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Free Republic University, Department of History presents World War II Plus 70 Years: Seminar and Discussion Forum
First session: September 1, 2009. Last date to add: September 2, 2015.
Reading assignment: New York Times articles delivered daily to students on the 70th anniversary of original publication date. (Previously posted articles can be found by searching on keyword “realtime” Or view Homer’s posting history .)
To add this class to or drop it from your schedule notify Admissions and Records (Attn: Homer_J_Simpson) by freepmail. Those on the Realtime +/- 70 Years ping list are automatically enrolled. Course description, prerequisites and tuition information is available at the bottom of Homer’s profile. Also visit our general discussion thread.

September 21, 1942:

"Open-pit burning of bodies begins at Auschwitz in place of burial.
The decision is made to dig up and burn those already buried (107,000 corpses) to prevent the fouling of ground water and to hide evidence of atrocities."

System of Death

" 'Men to the left! Women to the right!'
In his classic Holocaust memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel recalls that an SS man barked those orders as Hungarian Jews left the railroad cattle cars that transported them to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring of 1944.
"Form fives!" Wiesel heard, as a selection began to determine who would go to the gas chambers.

"Such commands were part of death-camp methodology, a system invented by Nazis who became specialists in the destruction of Jewish life.
The killing centers at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek, as well as Birkenau, combined to make 1942 the most catastrophic year of the Holocaust.

"The destruction process varied from place to place, but the similarities increased the "Final Solution's" efficiency.
As 1942 unfolded, packed rail transports regularly brought European Jews from ghettos and transit camps to the Nazi killing centers in Poland.
When the trains reached their destinations, the dead had to be separated from the living.
Next, those unable to walk were culled out and shot so that foot traffic on paths to the gas chambers could move more rapidly.

"The more-or-less able-bodied were segregated by sex, which split up families.
Babies and small children remained with their mothers.
At Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, no further selection took place (except for a few people who were selected to work in the camp).
Within hours virtually all arrivals in those three camps were gassed after giving up valuables, clothes, and hair.

"At Auschwitz (pictured), which was a huge slave-labor camp as well as a killing center, the Selektion was more detailed.
Under the supervision of SS physicians such as Dr. Josef Mengele, and depending on the camp's needs, smaller or larger numbers of healthy men and women between the ages of 18 and 40 were singled out for "extermination through work."
The new laborers were sheared, tattooed, registered, inadequately clothed, starved by meager food, sleep-deprived, sickened by deficient sanitation, condemned to exhausting labor, demoralized and sometimes tortured by their captors, and always endangered by further selections.
During work hours, they confronted a brutal routine that racked body and spirit to the breaking point.
Relatively few survived.

"At Majdanek and Auschwitz, those who failed the selection for slave labor walked on toward death.
After their clothes and valuables were stripped away and their hair was shorn, they were gassed.
Before their bodies were burned, gold fillings were harvested.
After cremation, ashes that were not dumped in ponds or rivers became fertilizer.

"This process produced huge amounts of booty.
The system ensured that nothing was wasted--except, of course, millions of Jewish lives."

As one who was born a little before WWII, I have taken an interest in the travails it caused and the strategy involved - and the political background, too.
My immediate reaction to the headline about British bombing was to reflect ruefully on Bomber Harris.

During the Second World War, Allied air forces dropped nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying some 60 cities, killing more than half a million German citizens, and leaving 80,000 pilots dead. But the terrible truth is that much of the bombing was carried out against the expressed demands of the Allied military leadership, leading to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. - Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945
One point made in the fascinating

The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II by Thomas Fleming
is that carpet bombing wasn’t accepted politically in America - at least for Europe.

American aerial warfare strategy in Europe was to attempt daylight precision bombing, ultimately succeeding in choking off German fuel consumption. And, when the fighters were given the mission of attacking the Luftwaffe instead of merely escorting the bombers relatively passively, the combination of fuel strangulation by the bombers and aircraft/aircrew decimation of the Luftwaffe by the fighters clearly shortened the war.
Whereas the British under Harris carpet bombed civilians in city after city, obliterating cultural landmarks wholesale - and continued on the theory that civilian disruption, which had not weakened the Third Reich at 50% devastation of all German cities, would become effective at 75% devastation - or at 100%. Harris had it in hand to redouble US bombers’ attenuation of German fuel production, but - even when confronted with intelligence from Ultra that the German military was appalled at the effect of fuel-supply bombing on its capabilities - Harris continued to concentrate on carpet bombing of German cities when he could have magnified the effect of the American effort that they knew was working. And even to complain that the American bombers weren’t supporting his priority.
Of course when it came to Japan, the American strategy was exactly what the British strategy in bombing Germany had been. And with the A-bomb, of course, it worked . . .