Discussion for article #229863
This truly is a heartbreaking story, and one that was seen over and over again. Itâs also a reality that most countries were turning Jews away by that point and that from officials who milked every penny in bribes then turned the families away down to the âordinary peopleâ who stole land and possessions, there was no question that the Jews still in Europe were doomed. Dr. Wildman carried this burden his whole life and Iâm sure spent many nights sitting up and wondering if there was something else he could have done. Grace and peace to his memory.
6 Likes
We have to keep asking the question: how did this happen? Germany was by all reasonable measure a highly developed nation having made vast intellectual and artistic contributions to the world. Yet they descended into this unspeakable barbarity. Iâm really interested to learn what other posters at TPM think about how this happened.
We have to keep asking the question: how did this happen? Germany was by all reasonable measure a highly developed nation having made vast intellectual and artistic contributions to the world. Yet they descended into this unspeakable barbarity.
It has happened over and over again so it must be in our nature,
It is tragic that we now see the creation of ghettos and the subordination of a lesser people by the descendants and survivors of the holocaust. Every day in the occupied territories is another day of homes being demolished, businesses being shuttered, dreams stolen. Each night another rush of police to make arrests without charges and then to hold and torture the victims without trial.
2 Likes
Germany didnât do anything really new as far as barbarity goes. If you look up to history unfiltered by politically correctness, you will see that human beings have done even worst than the Germans did.
http://hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP3.HTM
What is different with WWII Germany is that cameras become more readily available and the captured images brought reality to the masses more so than in other conflicts, where stories real and exaggerated about horrifying deeds happened âover thereâ in the distance, away from sight. Unfortunately what Germans, Italians and Japanese did during WWII is being repeated nowadays in some parts of the middle East and even so called âcivilizedâ Nations not so long ago have âindulgedâ in the very same atrocities the Nazi perpetuated, Srebrenica massacre comes to mind.
3 Likes
How it happened is well documented. Why it happened where and how it did, with much of the world passively watching, is the real stumper. The âtruthâ resides in a million fragments, which feels unsatisfactory. A âgrand unified theoryâ which might satisfy everyone as the âtruthâ is probably illusory.
You can multiply 1940 dollars by about 15 to get todayâs equivalent.
Not many people today could come up with $4500 they didnât already have.
1 Like
I have tried to understand this since I was 12 years old; both the cruelty of the perpetrators and the consent of the âinnocent bystandersâ. This may seem reductionist to some of the scholars on this site, but I think authoritarian child rearing practices install the cruelty of the perpetrators and the blind obedience of the bystanders. These fester in the dark until social conditions enable demagogues to exploit fear and envy and call the latent cruelty and obedience into action. See Wilhelm Reich: The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Erich Fromm: Escape from Freedom.
1 Like
For a book directly pertinent to the Holocaust, read Raul Hilbergâs Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders.
This brings to mind a book from the early '90s, Stella written by Peter Wyden (father of Oregon Senator Ron Wyden). Stella was a childhood classmate of Wydenâs in a Jewish school in Berlin. While Wyden was able to escape Nazi Germany, Stella remained in Berlin into her young adulthood and became an informant and âcatcherâ for the Nazis. The book recounts Wydenâs investigation, decades later, to understand how her life unfolded, what her motivations were, and what became of her.
The notion that Germany wouldnât commit an atrocity of this kind was an enabling factor. Thatâs why the gas chambers were made to look (and sometimes worked) like showers.
Even the victims for the most part didnât realize that they werenât just prisoners to be exploited in work camps.
Keeping the machinery of genocide hidden away in Poland also helped to conceal what was going on.
With regards to the moral dimension of how Germany could sink so low, once democracy was defeated there simply werenât any checks left to stop the genocidal logic of the Nazi ideology to run its course.
A recent biography of Erich Fromm discusses some of the relatives he was able to help financially on their way out of Germany in the late 1930s. The biography is by Friedman, Lawrence Jacob and is called The Lives of Erich Fromm: Loveâs Prophet (Itâs Erich Fromm, so I guess the book gets a title like that.)
The letters above remind me of the letters discussed in the Fromm biography. For anyone interested in research, I had the sense some of the letters by Fromm and his correspondents are available to researchers and writers. So much has been written about that era, that itâs sometimes possible to construct mini-histories of what happened, what was going on in the region, what people were facing. But also what various state departments were doing or not doing.
Itâs hard reading these histories but important.