Posts by Simon Grigg
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As for the Jews, there's plenty of evidence to show the Jews had no idea what the Germans were doing to them, other than they were taking the Jews away. When the Jews arrived at the camps they were told they were going to be showered. We all know what happened next.
I would suggest, if you've not already, watch the BBC 4 or 5 parter on Auschwitz and the Final Solution. It answers this. Most knew exactly what their fate was to be after 1942.
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I'm not. But the question of willful ignorance does arise.
I'm aware of (and have read both the book and the book written by it's detractors) the controversy around Goldhargen's book, but on balance find it simply to difficult to believe that the 13 odd million who served in the army alone (the other services were on top of that and likely more divorced from the horrors) or the 2 million in the SS, plus the Gestapo, military intelligence and the SA, existed in a space of their own.
We know they didn't and the civil service that existed just to support the camps (and there were many dozens of them if you include sub camps, some in population centres in Germany itself) was massive. The Jews were only one group in those that suffered, there were so many different races and political groupings, plus the disabled and mentally infirm. Much of it went through the legal system. with police, lawyers and judges, in full public view. The transports and parades often went through cities and towns. Towns in Germany flew banners to boast that they were now Jew free. Many Jews were turned in by their neighbours and many businesses stolen as their owners were shipped off to a fate that the new owners could surmise, with some degree of accuracy, was not a pleasant land in the east.
Those in Germany were not arrested and processed by the SS..it was the police and the civil bureaucracy. The infirm died in front of doctors and nurses. Many of the larger German enterprises today have very dark shadows in their corporate past. Brigid & I won't allow Nivea in our house for example.
The 'we didn't know' argument simply fails in view of all this. And the wilfully ignorant defence.
I'm not trying to speak for anyone, but I think this is what Anke means by
It's about human tragedy and atrocities of the worst possible kind. It's shameful, and it's painful, and it's impossible to grasp in its monstrosity.
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Bloody hell. Those poor bastards. As if they haven't been through enough, already.
To quote myself (from Twitter):
5 years after the Tsunami I can not even begin to imagine the horror these folks in Sumatra felt yesterday, even though Padang was spared 2004.
It did however, suffer a fairly hefty tsunami in 1797 and in Indonesia these things stay ingrained in the popular memory.
Anak Krakatua is rumbling badly again right now too just to cheer us all up.
The mad Imams are saying it's all because Indonesia is not devout enough....
I was wondering how close Simon was to that one.
All fine here thanks Hillary, we're about 1500km from Padang. But we did get our big shock last week in Bali. I wasn't here but I'm told it was fairly scary. I was here for the previous two in September.
Given the way that buildings are constructed here (the Balinese build beautiful temples but everything else is shockingly slapped together) I'm keeping out of anything that's more than one storey high right now.
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I'm not so sure that is true, at least for the civilians. Most German civilians genuinely had no knowledge of the concentration camps. Anti-semitism was actively encouraged, but mosty people didn't understand what had happened to the Jews.
This is much discussed of course but I'm going to have to agree with Tom. Most males were in the military by 1941 and every family had military age males and they most certainly knew what was going on. The list of occupations needed to make the camps work was vast and went through German society.
There is voluminous evidence that the Jews of Europe knew their fate long before they were selected to be shipped so I'm always very uncomfortable with the claim that the civilians en-mass had no knowledge
If you date the second round of fighting from the Spanish civil war in 1936
Surely the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 is a more appropriate starting point if you wish to finish it with the CCP's victory in 1949. Although the wars in Korea, Malaya, Indonesia & Vietnam that went into the 50s and 60s all extended fairly continuously out of the second conflagration.
The birth of the modern world is widely set at 1789 aand the French Revolution.
Sure, but the decisions taken at Vienna, the events of 1848, and the rise of Prussian led Pan-German militarism thereafter directly contributed to the place that Germany found itself at in 1917-18 and the extremism which came from the trenches.
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The way so many committed nazi's were spirited away to a new life in the US, for example, to work on the space program. Effectively they were given a free pass.
And much more than that, they remained the judges, police, elected representatives, civil servants, miltary and industrialists of Germany, especially in the west. De-Nazification was largely a fiction after an initial rush. Simply put, the Allies couldn't have run the country without them so a blind eye was increasingly turned.
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Well, yes. When we tried to explain World War II to our girls, we started with the Treaty of Versailles.
I'd take it back to the Congress of Vienna myself. As much as anything the horrors of WW2 were caused by the mess the European powers made sorting out the post Napoleonic chaos and the alliances that followed. But, sure, Hitler used Versailles as a bogey-man, although Germany was ripe for extremism after WW1 whether Versailles existed or not. If he'd not used the rather fanciful 'stab in the back", he'd have found another demon.
You're talking about something that died in 1945 in the rubble of Berlin.
Except that many (most?) Nazis were fairly quickly rehabilitated after WW2, and even those who were jailed were mostly out and often in positions of power and authority from the 1950s onwards. Most camp guards died peacefully in their beds in the 60s-90s.
I have a lot of German friends here in Bali (there is a very large German community) and we've talked of this. My understanding from what i've heard is that many of that generation went to their graves rather unrepentant, or in some denial.
Oh sure, those Lincoln students were making satirical political commentary on Nazi self-importance and the complex layering of the Final Solution.
The first wave (and parts of the second and third for that matter, but they had little to do with me) of the punk thing here in NZ used a fair amount of Nazi imagery in our posters and artwork. I can try to justify it on the aesthetic level (yes they had the best design and the reason we put SS cufflinks on the cover of the first Suburban Reptiles single was simply because we loved the stylised S). But mostly of course we used the imagery to shock, and gain media coverage. It was designed to offend which it did and I'm still not sure how I feel about that some 30 years later. I grimace a little and wish we hadn't.
There was no attempt on our part to align ourselves with any right wing movement and we made very sure that we distanced ourselves rather quickly (and dropped the imagery after it had served it's shock purpose) from any rightist political posturing.
But I'm still uncomfortable about what we did after all this time and can't use the excuse that we were de-powering the symbolism.
I feel for the Balinese though..their swastika, a symbol of peace, was taken from them. It's still widely seen here on buildings, temples, and in art and they remain bemused when tourists react, as they often do, at hotels called Swastika Lodge etc. I guess it's with some irony then that they use Nazi styled coal shuttle helmets on motor-bikes, and available in shades of pink, powder blue, lime green, and everything in between.
Japan
They may not have apologised as verbally as they should but they have as a nation spent vast sums in many of the formerly occupied Asian territories by way of reparations and still do. They have, for example, completely rebuilt the washed away beaches of the parts of Bali where they landed in 1942, at no cost to the island.
But I was still rather taken aback by the young Japanese girl selling Death Railway postcards by the River Kwai bridge a couple of weeks back.
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Gotta challenge that, at least for Melbourne's sake.
Like I said, a little out of touch as my experience was half a decade or more back and I'm aware things have changed. Melbourne has always been the restaurant capital of Australasia, and had a great bar or two but I spent a fair amount of time traipsing the clubs and bars of it's inner city, often lead by DJs or record company folks and whilst the the venues existed, we demolished them in what was on offer musically.
It was a standing trans-tasman joke in the record industry as to how few copies of the more interesting things that labels had to offer were sold in Australia....say a Massive Attack record or a reggae disc which would sell in the low hundreds Australia wide and in the tens of thousands in NZ.
I used to enjoy the better places in the city but was aware that out there it was an alien culture. The huge difference is that the in NZ what was on offer in here often penetrated, given a little time, rather deeply into the out there. We are a far more adventurous culture.
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the "real" New Zealand is out there in the provinces, as if real New Zealanders spend their lives doing bunging jumping hakas onto jetboats that are zooming across the surface of active volcanoes.
Ha, you get that here in Bali...the flow of folks who wander up to the hills and return to tell you how they experienced the 'real Bali', which, as stunning as it may be, is mostly alien to the world where most Balinese live and work: the belching, polluted and overcrowded city of Denpasar and it's environs, or the over-commercialised and just as polluted strip of Kuta-Legian-Seminyak.
I must know two dozen or more high achieving, beautiful, and well qualified New Zealanders who live in Sydney or Melbourne or London and whose primary motivation to move was because "Auckland's nightlife sux",
Which, London aside, I think is unfair. Over the recent decades Auckland's entertainment in licensed premises has easily matched that of our Australian cousins, and, I'd argue without much hesitation, often surpassed it in quality, if not quantity.
I'm a little out of touch right now, having spent half this decade out of town, but over the previous ten years I was in Sydney some 36 times and Melbourne not a lot less and always came back to Ak feeling a little smug about what we had to offer which was a more than a bar or two with listenable music coupled with endless RSLs churning out that faceless oz-rawk so beloved in the Great Southern Land.
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jeebus... we're talking about fraking Letterman
Yep, I'm with Craig. He came across as a complete knob, but it was only Letterman
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The next best thing
Nice to have one's great memories confirmed. Brill, ta...