Just a couple hours ago I watched Conspiracy. It's about the Wannsee Conference where the Nazi's finalized plans for the "final solution".

The casual nature of the "meeting" to decide the extermination of humans is beyond disturbing. I guess it's just easier to ignore when it's not your neck on the line. I wish I could say I would have done something back then, but I probably wouldn't have.

It's available to stream on Amazon,and free with Prime. Definitely worth watching.

I was on the Wannsee at an ev psych conference. Beautiful and creepy.

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2004/07/24/final_solution.html

Joseph Stalin said, "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million men a statistic."

I suppose each person feels powerless in the face of such horror that we just shut fown and accept the unthinkable as inevitable.

Ignored because they were Jews? Of course not.

No more than I think we enslaved Africans for generations all across two continents because they were black. No more than the meticulous murder of Armenians, Tutsis, Amerindians, homosexuals, North Koreans, etc. Nobody talked about what the Japanese did on a bigger scale either. Nobody talks about it here in the West now.

I think people view what happened to the Jews as unique because of how theatrical the whole thing was. Suits designed by Hugo Boss, nice cars, German accents, modernized Western society crumbling before a villain with a funny mustache.

We like to kill each other in tough times and mourn our depravity in better conditions. Don't let anyone convince you that most humans aren't nasty little chimps at the heart of it all. Keep your guns close people.

Look at all the slaughters going on today, that people are doing nothing about -- Darfur, Boko Haram, Syria. This country isn't taking in significant numbers of refugee.

It was because they were Jews, but that is not unique in history. Africans were slaves because they weren't like us. The Oriental Exclusion Act was possible because Asians were different. The Irish were "indentured servants" because they were a little more like us, I guess.

This is why I hate the official practice of classifying people by race. No good will come of it. But what do I know? I'm just an infidel.

Jews have been outsiders in countries they've lived in and other peoples who were slaughtered probably fit in that category, too.

The people slaughtered by Boko Haram are non-Muslims. The same goes for the Copts being slaughtered in Egypt and other Christians being killed in the Middle East. Horribly killed. Tortured and made to suffer. Slaughtering them often isn't enough.

When I was a child, I asked my dad if a holocaust could happen here. He answered "no". I believed that then. I don't believe it any more.

It's simple. Politicians are desperate for power. In our country, that requires election. Election requires votes.

Clever politicians the world over, and throughout history, understand that an effective way to win support is to divide us into categories, then play upon the timeless human emotions of greed, envy, and hate. You see that increasing in this country every day. While people cheer.

I think it's "all of the above" - Yes, because they were Jews. Yes, because of the Stalin quote. Yes, because we always want to turn a blind eye to this sort of thing. Things only changed when the camps were liberated and Allied soldiers saw the victims with their own eyes, but even that didn't keep the BBC from burying the famous documentary that included raw footage from the camps. It went uncompleted and unaired for decades.

I remember studying the question of why Allied bombers didn't bomb the rail lines (even as secondary targets when they were returning with extra bombs). There is no real answer/closure.

Perhaps some of the disbelief is a holdover from the (mostly) overstated propaganda from WWI.

You think that the annihilation of Jews can now happen in the U.S.? Let's not get carried away. What makes the German slaughter so unsettling was the assimilation of Jews into the country, and into France prior to the killing. They were fellow citizens in what was purportedly a highly civilized nation. The other slaughters mentioned were/are in the context of war and long standing violent ethnic/religious strife. And remember we finally intervened in the Balkan wars.

I think part of it was simply an inability to do anything about it for a good chunk of the war. Between June 4, 1940, when the Dunkirk evacuation was wrapped up, and D-Day on June 6, 1944, the Allies had absolutely nothing on the continent. Bombing has been mentioned, but most of the concentration camps were located to the east, and well away from the industrial centers that were the Allies' main bombing targets. Until about mid-1943, Bomber Command and the USAAF had little ability to reach into Germany, and heavy losses when they did attempt such discouraged any deviations from the planned mission.

It wasn't until late 1944, when ground troops started making their way into Germany, that the Allies were able to start addressing the concentration camps. Once they got there, they liberated many of them in fairly short order, but by then most of the damage was already done.

The Jews had a longer history of violent/ethnic strife directed towards them. This isn't the first time this sort of thing happened to them. They also weren't considered assimilated even if you and I do. Such a concept did not exist and does not exist in most of the world even if you are the same religion. Just because they weren't violent doesn't mean you need to be violent to get attacked. Especially when a war was going to happen anyways and people are all worked up like little chimps. The only thing making this unique was the factory like efficiency in killing them.

Plus just look at the Tutsi and the Hutu. Partly happened because Belgians assigned them racial documents. Or the Khmer Rouge.

But when you do protest people involved in terrible policy decisions that result in the deaths of countless human beings, you're low-life scum.

So shut the hell up and stop bothering the important people.

Not because they were Jews. Just because people tend to ignore stuff that doesn't immediately affect them. Especially back then, they didn't have the media we have now, they didn't have images from the wars streaming into their homes 24/7.

As for the Germans, they were scared.

My FIL's father went for a walk after Kristalnacht and commented to his friend, "This is insane". A woman overheard him and started yelling at him, "What do you mean insane, how dare you question the Fuhrer, give me your name, I'm going to report you!" She followed them several blocks, threatening them, until they managed to shake her.

The reality is, when confronted with horror, very few of us are heroes willing to sacrifice our families for the greater good. We all like to think we'd be heroic, but when pushed comes to shoved we protect our closest loved ones.

As for stuff happening in far-off lands, its abstract and doesn't seem real. There is so mch crap going down everywhere that you can't get involved anywhere.

But the fact is even during WWII, people did do heroic things. Let's not forget the Mieps of the world in our anger and disappointment in those who did nothing.

"The reality is, when confronted with horror, very few of us are heroes willing to sacrifice our families for the greater good"

Stern has this great story about how his great-grandfather was granted asylum here in the U.S.....and then proceeded to dump his family back in Europe to marry a woman he met here. They were all killed by Hitler except two of his daughters because they managed to escape on their own.

Yet the article, which referred to "the greatest massacre in the world's history", was published on the fifth page of a six-page issue. And it got no traction elsewhere.

What traction was necessary or relevant?

Britain and the US, in 1942, were already 100% committed to overthrowing Nazi Germany, with unconditional surrender the only proffered option, and were putting their entire economic might into war production for the purpose of invading the Reich.

Would a sternly worded letter to Hitler about the Final Solution have helped, on top of that, maybe?

The USA has already decided to strip-search its own population for wanting to travel on an airplane, its schools already contain police and some state photo IDs are prohibited from use to enter Federal property. Hmm.

Every Generation thinks they are above this.

The round up of the Jews in Germany didn't happen overnight.
It was incremental, like putting the proverbial frog into a pot of cold water, and then slowly turning up the heat.

Hitler told them what his plan was. A lot of the Jews in Germany who had the means took off for better parts of the world in the thirties.

Einstein was one of many. He lost his university job because Jews were barred from teaching positions.
The ones who stayed either didn't believe Hitler was capable of doing what he said he was going to do, or those who didn't have the means to leave.

Because of this, far fewer German Jews were killed in the Holocaust than Jews from countries that were quickly overrun by the Nazi army's blitzkrieg.
Poland was particularly hard hit. They were caught between the Russians and the Nazis.

To NicoleK:

Can't find the true story online, but according to Terry Deary's juvenile book on WWII (from the "Horrible Histories" series - for those who don't know, Germans were forbidden to listen to Moscow Radio) this happened back then:

"How's this for gratitude?

"A South German woman was listening to Moscow Radio (and heard them say 'Hans Krupp is also a prisoner');

"She rushed next door to tell the news - 'It's your son Hans - he's a prisoner but alive'

"'Wonderful news! I was so sure he'd died...how did you find out?'

"' I heard it on Moscow Radio!'

"'Traitor! I'll report you!'

"'But...but...'

"And the good neighbor was arrested!"

Not much to add to all the various comments - truth in all of them! But, I'll add this:

NicoleK, yes, let's not forget the Mieps.

I remember when in grade school we were given the choice to read Anne Frank's Diary or some other book; most of us boys weren't going to read a "diary." That was so girly! No thanks.

Actually, I'm kind of glad that I didn't because if I had I wouldn't have considered reading the "unabridged" version published 50 years later. This version includes many passages (e.g., "Mother's so stupid!") that her father, showing respect for his late wife, didn't include in the original first publication. And while I can certainly understand why he removed them I'm glad that they decided to re-publish the original and put those passages back in. They simply make Anne all that more like a typical teenager. I highly recommend reading it.

But, this brings me back to NicoleK's comment about Miep. Miep Gies also wrote a book - Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family - which is also a great read that I highly recommend.

Without giving too much away, one of the things that struck me as a simple act, yet was a rather heavy toll on Miep was how she spent hours and hours in lines to buy food for those in hiding. She, out of fear, didn't buy all the food at one place. For example, when she needed to get potatoes for the 8 people she couldn't buy that much without someone noticing; So, she would wait in line at one place and buy enough potatoes for 2 or 3 people, take those home, then go wait in another line at a store in another part of town to buy potatoes for 2 or 3 more people, etc. She also comments in her book that some of the store keepers seemed to know what was going on and would slip her a little extra. She also mentioned that she would see some of the same folks in the various lines as well. At first she was afraid that her secret would be out; but then, she realized that they, no doubt, were like her buying extra for folks in hiding.

Such a simple act (or should I say acts? plural, since it was so many lines and so many hours) but it was helpful, even if in a small way. And, it was also a simple act that could get you arrested. So, can we really blame many for not getting involved?

I'd also like Miep's book to be included in school curriculums with Anne Frank's Diary to be read together so that future generations will know how civilized people behave in bad times.

It might have been ignored in an effort to cover up for socialism, because that continues to be covered up today. To this day almost everyone is ignorant of, or fails to mention, the greater number of people slaughtered by the socialists Stalin and Mao. And others who only mention the Germans, call them "Nazis" and "Fascists" even though they did not call themselves that; they called themselves socialists (see the work of the historian Dr. Rex Curry). In other words, people today (probably including this article and most of the commenters) ignore the socialist Wholecaust (of which the Holocaust was a part) under the socialists Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.

Tiffany, I can assure you that Amy and most of the commenters here are fully aware of the atrocities of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and his ilk. Someone, I forget who, said on a comment thread a few weeks ago that socialism is by far the deadliest idea that humans have ever come up with.