The Holocaust’s Great Escape | Hacker News Reader

The Holocaust’s Great Escape

smithsonianmag.com

81 pointsdiodorus93 comments

Let's not forget that some people tried to escape early, but were turned away by governments who didn't want to let in refugees.

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267

It's interesting talking in person with a Holocaust denier.

They start out by explaining there is no evidence of the Holocaust, and in fact the Nazis killed few Jews.

So you ask them why this idea is so widely believed, and they explain it is because the Jews have a vast conspiracy to mislead the world so as to gain favor for themselves and the state of Israel.

So you ask them, "Have the Jews done anything else bad?" and their eyes light up, and they go into an long rant about one terrible thing after another the Jews have done, throughout the whole course of human history.

And by the end they have made the Jews look so bad that it would have been a simply wonderful thing for Hitler to try to kill them all off.

I have observed two different kinds of revisionists.

The first kind are simply Jew haters. After they say that they don't believe that the Nazis tried to kill all of the Jews, they either imply or say outright that they should have.

The second kind has an Asperger Syndrome like fixation on details. If the true number was 5.4 million or 6.5 million Jewish people killed, they take exception to the "6 million" figure.

> The first kind are simply Jew haters.

I sadly can't deny that such people exist but it seems profoundly weird to me that anyone could just hate a bunch of random people they've never met. Some sort of wiring bug.

It's passed on as oral culture through the family and environment they grow up in, it seems.

Classic pathway for hate

Such people don't hang around the sorts of circles you live in. But in much of the world they are the norm, alas, such as the present Middle East.

Good point about the fixation-on-details type. However, it is the Jew haters who sometimes get organized and do real damage to the world. Also, nasty politicians can sometimes convert large numbers of people into Jew haters.

So what are your thoughts on this argument? It sounds like you were convinced, and the comment reads like a slightly clever way to spread these hateful ideas. (I can't speak for your intent.)

Oh, sorry, I should have made my point clearer. This is that Holocaust deniers often say they are not antisemitic,just trying to be factual, but if you question them the right way, it turns out they are.

What is really going on in their minds is that they mistakenly believe Jews are evil, and so they defend anyone who think the same, in this case the Nazis against the accusation of killing millions of Jews, even though they themselves think it would be great.

As horrible as the Holocaust was, I think the thing from the Second World War that has scared me most is probably the Dirlewanger brigade[0]. I guess it's the difference between someone who kills you because that's his task, and someone who kills you because he likes it. Dirlewanger[1] was a cartoon villain. In a work of fiction he would have been easily dismissed as not believable, but he was very real.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Dirlewanger

He was hardly the only murderous sadist; you can find many in the history of Holocaust camps. Look up Joseph Mengele, for example, who would perform sadistic medical procedures (called experiments, but really for sadism) on prisoners, including children, and without anesthesia. Too sickening to describe here.

Japan's Unit 731 did some truly horrific things too.

Lavrentiy Beria was the head of the NKVD (USSR secret police) during WW2 and also a serial rapist/murderer, the high ups including Stalin all knew, but considered him good enough at his job to essentially let it slide though of course they never let their female relatives anywhere near him.

This is a good article, but it's very difficult reading.

It's a difficult part of recent history that is important to be known and understood.

I often wonder what people actually have understood other than "the Nazis were bad". It's not enough to not be a racist, and it's not enough to have excuses for putting up with war and exploitation and double standards.

We live in an age where narcissism and outer appearances are glorified more than ever, where showing off and fitting in are accepted and the only debate is on how to best do that, where the atrocities and all our complicity in them is a constant background hum, where tribalism and identity politics and other things are considered "natural", where people hide their own person behind pseudo-objectivity, surveillance is everywhere and eternal, robocops are around the corner, we engage in constant double think about "consumers" deserving the crap shoved onto them by corporations. It's all just human nature, it's "science" (with a deus ex machina always around the corner) -- I would say things like the above are the things which people like Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner or other people I would consider heavy weights on the subject pointed out as crucial, that is, when you asked them about the Nazis, they didn't talk about the content of their ideas so much as about their personalities, the personalities and excuses of their followers, obedience and a lack of connection with oneself and reality, and so on. In comparison to that stuff they all seemed to agree that the "content" of the Nazi ideology was just smoke and mirrors. Even their methods held more content than their content did, if you will. Sure, they needed enemies and a cult of their own supposed superiority, but any details beyond that were subject to change.

Every time I learn about something like Abu Ghraib, I die a little inside. That is, I get diminished a little, and every following day I live on this planet without the perpetrators of those deeds being brought to justice I get diminished some more. That's bad enough, but the way most people don't even notice that is really scary.

Please, don't take this as me snapping at you. I have no way of knowing how exactly you meant what you said, but I am reminded every single day of parallels to Nazi Germany that are perfectly accepted in polite society, so I had to rant a bit.

One way to look at it is that our civilized world is just a thin veneer covering up our animalistic, brutal nature.

Another way to look at it is that we're a budding new form of life that seems rather distinct from what came before (consciousness, reason/science, etc.), and we're still very young and foolish and unable to fully utilize these new abilities.

Of course, there's a real risk that we'll destroy ourselves, or that we'll remain stuck in some kind of local optimum, doomed to repeat ourselves and constantly wage ware against our evolutionary 'legacy code'.

But as someone who can get quite depressed or cynical about all the bad things that are happening (over and over again, it seems), it helps me to focus on the amazing ways in which we did overcome our more brutal past.

If we're looking for ways to meaningfully understand Nazi-ism, and actually look beyond "omg bad" and "death camps" into the ideals and philosophies and the sociopolitical situation leading to the party's rise... well, you could do far worse than to start with Harper's "Who Goes Nazi?" (1941).

http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/

Also, we need to look in the mirror. If we think of the people who were Nazis as somehow alien creatures, not ordinary people like us, we overlook a central point and a critical risk. Germany and Austria were a/the centers of science, culture, industry, and civilization; think of all those scientists, composers, industrialists, philosophers ...

Humans - educated, modern people like us - did these things. A whole society provided all the services, political support, leadership, funding, engineering, manual labor, management, project management, architecture, transportation infrastructure and operations, IT (look up what IBM did), etc. etc. Imagine the scale of that project. Other whole societies helped or looked the other way; the U.S. turned away Jewish refugees from its shores, IIRC; the Roman Catholic church kept its head down, at best. (And others resisted, such as Denmark and, IIRC, the Eastern Orthodox church.)

The human genetic code hasn't changed; we're biologically exactly the same as the Nazis, and millennia of humanity before that. Unless you believe in a supernatural power (and what good did that do?), nothing prevents the same (or other evils) from happening again except us. It doesn't happen randomly or instantly; we have societal norms and institutions. But we need to protect those norms and institutions and make sure we don't get to the point of doing evil; it's too late to stop by then.

Rereading that, it sounds very grim; but we have all the power we need in our hands to stop it and more, to do good. I think of the people who built those institutions of freedom in the generations before us - in the U.S., for example, from Washington to Lincoln to MLK - making the world a better place. I think of the people who died in WWII - many 18 year old kids who died in pain - to give us the freedom we have today from Nazis, fascists, and religious oppression. What are we giving the next generation?

(Sorry I got a bit carried away, but I don't mean it as a lecture; I feel pretty strongly about it.)

Germany had strongly militaristic culture long before and was pretty violent prior Nazi taking power. Its democracy was also very dysfunctional, had weak support among citizens and many people did not got over previous revolutions yet. When we are painting them as the centers of science, culture and civilization, we are painting that in much better colors than was the actual reality.

There is a risk it will happen again, but we are not there yet. We are far from that levels of dysfunction. (Same goes for French revolution and communist uprising in Russia.)

Agreed, very good points; thanks. I should have been more careful with my paints. I did mean to depict that we aren't there yet.

> Germany had strongly militaristic culture long before

The U.S. has had a strong culture of racial discrimination for its entire history. I don't mean that in an exaggerated sense like "everyone is racist", but I think that rationally it's hard to escape the fact that such a culture has always been prominent.

Speaking of strong militaristic culture, this section of "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" is interesting, re: the role of Prussia in the modern German state:

"By this time Prussia had pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to be one of the ranking military powers of Europe. It had none of the resources of the others. Its land was barren and bereft of minerals. The population was small. There were no large towns, no industry and little culture. Even the nobility was poor, and the landless peasants lived like cattle. Yet by a supreme act of will and a genius for organization the Hohenzollerns managed to create a Spartan military state whose well-drilled Army won one victory after another and whose Machiavellian diplomacy of temporary alliances with whatever power seemed the strongest brought constant additions to its territory.

There thus arose quite artificially a state born of no popular force nor even of an idea except that of conquest, and held together by the absolute power of the ruler, by a narrow-minded bureaucracy which did his bidding and by a ruthlessly disciplined army. Two thirds and sometimes as much as five sixths of the annual state revenue was expended on the Army, which became, under the King, the state itself. “Prussia,” remarked Mirabeau, “is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.”

And the state, which was run with the efficiency and soullessness of a factory, became all; the people were little more than cogs in the machinery. Individuals were taught not only by the kings and the drill sergeants but by the philosophers that their role in life was one of obedience, work, sacrifice and duty. Even Kant preached that duty demands the suppression of human feeling, and the Prussian poet Willibald Alexis gloried in the enslavement of the people under the Hohenzollerns. To Lessing, who did not like it, “Prussia was the most slavish country of Europe.”

> Germany had strongly militaristic culture long before and was pretty violent prior Nazi taking power. Its democracy was also very dysfunctional, had weak support among citizens

This is what I see when I like at the US. It may not be third reich levels, but compared tot he rest of the western world it is very militaristic and democratically dysfunctional.

It's much more militaristic than before 9/11. In the U.S., the military now is glorified, as is war and violence.

* Despite the military's lack of success in Afghanistan and extreme recklessness and failure in Iraq, the public trusts the military more than most other institutions.

* Politicians must say 'the greatest military in the world'; the military is glorified at sporting events and elsewhere. I attended a small college's graduation in a rural area. A few students were ROTC members;[0] the audience gave them a standing ovation for several minutes; no other graduates received anything like it.

* Politicians on the right, and to some extent the left, must openly demonstrate hyper-aggression and an embrace of war and violence in foreign policy. Diplomacy is mocked by some (and Trump is neutering the State Department). When is the last time you heard a U.S. politician mention "peace" as a goal and priority, or speak of the horrors of war?

* Trump has appointed members of the military as Secretary of Defense (which hasn't happened since WWII), Homeland Security, and as National Security Advisor. All are almost always civilian jobs, to maintain civilian control of the national security apparatus. Now people seek the military to run the government.

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[0] ROTC: Reserve Officers Training Corp: In return for scholarships, college students undergo military training in college and serve for a few years afterward (IIRC the details).

> Rereading that, it sounds very grim; but we have all the power we need in our hands to stop it and more, to do good.

Fundamentally I share that optimism. However, I am a bit worried that the main 'solution' that I hear about is some variation of 'remembering the past' and 'education'. The reason why this worries me is that 'remembering and learning from the past' is probably exactly what people have said throughout history and yet we still had WW2/the holocaust, relatively recently. What do we do when 'never again!' keeps happening?

I don't think the lesson is that learning from our past or being educated is not effective. So far at least in some regards we seem to be moving 'forward', however vague that statement is. I'm just worried that it's not effective enough.

Disgusting neo-nazi propaganda in the comment thread, of course.

Disgusting, but sociologically fascinating, too. And very valuable to keep around, in case anyone falls under the mistaken impression that the nazis were simply born evil.

One gets the impression that there is a relatively small amount of people that spends a lot of time looking for related comment threads to pollute.

It vastly exceeds even what you would expect from the 80-20 rule. I don't have a source for this, but I've read that about 0.7% of commenters are responsible for about 75% of the comments by volume, and they trend overwhelmingly negative.

That suggests that banning a small number of people would greatly improve most comment areas.

It's probably not that simple. They'd just get a new account, marked green of course, but still someone "completely different" as far as comment history is concerned. You banned the account, but not the person.

You could go further, by tracking the IP addresses that people post from, and banning new accounts from those IP addresses. But that's not foolproof, in an age of DHCP. It's also turning the hosting site into something that tracks you, which is a bit frightening.

Sure, but this is banning 101 - if it's trivial to create accounts then banning is ineffective. Similarly, if you don't check IPs then running a mail server becomes impossible as you drown in spam. And this is why so many places ban Tor.

(The extreme end is metafilter, who have maintained a sustained long-term stable friendly community by charging $5 to make an account. They don't ban many people - they don't have to. Difficult to replicate this!)

No, it's easy to replicate. Just build a community where it's worth $5 to people to be a part of.

Oh, yeah, I guess that is hard...

And there's no better proof of your claim than the two holocaust deniers in this very comment chain - both of them have very old accounts, with some very old comments, and then over a year of utter silence - and then today, they're both all "holocaust never happened".

reply to self:

Nevermind. The deniers are getting their comments flagged, which hides them... so either they had a year of utter silence, OR the last year's worth of comments were all bad enough to get removed.

Fascinating, either way.

You can turn on "showdead" in your profile and check which one it is.

With some (but not all that many) comments, and not very much karma. They're old enough to not appear as green, but they're little-used accounts.

My anecdotal observation is that in the last week or so, the extremist right-wing[0] trolls have returned to HN after being silent for a time, maybe since Trump's election and especially since the inauguration time.

First there were brand new accounts that posted trolling questions to otherwise intelligent discussions. Things like, 'how can we really predict the climate years in the future?' or 'maybe Putin really is an ally' - i.e., the old technique of raising vacuous, speculative, provocative questions, without contributing anything substantive. Then I saw older accounts doing it.

[0] To be clear, they have no more to do with the rest of people on the right than al Qaeda has to do with Islam. One is not a reflection on the other.

EDIT: Also, others are voting for them. For example, I can only wonder how this relatively bizarre comment (judgmental, I know, but a pretty safe judgment in this case) get voted to the top of a front-page thread?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13703286

It's simply another form of trolling. If they could get people to debate about the moon landing then they will pull out the same crap.

I disagree, for some of these people maybe, but plenty of them are legitimately Nazis who would happily staff an extermination camp. Moon landing conspiracy is relatively harmless, Nazism killed millions.

Nazism includes people who feel no need to deny the Holocaust which IMO shifts things around somewhat. Further, you notice people that are vocal not just those who believe something.

And yea, there are also Nazi trolls.

I disagree. I've known some of these people. They are sincere and thoughtful, it's just that they've got a severe case of bias that causes them to hold contradictory evidence to an absurdly high standard, while blindly accepting anything that agrees with them.

These people are used to being shouted down, banned, and publicly mocked, which just feeds into their persecution complex. They can be reasoned with, but it's laborious, unpleasant, and not really worth my time.

That's not to say there aren't quite a few regular trolls - but anecdotally, I don't think trolls are the majority.

> They are sincere and thoughtful, it's just that they've got a severe case of bias that causes them to hold contradictory evidence to an absurdly high standard, while blindly accepting anything that agrees with them.

This seems to be a recurring theme.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/23/14703472/cp...

"Once the war ended, Zeidel traveled overland before smuggling himself in the autumn of 1945 to what would become the State of Israel"

Well there's the Holocaust deniers on the one hand.

But then, it does no harm at all for the state of Israel to see a story like this appear just when it has decided to extend still further the settlements in the West bank.

If you're talking about the HN comment thread, then please don't make it worse by posting like this. Instead, the way to be a good community member is by flagging the comments you find egregious so that moderators have a chance to see them.

To flag a comment (assuming your account has > 30 karma), click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top.

Sorry, I didn't notice this. I was talking about the comment thread in the external website. I didn't specify because at the time the sleeper nazi accounts hadn't yet activated here.

> violent series of pogroms

> undertaken by the Czarist government

This is a very serious claim right here. Any concrete data on "Czarist government" undertaking pogroms?

The whole discourse right here reeks of 60's university left's "commies good, czars bad". This is when commies could murder the same number of people, off-war, on their not the most busy day, as the "Czarist government" during the whole early XX century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Rus... ?

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