U.N. Prisoner Boxcars in U.S.A.

[Jim Beaux]

Around the time of WWI, my grandmother, a Polish Jew, was living above a tavern with her mother, sisters and brother. Their father had left for the U.S. in order to earn enough money for the rest of the family to follow.

One night her mother was boiling a chicken for dinner when the tavern keeper snuck upstairs and warned that there were drunken German soldiers downstairs making plans to come up with intent to rape and kill. My g grandmother bundled up the children, (my grandmother couldnt have been over the age of 5) grabbed the half cooked chicken and, with the Germans shooting at them, fled to a nearby river and hid. After things seemed to settle down the family began to eat the chicken; but the chicken needed salt. So my g grandmother snuck back to the tavern to get the salt!

The notion of risking life for something as outrageous as salt speaks volumes about how these people had become acclimated to the risks of death.

My grandmother to the day she died remembered that terrifying, cold, dark night, hearing the bullets whizzing by & then eating half raw chicken on the river bank.

The immediate family made it to the U.S. and all led successful lives, but the fate of many of the extended family remain a mystery. When I watch documentaries of the holocaust and see the mass of humanity being led to the ovens I focus on the individuals and wonder if that person was one of my family.

[mamabearCali]

I think the germans had mostly been disarmed though by that point.....what if those same scared townspeople had had rifles and knowing that atrocities were taking place had sniped the guards, and freed the people? What if the ex-military had been taking out the locomotives to the trains that were hauling people away with IED's. What if every SS officer had to be afraid that with his next round up he would be on the wrong end of a bullet.....I think things might have shaken out different than they did. You see, as long as we as a people have a method to defend ourselves, as long as we have a mindset to defend ourselves where there is a will there will be a way.

I think your starting assumption...that most Germans were opposed to what was happening, or would be opposed if they were better informed...is false. The numbers are debatable, but many Germans supported what was happening, and it was only after the war that they began saying they didn't know --which is hogwash. It was almost impossible not to know. Trains full of Jews screaming and moaning sat in train yards for hours, and sometimes days. People used to stand by the train tracks and curse them as they went by. The concentration camps employed local workers, like electricians and carpenters. Those few in the military who wouldn't follow orders were simply killed. Furthermore, most of the occupied European countries freely turned over Jews and other "undesirables" to the Nazis.

The murders and slave labor were not some isolated and invisible event --it permeated all of German society. Werner Von Braun, for example, calculated the minimum number of calories necessary to keep slave laborers alive for a month, while building the V-2 rockets. Engineers designed the extermination methods, architects designed the camps, bureaucrats ordered and payed for material, manufacturing plants produced things like Zyklon B for the gas chambers, businessmen supplied their factories with slave labor, farmers supplied concentration camps with food. Everyone who worked in a train yard or lived near tracks or a train station saw and heard what was happening.

As far as resistance goes, virtually the same things happened in Russia under Stalin. People did not resist. The Russians got so that instead of sending a whole company out for a roundup they sent just one militiaman, and people would obediently line up and let him lead them away. The Germans would simply issue public orders for Jews to appear at such and such a place, and they would. Very few refused to show up when merely ordered to do so. Defense is more mindset than weapons. Most people don't fight and won't fight when a situation is ambiguous. Many may fight when they sense death is certain, but these mass exterminations work by preying on ambiguity: death is certain if you resist, uncertain if you don't. It's the same reason people will allow themselves to be herded into a walk-in freezer by gunmen, and kneel down to be executed: most of those that might resist lack certainty until it's too late to act.

See this what I don't understand. There are a few people in this world that I wish that God would call times up on (the leadership of N. Korea for example). There are people groups that I don't trust because their leadership keeps calling for the destruction of another nationality. However there is no people group that I want wiped off the face of the earth. How do you stand in a society and see this happen and not try to stop it? How do you watch an entire people group be murdered before your very eyes? I don't understand it at all.

[rwg3]

[See this what I don't understand. There are a few people in this world that I wish that God would call times up on (the leadership of N. Korea for example). There are people groups that I don't trust because their leadership keeps calling for the destruction of another nationality. However there is no people group that I want wiped off the face of the earth. How do you stand in a society and see this happen and not try to stop it? How do you watch an entire people group be murdered before your very eyes? I don't understand it at all.[/quote]

You start it by devaluing a group of people, make them the cause of all bad things in society, then you move dehumanizing them. Their life has no value to society and in fact is a drain on society. Keep up the propoganda long enough and then there is minimal public reaction to the extermination. It is a formula as old as man and I am sorry to say it still works today.

[VMI77]

I think the germans had mostly been disarmed though by that point.....what if those same scared townspeople had had rifles and knowing that atrocities were taking place had sniped the guards, and freed the people? What if the ex-military had been taking out the locomotives to the trains that were hauling people away with IED's. What if every SS officer had to be afraid that with his next round up he would be on the wrong end of a bullet.....I think things might have shaken out different than they did. You see, as long as we as a people have a method to defend ourselves, as long as we have a mindset to defend ourselves where there is a will there will be a way.

I think your starting assumption...that most Germans were opposed to what was happening, or would be opposed if they were better informed...is false. The numbers are debatable, but many Germans supported what was happening, and it was only after the war that they began saying they didn't know --which is hogwash. It was almost impossible not to know. Trains full of Jews screaming and moaning sat in train yards for hours, and sometimes days. People used to stand by the train tracks and curse them as they went by. The concentration camps employed local workers, like electricians and carpenters. Those few in the military who wouldn't follow orders were simply killed. Furthermore, most of the occupied European countries freely turned over Jews and other "undesirables" to the Nazis.

The murders and slave labor were not some isolated and invisible event --it permeated all of German society. Werner Von Braun, for example, calculated the minimum number of calories necessary to keep slave laborers alive for a month, while building the V-2 rockets. Engineers designed the extermination methods, architects designed the camps, bureaucrats ordered and payed for material, manufacturing plants produced things like Zyklon B for the gas chambers, businessmen supplied their factories with slave labor, farmers supplied concentration camps with food. Everyone who worked in a train yard or lived near tracks or a train station saw and heard what was happening.

As far as resistance goes, virtually the same things happened in Russia under Stalin. People did not resist. The Russians got so that instead of sending a whole company out for a roundup they sent just one militiaman, and people would obediently line up and let him lead them away. The Germans would simply issue public orders for Jews to appear at such and such a place, and they would. Very few refused to show up when merely ordered to do so. Defense is more mindset than weapons. Most people don't fight and won't fight when a situation is ambiguous. Many may fight when they sense death is certain, but these mass exterminations work by preying on ambiguity: death is certain if you resist, uncertain if you don't. It's the same reason people will allow themselves to be herded into a walk-in freezer by gunmen, and kneel down to be executed: most of those that might resist lack certainty until it's too late to act.

See this what I don't understand. There are a few people in this world that I wish that God would call times up on (the leadership of N. Korea for example). There are people groups that I don't trust because their leadership keeps calling for the destruction of another nationality. However there is no people group that I want wiped off the face of the earth. How do you stand in a society and see this happen and not try to stop it? How do you watch an entire people group be murdered before your very eyes? I don't understand it at all.

I'm not going to say I really understand it, but I can recommend three books for insight: 1) The True Believer, By Eric Hoffer; and 2&3) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, & On Violence.

Part of the explanation is obviously fear in various forms, a sort of tribalism, and indifference. The Nazis targeted the marginal elements of society --those that didn't fit in with average Germans, so individuals in general society had to balance a concern for people they essentially didn't know, and may not even have liked, against their own interests, and the interests of their families; while at the same time having no power as individuals. It's tough to come together in a group to gain that power when you're afraid, there are deadly serious consequences for participation, and you know you can't trust other members of the group --as we're about to find out in the next few years as those of us in opposition to the Welfare Nanny Surveillance State try to take back our country.

One of the reasons I don't see a similar event happening in the US is because what are essentially the "marginal" groups are either part of a politically protected class, or they are integrated into the general population in various ways: you can't simply separate people by religion, ideology, politics, or even race, because for the most part, the lines aren't distinct. And we don't have the same kinds of divisions like those that made it possible to round up Japanese Americans in WW2. After all, we didn't round up all the German and Italian Americans. So, going to round up "conservatives?" What about all those "liberal" families who have "conservative" children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, brothers and sisters, neighbors, etc? There really isn't anything equivalent to Jewish ghettos in the US. People live in neighborhoods together, for the most part, in accordance with their income. Muslims are probably the only group in the US that can be targeted in this way, and even that would take a major catastrophic attack on US soil.

Still, I don't think we can discount the threat from, and animus of, the left.....almost every mass murdering government has been a leftist government. We're seeing examples everyday of what the left does, and wants to do, with just the possibility their guy might lose the election. And the left, take Obama's mentors for example, have talked openly in the past about exterminating their enemies en masse in order to secure their Socialist Utopia.

[WildBill]

Around the time of WWI, my grandmother, a Polish Jew, was living above a tavern with her mother, sisters and brother. Their father had left for the U.S. in order to earn enough money for the rest of the family to follow.

One night her mother was boiling a chicken for dinner when the tavern keeper snuck upstairs and warned that there were drunken German soldiers downstairs making plans to come up with intent to rape and kill. My g grandmother bundled up the children, (my grandmother couldnt have been over the age of 5) grabbed the half cooked chicken and, with the Germans shooting at them, fled to a nearby river and hid. After things seemed to settle down the family began to eat the chicken; but the chicken needed salt. So my g grandmother snuck back to the tavern to get the salt!

The notion of risking life for something as outrageous as salt speaks volumes about how these people had become acclimated to the risks of death.

My grandmother to the day she died remembered that terrifying, cold, dark night, hearing the bullets whizzing by & then eating half raw chicken on the river bank.

The immediate family made it to the U.S. and all led successful lives, but the fate of many of the extended family remain a mystery. When I watch documentaries of the holocaust and see the mass of humanity being led to the ovens I focus on the individuals and wonder if that person was one of my family.

Thanks for sharing this story Jim. This is something to reflect on.

[DLBConductor]

I am thankful for the growing trend of gun ownership by the average American. I am not one to worry about all the conspiracy theories floating around the Internet and I have yet to find a need to wear a tin-foil hat. That said, I believe it is critical to become a student of history.

In "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," William Shirer makes the observation that anti-semitism was a fairly strong and socially acceptable view, not only in Germany, but throughout most of Europe in the late 1800's. It appears that while the average German may or may not have anticipated the outcome of Hitler's election or supported the Holocost, certainly anti-semitism was an accepted view within German and European culture.

One of the real tragedies for mankind was in not taking seriously what Hitler wrote in "Mein Kampf." He clearly stated his evil intentions and was true to his word.

In the early stages of his successes, Hitler had the overwhelming support of Germany's general populace. By the time they realized the full implications of his intentions, it was too late. They had already been disarmed. German history is one of the reasons I own guns, have a CHL, and strongly support the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution. I find it interesting that my 2nd Amendment views cause many of my liberal, academic friends to believe that I wear a tin-foil hat!

In regard to the Holocost: "NEVER AGAIN!"

[Topbuilder]

"But when a government is so thoroughly evil to its core that some faceless bureaucrat with an engineering bent can draw up a memo to describe, not just as theory, but how to actually practice the mass extermination of civilian populations most efficiently and tidily, then that government has gone beyond being merely corrupt, and has entered the realm of being satanically evil."

Does the police/military "zombie" exercises raise the hair on the back of your neck?
Sometimes I have to put my "hat" on to make it go away...

[tacticool]

Germans saying they didn't know about the camps is about as believable as Americans of the same era saying they never heard about lynch mobs. It might be believable if they say they didn't participate but it's hard for me to believe they didn't know it was happening.