The holocaust looms large, in part, due to recency bias and the fact there are still people who lived it. There are people alive who claim to have been victims of the Nazis and there are people who were allegedly Nazis. There is big money oin finding these people and putting them in the media. In fifty years, there will be no one alive who thinks much about Nazis or their victims.
That said, Western Radicals will never forget and never let the world forget. At least that seems to be the plan. The interwebs tells me the Germans just convicted a 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard of being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people at the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard was sentenced to jail in Germany on Friday by a judge who branded him a “willing and efficient henchman” in the Holocaust.
In what is likely to be one of Germany’s last trials for World War Two-era atrocities, Reinhold Hanning was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people at the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Rejecting the defense argument that the former SS officer had never killed, beaten or abused anyone himself, Judge Anke Grudda said Hanning had chosen to serve in the notorious death camp and had helped it run.
“It is not true that you had no choice; you could have asked to be transferred to the war front,” Grudda told Hanning as she read out the verdict.
She said it was impossible that he had been unaware of the murders since he spent two and a half years at the camp and had been promoted twice during that time.
“That shows that you had proven your value as a willing and efficient henchman in the killings,” Grudda said.
The white-haired Hanning, dressed in a gray suit and tie and seated in a wheel chair, listed to the verdict impassively. His lawyer, Johannes Salmen, said they would appeal.
During the 20-day trial that dragged on over four months, the court heard testimony from around a dozen Holocaust survivors, many extremely elderly, who detailed horrific experiences, recalling piles of bodies and the smell of burnt flesh in Auschwitz.
I have no doubt that the death camps were horrible. Russian prison camps were horrible. The Andersonville prison in the American Civil War was monstrous. The Japanese did horrific things to Allied prisoners. I had family die in the Bataan Death March. Of course, the Rape of Nanking and the Turkish genocide of Armenians killed unknown numbers. The point being, war is horrible and industrial war is the most horrible. It’s why we should do what we can to avoid it.
Vengeance after war for the “crimes” of the losers is understandable. Hanging German officers and leading political figures for their crimes during the war made perfect sense. In this case, what the Nazis did was the logical end of Rouseau-ist moral philosophy and that scared the hell out of people in the West, as it should. They needed to find a way to pretend it was an aberration. The Nuremberg trial was an effective way of “proving” that the Nazis were outside the scope of Western moral philosophy.
Still, prosecuting a 94-year old guy, for anything, is of dubious value. It’s not like there had been a 70 year manhunt for this guy. He lived his entire life in plain sight. He did not go around bragging about his time in the war, but he could have been put on trial years ago if it was so important to justice. Clearly, it was not important enough 70 years ago or 50 years ago or even 20 years ago. It’s not like this old man was a danger to anyone or a flight risk.
It’s important now because the people in charge only have a list of bogeymen. They no longer have an affirmative argument for why they should rule and why their preferred system is best. The main argument against Trump, for example, is to chant “Hitler” or “Racist” over and over. The argument for maintaining the monstrosity that is the EU is, well, “Hitler!” Putting a corpse on trial for the Holocaust is just a morality play to remind everyone that the night is dark and full of terrors.
In the US, the Civil War often fills the role of the Holocaust. A mentally ill kid shoots up a black church and the people in charge restart the Civil War, tear down some Confederate flags and topple over some old statutes in the South. The message was clear. Do as we say or the KKK will be riding through the streets and Union Army will be forming on the Potomac. It’s a histrionic madness that is wildly out of proportion to the triggering event, but all they have now is this pointless vengeance.
Coming to grips with the fact that is all about vengeance is crucial. The alt-right has done so. Conservative, Inc’s supporters have not. A concise, functional working definition of a(n earnest) cuckservative is someone on the right who doesn’t understand the overwhelming role this sense of moral righteousness–vengeance–plays in all that They do.
Realizing it means perpetually going on the offensive, never yielding an inch or apologizing for anything, refusing to accept the priors of your persecutors, and having no enemies to the right.
Amen. Love your site, too, Audacious Epigone. The left is at war. For them, there is no peace, no loyal opposition. This is precisely what the alt. right gets. It has taken me years to comprehend this simple fact.
Thank you.
It has taken me years to comprehend this simple fact.
Likewise, and then a few more to become confident that the necessary response is what I laid out above. Trump has so overwhelmingly shown that it is the way, though, that any lingering doubt I may have had has been spectacularly dispelled.
Off topic…I discovered this blog a few weeks ago – I can’t exactly remember how; maybe Vox Day or Instapundit linked one of your posts – and I really dig it. There’s a pull quote in every paragraph. Just saying “thanks.”
You’re welcome and thanks for reading.
It’s interesting to see how the Japanese and Germans were treated after the war. We got big show trials for the Nazis, not so much for the Japanese. And we still don’t really talk about the atrocities the Japanese commited. Somehow I think it was decided that it would be racist to continue to blame the Japanese. It’s really too bad that we pay so little attention to WWI. It was a horrific war. It’s hard to understand the cause of it. It changed civilization in a major way. And most school kids can’t even tell you who we fought… Read more »
My in-laws placed two restrictions on who their sons could marry: no Muslims and no Japanese people. They Japanese were absolutely barbaric in Asia and a lot of people there are still furious.
They hung plenty of Jap officers a officials, too. And a lot of the ones who would have been hung took the hairi kiri express out of town ahead of the trials…
I think a LOT of the reason there was no shaming of the Japs after the war more than there was , is do to the anti-bomb folks and the nano-PC group-think. Not right away, but within 15 years , it appears to me ( willing to be rebuked ) that the mindset of a lot of folks was, we were monsters for dropping the bomb on two Jap cities forcing their surrender. The anti-war folks and the pro-communists melded as useful idiots and to me, that’s why the Japs were cruel and the enemy in the war movies, but… Read more »
WW I started when the Russian Empire attacked the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kaiser Wilhelm actually tried to stop the war, yet the Germans somehow ended up as the bad guys. The cause of WW II supposedly was the German attack on Poland. Yet, after years of war, the Russians gobbled up Poland with nary a peep from the Allies.
Some fair criticism there but, apart from the question of what the Allies could have really done to enforce the Yalta terms on the USSR, it’s worth noting that the Russians permitted Poland to be run as a puppet state by its own communist dictator wannabes. It didn’t abolish the existence of the Polish state entirely, nor turn its heartland into a charnel house of murder camps, nor speak of massacring enough Poles to extinguish the language and culture entirely, and then pursue that policy. There are places in eastern Europe that could fairly say Soviet rule was worse than… Read more »
Notsothoreau, it’s easy to figure out why the Nazis and the Japanese got treated so differently after WW2 when you know where to look for the answers. Find this book and read it: “Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold”. https://www.amazon.com/Gold-Warriors-Americas-Recovery-Yamashitas/dp/1844675319
As always…follow the money!
I was dating an American Jew during the Rowandan genocide. I asked her parents about “never again” and about stopping it, more recent industrial killings like Pol Pot,etc. They admitted they didn’t care. They lived just a few miles from the Holocaust museum in LA.
It was then that I realized the whole Holocaust industry – countless movies and documentaries are still cranked out every year – was a sham to guilt Westerners into helping Jews. That Jews only care about mass killing when Jews are involved, are content to let things take their course and avoid involvement otherwise.
If you want to have some fun, engage a Jew adamant about the Holocaust never happen again, bring up Holodomor. Sorry folks, I’m against all mass slaughter, not just the ones that involved Jews. (And as many Christians died in the Holocaust as Jews.)
Or even funnier, ask about the Armenian Genocide, which Israel officially denies!
“Israel Won’t Recognize Armenian Genocide, Says Ambassador”
The German parliament just voted to recognize it in June, Turkey promptly recalled its ambassador to Germany in protest, vowing to take further steps in response, i guess this means more refugees!
It was well known that Nazi officials were allowed to continue running Germany after WW2 ended, and were asked to do so by the US government. While this might have been kept from the average US citizen, everyone here knew exactly who was an ex-Nazi*. Reinhold Hanning is just a case for Germany to satisfy the Jews, who constantly throw the holocaust in our faces in a way to perpetuate a guilt-trip Germans should have gotten over decades ago. So when do we expect to see IMB executives hauled into court? Are they not complicit too**? How about Standard Oil… Read more »
You know, accusing American corporations of complicity in the holocaust because they sold products or established subsidiaries in Nazi Germany **in the thirties** is just as stupid as prosecuting a 94 year old ex camp guard 71 years later. (…and as far as I can tell, poor Reinhold wasn’t even a guard. He was some kind of camp accountant.) I agree with Z-man. Today’s holocaust obsession has gotten out of hand. I also agree that WWI had a greater effect on the world at large than WWII. But then again, I consider WWII to be a direct extension of WWI.… Read more »
That was Karl’s point, by my reading of his comment.
@ Solomon – Thank you. Exactly my point.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Thats why we should remember wars and the reasons that they happened.Even the Rwanda situation should be remembered…And that a-hole Pol Pot communist thing in Cambodia.
I agree. My father flew B-24’s in the CBI theatre. My uncles also served. I lost friends in Vietnam .
I make sure my grandchildren know what I know.
Gob bless those that serve.
I do not personally “beat up” Germany or Germans for what happened in WWII. However, I do find it extremely convenient to simply say “… recognize what happened, accept it, and move on.” Others say it is a hand that has been overplayed. I agree. Sometimes I get fed up with Hollywood and “another movie about the holocaust” but regarding the events and actions themselves, they deserve remembering. Why? Because as historians know and Gen. Santayana said so eloquently, “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” (my paraphrase) This is important because the same sentiments (antisemitism)… Read more »
Karl, quit fucking apologizing for WW2. When I compare what Hitler did and what Stalin did, Stalin was 10x worse. Frankly, if we had been on Hitler’s side, we might have been able to curb his excesses, limit his ambitions to the restoration of pre-1919 borders, and together we could have stomped the shit out of Stalin. Stalin was literally satan on earth, but you don’t hear the Russians apologizing for him continuously.
@ Buckaroo Banzai – We would like to, but some people like to throw it in our faces.
On the one hand, point well taken; vengeance and the will to power seem to be all that is left, for the left. But this – “I’ve never found the Holocaust and WW2 to be very interesting.” is inexplicable. Your intellect and reasoning power are so great, and yet you say you find WW2 not very interesting. I’ve been reading about the subject of the war, and speaking to participants my entire adult life and have never found it to be uninteresting. The sheer scale and enormity of the war, and its profound meaning is the single greatest cautionary tale… Read more »
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t ignore it. It’s just that in the grand scope of history, it is not as high on the list of important events as The Great War, the 30 Years War, The 100 Years War, The English Civil War, the American Civil War, the French Revolution and many other events. I’d place it in the next level down. The residue of WW2 is just about gone now. We still live with the effects of the English Civil War.
Yes, WWII really is the end of WWI. WWI changed everything about Europe, it already knew how to kill on mass scale before it got the Holocaust.
I think that the invention and introduction of the Atom Bomb rates putting WW2 as a long term historically important event. It was atomic weapons that has largely shelved open warfare between the great powers. Without it we probably would have had a Soviet-West war in the 1960s or 1970s. Instead we got airplane hijackings and proxy warfare here and there. That said I think that in the long term historians won’t look at WW2 as its own event but rather the entire period from 1914-1953 as one long period of war same as the 100 Years War.
The 1st and 2nd World Wars were less two wars than a thirty year war in which the most lasting damage had already been secured by 1919. The world had fundamentally changed, and not for the better. The 2nd World War in Europe was Adolf Bonaparte breaking out of Elba but with a better plan. The battle film was much better too, some of it even in color. But the earlier war created the geopolitical monster of communism, ended the evolution of 500 years of European civilization, and, it should be said, diluted the very quality of it’s DNA.
“……Adolf Bonaparte breaking out of Elba but with a better plan…..”
Brilliant. Sadly, while Z’s loyal readers can connect the dots, how many people under 40 or so would have any idea WTF you are talking about. 1%, maybe….and I’m being generous.
WW II was actually the second half of WW I. WW II is important to Americans because we played a big part in it. The Pacific naval war was all ours. WW II is important to the Brits because they destroyed themselves fighting it. One can make a good argument that the U.K. has never recovered from WW I/WW II. I believe that the period from 1914 to 1945 was one of the critical turning points for the West, but that WW I was the significant conflict.
‘… the Brits destroyed themselves fighting it…” Really? Wow! I guess they would have been better off surrendering like France and wind up speaking German (should the overall war have been lost).
“The Nuremberg trial was an effective way of “proving” that the Nazis were outside the scope of Western moral philosophy.” Bingo. “Berkeley or Nazi?” is a fun party game if you want to feel suicidal. Take the most virulent, over the top race essentialist statement you can find: “All ___ are ____, and deserve ____.” Does that come from the pen of A) Heinrich Himmler, or B) the syllabus of a freshmen humanities seminar in any “elite” college in America? National Socialism is evil and horrible, but it’s a very obvious consequence of the Cult-Marx garbage taught in every school… Read more »
Once you start imagining the perfect society, you have to imagine the perfect citizens and that means culling the herd. It’s why utopianism always leads to a bloodbath.
Ever read Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium? It’s still in print, I think, despite being written in the 50s. He traces this stuff all the way back into the early Middle Ages. And he was in US intel during WWII, and interviewed many captured Nazis and about-to-be-repatriated Soviets. Interesting stuff – turns out we can force Jesus to return if we just kill off all the sinners.
Article 21 of Charter of the International Military Tribunal: The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof. It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United Nations, including the acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and of records and findings of military or other Tribunals of any of the United Nations. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/imtconst.asp English translations of Russian translations of Polish copies of an alleged German original which cannot be found. That is typical… Read more »
I don’t particularly care for the term “Holocaustianity” mainly because it suggests that Holocaust worship on its own is the issue when its just a larger part of something else. The Holocaust like climate change and similar issues became as big as they are because the Cold War ended. It was never such a big deal even as late as the late 1980s in the general public. I figure that some historian in the future looking back at the period from the end of the Cold War to when the new order and theology eventually takes hold (probably in the… Read more »
Have you as a dirt person had enough? I have. A craw full of the sonofabitches running things. Funny, the truth couldn’t be much simpler. Who is it and what is it the great blood thirsty murderers, the mind blowing waste of blood and treasure, almost always somebody else’s but their own, behind the Armageddon’s of the nation states, in the sphere of human activity. The human’s who usurp power and wealth in the form of the state isn’t it? And in order to retain the order of their power, it requires vast energies to keep up the appearance of… Read more »
I keep waiting for “cuz Nazis” to stop being an automatic argument winner, but I see people my age using it, and I’m young enough that half my grandparents were in elementary school during the war.
Has anyone stopped to think about the coalition of the oppressed, our new majority, is going to think of segregation and the Holocaust? My in-laws experienced WWII as the Japanese behaving abominably with a distant German sideshow and they were shitting in latrines in the sixties. I just don’t see someone from that background feeling bad about segregated plumbed in washrooms fifty years ago.
Anyone about 20-25 right now will have had absolutely no experiences with the WWII generation (or if they did was nursing home type experiences). In looking at the age of the alt-right and it’s themes, you can see that of bewilderment by that age bracket who are conservative.
At this point, I’d say “cuz Nazi” is going to become a high comedy trope. It’s already being turned in that. Once you scream out “Nazi” and the entire group laughs automatically at you for it, it’s done.
“At this point, I’d say “cuz Nazi” is going to become a high comedy trope. It’s already being turned in that. Once you scream out “Nazi” and the entire group laughs automatically at you for it, it’s done.”
https://youtu.be/kHmYIo7bcUw 🙂
Stuff they don’t teach you in school:
http://www.unit731.org/Experiments.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html?pagewanted=all
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/13/japan-revisits-its-darkest-moments-where-american-pows-became-human-experiments
The ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ are scientifically impossible frauds.
see the ‘holocaust’ scam debunked here:
http://codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here:
http://forum.codoh.com
We’re talking about an alleged ‘6M Jews & 5M others’ … 11,000,000.
There is not a single verifiable excavated enormous mass grave with contents actually SHOWN, not just claimed, (recall the claim of 900,000 buried at Treblinka, 1,250,000 at Auschwitz, or 250,000 at Sobibor, 34,000 at Babi Yar) even though Jews claim they still exist and claim to know exactly where these alleged enormous mass graves are.
Lumping the holocaust together with war overlooks civilization entirely. The casualties endured by the Japanese due to the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fewer than casualties that occurred during the battle for Okinawa. Okinawa, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki were war while the pogroms and concentration camps were mass murder with Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally ill and others deemed undesirable.
I find the trial as stated in your post actually quite strange when considering Angela Merkel’s family who did nearly identical deeds as George Soros. The Merkel’s lived in Poland – the homeland of my father – while George Soros was born in Hungary. Merkel’s family assisted the Nazi’s by snitching on Jews in Poland to be handed over while Soros not only snitched but actively participated in stripping the Jews of their valuables and herding them to concentration camps. Soros – a Jew himself – claimed his collaboration was to stay alive, yet – his wealth originated going back… Read more »
As history ages, she changes. I’m still waiting for politicians and pundits to forget Vietnam.
Sarge, that’s exactly the problem. They do forget and never learn from “their” mistakes. Maybe like the Japanese, these so-called leaders should have some honor and fall on their swords when the create such epic disasters. But that would be too much to hope for wouldn’t it? 58,000 plus and countless veterans wounded physically or otherwise for someone’s lies and wet dreams.