Until 1972, portions of the former German concentration camp [KZ] at Dachau was used by the US Army as a military prison.
It must have been an interesting experience for American soldiers of the Jewish faith or of Jewish parentage.
-archy-/-
Posted on 08/08/2002 6:13:57 PM PDT by clintonbaiter
I'm not Jewish. Nobody in my family died in the Holocaust. For me, anti-Semitism has always been one of those phenomena that doesn't really register on my radar, like tribal genocide in Rwanda, a horrible thing that happens to someone else. But I live in a small town outside of Munich on a street that until May of 1945 was named Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. I work in Munich, a pleasant metropolitan city of a little over a million inhabitants whose Bavarian charm tends to obscure the fact that this city was the birthplace and capital of the Nazi movement. Every day when I go to work I pass by the sites of apartments Hitler lived in, extant buildings in which decisions were made to murder millions of innocent people, and plazas in which book burnings took place, SS troops paraded and people were executed. The proximity to evil has a way of concentrating one's attention, of putting a physical reality to the textbook narratives of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans.
Then the little things start to happen that over a period of time add up to something very sinister. I'm on a bus and a high school boy passes around Grandpa's red leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf to his friends who respond by saying "coooool!." He then takes out a VCR tape (produced in Switzerland) of "The Great Speeches of Joseph Goebbels." A few weeks later I'm at a business meeting with four young highly educated Germans who are polite, charming and soft-spoken to say the least. When the subject matter changes to a business deal with a man in New York named Rubinstein, their nostrils flair, their demeanors attain a threatening mien and one of them actually says, and I'm quoting verbatim here: "The problem with America is that the Jews have all the money."
They start laughing and another one says, "Yeah, all the Jews care about is money."
You could have knocked me over with a feather. I half expected one of them to start talking about the historical veracity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here were four young, charming, well-educated Germans spewing forth anti-Semitic bilk that would have made Julius Streicher proud. I found that this type of anti-Semitic reference in my professional dealings with Germans soon became a leitmotif (to borrow a term made famous by Richard Wagner, another notorious German anti-Semite). In my private meetings with Germans it often happens that they will loosen up after a while and reveal personal opinions and political leanings that were thought to have ceased to exist in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945.....
(Excerpt) Read more at iconoclast.ca ...
Until 1972, portions of the former German concentration camp [KZ] at Dachau was used by the US Army as a military prison.
It must have been an interesting experience for American soldiers of the Jewish faith or of Jewish parentage.
-archy-/-
My impression - the cultural guilt cannot stand for another generation. How many people can live with the idea that "Daddy gassed the Jews?"
Eventually, one comes to deny it, and then resent it.
Anybody think different?
I believe you mean "if an anti-Semite ever talks to a survivor ... and comes away still hating Jews" ... right?
The reason I ask is because hating Nazism is a perfectly legitimate form of hatred. I'm reminded of Ike's remark to an American enlisted man, who bumped into a German civilian at a KZ when they were forcing the Germans to tour the camps after the war, and excused himself rather too politely ... Ike said, "Still having trouble hating them?"
Disclaimer: I'm of German heritage myself, and certainly don't advocate hating all Germans; that's ethic bigotry no better than Nazism was. But Nazism as an ideology richly deserves hatred. Nazism is not dead, and the less Christian Europe becomes, the more Nazism will resurface.
The sentiment in much of Europe is certainly anti-Jewish then. It goes far beyond rude behaviour. If one supports the Palestinians in their concept of Palistine from the sea to the river, you are calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. You are correct in that many of the Israelie people will support the concept of a Plaistinian state or have supported it. On the other hand, the Palistinians have always stuck in the "right of return" in even their most sincere negotiations. When pressed, their meaning of right of return means to all of their "historical" Palestine.
Most Palistinians look upon Jews as European intruders. They will not ultimatly agree to live in a non-Islamic state. Palistinians only tolerate the Christians among them when Islamic rule is secure.
Many of the European supporters of the Palistinians understand this and believe the UN and USA were wrong in 1948. Now, do you suppose these Europeans would welcome the Israelies into their countries as part of giving the Palistinians their state and ensuring pease?
"After having committed the worst crimes in the history of humankind, the Germans were allowed to regain their sovereignty after only ten years, their infrastructure was completely rebuilt thanks to the generosity of the American people, and relatively few Germans were brought to trial for their monstrous crimes."Can somebody please tell me why the crimes of "the Germans" are worse (in absolute numbers) than those of "the Russians" or "the Chinese" or even (in proportion of victims to population) of "the Cambodians."Is it that a dead Jew (he doesn't even mention dead Poles, Russians, and Gypsies here) is so much more of an atrocity than a dead Ukrainian, Chinese, or Cambodian? And, as I imply in my question, how is it that "the Germans" are targeted for some Borg-like collective (and hereditary) guilt, while those who even bother to mention the crimes of other dictatorial regimes are specific in accusing the Bolshevics (but never the Russians and the Chinese), or Pol Pot (but never the Cambodians)?
"Even those who were tried and convicted received relatively short sentences or had those reduced or commuted in general amnesties. For example, some members of the Einsatzkommandos, those Germans who, before the construction of the death camps, hunted and murdered Jews by the hundreds of thousands, received sentences of as little as five years imprisonment."And?
If there were true justice in the world, Germany would no longer exist as a separate country, but would have long ago had its territory divided up and dispersed among the Allies. It was an unfortunate historical coincidence that the Cold War began just as Germany was at last being brought to task for its many crimes and atrocities extending back to the First World War.And this is where the author's true prejudice surfaces. The "atrocites" of the First World War were largely the fabrication of Anglo-French propaganda mills, designed to whip up the proletariat into a racist war frenzy so as to furnish the willing raw material for casualty-intensive trench warfare. The idea that war was being waged to preserve England's global hegemony and to accomplish French revenge would not sell nearly as many war bonds as images of Huns tossing Belgian babies on bayonets.
I observe that, although Hitler's generation has ceased to be a significant presence within Germany, the author STILL wishes to see Germany punished. The double standard is obvious. If every nation on earth were held to the same standard of hereditary guilt as the Germans, there would be NO nations left, because there is not a single one whose government has not sanctioned or effected despicable action. A scant sixty years beforehand (the same time between now and the Third Reich) English policy had led to the starvation of the Irish Untermenschen. Are we calling for the breakup of the U.K.?
The tragic result is that . . . the Czech Republic and Poland, are just now coming out of decades of economic decline, while Germany--fat, sassy, arrogant, self-satisfied, and essentially Judenfrei--has enjoyed four decades of undeserved economic prosperity.
The lands in question were under German occupation for all of six years. They were under Soviet occupation for over forty years. And some of them -- Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Rumania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia -- had been allies of the Germans, so much of their economic suffering was the result of losing a war to the Soviets who specialise in reprisals. And as for "undeserved economic prosperity", I detect a note of socialist resentment. How, exactly, is prosperity "undeserved"?
"We can't turn back the clock to redress all of the historical wrongs that have been committed by the Germans, but there are a number of things that can be done to assure that Germany can never again be in a position to threaten the rest of the civilized world. First and foremost is the realization that, while not all Germans are anti-Semitic, there is an anti-Semitic tendency within German culture that extends back to the time of Martin Luther. Germans are instinctively anti-Semitic in the same way that Americans are instinctively freedom loving. Anti-Semitism has been and unfortunately remains the default ideology of the German people."This is an outright lie. Until the Nazis came to power, Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary were the most philo-Semitic states in the world. How is it that the author is willing to view the eight years of Nazi rule as somehow characteristic of the "true" German nature, while totally ignoring the foregoing Wilhelmine period? Throughout the nineteenth century, Germans had a better record in dealings with the Jews than did the English in their treatment of the Irish, or the Americans in their treatment of Negroes and Indians. Why is the author even willing to offer the argument that there is such a thing as a national personality? This does not differ in principle at all from the Nazi claims that Jews are "by nature" devious, grasping, and traitorous. What about characterisation of the Irish as drunken and lazy? Or the English as effete and hypocritical? Or the French as lying cowards? Why should the stereotype of Germans be true, and the others false?
All things being equal, Germans will instinctively support the enemies of the State of Israel.INSTINCTIVELY? There's that racial profiling again. If the Germans were so instinctively anti-Semitic, how is it that there were NO laws prejudicial to Jews during the Imperial period, when every state in Germany had male franchise and the majority opinion could have been made known easily enough in the Reichstag? It took a dictatorial government to IMPOSE anti-Semitism on Germany. And even then, it was not wholly successful, since the persecution was directed primarily at non-German Jews. Indeed, there are claims that up to 150,000 of partial Jewish descent served in the various branches of the Wehrmacht, even up to the rank of admiral and general.
Therefore, America will need to monitor closely and be ready and politically willing to intervene at a moment's notice in German affairs when it appears that Germany is back-sliding into anti-Semitism.Clearly, the author means "anti-Zionism" rather than anti-Semitism per se. But, even granting that the two are identical, why does the author urge our government to intervene against Germany when it is our "friends" the Saudis who pose a greater threat to Israel? And, as I recall, ALL of the 9/11 terrorists were based in the U.S., and what with George II continuing with his idiotic "Islam is a religion of peace" nonsense, American domestic policy is easily as supportive of Islamic terrorism as German domestic policy. Perhaps if we get our own priorities straight in dealing with Mr. Bush's "religion of peace" then we can worry about the splinter in Germany's eye.
"Additionally, it should be a goal of American foreign policy to oppose and to accelerate the dismemberment of the European Union. We must not allow German domination of the EU to accomplish through parliamentary maneuvering and brokered deals what Hitler and the Germans were unable to accomplish during the Third Reich."On this, at least, I can agree with the author. German "domination" of the EU is like being the captain of the Titanic. Sure, you're in charge . . . but why would you want to be?
The surest way to eliminate anti-Semitism in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, is to eliminate the Moslem presence. This is an agenda that is common to the various nationalist parties, frequently sanitised under the heading of "Immigration Reform." While I am not familiar with the corpus of this author's work, I will assume that he is opposed to such nationalists on the grounds that they are "neo-Nazi." This is a false charge. European Jews are, contrary to what the Establishment Press implies, active in the various nationalist movements, and evidence suggests that European nationalists are, on the whole, more anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic. At least one highly placed officer in the Freiheit Partei Österrreich is Jewish, as is le Pen's son-in-law.
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