You Einsatztruppen (task forces) are called upon to fulfill a repulsive duty. But you are soldiers who have to carry out every order unconditionally. You have a responsibility before God and Hitler for everything that is happening. I myself hate this bloody business and I have been moved to the depths of my soul. But I am obeying the highest law by doing my duty. Man must defend himself against bedbugs and rats– against vermin.
–Heinrich Himmler, in a speech to the SS guards, (Hitler’s Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich’s Most Notorious Henchmen,” Berkley Books, 1990
Such a mentality made it easy to commit murder; we see this when, a little later, Hoess is confronted with Hitler’s verbal order (summer 1941) of using physical killing as a means to eliminate Europe’s Jews. “Of course, this order was something extraordinary, something monstrous. However, the reasoning behind the order of this mass annihilation seemed correct to me. At the time I wasted no thoughts about it. I had received an order; I had to carry it out. I could not allow myself to form an opinion as to whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not.”11 This idea manifests repeatedly: that the order from Himmler emanates from Hitler, and that following the order is a holy act, for which one must die for, if necessary.12
http://www.jewishmag.com/112mag/evillurks/evillurks.htm
Henriette von Schirach presumed on her long friendship with Hitler to describe what she had witnessed in Amsterdam: “Although I had already had a double cognac, the moment still came totally unexpectedly. I took a deep breath and answered: Yes, that is why I am here. I wanted to speak to you about some terrible things I saw; I cannot believe that you know about them. Helpless women were being rounded up and driven together to be sent off to a concentration camp and I think that they will never return.” Hitler was furious.
Her then husband, Baldur Von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth, admitted that he had approved the “resettlement” but denied all knowledge of genocide, denouncing Hitler from the dock as a “million –fold murderer,” and calling Auschwitz “the most devilish mass murder in history.”
Von Schirach was sentenced on the 1 October 1946 to twenty years imprisonment for crimes against humanity in which he served out in the company of Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer in Spandau prison.
During his trial, HJ leader Von Schirach underwent a change of heart, recognizing that he had misled German youth and contributed to poisoning a whole generation. He stated: “I put my morals to the side when, out of misplaced faith in the Führer, I took part in this action. I did it. I cannot undo it.”
With regard to the death camp Auschwitz he said: “It was the most all-encompassing and diabolical genocide ever committed by man .. Adolf Hitler gave the order .. Hitler and Himmler together started this crime against humanity which will remain a blot on our history for centuries ..”
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/bvs.html
Henriette Hoffmann, the wife of HJ leader, Baldur v Schirach
On the night of Good Friday 1943 Henriette told Hitler in the Berghof on the Jewish deportations in Holland .
1966 Speer confirmed in an interview this scene: “It was a sombre mood after that, we knew that something had happened, but it was silent about it, and as far as I know, this was also the reason that Henriette von Schirach and by her husband, court ‘were banned. ” source: wiki
Rees, Auschwitz:
Dec 8 -13 1941 AH formulated orders for the Holocaust, as well as a Declaration of War on the US.
Chelmno put into action. Mar 42 to Nov 44, Auschwitz Birkenau in operation. May 2, 1941, Wehrmacht ‘to live off Russia’. Sonnenstein, near Danzig, use of ‘ gas vans’.
p. 61, SD Report on the Holocaust
20 Percent death rate, Lodz ghetto, 164,000 incarcerted there
p 262, death march
nov 44 for slave labor
p 266, Bergen Belsen, slaves
virtually no effort by the Germans to house or feed them
p. 269, Heinrich Himmler …”alllowed BB to be captured…”
“Hitler had all ordered all concentration camps to be destroyed before the Allies arrived”.
HH’s last order to Hoess: “Disappear into the Wehrmacht”.
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http://natgeotv.com/uk/world-war-ii-the-apocalypse/videos/the-holocaust-by-bullets
national geographic
very disturbing footage of nazi murders
http://natgeotv.com/uk/nazi-art-theft
The Nazis were art thieves. They looted Europe, including Europe’s Jews, blind. (“The Rape of Europa”)
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In the early days of World War II, British intelligence agencies began secretly recording conversations between German prisoners of war in the hope of acquiring information on technical advances. The information gathered was to be used in the war effort against Germany. Transcripts of these conversations, now declassified, represent a previously unknown or overlooked source of information about the Holocaust, providing evidence of individual German officers’ participation in and knowledge of war crimes. The fact that the transcripts of and reports on the monitored conversations were locked away for over thirty years after the end of the war supports the view that intelligence agencies placed a higher priority on maintaining the secrecy of their methods than on aiding the prosecution of war criminals.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/summary/v022/22.1.tyas.html
Until November 1944, at which time the SS, on orders from Himmler, disabled the gas chambers that still functioned. The SS destroyed the remaining gassing installations as Soviet forces approached in January 1945.
USHMM
nazi died
Around 60% of the 5.7 million Soviet soldiers captured were to die in German custody.
http://wwwbbc.co.uk/history/whyworldwars/genocide/racial_state_01.shtml
German courts:
“The result was that local commanders of remote SS and SD posts in eastern Europe, men who were known to have arranged the murder of tens of thousands of people, were acquitted if they could not be shown to have personally killed anyone. Only their subordinates – who were sometimes indeed sadistic types, but of no importance whatsoever in the organisation of genocide – were sent to jail.
That the judges and lawyers who debated such cases had mostly been active themselves in the Third Reich was obviously part of the irony.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/whyworldwars/genocide/deniers_01.html
Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that coordinated these massacres, prepared detailed reports on the murders – reports that contained precise death tolls, broken down into men, women and children. Walter Rauff and Dr. Becker created these gas vans.
Many perpetrators confessed to what they had done during the war, after it was over.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/features/auschwitz-debates.html
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Historians on the Holocaust
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/features/laurence-rees.html
Laurence Rees, new book on Auschwitz.
He interviewed some of the perpetrators themselves, who did not deny the Holocaust, but admitted it.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/summary/v022/22.1.tyas.html
review, Auschwitz
“The Jews were uniquely singled out for the worst possible persecution. Of the 1.1 million people who died at Auschwitz 1 million were Jews – thus by far the greatest proportion.” Rees, Auschwitz
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Hans Frank, Hitler’s right-hand man in Poland as quoted by Christopher Browning
” But what is to happen to the Jews? Do you believe that they will be lodged in settlements in the Ostland? In Berlin we were told: why all this trouble; we cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you, arm yourselves against any thoughts of compassion. We must destroy the Jews, wherever we encounter them and wherever it is possible, in order to preserve the entire structure of the Reich. ”
Mark Roseman’s excellent work on the Wannsee Conference didn’t cause any disquiet in me, as the lack of firm written evidence connecting someone like Hitler with the ‘Final Solution’ is entirely consistent with the way in which decisions were taken in the Nazi state – often verbally at the highest level.
The truth is that revisionist history was occurring even as the German Army asked for an Armistice in 1919, acc to History Professor, Persico. In August 1918, the impact of the arrival of American troops helped turn the tide against the German Army, along with starvation and uprisings in Germany. The war was being lost, and Germany was the one to ask for an armistice. The Allies were ready to keep fighting. However, after Germany signed the armistice, they pretended that their army had been victorious! They couldn’t admit defeat, and began rewriting the history to suit Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
In 1941, Einsatzgruppen / SS used gas vans in parts of Ukraine as well.
http://remember.org/History.root.rev.html
oxonboy (The death lists from Auschwitz do not show that any people were gassed, and point to a smaller number of victims.
This is because those lists refer only to those who where assigned serial numbers. The majority of people transferred to the camp were classified as “unfit for work” and gassed immediately. This fact is noted, for instance, in a report written by top SS officer Franke-Gricksch to Himmler (this report is included in our file of Nazi documents, in this archive). These people were not registered nywhere, and no one recorded their names. (Testimony of Polish prisoner Aloiz Oskar Kleta, Shelly, p. 284; Fertig, 12; Fleming, 174. Also, see testimony of Henryk Tauber, Pressac, page 488, as to how the SS routinely burned documents regarding the number of victims).
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,532032-4,00.html
Good analysis of how the Corporal became Chancellor with the conniving of Germany’s elite, and the corrupting of democratic voting practices.
Pope Pius XI soon became very troubled by his deal with the ‘devil’ and the more he observed their inhumanity and deceit, the more determined he was to confront them.
In his 1937 Encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety),” he lambasted those who worshiped the superiority of race. A year later, when the Austrian Cardinal Innitzer welcomed Hitler’s takeover of Austria, Pius XI summoned him to the Vatican and forced him to issue a humiliating public retraction.
http://spectator.org/blog/2009/04/15/the-case-against-demjanjuk-and/print
http://depts.washington.edu/baltic/papers/holocaust.html
Majdanek. The Waffen SS murdered over 20,000 Jews there in a few days.
http://www.its-arolsen.org/en/historical_research/education/persecution/timeline/index.html#c3343
Bad Arolsen, German historical documentation ctr.
1941 23rd August: Jews are prohibited from leaving the Reich for emigration, Heydrich’s order.
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Enigma:
According to a summary of the report in the New York Times, one of the most harrowing messages codebreakers overlooked was intercepted on January 11 1943 and detailed the 1,274,166 Jews killed under Operation Reinhard at four death camps – Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka – during 1942.
The report notes: “The message itself contained only the identifying letters for the death camps followed by the numerical totals.”
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http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005473
Polish non Jewish deaths estimated at 1.9 million
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007299
Majdanek subcamps
German Airforce members visit Yad Vashem in Israel:
The Defence Ministry in Berlin declined to allow the Luftwaffe trainees to be interviewed about such symbolism, but one of them described how they took time off to visit the central Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Dressed in civilian clothes while in Israel, trainees on an earlier course stood at attention for annual commemorations in April of the six million Jews killed in the Nazi genocide.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE66Q05W
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http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3040698/Nazi-executioner-strolls-in-park.html
2 dead nazis
Former Nazi SS officer Erich Steidtmann, who was suspected but never convicted of involvement in Second World War massacres, died on Saturday, according to reports.
Adolf Storms, a 90-year-old former SS sergeant who was number four on the Simon Wiesenthal list, died earlier this month.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS118811+28-Jul-2010+BW20100728
The Hungarian government worked hand-in-hand with the infamous Nazi SS
commander Adolf Eichmann in organizing large-scale deportations of Hungarian Jews to German death camps. Between mid-May and July 1944, Hungarian authorities
deported over 430,000 Jews, comprising more than 50% of the Hungarian Jewish population.
In Buchenwald the Nazis incarcerated nearly a quarter of a million people, many of them Jews, who were forced to work in arms factories. An estimated 56,000 of them died of exhaustion, starvation or illness, or were executed.
Mittelbau Dora nearby also provided forced labor for a Nazi weapons factory and it is estimated that one third of the 60,000 prisoners held there died.
“In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret,” the director said. “Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity – and it was an atrocity.”
Oliver Stone
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http://www.newser.com/story/96717/third-most-wanted-nazi-suspect-charged.html
http://www.holocaust-history.org/jews-central/
“Are Jews central to the Holocaust?”
books:
Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Arad
The Unknown Black book, Rubenstein, Altman (ed.)
The Holocaust by bullets, Father Desbois
Hitler-Germans-Final-Solution- Ian Kershaw
Jews-Nazi-Berlin-
Death-Third-Reich-Peter Fritzsche
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, and Eichmann in Jerusalem
Levi, Primo -Survival at Auschwitz , or “If this be a Man”
At the beginning of World War II in Serbia in 1941, some Jews joined Yugoslav resistance forces, which consisted of two factions: the communist-led Yugoslav Partisans (or simply the “Partisans”), and the royalist Chetniks. The Chetniks were founded as a Royalist movement, but increasingly evolved into a Serb nationalist militia. The movement was reactivated under the form of the ‘Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland’ by Colonel Draža Mihailović in the Serbia’s Ravna Gora province after the invasion of Yugoslavia.
Jews were also members of the “Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland” (Jugoslovenska vojska u otadžbini, JVUO) Although an overwhelming majority of its members were Serbs, the movement also included a number of Jews (source: oxonboy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katzmann Report
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/browning3.htm
christopher browning, quotes on extermination policy.
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/map.cfm?map_id=3432
“vernichtungslager” (Ger) or “death camp” (todeslager). There is some debate as to the terminology that the Nazis employed with references to the camps. They used euphemisms, generally, as there was an injunction against SS men speaking openly about the Holocaust, the camp functions, and the murder of prisoners in general.
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denierbud (3 years ago) :
Hi Deconneurnot: Interesting point about use of “vergasungskellar” but I was recently reading about this from a different angle: if it meant “extermination gas chamber” why isn’t that word used to describe all the other “extermination gas chambers” at Auschwitz? I think (not sure) it’s only used once? as a reference to one room. Auschwitz isn’t my area of expertise so I don’t get into it much. I focus on the Reinhard camps. I don’t know much about Auschwitz.
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On his site, Denierbud admits his ignorance about the Holocaust. Priceless!
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