Posted on 10/14/2020 3:54:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
Studying Holocaust history is difficult. Our American psyches are not conditioned for the unprecedented level of cruelty that is the Holocaust. This column may be unstomachable for the weak of mind. Be forewarned.
The American liberation of the concentration camp Dachau is distinct from all other Holocaust liberations. U.S. soldiers, according to the book "The Day of the Americans," were so overpowered by the horrors of Dachau that they “summarily executed” some of the Nazis who operated the concentration camp, along with their dogs. Their dogs? I can understand the human nature that propelled American soldiers to execute the Nazis who, in that one camp alone, enslaved, tortured, and killed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. But why their dogs?
It is infrequently discussed when we reference the Holocaust, how Nazis conditioned and utilized dogs in the torture of their victims. Each camp kept about 50 to 60 dogs for this purpose.
“The gruesome part of this was how they killed those people. Either by torture by the firing squad, mutilation with starved bloodhounds of which each camp had about fifty or sixty, and by mass gas poisoning…” wrote U.S. soldier Leon Morin to his family in 1945, after the liberation. “The worst sight …. Dachau … I think it is wors[e] than Buchenwald…”
In 2007, the United States government initiated deportation proceedings for a former Dachau S.S. guard who moved to America after the war. In the paperwork filed with the court, the DOJ revealed that Paul Henss was a dog handler in Dachau and Buchenwald during the Holocaust and that he trained dogs “to ‘bite without mercy’ and to literally tear prisoners to pieces if they attempted to escape.” As Leon Morin describes, these dogs were starved by the Nazis in order to achieve this ferocious behavior. Historic photos show Dachau prisoners fighting the ravenous dogs with clubs to survive.
The Nazi dogs were considered by U.S. soldiers as complicit in the murders and tortures of Dachau victims, which may explain why some of the dogs were executed along with the Nazis.
But the concentration camp dogs did more than just terrorize Holocaust victims. According to Leon Morin’s letter, the dogs brought evidence of death back into the German town near the Dachau concentration camp: “…a couple of dogs got into a fight over a half-eaten human foot which was dug out of a bone pit. One of the dogs ran through [the] fence and into the town with the foot in his mouth. I wonder what the civilians in the town think of that place, I’m sure that they must have known what was going [on] inside that camp.”
What did the Germans know about the concentration camps? History shows many Germans denying knowledge of the atrocities of their pedestaled Nazi soldiers, but the reality of the evidence from the camps renders such claims impossible.
According to Leon Morin’s letter, it would take “15 minutes to cremate 50 persons.” They were burning thousands of human bodies a week. The area would have been filled with the odor of “burning flesh,” Leon Morin writes. While the Nazis attempted to camouflage the odor as coming from a nearby soap factory, which Leon describes in his letter, the confusion is simply not believable.
Indeed, the American soldiers did not believe the German civilians were unwitting bystanders. U.S. troops forced the German civilians to bury the 9,000 dead bodies found throughout the Dachau concentration camp.
Leon Morin was 29 years old in 1945 when he wrote the letter described in this column to his family. The 10-page letter has never before been published. Leon’s sister Lorraine McAleavy and her son Tim McAleavy sent this very special letter for me to share with our readers. This is the second in a series of three columns I will dedicate to Leon Morin’s letter.
I believe dogs take on behavior of their owners whether good or bad. Once a vicious dog is encouraged by their owner it should be put down easy. The owner? Put them down hard.
Once a dog learns to bite humans there is one one sure cure.
Those dogs were conditioned to hunt and devour people. These animals had to be put down, as there was no practical way to retrain them.
The first term of the Trump presidency has reminded me how the average person can begin to embrace cruelty as a method of hysterical and compulsive resistance.
We as a species are NOT that far removed from the Nazis or members of ISIS.
This latent cruelty to others is a primative human trait we must all work to keep under control.
Kind of like how many Americans drive by a planned parenthood facility on their way to work or to the grocery store without batting an eye, knowing full well what is going on in there.
Anyone who thinks he isn't is lying to himself.
I can't read this article. Didn't even make it past the headline. For one thing I'm a dog lover. For another greater reason, there is too much grief and pain and heartbreak in this sorry old world, and the older I get the less I want to know about it.
Humans are the cruelest animals on earth.
When I was a college student, I did a study tour of Europe. We went to Dachau and it changed me forever and I became adamantly totalitarianism in any form (*cough* dems *cough*).
Ironically, though, homeschooling is illegal in Germany I have heard because they never want to raise up future fascists, but they indoctrinate future communists in their schools. Other side of the same coin, and both lead to control, starvation, death, genocide and complete government control. One under the guise of nationalism one under the guise of “for the people”.
They sure are.
“We as a species are NOT that far removed from the Nazis or members of ISIS.”
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All one has to do is find the nearest Planned Parenthood butchering center. Or locate a female who is willing to do FGM on a child.
The irony is without women to facilitate these forms of evil they wouldn’t be done.
Yeah, so while men do cause great harm in the ‘passion of the moment,’ I do hold with the belief that women, in general, can facilitate greater harm to humanity in cold-blood.
As woman, it causes me pain to admit it. Nevertheless, it must be admitted.
Pit Bulls have a bad reputation because of their owners. My son and his ex had a pitbull, who was the most gentle dog you could imagine. Jersey, or Cow as they called her because she had the markings of a Jersey cow wouldn’t hurt a flea so to speak.
Very good point.
CHOICE will kill about 3,000 future American citizens today.
COVID-19 will kill about...
CHOICE has killed over 60,000,000 just in America alone.
Again; how many did the Nazis kill?
I doubt they considered the dogs “complicit” — in what world does that make sense? But if a dog is continuously starved and abused, and trained to attack, and fed human remains, it would take an unbelievable amount of retraining to even have a chance of bringing out its better nature, with no guarantee that the damage done by its previous training isn’t irreversible. Sadly, in the best of times a dog brought to that level would likely have to be put down. In the midst of a world war, there would be no other option.
On a yearly basis about the same; but the Nazis were stopped after one decade whilst Planned Butcherhood is still operating after nearly a half-century of killing.
Nazi leaders were noted for love of their pets and for certain animals, notably apex predators like the wolf and the lion. Hitler, a vegetarian and hater of hunting, adored dogs and spent some of his final hours in the company of Blondi, whom he would take for walks outside the bunker at some danger to himself. He had a particular enthusiasm for birds and most of all for wolves. [...] Goebbels said, famously, ‘The only real friend one has in the end is the dog. . . The more I get to know the human species, the more I care for my Benno.’ Goebbels also agreed with Hitler that ‘meat eating is a perversion in our human nature,’ and that Christianity was a ‘symptom of decay’, since it did not urge vegetarianism. [...] On the one hand, monsters of cruelty towards their fellow humans; on the other, kind to animals and zealous in their interest. In their very fine essay on such contradictions, Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax offer three observations. One, as just noted, many Nazi leaders harboured affection towards animals but antipathy to humans. Hitler was given films by a maharaja which displayed animals killing people. The Führer watched with equanimity. Another film showed humans killing animals. Hitler covered his eyes and begged to be told when the slaughter was over.[29]
Animal welfare in Nazi Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germany
Animal welfare and rights in Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_and_rights_in_Germany
The liberation of Dachau was a MODEL of how all the camps should have been liberated.
Everyone should have realized that war crimes trials were going to be a joke.
I would have filled the camps with all the SS and left them to their former victims until they said it was enough.
This is the Day
The Lord has Made
Let us Be Glad
and Rejoice in It!
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