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Comment by cholmon | Hacker News Reader

> Dushman has said he was unaware Auschwitz existed during the war, only learning about the atrocities carried out there in the years after.

It's always jarring to me, with my modern/simplistic/naive perspective of these major historical events, to consider that the people who lived during and/or participated in these events didn't understand full extent of what they were seeing or what was happening. It totally makes sense, academically...fog of war, slow/spotty spread of information, determining what's propaganda and what's not.

But still, there's something mind-blowing to me about a soldier mowing down the fence at Auschwitz with a tank, but not knowing what the place was.

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> to consider that the people who lived during and/or participated in these events didn't understand full extent of what they were seeing or what was happening.

No internet. Television was in its infancy (meaning few even had a television). There were no "24-hour news channels" anywhere. News arrived via newspaper, film short before a movie in a movie theater, or a brief "news update" on a radio station. Information flowed (worldwide) at a snails pace as compared to how quickly we learn of some happening on the other side of the globe today.

There are atrocities happening on the other side of the globe right now and many still don’t know.

It makes me think that some truths may take years, decades to really come out. Things we read today in the news might only become clear in the future, specially politics and such.

This has definitely always been true.

I have never been interested in “breaking news” because it is usually pretty impossible to give it context. Reading the news from a few days or even weeks past helps make clear what matters amd what does not.

There is a theory that the Nazis were just a sub group of a much older and secret group. This group empowered Hitler to become a major distraction while they took control of the worlds economy, shipping and communications in the background. This theory supposed that nazis were completely invented purposely as a group of villains performing evil that no one can ignore. The theory also suggests that the jews were chosen because it was known that it would evoke the largest response from the Christian nations

Can you cite any of this, or at least give the name of the supposed group?

You mean the least response? "it would evoke the largest response from the Christian nations" Christian/American/European leaders didn't care at all about jews.

The rock you are hiding under should be analyzed for potential breakthroughs in stealth and soundproofing technology. Christian nations are the biggest supporters of the Jewish ethnostate Israel.

now yes, not during WW2.

It does make sense that a soldier didn’t know. On the other hand, the American military knew of Auschwitz and Birkenau, had the opportunity to bomb and incapacitate it, and didn’t apparently at the request of FDR to direct all munitions toward winning the war. His administration was implored by escapees and refugees. One of the greatest tragedies of many during the war.

Wouldn’t bombing the camp kill the prisoners? Or are you suggesting that they could have successfully bombed and “incapacitated” the camp without killing the prisoners? How exactly?

Destroying the gas chambers would probably save thousands.

Well, giving the accuracy of the bombings at the time it wasn't simply possible.

Objectives (such as bridges) were often missed by hundreds of meters.

We're Monday morning quarterbacking, but I wonder if destroying the railroad lines into the camps would've been effective. Less chance for a missed bomb to kill camp prisoners, lots of opportunity to hit the tracks.

I think the same trains or tracks that carried prisoners carried the (paltry) food for the camps, so I guess it's a trolley problem still.

Destroying rail lines is even harder and generally temporary. They're fairly easily repaired within a few days, given material and labor.

I agree. Hence the scale of the bombings in WW2. But the camp operated multiple years. Maybe there was a price to pay but in the long run, maybe it would have been worth taking a chance. We will never now, it’s a maybe game.

Optimist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_Report:

“Of those aircraft recorded as attacking their target, only one in three got within 5 mi (8.0 km).”

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/worldwar2/thea... has data for later years. It got better, but stayed bad.

https://www.airforcemag.com/article/1008daylight/:

“Bombing accuracy was terrible. The average circular error in 1943 was 1,200 feet, meaning that only 16 percent of the bombs fell within 1,000 feet of the aiming point”

Babi Yar and the hundreds of similar tragedies show that the Germans had no trouble killing Jews using more conventional means.

It might have helped but it’s far from a certainty.

That’s right, and 200000 in Warsaw. It’s not certain, however, approximately 1.1 million people died in gas chambers. Let’s not forget about the atrocities of those who were not sent to the gas chamber. It’s all ifs and maybes but maybe the camp would have to be abandoned if mass gassing wasn’t possible.

Plenty of concentration camps didn't have gas chambers.

The tools of killing were bullets, disease, and starvation.

The Nazis ran out of many things, towards the end of the war. But never bullets.

Edit: I have no idea why people are doing the drive by downvote thing here? Maybe you think I'm denying that gas chambers were real?

No. I'm saying there were concentration camps without them, where prisoners were mass-murdered as I described above. That statement is not controversial.

I don't think destroying the gas chambers would have been enough to stop Auschwitz.

The best payoff would have been the train tracks running into the camps.

But how many planes would this have taken? How many would have been lost? No loss was affordable during most of the war; industrial production won it for the Allies as much as anything did.

There were no easy decisions to make.

The Americans strafed the concentration camp my grandfather was working at in 1944 from air -- my grandpa still carries a scar from that. It was definitely not an easy decision to attack or not attack these camps.

I think the general "hope" was to bomb the train tracks so that they couldn't keep bringing trainloads of people to the camps. This could be done without bombing barracks of people.

My grandfather used to tell me how one time he "flew" with his "bed" when he was there ;

How he woke up safe on his bed in the middle of the courtyard ; There were walls when he had gone to sleep before, but the walls weren't there anymore.

When I became older, I learned that fifty prisoners in his barrack had died this night.

There were probably some who wanted to try something targeted/infrastructural to avoid that, but there were also some advocates (including Jewish ones) who explicitly supported bombing the camps, including their occupants, because even if they died, it would be net-life-saving as future waves of trains would no longer have a place to go.

PBS's "Secrets of the Dead" series did an episode about this last year: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/bombing-auschwitz-wnrzgw/47...

FDR's inactivity during the war, regarding the Jews is a very large, black stain on his legacy.

Not necessarily. The international Red Cross was famously invited to tour Auschwitz[1] where they were given a carefully staged show of how well their prisoners were being treated. Plus prisoners would have been in danger.

[1]https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresiens...

That was Theresienstadt, not Auschwitz. Theresienstadt was specifically staged as a "model camp" for propaganda purposes.

You are right. My bad.

had the opportunity to bomb and incapacitate it, and didn’t

War is not a video game.

Bombing an enemy concentration camp, especially with WWII-era weapons, would mean killing the people you're trying to save.

Old issue. See [1]

"The first proposal to bomb Auschwitz was made on 16 May 1944 by a Slovak rabbi." That was 3 weeks before D-Day (June 6, 1944).

Eisenhower's policy was to defeat Germany, and not get distracted. He had planned to bypass Paris, which wasn't on the route to Berlin.[2] (De Gaulle went off-script and liberated Paris ahead of schedule, but that's another story.) Eisenhower was trying to hold an alliance with different goals together. All the allies were agreed on "defeat Germany", but there were other national goals. Britain was concerned about preserving its empire, for example. To hold the alliance together, Eisenhower focused on "win the war" above all else.

The person this article is about was in the Red Army. "One of just 69 men in his 12,000-strong division to survive the war, Mr Dushman suffered serious injuries during the conflict". The USSR had about 20 million casualties in WWII. Never forget that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate

[2] https://www.historynet.com/the-generals-who-brought-paris-ba...

The "Slovak Rabbi" was Michael Ber Weissmandel. If FDR and co. had demonstrated even a fraction of his determination to save his fellow Jews, many hundreds of thousands could have been saved. That "not getting distracted" is an absolutely terrible excuse. If FDR had acted, the almost 1 million Hungarian jews still living might not have perished.

It's questionable how much it would have inhibited their genocide capabilities, it almost certainly would have killed the people in the camps and it was only an option late in the war. Prioritizing strategic targets to end the war & regime faster is defensible.

Well, oftentimes people don't -want- to know or believe the truth, too. We've seen ample evidence of that recently, with one noted politician even flat out telling his followers a couple years ago that "what you are seeing and reading is not what is happening".

How much do you know about what is going on in North Korea? The little you do know is probably due to it being politically expedient for the US to trot them out as the evil empire.

Well, we could obviously just ask the North Korean emigres who work in our countries. Surely they will tell us the truth? Or the many North Korean tourists who visit Europe and North America? Or indeed the vast numbers of North Korean folks visiting around the world for work purposes?

Oh, wait. We can't ask any of those people, because they seem not to exist. Is that because North Korea is so wealthy that no one wants to leave to work elsewhere? Because North Korea is such a utopia that they don't even want to travel overseas? Because their industry is so advanced and self-sufficient that they need no trade deals with others?

You don't have to believe everything you read about North Korea, but to dismiss it all as US propaganda without offering a significant countervailing body of evidence is, well, silly.

Sorry, I was unclear.

While I do definitely mistrust US propaganda on North Korea, I don't doubt at all that it's a terrible place to live in every possible way, I have read several books by defectors (and visited numerous communist and post-communist countries).

My point was more that the reason we have heard about it is mostly because that suits the Western agenda. Otherwise very few would have any idea about what is going on there. Just like few Americans or even Europeans know much about Transdniestria, a present day communist state in Europe. Or Bhutan, a seemingly very happy little country.

Even in the days of Wikipedia and internet news, most people don't know much more about the world than what is convenient for Western media to tell us.

All this to say that it's inconceivable that people outside Germany could be pretty ignorant about what was going on in the late 30s.

Part of it may also be that people don't want to know. Take the ongoing Uyghur genocide right now, but most are ignoring it. Why isn't it an emergency and headline news every day?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide

Because it's China and the ruling class in America decided it would not be in their interests to press them on the issue. So they spread propaganda to dismiss it as a Conspiracy Theory. Which is the mental short circuit the media uses to shut down any further thought on the matter.

they're not ignoring it, plenty of countries have been recognising it. the issue is that much of the available information isn't exactly reliable, a lot of the research comes from one single person (an ultra-christian extremist), and plenty of the people who have been detained are leaving from the front door, unlike the armenians in 1895-1925 and the jews in 1943-1945. mosques are still open and there are plenty of videos of 2021 eid al fitr in xinjiang.

not saying "there is nothing going on there" and "those incarcerations are complete lies" but the whole thing is fishy, especially considering that there are political motives behind screaming bloody murder – for comparison, there is literally zero western pressure on israel on the occupation issue, and the EU is blatantly ignoring the insane conditions migrants are subjected to on the other side of the EU barriers.

We have plenty of data to prove the camps are real, birth rates among Muslims in the country fell through the floor. People disappear in the night, cities that were once heavy Uighur communities are now devoid of them. We've intercepted shipments of Uighur Muslim hair, etc. It's not to the extreme level of the Holocaust with mass executions, but it is real.

China has done a great job of making people frame it as the US/EU lying and the "whataboutism" in your last paragraph. This is also a tactic that Putin loves to use. Using Western shortcomings to justify their own tyranny.

> It's not to the extreme level of the Holocaust with mass executions, but it is real.

Those may well be actual death camps. The stated amount of people disappeared (2m+) far exceeds just how much people you can physically fit into those camps. They may fit few hundred thousands, but not millions.

It's possible, but I would bet most are scattered about doing slave labor, while also having been sterilized. So they get free labor and can effectively kill new generations. That to me seems like the most likely CCP method than mass executions and has a much smaller paper trail/footprint.

let's first address the heart of the matter, as i've said in a few comments: i think it would be great to have an explanation from china on what the hell is actually going on in xinjiang, and if those claims are correct, i obviously think that policy is atrocious. it's still not a genocide, of course, as there is no planned extermination. it's not just "not to the extreme level of the holocaust". it just isn't a genocide. it doesn't have to be a genocide to be despicable.

on the data: if by "we" you mean adrian zenz then you're out of luck when it comes to quality. i'd like to see better sources than someone who thinks he's in a mission from god like he's the blues brothers. china hasn't done "a great job" at framing the west for lying otherwise there wouldn't be a wikipedia page and we wouldn't be discussing this on hacker news. the sad reality is that china doesn't give a shit about its reputation abroad, which is why many of the rebuttals to those claims are in chinese. one is here: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/13029926735409111... – it's by the chinese state media so one can still claim they're lying.

on the "cities that were once heavy uyghur communities ..." as i mentioned above: kashgar still has a lot of uyghurs. they go to their mosques and so on.

what is true, however, is that china is encouraging resettlement of han chinese (they've been doing it for decades), for the sole purpose of making the uyghurs a minority in their own land. this is something that personally i don't like, but (here comes the whataboutism) i have not seen a single piece of criticism when this happened literally everywhere else, minus of course when it was accompanied by planned extermination, which only applies to anatolia's christian minorities, as the jews were already a small minority in the locations that were affected by the deportations.

> and the EU is blatantly ignoring the insane conditions migrants are subjected to on the other side of the EU barriers

What would you propose to do?

this is the same question that china asks when confronted with the uyghur problem. they believe they are fighting terrorism and extremism and those camps are (part of) the solution. we can disagree with them – and if the extreme claims about those camps are correct, then i do disagree with them.

on the EU issue: there isn't one single solution since all the cases are different. a few come to mind. i would not pay blood money to morocco and libya to "keep them at bay" because the EU can't just champion human rights at home and then fund concentration camp-like establishments outside of its borders – we are not funding the ones in xinjiang, we are funding the ones in the libyan litoral. a way more efficient refugee processing scheme with the participation of everyone else would be ethically better. much as i disliked him, matteo renzi put it very well for the eastern european extremists: no refugees, no money. on an EU level i'd also crack down on pushbacks (such as the ones happening in spain and in greece), where the carrot should be a better refugee distribution.

let's not forget that europe's exploitation caused this problem, it's also on us to help people and figure out a solution.

the Uighurs aren't a problem though (unless your problem is that they aren't ethnically Han chineses) they are people living in their homes in their own country

the "uyghur problem" for china is that there is an ethnic minority that is substantially poorer than the average, worse educated, less integrated and some of which has been involved in terrorist attacks. this is the same thing that france calls "separatism". they use a better word but it's inevitably about muslims.

as i have said a thousand times though, i don't think they're approaching this "problem" the right way.

You are participating in the denial when you make statements like this. Let's say we start at our most charitable to the ruling party: there's no work camps, Uyghurs are treated fairly, paid a decent wage. Why then are the compounds, which we can see from the sky, off-limits to human rights observers? Why are these complexes expanding at an alarming rate?

I expect evidence. I do not get upset because it is the fashion to do so. If someone calls me a liar and demands proof I didn't mislead them, I do my best to display evidence in my defense. All that the CCP offers is threats to other sovereign nations.

There is a pattern of behavior from the CCP which indicates duplicity and untruthfulness from the destruction of viral lab samples in Wuhan, to entire fishing fleets going dark off sovereign waters. Every day we receive more of these reports of bad behavior. If China wants us to believe them, they need to start producing evidence. Let observers in. Show the world.

there are a few rhetorical tricks here. what am i denying exactly? the genocide? yes i am. it's not a genocide. there isn't a planned extermination of uyghurs going on. there have been planned exterminations of armenians from anatolia and jews from europe.

on the other hand: am i denying the existence of fishy "re-education camps" targeting one ethnic group and one only, where they are brought in under very opaque circumstances? no, i am not denying that.

if you want a very long read with some context behind some of those claims, here's one: https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/education/xinjiang

there are a bunch of things there, a full timeline of the "conflict", a couple of articles debunking both poor google maps journalism and a few poorly-made BBC & vice docs on the matter.

there's also the fact that some of the "punishments" against the uyghurs are forcing children to go to school, to mandarin-speaking public ones even, which is the same policy most countries in the world adopt (a recent request in france to partially allow schooling in catalan in the region of perpignan has been rejected). there are some claims that state-funded xinjiang schools are even bilingual but i haven't dug enough on it.

i won't comment on the wuhan issue because i don't really know enough about it, but as someone who is born in an island with plenty of US bases i laugh at everyone claiming china is "flexing their muscles" with their navy.

to be clear: nobody approaching any of those bases gets allowed in, just like in the "xinjiang camps". does this excuse china? no, it doesn't, but we should probably be fair in our judgment.

> Why then are the compounds, which we can see from the sky, off-limits to human rights observers? Why are these complexes expanding at an alarming rate?

Can you prove that this refutation of those satellite images is false? Let's remember that there were satellite photos of WMDs before the Iraq War also. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1208288.shtml

> Let observers in. Show the world.

According to China many observers have come, and there is an open invitation for more to come as well: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1180917.shtml

Do you have evidence that this is false?

The Palestinian, Pakistani, and Syrian ambassadors to China have commented on camera about what they observed in Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ebeGipO6-gU?t=490

Do you have evidence that they are lying? Which Muslim-majority countries or non-Western-aligned Muslim interest groups have condemned China for human rights abuses in Xinjiang?

Your journalist sources are from the Global Times, "part of a broader set of Chinese state media outlets that constitute the Chinese government's propaganda apparatus." [1]

> The Palestinian, Pakistani, and Syrian ambassadors to China have commented on camera about what they observed in Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ebeGipO6-gU?t=490

There is every indication that these are sanitized media tours. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Times

[2] https://wokeglobaltimes.com/aac16063149c4e37a8e3ee58066c4837...

> Your journalist sources are from the Global Times, "part of a broader set of Chinese state media outlets that constitute the Chinese government's propaganda apparatus."

Right, and the Western claims all stem from people or organizations connected to the US state department or intelligence apparatus. These claims are propagated by the same bastions of journalistic truth which stoked popular fervor in the run-up to the Iraq War and every other unjustified US foreign coup or war (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony).

or, worse, someone who is a fellow at the "victims of communism memorial foundation", like it's not a completely bogus entity. literally any article on the topic this week (and plenty before) has him as the only source.

I don't know what you're trying to do here as you appear to believe Wikipedia (and its citations) is trustworthy enough to source for your own arguments but not for mine.

Global Times is an organ under the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP. There is no controversy of its origins or whose authority it acts. Given that no newspaper can be wholly privately-owned in China, conflicts of interest are unavoidable.

Did I dispute that? Of course it’s going to present the Chinese perspective. My point is there’s just as much conflict of interest with US corporate media. As a matter of historical record, there is no hard separation between the US corporate elite and the elite of the US state and intelligence apparatus.

I don’t think Wikipedia is objective in any way on geopolitics. I don’t think that’s possible. My point was simply that some geopolitical facts are so indisputable that even Wikipedia admits them (of course this only tends to happen once the US has gotten what it wants). You have to decide whether you’re going to reckon with those facts or just talk more about sources. At the end of the day that’s a cover for not having any hard evidence.

So in summary your argumentation rests on the case that Western media is corrupted by American interests. At the same time you admit that the CCP manipulates their own media to use as propaganda but you prefer to believe those vehicles, from a single nation rather than a collective of media across multiple cultures because all of them are under the fold of American influence.

It sounds like a major conspiracy.

You are not wrong; the Muslim's silence on this is deafening.

> the Muslim's silence on this is deafening.

Which Muslim?

I mean, Muslim countries and Muslim NGOs and the like, the same people who were making the noise when Israel was fighting with HAMAS.

> Dushman has said he was unaware Auschwitz existed during the war, only learning about the atrocities carried out there in the years after.

Germany was USSR's ally in their planned occupation of Europe, which fortunately never happened.

USSR spent the remaining 45 years of its existence erasing the fact Union-Germany military alliance from the history.

Germany also decided between China and Japan and chose Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-German_cooperation_(1926%...

Quite strange to see Chinese in German uniforms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-German_cooperation_(1926%...

> Germany was USSR's ally in their planned occupation of Europe, which fortunately never happened.

This sentence comes up a lot and I've never seen it fail as an indicator of either ignorance or Nazi apologism

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