I am still moved by this subject, so I am posting more information on it.
The internet is a resource for huge amounts of information, including photos, and historical text, including quotes, speeches and timelines.
My curiosity into World War 2 was aroused after watching, and being being interested in the details, of a movie called CONSPIRACY.
I don't believe I have a ghoulish absorption, and I am not attempting to find the most negative, dark, terrors that I can. I am encouraged that we have at our disposal, the means to understand how massive mechanisms for disaster get put into motion, and what drives and motivates individuals to co-operate. If we understand these areas, we can find ways to anticipate them happening again, and ward off any chances of history repeating itself. If we maintain our knowledge as the conventional wisdom, we risk, I feel, a lot. Conventional wisdom is not often, I feel, very wise.
I have also had my own knowledge broadened to a large extent, and I find this good, not emotionally, but consciously. Enlightening.
I did not know, for example, that a week after D-Day, Hitler launched his V-1 rockets against England, every hour, day and night, for 80 days. These rockets had the appearance of gliders, and buzzed until shortly before impact. 57% of these rockets hit their targets. The remainder were intercepted or shot down. The V-2 rockets that were developed could not be developed, as they flew at supersonic speeds. This is interesting, and sobering.
The woman who made a movie of the Berlin Olympics - that is another interesting story. So too is the fact that Jesse Owens said he waved to Hitler, who was in a box, in the stands, and he said, Hitler waved back. But Hitler did not present him, or any other Black American with a medal. Berlin pretended to be civilised for the duration of the games, and once the foreigners left, and it was no longer to promote a veneer of respectability, all the apartheid laws pertaining to the Jews returned.
The most evil aspect of the Holocaust, of the 2nd World War, is personified by Dr. Josef Mengele, who performed experiments at Auschwitz. He is repeatedly described as a charming, affable, perfectly groomed and handsome man, who offered chocolates and charm to children before injecting them in their eyes (attempting to change eye color), chloroform in their hearts, and one of the worst experiments seems to have been trying to create a siamese twin by connecting two twins vital organs and tissues. These twins were said to have screamed for hours on end, and died 3 days later of gangrene, having suffered excruciating pain. Anaesthetics were not used. And all manner of experiments devised in the name of furthering German medical science. Mengele was never caught. He escaped to Argentina and died from Natural causes - a stroke while swimming, many years after the war ended.
The story below illustrates something that is hard to bare in mind, when coming to terms with great human tragedy. That is the glimmer of hope, the fragile life that wants to live, the individual reality of a flame that struggles, flickering in the wind. It is, I feel, important to know, and remember, so that we appreciate our lives, and love those around us, knowing that others struggled for life.
Miraculously, Nyiszli survived to give an horrifying and sobering account, one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the public - Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. You find this account pp. 114-120:
"In number one's crematorium's gas chamber 3,000 dead bodies were piled up. The Sonderkommando had already begun to untangle the lattice of flesh. The noise of the elevators and the sound of their clanging doors reached my room. The work moved ahead double-time. The gas chambers had to be cleared, for the arrival of a new convoy had been announced.
The chief of the gas chamber kommando almost tore the hinges off the door to my room as he arrived out of breath, his eyes wide with fear or surprise.
"Doctor," he said, "come quickly. We just found a girl alive at the bottom of a pile of corpses."
I grabbed my instrument case, which was always ready, and dashed to the gas chamber. Against the wall, near the entrance to the immense room, half covered with other bodies, I saw a girl in the throes of a death rattle, her body seized with convulsions. The gas kommando men around me were in a state of panic. Nothing like this had ever happened in the course of their horrible career.
We moved the still-living body from the corpses pressing against it. I gathered the tiny adolescent body into my arms and carried it back to the room adjoining the gas chamber, where normally the gas kommando men change clothes for work. I laid the body on a bench. A frail young girl, almost a child, she could have been no more than fifteen. I took out my syringe and, taking her arm - she had not yet recovered consciousness and was breathing with difficulty - I administered three intravenous injections.
My companions covered her body which was as cold as ice with a heavy overcoat. One ran to the kitchen to fetch some tea and warm broth. Everybody wanted to help as if she were his own child. The reaction was swift. The child was seized by a fit of coughing which brought up a thick globule of phlegm from her lungs. She opened her eyes and looked fixedly at the ceiling. I kept a close watch for every sign of life. Her breathing became deeper and more and more regular. Her lungs, tortured by the gas, inhaled the fresh air avidly. Her pulse became perceptible, the result of the injections.
I waited impatiently. I saw that within a few minutes she was going to regain consciousness: her circulation began to bring color back into her cheeks, and her delicate face became human again .. I made a sign for my companions to withdraw. I was going to attempt something I knew without saying was doomed to failure.
From our numerous contacts, I had been able to ascertain that Mussfeld had a high esteem for the medical expert's professional qualities. He knew that my superior was Dr. Mengele, the KZ's most dreaded figure, who, goaded by racial pride, took himself to be one of the most important representatives of German medical science. He considered the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers as a patriotic duty. The work carried out in the dissecting room was for the furtherance of German medical science ...
And this was the man I had to deal with, the man I had to talk into allowing a single life to be spared. I calmly related the terrible case we found ourselves confronted with. I described for his benefit what pains the child must have suffered in the undressing room, and the horrible scenes that preceded death in the gas chamber. When the room had been plunged into darkness, she had breathed in a few lungfuls of cyclon gas. Only a few, though, for her fragile body had given way under the pushing and shoving of the mass as they fought against death. By chance she had fallen with her face against the wet concrete floor. That bit of humidity had kept her from being asphyxiated, for cyclon gas does not react under humid conditions.
These were my arguments, and I asked him to do something for the child. He listened to me attentively then asked me exactly what I proposed doing. I saw by his expression that I had put him face to face with a practically impossible problem.
It was obvious that the child could not remain in the crematorium. One solution would have been to put her in front of the crematorium gate. A kommando of women always worked there. She could have slipped back to the camp barracks after they had finished work. She would never relate what had happened to her. The presence of one new face among so many thousands would never be detected, for no one in the camp knew all the other inmates. If she had been three or four years older that might have worked. A girl of twenty would have been able to understand clearly the miraculous circumstances of her survival, and have enough foresight not to tell anyone about them. She would wait for better times, like so many other thousands were waiting, to recount what she had lived through.
But Mussfeld thought that a young girl of sixteen would in all nai 'vete' tell the first person she had met where she had just come from, what she had seen and what she had lived through. The news would spread like wildfire, and we would all be forced to pay for it with our lives. "There's no way of getting round it," he said, "the child will have to die." Half an hour later the young girl was led, or rather carried, into the furnace room hallway, and there Mussfeld sent another in his place to do the job. A bullet in the back of the neck."
I had breakfast, and while I was eating I wondered what the significance of this knowledge brings. It is a personal choice, but I feel that these cruelties, this industrialisation of death may have been curtailed, but it has not ended. This is what we do to our animals, our chickens, pigs and cattle. We eat them after a long, arduous period of torture. We eat their pain and suffering, and so, bring sickness and suffering into our own bodies. Maybe we may not choose to be vegetarian, but maybe we can choose to merely reduce the amount of meat we consume.
This seems to be a sensible, reasonable response. Hopefully it can become a habit and a lifestyle.
It seems to me that consciousness comes with response-ability. It is important, I feel, to be aware, as fully aware, of our human condition, and our place, our portrayal of it, and our continued participation, in an honest and an affirming a way as we can find. There seems to me to be plenty that preys on life, that our worst enemies can be our own self destructiveness. This means we must be disciplined and decisive, clear minded and energetic in keeping our bodies and minds fit for life and health.
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