Posted on 11/29/2007 9:17:35 PM PST by camerakid400
A vast archive of wartime German documents on the Nazi Holocaust has been opened to the public.
The 47m documents, kept in Germany, contain detailed records on 17.5m forced labourers, concentration camp victims and political prisoners.
Previously, the files were only used to trace missing persons, reunite families and provide information for compensation claims.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) manages the files.
The whole archive takes up some 26km (16 miles) of shelving in the town of Bad Arolsen in western Germany.
Minute details
The files are not expected to shed dramatic new light on the Nazi regime - already one of the most researched periods of modern history.
But it will provide historians with more details about the murder and exploitation of millions of Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and other victims.
The Nazis kept records on the smallest details - from the number of lice on a prisoner's head to the exact moment of their execution.
Allied forces began gathering the records from concentration camps and other Nazi prisons as they swept across Europe at the end of World War II.
The move to open the archive came after the last of the 11 countries that sit on the body managing the archive ratified a 2006 agreement to allow public access.
"I would like to invite all researchers to make use of this, and work through this dark chapter of German history," said Guenter Gloser, Germany's deputy foreign minister for Europe.
Ping
Not unparalleled as the Soviets & the Kmher Rouge rivaled.
There’s something obsessive and neurotic about the record-keeping that went on. Germans ARE different! And I suspect that the obsession with getting every conceivable detail right, recording every louse picked off someone’s head, provided some kind of compensation or mask for the criminal nature of the whole enterprise. It meant “I am doing a GOOD job. I am doing everything RIGHT. Thus, I am a good person.”
Unfortunately, I agree with you. I worked in a plant in a heavily German-American community. The people I worked with took pride in following the bosses rules to the letter even when it made their work harder. If they would have just spoke up and suggested a better way, they could have produced more and made their own life easier. But, they didn’t. They told everyone around them how stupid the bosses were, but continued following orders no matter how difficult it made their work.
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Very cogent observation McGowan. About the obsessive rule-keeping: I think there is a realization of this among younger Germans—partly due to the youth culture and the contact with the USA. However it is a deep part of German culture. Kant and other philosophers from 200 years ago pushed HARD a concept of “duty” in replacement of traditional Christian grace-based ethics. Germany is still very secular, and when there is no reliance on the grace of God in Jesus Christ—”duty” alone is left.
Today’s Germans are pacifistic—that’s been drilled into there heads since infancy, so we need not fear the old militarism—however without real Christianity, raw rule-keeping (even if its according to a very liberal, seemingly squishy, politically-correct set of rules) is all that remains.
“The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.” (Numbers 14:18)
Germans as a people, yes, but not the German state. Post -war Constitution of BRD has been silently ammended and now it is possible for German government to send Bundeswehr and Luftwaffe into combat missions outside of German territory. That was previously forbidden by the Constitution. People can be changed within a generation to utilize this to the full extent. It is important to remember that it was not German people who financed Hitler to grab the power, nor it was a German people who armed Hitler against the Versailles Treaty clauses. The same story can be repeated and Germans duped like they were in the 1930s. The safety pin to prevent this was included in German constitution, but it has been silently removed.
PING!
Send ‘em all to Ahmanutjob’s house.
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