Posted on 05/25/2011 4:55:27 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Thanks for the links..
Great thread today...
BTW, interesting question #6 on the 20 questions this morning....
Fascinating stuff.
First mention of Major General George S. Patton in the NYT as far as I can remember.
"The Second Armored Division, now nicknamed 'Hell on Wheels', will be at full strength of 11,000 men when the manoeuvres are begun, and the mechanized equipment will include more than 2,000 vehicles, ranging from medium and light weight tanks down to motor cycles..."Major General George S. Patton will be in command."
What do you think, when will those green troops be ready to take on Hitler's Panzers?
;-)
“Among the 195 passengers was a man who had been in the concentration camp in Dachau, Germany from November, 1940, to last March-Walter Schein, 29, former Viennese manufacturer. He said the camp held 25,000 prisoners, of whom 20,000 were Jews.”
On May 25th, 1941 it was being openly reported in the New York Times that Jews were being put in concentration camps, specifically citing Dachau.
Evidently this information was not as hidden as some would have us believe.
Among the 195 passengers was a man who had been in the concentration camp in Dachau, Germany from November, 1940, to last March-Walter Schein, 29, former Viennese manufacturer. He said the camp held 25,000 prisoners, of whom 20,000 were Jews.”
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't read the article carefully, only saving it for posting because it was adjacent some other more prominent story.
I think it was common knowledge that the Jews were being put in “camps.” However, at this time conditions in these camps were not nearly what they would eventually become. Plus, the Wansee Conference authorizing the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was still some years away. Once we go to war with Hitler’s Germany, there will be little news of any kind coming out of Nazi occupied Europe, including information about Dachau and other death camps. In addition, when thousands of American and British soldiers are dying in the hedgerows of Normandy and the snow drifts of the Ardennes, and hundreds of thousands of Russians are being killed on the long road to Berlin, there isn’t going to be a lot of journalistic interest in “camps” inside Germany.
I do believe the Germans knew quite well what was happening in the camps. Certainly the Reichsbahn workers who ran the trains in and out of the camps knew. It was the “open secret” among the German people; they heard the stories but didn’t really want to acknowledge it. Just as anecdotal evidence, a friend’s neighbor was a teenager in Germany during the war; her brother served in the East. Once when he was home on leave, he told his sister “We have to win this war; if they ever discover what we have done they will kill us all.” There had to be more discussion than that among the grown-ups.
My point is that the Americans, British and Soviets didn’t know the extent of these Nazi barbarities until their soldiers walked through those camps in 1944 and 1945.
I’ll bet in 1941 the term “concentration camp” didn’t summon up the images we have now. We hear it and think of walking skeletons and gas chambers and the other horrors that were uncovered in 1945. In 1941 a concentration camp was probably seen as a place to detain a lot of people the government distrusted. No picnic, by any means, but hey, there were stories in the news just recently about aliens being rounded up in the U.S.A. because their visas were expired or whatever. Where did the feds stick them while processing their cases? A concentration camp, maybe.
You mean, some months away -- January 1942.
And the major mass murder of Jews begins in just one month with the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Time flies when... well, maybe just when you're not expecting it to?
As far as the Germans knew, KGV was the only ship of the class operational. Prince of Wales had only been completed 7 weeks earlier, and was still working up.
Not by Valentine’s Day, 1943.
My next book review is actually on the Wannsee Conference. You can read it later next month if the schedule I have is correct.
It really is a misconception that there was limited knowledge on the percecutions of the Jews prior to the liberation of the death camps. But it is equally important to note that the progression to extermination was not a distinct or fast one.
Placing Jews in concentration camps didn’t have the connotation of death at this time that we think of today. Even Auschwitz at this time is only a concentration camp and has not taken on the monikers of labor and death camp as of yet. Other facilities such as Belzec, Chelmo, Sobibor and Treblinka are not even on paper yet. The first of these four extermination camps, Chlemo, will not begin operations until December of 1941 and even then will only be a facility designed to provide barracks and administration housing for three mobile gas vans.
The Wannsee Conference itself did not make extermination policy. In fact there is a lot of evidence that it already was decided at this point. The Einsatzgruppe as well as the aforementioned Chelmo would be examples of that. Additionally, the first victims of Auschwitz could be considered to originate in June of 1941 when some 500+ sick and disabled prisoners were sent to Germany to one of its euthanasia centers (part of the T4 project). This is coupled with the first experiments with Zyklon-B on Soviet POWs in September. What it did do was address some of the details (including the fate of Mischlinge) and pretty much made it clear that any debate as to the fate of the Jews was over so that dissenters would know to fall into line. I wont go into too much more detail here since I do want you to read my book review.
It is important to remember that the U.S. also had concentration camps. Only we called them interment camps. The were initially administered by Milton Eisenhower (Dwight’s brother).
I also remember a story in the times before France fell in which a woman was stopped and questioned by Paris authorities. She was found to be German....and also a man. The article stated that she..he was placed in a concentration camp since he was considered to be an “undesirable”. So France had them as well.
The big difference is as you say. From our perspective, concentration camps are immediately related to the death camps or at least camps in which prisoners are slowly starved to death. Clearly this was not always the case since we know that the U.S. did not administer the interment camps with the same degree of cruelty that the Germans administered even their “old age” camp at Thereinstadt.
It’s definitely a matter of perspective as well. Imagine if we viewed all POW camps through the same prism that the Japanese POW camps were administered. Everyone would be a monster then.
http://worldwar2daybyday.blogspot.com/
Day 633 May 25, 1941
Overnight 400 miles Southeast of Greenland, British cruisers HMS Suffolk and HMS Norfolk shadow damaged German battleship Bismarck using radar, while zigzagging to avoid potential submarine attack. At 3.06 AM, Admiral Lütjens (celebrating his 52nd birthday) orders Bismarck to zig West while HMS Suffolk and Norfolk are zagging East, breaking the British radar contact. Bismarck circles behind the British cruisers and steams Southeast at 20 knots toward safety at St. Nazaire, France. British Admiral Tovey is desperate to locate Bismarck and, incredibly, Lütjens sends radio signals in the morning allowing Tovey to plot his position. British warships and aircraft search all afternoon and evening but cannot find Bismarck.
Crete. More German troops are airlifted into Maleme airport. After dive-bombing by Stukas at 4 PM, German paratroops and mountain troops attack the North coast town of Galatas (on the approach to Suda Bay) from both South and West. Allied forces quickly withdraw but a group under Major John Russell holds their position and is surrounded. New Zealand Colonel Howard Kippenberger immediately organizes a scratch force with 2 British light tanks (3rd Hussars) to counterattack. Led by a Maori war chant (haka), New Zealand troops charge into Galatas with bayonets fixed, causing a German retreat and freeing Russell Force. Germans mortar fire pushes them back out of the town with the loss of 1 tank. On the other end of the island, Luftwaffe bombs Heraklion heavily.
Off Monrovia, Liberia, West Africa, U-103 sinks Egyptian SS Radames at 4.31 PM (1 killed) and Dutch SS Wangi Wangi at 10.13 PM (1 dead, 92 survivors in 2 boats reach the Liberian coast next day).
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