The Dachau Massacre. The Slaughter of Nazis in Death Camps During WW2.

Look into the strategic bombing of cities such as Dresden in WW2. 20,000+ people were killed including women and children.
Atrocities were high on both sides. Add that to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other Axis cities and you will find that the Jewish atrocities are only one side of the story. The story is always slanted to favour by the victors. It is just spin.
That of course does not diminish the atrocities against the Jewish people, or even Japanese held Pows.
It was a terrible war after all.

reply to post by kudegras


Imagine what the story would be like had the Germans won.

Seems like all sides did bad things during all wars.

It is hard for me to find sympathy for the guards of Dachau.

My husbands great-uncle (his grandmas brother) died there just 2 days before the camp was liberated. He was taken there after being caught passing messages to the families of the people being shipped off to the camps. According to the records my father-in-law brought back on his last trip to Germany, they tortured this man in ways far worse than starvation.

The look of saddness on our grandmothers face when she spoke of her brother still breaks my heart. So yeah, it is hard for me to feel anything for the souless butchers who were "guards" and as much as I am for fairness and justice, I just can't not think of a better form of justice for them. Just my biased opinion.

Originally posted by Monger
reply to post by Wide-Eyes

 

One that same note, do you know what German soldiers did to Russian women. Doesnt make it right, but it happened on both sides on an almost industrial scale.

I've seen photographic evidence of what some German soldiers did to Russian women. It was 2009, at a local Militaria show in Pomona, CA. One dealer specialized in all manner of German WWII paperwork, posters, photographs, and photo albums. I always like to look at his photo albums (these are albums put together by German soldiers during the war), as they all have photos I,ve never seen before. One photo album had the usual photos of soldiers doing regular things, like posing with fellow soldiers, and scenes of the Russian countryside. There were 3 pages of photos (probably 10 to 12 photos) that showed naked women, and it was obvious to me that many of them had been gang-raped and beaten horrifically. One looked like she had been left for dead in a ditch, with large bruises and blood all over her body. I was disgusted by it, and couldn't eat my lunch after viewing the album.

[EDIT] I forgot to mention that it was clear in the photos that Germans had raped and beaten the women in the photos, since it was plain that the blood (and in one case, body fluids) was still fresh or wet on the photos. In a couple of the photos, German soldiers are smiling and laughing near the women, which they probably wouldn't have done if they had merely come across these women in that state.

reply to post by anton74


I believe it is very important to discuss and show people how tyrannical dictators can destroy humanity with their ideas of de-humanizing others, so that genocide, or mass executions, are "acceptable".

Be it hitler, mao tse taung, pol pot, assad, stalin, the spanish conquistadors, (fill in your favorite mass murderer), if humans don't learn from history, we will repeat it.

I would like to add that the first thing tyrants do is disarm the populace, the second thing they do is divide families (they can do this simply by drafting men into the army, and away from their families), the third thing they do is kill anyone who has any education.

Seems some people just want to twist the truth. Its out there in plain site whether revisionist or not.

For starters, Dacau was not an extermination camp. It was a concentration camp and people were not killed directly in the way described. Dachau was formed in 1933 and liberated in 1945. In total 31,951 were killed there, do the maths, that 2662 killed each year, or 221 a month or about 7 a day.

Thats not trivial, but it was not an extermination camp.

Most people died from disease:

Though at the time of liberation the death rate had peaked at 200 per day, after the liberation by U.S. forces the rate eventually fell to between 50 and 80 deaths per day. The cause of these deaths was, besides the murderous SS policies, typhus epidemics and starvation which claimed thousands of lives. The number of inmates had peaked in 1944 with transports from evacuated camps in the east (such as Auschwitz) and the resulting overcrowding led to an increase in the death rate.

The death rate peaked at 200 a day when many people in Germany were dying from hunger.

The SS executed people, as you would expect, but not in gas chambers, they shot people that conspired to escape or tried to kill gaurds. Many people were criminals. The main purpose of the camp was house communists and political subversives, not Jews:

On Wednesday the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5000 people. 'All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons, and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organize as soon as they are released.

If you read the facts, from Wikipedia, and judge the balance you'll only be able to come to the conclusion that Dachau was not a huge death camp where thousands of people were murdered in gas chambers. They were prsioners that could not be held in jails and were too dangerous to let out. At the peak of the war many of them died from medical complaints. Even after 'liberation' they died by their droves under US control at a rate of 50-80 a day. The Americans didnt execute them, they died of hunger and disease brought about by the war.

Add to that the fact Heinrich Wicker had been in charge for 1 day and you end up with a picture that is in no way as 'evil' as some people are making out.

Then follow on to consider that after the war, the Communists did EXACTLY the same thing. They went on a witch hunt arresting all nazis and members of the Social Democratic Party and anyone anti-communist, so much so that they had to open 12 concentration camps of their own including Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.

Im not defending the Nazis, but I do think you should address the facts if your talking about something in particular.

For starters, the constant reference to NAZIS. Really? the Nazis were political members, the Nazi Party was a political organisation. It was the Gestapo and the SS that killed people. Small difference, but when you want to get pedantic then you can take it both ways.

Maybe reading Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans www.amazon.com... will help. Below is an extract of a review:

Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans reconciles conflicting interpretations of the Nazi regime and its genocidal policies by focusing on how both party officials and average individuals created and maintained the totalitarianism that gripped German society from 1933 to the end of World War II. Eric A. Johnson argues that historians have understood the authoritarian nature of the National Socialist state in two ways. Scholarship in the 1970's and 1980's highlighted the average person's resistance to the terror fostered by panoptic and ruthless police agencies, while more current investigations show that the Gestapo and related organizations often had less power than was previously assumed. These studies stress the roles played by citizens in the execution of Nazi policies. The most notable example of this interpretation is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's chilling Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Johnson argues that ordinary Germans did not willfully intend to harm others, though their cowardice and apathy made the implementation of Nazi policies possible. Drawing from court records and Gestapo files from the area around Cologne, a region that had demonstrated only lukewarm support for the Nazis in elections, Johnson shows that Germans' participation in the Third Reich was not heavily driven by images of anti-Semitism but by a routine obedience to the state.

okay... I just read the first 6 pages of this thread.... I enjoy history but I can only take so much single-track mindedness or taking sides from whatever you feel you believe to be right or wrong.

It is not a matter of RIGHT or WRONG... it isn't black and white.... that is the concept put onto us humans derived from old time religion that yes was adequate for it's time, however today as human beings we have developed past the salem witch trial frame of mind. Some things go without saying... WE ALL KNOW ITS WRONG TO KILL... the meaning of revisiting historical events is to study the player's habits and learn from/prevent these mistakes from happening again. We, reading about what did happened, are to take the role as the coroner... NEUTRAL TO IF THE DEATH WAS WRONG DOING... but simply to figure out WHY such atrocities could happen and understand the effects from said mistakes.

Taking sides in matters over 50 years old which you play no part of truly shows you're missing the forest for the trees.

Read history with an open mind and understanding... learn.... and remember, you are not an attorney or a judge at the Nuremberg Trials.

reply to post by daaskapital


I think both sides committed serious war crimes but only the Germans were charged with this at the Nuremburg trials, I also believe the numbers of jews killed by the Germans in these camps were grossly over exaggerated as there was not that many jews living in europe at that time and when you look at any reconnaissance photo's taken of these camps, you dont see any smoking chimneys or large piles of dead bodies piling up like we saw on the films in the trials. My grandfather was in the war and he told me his troops were more angry at Churchill than they were with Hitler as it was Churchill throwing our troops at machine guns without any regards for their families, just like Bush did in Iraq. The British declared war on Germany and Hitler didn't want to go war with us, all Churchill was good for was speeches that i bet someone else wrote for him (sounds like Obama).

Originally posted by Happy1
reply to post by anton74

 

I would like to add that the first thing tyrants do is disarm the populace, the second thing they do is divide families (they can do this simply by drafting men into the army, and away from their families), the third thing they do is kill anyone who has any education.

I really like this last bit. Spot on.

Im reading Stasi by John O Koehler and its talking about Erich Mielkes rise to power. Communism was was big in Germany before the Nazis took power and even after the war there were lots of communists. However they fell mainly into blue collar working class Communists (the bread and butter of the communist party and the majority) and the intellectual Communists (who couldnt comprehend that they were a minority). Of the intellectuals they formed many differring splintered groups of communists that could never agre on a central philospophy. Unfortunatly that made them radical in the eyes of the Stasi and therefore dangerous and they were all (the intellectuals) rounded up, even though they were communists, and put into the east German concentration camps or just shot for treason etc, mainly because they could think and reason.

Your spot on with what your saying. We need to understand our past, and I cant help but continually find myself say do'h again and again as I read about govts doing things to keep power and control whether its the Catholics banning books after the invention of the printing press (banned websites after the invention of the internet anyone) or the ban on political police such as Komissariat 5 which was formed as an attachment to the normal police which was a loophole, K5 becoming the Stasi. Cant think of any immediate examples, but im sure we have police sections which doing the same thing, such as the british High Tech Police which are nothing more than political sensors arresting people speaking freely, such as the Hillsorough incident today.

History repeats itself, and intellectuals quite often die mysteriously. Glad im as thick as a brick.

reply to post by gazzachel


And Obama's puppet-masters are all communist - people wake up and learn from history.

Holocaust was grossly exaggerated filled with heart stopping stories that can't stand up to engineers or scientists. The smoke chimneys and burning bodies to ash in pits has been slapped down by people who work in modern crematoriums, crematoriums do not produce smoke, that is not what the chimney stack is for. Time to put the heart down and listen to the brain, when you say things like six million, you actually need to account for six million, that is the whole of Houston, Tx gone, the whole of Libya gone, really? come now.

Crimes where committed on both sides, but if you declare war on someone then prepare for poopoo to hit the fan, plus as an African from a country under British control you can see who my money would have been on.

reply to post by WaterBottle


By not mourning loss of life, regardless of who owned that life makes you no better then those you claim to hate.

And if that isn't enough, should you feel sympathetic towards the Japanese American's who were put in American concentration camps just for being Japanese? Should you feel sympathetic towards German American's who were put in the same concentration camps for being of German decent? How about Russians? Many lost their lives because of the paranoia and hatred the US felt.

America is no more innocent then the Nazi's when it comes to WWII. It's just easier for the victors to cover-up their wrong doings then it is for a fallen nation who's every secret is laid bare.

Originally posted by lynn112
It is hard for me to find sympathy for the guards of Dachau.

My husbands great-uncle (his grandmas brother) died there just 2 days before the camp was liberated. He was taken there after being caught passing messages to the families of the people being shipped off to the camps. According to the records my father-in-law brought back on his last trip to Germany, they tortured this man in ways far worse than starvation.

The look of saddness on our grandmothers face when she spoke of her brother still breaks my heart. So yeah, it is hard for me to feel anything for the souless butchers who were "guards" and as much as I am for fairness and justice, I just can't not think of a better form of justice for them. Just my biased opinion.

edit on 30/12/2012 by lynn112 because: (no reason given)

This is an example of lynching, witchunts etc. You feel bad because of what Nazis did to someone you love, and want revenge. Its just too biassed... We don't know who did it (or maybe you do, if you have access to some records), so how can that justify the massacre of possibly hundreds of men at Dachau. You do realise that they are people also.

Both sides did wrong, this massacre is not justified because of what may or may not have happened to your husbands great grandmothers brother.

Originally posted by Auricom
reply to post by WaterBottle

 

By not mourning loss of life, regardless of who owned that life makes you no better then those you claim to hate.

And if that isn't enough, should you feel sympathetic towards the Japanese American's who were put in American concentration camps just for being Japanese? Should you feel sympathetic towards German American's who were put in the same concentration camps for being of German decent? How about Russians? Many lost their lives because of the paranoia and hatred the US felt.

America is no more innocent then the Nazi's when it comes to WWII. It's just easier for the victors to cover-up their wrong doings then it is for a fallen nation who's every secret is laid bare.

Exactly, people are still people. Mass murder is wrong.

Originally posted by chishuppu
Holocaust was grossly exaggerated filled with heart stopping stories that can't stand up to engineers or scientists. The smoke chimneys and burning bodies to ash in pits has been slapped down by people who work in modern crematoriums, crematoriums do not produce smoke, that is not what the chimney stack is for. Time to put the heart down and listen to the brain, when you say things like six million, you actually need to account for six million, that is the whole of Houston, Tx gone, the whole of Libya gone, really? come now.

Modern crematoriums do not produce visible smoke, because these days fumes are controlled. Years ago things were different, seriously, they burned the bodies, of course there was smoke.

Read up on history, old cremattoriums do have chimneys. Eg. Working Crematorium


en.wikipedia.org...


EDIT: Not sure if someone in this thread linked to this, or if I found it (I had open in my tabs), but this is an article directly addressing smoke coming from crematoriums:

codoh.com...

reply to post by daaskapital


I dont feel bad for them. Those people allowed themselves to be brainwashed into being the most self-absorbed Nation on Earth! Oh wait..

Originally posted by 1/2 Nephilim
reply to post by daaskapital

 

I dont feel bad for them. Those people allowed themselves to be brainwashed into being the most self-absorbed Nation on Earth! Oh wait..

But really, your right.

Originally posted by kudegras
Look into the strategic bombing of cities such as Dresden in WW2. 20,000+ people were killed including women and children.
Atrocities were high on both sides. Add that to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other Axis cities and you will find that the Jewish atrocities are only one side of the story. The story is always slanted to favour by the victors. It is just spin.
That of course does not diminish the atrocities against the Jewish people, or even Japanese held Pows.
It was a terrible war after all.

Only 20,000+ people killed during the fire bombing of Dresden? Where did you get that figure?

It was more like 75,000, possibly as high as 125,000. The estimates varied wildly because Dresden was flooded with refugees from the East fleeing the Soviet troops. In other words, no one is really sure how many people were in Dresden when it was fire bombed. The number of people was higher than its normal population.

The heat from the fires (jellied gasoline with white phosphorus fuses) was so intense, there wasn't a lot left of the bodies.

Originally posted by MikhailBakunin
...
Taking sides in matters over 50 years old which you play no part of truly shows you're missing the forest for the trees....

1945 was 68 years ago.

Originally posted by salainen

Originally posted by chishuppu
Holocaust was grossly exaggerated filled with heart stopping stories that can't stand up to engineers or scientists. The smoke chimneys and burning bodies to ash in pits has been slapped down by people who work in modern crematoriums, crematoriums do not produce smoke, that is not what the chimney stack is for. Time to put the heart down and listen to the brain, when you say things like six million, you actually need to account for six million, that is the whole of Houston, Tx gone, the whole of Libya gone, really? come now.

Modern crematoriums do not produce visible smoke, because these days fumes are controlled. Years ago things were different, seriously, they burned the bodies, of course there was smoke.

Read up on history, old cremattoriums do have chimneys. Eg. Working Crematorium


en.wikipedia.org...


EDIT: Not sure if someone in this thread linked to this, or if I found it (I had open in my tabs), but this is an article directly addressing smoke coming from crematoriums:

codoh.com...

edit on 31-12-2012 by salainen because: (no reason given)

been through this discussion before, thanks for you input though.

Originally posted by brookster18
Seems some people just want to twist the truth. Its out there in plain site whether revisionist or not.

For starters, Dachau was not an extermination camp. It was a concentration camp and people were not killed directly in the way described. Dachau was formed in 1933 and liberated in 1945. In total 31,951 were killed there, do the maths, that 2662 killed each year, or 221 a month or about 7 a day.

Thats not trivial, but it was not an extermination camp.

Most people died from disease:
....

This is a common misunderstanding. Many people confuse the concentration camps with the extermination camps. Most of purpose-built extermination camps were built in Poland.