I'm feeling sick. I just saw Nazi footage of a bulldozer burying corpses...

[derby378]

It was almost more than I could take. I thought I felt a stroke coming on. And then I took hold of myself, took a deep breath, and clicked the icon on DU to post a message.

There's a program about the Nuremburg trials on History Channel International. That's where I saw the footage.

You can read about the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust in gruesome detail - and I pray that none of you ever have to learn what sort of torture instrument the Boger Swing is. But no matter how much you read, if you do not see the atrocity, gaze into the hollow eyes of the survivors, or watch American soldiers carry the corpse of a naked adult male that only weighs 50 pounds...

I should pull Art Spiegelman's Maus off the bookshelf again. One hell of a read, all the more so because it's a true story.

[Greeby]

1. We in Britain have had the documentary series The World At War for 30 years

And it is hard to hack it on the episodes dealing with the Holocaust

[Mythsaje]

3. I remember that series

from when I was a kid. We had it here too. Back before cable. Some of the worst images that have burned themselves into my brain came from that show.

[readmoreoften]

8. That series caused my dad to have a mental breakdown. It was one of my first memories./nt

[Mythsaje]

9. Eeek...

That's awful.

I've seen my dad go through some crap when movies or other things about Vietnam came up. It took him over thirty years to get past some of it...other parts he still haven't gotten past.

[Mythsaje]

2. I've seen that...

That's one of the things that comes into my mind every time I hear someone trying to deny the Holocaust.

One of the reasons I really, really don't like listening to Holocaust deniers, even for a second.

[MadMaddie]

4. I have watched all of the documentries..trying to find out how

it happened....not understanding how a civilized country falls into depravity and murder....

[Journeyman]

10. Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" is a good place to start. . .

there are many factors, but Dr Arendt makes a convincing argument for the primacy of isolation and loneliness as essential preconditions for total domination . . .

[MadMaddie]

12. I will read it..

[Journeyman]

19. For a flavor of the sweep of her ideas. . .

you can read this article:

Evil: The Crime against Humanity
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayc1.html


For full appreciation of her brilliance, however, you have to study her work, especially The Origins of Totalitarianism, or at the least, the third book, Totalitarianism. Be prepared, however, for a thorough revision of any preconceptions you bring to the study: Dr Arendt strives for comprehension, "in short, the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to and resisting of reality -- whatever it may be." And in the end she brings you face to face with absolute evil, a force beyond understanding, as it can "no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives."

You'll never see the world the same way again, least of all will you bandy about quick and innacurate analogies such as we've seen these past five years.

[aquart]

14. It starts with an ancient habit of hate.

Or maybe it starts elsewhere and simply draws on that for sustenance and strength.

[Fredda Weinberg]

5. They were my relatives

My grandparents, uncle and an aunt who looked just like me. All my cousins.

I've seen that film before ... oddly enough, it doesn't evoke any emotion, just a determination to do what I can to improve the human condition.

[aquart]

13. My great-grandfather, great-uncles, great-aunts, cousins...

[bluerum]

6. Yes. I remember those images from gradeschool. The never wanted us

to forget - to never let that happen again. Not ever.

This was in the mid-sixties. Just twenty years after WWII.

[aquart]

7. First time?

Makes an impression, doesn't it?

[stillcool]

11. I saw a documentary on the Ist...

Iraq war that echoed that image. Something about clearing and burying in one sweep. The wonders of humanity, and how politics shape our social safety net. The one thing I no longer ask myself is how the German people could allow this to happen.

[Sal Minella]

17. Yes.

[Swede]

15. This is why Israel is so important to the Jews.

They feel that it is their last best hope.

[aquart]

16. You might want to look up the photos of Roman Vishniak

To see what they looked like alive.

"In 1936, a man named Roman Vishniak, possessed of an extraordinary urgency, crossed and recrossed the borders of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Carpathian Lithuania to take pictures of Jews. Braving incredible dangers, using a hidden camera, he roamed the ghettos and shtetls, and secretly recorded that vanishing world. He took 16,000 pictures of which 2,000 survive. He smuggled some of the negatives sewn into the lining of his coat out of Europe to America. It is difficult to look at these images. It's nearly impossible to keep in mind that the people we see ceased to exist almost immediately after the pictures were taken. These people went to their deaths almost exactly as we see them: in the puzzle of their childhoods, in the perplexity of their old ages. We see them all: scholars argue through the grey slush of Europe; wide-eyed children look to their teachers, the Torah open in front of them; sages, rabbis, Zaddiks, Hassids in flapping black vestments and wide-brimmed hats. The European Jews of 1936, my mother's aunts and cousins, had been marked for destruction. Vishniak's children, from Seder scholars to street ragamuffins, share a seriousness and understanding beyond their years. In the crumbling innards of the old Polish cities, the threadbare objects of poverty glow with a life of their own. Here is a peddler with two customers, bent over a coat, carefully examining the fabric. There is an incredible materiality to this coat, paradoxically suggesting its opposite, spirituality. When this coat falls apart, this whole world will go with it. Soon, human beings will also become things, to be discarded and junked."

<http://www.stare.com/stare/stare802.html>

[Blackthorn]

18. I'm sure I wasn't the only curious one...

http://www.calitreview.com/Essays/fraubraun_5022.htm

<snip>

Was that something to do with the word altalena? I asked. "The Boger swing”? Yes, it was a meter-long iron bar suspended by chains hung from the ceiling. We could never have imagined what it was for until she described it, in a monotone spoken as by rote, its details recalled and rehearsed repeatedly during her months bearing witness in Frankfurt. A prisoner would be brought in for “questioning,” stripped naked and bent over the bar, wrists manacled to ankles. A guard at one side would shove him – or her — off across the chamber in a long, slow arc, while Boger would ask “questions,” at first quietly, then barking them out, and at the last bellowing. At each return, another guard armed with a crowbar would smash the victim across the buttocks. As the swinging went on and on, and the wailing victim fainted, was revived only to faint howling again, the blows continued —until only a mass of bleeding pulp hung before their eyes. Most perished from the ordeal; some sooner, some later; in the end a sack of of bones and flayed flesh and fat was swept along the shambles of that concrete floor to be dragged away.

<snip>

Fucked. Up.