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A Thought of Hope

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DrEntropy said:
Father-in-law (R.I.P.) lost track of his twin brother as they were aided in escaping a Nazi camp by their older brother. The older one stepped on a land mine and lost a leg in the attempt. Not until the Wall fell did F.I.L. learn his twin had died a few years earlier in East Germany. These three were Ukrainians. F.I.L. went on to be a "messenger" for the Allies.
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My father's parents also ran from the nazis to escape what is now the Ukraine. My grandfather arrived in NYC. He got off the boat and started washing windows on skyscrapers. In the Ukraine he was a blacksmith but arriving in NYC in the early 1900's there was no blacksmiths.
 
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I had a German friend (now deceased) who's dad was a train engineer that took Jew's to the concentration camps. My friend Gustav was haunted by his fathers actions. His dad claimed that he had no idea what was happening to the people he transported.
He told me many, many times how he would ask his dad "How could you not know?".
 
The same way so many who lived around the camps "didn't know", willful ignorance, what I don't actually see isn't happening in my personal opinion.
 
There is a great foreign film that should be watched along with 'Decision at Nuremberg' ( great classic)...and that is the true story of 'Labyrinth of Lies' the later is the true story of a single young German lawyer pushing to bring those that committed war atrocities to justice.
This is 15 years after WW2 and the pushback from officials and the Police was immense. The obstacles put in his way were done by those in authority and some of his fellow lawyers. They wanted to pretend it did not happen as told in Nuremburg. The average German wanted to believe the 'winners' wrote the script and it was not true.

Johan Radman documented the killings, individual killers, and brought them to trial with other senior adjudicators ... with eyewitness accounts of survivors. Prior to this and even after many Germans pretended these men on trial were 'unique' and not common at all...it took decades before Germans faced the truth.

Even tho known as the Dr. at Auschwitz Mengele freely traveled back and forth to Germany under his own name in the 1950's from S. America. The Police were aware...let sleeping dogs lie...

en.wikipedia.org

Frankfurt Auschwitz trials - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Not germane to any particular part of this thread, but: 2 things I carry from the Museum. A photo of a man standing next to a hole with a Nazi officer, pistol leveled at the man's head. German rank and file soldier next to them with a look in his eyes that, to me, indicated him thinking 'WTF are we doing here?' Once the guy with the '6 million is not enough' tee shirt is next to power, it is too late.

Death camp road paved with gravel from crushed headstones of a Jewish cemetery. Mike: What is going thru the minds? We cannot possibly understand such utter insanity. There is no mind there.

This stuff is not limited to the Reich. I learned recently that a Japanese controlled island, from which GHW Bush barely escaped after a shoot down of his plane, had a contingent of Japanese whose commander had his surgeons remove glutes (and other meaty parts) from live American captives, keeping them alive for harvest of later meals.
Bob
 
A quick review of articles on the internet does not confirm the live cannibalism part of my last, which I have seen only on one TV documentary. Cannibalism from corpses remains undisputed.
Bob
 
The veneer of civilization is thinner than we ever want to imagine.

Remember the Milgram Experiment of the 1960s?


"Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

en.wikipedia.org

Milgram experiment - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
True, it isn't limited to German WW2 crimes, we can find people blindly doing things like that around the world and across time. Gremany was just one of the most industrially organized about it.
 
NutmegCT said:
The veneer of civilization is thinner than we ever want to imagine.

Remember the Milgram Experiment of the 1960s?


"Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

en.wikipedia.org

Milgram experiment - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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I remember learning about this experiment when I was in college.
 
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I had completely forgotten about Milgram. That scares me almost as much as the result of the experiment.
 
Regarding Milgram, in my first college Psy class, I asked the prof why they called it science. I am deeply skeptical of Psy "experiments" from which statistical inferences are drawn. This is not to suggest that an undetermined subset of people will not cause or be complicit in cruel to unbelievably cruel behavior toward others. History proves they will.
Bob
 
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