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The Place Where You Are Standing

By lex, on February 27th, 2012

A photographic comparison of Auschwitz-Birkenau, then and now.

Some buildings remain, some are gone, but what’s really missing is the people. All those people.

Update: Thank heavens that our Republic is immune to such hatreds.

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February 27th, 2012 | Tags: | Category: History

24 comments to The Place Where You Are Standing

  • SK1
    February 27, 2012 at 9:29 am

    Man’s inhumanity to man.

    The Holocaust illustrates the consequences of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on a society. It forces us to examine the responsibilities of citizenship and confront the powerful ramifications of indifference and inaction.

    - Congressman Tim Holden of Pennsylvania

  • Kris, in New England
    February 27, 2012 at 10:09 am

    Nor do I believe that Obama is aware that an organization that claims close ties to his administration is saying such bigoted things about AIPAC…

    With due respect to Mr. Dershowitz – he’s delusional. Of course Obama knows and he just doesn’t care.

    Because if it’s not about The One Who Won, then it’s not worth acknowledging.

    • Justthisguy
      February 28, 2012 at 12:14 am

      I dislike AIPAC somewhat, certainly not nearly as much as I despise those people, Nazis, Ukrainians, Polacks, whatever, who murdered all those Jews, just for being Jews. AIPAC is a foreign- influenced subversive organization, acting to help a foreign country, and has lobbied to get us into silly wars which cost us lots of blood and treasure, and did us no good that I can see.. Being a Gentile, I have no particular feeling for the people in the State of Israel, aside from wishing them well. I do not believe we should subsidize them and help them in war, as we have been doing.

      Nor should we continue to subsidize Egypt, or any of those other silly Mohammedan states in that part of the world.

  • virgil xenophon
    February 27, 2012 at 10:30 am

    My Father was part of the advance contingent of 42nd Inf Div troops that liberated Dachau. (there is a plaque there commemorating the 42nd’s role) I still remember (and still have) those photos he took of the survivors , the piles of dead, but-as-of-yet-un-disposed-of bodies and the conditions. Bad enough in grainy B&W–must have been ghastly in “living” color–plus the smells–he could never forget the smell..

  • marc
    February 27, 2012 at 10:32 am

    true and true — yet even still –

    Consider that more people were killed in the last century as a result of class warfare than racially based oppression. Mao + 3/4 Stalin + Pol Pot = more killed than Hitler. And I point that out as someone who had family in those pictures on the BBC site.

    My sense is that much of the communist class warfare/murder was to eliminate any remote possibility of competition with the governing dictatorship.

    Of course I don’t think we’re close to such extremes here, and I’m not sure that there’s a connection between that kind of class warfare and that the kind bandied about today, but because of the sheer tens of millions killed, shouldn’t we at least be careful of our rhetoric? Or at least as self-aware as we are correctly enjoined to be with our ethnicity-based rhetoric?

    • virgil xenophon
      February 27, 2012 at 10:59 am

      @marc/

      The ground-breaking/breakthrough seminal work by French academics “The Black Book of Communism” which delves in detail deeply into the numbers and the rationale, has an entire chapter on the psychological reasons the West obsesses over the Holocaust deaths while ignoring the greater human disaster Communism foisted off onto humanity and the academic and social respectablity that Marxism/Communism still enjoys in academic/”intellectual” circles (think the Che T-shirt phenomenon) as opposed to all things Nazi/Hitler being absolutely persona non-grata in “polite society.” A book EVERYONE should own.

  • Spencer
    February 27, 2012 at 11:45 am

    I visited Dachau in the mid 90s. It left me very sad and depressed. The ovens and the gas chamber are still there.

    • Quartermaster
      February 27, 2012 at 5:09 pm

      I was there in the late 60s. The crematorium was there, but there was never a gas chamber at Dachau. It has long been acknowledged that Dachau was not a killing camp.

      • virgil xenophon
        February 27, 2012 at 5:58 pm

        You’re right, QM, Dachau was not a killing camp per se, but many thousands died of disease, malnutrition and overwork. As I mentioned above, when Dad and the 42nd arrived there were still many hundreds of bodies piled around that had died from “natural” causes that the Germans had not yet had time to dispose of via the camp crematorium..

        • Spencer
          February 27, 2012 at 6:41 pm

          Interesting. I swore there was a room attached to the crematorium that had “showers” in the ceiling that were really gas outlets.

          If google “Dachau Gas Champber” there seems to be several sites indicating gas chambers were constructed but possibly never used depending on who to believe. Including one disguised as a shower. The pictures of piles of bodies waiting to be incinerated suggests gas was used.

          http://www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/

          • Quartermaster
            February 28, 2012 at 3:57 pm

            Those “showers” were not there when we were there in the late 60s. It has depended on holocaust politics as to whether they were there or not. But Dachau never had “gas chambers.”

            Towards the end of the war, they were overwhelmed with the number of inmates dying. They didn’t have mass graves, and the crematorium was unable to keep up.

        • Justthisguy
          February 27, 2012 at 7:16 pm

          Yep, even if they didn’t set out to murder every last one of the folks they caught, they sure weren’t very careful to preserve their lives. The people who ran Germany back then didn’t care much for non-Germans of any kind, and cared very little even for their fellow Germans who got athwartships with them. This is one of the reasons I despise racial collectivism, even though I think I’m a bit of a White Nationalist. Charles Lindbergh kinda liked Germans, having only met them socially. Alvin York really disliked Germans, having met them in combat. Alvin disliked Charles, srsly.

          • Justthisguy
            February 27, 2012 at 8:03 pm

            P.s. As Neal Stephenson had the Funkmaat in the U-Boot say in “Cryptonomicon”, “… the wisdom of the the Fuehrer’s plan to find everyone on the planet who is not German, and kill them…”

        • Quartermaster
          February 28, 2012 at 3:54 pm

          Yep. Typhus was a huge killer in the camps that gave Fritz constant problems. Poor nutrition as well. The number of deaths overwhelmed the camp guards towards the end of the war who were mainly troops that could fight on the front lines anymore.

          • Quartermaster
            February 28, 2012 at 3:58 pm

            could “not” fight…

            I skip too many words when I type and don’t catch it in proof reading until after I post, alas.

  • Bou
    February 27, 2012 at 4:26 pm

    It is haunting to look at those pictures and to realize, every single one of those people were murdered. Every man, woman, child, all of them.

    There is a holocaust survivor in town that I have gotten to know. Until last year, when he struggled to get around, he would visit my kids’ school, to the 7th graders, and talk to them about it, bringing pictures of Auschwitz where his father was murdered, and pictures of his cousins. He would spend time explaining to the kids… putting it in perspective. “Imagine, six of your schools full of children, every day, all of the children dying, for a year. Day after day, all those children dying.” The kids understood and it made an impression.

    I wonder what this world would be like if all those people were not murdered. Would we have a cure for cancer?

    • Babs
      February 28, 2012 at 6:35 am

      Bou – I have asked myself that many times. Would the world be a better place if the Jews had not been killed? My only answer is that Jews were and are to this day intellectually superior to other white races. When the pogram started they just couldn’t believe that they were slated for extermination. They “over thought” it and that was their downfall. In short, their intellectual incapacity to understand what was actually going on.
      I think, based on the number of patents and various other factors incontravertable regarding Israel, that yes, the world would be a better place had the Jews not be slaughtered in death camps.

      • Babs
        February 28, 2012 at 7:39 am

        In addition, I can understand why Israel is armed to the teeth and every man and woman must stand up for their existance.
        The European Jews were pacifists. This did not serve them well…
        There are only something like 16 million Jews on the planet today.
        Never again.

        pizzaIDF.com Check it out and tell Menachem I sent you.

  • Justthisguy
    February 27, 2012 at 6:26 pm

    I remember reading Primo Levi’s account of his experiences there. “The Drowned and the Saved”, I think it was called. It really messed with his mind, to the extent of maybe accounting for his suicide late in life.

    One thing I took away from the book, was to make sure you have shoes, shoes being more important than food. If you have shoes, you can go out and get food. As a guy who has exactly one pair of shoes at the moment, I take this to heart.

  • TG McCoy
    February 27, 2012 at 9:00 pm

    My late Father-in-Law was part of the Dachau Liberation too.
    He was in a Tank Battalion. When he came home had pictures.
    He was very angry when some “Aryan Nations” type got into an argument with him over whether the Holocaust was real.
    Had to keep him off of the Kid,(he was 22) Carl was 78,
    This was a local bar, and there were witnesses,if they were
    alone I’m not sure I’d stopped Carl..

  • TIM CARROLL
    February 28, 2012 at 8:21 am

    I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau went I was in Krakow back in Oct/Nov 2002. I just remember standing at the wire looking at all the chimneys that were still standing, then walking in to the prison camp and getting chills from it — still do even as I write this.

  • Chockblock
    February 28, 2012 at 11:38 am

    Without class warfare, and antisemitism, the left has nothing. Not a blessed thing to offer. The environmental movement is stalling as the science settles against their crazy agenda. Mostly they embraced it as a way to sell socialism and greenwash class warfare (yes “environmental racism” is a word in their lexicon).

    Out left hates Israel and Jews for the same reasons that the Nazis did. They just have better PR.

    • Quartermaster
      February 28, 2012 at 4:02 pm

      What is astounding is given the left’s antisemitism, the Jewish population of the US still votes overwhelmingly for leftist candidates. The stupidity of Jews boggles the mind and belies their supposed intelligence.
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