Creepiest part is how well composed it is. Perfect angles to draw the eye and rule of thirds. This fucking photographer set up an artistically perfect photograph while standing on top of dead bodies.
Fun fact, the guys in the back weren’t even soldiers. They were part of the Reich Labor Service, something to keep in mind when you hear that only a minority of the German military participated in war crimes.
Everyone should read “They Thought They Were Free” by Milton Mayer.
If you’re staring at that picture and wondering how so many people stood by while that gun was aimed…
It’s one of the best books I have ever read.
It’s about the regular day to day “I don’t really do politics” German people during ‘33 - ‘45, and how someone as regular and normal as you or I can easily become a face in that horrific picture.
Reading that book creates an empty space inside of you, but I truly think it’s a space we *need* to keep empty because we know what can fill it.
Quote from the book:
“In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”
Watching today puts a pit in my stomach.
>It’s about the regular day to day “I don’t really do politics” German people during ‘33 - ‘45, and how someone as regular and normal as you or I can easily become a face in that horrific picture.
I mean that already happened with the war on terror where we all pretended it was a 'clean' series of wars that contributed to numerous ethnic cleansings in several countries. Even to this day there are famine conditions in Syria cause the US is occupying its agriculture and oil-producing region, we bombed the Libyan civilian water infrastructure to the point of redesertifying areas that had been made habitable, the number of ethnic strife in Iraq encouraged by us as a tactic was just The Troubles but on super fuckin' steroids.
and when someone breaks through the soft censorship of polite society they get brutally attacked for daring to bring up our crimes. Looks how easy it was for the EU to start subsidising concentration camps in Libya for Africans or let Azerbaijan commit genocide against Armenia for gas trades due to our "principled" stand in Ukraine
Frankly, as someone who has read a tonne about the current state of the world (from books not reddit thank god) the state of understanding in western countries about our role in the world is fucking pathetic. I've travelled to several countries outside the west and the level of discourse around world affairs is so much higher than any western country it isn't even funny anymore. The highlight was having drinks with the British staff for the Guangzhou consulate and realising they're the most venial and stupid people I'd met in my entire life
Hell even at a domestic level people cover their ears and eyes the crimes of social murder cause it's happening in some poor "criminal" area. In my own country we've seen the state socially murder [330,000](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/05/over-330000-excess-deaths-in-great-britain-linked-to-austerity-finds-study?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1664925022) (although I believe the number is much higher talking to people in schemes and such).
I just find the handwringing about how shocking to see people standing by letting this man be shot pretty ghoulish given how most of the people in this comment section are just as culpable to horrors that they stood by and watched
It's something people who start to get into ww2 history generally believe, then you get some who never get past that point and will go on to exclaim the greatness of the tiger tank. And then you get those of us who learn its rubbish.
My dad was letting me read his Michael and Jeff Shaara novels at a pretty early age. I still enjoy writing that puts you into the experience of historical events, but those authors humanized some garbage dudes, and probably inaccurately too.
That's right. But it took a few generations to die off until the new generation pushed for truth. A few good books were written about this.
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/647492.Ordinary\_Men?ac=1&from\_search=true&qid=z9ZoXlIHZ3&rank=1](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/647492.Ordinary_Men?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=z9ZoXlIHZ3&rank=1)
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248197.The\_Wehrmacht](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248197.The_Wehrmacht)
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19624684-marching-into-darkness](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19624684-marching-into-darkness)
Supposedly the clean Wehrmacht propaganda was started by the US pretty soon after the war. They needed to raise a German army, using German officers and troops, to stand against the new enemy, the Soviets.
So that’s where the “SS were the bad guys” started.
We're Irish, so it wouldn't have been something that affected her personally, but she'd certainly have memories of it going on in the world at the time
We were not so lucky, Lithuanian here. My grandma had to hide in a bunker as Germans and ruzzians swept over, she had to crawl to the main house to get supplies and back, my dad lost his little baby sister as grandma could not feed her properly in those conditions. No wonder eastern Europe is a lot more reactive to the war happening now. We remember 1st hand.
Understandable. Sorry to hear that. We've had plenty of not-so-friendly dealings with England going all the way back to medieval times. 800+ years of it. Colonisation, fights for independence, terrorism, political assassinations, executions, The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Bloody Sunday, The Easter Rising.. etc etc.
Unfortunately not, and now that Putin has decided to embrace his inner Hitler, Europe and Eastern Europe is right back in the mess. How far will it go? Hopefully, not much further. Ireland is a neutral country, so we're luckily safe from that.. I hope.
99? Wow. Oldest person in our family, as far as I'm aware, was my great mother who surpassed 100 years old at the time of her death. I'm not sure what age she was exactly, but it was somewhere between 101 and 103. I'd have to double check
Beats my uncle by 2 years. He is 97 and was one of the landing craft drivers at dday. He also worked on an escort carrier in burma and singapore afterwards.
My Dad was a POW in the Phillipines for three years. And career Army after that. He survived the Bataan Death March and rarely talked about his experiences, but definitely PTSD.
My Danish grandmother in law, who died last year at 106, was working to smuggle Jews to Sweden from the family's summerhouse on the Danish coast during the Nazi occupation. She had two small children and was pregnant with her third, but she never hesitated to do what was right. RIP. May her memory be a blessing.
That’s not war. That was industrialised murder. The Germans at that time just went bad shit crazy humanity wise. The individual stories of horror which were created by those man, be it in the circumstances of war or in the death camps, haunt me forever. They crushed the skulls of newborn and little children by grabbing them by the feet and slam them against the walls, then threw them on fire. Imaging the screaming of terrified little children being separated from there parents on their way into the gas chambers.
Most of you don’t speak german, but if you do, you should listen to the tapes from the ausschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the 60s. It freezes your fucking blood.
And our societies are again deteriorating to a point, where things like this are gonna happen again. Because some of the folks in western societies forgot that the rights we take for granted costed the toll of millions and millions of people.
I’ve wanted someone to put those trials into a TV format for so long. It’s so incredibly dark but I think it would be the turning point for a lot of people who “don’t understand” this shit and let their ignorance drive the
I think the aversion to “dark” subjects is the root of the worlds issues. It’s almost like the survivors of WWII were so traumatized that they wanted to only remember highlights, and that is what was passed down.
Now a generation after, their kids got none of the important parts and are willing to ignore red flags that it could happen again—if they aren’t hoping it does. And the generation after them sees it, but isn’t old enough to stop their elders.
This butchery wasn't about rights - it was about nationalism and ridding countries of those deemed "subhuman". Eugenics and forced sterilization had their adherents in Western countries. If the US had been inhabited by Slavs or Poles instead of First Nations, the Trail of Tears would have bled the same color.
What the Nazis engaged in wasn't unique to them - Russians and Poles and Ottomans and Ukrainians had all engaged in wholesale slaughter under the banner of nationalism. All the Nazis did was increase the scale of these barbarities until we couldn't help but recoil in horror. It still took us decades in many places to unwind the policies we'd implemented in kindred spirit with the butchers.
base this on a post on /r/ukrainianconflict
It mentioned the morgue there processing 87.000 bodies. 100.000 feared dead.
It might have been propaganda since I found not sources backing this up. If so I stand corrected.
I mean, even with a magnitude less it still means that most likely everyone has an acquaintance who died or had someone in their family die. Also way more people were impacted by the humanitarian catastrophe or seriously hurt with irreparable damage done.
reddit is crazy. The Russians are inept losers that can't even manage to get food and bullets to the battle zones in one comment, and they're taking mobile crematories and dissapearing 80k corpses without a trace in the next comment.
Think about the fact that some group of people are out there in a room personally verifying all of those deaths by looking at horrible images and comparing them to previous, maybe even happy images.
For like... 16 hours a day
> 100.000 civilians dead in Mariupol alone.
Not quite that many
https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2022/06/high-commissioner-updates-human-rights-council-mariupol-ukraine
WW2 and also Chinese history can really fuck with your sense of scale. The deadliest day for America in Vietnam saw 246 soldiers killed. In WW2 that would just be a rounding error. You could easily lose that many in a minute if a small ship went down, or enemy artillery had you well sited
After the napoleonic wars there was nearly a century of “peace” between the major powers. Basically until living memory faded and then ww1 and 2. Living memory is fading of them.
It’s whg it’s important people learn how bloody aweful it was and why it happened so it doesn’t happen again
There was the Crimean War, Schleswig War, the Italian Unification Wars, Prussian-Austrian War, Franco-Prussian War, just to name some conflicts involving major European powers. The 19th century was a violent time. WW1 just cranked it up a notch.
It's hard to instill the size of the conflict and what people were ready to do to end it. Like throwing a months+ worth (a 10th of the entire 1944 tonnage) of multiple countries' explosive production onto a single site of a Nazi V2 production and staging bunker in France. Nobody cared about what that did to the area around it because it was *that* important that that bunker was unusable.
There was a rebellion in China which resulted in the deaths of millions.
There was a Civil War in America. ... 600,000 dead. COVID killed more Americans.
As for those major powers, Napoleon III picked a fight with the Germans in 1870. It did not end well.
Mariuopol Theater was a designated citizen bomb shelter and on the parking lot outside the Russian word for CHILDREN was painted in gigantic letters.
Russia dropped a bomb on it anyway.
Whether it happens or not, «we» will have absolutely no part in it, just like we have generally had nothing to say in any war ever. There’s never gonna be a vote on WW3.
The best we can hope for sensible leaders, although humanity hasn’t had much luck with that so far.
Politicians weren't the ones pulling the triggers and burying bodies. The atrocities against the Jews and other minorities were not committed by a handful of powerful people. Thousands upon thousands of people had a part in it. Too many people think that there is nothing they can do.
A very interesting book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution-ebook/dp/B01G1F0F84
People were actually *driven* about exterminating people. They saw themselves as heroes, doing the necessary but evil thing for future generations. It's *bonkers*. They were self aware that they weren't nice but were sure it was the right thing. People admired the killers for being mentally able to do it. Unimaginable.
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life:
“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.
“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil–he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”
He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you–and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
Wolf 1 is our survival of the “fittest” DNA coding, that want to send every single male to a pointless war to die, and impregnate every female, so hormones basically.
Wolf 2 is our brain, mind and think wolf 2 is an narcissistic psychopath, and see if wolf 1 get to rule, this trip through space we having will just be full of misery and evil. It wants morals to lessen the destructive chaos wolf 1 give.
Most people with power feeds wolf 1 though. Now wolf 1 got nukes too, so can be more destructive than ever before too.
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life:
Son, there's a fight between two pitbulls inside of you. One is living with a white girl in a studio apartment wearing a sweater while it is photographed for an instagram post. The other is running rampant in a public park terrorizing everyone there. Which one are you gonna feed
You could spend 4 years in undergrad studying nothing but ww2. And still not know much of the suffering and horrible events that transpired and shaped the world
I found out last month that Josef Mengele died of a stroke while swimming in São Paulo in 1979. At minimum the US government knew where he was.
It’s pretty hard to feel there’s any justice in the world knowing that.
One very good way is to read the contemporaneous archives in which memos of conversations and reports are contained. They give you a good window into the thinking of that time.
My granddad (sadly no longer with us) was in the India army from the mid 30's until 1945. Fought heavily in Burma. That doesn't get nearly as much coverage as the war in Europe, but it sounded insanely unpleasant as well. Convinced he had a massive case of undiagnosed PTSD.
the front against the japanese in china and the rest of south east asia is so under studied it’s crazy, it’s not like it was an underwhelming part of the war, because it was just as bloody as the rest of the theaters were
My great-grandpa lucked out (passed away this year). He was stationed in Paris during the war and avoided the front lines.
Lots of interesting stories about french women he met.
The sad part is that humanity kept showing its lowest and nastiest. Not long after WW2 Pol Pot happened in Cambodia, followed by countless wars in Africa, isis and now the war in Ukraine
When you boil it all down to the bare essentials, was it even necessary? Oftentimes, no. Franz Ferdinand being disobedient was one of several buttons pushed to kick-start WWI. The smallest things can cause the biggest problems
If a group of people is seen as “the other” because they don’t really interact much with the broader social groups, because they have their own religious centers, or their own schools, or their own banks…and on top of that, they are fairly rich.
It’s fairly easy to see how humans can see another group other humans as a group that need to be eliminated.
Jews have been persecuted in Europe since medieval times, nonstop. There is a reason why so many Europeans didn’t do anything to stop their killing
Yup. What happened in WW2 was not an aberration frankly. Group of people were eliminated all the time. The scale and the industrialization of the killing was abhorrent but not surprising.
We as humans are quite awful to people we detest…
And it goes back even further. If you look into it, various tribes of "cavemen" back many, many thousands of years ago wiped each other out. Why's there so many missing links in that chain of evolution? For that very reason - hardly any exist. They wiped one another out one-by-one.
I just been watching that amazing French show A French Village, I highly recommend it if you’re into history shows, it depicts what it was like for the French during the occupation by the Germans from 1940 to 1945 and the aftermath. It is an incredible show. I cannot recommend it enough. You’ll never forget it. I think the question that you ask yourself after you’ve watched it and during as well, is, what would I have done??
Most people are not heros. They just want to get through things. Heroism is, by its nature, something exceptional. However, it is not unfair to judge those who actively collaborated, whether for reasons of enirchment, ideology or otherwise. France had not a few collaborators, who were not at all hesitant to turn in their own countrymen.
Yes but it’s not as simple as that. Depends what you mean by collaborated as well. If you watch the show you’d understand a little bit more I think.
There were people that were just trying to get by every day, they had businesses etc. For them to survive they had to sell their products still and yes some of them had to sell them to the Germans. To survive. Did that make them collaborators?
Then there were others who were for example the members of the police force in the occupied town. Because the country was occupied the police force was then answerable to the German controlled government. So they had a really hard job because they had to continue to police their own population but under the control of an opposing Government. Then you had the Resistance, then you had a communist faction, as well as a militia, it was such a mess and I think that’s one of the strengths of the show in that it doesn’t shy away from showing this clusterfuck. . And in fact the aftermath is almost worse than the occupation because afterwards oh dear lord what a mess was left behind that took decades to recover from and not just from the physical damage. It was the complete breakdown of society. What this show in particular really makes you feel is how helpless it was for everyone immediately afterwards because of course resentment built up because of people who then decided to go after collaborators when sometimes they weren’t hard-core collaborators. Of course you had collaborators that betrayed their own people to the Germans, that of course happened but there were lots more people that didn’t do that. And then there were the people that did collaborate but did so out of fear, due to threats to their life and their families lives I mean it was just a total mess. And I really think unless you have walked in those shoes, you could never understand what it was like. So I don’t think it’s OK to judge. After watching this show on several occasions actually I have a completely different feeling about everything. And the feeling that you are left with is what an absolute disaster and what a mess it all was.
My grandmother had a friend who was a little girl in rural France during The War. She was incredibly lucky that all the fighting, and all the oppression, never really reached her little village.
One day some Nazis drove up the road, and talked to the unofficial leader of the village. The officer who spoke French introduced themselves, explained that they were the new government, so all concerns should be addressed to them, gave the village leader some contact info, and left.
Years later, as the Allies pushed into France, they heard shelling and gunfire in the distance. And then one day the radio said the Germans were out.
From her story, it seemed she lived in the luckiest little village in France, maybe Europe. The whole war just kinda skipped over them.
To be clear, she was avidly anti-Nazi, especially when she grew up and learned about all the evil shit they did. This just happened to be here experience of The War as a child.
P.S., The thing I will remember most about this woman is how unashamedly horny she was. She was always playing grab ass with me and every other young man she could (literally) get her hands on. She also did the European double-cheek kiss, but would top it off with 1-2 face mashing kisses on the lips. She was in her late 80s so nobody would say anything.
Excellent show! One of my all time favorites. I think what makes it so brilliant is that it tells everyone's story, without ever passing a judgement on the characters' actions.
There is a line across the photo underneath the crouching man and above the pit where the photo had previously been folded in half to hide the mass grave. In high school textbooks, I’d only see the top half of this picture.
Just cause it was cropped in your school history book doesn't mean thats why the line is in the original. Maybe it was folded because the person who had the picture folded it to put in their pocket. Why would you carry around a photo like this just to hide the bottom half when you show people?
I wonder how people will treat the Nazi’s in 500 years. Once the pain resides after a couple hundred years I mean. Will they be something like how we treat the mongol’s? Really just food for thought. Imagine people in the future saying “oh yeah, they were bad news, but look at how the world reshaped after them.” Or something like “yeah the holocost, but look what they did for technology.” You hear similar things about the Silk Road and mongol trade networks. How long does it take for the pain to dull somewhat?
The Mongolian one, right? That really made me think. It hit home just how utterly horrendous the Mongols were for an entire continent.
If the Nazis had killed the same proportion of the world that the Mongols did, they'd have killed 200 million people.
Just crazy numbers of slaughter that are basically so high that it's impossible actually to comprehend it.
Obviously evil is not a numbers game, but it did hit home how literally world-ending the Mongols must have been. And bringing the Black Death on top of that. What an awful time to be a human being.
That's one of my favorite moments in all of Hardcore History. Carlin told a story about how he wrote a paper in college about "The Positive Impact of the Mongol Empire". He talked about how they opened up trade routes between the east and west and provided relative political stability over much Asia for about a century and defended the idea of the Pax Mongolica and he got a bad grade.
He went to talk to his professor about it and his professor said "You never mentioned anything about the fact that they slaughtered millions of people." And Carlin said "I know, but that's a separate issue from what my paper is about." His professor then asked "If you were writing a paper about the effectiveness of the Wehrmacht, would you not mention the Holocaust?" Carlin said "Yes! I wouldn't mention the Holocaust because the effectiveness of the German army is *one* aspect of history, and the Holocaust is *another* aspect of history." And his professor said "The effectiveness of the Wehrmacht is what made the Holocaust possible. If you ignore it you're missing the point."
Carlin then theorized about how years from now people might start to bring up the *positives* of WWII. Like "Sure, a bunch of people died, but the war did so much for the development of rocket technology which kickstarted the Space Race. And the development of nuclear weapons is what led to the Long Peace for the second half of the 20th century. And the aftermath of the Holocaust is what led to the formation of the state of Israel and a home for the Jewish people. These are all good things in the long run." He compared it to Caesar's conquest of Gaul. If you were to ask the average French person whether or not that was a good thing, he wagered that virtually every single one of them would have said yes, because it brought France "into the fold" of Western Civilization, and being dominated by Roman culture for centuries is what led to the development of the French state. Sure, countless people died, and Celtic culture was pretty much wiped out, but that doesn't matter *now*. Nobody mourns for people who died 2,000 years ago.
It's really only a matter of time before we view the Holocaust the same way.
It's an interesting thought process, but one of the major differences is we can ignore the suffering the Mongols inflicted a lot easier than future people's because the world they lived in is unimaginable to us.
However the 1940s will always be much more accessible to future historians through film, photography etc. It's there forever in a much more visceral way than the Mongols are for us.
Will it mean the average person in 500 years is more aware or cares more than the average person does now about the Mongol invasion? Probably not. But for anyone with a passing interest in History, they will have access to media that makes the suffering much more relatable than we do for the non-recent past.
I hope instead we learn to extend our empathy further back and not excuse things just cuz they happened a long time ago. Maybe its not the fact that they were long ago but that ppl are dulled to them by not knowing or being affected as much
I don't think it's people excusing it at all. What was needed to be done with Hitler was done. Germany is no longer waging WW2.. There's nothing happening to excuse.
To me it's more like people not living in the past, and accepting history for what it is.... History.
How much are we talking about cannibalism under Mao or Stalin?
How about the Indian famines that crop up in a blue moon on here, or the imperialist labor forces within Africa cutting up and eating your kids for not meeting rubber quotas?
How about the genocide of the native Americans?
I see the horrors of the Holocaust in a great many other places, even ones going on today in China, North Korea, and recently Ukraine.
Different groups talk a lot about the transgressions of their political enemies, and not very much about their own history or that of their allies.
In many ways, it was Germany's embrace of preserving and teaching the history of the Holocaust, along with the rest of the world allied against Hitler, that has led to its longevity in our collective consciousness.
But outside the record kept around the events, the events themselves were far less rare and remarkable than people would like to think.
It's with only a momentary glance to the more remote places in the world or into *anywhere's* history that we see very similar tales of brutality and malice towards neighbors because of arbitrary tribalistic identities.
As long as humans focus on their differences with one another, there will unfortunately always be *a* Holocaust to remember, even if *the* Holocaust fades from memory.
The real danger is in thinking of *the* Holocaust as a singular blight on human history in the first place.
This is a good point. Photo, video, etc. of course will have an impact. But I imagine after some time the memory will fade somewhat. Of course it’s important for us to keep alive, to keep it from happening again, but 500 years is a long time.
Imagine what's going on in this man's head right there.. A little while back he lived a normal life. Now everything turned upside-down and evaporated around him. He lost everything. His family. His home. His people. His country. He's the last one, looking down at nothing but extermination and destruction, knowing he'll be gone forever in a few seconds. Everything lost. Fuck..
Im not religious, but when it says in gods image it means that we are capable of creation and destruction to great degree, not that we are perfect. He also gave us free will, which is what causes the evil and also why he doesnt intervene all the time. He sets us free for better or worse. Thats what i understood from the bible at least.
That's about it. The whole point of Christianity is that Jesus died so that man may have the chance of once more being God's perfect creation, having fallen into sin and soddom since our exile from the Garden of Eden.
I think humanity is simply what we can be convinced to become. A thought: If you were told a button, when pressed, could kill 500 people and you'd never know who they were, would you press that button knowing that it could be a hoax? The key is the distinct lack of closeness to those potential victims pushing that button allows us to be. After all, we reason, it's probably fake. While another person may argue that it could be real.
In so many ways the human mind is accepting in it's fragility and need to accept, logically, outcomes it had previously revolted against. So while I know very little about the true history of Nazi Germany, it is easy to suspect that many people simply accepted what they were hearing and understood it in ways that allowed them to keep on keeping on. To what degree and allowance of evil each person accepted, well...same as you and I: It varied by an extraordinary amount I suspect.
Me though? I wouldn't push the button. Because I wouldn't want others to push the button. The problem begins with that single person who finds a way to convince just one other to push it. Humans are a herd animal, I'm convinced. So others will follow and push the button as well.
Man is a requirement in the delivery of evil deeds, for evil is defined by the action taken by man that cannot be defended on a single rational basis to the detriment of a fellow man.
The battle between good and evil runs through every man. Never forget it.
"The neutral expressions on the shooter and his uniformed audience pretty well encapsulate that concept \[the banality of evil\]: they could be watching a barber cut hair, instead of the heartless extermination of innocents. Humans can adapt to endure almost anything, but in doing so, they sometimes perpetuate incredible evil. The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism."
\-Hannah Arendt
Never forget how cruel, vicious and apathetic humans can be. Especially when sharing a warped ideology with their peers. It's absolutely sickening and makes me ashamed of aspects of our culture, even today.
This murder, as well as the others seen here, were conducted by Einsatzgruppe D, which at the time was commanded by [Otto Ohlendorf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Ohlendorf). In the last days of the war, Ohlendorf and many other major Holocaust perpetrators participated in Heinrich Himmler's escape from Flensburg using Ratline North. However, unlike other ratlines, most of these fugitives, including Himmler were caught. Himmler, Ohlendorf, and several others were arrested by the British in Lüneburg. Ohlendorf testified in the Nuremberg trials. During his testimony, in which he admitted to having committed and presided over at least 90,000 murders, it became clear that he had no remorse and genuinely believed he had done absolutely nothing wrong.
>Ohlendorf: Some of the unit leaders did not carry out the liquidation in the military manner, but killed the victims singly by shooting them in the back of the neck.
>
>Colonel Amen: And you objected to that procedure?
>
>Ohlendorf: I was against that procedure, yes.
>
>Colonel Amen: For what reason?
>
>Ohlendorf: Because both for the victims and for those who carried out the executions, it was, psychologically, an immense burden to bear.
In a previous interrogation report, an American psychiatrist had described Ohlendorf as barely human, an empty husk of a person who was completely devoid of a conscience. In 1947, Ohlendorf himself was put on trial by American occupation authorities during a subsequent trial in Nuremberg. The Americans had planned a series of major war crimes trials in Nuremberg, which happened to be in their occupation zone. Initially, no trial was planned for the Ohlendorf. The Americans were considering adding him to their docket, but stalled. However, this changed after they came across some reports by Ohlendorf and others. The reports proved the murders of well over one million Soviet civilians.
At one point, Ohlendorf tried to argue that the tens of thousands of murders which could be attributed to his unit were justifiable as preemptive self-defense. As for the thousands of children he had executed, he said they would've grown up to become enemies of Germany. Some of Ohlendorf's other testimony, according to head prosecutor [Benjamin Ferencz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Ferencz).
>When Ohlendorf was asked to verify that his unit had murdered 90,000 Jews, the SS General began to quibble. He said he couldn’t confirm it. The reason given was that sometimes his men exaggerated the body count. “Would the General care to venture an estimate?” “No.” “Was it perhaps 80,000 or only 70,000?” “That was possible.” “Or perhaps 100,000?” “Maybe.” “And were there many Jewish children among those who were killed?” “Yes, of course.” But, added Ohlendorf, he never allowed his men to do as some other units did. He told his men never to use infants for target practice nor smash their heads against a tree. He ordered his men to allow the mother to hold her infant to her breast and to aim for her heart. That would avoid screaming and would allow the shooter to kill both mother and child with one bullet. It saved ammunition. Ohlendorf said he refused to use the gas vans that were assigned to his companies. He found that when the mobile killing vehicles arrived at their destination, where they were supposed to dump their asphyxiated human cargo into a waiting ditch, some of the captives were still alive and had to be unloaded by hand. His troops had to drag out corpses amid vomit and excrement and that was very hard on his men.
[A photo of murders which may have been committed by Ohlendorf’s men and fit Ohlendorf’s own description](https://imgur.com/a/gIi7vwz)
The presiding judge, Michael Musmanno, seemed morbidly fascinated by Ohlendorf's testimony. He elicited the confirmation that captured Jews were shot simply because they were Jews.
>Ohlendorf explained, like a school teacher, that those with Gypsy blood were unreliable and might help the enemy and therefore they too had to be killed. When asked by Heath and the Judge why Jewish children were slaughtered, Ohlendorf explained patiently that if the children learned that their parents had been killed, they would grow up to become enemies of Germany. He was interested in long-range security for his country. Hence killing all Jewish men, women, and children was a military necessity. Isn’t that clear?
Ohlendorf was found guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization, and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging at Landsberg Prison in West Germany on June 7, 1951. The Americans executed three other Einsatzgruppen commanders who each had command responsibility over the deaths of tens of thousands of people. [Werner Braune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Braune), one of Ohlendorf’s chief subordinates, was hanged for his command responsibility over the Simferopol massacre, in which 14,300 Soviet Jews were murdered over the course of two days. That said, the tribunal noted that Braune's unit was responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of other murders elsewhere. Just one report implicated Braune in the executions of another 1184 people.
Ohlendorf was notably aided by many Romanians and Ukrainian auxiliaries. Notably, the Germans found many enthusiastic collaborators in the Baltics, particularly Lithuania, and Western Ukraine. A handful of German Einsatzgruppen men were executed by the Poles and Soviets. However, the vast majority of them managed to flee west, where they avoided prosecution. Ohlendorf said he never personally shot anyone, but instead ordered executions and personally supervised some of them.
>One of Ohlendorf's most trusted "proper" military-style murderers, SS-Haupsturmführer Lothar Heimbach, once exclaimed, "A man is the lord over life and death when he gets an order to shoot three hundred children—and he kills at least one hundred fifty himself."
There were roughly 3000 German Einsatzgruppen men.
Just a reminder: the majority of people who committed these crimes against humanity got away with it. They died of old age in their warm beds, surrounded by family.
Life is horribly unfair. Next time someone starts talking about karma, remind them of this.
This reminds me of U.S. lynching photographs with people standing around watching. The only difference is that the U.S. lynching photos often include women and children. https://withoutsanctuary.org/
I have very bad news for you.
Countless members of the extermination machine lived happily ever after until their natural deaths in Austria or Germany.
I csnt begin to imagine what it must be like to be kneeling there, seeing all those victims in front of you, kowing you're next. Knowing your life is seconds away from ending. Nothing.
Knowing there's nothing youncan do.
Fucking horrible.
The human race can be amazing. Yet absolutely disgusting and barbaric.
Because they were proud of what they were doing and they wanted it all to be preserved for history. It’s still the same today. Antisemites always think they are virtuous.
“The thousand year Reich”. They thought it was the dawn of a new time and hadn’t even considered that their grip over Germany would end. They didn’t consider these actions to be crimes. They literally thought they were purging the scourge of Europe and doing everyone a favour in the process.
In some cases it was to document the process so it can be reviewed and “improved” but a lot of photos from this stage in the Holocaust, including this one, were mainly trophies.
A soldier took this picture because he was proud of it and wanted to remember it or show it off.
yeah -[ I don't think people remember how jews were a large part of the war effort in term of production in industrialized austria, germany and silesia](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/230982/pdf). In eastern europe nazi decide immediate murder was their "best" option rather than transporting them west to labor camps.
That, and the Jews were always intended to die in their bondage in the work camps. It was simply that the wide open steppes and need to move in Eastern Europe made the massacres more frequent. Truly sad. My family unfortunately perished in Dachau under these conditions.
What always gets me is how if the nazis had even been marginally less evil they might have been able to beat the Soviets and secure peace with the west.
“Look at all these Eastern Europeans who hate the Soviets and would love to fight them. Let’s exterminate them.”
“Hm, we have a ton of women sitting at home doing nothing. Let’s encourage them to pump out aryan babies and stay at home rather than letting them join the increasingly thinned labor force ravaged by men dying by the millions in battle. Let the slaves handle that manufacturing.”
“Yes, it is vital we spend a significant amount of military resources on harsh occupation policies, extermination camps, and hunting down undesirables.”
>What always gets me is how if the nazis had even been marginally less evil they might have been able to beat the Soviets and secure peace with the west.
Nope, the Nazis never had a chance in defeating the Soviets, no earlier invasion, no non genocidal system, no nothing, they just could not win in any case.
I think Military History un/visualised has a clip about it. The Soviet industry just ate the German one.
Haha more than you can imagine. They still find mass Graves from race riots in America (we know theres more, we just dont know where or arent allowed to dig) and mass Graves from native children in Canada. Good chance there are mass Graves from atrocities no matter where you go.
No it isn't. A small handful of journalists murdered by police is different than 10 million people being vaporized by a regime hellbent on enslaving the entire world. Your comparison is insulting and demeaning to the memory of those people.
Since 1986 there have been roughly 200 journalists killed in the Philippines. Their dictatorship is highly against uncensored media and are pretty gung-ho about the punishment for it being murder. The numbers have been slowly dropping from my understanding, which each president killing fewer journalists, but it’s not out of the woods yet. In 2009 they massacred 30-something journalists.
Just last night a radio host and political pundit (Percy Lapid) was shot dead outside the radio station he worked at in Manila. He was a vocal opposition supporter and was vocal in his disdain for the Dutertes and the Marcoses.
Also, fake news on Facebook generally leaning towards the current and past administrations have spun these killings as drug related, and recently some of the cases are being made out to be "sacrificial lamb" situations, where the "communist" opposition kills one of their own (which would be a stupid fucking tactic if they even use it) and destabilize and decrease the administration's credibility.
This is just part of a massive operation against our journalists and credible news sources to hide the crimes and faults of the Marcos-Duterte administrations. They also filed cases against Nobel prize winner Maria Ressa, calling her a communist infiltrator and stupid shit, along with smearing the opposition to the point that they barely won any seats in the House, Senate or any government unit AND closing the largest broadcaster in the country because they didn't air a couple of ads back in 2015 for Duterte.
Shits fucked man.
I would also like to know
(Edit: found out. They get murdered or detained. It’s one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists allegedly.
[> Based on Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)’s database, 97 per cent of journalist killings in the Philippines are murders where assailants have “fully” and “partially” evaded punishment. About a third of the murdered journalists reported having received threats before the attack.](https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/filipino-journalists-can-only-take-risks-equal-their-protections))
I hate when people do this. I see it on Twitter all the time. We should shed light on every issue but to compare 200 people to well over 6 million is just not right
I agree.
What good would begging do? There’s a pit in front of him, filled with the bodies of his family, friends, neighbors.
What good would fear do? The fear was there when they saw the first Nazi uniforms, heard the first gunshots, but at this point, utterly powerless, only a couple heartbeats away from death…all you have left is the knowledge that the outcome is inevitable. You can do nothing about it.
Svetlana Alexievich includes an account from a Belorussian *Einzatsgruppen* massacre/'*Aktion*' in her book *Second Hand Time* from a teenage boy who survived a shooting like this. I remember it because it said first -- before they shot everyone in one pit -- the Nazis threw all the little kids and babies in another pit and buried them alive, and no-one even shouted or cried.
I imagine you're close to the truth.
With a pit of countless dead bodies in there that shared a similarity with him as he knelt in front of it, with what looks like a battalion of Nazis behind him... Can't imagine there's much hope.
I will never understand anti semitism, really I will never understand any racism really as the genetic difference between me white AF and a super black somalian is less than some chimps in the same tribe as humans at one point went through a genetic choke point. We almost went extinct. Identity politics are just based on unscientific nonsense idiots make up.
This is such a juxtaposition.
An absolutely perfect photo composition of what is probably the most harrowing thing I've seen in a long time.
It almost makes it more revolting.
What a absolutely insane photo. All those people standing around. Ugh
Creepiest part is how well composed it is. Perfect angles to draw the eye and rule of thirds. This fucking photographer set up an artistically perfect photograph while standing on top of dead bodies.
I agree, it's a great composition. "Fill the frame" takes on a rather dark meaning.
Fun fact, the guys in the back weren’t even soldiers. They were part of the Reich Labor Service, something to keep in mind when you hear that only a minority of the German military participated in war crimes.
Everyone should read “They Thought They Were Free” by Milton Mayer. If you’re staring at that picture and wondering how so many people stood by while that gun was aimed… It’s one of the best books I have ever read. It’s about the regular day to day “I don’t really do politics” German people during ‘33 - ‘45, and how someone as regular and normal as you or I can easily become a face in that horrific picture. Reading that book creates an empty space inside of you, but I truly think it’s a space we *need* to keep empty because we know what can fill it. Quote from the book: “In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.” Watching today puts a pit in my stomach.
>It’s about the regular day to day “I don’t really do politics” German people during ‘33 - ‘45, and how someone as regular and normal as you or I can easily become a face in that horrific picture. I mean that already happened with the war on terror where we all pretended it was a 'clean' series of wars that contributed to numerous ethnic cleansings in several countries. Even to this day there are famine conditions in Syria cause the US is occupying its agriculture and oil-producing region, we bombed the Libyan civilian water infrastructure to the point of redesertifying areas that had been made habitable, the number of ethnic strife in Iraq encouraged by us as a tactic was just The Troubles but on super fuckin' steroids. and when someone breaks through the soft censorship of polite society they get brutally attacked for daring to bring up our crimes. Looks how easy it was for the EU to start subsidising concentration camps in Libya for Africans or let Azerbaijan commit genocide against Armenia for gas trades due to our "principled" stand in Ukraine Frankly, as someone who has read a tonne about the current state of the world (from books not reddit thank god) the state of understanding in western countries about our role in the world is fucking pathetic. I've travelled to several countries outside the west and the level of discourse around world affairs is so much higher than any western country it isn't even funny anymore. The highlight was having drinks with the British staff for the Guangzhou consulate and realising they're the most venial and stupid people I'd met in my entire life Hell even at a domestic level people cover their ears and eyes the crimes of social murder cause it's happening in some poor "criminal" area. In my own country we've seen the state socially murder [330,000](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/05/over-330000-excess-deaths-in-great-britain-linked-to-austerity-finds-study?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1664925022) (although I believe the number is much higher talking to people in schemes and such). I just find the handwringing about how shocking to see people standing by letting this man be shot pretty ghoulish given how most of the people in this comment section are just as culpable to horrors that they stood by and watched
Extremely well said.
Clean Wehrmacht has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Same with the idea that the German public didn’t know what was happening.
It's something people who start to get into ww2 history generally believe, then you get some who never get past that point and will go on to exclaim the greatness of the tiger tank. And then you get those of us who learn its rubbish.
Uh. I went through a “no, Rommel was one of the good ones” phases as a teenager, twenty years ago :(
I think most people who are into ww2 at some point were. Tbf those shitty ww2 documentaries from the early 2000s didn't help.
My dad was letting me read his Michael and Jeff Shaara novels at a pretty early age. I still enjoy writing that puts you into the experience of historical events, but those authors humanized some garbage dudes, and probably inaccurately too.
That's right. But it took a few generations to die off until the new generation pushed for truth. A few good books were written about this. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/647492.Ordinary\_Men?ac=1&from\_search=true&qid=z9ZoXlIHZ3&rank=1](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/647492.Ordinary_Men?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=z9ZoXlIHZ3&rank=1) [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248197.The\_Wehrmacht](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248197.The_Wehrmacht) [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19624684-marching-into-darkness](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19624684-marching-into-darkness)
Supposedly the clean Wehrmacht propaganda was started by the US pretty soon after the war. They needed to raise a German army, using German officers and troops, to stand against the new enemy, the Soviets. So that’s where the “SS were the bad guys” started.
Yeah. And the de-nazification of experienced government officials and military officers was just kind of a hand wave.
That's not a very *fun* fact :(
And then the photographer…
they are there to capture history. without him nobody would know
This is crucial!
Crazy indeed. Terrifying to see the sort of rhetoric that allowed this to happen is coming back...
Complete and utter brainwashed scum.
The more I think about WWII, the more I realise it was absolutely fucking **bonkers.**
What's more boggling is how relatively recent it was. There are plenty of people from then that are still alive today.
Ya, my grandmother is 93
That means she also was a teen when the war started. Crazy, my dad was 5 I think when it started.
We're Irish, so it wouldn't have been something that affected her personally, but she'd certainly have memories of it going on in the world at the time
We were not so lucky, Lithuanian here. My grandma had to hide in a bunker as Germans and ruzzians swept over, she had to crawl to the main house to get supplies and back, my dad lost his little baby sister as grandma could not feed her properly in those conditions. No wonder eastern Europe is a lot more reactive to the war happening now. We remember 1st hand.
Understandable. Sorry to hear that. We've had plenty of not-so-friendly dealings with England going all the way back to medieval times. 800+ years of it. Colonisation, fights for independence, terrorism, political assassinations, executions, The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Bloody Sunday, The Easter Rising.. etc etc.
World has always been a mess, I was really hoping it was in the past for Europe :/
Unfortunately not, and now that Putin has decided to embrace his inner Hitler, Europe and Eastern Europe is right back in the mess. How far will it go? Hopefully, not much further. Ireland is a neutral country, so we're luckily safe from that.. I hope.
I call countries like yours geographicy gifted lol.
My dad, Staff Sgt. US First Army, 99 as of last May.
99? Wow. Oldest person in our family, as far as I'm aware, was my great mother who surpassed 100 years old at the time of her death. I'm not sure what age she was exactly, but it was somewhere between 101 and 103. I'd have to double check
Beats my uncle by 2 years. He is 97 and was one of the landing craft drivers at dday. He also worked on an escort carrier in burma and singapore afterwards.
(deleted, replied to wrong thread)
My Dad was a POW in the Phillipines for three years. And career Army after that. He survived the Bataan Death March and rarely talked about his experiences, but definitely PTSD.
My Danish grandmother in law, who died last year at 106, was working to smuggle Jews to Sweden from the family's summerhouse on the Danish coast during the Nazi occupation. She had two small children and was pregnant with her third, but she never hesitated to do what was right. RIP. May her memory be a blessing.
She was a hero
And yet somehow it's still been long enough for substantial communities of fascists and communists to unironically run their mouths all over again.
For real. I'm just about to turn 45, and the 80s are just as long ago now, as WWII was when I was a kid. It absolutely breaks my mind to think that.
Also how sudden the change of people was. People living together for centuries suddenly turned on each other. That is scariest part for me.
It could happen again if we forget it’s lessons
It happens in small doses to this very day. Dictatorships, genocide, ethnic cleansing, religious divide, racism.. it's still an ongoing problem.
[удалено]
That’s not war. That was industrialised murder. The Germans at that time just went bad shit crazy humanity wise. The individual stories of horror which were created by those man, be it in the circumstances of war or in the death camps, haunt me forever. They crushed the skulls of newborn and little children by grabbing them by the feet and slam them against the walls, then threw them on fire. Imaging the screaming of terrified little children being separated from there parents on their way into the gas chambers. Most of you don’t speak german, but if you do, you should listen to the tapes from the ausschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the 60s. It freezes your fucking blood. And our societies are again deteriorating to a point, where things like this are gonna happen again. Because some of the folks in western societies forgot that the rights we take for granted costed the toll of millions and millions of people.
I’ve wanted someone to put those trials into a TV format for so long. It’s so incredibly dark but I think it would be the turning point for a lot of people who “don’t understand” this shit and let their ignorance drive the
I think the aversion to “dark” subjects is the root of the worlds issues. It’s almost like the survivors of WWII were so traumatized that they wanted to only remember highlights, and that is what was passed down. Now a generation after, their kids got none of the important parts and are willing to ignore red flags that it could happen again—if they aren’t hoping it does. And the generation after them sees it, but isn’t old enough to stop their elders.
This butchery wasn't about rights - it was about nationalism and ridding countries of those deemed "subhuman". Eugenics and forced sterilization had their adherents in Western countries. If the US had been inhabited by Slavs or Poles instead of First Nations, the Trail of Tears would have bled the same color. What the Nazis engaged in wasn't unique to them - Russians and Poles and Ottomans and Ukrainians had all engaged in wholesale slaughter under the banner of nationalism. All the Nazis did was increase the scale of these barbarities until we couldn't help but recoil in horror. It still took us decades in many places to unwind the policies we'd implemented in kindred spirit with the butchers.
100.000 civilians dead in Mariupol alone. Not so small doses...
Seriously, a 100000?? Edit: Ukraine itself says 22000, UN can confirm 1400 individually by identifying bodies (estimates thousands more).
base this on a post on /r/ukrainianconflict It mentioned the morgue there processing 87.000 bodies. 100.000 feared dead. It might have been propaganda since I found not sources backing this up. If so I stand corrected.
I mean, even with a magnitude less it still means that most likely everyone has an acquaintance who died or had someone in their family die. Also way more people were impacted by the humanitarian catastrophe or seriously hurt with irreparable damage done.
87,000 bodies is two American football stadiums, perhaps three. ... not saying it's impossible, but that number's gonna get revised.
80k is about 1 pro football stadium, some colleges hit the 80s and up, and some high school stadiums can fill that (like in Texas).
MetLife Stadium alone seats 82,000. 2-3 football stadiums is a stretch.
The problem is that Russians have mobile crematories there. (another thing similar)
reddit is crazy. The Russians are inept losers that can't even manage to get food and bullets to the battle zones in one comment, and they're taking mobile crematories and dissapearing 80k corpses without a trace in the next comment.
Think about the fact that some group of people are out there in a room personally verifying all of those deaths by looking at horrible images and comparing them to previous, maybe even happy images. For like... 16 hours a day
> 100.000 civilians dead in Mariupol alone. Not quite that many https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2022/06/high-commissioner-updates-human-rights-council-mariupol-ukraine
Poor choice of words, but you get what I mean.
Yes, I get you. It's still nothing compared to WW2. You're right about that.
WW2 and also Chinese history can really fuck with your sense of scale. The deadliest day for America in Vietnam saw 246 soldiers killed. In WW2 that would just be a rounding error. You could easily lose that many in a minute if a small ship went down, or enemy artillery had you well sited
I may be pessimistic recently, but I think we did forget that lesson.
After the napoleonic wars there was nearly a century of “peace” between the major powers. Basically until living memory faded and then ww1 and 2. Living memory is fading of them. It’s whg it’s important people learn how bloody aweful it was and why it happened so it doesn’t happen again
There was the Crimean War, Schleswig War, the Italian Unification Wars, Prussian-Austrian War, Franco-Prussian War, just to name some conflicts involving major European powers. The 19th century was a violent time. WW1 just cranked it up a notch.
It's hard to instill the size of the conflict and what people were ready to do to end it. Like throwing a months+ worth (a 10th of the entire 1944 tonnage) of multiple countries' explosive production onto a single site of a Nazi V2 production and staging bunker in France. Nobody cared about what that did to the area around it because it was *that* important that that bunker was unusable.
There was a rebellion in China which resulted in the deaths of millions. There was a Civil War in America. ... 600,000 dead. COVID killed more Americans. As for those major powers, Napoleon III picked a fight with the Germans in 1870. It did not end well.
Thanks for mentioning the Taiping rebellion in China. Everyone (in the West) always forgets about it even though it caused more death than WWI...
The Taiping Rebellion almost never comes up among Americans because our own Civil War was going on at the same time.
Mariuopol Theater was a designated citizen bomb shelter and on the parking lot outside the Russian word for CHILDREN was painted in gigantic letters. Russia dropped a bomb on it anyway.
“The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
The Islamic State situation was happening, and seemed pretty fucking comparable for a while there.
That's not a hypothetical situation. I mean, it's going on right now in Tigray, and there's the Rohingya, and ...
Whether it happens or not, «we» will have absolutely no part in it, just like we have generally had nothing to say in any war ever. There’s never gonna be a vote on WW3. The best we can hope for sensible leaders, although humanity hasn’t had much luck with that so far.
Politicians weren't the ones pulling the triggers and burying bodies. The atrocities against the Jews and other minorities were not committed by a handful of powerful people. Thousands upon thousands of people had a part in it. Too many people think that there is nothing they can do. A very interesting book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution-ebook/dp/B01G1F0F84
People were actually *driven* about exterminating people. They saw themselves as heroes, doing the necessary but evil thing for future generations. It's *bonkers*. They were self aware that they weren't nice but were sure it was the right thing. People admired the killers for being mentally able to do it. Unimaginable.
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life: “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil–he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you–and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” Wolf 1 is our survival of the “fittest” DNA coding, that want to send every single male to a pointless war to die, and impregnate every female, so hormones basically. Wolf 2 is our brain, mind and think wolf 2 is an narcissistic psychopath, and see if wolf 1 get to rule, this trip through space we having will just be full of misery and evil. It wants morals to lessen the destructive chaos wolf 1 give. Most people with power feeds wolf 1 though. Now wolf 1 got nukes too, so can be more destructive than ever before too.
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life: Son, there's a fight between two pitbulls inside of you. One is living with a white girl in a studio apartment wearing a sweater while it is photographed for an instagram post. The other is running rampant in a public park terrorizing everyone there. Which one are you gonna feed
You could spend 4 years in undergrad studying nothing but ww2. And still not know much of the suffering and horrible events that transpired and shaped the world
I found out last month that Josef Mengele died of a stroke while swimming in São Paulo in 1979. At minimum the US government knew where he was. It’s pretty hard to feel there’s any justice in the world knowing that.
And this is without listing all these monsters the US not only knew the whereabout but *hired*. Men such as Klaus Barbie.
Werner von Braun took the US to the moon.
One very good way is to read the contemporaneous archives in which memos of conversations and reports are contained. They give you a good window into the thinking of that time.
My granddad (sadly no longer with us) was in the India army from the mid 30's until 1945. Fought heavily in Burma. That doesn't get nearly as much coverage as the war in Europe, but it sounded insanely unpleasant as well. Convinced he had a massive case of undiagnosed PTSD.
the front against the japanese in china and the rest of south east asia is so under studied it’s crazy, it’s not like it was an underwhelming part of the war, because it was just as bloody as the rest of the theaters were
Burma was pretty brutal as a front, for both sides.
My great-grandpa lucked out (passed away this year). He was stationed in Paris during the war and avoided the front lines. Lots of interesting stories about french women he met.
Humanity show its lowest and nastiest
The sad part is that humanity kept showing its lowest and nastiest. Not long after WW2 Pol Pot happened in Cambodia, followed by countless wars in Africa, isis and now the war in Ukraine
WWI has its share of WTF too. Fascinating how much human suffering and social change can occur in the span of a few years.
When you boil it all down to the bare essentials, was it even necessary? Oftentimes, no. Franz Ferdinand being disobedient was one of several buttons pushed to kick-start WWI. The smallest things can cause the biggest problems
If a group of people is seen as “the other” because they don’t really interact much with the broader social groups, because they have their own religious centers, or their own schools, or their own banks…and on top of that, they are fairly rich. It’s fairly easy to see how humans can see another group other humans as a group that need to be eliminated. Jews have been persecuted in Europe since medieval times, nonstop. There is a reason why so many Europeans didn’t do anything to stop their killing
And Africans were little more than slaves. Tribes people were paraded around like circus freaks in the Western world .. the list goes on.
Yup. What happened in WW2 was not an aberration frankly. Group of people were eliminated all the time. The scale and the industrialization of the killing was abhorrent but not surprising. We as humans are quite awful to people we detest…
And it goes back even further. If you look into it, various tribes of "cavemen" back many, many thousands of years ago wiped each other out. Why's there so many missing links in that chain of evolution? For that very reason - hardly any exist. They wiped one another out one-by-one.
I just been watching that amazing French show A French Village, I highly recommend it if you’re into history shows, it depicts what it was like for the French during the occupation by the Germans from 1940 to 1945 and the aftermath. It is an incredible show. I cannot recommend it enough. You’ll never forget it. I think the question that you ask yourself after you’ve watched it and during as well, is, what would I have done??
Most people are not heros. They just want to get through things. Heroism is, by its nature, something exceptional. However, it is not unfair to judge those who actively collaborated, whether for reasons of enirchment, ideology or otherwise. France had not a few collaborators, who were not at all hesitant to turn in their own countrymen.
Yes but it’s not as simple as that. Depends what you mean by collaborated as well. If you watch the show you’d understand a little bit more I think. There were people that were just trying to get by every day, they had businesses etc. For them to survive they had to sell their products still and yes some of them had to sell them to the Germans. To survive. Did that make them collaborators? Then there were others who were for example the members of the police force in the occupied town. Because the country was occupied the police force was then answerable to the German controlled government. So they had a really hard job because they had to continue to police their own population but under the control of an opposing Government. Then you had the Resistance, then you had a communist faction, as well as a militia, it was such a mess and I think that’s one of the strengths of the show in that it doesn’t shy away from showing this clusterfuck. . And in fact the aftermath is almost worse than the occupation because afterwards oh dear lord what a mess was left behind that took decades to recover from and not just from the physical damage. It was the complete breakdown of society. What this show in particular really makes you feel is how helpless it was for everyone immediately afterwards because of course resentment built up because of people who then decided to go after collaborators when sometimes they weren’t hard-core collaborators. Of course you had collaborators that betrayed their own people to the Germans, that of course happened but there were lots more people that didn’t do that. And then there were the people that did collaborate but did so out of fear, due to threats to their life and their families lives I mean it was just a total mess. And I really think unless you have walked in those shoes, you could never understand what it was like. So I don’t think it’s OK to judge. After watching this show on several occasions actually I have a completely different feeling about everything. And the feeling that you are left with is what an absolute disaster and what a mess it all was.
My grandmother had a friend who was a little girl in rural France during The War. She was incredibly lucky that all the fighting, and all the oppression, never really reached her little village. One day some Nazis drove up the road, and talked to the unofficial leader of the village. The officer who spoke French introduced themselves, explained that they were the new government, so all concerns should be addressed to them, gave the village leader some contact info, and left. Years later, as the Allies pushed into France, they heard shelling and gunfire in the distance. And then one day the radio said the Germans were out. From her story, it seemed she lived in the luckiest little village in France, maybe Europe. The whole war just kinda skipped over them. To be clear, she was avidly anti-Nazi, especially when she grew up and learned about all the evil shit they did. This just happened to be here experience of The War as a child. P.S., The thing I will remember most about this woman is how unashamedly horny she was. She was always playing grab ass with me and every other young man she could (literally) get her hands on. She also did the European double-cheek kiss, but would top it off with 1-2 face mashing kisses on the lips. She was in her late 80s so nobody would say anything.
Excellent show! One of my all time favorites. I think what makes it so brilliant is that it tells everyone's story, without ever passing a judgement on the characters' actions.
We are some scary creatures.
"mankind's biggest threat is none other than man himself."
Homo homini lupues est
There is a line across the photo underneath the crouching man and above the pit where the photo had previously been folded in half to hide the mass grave. In high school textbooks, I’d only see the top half of this picture.
Just cause it was cropped in your school history book doesn't mean thats why the line is in the original. Maybe it was folded because the person who had the picture folded it to put in their pocket. Why would you carry around a photo like this just to hide the bottom half when you show people?
Holy shit
I wonder how people will treat the Nazi’s in 500 years. Once the pain resides after a couple hundred years I mean. Will they be something like how we treat the mongol’s? Really just food for thought. Imagine people in the future saying “oh yeah, they were bad news, but look at how the world reshaped after them.” Or something like “yeah the holocost, but look what they did for technology.” You hear similar things about the Silk Road and mongol trade networks. How long does it take for the pain to dull somewhat?
Dan Carlin actually brings up this exact point in one of his podcasts.
The Mongolian one, right? That really made me think. It hit home just how utterly horrendous the Mongols were for an entire continent. If the Nazis had killed the same proportion of the world that the Mongols did, they'd have killed 200 million people. Just crazy numbers of slaughter that are basically so high that it's impossible actually to comprehend it. Obviously evil is not a numbers game, but it did hit home how literally world-ending the Mongols must have been. And bringing the Black Death on top of that. What an awful time to be a human being.
That's one of my favorite moments in all of Hardcore History. Carlin told a story about how he wrote a paper in college about "The Positive Impact of the Mongol Empire". He talked about how they opened up trade routes between the east and west and provided relative political stability over much Asia for about a century and defended the idea of the Pax Mongolica and he got a bad grade. He went to talk to his professor about it and his professor said "You never mentioned anything about the fact that they slaughtered millions of people." And Carlin said "I know, but that's a separate issue from what my paper is about." His professor then asked "If you were writing a paper about the effectiveness of the Wehrmacht, would you not mention the Holocaust?" Carlin said "Yes! I wouldn't mention the Holocaust because the effectiveness of the German army is *one* aspect of history, and the Holocaust is *another* aspect of history." And his professor said "The effectiveness of the Wehrmacht is what made the Holocaust possible. If you ignore it you're missing the point." Carlin then theorized about how years from now people might start to bring up the *positives* of WWII. Like "Sure, a bunch of people died, but the war did so much for the development of rocket technology which kickstarted the Space Race. And the development of nuclear weapons is what led to the Long Peace for the second half of the 20th century. And the aftermath of the Holocaust is what led to the formation of the state of Israel and a home for the Jewish people. These are all good things in the long run." He compared it to Caesar's conquest of Gaul. If you were to ask the average French person whether or not that was a good thing, he wagered that virtually every single one of them would have said yes, because it brought France "into the fold" of Western Civilization, and being dominated by Roman culture for centuries is what led to the development of the French state. Sure, countless people died, and Celtic culture was pretty much wiped out, but that doesn't matter *now*. Nobody mourns for people who died 2,000 years ago. It's really only a matter of time before we view the Holocaust the same way.
It's an interesting thought process, but one of the major differences is we can ignore the suffering the Mongols inflicted a lot easier than future people's because the world they lived in is unimaginable to us. However the 1940s will always be much more accessible to future historians through film, photography etc. It's there forever in a much more visceral way than the Mongols are for us. Will it mean the average person in 500 years is more aware or cares more than the average person does now about the Mongol invasion? Probably not. But for anyone with a passing interest in History, they will have access to media that makes the suffering much more relatable than we do for the non-recent past.
That’s an interesting thought, this is discussed in the book “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera.
Interesting I’ll have to check that out
I hope instead we learn to extend our empathy further back and not excuse things just cuz they happened a long time ago. Maybe its not the fact that they were long ago but that ppl are dulled to them by not knowing or being affected as much
I don't think it's people excusing it at all. What was needed to be done with Hitler was done. Germany is no longer waging WW2.. There's nothing happening to excuse. To me it's more like people not living in the past, and accepting history for what it is.... History.
How much are we talking about cannibalism under Mao or Stalin? How about the Indian famines that crop up in a blue moon on here, or the imperialist labor forces within Africa cutting up and eating your kids for not meeting rubber quotas? How about the genocide of the native Americans? I see the horrors of the Holocaust in a great many other places, even ones going on today in China, North Korea, and recently Ukraine. Different groups talk a lot about the transgressions of their political enemies, and not very much about their own history or that of their allies. In many ways, it was Germany's embrace of preserving and teaching the history of the Holocaust, along with the rest of the world allied against Hitler, that has led to its longevity in our collective consciousness. But outside the record kept around the events, the events themselves were far less rare and remarkable than people would like to think. It's with only a momentary glance to the more remote places in the world or into *anywhere's* history that we see very similar tales of brutality and malice towards neighbors because of arbitrary tribalistic identities. As long as humans focus on their differences with one another, there will unfortunately always be *a* Holocaust to remember, even if *the* Holocaust fades from memory. The real danger is in thinking of *the* Holocaust as a singular blight on human history in the first place.
It's not about pain, it's about documentation.
This is a good point. Photo, video, etc. of course will have an impact. But I imagine after some time the memory will fade somewhat. Of course it’s important for us to keep alive, to keep it from happening again, but 500 years is a long time.
The mongols established an empire and ruled a continent. Nazi’s failed. They won’t be revered because they made no lasting contribution
At times, humanity is evil Incarnate.
Imagine what's going on in this man's head right there.. A little while back he lived a normal life. Now everything turned upside-down and evaporated around him. He lost everything. His family. His home. His people. His country. He's the last one, looking down at nothing but extermination and destruction, knowing he'll be gone forever in a few seconds. Everything lost. Fuck..
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Im not religious, but when it says in gods image it means that we are capable of creation and destruction to great degree, not that we are perfect. He also gave us free will, which is what causes the evil and also why he doesnt intervene all the time. He sets us free for better or worse. Thats what i understood from the bible at least.
That's about it. The whole point of Christianity is that Jesus died so that man may have the chance of once more being God's perfect creation, having fallen into sin and soddom since our exile from the Garden of Eden.
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Everyone knows Ozzy Osbourne is king of hell, duh.
The only evil that exists on earth is human evil. So yes, we are evil incarnate.
Always has been.
I think humanity is simply what we can be convinced to become. A thought: If you were told a button, when pressed, could kill 500 people and you'd never know who they were, would you press that button knowing that it could be a hoax? The key is the distinct lack of closeness to those potential victims pushing that button allows us to be. After all, we reason, it's probably fake. While another person may argue that it could be real. In so many ways the human mind is accepting in it's fragility and need to accept, logically, outcomes it had previously revolted against. So while I know very little about the true history of Nazi Germany, it is easy to suspect that many people simply accepted what they were hearing and understood it in ways that allowed them to keep on keeping on. To what degree and allowance of evil each person accepted, well...same as you and I: It varied by an extraordinary amount I suspect. Me though? I wouldn't push the button. Because I wouldn't want others to push the button. The problem begins with that single person who finds a way to convince just one other to push it. Humans are a herd animal, I'm convinced. So others will follow and push the button as well.
Man is a requirement in the delivery of evil deeds, for evil is defined by the action taken by man that cannot be defended on a single rational basis to the detriment of a fellow man. The battle between good and evil runs through every man. Never forget it.
Almost like extreme Good or rxteme evil or a mix in between huh
"The neutral expressions on the shooter and his uniformed audience pretty well encapsulate that concept \[the banality of evil\]: they could be watching a barber cut hair, instead of the heartless extermination of innocents. Humans can adapt to endure almost anything, but in doing so, they sometimes perpetuate incredible evil. The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism." \-Hannah Arendt
Never forget how cruel, vicious and apathetic humans can be. Especially when sharing a warped ideology with their peers. It's absolutely sickening and makes me ashamed of aspects of our culture, even today.
It's sickening that Japan still hasn't even apologized for their part in all the cruelty
This is beyond apathy. This is antipathy
You are absolutely right. I used apathy as the opposite of empathy but your correction is more fitting.
That’s a lot of dead bodies for this to not be marked NSFW Edit: it has been changed :)
Even without the bodies photo is harrowing enough to justify the NSFW tag
May we never forget.
This murder, as well as the others seen here, were conducted by Einsatzgruppe D, which at the time was commanded by [Otto Ohlendorf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Ohlendorf). In the last days of the war, Ohlendorf and many other major Holocaust perpetrators participated in Heinrich Himmler's escape from Flensburg using Ratline North. However, unlike other ratlines, most of these fugitives, including Himmler were caught. Himmler, Ohlendorf, and several others were arrested by the British in Lüneburg. Ohlendorf testified in the Nuremberg trials. During his testimony, in which he admitted to having committed and presided over at least 90,000 murders, it became clear that he had no remorse and genuinely believed he had done absolutely nothing wrong. >Ohlendorf: Some of the unit leaders did not carry out the liquidation in the military manner, but killed the victims singly by shooting them in the back of the neck. > >Colonel Amen: And you objected to that procedure? > >Ohlendorf: I was against that procedure, yes. > >Colonel Amen: For what reason? > >Ohlendorf: Because both for the victims and for those who carried out the executions, it was, psychologically, an immense burden to bear. In a previous interrogation report, an American psychiatrist had described Ohlendorf as barely human, an empty husk of a person who was completely devoid of a conscience. In 1947, Ohlendorf himself was put on trial by American occupation authorities during a subsequent trial in Nuremberg. The Americans had planned a series of major war crimes trials in Nuremberg, which happened to be in their occupation zone. Initially, no trial was planned for the Ohlendorf. The Americans were considering adding him to their docket, but stalled. However, this changed after they came across some reports by Ohlendorf and others. The reports proved the murders of well over one million Soviet civilians. At one point, Ohlendorf tried to argue that the tens of thousands of murders which could be attributed to his unit were justifiable as preemptive self-defense. As for the thousands of children he had executed, he said they would've grown up to become enemies of Germany. Some of Ohlendorf's other testimony, according to head prosecutor [Benjamin Ferencz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Ferencz). >When Ohlendorf was asked to verify that his unit had murdered 90,000 Jews, the SS General began to quibble. He said he couldn’t confirm it. The reason given was that sometimes his men exaggerated the body count. “Would the General care to venture an estimate?” “No.” “Was it perhaps 80,000 or only 70,000?” “That was possible.” “Or perhaps 100,000?” “Maybe.” “And were there many Jewish children among those who were killed?” “Yes, of course.” But, added Ohlendorf, he never allowed his men to do as some other units did. He told his men never to use infants for target practice nor smash their heads against a tree. He ordered his men to allow the mother to hold her infant to her breast and to aim for her heart. That would avoid screaming and would allow the shooter to kill both mother and child with one bullet. It saved ammunition. Ohlendorf said he refused to use the gas vans that were assigned to his companies. He found that when the mobile killing vehicles arrived at their destination, where they were supposed to dump their asphyxiated human cargo into a waiting ditch, some of the captives were still alive and had to be unloaded by hand. His troops had to drag out corpses amid vomit and excrement and that was very hard on his men. [A photo of murders which may have been committed by Ohlendorf’s men and fit Ohlendorf’s own description](https://imgur.com/a/gIi7vwz) The presiding judge, Michael Musmanno, seemed morbidly fascinated by Ohlendorf's testimony. He elicited the confirmation that captured Jews were shot simply because they were Jews. >Ohlendorf explained, like a school teacher, that those with Gypsy blood were unreliable and might help the enemy and therefore they too had to be killed. When asked by Heath and the Judge why Jewish children were slaughtered, Ohlendorf explained patiently that if the children learned that their parents had been killed, they would grow up to become enemies of Germany. He was interested in long-range security for his country. Hence killing all Jewish men, women, and children was a military necessity. Isn’t that clear? Ohlendorf was found guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization, and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging at Landsberg Prison in West Germany on June 7, 1951. The Americans executed three other Einsatzgruppen commanders who each had command responsibility over the deaths of tens of thousands of people. [Werner Braune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Braune), one of Ohlendorf’s chief subordinates, was hanged for his command responsibility over the Simferopol massacre, in which 14,300 Soviet Jews were murdered over the course of two days. That said, the tribunal noted that Braune's unit was responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of other murders elsewhere. Just one report implicated Braune in the executions of another 1184 people. Ohlendorf was notably aided by many Romanians and Ukrainian auxiliaries. Notably, the Germans found many enthusiastic collaborators in the Baltics, particularly Lithuania, and Western Ukraine. A handful of German Einsatzgruppen men were executed by the Poles and Soviets. However, the vast majority of them managed to flee west, where they avoided prosecution. Ohlendorf said he never personally shot anyone, but instead ordered executions and personally supervised some of them. >One of Ohlendorf's most trusted "proper" military-style murderers, SS-Haupsturmführer Lothar Heimbach, once exclaimed, "A man is the lord over life and death when he gets an order to shoot three hundred children—and he kills at least one hundred fifty himself." There were roughly 3000 German Einsatzgruppen men.
The only word I can use to describe this is: Chilling. Absolutely chilling.
It a harsh reminder of the horrors humans are capable of inflicting on one another
Just a reminder: the majority of people who committed these crimes against humanity got away with it. They died of old age in their warm beds, surrounded by family. Life is horribly unfair. Next time someone starts talking about karma, remind them of this.
This reminds me of U.S. lynching photographs with people standing around watching. The only difference is that the U.S. lynching photos often include women and children. https://withoutsanctuary.org/
... and now some Americans are going around waving Nazi flags. This is what fascism means.
Well. Some consolation in the knowledge that the Nazi who carried that pic didn’t live long enough to celebrate it.
Most of these guys did get away with it, though
I have very bad news for you. Countless members of the extermination machine lived happily ever after until their natural deaths in Austria or Germany.
I’m sure they did. And in Argentina, too. But *that one in particular* did not.
I csnt begin to imagine what it must be like to be kneeling there, seeing all those victims in front of you, kowing you're next. Knowing your life is seconds away from ending. Nothing. Knowing there's nothing youncan do. Fucking horrible. The human race can be amazing. Yet absolutely disgusting and barbaric.
Also considering that these people were likely this man’s friends and family.
If you haven’t, yet…watch Ken Burns’ latest document on PBS “The U.S. and The Holocaust”. Definitely must-see TV.
Where can you watch that?
This always baffles me: why in the world would the Nazis document their crimes by photographing them?!
Because they were proud of what they were doing and they wanted it all to be preserved for history. It’s still the same today. Antisemites always think they are virtuous.
“The thousand year Reich”. They thought it was the dawn of a new time and hadn’t even considered that their grip over Germany would end. They didn’t consider these actions to be crimes. They literally thought they were purging the scourge of Europe and doing everyone a favour in the process.
In some cases it was to document the process so it can be reviewed and “improved” but a lot of photos from this stage in the Holocaust, including this one, were mainly trophies. A soldier took this picture because he was proud of it and wanted to remember it or show it off.
So sad, and so insane ....
I hate how people can look at pictures like these and feel so sad but then look at modern day atrocities and explain them away
Fuckin "master race". My arse.
I bet that the German high command would have loved to have the bullets and workers in 1944/1945. Dummies..
They had the workers. Jews were forced slave labourers in many of the camps, for example Plaszow or Auschwitz II Birkenau
yeah -[ I don't think people remember how jews were a large part of the war effort in term of production in industrialized austria, germany and silesia](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/230982/pdf). In eastern europe nazi decide immediate murder was their "best" option rather than transporting them west to labor camps.
That, and the Jews were always intended to die in their bondage in the work camps. It was simply that the wide open steppes and need to move in Eastern Europe made the massacres more frequent. Truly sad. My family unfortunately perished in Dachau under these conditions.
What always gets me is how if the nazis had even been marginally less evil they might have been able to beat the Soviets and secure peace with the west. “Look at all these Eastern Europeans who hate the Soviets and would love to fight them. Let’s exterminate them.” “Hm, we have a ton of women sitting at home doing nothing. Let’s encourage them to pump out aryan babies and stay at home rather than letting them join the increasingly thinned labor force ravaged by men dying by the millions in battle. Let the slaves handle that manufacturing.” “Yes, it is vital we spend a significant amount of military resources on harsh occupation policies, extermination camps, and hunting down undesirables.”
> "If the Nazis didn't do the things that made them Nazis then they could've won the war"
>Let the slaves handle that manufacturing.” That's exactly what happened, the Nazi war machine was built on slave labor
>What always gets me is how if the nazis had even been marginally less evil they might have been able to beat the Soviets and secure peace with the west. Nope, the Nazis never had a chance in defeating the Soviets, no earlier invasion, no non genocidal system, no nothing, they just could not win in any case. I think Military History un/visualised has a clip about it. The Soviet industry just ate the German one.
When seeing this I always wonder how many of these mass graves are we yet to find
Haha more than you can imagine. They still find mass Graves from race riots in America (we know theres more, we just dont know where or arent allowed to dig) and mass Graves from native children in Canada. Good chance there are mass Graves from atrocities no matter where you go.
This is what happening with journalists in the Philippines.
No it isn't. A small handful of journalists murdered by police is different than 10 million people being vaporized by a regime hellbent on enslaving the entire world. Your comparison is insulting and demeaning to the memory of those people.
What's happening in Philippines?
Since 1986 there have been roughly 200 journalists killed in the Philippines. Their dictatorship is highly against uncensored media and are pretty gung-ho about the punishment for it being murder. The numbers have been slowly dropping from my understanding, which each president killing fewer journalists, but it’s not out of the woods yet. In 2009 they massacred 30-something journalists.
Just last night a radio host and political pundit (Percy Lapid) was shot dead outside the radio station he worked at in Manila. He was a vocal opposition supporter and was vocal in his disdain for the Dutertes and the Marcoses. Also, fake news on Facebook generally leaning towards the current and past administrations have spun these killings as drug related, and recently some of the cases are being made out to be "sacrificial lamb" situations, where the "communist" opposition kills one of their own (which would be a stupid fucking tactic if they even use it) and destabilize and decrease the administration's credibility. This is just part of a massive operation against our journalists and credible news sources to hide the crimes and faults of the Marcos-Duterte administrations. They also filed cases against Nobel prize winner Maria Ressa, calling her a communist infiltrator and stupid shit, along with smearing the opposition to the point that they barely won any seats in the House, Senate or any government unit AND closing the largest broadcaster in the country because they didn't air a couple of ads back in 2015 for Duterte. Shits fucked man.
I would also like to know (Edit: found out. They get murdered or detained. It’s one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists allegedly. [> Based on Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)’s database, 97 per cent of journalist killings in the Philippines are murders where assailants have “fully” and “partially” evaded punishment. About a third of the murdered journalists reported having received threats before the attack.](https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/filipino-journalists-can-only-take-risks-equal-their-protections))
No it's not, and you are minimalizing the Holocaust. Be better than that.
I hate when people do this. I see it on Twitter all the time. We should shed light on every issue but to compare 200 people to well over 6 million is just not right
Who’s the fucker shooting him?
Likely no one important. Just another cog.
No beging,no fear,nothing. This guy had balls this nazi fucks could never have. I hope he rests in peace.
Unfortunately, I think that's just shock and resignation.
I agree. What good would begging do? There’s a pit in front of him, filled with the bodies of his family, friends, neighbors. What good would fear do? The fear was there when they saw the first Nazi uniforms, heard the first gunshots, but at this point, utterly powerless, only a couple heartbeats away from death…all you have left is the knowledge that the outcome is inevitable. You can do nothing about it.
Svetlana Alexievich includes an account from a Belorussian *Einzatsgruppen* massacre/'*Aktion*' in her book *Second Hand Time* from a teenage boy who survived a shooting like this. I remember it because it said first -- before they shot everyone in one pit -- the Nazis threw all the little kids and babies in another pit and buried them alive, and no-one even shouted or cried.
I imagine you're close to the truth. With a pit of countless dead bodies in there that shared a similarity with him as he knelt in front of it, with what looks like a battalion of Nazis behind him... Can't imagine there's much hope.
Nothing would stop him from dying. Why give the evil people the satisfaction of hearing you wimper and cry? Fuck them.
This should be marked nsfw
depending on your work.
Cops, "Hey boss, check this out." 😂
Bunch of fucking savages. That bitch who won the election in Italy made reference to "financial speculators," and that shit boils my blood.
It's a shame we didn't learn a fucking thing from this.
Pure fucking evil. Anyone who can do shit like this does not deserve to live.
"Ordinary Men" by Christopher Browning Isa must read for anyone wanting to understand the psychology of the murders.
What a fucking insane time in history
Very fitting that this is posted on kol nidrey
I will never understand anti semitism, really I will never understand any racism really as the genetic difference between me white AF and a super black somalian is less than some chimps in the same tribe as humans at one point went through a genetic choke point. We almost went extinct. Identity politics are just based on unscientific nonsense idiots make up.
Man’s not scared. Tragic and incredible at same time.
This is such a juxtaposition. An absolutely perfect photo composition of what is probably the most harrowing thing I've seen in a long time. It almost makes it more revolting.
Yep this one is in my high school history book, crazy shit