Nearly half of Britons never heard of Auschwitz

[KettleWhistle]

Thu Dec 2, 8:20 AM ET

From news article:

Picture: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...actwp4v_photo0
A pile of human bones and skulls are left at a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. A BBC television poll found that 45 percent of those questioned have never heard of the Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland.

LONDON (AFP) - Nearly half of Britons have never heard of the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in southern Poland, according to a BBC television poll that was conducted just ahead of the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation. .


Forty-five percent of the 4,000 people questioned for the survey by BBC Two said they had never heard of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, the television channel said Thursday.

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is due to broadcast several documentaries on the "Final Solution", the Nazi's plan to obliterate European Jewry, including on Auschwitz, for the 60th anniversary of the concentration camp's liberation on January 27, 2005.

"Our series is not only about the shocking, almost unimaginable pain of those who died, or survived, Auschwitz. It's about how the Nazis came to do what they did," said producer Laurence Rees.

The documentary based on statements from nearly 100 survivors and officials from the camp took three years to make.

The BBC has also produced a musical show at the site of the camp dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust.

Between 1940 and 1945 more than one million men, women and children -- most of them Jews from around 20 European countries -- died in horrific circumstances at Auschwitz, one of the most infamous of World War II concentration camps.

[RichardP]

Mind-boggling, to say the least… when I read it yesterday, (I think) I was stunned and incensed.

[Mediocrates]

I'm sure it's here somewhere...Oh here it is, yes across the river from Goniadz (Goniondz) near Bialystock.

[RichardP]

Chuckle… there is no excuse, unless people are totally ignorant, which explains most, or perhaps, mentally challenged (being politically-correct). I wonder what the poll results would be elsewhere; similar.

[Mediocrates]

Well I have school age children and their coverage of significant history is paltry. Most students learn that there was a Holocaust and little else. But generally they cover state history in excruciating ponderous detail year after year.

[RichardP]

Exactly, if history is on the curriculum at all; it is often sanitized or distilled, so that, it won’t be found offensive to whomever and whatever. Or as said, the students are rendered comatose, by a load extraneous and somewhat mind-boggling, numbing facts, dates etcetera.

[KettleWhistle]

That's because it's politically incorrect to teach the children what the real world is like. So they usually wouldn't see anything like this: http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/...y/gallery1.htm

[RichardP]

Yup, sad to say, that’s the way it is here, too, KettleWhistle. Yet, it’s amazing how these young minds are being polluted with misinformation about Palestinians et al. PC is the social disease; perhaps, one day, they’ll discover an antidote, to rid us of it, once and for all.

[wellofvow]

OK, this is not going to win me any popularity contests, but what the H....

Have you guys heard the saying "If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem"?

Proactive parenting?

If you don't approve of the school curricula, speak up. Make waves. Hold meetings. Get petitions going. Be interviewed on TV.

Is it still a free country?

[Xela]

Former chief rabbi: European Jewish history nearing its end

By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz Correspondent

Former chief rabbi Meir Lau said Thursday that European Jewish history is nearing its end and called on the government and the Jewish Agency to prepare for the absorption of Europe's Jews in Israel.

There is a rise in anti-Semitism in nearly every European country that is being expressed, among other ways, via extreme anti-Israel sentiments, Lau warned in a statement.

Lau quoted data released this past week in Germany indicating that 62 percent of that country's citizens are tired of hearing about the Holocaust. Seventy percent of Germans are angered when reminded of Nazi crimes, the poll indicated.

Lau, a Holocaust survivor, said he does not see a future for the Jewish community in Europe.

"I see the end of the Diaspora of Jews in Europe," Lau said. "I call on the government to prepare for a new phase in the spiritual and physical absorption of European Jewry before they consider emigrating to the United States or Australia," Lau said.

According to demographic estimates, there are just over one million Jews currently living in Europe.

[Xela]

DER SPIEGEL
Josef Mengele in Brazil
"Angel of Death" Diary Shows No Regrets
By Erich Wiedemann and Jens Glüsing

A diary and letters written by Josef Mengele that recently surfaced in police archives in Sao Paulo, Brazil, show that the infamous concentration camp mass murderer remained a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi until his death.

Fear can cause physical illness. It can cause outbreaks of perspiration, weakness of the knees and sometimes even intestinal blockage. That's exactly what happened to Josef Mengele.

The medical history of the notorious Nazi doctor is so bizarre that it really doesn't fit the image of the cold and calculating monster of the concentration camps. At some point during the years after he fled prosecution in Germany, Mengele, terrified of being discovered, began chewing off the tips of his moustache hairs and swallowing them. After a few months, the hairs collected in his intestines into balls, blocking his digestive tract. It was a life-threatening condition.

Nevertheless, Josef Mengele, born in 1911, survived his case of intestinal obstruction. But the illness had such a profoundly debilitating effect on the man -- who treated prisoners like laboratory rats during the Nazi era, who surgically removed people's hearts while they were still alive and sliced newborns into pieces -- that he abandoned his idea of returning home to Germany after spending more than 30 years in exile. He was simply too weak.

Weak, broke and depressed. That, at least, was the diagnosis Mengele gave himself in the mid-1970s. And that's what it says in his diary, which the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo began printing in installments last week.

The diary, as well as 84 other documents and a hand-written life history, were found in two cardboard boxes in the records department of the Brazilian federal police in Sao Paulo. Investigators found the documents in 1985, together with books and personal mementos, in the Sao Paulo home of the German couple Lieselotte and Wolfram Bossert, as well as in their beach house at Bertioga. At the time, however, they paid little attention to their find.

Almost everything was still in perfect condition: the library that included works by Goethe, Goebbels, Erich Fromm und Siegfried Lenz, medical literature about soft tissue rheumatism, an Olympic souvenir placard, a package of "Olla" brand condoms.

A few things were missing. Someone had stolen a pair of glasses and one of two typewriters -- Zephyr models made by American manufacturer Smith Corona -- on which he wrote most of the letters.

In some respects, the find from the eleventh floor of the federal police headquarters building in Sao Paulo is sensational. The letters and diary contain many new details about the life in exile of Auschwitz's "angel of death." They provide sudden insight into Mengele's paradoxically bourgeois character, into his ability to repress memories, into the incomprehensible contradiction between his bestial approach to science and his weakness for the beauty of art. But none of this means that the history of Auschwitz needs to be rewritten.

The letters are addressed to Mengele's son, Rolf, and Wolfgang Gerhard, an Austrian former Nazi who took in Mengele for a few years and moved from Brazil back to Austria in 1971. When he left Brazil, Gerhard gave his friend Josef his identification papers and his identity. In 1979, Mengele drowned while swimming in Bertioga and was buried, under the name Wolfgang Gerhard, in the Nossa Senhora do Rosario cemetery in Embu.

Bounty hunters and Nazi hunters continued searching for the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp doctor for many years after his death. Even after his skeleton was found in grave number 321 in Embu, the hunt continued. Skeptics suspected that the Mengele clan in his hometown of Günzburg had invented the story to detract from Mengele's real whereabouts. It is now clear that this is almost impossible, after a DNA analysis of genetic samples taken from Mengele's remains produced a 99 percent match with samples taken from his son Rolf.

But the conjectures and legends are a good fit with the way Mengele lived his life. The entire life of this monstrous antihero consisted of murder, lies and fleeing from the consequences. After going underground in Bavaria for four years, he obtained a Red Cross passport in 1949 and escaped to South America, where he spent 30 years traveling through Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil under a host of fake names: Fritz Fischer, Walter Hasek, Dr. Helmut Gregor-Gregori, José Aspiazi, Friedrich Edler von Breitenbach, Dr. Henrique Wollmann and, finally, Wolfgang Gerhard.

His flight came to an end in Sao Paulo. Brazil had always been a safe haven for Nazi refugees. But even there Mengele found no peace. He had to fight with bureaucrats over driver's licenses and residence permits and pay bribes to fend off blackmailers who knew his true identity. Then he suffered a stroke and intestinal obstruction.

It was during this period that Mengele wrote the letters and diary, volumes filled with blue, lined pages from a school notebook.

All of his writings are suffused with a concert pitch of whininess and the complaints of the eternally misunderstood: "Very hot ... slept very poorly ... the rainy weather is depressing." The situation, Mengele writes, "offers little hope."

While living in exile, Mengele also believed the situation in Germany was hopeless. On May 8, 1975, the 30th anniversary of the end of World War II, he wrote an "Attempt at a Lyrical Variation." It was filled with such phrases as: "Oh Germany, land in crisis, where is your empire?"

Predictably, Josef Mengele found the German reality in the late 1960s to be irritating. For Mengele, phenomena like the "professional college student (Rudi) Dutschke with his beard and unkempt hair," the wing collar proletariat" and "riveted trousers and cowboy shirts for boys and girls" were evidence of the fact that the decline of traditional order and decorum had already begun.

Mengele was also a merciless critic of culture. The new music was cacophony to his ears. Contemporary theater and television produced, in his mind, nothing but "thoughts of entrails." And he believed that modern art was little more than "the expression of pathological mental conditions, ignorance, lack of talent, malice, or whatever." Anyone who gave serious consideration to this type of material, according to Mengele, was not entitled to be taken seriously themselves. "And in architecture," he wrote, "things have remained essentially the same." The Führer, Mengele believed, would have been amused by this concept of culture.

"Degenerate youth," sex, democracy in Germany -- all of this was garbage to Josef Mengele. Why he would want to return to this horrible country will always remain his secret.

But it wasn't the general state of the German psyche that kept him from returning to Europe. The fact was that he was broke and didn't feel healthy enough to start a new life.

His friend, the real Wolfgang Gerhard, who by then was living in Austria, urged him to make the attempt anyway. He encouraged Mengele to keep up his spirits. "Dear old boy," Gerhard wrote, "I would never give advice to a friend that would harm him."

But Mengele hesitated. On the one hand, the stress of being a constant fugitive was taking its toll. On the other hand, he was loath to give up what had become the familiar life of the reclusive scholar.

The man who sent tens of thousands to their deaths at Auschwitz without blinking an eye also wrote tender poems: "Wherever a joyous bird sings, he sings for another. Wherever a tiny star twinkles far away, it twinkles for another."

Mengele's letters and notes confirm that his cultural and political consciousness remained stuck in 1945, and that he was never able to recognize anything reprehensible about the atrocities he committed in his human laboratories at Auschwitz. He believed that he was simply killing people who were already sentenced to death.

In a letter dated Sept. 3, 1974, Mengele suddenly writes about "remorse for the unbelievable crimes we committed against this 'chosen people'." But the mere fact that he places these two words in quotes emphasizes how absurd he believed them to be.

It comes as no surprise that Mengele, in another letter, expresses his astonishment and disgust over the remorseful position taken by Hitler's master builder, Albert Speer, in his Spandau Diary. His mood, Mengele complains, has "almost hit rock-bottom." Speer's self-accusations, he writes, are disgusting.

The Nazi theory of race remained the focal point of all his writings. He considered the South African apartheid system the most efficient way of preventing the mixing of races.

In Mengele's view, racial confusion prevailed in his adopted country, Brazil. Nevertheless, he imagined that he was surrounded by like-minded people. In one letter to Wolfgang Gerhard, he wrote that he was living among families who felt largely sympathetic toward the Nazis. There was only one exception: a niece in one family was engaged to a Brazilian who had no appreciation for Aryanism. But, Mengele wrote, there will always be black sheep. From his point of view, everyone else in his social environment was intact in terms of this race-based ideology.

Even today, Josef Mengele wouldn't feel completely alone in Brazil. Children in Sao Paulo are still given the name Hitler -- as a first name. Even socialist Brazilian President Lula da Silva recently said in an interview that although he believes that Adolf Hitler was wrong, "he had something that I admire in a man: this fire, this passion to get involved in order to achieve something."
It seems that some old fires are still burning along the Tropic of Capricorn in South America.

[RichardP]

Trust me I did just that, Wellofvow, spending as much time going head-to-head with the system; with some results, both positive and negative. However, saying this, if your child doesn’t take history classes, or whatever; one doesn’t have to leave teaching, or instilling interest, solely to the educators.
Xela, thanks for the two great posts.

[KettleWhistle]

The problem in U.S. is the lack of centralized education and complete lack of children's rights laws. So if something might potentially be disturbing in nature, first of all parents must allow for it to be shown/taught to children, and second, the local school board will likely vote against it being taught. There isn't much that can be done about, except to wait until our educational system completely crushes and will have to be restructured. Until then, here's what kind of system we are up against: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...NGVNA3PE11.DTL Basically any loon can run for the school board, get his neighborhood to vote him/her in, so that (s)he can decide what will and what will not be taught.

[wellofvow]

Trust me I did just that, Wellofvow, spending as much time going head-to-head with the system; with some results, both positive and negative. However, saying this, if your child doesn’t take history classes, or whatever; one doesn’t have to leave teaching, or instilling interest, solely to the educators.
Xela, thanks for the two great posts.

Good for you!

Look into cloning yourself times a million! Why not buy into "might makes right" when everyone around you is?

[wellofvow]

The problem in U.S. is the lack of centralized education and complete lack of children's rights laws. So if something might potentially be disturbing in nature, first of all parents must allow for it to be shown/taught to children, and second, the local school board will likely vote against it being taught. There isn't much that can be done about, except to wait until our educational system completely crushes and will have to be restructured. Until then, here's what kind of system we are up against: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...NGVNA3PE11.DTL Basically any loon can run for the school board, get his neighborhood to vote him/her in, so that (s)he can decide what will and what will not be taught.

This is mind-boggling, frankly. What you seem to be saying is that if any parent thinks that his child will be harmed psychologically by being taught something that actually happened or is happening, he can demand that this not be taught to all children? This, in the name of "child's rights"?

Is this really true everywhere in the States?

Does this mean that the southern states don't teach anything about the Civil War because it is disturbing that the South lost?

Does this mean that the subject of cancer is not brought up until university since it is disturbing?

In driver's ed classes, teenagers aren't shown movies of what happens when driving under the influence, or recklessly, since this is disturbing?

Biology students aren't shown nature movies, where the big bad lions hunt and eat little Bambis?

Denying or trivializing the effects of the Holocaust on particular segments of society (Jews, gypsies, etc.) will have horrific outcomes, since it is a model of political science.