Key facts about the Nazi Holocaust

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L13514804.htm

JERUSALEM, March 13 (Reuters) - Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial opens a new museum on Tuesday to teach about the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

Following are some facts on the Holocaust, state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews and other groups by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.

-- Nearly 6 million Jews were murdered in Europe as part of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" to what the Nazi dictator called the Jewish problem, according to Yad Vashem.

-- The decision to kill Europe's Jews was formulated in late 1941, and Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 coordinated the apparatus of mass murder.

-- Most victims were murdered in six extermination camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland was the largest and at least 1.1 million Jews were killed there before its liberation by the Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945. In total 85 percent of the Jewish population in Poland died -- some 2.8 million people.

-- Only an estimated 11 percent of Jewish children who were alive in 1933 survived the Holocaust.

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[Kathy in Cambridge]

1. Chilling statistics

"The United States and Britain garnered much intelligence about the camps, other historians say, but their priority was a total military defeat of Nazi Germany, not rescuing European Jews."

I believe the anti-semitism in the US and Britain at the time is one reason that we didn't act sooner.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[papau]

7. "garner sympathy for that cause" is Bull - the Balfor agreement was 20 yrs

earlier,

Other anti-semetic, KKK anti Jew, crap you will find on the net includes "if you give us the Balfour Agreement(in 1917) creating Israel we gaurantee to get the US to enter the war .. BECAUSE WE OWN THEIR FEDERAL RESERVE AND THE US MEDIA .." (the real reason for Balfor was the usual Anglo reason that exists today - to piss off the French who thought they should control the area, without claiming perpetual control to be kept by the Brits)

NO - neither crappy lie is "within the realm of possibility"

The presumed "Jewish Control" never existed, and no new incentive was needed in 1940 to get the Ottoman area of Israel given to a Jewish State after the war.

[Name removed]

10. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

12. Why is it necessary to have "credentials" to disagree with....

...the premise you've posted to this forum?

I don't believe it either. There is no proof for your assertions despite the quotes you've used from people that think like you.

[Sporadicus]

13. There's More Proof In My Post

than in the automatic gainsaying of what the other person posts. Citations of direct quotes and provision of a historical framework go a lot further toward proving a point than saying, 'no, it isn't.' Otherwise, all we've got is a version of Monty Python's 'argument clinic.'

'Credentials' and 'credence' share the same root word: credentia: Medieval Latin, present participle of 'believe.' It's obviously easier to believe the research of someone who has devoted their professional life to a cause than take the word of some average asshole on the street.

[papau]

21. A "Credentialed" anti Zionist who is now a Christian carries what weight?

Those proofs of an agreement/plan in 1916/1917 to "bribe to Jews" to back the Brits have never been found!

Indeed there is nothing other the assertions of anti-Zionist folks, usually made to each other; about how a 3rd party had screwed up the world.

I agree this DOES NOT emanate strictly from anti-Semitic sources - although it is used by them. It comes from anti-Zionist sources that in turn are found to have no proof beyond rather good research that anti-Zionist person "A" did indeed assert that such and such happened. It is only when you ask for documents that you get "so and so had dinner with so and so" as the "proof" of an agreement or even of a discussion occurring about a given topic.

If that floats your boat as to "credentials", so be it.

But we are agreed that Lilienthal is an anti-Zionist - and is not an anti-Semite!

In any case in IMHO, it is a bullshit argument with no proof to hang its hat on.

:-)

[K-W]

8. Thats way way too much of a stretch. EOM

[Andromeda]

22. This is a load of crap...

and even bringing it up tells me something about you.

[NNN0LHI]

4. Same problem as today. Even Jewish Americans did not want to believe it

http://www.holocaust-trc.org/Whatdidtheyknow.htm

<snip>Atrocities Revealed In The American Press

In an editorial on January 24, 1940, the New York Times explained it had been reluctant to report atrocity stories coming out of Poland because "All we have heard until now have been unofficial accounts of such horrors that we chose to disbelieve them as exaggerated." But the Times acknowledged it could no longer ignore these accounts because the Vatican radio station had broadcast that it had been receiving almost daily reports from Warsaw, Krakow, Pomerania, Poznan, and Silesia that told of "destitution, destruction and infamy of every description." (33) The Vatican "has spoken with authority that cannot be questioned; and has confirmed the worst intimations of terror which comes out of the Polish darkness," the Times reported. (34) Jews and Poles were being moved into hermetically sealed ghettos that were inadequate to sustain the millions destined to live there.

What the Times did not explain is why these unofficial reports and those supplied by the JTA could not have been independently investigated. Some Jews doubted the authenticity of these horror tales because they believed American newspapers rarely suppressed news. If anything, they considered the press to be "over sensational." If these events actually occurred, they would have been reported in the American press.

In The Terrible Secret, Walter Laquerer explains another reason for the reluctance to accept the news Poland. Many individuals remembered the propaganda campaigns of the First World War, when each side charged the other with wanton brutality. The Germans were accused of burning down villages, cutting off breasts and tongues, making soap from dead soldiers (a myth that found its way into the press during the Second World War as well only with Jewish bodies being used instead) and other unspeakable crimes. The press duly reported the atrocities, but at the end of the war it became clear they had been duped; many of the stories had either been made up or were greatly exaggerated.

Reports from Poland were given further credibility when Congressman Samuel Dickstein (D., N.Y.) chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee read eleven dispatches of the JTA into the Congressional Record on January 24, 1940. (38) Three days later Howard Daniel, writing in The Nation (a liberal American weekly magazine), observed that if there were still individuals inclined to regard Jewish reports as exaggerated, an account in the Breslau Schlesische Zeitung should dispel their skepticism. Based on German police records in the Lodz district the information first appeared in the JTA of the January 3, 1940. It told of a hundred Jews of being executed for allegedly having resisted the Germans during a house-to-house search. In Lodz, hundreds of other Jews were shot for supposedly surrounding a synagogue in the city to prevent Germans from entering the premises. There were also reports of Jewish streets being sealed off and of a typhoid epidemic. In other cities in Poland, German soldiers were shooting, publicly flogging, and executing Jews. Some of their work had been simplified the report concluded because "in some houses many Jews had committed suicides."

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[wtmusic]

3. If you've never visited a concentration camp memorial

do so.

I went to Mauthausen in Austria in 1993 and my entire perception of the holocaust changed. It's one thing to know the facts; it's another to walk through the gas chambers, to see the ovens, the barbed wire; to walk the concrete now grown over with weeds.

Unforgettable.

[Andromeda]

23. I plan to see it.

It's something that the world should never forget.

It CAN happen again.

[kurtyboy]

26. I went to Auschwitz when I was 17

Haven't been the same since--one of themost troubling days of my life.

[Metrix]

5. 50 million dead in WWII

http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/Lucaire.htm

The best-kept secret in the U.S. about the Holocaust is that Poland lost six million citizens or about one-fifth of its population: three million of the dead were Polish Christians, predominantly Catholic, and the other three million were Polish Jews. The second best-kept secret of the Holocaust is the greatest number of Gentile rescuers of Jews were Poles, despite the fact that only in Poland were people (and their loved ones) immediately executed if caught trying to save Jews. The Yad Vashem museum in Israel honors "the Righteous Among the Nations" and Poland ranks first among 40 nations with 5,503 men and women, almost one-third of the total, honored for their "compassion, courage and morality" and who "risked their lives to save the lives of Jews."

[Deja Q]

6. Here's a chart. Chilling stuff.

http://www.postcardsfromnowhere.com/postcards_from_nowhere/2004/week18/
(look for "The New Holocaust" for a pic of the symbols if the above graphic doesn't appear)

[LynnTheDem]

19. Change the yellow Star of David to Muslims, and there's the American

wish-chart of the rightwing talibornagains.

[Amfortas]

9. And the scary thing is ....

that this can happen again ....
people never learn from history !

could it be the muslims turn now ?

and lets not forgot the people of rwanda whom noone give a f**k about .

[bloom]

11. .

A person might get the idea from "key Facts" article that ONLY Jews died. It did get around to mentioning 5.5 million other victims - but if you didn't know better - you might think they all survived.

"- An estimated 5.5 million other victims of Nazi atrocities -- labeled "enemies of the German state" -- included up to half a million Gypsies, an estimated 10,000-15,000 homosexuals and 3 million Poles. Catholic and Protestant clergy also were sent to concentration camps as well as Jehovah's Witnesses"


Other sources:

http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/people/victims.htm

-----

http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/

Non-Jewish Holocaust Victims - the 5 Million Others

Raised by parents who had survived the Holocaust, I heard many stories about the atrocities of this World War II horror. I learned how one of my family's homes in Poland was burned to the ground by Nazis. I learned that my uncle was shot in the head by Nazi soldiers because his family was hiding a Jewish woman. Painful as it was for them to speak about it, my parents felt it was important that I knew the stories of the Holocaust.

It was only after I moved to the Los Angeles area several years ago that I realized that many people were not aware that millions of victims of the Holocaust were NOT Jewish. Outside the Polish community, I heard very little mention about the five million non-Jewish victims -- usually referred to as "the others".

Whenever I would say that my parents were survivors of the Holocaust, people would look at me oddly and say, "Oh, I didn't know you were Jewish?"

<snip>

While there is no argument that Hitler abhorred the Jews and caused almost six million to be ruthlessly killed, often non-Jewish victims are tragically forgotten from Holocaust remembrances. Eleven million precious human lives were lost during the Holocaust. Five million of these were non-Jewish. Three million were Polish Christians and Catholics. It would be very sad to forget even one precious life extinguished so ruthlessly. It would be a tragedy to forget five million.

(written by someone who later converted to Judaism).
------------

I suppose since there were so many disparate groups a part of the 5 million others that they are comparatively ignored. WE shouldn't forget that among the first to go were political dissidents.

[Behind the Aegis]

14. This should be taught in all schools

The atrocities are almost incomprehensible. Too many today "blow off" the numbers as insignificant. 13 million people were systematically murdered and few people blinked an eye.

[NNN0LHI]

15. It is taught in schools. 5 minutes in my history class and it was covered

We need to teach this to our children and their children's children. The schools will not devote enough time to this. Its up to us. And if we don't take the time to do it shame on us. Really.

Don

[Tansy_Gold]

16. Illinois high school in the 1960s

Don -- I think you're about the same age as I and I think you are also an Illini, so you may relate to this.

I graduated from a suburban Chicago high school in 1966. Because much of my mother's family is Jewish, I always "knew" about the Holocaust. I didn't dwell on it, but I knew about it.

As a senior in high school I took World History as an elective. When we reached the era of WW2, we were at the end of the school year, spring was moving closer to summer, and graduation was the big thing in the immediate future.

Our book contained one short paragraph on the Nazi extermination efforts. Our teacher brought it up in class and asked if anyone had any questions. No one did.

This was 1966. Vietnam was in our living rooms every night. No one cared about the millions of dead in Europe a generation ago -- not the Jews, not the Poles, certainly not the Russians.

They moved along. There was nothing to see here.

[NNN0LHI]

17. Class of '73. Bloom Township High School, Chicago Heights, Illinois

I too have Jewish relatives and pretty much learned about the Holocaust through my own research. You are right. There was nothing to see here. I learned more about the Holocaust from PBS and other documentaries than I ever did in school. I spent time with my kids explaining to them what happened though. I encouraged them to research this nightmare more on their own and to never forget it either. Take care and see you later.

Don

[bleedingheart]

18. US History should be covered over a few years in school

not in just one class.

What I learned about WWII, I learned mostly from reading outside the classroom.

[Karenina]

20. It's HAPPENING AGAIN!!!

(Duck and cover!)

[Andromeda]

24. God help us all...

:cry:

[fujiyama]

25. It is so awful

That's why I am so disgusted by fundies that compare abortions to theh holocaust.

It's insulting as a human being.

It's unfortunate that various groups with political agendas are undermining and making light of what happened over a half century ago.

[cynatnite]

27. Thousands of subcamps scattered across Europe

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/cclist.html

"This list is far from complete. It is estimated that the Nazi established 15,000 camps in the occupied countries. There were several small camps which were created for limited in time operations against local population. Most of these camps were destroyed by the Nazis themselves, sometimes after two or three months of activity. This list does not contain the names of the ghettos created by the Nazis, even if several ghettos (i.e. Theresienstadt ghetto) had their own external kommandos (work team)."


There are many more camps than the ones you commonly hear about. Subcamps were located almost everywhere you went.

I personally think the numbers are much more than what we realize given the widespread killing that went on.