The BBC shows its insensitivity on Holocaust Remembrance Day

153 thoughts on “The BBC shows its insensitivity on Holocaust Remembrance Day”

1. Subscribe.

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3. Beteridge’s Law of Headlines.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

4. Thanks for posting this.

5. Thank you for this post.

6. So sad. I went to Auschwitz two years ago and I still can’t forget about it (especially the hair that they told us was taken from approx. 40,000 victims). Seeing the children’s shoes was the worst. I had a Polish great-grandfather who was disappeared by either the Soviets or the Nazis (we aren’t sure) so it really makes my blood boil when the BBC makes such a ghastly comment like that. Auschwitz reminds you of what truly despicable evil is; like our guide said, it was a “death camp” – a place to kill people because of who they are. What was also memorable was when our guide said that they speeded up the killing process towards the end of the war (at its height I think they killed 4,000 people per day – an shockingly large number). You shouldn’t forget such organized genocide and shame on the BBC for thinking so.

   1. The BBC doesn’t think so and that programme reflects the idiocy of some Daytime TV producer who needs something to give to his “talking heads”. As I write the BBC has live coverage from Auschwitz on its news channel (as well as leading on its website) as do some of the other channels. Fox seems to be covering the snow and the Russian RT are complaining that Putin wasn’t invited by the Poles and pointing out that the Red Army did liberate the camp.

      1. I heard on (US) NPR this morning that the Poles explicitly stated that the Red Army liberated those camps and that the Polish nation thanked them and the Russian people this day.

         1. Poland is quite conflicted about Russia; the Russians were just as homicidal during the second world war (The Katyn massacres, mass deportations to Siberian labour camps), and Russia as a state has been unwilling to admit responsibility for the above. Moreover, they then spent 50 years effectively occupying Poland and propagandising all the while.

            In all honesty, even if the Red Army did liberate the camps, they have enough blood on their hands that I can quite understand people not wanting to invite Putin.

            1. Do I correctly recall some Soviet atrocity in the Katin (sp.?) Forest of Poland, fobbed off on the Nazis?

            2. Pretty much. 40,00 officers shot and buried in a mass grave. Took until the 90’s for the Russian state to admit their involvement.

            3. “Involvement”, nice euphemism.

            4. Not really sure how else to phrase it, given that they’re still trying to avoid taking responsibility for the massacre. “Involvement” is about all they’ve admitted to so far.

      2. Exactly. The BBC is a massive organization. You can’t take this tweet to be indicative of what the BBC, as a whole, thinks about the Holocaust. It’s probably just someone trying to be provocative.

         1. That show is actually quite good. There are people who ask this question and they discuss the idea openly. Given the usual slant of the show, they are likely to come up with the answer “No”, and resoundingly.

            Another show was whether women are treated unfairly by religion. Of course, all religious leaders there thought they weren’t, even while refusing to shake a woman’s hand, or insisting on particular dress for women.

            Another recently was whether freedom of speech should be limited, which was very interesting. I subscribe to this show on YouTube, and the discussion always makes you think. It also exposes some awful people, and this week’s show will do that again I’m sure.

            Btw, there’s an original documentary on CNN this weekend about Auschwitz that looks good.

            1. Just to be clear, I’m not excusing their insensitivity. I can’t look at pictures like those above without feeling sick. We must never forget this. It won’t be long before we’ve lost the last of the survivors, which is when things start to fade. We have to remember to honour those we lost and make sure it never happens again.

               My particular horror is with the governments, like Austria, who paid the Germans to take away their Jews, knowing what would happen to them.

               I loved Kingsley’s words. He has a wonderful way of expressing himself.

            2. Is there some background I’m missing? I see no reason to interpret that tweet as saying “Isn’t it time for people to quit whining about the Holocaust”? There are people who make that suggestion and I see that tweet as a neutral way of giving the public a chance to respond.

               You could call it insensitive, or you could say that it is using the emotion of the occasion to elicit a resounding “no”.

            3. There is absolutely no reason to be horrified about the Austrian government as such a government did not exist during World War II
               (Austria had been united with the Reich – a step already stipulated by Art. 2 of the republican Austrian constitution of 30 November 1918 but at that time prevented by the Allies).

               You probably mean Slovakia (which was not a part of former Yugoslavia).

      3. I agree, there is lots of coverage of the Holocaust on the BBC, I watched the Freddie Knoller documentary and The Eichman Show on Sunday, The Big Questions show was actually a very interesting discussion in which diverse views were aired- there was even a young woman who had been brought up as Muslim and told how she was taught to hate Jews and how important she thinks it is that these abhorrent views are brought out into the open in order to change them. Peter Tatchell (sorry for all my spelling mistakes, I’m writing this hurriedly on my phone before bed) was there and spoke up for holocaust denial to no longer be a crime as we need to hear people who believe these things and challenge their erroneous opinions on the open.
         It was interesting and not disrespectful.

   2. I’ve watched BBC’s live coverage this afternoon and in my opinion it was superb – everything you’d want it to be.

7. Those were the eyes of people who knew that they were no longer viewed as being human, but as mere objects to be humiliated, tortured, and disposed of whatever way it amused or benefited their abusers and murderers.

   1. Everyone knew what was going on in those camps.

      There were 10,000 camps in the Lager system in Germany alone! Everyone knew. People went into the Lager system and never came out. And everyone knew what the criteria were.

      1. I’m not so sure about *everyone*, nobody as blind as does not want to see…., but then I agree they were only very few who did not realise it was not something ‘nice’ happening to the deportees.

         1. I mean, my father and his family had no illusions at all, they did what they could to hide and smuggle away jews. My father’s oldest brother was executed for that.
            My mother’s family was appalled at the rampant antisemitism, but they were genuinely shaken at the revelation after the war of the actual horror of the ‘Endlosung’ (=Holocaust, =Shoah), they naively did not believe at the time that that was really possible
            I’ve had some nasty, reproaching argument about that with my grandfather. (How stupid could you be, kind of thing)
            What would cause the one to have no illusions and the other to wallow in (well nearly) blissful ignorance/

            1. Thanks for telling us this.

               One of the really bright spots of the war were the few who risked their lives to help others, as your family did. You should be proud of them.

               And the other side of the story is that the Nazis (their paramilitary thugs and military thugs) used murder and intimidation to cow the entire populace into compliance or at least non-interference.

               Germany under the Nazis shows what happens when an unabashed gang of criminals gets control of the levers of power.

            2. Well, as you gathered it was only my father’s family. I *am* very proud of them.
               In fact I recently got some photographs (from a historian) of my father in receiving the ‘Yad Vashem’ in Israel in the 79’ies.
               It was instrumental in overcoming his belated (it was about 25 years after the facts) PTSD.

               My point is: why were they so clear about it, and why was my mother’s family (nearly) blind to it?

            3. Perhaps it was cognitive dissonance.

               Also, sometimes the truth is so painful and horrible that we turn our gaze from it. In so doing, it becomes even more painful because that turning away then reveals something about us, possibly our lack of character and courage. And it becomes a matter of survival for all.

               Your father and his family helped to save some Jews, and that’s a great thing, done at great cost. Though some may not agree with the literal meaning of this quote, your family did something good. “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”

      2. There was no free press. I’m sure there were rumors and suspicions. I’m sure that people understood that being taken away was not likely to have a happy ending. But there was no way to learn with certainty which horrendous, impossible rumors were true and which were not. I don’t think any of us can imagine what it would be like to live in a time and place with no access to reliable information.

8. The big answer: no.

   WTF, BBC? We teach the crusades. The hundred years’ war. The napoleonic wars. We still observe a moment of silence for the end of WWI (9 million combatants killed, plus a little less than that in noncombatants). Why wouldn’t we keep discussing an event in history both more recent than any of those an also larger or comparable in terms of casulties?

   France just had a whole day of mourning for the deaths of 12 people. The US annually mourns the deaths of 3,500 people to terrorism. Now those are right and good gestures to make, but if we’re going to do that, I think we can spare a few minutes of discussion time a year for 11 million killed.

   1. Next on the BBC, the Big Question: the spanish flu was soooo 1900s. Should we really be worrying about infectious disease any more?

      Sorry about the follow-on post. Their idiocy actually has me angrier than the pictures.

      1. Their idiocy actually has me angrier than the pictures.

         I had to breathe deeply for a few minutes to avoid responding with a string of expletives.

   2. Well said.

   3. Indeed. I guess I could click the link and find out, but I can’t imagine why that question is the premise of a conversation, and what reasonable argument could be made for a “yes” or even “maybe” conclusion.

      “Put to rest” is not something that we need to do with history. One can put to rest an objective question like “What is 2 plus 2?,” even relatively complicated ones “Who killed O.J.’s ex-wife?” – but not history.

      We shouldn’t put any genocide, slavery, displacement of native people, war – you name it, however ugly or grand – to “rest” in any kind of way I might think of. People can differ over the import of historical events – for example how relevant the Shoah or the enslavement of Africans is to understanding the past and current situations of descendants and other living members of that group – but the dialog will always be useful.

      For the BBC to tweet the question, phrased in that way – on Yom HaShoah no less! – in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo and all the “Mohammed’s likeness” apologetics, really makes me wonder what kind of epidemiological bubble that tweeter and his or her editors live in.

      Hopefully metaphorical heads – and hopefully only metaphorical heads! – will roll for this epic blunder.

      1. epistemological, not epidemiological … Freudian slip? It is a sick tweet after all!

         1. 👍 I knew you meant epistemological. And sick is right. 😉

            This BBC person comes out with this less than a month after people were murdered in a kosher market. Because they were presumed to be Jews. When people including the BBC act like Jew hating doesn’t exist, they’re being like people back before the holocaust. “Oh that’s no big thing.” There’s Jew hatred and then there’s the bland prejudice of dismissing Jewish problems as if they are unworthy. Jews and the whole of the first world have the same enemy in jihadism and yet still…

         2. Uh oh. Perhaps you were thinking of an earlier post of mine alluding to epi. It is catching.

            1. For the rest of the day, I will be doing my web surfing in surgical mask and gloves so as to stem the spread.

      2. “hopefully metaphorical heads…will roll”
         Really? D’you think your outrage might not be even slightly mitigated by watching the hour-long programme in which the question’s addressed?

         It’s a consistently interesting show and the episode itself was polite, reasonable and sensitive. I agree the question’s a daft one, especially since the question they actually debated on the show was more like ‘do we pay sufficient attention to other historical genocides?’, but I’d at least watch the debate before demanding BBC heads on a plate.

         I’d also recommend watching a back episode or two – it’s the only show anywhere on British television that consistently debates exactly the issues that WEIT deals with, and it does so entertainingly and even-handedly. It’s even revealed the formerly-reviled host Nicky Campbell to be rather likeable.

         1. Interesting. If the show is as you say, I wouldn’t have any outrage to mitigate – I can handle offensive and idiotic commentators when they are balanced with people who debate effectively.

            It’s their clickbait link I did not favor with a click, not the whole of the BBC.

            1. I have to say, I didn’t really think you’d be firing off ‘Outraged of Reading’ letters to the BBC;) There aren’t too many people like that around here.

               I do remember wincing slightly at the title at the time, but since it was immediately followed by the debate, which was polite and inoffensive and reasonable, I missed the possibility of offence entirely. In fact, and uncharacteristically so for The Big Questions, it was a rather dull episode.

         2. Good point – Another good thing about this programme is it allows religious people a pedestal to spew their bile and show for everyone to see how loathsome they actually are.
            They will usually have a humanist perspective and the humanist speaker will always come across as polite, rational and level-headed.

            Whilst the religionuts come across as bat shit crazy!!!

         3. +1

9. Seems very strange that BBC of all instruments would say something like that. It’s like asking the English to lay aside Verdun or Somme and put that world war behind you. Ask the northern states to forget about that Gettysburg, after all it is only history. If you do not continue to study and learn about the past you are just stumbling around in the present.

   1. Ask the Australians and New Zealanders to forget about Gallipoli. Hey, while we’re at it, South Africans should really quit teaching about that whole Apartheid unpleasantness. What’s past is past, amiright BBC?

   2. Everyone is making out that it’s the BBC’s official stance. All they did was host a debate.

      1. I’m glad my voice (above) isn’t a lone one.

      2. It’s still insensitive to ask the question.

         Just weeks ago England and the BBC made a great big hoohah about the centenary of WWI.

         I presume they didn’t ask the question “should we not quit moaning about this long past war” because the Great British public would have eaten them alive.

         Call it “they’re only asking a question” but there’s definitely some hypocrisy there.

10. I was in Dachau a few years ago, not the same but still impactful. It brings home not just how pointless and horrible the holocaust was, but that it wasn’t committed by monsters or aliens but by regular, dull, ordinary human beings and that in some sense we all have that capacity in us. In a different time, with different upbringing, who knows what we’d have become (and there are more than a few people who would thrive). Whatever the BBC thinks, in just a couple generations we haven’t changed enough to make that lesson any less relevant.

    Good post. Chilling.

    1. The ordinariness of the citizens who perpetrated it or went along with it is intended to bring home the point that in this time and with this upbringing, many of us would become this.

       That is why we must actively remember: because if we think of the nazi collaborators and rank and file troops as people of a different time and upbringing, we lose our best defense against becoming them. Thinking and discussing the holocaust is practicing for a test that, as far as science can determine, about 90% of the human population and yes that includes us moderns today would regularly and repeatedly fail.

       1. That is why we must actively remember: because if we think of the nazi collaborators and rank and file troops as people of a different time and upbringing, we lose our best defense against becoming them

          I get the impression the opposite happens more often: repeated exposure and turning over of the Holocaust almost elevates it to the point that Nazism and Hitler have become bywords for pure evil. The result is that it makes it easier to split the world into black and white categories, and so convince ourselves that we are always on the side of angels. That is the very problem itself.

          I’m not saying forget the Holocaust, but at times you’d swear it was one of the few genuinely bad things humanity ever did. What about more obscure historical atrocities, like the engineered famines in India during British colonial rule, the Rwandan genocide, the Armenian genocide, the tortures committed by early European settlers on Native Americans, the Srebrenica incident, the US’s violent bungling in Somalia, and the like? Why is it I only ever hear about stuff like that incidentally, rather than coming across it frequently on most media outlets and books?

          None of them is about to eclipse or obscure the horrors of Nazi Germany, but I wonder at times if the reverse doesn’t hold true as well. Education is usually hampered rather than helped by selective focus, as that’s dangerously close to cherry-picking.

          1. I tend to think in this case the special focus is warranted. See my reply just below yours in @11 for the long version of why. The short version is: many of the examples you cite are about land or keeping/gaining political power over some formerly powerful rival(s). The holocaust was not. Its not cherry-picking because it seems to be a fairly unusual case of genocide for genocide’s sake, rather than for venal motives of material/political gain or retribution.

             1. Also see my reply to yours at @11, but in brief: the Holocaust isn’t as unique as it’s made out to be. It wasn’t some oddity that came out of nowhere with barely understood motives, like an asteroid impact. It was the latest in a long line of similar atrocities, seemingly singular only because of a tendency to downplay those other atrocities. It isn’t necessarily alone in its category in terms of size, either. And to the extent that it distorts an understanding of the nature of such atrocities, then yes, it is cherry-picking.

          2. Ishmael Beah’s “Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” talked in some part about how he was ripped out of his family and became a part of a civil war. Gangs would invade villages, cherry pick some young boys, give them drugs and a gun and force them to kill their family or be killed themselves. The boys that complied would quickly become active participants in the new gang. I guess it was their only “family” left and committing such brutality (forced or not) makes it a lot easier to do it again. There are countless examples.

             The Holocaust was remarkable because of the scale, the recency, the calculation involved and, let’s face it, the many shades of racism. Not just the racism towards the Jews but the fact it was conducted by good, Christian white folk. Sad to say, but it’s a lot easier to dismiss genocides by and on people that we already think of as “other”.

             1. Sounds very familiar. Hasn’t this recently been going on in Africa with black children?

             2. Yes, just look at how Boko Haram is getting reported – not very damn much. There are many factors involved but I think the fact that it’s Africans killing Africans makes it easy to dismiss as just something “they” do.

                Recently many women have spoken out publicly about how badly they’re treated and it often gets dismissed or neglected. When a man says the same things, people pay attention. It’s not fair, it’s not just but it happens. My guess is that the same thing is happening here making the Holocaust resonate more strongly with Westerners because we think it could/did happen to “us” and not “them”. (More importantly, it was perpetrated by “us”.) Is that a reason to forget it? Hell no!

             3. I would take strong issue with that. There is aid available for female victims of rape in African conflicts. Repeated rape is used against male captives on a large scale as a weapon and the victims are explicitly denied aid by the UN (thanks Hilary). Not only that, they are despised by the women.

11. I saw the Big Questions episode and, in spite of the presence of the odious Angela Epstein, it was interesting.

    I think the point underlying the episode was that the holocaust was not unique, and that somehow, by focusing on the European holocaust to such an extent we are implicitly ignoring or even devaluing other genocides, like the Rwandan and Armenian atrocities.

    There’s certainly some truth in the idea that we’ve ignored many, many other genocides throughout history but I don’t think it does much good to link that to our attitude to the holocaust.

    The imagery from the BBC’s Eichmann docu-drama, particularly the footage of construction vehicles pushing vast piles of corpses into mass graves, was jaw-droppingly grotesque, and showed the uniquely industrialised, bureaucratically-informed efficiency of the final solution. It seems pretty reasonable to emphasise how singularly revolting it all was.

    Still, The Big Questions’s mandate is to ask this kind of stuff and it does it brilliantly.

    1. I can see why the timing is extremely bad though, and if the question had been something a little less obviously stupid it mightn’t be getting so much flak. Should We Lay The Holocaust To Rest? is an absurd question(of course we shouldn’t – the idea of it makes me uneasy) but most of the studio debate was actually about the lack of remembrance for other historic genocides. There’s no reason why remembering the holocaust and remembering other genocides should be mutually exclusive.

    2. Well, the Nazi machinery was very much more planned, engineered, managed, and controlled, and was more a matter of clear policy than others (especially, for instance, Rwanda, Sudan, Chad, the Balkins, Nigeria; not sure about Cambodia). Which I think makes it more horrific and in fact more devastating (the number of lives snuffed out in such a short time was staggering and took a huge, organized effort.)

       I think the cold-blooded management aspect of it is a big part of what makes it so repulsive.

       Another thing is that we have extant records, detailed records, that the Germans kept, and generally we do not have this elsewhere.

       As a species, we have a bad record with regard to inter-tribal warfare. It seems very important to emphasize and remember our worst moments, in the hope that they are not repeated.

       1. Well, the Nazi machinery was very much more planned, engineered, managed, and controlled, and was more a matter of clear policy than others (especially, for instance, Rwanda

          The Rwandan genocide was (at least in part) carefully and deliberately planned in advance. There’s no lack of evidence for other atrocities, either, such as the culling of native Americans and Australians, and the mistreatment of Kikuyu at the hands of British authorities.

          I agree with Saul Sorrell-Till’s point. I have no objection to remembering the Holocaust, nor would anyone deny it was an atrocity, but it’s also an atrocity that A) places many nations as victims, B) was won decisively by the right side, and C) is popularly used as a clear-cut example of the depths of human evil. In other words, it lends itself well to the dangerous sort of self-serving biases that people are readily susceptible to, especially without checks and balances that more thoroughly challenge such black-and-white thinking. It can also be used as a rhetorical stick to beat opponents’ heads with, just as the book 1984 often is. That seems more likely to cause problems, as it can then lead to double standards and “plausible” deniability when other genocides do occasionally come up in popular consciousness.

       2. In addition to the mechanical aspects of it, the holocaust is different from many other genocides because it seems to have less of an understandable motive. We understand wars of land/resource conquest (like the US-indian wars). We understand paranoid attempts to eliminate political enemies on a mass scale (Stalin, Mao). We understand that after any revolution or colonialist withdraw, there may be purges of people who were in favor/power with the previous regime (the Bolshevik revolution, Rwanda, Pol pot).

          But the Jews in the 1930s were none of those things. They controlled very little land, and were not politically powerful or favored by any older regime. They fought for Germany in WWI. There was very little material or political-institutional gain involved, no motivation except hate of cultural outsiders. And the fact that Hitler put more resources into the effort when he perceived he was losing the war really brings the point home: it is really hard to understand a level of hate that would bring a military command to cripple itself when its in deep trouble already. I do think the holocaust is unique in a lot of ways. That doesn’t mean we should forget the other genocides, but it does mean the holocaust is worth talking about spefically, as a unique historical event, and not just as one case amongst many other similar slaughters.

          1. There are huge problems with this analysis, and most of them revolve around the idea that the Holocaust is so unique that it requires special attention.

             For starters, it’s not unique even in size: communist atrocities in Russia and China rival it in sheer size and numbers. During WWII, more Russian soldiers were killed than were Holocaust victims, largely because of Stalin’s “we have reserves” attitude towards the frontline. This is before you turn absolute numbers into relative-to-population equivalents and find that it fits comfortably within the general trend, as shown in Better Angels by Steven Pinker.

             The unique motive idea is nonsense. This was hardly the first time Jews have been the source of discrimination, much less of atrocities, and intellectual thought had long been against them, especially when eugenics had been a surprisingly common idea early in the 20th century. They weren’t even the only ones killed: a quick look at Wikipedia lists that as well as “Romani (of whom 1,5 million approximately were killed), the targeted groups also included communists Ukrainians (of whom 3 million approximately were killed), Poles (2.5 million) and other Slavic peoples; Soviets (particularly prisoners of war) and others who did not belong to the Aryan Herrenvolk (Master Race) such as people with mental disorders, the deaf, the physically disabled, those with learning disabilities; gay men (and occasionally lesbians), transgender people; political opponents (such as communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, anarchists and others with left-wing political views); and religious dissidents such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

             Conquest, paranoia over rivals, rhetorical scapegoating after a recent defeat (WWI) – these aren’t diametrically opposed to the Nazi movement, but were a huge part of its aims. Jews were portrayed as internal traitors in the wake of WWI. And “revenge” or “fear” of long-hated minorities, however unjustified, is a pretty common cause of genocide. And militarily self-defeating strategies even in the face of defeat are a common enough theme in history to have spawned plenty of books. Far from being odd in its motivation, the reasoning behind the Holocaust is the usual, drearily familiar persecution myth of people abusing power for “moralistic” ends. It is unusual only to the extent that it is an unusually large absolute number of casualties compared with previous wars.

             In any case, if you wanted to identify risk factors for something like genocide, you’d want to focus on the most common and usual causes first, and not heap focus and attention on an oddity or an outlier. This is precisely why I said it was a bad idea: it’s like creationists ignoring vast tracts of fossils to blow up the importance of Piltdown Man. Mystifying and almost deifying WWII to make it seem more exceptional, inexplicably evil, and unique than it really was can only backfire, because it makes it more likely that understanding will be distorted, not clarified.

             1. More remembering, education and discussion is needed about the Holocaust, not less. “We” must never again take it into our own hands to cleanse the general population of “races” or “types” of people “we” decide shouldn’t be alive. In this selection process, any of us at any point could be considered to be in some category of human beings unworthy of life.

             2. And what of the many other atrocities and genocides committed, some of them shockingly recently? If educational policy requires attention on this, how much are we going to give to them? How many programmes are going to be dedicated to them? Are we looking for risk factors and trends, or case studies to endlessly pore over? Because the status quo answer seems to be that of a one-track mind.

                I couldn’t forget the Holocaust even if I was perverse enough to want to. But I could barely name more than a few genocides committed elsewhere. This strikes me as an indictment of how such matters are taught. Perhaps it’s some kind of ethnocentrism, or some other form of double standard, but a double standard is what it seems to be. What about other atrocities? Why aren’t we asked to remember them? Where are the heartfelt appeals and defences for more research and understanding there?

             3. Hers one not many remember. The Indonesian massacre of mostly communist party members and suspects. The numbers are not really known but could be in the the millions. Not much was said and not much has been investigated. There was also almost certainly complicity by rabid anti communist western governments.
                This is what Australian PM Harold Holt said, in America, “With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”
                “knocked off”? Lessons, anyone.

             4. I think that the Holocaust is unique. As a racial regime the elimination of Jews, in particular but not exclusively, was a primary political goal of Nazi Germany, and a strategic goal for them in the Second World War. While many regimes for religious or political reasons have felt that opponents should be killed en masse, that seems to me to be different. And rather than ignoring it as an “outlier,” it seems we should attend to it as one of many difference spurs to mass murder.

                That said, I continue to find the lack of regular education (for lack of a better word) about the millions of deaths caused by other 20th century regimes to be unjustifiable.

             5. I’m not saying there’s nothing unique about it, but I am saying that this angle of unique atrocity is oversold. I can’t think of an equivalent Jewish massacre so ambitious and systematic as the one that made up the Holocaust, but its motivation was a much more ancient and well-established antipathy towards Jews. Looking back at the moral zeitgeist of the early 20th century, you get the impression that, if the Nazi regime didn’t do it, there’d be no shortage of ideologues in the West willing to give it a try. I don’t see it as being that different from other attempts at wiping out a designated opponent en masse.

             6. Agreed, good point. You left out ‘freemasons’, another one of their targets. They would have decimated the USA’s founding fathers, including George Washington.

                In fact (I hOpe I’m not derailing here), I think that the reason the USA is generally still appreciated in Europe is their siding in WWII and the subsequent Marshall aid, despite the support for all kinds of callous regimes in name of anti-communism (from Argentinian dictators and the Saudi’s to the SA’n apartheid).

             7. “This was hardly the first time Jews have been the source of discrimination, much less of atrocities…”
                Not very felicitous expression there, in fact you seem to have written the opposite of what you (presumably) meant.

             8. Yes, wrong word. I made a mistake there. I meant that they had been victims so often. Thanks for pointing that out: I’m pretty surprised I phrased it that wrongly.

    3. I somewhat agree that we need to focus not only on the WWII holocaust, but on the many holocausts that have plagued history. As an example there were numerous “holocausts” in the Americas where millions were exterminated, but we rarely talk about that.

       1. I agree, but it must be stressed that reporting and analyzing other genocidal events and continuing to examine the holocaust are not mutually exclusive concepts, certainly not for the press.
          I worked in TV news from 2008 to 2014. There were US troops deployed in two separate active theaters of combat for most of my career and the number of stories about vacuous celebrity triviality so vastly out-numbered stories about Iraq or Afghanistan that I had to remind producers on three separate occasions that there was, in fact, an actual war on, but hey, why bother to do the hard work of telling people about actual current events when Tiger Woods just cheated on his wife!?!?!?!
          Little is known, among large swaths of the public, about even the more recent events of genocide. I was involved in a discussion on Saturday in which I made reference to the genocide that occurred at Srebrenica. No one knew what I was talking about. Srebrenica was in 1995, most of the people I was talking to were at least teenagers when it happened. Some of that can be explained by he fact that many public school students don;t study enough history, but the lion’s share of the blame has to be attributed to poor coverage of these vents in the press.
          Which is why the BBC’s “Big Question” isn’t just insensitive and ignorant (willfully?) of the horrors Jews have had to face, it’s just flat-out dumb. The answer is an obvious NO.

          1. I have just watched the Big Questions programme and you really have the wrong end of the stick in your final paragraph. The programme is an hour long debate that includes historians, philosophers, campaigners and a holocaust survivor plus the relatives of survivors. Crucially there were no holocaust deniers involved. It considered whether the holocaust was unique amongst genocides, what had caused it and debated how genocides can be avoided in the future. In no way was it ‘insensitive or ignorant’.

             1. My apologies, I wasn’t aware that it went past the twitter question.

             2. Just saw your comment. Oops – ignore the previous reply.

          2. I agree, but it must be stressed that reporting and analyzing other genocidal events and continuing to examine the holocaust are not mutually exclusive concepts, certainly not for the press.

             Only if you ask the historians, who keep massive records and archives that can be accessed and studied at leisure. As far as educating people more generally, yes it does, because the list of atrocities and genocides cannot be perused in its entirety. There are only 24 hours in a day.

             The problem is that other atrocities receive incredibly light treatment compared with WWII and the Holocaust. These are thrust around so often that they do crowd out many genocides and atrocities, and that’s a problem because it limits people’s thinking and understanding about the issues involved. If remembering is such a key aspect to preventing further atrocities, then surely we need to examine the assumptions behind prioritizing and setting one atrocity ahead of the others.

             1. “WWII and the Holocaust. These are thrust around so often that they do crowd out many genocides and atrocities, and that’s a problem because it limits people’s thinking and understanding about the issues involved.”

                Undoubtedly true.

                I am very very disappointed that we did not move in quickly in: Rwanda, (Nigeria right now), the Balkans, Darfur, etc.

             2. I am very very disappointed that we did not move in quickly in: Rwanda

                Rwanda is a particularly bad case because no less than six institutions documented the subsequent fallout in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the genocide, which claimed millions of victims:

                http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AFR62/014/2003/en

                http://www.hrw.org/news/2004/06/11/dr-congo-war-crimes-bukavu

                http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2002/18177.htm

                http://www.globalwitness.org/library/conflict-congo1-will-persist-unless-natural-resources-are-controlled

                http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/africa/central-africa/dr-congo/b018-pulling-back-from-the-brink-in-the-congo.aspx

                This was all done in the midst of the DRC civil war, but good luck finding anyone who remembers that part.

             3. “I am very very disappointed that we did not move in quickly in: Rwanda, (Nigeria right now), the Balkans, Darfur, etc.”

                On Rwanda and Darfur, you have a point although I don’t think that the coverage of the Holocaust can explain apathy towards violence and atrocities in Africa entirely.
                However, there were UN peace keeping forces in the Balkans.
                In fact, there was a Dutch peace keeping force in Srebrenica that effectively abandoned the Bosniak Muslims to be slaughtered by Mladic and the Serbs. There were supposed to be NATO airstrikes against the Serbian aggressors the morning that the genocide began, but they were called off due to a clerical error.

             4. My opinion is that not many know about this because there’s no way to spin the story to remove any share of the blame from the “good guys”. It is my further opinion that that’s the very reason people need to know about it.

             5. I agree, I just don’t see it as a binary proposition. I don’t think a choice necessarily be made between educating people about the Holocaust or educating people about other atrocities. I think there is enough room in those 24 hours to educate people about the Indonesian occupation of East Timor without diminishing the tragedy of the holocaust. The mechanized extermination of “undesirables” should be more than a footnote in history.

          3. Re. your last paragraph – I agree that the answer to the question should be unequivocal. I also agree that the question’s a daft one. I would ask you though whether you’ve watched the actual debate, as very little airtime(none AFAI can remember) is given over to arguing for a stop to commemorating the holocaust.

             The arguments from the other side are mainly about widening our sphere of compassion and remembrance to include other historical genocides.

             I agree that, without watching the relatively polite, sensitive debate that follows the question the BBC could come across as crass. So I’d recommend watching it first.

             Of course if you have watched it then my apologies.

             1. To my knowledge, that program is not available from my provider in the states. When I made that comment, I was unaware that there was anything to the question other than what was posted on twitter, hence the total lack of context.

             2. It’s on YouTube (I won’t post a link because I’ll probably embed by mistake)!

             3. Theres a link down the page at post 31.

             4. Thanks.

12. “Is’t that totally screwy.” Kingsley says this no contempt, but as a plea for reason. I love him.

    “If you don’t shut up it will happen again.” This is what all prejudicial and ignorant people think about anything that appears caustic to their xenophobic lives.

13. I’ve read several books on the Holocaust which dealt with the Nazi soldiers who directly perpetrated such horrors. How?

    My understanding is that most of the Final Solution soldiers had volunteered. You didn’t get drafted into concentration camp duty. Some of them were malignant sociopaths who also terrorized their families. But most of them seemed to be otherwise were ordinary men and women who relied upon their principles to get them through a “hard time.” They had a very strong sense of duty.

    Apparently there were many discussions among SS officers about the future and how history would view them. As they saw it, what they were doing was often emotionally hard and psychologically painful — but necessary for the greater good. It was like lancing a boil or cutting off a gangrenous leg. There was no real choice if you cared about the health of the whole. You had to steel your emotions. You had to keep the goal in mind and realize that any softer instincts or doubts were weakness and not reliable.

    And one day people would look back at them and wonder how??? They must have been more than men. This idea encouraged them.

    Well, technically speaking, they got their wish.

    1. I strongly recommend Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. You will find out there. And be amazed and chilled.

       1. Yes, iirc that’s one of the books I read, along with one on Mengele and other Nazi “doctors.” There was also another very interesting book which had interviews with the adult children and grandchildren of Nazi war criminals. I don’t remember the title, sorry.

          What’s chilling is that all too frequently there was nothing amazing going on. The result, yes — but the faulty rationalizations and compartmentalization processes are familiar old friends in the skeptic movement.

          1. all too frequently there was nothing amazing going on

             Yep. I’m not sure whether Milgram was motivated by a desire to understand why the rank and file nazis did what they did, but he certainly (IMO) found out part of the answer: the vast majority of us would go along with such things, given the proper context. That is why it is so important to remember what happens when we do just ‘go along with things.’

             1. Yes, unfortunately.

          2. The question “what would I have done?’ has always felt like the big question of the 20th century to me. A kind of silent, ever-present moral stone in the shoe.

             1. I remember talking to my dad about this when I was a kid (about 10 – early 1970s). He was in the army. He said he would’ve done what he was ordered to do. He didn’t think anyone except the camp commanders should be prosecuted for war crimes because they were just doing their job. I was horrified by his attitude, but looking back I find it interesting.

             2. At least he was honest. But that is what armies – all armies – invariably and specifically try to instil in their troops. I don’t mean honesty, I mean blind unthinking obedience to orders.

                And they shoot anyone who doesn’t.

             3. That’s a frighteningly honest answer. I would very much like to say I would have refused, or that I would’ve joined the white rose movement – but most of what I know about human psychology and sociology suggests otherwise. But then again I can’t imagine being who I am now and participating in even the ghettoisation of minorities, never mind all that followed.

                This is why I called it a silent question – because answering it out loud means confronting its extraordinary moral complexity; it means facing up to all the evidence that contradicts the idea of pure, innate evil. And who wants to do that?

    2. A recent read — especially concerning the banality with which the Nazis went about their business: “The Good Old Days: the Holocaust as seen by its perpetrators and bystanders”.

       an excerpt from the letters by Gendarmerie chief Fritz Jacob. (ellipses mine, where I skip portions) – pardon the length

       Ebersbach, 29 October 1941
       …Together with Meister Kluge and others I have been detailed for service in the East. I am truly pleased about this as I can now get down to doing some practical work for our Fuhrer. I hope that we shall be going to a region which will suit my love for nature, and that this opportunity will finally permit me to advance myself… I send best wishes to you and your most worthy family.

       Kamenets Podolsky, 5 May 1942
       …I have been meaning to give you a sign of life for a long time, but there seems to be no end to work. No wonder either. The region which I have to look after after together with 50 Gendarmes and 500 Schutzmannern (Ukrainians) is as large as a Regierrungsbezirk in Germany. The Schutzmanner cause me the most work, the good-for-nothings. Hardly surprising, really… In my capacity as station chief I act as executioner, lawyer, judge, etc.
       Naturally, there’s a good deal of mopping up to take place, especially amongst the Jews. As you can imagine, the population needs to be kept on a tight rein. You have to be very careful. Well, we just get on with it. That way we’ll be home quicker. My family is not happy… permit me, Herr Lieutenant-General to send you my best wishes,

       Kamenets Podolsky, 21 June 1942
       …my very best wishes for your birthday (your 50th, I believe)… I can just picture you Barbary stallion. It must be a fine beast. Doesn’t your wife wish to ride on its noble back? I almost envy her. Our nags are mostly a hotchpotch, like the local population. But up till now, I’ve been surprised at their lack of criminality. You can just ask anything of them, just like horses. They work until they drop and make no demands…
       Well, there is only a small and dwindling percentage left of the 24,000 Jews originally living in Kamenets Podolsky. Those little Jews living in the Rayons [counties] are also some of our best clients. We are forging ahead and suffering no pangs of conscience and then ‘Die Wellen schlagen zu, die Welt hat Ruh’ [‘the waves will claim what is theirs and the world will have peace’].
       And now for my girlfriend. She has chosen the profession of pharmacist. I wish I had once gone to a certain pharmacy in Hamburg, to buy some acid drops for 5 pfennings… I hear that Tommy is keeping you on your toes… etc., etc.

       with glossary, tables of ranks, a chronology, document sources. A brutal, but necessary read.

       1. Yes, that is something I also found troubling. So well organised, the banality of it.
          Just like a slaughterhouse were jews instead of cattle were killed.
          There is a 3 hr long documentary “Shoah” (I saw it about 20 hears ago, so I have no more details) that gives you exactly that feeling of banality, very, very scary.

          1. Yes, I have provided details of Shoah below. I watched the full 9 1/2 – hour version over the course of 3 days, I think. Watching it all at once would’ve certainly driven me to jump off a cliff.

             With some +300 hours of footage shot for the movie, apparently 4 additional films were made, just from the outtakes. (according to IMDB).

    3. I’m sure the doctors who help the military and intelligence services figure out the best ways to prolong the torture of Muslims feel exactly the same – a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

14. My condolences to anyone personally connected to the horror of Auschwitz and beyond.

    There really is no such thing as a time frame for grief resolution or healing. One just goes on living, changed. Help those with such wounds and be nice to them. That such an approach seems too much to observe, for some, strikes me as uneducated slanting towards inhumane.

    Mike

15. I’ve read a lot about the Holocaust; but even looking at your post and the photos (and the emphasis on how short their lives were is really telling and wrenching: They were treated so badly, they only lived a few weeks or days), let alone going to the camps and museum, really chills me.

    I’d like to say thanks for posting this; but it’s very disturbing.

    After reading many books about that time (I strongly recommend: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Berlin Diary by William Shirer and Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen), I found, on trying to read The Nazi Doctors that I couldn’t do it (read further) after they starting talking about the “experiments” done by the Nazi doctors to children. This was after I had my own children.

    The things done to the people caught up in the Konzentrationslager system were so horrific that our natural reaction is to turn away. But we need to face them squarely, as best we can. And, mainly, to never forget.

16. Both the tweet, and the programme date from Sunday not today. I won’t say any more because I didn’t see it.

17. And the very religious Irish Taoiseach Éamon de Valera said sorry to the German ambassador in 1945 for the death of his Führer Adolf Hitler!

    1. Signed the book of condolence for hitler on behalf of the Irish people as well. Ireland was neutral during the second world war, doing so was normal diplomatic procedure. This was one of the reason Ireland was blocked from becoming a member of the UN until 1955.

       1. There’s an interesting BBC documentary about Nazi war criminals that settled in Ireland while they refused Jewish orphans. The Catholic Church has dirty fingers again.

          1. http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/tv-eye-irelands-nazis/

             This one?

18. I went to Dachau in 1976. It was every bit as impactful as Jerry describes. Certain moments of that experience are still vivid. The most disturbing, impactful and persistantly vivid moment was walking into the ovens. The combination of knowing, seeing and, most distressing, smelling, that made up that moment was overwhelming.

19. My father’s parents were Romanian Jews. They emigrated to the US in 1899-1900, leaving behind their parents, siblings, and extended families. Romania didn’t treat Jews any better than other countries did. My genealogy research has ended in the 1940’s. No family left to trace. I’ve been to Dachau but Auschwitz would be unbearable.

    Thank you for this post, Jerry.

20. I’m quite surprised at your response Jerry. Not least because you seemed to (and most people on this blog) have judged a show with out watching.

    You seem to be committing the same over sensitive pseudo outrage that you accuse people of faith of.

    The show went ahead with many experts from all sides without any furore here. I was even in the audience, its probably on youtube.

    Do I agree with the question? Of course not but its not to say at some point in the future we should lay it to rest be that in a 100 or 1000 years. There have been many genocides before and since the Holocaust that we do not mention.

    1. Over-sensitive pseudo-outrage?
       Really?

       While it is fair to say that a tweet is unlikely to accurately represent an entire show, it is nevertheless a curiously crass selection of words worthy of Buzzfeed or Clickhole or lower.

       1. Jerry & almost everyone on this blog are making out that the BBC have made some editorial stance that the Holocaust should be forgotten. Yet they are probably doing more to commemorate it than any other channel.
          The Big Questions is one show not even produced by the BBC.
          Is the question a little clickbaity? Probably but however you phrase that question people will be outraged.

21. …and black people should stop whining about slavery, I suppose.

    Do Londoners plan to erase memories of the Blitz anytime soon?

22. Reblogged this on Fairy JerBear's Queer World News, Views & More From The City Different – Santa Fe, NM and commented:
    Another reminder or the importance or remembering…

23. I see the number of 11 million total victims is on wiki. I think its possible its wrong. In the 80s the 6 million number was widely discussed. Most people didn’t know that that number broke down to 1 1/2 – 2 million non-jews and the rest Jews so they interchanged it with 6 million Jews. It if later became widely known that almost a third of the victims where non-jews the 6 million figure might have been inflated from there. I don’t know- maybe there has been new research on it.
    My uncle Peter who died 2 years ago was in Auschwitz. On Thanksgiving and other family gatherings I’d hear surreal stories about his time there. He said that Mengele rode around the camp on a bicycle whistling Bach. He said the Polish guards were far worse than the Germans and the story of how he and a Russian POW survived is harrowing. The most bizarre story concerns a Catholic German aristocrat – something von somethingberg – who was there for political reasons. He was serving a sentence and was released. I had always thought a trip to Auschwitz was a one-way trip but for a few it was more a prison. Anyway, after the war my uncle was walking down a street in Vienna. The aristocrat saw him and his exact words were: ” Peter! How are you? Its great to see you! I haven’t seen you since Auschwitz”
    These stories always put me in a very somber mood.

24. My husband and I visited the Mauthausen Camp when we were in Austria, located just southeast of Linz, Austria. Upon arriving in the area/town, we could not locate the camp. There were no obvious signs as we had expected. We stopped several townspeople and asked them where we might find the camp. NONE of the people we asked knew where the camp was (or so they said.)It seemed to us they did not even want to talk about the camp. Once we found it, we understood why. Who would want their town to be associated with such a horrible time in world history? Prisoners in the camp were subjected to horrify medical experiments, including surgically removing significant organs (kidney, stomach, liver) from living prisoners in order to determine how long a prisoner could survive without the organ. We toured the camp, viewing the ovens and collections of belongings that had been taken from the victims. We got separated from one another as we each took in the horrors. It was a good time to be alone. Finally, I looked for my husband and found him sitting up against a wall overlooking a field where victim’s bodies had been discarded. He was crying. It makes me cry as I sit here remembering. Viewing these horrors is just one of the many reasons I am certain there is no god.

25. Jerry, perhaps you or others here, whether having been to one of the death camps or not, can answer a question I have never seen addressed. Were there churches in the vicinity of the camps, ones that those working in them attended? If so, one must assume that the priests or ministers of those institutions must have justified to their congregants that they were doing the Lord’s work, since it is impossible that they couldn’t know what was happening. Perhaps Goldhagen’s book – which I need to read – addresses this. Or perhaps I should ask Karen Armstrong?

    1. I think I remember a portion of the (9 1/2) film “Shoah” that involved a small Polish church and its current congregants. The same site was also active in WWII (if I remember correctly) with experimentation on how to make the slaughter more efficient, save bullets, etc. (in this instance by modifying the exhaust systems of large vans to gas the victims driven around inside) I’d be surprised if the Polish congregants of the time were not actively involved.

       You can see the wiki ref (above) for relevant criticisms of the movie (French filmmaker, who perhaps thought a Shoah couldn’t have happened in France, for example… when the antisemitism in France at the time was some of the worst in Europe, for example.) Despite problems that seem like finger-pointing, I consider it an essential movie. It was all done with interviews – no stock footage or reenactments. Interviews with people who plainly knew what was happening in their backyards (boxcars full of people going one way, screams, then silence & returning train cars). Villagers standing by the tracks and drawing fingers across their necks at the passersby. Current residents occupying confiscated houses suddenly getting very uneasy and cutting off interviews when asked if they knew the previous owners… things like that.

26. Those who forget the past are destined to repeat it.

27. Lets try and put this another way.

    The UK government actively made and used concentration camps in Kenya, The Boer War and other places I forget.

    Why do I forget? because we do not conveniently remember those!

    If the question posed was. Should we remember the Boar war? Would we have the same outrage.

    1. I do not really want to apologise for concentration camps during the Boer war or Kenyan colonial wars (they were horrific), but they were not *extermination* camps as such, like Auschwitz-Birkenau II or Sobibor were: the latter were camps whose main purpose was *extermination*, on an industrial scale at that. The ‘evilest’ of all, immo.
       Not even in Rwanda or ‘Kampuchea’ was it that well organised.

       BBC, again, “whining?” WTF are you saying, “*whining*”??? What TF are you implying? Shame on you. Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame!

       1. but they were not *extermination* camps as such

          Not officially, no, but in practice they were scarcely distinguishable, as many died through malnutrition and disease anyway.

          In any case, as I’ve already argued above, this is solely if you consider absolute numbers the key determinants. In terms of relative numbers, as used in Better Angels by Steven Pinker, the Holocaust wasn’t even outside normal trends, so even the use of more modern tools and social infrastructure doesn’t deserve its special status.

          No, I think the most conspicuous thing separating Nazi atrocities from those of other cruel regimes is that they failed and have since been easily designated as evil works, pure black-and-white. Conquesting “empires” that succeed, like the British, the US, and the Roman ones, don’t receive nearly as much opprobrium, despite the fact that many of them were more successful and repeated more than once.

28. I think the BBC’s “isn’t it time to quit whining about the Holocaust” comes close to denial of the Holocaust.
    No BBC! Never ever we should quit ‘whining’ about the Holocaust, never ever about any genocide, Armenian, the Great Leap Forwards, the Khmer Rouge genocide and, of course closest to me personally, the Rwandan Genocide in 94. 20 or 70 -or even 500- years are not enough to stop ‘whining’. It should never, ever, ever been forgotten.
    The evils of genocide should be exposed, and exposed, and exposed, and learned from.(reason I’m not 100% with you on hate speech).
    You know Jerry, that post kept the tears flowing, I guess I’m getting weak, weak…

    1. Can I suggest that you watch the programme. It is a debate, not a polemic, no-one is accused of whining. It does consider the Holocaust in the context of the other hisoric genocides and asks if the Holocaust was unique. Most think it was.

29. It’s a question to spur debate for their debate show. Not a statement that they think we should put WWII to rest.

    I don’t find any problem with debating this question, or any other question.

30. I think that the BBC does not intend that the Holocaust be forgotten. There is an extensive season of programmes of which The Big Question debate is but one part:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02ghbp8

    Asking the question is one way to ensure that we do not forget.

31. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwRdLCUJ_rg&spfreload=10

    This is the YouTube link.

32. This is a place I want to visit before I die. I would like to tour the world war II sites of Europe. Even though the war was over long before I was born, I grew up with TV shows about the war, fictionalized movies, documentary after documentary, (the World at War, History of World War II, The Valour and the Horror, Canada at War) all of which I found absolutely fascinating, and I’m absolutely certain they shaped my view of right and wrong in the universe, no more so than the episodes that explored Hitlers Final Solution.

    Not long ago I watched the 2001 movie Conspiracy on Netflix. Conspiracy is a historical recreation of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, a meeting of the senior Nazi officials, and the confirmation of the final solution. I watched it twice, I thought it was excellent, a terrifying look at the banality of evil. Of course it’s difficult to know exactly what that meeting looked like, we only got to know about it because one person neglected to destroy all the copies of the minutes, as ordered. They knew what they were doing was wrong. Excellent acting all around.

    World war two changed our world so much it’s difficult to even imagine what the world would look like if a megalomaniac had not risen to power in Germany in the thirties. Of course, Hitler is made to look like small change when compared with Genghis Khan. But Genghis won, and thank Ceiling cat, (and millions of soldiers and others in the war effort) Hitler lost. I shudder to consider a world where Hitler had won.

    The one thing that always confounds my intellect and reasoning, is how any rational person, any person with any compassion or humanity could call him or herself a neo Nazi, or model themselves on the horror of the Nazi’s. Few things revolt me more than a modern day Nazi’s. Perhaps worse are older nazi supporters, white supremicists and the ilk who look up to and admire the machinations of people like Himmler, Hitler and their ilk.

    I made sure my children understood what those camps meant, and I was proud when my daughter took a trip to London she took in some of the great war sites. I hope my children do the same for their children, if they have any, so they will understand just how important it is to remember those camps and understand the dangers they represent.

    I’d like to see the same sorts of shows on, but they seem to be replaced by such bastions of intellect as Survivor and Big Brother. Which might be why so many American teaparty and Republican fools fall for the moronic conspiracy stories of Obama setting up concentration camps via FEMA.
    Sometimes stupidity knows no bounds.

33. NBC went to Auschwitz with a group of survivors to commemorate the liberation. Trigger warning: It’s a tearjerker.

    http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/auschwitz-survivors-return-nazi-concentration-camp-after-70-years-n293921.

34. Note to self what is a recipe for disaster: questioning whether it is time to put to rest an ugly historical fact which is of specific relevance and pain to a living group of people other than one’s own.

    Germany’s role in the Shoah is a tragedy, too, even though it is significantly less tragic than the genocide itself. How did a nation which was and is a leading light in science and philosophy come to commit the most evil crimes in modern history? I don’t think that question should never be put to rest either.

35. I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau May 4, 2000, with a Pilgrimage group of approximately 40, equal number of Jews and Christians. My post today (Jan 27) at my blog has my reflections and photographs from then. I wonder if George Santayana’s quotation remains at the entrance to the Auschwitz museum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Those words apply to everyone of us in this society of ours which in too many cases worships power and military might above all else.

36. BBC doesn’t want us to forget Auschwitz at all – yesterdays documentary “Freddie Knollers’s War” was very good.

37. Thank you for marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. My heart is heavy in remembering and also in knowing that the world is still fraught with turmoil and ever-teetering on the brink of something not good, something frightening, something vile.

    Thank you for using the voice of Ben Kingsley. His work in Schindler’s List was incredibly outstanding. The movie was life-changing and life-expanding for me, for so well did it depict the horrors of the Holocaust, and so well did it honour the memory of all these innocents.

38. The prosthetics! I’m sure many of the diaabled had been injured in WWI, and many if not most of those in the service of the German and AustroHungarian empires.

39. Kingsley’s comment at the end of the video gets to the heart of why we shouldn’t forget the Holocaust: because too many of us want to forget. It was educated, civilized white folk carrying out a genocide. It hits too close to home for many people and it’s very tempting to want to distance ourselves.

    And of course the racism & anti-semitism is still very much a part of modern culture.

40. We should not forget that homosexuals were also exterminated by the Nazis.

    1. The only monument dedicated to the extermination of homosexuals by the Nazis is, as far as I can remember, the pink marble Homomonument in Amsterdam. Homosexuals, along with the roma and the disabled, are the forgotten victims of the Holocaust.

       1. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25687190

41. Someone once complained to me that it was time to stop thinking about the wars and we shouldn’t have remembering day anymore because we should, “get over it”. Ironically this person thought it was OK to hate a group of people because his parents hated them in the old country. So he couldn’t get over it in a new country in a new generation.

    1. Years ago, I remember talking with my mother about our family’s Heinz 57 variety of nationalities,including English, Irish, Dutch, Welsh, Scots and German. At that time, I was pro-English, anti-German (probably reflecting post-WWII history classes). My mother felt just the opposite, having grown up with family stories about English atrocities against the Irish, Scots and Welsh (not to mention, the colonies).

42. All the BBC news programmes today – radio and TV – have led with coverage of the Auschwitz commemorations. The flagship 10pm news had a 10-min piece as the lead item. BBC2 has run a programme tonight featuring survivors and making a powerful case for not forgetting. I don’t think we will; and I don’t think the BBC will either.

43. The BBC have done a massive job covering the remembrance. I’ve now watched probably at least six programs/documentaries and there are others I haven’t watched. And Sunday’s The Big Question (is a weekly debate-style show) was actually fascinating and interesting; hearing from the Jews and historians in a dialectical environment which was less about the Holocaust per se, but what it means to put it into context with other atrocities and how people can learn from them.

44. If we do not remember, we will forget, until the next time.
    If history shows us anything, it is that there will always be a next-time.
    Then people will cry-out, why did you not tell us?
    And we will have no excuse.

45. Has anybody read “IBM and the Holocaust” (Black)?

    1. I have a hard copy and I read some of it but didn’t finish (which is exactly what the book says not to do). From what I read it is quite interesting and horribly sickening at IBM’s involvement as technicians visited concentration camps to fix equipment so they would have known exactly what was going on there.

       1. Has anyone read about the interaction of the Nazis and the Catholic Church, including the papacy? There’s a plethora of material on the internet, including photos of priests giving the Nazi salute. The church colluded with the Nazis from early in their political life up to and, including,helping them escape justice after the war.

46. Some of my mother’s cousins were sent to concentration camps. They lived through the experience. I find it hard to say they survived. They moved to the United States after the WWII and I remember them from visits at family gatherings. One woman suffered severe depression and died at a young age. Her sadness made a deep impression on my childhood self – it is often her face I recall when the Holocaust is brought up.

    No — I don’t dwell on the subject, but I doubt I will ever forget the millions who died or lived to suffer with life-long physical and mental health problems. My mother’s family is not Jewish, nor were her cousins. They were just young people who for whatever reason offended the Nazis. I resent the BBC suggestion, and its anti-semitic taint, that we leave the Holocaust in the past.

    I think our country is too close to repeating the past. So, no, I do not want want to forget it.

47. I am curious to know why you apparently observed the prohibition against photographing the women’s hair exhibit in Auschwitz, but not the one proscribing picture taking in Tagore’s Calcutta home.

48. Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.

49. What I don’t necessarily agree with is the argument “We must never forget, lest it happen again”. The first bit I don’t quibble with, but the second just doesn’t seem to follow. It has happened again, repeatedly, albeit not so well organised and not on quite the same scale. But usually to non-European, non-English-speaking people who typically live in some country most of us can’t even point to on the map and who don’t have a high profile in US/European circles, which is why it passes relatively unnoticed.

    And, even the memory of the Vietnam War didn’t stop the Iraq invasion.

    I used to think, cynically, that Holocaust remembrance was a great and convenient distraction from other atrocities. That in the 80’s, say, Americans could tut-tut about the Holocaust (which of course was over and the US helped to stop, so their conscience was clear) while they conveniently overlooked the modest mass-murders that the CIA’s pet dictator Pinochet was up to in Chile. As I said, I was cynical.

    The BBC program from all accounts was making the point that that shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

50. Never forget this deplorable, despicable, hateful and lethal atrocity. People suffered in ways we can’t even begin to comprehend, then were brutishly murdered after horrendous misery and suffering.

    All news organizations realize the importance of history; their livelihood depends on it. Asking such an absurd question is not only insensitive, it’s deplorable! Professor Ceiling Cat should call for an apology immediately.

    Jewel helps me remember with her thought-provoking poem she eventually set to music: Pieces of You.

    1. Thank you so much for this song.

51. Thank you for an excellent post. I was glad to see the BBC defended in the posts that followed because they have done a good job and I am sure will continue to do so. The Ben Kingsley clip was very good too. The word “insensitive” brought to mind the story I was just told about a friend of a friend here in France who has taken his children out of the German school (in France) that they were at, because the school insisted on frequently “hammering home” teaching about the Shoah! Coming from a citizen of a country that helped list, round up and deport its own citizens it certainly brings to mind the word “insensitive”. There was also a remark about the fact that the Jews placed the yellow stars on their own clothes, voluntarily! On the other side of the balance is the ceremony I attended in a small, close-by village; it was the “ceremonie des Justes” where a representative of the Israeli Goverment was honouring a Catholic nun who, during the war, had hidden several Jewish children in the Convent thereby saving their lives. I must look and see if Fritz Jacob’s “the Good Old Days: the Holocaust as seen by its perpetrators and bystanders has been translated into French. The reading group these people belong to would benefit from having it brought to their attention.

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