OhMyLord! Nazis
and accordions. Didn't
know Nazis had those...
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Posted on 09/22/2007 6:46:14 AM PDT by Argentine-Firecracker
Newly released photos of SS officers sitting in canvas chairs, participating in sing-alongs and enjoying their free time at a recreation home near Auschwitz have shocked many in Germany this week.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Why is this shocking them? The article never explains the title. If they’re shocked, they’re still living in denial about what their ancestors did.
Ahmadinejad wanted to take one of those canvas chairs down to Ground Zero. To help him gloat.
It was actually a photo of the faculty of Columbia University . . .
Creepy!
Shocked? At what? Has the aura of denial worn thin or what?
Every sane person in the world knows what happened there, and who was responsible.
This is the only thing that I personally find shocking:
>he was convicted on charges of aiding and abetting the murders of 1,000 Jews and was sentenced to seven years in prison
Well, no wonder its fashionable to murder Jews these days.
And support those who do.
What would he have gotten for the murder of a million? 10 years? big deal.
Yup. These were SS officers for crying out loud, not boy scouts. They took great joy in torture and murder. Its like being shocked that Manson partied after the Sharon Tate murders.
Because the world would like to imagine those capable of such atrocities as utterly joyless, bent by horrific psychological torture to madness. The notions that the horrors could be committed by people still capable of laughing and singing is perhaps shocking not so much in the sense that it is surprising, but in the sense that it is horrifying. Where is the soul-destroying, joy-depriving, bowel-wrenching spiritual misery that we’d like to imagine could be the only thing that could lead people to such horrors?
Why, these Nazis aren’t monsters at all... they look so normal, so much like Der Speigel’s customers’ family photos! How could they have ACTED like such monsters? They hardly look mentally tortured and anguished into such actions, disfigured beyond recognition by whatever forced them into such madness... they look like ordinary people who freely and carelessly partook in such horror.
Give them a break. Mass murder is hard work.
Shocked ? Not. This was Nazi Gestapo. Nothing they did would be shocking. Horrible, immoral, disgusting but not shocking.
Exactly! You had to be a monster to get into the SS to begin with.
One of the strangest things that I discovered living in Europe (and having visited Auschwitz more than 6 times and the Terezin Ghetto more than a dozen times) is that there is a tendency to pretend that the “Nazis” were solely responsible for the atrocities, and that, somehow, “Nazi” and “German” can easily be divorced. I’ve encountered this surreal separation of semantics many, many times.
The terrible aspect of these photos (and you have to strain to keep it in mind) is how ordinary these SS-Germans appear. In a movie about Auschwitz, none of them could have played his own part to dramatic effect (unlike Audie Murphy).
I tried to look into the eyes of those in the photos and think, “those eyes witnessed mass murder daily, and their owners took part in mass murder”. Drew a blank.
Whoever coined the expression “the banality of evil” to describe those who carried out the daily wicked work of the Holocaust, is proven right by these images alone.
If only some of those faces had long fangs dripping blood.
As Arendt said, it’s the banality of evil.
I was totally shocked that not only was the guy sentenced tojust 7 years, but that he was released after serving five years!
The sad truth is, even normal people can be whipped up into a hate-filled frenzy by certain types of regimes.
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“Mass murder is hard work”
Years ago `Sixty Minutes’ did a piece on the Orchestra of Auschwitz, complete with incredible footage and sound.
They described it thus:
“It was there to sedate new arrivals against the truth of Auschwitz; to provide a rhythmic beat for those who worked. But mainly it was there to give relief to the German staff and guards; relief from the long days of killing.”
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