RNB: newly opened nazi archives
another disturbing article from the Religion News Blog
Within weeks of Hitler’s 1933 rise to power, the iron gates slammed shut on inmates of the first Nazi concentration camps. It was the start of an unparalleled experiment in persecution and genocide that expanded over the next 12 years into a pyramid of ghettos, Gestapo prisons, slave labor camps and, ultimately, extermination factories....
Collecting and analyzing fragmented reports, researchers at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum say they have pinpointed some 20,000 places of detention and persecution - three times more than they estimated just six years ago...
The “pyramid” ranged from death camps such as Auschwitz at the top, to secondary and tertiary detention centers. There were 500 brothels, where foreign women were put at the disposal of German officers, and more than 100 “child care facilities” where women in labor camps were forced to undergo abortions or had their newborns taken away and killed - usually by starvation - so the mothers could quickly return to work.
The earliest prisoners were communists, Social Democrats, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other political opponents, as well as homosexuals and common criminals. The Final Solution, which ultimately would claim 6 million Jewish lives, had not yet begun...
Organized killings began shortly after the war started in late 1939 at so-called “euthanasia sites,” where the victims were physically or mentally handicapped people or prisoners no longer capable of work. Estimates say the number reached 200,000.
By 1940, Jews in Poland and Russia were being confined in ghettos. As German men were needed to fight, men and women were brought from Poland, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union and other occupied nations to work in German industries. Labor camps proliferated.
In 1941 the Germans devised the Final Solution to exterminate Europe’s Jews. In September, even before the plan was formally approved, the SS began experimenting with gas chambers at Auschwitz, about 40 miles (60 kilometers) from the Polish city of Krakow.
Auschwitz was the largest of six camps whose primary purpose was to kill Jews at maximum speed. In 1941-42, more death camps were built in Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek.
By the time Germany capitulated in May 1945 and disbelieving Allied forces marched into the camps, 2.7 million people had been incinerated in the ovens or open pits of these six compounds. Of every three Jews in Europe at the start of the war, two were dead.
Comments
This book focusses on POws from Australia and Great Britain who worked in deplorable conditions under their captors, the Japanese, during WWII in the 'Far East". Emaciated and degraded, they built the infamous Railway of Death between Nong Pladuk, Thailand and Moulmein, Burma. (Now I understand why my father, a WWII veteran, agd 85, has periodically made some very demeaning comments about the Japanese race. Memories of human-engendered evil and of comrades experiencing such evil, are slow to disipate.)
Something very positive: One uplifting experience in the book was the formation of "kongsis"---small groups of prisoners dedicated to the survival of each other. If one was sick, the others in htese groups of four to seven men or so, would contribute their meager rations of rice, for example, to help the debilitated person get a bit stronger. If the infirmed comrade was coverd in feces from diahreal disease, they would clean it up. They understood ..."what it means to be dirt yet privleged to be surrounded by life-saving comradship." (p. 7)
I do wonder what related groups and survival strategies were present among the Jews in WWII and other tortured peoples throughout history. The human spirit for sure can rise to incredible heights of nobility in the face of unspeakable barbarism. And above all I wonder what we can learn from their examples of bravery, sacrifice, and determiation to survive.
Two quotes from the book:
[The POWs] believed that their experiences at the hands of the Japanese were literally incomprehensible. p. 5
With its societal skin flayed, human nature became visible as never before. Gred, cowardice, and vanity, perseverance, altruism, and generosity, in brief the wide panoply of virtue and vice, were there to be observed in the open, wihtout pretence, with no place to hide. p 169
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With yearnings for true peace on earth, for the cessation of dozens of internicine wars, for the safe resettlement of dozens of millions of displaced peoples, and with yearning for the return of the Prince of Peace when every tear shall be wiped away and the human race can experience the true emancipation that we all crave,
Kelly
Dr. Kelly O'Donnell
Consulting Psychologist
Member Care Associates--Europe