The Pianist - Were people really this spineless?

[QKRTHNU]

Well in that case, it was just a Modern English translation. Everyone is a terrorist.

 

[HankB]

Ian wrote:

HankB - Actually, the Japanese arrested here included a great many native-born, American citizens.

Sir, you are correct - that's what made those actions (by a democRATic administration) so shameful. It was my intention to point out that not all of those Japanese interned were US citizens.

And as a matter of interest, when former internees were lobbying our government for reparations during the '80's, they also called for foreign nationals who'd been interned to be compensated, as prewar policies made it difficult for a Japanese national to gain citizenship.

 

[RON in PA]

Did the non-Jews of Europe react in ways different than the Jews? It took several years for resistence groups to arise and most people did not join, most people just want to survive. The Germans captured millions of Soviet soldiers in the first year of the Eastern Front, most were dead within a year of capture. Six million Polish citizens died during WW2, 3 million non-Jews and 3 million Jews.

How many slave revolts occurred in this country before the Civil War? Some but not many. Slavery, pogroms and genocide have existed through out human history. Historically governments have been brutal thugs.

 

[45King]

Hank B wrote:

Many more simply didn't want to see what was going on, refused to believe how bad things were . . . and were murdered.

Hope springs eternal. We all have hopes for better things to come. We've all heard the story of Pandora's box, and that Hope was the last to be freed.

The world would be a terrible place without hope....but sometimes, it can be a terrible place BECAUSE of hope. I think this is part of what happened to the Jews...they were hoping for something better to happen. That, along with the very human "it can't happen to ME" attitude.
I can't imagine what it must have been like to live in such desparate circumstances, and it seems reasonable to me that if one lives under too much oppression for too long, one loses all hope and will to live. The "slippery slope" has a psychological effect as well, apparently. (See Oleg's last post about such violence coming to be accepted as part of the norm.)

When the writing is appearing on the wall in blood, it is time to stop hoping and time to start fighting. May all of us and all future generations be blessed with enough wisdom to realize when it's time to stop hoping and take action.

 

[another okie]

One thing people forget is that there were Jews in every army fighting the Germans: the American army, the British army, the Soviet army and so on.

Another fact that is useful to understand is that in fact many German Jews had fled long before 1941, when the Holocaust proper started. Most of the victims of the Holocaust were citizens of Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, or some other country which was invaded by Germany or cooperated with Germany. The chance of Germany overrunning their country and killing millions of helpless people must have seemed pretty remote, about as remote as China overrunning the U.S. and killing all the gun owners or all the Christians.

I would also have to say that it is impossible for most Americans to understand the highly controlled world of Europeans at that time, let alone the world of the Jewish ghetto. I spent some time behind the Iron Curtain and I can tell you that governments can indeed break the spirit of the public and coerce and manipulate them into compliance with almost anything.

There is a good book by Willy Lindwer, the Last Six Months of Anne Frank (I may have the title slightly wrong.) In it he interviews people who knew Anne Frank in the transit camps and at Bergen-Belsen, where she died. One of those interviewed discussed this very question, why didn't they fight more? And she said, Well, we had no weapons and they did, and if we killed a German they would kill ten of us. And they didn't know what was waiting for them.

 

[H Romberg]

The Holocaust was an object lesson in the theory of incrimentalism. Small changes, over time, each in and of itself innocuous, allowed the Nazis to strip part of their nation of freedom, wealth, the ability, and finally the will to resist. There's a lesson for us in that. The writing is on the wall for gun owners. If we don't change the trend somehow, it won't be long till we find ourselves in the same situation as the Brits and Aussies.

 

[CZ-100]

Small changes, over time, each in and of itself innocuous, allowed the Nazis to strip part of their nation of freedom, wealth, the ability, and finally the will to resist.

Kind of like if you throw a frog into boiling water, he will jump out, but if you put him into room temp water and slowly turn up the heat he will cook to death.

 

[JJohnston015]

it seems reasonable to me that if one lives under too much oppression for too long, one loses all hope and will to live. The "slippery slope" has a psychological effect as well, apparently. (See Oleg's last post about such violence coming to be accepted as part of the norm.)

For more on this, do a web search on the phenomenon "learned helplessness".

 

[moa]

Yesterday at Borders and Books I found an astonishing book about the Holocaust. I have just started reading it and it is hard to put down.

If you go to Amazon.com you read excerts from the book plus many reviews.

This is a book about the Nazi Order Police (Ordo for short in German). It mostly covers the well documented actions of 101 Reserve Police Battlion.

What is unique about them is that they are just ordinary middle age, lower-class to middle-class German men mostly from the Hamburg region. Few were actual career police and not many were members of the Nazi Party, or SS, etc.

However, they and the other counterpart battlions where engaged in the slaughter of many thousands of Jews and others. IIRC the 101st killed at least 38,000 Jews by their own reckoning. They functioned just like the notorious SS Einsatzgruppen.

These were very ordinary men, most of whom came from what is considered the least Nazified city in Germany, Hamburg. That is what makes the book so amazing. These guys were stone, in-your-face killers of all ages and both sexes. Some of the accounts are absolutely bizarre. One example is of only ten members of the 101st where assigned the transport of more than 8,000 Jews by rail. They Jews were attempting to escape the rail cars by the hundreds (est. 180-200 Jews per car). The Order Police ran out of ammunition including 200 extra rounds they bummed off the German Army, trying to stop the escapes. It was estimated 2,000 Jews died in the rail cars because of the conditions like summer heat, etc.

Many of their accounts of mass round-ups and shootings remark that no resistance was met. Later the 101st got involved in anti-partisan and regular military operations and some were killed or wounded. Very few after the war were indicted or punished.

 

[moa]

I knew I forgot something. Title of book is "Ordinary Men". Duh!

 

[Byron Quick]

Some of the Jews who resisted the Nazis later found that they should have been less discriminatory in target selection:

http://www.ushmm.org/uia-cgi/uia_doc/photos/1392?hr=null

 

[Dain Bramage]

"Ordinary Men"

In addition to the "learned helplessness" of the holocaust victims, some of the threads here are discussing the "banality of evil" of the perpetraters. All across Europe, "Ordinary Men", as a previous entry listed a book title, were committing the most ghastly atrocities.

I watched a European documentary filmed in the '90s, where a Lithuanian member of a Nazi-controlled killing squad was interviewed. It was pointed out that the members were volunteers. The young man running the interview was trying to understand what drove men into such butchery. He kept asking the elderly veteran probing questions, but only got blank-faced replies, "It was a different time" and "I was following orders".

The only time the old guy got red-faced and upset, was when he was asked if he new it was wrong. He seemed indignant that the youngster was insulting him, and not for any sorrow for his victims.

We may never truly understand the psychology of evil.

 

[moa]

"Ordinary Men" discusses the "Lithuanian" companies assigned to assist the Order Police. The Lithuanians apparently went about their tasks with greater enthusiasm than their German colleagues.

 

[Art Eatman]

I think it was Amnesty International--although I'm not sure--had a set of interviews made with known torturers, maybeso ten years back. Government employees whose job was to discover information or get confessions. Argentina and Guatemala come to mind, although some other countries were mentioned.

Almost uniformly these men were reportedly banal and boring. Most were married and had children, and lived rather quiet home lives. "That nice family, next door..."

Art

 

[pax]

Why did they let it happen?

Excerpts from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, found at http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-021-03.html

Attorney General: At that time you didn't believe that the programme was to destroy the Jewish people?

Witness Gurfein: No.

Q. Despite the fact that you had heard reports from Belzec?

A. We received reports, but the spark of hope, nevertheless, still flickered in our hearts and we hoped that, perhaps, despite this, some miracle would occur. They kept promising day and night that they were stopping the deportations, the exterminations. But in view of the fact that the train turned in the direction of Rawaruska, we managed to force the window open and several of the people in the train jumped out. Each time a person jumped out, we heard shots. On each waggon there was an SS man with a machine gun. At approximately 2 o'clock in the morning - this was beyond Yaroslav - my mother pushed me from the waggon and told me to jump. I jumped from the waggon.

...

Q. Tell me, at the railway station when they packed you into the train going to Belzec, when you thought that it was likely to go to Belzec why didn't you resist, why didn't you board the train?

A. We no longer had any strength left. Very simply, we wanted it to end quickly. This was in 1943. After so many years we did not have the strength to resist any more.

Q. You wanted it to end?

A. We wanted to die more quickly.

Q. Then why did you jump from the window?

A. There nevertheless was an impulse. For from the moment that we saw that the train was going in the direction of Belzec some spark was ignited. We saw someone jumping and some spark was kindled within people who wanted to save themselves. I wouldn't have jumped, if my mother hadn't pushed me forcibly.

Excerpts from They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Meyer, found at
http://www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free.html It is written from the perspective of an ordinary German, not a Jew -- but the reasons why they did what they did are much the same.

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. "One had no time to think. There was so much going on." "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your "little men", your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies", without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings" and "consider the end." But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn't, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.

"Your "little men," your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing: and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late."

"Yes," I said.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, "everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're an alarmist."

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to – to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked – if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done ( for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

 

[pax]

How strong is your desire to be free? How much more will you take before you fight back?

Gordon Fink,

You make a good point -- one that Jefferson answered, as someone else pointed out. "...all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed."

It is human nature not to fight back against government. "You can't fight City Hall" was probably a truism long before there was such a thing as a City Hall.

Jeff Cooper points out, "It is interesting to hear certain kinds of people insist that the citizen cannot fight the government. This would have been news to the men of Lexington and Concord, as well as the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan." Cooper is right, but it's not a question of can't. "All experience hath shewn" that the citizen won't.

Not until it is too late, too bloody, and too dangerous to do anything but win -- or die trying.

pax

The limitation of tyrants is the endurance of those they oppose. – Frederick Douglass

If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. -- Winston Churchill

 

[pax]

Another excerpt from the Eichmann trial, this one found at http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-021-08.html

Witness Beisky: It was said in the camp that young Haubenstock had sung a Russian tune. The offence of the engineer Krautwirt - I don't know. The boy was hanged and something happened which occurs once in many thousands of cases - the rope broke. The boy stood there, he was again lifted on to a high chair which was placed under the rope, and he began to beg for mercy. An order was given to hang him a second time. And then he was raised a second time to the gallows, and hanged, and thereafter that same Amon Goeth, with his own hands, also fired a shot.

The engineer Krautwirt, throughout that time, stood on the second chair, and here the perfidy went even further. SS men, with their guns, and machine guns, passed through the ranks, and gave orders to all those standing on the ground to watch. Engineer Krautwirt cut the veins of his hands with a razor blade, and in this condition went up to the gallows.

Q. While his blood was running?

A. While his blood was running. And in this way he was hanged. I don't know, it is hard to describe these things, when standing around there are not tens but hundreds of SS men with guns and fixed bayonets, and machine guns, and one had to stand there and look on. It was a sight...

Q. 15,000 people stood there - and opposite them hundreds of guards. Why didn't you attack then, why didn't you revolt?

A. I believe that this thing cannot be explained - it cannot be answered. To this there is no single reply. What I can talk of is the general situation. And perhaps from this it can be deduced.

It will certainly be difficult for anyone who was not there to understand, but after all, this happened in the middle of 1943. This was already in the third year of the War, and it didn't begin with this. It began with something else. The people were already, the whole of Jewry was already in a state of depression owing to what they had endured, during three years. This is one thing. And the second - nevertheless there was still hope. Here were people working on forced labour, they apparently needed this work. Possibly, maybe...it was plain at that time that if anyone did the pettiest thing - for it was not difficult when people, when many forces were standing there...may I now be permitted to sit?

Presiding Judge: Certainly, you may also rest for a while.

Witness Beisky: First of all, I can no longer - and I acknowledge this - after eighteen years I cannot describe this sensation of fear. This feeling of fear, today when I stand before Your Honours, does not exist any longer and I do not suppose that it is possible to define it for anyone. After all this thing is ultimately a terror-inspiring fear. People stand facing machine guns, and the mere fact of gazing upon the hanging of a boy and his cries - and then, in fact, no ability remains to react.

Something else: The belief in the fact that nevertheless the War would somehow come to an end, that we should not, because of that, endanger 15,000 people. One could ask something else: If we did, where could we go? Nearby us there was a Polish camp. There were 1,000 Poles and there, too, were shootings from time to time under no better conditions than ours. One hundred metres beyond the camp they had a place to go to - their homes. I don't recall one instance of escape on the part of the Poles. But where could any of the Jews go?

We were wearing clothes which at that time were not the garments of the concentration camps, but all the clothes were dyed yellow, with those yellow stripes. The hair at the centre of the head was not cut, but they made a kind of swath in a stripe 4 cms in width. And at that moment, let us suppose that the 15,000 people within the camp even succeeded without armed strength, empty-handed, let us suppose that they even did manage to go beyond the boundaries of the camp - where would they go? What could they do?

But inside the camp it seemed, at any rate - and let us not forget this, Your Honours, in 1943 we did not yet know what was the fate of our families and what had happened to all those who had been taken away in the deportations - this became known to us only much later. Therefore, there was also the hope that by carrying on with the work...it was impossible to imperil the lives of 15,000 people.

These are, moreover not the only reasons, Your Honours. Anyone today trying to find the causes - I do not know whether he could find them for one simple reason: it is not physically possible to present the conditions of those days in the courtroom, and I do not believe, Heaven forbid, that people will not understand this, but I myself cannot explain it and I experienced this on my own person. Accordingly, the question perhaps can be asked from the dialectic point of view, but the conditions of those times cannot be described.

These were things, situations, which were completely different. And I will quote one other example, a very classic example: there was a martyr in our camp. All of us were in the situation in which we found ourselves. But let us take Engineer Greenberg, one of the most beloved inmates of the camp who was appointed to plan the construction of the huts. I cannot really remember this man without bruises and without a bandaged head and without wounds. This man on every single day - either they set dogs on him, or he received beatings, 100 lashes or 25, or simply fist blows, because in a particular place the jobs were not performed.

This same man who more than once implored the camp commandant "Goeth - Shoot me," he himself never committed suicide. This is even stranger: but his wife and daughter were in that camp - I think his daughter lives in Jerusalem. His wife and daughter were from time to time thrown into prison in order to frighten him into committing something. It was a fact that this man underwent, in addition to what the inmates of the camp endured - if there are 100 stages of hell and not seven, he went through them all in his lifetime. Ultimately he was killed - he is no longer alive. But it is a fact, that was the situation. Try to explain it today - you will not find the explanation, these were different conditions, something had already befallen Polish Jewry before we reached Plaszow.

Judge Halevi: You were mistaken in the number when you said the "third year," four years had already passed and you had entered upon the fifth.

A. This was in the middle of 1943. And they began, in fact, before the War, on 1 September. I am still describing events that took place up to June and July 1943, that is to say in the course of three years. But if Your Honour will permit me this remark, these three years were much more than ten times as many in the most terrible conditions that the human mind can picture to itself from the point of view of physical possibility.

...

Incidentally, if I may be allowed to recall this, the Attorney General asked my why they did not rise up during this period. I shall give a better example. There was also, in fact, no difficulty, not for me personally, to escape during the time that I was at my place of work in the gas works, since in the course of the work there was the possibility...

Q. The municipal gasworks in Cracow?

A. Yes. Moreover, of the group to which I belonged before the War - Hanoar Hazioni (The Zionist Youth) - a few managed to cross into Slovakia. On two occasions a representative was sent to get me out. Those two are living in Israel today. One was Frederika Maze who lives in Rehovot and the other was Zelig Weil who lives in Haifa. Both of them met me near the gates of the camp and informed me that it had become possible to smuggle a number of people to Slovakia. And some of our comrades, most of whom are today in Israel, succeeded in crossing to Slovakia.

But it is not a simple matter, when you have 70-80 persons from the same town, amongst them my two brothers, to flee the camp when you know that in the afternoon of the same day the entire group would no longer be alive. And consequently people did not dare to do this so easily, even when the chance existed and even when, at the time, still in 1943, crossing into Slovakia appeared to be a kind of promise of life. And it is a fact - I did not do so. These two people reached Palestine; the one Frederika Maze, managed to get here - at the beginning of 1944 and brought the first tidings.