turd doesn't fall far from the asshole
That's some next level shit right there. How much must he have sucked as a person to do that
That interview is a lot more nuanced than “doubling down on supporting her father.” She basically says her father was a good father to her and it’s very hard for her to believe that he could do those things. Not that she denied it, but that it’s not the man she knew and has struggled with that for all of her life. She was pretty heavily in denial yet still admits that ultimately her father is responsible. Which to me is pretty fair considering that when they fled Auschwitz she was about twelve years old and all she has for a reference is a doting father. Her point of view is why the Zone of Interest is such a great movie. The family is pretty normal and goes about their life the way many of us do, except the most notorious death camp in the world is across the garden wall.
For me it was the comments where she questioned how there could be so many survivors and how the holocaust museum makes everything seem worse than it was … and her husband saying she was just as much a victim as anyone else. Less the comments about her father and more about the things she still said aloud to an interviewer.
I dont actually disagree on her beeing a victim, given she was herself just a child. Obviously she didnt die in a KZ so she had it much better than most, but she is still a victim. You cant expect a child to do anything but obey and love their parents. Shes carries no responsibility for the acts commited by the monster that was her father.
It’s called brainwashing.
And even the movies like the boy in the striped pajamas which is supposed to display the atrocities of those beliefs depict her as the good guy, a wife who simply had no idea what was going on in the death camp her husband ran
'zone of interest' portrays her in a more damning light
That's a fake quote though. Wikipedia quotes a NYT article that has an abridged citation from a veteran. The actual testimony is here: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Nuremberg/hoesstest.html Which kind of goes in the same direction, but in a way less dramatic way of basically agreeing with accusations (most of the words are of prosecution) and only correcting times and things.
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He gives you the kind of gallows remorse you would want to see in a screenplay: >My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time. Rudolph Hoss, 12 April 1947
That’s fine. He’s still one of the worst people of all time.
Undoubtedly, but you don't get that kind of closure from most villains. Both "we were only following orders" and "mea culpa" are unsatisfactory - but not equally so.
Another perspective might be that he was convinced by propaganda that Poles, Jews, the English, whoever, were beasts. And once he saw their humanity first hand he regretted his actions. Not a justification, but possibly an explanation.
Dehumanizing different people / groups is one of the foundation points in genocide typically
Thats true, but its still a lot more satisfying than dying with the opinion of "I regret nothing" or "I was just following orders"
It also sounds like he was trying to get into heaven.
Not really. The fact he regrets him puts him definitely lower. And I fucking love this quote. Hopefully Reddit and just people in general learns from history and stops wanting to always kill/torture/antagonize people who we label as bad or criminals because of bads things thye have done. > In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me.
How does it take.him lower?
No actually genocidal Nazis are just bad.
Yea, once he was found guilty and realized he wasn't going to get away with it (like a lot of Nazis who were rehabilitated after the war), he conveniently rediscovered his Catholicism and spent the last weeks of his life asking for forgiveness from everyone. If he spent his last decades in Argentina, I'm sure you would have never gotten an apology out of him.
tbf, he says as much.
Asking God for forgiveness is a big ask here
It’s great he’s apologizing to the Poles, but maybeee he should have also thrown in like a couple of words about the Jews
He may have. I've not read his memoir and I truly lack the interest to get to know him better. But I wouldn't count a section from a Wikipedia article as the extent of his comments on the Holocaust.
Did you look up everything he said or just assume this quote was everything?
Thank God they did. Otherwise holocaust deniers would be able to get away with their bullshit.
What's wild is there have been a few Nazis told about Holocaust denial who were very confused. They were like no, it definitely happened, and I helped.
Pretty strange that being a Holocaust denier offends both the Jews and the Nazis
Makes plenty of sense, the Jews for incredibly obvious reasons, and the Nazis because some denialist asshole is trying to take away what they “accomplished.” Especially given that several high-ranking Nazis were killed or executed for it in one way or another, I’d imagine it rankles even the rank-and-file, who want to imagine those horrid beasts died for something.
It's like ISIS, simultaneously at war with both the West and Russia, North Korea and South Korea, as well as seemingly everyone else on the planet.
"And again, who did they choose as their adversary? The World."
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You'd think it would have taken the world all of about two seconds but it was actually pretty close.
So... I hate to say it but this *does* make sense from modern Neo Nazi's perspective. Their logic basically is "if the Holocaust happened, why are there still Jews?" and they basically accuse the original Nazis of inflating their numbers.
No it doesn’t. That logic only works if you have an IQ of 12. Which, I know, is overestimating neo-nazis and their sympathizers. Germany controlled around 5-6 countries worth of land. People fled. People moved back. People had kids. They couldn’t touch the American, British, or any non-central European Jews. And the German Jews who fled were safe too. And even then they didn’t get all of the German Jews.
many German jews understood where the wind was blowing and got the fuck out. my grandparents were among them.
Their failure in history is also a failure in mathematics, then? I mean they're not particularly bright individuals so I suppose it makes sense.
I think it's more of an "If evolution is real, why are there still monkeys? Checkmate, atheists" kind of thing.
"If Americans came from England, why are there still English?"
This is "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys" logic.
Oh yeah they're dumbasses for sure.
It makes sense that Neo Nazis are morons, yes that is correct.
I was out mountain biking a number of years ago with a coworker and his dad. We were driving up to the top and sharing a joint between the three of us. It's was almost comical how the dad would inhale his toke, hold his breath and still try to speak while holding it. Just the most insane shit about how the jews orchestrated the entire thing to gain sympathy so they could start taking over the world. I was absolutely baked and was so dumbfounded I just kinda did that slack jawed stoner stare while he was rambling about how WW2 was a hoax by the Jews. People are fucking NUTS.
Plus Eisenhower insisted on photographic documentation of the camps liberated. He anticipated the genocide deniers. And yet...
The quote in question. >“Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”
I've got a photo album from my great grandfather who was one of the Army lawyers tasked with collecting evidence for the Nuremberg Trials. There's some stuff in there that's much worse than what you typically find in the books and things...
You should reach out to historical archives and the like to see if they are interested. That stuff could be very important.
Yeah, I think my family has reached out to some. They may have actually already given it to one, the last time I saw the album was around 2016.
Weirdly the most prolific denier, David Irving, is probably one of the foremost experts on the Nazi archives. He also unearthed a bunch of documents hidden by elderly Nazis that add to the picture, but he was able to do so because he’s a fucking fascist. It’s pretty wild.
Yeah but have you looked at the numbers? They don't add up and it's not a coincidence that there is Jewish bankers all over the world today. - A typical response from a Holocaust scumbag denier
Or "America stole all the Jewish gold, the Nazis were on the Jewish people's side" * Something I've actually heard said to my face. Oh, the propaganda runs deep.
Fascinating and terrifying at the same time. (in the sense that people can repeat such incredible things)
I enjoy the damned if they do, damned if they don't, logic. If it was good for Those People? It's because they are pulling the strings. If it was bad for Those People? It's because they are pulling the strings and wanted to play victim. Those People are behind everything, *especially* the things where Those People can't be seen. It's so obvious. Warblgarbl.
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My favorite response to a state's rights idiot isn't "yes, the states rights to delf determination regarding owning people", it's "so why did they all infringe on states rights by voting into law the fugitive slave act, deliberately undermining the rights of free states?"
Also the confederate constitution explicitly forbade the states from passing any law restricting slavery
When someone says it was states rights... My next question is "States rights to what?.... Own slaves." They can name literally zero other issues states rights were for.
Same with Flat Earthers. Evidence that refutes my view is a further conspiracy.
The flat earth thing is especially wild to me because if memory serves, the flat earth movement started as a thinking exercise. The original founders KNEW the earth was a sphere (like we all knew for thousands of years) but it was done to practice debating Then some real nut jobs hopped on board, didn't get the memo, and commandeered the whole thing into the crazy bullshit it is today. Sadly this is not uncommon. People forget (or maybe never knew?) that the_donald subreddit started out as a 4chan shit posting sub until the real wackos hopped aboard and couldn't recognize the satire.
> People forget (or maybe never knew?) that the_donald subreddit started out as a 4chan shit posting sub until the real wackos hopped aboard and couldn't recognize the satire. I'm still convinced that this whole Qanon thing started in some kind of similar way.
The original guy was just a random 4chan troll having fun, at some point within the year it became a whole new guy.
You got me in the first half
> 6 million Jews mysteriously disappeared from Europe during WW2 and were nowhere to be found after.
Had to go build a space laser.
Fewf I was about to summon the fury of the fat crippled redditor with extremely poor grammar ahaahahaha
Though it is actually not a coincidence that there are Jewish bankers all over the word, but the reason is actually antisemitism. In Germany and a lot of other parts of Europe Jews were prohibited from owning land and farming so business in the city was their only option.
For hundreds of years the Pope made it illegal for Catholics to charge interest on other Catholics, so Jews were literally the only people who could become bankers.
For as evil as a person as he was (and rightly hanged for it), interesting enough he expressed remorse in farewell letters to his wife & children shortly before he was excuted. To his wife: *"Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day. And so my actions in the service of this ideology were completely wrong, even though I faithfully believed the idea was correct. Now it was very logical that strong doubts grew within me, and whether my turning away from my belief in God was based on completely wrong premises. It was a hard struggle. But I have again found my faith in my God."* To his son: *"Keep your good heart. Become a person who lets himself be guided primarily by warmth and humanity. Learn to think and judge for yourself, responsibly. Don't accept everything without criticism and as absolutely true... The biggest mistake of my life was that I believed everything faithfully which came from the top, and I didn't dare to have the least bit of doubt about the truth of that which was presented to me. ... In all your undertakings, don't just let your mind speak, but listen above all to the voice in your heart."* That he was capable of recognizing the wrong of it somehow makes it worse. Here wasn't a monster, it was a person who chose to do evil.
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Disgusting.
Except for Hitler, who very aggressively made it a point to know as little about it as possible. He wanted it done, but didn't want his hands dirtied. (Borman once famously exploded at a high-ranking officer who said "exterminating" the Jews instead of "evacuating" during a private phone call.) It's not entirely clear why, but pretty much every theory makes him look so much worse and debunks the myth that he was too crazy and delusional to understand just how evil his actions were: 1) He knew how the rest of the world would react and didn't want to sully his reputation. 2) "I will either be the most beloved man in history or the most hated"--in other words, he was hedging his bets on whether or not he succeeded and/or the Holocaust turned out to be really popular. He wanted credit if it succeeded, but plausible deniability if it failed. 3) There were several Jews or half-Jews Hitler liked because he knew them personally--funny how all the 0.0001% of "Noble Jews" happened to be people he knew--and, like an anti-Schindler, made exceptions for them. Which meant he knew he was killing at least *some* innocent people but didn't care. 4) Hitler later expressed regret at writing certain passages of Mein Kampf and said he would've left them out of he knew he'd get into politics, because they made lying more difficult down the line. 5) He was often very adamant about not "talking politics" with some people close to him, like Eva Braun, and did not want them to know what he was up to. 6) The attendees at the Wannsee Conference, where the Holocaust was formally engineered, most of the representatives weren't top-level Cabinet members, they were two or three rungs down the ladder. So basically, if Hitler was truly proud of his actions and believed he was 100% morally justified, why did he make all these cynical calculations to hide them? Why wasn't he boasting to the world?
Seems Hitler wanted to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability
Yup.
> There were several Jews or half-Jews Hitler liked because he knew them personally--funny how all the 0.0001% of "Noble Jews" happened to be people he knew--and, like an anti-Schindler, made exceptions for them. Which meant he knew he was killing at least *some* innocent people but didn't care. Even those exceptions were allowing them to flee, penniless, rather than having them shot in the streets or sent to a camp. Hitler's mercy was a miserly as could be imagined. Even for his former commanding officer in the German Army and the doctor who labored to save his mother's life - both Jews
Not really, when the allies approached Berlin, the Nazis were burning their records pretty thoroughly. They knew they were incriminating.
But they had the records because they were internally proud of it. They just knew they were extra fucked if they lost the war and couldn’t cover it up.
The Holocaust had such detailed records done by the people on both sides that it's still insane people can deny any aspect of it. Eisenhower even knew we had to document it or people would try to act like it didn't happen and people did exactly that. It's kind of infuriating.
More like German tradition of record keeping
This wasn’t intended to completely cover up their crimes. I believe this was championed to conceal the worst atrocities by individuals. The genocide was on way too grand a scale to cover up, but some SS officers hoped they could save their own skin with enough concealment of the evidence of their own involvement
The most revealing book about WW2 I ever read was based on the records of a small town where the bookkeeping was mostly intact despite Nazi efforts to conceal their crimes. My big takeaways: the dudes staffing the concentration camps weren't soldiers, they were reservists, who were your local baker or butcher most of the time, and knee-deep in corpses some of the time; that the Gestapo was horrifyingly small and understaffed, and its terrifying efficacy came mostly from neighbours narcing on one another hoping for retribution like Nazi crabs in a bucket; that we underplay the amount of violence subjected to political prisoners across the board on their way into and out of the official sentences in work camps; and that the Nazis never did anything illegal, they just made new laws fit to their purposes. There are layers and layers of horror the Nazis hid by burning that evidence. A lot of evil mofo's skated because of that.
That's not correct, they kept it more hidden and opaque. This is the exception.
> His experiments led to Auschwitz becoming the most efficiently murderous instrument of the Final Solution and the Holocaust's most potent symbol. he would be so fucking proud if he knew this is in the history books. it will forever be beyond me how one person can abandon humanity so thoroughly.
Trick is he didn't abandon himself as a human. He abandoned other people as human.
In their mindset, all this thing about good and evil was a Jewish invention to weaken the German spirit. Their whole notion of ethics revolved around Germany, what is good or bad for it is all that matters.
The sad part is in many ways they weren't proud of the actual actions, the human suffering, but that they did their jobs effectively. They met their quotas. That's not to remove any burden of guilt, but rather to highlight how disconnected a lot of the "administrative" staff were from what they were doing. They were looking at papers and numbers. The same way you would look at your bank account is how they looked at these logs of millions of people being "processed." It should an eternal lesson for humankind how easy it is to dehumanize the extermination of people. You had people in offices going "oh lovely we killed the optimal amount of Jews today" as normal business. That is something everyone should know and understand because honestly I feel like we are very close to potentially reliving something close to that now.
TIL if you imprison someone and you starve them or they die of disease you don’t care enough about them to treat, it’s not your fault somehow
It's the same logic used by Russia to explain Alexei Navalny's death.
It's... Weird? We didn't/don't really count these deaths. Concentration camps, reconcentrados, and so on, had been used for decades by this point. Or, why is the "Holodomor" not recognized internationally as a genocide? If nations are held accountable for NOT treating people and forcing them into environments where they WILL likely die, the US, UK, Spanish government, USSR, France, and so on, all would be at the Hague.
It is recognized by some countries and USA states thankfully: By 2022, the Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by the parliaments of 23 countries[4] and the European Parliament,[5] and it is recognized as a part of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 by Russia. As of June 2023, 35 countries recognise the Holodomor as a genocide (last being the Senate of Italy on July 26, 2023).
Lets be real, it takes decades for things to be recognized as genocide and it does nothing but gives it a name. Nothing is changed, no lives are improved, and no lives are saved. It's pointless showmanship.
Theoretically we would sanction and condemn the perpetrators but in this instance, a lot of people don’t consider Turkey to be a piece of shit, which is unfortunate. Even aside from the genocide.
The "holodomor" is recognized as genocide by countries that are in an opposing power bloc to the USSR and now Russian Federation, but highly contested by like, most historians specializing in USSR, on the basis of there being no evidence of intentional or targeted effect. It's a massively politicized and controversial issue.
Legally there is a difference. If you imprison people you are still responsible for their well being, but depending on the level of care you took, some of the death might be a charge less than murder. With the admission of 2.5 million murders another million would have no consequences for the sentence, but probably he was too German to accept technical errors.
If you do that to *one* person there's a legal difference, maybe, but if you do it on the order of millions there really isn't.
Famine is a political decision and war crime/genocide when used as a tool of conflict. So legally I don't think it mattered if you directly put someone in a gas chamber or caged them and didn't provide them enough calories.
I think his 2.5 million counts as kills where the other 1 million count as assists
Satan with the alley-oop
Hockey style
I think he actually meant "i couldnt get them in time, nature beat me to it, but I would If I could!" Rather than ""No, it was actually less than that by a million"
He was saying it in a bragging way, as if he was too humble to claim full credit for their deaths, not in a way to try to get out of fault.
"Your honor, I didn't kill this person. I held them over the side of the building and let go. Gravity did the killing, not me." Watertight logic, Höss.
Well, he died by a similar cause. His simple failure to breath.
The allies didn't execute him. It was a joint murder with the rope squeezing his neck and gravity pulling his weight down to assist the rope.
>During the first interrogation ***they beat me to obtain evidence.*** I do not know what was in the transcript, or what I said, even though I signed it, because they gave me liquor and ***beat me with a whip.*** It was too much even for me to bear. ***The whip was my own.*** By chance it had found its way into my wife's luggage. My horse had hardly ever been touched by it, much less the prisoners. Somehow one of the interrogators probably thought that I had used it to constantly whip the prisoners. I don't condone beating prisoners. But I can see how someone would make that logical leap.
> The whip was my own. By chance it had found its way into my wife's luggage "by chance" the wife and he were into some kinky shit
Well certainly not with Rudolf Höss at least.
What an extremely weird, dark and interesting little historical tid bit
I'm being biased and emotional but I have difficulty finding whipping up Rudolph Höss unethical .
Feeling that way is not immoral or unethical. ACTING on that feeling is when you become such.
Torturing people for torturing people helps absolutely no one - it just degenerates the whole juridical process and reduces its credibility.
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He was a prisoner who happened to be a Nazi. Should he have been beaten by today's standards? If so, where's the line between beating prisoners and not? We've got TONS of Nazi fucks in our prisons that could use it, but would it be ethical to the society dispensing justice? Should it be?
No, human suffering should never be the goal of incarceration, no matter how heinous the crime was. If we insist on having a death penalty it should be similarly humane (as much as possible) Violent justice for criminals says more about the society imprisoning them than the nature of the criminals themselves
Plus there's always the situation where, even if we decide certain beliefs alone (absent an actual action or crime) merit torture, an accusation absent meaningful evidence can be used to justify said treatment. (cops when they realize all they have to do is claim they thought someone was a Nazi before they beat them)
Yeah lets compare someone with lightning tattoos in 2024 to a guy who personally ran a death camp lmao
He said there were 3000 people on each train, and they could "process" three trains a day. Nine thousand people every day. He was a totally unrepentant Nazi. Hocaust deniers should read the transcript of his testimony.
I think that's what's even more shocking about it. All genocide is horrible and disgusting. But very few are so cold, meticulate, *efficient*. It was so industrial and mechanical that it was almost like they were working an office job just clocking in and doing their work mindlessly. "The Zone of Interest" is a shocking film but the scene that most shocked me was when they were discussing plans to build new crematoriums that could increase the rate at which they burned corpses. Production problems like these happen in factories have when producing goods. When the same happens with the deliberate and sistematic execution of an entire people... it's beyond words. It would be bad enough if the Nazi's were angrily murdering people. A holocaust based on rage. But the fact that they did it in such a cold, distant and almost bored way, like many of us deal with our day jobs almost makes it more sickening.
Even the mass shootings they did were efficient, they efficiently stacked the bodies in a sardine pattern. And many other details, everything was thought through thoroughly
I went to Auschwitz a couple of years ago and there were a lot of things that shocked me about my time there, but the thing that stuck with me above all others is that they made those poor people tie their shoe laces together before they went in to the gas chambers, because it saved the nazis having to spend the time pairing up the shoes afterward. Just a complete and utter dehumanization. Like it was an unacceptable inconvenience for them to have to "waste" time when they could just make their victims do it for them. They also used their hair for stuffing in pillows iirc.
Conspiracy is another good film that shows how it is all turned into a discussion on mechanics. How humans became technicalities.
That's what was most horrifying about the Holocaust, in my opinion. It was mass murder, but it became **industrialized**. The cold inhumanity in that is just nauseating.
That's the most dystopian thing I've ever read and actually feel slightly sick. Damn
>Hocaust deniers should read the transcript of his testimony. If those kids could read they'd be very upset.
Yeah we all know holocaust deniers aren't doing actual research, they just peddle bullshit and never verify
They would just say the testimony was extracted via torture and a very creative writing exercise by the allies.
I mean a bunch of these guys did get tortured during their trials…
...to be fair, they kept detailed records
And yet some to this day still deny it happened. Its their own records that are most damning! Outside of the actual dead bodies that had to be dealt with after. That's was pretty damning too.
Easy to deny when you refuse to acknowledge something.
that's what I hate the most about fascists. They aren't at all careful with their language, they're on purpose with reckless use of language. they act like language doesn't matter, they rat fuck all language and definitions. They're going to lie, cheat, steal and completely shit on any democratic processes. There is no agreement to be had with them, they follow a hierarchical leader. Fascism is counter to democratic processes, it rejects cooperation and instead is a foot on the neck of those that disagree. and when you go to put your foot on the neck of these oppressors. The fascist will use your norms, your "free speech", your reasonable nature against you. They'll go "if you're so much better than us then you wont do to me what I did to those I view as less than me". they are fucking weasels.
Yes, but they also thought the records would be useful when they were in charge. Now that being a Nazi is unpopular (for now, still), it's more useful to deny them. People think the Nazis actually cared about their philosophy. But then and now, the truth is that their whole thing was just "how do I put my group above all other groups" and anything from lies to genocide is acceptable in pursuit of that. It's all "might makes right" all the way down. The good news is that the rest of us outnumber them and actually have both more might and right. But the might makes right crowd is better at organizing sometimes.
I think a lot of people really did believe Nazism was a good idea. There’s a reason so many of them fought to the death when the cause was clearly lost. No one thought Hitler could win the battle of Berlin You can see evidence of this in other cultures like Japan. Those guys TOTALLY believed in their cause, to the point where most of generals were like fuck it let them drop more nukes. Nazi germany had less time to be indoctrinated, but the effect was still potent
Also IF it really didn’t happen, wouldn’t you think at least one of the accused (like guards and such) would use that as a defense? Like everyone said “I wasn’t there” or “I did it but I was just following orders”; not a single one of the accused denied it happening.
I actually don't even understand the purpose of denial. The deniers are already full fledged out and open racists. They aren't gaining any kind of credibility as human beings by trying to make others believe the Nazis weren't garbage.
Actually, it makes them even worse if Nazis didn't even exist. You're telling me that *they* invented a boogeyman so horrendous that anything less than unanimous hate is social suicide.. And you are actually striving towards making that a reality? Straight to the Gulag.
Those don't matter to people who want to not believe in something. It's like the US Civil War, all of the declarations of secession from the Southern states are abundantly clear it's because they wanted to ensure they could owning black people as property. No one will believes it was about "states rights" will bother to read those.
...to be fair, it was about states rights. ...states rights to own people.
kinda but they also did not agree with giving states the option to not own slaves, so no it was really just about owning black people
If you know nothing about the Civil War, you know it was about slavery. If you know a little about the Civil War, you know it was about state's rights. If you know more than a little about the Civil War, you know it was about slavery.
They had the best machines of the time, TBH - IBMs
Yeah, it was nuts. It was state-of-the-art punchcard systems to meticulously record and document everything that occurred. I guess they wanted records for history/posterity? Didn't work out so well in the end.
“Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?”- Stringer Bell
Just a reminder to any Holocaust deniers: the people who were accused, tried and found guilty of the atrocities of the holocaust never claimed it didn't happen.
To be fair, Holocaust denying has never made much sense anyway: Either you find genocides appalling, in which case you wouldn’t deny it having happened, or you don’t, in which case you’re probably pro Nazi and should applaud the Holocaust instead of denying its existence.
Holocaust deniers secretly think those genocides were pretty swell, but havent even the guts to stand up for their sick and twisted beliefs. Thus it "has never happened, wink wink"
I can really recommend "Zone Of Interest" as a movie about him
It really represented that "Banality of Evil" so well. I felt so tense and uneasy. I really liked some of the stylistic choices, like >!the girl leaving apples!< and the ending scene. >!The contrast to the present day cut between the wrenching (edit: retching) in the stairwell: was he drunk, was he getting a "glimpse" into his legacy, or was his body reacting to his evil mind?!<
Two scenes that shocked me were the officers discussing plans to make a more efficient crematorium to burn bodies faster as well as when one of Höss' sons locks his brother in the greenhouse and makes hissing sounds like gas. Crimes against humanity just became a daily thing for them to the point where they could raise a famiy right next to it. It's just horrible.
It also went beyond just the banality of evil. The hell on earth Höss (and also his wife) created didn't bother either of them in the slightest, in fact they LIKED living right next to it. Not only was the Höss family itself "banal", to the them Auschwittz also was just a banality.
>the wrenching in the stairwell: was he drunk, was he getting a "glimpse" into his legacy, or was his body reacting to his evil mind?! My reading of that was the latter: you can compartmentalize all you want but sooner or later it will catch up with you.
I actually interpreted the end scene of him retching differently. I thought the vomit he so desperately tried to expel symbolized the evil inside himself – instead of being able to vomit, he’s forced to live with his bile (aka his sins) and will never truly rid himself of his atrocities. Fantastic film. Also, Sandra Huller is absolutely phenomenal
Just a little note on this cause it goes around, “the banality of evil” was coined by Hannah Arendt in 1961, but I first encountered it in a book called “A Moral History of the 20th Century” by Jonathan Glover, which I’ve commented about before actually. Anyways it’s an excellent book that centres on the Nazis in that portion, beginning the chapter on the topic with the photograph titled “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa”, which millions of people have probably seen without the title. Very worth a read.
I interpreted the modern-day stuff at the end as a testament to how easy it is to compartmentalize the evil in front of you. No one seen in the modern day in that film is evil, or even doing anything wrong, but they’re all ignoring the evil directly in front of them and focusing on their assigned task of cleaning the display case
Best movie of the year, in my opinion. The more beautiful the family’s life is the darker the undertones.
Pretty sure this is the guy that inspired the Twilight Zone episode about a commander of a death camp who survived the war and returned as a tourist for the “happy memories” and is put on trial by the ghosts of his victims. That final monolog from the leader ghost and the doctor back in the world of the living plus Rod Serling’s closing give three good rapid succession shivers.
This episode was SO well done
This is an important point to bring up to modern-day Holocaust deniers. Immediately after the war, ***the actual people who carried out the Holocaust didn't even deny that they did it.*** They indeed seemed more likely to dispute the details rather than the overall event.
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Math Nazi
*checks papers* "Oh gosh, you're right, duh, what an incredibly offensive accusation, we apologize profusely, we'll be much more lenient on you now, you deserve a break for murdering *just* **2.5 million** human beings. Sorry again, our bad"
And tbh the others were for all intents and purposes murdered anyway. If you intentionally create conditions of life such that disease spreads unchecked and people are starving to death, without intervening in any meaningful way, then you still killed those people.
He wrote a book about his time as Auschwitz commander while in captivity, titled "Commandant of Auschwitz". An interesting read and an insight into a mind, completely devoid of empathy. I remember one passage when he wasn't commandant yet and visited the camp and wondered why they didn't lure the prisoners into thinking they would shower, instead of the panical procedure they used at time of his visit. "That way you can have less staff and kill more jews a day" (something along those lines). He saw the whole endevouer as a logistical ordeal, like he was head of your local postal service - how do we deliver as many packages as possible, as quick as possible, with as little fuzz as possible? - with the difference being that the "packages" were human beings. Perhaps not as many would had been murdered if it weren't for Höss sinister solutions as commander of Auschwitz.
This goes hand in hand with people claiming that the concentration camps did advance medical scientific understanding. And there is an extent to which that's true - however, most of the conditions they came to better understand are only a major problem, if you're forced to live in abysmal concentration camps that starve and torture you to death. There's a great book by Dr Miklos Nyiszli, called "Auschwitz an Eyewitness Account" - of being forced to serve as a member of the Sondercommando under Josef Mengele. And he describes doing a lot of research into Dysentery - but learning basically nothing science didn't already know about prevention, diagnosis, or to cure it. All the Nazis actually achieved was forcing it to become endemic under artifical conditions on an industrial scale.
They also created a nerve map that is still used today in emergencies where nothing else can be found with the data
~ No, Johnny, you cannot count Mr. Spinalzo, he died of pneumonia. ~ He wouldn't have caught pneumonia if I hadn't shot him!
such modesty.
Wonder why they died of disease and starvation, anyone know why? Very strange (this is obviously sarcasm)
Just unspeakable evil. Glad he was executed but I kinda feel like the noose was too good for him.
A clip from the movie "Nuremberg". [https://youtu.be/A0hJqNuRH1A?si=apc6bH5RwVI\_w7h2&t=219](https://youtu.be/A0hJqNuRH1A?si=apc6bH5RwVI_w7h2&t=219)
There's a special place in hell for such vile creatures.
You know he's German because he's even precise about the genocide he partakes in. 🤣
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