Anybody personally know any Holocaust survivors or older Germans?

[StellaBlue]

Because now is the time to ask them what to do. NOW.

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[HereSince1628]

2. There was an article on the phrase they have about nipping it in the bud.

We KNOW what to do now. Now we need to GOTV.

When it gets stolen...well, then we'll know what to do but we won't be writing about it here.

[Newsjock]

5. This article

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2260057&mesg_id=2260057

[fasttense]

3. About ten years ago I worked for an old German

He wasn't Jewish. All he would say was he didn't know about the extermination camps and other horrors.

[treestar]

17. Me too; years ago I knew a guy who was in the German army and

21 years old when the war ended. So he grew up under the Nazi state. He said he and "everyone" didn't know about it and wouldn't have stood for it had they known. He had lived in the US for decades, though, and might have decided it was the "correct" thing to say.

[hootinholler]

4. Yes, but sadly, they have passed. n/t

[cynatnite]

6. My grandmother refuses to discuss that time...

She lived in Austria and later moved to Berlin. My sister and I can't pry a single solitary piece of information out of her about our grandfather or even her family. It's like she's trying to pretend that part of her life never existed.

[StellaBlue]

8. Is it because she is German or because she is Jewish?

Either way, :hugs:

I am sorry for the pain experienced firsthand in your family.

[cynatnite]

10. It's because she is German and...

had two sons out of wedlock with a Nazi officer.

[StellaBlue]

11. Wow.

The world is an... interesting... place.

So much horror in so many lives.

We humans are stupid animals.

[sweetheart]

7. Which side of the pond

On the US side, holocaust survivors would likely counsel to "get out before it gets bad."

Inside Germany, they might say to keep your head down and survive.

There are 2 ways out:

1. World war where the Corporations are defeated at great cost of life and suffering
2. Bankruptcy of the dollar at great cost of suffering

Theres a possibility it will go down gorbachev like, but that will only be after a
number 1 or number 2 event.

The third way out is to die, an option that some consciencious objectors have and
will take. Lots of germans followed this path as well.

[havocmom]

9. My daughter does and she is arranging a lunch date...

Wonderful gentleman who granted her an interview years ago when she was in high school. He is still doing great things and still willing to speak to kids. Just made the paper again recently when, after speaking to kids at same school my daughter attended, one young man arranged for the high school to confer the diploma Mr. Strauss could not earn in Germany owing events in his life at the time most young men are enjoying adolescence.

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/ss/history_culture/24599.php

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=5613210

And, you are right, we need the counsel of such people now.

My daughter recently told me she used to hold the German people of the early Nazi period and WWII in disdain - how could they have let it happen. She says she has changed her attitude. She sees all too clearly how it could happen. It is happening here.

She cherishes being in contact with a man such as Gerd Strauss. She knows there are few like him left and we have to make sure there are witnesses to their first hand accounts. Too few lived to give witness. Those who still can must be heard and heeded.

[StellaBlue]

12. That is awesome.

That makes me want to cry, and I am not a woman prone to sentimentality.

That was my main feeling yesterday, walking around town, things going on as normal, but with a dark, sinking, nagging feeling... that they could come and get me. For things I have said or written. We are living in 1933.

I see all too clearly how it happened.

[G Hawes]

21. That's a great story, havocmom.

Thank you for posting it.

[never cry wolf]

24. Very strange, I never knew this...

From the article you linked I was very surprised to find the below:

instead of a high school degree, he was given a number and a Jewish star for the uniform he wore in the Buchenwald death camp in Weimar, Germany.
Eight and a half months in the concentration camp ended when a relative in Palestine secured a place for him in art school, which Strauss left to take up arms against the Nazis who murdered millions of his people, including his parents.

-----------
Being accepted to a foreign school was one of the few ways out of Buchenwald at the time, and Strauss left Germany for Palestine the day before Hitler's army took over Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

I never knew ANYONE could ever "legally" get out of a concentration camp, alive anyway. He and the others (albeit probably few in number) witnessed the atrocities yet it seemd that common knowledge of what went on in these camps does not seem to have been disseminated until they started to be liberated. I am sure that those released told others of their experiences.

Maybe I am mistaken about how many people knew or if there was any media coverage of the camps prior to their liberation butthat is how it seems to me.

[mnhtnbb]

13. Read Upton Sinclair's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "Dragon's Teeth"

which is based on the rise of the Third Reich. Published in 1942. I am about 2/3 through it and have made notes of passages that reflect similar things to what is going on now. I plan to do a full post about the book when I'm finished. Here's a sample:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2255599&mesg_id=2257846

[Solly Mack]

14. Yes..

I live in Germany and the usual comment from those who remember is "stop it before it gets worse" ...or some variation

I'd have to say they are more worried about us than most Americans seem to be

I grew up around survivors of the Shoah. They are all dead now.

I also know a man who was a young soldier at the time. He was with the forces when they entered Dachau and he was also at the Nuremberg trials.

[Atlas Mugged]

15. Yes, but he died in 1998

I had known him casually for many years. His name was Joseph and he owned 'Joseph's Frame Shop' in the French Quarter. When a mutual friend of ours died (who was my best friend, ever) Joseph and I became much closer. It was only then that I learned that he was in a concentration camp (near Leipzig) when he was a child. He was interviewed by Steven Spielberg for the Shoah Project and had a copy of the tapes, which he copied for me (with written permission for me to have them). I still have them and the interview is utterly heart stopping - 4 hours of real life horror. I definitely need to have them transfered to dvd before they deteriorate any further.

I have many German friends since I travel to Berlin quite frequently. Some are old enough to have lived during the war, but, with one exception, they were children. All of them, without exception, loathe and despise Bush. But their only advice to me...is to move there. As friends, they genuinely fear for me.

[StellaBlue]

16. That's the same attitude I get from my friends in the UK...

none of them Holocaust survivors, but all of them detest Bushco.

I might move back there if I could. Long story.

They can see through it and we can't, though.

For the record, my ex's grandmother, who lost a finger in a British grenade factory, said that Bush, Blair, AND Churchill were all "warmongers". She was Catholic, but, when pressed, would answer, "We're all going to the same place... the same place."

[bklyncowgirl]

18. Yes. My husband's parents grew up in Nazi Germany

My father in law is terrified of Bush.

He believes that Bush is doing what Hitler did. For the first time in his life he voted for Democrat for President.

[bigbrother05]

19. interesting question

I heard a story, The University in Heidelberg was very against Hitler, and he could not get them to conform, so Hitler builds a stadium in Heidelberg Thingstatt, to hold his Propaganda Rallies. Would easily hold several thousand people. It is still standing today. So maybe we can count on the universities here such as Berkley

[BrotherBuzz]

22. The same Berkeley that employs John Yoo?

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/faculty/yooj/

[BrotherBuzz]

20. I grew up learning from "Confessing Church" (liberal) Germans...

They resisted with The Barmen Declaration and subsequently many of their associates and friends disappeared. I don't know what we can learn from them beyond emulating their courage and strength to do the right thing. The baton was exchanged many years ago: It's our job to fight now.

[RebelOne]

23. My next door neighbor was born in a concentration camp,

but unfortunately, she passed away a few years ago.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Dupe

:shrug:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

25. Two stories 1) At a translators' convention, I heard a talk by a man

who was born into a Jewish family in Germany but who escaped in time by being admitted to a school for translators and interpreters in Switzerland.

After the war, the Allies hired him as an interpreter for the Nuremberg Trials, because they figured he wouldn't be partial to the Nazis. I believe he is the last surviving interpreter.

He said at that time (2004) that he found the actions of the Bush administration deeply disturbing, because they were doing some of the same things that the Nazis were condemned for, such as "waging aggressive war." Also, he reminded us that under the Geneva Conventions, there is no such thing as an "unlawful enemy combatant" and that prisoners in all types of conflicts are supposed to be treated humanely.

2) When I was in Germany as a teenager, we visted some relatives, including my grandmother's aunt, who was 97 at the time and living with her daughters, one of whom was widowed and the other of whom had never married. They originally lived in East Prussia, the farthest eastern reach of German territory, now the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia. Given their location in a small town far from the front lines, they were largely spared the bombing raids, and they thought of the Nazis as a minor annoyance. Their only source of information was the government media, which kept telling them that Germany was winning the war.

However, one day, they saw people filing past their house with suitcases, bicycles, and farm wagons, and they asked what was happening. The people told them that the Red Army had crossed the frontier, was headed their way, and was wreaking vengeance on German civilians for what had been done to their own civilians. My grandmother's aunt and her daughters hurriedly packed suitcases and joined the parade of refugees.

One interesting thing she said was that after they had been walking for a while, she started laughing, because she realized that she had locked the door before leaving, but of course, that wouldn't stop the Soviet soldiers from looting the place, and besides, she might never return.

But I was most struck by how thorough the Nazi propaganda machine must have been if my relatives had not known that Germany was losing the war until they actually saw people fleeing west. It is quite possible that people who didn't actually live near a concentration camp didn't know how bad conditions were and really believed that the Jews were just being "resettled in the East."

[Karenina]

26. Quite a few.

Let me translate Herr Faßbender, a favorite neighborhood outspoken and fearless octogenarian, into American vernacular. "You wanna know who blew up those buildings? Follow the damn MONEY. I've already lived through it and prefer DEATH before it happens again. MARK MY WORDS, IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN. (muttering as he ambled away) Damn dumbasses..."