I have been hearing that the Holocaust (known
also as The Shoah) never happened, it was a
hoax, the amount of the people murdered was grossly exaggerated, it is a
fantasy created by the Jews, there are "similar holocausts" occurring
all the time, and it is all one huge Zionist plot. These are words and
statements that are alarmingly increasingly
popular in recent years as the "truth".
The passage of time seems to dull the worlds memory and that of the human race about many things, especially when it is considered part of the realm of that which is deemed "over and done with". The world gets tired of hearing, viewing, reading about victims of anything whether it be war crimes, mass shootings, war crime atrocities, injustices, and the struggles of other humans to survive.
The Holocaust happened, a horrific, unbelievable, bestial, organized act of evil joined in by many to deliberately exterminate others simply for their religion or beliefs. Sadly it is not a hoax or an exaggeration of how many innocent souls were murdered by the Nazis, their collaborators, and the cowardly silence, indifference of the rest of the so called "civilized" world.
Keeping all this in mind, it is with great interest that I read today that Researchers from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have concluded that over 42,500 Nazi camps and ghettos existed during Hitler's reign of terror between 1933 to 1945.
Perhaps you've
heard of Auschwitz or Treblinka Nazi Concentration Camps and their gas
chambers with massive ovens to burn the bodies, but probably not the
Munchen-Schwabing camp in
Germany. It was the smallest slave-labor camp run by the Nazis,
with maybe a dozen people there at a time forced into manual labor,
writes Eric Lichtblau in the New York Times.
Researchers at the The U.S. Holocaust Museum say
it's now becoming
clear that such facilities were far more prevalent than thought in
Germany and throughout Europe during the war. They've identified 42,500 of various sizes, about six times the number they expected
to find. The sites ranged from killing centers, to brothels, to ghettos, to
labor camps. The Holocaust Museum team also created maps of the sites,
which were
scattered across Europe.
“Nobody
even knows about these places,” says one survivor of five lesser-known
camps, who now volunteers at the museum. “Everything should be
documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that
they know, and they’ll remember.”
Hartmut Berghoff, director of the German Historical Institute,
said the research is simply astounding, reports The Times. "We knew
before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was," he said, "but
the numbers are unbelievable."
The researchers' work may also help Holocaust survivors attempting to sue insurance companies or recover stolen property."How many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a
camp that we didn't even know about?" said Sam Dubbin, a lawyer who
represents survivors.
The total is far higher than most historians had previously estimated,
according to The New York Times. Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, the
lead editors of the project, have compiled the thousands of sites in a multi volume encyclopedia that is being published by the Holocaust Museum.
Each volume catalogs thousands of sites,
providing a comprehensive history of the "living and working
conditions, activities of the Jewish councils, Jewish responses to
persecution, demographic changes, and details of the liquidation of the
ghettos.
Megargee and Dean,
estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in
the sites that they have identified as part of this multi volume
encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with
five more planned by 2025.)
Perhaps you've
heard of Auschwitz or Treblinka Nazi Concentration Camps and their gas
chambers with massive ovens to burn the bodies, but probably not the
Munchen-Schwabing camp in
Germany. It was the smallest slave-labor camp run by the Nazis,
with maybe a dozen people there at a time forced into manual labor,
writes Eric Lichtblau in the New York Times.
Researchers at the The U.S. Holocaust Museum say
it's now becoming
clear that such facilities were far more prevalent than thought in
Germany and throughout Europe during the war. They've identified 42,500 of various sizes, about six times the number they expected
to find. The sites ranged from killing centers, to brothels, to ghettos, to
labor camps. The Holocaust Museum team also created maps of the sites,
which were
scattered across Europe.
“Nobody
even knows about these places,” says one survivor of five lesser-known
camps, who now volunteers at the museum. “Everything should be
documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that
they know, and they’ll remember.”
Hartmut Berghoff, director of the German Historical Institute,
said the research is simply astounding, reports The Times. "We knew
before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was," he said, "but
the numbers are unbelievable."
The researchers' work may also help Holocaust survivors attempting to sue insurance companies or recover stolen property."How many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a
camp that we didn't even know about?" said Sam Dubbin, a lawyer who
represents survivors.
The total is far higher than most historians had previously estimated,
according to The New York Times. Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, the
lead editors of the project, have compiled the thousands of sites in a multi volume encyclopedia that is being published by the Holocaust Museum.
Each volume catalogs thousands of sites, providing a comprehensive history of the "living and working conditions, activities of the Jewish councils, Jewish responses to persecution, demographic changes, and details of the liquidation of the ghettos.
Each volume catalogs thousands of sites, providing a comprehensive history of the "living and working conditions, activities of the Jewish councils, Jewish responses to persecution, demographic changes, and details of the liquidation of the ghettos.
The truth is that the holocaust was the systematic annihilation of at least, if not more than six million Jews during the Nazi genocide. In 1933 nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Nazi Germany during World War 2. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been murdered.
While the term Holocaust victims generally refers to Jews, the Nazis also persecuted and killed millions of members of other groups they considered inferior (Untermenschen), undesirable or dangerous.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) states: “The Holocaust was the murder of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II."[1]
Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 is called Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem is located on the western slope of Mount Herzl on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, 804 meters (2,638 ft) above sea level and adjacent to the Jerusalem Forest. Yad Vashem is a 180-dunam (180,000 m2;
1,900,000 sq ft) complex containing the Holocaust History Museum,
memorial sites such as the Children's Memorial and the Hall of
Remembrance, The Museum of Holocaust Art, sculptures, outdoor
commemorative sites such as the Valley of the Communities, a synagogue,
archives, a research institute, library, publishing house and an
educational center, The International School for Holocaust Studies. Yad
Vashem honors non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust, at personal
risk, as the Righteous Among the Nations.
In addition to Jews, the targeted groups included Poles (of whom 2.5 million gentile Poles were killed) and some other Slavic peoples; Soviets (particularly prisoners of war); Romanies (also known as Gypsies) and others who did not belong to the "Aryan race"; the mentally ill, the deaf, the physically disabled and mentally retarded; homosexual and transsexual people; political opponents such as social democrats and socialists; and religious dissidents, i.e. members of Jehovah's Witnesses.[2][3]
Taking into account all of the victims of Nazi persecution, they
systematically killed an estimated six million Jews and mass murdered an
additional eleven million people during the war. Donald Niewyk suggests
that the broadest definition, including Soviet civilian deaths would
produce a staggering, unimaginable death toll of 17 million human beings.[4]
Despite often widely varying treatment (some groups were actively targeted for genocide, while others were mostly not), it didn't matter in the end.
These victims all perished alongside one another, some in concentration camps such as Dachau,
some as victims of other forms of Nazi brutality, but most in death
camps, such as Auschwitz, according to the extensive documentation left
behind by the Nazis themselves (both written and photographed),
eyewitness testimony (by survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders) and
the statistical records of the various countries under occupation.
The number of children killed by the Nazis is approximately 1.5 million murdered children during the Holocaust. This horrific figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized "defective" handicapped children of all religions.
Small Boy Captured
During the April-May 1943
Warsaw Revolt
To
the Little Polish Boy Standing With His
Arms
Up
|
|
|
(Poem by Peter L. Fischl) from the Archives of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles,
California, USA)
The Germans kept meticulous, minute, detailed records, documenting every aspect of their systematic progress in annihilating the Jewish people and other non Aryan humans.
No matter how someone tries to twist it, the facts say it all, but lies repeated often enough are believed by those who don't know the truth. The current sanitizing, minimizing of what actually happened during the Holocaust unfortunately becomes less real as the years go by, and the remaining Survivors, witnesses die.
This latest Holocaust research is yet another piece of evidence that can be used to refute the fringe movement that continues to deny the Holocaust took place, or that its terrible legacy has been exaggerated for political gain.
When
Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during WWII, General Dwight
Eisenhower found the victims of the death camps, he ordered that all
possible photographs and films be
taken of the horrors he found. He did this because “somewhere down
the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never
happened”.
That time in history began immediately after the war ended, the bastards are many.
That time in history began immediately after the war ended, the bastards are many.
According to Bernard Lewis, the three most common positions on the historicity of the Holocaust are: "it never happened; it was greatly exaggerated; the Jews deserved it anyway. On the last point, some more enterprising writers add a rebuke to Hitler for not having finished the job."[103]
In European schools, colleges and universities, the schools’ study program no longer list the Holocaust as part of the curriculum and members of the United Nations sit in rapt attention as Mahumud Ahmadinijad, the Iranian President and Holocaust denier stands on the podium bellowing his call for another genocide. A chorus of enthusiastic applause rises from the stands as the Jew hater concludes his harangue. Hitler has risen again and the world applauds.
In many Muslim countries the denial of the Holocaust has become an obsession
and an art of erasing the story of Nazi evil against the Jews as part of their hatred of Israel. Plays,
shows, books and publications spew the lie that the Holocaust was a
myth, a story fabricated by the Jews in order to extract money and
influence.
Denials of the Holocaust have also been
regularly promoted in the United States and all over the world by a wide
array of anti Semitic hate groups, pro Palestinian propaganda,
educational revisionists in Universities, all kinds of people again
looking for someone innocent to blame for their own problems.
Catholic Clergy and Nazi officials (See below), including
Joseph Goebbels (far right) and Wilhelm Frick (second from right), give
the Nazi salute. Germany, date uncertain.
— Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Dead men will have indeed
died
in vain if live men refuse to look at them." A MASS GRAVE IN THE BERGEN-BELSEN GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMP
Corpses at Dachau Concentration
Camp Majdanek German Concentration Camp- Lublin Poland-Crematorium
Majdanek German Concentration
Camp- Lublin Poland-Crematorium Ovens MY GREAT GRANDPARENTS AND CHILDREN-ALL HOLOCAUST VICTIMS MURDERED IN PONARY FOREST BY THE NAZIS AND COLLABORATOR NEIGHBORS FROM THE TOWN THEY LIVED IN.
The
above photo is a poster that
our family circulated in local European newspapers looking for two children Gisia and Luba from our family that were thought to possibly have survived. There were never any replies. I do not know what happened to my family from my grandfather's side, except that they were all murdered in the Holocaust, disappearing as if they never were alive. I do know a few things about some of my family from my grandmother's side, that were researched extensively by my uncle Joey. My great grandparents and some of their children (in the photos above) lived in Vilnius Lithuania, they were farmers. Over the course of the summer in 1941, German troops and Lithuanian collaborators killed in a mass extermination program the entire Jewish population of Vilnius. On the eve of the Holocaust there were more than 60,000 and within a year it was reduced to zero, except for a few hundred that escaped to fight with Soviet partisans.
An eye witness from the village kept
a diary of all the things he saw during this time in the Vilnius area. He was a journalist by the name of Kazimierz Sakowicz and the diary was eventually published as the "Ponary Diary-1941-1943- A Bystanders Account of a Mass Murder (Yale University Press, December 2005).
This
is what happened to my
family members. On November 19, 1941, several hundred Jews were rounded up in Vilnius by the local police and collaborators. Included in this group of Jews were my family members shown above in the photos. "They were taken to Ponary Forest, a suburb of Vilnius.There was only a small supply of bullets, so the little babies were taken from their mothers, some still suckling at their mother's breast, and killed with rifle butts by smashing their heads until they were dead. The rest of the people were then rushed by the smashing of rifle butts against them and pushed into a freshly dug, open large pit.
The local police,
several Nazi soldiers, and local villagers standing above the pit, then shot the people who were lying in the hole. A man in the pit resists, says something and points to the children next to him, they are all immediately shot. A mother goes alone to the edge of the pit, followed by a teenage girl in a red sweater shouting "mama". A German soldier kills both of them instantly with 2 rifle shots".
The
remaining Jews in the hole
are then killed, buried together in a mass grave as if they never existed, never were human beings, and as if this atrocity never happened.
Somewhere in that unmarked
mass grave are members of my family murdered that day in this massacre.
Over
the last 70 years
the Holocaust has been memorialized, theorized, condemned, denied, revised, but its sheer scale of how many people were exterminated defies ones imagination, thereby threatening to turn it into an abstract, less horrifying catastrophe.
The
human mind resists
visualizing the above atrocities and the extermination of 6 million Jews plus another 14 million people considered by the Nazis as "unfit" to live, for an unthinkable total of 20 million people exterminated. How does one put that number into perspective and grasp the meaning of how large a number 20 million human lives is in reality? All of these dead, never to live again, never to have families, future generations never to be born, aspirations never to be realized, dead forever. How does one explain why many god fearing, deeply religious people participated willingly in the murder of other human beings or simply ignored it?
Jewish
Children marching
unknowingly
to their death towards the gas chamber at Birkenau (Auschwitz II).
Starving Children in Concentration
after by the NazisCamp-Too weak to work and exterminated shortly My God, How Could You Have Failed
So Miserably?
|
In 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, anticipated that someday an attempt would be made to recharacterize the Nazi crimes as propaganda and took steps against it:
"The same day[18] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never been able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain however, that I have never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock.
I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda".
Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and the British public in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt."[19]
Eisenhower, upon finding the victims of the death camps, ordered all
possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from
surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to
bury the dead. He wrote the following to General Marshall after visiting
a German internment camp near Gotha, Germany:
The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."[20]
The list of Holocaust deniers is very, very long and their adherents are far too
many. And those who forgive, forget and hide the horror are bound to
repeat it.
Already forgotten by many are facts, such as that if not for the genius of fledgling American technology companies such as Innovative Business Machines (IBM) and its subsidiaries, who created a business alliance with the Nazis to sell, install, program the first computers for the Germans in helping them create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging of Jewish extermination programs of the 1930s to the Concentration camp selections of the 1940s of who were to be saved and who were to be slaughtered.
If not for the hundreds of millions of dollars in research by pharmaceutical Company's such as Bayer (yes like in Bayer aspirin) into advance nerve agents to render people unconscious in “gas” chambers for easy transport to the ovens, and a long list of other Company's who profited from the Holocaust, then the plan would have been impossible.
But most of all, if not for the willing and complicit support of the allies with the exterminations happening in these death camps, the Nazis managed to kill more innocent people by burning them in the concentration camp ovens in 1944 and 1945 than all the other years combined.
All photos of the camps taken by the allies since early 1940 were classified at the highest level of secrecy. Clear and unmistakable evidence since World War II has emerged that the allied command even went to the extraordinary length of tracking logistical movements and likely process rates of victims by tracking rail movements to the sacrifice camps.
In the end, they permitted not one single bomb to be dropped on the Nazi Death camps during their construction and while they were in operation.
What should you remember?
Remember that these were all innocent human victims, with names, faces, just like you. They did nothing to deserve what was done to them
In the famous Diary of Anne Frank she said
“If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.”
Next
time, another mass
group or groups of people could be
targeted for their complete
annihilation. As the late
Simon
Wiesenthal
so eloquently put it,
"It is not a written law
that the next victims must be
Jews."
Remembering the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust and its innocent human victims forever is a lesson, that humanity, at all cost, must always be present, preserved, and remain within us.
Remembering the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust and its innocent human victims forever is a lesson, that humanity, at all cost, must always be present, preserved, and remain within us.
Never Again! The famous declaration heard around the world.
Never again
will Jews be herded like cattle, beaten and tortured, starved to death,
hanged, shot, gassed and burned to ashes.
Never again! Will a Holocaust
be repeated.
Never again…you say?
But it never happened. Did it?