When we were in school, we all had to watch the film footage shot by the Allies of the liberation of the camps. The stacks of bodies, bodies being heaped by bulldozers like earthworks, the gas chambers, all of it. Those are images that never leave you, and I think it’s the right thing to do to show kids that stuff (at the appropriate age).
I hope schools still do that.
Technically it’s only 5 of the 6 reels of film that Alfred Hitchcock shot, but it was every bit as horrifying as seeing all 6:
I think this is the complete film:
Hitch was only involved after the material was shot. I suspect calling him the director is for publicity purposes. Other sources say he functioned as more of an advisor to the production.
Good info, thanks!
It has much more impact than just ignoring them and hoping they go away on their own.
Took me way too long to finally get to watching Shoah a couple of months ago.
Alternatively I watched it at exactly the right time I needed to because while holy sh*t it was rivetngly bleak it also really reaffirmed the banality of evil, it was such a systematic and orderly genocide.
“A perfunctory clearing of the ledger” indeed.
German law.
I would guess mostly not written in Germany.
Again, German law.
(Just FTR, the number of victims barely matter in the German judicial system. Individual cases matter.)
Thing is, this seems to apply more or less exclusively to WW2-era Nazis. Obviously, the Holocaust is uniquely horrible for its enormous industrial-scale mass murder, and thankfully nothing directly comparable has happened since, so it makes sense as a focus of attention. But the people responsible for the massive scale - the high-ranking officials - were mostly tried at Nuremberg, or if any managed to evade justice, they must surely be long dead by now. The people who end up on trial these days were very young during the war and had limited roles in the atrocities. Although the Holocaust as a whole is unique, the level of crime of a single concentration camp guard does, unfortunately, have many analogues in many parts of the world since WW2.
For example, the perpetrators of Soviet atrocities under Stalin got to live out their lives as decorated veterans, and the white-washed version of history propagated by the current government of Russia continues to glorify them. The perpetrators of the 1965-66 mass killings in Indonesia also face no justice, even while the surviving victims are still ostracized. The perpetrators of mass murders and tortures in Spain under Franco are protected from prosecutions by the Pact of Forgetting. The list can continue.
So the message historically literate fascists would hear is that so long as their side doesn’t suffer total military defeat and unconditional surrender, committing crimes against humanity is basically OK, they probably won’t live to regret it. The continuing focus on Nazi crimes while more recent atrocities pass by without much attention illustrates the gap between good moral intentions and unfortunate practical realities.
Very true. I would say that some of the examples you bring up (and I suppose this case) are domestic matters, but the same “victors write the history” outcome applies there too. Truth and reconciliation does not necessarily have to involve prosecutions, but Germany has provided a model to the world for doing so aggressively (even more so in contrast to the Allied victors who let some Nazi killers off the hook when it was geopolitically expedient)
Cases like this also serve as a reminder to the complacent and uneducated in the West that it did happen here and could again.
This has always struck me as an interesting approach, although it is one I definitely reject. It is hard for any country to avoid some sort of reckoning, even if it’s not the justice we’d prefer.
And of course we always must be vigilant against those who would try to erase history.
With that one, 24 yr old at the wars end.? Yes, that is all it is.
“The remains of Spanish dictator Gen. Francisco Franco have been exhumed”
Did they confirm that he’s still dead?
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