The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

[relicz]

Even after all these years the scope of the atrocities is still being redefined and expanded.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/su...w0svfJWxthXZQ&

[Larry C]

Hi Relicz,, can you redefine your search,, this link is turning up to be a misdirect. Regards Larry

[relicz]

Hi Relicz,, can you redefine your search,, this link is turning up to be a misdirect. Regards Larry

Apologies Larry, thanks for the heads up - it has been corrected.

[dramos]

Great article, thanks for sharing. Really makes you wonder how so many people could deny they knew what was happening...

[Interkosmos]

It's so hard for me to mentally-grasp just how many people were snatched up by the Nazi's efforts. forty-two THOUSAND camps and ghettos.
Really great article, thanks for posting.

[Adrian]

I didn't think the holocaust could get any more shocking or how people can deny it occurred.

Thank you for sharing the link, the figures unfortunately are impossible to quantify or imagine on such a huge scale in black and white when so many names are lost.

I would urge anyone to actually take the time and make the effort to visit one, or many of these sites to get true perspective.

[StefanM]

"The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions."

Once again a respected newspaper falsely and insidiously conflates the Holocaust and its "black clusters of death, torture and slavery" with Germany and Poland.

Between September 1939 and the Potsdam Conference of July 1945 the state of Poland did not exist.

Poland was occupied and partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union until June 1941 when Germany invaded the USSR and occupied those territories of former Eastern Poland which had been occupied and incorporated into Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. There was no longer a country called Poland.

So factually there were no death camps or Jewish ghettos created in Poland! Auschwitz Birkenau was built by the Germans in the annexed territory of Upper Silesea; Majdanek and Chelmno were also in the German annexed territories. The Warsaw Ghetto was created by the Nazis in the German territory called the Generalgouvernement as was Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek.



Map from USHMM

By Führer decree of 8 July 1940 the Generalgouvernement (General Government) was declared to be part of the German domain, a Nebenland of the Riech. Gauleiter (Governor-General) of the Generalgouvernement, Dr. Hans Frank, stated;" Henceforth the General Government will not be looked upon as occupied territory, but as an integral part of the Great German power space. The Vistula is henceforth a German river" ... See p17; The New order in Poland, Simon Segal, 1942.



Map from USHMM

However the sad legacy is that the former German death camps and "black clusters of death, torture and slavery" are now located in the postwar reconstituted Poland which of course does not even have the the same national boundaries as it did prior to the German and Soviet invasions of September 1939. But the fact that these "black clusters of death, torture and slavery" are now in Poland doesn't mean they are or were ever Polish—they were entirely German on German territory.

[SteveR]

I remember my uncle ,Jack Dempsey Ray, talking to me over a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey about burying bodies at camps, liberated by American forces, with bulldozers. It is the only time I ever seen him cry. He was a hardend combat vet by then. Started as an infantry grunt and was transfered to the Red Ball Express delivering arms, ammunition and gasoline up to the front under fire because he could drive a truck. He told me about having to drive over bodies ( German and American) laying in the road. He said fully loaded trucks squashed them like melons. That bothered him but burying bodies at the camps is what really tore him up. He said they worked 15 minute shifts. The stench and the bodies tearing apart from the dozer blades would make them so sick that 15 minutes was all they could take at a time.

[CARL]

The research and the work involved in creating this most comprehensive record of the camps, prisons and ghettos of the 1933-1945 period is far from done. I myself am working on this project, which I consider both an honour and a privilege. I would also thoroughly endorse Adrian's earlier comment. To visit at least one such site related to this dark chapter of our history, is to show recognition and respect - let us hope and pray that we as a race can one day learn from this the greatest crime in modern history.

[CARL]

Three years, give or take...off and on...but finally, I recently finished my contribution toward this great study. Special thanks go out to JMP (Jewish Museum Prague), the DSP Hagibor facility in Prague and Terezín Memorial, all of whom were of great assistance in helping me document and record this lesser known camp - the first English language study and the only plan of the camp are due for publication in one of the USHMM's future volumes of "Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945".

http://www.ushmm.org/research/public...-camps-ghettos

I am now working on my next project(s)...

Carl